Beidler, Philip D. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1982.

Chronological discussion of Vietnam antiwar literature, illustrating the stages and styles of writing. Privileges writers attention to the writing process itself and literature’s potential to tell a war story that is truer than true.

From David Halberstam’s One Very Hot Day, “‘yes as no longer yes, no was no longer no, maybe was more certainly maybe.’ So it was in Vietnam with all attempts at signification. To try to talk or write about it, before, during, or after the fat, was to risk being swept up into a self contained universe of discourse where everything from official euphemism to battlefield slang seemed the product of some insane genius for making reality and unreality—and thus, by implication, sense and nonsense—as indistinguishable as possible” (Beidler 5).

“In this way, what facts that could be found might still be made to mean, as they had never done by themselves, thought he shaping, and ultimately the transforming power of art” (Beidler 16).

“the literary interpreters who most often got Vietnam right from the outset began with the premise (or quickly accepted it along the way) that all the basic categories of meaning one might think of—facts and fictions, realities and imaginings, things remembered an things reconstituted in the shapes of collective myth—had to be reckoned in this case as simply and flatly interchangeable” (Beidler 31).

“This was the most important discovery made by major early writers about Vietnam, and it is the one that has dominated the literature of the war ever since: that what sense was to be made of it at all would lie in the self-conscious explorations of relationships between experiential and aesthetic (and in a vast number of cases, mock-aesthetic) possibilities of truth-telling, in the realization that far from being incompatible or opposite, they would often imply and even entail each other” (Beidler 34).

Moore’s The Green Berets: “the initial focus of concern is not with the war as subject but instead with identifying in generic terms the appropriate manner of its depiction. From the outset, however intuitively, this first ‘big’ book about Vietnam focuses itself on the nature of literary process, the idea of sense-making itself. Should the narrative be seen as basic reportage, shaped, edited, infused with color and point, perhaps, but still essentially ‘factual’? Or might it be best described in terms of one of the more familiar categories of the ‘creative’—a novel, a collection of stories, a linked series of dramatic vignettes? Moore opts for the latter, calling his work a novel even as he continues to attest to its wholesale veracity. He suggests in this case that fiction will somehow be truer than fact” (Beidler 37).

“the matter of the thing would find a reality truer than the truth alone in the literary means of its telling” (Beidler 46).

“Preexisting myths and conventions of form, even in their frequent appropriation and acknowledgement, become at most part of a first step toward new kinds of sense-making suited to the peculiarities of the experience at hand” (Beidler 47).

“Verification, he [Harold Pinter] writes must be a kind of ‘truth-i-fi-cation’ in the fullest sense of the term possible. Our wish for it, he continues, ‘is understandable.’ Unfortunately, the wish, ‘cannot always be satisfied. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what false. The thing is not necessarily true or false. It can be both true and false” (Beidler 51).

“The truth of Eastlake’s vision of the war, to put it another way is art-truth. It is something that in its fashion just may be truer, he proposes, than facts themselves can be” (Beidler 53).

“The feature, besides Bunting’s and Roth’s comparable gifts for experiential witness, that brings new creative life, so to speak, to the unabashedly ‘epic’ impulse standing at the heart of their narratives, is the self-conscious, indeed almost self-depreciating way in which the two writers both acknowledge and in a manner mock their sense of formal indebtedness” (Beidler 93).

“both writers also seriously employ the strategies of their literary predecessors, almost to make their world of war a microcosm of their America and their age as well” (Beidler 93).

“In striking new affiliations between experiential and literary values, both writers finally succeed in allowing the war to create, after a fashion, its own master iconography” (Beidler 96).

“The account of a young infantryman’s passage through a year at war becomes at the same time an odyssey through a whole inherited body of cultural myth, with a perpetual striking of connections, more or less as they are found, along the way; apace, precisely through this synthesizing function of consciousness, the process of narration becomes itself the source of what might be thought of as new permutations of useable myth as well. More than anything else, finally, a sustained mediation no only on the experience of the war but also on the very idea of sense-making itself, If I die in a Combat Zone . . . “ (Beidler 100).

“Experience remembered becomes in the same moment experience made to signify in terms old and new through the transforming power of imaginative myth, experience made in effect a set of notes toward its own master iconography” (Beidler 105).

“Again, moreover, this seems to be in large part a function of the Vietnam writer’s increasingly complex and sophistication ability to see consciousness itself as the ground of a new reality somehow born equally of memory and imaginative invention, a Vietnam somehow more true in its achieved signification than anything that had ever existed in fact” (Beidler 119).

“Yet if it is as close perhaps, to a vision of the end as any writer of the war has come, a genuine exemplar of apocalyptic horror, it is also in the same moment, for the book that it introduces, a kind of beginning as well, a tight, harrowed first step on the way back to meaning. Now the poet begins the work that can be found in the war’s wake, begins in art to enact the process whereby experience even of so devastating a kind can finally somehow again be imaginatively assimilated to terms of collective sense-making” (Beidler 133).

“one can at least begin to deal with them by imagining a context in which personal memory might be something like cultural memory, a medium of collective witness and truth. One can make a sense that is at least better than no sense by recognizing the commonality of human experience, and by doing so specifically in terms of that especially rich and complex form of cultural memory that comes as literary tradition. The remembered ‘worlds’ of Gawain and the Green Knight and the Iliad can and indeed must be brought into touch with the world of private experiential remembrance, all of them at once casting the light of new meaning on each other” (Beidler 133).

“It can all be there insofar as we learn to make it from our own responding. Sense-making, be it that which we inherit or that which we invent, must be given a chance to sustain us after our war” (Beidler 134). Sense-making – begins with the premise that war is incommensurable.

“To put this another way, the most distinctive feature of the ‘optative’ mode across the whole range of recent Vietnam writing would seem to be the self-reflexive attempt to comprehend what can be known of the war within a dimension of consciousness at once incorporating both memory and invention” (Beidler 140-141).

“This is not to suggest that recent Vietnam writing has been largely ‘metafiction’ in the current, fashionable sense of that idea. Most of it is far less flashy, studied, oppressively art-conscious. The dominant impulse of the mode would seem to be something more simple, a basic acceptance of each age’s need to examine the nature of its own myth-making processes, to find the crucial nodes” (Beidler 141).

“Michael Herr’s Dispatches, by general consent one of the most fully wrought and authoritative works to emerge from all the literature of Vietnam” (Beidler 141).

“The prize of experience for the Vietnam writer, as all these novels again reveal, is the penetration of a strange midworld of consciousness, a ‘country,’ once more to paraphrase Michael Herr, that is ‘the war,’ a precinct of memory and imagining, the two caught in some curious, perpetual suspension” (Beidler 171).

“One must finally make a going back that is a going ahead as well” (Beidler 172).

“Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato, a work not so much a synthesis of memory and imagination, life and art, as a testament to their utter fluid interchangeability” (Beidler 172).

“No substance equals no order. ‘Can’t have order in a vacuum’” (Beidler 173). Doc Peret; body = substance

“For him, for all the writers represented here, for all of us who care to read what they have to say, the war is not over. It will only be over when we have made it so through a common effort of signification, when we have learned at what cost it was waged for everyone it touched then and now and beyond. Then it will be over. then we can say good-bye to it. Not before” (Beidler 202).