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In 2010, Atlantic Monthly Press, a well-respected imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc., released Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War.1 The text, authored by Marine Corps combat veteran Karl Marlantes, is a wonderful prospect for inclusion into the canon of traditional American war literature. By "traditional American war literature," I mean the school of representing war for which Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is the model text and for which the use of naturalist aesthetics becomes a means of bridging the gap between those who have experienced the horror of industrialized combat and those who have not. Fredric Jameson approvingly refers to such texts as those invested in conveying war's "sense datum," which is to say texts striving to produce a simulacrum of "the existential experience of war" ("War" 1534).2 According to Marlantes, this is exactly the project he undertook in crafting Matterhorn, a thirty-five-year-long process that saw him revising his novel repeatedly, while collecting a stream of rejection letters. In January 2010, Marlantes wrote in Publishers Weekly that the Vietnam War opened a "chasm" in American culture that he hoped his fiction could "bridge" in some way. Marlantes states,
Ultimately, the only way we're ever going to bridge the chasms that divide us is by transcending our limited viewpoints. My realization of this came many years ago reading Eudora Welty's great novel Delta Wedding. I experienced what it would be like to be a married woman on a Mississippi delta plantation who was responsible for orchestrating one of the great symbols of community and love. I entered her world and expanded beyond my own skin and became a bigger person.
In citing the bridging of "chasms" as his ambition in writing Matterhorn, Mariantes reflects an anachronistic understanding of language's nature, as well as literature's purpose. Mariantes' comments-as weii as his novei, I argue beiow-assume that ianguage is reiativeiy stabie, that ianguage can represent even extreme events with accuracy, and that the goai of iiterature is to communicate human experience such that identification, empathy, and community are reading's proper outcomes.
I suspect that it is on account of its successfui reaiization of these assumptions and prerogatives that Matterhorn has been reviewed quite favorabiy in the popuiar press.3 I suspect, too, that it...