Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present : Fields of Action, Fields of Vision [1 ed.] 9789004353244, 9789004353237

Citation preview

Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present

Textxet Studies in Comparative Literature

Series Editors Theo D’haen (University of Leuven) Karen Laura Thornber (Harvard University) Zhang Longxi (City University of Hong Kong) C.C. Barfoot (University of Leiden) Hans Bertens (University of Utrecht)

volume 85

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/tscl

Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present Fields of Action, Fields of Vision Edited by

Claire Bowen Catherine Hoffmann

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: C.R.W. Nevinson, Bursting Shell, 1915. Oil on canvas 76 × 56 cm. Copyright: Tate, London. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017059326

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0927-5754 isbn 978-90-04-35323-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-35324-4 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

le théâtre de la guerre … songea Grange. Le mot n’est pas si mal trouvé. julien gracq, Un balcon en forêt

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Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Figures x List of Contributors xi Introduction 1

Part 1 The Spectacle of War 1 Deconstructing the Spectacle of War? Brian de Palma’s Redacted, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha, Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah and the Iraq War 13 Monica Michlin 2 The War in Images: The Poetics of Plasticity in Juan Benet’s Herrumbrosas lanzas 31 Sandrine Lascaux and Claire Bowen (trans.) 3 The Second World War Seen from the Balcony: Representations of the Spectacle of War in the French Post-War Novel 51 Clément Sigalas

Part 2 At a Distance from War 4 The “Comic Opera” of the Allied Intervention in Russia: Off-Staging War in William Gerhardie’s Early Novels 69 Catherine Hoffmann 5 Margaret Atwood’s Representation of Modern and Imaginary Warfare 89 Teresa Gibert 6 Memory Keeping and Visual Narratives of Commemoration: Representing Interned Japanese Americans during World War ii 103 Catherine Collins

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Part 3 Bringing the War Home 7

Martha Rosler, an American Artist at War with War 123 Éliane Elmaleh

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Conflicting Documentary Strategies and Italian Counter-propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 136 Marie-France Courriol

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Revisiting the Congo’s Forgotten Wars: Jean Lartéguy’s Les Chimères noires and the Secession of Katanga 154 Christopher Lloyd

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“A Boy and His Dog…”: The War in Afghanistan and Storytelling 167 Claire Bowen

Part 4 Experiencing War and Bearing Witness 11

Aphonic Images: Aurality and Silence in Civil War Photographs 185 William Gleeson

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Profiles of War by Hayashi Fusao: A Writer’s Approach to War 194 Guillaume Muller

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Ōoka Shōhei’s Democratization of the Self 209 Misako Nemoto

Conclusion 222 Select Bibliography 229 Index 231

Acknowledgements Our thanks go to the Groupe de Recherche Identités et Cultures and the Université Le Havre Normandie for their financial and logistical support for the Fields of Action, Fields of Vision project from its beginnings. We would also like to thank Kate McLoughlin for her generous advice and assistance. Sarah Hatchuel has, as always, been the best of loyal and supportive friends and colleagues. Masja Horn of Brill has been unfailingly kind and a fountain of knowledge. We thank her warmly for her help and patience throughout the editorial process. Finally, we would like to thank all the contributors to the book for sharing this journey with us.

List of Figures 6.1 Washington dc memorial pool 110 6.2 Bainbridge Island, Washington bijac memorial wall 112 6.3 Seattle, Washington memorial wall 113 6.4 Bainbridge Island, Washington memorial story wall 115 6.5 Portland, Oregon’s Japanese American Historical Plaza 116 6.6 Washington dc Memorial to Japanese-American Patriotism in World War ii 117 11.1 George Barnard, “Ruins in Charleston, S.C.”, from Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign 192

List of Contributors Claire Bowen was Senior Lecturer in English (retired 2014), at Université du Havre Normandie, France Catherine Ann Collins is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Film Studies at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon, u.s.a. Marie-France Courriol completed a PhD in Italian Film Studies jointly supervised at the University of Cambridge, u.k. and Université Lille 3, France. She currently works in publishing as an editor. Éliane Elmaleh is Professor of American Civilization and History, Université du Maine, France Teresa Gibert is Professor of English at uned (Universidad Nacional de Educación a ­Distancia), Madrid, Spain William Gleeson is Senior Lecturer in English at Université du Maine, France. Catherine Hoffmann was Senior Lecturer in English (retired 2015) at Université du Havre Normandie, France. Sandrine Lascaux is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at Université du Havre Normandie, France. Christopher Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University, u.k. Monica Michlin is Professor of Contemporary American Studies at Université Paul ValéryMontpellier 3, France.

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Guillaume Muller is a doctoral student at the Centre for Japanese Studies, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, France. Misako Nemoto is Professor of French Literature at Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan. Clément Sigalas completed a Doctorate at Université Paris 4-Sorbonne on representations of World War ii in the French novel. He teaches at Université Paris-Est-Marne-laVallée, France.

Introduction Claire Bowen and Catherine Hoffmann Recent years have seen an extraordinary number of literary, non-fiction and visual productions about war, at least in Western Europe and North America. The plethora of fiction, life-writing, poetry, theatre, film, photography, fine art and memorial events, architectural innovation and landscaping is hardly surprising in a period that continues to commemorate the First World War, that celebrates the significant anniversaries of the Second with its last living protagonists and that also remembers and discusses the great colonial and post-colonial conflicts of the twentieth century. The intense academic interest in the subject of historians and specialists in, inter alia, fine art, photography, literature and cultural studies is also remarkable and the occasion of much debate on the manner in which the study not only of war itself but, increasingly, of its representations, should be apprehended. A great deal of the work published over the last twenty years, certainly in English-speaking environments, has taken the traditional medium-based approach to the subject: Kate McLoughlin’s Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq, Julia Boll’s The New War Plays from Kane to Harris and the volume edited by Joanna Bourke War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict for example. There is also a growing tendency to think about war in terms of conceptual categories such as gender, practices of reception, the body and memorialization, with work of this kind necessarily crossing interdisciplinary lines. Thus Maryelle Beider and Roberta Johnson consider questions of literature, history and gender in their collection of essays on Spanish Women Writers and the Spanish Civil War, Jay Winter that of perception, recall and reality in his Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century, Jan Mieszkowski that of war as spectacle and thus of the tension between observation and imagination in his Watching War. Contemporary events have changed the very definition of “war” and created a need to re-examine how we describe and think about situations that have nothing to do with what are – or, at least were – usually understood as the laws and customs of armed conflict. As new kinds of conflict inspire new subjects, so P.W. Singer engages with digital warfare in his Wired For War while Judith Butler discusses how media coverage of contemporary wars may encourage a fatally reductive perception of the Other in her Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?1 1 Much is being published on the Internet, whether by artists and writers themselves or by critics. See in particular WAR-net.org which presents ongoing research into war and representation and provides a forum for academics working in the field. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004353244_002

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The present collective work too originated in renewed and increasing interest in war representation and in the feeling that our task, as academics, was to investigate the complex relation between the changing notion of war and the proliferation of its representations through a variety of media. To do so necessarily implied a multidisciplinary approach while the persistence of war representation across time and space also called for a widening of the temporal and geographical range of our enquiries beyond Western European perspectives on major twentieth-century conflicts. The theme has indeed been addressed by writers and artists since the earliest times and representations of war have been subjected to changing conventions. For example, Modern European war painting from Uccello’s battles to the set pieces of the early nineteenth century, offer the spectacle of an organized army shown in the exact geographical context of a specific moment and with senior officers given special prominence being placed in the foreground and/or on horseback. There is, in short, a time, a place, an overview, men in arms and recognizably important, even named, individuals. In contrast, the patriotic wars of modern France and the post-Crimean War view of the military in Britain encourage the attention on the ordinary soldier apparent in the works of, for example, Alphonse de Neuville and Lady Butler. Similarly, the perspective of written accounts of war shifts from the foregrounding of heroes and heroic deeds in the chansons de geste and chronicles of the Middle Ages to the narratives of ordinary, individual experience produced by modern writers as spatially and temporally distant as Rudyard Kipling, Eric Maria Remarque and Michael Herr. Changes in the manner of representing war are a natural extension to whatever narratives of war and the military are prevalent in a given society. And the representations also contribute to these narratives. For instance, the changes in perception that operated in Britain in the nineteenth century and which ended in the transformation of Wellington’s “scum of the earth” into the hero Tommies of the First World War were accompanied, if not initiated, by sympathetic and almost real-time journalistic coverage of battles and military life with engravings and photographs and paintings in which the represented “ordinary” soldier, possessed of heroic qualities, simply represents the potential of all the others of his class. Representations of war are utterly inscribed in the social and political life of the community in which they are made. They may be either personal or commissioned, the work of journalists or state-commissioned artists and photographers. They form a significant part of the cultural landscape of a great many nations. They are both a manifestation of how a given society thinks about war and about itself in war, but are also crucial in shaping opinion by

Introduction

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their ­contribution to a narrative that will be about far more than mere military operations and fighting. But the representation, like the narrative, will necessarily be confined. The proliferation of fields of action in the modern period, and the use of new technology in the present, entail a multiplicity of fields of vision, sometimes very restricted, sometimes abstract and digitalized, from which war may be experienced and/or represented. Crucial to representation in general – the absent object being always viewed and presented from a point of view whether concealed or acknowledged – perspective is paramount in war representation. And perspective will always be problematical because it will always impose limits. As the war correspondent Marc Kravetz, winner of the Albert Londres prize in 1980, wrote in an issue of Le Magazine Littéraire devoted to war writing: Insubstantial, ghostly, war is but the generic name of a large scale human disaster of which even the best journalist, like the other participants, civilians or combatants, experiences for only a moment and in a limited space. The only truth available to the war reporter-correspondent is that of the moment and place where he finds himself, a truth resembling that of the novelist. The heroes and high deeds of the day soon vanish. What endures are chance meetings, gestures, words, situations of no historical import. (100, our translation) The two fundamental affirmations about war representation – that it is necessarily engaged with opinions held by members of a given society in a particular time and place and that it is necessarily biased and incomplete because no wide perspective, physical or intellectual, can possibly be available – are at the heart of this volume. The remit for the authors was to examine the degree to which representational models may be culture- and medium-specific and the ways in which war narratives and images have been modified or created in function both of the “laws and customs” of war itself and the availability of new forms of representation. The contributors were invited to consider their ­particular case study in terms of subject choices, of the relationship to traditional or pre-existing modes of war representation (whether as persistence, adaptation, re-appropriation, rejection, or deconstruction), of the application of strategies of framing, distortion, obliquity, or expansion, and finally, of the aesthetic and ideological problems associated with the over- or under-­ representation of war. This book constitutes the final stage of a four-year project on perceptions and representations of modern wars in the fixed and moving image and in the written word since the mid-nineteenth century, the time when p ­ hotography

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came into its own. The project included workshops, lectures, exhibitions, screenings, and an international conference at the University of Le Havre, France, and was rooted in the conception that war representation is an integral part of war itself, used in a variety of ways ranging from explicit propaganda to demythologizing, from reiteration of collective purpose and unity to exploration of individual experience. In keeping with this conception, the “fields of action” of the volume’s title are not restricted to the combat zones: not only do they extend to the margins and periphery of wars but also include the area of representation understood as a species of action, inter-action and communication, whether of a performative, informative, or reflexive kind. The choice of contributions reflects our initial decision to cut across the boundaries of academic disciplines and brings together work by scholars from the fields of literature, film studies, the visual arts and cultural studies, in order to account for the kaleidoscopic multi-media nature of the representations of conflicts to which many people are now daily exposed. Thus, the volume contains essays on novels, press reporting, autobiographical writing, documentary and fiction films, photomontages and early war photography, and public memorials combining linguistic and visual components. Since we have deliberately defined a wide spatial and temporal frame of reference, we have encouraged contributions on distant fields of action, idiosyncratic perspectives, forgotten wars or neglected aspects of major conflicts. The conflicts represented in the works studied here range temporally from the 1860s to the near present: they include the American Civil War, the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Secession of Katanga, the Second Sino-­Japanese War, the Second World War seen from a Japanese and ­Japanese-American point of view, and from a detached, peripheral French perspective, and the Vietnam War as well as recent American or British interventions, launched in the context of the “War on Terror”, in Iraq and Afghanistan while the chapter on Margaret Atwood spans various twentieth-century wars and imagined future wars from the perspective of Canadian women characters. The volume is divided into four sections which, rather than conceived as discrete entities, are intended to form four “movements” corresponding to different angles of perception and modes of representation, yet connected by echoes, parallels or contrasts inviting dynamic and multi-directional reading. In the first section, “The Spectacle of War”, the authors interrogate the notion of war as spectacle, as a “show”, staged and performed in a “theatre of war”, the very vocabulary suggesting that war is always already conceived as a representation in the sense of a performance. Aesthetic choices may deconstruct the spectacle of war by demythologizing its glamorized representations

Introduction

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of action and drawing attention to the moral and physical corruption at the heart of warfare and such choices are analysed in Monica Michlin’s chapter on the Iraq war film and that by Sandrine Lascaux on Juan Benet’s novelistic representation of the Spanish Civil War. Michlin analyses the ways in which three American directors revisit the classic combat film, question the forms of spectacle and the types of gaze allowed by the “War on Terror”, and strive towards an ethics of perception. Lascaux argues that in Benet’s case, deconstruction is achieved through a baroque aesthetic of excess resulting in the collapse of both the spectacle and its representation, described as “a counter-epic about the anti-heroes of a non-event”. One may, in fact, read the dissolution of a text mobilizing such a spectacular array of material, references and devices as an allegory of the disproportion between the costs of wars and their derisory or disastrous outcomes. The section ends with Clément Sigalas’ study of six French novels published just after World War ii. In these, war, experienced indirectly, provides a “narrative of vision”, rather than a “narrative of action”, a spectacle viewed through various framing and optical devices from the restrictive point of view of observers safely positioned at their windows or balconies. The chapters in the second section, “At a distance from war”, consider ways in which fictional and visual narratives make use of different types of ­distance – spatial, temporal, moral, or gendered: how, in other words, war may be represented when it is, to all intents and purposes, absent. War, although temporally and spatially close, may be experienced as remote by fictional protagonists whose eccentric perspective insulates them from its harsh realities which take place, as it were, off-stage. Catherine Hoffmann’s study of the representation of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in two novels by William Gerhardie expands the idea of indirectly experienced war explored by Sigalas in the previous section but this time with protagonists so detached from the on-going war that it cannot be said to even provide a spectacle. An absurd conflict becomes a fitting subject for comic treatment and for the sarcastic anti-war diatribes of the narrators and characters. In her chapter on the fiction of Margaret Atwood, Teresa Gibert considers distance as a matter of gender and examines the ways in which Margaret Atwood represents the traumatic aspects of twentieth, twenty-first century and imagined conflicts in terms of the multifaceted relationship between war and women. Returning to visual forms of representation, Catherine Collins addresses the question of complex physical and temporal distance in her account of the u.s. memorials to the Japanese Americans interned in World War ii, removed from their homes in America to unknown American destinations for the duration of a war fought at a great distance by unknown protagonists and commemorated

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only in the late ­twentieth century. The memorials combine a commemorative function and political reflection, attempt to bridge the temporal gap between past, present and ­future. They perform a double function as “fields of vision”, spatially ­located and making the treatment of Japanese Americans visible to the sites’ visitors, and “fields of action” in their reshaping of national memory of World War Two and their intended effect on future attitudes to civil rights in war time. The next section, concerns non-memorial strategies for raising awareness in audiences physically distanced from fields of action in which their country is directly or indirectly involved. “Bringing the War home” involves making subversive use of media images from a determined ideological perspective as Éliane Elmaleh shows in her study of Martha Rosler’s Vietnam and Iraq photomontages. Paradoxically, the elements of the photomontages brought into American homes were already omnipresent there through tv footage and, later on, websites and social networks. As Elmaleh demonstrates, Rosler’s work therefore was intended to shake viewers out of their own familiarity with war images and cause them to probe the political implications of their reception. Marie-France Courriol considers the moving image in her work on the competing militant documentary films made by Joris Ivens and Romolo Marcellini during the Spanish Civil War. She examines the pool of motifs common to the two film-makers and the combination of newsreel and fictional models to enhance the propaganda value of the material. Wars can also be brought home in fiction such as Jean Lartéguy’s Chimères noires, a roman à clé by the bestselling French author and war correspondent on the brief, bloody and generally under-reported secession of Katanga in 1960. Christopher Lloyd analyses Lartéguy’s treatment of the conflict and considers the strengths and limitations of fictionalized accounts of historical events. Finally, the narrative spirals analysed by Claire Bowen in the chapter on the British popular press narratives of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns offer a paradigmatic instance of how certain types of war representation come to prevail in a given culture, and sometimes across cultures, through an incremental self-generating process involving a high degree of audience participation. In the closing section, “Experiencing war and bearing witness”, three authors discuss works conveying a direct experience of the field of action, either by a soldier or by observers attempting to record a war, especially as a field of perception. William Gleeson considers a collective experiencing and representation of the American Civil War and the effect of time on our reception of images which no longer resonate with the sounds and noises of the battlefield experienced by soldiers and photographers who, in the nature of things, no

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longer exist. The passing of time heightens our awareness of a fundamental characteristic of representation, namely the absence of what is represented,2 so that the photographs studied by Gleeson now appear to viewers as elegiac representations of absences. The question of overcoming the limitations of an individual’s point of view is crucial to the discussion of the strategies used by two Japanese writers, Hayashi Fusao and Ōoka Shōhei. Misako Nemoto and Guillaume Muller both turn their attention to Japanese experiences of war. Guillaume Muller examines Profiles of War by Hayashi Fusao, one of the leading figures of the Japanese Romantic School. The Profiles, published in 1937 in the aftermath of the so-called “China Incident” offer a multi-faceted representation of war approached from a multiplicity of angles and genres by a non-combatant professional writer. Ōoka Shōhei, also a professional writer, experienced combat, being drafted at the age of thirty-five and sent to active service in the Philippines in 1944. Misako Nemoto offers a reading of his Taken Captive: A Japanese p.o.w.’s Story (1948–1951). Time and the related question of what can be known about war in retrospect are essential to Ōoka’s reflections about his war experience. Writing, in his case, becoming a means of making sense of a traumatic moment, a haunting scene displaced onto literature – his own familiar field of action – and a process of what Nemoto terms “democratization of the self” which, through the intimate experience of facing death common to all soldiers, brings about his consciousness of shared humanity. Since the problematic nature of war representation is repeatedly foregrounded both by the artists whose works are studied in this volume and by the contributors to Representing Wars, it would be tempting to concur with the often-expressed idea that war is irrepresentable, or at least, that no representation of war can ever convey a “true” picture or sense of what it feels like for those who experience it.3 This, however, would appear to rest on a reductive conception of representation as mimesis, perhaps implicitly coupled with Platonic moral or philosophical objections to the illusionistic nature of such representation. Since any representation posits its object as a represented object, not as the thing itself,4 there is no reason to consider that war, in this r­ espect, 2 See Schaeffer: “toute représentation se caractérise par l’absence de ce qu’elle représente : c’est même là sa fonction, puisque son utilité dépend du fait qu’elle peut nous tenir lieu de ce dont elle est le signe” (285). “Any representation is characterized by the absence of what it represents. It is precisely its function, since its purpose is to stand for what it signifies” (Translation C. Hoffmann). 3 See McLoughlin’s “Not writing about war” 46. 4 See Schaeffer 109.

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should constitute an ontologically different category. This is not to deny that representing it raises difficulties inherent in the subject matter. Firstly, in terms of experience, it means many different things to different people across time and space. Secondly its representation involves a particularly complex interaction between ethics and aesthetics. Thirdly, war representation may fulfil an extensive variety of functions, and in its most ideological or performative forms, calls for an especially high degree of audience participation. The challenge is further compounded by the remarkably long history of war representation in literature and the visual arts, which, incidentally, makes its supposed irrepresentability something of a paradox, and which has established representational models and conventions exercising a strong influence not only on subsequent verbal and visual representations but also on communities, nations, and individuals of the past and present. With these difficulties in mind, we hope that the present volume will contribute both to making sense and giving a sense of the variety of perspectives from which war can now be represented. We also hope that it will encourage reflection on our own responsibility as readers and viewers, consumers of cultural productions which, at one end of the spectrum, may promote a vicarious experience of the “adrenaline rush” (Michlin 13) of combat, or, at the opposite end, elicit a powerful rejection, not only of war itself, but also of some of its representations. Works Cited Beider, Maryvelle and Johnson, Roberta, eds. Spanish Women Writers and Spain’s Civil War. London: Routledge, 2016. Print. Boll, Julia. The New War Plays from Kane to Harris. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Print. Bourke, Joanna, ed. War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict. London: Reaktion, 2017. Print. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? 2009. London, New York: Verso, 2016. Print. Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Knopf, 1977. Print. Kipling, Rudyard. Barrack Room Ballads. London: Methuen, 1992. Print. Kravetz, Marc. “Profession: correspondant de guerre.” Magazine Littéraire. Écrire la guerre de Homère à Edward Bond. July-August 1999. 98–102. Print. McLoughlin, Kate. Authoring War. The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. McLoughlin, Kate. “Not Writing About War.” Fighting Words and Images. Representing War Across the Disciplines. Ed. Elena V. Barbaran, Stephan Jaeger and Adam Muller. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 46–64. Print.

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Mieszkowski, Jan. Watching War. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. Print. Remarque, Erich Maria. Im Western nichts Neues. Berlin: Propylaen Verlag, 1929. Print. Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Trans. Arthur Wesley Ween. New York: Little Brown, 1929. Print. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Pourquoi la fiction? Paris: Seuil, 1999. Print. Singer, P.W., Wired For War. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Print.

Part 1 The Spectacle of War

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chapter 1

Deconstructing the Spectacle of War? Brian de Palma’s Redacted, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha, Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah and the Iraq War Monica Michlin Abstract This chapter examines the generic hybridization of the Iraq war film away from the combat film and against the forms of spectacle and the weaponized gaze that War on Terror allowed. The discussion raises issues about the political and ethical difficulty of representing an ongoing war and the artistic difficulty of renewing war film tropes. Paying special attention to Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, Brian De Palma’s ­Redacted, and Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha, all released in 2007, the analysis shows how those films, through their reflexive scrutiny of digital war imagery and adoption of conflicting points of view, break away from the spectacle of war and strive for an “ethics of clarified vision” (Garrett Stewart). In doing this, they react against the sanitized, ­one-sided representation by those war films which reveal the “theatre” of war while screening – in the sense of redacting – the realities of war.

It may seem a paradox to speak of the Iraq War film as deconstructing the spectacle of war, if one has in mind either Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) or James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). While these films’ visuals packed a relentless series of adrenaline rushes and arguably operated within a “frenzy of the visible” (Ndalianis), the majority of Iraq War films have, as Martin Barker (2011, 27–44) puts it, constructed an “Iraq War experience” made of long stretches of boredom at checkpoints, confused urban fighting of a faceless enemy, and the violent knocking down of civilians’ doors, often spilling into war crimes – a combination geared at making the spectacle of war ethically unbearable.1 1 Other films undo the spectacle by mainly focusing on how the war replays itself in the veteran’s haunted psyche. This, by putting the emphasis on soldiers’ post-traumatic stress, deliberately takes the pleasure out of vicarious participation in war – Irwin Winckler’s Home of the

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Brian De Palma’s Redacted, Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, and Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha, all released in 2007, fit this pattern. Arguably, it is because of these three films’ politics, and because they arouse moral discomfort and physical disgust and offer no soldier-hero for the viewers to identify with, that they were failures at the box-office (see Corliss, D’Addario, Farhi, Kaufman, and Scott 2007). Directors opposing the Iraq War have deliberately subverted the categories defined by Chapman – war as spectacle, war as tragedy, war as adventure –, even as the war film itself, in an era coinciding with the digital turn, was hybridizing with other genres or media forms (the spy film, the war documentary, the video log, the filmic diary, reality shows, etc.). I will quickly examine the hybridization of the Iraq War film with the spy film within the War on Terror, then focus on representations of the dirty war that corrupts the soldier, highlighting how digital imaging within the films reveals the war crimes that official storytelling seeks to redact (the military euphemism for “censor”), and finally show how this questioning of corrupt imagery of war reflexively impacts the meaning of contemporary war cinema itself. 1

The Hybridization of the War Film beyond the Combat Film

As Robert Eberwein points out, what constitutes a war film has been hotly discussed; while Steve Neale narrowly defines war film as necessarily ­featuring combat, most scholars would allow that In the Valley of Elah is a war film. ­Robert Burgoyne’s definitions of war film as defined by “genre memory”, crystallizing “forms of social and cultural perception” and participating in ­“national mythology” (Eberwein 52) of course do not preclude oppositional creations by contemporary directors. The latter can contest both the constraints and archetypes of the genre while subverting the image of the nation projected by other representations of war, as demonstrated in documentary film by ­Jeffrey Geiger’s Projecting the Nation (2011). Following George W. Bush’s May 1, 2003 announcement – “major combat operations are over … in the War in Iraq, the United States and its allies have prevailed” – the Iraq War film as a

Brave (2006) and Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss adopt this model. Finally, a last group of films deliberately eschew all images of war, and choose to describe combat orally. These are generally explicitly antiwar: Francesco Lucente’s Badland (2007) and Rodrigo Cortés’ Buried (2010) respectively use tropes of the thriller and of the horror film to shred both the heroics and the aesthetics of war film, while Oren Moverman’s The Messenger (2009) replaces conventional notions of valor with a male figure of care.

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genre seemed to say, “welcome to minor combat”.2 Minor combat, or guerrilla warfare, is cinematically defined in terms of an absence of perspective and of panoptic control (Eberwein 134). Arguably, while Iraq War films did very poorly at the box office, War on Terror3 did well in film and tv series (see Prince, Takacs) precisely because it allowed viewers that sense of enhanced vision that urban warfare films preclude. The split screen in 24 (Fox, 2001- 2010), the satellite imagery in Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008) and in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012) in which optics and weapons are one (Virilio 1989), and the featuring of torture in all three, stage war on terror as biopower, in a Foucaldian way. While these films revolve around covert operations and chains of command, they seemingly pertain more to the thriller/espionage/action film than to the war film genre. But what the War on Terror brought was precisely a long-term blurring of the lines between peace and a state of emergency, between military war and cia or nsa wars, between drones as weapons of mass surveillance and statesanctioned killing machines. Whether to reclaim an audience fond of combat, or to point out that the omnipotent gaze is a fantasy, both Body of Lies and Zero Dark Thirty stage the failure of weapons of surveillance – when the target is obscured either by a sandstorm or by high walls. This in turn requires Special Forces, close-range fighting, more conventionally recognizable as war, (though not as heroic combat), to return. The last third of Zero Dark Thirty, though it is filmed in near dark, as its title heralds, is simultaneously construed as payback for the first scene that opens in the dark while one hears the real-life calls of those trapped in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and as a form of video-game-like militainment (Stahl) in a literalization, in the anthracite visuals, of black ops. This on the one hand renews suspense (breathing new life into the tradecraft question “do you have a visual?”), while on the other, it prepares us for immersion in night-vision green, through the elite unit’s infrared scopes. The film strikingly starts with the pixellation of the production 2 This is a quotation from the voice-over that opens the embedded documentary Gunner Palace (Epperlein & Tucker, 2004). 3 As well as films making the point that the war was for oil, geopolitical control of the Middle East, and for us corporations to make a killing. Eberwein considers them a new subgenre of war film: “A new kind of war film cycle appears in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004), Syriana (2005) and The Kingdom (2007). We need to see films in this group in relation to the concept introduced by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961 when he warned of ‘the military-industrial complex’. […] [They] provide frightening demonstrations of how the huge corporations tied into or heavily dependent on the oil industry, which benefits from the United States’ spending on war, are succeeding in a ‘disastrous rise’ connected with their acquisition of international power” (39).

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company’s logo as if seen through surveillance satellite imaging as it breaks up. These effects remind us that Zero Dark Thirty shares its screenwriter4 with In the Valley of Elah, which likewise starts with the fragmentation of images, including the Warner Brothers logo, in its opening sequence. 2

Digital Images: The Corrupt Nature of War

In the Valley of Elah (2007), Redacted (2007), and Battle for Haditha (2007) all focus squarely on war as atrocity, and specifically, on us war crimes in Iraq. In a reflexive scrutiny of war images, they emphasize how the circulation of images was itself part of war, developing in a popular medium what W.J.T. Mitchell was to say of the cloning of images of terror, from trophy shot to recruitment poster or cultural icon of protest. As opposed to the War on Terror films quoted above, they are not ethically ambiguous in their depiction of torture, rape, or gratuitous killing of civilians by American soldiers, but instead uphold an ­ethics of viewing which relies on empathy for the Iraqi victims rather than on sadistic pleasure or inhuman indifference.5 All three works display a post-Abu Ghraib-scandal consciousness of ubiquitous digital devices like cell phones with which soldiers record their war, as well as of the indexicality and metaindexicality of video filming; they display an awareness of how images will be circulated, on either side, with a change of framing discourse as part of a war of images on internet or on opposed tv networks. One recognizes, under their aliases, Al Jazeera, cnn and other echo chambers for the various sides at war. Because of their clear antiwar message, in their allegorical conflation of war with atrocity, de Palma, Broomfield and Haggis were called “traitors” and their films branded “Bin Laden cinema”.6 All three films work against “getting lost in the eroticism of violence”,7 but also, against the idea of one-sidedly immersed spectatorship of war. All three force us to piece together the truth about an actual, ripped-from-the-headlines incident which, in its fictionalization by each director, stands as an allegory for the war. 4 On Mark Boal’s writing such widely different screenplays as Haggis’s and Bigelow’s, see Smith. 5 On the deep connection between war and the abuse of civilians see Scarry and Hardt & Negri, on torture during the Iraq War see Danner 2004 and Danner 2009, on the ethics of viewing another’s pain see Sontag. On the “apolitics” of the war films that did well at the box office, see Scott 2010. 6 See Hattenstone. These three directors have asked of the media supposedly covering the reality of war, “where are the images?” On this point, see Michlin 2008. 7 As Chris Menges, the cinematographer of Stop-Loss puts it, in his commentary on dvd (54’).

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In the Valley of Elah: Corrupted Video

In the Valley of Elah starts off as a thriller. We follow a former Military Police nco, Hank Deerfield, as he investigates the disappearance of his son Mike, a young soldier who has just returned from Iraq but apparently gone awol.8 In uncovering what has happened to Mike, the focus shifts to returning vets’ violence; in the subplot starring Charlize Theron as Emily Sanders, a local police detective, we realize that military and civilian police forces collude in covering up the crimes that soldiers commit upon each other and on their spouses (this was the first fiction film to truly expose the epidemic of domestic violence on the part of returning Iraq War veterans).9 Central to the plot is the missing soldier’s cell phone, which his father secretly pockets when visiting the barracks. Severely damaged videos on this phone seem to hold clues; the computer technician tells Hank these “corrupted files” are probably “just trash” (12’) – terms that alert us to the deeper meaning of the damaged video which, bit by bit, will be retrieved and played before our eyes on Hank’s computer. The entire film is to be read within this symbolic image of fragmentation, since it starts with the Warner Brothers logo itself, shot in ominous charcoal lighting, pixellated and breaking up before our eyes, warning us that we are embarked upon a journey into a heart of darkness, to reconstitute how Mike, of whom Hank says “he’s a good boy” (18’), has become a war criminal. An obscure detail – his being nicknamed “Doc” by his fellow soldiers – will be decrypted in the last retrieved video, which documents Mike putting his gun in a prisoner’s open wound, asking “does this hurt?” in a perverse parody of a medical examination. There are no visuals, only the audio of the prisoner’s screams. When one of his former comrades depicts this as “just a way to cope. We all do stupid things” (97’) we understand torture to be part of the domino effect of dehumanization caused by war, one which affects the entire unit. Another retrieved video shows Mike playfully slapping red devil stickers on the bodies of the charred Iraqi dead, in an explicit image of the sadist he has become and in an uncanny prophecy of how he is to die (murdered and set on fire). But while Hank’s role as investigator leads him to expose the army’s cover-ups, he harbours a secret, too. 8 The initial pixellated first images including the logo can thus be read as the main video puzzle of the film spilling outside the frame. They also mirror the destabilization of Hank’s formerly fixed views and his descent from dogma and discipline into radical doubt that may also “contaminate” the viewer. 9 On this issue, see for instance Alvarez & Frosch and Benedict. In fiction film, this was shown in Stop-Loss (2008) and most shockingly in Badland (2007).

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A phone call haunts him, replaying every night in his nightmares: the screen goes dark and we hear his son’s voice, jolting him awake. As it recurs, we incrementally discover the truth: Mike was pleading, from Iraq, “you’ve got to get me out of here” (103’), and Hank had rejected this cry for help, considering it weakness. In the last minutes of the film, as he sits in his own car, preparing to drive home, Hank hallucinates what the videos did not completely show – what happened on the day of the phone call which is shown in fragmentary form at the start of the film: his son’s vehicle had deliberately run over an Iraqi child (99’). While, from what one gathers in documentaries like Patricia Foulkrod’s The Ground Truth (2006), this is horribly common for Humvee drivers in Iraq, the coda to the film, the picture of a mangled road-killed child10 with the dedication “To the children” signals Haggis’s will to speak up for the Iraqi children but also to speak to the American young, who must resist becoming the red devil of war. It is also a powerful cinematic commentary on the power of cinema, versus digital imagery, to “figure an ethics of clarified vision”, as Garrett Stewart puts it in his powerful study of “digital fatigue” in Iraq War (and War on Terror) film, since the truth is revealed through Hank’s imaginary projection of what must have happened, in 35 mm film, and not through an ultimate digital recording: Deerfield becomes the ideal viewer of the movie he’s in. In its whiplash exchange between then and now, us and them, that’s the political charge of this climactic montage. The film that opens with a logo pretending to be a video image recovering from its digital glitches and break-ups has, two hours later, closed instead by foregrounding its inherent cinematographic power to figure an ethics of clarified vision. (53) The title “In the Valley of Elah” is a reference to the story of David and Goliath, which Hank reads out loud to Emily Sanders’ little boy, who is frightened of the dark. One can read it as a tragic irony, since Hank raised both his own sons to be warriors, and they both died as a result. Within the broader anti-war allegory, the biblical story carries the moral lesson of the film: not to fear taking on the powerful (including the military chain of command), and to challenge reflex forms of patriotism that the pro-war media has powerfully mobilized, in particular, around the us flag, since 9/11. Hank’s journey begins and ends with a symbolic scene involving the flag: on his way to Mike’s base, he sees it flying 10

In a shot that recalls the real-life shots of a similarly mangled Iraqi woman in Scranton’s The War Tapes (2006).

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upside down at a local school, and corrects this mistake, explaining that this constitutes an international distress signal. When he returns, he deliberately hoists his own tattered us flag – inherited from his veteran father and that he, in turn, had passed on to Mike – so that it flies upside down. His conservative view of us military history is thus recycled into the cry that the Iraq war is a disaster and that the nation needs to be saved.11 The showcasing of corrupt and corrupted imagery of war performs the message, while the domestic violence subplot further emphasizes that the killing continues, at home as well as abroad. The film’s main symbols resurface in Brian de Palma’s Redacted, which takes up his earlier Casualties of War (1989), set during the Vietnam War. 4

Redacted: Faux Found Footage to Expose the Truth about War

Redacted, like Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha, exposes the vicious circle of violence, as soldiers kill Iraqi civilians at checkpoints;12 Iraqi insurgents plant ieds; soldiers go on punitive raids to kill civilians in their homes; troops supposedly deployed to bring democracy to Iraq speak of the Iraqis as “cockroaches” (25’) and express their racist desire to “vaporize every last sand nigger” (33’).13 The soldiers are, with one exception, portrayed as bigoted, violent and seemingly amoral. Here, as in Haggis’s film, the one soldier who calls for help from home – on Skype – happens to have an ex-military father who also equates whistle-blowing with betrayal. The film lambasts the chain of command for redacting the true story of war, but also, the American public for wanting only clichéd war stories from vets and sanitized representations of war from the media (from tv reports to cinema). As Charles Taylor points out in his l.a. Times review of the film: 11

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The symbols used by Haggis, from the flag to the Bible, from the fact that the immigrant janitor is from El Salvador, to the haunted conservative military father, aimed, of course, at engaging a more conservative audience. This is rarely recognized by top commanders, but General McChrystal (former nato Commander in Afghanistan) admitted it of checkpoints in Afghanistan: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat”. (See Oppel). Echoing what real-life soldiers actually say in such embedded documentaries as Occupation: Dreamland (2005) or The War Tapes (2006). See Steuter and Wills on the rhetoric of dehumanization of the enemy, on the part of such neo-con pundits as Ann Coulter or Bill O’Reilly, and the broadcasting of exactly such potentially genocidal statements on television after 9/11.

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Paradoxically, though there are more outlets for them, images from Iraq have not dominated the public consciousness in the way images from Vietnam did. That, De Palma says, was the prime inspiration for Redacted. “Where are the pictures? Why can’t we see them?” he asks. “If we’re going to invade, occupy, bomb, destroy, I would like to see what we’re doing”. The film starts with a fundamental irony: the displaying of the routine disclaimer as to being “entirely fiction” is progressively redacted, but in a reversal of military censorship, since the word “fictional” is first blacked out; then the entire paragraph, until only the letters of the word “redacted” are left, to float forward and reassemble themselves against the dark, redacted screen. Then, to a typing sound, enacting the performance of speech and of frames through which the story will be filtered, the title appears with a contradictory definition (“Redacted visually documents imagined events before, during, and after a 2006 rape and murder in Samarra”) which blends the indexicality of images and fiction around a real-life war crime, the location of which has however been changed, from Mahmudiyah to Samarra. This makes Redacted a “fakumentary” that claims to tell the truth: as a coda to the film, De Palma shows a montage titled “Collateral Damage” made of seventeen stills of killed Iraqi civilians, including numerous women and children. This deliberate overflow from the frame of fiction back into real, indexical images echoes In the Valley of Elah’s coda. Ironically, though, because the producers did not want to risk litigation for showing the faces of the dead, De Palma redacted the victims’ faces. While this undermines the indexicality of the ­images, the redaction is proof that the images are indeed real, while overcoding the theme of the entire film. This palimpsest of the redaction of the truth, while it must be replaced within the context of the Bush Administration’s refusal to allow any adversely affective images of the war to be shown (from footage of Iraqi victims to the body bags or funerals of fallen us troops) must also be seen as mirroring the narrative’s own fascination for the reflexive construction of images and of storytelling.14 Redacted is indeed presented as a montage of faux-found footage, from the video diary Private Angel Salazar hopes can help get him into film school, to a pastiche of a French documentary (in French, complete with its own credits) on us checkpoints in Iraq, to American news reports, insurgent footage posted on internet websites, Al Jazeera-like television reports in Arabic, surveillance cameras outside the American military barracks, helmet-mounted 14

Whether for its anti-war message or for its reflexive sophistication, Redacted received the 2007 Silver Lion in Venice.

