Counterfire: The Military Unconscious, Counternarratives, and the Hegemonic Soldier in Phil Klay’s Redeployment
Ari Räisänen 241739 MA Thesis
Professor Jopi Nyman
University of Eastern Finland 9 November 2018
Tiedekunta – Faculty
Philosophical Faculty Osasto – School
School of Humanities Tekijät – Author
Ari Räisänen Työn nimi – Title
Counterfire: The Military Unconscious, Counternarratives, and the Hegemonic Soldier in Phil Klay’s Redeployment
Pääaine – Main subject Työn laji – Level Päivämäärä – Date Sivumäärä – Number of pages English Language and Culture Pro gradu -tutkielma X 9.11.2018 131
Sivuainetutkielma Kandidaatin tutkielma Aineopintojen tutkielma Tiivistelmä – Abstract
The thesis examines the ways in which Phil Klay’s Redeployment (2014) generates counternarratives that rupture the hegemonic representations and narratives surrounding the contemporary American soldier, and thus illuminating the peculiar disconnect between the American public and the military community. By applying Fredric Jameson’s theories of the political unconscious and nostalgic recreation to Redeployment, the thesis approaches this disconnect through the concepts of the military unconscious, and what I term as the hegemonic soldier. The military unconscious refers to a type of political unconscious specific to the military, one that rises from the lived-in social realities of those that serve, or have served, in the US military, and functions in a context totalized by History. The hegemonic soldier refers to a construct consisting of the reified representations of war. As such, the hegemonic soldier is established as an ideological construct that informs the dominant cultural representations of the American soldier, as well as the wars they fight in, and reinforces itself through a process resembling Fredric Jameson’s idea of nostalgic recreation. By approaching Redeployment through this theoretical framework, the analysis is able to uncover the previously hidden military unconscious of the text and the counternarratives stemming from it. As seen in the analysis, these counternarratives rupture both the hegemonic soldier, and hegemonic Americanness, thus demonstrating the transgressive potential of veteran literature.
I have structured the thesis as follows. After the introductory chapter, I present the relevant theories in the second chapter beginning with an overlook of Fredric Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious, which is then expanded into the idea of the military
unconscious in section 2.1.2. In this section, I establish the fundamental characteristics of the military unconscious and the dynamics of the interaction between it and the general populace. This dynamic is characterized by the transference of reified military signifiers and symbols of the military unconscious to the wider culture. Thus, the military unconscious is shown to possess an anticipatory quality to it and interacts with the wider political unconscious in a dialectical fashion. Section 2.2.1 moves on to examine the notion of American ideology and its interaction with the American hegemonic soldier. I begin by introducing the theory of ideology to be used, which is followed by an examination of the historical development of the American national ideology. I show that violence and violent heroes have always been at the core of Americanness, and consequently, the central position of the soldier/veteran in contemporary American society can be viewed as the latest manifestation of a long series of violent national heroic archetypes. In section 2.2.2, I analyze the internal mechanisms of the hegemonic soldier and its manifestations in contemporary culture. The hegemonic soldier’s internal mechanism is characterized by a type of Jamesonian nostalgic recreation: the American public has become more detached from the military and the wars they fight in, and thus leaving only the reified imagery of entertainment as the sole connection. Finally, section 2.3 examines the ways in which veteran literature provides an opportunity to resist and rupture the hegemonic soldier through the
generation of counternarratives via the act of witnessing and remembrance.
The third chapter consists of an analysis of four short stories from Redeployment, which have been chosen to correspond with four key thematic stages in the generation of counternarratives: war (“After Action Report”), “the in-between” of war and home (“Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound), home (“Psychological Operations”), and the narrative stage of war stories (“War Stories”). In my analysis of
“After Action Report” in section 3.1, I demonstrate how the story’s counternarrative ruptures hegemonic military discourse by offering an alternative discourse of killing. Section 3.2 shows how the counternarrative of “Unless” collapses reified military identities through the act of remembrance. In section 3.3, I reveal how “Psychological Operations” ruptures the hegemonic soldier through a critique of ideology and its effects on identity. The chapter closes in section 3.4 with an examination of the ways in which the hegemonic soldier in
“War Stories” is shown to be internalized in contemporary American culture to such an extent that its latent presence is evident even in narratives seeking to subvert it. The analysis of these stories demonstrates that the counternarratives of Redeployment rupture the hegemonic soldier on multiple levels, and in the process reveal the previously hidden military unconscious of the text. The soldier subject of these texts is shown to exhibit a desire to move beyond their reified status as a soldier singularly defined by war. The analysis also demonstrates that Redeployment displays metafictional qualities in critiquing the veteran author’s role as a conduit for the military unconscious. Here, the contemporary American veteran author comes to resemble a self-aware storyteller figure who is intensely aware of their historical status, and how they are connected to it.
In the concluding chapter, I present a summary of my arguments and findings, discuss what has been left unexamined, and conclude with a look at prospective future research topics on this subject.
Avainsanat – Keywords
Redeployment, Phil Klay, war writing, Fredric Jameson, political unconscious, Americanness, Iraq War, veteran literature, American literature
Tiedekunta – Faculty
Filosofinen tiedekunta Osasto – School
Humanistinen osasto Tekijät – Author
Ari Räisänen Työn nimi – Title
Counterfire: The Military Unconscious, Counternarratives, and the Hegemonic Soldier in Phil Klay’s Redeployment
Pääaine – Main subject Työn laji – Level Päivämäärä – Date Sivumäärä – Number of pages Englannin kieli ja kulttuuri Pro gradu -tutkielma X 9.11.2018 131
Sivuainetutkielma Kandidaatin tutkielma Aineopintojen tutkielma Tiivistelmä – Abstract
Tutkielma tarkastelee tapoja joilla Phil Klayn Redeployment (2014) tuottaa vastakertomuksia, jotka murtavat hegemonisia
nykyamerikkalaista sotilasta koskevia representaatioita sekä kertomuksia ja joiden avulla teos valaisee amerikkalaisen yhteiskunnan ja sotilaiden välistä kuilua. Soveltamalla Fredric Jamesonin poliittisien alitajunnan ja nostalgisen uudelleenrakentamisen teoriaa
Redeploymentiin, tutkielma lähestyy edellä mainittua kuilua sotilaallisen alitajunnan ja hegemonisen sotilaan käsitteiden kautta. Sotilaallinen alitajunta on poliittisen alitajunnan versio, joka viittaa asevoimille ominaiseen poliittiseen alitajuntaan. Se nousee asevoimissa palvelleiden ja palvelevien eletystä sosiaalisesta todellisuudesta ja joka toimii Historian totalisoivassa kontekstissa. Hegemoninen sotilas viittaa rakennelmaan, joka koostuu reifioituneista sodan representaatioista. Näin ollen sen voidaan katsoa olevan ideologinen rakenne, joka määrittää amerikkalaisen sotilaan ja sotien dominantteja kulttuurisia representaatioita. Hegemonisen sotilaan rakentuminen muistuttaa Fredric Jamesonin nostalgisen uudelleenrakentamisen prosessia. Lähestymällä Redeploymentiä edellä kuvatun teoreettisen kehyksen kautta on analyysissä mahdollista paljastaa tekstin aiemmin piilossa ollut sotilaallinen alitajunta ja siitä kumpuavat vastakertomukset. Kuten analyysi osoittaa, teoksen vastakertomukset eivät ainoastaan murra hegemonista sotilasta, vaan myös hegemonista amerikkalaisuutta ja näin ollen osoittaa veteraanikirjallisuudella olevan transgressiivisia mahdollisuuksia.
