SOURCE: Weston, Ruth D. “Debunking the Unitary Self and Story in the War Stories of Barry Hannah.” Southern Literary Journal 27, no. 2 (spring 1995): 96-106.

[In the following essay, Weston suggests that Barry Hannah's Vietnam stories attempt to make sense out of the violence of the Vietnam era, and views his stories within the context of Southern history and literature.]

In a new book on storytellers of the Vietnam generation, David Wyatt argues that literary generations are defined by, among other things, “the impact of a traumatic historical incident or episode … [which] creates the sense of a rupture in time and gathers those who confront it into a shared sense of ordeal” (2). Whether they, their friends, or someone in their families were the actual combatants, the writers born between 1940 and 1950 are those most directly influenced by the Vietnam period: from commitment of troops to Vietnam in 1965 to troop withdrawal in 1972. Recalling the comments of individual writers about their frustration with impersonal accounts of the history of the Vietnam era, Wyatt focuses on the idea of story as a formal structure that mediates between the public history and the intensely personal individual responses to the chaos of this “rupture in time.” Historically, the concept of story is as more than mediator; it has been understood as a force for coherence, a form imposed upon the chaos of experience. Philip D. Beidler points out that the best writers about Vietnam are not only committed to the concrete reporting of experience as “at once a thing of the senses, of the emotions, of the intellect, of the spirit”; they are also involved in “a primary process of sensemaking, of discovering the peculiar ways in which the experience of the war can now be made to signify within the larger evolution of culture as a whole,” contributing to “the process of cultural myth-making” and to experiences common to all people (xii-xiv). Wyatt believes that the so-called Vietnam generation desperately desires its stories to be this kind of formative force. Comparing it with Eliotic “fragments shored against ruins,” he argues that story, as that formative force, is the means by which those who write about Vietnam “resist the dominant and violently inarticulate contemporary discourse” (Wyatt 2-7). But many tellers of war stories do not seem to think of their narratives as “formative” forces but rather as extreme versions of that discourse's violence and inarticulateness. Pointing out that “a true war story” does not “generalize,” Tim O'Brien suggests that such stories fail to cohere in the kind of formal unity that lends itself to the establishing of a theme that can be recognized either by author or reader. “Often,” O'Brien says, “there is not even a point.” Moreover, he argues:

you can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever. … All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth. … And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. … It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

(76-91)

Central to Barry Hannah's narrative structures (especially in Airships and “Bats out of Hell Division”) is the chaos of war, both as war and as metaphor for the more general violence and inarticulateness of his generation. His fiction is intensely concerned with the kind of shattered individual psyches that a Vietnam war correspondent recognized by battle-fatigued soldiers' “eyes that poured out a steady charge of wasted horror” (Herr 22). As such, Hannah's stories show how the habit of violence is both cause and consequence of the divided self, for the fragmented narrative of a Hannah war story accurately reflects the lives of its characters. Mark Charney's new critical biography of Hannah asserts that these stories satirize the characters' “inability to make sense out of life” (64); yet, for Hannah as well as for his fictional narrators, each story constitutes a sensemaking attempt such as that Beidler finds in other Vietnam literature.

In contrast to many writers on the topic, Hannah does not depict Vietnam as a unique experience, as does Philip Caputo, who calls it “the only … [war] we have ever lost” (xii). Rather, in Hannah's fiction, Vietnam is presented in the context of the history of the South and its lost cause: as a modern manifestation of Southern traditions of violence, honor, and dishonor. His approach is appreciated by Owen Gilman, Jr., who shows the extent to which, in many Southern writers, and in the Southern imagination in general, Vietnam was “prefigured in the history of the South” (Gilman 87). To Hannah's characters it is one of two “unfinished” wars, in the sense of unresolved issues that continue to exert force over their lives.

Hannah's unstable male narrators refight the same wars by retelling the same stories, as if the next telling might provide meaning, perhaps vindication, or at least closure. They long for the good fight, even the good death, which is necessary to a culturally enforced idea of honor but which is continually undermined by the perverse human inability to avoid dishonorable acts. His fragmented, often surreal, narratives are at once postmodern and squarely in the mainstream of the American short story tradition that includes both the epiphanic story of innocence, experience, and integration, and its complement, described by Thomas Leitch as “a means to the author's unmaking, and the audience's unknowing” (134). Hannah most often writes the latter, the kind of story that exhibits what Leitch calls a “debunking rhythm” in which antithesis is unresolved, epiphany is not achieved. Such a narrative rhythm, Leitch says, is integral to the thematic debunking of “the concept of a public identity, a self that acts in such a knowable, deliberate way as to assert a stable, discrete identity … that was only an illusion to begin with” (Leitch 134). Vietnam is a topic made for such a technique, since that experience forced the entire nation to rethink the contradictory nature of its self-concept and its public identity. It is also a topic that embodies the paradox of story fragments that try but always fail to shore up the ragged holes in individual psyches as well as in the culture's heroic myth.

