War is Hell: Traces of Truth in Tim O'Brien's “How to Tell a True War Story”
Tim O'Brien's short story, “How to Tell a True War Story,” offers a postmodern perspective on the inadequacy of abstractions and absolutisms in communicating the concrete horror of war. He proposes the argument that theories, justifications, and definitions of war are meaningless when it comes to accounting for the daily experience of combat; how can a theory convey the magnitude of the individual lives lost...the death of a brother, a daughter, a lover, a friend? How can a definition of war ever capture the blood and gore of a body torn asunder by a grenade? O'Brien struggles with these limitations of language and imagination while examining the play that occurs between truth and fiction.
O'Brien's thematic statement recalls Jean-Francois Lyotard's discourse, The Postmodern Condition: “True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can’t believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside”(O'Brien 6). O'Brien's writing is characterized by the same “incredulity toward metanarratives,” that Lyotard uses to define postmodernism (Lyotard 356). A metanarrative must as a matter of necessity generalize and abstract. For O'Brien the degree of distance that this theorizing creates causes a story to lose its power. The words no longer hold a visceral influence over the reader.
O'Brien arrives at truth of experience by circling around the actual events; by telling and retelling the same story from different perspectives. This inclusion of multiple narrators relating different versions of same event within a single story exemplifies postmodern historicity. Furthermore, it is in alignment with Lyotard's preference for a multiplicity of smaller narratives versus the “legitimating myths” of the metanarrative (357). Lyotard argues that the metanarrative “is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements...Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these” (356). O'Brien aims for this intersection through the inclusion of his many competing narratives. And, it is due to the contradictory nature of these perspectives that O'Brien is able to come closer to visceral truth than he would have through the use of theory or abstraction.
O'Brien uses the binary of war and peace to elucidate the paradoxical nature of truth: “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life” (O'Brien 7). This stylistic device, focusing on paradoxical and contradictory nature of reality is characteristic of postmodern literature. It capitalizes on the shadow of “alterity” that all objects of thought—all words—carry, as described by Jacques Derrida in his influential text, Difference (292). Derrida argues that due to “temporalization” and “espacement” the exact meaning or definition of any given word can never be reached...there are no absolutes in language, no actual substance or presence (283). A word such as “war” takes on meaning, as O'Brien demonstrates, in its shades or “traces” of difference from other words. In the above quotation O'Brien juxtaposes “war” with the terms “peace,” “death,” and “life” to create a complex, stratified connotation of war towards which a generalization could but gesture. To conclude his argument put forth in the essay Differance, Derrida refers to the pre-Socratic concept of “sumploke,” the idea that “everything in existence is relationally connected” (Rivkin 279). O'Brien mirrors this idea of interconnectedness in his multifaceted description of war: “War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead” (O'Brien 7).
Through O'Brien's reflection of Lyotard's “incredulity toward metanarratives” and Derrida's “undoing of binary oppositions” the power of the “legimating myths--” the power of the lies we are told about war-- is discharged (Lyotard 356). “How to Tell a True War Story” disables and deconstructs the rhetoric that the dominant political and social powers use to glamorize and promote war. While instructing the reader on how to tell a true war story, O'Brien reminds us of art's capacity for liberation from society's strictures: “ The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true” (O'Brien 8).
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. “Differance.” Literary Theory: An Anthology.Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Blackwell Publishing, Maldon, Ma, 2004
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Postmodern Condition.” Literary Theory: An Anthology.Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Blackwell Publishing, Maldon, Ma, 2004
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan, ed. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell Publishing, Maldon, Ma 2004
"Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" ". WISC.edu. 7/11/09
I enjoyed this thank you.
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