verbava все записи автора Fighting to understand: violence, form, and truth-claims in Lesy, Vonnegut, and Herr

By Stacey Peebles, Philological Quarterly. Fall, 2005.
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In 1973, Michael Lesy published his first book, a collection of photographs, newspaper accounts, records from an insane asylum, literary excerpts, and other materials that together provide a portrait of the town of Black River Fails, Wisconsin, from 1885 to 1900. He called the book Wisconsin Death Trip, and it has remained in print as something of a cult classic ever since. Lesy provides an introduction and conclusion, and Warren Susman a preface, but otherwise the images and text speak for themselves, with no connecting narration or explanation. Lesy would go on to publish a number of other books, and is currently a professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College. In December of 2006, he was named a United States Artist Fellow, and in a statement he prepared for the program, Lesy says that in his work he uses "historical photographs from public archives--utilitarian images made for every purpose except art--to tell a variety of difficult truths about our country and our shared pasts." (1)

This emphasis on archival photography certainly is evident when considering the body of his work as a whole--twelve books, including titles like Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life, 1860-1945, Visible Light, and, his most recent, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties. Yet even among these other inventive projects, Wisconsin Death Trip stands out. (2) This odd collage of information and imagination focuses on the historical, but reasonably could also be referred to as art, a novel of sorts, a collective psychological portrait, or even a scrapbook, as Wisconsin Death Trip has no page numbers. In another of his works, The Forbidden Zone, Lesy notes that "those who read the book couldn't decide if it was poetry or history, a fabrication or a discourse, a hoax or a revelation. The book took on a life of its own. It bred other books; it bred plays and ballets, concertos and an opera. It made me famous and notorious; honored and suspect." (3)

As Lesy implies, knowing what to call a work often determines how the work, as well as its creator, are evaluated. If an agreement about form--that is, a classification tending toward broad terms like art, history, film, and photography, rather than narrower distinctions between, for example, the genres of comedy and horror--guides our interpretive acts, then different forms entail different understandings about the nature of truth and the way that truth finds proper expression. Of particular interest are works representing violence and war that include overt truth-claims about their content, claims that are then deliberately complicated by the work's ambiguous form. Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip as well as Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Michael Herr's Dispatches all make explicit claims to truth about life in rural America at the turn of the century, about the firebombing of Dresden, and about the experience of Vietnam, respectively, though none of these works are easily classifiable as a single form or method of expression. They do so, I argue, to push against more established, collective histories of violence and war, ones which necessarily negate the truths of individual experience, truths which often lack resolution and conclusion, which resist theraputic assimilation into one's life story, and which cannot--and should not--be "domesticated" by traditional narrative. In opening the space for historical and narrative resistance, these works have the potential to voice political resistance as well, writing against, for instance, the possibility of "another Dresden" or "another Vietnam." But in avoiding adherence to a particular form, they leave such potential implicit, and as such, perhaps more powerful.

The concerns and challenges of "telling violence" have been addressed by trauma scholars like Judith Herman and Cathy Caruth, and may seem similar to what we saw with reader-response critics like Wolfgang Iser, and his concern with the fundamental asymmetry between the reader and any kind of text. Though not consciously revisiting Iser, many war writers have pointed out that this asymmetry is particularly acute when a soldier tries to communicate either in speech or writing the experience of violence to a noncombatant on the "home front." For Iser, this is the experience of all reading, regardless of subject. The asymmetry in knowledge, understanding, and points of reference between writer and reader constitutes the blanks or gaps in the text that the reader must bridge while reading, thus achieving communication. "The blank in the fictional text," he writes, "induces and guides the reader's constitutive activity." (4) These gaps are the unseen joints of the text, information that is temporarily withheld--a bit of unheard dialogue, perhaps, or a motif that is not explicitly elucidated. But the gaps in violent texts like those by Lesy, Vonnegut, and Herr are much more significant, as they do not occur in an otherwise stable text. Here, form and narrative are being deliberately scrambled as a direct reflection of the ineffable nature of violent experience. Indeed, the goal of communication is quite different than that which Iser delineates; what is communicated is in many ways a kind of incommunicability. This goal is common to many works about violence and war, of course, but these texts work to achieve it in ways that have broader implications for the way we understand violence, representation, and the fraught but rich relationship between them.

