Blog 6 - "Specimen Days" and "Dispatches"

Walt Whitman – from “Specimen Days”

Walt Whitman is a master at crafting sentences to create his intended effect. “Specimen Days” is no exception. Throughout the excerpt provided in “Art of Fact,” Whitman douses us with ultra-descriptive adjectives and verbs, such as, “the red-life blood oozing out from our heads or trunks or limbs upon that green and dew cool grass.” His poetic sentences, such as, “entering us like a wedge,” or “the tug of a Saturday evening,” carry weight beyond a simple statement. With his use of alliteration and onomatopoeias, Whitman’s second-hand account of the Battle at Chancellorsville reads like a poem, such as, “flashes of fire” and “determined as demons,” and “cheer,” “crash,” and “roar.” Interjected into Whitman’s mostly staccado-sounding style of writing are personal thoughts, such as “Oh heavens, what scene is this? – Is this indeed humanity?” This device takes the reader away from simply reading the description and into the mind of the writer, in this case, his shock and despair at "witnessing" such a scene. Finally, Whitman’s stark comparisons toward the end of “Specimen Days,” set up a rather stunning juxtaposition between nature and the evils of man, such as, “the odor of blood mixed with the fresh scent of the night.” The author also continuously uses the “radiant” moon (and sky) as a sort of omnipotent source of innocence with statements such as, “such is the camp of the wounded – such a fragment, a reflection afar off of the bloody scene – while over all the clear, large moon comes out at times softly, quietly shining.” His decision to name the moon “large moon” instead of “the moon” or “a large moon,” adds a kind of poetic anthropomorphization of nature, watching over this bloody scene – and its effect is truly haunting.

Note: “Art of Fact” points out that Whitman, as much as John Hersey in “Hiroshima” was practicing the art of re-creation and should be noted as a pioneer of the practice. The unsettling part, for me, in this case, is that Whitman uses a first-person point of view in a way that creates an aura of “pretending” to be a soldier witnessing this scene. I do recognize, however, the power in this first-person point of view choice as well as the year in which “Specimen Days” was written.

Michael Herr – from “Dispatches”

In “Dispatches,” Herr’s almost unsettling honesty as he consistently reveals his own fear of war and his inner battle between curiosity and safety, manages to put the reader immediately at ease. Straightaway, we learn that, upon hearing a noise at night, the author would “practically flip out, hoping to God [he] wasn’t the only one who’d noticed it.” Perhaps it is his unabashed fear of war that allows for such a wide-eyed, clear picture of it. Herr’s fragmented and short, succinct sentences manage to speak grandly, such as, “All I ever managed was one quick look in [to the Lurp's eyes], and that was like looking at the floor of the ocean.” And his dialogue is consistently somehow both riveting and pithy. Two great examples of this are the following:

“Didn’t you ever meet a reporter before?” I asked him.

“Tits on a bull,” he said. “Nothing personal.”

or

“Vietnam, man. Bomb ‘em and feed ‘em, bomb ‘em and feed ‘em.”

Herr jumps around in his timeline, going from getting ready to board a helicopter for home to describing the months after returning to returning to the middle of the jungle, a method that leaves the reader with a rather jumbled feeling. However, his fascinating, short bursts of stories are completely satisfying in both their content and style. And he appears to have succeeded in his effort to “explore the collective mind of the soldiers,” as noted in “Art of Fact,” as he describes universal feelings such as watching the helicopter he arrived in fly away and wondering whether “[he]’d made a terrible mistake this time.”

Similarities

Herr’s style in “Dispatches” is similar to Whitman’s in that it is fragmented and nondirectional. Perhaps he is writing in this fashion, at least partly, as a comment on the lack of a “linear ‘front’” in war, as noted in “Art of Fact.” This idea that war is messy and omnipresent is well represented in the style and manner in which Herr writes. However, I feel that Whitman is more chronological in “Specimen Days,” albeit loosely, as the day turns from one to the next, in order. Both authors are gifted in their ability to capture “war” in a grand way, summing up a subject so complex and emotional, in some cases, in just a few sentences. Both, too, utilize a version of shock effect when describing the violence of war, such as Whitman’s “one man is shot by a shell, both in the arm and leg – both are amputated – there lie the rejected members.” Similarly, Herr writes, “… the total impersonality of group death, making them lie anywhere and any way it left them, hanging over barbed wire or thrown promiscuously on the top of other dead, or up into the trees like terminal acrobats, Look what I can do.” However, the point of both examples, in my opinion, is not so much shock value, but the ability to adequately describe the truths of war.

[Note: I rather enjoyed the stark difference in Herr’s reference to the moon compared to Whitman’s. Herr writes, “The moon came up nasty and full, a fat moist piece of decadent fruit. It was soft and saffron-misted when you looked up at it, but its light over the sandbags and into the jungle was harsh and bright.”]

Organic form

The notion of organic form, “works whose formal characteristics are not rigidly predetermined but follow the movement of thought or emotion being expressed,” certainly exists in “Dispatches.” It’s almost like Herr is sitting in front of us, telling us the stories as he thinks of them, remembering details and getting more excited as he goes along. At times, it almost seems to be “stream of thought” writing, as he jumps in with a popular country song lyric or a random, but enthralling, quotation. I’m not convinced that Whitman’s “Specimen Days,” is of the same variety, as his writing reads, to me, like carefully planned poetry, even if the subject jumps around a bit in describing the battle. I would be interested, however, to hear an alternate argument on the question. In terms of covering an event, I can see how organic form might create an element of truth, or immediacy, in words, as writers tend to go back and edit and then re-edit their work. Creating a kind of writing "as it comes," especially in an action-packed event such as war, in its most raw form has a kind of power that flows from the pages, much like Herr’s “Dispatches.” 

Discussion question:


What literary journalism technique(s) are Herr and Whitman utilizing when they describe natural scenes (moon, sky; jungle) amid the interjections of violence and chaos? Why do they do this?