War Porn

War Porn is a anti-war novel by Roy Scranton completed in 2011 and published in 2016 by Soho Press.[1][2]

War Porn (2016), dust jacket cover

The novel presents structurally integrated stories told through both third- and first-person narratives presenting contrasting and complex perspectives on the Iraq war.[3][4]

Scranton served with the US Army from 2002 to 2006, and was deployed as a Specialist with the 1st Armored Division to Baghdad in 2003 and 2004.[5][6] The term "war porn" refers to graphic images of violence collected in war zones, often "viewed voyeuristically for emotional gratification."[7][8]

Structure

“[That] these three kinds of narratives…are usually isolated genres suggests something about the way we compartmentalize our imagination in response to the complexities and contradictions of living inside the American empire…My intention in juxtaposing these three narratives was to give shape to these contradictions…I want to make them visible so we can talk them out instead of acting them out, as we so often do, through politics and political violence. - Novelist Roy Scranton, interview with Hilary Plum in The Fanzine, September 26, 2016.[9]

War Porn is set just prior to and during the early years of the Iraq War (2003-2011) The novel presents three main storylines, divided into five sections resembling the configuration similar to "Russian nesting dolls": "A-B-C-B-A."[10][11] The intertwining narratives revolve around the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early years of the war and its impact on a number of American and Iraqi soldiers and civilians.[12]

"Strange Hells" comprises the "A" narrative (sections 1 and 5, both set in a Utah suburb). The author employs a limited omniscient third-person point-of-view. The focal characters include Aaron "Sto" Stojanoski, a recently discharged corporal in the National Guard whose Military Police unit was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and stationed at Camp Crawford and the Abu Ghraib detention center.[13] Dahlia, identified only by her first name.,is a disaffected suburban housemate and a key protagonist in this homefront narrative.

"Your Leader Will Control Your Fire" comprises the "B" narrative (sections 2 and 4, set in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004). The story is presented from a first-person confessional point-of-view.[14] The protagonist is Army Specialist Wilson. Identified only by his rank and last name, he serves as a Humvee driver in combat zones in Baghdad.[15] The "B" narrative dealing with Wilson is fragmented into vignette-like chapters, each two or three pages in length. The chapters are introduced with an epigraph which quotes from the U.S. Army Ethics and Combat Skills Handbook and the M16 Weapon Manual.[16]

The "B" narrative is the only story that incorporates flashbacks: these are signaled by their presentation in italics. All the events described in Wilson's flashbacks are set in the United States.

"The Fall" is the single "C" section occurring sequentially at the mid-point of the other narratives. The author employs an omniscient third-person point-of-view. The central character is Qasim al-Zabadi, an Iraqi university mathematics professor living with his extended family in Baghdad and Baquba during the war; he later serves as an interpreter for US occupation forces.[17]

The Babylon "prose-poems"

Each of the five sections in the novel are preceded by a unique "prose-poem", all uniformly entitled "Babylon". These stream of consciousness-like passages are amalgamations of the "fables, lies, half-truths, myths, delusions, and anxieties that underwrote the Iraq War" and include references to operations conducted by US military intelligence during the war.[18][19][20]

Reception and analysis

Literary critic Hilary Plum, writing in The Fanzine, comments on the merits of Scranton’s literary style in War Porn:

The writing [in the Wilson narrative “B”] is bitingly vivid, moves so fluently through the speeds of boredom, violence, uncertainty, machismo—yet, too, there is a glimmer of metafictional awareness...in Qasim’s section [narrative “C”], [the] style shifts, becomes lusher and more capacious in perspective; in the rhythms of the syntax and narration there is to my ear a gentle echo of great works of contemporary Arabic fiction as they arrive in English translation…to write from a perspective distant in language, ethnicity, culture from one’s own, a perspective indeed from the other side of a war. This too is an act that most American writers avoid.[21]

Journalist Sarah Hoenicke in the Los Angeles Review of Books writes:

