← New Books Network
New Books Network
David Eisler, "Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present" (U Iowa Press, 2022)
01:16:05
Loading summary
Transcript70 lines
- [00:00]
Quince Brand Representative
I love wearing clothing that's both comfortable and elevated. Outfits I can wear on a walk through the park or in a meeting with a client. Quince has become my go to with fabrics that are incredibly soft, clean and versatile. This spring I refresh my wardrobe with quints. I especially love their Pima cotton tees and bamboo jersey lounge shorts. Surprisingly soft and breathable with a quality level you'd expect to pay a lot more for. If you're looking for new clothes this spring, I highly recommend checking out their Italian swim trunks. I love swimming but can never find swimwear that feels comfortable and looks good. Quince's swimwear is the best I've ever owned. I can't emphasize enough how affordable Quince is for the quality you get. Check out their incredible deals and offerings, especially if you're looking for clothes that feel good and look great. Whether you're at the office or the beach. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to Quince.com NewBooks for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com NewBooks for free shipping and 365 day returns.
- [01:03]
Red Bull Summer All Day Play Announcer
Quince.com NewBooks ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play? You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer. Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our Associate degree in Nursing program that prepares you Registered nurse Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit Carrington.edu.
- [02:02]
David Eisler
sCI welcome to the New Books Network
- [02:09]
John Armenta
welcome to New Books Network. My name is John Armenta, your host for this episode. Today. I'm here with David Eisler, author of Writing Wars, Authorship and American War Fiction. World War I to Present from the University of Iowa Press, published in 2022. David welcome to New Books Network.
- [02:27]
David Eisler
Thanks for having me, John. Appreciate it.
- [02:29]
John Armenta
So let's get started. Tell us about yourself and your path to writing this book.
- [02:34]
David Eisler
Yeah, well, I mean my Path to writing the book was quite nonlinear, I guess you could say. I, I as is important, I guess for at least the genesis of the ideas. I served in the army from 2007 to 2012 and immediately after finishing my, my bachelor's program and I, I guess I had a fairly typical experience, I think of, of someone who served during that time. It goes back quite a while now, but those years were pretty characterized by relatively frequent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. And that's, that was kind of my experience as well as I was stationed in Germany and had a shorter tour in Iraq and then a longer tour in Afghanistan during that time. And then afterward I left and wanted to figure out kind of what was, what was next for me. So I ended up doing a master's program in international relations and security policy and things like that. Spent a few years as a research analyst doing defense oriented work and projects in the D.C. area. And around that time is when I started thinking about, because I, I shied away from the literature of the wars for a while. I didn't read any of the novels. I, I didn't read any, I didn't watch any of the movies. I just, maybe it was just too recent, but I just, I wasn't interested for a while. And then somewhere around, it must have been 2015, 2016, around that time frame I thought maybe I should dip into this and figure things out and just kind of read about how other people had been thinking about this and how they treated in fiction. Because some of the more longer lasting books and novels that I had read in my past were war related novels. And I thought like I read the things that they carried from Tim o' Brien many years earlier. And I was struck by it. Like a lot of people I think, who have kind of a literary mindset, same with Hemingway, you know, these classic names that end up showing up in my book as well. And I started off reading those things and I was like, well, let's see what my generation of veterans and the non veterans, actually I really, I went to it thinking what has my generation of veterans had to say in fiction about the wars? And when I started that, I came to realize fairly quickly that more of these novels were written by non veterans. And it was just a very quick brief observation that said this is kind of interesting. It's not maybe what I would have expected. And that that thought stayed with me for a long time even while I was doing my, my analytical research work while I was in D.C. and at some point around the 2016, 2017 timeframe, I started thinking about, I would like to do a PhD, but what do I want it to be on? I wasn't a literary trained scholar. I wasn't, I wasn't really much of anything when it came to a consistent background. My undergraduate was in astrophysics and then I had a master's degree in international relations. So I was like, okay, what can I do with all of this? So around that time when there was an opportunity to do a PhD program in American Studies in Germany, I started thinking, what, what would I want to write about? And I had been thinking about and, and working on, and even writing about civil military relations in an American context for a couple of years. At that point, sort of my post civilization military service timeline and then my policy oriented thinking was really influenced by questions of service, questions of who has the right to speak on these topics, degrees of engagement, things like that. And so I started asking myself the questions. Like I think the original idea that I had for my dissertation project and then what became the book was, well, maybe veterans. Maybe there's a difference in war literature between sort of realistic approaches and science fiction approaches. So I think my, my first basic idea was I wanted to, to compare like Slaughterhouse 5, Catch 22, the things they Carried, and then Joel Haldeman's the Forever War, which was a novel that was, you know, he's a drafted Vietnam vet, but you read that book. And it was, when I read that novel, I thought, this is the best explanation of what it feels like to come home from war. And he's using science fiction and he's using like hard science fiction. He did it using the theory of relativity. And I was like, this is perfect because we'd always been talking about coming home from a deployment feels like coming back to a different world. And we meant it metaphorically. But he turned that metaphor into something physical. And I was blown away by that. So I, I thought maybe I could compare these things. And then at some point the, the scientific mind that I had with my physics training in the background said, well, if I really want to make claims about something, I have to include a lot more texts. So the project idea, the book idea really shifted toward how can I combine literary studies with civil military relations? That was really the genesis of this, the origins of this. So I thought, how has the motivating question really was how has the abolition of the draft affected the production of war fiction basically from Vietnam forward? And then there was this. I was like, okay, I'm going to pick a handful of novels written by veterans A handful of novels written by civilians. I'll do this kind of classic literary approach. And then, like I said, at some point I realized, no, if I want to make claims, I need to read it all. I have to. I have to have a much larger sample size. So because I wanted to make claims that the literature that American war fiction has changed had changed between Vietnam and the present day. And that's kind of where I started. And then the project that came out of that always returned back to this original idea of how did the draft, the end of the draft, influence fiction produced about the wars? But during the course of writing and during the course of thinking, I ended up pushing everything a lot earlier and say, well, how did it come to be even that we think that only veterans write about war? How did that happen? And this was all under the context of cultural authority, this idea of who gets to write about what types of subjects.
- [08:45]
John Armenta
Thank you. And before we get deeper into your argument, can you tell us a little bit about the text you're examining? What was your criteria for selection? You know, time period, you know, the author's background, things like that?
