Josephs of the Country: James Jones’s Thirty-Year Men and the Image of the WWII Soldier in American Culture by Laura Dunbar A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2016 © Copyright by Laura Dunbar 2016 Josephs of the Country: James Jones’s Thirty-Year Men and the Image of the WWII Soldier in American Culture Laura Dunbar Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2016 Abstract This dissertation analyzes the war trilogy written by James Jones and argues that Jones’s GI characters are foundational sources of the American World War II soldier’s popular culture image in their own time and in the decades that followed. Not only do From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle demonstrate the influences of factors both historic and contemporary across the thirty years of their publication span, but they also serve as a generative medium in which the American soldier’s representative capacity, fluidity, and adaptability are highlighted. While a central goal of this thesis is to encourage new understandings of Jones’s characters as interstitial figures capable of expressing dissent within the channels of regulated society, the study also offers a critique of the ways that these same soldiers perpetuate certain values associated with a traditional American character. The dissertation begins by showing how Jones’s secondary soldiers rework the figure of the colonial yeoman in contemporary contexts, proceeds by explaining the characters’ reflection of Weberian influences in the organization of post-war American life, and finishes by examining their response to ii America in Vietnam. At stake in the study is a deeper understanding of the soldier’s image in American life and the ways that this malleable image both shapes and reflects the cultural imagination. By seeking to restore balance to the discourse currently surrounding the soldier, the study engages current scholarship in the fields of Jones scholarship, studies of the war novel, and veteran studies. iii Table of Contents Introduction: Josephs of the Country: James Jones’s WWII Soldiers …………………………………………………………………………………………….5 Chapter 1: ‘Good Soljers’ and Good Men: G-Company Waits for War in From Here to Eternity…………………………………………………………………………………………… 20 Chapter 2: Jerkoffs and Brothers, Getting By: C-for-Charlie Goes to War in The Thin Red Line ……………………………………………………………………………………. 59 Chapter 3: Into Thin Air and Out: Jones’s Good Soljers Come Home in Whistle …….111 Conclusion: Josephs of the Country: Iraq and Beyond …………………………………………………………………………………………152 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………...164 iv 1 Introduction Josephs of the Country: James Jones’s WWII Soldiers The American World War II war novel marks a turning point in the genre's history. From a form whose relation to the American character in the twentieth century is characterized either by its modernist alienation (E.E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms) or by its political radicalism (Laurence Stalling’s Plumes, John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers), war novels written during and after WWII mark a large-scale change.1 Alongside accounts of civilian experience, narratives of atrocity, and historical analyses, contemporary soldiering fiction fed the national appetite for stories that would help civilians and veterans alike to understand what “it” had really been like. Whether tied to enlistment, training, active duty, or discharge, war fiction functioned as a medium through which the reality of the war could be integrated— and re-integrated, time after time—not just into an exclusively national representative frame, but also into the broader context of Western cultural iconography. Besides serving as a medium for ontological negotiations with the war, the tropes generated by WWII war fiction are resources of enormous symbolic value and mythic energy for understanding other currents in contemporary American culture. A central idea is that the ordinary American soldier is the modern day equivalent of the colonial yeoman, a “Joseph of the country” upon whose honest and unassuming toil rests the progress of the generations, an industrious and temperate bedrock for a law-abiding and 1 As Robert Reed Bonnadonna notes, "If poetry is the dominant genre of World War I (and the oral account that of the Vietnam War), the big novel is surely the master genre of World War II” (14). In American war literature of WWI, the disillusionment of works like Hemingway’s has less to do with the problems of an historic American self than it does with the crisis of modernity. Other works, like Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, consider the soldier from the perspective of melting-pot cultural ferment. By the time of the Second World War, authors like Mailer, Vidal, Hawkes, and Wouk were writing war novels whose themes range from disempowerment to surreal fantasy, while war fiction by black and other minority writers became a flashpoint for discussions of patriotic performance in an inherently racist culture. War or soldiering fiction was written, published, sold, read, and adapted for film on an unprecedented scale in the Consensus period. Into this milieu the novels that make up Jones’s war trilogy appeared in 1952, 1962, and posthumously in 1978. 