Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: We’re Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1976
WEBSITE:
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2013001053 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2013001053 |
| HEADING: | Scranton, Roy, 1976- |
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| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC |
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| 053 | _0 |a PS3619.C743 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Scranton, Roy, |d 1976- |
| 373 | __ |a Princeton University |
| 670 | __ |a Fire and forget, 2013: |b t.p. (edited by Roy Scranton) |
| 670 | __ |a Email from pub., Jan. 9, 2012: |b (Roy William Scranton; b. Aug. 25, 1976) |
| 670 | __ |a Learning to die in the Anthropocene, reflections on the end of civilization, 2015: |b ECIP t.p. (Roy Scranton) |
| 670 | __ |a Princeton University, Department of English, viewed June 10, 2015 |b (Roy Scranton; B.A., M.A., New School for Social Research; joined Princeton English Dept. in 2010; dissertation, The trauma hero and the lost war : political theology, World War II, and American literature, 1945-1975; co-editor, Fire and forget; author: Learning to die in the Anthropocene) |
| 953 | __ |a rg16 |
PERSONAL
Born in August 25, 1976; partner; children: daughter.
EDUCATION:New School for Social Research, B.A., M.A.; Princeton University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, historian, teacher. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Department of English, teacher; University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, teacher.
MIILITARY:Enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2002. Served four years, including a fourteen-month deployment to Iraq; attained the rank of sergeant.
AWARDS:Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2015, for Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene; Rice University, Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, post-doctoral research fellow; Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities; Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction.
WRITINGS
Contributor of journalism, essays, and fiction to periodicals, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, Nation, Prairie Schooner, and Theory and Event. Writer of dissertation “The Trauma Hero and the Lost War: Political Theology, World War II, and American Literature, 1945-1975.”
SIDELIGHTS
Roy Scranton writes about politics, history, climate change, and the Iraq War publishing several books, both fiction and nonfiction. He has also had his journalism, essays, and fiction published in various periodicals, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and Prairie Schooner. Scranton grew up in Oregon, spent his early twenties wandering the American West, joined the U.S. Army in 2002 and fought in the Iraq War, then went to college earning an undergraduate degree at New School for Social Research and a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. He received a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction.
Fire and Forget
In 2013, Scranton coedited Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War with Matt Gallagher. The book collects fifteen realistic, haunting, and shocking fictional stories centered around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by writers who were there or who waited at home for personnel to return. To help veterans process their experiences, the stories are written by actual soldiers, men and women who use their powerful voices to describe what they saw and felt that have been difficult to put into words. Diane Gardner remarked in ForeWord: “The writing is vivid and compelling, artfully selected by the editors. But it’s heavy. At times, the book is best read in small chunks, as it will strain the emotions.” Ashanti White commented in Library Journal that the “language may occasionally be challenging for civilians, but the honesty and authenticity of the stories are universal.”
Stories by prominent writers of the two wars, such as Brian Turner, Colby Buzzell, and Siobhan Fallon, describe wounded soldiers finding solace in nature, a man who takes out his rage on his wife, difficulty returning to civilian life, loneliness, self-conscience, and helplessness. Steven McGregor in New Criterion noted the variety of the stories in form and content, “however, there is a disappointing consistency of tone and effect. Stock characters frequently reappear—the deranged enlisted man, the hapless officer, the meddling civilian—and rarely do they challenge stereotypes. Additionally, questions of the authors’ motivations are unavoidable as these stories seem designed to support one viewpoint with regard to war.” In a review in Booklist, Patty Wetli observed: “Though fiction, each work reads true, filled with tension, fear, and anger.”
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
Scranton published Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization in 2015. A combination of memoir, philosophy, and science, the book explores Scranton’s experiences coming home from the Iraq War. In addition to the destruction war causes, he also saw how climate change and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy are changing the world and life on the planet. Draughts, floods, plagues, water shortages, melting Arctic, and the resulting political and economic stability and flood of refugees have made him reflect on how humanity must change and adapt. Explaining how the book is an unapologetic punch in the gut, Michael Berry said on the Sierra Club website: “By making tough accommodations and reconnecting with our core humanity, we may eventually be able to recover our collective breath.”
Scranton contends that although Western civilization has become schizophrenic when facing the enormity of having caused global warming and then refusing to confront or mitigate it, he acknowledges that civilization is not completely suicidal. Scranton told David Henry Sterry in an interview online at Huffington Post: “I think our conscious ability to deal with the problem has lagged fatally behind the opportunity we had for arresting climatic feedbacks before they spin out of control. Now I think the best we can do is adapt, dampen the worst effects, and try to keep the Earth from turning into a Venusian hothouse.”
War Porn
War Porn is Scranton’s 2016 debut novel. During his fourteen-month deployment in Iraq with the U.S. Army, Scranton vividly remembers the photos of tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraid. From these images, he explores the political and moral questions of war and its impact on soldiers, victims, and observers in his novel. The main characters are a young woman anti-war advocate in Utah, an American soldier in occupied Baghdad lamenting his inept commanders, and an Iraqi math professor reacting to the U.S. invasion of his homeland. Through the voyeurism of war porn and twenty-four hour news cycles, Scranton reveals the various perspectives of war. “The result is a no-holds-barred amalgam of plotlines that is especially tragic,” said Poorima Apte in a review in Booklist.
According to A.S.H. Smyth in Spectator: “War Porn rewards repeated reading, not least to admire how unaffectedly the strands are drawn together to reach a conclusion …which might later seem somewhat inevitable.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted: “Scranton writes with honesty and authority about a complicated clash of weapons, politics, and culture.” Library Journal contributor Joshua Finnell said: “The result is an uncompromising look at the trauma of war that will leave readers shattered and disheartened.”
We're Doomed, Now What?
In 2018, Scranton published We’re Doomed, Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change, listed as an American Orwell for the age of Donald Trump. In original and provocative essays, Scranton addressed the fact that we’re all doomed from a crumbling of the post-1945 world order, multispecies mass extinction, and the foreseeable end of civilization as a whole. He offers his philosophical opinions on war, natural disasters, race, war literature, fantasy violence in pop culture like Star Wars, pollution, climate change, and the concept of the Anthropocene era—the human species as a geological force. “The author is clearly frustrated and angry, and he is doing his level best to face the doom and gloom,” according to a Kirkus Reviews critic.
“Sometimes astute, sometimes meandering, Scranton’s latest work is heavy on fatalism and light on focus,” a reviewer commented in Publishers Weekly. Rather than a rant against those destroying the environment, “Scranton is a more subtle and versatile writer than that. While he has many disturbing factoids about climate change at his fingertips—and deploys them with precision and accuracy—the essays benefit from the author’s tendency toward self-deprecation,” observed Michael Berry online at Sierra Club.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2013, Patty Wetli, review of Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, p. 34; July 1, 2016, Poorima Apte, review of War Porn, p. 31.
ForeWord, February 26, 2013, Diane Gardner, review of Fire and Forget.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2018, review of We’re Doomed, Now What?: Essays on War and Climate Change.
Library Journal, March 15, 2013, Ashanti White, review of Fire and Forget, p. 106; August 1, 2016, Joshua Finnell, review of War Porn, p. 86.
New Criterion, April 2013, Steven McGregor, review of Fire and Forget, p. 74.
Publishers Weekly, June 13, 2016, review of War Porn, p. 74; April 16, 2018, review of We’re Doomed, p. 82.
Spectator, August 6, 2016, A. S. H. Smyth, review of War Porn, p. 28.
ONLINE
Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (November 24, 2015), David Henry Sterry, author interview.
Sierra Club, https://www.sierraclub.org/ (February 10, 2016), Michael Berry, review of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene; (July 18, 2018), Michael Berry, review of We’re Doomed.
Roy Scranton is the author of We're Doomed. Now What?, War Porn and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. He is the co-editor of Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. Scranton's journalism, essays and fiction have been published in The Nation, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Boston Review and elsewhere.
He holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton and an M.A. from the New School for Social Research and teaches in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame.
Photo credit: Hannah Dunphy
Bio
Roy Scranton is the author of We’re Doomed. Now What? (Soho Press, 2018), War Porn (Soho Press, 2016) and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights, 2015). He has written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and he co-edited What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent Our Future (Unnamed Press, 2017) and Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo, 2013). He grew up in a working-class family in Oregon, dropped out of college after his freshman year, and spent his early twenties wandering the American West. In 2002, he enlisted in the US Army, serving four years, including a fourteen-month deployment to Iraq. After leaving the Army at the rank of sergeant, he completed his bachelor’s degree and earned a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, then earned a PhD in English at Princeton. His essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University, and he has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction. He currently lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his partner and daughter, and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
Scranton, Roy: WE'RE DOOMED. NOW WHAT?
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Scranton, Roy WE'RE DOOMED. NOW WHAT? Soho (Adult Nonfiction) $16.95 7, 17 ISBN: 978-1-61695-936-4
Essays on war and the "eve of what may be the human world's greatest catastrophe."
Novelist and journalist Scranton (English/Notre Dame Univ.; War Porn, 2016, etc.) collects essays and talks, most previously published, that primarily cover climate change, serving with the Army in the Middle East, race, and contemporary war literature. The author is clearly frustrated and angry, and he is doing his level best to face the doom and gloom. As he writes in the title essay, "we stand today on a precipice of annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined." In fact, he admits, "it's probably already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming." At this moment of crisis, we must use our "human drive to make meaning...[it's] our "only salvation." In "Arctic Ghosts," Scranton recounts a 2015 cruise he took in Canada. He writes about John Franklin's 1845 failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Today, his cruise succeeded: "I was overtaken by the realization that what I'd come to see was already gone." Our planet had warmed "beyond anything civilization has ever seen." In "Rock Scissors Paper," which he describes as a "Borgesian bastard," the author riffs about our new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, "characterized by the advent of the human species as a geological force." No one, he writes, "intended this, and we seem to be incapable of preventing it." In "Anthropocene City," Scranton chronicles his tour of heavily polluted Galveston Bay, "so full of PCBs, pesticides, dioxin, and petrochemicals that fishing is widely restricted." When he writes about his personal involvement in war, it comes almost as a relief. In the book's longest essay, the powerful "Back to Baghdad," he returned as a journalist: "They stayed, I left. But while I may have left Iraq, Iraq hadn't left me."
Despite the inevitable repetitions, Scranton's warnings must be heeded...again and again.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Scranton, Roy: WE'RE DOOMED. NOW WHAT?" Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538293974/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=b549127d. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538293974
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We're Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p82+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
We're Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change Roy Scranton. Soho, $16.95 trade paper
(360p) ISBN 978-1-61695-936-4
Novelist and nonfiction author Scranton (Learning to Die in the Anthropocene) struggles to provide satisfying responses to his titular question in this jumbled collection. His premise is that an era of environmental and political catastrophe already exists, and the only meaningful next step is to "let our current civilization die" and find a "new order of meaning." Specifics of what that new order looks like, beyond a repudiation of consumer capitalism, are left abstract. Scranton organizes his essays under thematic headings: "Climate & Change," "War & Memory," and "Violence & Communion." The climate essays cover, among other topics, the melting of the Arctic ice cap and the possibility of a Texas mega-hurricane, and express pessimism about the possibility of mitigating global warming. The war section covers Scranton's memories of patrolling Iraq as an Army private, attending antiwar rallies after his return to the U.S., returning to Baghdad as a civilian to witness the 2014 elections, and his concerns about the dangers of fetishizing American power. In the "Violence" essays, Scranton draws connections between victims of war, terror, and police shootings, decrying social hierarchies that value some lives over others. Sometimes astute, sometimes meandering, Scranton's latest work is heavy on fatalism and light on focus. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"We're Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr.
2018, p. 82+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532754 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=54177788. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532754
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Scranton, Roy: War Porn
Joshua Finnell
Library Journal.
141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p86. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Scranton, Roy. War Porn. Soho. Aug. 2016.352p. ISBN 9781616957155. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781616957162. F
The fragmented images of tortured prisoners from Abu Ghraib and the U.S. military's tactic of "shock and awe" are what many remember from the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Scranton (Learning To Die in the Anthropocene; Fire and Forget) experienced these events firsthand during his 14- month deployment in Iraq with the U.S. Army. Here, in his debut novel, Scranton unflinchingly explores the political and moral stress of war inflicted on perpetrators, victims, and observers alike. Through the intertwining narratives of three characters--an American soldier serving in Baghdad, a math professor struggling to survive in occupied Iraq, and a vocal antiwar advocate at a barbecue in Utah--the author demonstrates how voyeurism functions as an anesthetic agent on both the spectator and the participant. Each character yearns to escape from and stop the brutality perceived in the world but finds the cyclical nature of violence inescapable. VERDICT Unlike most contemporary war literature, this work makes no attempt to excuse, venerate, or empathize with combat veterans. The result is an uncompromising look at the trauma of war that will leave readers shattered and disheartened, wondering whether the final gut punch illuminating the violence inherent in our culture was necessary or gratuitous.--Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Finnell, Joshua. "Scranton, Roy: War Porn." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 86. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A459804995/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=c07d0e7a. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459804995
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Heroes in error
A.S.H. Smyth
Spectator.
331.9806 (Aug. 6, 2016): p28. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
War Porn
by Roy Scranton
Soho, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 343
In the first year or so of the Iraq occupation --or 'big Army goatfuck', as it is not quite specifically referred to in former US Army soldier Roy Scranton's debut novel--three central storylines move through and around each other.
Specialist Wilson, whose commanders can't read maps but watch Black Hawk Down for 'pointers', and who is so frustrated he actually wants to be attacked by the Iraqis; Qasim al- Zabadi, a timid maths professor who lives with his Baghdadi uncle, enduring the attentions of unnamed government officials and of his Michael Jackson-loving cousins; and Aaron, who's 'just come back'--too recently, in fact, to be breaking tofu with civilians who ask him questions until he tells them what they don't want to hear: 'Not that it's any of your goddamn business, but no, I didn't kill anybody.... I just held the camera.'
But if you've come to War Porn expecting some sort of jarhead Chuck Palahniuk, then you're in the wrong place. Scranton opens with a line by Wallace Stevens, and punctuates the principal narratives with a cacophony of 'found' poetry, cut and pasted from Quranic verses, administrative documents, rolling news, philosophy, film synopses, motivational laminates and manuals on how to win the hearts and minds of the should-be grateful Iraqi population. It's a 'fugue of half- thoughts and disconnected images', in the words of a fifth, unidentified voice that seems most directly based on the author's own four years of military service.
Like all good contemporary war writers, Scranton has an ear for the Beckettian banter, the barely- conscious movie-quoting, the almost limitlessly mediated experience that comprise most modern soldiering. And if once or twice I felt he might have overcooked it (most soldiers have cause to 'think of some other life you lived once' but very few think back to when they were 'a poet'. And find me a ranker who can use 'irenic' accurately), War Porn rewards repeated reading, not least to admire how unaffectedly the strands are drawn together to reach a conclusion (or, perhaps, an 'aftermath'?) which might later seem somewhat inevitable.
But the abiding impression is how personally traumatised Scranton seems on behalf of all
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concerned in the Iraq invasion. He is hardly more optimistic for the whole human race. 'Up out of the ancient garden of Sinbad's Baghdad,' Wilson surveys 'a ruin outside of time, a 21st-century cyberpunk war-machine interzone'. The soldier next to him remarks: 'I can't believe how much this place looks like LA.'
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smyth, A.S.H. "Heroes in error." Spectator, 6 Aug. 2016, p. 28. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A459977093/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=440940db. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459977093
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War Porn
Publishers Weekly.
263.24 (June 13, 2016): p74. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
War Porn
Roy Scranton. Soho, $26 (352p) ISBN 978-1-61695-715-5
Scranton's provocative debut novel lucidly captures the fractured perspectives of war. Told in three recurring sections punctuated by fragmentary, poetic introductions, the lives of three characters unfold under the influence of the Iraq War which, at every turn, is mediated and distorted by the lens of mass media. The first section follows civilian Dahlia at a party somewhere in the American Southwest, where she meets Aaron, a veteran newly home from Iraq. Conflicting political ideologies clash as booze and drugs create a dangerous mix for the impassioned opinions. In the second section, Wilson weaves his armored vehicle through the streets of Baghdad while contemplating his role in the conflict. He performs the day-to-day grind of someone who only wears the uniform, cynically following orders sometimes rooted in prejudice against the Muslim civilians. In the third section, Qasim, a mathematics professor in Baghdad, tries to survive the brutality on both sides of the befuddling war while making sense of himself, his country, and what may become of both. Living with his uncle Mohammed and away from his wife, Lateefah, he struggles with the expectations of his family. Having enlisted in the U.S. Army from 2002 to 2006 and having been deployed to Iraq, Scranton writes with honesty and authority about a complicated clash of weapons, politics, and culture. His novel is an unflinching, and sometimes difficult, examination of humanity during wartime. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"War Porn." Publishers Weekly, 13 June 2016, p. 74. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A458871696/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=a21ae476. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458871696
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What Future: The Year's Best Ideas
to Reclaim, Reanimate and Reinvent
Our Future
Publishers Weekly.
264.38 (Sept. 18, 2017): p64. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
What Future: The Year's Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate and Reinvent Our Future
Edited by Torie Bosch and Roy Scranton. Unnamed, $18.99 trade paper (258p) ISBN 978-1-944-70045-4
Introducing this vital collection of forward-looking writing published in 2016, editors Bosch and Scranton (Fire and Forget) pull no punches: "The future is already here," they write, "and it's confusing as hell." They've gathered together a solid collection of writers--Elizabeth Kolbert, Bill McKibben, and Laurie Penny, among others--to explore "what the future means as an idea" and how to come to terms with it. Formats range from short fiction to long investigative essays, and subjects include virtual reality, global warming, and "crime-predicting software." Sarah Aziza investigates what self-driving cars would mean for women in Saudi Arabia, while Jeff VanderMeer looks at how "weird fiction" can make reality more understandable. Though a few pieces aren't as polished as one might expect given their authors' reputations, such as Kim Stanley Robinson's choppy essay "Our Generation Ships Will Sink," about space travel, their ideas they express and the explorations they undertake will endure. Indeed, Scranton's essay "Anthropocene City," subtitled "When the Next Hurricane Hits Texas," has already taken on the ring of prophecy thanks to Hurricane Harvey. The overall tone is worried but optimistic. Don't look for utopian fantasies here--look for topical, intelligent projections of a realistically better future. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"What Future: The Year's Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate and Reinvent Our Future."
