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Masculinities, Masculine Subjects and Their Representation in the Twentieth Century American War Novel

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Masculinities, Masculine Subjects and Their Representation in the Twentieth Century American War Novel i ‘It’s duty boy.’ Masculinities, masculine subjects and their representation in the twentieth century American war novel. Fraser David Mann Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds York St John University Faculty of Arts June 2015 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Fraser David Mann to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2015 The University of Leeds and Fraser David Mann iii Acknowledgements I would like to express sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr Keith McDonald. His advice and guidance has been invaluable throughout this process. Keith has encouraged and challenged me in equal measure and never let me settle for anything less than a full engagement with complexity. I am also grateful to my colleagues and the students in the York St John Faculty of Arts. The discussions and conversations I have been involved in over the last three years have been a crucial part of this learning process. Finally, I would to thank Nic for her love, help and support. I don‟t know where I would be without her „London ways‟. iv Abstract This thesis examines and explores twentieth century literary representations of American masculinity at war. It aims to demonstrate the manner in which American novels responding to the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam conflict reflect symbolic, mythic and material anxieties regarding America‟s masculine identities. The thesis examines in particular the pervasive myth of the American Adam and its influence on behaviours, ideologies and narrative. Each text and each conflict operates under the influence of Adamic myth. I argue that prose fiction offers a space in which to scrutinise, engage and ultimately resist such mythic singularity. The incorporation of gender theory into such a study provides an original critical perspective with which to read crucial artistic responses to major events of the American twentieth century. Its central arguments engage with anxieties existing between ideological representations of hegemonic American masculinity and the graphic truth of experience for the corporeal and psychological subject. As well as thematic aspects of the literature, the thesis analyses shifts in narrative technique and the manner in which they reflect the growth and pluralising of wider narratives within the fields of modernism, American naturalism and postmodernism. The contemporary era is marked by commemoration and reflection regarding twentieth century conflict and by anxiety regarding the unstable post 9/11 world. In addition to this, there is resurgence in scholarly, political and popular interest in gender and its representation. These factors mean that this is a timely and vital study that reflects on literary history and current literary debates. The authors and their work in this thesis are considered in chronological order and cover a significant part of the American twentieth century. Chapter one examines John Dos Passos‟ Three Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway‟s A Farewell to Arms. Chapter two engages with two Pacific war novels; Norman Mailer‟s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones‟ The Thin Red Line. Chapter three explores post-war existential angst and early postmodernism in Joseph Heller‟s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut‟s Slaughterhouse-Five. The final chapter offers analysis of Larry v Heinemann‟s Close Quarters and Paco’s Story and Tim O‟Brien‟s Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………….iii Abstract………………………………………………………..iv Table of Contents……………………………………………. vi Introduction…………………………………………………... 1 Chapter One. ‘I had seen nothing sacred’: Dos Passos, Hemingway and the First World War………………………………………………23 Chapter Two. ‘Fitted into a fear ladder’: Mailer, Jones and the Pacific Second World War…………………………………………………….72 Chapter Three. ‘Nothing intelligent to say’: Heller, Vonnegut and the European Second World War…………………………......................124 Chapter Four. ‘This is true’: Heinemann, O’Brien and the Vietnam War…………………………………………………………… 177 Conclusion……………………………………………………235 Bibliography………………………………………………….242 1 Introduction In January 2015, I spent an afternoon in London visiting Tate Modern‟s Conflict. Time. Photography. Exhibition (2015). The Tate‟s premise was to engage with the „great challenge of looking back, considering the past without becoming stuck in the process‟ (np). The photographs in the exhibition did just that. It made looking back a temporally fluid process. War and conflict were locked into their historical place yet the very act of historicising them also offered a commentary on the cultures that produce such memories. The event and the memorial of the event overlapped and intermingled. The manner of telling was as revealing of national symbolism