Tutkielman rakenne on seuraava. Johdannon jälkeen esittelen tutkielmassa käytetyt teoriat. Luku 2 alkaa katsauksella Fredric Jamesonin teoriaan poliittisesta alitajunnasta, joka laajennetaan sotilaallisen alitajunnan konseptiksi jaksossa 2.1.2. Kyseinen luku esittelee
sotilaallisen alitajunnan perusteet sekä dialektisen vuorovaikutusdynamiikan sotilaallisen alitajunnan ja laajemman poliittisen alitajunnan välillä. Vuorovaikutuksen ominaispiirteenä on reifioituneiden sotilassymbolien ja –merkitsijöiden siirtyminen yleisempään käyttöön. Näin ollen sotilaallisen alitajunnan voidaan katsoa omaavan ennakoivia piirteitä. Jakso 2.2.1 tarkastelee amerikkalaisuuden ideologiaa ja sen vaikutusta amerikkalaiseen hegemoniseen sotilaaseen. Aloitan esittelemällä käytetyn ideologiateorian, jota seuraa amerikkalaisuuden historiallisen kehityksen tarkastelu. Jakso näyttää, että väkivalta ja väkivaltaiset sankarit ovat olleet aina amerikkalaisuuden ytimessä.
Samoin sotilaan/veteraanin keskeinen rooli nykyisessä amerikkalaisuudessa voidaan käsittää viimeisimpänä ilmentymänä kansallisen väkivaltaisten sankarillisten arkkityyppien jatkumossa. Seuraava jakso 2.2.2 siirtyy käsittelemään hegemonisen sotilaan sisäisiä mekanismeja sekä sen nykyaikaisia kulttuurisia ilmentymiä. Hegemonisen sotilaan sisäinen mekanismi muistuttaa luonteeltaan Fredric Jamesonin nostalgisen uudelleenrakentamisen prosessia. Amerikkalaisen yleisön etääntyessä sotavoimien todellisuudesta ja maan käymistä sodista, ainoaksi yhteydeksi muodostuu populaarikulttuurin reifioitunut sotilaskuvasto. Teorialuvun päättää jakso 2.3, joka käsittelee tapoja, joilla veteraanikirjallisuus tarjoaa mahdollisuuden vastustaa ja murtaa hegemonisen sotilaan diskurssin todistamisen ja muistamisen kautta tuotettujen vastakertomuksien avulla.
Kolmas luku koostuu neljästä Redployment-kokoelman sisältämän novellin analyysista, jotka vastaavat neljää vastakertomuksien kannalta keskeistä temaattista aluetta: sota (”After Action Report”), sodan ja kodin välitila (”Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound”), koti
(”Psychological Operations”), ja sotatarinoiden kerronnallinen näyttämö (”War Stories”). Jakson 3.1 analyysissä osoitan, kuinka ”After Action Report” tuottaa vastakertomuksen, joka murtaa hegemonisen sotilasdiskurssin tarjoamalla vaihtoehtoisen tappamista käsittelevän diskurssin. Jakso 3.2 puolestaan tarkastelee, kuinka muistamisen ja todistamisen tuottama vastakertomus romahduttaa reifioituneet sotilasidentiteetit. Seuraavan jakson 3.3 analyysi esittelee, kuinka ”Psychological Operations” murtaa hegemonisen sotilaan ideologian vaikutuksen identiteettiin kohdistuvan kritiikin avulla. Luvun päättävä jakso 3.4 tarkastelee kuinka ”War Stories”-novellin tuottama vastakertomus osoittaa amerikkalaisen hegemonisen sotilaan esiintyvän piilevässä muodossa myös kertomuksissa, jotka pyrkivät haastamaan sen. Novellien analyysi osoittaa, kuinka Redeploymentin vastakertomukset murtavat hegemonisen sotilaan monella tasolla ja samalla paljastavat tekstin aiemmin piilossa olleen sotilaallisen alitajunnan. Tekstien sotilassubjekteille on ominaista halu siirtyä eteenpäin reifioituneesta asemastaan sotilaina, jotka määrittyvät yksistään sodan kautta. Analyysi osoittaa myös, että Redeployment omaa
metafiktionaalisia ominaisuuksia käsitellessään veteraanikirjailijan roolia sotilasalitajunnan kanavana. Näin ollen nykyamerikkalainen veteraanikirjailija muistuttaakin itsetietoista tarinankertojahahmoa, joka on hyvin tietoinen historiallisesta asemastaan ja yhteydestään siihen.
Tutkielman päätösluvussa esitän yhteenvedon argumenteista ja havainnoistani, käsittelen tutkielman temaattisia puutteita ja päätän luvun lyhyellä katsauksella mahdollisiin jatkotutkimusaiheisiin.
Avainsanat – Keywords
Redeployment, Phil Klay, sotakirjallisuus, Fredric Jameson, poliittinen alitajunta, amerikkalaisuus, Irakin sota, veteraanikirjallisuus, yhdysvaltalainen kirjallisuus
1. Introduction………... 1 1.1. Aims, Methods, and Structure……… 2 1.2. Literature and Earlier Studies………... 5 2. Reconnoitering Theory: The Military Unconscious and the Hegemonic Soldier…... 10 2.1. Uncovering the Military Unconscious: The Political Unconscious and Veteran
Literature
2.1.1. Fredric Jameson and the Political Unconscious...…………... 14 2.1.2. Towards a Military Unconscious……….….... 21 2.2. All Good Soldiers: Ideology of Americaness and the Hegemonic Soldier…... 27 2.2.1. Ideology of America in the 21st Century and Militarization....……….….. 27 2.2.2. The Hegemonic Soldier and Nostalgic Recreation……….…. 35 2.3. Flanking Maneuvers: Counternarratives in Veteran Literature……….…... 43 2.3.1. Creating Counternarratives Through Witnessing and Remembering….…. 43 2.3.2. Counternarratives as Tools of Resistance……….... 49 3. War of Words: Uncovering the Military Unconscious and the Hegemonic Soldier in Phil
Klay’s Redeployment……….….. 55 3.1. The Discourse of Killing and Counternarratives in “After Action Report”……. 57 3.2. Negotiating Veteran Identity in “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound”………... 70 3.3. Ideology, Identity, and the Hegemonic Soldier in “Psychological Operations”... 88 3.4. Theatre of War: Critique of War as a Narrative Stage in “War Stories”………. 102
4. Conclusion………... 118
Works Cited………... 123
1. Introduction
In January 2015, The Atlantic magazine published an article titled “The Tragedy of the American Military” by James Fallows. The article’s main point is the peculiar sense of disconnect between the American military and the rest of the country. Fallow illustrates this disconnect expertly when describing a scene which he witnessed at an airport, while watching President Obama’s gushing speech to members of the military on a nearby television:
If any of my fellow travelers at O’Hare were still listening to the speech, none of them showed any reaction to it. And why would they? This has become the way we assume the American military will be discussed by politicians and in the press: Overblown, limitless praise, absent the caveats or public skepticism we would apply to other American institutions, especially ones that run on taxpayer money. A somber moment to reflect on sacrifice. Then everyone except the few people in uniform getting on with their workaday concerns.
