Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Introduction
Manufacturing Canons
This book examines the critical reception of Vietnam War novels and
autobiographies; it does not offer new interpretations, nor does it make a
case for the importance of these texts. By looking at critical reception I
hope to reveal not merely the vicissitudes of literary taste but the ideology
of literary culture. In recent years, particularly in debates about canon
development, critics have begun to recognize the ideological work
involved in literary reception, but very little has been written on the
ideology of contemporary literary culture. My focus on the critical
reception of Vietnam War novels and autobiographies, therefore, is
intended to explain something of the process by which contemporary
literary texts achieve precanonical status and to examine how this process
has cohered with larger cultural forces to further a conservative rewriting
of the Vietnam War. In tracing the development of a canon of Vietnam War
prose narratives, I examine the sometimes antagonistic, often sympathetic
relationship between commercial and academic literary cultures, and I
outline how academic literary culture has been transformed in recent
years, identifying the important and often overlooked ideological
continuity between traditional and revisionist literary studies.
I focus on Vietnam War literature for several reasons. First, a personal one:
as a teenager I lived in Bangkok, where I witnessed the damage caused by
U.S. use of Thailand as a military staging area and site for its troops' "rest
and recreation." Second, since the writing and reception of Vietnam War
literature took place during the advent of theory and the revising of
literary studies, its reception may reveal whether this transformation in
2
Since helicopters lifted off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon
more than twenty years ago, a generation has come of age without
contemporaneous knowledge of the war. To this generation, the war is
understood through documentary footage, popular films and television,
novels, songs, memoirs, and historical texts (as well as through school
instruction, personal reminiscences, and family lore). Despite such varied
cultural representations, the war has for many been reduced to a simple
lesson: it was a noble struggle fought by heroic young men who were
betrayed by cowardly politicians and a treasonous media. A more critical
yet, I believe, equally inaccurate interpretation is often asserted by the
liberal establishment and mass media: America's involvement, though
well-intentioned, was tragically flawed due to a national character whose
naiveté exceeded its ambition, what New York Times correspondent
Homer Bigart defined as "less a moral crime than the thunderously stupid
military blunder of throwing half a million troops into an unwinnable war"
(quoted in Herman and Chomsky, 238).
How did a nation that had once had a mass antiwar movement and had
once responded with outrage to U.S. atrocities become oblivious to such
horrors? How was it that the most popular and most thoroughly
documented war in U.S. history was transformed into a lesson in
patriotism and national character? In examining the construction of the
Vietnam War canon, I offer a partial explanation and sketch out the
background assumptions, ideological necessities, and configurations of
power that have allowed this transformation to flourish.
But the question remains: how, against the best efforts of so many, did a
war once perceived as a nearly genocidal slaughter to perpetuate
American neocolonialism come to be viewed as an American tragedy? And
to what extent have cultural and in particular literary representations of
the war helped in this transformation? It could be argued that Vietnam
6
Critics of Vietnam War literature have almost uniformly seen these texts
as offering a radical alternative to the popular rewriting of the war.
Whereas in the broader culture perceptions of the war have been revised
to perpetuate a belief in American militarism and to repudiate the mass
social movements of the 1960s, this literature, it is alleged, offers a
steadfastly opposing-- indeed, a counter-hegemonic-- view. Thomas Myers
7
The first such objection is that the war was revised for the sake of
historical accuracy, not ideological necessity. Few would dispute the
notion that public perceptions of the Vietnam War are considerably
different now than during the war. Whereas the late 1960s and early
1970s saw large antiwar demonstrations, occasional news accounts of U.S.
atrocities, and even (infrequently) public discussion of U.S. imperialism,
the 1990s sees the war as a tragic error, a noble but misguided struggle
against global communism that led to the unfortunate sacrifice and
mistreatment of brave Americans. The Gulf War revealed the predominant
lesson of Vietnam to be the need to use massive firepower, to censor the
mass media, and to promote jingoistic sentiment. In this view, the
rewriting of the Vietnam War was due not to ideological necessity but to a
more accurate understanding of recent history, including recognition of
the evils of communism, the heroic (and unappreciated) actions of the
American military, and the misguided behavior of the mass media, the
antiwar movement, and much of the liberal establishment. Such views,
however, overlook the considerable effort that has gone into rewriting the
war and creating a pro-military, pro-business, anti-social welfare
consensus. A main goal of this book is to demonstrate the complicity of
literary culture in this revision. As evidence of the shift in the intellectual
climate one need only look at the career of Noam Chomsky. Whereas
during the war Chomsky At War with Asia was published by Random House
and his "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" (and many other essays) were
published in the New York Review of Books, today his books are published
by tiny presses like Common Courage and South End, while his essays
10
Others might object that a liberal media would not further a conservative
agenda. I concede that the mass media is largely liberal in orientation.
