by Roy Scranton
The whole of our parts is the so-called global war on terror. We, meaning you and me and all of us, are and are not part of that war. It concerns us in terms of aesthetics because we live and breathe aesthetic production and consumption. And it concerns us in terms of politics because it affects us politically, more or less. Mostly less, to be honest—few of us will feel the chill touch of Big Brother on our shoulder. But we sense—we know—we believe we ought to be concerned with what the US does, both abroad to others and at home to us, from trivial acts of degradation like forcing us to remove our shoes at the airport to not-so-trivial acts of torture and totalitarian surveillance.
As aesthetic producers and consumers, we operate within a cultural logic that fetishizes novelty. As political beings, we are responsible to a greater or lesser degree for shaping our collective life. What do these things have to do with each other? The answer is not clear. Certainly there are traditions in which the artist’s responsibilities include cultural critique and social intervention. Innovation in this domain is a technique for subverting preconceptions and conventions and making space for utopian possibility. As Adorno understands aesthetic production, it is through innovation itself that the artwork achieves its social reality as a negation of society. Yet if the cultural logic of commodity capitalism is itself one of constant innovation, how can innovation possibly be understood as the form of its critique?
It has been twelve years since the attacks of September 11, twelve years since Stockhausen’s comments, and we have had twelve years of aesthetic responses to terror and to the global war on terror, some innovative in the way we mean by the word experimental, some innovative in other ways, but most fairly conventional. From James Cameron’s Avatar to Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic and Seven American Deaths and Disasters, from Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes to Joss Whedon’s blockbuster Avengers, from PJ Harvey’s album Let England Shake to Sinan Antoon’s novel The Corpse Washer, from the numerous soldier-posted YouTube videos of songs like “Fobbit Rap,” “Hadji Girl,” and “The Homecoming Song,” to Jena Osman’s Public Figures, Philip Metres’s Abu Ghraib Arias, and Hilary Plum’s They Dragged Them Through the Streets, a staggering amount and variety of aesthetic production has responded to diverse aspects of what we’re calling the global war on terror.
But what do we even mean, finally, by this term—this whole of our parts—the so-called global war on terror? Do we understand it? It is not an event, or even a series of events, or even a network of events, but rather maybe something like a lifeworld, an era, a Zeitgeist. Like the Sixties, the Cold War, or even modernity, the global war on terror is an abstract index, a very thin question mark in place of a robust complexity. It is part of a bigger complexity we used to call globalization, which is itself interwoven with other great complexities of the present: the digital revolution, the great recession, and global climate change. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see where or when one complexity ends and another begins. Even before the NSA started monitoring our Facebook posts, Google searches, and cell-phone calls, the war on terror had already stained the very fabric of our lives.
Which is to say that responding to the phenomenon is like responding to capitalism, or society, or the atmosphere. It is our environment. It is our world. It is not just a war, or an event, or a moment, just as modernism is not only The Rite of Spring. Part of our problem is that we cannot even see our world, our moment, as it is happening, or even as it has just happened. Always already caught up in the next thing, we are distracted from the present by the new.
Returning to Stockhausen and Adorno, what their terror aesthetics suggest is that innovation is not a solution, but a symptom. We have been laboring for a century under the tyranny of the modern demand to “make it new,” under an idea of art as innovation, as the social antithesis of society, as shock therapy for conventional thought, an idea that bears disturbing affinities with both terrorism and the commodity logic of the empire that ostensibly makes war against it. What was truly scandalous in Stockhausen’s statement about 9/11 was his thoughtless exposure of the revolutionary utopian claims of modern aesthetic production, and the fact that the new always demands not only the destruction of the past, but the annihilation of the present. [2013/2014]
The Trauma Hero
Every true war story is a story of trauma and recovery. A boy goes to war, his head full of romantic visions of glory, courage, and sacrifice, his heart yearning to achieve heroic deeds, but on the field of battle he finds only death and horror. He sees, suffers, and causes brutal and brutalizing violence. Such violence wounds the soldier’s very soul.
After the war, the boy, now a veteran and a man, returns to the world of peace haunted by his experience, wracked by the central compulsion of trauma and atrocity: the struggle between the need to bear witness to his shattering encounter with violence and the compulsion to repress it. The veteran tries to make sense of his memory but finds it all but impossible. Most people don’t want to hear the awful truths that war has taught him, the political powers that be want to cover up the shocking reality of war, and anybody who wasn’t there simply can’t understand what it was like.
The truth of war, the veteran comes to learn, is a truth beyond words, a truth that can be known only by having been there, an unspeakable truth he must bear for society.
So goes the myth of the trauma hero.
