From Frontline to Homefront the Global Homeland in Contemporary U.S
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Kristen Rau From Frontline to Homefront The Global Homeland in Contemporary U.S. War Fiction Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Geijerssalen, Humanistiskt centrum, Thunbergsvägen 3P, Uppsala, Saturday, 6 May 2017 at 10:15 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in English. Faculty examiner: Professor Caren Irr (Brandeis University, Department of English). Abstract Rau, K. 2017. From Frontline to Homefront: The Global Homeland in Contemporary U.S. War Fiction. 149 pp. Uppsala: Department of English, Uppsala University. ISBN 978-91-506-2623-0. Criticized for providing a simplified depiction of a post-9/11 United States, contemporary American “War on Terror” fiction has been largely neglected by critical discourse. In this dissertation, I argue that this fiction offers a vital engagement with how the War on Terror is waged, and how the fantasies and policies of the Global Homeland inform it. Most immediately, the texts I analyze undercut the sanitization of the war by including depictions of intense combat and the psychological fallout of derealized warfare. In these works, the public’s reluctance to acknowledge such concerns lays the foundation for a schism between American civilians and the military. I argue moreover that this fiction engages with the collapse of distinctions between foreign and domestic spheres through exploring both battlefields abroad and how a military logic is transposed onto American society. In the first chapter, I analyze the way in which narratives by Kevin Powers, David Abrams, Phil Klay, and Dan Fesperman complicate sanitized images of the war by foregrounding its visceral qualities and representing the traumatic impact of mediated warfare. The second chapter focuses on Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, specifically its representation of the military characters’ frustration with the public’s failure to acknowledge the traumatic impact of the War on Terror, and its critique of melodramatic patriotic gestures that glorify the war but do not require actual social, financial, or affective investment in the military. The third chapter zeroes in on portrayals of returned veterans in texts by George Saunders, Atticus Lish, and Joyce Carol Oates, who react with increasing antagonism to civilian disinterest in their plight, which gives rise to acts of violence against civilians and a shift in societal attitudes toward the military. I conclude by examining Lish’s depiction of how the policies of the Global Homeland result in the deployment of a military logic within the domestic U.S. Through its engagement with American warfare and the Global Homeland, contemporary American war fiction offers a nuanced exploration of the conduct and ramifications of the War on Terror. Keywords: Global Homeland, derealized warfare, direct warfare, military-civilian relations, sanitization of warfare, state fantasy, War on Terror, War on Terror fiction Kristen Rau, Department of English, Box 527, Uppsala University, SE-75120 Uppsala, Sweden. © Kristen Rau 2017 ISBN 978-91-506-2623-0 urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-317452 (http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-317452) Für meine Familie Contents Acknowledgements ......................................................................................... 7 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 9 The State of Contemporary War Fiction in Criticism .............................. 11 The Global Homeland .............................................................................. 22 Derealized Warfare .................................................................................. 29 Chapter Outline ........................................................................................ 31 Chapter One “It was a shitty little war”: Disillusionment, Sanitization, and Loss of Affect in the Writing of the War on Terror ................................................... 33 Chapter Two “Extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence”: Spectacular Militarization, Commodification, and Disenchantment ........................................................ 68 Chapter Three “But his mind did not have a safety and there was no way to shut it off”: Returning Veterans, the Homeland, and Violent Frustration ........................ 97 Conclusion: The War Comes Home ........................................................... 134 Works Cited ................................................................................................ 141 Index ........................................................................................................... 147 Acknowledgements There are many people to whom I owe my gratitude for their assistance and countless advice during the time it took me to complete this manuscript. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors for their unwavering sup- port and encouragement. Dr. David Watson has unfailingly provided valuable and generous input at all stages of my project, from the selection of material to theoretical ideas and the writing process. Professor Danuta Fjellestad of- fered critical insights as well as comments on the rhetorical and structural mat- ters; she has been a constant source of encouragement as well as an occasion- ally needed admonition. I also want to thank Dr. Elisabeth Herion-Sarafidis for her invaluable assistance in the editing process. I am deeply indebted to all three. I would also like to thank all those who have provided feedback during the Work-in-Progress seminars at the English Department, created a supportive and stimulating research environment, and contributed to the progress of my thesis. Particular thanks are due to Leonard Driscoll, Ryan Palmer, and Dr. Roberto del Valle Alcalá. I would also like to thank Ruth Hvidberg, Lóa Kris- tjánsdóttir and Dr. Åke Eriksson especially for their assistance in all matters administrative and practical. I was fortunate enough to write my thesis as part of the STINT-funded re- search project “Fictions of Threat: Security, Speculation, and Surviving the Now” which has provided me with invaluable opportunities to present my re- search, receive helpful feedback, and exchange ideas outside of Sweden. I am very grateful to Dr. Michael Boyden from Uppsala University, Dr. John Mas- terson, Dr. Doug Haynes, and Professor Maria Lauret from the University of Sussex, Dr. Marc Botha from Durham University, and Karl van Wyk, Natalie Paolie, Professor Merle Williams, and Professor Michael Titlestad from the University of the Witwatersrand. I would also like to thank Professor Stacey Peebles from Centre College for her examination of the manuscript at the so-called “mock defense.” Above all, I would like to thank my family without whom this would not have been possible. 7 8 Introduction “War reverberates through literature,” writes Kate McLoughlin (1). Although the War on Terror is no exception in that regard, this has not yet been ade- quately registered by literary criticism.1 Assessing the state of war literature in early 2014 in an article for The New Yorker, George Packer indirectly at- tributes the dearth of critical engagement to a shortage of literary depictions of the war, claiming that not until the time of the publication of his article “[t]he first wave of literature by American combatants in these long, incon- clusive wars has begun to appear” (70).2 Packer predicts an upsurge in the literary engagement with the War on Terror by attributing the relative scarcity of what he regards as an emerging literary concern to largely practical obsta- cles causing a delay in the production of accounts of the war: “the minimum lag time between deployment and publication [of war literature penned by veterans] seems to be around five years” (70). A similar claim of a time delay between the unfolding of the war and a literary engagement with it may hold true also for civilian authors. But the present literary landscape, I argue, now offers a considerable number of literary depictions of the War on Terror, var- ying in form, tone, and genre and providing far more nuanced and provocative engagements with the war and its underlying policies than has actually been accounted for by literary critics. Perhaps owing to external circumstances, most of all the general troop strength and intensity of combat, the literature of the War on Terror has strongly favored the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan as its setting.3 And it 1 The term “War on Terror” is a rhetorical simplification that denotes a variety of military, political, and cultural domestic and foreign practices. In the context of my dissertation, I adopt the use of the Bush and Obama administrations of the term as it refers to the military campaigns especially in Iraq and Afghanistan if not specified otherwise. 2 Packer refers to the individual campaigns that comprise the War on Terror that, in addition to operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, also included smaller-scale operations in, for instance, the Mediterranean Sea, the Horn of Africa, Somalia, and the Philippines. 3 The deployment of U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are fundamentally different in terms of numbers and duration and have been the subject of extensive journalistic documenta- tion. Relying on covert operations and air strikes, President Bush began the Afghanistan inva- sion with just over 1,000 U.S. soldiers in 2001. This number was only slowly expanded, reach- ing its peak at a still relatively low level of