- [08:56]
David Eisler
Yeah. So the. The book is divided kind of into two different sections. There's a. The first three chapters are really historical in examining this idea of how did veterans come to dominate the. The narrative authority of the literary representation of war and conflict? Because if you go back to even Civil War timeframes, this wasn't the case. So, I mean, the most famous novel about Civil War, probably this Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane, he was born years decades after the war was over, and. And yet everyone thinks of that as a very realistic novel. It's almost the first realist novel. So I started with this kind of understanding of let's trace the origins and the evolution of this cultural authority, narrative authority. But then when I got to the. More let's call them like textual analyses of the texts from Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, but then also from Vietnam. For the Vietnam era texts, I tried to read as many as I could get my hands on, but there were just so many that I picked a handful of representative ones to kind of illustrate certain arguments. But then for the texts about Iraq and Afghanistan, I tried to read them all. So at the time that I did it, I think there were 54 or 55 novels, and I read all but maybe two or three in a way to try to get. To make my argument feel as, I don't know, robust as possible. So, yeah, my criteria really was, because actually, that's an important distinction. I was looking at literary fiction only because my arguments, my claims were really focused on literary fiction as a genre because there is a different logic to authorship in literary fiction, where these questions about who can write and who has the authority, they're played out in literary fiction in lots of different ways, whether it comes to race, ethnicity, gender, but then also veteran ness. That was kind of my claim for this, that are not as prevalent in other genres. So think about science fiction. Nobody cares what the author's background is when it comes to science fiction. The same is true of thrillers, and the same is true of even something like romance. So these were all genres that I at one point considered, but realized that I would balloon my text selection into an unmanageable amount if I tried to include all that. And I also realized that including all of those things would really only reinforce my main arguments, which was that you don't have to be a veteran to write about war. And the modern approach to. Or the contemporary approach to the subject bears that out, despite the way that things. That the narrative authority had been consolidated from essentially World War I up until Vietnam. And I realized, you know, if you're looking at Tom Clancy novels, if you're looking at other thrillers, if you're looking at sci fi, if you include all of those things, these are mostly written by non veterans. So if that's the case, then my argument actually holds up even more at a broader scale.
- [11:58]
John Armenta
Yeah, thank you. And it's interesting how the generic conventions are an important part of this overall story about credibility and authenticity. And I want to ask you a question about that is like, why is this connection between authorship and credibility, authenticity, so important when looking at novels about war and not novels about other subjects?
- [12:23]
David Eisler
You know, I think that it is important when it comes to those other subjects. And it often gets debated within literary circles, whether it's in criticism or it's in scholarship. There. There is a kind of shifting set of questions, shifting landscape, about who is. Who is allowed to write about what subject. And I think that it's in my mind, one of the most important questions in literary studies at the moment is, is how do we deal with this? Because most of the time it's not actually about the writing itself or the author's background, but it's about what I think. I can't remember if I said this in the book or not, or if it's something that I came up with afterward, but it's this. This access to the memory industry, where it's really about the structures that allow or Privilege certain voices over others. That's kind of the main, the main point. It was, it wasn't that when it comes to veterans, that the veteran written, veteran authored literature was privileged over non veteran authored literature for many years, primarily because there was a rationale for this and there was also an appetite for it within the reading public. Whereas for other subjects like race, ethnicity, gender, et cetera, these, these are quite contentious, but often stuck in strict structures that have for the majority of the time frame of the, of the literary industry, privileged, for example, white male voices over anybody else's. So there's a question of why does one work from a publisher get a lot of attention? For example, I think I talk about American Dirt in the book and this was a novel that was, that received a lot of attention and it was kind of the publisher's belle of the ball for a while. And then there was a question of why is, why is this voice being privileged over, let's say, somebody else from that community who maybe has a different experience? So often these questions are extremely difficult because they cross into each other and they cut on intersectional boundaries that are not easy to disentangle. And with the veteran ness, it was much easier to trace the development of this, this authority and how it, how it changed over time because we're talking about a certain, a very specific subset within the lyric fiction genre.
- [14:46]
John Armenta
Yeah. And what is the role of, I'm sorry, what is the role of the publishing industry in making these decisions?
- [14:53]
David Eisler
I think that's a hard question to answer directly. I think you can only infer it indirectly. We can say there's evidence. Right. This is like if publishers are publishing books written by certain people or written about certain subjects, there's an assumption that they think that these are going to sell. Right. This is a business product. In the end, most of the time they're not doing it because it's not a nonprofit. They're trying to sell books. And you can say if for years books about war, novels about war were published that had been written by veterans, then there was an assumption that that was a signal of authenticity, that, that people would be drawn to when they wanted to read. And then you can say, well, if as I observed and I, I count in, in my book that more novels as of 2020 had been published as written by non veterans than veterans, this, this means something. And so from that I, I, I deduced the changing landscape of authority saying that publishers maybe didn't think that that was so important. I don't think this was a conscious decision I don't think that the big five publishers out there or even the smaller publishers that were producing these works, I don't think they sat around and said, well, is this really authentic? Or maybe they had conversations kind of on a work by work basis. But of course, when we're talking about several dozen novels and probably at this point several more, there's no conscious decision that says, well, we're going to start including more of these voices. I think it's just a question of maybe it doesn't matter so much anymore. And then the real question at that point is why? Why doesn't it matter so much? And that's, that's where my civil military relations theory came in.
- [16:41]
John Armenta
Okay, now, now that we have that, that background, there's those larger, that larger conceptual background. Let's talk about some of the,
- [16:52]
David Eisler
some
- [16:52]
John Armenta
of the studies more directly. But first, how was war literature received and understood prior to World War I? And World War I really is where your, where your book begins. So prior to that, what was the role of the veteran author?
- [17:07]
David Eisler
There wasn't one. At least we're talking about American war fiction, right? I mean, that's, that's, it's always important to kind of keep that in mind because I didn't look at, for example, British war literature, which maybe has its own logic, would be kind of interesting to do a parallel study to think like, is it the same? Because the British war literature has existed for a long time as well, and it would be kind of. I'd be curious to hear how that has changed. I don't think the industry is quite as large as the American war literature, the field itself. But yeah, prior to World War I, there really was not a genre of war literature. It was just literature. And sometimes they dealt with war and sometimes they didn't. There's a very interesting book. I can't remember the author's name right now, but I think it's called the Unwritten War. It was a Pulitzer Prize winner in the 70s and the claim was, or it was more of an observation that the writers around the time of the Civil War, so some of the big 19th century names like Henry James and a few others essentially did not write about the Civil War as a subject, which is kind of an interesting. It was the, it was the defining event of probably all of American history to this date. And it was certainly an important, the most important event in 19th century American history, without argument, really. And yet as treated in fiction, it really didn't appear very much. There wasn't a whole lot Of. I mean, it appeared later. And there's some names that you can point to as counter examples like what's his name? Ambrose Bierce and of course, Stephen Crane and there are a few others who wrote about it. But. But a lot of it appears much later and not contemporary. So there weren't contemporary novelists, like even in the 1860s, 1870s, that there were very few. It wasn't a huge subject in American literature. I mean, you could. There's. There's. The whole book probably makes an argument about we don't want to think about this, so we're not going to write about it. I can't remember the main. The main argument of that book anymore, but it's. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what it was. Yeah. So it wasn't until really the First World War that the genre kind of turned into its own thing.
- [19:13]
John Armenta
And you talk about combat Gnosticism. Can you explain that a bit? And how did it develop as important for the conventions of the genre?