This myth informs our politics, shapes our news reports, and underwrites our history. It dominates critical and scholarly interpretation of war literature, war movies, and the visual culture of war. It shapes how we understand Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and World War II, and it affects whom we vote for. Like all myths, this story frames and filters our perceptions of reality through a set of recognizable and comforting conventions. It works to convince us that war is a special kind of experience that offers a special kind of truth, a truth that gives those who have been there a special kind of authority.
The trauma-hero myth also serves a scapegoat function, discharging national bloodguilt by substituting the victim of trauma, the soldier, for the victim of violence, the enemy. Take Clint Eastwood’s recent adaptation of Chris Kyle’s memoir, American Sniper. The story, as everyone knows, is of the life and death of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who as a shooter in Iraq racked up more confirmed kills than any other sniper in American military history. Kyle served four tours in Iraq as a trigger puller, then retired and began to work with disabled and traumatized veterans. One day one of these veterans shot him.
The opening scene sets the moral stakes. Our hero, played all lockjaw, thousand-yard stare, and darting eyes by Bradley Cooper, must decide whether or not to shoot an Iraqi child whose mother gave him a grenade to throw at an American convoy. Never mind the tired Vietnam-era trope of the bomb-wielding child, a fiction that Eastwood grafted onto Kyle’s less sensational autobiographical account of shooting a woman. What’s important here is that we’re being shown what extremes of psychological torment our hero must endure—and this is only the beginning. Such suffering is the upshot of the whole narrative, which is an account of Kyle’s increasing combat stress and the toll that takes on his family, layered over with a simplistic dueling snipers plot, both of which culminate in a climactic rooftop battle scene.
In this scene, Kyle draws on his years of training and warrior wisdom to make an “impossible” shot, killing the sniper “Mustafa.” As a gibbering horde of Iraqi insurgents descends upon our American heroes, Kyle calls his wife by satellite phone and tells her he’s ready to come home. A dust storm envelops the battle and the Americans fight their way out, barely escaping, in a visually striking chaos that serves as a symbolic baptism: Kyle is sucked into the whirlwind and only barely makes it out, leaving his weapon and his lucky Bible behind him. He has been reborn.
The last scenes of the film intimate Kyle’s recuperation. Cooper loses his thousand-yard stare and lets his jaw relax, revealing a man who has learned how to turn the
lessons of war into the lessons of peace. Instead of helping endangered soldiers by killing Iraqis, he has learned to help wounded soldiers by talking with them and mentoring them in shooting-range therapy. The final scene, before the documentary footage of Kyle’s flag-bedecked funeral, is of Kyle as father and husband, warm, joking, engaged with his wife and children.
American Sniper focuses in tight on one man’s story of trauma, leaving out the complex questions of why Kyle was in Iraq being traumatized in the first place. The Iraqis in the film are villains, caricatures, and targets, and the only real opinion on them the film offers is Kyle’s. The Iraqis are all “savages” who threaten American lives and need to be killed. There’s some truth in this representation, insofar as this is how a lot of American soldiers thought. Yet the film obviates the questions of why any American soldiers were in Iraq, why they stayed there for eight years, why they killed thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians, and how we are to understand the long and ongoing bloodbath once called the “War on Terror.” It does that precisely by turning a killer into a victim, a war hero into a trauma hero.
The myth of the trauma hero, like all great myths, has a history. It goes back to the birth of Romanticism in the eighteenth century and is first seen taking shape in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The myth achieved its mature form in twentieth-century war literature and is often now read as the very definition of war literature itself, even though as the twentieth century wore on, the myth became increasingly conventional and self-referential. Tracking this myth through the poetry of Wilfred Owen, the prose of Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien, and Kevin Powers’s Iraq war novel The Yellow Birds can help us see how the myth works, how it has been used by writers eager to capitalize on the moral authority it offers, and how it has turned from being a frame for understanding reality into a mirroring surface that reflects back only our own expectations.
In June 1917, while recuperating from shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, British lieutenant Wilfred Owen wrote the first draft of a bitter poem describing the death of a fellow soldier in a gas attack. This draft was dedicated “To Jessie Pope,” a widely published female civilian poet known for her patriotic poems. Owen’s dedication, later amended “To a certain poetess,” was as facetious as the poem’s now famous ending is ironic: the vividly depicted horror of a comrade’s choking death was intended to chasten prowar civilians like Pope and repudiate “the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.”