(Fallows)
While Fallow’s comments are aimed mainly at the military as a national institution, his observation holds true even if the focus is moved from the collective to the individual level of the American soldier. After 15 years of continuous war the American soldier has come to inhabit a central position in the American national consciousness. The contemporary American soldier is the focus of an avalanche of cultural products, ranging from video games such as the Call of Duty series, to movies mythologizing their real-world exploits such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012) or Blackhawk Down (2001). The aim of this thesis is to study the ways in Phil Klay’s Redeployment (2014) challenges these representations of the American soldier by constructing counternarratives that rupture hegemonic representations of soldiers on multiple levels.
At the same time, the phrase “Support our troops!” has become so ingrained in the American national ideology that what it implies is an act veering on the sacrosanct. One can oppose the war, but support for the troops is non-negotiable, and to suggest otherwise borders on blasphemy. Occasionally, the discourse extends beyond the slogans of the bumper sticker and the symbolic support shown through yellow ribbons: soldiers often receive special treatment when travelling or shopping in uniform. The mythologizing tendencies of this discourse are further exacerbated by America’s geographical distance from actual theaters of operations, as well as demographic factors: “A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once” (Fallows). The discourse of unquestioning support and hero worship often serves to mask the disconnect between reality and the national fictions they seek to establish. Underneath the hero worship and symbolic gestures, the realities facing both active duty members of the military, as well as returning veterans, are often dire. A study by the US Department of Veteran Affairs released in 2017 showed that in 2014 “an average of 20 Veterans died by suicide each day” (4), while the agency itself has been mired in scandal after scandal (Devi).
1.1 Aims, Methods, and Structure
It is this disconnect between reality and discourse, between national fictions and the soldier subject as a non-reified individual, which is at the heart of this thesis. Veteran literature, such as Phil Klay’s Redeployment, provides a uniquely suited medium through which to explore these questions, as it provides a conduit into a multitude of experiences that forces a shift in perspective from the reified representations of war to the experience of the individual soldier subject. In doing so, veteran literature challenges reified hegemonic representations of war
and soldiers by providing an opportunity for veteran authors to generate counternarratives challenging the cultural status quo. In this thesis, the discovery of these previously hidden counternarratives is achieved through the application of Fredric Jameson’s theories of the political unconscious and postmodernism, resulting in the unearthing of the text’s hidden military unconscious and its interaction with the reified representations of war, which I term as the American hegemonic soldier. The counternarratives generated by veteran literature also challenge and rupture hegemonic Americanness, which is undergoing militarization on multiple levels, as section 2.2.1 shows. In other words, veteran literature provides an opening for the fragmentation of the reified representation of the American soldier as a nationed figure who acts as a physical extension and a symbol of the state’s power, while at the same time challenging the ways in which hegemonic Americanness is produced
The aim of this thesis is to study the formation of these counternarratives in Phil Klay’s Redeployment, a critically acclaimed collection (Howard 5) of twelve short stories published in 2014. In the collection, Klay, who served in Iraq as a Public Affairs Officer in the Anbar province, provides a wide range of perspectives on the war both at home and in Iraq: each of the twelve short stories is presented by a different narrator. Thus, the multitude of perspectives allows for the foregrounding of a multitude of subjectivities that are usually marginalized in hegemonic representations of war and offers ample opportunity for the uncovering of the military unconscious. These subjectivities range from the mortuary workers of “Bodies” to the Foreign Service Officers of “Money as a Weapons System”, and to the experiences of an Arab-American Psychological Operations specialist in
“Psychological Operations” to name a few. In other words, the stories of Redeployment do not privilege the experience of infantry combat as the true defining experience of war, perhaps owing to Klay’s own service background in a support role. Redeployment also displays a deep connection with previous American veteran literature. As a collection of
short stories, Redeployment has also been compared to Tim O’Brien’s short story collection The Things They Carried, a classic of Vietnam veteran literature (Howard 1, 16). It is the combination of these factors which makes Redeployment an immensely useful object of study in the uncovering of veteran literature’s hidden military unconscious. What this thesis will show is, that by approaching Redeployment from a Jamesonian perspective, the analysis is able to take into account the full historicity embedded in the military unconscious, and thus revealing a more complete picture of the contemporary American soldier subject.
The thesis is structured as follows. Section 2.1 of the theory chapter examines Fredric Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious which is then further expanded into the concept of a military unconscious. The following section 2.2 goes on to explore the concept of ideology by first detailing the characteristics of ideology and contemporary Americanness, and then moving onto the exploration of the American hegemonic soldier.
Finally, section 2.3 looks at the ways veteran literature provides an opening for the resistance against hegemonic ideologies through the generation of counternarratives. After providing the theoretical foundation, the thesis then presents an analysis of Phil Klay’s Redeployment.
This chapter is divided into four sections, with each section focusing on a different short story and thematic stage. Section 3.1 details the ways in which “After Action Report”
ruptures hegemonic Americanness and reified military discourse by providing an alternative discourse of killing. In section 3.2, the thematic stage shifts from war to the in-between of war and home. In this section, I examine the ways in which “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound” collapses reified soldier and veteran identities through remembrance, thereby generating a counternarrative that challenges the hegemonic narrative of heroism. Section 3.3 examines the distorting effects of ideology and the ways in which “Psychological Operations” ruptures the hegemonic soldier by presenting the story through the perspective of an Arab-American Copt veteran. Finally, in section 3.4 I examine the ways in which “War
Stories” shows how the hegemonic soldier is a latent presence even in narratives seeking to subvert it. The thesis then closes with the conclusion, which sums up previously presented arguments and explores possible future approaches afforded by thesis’s theoretical framework and source material.