- [19:22]
David Eisler
Yeah, so the idea here, and there's a lot of development that comes around with this, but it was really in. Oh, goodness, I can't remember the author's name anymore. It's been. It's been too long. The guy who wrote the paper about this, and he wrote it specifically as. Was it Campbell? I can't remember. Campbell. Yeah. Thank you. So his observation was starting with Paul Fussel, really. There was this sense that when you write about something, war in particular, combat agnosticism says that. That the reality of combat is not only something that you have to have experienced in order to write about, but that is simply unknowable. That's this Gnosticism that comes in. It's that that experience is unknowable to those who have not personally experienced it. And this idea. Yeah, Campbell's. Campbell's corning of the term was very important because it allowed a way to talk about war literature, war fiction, although it was applied more broadly to literature, not just fiction. And it gave us like a framework to think about the genre and to say, well, why has it developed this way? And so that's the idea, this main idea, that if you haven't seen war, if you haven't experienced it, then you can't write about it, you can't know about it. So that you certainly can't claim to communicate the experience, that the experience itself is something transcendental as opposed to just a relational experience. Something that I. Something happened to me, like, oh, I was in a car accident. Let Me tell you about it, then you can say, well, I've never been in a car accident, but I've driven a car, so I kind of get it. I can imagine that. And the idea that combat is a set of experiences that exists outside of this realm is that getting shot at or getting blown up or whatever else is something that is not communicable to somebody who has not experienced it themselves. That's the main idea.
- [21:19]
John Armenta
And with this in mind, how does your comparison walk us through your comparison between Dos Passos Three Soldiers and Will the Cather's One of Ours?
- [21:31]
David Eisler
Yeah, this is one of my favorite things that I observed. This was not part of the original concept in the book. It was something that kind of came up. I don't. I think when I started to go back and. And read some of the older works, I don't even remember how I came across Willa Cather's One of Ours. But I read. I read Three Soldiers and I read One of Ours and realized that I think I was looking at some of the critical response to the novels or World War I novels in the 1920s. And in this case, what happens is that you've got John Just Passos, who had served as an ambulance driver, kind of like Hemingway in the Volunteer Ambulance Corps during World War in France, and Willa Catherine, who was just sort of a Midwestern but well established writer. And they each went and wrote about World War I. In the case of One of Ours, it was about a soldier who was very idealistic and wanted to go serve overseas and then has his experiences and then is, I guess it's not really a spoiler anymore. You know, he's killed in action toward the end. Sorry if you didn't know that. It's been more than 100 years. It's still very much worth reading because I was blown away by this book because it has a very idealistic way of treating the subject until you get to the end. The last few pages in my mind are the most important pages in the entire novel because she really kind of, in my view and my reading of it, questions the idealism. But a lot of the critical reviewers of the time missed that or didn't want to see it because of course there's a gendered element too, right. They were saying, what does this Midwestern woman have to say about war? And at the same time, you've got this manly John Dos Passos who came back from France driving his ambulance. And you know, he's really seen it and his view was extremely critical. Right he was taking this, this anti war view that was, hadn't been seen quite so much to that point. There hadn't been so much criticism. There had been a lot of action adventure stories. There had been some genre specific stories in the 1917, 18 time period. But when does Passos novel appears? It's the first one to really be so outwardly critical. And there are components to this too, right? There was a propaganda bureau or things like that that did not particularly like anti war criticism. So the fact that Dos Passos novel was even published was somewhat subversive in and of itself. So but they appeared pretty close to each other. And so that allowed for a more or less direct critical comparison. And in the 1920s, a lot of the people who were writing literary criticism were extremely influential in the field. And when they, when they reviewed these novels, they essentially said, well, Dos Passos was there and he's really critical. Of course, it helps to recognize that these critics who were writing probably themselves were somewhat anti war and were already drawn to the message as opposed to saying maybe there was something else about it. It's not that Cather's novel was pro war. It certainly is not if you read it carefully. But they chose not to read it carefully in most cases. And a lot of the reviews are extremely misogynistic and essentially try to put Catherine more or less back in her place as a, as a woman writer who has no business writing about these kinds of things. And that, that view is what influenced the next 10 years worth of thinking and criticism about the genre. It's really the birth of the genre.
- [24:54]
John Armenta
No, it's. It's really interesting how that, and that comes through in the book, how that piece of criticism stays with a lot of the commentary about these books. Now I think we're going to come back to this question towards the end, but is this idea of combat Gnosticism really about being a faithful representation of war and trauma, or is it just about, you know, gatekeeping and, you know, trying to keep certain people, allow certain people into the genre and keep other people out?
- [25:30]
David Eisler
That's a good question. I think it's probably a bit of both, honestly. I think that it's very easy to use as a gatekeeping mechanism. But I also do think that, and especially if you read, as I talk about a little bit in the introduction to my book, this idea within the academic writing and scholarship about war, it really stays with combat Gnosticism really stays with even the scholarship. It's not just who gets to write about the war. It's really, who gets to write about. Who gets to write about war. And that sticks around for a very long time. So people are using this. Scholars are using this and quoting it or inferring it in their own work for. For generations to come afterward. And I don't think that they're thinking about this as gatekeeping. I think that they. They do believe that there is a certain representational disadvantage that comes with not having experienced war almost as a singular subject within American literature. Trauma as a larger subject is not one that seemed to have quite as much gatekeeping. No one is saying that you haven't experienced trauma. You can't write about it, or you can't understand what's been written about it. That's the main thing com agnosticism is, isn't just saying that you can't write about it if you haven't experienced it. It's saying that you can't even understand it. That's what I mean. You said, we'll come back to it, and that's true. This is where the generation of Vietnam veterans really take this to the extreme, saying, if you weren't there, you don't know, you can't understand, and you'll. And no amount of us telling you about it is going to make you understand. It's only going to reinforce the gap between the. Those in the know and those who are not. So I think that there is. There's an element of gatekeeping involved. But when it comes down to how this idea of experience is critical as a. As a mechanism and a tool for understanding American war literature, it's really. It's really hard to get rid of. I bet even today, if you were to ask most people, you know, who writes about war, it's the opening line of the book, you know, who writes novels about war? I think most people would still tell you it's soldiers who've been there. And there's not a whole lot of room for other voices. But I think what I try to show is that that's false.
- [27:50]
John Armenta
Yeah. Thank you. And how does this. I mean, we will definitely talk about, you know, how it starts to break down, but how does the combat gnosticism carry over into the World War II fiction?