Publishers Weekly, 18 Sept. 2017, p. 64. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A523623374/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=58f3741c. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523623374
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War Porn
Poornima Apte
Booklist.
112.21 (July 1, 2016): p31+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
War Porn. By Roy Scranton. Aug. 2016.352p. Soho, $26 (9781616957155).
If, as tennis star Andre Agassi once claimed, image is everything, how does the feed of information about war get relayed with the highest impact in the age of 24-hour news? How do those bits and pieces merge to create the larger picture? Scranton's fierce debut novel finds out. The front lines of battle can deliver an addictive adrenaline rush, as the unnamed soldier in this narrative proves. In the trenches in Iraq, in the Sadr City that most only see through news flashes, he is a recruit trying to make sense of a mission he wanted to believe would become the anchor for his drifting life. Professor Qasim al-Zabadi is no different in his isolation, drawn back to his native country due to family ties, trying to stay on the fringes of the brewing war, sucked into the maelstrom nevertheless. Scranton delivers a poetic sensibility and a staccato writing style, and the result is a no-holds-barred amalgam of plotlines that is especially tragic given all that we now know about the wrenching mess that is today's Iraq.--Poornima Apte
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Apte, Poornima. "War Porn." Booklist, 1 July 2016, p. 31+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A459888955/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=d31cf05b. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459888955
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A terrible god to worship
New Criterion.
31.8 (Apr. 2013): p74+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Foundation for Cultural Review
Full Text:
Roy Scranton & Matt Gallagher, editors
Fire & Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. Da Capo Press, 256 pages, $15.99
Fire and Forget is the latest offering of the military-publishing complex, devoted to printing the works of returning soldiers and their spouses. The fifteen stories gathered here describe, in various ways, action in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the difficulties encountered in returning to civilian life. The collection also features some experiments with form, including a sardonic "choose your own adventure" which places the reader inside the gun-turret of a Humvee. Despite all this variety, however, there is a disappointing consistency of tone and effect. Stock characters frequently reappear--the deranged enlisted man, the hapless officer, the meddling civilian--and rarely do they challenge stereotypes. Additionally, questions of the authors' motivations are unavoidable as these stories seem designed to support one viewpoint with regard to war.
Brian Van Reet's "Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek" is a good example of the collection as a whole. This story is about two wounded soldiers, Rooster and Sleed, who go on a fishing trip, hoping to find solace in nature. Among other injuries, Rooster's face has been masked, burned featureless by fire. He reflects, "'Wounded warriors'--the term the Army used to refer to us in official memoranda.... 'I guess it's what we were, but the phrase was too cure to do our ugliness justice:" Exacerbating his physical injuries are his loneliness and a family that, at least in his eyes, is of no use. His father is a government employee who tests chemical and biological weapons on monkeys while his mother spends "her days watching cable news and talking to the cat." Rooster blames them for his wounds with a rhetorical appeal to the reader: "How could they have known their values would lead me to this? That all that safety would push me into the fire?"
And here is the collection's main issue: it's overreliance on self-conscious lament. It is indicated in Van Reet's title, a parody of Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." (Many authors in the collection are graduates of MEA programs and workshops; they seem determined to achieve some type of literary authenticity while at the same time rationalizing their military service.) The concept of Van Reet's story is also illustrative. "The whole situation was nightmarishly helpless" Rooster observes, again self-consciously. "But there it was, our bodies transformed in a flash I could not remember. The only thing now was deal with it. Time was reckoned in two halves, before and after." This statement applies to almost all of Fire and Forget . It is a string of situations, each describing soldiers who are nightmarishly helpless. They find themselves transformed in a flash of war almost impossible to remember. And instead of creating critical
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distance for the reader to assess the war, the characters are presented to us already judged: hideous ghouls such as Sleed, evil scientists such as Rooster's father, or naïve housewives, such as his mother. This fixed perspective prevents the reader from entering into Rooster's world at all. Thus when "Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek" finishes, we are unable to grasp Rooster himself for the final image. He says, "Hailstones began to fall. They hit Big Hunting Creek like bullets ricocheting off depleted uranium armor."
What the reader soon realizes is that Fire and Forget is populated with a host of victims and psychopaths. Like Chinese actors, they wear identifiable masks. Could men named Rooster and Sleed behave any different? Instead of entering into a bargain with the authors, or being seduced by them, the reader must submit to them completely. Roman Skaskiw's "Television," for instance, begins "It'd been a day since the attack ... no one was hurt, just a local kid they shot." This is the voice of the omniscient third-person narrator, not a character. The reader is forced to accept this jocular tone toward violence, presumably to congratulate ourselves that we recognize the horror that the soldier-actors do not.
T wo exceptions are the highlights of the collection, Colby Buzzell's "Play the Game" and Siobhan Fallon's "Tips for a Smooth Transition." Buzzell takes Van Reet one step further by having the protagonist undermine his self-examination with irreverent humor. He is lampooned in the final twist of the story. This has a powerfully revealing effect, deepening our understanding of how strange it can feel to return to civilian life. Fallon, by contrast, uses a romantic relationship to engage the reader. She is the only author in the entire collection who writes convincingly about love. Her two central characters are Colin, a soldier recently returned from Afghanistan, and his wife, Evie:
Evie starts awake, feeling the bed quake. She
realizes it is Colin. He gasps, a thick and struggling
sound as if he can't get enough air. "Shhh,
Colin. You're alright." Evie slips out of the bed.
"Everything is OK." She walks across the dark
room and turns on one of the lamps. "Wake up,
Colin." Her husband groans and Evie wonders
what images wrack him: cars that won't stop
at checkpoints, the hiss of a mortar too close,
smoke and gunfire.
Fallon's constant use of names maintains distance in an almost childlike way. But unlike other stories in the book, our alienation from the characters does not lessen our emotional response. We are able to think critically about Evie and Colin from many different angles. The returned soldier seen here has our sympathy, fear, and respect. Evie is also a figure we enjoy contemplating, unsure if we should want her to succeed in hiding her infidelity from her husband. These are the only two characters in the collection threatened by something other than war. The multidimensional scene that Fallon creates further entices the reader because it is impossible to guess how it will end. Nevertheless, it is within their power to choose--to maintain their marriage despite years of deployment or to go their separate ways.
Tellingly, Fallon is the only contributor who has never served in the military. Her husband is an
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army officer. It would seem that her position on the sidelines has enabled her to better connect with the reader. But in the other stories there is an almost religious attitude toward war. This is the transformative power Rooster references when he defines his life as "reckoned in two halves." Colum McCann agrees, writing that "We are scripted by war," in the foreword to the book. "It is the job of literature to confront the terrible truths of what war has done and continues to do to us." For him, war has power and agency--it is even a source of our collective identity. For the veterans in Fire and Forget , this divinity is not an abstract idea as it is for McCann, but it is a war made flesh, a previous experience in Iraq or Afghanistan on whose behalf they now proselytize. What a terrible god to worship.
McGregor, Steven
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A terrible god to worship." New Criterion, Apr. 2013, p. 74+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A326659506/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=74ebde40. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A326659506
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Fire and Forget
Diane Gardner
ForeWord.
(Feb. 26, 2013): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Matt Gallagher (editor), Roy Scranton (editor); FIRE AND FORGET; De Capo Press (Fiction: Short Stories) 15.99 ISBN: 9780306821769
Byline: Diane Gardner
It's sometimes hard to understand a hero's heart. Thousands of soldiers have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when they return, they often find it difficult, even impossible, to explain what they faced and how they feel. They need to speak, for their own sakes, for healing. We need to hear them, to comprehend their sacrifice and to support them.
Fire and Forget can assist us. A short-story collection of fiction written by actual soldiers, it emerged out of a project intended to help veterans process their experiences. It also aims to share with readers what soldiers long to tell but cannot express. And it focuses heavily on their lives after they return home. From an inability to find purpose and direction to feeling alone, angry, or unable to cope, the revelations, while hardly surprising, prove deeply insightful.
There's one story about a veteran who desperately wants to tell his wife how he feels but cannot find the words. Without them, he can only lash out. But, "Being angry with her in just the right way never seemed to make her understand." Another tells of a woman who incessantly rides the subway, the only place that helps her forget a painful event she experienced while serving. Attempting to meet her mother for a few quiet days away, she cannot bring herself to go to even that safe place. Others tell of violent impulses or the inability to pull out of a pained state long enough to get a needed job. One account offers the perspective of the wife reunited with a hurting soldier. Only a few speak directly of the wartime experience.
The writing is vivid and compelling, artfully selected by the editors. But it's heavy. At times, the book is best read in small chunks, as it will strain the emotions. Aside from one story, in which a vet imagines training and commanding wild rabbits to take over a university, little lightens the mood. However, this is an important book. Important for veterans, to know they are not alone. Vital for those who haven't served, to understand the needs of returning soldiers. And insightful for all, to understand just how great a sacrifice our military members make. Although some may find the reality of what it means to be a hero tough to bear, this collection deserves to be read.
Diane Gardner
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gardner, Diane. "Fire and Forget." ForeWord, 26 Feb. 2013. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A321022352/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=38a51cc8. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A321022352
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Fire and Forget
Patty Wetli
Booklist.
109.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2013): p34. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Fire and Forget.
Ed. by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher.
Feb. 2013. 256p. Da Capo, paper, $15.99 (9780306821769).
While the grand, noble causes of the past wars continue to capture our collective imaginations, the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated with greater ambivalence. Fire and Forget, a collection of short stories by authors who are also military veterans (or, in one case, a family member), captures the messiness of soldiering when the mission and endgame are unclear. Though fiction, each work reads true, filled with tension, fear, and anger. Readers are transported to desert checkpoints, ride along with vehicle convoys, and return home from combat to Face an uncertain future. Standouts include Andrew Slater's "New Me," a sobering glimpse inside the mind of a soldier who has suffered a traumatic brain injury. In "Tips for a Smooth Transition," Siobhan Fallon, an army wife, quotes from a manual that urges spouses to "set up a security plan" in the event that their husbands experience a vivid flashback. It's a stark reminder that war, for combatants and their families, never truly ends. Writes Gavin Ford Kovite: "Heads they win, tails you lose." --Patty Wetli
Wetli, Patty
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wetli, Patty. "Fire and Forget." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2013, p. 34. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A315918845/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=44a56457. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A315918845
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Fire and Forget
Ashanti White
Library Journal.
138.5 (Mar. 15, 2013): p106. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Fire and Forget. Da Capo. 2013. 256p. ed. by Ray Scranton & Matt Gallagher. ISBN 9780306821769. pap. $15.99. F
With wars come war stories and from those stories evolves literature. Leading this generation of war literature is this collection of short stories written by soldiers and a military spouse whose lives were directly affected by the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. As is to be expected, some stories, including Brian Turner's "The Wave That Takes Them Under," discuss life in foreign battles; many others, such as Jacob Siegel's "Smile, There Are IEDs Everywhere," reveal the various issues involved in deployment and returning home to people who are fully aware of the war experience. "Roll Call" by David Abrams is especially warming and heart-shattering as soldiers reflect on the good times at a fellow soldier's funeral. Perry O'Brien's "Poughkeepsie" likewise captures the confusion and pain of separation due to war. The encompassing and humanistic tone is the heart of this work. The language may occasionally be challenging for civilians, but the honesty and authenticity of the stories are universal. VERDICT Like Walter Dean Myers's Sunrise Over Fallujah, these tales will appeal to readers of war and historical fiction.--Ashanti White, Yelm, WA
White, Ashanti
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
White, Ashanti. "Fire and Forget." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2013, p. 106. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A322330064/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=18be96a7. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A322330064
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Fire and Forget
Kathleen Harrington
War, Literature & The Arts.
25.1 (Jan. 2013): From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Harrington, Kathleen. "Fire and Forget." War, Literature & The Arts, vol. 25, no. 1, 2013. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A353320661/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=b21f44ae. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A353320661
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Scranton, Roy. We're Doomed. Now
What? Essays on War and Climate
Change
Jason L. Steagall
Xpress Reviews.
(May 11, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Steagall, Jason L. "Scranton, Roy. We're Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate
Change." Xpress Reviews, 11 May 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A538858790/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8b329b25. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538858790
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Review: ‘War Porn’ Widens the Field of Vision About the Costs in Iraq
Image
CreditPatricia Wall/The New York Times
By Michiko Kakutani
Aug. 8, 2016
In a controversial essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2015, Roy Scranton, a United States Army veteran who served in Iraq, argued that our perception of war has been warped by modern war literature’s preoccupation with what he called “the trauma hero myth.”
In focusing on “the revelatory truth of combat experience” and “the psychological trauma American soldiers have had to endure,” he wrote, “we allow ourselves to forget the death and destruction those very soldiers are responsible for.”
In the case of the Iraq war, he contended, the big questions of “what U.S. soldiers were fighting for and the bigger problem of who they were killing” were often pushed aside “in favor of the more narrow and manageable question of ‘what it was like.’”
These ideas, and Mr. Scranton’s anger at the catastrophic consequences of a misguided and unnecessary war, inform the tone, story and point of view of his ambitious first novel, “War Porn.” They fuel the power and eloquence of the many passages in the book that capture the chaos of the United States invasion and the snowballing misery it has inflicted on Iraqi civilians. But they also fuel the novel’s more tendentious and stage-managed sections, which feel willfully constructed to italicize the bankruptcy of the war and the worst crimes, like torture, committed by some American soldiers — a take on the war that is as constricting in its own way as what Mr. Scranton has assailed as the myth of the trauma hero.
So far, there has been no big, symphonic novel about the war in Iraq. Perhaps it’s too soon for a wide-screen perspective of the sort Denis Johnson provided on Vietnam with his novel “Tree of Smoke” (published more than three decades after that war). After all, the tragic consequences of the American invasion of 2003 continue to unfurl day by day for the people of Iraq and the entire region, rippling outward across the globe.
In “War Porn,” Mr. Scranton has tried to broaden his novel’s scope by telling three separate tales that illuminate the war from different angles, and some stream-of-consciousness-like interludes that suggest links between Iraq and Vietnam and other wars, and the original human sins of violence and hubris.
Image
Roy Scranton’s novel builds on themes he has raised in essays.CreditHannah Dunphy
The central and most compelling tale is told in the first person and often reads like a journal, recounting the experiences of a poet turned soldier, who finds himself in Baghdad, trapped in the mindless “Groundhog Day” loop of the war, patrolling the streets, “damned to drive the same maze over and over till somebody killed me.”
These sections attest to Mr. Scranton’s keen reportorial eye and his Michael Herr-like gift for conveying the surreal feel of modern war — where real-life bleeds into nightmare, and the default emotional setting is “manic paranoid torpor.” Soldiers eat beef teriyaki and chicken cavatelli M.R.E.s in a war zone where “armored ruins” line the roads, “charred corpses scattered in among the blasted metal”; and sniper fire and I.E.D. ambushes are a constant threat: “the chaos out there, the crazy Arabic writing and abu-jabba jabber, the lawless traffic, the hidden danger and buzz and stray bullets and death looming from every overpass.”
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The second story line in “War Porn” features Qasim, an Iraqi mathematician whose life and family are torn apart by the war. Mr. Scranton does a thoughtful job of showing how Iraqis’ ordinary dreams — of a career, of building a family or earning a degree — are exploded by the war and how the daily (or nightly) bombing raids terrorize Baghdad residents.
“You watched it on TV,” Mr. Scranton writes, “you heard it on the radio, you saw it from the roof and when you ventured out into the street”: people “scurrying to hide in dim burrows, where they would wait to die, as many died, some slowly from disease and infection, others quick in bursts of light, thickets of tumbling steel, halos of dust, crushed by the world’s greatest army.”
The third and most unconvincing section of “War Porn” concerns a youngish group of men and women, who gather at a barbecue in Utah, and a hostile visitor — an angry veteran of the Iraq war named Aaron — who disrupts their middle-class hippie lives with some deeply alarming revelations about his experiences in Iraq and a savage act of violence. These scenes seem meant to underscore Mr. Scranton’s dark view of the Iraq war as “a murderous hustle,” as he wrote in a 2014 Rolling Stone article, and his conviction that “the politicians who ran the war had shown no higher ideals than robbery and plunder, and I’d been nothing but their thug.”
In that article, Mr. Scranton berates himself for being “an historical agent in the vast, crooked enterprise that was the Iraq war,” for “the pride I’d taken in my service” and for “the blood money that had bought my college education.”
It’s a point of view that also comes through in this forceful and unsettling book, though the novel is at its most persuasive not when Mr. Scranton is laboriously trying to illustrate his arguments but when he trusts his own myriad gifts as a storyteller.
Follow Michiko Kakutani on Twitter: @michikokakutani
War Porn
By Roy Scranton
343 pages. Soho Press. $26.00.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 8, 2016, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Broader Field of Vision for the Iraq War’s Costs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
When the Hurlyburly’s Done: Roy Scranton’s “War Porn”
By Sarah Hoenicke
AUGUST 16, 2016
WAR PORN, Roy Scranton’s fiction debut, is not a comfortable book. Scranton’s experimental and interesting prose is meant to disturb the entrenched thought patterns of his readers. He defies the American cultural tenet that our military is lawful, moral, and organized, depicting it instead as it more probably is: needlessly brutal, a blunt instrument rather than a refined machine. War Porn is a complex novel about complex systems. It calls into question mindsets rampant on both sides of the Iraq War — what the sides believe about each other, what holds up, and what’s obviously unnuanced bigotry.
An English teacher of mine once called Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 a “hyperlink novel.” She meant that the book is trying to scatter its readers’ attention by being filled with things to look up — like a web page filled with clickable links that lead away from the main article. She said we should avoid looking everything up, and thus avoid becoming scattered. Readers of War Porn would be wise to follow this advice. The novel bombards with military jargon — mostly capitalized abbreviations like GWOT, IED, HAL, MRE — yet it remains entirely possible to understand the drift of the text without searching for the abbreviations’ meanings. Indeed, to do so would be to miss the point of this particular technique. When left obscure, the jargon causes the reader to be engulfed by a vague confusion, like the feeling of doing something for the first time, or of visiting a country in which one is not familiar with the language. We are meant to be overwhelmed. We experience three distinct narrators throughout, three different prose styles, and unannounced time changes, the text oscillating frequently between present and past. And yet Scranton succeeds in furthering his narrative while still maintaining his reader’s attention and interest. War Porn isn’t easy to comprehend, but it isn’t easy to put down either.