Of the three works, formal ambiguity is most obvious with Wisconsin Death Trip. Lesy, in his introduction, and Susman, in the preface, both address the format of the book and how it should be classified. Susman's statement about this could easily be applied to Slaughterhouse-Five and Dispatches as well; he notes that Lesy wants to explore a kind of psychological underworld, but that

in the course of that exploration the author soon discovered (and this he shares with many other creative young thinkers, scholars, and artists of his generation) that the old forms, bequeathed by a great historical tradition developed with enormous skill and energy most especially over the last century, will no longer serve his purposes. The structure of experience that most interests him cannot be captured by the logic of observation, description, or explanation traditionally deployed in the narrative (which tells a story), the monograph (which permits systematic analysis), or even the documentary (which records the "facts"). (5)

If Lesy failed to find a historical genre to suit him, the approach he takes may have left the historical form behind almost altogether. Susman does acknowledge that Lesy's work suffers "from some confusions, laboring as many pioneer works do under serious methodological difficulties," but ends his preface by affirming the work's scholarly value, stating that "the result is a serious historical work that must be taken seriously" (3-4). In his introduction, Lesy details the book's contents and, to some extent, his historical methodology. The Black River Falls town photographer Charles Van Schaik took the photos included in the book between 1890 and 1910, and the father and son newsman team Frank and George Cooper wrote the material excerpted from the local paper. The medical records are from nearby Mendota State Asylum, and Lesy also incorporates passages from novels by authors like Glenway Wescott and Hamlin Garland, as well as additional passages about local history and gossip that were apparently written by Lesy himself. "The text was constructed," Lesy tells us in the introduction, "as music is composed. It was meant to obey its own laws of tone, pitch, rhythm, and repetition" (7).

The book obeys its own laws, Lesy says, in order to tell the truth. His introduction begins with a truth-claim similar to those of Herr and Vonnegut:

The pictures you're about to see are of people who were once actually alive. The excerpts you're about to read recount events these people, or people like them, once experienced. None of the accounts are fictitious. Neither the pictures nor the events were, when they were made or experienced, considered to be unique, extraordinary, or sensational. (5)

Lesy ends his introduction, however, by noting that although one aim of this project is "historical actuality," its deeper aim is much more metaphysical or artistic. His description of the book as "flexible mirror" veers dangerously toward the baroque, though it does reflect an awareness of historical understanding as an interpretive, enculturated process:
This book is an exercise in historical actuality, but it has only as much to do with history as the heat and spectrum of the light that makes it visible, or the retina and optical nerve of your eye. It is as much an exercise in history as it is an experiment of alchemy. Its primary intention is to make you experience the pages now before you as a flexible mirror that if turned one way can reflect the odor of the air that surrounded me as I wrote this; if turned another, can project your anticipation of next Monday; if turned again, can transmit the sound of breathing in the deep winter air of a room of eighty years ago, and if turned once again, this time backward on itself, can fuse all three images, and so can focus who I once was, what you might yet be, and what may have happened, all upon a single point of your imagination, and transform them like light focused by a lens on paper, from a lower form of energy to a higher. (9)

Then begins the text proper, which is divided into year-by-year sections. The first pages of the chapter titled "1885-6" include the following newspaper items:

La Crosse was somewhat agitated last week by an alleged ghost, manifesting itself by the usual symptoms. March 13.

The wife of Hans Nelson committed suicide at her home in the town of Washburn, Grant County, the other morning, by cutting her throat. She had been deranged for some time. April 24.

N. H. Young went 'to Loyal ... and brought home a bottle of whisky which he put up in the house near a bottle of carbolic acid which had been there for some time. He arose in the night, drank about 4 ounces at one swallow and lived about 4 minutes.' August 10. (17-18)