War Porn is not a comfortable book. Scranton’s experimental and interesting prose is meant to disturb the entrenched thought patterns of his readers. He defies the American cultural tenet that our military is lawful, moral, and organized, depicting it instead as it more probably is: needlessly brutal, a blunt instrument rather than a refined machine.[22]

Hoenicke adds: “We experience three distinct narrators throughout, three different prose styles, and unannounced time changes, the text oscillating frequently between present and past…War Porn isn’t easy to comprehend...We are meant to be overwhelmed.”[23]

“As an example of war lit, War Porn is more Hemingway than Heller, more O’Brien than Vonnegut, meaning it belongs to an existentialist, rather than absurdist tradition of American war fiction...War Porn also argues vehemently against the age-old American investment in the idea that violence can redeem, and finally arrives at the conclusion that war offers no lessons or truths, not even the existentialist ones so favored by other soldier authors.”—Arabic studies professor Elliot Colla in The Intercept, August 7, 2016.[24]

Literary critic Eric London, writing in the World Socialist Web Site, calls War Porn “the most memorable and aesthetically rich anti-war novel to have emerged in response to the ‘war on terror’”[25] London adds “Though the title strikes the reader as an attempt at shock value, the inside jacket explains that ‘war porn’ means ‘videos, images, and narratives featuring graphic violence, often brought back from combat zones, viewed voyeuristically or for emotional gratification. Such media are often presented and circulated without context, though they may be used as evidence of war crimes.’”[26]

Journalist Peter Molin, writing in Acolytes of War observes that “the storylines, scenes, and episodes in War Porn are carefully integrated, while also serving the purpose of providing a kaleidoscopic view of war experience without privileging the perspective of any one participant, particularly that of a twenty-year-old American male combatant.”[27]

Arabic studies professor Elliot Colla writing in The Intercept reports that “War Porn contains some of the most significant and original writing on deployment to be found in contemporary American literature about the Iraq War.”[28] Colla adds this caveat:

Scranton’s War Porn, however, diverges sharply from other recent works of fiction about Iraq in such fundamental ways that it is difficult to imagine mainstream critics giving it the same hearty ‘thank-you-for-your-service’ reception that they normally extend to any title produced by a veteran…Further upsetting the typical narrative...is the fact that the story is told out of order. The effect—like so much contemporary fiction on the war—is to plumb the disorientation that occurs in cycles of deployment and return…[29]