- [28:03]
David Eisler
The main culprit here, or the main banner carrier, if you want to call him that, it's Ernest Hemingway, who is, of course, a product of World War I generation. And despite his sort of, let's call him, questionable combat bona fides, much like this Passos. Right. In fact, those Passos is criticized quite heavily by veterans for saying he wasn't actually in combat, he was just kind of sort of there. Maybe he was shot at, but that doesn't really count. It's kind of weird how the, the standards change over time. But yeah, it's. It's Hemingway's formation as a major American author. Of course, he's published in 1926 with. What's the name of that one? Sun Also Rises. But then, of course, it's Farewell to arms in 1929 that becomes the runaway bestseller. And it's. These texts are important for the time that they're written, but become even more important to the generation of World War II writers because they're collected and packaged in a paperback edition that's sent overseas to soldiers who are serving in World War II as, like, here, here's something that you might like to read. You know, this. This guy, he's one of you. He wrote some novels about the First World War. And maybe, maybe you'll like them. I don't. I don't know what the logic was behind doing that, but sure. And the thing was that, that the, the generation of World War II veterans that, that, that come back, they're given the educational opportunities by the GI Bill, which allows them to go to different institutions at the same time. These creative writing institutions are formed post World War II, and a lot of them are using Hemingway's short stories as their main examples. So it's this particular style of writing of what is. What counts as truth, and that fiction is the truest thing that you can have, and it's even more true than if you write fiction. Well, then it's. It's more true than the facts. Something like that. And this idea really take hold is. It's. It's not labeled as combat gnosticism. Hemingway himself is not directly saying, at least not in my memory, that if you weren't there, you can't write about it. But he's saying that this should. That. He basically says that true writing comes from experience. So you can read into that. And if you preach this to a generation of World War II veterans who are now coming back and attending creative writing programs on the GI Bill and learning from Hemingway stories, they're all going to kind of do the same thing.
- [30:27]
John Armenta
Yeah, the idea of write what you know.
- [30:30]
David Eisler
Exactly.
- [30:30]
John Armenta
And, and on. On the subject of those veterans in those creative writing programs, what happened to them after they graduated? What was their role in shaping war fiction afterwards?
- [30:43]
David Eisler
I was really lucky that I was able to get a list, an archive list of a lot of the graduates of. Of the Iowa and the Stanford Writing Workshops in post World War II. And I tried to trace their careers as much as possible, and I found that in many cases they went on to very important, influential positions within the American literary field, whether they were teaching English classes at other institutions or they were working at different publishers. So like this generation of veterans who'd been fed a steady diet of Furnace Hemingway and taught write what you know, they go off and they form their own creative writing programs and they teach the next generation of writers to do the same thing.
- [31:20]
John Armenta
And even as high school teachers, too.
- [31:22]
David Eisler
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [31:24]
John Armenta
And I mean, and that is a good segue to talking about the Vietnam War, because these would have been the people teaching high school to the men who then went on and fought in Vietnam. But what was it about the Vietnam War and the veteran authors who fought there that was different than previous wars? And how is this reflected in the novels that came out of this war?
- [31:45]
David Eisler
Yeah, this was. This was one of the more interesting observations that, that I came across while. While doing the research for this, which was that there was a lot of the way that veterans talked about Vietnam as a different place as not really. They always referred to going back to the US as. As going back to the world. And so they made this kind of rhetorical distinction between Vietnam as being a place not of this world and then everywhere else being the rest of the world. So it was this kind of thinking that really reinforced this idea that if you hadn't been to Vietnam, if you hadn't experienced this, then it was an experience that was so surreal, so incommunicable, that no one who had been there. Right, no one who hadn't been there could understand what that would be, would have been like. And of course, the socio cultural conditions at the time contributed to this, because unlike during our generation of military Service, where the post 911 generation, there was a lot of positive comments, a lot of support. There was this, you know, you don't have to like the war, but support the veterans, the yellow ribbon, patriotism, that kind of stuff. This was a response, at least partially, to the way that Vietnam veterans were received back during the 1960s and 70s. And I think it was this negative image in the American cultural imaginary at the time that contributed to this. We're going to reassert our authority to control the narrative about what it was like. Right. So that was. That was the main result in the literary field of what happens with that generation of veterans. But, yeah, there's a loud noise here. So I'm getting distracted too. I think it's outside.
- [33:31]
John Armenta
Okay. Hopefully nothing too, you know, nothing too important.
- [33:37]
David Eisler
It's all good.
- [33:38]
John Armenta
Yeah. All right, well, let's. Let's. Let's stay. Let's stay on that. On that path there. And you note that the Vietnam War novels really focus on trauma, but how does this focus on trauma allow the veteran authors to avoid talking about politics? And I mean politics in both the domestic political sense, but also the. The colonial sense of the war.
- [34:04]
David Eisler
Yeah. So the literature or the fiction in particular that's written about the wars is extremely sobistic in the sense that the veterans are mostly writing about what it was like to be a veteran, to be a soldier in Vietnam. And so this focus on trauma, it was kind of using the rhetoric of trauma combined with combat agnosticism is a powerful tool to say not only can you not understand what it was like, but also you can't criticize us for the experience because that's insensitive. This is our trauma. And, you know, it's. How. How can you say that my trauma is not real or it's not. It's. It's not valuable as a subject? There's no real way to criticize that. So this rhetoric is extremely important to the consolidation of narrative authority, is what I call it in saying that if you hadn't been there, then you can't write about it and you can't understand it. It was. So, of course, there were conferences and literary theorists who at the time, we're saying, well, if. If you can't understand and you've never been there, then why are people writing all these novels? And they're bas. And most of the time they're saying, well, we're doing it because we need to get something out of us, or we need to. We're just telling what the other veterans think, but they don't need to know that. So that's a distinction between the post Vietnam fiction and World War II fiction, because World War II fiction, it was. There's this idea of tell it like it was right. Tell the truth, Tell what was it like to be a soldier, sailor, Marine, etc, during World War II. But the. The incentive to tell it like it was presumes that that experience can be communicated to someone who didn't have it. Whereas, you know, if you weren't there, you can't know. Immediately excludes the potential reader or listener from a story. And I think when you add trauma to that, it becomes even more of a. Of a fortress against criticism.
- [35:58]
John Armenta
Thank you. And I'VE definitely seen that, that argument play through with, you know, in my own studies on veterans and how they write about their experiences. But before we get to what is really a turning point in the book, which is the end of the, of conscription. But before you do that, it's like, how did the Vietnam War change the relationship between state society and the military? And how, and what was the, you know, how did that impact, you know, the, the veteran authors and what they wrote about?
- [36:36]
David Eisler
Do you mean about in terms of the cultural conditions at the time or do you mean the ending of the draft?
- [36:41]
John Armenta
Well, we'll get to the ending of the draft in a moment, but I'm talking about during the war itself.
- [36:46]
David Eisler
Ah, yeah. So I mean the cultural conditions of the time were tricky in that there was no public consensus for the war in and of itself, as well as the fact that the way that units and individuals deployed during the war was on an individual basis. You served a 365 day tour, didn't matter if you came with different people or if they came later. However long you've been together, your tour was up, you would return. So this individual nature of service meant that those who returned back to society that was not particularly welcoming only increased the feelings of alienation compared to, let's say the World War II generation or even the World War I generation that returned back as a group and were welcomed as heroes, essentially. So that was, I mean there's, there have been so many books written about the socio cultural and political conditions of the Vietnam War, I couldn't even begin to go on into the details about it. But when it comes to the veterans, the idea essentially is that it wasn't called the common thought about this, or at least the common knowledge about it in our culture memories, that it was not particularly enjoyable to return as a veteran post Vietnam.