Page after page of accounts of disease, insanity, murder, robbery, and vandalism--accounts that Lesy calls "unsensational"--are interspersed with pictures of prized horses, deceased relatives, stiffly posed families, and various other ephemera. Susan Sontag discusses the pastiche nature of Wisconsin Death Trip in her book On Photography, including Lesy's book specifically in her section on photography and the surreal. "Surrealism," she notes, "is the art of generalizing the grotesque and then discovering nuances (and charms) in that ... Surrealism can make of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip." (6) Sontag says of Lesy's particular project:
In case anyone was thinking it was Vietnam and all the domestic funk and nastiness of the past decade which had made America a country of darkening hopes, Lesy argues that the dream had collapsed by the end of the last century--not in the inhuman cities but in the farming communities; that the whole country has been crazy, and for a long time. Of course, Wisconsin Death Trip doesn't actually prove anything. The force of its historical argument is the force of collage. To Van Schaick's disturbing, handsomely time-eroded photographs Lesy could have matched other texts from the period love letters, diaries--to give another, perhaps less desperate impression. His book is rousing, fashionably pessimistic polemic, and totally whimsical as history. (7)

As Sontag aptly notes, though the late 1960s and early 1970s may very well have seemed like a breaking point in our national history, when the American dream began to fragment and disintegrate in earnest, records like those Lesy collects together provide a significant counter-claim to that thesis. But the validity of that thesis, or at least the method used in reaching it, is called "whimsical" by Sontag and strongly criticized by other writers. Many focus on Lesy's conclusion, which references several sociological and historical studies and argues, rather formally, that rural populations like these suffered from obsessive-compulsiveness and paranoia, largely as a reaction to oppressive socioeconomic conditions. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who reviewed the book for the New York Times, doubts if Lesy's conclusions are justified by the "evidence" he presents, "if evidence it may be called." (8) C. Zoe Smith has written about Lesy's troublesome methodology, and points out Lesy's failure to acknowledge, in the conclusion or elsewhere, that the practice of photographing the dead was commonplace at that time, or that because of the long exposure times for glass-plate photographs, subjects tended to look stern and unblinking due to the discomfort of holding their pose rather than because of a psychological problem. (9) If Lesy is aware of the enculturation of historical understanding, then in this way he may be exploiting that very phenomenon.

When taking this book to be history, sociology, or even psychological profile, these critics deem Wisconsin Death Trip to be, at best, problematic.

In a 2003 interview, Lesy himself discusses what he calls the book's failure, which he attributes to people's inclination to focus on the text, or the images, but not a complex layering of the two. When asked, "Are you a historian? Writer? Photographer?" Lesy replied, "I think I have a polymorphously perverse imagination. To the extent I have an ability to use words, and to the extent I have the ability to use photographs, other peoples' photographs, to talk about what passes for historical reality. So figure it out. I don't know what that is. No one knows what that is." (10) As Lesy notes in The Forbidden Zone, however, that ambiguity has attracted other artists to the text and spawned adaptations of sorts, including composer Daron Hagen's "Songs of Madness and Sorrow," a dramatic cantata for tenor and piano, and James Marsh's 1999 documentary, also titled Wisconsin Death Trip. (11) John Corner, in fact, has written about questions of genre and the "discursive space of 'documentary'" within Marsh's film adaptation, which adds scenes of contemporary Black River Falls and its inhabitants. As befitting the film's source material and the critical conversation surrounding the text, Corner discusses "the extent to which the film is to be regarded as an historical documentary and the extent to which it is to be seen primarily as an 'art project.'" (12)

Like Lesy deliberately complicates his role as "historian" in order to challenge ideas about historical reality, Vonnegut and Herr complicate their roles as "author" and 'Journalist" respectively. Each writer emphasizes the highly individualized nature of violent experience, and thus writes against the more traditional, broad, and collective narrative project of a historian, a journalist, or an author writing about historical events. In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut explains the difficulty of representing the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, which he experienced as an American prisoner-of-war in 1944. He begins with a truth-claim similar to the statement Lesy includes in his introduction:
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names.

I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground. (13)

Putting his memories in meaningful order, however, is harder than he thinks:

I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.

But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then--not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown.

I think of how useless the Dresden part of my memory has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about.... (2)

The book about Dresden that is Slaughterhouse-Five is as much about this author as it is about Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of the tale that starts in Chapter Two. Billy, a prisoner-of-war in World War II and also present at the Dresden firebombing, goes on to marry, have children, and become a successful optometrist, but also believes that he has been kidnapped by aliens called Tralfamadores and come "unstuck" in time. The speaker/author in the opening chapter, however, breaks in at odd moments as the book progresses to assure the reader that "I was there." When an American near Billy wails about the diarrhea brought on by a POW meal, Vonnegut adds, "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book," and later says the same thing after stating that someone behind Billy in a boxcar said the word "Oz": "That was I. That was me. The only other city I'd ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana." And finally, near the end of the book, the speaker makes sure to note that he was with Billy in Dresden after the firebombing: "I was there" (67, 125, 148, 212).

