Artful Dodge Interview: A Conversation with Tim O’Brien
Interviewer: Daniel Bourne
Excerpts from the interview-October 2, 1991.
Before you begin reading the interview, define the following:
1- metafiction-
2- verisimilitude-
3- melodrama-
DB: After the war, when you did start to write about your experience, did you make a conscious decision to start writing about Vietnam through nonfiction, through a war memoir as in If I Die in a Combat Zone ?
O'Brien: No. At the time, and to this day really, I couldn't care less that the book was nonfiction. It is presented in this way, but any person with an I.Q. over 84 knows that any narrative has to be-at least in part-invented. That is, who's going to remember every scrap of dialogue? Most of that speech has to be made up. And events get reordered in the course of writing, recounting. Also, reality did not come at me the way it comes at you in the book: in the war, back at home when still a little boy, then in basic training, back to the war. There's a scrambling of the chronology which isn't totally real to the world as I lived it. Also, parts of the book, although it's technically nonfiction, are utterly invented, in the same sorts of ways as in The Things They Carried. Not a lot of it, but now and then in the course of writing I took a scrap of event and put it together with another scrap, or I took something from an account, when I wasn't personally present to witness it, or sometimes I would take a conflicting account and choose it over my own, blending everything together to make what seems to be a convincing and coherent story about things I hadn't born witness to in their entirety. By and large the book is a representation of the kinds of reality I lived through, but the picture is also changed by the dialogue, the storytelling technique, things I wasn't aware of at the time. I did this intuitively, sort of saying "I think basically that this is true," but knowing, at the time, I had to do things that weren't strictly nonfiction to make the account possible.
DB: Was there any point in Vietnam where you woke up as a writer? Do you remember saying "I need to write about this" or "There is no way I can write about this?"
O'Brien: There was one incident I wrote about while I was still there. Something may have happened inside of me that said, "Tim, you have to write about this," but the voice there was a mute one, speaking in gesture to me, through my genes or something. I guess something just happens when one day a guy hits a land mine and he's a friend of yours. The horror brought me to put some words down on paper, and having written those words, new words came to me, and having written new words other words, until I had a six or seven page piece that went beyond this one man's death and the death of those around him to death in general, almost outside of Vietnam, and I was examining myself essentially, my own terror inside.
DB: Now that you are looking at the war in that way, how have you found this terrain of Vietnam a convenient metaphor?
O'Brien: That's mostly how I look at it-though I'm not sure I'd call it a convenient metaphor. I'd say an essential metaphor or a life-given metaphor that, for me, is inescapable. And I'm grateful for it in a sense. I've used it in the way Conrad writes about the sea, life on the water, stories set on boats, from Heart of Darkness to Lord Jim, from Nostromo to Typhoon to Youth. But Conrad is no more writing about the sea than I am writing about war. That is, he's not writing about marine biology and dolphins and porpoises and waves. He's writing about human beings under pressure, under the certain kinds of pressure that the sea exerts, life aboard vessels, the discipline of living aboard a ship at sea, the expectations of behavior that are a part of a ship's life. Lord Jim and his act of cowardice and so on. Conrad uses the sea the same way I use Vietnam, as a way to get at the human heart and the pressure exerted on it. He's not writing literally about sailing and sailors. At the same time, this life aboard vessels carries with it a framework for storytelling that he uses beautifully. My content is not bombs and bullets and airplanes and strategy and tactics. It is not the politics of Vietnam. It too is about the human heart and the pressures put on it. In a war story, there are life and death stakes built in immediately, which apply just by the framework of the story. There is a pressure on characters that in other kinds of fiction one would have to meticulously build. So, in a way, using the framework of war is a short cut to get at things without having to engage in some of this mechanical work that I don't particularly like, to get bogged down in plotting. I don't like reading heavily plotted stories. I like a situation to have an instant sort of pressure.
DS: Is that why The Things They Carried is anecdotal, not a sustained, plotted narrative?
O'Brien: It is. In any case, that's the form of the book, anecdotal. But the anecdotes have a kind of pressure on them which is automatically there. If two guys are sitting in the middle of a war, talking about their girlfriends, that's not the same as two guys sitting in a cafeteria at a college talking about theirs. There's a sense of the unexpected or the unanticipated happening at any second, a sense of one's own imminent death being just beyond the next word that's uttered. But that's a metaphor that goes beyond war. It has to do with our own mortalities we aren't always aware of. When we lead our lives, when we fall in love or our fathers hurt us or our mothers forget to feed us, by and large we forget that we're going to die pretty soon. But in a war story, when the mortality is right on you every moment, those subplots of our lives take on an added resonance and an added existential tension. And that's part of why I like writing war stories.
DS: In "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" you describe Rat Kiley, an inveterate liar, as a man for whom "facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around." Do you work like that?
O'Brien: Yes.
DS: Are there aesthetic risks?