Barry Hannah, born in Clinton, Mississippi, in 1942, did not serve in Vietnam, but in his published interviews, novels and short stories, he bears witness to the fact that he is of the Vietnam generation. His interest in military history, Vietnam, and war in general is no doubt complemented by his admiration for the fiction of two other famous American noncombatants, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, with whom his work has been compared. And since Hannah is a Southerner, for him the concept of war is always colored by the peculiar traditions of violence and the codes of honor, military and otherwise, that coexist in the Southern mind.

If Hannah's fiction is not the direct response of a veteran, it is, nevertheless, a response that resonates with the knowledge of wars and other national traumas. Asked about Vietnam, Hannah recalled, “You woke up every day with that war on your TV. … You were watching ‘The Three Stooges’ or whatever, and the next thing on was bloody corpses and body counts [and] the copters always.” Asked about a locus of violence closer to home, the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, Hannah replied, “You could get a pistol pulled on you for wearing tennis shoes at one point … [because it] meant ‘hippies’ [or] ‘Freedom Riders’” (Jones 145; 150).

The other war that most directly informs Hannah's fiction, the Civil War, does so in part by his having grown up surrounded by memorials of the South's honored dead. Allen Tate, in “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” asks what is to be done with such memories:

What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?

Historically, that is exactly what Southerners have done. In Barry Hannah's words, “Growing up here, you can almost feel Vicksburg if you're alive. … You grow up in that park with those gloomy old busts and those cannons. It's easy to be full of history. … You know things just by growing up, like [the fact that] Jackson was Chimneyville” (Jones 147-48). Moreover, if Hannah lacks first-hand knowledge of battle, he has the Southerner's comprehension of the qualities basic to life in general and war in particular: honor, and its mirror image, shame. According to historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, honor and shame “cannot be understood apart from … [each] other. [A Southerner] was expected to have a healthy sense of shame, that is, a sense of his own honor. Shamelessness signified a disregard for both honor and disgrace. When shame was imposed by others, honor was stripped away” (Wyatt-Brown viii).

Hannah's protagonists are driven by inherited ideas about honor, shame, and vengeance—from ancient Indo-European tribal concepts to Old Testament imperatives—and by the American, especially Southern, translation of these ideas into a personal code that assumes the public nature of private acts. The South has understood the primal honor code as one

designed to give structure to life and meaning to valor, hierarchy, and family protection. But its almost childlike clarity, its seeming innocence, contained inner contradictions. Within the ethic, there was a conflict never wholly mastered, a point at which the resolutions and the alternations of the system broke down … [because of] the discrepancy between honor as obedience to superior rank and the contrary duty to achieve place for oneself and family.

(39)

Although meant to “prevent unjustified violence, unpredictability, and anarchy,” the honor code could lead to “that very nightmare” (Wyatt-Brown 39).

In Hannah's fiction, the individual continues to do battle with the code by aspiring to its mythic, heroic ideal; and conflicts between the exigencies of that public ideal and those of the private self are at the heart of the psychic ruptures in his characters. In their search for honor, love, and power, they tell lies, act reprehensibly, and are in general at the mercy of their own self-defeating behavior. All the heroes of Hannah's stories imagine “high and valiant stuff,” as does Horace in “Scandal d'Estime,” a story from his most recent volume, Bats Out of Hell (217); but when they cannot live up to such ideals, they resort to “dreams, lies, and confessions” about them (Weston 428). Reflecting this disjunction, the stories themselves are ruptured by unsettling shifts, gaps, and disavowals of their own truth. Describing such disunities in Vietnam literature, Beidler notes that “everything from official euphemism to battlefield slang seem[s] the product of some insane genius for making reality and unreality—and thus, by implication, sense and nonsense—as indistinguishable as possible” (5).

