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Dispatches - Recap

• survivors ask ‘why me?’ and ‘why?’• survivors question identity, relationships, belief systems,

faith in an orderly universe.• Problem is to find a place in history and in memory for to

the traumatic event • May transform their experiences and offer testimonial as

“a gift to others” (Herman) as way of making meaning out of random experience of trauma

• The telling necessary for healing may take the form of writing since writing implies an auditor

• Constructing a narrative is a means of integrating traumatic event into existing experience and into collective memory of history

• There was a need to “find a form and an expression for a very extreme experience…. We had to find this in order to save our lives” (Herr in Schroeder 40).

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• Dispatches as a form of healing for Herr• See desire to both reveal and obfuscate in indirect

accounting of war• Text becomes an offering to grunts as an attempt to

articulate their experience• Personal testimonial - writing provides him an

opportunity to integrate traumatic events into his existing experience

• Our role as reader is to listen, wholeheartedly

• Herr’s account has little of the ‘blood and guts’ accounts that appear in other Viet Nam narratives

• He openly acknowledges the two-faced nature of war as both terrifying and exhilarating:

“Some people found it distasteful or confusing if I told them that, whatever else, I’d loved it there too” (251).

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• Herr offers very little direct commentary or analysis about the war

• Herr’s account annoyed both political right and left: “I was deeply thrilled….I knew I had succeeded. I offended everybody” (DLB).

• “Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along...” (49). (Cherokee forcibly removed from their lands in Georgia and marched 1000 miles into Oklahoma because gold was discovered in their traditional territory – 4000 Cherokee died)

• “Unspeakable arrogance“ to go there• Critique of culture that created mythic view of war and

masculinity

Form

• Oral narrative• New Journalism that mixes fact and fiction

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Style

• novel appears to be a confused, random account using ‘in-group’ language that obscures any resolution

• Lack of linear narrative, resolution and single protagonist undermines the familiar heroic paradigm

• Truth is uncertain• Text mimics Herr’s experience and that of ‘grunts’ in Viet

Nam • Reader experiences disjunction similar to that of the

‘grunts’ in trying to force text into coherent, linear narrative of the type to which we are accustomed

• Language is informal, colloquial• Use of obscenity as means of undermining ‘official,’

sanitized accounts

Audience

• ‘grunts’• American public• History• Imaginary witness or auditor: the reader

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Content

• Testimonial to experience of ‘grunts’• Trauma narrative • Critique of war as defined in the movies• Critique of masculinity as defined exclusively through

enactment of violence

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Susan Sontag

Brief Biography• b. January 16, 1933 in New York City• Raised in Tucson and L.A.• Reading at 3 years of age• Father died in China of tuberculosis when she was 5• Graduated from high school at 15 and spent one year at

University of California, Berkeley• Entered University of Chicago at 16, B.A. in philosophy• Married Philip Rieff in 1950• Had one child, son David

• attended Harvard 1951-57 for M.A. in English and M.A. in philosophy

• continued studies at Oxford and the Sorbonne• At 26, Moved to New York and taught religion at

Columbia University• Divorced in 1959• Began to write full-time• First novel, The Benefactor, (1963)• Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1970s; led to essays

Illness as a Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)

• d. December 28, 2004 of leukemia

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• Wrote about pornography, illness, literary criticism, American culture

• four novels:– The Benefactor– Death Kit– The Volcano Lover– In America (2000 National Book Award)

• essays• screenplays• short stories• drama

Regarding the Pain of Others

• Essay about ‘looking’• Sontag considers numerous photographs and works of

art that show others in pain• Yet paradoxically, (perversely?), the essay contains no

pictures• Have only Goya’s etching on the cover of the book• Why?

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• Pick one slide that you saw and write down what you felt

• Be honest

• Now view the same photographs with captions

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Robert DoisneauLe Baiser de

l'Hotel de Ville, Paris, 1950

Eddie AdamsGen. Nguyen

Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon.

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Don McCullinBiafra 1969

Francisco de Goya Lucientes

Los desastres de la guerra (1810-1815)

Napoleon’s Invasion of Spain

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W. Eugene Smith

Minimata 1971-5Mercury poisoning

from Chisso Co.

Laocoön and his sonsenveloped by sea

serpents

c. 175-150 BCMarble, height 242 cm (95 1/2 in)Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican

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Huynh Cong UtVietnam 1972Children fleeing South

Vietnamese napalm attack

Werner BischofFamine in India 1951

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Ernst FriedrichWar Against War

1924

Jeff WallDetail, “Dead Troops Talk

(A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) 1992”

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Robert CapaSpain 1936Death of Republican soldier

TitianThe Flaying of Marsyas

1575-76Apollo flayed Marsyas alive while Marsyas hung from a pine tree

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Tyler HicksAfghanistanNovember 12, 2001

Alexander Gardner“The Home of a Rebel

Sharpshooter”5 July 1863

Gettysburg

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Larry BurrowsHuè, South Vietnam 1969woman mourns husband killed by

Viet Cong after body found in mass grave

Roger Fenton“The Valley of the

Shadow of Death”

Crimea 1855

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Yosuke YamahataNagasakiAugust 10, 1945

DachauApril 29, 1945Allied Liberation

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Felice BeatoInterior of the Secundra

Bagh after the Slaughter of 2,000 Rebels by the 93rd Highlanders and 4th Punjab Regiment. First Attack of Sir Colin Campbell in November 1857, Lucknow.

