View of “Confronting Ending Itself, Many Repeated Endings”. The Recovery of the Vietnam War in the Traumatic Imagination

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Résumé

Établir une connexion entre le texte littéraire et le trauma (compris non seulement comme une blessure individuelle mais aussi comme une dominante culturelle souvent invisible) nécessite un outil conceptuel interdisciplinaire ; par conséquent, nous proposons le terme d’« imagination traumatique » pour désigner le mode de pensée qui permet à l’auteur/narrateur et au lecteur de jouer ou même de dépasser le trauma en racontant une histoire fantastique (relevant du réalisme magique tout particulièrement). L’imagination traumatique sous-tend la production de textes littéraires qui luttent à la fois pour redécou- vrir et re-couvrir l’ineffable et, en dernier lieu, pour reconstruire des événements dont l’absence s’est révélée aussi insupportable que leur remémoration. L’imagination traumatique est le principal mode de pensée du survivant à laquelle l’esprit humain recourt quand il est confronté à l’impossibilité de se remémorer l’indicible (événement-limite) et la répétition compulsive d’images de violence et de perte qui en résulte.

Abstract

Establishing a nexus between the literary text and trauma (understood not only as an individual wound but also as an often invisible cultural dominant) requires an interdiscipli- nary conceptual tool; therefore, I propose the term “traumatic imagination” to designate the consciousness that enables author/narrator and reader to act out or even to work through trauma by means of fantastic (and particularly magical realist) storytelling. The traumatic imagination underlies the production of literary texts that struggle to both recover and recover the ineffable and, ultimately, to reconstruct events whose absence has proven just as unbearable as their remembering. The traumatic imagination is the essential consciousness of survival to which the human psyche resorts when confronted with the impossibility of remembering the unspeakable (limit-events) and the resulting compulsive repetition of images of violence and loss.

Eugene L. A

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“Confronting Ending Itself, Many Repeated Endings”

The Recovery of the Vietnam War in the Traumatic Imagination

Pour citer cet article :

Eugene L. A^rvA, « ‘‘Confronting Ending Itself, Many Repeated Endings’’. The Recovery of the Vietnam War in the Traumatic Imagination », dans Interférences littéraires,

http://www.uclouvain.be/sites/interferences ISSN : 2031 - 2970

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Interférences littéraires, n° 4, mai 2010

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The Vietnam War represents the quintessential meat- (and mind-) grinder to the soldier-characters in Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato (1978). O’Brien is conside- red one of the most important soldier-authors of the Vietnam generation and one of the most notable postmodernist writers in the United States, particularly for “his ex- ploration from multiple perspectives of the problematic nature of truth and reality”¹. Because of his combination of gritty realism with dreamlike images, O’Brien has also been described as a “postmodernist classic of magical realism” (Philip Beidler)², a classification from which he has consistently distanced himself by arguing that fantasies and daydreams are real, and thus, paradoxically, confirming rather than denying his use of magical realism – a primarily realistic writing mode in which fantasies are, indeed, real. His misunderstanding of the magical element and possible underestima- tion of the realism component of the term notwithstanding, O’Brien has proven to be a self-conscious writer, an accomplished master of his craft, acutely aware of the role played by his war trauma and persistent feeling of guilt in his writing, and mindful of his artistic responsibilities of bearing witness to the horrors of war.

O’Brien’s traumata – not all of which are traceable to his war experiences – find a terrifyingly accurate reflection in most of his soldier-characters. Even before he left for Vietnam in 1969 (his tour lasted until 1970), O’Brien had had, by his own admission, a complicated relationship with his father – an alcoholic given to abusive ridiculing and teasing of his son – a source of latent trauma that would only exacer- bate the feeling of guilt incurred from O’Brien’s participation in the Vietnam War.

Significantly, in an interview with Tobey C. Herzog, the writer qualifies the father theme as “incredibly important” in his work, beside those of history, war, lone- liness, and alienation³. His father’s pro-war attitude, regularly displayed at the family dinner table, and the overall jingoistic mindset of Worthington, Minnesota, where the O’Brien family has lived since Tim was twelve, constituted the main sources of the moral pressure that ultimately pushed the future writer to join the army at age twenty-one; he could have pleaded for draft exception as a student, but did not, lest he should disappoint his family and community. O’Brien has consistently discarded the idea of “lost innocence” for the simple reason that he did not go to war as “an innocent” but as “a guilt”: “I was not an innocent, I was a ‘guilt.’ I knew that the war was wrong”⁴. After the end of the war, in response to the literature of 1972-

1. Tobey C. Herzog, Tim O’Brien, New York, Twayne, 1997, p. 78.

2. Ibid., p. 80.

3. Tobey C. Herzog, Writing Vietnam, Writing Life: Caputo, Heinemann, O’Brien, Butler, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2008, p. 95.