O'Brien: No, but I'm willing to hear what they may be. In general, though, for me one of the fundamental things to be accomplished in fiction is to convince. That is, to convince the reader of the stuff that is happening in the now that it's occurring, whether it's a fairy tale, something fabulous, or something realistic. No matter what it is, fiction requires a sense of underlying credibility. And so when one's inventing fact, and the so-called invented facts aren't convincing, then there's a problem. But, when you're inventing things, what you try to do is to make them seem as if they are truly occurring. I guess every fictional writer runs the risk of invention all the time. I'm sure Mark Twain ran into it, writing about trout or a kid going on a raft down the Mississippi. Much, almost all, of that story is invented, though Twain does draw on remembered images, remembered dialogue. Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? That stuff can't happen at all. You can't go back in time that way. Here especially you have to develop this sense of things happening, and that requires good technique, that requires keeping the dream alive, the way dreams are alive when we're truly dreaming, a state that we're constantly at risk of disrupting if we lose the sense of credibility. This disruption can be done in a million ways. You can lose your readers' faith by putting a stone here rather than there, or by having a comma in the wrong place. You can do it by melodrama, by making your stuff seem too cartoonish. You can lose the sense of credibility in all kinds of ways. And what one tries to do is not to make those kinds of mistakes.
DS: Speaking of credibility, in The Things They Carried there are numerous devices-come-ons, enticements, snares for the reader-such as starting out stories with "It's time to be blunt" or "This is true," having one story supposedly give the facts about the evolution of another story, or naming the narrator after yourself. It seems to me that an appropriate metaphor for talking about this aspect of the book would be that you're seducing the reader, and that obviously the reader can have ambivalent feelings toward such a seduction. Do you see that?
O'Brien: I'd say that maybe it is an appropriate metaphor, probably not one I would use, but it's certainly appropriate. I guess that's what I was trying to do, to make the reader feel those sorts of ambivalences. Hearing a story, being seduced, then having the seducer say "by the way, I don't love you, it all isn't true." And then doing it again. And then saying, "that also isn't true, just kidding," and doing it again. It's not just a game, though. It's not what that "Good Form" chapter is about. It's form. This whole book is about fiction, about why we do fiction. Every reader is always seduced by a good work of fiction. That is, by a lie, seduced by a lie. Huckleberry Finn did not happen, but if you're reading Huckleberry Finn you're made to believe that it is happening. If you didn't believe it, then it would be a lousy work of fiction. One wouldn't be seduced. And I'm trying to write about the way in which fiction takes place. I'm like a seducer, yet beneath all the acts of seduction there's a kind of love going on, a kind of trust you're trying to establish with the reader, saying "here's who I am, here's why I'm doing what I'm doing. And in fact I do truly love you, I'm not just tricking you, I'm letting you in on my game, letting you in on who I am, what I am, and why I am doing what I am doing." All these lies are the surface of something. I have to lie to you and explain why I am lying to you, why I'm making these things up, in order to get you to know me and to know fiction, to know what art is about. And it's going to hurt now and then, and you're going to get angry now and then, but I want to do it to you anyway�and for you. That's the point of the book.
DS: It strikes me as interesting that your first book is a real memoir, while your last is a pseudo-memoir. How do you see that development, the relation between the way you want to accomplish those seductions in nonfiction and in fiction? Would you write nonfiction again?
O'Brien: There are all kinds of things that occur to me in answer to your question. One is that I don't form my career, my writerly interests, consciously. I don't outline a novel and say "Here's where I'm going next" in terms of form and so on. The language just takes me there. A scrap of language will occur to me that seems interesting. And one of the first scraps of language that occurred to me in writing The Things They Carried was the line, "This is true." When that line was written, "This is true," the form of the book wasn't present by any means, but the thematic "aboutness" of the book was there in those three words. "This is true." I had no idea what I was going to do with it, or where it would take me, but I knew in my bones as well as intellectually that this was important, these three words are important words. I didn't know important in what way or how I'd be exploring them, but I knew they were important. In the way I'm responding to your question, I guess I'm not trying to evade it exactly as much as I'm trying to speak in terms of heart. In terms of heart I don't think about these things much, and don't want to think about them. I prefer to look at writing as a heroistic act, finding out what I care about through writing stories. "Why do I care about truth? I don't know why I care about it!" And I'll write a story like "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," for example, in which the guy Rat Kiley is telling the story and within the context of the story the matter of truth gets talked about. All along I've cared about this, but now in writing the story I wanted to know how I cared. That is, I always wondered, "Why am I making this stuff up? Why am I writing these stories?" But I never pursued it intellectually. I just said, "Well, I am." But I always wondered, and by writing those words down I began to realize there's a way you can begin to ask yourself a question seriously, methodically.
DB: Given your statement that everything in The Things They Carried is fiction, can we believe "Notes" is nonfiction, when at least the surface assumption is that here you're giving us the truth about what went on in the composition of another story?
O'Brien: You ought not to believe it. In fact, it's utterly and absolutely invented. It's an example of one more seduction on top of the rest. No Norman Bowker, and no mother. It's a way of displaying that form can dictate belief, that the form of the footnote, the authority that the footnote carries, is persuasive in how we apprehend things. We think once again we're locked into a factual world by form, and that process is a great deal what the book is about, including the next little note called "Good Form," which is sort of the same thing. It says, "Well, I'm going to confess something to you. It's time to be blunt. None of this stuff happened. I'm going to tell you no guy ever died, and here's what really happened." And then the next paragraph is going to say but that story too is invented. Here's the real story. Of course, that one's invented, too. I just don't say so in the story.
DB: It's interesting that in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" a woman actually comes from America to Vietnam.
O'Brien: Right, that story is an example of a woman's presence, but this is striking only because women are so rare. The story's also one of the few cases in the book that is based on reality. A woman did in fact come to Vietnam, an ex-cheerleader, just out of high school, pretty much as I described it. But the rest of the story I invented. I had fun doing it.