Dawes, James. The Language of War. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Thematically organized chapters theorizing the binary oppositions amplified and destabilized by war. Language is not restricted to literature but also includes journalism, diary, and war policy. Especially useful for violence/language and counting/naming.

“The primary models available for understanding the relationship between language and violence: what I call the emancipatory model, which presents force and discourse as mutually exclusive and the disciplinary model, which presents the two as mutually constitutive” (Dawes 1).

“During war the effect of violence upon language is amplified and clarified: language is censored, encrypted, and euphemized” (Dawes 2).

“As war reveals, violence harms language” (Dawes 2).

“The thesis that violence annuls verbal intercourse has implications so pervasive for our culture that its inverse is often also asserted to be true: the expansion of discourse through witnessing storytelling, by this argument, directly corresponds to the cessation and prevention of violence. Insofar as violence-as-coercion is an assault upon free agency, and the act of speaking is conceived as of the fundamental sign and application of our free agency, then the volitional use of language is miraculously an assault upon violence, a contradiction of its felt coercion through assertion of the will” (Dawes 2).

“As one approaches pure violence, as Elaine Scarry would argue, language is twisted, distorted, and diminished, until with physical pain it is shattered altogether into the prelanguage of cries and groans. As one approaches the pole of pure language—or ideal speech conditions, as Jurgen Habermas puts it—violence shrinks and retreats” (Dawes 3).

“Boa Ninh’s Sorrow of War, which presents writing as a release from trauma, a method of undoing the continuing work of violence” (Dawes 3).

“War attacks language not only through confusion and astonishment but also through impotence, and through the aversion to recall that manifests itself as apathy. What can we possibly say that has not been said before, or that will make a difference? ‘Let us change the disgusting trope,’ Mark Twain writes in an emblematic moment of correspondence. With the ascendance of violence, speech is made irrelevant” (Dawes 6).

“war is an apocalyptic noise that threatens the possible end to language Meaning is swept away in a relentless list of negations—‘not,’ ‘no,’ ‘nor,’—and the whole of the body politic, from the businessman to the lawyer to the mother and child, is rendered mute” (Dawes 6).

“When Whitman asserted that the real war would never get into the books, he was arguing not only that the scale of the war defied comprehensive encapsulation, but also that the attempt to depict war’s violence through language afterward is impossible, necessarily, because the essential nature of violence is always in excess of language” (Dawes 7).

“Whitman remained unconvinced that it had an absolute right to do so: the intimate vulnerability of combat and injury demanded the chaste silence of respect. Future generations will never know the ‘interiors’ of the war, he argued, ‘and it is best they should not” (Dawes 8).

“The struggle to talk during and after violence is language’s struggle to regain mastery over violence, whether manifest in the individual’s attempt to speak her trauma or a culture’s attempt to produce a literary record. The language that has been destroyed by war reasserts its primacy by wrapping words around the past experience of violence, by attempting to subdue violence with language, much in the same way that traumatic recall, according to Freud, reestablishes agency by choosing to replay and direct an original scene of helplessness” (Dawes 11).

“talking about war is sometimes an act of complicity with it. As Kerry Larson writes in Battle-Pieces ‘words and weapons share an intimacy that demonstrates how readily the poet may exchange the role of mourner for that of executioner’” (Dawes 14).

“While accounts of war trauma like Chesnut’s point to the mutual exclusivity of language and violence, accounts of the cultural and material organization of war like Melville’s point to their interdependence” (Dawes 14).

“Indeed asks Clausewitz, is not war just another mode of political discourse, ‘another form of speech or writing?’” (Dawes 15).

“the expansion of discourse is itself sometimes a form of violence, as thinkers from Antonio Gramsci to Michel Foucault have observed” (Dawes 15).

Catherine McKinnon, most notably in Only Words, argues that in societies structured by asymmetries of power speech functions to perpetuate violence against the disenfranchised” (Dawes 17).

