[Another entry
in my biannual
series on interesting and impressive new
releases in AmericanStudies. Add your favorite works, new or old, in
comments for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list!]
On a book that
reminds us of the value of looking at things from the other side.
In John Guare’s
complex and powerful play Six Degrees of SKeparation
(1990), a great deal is made of a certain painting by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky,
which is, as the oft-quoted refrain puts it, “painted on both sides.”
Ultimately this detail, highlighted by con artist Paul to his confident Ouisa
Kittredge the last time they see each other, seems to function as a way to
remind Ouisa that the life she’s currently leading is not her only option, that
there are other possibilities and other choices that might lead to them (one of
which she begins to take as the play concludes). But I would argue that there’s
another and equally salient way to read this repeated line: to see it as a more
specific reminder that many things have two sides, and that looking at any
particular thing from the other, perhaps less frequently observed side (the
reverse, that is) might yield a very different perspective than what we are
used to seeing from the front.
Exemplifying
that shift in perspective is the first book by my friend and former Boston
University Writing Program colleague Chris
Walsh, Cowardice: A Brief History
(Princeton, 2014). When I worked with Walsh, he was (as I understood it, at least)
working on a book about war, which is to be the sure the side of this
particular duality at which we most often look. Not only because it is through
wars that we tend for example to view and define our history (there’s a reason
why two-part American literature and history surveys so frequently divide at
1865), although that certainly is a part of my point. But also and even more
saliently because when we remember wars, when we think and write about them,
when we tell stories of them, it is almost always through moments and histories
from or directly related to the war itself—those who fight them, those affected
by them, those on a homefront but connected to the war nonetheless, their
causes, their legacies, and so on. Sometimes those war stories do feature
individual characters who are afraid to fight—Jeremy Davies’ cowardly
translator in Saving
Private Ryan (1998), for example—but whole stories or narratives
focused on such so-called cowards? Not so much.
I can’t say for
sure if Walsh’s Cowardice is the
first scholarly analysis dedicated entirely to the subject, but it’s the first
I’ve seen, and an excellent illustration of the
value of looking at a topic from the other side in any case. Partly that’s
because of the new ideas about the familiar topic, war, produced by that shift
in perspective: Walsh’s focus helps us think both about the often unspoken narratives
that underpin war efforts and the corresponding fears against which those
narratives are created. But this new perspective is even more striking precisely
because it examines one of those alternative narratives, the concept of
cowardice, and considers the social, historical, literary and cultural, and psychological
causes and effects of this narrative on its own terms (rather than, like Davies’s
character, as an afterthought in war narratives). Such an alternative focus
might, for example, help us start to unpack one of the most unexpected moments
in any American text, the concluding lines of Tim O’Brien’s short story “On the Rainy River” (from The
Things They Carried), in which the narrator has traveled to the
Canadian border to consider dodging the draft: “I was a coward. I went to the war.”
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what AmericanStudies books would you recommend?
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