What this orientation amounts to as a practical matter, however, is not
sympathy for the Left but its virtual exclusion and a welcoming embrace of
conservatives. Indeed, this liberal-conservative axis represents the poles
of ideological belief, rendering alternative positions invisible and
constraining political choice. As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky note,
"Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected
within the mass media' which in this narrow sense may adopt an
'adversarial stance' with regard to those holding office, reflecting elite
dissatisfaction with current policy" ( 177 ). Arguments that fall outside this
framework are defined as extreme and are ignored. From a Marxist
perspective, the marginalization of alternative views and the
reinforcement of implicit consensus (in the guise of elite disagreement) is
understandable, even predictable, since institutions like the media
function to reproduce the structural domination of capital over labor. In
the context of the Vietnam War, this elite disagreement has meant for
11
We must also remember that this array of critical approaches exists within
a specific historical context and political economy. A good deal of the
radicalizing of the profession in recent years stems from the impact the
post-Fordist economy has had upon the academy. Facing an increase in
temporary and part-time teaching jobs, a work speed-up, and a surplus of
job applicants, graduate students and junior faculty have understandably
been attracted to a version of historical and quasi-Marxist analysis. The
same pressures that encourage this politicization, though, encourage
department and university administrators and senior faculty, wary of
dwindling funds and bad publicity, to be circumspect about hiring and
promoting those who may be perceived as challenging dominant beliefs
and agitating for serious reform. A radical scholar or two may be brought
into a department to provide academic coverage, but it is unlikely that a
department will have more than this number, let alone be dominated by
Marxists. Non-elite schools and community colleges are unlikely even to
13
hire token Marxists, unless their politics are muted. Thus, although its
practice has been significantly altered since the heyday of New Criticism,
academic literary culture continues to endorse a liberal-pluralist ideology.
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and the rest of southeast Asia? These questions
are answered obliquely if at all in critically sanctioned Vietnam War
literature and are consistently overlooked by commercial reviewers and
academic critics for the sake of more traditional literary aesthetic
concerns. The goal of this book, therefore, is twofold: to explain how
critically acclaimed Vietnam War narratives have at times addressed these
important questions, and to show how, by ignoring such questions,
American literary culture has been complicit in a reactionary rewriting of
the war.
5
Rock-and-Roll-War
Published only three years after The Laotian Fragments, Michael Herr
Dispatches was received by a literary culture far more sympathetic to
literary representations of the war. Dispatches was reviewed widely and
favorably-- and remains central to most discussions of Vietnam War
literature. One could argue, however, that Dispatches lacks the scope of
The Laotian Fragments; the verisimilitude of Philip Caputo A Rumor of War,
Larry Heinemann Close Quarters, and John Del Vecchio The 13th Valley;
the imagination of Tim O'Brien Going After Cacciato and The Things They
Carried; the conviction of Ron Kovic Born on the Fourth of July. Why, then,
has Dispatches been read as the most successful of Vietnam War
narratives? Because it was thought to have successfully matched form and
content. Eschewing many of the conventions of traditional narrative, Herr
was believed to have constructed a book whose nonlinear structure and
kinetic prose in some vital way seemed to mirror the war itself.
From its initial reception, critics noted that with this book the Vietnam War
at last had its own literature. For C.D.B. Bryan, in a front-page review in
the New York Times Book Review, "Dispatches is the best book to have
been written about the Vietnam War. . . . nothing else so far has even
come close to conveying how different this war was from any we fought-or
how utterly different were the methods and men who fought for us."
Similarly, Jo Ann Learman in the Progressive claims, "No other writer has
been able to capture so intimately what it must have been like to fight in
Vietnam" (54), while Elizabeth Pochoda in the Nation declares Dispatches
"the first book to convincingly address itself to that place" (345).