The novel follows several characters, but sticks most closely to two. Specialist Wilson’s voice has two alternating modes: one, italicized, details his pre-military life, the other, un-italicized, his time in occupied Baghdad. Qasim, a Baghdad resident, has a long section in the second half of the text. Together, the two narrators, combined with the “Babylon” poetry sections and the chapter epigraphs that read like they’re excerpts of an American military instruction manual for dealing with Arab countries, tell the story of the invasion, the occupation, the dirty tactics, the politics.
City Lights Books published Scranton’s first nonfiction book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, in 2015. Booksellers must puzzle over where to shelve this book, as it is both a scientifically persuasive pamphlet detailing the catastrophe that is global warming, and a philosophical treatise on creating meaning in the midst of chaotic modern life. To read Scranton, either his fiction or nonfiction, is to engage with a powerful intellect. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the New School for Social Research after leaving the army, and then moved on to Princeton where he completed a PhD in English. He is a writer who doesn’t deny either the horrible waste and futility of war, or the real impacts of the Western way of life on a rapidly warming planet. Nevertheless, he maintains his hope for humankind. In a piece for The New York Times in 2013, Scranton wrote that “the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: ‘What does it mean to be human?’ and ‘What does it mean to live?’” Scranton continues to wrestle with these questions in his fiction. The context for questioning has changed from impending global climate disaster to the war on terror, but the inquiry remains the same.
Scranton served in the US army from 2002 to 2006. In the same Times article, he wrote about that era of his life: “I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s ‘Hagakure,’ which commanded: ‘Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.’ Instead of fearing my end, I owned it.” This is Scranton’s apparent motive: to spur his readers to face inconvenient truths, and own them. The truth soldiers face daily is that of their impending death. War Porn’s characters include a contemplative soldier, brutish grunts only capable of snide comments and Game Boy playing, and inept leaders barking orders, as well as a group of vegan, antiwar animal lovers. And others: The novel tells the story of a young Iraqi, trying to reconcile her love of Michael Jackson with her love of religion; a tongueless blind man, writing the suras repeatedly from memory; Qasim, a PhD student in Baghdad wrestling over whether to stay, to teach and work on his dissertation, or return to his family in another city. All of these characters, and all of us — we either face our realities or don’t, but they remain realities. The Iraqis are for the United States and against it; the people are religious but not always devout; there is intelligence on both sides, and ignorance. Whether you supported the war or not, it still happened, and the consequences still have to be dealt with.
This book is an effort to help the reader see the limits of her own seeing — that there is another side, another logic. Much of the speech is unattributed, especially during the sections taking place in Baghdad. This erases individual culpability, as does being at a low level inside the military for some characters — a soldier isn’t responsible for the war being waged, or for the atrocities of that war, though it is his job to carry them out. For many of them, soldiering is a grownup cowboys-and-Indians scenario to live out — they torture bugs, and frequently express the wish to kill, to fire their weapons. Efforts to understand the Arab worldview clash with the use of phrases like “the others” and the inclusion of Muslim traditions amid a list of other annoyances.
There will always be the opportunity to pass the blame, to disown the past and present. Scranton, both in this new book and in his nonfiction calls on readers to own up to the choices they’ve made, to the history we share — to care for each other and refuse to draw artificial lines. There is enough to fracture us — war, the changing climate, death. The book leaves space for the reader to fill in a meaning, literally, in its last sentence, which is scattered over the page, without punctuation to separate: “I begin to / feel / of holes.”
As the mind naturally fills the blanks left in the prose, so it does with the vacuum created by the narrative. With destruction and pain abounding, “We must practice suspending stress-semantic chains of social excitation through critical thought, contemplation, philosophical debate, and posing impertinent questions,” Scranton wrote in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. The only antidote to the madness is to listen carefully, to care.
¤
Sarah Hoenicke studied creative writing and journalism at Mills College. You can find her writing in Mills College’s newspaper, The Campanil, as well as in Necessary Fiction, Wait(er), Drunken Boat, Voices & Visions Journal, and elsewhere.
War Porn
By Roy Scranton
Published 08.02.2016
Soho Press
352 Pages
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War Porn by Roy Scranton
Reviewed By Nathan Webster
September 26th, 2016
Roy Scranton’s Iraq War-themed novel War Porn is vile and reprehensible. It viciously insults veterans of every stripe and concludes with no character’s salvation, no hint of redemption.
The book is brilliant in its repellent execution. War Porn gives no comfort, and readers of Iraq and Afghanistan-related fiction deserve no easily digested narratives of tragic heroes. Scranton’s novel lashes readers with the degradation of our last 15 years.
To readers who expect a tidy war story, this book says: How dare you.
War Porn gives what the title promises—war porn, every clichéd anecdote from a thousand veterans’ breathless stories. Scranton (an Army veteran of the Iraq War, freelance journalist, and Notre Dame professor) telegraphs his intention with choppy, nonsensical chapter breaks—a look into the chaotic hivemind of this war. Only a few times do these breaks deliberately make sense as summaries of the war porn of conventional fiction:
This is the story of valor, duty and the cost of war. A young wacky… a wacky bunch of ragtag misfits trying to escape a Nazi prison… a wacky bunch of misfits running an Army hospital in Korea. A ragtag maverick valor war. This is the story of a young man’s war, the story of we happy few.
The book’s three narratives follow unpleasant characters who are unconnected at first. In the first narrative, a group of hippie-ish friends at a cookout meet a National Guardman just back from Iraq, brought to the gathering by his semi-girlfriend. It’s a conglomeration of war story chestnuts—the tattoos, the “were you in the shit” questions, the “close-cropped” hair and “Enemy Combatant” t-shirt. And of course, “I wonder if he has any pictures.”
The scene blows up into an attack on Aaron, the veteran. “Aren’t you ashamed?” he’s asked. Later he’s called a “Nazi asshole” and “fucking facist puke.” It’s every Red State war porn conspiracy of what the educated elite really thinks of soldiers. The 20-something characters are good targets for Scranton; he makes them look pathetic, especially in a country that loves to “support the troops even if I don’t support the war.”
I should go back, Matt thought. I should go back and tell Aaron he’s no longer welcome. I can tell everyone about the pictures. Tell him he has to leave. And if he hits me? Then I’ll hit him back. No I wouldn’t. I’d lie on the ground and they’d laugh… Maybe I should just go talk with her. Be reasonable. Just sit and talk… Explain. Decode. I know you’re upset. I know it’s my fault.
Matt’s girlfriend Delilah is attracted to the rough-and-ready Aaron, despite his latent anger. Each character’s biggest flaw is thinking they’re in control.
She nodded at this, nodding her head, brushing his arm with hers. At a certain point, climbing down a pair of boulders, he offered his hand for assistance… they stood as if in another world and looked in each other’s eyes… She felt a little dizzy… then, aloft, she rose up and kissed him.
When the action shifts to Iraq, the perspective becomes that of Specialist Wilson, a junior troop often engaged in the wastes of time that make up so much of war. He trades harshly racist and misogynistic comments with his friends and apathetically listens to his incompetent commander make mistakes. He’s a mediocre soldier, no warrior, no scholar, despite the pretentious book of poetry he carries around. He’s a joke, a clown with a gun:
Too tired to care whether I’d fucked up or what, so what. Fuck shit fuck whatever… I jerked awake, pulling my seven-hundred-pound head off the steering wheel. Captain Yarrow lay slumped against his door, drooling on his armor. The convoy was gone.
Later, he listens to his battalion commander give a “motivational” pep talk:
We have trained months for this, and it is the epitome of our job as soldiers… I know your leaders and they are the best leaders in the Army, and I know your sergeants and they are the best sergeants in the Army. We will succeed and we will be victorious.
In other contexts, this speech would be a patriotic high point. In War Porn, with our 15 years of historical perspective, it is bitterly ironic. It’s an old man running his mouth, saying what he’s expected to say, to soldiers who expect him to say it.
Also in Iraq, Scranton introduces a blundering Iraqi academic trapped in Baghdad, making mistake after mistake as the war closes in around him. He’s not a good guy or a bad guy; he’s a stupid guy. The Iraqi’s pre-invasion hopes and dreams read like bitter ash:
The name Baghdad will sing on the tongues… the name Iraq will jingle like gold coins… and our literature! It’ll flourish like flowers after the rain. No longer will we have to mutter our lines into our hands… We’ll shout our poetry in the streets. I’ll finally finish my epic.
These are all delusions that the Iraqis probably held before the fall, just like the fraud of the colonel’s motivational speech.
War Porn is unforgiving at all turns, and when the plotlines finally intersect and the connections all established, readers are left only the fraud of their own emotions—we want things to work out, for at least somebody. They don’t.
***
In 2013, Scranton co-edited Fire and Forget, one of the first short story collections of fiction derived from the recent wars; his short book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, is a manifesto on the subject of climate change—but more specifically, how the human race must come to grips with the existential threat of a changing world. With War Porn, Scranton seems to turn his back on the war-lit complex he helped create.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Scranton describes arguing with his friends and fellow authors and fellow Iraq War veterans Matt Gallagher and Phil Klay: “suddenly we’re shouting at each other, arguing over whether or not anything could be redeemed from the Iraq War … I’ve seen a lot of so-called ‘veteran writers’ closing ranks over the last two years… resisting any criticism of their dubious role as hallowed idols…. it’s a disturbing trend.”
Scranton also criticized current war literature in a separate Los Angeles Review of Books essay, where he wrote:
Novels such as The Yellow Birds (by National Book Award finalist Kevin Powers) and stories such as Redeployment (by National Book Award winner Phil Klay) are gross moral and literary failures. But the failure does not belong to the writers. It belongs to all the readers and citizens who expect veterans to play out for them the ritual of trauma and recovery, and to carry for them the collective guilt of war. Such an expectation is the privilege of those who can afford to have others do their killing for him them.
Roy Scranton
Roy Scranton
In War Porn, Scranton holds up his end. His civilian characters are those privileged people who stand for his readers. War Porn assaults those who want to read about the wars while cozily tucked into bed. In these pages, Scranton is both brutal and brutally consistent.
On War Porn’s cover, Scranton is something else. There’s a blurb from Ben Fountain, acclaimed author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Fountain writes War Porn is “as pure and true of its vision of the long war as anything I’ve read. War’s corruption soaks through every layer of life.”
That’s a true statement, and Scranton did well to receive accolades from an author of the satirically bitter Billy Lynn, whose harsh indictment of sunshine patriotism read so hysterically. The book has turned into a big-budget movie. While it’s unfair to judge based only a trailer, the satire of Fountain’s novel seems to have been leeched away, replaced with backslapping bonhomie, epic camera sweeps of heroic combat and brave young soldiers, and a sister carefully asking “what really happened over there?”
Hollywood doesn’t budget $50 million for 3D war movies full of silly satire. As Fountain said: “war’s corruption soaks through every layer.”
Phil Klay writes that the book is “intense and troubling. It’s what all truly excellent literature leaves you with. A sense of something shattering.” Also a true statement. Matt Gallagher calls it “harrowing” and “stark.” More names follow, each providing laudatory adjectives: “searingly honest,” “brutal,” “savage,” and of course the go-to of war porn compliments: “truth-telling.”
With publicity like this, War Porn is the type of book that will lead readers to say, with no irony: “I’m looking forward to this one!”
Anyone who still feels that way when they finish reading War Porn has missed the point. Or worse—they will view this book like the blurbs tell them too. As “art.”
***
Art is meant to be admired. It is judged as important. It hangs on a wall and invites comment. Scranton has accepted the compliments of his peers and their imprimatur validates War Porn as a subject of serious commentary.
The Red State crowd that loves “American Sniper” would lash out at this book, and well they should. War Porn is a despicable portrayal of the American soldier—Scranton should be ashamed of this betrayal of his comrades. Blue Staters should admire his courage at presenting the American soldier in all his unleashed, rancid glory—a far more accurate portrayal than any story of selfless heroism. It’s the most unsparing narrative yet presented of our modern wars.
War Porn is an implicit insult to those who would use a conventional narrative to tell a story about the debasing effects of war. But by aspiring to join the artistic ranks of those authors, and by accepting their accolades, War Porn reduces itself to simply another story among many. It should never have accepted any allies.
In the interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Scranton said, “The thing is, we’re all forced to negotiate with the systems we find ourselves thrown into.”
Scranton wrote an uncompromising book with an American veteran as the worst villain of all – a necessary spit in the face of flag lapels and “support the troops.” Scranton didn’t negotiate then. The negotiations came later. Like he said in that L.A.R.B. interview: “War’s a hustle.” Its corruption soaks through everything.
Literary elites were happy to tell Scranton how his book belongs, how he did a good job. Scranton should have asked, “Why would I care what you think?”
War Porn is not a book to be complimented or endorsed. It is not enjoyment or clarity. It is a darkness.
Nathan S. Webster reported from Iraq several times as a freelance photojournalist, and his work was published in dozens of newspapers nationwide. He writes on a variety of topics. More from this author →
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War Porn: An Interview With Roy Scranton
Hilary Plum
26.09.16
Final Cover Image 052416“The truth of war is always multiple.”
A few years ago I was struck upon hearing Roy Scranton begin a talk with this line. A simple statement, but its simplicity demands unending complexity— a complexity that exposes our blindness, we the American public, in the years of the Iraq War.
War Porn, Scranton’s debut novel, answers this demand for complexity with the force of a reckoning. One could describe the novel as three novellas that brush up against then seize one another. Perspectives upon the Iraq War multiply mercilessly: in “Strange Hells,” a recent veteran appears at a 2004 Columbus Day barbecue among twentysomething leftists; conflict escalates. “Your Leader Will Control Your Fire” offers the immediacy of a notebook written by a U.S. soldier in 2003 Baghdad. “The Fall” tells the story of the invasion and occupation from the perspective of an Iraqi family, centering on Qasim, a young math professor. Threaded throughout, brief gorgeous passages titled “Babylon” blend the discourses of this war vertiginously, moving us with a violent grace between these settings.
I first read a version of War Porn in manuscript years ago and have not stopped thinking about it. I spoke with Roy about the novel upon its release from Soho Books.
HILARY PLUM: Let’s begin where the novel begins: you chose to set your readers down first in the American home front, the Western landscape of Utah, amid a casual barbecue. We begin, then, as spectators, with the fact of the Iraq War entering in the figure of Aaron, the veteran; a dialogue about the war proceeds heatedly among intelligent, well-meaning characters with whom we may or may not wish to identify. The title War Porn also emphasizes, in force, the role of the spectator. Can you talk about why you began with this scene, this particular truth?
ROY SCRANTON: I wanted to bring readers in through Dahlia’s perspective because she’s one of the more relatable characters in the book. Here she is, among these young Americans in Utah, and the war doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with their lives: it’s noise on a distant channel. So what happens when the war comes home?
Dahlia is basically a decent young woman who’s trying to figure her shit out, and who longs for something more than the tedium she’s found herself stuck in. For her, there’s an unarticulated appeal in something dangerous, because it offers the possibility of breakage: breaking out, breaking open. But she doesn’t understand how dangerous Aaron really is.
The book’s three main sections are built like Russian nesting dolls, so the first and last sections are Utah, the second and fourth are Iraq during the war, and the third section, the middle section, is Qasim the Iraqi mathematician. I wanted to start where we’re at, the so-called “home front,” because I wanted to come back there after going through Wilson’s entire deployment and Qasim’s view of the American invasion. I wanted readers to experience the sense of seeing Baghdad as home, with Qasim, and the war as home, for Wilson, so that when we come back to Utah and the US we get something of that epic feel of returning to where you began from a whole new perspective. I don’t know if I succeeded, but that was the idea.
As for the central question of “war porn,” of war as spectacle and of war as narrative, it was very important to me in writing this book to not just offer another soldier story, “I went to war and war is hell.” I wanted to show that story in a context, in a frame that breaks its implicit claim to authenticity. That’s not new, of course, but even The Things They Carried has been so absorbed into readers’ understanding of war as a kind of ultimate authenticity that it’s hard to hear the real critique of narrative in that book. What we typically take from The Things They Carried is not that soldiers lie or make up stories, but that war is SO TRAUMATIC that language can’t capture it. “The real war will never get in the books” and all that. Well, that’s basically true of human experience in general, day to day life, going to the grocery store. Existence exceeds our ability to put it into language. Nevertheless, we tell stories.
But why do we tell war stories? What do we want from them? Why would anyone want to read a book like War Porn? I know why I read war literature, and it’s something inside me that connects me to Matt as much as it connects me to Aaron and Dahlia. I went to Iraq in part because I wanted to see. I wanted to know. In The Republic, Socrates tells the story of Leontius, who comes across some dead bodies lying on the ground outside the walls of Athens, where they were executed. He wants to look at them but he’s also repulsed and disgusted. He covers his eyes and turns away, but in the end he can’t help himself: he runs up to the bodies screaming, “Look, then, look! Take your fill, you wretches!” I wanted to put readers in that position and then make them conscious of it. I wanted us to look at how we look at war.
HP: And this is precisely what the novel achieves. I’ve been considering your phrase implicit claim to authenticity alongside the word representation. This novel commits bold acts of representation. At the center of its nested structure the fact of US torture in the “war on terror” is grievously present, a dark stain spreading through these narratives. The fact of torture—widespread, officially sanctioned—is one that many prefer not to see, not to foreground in their story of this war.
Another question of representation: the Wilson passages (“Your Leader Will Control Your Fire”) seem keenly self-aware in how they offer the strengths and satisfactions of “war literature.” The writing is bitingly vivid, moves so fluently through the speeds of boredom, violence, uncertainty, machismo—yet, too, there is a glimmer of metafictional awareness. The structure of the novel quietly comments on these passages, draws our attention to how the implicit works in your phrase implicit claim. Then in Qasim’s section, your style shifts, becomes lusher and more capacious in perspective; in the rhythms of the syntax and narration there is to my ear a gentle echo of great works of contemporary Arabic fiction as they arrive in English translation. One may discuss this as a question of “authority” and representation: to write from a perspective distant in language, ethnicity, culture from one’s own, a perspective indeed from the other side of a war. This too is an act that most American writers avoid.
