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Introduction
T
here is something counterintuitive about “the literature of war.” How can war, a phenomenon of destruction, give rise to literature, an act of creation? What sort of fiction, poetry, or
drama might thrive on mass death, injury, and loss, other than the voyeuristic, the exploitative, or the simply sadistic? Might war writing even perpetuate war, glorify violence, and obscure
suffering?
War literature does all of these things. It also warns against pursuing armed conflict, exposes its
atrocities, and argues for peace. It records the acts of war with as much accuracy as is possible, and it
memorializes the dead. It is voyeuristic, exploitative, and sadistic; it is also tender, selfless, and comforting. It is gleeful and angry; inflammatory and cathartic; propagandist, passionate, and clinical. It
is funny and sad.
The literature of war is a literature of paradoxes, the greatest of which is the fact that it comments
continuously on its own failure. War writers often lament their incapacity to describe the realities of
armed combat, the inexpressible nature of the subject matter, the inadequacy of language, and the
inability of their audiences to understand. Here, for example, is a description by the American writer
Tim O’Brien of the war he experienced in Vietnam:
There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right
spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility
into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty
is overwhelming ambiguity.i
Paradoxically, in stating what makes war impossible to represent, O’Brien represents it. The inversion of what he perceives as the normal order of things (though the definitions and sources of “truth,”
“right,” “order,” “law,” and “civility” might be questioned) is matched physically in armed conflict.
O’Brien’s list of inversions occurs in a story, presented in a series of textual shards, that details
the blowing of a man’s body to bits:
The booby-trapped 105 round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and
I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces
of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays
with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down
the parts.ii
There are a number of reversals here. A GI, Curt Lemon (a name suggestive of lemming-like
behavior, yellowness, cowardice, a life curtailed, things gone sour), has literally been blown from
ground to treetops: the world turned upside-down. His innards have been externalized: the body
turned inside-out. “Lemon Tree,” in addition to invoking his name, refers to the Peter, Paul and Mary
song of that title. With this allusion, O’Brien suggests that the GI’s organs, which his comrades must
symbolically harvest from the tree, have metamorphosed into fruit.
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INTRODUCTION
War’s surreal inversions are not limited to the human body. When buildings collapse, rooms—
enclosed and private spaces—are exposed to the air. George MacBeth’s poem “The Land-Mine”
(1967) describes this effect:
It brought the garden to the house
And let it in. I heard no parrot scream
Or lion roar, but there were flowers
And water flowing where the cellared mouse
Was all before.iii
In this nightmarish invasion, objects have again lost their qualities: solid has turned to liquid,
animal has turned to vegetable, and the house has taken on a surreal, jungle-like quality, evoked by
the references to parrot and lion. On a larger scale, bombing makes, in the words of Robert Mezey,
“bridges kneel down, the cities billow and plunge / like horses in their smoke.”iv
Language and literary form are sensitive to the fragmenting effects that war has on individual
lives, communities, the body, and the environment. Writing can itself shatter very finely. In Jerzy
Ficowski’s poem “Script of a Dead Cemetery” (1979), individual words break like the Jewish tombstones whose fragments are now “the predominant iconographic figure by which public memory of
the Shoah is constructed” in present-day Polandv:
Sandstone is good
for honing scythes
so all that is left
is a rib of stone
here a foot of stone
a tibia
there a shinbone
a bone of sto
a shank of stvi
Like the splinters of sandstone, the word fragments “sto” and “st” cannot stand alone: if they are
to have meaning, it is only through being cemented, still jagged, with other shards.
In these examples from O’Brien, MacBeth, Mezey, and Ficowski, the peculiar paradox that
is war literature is clearly visible. Destruction creates. Writing about war is akin to building—or
rebuilding—a city. It is an act of creation, of binding together. In the extracts quoted above, destruction is captured and suspended in literary form (through such devices as rhyme, imagery, allusion,
and juxtaposed opposites). The literature of war, then, is both dependent on, and the opposite of,
armed conflict.
The examples considered so far display the experimental, self-reflexive nature of literature
stretched to its limits in the task of representing the unrepresentable. The pioneering American war
correspondent Martha Gellhorn argued:
If you can’t change it [war] you must at least record it, so that it cannot just be ignored or forgotten. It is some
place on the record and it seemed to me personally that it was my job to get things on the record in the hopes
that at some point or other, somebody couldn’t absolutely lie about it.vii
The argument for realism in war literature is that the facts must be presented as accurately and
objectively as possible, so that the record cannot later be distorted. Formal decoration and imaginative license have no place in this strict regard for truth. But the realist project falters as soon as it
states its terms. “Fact,” “accuracy,” “objectivity,” “truth,” and “realism” itself are infinitely contestable
concepts. And the realist approach has other problems. The more realistic the portrayal of war’s
atrocities, the greater the risk of sadistic enjoyment. It is impossible (and unwise) to ignore the fact
that war literature delights in, and occasions delight in, violence. This is what David Bromwich
terms “the non-moral theory of art.”viii Bromwich draws attention to the pleasure that can be taken
in the representation of suffering and destruction, which, he argues, is derived from a sympathetic
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engagement, a “state of being held to attention by helpless feelings about someone else, who at the
moment is visibly suffering.”ix Bromwich argues that war literature induces pleasure in the reader
because it brings him or her “close to a scene of risk.”x The reader, safely remote from the war zone,
vicariously experiences danger and suffering and even imagines horrors greater than those represented. According to Bromwich, the experience may be positive, and even joyful—and the reader
does not have to be a sadist to find it so.