( 102 ) and thus succeeded in writing "in the style of the place and the
time" ( 104 ).
Not only its prose but the form of Dispatches was identified as true to
Vietnam. To Bryan, "Herr's dispatches are as formless as the war they
covered" ( 54 ). And to Pochoda, it "was a war with no center, no decisive
battles; it was all circumference and it is therefore difficult to filter the
thing through unified plot and point of view." Herr was able to avoid the
pitfalls of conventional narrative by finding, in Pochoda's words, "a method
that is both personal and public enough to convey his war's odd
combination of familiarity and weirdness." Specifically, Herr built the book
" around the wearisome convention of the acid trip " yet managed to avoid
the solipsism of one individual, suggesting instead "that individual's
tapping into a general psychosis" ( Pochoda, 345). Or as Gray explains,
Vietnam was an "irrational place," and the war was "beyond the grasp of
logic" ( 120 ).
influence, writers, reviewers, and critics must have access to the means of
cultural distribution, which in the current setting means the mass media
and the academy. Thus institutional pressures and biases are likely to
influence the shaping of an era's dominant aesthetic-- in this case,
postmodernism. To evaluate Dispatches in, say, the New York Times Book
Review, one must not stray too far from the dominant ideology of the
Times (and the times). Writing in the New Republic, Zalin Grant explains
how the Vietnam War narrative changed to reflect dominant belief,
beginning with books that saw the war as "an agonizing moral dilemma" (
22 ) and turning "conclusively antiwar in 1968" after the Tet offensive--
what he labels "the 'bad American-good Vietnamese' interpretation of the
war." The literary community in particular, according to Grant, "was often
exposed to an extreme version, largely as the result of the ascendance in
the late 1960s of the New York Review of Books and its chief polemicist,
Noam Chomsky." Reaching "its most influential point in 1971, when Neil
Sheehan wrote a lead article for the NY Times Book Review, entitled
'Should We Have War Crime Trials?' " ( Grant, 23), this Chomskian
interpretation "prevailed, in one form or other, until the . . . publication of
Dispatches" ( 22 ). Ultimately, Chomsky's view, according to Grant, "was
unsatisfactory-- too filled with self-righteousness and finger-pointing, [and]
inappropriate now that the war was over" ( 23 ).
By 1977 the prevailing interpretation was that Vietnam was "simply a time
of temporary national madness" ( Grant, 21). Herr's spin on the war (and
Hollywood's as well), asserts Grant, "contained elements that the whole
country had already begun to agree upon: the concept of the veteran as a
victim of the war's madness. If we could not give them our admiration as
in past wars, we could at least treat them solicitously like outpatients of an
insane asylum" ( 24 ). For Grant, the dismissal of Chomskian analysis was
necessary since such self-righteous moralizing was crudely polemical. In
dismissing the moralistic denunciation of U.S. militarism in Indochina,
however, Grant fails to consider the ideological usefulness of this
dismissal. (He also fails to mention Chomsky's being shut out of the pages
of the New York Review of Books.) Grant does not recognize that the
22
Newspapers and magazines at the time were filled with worries about
excessive social justice. The New York Times addressed this issue when it
pointed to the Carter administration's struggle to "rebuild . . . business
confidence and still . . . renewed anxieties over inflation" without causing
"yet another devastating mass explosion of black rage in the urban ghetto
of the type that swept the nation a little over a decade ago" ( Raskin, 4). In
a cover story entitled "Is America Turning Right?" Newsweek spoke of "the
view that the government has given too much y welfare to the minority
poor" ( Gelman et al., 35). Newsweek attributed this view not to the
wealthy or to corporations but to the economically squeezed middle class,
while at the same time acknowledging that "the majority of Americans
favor more public spending on the environment, schooling, medical care,
the elderly, and the unemployed" ( Gelman et al., 34). The sympathetic
manner in which it reported the notion that too much was being spent on
welfare suggests that, although attributing these to the middle class,
Newsweek was enunciating its own beliefs. Likewise, Newsweek was
sympathetic to what it labeled the neoconservative interpretation of the
1960s, the belief that "On the campuses, legitimate dissent boiled over
into movements that disrupted and undermined academic life. In the
ghettos, grievances exploded into brutal riots. On the left, reformists
turned into revolutionaries who attacked middle-class values. To many
blue-collar workers and academics alike, the breakdown of order was the
end result of excessive moral permissiveness and lax law enforcement--
liberalism gone berserk" ( Gelman et al., 36). This reactionary narrative
was to Newsweek hardly even ideological because "Today's new
conservatives lie very much within [ America's] pragmatic tradition."