1.2 Literature and Earlier Studies
Before delving into the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary American veteran literature, it is useful to briefly examine the ways in which Fredric Jameson’s theory on the political unconscious has been used. The theory of the political unconscious is marked by its versatile and modular nature (Kilpeläinen 26). As such, it has been used in the analysis of a variety of topics ranging from Kilpeläinen’s theory on the racial unconscious in his dissertation Search of a Postcategorical Utopia: James Baldwin and the Politics of "Race"
and Sexuality to Nadir Lahiji’s The Political Unconscious of Architecture, which, as the name suggests, applies Jameson theories to architecture. Despite my efforts, I could not locate previous studies that explicitly use Jameson’s theory on the political unconscious to construct a military unconscious.
As a critically acclaimed text, Redeployment has also been the subject of previous studies. Scholars such as McKay and Petrovic have focused on the ways in which Redeployment subverts previously established conventions of American war literature. In his analysis of Klay’s “In Vietnam They Had Whores”, McKay argues that the text displays
“an increased willingness on the part of war writers to critique or dispense with old narrative stereotypes” (39). Petrovic’s analysis of “Psychological Operations” supports McKay’s assumptions about Klay’s willingness to subvert and critique traditional narrative stereotypes. He argues that by foregrounding a Coptic American subjectivity, Klay is able to “contest” his “own autobiographical privilege” and deepen his “engagement with the
colonized subject” (Petrovic 2). Other scholars have studied Redeployment’s status in the canon of American veteran literature. Howard notes Redeployment exhibits notable similarities with Tim O’Brien’s collection of Vietnam short stories, The Things They Carried (1). Despite the similarities, she argues that while “Klay’s writing certainly relies upon and extends O’Brien’s work when it comes to aspects of storytelling and truth [...] both texts should be regarded as separate entities” (Howard 16). Also, Joseph Darda argues that by continuing to “imagine the white American soldier as universal and marginal” Redeployment continues the “ethinicization of veteran American” present in much of contemporary American veteran literature (414; emphasis original).
The literature of America’s post-9/11 wars has grown steadily as wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan have become the longest running continuous deployments in American history. The literature encompasses both veteran and non-veteran authors alike, emphasizing the central role the American soldier has come to inhabit in contemporary American culture who’s “literature has embraced the movement from post-9/11 culture to more holistically considering the weight, and human cost, of the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq”
(Petrovic 2). Veterans of these wars have gone on to publish a multitude of memoirs, poetry, short stories, and novels detailing their experiences. In addition to Phil Klay, notable Iraq War veteran authors include such writers as Brian Turner (My Life as a Foreign Country,
‘Here, Bullet’) who served as an infantry leader in Iraq, Kevin Powers (Yellow Birds, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting) who served as a machine gunner during the occupation of Iraq, and David Abrams (Fobbit), a retired Army journalist. Civilian authors such as Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk) have explored the peculiar position the American soldier inhabits in contemporary American culture, while others, such as Roxana Robinson (Sparta), have focused on the difficulties faced by returning servicemen and -women in adapting to civilian life.
Perhaps owing to the centrality of the soldier in American culture and the length of the latest wars, American Iraq veteran literature also carries with a sense of urgency especially in contrast to “classics” of the Vietnam War literature which “appeared in the 1980s or later”
(Ryan 2). Furthermore, Ryan notes that the fact that
compelling fictional representations of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were published at the time of America’s withdrawal of military personnel from Iraq in December 2011 [...] is only one of many notable contrasts — juxtaposed by equally significant similarities — between the new literature from the recent wars and the imaginative texts of earlier wars. (2-3)
The literature of America’s War on Terror is also markedly concentrated on the war(s) in Iraq: Peebles notes that the War in Afghanistan “has inspired fewer and less prominent works of literature and film than the wars in Iraq” (2). A central characteristic of the Iraq War literature is the lack of agency, the “guilt, helplessness, and frustration felt by soldiers fighting a war in which choices are impossible [...] because often there is very little time or leeway to make a choice in the first place” (Peebles 164), paradoxically expressed by soldiers who were not drafted, but rather enlisted by their own choosing. Considering the signature weapon of the war, the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), and that the American forces were fighting a counterinsurgency operation where the enemy could blend in with the populace, it is not wholly surprising that the theme of agency surfaces in such a thorough fashion (Peebles 167-8). The often accidental death of civilians as collateral damage from IEDs or at American hands is a recurring trope throughout the literature. As with virtually all other war writing, the trauma that stems from the nature of the war, and its alienating effect is another central characteristic of Iraq War Literature (Ryan 8, 17). In these stories, returning veterans find themselves faced with an “exceptional alienation from the people and
the country they return to” (Ryan 20) stemming from the disconnect between the military and the civilian populace.
The alienation of the American soldier from the American public points towards what is Iraq War veteran literature’s perhaps most distinguishing characteristic: its understanding of the Iraqi people and a refusal to reduced them to the reified enemy Other. Petrovic notes that “engagement with the subject position of the Other has become a fundamental aspect of US literature written by recent war veterans” (2). By shifting the perspective to the Other, the enemy, the veteran author opens up the possibility to not only resist the hegemonic discourse of war, but also opens the possibility for the emergence of an intact soldier subject which ruptures the “paradoxically empowering and obliterating, uniformed whiteness”
(Najmi 57) of hegemonic Americanness. This viewpoint is echoed by Petrovic, who notes that “in the arena of US imperial occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq, white war veterans’
adoption of these Othered viewpoints allow them a narrative perspective through which they can question their own complicity in military operations” (4). It should be noted that not all Iraq veteran literature displays this transgressive tendency. Autobiographies such Chris Kyle’s American Sniper, and its movie version, repeat and reinforce the soldier subject as defined by the hegemonic soldier and correspondingly reinforce an Othered spatiality of Iraq and its citizens. This aspect is covered in more detail in section 2.2.2. However, it does not mean that non-transgressive veteran texts such as American Sniper should be ignored, but rather that their inclusion is necessary if the goal is to provide a complete picture of the American Iraq veteran literature and further understand contemporary Americanness through “a key corpus of inquiry, one that has not been studied sufficiently” (Petrovic 2).
Thus, the sense of urgency present in the sudden appearance of Iraq veteran literature carries on to its research. It is this urgency that I hope to address in some small way with this thesis.
By approaching the central characteristics of Iraq veteran literature in Redeployment in a
Jamesonian context, I hope to provide a fresh reading of a literature which has grown increasingly important throughout recent years, and hopefully shed new light on the fundamental disconnect between the American military and the civilian populace through the uncovering of a military unconscious hidden in the text.
2. Reconnoitering Theory: The Military Unconscious and the Hegemonic Soldier
Whatever the form of the war story or its narrative content it is politics—often domestic or intracultural politics—by other means. (Bates 2)
The approach taken in this thesis to reading veteran literature is fundamentally a political one, as the locus of my argument lies in the underlying disconnect between the American military and American society, and the resulting distortion in the cultural representations of American soldier. This clash between what I have termed the military unconscious, a concept based on Fredric Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious, and the hegemonic soldier, which is the ideological construct that informs the dominant cultural representations of the American soldier, and the wars they fight in. The disconnected status of the American soldier results in a fragmented soldier subject, who inhabits an in-between state in the borderlands between the military unconscious and the hegemonic soldier, and the civilian world.