Although the question of form here is less complicated than with Wisconsin Death Trip, the book's structure and content are still enough of a pastiche of styles that critics have varying ideas about what to call Slaughterhouse-Five. Peter Freese refers to the book as "this violation of generic conventions in a self-reflexive tale that blends autobiography with realistic narration, satirical exaggeration, and 'science fiction of an obviously kidding sort.'" (14) Though this may seem more of a question of genre, I would argue that the blending of factual and fictional experience and the non-chronological narration of Billy Pilgrim's temporally un-stuck life do raise fundamental questions about narrative and the novel form. Vonnegut's book in some ways resembles the "novels" of the Tralfamadores: "Billy couldn't read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out--in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars." An alien explains to Billy how the books work:
"... each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message--describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once." (88)

Given Vonnegut's claim in Chapter One that "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre," that is, nothing that will make it make sense, this kind of storytelling that is literally "alien" to us might be entirely appropriate. The Dresden bombing at the heart of this story was unprecedented; British and American planes dropped approximately 3,000 tons of bombs on the residential and largely undefended center of Dresden, which was occupied by citizens as well as POWs and refugees. The attack killed about 135,000 civilians in fourteen hours and ten minutes. (15) Freese sees the nonstandard form--or the lack of form altogether--of Slaughterhouse-Five as a result of trying to write honestly about a horrible, real event:
The painful gestation of this unique novel can hardly surprise, since any writer who tries to reconstruct a historical atrocity of such unimaginable proportions by means of traditional fictional strategies, that is, by storifying the event through an individual narrative perspective, is bound to fail, for the sheer number of casualties transcends the limits of personal empathy. A historical novel about the destruction of Dresden, therefore, is not only beset by the genre-specific problems of recreating the past through the epistemological limitations of the present, but also defeated by the very limits of the human imagination. This is why Vonnegut has to resort to unheard-of narrative strategies and why Slaughterhouse-Five is a tale that defies all generic classifications and introduces strange new ways of dealing with the grievous lessons of history. (16)

Vonnegut, like Lesy, attempts to capture some fundamental aspect of violent experience that the traditional forms--historical or novelistic narrative--smooth over and assimilate. When one narrativizes a historical event, one assigns it meaning. Freese calls this the "domestication of horror" that Vonnegut works hard to prevent. Vonnegut also repeatedly castigates, through satire, accounts of horrific events that do resort to this domestication; two that have prominent places in the text are Truman's announcement of the bombing of Hiroshima, and David Irving's book The Destruction of Dresden. War literature such as The Red Badge of Courage is critiqued as well, though more subtly. We see "poor, doomed" Edgar Derby re-reading Crane's novel--Derby, who "expected to become a captain, a company commander, because of his wisdom and age," but ends up as a prisoner-of-war later shot in Dresden for stealing a teapot (99, 92). For Derby, war will not be the masculine rite of initiation and reward that Crane's novel perhaps led him to expect. Thus despite Vonnegut's resistance of traditional forms of meaning-making, the book still has a moral stance, and critics like Robert Merrill, Peter Scholl, and Lawrence Broer have argued that Billy Pilgrim's resigned acceptance of anything that happens is as inappropriate as Truman's or Irving's justifications of horrific acts, and is also ultimately critiqued by Vonnegut. (17) As the book appeared hard on the heels of the Tet Offensive of 1968 and growing doubts about being "resigned" to victory in Vietnam, a condemnation of the justification and domestication of the horrors of war would seem particularly apt.
In one sense, the phrase "so it goes" that Vonnegut repeats over one hundred times in the book might seem like resigned acceptance as well. The phrase appears immediately after every death that occurs in the book, and "so it goes" for war casualties, suicides, even the crucified Christ on Billy's wall. But this constant repetition, the constant reminder of the inevitability and, often, the absurdity of death, especially in times of war, actually functions as the opposite of resigned acceptance--it forces you to keep noticing, to keep paying attention to even the smallest or most distant death. None are insignificant, and all are memorialized. The seeming irreverence here actually may be the highest form of reverence for Vonnegut. This kind of reverence, the attention paid to every life lost, is precisely that which is absent or explained away in the war stories Vonnegut writes against.

