Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature [1 ed.] 022663728X, 9780226637280

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Total Mobilization

Total Mobilization World War II and American Literature Roy Scranton

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by Roy Scranton All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­63728-­0 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­63731-­0 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­63745-­7 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226637457.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Scranton, Roy, 1976– author. Title: Total mobilization : World War II and American literature / Roy Scranton. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018056059 | ISBN 9780226637280 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226637310 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226637457 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Literature and the war. | American literature—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PS169.W27 S37 2019 | DDC 810.9/3584053—dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2018056059 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for Martin

The image of war as armed combat merges into the more extended image of a gigantic labor process. . . . In order to deploy energies of such proportion, fitting one’s sword-­ arm no longer suffices; for this is a mobilization that requires extension to the deepest marrow, life’s final nerve. Its realization is the task of total mobilization: an act which, as if through a single grasp of the control panel, conveys the extensively branched and densely veined power supply of modern life towards the great current of martial energy. E r n s t J ü n g er , “Total Mobilization” (1930) Sunday-­school texts have ever been considered by sophisticated moralists the essential stimulus to “sin”—and I see no reason why the same fact should not apply to a Sunday-­ school simplification in dealing with the problems of war. On the other hand, let war be put forward as a cultural way of life, as one channel of effort in which people can be profoundly human, and you induce in the reader the fullest possible response to war, precisely such a response as might best lead one to appreciate the preferable ways of peace. K e n n e t h B u rke , “War, Response, Contradiction” (1941) The war is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field. W illi a m C a rl o s W illi a m s , introduction to The Wedge (1944)

Contents

List of Figures  ix Introduction: A True War Story  1

1 The Bomber The Bomber Lyric The Bomber as Scapegoat: Randall Jarrell’s “Eighth Air Force” Atrocity Aesthetics: James Dickey’s “The Firebombing” Agency and Death

15 32 49 57

2 Repetitions of a Hero The Hero as Riddle: The Negro Hero and the Nation within a Nation The Hero as Social Media: The Caine Mutiny Participating in the Heroic: Wallace Stevens and the Poetry of War The Reality of the Modern State: The Thin Red Line

63 76 90 102

3 War as Comedy Zany Dialectics: “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips” The Education of a War Poet: Kenneth Koch at War Barbaric Poetry: From Okinawa to the Cold War Encoding War: “Sun Out” and “The Islands”

119 129 141 150

4 Total War and Historical Time War as Origin Myth: Joan Didion’s Run River War as a Promise to the Future: “Letter from Paradise, 21° 19′ N., 157° 52′ W.” The Hanged Man and the Military-­Industrial Complex: The Young Lions and Gravity’s Rainbow One World, One War: The Great War and Modern Memory War as Fantasy: Star Wars 5 The Trauma Hero Combat Gnosticism and the Old Lie: From Clausewitz to The Yellow Birds Traumatic Revelation “The Good War” and Postmodern Memory

159 168 175 183 188

195 207 222

Conclusion: Nothing Is Over  227 Acknowledgments 245 Works Cited  249 Index 265

Figures

1 Cover of Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet (2005) 5 2 Still from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 18 3 Still from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 19 4 Douglas A-­20 Light Attack Bombers (1944/1945) 20 5 B-­29 Incendiary Attack, Kobe (1945) 47 6 Pfc. Kenneth Koch (ca. 1944) 130 7 US Invasion Fleet, Leyte (1944) 134 8 381st Infantry Regiment, Catmon Hill (1944) 137 9 382nd Infantry Regiment, Leyte (1944) 141 10 “Visions” from Deadeye Features (1945) 142 11 Joan Didion, “Hawaii: Taps at Pearl Harbor” from Saturday Evening Post (1966) 160 12 Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” draft manuscript (1917) 196

Introduction

A True War Story “Kindly! Sir, I pray, let me ha’t: I have wounds to show you.” willi a m sh a kespe a re , Coriolanus , act 2, scene 3

The true story of war is a story of trauma. A young man goes away to war, his head swimming with visions of courage and his heart yearning for sacrifice, but what he finds instead is death. He sees, causes, and suffers horrific violence, violence that wounds his very soul. After the war that same youth, now a veteran, returns to the world of peace haunted by his experience, wracked by what Judith Herman identifies as the central compulsion of trauma and atrocity: the conflict between the need to publicly witness his encounter with violence and the compulsion to repress it.1 He struggles to turn the inassimilable reality of the traumatic event into narrative but finds himself blocked at every turn: the memories slip from his grasp; no one wants to hear about the horrors he’s seen; and it is impossible for people who were not there to understand. As Herman writes, “Soldiers in every war, even those who have been regarded as heroes, complain bitterly that no one wants to know the real truth about war.”2 The traumatic violence of war destroys even language itself. Literary theorist James Dawes argues that “war impairs the human power to describe, define, or narrate. At the broadest level, war interrupts history. . . . War interrupts intersubjective evaluation and, at the most personal level, interrupts self-­narration.”3 Adam Piette asserts, “War zones destructure any narrative that attempts to describe them with powers of menace capable of warping civilian space-­time.”4 According to Mary Favret, “War, even at a distance, 1. .J Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1. 2. J. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 8. 3. Dawes, Language of War, 200. 4. Piette, “War Zones,” 38.

2

Introduction

works to dismantle the forms that prop up our sense of the world and our place in it.”5 War’s capacity to impair, destructure, or dismantle language may be an effect of its inherent resistance to conceptualization and representation; as Fredric Jameson argues, war itself is “an impossible collective totality, a manifold of consciousnesses as unimaginable as it is real.”6 Experiencing firsthand how war damages and exasperates our powers of description, sense making, intersubjective evaluation, self-­narration, and even space-­ time itself, the veteran comes to understand that war’s truth is a truth beyond words. “Because war is a world-­unmaking event, a reality-­deconstructing and de­familiarizing activity,” writes Margot Norris, the problem the veteran then faces is “how to make its inherent epistemological disorientation, its sense of experienced ‘unreality,’ real.”7 Thus the soldier’s most heroic battle occurs not on the field of combat but after he has come home, when he strives to bear testimony to his experience. He has gone to war, confronted death, and returned with that most priceless of treasures, self-­knowledge, for in passing through the fires of combat, the soldier has learned “momentous truths” about human existence that rend the illusory veils of modern civilization.8 As Chris Hedges asserts in his best-­ selling, award-­winning book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, “War exposes a side of human nature that is usually masked by the unacknowledged coercion and social constraints that glue us together.”9 Integrating this revealed knowledge into his life, turning it into narrative, and testifying to it before his community is precisely how the veteran heals his psychic wounds. “The testimony is . . . the process by which the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as a witness,” observes Dori Laub.10 Every war story, every true war story, is a story of trauma and recovery, a narrative that struggles to speak the unspeakable truth of war, a story that speaks war’s unspeakability. Yet as Kalí Tal reminds us, “the task of the traumatized author is an impossible one.”11 While a few survivors may be able to turn their suffering into literature, many veterans, unable to cope with the impossible task of narrativizing war’s “inherent epistemological disorientation,” remain stuck in their 5. Favret, War at a Distance, 15. 6. Jameson, Antimonies of Realism, 257. 7. Norris, Writing War, 24. 8. J. Glenn Gray, Warriors, 21. For the most influential version on this universalist Jungian interpretation of the “warrior myth,” see Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces; or later popular versions of this line of archetype-­psychology such as Robert Bly, Iron John; and R. Johnson, He. 9. Hedges, War Is a Force, 12. 10. Laub, “Truth and Testimony,” 70. 11. Tal, Worlds of Hurt, 121.

A Tr u e Wa r S t o r y 3

trauma for decades, compulsively reliving their pain, always returning to war’s unimaginable unmaking. “What one returns to, in the flashback, is not the incomprehensibility of one’s near death,” explains Cathy Caruth, “but the very incomprehensibility of one’s own survival.”12 In either case, the veteran, now a survivor and a witness, is known, like the Greek archer Philoctetes, by his wound. His testimony defines him, his work, and his speech. “The writings of trauma survivors comprise a distinct ‘literature of trauma,’” asserts Tal. “Literature of trauma is defined by the identity of its author.”13 To understand this literature, she explains, “we must embrace critical strategies that acknowledge the peculiar position of the survivor-­ author . . . and move into the realms of psychology and sociology, acknowledging the specific effects of trauma on the process of narration.”14 Every true war story is a story of trauma because the experience of war is essentially traumatic, because war itself is trauma, and we can only ever understand literature of and about war in these terms. So speaks the myth of the trauma hero. This myth is perhaps the single most important cultural frame for understanding the experience of war in the United States today. It informs our politics, colors our news reports, and underwrites our history.15 It dominates critical and scholarly interpretation of war literature, war movies, and the visual culture of war. It shapes how children imagine war and how veterans remember it. It even affects projects and viewpoints that might be otherwise critical of hero worship and skeptical of trauma theory. And it has sunk so deeply into our culture and become so naturalized that we have difficulty thinking of war in any other way. The myth of the trauma hero is compelling: it claims to speak to deep psychological truths, makes a kind of intuitive sense, and, perhaps most important, makes the American veteran a sympathetic victim, rather than a perpetrator, of violence. It is a myth that harmonizes with a Romantic valorization of embodied, subjective truth, since it frames war as a personal aesthetic experience rather than as a sociopolitical event, and portrays the experience of war as an experience of transcendental revelation achieved through physical proximity to death. The trauma hero’s revelation is predicated on the idea that the subjective 12. Caruth, “Traumatic Departures,” 34. 13. Tal, Worlds of Hurt, 17. 14. Tal, Worlds of Hurt, 117. 15. In Hal Foster’s analysis, trauma has been a central American cultural trope since the 1970s: “Across artistic, theoretical, and popular cultures (in SoHo, at Yale, on Oprah) there is a tendency to redefine experience, individual and historical, in terms of trauma.” H. Foster, Return of the Real, 168.

4

Introduction

feeling of having undergone an experience offers a more robust claim to truth and a greater moral authority than do history, eyewitnessing, or other kinds of accounts that rely on observable evidence or reasoned argument. Indeed, the trauma hero’s truth claim is a claim to a truth which exists beyond language: it is “impossible,” it is “unspeakable,” it is “incommunicable.” Nevertheless, and not without irony, the trauma hero’s claim is a claim necessarily made in language. The trauma hero’s transcendental revelation, that is to say, is a rhetorical and literary convention. The “truth of war” has a history, as does the trauma hero’s revelation. As does the trauma hero. Myths such as this sustain our sense of reality as coherent and meaningful. They are not, properly speaking, falsehoods, though their basis in empirical reality is often tenuous at best. Such myths are social facts, collectively held beliefs, which serve to codify social norms, represent collective identity, and make concrete the metaphoric relations structuring thought. Myths bring ideas to life in stories. We can never live wholly free of myths, for without them human existence would literally make no sense. Yet the need to live together within stories that tell us who we are does not mean that we must do so blindly, unconsciously, and without reflection. Bringing myth to light as history will not ever wholly dissolve the symbolic bonds that hold us together, if that were even desirable, but it might loosen them, allowing us a little more freedom of thought within their constraints, a little more self-­conscious deliberation. I began to delve into the history of the trauma hero in 2007 because I was curious about the ways in which the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were then being represented. Specifically, I was puzzled by the prevailing emphasis on soldiers’ trauma and the heartfelt admiration expressed across the political spectrum for veterans, two things that seemed to be connected. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were corrupt, possibly illegal, and immensely destructive, of dubious merit even from a cynical perspective, yet our most resonant cultural narratives about the wars focused not on the systemic political failures the wars represented or the thousands upon thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives that were being callously destroyed, but rather on the psychological suffering of individual American soldiers. One telling instance of the phenomenon can be seen in the story behind the cover of American veteran Brian Turner’s award-­winning poetry collection, Here, Bullet (2005).16 The cover of his lauded, well-­known, and much-­ taught book offers an iconic image: a slouching soldier in battle gear staring 16. I rely here on Antoon, “Embedded Poetry,” which first drew my attention to the story behind the Here, Bullet cover.

A Tr u e Wa r S t o r y 5

F i g u re 1 . Cover of Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet (2005).

at the viewer, standing alone against a harsh desert landscape (fig. 1). The image calls to mind countless similar images of battle-­weary soldiers while also evoking the tradition of the American Western through its figure of the solitary cowboy poised against the horizon. The figure is Turner himself; his gaze challenges the reader with his archetypical “thousand-­yard stare,” at once wounded and aggressive, guarded and yet hinting at hard-­won wisdom. This image came from a photo Turner had provided his publisher. Naturally, the photo had needed to be edited. The most important thing that had needed to be done was that the zip-­tied, hooded Iraqi prisoners whom Turner and his men had captured needed to be erased. In an interview in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Turner describes the decision-­making process at length, offering valuable insight into the process by which artists and editors collaborate in the production of war’s truth:

6

Introduction

The editor at Alice James Books asked me to send along a number of photos so that, while she was editing, she could get a feel for the people that show up in the poems. She wanted a visual feel for the landscape, and I think she was trying to get closer to the material too. She came across one photo and said “this has got to be the cover,” but it was very contentious for me for several reasons. . . . The contentious part of the photo—and I struggled with this—on the cover just above my name in the lower half of the photo, between the photographer and me were three Iraqi prisoners. They were on their knees, their hands were flexcuffed behind their backs, and they had sandbags over their heads. Jackowski, he was my M203 gunner, he took the photo. The prisoner on Jackowski’s right had a leather jacket on and we’d written RPG across his back because he’d fired a Rocket Propelled Grenade. In fact, Jackowski was in the center of a circle of prisoners—about ten or thirteen of them—and the stance that I have in that photo looks sort of like John Wayne. That photo looks like “I came over here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubblegum,” as they say in the movies. It just wasn’t right for a cover photo, especially with the sandbags over the heads because that’s now synonymous with torture. If I were someone walking into a bookstore—as we were talking about this during the editing process—I felt like some people would be repelled by that image. They would just think torture right off the bat, and this book isn’t about torture. There are books that need to be written about torture, and some of those are starting to come out, but my book isn’t about that. I wanted to invite people into the book rather than push them away.17

According to Turner’s own account, Turner and his editor worked together to shape an image of the Iraq War that focused on the American soldier, invoked the cowboy-­hero tradition of John Wayne, and literally erased Iraqi bodies, for the cover of a book of lyric poetry published by a respected nonprofit poetry press founded with a feminist and socially progressive mission. The reality of the war—specifically, the fact of Iraqi bodies—was deemed too repellent, so a new truth had to be constructed, one that elided the history of torture and the Abu Ghraib scandal, eliminated the troublesome Iraqis, and made the war more inviting to American readers. Most poetry readers today would probably not think of words or phrases such as “state ideology,” “propaganda,” “nationalism,” or “lies” when they think of Alice James Books or Brian Turner’s poetry, yet an image invoking nationalist war ideology that was constructed through erasure and deceit is precisely the face Alice James Books put on Turner’s poems. As I struggled to understand the motivation behind this process of ideological erasure and reframing that I was witnessing in American culture, I 17. Turner, “Conversation.”

A Tr u e Wa r S t o r y 7

began to see that it had something to do with the genealogy of trauma itself and how trauma had come to be synonymous with war. Trauma as a psychological concept has a long history going back more than a century, which has been discussed in detail by authors such as Ian Hacking, Ruth Leys, Didier Fassin, Richard Rechtman, and Allan Young,18 but trauma really only came into mainstream American culture in the 1970s. As I traced the history of trauma and its connections to American narratives about war, I began to see that the trauma hero myth had, at some point in American history, taken on a political function: in a way homologous to the way in which Brian Turner’s image was constructed on the cover of Here, Bullet, the trauma hero myth focuses all of our attention on the solitary soldier while erasing the bodies of the enemies and innocents that our traumatized hero killed. I also began to understand that whereas the myth’s political function seemed at first to be about American efforts to make sense of the war in Vietnam, it actually had much more to do with a revision within American cultural memory of the meaning of World War II, specifically related to that war’s total mobilization of American culture to military ends, a mobilization that did not end in 1945 but which persisted throughout the Cold War and into the twenty-­first century, and which remains with us today. The historical, political, and cultural importance of World War II to American life in the twentieth century scarcely needs to be argued. Yet for just that reason, it’s easy to forget how pervasive, radical, and upsetting the war’s effects were. As Richard Slotkin reminds us, “the Second World War plunged American culture into a crisis of unprecedented scope and intensity.”19 Some thirty million Americans were uprooted from their homes, and sixteen million of those stripped of their civilian identities, shuttled through a vast national bureaucracy, and sent across the country or across the world in what became the greatest experiment in cosmopolitan mixing and mass indoctrination in American history.20 More than 400,000 of these people died; another 670,000 of them were wounded. Women entered the workforce en masse, suddenly experiencing wholly novel forms of financial and sexual independence: “The percentage of women in the workforce increased by some 50 percent in the five years after 1940.”21 African Americans served in (segregated) military combat and support units and migrated north and west to work in an expanding defense industry: Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, and 18. See, e.g., Hacking, Rewriting the Soul; Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy; Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma; Young, “Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder.” 19. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 313. 20. Bodnar, “Good War” in American Memory, 20. 21. Bodnar, “Good War” in American Memory, 21.

8

Introduction

Philadelphia all saw African American populations nearly double between 1940 and 1950.22 The material culture of American life was transformed beyond imagining: food production and consumption, housewares, automobile production, home building, highways, television, film, clothing, airplane travel, and music all underwent incredible metamorphoses between the 1930s and the 1950s, spurred by wartime consumption, government investment, and a metastasizing military-­industrial complex. Millions of Americans experienced firsthand the terror and excitement of mortal violence, and millions more were imaginatively and emotionally invested in what was perceived as an existential struggle for the future of the planet. Last but not least, the scale of America’s self-­image was wrenched into a new frame as the United States took on leadership of “the West,” facing Soviet Russia in what would become a winner-­take-­all Cold War for global dominance, meanwhile unleashing the godlike destructive power of the atomic bomb. If we can say that World War II is a single event, it surely strains the imagination to conceive of it as such. Even from a strictly American perspective, what World War II is and means have been contentious and difficult issues from the beginning, not merely because of political investments and predispositions but also because the sheer scope of the war and its aftershocks remains difficult to assimilate or even to clearly perceive. As Norman Mailer wrote in 1957, “The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.”23 And perhaps it still does, though not for lack of looking. Cultural and aesthetic representations of World War II have struggled to come to terms with its staggering historical, ethical, political, and psychological complexity in a variety of ways; in poetry, novels, musicals, history, television miniseries, comic books, video games, and films. From Pearl S. Buck’s novel China Sky (1941), depicting American doctors caught in the Japanese invasion of China, to the first-­person shooters set in World War II that appeared in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-­first century, starting with the now-­classic Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and continuing with the blockbuster franchises Medal of Honor (1999) and Call of Duty (2003); from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos (1948) to George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977); from Chester Himes’s novel of racial tensions in wartime Los Angeles, If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945), to Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), the protagonist of which is a professor of “Hitler Studies,” the variety of American cultural production from the 1940s 22. See Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself, 182–87, for an overview of a few ways that the war transformed the political landscape in both northern and southern states. 23. Mailer, “White Negro.”

A Tr u e Wa r S t o r y 9

onward that works explicitly, allegorically, and sometimes unconsciously with and through World War II is at once a testament to the war’s importance and a forbidding challenge to our efforts to understand it.24 Given the tremendous richness and diversity of representations of World War II produced since the 1940s, it seems remarkable that a single narrative strain—trauma—has come to dominate the war’s literary canon. The short list of canonical American literary works “about” the war comprises the novels The Naked and the Dead (1948), Catch-­22 (1961), Slaughterhouse-­Five (1968), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and perhaps Ceremony (1977), along with a wider array of poems best represented by Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” Louis Simpson’s “Carentan O Carentan,” some of Robert Lowell’s antiwar poetry, several poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore’s “In Distrust of Merits,” and W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”25 These are the works that occupy the center of both academic and popular discussion of World War II literature, focus attention in canon-­setting works such as The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II, and serve as the ready-­to-­hand examples of World War II literature for teachers and scholars of twentieth-­century American literature. These works are stylistically and topically diverse, yet except for Moore’s complex meditation and Auden’s rueful lyric, they are alike in that they all rely on the concept of trauma and the trope of traumatic revelation. When other works are discussed, they are typically dismissed as aesthetic failures, as in Walter Hölbling’s discussion of American World War II literature in The Cambridge Companion to War Writing, where he lumps together all the fiction not identified as “postmodern” under the flattening category of “the mimetic mode,” tendentiously describing a great variety (and, indeed, the majority) of World War II novels as “traditional,” “conventional,” and simplistically comforting: “The focus is on telling a ‘story’ whose chronology more or less corresponds to the historical sequence of events. Characters conform to the tradition of psychological realism that encourages readers to identify with protagonists, and the connection of events by means of chronological narrative and plot structure suggests that the sense-­making of the fictional ‘story’ is more or less identical with what took place. At the end, readers have a sense 24. See Clune, Gamelife, chap. 4, “World War II Has Never Ended,” for a fascinating exploration of the philosophical and historical implications of Castle Wolfenstein (91–118). 25. Gravity’s Rainbow is often considered, despite its manifest content, to be not about World War II at all but rather about the Cold War and the Vietnam War. What such a reading misses— almost deliberately, it seems—is how much the Cold War and the Vietnam War were themselves “about” the legacy and meaning of World War II.

10

Introduction

of closure and the feeling that the things that happen in this fictional world can be explained and understood.”26 Even ignoring Hölbling’s contempt for “story” and “characters,” we’re left to puzzle out how this helps us make sense of works such as Harry Brown’s existentialist fable A Walk in the Sun (1944), Gertrude Stein’s gnomic Wars I Have Seen (1945), and John Horne Burns’s cynical portrait of occupied Naples, The Gallery (1947), or how it helps us understand the contradictions and dilemmas being worked out even in such “conventional” works as William Wister Haines’s Command Decision (1947) or William Gardner Smith’s Last of the Conquerors (1948). James Dawes likewise consigns everything but Mailer, Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon to the slag heap of mediocrity (though he does reserve a few nice words for Martha Gellhorn): “A great deal of readable, competent work was produced and lavishly celebrated . . . but few of these novels marked new directions for literature and fewer still are given extended attention by literary critics today. It is a much smaller subset of works that is now widely taken as the most important art coming out of the conflict.”27 Dawes’s vague gesturing toward “new directions for literature” and “the most important art” reveal his argument as the evasion it is. In fact, neither Mailer’s book nor Heller’s offers much in the way of technical innovation, and both books can seem at times repetitive exercises in illustrating the point that “war is bad,” while merely “readable, competent” novels such as From Here to Eternity and Tales of the South Pacific, which actually approach the war in fresh and innovative ways, have had deep and long-­ lasting impacts on American culture. More to the point, bandying about such opinions says nothing about why any of these books are important to scholars and readers either today or when they were published, or why, in the words of Kenneth Rose, “it is one of the conventions of literary criticism that World War I produced great writers but World War II did not.”28 Scholarly discussion of World War II poetry is typically more nuanced than that of the novels, though Hölbling, like other critics such as Margot Norris and Diederik Oostdijk, tends to privilege the same handful of poets (Auden, Jarrell, Lowell, Moore, Simpson), ignoring the challenges posed by the war poetry of writers such as H.D., Diane DiPrima, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, George Oppen, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Louis Zukofsky.29 How are we to understand the fact that when it comes to a war in which the United States arose to victory as a global superpower, the canonical lit26. Hölbling, “Second World War: American Writing,” 214. 27. Dawes, “American War Novel,” 56. 28. Rose, Myth and the Greatest Generation, 185. 29. Rachel Galvin’s recent book, News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945, is a salutary corrective to this tendency.

A Tr u e Wa r S t o r y 11

erary representations valorized as aesthetically worthwhile all tell stories of individual soldiers—Slothrop, Billy Pilgrim, Yossarian—psychologically traumatized by their proximity to violence? How did it happen that in the face of the overwhelming amount, variety, and complexity of representations of the experience of World War II, the narrow interpretive frame of trauma has come to dominate canonical literature about the war? Reading across the war’s literary archive from Lincoln Kirstein’s ribald poems to Martha Gellhorn’s melancholy novel Point of No Return (1948), from John Hersey’s documentary novels and novelistic reportage to Wallace Stevens’s complex considerations of the imagination of the hero in time of war, one can see that the majority of literary work explicitly concerned with World War II is in fact actively misrepresented by this canon.30 Just as Brian Turner and his editor went about constructing a simplified image of the Iraq War for the cover of Here, Bullet, a collaborative process of aesthetic reframing and erasure has washed out the complexity of World War II literature and replaced it with a story of trauma. How and why did this happen? Even more important, what is this misrepresentative canon leaving out, marginalizing, and obscuring? As my research progressed, I began to understand that one of the key things that the trauma hero myth has obscured is the way that writers dealing with World War II in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s struggled to make sense of the notion of heroism itself in a moment when the United States was transforming into a global military superpower. Who a hero was, what a hero did, how the hero was represented, and how the hero embodied American culture’s self-­understanding were contentious, open, and vital questions. The problem of the hero had been a pervasive Western concern since the late eighteenth century and can be seen emerging in Goethe’s revolutionary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wordsworth’s war poems, and Hegel’s vision of the world spirit as Napoleon on horseback, but total war revealed the problem to be a crisis at the heart of industrialized democratic society. Sidney Hook, Eric Bentley, Kenneth Burke, and other thinkers in the 1940s worried that the relationship between liberal democracy and heroism was at best beset by a troubled tension, at worst an irreconcilable antagonism. What was at stake was a conflict between different kinds of stories society told itself about its values, which is to say, how Americans told themselves the story of who they were: on the one hand, narratives in which every individual was an equal and independent member of a commercial democracy where everything was for sale, and on the other hand, narratives in which every individual was subordi30. Gellhorn’s Point of No Return was originally published as The Wine of Astonishment, a title which she regretted.

12

Introduction

nated to the collective and the most important thing anyone could do was to sacrifice their life for the nation. The total mobilization of American society to fight World War II demanded, in Kenneth Burke’s words, a “change from a commercial-­liberal-­monetary nexus of motives to a collective-­sacrificial-­ military nexus of motives.”31 In effect, World War II opened wide a conflict that had been building within the Western world since the Napoleonic Wars: the conflict between nationalism and capitalism, specifically the conflict between the metaphoric logic of nationalism and the metaphoric logic of capitalism around the issue of bodily sacrifice. To understand this conflict, we need to recognize nationalism and capitalism as competing belief systems with competing myths and rituals. In nationalism, collective identity is formed through the sacrifice and sacralization of a human body. The hero gives his body to and for the people, thus giving substance to the collective’s notion of itself, here “the nation.” Capitalism, in contrast, resists such sacrifice, since the human body must be converted, like everything else, into an exchangeable commodity—in this case, wage labor. What we sacrifice to collective identity in capitalism is not the body as such but nature, which we feed to the machine in exchange for material plenty.32 In World War II, national demands for the total mobilization of economic and spiritual resources conflicted powerfully with capitalism’s totalizing logic of commodity exchange. One belief system demanded the sacrifice of individual lives to a notion of collective identity grounded in genetic or legal consanguinity and geographic cohabitation, while the other demanded the sacrifice of all that is deemed essential and natural, including national identity, to a logic of metaphoric substitution in which any given thing, including the human body, can be transformed into any other thing. These belief systems had been in conflict since their emergence, but it was only with World War II that the conflict between these competing belief systems emerged into global ideological crisis. To put it another way, while we tend to think of the major ideological conflict motivating World War II—the gigantomachia peri tēs ousias, the “battle of giants concerning being”—as being between democracy and totalitarianism, that ideological conflict is better understood as being between two totalizing forms of social organization competing to control the world: nationalism versus capitalism. Seen in this way, the United States’ victory in World War II represented not so much the victory of capitalism over nationalism but rather a kind of 31. Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 404. 32. See J. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, and J. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, for more on the role of nature in capitalist exchange and the concept of the “metabolic rift.”

A Tr u e Wa r S t o r y 13

sublation, an aufhebung, that triple action of preserving, negating, and raising up, in which the two contraries are dissolved into each other through a new synthesis: in this case, American military-­commercial hegemony. The trauma hero, I came to understand, was taken up as an imaginary solution to the real conflict between capitalism and nationalism still at work within postwar American culture, offering a satisfying narrative of sacrifice that fosters a sense of communal belonging yet still preserves the body for labor, in ideological form at least, since the sacrifice the trauma hero undergoes is no longer physical but psychological. In this way, wartime sacrifice is enlisted to serve two masters, now locked in uneasy alliance. The trauma hero does not die for the nation but suffers spiritually for all nations; the trauma hero does not bleed for the nation but weeps while spilling blood for international human rights; the trauma hero does not embody a particular national ideal but rather performs a universal ideal by turning the brute fact of death into narrative, translating the Real into the Symbolic: blood and bodies become signs, artworks, stories; nature becomes culture. Once war is redefined as an irreducible trauma, a natural force with the same ontological power as racial or religious identity, then it can be assimilated within capitalist exchange by being converted into a tradable commodity, like any other natural resource. In the wake of World War II, as the war machine and the capitalist machine joined in what General Dwight D. Eisenhower called in his monitory final address as president “the military-­industrial complex,” the totalizing logic of the market absorbed even the act of total sacrifice. Total mobilization in a time of permanent crisis demands that we continue to give our laboring, consuming bodies to the global marketplace, while sacrificing our souls to the truth of the nation. “Keep shopping, only support the troops!” This book is organized around the problem of the hero in an era of total mobilization, focused on American literature produced between 1941 and 1975 having to do with World War II. While I draw from cartoons, films, journalism, and other media, I am primarily concerned with novels and poetry. My main interest, however, is not in the technical developments and stylistic genealogies of these specific forms but rather in how these forms serve as fields in which competing cultural forces come into conflict and resolution. Form is the necessary expression of content, content the necessary meaning of form; to argue for a particular aesthetic development taking place over time without accounting for the historical forces that give it life is to do no more than pro­ject onto the past a just-­so story which only confirms our own aesthetic taste, which is to say, our ideology. Total Mobilization is intended to offer a revision of the now canonical postmodern, posttraumatic revision of World War II that happened in the 1960s

14

Introduction

and 1970s. My core argument is threefold: first, that readers and literary scholars have mistaken the relationship between World War II and American literature by focusing on a handful of misrepresentative texts, and that in order to understand the impact of that war on American culture and literature, we must return to the archive with fresh eyes; second, that when we do so, we will see that for American writers trying to make sense of World War II, one of the central problems (if not the central problem) was the role of the hero in totalized industrial war; and third, that trauma as an interpretive frame for the experience of war emerged as an ideological solution to the problem of the hero and successfully took hold in the American political imaginary as a self-­serving way of reinterpreting the history of American violence. It is my hope that Total Mobilization can substantially refresh and revise the way we read World War II in American literature, and American war literature in general, while also reframing our understanding of postwar American culture. Only by so doing will we be able to understand the full import of World War II for American literature and see that the definitive fact of late twentieth-­century American culture is neither postmodernism nor the Cold War but rather World War II and its repercussions. The stakes are historical and literary, but they are also political, for as long as we see war as something outside and beyond civilized discourse, a traumatic “Real” manifesting a truth beyond language, we will continue to obscure the violence foundational to American empire and global capitalism, and as long as we confuse nationalism with liberalism, we will continue to feed the terror engine of American exceptionalism. As much as this project is about recovering the war lost behind the mythic image we’ve constructed of World War II, it is also about recovering what might not yet be lost behind the image of global war within which we live today.

1

The Bomber I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. S t a n le y B a ldwi n , Speech to Parliament (1932) The bomb-­sight adjusted destruction hangs by a hair over the cities. Bombs away! and the packed word descends—and rightly so. W illi a m C a rl o s W illi a m s , “To All Gentleness,” in The Wedge (1944) “I have seen the world spirit,” not on horseback, but on wings and without a head, and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel’s philosophy of history. The o d o r Ad o r n o, Minima Moralia (1951)

The Bomber Lyric William Wyler’s film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) opens with US Air Force captain Fred Derry, played by Dana Andrews, getting snubbed at a civilian airline counter. “I just got back from overseas,” he tells the attendant. “I want to get home.” But to the civilian behind the counter, Derry’s fancy uniform and silver wings mark him not as the hero he is in his mind but as just another customer, and what matters in the world she lives in—the “home front” of peacetime America—isn’t rank, valor, or sacrifice but money, a fact made manifest by the way she lets a businessman cut in front of the war veteran.1 Derry takes it on the chin like a soldier and smiles when the attendant sends him to the Air Transport Command office, where he manages to catch a military flight in a B-­17 bomber with two other veterans, sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) and infantry sergeant Al Stephenson (Frederic March). After the B-­17 takes off, Derry, who’d been a bombardier in Europe, takes the other two men up into his “former office” in the nose of the plane. The farms and orchards of “the good old USA” roll below, uncannily seen through Derry’s eyes as if targeted by a bombsight. McKinley Kantor’s blank verse 1. Wyler, The Best Years of Our Lives.

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novel Glory for Me (1945), from which The Best Years of Our Lives was adapted by Robert Sherrod, lingers in this moment: “Dwelling in space where once the bombsight lay, / He held his nose above the Plexiglas, / And watched the wads of villages and farms / And larger towns.”2 As the film follows the bomber’s flight over home territory, dramatizing the unheimlich (uncanny) vision of the returning veteran for whom every landscape is a potential battlefield, it follows the three men to (fictional) Boone City, where they make their difficult readjustments to civilian life. Together the three men represent the most iconic fighting figures of the war—soldier, sailor, airman—and also the most iconic problems of postwar adjustment. Derry, a version of the trauma hero, is haunted by nightmares of his burning bomber. Homer Parrish lost his hands when his aircraft carrier sank into the Pacific, and he now greets the world with two mechanical pincers.3 Stephenson faces the more complex problem of inhabiting competing ethical worlds, risking his prewar career at a bank when the values he had lived by as an infantry sergeant—camaraderie, personal judgment, frankness, sacrifice, and courage—run counter to the bank’s commercial ethos. In addition to these psychological, physical, and ethical challenges, the men also face identity crises typical to homecoming veterans. The Best Years of Our Lives (which title remains ironic throughout) ends on a note of prudently limited happiness, with Stephenson stable and adjusted to corporate realities, Homer married to his loyal fiancée, and Derry released from his loveless marriage, degrading job as a soda jerk, and traumatic nightmares, having found new love and a new job scrapping old bombers, work that is both appropriately masculine and explicitly therapeutic. All three men are offered domestic contentment, dependent on their acceptance of feminized civilian restraint.4 2. Kantor, Glory for Me, 20. Glory for Me was inspired by an August 1944 article in Time magazine about returning veterans (“The Way Home”). Belying the commonly held delusion that all returning veterans from World War II were greeted with kisses and parades, “The Way Home” tells a complex story of worry, confusion, and civilian indifference: “In another war there might have been brass bands at every stop. But in this pageantry-­less, slogan-­less war, the train just rumbled on toward New York, through the big towns and whistle-­stops.” Kantor flew combat missions on B-­17s as a war correspondent in Europe (Shroder, Most Famous Writer, 264–65). Robert Sherrod, a World War I veteran, worked during World War II under William Donovan as the head of the Foreign Information Service in the Office of the Coordinator of Information, and then as head of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information, serving as one of the top US propagandists (Alonso, Robert E. Sherwood, 236–58). 3. The actor who played Parrish, Harold Russell, was an amputee who had lost both his hands in a training accident. 4. Robert Warshow makes this point in his review of the film: “Since the starting-­point of the story is the veterans’ need for ‘readjustment,’ the sexual relations of the characters form an

The B o m ber 17

Despite the perhaps sustainable charge issued by critic Manny Farber that the film was a “a horse-­drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz,” The Best Years of Our Lives was deeply resonant with popular audiences (it was the highest-­ grossing film since Gone with the Wind), enjoyed massive critical success (it won seven Oscars), and offers real moments of insight and emotion to the attentive viewer even today, especially in its portrayal of Fred Derry’s changing relationship to his former role as a bombardier.5 Indeed, Derry’s story is the heart of the film, and in important ways he represents not only the air force but the American experience of World War II. Most readers today would probably think of John Wayne’s hard-­bitten Sergeant Stryker from The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) as representing the face of the archetypical World War II soldier, at least until he was displaced by Tom Hanks’s tough-­but-­ tender schoolteacher Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan (1998), but in 1946, that face would have belonged to Dana Andrews, who had starred in several World War II films (including one in which he played the ghost of a sailor killed at Pearl Harbor), most recently Sergeant Bill Tyne in director Lewis Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun (1946), a harrowing, poetic film which, as Jeanine Basinger points out, marked the beginning of a new “demythologizing mythology”: “Instead of seeing the events [of the war] as glamorous, we . . . learn about the ‘real’ war, one of waiting and no real information for the fighting man.”6 In A Walk in the Sun, the viewer is brought “inside” Dana Andrews playing Sergeant Bill Tyne as he tries to make sense of the chaos of combat.7 In The Best Years of Our Lives, we enter Andrews’s mind again, but now as a Captain Fred Derry, the veteran come home, reckoning with the war’s meaning for American society as a whole. Captain Derry, through his identification with his old “office” in the bomber’s nose, embodies the problem that the professional practitioner of industrialized warfare faces on returning to peace: a useless machine must be remade or get junked. After Derry loses his job, finds out his wife is cheating on him, and is warned away from Sergeant Stephenson’s daughter, he returns to the airport seeking a military flight somewhere—anywhere—else. While waiting for the next plane out, he wanders into a boneyard, where dozens of stripped bomber unusually clear projection of the familiar Hollywood (and American) dream of male passivity. The men are inept, nervous, inarticulate, and childishly willful; the women are strong, dignified, wise, and forgiving. . . . For each of the main characters, there is a scene in which the woman he loves undresses him . . . and puts him to bed.” Warshow, “Anatomy of Falsehood,” 161. 5. Farber, “Underground Films,” 15. 6. Basinger, World War II Combat Film, 138; Milestone, Walk in the Sun. 7. Basinger, World War II Combat Film, 134.

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F i g u re 2 . Still from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), in which Captain Fred Derry (played by Dana Andrews) walks through the boneyard.

fuselages sit partially disassembled, immobilized, evacuated of their power, line after line of gray skeletons stretching to the horizon (fig. 2). Derry is identified with the bombers and at the same time alienated from them, as what had once been the source of his identity and power is now gutted, impotent junk. As one man in one bomber in one field that indexes, in its mass-­ produced repetition, the totality of the industrial war machine, he suddenly understands his heroic role as that of a replaceable part in a global system. He had thought he was a demigod, but in fact that identity was nothing but a moment in a network of wartime production.8 At the same time, the machines themselves suggest the eerily insectoid grace of technological power in one of its most titanic manifestations and, as if they were gravestones, evoke the millions of all-­too-­human corpses the war produced. 8. Adorno, in his mention of the film in Minima Moralia, points to the film’s occlusion of class in the way that it replicates the factitiously egalitarian ideology of commodified labor under late capital: “When, in the most successful film of the year, the heroic squadron leader returns to be harassed by petty-­bourgeois caricatures as a drug-­store jerk, he not only gives the spectators an occasion for unconscious gloating but in addition strengthens them in their consciousness that all men are really brothers. Extreme injustice becomes a deceptive facsimile of justice, disqualification of equality. Sociologists, however, ponder the grimly comic riddle: where is the proletariat?” Adorno, Minima Moralia, 124.

The B o m ber 19

F i g u re 3 . Still from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) looks out from the cockpit of a scrapped B-­17.

In this scene, a single life comes to speak in its isolated self-­reflection for an entire cultural moment, and Wyler fixes this self-­reflection in the unforgettable image of Dana Andrews huddling disconsolately in the nose of a scrapped bomber, while the soundtrack roars with the haunting thunder of the bomber’s ghostly engines (fig. 3). The irony in the film’s title comes back to us with bitter wonder: the “best years” of Fred Derry’s life were spent trapped in a mass-­produced war machine raining death on anonymous enemies, many of them civilians, doubtlessly including women and children just like those who inhabit Boone City. This image of self-­reflection in which the individual merges with the collective, the man with the machine, and the destroyer with the victim is a perfect emblem of World War II’s most important and representative literary figure, the bomber. The bomber pre­sents a simple image: a black cross in the air, a silhouette “screaming across the sky,” “on wings and without a head,” a semidivine, gleaming metal death-­phallus (fig. 4). At the same time, the bomber is composite and fluid, sometimes singular, sometimes multiple, organic, technological, historically specific in each of its swarming variations, a squadron of ponderous Zeppelins, a single biplane, a Heinkel, a Lancaster, a V-­1 Buzzbomb or silent V-­2, a kamikaze Zero, waves upon waves of B-­17s, B-­25s, B-­29s, a man, a crew, a machine, a multitude. “The unit was the crew,” recalled poet

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F i g u re 4 . Douglas A-­20 light attack bombers of the 410th Bomb Group release their bombs over their target (European theater, 1944–45). Photograph courtesy of National Archives (Fold3, National Archive reference number 342-­FH-­3A15845–72983AC, 1944/1945).

and bomber crewman John Ciardi. “You belonged to eleven men. You’re trained together, you’re bound together.”9 The material technology manifesting this image was developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Made possible by the invention of the airplane and the production of increasingly stable and compact explosive devices, aerial bombing was introduced to the world—and to an unlucky group of Turkish soldiers in Libya—by Italian Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti on November 1, 1911. Dropping hand grenades from his Taube biplane on a Turkish encampment at Ain Zara, Gavotti inaugurated a practice of mass killing at a distance that over the course of the century would destroy millions of human lives, transform the nature of warfare, and provide our age with some of its most indelible images of state power, technological sublimity, and human vulnerability. Recall the photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc burned by napalm and running naked down a highway near Trảng Bàng. Think of 9. Terkel, “Good War,” 199.

The B o m ber 21

the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki and the scarred bodies of the hibakusha. Google “Shock and Awe.” The bomber has always been more than just a weapon.10 After small bombers and zeppelins appeared in the First World War, inspiring nightmare scenarios of aerial Armageddon, General Giulio Douhet prophesied the importance of strategic bombing in his 1921 book The Command of the Air, and increasingly sophisticated aircraft were used for colonial control throughout the 1920s and 1930s, most notably by the British in Iraq. With World War II the bomber achieved its apotheosis as a technocultural assemblage reshaping the flows of human existence. The movement of state power into the air and the translation of atmospheres into sites of conflict and control entailed modifications in our species-­life beyond mere war fighting, as the immanent logic of airborne explosives unfolded from hand-­launched grenades to napalm and atomic bombs, from bursts of shrapnel as microlocal phenomena to vast weather systems of fire engulfing entire cities.11 The most 10. The complex relationship between the technoutopian imaginary opened by militarizing the atmosphere, from H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air (1908) to Billy Mitchell’s Winged Defense: The Development of the Possibilities of Modern Air Power—Economic and Military (1925), and the new optics of destruction manifested by the actual machinery, can be traced in the history of the development of strategic bombing, the early years of science fiction, interwar journals such as Aero Digest, Flying, Air Progress, and Aerosphere, and, as Paul K. Saint-­Amour persuasively argues in Tense Future, the very lineaments of modernism. 11. Much has been written about the effect of strategic bombing on twentieth-­century culture. Peter Galison’s authoritative account of the importance of the US Strategic Bombing Survey and “self-­targeting” to postwar American urban planning—and hence to the material conditions of postwar culture—is foundational here (“War against the Center”), as are Michael Sherry’s The Rise of American Air Power and Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light. Peter Sloterdijk argues that the “terror from the air” signifies a fundamental shift in human being-­in-­the-­world: “The fact that the dominant weapons systems since World War II, and particularly in post-­1945 US war interventions, are those of the air force, merely betokens the normalization of the state-­terrorist habitus and the ecologization of warfare” (Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 53). Consider also Carl Schmitt’s analysis: “Development of modern technology has robbed the sea of its elemental character. A new, third dimension—air-­space—has become the force-­field of human power and activity. Today, many believe that the whole world, our planet, is now only a landing field or an airport, a storehouse of raw materials, and a mother ship for travel in outer space. That certainly is fantastic. But it demonstrates the power with which the question of a new nomos of the earth is being posed” (Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 354). As well, Rey Chow argues in The Age of the World Target that “the dropping of the atomic bombs effected what Michel Foucault would call a major shift in epistemes, a fundamental change in the organization, production, and circulation of knowledge” (Chow, Age of the World Target, 53). See also Paul K. Saint-­Amour’s argument for terror bombing’s influence on the development of interwar literary modernism; Saint-­Amour, “War, Optics, Fiction,” and Saint-­Amour, Tense Future.

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astonishing recent symbols of the power of human air power—the use of passenger jets as suicide bombs in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the use of unmanned drones to murder alleged terrorists—only deepen the mythic resonance inhering in the dialectical image of the winged destroyer.12 Rainer Maria Rilke’s aesthetic-­spiritual apothegm, “Every angel is terrifying,” is the inevitable epitaph to the century of the bomber, which also happens to be the American century.13 Indeed, within a specifically American historical context, the bomber takes on an even more substantial role than the symbolic manifestation of Hegel’s world spirit (as in the epigraph to this chapter from Adorno’s Minima Moralia). “The way trench warfare dominates the imagery of World War I,” writes Harvey Shapiro, “the fleets of bombers and the smoking cities dominate the imagery of World War II.”14 Daniel Swift makes a similar point: “Bombing was to the Second World War what the trenches were to the First: a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss.”15 The mythic role of the bomber took form during the war, in advertisements, newsreels, and films such as the Office for Emergency Management’s propaganda short Bomber (1941, with commentary by Carl Sandburg, where he calls the bomber “An angel of death—/ Death to those who mock at free peoples.”), Howard Hawks’s Air Force (1943), William Wyler’s wartime documentary Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), and Mervyn LeRoy’s Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), and then was confirmed after the war in films such as The Best Years of Our Lives, Command Decision (1948), and the much-­lauded command drama Twelve O’Clock High (1949).16 From the desperate heroism of the Doolittle Raid and the apocalyptic horror unleashed by the Enola Gay to Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which connects the Allied firebombing of Dresden with al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center, the bomber 12. Paul Kahn suggests that one effect of 9/11 was to shift all air travel into Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception”: “The contemporary war on terror represents the point at which conscription becomes truly universal, escaping even the formal structures of justification. Conscription can now occur to anyone at any moment: It is just a matter of finding oneself on the wrong airplane at the wrong time. At that moment, there is no further discussion, there is only the act.” Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters, 156; see also Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters. The drone strike which both judges and executes from on high, like the miraculous violence of God, is the image of sovereignty most apt to this new totalized state of danger. 13. Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, 12. 14. H. Shapiro, introduction to Poets of World War II, xxiii. 15. Swift, Bomber Country, 38. 16. Sandburg, Bomber.

The B o m ber 23

exudes troubling power well beyond the 1940s. Consider, for example, the bomber’s unexpected but wholly apposite appearance in John Ashbery’s 1975 volume Self-­Portrait in a Convex Mirror: A pleasant smell of frying sausages Attacks the sense, along with an old, mostly invisible Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage. How to explain to these girls, if indeed that’s what they are, These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas About the vast change that’s taken place In the fabric of our society, altering the texture Of all things in it?17

Ashbery’s knack for Wordsworthian commonplaces, the plodding pondering of social transformation in “language really used by men,” such as the clichéd “vast change that’s taken place / In the fabric of our society,” that quality Geoff Ward called Ashbery’s “unerring banality,” stabilizes the tenuous historicity of the photographic image amid several free-­floating frames.18 Fixing on the “fighter bomber” connects the narrator to a specific historical moment (“circa 1942 vintage”) and poses the question of how he might speak to the women in the picture from thirty-­five years later. Between the narrator and “These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas” lie the end of World War II, the atomic bomb, Korea, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X, the Vietnam War, the 1960s, the moon landing, second-­wave feminism, Stonewall, and much else besides, including shifting mores with regard to gender roles, sexuality, and American geopolitical power. The seemingly simple world of the photograph, featuring girls “draped” on a symbol of American military masculinity as innocent as its Donald Duck insignia “fading . . . to the extreme point of legibility,” is now “old, mostly invisible” and yet conjured and sustained for these “creatures (that’s the word) / of [his] imagination” through the figure of the bomber. Even as the speaker tries to forget them, the women remain attached to the bomber as not just a moment but an axis of history, which in this poem reveals its immanent development as air power and environmental control “in the not too distant future / When we meet possibly in the lounge of a modern airport.”19 Through such complex gestures of fascination and disavowal, American 17. Ashbery, “Mixed Feelings,” in Self-­Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 41–42. 18. Ward, Statues of Liberty, 102. 19. Ashbery, “Mixed Feelings,” 42.

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writers during and after the war fixed on the figure of the bomber as a powerfully overdetermined embodiment of the problem of the hero in an age of total mobilization. Consider Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-­22, widely seen as the most important American work of literature about the war and one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Catch-­22 tells the story of Army Air Corps Captain John Yossarian, a B-­25 bombardier, during his tour of duty in Italy. Yossarian’s story is told through a complex interweaving of flashbacks, repetitions, digressions, repressions, and displacements that circle elliptically and erratically around his memory of a fellow crewmember’s death. As sophisticated as the story is, the essential narrative is simple and familiar: Yossarian experiences a traumatizing revelation of human mortality, then spends most of the novel striving to escape this knowledge. The novel’s eponymous “catch” is specifically invoked with regard to whether or not Yossarian has to fly more missions, though it generalizes to the human condition. Yossarian, fearing for his life, tries to fake insanity, because an insane pilot will be relieved of duty. Trying to avoid death, though, is in the novel’s logic the very sine qua non of sanity. The more Yossarian tries to prove he’s mad, the more he proves his fitness as a war fighter: “There was only one catch and that was Catch-­22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.”20 This “catch” is not quite the paradox that Heller makes it out to be. The defining fact of being alive is that you die—there is no escape from death, not through insanity, not even to Sweden, and the desire to escape death is not the definition of sanity but a particular expression of human will, and whether such an expression is “sane” or not depends entirely on its force and context. A paranoid agoraphobic shut-­in may be as mentally unbalanced as a recklessly self-­destructive risk taker. Yossarian’s will to immortality is both comic and Christlike in its appeal, and his rejection of modern bureaucratic society inspiring in its contrarian logic, yet what’s paradoxical about Catch-­22 is not that Yossarian is another Romantic hero striving to triumph over death. What’s paradoxical about Catch-­22 is that the victim of traumatic violence at the novel’s center is also an agent of superhuman destructive power deployed by one of the most powerful military forces ever seen in what is eventually a victorious war against Fascist militarism. Men like Yossarian flying B-­25s like his unleashed apocalyptic violence on Germany, Italy, and Japan incomprehensible in the scope of its destruction. American and British bombers dropped almost three million tons of bombs on Germany, killing more than half a million civilians, while American bombers dropped 160,800 tons 20. Heller, Catch-­22, 46.

The B o m ber 25

of munitions on Japan, killing approximately 806,000 civilians.21 Yossarian, as an American bombardier, is directly responsible for a portion of this almost unimaginable destruction, yet his role in the novel is not as an agent of collective violence but rather as its traumatized victim. Yossarian’s victimization is, from a certain point of view, understandable. The subject position of the bomber crew, terrified and immobile, strapped into ball turrets, belly guns, and Plexiglas noses while flak exploded all around them, resembled the archetypical subject position of the trench soldier in World War I as depicted in the British trench lyric. Both the trench and the bomber required men to suffer intense fire in essentially fixed positions with little recourse to action: while the bomber flew through the air, the physical bodies of the men inside were stuck, and while the gunners could fight off Messerschmitts, there was still nothing they could do about flak. Drawing an explicit parallel between Ernst Jünger’s sense of weightlessness under artillery attack in the trenches of World War I and an American pilot’s description of night bombing over North Vietnam, Paul Virilio writes, “Tied to his machine, imprisoned in the closed circuits of electronics, the war pilot is no more than a motor-­handicapped person temporarily suffering from a kind of possession analogous to the hallucinatory states of primitive warfare.”22 As Samuel Stauffer and colleagues note in their authoritative survey of World War II soldiers’ psychology, “The necessity to fly in rigid formation and the restrictions on evasive action when exposed to flak and enemy fighter attacks are conditions which probably tended to augment anxiety reactions in all members of the crew.”23 Patrick Deer, in his study of British war culture, Culture in Camouflage, observes that “while the pilots of the Royal Air Force Fighter Command [in World War II] enjoyed their finest hour in a futuristic time and space, the flight crews of Bomber Command lived a position much closer to that of the Great War balloon corps. Casting a lethal gaze over the battlefield of the enemy’s cities, they were nevertheless trapped in a fixed routinized war of attrition. Bomber crews carried an enormous psychological burden and suffered the highest casualty rates for any branch of services in the Second World War.”24 Deer’s statistics on the high rate of death among bomber crews relative to other branches of service apply only to British forces, but they nevertheless help indicate the relative intensity of the bomber’s war. (The United States and United Kingdom each lost approximately 79,000 airmen in the bombing campaigns over Germany, though since more American troops 21. United States Strategic Bomb Surveys, 84, 92 (hereafter cited as USSBS). 22. Virilio, War and Cinema, 106. 23. Stauffer, Lumsdaine, et al., American Soldier, 2:408. 24. Deer, Culture in Camouflage, 63.

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were involved worldwide, that number—though still large—­accounts for a smaller overall percentage.)25 One statistical study followed 2,051 American bomber crewmen through a series of twenty-­five missions with the Eighth Air Force over Germany. Slightly more than a quarter of the men completed all twenty-­five missions, 15.8 percent were lost for noncombat reasons (death, disease, administrative removal), and 58.3 percent—eleven hundred ninety-­ five men—were killed or lost in action.26 Further, because of the tight interdependence of the bomber crew, “heavy bomber crews also suffered the special strain of responsibility for comrades.”27 There can be no question that crewing a bomber was frightening, dangerous, and excruciatingly stressful.28 Yet the subjective experience of the bomber crewman in no way disposes with the objective destructive power unleashed by the machine he was a part of. This paradox, central to the structure and function of the trauma hero narrative in postwar American culture, comes into relief in Catch-­22 through the extreme discrepancy between Yossarian’s objective social role (bombardier) and his subjective literary one (trauma victim). The very word itself, bomber, meaning both the superhumanly powerful war machine and the vulnerable human inside it, adverts to its dualism. In novels such as Catch-­22 and in poems such as Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” which I’ll turn to imminently, the bomber stands as a symbol of the industrial state’s mass-­produced destructive power, yet the American looking through the targeting reticle is portrayed as being more a victim of that power than are the shrapnel-­torn bodies of the soldiers and civilians burning below. The chief concern of such literary works is neither the lives of the bombed, nor the authentic but troubling thrill of destruction, nor even American military-­ industrial power (all of which do appear, though only as subsidiary aspects), but rather how the young man in the machine is an innocent, sympathetic, and sacrificial hero.29 25. “Over-­all Report (European War),” in USSBS. The US bombing of Japan, it should be noted, was much less dangerous, with approximately 2,600 casualties (Kerr, Flames over Tokyo, 276). 26. Sherry, Rise of American Air Power, 205. 27. Sherry, Rise of American Air Power, 205. See Hersey, War Lover, esp. 164–77, for a thickly textured dramatization and description of how this interdependence worked. 28. See also ch. 8, “Objective Factors Related to Morale Attitudes in the Aerial Combat Situation,” in Stauffer, Lumsdaine, et al., American Soldier, vol. 2. 29. See Michael Sherry’s discussion of how John Steinbeck’s book Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (1942), Brendan Gill’s New Yorker story “Young Man Behind Plexiglas” (1944), and Dixon Wecter’s essay “Children of the Machine Age” (1944) tried to manage and make sense the contradictory character of the bomber crewman; Sherry, Rise of American Air Power, 134–37.

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The self-­contradictory sacrificial bomber served as the central figure of World War II in American film and literature and inspired what may be the only new literary genre to emerge out of the war, the “bomber lyric.” Activating at once the glamour of the fighter pilot and the proletarian dehumanization of the replaceable machine part, recalling sublime skies full of killing angels, juxtaposing terrifying vulnerability against godlike power, the bomber lyric is a distinct genre of poetry focusing on aerial bombers. The bomber lyric is identifiable by its subject matter (bombers), its evocation of the trench lyric, and its thematic concern with the tension between power and vulnerability, a tension embodied in the relationship between the bomber-­as-­war-­machine and the bomber-­as-­human-­operator. A bomber lyric need not offer a dramatic monologue, a poet overheard speaking to himself or to a silent auditor, as some modern definitions of lyric would insist. Many bomber lyrics do, of course, such as Richard Hugo’s “Spinazzola: Quella Cantina Là”: “I mix up things, the town, the wind, the war. / I can’t explain the drone. Bombers seemed / to scream toward the target, on the let-­down / hum . . .”30 Other bomber lyrics are narrative, such as Randall Jarrell’s “Transient Barracks,” which describes an airman’s return from abroad to his new duty station at an American airfield: “Summer. Sunset. Someone is playing / The ocarina in the latrine . . .”31 Some are apostrophic. Many are elegies. Scholars and poets have identified the importance of bomber poetry in the literature of World War II, though without ever categorizing it as a distinct genre.32 Daniel Swift’s Bomber Country comes closest, arguing convincingly that the poetry of the air war is “a poetry specific to the Second World War,” and worth consideration as such.33 Bomber Country is informed by broad reading around the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II, mostly in Europe, and is illuminating on the literature arising out of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain. Yet it is just where Swift’s inquiry leaves off that the deeper problems of the bomber lyric become visible. He writes, for example, “The bombers who fly and do not return threaten our need for stories because they thwart the possibility of an ending. The bombers who kill civilians in foreign 30. Hugo, Good Luck in Cracked Italian, 44. 31. Jarrell, “Transient Barracks,” in Selected Poems, 141. 32. David Vaughan, in his Words to Measure a War: Nine American Poets of World War II, though considering a preponderance of airmen and understanding that the poetry of the air war demands special consideration, sees the bomber as merely one subject among many. Diederik Oostdijk’s Among the Nightmare Fighters offers a similar view. Whereas Oostdijk thematizes bomber poetry in his book, like Vaughan, he doesn’t see the bomber lyric as a distinct genre. 33. Swift, Bomber Country, 28.

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cities threaten our demand for goodness in our heroes, and it is for both of these reasons that the poetry is theirs.”34 Swift clearly identifies the central paradox of the bomber lyric—the relationship between sacrificial violence and agential violence—yet takes that paradox as if it were its own self-­evident explanation, needing no further analysis. Further, although Swift sees bomber poetry as a historical development reflecting both new technologies of destruction and what he suggests is the war’s representative setting (the bombed-­out city), the emergence of the bomber lyric cannot wholly be explained by weapons technologies.35 It must also be explained by cultural technologies: literary practice, ideology, and myth. Poets, like all artists, work from the conventions they have learned. As Nils Clausson writes in his discussion of the origins of the British trench lyric: It is impossible to write a successful poem simply by wanting to, or by being inspired to, or by instinctively sensing how to. The would-­be poet must imitate a model. When World War One broke out, not only was there no tradition of soldiers writing poetry . . . but there was simply no English tradition of war poetry upon which a modern poet could draw to write about trench warfare. Blunden, certainly the most scholarly of the war poets, searched in vain for one. In the absence of such a tradition, the single greatest problem facing Blunden, Sassoon, Rosenberg and their fellow poets was to identify an existing set of literary conventions . . . , which would enable them to write about the new kind of war experience they encountered in the trenches of France and Flanders. . . . The problem . . . is not one of evolving an adequate response to an unparalleled experience but of finding or identifying a literary form that will enable the poet to have an adequate poetic response to that experience in the first place. The poet does not first have a poetic response, and then put it into a poetic form. Rather it is the poetic form that constitutes the response as a poetic one.36

American poets in the 1940s, confronting a strikingly new kind of mechanized total war, and having no strong tradition of American war poetry to draw on (save Whitman and Melville’s idiosyncratic Civil War poems), faced a similar problem. Leaning on tradition in a moment of crisis, many poets looked to the British trench lyric, translated into the air. After all, to find the poetry in the pity, the subject must be pathetic, and the stoic but hardy infantryman “fighting fighting fighting” in Guadalcanal and Italy (as in Mari34. Swift, Bomber Country, 42. 35. Swift, Bomber Country, 29, 38. 36. Clausson, “‘Perpetuating the Language’: Romantic Tradition, the Genre Function, and the Origins of the Trench Lyric,” 106–7.

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anne Moore’s “In Distrust of Merits”), simply would not do.37 By turning to the figure of the bomber, at once singular and multiple, at once human and machine, at once victim and destroyer, poets were able to draw on the trench lyric’s reiteration of the Romantic tradition, its depiction of war as an apocalyptic sublime, and its focus on human fragility, while also depicting the staggering military and technological might of the United States of America. Four poems from the 1940s, Walter Benton’s “Summary of the Distance between the Bomber and the Objective” (1941), H. R. Hays’s “To an American Flyer” (1942), Robert Lowell’s “The Bomber” (1944), and John Ciardi’s “Reveille for My Twenty-­Eighth Birthday” (1944), exemplify the bomber lyric’s dualisms: singular/multiple, man/machine, victim/destroyer. Consider Ciardi, who meditates on the bomber’s hybrid ontology: “I am the theorem of the pure believer: / The thumbs for switches and the hands for pliers / Moved on a diagram of nerves like wires.” His final lines consummate the merging of crewman and plane: “My hand the blueprint that the lightning traced, / My wish resolved, mechanical and lean: / Decidedly hot, then numb as a machine.”38 Likewise, Benton’s “Summary” depicts the bomber as a metallic bird, an explosively organic machine: The duraluminum dove dives—

How slenderly space splits—the momentum doubles, multiplies, the dynamite muscles flex for sudden violence!39

Seen as an agent of power, the bomber is a marvel of technology and spirit, a wonderment only conceivable through the most vatic and cosmological hyperbole. As Benton writes, “behold the stark embodiment / of the millennia of mind.”40 The bomber’s hybrid ontology is not always cast strictly in terms of machines and bodies; sometimes bomber lyrics frame their dualities in a more Romantic register, by allusion to the sparrow or lark of poetic inspiration, or the angels of Milton, Blake, and Rilke. Benton writes, “Beautiful . . . beautiful to see against the sky / of flying birds—.” Hays calls his flyer a “singing spark” and a “pure and dangerous angel.”41 Often the bomber is posed as a kind of deity or demigod, a supernatural power beyond human reckoning. Lowell, in a poem redolent with religious imagery, writes: 37. M. Moore, “In Distrust of Merits,” in Complete Poems, 137. 38. Ciardi, “Reveille for My Twenty-­Eighth Birthday,” 180, 181. 39. Benton, “Summary of the Distance.” 40. Benton, “Summary of the Distance.” 41. Benton, “Summary of the Distance”; Hays, “To an American Flyer,” 423, 424.

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O godly Bomber, and most A god when cascading tons Baptized the infidel Huns For the Holy Ghost, Did you know the name of flight When you blasted the bloody sweat And made the noonday night: When God and Satan met And Christ gave up the Ghost?42

From below, the bomber reveals its most medieval aspect: a giant, fire-­spewing crucifix. The ecstatic worship of quasi-­divine power jars uneasily with a lyric sense of human sympathy, and one way the poets writing bomber lyrics try to square the circle is through irony, sometimes yoking disparate positions so extreme they barely hold together, as in Lowell’s vision of the “godly bomber” baptizing the “infidel Huns.” Benton’s ostentatiously banal description of the bomber in the italicized final line of his poem, “bringing peace to many,” is similarly ironic. Most often, though, rather than ironizing the disjunction between human agency and divine power, the bomber lyric works to humanize the destroyer. Hays’s poem, for example, addressing the young man at the control stick or the bombing reticle, is an earnest appeal to a fearsome deity: Half child, half god, This is the season of temptation. Reject your cruel immortality, Pride in your bloody lightnings. These flecks, these germs below Are human as your hand. Be humble As you prune the earth, your garden.43

For Hays, the bomber is a metaphysical force that must be propitiated. Benton, somewhat differently, sees the bomber in a line of human achievement including “Rembrandt, Beethoven, Steinmetz, Plato, Christ.” Ciardi’s poem represents the bomber as a technician whose métier is death: “Journeyman expert in the trades of kill, / Scholar of bomb and fuse . . .”44 Even at their most metaphysical, these poems struggle to contain the bomber’s awesome destructive power within a preindustrial, humanist cultural framework, at the 42. Lowell, “The Bomber,” 12–13. 43. Hays, “To an American Flyer,” 423–424. 44. Ciardi, “Reveille for My Twenty-­Eighth Birthday,” 181.

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center of which lies the bomber’s fragile human body (as Hays writes, “Fierce death you carry fill your heart / With life—”).45 While these poems illustrate well the tension between power and vulnerability embodied in the bomber, they do not exemplify the culmination of that contradiction, which occurs through the bomber’s sacrifice. Not all bomber lyrics go so far as to depict the bomber’s death, trauma, or wounding, though many of the best-­known lyrics do, from Jarrell’s “Siegfried” (“you have tasted your own blood”) to Howard Nemerov’s “The War in the Air” (“For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead, / Who rarely bothered coming home to die.”).46 One typical wartime sacrifice poem is May Sarton’s “Navigator,” written for Edmond Kennedy and published in the New Yorker in 1943: This lazy prince of tennis balls and lutes, Marvelous redhead who could eat and have his cake, Collector of hot jazz, Japanese prints, rare books, The charming winner who takes all for the game’s sake, Is now disciplined, changed, and wrung into a man. For war’s sake, in six months, this can be done. Now he is groomed and cared for like a fighting cock, His blood enriched, his athlete’s nerve refined In crucibles of tension to be electric under shock, His intellect composed for action and designed To map a bomber’s passage to Berlin by stars, Precision’s instrument that neither doubts nor fears. This can be done in six months. Take a marvelous boy And knead him into manhood for destruction’s joy. This can be done in six months, but we never tried Until we needed the lute player’s sweet life-­blood. O the composed mind and the electric nerve Were never trained like this to build, to love, to serve. Look at him now and swear by every bomb he will release, This shall be done. This shall be better done in peace!47

Sarton’s poem registers a complex mixture of erotic innuendo, pride, and rue. While the ephebe is admired for his insouciant, aristocratic grace, and his forced transformation into manhood is regretted, the transformed man is 45. Hays, “To an American Flyer,” 424. 46. Jarrell, “Siegfried,” in Selected Poems, 144; Nemerov, “War in the Air.” 47. Sarton, “Navigator.” “The airman I wrote about is in North Africa,” Sarton wrote to Juliette Huxley in January 1943 (Sarton, Dear Juliette, 121).

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nevertheless admired for his power. He is “enriched,” “refined,” potent, and capable of difficult acts of esoteric reckoning, yet all this potency is spent— even wasted—in sacrifice. The ephebe is transformed only to spill his “sweet life-­blood,” not for constructive goals but for “destruction’s joy.” The final lines turn sententious, demanding that the reader look and swear. “This shall be done” opening the ultimate line both suggests an impotent ex post facto alignment of will with fact—deixis reclaimed as intention—and inaugurates Sarton’s final critique. The “this” refers back to the failure pointed to in the final lines of the previous stanza and insists that it be rectified: the ephebe ought to have been trained “to build, to love, to serve,” a training “better done in peace.” Sarton’s moral outrage at the poem’s end rings hollow against the eroticism of the prior stanzas (“knead him into manhood”), which hints at an investment in the sacrifice itself—the destruction of the beautiful boy—­ exceeding her merely performative denunciation. The archaic, biblical tenor of the final lines sets them apart from the rest of the poem, suggesting a failure of native idiom. The aesthetic power in this poem, such as it is, comes not from the moral message in its final lines but rather from the ephebe’s sensuality, his transformation, and the sacrifice of his “sweet life-­blood.” The vulnerable, beautiful boy locked into the godlike destructive machinery of the aerial predator exemplifies perfectly the culminating narrative—and problem—of the bomber lyric: the aestheticized sacrifice of the community’s appointed killer. The Bomber as Scapegoat: Randall Jarrell’s “Eighth Air Force” The most well-­known bomber lyric, perhaps the single most anthologized poem from World War II, the poem Karl Shapiro called “the most famous and the best war poem of anyone in the twentieth century,” is Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.”48 Jarrell was not a bomber crewman like John Ciardi or Howard Nemerov but instead spent his war service teaching celestial navigation in Oklahoma and Arizona. His close contact with flight crew trainees spurred him to write from their point of view. In five 48. K. Shapiro, “Death of Randall Jarrell,” 220–21. Jarrell’s poem was first published in Partisan Review (Winter 1945), in the same issue as his famous critique of Marianne Moore’s poem “In Distrust of Merits.” See Schweik, Gulf So Deeply Cut, 31–58, for a thorough discussion of Jarrell’s attack, and Miller, Marianne Moore, 163–66, for an attentive, generous reading of Moore’s poem (which is too often ungenerously disparaged by critics lacking sympathy for Moore’s complex ethical self-­castigation). “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” also appeared in Jarrell’s 1945 collection Little Friend, Little Friend.

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dense lines of loose, mainly trochaic verse, Jarrell produced an iconic, murmuring, self-­elegizing lyric, an example of what Diana Fuss calls a “corpse poem”—a spectral voice overheard speaking to itself in an impressionistic succession of images.49 From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.50

The poem is nearly the sestet of a sonnet, with lines measuring eleven syllables, twelve, ten, eleven, and fourteen.51 The first line, dreamily allegorical, opens the poem with a troubled rhythm destabilizing the surreal event it describes: beginning with a soft trochee, the rhythm marks a caesura after the fifth syllable, then slides into a turbulent metric upset that speeds us through an iambic “fell” to a quasi-­spondaic “into” and comes down hard on “State,” capitalized as if a personification. The stress of into carries a tension—the second syllable of the word pulls at the ear to take its own stress, to separate itself off as its own preposition and a distinct beat in the rhythm, yet it remains subordinate to the first syllable. This prepositional ambiguity does semantic work complicating the speaker’s “fall”: Did he fall “into” it, as one falls into a pit, or did he “fall in,” as one falls in to military formation? The voice carries a clear judgment. The speaker’s mother, negligently dormant, has betrayed him: birth and fall are one. The birth is into the “State,” both the body politic and the faceless administration of mass society, and thus also represents the interpellation of a specifically wartime government. Once drafted by the wartime state, a person becomes a GI, “government issue,” a thing to be shuttled through vast, impersonal systems toward the great death-­ making machine of the front. “I fell into the State” also alludes to the physical experience of appearing before a draft board or reporting for service. The transition from citizen to soldier is a fraught threshold, marking irrevocable shifts from individual freedom to military discipline, from family life to other collective identifications, and from peace to violence. Thus, from the passively innocent purity of feminine negligence, the speaker “falls into” the collective subject formation demanded by total mobilization. This is the standard critical reading of the poem. As Leven Dawson writes, 49. Fuss, Dying Modern, 44. 50. Jarrell, “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” in Selected Poems, 137. 51. This quasi-­sonnet appearance is something it shares with that other iconic twentieth-­ century war poem, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which I discuss in chapter 5.