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cameras ­recording in night-vision green when the soldiers go on their punitive raid, military police interrogation recordings, Skype conversations between soldiers and their families, anti-war activists websites… Martin Barker lists thirteen types of visuals (37). While using what could be immersive forms of social media and video, De Palma deliberately mobilizes a variety of alienation effects and, in particular, highly artificial wipes between scenes – shattered windowpane or closing jaws transitions, in a throwback to 1970s cinema – to signal that someone is mediating these images, that this too, is a narrative construction, not a transparent window into the war. These visible artifices, as well as deliberate overacting by the cast of soldiers make viewing an uncomfortable experience, which some spectators will resist. The film is overtly didactic: Salazar, who films the rape, eventually cries to the military psychiatrist: “Just because you’re watching doesn’t mean you’re not a part of it. That’s what everyone does – they just watch and do nothing. Or they make a video for people to watch and do nothing”. To drive home the point that we cannot be mere onlookers, De ­Palma concludes his own film, after the montage of the Iraqi victims, with a last image of the young rape and murder victim, who (horrifically) stares at us in terror and accusation. This deliberate reversal of the gaze, though a powerful filmic ploy, rests on a paradox: it is a photograph commissioned by the director, who had to use a fake to speak the truth about the abjected, as well as abject, reality of war. Ken Provencher notes: “Redacted has a dual purpose: to dramatize incidents of atrocity in Iraq, and to challenge the authority of mediated content at a time of war” (32). Indeed, the film suggests that post-Abu Ghraib, the reality of war can only be caught in a 360-degree view – not in the spectacular hyperkinetic heroism that The Hurt Locker was about to revive, but in the deliberate and constant reversals of perspective, to show the bigger picture. Thus, the compiling of heterogeneous digital recordings to form the narrative creates a dialectic of conflicting points of view on the us occupation. These are organized in clear counterpoints, between the voice-over of the fake French documentary that highlights that Iraqi civilians do not understand the hand signals of the us soldiers and the soldiers’ own self-justifications about “just doing their job” in Salazar’s video diary; between the coverage of war on Western networks and on Arab ones; between videos filmed by the soldiers, with their meta-indexicality (dates of recording, time of recording, etc.) and what filters out of this when they are questioned later. One of the film’s first spoken lines, as Salazar explains the title of his video diary, “Tell Me No Lies” – which appears in an insert – is a variation on the famous quotation from Aeschylus: “the first casualty [of war] is going to be the truth”. Salazar immediately turns this into a meta-filmic notion of truth-telling (highlighting the war cinema De

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Palma is actively rejecting): “So don’t be expecting any Hollywood action flick, no adrenaline-pumping soundtrack, no logical narrative to help make sense of it; basically here, shit happens” (4’20). What makes the film painful is not only that the few spectacular events are all atrocities: a pregnant woman shot at a checkpoint, a gang rape, a us soldier beheaded live on internet. Beyond, De Palma rejects the theory that the spectacle of terror might lead to catharsis. McCoy, the moral soldier who tries to prevent the rape but is bullied into submission, tries to tell the truth to the world outside, but no one wants to hear him. The last scene before the cut to the extradiegetic montage of real-life carnage shows him at a homecoming party, filmed on video-camera by his friends. When one asks, “How about a war story?” (77’), McCoy returns the question, tensely: “You really want to hear a war story?” The only frame within which his audience wants to hear war stories is made clear by the follow-up question: the eagerness to find out if as a soldier, he “[got] some licks on for what they did to the fucking towers” (78’). De Palma expects his audience to see that this frame, born of the Bush-Cheney Administration’s lies connecting the War in Iraq to 9/11, imperils all true-story telling. When McCoy summarizes his war, he runs counter to his audience’s expectations: “Everywhere you look is death and suffering […] the killing I did do made me sick […] these smells and these sounds and those images are burned into my brain and I don’t know what I’m going to do about them”. As he confesses what happened in Samarra, he breaks down in tears, but is silenced by the protests of his loved ones who clap loudly, covering his speech, getting him to kiss his wife for the camera, in the perfect picture of the returning hero – thus rejecting, in a pun on the saying, the “real McCoy”. The truth is thus, once again, redacted, and the fabricated picture fills the frame. Reception of the film in the us was harsh. Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate, “Redacted isn’t a critique of war or of America’s behaviour in this war. It isn’t sharp enough for that; it’s too crude, callow, and one-dimensional. It’s nothing deeper than war porn”, echoed George Packer’s meta-filmic critique in The New Yorker: Redacted is an act of voyeurism that becomes part of the thing that it claims to denounce. If the pictures from Abu Ghraib […] are war porn, Redacted is film-theory porn – a stylized snuff film inside a meta-critique of the media.15 15

Echoed almost exactly by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: “Perhaps without quite realizing it, De Palma is applying his extensively developed idiom of slash, splatter and gore. After a while, Redacted starts to feel like a sort of politicized exploitation-horror picture”.

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The power of the film, however, lies in its ability to produce outrage – or, as the New York Times reviewer put it, “rage, fear and revulsion”. Many critics unfavourably compared Redacted to Battle for Haditha, which adopts a more humanist vision within its own multiple-focalization of war. 5

Battle for Haditha: Crosscut Points of View

Like Redacted, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha rejects the sanitized spectacle of war, and the monolithic embedded grunt point of view. The film is built around three crosscut perspectives: we are embedded with a group of Marines, two Iraqi insurgents, and a young Iraqi couple in turn. From the first minutes of the film, their various lives are connected by the camera: a Marine goes into a dvd shop to buy what the seller advertises as a “boom-boom” dvd – which could mean everything from warnography to pornography to hard rock m ­ usic – and we follow, in one continuous shot, one of the handsome young Iraqis who works in the shop, who turns out to be an insurgent. Through him and an older, fiftyish former Iraqi army officer who, like all others, has lost his job, we see the despair of ordinary people who have no water, no electricity, no jobs, and who are constantly humiliated under us occupation. These insurgents, whom Broomfield chooses to represent as instrumentalized by foreigners, Al Qaeda-offshoot militants, plant an ied on a highway. When it kills and grievously wounds Marines on patrol, the surviving Marines take revenge by massacring the families living in the immediate vicinity, one of which is the extended family of the couple we have come to care for. Intimacy with the couple formed by Hiba and Rashid is created in a striking scene in which the young woman, who wears a full-length burqa, returns home to make passionate love with her lover. Many viewers will go from alienation to identification in this scene, realizing the identities of the characters to be infinitely more complex than the public roles they perform. Battle for Haditha is construed as a tragedy: we are forewarned by the pretitle sequence as to what will happen. The film starts with a series of interviews with Marines, who speak of the collateral damage of war and of the way the term “enemy combatant” can come to include any Iraqi man, woman or child. One of the first soldiers to speak emphasizes his own fear and his rejection of the war, which has turned into his fight for mere survival – “Basically, the only thing I’m fighting for – that I know that I’m fighting for, is getting home every day without being killed. I don’t know why we’re here – I mean, I know why we’re here – no, I don’t know why we’re here”. But the last soldier interviewed in this sequence points out the similarity between war and hunting: “I’ve hunted

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deer and coyotes and shit. But a person thinks the same – tries to think like another person would with a weapon. So, it’s the ultimate style of hunting, with war” (1’31). Just after this line which makes Iraqis fair game, the title credits appear; and, in Redacted-like dialogues, a Latino Marine says that to him, Iraq is “a giant butthole” – a degrading image that simultaneously recasts war as anal rape, and/or the Marines as in deep shit, in their own parlance. Rising omnisciently above this cast of soldiers depicted in documentary-like style – a number of the cast were not professional actors, but real-life Marines – the voice of the documentary immediately forewarns us that this is a narrative about a war crime. A placard – “On November 19, 2005, an ied went off and killed two Marines. A few days later, 24 men, women and children were killed by Marines” – fills the screen to the sound of mournful Oriental music. ­Broomfield is overtly didactic, showing war as the escalation of violence, in cycles of revenge, but also, war on terror as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the arrival of Al Qaeda (foreign) terrorists in Iraq because of the war. A placard mentions Al Qaeda at the fifth minute of film, thus creating a formal symmetry not merely between (American) occupation and (Iraqi) resistance, but between occupation by the Marines and underground occupation by the Al Qaeda operatives who are seen to dominate the homegrown resistance (an exchange between the middle-aged Iraqi insurgent and the Al Qaeda officer who provides him with a bomb hinges on the ideological divide between them: the Iraqi wants his country back, while the foreigner wants Haditha to become an Islamic city).16 To emphasize how Al Qaeda and the Bush Administration are playing into each other’s hands, we see the older Iraqi insurgent, disgusted by a killing at the market, telling his wife “those stupid Al Qaeda have killed the English teacher”, and turning on the news about his own city on tv. As we discover charred cars, and see prone bodies carried out on stretchers, we are being taught to decode these images doubly – as simply the surface of what Broomfield’s own film is about to reveal to us, as we go behind the scenes, and as undercutting pro-war propaganda as it continues to be aired on television. Indeed, the broadcast cuts to George W. Bush claiming, in a striking dramatic irony and a gross misreading of the situation at best: “Democracy will succeed, because every month more and more Iraqis are fighting for their own country. People we have liberated will not surrender their freedom. Democracy will succeed because the United States of America will not be intimidated by a bunch of thugs”.17 16 17

In hindsight, from the vantage point of 2017, one can see this as a portrayal of the beginning of isis, (aka isil or daesh). This is actually a George W. Bush speech uttered on November 24, 2003, in Fort Carson, Colorado, where he was meeting troops for Thanksgiving.

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Part of Broomfield’s Brechtian aesthetics is to have the Marines themselves voice to us, as they do in Brian de Palma’s and Paul Haggis’s films, the violence they both endure and inflict. He first punctures the myth, naively mouthed by one soldier, that “the Corps takes care of its own”; the sergeant reveals that when he was badly wounded in combat, he was only offered 10% of his pay to leave the Corps, and concludes: “So I’m telling you, nobody gives a shit about you, but you” (25’30). Similarly, while we hear one soldier give the official reasons for the war – “to protect freedom” (26’45) – we also hear their training songs, which are graphically bloodthirsty. The soldiers’ racism is uncensored: one African-American Marine shouts, “I’m ready to take down some fucking ragheads” and his Latino sergeant answers, “I know you are, and that’s good – that’s why we train, train, train: to kill, kill, kill!” (26’30). The film plays on the trope of optical instruments being those of death, while also highlighting how images of war circulate as a form of entertainment, of psy ops, and of propaganda wars. We view Marines watching the boom-boom dvd of ied explosions (13’); a military drone take out a suspect on a highway (15’); in the climactic scene of violence, we shift from the insurgents using their cell phone as a detonator, to the explosion, to the maimed soldiers, and to their systematic massacre of the families living in the area, while this rampage is reflected in the binoculars of the older insurgent, who, horrified, exclaims: “we are killing our own people” (65’). We witness the gratuitous shooting of the young Iraqi man and fear that his young soulmate will die, as she ignores orders and runs despite the guns trained upon her, to throw herself upon his dead body. In a powerful scene, the young Marine who had his sights trained on her is shamed by her grief into lowering his weapon, and extending, instead, a hand to help her up – a human gesture that comes too late, but illustrates the soldier’s gaze, shifting back from killer to human. Finally, and in an essential departure from Redacted’s aesthetics, the peak of the massacre remains beyond the frame, our gaze focalized by the terrified little Iraqi girl who hides under a bed as the Marines mow down her entire family. This shot, whereby the spectacle of war is suddenly reduced to a Marine’s boots and the shells cascading to the ground beside them, translates the moment of trauma from the tiny victim’s perspective, a sequence aptly analysed by Garrett Stewart as an allegory of the war itself: In this fixed, prolonged, abjected shot, during which all sound but the lugubrious orchestral score has been dialed out, we are trapped in a fixed-frame view of a pair of marine feet (the u.s. “boots on the ground”) around which a rain of empty shells pelts the floor – until all motion subsides on the mattress above them. In this visualized multiple discharge of

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a self-defeating revenge, the true American footprint is indelibly left on the region. (55) Broomsfield’s allegory, however, centres on what the media screen of war, in both, contradictory, meanings of the term “screen”. Even as the massacre is discovered by an Al Jazeera-like network that broadcasts the testimony of the little girl (81’) whose gaze we shared from underneath the bed, we understand the child’s voice to have been reframed by the local religious leader into a callto-jihad, in a betrayal of what her family embodied. She too thus becomes a pawn in war propaganda. Meanwhile, the belatedly investigative us media are content with the explanation that the Marines who had been decorated for their bravery will now be judged. Broomfield thus attacks both the hypocrisy of the chain of command that covers up atrocities, and then sacrifices the troops, and that of the media, which seem to care about the carnage of war only if it makes for sensational storytelling. This “fictionalized documentary”, in Philip French’s oxymoron, or this reconstruction of the real events at Haditha, cannot resist a form of perhaps dubious reconstruction of its own, out of a desire to redeem the soldier who led the massacre. As the charges against him are read out at his court martial, he confesses, in voice-over, what will haunt him forever. But we also see him, in an overexposed dream-like sequence, leading the little Iraqi girl out from under the bed to safety. Whether this is a flashback as to how the child survived, or whether it is a belated fantasy – overexposure is very often the sign of the unreal (Michlin 2014) – remains unclear, but it allows the film to end on an uplifting image, rather than on the gruesome one that concluded Redacted. Some spectators will consider it to weaken the film’s message, and to, in effect, redact it. Real-life photographs that one can look up, however, of soldiers crying as they clutch the bodies of children they have just killed or maimed, in documentaries like Patricia Foulkrod’s The Ground Truth, for instance, incite us to think that Broomfield wishes sorrow and hope, rather than horror and revulsion, to stay with the viewer as his humanist anti-war film ends. To conclude, in the three anti-Iraq War films of 2007 I have studied here, the “logistics of perception” (Virilio) is deliberately turned into conflicting points of view, politically as well as optically. These films invite us to rethink the meaning of digital imagery (Stewart, Pisters),18 the latter having turned repulsive in 18

Pisters is right to insist that Virilio’s analysis does not allow for the spectacular democratization of optics through digitalization (with the dissemination of cheap video cameras and cell phone video technology). The Armed Forces are very conscious of this and of the risk of each soldier becoming a cinematographer: see Dauber.

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the immediate aftermath of Abu Ghraib. These films strikingly break out of the spectacle of war to insist on narrative cinema’s power to imagine, project, and strive for an “ethics of clarified vision” (Stewart 53) which opposes itself to the surveillance camera and the false immediacy of the internet upload or the war video diary – even if the spectacular war film was to make a remarkable comeback in the immersive aesthetics of The Hurt Locker the following year. The anti-war film’s emphasis on rethinking images, far from lending itself to a derealization of war, forces viewers to confront media and Hollywood screening and framing of war. The audience is called upon to listen, when nobody wants to hear the truth the soldier has to tell (Redacted), especially in films that keep combat outside their visual frame. These 2007 films develop the trope of war as haunting, sending ripples of disturbance into viewer reception; all try to make war traumatically intimate. Arguably, even those films that play on the adrenalin rush or the voyeuristic impulse (Redacted) infuse it with dread, while through militarized scopes and night-vision goggles, inset tv screens and internet posts or video diaries and cell phone recordings, we are forced to face war as terror. Because some of the films studied here seek to create revulsion, they did not do well at the box-office. Only those films that turned again to the immersive spectacle of explosions and combat, hybridizing with other genres than war film (action film in The Kingdom, science fiction in Avatar, historical epic in Kingdom of Heaven) and that did not openly feature Iraq, made money. But all of the films studied here will have left their mark, through their original exploration of digital imagery, of multiple focalization, of mediation and of artifice – and their will not to let an ongoing war fall under the radar, and out of sight. Works Cited Alvarez, Lizette and Dan Frosch. “A Focus on Violence by Returning G.I.S.” The New York Times 1 Jan. 2009. Web. Barker, Martin. A “Toxic Genre”: The Iraq War Films. London: Pluto Press, 2011. Print. Benedict, Helen. “Violent Veterans, the Big Picture”. The Huffington Post 14 Jan. 2009. Web. Bradshaw, Peter. “Redacted: Film Review”. The Guardian 14 Mar. 2008. Web. Burgoyne, Robert. “Embodiment in the War Film: Paradise Now and The Hurt Locker”. Journal of War and Culture Studies, 5.1, 2012. Web. Chapman, James. War and Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Print. Corliss, Richard. “Iraq War Films Focus on Soldiers”. Time 1 Sep. 2007. Web. D’Addario, Daniel. “Ten Years of Iraq War Films: Why Audiences Shunned Movies about Mideast Conflicts”. Salon.com 19 Mar. 2013. Web.

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Danner, Mark. Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War. NY: Nation Books, 2009. Print. Danner, Mark. Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. London: Granta, 2004. Print. Dauber, Cori E. YouTube War; Fighting in a World of Cameras on Every Cell Phone and Photoshop in Every Computer. Strategic Studies Institute Website, November 6, 2009. Web. Eberwein, Robert. The Hollywood War Film. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print. Farhi, Paul. “The Iraq War, in Hollywood’s Theater”. The Washington Post 25 Mar. 2008. Web. French, Philip. “Battle for Haditha”. The Guardian 3 Feb. 2008. Print. Geiger, Jeffrey. American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011. Print. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. NY: Penguin, 2004. E-book. Hattenstone, Simon. “No One Wants to Know”. The Guardian 8 Mar. 2008. Web. Kaplan, Fred. “War Porn. Brian de Palma’s Redacted is Schlock Fantasy”. Slate Magazine 16 Nov. 2007. Web. Kaufman, Anthony. “Yanks Nix Iraq Pix: Why Haven’t War Films Found an Audience?” Slate Magazine 12 Oct. 2006. Web. Kellner, Douglas. Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print. Michlin, Monica. “War on the War in Iraq: Antiwar Documentary Film 2003–2006”. Images of War and War of Images. Eds. Karine Hildenbrand and Gérard Hugues. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 171–191. Print. Michlin, Monica. “Open Your Eyes Wider: Overexposure in Contemporary American Film and TV Series”, Sillages critiques 17 (2014). Web. Mitchell, W.J.T. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Print. Ndalianis, Angela. “The Frenzy of the Visible”. Senses of Cinema, Issue 3, February 2000. Web. Neale, Steve. “War Films”. In Hollywood and War: The Film Reader, J. David Slocum (ed.) London: Routledge, 2006, 23–30. Print. Oppel, Richard A., Jr. “Tighter Rules Fail to Stem Deaths of Innocent Afghans at Checkpoints”. The New York Times 26 Mar. 2010. Web. Packer, George. “Godard in Iraq”. The New Yorker 18 Oct. 2007. Web. Pisters, Patricia. “Logistics of Perception 2.0: Multiple Screen Aesthetics in Iraq War Films”, Film-Philosophy, 14.1: 232–252. Web. Prince, Stephen. Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. NY: Columbia UP, 2009.

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Provencher, Ken. “Redacted’s Double Vision”. Film Quarterly 62.1 (Fall 2008): 32–38. Web. Robb, David L. Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004. Print. Rosenberg, Alyssa. “How Iraq Changed Everything: From The Hurt Locker to The Marine, The Rise of Soldiers in Pop Culture”. ThinkProgress.org, 19 Mar. 2013. Web. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World. NY: Oxford UP, 1985. Ebook. Scott, A.O. “Redacted: Rage, Fear and Revulsion: At War with the War”. The New York Times 16 Nov. 2007. Web. Scott, A.O.. “Apolitics and the War Film”. The New York Times 6 Feb. 2010. Web. Slocum, J. David (ed). Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2006a. Print. Slocum, J. David. “General Introduction: Seeing Through American War Cinema”. Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. Ed. J. David Slocum. London: Routledge, 2006b. 1–21. Print. Smith, Jordan Michael. “The Many Faces of Mark Boal”. The Nation 14 June 2013. Web. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. NY: Picador, 2003. Print. Stahl, Roger. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print. Steuter, Erin and Deborah Wills. At War with Metaphor. New York: Lexington Books, 2008. Print. Stewart, Garrett. “Digital Fatigue: Imaging War in Recent American Film”. Film Quarterly 62.4 (Summer 2009): 45–57. Print. Takacs, Stacy. Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America. Lawrence, Kansas: U of Kansas P, 2012. Print. Taylor, Charles. “A Need to Know More”. L.A. Times 4 Nov. 2007. Web. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: the Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller. New York: Verso, 1989. Print. Virilio, Paul. “A Traveling Shot Over Eighty Years”. Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. Ed. J. David Slocum. London: Routledge, 2006. 45–55. Print.

Filmography

Avatar. Dir James Cameron. Perf. Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver. 20th Century Fox, 2010 [2009]. DVD. Battle for Haditha. Dir. Nick Broomfield. Perf. Matthew Knoll, Elliot Ruiz. MK2, 2010 [2007]. DVD. Body of Lies. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong. Warner Home Video, 2009 [2008]. DVD. Casualties of War. Dir. Brian de Palma. Perf. Michael J. Fox, Sean Penn. Columbia, 1989. Film.

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The Hurt Locker. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Perf. Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie. Warner Home Video, 2009 [2008]. DVD. In the Valley of Elah. Dir. Paul Haggis. Perf. Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon, Charlize Theron. Warner Bros, 2008 [2007]. DVD. Redacted. Dir. Brian De Palma. Perf. Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, Izzy Diaz. Magnolia Pictures, 2008 [2007]. DVD. Stop-Loss. Dir. Kimberly Peirce. Perf. Ryan Philippe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Channing Tatum. Paramount, 2008. DVD. Zero Dark Thirty. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Perf. Jessica Chastain, Reda Kateb, Jason Clarke. Universal Pictures, 2012. DVD.



TV Series

24. Creators Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow. Perf. Kiefer Sutherland. Fox, 2001–2010; 2014. DVD. Homeland. Creator Howard Gordon. Perf. Claire Danes, Damian Lewis. Showtime, 2011. DVD.

Documentaries

The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends. Dir. Patricia Foulkrod. Universal, 2006. DVD. Gunner Palace. Dir. Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker. Nomados Films, 2004. DVD. Militainment, Inc.: Militarism and Pop Culture. Dir. Roger Stahl. Media Education Foundation, 2007. Streaming. The War Tapes. Dir. Deborah Scranton. SenArt Films, 2006. DVD.

chapter 2

The War in Images: The Poetics of Plasticity in Juan Benet’s Herrumbrosas lanzas Sandrine Lascaux and Claire Bowen (trans.) Abstract Herrumbrosas lanzas (1983–1986), Juan Benet’s major novel of the Spanish Civil War, is an epic account of war set in the fictional area of Región which becomes briefly the focus of attention for two opposing military commands. The novel, intended by Benet as a picture of the war, is characterized by a descriptive hypertrophy which this chapter analyses as part of the visual and plastic dimension of the text. The different types of description and images, and the reflexive pictorialism of Herrumbrosas lanzas, are informed by Benet’s conception of the “theatre of war” as a place governed by a poetics of simulacrum where military actions unfold in artificial décors, and which cannot resist the corrosive effects of reality. The narrative thus progressively deconstructs the appearances and values of war until the theatre of war, in the literal and metaphorical sense, is destroyed and the whole representation dissolves into nothingness.

Introduction Juan Benet was one of the major figures of the Spanish literary revival in the second half of the twentieth century. He was the creator of the fictional territory of Región, an autotelic space inspired by Faulkner’s Yoknapathopha County and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ imaginary village of Macondo. As has often been said, the world of Región can be seen as a sort of imaginary miniature of Spain during the Civil War, a microcosm in which the author could give free rein to his imagination over decades before abandoning it in his last years of writing. The majority of the texts refer obsessively to the Spanish Civil War and we know that Benet spent much of his life bringing together the sources which would have eventually allowed him to write a new and true account of the period (Benet Cartografia 2), none of the existing histories being satisfactory in his eyes. He never wrote his history which was, perhaps, too great a project,

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but he did produce the fiction Herrumbrosas lanzas1 which is the subject of this chapter. The work has a documentary aspect but what strikes the reader above all is the way in which the author, while presenting a historiographical deconstruction of events, offers a series of scenes that come together to form a picture of the Spanish Civil War and with which Benet seeks, albeit not exclusively, to fictionalize History. Benet’s objective in creating this monumental fresco is, in fact, to create a representation or a reproduction of war. He says this specifically in Herrumbrosas lanzas when he writes that his intention is to describe the war in the imaginary area of Región as the representation of tragedy on a small scale. He insists on the fact that this will imply alterations, changes in substance and deformations and then, making an analogy with photography, he concludes that the object of the text will be to obtain “a single picture, one which is neither truer or falser than any, which is more or less pleasing to the eye of the observer and which responds to the impulse of curiosity that brought him to contemplate it” (99). Benet’s intention, which is, then, to compose an overall view of an historical event, incorporates a plastic dimension as it exploits the writer’s ability to introduce a three-dimensional aspect into a literary work which will thus become capable of competing with painting. This aspect of the work would seem, at first, to be directly related to the trauma caused by the war to Benet as a child. He speaks in several interviews of the way in which the events which he experienced between the ages of seven and nine were profoundly shocking and of the ways in which his life, like that of other writers who were deeply moved by the Civil War, changed completely after 1939. During these three years his family was forced to live as and where it could, it witnessed the ravages of war on both sides and suffered personal tragedy when his father was executed. Later Benet would say, on a number of occasions, that he had never forgotten what he had seen at that time and that the curiosity he felt as an adult about the conflict had been grafted onto the indelible visual memories of his childhood. It was therefore through images that the Civil War became rooted in his consciousness to the point of becoming a permanent obsession.2 1 The first twelve books, constituting Parts 1, 2 and 3, were published from 1983 to 1986 but without the final sequence which was to relate the defeat of the Republican loyalist Región forces at the hands of the rebels at Macerta. This final catastrophe was to have been the conclusion of the novel. The edition used here includes the sixty existing pages of Herrumbrosas lanzas Part 4 as well as Books xiv and xv in progress. 2 Juan Benet, Cartografia personal, 107, 218, 240, 315. Benet relates that for three years he was convinced that he had caused the war by simply playing a game with his brother. Their father had bought them “Brownie” pistols that were all the rage in Madrid at the time. One evening they caused a panic by playing with the guns in Abascal Street – where Calvo Sotelo had been

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In this chapter, we will explore some of the main aspects of the poetics of plasticity of Herrumbrosas lanzas. We will divide our work into two parts. In the first we will examine the representation of the Spanish Civil War by looking at the stylistic choices that underpin a form of writing which is entirely “in pictures”. It will be particularly useful to analyse the way in which the autonomous nature of the descriptions allows Benet to make a picture of war. We will also think about the special function of certain images and fragments at moments when the textual dynamic turns into a visual one during the reading process. In the second part of the study we will show how Benet sets up a reflection on the representation of representation, or, in other words, how, with a view to demystifying the historical moment, he establishes a system for meta-coding originating in the visual arts in particular, but also the cinema or the theatre. 1

Describing the War

Engraving the Text In his introduction to the most recent edition of Herrumbrosas lanzas, Javier Marias quotes from a letter dated 25th December 1986 in which Benet discusses the question of the homogeneity of his epic work. He insists that the majority of writers are wrong in thinking that everything in a novel or a poem should be of equal quality and stylistic intensity. The search for “constant magnetism” (14) is ultimately counterproductive as it is precisely certain fragments of a work and not the whole that, by attracting attention, constitute the quintessence of literature or, as Benet puts it, “the nec plus ultra of thought, a sort of stable ionosphere situated at the same height as the best of the human spirit” (14). Thus, Benet does not look for harmony in a narrative in which every element would be at the same level (in any case he absolutely does not believe that to write is to tell a story or to seek global coherence) (15). He seeks instead in a text those exceptional and fine passages which are capable of captivating the reader with their force and beauty and which far exceed the power of the narrative as a whole.

assassinated a few days earlier – causing the whole district to be blocked off for the night. The boys and their mother then left for Italy where they stayed for three years, persuaded that they had been responsible for the start of the Civil War. It seems hard to believe Benet when he says, certainly sincerely, that being told by his mother of his father’s execution at the beginning of the war, three years after the event, had no great emotional impact.

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Critics have often commented on this point of view, particularly when discussing how Benet, in a period dominated by costumbrismo and social realism, put forward a literary theory that presupposed a fundamental restructuring of writing habits and was in opposition to everything that he considered to have contributed to the decline of Spanish literature. In his essays, and notably in La inspiración y el estilo, El ángel del se̴ñor abandona a Tobias and La moviola de Eurípides, Benet explains that in his opinion the essence of the force of literature lies in what he calls “estampa” (La moviola 77–115). The Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy gives the first meaning of the word as “print”. Lorenza Salomon provides the following definition: “a print is an image obtained from a drawing made on a support which, once inked, is printed, almost always on a sheet of paper” (10). The second definition concerns the image and its reproduction as such, the third a drawing illustrating a publication, the fourth indicates that, by antonomasis, the term may refer to a holy picture, the fifth a complete representation of a person or an animal, the sixth printing and the print and, finally, the seventh definition refers to a trace. While the word itself, therefore, would seem to have been chosen so as to embrace a global definition of the image, it also associates representations with reproductions and again contains the idea of traces left behind, of persistence. What Benet calls an “estampa” refers to the iconic in literary texts in a wide sense and also, specifically, to the idea of the image-effect in the sense of leaving traces and thus haunting the reader’s consciousness by fragmenting the narrative and intensifying sections of the text. This literary model is presented as being infinitely superior to that of the so-called traditional narrative which is based on an argument (“argumento”) and which has a linear development, successively presenting information from page to page but thereby losing textual intensity and aesthetic quality. To explain the opposition that he draws between these two models, Benet compares texts such as Don Quixote, Justine, and La recherche du temps perdu with La Chartreuse de Parme, The Portrait of a Lady and Le Rouge et le noir. In the first case, he identifies novels that may be reread starting from any page opened at random and in which fragmentation gives added value to the text. In the second group, the reader is required to follow the narrative from beginning to end. In the best novels, the plot will be of lesser importance. Not only will the reader be able to consider each passage as an autonomous entity but, beyond this, the whole structure of the text will seem to be dominated by description and images. In other words, in “informative” texts, description will always be understood in terms of its function in the narrative, of the way in which it will serve the plot and it will thus always be perceived as ancilliary. The “estampa” narratives, by contrast, will be full of self-sufficient descriptions

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into which is compressed an intense and static force so that the textual flow becomes “a long projection of immobile images” and description takes pride of place (La inspiración 189–192). We will give an example which seems to illustrate exactly what Benet means when he writes on the nature and power of the estampa. This is the moving quotation of the first lines of the elegy written by Miguel Hernandez after the execution of Federico García Lorca in Viento del Pueblo which Benet places at the beginning of Herrumbrosas lanzas. The gravity and extraordinary power of this epigraph, at the peritextual frontier, resonate throughout the body of a narrative which fictionalizes History and its tragedies. Besides, by virtue of its baroque intensity, the fragment stands alone: its pictorialism, evocative of a vanitas, generates an immediate vision of war personified, death sweeping away everything in its path, earth that – to use terms dear to the creator of Región – hardens into tantalum, crystallizes and becomes mummified. It is also tempting to see Hernandez’ elegy as a memorial to Benet’s father who, like Lorca, was executed during the Civil War. From time immemorial, the elegy has been “an expression of a fundamental feeling that is general and common to all Mankind” (Camacho Guizado 20). Here, in its introductory position, it sheds light on the text, acquires vast significance and expresses a real narrative intent: Death traverses, with rusty lances, Bearing its cannon, the barren plains Where men cultivate roots and hopes, Raining salt, and scattering skulls. All in Pictures Different types of descriptive passages, narration and reflexive developments alternate in the text, all intended to inspire thoughts on human nature and the course of History and war. It may be said that the content is like a double drawer in the sense that the organization of the sequences is sufficiently sophisticated to allow the reader to perceive dissonances between what is said and what is done, between the appearances and essence of things. This structure allows the descriptions a degree of autonomy so that they are no longer considered in terms of the argument or the narration or even subordinate to a central discursive topic. This, to some extent, contradicts Genette’s observation that “in the order of things, description is ancilla narrationis, a necessary handmaid yet forever subordinate, never emancipated” (57). What will interest us now, then, is the way in which description comes to the fore in Herrumbrosas lanzas and we will find it useful to refer to the ­distinction

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made by Bernard Vouilloux between description-as-picture (the purpose of which is to establish a general view) and the description-of-pictures, a concept which we will encounter in the second part of this chapter as it concerns the representation of representation. Fontanier indicates seven types of description. Chronography vividly evokes the temporality of an event by highlighting the circumstances in which it takes place. Topography identifies a given place. Prosopography is concerned with the form, the body, the features and the external qualities of the subject. Ethopoeia shows the good or bad moral quality, the vices, virtues and defects of a person real or imagined. The portrait brings together the physical qualities of an animated being, again real or imagined. The parallel consists in two descriptions, either consecutive or mixed which combine into a single moral or physical representation. Finally, the term “picture” designates certain vivid animated descriptions of passions, actions, events and physical and moral phenomena (422–432). It is remarkable that Benet uses a mixture of these different types of descriptions to test the nature of what he calls the “theatre of war”, that is to say the unavoidable elements which combine to create fiction, characters, space and time. Within the global economy of the narrative, the place of the portrait and its variants (prosopography, parallels and ethopoeia) is far from insignificant. The actors of the conflict are systematically presented in long and detailed portraits, the intention being to show the reader exactly what these warriors are made of – extraordinary warriors who, seeking victory, triumph or a demonstration of military prowess, find themselves on opposite sides during that pathetic moment in history when Región, for entirely inexplicable reasons, becomes the centre of political attention. This gallery of portraits is made for ethical and moral reasons. The portraits frequently turn to caricature and show the often lamentable nature of the passions and ambitions of the men of both camps who made history. The portraits are always made with the intention of folding the apparent splendour of History into mediocre and private narratives. On the other hand, the treatment of the space and time of conflict, especially of battles, is exhaustive and done with a view to handling the subject so thoroughly that the reader’s immersion in the theatre of war will be complete. We know that Benet has a tendency to insist on spatial descriptions. He does so notably in his first novel, Volverás a Región and continues in Herrumbrosas lanzas where, however, the details of military operations are emphasized by images – in the event a map of Región and its surroundings and of the military operations carried out there. It may be said, therefore, that in places the text gives way to a form of cartographic ekphrasis. Often the mental representation

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of space initiated by Benet’s descriptive hypertrophy is necessarily partial, for there are so many accumulated facts that they are impossible to grasp. The effect intended here is one of complete saturation which combines with the impression of chaos prevailing in the space occupied by the opposing forces. The story of the Civil War in Región really begins with a hypotyposis and induces a sort of climax of intensity in the text. As we know, hypotyposis “depicts things in such a vivid and energetic way that it puts them, as it were, before our eyes and turns a narrative or description into an image or picture” (Fontanier  390).3 In Herrumbrosas lanzas, hypotyposes occur frequently in the text, transforming it into a spectacle. The first instance is that of the two pages which herald the beginning of the war (390). By the use, in particular, of the accumulation and disparity of material, Benet establishes the operating elements of a form of “carnivalization” which will permeate the text (57–58). Thus, descriptions rest on an anaphoric structure which takes the war as a point of departure (“Suddenly one July morning the province found itself at war” and “the start of the war it was”) and continues with a haphazard inventory of the ambient chaos (fighters armed with stakes and weapons of blue steel, a banner, the creak of wheels, two vans and a bus etc.) which evokes a fair, a colourful carnival, a grotesque procession. Then, the description takes us from the street to the houses before operating a sudden proleptic leap into the comfortable residences of Cister Street three years later. In the light of the previous examples, we may be tempted to think that the power of Benet’s writing lies, above all, in the variety, the frequency, the organization and hypertrophy of the descriptions colonizing the narrative space. However, the plasticity of the text, that is to say its capacity to generate more and more images, does not depend exclusively on these factors. A powerful evocative potential may also be concentrated in a phrase or even in a single word which becomes the condensed representation of one or more images. Thus, Benet varies his stylistic devices working at the same time with the possibilities offered by length, expansion, brevity, exhaustivity, condensation and percussion. The use he makes of often highly incongruous comparisons, thus forcing brutal changes in tonality and creating a sense of strangeness, always strikes the imagination. Besides, the frequent inclusion of fairly short lists of objects, clothes and various characteristic features or attributes of the fictional components produces sharp visual effects through compression and 3 Benet includes a map of the area on a scale of 1:150000 in the first volume of Herrumbrosas lanzas. The map was conceived by Benet himself and drawn by José Maria Sanz. Military maps showing troop movements during the war were included in the two following volumes in 1985 and 1986.

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­localization. Finally, a number of archetypal motifs possessed of great symbolic significance populate Benet’s universe and contribute to the image of a sick nation at war with itself. For example, the frequent use of the expression “larval state” is applied to the members of the militia, to other characters and their relations, to the nation. Similarly, there are references to biology and the natural sciences that place the human condition in its rightful and limited place as well as what may be described as an organic theme in which chronic illness and decomposition indicate the internal corruption of the nation and its political structures. The figure of the double in its many guises evokes an historical division of the nation anchored in the story of Cain. The omnipresence of the crucifix and of other religious icons and symbols reflects Spain’s obsession with religion and its interference in political authority. Benet’s symbolism, in fact, underlies a form of moral criticism made all the more forceful because it is expressed in striking and repeated images of relatively few subjects. The choice of these symbols depends, so to speak, on their ability to meet a visual challenge. The question is how to “make an image” in order to “make a fragment” and to “leave a trace” in order to “haunt” the reader. The suggestive power of a lexical item (I mean its “power of persistence”) depends simultaneously on its pre-existing significance and on an internal logic based on the triangulation of writing-text-reading that necessarily reaches beyond the control and use of reason. The Flesh of the Image In her very interesting work, Stefania Imperiale examines Benet’s images using those theories of Walter Benjamin which are applied to art history by Georges Didi-Huberman in his observation that when we find ourselves before an image we find ourselves before time itself. For Didi-Huberman, time is not chronological but rather a series of hidden temporalities made manifest as soon as we observe an image which is, therefore, necessarily impure, complex and over-determined. Benjamin’s “dialectical image” thus contains different temporalities. It is instantaneous and, in its immediacy, it reveals something which may have remained concealed and forgotten forever. It is a representation in which what has been instantly combines with the present to form a new constellation. Pursuing the same idea, Didi-Huberman, the art historian, has applied and transferred Freud’s concept of symptom to the hermeneutics of images and uses the term “symptom-image” as meaning a representation in which repressed impulses and the semiotic resources of a given cultural system converge. What Stefania Imperiale demonstrates is that, in a way, the narrative theory presented by Benet in his essays has affinities with the dialectical image. The writer only wishes to invent images, to produce “symptom-images”

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which, like magnets, attract overdetermined details suggesting heterogeneous significations and temporalities. The careful reader should thus be able to make another interpretation of the images and accordingly understand how the dynamic of fragmentation leads beyond the merely visible. The red chromotope which appears throughout the narrative illustrates this principle. In Herrumbrosas lanzas and in the fictional world of Región, red is associated with heredity, with the blood that runs in the veins of the local aristocracy. It is an ancient colour, one so old as to have lost its origins, archaic and abstract and so, for example, the Spanish earth and the vegetation of Castille take on a mythical quality as the fields, soaked with the blood of the dead, turn red after winter. Red also possesses an historical function related to the purity of blood. It thus brings to mind the major events of Spain’s tumultuous history – the Reconquest, the Inquisition, the period of Colonisation, the Black Legend, the Golden Age, the Carlist Wars and the Civil War. Red brings together the various temporal layers of the novel (myth, historical periods, the private narratives of characters affected by traumatic events) so that, although the writer obviously cannot control all the possibilities and although the circumstances in which the text is read will vary, clues and symptoms will accumulate and combine in such a way as to render possible the emergence of dialectical images, that is to say of images the interpretation of which will be permanently unstable. We can also observe that this chromotope is organized in a totalitarian and centrifugal way in that it concerns the secondary levels of the narrative (the detective story in Book vii) as well as the main story (the Civil War in Región). The colour red indicates the visible surface of things, the better to penetrate them and explore their secret dimension. Thus, the presence of ramified secondary narratives rests on the network of signs (sounds, visual elements, traces of bloody violence) which, while initially scattered and “deterritorialized” will converge in an imperceptibly organized manner towards what Deleuze calls “zones of intensity” in which a form of meaning is revealed.4 Red thus apparently diffuses from the outside to the inside. On the one hand, the descriptions are those of extremes (blood gushes, there are executions, shattered heads and torture, rats gnaw at prisoners’ guts, soldiers are bombed). On the other, the descriptions make an event of a detail and allow a movement towards a darker world in which the corruption of place is made manifest in various symptoms. For example, purple dogs wander the gardens of houses gone over to the enemy and the leaves of the trees in them turn red as rust spreads everywhere. There will even be a reference to a barely visible “leech” among the ­Republicans. 4 According to the concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in L’anti-Oedipe.

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The reader gradually comes to understand what is never made explicit – this organic and integrated red indicates that the Republican body is rotting from within, afflicted by “intestinal decomposition” (Herrumbrosas 50). The purpose of the chromatic pulsion is to expand, to diffract and form constellations. Its modus operandi is concretion, or the accumulation and amplification of all the occurrences of red so that they are seen in terms of c­ omparison and differentiation. As Merleau-Ponty observes, we see things “according to or with” the images that people our perception and imagination: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it. In short it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility… A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. (132) And, as Mauro Carbone explains, this visibility is also termed “flesh” in Merleau-­ Ponty’s philosophy: The idea of “seeing more than one sees”, which can be taken to mean to see “with or according to” what is seen, is underpinned by the efficacious and persistent presence of what Merleau Ponty calls a “mythical” dimension possessing its own spatio-temporal dynamics and unexplored ontological implications. In short, this is why, in his L’oeil et l’esprit, what he called “visibility” could also be termed “flesh”. Between colours and the ostensibly visible could be detected the layer of substratum which supports and feeds them and which is not in itself a thing but rather the condition for the existence of things and their substance. (175)5 Thus, the omnipresence of descriptions, the use of the estampa and the dynamic of fragments give the text, in which the visible and invisible are ­intertwined, an “all image” quality. For Benet, to allow the image to dominate a literary text is to deconstruct the apparent opposition between the visual and other arts, between the supposedly immediate nature of visual perception and the s­ upposedly literal linearity of description. This artificial opposition may be overcome by rebalancing the acts of reading and writing which should no longer be considered as separate but rather as being in a state of reciprocal bonding. What matters, above all, is local textual densification which aims to 5 Translation by Claire Bowen and Catherine Hoffmann.

