Truth, Mon Amour
KEA TREVETT
“T
his is true,” writes Tim O’Brien, in the first line of a piece appropriately titled “How to Tell a True War Story.” The words are a promise, an
avowal of reality, of history, of O’Brien’s own credibility. It is a promise of
information to come, of a story, and therefore of creation, of art. But even as
O’Brien creates, he destroys, even as he promises, he reneges. This vignette
comes from a collection of stories based on the real Vietnam War experience
of a former soldier, but the collection is a book of self-proclaimed fiction. Not
quite fact, not quite fantasy, it is a rendering of events based on one man’s
memory of them: how they were, how they seemed, how they could have
been, how they weren’t at all. True story. And we wonder how the two words
can be reconciled without demeaning their meanings.
If the concern is with objectivity of truth, memory is a deceptive storyteller. Being the product of one particular person’s point of view, it has a stake
in its own interpretation that affects what information it chooses to store, and
how it sorts, filters, and frames recalled people, places, things, and events.
This singularity of perspective does not, however, work to eliminate obtuseness or ambiguity in storytelling, and just as not every person has a clearly
defined opinion of all they’ve witnessed in the world, not every retold memory has a moral, or even a point. And yet memory, retold, is not untruthful.
When addressing the question of how we tell our stories, and to what end,
O’Brien’s writing suggests that the “lie” of subjective memory sometimes
achieves more truthfulness than the event itself as it really happened.
The particular identity of the man behind the memory adds another
shade of nuance to this concept of true stories. O’Brien is himself a Vietnam
veteran; this is a fact that necessarily informs the telling and the title. O’Brien
wants to tell us something about memory and about story-telling, but he also
wants to tell us something true and specific about war, which is complicated
by the fact he himself asserts within the text that there are some things you
just can’t retell, some things you can’t possibly know unless you were there.
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There is a tone of irreverence and circumstantial authority in O’Brien’s
words that one senses from the very beginning of his story, coupled with the
feeling that we, as readers, are being granted access to a private world in
which we don’t belong. It’s a world that’s frightening but seductive, dangerous but thrilling, ugly and full of death and gore, but also passionately alive
and therefore beautiful. It’s a world in which we are largely strangers, unless
we ourselves have experienced the reality of combat. At times, O’Brien speaks
to us with all the familiarity of a fellow soldier, and at times he drills the truth
of war into us like an army sergeant; in both cases, his sense of personal conviction and self-assertion is so strong, his ease with his own rhetoric so apparent, that we can’t help but believe his every word as absolute truth on the subject. The truth, according to Tim O’Brien, and perhaps that’s enough.
***
Hiroshima Mon Amour begins with no promise. It begins without words.
For the first fifteen seconds of the film, a single black and white image silently dominates the screen.
An embrace.
The frame is too close for a cohesive whole to be discernable; all that can
be identified is skin, a tangle of limbs, thickly covered with dust and ash. Two
bodies pull ravenously at one another. It is unclear in the black and white picture where one body ends and the other begins; there is only flesh, and perhaps desire. The thick layer of ash weighs heavily on the image, and the tangled limbs move slowly beneath it. Are these bodies loving or dying? After a
moment the dust shines brightly, becoming iridescent, no longer dust at all
but liquid. The skin beneath it glows, and we realize that the liquid is sweat.
A man’s voice. You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.
I saw everything, a woman replies.
She explains about the museum, and as she does it flashes on the screen
before us. Her insistent words are repetitious and rhythmic, charged with
urgency and yet simultaneously devoid of feeling. The two voices are authoritative but numb, nostalgic but empty, full of agony and despair but also vocal
embodiments of a void, just like the montage of images from the museum at
Hiroshima over which they narrate.
The woman speaks again as we watch documentary shots of visitors at
the museum, observing the remnants of what was once a city. Photography.
Reconstructions. For lack of anything else. What is left of Hiroshima that’s real?
Only charred fragments, evidence of destruction.
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There’s something perverse, obscene, deeply unsettling about the lifelike associations the female voice gives to the objects in the museum. A bouquet of bottle caps, steel charred and mangled like human flesh. She tells us
the films were “as authentic as possible,” but her words seem ironic. Inherent
in her subtext is the knowledge that any hope of achieving authenticity in the
reproduction of such a scene is absurd.