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“The theme of Randall Jarrell’s ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’ is that institutionalized violence, or war, creates moral paradox, a condition in which acts repugnant to human nature become appropriate.”52 This so-­called dehumanization of the soldier in the military is something Jarrell explores further in other poems such as “Port of Embarkation,” “The Lines,” “The State,” “Losses,” “The Sick Nought,” “Siegfried,” and, most despairingly, “Prisoners,” where he sees, presaging Giorgio Agamben, the prison camp as the nomos of the modern. In “Prisoners,” industrial existence is reduced to meaningless drudgery within an absolute (and absolutely violent) authoritarian regime trapping the oppressors as much as the oppressed: “The prisoners, the guards, the soldiers—they are all, in their way, being trained. / From these moments, repeated forever, our own new world will be made.”53 Didactic and tendentious, in stilted, complex rhythms playing on alexandrines and fourteeners (suggesting faintly mock epic), this poem dramatizes Jarrell’s view of the modern world and modern man. The dumb machinery of “our own new world” reduces men to inarticulate passivity, mere endurance, and eternal punishment, whether they are the prisoners in “soiled blue” or the soldiers in “soiled and shapeless green.” All their being is expressed in “their child’s, beast’s sigh—of despair . . .” Even the guard is mute, “yawning,” and no more than a tool: he is one with the instrument of oppression, the “sights of the cradled rifle” identified appositively with his eyes. The assimilation of the individual into the social machinery of the mass industrial state was a major theme in Jarrell’s work. Stephanie (Stephen) Burt has argued persuasively that Jarrell’s embrace of the individual voice against the perceived homogenization of institutional life is key to explaining many features of the poet’s work, from Jarrell’s tendency toward mawkishness to his taste for dramatic monologues. One central feature Burt finds exemplifying this theme in Jarrell’s poetry is the poet’s avowed repudiation of power. Burt sees this repudiation embodied in Jarrell’s “talky, stuttery style,” arguing that “Jarrell’s ‘semifeminine’ tones and attitudes help him . . . ‘disengage literature from power.’”54 Burt’s argument relies on a point made by Langdon Hammer, who asserts that “the life Jarrell led and the poems he wrote both express his will to disengage literature from power—to identify himself and his writing with an innocent domestic world which is linked to childhood, fairy tales, and ‘femininity,’ and isolated from the culpable, public, masculine world of self-­interest.”55 52. L. Dawson, “Jarrell’s ‘Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,’” 238. 53. Jarrell, “Prisoners,” in Selected Poems, 159. 54. Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age, 40–41. 55. Hammer, “Who Was Randall Jarrell?,” 392.

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As Burt observes, Jarrell saw his fellow draftees as not only divorced from power but also oppressed by it: what Tom Brokaw later dubbed “the Greatest Generation” were for Jarrell a mass of dumb, inarticulate, and powerless “victims of the hypostasized social.”56 Jarrell’s letters describe his fellow soldiers as “ignorant of the nature and conditions of the choices they make” and “pretty well determined in the passive sense.”57 He characterizes them elsewhere as “just like lumps of Cream of Wheat, almost indistinguishable from the Cream of Wheat.”58 As Burt points out, “A spectacle of power without agency, in which everyone seemed under compulsion and nobody seemed in charge, was exactly what many soldiers saw in the Army and the war. . . . That experience of powerlessness unites almost all the people in Jarrell’s war poems: the orphans, the gunners, MPs, POWs, refugees.”59 Burt’s point is worth attending to further. There is certainly no obvious objection to Jarrell portraying “the experience of powerlessness” among orphans, prisoners, and refugees. Even if writers such as Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, and Jean Améry have testified to how prisoners in Nazi concentration camps internalized, replicated, and sustained the authoritarian hierarchies imposed on them, how agency in the camps wasn’t evacuated but rather negotiated through institutional channels, and how prisoners’ “individual” identities, in the face of some of the most brutal and demeaning socialization known to history, still found expression in their public roles in camp society, the myth of the zombified and wholly innocent prisoner or refugee as representative subject of state domination is dear to the modern Western political imagination and possesses authentic historical force (to say nothing of the pathos of orphans). Yet it is quite another thing to describe pilots, gunners, bombardiers, soldiers, police, and prison guards, especially those enlisted in one of one of the most potent armies the world has ever seen, as powerless, “without agency,” or “pretty well determined in the passive sense.” Robert Lowell put the problem neatly enough in his 1951 review of Jarrell’s book The Seven-­League Crutches: 56. Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age, 56. 57. Jarrell, Letters, 150. 58. Jarrell, Letters, 107. Jarrell here is comparing the vivacity of soldiers in a story by John Cheever with the reality, “that men so different, from such different places, can act so alike, and give you such an intolerable feeling of stupid loud dreary sameness.” Jarrell complains constantly through his letters while in the army about how stupid the army and his fellow soldiers are. As Langdon Hammer notes, “Because the audience for Jarrell’s war poems project was either hopelessly atomized—a world of isolated victims—or as hopelessly monolithic as the State, it should not surprise us that Jarrell came to view the public and the State as one, or that he finally felt revulsion for the people he wished to address” (Hammer, “Who Was Randall Jarrell?,” 400). 59. Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age, 57.

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“The determined, passive, sacrificial lives of the pilots, inwardly so harmless and outwardly so destructive, are ideal subjects for Jarrell.”60 In this understanding, the objective being of bomber crews, soldiers, and pilots—­ destructive, murderous, awesomely powerful—is seen as somehow completely divorced from their subjective existence. As agents of state power, they kill thousands with the flick of a button; as persons, they are “determined, passive, sacrificial.” This division goes beyond mere alienation to suggest a complete mind-­body split, in which the souls in question are simply not responsible for their physical deeds. For Jarrell, Lowell, and the strain of sentimental individualism to which they appeal, these men are not autonomous beings living their lives but rather what James Dickey aptly described in his review of Jarrell’s war poetry as “Killable Puppets.”61 Any portrayal of power relations that sees agents who exercise power as first and foremost victims of that selfsame power is a partial one, to say the least. Indeed, Jarrell’s vision of a “spectacle of power without agency” is no more than the bedazzlement of a moral simplicity which refuses to see differences in strength, responsibility inhering in social roles, or the functioning of actual networks of agents exercising power through decision making. Seeing everyone in the military (or modern industrial society) as no more than a function of structural prerogatives, “pretty passively determined,” is a shallow view of how subjectivity functions and disdains the question of ethics altogether. It is an essentially authoritarian view of social life, investing total sovereignty in leadership and institutions, and is the very view expressed by Nazi defendants at Nuremberg who claimed in their defense that in committing war crimes they were “just following orders.”62 The victimization trope in Jarrell’s poetry, in which the agent of state violence is turned into a “killable puppet,” has a deep and complex history. One aspect of that history is the history of the “trauma hero,” which I discuss in the introduction and will discuss more fully in chapter 5. Another aspect of that history can be seen in Richard Slotkin’s idea of the “avenging angel,” the archetypical hero of what Slotkin identifies as the American myth of “regeneration through violence.”63 The myth that Slotkin describes has its roots in 60. Lowell, “Randall Jarrell’s Wild Dogmatism,” 27. 61. Dickey, “Some of All of It,” 346. 62. As articulated in the fourth Nuremberg Principle, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him” (International Law Commission, 375). 63. Slotkin’s painstaking analysis of the American myth of redemptive violence was first sketched in 1971, in an article for the Journal of Popular Culture, then elaborated over three vol-

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early American captivity narratives and joins scenes of primal violence with Puritan ideology and Eurocentric racism in a seemingly inescapable pattern of victimization, vengeance, guilt, and scapegoating that forms one of the dominant narratives of American self-­understanding and is, according to Slotkin, “the structuring metaphor of the American experience.”64 This is the paradigm: the American in his pastoral country, troubled by an obscure malaise, a sense of weakness and threat, finds in the first assault on his world and values the concretion of all terrors and villainies, both cosmic ones and ones which are intimate parts of his own family or his own being. His world view polarizes, he suddenly perceives his role in the drama as that of victim; he purifies and strengthens himself, feeding his wrath on the sense of his difference from his enemy and an exaggerated sense of being that enemy’s helpless captive. Then he ceases to be victim and becomes avenger, exorcising and destroying utterly all demons, all jungles where demons might lurk.65

Slotkin traces the reappearance of this foundational myth again and again throughout American culture, in political speeches, popular novels and films, literary works, and historical accounts. One of the deepest continuities in American identity, this myth remains alive today, connecting The Last of the Mohicans to Zero Dark Thirty, joining Jonathan Edwards and George Zimmerman, and sounding the central motif of American empire: Remember the Alamo, remember the Maine, “Today is a day that will live in infamy,” “Aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America,” and 9/11.66 One of Slotkin’s key points is that “The myth is cyclical, each exorcism leading to another more profound, more damaging.”67 The first moment in the cycle is one of wounding and victimization. The second moment is the ritual self-­purification of the victim-­avenger. The third moment is the revenge killing of the alien Other, be they Iroquois, Filipino, African American, Japa‑

umes that trace the archetypal narrative from colonial America to the twentieth century: Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973), The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985), and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-­Century America (1992). 64. Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 5. 65. Slotkin, “Dreams and Genocide,” 51. 66. The resonances between 9/11 rhetoric and early American captivity narratives were explored in Faludi, Terror Dream. 67. Slotkin, “Dreams and Genocide,” 57.

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nese, Vietnamese, or Iraqi.68 The next moment is the revictimization of the avenging angel as victim of his own traumatic violence. Violence as such calls down the mark of sin, and the avenging angel, who has committed violence on a cultural mission, must now bear the blood guilt of the whole alone. In Slotkin’s words, “Guilt is the root of dissatisfaction, the sense that they have participated in evil and thus shared the racial nature of the Indian, the gook, the devil; killing the devil assuages the guilt, but . . . the nature of the struggle is such that the identities of good gooks and bad gooks and the haunted soldiers themselves are confused. . . . So one returns from massacre alienated, psychologically still trapped in the jungle cycle of sin and exorcism.”69 Since violence is taboo in civil society, the one who commits violence for society must be expelled from it, typically today into the realm of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The hunter becomes the scapegoat: he must suffer for the killing he undertook on society’s behalf.70 Once expelled, the avenger must again be purified in order to return to collective life. Seventeenth-­century religious language of sin and exorcism has been replaced by today’s pseudoscientific language of trauma and recovery. Within the trauma aesthetic dominating modern Western discourses of conflict, 68. This particular mytheme may be merely a culturally specific version of a general human tendency toward xenophobic self-­victimization. Consider René Girard: “This also contains a major discovery in anthropology: aggression does not exist. Among animals, there is predation, and there is doubtless genetic rivalry for females. However, among humans, the fact that no one ever feels they are the aggressor is because everything is always reciprocal. The slightest little difference, in one direction or another, can trigger the escalation to extremes. The aggressor has always already been attacked. Why are relations of rivalry never seen as symmetrical? Because people always have the impression that the other is the first to attack, that they are never the ones who begin, though in a way they are always the ones. Individualism is a formidable lie. We make others understand that we recognize the signs of aggressiveness which they manifest, and they in turn interpret our posture as aggression. And so on. There comes a time when conflict breaks out, and the initiator places himself in a weak position. The differences are so small at the beginning, and fade away so quickly that they are not perceived as reciprocal to each other, but as always unique to themselves. To think, as Clausewitz seems to have done . . . about war as ‘the continuation of policy by other means’ is thus to lose sight of the intuition of war as a duel, in other words, to deny the notion of aggression and response to aggression. It is to forget reciprocal action that both accelerates and suspends the escalation to extremes, which only suspends it in order to further accelerate it later.” Girard, Battling to the End, 18. 69. Slotkin, “Dreams and Genocide,” 56. 70. Paul Kahn writes, “Is it the captured enemy who is sacrificed to the god or is it the member of the polity? The answer is both, for the ritual includes a symbolic exchange such that the former can substitute for the latter” (Sacred Violence 94–95). The economy of symbolic exchange and substitution that the scapegoat makes possible is illuminated in Girard, Scapegoat, and Girard, Violence and the Sacred, and discussed in more detail here in chapter 2 and chapter 5.

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that is, atavistic rituals of sin, guilt, and exorcism are transposed into the pseudoscientific technopathological terms of trauma, PTSD, and therapeutic recovery. The terms concerned remain morally inflected and do much the same social work, and are perhaps best understood through an analysis of how secular political practices operate through theological concepts.71 In legal scholar Paul Kahn’s words, “We have to see that political truth, just like the truth of religious faith, does not arise out of a division between subject and object. Rather, political truth is constructed at the intersection of body and word. It, too, is a meaning performed on the basis of faith and tested through suffering.”72 Randall Jarrell’s wartime poetry is especially illuminating in this regard in that it adopts a Freudian psychology of wartime trauma yet still relies on overtly religious imagery and metaphor, thus helping us see how Christian theology was translated into the pseudoscientific metaphysics of trauma. Consider Jarrell’s explicit meditation on the problem of the scapegoat in his poem “Eighth Air Force.” In the poem’s opening stanza, Jarrell establishes a quiet behind-­the-­lines scene of gentle domesticity, ironically capped by an allusion to Plautus.73 The second stanza explicitly marks the airmen who are the subject of the poem as guilty: “The other murderers troop in yawning . . .”74 In this opening, Jarrell sets up a strong dramatic irony between two conceptions of the airmen: on the one hand, they are regular joes, essentially boys, soft-­focus masculine figures yawning, shaving, playing games, whistling arias, fond of flowers and puppies; on the other hand, they are “murderers.” In its last two stanzas, the poem turns from objective observation to the subjective judgment of a narrative “I” who appears as a combination of judge and condemned, dressed in allusions to Pontius Pilate. The Plautan irony opening the poem (“homo homini lupus est”) is rewritten as Pilate’s “ecce homo,” offering the wolfish bombers up as Christ figures. Jarrell ends the poem on a complex, arresting image which has provoked much commentary 71. I favor the analysis of such cultural processes through structuralist and anthropological approaches to “theological” or “mythological” frames rather than through post-­Freudian psychoanalytic frames of “fantasy,” since to apply psychoanalytic hermeneutics too readily to collective cultural practices is to risk hypostasizing individual psychological processes into collective dynamics and obscuring the real difference between how individual humans function within social groups and how social groups function as such. 72. Kahn, Sacred Violence, 31. 73. This likely refers as well to Marianne Moore’s “In Distrust of Merits.” It is worthwhile considering “Eighth Air Force” in dialogue with “In Distrust of Merits,” as Schweik suggests (Gulf So Deeply Cut, 31–53), though this is unfortunately beyond the scope of my argument. 74. Jarrell, “Eighth Air Force,” in Selected Poems, 135.

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and which deserves further consideration: “Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can: / I find no fault in this just man.”75 Cleanth Brooks admired this poem and found it to be one of the “best instances” of what he saw as Randall Jarrell’s Miltonic “architectural quality, his ability to build the lofty rhyme.”76 It was specifically these last two stanzas, when the “brilliant resolving image” of Pontius Pilate is introduced, where Brooks finds exactly the sort of intellectual-­literary puzzling that was New Criticism’s bread and butter. He is especially interested in the final line. It offers, admittedly, a provocatively paradoxical image—as Brooks points out, it is “thoroughly equivocal,” and “rich in possible meanings.” It could mean: Since my own hands are bloody, I have no right to condemn the rest. It could mean: I know that men can love justice, even though their hands are bloody, for I love justice and there is blood on mine. It could mean: Men are essentially decent; they try to keep their hands clean even if they have only blood in which to wash them. But it could also be a cry of desperation: How can one expect men to keep their hands clean when so often they are given only blood in which to wash them?77

It is true that the line seems ambiguous and equivocal. Given that the scene being invoked is of Pontius Pilate “washing his hands” of the responsibility for sentencing Jesus, by which act he laid that responsibility on the angry crowd in attendance, an uncanny triangulation is set up between the poem’s narrator, the poem’s subject (the bomber crew), and the poem’s audience. The scene invoked, as described in the Gospel according to Matthew, reads: “When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.”78 Within the logic of Jarrell’s poem, the narrator takes on the role of Pilate, the airmen Jesus, and the reader the angry crowd demanding a scapegoat. As Jarrell writes about the poem in the notes to his 1955 Selected Poems, “The phrases from the Gospels compare such criminals and scapegoats as these with that earlier criminal and scapegoat about whom the Gospels were written.”79 The narrator, claiming equal guilt and responsibility with the “murderers” for their deeds, turns to offer his fellow soldiers to the readerly crowd: “I will content the people 75. Jarrell, “Eighth Air Force,” 136. 76. C. Brooks, “Jarrell’s ‘Eighth Air Force,’” 26. 77. C. Brooks, “Jarrell’s ‘Eighth Air Force,’” 30. 78. Matt. 27:​24 (AV). 79. Jarrell, Selected Poems, xiii.

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as I can / And give up these to them: Behold the man!”80 The role of the poet-­narrator here is analogous to that of the imperial bureaucrat, seemingly powerful in his role as judge but in fact constrained between Caesar’s dictates and the irrational demands of the masses.81 Jarrell has reversed the order of the events in the Gospels, beginning with what came last, Pilate’s “ecce homo,” and ending with the washing of hands and Pilate’s judgment, just as he changes the order of words from Matthew 27:​ 19, in which Pilate’s wife advises the prefect to have nothing to do with Jesus: “Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.” These shifts take the emphasis off the relationship between the readerly crowd, poet-­narrator, and sacrificial soldier, and put it instead on the act of judgment. In so doing, Jarrell obscures the manifest social relations and directs the reader’s attention instead toward an aporetic and largely artificial intellectual dilemma. The significance of washing hands over a sacrifice comes specifically from Deuteronomy. If a man is found murdered but no one knows who committed the murder, then the elders of the city nearest the murder are supposed to sacrifice a heifer: part proxy, part scapegoat, part propitiation. “And all the elders of that city, that are next unto the slain man, shall wash their hands over the heifer that is beheaded in the valley: And they shall answer and say, Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it.”82 In the story of the Gospels, Pilate is sending a clear signal to the Sanhedrin and the crowds at the trial, performed in the terms of Jewish ritual, that they are responsible for Jesus’s death, not he. As Matthew 27 continues, “Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children. Then released he Barabbas to them: And when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.” In “Eighth Air Force,” homologously, the poet-­narrator is abjuring responsibility for judgment and sacrifice, turning it over instead to the readerly crowd. And when the poet-­narrator concludes, “Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can,” he is deliberately conflating his own role as Pilate with the role of the pilots and bombardiers doing the killing, while at the same time invoking the disavowal of guilt by which Pilate laid responsibility for 80. Jarrell, “Eighth Air Force,” 135. 81. This fits with Karl Shapiro’s view of Jarrell as an “insider,” whose great internal conflict was “between his instinct for freedom and his desire for cultural asylum”—a man made by institutions who, with the great bad faith of the timid rebel, despised the institutions that made him (K. Shapiro, “Death of Randall Jarrell,” 195). 82. Deut. 21: 6–7 (AV). Also enlightening is David Dawson’s discussion of the scapegoat in Leviticus 16:8; D. Dawson, Flesh Becomes Word, 1–8.

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Christ’s Crucifixion on the Jews of Jerusalem, which itself invokes the Jewish purgation of collective guilt through ritual substitution as described in Deuteronomy. The poet narrator finds “no fault in that just man,” meaning both himself and the killers he speaks of. The murderous bomber crewmen’s blood guilt is thus transferred to the reader and by that transference transformed. Cleanth Brooks sees this moment as an expression of the poem’s fundamental conflict, between a sense of guilt and a “yearning to believe in man’s justness,” and this superficial paradox seems at first sufficient. Yet what Brooks’s method does not address is the logic by which this seeming paradox functions or what purpose it serves. In the dream logic of “Eighth Air Force,” which mirrors the mythic logic of sacrifice, it is precisely guilt which exonerates. The blood, in this case, is precisely what makes the condemned man just. It is what unites the poet-­narrator and the sacrificial soldier while separating them from the readerly crowd, who stand in for the civilian population. The “murderers” are both “just” and given up to the people, both sacred and sacrifice, precisely because their hands are bloody—because they are the agents of collective violence. If, as Brooks avers, it is “one of the ‘uses’ of poetry . . . to make us better citizens,” then “Eighth Air Force” serves this utility well, for in it Jarrell finds the “proper symbol” for “the very matrix out of which, and from which, our creeds are abstracted,” which is to say, the mythology of regeneration through violence and the figure of the sacrificial avenger.83 The bomber crewmen are identified with Christ and declared both just and faultless. The guilt for their murderous acts falls on the crowd who sees them as murderers; the blood guilt redounds from the agent to the collective. But something has changed, and rather than be comforted or bedazzled by this enigmatic shell game, we must follow the ritual substitution being enacted, in which the soldier takes the enemy’s place as the victim of collective violence. A community pro­jects its collective blood guilt onto the soldier it sent to do its killing, then reinterprets that projection as both a judgment against the soldier and a judgment against itself for having victimized the soldier. The soldier bears the blood guilt of and for the collective, and it is precisely this burden that marks him as the victim of collective violence. Yet by being transformed thus from the agent of collective violence into its blameless victim, the soldier is purified of his own blood guilt and takes the place of the original victim of violence, who has by this substitution effectively been erased. The soldier need not physically die: since his “death” fulfills a purely symbolic 83. C. Brooks, “Jarrell’s ‘Eighth Air Force,’” 31–32.

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function, it can take place on a purely symbolic level, as psychological trauma or social expulsion. Thus enlisted as the community’s scapegoat, the soldier bears the stain of violence out of the community. The connection between the collective and its killing has been broken; their blood guilt has been compartmentalized, transformed into psychological suffering, and purged. Kenneth Burke is helpful here on the “Dialectic of the Scapegoat”: The scapegoat is a “charismatic,” a vicar. As such, it is profoundly consubstantial with those who, looking upon it as a chosen vessel, would ritualistically cleanse themselves by loading the burden of their own iniquities upon it. Thus the scapegoat represents the principle of division in that its persecutors would alienate from themselves to it their own uncleanliness. For one must remember that a scapegoat cannot be “curative” except insofar as it represents the iniquities of those who would be cured by attacking it. In representing their iniquities, it performs the role of vicarious atonement (that is, unification, or merger, granted to those who have alienated their iniquities upon it, and so may be purified through its suffering). All told, note what we have here: (1) an original state of merger, in that the iniquities are shared by both the iniquitous and their chosen vessel; (2) a principle of division, in that the elements shared in common are being ritualistically alienated; (3) a new principle of merger, this time in the unification of those whose purified identity is defined in dialectical opposition to the sacrificial offering.84

Thus Jarrell’s poem helps us be “better citizens” by ritualizing a political theology in which the soldier is the scapegoat of liberal capitalist democracy, our “just” murderer.85 In excluding the killer from civil society (or normative realms of discourse—that is, what is “speakable”), we are able to perpetuate our faith in society’s lawful order, obscure its violent origins, and reaffirm the state monopoly on force that sustains it, all while personally disavowing the acts of violence committed in our name. Jarrell’s suggestive inversion in this poem under the sign of Christ, by which he works to mark the soldier innocent and the people guilty, sustains both the separation of the soldier from the community (today invoked by the mantra of the “military-­civilian divide”) 84. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 406. 85. Jeffrey Walsh notes the scapegoat function but reads more ambivalence in Jarrell’s last line, finding a cynical irony in the bombers’ “justness”: “Contrariwise, the narrator recognises the criminal scapegoating process that socially exploits them as instruments, because they are also agent-­victims, frightened, child-­like, and even (according to an overriding equation, it is implied, which prefers ‘democracy’ to fascism) ‘just’ men.” Walsh, American War Literature, 158.

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and the soldier’s role as scapegoat, through a symbolic exchange mediated by the poet-­judge as Pilate. For Jarrell, it is the soldiers’ innocence and guilt alike that exempt them from the civic order they kill and die for. Yet the economy of blood remains in place. The soldier suffers symbolic trauma so that we citizens might be symbolically absolved, thus symbolically mediating the physical violence at the foundations of society. Jarrell’s poem brings this economy of sacrifice to light with remarkable intuition. It is at this point that the soldierly enactment of the scapegoat function must be clarified and made explicit. Paul Kahn writes, “That there can be no social contract of well-­being absent the pledge to engage in the violence of killing and being killed is a proposition that is both undeniable and inexpressible. The veteran bears this foundational sin of the political community. He embodies the symbolic exchange that maintains the order of law within the sacred time and space of the sovereign.”86 The soldier’s violation of the killing taboo and the consequent stain of violence mark him as both sacred and polluted, and has traditionally required ritual purification at the moment of his return to peaceful society.87 As Kahn argues, the figuration is not only itself double (sacred/polluted), but constructed socially through a double practice: consecration and persecution, or heroic memorialization and scapegoating.88 Consequent on a campaign of mass civilian conscription that transformed more than sixteen million members of the body politic into war fighters, the problem of the soldier’s claim to enact violence arose with some urgency during and after World War II. As William Waller wrote in his 1944 book The Veteran Comes Back: The veteran, so justly entitled to move us to pity or to shame, can also put us in fear. Destitute he may be, friendless, without political guile, unskilled in the arts of peace; but weak he is not. That makes him a different kind of problem. That hand that does not know how to earn its owner’s knows how to take your bread, knows very well how to kill you, if need be, in the process. That eye that 86. Kahn, “Managing Violence,” 326. 87. Consider Freud: “The savage, such as the Australian, the Bushman, or the inhabitant of Terra del Fuego, is by no means a remorseless murderer; when he returns home as victor from the war path he is not allowed to enter his village or touch his wife until he has expiated his war murders through lengthy and often painful penances. The explanation for this is, of course, related to his superstition; the savage fears the avenging spirit of the slain. But the spirits of the fallen enemy are nothing but the expression of his evil conscience over his blood guilt; behind this superstition there lies concealed a bit of ethical delicacy of feeling which has been lost to us civilized beings.” Freud, Reflections, 59. 88. Kahn, Sacred Violence, 158–69.

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has looked at death will not quail at the sight of a policeman. Unless and until he can be renaturalized into his native land, the veteran is a threat to society.89

Under conditions of total mobilization, mass conscription by the state turns the citizen into a soldier. The job of the soldier is to kill. At the same time, as Kahn points out, the state-­as-­sovereign has the right to demand a sacrifice. Indeed, it is precisely by giving himself up to sovereign power as a ritually consecrated sacrifice that the soldier participates in that sovereignty: in being willing to be killed, he is granted the power to kill. The veteran returns to civil society living a contradiction: on the one hand, a citizen submissive to the state’s monopoly on force; on the other hand, an agent of that very monopoly. The irresolvable contradictions between the role of the soldier as agent of state violence and the role of the citizen as participant in a social contract, and between the soldier as sacrifice and the citizen as embodiment of popular sovereignty, cannot be resolved rationally, because the roles themselves are symbolic and can only be managed in symbolic terms. The trauma hero is an attempt at such symbolic management, as is the bomber lyric. These contradictions are managed by the symbolic expulsion of pathogenic violence, either through projection into a legendary past of memorialization (the “Good War”) or through its repudiation via a scapegoat mechanism of victimization (the trauma hero). As Kahn explains, “Memorialization is one way of managing contact between law and sovereign violence. Scapegoating is another. The scapegoat bears the sins of the community, taking onto himself symbolically that which the community can neither do without nor acknowledge as its own. He is both polluted and sanctified. The sin must be cleansed. Memorialization refuses to see killing and being killed as anything other than sacrifice. Scapegoating sees the killing but pushes the killer out of sight. Where memorialization is not possible, scapegoating is necessary.”90 Either way, the claim to violence is redefined as existing beyond the bounds of the peacetime social contract. Disturbingly, Hannah Arendt’s description (in Eichmann in Jerusalem) of how Heinrich Himmler and other Nazi leaders helped salve the conscience of the men they directed to murder Jewish civilians looks remarkably like a version of the trauma hero narrative, especially in the way that it shifts the focus of suffering away from the victims of violence and onto its perpetrators: What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique . . . which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the mur89. Waller, Veteran Comes Back, 13, italics in original. 90. Kahn, Sacred Violence, 162–63.

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derers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted from the Armed S.S., a military unit with hardly more crimes to its record than any ordinary unit of the German Army, and their commanders had been chosen by Heydrich from the S.S. élite with academic degrees. Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler— who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself—was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!91

Or, more explicitly with the trauma hero, manifest in Heller’s Yossarian, Jarrell’s airmen, and the bomber lyric: “What horrible things having to kill did to me!”92 The dialectical power of the figure of the bomber, as Randall Jarrell intuited, is that it embodies both the image of state power and the figure of the scapegoat soldier. The stakes of this dual embodiment begin to come into focus when we realize that the bomber serves as a scapegoat not merely for collective violence but for wartime atrocities. While the Allies in World War II promulgated nothing as horrific as Auschwitz or Buchenwald, war crimes were still widely and systematically committed by British and American forces, some of them by the men in Jarrell’s Eighth Air Force. For instance, it is generally agreed now by informed observers that Allied strategic bombing of German and Japanese civilians during World War II (fig. 5), called at the time “morale bombing” or “terror bombing,” constituted atrocities and very probably war crimes under the standards established by the victors themselves 91. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 105–6. 92. Kurt Vonnegut dramatizes this way of thinking neatly in Slaughterhouse-­Five, when Air Force historian Bertram Rumfoord speaks with firebombing survivor Billy Pilgrim: “It had to be done,” Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden. “I know,” said Billy. “That’s war.” “I know. I’m not complaining.” “It must have been hell on the ground.” “It was,” said Billy Pilgrim. “Pity the men who had to do it.” “I do.” (Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-­Five, 198)

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F i g u re 5 . B-­29 incendiary attack on Kobe, Japan (1945). Photograph courtesy of National Archives (Fold3, National Archive reference number 342-­FH-­3A03492–57687AC).

after the war.93 As Arendt herself noted, “the saturation bombing of open cities and, above all, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly constituted war crimes in the sense of the Hague Convention.”94 If the firebombings of Japan and Germany were atrocities, then our bomber lyrics are atrocity poems. And if the firebombings of Japan and Germany constitute war crimes under international norms, then the work of Randall Jarrell, John Ciardi, James Dickey, and Richard Hugo offers not a poetry of witness but a poetry of war crimes.95 To sympathize with Adolf Eich93. The literature on this topic is immense, but see Sherry, Rise of American Air Power; Pape, Bombing to Win; and Grayling, Among the Dead Cities for a good introduction to the broader moral questions opened by strategic bombing. 94. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 256. 95. It should be noted that in Europe, the intentional terror bombing of civilians was primarily carried out by the British Royal Air Force (RAF). The US Army Air Forces (AAF) in Ger-

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mann or the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, to portray them as victims of circumstance or of state power, would surely be unacceptable to our sense of morality. Yet creating sympathy with men responsible for murdering thousands of unarmed civilians is one of the central effects of much canonical American literature of World War II (and most canonical American war literature since). Presented as victims of abstract forces such as “the State” and “War,” protagonists like Heller’s Yossarian and Jarrell’s Gunner are absolved of responsibility, as are we, since they serve as our surrogates. As scapegoats, Yossarian and the Gunner bear the stain of sin and murder, and bear it symbolically out of the community. The mediating figure of the bomber, as Slotkin writes of the frontier hero, “was not only a psychological but a social and political necessity.”96 Most important, what this analysis exposes in Jarrell’s “Eighth Air Force” is the ethical problem at the heart of how the postwar democratic-­liberal order conceptualizes World War II: the question of how citizens in an industrialized commercial republic attempt to manage the conflict of liberal humanist values with the military violence that makes the practice of those values possible.97 To put it another way, if one of the historical conditions for the possibility of progressivist international liberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century was the firebombing of civilians in World War II, how could we possibly affirm those political values while also taking responsibility for the horrific, inhuman violence that made them possible?

many followed a policy of daytime bombing, against industrial, logistical, and military targets; it was the RAF under Air Marshal Harris that made a policy of nighttime raids on residential centers. In cases such as Dresden, however, where the rail yards targeted by the Americans were directly in the city center, and in Operation Gomorrah, the eight-­day-­long firebombing of Hamburg, where American bombing contributed to the general firestorm, guilt and innocence cannot be quite so neatly apportioned. In East Asia, however, AAF General Curtis LeMay’s strategy was essentially one of racial extermination. 96. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 205. 97. David Dawson helps clarify the mythic work being done by this substitution in this gloss on the work of René Girard: “The pattern is not unfamiliar: the surrogate victim ‘participates in’ or ‘reproduces’ the sacrificial power of the original victim to reconcile the people, to atone in the sense of binding them together as one. The founding murder is repeated and this repetition stands as the paradoxical origin of the group as its first collective act, but one that is ‘radically generative’ as such. It ends ‘the vicious and destructive cycle of violence,’ while initiating ‘a constructive cycle, that of the sacrificial rite—which protects the community from that same violence and allows culture to flourish.’” D. Dawson, Flesh Becomes Word, 70–71.

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Atrocity Aesthetics: James Dickey’s “The Firebombing” James Dickey’s “The Firebombing,” which juxtaposes the air campaign over Japan against a postwar suburban American landscape, offers an opportunity to think through the problem of collective responsibility for and complicity with state violence along a different route than Jarrell’s scapegoating and disavowal. Dickey’s poem became a target of condemnation when it was published in the mid-­1960s, in fact, for just this reason. In comments on Dickey’s 1965 volume Buckdancer’s Choice, in which “The Firebombing” appeared, Robert Bly describes the book as “repulsive,” sadistic, and “middle class,” going so far as to call Dickey “a toady to the government” and “a sort of Georgia cracker Kipling.”98 Bly is explicit regarding his expectation that a war poem must have a scapegoat, and he is incensed that Dickey does not provide one: “If this were a poem scarifying the American conscience for the napalm raids, we would feel differently. But this poem has no real anguish. If the anguish were real, we would feel terrible remorse as we read, we would stop what we were doing, we would break the television set with an ax, we would throw ourselves on the ground sobbing. We feel no such thing. The poem emphasizes the picturesque quality of firebombing instead, the lordly and attractive isolation of the pilot, the spectacular colors unfolding beneath, the way the fire spreads.”99 As Bly dimly realizes amid his moralizing, the poem’s tense contrapuntal energy, the troubling pull that sustains its narrator, is precisely the “picturesque quality of firebombing”—the disconcerting pleasure humans take in destruction, which Dickey makes explicit. Bly’s problem is less with Dickey than with Kant’s dynamic sublime, but he is right to bring up the question of imaginative sympathy. How aesthetic pleasure relates to and works against imaginative sympathy is one of the central problems explored by Dickey’s poem. Consider the following lines: Deep in aesthetic contemplation, Seeing the ponds catch fire And cast it through ring after ring Of land: O death in the middle Of acres of inch-­deep water! Useless Firing small arms Speckles from the river Bank one ninety-­millimeter Misses far down wrong petals 98. Bly, “Collapse of James Dickey,” 177, 180, 187. 99. Bly, “Collapse of James Dickey,” 181–82.

gone

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It is this detachment, The honored aesthetic evil, The greatest sense of power in one’s life, That must be shed in bars, or by whatever Means . . .100

The turn here from description to reflection, the ethical recognition that aesthetic detachment alienates us from other people and works against imaginative sympathy, comes deep into Dickey’s long and complex poem, which cannot be dismissed as easily as Bly would like. Dickey’s bomber lyric, whatever its faults, takes up the question of mass violence and guilt with a nuanced sense of responsibility and an astute awareness of agency. Let us begin at the beginning. Dickey prefaces his poem with two epigraphs, one from the book of Job and the other from Günter Eich, in German. Opening “The Firebombing” with a quote from a German, in German, creates from the start a sense of uneasy equivalence between American and Nazi behavior during the war, especially since during the war Eich wrote radio plays for the Nazi Party. This equivalence is accentuated by Dickey’s staged opposition of personae. When “The Firebombing” was published, Dickey was known as a war hero, having spun a legendary autobiography around himself in which he was a maverick bomber pilot who’d flown “over 100 missions” in the Pacific, survived a plane crash, shot down Japanese fighters, participated in firebombing campaigns, and even witnessed the immediate aftermath of Nagasaki. None of this was strictly true—Dickey had flown thirty-­eight missions as a radar operator in a P-­61 Black Widow, never personally bombed or shot down anyone, and was nowhere near Nagasaki when it was annihilated—but readers of the day nonetheless took Dickey as the larger-­than-­life war hero he pretended to be.101 For this John Wayne of the air to ventriloquize, by way of citation, the guilty lament of a German propagandist was to set up the Wehrmacht soldier as doppelgänger to the decent, well-­meaning American GI. More telling even is what Eich’s lines say: “Denke daran, dass nach den grossen Zerstörungen / 100. Dickey, “The Firebombing,” in Poems 1957–1967, 186. All quotations from the poem refer to this edition, which appeared on pages 181–88. 101. In her attentive reading of “The Firebombing,” for example, from 1974, Joyce Carol Oates sees Dickey’s war experience as central to the poem’s meaning: “This stranger is, or was, Dickey himself, who flew one hundred combat missions through the South Pacific, the Philippines, and Okinawa and participated in B-­29 raids over Japan.” Oates, “Out of Stone, Into Flesh,” 91. For biographical information on Dickey, I rely on Hart, James Dickey: The World as a Lie.

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Jedermann beweisen wird, dass er unshuldig war.” (“Keep in mind that after the great destructions, everyone will testify that they were innocent.”)102 The irony in these lines and the equivalence thereby established between Eich the German and Dickey the American call into question from the beginning the innocence of Dickey’s narrator, Dickey himself, and by extension the entire American war effort, a subtlety missed by Bly in his histrionic misreading. The second epigraph, from Job, “Or hast thou an arm like God?” opens further ambiguities in its invocation of divine might. The particular reference at work here is a scene of Job’s abjection and humility before the omnipotence of Jehovah, who is chiding Job for questioning his fate. “Then answered the Lord unto Job out of the whirlwind, and said, ‘Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?’”103 At the same time as this epigraph bespeaks the humility of Job, that humility is subverted by the invocation of power: the fact is that if we asked the bomber pilot who is the subject of Dickey’s poem if he had “an arm like God,” the answer would be a resounding yes. Furthermore, Dickey’s readers wouldn’t have needed to turn back to Robert Lowell or Benson Hays to recall the heavenly might of the bomber or the godlike reach of American air power. In late 1964 and early 1965, right around the time when “The Firebombing” was being published, public discussion of American policy in Vietnam focused on questions about strategic bombing. The New York Times reported on the use of napalm by American bombers and on allegations that military leaders had deliberately targeted civilians as the US Air Force ramped up what would eventually become the largest bombing campaign to date, Operation Rolling Thunder, a forty-­four-­month air attack against North Vietnam that dropped almost a million tons of bombs on “strategic” military and civilian targets, and killed an estimated 52,000 civilians.104 “The Firebombing” predated these events—the poem was completed in 1963 and first published in Poetry magazine in May 1964, before the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the be102. My translation. Michael Hofmann translates the lines as follows: “Remember that, following the great destructions, everyone will provide an alibi for himself to prove he had no part in them.” Eich, Angina Days, 171. 103. Job 40:6–9 (AV). 104. Tucker, Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, 358. The bombing was reported most notably in a series of articles by Hanson Baldwin (e.g., H. Baldwin, “Transcript of News Conference”; H. Baldwin, “Eyes on Vietnam”). Journalist Peter Grose reported the use of napalm in Vietnam by Americans as early as May 3, 1964, also in the New York Times (Grose, “In South Vietnam”).

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ginning of Operation Rolling Thunder—yet the context in which the poem appeared in Buckdancer’s Choice in 1965 doubtlessly shaped its reception.105 As Eric Suarez argues in James Dickey and the Politics of the Canon: Assessing the Savage Ideal, “James Dickey’s career shows us how the Vietnam milieu not only shaped the critical community’s responses toward war and violence, but also influenced the different directions literary criticism took in the sixties and seventies.”106 Buckdancer’s Choice won the National Book Award in 1966 and was reviewed widely. Joseph Bennett in the New York Times went so far as to say that “The Firebombing” was “one of the most important long poems” written after World War II.107 Yet Dickey’s poem and his point of view have since been consigned to obscurity. Bly’s judgment, for all its narrowness, won out. As carefully reading the opening epigraphs shows, however, Dickey’s poem pre­sents a more complicated and provocatively ambiguous lesson. Whether his intent is “antiwar” or not, Dickey suggests that we should see the American bombing of Japan—and by extension, Vietnam—as an act of destruction comparable to Nazi aggression. Dickey seeks in “The Firebombing” to explore, not merely denounce, the feeling of godlike potency that comes with laying waste to whole cities. By portraying and owning his narrator’s youthful pleasure in the aesthetics of atrocity, he imbues the narrator’s concerns for home, family, and safety with a rueful pathos unavailable to the traumatic victimization we find in such poems as Bly might advocate, those that “scarify” the American conscience. Contra Bly, it is precisely through Dickey’s enunciation of power’s heady affects that he’s able to develop a convincing critique of its effects. At the poem’s end, when Dickey shows us his narrator today looking back without regret, unable to see the neighbor at his door as “nothing not as / American as I am, and proud of it,” he restages the mirroring of the poem’s opening, only this time as a failure of vision: “It is that I can imagine / At the threshold nothing.” If “The Firebombing” is a poem of witness, it is the witnessing of power— something like the sublime—and Bly has missed the poem’s entire point because he’s too focused on the expectation of experience behind it and on the proper lesson that a right-­thinking reader would expect Dickey to offer. Bly blames New Critical “academic jabber” for “brainwashing” readers into thinking that Dickey is writing as a persona, which he sees as a wholesale misappre105. John Ullman, a student of Dickey’s at Reed College, recalls Dickey reading a version of the poem in the spring of 1963, as described in Hart, James Dickey: The World as a Lie, 294. 106. Suarez, James Dickey and the Politics of the Canon, 79. 107. Bennett, “Man with a Voice.”

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hension because “Mr. Dickey is not standing outside the poem. . . . There are no personae. The New Critical ideas do not apply at all.”108 But Bly is mistaken in assuming that the poem is autobiographical or even, properly speaking, personal. Not only did Dickey never pilot a bomber over Japan or personally drop any bombs on anyone, the city on which his narrator drops napalm was never bombed by Americans; Beppu survived the war unscathed.109 The narrator of the poem is unquestionably a mask, the events imagined, the conflict allegorical.110 “The Firebombing” is not a confession but an imaginative lyric about the failure of imagination.111 Which failure is, for Dickey, an ethical concern. Following the spacious and unstable framing of the epigraphs, the poem proper begins with yet another set of ironized citations, this time by way of allusions to Marx and Engel’s famous dictum from The Communist Manifesto and the opening lines of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: Homeowners unite. All families lie together, though some are burned alive. The others try to feel For them. Some can, it is often said.

The poem’s problem is thus neatly posed. The normative call to universal humanitarian ethics, grounded in a liberal conception of personhood as being constituted by owning property and manifest in confraternity, is under108. Bly, “Collapse of James Dickey,” 185. 109. Dickey did engage, as a radar operator, in two “practice bombings” of Japan. Using one-­ thousand-­pound “demos” with phosphorous igniting devices, Dickey’s unit bombed huts in a rural area near Fuchu. For further discussion of the biographical facts behind “The Firebombing” and Dickey’s poetic confabulation, see Hart, James Dickey: The World as a Lie, 108–11. 110. “I think lying, with luck sublimely, is what the creative man does,” Dickey once said in an interview (Dickey, Self-­Interviews, 32). 111. “It might be argued that Dickey is our era’s Whitman,” wrote Joyce Carol Oates in 1974, “but a Whitman subdued, no longer innocent, baptized by American violence into the role of a ‘killer/victim’ who cannot locate within his society any standards by which his actions might be judged” (Oates, “Out of Stone, Into Flesh,” 78). Compare this with Robert Duncan’s short review of Two Poems of the Air (including “The Firebombing”) from a 1964 issue of Poetry, which highlights the role of fantasy in Dickey’s poeisis: “The firebomber has no creative freedom but must carry out the bombing mission his fantasy demands; the sea bird must carry out his migration driven by instinct and directed by the stars, stronger than any self-­creation; the poet carries out the story-­idea his fantasy demands; immune by the superior orders of military command, mating instinct, or the story to tell, from that ‘kiss in the brain,’ the angel or messenger brings, from the creative ground of image, meaning and self, the real world is.” Duncan, “Oriented by Instinct,” 19.

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mined by violence. The collective’s normative response to suffering is one of imaginative sympathy, a kind of affective labor, which the narrator suggests is only rarely achieved. With the antithesis built into “Some can, it is often said” (my italics), Dickey’s narrator implies a kind of ideology of sympathy, a conventional assertion of “feeling” which, even if it really only exists for a few, sustains its normative power through repeated avowal. The narrator also implies that he does not “feel / For them,” since it is an action he attributes (dubiously) to others. The central conflict driving the poem is presented as being a conflict between normative expectations of universal humanitarian ethics and a lived emotional reality founded in national identity, which the power of imaginative sympathy fails to resolve.112 Dickey positions this moment of lyric reflection against a memory from twenty years before, the superposition of which structures the large-­scale movement of the poem. With a handful of swift metonymic gestures, we’re brought from the suburban opening to a runway at night in the South Pacific. Sensuous memory is brought to life by the minor askesis of dieting: “Starve, and take off // Twenty years in the suburbs . . .” gives way to “cowl flaps and the tilt cross of propellers . . .” The narrator bodies forth with a “snap,” coalescing out of “somewhere among these” planes into another doppelgänger, “some technical-­minded stranger with my hands.” This is the narrator’s history-­ double, the “other self ” of an alienated past but also, perhaps, a subtle recognition by Dickey that the pilot is, in fact, another man, a man whose experience he is imagining his way into. Perhaps that man is Dickey’s actual pilot, Earl Bradley, who described his experience bombing Fuchu as follows: Jim and I would usually announce our departure from an area by strafing these boats, so it seemed natural that we would do the same with the napalm, which we did on these two trial missions. I always maintained a detached state of mind when we did things like this, but Jim . . . placed himself, mentally, into the scene . . . [and] imagined what it must have been like to have been on those boats or in those houses when they were attacked. . . . All I remember were huge fires behind us as we sped away at low altitude.113 112. Paul Kahn describes the conflict so: “We Americans are still deeply wrapped up in this debate over the foundations of the political community: reason or identity? When, for example, we argue about whether to extend the privileges of the welfare state to immigrants—legal or illegal—the question is whether we should think of the individual from the perspective of universal need or from the perspective of membership in a historical community. Are individuals seen, in the first instance, as bearers of rights or as possible friends and enemies? The discourse of rights quickly moves to the level of the universal: human rights. That of friends and enemies insists that in politics there is no such universal perspective.” Kahn, Political Theology, 20. 113. Hart, James Dickey: The World as a Lie, 110.

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Given that Dickey’s position was in the rear of the plane facing backward, he would have had a prime view of the destruction their test bombs caused. The bombing run is explicitly eroticized (“. . . my hand turns whiter / Than ever, clutching the toggle—/ The ship shakes  bucks”), but after the buildup to the money shot, the actual destruction of Beppu is an anticlimax. The only clear victims are dogs and cattle; the people remain abstracted and vague, the devastation notional. Overwrought description (“As I sail artistically over”) suggests a failure of imagination, yet when we return to the narrator’s estimation of the trauma value of his memory, Dickey portrays his narcissistic affective inflation with clear and memorable images: Holding onto another man’s walls, My hat should crawl on my head In streetcars, thinking of it, The fat on my body should pale.

That the fat on the narrator’s body should pale, that his very skin should physically react to the outrageousness of the violence he committed implies that it does not. He does not—react, that is. We are reminded again of the poem’s central problem: the failure of imaginative sympathy. Dickey marks this as the center of the poem and the crux of his dilemma: I swing Over directly over the heart The heart of the fire. A mosquito burns out on my cheek With the cold of my face . . .

Cold, the narrator passes through heat. The power of aesthetic detachment is precisely in the distance it takes from the fire, its cold range from other humans burning with life and burning to death. Dickey’s narrator recognizes this fact and knows he should repudiate that distance but chooses instead letting go, as “letting go / The plane rises gently.” The narrator ascends into “safe zones” as “dark forms / Glide off ” him, and when something threatens his rise, his decision is to “Leave it leave it clinging and crying.” In Dickey’s eroticization of violence, the “it” turns out to be a woman, or death, or the death of a woman, or all three. The narrator’s napalm-­semen “. . . consumes them in a hot / Body-­flash, old age or menopause / Of children, clings and burns,” offering a sexual inversion of the “bomber-­womb” in Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” Having accepted aesthetic distance and its “sense of power,” having owned the “secret charge” that will sustain apotheosis, the narrator says good-­bye to the “grassy mountains,” symbols of femininity which are “left,” “let go,” as Dickey’s narrator ascends

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into chivalric-­ecstatic union with the sky. Yet despite the fond memory of the bombing raid’s “happy ending,” the narrator remains trapped in his suburban present, still subject to his lusts, still too weak to resist them, and still isolated from sympathetic connection, “still unable / To get down there or see / What really happened.” As we come to the final stanzas, we return to the ethical dilemma posed at the poem’s opening, but with a difference. We face the same claim to universal humanitarian ethics, the same problem of violence, and the same question of imaginative sympathy. Now, however, we confront the dilemma alongside the narrator, who sees the question through his experience of atrocity. In the moment, watching the Japanese burn below him, the narrator rejected sympathetic imagination in favor of a detachment that viewed things from a Kantian-­rationalist aesthetic distance, and he remembers the bombing raid as an exhilaratingly sensuous erotic adventure—the male gaze as bombsight. Today, he remains subject to the same desires, even though he now knows what they cost: his “secret charge” gives him a power proportional to his distance, because it is the power of imagination, yet it is a “cold” power that disconnects him from other humans. He begins the penultimate stanza doubting his ability, despite whatever effort, to imagine confraternity across the threshold of difference. The doubling with which the poem began recurs, only this time the vision in the mirror proves imagination’s limits: the narrator tries to imagine an Other but can see only himself. Dickey’s awkward construction in this stanza highlights the object of his imagination and undermines our sympathy with the narrator. The phrasing of the line—“It is that I can imagine / At the threshold nothing / With its ears crackling off ”—poses a discomfiting challenge. It is not that the narrator cannot imagine someone, it is that he can imagine nothing, a “nothing / With its ears crackling off.” The primary meaning here is the obvious one, despite the stilted diction: the narrator is incapable of imagining one of the Japanese victims of Beppu at his door. Yet behind that meaning another more troubling meaning wavers: the narrator can imagine a victim at his door, but that victim is to him precisely nothing, no thing, a nonentity that provokes no emotional response and is undeserving of sympathetic engagement. Dickey’s problem is touched on elsewhere by John Ciardi: “We were in the terrible business of burning out Japanese towns. That meant women and old people, children. One part of me—a surviving savage voice—says, I’m sorry we left any of them living. I wish we’d finished killing them all. Of course, as soon as rationality overcomes the first impulse, you say, Now, come on, this is the human race, let’s try to be civilized.”114 114. Ciardi quoted in Terkel, “Good War,” 200.

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Given Dickey’s thematization of race in Buckdancer’s Choice (in the controversial poem “Slave Quarters,” for example), we should be attentive to how the failure of imaginative sympathy staged in “The Firebombing” is not only gendered but racialized. It is definitively nationalistic. After all, Dickey’s narrator is explicit about the fact that he can imagine “nothing not as / American as I am, and proud of it.” The patriotism that “inspires” the commodities of the narrator’s suburban life to burn in “an apotheosis of gelatin” limns the boundary of his imaginative sympathy. The question of universal humanitarian ethics—and the issue of atrocity, for that matter—is reduced to local, physical identity: “Absolution? Sentence? No matter; / The thing itself is in that.” “Absolution,” “sentence,” and the universalist ethics they invoke are presented as abstractions that do not touch reality; they are “no matter,” not material. By the same token, the surviving Japanese of Beppu are for Dickey’s suburban narrator nothing but imaginative conceits. They are “nothing at the door,” they are “No matter.” The central problem of the poem is exactly the disconnection Dickey sees between abstract humanitarian ideals and existential human materiality: “the thing itself is in that.” As befits a poem directly concerned with the sensual experience of war and the memory of that experience, this judgment sides with a subjectivist understanding of human collective identity. In effect, Dickey’s narrator decides that what matters are not ideals but matter, bodies, the people to whom one is physically connected, one’s neighbors, one’s nation. This would seem to put paid Bly’s accusations of jingoism, except for the fact that the poem is fictional, and the sententious judgment on which it ends is that of a persona. The narrator’s ironies, the opening quotations, and the moments of self-­awareness, self-­doubt, and self-­judgment within the poem all work to frame and destabilize the final lines. If the poem doesn’t lift them to the level of outright criticism, it does at least develop them within a complex and sophisticated context that both allows them their provocative spur and restrains the careful reader from accepting them as the last word. “The Firebombing” remains a tough, thoughtful, and lively exploration of the problems it sets up: the claim to universal humanitarian ethics, the aesthetic pleasures of war, the affects and effects of power, and the all-­too-­human failure of imaginative sympathy. Agency and Death Dickey offers us a “murderer” as nonchalant as the men in Jarrell’s “Eighth Air Force” but strips Jarrell’s pieties to their ethnonationalist core. Dickey’s provocative move is to refuse judgment, which keeps his firebomber from—

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exactly as Bly argued—“scarifying the American conscience” by proxy. In Jarrell’s poem “Eighth Air Force,” by contrast, the blood on the bombers’ hands is paradoxically “washed clean” not by their rude humanity but by the blood itself. The men are sacrifices, scapegoats, passive victims of an institution that evacuates their agency and responsibility precisely through their act of bearing guilt. To help underline their innocence, Jarrell portrays the men in “Eighth Air Force” as children—playing with a puppy, “as puppies,” playing games, goofing off, totally lacking any adult sexuality or aggression. As Helen Vendler noted in her 1969 review of Jarrell’s Complete Poems, “The secret of [Jarrell’s] war poems is that in the soldiers he has found children; what is the ball turret gunner but a baby who has lost his mother?”115 Characterizing American soldiers as innocent children is a common enough trope. Paul Fussell and Kurt Vonnegut both called World War II a children’s crusade.116 Yet as Dickey’s poem illustrates, the men who fought World War II were not motherless babies. They were not even children. They were grown men, soldiers, and citizens. Indeed, in spite of the widespread infantilization of soldiers one sees in antiwar discourse, it should be remembered that the single most dangerous animal in the world is the human male: “Across the world, about 80–90 percent of all human killing is committed by males aged 14–35.”117 Jarrell’s “murderers” may have been young, foolish, or callow, but it is sheer delusion to see them as innocent babes. Further, Randall Jarrell’s portrayal of soldiers as passive victims is not only sentimental and delusional but also hypocritical. In truth, Jarrell didn’t much sympathize with his fellow soldiers or think them all that innocent; he looked down on them in contempt and thought they were violent, ignorant racists. “99 of 100 of the people in the army haven’t the faintest idea what the war’s 115. Vendler, “Review of The Complete Poems,” 38. 116. The full title of Slaughterhouse-­Five is Slaughterhouse-­Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-­Dance with Death, and in 2003 Paul Fussell wrote a kind of sequel to his two other books about World War II, Wartime and Doing Battle, titled The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944–1945. 117. Scott Atran, “War, Martyrdom, and Terror,” 229. It’s worth considering Atran’s further evidence: “In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted that most human violence is committed by young men. Across the world 80–90 percent of all human killing is committed by males aged 14–35. . . . In the US, for example, men were responsible for 88 percent of all homicides between 1976 and 2004, and nearly three-­quarters of these involved men killing other men. The peak period for murders in recent US history was between 1990 and 1994, when the homicide rate exceeded nine people killed per 100,000. . . . In those years, the number of killers ranged from 23–30 per 100,000 for male teens aged 14 to 17, 34–41 per 100,000 for young men aged 18–24, and 15–18 per 100,000 for men aged 25–35. . . . These trends closely follow trends for killing in war, except that in war nearly 100 percent of the killing is by men.”

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about,” Jarrell wrote in a letter. “Their two strongest motives are (a) nationalism, pure nationalism . . . and (b) race prejudice—they dislike the Japanese in the same way, though not as much as, they dislike Negroes.”118 Whether or not this observation was accurate (according to sociological surveys conducted during the war, it was) is beside the point.119 Jarrell himself saw the soldiers around him not as passive or childlike but as agents motivated by real passions—nationalism and racism—which almost never show up in his poetry.120 Only by suppressing what he himself saw as 99 percent of American soldiers’ “strongest motivations” was Jarrell able to construct his passive child-­soldiers, object-­subjects, and “killable puppets.” Only by denying what he perceived to be the actual psychological drives of most of his fellow soldiers was he able to fashion the pathetic victims of his war poems. Dickey, by contrast, offers a more complex and ethically nuanced account of soldierly psychology by refusing to turn his killer into a victim. This brings us back to the opening of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” which does exactly that. Recall the first line of that poem: “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State.” The second line, “And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze,” reprises the soft trochaic opening and its midline caesura, extending to a full twelve syllables, moving at a firm rhythm. The first beat is softened; the second beat, on “hunched,” is followed by a swift offbeat pair winging us on; and the alliterative “fur” at the line’s end is stressed, ending the poem with a spondaic punch that distantly calls up the alliterative stresses of Anglo-­Saxon hemistichs. This line initiates two important transformations. The first is that the abstractions from the opening line metamorphose into animal bodies: the State now has a belly, the “I” is now furred. We move from the conceptual to the somatic. The second transformation is that the State is now identified synecdochally with the bomber: the “belly” is, of course, the belly of a plane. The title of the poem still echoing in our ears, “belly” will call up “ball-­turret” and position the reader “hunched” there with the speaker. The State has taken 118. Jarrell, Letters, 103. 119. See especially ch. 3, “Combat Motivations among Ground Troops,” in Stauffer, Lumsdaine, et al., American Soldier, vol. 2; ch. 9, “The Orientation of Soldiers toward the War,” in Stauffer, Suchman, et al., American Soldier, 1:61–64; and Dower, War without Mercy, 36–37, 53–54, on the almost total lack of idealistic motivation or concern for war aims on the part of the American soldier and the widespread racial hatred the American soldier felt toward the Japanese. According to Stauffer, most soldiers saw the war as a fight for sheer survival. 120. Consider also Win Stracke: “I don’t think very many were ideologically motivated. Some couldn’t tell the difference between the Nazis and our Allies.” Stracke quoted in Terkel, “Good War,” 160.

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shape as a vaguely animal flying machine, a monstrous leviathan in whose belly we live. Through these transformations, Jarrell offers an elaboration of his birth metaphor through a strange obstetric transplantation: the speaker has gone from “mother’s sleep” to the State’s “belly,” he is “hunched” as if in a fetal position, his fur is “wet” as with blood and afterbirth. There is something stillborn about this shift, yet the hunched, furred innocence of the speaker calls on our most animal sympathies. The speaker has been powerfully infantilized, and it is already all but impossible to think of him as in any way responsible for his fate. The passivity of the speaker persists throughout: his only actions are to fall, hunch, wake, and die. The third line is the poem’s pivot. First, the rhythm shifts from softly trochaic to the predominantly iambic beat that will carry us through line four. This line also contracts from the previous eleven and twelve-­syllable meters to a clean pentameter, as it joins the abstraction and concreteness of lines one and two into a powerful allegorical image: “Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life . . .” The strong caesura after “earth” inscribes the vertiginous altitude the line portrays, and the imagery works another turn on the birth metaphor being developed, so that now the “fall” is a kind of launch into space, away from the maternal earth, and birth portrayed as an exile from “its dream of life.” The notion here is of a living being cut off from the Umwelt (lifeworld) of organic existence, alienated from the phenomenological consciousness of animal vitality. This line pivots too by providing two adjectival phrases preceding the noun they modify in the next line, thus activating a grammatical suspense that only adds to the line’s sense of airy summiting. The next line resolves the suspension of the prior. “I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.” The Gunner comes alive amid combat and threat. This line retains the overall iambic rhythm of the prior, sustaining its modulation, and at eleven syllables manages a strongly pentametrical shape. The three hard, glottal /k/s in the first half of the line perform an onomatopoeia of antiaircraft fire, and their harsh contrast against the previous sibilants and fricatives helps physicalize the shift from vague, dreamy unconsciousness to the crude terror of reality. Which is where we end: the crude terror of reality resides at last in the inescapable materiality of the human body, its finitude, its meaty meaninglessness. Jarrell’s last line reverts to the trochaic rhythm of the poem’s first half, which rhythmic recapitulation combines with the final rhyme (froze/hose) to bring a sense of closure. Yet it is the longest line of the poem and extends further than the ear has any sense it ought to. The extension of the line past the

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pentametrical norm established in the prior two lines has the effect of draining rhythmic energy at just the moment where convention would have it intensified. This attenuation is strengthened by the iambic substitution ending the line, which creates a double offbeat at just the position of the expected final foot (“out of the turret”). The closure is flattened and diminished. The reduction of the human to mere matter—and, what’s more, waste—is the poem’s revelatory offering. Consider similarly the central image of Catch­22, the revelation that unveils for Yossarian the nihilistic, absurd truth of war, the traumatic primal scene avoided, returned to, avoided again, and finally remembered: Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden’s flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden’s insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out. A chunk of flak more than three inches big had shot into his other side just underneath his arm and blasted all the way through, drawing whole mottled quarts of Snowden along with it through the gigantic hole in his ribs it made as it blasted out. Yossarian screamed a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes. His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here was God’s plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared—liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes and turned away dizzily and began to vomit, clutching his burning throat. The tail gunner woke up while Yossarian was vomiting, saw him, and fainted again. Yossarian was limp with exhaustion, pain and despair when he finished. He turned back weakly to Snowden, whose breath had grown softer and more rapid, and whose face had grown paler. He wondered how in the world to begin to save him. . . . He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.121

The revelation of Snowden’s “secret” is the motivating event for the entire novel, the inspiration for Yossarian’s frantic effort to escape the human condition. Heller’s vision of the truth of war, like Jarrell’s, is a confrontation with the fact of mortality. For Heller, “ripeness was all,” just as for Jarrell, birth is death. As James Dickey writes of Jarrell’s war poems, “They have all the attitudes 121. Heller, Catch-­22, 439–40.

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that most people think ought to be shown by poets during wars. Can you imagine a poet loving war, or not pitying the individual soldiers?”122 Similarly, can we imagine a poet accepting war, sympathizing with the powerful affects opened up by collective violence, and exploring them as fit subjects for aesthetic contemplation? These questions open the central question of war literature more broadly. Must all war literature be “antiwar” literature in Jarrell or Bly’s moralizing, naïve, and fundamentally ideological vein? If we want to understand the human experience of war, we must come to terms with numerous difficult and unpleasant facts. One of them is that no agent of violence can be deemed innocent or faultless, even if that agent is drafted against his or her will to fight in a war ultimately considered just. We must understand the soldier first, foremost, and always as an agent of state power, since that is the soldier’s objective social role. Hence stories of soldiers must be read in light of their complicity with and participation in sovereign power. Soldiers are the state’s killers. That’s their job. Jarrell’s efforts to excuse the men engaged in bombing the German people on the basis that they like puppies and opera, or because they are mortal, turn soldiers into victims of their own violence. Such efforts are not only deluded and obscurantist but ethically naïve, at best. As James Dickey’s, Robert Lowell’s, and May Sarton’s bomber lyrics show, violence has aesthetic and erotic appeal, and as Jarrell suggests in his letters, even a just war will be fought for unjust reasons, including nationalism and racial hatred. Thus to expect a poet to hate war and pity individual soldiers means that we do not want the poet to give us an accurate account of what war means in our culture or how the men who fight experience it, but rather a mythic confrontation with the physical fact of death transformed through aesthetic sophistication into a moment of literary transcendence, the Real of matter magically translated into the Symbolic of culture. Yet readerly expectations are themselves never wholly consistent. While we may want our war literature to be antiwar literature, we still also want the sublimity of violence. While we want to see our American heroes as sympathetic victims, we also want them to embody national power. Sometimes the demands to meet contradictory expectations are so strong, so crassly hypocritical, and so fraught, especially in years of ongoing conflict and repression, that the best an artist can do is reflect back to an age its own violent and obscure desires.

122. Dickey, “Some of All of It,” 346.

2

Repetitions of a Hero How many selves are there in a war hero . . . ? F r a n k O ’ H a r a , “In Memory of My Feelings” (1956), in Selected Poems

The Hero as Riddle: The Negro Hero and the Nation within a Nation Soaring over the heartland, the graceful and murderous bomber embodies the contradictions of American power and heroism—while someone else stands watching below. He is American, too, but he cannot be a hero, because even if he does die serving his country, his death would not be recognized as a fitting sacrifice. His life cannot be given to the nation because it is already forfeit, segregated out, and marked for violence; he is more apt to be left hanging from a tree than laid to rest with military honors. His skin shines “metallically black in the strong sunlight,” and it is his color that marks him as belonging to a separate caste, a separate nation, a nation within a nation.1 The meaning of his existence is obscured within a metaphor. “He is an American, because he was a native son, but he was a Negro nationalist in a vague sense because he was not allowed to live as an American,” and his name is Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son.2 A weaving motion in the sky made him turn his eyes upward; he saw a slender streak of billowing white blooming against the deep blue. A plane was writing high up in the air. “Look!” Bigger said. “What?” “That plane writing up there,” Bigger said, pointing. “Oh!” They squinted at a tiny ribbon of unfolding vapor that spelled out the word: USE. . . . The plane was so far away that at times the strong glare of the sun blanked it from sight. 1. R. Wright, Native Son, 17. 2. R. Wright, Native Son, 451.

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“You can hardly see it,” Gus said. “Looks like a little bird,” Bigger breathed with childlike wonder. “Them white boys sure can fly,” Gus said. “Yeah,” Bigger said, wistfully. “They get the chance to do everything.”3

Bigger, like the bomber, is a paradoxical figure. While the bomber is both victim and destroyer, both citizen sacrifice to national sovereignty and sacred embodiment of national sovereignty, Bigger is the American who cannot be sacrificed, a kind of homo sacer who may be lynched but who cannot give his life for the nation. This scene from Native Son showing Bigger and Gus watching a skywriter fly overhead suggests the close and contrary relation between the two figures: while the plane is a symbol of freedom, that freedom is inaccessible to Bigger and Gus down in the Chicago ghetto. Bigger insists that he could fly if the social structures of racism didn’t stand in his way, but then he concedes that under the current system, perhaps the white supremacists keeping blacks from flying were showing a certain prudence: “‘Maybe they right in not wanting us to fly,’ Bigger said. ‘’Cause if I took a plane up I’d take a couple of bombs along and drop ’em sure as hell.’”4 With this comment, Bigger pierces the ideological smoke screen laid down by the skywriter to expose the true power of the airplane as an agent of military-­industrial power, which power is precisely why “them white boys” don’t want him to fly. In his essay “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright talks about the relationship between the individual and the collective, sacrifice, and national belonging, articulating black resentment at the way America’s wartime call for unity largely excluded African Americans: “Sometimes I’d hear a Negro say: ‘God, I wish I had a flag and a country of my own.’ . . . Sometimes I’d hear a Negro ex-­soldier say: ‘What in the hell did I fight in the war for? They segregated me even when I was offering my life for my country.’”5 Such feelings were widespread among African Americans during the 1940s. “The Army jim-­crows us. The Navy only lets us serve as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and labor unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We are disenfranchised, jim-­crowed, spat upon,” observed one black student. “What more could Hitler do than that?”6 The wartime demand for national unity and sacrifice put pressure on the United States’ racial caste system, producing both increasingly militant civil 3. R. Wright, Native Son, 16. 4. R. Wright, Native Son, 17. 5. R. Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” included in volume with Native Son, 440. 6. White, “What the Negro Thinks of the Army,” 67.

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rights activism to end the caste divide and increasing violence, largely from whites fighting to maintain it. On the one hand, there were a range of efforts to work for social justice by legal and peaceful means, from the work of national black leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and Walter White to the exemplary case of Winfred Lynn, who responded to his draft notice with a demand that the military place him in a desegregated unit in accordance with the Selective Service Act of 1940, which contained a clause prohibiting racial discrimination.7 Emblematic of these efforts was the Pittsburgh Courier’s Double V campaign, inspired by a letter to the editor from cafeteria worker James G. Thompson, who asked, “Should I sacrifice my life to live ‘half-­American’?”8 On the other hand, intense racialized violence, mainly from whites against blacks but also sometimes from blacks, flared in ghettos, around Southern military bases quartering black soldiers, and on military bases themselves from Texas to Australia, and erupted in a series of riots in the summer of 1943, most notably in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Harlem, that shocked liberal whites and chastened black civil rights leaders.9 As described by Harvard Sitkoff, “The chaos, despair, and frustration arising from the Negro’s resentment of the slow pace of racial progress and his accelerating hope for a better day, plus the bewilderment and anger of whites determined to maintain the racial status quo—expressed in and nurtured by three years of racial friction and conflict—exploded in an epidemic of interracial violence in 1943. The Social Science Institute at Fisk University reported 242 racial battles in forty-­ seven cities.”10 Whites protested the hiring of black workers for defense industry jobs in Beaumont, Texas, and Mobile, Alabama, in both cases rioting and terrorizing black communities for days. “Similar fears of Negro economic competition led to a series of hate strikes against the hiring of black workers 7. MacDonald, “Novel Case of Winfred Lynn.” The clause, Section 4(a) of the Selective Service Act, reads “In the selection and training of men under this Act, and in the interpretation and execution of the provisions of this Act, there shall be no discrimination against any person on account of race or color.” 8. Thompson, “Should I Sacrifice to Live ‘Half-­American’?” “ Of course the black press wasn’t only critical but also lauded black heroes and publicized black deaths. For example, pointed out Thomas Sancton, “How many white people know who Dorie Miller is? The name means as much to Negroes as Colin Kelly’s does to white newspaper readers. The Negro press has built up more war morale with Dorie Miller’s story than official Washington tears down in a month” (Sancton, “Negro Press,” 557). For more on the efforts of the black press during the war, both patriotic and activist, see Davis, “Negro Newspapers and the War.” 9. In addition to the sources following, see also chap, 12, “Harvest of Disorder,” in Lee, Employment of Negro Troops. 10. Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,” 671.

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in Maryland, Michigan, New York, and Ohio, and a violent battle between blacks and whites in the Sun Shipbuilding Yard at Chester, Pennsylvania.”11 Black soldiers were not exempt from this violence: not only were they segregated, mistreated, and disrespected in the Jim Crow military, but they were also beaten, shot by local police, and lynched in Army towns throughout the South (where most blacks were stationed).12 These were physical conflicts being fought to contest the truth of imagined concepts—race, nation, and the liberal subject—which were themselves in conflict. The social norms of Jim Crow conflicted with the demand for American wartime unity, and both were in contradiction with the notion of the liberal subject, the rights-­bearing individual who sells their labor on a free market. One could see these conflicts already present in American culture long before the war. Bigger Thomas saw them as a riddle whose answer was at once obscured and revealed in the image of the sky-­writing plane. “There was in his eyes a pensive, brooding amusement, as of a man who had been long confronted and tantalized by a riddle whose answer seemed always just on the verge of escaping him, but prodding irresistibly on to seek its solution. The silence irked Bigger; he was anxious to do something to evade looking so squarely at the problem.”13 Coming out of his momentary reverie, Bigger does not so much evade the problem as attempt to master it through mockery. He cajoles his friend Gus into “playing ‘white,’” and the two men act out three scenarios dramatizing and mocking the structures of American political power. First, Bigger imitates a military leader ordering a lower-­ranked general to “attack the enemy’s left flank . . . with tanks, gas, planes, and infantry.” Then, Gus imitates J. P. Morgan ordering an underling to “sell twenty thousand shares of U.S. Steel. . . . at any price.” Finally, Bigger imitates the president of the United States ordering his secretary of state to attend a cabinet meeting. Gus, playing a phlegmatic Secretary Hull, tells the president that he’s busy dealing with the Germans “raising sand,” but President Bigger tells him the cabinet meeting takes precedence. “‘Well, you see, the niggers is raising sand all over the country,’ Bigger said, struggling to keep back his laughter. ‘We’ve got to do something about these black folks.’” Gus responds, “‘Oh, if it’s about the niggers, I’ll be right there.’”14 The first two scenes dramatize American military power and American economic power, both thoroughly racialized. The third scene offers something 11. Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy,” 672. 12. MacDonald and MacDonald, War’s Greatest Scandal! 2. See also Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy,” 668–69. 13. R. Wright, Native Son, 17. 14. R. Wright, Native Son, 19.

