Storie di guerre

George Wickes tells the story of his missions for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Saigon (1945) and in Hanoi (1946) when he was 22. His account of those trips recalls a moment when Vietnamese independence seemed possible and there was still the possibility that the United States government could have chosen for Ho Chi Minh rather than against him. There is an abundance of irony in this account: the death of an American colonel at the hands of those whose cause he supported, the use of Japanese troops under British command to burn the villages of Vietnamese the Allies were supposed to have liberated, the arrival of Wehrmacht veterans fresh from the battlefields of Europe to support the French colonial cause. The excerpts from letters Wickes wrote his parents at the time are as eloquent as they are prescient and his brief portrait of Ho Chi Minh, with which the account concludes, is especially powerful.

While Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan has by and large been critically praised on both sides of the Atlantic, most discussions have altogether ignored the connections between the film and current ideological uses of the World War II narrative. Whatever Spielberg’s original intentions, the ambivalent “anti-war” message of his movie, as well as the ambiguous morality of the “mission of mercy” launched in order to save Private Ryan, both reveal an uncanny resemblance to the rationale offered for going to war in both the Persian Gulf and Yugoslavia. Despite its shocking landing sequence, the movie moves relentlessly from the gory to glory, with the final scenes amounting to nothing less than an aesthetic as well as ideological recanting of the now famous opening sequence. Spielberg’s homage to the “Good War” ends up by making war good again.

One of the most frequently overlooked consequences of the prolonged military presence of Americans in South Vietnam were the 30,000 children born of the relations between American soldiers and Vietnamese women. Sylvia Ullmo reconstructs in detail the intricate and often tragic odyssey of those “children of the enemy” from Vietnam to the United States. Both the Vietnamese and the American government did little to help them migrate to their “homeland”. Once in America, they faced an entire new set of enormous difficulties in their effort to adjust, again with little help from the authorities (and often from their fathers), to the new society.

If the most appropriate metaphor for the Persian Gulf war was “total television”, perhaps a comparable metaphor for the war in Yugoslavia is the World Wide Web. In particular, the war in Yugoslavia evoked a response that illuminated current U.S. ambivalence towards the concept of national borders in a time of global expansion, and the World Wide Web is both symptom and agent of changes in notions of sovereignty, which underlie the apathetic reception of the war in Yugoslavia. This new medium – multi-voiced and complex – contributes to and reflects broader cultural concerns, particularly the growing role of the U.S. in global capitalism and the racial and ethnic tensions within the U.S.

The article is part of a doctoral dissertation on the Prefaces of Henry James and focuses on a short essay – The Science of Criticism, published in 1891 – where James discusses the value and the role of literary criticism at that time in the light of the ever increasing commodification of the literary field, of the politics of the new literary market, and of the dissolution of a traditional public sphere. Martinez argues that The Science of Criticism paves the way to the celebrated, hegemonic critical assumptions of the Prefaces, as it deals with literary criticism in terms of a creative activity, committed to issues of experience and tradition. James contends that the critic’s function is that of a cultural translator, reviving and reactivating the values and significance embedded in literary tradition. In regarding criticism as an exemplary mode of expression of modern sensibility, James’s stance foreshadows some of the tenets of later critics such as Lukács and Benjamin.