DEVIATIONS FROM REALISM IN THE VIETNAM WAR NOVEL DESVIOS DO REALISMO NO ROMANCE DE GUERRA DO VIETNÃ Tom Burns* Resumo Ao contrário dos romances de guerra com forma similar às narrativas de combate do realismo da Segunda Guerra Mundial, alguns dos romancistas inovadores da Guerra do Vietnã utilizaram estratégias narrativas de estilo pós-modernista – fantasia, metaficção, paródia etc. – para escrever sobre uma guerra que parece desafiar uma análise racional. Dois exemplos, The bamboo bed, de William Eastlake, e Going after Cacciato, de Tim O'Brien, são aqui analisados. Palavras-chave: Realismo, Guerra do Vietnã, Literatura de Guerra, Pós-modernismo. Abstract In opposition to the war novels modeled on the combat narratives of realism of the Second World War, some of the innovative novelists writing of the Vietnam War employed narrative strategies of the type called postmodernist –fantasy, metafiction, parody, etc. – to write about a war that seemed to defy rational analysis. Two examples are analyzed here: William Eastlake's The Bamboo Bed and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. Key words: Realism, Vietnam War, Literature of War, Postmodernism. 1 Realism as Inadequate to the Experience Most fictional narratives inspired by the Vietnam War have carried on in a number of ways – thematic, stylistic, and structural – the literary inheritance of previous wars in theme and structure by representing the experience of that war in traditional modes of realism, especially in the popular works and pulp fiction of the war. A number of serious novelists of the Vietnam War, however, have denied the efficacy of that kind of representation. Authors such as William Wilson, Gustave Hasford, William Eastlake, Ward Just, Lloyd Little, James Park Sloan, Nicola Rinaldi, and especially Tim O'Brien seemed to sense in their work that the old war narrative of realism "entails notions of objective truth and depends on Western historical metanarrative for its justification" (Carpenter, 2003, p. 30). New forms of doing fiction were required that eschewed the traditional mimetic modes of realism and naturalism found in older writers about war like Norman Mailer and James Jones, as well as in newer ones like Winston Groom, James Webb, and John Del Veccio. In Robert M. Slabely's formulation, "The depiction of America's longest, strangest war required new devices, structures, styles, even a new language to tell it 'like it is'" (Slabely, 1988, p. 88). One might add that Slabely's final phrase is redundant: there is a need for such devices precisely because the war is too ambiguous to be told "like it is." Don Ringnalda has also argued that the narrative of realism was an inadequate instrument for representing the war: "Implying a sense of controlled continuity and rational ordering, realism is a particularly inappropriate mirage in the context of America's Vietnam War" (Ringnalda, 1994, p. 5). Nevertheless, realism is the dominant mode of choice, not so much because, as Ringnalda claims, that it "reflects a belief that one can make the private nightmare public and bring it under control with that fictive rein, that one can linearize and cause-and-effect it into some kind of submission" (Ringnalda, 1994, p. 5), but because it had long before become the dominant mode of representing the experience of war. These soldier-novelists of Vietnam were imitating their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers. In response to the perceived inadequacy of realism to represent the experience of Vietnam, the authors of these "deviant" novels evidently thought that a more indirect, allusive, parodist representation would be more appropriate to a war whose origins, causes, and objectives were not clearly understood or well-defined. In fact, it was during the war – and partly in response to it – that American literary postmodernism was developed, with its distrust of transcendent, all – encompassing narratives and the authoritative certainty associated with realism. In the postmodernist manner, these novels employ a number of procedures and devices, such as a mixture of high and low discourses; diverse styles and genres (parody, pastiche, allusion, black comedy); and the deliberate confusion of fact and fiction. They mix fantasy and realism, graft fantastic elements onto a straightforward narrative structure or offer fantasy as an alternative narrative, insert metafictional comment, and even problematize the truthfulness of war narratives. Politically, these works tend to be critical of the whole enterprise of the war. 2 Rewriting the Classic War Novel I would like to examine here two examples in some detail to show how these procedures have been assimilated into the Vietnam War novel. It seems clear by now that this type of novel has become more common with the passing of time and the