The museum is bright and clean, a scene of sterility. Here curators have
collected the vestiges of post-bomb agony, contained in polished exteriors
and displayed behind identifying placards. Black, deformed, almost unidentifiable fragments of the lost city are mounted on white backgrounds; pieces of
human flesh are suspended in glass cases. She insists once again that she saw
it all. Again he denies her. You saw nothing in Hiroshima.
Following the footage from the museum is a montage of filth and suffering. Shots of the people of Hiroshima just after the bomb. A desolate landscape. Mass bodies in despair. Dirt, blood, hysteria, paralysis. Children’s faces
mangled by fire and chemicals. Ripped, charred flesh. Human hair falling out
in chunks.
At some point there is a change. Of tone, of intention, of pace. The documentary-style images of Hiroshima in the weeks and months after the
bomb, which have been steadily increasing in speed of succession and manic
urgency, are cut short and replaced with one long contemplative shot of the
city’s current landscape. Still the woman speaks.
I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You’re destroying me. You’re good for
me. . . . I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slow all of a sudden. How sweet.
You cannot know. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. You’re destroying me.
You’re good for me. I have time. Please, devour me. Deform me to the point of
ugliness.
It is unclear who is being addressed by the bodiless female voice. Is she speaking to her lover? Is her lover a man, or some physical manifestation of an
abstraction? War itself, perhaps. Whatever the case may be, what is clear during this opening sequence of filmmaker Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour
is the emergence of a thematic trend that will continue throughout the
remainder of the film. What is clear is that we have entered a world in which
words and images rarely mean only one thing, in which beauty and romance
mingle and merge habitually with death and destruction.
The sequence ends and fades to black, and the embrace fills the screen
once again. Still the woman speaks. But now her voice does not have the clarity of voiceover; the sound comes from within the scene itself. The camera
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widens its shot, and for the first time we see the faces that belong to the two
narrating voices. A French woman and a Japanese man lie in bed together. He
makes a joke, and they laugh lightheartedly, as though completely unaware of
the 15 minutes of film that preceded them. Upon reaching this moment, the
film undergoes a transfiguration, shifting with absurd fluidity from the journalistic to the personal, from documentary to fiction. What follows is a love
story.
***
In 1958, after receiving critical acclaim for Night and Fog, his 32-minute
documentary on the Holocaust, French filmmaker Alain Resnais was commissioned to take on a similar project documenting the aftermath of the
atomic bomb. Although the original intention had been to make another documentary, somewhere in Resnais’ creative process, a shift occurred, and
Marguerite Duras joined the production team as screenwriter. The final
product was Hiroshima Mon Amour, a feature-length film that innovatively
combines journalistic and fictional narrative to tell a story about Hiroshima
that questions the very ability of documentary film to capture events of the
past.
It seems that somewhere between these two projects, Resnais developed
a concern for the idea of truth-in-retelling that led him along a path of thinking similar to O’Brien’s. The central plot of Hiroshima Mon Amour is in no
way a true story in terms of historical accuracy. Duras invented the plot and
the characters; the event of the atomic bomb itself serves merely as context
for the central narrative. However, by juxtaposing a fictional story that takes
place in Hiroshima—which constitutes the majority of the film—with
archival footage from newsreels depicting the city after the attack, the film is
still about the aftermath of the atomic bomb. Resnais has simply chosen to
frame his subject in a way that argues for the kind of “truth in an untruth”
philosophy suggested in “How to Tell a True War Story.” The argument in
the film is that it is impossible for someone who wasn’t present on the day of
the attack to know Hiroshima the way the traditional documentary, with its
illusion of objective and absolute historical accuracy, suggests one can.
Resnais is suggesting that any recreation can’t come close to the reality of the
event, that the documentary, like any personal account, is only a single point
of view on the real.
Formally, Hiroshima Mon Amour was a pioneer in its time, breaking from
traditional episodic plot structure, employing a unique rhythm of visual and
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verbal repetition, and becoming the first film to use flashback within a story
narrative. The love story itself takes place within a single day in Hiroshima,
but the temporal structure of the narrative expands internally, taking the
viewer far back into the female lead’s memory to events that transpired more
than a decade earlier. At points when Resnais incorporates documentary
footage, the film seems to break with time altogether.