Rather than attempting to reassert elite authority, neoconservatives,
according to Newsweek, were merely "drawing attention to solutions that
often do not work" ( 44 ). Although labeled pragmatic (read:
nonideological), the neoconservative attack on the 1960s was specifically
23
Actually, the view that there was a moral equivalence between North
Vietnamese and the Americans has been the left-most position within the
mass media. For many commentators, the North Vietnamese
demonstrated far greater cruelty than did the Americans. To the New York
Times, this mistreatment of prisoners was a "damning indictment of the
Vietnamese Communists, one that cannot be erased by the pious denials
of the North Vietnamese or their apologists in this country. A compelling
case can and should be made against the North Vietnamese for their clear
violations of the Geneva Convention. . . . Unfortunately, the record is not
unflawed. South Vietnam's 'tiger cages' for political prisoners at Con Son,
the Mylai massacre and similar, if lesser, incidents involving American
troops, the bombing and shelling of civilian areas, torture of prisoners in
the field and the use of chemical weapons are all violations of the spirit if
not the letter of international law, for which the highest United States
authorities cannot escape responsibility, even if the violations were not
28
Throughout President Nixon's first term, the issue of POWs and MIAs would
serve mainly as an indispensable device for continuing the war,
functioning on the domestic front as a potent counterforce to the anti-war
movement while providing an ingenious tool for building insurmountable
roadblocks within the peace talks. And then the issue would be
transmuted into a major obstacle to normalized relations for more than
eighteen years after the 1973 accords. . . . The campaign was promoted
by a medley of astute publicity schemes staged by the Nixon White House,
POW family organizations, Congress, and Texas multimillionaire H. Ross
Perot. . . . America's vision of the war was being transformed. The actual
photographs and TV footage of massacred villagers, napalmed children,
Vietnamese prisoners being tortured and murdered, wounded GIs
screaming in agony, and body bags being loaded by the dozen for
shipment back home were being replaced by simulated images of
American POWs in the savage hands of Asian Communists. ( 48 - 54 )
Also, the idea that the war was a form of mental illness makes it more
difficult to see U.S. militarism in Indochina as a logical extension of U.S.
policy. If the war is by definition irrational, how can it be understood-other
than through Herr's vague, impressionistic retelling? In sympathizing with
Herr's account, reviewers often dismissed previous attempts to make
sense of the war. Pochoda, for instance, discounts "memoirs like Philip
30
Caputo A Rumor of War" because such texts are too "eager to overexplain
and digest the experience for their readers" (345). Compared to
Dispatches, Gloria Emerson Winners and Losers seems flawed, according
to Learman, because "she tends to moralize . . . [thus] the only readers
who finish her book are those who began with the same point of view" ( 54
). "Alongside Dispatches," writes Roger Sales, Frances Fitzgerald Fire in
the Lake, "with its clarity, its balanced views, its intelligent laying out of
the evidence . . . seem[s], in its neat detachment, obscene" (35). In
praising Dispatches, critics were almost literally rewriting the war,
supplanting more conventionally rendered histories with Herr's
fragmented account. Unfortunately, what these critics identified as the
drawbacks of Caputo's, Emerson's, and Fitzgerald's approaches--
explanation, moralizing, clarity-- are precisely what has been missing from
all too many cultural interpretations of the war, allowing the war to be
rewritten.
The impact a book's initial reception may have upon its subsequent
scholarly reception can be seen by comparing Dispatches and The Laotian
Fragments. Pratt's book has much in common with Herr's, particularly its
fragmented structure and sense of war-induced psychological
disintegration. But even if one were to grant that Dispatches is a better
book, it would be difficult to argue that the disparity in the academic
reputations of these books reflects their relative merits. The Laotian
Fragments was almost completely ignored by commercial literary culture
and has been discussed in only two scholarly articles, whereas Dispatches
received widespread praise and has become the central text in discussions
of Vietnam War literature.
available in the fictive forms already imposed upon the experiencing mind
by one's culture" ( 132 ).