In this understanding of war literature, the text becomes a place of rehearsal, and reading becomes
a process of approaching and testing fears. The war writer thus serves as a knowledgeable guide to the
“scene of risk.” This is one reason why war, to a greater extent than other subjects (even subjects such as
love, grief, and physical pain), requires personal experience on the part of those who seek to convey it.
Eric J. Leed has suggested that battle is “learned” through “physical immersion”: knowledge of war is,
like sexual knowledge (or, more mundanely, the ability to ride a bicycle), “acquired in the body.”xi To
write about war—to guide the reader to and through “the scene of risk”—therefore becomes a right to
be earned. As Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who has worked with Vietnam War veterans suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder, remarks, if a listener is willing to experience “some of the terror, grief,
and rage that the victim did,”xii the combatant is more likely to feel understood and to trust the listener.
Confining the right to write about war to combatants, however, has the result that those traditionally denied access to the war zone (women are the most obvious example) are also denied access
to the genre. Where women have historically gained firsthand experience of the war front, it has
primarily been as caregivers rather than combatants. Consequently, women’s war writing has often
been limited to accounts of nurses or of those who assumed responsibility for maintaining the home
front. Vera Brittain’s World War I memoir Testament of Youth offers examples of both roles, moving between the home and war fronts. Combining retrospective autobiography and diary, Brittain
reveals how direct contact with fighting rapidly diminished her idealism. The tendency to privilege
firsthand accounts of combat, however, has not prevented civilian observers from writing about war.
For instance, diarist Nella Last details the changes that World War II brought to domestic life in
Britain, and Amrita Pritam’s “Today I Invoke Waris Shah” reflects on the experience of becoming a
refugee in the aftermath of the Partition of India. Such accounts demand recognition that the experience of war extends far beyond the field of battle.
In broadly defining the genre of war writing, The Literature of War considers texts treating the
diverse impacts of war on those who experience it, whether as soldiers or civilians, and examines the
ways in which war is transformed through writing. Because the experience of war transcends geographical boundaries, genres, and specific conflicts, this book is organized thematically, rather than
chronologically or geographically.
The first volume highlights various approaches to war, from the theoretical to the experimental,
discussing the works of writers as diverse as the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, the
Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and the twentieth-century African writer and political
activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Collectively, these and other texts in the volume demonstrate that there is
no one approach to war—and that theoretical and artistic attempts to grapple with war (whether in
theory or reality) have historically taken myriad forms, from popular songs to epic poems, speeches,
and experimental fiction. The approaches to war considered in this volume have been employed as
propaganda (both for and against war), offered rules for conducting war, and reflected on the impossibility of writing war experience.
The second volume considers texts centered on the experiences of those who encounter war,
whether on the battlefield or the home front. Written by men and women of diverse backgrounds—
from classical epic poets Homer and Virgil, to novelist and American Civil War hospital volunteer
Louisa May Alcott, to Palestinian activist and writer Ghassan Kanafani, to First Gulf War veteran
Anthony Swofford—these texts reveal the multiplicity of perspectives and experiences contained
within any conflict. Combatants describe the fear and trauma of experiencing warfare firsthand, but
they also occasionally celebrate its exhilarating and empowering effects. For some writers discussed
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INTRODUCTION
in this volume, particularly women, war brings new opportunities and responsibilities as well as new
dangers. The accounts of the men and women who have maintained the home front during a war
reveal the state of anxious anticipation in which they await news of loved ones on the front, and, in
many cases, their struggles with privation and change at home. For the displaced and alienated—the
refugees, exiles, and prisoners of war—home is revealed to be a contested idea that can be a source
of both strength and trauma.
The final volume explores a body of writing reflecting on the impacts of war on individuals,
communities, cultures, and human values. The texts discussed in this volume, which range from
memoirs and histories to epic poems, speeches, and works of fiction, are written by a diverse group of
authors that includes ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, Native American leader Black Hawk,
British World War II fighter pilot Richard Hillary, and Nuruddin Farah, a Somali novelist whose
family was displaced by political and military strife. Collectively these texts express the transformative power of war, which kills and wounds (both physically and psychologically), shifts geographical
boundaries, and often challenges the meaning and worth of long-held values such as courage, loyalty,
and sacrifice. War, these texts demonstrate, can also bring about liberation (both political and social),
and it can engender new ways of conceptualizing and creating art when those impacted by war find
old modes inadequate to the challenge of depicting war’s realities.
The English novelist Henry Green, sensing that the Second World War was breaking up
everything that he knew and relied on, nonetheless remarked, “these times are an absolute gift to the
writer.”xiii Created from destruction, the literature of war is writing stretched to its limits, demanding extraordinary resourcefulness from those who seek to produce it. Its readers also have significant
responsibilities. Understanding how and why truths and lies about war are conveyed, perceiving the
status of those who convey them, and appreciating the surrounding ethical issues are nothing less
than necessary acts of global citizenship.
Kate McLoughlin,
Advisory Board Chair
i
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (London: Flamingo, 1991) 78.
ii
O’Brien, 78-79.
iii
George MacBeth, Collected Poems, 1958-1982 (London: Hutchinson, 1989) 107.
iv
Robert Mezey, “How Much Longer?” Collected Poems, 1952-1999 (Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2000) 80.
v
James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993) 185.
vi
Jerzy Ficowski, A Reading of Ashes, trans. Keith Bosley and Krystyna Wandycz (London: Menard, 1981) 29.
vii
Freedom Forum European Centre, “Freedom Forum Europe Pays Tribute to Martha Gellhorn” (London: Freedom Forum
European Centre, 1996) 7.
viii
ix
x
Bromwich, 234.
xi
Eric J. Lead, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979) 74.
xii
Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Schuster, 1995) 189.
xiii
xiv
David Bromwich, Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001) 234.
Bromwich, 237.
Quoted in Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000) 77.
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