4. Ibid., p. 99.

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1973 that mostly glorified the “patriotic grunt experience,” O’Brien felt the urge to show the experience of Vietnam “through the eyes of a soldier who acknowledged the obvious: we were killing civilians more than we were killing the enemy”⁵; his unorthodox, anti-mainstream literary credo may also be viewed as an expression of perpetrator’s guilt, another common cause of trauma.

It would seem that the acknowledgment of guilt has become a coping mecha- nism that has helped O’Brien adjust to civilian life better than other Vietnam vete- rans did after returning home. In the same interview with Herzog, O’Brien admitted that “acknowledging the guilt helped [him], from the start, helped [him] adjust, as opposed to kidding [him]self and finding out later”⁶. It should be noted, however, that “kidding” oneself, particularly one’s traumatized self, is not a matter of perso- nal choice. As a delayed response to extreme experiences, trauma does not allow consciousness either to shut out or to turn traumatic memories into narrative memories, which makes complete healing impossible regardless of the therapy applied.

Moreover, dealing with perpetrator’s guilt can never be the same as working through trauma suffered as a victim. O’Brien even attributes, in a somewhat naïve manner, an upside to PTSD: “[The effects of trauma] are not all terrible. It’s good to have a little post-traumatic stress syndrome, so you won’t get stressed again, so you won’t get traumatized again. It’s like putting your hand in a fire. You do it enough times and you’re going to be careful of fire”⁷. The arguably unintentional reference to what-doesn’t- kill-you-makes-you-stronger cliché oversimplifies the nature of the disorder under at least a couple of aspects: first, the possibility of re-traumatization can never be excluded, regardless of the severity of the initial trauma; and second, traumatization is never intentional, and cannot bear comparison with “putting [one’s] hand in fire.”

Although the behavior of a returning war veteran might often be viewed as “tough”

in a normal, civilian environment, responsible for it is, in fact, the trauma symptom of withdrawal.

Mustering enough strength to write about war trauma, O’Brien has put his hand in fire more than just once; in the process of writing his works, he has consciously assumed the risk of testing the effectiveness of fictional catharsis.

Psychological healing by means of narrative recovery of the origins of one’s trauma necessarily implies their re-visitation, which, in turn, can quite easily (and counterproductively) lead to re-traumatization; consequently, narrative recovery might, in fact, sometimes work as a re-covery of trauma. In Going after Cacciato, Paul Berlin’s imaginary narrative, which undermines the reality of the actual plot (but at the same time complements it by filling its blank, ineffable spots), is meant to serve the same purpose for the character as the one that writing the novel did for O’Brien: to work through perpetrator’s guilt and the trauma of victimhood (perpetrator’s trauma). However, Paul Berlin’s attempt, unlike O’Brien’s, fails because his dream “has no audience but his own imagination; he is left trapped within the war, aware of his traumatization but unable to share his enlightenment with others”⁸. O’Brien’s narrative has at least found an audience and a validation,

5. Ibid., p. 111.

6. Ibid., p. 112.

7. Ibidem.

8. Mark A. Heberle, A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam, Iowa City, Uni- versity of Iowa Press, 2001, p. 143.

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whereas Paul Berlin’s last dream episode (breaking into Cacciato’s hotel room in Paris) takes the character back to the scene of his initial breakdown: preparing the ambush on the deserter Cacciato. The author’s and the character’s creative dream- therapy would then suggest that the subject of the novel is not so much trauma as, rather, the traumatic imagination – the very medium that translates trauma into an artistic chronotope.

Although a delayed response to past events, survivor’s trauma is also an em- pathic anticipation of its own future recurrence. “Witnessing the sudden and unex- pected death of others anticipates one’s own, and life as usual cannot be easily resumed after the survivor has seen the end of his or her own story”⁹. Significantly, the first six sentences in the novel casually list the names of seven dead – Billy Boy Watkins, Frenchie Tucker, Lieutenant Sidney Martin, Pederson, Rudy Chassler, Buff, and Ready Mix – with little or no reference to the causes or circumstances of death, except for the “field of battle,” “tunnels,” and “paddies,” details which might or might not immediately suggest Vietnam, depending on the reader’s per- ceptiveness¹⁰. The eerily detached, matter-of-fact tone of the third-person narrator (already apparent in the opening understatement, “It was a bad time”) suggests the main character’s traumatic symptom of psychic or emotional numbing and his paralyzing fear of death, which is, in fact, to become explicit in life-and-death situa- tions in which Paul Berlin soils himself. Blocking out specific details and splitting up some of the accounts of his comrades’ deaths also speak for the elusive nature of traumatic memories. As Paul Berlin randomly recalls each individual death, the scene descriptions either start right after, or end immediately before a soldier dies:

