-
Artful Dodge Interviews Tim O’Brien
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
68 Artful Dodge Interviews Tim O’Brien Daniel Bourne and Debra Shostak/1991 From Artful Dodge 22/23 (1992): 74–90. Reprinted with permission of Daniel Bourne. Since the appearance of his war memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone in 1973, Tim O’Brien has been widely regarded as not only a major new voice in American writing, but also as an important witness to the day-to-day realities of the Vietnam conflict and to war in general. His novel Going After Cacciato, set in Vietnam, won the 1979 National Book Award; and more recently, The Things They Carried (1990), a novel composed of interlinking stories about a group of American foot soldiers on patrol, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best works of fiction in 1990. The recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation, Tim O’Brien has published two other novels, Northern Lights (1975) and The Nuclear Age (1985), and is currently at work on his next book of fiction, an excerpt of which appeared in the January 1992 issue of the Atlantic under the title “The People We Marry.” The following interview, however, contests the classification of Tim O’Brien as solely a war writer. Instead, O’Brien’s choice of dramatic landscape provides “a way to get at the human heart and the pressure exerted on it,” for instance, how in Going After Cacciato fear and desire open the door to imaginative possibility, or how stories can save us, as O’Brien writes in The Things They Carried. As the latter example shows, O’Brien is deeply concerned with the many faces of storytelling itself—the relationship between fact and fiction, the creation of what he calls “happeningness,” the way language is incommensurate with reality, the way form shapes belief. Tim O’Brien’s gift is to explore these questions through lyrical, deceptively spare, casually immediate prose. His fiction puts a spin on human experi- DANIEL BOURNE AND DEBRA SHOSTAK / 1991 69 ence to reveal the unexpectedness in our most intimate feelings. Fear and love, longing and guilt, violence and the urge for vengeance—all these are landmarks on the terrain of our common humanity: glimpsable, but not necessarily knowable. Addressing a gathering of writing teachers a few months after the interview with Artful Dodge, O’Brien explained the openendedness of his exploration this way: “The purpose of writing is to enhance mystery, not solve it.” The following conversation took place on October 2, 1991, during Tim O’Brien’s residency as a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writing Fellow at The College of Wooster. Daniel Bourne: Do you think you would have been a writer if you had not gone to Vietnam? Tim O’Brien: No. At least I don’t think so. These things are always mysterious and so any answer has to be equally enigmatic. Debra Shostak: But had you thought about writing before you went? O’Brien: I’d thought of it, but never as a career, never as a profession. It wasn’t the material that Vietnam presented me with so much as it was a revolution of personality. I’d been an academic and intellectual sort of person , and Vietnam changed all that. DB: After the war, when you did start to write about your experience, did you make a conscious decision to start writing about Vietnam through non- fiction, through a war memoir as in If I Die in a Combat Zone? O’Brien: No. At the time, and to this day really, I couldn’t care less that the book was nonfiction. It is presented in this way, but any person with an I.Q. over 84 knows that any narrative has to be—at least in part—invented. That is, who’s going to remember every scrap of dialogue? Most of that speech has to be made up. And events get reordered in the course of writing, recounting . Also, reality did not come at me the way it comes at you in the book: in the war, back at home when still a little boy, then in basic training, back to the war. There’s a scrambling of the chronology which isn’t totally real to the world as I lived it. Also, parts of the book, although it’s technically...