Brosman, Catharine Savage. "The Functions of War Literature." South Central Review. 9.1, 1992. 85-98.

This essay does not offer formalist readings of theme or style, but, rather, focuses on the functions of French- and English-language war literature over the past 150 years. Clearly traces antiwar literature back to Greek and Biblical myths. Offers the clearest moral distinctions between war and antiwar literature.

“The role played by the Trojan War in the whole of ancient Western literature is so central that it can be considered the single most important topic of the body of literature inherited from early Western civilization” (Brosman 85).

“In the present discussion, largely based on texts of the past 150 years, especially from French- and English-language literature, I shall be concerned not with tracing the history of the theme, nor its modes of expression and generic questions, but with examining the functions of war literature” (Brosman 85).

“What distinguishes literary expressions of war from these, at least in the modern period, is first of all the emphasis upon the experiential dimension” (Brosman 85). These refers to “chronicles, histories, military and other archival records, philosophical treaties”

“can create, from destruction, violence, and fear, psychological and aesthetic fulfillment” (Brosman 86).

“create a fictional rationality that tends to overcome formlessness and thus seems to ratify experience” (Brosman 86).

“There can be little doubt that older war narratives and chants had as one of their primary purposes—along with the collective one of memorializing great military deeds as part of the history of a people—the setting of standards of military conduct and the inspiring of a warlike spirit. Thus the whole notion of literary hero has military roots. It is collective: valor is defined by, exercised on behalf of, and ratified by the community” (Brosman 86).

“the modern action novel, especially the war novel, is generically a descendant of the epic and heroic modes of earlier literature” (Brosman 86).

“It is not only to war as a national undertaking that such literature has incited men, but to a personal challenge This development is consistent with the Romantic and post-Romantic privileging of the self” (Brosman 86).

“It should be remembered that, prior to that frequent replacement of Latin by the modern languages in secondary schools, every year thousands of students read Caesar’s Gallic Wars” (Brosman 87).

“The literary image of war as a proving ground, which comes from the power of language to convey experience, has often seemed tantamount to an invitation to the military life” (Brosman 88).

“A brief glance at the recent period will illustrate the perception of war literature as an expression of the heroic mode. When, for military, political, and sociological reasons, the U.S. action in Vietnam, as it dragged on, was the occasion for a deglamorization of war—the ‘grande illusion,’ in Jean Renoir’s phase—and of American global political policy, in the public eyes there was a similar devalorization of the creation and consumption of war writing” (Brosman 88).

“Another function of war literature in modern times has been the very opposite: to demystify war and the military, with its linguistic, behavioral, and other codes to support pacifism. This is the case with much of the literature that arose from the Vietnam experience, for instance, D.C. Berry’s Saigon Cemetery and Time O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. But the phenomenon goes back at least to the nineteenth century” (Brosman 89).

“When Roger Martin du Gard laboriously reconstructed, around a fictional core, the diplomatic and military maneuverings that led to the Great War in L’Ete 1914 (1936), it was with the hope that his readers would be inspired to adopt the pacifism that had grown out of his own vision of the war” (Brosman 89).

“E.E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room . . . uses a matter-of-fact tone to point to he insanity of the war. This style is often associated with Hemingway because of his debunking of war in A Farewell to Arms, although in For Whom the Bell Tolls The totally different political context leads rather to a valorization of individual bravery on behalf of the cause” (Brosman 89).

“The most widely-read French novel of World War I, intended to sap the chauvinistic patriotism on which the conflict was founded and the war itself, draws on these means. In Le Feu (1916), Henri Barbusse attempted deliberately to describe the battle, as it was being fought, in such a way that the participants would not only reach some understanding of its conduct but also arrive at Barbusse’s position , a nearly-total pacifism” (Brosman 90).

“For most modern readers, the function of war writing I have saved for the last may be most familiar: literature as a way of resolving, or attempting to resolve, war experiences whose recurring trauma must be relived, reexamined, and, through an apparent catharsis, accepted. For such writers as James Dickey, Randall Jarrell, and Norman Mailer, who drew on their experiences in World War II, and later, Tim O’Brien, Walter McDonald, G.C. Hendricks . . .” (Brosman 90).

“it can be argued that reconstructions of the experiences of battle may serve as a collective catharsis, not just a personal one” (Brosman 90).

“Some of the communal functions—those tending to illustrate heroic ideals and support nationalistic military undertaking—have now been devalued, replaced by the deconstructing of the war” (Brosman 91).

“For those who see war as disorder, there is a fundamental contradiction between their view and the project of recounting war, since as I emphasized earlier, literary texts imply ordering. How can one organize chaos? Modernism and postmodernism solved the problem by writing chaos into the structure of fiction—as in Claude Simon’s La Route des Flandres (1960), in which the postmodernist technique, which challenges its own meaning, its own possibilities for narration, is intrinsic to the historical problems posted by the war, as the author saw them” (Brosman 91).

“Such questions as the degree to which the self should be narrated and can be narrated—questions that have been central to much Romantic and post-Romantic literature—are especially pertinent to those who have lived through degradations, terror, and other experiences that throw into jeopardy the sense of self and reduce the ability to make sense of an experience by arranging it into a coherent chain of cause-and-effect relationships—that is, to tell it” (Brosman 91).

“During and after the Great War, British and French writers alike stressed the difficulty of describing it, of ‘saying the unsayable,’ as critics have put it” (Brosman 91).

“In addition, the question of historical truth versus poetic truth arises” (Brosman 92).

“At the extreme, the risk is turning war into an aesthetic experience” (Brosman 92).

“Neither Apollinaire nor Proust was a militarist who sought a kind of mystical redemption in war—the sort praised by Junger and other German writers. But their poetic transformations constitute an anesthetizing of combat. Behind the artistic impulse that gave rise to them may be a more one, that of relieving the war of its destructive power and turning it into something that, individually, and collectively, can be assimilated” (Brosman 93).

“The element of nostalgia also contributes to a falsification of war, even when the author does not wish to glorify combat” (Brosman 93).

“Another risk—or, if one prefers, possibly—is that of glorifying heroism and of seeing in combat a positive moral and cultural function” (Brosman 93).

“the author runs the risk of endowing individual heroism with a virtue and power that goes beyond the ordinary—hence the war that makes heroism possible” (Brosman 93).

“Tim O’Brien, writing about Vietnam, argues that “a true war story is never moral . . . IF a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end . . . you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie” (Brosman 93).

“There is, indeed, a dialects of war by which destruction turns to creation, terror to courage, evil to good. Anesthetically speaking, creating literature from violence is already a reversal” (Brosman 93).

“Moreover, even as the writer is criticizing, explicitly or implicitly, the war experiences he has observed or undergone, the sense may come through that his ability to see air in this critical light is itself a function of the war—that only those who pass the test of courage or at least have been through the particular kind of initiation or death and rebirth offered by war can, both practically and psychologically speaking, see the ordeal accurately, even if their vision is ironic” (Brosman 94).

“Whether in the form of initiation, metamorphosis, purification, sacrifice, or death and rebirth, the war experience is made up of other mythic patterns, sometimes in a powerful form; and it is hard to imagine that readers can be dissuaded from the pull of such experiences. Moreover, to demythify is also to recognize the power of the myth” (Brosman 95).