Leontius in Vietnam: The Aesthetics of Violence in Michael Herr’s Dispatches

The killing was good in Vietnam, or so suggests Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), an account of his experiences as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War. Like Leontius in Plato’s Republic, who simultaneously felt disgust and delight at the sight of dead bodies near Athens’ city walls, Herr’s book struggles with the relationship between beauty and violence, ethics and aesthetics, during times of war. This essay explores the aesthetics of violence in Dispatches and concludes that in Herr’s moral vision, pleasure—and not simply politics—is the human motivation for waging war. Furthermore, Herr’s book suggests that by viewing violence—even fictional portrayals of violence in art, movies, or literature—one may become complicit in it.