4th Global Conference
Wednesday 2nd May - Saturday 5th May 2007
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Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session Seven: Writing about War
Chair: Susan Scheibler
Ethical Crossings
in War Writing: Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and
the Sri Lankan Civil War
Elke
Rosochacki
University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
This paper offers a reading of Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost in which the ethical crossings that are entailed in operations of both beneficence and destruction conducted by parties at war with one another is examined. Ondaatje' novel is set during the Sri Lankan civil war which may be described as a conflict typical of the globalization era. As identified by Zygmunt Bauman and Achille Mbembe amongst others, wars of the present time can no longer be understood through the earlier typologies of just or unjust wars, nor can they organized into binary affairs in which victims and perpetrators are clearly distinguishable. Ondaatje's novel exposes the ethical complexity and ambiguity that mark human relations during a time of war and as such it poses a significant challenge to the global ideology of justice and the universal human rights discourse upheld by institutions of the west such as the United Nations. Not only are the participants of war and those directly affected by the work of its destruction implicated in the ethical disaster of war, but also those who occupy the position of observer, independent investigator, reporter or indeed anyone who delivers an account the event of war by means of text or visual representation. According to Giorgio Agamben the ethical imperative to bear testimony to extreme events such as war or genocide can paradoxically only be undertaken from an ethically compromised or 'gray zone'. It is just such an ethical 'gray zone', occupied by writer and independent observer alike, that Ondaatje exposes in Anil's Ghost and that is the subject of this exposition.
Mobility and
Transformation: Engaging the Enemy in Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story
David
Boulting
English Subject Group, University of Salford, Greater Manchester, United Kingdom
The proposed paper will explore enemy images and sites of conflict in Larry Heinemann’s 1986 Vietnam War novel, Paco's Story. Of America’s remarkably prolific output of Vietnam War narratives, few texts present a better opportunity for a parallel discussion of alien/external and domestic/internal ‘enemies’ and the collapsing boundary between these categories. I will analyse the novel’s construction of a complex hierarchy of enemies and threats facing both the American combat infantryman in Vietnam and the returning veteran in America. The paper will interrogate representations of the Vietnamese enemy both within and (selectively) beyond the text, emphasising the role of race and gender constructs in the formation of these enemy images and briefly referring to the work of other scholars in understanding and critiquing the cultural practices and processes by which enemy images are constructed. Since Heinemann’s novel repeatedly returns to themes of betrayal, endogenous and factional conflict, ‘friendly fire’ and the returning veteran’s rejection (or perceived rejection) in American communities in the sixties and seventies, this paper will be as concerned with American ‘enemies’ as with Vietnamese ones. It will consider the troping of the Vietnam veteran, prevalent in the late seventies, as dangerous psychotic—essentially an American Vietcong, polluted and othered by his experience. Heinemann’s novel seeks to manipulate and thus critique this trope as the reader anticipates of the protagonist a cathartic descent into violence, a re-enactment of Vietnam atrocity on American soil, which the narrative’s (anti-)climax ultimately refuses. It will be argued that Heinemann’s novel functions as an early indictment of the ideological practice of repeatedly inscribing or overwriting the iconic figure of the Vietnam veteran in American culture (a practice more recently critiqued in relation to rightwing revisionism in the eighties and the elevation of the veteran to a kind of heroic and mythic victimhood).
The Unlisted Character
Julia
Boll
Department of English Literature, Edinburgh University, Scotland, United
Kingdom
Conflict is the substance of drama, just as it is
the substance of war. This paper will discuss the theatrical representation
of both the individual and war in a time of disintegrating national
states and the dramatisation of destruction versus survival as the
driving forces on stage. Springing from the discussion about ‘new
wars’ in
the age of globalisation, it will be demonstrated here how these ‘new
wars’ also bring forth new plays about war. This will be illustrated
with the example of the plays Far Away by Caryl Churchill
(2000) and Midwinter by Zinnie Harris (2004). Both works incorporate
the experience of a continuous state of war and terror into the dramatic
text. Their characters struggle for survival in the midst of nameless
wars controlling their lives, confronted with random enmities and absurd
frontlines. Since the narratives are not framed, the audience finds
it as impossible to position themselves within this intricate framework
of alliances and antagonisms as do the characters, which are helplessly
caught within despotic systems, whose ideologies, power centres and
international relations remain ambiguous and unstructured.
The surreal
and apocalyptic visions presented in both works mirror the experiences
of those who have lived through war: it seems to happen far from reality, ‘far
away’. Evaluating briefly how theatre
as a form is, due to its immediacy, particularly able to react to current
events, the paper will examine the possible connections between the
results of political and sociological research and the artistic representation
of war and warlike conflicts on stage.
How, then, can something as horrific
and surreal as war be represented? In the dramatic form we might find
an appropriate means to communicate catastrophes like war. The war
play is at the same time an act of mourning for war, commemoration
and mediation. Through literary alienation, access to the truth could
prove to be more immediate. Leading away from the more common theatrical
antagonisms between the dramatic characters, the new war plays show
their protagonists in confrontation with an unlisted character: the
war machine.