Carthage explores the psychological trauma of a post-war American nation

By Aneeqa Wattoo

“IN war, there are no innocent victims”, Sartre quoted Jules Romains in his essay, ‘Existentialism and Humanism’. Romains’s quote opens up a question that lies at the heart of Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel, Carthage: are there absolute victims in any war? And furthermore, is any sort of redemption truly possible for anyone who believes he has committed a crime?

Set in Carthage, a small city in New England, where the novel’s protagonists, the Mayfield family live, the novel opens with a search group that includes 53-year-old Zeno searching for his 19-year-old daughter, Cressida, who has gone missing. Soon, Zeno’s family learns that Cressida was last seen in the company of Brett Kincaid, Carthage’s celebrated Iraqi war veteran. For the family, this information is baffling; Brett is also the former fiancée of Juliet, Cressida’s sister. In the sheer horror of the ensuing days, Cressida’s family is confronted by a range of unanswered questions: why was the quiet, deeply introverted Cressida meeting with Brett at all? Also, was Brett involved in her disappearance? This is something the police considers when they arrest him the following day.

Oates does not provide the reader with easy explanations. Instead, she leaves them with an instinctual desire for clarity and answers in a novel that often shifts its narrative voice, relaying the ex-perience of each member of the Mayfield family after the disappearance, separately in first person. Through these accounts, the reader slowly begins to identify the cracks in the ostensibly perfect family life of the Mayfields. Zeno’s relationship with his wife, Arlette for example, slowly disintegrates as the trauma of losing a child allows Arlette to disengage from her marriage and start a separate, more independent life without the protective aura of Zeno’s subtly dominating personality.

Cressida’s relationship with her sister, too — as the novel shifts into the past — is revealed to be marked by a deep and abiding resentment. The generally praised Juliet, who is lauded by her par-ents and their friends as the “pretty one” is the object of Cressida’s resentment, and part of her desire for escape from her life at Carthage. However, her envy and the ‘love-hate’ dynamic between the sisters, as portrayed in the novel, seem to be neither very surprising nor original (it brings to mind the highly popularised novel, My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult). Oates descriptions of Juliet as the “pretty” sister and Cressida as the “smart” one, in addition, appears reductive, and forces the reader to neglect the individual complexity of each character by setting up the clichéd dichotomy of ‘beauty vs. brains’ as the standard with which they are to be viewed.

More interesting is Brett’s character and how his experience of the war in Iraq affects his relationship with Juliet. In the scenes dealing with him, Oates seems to be at her best as she tackles what seems to be a central concern of the novel: the effect of the US’s ‘war on terror’ on the lives of average Americans. It is deeply telling for example, that in an imaginary letter to Brett, Juliet writes: “Very few people in Carthage know the difference — if there is a difference — between Iraq and Afghanistan. I know: for I am your fiancée and it is necessary for me to know.”

Revelations such as these hint at the wide disparity between the perceptions and concerns of American civilians, and the national rhetoric of a country waging a prolonged international war. This is perhaps also why when Brett returns from the ‘Iraqi Freedom Operation’, deeply traumatised, his face disfigured and his body disabled, Juliet is unable to understand Brett’s new, nihilistic stance towards life. As he says: “it’s a toss of the dice. Who gives a shit who lives, who dies.”

The reader realises that for Brett the façade of patriotic zeal and loyalty has completely fallen apart. Yet, on a larger level, his drastic transformation from a young, friendly boy to an embittered war ‘hero’ — a ‘hero’ who often displays an affinity for violence — appears to be a metaphor for the invisible, deeply psychological changes that a collective American nation has undergone.

Over the course of the novel, the reader finds herself asking: in a life filled with such insecurity and fear, a life in which the freedom of the individual is constantly restricted by the larger community’s imperative, what is the right way to live life? To give yourself up, as Brett does, for ‘national duty’ and to be shattered physically and emotionally in the process? To live cocooned in a secure and comforting family life as the Mayfields did before Cressida’s disappearance? Or, to run away, to vanish, as Cressida did, escaping both her family and the oppressive, intrusive community she felt suffocated by.

And, yet, the reason for Cressida’s disappearance, the one event that affects all their lives, is left as an open question in the novel. Was it just to spite and hurt her family; a sort of elaborate, staged revenge? Or is it something else, far more elusive and confounding? Is it, one wonders, the deeply human desire to vanish completely, and to be born anew?

At the core of the novel, one realises then, is an existential crisis; is this life worth living at all, and if not, is any semblance of a new birth worthwhile?

Despite flaws such as an unnecessarily prolonged and often repetitive second half, what seems to me the most beautiful achievement of Carthage is the rare insight it gives into the heart and the soul of not just the victim, but the perpetrator of a crime. One realises at the end that the novel constantly compels the reader to decide whether different characters are blameworthy: are Cressida’s parents guilty of neglecting her in their adoration of Juliet? Is Cressida herself guilty of being indifferent to her parent’s hurt? Is the Carthage community guilty of alienating her?

Yet, all these crimes pale in comparison to the novel’s most surprising revelation; a crime shrouded in Brett’s memory. During a cross examination by the police, Brett confesses to colluding in a crime he has carried inside him; the rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl — by his fellow soldiers — during their time in Iraq. Brett tries to absolve himself of guilt by finally confessing, many years too late, to a crime that he is actually guilty of. This climactic moment in the novel reminds one once again of Romains’s declaration that “in war, there are no innocent victims”.

This unexpected confession of guilt and the passionate yearning for redemption in the following years, by the physically disfigured, clinically-depressed war veteran then, seems to emphasise the novel’s tentative suggestion that there are no absolutely innocent victims just as there are no absolutely guilty perpetrators. Instead, perhaps, we are all both simultaneously perpetrators and victims in the private wars in our lives.

Carthage

(NOVEL)

By Joyce Carol Oates

Ecco, US

ISBN 978-0062208125

496pp.