e.g., Frenchie Tucker’s dead body has just been dragged out of a Viet-Cong tunnel¹¹; Buff is already being wrapped in a poncho, and his helmet emptied of his head¹²; after crawling into the tunnel to retrieve Frenchie Tucker’s body, Bernie Lynn receives a throat wound, and is dying in Doc Peret’s arms¹³; mowed down by the gunners of the same Chinook helicopter that has just dropped him off in the combat zone, Jim Pederson is shooting back at them¹⁴; and after his foot is blown off by a mine, Billy Boy Watkins panics, and apparently dies of a heart attack¹⁵. “This truncation [of scenes] has the antitraumatic, self-protective function of stopping just short of physical atrocity, but it also resurrects the individual while he is still alive. […]

Remembering transforms the catalog into stories that memorialize the dead so that the survivor’s life can go on”¹⁶. Paul Berlin himself, the de facto narrator of the novel (whose point of view is expressed by the third-person narrative voice), becomes painfully aware of the importance of order and linearity in his recollections: “The order of things – chronologies – that was the hard part. Long stretches of silence, dullness, long nights and endless days on the march, and sometimes the truly bad times. Pederson, Buff, Frenchie Tucker, Bernie Lynn. But what was the order? How did the pieces fit, and into which months? And what was it now – November-the-

9. Ibid., p. 14.

10. Tim o’brien, Going After Cacciato (1978), New York, Broadway Books, 1999, p. 1.

11. Ibid., pp. 65-66.

12. Ibid., pp. 280-285.

13. Ibid., pp. 66-69.

14. Ibid., pp. 131-132.

15. Ibid., pp. 216-217.

16. Mark A. Heberle, A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam, op. cit., p. 116.

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what?”¹⁷. Paul Berlin is just about to discover the pain inherent in the daunting process of transforming traumatic memories into coherent narratives.

Unlike Paul Berlin, who consciously creates an imaginary scenario in order to work through combat trauma and the moral sense of guilt and victimhood, Lieutenant Corson has apparently never managed to put the Korean War behind him; in fact, he has been missing it for the past fourteen “dull years,” soaked in whisky and nostalgia¹⁸. The causes of his fatigue are believed to be age, dysentery, and “something else” – just another disease that the narrator cannot or cannot bring himself to name¹⁹, but which Doc Peret, the squad’s medic and the novel’s raisonneur, eventually will. “Nostalgia: the pain of returning home. And the ache that comes from thinking about it. See my drift? The old man’s basic disease is homesickness. Nostalgia for the goddamned war, the army, the lifer’s life. And the dysentery, the fever, it’s just a symptom of the real sickness”²⁰. The sparse textual references indicate that Lieutenant Corson is, in fact, acting out a more than fourteen-year-old trauma, and that his prosthetic, traumatized self is incompatible with the new type of trauma represented by Vietnam; therefore, returning home does not imply a possible readjustment to a civilian lifestyle, but a much desired revisi- tation of the initial locus of trauma. The character’s traumatized behavior fits into the category of PTSD symptoms that the American Psychological Association (APA) defines as constriction, “the shutting down of physiological, emotional, and cognitive responses,” and which “resembles affectless hypnotic trance states in which time and self-consciousness seem to dissolve”²¹. Lieutenant Corson’s zom- bielike identity (he is, after all, a walking dead of the Korean War) is most likely intended to represent the transformation awaiting all the other soldiers in Paul Berlin’s squad several years down the road, provided they survive Vietnam.

O’Brien’s real concern in Going after Cacciato was not so much Vietnam as, by his own admission, “the difficulty of doing right, the difficulty of saying no to a war”²². The media spectacle that accompanied the war in the 1960s and the early 1970s has turned Vietnam into a synecdoche for an unjust war and perhaps the severest collective trauma in American history – hence O’Brien’s reluctance to limit the scope of his novel’s moral message to a specific war. The distinction between “Vietnam” and “Viet Nam” is more than orthographic as it pertains to the substance of both signifiers: the former, ideological in nature, refers to

“the futilely destructive American military, political, and economic intervention in Southeast Asia and its cultural and political ramifications within the United States and elsewhere,” while the latter designates “the nation that won the war and has a history and culture that transcends ‘Vietnam’” (Renny Christopher)²³. Significantly, O’Brien’s novel ironically suggests the immoral economic interests of the American military-industrial complex in prolonging a profitable war.