The present-time action in Hiroshima Mon Amour is set 15 years after the
bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, marking the end of World
War II. Like O’Brien’s piece, the film takes a retrospective look at war; the
characters are not living the events of the past, but recounting them through
story-telling, relying on memory and personal experience as their sources of
historical fact. Much of the film is devoted to one traumatic wartime story
from the leading woman’s past that she recounts to her present lover. The
parallel Resnais desires us to see between this fictional character’s personal
narrative and the journalistic video footage he incorporates into the film is
that both are interpretations of history in their own right. Both present an
illusion of what was; neither achieves exact recreation, only singular representation. Both communicate a kind of historical truth, but ultimately both are
stories.
It could be argued that the documentary film footage is more truthful by
default, simply because the love story in Hiroshima Mon Amour is the screenwriter’s fabrication. But no depiction of the “real” is free of agenda or point
of view. This is evident in Resnais’ own documentary Night and Fog, which
closes with images of the present state of one German concentration camp—
abandoned and overgrown with weeds—narrated with the words “with our
sincere gaze we survey these ruins, as if the old monster lay crushed forever
beneath the rubble.” Objective history, the event itself, does not have its own
interpretive agency; even in non-fiction storytelling someone exists behind
the words, or the camera lens, deciding what to highlight, what to exclude,
what to portray positively, or negatively, or even indifferently. The fictional
story in Resnais’ film suggests that there is an inherent “I” in any account of
history, and begs the question of how one can separate historic from personal when the two are so inexorably linked within the very process of storytelling. This complexity of storytelling is what Resnais has discovered; it’s
what he believes the classic documentary format fails to reveal.
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***
Although an undeniably different piece of fiction in terms of content and
style, “How to Tell a True War Story” shares much with Hiroshima Mon
Amour, both thematically and in its lack of adherence to linear narrative plot.
O’Brien’s story is fragmented, chunks of text appearing on the page the same
way they might manifest in the mind: memory and thought interwoven, backtracking and re-stepping, re-evaluating and newly defining. The stories told
about events from the war are fused with O’Brien’s opinions about storytelling to the extent that it becomes difficult to determine where the past
events end and the retrospective philosophizing begins.
The entire text, although fragmented, focuses on one particular event
from the war, one that is told in story form right away, then retold, and then
reflected back upon and returned to at various other moments in the piece.
Immediately following the words “This is true,” O’Brien tells the story of his
buddy Rat Kiley, and Kiley’s best friend Curt Lemon who died in Vietnam
(67). Although this central focus of the story (Lemon’s death) is repeated and
returned to as O’Brien recalls the memory in pieces, it is never exactly the
same story told. This is not to say that the smaller fragments contradict each
other, but rather that the event of the death becomes the center of various
memories associated with it, each framing it in slightly different ways, using
it to make slightly different points. The exact moment when Lemon stepped
on a booby-trapped 105-round—blowing his body off the ground and into a
tree, where it landed in pieces—is the event, but the true war story is more
complex. It’s how Rat Kiley wrote a touching, heart-felt letter to Lemon’s sister, to which “the dumb cooze” never responded (68); it’s how he mutilated
and eventually killed a baby water buffalo the night of Lemon’s death, while
the rest of his platoon stood back and watched.
A detailed description of Rat Kiley’s systematic destruction of the water
buffalo recounts how he shot at its knees and its sides, eventually shooting off
its ears, mouth, and nose, and “chunks of meat” beneath its ribs, before
switching his gun to automatic. Finally, O’Brien writes, “He bent forward and
whispered something, as if talking to a pet, then he shot off its throat.” After
Kiley leaves the scene of the act, O’Brien describes the rest of the platoon:
“For a time no one spoke. We had witnessed something essential, something
brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet
a name for it” (79). This sense of the “new and profound” that the soldiers
observe in the indiscriminate carnage of Vietnam is what they (like O’Brien)
are struggling to make sense of with their war stories.
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There’s something about war that demands the absolute, the moral, the
meaning, something that will offer an explanation for all the atrocities it
spawns and cultivates, because there must be, needs to be, some good reason
for such epic destruction, such a profound loss of life. But it’s hard to extract
the larger meaning from any of these stories when, as O’Brien questions,
“How do you generalize?” (80). He goes on to explain that “the truths are
contradictory. . . . To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace.
Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true” (81).
The idea of “everything” and “nothing” exists amongst many paradoxical
assertions in O’Brien’s text; notions of beauty and the obscene, of love and
death, also exist in a complicated marriage in “How to Tell a True War Story,”
in much the same way they do in Hiroshima Mon Amour. All reveal a central
tension O’Brien sees as inherent to a soldier’s experience of war, a sense of
“overwhelming ambiguity” (82).
For O’Brien, “beauty” has a multiplicity of meanings, referring most
notably to the romance of war, the profound bond of love between soldiers,
and the heightened awareness of life’s natural beauty that comes from a soldier’s constant, incalculable proximity to death. The obscene refers to the
ugly underbelly of all that is beautiful in his text. Yes, death in war is a somewhat romanticized concept, but death is also blood and gore, pointlessness
and excess. Soldiers are loyal friends and young men with souls and hearts,
but they are also killers who use foul language, destroy superfluously, and disrespect the sacredness of death. The simultaneity of the occurrence of these
ideas creates a hazy moral atmosphere, leaving the soldiers in “How to Tell a
True War Story” in a state of mind so conflicted that it seems impossible to
pin down what O’Brien calls “the final and definitive truth” of their war stories (76):
The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right
spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness
into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. . . . In war you lose
your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s
safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true. (82)
Yet even as O’Brien argues for the unavoidable ambiguity of truth presented
by his war stories, he still struggles with his own desire for the absolute, that
instinctual necessity of a soldier to find the moral, the one meaning. He renders the image of Curt Lemon’s death (how he was lifted up into the air, as if
by the sunlight, and cast into the canopy of a blossom-filled tree) with
absolute clarity, with sparse, carefully selected detail and diction. But he says
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if he could ever get the story right, “you would believe the last thing that Curt
Lemon believed, which for him must have been the final truth” (84). Years
after the war, O’Brien still struggles to get it all right. The variables time,
experience, and perspective are in constant motion, keeping his stories in a
perpetual state of revision with each retelling. Memory corrects and edits
itself. The interpretive frames and filters are numerous. There’s always something true that’s left unsaid, and also something else true that can never be
articulated with the words we possess. O’Brien writes, “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” (85).
In the essay “Aching for a Self,” Jim Corder also writes of the infinite
incompleteness of an event retold: “The still life invites because it is not still,
it is always a trace, always fleeting, always only what a single soul beheld, as
that could be rendered by errant perception, failed memory, and faltering
hand, always only what somebody was able to see and rearrange” (140). This
is what O’Brien grapples with as a storyteller: one telling, one version of any
story, can only achieve so much. You give history an inevitable quality of permanence when you commit it to the text of a single story. It is a quality that
seems to go against the very nature of history—something enigmatic and
shape-shifting, something to be reframed or distorted depending on the particular circumstances of the telling and the state of mind of the teller. How
can the truth in one telling measure up to the vastness of possible signification of the event itself? Corder and O’Brien argue that it simply cannot.
***
What can be said to be unconditionally true of history? To retell any
event “as it happened” is necessarily singular in perspective, dependent
entirely on the discriminative and selective power of who’s doing the telling.
Additionally, what one thing means today, in one place, in one context (social,
political, historical, personal, creative, ideological, philosophical) might be
entirely different from what it meant yesterday in some other place, or what
it might mean somewhere else, tomorrow.
“Words and images are incomplete class notes on the world,” writes
Corder, “a way of catching reminders. Of course they are only traces” (140).
Corder explains storytelling as an attempt to know a world that is “always
coming unfixed” (140). We writers and storytellers, O’Brien included, are
constantly trying to reconcile the inevitably fixed and permanent quality of a
single text with the fact that we exist in a reality that is in perpetual motion.
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Corder’s argument is that the two facts cannot be reconciled: our stories cannot contain the whole, they can only be “traces,” “scraps,” “remnants,” representative of how something was beheld in one fleeting moment in time, perceived and articulated by “a single soul.”
