Tal, Kali. “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Trauma.” Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature. Ed. Philip K. Jason. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. 217-250.

Approaches war literature through trauma theory. Criticizes Beidler and Wilson for failing to connect personal myth with national and cultural myth, either neglecting one or the other. Theorizes Other People’s Trauma (OPT) and questions the audiences’ reception of OPT.

“Literature of trauma, I will argue, is the product of three coincident factors: the experience of trauma, the urge to bear witness, and a sense of community. Trauma literature demonstrates the unbridgeable gap between writer and reader and thus defines itself by the impossibility of its task—the communication of the traumatic experience” (Tal 218).

“For Beidler, myth and actual events seem to be equally involved in generating history, a strangely retroactive process in which we revise our interpretations of the past as new cultural myths are generated that affect our future decisions and actions” (Tal 218).

“Beidler’s goal seems to be to reduce the war to sign—to see Vietnam War literature as part of a continuing process of signification. The telling and retelling of the war inscribe it upon the nation’s consciousness until ‘we have learned inscribe it upon the nation’s consciousness until ‘we have learned at what cost it was waged for everyone it touched then and now and beyond.’ When the signification is complete the war will be over: ‘Then we can say good-bye to it’ (202). There is an urge to closure in Beidler’s analysis. When the war becomes sign (and therefore not war) we won’t have to think about it anymore” (Tal 219).

“To Wilson, this portrayal or annihilation and the destruction of values and morality is a metaphor for the current American cultural crisis” (Tal 220).

“Wilson is looking for reality while Beidler denies the existence of the real war” (Tal 220).

“Wilson demands political awareness from both his writers and readers: we read Vietnam War literature in order to learn what not to do next time” (Tal 220).

“Hellmann’s work seems to be closer to the spirit of Beidler’s analysis than to Wilson’s. Also concerned with the question of the continuity of classical American cultural myths, he claims that Vietnam War Literature reflects a national disillusionment with the frontier myth upon which we based our involvement in Vietnam” (Tal 220).

“In Hellman’s eyes the best Vietnam literature and the best new American literature help us reformulate a myth we can live with” (Tal 222).

“The Vietnam War, then, becomes a trail on the American path to progress—an episode in the development on the American path to progress” (Tal 222).

“Like Beidler, he asserts that the war is not over until it is properly signified” (Tal 223).

“The unfortunate truth is that the Vietnam War was the work of no one’s imagination” (Tal 224).

“Only in memory or in narrative can war be elevated to the level of symbol; narratives are generated in retrospect in order to explain, rationalize, and define events” (Tal 224).
“The problem with traditional literary interpretation is that it assumes that all symbols are accessible to all readers” (Tal 224).

“This problem is rooted in the conflation of two very different but constantly intersecting kinds of myth: national myth and personal myth” (Tal 224).

“Personal myth is the particular set of explanations and expectations generated by an individual to account for his or her circumstances and actions” (Tal 225).

“The conflation of national and personal myth by traditional critics of Vietnam War literature is supported by their failure to distinguish between works by combat veterans and those by nonveterans” (Tal 225).

“Nonveteran literature is, in short, the product of literary decision . . . The ‘real war’ about which they write is the war of symbols and images” (Tal 226).

“For combat veterans . . . Retelling the war in a memoir or describing it in a novel involves not merely the development of alternative national myths through the manipulation of plot and literary techniques, but also the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (Tal 226).

“The theory of liminality describes a process of symbolic production based on the traumatic experiences of those entering the transitional or liminal state” (Tal 227).

“According to Lawrence L. Langer, ‘The survivor does not travel a road from the normal to the bizarre back to the normal, but from the normal to the bizarre back to a normalcy so permeated by the bizarre encounter with atrocity that it can never be purified again” (Tal 229).

“One of the strongest themes in the literature of trauma is the urge to bear witness” (Tal 229).

Wiesel: “‘Not to transmit an experience is to betray it . . .’” (Tal 230).

“Each of these authors articulates the belief that he or she is a story-teller with a mission; their responsibility as survivors is to bear the tale. Each also affirms the process of storytelling as a personally reconstitutive act and expresses the hope that it will also be a socially reconstitutive act” (Tal 230-231).

“The horrific events which have reshaped the author’s construction of reality can only be described, not re-created” (Tal 231).

“Caught forever in this liminal state, the survivor comes to represent the shattering of our national myths without ever coming close to shattering the reader’s individual personal myths—the very myths that support and uphold the most widely accepted national myths” (Tal 231).

“I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that the personal myths of the reader are never tragically shattering by reading. Only trauma can accomplish that kind of destruction” (Tal 232).

“The inability to communicate trauma is evident in the preoccupation of trauma authors with the limitations of language. Once again, this preoccupation is evident across genre lines” (Tal 232).

“A crucial question, and one which is rarely explored in studies of either Holocaust or war literature, is, To whom does the survivor bear witness? To begin to answer this question we must examine carefully the trauma victim’s notion of self and community” (Tal 235).

“Des Pres claims that the task of survivors is to wake the conscience of the greater community and that the testimony of survivors bears witness to ‘objectivity conditions of evil’ which will naturally arouse the sympathies of ordinary people. ‘Conscious,’ writes Des Pres, ‘is a social achievement’ (46)” (Tal 236).

“Survival literature tends to appear at least a decade after the traumatic experience in question” (Tal 236).

“The dislocation of trauma, which removed meaning from the world, is gradually replaced by new stories about the past which can support a rewritten personal myth. The survivor’s perception of community is a crucial element in the shaping of the new myth” (Tal 236).

“Another sort of veteran’s community does not seek to valorize their deeds in war or to rewrite the history of the war so as to make their presence there more honorable. These combats veterans attempt to come to terms with their experiences by undertaking the task of rewriting national mythology so that it conforms to the basic tenets of their revised personal myths” (Tal 243).

“To those outside of the marginal, traumatized community trauma is a curiosity, or it is indicative of a problem, or it is a useful example. At this point I would like to introduce a new term—Other People’s Trauma (OPT)” (Tal 246).

“OPT is, by definition, always metaphoric” (Tal 246).

“The imperative of trauma critics is to define their position as outside readers and to recognize that however empathetic, the trauma of the author becomes merely metaphor” (Tal 247).

“Crucial, then, is the ability to consider the author as survivor” (Tal 247).

“What fundamental changes in the author’s personal myths have occurred? How do these affect the author’s conception of national myth?” (Tal 247).

“How do readers interact with texts of trauma?” (Tal 247).