When Lieutenant Corson radios back to base that the squad is in pursuit of the

17. Tim o’brien, Going After Cacciato, op. cit., p. 47.

18. Ibid., p. 2.

19. Ibid., p. 34.

20. Ibid., pp. 183-184.

22. Eric James ScHroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, Westport, Praeger, 1992, p. 137.

23. Mark A. Heberle, A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam, op. cit., p. xviii.

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enemy, not of Cacciato (Corson is unwilling to take blame for a case of desertion in his unit), a radio-voice inquires whether gunships are needed. After the lieutenant turns down both gunships and artillery support, the radio-voice sounds disappointed, and playfully assumes the role of a pushy telemarketer: “We got a real bargain going on arty [artillery] this week – two for the price of one, no strings and a warranty to boot. First-class ordnance, real sweet stuff. See we got this terrific batch of 155 in, a real shitload of it, so we got to go heavy on vo- lume. Keeps the prices down”²⁴. The use of commercial jargon with reference to extremely lethal weaponry conveys not only the author’s satirical message but also the anonymous character’s gross desensitization, his immunity to the horror that he is peddling.

A similar case of desensitization, or emotional numbing, can be noticed among the vague references to Cacciato’s character. The narrator’s thrifty use of details is intentional: Cacciato is just another guy, albeit one that musters enough courage, or is reckless enough, to leave the war behind. O’Brien’s inspiration for Cacciato was apparently a soldier called Kline, whom he had met in basic training, a “klutzy guy with tiny beady eyes”²⁵. However, the character’s klutziness goes well beyond his clumsiness: it borders on the monstrous. Before his desertion, Cacciato used to carry around a photo album wrapped in plastic, whose cover reads “VUES OF VIETNAM.” In his search for clues, Paul Berlin now finds it, and notices the chronological order of the hundred-odd pictures in it; they show Cacciato’s father, mother, and twin sisters, “dressed for XMAS EVE, printed below the snapshots in red ink.” The family photos and domestic snapshots of “Cacciato smiling and shoveling snow, […] Cacciato in fatigues, Cacciato home on leave” are followed by a warrior pose suggesting the numbing effect of the atrocity of war: “Cacciato squatting beside the corpse of a shot-dead VC in green pajamas, Cacciato holding up the dead boy’s head by a shock of brilliant black hair, Cacciato smiling”²⁶. The artificiality and the incongruity of the poses do not help clarify Cacciato’s identity in the least, so that Paul Berlin is still left with the question, “But who was he?”

Cacciato’s apparent insensitivity to the shocking reality of the combat zone is suggested several times in Paul Berlin’s and the other squad members’ random, asynchronous recollections. Among Cacciato’s “pretty brave stuff,” there was the time when “he dragged that dink out of her bunker” and “the time he shot that kid – all those teeth”²⁷. Also, after Buff ’s body has been flown out by chopper, Paul Berlin watches on, awestruck, the casualness with which Cacciato retrieves the fal- len comrade’s helmet: “[Cacciato] stepped over a log, stopped, and then, like a wo- man emptying her wash basin, heaved Buff ’s face into the tall, crisp grass. […] He rinsed the helmet under his canteen, wiped it with his shirt, and tied it to his ruck- sack. Smiling, he took out a stick of gum and unwrapped it and began chewing”²⁸.

25. Eric James ScHroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, op. cit., p. 143.

26. Tim o’brien, Going After Cacciato, op. cit., pp. 119-120. Almost forty years later, Cacciato’s picture has come to bear an eerie resemblance to the ones taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by U.S. military police, showing some of their members posing, giving the two-thumbs-up sign, and smiling next to tortured or dead Iraqi inmates.

27. Ibid., p. 15.

28. Ibid., p. 285.

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The narrator’s uncanny attention to detail, to the character’s every motion (rinsing, wiping, tying, unwrapping, chewing), is in itself indicative of the severe battlefield trauma that Paul Berlin is still trying to work through. (Although the narrative voice is not his, the point of view is.) Even the fake booby trap that Cacciato sets up to slow down his pursuers accounts for his apparent obliviousness to suffering and trauma. As Stink Harris trips it, there is no explosion but only smoke spreading around. In shock, Harris falls to his knees, crying, while Paul Berlin soils himself;

he can smell and feel his own urine draining his thighs. Two hundred meters away, Cacciato watches on from the top of a small hill, “hands in his pockets, patient, serene, not at all frightened. He might have been waiting for a bus”²⁹. Whether Cac- ciato has ultimately discovered the monster in him – or acknowledged the “horror”

in a manner similar to Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz – and consequently decided to assume the risk of being court-martialed by deserting remains debatable just because details about his personality and his eventual fate are sparse, as if Paul Berlin’s memory has instinctually shut them out.