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different: not power as such but governance. While the first two scenes depict authoritarian power relations wherein a superior is giving precise orders to a subordinate, the third scene shows a more flexible and administrative hierarchy in which a leader is calling a meeting to discuss planning, a meeting from which Gus’s secretary of state at first demurs, since he is concerned primarily with international politics. Once Gus’s Secretary Hull finds out that the cabinet meeting is about “the niggers,” however, he changes his tune. White supremacy trumps geopolitics, since American ethnonationalist identity is more threatened by blacks claiming equal status with whites than it is by foreign armies “raising sand” overseas. This attitude was not a fiction, as John Dower explains: “The alarm which accelerating black demands for equality caused in US military and civilian circles during the war cannot be underestimated. . . . General Marshall confidentially told reporters in August 1943 that he ‘would rather handle everything that the Germans, Italians and Japanese can throw at me, than to face the trouble I see in the Negro question’”15 Thus as Gus and Bigger lay out the structures of American power, they find no place in it for themselves except as a problem. This is the “riddle whose answer seemed always just on the verge of escaping” Bigger, and once it has been refracted through their comic routines, he can allow himself to feel the tiniest part of the rage and sorrow it fills him with, the feeling “like something awful’s going to happen to me.”16 Another black writer took up this riddle through the story of an African American bomber crewman in a German prisoner of war (POW) camp. In this story, the airman sacrifices himself, bailing out of his damaged bomber over Germany so that his fellow crewmen might get home, is then captured, and finds himself, as the highest-­ranking American in that particular Nazi POW camp, the designated spokesman for his fellow prisoners. “Predictably,” the author writes, “the dramatic conflict arose from the fact that he was the only Negro among the Americans, and the resulting racial tension was exploited by the German camp commander for his own amusement.”17 The Nazi commandant manipulates the Negro airman against the other Americans, hoping “to prod the Negro into plotting the death of the whites.”18 Caught between his Nazi enemy and his racist American countrymen, the airman is thus isolated in an existential dilemma to which he can respond only 15. Dower, War without Mercy, 173. 16. R. Wright, Native Son, 20. 17. Ellison, “Introduction to Thirtieth-­Anniversary Edition of Invisible Man,” 479. Thanks to Sandra Gustafson for pointing this out to me. See Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 180–81, 194, for a discussion of this project’s development. 18. Ellison, “Airman Novel.”

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by appealing internally to the idea for which he has offered himself in sacrifice as a soldier: “he had either to affirm the transcendent ideals of democracy and his own dignity by aiding those who despised him, or accept his situation as hopelessly devoid of meaning.”19 The airman knows that his affirmation and sacrifice are not recognized as valid by the very men whom he is supposed to represent, yet he cannot act otherwise without surrendering to nihilism. Ellison concludes, “Thus, democratic ideals and military valor alike were rendered absurd by the prevailing mystique of race and color.”20 In the end, the black airman is killed while helping some of his fellow prisoners escape.21 The airman’s existentially absurd situation proved insoluble, since the author could find no way to reconcile the war hero and the Negro, and in the end, the novel was never written. All that remains today of Ralph Ellison’s “Airman Novel” are a few outlines, some notes, and a handful of short scenes that seem to presage the “taunting, disembodied voice” of the work he next turned his hand to, the novel Invisible Man: In the room behind the office of the kommander of Offlag 369 the American flier lay in a fitful dream. He was a young man of twenty-­five, of light brown complexion, and as he dreamed his not unhandsome face was torn with the passion of soundless cries. He was caught in Hell, a place in which even now he realized he did not believe, and there before him was the kommander who somehow had now become the devil. He was being urged to do something which he could not understand and each time he refused the American fliers struck him across the back with loaded machine gun belts and yet as both tortured him they seemed angry with each other and he could hardly hear his own cries of pain for their shouted insults.22

Ellison made other attempts to solve the riddle of the Negro hero, notably in his short stories “Flying Home,” in which a downed black Air Force trainee is caught by a racist white Southerner and taken away in a straitjacket, and “In a Strange Country,” in which a black sailor on leave in Swansea sings “The Star-­ Spangled Banner” for a roomful of Welshmen. The latter story’s protagonist, Mr. Parker, comes ashore and is set upon by a bunch of white soldiers who give him a black eye, but he is rescued by a Welshman named Catti, who buys him a couple of drinks, then takes him to a sing-­along. The men at the sing-­ along represent all the classes of Swansea, bourgeoisie and working class, and they sing Welsh nationalist songs, then “God Save the King,” then the “Inter19. Ellison, “Introduction to Thirtieth-­Anniversary Edition of Invisible Man,” 479. 20. Ellison, “Introduction to Thirtieth-­Anniversary Edition of Invisible Man,” 480. 21. Ellison, “Airman Novel.” 22. Ellison, “Airman Novel.”

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nationale.” Parker is confused and drawn in by the white Welshmen, at times suspecting them of mockery but struggling throughout toward a tentative faith in their hospitality. “I want to believe in this people,” Parker thinks. Then they begin playing a new song. And suddenly he recognized the melody and felt that his knees would give way. It was as though he had been pushed into the horrible foreboding country of dreams and they were enticing him into some unwilled and degrading act, from which only his failure to remember the words would save him. It was all unreal, yet it seemed to have happened before. Only now the melody seemed charged with some vast new meaning which part of him that wanted to sing could not fit with the old familiar words. And beyond the music he kept hearing the soldiers’ voices, yelling as they had when the light struck his eye. He saw the singers still staring, and as though to betray him he heard his own voice singing out like a suddenly amplified radio: “. . . Gave proof through the night That our flag was still there . . .” It was like the voice of another, over whom he had no control. His eye throbbed. A wave of guilt shook him, followed by a burst of relief. For the first time in your whole life, he thought with dreamlike wonder, the words are not ironic. He stood in confusion as the song ended, staring into the men’s Welsh faces, not knowing whether to curse them or return their good-­natured smiles.23

Parker’s complex, violent ambivalence to singing “The Star-­Spangled Banner,” and the way that he cannot help himself from singing out, “like the voice of another, over whom he had no control,” create an effect of nightmarish possession, as if Parker is being forced against his will to participate in a cult ritual. Which in a sense he is: he is being called on to represent America, to literally embody the idea of the nation with his lungs and throat and mouth and breath, and while the Welshmen take him for a proper representative, Parker also knows, as his “black” eye attests, that his right to represent America is denied by a racial caste system in which black Americans are not full citizens. Parker’s performance is a nightmare and a relief because for a moment he is allowed full participation in the nation, not only as a citizen but as a representative of America to other nations, while knowing at the same time that his full participation is precisely what is denied by white supremacy and its Jim Crow laws. A similar scene is dramatized in John Oliver Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), an autobiographical war novel following Solomon “Solly” 23. Ellison, “In a Strange Country,” 145–46.

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Saunders Jr., a young, ambitious City College graduate, and his segregated unit, H Company, Fifty-­Fifth Quartermaster Regiment, from their training in the American South to combat in the Philippines and finally to a cataclysmic race riot in Australia (which, although fictional, was based on real events in Queensland that were hushed up during the war).24 In the scene in question, Saunders and his fellow soldiers—a segregated unit—are boarding the troop transport that will take them to the Pacific. The last of the white soldiers were boarding the beautiful white ship, and a band on board was playing “God Bless America.” He felt a chill like a wave of electric current pass across his slim shoulders, and he wasn’t sure whether it was from “God Bless America” or from leaving Millie behind. He hoped she could hear the band playing and that she would know how much it helped him to understand why Americans, no matter their color or condition, had to go to fight for their country so many thousands of miles away from home. “God bless America . . . God bless America . . . I love this land . . .” He really loved this land. They stopped in the middle of the block and stood waiting until the last white regiment was all aboard. He wanted to look back for one last glimpse of Millie. . . . He wanted desperately to look back, but he would not let himself. Then they started again, marching toward the ship, and it hit him like a vicious kick in the solar plexus, as suddenly the band stopped playing “God Bless America” and jumped into another tune—“The Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” . . . He didn’t want to believe his ears. He looked up heatedly at the ship and saw some of the white soldiers on deck, waving and smiling innocently and friendly-­like at the Negro soldiers below, and yelling, “Yeah, man!” and popping their pinky-­white fingers. The taste of gall crept from his stomach up into his mouth. . . . Worm grinned at him. “What’s the matter, good kid? Mad about something? Damn—that’s what I hate about you colored folks. Take the goddamn chip off your shoulder. They just trying to make you people feel at home. Don’t you recognize the Negro National Anthem when you hear it?”25

As “God Bless America” plays, Solly revels in his pride and sense of belonging as a soldier, electrified by his patriotic participation in the idea of America as, through the somatic power of the music, his body is unified with the bodies of his fellow soldiers, “no matter their color or condition,” into one nation. The shift from “God Bless America” to “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball” cuts through Solly’s pride as quickly as it cuts apart the unity he had assumed, or 24. Specifically a riot in Brisbane and a riot at Kelso Field, only recently unearthed by Ray Holyoak. See Gilyard, John Oliver Killens, 58–60; Evans and Donegan, “Battle of Brisbane,” 209. 25. Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder, 257–58.

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had wanted to assume, between white and black Americans. The shift to “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” and his fellow soldier Worm’s telling and ironic comment on it—“Don’t you recognize the Negro National Anthem when you hear it?”—dramatize both the social fact of the racial caste system, in which blacks were not recognized as full participants in national belonging even while serving in a wartime military, and the complex affective and political ambiguity in the inevitable response white supremacy provokes, which is to say the idea of black nationalism.26 Bigger Thomas, forced to embody and perform the contradictions of identity in a racist nation on the cusp of global war, slips into revolt and is condemned for it. The fate of black American soldiers caught within the American military machine was, for better and for worse, not so clear. For while black Americans served in a Jim Crow army, total mobilization put manpower demands on the military that superseded segregation. The war machine needed bodies and didn’t especially care what color those bodies were. What’s more, the ideals for which the nation had mobilized, as articulated in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speeches and government propaganda, were expressly opposed to the kinds of segregation and oppression that typified the Jim Crow regime, even as, according to Ira Katznelson’s argument, “liberal democracy prospered as a result of an accommodation with racial humiliation and its system of lawful exclusion and principled terror.”27 Further, however much the figure of the black military hero remained a paradox and a contradiction—complicated for writers such as Wright, Ellison, Killens, William Gardner Smith, and Gwendolyn Brooks by the fact that black American sacrifice was both unrecognized as valid wartime sacrifice by most whites and seen as a betrayal of black nationalist unity by many African Americans—the military still put black men in uniform, armed them, and assigned them to positions of respect and responsibility. Even if, as Brooks writes in the voice of Dorie Miller, who was awarded the Navy Cross for valor during the attack on Pearl Harbor and later died at the Battle of Makin Island, the black hero “had to kick the law into their teeth in order to save them,” and 26. See James, A Freedom Bought with Blood, 265–68, for a more thorough account of Killens’s weighing of “the integrationist-­nationalist debate” in And Then We Heard the Thunder and elsewhere. Killens recounts his own radicalization in World War II as follows: “In the Army I came face to face with the real world, with what this country and the world was all about, with what John O. was all about. . . . My in-­laws, wonderful progressive people, thought their darling daughter was marrying a future lawyer. But after seeing all that blood and shit and suffering in the South Pacific, I had been turned by the experiences from a liberal-­progressive into some kind of half-­assed revolutionary.” Killens, “Rappin’ with Myself,” 98. 27. Katznelson, Fear Itself, 25.

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even if “In a southern city a white man said / Indeed, I’d rather be dead / . . . Than saved by the drop of a black man’s blood,” Dorie Miller’s heroic sacrifice remained an obdurate physical fact that could not be wished—or lynched—away.28 Indeed, in 1948 President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, abolishing segregation in the US military. Yet despite racial integration in the US military (which was largely restricted to the enlisted ranks; even today, the US military officer class is predominantly white) and notable civil rights victories over the next decades, the problem Brooks was working out in “Negro Hero” didn’t go away.29 A year after President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, young James Baldwin wrote a now-­famous essay that makes a dense, complex argument about protest novels in general and two such novels in particular: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son. Baldwin, whose father died during the Harlem riots of 1943 (which had been sparked by rumors that police had killed a black soldier), argues that “notwithstanding that the avowed aim of the American protest novel is to bring greater freedom to the oppressed,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin should be seen as acting out a grim and lurid fantasy, and that Bigger Thomas “is Uncle Tom’s descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses.”30 Baldwin takes up in this essay a radically integrationist position and, with fierce dialectical imagination, turns the problem of race in America into a problem of rationally accepting what is already given, that, as he says in a later essay, “the story of the Negro in America is the story of America.”31 Baldwin presupposes this integration in an act of syntactical nationalism, with his bold and slippery we, the first person plural he had developed to speak to the white audiences reading his essays in Commentary, Partisan Review, and Harper’s. Baldwin first defined this we in an essay on the Harlem ghetto as “Americans 28. G. Brooks, “Negro Hero,” in Street in Bronzeville, 48–49. 29. As of 2016, the US Army officer corps were 72 percent white, 11 percent black, and 7 percent Hispanic, while the enlisted ranks were 53 percent white, 24 percent black, and 16 percent Hispanic, mirroring general US demographics for those who hold a bachelor’s degree against those with only a high school diploma. Thus you have in the army a small caste of mostly white officers ruling over more racially diverse enlisted ranks, which replicates broader American socioeconomic inequality (US Army, Army Demographics). In the words of Killens, “I should think an institution like the Army would be one of the last bastions of white supremacy to go, since it is based on a white southern officer caste system” (“Rapping with Myself,” 133–34). 30. J. Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son, 14–15, 18. 31. J. Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” in Notes of a Native Son, 19.

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in general,” yet even this first definition is betrayed by its performance of inclusion and exclusion. The full sentence reads, “We (Americans in general, that is) like to point to Negroes and to most of their activities with a kind of tolerant scorn; but it is ourselves we are watching, ourselves we are damning, or—condescendingly—bending to save.”32 The we here only pretends to be “Americans in general,” for as soon as it appears it’s pointing to an Other, the Negro. Baldwin’s argument, an argument he makes again and again throughout his writing—that black and white are locked in dialectical embrace—is put in the voice of a black man ventriloquizing the viewpoint not of “Americans in general,” whatever that might mean, but specifically of white liberals. “The confidence in his tone, and the assumption of shared cultural life, was astonishing,” notes Lawrence Jackson.33 Baldwin’s argument against Stowe and Wright hinges on the idea that Stowe and Wright are both beholden to and acting out what Baldwin calls “a theological terror, a terror of damnation . . . not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcise evil by burning witches . . . not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob.”34 Protest novels thus should be understood not as working to change a horrific reality, as they claim, but rather as reassuring us that we—that ambiguous we—are on the right side of an ineluctable theological divide. He writes of protest novels, “They are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental; in exactly the same sense that movies such as The Best Years of Our Lives or the works of Mr. James M. Cain are fantasies. Beneath the dazzling pyrotechnics of these current operas one may still discern, as the controlling force, the intense theological pre-­occupations of Mrs. Stowe. . . . The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe.”35 In his virtuosic concluding paragraph, having turned to focus on Native Son, Baldwin asserts that “Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life.”36 Setting aside the question of whether or not Baldwin has fairly understood Wright’s novel, we might focus on this word theology and what Baldwin meant by it, and what it has to do with this we he keeps deploying. Baldwin brings together many things under this idea of “theology,” from Stowe’s Christian metaphysics and “the terror which activates a lynch 32. J. Baldwin, “The Harlem Ghetto,” in Notes of a Native Son, 47. 33. Jackson, Indignant Generation, 279. 34. J. Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 14–15. See also Jackson, Indignant Generation, 283–88. 35. J. Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 16. 36. J. Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 18.

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mob” to the metaphysics of race and caste which, in Baldwin’s phrase, denied Bigger Thomas life. But what it all comes down to, as Baldwin himself intuits, is to “reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe.”37 The fantasy, as Baldwin recognizes, is of a single political body, unified in action and thought, mind and body, yet unmarked by sacrifice, “bloodless.” We might well ask how this political body relates to Baldwin’s we. Decades later, in the introduction to his 1985 volume of collected nonfiction, The Price of the Ticket, Baldwin offers an enlightening perspective, taking up his we again with a kind of rueful hindsight, in a reflection on the Second World War worth quoting at length: This was in 1943. We were fighting the Second World War. We: who was this we? For this war was being fought, as far as I could tell, to bring freedom to everyone with the exception of Hagar’s children and the “yellow-­bellied Japs.” This was not a matter, merely, of my postadolescent discernment. It had been made absolutely clear to me by the eighteen months or so that I had been working for the Army, in New Jersey, by the anti-­Japanese posters to be found, then, all over New York, and by the internment of the Japanese. At the same time, one was expected to be “patriotic” and pledge allegiance to a flag which had pledged no allegiance to you: it risked becoming your shroud if you didn’t know how to keep your distance and stay in your “place.” . . . I have never been able to convey the confusion and horror and heartbreak and contempt which every black person I then knew felt. Oh, we dissembled and smiled as we groaned and cursed and did our duty. (And we did our duty.) The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can’t betray a country you don’t have. . . . And we did not wish to be traitors. We wished to be citizens. We: the black people of this country, then, with particular emphasis on those serving in the Armed Forces. The way blacks were treated in, and by, an American Army spreading freedom around the globe was the reason for the heartbreak and contempt. . . . When these young men came home, in uniform . . . one wondered—as one could not fail to wonder—what nation they represented. My brother, describing his life in uniform, did not seem to be representing the America his uniform was meant to represent—: he had never seen the America his uniform was meant to represent. Had anyone? did he know, had he met, anyone who had? Did anyone live there? . . . 37. The figure of the bomber haunts this passage too: Baldwin’s invocation of “a guy named Joe” may be invoking a 1943 film by that name starring Spencer Tracy as an American airman, killed in a bombing raid, who is sent back as a guardian angel to give advice to a younger pilot (Fleming, Guy Named Joe).

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Was it worth his life? For he, certainly, on the other hand, represented something much larger than himself and something in him knew it: otherwise, he would have been broken like a match-­stick and lost or have surrendered the power of speech. A nation within a nation: this thought wavered in my mind, I think, all those years ago, but I did not know what to make of it.38

Baldwin here revisits the we he had so delicately constructed in his early essays, the first-­person-­plural bid for syntactical nationalism, in the name, it seems, of setting the record straight: this we did not exist at all except as a syntactical conceit, a bid for belonging that betrayed the truth he knew for a truth he hoped might exist. This late reflection from The Price of the Ticket looks back on the wartime years in which Baldwin’s postwar dialectics of race had been forged and sees that Bigger Thomas’s tragedy had not been, as Baldwin asserted in 1948, simply that the Negro was beholden to a benighted theology and had failed, as much as the white man had failed, to accept our common humanity, but rather that blacks and whites comprised two nations, one represented by black skin and lynched bodies and “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” the other represented by military uniforms and “The Star-­spangled Banner” and “God Bless America,” and that reconciling these two nations—the nation and the “nation within a nation”—was not so simple as accepting our humanity or subtly deploying the word we. What Baldwin is writing about in The Price of the Ticket, however, is the same theology that he wrote about in “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which turns out not to be theology in the sense of hellfire and angelic glory but theology in the sense of collective political imagination, which is to say political theology: the way that a group of people imagines their life together as a nation through acts of representation, exclusion, and sacrifice. What Baldwin is writing about here, as he asks whether the nation his brother’s uniform represented had ever existed and whether that imagined nation was worth his life, is the same problem being worked out and dramatized in Brooks’s poem “Negro Hero,” in Bigger Thomas and Gus playing at being white generals, in Mr. Parker singing “The Star-­Spangled Banner,” in Solly Saunders reacting in pain and rage to the shift from “God Bless America” to what his fellow soldier Worm cynically dubs the “Negro National Anthem,” and in the slow, complicated failure of Ellison’s war novel opening out into the profound originality of Invisible Man, the same problem so densely compacted into the multiplicity and ambivalences emergent in the figure of the bomber: the problem of the 38. J. Baldwin, Price of the Ticket, 836–37.

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hero in a time of total mobilization, the problem of who “we” are, how “we” represent ourselves to ourselves in narrative, and how that narrative is enacted in violence. The Hero as Social Media: The Caine Mutiny Consider mutiny. In 1944, in the middle of a typhoon, the captain of the warship USS Caine was relieved by his executive officer, Lieutenant Steven Maryk, under Article 184 of Navy Regulations. That article allows for such relief in “most unusual and extraordinary circumstances,” and Lieutenant Maryk believed such circumstances held: that his commander, Lieutenant Commander Philip F. Queeg, had suffered nervous failure, and that Queeg’s derangement was endangering the ship. Queeg refused to step down, but with the support of the officer of the deck, Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Willie Keith, and a seaman named Stilwell, Lieutenant Maryk took command of the Caine and skippered it safely through the typhoon. This fictional conflict of authority is the central dramatic event of Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize–­winning 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny, but it is not the novel’s only conflict of authority. Authority is questioned, challenged, tested, and fought for throughout, and not only between men at war but also between men and women, sons and mothers, differing accounts of the truth, and even literature and reality—indeed, between different kinds of “literature,” different kinds of discourse. This last conflict is perhaps the novel’s most important, as suggested in the irony of Lieutenant Maryk relying on Navy Regulations (i.e., “the book”) as the justification for his rebellion against a petty despot whose entire leadership style is avowedly “by the book.” As Queeg tells his subordinate officers when he assumes command of the Caine, “Now, I’m a book man, as anyone who knows me will tell you. I believe the book is there for a purpose, and everything in it has been put in it for a purpose. When in doubt, remember we do things on this ship by the book. You go by the book and you’ll get no argument from me. You deviate from the book and you better have a half dozen damn good reasons—and you’ll still get a hell of an argument from me.”39 Maryk’s rebellion against “book man” Queeg was inspired by a different kind of “book man”: Lieutenant Keefer, the ship’s communications officer, who had been a writer before the war and spends his free time on the Caine working on a novel titled Multitudes, Multitudes. Keefer is a cynical, cheerfully subversive elitist, a self-­satisfied intellectual who (like Randall Jarrell) sneers at the men around him and at the bureaucracy 39. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 131.

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in which he finds himself enmeshed, and he is the one who first suggests to solid, plodding Maryk that Queeg might not just be mean, stupid, cowardly, and dishonorable but a dangerously paranoid psychotic. Keefer turns out to be a great success as a “book man”: he not only sells Maryk on the mutiny, he also sells Multitudes, Multitudes to a publisher. Keefer’s success as a “book man,” however, is as ignominious as Queeg’s genuine failure of character. Later, after Maryk is tried for mutiny and acquitted, Maryk’s lawyer Lieutenant Barney Greenwald names Keefer as “the author of the Caine mutiny,” right before he throws a glass of wine in Keefer’s face.40 This insult follows a drunken, impassioned speech in which Greenwald excoriates Keefer, Maryk, and Keith for their complacency and disloyalty. The lawyer begins by claiming that if he’d written a war novel like Keefer had, he would have made Queeg the hero.41 Men like Queeg, Greenwald goes on, were all that stood between “old Mrs. Greenwald” and the Nazis, while ambitious “sensitive intellectuals” like himself, Keith, and Keefer were busy enjoying their civilian lives. It’s personal for Greenwald: he’s Jewish, and “the Germans aren’t kidding about the Jews. They’re cooking us down to soap over there.”42 Greenwald admits that the mutineers are all guilty and says they should have been convicted, but he used “phony legal tricks” to get Maryk off because “the wrong guy was on trial”—it should have been Keefer on the stand, not Maryk.43 Greenwald, ashamed of himself for having disgraced Queeg and furious with Keefer for having manipulated Maryk, splashes his “yellow wine in Keefer’s face.”44 Wouk’s portrayal of Keefer the novelist as an arrogant, narcissistic subversive, and this scene in particular, in which Greenwald publicly shames and insults Keefer for his disloyalty, might look like an attack on literary intellectuals as a type and suggest that The Caine Mutiny is a celebration of blind obedience. But reading the work in this manner would require simplifying the novel’s complexities, eliding its thick allusiveness (references range from Kant 40. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 448. Keith elsewhere describes Keefer’s novel as follows: “It doesn’t seem very original in thought or style—sort of a jumble of Dos Passos and Joyce and Hemingway and Faulkner—but it’s smooth, and some of the scenes are brilliant. It takes place on a carrier, but there are a lot of flashbacks to the beach, with some of the most hair-­raising sex scenes I’ve ever read. It’ll sell like hotcakes, I’m sure” (468). 41. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 446. Greenwald actually calls Queeg “Old Yellowstain,” the derogatory nickname given him by Keefer after one of Queeg’s more notable acts of cowardice, in which he ordered the Caine to abandon the landing craft it was escorting and drop a yellow dye marker to mark their route. 42. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 446–47. 43. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 447–48. 44. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 448.

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to Conrad), and ignoring Wouk’s interest in the relationship between literature and reality. On that point, what Greenwald has to say about Keefer’s novel before the trial is much more equivocal than his later disdain: “I’d like to read it. I’m sure that it exposes this war in all its grim futility and waste, and shows up the military men for the stupid, Fascist-­minded sadists they are. Bitching up all the campaigns and throwing away the lives of fatalistic, humorous, lovable citizen-­soldiers. Lots of sex scenes where the prose becomes rhythmic and beautiful while the girl gets her pants pulled down.” Greenwald saw Maryk’s mystified suspicious smile, and shrugged. “Well, I can tell, because war novels are coming out already and the war is still on. I read ’em all. I like novels where the author proves how terrible military guys are, and how superior sensitive civilians are. I know they’re true to life because I’m a sensitive civilian myself.”45

The issues of representation lurking behind Greenwald’s sardonic dismissal, no doubt a shot at Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, are key. As The Caine Mutiny’s central theme is the relationship between literature and reality, the novel’s central conflict is between the authority of literature and the authority of experience. This conflict becomes more explicit as we turn from the various characters involved in the mutiny to the novel’s protagonist, Willie Keith, and main narrative, which is the story of how Keith learns to be a leader and a hero. What Keith learns through the trials of war are judgment, discipline, and the limits of his ego, and he achieves this knowledge not through the deceptions and fantasies of literature but through experience: Keith learns to read men. Keith begins the novel a “book man,” too, having recently graduated from Princeton, where “his academic specialty had been comparative literature.”46 As a young ensign aboard the Caine, he mistrusts the intuitive, experiential authority of Lieutenant Maryk and Captain de Vriess and is seduced by Keefer’s literary and intellectual glamour, a seduction that pulls him into rebellion against Queeg’s “by the book” tyranny. After their successful but pyrrhic mutiny against despotic “book” authority, Keefer takes command of the Caine, with Keith as his executive officer. Keefer, however, lacks the moral fiber for leadership: when a Japanese kamikaze crashes into the Caine, he jumps overboard with his novel, leaving Keith to save the ship from disaster. Confessing his cowardice to Keith after the attack, Keefer compares himself with Queeg and the eponymous coward of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, and he 45. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 357. 46. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 2.

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complains about how much pressure it is to be in command (“It’s the loneliest, most oppressive job in the whole world”).47 Keith, on the other hand, discovers that command suits him: Even at anchor, on an idle, forgotten old ship, Willie experienced the strange sensations of the first days of a new captain: a shrinking of his personal identity, and a stretching out of his nerve ends to all the spaces and machinery of his ship. He was less free than before. He developed the apprehensive listening ears of a young mother; the ears listened on in his sleep; he never quite slept, not the way he had before. He had the sense of having been reduced from an individual to a sort of brain of a composite animal, the crew and ship combined. The reward for these disturbing sensations came when he walked the decks. Power seemed to flow out of the plates into his body. The respectful demeanor of the officers and crew thrust him into a loneliness he had never known, but it wasn’t a frigid loneliness. Through the transparent barrier of manners came the warming unspoken word that his men liked him and believed in him. He gave them fresh reason to do so in his first week as captain.48

When the Caine is caught at anchorage in another typhoon, Keith conns the ship thirty straight hours, “maneuvering finely with his engines and rudder to keep the anchor from dragging.” The storm finally breaks and reveals “a dozen ships stranded on beaches and reefs all around the bay,” and Keith is recognized as a hero for saving the Caine.49 In contrast to the narcissist Keefer or the paranoid Queeg, both driven to impose their personal fantasies on the world, Keith learns to subordinate his personal identity to that of the collective and to become thereby a sensitive reader of men and machines, with “the apprehensive listening ears of a young mother.” Command and heroism are here figured as requiring a submission to collective life, feminized nurturing, and attentive sensitivity. The Caine Mutiny offers a dramatic exploration of some of the central problems of collective existence, but within a strictly hierarchical institution that seems alien (if not anathema) to liberal individualism. Social position and caste are fixed in the military, and movement within rank and role demands that individuals accommodate themselves to their objective responsibilities, which extend both up and down the chain of command. As we see in Wouk’s novel, a good captain is at once autonomous, as “the highest function” of a commander is defined as having the self-­possession to “listen to nothing but the voice of his own judgment,” and heteronomous, as it is the captain’s 47. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 463. 48. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 482. 49. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 482.

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responsibility to attend to the “composite animal” of which he is only a part, and to carry out the orders given to him by his leaders.50 Keith shows his disposition for leadership and is recognized as a hero because of his willingness to sacrifice his individuality to collective needs. Wouk’s novel should be read as an effort to make sense of a pressing social issue, for in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the idea of the hero was a problem: world war, the emergence of mass media and mass society, rampant nationalism, the attenuation of preindustrial values, and the rise of totalitarianism all provoked anxious questions about whether the “hero” was a positive force for democratic society and whether, and how, American “hero worship” might be distinguished from fascist or communist idolization of military leaders.51 Social and cultural historian Dixon Wecter, for instance, in his 1941 paean to American heroism, The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero-­Worship, argues that the American tradition of hero worship was politically healthy insofar as it differed from other forms of hero worship in its exceptionally individualist, informal, skeptical, and democratic character, offering a stentorian great-­man history of the United States from “The Pilgrim Fathers and the American Way” through “Lee: The Aristocrat as Hero” to “Gods from the Machine: Edison, Ford, Lindbergh.”52 Gerald W. Johnson’s American Heroes and Hero-­Worship (1943), in contrast, pre­sents a much more nuanced and ironic account of the hero in American history, considering the ambivalences and ambiguities in the lives of Andrew Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, William Henry Harrison, and Woodrow Wilson. One of Johnson’s central concerns is historical reception and revision: how heroes are anointed and how they fade from the pantheon through neglect. In The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility, published the same year as American Heroes and Hero-­Worship, Pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook looks at the problem of the hero from a more philosophical perspective, taking up questions of leadership, pedagogy, political action, the philosophy of history, and psychology. Whereas Wecter and Johnson both agreed that, in Wecter’s words, “Hero-­worship answers an urgent American need,”53 Hook saw the hero per se as a threat to American democracy: “If the hero is defined as an event-­making individual who redetermines the course of history, it follows at once that democratic community must be eternally on guard against him.”54 50. Wouk, Caine Mutiny, 408. 51. The problem of the hero was related to the “discourse of man” that Mark Greif illuminates in The Age of the Crisis of Man. See especially chapter 2, 27–60. 52. Wecter, Hero in America. 53. Wecter, Hero in America, 1. 54. Hook, Hero in History, 229.

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Literary critic and translator Eric Bentley, in A Century of Hero-­Worship: A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche with Notes on Other Hero-­ Worshipers of Modern Times (1944), also sees the hero as a potential danger to democracy, if a more ambivalent one. For Bentley, the tradition of “Heroic Vitalism” was complicated in American culture by the faith in meritocratic achievement, which Bentley saw as democracy’s implicit ideal. The greatest difficulty, in Bentley’s view, is that meritocracy leads inevitably to aristocracy. “Our democratic faith is a paradox,” Bentley writes. “Democratic equality means to respect the individual and thus to notice individuality, to welcome variety, to revere superiority—which implies inequality. . . . Aristocracy is one of the goals of democracy.”55 Wecter, Johnson, Hook, and Bentley are only the most explicit examples of a concern that, broadened to include discussion of celebrity, mass society, fascism, cinema, comic books, political philosophy, biography, and the idea of genius, can be seen flashing across the twentieth century in everything from the avant-­garde works of Gertrude Stein to pulp stories starring Superman and Tom Mix, from the Frankfurt school’s analy­ses of the authoritarian personality to Henry Luce’s Life magazine. The history of the hero that Bentley and Hook rely on traced the concept from its origins in Greek literature and philosophy to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The word itself comes from Homer (ἥρως, hḗrōs), referring first to those “major men” who excelled all others in some quality of strength, fortitude, courage, wit, or battle prowess. Thus heroism and aristeia, or excellence, were originally joined. The hero was more than a protagonist, though he was that too: he was an exemplar, a representative, a leader, and a figure of cultic worship. A few centuries later, the term came to have a more technical meaning restricted to demigods, which Plato punned on in the Cratylus, in which Socrates suggests that the word hero comes either from “eros,” which “signifies that they were born of love,” or from “erwatan” (ἐρωτᾶν), which means “to ask.”56 Plato thus wryly undermines the Homeric ideal of heroism as excellence in action with an etymological argument claiming that to be a hero means to be born of love or, better yet, to be a sophist. For Plato, as for us, heroism wasn’t a static given but a field of conflict where social values were debated. How we choose to define the hero is a choice about how we define what is good. By the time we get to the preeminent modern theorists of heroism framing the midcentury discussion between Wecter, Johnson, Hook, and Bentley—namely, Carlyle, Emerson, and Nietzsche—the word’s meaning has 55. Bentley, in Century of Hero-­Worship, 288. 56. Plato, Cratylus 398:d–­e.

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shifted even further from the Homeric warrior ideal. Carlyle, whose catalogue of heroes includes Mohammed, Dante, and Samuel Johnson, delineated the hero as follows: “They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain.”57 Emerson’s heroes included Goethe, Swedenborg, and John Brown, and his definition of greatness is notably more vatic than Carlyle’s: “I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large relations.”58 Nietzsche’s idea of the heroic is yet more complex, as much a matter of perspective as it is of capacity or achievement. From one point of view, heroes are “models, teachers, and comforters,” those “great moments in the struggle of the human individual” wanted for the “monumental” use of history.59 From another perspective, though, a hero is nothing but an ex post facto fiction, as Nietzsche argues in Beyond Good and Evil: And who knows whether what happened in all great cases so far was not always the same: that the crowd adored a god—and that the “god” was merely a poor sacrificial animal. Success has always been the greatest liar—and the “work” itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, often beyond recognition; the “work,” whether of the artist or the philosopher, invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have created it; “great men,” as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction; in the world of historical values, counterfeit rules.60

What Nietzsche’s perspectivism brings into discussion of the problem of the hero is an understanding not only that heroism is a social attribution, or that heroes reflect a society’s ideals, but also that out of its need for ideals a society will fashion heroes using whatever materials are at hand, making great men out of “minor fiction” and gods from sacrificed animals. The more pressing question in the 1940s was how heroes and leaders manipulated mass communication to promulgate their own worship. Thus Hook revises Nietzsche’s notion of the “monumental” use of history: “Technical advances in communication, together with the new psychological methods of inducing belief, make it possible to create mass enthusiasm and worship of 57. Carlyle, On Heroes, 21. 58. Emerson, “Uses of Great Men,” in Representative Men, 616. 59. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History,” 67–68. 60. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 408. Italics in original.

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leaders which surpass anything evolved in Byzantium.”61 Unthinking mass indoctrination was not the only threat the hero posed to democracy. Hook also saw a kind of persistent power vacuum in operation because of the fact “that the overwhelming majority of people have little desire to assume positions of power and responsibility.”62 Inevitably, according to Hook, “a need will be felt for a hero to initiate, organize, and lead,” and that moment of need is a moment of danger.63 For Bentley, however, it wasn’t people’s need for leadership that was the problem so much as their questionable capacities for choosing and judging their leaders: “The hero is a fact. He is a man to whom things do not merely happen but who makes them, or some of them, happen. The environment can accept or reject him, and a democratic people—which would be a very decisive part of the environment—can accept or reject him. Indeed this is probably the greatest problem of democratic politics: to find peoples who can wisely accept or reject the leaders who come forward.”64 Bentley and Hook have notions of heroism and leadership that blend into one another, and which resonate with Wouk’s depiction in The Caine Mutiny: a hero is a leader, and a leader must be heroic. This conflation between leadership and heroism is hardly part of the popular definition of the hero in twenty-­first-­century American culture, which tends to see its heroes not in terms of their social integration but in terms of their countercultural isolation. Yet the hero is an inescapably social phenomenon, and, in fact, the role of the hero hasn’t changed much since Homer’s time: the hero still stands as the representative agent of a collective, an exemplar of a social ideal. The hero may be more representative if his or her agency is regarded as enacting collective will or as portraying a collective identity, or the hero may be more authoritative if he or she is seen as an autonomous agent leading through wisdom, skill, or force of personality. Yet one of the most interesting and puzzling facts about the hero is that he or she is never wholly authoritative nor wholly representative. A hero must act, but unless that act is socially validated as heroic, there is no hero. As psychologists Zeno Franco, Kathy Blau, and Philip Zimbardo argue, “Heroism is a social attribution, never a personal one.”65 Still, the heroic act is itself not a collective act but an individual one. The hero must singularly perform a collective’s notion of itself; he or she must 61. Hook, Hero in History, 10. 62. Hook, Hero in History, 23. 63. Hook, Hero in History, 13. 64. Bentley, Hero-­Worship, 286. 65. Franco, Blau, and Zimbardo, “Heroism,” 99.

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author the collective’s identity. It is in this way that the hero performs a kind of Schmittian “sovereign decision,” defining a specific threat and the boundaries of a social unit through an act of existential risk. The sovereignty of the hero lies at least in part in the hero’s assertion of identity against a clear enemy, internal or external. Yet it is only through the collective recognition of that action as heroic that the sovereign decision of the actor is legitimated. Hence the problem embodied by Ellison’s airman, Solly Saunders, and Dorie Miller: the Negro in the Jim Crow military may perform a courageous act of self-­sacrifice, but unless that act is recognized as such by the collective in question, it’s not “heroic.” Ellison’s airman felt obliged, just like Willie Keith, to sacrifice himself for collective needs, but within the racial caste logic of Jim Crow America, this isn’t a heroic act at all but rather one that merely confirms the Negro’s role as a second-­class citizen subservient to white desire. As we will soon see, racism was only one of the complicated aspects of the problem of the hero that emerged out of America’s wartime mobilization. One helpful insight to draw from Franco, Blau, and Zimbardo’s study on heroism cited here is the real diversity in kinds of heroism. They define heroism as a social activity “in service to others in need,” which is “engaged in voluntarily” and “with recognition of possible risks,” and further “in which the actor is willing to accept anticipated sacrifice” but “without external gain anticipated at the time of the act.”66 This comprehensive definition allows Franco and colleagues to identify twelve heroic types including, along with physical heroes such as soldiers and firefighters, the “Good Samaritan,” scientific heroes, martyrs, underdogs, and religious figures. Too often, critical readings of war literature have implicitly defined heroism in a narrowly physical and martial sense, without taking into account the various ways heroism works culturally and the various ideals for which various kinds of sacrifice have been recognized as heroic. This failure has led to terminological confusions, such as describing Catch–­22’s Yossarian as an “antihero.” The idea of the so-­called antihero obscures a heroic spectrum running from corrupted heroes such as Oedipus or Achilles, where our sympathy and admiration are mixed with disapproval, to socially rebellious heroes such as Jesus Christ and Gandhi, who risk social ostracism (and physical death) for a specific set of transcendental values. The term antihero confuses the hero’s social role with a putative set of beliefs invidiously defined (the “heroic”) and serves an ideological rather than an analytic function. Thus we can see that Yossarian is not an “antihero” at all but rather a hero twice over: not only does he face death 66. Franco, Blau, and Zimbardo, “Heroism,” 101.

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and physical wounding as a bombardier, but he also risks social exclusion as a version of what Franco calls a whistle-­blower, or “bureaucracy hero.” This discussion brings up an important point, which is the relation between the reader and the hero, between an audience and a protagonist, which is in some sense the question of the relation between “hero” as a social role and hero as a term of narrative analysis. Humans are mimetic primates, but not merely and not simply. Strict emulation of the kind Plato warned against in The Republic might be taken as a reductive interpretation of cultural reception, yet we nevertheless remember and internalize characters and their stories as models for life. (Alarmingly, there appears to be no substantial cognitive boundary between fact and fiction—once something has been imagined, it exists for us as a virtual reality to be actualized at any moment, no matter how far-­fetched or fantastic: space flight, submarines, cloning, money, race, a nation.) Our engagement as readers, viewers, and auditors with the protagonists of stories occurs via sympathetic identification and imaginative substitution: we identify with the heroes, sympathize with them, and imagine ourselves in their place. At the same time, we also identify ourselves with the collective from which the hero is separated and abstracted, because we are not the hero, despite our sympathy. We are, rather, in the position of judging the hero’s behaviors in relation to social norms; the reader or audience member is at once Antigone and the chorus. Our sympathies engage more or less with the hero, more or less with the collective, depending on a narrative’s construction, its cultural context, and our own individual tendencies toward identification. Every reader knows the experience of finding a hero unsympathetic because we fail to identify with his or her situation. With works that focus on an unlikable, ruined, corrupt, or even explicitly “evil” hero such as Captain Ahab, Hedda Gabler, or Patrick Bateman, our emotional engagement depends on our not identifying wholly with the hero but identifying with him or her in part while identifying more substantially with collective norms. Tragedy in the Hegelian vein, the conflict of ethical worlds we see in Antigone, for instance, arises when our sympathetic engagement is pitched at equal or near-­ equal levels between a protagonist and her social group, or between two competing protagonists. It is one of the great virtues of fiction (what we might call the fictional epoché) that it allows us to bracket our real-­world social investments in order to role-­play imaginative identifications with others, even with multiple competing identifications at the same time. These identifications change over time, of course, and across cultures, so that a contemporary American reader of Antigone will not likely identify all that strongly with

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Creon and his enforcement of civil order: rather than see Antigone as pitched in tension with Creon, they will likely see her as the play’s hero and him as its villain. The blurring between hero as a term of narrative analysis and “hero” as a social role is thus definitive, not accidental. Our social reality takes shape through the narratives we reproduce, and vice versa, and figuration is key to that mediation. In Emerson’s phrase, “all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.”67 But heroes are not only the resolutions and reductions of the past; they also embody the cultural values of their moment. As Richard Slotkin writes: When history is translated into myth, the complexities of social and historical experiences are simplified and compressed into the action of representative individuals or “heroes.” The narrative of the hero’s action exemplifies and tests the political and/or moral validity of a particular approach to the use of human powers in the material world. The hero’s inner life—his or her code of values, moral or psychic ambivalence, mixtures of motive—reduce to personal motive the complex and contradictory mixtures of ideological imperatives that shape a society’s response to a crucial event. But complexity and contradiction are focused rather than merely elided in the symbolizing process. The heroes of myth embody something like the full range of ideological contradictions around which the life of the culture revolves, and their adventures suggest the range of possible resolutions that the culture’s lore provides.68

Thus we might best understand the hero as a form of mediation, a kind of social media: the concrete middle term embodying a metaphoric relation between a collective and its ideals. The hero connects human life to a specific communal ideal by demonstrating that the ideal in question is worth a human life; the hero makes the ideal real by staking his or her existence on it. A hero who dies for an ideal has realized that ideal in blood; the hero has transformed a mere word into physical truth, a sign into substance. Thus just as leadership and heroism are closely related, so are heroism and sacrifice. As Franco, Blau, and Zimbardo point out, heroism is an act undertaken “in which the actor is willing to accept anticipated sacrifice.”69 Heroism is always predicated on the willingness to be sacrificed and on the possibility of sacrificial fulfillment. The foundational anthropological work of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss can help elucidate the intermediary role the hero plays through his or her risk or sacrifice: “We see what is the distinctive characteristic of consecration in sacrifice: the thing consecrated serves 67. Emerson, “Self-­Reliance,” 140. 68. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 14. 69. Franco, Blau, and Zimbardo, “Heroism,” 101.

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as an intermediary between the sacrifier, or the object which is to receive the practical benefits of the sacrifice, and the divinity to whom the sacrifice is usually addressed.”70 The word divinity should not confuse us here by leading us to assume the personification of an idea that is just the sacrificial and heroic function; where Hubert and Mauss say “divinity,” we must read “ideal” or, even more specifically, “concept.” As Kenneth Burke points out, “Martyrdom creates the creed.”71 Kurt Cobain died for Rock and Roll, Sylvia Plath died for Poetry, Tupac Shakur died for Hip-­Hop, and Martin Luther King Jr. died for Civil Rights, and these sacrifices embody these “divinities” for the communities who venerate them. What Hubert and Mauss help us see is the relation between what they call “the thing consecrated,” the “sacrifier,” and the “divinity,” which might be better understood as the relation between a sacrifice, the collective, and its ideal. The sacrifice mediates between the collective and its ideal: it conjoins even as it differentiates, it consecrates even as it embodies. In The Savage Mind, Claude Levi-­Strauss elaborates this Maussian understanding of sacrifice in a way that reveals its constitutive metaphoric logic— that is, the way that it joins two unlike terms (collective and ideal, here “man and the deity”): In sacrifice, the series of natural species . . . plays the part of an intermediary between two polar terms, the sacrificer and the deity, between which there is initially no homology nor even any sort of relation. For, the object of the sacrifice precisely is to establish a relation, not of resemblance but of contiguity, by means of a series of successive identifications. These can be made in either direction, depending on whether the sacrifice is expiatory or represents a rite of communion: thus, either of the person offering the sacrifice with the sacrificer, of the sacrificer with the victim, of the sacralized victim with the deity; or in the reverse order. This is not all. Once the relation between man and the deity is secured by the sacralization of the victim, the sacrifice breaks it by destroying the same victim. Human action thus brings about an interruption of continuity, and, as it had previously established communication between the human reservoir and the divine reservoir, the latter will automatically fill the gap by discharging the anticipated benefit. The scheme of sacrifice consists in an irreversible operation (the destruction of the victim) with a view to setting off an equally irreversible operation on another plane (the granting of divine grace), which is required by the fact that two “recipients,” situated at different levels, have previously been brought into communication. 70. Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 11. 71. Burke, “War, Response, Contradiction,” 254.

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So sacrifice is an absolute or extreme operation which relates to an intermediary object.72

The hero (or sacrifice) establishes a metaphoric relationship between the human and the idea, between matter and spirit, a relationship at once of unity and separation. The relationship of the hero to each pole is metonymic, in that the hero is joined to either pole by similitude: the hero is human; the hero is ideal. But the relationship the hero-­sacrifice creates is metaphoric, in that the two terms it brings together are unified precisely by their difference: Man and God, the People and the Nation. The Western tradition’s exemplary hero-­ sacrifice of the first relation is, of course, Christ; the exemplary hero-­sacrifice of the second is the citizen soldier. On this point, we might bring together Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as “an imagined political community” and Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political as the distinction between friend and enemy in order to see more clearly the sacrificial logic of political theology at work in modern cultural representations of the soldier.73 Consider Anderson on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier: No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times. . . . Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. (That is why so many different nations have such tombs without feeling any need to specify the nationality of their absent occupants. What else could they be but Germans, Americans, Argentinians . . . ?).74

The tomb of the Unknown Soldier memorializes the sacrifice of the soldier by the people to the idea of the nation. As Dixon Wecter observes, “Stripped of ancestry and name, of rank and calling, of home and friends and creed, the Unknown Soldier became a pure symbol of devotion to country.”75 The sacrificed soldier’s body makes the metaphoric relationship between a collective and its idea of national identity real. We might even go so far as to say that the soldier’s sacrifice creates the nation as such: at the same time as the soldier mediates between a collective and its idea of national identity, the soldier 72. Lévi-­Strauss, Savage Mind, 225. 73. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6; Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 26–37. 74. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 9–10. 75. Wecter, Hero in America, 412.

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defines that identity in his opposition to its counterimage and negation, the enemy. By physically confronting an existential threat of collective negation, the soldier materially and dialectically enacts that collective’s identity. In World War II, the American GI was represented as a tenacious, independent, rough-­ and-­ready fighter dreaming of the comforts of home, who stood heroically opposed to the technological threat of hyperprofessionalized Germans, on the one side, and the menace of swarming Japanese hordes, on the other. At the level of ideology, American democracy defined itself by its individualist opposition to totalitarianism in these two forms, the machine-­man and the bestial horde.76 But as Hook and Bentley worried, the relationship between democracy and heroism is a troubled one. Even more troubled is the relationship between the cultural logic of capitalism and the cultural logic of heroic sacrifice. Hence we come to the essence of the problem of the hero in a time of total mobilization, which is that of reconciling a structuring system of metaphoric exchange mediated by signs (capitalist exchange) with a structuring system of metaphoric exchange mediated by substance (heroic sacrifice). What I mean here will be elaborated on and explained throughout the rest of this chapter. As Kenneth Burke wrote in “War and Cultural Life,” the primary cultural issue facing the United States in World War II was “the need to change from a commercial-­liberal-­monetary nexus of motives to a collective-­sacrificial-­ military nexus of motives.”77 He elaborated on this point in his 1945 book, A Grammar of Motives: For the conditions of a war economy, as for the conditions of warfare itself, we need a collectivistic motive, which will be shared by all except the war profiteers and the empire-­builders of big business. To say as much is to realize the magnitude of the problem. The orthodox philosophy of capitalism involves precisely the opposite kind of dialectic. In the capitalist dialectic, as per Adam Smith, individual aggrandizements are made synonymous with public benefits. . . . In the Adam Smith vision of peace, people would be too busy amassing things to stop and fight over them. And the more they amassed as individuals, the more this would add up as total wealth for the society as a whole. Here there would be neither need nor room for a 76. As Kenneth Burke described the phenomenon in an article published in the American Journal of Sociology while US marines were fighting the Japanese Army on Guadalcanal, “The fascist enemy, by his opposition to democracy as an ideal, called upon us to prize it out of sheer dialectical necessity. Surely this roundabout assistance to the cause of democracy has, to date, been Hitler’s major contribution to culture” (“War and Cultural Life,” 405). 77. Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 404.

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concept of individual sacrifice for the collective good—individual and collectivity being in apposition, not opposition. Yet under a war situation, i.e., under a war motive, you must so alter the dialectic that individual sacrifice equals collective good.78

When the “commercial-­liberal-­monetary nexus of motives” comes into tension with the “collective-­sacrificial-­military nexus of motives,” intense disputes emerge around topics of leadership, authority, the hero, violence, race, gender, and even meaning as such: the opposition between capitalist individualism and wartime collectivism is an opposition between systems of metaphoric relation, between the conceptual structures organizing our cognitive maps of reality—what we might call the supreme fictions by which we make sense of experience. Participating in the Heroic: Wallace Stevens and the Poetry of War In the spring of 1941, at the invitation of Henry Church, Wallace Stevens gave a talk at Princeton University titled “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” dilating elliptically on a succession of mounted figures as metaphors of his main concern, which was the relation between reality and poetry, specifically the pressure put on the poet by the turmoil of a world at war.79 Stevens argued that the news—“news incomparably more pretentious than any description of it, news . . . of the collapse of our system, or call it, of life . . . news of a new world . . . and finally news of war”—destroyed the contemplation necessary for creating the musical and connotative language of poetry.80 Against this turmoil there was only one response: “A possible poet must be a poet capable of resisting or evading the pressure of the reality of this last degree [of violence], with the knowledge that the degree of today may become a deadlier degree tomorrow.”81 78. Burke, Grammar of Motives, 397. Burke was not the only thinker to see this conflict at work. Notably, Hannah Arendt saw the conflict between bourgeois-­capitalist imperialism and democratic nationalism as fundamental to World War II and the rise of totalitarianism (Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, part 2, “Totalitarianism”). 79. Allen Tate suggested Stevens to Church as one of the possible speakers for a series on poetry they were proposing to Dean Christian Gauss at Princeton. Church put the idea to Stevens in December 1940 (Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, 382n5). Also see Brazeau, Parts of a World, 198–99, for accounts of the talk by two Princeton undergraduates, Bernard Heringman and Frederick Morgan. They agree that the talk was staid and muted in its delivery (“It was as if he’d written a paper and read the paper”). 80. Stevens, Necessary Angel, 20. 81. Stevens, Necessary Angel, 27.

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Within two years, though, Stevens had changed his tune. In August 1943, he was invited to Mount Holyoke College to speak as part of a series of philosophical and literary discussions, Les Entretiens de Pontigny, organized by Jacques Maritain, Gustave Cohen, Jean Wahl, and Helen Patch.82 Stevens’s 1943 Pontigny talk at Mount Holyoke, “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” is more lyrical and esoteric than “The Noble Rider,” and while it is just as much concerned with the relationship between reality and poetry, it doesn’t speak of reality’s “pressure” or of the incessant “news,” and there is no more talk of “resistance” or “evasion.” Instead, Stevens pronounces that “it may be said that poetic truth is an agreement with reality.”83 The poet no longer stoically presses back against the “violence without” but “merely enjoys existence.”84 Poetic truth is redefined as “the truth of fact,” and poetry as “the imagination of life.”85 The most persuasive explanations for this change remain Alan Filreis’s and James Longenbach’s painstaking historical readings of Stevens’s wartime poetry. Between 1941 and 1943, as Filreis and Longenbach help us see, Stevens found himself in the middle of intense debates about the role of poetry in wartime, with friends and colleagues on both sides: must poetry address the war, as Kenneth Burke and others argued, or should it remain focused on more autonomous issues of form and poetic tradition? Filreis tracks Stevens’s deliberate maneuverings between nationalist and formalist demands on poetry, his encounters with European émigrés such as Fernand Auborjonois, Jean Paulhan, and Wahl, and his genealogical investigations into his Dutch-­American ancestry as evidence for Stevens’s careful effort to negotiate with the actuality of a world at war which could not be avoided. As Stevens wrote in his 1942 poem “Of Modern Poetry,” “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice . . . has to think about war.”86 Longenbach, in distinction to Filreis, argues that Stevens’s effort was less to accept the reality of war than to respond creatively to it, less “to find what 82. Pontigny-­en-­Amérique, as it was billed, was seen as the continuation-­in-­exile of a tradition of annual meetings of intellectuals that had been held since 1910 in Normandy, France. These Pontigny décades, begun by Paul Desjardins, had included Gide, Valéry, Camus, Sartre, Lytton Strachey, Walter Benjamin, and Edith Wharton, among many others. The 1939 session was interrupted when the Germans invaded Poland, and by 1940 the Wehrmacht were using Pontigny as an arms depot. For this history of Les Entretiens des Pontigny, see Christopher Benfey’s introduction to Benfey and Remmler, Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II, 2–11. Alan Filreis also discusses the event in his Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, 98–115. 83. Stevens, Necessary Angel, 54. 84. Stevens, Necessary Angel, 56. 85. Stevens, Necessary Angel, 62, 65. 86. Stevens, Collected Poems, 240.

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will suffice” than “to construct a new stage,” as “Of Modern Poetry” also asserts. The figure that will come to inhabit this new stage, Longenbach argues, is a Chaplinesque tramp: “The man / In the old coat . . . [and] sagging pantaloons,” as seen in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.87 Longenbach first finds this “image of the supreme fiction” in a moving reading of Stevens’s earlier poem “The Man on the Dump,” and he sees the image as an emblem of what he calls Stevens’s “rehabilitation of the ordinary.”88 While Filreis’s exhaustive archival efforts bring together Stevens and the “actual world” in tremendous detail, there is an inner logic at work in Stevens’s poetry that nevertheless remains obscure in Filreis’s account. And while I am certain that Longenbach is correct that Stevens’s greatest poems dramatize the failure of the Romantic imagination—that, in Longenbach’s words, “we could best appreciate the power of Stevens’s finest work by thinking of its point as the self-­defeat of poetry”—I’m not convinced that the “rehabilitation of the ordinary” is the most fitting description of that defeat, nor that the “man in pantaloons” is an emblematic or even convincing “image of the supreme fiction.”89 According to Stevens’s eponymous poem, the “supreme fiction” must give pleasure, it must be abstract, and it must change, and while the “man in pantaloons” may give pleasure, he is not abstract but figurative, and he does not change. He is an archetype. And while Longenbach’s account does explain that aspect of Stevens’s work wherein “the poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself,” it doesn’t seem to do much to account for the “war between the mind and sky” that Stevens describes in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, or to reckon with Stevens’s obsessive insistence that the “supreme fiction” remain indefinable.90 We might better understand Stevens’s wartime poetry and his turn from “resistance” to “agreement” by reading them in the terms by which he himself framed them—in terms, that is, of a conflict between reality and the imagination. Let us consider the stakes as Stevens set them out in his well-­known prose statement on the poetry of war, from 1942: The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war as a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, 87. Stevens, Collected Poems, 389. 88. Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: Plain Sense, 261, 271. 89. Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: Plain Sense, 265. 90. Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 164; Stevens, Collected Poems, 407.

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but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one’s thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic.91

The first thing to note here (besides the Platonic language in the idea of “participation”) is that Stevens formulates the problem that war poses poetry not as an opposition between poetry and reality but as an opposition between two kinds of poetry, two kinds of making meaning. In one, the ruling force is imagination, by which he means what he calls in one poem “the exhilarations of changes”—the free play of metaphoric substitution homologous to and mimetic of capitalist exchange. Stevens wrote in his Adagias (sometime in the early 1940s) that “money is a kind of poetry,” and we might read this as an insight into how both money and poetry function as open metaphoric relations within an economy of free-­floating symbolic mediation, formalized by Marx in the commodity exchange relationship C=M=C, where C is any commodity or thing and M is the mediating signifier, whether it be money, an empty jar in Tennessee, or an “obscure moon lighting an obscure world.”92 You trade your labor for money, which you use to buy food; homologously, as Stevens writes in “Loneliness in Jersey City,” “the deer and the dachshund are one” through the mediation of poetry, just as the empty jar in Tennessee “made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill” upon which it was placed.93 By contrast, the poetry of war is the poetry of fact, “of heroic fact,” as Stevens writes, “of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one’s thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic.” Stevens seems to be claiming here that the poetry of war is a way of making meaning out of human action that compels collective identification with that action. Stevens feels this compulsion as something that threatens to overwhelm the free play of metaphor, as “consciousness” threatens to take “the place of the imagination.” The structuring logic of metaphoric relation mediated by signs, which Stevens called “the poetry of the work of the imagination,” is opposed by a structuring logic of metaphoric relation mediated by substance, a kind of consciousness that constitutes “a participating in the heroic,” which Stevens called “the poetry of war.” The mediating substance in the latter system of metaphoric relation is the “heroic fact” of the soldier’s body, and what it mediates is the relationship between a group of people and their concept of themselves as a collective—that is, the imagined community of the nation. 91. Stevens, Parts of a World, 183. 92. Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 165. 93. Stevens, Collected Poems, 210, 76

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Recalling that the hero as sacrifice realizes (makes real) a metaphoric relation between the human and the idea, a relationship at once of unity and separation, we might formalize that relation (à la Marx) in the relationship C  =M=C  , where C  is the collective, M is the mediating sacrificial body, 1 2  1 and C is the collective’s concept or ideal of itself. In this case, C  , a bunch 2 1  of people, become C  , a nation, through the mediation of M, the hero. As 2  pointed out before, the relationship of the hero to each pole is metonymic, in that the hero is joined to either by similitude: the hero is one of the people; the hero embodies the nation. But the relationship the sacrifice creates is metaphoric, in that the two polar terms it brings together are unified in their difference: a church is and is not God, a people are and are not the nation. The sacrificial soldier realizes—makes real—the metaphoric relation between a collective and its idea of national identity.94 This is what Stevens intuited in his notion of “heroic fact . . . on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one’s thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic.” The conflict between these two structuring logics of metaphoric relation, one mediated by signs, one mediated by substance, the very reason why Stevens is afraid that the “poetry of imagination” will be overwhelmed by “consciousness of fact,” emerges because in the first relation the terms are interchangeable, free-­floating, and thus amenable to autonomous manipulation by the poet, but not in the second. In the first relation, anything can serve as a mediating sign, and anything can be exchanged for anything else. We might think of this logic as horizontal, chronological, and open to infinitely variable repetition. The second relation is only meaningful if the terms are particular, and, what’s more, as we saw in the discussion of heroism, they must be socially valid. A particular sacrifice must be made for a particular group to a particular concept. We might think of this logic as vertical, kairotic, and open to repetition only in a strictly formal sense, as ritual. Thus sacrifice threatens free exchange with ideological, morphological, and temporal fixity, 94. As Walker Connor defines the term in Ethnonationalism, the idea of a nation “connotes a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related. Nationalism connotes identification with and loyalty to one’s nation as just defined. It does not refer to loyalty to one’s country” (xi). This ancestral relation can be established through intermarriage or through collective sacrifice, but it must be a relation established in blood, or at least a narrative of blood. As Connor notes, “With but very few exceptions, authorities have shied away from describing the nation as a kinship group and have usually explicitly denied that the notion of shared blood is a factor. Such denials are supported by data illustrating that most groups claiming nationhood do in fact incorporate several genetic strains. But, as earlier noted, such an approach ignores the wisdom of the old saw that when analyzing sociopolitical situations, what ultimately matters is not what is but what people believe is. And a subconscious belief in the group’s separate origin and evolution is an important ingredient of national psychology” (Connor, Ethnonationalism, 93).

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or as Stevens writes in “The Motive for Metaphor” (1942), with “the hammer / Of red and blue, the hard sound—/ Steel against intimation—the sharp flash, / The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.”95 This poem, in which Stevens opposes the poetic imagination as he sees it against the brutality of collective union forged through wartime propaganda, might be read as a response to Kenneth Burke, who had himself been invited to give a talk at Princeton in 1942 and who argued (against any kind of Stevensian “resistance”) that art ought to be politically and polemically committed to articulating an internationalist ideal.96 As Burke wrote in “War and Cultural Life,” “The need to think of global war and of its counterpart, global peace, invites us to seek also a truly global attitude toward all mankind.”97 While Stevens’s internationalist disposition is manifest and well documented, it remained throughout his life in tension with an isolation not so much political as constitutional: Stevens never traveled to Europe, Asia, or Africa; his rich network of international contacts was constructed almost entirely through correspondence; and his reluctance to meet correspondents in person bordered at times on the pathological. Even if Stevens’s imagination favored the exotic and the distant, he retained a stubborn resistance to submitting that imagination to the “vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X” of the “actual world.” As Lee Jenkins puts it, “Stevens may have been attracted, intellectually, to relativism and the provisional, but temperamentally he was drawn to unity, to closure, to the sealed world of the poem where the poet himself calls all the shots.”98 That sealed, narcissistic world could only be sustained through constant resistance. As Stevens asserted in his prose statement on the poetry of war, “The poetry of the work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace.”99 Malcolm Woodland suggests that Stevens’s struggle to separate self and world was perhaps his defining agon: the “‘within/without’ figuration itself is crucial,” he writes, and it is through this figuration that we might be able to begin to understand both what Stevens meant by his enigmatic “supreme fiction” and the great threat posed to that idea by the demands of American wartime nationalism.100 In the final canto of the last section of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, Stevens recapitulates the apostrophic mode of the prelude, 95. Stevens, Collected Poems, 288. 96. Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, 85–86. 97. Burke, “War and Cultural Life,” 409. 98. Jenkins, Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order, 54. 99. Stevens, Parts of a World, 183. 100. Woodland, Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode, 38.

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this time not to an unnamed “you” but to the world at large, addressed as “fat girl.” The subtle transformations and movements of this final canto have been much commented on, and indeed the delicate shifts from stasis to movement and back are well worth attending to. But what seems most important about this canto as the culminating and definitive moment of Notes is that it pre­ sents a clear separation between the speaking “I” and the mute addressee. The fact that this relationship is gendered and embodied is important, but not as important as the fact that it is impermeable: the “I” and “you” are distinct, separate, paired but unjoined. There is no “we.” As the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger put it in The Philosophy of “As If ” (1924), “The division of the world into Things-­in-­themselves=Objects and Things-­in-­themselves=Subjects is the primary fiction upon which all others depend,” and this “primary fiction” of a distinct phenomenological or even ontological division between subjects and objects can be seen as the primary structuring principle of Stevens’s poiesis from Harmonium to “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” a principle deeply threatened in the early years of the 1940s by the collectivist demands of nationalist war culture.101 The existential confrontation of war welds an assembly of persons into a “Nation” through the heroic sacrifice of the soldier, blurring the boundaries between subjects and objects, within and without, creating an “I that is We and a We that is I.” America’s wartime nationalist communion, “the hammer / Of red and blue, the hard sound—/ Steel against intimation—,” provoked a deep anxiety in Stevens evident in his letters, in his wartime poetry, and in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” It was in defensive reaction against this merging of subject and object, against the threatened dissolution of individual lives into national sovereignty, and against the wartime interpellation of the state, that Stevens erected his mightiest fortress of solitude, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. Admittedly, according to Milton Bates, “there is no evidence that Stevens ever read the German philosopher [Vaihinger] or even heard of him,” yet a handful of Stevens’s readers (including Frank Doggett and Frank Kermode) have found “striking affinities” between Stevens’s poetry and Vaihinger’s Kantian philosophy.102 Longenbach sees an affinity there too, but like Bates, he locates it in a broad sense of willful fictionality, a kind of “will to believe,” as Stevens put it in this aphorism: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is 101. Vaihinger, Philosophy of “As If,” 77. 102. Bates, Wallace Stevens: Mythology of Self, 202. See also Kermode, Wallace Stevens; and Doggett, Stevens’ Poetry of Thought, especially chapter 6, “This Invented World,” 98–119.

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to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”103 This kind of Jamesian pragmatism is certainly a strong candidate for the meaning behind Stevens’s “Supreme Fiction,” but I’m inclined to think that rather than the “Supreme Fiction” itself, such pragmatism is a condition for it, and Stevens said as much in a letter to Gilbert Montague: “Underlying [Notes] is the idea that, in the various predicaments of belief, it might be possible to yield, or to try to yield, ourselves to a declared fiction.”104 Even more illuminating is a later letter to Henry Church where Stevens asserts, “The chief defect of humanism is that it concerns human beings. Between humanism and something else, it might be possible to create an acceptable fiction.”105 “Between humanism and something else” is vague twice over, but that the effort would be toward creating something somewhere in between, between humanism and whatever else, perhaps most emphatically between “human beings,” resonates with Stevens’s strenuous efforts to maintain the primary fiction of an autonomous self. There is something unusual about Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, however, that makes it a misleading poem through which to attempt to understand Stevens’s poetic response to World War II. What’s misleading about it is the fact that even though Stevens offered the long poem as the ultimate development of his thinking about the war when it was published in 1947 as the final poem in Transport to Summer, that placement is misleading. Rather, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, which was first published as a stand-­alone volume in 1942, should be seen as a transitional early moment in Stevens’s complicated negotiation between the poetry of war and the poetry of the work of the imagination. Notes, that is, is not the decisive engagement in Stevens’s “war between the mind and sky,” but a preliminary attempt surpassed by later reverses. Taking Notes as an act of resistance when first published in 1942, we can read Stevens’s republishing the poem at the end of Transports to Summer in 1947 as an insistence that his resistance never flagged. Yet between those two dates came a battered recognition of sovereign reality, a submission to the dominant metaphor of the day, and an acceptance of world war. We can see this acceptance and submission in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” delivered at Mount Holyoke, but we can also see it in several of the poems collected in Transport to Summer written between 1942 and 1947. Whether or not anyone will ever be able to say definitively what Stevens meant by “Supreme Fiction,” and even if Stevens tried to remotivate its resistances after the war 103. Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: Plain Sense, 287; Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 163. 104. Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, 478. 105. Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, 484.

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was over, we can see manifest in Stevens’s wartime poems an acute understanding of the demands made on citizens’ consciousness by total mobilization. He perceived clearly that “the sign of the times”—the socially dominant metaphoric relation—was the hero’s sacrifice, and that this sacrifice was an enactment or creation of a social fact, the physical embodiment of national identity. In war, the nation-­state calls on every “I” to become a “we.” Under total mobilization, even poets are enlisted to participate in the heroic.106 We can see Stevens give in to this call in his 1944 poem “Repetitions of a Young Captain,” in which he renounces his protected solitude in submission to the demand for national unity. “Repetitions” documents Stevens’s brief embrace of Whitmanian permeability and collective identity, when for at least the length of one poem Stevens identifies himself directly with a nation at war. This paean to civic nationalism is so formally recondite that it should rebuff any charges of being mere propaganda, yet it is as much a nationalist lyric as Stevens would ever write. The poem begins dramatically, with an image of clouds and lightning over a stage: “A tempest cracked on the theatre.” Placing “tempest” so close to “theatre” strongly suggests Shakespeare, the Globe, and the idea of the world-­as-­ a-­stage, calling up Shakespeare’s meditation on theatricality in The Tempest and the renunciation of theatricality dramatized by Prospero cracking his staff. “Tempest” invokes war, as does “theatre,” while “theatre” also alludes to Stevens’s earlier poem, “Of Modern Poetry,” where “the theatre was changed,” and “the poem of the mind” had “to think about war” and “construct a new stage.”107 Within this miniature proscenium of six words, Stevens’s characteristic dialectic of “mind and sky” erupts with violence, on the one side the Shakespearean theater, on the other the theater of war, and between them the illusionist glamour constitutive of the theatrical act, invoked by way of its most resonant emblem of abdication.108 This portentous image of theatrical ruin opens into its later recollec106. As Rachel Galvin notes, “Parts of a World is a book of war poems in which the poetic speaker reflects throughout on the difficulty of articulation and the role of rhetoric in a time of war. This is true not just of the much-­studied ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’ and its accompanying prose statement that concludes the book, or even of the apparently hermetic poems such as ‘Martial Credenza,’ but also nearly every other poem in the collection” (Galvin, News of War, 166). 107. Noted by Jarraway, Wallace Stevens and Question of Belief, 220; and Woodland, Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode, 65. 108. Filreis, in his extremely helpful historical contextualization of this poem, suggests persuasively that the image opening the poem emerged for Stevens out of conversations he’d had with the young Captain Fernand Auborjonois, who used to stand on a balcony watching German and Italian bombers strike Algiers. Yet while Filreis’s elucidation of Auborjonois’s importance as

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tion in a series of repetitions and revisions that trouble our senses of place, speaker, and time.109 The quick shifts in temporality and situation, from “It had been real” to “It was not now,” from “It was something overseas / That I remembered” to “something that I remembered / Overseas,” create a sense of building intensity, an abstract vibration of memory that ends with a powerful transformation: “The rip / Of the wind and the glittering were real now, / In the spectacle of a new reality.” These lines suggest that it is the destruction that was real, rather than the thing destroyed, positing an ontological primacy to force over substance: the ruin had been real, but was not now—only the tempest’s wind and glittering “were real now,” in the synthesis of spectacular reality. The first two stanzas of the second canto repeat the theatrical image, but in a grotesque dumb show of passive observers, a “glibly gapering” actor, and his partner, a “faintly encrusted . . . tissue of the moon.”110 The next two stanzas develop this masque into metaphorical description of actorly craft: “They polished the embracings of a pair / Born old, familiar with the depths of the heart, / Like a machine left running, and running down.” These actors working their art, “polishing embracings,” and sliding entropically into decrepitude, form an allegory of the poet and his muse depicting the poetic act of creation as merely a kind of stagecraft, the mechanical repetition of a well-­ polished illusion. The renunciation suggested in the first stanza by allusion to Prospero’s broken staff is replayed here as a fatalistic domestication ending in oblivion. The final stanza of section 2 completes this elegiac turn: “It was a blue scene washing white in the rain, / Like something I remembered overseas. / It was something overseas that I remembered.” A “blue” scene, faintly suggesting a source of inspiration for the poem is important, it is not definitive, and the opening image of the poem is not “otherwise inexplicable” (Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, 29–36. 109. Filreis reads this section as a trope of traumatic memory (Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, 32–33), while Longenbach sees it as portraying the inability of civilians to comprehend the reality of war (Wallace Stevens: Plain Sense, 232). The poem has not received much attention from readers, and what attention it has received seems perplexed. Filreis and Longenbach differ substantially in their readings, and while Woodland’s reading (in Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode) builds on Jarraway’s (in Wallace Stevens and Question of Belief ), it also diverges from it. Of them all, Filreis and Woodland are most helpful, though Woodland relies on a somewhat clunky gender binary as his interpretive lens, and Filreis stakes everything on Auborjonois. Frank Kermode noted unhelpfully that the poem is “on the whole less successful” than “Chocorua,” “though its conclusion has some of the passion of Notes” (Wallace Stevens, 102). 110. We might attend to the actor’s “thick shape,” recalling Stevens’s own massive physicality, and the way that “His hands became his feelings,” i.e., through pen and paper and poetry— a figure not only of performance but of writing.