Counternarratives provide the veteran author a means of resistance against the reified representations of the hegemonic soldier and allow for the reassertion of lost agency in terms of identity and ownership over the soldier subject’s life story from both the military as well as the hegemonic soldier. They allow for the soldier subject to negotiate the rupture between the fractured subject and the soldier as a transfigured national symbol. The counternarratives are marked by a more granular and individualizing tendency in contrast to the conformist pressures of the military organization and the hegemonic soldier.
Fredric Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious forms the first pillar of my analytical framework for two reasons. First, it historicizes, and prioritizes the political as
“not as some supplementary method”, but “rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation” (PU 17). Secondly, the concept of narratives and the hegemonic voices stifling the marginalized are central to both the theory of the political unconscious, as well
as the dialectical process of hegemonic narratives versus counternarratives explored in this thesis. In other words, the military unconscious emerges in the previously hidden narratives of war stories through the veteran author’s role as a storyteller. Through the act of storytelling, the storyteller represents “communal rather than individual truths” (Dragas 2), allowing them to “question the grand narratives of history, religion and politics, as well as ideological constructs such as nationhood” (Dragas 2).
The political unconscious is also extremely modular in nature. As Kilpeläinen notes, it can easily integrate other theories and methods to analyze the political unconscious layered within cultural texts (26). The focus of the thesis is not, however, on class, but rather on the military as a distinct social formation within the larger context of American society. This allows for the deployment of the concept of a “military unconscious”, which is a part of the larger American political unconsciousness while still retaining distinct characteristics.
The second pillar of my framework is centered upon Jameson’s theories on the postmodern and the process of nostalgic recreation. The breakdown of historicity that is symptomatic to the postmodern era, has essentially transformed our lives into a series of perpetual presents. We can only access the past through the lenses “of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach” (PU 24). Hence, we deal with a form of nostalgic recreation: a process which seeks to reconstruct its object through familiar imagery drawn from popular culture. As our lives are a series of continuous presents, we can also apply this process to not just literature but all cultural texts and media, which seek to represent aspects of modern day life.
When applied in this fashion, Jameson’s theory on nostalgic recreation provides a powerful framework for the analysis of postmodern ideological structures, such as the hegemonic soldier. The hegemonic soldier is the ideological construct, a simulacrum, which informs and reinforces the dominant representations of the soldier in media, political, and
cultural discourses, as well as the military unconscious with which it has a dialectic relationship. The concept of the hegemonic soldier will be explored in depth in chapter 2.2.2.
Approaching veteran literature within the combined framework of the political unconscious and nostalgic recreation allows for the deconstruction of the dominant narratives and discourses of the hegemonic soldier and brings the previously marginalized discourses of the veteran experience, such as race, class, and sexuality, to the frontline. The dialectical nature of the relationship between the hegemonic soldier and veteran literature also means that the theoretical framework does not shatter when confronted with veteran literature that repeats the hegemonic discourses, but at the same time constructs counternarratives. This framework also enables the analysis of veteran literature that does not seek to challenge the ideological status quo, but rather enforces it, without marginalizing their discourses.
The core thematic of this thesis revolves around the way in which Phil Klay’s Redeployment and veteran literature seek to provide counternarratives that challenge and deconstruct the idea of the hegemonic soldier. It is, fundamentally, a question of representations. Whereas the hegemonic soldier gravitates towards the idealized, singular representation of the veteran (white, infantry, combat veteran), veteran literature foregrounds the marginalized experiences of war, such as the road paving combat engineers of Klay’s
“War Stories”, or the desk jockeys of “Money as a Weapons System”. The difference in the spatial representations of war spaces also plays a major role in the analysis.
The hegemonic war space is constructed through the interacting web of pop culture, such as movies and videogames, as well as news footage of thermal imagery of bombs being dropped from drones or airplanes. It is also true that some of the popular discourse, such as the movie and book Jarhead (2005) or The Hurt Locker (2009), go beyond the reified representations of the hegemonic soldier. Much like veteran literature reinforcing hegemonic discourses, these examples serve as a reminder that the discourses and narratives explored
are not static and one sided, but rather a dynamic and interacting web of discourses. The American hegemonic soldier has become a thoroughly mythologized and reified representation, a simulacrum representing the ideological closure of American imperial power, its underlying anxieties and Historical traumas.
I will close with a brief overview of the following theory chapters. The first chapter introduces the fundamentals of Fredric Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious, which will then be expanded into the idea of a military unconscious. This chapter will define the characteristics of the military unconscious, the ways in which it surfaces in general culture, and how it the military unconscious is apparent in veteran writing. The thesis will then move onto a chapter examining the function, and nature of ideology in the construction of American ideology in the 21st century. The ideas presented there will then be expanded upon in section 2.2.2, which defines the hegemonic soldier and its function: the reification of the soldier through representations in intersecting and interacting discourses. The theory section will conclude with the examination of counternarratives and their construction in veteran literature. The hegemonic soldier’s discourse presents a social and political problem, which the counternarratives seek to solve symbolically through the generation of fragmenting counternarratives. Importance is placed on narratives constructed through witnessing and survivor testimony of both spatial, as well as subject representations. This allows veteran authors to generate counternarratives as tools of resistance against the discourse of the hegemonic soldier, fragmenting it in the process and allowing for the emergence of an intact, non-reified soldier subject.
2.1 Uncovering the Military Unconscious: The Political Unconscious and Veteran Literature
In this chapter, I will first examine Fredric Jameson’s theory on the political unconscious, which will then be expanded into the concept of the military unconscious in the second part.
2.1.1 Fredric Jameson and the Political Unconscious
Fredric Jameson’s importance as a Marxist critic and theorist can hardly be denied. He has been characterized as perhaps the single most influential theorist of postmodernity (Homer and Kellner xii), and his writings encompass a field of topics dizzying in vastness and depth, ranging from intricate theories on the utopian nature of science fiction to examinations of the cultural structures and effects of global capitalism. However, there runs a continuous thread throughout Jameson’s writing and it lies in the seemingly contradictory relationship between the postmodern distrust towards totalizing narratives and Jameson’s focus on the importance of totality rooted in Marxist thought. The process of synthetization has resulted in a “highly eclectic and original brand of Marxian literary and cultural theory” (Homer and Kellner xv). Jameson’s ability to synthesize theories from an immensely wide theoretical field is one of the key factors in his importance in the field of cultural theory (Dowling 14).
