American War Stories in the 21st Century - Lecture Notes

Can War Be Represented?

Writers often struggle to convey war experiences, finding existing literary strategies and forms inadequate.
Violent conflict and warfare are, to some degree, considered beyond the scope of visual representation and verbal explicability.
Elisabeth Bronfen: "Our access to the real atrocity of war is only through the textual effects it produces even while eluding their grasp."
There is a "suspicion that war is ultimately unrepresentable."

The Difficulty and Necessity of Representing War

Not finding words for war may be the most potent technique for conveying its magnitude.
When words are used, there's a temptation to repeat outworn ones, rehearsing a version of battle that has more to do with how battles ought to be than how they really are.
The project of representing conflict should not be abandoned.
Crucial to find the words for war and to interrogate them at every stage.

Individual vs. Colossal Scale of War

Stories Americans tell about war shape ideological and everyday experience of US life.
The scale of warfare can overwhelm our understanding.
We can better "respond to one man in his war," as Samuel Hynes puts it.
Individual (male) war story serves as a significant touchstone in the American imagination, delineating and intertwining our understanding of both combat and (white) masculinity.
Examples: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), and the film American Sniper (2014).
War is colossal and chronic in its effects: it reconfigures nations, displaces peoples, disrupts families, razes cities, devastates landscapes.

The Importance of War Stories

War stories matter, often vitally for those who have seen combat.
Veterans may be driven to tell their experiences or be utterly unable to do so.
Telling stories can heal, as manifested in groups like the Veterans Writers Project.
Examples: What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It (edited by Trish Wood, 2006), and the HBO documentary We Are Not Done Yet (2018).

Critiques of War Representation

Critique of “combat gnosticism”: the belief that combat represents a qualitatively separate order of experience that is difficult if not impossible to communicate to any who have not undergone an identical experience.
“Fetishization of experience.”
“Anxiety of authenticity.”

Three Kinds of War Writing

Journalism, memoir, and fiction (poetry, too) each tells a different kind of truth.
They follow a strict chronological pattern: journalism, memoir, then fiction.
Journalism is reported at the time, from the field.
Memoir comes after people have come home and transcribed their notes.
Fiction is long and requires knowing more than the facts.
Journalism is meant to be neutral, memoir is meant to render factual experience, but fiction is meant to tell an emotional truth.

Contributions of Female Authors

Some of the earliest journalistic work by Tanya Biank on the Fort Bragg Army wife murders in 2002.
Memoirs by Kayla Williams in 2006 and Jess Goodell in 2011.
Fiction by Annie Proulx in 2008 and Helen Benedict and Siobhan Fallon in 2011.
Poetry by Jehanne Dubrow in 2010, all published well before the vaunted 2012 war fiction boom by male writers about male soldiers.
Female journalists like Jen Percy, Helen Thorpe, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, and Vanessa M. Gezari; filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow, Meg McLagan, and Daria Sommers; and fiction and poetry writers like Karen Russell, Lea Carpenter, Roxana Robinson, Joyce Carol Oates, Beverly Gologorsky, Mariette Kalinowski, Masha Hamilton, Hilary Plum, [Cara] Hoffman, Jehanne Dubrow, and Katey Schultz are exploring the War on Terror in innovative and capacious ways by telling stories about male and female veterans, military families, and Iraqi and Afghan civilians.
In literary criticism as well, women have published some of the earliest and only studies of contemporary war writing.
Women are now laying claim not only to the right to fight and die for their country but to what novelist Roxana Robinson calls the “right to write” about war.

Literature's Role in Telling War Stories

Literature confronts the terrible truths of what war has done and continues to do to us.
Literature makes sense of whatever small beauty we can rescue from the maelstrom.
The stories of the wars that defined the first decade of the twenty-first century are only just beginning to be told.
We don’t yet have all the stories, the kind of reinterpretive truth-telling that fiction and poetry can offer.

Ted Janis “Raid”

The narrator needed to get out of the community.
Bin Laden was fish food, but they were still chasing targets, hunting down low-level pipe swingers in the name of GWOT, an acronym and a concept that belonged to last decade.
Two deployments ago, the narrator drank the Kool-Aid – drank it like it was the blood of Christ.
Now it was all about the ritual, just like back home, sitting in pews, doing call and response.
The narrator hoped to find something new here, but it was just another church and just another creed, and he never was believer material.
At least he gets to jump out of planes.

Ted Janis “Raid” (cont.)

From an adjacent grove, on overwatch with the lieutenant and the rest of his gaggle, the narrator waited for the ambush to unfurl.
He scanned the village, so mute and ignorant of the violence about to play out.
The deafening crack of the earth being torn apart echoed into the night.
An instant of hopeful silence followed.
Then a shriek.
Shouts reverberated from cluster to cluster back to them.
Even before he could make out the words, he was in full sprint down the valley.
"Doc!" "Medic!" "Man Down!" "DOC!!!"
The wounded’s screams became moans and were accompanied by rifle fire and the shock of grenades from the compound.
Third squad, bringing the fight to the enemy.
"Don’t look at his face, I reminded myself. Don’t look at his face! Don’t look at his face!"
He forgot himself and looked down.
It was Peters.
He found it strange that his screams had been indistinguishable from the others.

Post-9/11 War Literature Themes

Question of representability & ‘truth’, (formal) innovation/creativity.
Experience of war (individualization, white male soldier, witnessing, combat gnosticism).
Therapeutic aspect.
Veteran-activist.
Beyond the soldier’s story: new distribution of authority over war stories & new perspectives.
Beyond combat: coming home as defining experience.