David Seymour, (“Chim”) Spain 1936Land distribution meeting.

Estremadura, Spain

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• See if you want to add anything to your earlier commentary

• How do the captions change your response to the photos and art work?

• Does order and arrangement of the pieces effect the your response? (eg., does seeing the picture from Lucknow after ones of Nagasaki and Dachau effect your expectations or responses?)

• Does your nationality or ethnicity effect your response?• Does the photographer’s intention effect your response

(eg. does knowing that Fenton was under contract from the British govt to show no maimed, diseased or dying British soldiers change the way in which you respond to the picture of Lucknow?)

• Come down to the front and put your comments on the board

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Regarding the Pain of Others • Opening lines reference Virginia Woolf’s essay “Three

Guineas.”• Sontag calls Woolf’s essay “brave” and “unwelcomed”• Points out things we already know:

– Woolf’s essay is a response to a letter– Notes that gender differences may outweigh similarities of class– “to fight has always been the man’s habit….”

• Sontag’s essay is both a conversation with and interrogation of Woolf’s essay

• Intertextual reference provides an opportunity for Sontag to both pay homage to Woolf’s essay and critique it at the same time as Sontag questions many of Woolf’s premises

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• Woolf “war must be stopped”;

• Sontag “No one, not even pacifists” believes that war can be stopped (5).

• ‘hope’ to stop genocide• ‘hope’ to bring justice to

those who commit violations of laws of war

• But “[w]e hope only (so far in vain)” (5).

• Woolf believes that despite class and gender differences, people respond uniformly to the barbarity of the photographs

• Sontag: “Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen” (13).

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From The New York Times,November 13, 2001Tyler HicksAfghanistanNovember 12, 2001

• “An ample reservoir of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry. And the pity and disgust that pictures like Hick’s inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown”(13-4).

• Recognition that the picture does not tell the whole story-if the photographer has chosen this picture, framed this slice of reality, what has been left out?

• We are given the perspective of the Northern Alliance soldiers; but there is still a Taliban perspective

• Reminds us to be critical of not only the photograph, but our response to it, which is shaped by the ways in which the photograph is taken, captioned, printed, and displayed

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• Woolf rarely saw photos of atrocity;

• Sontag – since the Vietnam war, we have had “tele-intimacy with death and destruction”(21)

• Woolf saw photos as ‘fact’ and objective since originating from a machine

Sontag: element of interpretation:- caption gives context- photographer frames a chosen slice of reality- photo takes on connotations depending on where it is reprinted,- can be used by “diverse communities” beyond the photographer’s intent.

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• Sontag notes that many people believed, as did Woolf, that viewing enough pictures of atrocities would convince people of “the insanity of war” (14).

• Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War (1924)• Juxtaposes pictures of toy soldiers with ruin of war• Sontag finds soldiers with facial wounds most difficult to

see• Note that many of the pictures were censored by German

government during the war since the photos obviously portray war in a negative light

• War Against War went through 10 editions and several language translations, yet by 1939, W.W. II had begun

Ernst FriedrichWar Against War

1924

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• For those who have not experienced war, understanding of war comes through photographs and television images

• “The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall” (22).

• “The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence” (23).

• Photograph of a particular situation can lose its original emotional impact (eg. The ‘mushroom cloud’ of the atomic bomb blast)

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• Portable camera meant that “picture-taking acquired an immediacy and authority greater than any verbal account in conveying the horror of mass-produced death” (24).

• Examples of the liberation of the Nazi death camps or the atomic blasts of Nagasaki and Hiroshima

• Cites Henry James, the author, as writing, “[t]he war has used up words….”

• Seems that in the case of witnessing a traumatic event, when words fail us, the picture can convey the experience

• Yet it is the use of words, in the caption, that give the photo context and, hence, meaning (eg. 30)

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• Between W.W.I and W.W.II, war photography was largely part of “left-wing dissidence”

• W.W.II shifted perspective; photojournalism now part of new consensus that war was justified

• Photographers interested in “wars of unusual interest”(33).

• As a result, only a few wars are photographed and “far crueler wars” are ignored or are under represented in the media (notably civil war in Sudan, Iraqi war against the Kurds, Russian invasion of Chechnya)

• U.S. attitudes to military at the time of Sontag’s writing were high – pictures taken by Larry Burrows in Vietnam of “wretched hollow-eyed GIs that once seemed subversive of militarism and imperialism may seem inspirational. Their revised subject ordinary American young men doing their unpleasant, ennobling duty” (38).