Last week in class, we read literary scholar Tim Gauthier’s mouthful of an essay, “’I Can Spin Some Bullshit If You Want’: Narrating (and Bridging?) The Civil-Military Divide in Phil Klay’s Redeployment”. Gauthier prefaces his essay with a detailed summary that focused on some of Klay’s main ideas in Redeployment, such as the refusal of both the soldier and the civilian to understand each other, the fact that civilians aren’t exposed to war and, inversely, that soldier “mythologies” aren’t exposed to public scrutiny, and empathy. Gauthier identifies empathy as being Klay’s main goal of his collection of short stories; Klay suggests that soldiers and civilians recognize their respective otherness, but, despite this, Klay calls for “mutual responsibility,” in Gauthier’s words. As you can probably guess, trying to give a summary of a summary is a little clumsy. While reading Gauthier’s essay, I got so lost in his own account of Redeployment that I forgot he had a point of his own to make, and I almost missed it: at the end of it all, just an analysis on the way Phil Klay uses the word “bullshit”. It sounds crass, in my opinion—but also in the opinion of someone who is unused to expletives from high school teachers, let alone as the leading argument of a literary scholar in the professional setting. Gauthier, however, emphasizes how the use of “bullshit” is intentional and important—via “negotiation” as he says—in dispelling the “falseness” or “charade” (Klay) that lies at the crux of delusion in the civil-military divide. What I got from Gauthier’s summary, the subsequent activities, and this blog post, in addition to Redeployment’s overarching message, is that one, it’s hard to keep track of who said what (and that it’s in vain to try to make it smooth), and two, that scholars can latch onto the smallest detail in a given writing and make an argument out of it. I think this is important to keep in mind for the upcoming literature review assignment. According to Dr. Luger, Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories seems to be a hot topic among scholars, so there is probably no stone left unturned, and you can fall down any number of rabbit holes, even if it so happens to be a singular world.

References

Gauthier, Tim: “I Can Spin Some Bullshit If You Want”: Narrating (and Bridging?) The Civil-Military Divide in Phil Klay’s Redeployment

Klay, Phil: Redeployment

Sturken, Marita: Tangled Memories