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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Tim O'Brien is obsessed with telling a true war story. Truth, O'Brien's fiction about the Vietnam experience suggests, lies not in realistic depictions or definitive accounts. As O'Brien argues, "[a]bsolute occurrence is irrelevant" because "a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth" (Things 89). Committed to examining the relationship between the concrete and the imagined, O'Brien dismantles binaristic notions of "happening-truth" and story-truth": "A thing may happen and be a total he; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth" (89). In order to assess whether he has written fiction that is "truer than the truth," O'Brien singles out the type of reaction his stories should provoke: "It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe" (84). This emphasis on the body's visceral response to fiction aptly encapsulates O'Brien's investigation of the literal and metaphoric relationships between stories and bodies, particularly as such affiliations are forged by a psychology of exile and displacement. For O'Brien, the returning veteran's paradoxical desires--a yearning to reverse the unwilling transformations conjured by combat experience; the inexplicable sense of exile that troubles any possibility of an easy return or rest--are best expressed by how a true war story "never seems to end" (83) but can only be told and retold, different each time yet no less faithful to the truths it must convey.
O'Brien's compulsion to revisit his war experience through fiction is not unique. The moral ambiguity and unresolved conflicts characterizing U.S. involvement in Vietnam have made that war a compelling presence in the American literary and cultural imagination.(1) Vietnam did more than redefine the mythos of war. According to John Hellmann, it provoked a crisis in the very narrative of nation:
Americans entered Vietnam with certain expectations that a story, a
distinctly American story, would unfold. When the story of America in
Vietnam turned into something unexpected, the true nature of the larger
story of America itself became the subject of intense cultural dispute. On
the deepest level, the legacy of Vietnam is the disruption of our
story, of our explanation of the past and vision of the future. (x)(2)
If the Vietnam War has been figured as a "disruption" of America's self-narration as nation, its rupturing of "our story" has none of the glamour or play that characterizes postmodernism. Rather, it has been cast as psychic trauma, a metaphysical fracture in the body politic that refuses to heal completely.
For O'Brien, the lingering hurts of the war are intimately linked to his stories, which, by virtue of their allegiance to the contradictory truths of war, resist closure. The Things They Carried, a collection of related short stories that appears grounded in O'Brien's own "real" combat experience even as it insists upon war as an endless fiction, ponders the complexities of such connections.(3) Written as a series of quasi-memoiristic episodes, the book questions the nature of truth and the possibility of ever having an unchallenged "sense of the definite" (88). Directing readers beyond the stories to the narrative gaps within and between them, O'Brien renders the indescribable experiences of "Vietnam" as moments one may gesture to but never fully represent. After Vietnam, it becomes impossible to "ten where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity." O'Brien's war stories, which are ultimately "never about war," reflect the difficult choices forced upon those who have confronted the contradictions of combat: "There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery" (88).
The disorder of a world without rules underlies O'Brien's problematizing of the boundaries between personal memory and official history. O'Brien's vexed preoccupation with the disjunctures that make history unreliable and memory the condition for narrative is engendered by the impossibility of ever achieving an unproblematic return home--whether that return is to family, community, one's prewar subjectivity, or nation. As such, the stories in The Things They Carried reflect the rootless existence of an exile. Marked by a complex understanding of Vietnam and its indelible consequences, the stories demonstrate a preoccupation with the nature of displacement and alienation. While much critical attention has been directed to the idea of the Vietnam veteran who feels exiled from America, O'Brien's work demands a reconceptualization of exile: O'Brien is alienated from his nation, his friends, himself, and, however counterintuitively, Vietnam.(4) Although O'Brien's fictive project centers on the impossibility of ascertaining any one "truth" from the experience of war, Things is guided nonetheless by an impulse to tell the truth, "though the truth is ugly" (87). And the ugliness of the truth that Tim O'Brien tells, an ugliness paradoxically sublime in its "largeness" and "godliness," deals much more with perpetual unmooring than it does with any kind of resolution. Exile as a fluid and inescapable experience resulting from immersion in the moral ambiguity of the Vietnam War inflects all aspects of the stories in Things.
Exile in The Things They Carried is rendered as a multiply located mode of experience; it is a condition both singular and plural in its manifestations. What begins as a fear of exile from a centrally located home, a site firmly identified as the plains of Minnesota, proliferates into multiply situated points of exile upon returning from the war. As a careful reading of Things reveals, O'Brien's war stories are not about recovering from trauma or resolving the conflicts contributing to or created by the war in any permanent way; they are about accepting indeterminacy and learning to live not through Vietnam but with it. In a 1991 interview with Steven Kaplan, O'Brien admits: "My concerns as a human being and my concerns as an artist have at some point intersected in Vietnam--not just in the physical place, but in the spiritual and moral terrain of Vietnam.... There was an intersection of values, of what was and what was to come, that I'll always go back to," even though the stories "are almost all invented, even the Vietnam stuff" (101, 95). This conscious, deeply intentioned reconstruction of Vietnam invokes Salman Rushdie's concept of "homeland" as one which, for the exiled writer, is always already fictive in nature: "if we do look back, we must... do so in the knowledge--which gives rise to profound uncertainties--that our physical alienation ... almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands" (10). Rushdie's eloquent articulation of an imaginary homeland recognizes the intimate relationship between an exilic longing and storytelling. O'Brien perceives such a connection occurring when "remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening" (36). His contested "confession" to killing someone during the war in "Good Form" testifies to the curious relationship between the stories and the idea of return, where each sustains and makes possible the other:(5)
Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many
bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid
to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility
and faceless grief.
Here is the story-truth. He was a slim,...
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