Going after the story

I read The Things They Carried by O'Brien on a recommendation from someone whose recommendation I could not refuse (see author of the next book I'm reading). That book of stories was remarkable in its will to conflate and conflagrate (all in a good way) fiction and nonfiction. Both of these books are labelled as fiction, as they should be, but what they emphasize is that everything we write is a fiction. It's all the product of a re-imagining of what was, or what might have been. Even if I fully and completely imagine settings, a la PK Dick (I'm seriously thinking of adding a surname), those imaginings are coming from the same place that spawns my rememberings. We're all in this mess of what's real and what's not, and, I think, the sooner we just accept that it's all not real, and it's all real, at one and the same time, the sooner we'll be able to talk to one another without angst or anger. But I digress.

In The Things They Carried O'Brien goes so far, in some of the stories, as to use his own name and the names of "real" people (that he has named in his dedication - names that are conventionally accepted as "factual" people). He calls it fiction to cover his ass against libel. That's the cynical way of seeing it. I'd rather say that he calls it fiction because he's writing it from memory and imagination and he's reasonable enough, from his own experiences and observations, to recognize that "fact" is impossible. Especially in war.

Going After Cacciato begins and ends in Viet Nam, in the memories and reveries of Paul Berlin. What we read on the first page is a litany of the squad members who have died so far. Then, in a few pages we read that Cacciato, the innocent, stupid, map-savant has gone AWOL in an attempt to make it from the peninsula to Paris. The remainder of the squad has been assigned to find him and bring him back. So they go after Cacciato.

In literary reading there's some question over the understanding of the terms story and plot. As I understand it (and I'm actually not alone on this, but I'm sure there's not unanimous agreement either) the story is the real, factual, event after event, elusive thing that we're all trying to remember and retell. It's the thing that we love. It's the thing we want to grasp. It's the thing we want to hear. The plot is our often stultified, hackneyed, over-wrought, under-represented reconstruction of it. It is our artifice of story. It is the artificial story. It is contrived, sometimes wonderfully new, and sometimes horrifyingly stale. When we talk of the arc of a story, we have already reduced it to plot, for we are applying our own beginnings, middles, and ends. We're determining what's climactic and what's anti-climactic. We're recreating the story as if it has meaning. As if it can be understood. Comprehended. Codified.

Well if you've ever witnessed a memorable event along with a few friends, and then later listened as one of them retold it, you'll recognize the problem. We all end up making our own codes. Which isn't all that bad, as long as we're interesting! But heavens people, let's not get too worked up about finding the right code. That quest, is a fiction.

And that's the quest that O'Brien throws us on, along with Paul Berlin and the squad, in Going After Cacciato. On this quest we find a prisoner, lost in an underground complex of tunnels that wind for hundreds of miles, who tells us that we are now his prisoners too, because he cannot help us get out, only to be led to the light by a young girl. On this quest we end up on a train to India, where we stay for a few weeks in a hotel with a hard-drinking mistress. On this quest we lounge about on the streets of Tehran, stumble upon a legal beheading, only to be arrested and nearly beheaded ourselves. But we are saved by Cacciato who, somehow, knows where we are, even in our deepest distress. After our fortuitous breakout of the Iranian jail, we speed on to the coast, and board a ship bound for Athens. From Athens we catch a train, and finally, in "fact" end up in Paris. We do all of this wearing fatigues and helmets, and without passports.

The tale of this Quixotic journey, which alternates (roughly) with the tales of the deaths of the men listed at the front of the book, is the point. The telling itself is the point. If I'm to get all teacher on you. The point is that we can tell our stories. The point is that plot doesn't matter, but that we do. That characters do. The squad's first lieutenant, Sydney Martin, places mission (plot) ahead of all else, forcing the men to follow the rules slavishly - to crawl into tunnels that are potentially ambushes rather than rolling grenades into them - and men die because of it. The men find Sydney Martin's view to be untenable. They refuse to crawl into the tunnels, so Martin, a slave to his own plot, crawls in, and the men roll a grenade down after him, and they get a new lieutenant. They change the plot. Because they can. And so the plot, what there is of one, must serve the men, the characters, and the story that must needs be told.

O'Brien's plain diction belies the wondrous simplexity of his tale. It is a grand story. It is the story of humans at war, with themselves, with each other. It is the story of humans in love with living, with humour, with one another. It is the story of humans telling stories. It is the story of humans surviving because they can tell stories.