2 economically stable nation, and a bellwether for gauging the synchronicity between a country’s public mind and its military program. Arising from mixed perceptions of the latter, the GI often appears in WWII fiction as a figure of resistance to the specter of a malignant and all-pervasive bureaucracy that lay beneath the benign surface of Consensus-era optimism. From 1938 to1962, popular belief in the moral justification and eventual triumph of liberal values globally was undermined by fears about the threat the military-industrial complex posed to American individuality. In popular war novels, the crisis is characterized by soldiers who persistently perceive the psychic threat posed by the military's institutional command structure as greater than the physical danger presented by the foreign enemy, because less honest in its intentions. An essential element of the war story's narrative is perfectly adapted for the framing of this rupture of trust between the individual and the state, and distinguishes the genre from all other forms of WWII cultural representations. Unlike works in which the main narrative propulsion is provided by civilian characters, who, when caught up in war, ask "Why is this happening (or why did this happen) to me?" the primary question of active- duty soldiering fiction, "Why am I doing this?" is always already preceded by the fact of self-abnegation to an organization whose service to the principles of freedom can frequently seem at odds with the practices of its rigid hierarchical structure. In this way, the figure of the soldier caught between self-sacrifice in service of duty to the liberal state or self-preservation in fulfillment of its creed, war fiction occupies specific narrative territory of unique thematic possibility. In his now-famous study of WWI and modern memory, Paul Fussell calls the soldier's conflict one of the "tragic satires" of war and its representations, and, indeed, after World War I it is impossible to think of soldiering fiction without thinking of its characters as figures determined by this central aporia (Great War 7). Some of the genre’s interlocuters, like Klaus Theweleit, Paolo Valesio, and George Mosse, consider the hypermasculine soldier as a figure that expresses a cultural desire for distinction and particularity combined with what John Fraser calls the "appeal of the martial and heroic" 3 (104).2 For the fictional soldier, psychic surrender is often worse than physical annihilation; their narrative condition means that soldier characters become voices for expressing the ways that obedience comes into fatal collision with the promises of progress and prosperity embodied by the military. My dissertation, “Josephs of the Country: James Jones’s Thirty-Year Men and the Image of the WWII Soldier in American Culture,” examines the war fiction trilogy written by the author whose works have played a central role in the development of the non- commissioned WWII soldier as a cultural touchstone in post-WWII American life. In my view, the soldier characters in From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle stand, Janus-like, at the crossroads of American liberal culture, hallmark figures in the effort to preserve individuality from the encroaching forces of bureaucratic statism. On one hand, they look back to the monolithic frontier roots of an historic American character; on the other, they are generative models for new forms of resistance needed in a bureaucratic and mechanistic postwar society. I support my belief in Jones's soldier characters as generative touchstones by showing how his characters embody the fullest range of the war’s physical and psychological experiences. In a culture which increasingly understands itself through the stories—good and bad, heroic or cowardly, humanitarian or imperialist, integrated or alienated—of its war experiences, Jones’s war fiction influences all of America’s later war understandings and plays a foundational role in establishing the soldier as a central cultural peacetime figure in postwar America. What Alan Robinson, in his theory of historical fiction, describes as the cognitive asymmetry between experience and inquiry is, in Jones’s war fiction, subject to a social and chronological span that is rarely available in war fiction. By ranging across pre-war Hawaii to post-war civilian life, Jones’s narratives imagine 2 Robert Reed Bonnadonna writes: "It is a central paradox of the hypermasculine figure, one grown sharper in the context of the gigantic, impersonal social organizations of the twentieth century, that the heroic fulfillment he desires must be sought through his membership in an organization, or within a social structure, from which he is at pains to distinguish himself even while he is complicit with it" (31).