Long Form and the Long View
- By Jim Hicks
I’ll begin with a pair of quotes. Tim O’Brien, in his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, says, “Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.”
And J.M. Coetzee, from his Diary of a Bad Year, writes: “The generation of white South Africans to which I belong, and the next generation, and perhaps the generation after that too, will go bowed under the shame of the crimes that were committed in their names.”
I use both of these citations often, probably too often, as a lever on authority that I myself do not have. The first has long been positioned at the top of the syllabus for a class I teach each year. The course is itself titled “War Stories,” and thus I intend it as a sort of caveat lector. O’Brien’s skepticism here is, I think, not merely tongue-in-cheek, even if he himself has spent much of his post-Vietnam life writing about war, and even when his war stories have surely been taught in more classrooms in this country that any others. Fabulation and self-aggrandisement in “telling war stories” is an unavoidable risk, and readers need to think carefully and complexly in approaching any sort of testimony.
As for the Coetzee quote, well, it actually isn’t one, at least in a technical sense. Taken from a novel, it’s a sentence from a letter to a newspaper written by Coetzee’s protagonist. The character is fiction, as is the newspaper, though its subject—outrage at the war crimes of the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan—is not. For me, these lines also offer a prediction about the future of our country, and there are few voices I find more wise than Coetzee.
Two points of reference often serve, as you know, to triangulate a third, or at least help us measure parallax. Which brings me to Roy Scranton, a contributor to the MR Casualty issue, and author of an absolutely essential article just out in Rolling Stone. In the latter, Roy writes about his recent trip back to Iraq, ten years after his last tour as a soldier in our occupying army. He conveys his impressions of Iraq now compared to then, he interviews an eloquent and diverse group of Iraqi writers, artists, and activists, and, in a form of early onset Coetzee, he begins to work out and through his own sense of understanding, of shame, and of responsibility for the horrors we have created in a land which is not our own.
It would be presumptuous, and even counterproductive, to tell you much more about what Scranton says; after all, my goal is to get you to read him, not me quoting him. So I’ll end with a question about long form journalism—purportedly an endangered species these days. Yet Scranton’s essay is over 8,000 words, longer than the limit that MR sets for nonfiction, and it’s published in a commercial rag. Kudos, Rolling Stone, kudos! What impresses me most, however, is how this essay demonstrates what Coetzee knows, and what Scranton himself is learning the hard way—that if we don’t take the long view, there is no such thing as history, and we simply will never learn.
In short, there’s a choice to make: the rabble and babble of so-called experts who are at best short-order cooks, or a few folks like Scranton, who are in it for the long haul. It’s up to you.