- [38:02]
John Armenta
Thank you. And now let's talk about the end of conscription and the beginning of the all volunteer force. How did that begin to change? Who had authority to tell war stories?
- [38:15]
David Eisler
I. It wasn't an overnight thing. Right. So you know, when you, when you think about. There was not. There was a lot of literature written about, a lot of novels written about Vietnam kind of in the, in, in the early 70s there was a wave of them and then there were a few more throughout the 80s. And it's kind of a, what do you call it, like a steady stream of them, but there wasn't that many. It wasn't an explosion of texts or something like that. But the, the end of the draft led to a Number of questions about, and this is kind of veering into the sociology of it, but it's a question of, well, who serves in a, in a country or in a military where no one is forced to serve. Because prior to that, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, a not insignificant portion of, of those who served were conscripted, they were forced to serve, they were drafted. And with the ending of the draft, that was no longer going to be the case. So there was this, this question of who's going to serve in an all volunteer force. And we don't really see the effect of this, in my opinion, on literature until the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was, there was some, there wasn't really a sustained conflict in between. Right. There were some small military actions, there was the Persian Gulf War, et cetera, and there was some literature that came out about that, but not much comparatively. And the bigger texts from the Persian Gulf War, things like Jarhead, et cetera, these were memoirs. Right. So Memoirs is really processing the experience for a reading public in a raw, non fictionalized way to say this is what it was like. That's the idea of the memoir. But the fiction is intended to interrogate it on a bit of a deeper level. And that doesn't really happen in great numbers. So it's not until you start to see the novels published about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that you really start to see, at least in my view, the influence of the end of the draft on the production of fiction about war and conflict.
- [40:21]
John Armenta
Okay, let's go there. What were some of these early novels about? The, the so called war on terror.
- [40:28]
David Eisler
Oh man, now you're quizzing me on my own stuff. I should probably have studied for this. Yeah, So I think there's a good. There were a handful of early novels that were published 2007, 2008, like very few. But it wasn't really 2012, I think it was. That was kind of the big banner year for American war fiction of the Iraq War in particular. Though funny enough, novels about the war in Afghanistan took a little bit longer because at least from what I had read there were some. But really you don't get too many of them until later. But it's 2012, you get this big splash of two. There's Billy Wynn's Long Halftime Walk, which has been Fountain, who's not a veteran, but he wrote, in my view, still one of the best novels about what it was like to be a veteran during that time. And then there's Kevin Powers Yellowbirds, which both books were put up for prizes and came close and I think nominated for the National Book Award, if I remember correctly, but didn't quite win. And this was like the first. And you have a direct comparison. Right. So Kevin Powers is a combat infantryman who comes back and writes a very lyrical. He's compared to Hemingway a lot. If you read the blurbs on the book, it's very much like this is like Tim o'. Brien. This is like Ernest Hemingway. So it recalls all of the stuff from Vietnam. It was sort of the expectation, almost the publisher's expectation that this type of novel would be the direct continuation of the Things They Carried or for Home the Bell Tolls. Whereas Ben Fallon's novel was a lot more cerebral and strange about like a young army specialist who is about to take part in a halftime show at a football game. So. And it's really more of an exploration of American society's response to veterans at that time. And this question of we support you, we are constantly looking for you to confirm our own political bias about what the war is. That's a theme that happens throughout that novel quite a bit. People asking Billy, who is 19 year old, doesn't have any greater insight into what the war means or how it's going to. He's just there and hoping not to die on a daily basis. So there's interesting ways that that plays out. There's a lot of great themes in that book and that's kind of where it really starts.
- [42:54]
John Armenta
And you note that the settings of these novels changed. Many set in the US or jumping between war and home. And the two you just mentioned. Fountain's book is almost entirely in the US and Power's book is evenly split between Iraq and the US what was the. Oh, I, I guess the question is. No, they. How important is this idea of setting in the. I, I guess how combat Gnosticism began to no longer have the hold that it once had.
- [43:30]
David Eisler
Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's a great question and observation. It, it comes down to the fact that I think when you, when you look at the texts and the novels written about Iraq and Afghanistan as a whole, in, in my view, combat and the experience of being deployed is no longer the defining experience of the war. It's. It's the experience of coming home that really is defining what this was like. And I, I think that you can see this shift in there. There are very few of the novels that I read that take place exclusively overseas, exclusively in the combat zone. There are a handful that do that. But even those still have kind of an eye about what it's going to be like to return. And the novels that explore what it's like to return then open things up saying, well, if combat is no longer the defining experience of war, then combat agnosticism really loses its power, because it's not that difficult to have an imagination and say, well, I might not write about combat, but I certainly can imagine what it's like to return home and feel different from an experience, and then to imagine what that experience might be like, whether or not you're writing about a veteran or you're writing about civilians.
- [44:45]
John Armenta
And this is a little speculative on my part, but what was it about the. The immediacy, the immediate nature of the war? Like, because we were both deployed to both, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan my entire time there, with very small exceptions like being out on patrol, I was able to e. Email, I was able to, you know, update my MySpace page, you know, like, and, you know, even, you know, the. The trip from the war zone back home was like under 36 hours. What was that? You know, you know, that connection, that constant connection between home and the war zone? How. How did that play into these. These decisions by the veteran authors?
- [45:31]
David Eisler
I'm glad you brought that up, because I remember thinking about this a lot at the time that I was doing the research for the book. I. I don't. I don't recall if I really used it much, but I know that it was a. It was a recurring thought about, you know, and I think I was asked by my, you know, my thesis advisor a couple of times, like, how does this affect it? And I could never really come up with a good answer. Like, I have speculative answers as well, but I. I couldn't. I couldn't come up with anything I could defend. Right. But I think there's this idea that, of course, if you maintain connectivity, then the link between the war zone and home is a lot easier. It's quicker to bridge. But it also makes the feeling. I mean, I know that I had this experience and you probably did, too, and a lot of veterans who served at that time, where you would be at the MWR tent on the computer sending an email or something, and then there'd be a rocket attack, and then you'd have to go and run to a bunker, and. And. And then it's like, okay, you know, hold on, Mom, I'll be right back. Like, you know, you're on the phone, and then it's like, I'll be right back. And Then hold on. That is, that is an experience that no other generation of veterans had, at least not in the same way, you know, that you can go back and say, well, the World War I and World War II veterans, they all returned home on two ships that took a long time to cross the Atlantic. Right, With Vietnam. Yes, they were on airplanes and they were home faster. And so that quick, the quickness of the return did combine, did increase the alienation, feeling. This, this, this cognitive dissonance of like, wait, 10 hours ago I was being shot at in the jungle, and then now I'm at home, and then I'm at, you know, the airport or something like that. In, in. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, it's, it's even faster because it's, It's. The link is not even broken anymore. I remember at the time, I think there were. There were some people arguing and saying that we shouldn't have any of this stuff. There shouldn't be so much connectivity because it's actually not good for the, for the troops. Because if you constantly have, you know, half of your thought process, half your mind on home, if you're thinking, okay, I'm going to go talk to my girlfriend or something like that, or I'm going to talk to my parents, send them an email, send them a picture, call them on the phone, then maybe you're not as effective on your missions. And I think there's probably some truth to that. Whether or not it's the right call is a different question. But, yeah, I think that this link means that the distance, at least the kind of emotional distance between the home front and the combat zone is so much shorter than it had been. And I think everybody gets that.