Lastly, this question of representation intersects with that of biography. You are, of course, a veteran of the Iraq War. With Matt Gallagher you edited the anthology Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, a diverse representation of veterans’ writing; you’ve also written powerfully on how the veteran is represented in art and literature and how veterans represent their own experience, including in a recent essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books critiquing the conception of veteran as “trauma hero.” Now your biography is part of the story through which this book reaches readers, placing you to some degree in the role of “representing” veterans. I wonder if you could talk about some of these acts of representation—inside the novel and outside it, if the two can quite be separated—and how you’ve approached them.
Roy-Scranton-credit-Hannah-Dunphy
Image: Hannah Dunphy
RS: Glossing Claude-Levi Strauss’s insights into structural anthropology, Fredric Jameson writes in The Political Unconscious that “the individual narrative, or the individual formal structure, is to be grasped as the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction.” This basic interpretive lesson, that our stories and myths offer us imaginary solutions to real contradictions, poses an interesting problem to the writer. What is one’s relation to the contradiction? How do we represent the contradiction? I think one of the best ways to approach this problem is through form.
There are several real contradictions at work in American culture and literature today that manifest in War Porn. One is between the mythic, artificial, imaginative, and empathetic promise of fiction, that it can take us somewhere else, into someone else’s soul, open up the world for us, and the contrary demand that our fictions be authentic, real, based in personal and factual truth. This isn’t a new contradiction—Melville has a great riff about it in The Confidence Man—but it is a live one, especially when it comes to war literature, doubly so when it comes to war literature by veterans, who are supposed to carry the authentic truth of war in their very psyches. The polyphonic structure of War Porn is intended less to solve this contradiction than to embody it, to create a formal structure that can hold and give shape to the many contradictions at work in the question of telling the story of America at war.
So the Wilson sections, many of which are drawn from my own time in Iraq, are in this “authentic” war-writing style, vivid, laconic, metonymic, with occasional flights into lyricism, which is the dominant style of writing in American war literature going back through O’Brien and Herr to Hemingway, even Crane. These sections are, as you suggest, not only narratively but formally in contrast to the Qasim section, which is in a style more in the tradition of the postcolonial novel, world novel, or novel in translation. My model here is not strictly the Arabic novel in translation, though that’s in the mix, but also Indian, West Indian, and African postcolonial fiction. I don’t mean to elide real differences between different traditions—obviously the Indian postcolonial novel is different from the Turkish postcolonial novel is different from the Nigerian postcolonial novel—but rather to think through the way the postcolonial novel as such functions within an American literary marketplace and cultural imaginary. The Dahlia sections are yet another style, “contemporary American literature,” with free indirect discourse, a slightly off-kilter, satirical tone, and “showing not telling”: a close focus on lifestyle and personality that fuzzes out context and social structure. The way these three kinds of narratives—war novel, world novel, literary novel—are usually isolated genres suggests something about the way we compartmentalize our imagination in response to the complexities and contradictions of living inside the American empire. My intention in juxtaposing these three narratives, insofar as it was conscious, was to give shape to these contradictions. I don’t know if I can “solve” them—I think War Porn is pretty pessimistic when it comes to solutions—but I’m also not sure that I want to or that it’s my job. They’re the contradictions we live with. I want to make them visible so we can talk them out instead of acting them out, as we so often do, through politics and political violence.
HP: Yes—I’m tempted now to ask you about the lived experience of this movement between forms. In 2015 you published a galvanizing book-length essay, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, which employs personal essay and the tradition of the humanities, largely conceived, to offer a compelling meditation and polemic on the epoch of climate crisis. You’ve written journalism for Rolling Stone and elsewhere, including the devastating “Back to Baghdad,” on returning to Iraq amid the 2014 elections. You write across myriad forms and exhibit a formidable sense of how each form contributes to specific cultural conversations—as above, where you note the differences among the subgenres of war novel/world novel/literary novel: each is published and received differently, each arises out of and re-inscribes a tradition, a readership.
I’m curious to know more about this work in personal terms: what draws you to the novel in your own life. That the novel still seems live to you as a discursive form, still has this potential to offer even “imaginary resolution,” comforts and inspires me. The novel is a hard form to defend yet a hard form to abandon. It is both fairly marginal to the larger culture and yet persistently entangled in problems of market and capital—apprenticed often embarrassingly, for instance, to Hollywood. Often one finds that one has read a truly great contemporary novel and only, like, three other people have read it. And often formally challenging, provocative works of fiction, such as your own, don’t have a clear path toward publication. For you, then, why the novel? Can you talk about the years of living in this form, why it demanded that you inhabit it?
Screen Shot 2016-09-01 at 11.09.38 AM
Image Source: Los Angeles Review of Books
RS: Why write fiction at all? This is something I wrestle with. I think that has to do with my searching out ways to survive childhood, finding in novels an escape and a freedom from the raw emotions of family life, the incessant barking of the television, and the painful limits of growing up poor in America. Novels offered not only respite but a wild freedom, not only release but revenge: I was especially fond of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, particularly post-apocalyptic narratives—Riddley Walker, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Stand, Lucifer’s Hammer. It was a way of surviving, a way of holding the world at a distance and, as with any art, translating it into terms over which I felt I had some control.
I don’t remember intending to become a novelist, though, until my freshman year of college. That year was a total shitshow for a bunch of reasons and I wound up spiraling into a deep depression then dropping out. I was the first person in my family to go to a four-year university, so my sense of failure was catastrophic: not only was I failing myself and my own ambitions, but I was disappointing my family and their hopes, especially my mother’s. She’d become pregnant with me while she was still in high school, which spoiled her hopes of going to college. She did get her GED and, decades later, earned a bachelor’s degree, for which I’m immensely proud of her, but I think in many ways and for a long time I was the vehicle of her intellectual and artistic aspirations, and after I dropped out of college I felt I’d failed her about as badly as possible.
That summer I got a job driving a truck, and from that nadir, I couldn’t find any real way forward except to write: I could either reinvent myself in language or let myself die. There really wasn’t any other option. My entire life since then has been a consequence of that desperate lunge.
As to the bigger philosophical, critical, or aesthetic question of “Why the novel?,” I think the answer lies in the novel’s ability to embody consciousness, especially multiple consciousnesses, we might even say the multiplicity of consciousness, in the sense of the Greek logos, Hegelian spirit, noösphere, or hivemind. The truth of war is always multiple because truth is always multiple, because we are always multiple, because I am always multiple—je est un autre. Language itself is already multiple, because it’s both spirit and matter: language is consciousness translated into sonic vibrations and physical marks, aural and visual stimuli. Written language is the crystallization of consciousness from physical process into physical form—thought made flesh.
The novel, then, insofar as it remains an ill-defined, experimental, polyphonic, bastard form, seems to be the most capacious and sophisticated machinery we have for turning existence into language. A novel contains multitudes, it gives shape to thought, it exists—like a symphony—both as a whole and complete object, and as a continuous process experienced only in time. It can directly absorb and repurpose any kind of written genre, from philosophy to song to advertising, and it can engage with and enter into dialogue with music, film, visual arts, and any human activity, from a Catholic mass to a mass hallucination. It can not only show but actually embody the way in which language is never our own, never under our control, but rather a kind of spirit that moves through us, that speaks us. Each of us lives within and gives life to the collective history of our language, even as we misperceive, disagree, and wound each other in our alienation from it. The novel is a way of turning those relationships into an object we can reflect upon.
That’s a dubious and no doubt unsatisfying answer. As to the social utility of writing novels—who can say? Our savage children will pluck their flowers from our graves, the slag-heap of global capitalist civilization, and go on their way willy-nilly. Narrative makes things easier to remember, so there’s that. We work in the contradiction, and perhaps the polyphonic, marginal, bastard novel can help us see the contradictions we live in. As long as there will be humans, there will be humans telling each other stories.
HP: Dubious and unsatisfying are right, though, because it’s just such restlessness that drives the long form of the novel, the daily return to the desk. I want to ask you a traditional final question, but also to cheat and let it be two questions. First, on the Iraq War: your novel is coming out in summer 2016, thirteen years after the war began. The machinery of the novel requires time. Other literary works of note that address this war have lately been arriving—Philip Metres’s Sand Opera, Eric Fair’s memoir Consequence; works in translation have in recent years begun to find readers here, by Hassan Blasim, Sinan Antoon, and others. The truths of this war keep multiplying, not only through the gradual processes of culture, but as the aftermath of the war—drone warfare; the rise of ISIS; the effects of environmental devastation and depleted uranium in Iraq; the fearmongering taking place right now at the RNC in Cleveland; these only a few examples—proliferates. I’m interested to know how you might predict the course of the representation of and reckoning with the Iraq War: what work seems to be happening now, what work has yet to be done?
Second, to return again to the personal: I’d love to know what you yourself are working on, what’s next for you.
RS: I think the best American work about the Iraq War specifically and the war on terror in general has been done by civilians. I think a lot of so-called “veteran writers” are too invested in redemption, in recuperating some sense of themselves and their experience at war as fundamentally good and decent, and that this desire for redemption has made them sentimental and weakened their integrity as writers. It’s a tendency I saw and fought against in editing Fire and Forget, but over time it has only seemed to grow stronger. I very much admire the work of people trying to think through our contemporary contradictions, the realities of human evil, collective political complicity in an illegal war of aggression, structural violence, racism, and torture, and global American militarism, and it seems that most of the people doing that work in fiction and poetry are civilians, not veterans. Such work by civilians is also often much more interesting formally, as craft. This is not to say that there’s not some good work being done by so-called “veteran writers,” which of course there is, nor that there haven’t been some execrable, sentimental, jingoistic novels by civilians, which of course there have been, but only to note a tendency.
We should count Iraqi and Iraqi-American writers among those civilians doing interesting and honest work, though they inhabit a third, unnamed category, neither “veterans” in the sense of having been soldiers nor “civilians” in the sense of being outside the war. I’m grateful for Salaam Pax’s The Baghdad Blog, for instance, Sinan Antoon’s novels and poetry, Dunya Mikhail’s poetry, Wafaa Bilal’s art-document Shoot an Iraqi, Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter, and Hassan Blasim’s scarily brilliant collection The Corpse Exhibition. I also look forward very much to Jonathan Wright’s forthcoming translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, which won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014.
As for what’s yet to be done, A.B. Huber, a scholar at NYU, once suggested that the great novel of the war on terror would somehow fold together the story of Chelsea Manning and drone warfare. I thought this was a remarkable provocation. I would also like to see something along the lines of a fictional version of Nir Rosen’s book Aftermath. That book is, in my opinion, the very best on-the-ground journalistic account of Baghdad during the war, and much of its virtue lies in Rosen’s painstaking, street-level reporting among both Iraqis and Americans. I fantasize sometimes about a fine-grained, 900-page-long novel about one neighborhood in Baghdad, say al-Dora or the Mansour, in the style of The Wire, tracking both Iraqis and Americans over five or six years of the occupation. Writing that properly would require knowing Arabic and going back to Baghdad again, though, so it may be out of my reach.
I also have some other, non-Iraq-War projects lined up. I’m currently finishing a work of criticism and literary scholarship, The Politics of Trauma: World War II and American Literature, which is the fruit of a decade’s thinking critically about war, literature, and the role of the veteran in American culture. I have another novel in draft, a “road movie novel” about freedom, violence, and art. I have some other ideas for the near future, including a noir thriller and something philosophical on materialism. But it’s really all about the daily return to the desk, as you put it: sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, recreating existence in language. I never intended to write a book about climate change, but when the confluence of desire, need, and opportunity emerged, I knew that I had to write Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. My next project may be just as much a surprise. That’s part of the joy of writing, the sense of exploration, the wild freedom: the void of the page can open anywhere.
Tags: Hilary Plum, Roy Scranton, War Porn
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November 21, 2016
Review: Roy Scranton’s “War Porn”
by Charles R. Larson
Let’s admit that there’s an increasing creepiness in novels that depict American soldiers who have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. War novels, historically, have been anti-war, either showing the futility of the individual engagement or the emotional results on the participants (PTSD). Even the good wars (if there are any) wreck havoc on soldiers, often making it impossible for them to fold back into the environments they left. Thus, Roy Scranton’s War Porn is no surprise—especially the novel’s premise that some returned soldiers get sexually aroused by recalling the despicable acts they committed in battle. War is a turn-on for them but for others (especially the women back home), well, the author’s implication is that they can be treaded as violently as victims in a battle zone.
So, yes, this is what we get near the end of Scranton’s story, i.e., how these acts began: “Yeah. That’s basically ‘cause we were bored. I mean one of our OGA dudes came from Abu G, and he gave us guidance on a bunch of shit he said worked really well over there. Naked Dog-Pile, Electric Wire Box, Fake Menstrual Wipe, shit like that. But a lot of shit we did ‘cause we were bored. I mean, plus all the normal shit—sleep deprivation, hostile environment, loud music, stress positions, beatings, immersion—you know, the basics,” stated matter-of-factly as if these events warpornare perfectly obvious and appropriate.
For Aaron Wilson (who considered himself cultured and sophisticated before the war, reading Whitman and Joyce), the torture began innocently enough—though also out of boredom—with insects. Huge camel spiders and scorpions were matched against one another. “When we got a scorpion we fought him against camel spider after camel spider until he died in captivity or was killed by another scorpion. The winner was named Saddam.” Cute.
Charged with clearing the undetonated IEDs, Wilson and his cohorts delight in abusing their Iraqi workers. No surprise, since they have nothing more than contempt for the Iraqis, and this is still very early in the war when there’s a high amount of rah-rah propaganda to keep them focused. Daily briefings with statements such as these: “We are soldiers, the fighting men who man the ramparts protecting America from the insidious evils of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism that now threaten our way of life. We’re here because Saddam Hussein was a threat to America, his nuclear weapons and biological programs poised to be handed over to terrorists who hate us because of our freedom, who hate our way of life, and who have no compunction about murdering your wives, mothers, sons, and daughters in cold blood.” It’s easy to forget how sick the rhetoric from the neo-cons was, even for those of us watching helplessly at home.
Ginned up with such rhetoric, Wilson and his buddies delight in running over innocent Arabs with their Humvees, including children; and after they return home, since they can’t fit back into the lives they led before, they redeploy. And redeploy. But multiple redeployments make them even less likely to adapt to life après la guerre. Wilson himself likes to show others the photos he took of the victims he and his pals tortured, using Abu Grebe as their model. Nor is there any way to forget, to escape the conditioning of the war arena: “All the long ride home while girls talked to me and each other, I scanned overpasses for snipers and watched the shoulder for IEDs. I kept reaching back for my rifle, startled that I’d lost it, and eyeballing cars passing on 205, feeling spooked, thinking I need a drink, I need a smoke, how the fuck long do I have to do this alone?”
There’s one Iraqi character in the story who acts as a kind of counterpoint to the violent American soldiers. The sections of the novel devoted to him also show the same distortions that Americans had been fed about the war’s success. “We have to get rid of Saddam and his goatcunt sons. Donald Rumsfeld says it’ll be short. Just a few weeks of insanity, just a few weeks of war, then the Americans will give us peace and democracy. We’ll be a great nation again, like Germany or Japan. We have the oil, we have the drive, we have the brains and dedication, all we need is freedom and we’ll be as great a Baghdad ever was.”
Roy Scranton’s War Porn is one more pathetic account of America’s worst foreign affairs decision ever. With hundreds of thousands of Vets in our midst, we’ve got problems that will be with us until the end of this century.
Roy Scranton: War Porn
Soho, 343 pp., $26
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Charles R. Larson is Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University, in Washington, D.C. Email = clarson@american.edu. Twitter @LarsonChuck.
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Finally, a Realistic Iraq War Novel
Roy Scranton's 'War Porn' bucks the trends of recent fiction about soldiers.
By Tom A. Peter
August 2, 2016
Thirteen years have passed since Roy Scranton was deployed to Iraq as an enlisted artilleryman in the U.S. Army. He’s since co-edited Fire and Forget, a collection of short stories about Iraq and Afghanistan and written a non-fiction book about facing the threat of climate change, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. Now teaching creative writing at the University of Notre Dame, Scranton has criticized the ways that many veterans talk about Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier this summer he tweeted, “You know what would be awesome? More veterans whining about how nobody understands the moral complexity of being an imperial stormtrooper.”
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He has a point: The last five years has seen a steady trickle of Iraq and Afghanistan novels (and many memoirs allegedly so full of holes that they may as well be considered fiction). Many of the books have won acclaim, and deservedly so, but almost all of them have suffered from the limitations of first-wave war fiction, works still close to the conflicts and more raw than they are reflective. As a genre, they tend to be obsessed with telling readers that war is awful, our post-9/11 conflicts were quagmires, but all our veterans were just good guys doing the best they could with a bad situation.
Rather than offering stories specific to America’s recent conflicts, these books wind up telling traditional war stories that are at odds with what most veterans experienced serving in places like Baghdad or Jalalabad. Iraq and Afghanistan rarely offered quintessential Hemingwayesque struggles for masculinity. In his recent non-fiction book Tribe, Sebastian Junger points out that only 10 percent of today’s veterans experienced actual combat and yet 50 percent of them have applied for permanent disability due to PTSD. No other war in recent memory has left service members traumatized in these numbers and yet post-9/11 veterans endured just a third the casualties of those who served in Vietnam. Troops in Vietnam suffered a quarter of the mortality rate of those who fought in World War II.
The global war on terror is vastly different and mercifully less violent than those that came before it and yet this distinction is anything but apparent in most of the fiction published about it so far. These visceral narratives are seemingly unmoored in time and place and tend to function as generic war stories about heroes making difficult choices in the face of great adversity. The central tension of Kevin Powers’s novel The Yellow Birds is the protagonist’s pledge to a fellow soldier’s mother that he will keep her son safe in Iraq. Amid the brutality and chaos of combat, the narrator does not succeed and commits a war crime to hide the extent of his failure. And yet, the book is written in such a way that relies on readers to feel more empathy for the narrator, an American infantryman, than an Iraqi man who is murdered while the soldier tries to cover his tracks.