“And Judith Butler, to compete this thumbnail sketch, critically evaluates in Excitable Speech the argument that language can be a form of physical violence, not simply analogous to physical injury but rather an actual though distinctive form of injury itself. She points to scholars who have drawn upon J.L. Austin’s seminal How to Do Things with Words in order to argue that certain assaultive representations are illocutionary rather than perlocutionary” (Dawes 18).

“Language is not the city gate that separates us from violence, as in Arendt; it is instead a prison wall that implies a larger system of threat and coercion” (Dawes 19).

“It is not the central anxiety of these thinkers, as it was with Chesnut and Melville, to determine how it could be possible for us to represent the manifestations of force in words; the problem instead is how we can escape the violence of language while nonetheless remaining trapped in linguistic existence” (Dawes 19).

“‘May words,’ he [Maurice Blanchot] writes, ‘cease to be arms; means of action, means of salvation. Let us count, rather, on disarray” (Dawes 19).


“The ones who do not count, so to speak, are merely counted” (Dawes 30).

“A Single death is a tragedy, as Stalin reportedly declared, but a million deaths is a statistic. If naming is a projection of identity, counting is an abstraction out of identity; if naming is an assertion of individuality, counting is an assertion of a category or type” (Dawes 31).


“The collective, consequently, can never suffer death, but rather only minor injury. ‘Several other regiments were pretty badly cut up’ (351)” (Dawes 31). From Sherman’s Memoirs

“The military narrative replaces the aversive incomprehensibility of war’s inhuman scale with a finite collection of clean, containable units of information” (Dawes 32).

“The mathematical formula becomes a sort of teleological narrative, both pointing to an end that is seemingly inevitable and natural and tying together the war’s multiply dispersed events with the satisfaction of a coherent and well-told story. History, and with it the possibility for questioning, is closed” (Dawes 34). Sherman

“Grant’s memoirs, in a phrase, is a narrative of control. His autobiography is built word by word, noun by noun; it is a text bristling with referential language, with names, dates, and numbers. Scarcely a paragraph passes without a rhapsodic catalogue of facts” (Dawes 35).

“For Grant, the incommensurability of subjectivity is at best a private adornment and at worst a contributor to all that distorts, exaggerates, renders unclear, or disrupts publicly accessible organizations” (Dawes 35).

“Grant’s will-to-order manifests itself in a desire to achieve comprehensible intelligibility, to transform his prose into a universal language and to make this language absolutely referential and transparent’ (Dawes 35-36)

“Objectivity is his [Grant’s] touchstone” (Dawes 36).

“A war that is passively endured rather than aggressively prosecuted is a war that can be incorporated into a vision of reciprocally forgiving union” (Dawes 38).

“Objectivity is the quintessential imperative of war” (Dawes 40).

“Grant endeavors to achieve a bird’s-eye perspective, or the view from nowhere in which the world approximates a map upon which men are counted and events happen” (Dawes 41).

“To borrow William James’s formulation from the essay ‘The Importance of Individuals’: ‘Truly enough, the details vanish in the bird’s-eye view; but so does the bird’s-eye view vanish in the details” (Dawes 46).

“Alcott and Whitman thus represent the two opposed poles of war writing, and indeed of representation in general. If one risks dehumanization, the other risks exclusion. If statistics lose intensity and depth, narrative loses scale, proportion, and breadth. The narrative imagination establishes the reality of person; the statistical imagination, of conditions” (Dawes 55).

“The logic of counting is structural equivalency and personal irrelevance, a logic that does not simply reflect war’s massive scale or violence’s indiscriminateness but that participates in and reinforces this pervasive commensurability” (Dawes 69).

“This chapter traces the concept of creation through various literary registers of the postwar period, establishing the questions that will structure the remainder of this book. What is the relationship between creation and consumption, and what are the links between the sublime and waste? between beauty and damage? what necessary relationship, if any, does the act of creating (creating with objects, crating with words) have with violence? And what processes can be built into the structure of creation to inhibit this potential? What does the created object (tool, weapon, novel, bureaucracy, legal treaty) require of its maker, and what responsibility does the maker bear to the social world” (Dawes 74-75).