This belief that a slang-filled, self-reflexive style in and of itself can begin
to reorganize a popular consensus that has been shaped by the mass
media seems more wish-fulfillment than an actual consideration of the
power and reach of media institutions and other ideological state
apparatuses. Richard Slotkin explains the perception missing from
analyses like Stewart's or Hellmann's:
Neither Hellmann, nor Stewart, nor Herr discusses the forces behind the
construction and perpetuation of these myths. Although Hellmann argues
that "even the most terrible facts will not provide sufficient information for
one to grasp truth, unless the structures of consciousness organizing those
facts are changed" ( Fables of Fact, 137), he does not refer to the political
and economic interests that promote these structures of consciousness.
Nor does he consider that a book like Dispatches, which was published by
the Hearst Corporation, and an author like Herr, who helped write the
screenplays of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, face institutional
pressures to reinforce prevailing "structures of consciousness." But the
main problem with Hellmann's argument is his notion that these structures
of consciousness can be changed through fabulist experimentation.
Calculating its relative merit and its position within the developing
Vietnam War canon, several critics compared Dispatches to other Vietnam
War books. To Gordon Taylor, all "American books fan out radially in
search of new forms of literary leverage on resistant material, from a
center [ Graham ] Greene seems at once still to occupy and no longer
usefully to provide" (296). Dispatches, he argues, "calls The Quiet
American most clearly into question as the literary base line from which
American writers might triangulate the subject of the war" (298). Noting
Herr's speculation that "Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina
when Alden Pyle's body washed up under the bridge at Dakao" ( 51 ),
Taylor sees The Quiet American "as an active element [within
Dispatches ], not a passively acknowledged influence" (299). Like many
others, Taylor concentrates on Herr's attempts to find "forms
commensurate with the extremity of the experience, yet capable of
transcribing its atonalities" (301), declaring finally that Dispatches is
profoundly different than The Quiet American. Whereas "Greene's Vietnam
is recognizably in the actual world" (301), Herr's Vietnam is "a place
[where] the historical and topographical reality . . . has become
hallucinatory" (302). Taylor finds that Herr's "words come from the other
side of a line, or from deep within a warp, which Greene's characters never
really cross or enter" (307). For all of the focus on the truthfulness of
Herr's aesthetic (even to the point, as here, of dismissing The Quiet
American), critics flatten historical and cultural particularity. Vietnam, in
Taylor's view, seems to exist in another dimension beyond our
comprehension. Although Taylor alleges that "American writers . . . [are]
now beg[ining] to make of the war what they must, in order to tell us what
Graham Greene could not" (308), he, like most critics, is vague about what
must be told, other than that it should convey the atonal hallucinatory
reality found on the other side of a line and deep within a warp.
37
For Jean Baudrillard, the underside of culture barely exists in a world that
has been overwhelmed by simulation. To explain this erasure of the real,
Baudrillard cites an allegory of Borges in which "the cartographers of the
Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the
territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes
frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts-- the
metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction) . . . ends up being
confused with the real thing . . . and now has nothing but the discrete
charm of second-order simulacra" ( 166 ). In the contemporary world,
Baudrillard argues, all that remains is simulation, representation, the
hyperreal. Any attempt to trace the real is but "the cartographer's mad
project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory" ( 167
). 1
War Zone C had increased 'significantly,' and American losses had doubled
and then doubled again, none of it was happening in any damn Ho Bo
Woods" ( 2 ). The madness of U.S. policy is seen as stemming from just
this futile attempt to control and understand the chaos of Vietnam, to
pursue "the cartographer's mad project." The implication of this opening,
with two maps that do not correspond to the territory they supposedly
chart, is that Vietnam is unknowable and unrepresentable. Conventional
methods of ordering and understanding do not apply. Hellmann links this
notion to the indeterminacy of language, seeing the relationship of a map
to a territory "as a common semantic analogy for that of language to
reality" and finding Herr's use of the map suggestive of "not only the
literal alteration of the landscape by American technology but also the
self-deceiving alteration of that destructive reality by a deceptive
language" ( 129 ). In the same way, Maria Bonn sees Herr "embark[ing]
upon the project of creating a new kind of language, a new map, a project
which he is fully aware is perilous from the start, because he is in a
country where all borders, all definitions refuse to stay put" ( "Lust of the
Eye,"31).