According to Michael Herr, one of the memorializing phrases used by grunts in Vietnam was strikingly similar: "There it is." Near the end of Dispatches, Herr describes watching a truck drive by with dead bodies in the back; as the truck hits bumps in the road, the bodies' leg jerk up and down in the truck bed. "'How about that shit,' someone said, and 'Just like the motherfucker,' and 'There it is.' Pure essence of Vietnam, not even stepped on once, you could spin it out into visions of laughing lucent skulls or call it just another body in a bag, say that it cut you in half for the harvest or came and took you under like a lover, nothing ever made the taste less strong." (18) He calls this kind of expression "pure essence" as it captures something fundamental about this experience, and memorializes it in an original way. It is "not even stepped on once." Herr strives for something like that kind of expression himself. The book is a collection, expansion, and revision of the reports Herr sent back from Vietnam when he was covering the war for Esquire magazine, and, like Vonnegut's project, is as much about Herr himself as the war. Critics generally refer to the book as a blend of memoir, military history, and psychological portrait, but some attempts at categorization are more creative. Brady Harrison, in discussing the book's postmodern qualities, calls it "a movie, a Hendrix rift, and a spliff all in one." (19) Herr's relationship to his storytelling is particularly vexed, even more so than Lesy's and Vonnegut's, because of his role as war journalist in Vietnam. For Herr, the two most insidious and dangerous sources of misinformation about Vietnam, and about violence in general, are war movies and most war journalism. They "domesticate the horror," to use Freese's phrase. In his chapter "Colleagues," Herr details the sins of conventional journalism, and says that it "could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history" (218). He calls the relationship between the Command, the Administration, and the press a "cross-fertilization of ignorance," and implicates war movies in a similar way, musing about "all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good" (209). In war, listening to and believing the wrong kinds of stories can have serious consequences.

Jen Dunnaway argues that Dispatches appropriates the form of oral history "to form a system of resistance, the 'unauthorized' narrative of the grunt subverting and replacing the officially sanctioned narratives of military and government institutions." (20) Michael Zeitlin and Paul Budra have agreed, and noted that if these voices "enrich our quest after historical knowledge, insofar as they represent what Michel Foucault has called 'the living openness of history' ... they also complicate it, deferring our attempts to resolve and conclude." (21) In war, Herr insists, one's actions are not infused with inherent resolution or conclusion, and so to speak as if they are is to buy into that "ignorant" propaganda, even if one does so to a lesser degree than the Command, the Administration, and the press. "In war more than in other life you don't really know what you're doing most of the time, you're just behaving, and afterward you can make up any kind of bullshit you want to about it, say you felt good or bad, loved it or hated it, did this or that, the right thing or the wrong thing; still, what happened happened" (21). Those violent events are not assimilated easily into one's life and life story, with or without the bullshit. They exist as an explosive and potentially lethal "blood consciousness": And if they just asked, "What was your scene there?" I wouldn't know what to say either, so I'd say I was trying to write about it and didn't want to dissipate it. But before you could dissipate it you had to locate it, Plant you now, dig you later: information printed on the eye, stored in the brain, coded over skin and transmitted by blood, maybe what they meant by "blood consciousness." And transmitted over and over without letup on increasingly powerful frequencies until you either received it or blocked it out one last time, informational Death of a Thousand Cuts, each cut so precise and subtle you don't even feel them accumulating, you just get up one morning and your ass falls off. (251)

And yet despite the risks, rather than making up "bullshit," Herr advocates a kind of linguistic prayer: "After enough time passed and memory receded and settled, the name itself became a prayer, coded like all prayer to go past the extremes of petition and gratitude: Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, say again, until the word lost all its old loads of pain, pleasure, horror, guilt, nostalgia" (56). Say again, one might add, until something vaguely like those associations have been communicated to the non-combatant reader or listener. Thus Herr ends his book: "And no moves left for me at all but to write down some few last words and make the dispersion, Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there" (260).

