Would The Things They Carried lose credibility if it were not written by a war veteran? What if, for example, you wrote the novel? The same novel, exactly the same, but instead of Tim O'Brien, the identified narrator/writer/editor were you?
I wonder if we aren't lending too much--or not enough--credit to lived (vs. imagined) experience.
In my Orientation discussion on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, my discussion leader brought up the point that there had been criticism of the book because Rebecca Skloot, the writer, was white.
ReplyDeleteThis is a difficult issue to deal with because there is nothing more real and important to people than their stories. Lots of the conflicts of history have been people taking other people's stories from them and twisting them. Racism and dehumanization often result from the way certain stories become engrained in a collective consciousness without anyone hearing the voices of the people who "deserve" to tell the "truth" about it.
The Rebecca Skloot example is perhaps kinder than many historical examples. She was desperately trying to tell the story of someone whose voice had been systematically repressed. Still, it was a story that was not "her own". She did not have the background to relate certain experiences. Her truths will always be different than that of those who grew up like Henrietta Lacks.
The other side of the issue is that the only way to "re"-humanize, as was mentioned in class the other day, is to imagine stories, even stories that never happened. The elaborate history of the corpse in "The Man I Killed" comes from an unreliable narrator who most likely would not have been able to know any of it. And yet, by constructing the history O'Brien activates the reader's empathy in a way it otherwise would not have come into play.
Stories are ways to feel connected with people. Stories are ways to breathe life back into people who can no longer speak for themselves. Stories are ways to deal with all of the common pain of human experience, whether or not the writer experienced each specific instance about which he writes.
It's inevitable that when you go to write a war story and have never experienced war, you will get wrong. In fact, if you go to write about your own experiences, you can't ever tell the full truth. But language is the salvation and connection of humankind.
So this was basically a really long way to say that this issue is way too loaded for me to comfortably come down on either side.
As of this moment I am split on how this would have effected my reading of The Things They Carried. Debating between myself for the past 24 hours, I have found that there are two sides of me; one that believes a different author would make no difference, the other that believes it would. I would like to say that I don't think this is a topic that can every truly be answered for we will never be able to read a story over again, without already knowing what we took from the story being written by a vietnam war vet. We subconscious would continuously remind ourselves of what we thought before and our new view would either summit to this pressure and be a diluted form of what we would have thought, or an over bias view that is just going against what we thought before.
ReplyDeleteThe reason for the debate within me starts by looking at the author as a storyteller who doesn't convey a story through events, people and places, but through emotion. If an author is able to accurately make you feel as if you were there, feeling the emotions of the men around you, then I believe that he has effectively written a war story. The question is, can someone who has never experienced war truly understand and thus convey the emotions felt during war? Would he/she be able to use the stories of others to convey this emotion? Or does it take someone who was there? Someone that felt their heart race every time a shot whizzed by them.
These back and forth questions have led me to believe that I have no idea if The Things They Carried would lose creditability if Tim O'Brien hadn't spent a second in Vietnam. It would all be based on reading the book written by Tim O'Brien, the one that never left America.