In one of Paul Berlin’s recollections of an earlier scene of war violence (before Cacciato’s desertion), which describes the aftermath of an extended land and air attack on a mountain nicknamed the World’s Greatest Lake Country, Cacciato’s eccentric behavior speaks again for a traumatized self ’s need of normality in the middle of horror. The name of the mountain has been inspired by its many craters, the result of several hours of bombing. The craters are now filled with rain water and dead bodies:

The mountains were taken. And in the mountains they found the dead. They found bomb craters full of the dead – scrawny little men, many of them bur- ned, and the stench was terrible. Nothing moved. The corpses lay in heaps, some still kneeling over their guns. There was great silence. So they spent the night among the dead, and in the morning they began counting bodies, which were sometimes countable only by the heads.³⁰

The shocking incongruity between the horrific reality of the landscape and the idyllic, familiar nickname attributed to it reveals naming itself as an attempt to reestablish a feeling of normality in a context where nothing is normal, or as a process of working through trauma by making the extraordinary sound ordinary.

It is here that Paul Berlin finds Cacciato fishing, focused and undisturbed, rejoicing over imaginary bites and his discovery of the right technique³¹. The floating dead

“scrawny little men” are invisible in Lake Country.

The invisibility of the Vietnamese Other in the eyes of the American soldiers is due to a number of unfamiliar cultural markers, the most important of which is language. “Not knowing the language, they did not know the people”³², the narrator explains, echoing the voice of Paul Berlin’s guilty conscience. Guilt comes from aggressive behavior, aggressiveness from fear, fear from distrust, distrust from ignorance, and ignorance from lack of communication; it is this

29. Ibid., pp. 18-20.

30. Ibid., p. 177.

31. Ibid., pp. 237-241.

32. Ibid., p. 261.

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causational link that Paul Berlin ponders in the chapter “The Things They Didn’t Know,” eager to figure out the identity of the Vietnamese and to tell them that he “was no tyrant, no pig, no Yankee killer,” that he was innocent, that he

“had no enemies,” that he “had wronged no one,” and that he “was not guilty of wrong intentions”³³. After sixteen repetitions of the phrase “they did not know”

throughout its last section alone, the chapter concludes with a statement on moral ignorance: “Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil”³⁴. The exculpatory tone seems to imply not only the need for atonement of a guilty conscience, but also the anger and the despair caused by the subject’s utter impotence, by the para- lysis of its will.

Reflecting Paul Berlin’s traumatized self, the narrative constitutes itself both as an effect of trauma and as a means of recovering it. The language that effectively recovers the “magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells” of the original experience combines the gritty realism of scenes of violence with the flights of fantasy of the witness-narrator’s imagination. Thus, the three basic tense forms of “flee” and “fly” form confusing strings of signification in Paul Berlin’s mind – “flee, fly, flew, fled” or sometimes “flee, fly, flown” – as if the character tried to understand whether flying off into an imaginary world of

“possibilities” and fleeing from war (i.e., deserting) amount to the same kind of moral act³⁵. No one in the squad seems to know whether they follow Cacciato to Paris, and thus leave behind an unjust and immoral war, or chase a deserter to capture and make him pay for his betrayal of the unquestionable principle of duty; the moral double- bind created by Cacciato becomes the squad’s Catch-22. However, as O’Brien once recognized, “[t]he very themes of the book [Going after Cacciato] are imagination and memory”³⁶, rather than war, just as Conrad’s books are not about the sea. Besides reflecting upon itself as theme, imagination – and in particular the traumatic imagination – also acquires a “heuristic power” in O’Brien’s war narrative, reinforcing his declared “faith in the fertility of dream”³⁷. Nevertheless, to discover the feel of a past experience by storytelling – or, as in the case of the traumatic imagination, to recover it – does not mean to explain the past but “rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination”³⁸ in a manner similar to the workings of magic.

Ironically, O’Brien has shown himself adamant to recognize any use of magical realism. Asked by Eric James Schroeder whether he was influenced by Gabriel García Márquez, O’Brien candidly admitted that he had not read him – in fact, that he had “hated” One Hundred Years of Solitude so much that he could not read more than three pages of it – but mentioned his admiration for Jorge Luis Borges³⁹. The

33. Ibid., p. 263.

34. Ibid., p. 271.

35. Ibid., pp. 177-178.

36. Eric James ScHroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, op. cit,.

p. 135.

37. Tim o’brien, “The Magic Show”, in Writers on Writing, Robert P^Ack and Jay PArini (eds.), Hanover, University Press of New England, 1991, p. 179.

38. Ibid., p. 183.

39. Eric James ScHroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, op. cit., pp. 129-130. In her review of The Things They Carried (The New York Times, March 6, 1990), Michiko

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irony lies in the fact that, in one of his essays, O’Brien intuitively, and quite accura- tely, describes the magical realist writing process:

The writer of fiction, like the shaman, serves as a medium of sorts between two different worlds – the world of ordinary reality and the extraordinary world of the imagination. In this capacity, the writer often enters a trancelike state of his own. […] This is the sensation I get – both physical and emotional – as a wa- king dream unfolds into words and as the words unfold into a piece of fiction.