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keep the reader in the present time of the reading process and which, in a way, probes the narrative and thus allows the flesh of the images or the very meaning of things to be released. 2

Pictures. Representing Representation

When Benet associates his description-as-image with descriptions of images, that is to say when he accompanies representation with an analysis of the representation of representations, he moves into another field of enquiry. One of the elements that will help to integrate this investigation – which will become crucial – into the narrative is certainly a manifest tendency to pictorialization intended to create a meta-discourse. We mean here that visual arts such as painting, engraving, drawing, lithography and photography6 are components of the fictional world whether in the form of frequent references to imaginary or identifiable works or in the explicit use of specific vocabulary. We will not make an exhaustive list of all the types of pictorialism7 apparent in Herrumbrosas lanzas but it is clear that painting is of prime significance. While Benet rarely mentions precise known works of art in his text, some references leave lasting traces. The first observations on painting appear at the very beginning of the work: the war will often be relegated to the background, rather as it is in the great paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which the fighting, seen from a distance, is generally a context for some arrogantly posed famous officers – generally painted foreshortened, facing the viewer and with their backs to the scene – who see the battle simply as a necessary distraction on their paths to personal glory. (26) This inaugural evocation foreshadows the many representations of horsemen found in the work. It offers an inverted image of the picture chosen by Benet, Gerard Ter Borch’s Man On Horseback (1634), a portrait of a lone, defeated soldier leaving the field, his back to the observer, for the cover of the four-part edition.8 Besides, it conjures up from the beginning a panorama of battle painting, 6 On Benet’s tastes in painting – he was himself a painter – see especially Juan Benet, Collages and Eugenio Benet, “Juan Benet con lápis y pincel” 26–28. 7 See Louvel 15–42. 8 See the remarks by Javier Marias in the introduction to the 2011 edition of Herrumbrosas lanzas.

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thus drawing the readers’ attention to the way in which war has been depicted over the centuries and, at the same time, heralding the deconstruction of the heroic model that will be present throughout the narrative. One thinks here of the entirely different approaches of, among others, Tintoretto, Rubens and Pietro da Cortona, but also of the collection of twelve battle paintings commissioned in 1634–1635 by the Spanish Crown for the Royal Reception Room at Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid. These works develop, on a grand scale, a variant of the topographical or “commander” battle painting. In keeping with the classic topographical form, the movements of the troops are seen in a landscape observed from an elevated point of view. The panorama is juxtaposed with a monumental full-length or equestrian portrait of the commander. This type of composition is essentially an assertion of military authority (Delaplanche and Sanson 73–134). The cycle was painted by eight artists, among them Velasquez with The Surrender of Breda or Las Lanzas (1634–1635). The title Herrumbrosas lanzas refers to Miguel Hernandez of course, but principally to Velasquez and Benet will even create an adverb, “velasquezly”, to characterize one of his descriptions, in doing so flirting with ekphrasis: She turned left, went to the other side of the street and, with the gypsy, stopped to watch (completely lacking in military bearing, heads lowered and chins sunk into their chests, reins slack between hands resting idly on saddle pommels, boots swinging with the movement of the stirrups, musket barrels pointing to the heavens, velasquezly encountered in the heart of the sierra) the detachment pass by like a preparatory sketch for the apotheosis of defeat. (398, italics mine) The reference to Velasquez may function as a premonition – the “preparatory sketch” for the apotheosis of defeat heralding the Republican defeat at Macerta which will take place at the end of the novel. It will be followed by the reconciliation of both sides, seen in Herrumbrosas lanzas as a moment during which the defeated are treated with dignity and respect. But, to reach this point, it is not necessary for the confrontation to have really taken place. In fact, the theatre of war and the chimerical enemy will vanish before the fighting, taking with them the possibility of an ending, of peace, of understanding, and even of an historical event, leaving instead the persistence of a potential enemy and, in consequence, the possibility of endlessly renewed conflict. Benet also makes more or less precise allusions to the universe of Goya, for example in his reference to the “Burial of the Sardine” (356). This was a popular Madrilenian ceremony which took place on Ash Wednesday and culminated in the burial by the crowd on the banks of the Manzanares of a small sardine

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which had previously been paraded around the city hung on a giant puppet. In his El entierro de la sardine (The Burial of the Sardine), a work painted between 1812 and 1819, Goya uses the ceremony as a carnivalesque and pagan metaphor for the absurdity, madness and chaos rife in the country ruled at the time by the despotic Ferdinand vii. Other references also have Goyaesque undertones, for example, the narrator’s mention of “a stage upon which children stutter and imitate their elders using sticks as rifles” (386). Although there is no allusion to a specific painting, Riña a garrotazos (The Fight with Cudgels), painted between 1819 and 1823 and one of the Black Paintings series, comes to mind, anticipating as it does the fratricidal conflicts that will divide Spain well into the nineteenth century and until the Civil War. Some paintings emerge from the intertext. Thus, for example, the quotation from Lucan’s Pharsalia, “patria trepidantis imago” (583)9 sends the reader to Richard Westfall’s The Goddess Roma Appearing to Julius Caesar at the Bank of the Rubicon. Again, in the fragments of Book xvii, the critique of religion is generously supported by iconography. The Convent of the Poor Clares (“The only place in central Macerta that the Republicans managed to take and hold throughout the siege”) is decorated with “the inevitable holy pictures and a couple of tenebrist oils” in which can be seen “the beard and the knee of a hermit – and the leaves of the fig tree beneath which he meditated and mortified himself” (580). A little further on, as the narrator describes the nuns praying in the street, the pious scene (the “print”) is compared to a Flemish or Umbrian engraving and also to the sacrifice evoked in Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, itself a representation of an episode in Jacques de Voragine’s hagiographic The Golden Legend (582). “Peplumization” The choice of the paintings which, directly or more allusively, make their way into the narrative or haunt it, probably matters less than the aesthetic and ideological implications with which they gradually pervade the meaning of the text. It would seem that these references, all contributing one way or another to forming images (portrait, picture, description, representation), act as 9 When he reached the little river Rubicon, the General saw a vision of his distressed country. Her mighty image was clearly seen in the darkness of night, her face expressed deep sorrow and from her head crowned with towers, the white hair streamed abroad; she stood beside him with tresses torn and arms bare and her speech was broken by sobs: “Whither do you march further? And whither do ye bear my standards ye warriors?” (Lucan, bk.1, lines 185–194).

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­signals, pointing the text towards a caricature of itself. This promotional strategy, so to speak, leads to the “peplumization” of the literary text. The use of this term is not intended to imply that Benet was adopting a radical imitative logic that would lead to forms of near-pastiche, parody or transposition. He seeks, rather, to stand back from his objectives, remaining at a distance which is sufficiently far from a generic model that is, in any case, wide-ranging and difficult to define, but which necessarily causes the reader to associate the text with the mass-market films with which s/he is familiar. The “peplum” or “sword and sandal” movie may be described as a spectacular film which reconstitutes chapters from history or classical mythology. The film industry was quick to offer a view of the ancient world borrowed from classical tragedy and opera but also from nineteenth-century official history paintings manifesting the enthusiastic response of some artists to the first great archaeological digs (Winckelmann in Pompei, for example). In fact, the first-known peplum film, (Nero Testing Poison on a Slave) was a reproduction of Joseph-Noël Sylvestre’s painting, Locuste essayant en présence de Néron le poison préparé pour Britannicus (peplums.info). It is already apparent that the genres constitutive of the peplum – tragedy, opera and also painting – are all manifestly present, although in varying proportions, in the text under discussion which is itself a historical and mythological project. The ancient world of the peplum is a melting pot in which are mixed together mythology, history and different periods and heroes. This fluidity is typical of the genre and allows any possible combination of elements to be set against a classical background (peplums.info). In Herrumbrosas lanzas, almost every period appears in Benet’s staging of the survival of the past and of its founding myths. He brings together, sometimes placing them in close proximity, pictures of the Egypt of the Pharaohs and representations of Ancient Greece and Rome. In the same way, figures as varied as Scipio Africanus, Hannibal, the Hyperborean heroes, Homer, Jehovah, Our Lady of the Oak, Our Lady of the Pillar, Richard the Lionheart, the Prince of Denmark, Napoleon etc. are made to co-exist. The list of references appears so long, including as it does Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Spain of the Golden Age, the Romantic period and the twentieth century, that the reader could be forgiven for thinking that the spectacle is generated by a time machine. Benet shows us a world of the past on the edge of the abyss, one that is collapsing onto itself in moments of mythological-historical catastrophe like those of the last scenes of the work: All at once the sky had darkened, there had been a brief eclipse which had lasted for long enough to establish that the light when it returned was similar to the light before the event, yet separated from it by an

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i­ ntolerable break, all the more disturbing as it left no trace and remained suspended in the ragged and incomprehensible heavens. It is already another moment, another scene, a now preceded by a before which had ended with a change in the light or even just a moment of opacity – as in a film – allowing a shift to another time and place that are equally far away…” (638) This eclipse, which is a sort of grand finale, is nothing but a repetition of itself, like a repetition of all the conflicts suffered by Spain (the Carlist Wars referred to in Book vii, for example). As Benet often repeats, wars are inevitable. They are an integral part of humanity, they will always take place under “a sky the colour of old silver”, “metallic”, and be covered by “an invincible and inviolable layer of verdigris” (366). And, because things are thus and because the text is no more than a reconstitution of the Civil War among other possible wars, why not represent it as a glittering circus? In a way, all these references to images (portraits, paintings, descriptions, representations) perform the function of battlefield standards and colours, guiding the text towards self-caricature. We believe that this “promotional” device leads to a sort of “peplumization” of the narrative, achieved through a multiplicity of references to Antiquity. There are allusions to the famous Classical historians and their works, especially to Amiano Marcelino’s Ab Urbe Condita, to Titus Livy and to Tacitus, all of whom were models for Benet during the conception of Herrumbrosas lanzas. These multiple references coexist and form a mosaic of the past, one which underlies a text itself created out of an enormous number of documentary sources and archives pertaining to the Spanish Civil War and the Peninsular War. The reader has, in consequence, the impression of confronting a particularly multicoloured referential patchwork as well as a degree of bad taste which lightens a work that, on occasion, appears to be veering into a tragic mode. There are many other aesthetic indicators of the “peplumization” of Herrumbrosas lanzas: the steady movement and rhythm of an epic, a taste for the monumental and the luxurious, the baroque nature of the décors, the extravagant nature of some situations, the spectacular or sublime aspect of certain scenes, characters stereotyped according to predictable performance codes and psychological traits, names with a classical ring to indicate a dominant character trait like that of Arderius, for example, (“arder” meaning to “burn”, to “light”, to “set ablaze”) as well as a significant taste for caricature and irony.10 In those moments when tragedy may be about to reach a climax, the absurd is never 10

Given the cost of making these epics, it seems that the peplum film has survived, in part, due to the constant production of comic versions or parodies of the genre.

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very far away. Benet’s ability to mix the grandiose with thorough bad taste, to adopt a pompous, inflated style transforms the narrative into a spectacle as the following extract (among others) will illustrate. The house described here belongs to Escaen11 who has changed sides, justifying his decision with references to Ancient Rome: The house has got bigger and, although it is now distorted, it is so majestic, compared with all that surrounds it that it may be said that the war has been good to it. The double row of elms has been so badly mutilated that it looks like a scarred Ashurbanipal, like Pyrrhus resting at the rear of the Hall of Columns while the Captains of Rome wait outside in the solitary dusk. Only light and the crown exist in this early afternoon of a cold winter’s day. (161) The narrative sparkles with exotic references (in the use of terms such as Sassanian, Sybaritic etc.), elements of tragedy, of spectacle, of décor, sometimes of the colossal. This encourages a propensity to exaggeration which turns into a counter-epic about the anti-heroes of a non-event. Here it is Antiquity that allows the text to shift from chronicle to imagined and imaged narrative. This is appropriate for, as Hervé Dumont puts it, “Antiquity is the perfect space in which to reflect, in abstract, on the fate of civilizations and it is a perfect environment in which to relativize ones’ judgements” (20). It is in this sense that, in Herrumbrosas lanzas, Antiquity accompanies the deconstruction of the official view of the Civil War or its tendentious presentation by either side. Erasure The descriptive dimension, the moving images, the spatial transitions, the colours, the omnipresence of sound and description, action and emotion combine in such a way as to create a non-existent universe of myth which possesses all the characteristics of the peplum movie, hastily filmed on a plywood set. Thus, the world constructed by the narrative is shown to be potentially unreal or chimerical. Benet destroys the décor and ridicules actors who, like children, play “with pieces of cardboard cut out of a shoe box and coloured with crayons” (366). He does so particularly at the end of the narrative – in pages that remained unpublished in his lifetime – by eliminating the theatre of war in an apocalyptic scene. The metatextual process which will lead to this

11

Escaen’s house was an important centre for the resistance and has been taken over by the other side.

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d­ isappearance begins in the second part of the text as the protagonists are exploring the passage through the Zocs:12 There were four of them; Bordon and the two others had stayed at the rear, three bent and imperfect silhouettes caught in a pose, transformed instantly in the snow into the first outline that a monochrome brush traces on a pure, pale canvas, an outline that is repulsive and arrogant and ready to reject any stroke that fails to serve it. […] The first glimmer of day was appearing when the festivities stopped for a brief interval so that the actors could change their costumes. The stage became a uniform surface, without a centre, both near and almost non-existent, an emulsion of dust, confetti and expectations, a blackboard defaced by the scratches of some impenetrable movement like the lines and marks that appear on the first white frames when an old film is projected. (223) Appearing in touches that are more or less visible throughout the text, the different registers of meta-code observed here will be amplified considerably in Chapter 15. This pictorialism, which is especially developed through the lexical field of the fine arts (brush stroke, colours, lines, layers, gouache, draw, trace etc.) is combined with other devices such as the theatrical performance which is constantly present in lexical elements in the text (director, wings, spectator, drama, set designer, play, scene, theatre, performance etc.) or in the frequent references to a red curtain. There are also references to ballet and cinema. In the final scene, all the elements necessary to a visual representation (background, shot and frame) (Marin 64) are present but entirely devoid of substance. The character who observes the scene begins a description of those defeated souls “who should never have returned”: “From his vantage point at the window he saw the three men coming down the hill through the apple trees” (549). Benet produces an orchestrated synchronization of the gaze of his different protagonists; the narrator who tells the story, the character who sees and the reader-spectator who follows the stages in the visual journey (the descent through the apple trees, the binoculars-zoom effect to identify the third person walking behind the first two, the inconsistent choice of the path to be taken, the halt near the stream). By an autonomous and incoherent process,

12

In the fictional area of Región, the Sierra and places which are practically inaccessible like the Roq and the Zocs become strategically important as they must be crossed to reach the Francoist side and Macerta.

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the ­“artistic hand” – that of destiny, that of the creator (“the work of an artist lacking in clear ideas”) – achieves a final representation which is unfinished and virtually non-existent. The last scene takes place “at a neutral time having no light of its own” and so outside any possible referential framework. What is made visible here is no longer an image but a process which evolves until it reaches the limits of its possibilities and the point of its dissolution. 3 Conclusion Herrumbrosas lanzas ends with the destruction both of a décor and of a spectacle and, indeed, with the negation of the existence of a historical fact that is reduced to a series of autotelic and chimerical intellectual constructions that, in turn, have their origins in the remains of belief systems. In this sense Benet’s poetics manifestly achieve a total and radical demystification of History: “So, when the enemy disappeared”, he told him, “I understood that, basically, we probably hadn’t fought him because he was nothing but a representation of the other side, just a piece of information, not even a direct one and grotesque at that”. “Oh yes, just a representation, and not even a good one, but did we need anything else? Wasn’t a representation, especially an exaggerated one, what we needed to get us out of the sluggish inertia of peacetime thinking?” (546) But perhaps this well-oiled machine which produces infinite numbers of representations could also be interpreted as the source of a conscious or unconscious distancing, even avoidance, strategy. The carefully controlled and often Grand Guignol-type representation of a common history which may even lead to its denial, perhaps hides something which cannot be formulated and which is, therefore, inaccessible to human consciousness. It has already been said that the Civil War was also a personal matter for Benet and it is true that the writer rarely discusses the manner in which he experienced the period. He has often explained his fascination for ruins and the theme appears in his first major work, Volverás a Región (1968) in which, as he says in Cartografia personal, he intended to describe a concrete, material and identifiable ruin. In his next text, Una meditación, Benet turned to a more analytical discourse. The fallen narrator analyses the reasons for the existence of what is said to be a second, auto-generated ruin which is maintained as such in an environment of general decadence and which suggests that “only ruin saves us from greater ruin” ­(Cartografia 18). This attraction to the void intensifies with time, p ­ articularly

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in the last works in the Región cycle where the atmosphere of negativity becomes unbearable and the only positive affirmation is that language itself is impossible. Essentially, then, the objective is to reach a point where silence rules and nothing remains. Accordingly, this study should end with an analysis of the multiple strategies of negation operating in the other later works in which Benet appears to explore this movement towards silence even further. His preceding text, Saúl ante Samuel, is particularly interesting in that, here, the failure of language to give meaning to the personal consequences of a tragic historical event becomes, literally, a poetics of Nothingness. This work, which is extremely hermetic, reputed to be difficult and, accordingly, rarely read, led to change. After 1981, Benet claimed to write simpler, more accessible narratives which would not “take nine years work” (Cartografia 256) but which would, perhaps, include a little spectacle, a little circus and sparkle, the better to distract the reader. Works Cited Aziza, Claude. Le péplum, un mauvais genre. Paris: Klincksiek, 2009. Print. Benet, Juan. Benetiana. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997a. Print. Benet, Juan. Cartografía personal. Valladolid: Ediciones cuatro, 1997b. Print. Benet, Juan. Collages. Servicio de actividades culturales de Salamanca, 1996. Print. Benet, Juan. El ángel del señor abandona a Tobía. Barcelona: La Gaya Ciencia, 1976. Print. Benet, Juan. Herrumbrosas lanzas. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998. Print. Benet, Juan. Les Lances rouillées. Trans. Claude Murcia. Paris: Passage du Nord-ouest, 2011. Print. Benet, Juan. La inspiración y el estilo. 1966. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1999. Print. Benet, Juan. La moviola de Eurípides. Madrid: Taurus, 1982. Print. Benet, Juan. Otoño en Madrid hacia 1950. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987. Print. Benet, Juan. Puerta de tierra. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970. Print. Benet, Juan. Saúl ante Samuel. Madrid: Alfaguara: 1980. Print. Benet, Juan. Una meditación. 1969. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1985. Print. Benet, Juan. Volverás a Región. 1967. Barcelone: Destino, 1981. Print. Benet, Eugenio. “Juan Benet con lápiz y pincel”. Juan Benet rutas. Canales y Puertos: colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos, 2008. Print. Camacho Guizado, Eduardo. La elegía funeral en la poesía española. Madrid: Gredos, 1969. Print. Carbone, Mauro. La chair des images: Merleau-ponty entre peinture et cinéma. Paris: Vrin, 2011. Print.

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Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-Œdipe. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Print. Delaplanche, Jérôme & Axel Sanson. Peindre la guerre. Paris: Nicolas Chaudun, 2009. Print. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Devant le temps. Paris: Minuit, 2000. Print. Dumont, Hervé. L’Antiquité au cinéma. Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2009. Print. Eloy, Michel, ed. Péplum, Images de l’Antiquité, cinéma et bande dessinée. Peplums.info. Web. 18 Nov. 2015. Fontanier, Pierre. Les Figures du discours. Paris: Champs Flammarion, 1977. Print. García Pérez, Francisco. Una meditación sobre Juan Benet. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997. Print. Genette, Gérard. Figures II. Paris: Seuil, 1969. Print. Hamon, Philippe. Du descriptif. Paris: Hachette, 1993. Print. Hernandez, Miguel. Further Selected Poems. Trans. A.S. Kline. Poetryintranslation.com. Web. 12 Apr. 2016. Imperiale, Stefania. Contar por imágenes: la narrativa de Juan Benet. Tesis doctoral, Venecia, Universidad Ca’ Foscari, 2013. Print. Louvel, Liliane. Texte / image, images à lire, textes à voir. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2002. Print. Lucan. The Civil War (Pharsalia). Trans. J.D. Duff. London: Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1928. Loebclassics.com. Web. 12 Apr. 2016. Marias, Javier. Introduction. Herrumbrosas lanzas. By Juan Benet. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998. Print Marin, Louis. “Le cadre de la représentation et quelques-unes de ses figures”. Art de voir; art de décrire II. Spec. Issue of Les cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne (1988): 62–81. Print. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingus. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968. Monoskop.org. Web. 12 Apr. 2016. Salomon, Lorenza & Marta Alvarez Gonzàlez. 2010. Comment regarder la gravure. Paris: Hazan, 2011. Print. Vouilloux, Bernard. La peinture dans le texte XVIIIe–XXe siècles. Paris: CNRS éditions, 2005. Print.

chapter 3

The Second World War Seen from the Balcony: Representations of the Spectacle of War in the French Post-war Novel Clément Sigalas Abstract While many French writings about World War ii published in its aftermath constitute “narratives of action”, focusing on direct involvement in war, others provide “narratives of vision” giving an account of a war experienced indirectly rather than in harsh reality. Based on six novels of the second type, especially J-L. Bory’s Mon village à l’heure allemande (1945), J-L. Curtis’ Les Forêts de la nuit (1947), B. Beck’s Léon Morin, prêtre (1952), A. Bosquet’s La Grande éclipse (1952) and J. Gracq’s Un balcon en forêt (1958), this chapter analyses the devices mediating the literary representation of the war and the effects of the restricted field of vision of observers gazing from their window or balcony. This transforms war into a spectacle, enigmatic or pleasant, an experience which induces a feeling of guilt in the protagonists while serving as a corrective to the French post-war myth of universal resistance against the enemy.

“Fields of Action, Fields of Vision”: the subtitle of this publication, if related to the French writings about World War ii published between 1945 and the late 1950s, invites you to distinguish two main corpora. On the one hand, “narratives of action” focus on war episodes: great military battles, sabotages by the Maquis, air fights, escapes, and so on. These were the bestsellers of that time, particularly Colonel Rémy’s Mémoires d’un agent secret de la France libre (1945), General Giraud’s Mes évasions (1946) and Royal Air Force pilot Jacques Clostermann’s Le Grand Cirque (1948), one of the four best-selling books in France in 1961.1 Their authors, all members of the French Resistance, found themselves in the heart of the war and then wrote what can be called the epic of the French Resistance, celebrating courage and brotherhood. 1 “Les best sellers du siècle”, Bulletin du livre, 65 (October 1961), 32–34.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004353244_005

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On the other hand, “narratives of vision” give an account of a war experienced indirectly rather than in harsh reality. In these, one is able to gaze at the war or to hear it without being directly struck by it. These narratives, mainly novels, emphasize the distance separating the spectator from the spectacle and highlight the mediating function of the act of looking. Between the subject and the real there are always harmless intermediaries – at least, less violent than gun fire – that tend to have a “derealizing” effect: resistance graffiti or posters, maps, newspapers, radio, windows or balconies. The balcony then, which gives its name to one of the best French novels about war, Un balcon en forêt, turns out to be the metaphor of a peculiar way of apprehending this conflict: perceiving it at a distance, converting violence into a spectacle – in keeping with the theatrical specialist sense of the word “balcony”. I would like to examine and question this mediated representation of war in order to outline its political implications. The corpus of the “indirect war” is quite extensive.2 Consequently I will have to restrict my study to six novels I consider representative of the whole. Four of them were awarded the Goncourt Prize: Jean-Louis Bory’s Mon village à l’heure allemande (1945), Jean-Louis Curtis’ Les Forêts de la nuit (1947), Béatrix Beck’s Léon Morin, prêtre (1952) and Pierre Gascar’s Le Temps des morts (1953). The last two are La Grande Éclipse (1952), a forgotten and underrated novel by Alain Bosquet, and Julien Gracq’s masterpiece Un balcon en forêt (1958).3 All of these novels emphasize the pre-eminence of signs in the characters’ perception of the conflict: I will first observe how these innocuous signs prevail over actual violence. I will then consider how often war episodes are depicted as spectacular – in the sense of “artificial” rather than “impressive” – events. The protagonists often seem to watch a show instead of being actors in History. This may account for the feeling of strangeness, even guilt, experienced by those who did not act, but merely watched the war. In this case, the spectator on his balcony may stand for a people which missed out on the war, contrary to the mythology of the whole of France rising up against the enemy. 2 The doctoral thesis I have recently defended, which examines in greater detail the ideas summarized in this article, also deals with such novels as Roger Nimier’s Les Épées and Le Hussard bleu, Claude Simon’s La Corde raide and La Route des Flandres, Emmanuel Bove’s war novels (Le Piège, Départ dans la nuit, Non-lieu), Roger Vailland’s Drôle de jeu, etc. 3 All these novels, except La Grande Éclipse, have been translated into English. See the list in the Works Cited Section. In the body of the text, the page numbers refer to the French edition. For the translations provided in the notes, page numbers are those of the English version when available. The quotations from La Grande Éclipse and Mon village à l’heure allemande have been translated by Catherine Hoffmann, whom I would like to thank warmly.

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The Signs of War

It is a remarkable thing that, in these novels, the characters face the signs of war rather than its effects and manifestations – meaning violence, wounds, death. According to the Trésor de la langue française, a sign is a material, perceptible object, evoking or representing something else as a substitute.4 The six novels display two types of signs, depending on whether they “evoke” or “represent” war. This distinction is closely akin to that made by Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov between “symptoms” and “signs” in their strictest sense: symptoms are part of the referent – as fever is part of sickness – while a picture representing a German tank is not part of the real tank (133). As a consequence, softer forms of the war (“symptoms”) and representations of the war (pictures, maps, radio broadcasts…) have to be distinguished. In novels portraying life under the Occupation, war appears mostly in s­ ofter forms: neither weapons nor blood, but words (posters, graffiti),5 symbols (little coffins that Resistance fighters send to the collaborators as a threat)6 and looks. These in particular play an important role in Mon village à l’heure allemande and Les Forêts de la nuit, two quite similar depictions of everyday life in the occupied zone,7 staging the destiny of various characters and their contrasted behaviours toward the enemy. The Goncourt Prize these novels were awarded and their public success may indicate that the indirect war they described looked familiar to many readers. In both works, looks are substitutes for weapons. The protagonist of this peculiar war – or “phoney war”, if one considers that it did not end with the defeat in June 1940 – in Mon village à l’heure allemande is the old maid Miss Vrin, who is asked by the pro-German priest to observe the villagers’ behaviour from her skylight. This elevated position is like a pacific and parodic version of the height from which, in battle paintings, the general takes in the whole battlefield. Hence the martial terminology: “La position est bonne. Une position stratégique” (49);8 “Mademoiselle Vrin, dit-il, il faut continuer votre faction. Vous viendrez au rapport au moment de l’angélus” (71).9 This example shows how slight the difference is between 4 5 6 7

Trésor de la langue française informatisé, atilf.fr, “signe” entry. My translation. Bory 22, 46, 201, 202, 273; Curtis 171. Bory 226; Curtis 357. They are similar in their viewpoint: both novels are set in a typical French village or town and intend to give an image of France as a whole during the war. Nevertheless, Curtis’s novel is far more pessimistic and darker than Bory’s. 8 “This is the correct position: a strategic position”. 9 “Miss Vrin, he said, you must remain on duty. You are to report at angelus time”.

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war and the parochial quarrels inherited from the French Third Republic, embodied here in the rivalries between the priest and the pro-Resistance primary school teacher. At this point, war seems to be a continuation of the past rather than a disruption, even though this war “by looks” will eventually have serious consequences. Les Forêts de la nuit stages a similar balance between fairly peaceful appearances and a tragic outcome. In the first chapter, young Francis, one of the few authentic heroes in the novel, helps a Resistance fighter cross the Demarcation Line. Chapter 4 opens with a look which will have considerable repercussions on the plot: “Mme Costellot, une cigarette aux doigts, regardait à travers la vitre, dans la rue calme et grise. – Tiens, remarqua-t-elle, le petit Balansun a dû passer la ligne une fois de plus” (33).10 The spatial organisation is typical of many novels about the Occupation: outside is the war (in this case, an action defying German laws); inside are peaceful signs (a conversation, an armchair, a cigarette); in the middle stands the window, with its ambivalent place and function. The window simultaneously gives Mme Costellot the power to see and know – it gives her power in itself – and allows her an indirect, even peaceful relation to war. On the one hand, she uses it as a spy or soldier would use a weapon – hence the same military metaphors as in Mon village à l’heure allemande.11 On the other hand, the window acts as a screen, shields the one who looks through it, and leaves no stain either on the hands or on the conscience: the Gestapo, not Mme Costellot, will murder Francis.12 Just as fever is part of sickness, looks are part of war, but they are still “symptoms”: apparently innocuous signs hardly referring to a reality which is both tragic and faraway. The second type of signs Ducrot and Todorov evoke, which they consider signs in the strictest sense, are totally cut off from their referent, that is to say, from the reality they are supposed to refer to. In these novels, they are pictorial, photographic and radio representations. The definition the two linguists give is very helpful to this study: “Le signe est à la fois marque et manque: originellement double” (133).13 In fact, novels about the Occupation and the Phoney War are based on this duality. Their characters watch the war, listen to it, but do not feel it; neither are they affected by it. 10 11 12 13

“Mme Costellot, smoking a cigarette, was watching the quiet gray street through the windowpane. ‘There’, she said, ‘the Balansun boy must have crossed the line again’”. (23). For example, the keyhole through which Mme Costellot’s servant Berthe spies on her employer is called a “poste d’observation” (261) (“observation post” 188). In the plot, she informs the Germans about Francis, yet without knowing this will lead to his death. “The sign is both a mark and an absence: therefore intrinsically dual”. My translation.

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The treatment of the radio illustrates this ambiguity. Everyone knows about the important role the radio played in the Allied victory, from the appeal of 18 June 1940, to the famous poem by Verlaine giving the signal for the Normandy landing. However, in such novels as Mon village à l’heure allemande, the radio mostly reveals the absence of war rather than its mark. Far from being an instrument of war, the news broadcast is the only indication of fights occurring somewhere in the world – but not here, to be sure. Only in May 1944 does the war news begin to pose a significant threat to the villagers, when a presenter mentions the village of Jumainville: Dans presque toutes mes cuisines, on a fait: hein! oh! ah! non? On a regardé le poste avec un effroi incrédule; brusquement, il prenait une réalité menaçante parce qu’il parlait pour la première fois de quelque chose que l’on connaissait bien. Tant que cette boîte nommait Stalingrad, Tunis ou Cassino, la T.S.F. n’était qu’une belle invention, et le village était loin de la guerre, et Londres était à plusieurs centaines de kilomètres. Mais voilà qu’à Londres on parlait de Jumainville!14 (202–203)15 Up to the eve of the Normandy landing, the radio has referred to nothing “real” nor warlike: it was “a nice invention”, a means of entertainment allowing the villagers to keep the war away. Even soldiers of the Phoney War can hardly face the reality of war. In Un balcon en forêt, the garrison listens to “the Stuttgart Traitor”, a famous French presenter working for the enemy and broadcasting propaganda against France: “Après un long grésillement, toute l’irréalité de la guerre fusait à travers le brouillage avec cette voix mince et acide, qui prenait les temps de ses répliques comme un troisième couteau” (37).16 Since a “troisième couteau” refers to a (ham) actor and “réplique” means both “reply” and “line” in the theatrical sense, the war sounds as unreal as a bad play. Moreover, insisting on the “long sputtering”, the novel stresses what separates the listener from the enemy and the battle. 14 15

16

Emphasis added. The village is speaking, like a human being. In almost all my kitchens, people went: what! oh! no! They watched the radio with fright and incredulity; suddenly, it took on a threatening reality because for the first time it was talking of something familiar. As long as that box mentioned Stalingrad, Tunis or Cassino, the wireless was nothing but a nice invention, and the village was a long way from the war, and London was miles away. But now, in London, they were talking about Jumainville. “After a long sputtering, all the war’s unreality melted through the static into this thin, piercing voice, which lingered over its words, hissing like the villain of a melodrama” (28).

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Similarly, the Phoney War seems unreal to the protagonist of Alain Bosquet’s La Grande Éclipse. On 10 May 1944, while the German troops are launching their attack in the Ardennes, André Bénévent is in the Alps, at a considerable distance from the fighting: “Le soir, c’était La Pétanque, les dés, le pernod, parfois les cartes, parfois les liqueurs, le tout interrompu de nouvelles à la radio: l’ennemi avançait” (42).17 The novel focuses on a peaceful place, the café “La Pétanque”, very similar to the aptly-named “Café de la Paix” in Mon village à l’heure allemande. As long as the characters listen to the radio, they need not be scared of the fighting. What they learn from the radio is not so much how far the Germans have advanced as how far the war still is from them. In Un balcon en forêt, the radio is but one of the many intermediaries between the war and the character. Others include maps: Il allait parfois jeter un coup d’œil sur la carte de Belgique épinglée à la tête de son lit – un supplément gratuit en couleurs du “Petit Ardennais” entouré de sa frange de drapeaux français, allemands et belges, à ­découper, le moment venu, pour usage, suivant le pointillé. (127)18 The map should help lieutenant Grange have a global view of the operating forces. Instead, the light is shed not on the referent, but on the signs, on the materiality of the medium; in other words, not on the real, but on an abstract representation of it. The war seems to be a puzzle for children to solve – only children can discover with such pleasure that the supplement is free and in colour… The upcoming tragedy has turned into a play activity. Besides maps, Grange looks at photos of German blockhouses: L’ensemble, fait de feuilles libres sur papier glacé, encartées dans une couverture, avec les mensurations des ouvrages et des numéros de référence, évoquait la présentation soignée des collections de printemps que vous propose un tailleur. (47)19 17

18

19

“In the evening, at La Pétanque, there were dice games, pernod, sometimes card games, sometimes liqueurs, with occasional interruption by radio news: the enemy was advancing”. He would glance at the map of Belgium tacked over his bed – compliments of the Petit Ardennais – printed in three colours and surrounded by a fringe of French, German and Belgian flags with perforated outlines, to be used at the appropriate moment for marking the fronts. (104). The whole thing, consisting of loose-leaf sheets of glossy paper in a ringed notebook, with measurements of the structures and reference numbers, reminded him of the careful presentation of spring collections at a tailor’s shop. (36).

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The verb “évoquait” operates several transfers. Firstly, from pragmatic to aesthetic considerations: signs of the war do not arouse fear, but a certain pleasure experienced while contemplating beauty. Secondly, from masculinity to femininity: while the army is traditionally considered to be a man’s world, fashion vocabulary and terms like “measurement” connote femininity, suggesting sartorial rather than military preoccupations… Lastly, from reality to its artistic representation: once again, the emphasis is put not on the real, but on the medium (sheets, paper). Described elsewhere as “baroque” and “theatrical”, war has become a spectacle. 2

The Spectacle of War

All these novels show a spatial organisation that is characteristic of any spectacle: on the one hand, a spectator whose position at a distance is emphasized; on the other hand, events turning into a spectacle and seeming unreal to their witnesses. What we will see now is that such a spatial organisation makes the spectacle either enigmatic or pleasant, but by no means traumatic. As many critics have commented, viewpoints play a crucial role in Julien Gracq’s works. In this respect, there is, however, a striking discrepancy between Un balcon en forêt and Le Rivage des Syrtes. In the latter, the setting is a desert plain, marked by the absence of any visible sign, which, according to Michel Collot, stimulates the characters’ imagination (112). On the contrary, Gracq’s next novel, as its title implies, is set in the forest. The screen of trees, a widely used metaphor in the novel, abounds in signs. That is why Grange spends his time on the watch. In Un balcon en forêt, the paradigmatic sequence is a two-step process: firstly, identifying the viewpoint; then, describing the spectacle. By foregrounding the viewpoint, this type of sequence emphasizes the distance between the spectator and the spectacle, between the warrior-inwaiting and the war. Now, what can Grange see from his balcony – “balcony” serving as a generic term for any viewpoint –? One night, through a wide-open skylight, he can observe “un clin d’œil sec et isolé” (195)20 and “un point de feu minuscule et très clair” (196).21 The day after, he is watching through “a gun sight”: “Un mince tiret tremblé, dessiné par une cursive agile, enjamba la laie blanche, se perdit dans la marge d’herbe: une martre” (230).22 In brief, Grange 20 21 22

“a quick, isolated flash” (164). “a tiny, very distinct point of light” (164). “A thin hyphen drawn by an agile, cursive hand, crossed the white road and disappeared into the grass: a marten” (195).

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can never see warlike signs (bombings, planes…), but telegraphic and graphic ones (flashes, points, hyphens, handwriting, and the metaphor of the “margin” in the French version). For the observers, war is but an indecipherable text. Similarly, in Béatrix Beck’s novel Léon Morin, prêtre, watching the war does in no way lead to a global comprehension of it. The end of Chapter 2 is a good illustration of this. It consists of five strange “scenes” which are five visions recounted by the narrator from the position of a spectator. The last one looks like a hallucination: Un soldat allemand courait vers une petite troupe de ses compagnons. À une certaine distance en arrière, un jeune civil courait plus vite e­ ncore. Il rejoignit le soldat et tous deux, côte à côte, à une allure de forcenés, atteignirent la troupe. Aussitôt, avec une rapidité et une précision d’automates, le soldat qui arrivait, et un autre, martelèrent de coups de poing redoublés le visage et la tête du civil. Il s’écroula. Toujours avec une célérité et une coordination de mouvements hallucinantes, deux autres soldats le relevèrent. Ils semblaient spécialisés dans chacun de leurs gestes. Tenant l’adolescent sous les aisselles, ils le portèrent ­verticalement, sans que ses pieds touchassent terre. Sa tête pendait sur sa poitrine. Je me demandai s’il était mort. Le peloton s’éloigna au pas cadencé. Cette scène demeura pour moi ineffaçable et incompréhensible. (42)23 The spectator – she refers to a “scene” – seems to have witnessed the event as if in a dream state. The description combines precise elements (the participants and their coordinated movements like those of a well-oiled machine) with very vague ones (“some distance behind”). It lacks explicit spatial and temporal markers, especially because this passage, like the four previous ones, is surrounded with blanks. This raises the question of where and when this event 23

A German soldier was running toward a little group of his fellows. Some distance behind him ran a young civilian, going even faster. He caught up with the soldier and the two ran on, side by side, in a sort of frenzy, until they had reached the others. Immediately, and with the speed and precision of robots, the soldier who had been running and another soldier began to rain down blows with their fists upon the head and face of the civilian. He collapsed. Still with a speed and co-ordination that seemed a delusion, two other soldiers picked him up. Each gesture was that of an expert. Holding the adolescent by his armpits, they carried him in a vertical position without his feet touching the ground. His head hung down on his chest. I wondered if he was dead. The group of soldiers marched off, in step. This scene remained, for me, unforgettable and incomprehensible. (35) [All references to the translation of Léon Morin, prêtre are to the American edition.]

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occurred, even whether it really occurred that way. As in dreams, logic and will no longer prevail: the unit the first warrior and the civilian seemed to form suddenly breaks, for no apparent reason, and all the characters act as automatons. As in Gracq’s novel, the spectator, because of her position at a distance, cannot understand the signs and remains excluded from the experience of war. When not incomprehensible, the war can turn into a pleasant spectacle. It would be no exaggeration to say that all these novels propose a new reading of Lucretius’ “Suave mari magno”, the first two verses of which read as follows: “How lovely it is, when the winds lash the great sea into huge waves that beset sailors, to gaze out from dry land at the tribulations of others” (48). Originally, this was an allegory for the opposition between the philosopher’s serenity – thanks to his taste for reason and moderation – and the distress of those troubled by passion. Applied to World War Two, it means something very different. The spectator’s calm gaze at the troubled waters indicates either that he is not able to experience the war as such or that he is trying to protect himself by casting doubt on its reality. The spectacle transforms violence into pleasure, as manifested by the depiction of a bombing, in the opening of La Grande Éclipse: Le bruit procura une grande joie au jeune homme, qui s’accouda à la fenêtre, se demandant si une deuxième bombe allait suivre la première. Un avion s’abattit tout à coup. Cette masse qui tourbillonnait dans l’air et lâchait une fumée épaisse donnait à Bénévent la sensation d’assister à un spectacle grandiose. (9–10)24 This passage contains all the characteristics found in Lucretius’ poem: a viewpoint (the window), a disaster turned into a spectacle due to the distance, and the happiness one experiences when seeing danger and yet escaping it. ­Exactly the same features appear in Léon Morin, prêtre when the narrator observes from her balcony “comètes, bouquets de sang, rosaces de feu, fouets, serpents d’éclairs, flambantes cornes d’abondance, paroxysme de lumière” (41).25 From the balcony, overlooking the mountains instead of the forest, bombings metamorphose into “fireworks”, and fear into elation. The names of specific types of fireworks – “bouquet”, “serpents” – with their evocation of flowers and animals, 24

25

The noise filled the young man with a great joy. He leaned on the window, wondering if a second bomb would follow the first. Suddenly a plane crashed. This swirling mass filling the air with thick smoke gave Bénévent the impression that he was attending a gorgeous spectacle. “comets, bloody bouquets, fiery roses, whips, snakes of lightning, flaming horns of plenty, paroxysms of light” (34).

