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COPYRIGHT SUBARNO CHATTARJI, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 2004. A Version of this paper was read by John S. Baky during the conference Entitled War in Film, Television, and History. Sponsored by The Film and History League in conjunction with The Literature Film Association. November 11-14, 2004 in Dallas, Texas Media, poetics, and the narrativization of war Subarno Chattarji Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi, India Fulbright Senior Research Fellow, La Salle University: September 2004-April 2004. December 2004

Mass media and television in particular have altered the ways in which we look at our world and the ways in which politics, wars, and history are projected and reconstructed. The media presents seemingly ‘objective’ narratives of war. ‘This is the way it is’ say the slightly breathless correspondents out in the field. The anchors at home intone and repeat the idea that these reporters are conveying the immediacy of war. ‘It’s a minute by minute existence’ says Nic Robertson, CNN correspondent in Kandahar. The warfront is brought home to millions of viewers snugly ensconced in the global village. From Vietnam to Afghanistan the media has grown in sophistication and influence. By ‘the media’, for the purposes of this paper, I refer primarily to CNN International beamed to India since their veracity and authority is greater than Doordarshan or STAR NEWS (two local channels available in India). I will concentrate on the language of war, as well as the ways in which the media determines the parameters of the debate regarding a given conflict. Since I am not a media specialist I will introduce a few poems on the Vietnam War, a war that I have studied in depth. I propose to begin, however, with a propaganda model developed by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media . One of the dichotomies sustained during the cold war was that of the free and democratic West and the despotic and totalitarian communist bloc. One of the signs of that ‘freedom’ was the mass media, the fact that editors and anchors could critique the government of the time. Dissent was permitted in the West unlike the plight of dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. There are nuances within this monolithic position that I cannot examine in detail. I mention this because the Manichaen logic of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ helped to sustain both sides in the cold war. The media in the West, however, was and is neither totally ‘free’ nor ‘objective’. ‘The mass media serve’, in the words of Herman and Chomsky, ‘as a system for communicating messages and

symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.’ 1 In other words, the media is a powerfully hegemonic entity that creates and reinforces desirable opinions and values. Herman and Chomsky analyze the ways in which news is filtered before it is presented. These filters include the ownership and profit orientation of TV channels, the reliance of media on information provided by the government, business, and ‘experts’ funded by state authorities, and ‘anticommunism’ as a national religion during the cold war (now it might be said to be antiterrorism). ‘These elements interact with and reinforce one another.’ The filters operate so effectively that well-intentioned media people actually believe they are providing objective and fair coverage. The model is not, of course, a sealed one and dissenting views are occasionally aired or printed. ‘Occasionally’ is the operative word here because dissent is very effectively marginalized in the mass media. In the CNN coverage of the Afghanistan War available in India, we saw or heard very little about the scale and extent of antiwar protests in the US and Europe, but speeches by George W. Bush or Tony Blair were given prime time coverage. Vietnam was America’s first television war bringing home a sense of the carnage to millions of American homes. The media has been blamed by Congress, some veterans, and other responsible people in power of actually losing the war for the US. The logic is that images of war turned people off and they didn’t want to see napalmed villages while eating their TV dinners. Hence they turned against the war and persuaded President Nixon to start the withdrawal of US troops. Even as astute a critic of war as Paul Fussell asserts that the media during the Vietnam conflict was a moral agent, as opposed to its role during the Second World War: [] in unbombed America especially, the m eaning of the war seemed inaccessible. As experience, thus, the suffering was wasted. The same tricks of publicity and advertising might have succeeded in sweetening the actualities of Vietnam if television and a vigorous uncensored moral journalism hadn’t been brou ht to b 2 g ear. This is further from the truth than it might seem. As Herman and Chomsky point out: ‘It is a highly significant fact that neither then [i.e. 1965 when US Marines landed in Danang in south Vietnam], nor before, was there any detectable questioning of the righteousness of the American cause in Vietnam, or of the necessity to proceed to full scale