Half in the embodied world, half in a world where bodies are superfluous. […]

Whatever we call this process – imagination, fantasy, self-hypnosis, creativity – I know from my own life that it is both magical and real. […] The more I write and the more I dream, the more I accept this notion of the writer as a medium between two planes of being – the ordinary and the extraordinary – the embodied world of flesh, the disembodied world of idea and morality and spirit.⁴⁰

What O’Brien acknowledges from his own life to be both magical and real is, in fact, the writer’s traumatic imagination, the “flight simulator” that is called upon to remodel the world by evoking a version of it that has never been recovered as narrative memory. In the simulated reality of fiction, only emotions and imaginary replicas of the physical universe can pass for “real,” making it an ideal medium of reflection on truth and morality.

An imperfect avatar of O’Brien’s, Paul Berlin simulates the author’s effort to transform traumatic memories into a cohesive, chronological, and meaningful narrative. However, as also noted by others, the character’s traumatization is so severe that he cannot recapture the memory of what has happened to Cacciato, and his fantasy “ultimately leads back to the same blank place in [his] consciousness that it had attempted to satisfy”⁴¹. Both the author’s and his character’s fictional endeavors can thus be viewed as deliberate processes ofworking through war traumata by in- tegrating fantasy into the virtual reality of the combat zone, whose horrors would hardly be describable by the mimetic devices of traditional realism. At the same time, the author and his partial double do not intend to distort reality by forcing their raw experiences into a factual matrix, but attempt to convey the felt reality of war as they have witnessed it. In his interview with Schroeder, O’Brien remarked that the ten- dency of every storyteller, sometimes intentional and sometimes not, is to “hype up the [initial] story’s intensity to make [one’s] story equal to what [one] felt personally.

And so [one] rev[s] up detail, heighten[s] it, so as to create an emotion in the listener equivalent to the emotion [one] felt, this great fear”⁴². Whether it is Paul Berlin’s or the author’s traumatic imagination, the ultimate result of their fictional catharses, by means of blending and complementing real experiences with contingent scenarios, is a felt reality of wartime horror. The magical elements do not undermine the reality of the narrative because, as the author himself explains, “letting one’s imagination heighten detail is part of what fiction writing is about. It’s not lying. It’s trying to produce story detail which will somehow get at a felt experience”⁴³. The twofold ontological

Kakutani had briefly mentioned O’Brien’s use of the “devices of magical realism,” a suggestion that the author firmly refuted in the interview with Schroeder.

40. Tim o’brien, “The Magic Show”, in Writers on Writing, op. cit., pp. 178-179.

43. Ibidem.

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status of magical realism, which evokes both living a dream and dreaming in a state of wakefulness, allows the author’s (and the character’s) traumatized consciousness to create a narrative that will fill the blank spots and bridge the caesura left in the chain of signification by the traumatic event(s). Thus, Paul Berlin’s therapeutic fantasy⁴⁴, the road to Paris, becomes a sublimated account of the traumatic experiences that the character feels unable to recover, just as O’Brien’s novel in its entirety represents a soldier-author’s struggle with PTSD.

The first narrative split occurs right after Cacciato’s cruel prank of planting fake booby traps (smoke grenades) in his pursuers’ way. When Stink Harris trips one of them, terror overcomes the entire squad, Harris falls to his knees bawling, and Paul Berlin loses control over his bladder. As the chase continues, Paul Berlin finds himself “pretending, in a wishful sort of way, that before long the war would reach a climax beyond which everything else would seem bland and commonplace.

A point at which he could stop being afraid. […] He wasn’t dreaming, or imagining;

just pretending. Figuring how it would be, if it were”⁴⁵. At this point, however, the character seems to be both acting out and working through trauma – achieving the former by subconsciously repressing his traumatic memories, and the latter by consciously avoiding the terrifying probability of future traumatic scenarios.

Memory and imagination, not separately but as a paradigm, literally become Paul Berlin’s devices of survival, and according to the author, they might in fact “apply to all of us whether we are in a war situation or not”⁴⁶. Paul Berlin’s introspective moments and self-analyses of his double narrative, one based on remembering past facts, and the other on imagining a hypothetical future, appear mostly in a series of chapters entitled “The Observation Post,” an apparent double entendre with a literal, military connotation and a figurative, psychological one. In the first observation-post chapter, which follows the open-ended scene of the squad’s de- cisive ambush on Cacciato, the reassuring repetition of “it was not a dream” or “it wasn’t dreaming” points to the character’s almost paranoid adherence to a reality of “facts,” no matter how elusive these might be. The reader will never find out Cacciato’s fate because Paul Berlin and the narrator do not seem able, or willing, to remember it. The dizzying questions in Paul Berlin’s mind – “What part was fact and what part was the extension of fact? And how were facts separated from possibilities? What had really happened and what merely might have happened?