- [48:11]
John Armenta
Yeah. So let's turn to some of the major themes in these War on Terror books. And the, the, the two that you, you picked out that I found, you know, like most, most notable is a PTSD and moral injury and the connection between those two and this, you know, it's. It's what I call the, the thank you for your service culture. You know, like the. You. You know, a lot of the, in a lot of these books, how the protagonists are, you know, like, trying to struggle with, you know, their experiences and then being told, you know, thank you for your service. So how did those themes develop in, in some of the various books that you look at here?
- [48:55]
David Eisler
Yeah, and these are two, I think, of the biggest themes. I mean, not. Not surprisingly. Right. Because again, something like, like ptsd, it became better known culturally within the last number of Years, or at least during the time of, of most of these, these, these texts. Right. So the, the novels that I looked at were written primarily between 2010 and 2020, but they were depicting events that were taking place between 2001, 2003, 2007, things like that. So there's not a lot of historical distance between these, when they were written and what they were writing about. This is kind of. This. There's a number of interesting theories about contemporary historical fiction. So writing historical fiction. This is an argument that I make as well, that the novels function as historical, historical fiction, despite being very close in time to the events that they're depicting. But PTSD becoming better recognized and one of the more defining features, because we're taking this over from Vietnam where PTSD was defined, not defined in Vietnam, but it was retroactively applied to the experiences of a lot of the veterans from that era. And so having a better understanding of it going into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to this being a much more common theme both in veteran and non. Veteran authored works. And moral injury was the same. Moral injury is a topic that comes up quite often by the novels written by veterans, not surprisingly, because again, if you see fiction as a way of exploring an experience through a different lens, then kind of, I guess everybody who was not everybody, but a lot of the authors who were grappling with what do these wars mean? Were really thinking much more carefully about what it means to do something, what it means to serve as a volunteer in a. In a war that is arguably illegal and immoral. Right. And a lot of these things have changed over time. And the thoughts that I had in 2008 and 2010 are different from the thoughts that I have now 16 years later. Right. I think about my experiences and my participation very differently than I did at the time, which is why it's not surprising that as authors kind of revisit these experiences in fiction, whether veterans or not, this tends to be the foregrounding experience. No one is really at this point. I mean, I don't know if there has been in the last couple of years a novel that's just a straight up depiction of what it was like, you know, what combat was like during either of those conflicts. I don't know that it would be particularly interesting. Right. And maybe that's the publisher's question. And if a publisher's getting a novel, it's like, all right, what was it like to, here's a character who serves in the invasion of Baghdad or a character who serves during the Kandahar Surge or Operation. I was the one. It had a name. I can't remember anymore. It was in Marja in Southern Afghanistan in 2010. Right. Moshterak, something like that. So that I don't know if a publisher would find all that interesting. Like what? We've seen this before, right. There's nothing really new here. Although, interestingly enough, we can ask this question, we can broaden it a little bit. Asking what it's like to be in combat in Ukraine right now might be a different story than what it was like to be in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I wonder. This is kind of pushing past the. Beyond the boundaries of what my own work was. But I wonder if new technological elements like drones and cameras, constant filming and footage, if that actually has introduced new elements to contemporary literature about. I mean, these are. The war still ongoing. Right. So it's. It's maybe too soon to tell what that literature will look like when it does. But I will be curious to hear just to see what it. What it does when it comes out. But, you know, to kind of go back to the point about moral injury, I think moral injury as the defining element of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's not that strange to imagine at this point that that's more of an interesting theme to cover in a novel than, for example, straight up combat stories.
- [53:06]
John Armenta
Right. Because the novel, you can dig deep into a character and their emotions and their thoughts, whereas, you know, maybe a combat story is better off for a memoir, probably.
- [53:18]
David Eisler
Yeah. I mean, it makes you wonder actually, like, why. Why are there straight up combat novels to begin with? There are some. I mean, Vietnam had a bunch of these. Paco's story from Hyman was. Was one that's kind of like this. Well, Paco's story less so. Close Quarters, his first novel, was much more. And that one is. Is like brutal. That's really tough to read. Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about that in his own work, where he says that he read Close Quarters as a. As a Vietnamese immigrant in. In when he was like 13 or something like that. And he said that that book more or less scarred him because of its description and depiction of the Vietnamese, which is not great.
- [53:59]
John Armenta
Yeah, that. That's actually a good transition because I wanted to talk about how the. The wars themselves, the insurgency and counterinsurgency are represented in, in these works. And you note a different type of what you call the dispersal of authority. So the first type was non veteran authors writing about wars. But then there is another type of dispersal of authority with, you know, the, the two words, your quote, writing from the perspective of the other. So, so let's talk about this. How is the, the wars themselves, the insurgencies themselves represented in these, in these pieces? And what are the politics of representation in using these non American focalizers?
