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C h a p t e r o n e The Body and the Corporation Norris  Chambers The phrase “secret history” is Michael Herr’s and comes from a passage in Dispatches (1977). Herr is writing about the problem of determining when the war in Vietnam began: You couldn’t find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began going off? Mission intellectuals like 1954 as the reference date; if you saw as far back as War II and the Japanese occupation you were practically a historical visionary. “Realists” said that it began for us in 1961, and the common run of Mission flack insisted on 1965, post-Tonkin Resolution, as though all the killing that had gone before wasn’t really war. Anyway, you couldn’t use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter; might just as well lay it on the protoGringos who found the New England woods too raw and empty for their peace and filled them up with their own imported devils. Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle’s body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Bien Phu. But the first happened in a novel, and while the second happened on the ground it happened to the French, and Washington gave it no more substance than if Graham Greene had made it up too. Straight history, auto-revised history, history without handles , for all the books and articles and white papers, all the talk and the miles of film, something wasn’t answered, it wasn’t even asked. We were backgrounded, deep, but when the background started sliding forward not a single life was saved by the information. The thing had transmitted too much energy, it heated up too hot, hiding low under the fact-figure crossfire there was a secret history, and not a lot of people felt like running in there to bring it out. This passage not only provides the present book with its title but makes four important points about the ways in which literary art works. First, the range and audacity of Herr’s field of allusion argue that a writer can and continually does create the context within which he is to be understood. Second, the echoes set up between these allusions—they enforce the recognition that Vietnam and the Trail 2 Secret Histories of Tears involve wars against what Bruce Springsteen, in “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984), calls with some irony the “yellow man” and his North American descendants —argue for overdetermined and previously overlooked connections in the vast array that is the American past. Third, the breathlessness of the syntax and sheer scale of Herr’s sentences show a mind thinking and betray an ambition to find a form adequate to contain its associations and to allow their consequences to be felt. Fourth, the willingness to admit into evidence something that “happened in a novel” alongside what may have happened in fact summons art to the task of making secret history, a task that the passage not only identifies but chooses to enact. Herr makes a crucial distinction here between two kinds of history. By “straight history” he means to evoke official, euphemistic, committee-generated language. Straight history does not include the first-rate scholarship of a James M. McPherson ’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) or a Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), works of imagination as moving and artful as any strong novel. By “straight history,” Herr refers to something like the stories taught in the public schools or invoked at a political convention. Frances Fitzgerald has shown the ways in which high school textbook history reinforces rather than questions the nation’s myths of itself and thereby fails in the task of providing a critical-minded citizenry. What Elizabeth Bishop (1911–79) writes in “Crusoe in England” (1971) about the love of the two men on the island applies also to the Texas School Board–approved version of the nation’s story: “None of the books has ever got it right.” Straight history and secret history are both versions of a third thing, what we call the “real.” The distinction between two modes...

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