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erotic nostalgia, “washing white,” fading over time, “like something I remembered overseas”—or something overseas that I remembered. Stevens’s reprise of the initial syntactical inversion creates a melancholy consonance, and the setting of the first formulation in its own sentence, in its own line, gives it a sententiousness effecting strong closure, tinged with sexual loss. The sense of loss is compounded in the third canto, which opens with a scene of battle that puts the theatrical ruin of the first in diminishing perspective: “Millions of major men against their like / Make more than thunder’s rural rumbling. They make / The giants that each one of them becomes . . .” Against the previous allegorization of poetic production as mechanical stagecraft “left running, and running down,” the soldier enacts a collective identity that seems to be at first no more than pointless, sweaty vigor, merely “a giant sense / To the make-­matter, matter-­nothing mind,” until through conflict that action takes shape as a fact. The hero has an existence “beyond / The finikin spectres in the memory,” and through his metaphoric “elevation” achieves a more substantial reality. The final lines of the third canto, like its opening, contrast the poet’s position with the soldier’s, finding a similitude that disavows the difference insisted on in the prose statement on the poetry of war and suggesting an ambiguous relationship between soldier and poet-­narrator, in which the poet-­narrator is left wanting: “My route lies through an image in my mind, / It is the route that milky millions find, / An image that leaves nothing much behind.” The fourth canto sheds the “as if ” of the supreme fiction through its recognition “of the clear sovereign that is reality, / Of the clearest reality that is sovereign.” The rhetorical question (“If these were only words . . . how should I repeat them . . .”) framing the poet-­narrator’s submission to “sovereign reality” obscures his admissions of desperation and fear and his anxious recognition of the sanctity of the soldier’s sacrifice (“the adobe [sic] of angels,” the substance of spirit—see the next section for more discussion of Stevens’s interest in what he called “the predicate of substance”). For Stevens to sound the “heraldic-­ho” of sovereign reality is a step beyond the agreement between poetry and reality articulated in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” two steps beyond the parallelisms of soldier and poet in the coda to Notes, and a complete disavowal of the resistance offered in “The Noble Rider.” And what has brought about this change? The remainder of the canto suggests the answer. First, the “constant” sacrifice of the unknown soldier, who leaves “as he is, / Yet in that form will not return.” The question “But does / He find another?” asks pointedly what this sacrifice might mean, and Stevens finds the reason for his “heraldic-­ho” in the answer—not a supreme fiction,

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but the imagined community of the nation: “If, as giant, / He shares a gigantic life, it is because / The gigantic has a reality of its own.” The diminutions and recognitions of the poet-­narrator in the previous cantos come to a summation in the fifth, the poem’s longest. Here the dualities and contrasts structuring the previous four cantos fall away, giving rise to a series of appositive, anaphoric, deictic fragments, circling around “a few words”; “there it is.” What is “it”? “It” is the “memorandum voluble / Of the giant sense,” the “memorandum of the people sprung / From that strength, whose armies set their own expanses,” the “gigantic” that “has a reality of its own”—the American people as an American nation. “It” is “Millions of instances of which I am one”: the old, the roseate parent, the bride, the ensigns of the self, the drivers in the wind-­blows, the men pulling into the sky, the slow-­foot litter bearers, the soldier constantly stepping away, the complete society of the spirit when it is alone, without a word of rhetoric. In this moment, Stevens’s poet-­narrator has not only agreed with reality, but has identified himself with it. While the final canto begins with a typically Stevensian tweak, turning the invidious contrast between the private imaginarium and gigantic wartime reality into a question of whether or not they might both be merely theater, “theatre for theatre, / the powdered personals against the giants’ rage,” the poem of the mind seems to have found what will suffice, at least temporarily, and “the choice is made.” The “blue” of the stage and the moon merges with the “gold-­whipped reddened in big-­shadowed black” of primary noon to reveal an orator in “tufted green.” Her vague “Secrete me from reality” merges with “That reality secrete itself ” to become “Secrete us in reality” (my italics). The strictly separate you and I of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’s merge here, two years later, into an us, and the poem ends with a desideratum of vulnerable yet stoic collective responsibility, a call to poetry that fully faces the “pressure of reality” without evasion, resistance, or “mere rhetoric”: Discover A civil nakedness in which to be, In which to bear with the exactest force The precisions of fate, nothing fobbed off, nor changed In a beau language without a drop of blood.

This is a remarkable attempt at reckoning with an unacceptable reality, and if it ends ambiguously, like most of Stevens’s poems, it nonetheless offers a clear lyric dramatization of not only a process but an event, a turning point, a decision.

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Stevens’s next and last major war poem, “Esthéthique du Mal,” inhabits this same general stance of complex heteronomy, maintaining both the sympathetic Whitmanian pluralism of “Repetitions” and its disposition to engage the “consciousness of fact,” but once the war passes, Stevens’s work resolves back into its prewar hermeticism, in which the closest possible engagement with reality is to see or hear clearly. At the perilous penultimate moment of Stevens’s resistance to “national reality,” he peeked into the abyss: it really could all just be “theatre for theatre.” Instead he chose “reality”—“us” (a nation at war)—whatever that meant, whatever the cost, and it is clear from the last stanzas of “Repetitions” that he knew it meant not only a recognition of his connection to the rest of humanity but a Prospero-­like renunciation of autonomous creative power, since it meant submitting poetic freedom to the “vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X” of nationalist sacrifice. The Reality of the Modern State: The Thin Red Line On August 7, 1942, the same day that the US First Marine Division began its initial assault on the Japanese-­held island of Guadalcanal, Wallace Stevens visited a Reformed Protestant Dutch church in Kingston, New York. In that church, he spoke with a man he described as a “pleasant janitor with a red nose,” who gave Stevens a pamphlet about the Kingston church containing an article written by a local justice, one Judge Gilbert Hasbrouck.111 The article began, “Indeed, when Spinoza’s great logic went searching for God it found Him in a predicate of substance.” Stevens found this interesting enough to remark on: “The material thing: the predicate of substance in this case, was this church: the very building. Now, if a lawyer as eminent as Judge Hasbrouck went to church because it made possible for him to touch, to see, etc., the very predicate of substance, do you think he was anything except a poet?” As we’ve just seen, ontology was an urgent concern. While Stevens had always been a philosophical poet, the global war brought into American life by the Japanese Navy’s attack on Hawaii on December 7, 1941, and being waged across the world while Stevens pondered Spinoza in Kingston moved him to more acute meditation on the relationship between that-­which-­is, substance, and that which is said about that-­which-­is or exists in it, the predicate of substance, and to ask what this relationship has to do with poetry and war. In the modern understanding of war, accidental qualities—that a soldier happens to be American—are reinterpreted as essential and substantial through the act of bodily sacrifice: this soldier is a dead American. In modern wartime 111. Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, 449.

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death, the predicate national identity—“American,” “Japanese,” “German,” or “Russian”—participates in the substance of the body that is sacrificed to it. The idea behind the identity, the concept being consecrated in death, takes on the reality of the human bodies which it in turn consecrates. Over the winter of 1942–43, while Wallace Stevens pondered the “predicate of substance” and explored the hero function in his poetry, US Army Corporal James R. Jones saw the same ontological problem play out in conflicting and confusing ways across the hills and jungles of Guadalcanal, where he was fighting with the Twenty-­Fifth Infantry Division against tenacious Japanese defense. Twenty years later, Jones fictionalized and reflected on his experience, in the 1962 combat novel The Thin Red Line. The road Jones took from Guadalcanal to The Thin Red Line was a long one. A peacetime enlistee who joined the army to escape poverty in Illinois, he deployed in December 1942 to Guadalcanal from Hawaii with F Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-­Seventh Infantry Regiment, Twenty-­Fifth Infantry Division. Jones saw combat, likely killed at least two Japanese soldiers, and was wounded.112 Later, in March 1943, after the fighting on Guadalcanal was over, Jones was sent to an aid station for a twisted ankle, and his ankle turned out to be so badly hurt that he was sent to New Hebrides for surgery, then to New Zealand, San Francisco, and finally Memphis, Tennessee, for recovery. After some trouble, Jones was honorably discharged in 1944, and he returned to his hometown of Robinson, Illinois, where, following a tumultuous readjustment, he wrote his first novel, They Shall Inherit the Laughter. In 1945, Jones moved to New York City to attend New York University. While there, he submitted the manuscript of They Shall Inherit the Laughter to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s; Perkins passed on publishing it but encouraged Jones to develop another idea he’d had for a novel about the peacetime army, which eventually became From Here to Eternity (1951).113 From Here to Eternity was a tremendous commercial success, but while critics spoke almost unanimously of the book’s narrative force, many also found the writing clumsy, repetitive, and puerile. That didn’t keep Hollywood from turning it into a film that went on to win eight Academy Awards, deliver up iconic images shaping collective memory of the war (Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr embracing in the surf at Halona Cove, for one), and make Corporal Jones rich and famous. Jones’s second novel, Some Came Running (1957), a 1,266-­page homecoming story about a veteran and writer named David Hirsh, was universally panned. Critics found the novel tedious and in112. See Blaskiewicz, “James Jones on Guadalcanal,” for a painstaking account of Private Jones’s experience on Guadalcanal that corrects some earlier misconceptions. 113. On biographical data, I am generally indebted to Frank MacShane’s Into Eternity.

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coherent, even unreadable, especially because of the deliberately idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and syntax Jones had adopted in the attempt to convey realistic speech and stream-­of-­consciousness thought. The book sold well nevertheless, and Vincente Minelli made a superb and critically lauded movie out of it in 1958, starring Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine. Early on in Some Came Running, David Hirsh has an idea for a combat novel: His combat novel was to be a comic novel. A comedy. The writers after the last war had all written and written and written about the horrible horrible horrors of war until it had become a literary tradition. But nobody had ever thought of writing a comic combat novel. And really, if you could divorce yourself from imagining it was you, there was nothing funnier in the world than the way a man whos been shot tumbles loosely and falls down. Unless its watching someone slip on a banana peel and break their arm. Besides, he knew why the old ones had written like they did. They pretended that horror stuff. It was not because they especially hated war or felt sorry for the men and animals who got killed. And it was not particularly because of fear, either, everybody was afraid when he was being shot at. The comical thing was how unafraid it made you to do the shooting. No, they had written like they did because their egos could not support this hated indignity of personal death, any kind of death, which they feared they might have to suffer and were so vain they could not stand the thought of. That, and also because they were hungry starved for sympathy. He knew, because he had felt that way himself. But your typical Infantryman’s vanity took quite another form. He had got a glimpse of that, too, when he killed his first three Germans and felt so pleased and powerful and Godlike. Once youd killed a couple war wasnt nearly so horrible. He wanted to write a pleased delighted comical novel about killing and combat and bust up their old monopoly why should they have a monopoly on war? and at the same time force the human race for once to take an unvarnished unsugarcoated look at itself for a change. That was to be the theme of his combat novel, and its purpose, and the reason he wanted to do it was because he was as vain as they were, and because maliciously he would love it if he could just once make the human race for once look at itself.114

What we see in this riff from Some Came Running is James Jones trying to solve the riddle of the hero in much the same way that Ellison finally did in Invisible Man, by finding a novelistic structure which could contain the contradictions at work in American culture under total mobilization. While for Ellison the dominant contradiction was between the nationalist demands for wartime sacrifice and the racial caste system that refused to see black lives as 114. James Jones, Some Came Running, 145.

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meaningful, for Jones the dominant contradiction was between a liberal ideology that emphasized individual suffering (Hemingway is Jones’s main target here) and the sense of agency that participating in state violence offered, the way that killing on behalf of the nation made you feel “so pleased and powerful and Godlike.” The Thin Red Line both is and is not the comic war novel Hirsh had imagined. Jones’s 1962 combat novel does have moments of dark humor, and it does attend closely to emotions and affects considered base, undignified, or immoral (at the time), such as jealousy, envy, bloodlust, rage, fear, arrogance, abjection, homoerotic desire, and vanity, but if it were necessary to map Jones’s novel onto classical genres, the form it resembles more than any other is the epic: in its unity of space and time, its roster of static characters, its repetitions and transformations, The Thin Red Line rather resembles Homer’s Iliad. More important, Jones’s carefully drawn portraits of the men of C-­for-­ Charlie Company aren’t drawn with the flattening or distortion that we would need to recognize them as comic figures. In fact, while no character in the novel is drawn without flaws, nearly all of them are portrayed sympathetically, and even the meanest men in Charlie Company, such as Private Doll and Charlie Dale, have moments in which they are presented in the dignity of their own voice and their own self-­understanding. This representational pluralism or polyphony is one of Jones’s most striking achievements, and it brings us to the novel’s central concern, which is the life of a collective: how a collective persists in its organic unity even as it changes through the disparate and divergent actions of its individual constituents. Jones told his editor Burroughs Mitchell that he conceived of the novel as “the story of an infantry company followed through its initial combat (Guadalcanal) and its changes and reactions, and how it is different afterwards.”115 Although many of the characters have richly suggested interior lives and strong narratives of their own experience, there is no central or unifying figure, no individual protagonist, to pull them together or put them into symbolic order.116 Indeed, when a friend of Jones’s commented that one of the soldiers, Fife, was “emerging as a fine major character,” Jones changed the novel to give a key scene to another, less important character, Bead.117 The narrative lingers with assorted rebels, martinets, despots, lovers, and heroes, but not one of them occupies center stage for long. Jones’s authorial voice in the novel is cold, clean, measured, and ironic, moving in a register pitched somewhere be115. James Jones, To Reach Eternity, 265. 116. This is in marked contrast to Terrence Malick’s 1998 film version, which centers on the character of Witt. 117. James Jones, To Reach Eternity, 288.

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tween Stendhal and Gustave Flaubert (both of whom Jones admired greatly). The point of view is Flaubertian as well: written in a psychologically sophisticated free indirect discourse, The Thin Red Line takes us not only into various characters’ conscious thoughts but into their percepts, affects, and judgments. The novel’s complex perspectivism is highlighted by its framing: the novel begins with an ironic dedication “to those greatest and most heroic of all human endeavors, war and warfare,” and concludes with a disavowal of authorial truth, “Ahead of them the big LCIs waited to take them aboard, and slowly they began to file into them to be taken out to climb the cargo nets up into the big ships. One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way.”118 Given the novel’s polyphony, its fragmentary and epic narrative structure, and the cool irony of its narrative voice, we ought best to look for its center of meaning not in any single point but in the relation of its parts, for it was in this relation that Jones was able to resolve the contradictions between victimhood and agency, between subjective and objective being, that bedeviled David Hirsch in Some Came Running. C-­for-­Charlie exists as an assembly of men, a concatenation of disparate individualities, but it also exists as a single organism, a giant that “has a reality of its own.” But how might one represent the life of such a collective and show “its changes and reactions, and how it is different afterwards”? Can it even be done? Fredric Jameson, for one, argues that it cannot: “Group, nation, clan, class, general will, multitude—all these remain so many linguistic experiments for designating an impossible collective totality, a manifold of consciousnesses as unimaginable as it is real. War is one among such collective realities which exceed representation fully as much as they do conceptualization, and yet which ceaselessly tempt and exasperate narrative ambitions, conventional and experimental alike.”119 Perhaps this is correct, and the task Jones set himself was beyond that of even the most “Proustian” writer. Or it may be that Jameson’s point here is a bit too broad to be all that helpful, and we need to be more specific about what we mean when we talk about representations of collective reality. James Jones’s novel, written with the deliberate intention of representing collective life in action, offers a perfect case study for thinking through this problem. We might begin by reflecting on our analysis of the hero as the concrete mediation between a collective and its idea of itself, and by asking what the role of the “hero” in Jones’s novel is. Can a collective be a “hero”? How would that even be possible? 118. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 510. 119. Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, 257.

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One way into these questions is through considering the novel’s representations of leadership, especially (to adapt Wallace Stevens’s phrase) its “repetitions of a captain.” Leadership is a key theme in The Thin Red Line, addressed not only through attention to specific leaders in moments of crisis but also through showing how different men move through different leadership roles. Many of the men who begin as privates are promoted to corporal or sergeant to replace men killed or wounded in battle, and C-­for-­Charlie Company itself has four different commanders over the course of the novel. (In addition, three other leaders feature prominently: Lieutenant Colonel Tall, the battalion commander; Captain Gaff, who leads an assault team on a strongpoint and is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor; and First Sergeant Welsh.) C-­for-­Charlie’s first commander, Captain “Bugger” Stein, leads the unit through the first two-­thirds of the novel, from its arrival at Guadalcanal through its first two major battles, an assault on a Japanese-­held hill called “The Dancing Elephant,” and a reconnaissance-­in-­force through the jungle into the Japanese rear area. Stein is relieved by Colonel Tall following the second battle, despite C-­for-­Charlie’s success in both actions, because Stein had refused Tall’s order the day before to send his men in a direct attack against a Japanese position. “I think you’re too soft,” Tall tells him. “Too soft-­ hearted. Not tough-­fibered enough. I think you let your emotions govern you too much. I think your emotions control you.”120 The issue, in fact, is less about whether Stein has the capacity to give difficult orders and more about whether Stein understands and accepts his structural role as a leader in a collective. In the initial attack, Stein orders two platoons to “locate and eliminate the hidden strong points on . . . two grassy ridges.”121 Everything seems to go wrong almost immediately, as several men are killed and the two platoons are caught under heavy fire. Stein, down the hill from the attack, has no idea what happened or how, and, when Colonel Tall reaches him via field phone, Stein is certain he is going to be reprimanded. When Tall compliments Stein, telling him that he pulled off the “best sacrificial commitment to develop a hidden position I have ever seen outside maneuvers,” Stein is bewildered.122 Later in the attack, after another platoon has been sent in, Stein and Tall have another conversation by field phone that devolves into mutual incomprehension, with Tall berating Stein and Stein responding in weak confusion. “What do you want me to do?” Stein asks. Tall barks back, “Get cracking, boy! Get cracking!” As Stein turns from his field phone to consider himself as Colonel Tall and 120. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 336. 121. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 189. 122. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 200.

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his staff see him from their commanding view on Hill 207, he has a “horrifying vision” of what Wallace Stevens meant by “heroic fact”: Stein had a sudden and unholy, heartfreezing picture, which transfixed him for a moment, bulge-­eyed, of an identical recurrence up there now of the scene he himself had witnessed on Hill 207 two days ago. The same harassed, apprehensive Battalion Colonel with field glasses; the same diffident, but equally apprehensive little knot of eagles and stars peering over his spiritual shoulder; the same massed mob of pawns and minor pieces craning to see like a stadium crowd; all were up there right now, going through the identical gyrations their identical counterparts had gone through two days ago. While down below were the same blood-­sweating Captains and their troops going through theirs. Only this time he himself, he Jim Stein, was one of them, one of the committed ones. The committed ones going through their exaggerated pretenses of invoking the cool calm logic and laws of the science of tactics. And tomorrow it would be someone else. It was a horrifying vision: all of them doing the same identical thing, all of them powerless to stop it, all of them devoutly and proudly believing themselves to be free individuals. It expanded to include the scores of nations, the millions of men, doing the same on thousands of hilltops across the world. And it didn’t stop there. It went on. It was the concept—concept? The fact; the reality—of the modern State.123

Here we find dramatized the philosophical-­poetic problem Stevens explored in “Repetitions of a Young Captain.” Recall: Millions of major men against their like Make more than a thunder’s rural rumbling. They make The giants that each one of them becomes In a calculated chaos: he that takes form From the others, being larger than he was, Accoutred in a little of the strength That sweats the sun up on its morning way To giant red, sweats up a giant sense To the make-­matter, matter-­nothing mind, Until this matter-­makes in years of war.124

Here Stevens is directly thinking through the ontology of the political, as “a giant sense” is made matter, or substance, as what he calls in another section of the poem “this being in a reality beyond / The finikin spectres of memory” is created by young “blood-­sweating Captains.” Stevens’s lyrical meditation on this subject is as troubled as Captain Stein’s is horrified. 123. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 222–23. 124. Stevens, Collected Poems, 307.

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Both Wallace Stevens and James Jones are deeply concerned with what it means to “participate in the heroic,” which for Stevens is a problem of how the soldier and poet each relate to what he sometimes calls reality and sometimes calls the “gigantic,” and for Jones is a problem on the one hand of the relation between the individual and the collective, and on the other of agency and free will. Just as Stevens sees Leviathan-­like giants arising out of sweaty multitudes and the conceptual reality of “make-­matter, matter-­nothing mind,” Stein’s thought abstracts the repetitions before him out from a particular moment to the ontology of the political as such: “It was the concept—concept? The fact; the reality—of the modern State.” Stein’s swift shift from concept to reality, the dialectical collapse of the two into a question and answer caught in a parenthetical interjection struggling to sum up and define the scene of what Stevens described as “millions of major men against their like,” the move from concept to discrete fact then to totalized reality, reinscribes the metaphoric relation of the soldier’s sacrifice as a scene of industrial horror. The concept realized and consecrated in all this mechanical butchery is nothing less than the modern state: here, the imagined community of the United States of America. But this horrified revelation offers no enlightenment or transcendence. Stein must plunge ahead to the bitter end. As the attack wears on, he grows increasingly exhausted and strained until finally he refuses to obey Tall’s order “to attack, and attack now, with every available man at your disposal!” Tall repeats his order, Stein refuses again, and Tall comes forward to take command himself. By the time Tall reaches Stein, however, the entire situation has changed. “What Bugger Stein . . . could not know was that Sergeant Beck the martinet had, on his own initiative, knocked out five Japanese machinegun emplacements in the last fifteen or twenty minutes, all at the cost of only one man killed and none wounded. Phlegmatic, sullen, dull and universally disliked, an unimaginative, do-­it-­like-­the-­book-­says, dedicated professional of two previous enlistments, Milly Beck came to the fore here as perhaps no one else including his dead superior, Keck, could have done.”125 When Stein tells Tall that the situation has changed, Tall asks him, “And to what do you attribute the change?” Stein tells him “Sergeant Beck.” Tall says, “Then you got my message to him.” Tall is offering Stein absolution, the chance to wash away his disobedience, but Stein throws it away. He says, “No, Sir. I mean, yes, Sir I did. It went forward with the new squads. But Beck had already sent his men off before they got there. Some time before.”126 At this point Tall more or less takes over the attack. The next morning 125. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 264. 126. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 267–68.

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he sends C-­for-­Charlie around the back of “The Dancing Elephant,” where they surprise a party of Japanese soldiers and assault an encampment. In the second day’s action, the men anticipate Stein’s orders and take the initiative themselves, and Stein’s only real act as a commander is to keep his reserve platoon from joining the pursuit of a Japanese rout.127 During the attack on “The Dancing Elephant,” Stein made plans and sent them out to his lieutenants and sergeants, but the most important decisions were all made in the moment, on the line: Lieutenant Whyte’s charge, Keck’s retreat, Beck’s successful assault. Stein’s role in guiding the fighting on either day was minimal, and his only directly effective action was to hold his men back. When Tall called Stein on the field phone, Stein was honest about this: he didn’t know what was going on, and other men, closer to battle, were making the decisions that would shape the battle’s outcomes. So Stein fails as a leader, though not for the reason that Tall gives. In Jones’s view, Stein has failed because he refuses to take responsibility for the decisions made by his men and thus fails to perform his appointed role. Stein has refused to be the one who claims responsibility for the sovereign decision, whether the action was his or not. Stein’s role as a leader, as Jones sees it, is not to be honest or even to make decisions, since most of his decisions will be dictated by orders and military standards. Rather, the leader’s true role is to perform the unit’s highest ideal of itself as bold and decisive. Stein recognizes this in Tall, though he doesn’t draw the connection to his own performance: Whatever else Stein could find to say about him, and Stein could find plenty, he nevertheless had to admit that with Tall’s arrival on the battlefield a change for the better had come over everything and everybody. Partly of course the change was due to Beck’s feat, whatever that was exactly. But it could not all be that, and Stein had to admit it. Tall had brought with him some quality that had not been here before, and it showed in the faces of the men. They were less in-­drawn looking. Perhaps it was only the feeling that after all in the end not everybody would die. Some would live through it. And from there it was only a step to the normal reaction of ego: I will live through this. Others may get it, my friends right and left may die, but I will make it. Even Stein felt better, himself. Tall had arrived and taken control, and had taken it firmly and surely and with confidence. Those who lived would owe it to Tall, and those who died would say nothing. It was too bad about those ones; everybody would feel that; but after all once they were dead they did not really count anymore, did they? This was the simple truth, and Tall had brought it with him to them.128 127. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 325–27. 128. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 269–70.

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This is, in passing, a fine example of Jones’s use of free indirect discourse. The first three sentences are in the authorial voice, explicitly framing Stein as a discrete, objectified consciousness. The third sentence, with its “Stein had to admit it,” prepares us to enter Stein’s stream of thought directly. The next two sentences locate us within Stein, “here,” looking out at the men. But with the “Perhaps” of the sixth sentence, we enter into an indeterminate, indirect voice, blending Stein’s perspective with the author’s, so that by the time we get to “And from there it was only a step to the normal reaction of ego,” we hardly notice that we’ve shifted out of Stein’s register into an omniscient authorial voice, which takes on a disembodied, universal particularity. Who else but the Unknown Soldier is it thinking “I will live through this”? With “Even Stein felt better, himself,” Jones signals a clear break back into the authorial voice, but traces of Stein and the disembodied, universal particularity remain, lending a pathos to the otherwise almost unbearably callous “It was too bad about those ones.” Stein is mistaken, though, in reading Tall’s confidence as a personal characteristic, some special quality the man possesses; on the contrary, Tall is simply performing his role as a leader, a figurehead, the actor of a heroic ideal. Later, the virtue of dumb confidence is explicitly illustrated by Jones’s depictions of Charlie Dale’s extraordinarily calm acts of courage and leadership under fire: “Actually, Dale was probably the calmest of the lot. Imaginationless, he had organized his makeshift squad, and found them eager to accept his authority if he would simply tell them what to do.”129 C-­for-­Charlie’s second commander, First Lieutenant “Brass” Band, also fails as a leader and is not only relieved but reviled, though he shows confidence to the point of arrogance. His problem is not a lack of belief in his own agency, as it was for Stein, but a failure to understand how his agency only exists within the organism in which he functions, on the one side his unit, on the other higher command. Like Stein, Band has an inflated sense of his own individual importance, expressed not as victimhood but as hubris. Band leads C-­for-­Charlie on a long trek across the island and finally in an assault on the occupied village of Bunabala, called “Boola Boola” by the men. Band’s orders include the guidance to operate as an “independent command” when out of radio contact, and Band takes this guidance as license, neglecting to report back to the battalion commander for the entire movement, despite being within radio contact the entire time. When higher command catches up with him, he is relieved of command. 129. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 235.

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Band’s flaw is recognized and named by his men, who in this respect serve as a kind of Greek chorus: shortly after Band takes over, they start calling him “Glory Hunter.” After the attack on Boola Boola but before Band is relieved, there is a scene in which some of the soldiers are drinking and complaining about Band, and they wind up egging one another on until finally one of the mortarmen, Private Mazzi, is dared to go tell Band how they feel. Mazzi does so, standing in front of Band’s tent and calling him names, “marching back and forth and swinging his skinny arms, compounding insult and profanity with great artistry into an ever higher rising house of cards of his imagination,” until finally Band comes out to face his attacker.130 Band stands before his soldiers, drunk himself, wearing his lucky helmet, which had been pierced by a bullet, but he doesn’t say anything. Mazzi keeps screaming: “You think that fucking hero helmet means anything alongside all the good men that are really dead?”131 Mazzi’s reference is specific: on the way to Boola Boola, Band had sent fourteen men out on an ill-­advised mission to block a major Japanese travel route, and twelve of the fourteen died when a company of Japanese reinforcements came through. Ironically, Band becomes the commander that Stein thought Tall was: the blindly ambitious despot willing to throw away his men’s lives for personal glory. Yet even though Band understands better than Stein did the theatrical and situational demands of performing the heroic and agential role of the leader, he lacks Tall’s judgment and discipline. The sacrifices Band makes are not for the collective but for his own gain; the men recognize this and reject his claim to authority. C-­for-­Charlie Company’s final commander, Captain Bosche, is a stranger to the unit. He takes over during their last few weeks on Guadalcanal and leads them in training up for their next mission. He exudes professionalism, all surface and voice; we do not learn any of his thoughts or feelings except as they show physically or are articulated in speech. He was a tough little guy, maybe thirtyfive [sic], tightly packed into his tailormade khakis. He wore a tight little belly that appeared at least as hard as the flat abdominals of most athletes. His brass belt buckle shone like a star. On his left breast was sewn a whole flock of ribbons amongst which were immediately noticeable a Silver Star and a Purple Heart with cluster. He had been wounded twice. He had seen action at Pearl Harbor. He was not a West Pointer. He had, instead, learned his soldiering the hard way, which was by experience. . . . Everybody liked him. Even Welsh seemed to like him. Or, if not like, at least respect him.132 130. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 469. 131. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 470. 132. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 488–89.

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Bosche’s professionalism, earned “by experience,” mirrors the unit’s own, which is why even Welsh looks on him with favor. C-­for-­Charlie’s three commanders are not the “protagonists” of the novel in any sense, yet Jones’s astute analysis of the structural role of leadership reveals how each commander “represents” the idea of the collective to itself. Taken as a series, C-­for-­Charlie’s commanders can be seen as dramatizations of the unit’s own development as a collective organism: first timid, unsure, and divided against itself under Stein, then overconfident and brashly independent under Ball, the unit at last recognizes itself in the experienced, professional soldier, Bosche. By the time we come to the end of the novel, C-­for-­Charlie Company has gone through many changes. They’ve been bloodied, they’ve killed, they’ve lost a fair number of men to death and injury. They’ve gone through three commanders. Many of the men who landed as privates have become noncommissioned officers, and one has been offered a commission. Several have been awarded medals, including a Distinguished Service Cross for “imaginationless” Charlie Dale. Individually, however, few of them seemed to have learned anything deep or to have changed much psychologically. They have had no transformative spiritual revelations. The competent survivors had been competent when they arrived, and they took on the roles vacated above them by the unlucky, slow, and incompetent. Witt stayed a talented soldier but a foolish rebel. Fife was the same angry, insecure young man as he was when he arrived. Bell kept moving surely through each hour, his thoughts three thousand miles away. First Sergeant Welsh, granted the novel’s final moment of interiority, seems hardly to have been affected at all. “In his mind he was muttering over and over his old phrase of understanding: ‘Property. Property. All for property,’ which he had once said in rudimentary innocence arriving on this island.”133 This paradox is telling: Jones’s mode is the epic, in which experience follows innocence not through a revelation of hidden truths but through a new understanding of what was already the case. As a company, though, as a collective, the men have undergone a notable transformation. They have adapted to their objective situation. They move confidently in small units, fight competently and effectively, and have become used to killing and dying. The disparate parts of C-­for-­Charlie Company have been forged into one unified, effective organism, “a single and whole animal,” capable of engaging with and destroying other such animals. C-­for-­Charlie Company has been, at last—like its new commander Bosche—thoroughly professionalized. “The proper term for what has happened to every soldier,” wrote William Waller in 1945, discussing the World War II veteran, “is per133. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 510.

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haps not shell-­shock but institutionalization.”134 The surviving men of C-­for-­ Charlie Company have been properly institutionalized: they know their job, which is to be heroes on an industrial scale, throwing their bodies into the meat grinder of modern war.135 As Stein observes elsewhere, “So this was it. The long-­awaited, soul-­illuminating experience of combat. Stein could not find it any different from working for one of the great law offices, or any of the large corporations. Or for government. . . . A little more dangerous to life and limb, but no different in its effect upon the reward-­haunted, ax-­fearing spirits of the workers.”136 With The Thin Red Line, James Jones has indeed fulfilled David Hirsh’s dream of the comic combat novel, showing humanity to itself and controverting the false stories of the “old ones” from the last war. The novel is no memoir of a fox-­hunting life but a depiction of the base, selfish, crude, and undignified workers and managers who keep the industrial war machine running. The lives of these workers are not illuminated by sonnets, and these men find no revelations in their dirty labor, traumatic or other­ wise.137 If Jones’s prophecy at the end of the novel remains true, that no one remembers it that way, perhaps this is because we continue to feel the need to believe that war is something different, special, sacred. We want to believe that it’s not just business as usual. One way we avow war’s holiness is through apophasis, by insisting that war is indescribable or, as Fredric Jameson put it, that it is as “unimaginable as it is real.” In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson argues that representations of collective activity in war are “the abstraction of something else,” specifically wage labor.138 Jameson is explicitly talking about “war films (of the collective buddy type),” presumably the genre Jeanine Basinger identifies with more historical specificity as the World War II combat film, since, as Basinger points out, “the war film itself does not exist in a coherent generic form.”139 Jameson asserts that when narratives of war focus on leaders and institutions, that focus “initiates a shift of gravity towards the exterior of the experience of war, whether individual or collective, for the officers are ordinarily as much 134. Waller, Veteran Comes Back, 119. 135. See James Jones, Thin Red Line 449–50, for the unit’s first “boring” fight, which marks their complete transition from green to veteran soldiers. 136. James Jones, Thin Red Line, 338. 137. Steven Carter is helpful on this point: “The classical epic-­tragic view of warfare asserts that each man’s death in combat (or at least each hero’s death) is meaningful and noble, thus enshrining the ego of the individual dead man and of humanity. The Jonesian comic view, however, generally depicts men’s deaths as pointless, stupid, absurd, and laughable.” Carter, James Jones, 100. 138. Jameson, Antimonies of Realism, 236–37. 139. Basinger, World War II Combat Film, 9.

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a part of the external environment of the soldier as the enemy itself, and are indeed equally often objectified into what gets identified as the bureaucracy of the state” (an assertion which is not altogether accurate—consider, beyond the examples already discussed, the novels and films Command Decision, Twelve O’Clock High, and Guard of Honor, which all focus on the inner psychological struggles of high-­ranking commanders). Jameson’s examples for his argument range from Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein (1799) to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1968), and his argument turns on a swift and elegant handling of the problem of leadership in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), in which Jameson opposes “Tolstoy’s notorious loathing for Napoleon” against his “hero-­worshipping portrayal of . . . Kutuzov” and then effects a kind of dialectical synthesis through Tolstoy’s portrayal of Prince Bagration’s leadership as performing a structural rather than an agential role. The section of War and Peace that Jameson quotes illuminates questions about leadership, heroism, and the collective that have been brought to the fore in the work of Wouk, Stevens, and Jones: Prince Andrei listened attentively to Bagration’s colloquies with the commanding officers and the orders he gave them, and to his surprise found that no orders were really given but that Prince Bagration tried to make it appear that everything done by necessity, by accident, or by the will of subordinate commanders, was done, if not by direct command at least in accord with his intentions. Prince Andrei noticed however that though what happened was due to change and was independent of the commander’s will, owing to the tact Bagration showed, his presence was very valuable. Officers who approached him with disturbed countenances became calm; soldiers and officers greeted him gaily, grew more cheerful in his presence, and were evidently anxious to display their courage before him.140

The structural function of the leader is to perform the collective’s idea of itself as fearless, confident, and heroic, but even more fundamental is the leader’s performance of the collective’s idea of agency as such. The role of the leader, that is, is to pretend to be the one who makes things happen. After looking at Tolstoy, Jameson turns from the question of leadership to the representation of atrocities and eventually comes to argue that war is merely one more unrepresentable kind of collective activity. Understanding how the structural function of the leader as a collective’s representation of its own sovereignty maps homologously onto the function of the hero as the concrete mediation between a collective and its concept of itself, however, we can 140. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 193–94.

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see that Jameson’s argument that representations of war are always displacing or veiling more fundamental structures of wage labor and his “suspicion that war is ultimately unrepresentable” fails to account for the structural function of leadership that Tolstoy describes.141 Jameson’s claim is in the end an ideological assertion made despite the very evidence he himself lays out. As we’ve seen, the concept of the collective is given life in the sacrifice of its hero. Those who sacrifice their existence for the sake of a concept (such as the nation) give that concept a body. They make it substantial. They make it real. As Jones’s equivocal conclusion to The Thin Red Line suggests, any narrative position is ultimately limited (“none of them will remember it that way”), yet notwithstanding the fact that (in Stevens’s phrase) the “squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,” the human being must and does behave “as if,” laying faith in its fictions.142 And some fictions bear more ontological weight than others: the concrete realization of concepts in blood sacrifice, the hero’s tale, provides a narrative authority against which no notional “Supreme Fiction” can compete. Hence Wallace Stevens’s deep anxiety about poetic authority in the 1940s: truth as a play of metaphors, consonant with a structuring logic of exchange in which words and money are the mediating terms and any thing can be substituted for any other thing, stands opposed by a definition of truth whose media are lives and blood. Blood sacrifice shifts socioeconomic relations from a horizontal differential of relation, in which any two objects are unified in their difference through signs, to a vertical differential of relation, in which a collective and its concept of itself are unified through a body. Whereas capitalism offers “material relations between persons and social relations between things,” that is, war manifests conceptual relations between persons and material relations between ideas.143 The representations of war that reiterate these relations in narrative, the songs that sing of heroes and war for all the ages, are best understood not as ideological in the sense Jameson seems to want to suggest, in that they obscure other relations such as wage labor, but ideological in an even stronger sense, in that they depict the social embodiment of conceptual reality. The problem Jones and Stevens grapple with is not that industrial war is unrepresentable or traumatic, nor that “men wash their hands in blood as best they can,” but that it reveals a conflict between the metaphoric structures by which capitalism and nationalism respectively organize reality. The vision of industrial-­scale blood sacrifice, “the concept . . . The fact; the reality—of the modern State” that so horrified Captain 141. Jameson, Antimonies of Realism, 233. 142. Stevens, Collected Poems, 215. 143. Marx, Capital, 1:166.

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Stein is nothing less than the dialectical contradiction at the heart of liberal capitalism, which is to say its truth. What distinguishes the work of writers such as Jones, Stevens, Wouk, and Dickey from the more canonical trauma narratives of writers such as Jarrell, Heller, and Mailer is an awareness of the soldier’s agency and objective participation in collective violence, which thus precludes the dynamic of victimization and scapegoating central to the myth of the trauma hero. What makes the work of the former writers even more interesting and joins it with the work of writers such as Ellison, Killens, and Baldwin is how it works to explore the deep contradictions in modern industrialized society that total mobilization reveals—contradictions between nationalism and universalism, nationalism and capitalism, industrialization and liberalism, racism and democracy, between a structuring system of metaphoric relation based in substance and a structuring system of metaphoric relation based in signs. These contradictions, alarmingly evident during and after the war, were eventually obscured and displaced by the translation of World War II from a political event into a metaphysical one and the rise of the trauma hero. But to understand this process and what motivated it, we must first take a detour through the South Pacific, with a figure who might be seen as the trauma hero’s antithesis.

3

War as Comedy A meaningless violence seems to plague the world Which world cannot get rid of. K e n n e t h K o c h , The Duplications (1977), in On the Edge

Zany Dialectics: “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips” A lonely voice sings out across the vastness of empty space, “somewhere in the Pacific.” For a languorous twenty-­five seconds, the camera pans slowly along the horizon. Puffy white clouds mass against the sky. The sea is a calm blue field. Yet while the pan is slow and the singing almost wistful, a distinct tension is building and a specific moment of national trauma is being invoked. The song would have been immediately recognizable to contemporary audiences: “Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat” was a hit single made famous by the African American R&B quartet the Ink Spots three years before, and the opening verse sounds like a doo-­wop gloss on December 7, 1941 (the song was released just weeks before the attacks): Someone’s rocking my dreamboat, someone’s invading my dream. We were sailing along, so peaceful and calm, suddenly something went wrong.

Although ostensibly a love song about stymied romance (it ends: “But with love as my guide, / I’ll follow the tide, / I’ll keep sailing ’til I find you”), the obvious resonance of the lyrics with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor might help explain the song’s tremendous popularity. Reading the lyrics of this pop song in their historical context suggests that in the extended historical moment following the Pearl Harbor attacks, that kairotic day “when everything changed,” the past had been altered as much as the present. The Great Depression, with its labor battles between workers and bosses, the rise of communism and the corollary rise of anticommunism, race war in the American South, and twenty years of global political and economic

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crisis including American military interventions in China, Central America, and Russia were now, in contrast to open war, a prelapsarian, Edenic life, “peaceful and calm.”1 The elision of temporal deictic in the final line of the verse, where one would expect a “when” marking the interrupting event in relation to the preceding past progressive “were sailing,” heightens the dramatic emergence of the transformative (or “traumatic”) “something” as a break in time itself: “suddenly something went wrong.” But in the cartoon in question—“Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips”—the singer doesn’t sing this verse, not exactly.2 He grafts a later verse onto the opening line, turning the elegiac “someone’s invading my dream” into the anarchic “I’m a captain without any crew.” Thus in the opening shot, story writer Tedd Pierce and director Isadore “Fritz” Freleng have signaled what will come to be this cartoon’s most persistent tension: Bugs Bunny’s contingent “enlistment” in a war that seems to have nothing much to do with him, against the individualist commitment to urban, cosmopolitan, anarchic pleasure that he archetypically embodied. Even while invoking a commitment to national identity forged in the trauma of Pearl Harbor, that is, Bugs distances himself from it, insisting on his personal integrity through subverting well-­known popular lyrics, and, as the “camera” zooms in on the crate he’s floating in “somewhere in the Pacific,” reflecting on his predicament with the sophisticated irony of someone who can read the kinds of stories he finds himself in without ever fully submitting to their narrative demands: “Eh, just killing time until the island that inevitably toins up in this kinda picture inevitably toins up.” Remarking on “this kinda picture”—namely, shipwreck and “South Seas” films such as Little Robinson Crusoe (1924), Isle of Fury (1936), Typhoon Treasure (1938), Swiss Family Robinson (1940), Typhoon (1940), The Adventures of Martin Eden (1942), and Lifeboat (1944)—Bugs gives his audience a metanarrative wink: they understand that Bugs is an actor and a celebrity, which is to say a performer, and share his familiarity with generic conventions. Bugs and his audience both understand, that is, that narratives—and hence human ex1. It’s worth pointing out here that James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951) offers a take on Pearl Harbor that operates very much against the grain of the mainstream ideological narrative of the event as dramatized in “Rocking My Dreamboat.” In Jones’s novel, the prewar era was a time of bitter class conflict, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor inaugurates a carnivalesque period of class and social fluidity. Acutely, Jones sees that the “working class hero” Prew­itt cannot survive in the new era of total war, at once totalitarian and liberated, hence Prewitt’s death by friendly fire on the field of bourgeois play, a golf course. Thus Prewitt, the workers’ martyr, becomes in The Thin Red Line merely Witt, a recalcitrant individualist who cannot adapt to the new military-­industrial reality. 2. Freleng, “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips.”

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periences—can be interpreted through formal categories distinguishable by coherent, iterable features, and that these narratives can be slipped into and out of by skilled actors such as Bugs. More important than the expectations of any specific situation or “picture” in which Bugs finds himself is his ironic adaptability to a variety of situations and genres, his dispositive mutability in response to the dangers of being hunted in the forest, turned into dinner in a fancy Hollywood restaurant, or in this case fighting the Japanese army, exemplary of what Sianne Ngai identifies in Our Aesthetic Categories as the “absolutely elastic subject,” the subject characterized by the aesthetic category she calls the “zany.”3 In Ngai’s analysis, the “zany” character bounces from precarious situation to precarious situation, meeting each new challenge with a manic mutability. The “zany,” while having a history going back to Renaissance Italy, is especially contemporary for Ngai in that the zany dramatizes the instability of worker identity in post-­Fordist capitalism, an understanding seen most clearly in the postwar sitcom I Love Lucy, which “turns on the doggedly persistent, comically strenuous efforts of Lucy Ricardo to break into the world of artistic and cultural production she reverently calls ‘showbiz,’” which efforts take ceaselessly new forms as Lucy strives to adapt to the constantly shifting demands of the marketplace, “either by picking up a new skill, like French or ballet, or by taking on a temporary job involving some kind of affective service work: selling and then unselling salad dressing on television; babysitting and managing child talent; working as a magician’s assistant; opening a women’s dress boutique; competing in a game show. And if not by taking a job in retail or services, then by impersonating somebody with one: hot-­dog vendor, hotel bellhop, celebrity chauffeur.”4 As is often the case in twentieth-­century popular culture, mass media here offers itself as an allegory of the fundamental conditions of labor in late capitalism: the essential requirement of the labor market is that workers be adaptable, fungible, willing and able to conform themselves to the demands of production, whatever they might be. Bugs Bunny, distinct from Ngai’s examples of Lucy Ricardo, Richard Pryor in The Toy (1982), and Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy (1996), occupies what we might call the privileged autonomous fantasy zone of the zany. As a self-­ sufficient being whose only needs are carrots (which he seems able to find anywhere) and his rabbit hole (which he creates ex nihilo and can deploy at will, without regard to the laws of physics), Bugs retains a magical, autochthonous freedom in a world of necessity, even while he is perpetually threatened 3. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 174. 4. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 175.

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with capture by mainstream culture, as embodied in the Babbit-­like Elmer Fudd. Bugs’s godlike power consists in his ability to turn the tools, practices, and institutions of American conformism against its most persistent agents. As Sam Abel writes, “By slipping in and out of a variety of roles, without effort and simultaneously maintaining his own persona, Bugs becomes the critic, the rebel, at once in and out of the social norm. He manipulates identity as a weapon, defiant of the social expectation of identity stability.”5 Whereas Lucy’s zany adaptability is abjectly comic because she so persistently fails to sell herself to showbiz, Bugs Bunny turns the zany mutability that consumer capitalism demands from its workers against itself in order to stymie the be-­ Fudd-­eled managers and operators who take its ideological claims for ontological truth. Back in the South Pacific, when Bugs makes landfall on the island that “invetibly toins up,” he finds himself threatened not by the Babbitry of Elmer Fudd but by the Japanese Army. In “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,” the zany trickster god of American self-­fashioning is uneasily enlisted in a race war against a gibbering barbaric enemy. This 1944 Merrie Melodies cartoon was only one of many racist wartime cartoons, including “You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap” (1942) and “Scrap the Japs” (1942), both featuring Popeye, Looney Tunes’ “Tokio Jokio” (1943), and Disney’s “Commando Duck” (1944). In such cartoons, the Japanese are almost invariably bucktoothed and bespectacled, with thick lips, giant ears, and bulging eyes, gibbering, deceitful, barely human, and full of malice, examples of a historically pervasive American racial hatred of East Asians in general and specifically the Japanese.6 These are only a few of the vast panoply of propaganda cartoons produced during the war, including a feature-­length Disney cartoon on the virtues of strategic bombing (Victory through Air Power [1943]) and a series of War Department films created by Chuck Jones, Fritz Freleng, Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), Frank Capra, Mel Blanc, and others (the Private SNAFU films). Cultural historian Thomas Doherty notes that “in 1943, 94 percent of Disney’s work was war related.”7 While directly commissioned and regulated work such as the Private SNAFU series and Disney’s training films were intentional productions of state propaganda, however, independent work such as Fleischer’s Popeye car5. Abel, “Rabbit in Drag,” 193. 6. John Dower notes: “As World War Two recedes in time and scholars dig at the formal documents, it is easy to forget the visceral emotions and sheer race hate that gripped virtually all participants in the war, at home and overseas, and influenced many actions and decisions at the time.” Dower, War without Mercy, 11. 7. Doherty, Projections of War, 68.

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toons and Warner Brothers’ Merrie Melodies weren’t always on message. In multiple studies of print cartoons during the war, the Office of War Information (OWI) found that while “there had been a noticeable increase in the number of stories on the fighting and gags on shortages and rationing . . . the messages contained in the cartoons were not compatible with the OWI’s desired themes.”8 “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,” for instance, would likely have been found wanting by the OWI’s apparatchiks, because while the cartoon does offer properly nationalist racist caricatures of the Japanese, Bugs’s queer, ambivalent guerrilla actions against the Imperial Army hardly seem designed to inspire patriotism. If anything, the cartoon suggests that the Japanese share deep sympathies with the cartoon’s American audience. What’s more, the cartoon’s ending is practically seditious: given a choice between “rescue” by the forces of American military-­industrial might and capture by the erotic promesse de bonheur (promise of happiness) of a native female islander, Bugs would rather go AWOL. The manifest problem the cartoon stages is an old one in American political mythology: trouble in paradise. Almost as soon as Bugs makes landfall, after a brief, hyperbolic paean to the idyllic splendors of the “inevitable island,” the air erupts with explosions and cannon fire. The sudden terror of war sends Bugs leaping into a haystack—an amorphous mass of nonidentity that soon transforms into a hybrid war machine. As Bugs pokes his head out, the haystack rises, revealing human arms and legs. One of the arms sets a military cap on Bugs’s head, putting him “in uniform.” The haystack-­Bugs hybrid sneaks along the beach, then stops, pulls out a mirror, and looks at itself. Out of the defensive amorphous confusion of nonbeing arises identity as difference: a bucktoothed, eyeglass-­wearing Japanese soldier pokes his head out of the haystack and confronts bucktoothed Bugs, wearing his hat. The hostility with which the Japanese soldier reacts exceeds the situation. The audience knows, intellectually and ideologically, that the soldier is aggressive because he’s Japanese, yet this mirroring moment of identity trouble, when the Japanese soldier sees Bugs confronting him in his own uniform, suggests that the Japanese soldier’s aggression arises less out of an essential hostility and more out of a desperate claim for his own threatened identity. The soldier snatches his hat back and goes after Bugs with a machete, screaming in gibberish mock-­Japanese that, while uncannily reminiscent of some of Warner Brothers’ other hyperactive, speech-­impaired characters (such as Daffy Duck), marks him definitively as Bugs’ Other. He and Bugs may look 8. Barkin, “Fighting the Cartoon War,” 115.

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alike, and may even be able to share the same uniform and a blurred identity, at least within the amorphous haystack, but they most definitely do not speak the same language. Almost as soon as this difference is established, however, it is once again threatened with collapse. After a brief physical comedy bit involving Bugs and the soldier trading a bomb back and forth (in which the soldier, expectedly, gets the worst of it), Bugs confounds renewed attack by throwing on the costume of a Japanese general. The Japanese soldier responds with stereotypical abjection, falling to his knees and bowing repeatedly, begging forgiveness, though not in mock Japanese this time, but in dialect “Engrish”: “Oh regretterabr incident. Oh not unknowing honorabr Generar. Oh excuse prease. Oh not knowing make hari kari.” Bugs, confident in his zany powers of mutability and assured in his ironic detachment from generic convention, relaxes into the self-­satisfaction of chomping on a carrot. In revealing the mark of his brand (his magic autonomous phallus), Bugs reveals himself as himself to the soldier who, it turns out, is a fluent consumer of American celebrity and, what’s more, a fan. The Japanese soldier turns to the audience in an aside, giving them a metanarrative wink that both identifies him as wise to the situation and establishes a sense of identity between him and us, the audience, as consumers of American culture: “That not a Japanese generar. That a Bugs Bunny. I see in Warner Brother Reon Schresinger Merrie Merody Cartoon Picture. Oh yes, he no foor me.” Even while the Japanese soldier’s racial identity as marked by language prevents him from wholly conforming (you could call it a “shibborreth”), his fluency with American culture marks him as assimilable and, therefore, dangerous, since it means that he can use that fluency to pass in American society as a double agent (he even knows the name of the cartoon’s producer). Here he uses it against Bugs: turning the tables, the soldier stands up and starts chomping his own carrot, mimicking Bugs with a wry, “What’s a up, honorabr doc?” This scene mirrors the previous mirroring scene, but now instead of the Japanese soldier being threatened by Bugs’s ability to take on any identity, Bugs is threatened by the global dissemination of his own celebrity. As much as Bugs’s power within the cartoon world relies on his mutability, his power as a commercial product in “reality,” in the world of war, relies on his easy branding and identification, which can be turned against him by the global horde of consumers. This turns the dialectic of the zany that Ngai identifies in I Love Lucy from a valence of abjection to a valence of uncontrollable potency, offering less an allegory of the American worker than one of American com-

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mercial imperialism. Ngai writes, “The dialectic between social inflexibility and flexibility in comedy famously noted by Bergson is thus played out here in the oscillation between the character Lucy Ricardo (always straining unsuccessfully to be many things at once) and the actor Lucille Ball (whose consistency becomes visible across that very multiplicity of roles) staged in episode after episode of I Love Lucy.”9 Similarly, while the power of America’s commercial imperialism resides in capitalism’s ability to melt all that is solid into commodities interchangeable through the metaphoric relation C=M=C (as described in chapter 2), that commercial imperialism remains indissolubly a nationalist project. Bugs Bunny’s infinite mutability can’t transcend his made-­ in-­America branding. It is now Bugs Bunny’s turn to be horrified by the collapse of difference, so he flees and resorts to playing on the perceived strength of American industry against the then-­stereotypical notion of Japanese consumer goods being shoddily made. Bugs disembowels the Japanese soldier’s fighter plane by tying its rear to a tree and then dispatches the soldier—now parachuting to safety— by handing him an anvil, shouting, “Here’s some scrap iron for Japan, Moto.” Bugs has asserted the primacy of American steel over Japanese silk, and is next seen painting a “kill flag” Rising Sun on a palm tree. Bugs’s victory, however, is not yet complete. American commercial expansion takes Bugs ever deeper into Japanese culture, and he now runs smack into a sumo wrestler. Bugs, supremely confident in American industrial might, paints a bigger kill flag on the palm tree, then marches off in fighting stance to meet the wrestler. The two lock arms and circle, then the sumo ties Bugs into a neat knot. The importance of industrial-­grade steel notwithstanding, Bugs’s power has never been in brute physical strength but in his willingness to transgress boundaries of sense, good taste, physics, and even gender. And it is to drag that Bugs now turns, returning on-­screen made up as a geisha in lipstick, wig, and kimono, extruding his racially marked buck teeth, and coyly flirting with the sumo until the wrestler is seduced, closes his eyes, and puckers up for a kiss, at which point Bugs whops him with a hammer.10 This queer moment exemplifies one of the most powerful modes of Bugs Bunny’s zany adaptation or, as Sam Abel reads Bugs Bunny, his most powerful manifesta9. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 179. 10. “The central element of the camp formula here is that Bugs invariably takes on the role of seductress; he is not only pretending to be a woman, but a highly sexualized woman. In direct defiance of Susan Sontag (and long before her famous analysis of camp), Bugs in drag reveals the intensely political nature of camp. In Chuck Jones’s formula, camp is drag, drag is sex, and sex is power” (Abel, “Rabbit in Drag,” 196).

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tion as a “camp hero par excellence . . . nemesis of the straight world view . . . [and] iconoclast of traditional gendered role-­playing, merrily shattering all types of expected masculine and feminine behavior.”11 The “Yellow Peril” remains a threat, however: barely has the sumo hit the ground when Bugs is alerted to a convoy of Japanese troop transports heading for his “inevitable island.” “Japs!” he shouts. “Hundreds of ’em. This calls for strategy. I’ll have to put on my thinking cap.” His ultimate response to the problem is characteristically American: when we next see Bugs, he’s driving a “Good Rumor” ice cream truck, hawking chocolate-­covered ice cream bars that, in a cutaway X-­ray shot, are revealed to contain hand grenades. Not even the Japanese Army can resist mass-­produced American ice cream, and Japanese soldiers are soon thronging all around Bugs’s truck, waving wads of cash and shouting in mock Japanese. The irresistible lure of junk food wipes out all the Japanese but one, who comes running after Bugs shouting, “Just you one minute, just one minute, you no get away from me, you wait . . .” So powerful is the promise of consumer satisfaction that it’s not revenge the soldier wants, but more ice cream. “I got a free one,” he says, holding up an ice cream stick reading, “Good for Free Good Rumor.” Bugs indulges him, crooning, “Business is booming,” to the accompaniment of an off-­screen explosion. Ultimately, Bugs overcomes Japanese aggression with the same tricks of metaphoric slippage he uses against American conformism: zany mutability, masquerade, distraction, cultural fluency, technical mastery, drag, and the ability to turn consumer desire against itself. Bugs’s use of metaphoric slippage functions as a strategy of resistance to capture by the selfsame capitalist system that makes such slippage necessary, yet when deployed to the South Pacific, the slippage in its conflation of mass production and racialized extermination uncannily echoes James Jones’s depiction of industrial warfare on Guadalcanal as indistinguishable from big business. When the American trickster is conscripted as a war hero, he turns the irresistible seductions of consumer capitalism into weapons of empire: Bugs Bunny ultimately “nips the Nips” by selling them ice cream. While the Japanese soldiers (just like the cartoon’s viewers) are slaves to consumption, even when it destroys them, Bugs knows what he’s selling and recognizes his “Good Rumor” as a strategy of covert domination. Bugs is next seen surrounded by trees painted up and down with kill flags. The music has gone lyrical. Bugs has cleared paradise of its savages, tamed the Orient, and won the battle, if not the war. “Now as I was saying, what a beauteous Garden of Eden. So peaceful, so quiet,” he moons, then grimaces. 11. Abel, “Rabbit in Drag,” 184.

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“And if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s peace and quiet! Get me out of here! Peace and quiet nuts!” Suffering the horror vacui of the all-­devouring self-­consciousness in its isolation, Bugs flips out, desperate for another Other. There are no more Japanese to kill, however, no more Nips to nip, but, as if on cue, a representative American war machine shows up, a US Navy ship in the distance, and Bugs raises a white flag, “surrendering” to the necessity of enlisting in the military-­commercial project of American imperialism, compensating himself for his capture by reinterpreting Paradise as a prison: “You think I want to spend the rest of my life on this island?” Then something happens: he turns to notice a sari-­wrapped female island rabbit. “Hmm,” she purrs, promising another kind of capture, “it’s a possibility.” Bugs lowers his white flag, howls, and flings himself after the female island rabbit, pursuing her as she flees over the horizon. The promises of war’s excitements, it turns out, are no competition for the pleasures of peace. “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips” seems at first blush a straightforward example of racist wartime propaganda. On closer examination, we can see that the cartoon is an ambivalent meditation on the problems that arise when a comic trickster whose zany power resides in his capacities for substitution and metamorphosis and whose identity inheres in a campy, ironic attitude toward his own celebrity status finds himself in a certain “kind of picture”: a war film. We might understand director Freleng’s meditation on identity and difference in “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips” as an anxious mediation on the disjunct between what Wallace Stevens called the “poetry of war” and the “poetry of the imagination,” an assimilationist attempt to harmonize ethnonationalist militarism and liberal capitalist cosmopolitanism by reinterpreting war as a cultural conflict that will ultimately be won by the side with the more appealing consumer goods. But this harmony isn’t really sustainable, since commerce as conquest winds up eliminating (whether through genocide or assimilation) the very Other who made exchange possible in the first place. The logic of imperialism, whether military or commercial, constantly demands new islands, new markets, new fields of conquest, a logic which Bugs rejects in favor of an Edenic sexual pastoral. The cartoon’s originary politics of violent differentiation out of anamorphic similitude are finally subsumed in the comic integration of racial and sexual difference. Comedy and war might seem to have little to do with each other, but the question of whether a hostile confrontation is comic or belligerent depends in one sense only on a question of scale: hence the humor in Bugs Bunny’s characteristic declaration, “You realize, of course, this means war!” Comedy expresses the irrepressible but is ultimately a mode of closure and recuperation. The pleasure in comedy comes from a shared sense of collective identity

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in setting norms and rejecting abnormality. As Sigmund Freud observes in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, “Every joke calls for a public of its own and laughing at the same jokes is evidence of far-­reaching psychical conformity.”12 Freud goes on: Here moreover we have arrived at a point which enables us to guess still more precisely what takes place in the [audience member]. He must be able as a matter of habit to erect in himself the same inhibition which the first person’s joke has overcome, so that, as soon as he hears the joke, the readiness for this inhibition will compulsively or automatically awaken. This readiness for inhibition, which I must regard as a real expenditure, analogous to mobilization in military affairs, will at the same moment be recognized as superfluous or too late, and so be discharged in statu nascendi by laughter.13

Note the military metaphor. Aggression begins with a readiness to enact the law by force; it becomes humor when we realize the law has already been transgressed and we ourselves were complicit in its transgression. John Limon builds on Freud’s insight in his analysis of Lenny Bruce in Stand-­up Comedy in Theory to further elaborate the work comedy does in establishing community: “The audience—by means of its laughter, by means of its metalaughter—comes together as a community, under this pressure, to assert its right not to do community work. (It demands to be outraged in order not to be outraged.)”14 The comic hero can be a scapegoat or a clown, a fool or a god, seemingly violating social norms but in fact strengthening them by acting out the shame of their breaking: with Lucy Ricardo, it’s her lack of moderation that makes her comic; with Bugs Bunny, it’s his absolute self-­sufficiency and pride. Lucy is abjectly comic, Bugs divinely. Rather than being the object of laughter, however, the comic hero can also serve as a kind of cultural police, directing shame at worthy targets of collective derision, as when Bugs mocks Elmer Fudd’s muddling conventionality. War is like comedy in that it is a social practice defining collective identity by exclusion and negation. Where comedy creates subjects through the collective recognition of certain behaviors or characteristics as shameful and worthy of laughter, war creates subjects through the collective recognition of other groups as existing outside the moral order, worthy only of destruction. Yet the American subjects created by World War II faced profound internal contradictions on this point: committed to a universalist liberal ethos and 12. Freud, Jokes, 185. 13. Freud, Jokes, 185. 14. Limon, Stand-­up Comedy in Theory, 23.

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free markets, they were also enlisted in an ethnonationalist project to dominate the world through military force; seeing themselves as victims of sudden, horrific violence falling from the sky, they also saw themselves as wielding the same violence against their enemies. Writers working to make sense of World War II had no choice but to manage these contradictions in whatever ways they could. While the myth of the trauma hero proceeds through surrogation, scapegoating, and purgation, as in Randall Jarrell’s poem “Eighth Air Force,” “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips” proceeds through a violent dialectic of identity and difference, ending in comic escape. Ralph Ellison, John Oliver Killens, and Gwendolyn Brooks explored how demands for wartime unity were undermined by America’s racial caste system. Others, such as Wallace Stevens and James Jones, worked to understand how the individual was integrated into mass industrial war making. Still others, such as New York school poet Kenneth Koch, an infantryman who fought in General MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines, attempted to convert war into comedy, turning the problem of socially organized state violence as a foundational political act into a momentary interruption of the peace, a bit of “trouble in paradise” and nothing more. In Kenneth Koch’s comic war poem “To World War Two,” for example, the experience of war is portrayed as a youthful fling with a narcissistic and destructive lover, something to be survived and looked back on with chagrin. In turning from epic to mock epic, from the heroic to the comic, Koch’s poetry, like James Jones’s novel The Thin Red Line and Fritz Freleng’s Bugs Bunny cartoon, works to represent war not as a sacred moment of nationalist kairos or transcendental revelation, but as an iteration of the merely profane. The Education of a War Poet: Kenneth Koch at War In Koch’s apostrophe to World War II, written fifty-­five years after the war’s end, poetry and war stand opposed. Poetry is salvific and escapist, promising immortality, while war is an unpredictable and mortally dangerous c­ onfinement. One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night We take more precautions but it is night and it is you. The typhoon continues and so do you. “I can’t be killed—because of my poetry. I have to live on in order to write it.” I thought—even crazier thought, or just as crazy— “If I’m killed while thinking of lines, it will be too corny

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F i g u re 6 . Pfc. Kenneth Koch (ca. 1944). Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Kenneth Koch from Box 173, Kenneth Koch Papers 1932–2007, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York.

When it’s reported” (I imagined it would be reported!) So I kept thinking of lines of poetry. One that came to me on the beach on Leyte Was “The surf comes in like masochistic lions.” I loved this terrible line. It was keeping me alive.15

Things seem clear enough looking back, poetry on the one side, war on the other, but at the time (as was the case with Wallace Stevens) the distinction was more ambiguous. Koch started writing poetry in earnest as a teenager, and he didn’t stop just because he was drafted (fig. 6). Army life became a poetic subject for him, as did the terror and violence of war. In Koch’s papers at the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, dozens of pages of 15. Koch, “To World War Two,” in Collected Poems, 604.

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poetry and prose testify to his efforts to make sense of the war in writing. A few of these poems became his first publications, in Poetry and the Kansas City Review, though most have remained unpublished. These poems, autobiographical sketches, and meditations all exude the intensity and immediacy of a talented writer grappling with an overcharged experience. Jay Kenneth Koch was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 27, 1925. He grew up there in what seemed a fairly happy midwestern middle-­class Jewish household. His father, Stuart, owned a furniture store, and his mother, Lillian Loth Koch, was a housewife.16 Kenneth wrote poetry and stories and drew a lot. At the age of twelve, he made an anthology of poems, drawings, jokes, observations, and clippings about the Ohio River Flood of 1937, titled An Emergency. He attended Walnut Hills High School, where his interest in writing poetry flourished during his junior year (a year he later called an “inspired afternoon”), under the mentorship of a teacher named Katharine Lappa. Koch’s earlier juvenalia show strong rhymes, a favoring of ballad form, cartoonish narratives, and lots of attention to his domineering mother; in 1942, the year he was a student of Lappa’s, his poetry turned surreal, morbid, and fervid, sometimes even perverse, suggesting the influence of Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and Edgar Allan Poe. In addition to the influence of Poe and the French poètes maudits, the Romantic strain is heavy in Koch’s early work, which also includes explicit homages to William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Patchen. After graduating from high school, Koch spent one semester at the University of Cincinnati before being drafted. He went through basic training at Camp Hood (better known today as Fort Hood) in Texas, then was sent to the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago to study engineering as part of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), an advanced program designed to expedite the movement of particularly intelligent or capable draftees into technical and leadership roles. The ASTP had more-­demanding entry requirements than Officer Candidate School because of the rigorous curriculum, even though the ASTP men were enlisted, not commissioned: “Besides being highly accelerated—more than double the normal college pace—some of the ASTP curricula involved such always-­demanding subjects as physics, chemistry, and various advanced courses in mathematics.”17 16. Both Koch’s poems and Karen Koch’s recollections testify to Stuart Koch owning a furniture store, though Kenneth Koch’s birth certificate identifies Stuart Koch (misspelled Stewart) as the owner of a clothing store. Karen Koch, email correspondence with author, February 16, 2015. 17. As described by Louis E. Keefer in his history of the ASTP, Scholars in Foxholes (52, 96). One of Koch’s fellow ASTP recruits was Henry Kissinger, who studied engineering at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania (Keefer, Scholars in Foxholes, 99).

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While studying engineering, Koch kept writing poetry, and he also happened to take a course with the linguist (and later senator) S. I. Hayakawa, who was on faculty at Illinois Institute of Technology from 1939 to 1948. Hayakawa may be best known today as a writer for his 1949 book Language in Thought and Action, a popular book on semantics and cognition based on his earlier book, Language in Action, which had been published in 1941 as a Book-­of-­the-­Month Club selection. Language in Action had been written to enlighten people about the dangers of propaganda and to popularize the general semantics theory of Alfred Korzybski, with whom Hayakawa had studied. Korzybski’s key insight was that the sign is not the referent, or, in the phrase he coined, “The map is not the territory.”18 In an essay for i09, Lee Konstantinou called Korzybski “probably the most important influence on science fiction you’ve never heard of,” citing the impact of general semantics on the work of Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Frank Herbert, and Philip K. Dick.19 General semantics offered a complex, historically minded philosophy of language that sought to redefine the human relationship to culture, primarily by recognizing the socially constructed, contextual nature of language and ideas. As Korzybski and Hayakawa saw it, we create ideational “maps” of the world in language that can never fully describe the world and that often woefully misdescribe it, thus demanding a rigorously critical detachment toward language. Hayakawa, a published poet and working critic originally trained as an English professor, was interested not only in the critique of language but also in its practice, in how poets could “create new ways of thinking that bring us to terms with a changing world.”20 In an insightful 1946 essay on “Poetry and Advertising,” Hayakawa discusses the problem of how modern poets might do their work in a linguistic world awash in advertising. Comparing the “disinterested poetry” of art with the “venal poetry” of advertising, while recognizing that both shared common practice of “giving an imaginative, or symbolic, or ‘ideal’ dimension to life,” Hayakawa reads the “difficulty” of modern poetry as an effort to evade venality and the language of commerce.21 The essay ends with a call for a renewed understanding of poetry “as one of the most important of the communicators and creators of the values a civilization lives by,” to be arrived at by a denial of poetry as a space of autonomous 18. Korzybski quoted in Hayakawa, Language in Action, 194. 19. Konstantinou, “Eccentric Polish Count.” The influence of Korzybski and Hayakawa’s General Semantics on mid-­twentieth-­century American culture has yet to be fully understood, though Konstantinou makes an important beginning. 20. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, 142. 21. Hayakawa, “Poetry and Advertising,” 206.

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linguistic production and a recognition “that the problems of modern poetry are inextricably interwoven with the character of the semantic environment in which the disinterested poet is compelled to work, which in turn compels an examination of the technological, the sociological, the economic beliefs and practices that create that environment.”22 Hayakawa’s thesis on poetry and advertising calls to mind Wallace Stevens’s wartime efforts to think through the relationship between the “poetry of war” and the “poetry of the work of the imagination,” though Hayakawa gives up poetry’s autonomy much more readily. This conflict—between poetic autonomy and poetry “inextricably interwoven with the character of the semantic environment in which the . . . poet is compelled to work”—would reemerge in the poetry of Hayakawa’s student Kenneth Koch. Koch’s time thinking with Hayakawa about the relationship between language and society was brief, though later in life Koch recalled that he wrote a paper for Hayakawa on the language of law, and that his precocious opening line, “The law is a leathery word in the air,” caught Hayakawa’s attention.23 ASTP enrollment peaked in December 1943, at around 140,000 men, then underwent severe cutbacks in March 1944 due to a manpower shortage in the Pacific.24 What were needed were infantrymen to pit against Japanese defenses, not engineers thinking about linguistics and law. As Koch later wrote, “It was a time of general confusion / Of being a body hurled at a wall.”25 Fewer than 40,000 men were kept in ASTP in 1944; the rest were transferred to infantry divisions on the West Coast. Koch was assigned to E Company, Second Battalion, 381st Infantry Regiment, Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division, then training at Camp White, in the Rogue River Valley of southern ­Oregon.26 Not long after Koch’s arrival, the Ninety-­Sixth was designated as an amphibious assault division and tagged for deployment to the Pacific theater.27 In April 1944, the division deployed to California for amphibious training, and on July 21, it sailed out from San Francisco on five steamers. They spent three weeks in Oahu in logistical preparation and jungle training, then set sail 22. Hayakawa, “Poetry and Advertising,” 211–12. 23. Jordan Davis, conversation with author, November 13, 2014, New York City. For more on S. I. Hayakawa, see Haslam and Haslam, In Thought and Action. 24. Keefer, Scholars in Foxholes, 70, 157–88. 25. Koch, “To World War Two.” 26. Letters and poems from the period sometimes identify Koch as belonging to E Company, sometimes to F Company. The two units would have operated closely enough together, so we may assume one unit for the sake of simplicity. 27. Donald Dencker, in Love Company, his memoir of serving in the Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division, remembers being issued a “Jap Hunting License” at some time around April, when the unit went “Hot” (30).