A good deal of Jim Corder’s own creative work is grounded in historical,
non-fiction narrative; each of the final three books he published before his
death is an extensively researched history: of Corder’s hometown, of a single
period of time in his personal life, and of a long-deceased stranger. Because
of the nature of his literary pursuits, Corder too expresses great interest in the
question of truth in the retelling that permeates O’Brien’s text and Resnais’
film. In “A Writer’s Haunting Presence,” an essay that examines Corder’s final
three published books, Pat Hoy explores the author’s life-long literary project of chronicling a process that, for Corder, has as much to do with the storyteller as it does the story.
Hoy devotes a great part of his essay to Corder’s theory on researching,
an act that Corder sees as so closely tied to the particular identity and interests of the researcher that any compiled set of data, no matter how seemingly objective or historically accurate, like a documentary, is still singular in perspective, and therefore inevitably personal. It is because of this singularity (of
any one documenter, researching at any one moment in time) that our representations of history, our stories, in all their various forms, are destined to be
no more than “scraps” and “remnants.”
Every practice and process involved in retelling history involves a certain
degree of removal from the event itself. For Corder, this process of distancing begins with research. In his essay, Hoy cites this passage from Corder’s
book, Chronicle of a Small Town:
A research methodology is a human rhetoric that allows us to create structures of meaning. Such rhetorics are not in the nature of things; they are
the spoken, written, created nature of things, deriving from the utterances
of a community, much as facts become factual through agreement of an
assenting community. (qtd. in Hoy 106)
To this claim, Hoy adds his own interpretation: “We are the creators. We render the judgments; we reach consensus amongst ourselves; we make the facts
factual; we re-see and revise; we keep looking for that truth that is so hard to
find” (106). What’s suggested here goes beyond a notion of the author as creative director of his own story of history; instead, he is the creative director
of history itself. Because the storyteller derives meaning from the things he
observes (or witnesses, or researches), and because he uses a certain rhetoric
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to create a larger structure for that meaning to exist in, he is creating something with his story that is separate from, different from, the thing observed.
This story is not history as it happened; it can neither be it nor contain it. But
regardless, the story is what’s left behind. History itself, being wordless, is
lost. It disappears. We cannot keep it. The story, Corder’s “incomplete class
notes on the world,” imperfect though it may be, is what we have; it’s what we
share (140). The story is what endures. Corder writes, “We create a world
when we speak, staking out claims, making a history. We are not representing
reality but making it” (qtd. in Hoy 110). In light of this claim, we can see in
“How to Tell a True War Story” a chronicle of the past with as much historical credibility as a traditional documentary. Each author, O’Brien and the
documentarian, claims truth within the microcosm of his story of history—a
story created to represent the reality of the larger world outside the text, contained by a specific rhetorical structure.
But there remains another question that lies at the heart of “Aching for a
Self.” We have seen that, as creative director, the storyteller is necessarily central to his own text—that in every text the inherent “I” is the source of whatever truth is revealed. But what happens when the implicit self becomes an
explicit self? Who is the “I” we refer to when we tell our own stories, the stories of our selves?
Hoy describes Corder’s process in conceiving his most directly autobiographical book, Yonder: Life on the Far Side of Change, as “designing a life in the
text by selecting from a life outside the text. They are not the same, those two
lives” (109). He proposes that what is true of the history we create in our stories is also true of the selves we create. The self in the text is not a whole self,
but an aspect of self, contained and defined by a specific craft and form, representative of the singular context in which the whole self was perceived. “We
are not at the center,” Corder writes in his essay (141). He calls us writers
“exiles” from our own texts, claiming that the “I” we write with is separate
from our selves, because in whatever moment we write that declaratory “I,”
we can only ever be a single “scrap.”
To further explore this concept, Corder cites Ned Lukacher:
“Voice,” Lukacher says, “has always been a mode of distortion and concealment, for along with its promise of presence, voice has also proclaimed
[. . .] a haunting message of distance and absolute separation.” (141)
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“Perhaps there is no composing yourself for another,” adds Corder, “no matter what you do: you’re always left behind by your own text” (141).
Here, Corder’s concern has shifted. The world has opened up beyond the
self and now includes the other. The author and the self he creates in his story
do not exist in a vacuum; the very act of storytelling implies a third party, a listener. What part does he play? Corder claims that just as we cannot transcribe
our living selves wholly in our stories, we cannot “compose” our whole selves
for another. If this is true, what is it that these others receive when we tell
them our stories? Tim O’Brien seems uncertain, but perhaps Alain Resnais
can provide an answer.
