Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

There has always been a strong temptation in literary and cultural criticism to regard the war in Vietnam as a postmodern conflict and to interrogate the American experience of it as a “retreat from meaning,” a condition of “reality wholly other” than the soldiers “had known or were prepared to meet” (Lewis: 71, 72, 78). In such criticism, the temptation to seek coherence has to be resisted and “anyone who claims to have an inside track on the truth about the Vietnam War” is guilty of demonstrating “biased myopia” (Pratt: 152–3). Since the Vietnam experience was an insurgent one–fragmented, inconclusive, sporadic–our primary obligation, we are told, is to select those writers who are best able to incorporate into the fabric of their work that sense of Vietnam as a place of unreliable partnership and unexpected encounter. For Herman Rapaport, our reading must locate and then articulate the disarticulated experience of the war. In Rapaport's reasoning, the lack of linkage between events in Vietnam rendered the experience of combat “somewhat obsolete,” denying the possibility of “an active fighting with or against someone.” The lack of sequential narrative emphasized the soldier's separateness from an opponent whose world he was supposed to “engage” and could not. The text, therefore, should do the same. The lack of orderliness and shifts in causal structure in the novel ought to reflect ... log in or subscribe to read full text