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F i g u re 7 . US invasion fleet at harbor, Leyte, October 22, 1944. Photograph courtesy of National Archives (National Archives Identifier 80662621, National Archive reference number 111-­SCA-­2857–10).

the second week of September, ostensibly headed for Eniwetok and Yap, tiny Japanese-­held islands about a thousand miles east of the Philippines. After the division was under way, however, General James L. Bradley, the division commander, revealed their actual mission: they would be leading an amphibious assault to retake Leyte, in the Philippines, under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur. Leyte is a long, mountainous island, with a rugged ridge running roughly north-­south along the western coast. East of the mountains, the land descends through rough, hilly jungles and miles of low-­lying swamps before reaching the sea. The largest city on the island, Tacloban, lies on the northeast coast, and the American invasion targeted the eastern beaches along the northern third of the island from Tacloban south to the town of Dulag (fig. 7): X Corps would take Tacloban while XXIV Corps (including the Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division) would advance inland to the mountains. The battle front assigned to the Ninety-­Sixth Division lay between Dulag to the south and a line of hills to the north ascending inland west-­by-­northwest from Liberanan Head to 1,400-­foot-­high Catmon Hill, the highest landmark overlooking

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the beaches. The landing force was immense, and the scene epic. As historian Ronald Spector describes it: There is a photograph of part of the Leyte invasion fleet at anchor at Hollandia in early October 1944, probably taken from a low-­flying aircraft. . . . Ships stretch to the horizon like small black islands on the flat, calm sea. They fill the whole ocean. Nothing but ships and white cumulous [sic] clouds can be seen receding off into the grey distance. . . . Four hundred seventy-­one ships sailed from Hollandia, another 267 from Manus in the Admiralties; together they carried over 160,000 troops with their equipment and supplies. Battleships, cruisers, escort carriers, and destroyers from Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet provided the escort for the invasion convoys, while Halsey’s Third Fleet fast-­carrier task forces ranged the waters north and east of the Philippines, delivering their deadly air strikes against targets on Luzon.28

The 382nd and 383rd Regiments of the Ninety-­Sixth Division led the assault, landing at Leyte on October 20, 1944. The landing went smoothly, with the Ninety-­Sixth meeting little initial resistance. The primary lines of Japanese defense lay well back from the beaches, in the towns west of the swamps (Tabontabon, Tabugnon, and San Vincente) and in the line of hills between XXIV Corps and X Corps (Liberanan Head, Labir Hill, and Catmon Hill). Over the first few days of the invasion, most of the Ninety-­Sixth Division bogged down in the inland swamps, and a series of inconclusive fights left the Japanese in control of the high ground around Catmon Hill.29 First Battalion, 383rd Regiment fought through Japanese fortifications to take Liberanan Head on October 22, then held it against fierce counterattack. On October 27, a company-­sized combat patrol (B Company, First Battalion, 383rd Regiment) advanced onto Labir Hill but was repulsed by Japanese machine-­gun and mortar fire. Nine men were killed and thirty-­three wounded. Koch’s unit, the 381st Regiment (led by Colonel Michael “Screamin’ Mike” Halloran), had been held in reserve until October 25, then was thrown into a pronged assault on Labir Hill on October 28, with orders to take Catmon Hill behind it. First Battalion, 381st Regiment attempted to take Labir Hill from 28. Spector, Eagle against the Sun, 426. 29. An analysis by Major Claudius M. Easley Jr. at the US Army’s Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, concluded that General Bradley’s lack of reconnaissance and his stiff-­necked commitment of the main mass of his soldiers to slow, pointless slogging through empty swamp was a grave error (“Operations of the 96th Infantry Division”). Luckily for the Ninety-­Sixth Division (and Koch), Japanese resistance in the area was so light that General Bradley’s tactical blunder wasn’t fateful.

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the eastern, seaward side, but was repulsed by heavy sniper and machine-­gun fire, while Koch’s battalion (Second Battalion, 381st Regiment) moved up to the positions held by the 383rd Regiment and, supported by a massive barrage of artillery fire, took Labir Hill.30 “Just after dark on October 28th,” recalled veteran Donald Dencker, “a ty‑ phoon struck the island,” turning the battlefield to mud and the men’s foxholes into frigid tubs of filthy water.31 “That was about the most miserable night we ever spent,” remembered Captain John E. Bryers. “The only thing that could have made it worse would have been cold, and that came the next night from the winds atop the hill,” winds reaching speeds up to seventy miles per hour.32 The next morning, forty-­five tanks from the 780th Tank Battalion delivered direct fire into the last Japanese positions on the eastern side of Liber Hill, supporting the First Battalion, 381st Regiment’s assault on the seaward approaches. Koch’s battalion set off early in the cold wind, assaulting up the ridge to the peak of Catmon Hill (fig. 8), only to find the Japanese positions there largely abandoned. They took the top of the hill against minor resistance. The two battalions dug in, then spent the next two days hunting down stragglers and blowing up Japanese caves.33 “We were supposed to take a hill, Catmont [sic] Hill, where the Japanese had just wiped out a battalion of US soldiers,” Koch recounted. “Luckily the Japanese had left. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I had my bayonet fixed. I was very lazy and had the rifle slung over my shoulder. My bayonet hit a hornet’s next [sic], and a stream of hornets went after me. I screamed and fell down. My glasses flew off, I knew not where, in the dense jungle foliage. We were thirty feet in the air, walking on the tops of trees. The only person behind me in the company was a hillbilly corporal from Oklahoma. ‘C’mon Cock’— they all pronounced my name Cock—‘get your fuckin’ ass outta here.’ ‘But my glasses . . .’ ‘I don’t care about your mother-­fuckin’ glasses. Get up or you’re dead.’ He was right.” Later Koch reported to the commander of the company, “the only one in the whole battalion who called me Coke instead of Cock,” and explained that he couldn’t see without his glasses. Might his next combat assignment be deferred until a replacement pair could be obtained? “Sorry, we’re under strength,” the commander . . . replied. “Dismissed.” “But—” “Dis30. Davidson, Deadeyes, 33. 31. Dencker, Love Company, 99. 32. Bryers quoted in Davidson, Deadeyes, 33. 33. “In the entire catmon hill area covered by the 381st Infantry, a total of 53 pillboxes, 17 caves and numerous smaller emplacements were destroyed by demolition” (Easley, “Operations of the 96th Infantry Division,” 31).

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F i g u re 8 . Troops from the 381st Infantry Regiment, Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division, advance on Catmon Hill (1944). “We were thirty feet in the air, walking on the tops of trees,” Kenneth Koch recalled. Photograph courtesy of National Archives (National Archives Identifier 80662408, National Archive reference number 111-­SCA-­2856–191).

missed!” “So I fought the whole campaign without being able to see,” Koch explained. “I don’t know what he thought I’d accomplish. Maybe he thought I’d write another Iliad.”34

This incident calls to mind the story of the hornets’ nest in Norman Mailer’s 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead. In Mailer’s novel, a solitary patrol is making its way up a mountain into the Japanese rear, driven by their sadistic leader, Sergeant Croft. Having suffered casualties straining to complete what turns out to be a pointless mission, the patrol are nearly to the mountain’s 34. Koch quoted in Lehman, Last Avant-­Garde, 42. Ron Padgett remembered Koch telling the story slightly differently, though still as a comic routine. According to Padgett, there were no hornets, but Koch had gotten whacked in the face by a branch while his platoon trudged through the jungle up the hill. Koch yelled to the corporal in front of him that he couldn’t see and the corporal said over his shoulder, “We’ll see you back at the camp, Cock.” Jordan Davis recounted that Koch said a malicious sergeant broke his glasses (J. Davis, conversation with author). Another version of this story turns up in one of the poems in Koch, New Addresses, “To Carelessness.”

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crest when Croft accidentally kicks a hornets’ nest. The riled hornets attack, sending the platoon screaming back down the mountain.35 The attack was based on an actual event experienced by Mailer on one of the few (or perhaps the only) patrols he ever went on.36 As Mary Dearborn interprets the story, “It was a quintessential army experience: a futile mission, the men defeated by something other than the expected enemy, decidedly anticlimactic. Yet. . . . There was a kind of elusive nobility in the incident that moved the novelist.”37 Both Mailer and Koch pre­sent their stories of a hornet attack as deflationary and ironic. For Mailer, the hornet attack is symptomatic of the way that the oppression and stupidity of the military throw into relief the essential nobility of the human individual. For Koch, however, the hornet attack serves as an illustration of his own misfit with military life and an emblem of an absurd comic fate that damns and saves beyond moral logic, as in the last lines of “To Carelessness,” which recuperate Koch’s carelessness through the analogous carelessness of an anonymous Japanese soldier: Later the same day, I stepped on a booby trap That was badly wired. You Had been there too. Thank you. It didn’t explode.38

For Mailer, the horrors of war not only highlight the virtue of the suffering individual but also provide the opportunity for that virtue to shine tragically forth. For Koch, on the other hand, the horrors of war are misfortunes to be comically endured. From October 30, when the beachhead was declared secure, to November 8, the Ninety-­Sixth Division was mainly involved in “mopping up operations,” which is one of those military euphemisms that make the awful sound banal. “Mopping up” in this case meant combat patrols through swamps and jungles, long marches up and down steep ravines in tropical rain and typhoons, ambushes and assaults on Japanese positions, and generally living like an animal, on constant alert for the enemy. As Davidson observes, “The story of these . . . patrols is not one of fighting as it is one of hard marches up and down steep trails, of leeches by the thousands, of dysentery, dengue 35. Mailer, Naked and Dead, 699–700. 36. According to Mailer’s biographer Mary Dearborn, the patrol in question took place on Luzon, near the Agno River (Dearborn, Mailer, 42). Mailer was a cook in the 112th Cavalry Regimental Combat Team, which landed on Leyte in November and was later transferred to Luzon. 37. Dearborn, Mailer, 43. 38. Koch, “To Carelessness,” in Collected Poems, 601.

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fever and jungle rot, of laboriously packing supplies on tired backs.”39 Donald Dencker recalled, “Men were being sent to the hospital daily from Company L as a result of being wet almost all of the time. . . . As for myself, I could tell I was losing weight, probably 10 pounds already, but for some reason I had not become sick, except for dysentery. I could not fail to notice that my fatigue pants and shirt had started to rot apart.”40 For Koch, a slight, anxious young man now all but blinded by his lack of glasses, the “mopping up” must have been nightmarish. Imagine being in an alien jungle, far from home, full of people who mean to kill you, and imagine that all you can see are blurs of color and shadow. Faces blend into each other, roots blend into the ground, and enemy soldiers blend into trees. Without his glasses, Koch would have been worse than useless, incapable of protecting himself and a danger to his fellow soldiers. Koch had been so desperate while out on patrol, he told Ron Padgett, that anytime he heard firing he would fall to the ground and start shooting wildly into the jungle.41 Meanwhile, sixty thousand Japanese reinforcements had landed on Leyte’s west coast, and the Ninety-­Sixth was soon sent into the mountains to stop them. The terrain there was “characterized by a succession of ridges, separated by gorges up to four hundred feet deep,” Davidson describes. “At places there were vertical drops of two hundred feet on the steep banks. Obviously, such ground could only be crossed by foot troops, and supplies had to be hand-­ carried forward of the battalion bases. The ridges were covered by reed grass about eight feet tall, and often the troops were forced to cut their way through. There were trails that wandered aimlessly from one native hut to another, and on the bigger ones the Japs had dug spider holes every twenty feet.”42 On November 8, Koch’s battalion headed west, with F Company and elements of G Company moving up onto Malgnon Ridge, where they encountered Japanese fighters. The two companies withdrew and dug in, occupying a bivouac formerly held by the Japanese. Another typhoon hit the island that night, confusing some Japanese soldiers who, not knowing their unit had pulled out, wandered into the American lines and were killed. On November 11, F and G Companies attacked Japanese emplacements north and west of Buri, taking minor casualties. The next morning, November 12, Koch’s company joined the other two companies in the Dagami Heights and moved west with them deeper into the 39. Davidson, Deadeyes, 69. 40. Dencker, Love Company, 110–11. 41. Ron Padgett, telephone conversation with author, November 18, 2014. 42. Davidson, Deadeyes, 55.

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mountains, encountering fierce Japanese resistance. Koch’s company found itself in an extended firefight, under attack by snipers. “Before the fight could be brought to a climax,” however, “the battalion was ordered back from the ridge, and was replaced by the 17th Infantry of the 7th Division. It had been one of the stiffest battalion engagements.”43 Koch’s role in the fight likely would have been providing cover fire with his BAR light machine gun. As he later wrote: What would Anne Marie Goldsmith Have thought of me, If instead of asking her to dance I had put my BAR to my shoulder And shot her in the face.44

After being relieved, the 381st passed into the Sixth Army Reserve and spent about a week in the rear (fig. 9). On November 23, the 381st was sent back into the Dagami Heights against heavy Japanese defenses. The First and Third Battalions were thrown into direct assault on the Japanese positions, while “Screaming Mike” Halloran’s Second Battalion was sent probing along the north flank for a pass through to Ormoc. Company E set up a forward base near Mount Lubi, out of which they sent patrols. They failed to find a pass through to Ormoc (there wasn’t one), but on November 29, they discovered a Japanese emplacement. The next morning E Company moved up to attack, then set up an ambush along a trail near a stream. They occupied this ambush site for about a week, killing more than sixty Japanese soldiers without a single US casualty.45 “As machines make ice,” Koch later wrote, “We made dead enemy soldiers, in / Dark jungle alleys, with weapons in our hands / That produced fire and kept going straight through.”46 This was E Company’s last major engagement on Leyte. They were pulled back to the base camp, where they supported G Company for the next few weeks. Although this mission was a break from front-­line combat, it wasn’t soft, and it wasn’t made any easier by yet another typhoon that swept through the Pacific on December 18.47 On Christmas Day, General MacArthur declared organized resistance in the Philippines over. 43. Davidson, Deadeyes, 45–47. 44. Koch, “To World War Two.” The BAR was effectively a light machine gun, assigned one or two to a squad, best used for area and suppression fire rather than individually aimed shots (the perfect weapon for a half-­blind, frightened private). 45. Davidson, Deadeyes, 57. 46. Koch, “To World War Two.” 47. This historic typhoon sank several ships in the Third Fleet, as dramatized in The Caine Mutiny.

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F i g u re 9 . Men from the 382nd Infantry Regiment, Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division, move back from the front at Dagami, Leyte (1944). Photograph courtesy of National Archives (National Archives Identifier 80662408, National Archive reference number 111-­SCA-­2851–13).

The whole battalion was soon pulled off the line and deployed to a bivouac at Patok, a small mountain village northwest of Dagami, where they lived in Filipino-­built shacks and constructed a small airstrip.48 There, Koch was probably able to catch up on his reading, and he may have even found kindred spirits among all the “hillbillies”: the Ninety-­Sixth Division newspaper, the Deadeye Dispatch, featured doggerel from soldiers, and one special issue, Deadeye Features, closed with a back page reminiscent of surrealist collage (fig. 10).49 If Koch had seen the text, which references Gertrude Stein, Objectivism, and Immanuel Kant, perhaps it might have eased his feelings of alienation. In any case, this idyll came to end on February 8, 1945, when the Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division received orders for Okinawa. Barbaric Poetry: From Okinawa to the Cold War On April 1, 1945, which happened to be both Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day, the 381st Regiment of the Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division landed on the 48. Davidson, Deadeyes, 71. 49. Ninety-­Sixth Division Information and Education Office, Deadeye Features, January 20, 1945.

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F i g u re 1 0 . “Visions,” a surrealist collage, in Deadeye Features, January 20, 1945. Photograph courtesy of Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division Deadeyes Association.

beaches of Okinawa. The beachhead assault was relatively easy, but the invasion soon descended into some of the most awful fighting of the war, on par with Stalingrad or the sack of Berlin. E. B. Sledge, who called the fighting on Okinawa “an appalling chaos,”50 described the indescribable horror of fighting day after day on muddy ridges covered with maggot-­filled corpses: 50. Sledge, With the Old Breed, 227.

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“We didn’t talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew almost to the point of screaming. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane. But I saw much of it there on Okinawa and to me the war was insanity.”51 The 381st Infantry was one of the main combat regiments in the Okinawa campaign, fighting with Sledge’s First Marines, suffering extreme casualties, and participating in the assault on Mount Shuri, with E Company right in the lead. Private First Class Koch never landed: the night before the 381st hit the beaches, Koch was diagnosed with infectious hepatitis and designated to be sent rearward. Infectious hepatitis (hepatitis A, or jaundice) and hookworm were common among soldiers in the South Pacific because of humid jungle conditions and primitive sanitation. Koch must have had a very serious case of it to be held back. It was, in the event, an act of grace. After the war, Koch suffered nightmare flashbacks of the night he spent on the ship off the beaches of Okinawa, waiting for word to come whether or not he would be forced to land. As he wrote in his journals in the spring of 1946, “That is what I thought about last night: the unbelievable moments off Okinawa when the doctor was making sure I had jaundice and therefore couldn’t make the landing. . . . I lay terrified and confused in my comfortable Cincinnati bed. It was actually hard to persuade myself that I wasn’t on the ship off Okinawa waiting for the word just then. The nervousness never went completely away till I fell asleep.”52 From Okinawa he was sent to Guam, then to Saipan, where he was reclassified as a clerk-­typist and assigned to work in the headquarters office. He got new glasses.53 Koch remained on Saipan until he was sent back the United States in January 1946. While on Saipan, he took a course in calculus at an extension school set up by the US Army, had an apparently chaste love affair with a Red Cross nurse from Willamantic, Connecticut, named Bettye Schreiber, and received 51. Sledge, With the Old Breed, 282. 52. Koch, “May 14, 1946,” Journal March 11–­May 26, 1946, TS, Box 89/1, Kenneth Koch Papers 1932–2007. 53. Koch, “A Day for History,” ca. 1945, TS, Box 1/6, “army poems (1943–1945),” Kenneth Koch Papers, 1939–1995. “A Day for History” begins: “The first thing I did on V-­E day was go on sick call to get some glasses made. I had broken my only pair on the Battle Reconditioning Course here at the replacement depot and didn’t want to go back to Okinawa without any. I knew what it was like to be without glasses in combat as I had broken my only pair in the first week of the Leyte campaign.”

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news that one of his buddies had been killed by friendly fire on Okinawa, which event inspired the short poem “Elegy for Jim Gellar.”54 He also began preparing his application for Harvard University, reflecting on his military experience in his application essay as follows: When assigned as a rifleman in the infantry, I felt the army had done a masterful job of misclassification which I resented. . . . This unpleasantness was ameliorated by the esprit de corps of the company and the feeling of immediacy of value to the war effort which I possessed as an infantryman. The sudden feeling of fear of death and confusion as to meanings and purposes made the period which began with leaving the States and ended with the landing on Leyte take on a nightmarish quality. Once in action, fatigue, hunger, and other physical discomforts, added to the fact that my job was to kill or be killed made it almost impossible for me to think of anything besides day to day survival, devotion to the men of my company, and the alleviation of pain and discomfort. With the end of the campaign came unbelievable relief. When I was evacuated from Okinawa and again when I was reclassified on Saipan I had mingled feelings of extreme joy at being spared and guilt at leaving my friends. Life was very pleasant, by contrast, in the headquarters unit, although tedious. All things considered, I would say that aside from my formal schooling in ASTP I gained very little from being in the army in the States, but that my combat experiences broadened and matured my outlook a great deal.55

After getting out of the army in January but before matriculating to Harvard in the summer, Koch was footloose. He spent some time living in Greenwich Village, visited Boston, and went back to Cincinnati. It was an emotional period, fraught with angst and survivor guilt, and complicated by his transitioning from army life back to civilian life. Within a few months, though, he landed on his feet amid a mob of aspirant young veterans offered a shot in the upper ranks of society through the social-­mobility experiment of the GI Bill. As Brad Gooch describes Harvard’s 1946 incoming class: This sizable influx of veterans, constituting 71 percent of all students and pushing the total enrollment of Harvard College up to a record 5,435, radically changed the appearance of the Ivy League campus that third week in Septem54. Koch, “April 24, 1946,” and “April 25, 1946,” Journal March 11–­May 26, 1946. See also “Elegy for Jim, Gellar,” ca. 1945, TS, Box 1/6, “army poems (1943–1945),” Kenneth Koch Papers, 1939–1995. 55. Koch, “Autobiographical Fragment,” ca. 1946, TS, Box 89/1, Kenneth Koch Papers 1932– 2007. According to Stauffer and colleagues, a significant majority of veterans—approximately two-­thirds—felt that their military service hurt them more than it helped them (Stauffer, Lumsdaine, et al., American Soldier, 2:611).

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ber. The traditional prewar Harvard ceremony of seventeen-­year-­old beardless youths arriving in the Yard from select preparatory high schools in the Northeast, dressed in white bucks, unloading Vuitton bags from the backs of their convertibles, was lost in a surge of new, and often older, faces searching for their assigned rooms in squat red brick dormitories toward the north end that were reserved for veterans. . . . Double-­deckers were moved into dorms to accommodate the extra roommates, although even then a certain number of latecomers were forced to sleep on cots, shipboard fashion, in the Indoor Athletic Building basketball court. Lines formed everywhere—to eat, to cash checks, to receive Veterans’ Administration book authorizations. As the term began, seats on windowsills or in aisles were at a premium at choice lectures. The school newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, predictably kept referring to this turbulence as a “siege” or “invasion.”56

Cambridge in 1946 was a nexus of incredible intellectual ferment. Powerful currents in American life over the next half century had their fount there, and key cultural and political players jostled through the veteran-­packed halls and quads, sometimes as professors, sometimes as students. The immediate postwar years were a time of sweeping global transformation, and Harvard was, for that moment, a pivot on which the world turned. To take one example, Harvard’s 1947 commencement address—delivered on June 5, almost a year exactly after Koch arrived on campus—happened to be one of the most important speeches in the twentieth century: Secretary of State George Marshall’s unveiling of the European Recovery Plan. Marshall’s speech was, according to Joseph M. Jones, a State Department official who served under Marshall, one of three marking “a dazzling process which within fifteen weeks laid the basis for a complete conversion of American foreign policy and of the American people toward the world.”57 These three speeches were Truman’s address to Congress on March 12, 1947, announcing the “Truman Doctrine,” an explicit policy of political and economic intervention across the globe in defense of US interests, understood broadly as meaning the preservation of open markets, the backing of pro-­US world leaders, and the containment of communism; Dean Acheson’s speech to the Delta Council in Cleveland, Mississippi, May 8, 1947, which asserted the need for the US government to engage in certain kinds of trade regulation to ensure the survival and vitality of Western European economies; and Marshall’s commencement address at Harvard. Gary Wills sees these three speeches as key moments in what he calls the “annus mirabilis” in the development of the 56. Gooch, City Poet, 95–96. 57. Joseph Jones, Fifteen Weeks, 8.

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complex interlockings of unitary executive power, the burgeoning security-­ intelligence state apparatus, the newly dominant military-­industrial complex, and a permanently militarized society all taking shape around the central fact of executive control of nuclear weapons.58 These developments, Wills argues, metastasized American empire into global hegemony and created the national security state we live with today. Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery were all students at Harvard when Marshall gave his epochal speech; they all emerged as poets in the militarized, Cold War world that Marshall helped create. They had lived through the total mobilization of the United States during World War II only to discover that this mobilization did not end with the war to which it had been a response but rather evolved new targets and new strategies of enlistment as the American nuclear national security state developed its own aggressive inertia. Harvard in the late 1940s was both a postwar pastoral and a nerve center for the emerging national security state, and the moment must have seemed at once a dizzying opening of utopian possibility and a shocking narrowing and purgation in reaction to the war just past. Paul Goodman describes the period, in his influential essay “Advance-­Guard Writing, 1900–1950,” as being characterized by a kind of shell shock: “One would not call the aftermath of World War II buoyant and confident of progress. Probably one could not even call it an age of anxiety, as the ’thirties were anxious. Rather, from the clinical point of view, one sees the phenomena of shell-­shock, a clinging to adjustment and security of whatever quality, and a complete inability to bear anxiety of any kind, to avoid panic and collapse.”59 Within five years of the war’s end, F. O. Mattheissen would kill himself rather than be outed as a communist and homosexual, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be executed, a war would erupt in Korea, Soviet atomic and hydrogen bombs would be tested, and the Cold War would be in full swing. A time of supposed “peace,” the immediate postwar years were fraught with uncertainty and violence. Thus as Koch, Ashbery, and O’Hara set about beginning their careers as poets in deliberately “avant-­garde” fashion, the problem of the relation between politics and poetry was at once urgent and unmanageable—no less than it had been when Wallace Stevens felt compelled to negotiate between the poetry of war and the poetry of the work of the imagination, and in fact even more morally ambiguous. Whether understood as a question of the lyric’s “virginal” autonomy, in accordance with Theodor Adorno’s “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957); through Paul Goodman’s essay “Advance-­Guard Writing, 58. Gary Wills, Bomb Power. 59. Goodman, “Advance-­Guard Writing,” 371.

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1900–1950” (1951), so important for O’Hara’s thinking, in which “advance-­ guard” writing is a practice of cultural revolution; or in somatic terms through a concern with the importance of individual breath as opposed to collective regimentation (as with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson, for example), the production of American poetry in the immediate postwar era confronted intense political challenges.60 Between the embarrassment of Ezra Pound’s fascism and the aridity of Eliot’s anti-­Semitic Anglicism, the dominant strain of American modernist poetry had revealed disturbing sympathies with reactionary and totalitarian thought. On the other hand, the formalists around Cambridge in the late 1940s, such as Richard Wilbur, Richard Eberhardt, Delmore Schwartz, and John Ciardi, however accomplished their work, must have seemed to jaded ex-­GIs like Koch and O’Hara not merely complicit in the new repression but actively obstructionist. Williams, Auden, and Stevens represented lyric projects largely uncorrupted by the war but all the same belonging to another era. While Williams’s objectivist valence retained appeal, the apocalyptic Romanticism of Spring and All must have seemed grotesque in the radiant light of Hiroshima. Auden’s ironic, Augustan desuetude offered another possibility, but only if it could be translated into a new register for a triumphant global American empire, something Ashbery didn’t accomplish until the 1970s, with The Double Dream of Spring, when that very empire seemed to be in decline. And there was no going back to Stevens’s prewar “complacencies of the peignoir,” or even the old “supreme fiction”— Stevens’s cherished ideal of an autonomous poetry had been wrecked by terror bombing, the Holocaust, and the red scare. “Never in history has it been so difficult to say anything with enthusiasm or joy or conviction without running into the danger of sounding as if you were trying to sell some thing,” Koch’s teacher Hayakawa wrote in 1946, and in the postwar cultural field, the things you risked selling as a poet weren’t just refrigerators and new cars but war, surging American nationalism, and a militarized security state.61 The tension between the two systems of making metaphor that so troubled Stevens during World War II remained intense, with the added problem that economic imperialism turned everything into war matériel. Unrelenting postwar consumerism jarred harshly with sacrificial nationalism, but postwar American economic imperialism (exemplified in the Marshall Plan) joined the two together in a hybrid capitalist war machine, a “military-­industrial complex.” Just as Bugs Bunny redirected consumer capitalist production to fight a race war against the Japanese with his 60. See Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”; Goodman, “Advance-­Guard Writing.” 61. Hayakawa, “Poetry and Advertising,” 209.

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“Good Rumor” ice cream bars, American cultural and economic production that had been mobilized by World War II was redirected into a global ideological war against the Russians. Williams might have said “no ideas but in things,” but in the postwar world, even writing about things meant participating in the heroic ideals of a militarized America. How an American poet might carry on the lyric’s dialectic of individual identity and collective discourse in this almost totalitarian atmosphere was a serious problem for anyone beginning to write in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The stifling air so choked John Ashbery that he remembers not being able to write at all: “In the early 50’s, I went through a period of intense depression and doubt. I couldn’t write for a couple of years. I don’t know why. It did coincide with the beginnings of the Korean War, the Rosenberg case and McCarthyism. Though I was not an intensely political person, it was impossible to be happy in that kind of climate. It was a nadir.”62 John Shoptaw argues convincingly that Ashbery’s response was to develop a poetics of evasion, misrepresentation, and cryptographic dissimulation: “During these volatile years, misrepresentation was not only an aesthetic principle but a survival tactic.”63 Yet Ashbery’s own narrative suggests a direction less through misrepresentation as such than through pure language, a new understanding of the relation between signal and noise, music and silence. As Ashbery recounted, “I was jolted out of this [depression] by going with Frank O’Hara— I think it was New Year’s Day, 1952—to a concert by David Tudor of John Cage’s ‘Music of Changes.’ It was a series of dissonant chords, mostly loud, with irregular rhythm. It went on for over an hour and seemed infinitely extendable. I felt profoundly refreshed after listening to that. I started to write again shortly afterwards.”64 Ashbery didn’t come across Cage’s work in 1952 randomly. He and Koch had been exploring avant-­garde poetics together since 1946, when Ashbery introduced Koch to the work of Alfred Jarry by saying, “I think we should be a little crazier.”65 Both poets, along with Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and others, had been looking for ways out of and around the forms of subjectivity demanded by the continued total mobilization of postwar national security state culture, searching for a language that was neither reliant on prewar conventions nor assimilable to debased political and commercial discourses. Kenneth’s Koch’s first major attempt at a solution in this vein was his surrealist revision of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the long poem “When 62. Ashbery quoted in Kostelanetz, “How to Be a Difficult Poet,” 20. 63. Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out, 5. 64. Quoted in Kostelanetz, “How to Be a Difficult Poet,” 20. 65. Quoted in Lehman, Last Avant-­Garde, 51.

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the Sun Tries to Go On” (written circa 1950 but not published until 1969). This poem dramatizes the problem of how a poet might “try to go on,” between the degraded language of advertising and the repugnant language of American imperialism, by turning to pure language, words as words, in a strategy influenced by Korzybski and Hayakawa’s general semantics, French surrealism, Raymond Roussel, and the similarly heady attempts of his friends. Yet even while Koch works toward a lucid insensibility across the poem’s “brightness and hardness of language,” he cannot help but signify.66 While parsing this long, rebarbative poem is beyond my scope here, my point is that as we consider how Koch worked to make sense of his experience at war—which included fighting the Japanese, having friends die, and coming to terms with his own mortality, in a period characterized by the emerging security state’s continued demands for total mobilization—we can understand Koch’s making nonsense as a strategy of resisting the politics of trauma, the politics of consumer culture, and the politics of Cold War nationalism all at once by working to integrate the violence of war into a comic, redemptive worldview.67 Alan Nadel argues in Containment Culture that the pervasive “normality” projected across American culture in the 1950s was a fantasy symptomatic “of the trauma caused by witnessing a Great Depression, a Second World War, an ascent to atomic power, and a fantasy-­like economic boom in less than one generation,” and if we take this argument as basically correct, we can understand Koch’s coded, evasive, comic poetry as a resistance to the recuperation of this trauma as a trauma, which is to say as an originary “primal scene” of identity formation.68 Almost as if he were taking for his guiding light Adorno’s apothegm that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Koch began writing barbaric poetry, in the oldest sense of the word—foreign, 66. Koch, “Biographical Essay,” n.d., TS, Box 251/1, Kenneth Koch Papers 1939–1995. 67. Freud on jests is illuminating here: “And with this the second preliminary stage of jokes sets in—the jest. It is now a question of prolonging the yield of pleasure from play, but at the same time of silencing the objections raised by criticism which would not allow the pleasurable feeling to emerge. There is only one way of reaching this end: the meaningless combination of words or the absurd putting together of thoughts must nevertheless have a meaning. The whole ingenuity of the joke-­work is summoned up in order to find words and aggregations of thoughts in which this condition is fulfilled. All the technical methods of jokes are already employed here—in jests; moreover linguistic usage draws no consistent line between a jest and a joke. What distinguishes a jest from a joke is that the meaning of the sentence which escapes criticism need not be valuable or new or even good; it need merely be permissible to say the thing in this way, even though it is unusual, unnecessary or useless to say it in this way. In jests what stands in the foreground is the satisfaction of having made possible what was forbidden by criticism.” Freud, Jokes, 158. 68. Nadel, Containment Culture, xi.

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gibberish, a kind of Language poetry avant la lettre—in the radical attempt to achieve a view of the world broad and comic enough that even nonsense could sing. Encoding War: “Sun Out” and “The Islands” While the arc of Koch’s career generally moved from obscurity to clarity, from the early antics of “When the Sun Tries to Go On” to the powerful simplicity of New Addresses, some of Koch’s earliest published poems were strikingly and openly autobiographical. The November 1945 issue of Poetry featured three, sent to the magazine during his convalescent stay on Saipan: “Poem for My Twentieth Birthday,” “Ladies for Dinner, Saipan,” and “The Trip from California.”69 The first poem commemorates his birthday on Leyte. It is a somewhat stolid and formal lyric account of the movement from innocence to experience, juxtaposing an image of crosses in an American military cemetery against “palm trees stalking like deliberate giants,” held together by the somewhat self-­piteous repetition “for my birthday.” The second poem is situated during Koch’s time on Saipan, describing his emotional reaction to a visit of what seem to be USO women, his “sudden secret anger at the wellmade symbols of sex, / Fear and rage for the unbelievable flesh.” The third poem is positioned last of the three so as to suggest the passage that most Pacific theater soldiers made on their way home through California, but since Koch didn’t make that passage until January 1946, it must refer instead to his passage west, toward the front, in 1944. In this poem, the feeling of going through California is described “as though you could place your hand in a ripe fruit and withdraw a beautiful afternoon.” Despite Koch’s success in publishing these poems, he must not have been satisfied with them, since he never reprinted them. They do seem somewhat conventional, but Koch may also have been put off by their direct address, especially once he got to Harvard and felt the need to distinguish himself from teachers and elders such as John Ciardi and Richard Eberhardt. Another early published poem, “Physics Lecture,” from the Winter 1944 issue of the University of Kansas City Review (under the name Jay Kenneth Koch), is more 69. Koch, “Poem for My Twentieth Birthday,” “Ladies for Dinner, Saipan,” and “The Trip from California.” These poems helped Koch get into Harvard but, ironically enough, not on their own merits. One of Koch’s recommenders, Murray Seasongood, a lawyer and Harvard alum who claimed to have been on the Advocate staff with Wallace Stevens, highly recommended Koch on the basis of some of his favorite lines—which happened to be from “There’s Margaret,” a poem by Dorothy Alyea that was printed beneath Koch’s.

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along the lines of the work Koch developed in the 1950s.70 As Koch learned to bend his metaphors, to shift more rapidly from one metaphor to another, and to allow metaphoric relationships to float free of fixed signification, we can see this kind of work transform into something much more radical, or as Koch wrote in his postwar notebooks, “lines of poetry which are actually meaningless on the surface level but which stay in the mind as sort of growing curve.”71 Koch’s connotations grow increasingly tenuous, counterintuitive, and cloaked, until his language becomes a shield that bends against and resists interpretation, a surface that hides complex depths. Such is the case with the poem “Sun Out.” Bananas, piers, limericks! I am postures Over there, I, are The lakes of delectation Sea, sea you! Mars and win-­ Some buffalo They thinly raft the plain, Common do It ice-­floes, hit-­and-­run drivers, The mass of the wind. Is that snow H-­ing at the door? And we Come in the buckle, a Vanquished distinguished Secret festival, relieving flights Of the black brave ocean.72

“Sun Out” was first published in Koch’s 1953 Tibor de Nagy collection Poems and now stands as the first lyric in his Collected Poems. In some ways, it is a perfect emblem of early Koch: it invokes Whitman, it begins with a list and ends with an enigma, and its language is relatively plain yet seemingly random and only sometimes normatively syntactical. It’s difficult to tell at first whether the poem is even supposed to make sense, though there is a clear emotional movement from excitement to sadness or elegy. When read in the context of Koch’s war experience, though, the poem reveals itself as a coded cubist meditation on commitment and valor in the South Pacific. With careful 70. Koch, “Physics Lecture.” 71. Koch, “May 26, 1946,” Journal March 11–­May 26, 1946. 72. Koch, “Sun Out,” in Collected Poems, 5.

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and informed reading, there is enough evidence to strongly suggest that “Sun Out” is a persona poem from the point of view of a Japanese kamikaze pilot. The first official kamikaze attacks of the war, in which Japanese pilots deliberately crashed dedicated planes into American warships, happened during the invasion of Leyte, on October 25, 1944, but in the days leading up to those attacks, desperate Japanese pilots had already begun turning damaged planes into missiles.73 One of the most dramatic examples of this was on the morning of October 24, when a damaged bomber crashed into a troop carrier anchored off the beach. The troop carrier caught fire and sank. Thirteen men died. Minutes later, another bomber dove into the fleet tug Sonoma ATO 12, which was tied up to the supply ship Augustus Thomas. Both ships sank. It is probable that Koch saw these first attacks and the ones that followed, since his regiment had been held in reserve until October 25 and didn’t leave the beach until October 27, and it is certain he would have heard about them. The kamikaze attacks remain notable today, and at the time they were seen as shocking evidence of Japanese fanaticism. As former intelligence officer William Owens recalls in his memoir of the Philippines: In Dulag [on Leyte] in the middle of an afternoon I heard a plane coming from over the mountains, coming directly toward us at less than a thousand feet up. It was Japanese but not a Zero. It was coming at an angle that would take it directly into a troop ship anchored offshore. It came closer, so close that I could see the pilot’s face, the set of his jaw, the white ceremonial scarf around his neck. His machine gun was strafing troops and dumps, so near that I could see where the bullets kicked up dirt. With a whistle of wings cutting through wind he crossed the beach. He kept on target and with a crash of metal on metal went nose first into the transport. Flame and smoke rose, first from the plane and then from the ship. Soldiers swung themselves over the rails and into the water. In a few minutes no more came over the rails. In a few minutes more the steel plates amidships were a shimmering red. A funeral pyre, the ship was gutted to the waterline. If sacrifice was a way to Yasukuni, the pilot had made it.74 Soldiers who reached the shore would not talk to me. They wandered in a daze, their words disconnected mutterings of fear and grief and hatred. A plane had been traded for a ship, one life for hundreds of lives, in a kind of action for which Americans had no understanding, no psychological defenses, nothing but angry determination to kill, kill, kill, and never take a prisoner. American soldiers relied on man and machine and vaguely perceived principles of loyalty and morality in a world in which the individual counted. 73. I rely here on Reilly, Kamikaze Attacks of World War II, 117–22. 74. Yasukuni is a Japanese shrine preserving and honoring the consecrated memory of soldiers and others who gave their lives for the nation, similar to Arlington National Cemetery in the United States.

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Japanese soldiers lived and fought and died under strict thought control, their minds filled with memorized slogans such as “Liberalism and individualism are the dirt which must be removed,” teachings dutifully set down in diaries and repeated in assemblies of any size.75

“Sun Out” makes good the act of sympathetic imagination which James Dickey could not quite bring himself to perform in “The Firebombing.” The poem’s title, “Sun Out,” invokes (in addition to Whitman) the Rising Sun of the Japanese flag, the directed energy of attack, the unity of the kamikaze pilot with the Japanese nation, and Japan’s then-­imminent defeat: the “Rising Sun” is going out and it is also streaming out, life by life, into the world. The kamikaze is the Rising Sun, becomes the Rising Sun, is one with the Rising Sun: he goes out to meet his death. The first stanza drifts in and out of a mock “Engrish,” the kind of off-­kilter homophonic disarrangement Koch first noticed while learning French in Aix-­en-­Provence.76 The first few lines, though, are less aural than imagistic, a kind of rebus. “Bananas” alludes to both the tropics and the shape of Japan. “Piers” invokes the beach from which Koch would have seen the kamikaze attacks, the maritime character of the war in the Pacific, and a caricature Japanese dialect pronunciation of banana “peels.” “Limericks” suggests a kind of poetry known for its rigorous formal conventions, much like Japanese tanka, renga, and haiku. This is an apt connection: according to historian Ivan Morris, the names of the subunits of the Kamikaze Special Attack Force were taken from a classical Japanese patriotic poem.77 The exclamation mark at the line’s end suggests the kind of nationalist fervor you’d expect a kamikaze to have, a commitment to willed action above and beyond normal battlefield sacrifice. Read: Japan! The next line, “I am postures,” very likely connotes the American stereotype of ritualized Japanese social practice such as bowing. The “I” indicates the speaking voice, the kamikaze pilot. The rest of the first stanza remains difficult to parse, though the “I/you” relationship is clear, “mars” may refer to war, and the phrase “winsome buffalo” surely refers to the carabao, the swamp-­loving water buffalo indigenous to the Philippine islands that, from above, would appear as tiny brown spots in a green sea, “thinly raft[ing] the plain.” 75. Owens, Eye-­Deep in Hell, 49. 76. “When I first went to France I was 25 years old. I knew French but not very well. I read a lot of French poetry and enjoyed reading it, even though I didn’t entirely understand it. And I was interested in this quality that a work of literature could have, that it could be so exciting and at the same time slightly incomprehensible. I wanted to get this kind of quality into my own work, the excitement and mystery of a language that is not entirely understood but that suggests a great deal” (“Biographical Essay”). 77. Morris, Nobility of Failure, 289–90.

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The opening lines of the second stanza strongly suggest the kamikaze himself, or “divine wind”: the ships are the ice floes (evoking the HMS Titanic and shipwreck generally) and the kamikazes are the “hit-­and-­run drivers,” the “mass of the [divine] wind.” “Is that snow / H–­ing at the door?” dreamily dramatizes the moment of impact in a perspective that blends the identity of the speaker with the American sailors manning the kamikaze’s target. H–­ing may mean “Hell–­ing,” as expletives were often written in that period with a dash, and “helling” is a near homophone of “hailing.” The kamikaze’s impact, with its fireball and explosions, would be hellish, and the kamikaze is a storm knocking at the door. The last few lines, after the clotted semiotic and semantic tensions of the first stanza, unfold in an almost stately series of clauses. “We,” meaning kamikazes, “come in the buckle”—that is, the buckling steel of the ship’s hull broken open by the kamikaze’s impact, “a vanquished distinguished / Secret festival, relieving flights / Of the black brave ocean.” The kamikaze pilots are distinguished at the very moment they are vanquished: their glory comes from self-­sacrifice. In the penultimate line, “relieving” is a near-­homophonic dodge for “reliving,” and the last two lines very probably refer to the historical origins of the name kamikaze: it came from the name of the typhoons that scattered invading Mongol fleets in the thirteenth century. The kamikaze pilots’ desperate attacks were relieving pressure on the Japanese defense of the homeland precisely by reliving “flights / Of the black brave ocean.” Understanding “Sun Out” as a persona poem about a kamikaze pilot helps us see much of Koch’s work—such as the mock epic Ko; plays such as Pericles, Bertha, and George Washington Crossing the Delaware; and works such as “The Circus” (I) and The Red Robins—in a new light, inflected by the racial politics of World War II and questions of heroism and national identity which only emerge properly in light of Koch’s war experience.78 Again and again throughout his career, Koch subverts and parodies the generic conventions of the war 78. “Caricature, parody and travesty (as well as their practical counterpart, unmasking) are directed against people and objects which lay claim to authority and respect, which are in some sense ‘sublime,’” writes Freud (Jokes, 248). The Red Robins bears an especially odd reference to Koch’s war, in among the South Seas/Far East pseudomilitary adventurism that seems to be an obvious parody of the Philippines campaign: the hero and villain of The Red Robins are, respectively, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Some argument could certainly be made for understanding their opposition in mythological terms, but the clearest explanation has to do with dates of life-­and-­death importance to Koch during the Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division’s campaign in the Philippines. General MacArthur declared organized Japanese resistance on Leyte finished on December 25, 1944, and the Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division landed on Okinawa on April 1, 1945, Easter Sunday. Hence, in The Red Robins, Santa Claus stands in as a generally benevolent quasi-­ military authority, an ersatz MacArthur, while the Easter Bunny is a purely malignant force, the Japanese Army at Okinawa, or, more abstractly, death itself.

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story or the war poem. An especially vivid example of this is “The Islands,” which was first published in the fifth (and final) issue of Locus Solus, in the winter of 1961–62, then appeared in Koch’s 1962 collection Thank You and Other Poems.79 It is highly probable that this poem is a response to Frank O’Hara’s 1958 poem “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births),” especially O’Hara’s recollection of sexual transgression in the South Pacific.80 In that poem, O’Hara’s narrative is oblique but straightforward, recounting the story of an African American cook killed for fooling around with a native woman.81 The black soldier’s castration and death are presented as grim punchlines (“he has had his balls sewed into his mouth” and “he had a killing desire for women”), and they serve as an emblematic tale of punishment for transgressive sexual desire, which story is called back to in the closing lines of the poem by O’Hara’s revolutionary montage, where he imagines “a barque of slaves” turning on their captors, heralding a hero “born in pain” who “will be the wings of an extraordinary liberty.” In contrast to O’Hara’s narrative of sexual and racial violence avenged by political revolution, Koch offers a much cloudier story involving a young native woman named Sylvia, her father, two different army officers, an army sergeant named Leonard, an “unidentified sixteen-­year-­old boy,” a child or young man named Voss, the narrator, and the narrator’s friend Harry. Ever more minor characters drift in and out of the disjointed, polyphonic narrative, in which shifts of time, location, perspective, and speaker happen line to line, within lines, often without explicit marking: Andy, a king, a captain, Eddie, a consul, a Lieutenant Governor, a “Chinese miss / Named ‘Jolie,’” and someone named “Lillian Liberty” all show up and disappear without explanation. Koch’s poem is grim, sordid, unpleasant, and confusing, resisting legibility not only through marked and unmarked polyphony and a confusion of characters but also through seemingly unrelated asides, elision, parataxis, and misleading homophony. At the same time, the poem contains moments of surprising and surreal beauty: “The sea lilac of angry fudge,” for instance, or “She was a silver / Blade and he was like a hammer / Roses cannon dawn.” The loose, colloquial inflection of the main voice gives the poem the character of a dramatic monologue, the play of other voices creates a not unpleasant sense of aural collage, and the repetition of “joss,” “Voss,” and other long o sounds create a melodious through-­line. Poetry resistant to interpretive closure is nothing new, but there’s something special in what Koch is doing here in that 79. Koch, “The Islands,” in Collected Poems, 150–55. 80. O’Hara, Selected Poems, 130–39. 81. Gooch describes the background for this incident in City Poet (82–83). For more on Frank O’Hara’s experience of World War II and how it appeared in his poems, see Seiler, “Francis O’Hara, War Poet.”

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“The Islands” is explicitly narrative, and its resistance to closure creates a kind narrative suspense, a sense of mystery and rumor that heightens the poem’s mood, which is that of a shameful episode being recounted for entertainment. The lack of closure and clarity also prevents strong identification with any of the characters and thereby helps suspend moral judgment. What the poem evokes is a feeling at once of fascination and repulsion. A kind of colonialist horror story like something out of Joseph Conrad by way of Max Jacob, “The Islands” recalls the Lieutenant Cable/Liat storyline from James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, in which the native girl Liat is offered by her mother for marriage to the Princeton-­educated Lieutenant Cable, who then rapes and abandons the girl. Yet where Rodgers and Hammerstein in their musical version of South Pacific play Michener’s brutal story line for a tragic, star-­crossed love story, the tale in “The Islands,” so far as it is legible, is a story of murder undertaken in revenge for sexual transgression. The poem ends: Wonder how those Tout-­blankety native girls— Voss! Your own mother No, boy, I’m not going To sit around while that ! Am Lieutenant Governor Greaseball! Kill him! Dropped into the sea When they unwrapped it Found her earrings and his cloth “Maple leafs” as well as The naked body of a sixteen-­year-­old boy Completely defaced with scratches Like a “torpedo” “When I think that that might Have happened to me”— Sunlight Crutches Someone named “Lillian Liberty”82 Vile old iron ways 82. “Lillian Liberty” is likely a coded reference to Marjorie Main, an MGM character actress adopted by the Ninety-­Sixth Infantry Division as their “Occupation Girl.” Honored as “A Fighting Gal for a Fighting Division,” especially for her role as a brassy, pistol-­packing mail carrier

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The story seems to be that of a promiscuous native woman—“She was tan and brown and slippery”—who takes a succession of foreign lovers. An early affair with “the consul” leaves her pregnant, and the child, “Voss,” grows up to fight for the US Navy “At Sarapatee.” After the consul leaves the islands “to go back to Zululand,” the woman becomes the lover of the pilot telling the story (“Couldn’t keep bringing those / Carpenter tools / every day / Back to the plane . . .”), then takes up with “the Major,” whom she often leaves “Covered with bruises and / Slashed—.” Sylvia is both sexual aggressor and sexual object, apparently being passed from man to man up the chain of command: “Then / The Colonel took her.” The Colonel seems ambivalent, however, preferring gambling to sex (“that / Green cloth on the tables / ‘Better than native girls’”). The poem’s end suggests a confrontation of some kind over the woman’s behavior, perhaps between father and son, the consul and Voss, though the use of “Dad” may be figurative: half-­native Voss, working with the US military, may call the Colonel “Dad” as a gesture of general respect. What the issue at stake is remains unclear—matricide or incest is implied (“Voss! / Your own mother”)—and the poem ends with a dead youth being dragged out of the ocean to expressions of relief and guilt. Koch’s poem doesn’t expose the horrors of war so much as it implies them.83 It gains power in doing so, but at the risk of obscurity. What finally takes shape is a metaphor: the experience of fighting in World War II is allegorized as an affair with an exotic, promiscuous, demanding, and murderous lover, an affair whose only mementoes are a bit of shiny metal, a patch of fabric, a young man’s destroyed body, and a sense of guilty relief. Read in light of the much later apostrophic lyric “To World War Two,” Koch’s strategy in Jackass Mail (1942), which the unit watched overseas, Marjorie greeted the unit on its arrival stateside in Los Angeles (Davidson, Deadeyes, 236–46). 83. William Owens described the civilian population of the Philippines after the American invasion as “disoriented, dispossessed, disillusioned, in many cases angry, bitter, sullenly silent over what had happened to them. Not since the Aguinaldo insurrection against the Americans had there been fighting in Leyte. Never had there been so much death and destruction. . . . The fighting over, refugees drifted away from the beach camps back to their rice paddies and nipa palm huts. In monsoon rain they waded barefoot in mud and water, scantily clothed, sheltered by banana palm leaf umbrellas. On patrol to población and barrio, to church and government building, I saw the sadness of families as they returned home. Sometimes there was nothing left—not a house, not a carabao, not a pig, not a chicken—the crops ground to slush under the treads of Army vehicles. They searched in grief for what they had lost, the grief greater if the loss included death. I saw sadness change to despair at what lay before them. They could build a new hut in a few days, but the rice and banana crops were lost for the season. Without rice there was only starvation. I walked among them, sympathized with them, all the while feeling alien among people who had been under the same flag with me for forty years” (Owens, Eye-­Deep in Hell, 55–56).

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of evasion and allusion in “The Islands” grows clearer: the poem is a surreal rewriting of World War II as a dream of eroticized violence. “The Islands” is a powerful and disturbing war poem, shocking, shameful, and seductive, a nightmarish Orientalist noir unlike anything else written by an American about World War II. After considering “Sun Out” and “The Islands,” we can begin to see how radically the comic hero that Koch valorizes and Bugs Bunny embodies stands opposed to the trauma hero of the bomber lyric and Catch-­22. While the latter confirms the social order’s dependence on a primal scene of violence by serving as civil society’s scapegoat, the former profanes the ritual violence of war by refusing it sacred status. Hence Koch’s unwillingness to narrativize his experience in accord with post-­1945 expectations, similar to Bugs Bunny’s unwillingness to go along with the war machine when offered the chance at a sexual Eden, and hence Koch’s lifelong effort to recode and reinterpret his war experience in some other way. Understanding Kenneth Koch as a comic poet and a war poet helps us see how the wartime demands made by total mobilization during World War II did not end on V-­J day, but continued to mark, shape, and warp American culture for decades after.

4

Total War and Historical Time The wars now go on forever, and no writer can be sure which war he is writing about even if he has been to one. Alfred K a zi n , “The Decline of War” (1971) The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. Th o m a s P y n c h o n , Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

War as Origin Myth: Joan Didion’s Run River The headline sprawls across both pages, heralding the seriousness of the subject illustrated by the lush photographs taking up most of the space below. The larger photo shows a rusted turret housing that rises out of black water iridescent with leaking oil, wounded red metal ascending against the distant purple peaks of the Koolau Range and the muted blues of a clouded dusk. The smaller, inset photograph casts the silhouette of an F-­102 Delta Dagger against a lurid dawn, a black knife on banners red and violet. The two photographs call to each other, the vivid colors in the inset echoing the muted rust of the turret housing while the invisible hulk hinted at by the metal and oil is echoed by the sleek lines of the shadowed F-­102. The larger picture is elegiac, while the smaller bespeaks alarm and, more than alarm, readiness. “Never forget,” one seems to say; the other, “Never again.” “Hawaii: Taps at Pearl Harbor” reads the banner head, and the smaller deck head stacked below it spells out the story: “On jeweled islands of paradise and progress Hawaiians keep step to the muffled war drums sounding just beyond their Pacific horizon.” At first glance, this article, published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1966, ten days after the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, suggests the confluence of World War II, the Cold War, and the expanding conflict in Vietnam, but judging from the pull quotes and photographs scattered among the dense lines of print, the piece seems to be more about the tropical delights on offer in the newest US state: two sailors on Hotel Street beneath a sign reading “Swing Club / Go-­ Go Girls”; tourists in Hawaiian shirts learning the hula; surfers; Hawaiian women shopping. The two photos that complicate this impression offer pleasing images nevertheless, one of campaign signs on a street corner looking like nothing so much as a supermarket sale, and the other the National Memorial

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F i g u re 1 1 . Joan Didion, “Hawaii: Taps at Pearl Harbor,” Saturday Evening Post 239, no. 26 (December 17, 1966). Photographs by Wayne Miller. Reproduction photograph courtesy of Academic Search Premier.

Cemetery of the Pacific, a field of Technicolor green dotted by unobtrusive white squares. “The Aloha spirit is part of the product, and the product is where they live,” reads one pull quote. “War and money cracked feudalism’s spine,” reads another. It would have been easy for a contemporary reader to pass this article by, taking for granted that they’d already bought what it seems to be selling: that peculiar mix of wartime nostalgia, global imperialism, and tropical island tourism that formed such a vital part of American culture from V-­J day to the end of the Vietnam War, and which gave the world South Pacific, Blue Hawaii, Hawaii Five-­O, and surf rock. But were the reader to actually read the article, they would find something else entirely. As with James Jones’s Guadalcanal, Bugs Bunny’s Jap-­infested island in “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,” or Kenneth Koch’s “In the Islands,” this tropical paradise isn’t quite what it seems, which one can sense from the essay’s opening sentences: Because I had been tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter, I was sent, a recalcitrant 31-­year-­old child, to Hawaii, where winter does not come and no one fails and the median age is 23. There I could become a new woman, there with the life-­insurance salesman on million-­dollar-­a-­year incentive trips, there with the Shriners and the San Francisco divorcées and the splurging secretaries and the girls in the string bikinis and the boys in search of the perfect wave, children who understood the insouciant economy of buying a Honda

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or a surfboard for one dollar down and $2.50 a week and then abandoning it, children who have never been told, as I was told, that golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust.1

The lede hardly seems like a proper lede at all, but rather more like an obstacle course: the complex, inverted first sentence begins with a long dependent clause describing the author’s past emotional state in a kind of decontextualized blur, where the paratactic accretion of fatigue, captiousness, and fear merges into another paratactic list of what was feared, which moves swiftly from the concrete (migraines) through the abstract (failure) to a gesture at once vague and specific, “the days getting shorter,” implying winter, seasonal change, darkness, the passage of time, death, and suddenly an existential void gapes open before the reader, not yet to the predicate of the sentence. That predicate is a passive and transitive verb, “was sent,” which is separated from the object of the preposition completing it, “to Hawaii,” by an appositive phrase defining the subject “I”: “ a recalcitrant 31-­year-­old child.” The dependent clause closing the sentence reprises the parataxis of the opening clause with a description of Hawaii that in its acid irony makes paradise seem a changeless hell: “where winter does not come and no one fails and the median age is 23.” Many readers will by now have recognized the voice of Joan Didion, though few are likely to have encountered “Hawaii: Taps at Pearl Harbor” in its native state. Reprinted in 1968 in her first volume of collected nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the magazine essay there bears the title “Letter from Paradise, 21° 19ʹ N., 157° 52ʹ W.,” and seems somewhat anomalous among her other pieces, which are mostly about California and 1960s pop culture. What are today almost certainly the best-­known and most-­read essays from this collection, “On Keeping a Notebook” and “Goodbye to All That,” are models of the postmodern personal essay, excruciatingly self-­aware exercises in creative nostalgia, and the well-­known title piece offers a skeptical portrait of hippie counterculture in its Haight-­Ashbury heyday. Slouching Towards Bethlehem no doubt strikes most readers today as a product of the 1960s. Didion’s reportage on Hawaii, with its discussions of real estate, “My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua Hawaii,” Henry Kaiser, and the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor likely seems, despite its tonal and formal similarities to her other work, to belong to a completely different era, another generation’s concerns. Which in fact it does, as Didion herself belongs to another generation than the boomers who came of age during the Summer of Love. For as much 1. Didion, “Hawaii: Taps at Pearl Harbor.”

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as the Joan Didion of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album is a product of the 1960s, she was first of all a child of World War II. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor fell two days after her seventh birthday, and her father, Frank, an officer in the National Guard, was soon called up to active duty, assigned to the Army Air Corps, and sent with his family to Fort Lewis, Washington, the first in a succession of wartime assignments.2 The dislocations the war caused her family took on a mythic quality for Didion, analogous to the legends of westward pioneer expansion that she calls the “crossing story as origin myth.”3 As Didion writes in Where I Was From, her 2003 memoir of California, the last third or so of which explores the long-­term effects of the World War II defense industry boom, “I see now that World War Two was our own Big Sandy, Little Sandy, Humboldt Sink.”4 This observation follows a sequence of mostly unhappy and disturbing memories connected to the Didion family’s wartime moves to Tacoma and Durham and Colorado Springs, including the first time Joan could remember seeing her mother cry, coming out of a military housing office: “It seemed to be the end of some rope, one day too many on which there would be no place for us to stay. . . . When she got into the car her eyes were dry and her expression was determinedly cheerful. ‘It’s an adventure,’ she said. ‘It’s wartime, it’s history, you children will be thankful you got to see all this.’”5 Beyond the personal dislocations of those years, when Didion was in and out of schools, on and off military bases in strange towns, she was also deeply affected by the changes the war brought home to California, which she discusses at length in Where I Was From and in several of her shorter pieces. These changes make up the substance of her first novel, Run River (1963), a western gothic in a Faulknerian vein describing the decline of the aristocratic prewar California of second-­generation pioneer families in the face of modernization, World War II, the highway system, and new waves of migrants, including both poor Okies and adventure-­seeking hustlers.6 It is one of these hustlers, a wounded Army Air Corps captain from Tennessee named Ryder Channing, who is both victim and instigator of the violence motivating Run River’s narrative: Channing had been having an affair with Lily Knight McClellan, the book’s protagonist, and had planned to meet 2. Daugherty, Last Love Song, 26. 3. Didion, Where I Was From, 159. 4. Didion, Where I Was From, 211. 5. Didion, Where I Was From, 208. 6. In an earlier draft of the novel with a less linear, more digressive and elliptical structure, World War II shows up repeatedly in the first fifty pages of the book, clearly marking it as one of the novel’s key concerns (Didion, “Early Version of Run River,” 15, 37, 40–41).

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her one night down by the river that runs by the McClellan property, but Lily’s husband, Everett, goes down instead and shoots him. The novel opens with Lily finding this out; it ends with Everett killing himself. Channing’s murder seems at first a clear case of jealousy, but as the novel’s extended flashback unfolds, the story is revealed to be more complicated: Channing had had a long affair with Everett’s much-­beloved sister, Martha, which ended badly, after which Martha committed suicide by going swimming in the river alone after a big rain, when the water was high and the current strong. The river Martha drowns in is a natural feature of the landscape, but it is also History: the current of war pushing California into the future. Channing, for his part, is identified throughout the novel with the forces of real estate speculation, industrial development, and modernization, which are changing and undermining the frontier world of the Knights and the McClellans. We might even consider Channing, a wounded pilot, a variation on the figure of the bomber. Everett’s killing of Channing, we come to see, is an act of jealousy not so much personal as historical. Which is to say that although Run River may not look like a typical war novel, the book’s central events concern the social and cultural changes forced on California’s Central Valley because of World War II. Everett’s enlistment in the military and his deployment to Fort Lewis and Fort Bliss are the precipitating events that provoke Lily’s infidelity. The war is what brings Ryder Channing to Sacramento’s Mather Field.7 Lily’s father’s death loosely coincides with the beginning of the war, and it is Everett’s father’s death during the war that brings him home from Texas. The war is one of the central metaphors of the book, connected to the Knight and McClellan families’ stories of frontier heroism, in one instance even translating Martha’s sexual adventurism into the terms of military epic: “All the connections had been broken, all the bridges burned miles back in the country she had crossed to achieve this insular victory. Even Ryder was included in her pervasive contempt: he could no longer touch her. There, the battle had turned. All the others had been civilian casualties, lost somewhere beyond the front lines: Channing was her dam on the Ruhr, her Guadalcanal, her Stalingrad.”8 In a reversal of Kenneth Koch’s figuration of war as a bad relationship, here a bad relationship is figured as war, specifically a crucial turning point in a long campaign, a kind of harrowing and purification that puts Martha beyond merely mortal concerns—an undeniable proleptic echo of Didion’s later figuration of World War II as her “Big Sandy, Little Sandy, Humboldt Sink.” 7. Mather Field was a key Army Air Corps base for training B-­24 and B-­25 crews, and also a way station for matériel and men being transferred west to the Pacific theater. 8. Didion, Run River, 207.

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This consonance between Didion’s description of Martha’s relationship with the wounded veteran Ryder as a spiritual harrowing akin to war and Didion’s later description of war as a spiritual harrowing akin to “the crossing story as origin myth” is presaged in a key moment, early in the novel, when Lily and Martha see Everett off to Fort Lewis. That chapter contrasts Lily’s dependence and romantic imagination against Martha’s reckless frontier hardihood, while both women’s attitudes are compared against Everett’s taciturn stoicism. For Lily, Everett’s departure is an act of punishment: “You don’t have to go,” Lily repeated. She could not view Everett’s enlistment as anything other than personal and possibly deserved retribution. Bataan might fall, Corregidor might fall, and the Japanese might occupy Attu and Kiska, but Everett could not have gone had she not failed him somewhere. . . . “You don’t have to. You want to. You said you wanted to.” “All right. I want to. I don’t see any difference.” Lily lay without moving, her head aching dully. “I believe you want to die,” she said after a while. “All right. I want to die. Now I have to get up.” While Everett shaved she finished packing his bag, trying dutifully to memorize the way his shorts felt to the touch, the particular color and translucency of his toothbrush. They seemed things that she might want, at some future point, to remember. Although she considered putting on the same plaid skirt and paint-­stained sweater she wore most mornings, she thought then of ships going out under the Golden Gate in fog, of Wake Island, of that hot golden summer before they were married, and pulled on instead the white cashmere sweater that Everett had given her on her nineteenth birthday.9

Lily’s images of the war are all connected to a sense of personal failure and guilt. This contrasts distinctly with Martha’s vision of the war, which provides an opportunity not for grief but for family pride, as dramatized when Martha meets with Everett and Lily at the train station. Martha rushes to Lily and Everett in a raincoat and nightgown, carrying a bunch of chrysanthemums and a book. The book, which she thrusts at Everett, is her gift to him as he prepares to cross the threshold from domestic safety to danger. Whereas for Lily the war offers only a guilty presentiment of loss, for Martha the war is an opportunity to live up to their family’s frontier heritage. The book she gives Everett is The McClellan Journal: An Account of An Overland Journey to California in the Year 1848. Observing this, Lily reflects on Martha’s childhood obsession with the Donner Party, thinking, 9. Didion, Run River, 96–97.

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“Everett and Martha, Forward into the battle with the Cross before.”10 The conflation of going to war with pioneer legend and the way sacrifice legitimates such narratives are both made explicit here. Captain Ryder Channing, “that Air Corps captain from Tennessee” who is Everett’s dark double, appears shortly after this scene. Channing embodies the spirit of war come to California, and the transformation he heralds is profound: it destroys the McClellan family, bringing an end to their colonial legacy and replacing it with a new industrial garrison state—Fortress California, in the term coined by Roger Lotchin.11 During World War II, the United States military opened hundreds of bases and posts in California, expanded preexisting installations there, and brought hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines through the state. In-­migration boomed: while the population of California increased at a fairly steady rate over the first four decades of the twentieth century, adding around a million people each decade, the increase between 1940 and 1950 tripled that, from 6.9 million to 10.6 million. Many of these newcomers were African Americans, part of the Second Great Migration out of the South, seeking work, as whites did, in expanding armaments industries. According to US Census Data, over the course of the 1940s, the number of blacks in Sacramento jumped from 99,806 to 126,889, in San Francisco from 4,846 to 43,842, and in Los Angeles from 64,774 to 171,209.12 The federal government spent more than $35 billion in California during the war, much of it on weapons and matériel. This influx of lucre revolutionized California’s economy and culture. It became “a state in which virtually every county was to one degree or another dependent on defense contracts,” asserts Didion in Where I was From.13 Historian Kevin Starr offers one notable example, that of the Kaiser Shipbuilding Company: “Henry J. Kaiser of Oakland achieved the near-­impossible . . . the overnight establishment of shipbuilding facilities virtually from scratch in California, Oregon, and Washington. . . . Within five years, Kaiser built 1,490 ships for a total cost of $4 billion: 822 Liberty ships (small, fast 10,000-­ton freighters); 219 Victory ships, a larger version of the Liberty; fifty small escort carriers; and an assortment of tankers, tenders, and other craft. All told, the Kaiser shipyards built thirty 10. Didion, Run River, 99–100. Italics in original. 11. Lotchin, Fortress California. 12. Gibson and Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990.” 13. Didion, Where I Was From, 129.

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percent of American wartime shipping vessels.”14 The war transformed California infrastructure as waves of veterans flocked to new suburban developments in Riverside, Westlake, and Lakewood, and nurtured a vibrant new intellectual culture, as “the war had brought to California many of the finest scientists on the planet,” speeding the growth of the University of California system.15 Not only scientists came to California during the war but also a motley crew of European artists, composers, and thinkers, including Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and Fritz Lang, whose impact on Hollywood and American culture at large would be significant. Viewed from out west, World War II didn’t look like the dreary affair it might have seemed back east, all goose-­stepping Nazis and British rain and long, tense bombing runs. On the movie lots of the First Motion Picture Division in Culver City, in the shipyards chronicled by Chester Himes in If He Hollers, Let Him Go, on the bustling streets full of servicemen on pass and veterans looking to buy a home, and even in formerly sleepy agricultural towns like Didion’s Sacramento, World War II was an earthquake, a gold rush, a hinge point in world history. For many, such as Henry Kaiser, the war was a moment of potential profit unlike any other. For others, it was a grab at utopia. “The West emerged from the conflict with a new self-­image,” writes Gerald Nash, “a new self-­confidence that led its denizens to believe they could meet any challenge.”16 As Didion characterized the transformation in Run River: It was a season of promise for anyone with a little land or a little money or even nothing more than an eye on the main chance; it was a season of promise for Ryder Channing, back in town with his bride after a three-­week honeymoon in Acapulco; and it should be, Martha thought some nights as she was going to sleep, a season of promise for her. . . . She went everywhere, met everyone. She met builders, promoters, people looking for factory sites and talking about a deep-­water channel and lobbying for federal dams; people neither Everett nor Lily would have known existed had she not told them.17

The irony in this passage is paid out by Run River’s subsequent turn of events, in which Martha is raped by Channing and then commits suicide. What should have been her season of promise was instead prelude to her doom. The perspective Didion achieves in Run River, as in her other work, is complex. On one level, Didion is exploring and elaborating two mythic American narratives: one narrative in which World War II is fused with the idea of the 14. Starr, California, 235. 15. Starr, California, 242. 16. Nash, World War II and the West, 17. 17. Didion, Run River, 208.

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western frontier, where worldwide war merges with the “crossing story as origin myth,” where John Wayne can move seamlessly from the role of Thomas Dunson in Red River (1948), founding the Texas cattle industry, to that of Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), winning the war in the Pacific, playing in both films the same tough-­as-­nails father figure with a hidden sensitive side; and a second narrative in which World War II was a golden dawn that marked the emergence of global American leadership through the spread of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism, the beginning of Henry Luce’s “American Century.” These are what became the official mythic narratives of World War II, the one more or less subconscious, the other more or less overt, and taken together, they suggest a continuous progressive story, where the conquest of the American West is prelude to the defense of the global West against totalitarianism, where capitalism and judicious violence go hand in hand to bring peace and prosperity to the savage frontier, from Texas to the South Pacific. Yet for all Didion’s investment in these narratives, including her well-­ known love of John Wayne, anyone in the least familiar with her work knows that her great theme is the failure of narrative to account for experience. The often quoted and more often misunderstood opening to “The White Album,” “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” is not a statement of faith in the power of narrative, as is suggested when the quotation is brandished in advertisements for low-­residency MFA programs, but rather an ironic understanding that the stories we “tell ourselves in order to live” are artificial, ex post facto defenses tenuously held up to make the unbearable bearable. “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”18 While Didion is in this essay, “The White Album,” talking “about a time when [she] began to doubt the premises of all the stories [she] had ever told [herself],” specifically 1966 to 1971, we can see by looking at her work as a whole that Didion’s disillusionment in official narratives doesn’t fit her own neat narrative. Indeed, we can see by looking at her work in the light of Run River and Where I Was From that the moment of narrative breakdown occurred contemporaneously with the emergence of the master narrative itself, the very moment of her “crossing story as origin myth,” which is to say, World War II. Didion’s ironic and deflationary response to the narratives of the 1960s was characteristic of her 18. Didion, “The White Album,” in White Album, 185.

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attempt to make sense of the ways that World War II disrupted her family and transformed her home, her effort to reconcile the contradiction between the image of her mother crying on her way out of the military housing office, and her mother’s insistence that “it’s an adventure. . . . It’s wartime, it’s history,” her long meditation on the disjunction between the war she experienced and the mythic story Americans told themselves about it. Didion’s career shows her continually worrying the meaning of World War II in American culture through a uniquely Western frame, acutely examining the interdependence of violence and consumer capitalism, the fusion of frontier colonialism and global imperialism, the union of industry and government, the importance of tropical island exoticism to American culture, and the entanglements between the dream of the American West and the ideology of American liberalism. No single essay brings this concern into focus better than the one she wrote about visiting Hawaii, America’s newest and westernmost state, as a “recalcitrant 31-­year-­old child.” War as a Promise to the Future: “Letter from Paradise, 21° 19ʹ N., 157° 52ʹ W.” “Letter from Paradise, 21° 19′ N., 157° 52′ W.” begins with an ironic deflation of both the narrator’s own authority and Hawaii’s utopian promise, but it pivots swiftly at the end of the second paragraph to an unusually intimate assertion of emotional disclosure: “And so, now that it is on the line between us that I lack all temperament for paradise, real or facsimile, I am going to find it difficult to tell you precisely how and why Hawaii moves me, touches me, saddens and troubles and engages my imagination, what it is in the air that will linger long after I have forgotten the smell of pikake and pineapple and the way the palms sound in the trade winds.”19 Having thus oriented the reader, she begins with the idea of Hawaii she had as a child, a “barely perceptible irregularity glimpsed intermittently through squinted eyes” from the beach of California, characterized as a “curious void” created by a mysterious tripartite union: “in my child’s mind there were three distant Hawaiis, and I could perceive no connections among the three.” Along with this language of mysterious trinity, elevating Hawaii to the plane of Christian soteriology, there is also an easy-­to-­miss temporal doubling blurring past and present, for while Didion is speaking very clearly about her fantasies “as a child,” she is building on an idea of her self already established as a “31-­year-­old child,” weaving an 19. Didion, “Letter from Paradise, 21° 19′ N., 157° 52′ W.,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 142.