“The nightmare of World War I, as expressed in Anglo-American modernism, was not that the world was spiraling into indiscriminate butchery and thus to a final end, but rather that the world was spiraling into indiscriminate butchery and that humanity could live with it—indeed, could make an industry of it” (Dawes 76).

“A great deal of postwar avant-garde literature depicts failed linearity in association with technoskeptiscism derived from the war” (Dawes 79).

“The frequency of postwar representations of birth as death is uncanny: se is a way of killing a woman or disfiguring a body; the production of life demands a death, becomes impossible, occasions suicide, or represents the triumph of juggernaut Nature over human freedom” (Dawes 84).

“We are all, H.D. concluded in her account of wartime London a “still-born generation” (Dawes 86).

Mary Chestnut’s diary works to “challenge the assumed separation between domestic space and war space, and moreover to disrupt the larger epistemological distinction between war and peace” (Dawes 10).

“In the literature that represents World War I directly, however, where war is the world, retreat only furthers destruction. Escape, like the violent unraveling of the Italian army retreating from Caporetto in A Farewell to Arms, only amplifies the scope of waste. In Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, any retreat . . . is fraught with guilt, futility, and ineffectuality . . . for Cather in One of Ours, the world of war is the world to which we retreat; and for Dos Passos, there is nowhere to retreat to—the postwar peace is itself a brutal wasteland, a continuation of war by other means . . . ‘We could stand the war, but the peace has done us in’” (Dawes 93).

“Broad contrast between working and hurting, domestic space and battle sites, peace and war, cannot be read as stable oppositions” (Dawes 103).

“Hemingway is careful to prevent this psychic decoupling. In A Farewell to Arms the wound is not the breakdown of the story but a story in itself. The novel is, in a large part, the causal history of a single wound, from health to weapon to injury to surgery to recovery. Within the scene of the wounding itself (a narrative about damage that becomes a damaged narrative” (Dawes 97).

“In Homer’s Iliad, the weapon acquires meaning in the narrative by borrowing from the attributes of the man who wields it. The modernization of war reversed this vector of subjectivity. For Hemingway, millennia later, the persona assumes the attributes of the weapon” (Dawes 99).

“Battle deconstructs the human: a tank is an artifact . . . and with continued use a tanks man’s body is reshaped by his weapon” (Dawes 99).

“literary representation, in the same way, can give voice to suffering, but it can also aestheticize it. The artistic depiction of pain, argues Theodor Adorno, ‘contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it’” (Dawes 101).

“The transformative capacity of language is a tool but also a weapon” (Dawes 103).
“One the one hand, every artifact contains within it the explosive potential of a weapon . . . Weapons, on the other, more optimistic hand, can also become tools . . . and, in the hands of a doctor, a knife entering human flesh becomes a tool, an agent of work” (Dawes 103).

“In her World War I novel The Eye in the Door, Pat Barker likens the gaze of the doctor to an instrument of cruelty” (Dawes 104).

“Is a gas mask a tool for saving lives or preserving weapons? What about a helmet? A doctor? A slogan? A novel?” (Dawes 105).

“War slams together violence and productivity; it forces work and waste into a relationship of near seamless contiguity” (Dawes 107).

“Creation is instead reconceptualized throughout the novel [Farewell] as a morally neutral act, a use of power to alter the world for unknowable benefits at unforeseeable costs” (Dawes 107).

“what is typically seen as the parodic relationship between creation and destruction is thus reconceived as mimetic. The one clear and abiding difference—that creation produces an artifact—can carry no relevant meaning once it is accepted that artifacts themselves are morally neutral” (Dawes 107).