It has also been suggested that Jameson’s writing highlights the relationship between the interpretation of cultural texts and the importance of placing the process in the context of totality, and only then can the underlying “stratum of ideological messages” (Kilpeläinen 40) be unearthed for analysis. One can also think of Jameson’s theoretical corpus in this fashion, as Homer and Kellner point out: “One therefore reads Jameson as a (still open) totality, as a relatively unified theoretical project in which the various texts provide parts of a whole“ (xv).
Nowhere is the relationship between interpretation and Totality more visible than in Jameson’s seminal 1981 book The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (PU). Before delving into specifics of this rather complex book, a brief overview of its main points is in order. The book presents an interpretative framework rooted in Marxist thought, narratives, and a method of reading based on the idea of interpretative horizons, in which the text is analyzed “through three concentric, ever-widening interpretative horizons to a final view of History as, in Jameson's formulation, the ultimate ground and untranscendable horizon of textual meaning” (Dowling 127). This leads to another key point in Jameson’s ideological framework: all interpretation is fundamentally political, and therefore the political must be prioritized (PU 17). Only by practicing interpretation with the singular totality of History in mind can the critic unearth the social contradictions hidden deep within seemingly innocuous stories, as Jameson points out rather eloquently:
On this view, the oral tales of tribal society, the fairy tales that are the irrepressible voice and expression of the underclasses of the great systems of domination, adventure stories and melodrama, and the popular or mass culture of our own time are all syllables and broken fragments of some single immense story. (PU 105)
These unsolvable contradictions resulting from the “great systems of domination” go on to manifest themselves as contradictions, or antinomies in texts, which the narrative then seeks to symbolically resolve (Kilpeläinen 37). These antinomies also play a key part in the way Jameson thinks about ideology in the context of interpretation: ideology does not function as a false consciousness, but rather as an ideological closure, which is an “approximation of some truth about the totality that, given the limitations always imposed by the historical process, stands in for the deeper truth it exists to deny” (Dowling 53). In other words, history presents itself as an absent cause in the text, only detectable through the abstraction provided by narratives. Together, the collection of ideas and methods that Jameson presents in The Political Unconscious provides the critic with a powerful guide on interpretation that allows
for the rewriting of hegemonic texts. It is crucial, however, to first examine the concepts that form the foundation of Jameson’s interpretative method in greater detail.
The close examination is best started at the ideological level by examining the reasons why Jameson bases his interpretative method on the theoretical concepts of History and Totality, both of which are heavily rooted in Marxist thought. In Jameson’s view, “only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism evoked above. Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past” (PU 19). This same totalizing thread can also be seen in the way Jameson describes Marxism as a framework that “subsumes other interpretive modes or systems” (PU 47). Examples of this are the psychoanalytical theories developed by Freud that find their use within Jameson’s interpretative method. Rather than just directly applying Freud’s theories, Jameson historicizes the theories themselves and in doing so uncovers the hidden ideological framework governing Freud’s theories, and allows the Marxist framework to subsume that interpretative system.
It is in this context that the idea of History as the totality comes into play for Jameson.
As Dowling puts it, “The equation at the heart of Jameson's program asserts that the totality is humanity is History, and it holds in no matter what order the terms are rearranged” (38). In other words, History is the cage from which humanity can never escape as there is nothing outside to escape to. It is everything that has ever been or ever will be, a Totality “that includes all things, the perimeter beyond which nothing else can exist” (Dowling 42-43). For Jameson, all human history is one continuous story that surfaces in abstract and disguised forms in cultural texts: “It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity” (PU
20). History comes to us as not as a “text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause” (PU 35), something which is accessible to us only via cultural texts.
Jameson also repositions totality away from the orthodox Marxist view, which emphasizes a more concrete and materialist viewpoint of the totality, towards a more “ideal and abstract standard” that allows the totality to function as a “methodological standard”
(Dowling 51). Closely related to this is the way Jameson thinks about the process of rationalization, or reification. Reification is the process in which “’natural’ [naturwiichsige]
unities, social forms, human relations, cultural events, even religious systems, are systematically broken up to be reconstructed more efficiently, in the form of new post- natural processes or mechanisms” (PU 62). In other words, it is a process of commodification in which all previous relationships in a society cease and are transformed into relationships between things. Jameson’s view on this process resembles the way in which he views totality. Contrary to traditional Marxist thought, Jameson seeks to de- emphasize the economic and shift the focus on how reification functions as a mode of being (Dowling 27). The reification of veterans through representations also plays a crucial role in the construction of the hegemonic soldier, as the countless toys, war movies, and video games show. This process is examined in more detail in chapter 2.2.2.
As the title of The Political Unconscious suggests, concepts developed by Freud for psychoanalysis are another key feature of Jameson’s interpretative system. For Jameson, psychoanalysis “may indeed lay claim to the distinction of being the only really new and original hermeneutic developed since the great patristic and medieval system of the four senses of scripture” (PU 61). At the heart of this hermeneutic is the idea of the unconscious, the domain of the repressed which can be glimpsed only indirectly via dreams, slips of the tongue, and in outbursts of emotions. In a flash of insight, Jameson takes this concept from the domain of the individual to the collective. He substitutes the individual unconscious with
the collective political unconsciousness, which exists “in a troubled and antagonistic relation to those overt structures (for Freud the mechanism of the conscious, for Jameson culture and ideology viewed as a whole) that exist to hold the repressed at bay or ‘manage’ its threatening eruptions” (Dowling 36-37). History, Lacan’s Real, appears as the primordial nightmare which haunts humanity, something that must eternally be repressed:
What Jameson gives us, in short, is an idea of History intolerable to the collective mind, a mind that denies underlying conditions of exploitation and oppression much as the individual consciousness denies or shuts out the dark and primal instinctuality of the unconscious as Freud discovered and described it. (Dowling 77-78)
It is easy to see how something like the repressed collective trauma of the 9/11 attacks manifests in coping mechanisms such as the mythologized troops of the hegemonic soldier.
Soldiers are in general seen as a nation’s symbol, and the desire for revenge, imperial anxieties, and the cultural memories of the mistreatment of returning Vietnam veterans have sublimated in the American collective unconsciousness into a discourse of unquestioning and reflexive “support our troops” mentality. The repressed then comes to us in form of antinomies, or social contradictions.
Here we find Jameson’s view of how ideology functions within his interpretative method. As mentioned earlier, Jameson views ideology not as a false consciousness, but rather as a closure seeking to approximate a deeper truth it seeks to deny. In other words, ideologies can be thought of as “discourses unable to curve back critically upon themselves, blinded to their own grounds and frontiers” (Eagleton 60). Jameson views these ideological closures as strategies of containment, “a means at once of denying those intolerable contradictions that lie hidden beneath the social surface” (Dowling 54). This means, that they allow for the existence of discourses that espouse reflexive support for the troops,
usually in the form of ritualistic gestures such as the display of yellow ribbons, while at the same time returning veterans often face homelessness and suicide in the face of an overburdened support network. Ideological closure, such as the hegemonic soldier, is the mechanism that allows for these repressed contradictions to stay repressed within the collective unconscious.
