Shoot and CryModernism, Realism, and the Iraq War Fiction of Kevin Powers and Justin Sirois Jim Holstun (bio) It’s not about our process. It’s not about our awakening. . . . The story isn’t about me searching their house. The story is about their house being searched. . . . If I’ve murdered someone innocent . . . I can fall asleep, but he’s dead. —Yehuda Shaul and Edo Medicks in David Zlutnick, dir., Shooting and Crying Because not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But what’s worse, I think, is they’ll come back twenty years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad. . . . Americans making a movie about what Vietnam did to their soldiers is like a serial killer telling you what stopping suddenly for hitchhikers did to his clutch. —Frankie Boyle, “2014—Scottish Independence” A hunter was hunting sparrows one cold day, and he was killing them while his tears flowed. And one sparrow said to another: “There is no danger from the man. Do you not see him weeping?” And the other said to him: “Do not look at his tears, but look at what his hands are doing.” —Arab proverb from Louis Cheiko, Majānī al-adab fī ḥadāʾiq al-ʻarab, quoted in Thatcher INTRODUCTION: REALISM, MODERNISM, AND TRAUMA HEROES In a recent essay, Roy Scranton traces the “trauma hero” from Stendhal and Tolstoy through Wilfred Owen and Hemingway to contemporary American literature about the Iraq War. Indifferent to both nationalist justifications for the war and to anti-imperialist critiques, the trauma hero observes, suffers, and testifies. Above all else, he has [End Page 1] been there: returning home, torn and frayed, he utters an authentic truth somehow beyond language, beyond ideology, gesturing eloquently toward the impossibility of communication. But his apolitical ache has a political purpose: 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. . . . [W]hen the trauma hero myth is taken as representing the ultimate truth of more than a decade of global aggression . . . we allow the psychological suffering endured by those we sent to kill for us [to] displace and erase the innocents killed in our name. (222, 236) In this essay, I argue that the trauma hero is most at home inside a particular subgenre of late modernist fiction that emphasizes affect, fragmentation, and discontinuity, at the expense of cause, effect, and narrative totalization.1 Reflecting on America’s West Asian invasions and occupations, Michiko Kakutani argues that “Short stories, authors have realized, are an ideal form for capturing the discontinuities of these wars, their episodic quality, and so are longer, fragmented narratives that jump-cut from scene to scene” (2014). “Instead of a coherent explanatory narrative,” George Packer says, recent war writing presents us with fragments; for example, Dust to Dust, a 2012 memoir by Benjamin Busch, a former Marine Corps captain and an actor, is organized not chronologically but around certain materials—metal, bone, blood, ash. Fragments are perhaps the most honest literary form available to writers who fought so recently. Their work lacks context, but it gets closer to the lived experience of war than almost any journalism. Packer purges “lived experience” of the historical consciousness it had for the British marxist historians and (as Erlebnis and expérience vécue) for German and French existentialists. In the absence of context, chronology, explanation, and linear wholeness, we are left with fragmentation, discontinuity, cinematic metaphors, immediate subjectivity, and immediate objectivity—the stolid modernist innovations of a year, a decade, a century ago reappear, as if newly minted. Like all commodities, they can sparkle briefly by forgetting their own history. Late modernist war narratives have lost high modernism’s obsessive historical interests, becoming not merely nonhistorical, but antihistorical, from the global level (by erasing primitive accumulation and imperial conquest) to the level of the individual sentence (by collapsing [End Page 2] subject and object, cause and effect). The resulting “shoot and cry” narrative, as I will call it, provides US readers with heightened affect and a political alibi.2...
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Jul 16, 2023
Sada Reed + 1
Open Access