Naito, Hiroaki (2014) Vietnam Fought and Imagined: the Images of the Mythic Frontier in American Vietnam War Literature
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Naito, Hiroaki (2014) Vietnam fought and imagined: the images of the mythic frontier in American Vietnam War literature. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5101/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten:Theses http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Vietnam Fought and Imagined: the Images of the Mythic Western Frontier in American Vietnam War Literature Hiroaki Naito Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirement for the Degree of PhD School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow December 2013 1 Abstract This thesis seeks to examine how a particularly American ideological formation called the frontier myth has been re-enacted, challenged, and redefined in the literary works written by several American authors. Existing researches about the pervasiveness of the frontier mythology in American culture written by scholars such as Richard Slotkin, Richard Drinnon, and others demonstrate that, as the myth of the frontier–––the popular discourse that romanticizes early white settlers’ violent confrontation with American Indians in the New World wilderness–––has been deeply inscribed in America’s collective consciousness, when they faced with the war in a remote Southeast Asian country, many Americans have adopted its conventional narrative patterns, images, and vocabulary to narrate their experiences therein. The word, Indian Country–––a military jargon that US military officers commonly used to designate hostile terrains outside the control of the South Vietnamese government–––would aptly corroborate their argument. Drawing upon Edward Said’s exegesis of a structure of power that privileged Europeans assumed when they gazed at and wrote about the place and people categorized as “Oriental,” I contend that the images of the frontier frequently appearing in US Vietnam War accounts are America’s “imaginative geography” of Vietnam. By closely looking at the Vietnamese landscapes that American authors describe, I intend to investigate the extent to which the authors’ view of Vietnam are informed, or limited, by the cultural imperatives of the myth. At the same time, I will also look for instances in which the authors attempt to challenge the very discourse that they have internalized. I will read several novels and stories of American Vietnam War literature in a loosely chronological manner––from early American Vietnam novels such as William Lederer’s and Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American (1958), through three notable Vietnam–vet writers’ works published between the late ’70s and ’90s that include Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990), to Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (2007), a recent novel produced after 9/11. Hereby, I aim to explain the larger cultural/political significances that underlie the images of the frontier appearing in American Vietnam War narratives, and their vicissitude through time. While the authors of early US Vietnam War narratives reproduced stereotypical representations of the land and people of Vietnam that largely reflected the colonial/racist ideologies embedded in the myth, the succeeding generations of authors, with varying degrees of success, have undermined what has conventionally been regarded as America’s master narrative, by, for instance, deliberately subverting the conventional narrative patterns of the frontier myth, or by incorporating into their narratives the Vietnamese points of view that have often been omitted in earlier US Vietnam War accounts. 2 Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................ 1 Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ 2 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. 4 Introduction: Vietnam as “Indian Country”: the Images of the Mythic West as America’s Imaginative Geography of Vietnam ................................................................ 5 Sartre’s Criticism of the “Picturesque” Representations of Asia and Edward Said’s Idea of Imaginative Geography .......................................................................... 5 The Indian War Metaphor and America’s Vietnam Experiences ............................ 11 Chapter One: Oriental Agricultural Frontier and Indian Battlefield: the Two Topoi of American Vietnam War Imaginative Geography in Eugene Burdick’s and William Lederer’s The Ugly American and Robin Moore’s The Green Berets ............ 27 Defining Vietnam in Terms of the Frontier ................................................................ 27 Vietnam as America’s New Frontier: Lederer–Burdick’s The Ugly American ....... 36 Vietnam as an Updated Indian Battlefield: Moore’s The Green Berets ................... 62 Chapter Two: Criticising the Metaphor of Vietnam as a Diseased land: Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green ......................................................................................... 88 Colonialists’ Illusion: The land and the People of Vietnam as Diseased .................. 88 The Images of Vietnam as Diseased in Meditations in Green .................................... 93 Wright’s Metaphorical Narrative Device .................................................................... 98 The Plant Imagery ....................................................................................................... 106 American Machine and the Vietnamese Natural World: The Opposite Images in Meditations in Green .................................................................................................... 113 The Dissolution of the American World of Order .................................................... 135 Chapter Three: Robert Olen Butler’s Desertion Narrative: The Alleys of Eden ...... 150 American Youth and the Romanticized Images of Combat .................................... 150 Robert Olen Butler’s Anti–hero: An Escape from the Vietnamese Battleground 159 Vietnam as a Garden of Eden versus Alien American Cities .................................. 171 Contemporary American Pastoral: the Feminized Land of Vietnam .................... 180 Pastoral Undone ........................................................................................................... 189 Chapter Four: Walking Away from Tarzan Country and Entering into the Thoreauvian Woods: Tim O’Brien’s Two Desertion Narratives: Going After Cacciato and “On the Rainy River” .............................................................................. 197 Runaways from Tarzan Country: Going After Cacciato .......................................... 197 Burgers and Baseball: Paul Berlin As an Anti–Feral Hero .................................... 215 The Frontier Revisited and Redefined : “On the Rainy River” .............................. 226 The Middle–Class Dilemma and the Reality of the Wounded Body ...................... 236 3 The Northern Frontier ................................................................................................ 241 Chapter Five: Vietnam Revisited: Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke ........................... 256 Writing About Vietnam in Post–9/11 America ........................................................ 256 Murdering the Myth of America’s Cultural Fathers ............................................... 273 Imaging the Pain of the Others from Inside: Toward New American Fictions about the Vietnam War and Beyond ......................................................................... 302 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 310 4 Acknowledgements It is a great pleasure to express my warmest gratitude to all the people who have assisted me in many ways in completing this thesis. Foremost, I would like to thank my primary supervisor, Dr. Christopher Gair, who has painstakingly guided me in my research throughout the past few years. Had it not been for his invaluable advice, patience, and encouragement, I would never have been able to reach this stage. I also wish to thank all my joint supervisors, Dr. Kate Mcloughlin, Dr. Styliani Bolaki, and Dr. Gavin Miller, for giving me their suggestive feedback and comments throughout the course of my writing. They have been greatly instrumental in developing the following chapters. I feel very indebted to the professors in the Department of English Literature at Chuo University, of which postgraduate course I attended before undertaking a PhD at University of Glasgow. All of them have encouraged me to study in Scotland, and generously given me their support, whenever needed. I would especially like to mention my previous supervisor, Professor Hidehiro Nakao. In looking back, I think my current research actually started, when I wrote a short essay about Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” in his course on contemporary North American short