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emotional through-­line between past and present, suggesting at some faint remove that the “curious void” of the Hawaiian trinity she imagined as a child is still what shapes her view today. Didion has thus defined her difficulty with the postwar Hawaii narrative as operating concurrently in two distinct yet connected temporal planes. Her first problem with the postwar Hawaii narrative is that she “lacks all temperament for paradise, real or imagined,” today, in the article’s present, 1966. Her “lack of temperament” is figured as a neurological problem, but this figuration is a preemptive defense that allows Didion to deploy her critical skepticism toward that peculiar mix of willful naïveté, mass consumer capitalism, youth worship, and blind arrogance which defined the American character in the postwar decades, and to deploy it with a sharpness that would otherwise have seemed aggressive. In effect, her real problem, in the present, is that she doesn’t buy the ideology of happiness that postwar American liberalism is selling, of which Hawaii is the representative product. By presenting herself as someone who has, because of her own neurological weakness, failed to find the happiness that is her American birthright, she is thus free to critique it. At the same time, Didion identifies her problem with the postwar Hawaii narrative as being a historical one: the present narrative is in crisis because that narrative’s past is incoherent, comprising “three distant Hawaiis” with no connections between them. In the same way that Hawaii stands metonymically for postwar American consumer culture’s ideology of happiness, it also stands for postwar America’s contradictory vision of its own history. We might characterize the three contradictory images in that vision as war, aristocratic leisure, and pioneer sacrifice, which Didion identifies respectively with December 7, 1941, godmothers staying at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and learning all the lyrics to “My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua Hawaii,” and a “great-­great-­grandfather who taught there as a young missionary in 1842.” Toward the end of the essay’s first section, Didion manages by a remarkable fluidity of technique to increase the tensions between these three contradictory images, then to both collapse and elevate them through a kind of dialectical sublation to the deeper “truth” of the postwar Hawaiian narrative, the fundamental fact of the postwar American narrative: war. Defining the image of Hawaii as pioneer sacrifice as a place having only to do “with the past, and with loss,” Didion elaborates this sense of loss first as beginning with that 1842 mission, and second as occurring around a hundred years later, ever since the arrival of “Mr. Kaiser,” meaning industrialist Henry Kaiser, who in 1961 began building a suburban development on dredged land in Honolulu, “as if the construction of the Hawaiian Village Hotel on a few acres of reclaimed tidal flight near Fort De Russy had in one swing of the builder’s

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crane . . . blighted forever some subtropical cherry orchard where every night in the soft blur of memory the table was set for forty-­eight in case someone dropped by.”20 Introducing Henry Kaiser as the symbol of social change allows Didion to analyze the change that symbol represented while refocusing the entire essay through a single lens: Of course as I grew older I recognized that the name “Henry Kaiser” carried more symbolic than literal freight, but even then I missed the point, imagined that it was merely the proliferation of hotels and hundred-­dollar thrift flights that had disturbed the old order, managed to dismiss the Hawaii of my first memory, the Hawaii which meant war, as an accident of history, a freak relevant neither to the gentle idyll that must have been the past nor to the frenetic paean to middle-­income leisure that must be the present. In so doing I misapprehended Hawaii completely, for if there is a single aura which pervades Honolulu, one mood which lends the lights a feverish luster and the pink catamarans a heartbreaking absurdity and which engages the imagination as mere paradise never could, that mood is, inescapably, one of war.21

This two-­sentence paragraph, closing out the essay’s opening, performs a notable shift. In the first sentence, the symbol of “Henry Kaiser,” invoking industrial capitalism, is presented as having been interpreted as meaning merely the irruption of “middle-­income leisure” culture “that must be the present”—for example, the “proliferation of hotels and hundred-­dollar thrift flights”—into the “gentle idyll that must have been the past,” yet Didion undermines this interpretation even as she elaborates it. “The point” that Didion missed, the “truth” of Hawaii, is positioned deep within the sentence, in an appositive phrase nested within another appositive phrase elaborating and redefining the predicate of the sentence’s second main independent clause and its subsequent verbal phrases (“I missed the point . . . imagined . . . managed to dismiss . . .”), a formal displacement giving syntactical shape to the action described, which is dismissing “the Hawaii which meant war” as a freakish and irrelevant “accident of history.” The second sentence both replicates the style of the first and inverts it, recasting the irruption of war, hidden 20. Didion, “Letter from Paradise,” 143–44. This lost world of Hawaii, a colonial mission at once pioneer outpost and plantation house, is also evoked by a character in Didion’s novel Democracy: “I wouldn’t say ‘privileged,’ no . . . Off the mark. Not ‘privileged.’ I’d just call it a marvelous simple way of life that you might describe as gone with the wind.” To which another character observes: “I hope nobody twigs she’s talking about World War Two.” Didion, Democracy, 67. 21. Didion, “Letter from Paradise,” 144.

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among the convoluted phrases in the middle of the first sentence, as a conclusion whose appearance is foretold at the beginning of the sentence’s dependent, conditional second clause, building tension over the long paratactic list and the last adverbial interjection, and turning a narrative of illusory enlightenment into a narrative of enlightenment from disillusion. Following the break, which is marked by a premonitory quotation from a January 1941 issue of Vogue magazine describing Hawaii in terms of British imperial security and defense against the Nazis (“Hawaii is our Gibraltar, and almost our Channel Coast”), Didion tells the story of her visit to the USS Arizona. Didion highlights the “sleazy festivity” of the outing, then reflects on how the story of the attack on Pearl Harbor is a familiar one, having been told and retold countless times on movie and TV screens. The climax of this short section is a moment of raw sentiment unusual in Didion’s work: And then something happens. . . . I began to cry at the place where the Utah lies in fifty feet of water, water neither turquoise nor bright blue here but the gray of harbor waters everywhere, and I did not stop until after the pink boat had left the Arizona, or what is visible of the Arizona: the rusted after-­gun turret breaking the gray water, the flag at full mast because the Navy considers the Arizona still in commission, a full crew aboard, 1,102 men from forty-­nine states. All I know about how other people respond is what I am told: that everyone is quiet at the Arizona.22

This is a moment that was possible in 1966 but would not be for much longer, and is certainly not today. At issue is not simply an encounter with the material evidence of that kairotic moment of sacrifice “when everything changed,” the brute mark of History, nor merely the sacred patriotic encounter with the nation, the ritual enactment of one’s physical participation in the dream of collective life, but also the complex grief of the apostate. For Joan Didion, in 1966, the dream of collective life that was being “American” had already revealed itself as illusory, half legend and half advertising, just another story imposed on the “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” The political function of war memorials, as Reinhart Koselleck observes, is to “promulgate a demand for identification. The dead embody an exemplary status; they died for a reason, and the survivors are supposed to find themselves in accord with this reason so as not to allow the dead to have died in vain.”23 For what reason had those 1,102 dead men interred forever in the hull of the USS Arizona, almost half of the 2,403 total fatalities from the Japa22. Didion, “Letter from Paradise,” 145. 23. Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 295.

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nese attack on Pearl Harbor, died? This is the question that leaves Joan Didion weeping at the Arizona, and it is at the heart of how and why Hawaii “saddens and troubles and engages” her imagination, because just as the USS Arizona is a synecdoche for Pearl Harbor, Hawaii is a synecdoche for the United States of America. As Edward Linenthal argues: Other ships were sunk at Pearl Harbor during the attack, other crews decimated by casualties, but the Arizona’s “burning superstructure and canted masts [which] projected from the water” became as recognizable an image of Americans at war as Daniel Chester French’s Minute Man statue, the silhouette of the Alamo, or the artistic depictions of the Pickett-­Pettigrew charge at Gettysburg and Custer’s Last Stand. Here, too, a new world began for Americans, a world at war in new and horrible ways. The Arizona symbolized complex memories of that war for those who lived in it and through it, and for others . . . who were born into a world shaped by the events that brought fame to the Arizona and the Missouri.24

The problem Didion tries to understand in “Letter from Paradise, 21° 19ʹ N., 157° 52ʹ W.,” as she describes her visits to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and Hotel Street, as she elucidates how “war is in the very fabric of Hawaii’s life, ineradicably fixed in both its emotions and its economy, dominating not only its memory but its vision of the future,” as she observes how “war is viewed with a curious ambivalence in Hawaii because the largest part of its population interprets war, however unconsciously, as a force for good, an instrument of social progress,” as she shows how in Hawaii war is the foundational fact making possible the prosperity, multicultural integrationism, meritocratic advancement, industrial and commercial development, and sense of utopian possibility that we refer to broadly—often ignoring the pointedness of the prefatory adjective—as “postwar liberalism,” is what the dead men in the USS Arizona mean for America. “War memorials refer to a temporal vanishing line in the future in which the identity of a particular community of agents was supposed to be safeguarded,” writes Koselleck, and whereas we today mythologize World War II as a traumatic sacrifice that secured American global hegemony and the American “way of life,” for most Americans at the time, the war itself was an unequivocal boon.25 Consider the testimony of Paul Edwards, who during the war worked with the American Red Cross and the United States Relief and Rehabilitation Administration: 24. Linenthal, Sacred Ground, 175–76. 25. Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 294.

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While the rest of the world came out bruised and scarred and nearly destroyed, we came out with the most unbelievable machinery, tools, manpower, money. The war was fun for America—if you’ll pardon my bitterness. I’m not talking about the poor souls who lost sons and daughters in the war. But for the rest of us, the war was a hell of a good time. Farmers in South Dakota that I administered relief to, and gave ’em bully beef and four dollars a week to feed their families, when I came home were worth a quarter-­million dollars, right? What was true there was true all over America. New gratifications they’d never known in their lives. Mass travel, mass vacations, everything else came out of it. And the rest of the world was bleeding and in pain. But it’s forgotten now.26

Myth tells one story, history another. What Joan Didion is trying to understand in “Letter from Paradise,” as in much of her work, is the relationship between three ideas: the commemorative narrative of World War II acted out by men such as John Wayne and physically embodied in memorials such as the Arizona; the “temporal vanishing line in the future” to which this narrative refers, in crisis and overshadowed by the radiant void of atomic destruction practically from its emergence; and the “identity of the particular community of agents” which is supposed to be safeguarded in this troubled future, which is to say, the imagined community of “America.” Historical meaning is always constructed in historical time, a product of historical forces, affected by competing emphases, political conflicts, socioeconomic transformations, and generational shifts. The meaning of World War II changed, has changed, will change, and it’s difficult to peg such change to specific moments because the same events mean different things to different people at the same time, as strategic bombing meant different things to James Dickey, Randall Jarrell, Marianne Moore, and Ralph Ellison, and those coexistent meanings affect one another, change one another, and change the meaning made in the narratives that come to shape the meaning made by the next generation in their own narratives. The USS Arizona meant a great deal to those who could remember hearing about Pearl Harbor on the radio. It meant a great deal less to those born just a few years later. Didion observes precisely this shift in “Letter from Paradise”: “A few days ago someone just four years younger than I am told me that he did not see why a sunken ship should affect me so, that John Kennedy’s assassination, not Pearl Harbor, was the single most indelible event of what he kept calling ‘our generation.’ I could tell him only that we belonged to different generations.”27 Didion was born in 1934 and had just turned seven when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. 26. Edwards quoted in Terkel, “Good War,” 573. 27. Didion, “Letter from Paradise,” 145–46.

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She did not experience the war on the battlefields of the Ardennes or Tulagi, she was not a refugee nor a prisoner in a concentration camp, her father was not even deployed overseas, yet there can be no question that World War II permanently affected her life, uprooting her family, transforming her hometown in California’s Central Valley from a sleepy agricultural community to a bustling military-­industrial hub, and connecting her in inextricable ways to the idea of America by demanding her full participation in a community at war, a community defined by war, a community waging war across the globe and, it would soon seem, permanently. For Joan Didion at the USS Arizona, as for Wallace Stevens in his Dutch church in Kingston, James Jones reflecting on Guadalcanal, Kenneth Koch writing his comic war poems, and Ralph Ellison trying to write about a black American airman in a German POW camp, World War II was a problem, and it was a problem most fundamentally because it was a “total war,” a war demanding the full spiritual and physical mobilization of the community on whose behalf it was ostensibly being fought, a war which at the same time was thoroughly transforming American society, changing it from an ambitious but decentralized republic with a small standing army into a global military and commercial empire ruled by a cabal of war profiteers in collusion with an increasingly powerful and secretive executive holding in his hands the fate of the planet. The wartime sacrifice of American lives demanded that the American people identify themselves as a community defined by the ideals for which our young men died, yet neither the ideals espoused in government propaganda nor the ideals embodied in cultural narratives produced by Hollywood made sense of the emerging militarized garrison state, the industrialization of war, or the widespread Jim Crow racism that the war only exacerbated. For two generations of writers, the question of what World War II meant, what it was the beginning of, remained an open wound. Then something changed. Maybe it was the ebb and flow of generational conflict. Maybe it was the emergence of a generation who didn’t remember the USS Arizona, a generation who never knew any America other than one locked in a global struggle with evil, a generation inculcated in the ideals promulgated by government propaganda and Hollywood fantasy and who came to adulthood only to find those ideals betrayed by the brute facts of empire, a generation who found the incessant demand for “sacrifice” intolerable. Or maybe there was a particular moment when everything changed, a grim afternoon when a brave young hero from the old war rose to lead his nation into the future and was cut down by an assassin. And maybe what you see depends on where you’re standing when it happens. Joan Didion’s experience of this seismic shift locates the generational fault line somewhere between 1934,

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when she was born—old enough to have attained the “age of reason” before the war began, old enough to remember Pearl Harbor—and 1938, four years later. Lee Harvey Oswald, it’s worth pointing out, was born in 1939. The generational divide between the so-­called silent generation and the baby boomers is usually understood to fall sometime during or after the war, in the mid- to late 1940s, since the baby boom is taken to refer to the exceptional post–­World War II rise in birth rates. But Didion’s observation may offer an insight that complicates this easy division. In fact, the rise in birth rates that came to signal the baby boom did not begin after World War II but in 1937, after a low point in the years between 1933 and 1936.28 This dividing line coincidentally matches the age at which a child might be expected to remember the attack on Pearl Harbor. A child born before 1937, like Didion, would stand some chance of recalling the impact of Pearl Harbor as a significant personal event; for a child born after, like Oswald, there was practically no chance at all that they would remember the event personally. For someone born in the hinge year, 1937, as was Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr., the question of whether they would remember Pearl Harbor as a personal experience (at whatever remove), and the further question of how such an experience would shape their later apprehension of the global conflagration of World War II, must remain speculative. The Hanged Man and the Military-­Industrial Complex: The Young Lions and Gravity’s Rainbow Antiaircraft guns throw up flak, distant at first but coming closer, then the bombs start dropping. Another German raid, and deep underground at the Canteen of the Allies an eclectic mix of soldiers, reporters, Wacs, and generals drink, sing, and trade theories about what will happen after the war. The planes were overhead by now, and the guns were loud outside the house. The planes seemed to be coming over in ones and twos, and diving low over the streets. Mrs. Kearney was handing a card to the MP Top Sergeant who was coming from the kitchen now with his fish. “The war,” said Colonel Pavone, “is a foregone conclusion. Therefore I am not interested in it. From the moment I heard the Japanese had hit us at Pearl Harbor, I knew we were going to win . . .” “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’,” sang an American voice near the piano, “Oh, what a beautiful day. I got a beautiful feelin’, Everything’s goin’ my way . . .” “America cannot lose a war,” said Pavone. “You know it, I know it, by now 28. Linder and Grove, Vital Statistics Rates in the United States 1900–1940. See also Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Natality Trends in the United States, 1909–2013.”

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even the Japs and the Germans know it. I repeat,” he said, making his clown’s grimace, pulling heavily on his cigar, “I am not interested in the war. I am interested in the peace, because the issue is still in doubt.”29

This scene depicting a German bomber raid on London dramatizes the spatial and phenomenological logic of total mobilization, portraying the violence of war not as a specific threat against particular military bodies but as a generalized attack on the lived environment of an entire population, drafting civilians and soldiers alike through the possibility of their sacrifice into a unified wartime whole. This is the logic of the bomber from the viewpoint of the bombed—the logic of twentieth-­century war, which, as Peter Sloterdijk argues, is the logic of terror.30 Within this scene of terror, from Irwin Shaw’s novel The Young Lions (1948), the victims keep calm and carry on. After all, “the war,” says Civil Affairs officer Colonel Pavone, “is a foregone conclusion,” and has been ever since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His explanation of why this might be the case is interrupted, though, by “an American voice” singing a few lines from the opening song of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s blockbuster 1943 musical Oklahoma!—“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’!” Oklahoma! tells the story of a divided frontier community coming together and finding its identity over the body of a murdered mixed-­race scapegoat, and the song’s evocation of unity through violence is almost too neatly appropriate to the scene in the heterogeneous, polyglot Canteen of the Allies, with its Polish captains and Hungarian reporters, though what is really piquant about this particular performance of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’!” are its structural and dramatic ironies. Most obviously, it is night, in the depths of the war, underground, and in the middle of an air attack: the moment is not a beautiful morning in any sense. Yet this very irony suggests the song’s deeper resonance with Pavone’s laborious logic and, in a moment, the Hungarian Czigly’s visionary “system,” for while the war may mean night for Europe, it means a new morning for America, the dawning of a “Novus Ordo Seclorum.” Perhaps the interruption from Oklahoma! distracts Colonel Pavone from saying why he takes the war for a foregone conclusion, or perhaps that very interruption implies the reasons behind his confidence: America’s vast plenty, its sweeping farmlands, its industrious workers and jolly, murderous inno29. Shaw, Young Lions, 377–78. 30. “The 20th century will be remembered as the age whose essential thought consisted in targeting no longer the body, but the enemy’s environment. . . . By working on the enemy’s environment, these new processes, which consist in suppressing the basic prerequisites for life, yield the contours of a specifically modern, post-­Hegelian concept of terror.” Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 14–15.

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cence. In any case, what concerns Pavone, a Civil Affairs officer from Brooklyn who “somehow ran a circus in France in the 1930s,” is the peace, “because that issue is still in doubt.”31 Pavone is worried for America’s future, anxious that the rest of the world will “swing to the left” after the war and leave the United States “isolated, hated, backward,” and that Americans will live “like old maids in a lonely house in the woods, locking the doors, looking under the beds, with a fortune in the mattress, not being able to sleep.”32 Pavone’s fear provokes Laszlo Czigly, a Hungarian reporter, to offer his own take on things. In essence, Czigly’s impromptu thesis on “How to Save the Capitalist System” can be reduced to a single idea: put the economy on a permanent war footing. “Look around us now . . .” He threw his arm wide in a spacious gesture. “What do you see? Unparalleled prosperity. Every man who wants to work, with a good job. Every woman, who in normal times could not be trusted to rinse rubber nipples, now doing precision tooling at eighty-­seven dollars a week. Mississippi traffic policemen who in peacetime made eleven hundred dollars a year, now full Colonels, with pay starting at six hundred and twenty a month. College boys who were a drain on the family fortune, now Majors in the Air Forces making five hundred and seventy dollars a month. Factories working night and day, no unemployment, everybody eating more meat, going to more movies, getting laid more often than ever before. Everybody alert, happy, in good physical condition. What is the source of all these benefits? The war. But, you say, the war cannot last forever. Alas, that is true. The Germans will finally betray us and collapse and we will go back to closed factories, unemployment, low pay, disaster. There are two ways of handling the situation. Either keep the Germans fighting forever, and you cannot trust them to do that . . . or . . .” And he took a long drink of his whiskey, and smiled widely. “Or, pretend the war is always on. Keep the factories working. Keep producing fifty thousand airplanes a year, at two-­fifty an hour for everyone who picks up a wrench, keep producing tanks at a hundred thousand dollars a tank, keep producing aircraft carriers at seven million dollars apiece. Ah, you say, then you have the problem of overproduction. The Czigly System takes care of everything. As of the moment, the Japanese and the Germans absorb our production, prevent us from glutting our markets. They shoot down our planes. They sink our aircraft carriers, they tear holes in our clothing. It is a simple problem. We must be our own Germans, our own Japs. Each month, we collect the necessary amount of B-­17s, the allotted number of aircraft carriers, the specified number of tanks . . . and what do we do with them?” He looked proudly and drunkenly around his audience. “We sink them in the ocean, and we order new ones immediately. 31. Shaw, Young Lions, 373. 32. Shaw, Young Lions, 378.

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Now,” he said, very seriously, “the most delicate problem—the human element. Overproduction of goods, you say, that is not an insoluble problem. But overproduction of human beings—there we tread on dangerous ground. One hundred thousand men a month, two hundred thousand men a month, I do not know how many, are now being disposed of. In peacetime, there will be a certain objection to killing them off, even it if keeps the economy in A Number One working order. Certain organizations would protest, the Church would take a stand, even I can comprehend the difficulties.”33

Czigly’s solution to the overproduction of human beings is to “merely keep them in the Army,” though this of course hardly addresses the problem or makes his jape any less grotesque in light of the Nazis’ industrial genocide. In hindsight and informed by the scope of the Final Solution, IG Farben’s role in the German economy, IBM’s collusion with Nazi Germany, Operation Paperclip, the atomic bomb, and the subsequent rise of the American national security state, Czigly’s plan “To Save Capitalist America” looks less like whimsy and more like an eerie preview of the totalized war machine satirized in Catch-­22 and Gravity’s Rainbow, envisioned by James Jones, and analyzed by Joan Didion, the very military-­industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against in his well-­known monitory final address. As Michael Sherry argues, “What happened in the Allied nations [during and after the war] was not the decline of militarism or its failure ever to rise in those countries but its transformation. They departed from the path of militarism in the narrow sense that traditional military institutions, elites, and the values associated with them did not dominate. In another, broader sense— the willing enlistment of the broadest array of national energies and elites into the machine of war-­making—militarism triumphed in the Allied powers to an exceptional degree, in a variation of it which Alfred Vagts has called ‘civilian militarism.’”34 Indeed, despite the supposedly decisive ending of World War II on V-­J day, September 2, 1945, peace did not come to the world, and the transformations that preceded, emerged with, and followed World War II, from Roosevelt’s induction of tens of thousands of civilians into quasi-­ military regimentation in the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s to subsequent conflicts in the 1950s, did not cease their dislocating disruptions, despite efforts in the 1950s to reinstate prewar mores, especially around gender roles. As Mary Dudziak shows in War Time, the beginning and ending of World War II are unclear even in the legal and documentary history of the event, presenting an ambiguity that has fostered real problems when it comes 33. Shaw, Young Lions, 378–80. 34. Sherry, Rise of American Air Power, 193.

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to understanding (and limiting) the boundaries of the state’s war powers.35 Further, what World War II meant had yet to be determined, and since that question was at the same time a question of what “America” meant, a question of the “temporal vanishing line in the future in which the identity of a particular community of agents was supposed to be safeguarded,” it was a question that remained painfully open at the very heart of American culture. Consider Didion’s 1984 novel Democracy, which in Michael Tager’s words “portrays a democracy vitiated by a secretive national security apparatus and image-­conscious national politicians.”36 That novel begins with a vision of atomic bomb tests in the Pacific which collapses Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor into one originary metaphysical event and, in evoking the opening lines of “The Star-­Spangled Banner,” identifies that event as the beginning of a new American era: “The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see. . . . Something that could almost make you think you saw God.”37 The novel reaches its climax with the fall of Saigon in 1975 and ends with a denouement in Jakarta. The story Democracy tells is of the political disillusionment and spiritual education of Inez Christian, a senator’s wife: how it “came to her attention that her passport did not excuse her from what she characterized . . . as ‘the long view.’” Democracy’s narrator, a character named Joan Didion, says that “by ‘the long view’ I believe she meant history, or more exactly the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it, that Inez’s experience had tended to deny.”38 This realization is characterized as happening gradually, without any “instant of epiphany,” but Didion cannot help but offer us one a few pages earlier, as Inez waits listening to a short-­wave radio in Vientiane for the signal to evacuate the US embassy in Saigon, which may or may not tell her anything about the success or failure of her lover Jack Lovett’s quest to extract her daughter Jessie from South Vietnam: They were definitely connected to her but she could no longer grasp her own or their uniqueness, her own or their differences, genius, special claim. What difference did it make in the long run what she thought, or what Harry thought, or Jessie or Adlai did? What difference did it make in the long run whether any one person got the word, called home, dreamed of a white Christmas? The world that night was full of people flying from place to place and fading in and out and there was no reason why she or Harry or Jessie or Adlai, or for that 35. Dudziak, War Time, 33–62. 36. Tager, “Political Vision of Democracy,” 183. 37. Didion, Democracy, 11. 38. Didion, Democracy, 211.

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matter Jack Lovett or B.J. or the woman in Vientiane on whose balcony the rain now fell, should be exempted from the general movement. Just because they believed they had a home to call. Just because they were Americans.39

The bleakness in this vision, reminiscent of the opening paragraphs of Gravity’s Rainbow, is not only political, not only, as Michael Tager argues, the result of “three factors overwhelming popular sovereignty: a national security apparatus designed to maintain America’s global influence; a media-­based politic that elevates style over substance; and a loss of connection with the past.”40 The bleakness in this vision is existential and ontological, for it sees human beings as an undifferentiated mass of monadic individuals whose lives and desires are fundamentally meaningless, refugees and exiles fleeing this or that collapse, state and nonstate actors swooping in to prey on the weak, everyone subject to the same flattening chaos. This is not a new vision of humanity—indeed, it is a very old one—but it should be noted that what is new for Inez Christian, what changes for her, is the realization that Americans are not exempt from “the general movement” of history. While “the general movement” of history in this vision is entropic, the nation-­state is something else. “The concept—concept? The fact; the reality— of the modern State” may even appear, from this vantage, as one aspect of a vast global conspiracy to profit from organized murder. This, at least, is how it seems to Katje Borgesius, the grieving and benumbed Dutch double agent in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in a reflection that offers a kind of précis of that novel’s portrayal of class warfare, the preying of the elite on the preterite: Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-­policing, and can be entrusted to non-­professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey 39. Didion, Democracy, 208. 40. Tager, “Political Vision of Democracy,” 173.

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bars. Jews also carry an element of guilt, or future blackmail, which operates, natch, in favor of the professionals.41

Whereas Joan Didion strives to hold the personal integrity of her stoic Western heroes and heroines up against the meaningless “general movement” of history, even when they are doomed to fail, and whereas The Young Lions confronts the totalized war economy, from the Blitz to Hitler’s concentration camps, yet still pre­sents the death of Jewish American soldier Noah Ackerman at the novel’s conclusion as a meaningful sacrifice insofar as it represents the triumph of American multiculturalism over Nazi eugenics, the story that Gravity’s Rainbow tells is of a complete breakdown in the relationship between the community and the individual, between the totalized (and ultimately totalitarian) war economy and the soldier asked to die for it, Tyrone Slothrop.42 The metaphoric relationship mediated by sacrifice through which a multitude becomes a nation, which relationship James Jones saw as absorbed into industrial capitalism, which Wallace Stevens struggled to resist, and which Joan Didion experienced as a narrative in crisis, has for Thomas Pynchon failed entirely, hence Slothrop’s identification with the Hanged Man of the tarot deck—which card symbolizes submission to the sacrificial role— reversed. “When the Hanged Man is reversed,” write Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger, “it indicates blocked access to the martyr’s contemplative acceptance of violence. . . . Reversed, the card signifies selfishness, alienation in the crowd and, according to A. E. Waite, in ‘the body politic.’”43 For Pynchon, the metaphoric logic of sacrifice has failed. Indeed, it has been superseded and absorbed by a kind of capitalist perpetuum mobile, in which anything and everything is “negotiable,” including Jews: “The true war is a celebration of markets.” The only solution Pynchon can find to this crisis and alienation in the body politic is the dissolution of the individual per se, which occurs in Gravity’s Rainbow both at the level of plot (Slothrop dissolves into the Zone) and at the level of form. The novel sees all political affiliations as illusory, as “all theatre,” as “theatre for theatre,” because they are undergirded by an equalizing and totalizing economy which subordinates all human life to the military-­industrial complex, whose only goal is death.44 Those on the side of corruption and cruelty are subject to the same fate as 41. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 107–8. 42. See Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger’s brilliant and provocative Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom for a more comprehensive development of this argument about Pynchon’s novel. 43. L. Herman and Weisenburger, Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom. 153. 44. For a fascinating argument along these lines, see Benjamin Noys’s accelerationist reading of Gravity’s Rainbow in Malign Velocities, 42–46.

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those fighting in the resistance, the novel’s “counterforce.” As Herman and Weisenburger write, “There is no judgment, much less redemption for some, hence no apocalypse. All are equally doomed and damned. It’s game over. It’s been ‘too late’ for a long time.”45 Gravity’s Rainbow responds to the problem of World War II with a teleological negation of the ethical, a universalizing nihilism in which war itself is no longer a political or ethical fact, needing to be accounted for with some reference to human choices and human communities, but rather a wholly ontological, metaphysical event.46 One result of this negation, as Friedrich Kittler argues in “Media and Drugs in Pynchon’s Second World War,” is the semiological collapse of his­ tory.47 Kittler reads Gravity’s Rainbow through a media studies lens, seeing the major shift the novel portrays as being that of a “semiotechnological” change from primitive mass media technologies to a totalized electronic media environment. Kittler writes, “Under conditions of absolute semiotechnology, the only question remaining is which media are implementing these conditions. And if, as Pynchon formulates it, ‘[t]he more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona’ . . . then media analysts would be well-­advised to remember the military history of their own subjects. What appears as narrative and, accordingly, entertainment in media possibly only screens semiotechnological efficiencies. Media such as literature or film or phonograph records—and this is precisely why Gravity’s Rainbow pursues their systematic combination—are all at war.”48 Thus, in a world in which signs and their production are both indistinguishable from reality itself and “all at war,” Kittler argues, the relationships between history and nature, past and future, time and space collapse, and knowledge 45. L. Herman and Weisenburger, Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom, 217. 46. Much scholarship on Pynchon attempts to enlist his work into a vaguely progressivist agenda, as if negation and critique were in themselves political, and while it’s true that a case might be made for the progressive politics of Pynchon’s other books, Gravity’s Rainbow is profoundly nihilistic, offering nothing positive, dissolving every form, as close to total negation as any American novel has achieved, surpassing even Moby-­Dick and Lolita (though perhaps on par with Melville’s The Confidence-­Man). Nothing escapes the black hole of nuclear Armageddon. However justified Pynchon’s antipathy toward the national security state and the military-­ industrial complex might be, there can be no denying that his equivalence of liberal capitalist democracy with Nazi Fascism literally desecrates the memory of World War II and abjures the possibility of any progressive politics emerging out of the war. It may be that Pynchon’s view is not wrong, but it is a mistake to think that he comes down on the side of the angels. 47. Kittler, “Media and Drugs.” See also Paul K. Saint-­Amour’s argument that “the novel masquerades as an epic of scrupulous chronologism only to disclose its radical commitments to untimeliness and durativity. Gravity’s Rainbow is a transperiod work in period camouflage” (Saint-­Amour, “Perpetual Interwar,” 173). 48. Kittler, “Media and Drugs,” 103.

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is indistinguishable from paranoia—“or, like all psychoses according to Freud or Morris, only a confusion of words and things, of designatum and denotatum.”49 This shift from seeing war as an ethical and political relation to seeing it as a totalized metaphysical one is symptomatic of a wider cultural revision of World War II that happened in the 1960s and 1970s, which transformed political sacrifice into psychological trauma through the reinterpretation of war as mystic revelation and the transference of cultural narratives of war from the realm of the historical to the realm of the purely mythic, condensing all war into one war, all history into one moment, an eternal, totalized capitalist ­present. One World, One War: The Great War and Modern Memory The imposition of the military draft on a generation of young men; the televised escalation of a brutal war of dubious merit in Vietnam; the widespread recognition of the extent of Nazi genocide and the troubling equivalence between Nazi race policies and Jim Crow, made obvious by news footage of black marchers being attacked by dogs on the road to Selma; the threat of global destruction promised by nuclear war; and the ascension of the United States to the role of global superpower, self-­appointed guardian of universal human rights, protector of a newly constructed “universal” human subject— these are some of the most significant reasons why the political view of World War II was overtaken by a metaphysical one.50 This transformation of World War II can be understood in one sense, as I have suggested, as the product of generational forgetting, yet any major shift in the cultural meaning of a historical event will inevitably be overdetermined, and any new interpretation will find older proponents who had been outliers among their own generation or whose idiosyncratic views harmonize with the new paradigm in ways they did not with the old. In literary studies, one figure from the “GI generation” stands out for his reinterpretation of war as a metaphysical event, and although the limitations of his classic work have been pointed out by critics, it nevertheless remains influential, though perhaps more outside of the academy now than within it. What Pynchon performed with political distinctions in Gravity’s Rainbow, 49. Kittler, “Media and Drugs,” 106. 50. On the subject of the Holocaust in American culture, we might note the Eichmann trial and the publication of Hannah Arendt’s book on the subject (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem; as well as the influence of Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism). See Novick, Holocaust in American Life, 133–44; Torgovnick, War Complex, 45–70.

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Paul Fussell did with historical distinctions in The Great War and Modern Memory, collapsing Vietnam, World War II, and World War I into one war, which was for its part understood, like Pynchon’s World War II, not as a political event but a metaphysical one. The Great War and Modern Memory enacts one of our most troubling and intractable philosophical problems: the relationship between language and experience. On the one side, Fussell argues repeatedly, brilliantly, and with great erudition and sophistication that war literature is literary, contextual, and written through available language and forms. With the reach of a great historicist and the subtlety of the wiliest poststructuralist, Fussell shows how the language and reception of World War II and Vietnam were shaped by the culture of World War I, how pervasively our modern sensibility is inflected with the language and ideas we’ve inherited, and how even the fundamental structures of our thought are historical. But his concern is not just with the history of the present: Fussell exhumes the layers of culture living in the poems, letters, and memoirs of his subjects, the British trench fighters of World War I, to show how richly they drew on and were shaped by Pilgrim’s Progress, Romanticism, Thomas Hardy, Shakespeare, Milton, British floriculture, and late nineteenth-­century homoerotic religious verse. Fussell’s most impressive, fine-­grained, and fascinating chapters deal precisely with the ways in which World War I was (perhaps uniquely) literary. In these moments, Fussell is arguing that inherited forms and conventions shape experience. On the other hand, Fussell argues with dogged insistence that the experience of World War I so strongly marked the culture of the time that its influence far outweighed any merely “literary” genealogy. Fussell makes the case that modernity has come to think a certain way because of the way it has made meaning from the events of World War I, particularly the Battle of the Somme, as a disillusionment into irony and a fall from innocence into error: “For the modern imagination that last summer has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrecoverably lost. Transferred meanings of ‘our summer of 1914’ retain the irony of the original, for the change from felicity to despair, pastoral to anti-­pastoral, is dramatically unexpected.”51 Fussell pushes his point further, repeatedly, asserting throughout The Great War and Modern Memory that this change was not an issue of cultural interpretation according with available forms but rather that the event itself formed an “archetypical original.”52 For example, “Prolonged 51. Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 24. 52. Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 35.

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trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama”; “The sharp dividing of landscape into known and unknown, safe and hostile, is a habit no one who has fought ever entirely loses”; “Everyone who remembers a war first-­hand knows that its images remain in the memory with special vividness. The very enormity of the proceedings, their absurd remove from the usages of the normal world, will guarantee that a structure of irony sufficient for ready narrative recall will attach to them.”53 In these claims, experience shapes form. Thus The Great War and Modern Memory argues both sides of this philosophical dilemma at once: we understand historical experience primarily through the cultural forms which we bring to it, and historical experience is the primary force shaping cultural forms. The contradiction is all but irresolvable when teased apart, though Fussell’s argument within The Great War and Modern Memory nevertheless seems more or less coherent. This is because Fussell’s argument is no contradiction if World War I truly is an event utterly outside human language and history, which is just Fussell’s assumption. Throughout his book, Fussell takes it as given that World War I is not only interpreted as a rupture but is actually an ontological and metaphysical disjunct in human history.54 Fussell makes this point explicit at the end of his first chapter, following a reading of Snowden’s death in Catch-­22 as the “contemporary equivalent of the experience offered by the first day on the Somme, and like that archetypical original . . . a virtual allegory of political and social cognition in our time.” The argument is “that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”55 The power of this myth—our expulsion from Eden on the battlefields of Europe— is hardly vitiated by its manifest falseness, despite the work of diligent scholars showing the holes in Fussell’s story. “As a work of literary theory, The Great War and Modern Memory may be judged a success,” writes Dan Todman. “As a work of history—cultural, social, or military—it is seriously flawed.”56 Todman joins many other critics in saying so, not least Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson. In a thorough dismantling of Fussell’s claims to historical mastery, Prior and Wilson painstakingly catalog Fussell’s sweeping generalizations, blundering omissions, and tendentious 53. Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 76, 79, 326. 54. As Daniel Swift notes, “behind Fussell’s account is the Christian story of the Fall” (Swift, “Classic Book”). 55. Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 35. 56. Todman, Great War: Myth and Memory, 158.

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assertions.57 One of the most important observations Prior and Wilson make concerns “a thumbnail sketch of the chronology of fighting on the Western Front” in which the German gas attack on Ypres on April 22, 1915, was “followed ‘a few weeks later’ by the British operation at Neuve Chapelle on 10 March,” only one example of many where Fussell confuses and collapses time and space.58 “These novel propositions are more than lapses to which even diligent historians can be prone,” write Prior and Wilson. “Fussell’s disregard for sequence and geography stems from the conviction that, on the Western Front, time and place have no meaning.” This “disregard for sequence and geography” is symptomatic of Fussell’s method, further evinced by his thoroughgoing reliance on a handful of World War II novels—Gravity’s Rainbow, Catch-­22, and The Naked and the Dead— as examples of the persistence of various literary and sociocultural themes which he identifies as originating in the Great War. Gravity’s Rainbow is cited nine times, nearly as often as Ezra Pound. Catch-­22 is cited six times, more often than Ford Madox Ford or Ernst Jünger. Fussell’s discussion of these books is almost invariably without specific historical context or attention to the complexities of the works themselves, since his only uses for them are to assert the deep unity of all modern war and support his narrative of the Great War as a fall from innocence. This treatment leads him into peculiar arguments, such as where he reads Christopher Isherwood’s memoir Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties, published in 1938, as “a foreshadowing of some of the paranoid oppositions . . . in Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Gravity’s Rainbow,” or asserts without any evidence besides vague resemblance that key scenes in Catch-­22 were inspired by a subgenre of British homoerotic verse.59 It is almost as if Fussell suffers from the same temporal displacement as do Catch-­22’s Yossarian and Slaughterhouse-­Five’s Billy Pilgrim, leaping back and forth through time from decade to decade without any strong sense of the present except as one continuous war.60 “March might as well have followed April, or Vimy Ridge belonged in Belgium rather than France,” write Prior and Wilson of Fussell’s view. “In the world of trench warfare, every action was the same as every other action, and every scene of fighting the same as every other scene. Permanence was all. The killing, like the conflict, was endless, and futile, and endlessly futile.”61 57. Prior and Wilson, “Paul Fussell at War.” 58. Prior and Wilson, “Paul Fussell at War,” 70. 59. Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 110, 307–9, 34–35. 60. Slaughterhouse-­Five only shows up in The Great War and Modern Memory twice, and those times briefly. 61. Prior and Wilson, “Paul Fussell at War,” 70.

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Todman writes, “Fussell’s book keyed into many of the negative myths of the [Great War] which were achieving dominance in British popular culture by 1975. This is why it has been so easy for readers to accept it as a work of history rather than of literature.”62 Those myths were not only beginning to dominate British culture in the 1970s but also had long been dominant in the American conception of literary modernism, with its emphasis on the prose of Ernest Hemingway and the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The Great War and Modern Memory also keyed into antiwar sentiment related to the Vietnam War and to a generational historical revision of World War II. No longer the “Good War,” which in truth it never had been in the first place, the meaning of World War II had grown complicated, divisive, and dark.63 When Fussell approvingly quotes Alfred Kazin writing that “war may be the ultimate purpose of technological society,” he is articulating a widespread sense of modernity itself as a fall into perdition, a narrative that ends in the annihilation of the human species in nuclear apocalypse.64 “It is the business of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to enact that conclusion,” Fussell writes, and that conclusion, whether it is true or not, is psychologically unbearable: it offers no way out, no hope, no “temporal vanishing line in the future” in which the collective narrative of a community’s self-­conception might find purchase.65 This apocalyptic teleology is, perhaps, the subconscious meaning of “modern” in Fussell’s title; it might also help us understand his persistent confusion of time and space, the deeper resemblances between Fussell’s book and the World War II novels he relies on so heavily (Gravity’s Rainbow, Catch-­22, and Slaughterhouse-­Five), and the appeal such works had for the first generation of readers to grow up under the threat of global annihilation, a generation for whom something incredible, incommunicable, unparalleled, and unprecedented had happened, might happen, probably would happen, a generation for whom the progressivist teleology of History had been broken by an ontological and metaphysical disjunct—not on July 28, 1914, when the 62. Todman, Great War: Myth and Memory, 159. 63. Consider the testimony of Dellie Hahne: “The good war? That infuriates me. Yeah, the idea of World War Two being called a good war is a horrible thing. . . . I know it had to be stopped and we stopped it. But I don’t feel proud, because the way we did it was so devious. How many years has it been? Forty years later? I feel I’m standing here with egg on my face. I was lied to. I was cheated. I was made a fool of.” Dellie Hahne quoted in Terkel, “Good War,” 121. John Lukacs points out that “that very phrase ‘A Good War,’ as well as ‘The Greatest Generation,’ appeared in the United States some time after the 1960s, at least in some extent consequent to the popular unease with the Vietnam War and in contrast to that struggle” (Lukacs, Legacy of the Second World War, 3). 64. Kazin, “Decline of War,” 74, quoted in Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 320. 65. Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 320.

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Austro-­Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, but on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity Site near Socorro, New Mexico, the dawn of the American century. But if History is broken, how does the American story go on? How do we make positive sense of our collective life as Americans when the idea of America has been atomized? What kinds of stories do we tell “in order to live” in a present that has no future? The stories Americans seemed to want to hear in the 1970s were not ones that explored the historical and political contradictions that emerged out of the central event of the twentieth century, but rather stories that turned that event into myth. Gravity’s Rainbow, published in 1973, was an astonishing critical and commercial success for a forbiddingly difficult and nihilistic book which presented World War II as a depoliticized metaphysical encounter between the human soul in its longing for freedom and the teleological will-­ to-­death manifest in the technological supremacy of the military-­industrial complex. The Great War and Modern Memory, published in 1975, was likewise a remarkable critical and commercial success for an erudite work of literary scholarship offering a view of history that collapsed World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War into a single metaphysical fall from innocence. Two years later, in May 1977, a film came out that completed the transformation of World War II and the idea of war itself into metaphysical fantasy, a film which, like Paul Fussell’s critical work and Pynchon’s novel, collapsed America’s different twentieth-­century wars into a single war, then merged them with the Western and filtered them through Joseph Campbell’s Jungian schema of a universal human narrative, evacuating politics as such from the American imaginary, fusing past and future into a changeless wartime, and creating a resonant myth representing American war as a spiritual conflict between good and evil, abstract enough to translate historical subjectivity into wholly archetypical forms existing outside of history, “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” The film was an astounding commercial and cultural success for such a simple and fantastic story, in part because it gave spiritually weary Americans a new culture hero: a traumatized farm boy caught up in a war he hadn’t chosen, a blue-­eyed, blond-­haired Californian whose true struggle was not among bodies and nations but within his soul. War as Fantasy: Star Wars In George Lucas’s space opera adventure film Star Wars, American culture found the fantasy in which it could let the contradictions of World War II—the ideological contradictions of American empire and the problem of the hero in modern industrial capitalism, as embodied in the figure of the

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bomber—dissolve.66 In the first act, the Western is inverted: still a story of imperial conquest, our hero is no longer the stoic conqueror, the John Wayne of Red River or The Searchers, but a traumatized victim of the imperial war machine, Luke Skywalker, who is forced to action by the brutal My-­Lai-­style massacre of his adopted parents, Owen and Beru Lars.67 In the second act, our hero and his companions dive into the heart of the war machine itself— the military-­industrial complex given form as the Death Star, a hybrid objective correlative for both Hiroshima and the Holocaust—and rescue the gender-­bending Princess Leia, who combines Luke’s victimized femininity with Han Solo’s blaster-­wielding swagger. In order for our young group of heroes to escape the military-­industrial complex, however, the older generation must pass away. Actor Alec Guinness, best known in the United States at that point for his roles as British officers in Bridge Over the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, and who as an actual officer in the British navy had commanded a landing craft in the Allied invasion of Sicily, embodied in the robed, Zen-­monk-­like Obi-­Wan Kenobi the “GI generation” and the British Empire, predecessor to the American one; Kenobi’s willing self-­sacrifice at the hands of the cyborg Darth Vader performs an allegory of the decline of the British Empire and its supersession by American victory in World War II, while at the same time imaginatively freeing the next generation of American youth (Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie) from the grip of the military-­industrial complex’s invisible pull, its “tractor beam” a metaphor for the military draft. In the final act, the American bombing of Japan and Vietnam are reimagined as an act of derring-­do undertaken by a ragtag band of scrappy rebels, a deed in which the planet-­killing military-­industrial war machine is destroyed by a precision strike guided solely by the purity of Luke Skywalker’s feelings. The film ends with a scene recuperating Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, in which our young American heroes are honored for their valor and in effect knighted by the aristocrat Princess Leia, who thus integrates them into the patriarchal hierarchies the guerilla resistance has inherited from the “Old Republic.” Any lingering doubts about the triumph of good will over the military-­industrial complex are quickly chased away by the swift intrusion of the closing music. Star Wars is a fantasy in which politics and religion are conflated and reduced to a godless Manichean binary, there are no black people, and economic relations are marginal, and as the film’s reception proved, it was the perfect fantasy for the guilty children of a racist global empire longing for confirmation of their own innocence. As George Lucas himself said 66. Lucas, Star Wars. 67. For related and helpful readings that elucidate the connections between Star Wars and the Western, see Nadel, “Empire Strikes Out”; and W. Wright, “Empire Bites the Dust.”

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of the film’s origins, in 1977, “We all know what a terrible mess we have made of the world, we all know how wrong we were in Vietnam. We also know . . . how terrible we are, how we have ruined the world and what schmucks we are and how rotten everything is. And I said, what we really need is something more positive.”68 That Star Wars was responding to the American war in Vietnam by adopting and remixing pulp serials and Hollywood Westerns was clear to astute critics at the time. In an article for the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland compared Star Wars to Michael Herr’s Dispatches, arguing that “Star Wars is in many respects a film about Vietnam; but it is made at one step removed, for post-­Vietnam self-­absorbed Americans.”69 In the May 30, 1977, issue of Time, among articles on trade war with Japan, real war between Zambia and Rhodesia, and the electoral triumph of “superhawk” Menachem Begin in Israel, Jay Cocks wrote, “Star Wars is a combination of Flash Gordon, The Wizard of Oz, the Errol Flynn swashbucklers of the ’30s and ’40s and almost every western ever screened.”70 Cocks quotes science fiction novelist Ben Bova calling the film a “galactic Gone with the Wind,” suggesting that even in 1977, some viewers could see the aristocratic nostalgia for racial purity beating at the film’s heart. Other critics were yet more explicit about the film’s implicit racism, such as reviewer Walter Bremond, journalist Dorothy Gilliam, and actor Raymond St. Jacques, pointing out the film’s association of blackness with evil, the way that the droids evoke American minstrelsy, and, in St. Jacques’s words, the “terrifying realization that black people (or any ethnic minority for that matter) shall not exist in the galactic space empires of the future.”71 They might also have pointed out Chewbacca’s obvious role as the primitive sidekick to the white adventurer Han Solo, reducing Kipling’s Fuzzy Wuzzy, Natty Bumpo’s Chingachkook, and Huck’s Jim to their hairy, inarticulate master archetype. The connection between Star Wars and the Vietnam War was neither happenstance nor unconscious: the origins of Star Wars lie in the script for Apocalypse Now, which George Lucas started working on with John Milius in 1968. As Lucas’s biographer Brian Jones tells the story: Lucas had become more and more intrigued by a script John Milius was tinkering with for a war movie set in Vietnam. . . . It was a mashup of Dr. Strangelove . . . and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. . . . At first, Milius called his 68. Scanlon, “George Lucas: The Wizard of Star Wars.” 69. Hoagland, “Politics of Star Wars.” 70. Cocks, “Star Wars: The Year’s Best Movie.” 71. Quoted in Gilliam, “Black Heavies.”

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script The Psychedelic Soldier but then settled on Apocalypse Now, an inspired swipe at the Nirvana Now buttons being worn by the hippies Milius despised. Lucas loved the script, and as Milius continued writing, Lucas would throw out one idea after another about how the film should be made. Naturally, he would direct it, and would do it in a documentary style on 16mm film, to give it almost a newsreel effect.72

Lucas was still involved in preproduction for Apocalypse Now in 1971, when producer and Vietnam war veteran Gary Kurtz joined Lucas and Milius in developing the project, bringing with him footage he’d shot working with a military film unit in Vietnam.73 Yet it was at just this point that Lucas began to have doubts about the project and started thinking about how he might do something to “regenerate optimism” instead.74 Responding to a challenge from Francis Ford Coppola to “do something that’s human,” Lucas made American Graffiti, his autobiographical film about California kids graduating from high school in 1962.75 After shooting American Graffiti but before it was released, Lucas went back to Apocalypse Now. Negotiations with Coppola and Columbia bogged down in percentages, however, so even as Gary Kurtz was scouting locations in the Philippines, Lucas dropped Apocalypse Now and turned to completing the two-­picture deal he’d signed with Universal, fleshing out a vague idea he’d had for an action fantasy film inspired by Flash Gordon, Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, and World War II air force movies.76 This film would be a conscious translation of the Vietnam War into the fantasy realm of pulp science fiction: a kind of “star wars.” According to archival interviews done by Charles Lippincott between 1975 and 1977, George Lucas knew exactly what he was doing, and Lucas’s predraft notes make the conversion explicit:77 Theme: Aquilae is a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or a provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire. . . . The Empire is like America ten years from now, after Nixonian gangsters assinated [sic] the Emperor and were elected to power in a rigged election; created civil disorder by instigating race riots, aiding rebel groups, and allowing the crime rate to rise to the point where a “total control” police 72. B. Jones, George Lucas, 101. 73. B. Jones, George Lucas, 127–29. 74. B. Jones, George Lucas, 130. 75. B. Jones, George Lucas, 131. 76. B. Jones, George Lucas, 168–69; see also Rinzler, Making of “Star Wars,” 7. 77. “I figured that I couldn’t make [Apocalypse Now] because it was about the Vietnam War, so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy.” Rinzler, Making of “Star Wars,” 8.

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state was welcomed by the people. Then the people were exploited with high taxes, utility and transport costs. Gangsters a cartel made up of power companies, transport companies, + crime organizations . . . We are at a turning point: fascism or revolution.78

As Lucas wrote and rewrote treatments for The Star Wars, he revisited the pulps that had inspired him, read World War II veteran Harry Harrison’s neopulp science fiction novels, and studied books on mythology and religion, including Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Lucas was working deliberately to create a new myth, and as he did so, the political and economic aspects of the story— “Nixonian” gangsters, rigged elections, high taxes, and capitalist cartels— either faded into the background or fell away entirely. In 1974, Coppola tried one more time to get Lucas to helm Apocalypse Now, but Lucas passed. While the ways that Star Wars transformed the Vietnam War into space opera were overt and Lucas’s efforts to recuperate for a weary empire the innocent joys of colonialism intentional (“What we really need to do is to colonize the next galaxy,” Lucas told Rolling Stone in 1977), the ways that Star Wars revises and reimagines World War II are subtler and more complex, even though the film was from its inception also a reimagining of World War II.79 As Lucas wrote his early notes and rough draft, he began taping fighter scenes from World War II films, eventually collecting more than twenty hours of footage that he edited into an eight-­minute sequence.80 He watched Air Force (1943), The Bridges at Toko-­Ri (1954), The Dam Busters (1955), and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), among other aviation war films about World War II (and Korea). He even had his designers make the spacecraft look like World War II fighters.81 Lucas was going for a kind of nostalgic ostraneniya (estrangement): “I’m trying to make everything look very natural, a casual almost I’ve-­seen-­this-­ 78. Rinzler, Making of “Star Wars,” 16–17. Another version of these notes shows up in Lucas’s second draft of the script, Adventures of the Starkiller, as Luke Starkiller explains to his younger brother Windy how the Jedi Bendu were betrayed and destroyed by the Power and Transport Guilds, who took over the Great Senate (Rinzler, Making of “Star Wars,” 27–29). Another Vietnam influence: while Lucas was working on the rewrite to The Star Wars, his wife, Marcia, was helping to edit Martin Scorsese’s film about a traumatized Vietnam veteran turned vigilante, Taxi Driver (Rinzler, Making of “Star Wars,” 25). 79. Scanlon, “George Lucas: The Wizard of Star Wars.” As Lucas explained later, he wanted to create a fantastic, positive, fairy-­tale adventure story “about exotic lands and strange creatures” (B. Jones, George Lucas, 184–85). 80. B. Jones, George Lucas, 170–71. Rinzler, Making of “Star Wars,” 15. 81. According to model maker Colin Cantwell, the Y-­Wing was inspired by the World War II TBF Torpedo Bomber (Rinzler, Making of “Star Wars,” 38).

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before look. . . . Like the X-­wing and TIE fighter battle, you say, ‘I’ve seen that, it’s World War II—but wait a minute—that isn’t kind of jet I’ve ever seen before.’ I want the whole film to have that quality. It’s a very hard thing to come by, because it should look very familiar but at the same time not be familiar at all.”82 The film’s defamiliarized evocations of World War II go beyond the spacecraft, to include the Nazi-­like uniforms of the Imperial officers, the use of the word stormtrooper, the desert and jungle landscapes of Tatooine and Yavin (recalling the concurrent North African and South Pacific campaigns), John Williams’s Wagnerian score (reminiscent of wartime newsreels), Alec Guinness (as mentioned before), and the final scene’s echoes of Nazi pageantry. This is all fairly self-­evident. What is perhaps less easily recognized is the way that America’s primary enemy in World War II, Japan, made it into the film through Lucas’s appropriation of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai aesthetic: Obi-­Wan Kenobi’s name and dress, the use of light sabers, and Darth Vader’s helmet all suggest samurai. In this way, Star Wars goes a step beyond Tora! Tora! Tora!—the 1970 film that took as its protagonist Admiral Yamamoto, the Japanese commander who organized the attack on Pearl Harbor, and showed the attack from a Japanese point of view—by subconsciously integrating Japanese cultural iconography.83 Here we see again Bugs Bunny’s dialectic of identity and difference played out in the realm of cultural warfare, only this time instead of wiping out the Japanese with “Good Rumor” bars, the hybrid Hollywood war machine absorbs Japanese culture into its totalitarian dream life. Most important are two revisions that disconnect and disidentify American “good will” from the American military that won World War II, evacuating the political and economic complexities of history in favor of a cleaner, more “positive” narrative. First, the ragtag rebel army is distinguished from the technological behemoth of the Empire’s military-­industrial complex by playing on a subconscious and invidious American distinction between a “good” citizen army and an “evil” professional army. While the rebel pilots’ ill-­fitting uniforms suggest Bill Maudlin’s Willie and Joe, those earthy citizen-­ soldiers drafted to save the world from fascism, the professional sheen of the Imperial aesthetic identifies any modern, industrialized military with the Nazis. American war-­fighting spirit is thus subtly separated out from the material truth of the American war machine. This change is related to the second revision, which happens when Grand 82. Rinzler, Making of “Star Wars,” 97. 83. Interestingly, Akira Kurosawa was slated to serve as director of the Japanese portions of Tora! Tora! Tora! and worked on the film for two years in preproduction, but he was replaced in principal shooting by Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku.

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Moff Tarkin orders the Death Star to destroy the peaceful planet of Alderaan. “I felt a great disturbance in the Force,” says Obi Wan Kenobi, “as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.” In this moment, Star Wars collapses Hiroshima and the Holocaust into a single act of spectacular genocide that defines the clear moral boundary between the Empire and the Rebellion, since only villains as obviously evil as Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader would undertake such wanton destruction as mass civilian terror bombing. When Luke destroys the Death Star at the film’s end with a precision strike, the American firebombing of Tokyo, strategic bombing of Germany, and atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are both recuperated and expunged from the American imaginary of World War II. The Death Star, after all, has no civilians on it: it is a purely military target: indeed, a target which embodies the military itself. Thus, the messy moral complications of waging total war are redefined as a clear conflict between the manifest evils of technology and the natural good will of a blue-­eyed farm boy, and our deep American faith in the redeeming power of violence is restored. Star Wars stands out as perhaps the most notable artifact in the long, contentious revision of the meaning of World War II that took place in American culture in the 1960s and 1970s. The collapse of historical difference into a universal spatiotemporal “zone” of total war, as evinced in Star Wars, Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Great War and Modern Memory, is concomitant with the translation of war from a political activity into a metaphysical event, the ideological transformation of “war making” into universal “peacekeeping” and “counterterrorism,” and the emergence of the universal human rights subject within a global capitalist labor market. Star Wars is the positive sublation of the negative enlightenment offered by Gravity’s Rainbow and The Great War and Modern Memory: the trauma of war reveals transcendental truths of human existence, which for Pynchon and Fussell lead nowhere but death, but which for Lucas leads to self-­knowledge and maturity. Tyrone Slothrop’s disappearance in the Zone reflects the cultural moment when the liberal subject is subsumed and disappears within the military-­industrial capitalist war machine; Luke Skywalker’s miraculous rebirth from the Death Star’s fireball in his crucifix-­like X-­Wing dramatizes the liberal subject’s miraculous re­emergence under the sign of trauma.

5

The Trauma Hero It is interesting how much more “psychological” the modern soldier sounds than his predecessors. A victim identity, particularly if medically certificated, has taken a special place in contemporary society, inevitably shaping what a soldier thinks has happened to him. D erek S u m m erfield, “Shell Shock Patients: From Cowards to Victims” (1998) The theory of this program: Return to the traumatizing event. Remember it in detail. Think about it through therapy and by writing about it. Keep at it until you are thinking about what you did do instead of what you didn’t. Learn that truth is relative, and that there is the moment of trauma, and then the moment following the trauma of your first reaction, when shame and guilt can take hold. Healing is an act of persuasion. D a v id F i n kel , Thank You For Your Service (2013)

Combat Gnosticism and the Old Lie: From Clausewitz to The Yellow Birds In June 1917, after five months hard fighting on the front line, British lieutenant Wilfred Owen was sent to the rear to be treated for shell shock. While convalescing at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, he wrote the first draft of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” a bitter poem describing the death of a fellow soldier in a gas attack. This draft was dedicated “To Jessie Pope,” a widely published female civilian poet known for patriotic poems such as “The Call,” which asks “Who’s for the trench—are you, my laddie?”1 Owen’s dedication, later amended “To a certain poetess” (fig. 12), was as facetious as the poem’s now-­famous ending is ironic: the vividly depicted horror of a comrade’s choking death was intended to chasten prowar civilians like Pope and to repudiate the “old lie” that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. Owen begins his poem in the perspective of marching soldiers, invoking a first-­person plural collective speaker (“we cursed through sludge”) that shifts between subjective sensation and close description of physical suffering. Vivid images strike a scene as if out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch: 1. Owen, Collected Poems, 55; Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est.” See also Pope, “The Call.”

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F i g u re 1 2 . Wilfred Owen, first page of “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917). A manuscript draft “To a certain poetess.” The British Library, POEMS OF WILFRED OWEN, Vol. II (ff. 183), Add MS 43721. By permission of the Wilfred Owen Library Trust. Photograph: © The British Library Board.

bent, “knock-­kneed” men, “haunting flares,” “blood-­shod” feet. Details such as men losing their boots and the caliber of the artillery rounds being fired at them help establish the speaker’s authority. The soldiers’ crippled passivity and mute endurance—they are described as lame, blind, “drunk with fatigue,” and deaf—heighten their sympathetic appeal. In the second stanza, the poem makes two important turns. The men

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come under gas attack and we helplessly watch one of them fumble with his mask and choke to death. As that is happening, we move swiftly from a collective voice to a particular set of eyes; our singular speaker bodies forth from the mass of men at the very instant that he, through the “misty panes” of his gas mask, sees one of his fellows die. The poem’s first use of the first person singular, its speaker’s originating enunciation of selfhood, arrives at the moment of death. In this poem, as in the myth of the trauma hero, selfhood forms in and through an encounter with mortality: “I saw him drowning.” The turn here through perceptual detail into the speaker’s subjectivity is pushed further in the next stanza’s freestanding couplet, where the death only just seen is replayed within the speaker’s unconscious: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” In the final stanza, the speaker turns from his dream to the reader’s—“If in some smothering dreams you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in”—indicting the one who doesn’t know, the one who isn’t haunted by obsessive nightmares replaying the moment of death. The details press on, one after the other, “hanging face,” “gargling blood,” “incurable sores,” but now instead of describing the scene itself, or even its memory, the speaker describes the dream you, the reader, would be tortured by, if you’d seen what he’d seen and felt what he felt. If you could see, the speaker tells Jessie Pope, if you could hear, if you knew what it was really like, then you wouldn’t write poems supporting the war. Indeed, as Owen’s amended dedication might be read as suggesting, “a certain poetess” lacks not only the kind of experience that would give her the knowledge to make judgments about war, she lacks the kind of experience that would grant her a recognizable self, personhood, a name. The Latin tag ending the poem, from Horace’s Carmina III.2, is translated by David West as “Sweet it is and honourable to die for one’s native land.”2 This tag stands in for what Owen is aiming to attack, to dispel, to discredit: the “old Lie,” which comprises not just Jessie Pope’s jingoistic verse or the easy bellicosity of civilians back home but also the classical education of the aristocratic officer caste leading the war, the English public schools in which Horace was taught, and the very idea of war literature itself. The old lie, Owen suggests, is what you’ve read in your books, what you’ve been taught, what you’ve been spoon-­fed. I know the truth, Owen claims, not because I read about it in school, but because I’ve seen it, heard it, and felt it. Owen asserts his authority to make moral judgments on the basis of both his sensibility, meaning his sensitivity to experience, and on the experience itself. According to his logic, 2. Horace, Complete Odes and Epodes, 78.

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what he’s seen and what he’s felt give him privileged access to moral truth, truth beyond anything civilians can ever hope to achieve. The privileging of combat experience as a source of transcendental knowledge—the understanding of war as revelation—is a phenomenon historian Yuval Harari argues has its roots in a complex shift in European culture from recording external deeds as evidence of valor to recording internal experiences as evidence of developing sensibility, a shift from seeing war experience as a testament to personal glory to seeing it as a moment of sentimental education.3 Harari’s analysis accords with that of other historians of war culture such as David A. Bell, Azar Gat, and John Lynn, who identify the Napoleonic Wars as a period of epochal change in Western conceptions of war. During this period, as Bell writes, “the very concept and experience of ‘the self ’ in war was changing.”4 Bell identifies three significant cultural transformations that gave rise to modern war culture. First, a change from accepting “war as an inevitable, and ordinary, facet of human existence” to seeing it “as an exceptional, extreme state of affairs.”5 Second, the development of a notion of the “military” as a social sphere separate and distinct from civilian life.6 And third, the rise of “militarism,” which Bell defines as a belief in the moral superiority of military values.7 Bell elaborates how these transformations have evolved: As a result of these shifts, a culture of war that seems quite alien to us had given way, by the early 1800s, to one that remains highly recognizable today across the Western world and especially in the United States. . . . On the one hand, Americans today generally see war as an exceptional state of affairs. . . . Americans frequently describe war as something civilized nations have outgrown. American politicians automatically denounce the country’s adversaries as criminal malefactors, threaten them with prosecution or even assassination, and never do them the courtesy of a formal declaration of war. But many Americans . . . also have an unabated fascination with war, considering it a test of their society’s worth. They treat members of the armed forces with respect verging on reverence and take for granted that no one who has not been in combat can ever understand “what it is like” or how it changes a person.8

Harari’s analysis in The Ultimate Experience, consonant with Bell’s, describes how revolutions in military technology and organization in the early seven3. Harari, Ultimate Experience. 4. Bell, First Total War, 7. See also Gat, Origins of Military Thought; Lynn, Battle. 5. Bell, First Total War, 5–7. 6. Bell, First Total War, 11. 7. Bell, First Total War, 12. 8. Bell, First Total War, 12–13.

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teenth century helped create the conditions for detaching personal glory from military experience, while the growth of sensationalism, the “cult of sensibility,” and Romanticism combined with increasing literacy and a professionalized, middle-­class officer corps in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to make “war-­as-­revelation” the dominant narrative for the individual experience of war. War reveals transcendental truths about existence, according to this Romantic narrative, and that revelation is only available through direct, physical sensation, or what literary scholar James Campbell calls “combat gnosis.” The Greek term gnosis traditionally means experiential as opposed to theoretical knowledge and has connotations of secrecy and mysticism through its association with Hellenic mystery cults and later Christian sects. Campbell uses the term to describe a moment of revealed knowledge accessible only by direct, physical, sensory experience on the battlefield, such as the moment of vision Owen describes in “Dulce et Decorum Est”: “a qualitatively separate order of experience that is difficult if not impossible to communicate to any who have not undergone an identical experience.”9 What Campbell calls “combat gnosis,” Harari calls “flesh-­witnessing,” to distinguish it from eyewitnessing. The point is that the flesh-­witness and the combat gnostic have an intimate, sensual experience of war; they have undergone a physical initiation; it’s not enough to see war at a distance.10 The evolution of the idea of war-­as-­revelation in Western culture can be traced in a series of illustrative moments from Carl von Clausewitz to the present day. Consider the following well-­known passage from Clausewitz’s 1832 treatise On War: “If one has never personally experienced war, one cannot understand in what the difficulties constantly mentioned really consist, nor why a commander should need any brilliance or exceptional ability. Everything looks simple; the knowledge required does not look remarkable, the strategic options are so obvious that by comparison the simplest problem of higher mathematics has an impressive scientific dignity. Once war has actually been seen the difficulties become clear; but it is still extremely hard to describe the unseen, all-­pervading element that brings about this change of perspective.”11 For Clausewitz, the difference between eyewitnessing and flesh-­witnessing is blurred—the two kinds of witness work against each other in subtle tension. Clausewitz’s language shifts back and forth between felt experience and visible evidence as he begins with the question of personal experience but then recasts that experience in terms of the purely visual: “Once 9. James Campbell, “Combat Gnosticism,” 203. 10. Harari, “Armchairs, Coffee, and Authority”; Harari, “Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-­ Witnesses of War.” 11. Clausewitz, On War, 66.

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war has actually been seen the difficulties become clear.” Yet Clausewitz complicates the clarity of eyewitnessing with a qualification insisting on the “unseen, all-­pervading element that brings about this change,” suggesting that seeing war is still not enough: it must be felt. Three decades later, in War and Peace (1867), Leo Tolstoy offers perhaps the most iconic moment of flesh-­witnessing in Western literature. In book 1 of Tolstoy’s novel, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is wounded leading a charge in the Battle of Austerlitz, which battle the Russians lose. As dusk falls, the victorious French emperor tours the battlefield, looking over the dead and wounded. Andrei is found lying in his own blood, barely conscious, barely alive, staring at the sky and “unconsciously uttering a gentle, piteous, and childlike moan.”12 Prince Andrei hears Napoleon and his aides approach, and recognizes himself as the object of Napoleon’s utterance, “Voilà une belle mort!” (“That’s a fine death!”). Up to this point Andrei has admired Napoleon from afar as a great general, a great man, and a military genius. He has considered him his hero. “But at that moment,” writes Tolstoy, “Napoleon seemed to him such a small insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between himself and that lofty infinite sky with the clouds flying over it.”13 Napoleon is diminished by Andrei’s sublime revelation, and we see, in the pairing of Andrei’s selfhood with the “infinite sky,” an exact figuration of the epistemological relationship that war-­as-­revelation offers between subjectivity and totality. Andrei moans; Napoleon realizes he’s alive and calls for help. Later, when Napoleon visits the field hospital where wounded Russian officers (including Bolkonsky) are being treated, the two men encounter each other again. Napoleon and the Russian officers engage in a set of verbal exchanges that take place according to a ritualistic structure. Napoleon is expected to compliment the men on their bravery, and the wounded men are expected to assert their fighting spirit. This collective performance affirms that the opposed fighters are joined as men of courage and honor; it creates a sense of solidarity and security between the victors and the vanquished—they are all aristocrats and warriors, joined in a common caste if not in common cause. Prince Andrei refuses to participate in this ritual of mutual recognition, and his refusal is founded in the moral authority that his traumatic revelation has given him. Napoleon first demands to see the senior officer, Prince Repnin, then compliments Repnin on his regiment’s performance. Repnin returns the gesture 12. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 309. 13. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 310. My translation of the French phrase.

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of compliment. Then Napoleon looks at the young man beside Repnin, an officer named Sukhtelen, smiles, and observes: “Il est venu bien jeune se frotter à nous.” (“He is very young to tangle with us”). The youth responds with a conventional assertion of bravery that is belied by his wounded body: “‘Youth is no hindrance to courage,’ murmured Sukhtelen in a failing voice.”14 Napoleon admires the discipline in the ritual structure of the riposte, paying no attention to the physical suffering evinced in the young man’s broken voice. Then Napoleon turns to Prince Andrei. It is important to note how speech works in the exchange that follows. On the battlefield, Napoleon utters falsehoods (“That’s a fine death!”), which are to Prince Andrei no more meaningful than “the buzzing of a fly,” while Andrei speaks the pure sounds of being, performing a pathos that moves even its own performer: “He feebly moved his leg, and uttered a weak, sickly groan which aroused his own pity.”15 In this second scene, however, when Prince Andrei is brought out to complete the show of the prisoners, the manifest artifice of the military ritual forced on the wounded Russian officers by Napoleon leaves Andrei speechless. The conflict of moral authority at work here—staged in a moment of performative utterance where Andrei must respond to Napoleon’s question, “How do you feel, mon brave?”—is inscribed at the level of language. There are no true words Andrei can use in this purely conventional situation: So insignificant at that moment seemed to him all the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so mean did his hero himself with his paltry vanity and joy in victory appear, compared with the lofty, equitable, and kindly sky which he had seen and understood, that he could not answer him. Everything seemed so futile and insignificant in comparison with the stern and solemn train of thought that weakness from loss of blood, suffering, and the nearness of death, aroused in him. Looking into Napoleon’s eyes Prince Andrei thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.16

This epiphany powerfully affects the course of Prince Andrei’s life and shapes his development, in the sense of his moral education, or Bildung. Indeed, Prince Andrei’s battlefield wounding is staged as a moment of maturation and illumination. Prince Andrei can see Napoleon’s insignificance and vanity now because of the physical revelation of his wounding. His trauma gives him ac14. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 311. My translation of the French phrase. 15. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 310. 16. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 312.

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cess to a moral authority that overturns his old values and allows him to judge his former teachers, his former heroes, even the Emperor Napoleon, much as Wilfred Owen’s frontline experience five decades later would give him the moral authority to denounce the lies of Jessie Pope and Horace. As we can thus see, Tolstoy builds on Clausewitz’s distinction between the experienced and the inexperienced by changing the grounds on which one understands what experience means. It’s not enough to be in a war: the kind of experience one can have in war will depend on the kind of person one already is. The emphasis on physicality and embodiment accorded by these earlier representations of the revelatory truth of war opens later into a disavowal of representation as such. In Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel of World War I, A Farewell to Arms, Lieutenant Frederic Henry delivers a denunciation of martial ideals and abstract language founded in the moral authority of his wounding that makes this point explicit. Where Tolstoy staged the conflict of moral authority between a wounded, illuminated Prince Andrei and a vainglorious Napoleon, Hemingway stages the conflict of moral authority between two kinds of language: between what Lieutenant Henry calls the concrete and the abstract, but what are better understood as tropes of physical metonymy over against forms of social valuation. The scene is set in a conversation between Lieutenant Henry and the Italian ambulance driver Gino, in an area of the front that had been taken back from the Austrians. Gino makes a comment about how the summer fighting “cannot have been done in vain,” and Henry remains silent.17 “I did not say anything,” Hemingway writes, narrating Henry’s reflection. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.18 17. Hemingway, Farewell to Arms, 184. 18. Hemingway, Farewell to Arms, 185.

