Plausibility of Denial by H Bruce Franklin Two

“Plausibility of Denial” by H. Bruce Franklin

Two good achievements grew out of the Vietnam War 1. Anti-war movement in which ordinary citizens and veterans and active duty soldiers play a decisive role. 2. The literature that grew out of the war.

War Protest • Officials anticipated the likelihood of war protest, which is why they tried to at first wage the war covertly, and later to conceal how the war was being conducted, and finally, to expunge the memory of it. • NSA memorandum of 1963 mentions “plausibility of denial” as key phrase in covert plan for the war.

O’Brien’s Main Theme • Main theme in all of O’Brien’s work has been this denial (on both a personal and political level) • In O’Brien’s work we have a “tortured dialectic of concealment and exposure” • Imagined acts of escape are often the desired alternative to the remembered acts of slaughter • One needs to know this to understand the “deepest meaning” of In the Lake.

Lake • The novel “is not as indeterminate or unresolved as it may seem. ” • Some events did happen, while some take place only in the imagination. • Yes, the narrator ends by suggesting we can choose whichever scenario we want. • Yet, one scenario not presented only in a “hypothesis” chapter. • Each of the hypothetical scenarios is an act of imagination, offering an escape from the hideous event that did happen.

The Midnight Boil • This scenario outlined in the chapters “What He Remembered, ” “How the Night Passed, ” and “What He Did Next” • Although John cannot remember whether or not he murdered his wife, enough details surface from the depths of his memory—not his imagination—to allow readers to reconstruct the gruesome midnight boil. • Unless, O’Brien suggests, readers would rather indulge in elaborate fantasies of denial.

My Lai • In the Midnight Boil scenes, John re-enacts the murders he committed at My Lai and his attempts to expunge all records—and memory—of this act that was too awful to be possible • Wade’s frenzied murder of the houseplants linked to Calley’s actions—he shoots the grass, the palm trees, and the earth itself • Calley says, “Kill Nam. ” John says, “Kill Jesus. ”

Denial • John Wade, like the American nation itself, committed acts so horrible that they continually evoke denial. • Just over two years after Kathy and John Wade vanish in fiction, the denial that O’Brien is dramatizing was given its most succinct statement by President George H. W. Bush in his inaugural address: “the final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. ”

Conclusion • Novel not about our inability to get at truth, like most critics believe • Novel is about denial—our denial of the darker aspects of American history, of the darker potentials that lie inside of individuals?