and myth as the subject matter itself. The same revelation was evident this year in the polarising responses to Clint Eastwood‟s adaptation of US navy seal Chris Kyles‟ memoir American Sniper (2015). The Guardian‟s Lindy West (2015) claimed that Kyles‟ text suggested he was a „racist who took pleasure in dehumanising and killing brown people‟ (np). Variety‟s Scott Foundas (2015) added that Kyles „saw the world in clearly demarcated terms of good and evil‟ (np). Eastwood‟s film, however, was more divisive. West explained that it was treated by the American right with „unconsidered, rah-rah reverence‟ (np) and by fans of Eastwood as „a morally ambiguous, emotionally complex film‟ (np). Alex Horton, also writing for The Guardian (2015) and himself an Iraq veteran, argued that the film was simply an attempt to „capitalize on our insatiable hunger for stories about unstoppable commandos‟ (np). David Kaiser, (2015) meanwhile, contended in Time Magazine that the controversy „echoes the aftermath of the Vietnam War‟ (np) as „observers on both the right and the left suggest that one‟s attitude towards our soldiers must mirror our attitude towards the war in which they fought, and vice versa‟(np). What is clear from this debate is that narratives themselves are rarely stable. As well as the demarcation between written memoir and cinematic adaptation, there is also the relative reputation of each voice to consider. Throw in the blinkered manner in which both ends of the political spectrum appropriate creative material and what you are left with is confusing and contradictory plurality. If any single conclusion can be drawn from this mass of conflicting opinions then it is surely that war narratives and their responses often reveal more about their speaker or the speaker‟s cultural context than about the war itself. 2 This is also the case for the texts examined in this thesis. American history is bound together with war. Its resultant narratives help to navigate the liminal spaces that exist between polarised cultural and philosophical positions. David Hogan (2011) writes of a „nation proud of its military prowess, aroused by martial imagery, and if not necessarily quick to turn to arms at least emotionally and even structurally prone to military approaches to intractable problems‟ (1023). For Hogan, the reading of American war is complex and „differing views on man‟s basic nature produce widely varying attitudes on warfare and its place in human affairs‟ (1024). Such variance is a thread that runs through this work. The intention here is to analyse shifting attitudes to and representations of American masculinities in American war novels. Texts by John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, James Jones, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Larry Heinemann and Tim O‟Brien offer their own way of looking back. The American masculine subject slips from a position of supposed autonomy and self-determining agency to one of powerlessness and terror. War is a chance to symbolically enact mythic American masculinity yet is the very experience that challenges and subverts it. The American masculine subject, therefore, is both a material presence and a symbolic agent. He engages in material behaviour to symbolically perform masculine myths and ideals yet those same material acts also have corporeal and psychological consequences. The tension between masculinities‟ material plurality and the singularity of myth drives the content of this discussion. This thesis, then, explores the relationship between symbolic, mythic and material versions of the American masculine subject. Each novel discussed consciously and unconsciously presents a pluralised and complex set of paradoxes that jar with the simplistic codes inherent in hegemonic systems of gendered taxonomy. The novels are simultaneously social critique, historiography, memoir and commentary on narrative itself. All of these diverse and contradictory issues drive analyses that revel in paradox and uncertainty. John Beynon (2002) defines masculinities as „always interpolated by cultural, historical and geographical location‟ (1). In a material sense, there is no one overriding masculinity but a series of competing and shifting masculinities. The plural form is a key in addressing this. The tension in each text, however, is that such plurality exists alongside singular and powerful mythic constructions of 3 masculinity. It is at this point that I need to offer some explanation for a term that I will use frequently in this thesis. I use American masculine subject in a somewhat paradoxical fashion. It is, of course, a singular form, but I intend it as a representation of a plural phenomenon. American masculinities are bewilderingly diverse and encompass all manner of social, cultural, sexual and ethnic identities. Such plurality poses a grammatical problem and so when I use the aforementioned term it is intended to reflect many competing masculinities. What unites each of these masculine identities is that they are subject to pressure to perform a mythic singularity.
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