misreported the war not because of their naïve faith in the ability of
language to convey truth but because of their reliance on and their
credence in the pronouncements of military and government officials. This
sympathy was the result of the institutional biases and interests of the
mass media. Critics' insistence upon reading the discrepancy between the
war itself and official accounts of the war as evidence of the
epistemological rupture central to much postmodern/poststructural theory
(rather than as evidence of institutional sympathy and ideological
complicity) suggests literary culture's unfamiliarity with (or reluctance to
apply) institutional critique. Since literary culture is itself a bourgeois
institution (and its members are part of the professional-managerial class),
this absence of institutional analysis is no surprise. Why, after all, should
members of a somewhat privileged class be expected to interrogate the
very institutions that help maintain this privilege?
Like those critics who viewed the setting of The Quiet American as
Vietnam but its intellectual milieu as French, Carmichael reads Herr's
representations of Vietnamese as emblems of postmodern epistemology.
In so doing, he completely overlooks the racism implicit in Herr's notion
that Vietnamese faces are unreadable, a point strikingly reminiscent of the
stereotypical inscrutability of Asians. Actually, there is little discussion of
the Vietnamese in Dispatches. But for Carmichael this is a necessary
omission which shows "that the Vietnamese other is always only
understood as he or she can be subsumed under the familiar encodings of
American popular culture" ( 231 ). According to Carmichael, Herr"wants us
to see his experience of the war in the field of the other as a revelation of
the refusal to acknowledge difference" ( 232 ). Rather than an
ethnocentrism that has been useful in rewriting the war from an American
perspective, Herr's refusal to consider the Vietnamese is seen by
Carmichael as speaking to the impossibility of representing the Asian
other. Similarly, Carmichael does not object to the lack of historical
background in Dispatches but instead praises Herr for "refus[ing] to
construct a master narrative of his own experiences of the war." Herr's
provisional, subjective narrative is commendable "in the face of a history
whose motivations can only be traced in America through an endless and
ultimately empty chain of signification" (231). Carmichael's postmodern
sensibility leads him to deny the possibility of ideological critique, of
historical explanation, of cultural specificity, since all such attempts must
founder upon the meaninglessness of language. By Carmichael's logic, any
attempt to explain why the United States fought a decade-long war in
Indochina will fail because it requires the imposition of a metanarrative
onto the chaos of history. Discussion of U.S. imperialism is also
inappropriate because "Herr's postmodern narrative consistently
demonstrates that postmodern America is finally to be understood" not as
a commercial and military empire but "as that paradoxical construction,
44
Academic critics did find fault with some aspects of Dispatches. Dale
Jones, for instance, compares Dispatches to Tim O'Brien Going After
Cacciato and argues that O'Brien's magical realism affords him "greater
imaginative lattitude in which to explore the issues and questions raised
by his own Vietnam experience," helping him to "transcend . . . the
confusion and bloodshed of the conflict while Herr seems mired in the
war's violence and insanity" (310). Jones objects to Herr's depiction of the
war as a crazy and unknowable chaos. He argues that Herr's combination
of fictional styles and factual material "makes it difficult for the reader . . .
to discriminate between objectivity and subjectivity, reality and surreality,
facts and fictions" (314). Jones's argument is unusual within criticism of
Vietnam War literature, since to most critics this collapsing of borders is a
vital part of any aesthetic that seeks to convey the otherwise
unrepresentable nature of the war. Jones considers Dispatches "weakened
by Herr's emphasis on American insanity" (315). Like Zalin Grant's
objection to the depiction of veterans as "outpatients of an insane
asylum," Jones criticizes "the media myth of the violent vet, [in which
Vietnam is] present[ed] as a 'loony bin' with American soldiers as its
inmates" (319).