intervention. By that time of course, only questions of tactics and costs remained open, and further discussion in the mainstream media was largely limited to these narrow issues.’ 3 Mainstream media seldom, if ever, questioned the basic tenets of the war, i.e. the US was in Vietnam to protect and foster democracy. Facts inconvenient to these tenets were ignored or suppressed. Jack Lawrence, correspondent for CBS, has pointed out in his memoir, The Cat from Hue , that there was a significant degree of self censorship in the mass media, and that some scenes of war were actually enacted before the camera for consumption at home. TIME-LIFE magazine did not publish Ron Ridenhour’s photographs of the My Lai massacre for more than a year after the event. Print media and TV created and echoed a language that dehumanized the enemy. The death of civilians was ‘collateral damage’, Free Fire Zones implied areas where any Vietnamese person could be killed irrespective of his/her political affiliation or status as civilian, and acronyms such as DMZ contributed to the process of dehumanization. In sharp contrast to the media, it is in poetry that we find a resistance to this debasing of language and humanity. At an obvious but important level Robert Bly’s long poem The Teeth Mother Naked at Last , published in 1970, deals with the issue of disinformation - and its conceptual matrix, rationalizing, justifying - in an idiom of force and insistence. The agenda is not one of unearthing ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ information, it is one of highlighting the proliferation of the war, and the polyphony of that spread. The poem counterpoints brutal destruction with clinical military jargon: This is what it’s like for a rich country to make war this is what it’s like to bomb huts (afterwards described as “structures) this is what it’s like to kill marginal farmers (afterwards described as “Communists). 4 The appropriation of language and its manipulation for projecting doctored versions of reality is obvious and sinister. ‘Huts’ become ‘structures’, and ‘farmers’ are demonized into ‘Communists’. It is a process of naming at which the political establishment was adept. The fact that some ‘farmers’ may have been ‘Communists’ is not as important as all farmers being classified as such. From the perspective of the National

Liberation Front (the Vietcong), or the north Vietnamese, with a long anti-imperialist history, the farmers can never actually have been ‘marginal’. 5 ‘Marginal’ is itself a naive epithet employed from a metropolitan, abstract standpoint, and this is Bly’s position as well, especially in his more didactic outbursts. The naive generalizations are indicative of a lack of comprehension of the ‘other’, who is objectified and dehumanized by the politicians and the military. The military establishment in Vietnam generated its own argot (just as the soldier developed a very different slang to describe the war): MACV, I Corps, II Corps, DMZ, ‘body count’, pacification, Strategic Hamlet Program. These helped to create an easily definable and therefore confinable reality, and served to depersonalize and dehumanize the enemy. Bly highlights ‘the horrors of abstraction - [...] the cartographic work of reinscribing Vietnam as a military arena’. 6 Once the process of reinscription, reinforced by the politicians, was entrenched, the war could safely be consigned to an event happening in a distant part of the world. While the distance was a literal fact, the war had everything to do with the way America perceived itself and its role in the world. A large majority accepted the basic myths justifying US involvement and the images of war beamed daily co-existed placidly with the American way of life. Bly does not wish this placid response to continue, and collapses the distance between the war ‘out there’ and the war ‘within’ America - its collective psyche and national ethos as manifested in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the general atmosphere of strife. Bly refuses to distance the war: If one of those children came toward me with both hands in the air, fire rising along both elbows, I would suddenly go back to my animal brain, I would drop on all fours screaming, my vocal chords would turn blue, so would yours, It would be two days before I could play with my own children again. [ Teeth Mother , 19] Regressing to the ‘animal brain’ is essential in Bly’s opinion to comprehend the problems represented by Vietnam. The poem is a psychological analysis of American history based on the myth of the Teeth Mother, which posits an opposition between the Good Mother and the Death (or Teeth) Mother. This may be compared to Ezra Pound’s

‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’, where the poet characterizes his own generation as being tainted by war and its lies: Died some, pro patria, non ‘dulce’ non ‘et decor’... walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy; usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places. 7 The most direct echo occurs a little later in the poem: There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization[.] [‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’, 191] Pound’s evocation of a rottenness at the heart of civilization reinforces the idea of a terrible cyclicity, almost the inevitability of war fought in every generation for spurious ideals. In Bly’s vision of America, The Teeth Mother ‘suggest[s] the end of psychic life, the dismembering of the psyche’. 8 It is this dismembering of a personal and collective psyche that he presents. Normal, personal relationships seem like a weird aberration, and the prospect of playing with one’s children is as incongruous as the nonchalance with which the two pilots seek to ‘take out as many structures as possible’. The Teeth Mother motif, in so far as Bly uses it to analyze American society, leads to further aesthetic insights regarding political poetry. He posits a core of impulses and ideas that must be tapped to rejuvenate the polity and poetry: It’s clear that many of the events that create our foreign relations and our domestic relations come from more or less hidden impulses in the American psyche. It’s also clear I think that some sort of husk has grown around that psyche, so that in the fifties we could not look into it or did not. The Negroes and the Vietnam War have worn the husk thin in a couple of places now. But if that is so, then the poet’s main job is to penetrate the husk around the American psyche, and since that psyche

is inside him too, the writing of political poetry is like the writing of personal poetry, a sudden drive by the poet inward. 9

