Daniel McKay

THE POETICS OF APOLOGY Victimhood, Mutual Self-Implication, and Contingent Forgiveness in the Far East Prisoner of War Novel

This article surveys the Far East prisoner of war novel from its inception in En glish public school narratives and racially inflected character profiles to the more critically engaged publications of the last two decades. During the latter period, linear reconstructions of imprisonment, analogous institutional paradigms, and authors’ own memories of captivity have gradually declined in influence. Although not wholly absent, their place has been taken by an emphasis on intergenerational trauma, international relations (especially those involving the 1995 commemoration of the end of the war), and real or imagined meetings between surviving prisoners and their former torturers or interrogators. Through a close reading of journalist Jim Lehrer’s novel The Special Prisoner (2000), this essay examines the ways in which international relations inflect an imagined encounter between a surviving prisoner and his former torturer. The novelist’s sensitivity to contending notions of collective guilt and collective victimhood serve to illustrate the complications that arise at the individual level when forgiveness is freely offered by a trauma survivor and roundly rejected by the agent of that trauma.

Introduction: A Caveat on Caveats

In this introduction to part 4 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal’s editor assesses the argument made by Peace, the spokesperson of Erasmus in his Querela Pacis (1521), that the desire to impute and avenge wrongs against oneself is insatiable and at the root of both individual and social enmities. He notes that, in a symposium about how to resolve and prevent enmity, most contributions have to date expressed caveats about how justice and truth must take precedence over peace, how recovery from ill treatment may be impossible, how quietism is not a moral option, and how realism demands a national policy and a personal strategy of, at best, contingent forgiveness. He concedes that the attitudes of those opposed to quietism are healthy but suggests that there may be goods worthier than health of human devotion. This essay concludes that the main differences between what it terms “judgmental” and “irenic” regimes are disagreements over anthropology and metaphysics. The presumptions that truths are objectively knowable and that human beings are moral and rational agents characterize judgmental regimes; irenic regimes are characterized by disillusionment with those assumptions.

The Japanese tourist survival guide: Undead tropes of the Pacific War in contemporary New Zealand literature

During the 1980s Japanese corporations acquired a strong foothold in the American market, prompting media commentators to speculate that American society was being undermined by an encroaching Japanese “takeover”. Employing a comparative approach, I place New Zealand source material in conversation with an American cultural context in order to expose the mobility and malleability of Japanophobic discourses. New Zealand culture provides a basis for comparison in that the nation contained no hi-tech or car manufacturing industries, and yet writers there took issue with the presence of Japanese tourists and their increasing purchasing power. Writers Keri Hulme and Vivienne Plumb portrayed the Japanese as vampires and body-snatchers, while Ian Middleton suggested that the Japanese were seeking an escape from modern culture into an “untouched”, pre-modern environment. These features set New Zealand writing apart from the thriller genre adopted by Michael Crichton, Steven Schlossstein, and Tom Clancy. But in spite of these differences, a crosscurrent runs through both the New Zealand and American sources, making them more alike than not — that is, they all hark back to the wartime tropes of the Pacific War, which were reinstated within the context of the 1980s.

Don’t Hate the British: Old Boer Wisdom in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists

Daniel McKay South African patrols on ‘search and destroy’ missions operate with impunity far across the border into Angola. The ‘troopies,’ young border soldiers that patrol the bush land in armored vehicles resembling mechanized rhinoceroses, are the modern equivalents and descendants of the Boer commandos that defeated the Zulu and the Xhosa and severely tested the British. Indeed, the very term commando was an invention of the Boers during their war with Britain at the turn of the century, and the modern South African army employs some of the same quickstrike tactics pioneered by their predecessors. (K M Campbell 47)

Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock, Tick...: The Fizzles, Misfires, and Timed Delays of Manhattan Project Novels

Abstract Novelizations of the story of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos have been in publication almost from the moment when news of the Project first broke. In this article I survey these productions, from their earliest beginnings in the writings of Upton Sinclair to their latest manifestation in Nora Gallagher’s novel Changing Light (2007). The best way in which to read these works is to locate them within a larger cultural trend, prevalent in the US, which takes stories of scientific achievement as a means to deflect attention from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, one might also see these narratives as inadvertently revealing a gulf in the writer’s capacity to represent nuclear apocalypse within the genre of the historical novel.