Imagining Home: American War Fiction from Hemingway to 9/11

233 Pages·2017·4.625 MB·English

by  Susan Farrell

ImagInIng
Home
American War
Fiction from
Hemingway
to 9/11
SuSan Farrell
Imagining Home
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Studies in American Literature and Culture
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Imagining Home
American War Fiction
from Hemingway to 9/11
Susan Farrell
Rochester, New York
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Copyright © 2017 Susan Farrell
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2017
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-64014-001-1
ISBN-10: 1-64014-001-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Farrell, Susan Elizabeth, 1963– author.
Title: Imagining home : American war fiction from Hemingway to 9/11 / Susan
Farrell.
Description: Rochester, New York : Camden House, 2017. | Series: Studies in
American literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017019191| ISBN 9781640140011 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 1640140018 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: War stories, American—History and criticism. | American fiction—
20th century—History and criticism. | American fiction—21st century—History
and criticism. | Home in literature. | War in literature. | Hemingway, Ernest,
1899-1961—Criticism and interpretation. | Vonnegut, Kurt—Criticism and
interpretation. | O’Brien, Tim, 1946– —Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC PS374.W65 F38 2017 | DDC 813/.5093581—dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019191
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1: “Isn’t It Pretty to Think So?”: Ernest Hemingway’s
Impossible Homes 16
2: A “Nation of Two”: Constructing Worlds through
Narrative in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut 61
3: “It Wasn’t a War Story. It Was a Love Story”: Tim O’Brien
and the Ethics of Home 104
4: “A Hole in the Middle of Me”: Shattered Homes in
Post-9/11 Literature 144
Afterword 186
Notes 193
Works Cited 205
Index 217
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Acknowledgments
IW OULD LIKE TO THANK the College of Charleston for granting me a sab-
batical leave during the 2015–16 academic year to work on this book.
I would also like to thank the many, many College of Charleston stu-
dents over the years whose insights and discussion have helped shape my
thinking about the American war writers I consider here. I am grateful to
the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington for allowing me
to conduct research in their Vonnegut materials, as well as to the Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin,
whose collection of Tim O’Brien papers was very helpful in understand-
ing the author and his work. I would like to thank Camden House Press,
Jim Walker, and Carrie Watterson for their useful advice as I worked to
revise the manuscript. I am grateful as well to Michael Kromeke, who not
only granted me permission to use the cover photo—an official US Army
photograph of a soldier at Camp Cody in Fort Deming, New Mexico,
circa 1917—but who also saw to it that I had access to a high-resolution
copy. Most importantly, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Joseph Kelly,
whose unwavering support and astute editing buoyed me up throughout
the entire writing process.
Select portions of chapter 2 appeared in a somewhat different
form in “A Convenient Reality: Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night and the
Falsification of Memory,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55,
no. 2 (January 2014): 226–36. Portions of chapter 3 appeared in “‘Just
Listen’: Witnessing Trauma in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,”
in Critical Insights: Tim O’Brien, edited by Robert C. Evans (New York:
Salem Press, 2015), 185–201; “The Home Front and the Front Lines
in the War Novels of Tim O’Brien,” in The Vietnam War: Topics in
Contemporary North American Literature, edited by Brenda Boyle (New
York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015), 115–36; and “The Labyrinth
of Myth and Gender in Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato,” in Thirty
Years After: New Essays on Vietnam War Literature, Film, and Art, edited
by Mark Heberle (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009),
53–64. I would like to thank the publishers and editors of these works for
their kind permission to reprint.
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Introduction
BY THE END OF SEPTEMBER 2001, New York City was awash in poetry.
People pasted poems on lampposts, bus shelters, and subway sta-
tions; they taped poems to apartment windows and passed then around
by hand; they mailed poems to newspapers and to fire and police stations;
they organized poetry readings to raise funds for 9/11 victims; they cre-
ated websites and e-mail Listservs to circulate poetry.1 The sheer volume
of poetry responding to 9/11 was astounding, notoriously prompting
one New York City fire chief, in his thank-you for the food, blankets,
and flowers sent in by concerned citizens, to plead, “but please, no more
poetry” (Johnson and Merians ix). Nor did this outpouring of words stop
after the immediate shock of the attacks wore off. By February 2002,
more than twenty-five thousand poems had been published on the web-
site poems.com, while the website Poets against the War received nearly
thirty thousand poems by the time it was closed to submissions in 2010,
and more than ten anthologies of 9/11 poetry were published in the years
immediately following the attacks (Metres; Keniston 659; Luger 184).
Stories, essays, and popular songs addressing the events of September
11 appeared not long after the initial poetry. Television shows such as
The West Wing and Third Watch scripted episodes to specifically focus
on 9/11, and the first documentaries and feature films were released in
2002. The first novels to address 9/11 began to appear in 2003; they
ranged from those in which the events were fairly peripheral, such as
American science-fiction writer William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition,
which depicts the main character’s father as disappearing during the
attacks, to works such as French writer Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on
the World, set in the restaurant atop the North Tower where the terrorist
attacks take center stage. Clearly, the impulse to transform the trauma of
9/11 and its aftermath into literary art, to explore the attacks through
the written word, was profound and deep seated.
Yet, at the same time, the attacks reignited questions concerning
the relationship between trauma and literature that have long persisted
and that arose especially in relation to Holocaust writing. Can we and
should we make art in a time of atrocity? If a trauma is so great as to
be “unspeakable,” does art simply cheapen it, reduce its scope, wrongly
present trauma as something that can be controlled and contained? As
German cultural critic Theodor Adorno famously put it, “to write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Prisms 34). Adorno believed that producing
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