The darkness-at-the-heart-of-America kind of psycho-poetic analysis is valuable in its awareness of historical and collective memory, in its perceptions of the connections between the war and the civil rights movement, and the need for the poet to introspect and internalize the collective, psychic tremors surrounding him. The acknowledgement of the poet’s complicity - ‘since that psyche is inside him too’ - is essential and ironic, particularly for poets such as Bly, who often forget this and take on the stance of the neutral prophet. The formulation is thus suspect in its attempt to search for the essential causes or flaws that have led to Vietnam. Implicit in this statement is the idea that the poet has the answer/s to the dilemmas facing the country. Such an analysis is couched in absolute and prophetic terms, and substitutes one set of certainties (the rhetoric surrounding the war) with another (the evil at the heart of America), obliterating the complex histories of the past in the very process of recovery. In Bly’s poetics and representation of Vietnam there is a calculated attempt to establish the extent to which brutalization within American society is responsible for its actions in that country. He does not see the war as an aberration in America’s pristine history, but rather as an extension of earlier histories of conquest, and these histories constitute a collective repressed memory, the psyche that must be probed by the poet: I think the Vietnam war has something to do with the fact that we murdered the Indians. We’re the only modern nation that ever stole its land from another people. [...] What you do first when you commit a crime is you forget it and then you repeat it. So therefore in my opinion what we’re doing is repeating the crime with the Indians. The Vietnamese are our Indians. 10

The comfortable lobotomy of Vietnam from US historical memory, traditions, and values, practised not only by ordinary Americans and politicians, but by Hollywood over the past thirty years, is something that Bly will not perform. Passages in Teeth Mother refer to the connections between seemingly disparate imperial encounters: The ministers lie, the professors lie, the television lies, the priests lie [...]

These lies mean that the country wants to die. Lie after lie starts out into the prairie grass, like enormous trains of Conestoga wagons. [ Teeth Mother , 10] There is a rhetorical assertiveness and shrillness in these lines that project the poet as truth teller. Concurrently, however, the awareness of a historical legacy and climate of ‘lies’ enables Bly to interpret various connections in US history that are often suppressed. ‘Watching Television’ is a vision of America as a society convulsed by violence: Sounds are heard too high for ears, From the body cells there is an answering bay; Soon the inner streets fill with a chorus of barks. We see the landing craft coming in, The black car sliding to a stop, The Puritan killer loosening his guns. Wild dogs tear off noses and eyes And run off with them down the street -The body tears off its own arms and throws them into the air. [...] The filaments of the soul slowly separate: The spirit breaks, a puff of dust floats up, 1 Like a house in Nebraska that suddenly explodes. 1 As a phantasmagoric representation of and meditation on historic, psychic, and societal violence, this poem is unexceptionable. Themes adumbrated in The Teeth Mother recur here: the violence within the heart and mind of America, the combination of the crusader-killer (‘The Puritan killer loosening his guns’) and guilt-ridden reformer individual (‘The filaments of the soul slowly separate’). The fundamental contradiction between the millennial hopes and brutal actualities to fulfil that vision comes to a head in a society at war with itself. The individual seems to have lost control and violence takes on a life of its own: ‘The body tears off its own arms and throws them into the air.’ This dislocated violence mirrors the act of watching the Vietnam War on television which further alienated the war by never showing wounded or dead US soldiers, and where actual violence was almost never televised. Television allowed the viewer to spectate without responsibility, to maintain a comfortable distance from the war. Writing at the time of the

Falkland/Malvinas Islands conflict Raymond Williams referred to this distancing, the ‘latent culture of alienation, within which men and women are reduced to models, figures and the quick cry in the throat’. 12 Williams’s statement on the Falklands War is applicable to Vietnam where no responsible citizen could totally dissociate her/himself from the war. The fact that a majority of citizens treated Vietnam as being ‘outside’ their domain and their lives was indicative of dislocated violence; treating the violence committed by their compatriots as if it was being done by anonymous ‘others’. These ‘others’ could be the politicians or the soldiers, but the fact that they constituted an integral part of the nation was often overlooked. While particular groups were held responsible for the war, national myths and ideologies were seldom questioned. The passivity that the great majority displayed during the war is the object of Bly’s criticism. Vietnam, as pointed out earlier, was the first war brought directly into the homes of every television owner in the US. Individual citizens watched American power destroy another nation and this is Bly’s central point: that by not protesting the war, they silently participated in the dismemberment of the nation’s spirit: ‘The spirit breaks, a puff of dust floats up’. There is a disturbing involution that occurs in the act of watching this war on television: a society watching itself destroy itself in its desire to fulfil noble ideals. It is a society inured to violence, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the depth of violence within the country that manifests itself in Vietnam. In his poem ‘The Language of the Tribe’, Howard Nemerov reproduces the discourse of official doublespeak to indicate the inadequacy of a representational mode that presumes a monopoly on ‘truth’: The Secretary spoke of the “facilities. Under his bald dome the mouth opened and spoke. The raids, he said, were protection reaction responses Against the enemy’s anti-aircraft facilities. That were harassing our unarmed reconnaissance Surveillance over their facilities. But might the bombs have damaged other targets? Under his bald dome the mouth opened and spoke.