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With Clausewitz, Tolstoy, and Owen, we can see how combat gnosis gives the soldier moral authority and access to truth that civilians, armchair generals, and Napoleon do not have. The transcendental knowledge that combat provides through the traumatic wound or encounter with death is the criterion for determining who can speak the truth. For Hemingway’s Lieutenant Henry, the soldier’s truth becomes a formal truth as well: it determines not only who can speak but also what words they can use. Those words must be concrete, sensory, material, metonymic: place-­names, regimental numbers, and dates must stand in for the battles that were fought. Any social valuation at all, any judgment of character or worth, is for Hemingway unspeakably offensive (“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity”).19 War and combat can only be properly addressed by invoking the temporal and geographic markers which index the relevant events for those who experienced them.20 Thus Hemingway attempts to fix language spatiotemporally to the site of sacrifice, against the mutability of metaphoric or categorical description. As we have seen, such problems of metaphoric fixity, heroic authority, and social value opened out during World War II into a broader complex I have designated the problem of the hero, which emerged in the bomber lyric, midcentury trauma narratives, attempts to reconcile America’s racial caste system with its universalist ideology, and complex meditations on what it means to “participate in the heroic.” As has been pointed out, the range of approaches to making sense of World War II in literature was (and remains) various—from odd works like Peter Bowman’s verse novel Beach Red (1945), Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie and Willie (1946), and John Hawke’s The Cannibal (1949) to science fiction classics such as Robert Heinlein’s Starship Trooper (1959) and Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz (1960). Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, however, a recognized canon of World War II literature began to form around works focusing primarily on American trauma, works that presented 19. John Limon sees a conflict between metonymy and metaphor at the heart of Hemingway’s novel (and central to Hemingway’s writing about war generally): “The opposition of hyper-­ metonymic style and super-­metaphoric war means that there can hardly be a truce between them; there turns out to be no separate narratological peace. The relation of war activities to peace activities must, there, itself be a warfare of metaphor and metonymy.” Limon, Writing after War, 98. 20. Consider how this language filters into nonfiction accounts of war, as in Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning: “We are humiliated in combat. The lofty words that inspire people to war—duty, honor, glory—swiftly become repugnant and hollow. They are replaced by the hard, specific images of war, by the prosaic names of villages and roads. The abstract rhetoric of patriotism is obliterated, exposed as the empty handmaiden of myth. Fear brings us all back down to earth.” Hedges, War Is a Force, 40.

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the war as a baffling and nearly meaningless metaphysical confusion of space, time, and death: Catch–­22, Slaughterhouse-­Five, Gravity’s Rainbow. For Tim O’Brien, in his 1990 collection of linked short stories about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, war can’t even be talked about. Upping the literary stakes, O’Brien pushes beyond Hemingway’s repudiation of idealism and abstraction, beyond even Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdities, to a repudiation of civility and truth as such. Whereas Hemingway still allows metonymic invocation to carry the dignity of battlefield presence, O’Brien refuses to allow any connection between social norms and combat at all. Where Hemingway insists on the concrete, O’Brien avows the obscene. “A true war story,” he writes in “How to Tell a True War Story,” from The Things They Carried, “is never moral.”21 It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.22

The Things They Carried is presented as a series of reminiscences, partly fictionalized, partly “true,” from O’Brien’s time as an infantryman in Vietnam. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” he uses the dramatic moment of his comrade’s sudden death and his own vision of combat gnosis to explore the question of truth and representation in war literature. As with Owen’s poem and Heller’s novel, O’Brien’s story takes us in, voyeuristically, to watch a fellow soldier die, as evidence against “a very old and terrible lie.” What O’Brien ultimately works toward, in this story and throughout The Things They Carried, is the assertion of an encounter with truth that transcends communicability, not only for the character “Tim” but also for the writer. The knowledge Tim O’Brien claims to have experienced in Vietnam can’t be understood or even discussed, but only felt: For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell 21. O’Brien, Things They Carried, 68–69. 22. O’Brien, Things They Carried, 68–69.

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where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.23

In effect, for O’Brien, a true war story is about the failure of language to communicate experience at all, which is essentially an assertion that the soldier’s truth is a mystic truth. Language melts into pure metaphoric play—“Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos”—and the connections between referents and signs are lost. Illumination takes the form of negative theology, apophatically denying that the experience can be described, thereby denying both the truth of prior descriptions and the possibility that the experience can be communicated at all.24 Confronting O’Brien’s total negation, Kevin Powers’s 2012 Iraq War novel The Yellow Birds flips the script by representing war trauma as the font of the holy word: instead of negating the connection between language and reality, the experience of war offers Powers transcendental communion with the realm of pure language. Through flashbacks, The Yellow Birds tells of Privates John Bartle and Daniel Murphy, a wartime George and Lennie who deploy to Iraq under the tyrannical rule of one Sergeant Sterling. While downrange, Murphy loses his mind and goes AWOL. Eventually Bartle and Sterling find his mutilated corpse. In the novel’s present, Bartle has returned to the United States, struggles with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and is wrongly imprisoned by the military’s Criminal Investigation Division for his alleged involvement in an atrocity committed by Sergeant Sterling, who has in the meantime committed suicide. What redeems Bartle in the end is the novel itself, his story, his voice: the novel dramatizes the transformation of Bartle’s trauma into Powers’s poetry. Powers’s literary ambitions are signaled in the novel’s first lines, a lyrical meditation on war that builds metaphor upon metaphor into a surreal montage of sensation beyond meaning, and extend from its tortuously elaborate sentences through its melodramatic plot to its hyperliterate symbolism. Private Bartle’s narration is a perpetual cry of pain, a constant ache of swollen language that breaks into traumatic revelation at the moment he commits violence: 23. O’Brien, Things They Carried, 78. 24. On the question of apophasis, Harari notes, “Medieval arguments about God between mystics and learned theologians bear a close resemblance to modern arguments about war between common soldiers and civilian experts” (Harari, “Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-­ Witnesses of War,” 219).

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I moved to the edge of the bridge and began firing at anything moving. I saw one man fall in a heap near the bank of the river among the bulrushes and green fields on its edges. In that moment, I disowned the waters of my youth. My memories of them became a useless luxury, their names as foreign as any that could be found in Nineveh: the Tigris or the Chesapeake, the James or the Shatt al Arab farther to the south, all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own. I was an intruder, at best a visitor, and would be even in my home, in my misremembered history, until the glow of phosphorescence in the Chesapeake I had longed to swim inside again someday became a taunt against my insignificance, a cruel trick of light that had always made me think of stars. No more. I gave up longing, because I was sure that anything seen at such a scale would reveal the universe as cast aside and drowned, and if I ever floated there again, out where the level of the water reached my neck, and my feet lost contact with its muddy bottom, I might realize that to understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning. Noctiluca, I thought, Ceratium, as the tracers began to show themselves in the sifted twilight.25

Powers ascends from description to meditation, from simple declarations to disordered hyperbaton, from the concrete names of rivers now turned foreign to the abstract stymying of pluperfect desires (“until the glow of phosphorescence in the Chesapeake I had longed to swim inside again someday became a taunt against my insignificance”), and finally to esoteric Latin terms for bioluminescent plankton, deployed in a telling inversion of Owen’s rhetorical move ending “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Where Owen marshals sense data to controvert Latinate literary authority, Powers takes flight from materiality into the pretense of literariness. Where Owen inscribes a vision, Powers poetizes: “Noctiluca, I thought, Ceratium.” For Powers, the conventional tropes of war lit are not a means of conveying truth but rather the truth of war itself. The transformation of experience into literature is here characterized as a dissociation from one’s own embodied memory (“I disowned the water of my youth”), a process of evacuation in which concrete facts, Hemingway’s “names of rivers,” become not only interchangeable but alienated, pure signs operating in a closed economy of literary signification in which Powers (or Bartle) is an interloper (“the Tigris or the Chesapeake, the James or the Shatt al Arab farther to the south, all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own”)—an economy we might read as allegorizing the system of MFA programs and New York publishing circles that shaped The Yellow Birds and its reception. 25. Powers, Yellow Birds, 125.

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Powers’s climactic shift from experience to literariness rather than the other way around suggests that the conventions of traumatic revelation have become purely formal expectations of an audience more interested in myth than in reports from the front. The spatiotemporal fixity of sacrificial memory has been transubstantiated into a purely ritualized set of gestures. Within the ideology of combat gnosis, what is seen as the fundamental truth of human existence—the meat, blood, and death of being—is represented as a transcendental truth surpassing language. As Jay Winter writes, the “soldier-­poet” or war writer, from Wilfred Owen to Kevin Powers, “was in the end a romantic figure.” He was the upholder of moral values, the truth-­teller par excellence, the man who faced fear and death and spoke about them to the yet unknowing world. He ventured into the domain of the sacred, the no-­man’s land between the living and the dead, and acted as an interlocutor between communities in mourning: soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old. It was (and remains) his voice which reaffirmed the values of the men who fought, their loyalty to one another, their compassion for those who suffered on both sides, their stoical acceptance of fate. . . . A complex process of re-­sacralization marks the poetry of war.26

What understanding this process of sacralization helps us see is that the experience of war, as with any experience, is only understandable in the terms of the moral order through which it is apprehended. We can only comprehend an experience in the cultural forms which give it shape, in the stories we tell ourselves that make suffering bearable, in “the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience,” in the myths by which we give life form. Traumatic Revelation War has never been a uniform experience. In the Iliad, for example, we see that Achilles’s war was different from Hector’s, which was different from Hecuba’s, which was different from Agamemnon’s, which was different from Priam’s. The primitive tribal war narrated by Homer differed from the Roman civil war Horace fought in, which differed from the medieval raids of the Hundred Years’ War, which differed from the colonial wars fought by Great Britain or the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which differed from the massive tank battles sprawling across the Ukrainian 26. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 221.

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plains in World War II. The experience of the soldier differs from that of the indigenous farmer or scrabbling city dweller whose land he ravages, which differs from that of the camp follower surviving on the war economy’s margins, which differs from that of the politician who declares war, which differs from that of the civilian at home in whose name the war is fought or who suffers from siege, sanction, and blockade. Even the experiences of two soldiers fighting alongside each other in the same unit, in the same battle, often differ widely. As Nathaniel Fick writes in his memoir of the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Frequently, I found that my memory of a firefight was just that—mine. Afterward, five Marines told five different stories. I remembered turning left off the dirt road onto a paved street running west through Al Gharraf. I saw fire coming from buildings to the right and remembered a drag race of four or five kilometers out to the highway. That was my memory, my accepted truth of what had happened. But the map showed the distance was only about fifteen hundred meters, less than half of what I’d estimated. Some in the platoon remembered armed men standing to our left as we made the turn; I never saw them. The domed mosque was burned into my memory, but only Colbert and Wright could remember seeing it as I described it. Person was adamant that we had driven across a bridge during our sprint to the highway. Not one other person in the platoon remembered a bridge, but there it was on the map.27

Like marriage and kinship, war is a cultural activity with complex constitutive elements that take on a rich variety of forms and cultural expressions throughout human history, whose practice is always susceptible to the vagaries of personal idiosyncrasy and fallibility.28 Yet despite the variety and complexity of the forms and expressions of the experience of war throughout human history and culture, and the explanatory power of sheer physical and mental stress to explain most postcombat neurosis, the predominant cultural narrative of the experience of war in American culture today is the story of trauma.29 Indeed, PTSD is seen as the charac27. Fick, One Bullet Away, 219. 28. Wherever humans have appeared, so has mass, socially organized homicide. See Keeley, War before Civilization, for an account of the archaeological evidence for primitive warfare and a thorough dismantling of the false notion that prehistoric or premodern humans were any less violent than humans are today. Keeley explains that “cross-­cultural research on warfare has established that although some societies . . . did not engage in war or did so extremely rarely, the overwhelming majority of known societies (90 to 95 percent) have been involved in this activity” (27–28). 29. The psychological effects of industrial war are generally explicable in terms of the intense physical and mental stresses inherent in the situation, without recourse to the concept of trauma. As Grinker and Spiegel write, “The environment of combat . . . possesses an insane,

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teristic human response to the experience of war, and the primary social role the veteran soldier is asked to play is that of victim and witness to trauma. Why, then, do we remember and talk about the complex, difficult, infinitely various experiences of war—and indeed, many other complex, difficult experiences—as traumas? We might begin to answer this question by defining the concept of trauma itself—a challenging, if not impossible, task. Even the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder are vague: according to the most recent, fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), PTSD requires exposure “to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence,” but such exposure can take place through direct experience of the “traumatic event(s),” witnessing it happen to others, learning that it happened to a close friend or family member, or “experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the traumatic event(s).”30 The final criterion “does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work related.” The importance of attaching this final criterion to the context of viewing is obvious, in that it allows people who have to work with documents of trauma to claim such exposure as a work-­related disorder, but one cannot help but note how arbitrarily and summarily this clinical definition sidesteps difficult questions about what “trauma” is, how “exposure” works, and whether or not trauma is “contagious.” If a paid employee working with electronic media documenting violence can be traumatized by such exposure, on what basis can we neglect the repeated traumatic exposure of teenage video-­game players to the graphic violence of first-­person shooters, or the exposure of millions of moviegoers to the “aversive details” of Hollywood’s latest blockbuster kill-­fest? Even more troubling is the question of media: if pictures and movies can traumatize, what about text? Audio recordings?31 Music? The DSM is silent on such questions. The word’s Greek etymology tells us trauma is “a wound,” and until the late nineteenth century this is precisely what it meant: a physical injury to nightmare quality, like a bad dream which keeps recurring. This is due not only to the senseless destruction and incredible waste of battle, but also to its interminable nature; it cannot be stopped or brought under control” (Grinker and Spiegel, Men Under Stress, 28). 30. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 271. 31. Anyone watching the key scene of Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man (2005), where we observe Herzog listening to the audio recording of Timothy Treadwell being mauled and eaten by a bear, will probably suspect that repeated listening to such a recording ought to fit within the DSM’s criteria.

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the body. In the psychoanalytic tradition as it has developed since then, the term is generally accepted as referring to a psychological disturbance that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope. One classic definition by Sigmund Freud explains trauma as nothing but this kind of shock: “Indeed, the term ‘traumatic’ has no other sense than an economic one. We apply it to an experience which within a short period of time pre­sents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way, and this must result in a permanent disturbance of the manner in which the energy operates.”32 According Brian Garner’s Modern American Usage, “trauma, in pathology, means ‘a serious wound or shock to the body,’ but in popular contexts it has been largely confined to figurative (emotional) senses. Cf. insult.”33 In popular parlance, as Garner observes, trauma retains an especially ambiguous character: it usually means something to do with intense emotions and often injury or death, though not necessarily. Moving to a new city or being yelled at by your boss can be traumatic, just as a friend’s death by suicide can be traumatic. Soldiers are traumatized not only by the violence they suffer but also by the violence they commit. Social theorists write papers about the collective trauma of the Holocaust and the collective trauma of watching 9/11 on television.34 We joke that we’re “totally traumatized” by embarrassing and awkward social mishaps. Trauma is used ambiguously as to the level and kind of suffering it describes, and it is rarely clear whether the word refers to the wounding event, the psychological wound itself, or the symptomatic aftereffects of the wound. Further, not only is trauma now conflated with everyday distress, but it is also used by many writers and thinkers as a metaphor for history, evil, and death.35 Applied equally to events as disparate as genocide, watching disasters on TV, prolonged childhood sexual abuse, and minor psychological disturbances, the word trauma seems to offer less a coherence of meaning than a convergence of multiple meanings, a fat word in the place of a very thin question mark. Freud, in his murky yet provocative speculation on trauma and the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), noted, “No complete explanation has yet been reached either of war neuroses or of the traumatic neuroses of peace. In the case of war neuroses, the fact that the same symptoms sometimes came about without the intervention of any gross mechanical force seemed at once enlightening and 32. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 275. 33. Garner, Modern American Usage, 796. 34. On this point specifically, see Young, “Post-­traumatic Stress Disorder of the Virtual Kind”; Feldman, “On the Actuarial Gaze”; Feldman, “Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory.” 35. Summerfield, “Invention of Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder,” 97.

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bewildering.”36 We are hardly any more enlightened or less bewildered today. As Ruth Leys writes, “the field of trauma studies today not only continues to lack cohesion, but the very terms in which PTSD is described tend to produce controversy.”37 Neurobiological study hasn’t helped much, especially as it remains focused on repetitive stress response and fear conditioning. Most critically, no studies have been able to show any reliable neurobiological causal connection between specific events and PTSD.38 As the Institute of Medicine’s Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Military and Veteran Populations summarizes the problem, while studies do “show correlations between a stressor or a risk factor and PTSD symptoms,” these studies are inadequate, since “causal studies are necessary to firmly implicate any neurobiologic mechanisms for PTSD risk or resilience, and at present, these studies are lacking.”39 One central difficulty in discussing trauma is that however else we might define it, the concept is also defined by the concatenation of meanings that we give to it. This is not to say that trauma is just and only whatever people say it is, but to recognize that however incoherent the idea of trauma might be, it also happens to be a thing in the world that is defined by that very incoherence. This incoherence has been essential to the concept from its first adoption as a psychological term. Most genealogical accounts of trauma as a psychological phenomenon find its origins in the treatment of train-­accident victims in the late 1800s. Patients developing neurotic symptoms inconsistent with any physical damage were diagnosed with “railway brain,” “railway spine,” “traumatisme morale,” and later “trauma neurosis.” In this way, and with related industrial accidents, the physical event of the “trauma”—the train wreck, the factory explosion— was seen to have persistent psychological effects in people otherwise uninjured.40 The idea of trauma gained wider currency when Jean-­Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, and Sigmund Freud expanded it to include psychologically disturbing events of various kinds. Whether caused by being forced to sleep next to someone with a hideously ugly face (as was one of Janet’s patients) or 36. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 10–11. 37. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 6. 38. See, for example, Leys’s devastating analysis of Bessel van der Kolk’s scientific claims: Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 254–62. 39. Institute of Medicine, Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, 91–92. 40. Some observers have argued that the idea of trauma has deeper roots, going back to the American Civil War and J. M. DaCosta’s studies on “Soldier’s Heart,” or more generally to the development of the sciences of memory in the mid-­eighteenth century, inaugurated by Paul Broca and Herman Ebbinghaus. See Hacking, Rewriting the Soul.

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chronic sexual abuse, trauma came to be seen as an unassimilated event, a repressed experience returning in the form of intrusive memories and neurotic symptoms. Freud later and controversially changed his interpretation of traumatic neurosis from the “seduction hypothesis” developed in accord with Janet’s ideas, wherein symptoms refer back ultimately to a specific event, to the “fantasy hypothesis,” which describes neurosis as a symptomatic fantasy developed in response to repressed desires, arguing that there need not necessarily be any external traumatogenic event at all because sexual development is itself traumatic.41 Trauma theorists such as Judith Herman typically see Freud’s turn as a betrayal of the truth of trauma and a surrender to patriarchal repression, and the argument about whether the traumatogenic event or the susceptible psyche is more to blame for neurotic disturbance is alive and well today.42 With World War I, trauma moved from the analyst’s couch to the historical stage. The history of combat stress and shell shock in World War I and the importance of these for the development of the idea of trauma has been much discussed and is well known. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, in their genealogy The Empire of Trauma, carefully describe that era’s conflicts over psychiatric treatment and diagnosis, most centrally the “weakness” versus “illness” debate best exemplified in the treatment of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen by W. H. Rivers and Arthur Brock, and trace how after World War I and through World War II, combat-­related neurosis came to be seen less as indicative of weak character and more as an illness brought on by environmental stress, though neurotic collapse still carried a certain stigma. Despite the work of doctors such as Rivers and Freud, soldiers suffering what we now call PTSD continued to be suspected of psychological weakness or financial greed and, while treated more humanely than before, were often refused the compensation and treatment that would have legitimated their status as victims. Trauma fell by the wayside during and immediately after World War II, as psychiatric treatment of war-­related neuroses focused more on combat 41. Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, 31–33. 42. “The truth-­in-­memory debates that plague us at the end of the twentieth century may seem, by comparison with Freud’s agony and Janet’s complacency, like unrewarding recapitulations of bygone battles. The reason that we repeat ourselves may be that we are locked in to an underlying structure created in those twelve years, 1874–1886, when knowledge about memory became a surrogate for spiritual understanding of the soul. The psychologization of trauma is an essential part of that structure, because the spiritual travail of the soul, which so long served a pervious ontology, could now become hidden psychological pain, not the result of sin that seduces us within, but caused by the sinner outside who seduced us. Trauma was a pivot upon which this revolution turned.” Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 197.

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stress and combat fatigue, and American psychology adopted approaches to treatment that depended more on conditioning and pharmaceuticals than on talk therapy. Government and military doctors were quite interested in what we would today call soldiers’ mental health, but primarily for the purpose of keeping enough men healthy enough to win the war. Postcombat and postwar neuroses were typically seen as mechanical failures treatable by drugs, rest, separation from combat, and reintegration into social life, rather than as long-­ term moral-­psychological disorders.43 Fassin and Rechtman point to growing attention in the 1960s to Nazi genocide as effecting a change in cultural consciousness which affected how people understood war-­ related psychological disturbances.44 Fassin and Rechtman particularly identify the work of Bruno Bettelheim as central in forging a new paradigm for understanding trauma after World War II, a paradigm later elaborated and developed by Robert Jay Lifton and Mardi Horowitz, among others, that added to the role of victim the dimensions of being a survivor and a witness. It was this combined social performance of survivor, witness, and victim that activist veterans of the Vietnam War took up and passed on. Trauma discourse matured in the 1960s and 1970s through the crucial confluence of feminist social agitation (witnessing the trauma of rape and sexual abuse), Holocaust survivor testimonies (witnessing the trauma of genocide), the efforts of American veterans of the Vietnam War to redeem their status after coming home from a dishonorable conflict (witnessing the trauma of war), and work by clinical psychiatrists to establish persuasively objective criteria for their field. In 1980, with the publication of the third edition of the DSM and the formal emergence of posttraumatic stress disorder, trauma achieved the categorical social validity it carries today. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how the specific, clinical, ostensibly scientific diagnostics for posttraumatic stress disorder found in the third-­edition manual were shaped by political and social forces. “The task force that designed the new diagnostic category in DSM-­III was comprised of psychiatrists who were particularly sensitive to the problems affecting Vietnam veterans,” note Fassin and Rechtman.45 The group included Lifton, Horowitz, Chaim Shatan, and Jack Smith, a former marine involved with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. These were not disinterested scientific researchers but social activists with political agendas. Derek Summerfield, a 43. See, for example, Grinker and Spiegel, Men Under Stress; Stauffer, Lumsdaine, et al., American Soldier, vol. 2; Waller, Veteran Comes Back; and films such as John Huston’s harrowing and long-­suppressed 1946 documentary Let There Be Light. 44. See also Novick, Holocaust in American Life. 45. Fassin and Rechtmen, Empire of Trauma, 88.

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British psychologist who has been criticizing posttraumatic stress disorder as a “pseudo-­condition” almost since its inception, writes, “The new diagnosis was meant to shift the focus of attention from the details of a soldier’s background and psyche to the fundamentally traumatogenic nature of war. This was a powerful and essentially political transformation: Vietnam veterans were to be seen not as perpetrators or offenders but as people traumatized by the roles thrust on them by the US military. Post-­traumatic stress disorder legitimized their ‘victimhood,’ gave them moral exculpation, and guaranteed them a disability pension because the diagnosis could be attested to by a doctor: this was a potent combination.”46 Fassin and Rechtman argue that this transformation allowed Vietnam veterans to take up the role of traumatic witness at the same time as it allowed military authorities to mitigate “some of the horror” in response to widespread American atrocities by “showing men now destroyed by what they had done.”47 “While the new concept of trauma eschewed any valuation of the individual act,” they write, “it revealed the unbearable character of the event in general,” thus shifting moral responsibility away from particular agents to historical, structural, and institutional forces and helping to transform war from an ethical and political act for which somebody might be held responsible into a metaphysical event caused by abstract powers.48 As Fassin and Rechtman point out, “by applying the same psychological classification to the person who suffers violence, the person who commits it, and the person who witnesses it, the concept of trauma profoundly transforms the moral framework of what constitutes humanity.”49 Since the 1970s, trauma’s functional incoherence has exploded into a vast concern, in academic discourses, international humanitarian aid programs, the mass media, human rights talk, political struggles, popular culture, and apparently our very psyches. Allan Young notes, “The worldwide prevalence of diagnosed cases of PTSD has grown enormously since 1980.”50 He also writes, “Epidemiological research conducted in the United States during the 1990s indicates that approximately 60 percent of adults have been exposed to traumatic events sufficient to produce post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that 10 percent of adults experience PTSD at least once.”51 Summerfield quotes UNICEF as stating, “unequivocally, that ten million children worldwide have been psychologically traumatized by war and that addressing this 46. Summerfield, “Invention of Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder,” 95. 47. Fassin and Rechtmen, Empire of Trauma, 92. 48. Fassin and Rechtmen, Empire of Trauma, 95. 49. Fassin and Rechtmen, Empire of Trauma, 21. 50. Young, “Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder of the Virtual Kind,” 25. 51. Young, “Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder of the Virtual Kind,” 21.

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must be a cornerstone of their rehabilitation because ‘time does not heal trauma.’”52 It would seem that we are caught in some kind of long-­term trauma epidemic. Indeed, Shoshana Felman calls the twentieth century “a post-­traumatic century.”53 Yet this epidemic is, according to some scholars, only the recognition of our age-­old human condition: Cathy Caruth writes that “history is the history of trauma,” and Bessel van der Kolk writes that “experiencing trauma is an essential part of being human.”54 Just as Freud turned from an understanding of trauma as something caused by a traumatogenic event to an understanding of trauma as an ineradicable aspect of sexual development, Freud’s heirs have turned trauma from a personal psychological affliction into a definitive characteristic of history, memory, and human existence. Allan Young points out that PTSD differs from most DSM classifications precisely in that “its features are glued together by an inner logic.”55 According to Young, the logic of PTSD explains the entire shape and course of the disorder and establishes “a point beyond which further justification is regarded to be unnecessary and unproductive.” The logic is as follows: An individual is exposed to a traumatic event and responds with fear. Afterward, the individual experiences persistent, intrusive memories of the event, manifested as flashbacks, dreams, or compulsive repetition of symptomatic behaviors. Because of the memory’s threatening character, the individual begins to respond with persistent hyperarousal. Persistent hyperarousal in turn provokes either avoidance and numbing, by which the individual works to minimize and insulate against emotional triggers, or compulsive repetition, by which the individual attempts to reenact the traumatic situation in a way that offers some sense of control, or both strategies at once. The disorder is manifest in the symptoms, which are caused by the event; the memory of the traumatic event gives the manifest symptoms meaning. The symptoms without the memory of the event are “are not diagnostically specific. Most of them characterize other mental disorders (notably depression and other anxiety disorders).”56 And if the event does not return as embodied symptoms or flashbacks, then it cannot have been traumatic. The symptoms without the event are not diagnostically specific; the event without the symptoms is just an event. Memory is the linchpin holding the 52. Summerfield, “Social Experience of War,” 28–29. 53. Felman, “Education and Crisis,” 13. 54. Caruth, “Traumatic Departures,” 34; van der Kolk, “Black Hole of Trauma,” 3. 55. Young, “Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder of the Virtual Kind,” 22. In the fifth edition of DSM, only “Acute Stress Disorder” shares a similar logic. 56. Young, “Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder of the Virtual Kind,” 23.

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two together. As Young explains, “Structurally, PTSD’s memory logic is perfect. . . . Empirically, there is the problem of false positives, since it is difficult, and often impossible, to detect people whose clinical presentations mimic authentic (iconic) cases of traumatic memory. In the decades prior to the publication of DSM-­III, the problem was regarded as salient. Today it is largely ignored.”57 Memory is notoriously fallible, suggestible, and subjective. It can also be easily misrepresented.58 Nevertheless, as Young notes, the empirical problem is largely ignored and often dismissed out of hand: it is a recurring assertion of trauma theorists such as Caruth, Herman, Lifton, van der Kolk, and others that the flashback of traumatic memory is pure truth: undistorted, undigested experience. As Ruth Leys argues, the leading theorists of trauma share a “commitment to two claims: (1) an empirical claim, according to which traumatic symptoms . . . are veridical memories or representations of the traumatic events; and (2) an epistemological-­ontological claim, according to which those same symptoms are literal replicas or repetitions of the trauma and that as such they stand outside representation.”59 In this understanding, the traumatic event returns unchanged by the human psyche through which it passes. According to the logic of trauma, then, it is the event that makes us suffer. Trauma is always a suffering originating from without. Something happens to us, and the inevitable point of return is that trauma addresses something real—that when something happens to us, something happens. Trauma is not seen as a discourse constituting certain social realities.60 Rather, it is seen as a discourse about what is real beyond merely social reality. In a postmodern, late capitalist, cosmopolitan era of relativistic meaning and morality, trauma offers a moral construction of truth and evil (war, sexual abuse, genocide) that functions precisely through its transcendence of discursive systems of meaning and coherence. As Caruth puts it, “The history that a flashback tells . . . is, therefore, a history that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images and enactments are not fully understood. In its repeated impositions as both image and amnesia, the trauma thus seems to evoke the difficult truth of a history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence.”61 57. Young, “Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder of the Virtual Kind,” 22. 58. See Schacter, Searching for Memory, for a concise introduction to some of the problems of memory. 59. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 229. 60. Except in Freud’s controversial fantasy hypothesis or, as we will see, in the work of Jacques Lacan. 61. Caruth, “Recapturing the Past,” 153.

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The traumatic event, that is, is an encounter with the incomprehensibility of reality as such. This kind of language is essential to the discourse of trauma, and considering it in light of trauma’s memory logic, we can begin to see more clearly how trauma’s incoherence is not merely part of its definition, how its vagueness is not merely a symptom of the need for more neurological research, and how it is defined precisely by its incomprehensibility. The cultural work that trauma does is to mark certain kinds of human suffering as being beyond social comprehension, labeling them as “unspeakable,” at once sacred and taboo. The realm of the unspeakable, the realm of trauma, is the realm of reality in its obdurate existence beyond all possible linguistic mediation: that which “does not deceive,” or what Jacques Lacan called “the Real.”62 It is important to note that while the Real remains a consistent structural feature of human culture for Lacan, it is not necessarily always filled out by “trauma,” which is a specific historical formation. “This function [of that which does not deceive] . . . is fulfilled in various ways according to the cultural region in which the constant function of speech comes to function,” Lacan writes. “You would be wrong to think that the same elements, qualified in the same way, have always fulfilled that function.” That is to say, while the structure of the Real asserts its indubitability throughout human culture, specific cultural formations of the Real remain contingent on their historical and philosophical vocabularies. Lacan sees the Real of the modern West as inhering in matter: “It need hardly be said that matter does not cheat, that it has no intention of crushing our experiments or blowing up our machines. This sometimes happens, but only when we have made a mistake. It’s out of the question that it, matter, should deceive us.”63 Recall Owen: “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-­corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—.” Recall Hemingway and “the concrete names of villages.” Consider O’Brien’s focus on obscenity and bodily truth: “It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.”64 In these terms, then, we can understand trauma as a mystical encounter with material existence qua matter beyond all human meaning. As Harari points out, “Traumatized soldiers are not possessed by some evil demon, and nobody argues that what they saw and experienced in war is a lie. Their problem is exactly that they were given a peep behind the curtain of ignorance 62. Lacan, Psychoses, 64. 63. Lacan, Psychoses, 65. 64. O’Brien, Things They Carried, 78.

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that shields society from the harsh reality of injury and death.”65 The traumatic encounter is by definition an encounter with reality beyond the human social order, and “trauma” is understood in its incoherence as at one and the same time the traumatogenic encounter with the Real, the Real itself, and the symptomatic remainder of the Real that subsists within the psyche beyond the subject’s control, beyond the power of conscious language, beyond the reach of what Lacan called “the Symbolic.” As Lacan observed, “Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real should have presented itself in the form of that which is unassimilable in it—in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin?”66 We must keep in mind, however, that at no point are we talking about reality itself but only ever about how we talk about reality. The discourse of the Real, in its relation to the Symbolic, is a discourse of that which cannot be said, and the Real only exists through the Symbolic as an interpretable symptom, as behavior that “speaks.” What it says is, “I have touched truth; I have heard that fatum which does not deceive.” Words, on the other hand, can always deceive. We are all too well aware of the slipperiness of language. Hence that which does not deceive must be formulated in such a way that it comes from beyond language. The Real cannot speak itself but speaks always through a mask or screen; the mask may be the mask of a god, it may be the mask of madness, it may be the mask of the symptom. In other words, trauma is the word we use for all the things we want to claim that we can’t talk about, the things we refuse to understand—war, sexual abuse, and genocide serve today as our primary sites of this “truth.” As Lacan puts it quite clearly, “what is refused in the Symbolic order re-­emerges in the Real.”67 Not in reality, but in the Real: in another level of discourse, in another register of experience. Shifting focus from individual psychological trauma to historical and cultural trauma helps bring to light how this discourse functions, as in Caruth’s claim that the “historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all.”68 This can and indeed must be right, but only if we understand “forgetting” as active cultural repression rather than as a neurophysiological mechanism. Thus we see that the discourse of trauma is not an epistemological discourse about 65. Harari, Ultimate Experience, 304–5. 66. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 55. 67. Lacan, Psychoses, 13. 68. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 17.

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how we know reality, but rather an ethical discourse defining which aspects of reality we choose to deem socially acceptable and which we choose to deem beyond the pale.69 What this means is that we must understand “trauma” as a set of historically specific, socially constructed practices for interpreting the “shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience,” shaping memory, and managing cultural norms. As this understanding informs the idea of combat gnosis, then, we can see that what the experience of war offers is not a “peep behind the curtain” but yet another cultural mediation of experience and, like all cultural mediations, a semiotic practice through which social norms are constructed and maintained. The experience of trauma does not reveal the truth behind society but rather reproduces social truth.70 Let’s consider this dynamic from another perspective. Judith Herman opens her influential book Trauma and Recovery thus: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.” A traumatic event, she asserts, is inherently beyond signification, beyond the “social compact.” Nevertheless, Herman continues, the traumatized victim is compelled to signify: “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”71 In testifying to the truth of evil, horror, and death, the victims heals herself and is able to return to the normative social world, while reasserting the fact that all these nasty traumas remain alienated from us, “othered,” yet now come under our power as named things: psychological events comprehended within a technomedical discourse. Herman is more right than she seems to know in her description of the conflict between witnessing and denial as a “dialectic,” since the outcome of this conflict is not an overcoming but a kind of aufhebung—the dialectic of trauma results not in denial by witnessing but rather in the social witnessing of denial. The things we talk about when we talk about trauma are not “incomprehensible,” “unassimilable,” or even “unspeakable.” The industrialized murder of millions of Jews, atrocities such as the massacre of innocents at My Lai or 69. As Caruth herself writes, “Lacan’s reading shows us . . . that the shock of traumatic sight reveals at the heart of human subjectivity not so much an epistemological, but rather what can be defined as an ethical relation to the real” (Unclaimed Experience, 92). 70. In historian Joan Scott’s words, “the evidence of experience, whether conceived through a metaphor of visibility or in any other way that takes meaning as transparent, reproduces rather than contests given ideological systems.” Joan Scott, “Evidence of Experience,” 778. 71. J. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1.

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the bloodbath of the Somme, and the rape of children are horrific human deeds, but they are social activities and we have words we can use to describe them. We mark them as belonging beyond social discourse, as “traumas,” because we refuse to believe that we are capable of such deeds; we refuse to accept that such behaviors belong to the social order. On this point Paul Fussell, writing about World War I (and quoting Louis Simpson, a poet who fought in World War II), is worth quoting at length: One of the cruxes of the war, of course, is the collision between events and the language available—or thought appropriate—to describe them. To put it more accurately, the collision was one between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress. Logically there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of trench warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, sell-­out, pain and hoax, as well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines gushing out over his hands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and the like. Logically, one supposes, there’s no reason why a language devised by man should be inadequate to describe any of man’s works. The difficulty was in admitting that the war had been made by men and was being continued ad infinitum by them. The problem was less one of “language” than of gentility and optimism; it was less a problem of “linguistics” than of rhetoric. Louis Simpson speculates about the reason infantry soldiers so seldom render their experiences in language: “To a foot-­soldier, war is almost entirely physical. That is why some men, when they think about war, fall silent. Language seems to falsify physical life and to betray those who have experienced it absolutely—the dead.” But that can’t be right. The real reason is that soldiers have discovered that no one is very interested in the bad news they have to report. What listener wants to be torn and shaken when he doesn’t have to be? We have made unspeakable mean indescribable; it really means nasty.72

If we revise Herman in terms of Fussell, then, we can say that some human actions are too nasty to admit. The atrocities that “traumatize” us are morally and aesthetically unpalatable, and in being designated as being “unspeakable,” they are distanced, depoliticized, and denied. What is trauma, then, at last? Trauma is our Real, our transcendental signifier, that which is beyond society, beyond the Symbolic, beyond language, that “fatum which does not deceive.” Trauma allows us to maintain that certain human deeds and facts are not human, that they are outside the realm of 72. Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory, 170. See also Simpson, “Dogface Poetics,” 158.

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the word, the law, the social contract. Why? Because such deeds and facts are fundamental to the very social order that denies them, yet incongruent with its values and self-­conception. Through the dialectic of trauma and recovery, we reassure ourselves that our social order is fundamentally just, our lives transcend their material conditions, and our institutions and practices have the power to master death. “As a paradigm for the human experience that governs history, then, traumatic disorder is indeed the apparent struggle to die,” writes Caruth,73 yet through bringing this “struggle to die” within the social-­symbolic order, by witnessing it, by bearing the wound of trauma as a symbol of truth, we deliver ourselves from its otherwise tyrannical rule. The “traumatic” must be both rejected and assimilated, for only by recovering trauma under the law of scientific-­progressive talk therapy or artistic creation can we be “saved” from “the apparent struggle to die.” If we make evil unspeakable in its essence— that is, if the nature of trauma is that it cannot be spoken—then when we do speak it, we perform and display our mastery of it. By bringing what we had designated as “unspeakable” into the social-­symbolic order, we convince ourselves that we’ve gained power over the unnamable simply by naming it. Death becomes trauma. Genocide becomes trauma. War becomes trauma. The most hideous acts of torture and cruelty become mere trauma, which we can heal through art, science, drugs, consumerism, and talk therapy. In the same way that Star Wars shifts war from history to outer space, “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” trauma shifts political violence from the realm of ethics to the realm of metaphysics. Both are fantasies. As Slavoj Žižek writes, “The traumatic event is ultimately just a fantasy-­ construct filling out a certain void in a symbolic structure.”74 Trauma-­and-­ recovery is a fort-­da game that society plays with itself, and the figure of this fort-­da is not a ball-­and-­cup, as in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but the hero who goes through hell and offers transcendence in his or her return: the Holocaust survivor, the adult recovering from childhood sexual abuse, or the soldier who goes to war and redeploys home to testify of what he’s seen, the trench poet, the wounded warrior, the bloody-­handed bomber. The fort-­da game we play with trauma is a game played through and with the trauma hero, the one who takes upon himself or herself the spiritual burden of confronting the Real in order to show that it can be witnessed and mastered, in order to uphold the collective fantasy that we can dominate death through ritualized language. 73. Caruth, “Traumatic Departures,” 33. 74. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 191.

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“The Good War” and Postmodern Memory At stake here are not only philosophical or anthropological questions about what trauma means, or historical questions about what specific acts of collective violence such as World War II or the Vietnam War signify for American culture, but also more urgent questions about what political violence means to us today and what it will mean the next time we face a political or military crisis. Questions of just war, ad bellum or in bello, will be framed and colored by our collective cultural understanding of ourselves as agents and subjects.75 Cultural narratives about war that highlight the status of combatants as victims, sanctify combat experience as a revelation of transcendental truth, and disavow the recognition of complicity in favor of moralistic denunciation serve and have served to obscure serious consideration of the responsibilities of power, efface and marginalize the suffering of others (particularly those targeted by our tragic trauma heroes), justify aggression, and excuse war crimes. If this claim seems extreme, consider Paul Fussell’s argument justifying the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in his essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” Fussell published this essay in the New Republic in 1981, on the forty-­second anniversary of the bombing of those cities, arguing for “the importance of experience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one’s views about the use of the atom bomb.”76 Fussell goes on to claim that only those persons who had directly experienced combat, only those who had “come to grips, face to face, with an enemy who designs your death,” could possibly understand or be able to judge the decision to use the atomic bomb on the civilian population of Japan. While Fussell does by the by build a shaky case justifying the attacks, resting primarily on the assertion that the use of the atomic bomb hastened the Japanese surrender and saved American lives (an assertion unsupported by historical evidence), his main point is to assert the moral authority of his experience, and his main mode of argument ad hominem.77 Fussell dismisses economist and diplo75. These terms (ad bellum and in bello) are commonly used in discussing just war theory. Respectively, they address what criteria make war acceptable (ad bellum) and the proper norms of behavior in war (in bello). 76. Fussell, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” in Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, 14. 77. “The scholarly consensus,” writes J. Samuel Walker, “holds that the war would have ended in a relatively short time without the atomic attacks and that an invasion of the Japanese islands was an unlikely possibility. It further maintains that several alternatives to ending the

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mat John Kenneth Galbraith’s arguments because Galbraith worked in Washington during the war, historian Michael Sherry’s arguments because he was an infant in 1945, historian David Joravsky’s arguments because he was “on his way to the Pacific when the war ended,” and philosopher J. Glenn Gray’s arguments because Gray, who served in Europe as an intelligence officer and interrogator, “experienced the war at Division level. . . . miles—miles—behind the line where soldiers experience terror and madness and relieve those pressures by crazy brutality and sadism.”78 By the time Fussell gets to Gray, his criterion of validity has shifted significantly: though at the beginning, it was enough to have confronted an enemy who wanted to kill you, contra Gray, Fussell insists that only the front-­ line infantry soldier has the authority to speak about war. Yet Fussell doesn’t maintain this standard, citing approvingly the belligerent pronouncements of several high-­ranking military commanders, many of them British, whose wartime résumés include naval officer (Louis Mountbatten, John F. Kennedy Jr.) and pilot (Air Marshal Arthur Harris, who flew with the Royal Air Force in World War I). Fussell is arbitrary, as indeed he must be, since his criterion is wholly subjective. The moral authority of experience he invokes gives him not only the right to judge particular acts but also the knowledge to decide who can speak the truth. For his authority to remain in force, it cannot submit to extrinsic criteria, since to do so would undermine the indubitable authority of experience. Given Fussell’s example, we can see now how literary arguments about war without an invasion were available and that Truman and his close advisers were well aware of the options” (Walker, “History, Collective Memory, and the Decision to Use the Bomb,” 321). There exists voluminous literature on the question of the use of the atomic bomb. The most authoritative accounts find that the actual reasoning behind the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted from a combination of institutional inertia, anti-­Japanese racism, a desire to intimidate the Soviet Union, and a desire to minimize American casualties at the war’s end. Hastening Japanese surrender was not, in and of itself, a driving motivation, and the claims that President Truman, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and others made about the extremely high number of casualties expected from the invasion of Japan have no basis in military planning or fact. “The argument that the atomic bomb saved hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese lives is, of course, speculative,” writes Paul Boyer. “One should note, however, that it was decisively rejected in the authoritative United States Strategic Bomb Survey of 1946” (Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 186). J. Samuel Walker addresses Fussell’s claims directly in “History, Collective Memory, and the Decision to Use the Bomb,” and in his earlier article, “The Decision to Use the Bomb.” See also Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 181–226; Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy; B. Bernstein, “Postwar Myth”; Alperovitz, Messer, and Bernstein, “Marshall, Truman, and Bomb”; and B. Bernstein, “Reconsidering Truman’s Claim.” 78. Fussell, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” 21, 29–30.

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the language of war can obscure an ethical presupposition that both gives any veteran the right to speak with unimpeachable moral authority and justifies any action in wartime, because it takes the experience of war to be something utterly beyond civilian reason or morality—hence Fussell’s position on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Michael Walzer challenges Fussell in a later issue of the New Republic, arguing that certain moral norms have applied and must be applied in war and that Fussell’s logic of “anything goes, so long as it helps to bring the boys home” is a line of reasoning that leads to state terrorism and totalitarianism.79 Fussell responds by asserting that their disagreement is one of “sensibilities” (a key term for a scholar of the eighteenth century, as Fussell was, and all the more for a writer who puts such weight on “experience”) and that his main effort is to “complicate, even mess up, the moral picture,” by offering “a soldier’s view.”80 Fussell’s generosity and appreciation for complexity only go so far, however; he ends his response by noting “that in 1945 Michael Walzer, for all the emotional warmth of his current argument, was ten years old.”81 For Fussell, as for other writers who take up the tradition of combat gnosticism, there is one truth above all others: the truth of experience. The soldier’s truth. The rhetorical purchase such a claim exerts in contemporary society is significant. In contrast to eyewitnessing and historical accounts, the authority of experiential truth requires no corroboration. Unlike rational argument, it admits no procedural or logical critique. Against philosophical or moral debate, it forecloses the possibilities of abstraction and comparison.82 What’s more, the mere fact of experience becomes an explanation that obviates further analysis. As Joan Scott writes: When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one’s vision is structured—about language (or discourse) and history—are left aside. The evidence of experience then becomes evidence for the fact of difference, rather than a way of exploring how difference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects.83 79. Fussell and Walzer, “Exchange of Views,” 39. 80. Fussell and Walzer, “Exchange of Views,” 42–43. 81. Fussell and Walzer, “Exchange of Views,” 44. 82. Harari’s analysis of the rhetorical power of flesh-­witnessing is illuminating. See Harari, “Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-­Witnesses of War,” esp. 220–21. 83. Scott, “Evidence of Experience,” 777.

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The revelatory truth of war exceeds and obscures politics. Tim O’Brien can use it to assert the ultimate horror of the Vietnam War as easily as Paul Fussell can use it to justify the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It can be used to discredit government propaganda, and it can be used to dismiss universal humanitarian ideals. Whether the revelatory truth of war makes the men who fight it martial heroes or victims of a remorseless bureaucratized state, it anoints them as bearers of a sacred truth, a knowledge born and borne in the flesh. The trauma hero narrative, the story of the martyr who bears the psychological wound that both is and is caused by a revelatory encounter with truth, testifies to our persistent cultural sanctification of war. The trauma hero’s claim to revelatory truth supersedes the juridical, legislative, journalistic, scientific, and scholarly contests that establish consensus in secular liberalism, invoking instead a transcendental, mystic, subjective authority. The traumatic subject, writes Hal Foster, “has absolute authority, for one cannot challenge the trauma of another: one can only believe it, even identify with it, or not.”84 The trauma hero narrative not only demands that we identify ourselves with the nation—we must support the troops—but also functions as a mechanism of displacement and substitution, a ritual that asserts the power of language over reality and performs a process of symbolic scapegoating to purge society of its blood guilt. Recall the bomber, and Jarrell’s good men washing their hands in blood “as best they can.” The bomber-­as-­trauma-­hero offers a sublation of the dilemma between industrialized warfare and liberal capitalism, between Burke’s “commercial-­liberal-­monetary nexus of motives” and the “collective-­ sacrificial-­military nexus of motives,” at the same time as it serves to at once obscure, disavow, and consecrate the violent origins of the postwar liberal order by turning society’s agent of violence into its scapegoat.85 Since the violent origins of the law in liberal capitalism are anathema to the principles of the law itself, the war fighter must be excluded from the state order, because his transgression of the killing taboo threatens the state monopoly on violence and exposes the violent foundations of the legal order. The soldier must be sacrificed to the law. This sacrifice is accomplished by rewriting the war fighter not as the agent of violence but as its victim. Joseph Heller struggles in Catch–­22 to reconcile the problem of American air power with the victimization of the bomber in a way that illustrates precisely how the trauma hero functions as a scapegoat for postwar liber84. H. Foster, Return of the Real, 168. 85. As Paul Kahn writes, “The veteran bears the burden of the state’s sacrificial violence” (“Managing Violence,” 329).

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alism. Guilt for collective violence is displaced onto its agent, who through traumatic psychological wounding becomes a surrogate victim in place of the enemy. This displacement effects a double purgation. Guilt over the traumatically wounded soldier takes the place of blood guilt, while the soldier is purged of responsibility for his violence by being transformed into its victim. This symbolic scapegoating serves an important function in the liberal political imaginary: that of obscuring the scandalously violent origins of the peacetime political order. The cultural and political stakes of how we represent war and the experience of war are immense. At issue are several contentious debates about the meaning of violence in human life, the value and virtue of American power, the conflict between American national identity and imperial politics, the problem of reconciling universalist human ideals with the military force necessary to sustain them, and what heroism means in American society. These debates are dramatized and worked out not only through arguments between competing cultural authorities in the pages of journals and magazines but through poetic form and poetic metaphor, in plot choices, syntax, generic conventions, and the imaginary resolution of real contradictions in intergalactic and traumatic fantasies. As we look back over the decades since the end of World War II, we can see that the militarization of American society that began in the 1930s and accelerated with the total mobilization demanded by World War II did not end in 1945, was not rolled back in 1946, and has, in fact, never ended but rather has ramified and spread until its “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government,” just as General Eisenhower warned in his farewell address, so much so that “mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one’s thinking” and constitutes our participation even today in the imagined community of a nation forged in blood.86

86. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address”; Stevens, Parts of a World, 183.

Conclusion

Nothing Is Over In reality, nothing ended; rather, an inexorable process of social, economic, and cultural change, which had begun throughout the world a generation before, rolled on without any actual interruption, pregnant as ever with fantastic possibilities. Th o m a s M a n n , The Story of a Novel (1961)

On November 9, 1989, in the final minutes of an otherwise banal, hour-­long press conference in East Berlin, German Democratic Republic spokesman Günter Schabowski announced new government regulations covering travel between East and West Germany. Schabowski had not been briefed in depth on the new regulations but had only been handed a short summary just before the press conference, so he didn’t really understand the details. His vague announcement misrepresented the new regulations, and his muddled responses to reporters’ questions only reinforced that misrepresentation. “When does this go into force?” one journalist asked. “Immediately, right away,” Schabowski said.1

Within a few hours, international news media were reporting that East Germany had opened its borders. East Germans, illegally watching West German news, responded by flocking in the thousands to checkpoints along the Berlin Wall. There they were met with the same automatic rifles and traffic barriers that had barred their way the day before, since the guards at the border had not been notified about any changes. Soon, though, caving to the swelling press of bodies, the guards began to let people through one at a time. The crowd, growing ever larger, chanted “Open the gate, open the gate!” About half an hour before midnight, the guards did just that. Soon the same Western media that had, in effect, caused the event were turning it into a global spectacle, broadcasting breaking news of East Berliners pouring through checkpoints, drinking champagne with West Berliners, and dancing on the wall. The fall of the Berlin Wall portended the collapse of Soviet-­bloc commu1. Sarotte, “How an Accident Caused the Berlin Wall to Come Down.”

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nism and illustrated something about the power of global media to shape history, but it also awoke unquiet spirits of a deeper history subtending the long period known as the Cold War. In a November 17 op-­ed in the New York Times warning against the dangers of a reunited Germany, Elie Wiesel scolded German celebrants for forgetting their history: What is happening in Berlin troubles me because of its possible effect not only on the future, but also on the past. In fact, the past has already been affected. “Nov. 9 will enter history,” declared the Mayor of West Berlin. Others echoed his statement in every media around the globe. They forget that Nov. 9 has already entered history—51 years earlier it marked the Kristallnacht. The intense joy of the present has overshadowed the past. No one in Berlin, or in our country for that matter, made the connection. That is why I am worried. I wonder: What else will be forgotten?2

Wiesel’s concern about the effect of present events on historical memory articulates an anxiety that the triumphal end of the Cold War would somehow displace or obscure the dark history of World War II, specifically the memory of the Shoah, an anxiety that turned out to be both insightful and mistaken. The end of the Cold War did not, in fact, bring about the forgetting of World War II but rather revealed how the narrative of the Cold War had obscured the complexities and contradictions left unresolved at World War II’s end and exposed the possibility that the decades-­long conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union had not been a distinct event at all but rather a continuation of the United States’ total mobilization and global military expansion begun in the 1930s and 1940s. The years between 1947 and 1989 were neither peaceful nor static, but Cold War ideology imposed on those four decades a narrative facade of stability and coherence that collapsed with the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Francis Fukuyama glossed this narrative in his famous essay arguing that the world had achieved the “End of History”: “The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war.”3 Thus World War II was understood to be (1) primarily an ideological conflict, not an economic or political one, (2) a preamble to the much more important ideological conflict between Marxism and liberalism, and (3) merely one moment in a historical dialectic leading 2. Wiesel, “I Fear What Lies beyond the Wall.” 3. Fukuyama, “End of History?,” 3.

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from irrationality to Enlightenment. The end of the Cold War signified, for Fukuyama, the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” and “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”4 Yet behind the facade of the Cold War’s Manichean spiritual conflict stood not the “victory of the idea of the universal homogenous state,” as Fukuyama wrote, but the confused, conflicted, and violent foundations of the “peaceful” postwar legal order; behind Fukuyama’s vulgar dialectic of thesis and antithesis, the cunning of history was subtly at work.5 Thus it was not merely and not even primarily the coincidence of the fiftieth anniversary of the formal beginning of World War II that brought that war back into American consciousness as a problem of history, an event whose meaning had yet to be fixed. Rather, as the ideological master narrative of the Cold War fell away, the troubling ethical, cultural, and political questions surrounding the United States’ transformation into a militarized society, emergence as a global empire, and brutal victory in World War II—which the narrative of the Cold War had often overshadowed, if never quite silenced, and which the Vietnam War generation had translated into the realm of fantasy—returned with a vengeance. “Part of the problem was that Americans had long assumed that the Cold War alone had given rise to militarized institutions, so that the former’s demise somehow guaranteed the latter’s,” writes Michael Sherry in his history of the militarization of American society, In the Shadow of War. The other roots of those institutions, less often grasped, were less easily ripped out. Those roots involved old perceptions, confirmed more often than caused by fascism and communism, that evolving technological, economic, and political systems created a closed world posing permanent peril for the United States. The “Cold War,” historian Walter LeFeber noted, included “confrontations that were at times only faintly, if at all, related to the U.S.–­Soviet struggle.” It had also subsumed impulses—to contain Germany and Japan as well as Russia, to control the global economy, to turn America “into a consensual, secret, militaristic, international force” (as LaFeber put it)—that had sustained militarization. . . . As the Cold War’s superstructure crumbled, a less visible substructure surfaced . . . [which] dated to the world of the 1930s and 1940s.6

Sherry describes the complicated ways that the problems and contradictions of World War II reemerged at the end of the Cold War, sometimes in the form of bitter renunciation, such as Paul Fussell’s biting memoir-­cum-­study 4. Fukuyama, “End of History?,” 3, 4. 5. Fukuyama, “End of History?,” 10–11. 6. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 441–42.

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of World War II culture, Wartime (1989), which argued that “[World War II] seemed so devoid of ideological content that little could be said about its positive purposes that made political or intellectual sense,” and sometimes in the form of compensatory reenactment, such as in the rhetorical framing used by George H. W. Bush and the US media to describe Operation Desert Storm (the Second Gulf War, 1990–91), in which Saddam Hussein was cast as a new Hitler and Bush’s war as a new Operation Overlord.7 Fussell’s book Wartime inspired strong reactions in its reviewers, and no wonder for a book arguing that despite “so much talk about ‘The Good War,’ the Justified War, the Necessary War, and the like,” World War II “was a war and nothing else, and thus stupid and sadistic.”8 The global conflict that defined America for half a century, the war waged across two oceans to bring down the architects of the Final Solution and take revenge on the empire that had sent its planes to bomb Pearl Harbor one quiet Sunday morning in December, was, Fussell argued, wholly meaningless.9 “It takes some honesty,” he writes, “even if that honesty arises from despair, to perceive that some events, being inhuman, have no human meaning.”10 Stephen Ambrose called Fussell’s central argument “preposterous” and wrote that “the sections on the meaning of the war are perversely wrong-­headed,” even as he lauded the book’s depiction of wartime military life.11 In an even more negative review, Frederic Smoler, in the Nation, wrote, “A studious indifference to what actually happened accompanies the contempt for ordinary people’s capacities 7. Fussell, Wartime, 136; Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 444, 462–82. On terminology: the informal name in American contexts for the 1990–91 Gulf War, the Persian Gulf War, is not only confusing but obfuscatory. There were three major Persian Gulf wars between 1980 and 2011, all involving Iraq and the United States: the Iran-­Iraq War of 1980–88 (in which the United States supported Iraq not only with arms but also with attacks on Iranian warships and oil platforms), the war in which Iraq invaded Kuwait (1990–91), and the American invasion and occupation of Iraq (2003–11). In addition, the United States was involved in a decade-­long interdiction and bombing campaign against Iraq from 1991 to 2002, including cruise missile strikes in 1993 and 1996, and a four-­day bombing effort in 1998 (Desert Fox). 8. Fussell, Wartime, 142. 9. Fussell’s bitter view of World War II was held by others—for example, veteran Eddie Costello, who said, “World War Two for me is a sore asshole. World War Two for me is four years of nervous diarrhea. World War Two for me is a chance to look back on it, even now, and tell sea stories: to take what happened and enlarge it, embroider it, and come out maybe smelling like a rose, but smelling a little better than I do. . . . I can think back to World War Two and I can idealize the whole thing, because I don’t have a guy over the back fence reminding me of the crappy way I behaved then. . . . There is no such thing as a just war. Everything is perverted” (quoted in Terkel, “Good War,” 211, 215). 10. Fussell, Wartime, 143. 11. Ambrose, review of Wartime, 844, 845.

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that runs through the text, and allows Fussell to misread his own evidence. . . . Many of the people who stopped the Nazis from conquering the world remain perversely convinced that they did something significant.”12 Samuel Hynes, a fellow veteran and scholar, wrote a sensitive, generous, and thoughtful review in the New Republic which concluded that Wartime was “powerful” but “wrong-­headed.”13 Ted Bogacz, in the Journal of American History, called the book a “feeble followup” to The Great War and Modern Memory, “rambling, ill constructed, and unevenly written,” but his biggest criticism is that Fussell belabors the obvious, “as if a host of authors had not already exposed the manifold obscene horrors of war and the lies and cultural degradation it engenders.”14 In a front-­page review in the New York Times Book Review, Simon Schama wrote, “There is . . . a gaping moral sinkhole at the center of Wartime that, in the end, swallows up many of its interesting and sometimes brilliant perceptions.”15 This is a notably different cultural reception than the one that honored The Great War and Modern Memory, or even that equally nihilistic take on World War II, Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, which was awarded a National Book Award and a Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A great part of the difference in reception that Wartime and Gravity’s Rainbow faced can be accounted for by differences between the two books in genre, power, and ambition, even though both pre­sent World War II as a meaningless event, “stupid and sadistic,” incomprehensible in its scope and brutality. Gravity’s Rainbow is more formally complex and aesthetically accomplished, by far, and it’s also a novel, which means that its claims to truth are different and more flexible than those of a critical and historical book like Fussell’s. Yet we cannot compare these two books without also comparing the different contexts in which they appeared—1974 and 1989—which also means reckoning with what had happened in the meantime. Whereas once, under the stabilizing narrative of the Cold War, a ruthless critique of the meaning of World War II such as that offered by Gravity’s Rainbow could be entertained as being really about something else—namely, the master narrative of the Cold War, in which all history was a teleological progression that would end in either annihilation or the “universal homogenous state”—the collapse of the Cold War’s ideological and narrative structure left the historical contradictions of World War II exposed and its meaning vulnerable. “The reaction to [Wartime],” Fussell said in response to his critics, “shows how precious the 12. Smoler, “Fighting the Bad Fight,” 464. 13. Hynes, “Blood, Sweat, and Vulgarity,” 34–38, 38. 14. Bogacz, review of Wartime, 378. 15. Schama, review of Wartime.

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second war was to the self-­esteem of Americans,” and the war only grew in importance with the disappearance of the “concept of freedom, of America, that took sharpness from contrast with Communism,” as John Updike wrote in 1990.16 “If there’s no Cold War,” his character Rabbit Angstrom asked in Rabbit at Rest, which novel ends just before the Berlin Wall’s fall, “what’s the point of being an American?”17 In the years following the end of the Cold War, that very question would motivate a struggle over the meaning of World War II as a defining event in American history. Sometimes this struggle took shape in arguments about contemporary events framed in rhetoric invoking the moral clarity of World War II. As previously mentioned, the Second Gulf War (1990–91) is one example where arguments about a contemporary event were mapped onto a simplified narrative of World War II, with each explanation lending credence to the other. The deliberate conflation of Hussein and Hitler, Iraq and Nazi Germany, by government propagandists and media commentators continued through the 1990s and into the lead-­up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The brutality of the wars following the breakup of communist Yugoslavia brought out more references to World War II. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, resurgent nationalism, the siege of Sarajevo, and images of war-­torn European cities and war-­ravaged European refugees seemed to echo the wartime devastation of Europe and the Holocaust, and, as with the US military action against Iraq, interventionists left and right invoked the moral clarity of a simplified view of World War II to argue that American military violence should (and could) solve complex political problems half a world away. At other moments, the struggle over the meaning of World War II took place in more overt disputes, such as the critical reception of Paul Fussell’s Wartime, or the controversy that stopped the exhibit planned by the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. That controversy arose around the overdetermined body of a bomber, the Enola Gay, bringing to light complex cathexes, beliefs, and disputes about the righteousness of American military-­industrial power. As in that remarkable lyric moment in The Best Years of Our Lives when Dana Andrews sits in the nose of a scrapped bomber, the NASM exhibit proposed to focus on an evacuated fuselage to tell the story of World War II. This time, however, it wasn’t Dana Andrews viewers saw merged with the war machine, or even Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr., who flew the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, but 16. Fussell quoted in R. Bernstein, “War as Abomination.”; Updike, “Why Rabbit Had to Go.” 17. Updike, Rabbit at Rest, 442–43. This and the previous Updike quotation are taken from Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 440.

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themselves. As Tom Engelhardt suggests, the burnished metal of the bomber’s fuselage was intended to be a mirror “open to whatever story anyone might bring to it” but instead became a screen for conflicting and incommensurate visions of historical truth.18 Starting in 1990, the NASM began planning an exhibit for 1995 that would be organized around the Enola Gay, the B-­29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. From the beginning, as historian Edward T. Linenthal recounts, museum administrators, curators, and the Research Advisory Committee brought together to discuss the exhibit expressed concerns about the exhibit’s focus, its mood, and how the museum might best negotiate what Linenthal calls “the need to change . . . from a temple to a forum,” that is, the imperative to transform the NASM from a museum that celebrated a triumphalist narrative of American technological progress to a museum that “would seek to engage visitors in serious matters—like strategic bombing— in order to enrich civic culture.”19 The tension between the twin imperatives of “temple” and “forum,” which Linenthal elsewhere describes as the tension between “a commemorative voice—‘I was there, I know because I saw and felt what happened’—and a historical one that speaks of complicated motives and of actions and consequences often hardly considered at the moment of the event itself,” opened into outright conflict in 1993, before the museum had even completed its first script for the exhibition. Martin Harwit, the museum’s director, and Tom Crouch, chair of the museum’s Aeronautics Department, came under attack from Smithsonian secretary Robert Adams, who thought the exhibition should focus on the war instead of on the use of the atomic bomb. Crouch’s response to Secretary Adams’s criticisms neatly summarizes the problem: “Do you want to do an exhibition intended to make veterans feel good, or do you want to do an exhibition that will lead our visitors to think about the consequences of the atomic bombing of Japan? Frankly, I don’t think we can do both.”20 In the end, the exhibition would do neither. Coming under increasing pressure from the Air Force Association (or AFA, an Air Force lobbying group), the American Legion, members of congress, and concerned journalists, the NASM tried to make the exhibition commemorative yet still historically accurate, but it soon became clear critics would accept nothing less than a wholly uncritical exhibition that restated sacred myths about the use of the atomic bomb. Disagreements about the number of American deaths expected 18. Engelhardt, “Victors and Vanquished,” 248. 19. Linenthal, “Anatomy of a Controversy,” 22–23. 20. Crouch quoted in Linenthal, “Anatomy of a Controversy,” 35.

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from an invasion of Japan was a typical conflict and also wound up being the final stand-­off that sank the exhibition. Linenthal writes: In their postwar memoirs, both President Truman and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had spoken of horrendously high numbers—hundreds of thousands, even one million casualties—in any invasion of Japan. Yet as military historian John Ray Skates notes in his book The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb, “the source of the large numbers used after the war by Truman, Stimson, and Churchill to justify the use of the atomic bomb has yet to be discovered. Nor is there any record that Truman, Stimson, or Churchill used such large casualty estimates in the weeks before or following the use of the bombs against Japan. The large estimates first appeared in their postwar memoirs.” These numbers, however—particularly the one million figure— took on iconic significance over the years, much like the six million figure for the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Any attempt to question these numbers came to be construed as an attempt to belittle the horrendous reality that an invasion of Japan might have been, just as any attempt to adjust downward the six million of the Holocaust—even by several hundred thousand— was perceived as a murder of memory, akin to Holocaust denial.21

The museum’s first script addressed the problem of the projected number of American dead directly, contrasting Truman’s inflated postwar estimates with the actual estimates used by the US military at the time, which predicted between 30,000 and 50,000 dead in the invasions of both Kyushu and Honshu.22 Later, attempting to appease the AFA and its allies, the museum’s August 1994 revised script presented the dispute as a range of estimates, “from 30,000 to 500,000,” without specifying the sources of these numbers. The October 1994 script elided the lower numbers entirely, saying only that American casualties in the invasion “conceivably could have risen to as many as a million (including a quarter of a million deaths).”23 In December, responding to criticisms from Barton Bernstein and other historians that this was historically inaccurate, museum director Harwit changed the text again, so that while it still quoted Truman’s inflated claim, it also highlighted its uncertainty. This change enraged the American Legion and the AFA and was the final blow that brought down the exhibition. The exhibition was canceled on January 30, 1995, and Harwit resigned on May 2.24 This conflict between questioning the ethics of American power and celebrating American sacrifice shows how important the meaning of World War II 21. Linenthal, “Anatomy of a Controversy,” 54. See also Skates, Invasion of Japan, 77–82. 22. Linenthal, “Anatomy of a Controversy,” 55. 23. Linenthal, “Anatomy of a Controversy,” 56. 24. Linenthal, “Anatomy of a Controversy,” 58.

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remained to American identity, and its timing suggests that the meaning of the Cold War was supervenient on the meaning of World War II in crucial ways. If World War II was just, righteous, and honorably fought, that is, then the Cold War could stand as a moral and spiritual victory. But if America’s victory in World War II came under a cloud, complicated by racial hatred, deliberate atrocities, lies, and the emergence of a secretive unitary executive ruling over a permanently militarized state, then the Cold War’s supposed spiritual clarity turns into a fog of power politics, brinksmanship, dirty wars, profiteering, and economic imperialism. These arguments were not “merely” historical and not only concerned with the Cold War but also about the question of American identity and how we envisioned a post–­Cold War future— that “temporal vanishing line in the future in which the identity of a particular community of agents was supposed to be safeguarded.”25 The victory of myth over history in the Enola Gay controversy was a key moment in the post–­Cold War struggle for the meaning of World War II, exemplifying the trend away from the “sense of irony and moral complexity” that Fussell claimed to be trying to portray in Wartime, the nihilism of Gravity’s Rainbow, and the ambivalent grittiness of films such as The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes, and The Big Red One, toward more triumphalist visions that simplified the history of the war, glorified war making as a spiritual project, and justified American military intervention.26 This trend was also a turn away from the Pacific theater and toward the European, largely abandoning the story of the United States’ campaign of racial extermination against the Japanese in favor of a much nobler story of rescuing the world from Nazism, in spite of the fact that for Americans during the war, from beginning to end, the Pacific was much more central to their sense of the war’s meaning than Europe ever was.27 This trend is most clearly seen in the late 1990s turn to hagiography, as significant numbers of the GI generation approached their death and their baby boomer children swerved from ambivalence to worship, buying up Stephen Ambrose’s oral histories, Band of Brothers (1992), D-­Day, June 6, 1944 (1994), and Citizen Soldiers (1997); turning Tom Brokaw’s 25. Koselleck, “War Memorials,” 294. 26. Fussell quoted in R. Bernstein, “War as Abomination.” 27. Peter Novick writes: “For most Americans, the Pacific conflict was a matter of much greater concern than the war in Europe. . . . American soldiers and sailors were continuously engaged in combat with the Japanese from the beginning to the end of the war—first retreating, then advancing across the islands of the Pacific. It was not until the last year of the war, after the Normandy invasion, that there was equal attention given to the European theater. . . . ‘Axis atrocities’ summoned up images of American victims of the Bataan Death March—not of Europeans, Jewish or gentile, under the Nazi heel.” Novick, Holocaust in American Life, 26.

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oral history The Greatest Generation (1998) into a New York Times best seller; and flocking to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), which grossed more than $200 million at US and Canadian box offices, earned five Academy Awards, and redefined World War II in the American imagination for a generation.28 Spielberg’s film was lauded for its “realistic” portrayal of war, especially its twenty-­five-­minute-­long depiction of the D-­day landing at Utah Beach. The film is loud, violent, bloody, and often grim, and although it doesn’t depict posttraumatic stress disorder per se, it does highlight the psychological trauma (or combat stress) suffered by Tom Hanks’s Captain Miller, especially when Miller breaks down crying after the death of the unit’s medic, Wade. The use of handheld cameras, desaturation, sound design, and blurred lighting (much of it probably inspired by the 1985 Russian war film Come and See) all contribute aesthetically to an estranging “realism,” while the film’s attention to period detail attests to its verisimilitude. Yet the purpose of all this so-­called realism was overtly worshipful, nationalistic, and militaristic, in all the most vulgar and propagandistic ways. According to Spielberg himself, the film was made to honor his father, a veteran of World War II. It opens and closes with a close-­up image of light shining through an American flag. John Williams’s score bespeaks the seriousness of the project from its opening bars, self-­consciously old-­fashioned, stirring, elegiac, patriotic, and patriarchal. Yet the overpowering “realism” of the film and its flagrant nationalism were not pure state ideology; as is often the case with Hollywood, every film serves many masters, and many things are happening at once. What Saving Private Ryan displays in its $12 million opening scene, fabricated destroyed French village, handcrafted uniforms, and acute attention to sound design betrays not so much a dedication to the past as an attempt to dominate it—an attempt by a baby boomer director to take ownership of his father’s war. And to what possible end, beyond mere Oedipal aggression? Perhaps, we might suppose, to still unquiet anxieties about American identity opened up by the end of the Cold War. The key scene in the film, from a post–­Cold War perspective, is not the D-­day bloodfest, nor the difficult and moving moment when the men are looking through dog tags that had belonged to soldiers now dead, nor even 28. Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan. Box Office Mojo, “1998 Box Office Grosses.” It’s worth noting that whereas Stephen Ambrose was born in 1936, Tom Brokaw, George Lucas, and Stephen Spielberg were all born between 1940 and 1946 (respectively 1940, 1944, and 1946). Of the four men, only Ambrose and Spielberg had fathers who served in World War II, and none of the four men served in the military themselves (though Ambrose attended the Reserve Officer Training Corps, or ROTC, program in college).