Herr so vehemently writes against the false narratives of Vietnam that his entire work functions as an extended claim to truth, albeit a complicated one. In the book's opening, he describes the outdated map of Vietnam that hangs on the wall of his Saigon apartment, which he calls "a marvel, especially now that it wasn't real anymore." He then explains the impossibility of ever using maps to tell the truth about Vietnam:
If dead ground could come back and haunt you the way dead people do, they'd have been able to mark my map CURRENT and burn the ones they'd been using since '64, but count on it, nothing like that was going to happen. It was late '67 now, even the most detailed maps didn't reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. We knew that the uses of most information were flexible, different pieces of ground told different stories to different people. We also knew that for years now there had been no country here but the war. (3)

This statement works as a kind of reverse truth-claim: in telling the reader what is not real, that maps and other claims to truth about Vietnam are actually false, Herr can implicitly make a claim for the truth of his own account that writes against the others. "We knew" these things to be untrue, he says, and prepares the reader to hear about the more proper way to "read" Vietnam.

In representing real violence, Lesy, Vonnegut, and Herr all pose tough questions for themselves and for the reader: what is right, what is real, and what is right to tell? These are questions that a closer adherence to the rules of form might have tempered or even rendered moot; there are rules for traditional historical accounts, war novels, and journalism, and there are narrative structures to function within. But each author specifically rails against the histories or stories that these forms are capable of producing. Lesy challenges our idea of the pastoral, as well as the efficacy of historical account or even simple unaccompanied text to properly communicate the depth of experience, in particular the experience of poverty, disease, and alienation. Vonnegut subtitles his work The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, and in the book he tells us that he does so to fulfill his promise to another veteran's wife that he won't do what war stories do; as she puts it, "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs" (14). And Herr talks at length about the disjunct between the Vietnam experience and the way that experience is translated onscreen and in print. "Vietnam is awkward ... and if people don't even want to hear about it, you know they're not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up. (The Green Berets doesn't count. That wasn't really about Vietnam, it was about Santa Monica.) So we have all been compelled to make our own movies ... and this one is mine" (188).

Just as Herr calls Dispatches "nay movie" and repeatedly refers to his work as a kind of film, Lesy and Vonnegut also reference other media to underscore their works' challenges to perception and reception. Lesy not only uses images as a vital component of his text, but also refers to the text itself as something one hears rather than reads. In his 2003 interview, Lesy says of Wisconsin Death Trip that "people remembered the horror stories. And only remembered the horror stories in their reading. And the intent was something different. The text was to be a soundtrack." (22) Vonnegut makes reference to several different modes of communication; the book itself is subtitled "A Duty-Dance with Death," and begins the story of Billy Pilgrim with the command "Listen:" He ends the book with the onomatopoeiac birdcall "Poo-tee-weet?" Vonnegut also compares the Tralfamadorian temporal existence--and, by extension, Billy's--to that of a photograph: "The stills were a lot more Tralfamadorian than the movies, since you could look at them whenever you wanted to, and they wouldn't change" (23, 215, 200). Vonnegut's books make liberal use of actual images as well; Slaughterhouse-Five includes drawings of an epitaph on a gravestone, a sign on a latrine, and an engraved pendant hanging between Montana Wildhack's breasts (122, 125, 209). (23) These images are rendered rather crudely, and would seem to be included not to provide the reader with the kind of detailed and subtle information only available in, for instance, the reproduction of a photograph or work of art, but to surprise the reader with a representation of these three varied "texts" in a different format. All three authors assert that the content of their books is not containable only in text, but must be considered also as sound, image, or a combination of both.

Appropriately, trauma scholar Judith Herman uses a similar reference to sound and image to describe the psychic phenomena of trauma and recovery, while noting like many psychologists that the act of narrativizing is a necessary step for victims of violent experience to begin the work of recovery. Like Jonathan Shay in his literary and psychological study of combat Achilles in Vietnam, Herman in Trauma and Recovery emphasizes the construction of a personal narrative as the crucial element in the healing process. The "work of reconstruction," she notes, "actually transforms the traumatic memory, so that it can be integrated into the survivor's life story." She contrasts this "trauma story" with the traumatic memory itself, which she says is "wordless and static":

One observer describes the trauma story in its untransformed state as a "prenarrative." It does not develop or progress in time, and it does not reveal the storyteller's feelings or interpretation of events. Another therapist describes traumatic memory as a series of still snapshots or a silent movie; the role of therapy is to provide the music and the words. (24)