The trauma of war erupts in Hannah's stories, even in the midst of peacetime settings, through words, thoughts, and acts of his characters, one of whom is modeled on a close friend who flew F-4s in Vietnam. In “Midnight And I'm Not Famous Yet,” a story from Airships, Hannah illustrates the dilemma of honor betrayed into shame. It is the story of two young soldiers from Mississippi who have the apparent good luck to capture the Vietnamese general Li Dap and his gunner, the two occupants of a tank that had foundered in a pond. The general has been educated at the Sorbonne and is a history buff. The narrator, Captain Bobby Smith, learns from his prisoner that Li Dap's downfall is due to his fascination with “Robert Lee and the strategy of Jeb Stuart, whose daring circles around an immense army captured his mind.” As Bobby tells the story, “Li Dap had tried to circle left with twenty thousand and got the hell kicked out of him by idle Navy guns sitting outside Gon. He just wasn't very bright. He had half his army climbing around these bluffs, no artillery or air force with them, and it was New Year's Eve for our side” (Airships 110-11). Because Li Dap is captured while personally leading this insanely daring attack “as an example to [his] men,” Bobby recognizes and honors the heroic ideal the enemy officer represents. In the mind of the young Southern captain, the wars and cultures merge; to him, “all this hero needed was a plumed hat” to be seen as an officer of the Confederate States of America (113).

Tubby Wooten, the other American soldier in the story, is a photographer who enjoys a brief reverie of the fame that will surely accrue to him when his prize-winning photographs of the captured general are published in Time or Newsweek. Almost immediately after Li Dap's capture, however, their own unit is attacked by the North Vietnamese Army. Tubby is killed and, when a Vietnamese soldier is about to bayonet the American soldier guarding Li Dap, Bobby “burned them all up” with a phosphorus shotgun (116). For killing “a captured general” and allowing “twenty gooks to come upon us like that,” he is demoted to lieutenant and sent home, his own dream of honor reversed to shame. “That's all right,” he rationalizes. “I've got four hundred and two boys out there—the ones that got back—who love me and know the truth, who love me because they know the truth.” But the picture of Li Dap haunts him; in Tubby's photograph, the NVA general “looked wonderful—strained, abused and wild, his hair flying over his eyes while he's making a statement full of conviction” (117). Thus, through the ironic contrast of a Vietnamese general who dies Hemingway's “good death” and a Southern soldier who dreams of an honor that he turns into shame by his own firepower, Hannah evokes the psychological chaos of war and its literature.

“Midnight and I'm Not Famous Yet” is perhaps not even “about war … [but] about love and memory,” as Tim O'Brien says of all “true war stories” (O'Brien 91). There is no moral here, no epiphany, and no resolution. Rather, there is a debunking of the heroic ideal, and a concomitant debunking structural rhythm that results from Bobby's inability to resolve his shame at his demotion, especially in comparison with the heroism of the captive enemy he has killed. He is even more alienated in the larger civilian society to which he returns, now that he has failed to measure up to the myth of the hero that American culture continues to validate. The myth reveals itself even in peacetime, in society's worship of the fittest, as Bobby recognizes in the gallery's despair over a favorite golfer who loses a match. “Fools! Fools!” [he thinks]. “Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful” (Airships 118). Yet Bobby's fine-sounding rationale is hollow, since it is belied by his inability to countenance his own loss of stature. His fragile sense of self is apparent in his confession that, back home, he “crawled in bed with almost anything that would have [him]” (117).

Bats Out of Hell takes its title partly from the story “Bats Out of Hell Division.” The narrator is a Civil War soldier whose story reflects the realism of the Confederate defeat—of honor turned to shame for an entire region, and of a betrayal of the soldiers' self-image that involves a falling away of everything they had depended upon. On the level of military action, as the unnamed narrator tells us, “the charge, our old bread and butter, has withered into the final horror of the field, democracy” (44). In other words, the division has lost its coherent structure. Moreover, the beleaguered soldiers, constantly tortured by the smells of the Union camp's cooking food, are betrayed by their starved and failing bodies, so “gaunt … [and] almost not there” (48) that the enemy bullets haven't much of a target. They are also betrayed by their minds; even the general is “criminally insane just like the rest of them” (45).

On the level of language, the theme of betrayal is implicit in the many self-contradictions in the narrative, as in the beginning sentence of the story: “We, in a ragged bold line across their eyes, come on.” Here is Hannah's version of many an actual battle in the South's lost cause, wherein honor and glory were earned only by continuing to advance when hope of victory was as ragged as the Confederate soldiers' uniforms. In this war story, ironic reversal is seen in the backward waving of the Confederate colors, which continue to advance, while bearer after bearer is shot out from under them. “Shreds of the flag leap back from the pole held by Billy, then Ira,” we are told; but, fearing shame more than death, the soldiers go forward, while the tattered shreds of flag seem to point to the rear. “We … are not getting on too well,” admits the chronicler of the Bats Out of Hell Division. “They have shot hell out of us. More properly we are merely the Bats by now. Our cause is leaking, the fragments of it left around those great burned holes, as if their general put his cigar into the document a few times” (43). The story presents a paradigm of the Hannah hero, whose cause is always “leaking” and whose personality, like the character of the CSA division nicknamed “Bats Out of Hell,” is defined by “fragments” and “great burned holes,” which betray the truth that its “hellfire,” or spirit, has been devastated.