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the ridiculous, melodramatic close-­up when Hanks’s Captain Miller, dying, tells Matt Damon’s Private Ryan: “Earn this.” Rather, the film’s most important scene occurs at the end, after Matt Damon has morphed into Harrison Young, Young Ryan the private into Old Ryan the veteran, and has said his words to Captain Miller’s grave. Behind Old Ryan in the distance we see his blonde wife, three blonde granddaughters, grandson, and dark-­haired son, who had initially been our surrogate, following Old Ryan to the graveyard and snapping a picture of him with a camera. Now they all stand in the background, disconnected from the moment of truth—the moment of memory— which the film’s framing implies is the film itself, from Miller’s landing at D-­day to his death in the (fictional) town of Ramelle, a synecdoche for the untouchable, ultimately unknowable memory of World War II borne in the souls of the passing generation, a truth that cannot be spoken not because it is traumatic or “nasty” but because it is sacred, a combat gnosis protected by its initiates with a faithful silence. The truth those initiates bear is betrayed, however, by the historical anxiety of their sons. The weight of historical meaning is condensed into an image of pure sacrifice—Miller’s “earn this” given form as a white cross—and Old Ryan is preposterously burdened with the moral anxiety of that sacrifice’s meaning. “Tell me I’ve led a good life,” he begs his wife, giving voice to a later generation’s sense of debt to the “greatest generation,” a later generation’s sense of doubt that they had earned America’s astonishing postwar wealth and power. “Tell me I’m a good man.” The obvious problem here is that Ryan is himself a combat veteran who parachuted into Normandy, fought in the defense of Ramelle, and saw his entire unit killed. We might also note that he lost three brothers to the war. The proposition that Ryan “owes” something to Miller, that he must somehow earn Miller’s sacrifice, is as absurd as the conceit that the grave Ryan would go to visit would be that of some unknown officer who’d been sent to drag him away from his unit, rather than the grave of one of Ryan’s fellow soldiers who’d been killed. It is not Ryan who must earn Miller’s sacrifice, or who needs to articulate his fear of moral failure in the demand for moral validation, but another voice speaking through him: Steven Spielberg, the baby boomer generation, the viewer, us. In this confusion of sentiment, image, and voice, the film asks, “Have we earned this sacrifice? Have we led a good life? Are we good?” “You are,” Mrs. Ryan assures us, assuaging our anxiety. As she withdraws, Old Ryan (now standing in for the viewer) salutes the white cross signifying the sacrifice of the older generation, and the cross dissolves into the American flag, thus making explicit the connection between World War II, Christian sacrifice, and American identity. All the suffering and death we’ve watched

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over the past two and a half hours is made meaningful because we are good, as good as Matt Damon, as good as Tom Hanks, as good as old Harrison Young, white and blonde and American and good. Fade to black: the end of history. But of course it was not the end. Were we to create a biography of the twenty-­first century American cultural imaginary in film, the end of Saving Private Ryan might be followed by the opening of the equally propagandistic Zero Dark Thirty, in which the voices of people in the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 are heard emerging out of a black screen. Both films follow elite military operatives hunting for a single human, both films justify and validate American sacrifice in war, but between the two films, we returned from the “end of history” to its slaughter-­bench. America found a new crusade in the “global war on terrorism,” the field of sacrifice shifted from the beaches of Normandy to New York’s financial district, and our moral virtue was no longer in question: we had been attacked by evil, and were thus by that very fact definitively the good guys. More than a decade later, in 2018, the war on terror goes on and American soldiers continue to fight and die in Afghanistan and across the world, and the question of America’s moral goodness has been complicated by a host of factors, not least an unrepentantly racist president who advocates “America First.” What does World War II mean today? Was it the defeat of fascism or the emergence of a global empire? Was it the beginning of something great, the beginning of the end, the dawn of the Anthropocene, or merely one more war of American expansion? These questions have never been definitively answered, not by The Cambridge Companion to War Writing, not by Paul Fussell, not by the historians at the National Air and Space Museum, and not by trauma theorists, since, as Michel-­Rolph Trouillot points out, debates about historical meaning involve not only scholars “but ethnic and religious leaders, political appointees, journalists, and various associations within civil society as well as independent citizens,” and the final answers to these questions must lie in the war’s long-­term consequences, which are still being played out.29 One final example. On May 29, 2004, the National Park Service held a four-­day Tribute to a Generation on the National Mall, the focus of which was the ceremony dedicating the new World War II Memorial. The World War II Memorial is an odd monument, abstract without symbolizing anything but American power, reminiscent of Nazi and Soviet designs but lacking their awe-­inspiring grandiosity. Marc Fisher in the Washington Post called it a “hodgepodge of cliché and Soviet-­style pomposity.”30 Inga Saffron, in 29. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 19. 30. Fisher, “Memorial That Doesn’t Measure Up.”

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the Philadelphia Inquirer, noted more specifically that it “bears an uncanny resemblance to Moscow’s Victory Park.”31 It was built, against vocal resistance, on the site of an existing fountain on the National Mall, between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. Critics at the time objected to how the memorial broke up the sight line between the two memorials, and the placement does suggest a rather aggressive revision to the national narrative: blocking a clear line from the site of the people’s power, the houses of Congress, through father-­founder Washington to Lincoln the Great Emancipator, and thence to the future, the World War II Memorial breaks the circuit between Washington and Lincoln, demoting Lincoln to an afterthought and connecting Washington and Congress not to the racially charged and tragic Civil War but to the global triumph of American military power. The memorial is almost exactly the size of a football field, with an arch reading “Atlantic” at the north end and an arch reading “Pacific” at the south, evacuating the political specificities of the war—that it was against Japan, Germany, and Italy—in favor of vague geographical markers suggesting that the United States had conquered the entire world. Surrounding the fountain at the center is a circle of fifty-­six granite pillars, each bearing a bronze wreath along with the name of a state or territory, plus Washington, DC. At the west end, blocking one’s view of the Lincoln Memorial, stands a wall embedded with four thousand gold stars representing the dead, beneath which is engraved, “Here We Mark the Price of Freedom.” At the east end, the official entrance to the museum, two walls bear twenty-­four bas-­relief panels depicting “the all-­out mobilization of America’s agricultural, industrial, military, and human resources that transformed the country into the arsenal of democracy as well as the breadbasket of the world.”32 The panels represent key historical moments such as “Lend Lease,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Rosie the Riveter/Aircraft Construction,” “Agriculture,” “Air War/B-­17,” “Jungle Warfare,” “Tanks in Combat,” and “Russians meet Americans at the Elbe.” As journalist Thomas Keane observed, “Scattered around the site are various inscriptions, almost all of which sound the same note: ‘from certain defeat to incredible victory,’ ‘a great victory has been won,’ ‘the great crusade,’ ‘the price of freedom.’”33 One inscription, from General George Marshall, reads, “We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other.” Another inscription, from President Truman, seems to speak directly out of Saving Private Ryan, baldly telling us that we 31. Saffron, “Monument to Democracy.” 32. National World War II Memorial, “National World War II Memorial Bas-­Relief Panels.” 33. Keane, “WW II Memorial Fails Both Past, Present.”

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will never be good enough to “earn this”: “Our debt to the heroic men and valiant women in the service of our country can never be repaid. They have earned our undying gratitude. America will never forget their sacrifices.” Befitting a monument dedicated to mythifying American victory, there is no reference to the Japanese Americans interned in US concentration camps, no suggestion of the isolationism that kept the United States out of the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor, and no mention of the racial strife that rocked Detroit, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles during the war. More curious is the fact that there is no depiction of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no Dorie Miller, no Tuskegee Airmen, no reference to the Holocaust, not even an image of American soldiers liberating a Nazi death camp, a trope which has been central to the American war narrative from The Young Lions to Band of Brothers. The American victory memorialized here is one washed clean not only of the difficult ethical questions raised by American conduct during the war but also the historical, philosophical, moral, and political issues that emerged out of the war and which haunt us still today: genocide, nuclear Armageddon, the connections between ethnoracial identity and nationalism, the collusion of capitalism and militarism, the problem of American imperial power. Tribute to a Generation, the four-­day celebration organized for the memorial’s dedication, included “two large performance pavilions where guests heard the live sounds of big band, swing, and other music from the WWII era,” a Military Equipment Display, a Wartime Stories Tent, an “entertainment salute to all WWII veterans” featuring “talented members” of the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard, an interfaith religious service, and speeches from Tom Brokaw, Tom Hanks, Senator Bob Dole, and President George W. Bush.34 Tom Brokaw congratulated the men and women he dubbed the “Greatest Generation” on winning “the greatest war the world has ever known. . . . A war [that] for all its cruelties and terrible costs was a just war and a great victory and will be remembered for as long as history is recorded,” suggestively invoking an end of history from which, no matter how distant, even the last man will be able to see the greatness of American victory in World War II, a victory in which America was transformed, in Brokaw’s words, “into a mighty military machine.” Brokaw then introduced Tom Hanks with a series of appositive phrases deliberately conflating him with his character in Saving Private Ryan: “Ladies and gentlemen, the youngest member of ‘The 34. National World War II Memorial, “Events.”

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Greatest Generation,’ the schoolteacher from Pennsylvania, Ranger Captain John Miller, my friend Tom Hanks.”35 Hanks read a short statement honoring the Americans who, “in a 45-­month long battle against the conceit that moral superiority can be declared . . . proved that true human morality can only be demonstrated—by deed, by sacrifice and ultimately by mercy.”36 It is strange to hear World War II redefined as a battle to prove that the semiotic content of nonverbal action has priority over the semiotic content of language, but Tom Hanks is not mistaken in his insight that the truth of the war was not in the ideological claims made to justify it, neither “Four Freedoms” nor “universal human rights,” but in the fact of sacrifice itself. He should know. After all, didn’t Captain Miller die for our sins? Following a brief intermission, Frederick W. Smith—the founder, chair, president, and CEO of FedEx; DKE fraternity brother of George W. Bush at Yale; Vietnam War veteran, and cochair of the US World War II Memorial Project—introduced Senator Bob Dole, who spoke from his own experience as a veteran. Dole’s remarks were less grandiose than those that preceded his, yet he too emphasized the theme of sacrifice and made explicit the connection between sacrifice and national identity: “We have raised a memorial to commemorate the service and sacrifice of an entire generation. . . . A memorial to the American people who in the crucible of war forged a unity that became our ultimate weapon.” Dole also drew a connection between World War II and the “Global War on Terror.” “As we meet here today,” he said, “young Americans are risking their lives in liberty’s defense. They are the latest link in a chain of sacrifice older than America itself.”37 At last, President George W. Bush came forward to accept the monument on behalf of the American people. Bush tactfully chose not to mention the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the story he told of World War II was of resolve in the face of doubt, action in a moment of crisis, the world’s need for American leadership, and America’s need to act on the world stage, drawing a more subtle analogy between World War II and the “Global War on Terror” than had Senator Dole, yet implying the same teleological arc from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, from D-­day to Kandahar, leading to some yet unseen day of total victory. Bush highlighted the doubts and uncertainty of those war years, thus suggesting the uncertainty of his own ongoing wars, and emphasized the need for Americans to show faith in presidential leadership. “The bombs 35. Brokaw quoted in National World War II Memorial, “Events.” 36. Hanks quoted in National World War II Memorial, “Events.” 37. Dole quoted in National World War II Memorial, “Events.”

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at Pearl Harbor destroyed the very idea that America could live in isolation from the plots of aggressive powers,” he said, implicitly invoking the attacks of September 11. “The scenes of the concentration camps, the heaps of bodies and ghostly survivors, confirmed forever America’s calling to oppose the ideologies of death,” which his audience would know meant not only Nazis but also al Qaeda. “As we defended our ideals,” he went on, “we began to see that America is stronger when those ideals are fully implemented,” thus justifying the aggressive, immoral invasion of Iraq. Bush described Franklin Roosevelt in terms that painted an idealized portrait of himself: “His resolve was stronger than the will of any dictator. His belief in democracy was absolute. He possessed a daring that kept the enemy guessing. He spoke to Americans with an optimism that lightened their task.”38 The ceremony concluded with the national anthem, the song “God Bless America,” and a benediction. Senator Dole was not the only speaker to draw an explicit connection between World War II and the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during the celebration. One of the panels held in the “Wartime Stories Tent,” for example, included historian Howard Zinn, who served as a bombardier in the Army Air Corps and whose comments on the memorial were so critical that he worried how his audience would take them. In an article for the Progressive recounting his participation the event, Zinn described the scene at the Mall as looking like “a movie set for a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza—huge tents pitched here and there, hawkers with souvenirs, thousands of visitors, many of them clearly World War II veterans, some in old uniforms, sporting military caps, wearing their medals.”39 More than 150,000 people attended the May 29 dedication, and an estimated 315,000 people came through over the celebration’s four days. Zinn began his remarks to his audience that day by saying that he had come to honor two of his friends who had died in the war and “to honor all the others who died in that war,” but then offered a caveat: “I’m not here to honor war itself. I’m not here to honor the men in Washington who send the young to war. I’m certainly not here to honor those in authority who are now waging an immoral war in Iraq.” Zinn went on, warming to his theme: World War II is not simply and purely a “good war.” It was accompanied by too many atrocities on our side—too many bombings of civilian populations. There were too many betrayals of the principles for which the war was supposed to have been fought. Yes, World War II had a strong moral aspect to it—the defeat of Fascism. 38. Bush quoted in National World War II Memorial, “Events.” 39. Zinn, “Dissent at the War Memorial,” 14.

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But I deeply resent the way the so-­called good war has been used to cast its glow over all the immoral wars we have fought in the past fifty years: in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan. I certainly don’t want our government to use the triumphal excitement surrounding World War II to cover up the horrors now taking place in Iraq.40

Zinn’s peroration was met with applause, as were, Zinn reports, the antiwar sentiments of another veteran who spoke up during the question-­and-­answer period. The pervading atmosphere of veneration could sustain criticism, it turned out, provided that the criticism came from someone who had “been there,” and perhaps especially since Zinn and his fellow peacenik were undoubtedly tapping into growing doubts among their audience about the success of Bush’s overseas wars, the very doubts Bush’s earlier comments had subtly attempted to quiet. For while American support for the initial invasion of Iraq had been strong, the spring of 2004 had brought a series of shocks to the narrative of clean and easy victory that Bush and his secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld had been promoting, including brutal fighting in Fallujah, Shi’ite rebellion, the killing and burning of four American mercenaries, and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Today the monument to American victory that Bush accepted on our behalf still stands, visited by approximately four million people every year.41 To each visitor it reiterates a simple story of victory, goodness, and purity, a story in which freedom, material wealth, and “overwhelming force” are necessarily entwined and practically synonymous. But who among those visitors remembers the Iraqi bodies erased from the cover of Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet? Who remembers the Hooded Man that Turner feared his cover would call to mind, the Iraqi detainee forced to stand on a box in his cell in Abu Ghraib, holding electrical wires in his hands? The image was once iconic, but it has since been obscured by the countless new images to which we are subjected, to which we subject ourselves, every day. Yet whether we remember the Hooded Man or not, he has changed what America is, because America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have changed who we are, how we remember our history, and how we understand the meaning of World War II, just as the meaning of American sacrifice in World War II inheres within the meaning of those later wars, in the myths of the citizen soldier, “America’s calling to oppose the ideologies of death,” and the story of the trauma hero. The point of this book is not only the trivial but often forgotten one that historical meaning is never fixed but always in dispute, always a matter of con40. Zinn, “Dissent at the War Memorial,” 14. 41. National Park Service, “Visitor Use Statistics.”

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flict between competing authorities and their competing needs and claims, always changing in response to events, nor is it simply the no less trivial but often willfully ignored point that the meaning of “war” is historically and culturally determined. Rather, my point is to show how war as a social activity is itself a way of making meaning, how deeply World War II is woven into what it meant to be an American in the latter half of the twentieth century, and how deeply war is woven into what it means to be American today. Wars are not simply events that need to be understood, discrete objects to be analyzed or discussed, but collective practices that give life and form to certain values. Wars are politically, ethically, and morally definitive acts; when communities go to war, they transform what and who they are. Thus even wars fought by a tiny cadre of elite professionals touch the totality of national culture and mobilize every soul, consciously and unconsciously, since the actions of the few give shape to the self-­conception of the many. History decays not into images, as Walter Benjamin argues, but into myth, which with savage cunning we revise and revise in the most self-­serving and self-­aggrandizing ways.42 Yet for myth to survive, it must have a dependable fixity, it must be grounded in some transcendental signifier, something “Real,” for narrative alone is not enough. Myth, that is, must have ritual. Consciousness takes form in action; our stories about ourselves must be acted out in living practice. Our truth cannot be merely a “conceit that moral superiority can be declared,” as Tom Hanks observed, but must be given substance in bodies and blood, again and again and again, acted out in ritual violence and ritualized language. The fact of blood sacrifice reverberates throughout human culture. We try to forget this fact, obscure it, hide it from ourselves, and pretend that we are different than we are, yet all our metaphysical games and universalist fantasies, whether projected into the abstraction of empty ideals, onto the pseudoscientific field of psychoanalytic theory, or “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” are nothing but the echoing ramifications of a social fact forged in blood: the armed triumph of American global hegemony. Who we are, who we were, who we will become—these are not historical or academic questions but questions whose answers will be determined by what we do. Thus the past, just as much as the future, waits for that messianic hero whose sacrifice will change everything. 42. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 476 (N11, 4). “A mythology,” as Slotkin defines it, “is a complex of narratives that dramatizes the world vision and historical sense of a people or culture, reducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors” (Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 6).

Acknowledgments

Portions of chapter 1 were presented in different form at “War and American Literature,” American Literature Association Symposium, New Orleans, October 12, 2013; and at the Romanticism in the Age of World Wars Conference, Leuven, Belgium, November 12, 2018. Portions of chapters 2 were presented in different form at “War in American Culture,” Alexey Zverev International Biennial Conference on American Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia, May 12, 2015; the Future of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College, Hanover, June 22–28, 2015; ASAP/7: Arts and the Public, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Conference, Greenville, SC, September 25, 2015; and the Society for US Intellectual History 2018 Conference, Chicago, November 9, 2018. Portions of the introduction and chapter 5 were previously published in significantly different form in “The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to ‘Redeployment’ and ‘American Sniper,’” Los Angeles Review of Books (January 25, 2015), which was reprinted in my collection We’re Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change (New York: Soho Press, 2018). I’ve been working on this book in one form or another for nearly a decade, and I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to a host of interlocutors, mentors, colleagues, and friends who talked with me about war, sacrifice, and trauma, and were willing to read and discuss portions of the work in progress. Deepest thanks go to Maria DiBattista, Josh Kotin, Susan Stewart, and Martin Woessner, who gave generously of their time and energy to this work at various stages over its long development, to James Miller for his early and enthusiastic support, to Sam Hynes for the many generous conversations about his experience of the war, and to Nadia Abu El-­Haj, Sandra Gustafson, Stephen Fredman, Kate Marshall, Lt. Col. Peter Molin (ret.), Rosalind Parry, and Paul K.

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Saint-­Amour, who read late versions of the manuscript and offered detailed, helpful feedback. I am blessed to have found a courageous and gracious editor in Alan Thomas at the University of Chicago Press and owe much to his patient assistance, as well as to Randolph Petilos, Yvonne Zipter, Lori Meek Schuldt, and the rest of the editorial and production team at the press. I owe a great deal as well to the press’s anonymous reviewers who helped shape this work in its final stages. While in the end public responsibility for this book is mine and mine alone, including whatever insights offered or mistakes made, my experience of its authorship has been that it is anything but solitary, despite the many hours spent writing it hunched alone over my desk. This book took shape within a complex concatenation of arguments, discussions, epiphanies, and misunderstandings shared among a constellation of my contemporaries, whose brilliance has illuminated my search for understanding. I wish I could take the time here to note each conversation, to express my gratitude and camaraderie in particular and specific ways, but I fear even those whom I’d be thanking would find such lengthy remarks tedious. I hope this general “Thank you” might suffice: many thanks to Amanda Anderson, Hadji Bakara, Ian Baucom, David Bellos, Charles Bernstein, Richard Bernstein, Michael Bérubé, Patrick Blanchfield, Robert Boyers, Ella Brians, Lou Brown, Kevin Buckley, Olivier Burtin, Cathy Caruth, Terry Castle, Peter Catapano, Miguel Centeno, Mel Chin, Andrew Cole, Rachael DeLue, Jeff Dolven, Randy Fertel, Katie Fitzpatrick, Diana Fuss, Mark Greif, Matthew Hart, Jim Hicks, Lawrence Jackson, Philip Kadish, Amy Kaplan, George Kovachs, Kevin Kruse, Brooke Lamperd, Russ Leo, Meredith Martin, Sean McCann, Laren McClung, Mark McGurl, Jarvis McInnis, Eduardo Mendieta, Philip Metres, Melissa Monroe, Deak Nabers, Alan Nadel, Sianne Ngai, Kinohi Nishikawa, Josephine Park, Donald Pease, Ross Poole, Hilary Plum, Hugh Raffles, Shelly Rambo, Vaughn Rasberry, Bruce Robbins, Francisco Robles, Joydeep Roy-­Bhattacharya, Jacob Siegel, Richard Slotkin, Emily Sogn, Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Smith (ret.), James Sparrow, Holger Syme, Brian Turner, Dorothea von Moltke, Bruce Weigl, Stephen Wertheim, Benjamin Widiss, Kayla Williams, Michael Wood, Tamsen Wolff, Alex Woloch, Zoë Wool, Sandra Zagarell, Eli Zaretsky, the New York University veterans writers workshop, my fellow writers in Fire and Forget, the Forum for Scholars and Publics at Duke University, the Futures of American Studies Institute (2014), and the School for Criticism and Theory (2013). I am particularly indebted to those who engaged with this project at early stages of its development and carried some of its ideas into their own work, especially Rachel Galvin and Phil Klay. I would also like to thank Lyndsi Barnes and Joshua McKeon in the Berg

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Library of the New York Public Library, and the librarians at the Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley; the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame; the Houghton Library at Harvard University; and the Library of Congress for their generous assistance in my research. In addition, I would like to thank Joseph Cabrera, my research assistant at the University of Notre Dame, who was as assiduous in his labor as he was attentive in his reading. I am extremely grateful for the financial and institutional support that has made this work possible; the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame, the Lannan Foundation, the Mayapple Center for the Arts and Humanities, the New York Public Library, the Princeton American Studies Program (especially Candice Kessel and Judith Ferszt), Princeton University, and the Whiting Foundation. The bulk of Total Mobilization was written with the ambivalent assistance of Buster the cat, who kept my lap and wrists warm on cold winter mornings but was never wholly pleased with my stubborn insistence on making that annoying tap-­tap-­tap noise on my keyboard. He passed on as I was preparing the final drafts of this manuscript. He was a noble beast, and I miss him. Finally, as always, Sara. For long car rides spent hashing out the finer points of our terminology, for sautéed greens and beans, for picking up books for each other at various libraries, for the dedication and courage you bring to your own work, for your fierce close reading, for disagreeing, for questioning, for listening and discussing, for everything—I am forever grateful for your presence, your friendship, and your enduring love.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abel, Sam, “The Rabbit in Drag,” 125–26 Abu Ghraib scandal, 6, 243 Adams, Robert, 233 Adorno, Theodor, 166; on barbarism of poetry after Holocaust, 149; Minima Moralia, 18n8, 22; “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 146 African Americans, and WWII. See black Americans, and WWII Air Force (film), 22, 192 Air Force Association (AFA), 233, 234 Alice James Books, 6 Alonso, Harriet, Robert E. Sherwood, 16n2 Alperovitz, Gar, 223n77 Alyea, Dorothy, “There’s Margaret,” 150n69 Ambrose, Stephen, 230, 236n28; Band of Brothers, 235, 240; Citizen Soldiers, 235; D-Day, June 6, 1944, 235 American Legion, 233, 234 American soldier: as agent of state power, 62; characterization of as children in postwar literature, 58; Jarrell’s view of, 35, 35n58, 58–59, 76; lack of idealistic motivation, 59n119, 59n120; and problem of bearing testimony to war experience, 2–3; racial hatred of Japanese, 59n119. See also black Americans, and WWII; trauma hero, myth of; World War II literature Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 88 Andrews, Dana, 15, 17, 18, 19, 232 Antigone, 85–86 antihero, concept of, 84 antiwar discourse: infantilization of soldiers in, 58; and Vietnam War, 187 Antoon, Sinan, “Embedded Poetry,” 4n16 Apocalypse Now (film), 190–91, 192

apophasis, 205, 205n24 Arendt, Hannah: Eichmann in Jerusalem, 45–46, 47, 183n50; Origins of Totalitarianism, 90n78, 183n50 Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), 131, 133 Ashbery, John: The Double Dream of Spring, 147; at Harvard in 1946, 146; “Mixed Feelings,” in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 23; postwar inability to write, 148; and pure language, 148; response to Cage’s “Music of Changes,” 148 atomic bombs, dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 21n11, 47, 178, 194, 222–23n77, 240 Atran, Scott, “War, Martyrdom, and Terror,” 58n117 Auborjonois, Fernand, 91, 98n108 Auden, W. H., 10, 147; “September 1, 1939,” 9 Australia, race riots during WWII, 70n24 Baldwin, Hanson, 51n104 Baldwin, James: “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 72–74, 75; “The Harlem Ghetto,” 72–73; “Many Thousands Gone,” 72; and “a nation within a nation,” 75; on political theology of wartime, 73–76; on WWII in The Price of the Ticket, 74– 75 Barkin, Steve M., “Fighting the Cartoon War,” 123 Basinger, Jeanine, The World War II Combat Film, 17, 114 Bataan Death March, 235n27 Bates, Milton, Wallace Stevens, 96 Bell, David A., The First Total War, 198 Benfey, Christopher, and Karen Remmler, Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II, 91n82

266 Benjamin, Walter, 91n82, 244 Bennett, Joseph, “A Man with a Voice,” 52 Bentley, Eric, A Century of Hero-Worship, 11, 81, 83, 89 Benton, Walter, “Summary of the Distance between the Bomber and the Objective,” 29, 30 Beppu, 53 Bergson, Henri, 125 Berlin Wall, fall of, 227–28 Bernstein, Barton, 234 Bernstein, Richard, 232n16 Best Years of Our Lives, The (film), 22, 73, 232; popular and critical success, 17; stills from, 18, 19 Bettelheim, Bruno, 213 Big Red One, The (film), 235 black Americans, and WWII: black American hero, riddle of, 63–64, 66–72, 129; Second Great Migration, 7–8, 165. See also race, and WWII black press, during WWII, 65n8 Blanc, Mel, 122 Blaskiewicz, Robert, “James Jones on Guadalcanal,” 103n112 Blunden, Edmund, 28 Bly, Robert, “Collapse of James Dickey,” 49–50, 51, 52–53, 57, 58 Bodnar, John, The “Good War” in American ­Memory, 7nn20–21 Bogacz, Ted, 231 Bomber, Office for Emergency Management, 22 bomber crews, casualty rates of, 25–26, 26n25 bomber lyric, 203; as atrocity poem, 47; bomber as deity, 29–30; bomber image of both state power and scapegoat, 24, 25–28, 30–32, 45, 46; and death of bomber, 31–32; Romanticism, 29. See also Dickey, James; Jarrell, Randall; Lowell, Robert; Sarton, May, “Navigator”; trauma hero, myth of bombing, aerial: development of, 20–22; dominant imagery of WWII, 19–20, 22; scope of ­destruction, 24–25 Borowski, Tadeusz, 35 Bova, Ben, 190 Bowman, Peter, Beach Red, 203 Boyer, Paul, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 21n11, 222– 23n77 Bradley, Earl, 54 Bradley, James L., 134, 135n29 Brazeau, Peter, Parts of a World, 90n79 Brecht, Bertolt, 166 Bremond, Walter, 190 Bridge Over the River Kwai (film), 189 Bridges at Toko-Ri, The (film), 192 British Royal Air Force (RAF), terror bombing of civilians, 47–48n95

I n de x Brock, Arthur, 212 Brokaw, Tom, 236n28; The Greatest Generation, 235–36; speech at Tribute to a Generation, 240 Brooks, Cleanth, “Jarrell’s ‘Eighth Air Force,’” 40, 42 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 9, 129; “Negro Hero,” 71–72, 75 Brown, Harry, A Walk in the Sun, 10 Bruce, Lenny, 128 Bryers, John E., 136 Buck, Pearl S., China Sky, 8 “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,” 120–27, 129, 158, 160; allegory of American commercial imperialism, 124–26, 147–48, 193; camp format, 125–26, 125n10; racist caricatures of Japanese, 122–24; and zany adaptability, 121–22, 124–26 Burke, Kenneth: concern with relationship of liberal democracy and heroism, 11–12; “Dialectic of the Scapegoat,” 43; A Grammar of Motives, 89; and role of poetry in wartime, 91; “War, Response, Contradiction,” 87; “War and Cultural Life,” 89, 95 Burns, John Horne, The Gallery, 10 Burt, Stephanie (Stephen), Randall Jarrell and His Age, 34–35 Bush, George H. W., 230 Bush, George W.: speech at Tribute to a Generation, 240, 241–42; and wars in Iraq and ­Afghanistan, 241–42, 243 Cage, John, “Music of Changes,” 148 California, and WWII: effect of war on infrastructure, economy, and culture, 165–66; influx of scientists, artists, and thinkers, 166 Call of Duty (video game), 8 Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II, The, 9 Cambridge Companion to War Writing, The, 9, 238 Campbell, James, “Combat Gnosticism,” 199 Campbell, Joseph: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 192; and universal human narrative, 188 camp formula, 125–26, 125n10 capitalism, 14, 194; and demands on adaptability of workers, 121–22; and human body as exchangeable commodity, 12–13; individualism of vs. wartime collectivism, 89–90, 116; and industrialized warfare, 225; vs. nationalism, 12–13, 116–17; and war/violence, 167–73, 225. See also heroic sacrifice, as physical embodiment of imagined community of nation captivity narratives, early American, 37 Carlyle, Thomas, and the hero, 81–82 Carter, Steven, James Jones, 114n137 cartoons, racist wartime, 122–23

I n de x 267 Caruth, Cathy: “Recapturing the Past,” 216; “Traumatic Departures,” 3, 215, 221; Unclaimed Experience, 218, 219n69 Castle Wolfenstein (video game), 9n24 Catch-22 (Heller). See Heller, Joseph, Catch-22 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 211 Chow, Rey, The Age of the World Target, 21n11 Church, Henry, 90, 90n79, 97 Churchill, Winston, inflated numbers of deaths estimated from invasion of Japan, 234 Ciardi, John, 20, 32, 147, 150; and imaginative sympathy, 56; poetry of war crimes, 47; “Reveille for My Twenty-Eighth Birthday,” 29, 30 Civilian Conservation Corps, 178 Clausewitz, Carl von, On War, 38n68, 199–200, 202 Clausson, Nils, “‘Perpetuating the Language,’” 28 Clune, Michael, Gamelife, 9n24 Cobain, Kurt, 87 Cocks, Jay, 190 Cold War, and meaning of WWII, 7, 8, 9n25, 146, 159, 228–29, 232, 233–35 combat fatigue, 213 combat gnosis, 199, 219, 224, 237. See also war-asrevelation combat stress, 212–13, 236 Come and See (Russian war film), 236 comedy: Koch’s integration of violence of war into comic worldview, 129, 138, 149–50, 154–55, 158, 174; and shared sense of collective identity, 127–28. See also “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips” Command Decision (film), 22, 115 “Commando Duck” (cartoon), 122 concentration camp prisoners, 35 Connor, Walker, Ethnonationalism, 94n94 Conrad, Joseph, 156; Heart of Darkness, 190; Lord Jim, 78 Cooper, James Fenimore, The Last of the Mohicans, 37 Coppola, Francis Ford, 191, 192 Cozzens, James Gould, Guard of Honor, 115 Creeley, Robert, 147 Crouch, Tom, 233 DaCosta, J. M., studies on “Soldier’s Heart,” 211n40 Dam Busters, The (film), 192 Damon, Matt, 237, 238 Darwin, Charles, Descent of Man, 58n117 Daugherty, Tracy, The Last Love Song, 162n2 Davidson, Orlando, J. Carl Willems, and Joseph A. Kahl, The Deadeyes, 135–36, 138–39 Davis, Jordan, 137n34 Davis, Ralph N., “The Negro Newspapers and the War,” 65n8

Dawes, James, 1, 10 Dawson, David, Flesh Becomes Word, 41n82, 48n97 Dawson, Leven, 33–34 Deadeye Dispatch, newspaper of Ninety-Sixth Division, 141; “Visions,” surrealist collage, in Deadeye Features, 141–42 Dearborn, Mary, 138, 138n36 Deer, Patrick, Culture in Camouflage, 25 DeLillo, Don, White Noise, 8 Dencker, Donald, Love Company, 133n27, 136, 139 Deuteronomy: and Jewish purgation of guilt through ritual substitution, 42; and washing of hands over a sacrifice, 41 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): and PTSD, 209; third edition, 213 Dickey, James: autobiography of war exploits, 50; Buckdancer’s Choice, 49, 52, 57; engagement in practice bombings of Japan, 53n109, 54–55; review of Jarrell’s war poetry, 36, 61–62; “Slave Quarters,” 57. See also Dickey, James, “The Firebombing” Dickey, James, “The Firebombing,” 49–57, 173; allusions to The Communist Manifesto and Anna Karenina, 53; conflict between universal humanitarian ethics and national identity, 53–57; critical condemnation of, 49, 52; epigraph from Günter Eich, 50–51; epigraph from Job, 51; eroticization of violence, 55–56; failure of imaginative sympathy, 53–57, 153; inability to imagine the Other, 56–57; portrayal of affects and effects of power, 52; and problem of collective responsibility for and complicity with state violence, 49, 59; relationship of aesthetic detachment to imaginative sympathy, 49–50, 55–56; view of American bombing of Japan as comparable to Nazi aggression, 52 Didion, Joan: Democracy, 170n20, 179–80, 181; “Early Version of Run River,” 162n6; effect of WWII on life of, 162, 167–68, 173–75; and failure of narrative to account for experience, 167, 181; “Goodbye to All That,” 161; “Hawaii: Taps at Pearl Harbor,” 159–61, 160; “Letter from Paradise, 21° 19’ N., 157° 52’ W.,” 161, 168–75; and meaning of WWII in American culture, 168, 173; “My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua,” 161; “On Keeping a Notebook,” 161; Run River, 162–67; Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 161, 162; visit to the USS Arizona, 171–72, 173, 174; war and emergence of global American leadership, 167; war as “crossing story as origin myth,” 164, 166–67; Where I Was From, 162, 165; The White Album, 162; “The White Album,” in The White Album, 167 DiPrima, Diane, 10

268 Dirty Dozen, The (film), 235 Disney, war productions, 122 Doggett, Frank, 96 Doherty, Thomas, Projections of War, 122 Dole, Bob, speech at Tribute to a Generation, 240, 241, 242 Donovan, William, 16n2 Doolittle Raid, 22 Double V campaign, Pittsburgh Courier, 65 Douglas A-20 light attack bombers, 410 Bomb Group, 20 Douhet, Giulio, The Command of the Air, 21 Dower, John W., War without Mercy, 58n119, 122n6 Dresden, bombing of, 47–48n95 Dudziak, Mary, War Time, 178 Duncan, Robert, on Dickey, 53n111 Easley, Claudius M., Jr., “The Operations of the 96th Infantry Division,” 135n29 Eberhardt, Richard, 147, 150 Edwards, Paul, 172–73 Eich, Günter, Angina Days, 50–51 Eichmann, Adolf, 47–48 Eisenhower, Dwight D., warning against militaryindustrial complex in “Farewell Address,” 13, 178, 226 Eliot, T. S., 147, 187 Ellison, Ralph, 173; “Airman Novel,” 67–68, 75, 84, 174; “Flying Home,” 68; “In a Strange Country,” 68–69; Invisible Man, 68, 75, 104–5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and the hero, 81–82, 86 Engelhardt, Tom, 233 Enola Gay (bomber), 22; controversy over planned exhibit of at NASM, 232–35 Evans, Raymond, and Jacqui Donegan, “The Battle of Brisbane,” 70n24 Executive Order 9981 (abolishing segregation in US military), 72 Faludi, Susan, The Terror Dream, 37n66 Farber, Manny, “Underground Films,” 17 Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, 7, 212, 213, 214 Favret, Mary, War at a Distance, 1–2 Feldman, Allen, “On the Actuarial Gaze,” 210n34 Felman, Shoshana, “Education and Crisis,” 215 Fick, Nathaniel, memoir of 2003 invasion of Iraq, 207 Filreis, Alan, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, 91, 92, 98n108, 99n109 Finkel, David, 195 First Motion Picture Division, Culver City, 166 Fisher, Marc, 238 flashback, 3, 215–16 Fleischer Studios, 122

I n de x Foer, Jonathan Safran, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 22 Foster, Hal, 3n15, 225 Foster, John Bellamy, 12n32 Franco, Zeno, Kathy Blau, and Philip Zimbardo, “Heroism,” 83, 84–85, 86 Frankfurt school, 81 Freleng, Isadore “Fritz”: “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips,” 120, 127, 129; War Department films, 122 Freud, Sigmund, 44n87, 183; classical definition of trauma, 210; and “fantasy hypothesis” of trauma, 212, 215, 216n60; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 128, 149n67, 154n78; on trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 210–11, 221 From Here to Eternity (film), 103 Fukasaku, Kinji, 193n83 Fukuyama, Francis, “End of History,” 228–29 Fuss, Diana, 33 Fussell, Paul: The Boys’ Crusade, 58, 58n116; The Great War and Modern Memory, 183–88, 194, 220, 231; “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” 222–25; Wartime, 229–32, 235 Fussell, Paul, and Michael Walzer, “An Exchange of Views,” 224 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 223 Galison, Peter, “War against the Center,” 21n11 Galvin, Rachel, News of War, 10n29, 98n106 Garner, Brian, Modern American Usage, 210 Gat, Azar, The Origins of Military Thought, 198 Gavotti, Giulio, 20 Geisel, Theodore, War Department films, 122 Gellhorn, Martha, 10; Point of No Return, 11, 11n30 general semantics, 132 Gibson, Campbell, and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990,” 165n12 Gill, Brendan, “Young Man Behind Plexiglas,” 26n29 Gilliam, Dorothy, “The Black Heavies,” 190 Gilyard, Keith, 70n24 Ginsberg, Allen, 147 Girard, René: Battling to the End, 38n68; Scapegoat, 38n70; Violence and the Sacred, 38n70 global war on terror, 22n12, 238, 241 Gooch, Brad, City Poet, 144–45, 155n81 Goodman, Paul, “Advance-Guard Writing, 1900– 1950,” 146–47 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon). See Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity’s Rainbow Gray, J. Glenn, 223 Grayling, A. C., Among the Dead Cities, 47n93 “Greatest Generation,” 187n63 Greif, Mark, The Age of the Crisis of Man, 80n51

I n de x 269 Grinker, Roy R., and John P. Spiegel, Men under Stress, 208–9n29, 213n43 Grose, Peter, “In South Vietnam,” 51n104 Guinness, Alec, 189, 193 Gulf of Tonkin incident, 51 Guy Named Joe (film), 74n37 Hacking, Ian, Rewriting the Soul, 7, 211n40, 212n42 Haines, William Wister, Command Decision, 10 Halloran, Michael “Screamin’ Mike,” 135, 140 Hammer, Langdon, “Who Was Randall Jarrell?,” 34, 35n58 Hanks, Tom: in Saving Private Ryan, 17, 236–38, 240; speech at Tribute to a Generation, 240–41, 244 Harari, Yuval, 198–99, 205n24, 217–18, 224n82 Harris, Arthur, 223 Harrison, Harry, neopulp science fiction novels, 192 Hart, Henry, James Dickey, 52n105 Harvard Crimson, 145 Harvard University: incoming class of 1946, 144– 45; intellectual ferment in postwar era, 145; Marshall’s commencement address of 1947, 145 Harwit, Martin, 233, 234 Hawke, John, The Cannibal, 203 Hayakawa, S. I.: and general semantics, 132–33, 149; Language in Action, 132; Language in Thought and Action, 132; “Poetry and Advertising,” 132–33, 147; and the semantic environment of the poet, 133 Hays, H. R., “To an American Flyer,” 29, 30–31 H.D., war poetry, 10 Hedges, Chris, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, 2, 203n20 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11, 22 Heinlein, Robert: impact of general semantics on, 132; Starship Trooper, 203 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, 178, 186, 187, 204; bomber as hero, 84–85; bomber as scapegoat, 48, 225; conflict between power of bomber and role as traumatic victim, 24–25; impact on American culture, 9, 10; vision of the truth of war, 61 Hemingway, Ernest, 105, 187; A Farewell to Arms, 202–3, 204, 206, 217 Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery, 1, 212, 216, 219, 220 Herman, Luc, and Steven Weisenburger, Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom, 181, 181n42, 182 hero: black American, riddle of, 63–64, 66–72, 129; history of in Western thought, 81–82; and leadership, 80–86; narrowly defined in critical readings of war literature, 84; and necessity of social validation, 83–84; problem of in rela-

tion to democracy, 80–83; role of in totalized industrial war, 14, 89; as social phenomenon, 83, 86; as term of narrative analysis and as social role, 85–86. See also heroic sacrifice, as physical embodiment of imagined community of nation; trauma hero, myth of heroic sacrifice, as physical embodiment of imagined community of nation, 86–89, 93–95, 98, 100–103, 106, 109, 116 Herr, Michael, Dispatches, 190 Hersey, John, 11; War Lover, 26n27 hibakusha, 21 Hidden Fortress, The (film), 191 Himes, Chester, If He Hollers, Let Him Go, 8, 166 Himmler, Heinrich, 45–46 Hiroshima, bombing of, 21n11, 47, 176, 194, 222– 23n77, 240 Hoagland, Jim, “Politics of Star Wars,” 190 Hofmann, Michael, 51n102 Hölbling, Walter, “Second World War,” 9–10 Holocaust, 147, 178, 183, 183n50, 210, 213, 219, 234 Holyoak, Ray, 70n24 Homer: ideal of heroism, 81; Iliad, 105, 207 Hook, Sidney: and the hero and liberal democracy, 11; and the hero and mass media, 82–83; The Hero in History, 80, 89 hookworm, 143 Horace, Carmina III.2, 197, 202 Horowitz, Mardi, 213 Hubbard, L. Ron, 132 Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice, 86–87 Hugo, Richard: poetry of war crimes, 47; “Spinazzola: Quella Cantina Là,” 27 human killing, overwhelmingly committed by young men, 58, 58n117 Huston, John, 213n43 Hynes, Samuel, “Blood, Sweat, and Vulgarity,” 231 IBM, 178 IG Farben, 178 I Love Lucy (sitcom), 121, 122, 124–25 imaginative sympathy, 49–50, 53–54 Ink Spots, 119 Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), 230n7 Iraq: American bombing of (1991–2002), 230n7; American occupation of (2003–11), 4, 230n7, 232, 243 Jackass Mail (film), 156–57n82 Jackson, Lawrence, The Indignant Generation, 73 James, Jennifer C., A Freedom Bought with Blood, 71–72 Jameson, Fredric, The Antinomies of Realism, 2, 106, 114–16 Janet, Pierre, 211–12, 212n42 Japanese Americans, internment of, 240

270 Jarraway, David R., Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief, 98, 99n109 Jarrell, Randall, 10, 173; and assimilation of individual into social machinery of industrial state, 33–34; “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” 9, 26, 32–34, 48, 55, 59–61; “The Lines,” 34; “Losses,” 34; and Marianne Moore’s “In Distrust of Merits,” 32n48, 39n73; poetry of war crimes, 47; “Port of Embarkation,” 34; powerlessness of soldiers and bomber crews in poems, 34–36; “Prisoners,” 34; “The Sick Nought,” 34; “Siegfried,” 31, 34; “The State,” 34; “Transient Barracks,” 27; view of fellow soldiers as racist nationalists, 35, 35n58, 58–59, 76. See also Jarrell, Randall, and the scapegoat in “Eighth Air Force” Jarrell, Randall, and the scapegoat in “Eighth Air Force,” 39–46, 129, 225; guilt of soldiers transformed into psychological suffering, 42, 43–44, 58; narrator as Pontius Pilate and soldiers as Christ figures, 39–42; portrayal of bombers as passive and as children, 35–36, 39, 43n85, 58, 59; and problem of postwar democratic-liberal conceptualization of WWII, 48; separation of soldiers from community and role of soldiers as scapegoats, 43–44; soldiers’ replacement of enemy as victims of collective violence, 42–43 Jenkins, Lee, Wallace Stevens, 95 Jim Crow regime: conflict with call for wartime unity, 66, 174; and Nazi race policies, 183; in US military, 71, 84 Johnson, Gerald W., American Heroes and HeroWorship, 80 Jones, Brian, George Lucas, 190–91 Jones, Chuck, 122, 125n10 Jones, James: depiction of industrial warfare on Guadalcanal, 109, 113–14, 116–17, 126, 160, 174; From Here to Eternity, 10, 103, 120n1; Some Came Running, 103–5, 106. See also Jones, James, The Thin Red Line Jones, James, The Thin Red Line, 103, 105–17, 120n1, 129, 178, 181; epic structure, 105, 106, 113; focus on life of a collective, 105–6, 113–14; free indirect discourse, 106, 111; narrative voice, 105–6; representations of leadership, 107–13; and role of “hero,” 106 Jones, Joseph M., The Fifteen Weeks, 145 Joravsky, David, 223 Jünger, Ernst, 25 just war theory, 222n75 Kahn, Paul: “Managing Violence,” 225n85; Political Theology, 22n12, 54n112; Sacred Violence, 38n70, 39, 44 Kaiser, Henry, 160, 165, 166, 169–70 Kaiser Shipbuilding Company, 165–66

I n de x kamikaze attacks, during invasion of Leyte, 152– 53 Kamikaze Special Attack Force, 153 Kansas City Review, 131 Kant, Immanuel, 49, 141 Kantor, McKinley, Glory for Me, 15–16, 16n2 Katznelson, Ira, Fear Itself, 8n22, 71 Kazin, Alfred, “Decline of War,” 187 Keane, Thomas, “WW II Memorial Fails Both Past, Present,” 239 Keefer, Louis E., Scholars in Foxholes, 131n17 Keeley, Lawrence H., War before Civilization, 208n28 Kelly’s Heroes (film), 235 Kennedy, Edmond, 31 Kennedy, John F., 223 Kermode, Frank, Wallace Stevens, 96, 99n109 Kerr, Deborah, 103 Kerr, E. Bartlett, Flames over Tokyo, 26n25 Killens, John Oliver: And Then We Heard the Thunder, 69–71, 71n26, 75; “Rappin’ with Myself,” 72n29 Kirstein, Lincoln, 11 Kissinger, Henry, 131n17 Kittler, Friedrich, “Media and Drugs in Pynchon’s Second World War,” 182–83 Kobe, Japan, B-29 incendiary attack on, 47 Koch, Karen, 131n16 Koch, Kenneth, in WWII: and advance of 381st Infantry Regiment on Catmon Hill, 136–37; in Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), 131, 133; assignment to headquarters office, Saipan, 143–44; and BAR light machine gun, 140, 140n44; comic endurance of war, 138; contracting of infectious hepatitis, 143; loss of glasses, 136–37, 137n34, 139, 143n53; in MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines, 129, 133–41; and “mopping up” operations, 138–39; in 381st Infantry Regiment, Ninety-Sixth Infantry Division, 133; and typhoons in Philippines, 136, 139, 140; in uniform, 130. See also Koch, Kenneth, postwar writings Koch, Kenneth, postwar writings, 10; application for Harvard University, in “Autobiographical Fragment,” 144, 144n55; autobiographical poems, 150; Bertha, 154; “The Circus,” 154; Collected Poems, 151; “A Day for History,” 143n53; “Elegy for Jim Gellar,” 144; George Washington Crossing the Delaware, 154; integration of violence of war into comic worldview, 149–50, 154–55, 158, 174; invoking of Whitman, 148, 151, 153; “The Islands,” 155–58, 160, 163; Ko, 154; “Ladies for Dinner, Saipan,” 150; and learning French, 153, 153n76; mock epic and comedy, 129; New Addresses, 150; Pericles, 154; “Physics Lecture,” 150–51; “Poem for My Twentieth

I n de x 271 Birthday,” 150; Poems, 151; and pure language, 149; and questions of racial politics, heroism, and national identity, 154; The Red Robins, 154n78; “Sun Out,” as persona poem about Kamikaze pilot, 151–54, 158; Thank You and Other Poems, 155; “To Carelessness,” 137n34, 138; “To World War Two,” 10, 129–30, 140, 140n44, 157; “The Trip from California,” 150; unpublished works in papers at Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 130–31; “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” 148–49, 150 Koch, Lillian Loth, 131 Koch, Stuart, 131, 131n16 Konstantinou, Lee, 132 Korean War, 146, 148 Korzybski, Alfred, general semantics theory, 132, 149 Koselleck, Reinhart, “War Memorials,” 171, 172, 235 Kubrick, Stanley, 115 Kurosawa, Akira, 191, 193, 193n83 Kurtz, Gary, 191 Lacan, Jacques, and “the Real,” 216n60, 217–18 Lancaster, Burt, 103 Lang, Fritz, 166 Laub, Dori, “Truth and Testimony,” 2 leadership: hero and, 80–86; representations of in The Thin Red Line, 107–13; structural function of, 115–16 Lee, Ulysses, The Employment of Negro Troops, 65n9 Lehman, David, The Last Avant-Garde, 136–37, 137n34, 148n65 LeMay, Curtis, 47–48n95 LeRoy, Mervyn, 22 Les Entretiens de Pontigny, Mount Holyoke College, 91 Let There Be Light (film), 213n43 Levi, Primo, 35 Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind, 87–88 Leys, Ruth, Trauma, 7, 211, 216 Leyte, Philippines, MacArthur’s invasion of, 134– 40 Lifeboat (film), 120 Life magazine, 81 Lifton, Robert Jay, 213, 216 Limon, John: Stand-up Comedy in Theory, 128; Writing after War, 203n19 Linenthal, Edward: “Anatomy of a Controversy,” 233–34; Sacred Ground, 171 Lippincott, Charles, 191 literary modernism: influence of atomic bombings on, 21n11; and negative myths of WWI, 187; and reactionary and totalitarian thought, 147, 187

Longenbach, James, Wallace Stevens, 91–92, 96, 99n109 Looney Tunes, 122 Lotchin, Roger, Fortress California, 165 Lowell, Robert, 9, 10; “The Bomber,” 29–30; review of Jarrell’s The Seven-League Crutches, 35–36 Lucas, George, 8, 188–94, 192n79, 236n28 Lucas, Marcia, 192n78 Luce, Henry: “American Century,” 167; Life magazine, 81 Lukacs, John, Legacy of the Second World War, 187n63 Lynn, John, Battle, 198 Lynn, Winfred, 65 MacArthur, Douglas, 134, 140, 154n78 MacDonald, Dwight, and Nancy MacDonald, The War’s Greatest Scandal!, 66 MacDonald, Dwight, “The Novel Case of Winfred Lynn,” 65, 65n7 MacLaine, Shirley, 104 MacShane, Frank, Into Eternity, 103n113 Mailer, Norman: hornet incident in Luzon, 138, 138n36; The Naked and the Dead, 9, 10, 137–38, 186; “White Negro,” 8 Main, Marjorie, 156–57n82 Malick, Terrence, 105n116 Mann, Thomas, 166 March, Frederic, 15 Maritain, Jacques, 91 Marshall, George, 239; and African American wartime struggles, 67; unveiling of the European Recovery Plan (Marshall Plan), 145, 147 Marx, Karl, 93, 94 Marxism, 228 Mather Field, 163n7 Mattheissen, F. O., 146 Maudlin, Bill, 193 McCarthyism, 148 Medal of Honor (video game), 8 media, and trauma, 209 Memphis Belle (film), 22 Merrie Melodies, 122, 123 metaphoric relation, systems of, 90 Michener, James A., Tales of the South Pacific, 10, 156 Milestone, Lewis, 17 military-industrial complex: airplane as agent of, 64; Eisenhower’s warning against in “Farewell Address,” 13, 178, 226; and Enola Gay and disputes about the righteousness of, 232; and Gravity’s Rainbow, 181, 182n46, 188; of postwar California’s Central Valley, 174; spread from total mobilization of WWII, 13, 146–48, 226; and Star Wars, 189, 193–94

272 Milius, John, 190–91 Miller, Christanne, Marianne Moore, 32n48 Miller, Dorie, 84, 240; awarded the Navy Cross for valor during attack on Pearl Harbor, 71–72; and black press, 65n8 Miller, Walter, Jr., A Canticle for Liebowitz, 203 Minelli, Vincente, 104 Mitchell, Billy, Winged Defense, 21n10 Mitchell, Burroughs, 105 Montague, Gilbert, 97 Moore, Jason, Capitalism in the Web of Life, 12n32 Moore, Marianne, 10, 173; “In Distrust of Merits,” 9, 28–29 Morris, Ivan, The Nobility of Failure, 153 Mountbatten, Louis, 223 My Lai, 219 myth: defined, 244n42; and history, 4, 244. See also trauma hero, myth of Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita, 182n46 Nadel, Alan: Containment Culture, 149; “Empire Strikes Out,” 189n67 Nagasaki, bombing of, 21, 21n11, 47, 176, 194, 222– 23n77, 240 napalm, 20, 21, 49, 51, 51n104 Napoleonic Wars, and change in Western concept of war, 198 Nash, Gerald, World War II and the West, 166 National Air and Space Museum (NASM), planned exhibit of Enola Gay for fiftieth anniversary of end of WWII, 232–35, 238 nationalism: vs. capitalism, 12–13, 116–17; as identification with nation of people, 94n94; and soldier as sacrifice, 12, 94, 96 National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, 159– 60, 172 Nazi Einsatzgruppen, 45–46, 48 Nemerov, Howard, “The War in the Air,” 31, 32 New Criticism, 40, 52–53 Ngai, Sianne, Our Aesthetic Categories, 121, 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Beyond Good and Evil, 82; and the heroic, 81–82 9/11 attacks, 22, 22n12, 238, 241 Ninety-Sixth Infantry Division, campaign in Philippines, 133–41, 154n78 Normandy invasion, 235n27 Norris, Margot, Writing War in the Twentieth Century, 2, 10 Novick, Peter, Holocaust in American Life, 235n27 Noys, Benjamin, Malign Velocities, 181n44 nuclear war, 183, 187–88, 228 Nuremberg Principle, fourth, 36n62 Nuremberg trials, defendants’ claim of following orders, 36

I n de x Oates, Joyce Carol, on Dickey, 50n101, 53n111 Objectivism, 141 O’Brien, Tim: “How to Tell a True War Story,” 204–5, 217; The Things They Carried, 204 Office of War Information (OWI), 123 O’Hara, Frank, 10, 147, 148; at Harvard in 1946, 146; “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births),” 155 Okinawa, and 381st Infantry Regiment, NinetySixth Infantry Division, 141–43 Oklahoma! (musical), 176 Olson, Charles, 147 Oostdijk, Diederik, 10; Among the Nightmare Fighters, 27n32 Operation Desert Storm (Second Gulf War, 1990– 91), 230, 232 Operation Gomorrah, 47–48n95 Operation Paperclip, 178 Operation Rolling Thunder, 51–52 Oppen, George, 10 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 175 Owen, Wilfred, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” 195–99, 202, 206, 212, 217; first page of, manuscript draft, 196; Latin line from Horace’s Carmina III.2, 197; understanding of war as source of transcendental knowledge, 197–99 Owens, William, Eye-Deep in Hell, 152–53, 157n83 Padgett, Ron, 137n34, 139 Pape, Robert, Bombing to Win, 47n93 “participation in the heroic,” 98, 109, 203 Patch, Helen, 91 Patchen, Kenneth, 131 Paths of Glory (film), 115 Paulhan, Jean, 91 Pearl Harbor attack, 119, 120, 162, 173–74, 175 Phan Thị Kim Phúc, 20 Philippines: civilian population after American invasion, 157n83; US invasion of Leyte, 133–41, 134 Pierce, Tedd, 120 Piette, Adam, “War Zones,” 1 Pittsburgh Courier, Double V campaign, 65 Plath, Sylvia, 87 Plato: Cratylus, 81; The Republic, 85 Pontigny-en-Amérique, 91n82 Pope, Jessie, “The Call,” 195, 197, 202 Popeye cartoons, 122–23 posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): American view of as human response to war, 208–9; clinical criteria for diagnosing, 209; controversy over descriptions of, 211; DSM-III diagnostics shaped by political and social forces, 213–14; growth in worldwide cases of since 1980, 214; lack of neurobiological data on, 211;

I n de x 273 logic of, 215–17; and memory, 215–16; and mitigation of American atrocities in Vietnam, 214; and role of traumatic witness, 214; and scapegoating, 38; and shift to view of war as metaphysical event, 214 post–World War II era: economic imperialism and consumerism, 147–48; and emergence of global American imperialism, 8, 10–11, 14, 145–47, 160, 167–68, 172, 174, 183, 244; and national security state, 146, 148, 149, 178, 180; uncertainty and violence, 146. See also military-­ industrial complex Pound, Ezra, 10, 147, 187; Pisan Cantos, 8 Powers, Kevin, The Yellow Birds, 205–7 Prior, Robin, and Trevor Wilson, “Paul Fussell at War,” 185–86 Private SNAFU films, 122 Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity’s Rainbow, 9, 178, 180–83, 194; cultural reception of, 231; Fussell on, 186, 187; nihilism, 182, 182n46, 204, 231, 235; reading of as pertaining to Cold War, 9n25, 231; war as metaphysical event, 182–83 Pynchon, Thomas, V., 186 race, and WWII: black American hero, riddle of, 63–64, 66–72, 84, 129, 203; civil rights activism, 64–65; hate strikes against hiring of black workers, 65–66; mistreatment of black soldiers in military and in Army towns in South, 66; race riots of 1943, 65, 240; racial hatred of East Asians, 122, 122n6; racialized violence, 65–66; threat of black demands for equality perceived as greater than foreign threat, 66–67 racism, and Star Wars, 189, 190 Rampersad, Arnold, Ralph Ellison, 67n17 Randolph, A. Philip, 65 Red River (film), 167 Reilly, Robin L., Kamikaze Attacks of World War II, 152n73 Riefenstahl, Leni, 189 Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, 22, 29 Rimbaud, Arthur, 131 Rinzler, J. W., The Making of “Star Wars,” 191–93, 191n77 Rivers, W. H., 212 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 71, 178, 242 Rose, Kenneth, Myth and the Greatest Generation, 10 Rosenberg, Isaac, 28 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 146, 148 Roussel, Raymond, 149 Rumsfeld, Donald, 243 Russell, Harold, 15, 16n3

sacrifice: and collective good during wartime, 90; hero as (see heroic sacrifice, as physical embodiment of imagined community of nation); and nationalism, 12, 94, 96; post–Cold War celebration of, 233–35; washing of hands over, 41 Saffron, Inga, 238–39 Saint-Amour, Paul K.: “Perpetual Interwar,” 182n47; Tense Future, 21n10; “War, Optics, ­Fiction,” 21n11 Sancton, Thomas, “The Negro Press,” 65n8 Sandburg, Carl, 22 Sands of Iwo Jima, The (film), 17, 167 Sarotte, Mary Elise, “How an Accident Caused the Berlin Wall to Come Down,” 227 Sarton, May, “Navigator,” 31–32 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 91n82 Sassoon, Siegfried, 28, 212 Saving Private Ryan (film), 17, 236–38 scapegoat: bomber as image of state power and scapegoat, 24, 25–28, 30–32, 45, 46, 48, 224; and PTSD, 38; trauma hero as scapegoat for postwar liberalism, 45, 129, 158, 225–26. See also Jarrell, Randall, and the scapegoat in “Eighth Air Force” Schabowski, Günter, 227 Schiller, Friedrich, Wallenstein, 115 Schmitt, Carl, 88; The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, 21n11; Political Theology, 22n12, 84 Schreiber, Bettye, 143 Schuyler, James, 148 Schwartz, Delmore, 147 Schweik, Susan, A Gulf So Deeply Cut, 32n48, 39n73 Scott, Joan, “Evidence of Experience,” 219n70, 224 “Scrap the Japs” (cartoon), 122 Seasongood, Murray, 150n69 Second Gulf War (1990–91), 230, 232 Seiler, Claire, “Francis O’Hara, War Poet,” 155n81 Selective Service Act of 1940, 65, 65n7 self-victimization, xenophobic, 38n68 Shakur, Tupac, 87 Shapiro, Harvey, 22 Shapiro, Karl, “The Death of Randall Jarrell,” 32, 41n81 Shatan, Chaim, 213 Shaw, Irwin, The Young Lions, 175–78, 181, 240 shell shock, 114, 146, 195, 212 Sherrod, Robert, 16, 16n2 Sherry, Michael, In the Shadow of War, 229 Sherry, Michael, The Rise of American Air Power, 21n11, 26n29, 178, 223 Shoptaw, John, On the Outside Looking Out, 148

274 Shroder, Tom, The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived, 16n2 Silko, Leslie Marmon, Ceremony, 9 Simpson, Louis, 10; “Carentan O Carentan,” 9; “Dogface Poetics,” 220 Sitkoff, Harvard, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,” 65–66 Skates, John Ray, The Invasion of Japan, 234 Sledge, E. B., With the Old Breed, 142–43 Sloterdijk, Peter, Terror from the Air, 21n11, 176, 176n30 Slotkin, Richard: Gunfighter Nation, 7, 86; on heroes of myth, 86; and myth of redemptive violence, 36–37n63, 36–38, 48; Regeneration through Violence, 48, 244n42 Smith, Frederick W., 241 Smith, Jack, 213 Smith, William Gardner, 71; Last of the Conquerors, 10 Smoler, Frederic, “Fighting the Bad Fight,” 230–31 “Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat” (song), 119– 20 Somme, Battle of the, 184, 185, 220 Sontag, Susan, 125n10 South Pacific (musical), 156, 160 “South Seas” films, 120 Soviet-bloc communism, collapse of, 227–28 Spector, Ronald H., Eagle against the Sun, 135 Spielberg, Steven, 236n28; and Saving Private Ryan, 236–38 Starr, Kevin, California, 165 Star Wars (film), 8, 188–94, 221 Stauffer, Samuel, et al., The American Soldier, 25, 58n119, 144n55 Stein, Gertrude, 81, 141; Brewsie and Willie, 203; Wars I Have Seen, 10 Steinbeck, John, Bombs Away, 26n29 Stevens, Wallace, 10, 11, 129, 147, 174; Adagias, 93; conflict between poetry of the imagination and poetry of fact, 90, 92–95, 127, 133, 146, 181; division between subjects and objects, 96; “Esthéthique du Mal,” 102; “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” 91, 97, 100; and “heroic fact,” 92–94, 108; “Loneliness in Jersey City,” 93; “The Man on the Dump,” 92; “The Motive for Metaphor,” 95; “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” 90, 91, 96, 100; Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, 92, 95–97, 100, 101; “Of Modern Poetry,” 91–92, 98; and participation “in the heroic,” 98, 109; Parts of a World, 92–93, 95; and the “predicate of substance,” 100, 102–3; “Repetitions of a Young Captain,” 98–102, 107; and “supreme fiction,” 92, 95, 97–98, 147; Transport to Summer, 97; turn from resistance to pressure of war to agreement/ identification with reality, 91–92, 101–2; and

I n de x war hero’s sacrifice as physical embodiment of imagined community of nation, 93, 98, 100– 103, 116; and “will to believe,” 96–97 Stimson, Henry L., inflated numbers of deaths estimated from invasion of Japan, 223, 234 St. Jacques, Raymond, 190 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 72–73 Strachey, Lytton, 91n82 Stracke, Win, 59n120 strategic bombing: effect on twentieth-century culture, 21n11; of German and Japanese civil‑ ians by Allied forces, 46–47, 194; and modern‑ ism, 21n10; Operation Rolling Thunder, 51–52; public discussion of American policy in Vietnam, 51 Suarez, Eric, James Dickey and the Politics of the Canon, 52 suicide bombs, passenger jets as, 22 Summerfield, Derek, “Invention of Post-­ Traumatic Stress Disorder,” 213–14 Sun Shipbuilding Yard, Chester, PA, race riot, 66 Swift, Daniel: Bomber Country, 22, 27–28; on Fussell, 185n54 Tager, Michael, “Political Vision of Joan Didion’s Democracy,” 179, 180 Tal, Kalí, Worlds of Hurt, 2–3 Tate, Allen, 90n79 Taxi Driver (film), 192n78 Terkel, Studs, “The Good War,” 9, 56, 59n120, 173n26, 187n63, 230n9 Thin Red Line, The (film), 105n116 Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (film), 22 Thompson, James G., “Should I Sacrifice to Live ‘Half-American’?,” 65 381st Infantry Regiment, Ninety-Sixth Infantry Division: assault on Leyte, Philippines, 134–41; on Okinawa, 141–43 Tibbets, Paul, Jr., 232 Todman, Dan, Great War, 185, 187 “Tokio Jokio” (cartoon), 122 Tokyo, American firebombing of, 194 Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace, 115, 116, 200–202 tomb of the Unknown Soldier, 88–89 Tora! Tora! Tora! (film), 192, 193, 193n83 Torgovnick, Maria, The War Complex, 183n50 total mobilization: of American culture during WWII, 7–8, 12, 174; and American nuclear national security state, 146, 148, 149, 178, 180; and effect on postwar American culture, 14, 117, 158; and military-industrial complex, 13, 146–48, 226; role of hero in time of, 14, 89 (see also heroic sacrifice, as physical embodiment of imagined community of nation; trauma hero, myth of); and war as attack on environment of entire population, 176

I n de x 275 trauma: and conflict between need to witness and repress events, 1, 219; definitions of and multiple meanings, 209–11; and encounter with the Real, 217–18; and feminism, 213; focus on during and immediately after WWII, 212–13; functional incoherence of concept since 1970s, 214, 216–17; and the Holocaust, 213; logic of, 215–17; and moral construction of truth and evil, 216; as predominant narrative of war in contemporary American culture, 3, 3n15, 14, 208–9; pseudoscientific language of, 38–39; as psychological phenomenon, 210, 211–13, 211n40; as reproduction of social truth, 219; and shift of violence from matter of ethics to metaphysics, 221; as things we refuse to understand, 218–20; and Vietnam War characterization of survivors and witnesses as victims, 3, 3n15, 14, 208–9, 214; viewed as true story of war, 1, 3; viewed as unspeakable, 217–21, 237; “virtual,” 210, 210n34; and WWI debates over, 212. See also posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); trauma hero, myth of trauma hero, myth of: combat experience as source of transcendental knowledge, 197–203, 221, 222, 225; as cultural frame for understanding experience of war, 3–4; and cultural sanc‑ tification of war, 225; and guilt transformed into psychological suffering, 4, 7, 43–44, 183; as imaginary solution to conflict between nationalism and capitalism, 13; political function of, 7; as scapegoat for postwar liberalism, 45, 129, 158, 225–26 (see also Jarrell, Randall, and the scapegoat in “Eighth Air Force”); and symbolic management of contradictory roles of soldier and citizen, 11–12, 45; and truth claim beyond language, 4; as victim, 3, 36, 46, 117, 209, 225. See also posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Military and Veteran Populations, Institute of Medicine, 211 trench lyric, 25, 27, 28 trench warfare, dominant imagery of WWI, 22, 185, 186 Tribute to a Generation, dedication of World War II Memorial on National Mall, 238–44 Triumph of the Will (film), 189 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 238 Truman, Harry: and dropping of atomic bomb, 222–23n77; Executive Order 9981, 72; inflated numbers of deaths estimated from invasion of Japan, 223, 234; inscription from at World War II memorial, 239–40; 1947 address to Congress announcing the Truman Doctrine, 145 “truth-in-memory” debates, 212n42 Turner, Brian, Here, Bullet, cover of, 4–7, 11, 243

Tuskegee Airmen, 240 Twelve O’Clock High (film), 22, 115 UNICEF, and war trauma of children, 214–15 United States Strategic Bomb Survey of 1946, 222– 23n77 universal human rights subject, 183, 194 University of California system, 166 University of Kansas City Review, 150 Updike, John, Rabbit at Rest, 232 US military: Jim Crow regime, 71, 84; predominantly white officer corps, 72, 72n29; Truman’s order to abolish segregation in, 72 USS Arizona, 171–72, 173 Vagts, Alfred, and “civilian militarism,” 178 Vaihinger, Hans, The Philosophy of “As If,” 96 van der Kolk, Bessel, 215, 216 Vaughan, David, Words to Measure a War, 27n32 Vendler, Helen, review of Jarrell’s Complete Poems, 58 victim: soldiers’ replacement of enemy as, 42–43; as survivor and witness, 213; trauma hero as, 3, 36, 46, 117, 209, 225 Victory through Air Power (cartoon), 122 Vietnam Veterans Against the War, 213 Vietnam War: and Star Wars, 189, 190, 192, 192n78; and survivor and witness as victims, 213; and WWII, 9n25, 159, 183, 192–94 Virilio, Paul, War and Cinema, 25 Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse-Five, 9, 46n92, 58, 58n116, 186, 187, 204 Wahl, Jean, 91 Walker, J. Samuel, “History, Collective Memory, and the Decision to Use the Bomb,” 222–23n77 Walk in the Sun, A (film), 17 Waller, William, The Veteran Comes Back, 44–45, 98, 109, 113–14 Walsh, Jeffrey, American War Literature, 43n85 Walzer, Michael, 224 war: capitalism and, 167–73, 225; contemporary view of as exceptional state, 198; effect of violence on language, 1–2; effect on history, 1; focus of cultural narratives on trauma and recovery, 2, 3, 4–7, 221; reality of as too repellent to express, 6, 114; redefined as trauma, 2, 3, 3n15, 4–7, 13, 14, 208–9; and sacrifice, 90; as source of transcendental knowledge, 197–99. See also total mobilization; war-as-revelation; and specific wars war-as-revelation: and authority of experimental truth, 201–3, 222–25; and epistemological relationship between subjectivity and totality, 200; and failure of language to communicate experience, 204–5; and transcendental com-

276 war-as-revelation (continued) munion with pure language, 204–7; and transcendental knowledge gained through direct physical sensation, 195–207 Ward, Geoff, 23 War Department films, 122 war memorials, political function of, 171, 172. See also National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific; World War II Memorial Warner Brothers, 123 Warshow, Robert, “The Anatomy of Falsehood,” 16–17n4 “Way Home, The,” Time, August 1944, 16n2 Wayne, John: cowboy-hero tradition of, 6; in Red River, 167, 189; in The Sands of Iwo Jima, 17, 167; in The Searchers, 189 Wecter, Dixon: “Children of the Machine Age,” 26n29, 80–83; The Hero in America, 80, 88 Weisenburger, Steven, 181, 181n42, 182 Western film genre, Star Wars and, 189, 189n67, 190 White, Walter, 65 Whitman, Walt, 28, 53n111, 98, 102, 151, 153; “Song of Myself,” 148 Wilbur, Richard, 147 Williams, John, 193, 236 Williams, William Carlos, 131, 148; Spring and All, 147 Wills, Gary, 145–46 Wilson, Trevor, 185–86 Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 207 Wolfenstein 3D (video game), 8 Woodland, Malcolm, Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode, 95, 98, 99n109 World War I: and debates over trauma, 212; trench warfare as dominant imagery of, 22. See also Fussell, Paul: The Great War and Modern Memory World War II: ambiguity regarding beginning and end of, 178–79; bomber as dominant imagery of, 22; and Cold War, 7, 8, 9n25, 146, 228–29, 232, 235; as conflict between nationalism and capitalism, 12; cultural revision of meaning in 1960s and 1970s, 13–14, 183, 187, 194 (see also trauma; trauma hero, myth of); disagreement about number of American deaths expected

I n de x from an invasion of Japan, 223, 233–34; economic benefits for most Americans, 172–73; and emergence of global American imperialism, 8, 10–11, 14, 145–47, 160, 167–68, 172, 174, 183, 244; internal contradictions faced by Americans, 128–29; invoking of clarity of in arguments about post–Cold War events, 232; and Pacific conflict, 235n27; and post–Cold War conflict over ethics of American actions and celebration of American sacrifice, 233–35; reinterpretation as metaphysical event, 183–84, 188, 214. See also post–World War II era; total mobilization World War II combat film, 114 World War II literature, 8–12; bomber as central figure of, 27; characterization of soldiers as children, 58; and debates about role of poetry, 10, 91; dominated by narratives of trauma, 9, 11; and focus on American trauma, 203–4; and problem of relation to politics, 146–48; and sympathy for men responsible for death of civilians, 48. See also black Americans, and WWII; bomber lyric; hero; heroic sacrifice, as physical embodiment of imagined community of nation; trauma; trauma hero, myth of; and specific authors and works World War II Memorial: dedication by National Park Service, 238–44; design and placement on National Mall, 238–40 Wouk, Herman, The Caine Mutiny, 76–80, 83, 84 Wright, Richard: “How Bigger Was Born,” 64; Native Son, 63–64, 66–67, 72–74, 75 Wyler, William, 15, 19, 22 Yamamoto, Admiral, 193 Yasukuni, 152n74 Young, Allan, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder of the Virtual Kind,” 7, 214, 215; and logic of PTSD, 215–17 “You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap” (cartoon), 122 “zany” character, mutability of, 121–22, 124–25 Zero Dark Thirty (film), 37, 238 Zinn, Howard, “Dissent at the War Memorial,” 242–43 Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 221 Zukofsky, Louis, 10