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mitigate violence. Another widely used metaphor in the novels is that of white flakes, referring to anti-aircraft fire both in Mon village à l’heure allemande (“Un flocon de vapeur blanche aussi moelleux qu’un tampon d’ouate”, Bory 289)26 and Un balcon en forêt (“Une traînée languide de flocons globuleux suivait [l’avion allemand] à bonne distance, qui venaient éclore l’un après l’autre dans son sillage avec un ‘plop’ cotonneux et mou”, Gracq 129).27 Both descriptions use metaphors defined by rhetoric as in absentia, which substitute the comparing term (soft material in this case) for the compared idea (the “real” fires, which are totally absent from the text). Again, the view from the window transforms exploding shells into blooming flowers, the war into a “spectacle”: “Le spectacle ne parut à Grange nullement guerrier, plutôt ornemental et gracieux” (Gracq 129).28 Such an aestheticization of violence leads to its fictionalization. In a study about accounts of shipwrecks in the sixteenth century, Frank Lestringant considers, as I do, this fictionalization to be closely linked to the position of the spectator: La tragédie et le naufrage contemplé depuis la rive ont en commun la place du spectateur, regardant à distance et à l’abri du danger. L’éloignement et le confort du témoin tendent à déréaliser le malheur, et à faire du triste tableau de l’humaine condition une fiction fascinante. (120)29 Though not relating to World War ii, these words apply very well to the novels studied here, with one difference. The spectator of a tragedy does not belong to the fictional world: according to Aristotle’s theories, fiction acts on him as a catharsis, thus has a therapeutic value. Instead, in novels about war, spectators are part of the story world: they experience reality as a fiction from which they seem unable to emerge. They are cut off from the action as much as from the actors of History. That is why the spectacle of the war must be analysed in political terms. 26 27 28 29

“white flakes of vapour as soft as wads of cotton wool”. “A languid trail of globular puffs followed behind [the German plane] at some distance, blooming in its wake with a cottony ‘plop’” (107). “The spectacle seemed not in the least warlike to Grange, but rather ornamental, graceful” (107). “Tragedy and shipwreck viewed from the shore share the characteristic of a spectator watching them at a safe distance from danger. The witness’s remote and comfortable position tends to divest tragedy of its reality and to transform the sad picture of the human condition into a fascinating fiction”. (Translation by Catherine Hoffmann).

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The Spectator’s Feelings: From Strangeness to Guilt

By “political”, I refer neither to any left-right division nor to the question of “commitment”. Rather, I mean that the position of the spectator in relation to the spectacle of war may be linked to a certain position toward the City (“polis”), that is to say, toward the French community. In this respect, in the immediate post-war years, the most widely spread image of France was that of a whole country supporting the Resistance groups and fighting (with weapons or not) against the enemy.30 In other words, those years imposed the image not only of a people involved in action, but also of a united one, while the novels I study show both passive and individualistic protagonists.31 In Un balcon en forêt, for example, Grange keeps away from the war as much as he does from his fellow soldiers: “Il ne participait pas – d’instinct, chaque fois qu’il le pouvait, il gardait son quant à soi et prenait du recul” (14).32 The French term “quant à soi” also applies to his two friends, Hervouët and Gourcuff, whose behaviour is similar.33 Grange particularly hates meeting on Sunday with all the officers, guardians of the “esprit de corps”,34 one of whom writes some “petits sonnets patriotiques dans l’Écho du front, le journal de corps que diffusait l’armée” (43).35 Standing back from the corps, Grange embodies the feeling of separateness from the community. So does André Bénévent throughout La Grande Éclipse. When he sets foot on a Normandy beach three months after the Allied landing, “il était, comme toujours, comme partout, un étranger et un témoin un peu à l’écart” (167).36 Ironically called a “rearguard soldier” (48), he successively occupies three positions from which war remains quite a harmless amusement. First, he is mobilized during the Phoney War and joins a pioneer company of the Alpine light infantry, whose famous uniform he feels proud to wear: 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

The historian Henry Rousso called this image a “myth”, or the “mythologie résistancialiste”, underlining its exaggerations and complacency (20). On this subject, see Margaret Atack’s Literature and the French Résistance. “He did not participate – instinctively, whenever possible, he kept his reserve and a certain distance” (5). “Tous deux plaisaient à Grange […] par leur quant à soi” (27) “He was pleased by their discretion and reserve” (20). “Il était clair que les dimanches du capitaine Varin […] avaient quelque chose à voir avec le maintien de l’esprit de corps” (42). “It was evident that Captain Varin’s Sundays […] had something to do with the maintenance of esprit de corps” (33). “He published occasional patriotic verses in L’Écho du Front, the corps paper circulated by the Army” (33). “He was as always, no matter where, a stranger and a witness standing slightly apart”.

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Il se compara tantôt à Cyrano de Bergerac, tantôt à Aramis, et se dit que cette guerre prenait des allures chevaleresques et primesautières. […] Comme à regret on lui enseignait le rôle de pionnier alpin, ses instructeurs sachant mieux que quiconque qu’une fois le rôle bien appris, il serait trop tard pour le jouer. (41)37 War for André is but an entertaining fiction, since his models are literary ones (the heroic comedy Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand, Les Trois Mousquetaires, by Alexandre Dumas, and the medieval literature of chivalry). These are all books André would, like other children, have read at school, and the heroic roles would never have to be played out in real life. The theatrical vocabulary suits this soldier who shoots at the enemy only once and does not even know whether he aimed accurately. In the second part of the novel, André emigrates to the United States, where he is offered the chance to “aller à l’école et apprendre son rôle de futur occupant” (139).38 Again he finds himself behaving like a child and playing roles. This time, André participates in war simulations set up by Stanford University, plays the part of a lieutenant-colonel heading a battalion, attacks a fake hill and takes pretend prisoners. (141) Lastly, André is sent to London early in 1944. For once, he may be considered as playing a real role in the struggle, since he works for the intelligence service. However, his war remains a game, even a circus, as suggested by the fact that his office is not only situated in an Oxford Circus store, but in what used to be the toy department.39 As a consequence, André, who is in charge of mapping the German fortifications on the French coast, can see nothing but signs of the war devoid of any reality: “Sur cette carte au 1/50.000, vous verrez des symboles: batteries, nids de mitrailleuses, champs de mines, points d’appuis” (159).40 The map only shows symbols, and when André is shown photos from the front, human losses are only mentioned in passing. André tries to neutralize violence 37

38 39 40

He sometimes compared himself to Cyrano de Bergerac, sometimes to Aramis, and felt that this war was taking on a chivalrous and impulsive character […] He was trained for an Alpine pioneer company, albeit reluctantly it seemed, presumably because his instructors knew better than anyone that, once he had fully learnt his part, it would be too late to play it. “go to school and learn his part as a future member of occupation forces”. The reference to the toys confirms, if necessary, that “Circus” is used in both senses of the term. “On this Ordnance Survey map, you’ll see symbols: batteries, machine gun nests, minefields, operational bases”.

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by representing it in abstract forms and by talking about the media (maps, pictures) rather than the real, even in aesthetic terms (“Joli travail”, he says).41 Though really involved in the Allied air bombings, he remains a stranger to the war, which induces a feeling of guilt. The third and last section of La Grande Éclipse is entitled “La victoire des autres” (“The victory of others”). André, who never fought with weapons during the war, finds himself an impostor when he lands in France in 1944: “Il avait fui comme un lâche; maintenant, il revenait en vainqueur: il y avait dans son destin une telle tricherie!” (168)42 In some ways, this individual deception is an image of the official one, embodied by General de Gaulle’s speech at the Hôtel de Ville of Paris on 25 August 1944, asserting that France had freed herself from the German Occupier. While there is no denying that many people in France actively participated in the Allies’ victory, the discourse attributing this heroic attitude to the whole country needs demythologizing. André’s fictional war may be considered as an image of a collective mystification, and symbolizes the bad conscience of a country which, although included among the winners, had not behaved unambiguously. More broadly, the diverse forms adopted by the literary representation of the spectacle of war may convey the feeling, experienced by some people, of having “missed” the war, of not having sufficiently shared in the action and hardships common to most representations of it. In Léon Morin, prêtre for example, it seems that war does not strike hard enough, so that everything looks like a play: the narrator, in the first pages, mistakes the Italian occupiers in Grenoble for traveling actors (7), then compares a Resistance group’s assault to a theatrical performance.43 War has been replaced by its parody, an idea also expressed in Un balcon en forêt. Gracq twice uses the French verb “singer” (to ape): firstly, when depicting the Officers’ Mess on Sundays (44); secondly, when Grange, having been wounded by the Germans, orders his subordinate Gourcuff to run away and not to wait for him: C’est un ordre, ajouta Grange, d’un ton qu’il sentit malgré lui vaguement parodique. De nouveau, le sentiment le traversa que cette guerre, jusque 41 42 43

“Nice work”. “He had run away like a coward and was now returning victorious: his fate was riddled with deception!” “La scène se déroulait comme une représentation théâtrale d’une mise au point très poussée, où chaque acteur aurait possédé son rôle à la perfection, mais joué sans naturel” (19). “The scene resembled a stage play, elaborately produced, in which all the actors knew their parts perfectly but failed to give a convincing performance” (13).

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dans le détail, singeait quelque chose, sans qu’on pût au juste savoir quoi. (242)44 There are two questions being raised here, the answers to which differ: in the first case, the demobilized warriors of the Phoney War seem to feign peaceful life, Sunday lunches and family meals, so as to forget that, sooner or later, fighting will break out. In the second case, I would suggest that Grange like his comrades cannot help copying – and above all, betraying – the heroic representational model for all French men in 1940: that of the “Poilus” of the Great War, who fought so bravely. The theme of the spectacle thus has to be considered a consequence of the gap the characters bitterly observe between the epic of World War i and the defeat of 1940, followed by a certain passivity during the Occupation. Spectators of the war feel somewhat guilty not only towards those who were involved in action – whether it be the Resistance fighters, the Allies, or their glorious forebears –, but also towards those who were badly hurt by the conflict. It is not a coincidence that the novel which most insists on guilt, La Grande Éclipse, was written by a man who, in 1945, was one of the first to enter the Buchenwald extermination camp. This episode does not appear in La Grande Éclipse, but in an autobiography Bosquet published years later, entitled Les Fêtes cruelles. In the following excerpt, Bosquet asks an American officer: “– Qu’ai-je fait pour mériter ce supplice: être le témoin? – Nous avons libéré le camp; vous, vous êtes de passage. Nous sommes dans l’irréel, et vous un spectateur” (254).45 The position of a spectator turns out to be that of one who simply witnessed the drama, without being hurt in person. The same applies to Le Temps des morts, by Pierre Gascar. The novel, based on the author’s own experience, recounts the captivity of French prisoners of war sent to a camp on the borders with Ukraine. However, this is a peculiar form of captivity, since the prisoners, gravediggers in charge of taking care of the graveyard, do not suffer excessively. Again, the distant view plays a key role: from the graveyard, situated on the top of a knoll, the prisoners can see and hear the “death trains” carrying the Jewish populations to the extermination 44

45

That’s an order, Grange added, and felt that in spite of himself his tone was vaguely burlesque. Again he had the sense that this war, in its least detail, was imitating something without being able to decide what it was. (205). “‘What have I done to deserve this torture: being a witness?’ ‘We have freed the camp; you are but passing through. We are in the midst of the unreal, you are a spectator’”. Translation by Catherine Hoffmann. As far as I know, Les Fêtes cruelles has never been translated into English.

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camps. They can also observe from the window of their huts the Jews going to the station and being hit by the German guards, but the action is set too far from the spectators to allow them to perceive it in all its brutality: “C’était des coups un peu bas, maladroits et silencieux, plus semblables à de sournois méfaits qu’à des violences” (221).46 What follows in the book stresses the role of the window and will serve as a general conclusion: On me disait: “Il y en a un qui est tombé. Les gardiens lui tapent dessus … Ça y est: il repart…” On me disait: “Tiens, regarde celle-là qui court pour rattraper le groupe!”, commentaires inlassables où passaient des accents de pitié mais qui révélaient une sorte de détachement, car la passion consiste justement à ne pas aller jusqu’au bout de l’événement et ceux-là le parcouraient tout entier avec l’avidité triste des témoins. (221–222)47 Here is the viewpoint of the “witnesses” or “commentators”, not of the victims; the spectators feel detached from the events, not overwhelmed by them. Since they did not participate in the epic of World War ii or did not much suffer, they came out of the war unharmed, but consumed with guilt. Works Cited Atack, Margaret. Literature and the French Résistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms, 1940–1950. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989. Print. Beck, Béatrix. Léon Morin, prêtre. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Print. Beck, Béatrix, The Passionate Heart. Trans. Constantine Fitz Gibbon. New York: J. Messner, 1953. Print. [also published in the UK as The Priest. London: M. Joseph, 1953]. Bory, Jean-Louis. Mon village à l’heure allemande. Paris: Flammarion, 2009. Print. Bory, Jean-Louis, French Village. Trans. Daniel Philip and Pamela Joan Waley. London: Dennis Dobson, 1948. Print. Bosquet, Alain. La Grande Éclipse. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Print. 46 47

“Silent, clumsy blows, aimed low, more like stealthy misdeeds than like acts of violence” (207). Somebody said: “One of them has fallen. The guards are hitting him… Now he’s up, he’s starting off again…” Somebody said: “Oh, look at that woman running to catch up with the group!” The untiring commentaries, despite transient notes of pity, disclosed a sort of detachment, for passionate feeling will not allow you to see things through to the end, whereas these men followed the whole business with the mournful eagerness of witnesses. (207).

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Bosquet, Alain. Les Fêtes cruelles. Paris: Grasset, 1984. Print. Collot, Michel. “Les Guetteurs de l’horizon” . Un Écrivain moderne, Rencontres de C ­ erisy (24–29 August 1991). Ed. Michel Murat. Paris: Lettres modernes, 1994. 109–126. Curtis, Jean-Louis, Les Forêts de la nuit. Paris: J’ai lu, 1976. Print. Curtis, Jean-Louis, The Forests of the Night. Trans. Nora Wydenbruck. New York: ­Putnam, 1951. Archive.org. Web. 17 Feb. 2016. Ducrot, Oswald and Todorov, Tzvetan, Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du l­ angage. Paris: Seuil, 1979. Print. Gascar, Pierre. Les Bêtes suivi de Le Temps des morts. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. Print. Gascar, Pierre. Beasts and Men [including The Season of the Dead]. Trans. Jean Stewart. London: Methuen, 1956. Print. Gracq, Julien. Un balcon en forêt. Paris: José Corti, 1958. Print. Gracq, Julien. A Balcony in the Forest. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Harvill, 1992. Print. Lestringant, Frank. “La tempête, de près et de loin: la place du spectateur chez Ronsard, Rabelais, d’Aubigné et Montaigne” . L’Événement climatique et ses représentations (XVIIe-XIXe siècles). Ed. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Berchtold and Jean-Paul Sermain. Paris: Desjonquères, 2007. 102–125. Print. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. The Nature of Things. A poetic translation. Trans. David R. Slavitt. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Print. Rousso, Henry. Le Syndrome de Vichy (1944–198…) Paris: Seuil, 1989. Print. TLFi: Trésor de la langue française informatisé. ATILF-CNRS-Université de Lorraine. Web. 6 Nov. 2014.

Part 2 At a Distance from War

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chapter 4

The “Comic Opera” of the Allied Intervention in Russia: Off-staging War in William Gerhardie’s Early Novels Catherine Hoffmann Abstract This chapter analyses the representation of the Allied intervention in Siberia (1918– 1920) during the Russian Civil War in the first two novels of William Gerhardie (1895– 1977), Futility (1922) and The Polyglots (1925). This inglorious episode offered Gerhardie a fitting subject for comic treatment and exposure of the absurdity of war and the futility of intervention. The central argument of the chapter is that, although military action takes place off-stage, the two novels in their own idiosyncratic way belong to the category of war literature. The narrators, British officers posted in Siberia whose lives and those of their friends and relatives seem infinitely remote from the hardships of war, adopt an anti-heroic and self-ironic perspective. Although humour constitutes the prevailing mode through which the chaotic Russian situation and fictional family dramas are filtered, Gerhardie’s horror of warfare comes to the surface in the narrators’ and characters’ sarcastic anti-war diatribes.

This chapter concerns a nearly forgotten author,1 William Gerhardie (1895– 1977), writing about a nearly forgotten conflict from the perspective of a noncombatant British officer with a keen sense of the absurdities of the situation. The Allied intervention in Russia (1918–1920) began a few months before the end of the First World War to which it was, until the Armistice, officially if tenuously related.2 With the Armistice, the purpose of the operation changed 1 Gerhardie’s status as a nearly forgotten author requires some qualification since there have been reprints of his first two novels, most recently (2012) in the aptly named Neversink Library series. 2 The initial purpose of the Allied intervention had been to re-open the Eastern Front after the Brest-Litovsk treaty between the new Bolshevik regime and the Central Powers (March 1918, in the new calendar), in order to ease the pressure on the Western Front, and also to stop military equipment stored by the Allies in Russia from falling into German hands. Churchill,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004353244_006

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and involved direct intervention into the Russian Civil War which had followed the Bolshevik Revolution and prompted the Allies, especially the British, to invade various parts of Russia in support of the White armies. The author, born in Saint Petersburg of British parents, spent his childhood and youth in a mostly Russian and polyglot environment. His fluency in Russian, his first language, and knowledge of the country played an essential role in charting his career in the British Army, first on the staff of General Sir Alfred Knox, the British Military Attaché in Petrograd during the First World War, then, from 1918 to 1920, as a member of the British Mission in Siberia, under the same general. Gerhardie’s first novels, Futility (1922) and The Polyglots (1925), drawing much of their material and flavour from his experience in Siberia, brought him instant literary fame. He did not, however, manage to cash in on this dazzling début, giving up fiction writing in the late thirties and dying in obscurity in London in 1977. As for the Allied intervention, it is now mostly a specialist niche in military history. Writing in 2004, Miles Hudson observes in his book, Intervention in Russia 1918–1920: A Cautionary Tale: “Some eighty-four years after the event, many people do not realize that, shortly after the Revolution, Soviet Russia was invaded by armies […] from some sixteen countries, including Britain, the United States, France and Japan” (3). The operation ended in a complete fiasco, not only failing to achieve its objectives but in fact strengthening the Bolshevik regime which it intended to destroy. For a writer like Gerhardie, sharply attuned to the ironies of both private life and History, the Allied intervention offered a fitting subject for comic treatment and exposure of the absurdity of war in general and of interfering in other people’s conflicts in particular. The two novels were written and published in the aftermath of the First World War with its widespread feeling of physical and moral exhaustion, of horror at the cost in human lives and at the mixture of ruthlessness and incompetence which appeared to have characterized the conduct of the war at the highest levels. Tragedy in this case was on such a scale that Gerhardie, who, in his non-fiction, repeatedly gave vent to sarcastic anti-war and anti-militarist pronouncements in spite of having voluntarily enlisted in the British Army in 1915, would have found it difficult to use First World War material in his fiction with his usual humorous detachment. The Allied intervention, defined by the narrator of Futility as “a series of comic opera attempts to wipe out the Russian Revolution”3 however, was from the start intent on crushing Bolshevism (see Kinvig’s Churchill’s Crusade, introduction, especially xiii). 3 The expression “comic opera” had been used as early as the summer of 1918, at the beginning of the intervention, by Sir Eric Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty, to describe the situation

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(83) presented no such problems if seen from the relative safety of the British Military Mission in Siberia. From a Russian perspective, the picture would have looked very different: the country had lost more people in the First World War than all the Allies combined and “[t]he civil war and the accompanying intervention were to add significantly to that figure and to bring many more civilians into the count” (Kinvig 73). Although hardly mentioned or represented in Gerhardie’s novels, countless atrocities were perpetrated by all Russian parties to the conflict. The choice of fiction as a vehicle for representing a situation largely based on the author’s first-hand experience4 suggests that a central question in the case of Futility and The Polyglots does not only concern “how war literature relates to war but […] how war literature relates to literature” (McLoughlin, “Soldierly stile”).5 Approaching analysis in those terms presupposes that we agree to include the two novels in the category of war literature, which, given that military action in both is largely if not entirely relegated to the wings of the stage where private dramas take place, may not be an obvious label. Yet, Anthony Powell, who had himself written three war novels,6 regarded The Polyglots as “‘a war book’, even though a peculiar kind of war book” (Under Review 321), a statement that could also apply to Futility. The definition of what constitutes a war novel may prove as elusive as the definition of war itself and of its limits, as observed in the introduction to the present volume, while, as will be argued in this essay, Gerhardie’s eccentric and humorous take on the Allied intervention is no less valid in shaping a representation of war than perspectives foregrounding military action and individual heroism, or highlighting the disastrous consequences of war. 1

The Interplay of History and Private Drama

Both novels centre on a group of characters, members of an extended family – the Bursanovs in Futility and the Diabologhs in The Polyglots –, their friends in North Russia (see Kinvig 28). Gerhardie, assessing the intervention from a Siberian perspective, was struck by similarly burlesque aspects. 4 In his autobiography, Memoirs of a Polyglot (1931) he summarily disposes of his experience of the intervention. 5 This, albeit in a very different historical and cultural context, is also the point made by Guillaume Muller in his study of Hayashi in Chapter Twelve of this volume. 6 The Valley of Bones, The Soldier’s Art, and The Military Philosophers, respectively volumes 7, 8 and 9 of A Dance to the Music of Time.

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and dependants who appear on the scene at a point when their wealth has vanished and their familiar world is crumbling. Though there are connections between their personal situations and the general upheaval caused by the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War and Allied intervention, the relation between the characters’ microcosm and the chaotic macrocosm is analogical rather than logical. In literary terms, this is in keeping with Gerhardie’s rejection of traditional plot causality in his novels7 but it is also especially appropriate to a narrative representation of confused or absurd situations. The use of analogy is more conspicuous in Futility, originally subtitled “A Novel on Russian Themes”, as are the Chekhovian borrowings. The general organization of the narrative in four parts – “Three Sisters”, “The Revolution”, “Intervention in Siberia”, and “Nina” – recalls the four acts of Chekhov’s major plays, and explicitly refers to one of them, while also clearly indicating the politico-military setting in which the Bursanovs’ family dramas unfold. Futility extends over a longer period than The Polyglots, in which the story time corresponds strictly to the British presence in Siberia from the summer of 1918 to the spring of 1920. In the first novel, where the diegesis begins shortly before the First World War and ends a few months after the evacuation of the British Military Mission from the Far East, the Allied intervention forms the context of the third part, the most substantial of the four “acts”. This interference into the Russian Civil War and its lamentable outcome are, however, prefigured at the level of the diegetic microcosm by Andrei, the narrator’s intervention into the tangled situation of the Bursanovs and their hangers-on. “It was”, Andrei observes with hindsight, “my first experience of ‘intervention’” (48). In his ironic account of his match-making plans, Andrei appears in turn as a mock-heroic general “thinking with a Napoleonic concentration” and charting his strategy with the help of diagrams (48), a playwright assigning to “the dramatis personae of his human drama” their respective parts (48), a competent businessman restoring the family’s finances, a tactful diplomat whose intervention would “secure Fanny’s prestige in her own eyes and would consolidate her position in regard to her people in Germany” (49). Unsurprisingly, Andrei’s “intervention” ends in a fiasco foreshadowing in miniature the large-scale failure of the Allied intervention.

7 Gerhardie often expressed himself on the subject. In a letter to his parents, for instance, he complained about his agents’ failure to grasp the nature of the plot of Futility, with its “crisis” that “does not ‘explode’, but is allowed […] [to] dwindle down gradually […] until at the end the people find that their position is essentially the same and that nothing has happened. That is a new departure and is itself a plot” (quoted by Davies 119).

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Such analogies and mirror effects between the small story world and the Russian and international context are present in The Polyglots too, yet often in a less explicit manner. At the centre of the spatial organization of the narrative is the flat in Harbin, a Russian concession on the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria, where the narrator’s Aunt Teresa and her Belgian family have settled. For reasons only partly related to the civil war and intervention, more and more people, of various origins, speaking different languages, “invade” the flat, thus duplicating in miniature the polyglot invasion of the Russian Far East, and reflecting in condensed form the cosmopolitan population of Harbin. After the arrival of still more polyglots at the flat, the narrator, Georges Hamlet Alexander,8 a member of the British Military Mission in Siberia appointed military censor and liaison officer at Harbin, conflates in a dream the two invasions: “a host of polyglots, marching, an army of polyglots, marching relentlessly, marching on, on, on – a stampede of feet” (126). A military atmosphere pervades the fictional microcosm, which, in both novels, includes a cast of officers, most of them White Russians. Two historical figures, confined to a walk-on part, make a brief appearance in Futility and The Polyglots: respectively Admiral Kolchak, for a time “Supreme Ruler” of Russia, and General Horvat, a Russian general based in Harbin. There is, of course, nothing new in this erasure of the distinction between History and fiction, and Tolstoy in particular had used the technique extensively in War and Peace. In the case of Gerhardie’s novels, it may be no more than a playful acknowledgment of the role of the context in stimulating the writer’s imagination and generating a fictional world. As for the presence of characters of various military ranks and persuasions, it is as much a feature of the Russian literature of the nineteenth century, thoroughly familiar to Gerhardie, as it is justified by the situation in Siberia and in Harbin. For instance, in Chekhov’s play, Three Sisters, which forms the overt intertext of Futility, nearly two thirds of the male characters are members of the Imperial Army. In Gerhardie’s novels, the militarization of social life is combined with a militarization of language, to be expected from the officers, but less so from Aunt Teresa, a formidable figure whose contribution to the World War had been to exfiltrate her husband, a Belgian officer, from the theatre of war by taking him to the Far East, and who addresses him in a commanding tone reminiscent of regimental orders. One way in which the narratives connect the story world and the historical context is through a spatio-temporal configuration which situates private scenes in relation to specific events in Russia and in the vast territories ­forming 8 So was the character-narrator named at birth but since his relatives call him George, the English form of his first name will hereafter be used in this chapter.

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the theatre of operations in the East during the civil war and intervention. Central both to the participants in the conflict and to the fictional characters are the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern Railway,9 not only essential strategically and logistically, but also providing the sites of battlefields, with the major cities along the line falling into the hands of one group before being retaken by their opponents. Besides, a number of anti-Bolshevik Russian generals had elected to use railway carriages as their headquarters,10 a situation reflected in The Polyglots where General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski’s special train, containing his private office, sits still on the viaduct at Harbin “commanding military position, as if holding a pistol at the head of the city” (93). Across the vastness of Siberia, in a relatively pacific analogue of the movements of armed factions, the characters undertake journeys along the line, most often for personal reasons, as in the case of the Bursanovs travelling from Vladivostok to Omsk on the special train of the British commander. Even longer overseas journeys, from England to Siberia or Manchuria and back, follow the route generally used by members of the British Military Mission in the Far East. In the diegesis they signal spatially the beginning and end of the characters’ involvement – direct or not – in the conflict. The outward and return journeys also serve in The Polyglots as narrative opening and ending. The novel’s closing journey follows in reverse the route travelled by Andrei in the last “act” of Futility. Beyond its use as an internal mirror reflecting the first novel into the second one, the journey bringing the Diabologhs and their hangers-on from the Far East to Southampton operates simultaneously as a metonymy of the end of the British intervention in Siberia, and as a metaphor of the final disposal of this particular episode in Gerhardie’s fiction. As far as the temporal relations between the texts and context are concerned, there is a noticeable difference between Futility and The Polyglots. In the first novel, there is no discrepancy between the fictional and historical chronologies, the latter often providing a referential temporal framework for the private scenes, for instance: “It was the day after General Gaida’s unsuccessful rising” (133). In The Polyglots, Gerhardie seems to have deliberately severed this link between story and History, not through giving up references to crucial political or military events, but by freely altering and confusing their chronology. The most striking example concerns the date of the Armistice which in the novel is moved forward to the early summer when the narrator leaves England – “We sailed three days before the armistice” (10), he tells his Uncle Emmanuel 9 10

The struggle in Siberia “was essentially a struggle for the railway” (Kinvig 301). A short-lived, and rather exaggeratedly called, All Russian Provisional Government was, for instance, accommodated in railway carriages at a siding in Omsk (Kinvig 65).

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after arriving in Tokyo four weeks later in July, on his way to Vladivostok. A few days later, an official telegram arrives informing the narrator’s uncle and aunt of their son’s death on the eve of the Armistice. This repeated referential inaccuracy in the first chapters of the novel draws attention to the deliberate fictionalization of historical time at work in The Polyglots, which may be interpreted as a manifestation of the author’s freedom to fit the facts to his fiction rather than the reverse. In view of Gerhardie’s opinion of the Allied intervention, one may detect an ideological purpose in addition to the literary effect: placing it after the end of the War instead of a few months before implicitly invalidates the initial justification for the Allied invasion of Russia in the spring and early summer of 1918. Together with its independence from historical time, The Polyglots exhibits an emancipation from literary models, in particular the influence of Chekhov so overtly acknowledged in Futility that many in the American audiences to whom copies of the novel had been sold during performances of Three Sisters11 “believed that the Chekhov was merely a dramatized version of Gerhardie” (Davies 122). Though, in The Polyglots, Gerhardie also uses Chekhovian motifs and techniques – the principle of deferment, the oscillation between longing and elation, the combination in dialogue of trivial remarks and philosophizing, the sketching of characters through their mechanical repetition of set phrases or gestures – the echoes are no longer explicit, depending solely on the reader’s memory of certain details of Chekhov’s plays. Easily recognizable as a habit shared by many Chekhovian characters is George’s fondness for quoting or referring to literature of the past, including the Russian classics Goncharov, Gogol or Krilov. Strikingly, war literature – Russian or otherwise – does not appear among the many works cited by the martially named Georges Hamlet Alexander, whether in his conversations with others or in his narratorial interventions. If we return to Anthony Powell’s remark about The Polyglots being a war book and about the question of how war literature relates to literature, it is quite clear that, while originating in the context of Revolution, civil war and Allied intervention, Gerhardie’s early novels have their most vigorous literary roots in nineteenth century Russian literature. This is especially true of his conception of futility which owes more to his Russian predecessors than to the European modernists of the immediate post war period, of whose activities he seems to have been unaware.12

11 12

This was probably in 1926–27 when the Moscow Art Theatre toured the us. See Davies 116.

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Gerhardie’s Anti-heroic Perspective

In the aftermath of the First World War, futility seems to have become a central concept to many intellectuals, especially among European Modernists, a kind of shorthand for the absurdity of war, for a sense of existential emptiness and exhaustion or of the essentially destructive vanity of patriotic, nationalist and heroic values: feelings roaming the metaphorical territory of the “waste land”.13 In contrast, Gerhardie’s conception of futility is fundamentally humorous, even though in the expression of anti-war sentiment found in both his early fiction and in his non-fiction, the mode verges on the satirical and polemical. In his work, the futility of human action arises from disproportion, or mismatching between investment and return, expectations and realisation, conception and execution. At the level of private drama, this takes the form of a pattern by which outcomes are in inverse proportion to the amount of individual hope and effort invested in their achievement. For instance, the more Nikolai Vasilievich in Futility pours money into his Siberian gold-mines, the more elusive their profitability becomes. Similarly, George’s or Andrei’s intellectual and verbal exertions to impress the object of their love – respectively Sylvia and Nina – result in the girls’ boredom and unresponsiveness.14 The same pattern applies to the discrepancy between the aims of the Allied intervention and its outcome, summarized by Uncle Kostia in Futility: “And the fruit of it? The Bolshevik divisions wearing British uniforms with royal buttons and the Bolshevik minority in Moscow nationally strengthened in the face of foreign enemies” (161). Here, the appropriation of British uniforms by Bolshevik troops constitutes a visible sign of the Allies’ failure and a manifestation of its ironies. Combined with Gerhardie’s conception of futility is the narrators’ anti-­ heroic perspective which they share with the author. In Memoirs of a Polyglot, he repeatedly emphasizes his attitude to fighting and action, declaring for instance that the two weeks he spent in hospital while at the cavalry barracks in York “may be reckoned as among my happiest days of the war” and delighting in frustrating the expectations of readers who “would prefer to see me expose myself without delay to shrapnel fire and explosives, whatever my own view of a foolish world” (121–22). The characters-narrators of the two novels, both officers in the British Army posted in the shifting war zone of Siberia, 13 In Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly finds in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land the most adequate expression in poetry of this mood of “dissatisfaction and despondency, of barrenness and futility” (53). Incidentally, The Waste Land was published the same year as Futility. 14 See Hoffmann 259–260.

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are as ­successful as their creator in their avoidance of “action”. They are not alone in this since none of the military or pseudo-military characters are ever represented as involved in anything more dangerous than administrative work, censorship, dining, drinking and dancing or, in true Chekhovian fashion, philosophizing. With their impressive titles, display of martial uniforms and parades in the least military of circumstances, they are reminiscent of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, the nearest to the Lord High Everything Else being Count Vladimir Vsèvolodovich Valentine, whose visiting card states that, in addition to being Supreme Inspector of the Provisional Commission for Inland Revenue, he holds the strategic post of Assistant-Inspector of Communications with the title of Acting-President (with plenipotentiary powers) of the Special and Extraordinary Conference convened for the discussion of questions arising in connexion with the requisition of quarters allotted to members of the Allied contingents in the Far East, and the unification of measures for the defence of the State against the enemy. (Polyglots 156) The syntactical and superlative inflation of this job title visibly amplifies its comic disproportion with the trivial realities involved (billeting foreign troops), or with the vacuity of the last function since the State to be defended was, at best, an elusive entity. Grandiloquent titles are not the preserve of White Russian characters. Thus, Admiral Butt, Andrei’s commanding officer, has, to his delight it appears, been conferred the title of “‘Supreme Commander-in-Chief of All the Armed Military and Naval Forces operating on the Territory of Russia’ or something of that sort” by the heads of “four separate All-Russia Governments” (Futility 90). The contradiction between this stated all-inclusiveness and the number of governments – all short-lived – purported to represent the whole of Russia undermines the actual worth of the title, as does Andrei’s flippant addition “something of that sort”. It should also be kept in mind that such hyperbolic titles were indeed freely conferred, sometimes self-conferred, on a number of anti-Bolshevik commanders. The title given in Futility to the head of the British Military Mission in Siberia was not, in fact, Gerhardie’s invention. He simply transferred onto a semi-fictional character15 the title under which Admiral Kolchak ruled the Omsk government for about a year and a half. George, the

15

Admiral Butt is loosely based on General Sir Alfred Knox. The rank of admiral is another instance of the novelist’s merging aspects of Kolchak and Knox into a single character.

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narrator of The Polyglots, in keeping with the general titular inflation, decides to style himself the “British Military Ambassador” while staying at the flat in Harbin (138), a title of no more value than the high denomination banknotes circulating at the time. As characters, neither George nor Andrei are presented in their own narratives as superior to the rest of the cast of anti- or mockheroes. Self-irony and ingenuous manifestations of vanity, absurdity, and, in George’s case, a degree of cynicism contribute to the distinctive humour of the novels, in that the narrators include themselves as objects of laughter or, at least, sources of amusement while leaving their narratives unburdened with moral judgment of the characters’ foibles, failures, or follies. The narrator of The Polyglots, for instance, expresses no sense of having failed in his duty when he summarizes his activities in the British Military Mission in Vladivostok, and pre-empts potential moral objections on the part of readers, so often addressed in the novel: I favour, on the whole, a mild atmosphere of Bolshevism in public affairs. Accordingly I occupied myself with writing novels and let the office work be run by the two junior clerks. And very well they ran it, I must say! Some readers at this point may feel inclined to censure me a little for my levity. Believe me, they are (if I may say so) talking through their hats. (45) Humour, here, operates in a concentrated form, combining mock self-­ importance and English moderation, the incongruity of applying Bolshevism to personnel management in a British Military Mission involved in its eradication, and the oxymoronic association of “a mild atmosphere” and “Bolshevism”, especially in the context of the civil war and Allied intervention. In George’s presentation of himself wearing fancy uniform, there is something of the tin soldier and fake hero, no better and no worse than his Uncle Emmanuel and just as harmless. Both of them impress the rich Shanghai merchant who, after their departure from Harbin, offers them hospitality, as modern-day Bayards, “warriors without fear and without reproach”, “on account of [their] heroic-looking uniforms” (263). In earlier episodes, George is as prompt as his uncle to appear in a histrionic pseudo-military outfit on the flimsiest pretext, including one like Uncle Lucy’s funeral procession, unrelated to Army life and the war context: I had fished out ‘le sabre de mon père’ – a long clumsy thing in a leather scabbard. I had bought it cheap in a second-hand shop in Charing Cross Road; it was an obsolete cavalry sword of pre-Waterloo pattern, being much too long even when you sat on the top of a horse, and therefore long since discarded. (Polyglots 189)

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This ridiculous and literally worthless object provides one of the many instances of the transfer of autobiographical details to fiction based as it is on Gerhardie’s own sartorial excesses while posted in Petrograd during World War i (Memoirs 134). Like the author who labelled himself “the greatest fake of a soldier alive” (134), without the slightest feeling of guilt, George has no qualms about having won a promotion during the War thanks “to having, at a psychological moment, slapped a certain War Office Colonel on the shoulder: just as his ego had touched the height of elation” (Polyglots 10). Together with its expression of the character’s self-serving cynicism, the text here veers towards the satirical mode and destroys any notion of a connection between heroic deed and military reward. The words in this case, however, are spoken by the narrated-I, in a conversation with his uncle so that the satirical purpose need not be attributed to the narrator. In fact, since George’s satirical sting is lost on Uncle Emmanuel, his remark falls flat and his linguistic and intellectual effort yields only the derisory reaction of the vaguest of clichés: “‘Que voulez-vous?’” murmured by the uncomprehending uncle (10). The inclusion of the character-narrator among the laughable, ineffectual inhabitants of the fictional world corresponds to George’s conception of humour: “Humour”, he tells his aunt, “is when I laugh at you and laugh at myself in the doing (for laughing at you), and laugh at myself for laughing at myself and thus to the tenth degree” (320). In his view, humour brings together “the hilarity, futility, the insurmountable greatness of all life” (320). In his nonfiction, Gerhardie returned repeatedly to the question of humour, stressing two particularly important aspects. The first concerns the perception of the humorous aspects of tragic situations, and the fact that this perceptual ability does in no way alleviate the pain or diminish the tragedy (Memoirs 249). The second stresses the humorous writer’s benevolent attitude to his characters (“Literary Credo” 170) and sharply distinguishes it from the “savage wit” of satire. ­Gerhardie’s literary model for the “purity of insight into the humorous tragedy of life” remains Chekhov, whose insight “penetrates to […] a bed-rock of common humanity where all human beings, as human beings, are frail, irresponsible, weak. Against this, their success or failure is shown to be irrelevant” (“Literary Credo” 171). In the two novels, benevolence operates at the level of the narrative, in the combination of self-irony and absence of moral judgement, and at story level where “superfluous”,16 parasitic, grotesque, cheating, weak characters are all 16

The expression “superfluous man” was initially used in Russian culture, to characterize Pechorin-type figures in fiction, romantic heroes who, though men of action like the ­protagonist of Lermontov’s Hero of our Time, have no purpose in life. The expression then

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accepted within the extended family circles of the Bursanovs or Diabologhs. As time goes on and the general situation deteriorates, both families accumulate more and more dependants and hangers-on, never turning anyone out, regardless of their failings or of old grudges. Thus, in The Polyglots, space is made in Teresa’s already crowded Harbin flat for Uncle Lucy, his wife, a myriad children, legitimate or not, and various relatives-in-law, nurses etc. (116), in spite of an on-going dispute between Lucy and his sister Teresa. In both novels, money is borrowed and never repaid without the creditors bearing a grudge against their debtors or refusing further loans.17 The narratives imply no direct links between these relaxed attitudes to normally censured behaviour and the Russian chaotic situation. There is, however, one passage in The Polyglots where the narrator, commenting fondly on the mad visitors who used to call on him at Harbin, contrasts their harmlessness with the destructive folly of a war in which he was himself a participant, albeit a non-combatant one: I was besieged by them, yet I liked them. They were good, well-behaved lunatics, trim and neat in their diminutive, harmless lunacy, compared with our war lords in their raving, disorderly madness. They were floating in a sea of bewilderment and confusion, but we who were waging this colossal war with seriousness and with method were more destructively futile in our pretensions, more grievously self-deluded. (152) For once, the narrator takes on his share of responsibility for warfare. Since the Allied intervention hardly qualifies for the label “colossal war”, it would appear that, as he does elsewhere, George conflates World War One, the Russian Civil War and intervention into a paradigm of the folly of war. Yet, here too, the narrative focuses on individuals, uninvolved in the collective madness, rather than on the realities and effects of war. For war in the two novels, as already

17

came to include apparently passive characters like Oblomov in Goncharov’s eponymous novel (see Wachtel 134, and Terras 197). The characters in Gerhardie’s novels are definitely not men of action and some, like Uncle Kostia and “Kniaz” (always called by his princely title, not out of deference but simply because nobody knows or can remember his name) in Futility, cultivate an Oblomovian passivity. Kostia eventually arrives at the conclusion that “it was futility to get up at all, and of late conformed to his discovery” (190–191), while the prince (“Kniaz” in Russian) “was one of those quiet nonentities who enter unasked and leave unhindered almost any Russian home. […] I think Goncharov speaks of them somewhere […]” (51). I have elsewhere analysed this attitude as “a form of investment in shared humanity, an acceptance of liability – albeit limited – for the lives of others” (Hoffmann 261).