Footnotes
  1. London, 2016 (1): "...it is no surprise that the "war novel" has emerged as a predominant form of contemporary American literature."
  2. Molin, 2016: "Roy Scranton's Iraq war novel War Porn, out this week [2016], by all accounts was substantially complete by 2011."
  3. Molin, 2016: "War Porn consists of three interrelated storylines... the storylines, scenes, and episodes are carefully integrated,"
  4. Hoenicke,2016: "War Porn is a complex novel about complex systems."
  5. Colla, 2016: "Scranton served in the U.S. Army from 2002-2006, and was deployed to Baghdad with the famous First Division in 2003-4."
  6. London, 2016, WSWS: "Scranton enlisted in the US Army in 2002 and served with the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad, first as a Private Second Class before ultimately being promoted to Sergeant."
  7. Hefti, 2016: "War porn... a phrase well-known in military circles that encompasses forms of media depicting the most provocative and extreme depictions of violence, gore, and brutality wrought by combat 'viewed voyeuristically or for emotional gratification.'"
  8. London, 2016 (1) WSWS: "Though the title strikes the reader as an attempt at shock value, the inside jacket explains that 'war porn' means 'videos, images, and narratives featuring graphic violence, often brought back from combat zones, viewed voyeuristically or for emotional gratification.'"
  9. Plum, 2016:Composite quote, for brevity and clarity; meaning unchanged.
  10. Plum, 2016. Scranton: "The book's three main sections are built like Russian nesting dolls, so the first and last sections are [in] Utah, the second and fourth are Iraq during the war, and the third section, the middle section, is Qasim, the Iraqi mathematician... One could describe the novel as three novellas that brush up against then seize one another."
  11. Molin, 2016: "War Porn consists of three interrelated storylines."
  12. London, 2016: "...intertwining..."
  13. Scranton, 2016. "Strange Hells", Section 1, p. 7 and "Strange Hells", Section 5: p. 291
  14. Kakutani, 2016 NYT: "The central and most compelling tale is told in the first person and often reads like a journal, recounting the experiences of a poet turned soldier..."
  15. Scranton, 2016. "Your Leader Will Control Your Fire", Section 2, p. 43 and Section 4, p. 233
  16. Colla, 2016
  17. Scranton, 2016 "The Fall" p. 133
  18. Plum, 2016: "Threaded throughout, brief gorgeous passages titled "Babylon" blend the discourses of this war vertiginously, moving us with a violent grace between these settings."
  19. Molin, 2016: "Linking the three storylines are prose-poem interludes in which Scranton channels a collective unconscious voice declaiming the amalgamated collection of fables, lies, half-truths, myths, delusions, and anxieties that underwrote the Iraq War in the American and Iraqi cultural climate."
  20. Colla, 2016: "The experimentation with language is even more radical in the mini-chapters titled "Babylon" composed of military acronyms and operation nicknames, tiny collages featuring images from Rambo and the Big Red One, shards from the Iliad and T. E. Lawrence, as well as fragments from the U.S. Army "Ethics and Combat Skills Handbook" and the "M16 Weapon Manual...""
  21. Plum, 2016
  22. Hoenicke, 2016
  23. Hoenicke, 2016: Composite quote from same paragraph, for emphasis, clarity.
  24. Colla, 2016: Composite quote for brevity, clarity.
  25. London, 01 Sep 2016, WSWS
  26. London, 22 Aug 2016, WSWS
  27. Molin, 2016
  28. Colla, 2016
  29. Colla, 2016: Elliped material reads: “...in terms of experience, it is not so easy to keep “here” and “there,” much less “now” and “then,” apart from one another.”

Sources
  • Colla, Elliot. 2016. A Veteran Novel That Finds No Redemption in War. The Intercept, August 7, 2016. https://theintercept.com/2016/08/07/a-veteran-novel-that-finds-no-redemption-in-war/ Retrieved 27 November 2021.
  • Hefti, Matthew J. 2016. The Supply and Demand of War. Electric Literature.com 1 September 2016. https://electricliterature.com/the-supply-and-demand-of-war/ Retrieved 1 June 2022.
  • Hoenicke, Sarah. 2016. When the Hurlyburly's Done: Roy Scranton’s "War Porn" Los Angeles Review of Books. August 16, 2016. https://theintercept.com/2016/08/07/a-veteran-novel-that-finds-no-redemption-in-war/ Retrieved 27 May 2022.
  • London, Eric. 2016. (2) An Interview with Roy Scranton, author of War Porn. World Socialist Web Site. 1 September 2016. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/09/01/scra-s01.html Retrieved 20 November 2021.
  • London, Eric. 2016 (1) The anti-war novel re-emerges in American literature. World Socialist Web Site. 22 August 2016. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/08/22/warp-a22.html Retrieved 8 June 2022.
  • Molin, Peter. 2016. Right on Time, Five Years Later: Roy Scranton’s War Porn. Acolytesofwar.com August 3, 2016. https://acolytesofwar.com/2016/08/03/right-on-time-five-years-later-roy-scrantons-war-porn/ Retrieved 20 October 2021.
  • Plum, Hilary. 2016. War Porn: An Interview with Roy Scranton. The Fanzine, thefanzine.com, September 26, 2016. http://thefanzine.com/war-porn-an-interview-with-roy-scranton/ Retrieved 2 June 2022.
  • Scranton, Roy. 2016. War Porn. Soho Press. 2016. ISBN 9781616957155
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