![]() ![]() They place Americans in virtuous, heroic roles-how we like to think of ourselves and to present ourselves to the world, even at those times when the United States has been a belligerent and not-much-loved nation. These events and ideas form part of America's image of itself, frequently cited in public discourse and often memorialized. To be specific for World War II: D-Day, "the greatest generation," citizen soldiers fighting against the forces of totalitarianism, the effectiveness of trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, the Holocaust as an evil inflicted by Nazis upon Jews, genocide as something that should never happen again. The adjustment I am proposing in existing models of cultural memory represents a rhetorical shift, to be sure, but, more importantly, it represents a conceptual one. Instead, they form an integral and crucial part of how individuals and groups construct temporality-the ineffable part of memory itself, necessary for memory's very shape. ![]() Such adjustments and ellipses are not so much a lapse or a failure of cultural memory, as they are commonly conceived they are not even, properly speaking, an erasure or a forgetting, two other common conceptions. It highlights some facts but distorts others and allows still others to exist in limbo-known, but somehow never registered-what I mean by hiding in plain sight. Under such conditions, war memory intensifies patterns found in memory-work more generally. Like Fitzgerald's Nick, individuals and the collectivities they form feel a restless, disjointed feeling, the feeling of never quite being at home or even worthy of being there, disillusionment or hopeless passivity, and a heightening of our already uneasy attitudes toward death. détente and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall) remained ready to be reanimated on 9/11. ![]() For World War II, it persisted after 1945 through the Cold War, and (with lapses during periods of Soviet-U.S. Picking up on a speculation Freud makes in 1915, I want to claim that the altered state of consciousness produced by large-scale war, what Freud calls wartime and I call wartime consciousness, can last beyond the end of hostilities. It took a sojourn in New York and other encounters with death-although smaller in scale, more personal than the war-to restore a sense of normalcy that made him fit to "come back home."… Yet if we take the comment seriously-as I think we should-the passage suggests that Nick became afflicted with a blood-lust of retaliation, an enjoyment, to be specific, of killing up-close using bayonets and knives, that made him feel disoriented and out of place in his native Midwest. It's a peculiar set-up, a peculiar precondition for this story, which critics usually read as a novel about the American dream rather than as a novel about the aftereffects of World War I. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the narrator Nick Carraway tells us that he "participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War" where he "enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that came back restless." So restless that he left the Midwest, which had always seemed to him "the warm center of the world," and migrated to the more savage East, where he met Gatsby. ![]() “A beautifully written meditation, at once wide ranging and intensely focused by the master thesis that at the heart of modernity lies the consciousness of war and the spectacle-horrifying and yet strangely narcotic-of mass death.”-Stanley FishĪn excerpt from The War Complex World War II in Our Time by Marianna Torgovnick “Marianna Torgovnick is one of our most brilliant and probing cultural critics.”-Joyce Carol Oates Her promising ethical solution transcends identity politics in a way that should open important further discussion.”-Jonathan Arac “Torgovnick has begun to do for the Second World War what for some years now thoughtful scholars and critics have done for the Civil War: to explore how our patriotism can survive if we acknowledge terrible truths. ![]()
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