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Remembering Vietnam: Subjectivity and Mourning in American New Realist Writing

During the past decade a new school of writing has become prominent in the United States: a new realism. In the new realist novels, poems and short stories the condition of mourning recurs as providing both a symbol of and a structure for identity in consumer culture. The theme of mourning is frequently, although not always, explored in the context of invoking and reconstructing in memory the fathers, brothers and sons who were lost in the war in Vietnam. Reciprocally, the operation of images and narratives of the War in these texts casts some light upon the emergence, concerns and form of the new realist writing. In particular, images of the War provide a lens through which some of the meanings attached to sexual differences in contemporary American culture come into focus — a culture of which one may ask, after Julia Kristeva: “What can ‘identity’, even ‘sexual identity’, mean in a new…space where the very notion of identity is challenged?” The formation of identity through the structure of mourning is explored extensively in two new realist novels about remembering Vietnam: Jayne Anne Phillips's Machine Dreams and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.