***
Following the first 15-minute sequence of Hiroshima Mon Amour is a
story about love and death, passion and destruction. Superficially, it is the
story of an affair, a crossing of two histories during a brief encounter between
strangers. The central plot is fairly simple, transpiring within the 24 hours
subsequent to the evening the two spent together. The woman is a French
actress visiting Hiroshima to shoot a film about peace; the man is a local
Japanese architect. Her time in Hiroshima is drawing to a close, the filming
is wrapping up, and she is leaving the following morning. During the course
of the film, the two spend a final day together.
The man is a relatively straightforward character. His thoughts and motivations are clear: he is deeply attracted to this foreign woman; he desires her
to stay in Hiroshima. The woman is a more elusive figure. Early in the film
the man says to her, “When you speak, I never know whether you lie or tell
the truth,” to which she responds, “I lie, and tell the truth,” a paradox that is
central to her characterization.
Throughout the film, but especially in these early scenes, the woman’s
tone communicates a kind of subdued irreverence, the attitude of someone
who fears nothing because she has nothing left to lose. Behind a composed
demeanor there lurks the shadow of some past tragedy and hysteria. Her
melancholy is mysterious and strangely seductive. Perhaps it is a sense of
intrigue and wonder at her mystery that drives this man to pursue her.
The woman demonstrates ambiguous feelings of desire and repulsion
toward her Japanese lover. She is so conflicted in her relationship with him
that at different times throughout the film, she seems to inhabit altogether
different personas. She attempts to part from him at various moments
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throughout the day, but he pursues her tirelessly, and each time they reunite
she allows herself to be physically and emotionally re-enveloped.
At some point in the evening, while sitting in a café, she tells him her own
true war story, revealing her dark secret at last, one she claims she has never
told anyone else. At this point, the film plunges into the woman’s memory of
her adolescence, set in the small French town of Nevers while it was under
Nazi occupation during World War II. She tells the story of her first love, a
German soldier, and their secret, forbidden romance.
The story ends with disaster. The day they plan to run away together, she
arrives at their meeting spot to find him lying bloody on the ground, fatally
shot. For two days she lies with him, listening to the distant sounds of church
bells ringing in celebration of Nevers’ liberation as she feels his body turn
cold beneath her.
The flashback is a surreal sequence. Through most of the story, the
French woman recounts her experience in the present tense, and addresses
her present lover as though he were the German soldier. He willingly inhabits the role as she tells him the story, speaking in first person from the point
of view of the dead man. But then, in the middle of her story, she shifts
abruptly into the past tense, and begins to talk of the soldier as “he” instead
of “you.”
They part at the café, and she returns alone to her hotel. At this point in
the film the woman’s identity becomes most noticeably unfixed. She enters
the bathroom to wash her face, and as she does, all the variations of her narrative voice converge in one muddled monologue, in which she is sometimes
speaker and sometimes subject. At first her interior voice emerges in voiceover, and addresses her Japanese lover, You think you know, but no. Never. Then
she begins to speak out loud to her own reflection in the mirror, first talking
about her eighteen-year-old self in the third person, then about her present
self in first person. As she stares at her own reflection, her interior voice suddenly calls out to her dead lover, asking him to look at her.
The brief scene in the bathroom is an intentionally complicated moment
in which the woman, as storyteller, faces the many sides of her “self” that she
has created. Her identity has become fragmented, comprised of too many
voices to coexist within one speaker. She is alone and yet not alone in the
bathroom; she is various women at once. She stares at herself in the mirror,
but that self is not herself; it speaks to her in another voice separate from her
own.
In a way, the French woman in Hiroshima Mon Amour is like history itself.
She refuses to be contained. She only allows parts of herself to be known by
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any one person at a time. She is an enigma, both familiar and foreign to her
Japanese lover and to the viewer, both of whom feel a sense of intimacy with
her despite not even knowing her name. They, the “others” who receive her
story, only know the partial self that she creates for them, her history as she
perceived it and recalls it—her history as she tells it through a story.
