Rezensionen 337 Christina Meyer. War & Trauma. Images in Vietnam War Representations. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms, 2008. Stipe Grgas Whether it is thought of as the product of innate human predilections or as a consequence of socio-economic factors, war has been a constant of human history. No society has ever been spared its toll of human suffering and material destruction. Geopolitics, military history as well as other social sciences have explored the causes of war, its campaigns and what they have left in their wake. However, these disciplinary forays into the subject frequently bypass the less manifest dimensions of war, its pain and its hurt. On the other hand, the arts, literature and, more recently, cinema and television have, in different ways, thematized these dimensions of war. As such they provide a rich archive of how both the individual and the collective have registered its destructive force. Countless narratives have related how humans have fared in the extraordinary circumstances of war. On one level, they register the universal plight of humanity facing danger and possible extinction, on another it is also possible to discern differences which can be accounted for both by changing historical environments and by the way different cultures have been able to incorporate war into their sense-making stratagems. The correspondence between the individual soldier’s experience of war and the interpretative paradigms his culture provides to give it meaning has varied over time and place. The need for the literary articulation of wartime experience frequently arises when the reality of the battlefield cannot be accommodated to the understanding of the combatants or to the self-images of a particular polity. On the individual and on the collective level this incongruity is experienced as trauma. Christina Meyer’s study deals with one of the United States’ numerous wars. However, Vietnam holds a special position in American historical memory and in its cultural imaginary. Meyer’s study is one of many which confirm that even at our point in time, when the United States have experienced more recent traumatic events and when they are as of now engaged in two other wars, this has not changed. Vietnam was an important turning point in American military history. The deployment of modern technologies of destruction in an impassable terrain, from which the enemies seemed to have vanished after each encounter, the lack of any clear lines of demarcation, and the wracking tension of the constant danger of attacks are only some of the features of this conflict. The fact that Vietnam was daily televised, making it the first “living room” war, played an important role in bringing it back home and making it a contentious site which clearly affected the lives of United States citizens. Both in her research and in her readings of the chosen texts, Christina Meyer admirably intertwines these facets of Vietnam and shows their traumatic impact. In her initial remarks, Meyer positions her study within what she terms, quoting Hal Foster, the “lingua trauma” or the “wound culture,” which has come to permeate various contemporary discourses. She investigates this complex of problems in eight chapters and presents critical readings of a number of novels written by veterans of the Vietnam War, two novels written by non-veterans, and one Vietnamese novel. The emphasis of her study is “the mediation of experiences qua ‘verbal’ images, which implies the question of how things are passed down to a reader, in other Rezensionen 338 words, how ‘verbal’ images can convey (produce) meaning.” (25) There are three thematic sections: the first is titled “Images and the Vietnam War” and begins by defining the basics of trauma and the image, and then proceeds to delineate how different media represent the war. The second section, “Fictionalizing Trauma - Scenic Images & Image Stills,” begins with general remarks on the relationship between trauma and literature; the next three chapters describe how trauma is narrated through images in two novels by Tim O’Brien and one by the Vietnamese writer Bao Ninh. The focus of the third section is on two novels, one by Stewart O’Nan and the other by Bobbie Ann Mason. These novels are not about the war in Vietnam per se but rather about its after-effects and how its disturbing presence lurks within an America that has become a “trauma culture” (217), collectively and individually. In the “Coda” Meyer underlines the manner in which she believes her work departs from dominant research projects and reiterates the relevance of Vietnam for contemporary American policy. The book gives the reader an informative overview of the subject of trauma in the Vietnam War and summarizes the salient points that have been made concerning the way different authors have grappled with the experience on the Far East battlefields. The fresh angle Meyer brings to the discussion, by focusing “on verbal images as a mode and means of representation,” is convincingly argued and yields interesting insights. Her way of theorizing this dimension and applying it in concrete readings can serve as a stimulus to explorations of similar experiences in other locales. What I found particularly interesting was Meyer’s inclusion of a North Vietnamese to bear witness to the horrible impact of the war. Doing this, she remedies an elision which is endemic to many American interpretations of the war. Although she writes that she incorporated Bao Ninh into her study “to examine the extent to which cultural differences determine interpretations of the war in Vietnam” (19), I felt that the main point was to show how the devastation of war and its traumas transcend cultural boundaries. Perhaps literature as such cannot do otherwise. However, if literary study is placed within an “interdisciplinary dialogue”, to quote the title of the series in which Meyer’s book appears, and if the issue of trauma and the Vietnam War are explored within the context of, for example, American Studies, it becomes evident that the fact of defeat was the decisive factor in assigning such unprecedented weight to Vietnam in the American cultural imaginary. If we forget that the trauma in the United States was largely produced by the fact that the war had been lost, then we are missing the impact the U.S. experience in Vietnam has had in questioning the traditional American concepts of (successful) exceptionalism. Stipe Grgas Department of English Faculty of Humanities and the Social Sciences