Two weeks ago I was honored to participate in two conversations with high school classes about the Tim O’Brien Vietnam War novel The Things They Carried. Carl Rosin, an English high school teacher and regular reader of this blog, set up the occasion.
I have taught O’Brien’s marvelous work in our College’s 20th century English-Language Literature survey. It is distinctive for the way that it breaks down the distinction between fact and fiction. On the one hand, it appears to be a series of personal essays about O’Brien’s participation in the Vietnam War. On the other, O’Brien periodically asserts that he is making things up, although we are not informed of this at first.
In fact, until a few essays in, we have every reason to believe that the events he relates really happened. After all, the narrator is named Tim O’Brien and the book involves men who, we are informed in the dedication, were members of his Vietnam unit. In fact, we have such an investment in believing that we are reading “actual stories” that it comes as a shock to us when we learn that he made them up.
Or maybe they are only partly made up. At one point, O’Brien tells a particularly harrowing story about a soldier who, in grief over the death of a friend, proceeds to blow apart a baby water buffalo, shot after shot. It’s a story, O’Brien reports, that gets through to someone attending one of his readings, even when other war stories haven’t. O’Brien tells her that he invented the story:
Every goddamn detail—the mountains and the river and especially that poor dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it.
But then he qualifies this blanket assertion:
And even if it did happen, it didn’t happen in the mountains, it happened in this little village on the Bantangan Peninsuala, and it was raining like crazy, and one night a guy named Stink Harris woke up screaming with a leech on his tongue.
Of course, the students I talked to wanted to know what O’Brien was up to. Why mess with our minds like this? I talked with them about metafiction.
O’Brien, I told the students, is fighting against our penchant for using labels to avoid engagement. If the work were clearly a work of fiction, then we have the defense that “it’s only a novel.” We also have defenses against memoirs—we may listen with horror but then we sum up the work by the stance the author is taking. Is the author glamorizing the war? Is he describing it as a meaningless nightmare? Either way, the account has been given a moral, whether implicitly or explicitly. We move as quickly as we can from the painful facts to this moral, which provides us a certain distance. This allows us to put the war behind us.
But O’Brien doesn’t want us to move on. By not allowing us to easily categorize the work, he keeps us engaging with what happened in Vietnam. Above all, he won’t let us apply a moral. As he writes,
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.
O’Brien’s phrase “very old and terrible lie”—and in fact this passage as a whole—is an allusion to one of literature’s great anti-war poems, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which I have written about here. The poem, which describes a man caught without a mask in a gas attack, ends as follows:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
But although O’Brien agrees with Owen that it is a lie to say that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country, such horrifying scenes are not the entire “truth untold” of war (to quote “Strange Meeting,” another Owen poem). Why not? Because faced with such horror, we find refuge in abstractions, even the abstraction “war is hell.” Here’s what O’Brien has to say about that:
In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the threat that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.”
True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.
For example. War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can’t believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside.
It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.
And then, a little later:
How do you generalize?
War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and dspair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat.
And later:
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.
And still later:
In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
Mere facts can’t tell the story of war, which is why sometimes fiction gets closer to the truth than eye-witness accounts. After all, fiction gives us a sense that we are in the middle of the reality being depicted. If we stumble out of The Things They Carried not sure what to conclude about war, then perhaps O’Brien has gotten at some of war’s truth.
But even as he fights against labeling war, O’Brien feels continually compelled to come up with summary statements about it. Why? Because that’s what humans do. We try to make sense of what happens, even though making sense means resorting to abstraction and making generalizations. We could not negotiate the world without doing so.
I was aware, as I was talking to these high school students, that some of them may end up fighting in our country’s wars. A value of O’Brien’s work, then, is to encourage them to question any easy generalizations that people try to foist upon them. Don’t put your mind on hold when someone throws an abstraction in your direction, I told them. Test it with your intellect and then act according to your best understanding.
The rest of us can do the same. In fact, we have the obligation to do so. It may be necessary to send our young men and women off to war, but at least we owe them looking at war as honestly as we can. We do them a criminal disservice if we don’t. O’Brien’s book teaches us how to do so.