- [54:48]
David Eisler
This is where things get really interesting and another place where just the genesis of the work comes through. Having made the decision, which was not necessarily great for my mental health, but it was good for my research to read all of these novels and try to just, you know, consume as much of it as possible because I, in reading all of them, I had the chance to observe more and more and I started to realize that in particular the veteran authored works tended to write from the perspective of non veteran or non American characters far more frequently than you would imagine. Recall that I said the fiction about the wars in the war in Vietnam was mostly about what it was like to be an American soldier serving in Vietnam. And this is pretty much what it was. The Vietnamese are generally excluded from these Heideman's two most well known novels, Paco's Story, which Paco Story has the distinction of receiving the National Book Award in the same year that Toni Morrison's Beloved was also up for it. So one of these we remember a little bit better than the other is kind of interesting. Um, but yeah, those two novels, you know, Close Quarters is really about what it was like to get drafted and sent and serve in Vietnam. And then Paco's Story is what it's like to be at home afterward and struggling. So those are the main themes and it's kind of what we came to expect about the, the, the fiction that emerged from Vietnam. But quite a few of the novels about Iraq and Afghanistan included either civilian characters or even in some cases there was, there was the perspective of an insurgent, so somebody who was actively fighting and trying to kill American soldiers in Iraq. So the way I started to understand this, because I first just observed it and then tried to make better sense of it, was a way of, yeah, this, this sharing the burden of what that experience was like, but then also communicating the entirety of the experience. You know, when you think about the veteran authored works as a group, you can ask yourself what are they trying to achieve? And remember, we're talking about literary fiction, right? So this is not, not a single one of these works is going to affect the culture in the same way that for example, American Sniper does. So it's always important to kind of remember the scope and scale of the thing that we're talking about, but we can still make claims about what it is that these works are trying to achieve. And, and my, my contention was that they were trying to communicate the entirety of the experience of the wars to an American population that, in my words, had become unburdened from the causes and the consequences of the conflict because there was no skin in the game anymore. There was no threat to be drafted. There was an all volunteer force where bases and veterans were concentrated in very small communities in smaller areas across the country. So it was very easy. I mean, even today, if you served in Iraq and Afghanistan and you go into a random group of people, most likely you're either the only veteran or you're the first veteran that most of the people have ever met. And it's, it's that, that still happens. It's still talking about a very small percentage of the, of the population. So that was the reason why they did this. But what, what they often did. And you ask about the politics of, of representation. That's where things get tricky because there is, I think, a legitimate criticism of these works. I see it as a benevolent attempt. This is my personal interpretation. I think I see it as an attempt. Especially when you read the novels and you read these characters often like in Royce Granton's novel War Porn, the Iraqi character is the most honorable and let's call him even likable character in the entire novel. And every other American character is horrible, both soldier and civilian. Right. So this happens quite often that these, or, or when you think about Elliot Ackerman's Green on Blue, which is a novel told entirely from the perspective of an Afghan and you kind of, it gives you the entire backstory of what in. I point this out in the book as well. If you. There was a time when there were a lot of these insider attacks, so they called them Green on Blue, which meant that there was some Afghan policeman or, or soldier who then turned around and then shot and killed American soldiers who were serving there. They were supposed to be on the same side. And these, the, the Afghans in these stories are often reduced to, you know, nameless ghouls who then shot and killed Americans. And then we care about the Americans. And so Elliot Ackerman's book attempts to get you to think about what it might have been like for that Afghan to experience the American presence in his hometown. So this is a long way of saying I recognize that there are, and I think I acknowledge too that the politics of representation gets tricky quickly. And there are legitimate criticisms for doing this kind of thing. Nonetheless, I still interpret it as a positive development post Vietnam. When you say we criticize the fiction about the Vietnam War as being far too focused on the American experience, you can't make that same claim broadly about the fiction of Iraq and Afghanistan, which I think is a good thing.
- [60:04]
John Armenta
Yeah. And then also by having these reintegration stories or kind of this is showing how embedded militarism is in American life as well. And like these non veteran authors are recognizing that as well and their own roles in it too. So, so let's, you know, kind of zoom out again and like what can. This is a restatement of the question I asked you, I kind of hinted at earlier, like what does war fiction show us about the nature of civil military relations and this so called civil military gap?
- [60:44]
David Eisler
Well, that's, that's a good reformulation of my own animating question. And what does it show us? I think, and this was one of the motivating questions I had at the beginning of my own research, which is can you make any claims about American civil military relations just by reading this fiction? Can you infer anything about it? And I think the answer is yes, but you have to do a lot of work to do so. And again it's very indirect and so you have to really pull out what, what it means for society. I think the fact that the two observations that we have to work with, the first, that there are more non veteran authors publishing work or more works published by non veteran authors for Iraq and Afghanistan compared to Vietnam is an indicator that this standard of authority has shifted to some degree. That this post Vietnam or up through Vietnam consolidation of narrative authority to write about war and conflict and fiction was not as stable anymore in the conditions post ending of the draft. And then especially in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where you had an all volunteer force doing a lot of back to back deployments under conditions that were politically far more contentious than, than is often remembered now. And as a result you can say a lot of things about, I think, who wants to write about these stories? I mean, I'm always kind of careful with that and I catch myself because I almost always say it wrong every time, which is I don't want to make the claim that more non veterans are writing about war. That's not necessarily true. We just can say that more works by non veterans are being published. We don't know about this great unknown potentially works written by non, by non veterans in the immediacy of Vietnam, where publishers said well no, why would we Publish this. No one's going to care what you have to say. We have this to some extent. This changes a little bit. That's one, I think, thing I forgot to mention or sort of the first novel that really does. This is in country by Bobby and Mason, which is published I think in 1985. And this is one of the first, like really positive, critically received novels written by a non veteran, a woman at that too. Right. So we're breaking a lot of conventions that had developed over decades at this point. And she writes an absolutely fantastic novel about. Not about the war itself. She writes there's a veteran character, but then she writes from the perspective of that character's, I think nice or something like that. Maybe not even nice, but it's like her father's killer in Vietnam. And then she has a Vietnam veteran neighbor. I can't remember if it's her uncle or her neighbor might be neighbor. Fantastic book, though. So you can see some shifts already by 1985, post Vietnam, because it's not hammered the way that you might have expected it to be if you were to just look at what Willa Cather's reception was. And I'm kind of rambling to get back to my main point about civil military relations. I think you can look to these things as markers, right? I think they are markers for civil military relations. And then the second part about it is my, my claim that veteran authors writing about the totality of the experience is designed as a way to. For burden sharing and saying that we have been asked to bear the entire burden of this. We want to share some of that with a society that we feel should be more engaged. This is more of a political statement. And I don't want to put intent into the, the minds or the mouths of all of these authors, but this is how I personally see it.
- [64:31]
John Armenta
And I guess in a sense this burden sharing is really the thing that's shattering the combat narcissism. It was like they're. They're straight up saying, it's like, we don't want this anymore.
- [64:42]
David Eisler
Quite a few of them, Matt Gallagher and Folk High, they both wrote things. And they're not the only ones who've come out to say, you do not have to. I mean, I think Gallagher's article is titled exactly, you don't have to be a veteran to write about War. And, and it's, it's fascinating because that that article was published on the same day that that was. Like a lot of times you'll have an article that's that launches at the same time as a book, and it was published in the same day as. As. As Matt's book was published and his own war novel. Right. So it's. It's. When you think about it, it's a baffling thing to have happen. In light of what you would expect from the post Vietnam generation, you would think. Right. Just. Just scientifically, you would think that. All right, if veterans had effectively consolidated the entire narrative authority to write about war and conflicts and fiction post Vietnam. And now we've removed the draft, which means that veterans are the only ones. I say veterans, but, yeah, veterans are the only ones. So people who volunteer actively to serve. It's a smaller portion of people. They're the only ones who now explain, experience this and bear the cost, physically and otherwise, of the wars. You would expect that they would actively say, yeah, we're the ones who can do this. But no, exactly the opposite is what happens. And again, I don't want to make my claim wilder than it is. It's focused in literary fiction. If you were to do the same analysis but focus on memoir, I think you get a different answer in some places, because, again, memoir is. Is not. It's not about representation. It's not about literary representation. It is about the recounting of memories and events. But I think. And there's also a political divide here, too. Right. I mean, there's this sense that literary fiction tends to be more liberal and progressive and memoir is going to be more split. And I think if you look at a lot of the memoirs published by veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, it's a lot more conservative.
