Rethinking Trauma in US War Fiction A Dissertation Presented By RUTH ANNE HARIU LAHTI ...

261 Pages·2014·1.02 MB·English

by  Ruth Lahti

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction

A Dissertation Presented

By

RUTH ANNE HARIU LAHTI

Submitted to the Graduate School of the
University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

May 2014

English
© Copyright by Ruth Anne Hariu Lahti
All Rights Reserved
Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction

A Dissertation Presented

By

RUTH ANNE HARIU LAHTI

Approved as to style and content by:

____________________________________________
Laura Doyle, Chair

____________________________________________
Stephen Clingman, Member

____________________________________________
Sara Lennox, Member

__________________________________________
Jenny Spencer, Department Head
Department of English
DEDICATION
To Adam, now and always
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At this final stage of my dissertation project, I first want to express my gratitude
to the members of my committee. Warm thanks to Laura Doyle, Stephen Clingman, and
Sara Lennox for their guidance during this project and for the ways in which their own
scholarship has inspired me. My special thanks go to my chair Laura, who has been an
extraordinary mentor in all ways—helping me find my authentic voice as a literary
scholar and teaching me that the spirit with which we undertake our work in this
profession is as critical to our success as the content of that work. Thanks also to Deborah
Carlin, who has been a generous mentor throughout my graduate career and whose
influence has shaped this project.
Many thanks to all of the supportive faculty and staff of the UMass English
Department, the Graduate School, the Undergraduate Advising Office, and the Du Bois
Library. I especially thank Wanda Bak for her expert assistance at every stage of the
graduate program. My heartfelt gratitude goes to my graduate student peers—they have
made me understand the transformative impact of working within a true community of
scholars and teachers. I also thank my undergraduate mentors at James Madison
University, whose encouragement paved the way to my graduate studies.
Thank you to all the members of my Hariu and Lahti families, especially my
parents Laird and Bethany Hariu for their early and ongoing support. Most of all, I thank
my husband Adam, whose love, faith, and joyful spirit have sustained me every step of
the way.

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ABSTRACT

TRANSNATIONAL GESTURES: RETHINKING TRAUMA IN U.S. WAR FICTION

MAY 2014

RUTH ANNE HARIU LAHTI, B.A., JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY

M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Directed by: Professor Laura Doyle

This dissertation addresses the need to "world" our literary histories of U.S. war
fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale
the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to
representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war
fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and
developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this
analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction
privileges the "authentic" experience of the white, male American soldier-author, which
inadequately accounts for total war's impact on women, ethnic minorities, non-
Americans, and non-combatants on all sides of the battle. The literary text, I contend, can
restore a view to the diversity of war experiences, and my methodology provides a model
for recovering these overlooked perspectives: close-reading characters’ bodily gestures. I
develop this method to resituate war as relational, always involving two or more
participants who in the local encounter are differently vulnerable to operations of national
power. In three sections of paired chapters, this method illuminates the transnational
dimensions of canonical war fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien alongside
fiction by authors not as fully associated with the genre: Susan O’Neill, Toni Morrison,
Chang-rae Lee, and Jayne Anne Phillips. These authors represent World War I through
Vietnam; yet, in order to emphasize my reorientation of trauma theory, the chapters are
organized around particular stages of war trauma: the event of war, homecoming from
war, and war trauma across generations. By prioritizing war's embodied interactions, this
study moves away from trauma theory's grounding in a universal view of the singular
subject toward a conception of war trauma as intersubjective and inflected by uneven
material realities. In doing so, "Transnational Gestures" contributes a new perspective to
current scholarly debates about how American literary studies can intersect postcolonial,
world, and empire studies in ways that better attend to complex legacies of global
violence and inequality.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...................................................................................................v

ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................vi

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION: TRANSNATIONAL TRAUMA AND THE BODY OF
AMERICAN WAR FICTION.................................................................................1

A. Overview................................................................................................1
B. Background and Methodology...............................................................5

PART 1: SITUATING THE SURVIVOR-AUTHOR

1. GESTURAL MIMICRY AND BREAKING THE FRAME OF
THE THINGS THEY CARRIED............................................................................24

2. SUSAN O'NEILL, WOMEN'S VIETNAM WAR EXPERIENCE, AND
DON'T MEAN NOTHING......................................................................................53

PART 2: "THE WORLD-IN-THE-HOME": THE AFTERMATH OF WAR AND
THE PROBLEM OF HOMECOMING

3. THE HOMECOMINGS OF TOTAL WAR AND HEMINGWAY'S
IN OUR TIME........................................................................................................91

4. TONI MORRISON'S HOME AND THE "ORIGINATING
RACIAL HOUSE"...............................................................................................129