Possibly, he said, the bombs might have Deprived the enemy’s facilities Of access to logistic and supply Facilities in close proximity To primary targets; by which he meant, I think: “The bastards kept the bullets near the guns. 13 The poem is a striking example of what Hugh Kenner defines as the ‘phosphorescent quotation’: ‘It was long supposed that a politician was best mocked by parody; by isolating traits and exaggerating them. But in the mid 1950s satirists discovered that to mock Dwight Eisenhower it was sufficient to quote him verbatim.’ 14 The formal tone of the poem is deliberately foregrounded so that it can be undercut by the intervention of an alternative ‘personal’ voice and idiom. There is no single referent for Vietnam, no precise definition that can locate, isolate, and categorize the war, and this poem highlights the hierarchy of discourse operative in representations of the war. The ‘centre’, the ‘truth’ is constituted and articulated by particular administrations, and policy and military planners. At a press conference, which is an arena for the dissemination of this ‘truth’, the poet is ‘marginal’ by virtue of expressing an alternative and less acceptable ‘truth’. However, the poetic statement is ‘central’ to any representation of the war (and this is even more apparent in poetry by veterans) since it locates Vietnam in a non-absolutist matrix. The centre-margin paradigm requires the poet to constantly negotiate the problematic and often invisible boundaries between authority and dissent, the absolute and the relativistic. The question of location (the poet and politician vis-à-vis the war) and proliferation of the war is a central concern in the poem ‘Continuous Performances’: ‘The war went on till everything was it’ [ Sentences , 19]. The protean nature of Vietnam complicates the position of the anti-war protestor and poet. The anti-war poet can easily be assimilated into the larger framework of democratic pluralism (for instance, the way in which Ginsberg was perceived ‘as a figure of patience, charm, and conciliation’ even in the Sixties, and is now included in university syllabi in the US), and a polity that can absorb and tolerate protest can parade its democratic credentials. 15 Of course, plurality does not necessarily imply

actual debate, it involves the manufacture of consensus through the media and films, among other means: the growing war Already sponsoring movies about itself To let the children know what it was like. [ Sentences , 19] The influence of films harks back to the Second World War because it was the exploits of John Wayne and Audie Murphy that inspired many Americans to go to Vietnam. 16 The process of selective remembrance and re-presentation is evident in films about the Vietnam War, and Nemerov is anxious about its effects on collective national memory. Hollywood is not the only agent participating in the rewriting of the war. The documentary Hearts and Minds analyses the immense power and resilience of mainstream nationalism. In the film, Lt. George Coker, a POW, lectures on patriotism and the American way of principled survival to schoolchildren and mothers. He is welcomed back as a national hero. The film analyzes how the POW myth helped to create an acceptable heroism, in a war devoid of heroes, within the military-nationalist framework. While Hearts and Minds critically analyzes some issues, another documentary titled Vietnam Memorial is essentially a healing, reconciliatory film. While there can be no objection to the desire for healing the wounds of the war, it becomes problematic when that healing is at the expense of historical accuracy and memory. In this film, Vietnam is included in the pantheon of glorious sacrifices and history is revised: ‘We didn’t lose the war. The politicians did’ says a veteran in the film. The veteran is rehabilitated as a hero and absolved of all responsibility of trying to understand the war and its causes; so is the nation. The statement quoted is part of the extremely select remembrance that the Vietnam Memorial as monument and document contributes to, and that Hollywood films advance. A continual reappraisal and redescription of given realities is necessary if the poet is to resist the sort of convenient simplifications available in mainstream culture. In dominant American political myths as well as in popular culture representation, particularly film ( First Blood , Platoon , Forrest Gump ), Vietnam has been rewritten as a just and noble cause. Here are just two examples. Robert McNamara acknowledges errors