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suggested, takes place off-stage so that fighting, destruction or atrocities are hardly ever represented. 3

Off-staging War

It would be tempting, therefore, to read Futility and The Polyglots as examples of what Kate McLoughlin calls “not writing about war”, a variety of techniques she analyses as literary diversionary tactics which, by “deliberately circumventing the direct depiction of conflict” (Authoring War 139), “initiate the reader into the mysteries of imagining [war]” (“Not writing about war” 60). In ­Gerhardie’s case, however, indirectness is not used to stimulate the reader’s mind into imagining the pain and horrors of war. Rather, he chose to represent in fiction an experience of what he refers to in his Memoirs as “war de luxe” (133), very similar to the fictional experience of the narrators, insulated from actual fighting and from the physical discomfort or material shortages generally caused by conflict, although engaged in military intervention in a savage civil war. Some years later, Andrei thus notes My tangled memories of Siberia come to me to-day largely as a string of dances, dinners, concerts, garden-parties, modulated by the atmosphere of weather and the seasons of the year, with the gathering clouds of the political situation looming always in the background. (Futility 101) Andrei’s evocation of his own “war de luxe”, for all its concentration on fictional events most relevant to himself and his narrative, does not fundamentally differ from many accounts provided by British soldiers posted in Russia during the civil war. On the basis of their diaries and letters, Miles Hudson observes: From shooting duck, fishing, playing rounders with the local children in the north, to race meetings, opera, vast meals with apparently unending vodka and caviar in the south, many of the participating soldiers looked back on their experiences with great pleasure, even nostalgia. (178) Another aspect of the situation of those British soldiers mentioned by Hudson is that, with a few exceptions, they “did little actual fighting” (180). In this respect, Gerhardie did not need to twist reality much to transpose actual experience to fiction and fashion an environment congenial to the cast of anti-heroic characters who people his first two novels. Even in the few cases of imposing

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military figures like Admiral Butt, the narrator casts doubts as to the substance of their action: He had the air of a man engaged in winning the war18 while everybody else about him was obstructing him in his patriotic task. […] That warwinning quality was clearly manifest in his personality, but his actual work towards that end was all very obscure. (Futility 64) Much of the work of the British in Siberia was confined to the supply of arms and equipment to the anti-Bolshevik forces, a task which, together with traditional Army anecdotes of bungled logistics, probably provided the inspiration for one of the narrative leitmotivs of The Polyglots: “the sheepskin expedition to Harbin to bring back a quantity of sheepskin coats which had been ordered for the Russian Army”, a mission which allowed George to leave Vladivostok and combine “a little duty with pleasure” (51) – meaning in fact minimal exertion of duty and maximal enjoyment of Sylvia, his cousin’s company. This particular story line runs, in combination with others of a personal or family kind, through nearly forty pages. It takes the form of a mock quest narrativecum-investigation expressed in refrains. The initial leitmotiv is “the sheepskin coats, as I said, could not be traced” (55, 62), until it turns out that the elusive consignment was not one of coats but of 50,000 fur caps. These, which, through an unknown agency, end up cluttering the hall of the Harbin flat, are entrusted to the care of Captain Negodyaev’s manservant to be dispatched by train to Vladivostok. When they fail to reach the British Military Mission, the refrain then changes to “the caps were not there” (79 twice) and “enquiries still pending” (79, 80). Eventually, after George has been sent back to Harbin to trace the caps’ whereabouts, a telegram informs him that they have been found in a disused shed at Vladivostok station (89). The narrative thus exploits simultaneously the comic potential of incompetent Army logistics, the futility, from a military point of view, of George’s two Harbin missions, the principle of deferment and aborted outcome which governs Gerhardie’s plotless novels. Stylistically, the first stage of this adventure occasions an adjectival inflation which goes crescendo from the still relatively sober anadiplosis of “Meanwhile, the situation as regards the sheepskin coats was vague and obscure. Obscure and uncertain. Uncertain and hypothetical, to a quite extraordinary degree”

18

This passage records Andrei’s first impression of Admiral Butt at the beginning of Allied intervention, before the Armistice therefore, when the avowed objective was still the continuation of the war on the Eastern Front.

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(55) to an exuberant accumulation of adjectives which reads like a miniature thesaurus: Meanwhile, the situation as regards the sheepskin coats was still uncertain. Vague and perplexing. Dubious and undetermined. Confused and unsettled. Oracular, ambiguous, equivocal. Bewildering, precarious, embarrassing and controvertible, mysterious and undefinable, inscrutable and unaccountable, impenetrable, hesitant – apparently insoluble. Incredible! Incomprehensible! (62) The humorous effect of the passage rests in part on the disproportion between the narrator’s verbal excesses and the moderation of his efforts, at the diegetic level, to find the (non-existent) coats. Lack of evolution in the situation, expressed in the adverb “still” contrasts with a linguistic dynamics giving an impression of self-generating growth. Besides, the words are increasingly divorced both in meaning and exaggerated intensity from the situation referred to. 50,000 lost sheepskin coats would no doubt have been a serious matter, especially to Russian troops facing the Siberian winter, but the vocabulary used by the narrator bears no semantic connection to such practical considerations. In its suggestion of a quasi-religious unfathomable mystery and its hyperbolic expression out of proportion to the subject matter, the passage exemplifies a style akin to mock-heroic diction. The details of military bureaucracy, especially as incarnated in Sir Hugo – a character appearing in both novels – and his painstaking composition of perfectly punctuated reports which systematically get lost, provide another source of comic representation of Army life. Military obsession with trivia was and is, of course, not specific to wartime. In wartime, however, this magnifying of mundane details sharply contrasts with the global context of fighting and hardships on a huge scale. If viewed in terms of actual experience, it is true that the larger picture is not available to the men on the ground, and that much of their time is spent on routine tasks or waiting for action. It follows that, especially in the case of the British posted in Siberia during the civil war, literary works focusing on the seemingly harmless and often absurd sides of Army life are on the whole nearer the mark as representations of soldiers’ experience in times of conflict than narratives of combat and daring deeds. The case of Gerhardie’s novels may be regarded as extreme in the avoidance of any direct depiction or narration of fighting. The characters, whether White Russian or British officers, or civilians of various nationalities seem to exist in a charmed world impervious to physical violence, food or fuel shortages, disruption of the railways. In their Siberian or Manchurian flats, meals

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appear as if by magic, everyone is kept warm, social life is more cosmopolitan and livelier than ever, and long journeys are undertaken in comfortable trains. Yet no one appears to do any real work or have any money left to support this lifestyle. Fiction certainly allowed Gerhardie to accentuate an aspect of life in wartime sometimes forgotten: namely that for some people, war has little impact on their private preoccupations, activities, such as they are, and comfort. Fleetingly, the narrator of Futility suggests a degree of unease at the contrast between the desolation of the land and destitution of its inhabitants, and the luxurious bubble of the special train on which he is travelling through Siberia: we covered verst after verst, as our luxurious train, freshly painted, beautifully furnished, admirably kept, rushed through a stricken land of misery. On our choice engines we moved like lighting, or perchance stood long hours at lonely wayside stations, the glamour of the innumerable electric lights within our carriages presenting to a community of half-starving refugees the gloating picture of the Admiral and his ‘staff’ at dinner. (114–115) There is no room for humour here, as the text emphasizes the contrasts in its syntax, rhythm and vocabulary: the regular structure, laudatory adverb-­ adjective and its ternary rhythm evoking the train’s motion, clashes with the harsh consonant sounds at the end of the first sentence, while semantic ­oppositions – between “our luxurious train” and “a stricken land of misery”, “gloating” and “half-starving” – further suggest the narrator’s feelings. It is also noticeable that at the end of the paragraph, Andrei shifts the perspective from within the carriages to the starving outsiders’ imagined perception, allowing their miserable existence to seep into the text, even though at the diegetic level, the world of the passengers remains impervious to the world of the on-lookers. The human cost and atrocities of war are evoked more fully and graphically in the long description of the coup and counter-coup which took place in Vladivostok on 17th and 18th November 1919.19 The account is given first in a straight narrative then dialogically in a conversation between Andrei and Fanny Ivanovna. The different versions do not diverge in the horrors they ­describe – the moans and groans of the dying, the dead bodies in the snow, the ruthless execution of prisoners in the station. Neither are they contradicted by genuine eyewitness accounts of the events.20 Although Fanny Ivanovna’s description of 19

20

The anti-Kolchak coup was organized by Gaida, a Czech officer, and the Social Revolutionary Party, an anti-Bolshevik and anti-White party. The Kolchakites retaliated the following morning, retook the city and executed the prisoners in the railway station. See for instance the account provided by Company Sergeant Major Ivens, of the Royal Engineers, in a letter to his uncle, quoted by Miles Hudson (97).

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what she saw – from her window, one gathers – is more sentimental than Andrei’s and focuses on one individual, an “awfully good-looking” boy marched into the station to be killed, both emphasize the atrocities committed by the winning side, Andrei in fact putting so to speak the finishing touch to the scene witnessed by Fanny Ivanovna: When I entered the station […] I saw piles of dead bodies lying on the steps on which rich red blood trickled down all the way; and on top of all that handsome boy, with the back of his scalp blown off. (Futility 137) By the time he wrote The Polyglots, Gerhardie’s technique had evolved towards a complete exclusion of such scenes from the narrative, so that the violence of war now entirely took place off-stage. Of the three deaths which are reported in the narrative, only one is connected to a war context: Anatole’s death in Flanders on the eve of the Armistice, but Anatole is not a participant in the story and the news of his death is communicated through the economical wording of an Army telegram. It later emerges that George’s cousin was court-martialled and executed for falling asleep on watch duty for which he had volunteered. This death taking place on the Western Front and before the narrator arrives in the Far East cannot be the object of representation. It can only act as some sort of vindication of George’s virulent anti-war speech to his aunt, shortly before the news of Anatole’s death is received. This constitutes the longest of his anti-war diatribes and reflexions running for nearly three pages, and contains a graphic description of the effect of a bayonet blade on a man’s intestines, and a passage which foreshadows Anatole’s death: In the war men’s nerves gave way, and then they were court martialled for their nerves having given way – deserted them – and were shot at dawn – as deserters, for cowardice. And the sole judges of them were their superior officers who dared not know any better. (24) While Anatole’s useless death confirms George’s views of the absurdity of wars, this long disquisition may be regarded as an artistic infelicity, a judgement shared by Gerhardie himself who called it “the weakest passage” in the novel (Memoirs 297). In retrospect it makes the news of Anatole’s death appear contrived, almost a kind of narrative punishment inflicted on Aunt Teresa for her earlier martial remarks, the author in this case showing his hand in devising a localized plot for ideological reasons in an otherwise plotless novel. The character-narrator in this instance sounds too much like the author’s mouthpiece, since there is little to distinguish the fictional character’s speech from the author’s own sarcastic pronouncements as in the following example:

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Total strangers blown into smithereens with not the slightest ill-feeling – bombs dropped on towns from a high sense of duty – a bayonet plunged into another’s vitals from sheer love of one’s country and without bearing him a grudge. (Memoirs 119) Futility too contains anti-war and anti-intervention remarks or speeches but these are distributed among the characters, rather than confined to the character-­narrator, and fit harmoniously with the philosophizing tendency mentioned earlier as a characteristic of the dialogues. Whatever their artistic weaknesses or strengths, these passages lead one to a number of conclusions. Firstly, and contrary to appearances, the novels cannot be taken as examples of “not writing about war”, for war and intervention are written about in a combination of narratorial comments and conversations about the absurdity of all wars in general and the futility of the Allied intervention in particular. The impression that Gerhardie was not writing about war originates in the near or complete absence of direct representation of combat, violence and hardship. Narrative distance from the field of action is of a different kind here from the distancing techniques used in the French post-war novels analysed by Clément Sigalas in this volume. War does not constitute, for Gerhardie’s characters and narrators, an enigmatic or aesthetically pleasing spectacle watched from a safe distance. Neither do the characters experience any guilt at being insulated from war violence and action. As has been argued in this chapter, humour provides the prevailing mode through which the chaotic situation is filtered. Yet, and this constitutes the second concluding observation, humour is clearly best suited to the narrative of private drama and the trivia of Army life. When it comes to the causes, conduct and effects of war on a large scale, the narrators and some of the characters adopt a heavily ironic and even sarcastic tone which betrays a profound horror of warfare, jarring with the relaxed benevolence manifested towards individuals no matter how morally defective or ineffectual. The very fact that these passages are at odds with Gerhardie’s favoured tragi-comic approach to literary representation suggests the depth of his anti-war feeling. No artistic consideration could stop it from seeping into the early fiction of an author who stated, some years later: Not all the human touches of the war could, I knew, redeem its inhumanity. Though I wore uniform I felt, from start to finish, that there was neither rhyme nor reason in it all, and those who talked earnestly of national honour, which required a continuance of contemptible acts to prevent their repetition in the future, were precisely those who seemed to me like grinning idiots in an asylum. (Memoirs 122)

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The Allied intervention in Russia was, of course, a far less tragic, if equally futile, case than the World War evoked in the quotation. Yet, nowadays when foreign interventions into civil wars and other nations’ affairs appear to have replaced world and colonial wars, Gerhardie’s early novels are worth (re)reading not only for the literary enjoyment they provide in their own right and in keeping alive “the dead matter of history” (Memoirs 162) but also, obliquely, as cautionary tales.21 Works Cited Chekhov, Anton. Three Sisters. 1899. Plays. Trans. Elisaveta Fen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. Print. Connolly, Cyril. Enemies of Promise. 1938. London: André Deutsch, 1996. Print. Davies, Dido. William Gerhardie. A Biography. 1990. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Print. Gerhardie, William. Futility. 1922. London: Robin Clark, 1990. Print. Gerhardie, William. The Polyglots. 1925. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1970. Print. Gerhardie, William. Memoirs of a Polyglot: The Autobiography of William Gerhardie. 1931. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973. Print. Gerhardie, William. “My Literary Credo” 1947. Anton Chehov. A Critical Study. 1923. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975. Print. Hoffmann, Catherine. “Financial Matters, Motifs and Metaphors in William Gerhardie’s Early Works”. Money, New Comparison 35–36 (Spring/Autumn 2003): 255–265. Print. Hudson, Miles. Intervention in Russia 1918–1920. A Cautionary Tale. Barnsley (South Yorkshire): Leo Cooper, 2004. Print. Kinvig, Clifford. Churchill’s Crusade. The British Invasion of Russia 1918–1920. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. Print. McLoughlin, Kate. Authoring War. The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. McLoughlin, Kate. “Not writing about war”. Fighting Words and Images: Representing War across the Disciplines. Eds. Elena Baraban, Stephan Jaeger and Adam Muller. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012a. 46–64. Print. McLoughlin, Kate. “Soldierly Stile”. Rev. of Neil Ramsey’s The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture and John R. Reed’s The Army and Navy in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Times Literary Supplement, 1 June 2012b. Print.

21

This echoes the subtitle of Miles Hudson’s book on intervention in Russia, quoted earlier in this chapter.

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Muller, Guillaume. “Profiles of War by Hayashi Fusao: A Writer’s Approach to War”. Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present: Fields of Action, Fields of Vision. Eds. Claire Bowen and Catherine Hoffmann. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 194–208. Print. Powell, Anthony. Under Review. Writings on Writers 1946–1990. London: Heinemann, 1991. Print. Sigalas, Clément. “The Second World War Seen from the Balcony: Representations of the Spectacle of War in the French Post-War Novel” . Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present: Fields of Action, Fields of Vision. Eds. Claire Bowen and Catherine Hoffmann. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 51–66. Print. Terras, Victor. “The realist tradition” . The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel. Eds. Malcolm V. Jones and Robin Feuer Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 190–209. Print. Wachtel, Andrew. “Psychology and society” . The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel. Eds. Malcolm V. Jones and Robin Feuer Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 130–149. Print.

chapter 5

Margaret Atwood’s Representation of Modern and Imaginary Warfare Teresa Gibert Abstract Although Margaret Atwood is not generally regarded as a war writer, the shadow of war pervades her work. This chapter highlights the ways in which she meets, in her fiction, the challenge of representing the traumatic aspects of modern warfare from new perspectives encouraging reflection about its impact upon various areas of human experience. The analysis concentrates especially on the multifaceted relationship between war and women, whose connection with the battlefields is of an entirely different nature from the combatants’. Rather than depicting life on the front line or the horrors of warfare, Atwood’s fiction focuses on the process of recalling and commemorating the wars of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The effects of armed conflicts are evoked in the realistic settings of novels such as The Robber Bride (1993) or The Blind Assassin (2000) and also inspire aspects of the future wars of her speculative fiction.

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa on 18 November 1939, two and a half months after the outbreak of the Second World War.1 Although she did not reside in a battleground area and never suffered anything comparable to the serious physical, emotional and economic hardships that many of her contemporaries had to endure in the war-ravaged countries of Europe, or in the euphemistically called “relocation” camps where the Japanese-Canadians were confined in her own country, the Second World War made an extraordinary impact upon her imagination. Indeed, in spite of the fact that she is not generally regarded as a “writer of war” and despite her lack of first-hand experience 1 The author has often drawn attention to this fact, sometimes in a humorous tone. For instance, in “Writing Philosophy. Waterstone’s Poetry Lecture” she remarked: “Being born at the beginning of the war gave me a substratum of anxiety and dread to draw on, which is very useful to a poet. It also meant that I was malnourished. This is why I am short. If it hadn’t been for food rationing, I would have been six feet tall”.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004353244_007

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of this subject matter, the shadow of war pervades her poetry and her fiction. Her essays, poems, novels, and short stories are full of specific references to the long series of military engagements that have marked the history of mankind from ancient to modern times. In her writings Atwood devotes special attention to the violent mass conflicts of the twentieth century involving Canada: the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, and to a lesser extent the Second Boer War, the Korean War, and the recent wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Being extremely conscious of the difficulties of presenting the traumatic aspects of modern warfare from new perspectives through the literary media, Atwood has achieved her goal without falling into the dangers of triumphalism, sentimentalism, stereotyping, and the trivialization of violence. From her position as an influential author she has successfully met the challenge posed by any attempt to write with accuracy and subtlety about a complex phenomenon which both requires and resists verbal representation. She encourages critical reflection about the essential nature of military struggle and about its harsh effects impinging upon many other domains of human experience, with particular emphasis on the multifaceted relationship between women and war. Rather than directly depicting the horrors of the trenches or underscoring other significant features of life on the front line, Atwood’s contribution to war literature focuses primarily on the intricate processes of recalling and commemorating the wars of the past as well as anticipating the wars of the future. On the one hand, the various kinds of damage caused by the armed conflicts which have already taken place are recurrently evoked in the realistic settings of novels such as Life Before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1981), Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993), and The Blind Assassin (2000). On the other hand, the ravages of these actual, recorded combats also inspire some prominent aspects of the hypothetical wars imagined by Atwood in her speculative fiction. For instance, the dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and the post-apocalyptic world described in the MaddAddam trilogy – Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) – raise public awareness about the impending dangers of present belligerent policies and contain insistent warnings about their potential grim results.2 2 In the MaddAddam trilogy, humans have almost wiped out their own species by means of wars and genetically modified viruses. Crake, one of the main characters of Oryx and Crake, performs an act of universal bioterrorism by spreading a virus intended to exterminate mankind. His purpose is to replace the intrinsically violent human race by the Crakers, a new species of peaceful humanoids he has created. In MaddAddam it is explicitly suggested that Crake probably undertook his genocidal project because he wanted to end all wars (40–41).

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Atwood’s first collection of short stories, Dancing Girls (1977), provides two examples, one of each type: “The Man from Mars” (1977) is about an unexpected war which actually materializes, whereas “When It Happens” (1975) is about a much-feared war which only happens in the protagonist’s troubled mind. “The Man from Mars” satirically expresses its author’s concern about the prevalent utopian expectations of everlasting world peace by exposing the distorting effects of certain naive attitudes towards warfare through the character of Christine. She is a peace-loving Canadian undergraduate whose ill-informed judgment leads her to candidly argue that belligerence has become something of the past because all rivalries can be solved without resorting to violence. Being a student of Political Science and Economics, Christine should know better, but even more alarming than her ignorance is her ability to persuade the majority of her Debating Society to vote in favour of a resolution about the obsolescence of war: “The topic was, ‘Resolved: That War Is Obsolete’. Her team took the affirmative and won” (13). Christine, very much like many of her gullible contemporaries, is convinced that she will never witness a war until she must abruptly confront the appalling accounts of an armed struggle which is going on in an unnamed country we are given to understand is Vietnam. Her hopeful vision of a peaceful world is completely destroyed when she realizes that this particular war has entered her life through her relationship with a mysterious suitor, an Asian student in whose deportation from Canada she had been involved. The young foreigner had been a stranger to her, and she had treated him as if he were a Martian, as the title of the story implies. But all at once she stops viewing him as a sort of alien, and instead begins to apprehend him as someone fully human who could be either “near the battle zone or safely far from it” (30), and either already dead or still alive. Christine feels compelled to look for him in the pictures of the magazines she compulsively buys and in the late-night newscasts she watches obsessively, hoping to catch sight of him. However, all her efforts are in vain. The fate of the Asian student remains unknown. The image of the young man haunts Christine, who sees him in her dreams, carrying a rifle and “with blood streaked over his face, partly blotting out the features” (31), until she becomes so greatly distressed by nightmares that she collapses emotionally. At last, in order to overcome her mental breakdown, she decides to give her television set away so as to avoid watching the atrocities which are currently reported, and instead of reading newspapers and magazines, she takes refuge in the much safer world of nineteenth-century novels.3 Thus, rather than gaining wisdom about humankind’s innate violent 3 The speaker of Atwood’s poem “It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers” (1968) expresses her guilty feelings unreservedly through her depiction of herself both as a reader looking at war

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tendencies, Christine resumes her uneventful and comfortable existence by evading the terrible reality of military conflict and by deluding herself with the soothing idea that the young man has probably survived.4 The short story entitled “When It Happens” is about an elderly woman, Mrs Burridge, who imagines the outbreak of a war while she is writing her shopping list and pickling green tomatoes on her farm. The pronoun “It” of the story title refers to a catastrophe which seems to be about to happen, but in fact only happens in Mrs Burridge’s anxious mind. Her fantasies are partly nourished by the disquieting pieces of information she gets “by reading the newspapers and watching the television” (124). Such fantasies are not only based on media reports about current or prospective wars, but on an extrapolation of her own experience of the Second World War. From her memories of that war, including the details about how the news had been censored then, Mrs Burridge derives knowledge about what to expect now. Recalling the frightful events of what really occurred in her lifetime, she envisions how she and her husband will be subjected to an imminent attack, picturing its vivid scenes as if they were true. Her strong urge to store large amounts of food reflects both a typical reaction of anyone who has had to face rationing and food shortages, and more specifically the enthusiasm with which Canadian women responded to the domestic food conservation programs on the home front during the Second World War.5 But rather than feeling comforted by her abundant supplies, Mrs Burridge visualizes the presumed destruction of her jams and jellies in terms of a grisly spectacle of carnage: “She does not go down into the cellar but she has an image of her carefully sealed bottles and jars, red and yellow and purple, shattered on the floor, in a sticky puddle that looks like blood” (128). These two stories from the volume Dancing Girls exemplify two contrasting attitudes which juxtapose different responses to warfare, both of them fraught with contradictions. Although these short narratives seem to have little photos with “passive eyes” and as a writer “speaking of peaceful trees” while in Vietnam “the jungles are flaming” and “another village explodes” (The Animals in That Country 30–31). 4 When interviewed by Joyce Carol Oates in February 1978, Atwood commented on the male protagonist of “The Man from Mars”: “The man of course is not from Mars; he is from earth, like everyone else. But there’s no way of accounting for the atrocities that people perform on other people except by the ‘Martian’ factor, the failure to see one’s victims as fully human” (76). 5 When exploring the primacy of food issues on the Canadian home front during the Second World War, Ian Mosby cites some national studies indicating very high levels of home canning across the country, following policies promoted by the Department of Agriculture and patriotically supported by women all over the country as an essential contribution to the war effort.

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in common, they do share the purpose of illustrating the tension inherent in any representation of the war experience: the relationship between death and survival, between recalling dreadful past events and anticipating even more appalling future circumstances, between confronting an awesome reality or eluding it, and between escaping from unbearable anguish, or on the contrary, succumbing to despair. In both stories the focalizers are women, a feature of most of Atwood’s fiction, which contains only a few examples of male focalizers. As a result, the great majority of characters who try to understand the process of military struggle are women whose lives have been radically transformed by the direct or the indirect experience of war. Christine and Mrs Burridge can be included in the category of war victims because they suffer emotional and behavioural problems which are the inevitable consequence of the psychological effects of war. Other war victims in the same collection include Betty, unhappily married to an egoistic veteran named Fred to whom she got engaged just before he left for the front and whom she married right after he came back. Through the innocent-eye perspective of a girl-narrator, we learn that “Betty had written letters to him every single night and mailed them once a week. She did not say how often Fred had written to her” (36). But, since the girl adds that “Fred didn’t seem to make any efforts to be nice to people” (36), we presume that Betty’s devotion had never been reciprocated, either during the war, or in its aftermath. The title story of the collection Dancing Girls offers a glimpse of Jetske, a college student who “was from Holland, and could remember running through the devastated streets as a child, begging small change, first from the Germans, later from the American soldiers, who were always good for a chocolate bar or two” (206). Jetske does not want to give the impression that she has been traumatized by the Nazis. On the contrary, she is proud of having learned how to take care of herself and asserts that nothing is hard for children, exhibiting a strength which earns her the admiration of Ann, her Canadian friend. Comparing Jetske’s “exotic” background to her own bland existence, Ann feels she needs “at least a shadowy identity”, which is provided to her by the “Canadian soldiers buried in Holland”, so that “at least she had some heroic dead bodies with which she was connected, however remotely” (207). In one of her newspaper articles, “Margaret Atwood on The Blind Assassin – Guardian book club”, the author has referred to the huge impact made by the two World Wars on her country and to the very high percentage of young Canadian men killed in both of them. Therefore, the presence of war widows and war orphans in her fiction comes as no surprise. Life Before Man – a novel set in Toronto between the years 1976 and 1978 – is a case in point, with a war widow

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as one of its minor characters and with her only son, Nate, as one of its three protagonists. The war widow explains to her son how she survived emotionally after she lost her husband: “I had to do something to keep myself alive. During the war, you know. Right after you were born” (287). She began by knitting socks for the war effort, but that activity was not enough for her, and so “she took up part-time nursing at the veterans’ hospital where she still works, the legless and armless men that were young when she started there aging along with her, becoming, she tells him, more and more bitter, fading one by one, dying” (132). Nate advises his mother to get a less depressing job, but she stubbornly refuses to abandon these veterans, whom she describes as having been forgotten by everyone else. Raised as a Quaker, Nate’s mother advocates pacifism and campaigns for nonviolence, but at the same time maintains that her late husband was a hero. Nate is conscious of his mother’s dilemma, and thus summarizes what his dead father means for her: “Violator of his mother’s pacifist ideals, nevertheless a hero” (132). Life Before Man also presents other women’s perspectives of the Second World War. Lesje, one of the three main characters and focalizers of the novel, learns about this war through the sad stories told by her two grandmothers, one Ukrainian and the other Jewish, who had never agreed to meet and hated each other openly, rather than seeking mutual consolation in their analogous distress. Lesje’s uneasy and cautious attitude towards “any kind of nationalism”, which was “a forbidden subject” in her parents’ house, is explicitly linked in the novel to her down-to-earth perception of the striking similarities between the two old women: “Both grandmothers spoke as if they personally had been through the war, had been gassed, raped, run through with bayonets, shot, starved, bombed and cremated, and had by a miracle survived; which wasn’t true” (66). Paradoxically, nobody in the family ever discussed the fate of “the only one who had actually been there”, Aunt Rachel, who had disappeared in a silenced space. The notion that the voice of the authentic war victims is never heard whereas all the talking is done by those who know the least about real war is further underscored through the character of William, a Canadian who believes that being the son of a captain in the Navy has turned him into “the world’s authority” on the Second World War (28). He proclaims that the British and the Canadians “entered the war from superior moral principles, to save the Jews”, a view very much disputed by Lesje, who argues that “saving a few Jews was a sideline” (28). Atwood’s best-known war widow is Nate’s mother, an unnamed woman who is an example of strength, because she has managed to overcome her grief and to lead a self-sufficient life by working as a devoted nurse at a veterans’ hospital

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for over three decades. In contrast, Susanna’s mother in the short story entitled “Uncles” (1990) is an extremely weak war widow who has become a burden for her family because she is forever mourning the loss of her husband. Observing her mother’s passive behaviour with a critical eye, Susanna clearly perceives that her three uncles’ financial efforts to help their sister are deeply resented by their wives. The three aunts express their disapproval of their dependent sister-in-law through “oblique references” to their own “sets of mortgage payments” during the Sunday dinners to which they must contribute most of the food (Wilderness Tips 136). The characterization of Susanna as a war orphan is also far from being idealized. The only paternal image she ever has is based on two pictures, both of them of her father in uniform. The mantelpiece picture terrifies the girl, who finds in her father’s eyes an expression of “longing”, or “determination”, “or fear, or anger”, which she interprets as his hate for being dead while she is still alive (137–138). The other picture is that of her parents’ wedding, a photo which Susanna considers disappointing because the eighteen-year-old bride is “wearing an ordinary hat and dress, not a long white gown” due to a typically hasty wartime marriage (138). Susanna remembers how no one would say that her father had been killed, but euphemistically “lost in the war”, so that when she was a child she “got the idea that that he was wandering around somewhere – she pictured a vacant lot, like the one at the end of her street, where she was forbidden to play – trying to find his way home” (134). Frankly acknowledging that she did not love a father she had never known, Susanna used to “indulge in the old fantasy that he was only lost, that he would come back” (138). But rather than having a soothing effect upon the disturbed child, this possibility caused her several nightmares about her father’s dreadful return in the form of “a long shadow coming in through her bedroom door, a pair of baleful eyes” (138). At the end of the story, the adult Susanna, while recalling her traumatic infancy, remembers one of her performances at a recital, but instead of visualizing the much repeated scene of her uncles “beaming at her” and clapping enthusiastically in the front row of the auditorium, she sees “her mother, in the wedding-picture dress” and the resentful specter of her dead father “staring at her with hate” (156).6 6 In “Dark Lady” Atwood also makes a rather extensive use of the motif of the photograph of a man in uniform as the only paternal image which is provided to war orphans. In this short story, Jorrie and Tin (the twins Marjorie and Martin) are brought up by their “ineffectual mother”, the widow of a soldier killed in the Second World War. Mother Maeve is described as a “binge drinker” who “had an underpaid secretarial job that she needed to make ends meet, the military’s widow’s pension being so minuscule” (88).

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Jane, the female protagonist of “The Age of Lead” (1990), the next short story in the volume Wilderness Tips, is another troubled “war baby” (163).7 In her case, the trauma stems from being perceived by her mother as “a consequence”, “a mistake” or even “a crime that had needed to be paid for, over and over” (163). Jane is not a war orphan like Susanna, but the unloved daughter of a disastrous war marriage which ended with her father abandoning the family when the girl was five years old, that is, exactly the same age of Susanna’s first memories of missing her dead father.8 The characters of Susanna and Jane in the collection Wilderness Tips are paralleled by those of Charis (Karen) and Tony (Antonia Fremont), two of the protagonists of the novel The Robber Bride. Born after her father was killed in the Second World War, Charis was left in the care of a mentally unbalanced and aggressive mother who was unable to take charge of her sensitive daughter and ended up committing suicide. Tony’s parents, Griff and Anthea, met during the same war in England, where he behaved as a “victorious” Canadian soldier and showed no signs that he would become an alcoholic and ultimately a suicide. Anthea, whose parents had been killed when their London house was destroyed by a bomb during the Blitz, moved as a war bride to Canada, a country she despised and in which she led an unhappy existence. She gradually distanced herself from her husband and her daughter until she eventually abandoned them to start a new life with another man in California. Anthea’s successive relationships with several men are a clear proof of her emotional instability, a long-term effect of war trauma with serious repercussions on her daughter’s development. After the death of her parents, Tony comes to the conclusion that the identities of the three of them had been determined by the war: “Her mother was a war bride, her father was a war husband, she herself was a war baby. She was an accident” (183). Tony’s professional interest in the scholarly study of the mysteries of warfare can be traced to her childhood experiences as an indirect victim of World War ii. Courageously facing the incomprehension of her colleagues (both male and female), who regard her specialization as unsuitable for a woman, Tony pursues her vocation as a military historian. In order to visualize the military tactics of each war she examines, she works with the three-dimensional map she has built in her basement, a model battleground with Monopoly men standing for military leaders and kitchen spices representing different ethnic 7 The short stories “Uncles” and “The Age of Lead” were first published the same year, the former in Saturday Night and the latter in New Statesman & Society. 8 In the novel Bodily Harm Rennie is another daughter of a broken war marriage. Soon after she was born, her father went to Toronto, where he “got university free as a veteran” (109).

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groups. The complex system she has devised, which she prefers “to more schematic representations or to ones that show the armies and the strongholds only”, exemplifies her enthusiastic and unconventional approach to a discipline that absorbs all her attention (130). Rather than concentrating “on the kings and the generals, on their decisions, on their strategy”, she teaches her students about the “more lowly, but equally important factors” of war, such as lice, fleas, faulty equipment and inadequate military clothing (27). In a way similar to the unnamed speaker of Atwood’s provocative dramatic monologue “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” (1990), who concluded that “for every year of peace there have been four hundred / years of war” (Morning 53), Tony carries out her research and teaching duties with pragmatism and analyses statistics knowing that the atrocities of the past are likely to be repeated again and again. Outside academic circles, Tony also applies her expertise to conveying to her friends Charis and Roz her perception of current and future wars in terms of “market expansion” and victory ensured by technological superiority (The Robber Bride 35). When Tony explains the inevitability of the looming Gulf War, she expresses her certainty with an allusion to Julius Caesar: “It was decided as soon as Saddam crossed that border. Like the Rubicon” (34). Then, she sums up the expected outcome of that decision in caustic words intended to shock her two friends: “The lust for power will prevail. Thousands will die needlessly. Corpses will rot. Women and children will perish. Plagues will rage. Famine will sweep the land. Relief funds will be set up. Officials will siphon off the cash from them” (35). Roz – a businesswoman who earnestly seeks well-informed answers – reacts by calling the military historian “cold-blooded” (35), and Charis – an aging hippie always reluctant to discuss these thorny issues – adds that Tony is “a cynic” (36). In sharp contrast with Tony, sweet innocent Charis is full of hope for a warless world, according to her New Age beliefs about future everlasting peace, universal enlightenment and global harmonization. Given her pacifist views, it is not surprising that Charis shelters in her house an American draft dodger without a visa, Billy, whom she compassionately treats as if he were “in a way a prisoner of war”, keeping him in hiding as “her captive, because his very existence here depends on her” (240).9 Billy had been “allotted to her” very much “like the English children who were shipped across the ocean during the Second World War” (243). Being both unable and unwilling 9 Atwood deals with this issue in another of her novels when she refers to the American draftdodgers as feeling “depressed because Toronto isn’t the United States without a war on, as they thought it would be, but some limbo they have strayed into by accident and can’t get out of” (Cat’s Eye 335).

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to understand the Vietnam War, and neither approving of wars nor even “thinking about them”, she agreed to take him under her protection not “for political reasons”, but because she “felt an obligation to be kind to strangers” (244). Although Charis fears that Billy may consider her just as “a sort of way station” or “a temporary convenience, like the native brides of soldiers who are posted abroad” (242), she extends her generosity to him until he abandons and betrays her in a much more violent way than she had suspected (320–321). Hence Charis becomes a war victim again, this time not of the Second World War as she had been in her childhood, but of the Vietnam War. In a more specific sense Charis becomes the victim of unscrupulous Zenia, a villainess who not only seduces Billy, but also takes away the husbands of Tony and Roz, thus turning these women into her victims as well. Apart from being defined as “a double agent” in the metaphorical “war of the sexes, which is nothing like a real war but is instead a kind of confused scrimmage in which people change allegiances at a moment’s notice” (213), Zenia symbolizes the wickedness of real war, its intrinsic evil.10 In The Robber Bride readers are given three different – and perhaps equally false – versions of Zenia’s life story, each of them told in succession through the subjectivities of Tony, Charis and Roz, all of whom were initially taken in because there was at least one aspect in every war-related story which aroused their sympathy towards the woman who eventually proved to be a fraud. Tony once believed that Zenia had been a sex-abused child “rented” to old generals by her White Russian mother when they lived as refugees in Paris (189–190). Charis assumed that Zenia was the daughter of a Romanian gypsy who “was stoned to death, during the war” and a Finn who was killed “fighting the Russians, in the Winter War” (312–313). Roz, born to a Jewish father and an Irish-Catholic mother, gave credence to a third version, according to which Zenia was a “war baby” and a Holocaust survivor, whose German father, Catholic mother (“classified as a mischling, first degree” because of two of her four grandparents), brother and sister were caught in their Berlin apartment (417–418). When questioned by Roz about the three conflicting versions, Zenia acknowledged some of her lies and found excuses for having made up different pasts for herself (421–422). What all three versions had in common was a direct relationship with war, Zenia’s leitmotif, the main reason why Tony chose a symbolic moment of a Remembrance Day – “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” – to scatter her ashes in a ceremony which reunites the three friends in the final chapter of the novel (540). 10

Karen F. Stein calls Zenia a “symbolic embodiment of war” in her book Margaret Atwood Revisited (101).

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The pressure of war is overwhelming in The Robber Bride, a novel which begins precisely on 23 October 1990, with a brief acknowledgement of the fact that “there’s trouble in the Gulf” (4), and closes on Remembrance Day, 11 November 1991, when “the war in the Gulf is over and the desert sands are spackled with bombs; the oil fields still burn, clouds of black smoke roiling out over the greasy sea” (540). Far away from this scene of devastation caused by a war which broke out on 2 August 1990 and ended on 28 February 1991, people in Toronto are wearing poppies: “The flower of sleep and forgetting. Petals of spilled blood” (541). In Life Before Man Atwood had used a similar image to describe the artificial poppies customarily worn on Remembrance Day as “red cloth petals of blood spattered out from the black felt hole in the chest, pinned at the center” (57), thus providing a consistent link between the flowers and the blood of the soldiers whose sacrifice is yearly commemorated. An equally vivid picture of the wound made by a bullet is evoked with an even more violent effect in a short narrative piece entitled “Poppies: Three Variations”: “We always bought those felt poppies, which aren’t even felt any more, but plastic: small red explosions pinned to your chest, like a blow to the heart” (114). Yet, readers should not be misled by the power of this visual image, because Atwood here is subverting rather than endorsing the conventional discourse of public remembrance by using intertextuality to mock John McCrae’s popular poem “In Flanders Fields” (1915) through a parodic act which ironically debunks all military glory. Likewise, the author’s treatment of the trope of the war memorial – which has an undisputable relevance in her fiction – does not leave any doubts about her rejection of any glorification of war, an attitude clearly revealed by her depictions of such monuments. For instance, one of the symbolic sites in Life Before Man is the Boer War Memorial in Toronto, which brings Nate memories of his father, killed in France during the only war that is real for him. While exercising in Queen’s Park, Nate observes that the granite plinth is “featureless and without ornament, except for the Gothic wen at the top” and he remarks that, unlike other memorials, this one has “no naked women carrying flowers, no angels, not even any skeletons” (49), thus hinting a rather unflattering appraisal of these conventional icons. Later on, he mentions “a few tattered wreaths still on the cenotaph” (74), a detail conveying an impression of decay and neglect which is further strengthened in the description of a different war monument of the same city in another Atwood novel. Elaine Risley, the protagonist of Cat’s Eye, notices that the South African War Memorial in Toronto contains “a group of statues, coppery-green, with black smears running down them like metal blood”, and wonders “if anyone remembers that war, or if anyone in all these cars barging forward ever even looks” (311). Elaine’s description

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of the deteriorated statues bears a certain resemblance to that of the Weary Soldier in The Blind Assassin: On the left-hand side of the lawn, also with a petunia bed, is an equally mythic figure: the Weary Soldier, his three top shirt buttons undone, his neck bowed as if for the headman’s axe, his uniform rumpled, his helmet askew, leaning on his malfunctioning Ross rifle. Forever young, forever exhausted, he tops the War Memorial, his skin burning green in the sun, pigeon droppings running down his face like tears. (145) This statue is the subject of intense controversy, because it does not fit the expectations of most of the citizens of the fictional town of Port Ticonderoga for a suitable monument constructed in honour of their fallen soldiers, who are pompously defined in the proposed inscription of the planned memorial as “Those Who Willingly Made the Supreme Sacrifice” (148). In order to contest the propaganda that the soldiers of the “Great War” had willingly agreed to make a noble sacrifice, Atwood uses the character of Norval Chase, also known in The Blind Assassin as Captain Chase, whose life is recorded by one of his daughters, Iris, the protagonist of the novel.11 Through the character of Norval Chase, the author develops the prominent theme of the idealistic young Canadian volunteer who has been leading a peaceful life until he is enlisted to contribute to the cause of liberty, then undergoes a traumatic experience as a soldier fighting on the side of the British on foreign soil, and finally returns to his home country as a seriously maimed and shell-shocked veteran, having lost his two brothers at the emblematic battles of Ypres and the Somme. Captain Chase is invariably presented through the critical eyes of Iris, who writes a memoir emphasizing the disastrous long-term effects of the veteran’s post-traumatic stress syndrome upon the lives of his wife and his two daughters. In this novel, the erection of Port Ticonderoga’s wwi memorial – with its “dejected-looking” statue of the Weary Soldier – symbolizes an unequivocal retrospective questioning of “all the talk of fighting for God and Civilization” (77) and makes a strong case against war. In Atwood’s fiction, the Weary Soldier is not a character, but just a statue, “dejected-looking” rather than “triumphant”, silent and anchored in time. The important thematic role generally played by the combatant when representing war through literature is replaced in her writings by various characters 11

For a more detailed analysis of Iris Chase’s remembrance of the wars of her lifetime, see Gibert 46, 49–51, 55, and 57.