THE YELLOW BIRDS by Kevin Powers256 pp., Back Bay Books, $14.95
YOUNGBLOOD by Matt Gallagher352 pp., Atria Books, $26.00
The unwillingness of most veterans’ fiction to cast soldiers in an unsympathetic light—even when they commit war crimes—is one of the most striking elements of the genre. In Matt Gallagher’s Youngblood, a fresh-faced American lieutenant clashes with a salty staff sergeant on his fourth deployment. The enlisted soldier is aggressive with Iraqis and has a reputation for killing unarmed civilians and placing weapons to them after the fact to avoid criminal charges. As the story unfolds, the veteran’s apparent callousness is cast as a sort of wisdom and his brutality excused as a byproduct of serving so many combat tours. In books like The Yellow Birds or Youngblood, it’s sad when Iraqis die but the real victims are always the American soldiers forced to pull the trigger in a confusing, needless war. Aside from military translators, Iraqis and Afghans seem to exist in these fictional worlds largely as people to be killed so American soldiers can learn about war, life and death.
It’s hard not to see these problems as a consequence of a thank-you-for-service culture that has arisen in America as civilians over-correct for how the country treated those returning from Vietnam. We are comfortable questioning a war but almost never the soldiers who fight it. Take, for example, the mood in 2011 when America ended its war in Iraq and President Barack Obama announced the beginning of troop withdrawals in Afghanistan and plans to conclude combat operations there in 2014. At that moment, 57 percent of Americans said Iraq had not been worth fighting and 52 percent said the same of Afghanistan. Only 36 percent approved of Iraq and 41 percent of Afghanistan. And yet, the same survey by the Pew Research Center found that 91 percent of Americans felt proud of those serving in the military and 76 percent said they’d thanked a service member. In other words, up to about a third of Americans thanked members of the military for volunteering to fight wars that they opposed.
Not surprisingly, the villain in Iraq and Afghanistan fiction tends to be geopolitics, leaving those in the trenches with little to no agency. These messy insurgencies either anoint soldiers as troubled heroes or martyrs, morally compromised and sacrificed at the altar of misguided wars. That’s not to say these books are poorly executed. Phil Klay’s Redeployment is rightfully considered a masterpiece that compellingly engages these issues but even this short story collection feels confined in places by the moment in which it was created.
Scranton’s debut novel War Porn is at the forefront of what will inevitably be a second wave of books to emerge from post-9/11 wars, as veterans get more distance from them. Consider that the canonical works from other conflicts didn’t appear until decades after leaders signed peace treaties. It would take Joseph Heller 16 years after World War II ended to publish Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut 27 years to come out with Slaughterhouse-Five. Books printed either during the war or immediately after it were more likely to be traditional tales of heroism, bravery and survival like Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) or other titles modern readers are unlikely to have heard of.
WAR PORN by Roy Scranton352 pp., Soho Press, $26.00
War Porn offers a view of the American military unlike anything else written about Iraq or Afghanistan. Scranton traces the lives of liberals at a barbecue in Utah, an American soldier deployed to Baghdad, and an Iraqi mathematician on the eve of the invasion, exploring how the war causes all their lives to intersect.
Although Private Wilson, the soldier protagonist, experiences combat, fighting is peripheral to the story. Instead, Scranton chooses to focus on the struggle for humanity that comes in quiet moments. Early on we see a group of male grunts sexually harass three female soldiers as they try to change in private. Rather than creating a character who intervenes on their behalf or a narrator who expresses remorse, Scranton lets the scene unfold without commentary or apology. (It’s worth noting that statistically speaking, service members are about as likely to have sexually harassed a fellow soldier as they are to have fired a weapon at an enemy. Only 10 percent of veterans experienced combat whereas 8.85 percent of all active duty troops reported experiencing sexual harassment in the past year. Women deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan reported that the problem was even worse downrange.)
Throughout the novel, Scranton resists the temptation to deliver a redemptive or sympathetic moment for soldiers who misbehave or suffer humiliation. Soldiers in his book are normal humans capable of equal parts goodness and cruelty. If The Yellow Birds is the backstory we invent that compels us to thank a soldier, War Porn is the unspoken reality that might make some veterans uncomfortable accepting our unsolicited gratitude.
The portion of War Porn devoted to Qasim, an Iraqi professor, allows Scranton to look at the American invasion from the outside, revealing the terror the war often inflicted on civilians. At times it’s distractingly apparent that Scranton, a white man from Oregon, is writing from the perspective of an Iraqi—yes, Arabs have a rich tradition of proverbs and poetry but at times Scranton’s Iraqi characters seem unable to speak without using a parable or sharing sage bits of wisdom. But Qasim’s story is critical to the book’s universe and delivers a crushing payout in the end. Through the professor we’re also introduced to an array of complex Iraqi characters, shifting our reflexive sympathies away from American soldiers as we see them through the eyes of the occupied.
In War Porn, Scranton has found a way for America to move beyond the hero cult we’ve built around our military. Without any moralizing, he offers an undeniably courageous book that depicts war as a corrosive force that corrupts everyone it touches. The book offers a guided meditation on Iraq certain to force long overdue introspection on how we think about the war, those who fought it, and the Americans and Iraqis it affected. Though War Porn doesn’t set out to change anyone’s mind, it’s impossible to read it without reconsidering how you think about Iraq and our treatment of those who served.
Tom A. Peter is a freelance journalist who has covered the Middle East and Afghanistan for nearly a decade.
@TomAPeter
Read MoreBooks, Culture, Military, War, Iraq War, Soldiers
An interview with Roy Scranton, author of War Porn
By Eric London
1 September 2016
The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke to Roy Scranton, the author of the newly released novel War Porn (SoHo Press). Scranton enlisted in the US Army in 2002 and served with the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad, first as a Private Second Class before ultimately being promoted to Sergeant. His novel treats both the experiences of American soldiers in Iraq and at home, but, unusually, also attempts to present the reality of the war from the point of view of Iraqi civilians.
Roy Scranton
After returning from Iraq, Scranton received an MA from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in English from Princeton. He presently teaches in the University of Notre Dame Department of English.
The World Socialist Web Site reviewed War Porn earlier this month and noted that it “expresses and helps advance the profound social anger that is emerging amidst the rumble of a society devastated by imperialist war.” In the eyes of this reviewer, it is the most memorable and aesthetically rich anti-war novel to have emerged in response to the “war on terror.”
To a certain extent, Scranton reflects in literary terms the same objective opposition to imperialist war and conspiracy that finds expression in figures like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. For all three, their experiences in the “wars of the 21st century” shattered the veil of lies regarding the democratic and humanitarian character of those conflicts.
The emergence of such a novel indicates that the objective realities of war and economic hardship are increasingly coming into conflict with the stale and largely subjective intellectual and artistic trends that have dominated in recent decades. Serious writers have the responsibility to employ their skills and sensibilities to break literature from the prejudices and upper-middle-class conformism that still carry such weight.
The WSWS is grateful to have spoken with Roy Scranton and publishes an edited text of the conversation below:
* * * * *
Eric London: An early section of War Porn portrays the deeply reactionary climate amongst the American occupation forces in Iraq, expressed in the harshness of the language and the official encourage ment of a culture of brutality.
Roy Scranton: That’s the easy part of the genre. The “war novel” genre in America today is typically some version of a quest narrative. A young man goes to war with whatever vision or ideals he has and then finds out war is hell and when he comes back there is typically a moment of redemption or recuperation.
This can be done in a complicated, aesthetically interesting, and beautiful way like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried [1990]. This is the canonical work in this narrative and working against it was one of the key motivations I had in writing War Porn. The story of the soldier going to war had to be one of the main parts of the book, but I tried to turn this formula on its head while also trying to work with the genre in some ways.
For example, the war is often the flashback in this type of narrative, but in the sections following Wilson [a prominent character] in the book, the war is the present tense and his civilian life is flashback. Before he ever joins the military he is living in a trailer on the Oregon coast.
EL: The US has been at war for twenty-five years and imperialist war has been a central feature of political and cultural life for over a century. There is a passage in your book where you seem to mock formulaic patriotism and its dominance in popular culture. You mention here “the stories of previous wars.” How has this affected American society more broadly?
RS: We’ve been at war since the United States was founded. If you go back even past 100 years you get to the wars against the Native Americans, and the story of the US is the story of soldiers killing brown people and clearing land for businessmen and farmers and bankers. That seems to be the way we do it. It was the same in Iraq. There is a certain language that the American story is a war story. It’s the story of empire.
Interestingly, the artillery unit I served with in Oklahoma when I got back from Iraq had an insignia with two crossed swords on a red sun. One of the swords was wavy and the other was straight. That unit insignia commemorated a battle the unit fought, which was called the Battle of Bud Bajo [in March 1906]. This took place in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war.
It was a massacre. This battalion and some other units climbed up this dormant volcano to a village of mostly women and children, armed with swords. They came up the side and just shot down into the bowl of the volcano where the villagers were. The red sun commemorates how the field ran red with the blood of the so-called “insurgents.” That’s deep inside the culture of the US military, this history of imperial conquest. It’s the living heart of the American military.
EL: It was out of the imperialist bloodbath of the First World War that some of the greatest American literature emerged: John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers [1921], E. E. C ummings’ The Enormous Room [1922], of course ,Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms [1929], and somewhat later Katherine Ann Porter’s story Pale Horse, Pale Rider [1939].
RS: Dos Passos is a great example. Nobody reads Three Soldiers today. That kind of anti-war novel has continued to be written, but often it is shunted aside by later critics and by more recent writers. This is a huge question: when did the trauma narrative become the main way Americans talked about war? This is a version of the quest narrative I was talking about earlier where a soldier learns something true about the world. You have [English poet] Wilfred Owen and Tim O’Brien. And these books can be pro-war, as with Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel [1920].
For that matter it is not just World War One, it is also World War Two. You have James Jones and John Oliver Killens…
EL: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead [1948] …
RS: Right. Now, Jones and Mailer come out of the proletarian novel tradition and Killens out of the Richard Wright tradition. These are authors who are trying to make sense of World War II. In the ’60s and ’70s this method was superseded by books like [Joseph Heller’s] Catch 22 [1961] and [Kurt Vonnegut’s] Slaughterhouse-Five [1969] and [Thomas Pynchon’s] Gravity’s Rainbow [1973], which changed the focus to the individual traumatized soldier.
I would argue there is a complicated process developing here, where writers are trying to work out the problem of how to reconcile the official narrative of nationalist sacrifice with the logic of capitalist exchange, where it is not about sacrificing bodies but rather it’s about turning human labor into a commodity, turning everything into an exchangeable commodity.
EL: War Porn has been described as an angry novel. At one point, you describe a soldier receiving the bronze star after shooting a mentally retarded Iraqi child in the chest. One of the most effective moments in the novel is when you quote, in its entirety, George W. Bush’s speech announcing the beginning of the war in March 2003. Why did you quote the whole speech and why does it work?
RS: I quote that speech from the point of view of the Iraqi family in Baghdad waiting for the invasion. That’s part of the idea behind the concept of the book structurally, is that truth is always in the eye of the other. Truth is dialectical. I think this is one of the great things that the novel as a form has to offer as opposed to television and film, because the novel can still express a dialectical consciousness and engagement that no other art form can do.
We get to see not just how people see each other but how different worlds are constructed and how they are constructed in relation to one another’s worlds. It’s one thing listening to Bush’s speech here in America. There is the classic literary moment of the calm before the storm. It is a conventional dramatic moment. To put that in the setting of America’s moment, it is like thinking, “What will happen to our boys?” It is Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
But I wanted to dramatize what would 9/11 look like to the people of Iraq? 9/11 was just a little clink compared to the devastation that we unleashed on Baghdad. We blew that city the f--- up. I wanted that sense of drama and I wanted that sense of impending doom from an Iraqi point of view. I wanted to establish what Bush was saying would have sounded like to an Iraqi family waiting to be bombed. It’s one thing to be critical of Bush’s rhetoric and we can all do that, but I wanted to push it. None of it was legitimate. Even if there are people in Iraq who were hoping for the US invasion and hoping to get rid of Saddam, even for them the speech is a moment of total crisis.
EL: The idea that the “truth is dialectical” is also expressed in the descriptions of Baghdad, which seem so aesthetically beautiful in part because you contrast the ancient city and its inhabitants with the devastation unleashed by American imperialism.
RS: I wanted Baghdad to be alive. Wilson’s Baghdad is very different from Qasim’s Baghdad. They both lived there, Wilson for one year and Qasim for many years. The Baghdad I saw as a soldier was a ruined place torn by war. It was hostile. The city wanted to kill me. The city and the people merged into one giant hostile environment where the only place I felt safe was behind the walls and inside the wire of the most protected US bases, and even there you’d still get mortared.
But I knew even then that this was a city that people lived in, it was their home, and part of what I did going back in 2014 with Rolling Stone was to try to uncover or understand or to see Baghdad more from the point of view of someone for whom Baghdad is home. I wanted to make that idea and that place live. I wanted to humanize it, to make it beautiful in places. I wanted to make it mean something that we destroyed it.
EL: To what extent did you undertake a study of the modern history of Iraq as part of your research for War Porn? Did you study the fact that Iraq once had a mass socialist movement, and that in the mid-20 th century its Communist Party was amo ng the most powerful in the region, with over 100,000 members?
RS: I did take these historical questions up as part of my research. I was trying to understand Baghdad and the situation there. Of course, once you start reading the history you come to understand how deeply the US has been involved in manipulating and intervening in the region over and over again, particularly against socialist and workers parties.
The US and Great Britain have been profoundly antipathetic and hostile to any kind of real democratic and socialist organization in Iraq specifically, but across the Middle East. You see it again and again since the discovery of oil and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. You also see at moments how the Soviet Union is involved in the great power politics of the region.
EL: It has now been 25 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. How has this impacted the cultural level of humanity and how can writers approach this question? The October Revolution had an immense impact on several generations of writers.
RS: First, Russian writers have been talking about the fall of the Soviet Union since it happened. I’m not as conversant with that work as I would like to be but I do know there is a vibrant, complicated literature being written dealing with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its transition to wild west capitalism and then to the rise of Putin.
Second, from an American point of view, the fall of the USSR is a moment of American imperial victory. The greatest enemy of 50 years or so finally fell apart and we have people like Francis Fukuyama saying it’s the “end of history.” And that is most definitely worth trying to understand through the novel and through literary terms, this complicated global moment.
EL: I’m reminded of Edmund Wilson’s essay, “The Literary Consequences of the Crash,” or really the entirety of “The American Earthquake,” again, going back to the impact of the Russian Revolution and the 1929 economic crisis on literature.
RS: When you mentioned Edmund Wilson, I thought of the crash of 2008, the Great Recession, and how since then there has been a change in the way people talk about socialism and capitalism. That may eventually make more of a mark on American culture than I think the fall of the Soviet Union did, although in a way its all of a piece and it’s all connected. The most interesting work would be one that could connect the Clinton years and the fall of the Soviet Union to the war on terror and the Great Recession and this hellish moment we’re in now. And moreover it would have to deal with the crisis of climate change.
EL: You have a situation today where the class struggle has essentially been suppressed for almost 40 years, since the PATCO strike and Reagan’s firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers. Yet the class struggle had an immense impact on the p ost-First World War literary scene.
RS: The fact of the matter is that literary fiction is predominately a leisure entertainment of upper-middle-class people and a few wealthy people. As a result, it’s going to largely reflect the ideological predispositions of those people. These are the books that editors are going to push and that agents are going to sell. The institution of the MFA program serves to house and protect a sort of literary production within the universities. Ideologically, it is middle-class even if so many adjuncts now are more working class.
I don’t have an easy answer. To talk about class conflict in the US is always profoundly difficult because of the way it has been repressed and deflected and the ways in which it is projected into race. There is supposedly no such thing as poor people in America, just people who haven’t gotten rich yet. To talk of class consciousness in America, to think about American culture in a Marxist way has been a longstanding problem.
There is a new graphic novel by Maximilian Uriarte called the “White Donkey.” It’s really good. It is a class conscious work and it is a very strong story, a very astute work about the American occupation of Iraq.
Author Interview: Roy Scranton
The author of War Porn on war literature today, our social reality, and the contract of fiction
Photo Credit: Hannah Dunphy
“Myths survive for only as long as they are enacted by those who accept them,” John Gray writes in The Silence of Animals, “[they] are not eternal archetypes frozen somewhere out of time. They are more like snatches of music that play in the mind.”
To author Roy Scranton, “we make our myths.” It is a simple, axiomatic statement, but a crucial reminder in a contemporary moment where, to quote a wise friend, “to convince is to state the truth,” and where certain convictions seem increasingly cheap.
The myths I’m talking about, and the myths that appear to loom large in Scranton’s writing, are the ones we are perhaps too comfortably avoiding — the ones about civilization’s progress, endless economic accumulation, and the function of violence as a sustainable means to perpetuate it all.
In 2015, City Lights Books published Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, a book-length expansion of an essay written by Roy Scranton for The Stone, an online philosophy series for The New York Times, co-founded by philosopher Simon Critchley. Within the deceptively slim volume, Scranton soberly lays out the crises facing “our carbon-fueled global capitalist civilization,” a system engaged in a “suicidal burnout.” “The odds of that civilization surviving,” he argues, “are negligible.”
For Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “There is something cathartic about [Scranton’s] refusal to shy away from the full scope of our predicament”:
He is not asking us to do anything. He has no political agenda. He is pessimistic about grassroots activism and holds out little hope for international agreements. He doubts that renewable energy is even theoretically capable of replacing carbon-based energy. If he has an “ask,” it’s not for a carbon tax or a humbler lifestyle; it’s that we make an effort to save what we can of our cultural heritage, to salvage the hard-won wisdom of the dead, from the Greeks to the Buddha, from the Torah to the Federalist Papers.
Scranton’s debut novel, War Porn, is out this month from Soho Press. It examines the American invasion and occupation of Iraq through interwoven narratives — a group of barbecuing civilians in Utah with differing psychological distance from warfare (a section titled “strange hells”), the slow terror wrought upon Iraqis (titled “the fall”), the necessarily dissociating life of a grunt (“your leader will control your fire”). Breaking these narratives up are sections each titled “babylon” — prose poems of redacted text: military lexicon, the sanitized babble of war reportage, translations of the Koran. In a review at The Intercept, Eliott Colla writes that “Scranton has produced a literary work that doesn’t just describe the outrages of the war, but punches them into the American gut.” Tom A. Peter at The New Republic suggests that, “in War Porn, Scranton has found a way for America to move beyond the hero cult we’ve built around our military. Without any moralizing, he offers an undeniably courageous book that depicts war as a corrosive force that corrupts everyone it touches.”