While not strictly within the scope of this thesis, Jameson’s notion of the dialectic between ideology and utopia should be briefly discussed. In brief, Jameson views ideology and utopia as the two fundamental and interdependent dimensions of cultural texts, where the latter provides a counterforce to the first by “imagining alternatives to the prevailing power structures” (Kilpeläinen 54). In this sense, the concepts of hegemonic narrative and counternarrative used in this thesis exhibit the same dialectical dynamic of status quo and change. The counternarratives of veteran literature attempt to reassert ownership and agency over the soldier subject’s identity and life story from the dominant narratives of the hegemonic soldier, and from the deindividualizing practices of the military as an institution.
The role of literature, then, is the opening of these ideological closures via symbolic acts, or narratives. The role of narratives in Jameson’s interpretative framework is hard to overstate, as they provide a gateway into the very unconscious of humanity, and the way in which the world itself makes itself known to us (Dowling 95). As such, Jameson views narrative as an epistemological category of its own. What makes narratives especially fruitful for analysis in terms of literature, however, is due to “the fact that it is an integral formal factor of literature, especially the novel, which can be seen as a product of the capitalistic system and is therefore an interesting object of study for a Marxist critic” (Kilpeläinen 29).
Jameson’s theoretical focus on narratives also serves the purposes of this thesis for a rather obvious reason, for we are, after all, fundamentally dealing with war stories. Stories, narratives, and myths have always been an inseparable part of any war. Whether the stories
themselves are factual or not is rather irrelevant. As Dragas notes, it is the artifice of storytelling that makes the possibility of deeper meaning possible: “Storytelling, precisely because it is artificial, because it is creating ‘surface’ coherences between what is told and what has happened, is in itself an indirect way of talking about the essence underneath, or that there is an essence underneath” (67; emphasis original). For instance, the anecdote recounted by Fussell about a World War 1 legend of a “group of half-crazed deserters from all the armies” who lived underground on no man’s land between the trenches (123) might at first seem like nothing more than a rather inventive tall tale. However, when interpreted in the context of the political unconscious, a secondary narrative that has been embedded deeper is unearthed. This is a narrative stemming from the military unconscious of the soldiers, expressing a desire for change or an alternative to the prevailing situation by escaping, even if it meant fraternizing with the enemy. The narratives of war stories hide within them markers of History, which can only be found through interpretation and reconstruction, as they are never visible as such.
This method of interpretation consists of three ever-widening horizons of interpretation, in which the next horizon reconstructs the previous horizon’s object (Kilpeläinen 35). This thesis will mainly focus on the first and second horizon, so I will touch only briefly on the third, final horizon. In the first horizon the text is considered in a relatively mundane, “historical context”, and it is here where we first attempt to locate the underlying social contradiction via aesthetic contradictions present in the text (Dowling 128). Once we move on to the second horizon, we arrive the horizon of the social, where the
“latter becomes visible, and individual phenomena are revealed as social facts and institutions, only at the moment in which the organizing categories of analysis become those of social class” (PU 83). As Dowling notes, here the social contradiction takes on a dialogical nature: “Jameson's system demands that we reconceive the social order at the cultural level
in the form of a dialogue between antagonistic class discourses, which now become the categories within which a Marxist interpretation will rewrite individual texts” (128).
Kilpeläinen echoes this idea, noting that in “the horizon of class discourse, those oppressed and stifled voices must be uncovered in a literary work by rewriting them in terms of their originally polemical and revolutionary tones” (38). In other words, it is at this level that the object of this thesis’ study is found, i.e., the antagonistic and ideological dialogue between veteran authors and the dominant discourses of the hegemonic soldier, and the stifled voices that rise from the military unconscious.
2.1.2 Towards a Military Unconscious
Now the task at hand is to define the nature and boundaries of the military unconscious, which is a problematic process by nature. Too wide a definition risks losing any semblance of definition, drowning out the relevant insights in an ocean of noise. The reverse also holds true. A narrow definition dooms the insights glimpsed from any analysis by ironically marginalizing the already marginalized and emphasizing the hegemonic voices, while also losing sense of the bigger picture. For this thesis, the military unconscious is defined as the social unconscious formed by the cultural discourses, practices, and experiences rising from the lived in social realities from those that serve, or have served in the US military, in a context totalized by History. The totalizing context means that the military unconscious also carries with it the political, social, and class issues stemming from the contradictions present in the political unconscious. This gives the military unconscious a certain versatility as a theoretical concept, making it eminently suitable for the examination of such issues as race, religion, or sexuality in war literature within the larger context of the ideology of Americanness, while also positioning it to the opposite of the hegemonic soldier.
The military unconscious inhabits a space within the larger framework of the political unconscious, with reified military symbols and signifiers entering the wider culture functioning as the bridge between the two structures. Fussell documents this process rather aptly in The Great War and Modern Memory, where he points out that while “now attenuated and largely metaphorical, the diction of war resides everywhere just below the surface of modern experience” (189). Phrases covering every aspect of modern life are peppered with military phrases, from economics and labor politics (Fussell 189), to even such mundane activities as microwaving, or “nuking” food. This interaction is not just limited to language but extends to other forms of expression as well. In her essay “Camouflage and Surrealism”
Ann Elias explores the way in which military imagery entered the imagery of the artistic movements of post-World War 1 Europe:
[t]he central aesthetic and psychological predilections of Surrealism—
doubling, displacement, and metamorphosis—all have parallels in camouflage tactics developed in WWI. Further, two surrealist obsessions were metaphors and dreams, both of which operate through the camouflage principles of disguise, concealment and deception. (2)
This is the anticipatory nature of the military unconscious, the transference of the military unconscious into the political unconscious. The anticipatory nature of the military unconscious has also been noted by Fredric Jameson, who has written about the similarities between the function of the helicopter and postmodern space in Michael Herr’s novel Dispatches: “In this new machine, which does not, like the older modernist machinery of the locomotive or the airplane, represent motion, but which can only be represented in motion, something of the mystery of the new postmodernist space is concentrated” (“Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” 224). Fussell notes that this anticipatory tendency gave rise to war as a fundamental part of modern life in the form of sketches performed by
soldiers with such titles as “The Trenches, 1950” (73). While the predictions of an endless war had a “whimsical and the witty hyperbolic” nature to them, they had been shed entirely by the time of the Vietnam War (74), which was still ongoing at the time of Fussell’s writing.
To paraphrase Paul Fussell, History has domesticated the fantastic, and normalized the unspeakable (74). The normalization has given war a certain mundane quality, especially to those who are geographically distant to the war zones, making the transference of themes, symbols, and signifiers from the military unconscious to the popular culture a routine process. This confluence of the two entities has been expanding at a rapid pace in the United States during the first decades of the 21st century as I will demonstrate in later chapters.
