“I did not
look on my work as therapy, and I still don’t. Yet when I received Norman
Bowker’s letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a
swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling
stories you objectify your experience. You pin down certain truths. You make up
others. You start sometimes with an incident that really happened, like the
night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that
did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain (152)”.
What separates the character Norman
Bowker from the writer O’Brien, is that Bowker’s life is trapped in a circle,
while O’Brien escapes existential circling by transmuting his heart’s circles into
writing.
O’Brien invents a literary world in which Bowker is trapped
in an orbit around his pain, too disconnected from the peace around him to be
pulled out of his purposeless hump. The hub of his endless wheel is the lake,
which is analogous to the shit field, but which disallows Bowker to identify or
confront the source of his emptiness. The lake elicits all of the terror and
shame of the shit field, but it is of the peaceful world, and Bowker cannot
redeem his wartime self through the peacetime device he is fundamentally divided
from. He cannot discuss the war with any people of peace, because he does not
know what to say to them: he cannot understand how to bridge the gap between his
experience, and the chasm it rent in him, and people with peacetime
sensibilities. There is no way for him to remove the pointless wandering from
his soul.
As long as O’Brien writes Bowker circling, living in futility,
he can progress through graduate school, and marry, and live with trajectory. Through
his method described in the above quote, the careful finessing of happening and
construction to express and thereby escape his feeling of loss, O’Brien avoided
spiritual paralysis. He does not “look on [his] work as therapy,” possibly
because he connotes the word negatively, but O’Brien surely frees himself from
entrapping internal struggles by writing characters to shoulder some of the
burden.
While I agree with you, Dan, that Tim has managed a fairly successful life, and that his years after the Vietnam War were probably more productive than Bowker's sadness-filled last years and eventual suicide, I would argue that Tim's books are his circling of the lake. Especially given the striking resemblance of If I Die in a Combat Zone to The Things They Carried, I feel like if Tim were entirely free of this existential orbit, he would be free to write a book about something other than Vietnam. As an artist, he probably yearns to be innovative and has great ideas all the time, but they are overshadowed by his memories of the war.
ReplyDeleteO'Brien's books create the circling of the lake, but they are fundamentally different. I argue that O'Brien's writing works thusly: he creates Bowker circling the lake, and thereby manifests and partially and temporarily releases his deep seated inner questioning of purpose. This distance from his fundamental queries enables O'Brien's life to be linear rather than circular (he graduates Harvard, marries, has a daughter). As O'Brien's spirit begins to swirl, so to speak, he must write stories with similar plots and the same imperative function again. The stories are circular, and in a larger sense they circle one another, and though O'Brien writes them, he is not crippled, he is not lost, precisely because his characters ARE. I know not whether O'Brien wants to write anything else, but I am convinced that he needs to write these stories, and also that because he writes these stories, he does not have to live them.
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