"It Don't Mean Nothin'": Vietnam War Fiction and Postmodernism

One of the many ironies of the Vietnam War is that the one war America lost gave rise to more and better literature--collectively--than any of America's other twentieth century wars, the overwhelming majority of it written by the war's veterans, who realized early on that this was not their fathers' war. In fact, at least part of the reason for this prodigious outpouring (an ominous 666 novels according to John Newman's Vietnam War Literature: Annotated Bibliography, 1995) of narrative and other modes of literary expression is the synergy generated by the creative opposition of two very different ways of interpreting and representing the Vietnam War. One is through the precision lens of mainstream realism-naturalism, while the other is the kaleidoscope of simulacra associated with postmodernism. The former hinges on the meticulous mimesis of the human-as-animal experience of war as an intersubjective historical event, while the latter denies the possibility of such representation because it entails notions of objective truth and depends on Western historical metanarrative for its justification. The postmodern approach to Vietnam, however, also lays claim to Vietnam as a quintessentially postmodern event to be imitated in a postmodern manner. Thus the so-called "postmodern" representations of Vietnam are founded largely and problematically on the assumption that Vietnam was somehow a "postmodern" event-experience. As Michael Bibby puts it:

To modify the war as "postmodernist" implies that the war is yet another phenomenon of postmodernity. The war, in this sense, is read as exhibiting the traits of a general historical, cultural condition already identifiable. If we can attach a qualification to the name of the war, it must be because that which qualifies it supersedes it, gives it shape, definition, morphological precision. To term the war "post-modernist," then, is to colonize the war under the cultural; to subsume it under a critical sign, a name for the various modes of cultural practices we have come to recognize as the postmodern; to restrict the war under this name; to repress its historicity in the name of a unifying signifier. (Bibby 1999, 148)

In other words, to call the Vietnam War postmodern is to impose a hegemonic unity on a set of often radically dissimilar concepts, ideas and experiences, hence contradicting postmodernism's central logic of diversity and differentiation. Still, this is how the war has come to be regarded by many literary critics and historians and is an important part of their explanations of the emergence of postmodern Vietnam War fiction, which tend to view postmodern war fiction as a logical product of a postmodern war. But aren't such explanations based ultimately on the same mimetic principle underlying literary realism? To begin to answer this question requires a critical examination of the postmodern "status" of both the war and its fiction.

Certainly the historical and political anomalies of the war became clearer as it dragged on from its almost indeterminate origin and are embedded in its many narratives, as are many of its incipient postmodern characteristics and concerns. Nevertheless, some writers, most notably James Webb, John Del Vecchio, and Winston Groom, tried to accommodate Vietnam within the realistic-naturalistic, "war is hell" model of the American war novel, a tradition extending from Stephen Crane through Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos to Norman Mailer and James Jones. For these, the essence of the human experience of war is always everywhere the same, generally entailing a profound progression from innocence to experience involving some combination of fear, courage, brotherhood, sacrifice, and, at its most existential, an ultimate realization that one is a meaningless pawn in the larger (though equally meaningless) game of history. Vietnam was different only in terms of locale, participants, and technology.

Others, however, realized that their experiences in Vietnam demanded a very different kind of narrative paradigm. Strongly influenced by Joseph Heller's masterpiece of black comedy, Catch-22, these writers exploded the...