폭력의 탈신화화를 위하여: 미 라이(My Lai) 학살로 돌아보는 미국의 역사와 문학

Demythologization of Violence: American History and Literature vis-a-vis My Lai Massacre

America is a nation that "may have been invoked by myth, but.... was created in battle" (Grant 105). Historian Richard Slotkin interpreted American history including that of Viet Nam as an extension of Indian killing, the appraisal of which has been neglected so far. My Lai massacre, which happened on the Saturday morning of March 16, 1968, was notorious for its atrocities done against Vietnamese civilians, particularly, women, children, and babies. The representation of the massacre, however, has not been made much in that it is not (re)presentable. Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato is one of a few works which dealt with the unpresentable Viet Nam and the Viet Nam War with a postmodernist technique of fragmented narration. Fact and fiction, reality and imagination are blurred to present this un(re)presentability. Paul Berlin, the protagonist of the novel, says repeatedly that "he did not know" which was true or false, right or wrong. Berlin's such skepticism and gesture of escapism, however, incurs a problem because his ignorance or innocence does not absolve him of the collective sin of the American soldiers. In the case of Viet Nam, American innocence is "a kind of insanity" (Greene 163), often used as a shield to protect American people from the awareness of their destructive behaviors. O'Brien's insistence on "overwhelming uncertainty" is a kind of strategy to avoid the detailed realistic description of the historical facts such as rapes and murders of the Vietnamese. In Viet Nam, America has found out that it has become an evil monster, although its awareness has not received serious historical or critical attention. American people did not, however, learn a lesson from history because they keep repeating the same initiatory violence of the colonial period. Whether Americans become "a sort of recreant European" or "the whole new men" (Lawrence 3, 14) rests upon the prospect that they will develop a new myth other than the existing national myth of "regeneration through violence," which has governed the American mentality since the foundation of the nation. My Lai should then be considered a tragedy in which Americans realize that they themselves are "beasts" or "monsters." What is unpresentable in Going After Cacciato is not the representation itself, as some postmodernists argue, but the immorality of America's conduct in Viet Nam, which is presentable when we speak of Viet Nam (Rowe 212). The myth of regeneration through violence and war is not valid any more in the nuclear age of Pax Americana Bello.