Perhaps the gap between the myths currently ‘playing in our mind’ and the unvarnished truth cannot be entirely closed, but as a journalist, poet, essayist, novelist, and veteran, Scranton’s work critically functions as an approach to the gap itself, and a chance to ‘interrupt’ myth’s continual, ever-updating transmissions.
I spoke with Roy Scranton about War Porn, his nonfiction work, and more, below. He reads at Literati Bookstore August 22nd, at 7pm.
Q: Your dissertation is entitled The Trauma Hero and the Lost War: World War II, American Literature, and the politics of Trauma, 1945–1975. And you’ve edited a collection of “short stories from the Long War,” Fire and Forget, featuring the recent work of veterans like Phil Klay, Gavin Kovite, and others. What do you find distinct about the wartime literature of today versus the literature of the post-war period, and are there any similarities?
The biggest difference between war literature today and post-Vietnam or post-World War II war literature is simply the fact that today comes after yesterday. Writers working in the genre have to deal not only with Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane, and not only with Hemingway and Dos Passos, but with everything that came after, from Martha Gellhorn to Joan Didion to Yusef Komunyakaa to Tim O’Brien, and also with the increasing diversity of American culture. Weirdly, war literature has today become a kind of bastion of very traditional male whiteness — much of it is atavistic in that way — despite the real diversity of the American armed forces.
Soho Press (2016)
Q: War Porn is a novel of the Iraq War, but a critical narrative thread within it examines what one might call the military-civilian gap. In a recent op-ed for the New York Times entitled “Star Wars and the Fantasy of American Violence,” you suggest that the real military-civilian gap is not “that veterans know something civilians don’t understand or can’t imagine,” but is the gulf “between the fantasy of American heroism and the reality of what the American military does, between the myth of violence and the truth of war. The real gap is between our subconscious belief that righteous violence can redeem us, even ennoble us, and the chastening truth that violence debases and corrupts.”
At the Democratic National Convention, Gen. John Allen, to familiar chants of “USA,” gave a speech that rehearsed the narrative promise of a triumphant — and active — military, and though the particular chauvinism of his speech seemed to surprise the pundits, this rhetorical frame for warfare appears indispensable to both our political campaigns and, as you suggest, our cultural conventions. Was it your intention with War Porn to craft a literature that questions these myths? Is this a principle you feel should drive literary work today?
My intention with War Porn was to explore the relationship between fantasy and reality, how there is at once an unbridgeable gap between the two, and no gap at all: after all, they create each other. I take as an epigraph two lines from Wallace Stevens, one of our great poets of the imagination: “Soldier, there is a war between the mind / And sky, between thought and day and night.” Those lines, for me, set up the central conflict of the novel, which is the war between our fantasies and our reality. Matt and Dahlia and Mel in Utah all have their fantasies of war, what the war is and means, as do the soldiers, Aaron and Wilson. As do, in their own way, the Iraqis we meet in “The Fall.” None of them have privileged access to reality: what is real is the conflict and confluence of their perspectives.
I wouldn’t want to say what I think literary work today should be, because what I want most from literature myself, as a reader, is to be surprised, enlightened, and delighted, to see something new, to learn something, to be dazzled by fresh beauty. There are no rules for creating such things. But I do believe that the novel itself, as a form, has a unique capacity to put multiple consciousnesses, multiple discourses, multiple realities into a kind of aesthetic and conceptual tension, and I think that anybody working at the highest levels of the form would necessarily be working with that capacity.
Q: Your work in nonfiction, particularly the captivating book-length essay Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, seems as well to advocate for a transcendence over, or at least a reckoning with, myths about human progress. In the outset of Learning To Die you state that “progressivist belief in the infinite perfectibility of the human animal depends significantly on carbon-fueled Capitalism’s promises of infinite economic growth. Accepting our limits means coming to terms with our innate violence and our inescapable mortality.”
City Lights Books (2015)
Geographer David Harvey seems to expand on these limits when he, in a recent interview, wonders whether “every dominant mode of production, with its particular political configuration, creates a mode of opposition as a mirror image of itself,” adding that “much of the Left right now, being very autonomous and anarchical, is actually reinforcing the endgame of neoliberalism.”
It seems that much of our practices of political resistance in some way serve, as you mention, an economy dependent on carbon consumption and, as Harvey illustrates, mirror the strategies of flexible accumulation, such that, for Harvey, “the uprisings we see […] are not about the labor process: they are about the politics of daily life.” One such “uprising” about the politics of daily life might be the People’s Climate March, which you participated in and describe in Learning to Die as “little more than an orgy of democratic emotion.”
Whereas Harvey asks if there is “a way to organize that is not a mirror image,” you seem to suggest that there appears no way out of what you call “a system of cultural technology that is silently burning up masses of carbon while shunting activist outrage into impotent feedback loops.” One might presume this to mean that we are stuck, immutably, with carbon-fueled Capitalism. Even before the fascinating suggestions the book proposes towards the end — those of “interrupting social circuits of fear and reaction, looking deep into the face of death, and cultivating our rich stocks of human cultural technology,” re-orienting ourselves “away from the continual press of the present” and engaging in localized, humanistic projects of acceptance, memorial and remembrance — perhaps many people, Harvey included, are not yet willing to refrain from an, even if ineffective, political project of resistance, nor its goals of reforming or overthrowing the extant economic order. I wonder if you’ve found any pushback on this particular (potential) split from peers or readers on the Left? As well, what do you make of the viability of a project of anthropocenic acceptance, since the book’s publication?
We are born into and grow into a world and a set of thoughts not of our making. As Marx put it, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” We can’t ever see the backs of our heads, just like we can’t ever get to the bottom of the ways in which we’re always already shaped by the social reality we’re thrown into. The good news, though, is that just as much as we can’t escape our social reality, that social reality can never quite fully stitch up the totality of existence: within ourselves, between ourselves, at the margins and in pockets and shadowed nooks, we are always producing new reality that doesn’t quite fit the global capitalist tapestry.
That, I think, is one of the virtues of interruption over reaction, as I talk about it in Learning to Die: Interruption suspends the process by which we constantly weave our social reality around us, thereby opening up a space for something different. Reaction, on the other hand, engages and fuels that process. Clintonian neoliberalism produces Trumpist neofascism which reinforces Clintonian false consensus which reinforces the rage of those who feel like they’ve been abandoned by their own country, and on and on. For one instance. Interruption for me is something like Adorno’s negative dialectics, but also something zen. We cannot escape contradiction and causation, but in the awareness of contradiction and causation, we might for a moment understand how contradiction is no contradiction, and causation no causation.
When I talk about Learning to Die, some people think that when I say acceptance I’m telling them we need to give up on our work. It’s difficult to explain sometimes, because many people on the left are focused on whoever they perceive to be their enemy, “bad guys” like the Koch Brothers or Exxon, they’re locked into a moral struggle in which they’ve cast themselves as heroes. But I’m not saying that we should give up on our work. I’m saying that we should do our work in the full awareness of its inevitable failure. We should choose how to do our work, and even what work to do, in full awareness that there will be no judgment day, no salvation, no happy ending.
Q: Near the end Learning to Die you argue that “the fate of the humanities, as we confront the end of modern civilization, is the fate of humanity itself.” Did you view the composition of War Porn at the outset as a kind of implementation of the memorial practices you outline in Learning to Die? I suppose one’s critical work will find a way into one’s creative work, but I wonder if you framed the process of War Porn strictly as “novel-writing,” or if you frame all of your writing, in general, as part of the same project?
War Porn was written long before Learning to Die, but I don’t see storytelling and thought as separate processes. There are different contracts we make with our audiences: With War Porn, the contract is that this is fiction, even if it’s based in reality. With Learning to Die, the contract is that my claims are based on evidence, even if there are moments where the imagination helps shape the presentation. In all my work, I’m trying to do justice to the multiplicity of reality.
Q: What are you reading right now? What do you wish people were writing right now?
I’m reading Valerie Sayers’s novel The Powers. She’s a colleague of mine at Notre Dame, where I just joined the faculty, and The Powers is a gripping novel about Catholic anti-war activists and Joe DiMaggio in 1941. I’m also reading Felix Bernstein’s Notes on Post-conceptual Poetry. Stuff I’m teaching for class. I’m reading some stuff about the history of American intervention in the Middle East for an article I’m writing. I recently read Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself, about the New Deal, World War II, and the way Jim Crow Southern Democrats were key to Roosevelt’s success in dealing with both.
I wish Nathanael West was writing a novel about Silicon Valley. I wish James Baldwin was writing about the Black Lives Matter movement. I wish George Eliot was writing about the Syrian Civil War. I wish Mary McCarthy was writing about the Hillary Clinton campaign. I wish H.L. Mencken was writing about the war on terror. I wish Carl Sagan was writing about climate change. I wish Frank O’Hara and Elizabeth Bishop and Louis Zukofsky were still writing poems.
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Dying to Live
In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton explores the global failure to address the climate crisis.
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene by Roy Scranton. | Photo by Lori Eanes
By Michael Berry | Feb 10 2016
By 2003, 26-year-old Roy Scranton had already learned how to die. He attributed his physical and emotional survival while serving a tour of duty with the U.S. Army in Iraq to the teaching of an 18th-century samurai manual: "Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily." By imagining the worst, Scranton was able to concentrate on safeguarding his fellow soldiers.
He returned to the United States in time for Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans. That led Scranton to consider what it meant to live in a time when humanity operates as a geological force. In 2013, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, in which he insisted that the sooner humans realized that their civilization was already dead, the sooner they could address their new situation. The essay forms the core of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights, 2015).
With clarity and conviction, Scranton explores the global failure to address the climate crisis and the possibility that the planet could become uninhabitable. Referring to classic texts as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh, he urges readers to face their fear of death and find guidance in literature as they prepare for and adapt to the future.
The book is an unapologetic punch in the gut, likely to leave many readers gasping. Scranton does offer a kind of hope: By making tough accommodations and reconnecting with our core humanity, we may eventually be able to recover our collective breath.
Roy Scranton on Terror, Climate, Anthropocene and What They’re Terrified of You Knowing
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By David Henry Sterry
Like many angry teenage idiots, I read “Howl” and it turned me into a poet. When I saw it was published by City Lights, I made it my mission to someday get there. When I first walked into the bookstore in North Beach, I felt like a pilgrim finally reaching Mecca. One of my favorite moments as an author was doing my first event there. Thus, I became a friend of City Lights. When they publish something they think I’d like, they send it to me. This book blew the top off my head, and I feel lucky enough to be in the position to pick the big brain of Roy Scranton.
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David Henry Sterry: Your book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is in many ways about how the world is changing in dangerous, often horrifying ways. I’m curious how you see this in relationship to the attacks in Paris, in Nigeria, the beheadings, and acts of both sophisticated and crude barbarism which seem to be sweeping the globe at the moment.
Roy Scranton: The word “barbarism” comes from the ancient Greeks. They used the word “barbaros” to distinguish foreigners from citizens, partly by mocking the sound of foreign speech: “barbarbarbarbar.” That’s what I hear every time someone calls ISIS barbaric: not an empirical observation, but an atavistic political judgment about who belongs to the West and who doesn’t.
On an empirical level, of course, there is a very clear connection between climate change, the worst drought the Middle East has seen in modern history, the Syrian Civil War, the rise of ISIS, and the flood of refugees fleeing the region. Similar to what happened when the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi Army following the 2003 invasion, the devastation of agriculture in Syria (partly climatological, partly a result of Assad’s policies) created an army of jobless, hopeless, angry young men. The U.S. Department of Defense has called climate change a “threat multiplier,” but it is also a threat driver: the ramifications of catastrophic climate change are not only going to exacerbate existing conflicts, but are going to create whole new ones.
On the cultural level, fear, scarcity, and instability are going to drive people to increasingly violent extremes. Trump and ISIS are two sides of the same evil, two manifestations of the same fear-driven race to hatred.
DHS: As a soldier, an American, and a citizen of the world, what do you think we can do about this problem from both a macro and micro perspective?
RS: At the macro level, agents are usually trapped within not only institutional norms but also by their own internalized limitations. At the micro level, most of us are too busy trying to pay our credit card bills to do much about anything at all. We’re in a very dangerous time, and all the forces at work are pulling us deeper into the danger. The best that we can do is interrupt the cycles of fear and hatred, create more opportunities for compassionate reflection, and learn to accept our mortality. We need to learn to die.
DHS: I read somewhere recently that a writer was trying to make a connection between fundamentalist terrorism and climate change. Do you see that?
RS: Yes. There is a clear connection.
DHS: Why do you think Western civilization seems so cavalier about the way it is destroying the Earth? And again, what do you think is to be done?
RS: I don’t think we’re cavalier about it, I think we’re schizophrenic. Western Europe and the United State have come to dominate the Earth in the past two hundred years through genocide, violent resource extraction, and fossil-fueled technological innovation. These practices worked really well to put “white” Westerners on top, and there is a powerful cultural inertia that tells us that we should just keep doing more of the same, even if that very strategy seems likely to end in catastrophe.
Nevertheless, we’re not completely suicidal. Western civilization faced the moral horror of genocide when genocide was turned against part of Western civilization itself in the Holocaust, and we’ve been struggling with the consequences of violent resource extraction since the 1960s. Only in the past thirty years have we begun to realize that fossil-fueled industrialization is going to kill us. So on the one hand we have long-term, foundational cultural practices and beliefs, and on the other an empirical awareness founded in scientific observation. Add to that the immense power that we have access to through carbon-fueled technology (flying, iPhones, drones), and the immense pleasure that power provides, and our collective schizophrenia about climate change seems to make even more sense.
Sadly, I think our conscious ability to deal with the problem has lagged fatally behind the opportunity we had for arresting climatic feedbacks before they spin out of control. Now I think the best we can do is adapt, dampen the worst effects, and try to keep the Earth from turning into a Venusian hothouse. But even to do that, we need to decarbonize the global economy immediately.
DHS: Your description of the hell on earth that was Baghdad when you entered it in the early 2000s is absolutely harrowing. To what degree do you believe we have brought the extreme violence and chaos in the Middle East upon ourselves?
RS: The United States and Europe have been meddling in the Middle East for more than a hundred years, bombing, funding assassinations, backing tyrants such as Saddam Hussein, eviscerating populist democratic movements, and supporting fundamentalist regimes like the royal house of Saud. Largely, of course, this has to do with oil. We have been spilling blood in the region for decades. Is it any surprise that we’re reaping the violence we’ve sown?
DHS: Your book is filled with such beautiful writing. I was really struck by this line: “Carbon-fueled capitalism is a zombie system, voracious but sterile.” Could you unpack that for us?
RS: Carbon-fueled capitalism—by which I mean capitalism that runs on extracted coal, oil, and natural gas—is a kind of social organization that consumes large amounts of energy but doesn’t feed that energy back into the global ecosystem in productive ways. It is parasitic to the Earth. What’s more, it’s already dead, though it doesn’t seem to know it yet.
DHS: There are also so many wonderful quotes from so many brilliant and diverse minds in your book. I particularly liked your selection from the eighteenth-century samurai manual Hagakure: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” We in the West seem to have such a horrible relationship with death. How did you find being a soldier affected your relationship with dying, and what have you taken with you from that into your civilian life?
RS: Being a soldier in Baghdad didn’t offer any kind of mystical experience or transcendental wisdom. What it did was challenge me to confront my own mortality, a confrontation I could have had the privilege to avoid for many more years as a white male living in the early 21st century United States. But that challenge is one we all must face sooner or later.
DHS: What exactly do you mean by the term “Anthropocene”?
RS: The Anthropocene is a term some geologists have floated to describe the fact that the Earth has entered a new geological era, one characterized by the advent of the human species as a geological force. Thinkers and intellectuals have picked up the term as a rough synonym for climate change. The Anthropocene is a way to name the world we live in today, a world in which climate change is the single most important fact of our existence.
DHS: Have you been following the presidential candidates’ debates? What is your take on them from an Anthropocenic point of view?
RS: I’m very pessimistic about American electoral politics. By and large, the players at the electoral level are symptoms rather than agents; national policy is largely determined by bureaucracies and the corporate oligarchy. The only candidate who has offered a consistently responsible point of view on climate change has been Bernie Sanders, and we all understand very well that his chances of being validated by the establishment powers are practically zero.
DHS: You quote from the Bible in your book. What is your take on organized religion and its relationship to violence and repression as well as kindness and generosity?
RS: Organized religion is like any other institutionalized social structure, which is to say that it operates through a complex mix of inertia, individual ambitions, ideology, political relations to other institutions, and dependence on the group it serves. I quote the Bible for the same reason I quote the Bhagavad-Gita, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and James Baldwin: they’re all part of a rich, polyphonic tradition of human wisdom that can help us learn to live our transient, mortal lives with compassion and grace.
DHS: What do you want the reader to take away from your book?
RS: A sense of peace.
Author, journalist, Iraq war veteran, and Princeton Ph.D candidate, Roy Scranton’s journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. He has been interviewed by many media outlets, including NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
David Henry Sterry is the author of 16 books, a performer, muckraker, educator, activist, and book doctor. His new book Chicken Self:-Portrait of a Man for Rent, 10 Year Anniversary Edition, has been translated into 10 languages. He’s also written Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex, which appeared on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. He is a finalist for the Henry Miller Award. He co-authored The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published with his current wife, and co-founded of The Book Doctors, who have toured the country from Cape Cod to Rural Alaska, Hollywood to Brooklyn, Wichita to Washington helping countless writers get published. He has appeared on, acted with, written for, been employed as, worked and/or presented at: Will Smith, a marriage counselor, Disney screenwriter, Stanford University, National Public Radio, Milton Berle, Huffington Post, a sodajerk, Michael Caine, the Taco Bell chihuahua, Penthouse, the London Times, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a human guinea pig and Zippy the Chimp. He can be found at davidhenrysterry.com
Follow David Henry Sterry on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sterryhead
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David Henry Sterry
Author, activist, performer, muckraker, book doctor
“Fire and Forget,” by Roy Scranton, Matt Gallagher, Colum McCann, and others
Reviewed By Caleb Cage
April 22nd, 2013
“It is the job of literature to confront the terrible truths of what war has done and continues to do to us,” novelist Colum McCann writes in the foreword for Matt Gallagher and Roy Scranton’s new collection of wartime short stories, Fire and Forget. “It is also the job of literature to make sense of whatever small beauty we can rescue from the maelstrom,” he continues. When the combat veteran tells stories based on their own experiences, McCann adds, the literature takes on a new dimension, becoming a “fervent, and occasionally anguished political act,” but an act that provides truths and interpretations that cannot be provided by non-fiction sources.