“And it is the primacy of this experience of luck in war so much more desperately than in peace that makes urgent in writers like Sassoon and Hemingway the need to assert autonomy, to retain some reservoir of self that is not conditioned by chance causes, to make will matter” (Dawes 110).

“‘Meaning is never fixed,’ Beauvoir writes, so ‘it must be constantly won’” (Dawes 130).

“Violence destroys fiction: this thesis recurs continuously throughout the literatures of war” (Dawes 131).

“War legitimates itself through ‘unanchored language’—glory, honor, courage, hallow—and leaves in its wake the tatters of speech and belief that it no longer needs. For Hemingway, it is thus only at the subfoundational level of the deictic, with the capacity of language to name and to count, to match words up seamlessly with their physical referents, that language finds its appropriate place in social practice. Hemingway’s vision of solid, bordered, and impermeable referentiality is a retreat from the disorder of interpretation, from the semantic disruption that, for him, is both the cause and the product of violence” (Dawes 132).

“as Elaine Scarry and Paul Fussell argue, war as a field of experiential knowledge is conceptualized as a perverse set of binary categories in crisis, as ‘the visible friend and the invisible enemy, the normal (us) and the grotesque (them), the division of the landscape into known and unknown, safe and hostile” (Dawes 136).

“‘In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true’” (Tim O’Brien, How to Tell a True War Story in Dawes 137).

“War in Nineteen Nineteen is a matter of jobs and capital investment. Far from excluding each other as opposed concepts, war and peace now appeared to operate in tandem. Disruption of physical borders and conceptual binaries is essential to Dos Passos’s grotesque characterization of war” (Dawes 141).

“The post-world war movements against functionality (from Bataille and the revived Sade to the middle and later work of the Frankfurt School) have had an enormous influence upon contemporary literary criticism and cultural studies” (Dawes 154).

“The first and most characteristic response to the war’s chain of disasters, however, was silence . . . Much of the great literature and film about the war was produced long after it had ended . . . Kurt Vonnegut explained that it took more than twenty years for him successfully to complete anything about the war. Slaughterhouse Five was published in 1966” (Dawes 158).

“Yossarian’s indiscriminate response reduces communication to tatters: he lies in response to the doctors’ questions, and, in his required job as censor, makes ‘war’ on language, beginning with the deletion of modifiers and articles and concluding in the switching of signatures and the transformation of paragraphs into linear arrays organized spatially rather than syntactically or semantically” (Dawes 162).

“How does the institutionalization of violence affect language? The organization’s efficiency-oriented stratifications of communication and specializations of identity are in war so radically amplified that they self-consume: the reciprocal and innovative capacities of language are central casualties” (Dawes 179).

“And does just cause in entering a war justify all subsequent actions throughout the duration of war?” (Dawes 182).

“Language is so emptied of enduring referential content that the vow, a speech act important precisely because it retains a clear, singular, and durable meaning over time, is reduced to a temporally finite physical act” (Dawes 189).

“The witnessing of organizationally generated deconstructions of language and communication is a primary cause for postwar skepticism toward language; a second equally important cause, as Catch-22 shows, is related not to language’s moments of breakdown but rather to its moments of intentional material accomplishment . . . in other worlds, the organization’s language itself is treated as endowed with force rather than the institutional field within which it is deployed” (Dawes 190).
“Naming is violence” (Dawes 192).

“Names produce an Other, establish hierarchies, enable surveillance, and institute violent binaries” (Dawes 192).

“in Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida identifies naming as an act of ‘originary violence’ that is productive of both the disciplinary violence of the law and the cognate violence of its infractions: ‘war, indiscretion, rape.’” (Dawes 192).

“Writing about the disaster is necessarily a lie: it gives limits to the limitless, sense to the senseless” (Dawes 197).

“Meaningful language is suspect because it contributes to the establishment and consolidation of regimes of power, but also because it attempts to present as ‘real’ an experience inaccessible to reality” (Dawes 197).