Like the still photos in Wisconsin Death Trip coupled with unexplanatory text, like the searing images from Billy Pilgrim's life seen through a Tralfamadorian, nonlinear lens, traumatic memories are prenarrative. The kind of narrative integration that therapy strives to provide is precisely what Lesy, Vonnegut, and Herr, as authors, resist. They do not want to create a movie in which the soundtrack helps you know how to feel about the images you are seeing. For these authors, the comfort and meaning gained in such an assimilation would be experiential truth lost. Thus, their peculiar project of trying to make their silent movie "talk" without narrativizing. As Herr puts it, "what happened happened"; the way you shape it later is, to Herr at least, bullshit. That kind of narrativizing domesticates the horror, and with some horrific subjects, that domestication is unacceptable. And so in order to show us just "what happened," without the bullshit, these authors break the rules of storytelling and force us to question the boundaries of history, art, journalism, and authorship itself; they force us in some sense to confront the represented violence on very different and unfamiliar terms, without the meaningful foundation of form.

Cathy Caruth has written extensively about the relation of trauma and narrative, and in her Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, she addresses works by Freud, de Man, Kant, Lacan, Heinrich von Kleist, and the filmmaking team of Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais. She calls trauma "the story of a wound that cries out," an experience that happens too suddenly and horrifically to be fully known "until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor." (25) Representing that trauma, therefore, is a complex negotiation between knowing and not knowing: "If traumatic experience, as Freud indicates suggestively, is an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs, then these texts, each in its turn, ask what it means to transmit and to theorize around a crisis that is marked, not by a simply knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness." (26) Caruth looks more specifically at Freud's Moses and Monotheism and Duras and Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour to explore the nature of collective trauma, of trauma as cultural as well as individual history. In Chapter One, "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History," Caruth includes an epigraph from Herr's Dispatches, although she does not address that text in her analysis. Caruth's ideas about the paradox of writing trauma--"that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it"--becomes even more interesting, I would argue, when considering works grappling with America's violent history, violence that is so easily and frequently assimilated into traditional narrative forms. (27) The problem of conveying that inability to know becomes a most peculiar challenge.

In discussing the phenomenon of narrative "gaps," Iser does address the problem of the modern novel, which he argues has something of a similar project. "How is one to understand a text," he asks, "whose meaning can only be constituted through the realization that it transcends existing frames of reference?" Novels like those by Joyce or Beckett, he argues, invoke certain expected functions in order to transform them into blanks, and do so most often by "a deliberate omission of generic features that have been firmly established by the tradition of the genre." This sounds fairly similar to the project of the texts in question here, although they challenge not only generic but formal features. The difference, I think, lies in what Iser identifies as the result of these challenges in the modern novel. When books like Ulysses continually resist integration into a coherent, unified whole, they communicate the idea that "everyday life can be experienced as a history of ever-changing viewpoints." If the reader experiences the historicity of his or her own viewpoints, this then can have the effect of turning world-views into "mere possibilities of how the world can be experienced." The act of reading these kinds of novels "corresponds to the openness of the world." (28) Though at times a frustrating experience for the reader, the ultimate reflection allowed here is a positive one; the world is open and variously accessible, and play is possible and even necessary. For writers addressing individual and historical violence and trauma, however, that openness is perhaps not something to celebrate, even if it does lend itself to aesthetic innovation. Lesy, Vonnegut, and Herr might add that the openness of the world and the word have their origin in an open wound.

That openness, then, communicates something about the nature of experience in general, but, more poignantly and politically, about the nature of violent experience in particular. Lesy, Vonnegut, and Herr put the reader into something like the soldier's interpretive and specular position, where immediate narrative assimilation of violent events is simply not possible. If these representations push back against the large-scale, depersonalized justifications of war and violence, then so much the better. In that sense, Vietnam is a touchstone for all three writers. Vonnegut and Lesy may write about Dresden and the Midwest, but in the cultural context of 1969 and 1973, readers would certainly have found evidence of fragmentation, disillusion, and alienation resonant with their contemporary experience of the height of the Vietnam War, Altamont, Kent State, and Watergate. The national experience of Vietnam in particular, a kind of collective rude awakening, demands the project of revisiting and revising earlier, seemingly bucolic or righteous times in American history.