If McCann is correct about these special roles of literature, then the stories that follow his introduction do not disappoint. Fire and Forget combines the work of fifteen authors, some established contributors to the national wartime dialogue through their fiction and poetry alongside many new voices. The stories within the collection are as diverse as their authors, effectively addressing subjects from a perspective that has not been covered very well from various forms of American media over the last decade. They focus on the gritty sides of the wars that America has been shielded from, telling of its human impact, and challenging the narratives that are so often unquestioningly perpetuated and defended in newscasts, memoirs, and other media.
As individual stories, many presented in Fire and Forget are among the first to explore the variety of narrative opportunities that these wars offer. A group of soldiers reconnects in New York City after their war; a female soldier with survivor’s guilt rides a train to meet her mother; several soldiers gaggle together to deal with another memorial service the best that they can, relying on irony and sarcasm to make it through; a young soldier with traumatic brain injury attempts to reintegrate into his previous life. Collectively, they provide a snapshot of the moment following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a combined national exhale following ten difficult years.
Further supporting McCann’s assertions, the characters of these stories spend a considerable amount of time exploring the distance between the American culture and the military they served in during wartime. They are open about the lies that they tell their families back home because their loved ones cannot understand the depth of what they are experiencing; they squirm, finding themselves somewhere in between committed military volunteers and sheltered bystanders; and they try to figure out who they really are as individuals against all of those who have already decided their identities for them.
Roy Scranton
Roy Scranton
Although as a collection they offer no coherent narrative, they do combine to offer insights into what sorts of “anguished political acts” they were attempting in their writing, often through broad ironies. The first irony is seen as several of the characters in these stories discuss how difficult it is to talk about Iraq, suggesting that if such is true, then at least these authors can do so through fiction, as McCann suggests. Their discomfort, the differences that they represent as outsiders, and sometimes their simple inability to reintegrate is commonly shown through this distance, a fact that cannot help but comment upon the growing divide between the nation’s military and its civilian populace.
Second, nearly all of these authors write about their wars as events of the past, suggesting a subtle sense of irony on the part of editors who would name their collection Fire and Forget. These stories are not just written in past tense, but rather, often written from the perspective of the veteran, the one who has seen war and returned, not from the in-the-moment perspective of the combat soldier. This reflective style provides for a richer context for the stories, taking into account the wars as a part of the individual characters’ histories instead of merely defining them by their raw experiences as non-fiction and media accounts tend to do. Though there is no mention that any of this consistent approach was coordinated by the editors, it does suggest a political statement of its own: forgetting these wars for these authors would be impossible, even if they wanted to.
While some of the authors, like Colby Buzzell, David Abrams, Matt Gallagher, Siobhan Fallon, and Brian Turner, are well known contributors to the literature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, others are less known but no less significant. This book provides real value in giving these lesser-known authors an opportunity to share and to write fiction about their wars, to tell those truths about the violence they experienced as well as the distance they feel upon their return. These authors, who experienced the war firsthand, do a magnificent job of accounting for their war years in ways that many who have not shared in their experiences may find difficult or alien, which, no doubt, is at least part of the point of the collection.
That point, and the authors chosen to make it, provides the essential credibility for this work, which is also its primary significance. The credibility does not just help this work in terms of its art, but also in terms of its political message. At least this early in the discussion, only these authors and others like them, could engage in challenging sacred American narratives of good verses evil as America fights its enemies abroad. Only they could challenge the image of the sterile warzone depicted by journalists to their partisans on any given night. The fact that they do so effectively gives hope that Fire and Forget will be merely the first of many to do so.
Caleb S. Cage is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, West Point, and a veteran of the Iraq War. He is the co-author of the book, The Gods of Diyala: Transfer of Command in Iraq (Texas A&M, 2008), about his time as a platoon leader, and his essays and fiction have appeared in War, Literature, and the Arts, Red Rock Review, High Country News, Small Wars Journal, and various other publications and anthologies. More from this author →
In 'Fire And Forget,' Vets Turned Writers Tell Their War Stories
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November 11, 20131:38 PM ET
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U.S. Army soldiers begin their journey home from Iraq on July 13, 2010.
Maya Alleruzzo/AP
This Veterans Day, considers these lines from the preface to Fire And Forget, a collection of short stories by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
On the one hand, we want to remind you ... of what happened ... and insist you recollect those men and women who fought, bled, and died in dangerous and far-away places. On the other hand, there's nothing most of us would rather do than leave these wars behind. No matter what we do next, the soft tension of the trigger pull is something we'll carry with us forever.
Fire and Forget
Fire and Forget
Short Stories from the Long War
by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher
Paperback, 234 pages
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Veterans Roy Scranton and Jacob Siegel edited the collection, and each has a story in it.
Scranton served in the Army from 2002 to 2006 and was deployed to Iraq from 2003 to 2004. He's currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Princeton University English Department. Siegel is a captain in the New York National Guard, which he joined not long after Sept. 11. He served in Iraq from 2006 to 2007 and in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012. He edits The Daily Beast's Hero Project blog, which showcases the writing of veterans and covers issues pertaining to vets. Siegel and Scranton first met through the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop. They join Fresh Air's Terry Gross to talk about the experience of war and the challenges of telling their stories.
Interview Highlights
On the conflict soldiers sometimes face when telling war stories
Siegel: I think there's this continuous media appetite for war as narratives of derring-do and of heroism, which is part of it. And then there's an appetite for war where soldiers are just pawns in various political polemics. It's all for people who often, to the soldier, seem like they have no genuine interest in what it's really like, they just want to be entertained or have their opinions validated. ...
I think there's always a feeling among soldiers that what you bring home with you and what happened overseas may be something only you or your group will understand, and that any attempt to bring it to a larger audience or to tell the story of it is, in effect, a cheapening of it and a way of selling it rather than sharing it.
On coping with the fear of death on and off the battlefield
Scranton: I found that I had to shut down my imagination because it really turned into an enemy. The kind of daydreaming and extrapolation of ideas that I love to indulge in as a reader and as a writer was suddenly and completely maladaptive to the situation in Baghdad. The more I could imagine what could happen, the more different ways I thought I could die or fail or mess things up and it just would turn paralyzing. That's where I started to tell myself that it doesn't matter: "None of it matters; you're already dead. Just get through your job."
The kind of daydreaming and extrapolation of ideas that I love to indulge in as a reader and as a writer was suddenly and completely maladaptive to the situation in Baghdad.
Roy Scranton
Siegel: For me, I didn't think about death, the meaning of death, my own death; I thought about death in objects. It produced for me a fear of objects, of things; an adaptive fear. ... You want to see a rock for a rock and an IED for an IED, and so the fear, in those situations, of death is the fear of the thing that brings death. It's the fear of the instrument of death. And that was a powerful thing and something that created a kind of discipline in the mind in a certain way that was utterly exhausting.
On what, as a writer, Scranton hoped to gain from the war experience
Scranton: [I wanted] to be able to write with authority about war, about history, about love and life and so on. I think there's a common sense, especially when it comes to the way we think about the culture we live in, that we sort of live in a mass media spectacle. The real stuff happens in Iraq or somewhere else. Real life is not here where we're on the Internet and where we're on our phones and where we're watching TV.
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That's a myth about war and about the way we live today that is immensely powerful, and I totally believed it and I wanted to go "over there," wherever "over there" was, and encounter that reality with my body, with my existence [and] face danger, death and all the supposedly real, authentic things about war.
On the place of guns in the daily life of a soldier
Siegel: Wanting to carry a gun has almost nothing to do with — or nothing to do with — why I enlisted. ... Guns are obviously the single most important instrument of warfare, they're certainly the most symbolically potent instruments of warfare, but they don't feel so much different than these other tools that you're using.
In the Army, you talk about your "kit," and it's basically the stuff that you carry and it consists of your radio, your frag[mentation] grenades and your first aid pouch and your gun. ... [Guns] didn't feel to me so much different than those other parts of it, up until the point where it was engaged and then it did feel different.
Fiction Review: “Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War” edited by Matt Gallagher and Roy Scranton
February 26, 2013 at 4:00 am by Naomi Huffman
FireForgetRECOMMENDED
To those who have lived in the era that began with 9/11, it could be described as a constant state of war against an enemy, nebulous at best, called “Terror.” The longest sustained conflict the United States has been involved in, the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been wars largely invisible to the American people. There are televised reports, written articles, blogs and photo essays, but unless you’re a soldier or an immediate acquaintance of one, it exists solely in bits of information from 6,000 miles away. Documentaries and Hollywood dramatizations, too, have sought to capture the grit and soul of the wars, but can’t offer us the most important glimpse—confessional storytelling, rather than a cluster of absurd images from the front lines. Nothing brings the reality of war home like hearing it from the hearts and minds of those who experienced it.
“Fire and Forget” arrives at just the right time, when the last vestiges of conflict fall away. It’s a time when we confront, as a nation, what has been accomplished and at what cost. What this selection of stories shows isn’t contained to combat itself but to home life and life before deployment. There are soldiers, Marines, an army spouse, a Baghdad school teacher—editors Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher have not only compiled an excellent diversity of experiences and vantage points into the war, but also a list of accomplished and gifted writers.
The book, named for a type of missile-guidance technology requiring no human input after launch, is an apt metaphor for what soldiers and civilians alike face in the wake of conflict: the struggle and tragedy of forgetting. As Colum McCann says in the preface, “These are the wars America is so determined not to see that we banned images of soldiers’ coffins from our nightly broadcasts.” Missing too is the incalculable civilian death toll, read as a banal piece of journalistic prose, at times reduced to a number, always an estimate.
There are flashes—the capture of Saddam Hussein, the naming of President Karzai, the beheading of journalist Nick Berg, Abu Ghraib, the removal of the last combat operations troops—where we relate to the status of our campaigns in the Middle East, but for the most part they pass as uneventfully as any other soundbite. It’s hard to comprehend, to empathize what an IED claiming twelve lives feels like. Most of what the American people see of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is a flash; a before and an after, a convenient snippet, fit for a scroller; a shootout in Fallujah, a helicopter crash in Kandahar, with hardly any faculty to associate the territories with a place on the map, the names with faces.
A video of an airman coming home and his dog rushing out to greet him inspires millions of YouTube views. In Phil Klay’s “Redeployment,” a Marine returns home to find his dog, tumor-ridden, almost too decrepit to greet him at the door. Absent of this collection are the glorified “Jessica Lynch” narratives. Most of the pieces involve the slow terror of waging war against an invisible enemy: “For us, there had been no fields of battle to frame the enemy,” contributor Jacob Siegel says. “Our shocks of battle came on the road, brief, dark, and anonymous. We were always on the road and it could always explode.” Pervading too, is the “fog of war,” epitomized in Roman Skaskiw’s “Television,” where a lieutenant copes personally and officially with the shooting of an innocent Iraqi boy by his troops during a raid.
As if the war and readjustment weren’t daunting enough to most psyches, each homecoming veteran in the collection seems to grapple with another invisible force; the expectation that something is wrong with them, and in search of those neuroses in question, new traumas emerge. In Siobhan Fallon’s “Tips for a Smooth Transition” a military spouse tries to follow the advice of a guidebook on her husband’s readjustment to civilian life. Her fear, compassion and reverence for him are all vividly painted. Despite a seemingly unanimous desire to “Support Our Troops” very little has been done in reality to support those who have returned. According to a recent government study, there are an average of twenty-two veteran suicides a day.
There’s a sense weaned from the collection that the struggle to win hearts and minds in places like the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan is Sisyphean, all progress bound to restart itself with each new unit’s deployment. The Ranger medic at the center of Ted Janis’ “Raid” finds the same problem: “I re-upped back when I believed. These days we create more insurgents than we kill. I’m done. As soon as my contract is up. I’m out. Goodbye and good riddance.” The perception of the struggle in the minds of the soldiers is microcosmic of the American perception at large. Not knowing enough to care, realizing that efforts so far have been a failure but not caring enough to determine why or correct the action. And anyways, lacking the knowledge to know how.
The stories are by turns gritty and hilarious, poignant and rhapsodic, but there’s one thing they all share: they are all imbued with the deep love of their authors. Faced with something as unspeakably harrowing as war, the voices here have salvaged what small beauty they could from the turmoil. “There’s nothing most of us would rather do than leave these wars behind,” Scranton, a veteran himself, says in the introduction. “But for a soldier, to fire—and forget—is the one thing you can’t ever do.”
At no point is this an easy collection, but it is a necessary one. The least we owe, as citizens of the nation that launched these conflicts, who asked so much of these men and women, is to hear their voices—to confront the truth, to remember, to forget and to go on. (Taylor Cowan)
“Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War”
Edited by Matt Gallagher, Roy Scranton
Da Capo Press, 256 pages, $15.99
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Humanity Amid the Inhumanity of War
Review | 'We're Doomed. Now What?' Gripping essays both dark, beautiful
By Rob Cline, correspondent
If the end of the world is in the offing, what constitutes an ethical life?
Roy Scranton considers this question in “We’re Doomed. Now What?” The collection of essays grapples with the dehumanizing effects of modern warfare and the destructive impact of climate change, arguing that, in the case of the latter, the moment of no return has passed.
“We imagine ourselves at the precipice, again and again and yet again, then return to business as usual, the status quo of buying and selling, driving, flying, we’ll have the Wagyu beef, we’ll have the pork belly, we’ll turn up the heat or the lights or the AC, we have a conference to go to, we have business in Palo Alto, Dubai, Cambridge. We imagine each new shock is the real crisis, and a few months later convince ourselves that the fight still goes on.”
Scranton explicitly includes himself in this “we,” and in doing so he avoids taking the tone of a scold.
His interest is in how we can and should live now when options for the future of humanity have been, in his view, severely foreshortened.
Through the very act of grappling with it in essays of varying styles and tones, Scranton creates room to move, suggesting we still have ethical choices, and that the decisions we make aren’t devoid of meaning.
Scranton’s account of and his reflections on his time in Iraq as a member of the military are powerful descriptions of the horror of war as well as the sometimes irresistible pull of military service for those looking to prove something to themselves or other — or who are on a quest for a “real” experience.
Taken together, these essays — dark, often beautiful, frequently scholarly, always gripping — seek to accurately describe things we might prefer not be described.
The work is difficult, noble in intention, and brilliant in execution.
Book Reading
• What: Roy Scranton will read from “We’re Doomed. Now What?”
• When: 7 p.m. July 17
• Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City
• Cost: Free
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Roy Scranton: Some New Future Will Emerge
The author and Army veteran on climate change, war, and "the radical transformation of the basic structures of our existence."
By Amy Brady
Photo: Josef Samuel.
Writers have long faced the apocalypse. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written approximately four thousand years ago, imagines Earth flooded by angry gods. Flash forward a few centuries, and Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells bring us their own visions of the end of the world. In more recent years, novelists like Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, and Octavia Butler have carried on the tradition. Each of these writers shares the idea that the end will come quickly, sparked by an event that tumbles the pillars of civilization like dominoes. It takes little to understand why visions of sudden apocalypse—as opposed to a long, drawn-out one—are popular: a quick and dirty end to everything absolves us from having had anything to do with it. If we never saw the apocalypse coming, how could it have been our fault?
T.S. Eliot offers a different outlook. In 1925, the poet wrote in “The Hollow Men” that the world will end “not with a bang but a whimper.” It’s this idea of a slow death in which everyone is culpable that captures most accurately Roy Scranton’s thoughts on the end of civilization as we know it. The author, an Army veteran who holds a PhD in English from Princeton University, has written much about two of humanity’s biggest existential threats: climate change and war. In 2015’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Scranton combined memoir and science writing to express what it was like to return home from war-torn Iraq only to watch the world succumb to hazards even larger than Al Qaeda: hurricanes imperiling coastal cities; economic and political conflicts giving way to riots; plagues, droughts, and famine causing suffering in every corner of the planet. Global warming, writes Scranton, is at the heart of all of this, and we have long passed the point of being able to stop it. Two years later, he authored his debut novel, War Porn, which is told through the different perspectives of American and Iraqi soldiers and civilians and throws into question what it means to be ally or enemy, victor or victim.
He explores these ideas further in his latest, We’re Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change. This thoughtful and deeply moving collection brings together newly written pieces with those previously published in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. As the subtitle suggests, the essays cover both climate change and war, subjects that aren’t exactly strange bedfellows. As Scranton says in the following interview, both engines of colossal destruction emerge from “the basic structures of our existence.”
Despite signs to the contrary, Scranton argues that hope is possible. Hope arises, he maintains, from coming to terms with our fate and learning to live through the end with peaceful resolve and a new interpretation of what it means to be in the world. If we can’t do anything about climate change, we can at least adjust how we see ourselves in relation to other people and all living things, even as—especially as—great struggle and pain become more commonplace. With scrupulous prose, Scranton sheds light on the best and worst parts of humanity. These essays are not for the light of heart, but neither is the world we live in.
I spoke with Scranton over the phone as he enjoyed a sea-side vacation with his family—a luxury that will become rare to impossible in the coming years, he said, as the “bourgeois American life” becomes an artifact of the past. We discussed the government’s role in mitigating climate change, how our national identity is tied closely to our views of war, and the importance of recognizing our fears about the future and sitting with them.
—Amy Brady for Guernica
Guernica: Your new collection brings essays about war and climate change together. What do you see as the thematic link between them?
Roy Scranton: George Orwell once talked about his ability to face unpleasant facts, and that’s always inspired me. I want to look at the things that are happening in the world that we may not want to think about and try to really understand them. With that in mind, my approach to thinking about climate change and war involves seeing that surrounding both is a great deal of performance, ritualization, ideology, and propaganda. And both deal with the radical transformation of the basic structures of our existence. When the very weather turns against you, for example, it’s disorienting and hard to process. And war is one of the oldest aspects of being human. It’s everywhere you look in the historical record and across social organization. It’s deeply embedded in our society in ways we find difficult to understand, let alone articulate and reflect on. To engage with it involves crossing the deepest parts of ourselves emotionally, religiously, and spiritually. I guess in sum, to look at both climate change and war is to look at the very way we organize and live our lives.
