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C h a p t e r e i g h t The Second World War Mori  Vonnegut  Pynchon  Silko  Hersey The winning of a war can be a defeat for the imagination. In the sixty years since the two unconditional surrenders, narratives of “The Greatest Generation ” have crowded out accounts of the pain and alienation and bad behavior that are inevitably the experience of war. Triumph can become a tiresome subject, however , and sensing this, turn-of-the-century movies such as Saving Private Ryan (1998) and HBO’s Band of Brothers (2001) substitute decency for heroism as the quality being celebrated. While these toned-down approaches, shot in muted browns and grays, mark an advance on mere self-congratulation, they have probably not displaced the image of the good and glamorous war long ago laid down by the garish camera filters of South Pacific (1958). For anyone looking back at the history of the twentieth century, the war is in the way. It marks a breach in time that separates the “before” from the “after.” In The Gathering Storm (1948), Winston Churchill describes the First and Second World Wars as a “Thirty Years War.” This was a European and an East Asian civil war won by two outside powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The conflict then gave way to the cold war, “won” by the United States in 1989. The price for winning was stalemate in Korea and defeat in Vietnam. After a decade as the world’s unchallenged superpower and the moving force in Panama, the Gulf War, Bosnia, and Somalia, the United States was shocked into an anxious state of readiness on September 11, 2001, when the reality of an aggression already twenty years underway announced itself. Even so swift a summary argues for the truth of William Styron’s (1925–2006) prophecy, one made in The Long March (1952), that his country has gone “astray . . . in the never-endingness of war.” Given the immensity of the thing, it remains puzzling that more good American writing did not come out of World War II. If it was not quite the “Unwritten War,” as Daniel Aaron calls the Civil War, the response did appear delayed. It took twenty years before the best of the big books started coming: Catch-22 (1961), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Kurt Vonnegut opens his novel by addressing the matter of the delay: I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, 136 Secret Histories I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big. But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then—not enough of them to make a book, anyway. Perhaps Heller and Vonnegut and Pynchon had to wait for Vietnam to ramp up before being liberated into the vision of endless repetition of error that offered them a structural understanding of and a narrative handle on the experience of the war. In Wartime (1989), his book about “the psychological and emotional culture of Americans and Britons during the Second World War,” Paul Fussell maintains that “the real war is unlikely to be found in novels.” Fussell supplies at least two reasons for this. First, the war was a series of blunders that no one wanted to acknowledge; and second, its essential feature—combat—is the soldier’s work, and, like other kinds of work, it escapes representation. In his edition of The Norton Book of Modern War (1991), Fussell quotes historian Robert J. Spiller on this point: Because the soldier’s history of war does not readily submit to the orderly requirements of history, and because, when uncovered, it often challenges the orderly traditions by which military history has shaped our understanding of warfare , the soldier’s war has been the great secret of military history. And within this special, secret history of war, the darkest corner of all has had to do with war’s essential, defining feature—combat, what it is like to have lived through it, and to have lived with one’s own combat history for the rest of...

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