P. Klay's - Redeployment

“Perception is reality” - The use of narrative and ideological frames in Phil Klay’s “Psychological Operations”

There two ways how war narratives are framed. According to Giorgio Mariani they follow either a disciplinatory or an emancipatory model (Mariani 2015 1.40f), Phil Klay’s Psychological Operations (PsyOps), the ninth story in his collection of short stories Redeployment, tries to change the frame through which these stories are mediated. Opining up what Homi Bhabha calls a third discursive space, PsyOps’ set-up of narrative and counter-narrative self-reflexively engages with different narrative framing techniques to allow for a critical reflection on the underlying ideological assumptions about war and war stories.

Like most stories in Redeployment PsyOps functions on multiple narrative levels. The “war story” is embedded in a frame narrative set in on a college campus, where the homodiegetic narrator, a veteran of the Iraq war, is compelled to (re-)tell and adapt “his story” multiple times for different narratees (Zara, the mediator and the narrator’s father) within different settings. In this dialogical set-up, the presence of the narratee or “rhetorical audience” (Moger 1985, 316), thus, functions not only as a “relay between the narrator and the readers” (Prince 1980, 20), but also as a counterpoint to the narrator’s “veteran mystique” (R 170). Entering “realm of claim and counterclaim” (R 178), the veteran’s perspective is contrasted not only by Zara’s anti-war attitude, but also the politically correct mediator with a heightened awareness for conflict, and the narrator’s own hyperpatriotic father. This juxtaposition of multiple perspectives on “the war” forces the reader to distance themselves from either side of the dialectic. By turning the reader into an arbiter between these often times clashing opinions, they are given a sense of re-deploying multiple times throughout the story which enables them to actively consider alternatives to the dominant narrative and critically engage with the assumptions and underlying stereotypes presented.

Within this realm of narrative and counter-narrative, the narrator’s careful “packaging” (R 200) of information and the text’s self-reflexive awareness of its own making opens up a discursive space that allows for a creative exploration of the conventional frames of war narratives. When the narrator tells Zara “his war story”, he chooses one event that has significance for him, “one death among hundreds” (R 183). By his own self-conscious admission he is, however, profoundly unsure of how to tell his story, harking back to what Mariani calls the emancipatory model which insists that language is limited and thus unable to describe war because it will ultimately fall short of the war itself (Mariani 2015 1.40f). Needing to “ground” (R 183) himself within a familiar conventions of military protocol, he describes how he gives Zara a geographical orientation to get a “feel for the city” (R 184), a description of his mission to counter the Anti-American propaganda, the shooting and the slow death of the Iraqi, the narrator witnesses though the optic of a thermal scope. In this context the description of how the scope influences the narrator’s perception of death can be read a meta-textual comment on narrator’s story-telling,

The scope tracks heat not light, so everything, the shadings, the contrasts, they’re off in this weird way. There are no shadows. It’s all clearly outlined, and I was waving these bright white fingers across the scope, my fingers – but looking so strange and disconnected. (R 188)

Although the conventional frames, the narrator invokes, provide a clear outline of the events, they cannot shed sufficient light on the difficult subject. Similar to the optic scope that removes the narrator from the immediate scene of death, giving him just one image that “looks so strange and disconnected” (R 188), the narrators reliance on the “as you do” (R 183) of military conventions to retell “somebody else’s story” (R 211) also seem to keep Zara and the reader from understanding because “something was missing” (R 189). Admitting his failure, the narrator desperately searches for “any words” (R. 194) and a new “frame [for what he] was going to tell her” (R 216), grounding his second attempt at narrating “the war” in scraps of more personal experience, presenting Zara and the reader with a much more complicated narrative set-up that “requires [the] careful packaging” (R 200) of multiple subplots. While giving more detailed background information on the narrator and how he used language as a weapon that creates violence, the text activates second frame, the disciplinatory model, that according to Mariani presupposes language is not an instrument for representation, but it creates of its own world, generates action and changes reality (Mariani 2015 1.40f). Through this juxtaposition of two traditional paradigms of war narratives, the text problematizes the difficulty to obtain reliable knowledge about “the war” and subjectively mediated the “truth” of war, which forces the reader to re-adjust his own perspective and actively engage with this “firsthand information” (R 172), question its verisimilitude and the way it is mediated.

            Through the juxtaposition of various framing techniques this story maps out a third discursive space of narrative and counter-narrative for a war discourse outside of seemingly overused conventions that not only distort narratives of war but make it seemingly impossible to understand them. By orchestrating various levels of dialogues between narrator and multiple narratees, the text engages not only with disparate opinions, contrasting veteran’s perspective with Zara’s anti-war attitude, the politically correct mediator as well as the narrator’s own pro-War father. The multiperspectival approach also forces the reader to question their own “reading” and readjust their perspective to focus on how the choice of language and the use of ideologically charged frames that mediate the story shape their perception of the “narrated war”.

Works Cited:

Marini Giorgio, “Linguaggio e retorica tra violenza, guerra e non-violenza”. YouTube. Last modified February 16, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsycgHdCyVU.

Moger Angela, "Narrative Structures in Maupassant: Frames of Desire," PMLA 100.3 (1985): 315-27.

Prince Gerald, “Introduction to the Study of the Narratee”, in Reader-Response Criticism. (Baltimore: MD Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), 7-25.

Jauß Hans Robert, “The Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory”, New Literary History 2.1. (1970): 7-37

Klay Phil, Redeployment (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014), Kindle edition.