fading from the memory of the war itself. William Eastlake's The bamboo bed (1969) would seem to deny what I have written above about deviations in the Vietnam novels from the old models, as it pays explicit homage to Joseph Heller's World War II novel, Catch-22 (1961) and borrows extensively from it. As can be seen from the publication dates of both novels, moreover, the time gap between the two books is short. Heller's novel, one of the most important American literary productions to come out of World War II, was published fifteen years after the end of the war and was really more about the post war world of international corporations and civilian anomie than the war itself. For its part, Eastlake's novel was published in the middle of the Vietnam War when these phenomena were being assimilated. Indeed, John Clark Pratt has argued that Heller's novel "should properly be seen as a paradigm for the Vietnam War itself" (Pratt, 1991, p. 89). With respect to the fiction to come out of the Vietnam War, he claims that at least "nine major novels would probably not have been written without Catch-22 as a model" (Pratt, 1991, p. 95). Some of the more fanciful works that he discusses seem, like Heller's novel, to serve more as warnings about the future than narratives about the war itself, because they express "the author's despair in our ability to perceive what we are doing to ourselves, especially with our dependence on technology and media" (Pratt, 1991, p. 87, p. 109). Eastlake's strategy is to write an updated version of Catch-22, reproducing that novel's apocalyptic whimsy in the dialogue, the episodic plot weaving back and forth chronologically, the generally expressed feeling of absurdity, the mixture of comic and grotesque etc. Some episodes, like that of the back-and-forth business of the bridge changing hands are directly inspired by Heller's novel. The war is constantly regarded as itself a fiction. When one character (Colonel Yvor) tells another: "Jesus Christ and Clancy got killed for us, Billy", he receives the reply: "That's just in books" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 234). A series of improbabilities makes it clear that this novel never tries to establish itself as naturalistic: "Aberrant means truth," as the protagonist, Captain Clancy, says (Eastlake, 1969, p. 286). The various characters, all of whom have a philosophical bent, tend to speak in this mannered, portentous way, as if they are making utterances for a written record. Here is Mike: "This is not a lost generation. This is the ignored generation, the generation that is used by old people to kill young people" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 139). Or Batcheck, a chopper pilot, speaking to two soldiers who returned to Vietnam without knowing why: It's because nobody in the States gives a damn about the Vietnam war. They want to forget it. Anyway, you're supposed to win a war. You remind them that it's still going on. You're supposed to win a war or get killed. You guys didn't do either (Eastlake, 1969, p. 155). The dialogue itself often recalls Heller's repetitive, convoluted, absurd turns. Here are Batchek and Ozz discussing the massacre at Ridge Red Boy: What about Alpha Company? What about it? It's the biggest single loss our side has had in the war. How did they get it? They were bait. What does that mean? They bring the Chinamen out of the hills. Bait. But they were not supposed to be annihilated. No, that was a mistake. Something went wrong. What went wrong? We made a mistake. What was the mistake? Leaving home (Eastlake, 1969, p. 241). Heller's concept of "Catch-22" is explicitly evoked in a passage where Appelfinger, the "evolutionist," is trying to explain to Wientraub, a former peace-marcher who now finds he enjoys killing people, that he is not going mad: I know enough about evolution to know that man adapts. You mean if he adapts to insanity he's not going crazy? Yes, Appelfinger said. But he's crazy if he doesn't become crazy? If everyone else is crazy? Yes. Why is that? Because we have to set a norm, Appelfinger said. Even if that norm is crazy. It's called a mean (Eastlake, 1969, p. 296). Often in the novel, as Colonel Ivor says, "Talk is a defense against communication" (Eastlake, 1969, p. 343). The CO of Alpha Company, Captain Clancy is a leader with panache: he wears a plumed helmet with a roman crest and a sword, employs a Vietnam orphan as a drummer-boy to assemble his troops, and quotes Coleridge and Blake. He shares the danger confronted by his men, who will consequently follow him anywhere. Clancy descends with paratroopers to defend against an advancing NVA unit. He lands on the huge rubber plantation of Madame Dieudonné, Viet-French woman who takes him into her bed in her under-ground mansion located under the swimming pool.