Owen begins his poem in the perspective of marching soldiers, identifying a speaking “we” that shifts between subjective sensation and close description of physical suffering: “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge . . .” Vivid images paint a scene as if out of Bosch, and details such as the caliber of the artillery rounds help establish the narrator’s authority. The men come under gas attack, and we, with our narrator, helplessly watch one die choking, drowning in air. We see through the narrator’s eyes, through the “misty” lenses of his gas mask. This shift via perceptual detail into the narrator’s subjectivity is pushed further in the next stanza’s free-standing couplet, where the death recurs as a traumatic repetition within the narrator’s dreams: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”
In the final stanza, the narrator turns from his dream to the reader’s, indicting the one who doesn’t know the experience of war: “If in some smothering dreams you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in . . .” The details press on, one after the other, but now instead of describing the scene itself, or even its memory, Owen describes the dream that you, the reader, would be tortured by—if you’d seen what he’d seen and felt what he’d felt. If you could see, the narrator tells Jessie Pope, if you knew what it was really like, then you wouldn’t write poems supporting the war.
The Latin tag ending the poem, from Horace’s Carmina 3.2, translates roughly as “It is dear and honorable to die for one’s nation.” This tag stands for what Owen is aiming to attack, to dispel, to silence: the “old Lie” taught in English schoolbooks and put forth by civilian poets. I know the truth, Owen claims, not because I read about it in Horace, but because I’ve seen it, heard it, and felt it. Owen means to malign war, but according to his logic, it is his very experience of war that gives him privileged access to moral truth beyond anything civilians like Jessie Pope can ever hope to achieve. Owen asserts that war’s truth is the truth of the soldier’s experience, which puts the issue of war beyond debate.
The Israeli military historian Yuval Harari has argued that the practice of hallowing the experience of war as trauma grows out of a larger historical shift from recording external deeds as evidence of valor to recording internal experiences as evidence of developing sensibility. Revolutions in military technology and organization in the early seventeenth century created the conditions for detaching personal glory from military experience. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the growth of sensationalism, the cult of sensibility, and Romanticism combined with increasing literacy and a more professionalized and middle-class officer corps to make “war as revelation” the predominant frame for interpreting the individual experience of war in the West. Once a field of accomplishment, war became a kind of sentimental education.
In the US, this interpretive frame has led to contradictory attitudes about war. On the one hand, Americans denounce war as something uncivilized and exceptional, something only other countries do, something America does only under duress. On the other hand, Americans indulge in what historian David Bell has described as “an unabated fascination with war, considering it a test of their society’s worth. They treat members of the armed forces with respect verging on reverence and take for granted that no one who has not been in combat can ever really understand ‘what it is like’ or how it changes a person.”
Most Americans seem to believe that war can be known only through direct, physical, sensory experience on the battlefield, such as the moment of vision Owen describes in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Ernest Hemingway, who in contrast to Owen’s long frontline service lasted only a few weeks as a noncombatant before being wounded and returning to the US, stands in American letters as the high priest of combat gnosticism. In Hemingway’s work, the emphasis on physicality, embodiment, and materiality we see in Owen’s representations of the soldier’s truth opens into a metaphysical bias against representation itself. In Hemingway’s novel of World War I, A Farewell to Arms, Lieutenant Frederic Henry delivers a famous denunciation of martial ideals and abstract language, founded in the moral authority of his earlier wounding, that makes this point explicit.
During a conversation between Lieutenant Henry and an Italian ambulance driver named Gino, in an area of the front that had recently been taken back, Gino comments that the summer fighting “cannot have been done in vain.” Lieutenant Henry silently disdains not just Gino’s patriotism, but the very words he uses:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
For Hemingway’s Lieutenant Henry, the soldier’s truth b
ecomes a formal truth: it determines not only who can speak, but what words can be spoken. Gino, after all, has seen as much or more war than Lieutenant Henry has. The difference between them is in their sensibility. For Hemingway, Gino is a crude nationalist who thinks and speaks in clichés, while Lieutenant Henry is a refined and sensitive soul who knows the true words for war. Those words must be concrete, sensory, metonymic: place names, regimental numbers, and dates must stand in for the battles that were fought there. Any recognition of social value, any judgment of character or worth, Hemingway finds repugnant. War and combat can be properly addressed only by invoking the temporal and geographic markers by which those who were present will remember them.
Upping the literary stakes, Tim O’Brien’s influential collection of linked stories The Things They Carried pushes beyond Hemingway’s repudiation of idealism and abstraction to a repudiation of civic discourse and truth as such. Where Hemingway still allows invocation to retain the dignity of battlefield presence, O’Brien refuses any connection at all between social norms and combat. Where Hemingway insists on the concrete, O’Brien avows the obscene. “A true war story,” he writes in The Things They Carried, “is never moral.”
It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