For Jones, Going After Cacciato is a better book because it offers a much
more profound moral probing of "why one served in Vietnam and of the
issues of courage and responsibility" (318). What Jones sees as O'Brien's
45
did not know who was right, or what arguments were valid. Yet he went to
war because he believed in his country, believed in law and democracy,
and he feared that not going would be to risk censure and bring
embarrassment on his father and his community. . . . . As Tim O'Brien
himself had done, Paul Berlin goes to war less influenced by reason than
by gravity, by the magnetic pull of his town, teachers and family. But he
comes to justify his participation in the war by elevating his sense of duty
and responsibility to his family and friends over his desire for individual
freedom. (319)
O'Brien's explanation as to why Berlin goes to war was true for many
American soldiers. A young man's internalization of nationalist ideology
and his inability to see the connection between military service and class
exploitation would likely be perceived as the magnetic pull of town,
teachers, and family. The problem here is that Jones views Berlin's
confusion, his assertion that he went to war "not because of strong
convictions, but partly out of ignorance and partly for 'reasons that went
beyond knowledge' " ( Jones, 318), as profound explanation rather than as
mystification. In other words, Jones sees the confusion, ambivalence, and
fears of young men considering whether to serve their country militarily as
a complex matrix of motivations. This complexity, to Jones, is profound,
whereas an ideological reading that views such complexity as
mystification is shallow and simplistic. As is common in literary
scholarship-- and in liberal culture generally-- ideological commitment is
crude, ideological incoherence profound.
For Jones, Dispatches is flawed because it "leaves little room for genuine
courage and responsibility" and because it characterizes the war as "a
world devoid of decency, sanity and heroism" (319). Given the nearly
46
Herr's aesthetic strategy is also faulted by Maria Bonn. She too recognizes
that "by reordering syntax and punctuation and using a language which
draws upon popular culture and contemporary discourses, Herr works
towards constructing a language appropriate for representing his view of
the war" ( 30 ). And she repeats familiar arguments about Herr's showing
that popular culture colors soldiers' experiences in Vietnam. She even
repeats the idea "that it is through heteroglossia that we must hear the
Vietnam War" ( 34 ). She sees Herr ironically appropriating an "American
hypermasculinity," adopting the grunts' use of "a language in which the
sexual and military share terms" ( 36 ). Unfortunately, according to Bonn,
"those terms come to take over his analysis, and his irony falls away into
actuality" ( 37 ). She contrasts Herr's endorsement of something very like
traditional notions of heroism and glory with (in Winners and Losers) Gloria
Emerson's "inconsolable . . . rage and grief" over U.S. militarism in
Indochina ( 46 ). And she reads Herr as much more congenial to Reagan-
era revisionism, the redesign of Vietnam "so that it will fit into the national
mythic structure" (47), than Emerson, who "wants us to see Vietnam as
unredeemable, a cultural crisis from which the U.S. is still suffering" ( 47 ).
Jeffords's critique arises from her belief that gender is the defining
category by which the history of the war and the emancipatory politics of
the 1960s have been rewritten; she sees patriarchy as the driving force
behind this revision. Jeffords seems to believe that the U.S. invasion of
Vietnam, too, was the result of patriarchy, declaring that "there can finally
be no adequate understanding of that war and its place in American
culture without an understanding of its gendered relations" ( 182 ) and
arguing that "wars are the most historically visible specifications of
patriarchal power relations" ( 181 ).
Jeffords's argument that the war has been revised in the form of
remasculinization is to some degree true. As she argues, this revision has
49
James agrees with Herr that popular culture, particularly war movies,
hinders understanding of the war. Just as critics have found in Herr's style
a means to overcome the obstacles of popular culture and the war's
unrepresentability, so James points to Herr's use of rock and roll to "solve
the awkwardness of Vietnam" ( 83 ). This incorporation of rock lyrics, rock
slang, and a rock-and-roll sensibility into Dispatches is in keeping with
Herr's wish to be true to the language and experiences of grunts-- as
opposed to the deadening and mystifying Jargon of the military command
and official journalism. If this war is so different from other wars, its
literary representation must use an entirely new vocabulary. And rock and
roll serves just this function. ( James connects this perception to "the
various ideologies of postmodernism, most immediately with Jean-François
Lyotard's rejection of the possibility of totalizing languages and his
demand for a recognition simultaneously of the unrepresentable" [ 85 ].)
But in Herr's use of rock and roll James finds historical erasure and
ethnocentrism. He notes that after the mention of the old French map,
Dispatches
the war unintelligible, but for politically intelligible reasons-- that is, to sell
a war that needed selling. ( 44 )