＂Officer in Charge of the Dead＂: Traumatic Identity and the Autobiographical Self in Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War

〈掌管傷亡的軍官〉——卡普托《越南戰火》中的創傷認同與自傳自我

周廷戎(Ron S. Judy)

卡普托 ； 追思錄 ； 創傷書寫 ； 越南戰爭 ； 現代主義 ； Philip Caputo ； memoir ； trauma ； Modernism ； Vietnam war

興大人文學報

55期（2015 / 09 / 01）

161 - 178

英文

卡普托（Philip Caputo）1977年深具影響力的回憶錄《越南戰火》(A Rumor ofWar )不只是對戰爭殘忍創傷的體現，也是作者身為一個美國年輕軍官在1965年親身經歷的感人故事。本論文聚焦於《越南戰火》的第二章，也就是卡普托描述他在越戰初期時擔任「掌管傷亡的軍官」時的任務:計算、編錄死者和總結美軍陸戰隊「傷亡率」的恐怖工作。此片段是作家個人對戰爭的反射、創傷影響和他再進叢林重返戰場慾望的描述。分析本章是根據Leigh Gilmore對創傷自傳的研究， 那些作品「探索個人特質的展現:懷疑的個人和國家的優勢建構、憂心的私人與公眾相互影響，試圖瞭解此影響如何衝擊個人、美學和法律上的意義」(Gilmore 2001)。最近的創傷理論則是重視證人角色和認同生還者心理上的重要性。無論如何，Gilmore的觀點讓我們將創傷的自傳放在文學和審判歷史的視野裡， 理解創傷本體是一種美學的自我再造。卡普托自我重塑的實例是依賴現代主義的敘事手法，採用反諷自我疏離來削弱官方的軍事論述，藉由掌管傷亡的軍官名號，給自己不同的看法並且改寫肯定他作為倖存者的自我。

Philip Caputo's brilliant and influential 1977 memoir of his experience fighting in the Vietnam War, A Rumor of War is not merely an act of witnessing about the brutality and trauma of war, it is also a moving account of the author's life as a young Lieutenant in the US Marine Corps in 1965. This paper deals especially with Caputo's second chapter, which relates his hexperience as the ＂Officer in Charge of the Dead;＂ that is, as the official in charge of the gruesome task of cataloging and counting the dead and tallying up the Marines' ＂kill ratio＂ during the early stages of the conflict in Vietnam. This is also the section of the book that focuses on Caputo's private reflections on the war, its traumatic effects on him, and his irrational desire to return to the jungle to rejoin the fighting. My analysis of this section of the work relies chiefly on Leigh Gilmore's (2001) work on traumatic autobiographical writing-i.e., those works which ＂explore representations of personhood that are skeptical of dominant constructions of the individual and the nation [and are] concerned with the interpenetration of the private and the public, and how its impact is registered in personal, aesthetic, and legal terms.＂ Much recent trauma theory focuses on the role of witnessing (Laub 2009) and the psychic importance of claiming one's role as a survivor (Caruth 1996); however, Gilmore's approach allows us to situate the work of the traumatic memoir within the scope of literary and juridical history, and to understand traumatic identity as a form of aesthetic self-reinvention. In Caputo's case this self-reinvention relies on a modernist narrative style that undermines official military discourse by resorting to ironic self-distancing-i.e., by giving himself the moniker ＂officer in charge of the dead＂ he is able to see himself differently and re-write a self capable of accepting his role as survivor.

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