A Man with a Green Memory: War, Cinema, and Freedom in Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green

The world as cinema: in American postmodernist fiction, this idea is represented in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which Tyron Slothrop appears as a “conditioned” man in the World War II. In the Zone, where the “War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image” (261), Slothrop’s subjectivity is inseparably connected to the plot of the War; inexorably reacting to the rocket, he is deprived of any inner space of autonomy. Hence allusions to cinema throughout the novel—the whole Zone is conceived as a gigantic film-set, where the characters are cast to play their roles. “‘My “function” is to observe you,’” one of the characters tells Slothrop. “‘That’s my function. You like my function? You like it? Your “function” . . . is, learn the rocket, inch by inch’” (219). The individual is reduced to a “function” or role, which is determined in the script of the War; the whole world becomes indistinguishable from cinema. This cinematic view of the world does not allow Slothrop autonomy, who instead appears as a mere product or “construct” embedded in the apparatus of the war. Thus this notion comes close to the Foucauldian view of the individual—“power produces; it produces reality. . . . The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (Discipline 194).¹ Therefore, the idea of the cinema-world immediately raises the question of freedom: “How is freedom possible for human beings whose very existence is linked inseparably to a matrix of anonymous forces . . . which seems to dictate our every move, our every thought?” (Clifford 132). As Slothrop’s quest in the Zone ends up in his fragmentation, the cinema-world fundamentally rejects the integrity of the free individual.

Among contemporary American novelists who confront this conundrum in the framework of the cinematic world, Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green presents a singular notion of freedom. Following Pynchon, Wright’s 1983 novel describes Vietnam as a cinematic space, in which the workings of the army define the ontological framework of every soldier. Narrated by a veteran James Griffin, the novel explores the possibility of freedom within this condition—it is found in the internal transmutability of his self. The narrative does not appeal to the traditional notion of the autonomous subject who holds a transcendental position; rather, freedom is opened inside the cinematic world, in the act of rearranging his subjectivity through a new relation with the past self. Instead of relying on the idea of the free individual, the novel carries out a practice of rearrangement to produce the potential space of self-mutation.² The memory of the war is reshaped into a memory of resistance that affects his present situation; Griffin’s meditations are an attempt to subvert the current constitution of his self, which is haunted by the lingering effects of the war movie. “It is not a freedom for individuality,” Michael Clifford explains, “but from it” (136). Resisting the trauma that threatens to seize him in the shape of an individual soldier, Griffin’s narrative is an act of “counter-memory” in the Foucauldian sense: through the lens of meditations in green, the veteran desperately tries to transform himself.³

The Cinema-Planet in the Jungle: The Military-Cliché Complex

“I, your genial storyteller, wreathed in a beard of smoke, look into the light and recite strange tales from the war back in the long ago time” (8)—thus begins Griffin’s narrative. Introducing a number of characters, it provides a glimpse of the workings of the army in Vietnam: as an apparatus of power, it sets the conditions of the emergence of the masculine soldier as the subject of military activity. Its operations range over the dimensions of seeing, saying and time—the army organizes these domains so as to produce a certain type of man, soldier, as the end-of-chain product: “Power organizes the horizons of seeing and the limits of saying” (41), as D. N. Rodowick states. It is in this sense that cinema, a...