War, Truth and Memory
War
Truth
Munich
We Were Soldiers
Memory
Imagology
How to Tell a True War Story
War is a force that gives us meaning
War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of
them and us. It suspends thought [...] Most of us willingly accept
war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the
ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good... (10)
War is a force that gives us meaning
The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been
twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was
not underway somewhere. (10)
War is a force that gives us meaning
Our dead. Their dead. They are not the same. Our dead matter,
theirs do not. (14)
War is a force that gives us meaning
Collective amnesia: suppressing historical facts, in order to
further national identity
War is a force that gives us meaning
In wartime the state seeks to destroy its own culture. It is
only when this destruction has been completed that the state can
begin to exterminate the culture of its opponents. In times of
conflict authentic culture is subversive. (62)
War is a force that gives us meaning
National symbols flags, patriotic songs, sentimental dedications
take over cultural space. Art becomes infected with the platitudes
of patriotism. More important, the use of a nations cultural
resources to back up the war effort is essential to mask the
contradictions and lies that mount over time in the drive to
sustain war. (63)
Munich
We Were Soldiers
Memory
Memory vs reality
Memory
A manageable past: societies often represent their own past in a
form that is acceptable to current generations (1)
Memory
Forgetting vs reliving
Memory
Personal vs collective memory
Memory
It is in this sense that there exists a collective memory and
social frameworks for memory: it is to the degree that our
individual thought places itself in these frameworks and
participants in this memory that it is capable of the act of
recollection (2)
Memory
Why and how the past is remembered has increasingly become a
source of conflict (3)
Memory
The media has encroached upon many of our traditional forms of
remembering.
Memory
Collapse of memory
Memory
Perceptual fields
Memory
Which media forms represent war best?
Imagology
verbal, visual and conceptual images
Imagology
images work in an epistemological economy of recognition value
rather than truth value
Imagology
image worlds
interior
private
Imagology
Iconosphere
exterior
material form
Imagology
Image cache
Imagology
Resurfacings
Accessibility
Displacement
Portability
Loss
How to Tell a True War Story
To understand trauma as a form of protest and attempted witness
thus suggests that the war in Vietnam, conceived as a traumatic
event, was not only about atrocity, death and loss but about the
specifically political ways in which the deceptions and
self-deceptions of how the war was run helped both to create the
atrocity-producing situation of the war and to make it difficult to
perceive the way in which it was being carried out.
Cathy Caruth 152, in Witness
How to Tell a True War Story
To understand trauma in the Vietnam context [...] we must
understand it within the context of different witnesses of the way
in which this particular war literally made it difficult to see. It
is this difficult of seeing and the attempt to break through it
that, I will argue, lie at the heart of the political protest so
central to this war.
Cathy Caruth 153, in Witness
How to Tell a True War Story
Political reality
Military reality
Psychological reality
How to Tell a True War Story
Truthfulness and accuracy?
What subjects matter to the narrator?
Witness
Personal experience
Why the frustration mentioned by Herzog?
Intermingling life and fiction
Narrative closure violates our experience of life
Story truth vs happening truth
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