In fact, Lesy notes in The Forbidden Zone that while he spent his days at the University of Wisconsin engaged in this project, poring through the clippings and photos that would later become Wisconsin Death Trip, he would go home, in the evenings, to Vonnegut: "Every night I read and reread Slaughterhouse-Five, rocking back and forth to Billy Pilgrim's 'So it goes.'" The mantra provides, if not exactly comfort, at least a way of paying attention, and of remembering the necessity to do so. He decides to title his book "what some people who used drugs at the time called hallucinations of death and rebirth." (29) If, as Herr suggests, "Vietnam, we've all been there," then Lesy and Vonnegut would agree that America may well have "been there" long before the 1960s. The potential for horror is at least accompanied, as Lesy implies, by a potential for rebirth, as long as we take the time to look closely at our history. "I could let you go on thinking that we were all brave, witty, attractive and vaguely tragic," Herr says. "I could use it myself, it would certainly make for a prettier movie, but all of this talk about 'we' and 'us' has got to get straightened out" (219-20).

Notes

NOTES

(1) "Professor Michael Lesy Named United States Artists Fellow," Hampshire College News, June 6, 2007, http://www.hampshire.edu/cms/index.php?id=9654.

(2) Michael Lesy, Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life, 1860-1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Michael Lesy, Visible Light (New York: Times Books, 1985); and Michael Lesy, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (New York: Norton, 2007).

(3) Michael Lesy, The Forbidden Zone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 14.

(4) Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1978), 202.

(5) Warren Susman, preface to Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy (Albuquerque: U. of New Mexico Press, 1973), 1. Subsequent references to Wisconsin Death Trip appear parenthetically.

(6) Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 74-75.

(7) Ibid., 73.

(8) Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "Ghosts of the American Dream," New York Times, June 1, 1973.

(9) C. Zoe Smith, "Wisconsin Death Trip as Case Study on the Questionable Uses of 19th Century Photographs in Historical Research" (paper presented at a joint session of the Visual Communication and History Divisions of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, annual convention, Kansas City, 11 August 1993.)

(10) Robert Brinbaum. "Michael Lesy," Identity Theory (16 September 2003), http:// www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum125.htm.> (11) Cleveland Chamber Symphony, with Paul Sperry (tenor), Songs of Madness and Sorrow, compact disc, Arsis Audio, 2004; and Wisconsin Death Trip, DVD, directed by James Walsh (Hands On Productions, 1999).

(12) John Corner, "Archive Aesthetics and the Historical Imaginary: Wisconsin Death Trip," Screen 47 (2006): 291, 303.

(13) Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Random, 1969), 1. Subsequent references appear parenthetically.

(14) Peter Freese, "Slaughterhouse-Five; or, How to Storify an Atrocity," in Kurt Vonnegut, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000), 75.

(15) Freese, 73.

(16) Ibid., 74.

(17) See Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl, "Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: The Requirements of Chaos," in Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, ed. Robert Merrill (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 142-152; and Lawrence Broer, "Slaughterhouse-Five: Pilgrim's Progress," in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001), 67-80.

(18) Michael Herr, Dispatches (1977; repr., New York: Vintage, 1991), 254. Subsequent references appear parenthetically.

(19) Brady Harrison, "'This movie is a thing of mine': Homeopathic Postmodernism in Michael Herr's Dispatches," in The Vietnam War and Postmodernity, ed. Michael Bibby (Amherst: U. of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 103.

(20) Jen Dunnaway, "Approaching a Truer Form of Truth: The Appropriation of the Oral Narrative Form in Vietnam War Literature," in Soldier Talk: The Vietnam War in Oral Narrative, ed. Paul Budra and Michael Zeitlin (Indiana U. Press, 2004), 36.

(21) Michael Zeitlin and Paul Budra, "Introduction: Talk the Talk," in Soldier Talk: The Vietnam War in Oral Narrative, ed. Paul Budra and Michael Zeitlin (Indiana U. Press, 2004), 3.

(22) Birnbaum.

(23) The epitaph reads "EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND NOTHING HURT"; the sign reads "PLEASE LEAVE THE LATRINE AS YOU FOUND IT!"; and the pendant reads, in script, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference."

(24) Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 175.

(25) Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1996), 4.

(26) Ibid., 5.

(27) Ibid., 91-92.

(28) Iser, 180, 208, 210, 211.

(29) Lesy, The Forbidden Zone, 14.

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