Black Holes, Graveyards, and the Gravitational Force of What's Below: Mason's in Country

In final episode of M*A*S*H, highest-rated series episode in television history, Hawkeye Pierce is recounting a dream to his Army therapist, Sidney Friedman. Hawkeye has had a nervous breakdown, and he is struggling. In dream, he is on a bus that is parked, hidden in brush, and like other tense passengers, he fears discovery by enemy. He tells a Korean woman on bus to quiet chicken she is holding in her lap. In fact, he yells at her. And she smothers chicken, successfully keeping it from squawking. Then, in retelling, Hawkeye reaches an epiphany in which he retrieves what he has repressed: what woman smothered was not a chicken, but a baby. He had succeeded in getting woman to smother her baby. He has barely remembered guilt and grief before anger takes over. You son of a bitch, says Hawkeye to Friedman, why'd you make me remember that? The idea that unearthing a memory from unconscious will be therapeutic is fundamental to the talking cure, and in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country, it is an idea that 18-year-old Samantha Hughes urges upon veterans from whom she would like to learn truth of Vietnam War. She advises her uncle Emmett, for example, to vent his traumatic memories. Do way Hawkeye did when he told about that baby on bus. His lied to him. But he got better when he could reach down and get right memories (222). Sam Hughes, during summer after she graduates from high school, tries to find out about her past in response to her uncertainty about future and her estrangement from community's patriotic rhetoric. She lives with Emmett, whose wartime experience has left him unable, after many years, to adjust to civilian life. When Sam was an infant, her father Dwayne, Emmett's brother-in-law, was killed in Vietnam. Now all she has of him is a picture that she sometimes talks to, combined with scraps of information from shallow histories of war. She is convinced that she has missed something. When veterans in community and her mother hold back in their explanations, her loss and uncertainty give way to anger, disillusionment, and depression. Her situation is very different from Emmett's, but just as she believes that recovered will help Emmett, she has been probing communal memory in an attempt to satisfy herself and heal herself. In doing so, she has provoked some hostility and resistance. Sam's advice to Emmett, given in middle of a Western Kentucky swamp called Cawood Pond--where she has come on a mission to face dangers of nature in way that soldiers do--has initial desired therapeutic effect. It gets Emmett to talk. Emmett tells a story of his own about smothering, his own smothering, under dead bodies, when he was in Vietnam years earlier. His willingness to try to tell untellable helps him to take action in improving his life. In ensuing weeks, he organizes a trip, with his niece and with her grandmother, Mamaw, to Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Tom Hudson, one of veterans in Hopewell whom Sam tries to befriend, has called Memorial a big black hole in ground (80), and Mamaw refers to Memorial in a similar way when she catches sight of it (239). As complement of prick that is Washington Monument, it is a vagina that signifies where we have all come from; as a marker of death, it is symbolic of place where we're all going. The journey to Memorial is an important early step in a process of healing, but one can imagine that Emmett will have trouble sustaining project, because he thinks he should be able to solve his own problems himself, and because his repression has been a means of survival, and parts of his psyche will therefore continue to resist dredging-up of memories. If he is going it alone, what will he do next after he confronts a traumatic memory? He may need help, perhaps even highly trained help, to negotiate this uncharted terrain. …