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ABSTRACT
This paper argues for an expanded conceptualization of narrative as a tool for research in critical military studies (CMS). Narrative provides a means of studying the human experience of war as simultaneously ‘embodied’ and ‘storied’, but only if the underpinning conceptual framework can address both aspects. The paper introduces a conceptual synthesis of war, narrative, and the body that aims to bridge existing work on narrative within CMS with nascent research on war and embodiment. Drawing on the socio-narratology of Arthur Frank, three core ideas are offered as the basis for an embodied study of narrative in CMS. Together, these ideas demonstrate the value of narrative inquiry for providing detailed, contextualized, and nuanced analyses of war and post-war experiences. Stories are performative: they do things. War and post-war stories have personal and political consequences that affect how individuals and societies deal with war’s legacy and approach future conflicts. What kind of story we tell about war therefore matters deeply. Studying narrative in the form of embodied war stories expands CMS’s resources for critically engaging with matters of war, violence, and military experience.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Veterans tell stories not only of war, but also of military and post-military life; of careers spent honing their skills in preparation for action, mastering the technologies of war, and afterwards, of navigating a path through ‘Civvy Street’ (Cooper et al. Citation2018; Woodward and Jenkings Citation2011).
2. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting early clarification that it is not only bodies but the meaning we give them as reflective, interpretive subjects which matters, and which contributes to the production of war experience.
3. Whilst acknowledging wider definitional debates in narratology, Frank maintains that ‘the boundaries of what stories are should remain fuzzy’ (Frank Citation2010, 27).
4. Shilling (Citation2012) makes an analogous point about treatment of the body in social theory. Historically, theorists have treated the body either as a natural and material phenomenon or as a socially constructed one and have, until recently, neglected to consider a theoretical integration of the two perspectives.
5. Diverse scholarship on psychological trauma asserts that one reason for prolonged traumatic reactions to war is an inability to construct wartime events into a coherent, intelligible narrative (e.g. Burnell, Hunt, and Coleman Citation2009; Rubin, Schrauf, and Greenberg Citation2004).
6. ‘Valhalla’ being the Norse mythical home for dead warriors.
7. See also Schrader (Citation2014, 15): ‘With the walls of my ideologies and ardent belief in my government slowly failing, I did not know what to believe anymore’. Ben Schrader’s rich and evocative story shows how complex and painful veterans’ journeys from war to anti-war activism can be, as well as how war stories are often fraught with interpretive struggle and a ‘new war’ (23) for meaning, purpose and direction.
8. Translated from Pashtun as ‘old man’ in Helmand.
9. Information operations.
10. Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
11. Without stating the exact source, Green attributes these words to former Defence Secretary John Reid – setting out in 2006 a vision for the UK’s military involvement in Afghanistan.
12. Frank refers to these capacities as ‘stories’ narrative equipment’ (Frank Citation2010, 27): how they do the work that they do. My selection is not intended to imply that the other capacities Frank lists are unimportant or should be neglected, merely that in this limited discussion, several stand out as immediately relevant to an analysis of (post-)war stories. Furthermore, Frank considers his own list incomplete – hoping others will add to it – and merely suggested, not taken to imply that all stories always utilize all capacities.
13. Respectively, ‘unbelievers’ and ‘foreigners/invaders’.
14. O’Brien’s book has also received its share of criticism for its depoliticization of the Vietnam War. As Neilson (Citation1998, 204) argues, ‘In attempting to challenge the concept of an autonomous subject, O’Brien writes a text that is obsessed with self; he details the uncertain effects of an unreal war upon an unknowable self but fails to examine its all too real effects upon the Vietnamese’. Neilson thereby highlights a larger sense in which O’Brien’s stories fail to act – that is, to acknowledge the incredible suffering of the Vietnamese people within the overall war narrative.