***
Corder tells us that, as storytellers, we are not at the center of our stories,
that our selves in texts are not our selves in life. What is the result of such a
departure of partial self from whole self, realized by artistic creation? Corder’s
concern is that we cannot outlive our mortal lives, we cannot preserve ourselves, if we cannot exist wholly in the stories we tell. But is there a larger
concern worth considering? What we see occurring in this disparity between
self in life and self in crafted story, as illustrated in the mirror scene in
Hiroshima Mon Amour, is a resulting fragmentation of the whole. If the act of
retelling our stories causes such fragmentation of the self, is there a consequence for our habitual act of retelling stories?
O’Brien’s explanation of the true war story is the perfect evidence for this
idea that the more we retell something, the more fragmented the truth of it
becomes, translated through so many disparate interpretive frames. This
accounts for the “overwhelming ambiguity” central to his portrayal of the soldier’s experience of war, articulated through war stories. Depending on the
circumstance of the telling, one story can be retold to convey many contradictory truths.
“Rhetorics” is the term Corder assigns to these varying interpretive
frames. In “Aching for a Self,” he writes that his rhetoric seeks to “expand, to
take up space, to testify that [he is] real at the cost of others’ diminution,” concluding that “our rhetorics cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
They compete” (142). Corder’s concept of “competing rhetorics” teaches us
something essential about “How to Tell a True War Story,” which is itself not
a single war story, but a compilation of scraps. In this one text, O’Brien is creating a self and a history through the frame of so many competing rhetorics
that the final refracted self, represented by the narrating “I,” is so fragmented that the sum of the parts can’t possibly equate to one cohesive whole, giving the reader the sense that the ambiguous war story is so meaning-full that
it has become meaningless.
Upon reaching this conclusion about O’Brien’s text, it would be easy for
us fellow storytellers to submit to feelings of despair and dejection. We can-
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not express the whole truth of our reality, of our history, of our selves, with
our stories. The particularity of the individual involuntarily narrows the
frame, and our creations, fixed, are unable to contain what’s in constant
motion. And although we might feel there’s always something left unsaid, the
more we say, the further we seem to get from clarity and absolute meaning.
And yet, we continue to tell our stories. Corder tells us we must. We must
continue to observe, experience, collect, and create. Like O’Brien we must
continue to revise and re-craft. We must continue to tell our stories because
the story is what’s left. Corder writes at the end of “Aching for a Self” of our
despair as storytellers, but he leaves us with hope, reassuring us that in authorship we might straddle the divide between our texts and our selves:
In authorship, we might begin to hold our own cyclings and dartings [. . .]
to preserve them in order to change them, knowing that we invent in order
to make structure in order to make styles in order to serve occasions in
order to invent and make structures and styles and serve occasions, in
order to be making ourselves. (144)
Perhaps O’Brien’s text is not a war story at all. Maybe it is better described as
an essay about authorship. Though some of his facts may be fiction, perhaps
his promise of truth is not a lie if we understand that in “How to Tell a True
War Story” truth is not contingent on the factuality of the particulars, but on
the forever-evolving rhetoric with which those particulars are rendered.
Maybe O’Brien’s promise of truth is not a lie because it is also an admission
that what’s true can only be true for the moment, that truth is never free of
circumstance. “You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it,”
writes O’Brien, which is precisely what he does (85).
In Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain Resnais shatters the documentarian’s
promises of the objective and the absolute in singular representation, and
argues that we cannot contain history completely in a text, just as we cannot
wholly know the French woman through her story. But what we can do is take
Jim Corder’s advice, and follow Tim O’Brien’s example. We can continue to
tell our stories, and take comfort in the fact that although our world and our
selves may not be wholly present to us in what is retold, there is truth in the
retelling.
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WORKS CITED
Corder, Jim. “Aching For A Self.” Occasions for Writing: Evidence, Idea, Essay.
Ed. Robert DiYanni and Pat C. Hoy II. Boston: Thomson, 2008. 13944. Print.
Hiroshima Mon Amour. Dir. Alain Resnais. Perf. Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji
Okada. Pathé, 1959. Film.
Hoy, Pat C., II. “A Writer’s Haunting Presence.” Beyond Postprocess and
Postmodernism: Essays on the Spaciousness of Rhetoric. Ed. Theresa Enos
and Keith D. Miller. London: Taylor, 2003. 103-15. Print.
Night and Fog. Dir. Alain Resnais. 1955. Criterion, 2003. DVD.
O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” The Things They Carried.
New York: Random, 1998. 67-85. Print.
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