- [66:37]
John Armenta
And actually, for New Books Network, I interviewed Myra Mendible, her book American War Stories, Veteran Writers and the Politics of Memoir. And that is one of her claims. Yeah, Right. Right there.
- [66:50]
David Eisler
Oh, man, I have to check that one out.
- [66:52]
John Armenta
Yeah. I also think it's interesting. Is outside of. Right. Outside of literature is you do have this sense of combat narcissism from people like Pete Hegseth and leaders in, you know, like his. His cohort in the Pentagon right now, you know, like lambasting journalists for saying, how dare you talk about, you know, about war. You know nothing about it. Only I, as a veteran can. Can say anything about it.
- [67:21]
David Eisler
Yep. Yeah, that's. That is fascinating.
- [67:24]
John Armenta
Okay, so thank you for your time. And I. I've taken a lot of it. Is there any final thoughts you have about the work or maybe what you've seen? Like, it's now been three, four years since it's been published. Anything that you've started that you've noticed about literature being published now that fits into the framework that you already, that you wrote about or maybe is starting to break out of it.
- [67:53]
David Eisler
I'll confess I haven't stayed current on the, on the publishing world when it comes to novels about Iraq and Afghanistan. I, I can't even tell you what's been published in the last few years. I, I don't, I don't really know. So that, that's thing number one. I, I was fortunate to, to participate in a workshop about veteran studies last November in Zurich with a colleague who's doing the American Studies department there. Her name's Katerina Gerhund. And she asked some of these questions and she asked those of us who participated to really kind of think about how our own work has changed over time and what questions we still have that motivate us. And I have thought a lot about my own work in the context of the increased polarization in American culture and politics even since 2022, when, I mean I finished this work in 2020 and published it in 2022. So there's been almost a six year gap since I've written about this directly. And of course in those six years the politics, the political landscape has shifted so dramatically that I have wondered about how much, how many of my claims still hold. One of the things that I talk about in the final chapter of the book is this kind of the paradox of the literary representation of the all volunteer force, which it was something that I again, after reading all of the novels came to realize that most depiction of. I started off by thinking, all right, there's some really good positive developments here for American civil military relations, which ultimately my work was based on and situated in an interest in civil military relations. And it happened to look at literary, the literary field as an, as an object and trying to say, can I understand something about American civil, civil military relations by reading these novels and the positive observations that we started with that more women are writing about war again, more non veterans are writing or are publishing novels about. See, there I go again. They're publishing novels about the war. And that veteran authors are choosing to tell their stories through non, veteran, non American eyes. I said these are all good things. And yet when you look at a lot of these stories written both by veterans and non veterans, I mean, Jesse Goolsbee book, Jesse Goolsbee's book, I'd Walk With My Friends if I Could find them, was one of my favorites of all the ones that I read. And he It's a, I use that as the title of the last chapter which as there's a father and son conversation and the son is kind of talking about his experience and then the father basically says, well, what'd you expect? You volunteered to get screwed. And this idea of the, the volunteer force is saying, you know, you, you got what you signed up for. Now we have much more complicated questions about moral authority in an all volunteer force. And especially nowadays I actually think about this a lot with the context of the, of, of the war in Iran about moral authority and, and what, what's responsibility those who serve in a volunteer force have towards these, these conflicts. Of course, much different vantage points for me now at 41 than when I was 23 and asked us to go serve in Iraq. Right. So it's, it's perspective is a big thing. The other thing was that I, I saw an undercurrent of skepticism about the veteran experience even from the non veterans. So it's great that non veterans are writing about the wars and yet the unfortunate thing is that they are basing a lot of their characters and leveraging a lot of these stereotypes that were thought to happen about the all volunteer force back when it was, when the draft was ended. So the sociologists who were saying we have to be careful about an all volunteer force because what's going to happen? Who's going to serve when no one has to, it's only going to be poor people, it's going to be people with no education, et cetera. Meanwhile, the statistics don't back that up, right. That the modern military is not only a fairly accurate representation of American society demographically, but they tend to be on average better educated because there is a high school requirement, right? So a high school degree requirement. Officers have to have a college degree, things like that. They come from not necessarily the poorest zip codes. It's a fairly accurate distribution, right? So these are all stereotypes, they're not based in fact. And yet these find their way into the fiction. They find their way into the literary representations of these characters. These, all the veterans in nearly all of the veterans in these, in these novels struggle with post traumatic stress abuse, alcohol, drugs. Again, we're going all into this negative. There might be good literary reasons for this and nonetheless my, my claim slash worry was that if this is writ large, the cultural image that's being presented about this class of people, what's going to happen when the politics shifts? And now we're seeing it. Right. I don't think that to thank you for your Service culture that existed 15 years ago exists right now. I think there's more of a distance now. I'm judging this from overseas. Right. I'm sitting in Germany, and I don't have as much direct access to what this looks like in the. In the United States right now. And again, the war in Iran is not the same thing as a ground invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's just in terms of the sheer number of people involved. So I think that's important to keep in mind as well. But I do wonder, you know, none of these conflicts are popular. The Iraq war wasn't popular either, but I think not to the same extent that, that the war in Iran is. There's. There's a lot of complicated fonts with this. And it. I was always kind of worried that, that, that that dam might break if the polarization, plus the negative representations of these characters. There's. There's an entire analysis that I did that didn't make it into the book, but I always wanted to do something with, and I could never quite figure it out. It's what I called in cultural representations the metonymic veteran, which is using veteran as a shorthand for trauma killer, traumatized or hero, any one of those things. Right. And my go to depiction of this was the character of Warmonger in Black Panther, you know, Michael B. Jordan's character, who is coded as a traumatized killer, and then only in one, like a sideline. Later on you find out that he was a. He was a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was like a sniper or something like that. And then they're like, oh, okay, well, now all of his trauma makes sense because he was a veteran, and what else could he be but a killer or traumatized killer? Right. That's it. So when cultural representations of a certain group of people veer toward one overwhelming stereotype, there's a. There's a danger that that becomes the norm, and it's going to be much harder to work against it and to remind people that veterans are just individuals and people and there's no one way to describe them.
- [75:13]
John Armenta
Right. And then maybe you get a reactionary cycle and the combat narcissism comes back, like, which we. Which maybe we'll see in 10, 20 years.
- [75:23]
David Eisler
I wonder. I mean.
- [75:25]
John Armenta
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. Well, David, thank you so much for your time. This has been great. I've been speaking. So I've been speaking to David Eisner, author of Writing Wars, Authorship and American War fiction, World War I to Present, published from the University of Iowa Press. David, thank you.
- [75:42]
David Eisler
Thanks John. Appreciate it.
- [75:43]
New Books Network Host
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website new books network.com connect with us on Instagram and bluesky with the handle ew booksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly substack newsletter@newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.