Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried: Postmodern Fiction for a Postmodern War

In the western history of human existence the event, idea, and act of war stands totemic in the landscape. Borders both physical and mental have been defined by its threat and execution, and its aura hangs heavily over the last century as the bloodiest in the entire narrative of humanity.1 During a period widely considered to be the most perfect example of the efficient, mechanised destruction of life—the Holocaust—David Rousset gave a name to the experience he saw inside the internment camps as “l’univers concentrationnaire,” a world apart.2 This succinct explanation is at once informative and delimiting, setting up the challenge for all writers that aspire to communicate trauma: how can one communicate when the signifier no longer has a meaningful relationship to what is signified? This crisis of representation is a problem that plagues all that seek to authentically relate the experience of trauma and war in writing.

By virtue of its form and its overarching aim of portraying ‘truth’, The Things They Carried can also be linked, somewhat more nefariously to Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. Kozinski's novel was purported to be an autobiographical account of his brutal, formative experiences as a Jew of World War II but a media investigation later revealed that the author had “conjured up almost all the pathological episodes he narrates”.5 The consternation and outrage that the investigation provoked on both sides of the debate evoked this response from the author: “I aim at truth, not facts”6. Tim O'Brien's statement that “This is a work of fiction,” (O’Brien, 1990: frontpapers) of course nullifies any direct comparisons between Kozinski's unethical subterfuge and his own artistic innovations, but it is important to note the esteem that the 'truth' and the treatment of it can have in the wider world.

“It was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something – just boom, then down – not like in the movies” (O'Brien, 1990:6) With this concise rejection of the filmic conventions of death we are introduced to one of the main battles that O’Brien is waging with his book: the rejection of the cultural assumptions and conventions that any invocation of war is encumbered with. Before we discuss these conventions in The Things They Carried itself, it is informative to analyse the origins and scope of the conventions of war.

“Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign adventures, killing and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you need to frighten them.”7 Noam Chomsky’s typically blunt analysis of the necessities required to engage the American population in its first major “foreign adventure” gives us a specific time at which the creation of the modern conventions of war began. The key elements required in gaining public endorsement for prolonged and bloody wars are by “terrifying them and electing jingoistic fanaticism”8; an enemy and a glut of patriotism are the key ingredients. These remarks whilst relevant are about America’s major modern wars – what happens when we posit these ideas into the realm of Vietnam and the postmodern war?

These traditional, cultural values of war were inverted for Vietnam: the enemy was not one that threatened American soil, the cause was murky and the public support was polarised between blind patriotism and visceral remorse for the military action. When we place these values into the mysteriously dis-informative world of the media reporting their 'facts' through a shadowy system of misrepresentation, lies and disinformation we see that “For the U.S Military and Government, the Vietnam that they had in effect invented, became fact”9 When the authorities start to collapse the boundaries between history and invention, the very ideas of fact and truth become tarnished with an officially endorsed relativism and ideas of traumatic representation become even harder to distil. One of the most infamous examples of the blurring of invention and fact is the My Lai massacre where the military commended the soldiers for their performance, the newspapers reported on a job well done and 128 civilians were annihilated.10 Our ideas of a terrified population and their jingoistic fanaticism have been convoluted; the simple polarizations have been muddied. This is the background upon which The Things They Carried seeks to complicate and simplify, expose and explicate the assumptions and conventions of war through fiction.

We have already hinted at the main thrust of the deconstruction of the book, the binary opposition between truth and fiction. Perhaps one of the most easily assimilated dichotomies; it entails a litany of other inter-related hierarchical preferences: fact is preferable to fiction, truth as reality and fiction as unreality and fact as representative of reality. The effort to subvert these conventions is instantly palpable in the form of the book and its move away from social formal realism. As a form social realism is loaded with the cultural expectancy of reporting the ‘true’ facts, the events as it happened and subsequently the truth of the matter, but this is made inherently impossible by its form “[the realistic novel's] final sense of cohesion offers implicit reassurances that contradictions can be contained within a significantly ordered structure inherent in society”11.

The refusal to adhere to the social realist conventions is apparent from the start of the book. Verisimilitude is achieved through the cataloguing of weights both internal and external “Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a 4.5-calibre pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe light and the responsibility or the lives of his men.” (O’Brien, 1990:6) The listing of the physical items is monotonously long and when combined with the “humping” verb used repeatedly through the passage, the effect is comparative to the tiresome reality of war. Placing the internal responsibility at the end of the list adds a distinct level of gravity to the emotion which is in effect, another concrete item that the lieutenant must bear.

Parallel to this refusal to adhere to the conventions that realism implies is the necessity to escape from the cultural bondage that is initiated as soon as the idea of a war story is invoked.

“As soon as the word genre is sounded, as soon as it is heard as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: ”12

In addition to the more obvious terror and jingoism that we previously mentioned, the war story genre is one that is linked to myriad preconceived ideas and aspirations and through these we can detect “an array of typical motifs: the noble example, the test of courage, the battle as initiation...”13 Underlying the belief in these convictions is the desire to place the communal truths of war into a moral that justifies and glorifies the heroic battles that fellow countrymen are dying for on a grand generalized scale; that a level of morality is conscripted into the moral of the story. The moral forced upon war stories is something that O'Brien vehemently rejects. These cultural assumptions have no place in the actual truth of war, “'Hear that quiet, man?' he said. ‘That quiet – just listen. There's your moral.'” (O’Brien, 1990:74)