How did it end?” – speak for the character’s desperate need both to recover the blanks spots of his traumatic memories and to re-cover them by substitution with hypothetical scenarios⁴⁷. To Paul Berlin, pretending seems to imply, first, imagining contingencies, and second, paradoxically, refusing to dream, as if the latter involved a dangerous and irresponsible flight from reality.

By blurring the lines between memory, imagination, and fiction, the narrative follows the basic tenets of magical realism; significantly, almost every dream se- quence has a direct correlative in one of Paul Berlin’s memories. For example, when during its pursuit of Cacciato, the squad falls into a hole in the ground, and ends up in

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a Vietcong tunnel, the episode calls to mind the circumstances of Frenchie Tucker’s and Bernie Lynn’s deaths, who were ordered to search a tunnel before destroying it, by following a senseless SOP (standard operating procedure). According to the squad’s raisonneur, Doc Peret, the cycle of “what you remember is determined by what you see, and what you see depends on what you remember” needs to be broken by focu- sing on the order of things, by sorting out the flow of events, and by searching “for that point at which what happened had been extended into a vision of what might have happened”⁴⁸. In an environment beyond one’s control, such as war, imagination becomes a tool for controlling things, “a way of working out the possibilities”⁴⁹. The extreme nature of the events that characterize a war chronotope can easily blur the lines between dream and reality. However, at Piraeus, when the squad’s desertion (or pursuit of Cacciato, depending on one’s point of view) is about to come to an end, Paul Berlin manages to dream their way around an imminent obstacle (customs agents); and yet, he realizes that he is awake and fully sane, and not dreaming⁵⁰. In Paris, the reality check works again; Paul Berlin perceives the wind as real, and licks the rain from his lips, “wet and real”⁵¹. If he can imagine Paris, then it is real. The dream is about to end when the squad ambushes Cacciato in a hotel room yet again, but in fact it rejoins reality in the same inconclusive manner that it started. Neither Paul Berlin nor the reader will ever know what happened to Cacciato. In case he had been killed or captured (a plausible situation), the event would have generated such a traumatic blow that Paul Berlin might have blocked the slightest memory of it. The only other traumatizing event that Paul Berlin avoids describing is Lieutenant Sidney Martin’s fragging by his own squad.

The overall suggestion in O’Brien’s works is that, in any war, death becomes its own purpose; in Going after Cacciato, Lieutenant Sidney Martin is fascinated by it. What seems to appeal to him is “the chance to confront death many times,”

a possible sign of repetition compulsion, the type of behavioral disorder that Freud attributes to traumatic neuroses. Martin believes in war as “a means of confronting ending itself, many repeated endings”⁵², and yet, his own “ending”

can never be mentioned because it can be neither real nor imaginable; fratri- cide is too horrendous an act to understand and to remember. In the moral fog of war, good and evil are difficult to tell from one from another, and O’Brien does not take sides in the conundrum, considering the lack of order, purpose, and meaning in Paul Berlin’s memories. When yet again the character remembers the dead, “everyone so incredibly goddamned young,” he seems to recoil from his own imagination, and “[slips] back to his observation tower along the South China Sea,” apparently straddling two worlds, “partly here, partly there,” “[h]

ard to tell which is real,” and concludes that it is “neither real nor unreal, it [is]

simply there”⁵³. The elusive deictic “there” incorporates an unrecoverable past, an unbearable present, and a hypothetical future – all in one. Tortured by a past devoid of facts and order, and lost in a chaotic present marred by the randomness of death, Paul Berlin uses “his imagination as a kind of tool to shape the future.

48. Ibid., p. 206.

49. Ibid., p. 226.

50. Ibid., p. 272.

51. Ibid., p. 291.

52. Ibid., p. 166.

53. Ibid., p. 200.

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Eugene L. ArvA

Not exactly daydreams, not exactly fantasies. Just a way of working out the possibilities. Controlling things, directing things”⁵⁴. The need for control is apparently something new to him because his recollection of the time when he was drafted indicates the personality of a drifter, a sleepwalker out of touch with reality:

“[Being drafted] came as no great shock. Even then the war wasn’t real. He let himself be herded through basic training, then AIT, and all the while there was no sense of reality – another daydream, a weird pretending. He was too young”⁵⁵. In a politicized undertone, the internalized narrator suggests that Paul Berlin, along with his entire generation, were driven to slaughter like cattle (“herded”), unaware of their fate, unquestioning and obedient, entrapped in and by the system.