Guernica: Your essays on climate change suggest that we need to accept our fate—that the world is ending as we know it—and learn to develop a new way of life.
Roy Scranton: In the essay “Anthropocene City,” I write how people in Houston are working to protect the city from the next big storm, but that they’re not doing it super successfully. I’m proud of this essay, because it looks at climate change a little differently than many other pieces on the subject, which tend to ask one of two questions: Why do we suffer from a paralysis to do anything about climate change? What is the way around that paralysis? A problem that arises from looking at [climate change] this way is that we’re born into a world with a distinct conceptual armature and structure of reality. We can’t just, like, tear up all the roads and do something different. You can only build a new future using the rocks of the past. Some new future will emerge, certainly, but we don’t have a lot of control over how that happens. What we can do is facilitate its emergence in a more peaceful and thoughtful way.
Guernica: While reading “Anthropocene City” I couldn’t help but think of New York City and its delayed efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Hurricane Sandy hit almost six years ago, but it was only last fall that the city finally launched a multimillion dollar recovery and resiliency project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which was heavily damaged by the storm. How much can we rely on government, whether at the local or federal level, to play a part in finding—and implementing—solutions to climate change?
Roy Scranton: I’m often reluctant to talk about government in the abstract, because I don’t want to sound like a neoliberal, quasi-anarchist who’s against government [laughs]. But you bring up a real issue, which is that there’s a lot of bureaucracy and various levels of infrastructure, technology, and social organization that lie between whatever decision-making might happen and its ultimate execution. Here’s the funny thing: that slowness is supposed to be one of the great things about American democracy. It’s supposed to slow everything down and make the government less responsive to factional passions. That’s the federalist argument, anyway: when we decentralize power, then it’s harder for any one group to take over. Unfortunately, when it comes to the kind of radical decisions and policies that would need to be made to actually move on climate change, democracy isn’t very effective. We’d need to have some central world leader who just decides things. But that’s not going to happen. Climate change is such a “wicked” problem in that way. It has a scale that’s just enormous and involves so many different governments, localities, and interests at every level of the problem.
Guernica: So government won’t save us.
Roy Scranton: [laughs] No, it’s not going to save us. But local organization can help. That’s why we all need to engage in that boring, time-consuming, old-school progressive thing of actually getting involved in governance at whatever level we can, starting at the local level. We’ve seen again and again how important local organization is in moments of crises. When your city or neighborhood floods, it’s the people acting locally who reach out and help with any kind of efficacy. The government isn’t going to save us, but it can at least help us if we make it ours.
Guernica: Let’s go back for a moment to the issue of why climate change is so hard to wrap our minds around.
Roy Scranton: Sure. One reason is because it’s impossible to conceptualize the whole world at once with any kind of real texture or granularity, much less how to organize all of humanity to take care of one thing.
Guernica: You write that climate change is also hard to think about because it’s so scary. Is fear ever a useful tool for discussing this?
Roy Scranton: The thing about fear is that it’s going to be present whether we recognize it or not. We can pretend that we’re fine and tell ourselves we just have to have hope. But when we do that, we’re just pushing that fear down—we’re not getting rid of it. What we need to do is face the unpleasant facts. We need to come to terms with the seriousness of our situation, recognize it, and accept our fear, because we should be afraid. [Climate change] is scary! Our friends and families are threatened. Our world is threatened. Our future is threatened. We need to find ways to deal with that fear and move on to the next step, whatever that might be. There’s this increasingly unbalanced insistence that we ignore the fear and focus on hope, but to me, that’s the same sort of psychological reaction as Trump’s aversion to sharks: if we keep refusing to face the seriousness of our predicament, then it’s going to bite us in the ass.
Guernica: Much of your worldview seems to be informed by your experience as a soldier, and I’d like to discuss your writing on war. In the essay “The Trauma Hero,” you write that there’s a gap between the “myth of violence” that many Americans celebrate and what you call the “truth of war.” Can you expand on this idea?
Roy Scranton: Americans have long engaged in the mythification of war—the idea that war and violence can redeem us and that it needs to be done for freedom. That myth is central to the American character. You can see it in how our leaders talk about war, and even in our superhero movies. We always want those movies to come down to a battle in the last scene where the good guy finally overcomes the bad guy. But in real life, that never happens; reality is always much more complicated. Now, the “truth of war” is a phrase I use rhetorically and with awareness that it’s ridiculous to claim that war has only one truth. What I mean by the “truth of war” is that most Americans don’t want to think very hard or very much about what actually happens during a war or the political policy surrounding war—how it undergirds our dependence on fossil fuels or that it’s professionalized. War is a job, after all. It involves people whose job it is to kill other people, and we, Americans, send them overseas to do just that. The myth of violence involves an unwillingness to face the real costs that violence incurs, and not just for Americans and our own wounded warriors, but for the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives we’ve destroyed all over the world.
Guernica: America has been at war with Afghanistan for almost two decades. Has the gap between myth and truth grown larger in that time?
Roy Scranton: The United States has been involved in wars perpetually overseas, but at the same time, there’s a smaller cast of people who are fighting these wars. So civilians are increasingly disconnected from the people who are fighting. But the thing to remember is that this perpetual state of being at war isn’t really new. The United States has been involved in wars pretty much constantly throughout the twenty-first century. It’s had military forces deployed somewhere, fighting somebody, basically since World War I. Even in the years after World War II, when we were supposed to be in a time of peace, there were conflicts opening up left and right. Then the Cold War started, and then the US was fighting in Korea by 1950. And through all of it we see a disconnect between the myth of war and what was actually happening. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson initiated the American propaganda machine with the Creole committee to sell the war to the American people, and since then the mythification of American violence has been super intense.
Of course, during World War II, 16 million men and women, mostly men, were in uniform, and they experienced the reality of being a solider and learned that the myth was bullshit. But today, there are very, very few people who get that. There aren’t even many veterans willing to let go of the myth, because it makes their lives meaningful, too. I write about that in this collection.
Guernica: You also write that we as a nation tend to think of war as a kind of trauma—and that that’s a relatively new way of thinking. What brought on this conception of war, and why do we keep thinking of war in this way?
Roy Scranton: The American understanding of war as trauma came out of an older tradition of understanding war as revelation. That idea emerged in Europe with Romanticism. You can see it in novels like War in Peace and Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, and in poems by [the English poet and soldier] Wilfred Owen. In one of Owen’s poems, the narrator has a traumatic revelation when he sees his friend die in a gas attack. The moment opens his mind to a kind of “truth of existence” that civilians can never understand. Then there are novels like Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel, which is also about understanding war as this revelation of truth, but for him, war isn’t traumatic. It’s not about death; it’s about the future, and it’s beautiful. But these interpretations are two sides of the same coin. They both draw from this transcendental knowledge that war gives access to revelation.
So that’s the older tradition. The American understanding of war as trauma starts to take over in the 1960s and 1970s, because of a lot of things happening at once. At that time we’re trying to make sense of the Vietnam War and we have an increased understanding of the Nazi atrocities and concentration camps of World War II. Also happening is the professionalization of psychotherapy and psychology, and by 1980 we have the first formal designation of post-traumatic stress disorder.
What emerges from all this is the need to find a new way to tell our war stories so that violence redeems us, and the “war as trauma” narrative does that; it’s all about an American hero who goes and kills the bad guys and saves the day. But because we’ve also been told via propaganda that America is the defender of universal values and freedom across the world—something that makes us distinct from, say, the Soviet Union—our hero couldn’t just go and commit violence; he needed to be thrown into it, forced to struggle with it, and because he struggles with it, he turns out better in the end. You can see this narrative in books like Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five and other books emerging during the Vietnam War years. You can see it in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which is all about recovery from trauma. It’s this very narrative of recovery from trauma that helps us to forget about the people we killed.
Guernica: It occurs to me that war narratives are also about whom we consider to be our allies and our enemies.
Roy Scranton: Yes, they are!
Guernica: If that’s true, then what is Trump doing to our collective narratives whenever he pisses off an ally or claims that a historical enemy should be our friend?
Roy Scranton: One of the things that Trump has been able to seize on is the fact that our narratives are no longer convincing, or at least aren’t as persuasive as they used to be. There are economic reasons for this, and other reasons, too. There’s also the fact that globalization tends to erase local differences and homogenizes cultures. Trump was able to capitalize on these changes by making them part of his argument and his agenda.
Guernica: I suppose when narratives start to lose their persuasiveness then befriending an age-old enemy like Russia can suddenly seem like a viable possibility.
Roy Scranton: Exactly. The thing is we are in a time where we really should be asking important questions: What’s America’s role in the world? How do we relate to other countries? What does it mean that these people are our allies, while these other people are our enemies? These are all real and difficult questions, and we should spend time on them and try to figure them out. Trump is just the asshole with an unshakable confidence who thinks he already knows the answers. Also, he’s a crazy person and I’m terrified [laughs]. I know I sound like I’m saying that dismissively and humorously, but he is a crazy person and I don’t think he should be president. Though, we also can’t keep doing the same stuff that we’ve been doing. To do so would also be a bad way to respond to those questions.
Guernica: I have one more question for you, and it’s a personal one. You have a daughter. Are you hopeful for her future?
Roy Scranton: Oh, jeez [long pause].
I’m hopeful that she can find a way to live a meaningful and rich life in whatever world is coming. But if you’re asking me if I’m hopeful that she’ll be able to have a happy, bourgeois American life—go to high school, then college, meet someone and get a job and settle down and maybe have her own kids—then, no. In thirty years, that’s not going to be possible in the same way it’s possible now. Our way of life is going to be very different in the future than the way it is now, though I don’t know exactly what that means. One of the complicated things about living through the end of the world as we know it is that the end doesn’t come about because of a single event. It’s actually just a day-to-day occurrence that’s going to take a long time. We’ll see transformation and degradation, an increase in violence and insanity, the breakdown of social order in neighborhood by neighborhood, then city by city. We’re watching it happen now.
Guernica: That all sounds so hopeless.
Roy Scranton: Well, we do have to live through that, but there will be opportunities for joy and for living a meaningful life. It’s just that we won’t find those things by acting in ways we always thought we could. We have to learn to be more flexible, much more adaptable, and much more grounded in the present. That last part may seem like an odd thing to say, but living in the present means facing unpleasant facts, recognizing our fear and sitting with it, and accepting our sorrow and griefs and dealing with them. These aren’t things that we can just push aside in order to get to the next thing on our list. They are who we are. I’m hopeful that I can help my daughter to learn to do those things and live a full life in whatever world we wind up living in.
Amy Brady
Amy Brady, Guernica's deputy publisher, is a writer and nonprofit development specialist based in New York City. Her writing has appeared in the Village Voice, the Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Awl, Literary Hub, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere, and she is the senior editor of the Chicago Review of Books.
Roy Scranton Calls for Acceptance of a Future Defined by Climate Change
His new book "We're Doomed. Now What?" makes pessimism palatable
Photos courtesy of Soho Press
By Michael Berry | Jul 18 2018
Iraq War veteran and climate change philosopher Roy Scranton doesn't mince words. His new collection of essays on war and climate change, out this week from Soho Press, is titled We're Doomed. Now What? And readers brave enough to pick it up will discover the direct and unvarnished commentary it promises.
"The time we've been thrown into is one of alarming and bewildering change—the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it,” Scranton writes. “Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe."
Scranton made a name for himself in 2013 with the New York Times essay "Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene," the site's most emailed story on the day it was published. In 2015, the piece was expanded into an eponymous book, published by City Lights.
In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization, Scranton argues that his tour of duty in the army—which brought with it the daily knowledge that he could be killed at any time—taught him a way of coping with the dire news about climate change. This was exemplified, he says, by his homecoming to the destruction incurred by Hurricane Katrina.
Scranton went on to earn a PhD in English at Princeton and to author 2016’s War Porn, a critically acclaimed novel that observes the war and its consequences from the perspectives of soldiers and civilians, Iraqis, and Americans. He now teaches English at the University of Notre Dame.
In a recent telephone interview with Sierra, Scranton described the personal impact of writing that original essay for the Times as "huge." "The essay opened up the possibility to write the book Learning to Die,” he said. “That led to opportunities to do more reported journalism, to do longer pieces like ‘Back to Baghdad,’ and a piece for The Nation about the Northwest Passage."
We’re Doomed showcases those and other later assignments. Taken together, they reveal Scranton's wide range and impassioned erudition. Whether writing about the military violence of Star Wars in "The Fantasy of American Violence," hurricane preparations in Houston in "Anthropocene City," or his own experience as a "bad Buddhist" in "Climate Change and the Dharma of Failure," Scranton addresses his subjects with passion, precision, and empathy.
Based on its title, some readers might expect We're Doomed to function as an unremitting rant against the people and agencies actively destroying the environment. But Scranton is a more subtle and versatile writer than that. While he has many disturbing factoids about climate change at his fingertips—and deploys them with precision and accuracy—the essays benefit from the author’s tendency toward self-deprecation.
Scranton is at his best when he veers personal, as in "War and the City," in which he counts the costs of enlisting in the army at the time he did, and "Climate Change and the Dharma of Failure," in which he contemplates his own flawed nature. In “Back to Baghdad,” he reports on various external and internal revelations with honesty and vividness. And Scranton is not afraid to experiment, as he proves in "Rock Scissors Paper," which combines the real-life prospect of the Anthropocene with an alternative view from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional Professor Challenger, who penned the newspaper headline, "Methane Belch to Wipe Out Human Race."
The author, who describes his background as blue-collar military (his father, grandfather, and various uncles all served in the navy) turned his attention to climate change after surviving his own tour of duty in 2006. "For me, that's the big thing," he told Sierra, "because I'm deeply—I guess I would use the word 'pessimistic,' or at least other people would—about what our future looks like."
Indeed, Scranton believes things are just going to keep getting worse in a variety of ways. "It’s not just rising seas, but political effects, secondary effects from climate change, and a host of other problems connected to human over-development on the planet, our fossil fuel dependence, and so on. It's never going to get better. In some ways, whatever kind of day, today is as good as it's going to be ever again in our lives."
"It’s not just rising seas, but political effects, secondary effects from climate change, and a host of other problems connected to human over-development on the planet, our fossil fuel dependence, and so on. It's never going to get better. In some ways, whatever kind of day, today is as good as it's going to be ever again in our lives."
How to cope with such an outlook? "What can I do today to increase compassion in the world?” Scranton routinely asks himself. “What can I do to make something in the world a little better? What can I do right now to mitigate or heal some of the damage that is inevitable and that is just going to keep increasing?"
Scranton sees his Notre Dame students struggling with views of the future too, though he notes, "A lot of my students see the future pretty clearly. They have a strong sense that things are not going well and that they're not going to go well.” Still, they cope. "They're doing what they're told. 'Work as hard as you can. Don't waste your time. Outperform your peers. Make sure you get a job.'"
While climate-change-centric nonfiction is hardly in short supply, Scranton took a different approach to the subject in We're Doomed. Now What?
"It's not a book about weather patterns or the Arctic specifically," he said. "It's not about how we could build carbon scrubbers. The through lines of the book are these questions about how we tell stories that organize our lives in meaningful coherence. What are the costs of these stories? What are the limits of these stories? How can we think outside these stories when they don't match reality?"
The title essay creates a framework for the book as a whole. In it, Scranton starts by acknowledging the chaos of our times, in which we respond to the headlines according to our prejudices. He writes, "Nihilism defines our current moment, though in truth it's nothing new." Suspecting that apocalyptic planetary warming is too late to stop, Scranton turns to Frederich Nietzsche, "one of Western philosophy's most incisive diagnosticians," and contemplates the philosopher's statement "Man will sooner will nothingness than not will." Even as we "stand on a precipice of annihilation that Nietzsche could not have imagined," Scranton sees the quest to make meaning from life as our only salvation.
He writes, "If it's true we make our lives meaningful ourselves and not through revealed wisdom handed down by God or the Market or History, then it's also true that we hold within ourselves the power to change our lives—wholly, utterly—by changing what our lives mean. Our drive to make meaning is more powerful than oil, the atom, and the market, and it's up to us to secure the future of the human species."
Although war and climate are the main subjects, Scraton's prose ranges in tone from the journalistic to the lyrical, and the essays in We're Doomed allow him to explore the making of meaning through a variety of contexts—including poetry, art, and terrorism. He addresses Star Wars ("Mr. Lucas's Wagnerian space opera") and Clint Eastwood's American Sniper ("So goes the myth of the trauma hero"), Black Lives Matter ("This is a story about bodies and texts. Texts and difference. Bodies and violence") and Houston before the flood ("Imagine gray-black clouds piling over the horizon, a sublime spiral hundreds of miles wide. Imagine climate change. Imagine a happy ending").
Scranton concludes We're Doomed with an essay he says was particularly difficult to write: "Raising a Daughter in a Doomed World." It is a reflection on becoming a parent with his partner, Sara Marcus, a fellow Princeton PhD, and the author of Girls to the Front, about the Riot Grrrl feminist punk movement.
"It's an essay I had to do," Scranton said. "But it's something I have to keep working on. It's hard to think about her life in the future. It's one thing to say, 'Oh, yeah, my life is going to be shitty. I just have to accept that.' It's another thing completely to say, 'Oh, yeah, the life of this person I brought into the world—my little girl—her life is going to be shitty.' That's just harder to accept."
He continued, "Humans have had difficult lives for all of human existence. We come in with this expectation of progress and material plenty, comfort, and ease and safety. That's not how my daughter's life is going to go. And that's OK. Humans can still live rich, meaningful, joyful engaged lives, even under the most difficult circumstances."
"Humans have had difficult lives for all of human existence. We come in with this expectation of progress and material plenty, comfort, and ease and safety. That's not how my daughter's life is going to go. And that's OK. Humans can still live rich, meaningful, joyful engaged lives, even under the most difficult circumstances."
What does Scranton hope to accomplish, exactly, with the new essay collection?
"To reach as many people as possible with the idea that we're doomed," he says. "We need to be having a conversation about how this civilization changes into something else. The more we try to hang on to an old way of doing things, the more unprepared we're going to be for the change that's coming."
Meanwhile, the author focuses his own vision on daily life with his family.
"I try to take some time to do things that are joyful and do work that is of value for its own sake. I try to balance that with attending to these other questions that seem urgent and necessary."
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Freelance writer Michael Berry has written about books and authors for various local and national publications, including the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Portland Press Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle.