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Chapter 7. The Ditch
- University of Massachusetts Press
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[158] CHAPTER 7 The Ditch Scattered throughout Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (1994) are seven chapters called “Evidence.” The evidence given in the fourth of these chapters is about the My Lai massacre. O’Brien’s reader has known for some time that such evidence is looming and has begun to suspect, perhaps as early as page 10 of the novel and if he knows anything about the case, that John Wade’s having served in Company C in Task Force Barker is likely to have involved him in the events that took place on March 16, 1968, in Quang Ngai province in South Vietnam. There has been mention of John’s going to war, and of finding himself, in a phrase O’Brien will repeat at three different points in the novel, “at the bottom of an irrigation ditch.” By the time the evidence in chapter 16 is produced, we know that Wade has lost at the age of forty a race for a Senate seat in Minnesota and that his wife, Kathy, has gone missing in the great north woods, a wilderness into which John, too, will eventually disappear. We have also learned that the lists of facts and quotations making up the “Evidence” chapters fall short of achieving an adequate representation of the feelings and historical events summoned in the novel proper, and that such evidence is often conflicting, fragmentary, and ambiguous. John Wade’s story remains a “mystery” about which O’Brien seems to invite us, in Keats’s phrase, to remain “capable of being in uncertainties.” O’Brien even comes out into his narrative, in a footnote on page 30, where he admits that THE DITCH [159] “fact in this narrative . . . must ultimately be viewed as a diligent but still imaginative reconstruction of events.” So we perhaps hold off from judging John, refrain from convicting him of the murder of his wife a number of informants believe him to have committed, and therefore consent to entertain the thought that with material so hot to handle a novel may be a more adequate vehicle for getting at the past than is a trial. By placing My Lai at the center of his novel, O’Brien would seem to invite us to remain in uncertainties about the massacre as well. His public comments on the subject support this hypothesis. At a conference held in 1994 at Tulane University, O’Brien insisted on the one hand that “there were no mitigating circumstances” for the massacre, while also going on to conclude that “it’s a mystery.” “There are seeds of evil” in all of us, he maintained. Clearly conflicted about how to think and feel about the massacre, O’Brien contented himself with saying, “Evil is a mysterious thing.” O’Brien’s novel moves toward a more refined sense of complicity, however, than these comments would suggest. It does so by asking its reader to remain in a hypothetical relationship to the narrative. If “Evidence” is the title of seven chapters, eight others receive the title “Hypothesis.” Faced with the “implacable otherness of others,” even an other like John Wade, a character he himself has invented, O’Brien admits in one of his footnotes that “we wish to penetrate by hypothesis.” There is an authorial desire to perform “miracles of knowing.” But the word “hypothesis” has already ceded away any such achievement, embracing instead the contingent and constructed nature of any take on anything. So O’Brien ends the second “Hypothesis” chapter with a maybe: “Maybe she’s still out there.” The question of Kathy’s disappearance and possible survival merges, in O’Brien’s novel, with the question of what happened, in Vietnam, at the ditch. John Wade has been present at each occasion. He has also engaged in a cover-up of his involvement in each event, to the extent that he hides from the authorities the trouble in his marriage, just as he had failed to mention his presence at My Lai to his campaign manager, Tony Carbo. “All you had to do was say something,” Carbo later tells him, after the secret has come out and Wade has been forced to give his brisk concession speech. Despite his character’s insistence on the manifold “uncertainties” surrounding Kathy’s disappearance, O’Brien as interrogating commentator remains uneasy with John Wade’s negative capability. Such a capability is possessed, John Keats argues, “when a man is capable of...