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o­ therwise related to the battlefields: the courageous female military historian, the frustrated war bride, the anxious wife (or fiancée, or lover) of the absent (perhaps returning) soldier, the lonely war widow, the devoted nurse working at a veterans’ hospital, the unfading spectre of the dead hero, the genuine or the fake traumatized civilian survivor, the embittered veteran, the depressed draft-dodger, and the convinced pacifist. Atwood never celebrates warfare. Unlike many other writers, she does not believe that war makes us any wiser, nor does she extol any of its supposed advantages, including the possibility of renewal through destruction. The notion that the violence engendered by war spills over into peacetime appears recurrently in her writings and is summarized in the brief concluding paragraph of one of the sections near the end of The Blind Assassin. This section, aptly entitled “Home Fires”, finishes with a powerful metaphor about the end of the Second World War which both epitomizes the magnitude of war and conveys a poetic image of the extensive and long-lasting effects of its aftermath: “It wasn’t so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly” (481). Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. “It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers”. The Animals in That Country. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1968. 30–31. Print. Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. New York: Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, 2000. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Bodily Harm. 1981. London: Virago, 1986. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. 1988. London: Bloomsbury, 1989a. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Dancing Girls. 1977. London: Virago, 1989b. Print. Atwood, Margaret. “Poppies: Three Variations”. Good Bones. London: Bloomsbury, 1992. 113–120. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Life Before Man. 1979. London: Virago, 1982. Print. Atwood, Margaret. MaddAddam: A Novel. London: Bloomsbury, 2013a. Print. Atwood, Margaret. “The Loneliness of the Military Historian”. Morning in the Burned House. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995. 49–53. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print. Atwood, Margaret. The Robber Bride. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993. Print. Atwood, Margaret. “Dark Lady”. Stone Mattress: Nine Tales. New York: Anchor, 2014. 75–116. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Wilderness Tips. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991. Print.

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Atwood, Margaret. “Writing Philosophy. Waterstone’s Poetry Lecture”, delivered at Hay-on-Wye, June 1995. Canadian Poetry Online. University of Toronto Libraries. Web. 20 Feb. 2016. Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood: A Novel. New York: Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, 2009. Print. Atwood, Margaret. “Margaret Atwood on The Blind Assassin – Guardian book club”. The Guardian 9 Aug. 2013b. Web. 20 Feb. 2016. Gibert, Teresa. “Haunted by a Traumatic Past: Age, Memory and Narrative Identity in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin”. Traces of Aging. Old Age and Memory in Contemporary Narrative. Ed. Marta Cerezo and Nieves Pascual. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016. 41–63. Print. Mosby, Ian. Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014. Print. Oates, Joyce Carol. “A Conversation with Margaret Atwood”. Ontario Review 9 (FallWinter 1978–79): 5–18. Rpt. “Dancing on the Edge of the Precipice”. Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. Willowdale, ON: Firefly, 1990. 74–85. Print. Stein, Karen F. Margaret Atwood Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Print.

chapter 6

Memory Keeping and Visual Narratives of Commemoration: Representing Interned Japanese Americans during World War ii Catherine Collins Abstract This chapter explores the question of memory keeping through the study of four sites – in Oregon, the state of Washington, and Washington d.c. – commemorating the internment by the usa of 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War ii. The study, emphasizing the process of reconciliation and remembrance, draws on theories of trauma, visual communication and narrative theory to examine the visual, textual and spatial manipulation specific to each site and the various aspects of a discourse that commemorates the internees while criticizing the official narratives of justification that led to a massive violation of human rights. The sites offer both a field of vision for visitors seeking a lens on the Japanese Americans’ experience of World War ii and a field of action: a place and space giving voice to a group repressed during and after the war and, simultaneously, urging visitors to add their own voice to the narrative.

“Nidoto Nai Yōni: Let It Not Happen Again”. Thus begins the story of evacuation, relocation and internment of Japanese Americans during World War ii as it is told at the Bainbridge Island Japanese Exclusion Memorial. Bainbridge Island, a short boat ride from Seattle, Washington, was the first community to evacuate its Japanese population following Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, allowing the Secretary of War to designate areas “from which any and all persons may be excluded”, (Roosevelt) and Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1 issued March 24, 1942: “It is hereby ordered that all persons of Japanese ancestry, including aliens and nonaliens, be excluded from that portion of Military Area No. 1 described as ‘Bainbridge Island’, in the State of Washington, on or before 12 o’clock noon, p.w.t., of the 30th day of March 1942” (DeWitt). Six days later 227 islanders of Japanese heritage were “forcibly removed from their homes, rounded up by us army soldiers armed with rifles fixed with bayonets and boarded a ferry to Seattle” (bijac Web page). During the course

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of World War ii approximately 120,000 persons of Japanese heritage, more than 60% of whom were born in the United States, were sent to internment camps in Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Arkansas, California and Utah because the West Coast was deemed an excluded area for anyone of Japanese heritage. Ironically, Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not interned. As we collectively discuss ways of representing modern wars as fields of ­action and fields of vision, I want to turn our attention to memorials that seek to create a memory of us repression of Japanese Americans during World War ii as they simultaneously seek to educate visitors to these sites to the need for vigilance in defending everyone’s civil rights. I come to this task as an ­Oregonian who was never told about the imprisonment of Japanese in my town, state or in the nation in my public school, university or graduate education. I come to this study as a rhetorician who has studied visual communication, especially memorials, and the rhetoric of war. The events happened where I grew up and now live again, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. This chapter explores the treatment of reconciliation with and remembrance of the labelled enemy on the home front. Drawing theoretical assumptions from trauma theory, narrative theory and visual communication, I investigate four commemorative sites that reaffirm Japanese Americans and critique the war hysteria and race prejudice that led to the internment. Although the discourse emerges primarily after the war, the commemorative messages explain how similar behaviour conditions future actions. Thus, in assessing representation of war, this study critiques official narratives of justification that must be overcome, emerging narratives of oppression that must be acknowledged, and future polarizing narratives that need to be deterred. Through visual, textual, and spatial manipulations, each site represents the plight of Japanese Americans and warns viewers that war hysteria and prejudice has and may once again violate fundamental human rights. I begin with a brief contextualization of the history of internment and then introduce four memorials that have been created to represent the inappropriate treatment of Japanese Americans in the u.s. during World War ii. 1

The Context

Evacuated, relocated, often times from temporary centres to a second location, and interned in 1942, Japanese Americans remained in the camps until they were closed at the end of the war. Detainees returned to the cities from which they were evacuated, or relocated to be with family in other parts of the country. A few years later, in 1952, Congress passed the McCarran Walter Act that allowed Japanese aliens to become us citizens. Executive Order 9066 was not

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rescinded until 1976 by President Gerald Ford, and not until 1988 did official investigations and legislation finally conclude that “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” (Commission on Wartime) were the real basis for the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese heritage. Examples of race prejudice abounded before the issuance of Executive Order 9066, but most frequently cited in the histories of these years is an editorial in the Los Angeles Times from February 2, 1942, suggesting that anyone with Japanese blood, even those born in the United States, is the same as someone born in Japan and loyal to the emperor: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched. A leopard’s spots are the same and its disposition is the same wherever it is whelped” (quoted in Smith 118). California defined anyone who was 1/16 Japanese as sufficiently Japanese to warrant internment, but for some it only took one drop to be so labelled and feared. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan and the Congress of the United States issued a formal apology for the nation’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War ii. The congressional apology notes: a grave injustice was done to both citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry by the evacuation, relocation, and internment of civilians during World War ii. As the Commission documents, these actions were carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of sabotage documented by the Commission, and were motivated in part by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. United States Congress Public Law 100-383

President Reagan’s apology, memorialized on a bronze plaque at Portland, ­Oregon’s Japanese American Historical Plaza, labels the internment a “sad chapter in our history” that “teaches an invaluable lesson: that our Constitution is based on a belief in the innate, God-given worth of every individual, and that this worth cannot be denied without diminishing and endangering us all”. The internment of Japanese Americans violated the us Constitution. Since then commemorative sites have been developed to both remember the forgotten victims and warn the American citizenry that racial prejudice and war hysteria can subvert the human rights of the constructed enemy at home. 2

The Rhetorical Exigence

Traumatic events like the imprisonment of 120,000 people of Japanese heritage, while seemingly unspeakable, nonetheless demand a rhetorical response.

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We tell stories to explain what has happened and to morally judge those responsible for trauma. These stories are also commemorative narratives that, in James Young’s terms, seek to negotiate the past called into question by the trauma in order to restore the possibility of an Edenic future. Leaving the past unspoken may well perpetuate the trauma, in this case to both Japanese Americans interned during wwii and the American collective that needs to examine its actions and values. Anne Whitehead argues that the challenge in trauma narratives is to recognize “that representing the past raises complex ethical questions” (81) along with the standard challenges posed by representations that are temporally and spatially manipulated. If she is correct in asserting that the memory work of trauma narratives is as much about forgetting as remembering, then how we represent the events of the Japanese internment may hide what we need to elide, and give us a false sense of character, plot and scene. Trauma narratives should force us to ask less about what is remembered and more about why we remember what we do and the consequences of those memories that are evoked. Telling the story of trauma, even forty years after it happened, is a first step in gaining agency. That story about taking control of trauma has been told in memoirs like Farewell to Manzanar, in plays such as Snow Falling on Cedars, and in numerous testimonials. Memorial sites, I argue, offer the same kind of agency as memoirs or other literary narratives. They are places where the story can be told, where pilgrimages to the site may help some who endured the camps gain voice and where those who have never heard much about Japanese internment finally can learn about it. My particular interest is in memorial sites that have become increasingly popular since the formal apology in 1988. Interestingly, children and grandchildren of those interned who attended the opening of the Seattle memorial site report that families seldom talk about the camp experience (e.g. Green, 2010, September 10, quoting Susan Shinoda), but memorial sites visited on ceremonial or private occasions can open the possibility of telling this part of the tale as well. The four commemorative sites I am referencing in this chapter include the 2011 Bainbridge Island cedar story wall and the associated website that offers a virtual tour; Seattle, Washington’s memory wall (2010); Portland, Oregon’s Japanese American Historical Plaza (1990) – the first memorial to commemorate the Japanese internment; and the Memorial to Japanese–American Patriotism in World War ii (2000) located next to the Capitol in Washington dc. Through photographs, stories, carvings, and architecture as modes of representation, the sites argue that the traumatic story of Japanese Americans, long silenced in American memories of World War ii, needs to be voiced.

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Representations of war take many symbolic forms both linguistic and visual. Although the commemorative sites are predominately visual rhetoric, I want to begin with a linguistic representation that has proven controversial and may already have set you on edge in the terms I have used to represent America’s inexcusable actions toward Japanese Americans during wwii and for more than 40 years after its conclusion. Following a discussion of naming as a rhetorical act of representation I explain similarities between the representations at these four sites of commemoration as compared to conventional forms of representation in war memorials. Finally, I explore those forms of representation at the sites that are more consistent with Japanese traditions, and mark these commemorations as different from the expectations the public has of war memorials. Whether conventional or unfamiliar, reading the sites as rhetorical texts, just as reading the act of naming for the camps, reveals the fields of vision and fields of action that inhere in American discourse about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War ii. Earlier I noted that internment camps were sites of incarceration, and memory of this incarceration is central to the memorials. Significantly, even the appropriate label for these camps remains controversial: relocation centers, internment camps or American concentration camps. Deborah Schiffrin’s linguistic analysis problematizes the choice. Do the agents forcefully detained in the camps have the only authentic voice, and hence the privilege of naming? Is it only their story to tell? Naming the camps relocation centers was the administration’s choice; the narrative implied in this choice of label legitimates actions based on political fear emanating from the potential collusion between Japanese Americans and our enemy, a collusion that, if true, would have threatened the security of the West Coast of the United States. The euphemism strips the scene of the violence inherent in denying people’s civil rights simply because they are members of a particular group and not because they have acted criminally. At the other end of the spectrum, calling the sites concentration camps may symbolically link the United States incarceration of Japanese Americans with the Nazi Holocaust – an association that the public might reject if they envision all German concentration camps as death camps and then compare this with the substantively different (though no less reprehensible) treatment of Japanese Americans in American camps. The contested nature of the label concentration camps became apparent when an exhibition about the incarceration of Japanese Americans held on Ellis Island in 1998 sparked controversy in choosing this label. Some protested the aptness of comparing us policy with Nazi extermination camps. Others, including some Jews, argued that equating the two diminished the Jewish experience and that the term ­concentration

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camps belonged to their World War ii experience. ­Schiffrin argues, “The title ‘America’s Concentration Camps’ thus compensated for Americans’ misinformation (or ignorance) of their own tragedy by lexically embedding the exhibit in a larger, and more familiar, symbolic domain” (525). But Schiffrin acknowledges that time and place change the appropriateness of linguistic choices. Internment camp offers a middle point in the boundaries of representing behaviour and consequences in the act of naming. It reduces the inappropriateness of incarcerating people without proof of guilt but it avoids resistance to taking responsibility for this dark period in American history that comes with the extreme symbolism of a concentration camp as a facility for genocide. I raise the issue of what to call the camps because the act of committing Japanese Americans to these camps is in itself a form of representation of modern war on the us home front. Secondly, I raise it because I have consciously chosen to use the middle term internment in reference to the act of incarceration and as a descriptor for the camps. I do so because the focus of this study is on commemorative sites sponsored by Japanese American community organizations. In each case I believe the us government and the larger American public are the intended audience for the message. Each site gives voice to the experience of internment, the painful lessons of history that must be learned from these actions, and each pleads that visitors to the physical commemorative sites and to their virtual presence on the Internet remember what was done to those of Japanese heritage so that it never happens again. To use a label that masks the egregiousness of the incarceration or conversely symbolically overstates the consequences of incarceration may prevent the visitor from learning the site’s lesson: let it not happen again. Rhetorically, the commemorative sites are more likely to gain adherents to their exhortation when they offer common ground rather than a discourse that might foster division. Rhetorical language, Kenneth Burke argues, “is inducement to action (or to attitude, attitude being an incipient act)” (42). The language chosen, then, must be hortatory – not merely descriptive; “it must try to move people” (Burke 41). It does so by identifying A’s interests with B’s interests and thereby making “A ‘consubstantial’ with B” (Burke 21). But “[i]dentification is compensatory to division […]. For one need not scrutinize the concept of ‘identification’ very sharply to see, implied in it at every turn, its ironic counterpart: division” (Burke 22–23). Thus, choosing the middle term, internment, highlights the potential for consubstantiality between parties divided by both race and significantly different memories and post-memories of World War ii.

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Representation through Commemorative Sites

As I begin a reading of the commemorative sites as representations of United States’ treatment of Japanese Americans on the home front, I want to borrow James Young’s introduction to his assessment of the holocaust memorials. Young writes: Readers may not be surprised to find the author’s presence so often pronounced at the scene of memory. For in fact, detached reflection on these memorials is no more possible than it is desirable: there is no way around the author’s eye. Insofar as I stand within the perimeter of these memorial spaces, I become part of their performance, whether I like it or not. In describing these sites in narrative, I have unavoidably transformed plastic and graphic media into literary texts: how I critically evaluate these memorials and what conclusions I draw from them depend very much on how I have represented them – both to myself and to the reader. (xii) I cannot tell the story of these memorials, as would someone of Japanese heritage, but I speak from the perspective of an intended audience member – someone who seeks to better understand this part of American history, and why the story of Japanese internment has been so poorly taught in American schools. The four memorials I am examining follow James Mayo’s designation of memorials that have a high sacred sentiment that honours those who have suffered in war, especially those who gave their lives, but they also display a humanitarianism, pleading that the community “should neither forget nor allow such inhumanity to repeat itself” (8). I began the chapter with the Bainbridge Island memorial and the first written message of the story wall: “Let it not happen again”. A similar evocation of humanitarianism is the message on a large red banner at Seattle’s nvc (Nisei Veterans Committee) Foundation memorial. The banner reads, “Honoring the past, educating the future”. The dedication plaque in Portland’s Japanese American Historical Plaza poses the question, “Why do we remember the story of Japanese Americans?” The memorial conjoins the story of Japanese American immigrants with the experiences and hopes of other immigrant groups. The answer to why we remember the story of Japanese Americans forms commonality with all ethnic immigrants: “It is in some ways a common American story of an immigrant people, one shared by Americans of many national origins. It is also a unique story of a people whose Constitutional rights were tragically ignored during a

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period of wartime hysteria. We remember the story so it will never be repeated” (memorial plaque). The Washington dc memorial makes the same argument through the name chosen for the site, The Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War ii. A three-panel stone wall recounts the decision to intern Japanese Americans and the forty years it took to admit “that a grave injustice had been done […] and reaffirmed the nation’s commitment to equal justice under the law for all Americans”. On the stone wall surrounding the reflection pool the carved message is direct: “Here we admit a wrong. Here we affirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law” (see fig. 6.1). That wall has carved in it a passage from the Civil Liberties Act of August 1988. Three tall stone walls at one edge of the pool offer comments by successful internees and Japanese Americans who served in World War ii. Each panel affirms Japanese American commitment to the ideals of the nation, to the civil liberties the nation celebrates, and a steadfast belief in the nation. All four memorials articulate a sacred sentiment: forgetting our wrongdoing allows it to happen again; acknowledging our wrongdoing educates us to prevent its reoccurrence. Re-examining the past and negotiating the future are tasks central to commemorative sites. Although each of the sites takes on

Figure 6.1 Washington dc memorial pool © 2013. Image courtesy of the author.

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­different forms of representation to tell the story, all have a shared commitment to making sure the story of Japanese American internment becomes part of public memory. 4

Representation through Site Setting

Edward Linenthal reminds us: “Where something is remembered determines not only how it is remembered, but the importance of the memory itself” (256). A syntagmatic linkage wherein one thing follows another or two things are physically located side-by-side creates an intertextual reading, even for the casual visitor to a memorial. In Washington dc, filled with memorials, it is appropriate that a commemorative site seeking resolution for the grave injustice of Executive order 9066 is located next to the u.s. Capitol where Congress voted to apologize for the internment and for the race prejudice and war hysteria that led to the internment. The Portland, Oregon memorial is located a block from Chinatown and Japantown but it is also along the Willamette River that bisects the city and has over time become a favorite site for walking, biking, and hosting celebrations of community life. So located, the memorial is both visible to those who are not seeking education about internment and in close proximity to a museum about the internment that draws visitors who want to hear the story of the Japanese American experience during World War ii. Location guarantees easy access and proximity to historical sites familiar to residents of the city. The Bainbridge memorial is adjacent to the pier from which islanders were removed to the camps. It therefore serves, in Maria Tumarkin’s terms as a traumascape – “places around the world marked by traumatic legacies of violence, suffering, and loss, [where] the past is never quite over” (12). The pier, symbolic of the evacuation, becomes a space “where events are experienced and re-experienced across time”– a place where the past “continues to inhabit and refashion the present” (Tumarkin 12). It is a peaceful site, removed from frenetic tourist areas, a place for quiet reflection (see fig. 6.2). Although contemplation is possible, the Bainbridge memorial is several miles outside of town and hence not as accessible to tourists as might be desirable. On the other hand, one might argue that the tone for this memorial is communal; it offers a space for residents of Bainbridge Island to recollect their past and reaffirm cooperation between community members, regardless of race. The Seattle wall of names abuts the Nisei Veterans Committee (nvc) memorial hall where veterans’ sacrifices for the nation are celebrated. Although

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Figure 6.2 Bainbridge Island, Washington bijac memorial wall © 2013. Image courtesy of the author.

it could have simply celebrated the highly decorated all Japanese American 442nd Infantry Regiment who fought in the European theatre, the nvc equates the sacrifice of those interned with those who served in the military. The choice of setting for this memorial, like the other three sites, appropriately contributes to the message these commemorative markers are designed to share. So too does the inclusion of a wall of remembrance as the central form for the memorial. 5

Representations through Conventional Walls of the Missing

Creating a wall of names of those who are missing because of service to their nation is one of the most popular conventional forms of representation in war memorials. Mayo contends: “a wall of missing intensifies the reality of sacrifice. The density and proximity of names on these walls has a powerful impact […] names do not merely fill all the available space, they also easily permit manipulation for symbolic purposes” (106). The most familiar wall of names in the United States is Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Collectively, this form of representation offers a concrete site of memory for each individual.

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Figure 6.3 Seattle, Washington memorial wall © 2013. Image courtesy of the author.

In Washington dc’s memorial to the injustice of internment the names are carved into a wall of white stone. In Seattle the wall surface is the highly polished and reflective black granite of the Vietnam memorial in dc (see fig. 6.3). The architect who designed this wall said, “We tried to keep the design as ­subtle – in keeping with the Japanese culture – as possible. We didn’t want something ostentatious. The most powerful thing about it is seeing the number of names” (Nguyen quoting Jay Deguchi). Both the dc and Seattle walls list the names of the veterans of Japanese heritage who served in the us military during World War ii. A variant on the wall of the missing, the Seattle wall includes the names of internees as well as veterans. By listing the names of internees and below each the camp in which they were interned, the wall reinforces the places and scope of trauma to Japanese Americans. As visitors to Seattle’s memorial pass in front of the wall the repeated iteration of places of internment reinforces the scope of the incarceration and the distance families were sent away from their homes in Washington. The multiple ways the wall personalizes civil rights abuses intensifies the egregiousness of American policy toward citizens of Japanese heritage. By juxtaposing the names of those who served in the war to defend Americans next to the names of those to whom the nation denied

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civil rights simultaneously condemns the character of the nation while elevating the character of Japanese Americans sacrificing for a nation that dishonoured them because of their race. The Bainbridge Island memorial names each islander interned on etched porcelain bricks mounted on a cedar wall. Family units group the name bricks. The age at the time of evacuation follows each name; e.g., “Shoji Kino 10 * ­Setsuko Kino 8 * Reiko Kino 6”. Naming walls bear witness to those who have sacrificed for the nation. Of the four sites discussed in this essay, only the Portland memorial eschews this powerful form of representation. 6

Manipulations through Architectural Design and Embellishment

A final area of analysis explores representation through architectural design and embellishment choices. The Seattle memorial wall paradigmatically plays with confinement, both of the internees and visitors to the memorial. The physical construction of the memorial enhances the sense of confinement. In addition to repeatedly engraving identification of the internment camps to which each evacuee was sent on the granite bricks, an interpretive centre at the end of the memorial path displayed below the motto, “Honoring the Past and Educating the Future”, includes a map of relocation, assembly, isolation centres, the Justice Department Detention Camp and the wra Temporary Camps of imprisonment. The confinement that Japanese Americans experienced in the internment camps is simulated for visitors to the memorial wall. The tall, dark wall of names 12 feet high and 90 feet long has a 4-foot-wide path running along its face. Plantings and a pony wall at the opposite edge of the path narrow that space to just over 2 feet at its narrowest point. Japanese maple trees and shrubs planted in the beds give comparable height to that side of the narrow gravel path and create a claustrophobic space confining the visitor. The Bainbridge Island memorial is less subtle in its commentary on confinement (although generally the memorial fosters a sense of community rather than emphasizing the division of community during the war). One reminder comes in a section of the wall that changes from name bricks mounted on cedar planks to a section of cedar-crossed fencing that mimics the fencing surrounding the camps. The visitor is separated from lush greenery by the fence that divides the two halves of the cedar wall. In a second example, one of several large clay picture blocks is mounted behind a frame of seven strands of barbed wire. The sculpture shows a young girl standing in one of the camps, clutching her schoolbooks (see fig. 6.4). A guard tower and the American flag are in the background. One of the testimonials etched into the clay reads, “The

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Figure 6.4 Bainbridge Island, Washington memorial story wall ©2013. Image courtesy of the author.

searchlights played on our windows, back and forth all night. I couldn’t sleep”. A second testimonial reads, “Back home at graduation they had thirteen empty chairs on the stage. That day I felt so empty and sad. I sat on my bunk and cried”. Both testimonials, along with the visible pier from which the families were evacuated, intensify the fact of Japanese American confinement for the duration of the war. Symbolism that is both characteristic of u.s. war memorials and symbolism tied directly to Japanese traditions appear in the commemorative sites. The sites variously employ pools of water for reflection and cleansing, messages carved on boulders seemingly arising from the earth, groves of trees (in these sites Japanese cherry and Japanese maple trees abound) and architectural design features creating a sense of procession from profane space outside the boundaries of the memorial to sacred space, the naming of those who have died, served in the military, or been interned in camps or calls for ­remembrance and dedication to preventing similar profanities in the future. Progression through the space of these memorials is often prescribed, thereby creating preparatory time as one might expect before the performance of ­sacred rituals.

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Figure 6.5 Portland, Oregon’s Japanese American Historical Plaza © 2013. Image courtesy of the author.

Portland’s memorial symbolically captures the shattering experience of internment for detainees and the nation as a whole as it locates a stone identifying the internment camps set amidst fractured paving stones (see fig. 6.5). Constitutional guarantees were broken with the evacuation, relocation and incarceration of Oregon’s community of Japanese heritage. In addition to the traditional memorial architecture and embellishment, symbols particularly appropriate to Japanese culture prevail. Landscaping that models a Japanese garden in its sparseness and emphasis on elements of nature and prominent Tori gates punctuate the sites. Cranes are one of the most distinctive symbols. A symbol of peace, likely associated with the folded cranes that school children around the world have sent to the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, there are paper cranes left as offerings at the Bainbridge Island memorial and the Seattle wall of names. The dc memorial features the most distinctive use of the crane symbol. At the centre of its spiral design stands a pillar topped with two bronze cranes tragically enmeshed in barbed wire (see fig. 6.6). In his essay, “Imagery Says It All at New Monument”, Benjamin Forgey, writes:

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Figure 6.6 Washington, dc Memorial to Japanese–American Patriotism in World War ii © 2013. Image courtesy of the author.

Akamu’s sculpture is a brilliant allegory – there’s not a soul in the world who would not be moved by these golden, chained, winged creatures. All together, these pieces make magic. Standing in this enclosure under the baking sun is like being in the eye of a terrible, quiet storm. Escape hardly seems possible, but it comes, as you are gently led to the wall of names, to another view of the wonderful pool, and finally to Matisse’s bell […]. The tone goes on for a long time, and this long decline, Matisse says, is “the natural way of things, a falling away of the grief”. Choices in architectural design and embellishment help set these memorial sites apart from everyday life. As commemorative sites they seek to create a sacred space for remembering and for reflecting on how the past offers lessons for future attitudes and actions. In significantly different ways, all four sites succeed at this task.

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7 Conclusion The sites offer a field of vision for visitors seeking a lens on the experience of World War ii for Americans of Japanese heritage, and a field of vision for Americans who have never considered the hypocrisy of condemning other cultures for denying basic civil rights while their own nation has done the same to Japanese Americans and waited forty years to apologize. They also offer a field of action, a place and space for giving voice to a group whose voice was repressed during and after World War ii. Finally, they give a field of action to visitors to the site, reminding them of this sad part of American history while simultaneously urging them to add their own voice by narrating the story to which the sites make them witnesses. In The Texture of Memory James Young reminds us that in “bringing different formal qualities to bear on memory, every ‘memorial text’ generates a different meaning in memory […]. They juxtapose, narrate, and remember events according to the taste of their curators, the political needs and interests of their community, the temper of their time” (vii). The four memorials that I have discussed emerged following the United States’ formal apology for the internment of Japanese Americans more than forty years earlier. The messages they invoke now will likely be different for visitors to these sites forty years from now. As World War ii veterans and Japanese American internees are rapidly dying, the need for closure through commemoration increases. Communities, internment sites, and public spaces for remembrance of World War ii have recently increased the number and quality of memorials to Japanese Americans. Employing symbolic design and ­embellishment associated with traditional war memorials alongside symbolic features evocative of Japanese culture makes these memorials significant representations of once hidden voices repressed by race prejudice and war hysteria during World War ii. Works Cited BIJAC, Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community website. n. pag. nd. Web. 1 Mar. 2014. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Print. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. 1982. Summary. Personal Justice Denied. nd. n. pag. Web. 1 Mar. 2014. DeWitt, John L. Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1. 24 Mar. 1942. n. pag. Web. 1 Mar. 2014. Forgey, Benjamin. “Imagery Says It All at New Monument”. The Washington Post 30 June 2001. Web. 1 Mar. 2014.

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Green, Sara Jean. “A Wall to Remember: Seattle’s Memorial for Japanese Internment During World War II”. The Seattle Times 6 Sep. 2010. Web. 1 Mar. 2014. Linenthal, Edward T. “Locating Holocaust Memory: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum”. American Sacred Space. Eds. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1995. Print. Mayo, James M. War Memorials as Political Landscape. New York: Praeger, 1988. Print. Nguyen, Stacy. “NVC’s Memorial Wall is Worth a Thousand Words”. Asian Weekly 29.37 (9 September 2010): n. pag. Web. 1 March 2014. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. Executive Order 1066. 19 Feb. 1942. Web. 1 Mar. 2014. Schiffrin, Deborah. “Language and Public Memorial: ‘America’s Concentration Camps’”. Discourse & Society, 12.4 (2001): 505–534. Web. 1 Mar. 2014. Smith, Page. Democracy on Trial: The Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War One. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Print. Tumarkin, Maria. Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2005. Print. United States Congress. Public Law 100-383 100th Congress. 10 Aug. 1988. Web. 1 Mar. 2014. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print. Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1993. Print.

Part 3 Bringing the War Home

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chapter 7

Martha Rosler, an American Artist at War with War Éliane Elmaleh Abstract This chapter focuses on two series of photomontages, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, by post-modern American artist and anti-war activist Martha Rosler. The first (1967–1972), protesting the Vietnam War, combined photographs of the war from Life Magazine with prosperous domestic interiors from House Beautiful. In the New Series (2004), Rosler uses the same strategy to address the conflict in Iraq. Both series raise questions about advertising, the media, politics, war and violence and reconnect two sides of life artificially separated: distant wars and American homes. This interconnectedness of domesticity and war led Rosler to focus on representations of women and the space of the home as a site of political engagement. Highlighting the aesthetic forms of the artist’s activism and the interpretations entailed, the discussion stresses the difficulty inherent in “political art” of making the work both politically valid and visually compelling.

Martha Rosler is a postmodern American artist whose aim since the 1960s has been to question the dysfunction of American society. She denounced imperialism, the Vietnam War, us foreign policy, consumerism and anti-women stereotypes. The foundation of her work lies in the deconstruction of norms, prejudices and stereotypes and in the struggle against the infringement of individual and collective freedoms. Influenced by intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht or Benjamin Buchloch, she has resorted to the media to reach the widest possible audience. This article focuses on Rosler’s works entitled Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967–1972) and Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, New Series (2004), concerned with the two wars the us waged in Vietnam (1963–75) and Iraq (2003–11). The anti-war movement in the 1960s was at the origin of the slogan “Bring the War Home!” As a matter of fact, the remoteness of the Vietnam War made its violence abstract and many activists aimed to make it concrete and visible, to unearth hidden truths about the war by bringing it home to the us.1 In each case, Rosler took a stand against the consensual rhetoric of 1 See Chong. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004353244_009

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the governments, which in her opinion, used the two wars to impose a unity of sentiment and an uncritical patriotic devotion on us society. During the decades between the Vietnam War series and the new series, created in response to the us occupation of Iraq, Rosler became an incisive cultural critic as artist and writer.2 She brought her critical perspective to visual representations of everyday life through a process she described as “inserting public narratives into private ones”.3 The media representation of an artistic movement against the war is often homogenizing, whereas if we closely examine the components of this mobilization, we note the plurality of the artists’ profiles, depending on the art world they belong to. To account for the activism of Rosler against the war, I will analyse the aesthetic forms that her activism takes and the meanings and interpretations that her works entail. 1

The Vietnam War and Life Magazine

In Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, news photos of the Vietnam War from Life magazine are combined with domestic interiors from House Beautiful. Photomontage, with its roots in the world’s first anti-war movement, German Dada, produced in the wake of the First World War, has a history of being an effective aesthetic political technique. Dada managed to merge p ­ hotomontage with immediate political content.4 Using the same process, Rosler carefully matched colour, scale, and perspective, to create scenes that read as coherent, authentic spaces.5 The prosperity of post-war America was represented beside images of soldiers, corpses and the wounded. In opposing juxtapositions, luxurious living rooms and kitchens were “invaded” by the perpetrators, refugees, victims and bloody landscapes of war. The juxtapositions played on the montage character of Life, a magazine where photo-essays documenting the news alternated with lifestyle features, all of which seamlessly flowing into ads for the latest appliances, the ideal carpet, the designer sofa, or the perfect 2 Her numerous essays include: “Post-Documentary?” Fanny Knapp Allen Conference (University of Rochester, 1998); “Money, Power, Contemporary Art”, Art Bulletin (March 1997); “Documentary, Realism, and Responsibility”, Beyond Ethics and Aesthetics, (Nijmegen: SUN, 1997); “Women in Russia – Representations and Realities”, Foto/foto,1 (1994); “Place, Position, Power, Politics”, The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility, ed. Carol Becker (Abington: Routledge, 1994); “Negotiating New (His)tories of Photography”, Art Journal, 5 (1994). 3 See Berkeley. 4 See Green. 5 See Berkeley.

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kitchen. These commercial images, supposed to represent “life” in the United States, depicted ideal suburban homes, where white happy families enjoyed their day, totally unaware of the destruction and chaos involved in the war waged by their country.6 Thus, Rosler’s work, Boy’s Room depicts two brothers in a bedroom decorated in full 1970s design: red bedspreads accompany red-and-white carpeting. One boy sits at his desk with building blocks, while the other lies on his bed in a gesture that could be read as both laughing and crying. Above the desk, inserted where a window should be, is an image of a protester being arrested by two police officers.7 Rosler’s choice of a palette of red and white, which she repeats throughout the series, becomes subversive. The protester’s image operates as a shop window of the world outside the boys’ sheltered bedroom, as well as a threatening foreshadow of the boys’ possible future.8 This montage, like others belonging to the series, aimed at re-connecting life experiences that had been falsely separated (a distant war and the ­American living rooms), exposing relations between media representation and public opinion, advertising and politics, American foreign policy and violence. Soldiers with arms and ammunition, wounded or dying civilians, ruined houses and huge tanks enter comfortable, often luxurious American homes. The clash between two disparate worlds, disrupting the American ideal of home comfort, cleanliness, and security, the ideal promoted by a number of magazines like House Beautiful, was meant to come as a shock. For Rosler, Bringing the War Home was a political message, breaking not only with modernist art but also with apolitical conceptual art, which was just taking off in the United States at that time. Developed in the context of Rosler’s anti-war activism at the time, the montages were born of her frustration with images of the war in television and print media which seemed to be “always very far away, in a place we couldn’t imagine” (Cottingham “Crossing Borders”). Her images were produced at the height of the war, and positioned as a reaction to media images, conformist reports on the war and government propaganda. They originally circulated in underground newspapers, anti-war journals and flyers. They were not meant to be exhibited in galleries or museums; they were to serve a cause. Not until two decades later were the original collages printed as a limited edition of colour photomontages and exhibited in an art-world setting.9 6 7 8 9

See Darrow. See Cook. See Berkeley. See Berkeley.

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The images of Rosler’s series were representative of Rosler’s subversive realism: patio chairs overlooking tanks and slums, a young Vietnamese woman carrying a naked bleeding baby in a modern American house where a child’s birthday is being celebrated, a legless girl standing in a comfortable living room, Pat Nixon smiling before a gilt-framed picture of violence, dismembered bodies outside a living room where a Giacometti sculpture sits. The artist made her war images fit into the frames of American domestic property. Their precise positioning, into rectangular windows and picture frames, was a visual clue to the cognitive connection Rosler was making; these images of war were not imposed or forced into these living rooms, they belonged there.10 As a matter of fact, the Vietnam War came to be known as the “living room war”; when in mid-1965 Lyndon Johnson dispatched large numbers of us troops into Vietnam, many reporters could record and broadcast battlefield activity. Thus, the images of daily carnage (interrupted by ads for consumer comforts) which erupted day after day into homes across the us, appeared in Rosler’s early montages. 2

The Iraq War and New Technologies

When the us invaded Iraq in 2003, claiming that Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction posed a threat to its security, Martha Rosler felt once again that the nation was overcome by a consensual and enthusiastic attitude and that the media did not do their job of investigation properly. For her it was a déjà vu scenario. Her Vietnam works gained a new significance, but Rosler felt that the passing years had made the scenes nostalgic and quaint. They had been transformed from urgent, specific pieces into aesthetic objects so that her 1960s politically motivated art had been replaced by a universal, mythologized message. So, she created a new series that purposely evoked the previous one as it seemed to her that people were being seduced by the same sort of political manipulations as those to which they had been subjected during the Vietnam War.11 The more recent group, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, New Series (2004) revived the strategy to address the conflict in Iraq. Despite the availability of Photoshop and internet technology, Rosler chose to rely on her primitive cut-and-paste process because it subtly showed traces of the seams between

10 11

See Hallin 17–18 and Arlen 8. See Cook.

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images, reminding the viewers of the photos’ origins in the popular press.12 In the Iraq images, Rosler both revived earlier subjects and strategies and updated them to reflect the latest technologies and fashions, new perpetrators and victims. She confronted the viewers with clashes of narcissistic glamorous models and burqa-covered women, raging fires and twinkling kitchens, hooded prisoners and trendy sofas. The places and faces were specific to the conflict. Scenes of the Iraq war were not confined to the view outside the picture window or on the tv screen, they erupted across any available surface from oven, pillow, mirror, book cover, and picture frame to the cell phone screen.13 A prim, smiling woman sprays deodorant inside a bombed palace. A ­bare-chested soldier with an artificial leg walks away from a photo of President George W. Bush and his brother Jeb. A model (from an ad for a cell phone) stands in a modern living room snapping photos with her phone while bleeding Iraqi girls slump in chairs in the background and fires outside show American troops.14 A woman in a burqa sits on the floor of a palatial living room holding a photo of the anti-American Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. A wine bottle has been tipped over on a table behind her, spilling what looks like blood onto the floor. In the background, an American soldier smokes in a chair (the source is a widely reproduced April 2003 photo of American troops lounging in a Baghdad palace seized from the enemy).15 Rosler tried to relate the obsession with digital cameras and cell phones in the us to the cultural disconnection from the distant effects of war. The Iraq war is an example of how information technology could obscure what was actually happening in Iraq. With the help of accurately targeted air power, the coalition forces were able to claim that they had toppled the Iraqi regime “with a combination of precision, speed, and boldness the enemy did not expect and the world had not seen before” (Kaldor). Much was made of the American information advantage; coalition forces were able to process information received both from satellite pictures and from reports from the ground so that at any moment, the Internet could show the deployment of their troops. Paradoxically, the American public’s experience of the Iraq War, through highly censored video footage, was completely different from that of the Vietnam War with its gory details every night on the evening news. Some of the Iraq images, especially those that incorporated Abu Ghraib prison photos, also exposed the role that this technology (and the Internet as 12 13 14 15

See Cook. See Cook. See Zabunyan. See Cook.

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a means of distribution) played in the lives of soldiers and victims, and how these particular photos shaped perceptions of this war around the world. Thus, Election (Lynndie) shows a big, sleek kitchen. An American soldier stands at the back, holding a leash that disappears behind a counter. It represents army reservist Lynndie England clipped from the notorious photo of her standing in Abu Ghraib prison holding a leash tied to a prisoner lying naked on the floor. Here photos of abused prisoners appear on appliances and books throughout the room.16 Rosler chose to focus on the pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, which reflected as Susan Sontag remarked in her article “Regarding the torture of others”, “a shift in the use made of pictures – less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated”.17 During the Iraq War, a digital camera was a common possession among soldiers who were all photographers “recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities, swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe” (Sontag). For Sontag, the meaning of these pictures was not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures showed. That was the idea of “fun”, an idea which had become part of “the true nature and heart of America” (Sontag). These pictures are comparable to the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which showed Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated bodies of black men or women hanging behind them from trees. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action which the participants felt to be perfectly justified. The lynching pictures were trophies, taken by photographers in order to be collected, stored in albums, displayed, just like the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Rosler’s works incorporating pictures of tortured prisoners reminded the viewers that these images had become commonplace. They testified to the alienation and psychological disability of the soldiers who had uncritically absorbed damaging propaganda. 3

Women, War and Consumerism

Confronting both series shows how the media evolution from newspapers and television during the Vietnam War to computers and cell phones in the 16 17

See Cook. In her article, Susan Sontag quotes Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who, referring to Abou Ghraïb’s events, declared: “My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture. And therefore I’m not going to address the torture word”.

