There is an anecdote about the acclaimed film director Stanley Kubrick that goes as follows: when Kubrick told a friend he wanted to make the movie Full Metal Jacket, the friend asked why he would make another ‘war movie’, after already having made Paths of Glory. To this Kubrick replied that with Paths of Glory he had made an ‘anti-war movie’, but with Full Metal Jacket he intended to make a ‘war movie’.
I might have seen the movie Full Metal Jacket a dozen times before encountering that quote. I had, up to that point considered it to be an anti-war movie. The quote made me put that idea into doubt. What actually is the difference between the two very related genres of ‘war’ vs ‘anti-war’ art?
The conclusion I came to is that both depict war, but one seems to want to show war in its honesty, while the other wants to show war in such a way that the reader draws a negative impression from it. The problem with that is that it puts the work of this distinction entirely on the reader of the text. And then you remember that friend you have who watched Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers and just didn’t get the sarcasm, and you become afraid for the world.
This is the doubts with which I picked up Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The back blurb has a quote from the guardian calling this “One of the best war books of the century.
But what would they know about it?
I am not sure to what extent Tim O’Brien really wants to give us answers. The Things They Carried is largely a book of war-anecdotes. There is a feeling of ‘these are the just-so stories of my time in Vietnam. Which isn’t to stay that the stories aren’t thoughtful, and some even incredibly vivid and memorable. But at the same time, the author come narrator veils this further by confessing that he might indeed by making some of these stories up, and that we shouldn’t be concerned with the veracity of the stories as much as we should the spirit of the story, and a sort of ‘truth feeling’ that they have regardless of their veracity. I suppose one could get away with such things when this came out in the 90’s, but we have since then had a James Frey scandal or two in literature, and perhaps we are now more sensitive to these things as readers.
I for one wasn’t fussed about the nature of the tales, but it did give me food for thought. It might also mirror how the characters themselves value reality in a slightly different way. Consider:
When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the riveer. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame the people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body count, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.
In the field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgement or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.
I did like this book. But I did doubt the structure a bit. Somewhere in Samuel R Delany’s corpus of writing advice, there is a bit where he suggests to aspiring writers that one should not use a short story as the initial chapter of a novel. According to Delany, when you do the original short story will stick out stylistically from the rest of the work. I might have been influenced by this quote, but I did feel that here. The first story in this collection, the titular The Things They Carried, is a very strong opening piece that captivated my attention despite it being one of those stories I was obliged to read both in high school and university. None of the other pieces had its strength save for one. As Delany predicted, the rest of the work does fall short in comparison. The theme of The Things They Carried fits the original short story like a glove. That energy isn’t maintained throughout the whole book, and while it is there, it did at times feel like loose fitting clothes around some of the narratives. But to return to the books defense, O’Brien does a good job creating a frame narrative that keeps the fractured and anecdotal nature of the piece together cohesively.
Above, I quipped that maybe O’Brien doesn’t want to give us answers. That might be a possibility. But it might also be that, as with all the most complicated things in life, an answer isn’t forthcoming because of the pure chaos that is the nature of war. The novel is full off moments where we get strong impression of War’s chaos, and the titular Things They Carried, are all those tiny things the soldiers used to keep themselves sane. The stylistic choice O’Brien (and notably Kurt Vonnegut as well in Slaughterhouse 5) chooses to make, disjointing the narrative and making it seem like disconnected anecdotes is a way to represent the soldier’s own coping mechanism.
Now, is all that a ‘war’ book, or an ‘anti-war’ book? I have no idea. But I do know that I am largely an anti-war person. It might merely be that, through my lens, all war books would be anti-war books, save for those that are war propaganda.
Failures in Polymathy 