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Absurdity and Artistry in Twentieth Century American War Literature University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Open Access Dissertations 2016 Absurdity and Artistry in Twentieth Century American War Literature Brittany B. Hirth University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss Recommended Citation Hirth, Brittany B., "Absurdity and Artistry in Twentieth Century American War Literature" (2016). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 431. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/431 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSURDITY AND ARTISTRY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN WAR LITERATURE BY BRITTANY B. HIRTH A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2016 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION OF BRITTANY B. HIRTH APPROVED: Dissertation Committee: Major Professor: Naomi Mandel Valerie Karno Evelyn Sterne Nasser H. Zawia DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2016 ABSTRACT Fictional representation of historical war is a contentious subject. Two dominant modes of thought prevail: the realist and the anti-realist approach to representation. This dissertation argues that absurdity is a more constructive tool for investigating authors’ artistic renditions of war in the latter half of the twentieth century. The absurd novel contains comic exaggeration, parody, black humor, surrealism, the fantastic, and a general subversion of the traditional novel’s form. Absurdity, as an artistic technique, signals to readers that despite the real-life referents for historical war, the author’s fictionalization is not the representation. Absurdity serves two purposes: first, absurdity signals to the reader that this text is a work of fiction; and second, absurdity enables the novelist to overcome the representational challenges of war. The absurd functions as an artistic placeholder and enables authors to elide concern surrounding ethics or accuracy. Absurdity facilitates some language for the author’s personal perception of his experience, without holding him accountable for documenting the real. The aesthetic freedom of the absurd narrative also provides authors a critical distance that enables their meaning-making for the war experience. For the three authors in this dissertation, their absurd narrative constructions incite social and political commentaries. These remarks that are illuminated by absurdity indicate that these authors continue to work toward an understanding of their chaotic wars in the contemporary moment of their writing; in short, absurdity functions as a placeholder for the representation that has eluded these authors. Within this dissertation, authors who are writing on three different decades of war are included to establish a study on the evolution of war, as a conception, and to illustrate the narrative absurdity that shifts with the historical context to reflect the aesthetics, ethics, and politics at work in each of these wars. Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Everything is Illuminated, includes a fantastically written meta-narrative that accentuates the incomprehensibility of organized genocide during World War II. Michael Herr’s Dispatches demonstrates the surrealism and falsified governmental rhetoric that shapes his depiction of the Vietnam War. Ending with the Persian Gulf War, I analyze Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead to delineate the complications that technologically advanced military strategies create for the conception of war at the end of the twentieth century, especially pertinent as ground combatants were rendered nearly redundant in this war. Combined with the nonstop media coverage of the Gulf War, the subtle absurdity of Swofford’s novel illustrates the increasingly convoluted nature of understanding war at the end of the twentieth century. In the conclusion, I extend the possibility of studying absurdity in the context of twenty-first century war through discussion of 9/11 and Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. In bringing together these authors who fictionalize three different periods of American twentieth century war, I reveal that the absurd is an artistic technique that firmly roots these wars in public memory while leaving crucial questions about representation open-ended. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The first and foremost person I thank is Naomi Mandel. She facilitated this project’s evolution from tentative beginnings to its final form; but, more than merely directing and supporting my project, Naomi instilled within me a firm sense of rigorous scholarship and the desire to answer the complicated questions, for this I am immensely grateful. For giving firm advice on approaching my audience, I extend gratitude to Evelyn Sterne and Valerie Karno. I also thank the URI Department of English’s faculty and students for many interesting conversations. I also wish to thank Aimee Pozorski for teaching me to navigate traumatic material in the beginning of my graduate career and for continuing to offer collegiate warmth and support at its conclusion. For gifting me an abundance of laughter, food, revelry, and deep friendships, I am grateful to Shauny Pierce, Sara Murphy, Kim Evelyn, Jessica Gray, Donald Rodrigues, and Michael Becker. In a category all his own, I extend my gratitude to Gavin Hurley; a partner who not only understands the demands of academia but encouraged them. I am endlessly appreciative of his support, advice, and passionate conversations that help me think and rethink my role as an academic and the importance of this work. I also thank my parents for accepting my passion for reading and inquiry. Lastly, I am appreciative of the URI Center for the Humanities and the Hope and Heritage Foundation for the support to research and conference. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………...………iv TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………v INTRODUCTION: WAR IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE QUESTION OF REPRESENTATION AND FICTIONALIZING WAR……………………………....1 CHAPTER ONE: ABSURD HUMOR, TRAUMA, AND THE FANTASTIC: JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER……………………………………………………….52 CHAPTER TWO: (RE) WRITING THE “TRUTH” ABOUT VIETNAM: MICHAEL HERR’S DISPATCHES………………………………………………………….…..87 CHAPTER THREE: MISSILES AND MONOTONY: RETHINKING VIETNAM THROUGH ANTHONY SWOFFORD’S GULF WAR………………..….……….135 CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION: HISTORICAL TEMPLATES FOR THE PRESENT NARRATIVE……………………………………………………...……201 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………......257 v INTRODUCTION: WAR IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE QUESTION OF REPRESENTATION AND FICTIONALIZING WAR “We are writing…we are writing…we are writing…we are writing” (emphasis his, Foer 212-3). For a page and a half in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, the phrase “we are writing” is repeated one hundred and ninety-one times and ends with ellipses. This repeated phrase that is connected by and ends with ellipses suggests that there are gaps in what is being written but “we,” the authors, are compelled to keep writing. Written in the present tense, this phrase indicates that there is more to be revealed by the “we” who write. But, the phrase, “we are writing,” does not directly name what has to be written. These lines seem to operate more as a moment of self-reflexivity for Foer to acknowledge the demands of his task to fictionalize and represent the Holocaust, a task he does not master as suggested by his phrase that “we” are still writing. This phrase from Foer’s novel epitomizes the focus of this dissertation: to explicate three authors’ responses to the task of twentieth century war representation. Although World War II’s the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War are three major but very different war events in the mid to late-twentieth century, these events all share the commonality of representational challenges. To clarify the focus of the project for the first three chapters, the definition of “war” is the active deployment of U.S. soldiers to foreign countries and the subsequent military operations that employ violent strategies against an “enemy” force. For the selected literature of this study, war is the term that carries the connotation of material violence against a 1 foreign nation.1 My terminology is purposely vague because of the three wars that I am investigating through literature, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War, only World War II can be termed a “war” in that the United States publically declared war on the Axis forces. The formal declaration of war did not occur for the Vietnam or Gulf wars. Instead, those “wars” were authorized military engagements, or conflicts. In this project, the Vietnam and Gulf conflicts will connote war.2 In the conclusion, I similarly treat 9/11 as an act of war. This dissertation examines war events from decades that illustrate shifts in the conception of war: the Holocaust is referred to as a disruptive event that defies language in scholarship; the Vietnam War was the first war to be broadcast from the battlefront; and the Persian 1 World War II was a formally declared war on the Axis powers. The Vietnam War was not a formally declared war against North Vietnam. The formally declared war was between North and South Vietnam with the United States aiding South Vietnam. Unlike World War II and its clear delineation
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