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Iraq conflict redefined the Americans’ sense of time and space, further blurring traditional boundaries between private and public, inside and outside, the Americans (as “us”) and the others (as “them”).18 Thus, The Gray Drape (second series) shows a glamorous woman in what appears to be her bedroom, more interested in her linens than she is in the world outside. The drape she is waving and her devotion to upscale consumerism seem to be preventing her from noticing the chaos of the Iraq War outside. A weeping woman in Islamic headdress sits outside the room, seeming to beg for admittance, and is manifestly ignored. The Gray Drape might also be read as an examination of empty patriotism: the woman’s drape-waving movement recalls the waving of an American flag at a car race or at a parade. There is no red, white and blue on Rosler’s drape, just grey, a possible reference to both the moral hollowness of America’s engagement in Iraq and the jingoism encouraged by the government and many on the right.19 Rosler had used the device and image of the drape in the previous series, most obviously in Cleaning the Drapes. In this work, she depicted a housewife thin and smart in a black dress, her vacuum cleaner on her shoulder carried like a hand bag, cleaning her drapes. She is completely blind to the sight behind the curtains of soldiers sheltering in a trench, too preoccupied with her chores to notice a war raging outside her window; the work was as much a sly comment on the stifling effects of domestic isolation on women as on Americans’ wish to deny the horrors of the Vietnam War. By revisiting Cleaning the Drapes so directly in The Gray Drape, Rosler established a parallel between the way Americans fought in Vietnam and the way they fought in Iraq. Rosler did not just revisit old work with The Gray Drape, she argued that the United States’ morally questionable past conduct (involving, inter alia, the spraying of Agent Orange and civilian massacres such as the one at My Lai) had provided no useful lessons to subsequent generations.20 In both works, the drape locks up the two women, in the narrow confines of their home or in their incapacity to see beyond it. The artist seems to invite the spectator to consider the drape as a veil, the metaphor being all the more resonant with the Gray Drape which incorporates a veiled woman in the background. The drape, like the veil, is a sign of subordination; Rosler’s aim is also to reveal that the act of consuming is a form of collaboration with a social and political system and the consumer is as much a victim as an agent of her own oppression. This stand is confirmed in a work such as “Point and Shoot” (new series): a glamorous bride poses in a Baghdad street, holding an old Polaroid camera, while American troops, 18 19 20

See Berkeley. See Green. See Green.

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b­ ursting from a tank, point their machine guns at Iraqi civilians. One of them in the background is a woman in a burqa, holding a child. The western woman in the foreground, who turns her face to the spectators, seems to send them a knowing look. She contrasts all the more with the Iraqi woman’s small figure in the background, draped in black, head down, terrorized by the soldier in front of her who clearly orders her not to move. In both series, Rosler’s interrogation of the interconnectedness of domesticity and war led her to focus on representations of women and the space of the home as a site of political engagement. The female bodies that Rosler revisited and connected to the politics of war signified a range of realities and roles: victims, victimizers, rebels and seducers. In several images, Rosler strategically contrasted women’s domestic labour with the combat of soldiers. By putting war photos next to photos of sleek, sanitized dream homes, she tried to convey the underlying consumer message that women had a say in shopping, upscale consumerism and home decoration but had no voice in the war.21 Occasionally, iconic personalities were included (actress Faye Dunaway as the outlaw Bonnie, Pat Nixon as First Lady, Lynndie England as the Abu Ghraib torturer), but more often she focused not on the individual but on the context and what was repressed, suggested, or exposed by women’s appearance and action: a young Vietnamese amputee whose war-torn body disrupts the comfortable space of the modern living room and the border of the page; the perverse exoticism of an Asian nude from Playboy in the context of a war in Southeast Asia; glamorous models parading through spaces occupied by hooded captives or burqa-covered Iraqi women.22 Thus Rosler contrasted the domestic lives of women with international war, repression and politics. 4

Here and Elsewhere, War and Home

While some of the images and ad campaigns provided a clear link to an identifiable decade, war and the American perception of war remained consistent and, conceptually, the series were similar.23 They subverted both the premise and practice of documentary photography and its assumptions of realism. ­Rosler focused on the crisis that documentary photography had undergone during the decades between the two wars owing to the sensationalism and voyeurism of the mass media, and tried to highlight the social importance of “real” 21 22 23

See Rosler, “War in my Work”. See Berkeley. See Darrow.

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documentary photograph to interfere with the established order of power.24 This navigation between the space of signifier and signified, between images and the viewers’ perceptual associations, is a constant feature in R ­ osler’s work. By combining consumer culture with images of war, Rosler showed a world flattened and reduced to media content, a world that no longer felt shock at the horrors she depicted. Referring to reporters and the current flux of images, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard asserted in 2003: They are at the same time in the event and outside of it. Their involvement is short-lived. They are apriori in solidarity with the victims and with human distress, but their natural place is on the other side with those who look and do nothing. They are irresponsible in the sense that they do not intervene. Their irresponsibility is closer to that of the consumer of photos. They offer victims the mirror of their distress before dispatching the image to the ‘other side’ to be commercialized and consumed. Mirror of Photojournalism

Rosler pointed out that tv viewers in wartime were as familiar with violent images from Vietnam and Iraq as they were with the models and cleaning products that appeared every time they switched on. She forced Americans to reconsider their wars, how they processed their imagery, and how they experienced them, emotionally, as distinct from the ad campaigns and media they consumed.25 The media avoid directly referring to political and economic connection between the consumer’s sofa and someone else’s dead body; Rosler reveals the artificiality of this severed causality. The separation of Americans as “us” from the Vietnamese and Iraqis as “them”, between “here” and “there”, is an illusion that must be maintained in a war-profit society that favours the comfort of those who benefit from it. Rosler’s two Bringing the War Home series make their artistic closure by connecting the visual foreground with its infrastructural background. Her work draws on the disjunctive technical style and consumer-capitalism critiques of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, whom Rosler acknowledges as a major influence. In fact, Godard’s Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere 1974), produced after Rosler finished her Vietnam series, explored the same contradiction suggested in Bringing the War Home: French consumerism (here) and the Palestinian struggle (elsewhere).26 Rosler encouraged the viewers to ­remember 24 25 26

See Von Bismarck. See Darrow. See Cottingham “The War is Always Home”.

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where dead babies come from. Her war montages were not ­constructed from divergent sources: they derived from the same magazine, ironically called “Life”. The divorce between war and home imposed by the publishers’ division between advertising and editorial, home features and war views, was also accepted by the viewer/reader of Life: irrational misreading, encouraged from without, was accepted from within. Horkheimer and Adorno considered that ideology was “split into the photograph of stubborn life and the naked lie about its meaning, which is not expressed but suggested and yet drummed in” (118). Could Americans enjoy their cars, their tvs, their luxurious homes in the same way knowing someone died for their enjoyment? For Rosler, this was the central question that those who enjoyed “the spoils of post-colonial imperialism” should ask themselves; a question that concerned every citizen, as the material benefits of war are not limited to the rich, the multinationals, the government.27 The self’s failure to understand the social environment happens on two distinct but interdependent levels. The Bringing the War Home series are also an echo of the artist’s critical position vis-a-vis the restricted ranges of people’s thoughts. Misunderstanding is central to people’s relationship to experience. Just because they witness what is before them does not mean people will comprehend the situation. The concept of “symbolic power” was introduced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to account for the tacit modes of cultural and social dominations occurring within the social habits maintained over conscious subjects. Symbolic power includes attitudes that have discriminatory or injurious implications, such as gender dominance, racism and xenophobia. It maintains its effect through the failure to recognize power relations situated in the social matrix. While symbolic power requires a dominator, it also requires the dominated to accept their position in the exchange of social value that occurs between them.28 5 Conclusion Rosler’s works, however, have encountered the limit of what is considered to be “political art”. For French philosopher Jacques Rancière, the view of dead children in beautiful apartments, is certainly difficult to bear. There is, however, no particular reason why it should make spectators conscious of the reality of imperialism and desirous of opposing it. He states that 27 28

Cottingham, “The War is Always Home”. See “Social Space and Symbolic Power”.

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for the image to produce its political effect, the spectator must already be convinced that she/he is herself/himself guilty of sharing in the prosperity rooted in imperialist exploitation of the world. And she/he must further feel guilty about being there and doing nothing; about viewing these images of pain and death, rather than struggling against the powers responsible for it.29 For Rancière, this is the dialectic inherent in the political montage of images. One of them must play the role of the reality that exposes the other’s mirage. The mere fact of viewing images that denounce the reality of a system already emerges as complicity with this system. Emancipated Spectator 85

Besides, in spite of the artist’s determination to avoid the aestheticization of her works, their very exhibition in art galleries and museums has consecrated their status as works of art and weakened their critical potential. As Luc ­Boltanski and Ève Chiapello persuasively demonstrated in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2007), the managerial class successfully co-opted the various ­demands of social movements that arose in the 1960s. They managed to neutralize the subversive potential of the aesthetic strategies and ethos of the counterculture by integrating them into the market. Any form of representation involves an aestheticization of the subject, as it involves a transformation of the subject.30 The choice of the artist is not whether to aestheticize or not, but rather how to aestheticize. The challenge for Rosler as for other artists was to do it in such a way as to make the work both politically valid and visually and conceptually compelling. The characterization of these issues in terms of the left and right in politics is intriguing. The right often seems to promote an art that is devoid of politics and operates on the level of pure aesthetics, so that it does not function as a challenge to the status quo. The left is more likely to favour “an art that does not allow aesthetics to distract from the political message and challenges the system that is contained in the work”. David Levi-Strauss “says the latter is both impossible and undesirable, and […] aesthetics itself should be employed as an agent of change” (McCabe).

29 30

Quoted by Pascal-Moussellard. See Boltanski and Chiapello.

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That is what Rosler tried to do with her different series. The breaking of stereotypes and norms, a permanent revolt against the limiting of individual and collective liberty, the demolishing of personal or social myths are her main concerns. Her montages undoubtedly raise questions about the connections between advertising, journalism, politics, sexism, and violence and re-connect two sides of life that have been falsely separated: distant wars and the living rooms of America.31 Rosler’s violent images from the Vietnam and Iraq wars have forced viewers to reconsider their emotional and intellectual experience of war imagery, as distinct from the ad campaigns and media they consume. Works Cited Arlen, Michael. The Living room War. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. “Le Photoreportage en son miroir à Visa pour l’Image”. Le Monde 29 Aug. 2003. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Mirror of Photojournalism”. Interview with Jean Baudrillard at the International Festival of Photojournalism: Visa pour l’image. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 8 (July 2011). Web. May 2016. Berkeley, Allison. “Martha Rosler: Bringing the War Home”. News from the Worcester Art Museum. Worcester, Mass., 2 Aug. 2007. Web. November 2014. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London /New York: Verso, 2005. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power”. Sociological Theory, 7 (Spring 1989): 14–25. Print. Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey. The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam era. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print. Cook, Greg. “Of War and Remembrance, Martha Rosler’s Montages conjure Vietnam and Iraq”. The Boston Globe 11 Nov. 2007. Print. Cottingham, Laura. “Crossing Borders. Laura Cottingham on Martha Rosler”. Frieze Magazine, 13 (1993): 53–55. Print. Cottingham, Laura. “The War is Always Home: Martha Rosler”. Catalogue essay: New York City, October 1991. Web. Nov. 2014. Darrow, Susannah. “Martha Rosler: Bringing the War Home at Emory Visual Arts Gallery”. 15 Oct. 2008. Web. Nov. 2014. Green, Tyler. “Acquisition: Martha Rosler’s ‘The Gray Drape’ at the Hirshhorn”. Artinfo, 26 May 2009. Web. Nov. 2014.

31

See Berkeley.

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Hallin, Daniel. “TV’s clean Little War”. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. London: Arnold, 1997. 17–18. Print. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectics of Enlightenment. 1944. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Print. Kaldor, Mary. “Iraq: the wrong war”. OpenDemocracy, 8 June 2005. Web. Nov. 2014. McCabe, Hugh. “The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic – David LeviStrauss (1992)”. Traces of the Real. 6 Dec. 2009. Web. Nov. 2014. Pascal-Moussellard, Olivier. “Le philosophe Jacques Rancière: ‘La parole n’est pas plus morale que les images’”. Télérama 15 Dec. 2008. Print. Rancière, Jacques. Le Spectateur émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique, 2008. Print. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. Print. Rosler, Martha. “Negotiating New (His)tories of Photography”. Art Journal, 5 (1994a). Print. Rosler, Martha. “Place, Position, Power, Politics”. Ed. Carol Becker. The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility. Abington: Routledge, 1994b. Print. Rosler, Martha. “War in my Work”. Graz: Camera Austria, 47/48 (1994c): 69–78. Print. Sontag, Susan. “Regarding the Torture of Others”. New York Times 23 May 2004. Print. Von Bismarck, Beatrice. Martha Rosler: Passionate Signals. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Publishers, Bilingual edition, 2005. Print. Zabunyan, Elvan. Martha Rosler, Sur/sous le pavé. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006. Print.

chapter 8

Conflicting Documentary Strategies and Italian Counter-propaganda in the Spanish Civil War Marie-France Courriol Abstract This chapter provides a comparative study of two militant documentaries shot in Spain during the Civil War: Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth (u.s.a., 1937) and ­Romolo ­Marcellini’s Los novios de la muerte (Italy, 1938), the latter conceived as a ­Fascist response to Ivens’s pro-Republican film. The two documentaries pursued very ­ ­different objectives, Ivens’s aiming to shift American opinion in favour of helping Spanish Republicans while Marcellini’s film meant to demonstrate the power of the Italian armed forces in Spain. Relating militant strategies to representational models, the study ­investigates the common pool of motifs and the use of different ­generic models underpinning the author-viewer pact established in each film, n ­ otably the newsreel model as opposed to the spectacular and fictional forms. Moreover, using the ­reception history of the two documentaries, the analysis reassesses the field of action of propaganda which, rather than radically changing the audiences’ attitudes, mostly reinforces ­existing beliefs.

I was often asked, why had we not gone to the other side, too, to make an objective film? My only answer was that a documentary filmmaker […] has to have feelings about these issues, if his work is to have any dramatic, emotional, or artistic value […]. If anyone wanted that objectivity of ‘both sides of the question’, he would have to show two films, The ­Spanish Earth and a film by a fascist filmmaker, if he could find one. ivens 136–137

To the audiences who greedily indulged in Soviet film productions, relying on a false and sly realism which so easily surprises and moves spectators who are too bored by Hollywood artifice, here’s to Los novios de la muerte [The Lovers of Death]. Here’s to a response of Fascist cinema on

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004353244_010

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the reality of aerial warfare, the efficiency, the valour and the faith of our aviators. marcellini 3821

The Spanish Civil War is considered to be “the first modern war in which foreign involvement was critical” (Brothers 2). Its international scale characterized both the military aspects and the media coverage of the conflict. In particular, Fascist Italy considerably invested in the film medium in Spain as a tool to fight “the war that must crush Communism in the Western World”.2 Along with an estimated total number of 80,000 soldiers (Coverdale 393), Italy sent film units to accompany its troops, for documentary and newsreel production. The integration of the Italian film project within the military enterprise was planned at a very early stage. The Press and Propaganda Bureau (Ufficio Stampa e Propaganda)3 was established within the Italian Army Mission in Spain (Missione Militare Italiana in Spagna) in December 1936.4 The reading of the Spanish Civil War as a fundamental event that would shape the political and ideological European landscape was therefore a contemporary concern that informed Fascist Italy’s propaganda programme on the Spanish territory in a crucial way. The Italian case exemplifies a phenomenon the extent of which was unprecedented, that of a transformation of war images into “images not just of but in conflict” (Brothers 2).5 It therefore offers a rich case study for the construction of a counter-political vision within the documentary film form. The Spanish war theatre was giving birth to antifascist film initiatives which had various non-governmental foundations: the Progressive Film Institute in the United Kingdom, Frontier Film and History Today in the United States of America for instance (Crusells 85). For the first time, Italy had to face an enemy that was using film as a powerful ideological weapon. The characteristics of the Italian film involvement in the Spanish conflict are therefore best appreciated 1 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are the author’s. 2 “Spain appears more and more to the whole world as the battlefield on which we fight the war that must crush Communism in the Western World”, asmae. b. 1333, Telespresso 344, 14 Apr. 1937, 1. 3 The Bureau had several names: Ufficio Stampa e Propaganda della Missione Militare Italiana in Spagna, then Ufficio Stampa e Propaganda Italo-Spagnolo, and from 1937 onwards Ufficio Stampa Italiano. 4 asmae. b. 1242, fascicolo 4, 19 Dec. 1936. 5 Her observation originally concerns photographic images.

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through a comparison with other, pro-Republican films of the period. In order to better understand the Fascist film project in Spain in relation to the specific antifascist productions that contributed to its shaping, this article examines a particular case of Italian counter-propaganda. The documentary The Spanish Earth (1937, usa) by Dutch avant-garde filmmaker Joris Ivens was produced by the association of intellectuals, Contemporary Historians, Inc., in order to influence the American public in favour of the Republican cause. It included a direct attack on the Italian military involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Italy retaliated with the documentary Los novios de la muerte (1938) by Romolo Marcellini. Produced by the documentary production company incom6 and the Editoriale aeronautica, it was conceived as a direct Fascist response to The Spanish Earth. Both medium-length films7 were shot in Spain by foreign teams and were informed by a precise political agenda. This chapter offers a comparative study of these two militant documentaries on the Spanish Civil War, from the perspective of Italian ­counter-propaganda. The choice of a comparative reading is determined by the competitive ­framework in which these films were interpreted at the time, particularly in the Italian context. The study examines the translation of ideological stances into aesthetic and narrative choices, in relation to the films’ target audiences. Keeping the specific functions of both films in mind, it relates militant strategies to representational models. With that aim, it investigates the generic models which underpin the author-viewer pact established in each film,8 notably the newsreel model on the one hand and spectacular and fictional forms on the other. The chapter intends to account for the common pool of motifs and fiction-based techniques shared by the two documentaries, albeit with distinct aims. Furthermore, it offers a reconstruction of the films’ distribution and reception history, in order to understand both documentaries in the light of their defined propaganda objectives and their audiences. Confronting a well-known documentary (The Spanish Earth) with an underresearched film which aspired to be its Italian counterpart ultimately leads us to a reassessment of war documentary strategies. The commonplace view of propaganda as an art of persuasion able to radically change attitudes derives 6 Industria Cortometraggi. 7 Respectively 52 and 30 minutes long. 8 The pact defines the viewers’ approach to a film, and the film’s level of correspondence between representation and the real. A literary notion coined by Philippe Lejeune in Le Pacte autobiographique, it has proved useful in film studies, for instance Comolli’s, Voir et pouvoir.

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from the interwar period consensus about the unlimited power of the media. As pointed out by Pronay: between 1918 and 1945 the new media and new techniques of ‘communications’ were perceived as having a fundamentally important political role. And, because this belief was acted upon by governments and communicators alike, ‘politics and communications’ came indeed to be inextricably linked, to a much greater and much more conscious extent than ever before, both in domestic politics and to a slightly lesser extent perhaps, in international relations. (4) Studies that primarily focus on the propaganda machine in terms of organization and institutions have contributed to putting the emphasis on its pervasiveness9 and strength of persuasion. On the contrary, a study of r­ epresentational patterns in relation to the films’ target audiences addresses the concrete set of circumstances and the contingent conditions within which propaganda works were created, as well as the concerns raised by the films’ circulation. It therefore re-evaluates the field of action of propaganda, aiming to rebalance its role through a contextualized assessment of specific films. In this study, the conclusions drawn from close readings of individual films are supported by additional primary sources, such as reviews and film manifestos. Besides these textual sources, the study relies on rare material from Italy’s ministerial archives, with special emphasis on the collections of the Historical Archive of the Italian Foreign Ministry. 1

A Programmatic Italian Response: Production Context

Ivens wrote about The Spanish Earth: “It is as if the camera takes on a trigger and a barrel” (Schoots 123). The widespread identification of films with weapons in an ideological war should not obscure the variety of reasons that led to 9 In the Italian case, Philip V. Cannistraro’s La fabbrica del consenso. For a criticism of this kind of practice in the Nazi case, see David Welch: “Too often in the past historians have been concerned only with the organizational techniques of Nazi propaganda, not with how it was received by the population, the assumption being that simply because propaganda played such a disproportionate role in the Third Reich, by implication it must have been highly effective. Clearly Goebbels believed this, but the historian needs to be more sceptical” (51). For a reappraisal of propaganda in Fascist Italy, see Pietro Cavallo’s Italiani in guerra 24.

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the unprecedented mobilisation of artists and film professionals. The documentary strategies of each film need to be grasped not only in relation to the encompassing ideological projects that underpinned them, but also in light of the films’ specific (and sometimes more pragmatic) aims. Before all else, it is crucial to understand the radically distinct nature of the two films discussed here. The Spanish Earth was a non-governmental initiative promoted by members of the American Cultural Front, authorized by the Spanish Republican government, which hoped to influence us foreign policy then characterized by neutrality toward the Spanish conflict. It was therefore fundamentally different from the Italian project. Indirectly backed by the state, Los novios de la muerte was made two years after Italy’s military entry into the conflict on the nationalists’ side. It supported the Italian military intervention, while benefiting from technical and material aid from the Italian Military Mission.10 When the shooting of The Spanish Earth began in February 1937, a Republican victory was still possible. In parallel, the figures of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs show that almost 49,000 men in ground and air forces had been shipped to Spain by the end of February 1937 (Coverdale 175).11 At the same time, the American policy of non-intervention was becoming firmer. In January 1937, both houses of Congress passed a bill that banned the export of arms to Spain. In that context, the objective of The Spanish Earth was to shift American public opinion and, consequently, to determine material aid in favour of the Republicans. Italy had already been actively supporting the nationalists since their rebellion in July 1936 and had officially recognized Franco’s government on 18 November 1936. The Italian involvement was directly condemned and derided in The Spanish Earth. Los novios de la muerte had therefore a clear defensive aim. It meant to demonstrate the power of the Italian armed forces in Spain, with particular emphasis on the air force. In the us, Ivens had been involved in a previous film about the civil war, Spain in Flames (1936) by Helen Van Dongen, future editor of The Spanish Earth. Used in a campaign of support for the Spanish Republic, Spain in Flames was made mostly of edited newsreels. Aware of the film’s insufficiency, Ivens 10 Another incom project benefited from generous aid, being directly supported by the Ministry of Popular Culture. Sandro Pallavicini, the head of the production company, travelled to Spain with director Giorgio Ferroni and cameraman Mario Craveri in February and March 1939 in order to shoot España una, grande, libre!. Their travels were facilitated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Italian Consulate in Barcelona ­(asmae. b. 1242, f. 1 Missione Ingegnere Pallavicini). 11 Figures given for 27 February 1937.

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decided on a more ambitious project, The Spanish Earth, which would include exclusively new material shot in Spain (Schoots 116). It was first conceived in the autumn of 1936, roughly at the moment at which the first Americans left to fight in Spain in the International Brigades.12 It was produced by an association of American intellectuals including, amongst others, Dos Passos and Hemingway, who voiced the commentary. All of them but Hemingway were Communist Party members. Ivens was a recognized documentarist who had worked for Soviet Russia, directing the propaganda film Song of Heroes (1931) about the industrial town of Magnitogorsk. In addition, his avant-garde works had been appreciated since the late 1920s. Los novios de la muerte was co-produced by the documentary production company incom and the Editoriale aeronautica. The latter was an institution centralizing all Italian publications on aviation, financially linked to the Italian State, since the office of the Secretary of the Air Force (Segretariato Generale dell’Aeronautica) possessed all its shares (Ferrari 68). Established in 1932 by Italo Balbo, the famous aviator then Minister of the Air Force, the Editoriale ventured into filmmaking precisely during the Spanish Civil War. As a matter of fact, the Editoriale as well as the incom were created in 1938 to counter the monopoly of the Istituto Luce, the state organization dedicated to the production and distribution of newsreels and documentaries since 1926. This rivalry points to the complexity of a media war that was not only fought at an international level, but was also internal. Los novios de la muerte was conceived by a duo of Fascist journalists who had won fame for their colonial fiction film Bronze Sentries (1937). It was directed by Romolo Marcellini with a script by Gian Gaspare Napolitano. Los novios de la muerte was to be the endeavour of the Luce’s rivals to revivify a documentary genre that was regularly vilified by film critics as well as by high officials in charge of propaganda (Laura 160).13 However, continuity with Luce documentary-making is evident at several levels. Originally a reporter, Marcellini had previously directed several Luce documentaries on the Ethiopian war (Documentario di guerra sul fronte dell’Africa Settentrionale and Legionari al secondo parallelo, 1936). The continuity was also organizational and administrative: Napolitano, former head of the Foreign Affairs department within the Press and Propaganda Bureau had been responsible for the creation of a ­special film unit composed of Luce operators during the battle of Guadalajara (asmae. b. 1233, 15 Apr. 1937 2). Moreover, for Los novios de la muerte ­Marcellini and Napolitano worked with director of photography Mario Craveri, a ­specialist 12 13

In the us, the biggest organizer was the North American Committee for Spain. Luigi Freddi, then head of the General Directorate for Cinema, was one of them.

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in war ­cinematography and travelogues, who had been a staple figure of the Luce from the 1920s (Poppi 125). As the Head of the Foreign Affairs department of the Press and Propaganda Bureau, Napolitano arrived in Spain in February 1937, where he must have heard of Ivens’s film. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that he could have seen it in Spain, where the film’s distribution was hampered. In an article published in October 1937, N ­ apolitano alerted the Italian film world: a firm response to Ivens’s documentary was urgently needed. This film was detrimental to the image of Italian soldiers. Furthermore, thanks to its authors’ reputations (largely exploited in the film’s promotion), The Spanish Earth was met with acclaim abroad. “What Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, Ilia Ehrenburg have done for their own faith, we are ready to do for ours”, stated Napolitano (260). He called for a coordinated film response, both political and artistic: We must respond as authentic Fascists to the fake liberals of America. We must respond with true documentaries, with 100% Fascist and n ­ ationalist films to the so-called impartial films, to the false documentaries. (260) At the same time, the Editoriale areonautica, aspiring to diversify its activities, envisaged a film to the glory of the Italian air force in Spain. Marcellini was approached by his friend Federico Valli, head of the Editoriale, to direct such a work (Cori 61). Los novios de la muerte was therefore born out of the combination of these two agendas: a call for an ideological cinema as well as an industrial strategy. These aims united in a particular way in a film that is eulogistic, descriptive, as well as defensive. Italy’s prestige was at stake since its role in the battle of Guadalajara had been attacked by the Anglo-American press (Beevor 246) and international commentators in general. Contemporary Historians chose to centre The Spanish Earth precisely on this battle (March 1937), whereas Marcellini responded by focusing on a Nationalist victory, the battle of Teruel (December 1­ 937-February 1938). A large number of documents testify to the strong concern raised by Fascist officials on the treatment of the battle of Guadalajara. Reactions in France, the uk and the us were monitored, as well as the circulation of antifascist propaganda films on the topic (asmae. b. 1243, f. 2). The Spanish Earth was one of them since it directly undermined the honour of Italian troops. The last sequence of reel 5 concentrates on the heavy Italian casualties after the Republican victory of Brihuega, in March 1937. Commenting on the succession of close shots of corpses, the voice-over empathizes with the victimized Italian soldiers, misled into this fight by Fascist propaganda: “These dead came from another country. They signed up to work in Ethiopia. We took no statement

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from the dead but all the letters that we read were very sad”. This sequence is a real exercise in counter-propaganda. Not only does it expose the duplicity of the Italian state, but it also incriminates Germany, exhibiting German material used in bombings. It condemns both Italy and its ally as predatory states. As a consequence, the Italian response to The Spanish Earth was not just a response to one film, but also to international antifascist media that derided or diminished Italy’s military role in the Spanish conflict. As pointed out by Coverdale, “Guadalajara had occupied the front page of newspapers around the globe, and most had interpreted it as a crushing defeat for Italian Fascism” (263). The Spanish Earth was considered by Napolitano, then the future scriptwriter of Los novios de la muerte, “a film that claims to be dangerous not only for the nationalist cause but also for that of Italian soldiers and, ultimately, of Italy” (258). Los novios de la muerte therefore endeavoured to reassert Italy’s prestige after the devastating blow suffered at Guadalajara. Los novios de la muerte functions as a cinematic counter-offensive, in a war that marked the first major confrontation of Fascist propaganda with other foreign film productions. Its defensive strategy is visible in the narrative structure as well as in the aesthetic quality of certain sequences. Obvious parallels emerge from a comparison of the films’ opening sequences, demonstrating Marcellini’s attempt to reply literally to Ivens. The opening sequence of Los novios de la muerte displays a religious procession in memory of the fallen taking place in a village on nationalist territory. The ceremony is suddenly interrupted by a bombing. Close-ups of the faces of old villagers and altar boys alternate with low angle shots of Republican planes. Adopting the point of view of the Spanish villagers, this sequence depicts the defensive role of the Italian air force, which allegedly protects civilians as well as Catholicism from Republican cruelty and iconoclasm. The latter theme, central to Italian anticommunist propaganda, is introduced by a shot of the statue of the Virgin upon which images of explosion and ruins are superimposed. The expressionist quality of the sequence, dominated by the personification of this Mater dolorosa, matches the opening of The Spanish Earth through the choice of a similar popular point of view. Ivens’s film also opens on a group of Spanish villagers, in particular their building of an irrigation system. In The Spanish Earth the camera pans from a cloudy sky to a peasant on a mule in an arid plain. Los novios de la muerte uses an extremely similar establishing shot, identical angles, movements and motifs, and the voice-over underlines the sense of immutability conveyed by the image of the shepherd: “Nationalist Spain continues its centuries-old existence”. These two sequences both use archaic and pastoral images, albeit with different objectives. Los novios de la muerte drew on anti-communist motifs to

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present the Legionary Air Force as a protector of the Spanish people and traditions, endangered by destructive atheists. On the contrary, The Spanish Earth aimed to prevent anti-communist fears amongst its American audience in presenting an acceptable land reform, carried out by the villagers themselves. There is no mention of the term “collectivization” or of political factions. Since The Spanish Earth was meant to be screened to the main American political and film industry figures to raise money, it could not afford to scare potential donors with “subversive” social situations. Durable imagery was therefore preferred, reinforced by a score14 inspired by recognizable Spanish folk music.15 2

Narrative and Visual Choices

Fiction-based techniques were used differently by both filmmakers. Whereas Los novios de la muerte follows a more traditional structure that draws on the newsreel model, The Spanish Earth constitutes a narrativized documentary. The latter is structured around a specific Castilian village, Fuentedueña, which functions as a narrative connector. Placed on the road to Madrid, Fuentedueña is essential to the supply of the capital and Republican troops. Moreover, the semi-fictional character of Julian, who leaves Fuentedueña to fight in defence of Madrid, is symptomatic of Ivens’s technique of “personalization” (Ivens 215). Narrativization and personalization are aimed at emphasizing the causality between land reform and the Republican struggle. In contrast, Los novios de la muerte does not follow any specific characters. Civilians are displayed as a group, deprived of any right to speak. Similarly, the village featured in Los novios de la muerte remains an undefined Aragonese locality. The presence of shot-counter-shot editing can be similarly analysed. In the village sequences in the The Spanish Earth, it is a consequence of the aforementioned choices (narrativization and personalization). In Los novios de la muerte instead, this type of editing characterizes the war sequences, revealing their obvious staging. Whereas the opening sequence of Los novios de la muerte was shot with a stable, heavy tripod-based camera, the Spanish Earth bombing sequence of a small town was recorded instead with a very mobile camera. As a result, the latter is composed of disorganized images, captured by a small hand-held camera which pans quickly from one point of the street to the other. Arranged with “emphatic cutting” (Alexander 156), the images echo the civilians’ panic and chaotic movements. 14 15

Composed by Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson. For an analysis of its “musical ideology”, see Carol A. Hess.

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The narrative structure as well as the choice of the camera point of view establish a particular attitude towards the films’ audience. Paul Virilio has ­noted that film and photography during World War i, with the new possibility of relatively easily available aerial views, inaugurated a fundamental change in the perception of the territory (24, 26). From that moment on, the same portion of territory could be seen from an infinity of points of view, multiplied by aerial perspective. Bombs and bullets could be perceived either from the target’s or the shooter’s point of view. The Spanish Earth, as made obvious by its title, endeavours to remain at ground level, and chooses the victims’ point of view. In the sequence showing the bombing of the capital, viewers witness the panic of Madrilenians running to find shelter from the air raid. Some of them try to identify the danger coming from above, as shown in an image shot from a truck on the streets of Madrid. The camera nevertheless shows that their field of vision is blocked up. Low angle shots of tall buildings obstructing the view convey their sense of helplessness. In the aftermath of the bombing, the camera lowers to the ground, panning across the dead bodies. This low point of view constantly emphasizes the civilians’ extreme vulnerability, despite their attempt to look up and grasp the danger. Seeking to provoke empathy, this choice places spectators in the physical and viewing position of the victims. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the main angle adopted by Los novios de la muerte is an aerial point of view, as suggested by its subtitle (“the film of the Legionary Air Force in Spain”). Benefiting from free access to military material (Cori 61), Marcellini shot mainly in the airfields of Mallorca, Logroño and Zaragoza (Crusells 93). The camera operator would be positioned behind the aviator on a two-seater aircraft and shoot with a specially crafted small camera. Bombings were recorded by specific operators aboard fiat S 81 and S 79 planes (Cori 61). Viewers were therefore placed at the same eye level as the cameramen of the squadron to capture bombs dropping. The subjective camera technique employed in one of the squadron sequences reinforces the impression of domination. The target is seen from above, in a bird’s eye view over the Teruel plain, and therefore from a predator’s position. With the exception of the opening sequence, human suffering is completely distanced through the aerial view. In an unpublished text, Hemingway precisely distinguished the Italian “aristocrats” flying above, fighting for Franco, and the corpses of Italian working-class infantrymen (Vernon xv). This contrast seems to be continued in the dialogue formed by the two documentaries. The adoption of the aerial point of view does not completely rule out lower viewpoints, but rather incorporates them into a wider statement of allegiance integral to Los novios de la muerte. As such, this choice pertains to a precise political manoeuvre, clearly visible in the last aerial sequence of the Italian

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film. The editing, by Ferdinando Maria Poggioli, follows a strict alternation between aerial and eye-level angles. The camera first pans across an aligned squadron of biplane fighters from a two-seater aircraft. This image aims quite blatantly to highlight the power of the Italian air force. It is followed by a pan shot of the Nationalist Spanish infantry, taken from the ground. The camera then cuts back to a third, closer shot of biplanes in full flight. Immediately after, come two eye-level shots: a static shot of tanks and a pan shot of Spanish infantrymen on the same road. This constant movement aims to demonstrate the role played by the Italian air force in protecting the Nationalist infantry. The contribution of the Italian air force to the Nationalist war effort had precisely been questioned by the Francoists themselves following the disaster of the battle of Guadalajara. Guadalajara, an event The Spanish Earth addresses for its symbolic weight, became synonymous with Italy’s unpreparedness, and was considered a second Caporetto. As Sciascia reported in his short story on the Spanish Civil War, the acronym ctv standing for Corpo Truppe Volontarie (Corps of Volunteer Troops) was derided as “¿Cuándo Te Vas?” (“When are you leaving?”) by Italy’s Nationalist allies (Sciascia 214). The urgency of refuting accusations of cowardice clearly informed the film’s agenda. The decision to keep an original Spanish title, deriving from the anthem of the Spanish Legion, testifies to the same necessity of publicly reiterating the Italo-Spanish bond. The choice of the air force as the central character is per se eloquent, given its historic role in favour of the Spanish military rebellion. As early as on 28 July 1936, that is twelve days after the uprising, Italy initially supplied the aircraft that were to transport the rebels from Spanish Morocco to Southern Spain, allowing them to progress northward (Ufficio storico dell’Aeronautica militare). The visual emphasis on glossy metal, aircraft bodywork and the fighter plane as an object surrounded by many mythologies is therefore not a gratuitous choice of imagery. These elements are all part of the same strategy to recall the Nationalists’ immense debt to Mussolini’s Italy. As such, they are diametrically opposed to the naturalistic imagery of The Spanish Earth determined by the decision to foreground the human aspect of the Republicans’ fight. Here too, Ivens’s documentary strategy corresponds to a thematic necessity. The film’s correlated themes were in fact, as stated by Ivens, “working the earth and fighting for the earth” (124). Van Dongen’s editing of Ferno’s images privileges a poetic mode. According to Bill Nichols’s terminology, the poetic mode reassembles fragments of the world in order to transform historical material into a lyrical form (105). It aims to grasp an inner truth by putting forward visual associations, such as the central association of human wrinkles with the arid soil. Influenced by its authors’ experience of the modernist avant-garde, the poetic mode as it appears in The Spanish Earth presents the fight through “temporal rhythms” and “spatial juxtapositions” (Nichols 102).

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Los novios de la muerte set out to be an ideological as well as an artistic response to The Spanish Earth, the “response of Fascist cinema to the reality of aerial warfare”, with “a peculiar style, a novel technique and a special narrative pace” (Marcellini 381–382). However, more than distancing itself from a Soviet-influenced realist style, Los novios de la muerte sometimes attempted to emulate its American rival. For instance, it endeavoured to adopt the same human point of view as in the American film. This was however limited to the opening and closing sequences, respectively set in a village and in Zaragoza, among Spanish crowds. The close-up on a villager’s craggy and toothless face is for example reminiscent of the metaphor between peasants and land lying at the heart of The Spanish Earth. These visual elements, belonging to the poetic mode, were borrowed from The Spanish Earth, but mingled with other motifs. In fact, they seem out of place next to an imagery pertaining predominantly to aviation documentaries in the vein of ¡Arriba España! (1937, Luce) and Cielo spagnolo (1938, incom). These elements later became distinctive of the novel incom style. They brought new momentum to war documentary-making, a need that Napolitano himself had previously felt: “In Spain I have seen the Luce operators at work. They are simple and intrepid souls who have collected first-class material. […] But that is not enough” (260). The films’ visual qualities, determined by specific aims and strategies, translate into film genre in two main ways. The Spanish Earth is clearly defined as a social documentary. Ivens’s personalization technique ultimately tends to presentify a fight whose universal dimensions are brought forward. The inhabitants of Fuentedueña become the characters of a human tragedy. The ­voice-over does not mention the causes of war, and employs very little political terminology, thus transcending the Spanish reality. Such a choice presupposes a factual knowledge of the conflict on the part of the American audience. The predominant mode in Los novios de la muerte, differently, is expository (Nichols 102–105), privileging a didactic relation with the audience. With a ­rhetorical rather than an aesthetic mode, it guides the viewer with careful signposting. Dates, figures and names of battles abound. The voice-over summarizes the p ­ roportions and the chronology of Italian aid. Los novios de la muerte adopts primarily a n ­ ewsreels model, while it also incorporates elements of the ­adventure film and the aviation subgenre. The proximity with fictionalised newsreels can be traced back to the origin of the film’s production company, incom. Created in the wake of its founder Sandro Pallavicini’s visit to the United States, it aspired to the formula developed by Louis de Rochemont’s The March of Time (Laura 158). This kinship was claimed by Marcellini and ­Napolitano themselves (Sacchi), in what was the first major incom production. Real-life sequences were mingled with reconstructed studio scenes in order to give the documentary a more dynamic pace. It is noteworthy that

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both authors were already working at the boundary between journalism, documentary and fiction.16 In addition, the editor of Los novios de la muerte, Poggioli, had previously dealt in the same way with images of various origins, when working on the first major Italian aviation film L’armata azzurra (1932) by Gennaro Righelli (De Berti 196).17 3

Distribution and Reception History

A study of the documentary strategies of The Spanish Earth and Los novios de la muerte would be incomplete without an assessment of their results, in the light of the objectives previously analysed. In the usa, The Spanish Earth received praise for its artistic qualities. The National Board of Review declared it one of the three best American films of 1937. Meant to create public awareness, The Spanish Earth was screened at the White House to President Roosevelt on 8 July 1937, and to major Hollywood figures. It was scheduled by three hundred theatres and union halls (Schoots 132), but was banned in several towns after being accused by local authorities of being a propaganda piece threatening public order (Spencer Carr 373). It did not reach as huge an audience as Contemporary Historians expected since no big group agreed to take the risk of distributing it. Nor did it manage to influence American foreign policy toward Spain, a task that turned out to be much beyond the film’s capacity. In the Netherlands and England, The Spanish Earth was subjected to a number of cuts in order to preserve “neutrality”’ (Schoots 132). Furthermore, there is no evidence that the film was publicly screened in Spain, despite Hemingway’s desire to show it to the troops (Schoots 132–133).18 However, even if it could not reach the desired audience, The Spanish Earth did raise donations across the usa: seventeen thousand dollars which contributed toward the purchase of seventeen ambulances, sent to the Republican territory. Los novios de la muerte suffered from an overly ambitious agenda, attempting to answer back to international media, antifascist film projects and The Spanish Earth in particular, as well as to the Luce documentary style. Its s­ tylistic

16

17 18

Marcellini would go on to make war fiction films that bordered on the adventure movie. In 1943 he transposed his experience of the Spanish Civil War into fiction with the feature-length Inviati speciali. This fiction to the glory of Italian pilots was composed of various scenes shot by director of photography Carlo Montuori as well as by Cines and Luce cameramen. Brunetta disagrees with the distribution history put forward by Schoots (129).