PART 3: TRANSPACIFIC POSTMEMORY: THE AFTERLIVES OF WAR
TRAUMA

5. CHANG-RAE LEE'S A GESTURE LIFE, THE ASIAN AMERICAN
BODY, AND THE CROSS-CURRENTS OF POSTMEMORY........................154

6. JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS'S LARK AND TERMITE AND THE
BODIES OF MAGICAL REALISM...................................................................204

CONCLUSION................................................................................................................238

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................242
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INTRODUCTION
TRANSNATIONAL TRAUMA AND THE BODY OF AMERICAN WAR FICTION
Far from being an inert, passive, noncultural and ahistorical term, the body may be seen as the crucial
term, the site of contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual, and intellectual struggles.
--Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism

As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new
arrangements of culture and power.
--Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

A. Overview
Hurtling headlong into the twenty-first century, American literary studies has
encountered the pressing need to "world" its literary histories, to situate the significance
of American literature within its global contexts. The boundaries of our national literary
landscape have been transformed by the ethical exigencies of 9/11, as a realization of the
porosity of these conceptual boundaries also opens a view to the ways in which U.S.
literature is imbricated in complex global landscapes of power. Thinking in this enlarged
scale also prompts us to acknowledge another enlarged scale that fires the urgency of
global thinking: that of total war, particularly as Clausewitz’s mid-nineteenth century
description of total war has encountered the potentiality of total destruction in our nuclear
age. Indeed, William Faulkner pointedly vocalizes this urgency to his global audience at
the mid-point of the last century upon his receipt of the 1949 Nobel Prize, "There is only
the question: When will I be blown up?" The enlarged scale of total war signals the ways
in which the battlefield has converged with and increasingly depended upon the home
front, as soldiers and civilians alike across national contexts have become participants in
and victims of war. Attending to the event of war on a global scale promotes important
insights about what Jean Luc Nancy has called our global “violent relatedness” (xvii), yet
1
what often falls out of view when thinking in models of totality is the force of the
particular—the deep textures of individual human experiences that can evince the ethical
consequences of asymmetrical political and economic relations and imperial histories.
Along this line of thinking, this study of U.S. war fiction seeks to take up the questions:
how can we honor the humanitarian impulse of conceptualizing war on a world scale
while simultaneously attending to drastically uneven positions of individuals’ experience
within the event of war? How does one apprehend the presence of the "world" in war
fiction?
In this balancing act between attending to the universal and to the particular,
recognizing the framework through which U.S. war fiction imagines the world is a first
step. This frame can often be deceptively small, as compellingly illustrated in one the of
the last century's most important works of war fiction. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt
Vonnegut includes a scene that powerfully captures humans' limited vision of reality in
contrast to the expansive vision of the alien species, the Tralfamadorians; in this scene,
the Tralfamadorians use a metaphor to give Billy Pilgrim a sense of what he has been
missing:
But among them was this poor Earthling, and his head was encased in a
steel sphere which he could never take off. There was only one eyehole
through which he could look, and welded to that eyehole were six feet of
pipe. This was only the beginning of Billy's miseries in the metaphor. He
was also strapped to a steel lattice which was bolted to a flatcar on rails,
and there was no way he could turn his head or touch the pipe. The far end
of the pipe rested on a bi-pod which was also bolted to the flatcar. All
Billy could see was the little dot at the end of the pipe. He didn't even
know he was on a flatcar, didn't even know there was anything peculiar
about his situation. (115)

In a novel principally focused on the senselessness of war, this image dramatizes the
poverty of human vision. I begin with Vonnegut's cutting critique of human perception in
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order to draw a parallel to another form of envisioning the world in a diminished scale: in
a globalized era, scholarship on U.S. wars likewise has largely missed the full scale of
human suffering involved in these wars. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, however, whose vision is
hopelessly blinkered, the expressive capacities of fiction offer us glimpses into war in a
more global context. This returns us to the initial question, how does one apprehend the
presence of the "world" in war fiction?
This study provides one answer to this question in the particular case of U.S. war
representation by arguing that a transnational approach to this literary genre reveals the
world in American wars while simultaneously attending to the ethical exigencies of
particular traumatic experience. I turn to the generative site of the human body to
differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war representation, thereby rethinking
psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of
reading the literature of war. In what follows, I demonstrate that the literary text can
capture a glimpse of the diversity of war experiences, and my methodology provides a
model of critical practice through which we can recover overlooked textual presences:
reading characters’ bodily gestures. Influenced by postcolonial, feminist, and
performance theories, I develop this method to foreground war as a relational event,
always involving two or more participants who in the local encounter are differently
vulnerable to operations of national power as these structure war. By prioritizing war's
embodied interactions, this study moves away from trauma theory's typical grounding in
the singular subject toward a conception of war trauma as co-produced and inflected by
material realities. In her work Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Anna
Tsing describes how one can harness the ethical power of universal thinking—such as
3