Who is going to write the great American war novel about Iraq? About Afghanistan? Virginia Quarterly Review examines war literature and MFA programs for returning vets.
From the piece...
The fundamental challenge of writing about war is to translate an indescribable experience into language. As Gabe Hudson, the author of Dear Mr. President and a former rifleman in the Marines, wrote in a recent email:
Writing war fiction is nearly impossible. The word ‘war’ is primordial—it’s stitched into our DNA—and no matter what you think of war, the word itself is somehow sacred. The word ‘war’ represents language on the far edge of what language can do, trying to name what can’t be named.
Although Hudson is a creative writing professor himself and expressed great gratitude for the support he received while pursuing his MFA at Brown, he is skeptical about the value of an MFA workshop for a recently returned veteran. “The academy and the composition of war literature isn’t necessarily a natural fit,” he wrote. “There’s the danger that workshops might bleed your work of its requisite edge, or that your personal workshop ecosystem isn’t equipped to nurture your artistic vision.”
For his part, Robert Olen Butler sees no inherent disjuncture between MFA workshops and writing about war. He worries, however, that recently returned veterans might not have enough distance from their wartime experience. “The vets I’ve had, their experience has been too close to them. They have not forgotten enough. It took me eight years to be able to write well about Vietnam,” he said. “I needed every minute of it, to assimilate into my unconscious the abiding and important essence of my experience.”
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