War and Play: A Theory of the Vietnam Sports Novel

JOHN LIMON War and Play: A Theory of the Vietnam Sports Novel Why not a smooth, ordering arc from war to peace? —Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato By 1987, at least 130 Vietnam novels were in print. I have this from Timothy J. Lomperis' "Reading the Wind": The Literature of the Vietnam War, his record of a conference dedicated to establishing and publicizing the vitality of the subgenre. Nevertheless, even the conferees who were themselves Vietnam novelists "agreed that the Vietnam novel is yet to be written."' This is despite the fact that every few months a Vietnam film is released which disinterested critics hail as the Vietnam film. Assuming that the Vietnam novelists are right that no work of fiction has established itself as the necessaty Vietnam fiction, I want to atgue that it is a mistake to await it. There already exists a class of Vietnam novels whose claim to our interest is that they are not direct, final, exhaustive, satisfying treatments of the war in Indochina. I am thinking of the spate of sports novels in the 1960s, all written by noncombatants, all alluding to Vietnam by indirection or misdirection. There are two simple claims I may be perceived as making about the displacement of Vietnam into sports novels, and which I need to disavow. On the one hand, I might be taken to be arguing that something about the formlessness and endless interpretability of Vietnam necessitated new experiments in obliquity. 'At the gates of our world, there was Vietnam," Foucault announces: "our world" is known of Arizona Quarterly Volume 46 Number 3, Fall 1990 Copyright © 1990 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 6 10 66John Limon course as "postmodernism," and if there is a historical event that suggests why the United States should have followed France so sympathetically into postmodernism, it is surely out adventure in Southeast Asia.2 On the othet hand, I might be undetstood as asserting that Vietnam had to be displaced by sports only for noncombatant writers who considered their mediated relation to Vietnam in tetms of the inevitability of mediation in general. I might, in othet wotds, be misunderstood as congratulating ot condemning sports novelists for theit postmodern indirection, diagnosed eithet as an ingenious adaptation to Vietnam or as a failure to confront it; as either, in other wotds, following from Vietnam or, as a result of the authots' suspicions about the naturalness of natratives, helping to create our sense of the war. What I in fact mean to say is that the residual interest of Vietnam sports novels is all in the difficulty of determining whether they illustrate —in relation to the representational crisis of Vietnam—the representational poverty or resourcefulness of fiction. The issue was, of course, general in '60s fiction (and '70s theory); if literature turned to sport in the '60s, it was partly because at that time literature could seem like a game, rule-bound, and self-enclosed. But if sports share a border with games, they also share a border with wat, which implies that the spotts novel was perfectly poised eithet to mask the violence ofVietnam or to make the image Vietnam appear where all had been peace and innocence. The advantage of the great Vietnam films—so that no detour by way of the sports metaphor has seemed necessaty in them—is their capacity for registering Vietnam as pure sensuous bombardment (witness Platoon ), at the same time maintaining for two or three hours a faith in the possibility of diagrammatic narratives (the confrontation of good and evil in Platoon, the journey up the river in Apocalypse Now). The Vietnam film is uncontained and always perfectly framed. Thus a book as close to sensuous bombardment as Dispatches is conceived by Michael Herr—who worked on Apocalypse Now and Full MetalJacket—as a kind of literary movie. Yet no Vietnam book, including Dispatches, is abashed about the narrative indirections that are necessitated by its sensuous inadequacies (the hopelessness of picturing expressed as the failure to frame), from Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (Vietnam as what might be imaginatively escaped to Paris) to Bobbie Ann Mason's in Country (Vietnam as what...