The military unconscious also carries with it wars of the previous eras, not just in the form of organizational memory of victories and losses, but also in terms of how wars are perceived, enacted, and experienced (Dwyer 9-10). As Fussell points out, this is especially true in the early stages of the war, which “replay element[s] of the preceding war” (314).
These re-enactments can also take their inspiration from wars no longer in living memory, as noted by Bates who points out that much of the American military experience in Vietnam was negotiated in frontier terms, taking on a “compulsive recollection of America's frontier experience” (9). The recollective comparisons range from the wildernesses of Vietnam and the American West, to the elusive enemy “whose straight black hair signaled a racial connection to the American Indian” (Bates 10). Similarly, during the most difficult times of the Iraqi insurgency, American and international media started asking whether America was facing another Vietnam or referring to the situation as a “quagmire”, a phrase also harkening back to the American experience of Vietnam. Pease notes that this subconscious reenactment of American history resulted in a profound transformation in what I call the American hegemonic soldier: the “heroic adventurer” of previous wars was turned “into an emotional cripple” in the frontier wilds of Vietnam (570). There are, of course, counter examples as
well, such as the pro-war film The Green Berets (1968), which stars John Wayne as Colonel Mike Kirby. The movie portrays the war and the American soldier in a heroic light, and by casting Wayne in the starring role, also forges a link between the traditional American masculine ideal of frontier times through Wayne’s work in Westerns, and the American soldier of the late 1960s. Also notable is the fact that Kirby’s character is based on the Finnish officer Lauri Törni who immigrated to the United States after the Second World War, and joined the US military, eventually dying in Vietnam. As such, Kirby’s character can be viewed as a fore bearer to modern cultural texts that reproduce the internal logic of the American hegemonic soldier but are produced outside the United States. This process is examined in detail in chapters 2.2.1 and 2.2.2.
The military unconscious is not meant to replace the political unconscious, but rather as an entity that interacts with it in a dialectical fashion. The military unconscious, as seen in this thesis, is a variant of the political unconscious in which the focus shifts towards examining the dialogue between a distinct social group, such as veterans and members of the military, and the political unconscious understood in a wider, societal sense. War stories, veteran literature, and war-time legends function in the same fashion as Jameson’s description of the oral tales as the voices of the underclasses against the systems of domination (PU 105). The symbolic manifestations of the military unconscious layered within these narratives provide us a vital glimpse into the subconscious anxieties of a social group that finds itself at the intersection of multiple interacting discourses.
The interaction of various narratives and discourses is particularly visible when examining the dynamic between the American military and political unconscious. The American military unconscious is in a unique position, as the American soldier is often the subject of cultural texts with a global audience, such as video games and films and as such, the dialectical relationship between the American soldier and their cultural representations
exerts its influence on other military cultures. The unique position is further characterized by a cultural fascination with firearms, the “rugged individuality” implicit in the ideology of
“Americanness”, and the ever-increasing militarization of American society. It is also fundamentally tied to the question of gendered nationalism, and the soldier as a masculine ideal. The soldier’s story is told by men “and that story is singular and gendered” (Winter 39), one that sidelines the women’s perspective entirely. Winter goes on to point out that the experience of combat constitutes a “fraternity, whose masculine character is at the core of the identity both of the tale and of the teller (39). The American soldier has become the latest archetype in a long line of masculine American heroes, following in the footsteps of the previous masculine ideals such as the cowboy. The ideological dynamic of these discourses, and the way they affect the representation of the American soldier, are explored in more detail in the following chapters.
Given that the formation of the military unconscious is so closely tied with the ebb and flow of History, it would seem almost vulgar to attempt to universalize the ways in which it manifests. For example, the Iranian or Finnish military unconscious is markedly different than its American counterpart, just by the virtue of the differing cultural, social, and economic histories of the two countries. The ways in which war is experienced and processed by its participants is also dependent on the cultural and Historical factors. Yuval Harari points out that the modern Western image of war as an alienating and uniquely terrible is a rather new development that occurred “sometime between 1916 and 1969” (71) and was the result of “an earlier mental and cultural revolution in the image of ‘life’, implying that, the “twentieth-century revolution in the image of war uncovered neither the eternal nor the changing face of war” (71).
While examples of the alienation brought on by the transformative nature of war can be found as far back as Homer’s Iliad, the alienation and disconnect felt by the veteran
becomes the locus of war literature only in the 20th century. As Harari suggests, the anger that stems from the disconnect brought on by the transformative and unknowable nature of war is also another universal manifestation of the military unconscious finds its roots in the trenches of World War 1. In Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell quotes Philip Gibbs about the anger felt by the English soldiers returning to the front from leave during the First World War: “They hated the smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old men [...] They desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed God to get the Germans to send Zeppelins to England-to make the people know what war meant” (86).
Modern American veteran writing exhibits the same frustration. In Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” the anger of the American Vietnam-era military unconscious surfaces in the form of a letter sent by a character to a fallen soldier’s sister who never replies:
Rat pours his heart out. He says he loved the guy. He says the guy was his best friend in the world [...] So what happens? Rat mails the letter. He waits two months. The dumb cooze never writes back [....] so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it's so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back. (65)
The disconnect also surfaces clearly in the writing of Iraq war veterans. Kevin Powers, who served as a machine gunner during the occupation of Iraq, writes about alienation felt by returning soldiers in several of his works. A powerful description of the alienation brought on by war in Powers’s work is found in the novel Yellow Birds, where the protagonist finds himself unable to face his friends at a beach party after returning from Iraq, and instead retreats to a solitary camp out near a creek:
it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul [...] even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sign posts and made people crumple [...] everybody is so fucking happy to see you, the murderer, the
fucking accomplice, that at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every yellow ribbon in sight [...]. (144-145)
The ideological closure of the hegemonic soldier and the contradictions it presents are all laid bare in Powers’s text. The rupture caused by the reified representations of the hegemonic soldier can no longer be contained, resulting in an eruption of destructive desire against its physical symbols, the yellow ribbons. To fully realize the complicated relationship between the American military unconscious and the hegemonic soldier, we must now turn our attention to the exploration of American ideology.
2.2 All Good Soldiers: Ideology of America and the Hegemonic Soldier
In this chapter, I first present my theoretical approach to ideology and then examine the formation and development of the ideology of contemporary Americanness. The second part of the chapter examines the ways in which this ideology affects and constructs the hegemonic soldier.
2.2.1 Ideology of America in the 21st Century and Militarization
Before delving into the ideological waters of present day Americanness, it seems appropriate to examine the theoretical framework in which this thesis approaches the concept of ideology and its functions. The first part of the framework’s approach stems from Jameson’s view of ideology in the Political Unconscious, in which ideology is approached in Althusserian terms (Dowling 83). Althusser defined ideology as having two crucial components. First, it