The prospect, and thus the story, would be unbearable were it not for the bleak hilarity and the desperate energy of these would-be heroes. “But we're still out there,” the narrator tells us; “We gain by inches, then lose by yards. … By now you must know that half our guns are no good, either. Estes—as I spy around—gets on without buttocks, just hewn off one sorry cowardly night. … I have become the scribe—not voluntarily, but because all limbs are gone except my writing arm” (43). Note that it is not Estes but rather, in Hannah's rhetorical use of sentence grammar, it is “one sorry … night” that is branded as “cowardly.” He will not shame his comrade by use of the word coward.

The illusion of the heroic also causes the narrator to cling to a shred of vanity about his own personal appearance; for he sees himself in the image of a Southern figural hero, as described by Michael Kreyling: a nearly perfect physical specimen and one who can “instantly render the provisional nature of any situation into a part of a consecrated pattern” (4). The exemplar was General Robert E. Lee, Commander of the Confederate forces, whose personal appearance, according to a fellow cadet at West Point, “surpassed in manly beauty any cadet in the corps” (Kreyling 110), but another was J. E. B. Stuart, who appears in several Hannah stories. Stuart was also a handsome West Pointer who was said to represent “the ideal of Southern manhood” (Seib 43; Thomas 181). Perhaps aspiring to this model, Hannah's narrator in “Bats out of Hell Division” says that his comrades and Captain think him “not unsightly” and that the unit's “benign crone of a nurse” says he is a “man of some charm” (43).

In a passage that ponders the role of this front line nurse, the narrator thinks, “Maybe they use her to make us fight for home”; but he immediately contradicts himself: “Better to think she's part of no plan at all. The best things in life, or whatever you call this, happen like that. … This marks the very thing, most momentous, I am writing about” (43). In that statement, the narrator suggests that chaos—“no plan at all”—is inherent not only in war but in life, and perhaps in the story too. Moreover, in his analogy of war's death-in-life situation with “the best things in life,” with Candide-like humor and a best-of-all-possible-worlds manner, the narrator articulates the ironic truth that war holds a fierce attraction for soldiers. In fact, he interrupts his own story to tell of a soldier killed in the previous Mexican War who “returned out of the very earth once he heard another cracking good one was on. At last, at last! The World War of his dreams” (45). In this fantastic story-within-a-story, the dead-undead soldier rhapsodizes, “There is a God, and God is love! … Brother against brother! In my lifetime! Can Providence be this good?” (45). The irony in Hannah's treatment of the romantic mythology of war is heightened by the counterpoint that occurs when his narrator admits, “I have license to exaggerate, as I have just done,” and then qualifies that revision by continuing, without even a pause, “but many would be horrified to know how little” (Bats 45). Such constant self-revision, which is typical of many fictional and autobiographical war stories, contributes to the debunking narrative rhythm that Leitch calls “the author's unmaking and the audience's unknowing” (134).

Throughout “Bats Out of Hell Division,” the narrative shifts between the grimly real and the surreal, sometimes approaching the operatic. The term “operatic,” originally denoting the implausible, artificial, or histrionic nature of operas, can be extended to describe the exaggerated or heightened nature of dreams or, in Hannah's fiction, of memories. In “Testimony of Pilot,” for example, the narrator laments, “Memory, the whole lying opera of it, is killing me now” (32). This pattern of incongruities in Hannah's version of the literature of memory conforms to a pattern Beidler has described in many Vietnam narratives in which Vietnam itself is at the same time and “in a single moment, dreadful, funny, nightmarish, ecstatic.” In the midst of this bizarre foreign place, “innocent, bloodied eighteen-year-olds tossed off smooth, ugly, epigrammatic zingers,” Beidler writes, in a passage that could aptly describe some of Barry Hannah's characters. “Americans in Vietnam looked for something, anything, to sustain the flow of psychic energy that finally had to substitute for even the most remote sense of purpose,” Beidler says; thus, some of the unreal reality of the Vietnam experience is the result of soldiers who were “stoned out of their skulls, weighed down with their totems, their talismanic nicknames and buddy-love, their freaky bravado, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Stones blasting away in their ears” (Beidler 12-14).