Entrapment, the feeling of irrevocably losing control over one’s fate, of sur- rendering one’s will to invisible forces, is a significant concept in the novel. “A sense of entrapment mixed with mystery” is also the sense that Paul Berlin experiences in Quang Ngai, the kind of farm country that he has known well since childhood, now familiar but at the same time threatening, first of all because of the hedges behind which villages would hide:

Guarding, but mostly concealing, the hedgerows in Quang Ngai sometimes seemed like a kind of smoked glass forever hiding whatever it was that was not meant to be seen. Like curtains, or like walls. Like camouflage. So where the paddies represented ripeness and age and depth, the hedgerows expressed the land’s secret qualities: cut up, twisting, covert, chopped and mangled, blind corners leading to dead ends, short horizons always changing. It was only a feeling. A feeling of marching through a great maze.⁵⁶

The combination of beauty, mystery, and danger that underlies the des- cription of a Vietnamese rural landscape may easily induce a feeling similar to Carpentier’s marvelous real, which arises from a “privileged revelation of reality, […] or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado límite]”⁵⁷. The sense of “entrapment mixed with mystery,” experienced by O’Brien’s character, echoes quite closely – if unintentionally on the author’s part – Carpentier’s “extreme state” of the spirit. If Carpentier’s magical realism (a concept that the Latin-American writer and critic isolates, in fact, as referencing only European art) is ontological, meaning that “its source [lies in] material beliefs or practices from the cultural context in which the text is set,” O’Brien’s magical realist writing (a style from which the author theoretically distances himself) is epistemological, meaning that it “takes its inspiration for its magical realist elements from sources which do not necessarily coincide with the cultural context of the fiction, or for that matter, of the writer” (Roberto González)⁵⁸. The feeling that the elusive reality of Quang Ngai elicits in Paul

54. Ibid., p. 226.

55. Ibid., p. 227.

56. Ibid., p. 252.

57. Alejo cArPenTier, « On the Marvelous Real in America », trans. Tanya HunTingTon and Lois PArkinSon zAmorA, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Lois P^ArkinSon and Wendy B. fAriS (eds.), Durham, Duke University Press, 1995, p. 86.

58. Maggie Ann Maggie Ann boWerS, Magic(al) Realism, New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 91.

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Berlin’s mind does not seem any less magical than the impression that a South- American landscape left in Carpentier’s.

The amplified categories of reality that lead to O’Brien’s character’s extreme state of spirit remain, however, limited to a particular war chronotope – Vietnam, or more specifically, the American experience of it. Paul Berlin’s odyssey to Paris, which incorporates the trauma of Vietnam, is not a “madman’s fantasy.” Working out the possibilities in an observation tower by the South China Sea, Paul Berlin is “awake and fully sane.” The composite reality that he inhabits does not feel as just a daydream or a figment of his imagination, as he repeatedly checks on the veracity of this fact: “He touche[s] his left wrist. The pulse [is] firm. His brain tingle[s], his vision [is] twenty- twenty. Nothing nutty, nothing unusual. Leaning against the wall of sandbags, his back to the South China Sea, he [is] in full command of his faculties”⁵⁹. Nothing can be more terrifying than the magic experienced in a state of wakefulness, or conversely, the hyperawareness of a reality that resists authentication by both the senses and the mind. Paul Berlin fails to recover the experience of Vietnam because each time that he gets closer to ordering the facts and framing the ineffable, he compulsively re-covers the traces leading back to his initial traumatization.

O’Brien might find himself in a more privileged position than that of his character because, as a soldier-author, he has at least managed to acquire an empathetic audience and to expand the theme of his novel into a larger truth than the immediate anti-war message. The “war of the living” is O’Brien’s concept designating society’s ongoing war with issues of conscience: “We are at war with our own despair […]. The bombs can be words. The bullets can be misdeeds. We’re all at war, all of us, all the time. For me the use of Vietnam and war in general is a way of getting at what all of us face all of the time, every moment of life”⁶⁰. Considering O’Brien’s post-Vietnam social engagement and political activism, one may realize the urgent necessity to turn the artistic chronotope of war into a paradigm for peace, truth, and moral justice.

Writing horror is more than a gratuitous experiment in aesthetics: it combines creative activity and political activism, as well as a genuine moral engagement that involves empathy, responsibility, and ultimately the courage to face what reason has refused to capture in coherent thoughts and what official public discourse has marginalized as “inappropriate” topic. While vicarious traumatization is usually what prompts a trauma narrative, the act of storytelling itself, by ordering facts into a coherent history, becomes an act of witnessing. The link between trauma and the writing that recovers it is established through the traumatic imagination, a compulsive call for storytelling, an inner urge of the psyche to restore voices that histories of unspeakable horror and post-traumatic cultures have reduced to silence.

Eugene L. A^rvA University of Miami

60. Tobey C. Herzog, Writing Vietnam, Writing Life: Caputo, Heinemann, O’Brien, Butler, op. cit., p. 117.