Acts of cultural identification: Tim O'Brien's July, July

In a 1994 interview, Tim O'Brien insists that one of the key aims of his fiction is to invite the reader to occupy the position of the author/narrator so that the reader is encouraged, as O'Brien puts it, to identify with the experience which is being narrated. O'Brien's desire to enable the presumably non-traumatized reader to occupy the position of the traumatized writer/narrator demonstrates his concern with attempting to find ways of overcoming the division between those who experienced the war in Vietnam and those who did not. In this paper I argue that O'Brien's most recent novel, July, July (2002) constitutes his most sustained investigation of this theme. O'Brien attempts to negotiate the extremes of individualisation and universalisation appealed to in writing about war, and in writing about trauma more generally by situating the trauma of Vietnam, not within the geographical confines of South East Asia, but within the specific temporal confines of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I employ theories of hysteria developed by Juliet Mitchell and theories of mourning proposed by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok to investigate how loss is experienced by the class of 69. Furthermore, I explore how, by emphasising cultural or historical, rather than the psychological, equivalence between survivors of trauma, O'Brien is able to probe the limits of trauma as it is generally defined by canonical trauma writers including Judith Herman and Kal Tal. In July, July O'Brien creates a group of literal and metaphorical amputees who have all been similarly wounded by their shared time and place in history. In doing this, O'Brien extends the relevance and applicability of the experience of trauma to those who did not participate directly in the war, while still resisting the urge to universalize or suggest that trauma is equally accessible to all subjects. O'Brien's work in this area seems timely and suggests that, in the light of recent events like America's wars in the Gulf, 9/11 and the War on Terror' which challenge the polarisation between traumatized survivor and generally non-traumatized population, new interpretations of what it means to be traumatized are required.