In Hannah's story, the soldiers of the Bats Out of Hell Division, so skinny that the Union bullets cannot hit them, advance through the smoke with “happy bayonets high,” when they realize they “are running in sudden silence … [because the Union troops] are not firing anymore” (48). Here Hannah debunks the idea of war as glorious when his narrator describes the effect of the doomed Confederates' alleged “happy bayonets” on the Union general, who agonizes over the carnage. Through the haze the Southern troops are astonished to see General Kosciusky¹ screaming first at his own troops and then at the Confederates: “Stop it! Stop it! I can't take it anymore. The lost cause! Look at you! My holy God, gray brothers, behold yourself! Cease fire! Cease it all!” Then Kosciusky surrenders, shouting, “The music. The Tchaikovsky! You wretched specters coming on! It's too much. Too much” (49). At the climax of this fantastic opera, the “stunned” Confederate general takes Kosciusky's sword, and the narrator undercuts his own story by admitting its improbability: “Nothing in history led us to believe we had not simply crossed over to paradise itself and were dead just minutes ago” (49). As historian of the Bats Out of Hell Division, the scribe can tell the story any way he wishes, and so he gives the “Bats” the victory and, by extension, implies a dream self that fits the South's ideal of the victorious warrior.² Yet, the story ends with a mundane anticlimax about what to name this battle, evincing a narrative technique that counters the operatic climax with the matter-of-fact voice of the scribe, who has continually countered his own “license to exaggerate” (45). Each successive narrative act undercuts the previous act; and thus the story's structure, instead of providing a more traditional formal coherence, reflects, by its surface incoherence, a narrative consciousness shattered by violent internal and external conflicts.

Coherence is found, however, in the dialogue—even in the disagreements—both within the story and between the story and its background of cultural myths, including the emerging mythology of Vietnam. It is a coherence based on the play of mind and memory instead of the development of plot and character. And it is of a piece with the Vietnam literature that, in Beidler's words, is set in “a place with no real points of reference, then or now. As once in experiential fact, so now in memory.” Hannah creates a landscape like that described in the fiction of other Vietnam writers, one “that never was, … a landscape of consciousness where it might be possible to accommodate experience remembered evoking a new kind of imaginative cartography endowing it with large configurings of value and signification” (Beidler 16). Although their plot curve and setting may at first seem obscure, Barry Hannah's stories, nevertheless, also signify because they are a coherent part of American literary traditions, both of content and structure. He writes, as do most Southern writers, a literature of place; unlike most Southern literature, however, the “place” is often not a tangible locale. Rather, a primary component of the content in Hannah's fiction is that of intellectualized landscapes similar to those Beidler recalls in the journals of early American colonists such as Cotton Mather and in the fiction of J. Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Mather, Cooper, and Hawthorne found, in the New World, a “beckoning path of discovery and sacrifice amid bloodshed and terror … [in the] dark woods, the swamps, the mountains, the rivers, the ‘howling wilderness’” (Beidler 22). Hannah, like others who write war into literature, finds just such a “beckoning path” in the emotional and intellectual consequences of both the American Civil War and the Vietnam conflict; and his stories explore possible meanings along this path. They exhibit neither the unity afforded by a climactic plot structure not a clear epiphany, yet each of his war stories challenges thoughtful readers in several ways: by deglamorizing the mythology of war and the myth of the warrior, even while exhibiting Americans' fascination with both, and by dispelling the illusion that even the most devoutly held, most pervasive and seductive cultural ideals and models can engender in any individual aspirant a truly unified self based on them. Perhaps the reader's greatest challenge is to understand that Hannah's war stories cohere around the antiphonal, often cacophonic, debunking rhythms that contribute to the debunking of the unitary self and story.³

Notes

1. The name bears a close resemblance to that of General Thaddeus Kosciusko, the Polish officer and engineer who designed and built the fortifications at West Point during the Revolutionary War. He also served in the Continental Army as commander of the Engineering Corps. A statue of Kosciusko on the grounds of the U. S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., commemorates his service to this country. His sword, part of the West Point museum's collection, is inscribed: “Draw me not without reason, Sheathe me not without honor” (Heinbach and Kohlhagen 33).

2. Kenneth Seib argues that Hannah's narrators search for meaning in stories that not only demythicize legendary Confederate hero J. E. B. Stuart but also reject the macho warrior image with which Southern men have historically identified (41-52).

3. A brief version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the South Central Modern Language Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 1994.

Works Cited

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———. Bats Out of Hell. Boston: Houghton, 1993.

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Weston, Ruth D. “‘The Whole Lying Opera of It’: Dreams, Lies, and Confessions in the Fiction of Barry Hannah.” Mississippi Quarterly 44 (1991): 411-28.

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