ENVISAGING A WAR: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVEL

Beyond its identifiable military, economic, and political aspects, the Vietnam war was a supreme work of the American imagination that, at its deepest levels, exposed and threatened the core elements of national mythos. An entire American belief system--one that included strains of secular evangelism, faith in technology and cultural engineering principles, and collective assumptions of national innocence, virtue, and purpose--was brought into high relief, and it was simultaneously extended and reshaped within the pressurized configuration of new history. The achievement of the most successful American novelists and memoirists writing on the war is a two-fold one: they recreate with expanded definitions of reportorial objectivity how new American practices and attitudes manifested themselves, but they also assume the task of suggesting how those developments are illustrative of the larger rending of the cultural fabric. The Vietnam war was fought by disproportionate numbers of America\u27s disenfranchised, and a new figure emerges within the novels and personal narratives. The American participant-resister is the historical protagonist who fights with sparse knowledge of the war\u27s origins or purpose, with little sense of personal or collective commitment, with hope only of surviving a plentiude of threats to mind, body, and spirit. As representatives of the new sensibility that often lay buried beneath official narrative and traditional journalism, the best novelists and memoirists of the war write what may be called compensatory history; their narratives are self-conscious, antagonistic responses that retrieve and recreate the data from the war\u27s dark center with a new sense of what constitutes faithfulness to facts as they dramatically heighten or concentrate those facts within finished aesthetic-historical documents. The core project displays a variety of modes and strategies--self-conscious realism; the application of classical categories; black humor; a revised romantic impulse; narrative as mnemonic device--but all of the modes meet in the central proposition that, as the rigorous historian conjoining processes of invention and recording, the Vietnam war novelist deposits the most necessary report in an expanding American archive