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heterogeneity reveals a hesitation as to which documentary model was best to adopt. Los novios de la muerte was essentially structured as a defence of the military role Italy had played in Spain in the two previous years. As such, the film was aimed at Italian, but also at Spanish audiences. It was nevertheless withdrawn from circulation in several Spanish areas. The Italian embassy in Spain warned the Ministry of Foreign Affairs against screening the documentary in ex-Republican areas, conquered by the Nationalists, since these were the same regions that had been continuously bombed by the Italian air force. ­Inflicting images of Italian bombings on these spectators would have been not only indecent, but also absolutely counter-productive (asmae. b. 1242, f. 1, 6 June 1939). Besides, the hostile reception by Catalan audiences of German war documentaries, “particularly in regard to the air force” (asmae. b. 1242, f. 1, 29 Oct. 1937), constituted a warning Italy should take seriously. Because Los novios de la muerte was a demonstration of the power of the air force that had violently bombed the Republican territories for a period of two and a half years and it presupposed a strong anti-communist position, it could only be screened with some profit in areas that had traditionally been under the Nationalists’ influence. This situation was extremely detrimental to Los novios de la muerte. Its exploitation was weakened by the fact that the locations with a high potential for box-office success were Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, the only cities where a documentary film or a newsreel could be scheduled for at least a week in first run theatres (asmae. b. 1242, f. 1, 29 Oct. 1937 1). The same report from the Italian embassy promoted another documentary strategy in order for Italy to assert its presence on a Spanish film market that was already occupied by American and German newsreels and documentaries (asmae. b. 1242, f. 1, 17 Nov. 1937). Ironically, the approved model was that of American non-fiction. Given the divisions of the Spanish people, the following suggestions seemed more appropriate: Do not […] show – at the moment – the bellicose face of Fascist Italy. Rather, introduce Italy’s giant steps in the political, social, economic and moral areas, so as to trigger admiration, through specially crafted ­documentaries. These should be edited with material from the Luce collection, but with great dynamism, following the Northern American example which is the most appreciated in this country. asmae. b. 1242, f. 16, June 1939

If the dramatized style promoted by the incom seemed to constitute a solution against foreign film competition, Los novios de la muerte certainly suffered

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from the changing Spanish political situation. Envisaged at the end of 1937, it was released in Italy in December 1938 and reached Spain only in 1939. At the time of its initial conception, it fitted directly into a new phase of Fascist film propaganda in regard to Spain. In October 1937, Minister of Popular Culture Dino Alfieri had in fact decided to stimulate the production of anticommunist films, as demonstrated by his directives to the nupie (Unit of Italian Propaganda Abroad).19 However, the full military conquest of the Spanish territory by Franco’s troops, completed in April 1939, meant that the nature of film audiences changed. As a result, by the time the film was released, a glorification of Italy’s deadly air force was no longer acceptable. The ill-fated distribution history of Los novios de la muerte demonstrates that the success of Italian film propaganda on the Spanish Civil War relied heavily on pre-existing sympathies. Similarly, The Spanish Earth had been conceived to be understood by spectators who were already inclined to support its cause. Outside of their respective privileged area of reception, both films were unsuccessful and had either to be dismantled (The Spanish Earth) or removed from circulation (Los novios de la muerte). As such, these two films point to the limits of war propaganda and its restricted field of action. Methodologically, they demonstrate the need for a stricter contextualization of the components of propaganda; if the efficiency of propaganda is to be thoroughly assessed, the objectives of a given propaganda work, and the pool of motifs and shared ideas on which it relies must be examined in relation to their specific target audiences. Such a dynamic approach allows us to demythify the notion of propaganda, as the analysis of The Spanish Earth and Los novios de la muerte has shown, as well as to demonstrate that, rather than being an omnipotent tool or the ultimate art of persuasion capable of ­changing attitudes and beliefs, propaganda instead requires fertile ground in order to merely confirm or reinforce existing trends and opinions (Welch ­Introduction 2). Works Cited Books and Periodicals

Beevor, Antony. The Battle for Spain. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006. Print. Brothers, Caroline. War and Photography: A Cultural History. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.

19

asmae. b. 1242, f. 1, 8 Oct. 1937. See also asmae. b. 1233, Telespresso n. 4885, 12 Oct. 1937.

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Brunetta, Gian Piero. Il cinema italiano di regime. Da La canzone dell’amore a Ossessione. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2009. Print. Cannistraro, Philip V. La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975. Print. Cavallo, Pietro. Italiani in guerra. Sentimenti e immagini dal 1940 al 1943. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997. Print. Comolli, Jean-Louis. Voir et pouvoir. L’Innocence perdue: cinéma, télévision, fiction, documentaire. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2004. Print. Cori, Alessandra. Il cinema di Romolo Marcellini. Tra storia e società dal colonialismo agli anni ’70. Recco-Genoa: Le Mani, 2009. Print. Coverdale, John F. Italian Intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975. Print. Crusells, Magi. La Guerra Civil Española: Cine y Propaganda. Barcelona: Ariel, 2003. Print. De Berti, Raffaele. “Il genere aviatorio italiano negli anni trenta tra modernità e identità nazionale. Il caso de L’armata azzurra (1932)”. Comunicazioni sociali, XXIV, 2 (2002): 194–201. Print. Ferrari, Massimo. “La stampa aeronautica italiana in epoca fascista”. Le ali del ventennio. L’aviazione italiana dal 1923 al 1945: bilanci storiografici e prospettive di giudizio. Ed. Massimo Ferrari. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2005. 31–109. Print. Hess, Carol A. “Competing Utopias? Musical Ideologies in the 1930s and Two Spanish Civil War Films”. Journal of the Society for American Music 2.3 (2008): 319–354. Print. Ivens, Joris. The Camera and I. New York: International, 1969. Print. Laura, Ernesto G. Le stagioni dell’aquila. Storia dell’Istituto Luce. Rome: Ente dello spettacolo, 2000. Print. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Print. Marcellini, Romolo. “I fidanzati della morte”. Cinema, 2.60, 25 Dec. 1938: 381–382. Print. Napolitano, Gian Gaspare. “Il cinema e la guerra di Spagna”. Cinema, 2.32, 25 Oct. 1937: 258–260. Print. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. Print. Poppi, Roberto. I registi dal 1930 ai giorni nostri. Rome: Gremese, 2002. Print. Pronay, Nicholas. Introduction. Propaganda, Politics and Film 1918–1945. Ed. Nicholas Pronay and D.W. Spring. London: Macmillan Press, 1982. 1–19. Print. Reeves, Nicholas. The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? London-New York: Cassell, 1999. Print. Sacchi, Filippo. “Corriere di Cinelandia. Un film di Marcellini e Napolitano sull’aviazione legionaria”. Corriere della Sera 31 Dec. 1938. Print. Schoots, Hans. Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2000. Print. Sciascia, Leonardo. “L’antimonio”. Gli zii di Sicilia. Milan: Adelphi, 1992. 173–241.

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Spencer Carr, Virginia. Dos Passos: A Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. Print. Vernon, Alex. Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. Print. Virilio, Paul. Guerre et cinéma I. Logistique de la perception. Paris: Editions des Cahiers du Cinéma, 1991. Print. Welch, David. Introduction. Nazi Propaganda. The Power and the Limitations. Ed. David Welch. Totowa: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983. Print. Welch, David. The Third Reich. Politics and Propaganda. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. .

Official Papers

Abbreviations: ASMAE: Archivio storico diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri Gabinetto: Carte del Gabinetto del Ministro e della Segreteria generale (1923–1943) US: Ufficio Spagna b.: busta f.: fascicolo ASMAE. Gabinetto. Serie terza, US, busta 1333, Telespresso 344 del capo dell’Ufficio Stampa e Propaganda italo-spagnolo Danzi al Ministero degli Affari Esteri, 14 Apr. 1937. Print. ASMAE. Gabinetto. Serie terza, US, b. 1242, fascicolo 4 Propaganda fotografica, sottofascicolo Nucleo fotocinematografico in OMS, Lettera del presidente dell’Istituto Luce Paulucci di Calboli Barone a Luca Pietromarchi, vice direttore generale al Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome 19 Dec. 1936. Print. ASMAE. Gabinetto. Serie terza, US, b. 1242, f. 1 Propaganda cinematografica in Spagna, sottofascicolo Missione Ingegnere Pallavicini in Spagna da parte Minculpop per riprese cinematografiche varie. Print. ASMAE. Gabinetto. Serie terza, US, b.1233. Copia della lettera di Gian Gaspare Napolitano a Guglielmo Danzi, a destinazione del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Salamanca 15 Apr. 1937. Print. ASMAE. Gabinetto. Serie terza, US, b.1243, f.2 Nucleo fotocinematografico dell’Istituto Luce in OMS, Sottofascicolo Miscellanea. Print. ASMAE. Gabinetto. Serie terza, US, b. 1242, f. 1 Propaganda cinematografica in Spagna, Copia per conoscenza di Gabus del telespresso n. 3307/867 di Roncalli dell’Ambasciata d’Italia al Ministero degli Affari Esteri, San Sebastian, 6 June 1939. Print. ASMAE. Gabinetto. Serie terza, US, b. 1242, f. 1 Propaganda cinematografica in Spagna. Telespresso n. 3128/207 dall’Ufficio Stampa e Propaganda italo-spagnolo al Ministero della Cultura Popolare, al Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Ufficio Spagna, all’Istituto Luce, all’Ambasciata d’Italia a Salamanca, Salamanca 29 Oct. 1937. Print.

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ASMAE. Gabinetto. Serie terza, US, b. 1242, f. 1 Propaganda cinematografica in Spagna. Telespresso n. 3484/290 dall’Ufficio Stampa e Propaganda italo-spagnolo al Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Ufficio Spagna, Salamanca 17 Nov. 1937. Print. ASMAE. Gabinetto. Serie terza, US, b. 1242, f. 1 Propaganda cinematografica in Spagna. Lettera di Dino Alfieri, Ministro della Cultura Popolare, a Galeazzo Ciano, Ministro degli Affari Esteri, Rome 8 Oct. 1937. Print. ASMAE. Gabinetto. Serie terza, US, b. 1233. Telespresso n.4885 del Ministro della Cultura Popolare Dino Alfieri alla Direzionale Generale dei Servizi di Propaganda, Ufficio NUPIE, Ambasciata d’Italia a Salamanca, Rome 12 Oct. 1937. Print. Ufficio storico dell’Aeronautica militare, fondo Operazione Militare Spagna, Serie 7, Carteggio 1936–1942, sottoserie 1. Affari generali, 1936–1941, Organizzazione e impiego dell’Aviazione legionaria 1936–1941, b.76, f. 13, Registri di volo e diari storici. Print.

chapter 9

Revisiting the Congo’s Forgotten Wars: Jean Lartéguy’s Les Chimères noires and the Secession of Katanga Christopher Lloyd Abstract The French war correspondent and best-selling novelist Jean Lartéguy is mainly ­remembered for his novels about the Algerian War. Les Chimères noires (1963), the ­object of study of this chapter, also merits rediscovery, since this engaging roman à clé focuses on a more neglected but equally violent and tragic conflict of decolonization: the short-lived secession of South Katanga from the newly independent former ­Belgian Congo in July 1960. Given the relatively limited attention accorded by the international media to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s seventeen civil wars since independence, works like Lartéguy’s have an important memorializing function. Analysing Lartéguy’s treatment of the conflict, its ideological and mythic dimensions, the chapter also explores wider generic, ethical and cultural issues, in particular the strengths and limitations of fictionalized accounts of the Congo like Les Chimères noires in comparison to ostensibly more factual works by diplomats and historians.

The French war correspondent and prolific author Jean Lartéguy (aka Lucien Osty, 1920–2011) is mainly remembered for his best-selling novels Les Centurions (1960) and Les Prétoriens (1961) about the controversial role played by the paratroop regiments during the tumultuous final years of French Algeria. But his later work, Les Chimères noires (1963, co-authored with the journalist Max Clos)1 also merits rediscovery, since this engaging roman à clé focuses on a more neglected but equally violent and tragic conflict of decolonization: the short-lived secession of the province of South Katanga from the newly independent former Belgian Congo in July 1960. As with his earlier novels, Lartéguy offers a lively and at times provocative account of dramatic events from recent 1 Lartéguy 1970. Subsequent references given in the text as cn are to this edition. All ­translations into English are mine.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004353244_011

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history, that combines factual reportage, fictionalized adventure story and more philosophical observations on the clash of cultures and ideologies exemplified by the Katangan catastrophe. Les Chimères noires blends the tropes of popular adventure fiction with satirical and polemical reflexion on the ­failings of decolonization, in order to pursue a dialogue between history and fiction which Jerome de Groot sees as a generic characteristic of the historical novel. In analysing Lartéguy’s treatment of the conflict and its ideological and mythic dimensions (such as the complex inter-­relationship ­between European m ­ ercenaries, the forces of the United Nations, and C ­ ongolese ­politicians), I ­explore wider generic, ethical and cultural issues (for example, the strengths and limitations of fictionalized accounts of the Congo like L­ artéguy’s in comparison to ostensibly more factual works by diplomats and historians). To ­understand the historical resonance of Lartéguy’s work, it is therefore ­important to outline and analyse in some detail the key events behind and ­actors involved in the secession, particularly since few twenty-first century readers are likely to recall them. The so-called Congo Free State was recognized by the Berlin conference of July 1885 as the personal fiefdom of Leopold ii, until it became officially a Belgian colony in 1908; following independence on 30 June 1960, it became the Republic of Congo, was renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1964 to 1971, and then Zaire from 1971 to 1997; it reverted to the name drc in 1997 after Mobutu was ousted by Laurent Kabila. In his classic study of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild argues this unfortunate country has long since been consigned to the “silences of history” (294). The violent excesses committed by European settlers and their local enforcers under the successive rule of Leopold ii and the Belgian government caused an estimated drop of 50% in the native population between 1880 and 1920, which suggests an irrational, genocidal project far exceeding mercenary and ruthless exploitation of abundant natural resources (notably rubber and copper). In fact, an international protest campaign was mounted against Belgian atrocities in the early decades of the twentieth century, led by figures such as Roger Casement and E.D. Morel, though its practical impact was limited (Louis & Stengers). A recent historian estimates that since independence the drc has ­experienced seventeen civil wars, each lasting on average eighteen months and cumulatively causing over four million deaths; the vast majority of these fatalities have occurred since 1998, after the eviction of Mobutu (Kisangani). Most are due not to military action but the deadly incidental effects of ­sustained warfare and ensuing social collapse (disease, pillaging and famine). Although this suffering has been just as well chronicled since the turn of the twenty-first century as it was a century earlier by historians and writers, as the ­journalist

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Tim Butcher remarks, “the truly staggering thing was how this loss of life ­barely registered on the outside world” (5) (despite being among the highest in any conflict since World War Two). Following his 2004 journey retracing the explorer Stanley’s original mapping of the country, Butcher records systematic looting of the nation’s resources by its rulers and neighbours leading to regression to a pre-industrial state and loss of institutional memory. The basic infrastructure (health care, education, transport) that was maintained by the Belgian colonial system has largely collapsed alongside the shrinking economy (for example, per capita gdp was $430 in 1960 and only $90 in 2010). The Katanga secession was the first of these wars; it lasted from 11 July 1960 to 14 January 1963, caused at least 80,000 deaths, and remained a spectre that haunted Congo for subsequent decades (Kisangani 34). Following rioting and disorder, the Belgians notionally granted independence in 1960, while planning however on retaining control of Congo’s bureaucracy, army and economy. This ploy suited the businessman Moïse Tshombe, leader of the Confédération des associations tribales du Katanga, who sought autonomy for his mineralrich province, and to retain close links with Belgian business. On the other hand, the new Congolese prime minister, the firebrand Patrice Lumumba, denounced the atrocities committed under Belgian rule in an impromptu speech on independence day (after being excluded from the official programme), telling King Baudouin “Nous ne sommes plus vos singes” (Meredith 102).2 When Lumumba replaced the 1,100 Belgian officers in control of the army with Congolese ex-ncos (making his aide Joseph Mobutu chief of staff), a consequent army mutiny provoked Tshombe to declare unilateral Katangan independence, with Belgian connivance. Lumumba sought un assistance to end the secession and on 15 August also requested military aid from the Soviet Union to quell a further secession in South Kasai. Lumumba’s invasion of South Kasai and ensuing massacres of refugees lost him the support of Mobutu and Kasavubu, the president, (somewhat farcically, both prime minister and president proclaimed each other’s dismissal). On 14 September, with the backing of the cia and us government, Mobutu assumed power temporarily, evicting Lumumba and expelling the Soviets. Lumumba’s supporters set up a rival government in Stanleyville (with Soviet and Egyptian support), but Lumumba himself was detained in Kasai province and, though promised un protection, was surrendered to his enemies in Tshombe’s capital Elisabethville on 17 January 1961, where he and two close colleagues were tortured and shot by firing squad. Their bodies were destroyed and the exact circumstances of the assassination concealed, making Lumumba “one of 2 “We are no longer your monkeys”.

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the most famous political martyrs of modern times” (Meredith 112).3 By invoking Soviet support and thereby alienating most Western governments and his local allies, however, Lumumba had divided his country and made it a pawn in the cold war. One consequence was that, within three months of independence, Congo had four rival governments established in different provinces.4 In Katanga, Tshombe hired white mercenaries and retained Belgian officers to command the local gendarmerie (which he attempted to upgrade to an army). But North Katanga opposed the secession and remained loyal to the national government; most of the casualties were caused by Tshombe’s unsuccessful onslaught on the North. By January 1963, un forces had captured most strategic locations in the South, thereby ending the secession by force after diplomatic negotiations failed. In 1964, President Kasavubu recalled Tshombe from exile in Spain to serve as prime minister, when further uprisings spread across two-thirds of the country. Again, he used mercenaries to stiffen the national army; their relative success led to Tshombe’s dismissal as an unwelcome rival and Mobutu’s second coup in November 1965. Tshombe’s attempts to return to power were thwarted when his aircraft was hijacked in 1967; he died under house arrest in Algeria in June 1969. For a further thirty years, French, Belgian and American forces supported Mobutu in quelling uprisings in Katanga. The un returned to Congo in 2000, in the wake of the civil war that followed Mobutu’s overthrow; 20,000 un troops remain there, at the cost of one billion dollars annually (Adebajo). Les Chimères noires is thus a timely work, for anyone interested in the causes and representation of the tragic fissuring of the Congo (and indeed other postcolonial African states). Although it is tempting to dismiss Jean Lartéguy as an industrious producer of ephemeral bestsellers, for all their shortcomings as works of literature, his novels display the generic strengths of historical fiction, or more accurately, historicized fiction, in that the author takes near-contemporary issues of historic significance (typically, the struggles of decolonization and the clash of West and East), and attempts to illustrate their processes within the framework of an adventure story centred on fictional or semi-fictional characters who briefly become major players in key events. Despite somewhat perfunctory plotting and characterization, at their best his novels combine journalistic reportage, dramatic action and provocative commentary on 3 A striking example of the mythification of Lumumba as heroic martyr of colonial oppression is Aimé Césaire’s play Une saison au Congo (1966), which remains in the international theatrical repertoire today. 4 Namely: Lumumba’s supporters in Stanleyville; Tshombe’s in Katanga; Albert Kalonji’s in Kasai; Kasavubu’s in Leopoldville. See Wrong 2000.

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c­ lashing ideologies and myths. Arguably, literary works like Lartéguy’s, which attract and inform a large international audience,5 have an important memorializing function, heightening their readers’ awareness of historical processes as well as allowing them the vicarious experience of war and conflict. Although Les Centurions was somewhat bizarrely adopted by General ­David Petraeus as a manual on counter-insurgency techniques applicable to Iraq and Afghanistan, most of Lartéguy’s work is either ignored by critical commentators or dismissed with hostility as a quasi-fascistic apologia for western colonialism. For example, Philip Dine, in a well-researched study of fictional representations of the Algerian War, presents Les Centurions as a “site of literary mystification” adding “the novel’s sheer popularity ensured that it did more than any other comparable work to further the pro-colonial version of the para myth” (42). These assertions seem to be based on the erroneous assumption that Lartéguy is a monolithic supporter of both French Algeria and the French Army, when in fact a more careful reading of his work reveals that his judgements and stance are far more nuanced: the contradictions and corruption of the colonial system, government and military hierarchy in Indochina and Algeria are in fact exposed to unsympathetic scrutiny in many of his novels, and the author’s respect for heroic and sincere men of action (as opposed to selfserving politicians and hypocritical intellectuals) extends beyond paratroop officers to include at least some fln activists in Les Centurions and Les Prétoriens. An online article on “Le Négationnisme colonial” by Francis Arzalier (2006) misrepresents Les Chimères noires in an even more caricatural fashion. He asserts the novel offers a “lecture raciste de la décolonisation du Congo, glorification des mercenaires blancs du Katanga”;6 this sweeping judgement is based on one lengthy quotation from the book, which is offered without further analysis, although it actually comes from a character who is blaming Belgian colonialism for the ills of the newly independent Congo. In this respect, Lartéguy has suffered from the same ill-founded criticism as the author of a more famous fictionalized account of the Congo: Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness (1902) notoriously provoked Chinua Achebe into denouncing him as a “bloody racist” (7). Robert Hampson observes more temperately in his edition of the book that this (dis)ingenuously misreads Conrad’s 5 O’Connell estimates cumulative sales in France of over one million copies for Lartéguy’s novels. 6 “A racist reading of the decolonization of Congo and a glorification of white mercenaries in Katanga”. For more sympathetic and dispassionate studies of Lartéguy’s work, see Le Roux (2013) and O’Connell; the latter situates Lartéguy as “a non-Communist of the left” who defends “traditional Western humanistic values and […] modern political liberalism” (1095).

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use of oblique narration. He is not Marlow, and “If Marlow’s perceptions are at times racist, it is because [contemporary] codes and conventions were racist” (xxxi).7 Similarly, Lartéguy presents a diverse range of opinions about Katanga in Les Chimères noires: nearly all are expressed by characters who are viscerally engaged for or against the secession and often extremely biased (racial hatred of either black Africans or white Europeans is a common characteristic). As the journalist Dorat observes in the novel, Le Congo, c’est un rassemblement […] invraisemblable d’ethnies et de clans dont aucun ne parle la même langue et qui, tous, rêvent de s’étriper au nom de vieilles querelles dont l’origine se perd […] dans la nuit des temps… (26)8 A hostile reader certainly will have no difficulty in discovering other similar references to the timeless domain of the primitive, supernatural and collective soul of Africa in the course of the novel (including practices such as cannibalism and atrocious mutilation), or indeed more overtly racist ­stereotyping.9 Thus La Roncière takes refuge in the native quarter of Elisabethville with considerable revulsion, for “la lèpre nègre s’y était mise avec sa crasse, son grouillement d’enfants, ses détritus et aussi ses odeurs” (238).10 But this u ­ neasy enumeration is patently an example of free indirect speech, of discourse ­belonging to a bigoted character rather than the narrator, meant to reflect the contemptuous rejection (and personal humiliation) of a European mercenary commander. The author’s own viewpoint is much harder to discern, since it is ostensibly that of an objective chronicler who lets everyone express their conflicting perceptions, rather than seeking to manipulate his readers’ reactions and judgements. While thanking his collaborator Max Clos for his research in Katanga, Lartéguy prefaces the book by insisting it is fiction and “tous les personnages 7

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Achebe does however anticipate this objection by observing: “if Conrad’s intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator, his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters” (7). “Congo is an unlikely collection of ethnic groups and clans, none of which speak the same language, and all of which dream of eviscerating each other in pursuit of old quarrels whose origins are lost in the darkness of time”. Senghor and Césaire’s affirmation of “négritude” was an attempt to revalidate such negative colonial markers of African culture and identity. See Loomba (2005). “It was imbued with the negroes’ leprosy, its filth, its swarming children, its garbage and also its smells”.

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sont imaginaires, comme les aventures qu’il relate” (cn 5).11 This disavowal certainly is disingenuous, since the novel in fact closely follows the actual events in the Congo and several of its central characters are barely disguised ­representations of the key players. In this respect, it is revealing to read Lartéguy’s lightly fictionalized account in tandem with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s self-­ justifying memoir of his part in contesting the secession, To Katanga and Back: a un Case History, published in 1962, or indeed Mike Hoare’s self-glorifying account of working for Tshombe as a Congo Mercenary (1967). Despite its large cast of characters (many of them purely functional and barely individualized), Les Chimères noires concentrates mainly on six central figures, who fall into three contrasting groups: three French mercenaries (La Roncière, Fonts and Kreis); two Katangan politicians (President Kimjanga and his chief minister Bongo); and the Irish diplomat O’Maley, the representative of the un Secretary General. While the first three are largely fictionalized (and thus have a certain autonomy, insofar as their interventions are fictional additions to the historical record), the politicians and diplomat are patently calqued on Tshombe, Godefroid Munongo and O’Brien. Renaming them perhaps allows Lartéguy to escape complaints of factual distortion and libel suits (since Kimjanga is shown as a two-faced poltroon, Bongo accused of personally slaughtering Lumumba, and O’Maley presented as a vain, self-deceiving academic whose bungling interventions intensify the crisis). The mercenaries are presented more sympathetically, insofar as they emerge as courageous and efficient men of action who are motivated not by material gain but archaic values like honour, loyalty and patriotism. But the novel certainly does not glorify the mercenaries or justify their activities; however tactfully skilful their thwarting of superior un forces may be, they are shown merely to protract the agony of the secessionist state in service of an unjustifiable and corrupt cause. Lt Col La Roncière, a former commander of the 3e rep whose career is on hold after his unit’s mutinous activities in Algeria, is recruited with the complicity of the Elysée to be the co of Kimjanga’s new mercenary force. (In fact, La Roncière’s chequered career closely matches that of the notorious French mercenary Roger Faulques, but specific details within the novel seem to be invented.)12 Thomas Fonts, notionally a member of the consular service, is imposed on him as a deputy. Both Fonts and La Roncière are experts in clandestine and psychological warfare, although the civilian Fonts emerges as ­tactically more adroit and adaptable in the turmoil of Katanga. They recruit 11 12

“All the characters are imaginary, as are the adventures related”. Roger Faulques (1924–2011) also appears as the boss of Henri Alleg’s brutal interrogators in La Question (83).

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the Franco-German Karl Kreis, a former warrant officer in the Foreign Legion and originally a lieutenant in the Waffen-ss; despite his fondness for imposing iron discipline and blindly obeying orders (“un homme de fer mais une tête de cochon” 38),13 Kreis ultimately refuses Bongo’s command to blow up a dam in order to lay waste to most of the country. All three travel under false identities in January 1961 to the Congo, with the ostensible mission of defending order and prosperity in Katanga against the disorder overwhelming the nation. As La Roncière somewhat pompously claims, “Nous partons en Afrique défendre […] le droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes et de leur destin contre les prétentions que s’arrogent quelques fonctionnaires internationaux irresponsables qui se font consciemment ou inconsciemment les fourriers du communisme” (42).14 From their arrival, however, this mission is exposed as a sham doomed to failure. Following Lumumba’s elimination, most western governments no l­onger have any reason to back Katanga against the national government and to oppose the un policy of ending the secession. La Roncière rapidly realises that Katanga is an “immense duperie”,15 a phantom state set up purely to ­benefit Belgian financial interests and local European and African elites (121). The Belgian and Congolese officers who form the cadres of the nascent Katangan army do their best to subvert the mercenaries’ attempts to train local troops (as Kreis discovers to his cost). Kimjanga supposedly enjoys the support of local chiefs (unlike Lumumba, who regarded them as an obstacle to m ­ odernization (“cette lèpre qui empêchait l’Afrique d’évoluer”, cn 160));16 in this respect, Kimjanga is the pawn of the murderous Bongo, himself a d­ escendant of chiefs done to death by the Belgians. Such local leaders believe they hold “le pouvoir réel, celui qui prend ses racines dans le vieux passé de l’Afrique et se pare de tous ses sortilèges” (161).17 Fonts, on the other hand, thinks real power is located outside Africa altogether, at un hq in New York. His attempts to unify the chiefs are thwarted when the dominant chief uses his weaponry to massacre a rival leader and 3,000 members of his tribe, a war crime for which O’Maley blames the mercenaries.

13 14

15 16 17

“A man of iron, but stubborn as a mule”. “We are leaving for Africa, to defend the right of peoples to determine their freedom and destiny, in opposition to the pretensions of certain irresponsible international officials who consciously or unconsciously have become the forerunners of communism”. “Immense swindle”. “Leprosy preventing Africa from evolving”. “Real power, rooted in the ancient past of Africa and adorned with all its magic”.

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This atrocity allows O’Maley to launch direct military action by un forces against Katanga, with the aim of expelling the mercenaries and European cadres and forcing the government to capitulate. The multinational un troops are themselves divided and often incompetent; the Swedes fail to detain Kimjanga, who takes refuge in Northern Rhodesia; an inexperienced Irish company is ­taken prisoner by Katangese para-commandos and narrowly escapes being massacred; a Katangan training jet grounds all un aircraft, since their fighter jets have been held up by the British in Uganda. Only the Indian units, with their Gurkha mercenaries, show any fighting spirit; but by skilful use of agents provocateurs, Fonts tricks them into shooting unarmed civilians at a demonstration, thereby destroying O’Maley’s attempts to win the propaganda battle in the international media. The un head of security Colonel Degger concludes that O’Maley is neither a professional soldier nor a diplomat, but an “universitaire bouillonnant qui pensait trop vite, agissait de travers et tombait ­facilement dans les pièges que lui tendaient ses adversaires” (236).18 After rebuking O’Maley for exceeding his orders, the un Secretary General intervenes personally to negotiate with Kimjanga. On 18 September 1961 the aircraft carrying the Secretary General and his team crashes as it approaches N’Dola (Northern Rhodesia/Zambia), killing all on board. In a lengthy footnote (372), Lartéguy speculates on whether Hammarskjöld’s death was an accident or an assassination; in the novel, he implies that Bongo may be responsible. In November 1961, the Security Council votes a resolution to use force to break the secession and launches a full-scale bombardment of Elisabethville. In January 1963, as the novel ends, Kimjanga remains president of Katanga province, having retreated to Kolwezi with the support of Kreis and the few remaining mercenaries. For all their flaws, both Kimjanga and Bongo are politically skilful and outmanoeuvre their opponents at the un. As La Roncière grudgingly acknowledges, “l’incarnation du monde blanc […] s’agenouille devant un type qui, quinze mois plus tôt, n’était qu’un commerçant en faillite” (368).19 Neither of them are simply pawns of Belgian financial interests and the Union minière. In direct opposition to Belgian hegemony, Bongo threatens both to nationalize the mining company and to destroy the Delcommune dam. Their adversary O’Maley, the son of an Irish Republican militant who spent eight years in British prisons (cn 92), is blinkered by his anti-colonial preconceptions and constantly misjudges the complexity and tactical reality of the conflict: “Homme de gauche 18 19

“Hyperactive academic, who thought too fast, acted ineptly and easily fell into the traps set for him by his adversaries”. “The incarnation of the white world is on his knees before a fellow who fifteen months earlier was just a bankrupt businessman”.

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et libéral, Patrick O’Maley estimait déjà, avant son arrivée, que la sécession katangaise avait été provoquée par les grands intérêts économiques belges et anglais qu’il exécrait” (93).20 In practice, he is just as callous and mendacious as his opponents (when a colleague’s daughter is kidnapped, he refuses un assistance; she is rescued by Fonts and the mercenaries). This same colleague comments drily that O’Maley’s proposed book about his Katangan venture will merely remind the world of his failures. The narrative economy of Les Chimères noires makes O’Maley into an unflattering and unjust caricature of Conor Cruise O’Brien, whose career as a diplomat was destroyed by the Katangan secession, as he freely admits in what he calls his “testimony” (9).21 In actual fact, both books often overlap and agree in their account and interpretation of events. Nonetheless, O’Brien underestimates Tshombe by presenting him as a “moderately successful [ex-]grocer” serving the interests of Belgian financiers, and sees the secession as an exemplary ideological struggle between neo-colonial western interests and newly independent Afro-Asian countries, even asserting that Katanga institutionalized a form of apartheid, mimicking South Africa, “with a thin but expensive black screen” (119, 180, 305). While some historians accept this negative interpretation, others have argued that Tshombe had considerable local legitimacy and support, noting for example that O’Brien’s lofty dismissal ignores the views of the Katangese population resentful about their exclusion from Congolese national politics.22 Lartéguy’s account of African politicians may be unflattering in its insistence on their personal failings, but it does not deny or dismiss their political skills or ideological justifications. Their un adversaries are revealed to be equally unscrupulous and also militarily hamstrung by their reluctance to use force, given their supposed peace-keeping mission. On the other hand, Lartéguy ­ignores the un’s humanitarian mission, in particular its responsibility for a displaced persons’ camp holding some 45,000 people, most of them refugees from the military conflict. That Lartéguy’s semi-fictional account of the Katanga crisis is relatively balanced and nuanced becomes even more apparent if it is compared with another memoir, Mike Hoare’s Congo Mercenary (1967). After serving in Katanga in 1960–61, Hoare was recruited as a battalion commander 20

“As a liberal man of the left, Patrick O’Maley had already decided before his arrival that the Katangese secession had been provoked by the major Belgian and British economic interest groups which he detested”. 21 O’Brien was in fact an accomplished diplomat, politician, journalist and writer. 22 G. Nzongola-Ntalaja (2002), follows O’Brien’s interpretation, whereas Kisangani (2012) adopts a more nuanced view.

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in the Congolese national army, along with other white mercenaries, when Moïse Tshombe was briefly recalled from exile in 1964 to act as prime minister, after the un’s abandonment of its mission triggered a further uprising. Though readable and informative as an account of military action, and less inclined to romanticize mercenaries than Lartéguy, Hoare’s wider representation of the Congo is almost comical in its tendentious simplifications and omissions. Thus, he praises “the lasting benefits which the Belgians bequeathed to the colony which they administered so ably for fifty-two years” and asserts that the Congo’s post-independence troubles “are of Congolese making” (18, 284). While massacres and atrocities committed by the rebels are described in detail, and they are dismissed as uncivilized savages, Tshombe and Mobutu are glorified as disinterested patriots and statesmen. To sum up and conclude this discussion. Although it does not diverge ­significantly from other historical and autobiographical narratives on factual matters, Lartéguy’s novel (as its title implies) stresses a somewhat ­indeterminate mythic dimension that echoes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness rather than the ­partisan ideological stance more commonly adopted by postcolonial commentators. As Michela Wrong argues, Conrad’s “darkness” refers to the monstrous passions at the core of the human soul, lying ready to emerge when man’s better instincts are suspended, rather than a continent’s supposed predisposition to violence. Conrad was more preoccupied with rotten Western values, the white man’s inhumanity to the black man, than, as is almost always assumed today, black savagery. (10) Far from supporting neo-colonialism (whether sponsored by the Belgians or the international Realpolitik that drives un interventions), Lartéguy suggests, in a concluding exchange between two diplomats, that western interventions in Africa are chimerical, finally explaining his title Les Chimères noires: Nous autres Blancs, nous avons peuplé l’Afrique de chimères. Nous avons voulu imposer à ce pays nos dieux, nos idéologies, nos techniques…[…] L’Afrique, ce grand ventre, a tout digéré. Et qu’en est-il ressorti? Ces espèces d’animaux composites et monstrueux! […] Nous sommes furieux de reconnaître dans ces chimères noires des morceaux déformés, dénaturés de ces notions, de ces techniques que nous avons voulu imposer à l’Afrique! (405–406)23 23

“We whites have peopled Africa with chimeras. We wanted to impose our gods, our ideologies, our technology on this country. Africa’s big belly digested it all. And what came

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In other words, the monstrous aberrations and excesses which Europeans decry in post-independence Africa are as much a distorted product and image of their own misguided beliefs and ambitions as they are signs of Africa’s failure to assimilate Western civilization. As Russell Warren Howe argues, the tragic and apparently unending conflicts and divisions of the Congo do indeed lend themselves to mythification, with figures like Lumumba, Tshombe and Mobutu turned into “true characters of myth [whose] story and… image can be made to fit different needs and biases” (591). The mercenary too is more than a base hireling: he can be demonized as a callous, venal exploiter of strife and misery, or idolized as a warrior or champion of beleaguered minorities; in terms of military history, however, he represents a norm rather than an exception, since before the twentieth century, most European wars were fought by mercenaries, and most African countries have employed them in various guises. When Lartéguy evokes the primal spirit of Africa in opposition to western, materialistic values, he oscillates somewhat ambivalently between negative and positive judgements, which only naive or partisan readers will take at face value, since they reflect the contradictory views of characters rather than the author. Thus when La Roncière and Fonts witness a minister who is out of favour being severely beaten by soldiers on his arrival at Leopoldville airport, La Roncière is sickened, whereas Fonts remarks: “J’aime bien l’Afrique […] C’est le seul pays où l’on puisse voir un ministre se faire rosser par la garde d’honneur chargée de l’accueillir” (58).24 This incident provokes a variety of interpretations: that Congo is a violent place on the verge of anarchy; that even the apparently powerful are highly vulnerable; that blacks are well used to severe beatings and soon recover (according to a Belgian bystander); that French politicians deserve similar treatment (as Fonts perhaps implies). By presenting such a multiplicity of viewpoints and adopting a narratorial position of sceptical detachment, Lartéguy’s novel avoids the ideological dogmatism and blinkered self-justification which characterize other commentators’ ostensibly factual accounts. His version of the forgotten prologue to the contemporary tragedies of Congo and central Africa is both prescient and compelling.

24

out of all this? Those monstrous, hybrid animals! We are furious when we recognize in these black chimeras deformed and perverted fragments of those notions and technology which we tried to impose on Africa!” Les Chimères noires appeared in English translation as The Hounds of Hell (1966), which breaks the explanatory link between the novel’s title and this concluding passage. “I like Africa. It’s the only country where you can see a minister getting a beating from the honour guard sent to greet him”.

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Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa”. Research in African Literature, 9.1 (1978): 1–15. Print. Adebajo, Adekeye. UN Peacekeeping in Africa: from the Suez Crisis to the Sudan Conflicts. Johannesburg: Fanele, 2011. Print. Alleg, Henri. La Question. Paris: Pauvert, 1966. Print. Arzalier, Francis. “Le Négationnisme colonial, de l’Université à la littérature de gare”. Cahiers d’histoire, 99 (2006). Web. Feb. 2014. Butcher, Tim. Blood River. London: Vintage, 2008. Print. Césaire, Aimé. Une saison au Congo. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Print. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness & The Congo Diary. Ed. Robert Hampson. London: Penguin, 1995. Print. De Groot, Jérôme. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge, 2010. Print. Dine, Philip. Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film, 1954–1992. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Print. Hoare, Mike. Congo Mercenary. London: Robert Hale, 1967. Print. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost. London: Macmillan, 2000. Print. Howe, Russell Warren. “Man and Myth in Political Africa”. Foreign Affairs, 46.3 (1968): 584–598. Print. Kisangani, Emizer François. Civil Wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo1960–2010. Boulder/London: Lynne Rienner, 2012. Print. Lartéguy, Jean. Les Chimères noires. 1963. Paris: Paris Match/Editions Rombaldi, 1970. Print. Lartéguy, Jean. The Hounds of Hell. Trans. Xan Fielding. London: Cassell, 1966. Print. Le Roux, Hubert. Jean Lartéguy le dernier centurion. Paris: Tallandier, 2013. Print. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2005. Print. Louis, William Roger & Jean Stengers, eds. E.D. Morel’s History of the Congo Reform Movement. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Print. Meredith, Martin. The State of Africa. London: The Free Press, 2005. Print. Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges. The Congo from Leopold to Kabila. London/New York: Zed Books, 2002. Print. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. To Katanga and Back: a UN Case History. London: Hutchinson, 1962. Print. O’Connell, David. “Jean Lartéguy: A Popular Phenomenon”. The French Review, 45.6 (1972): 1087–1097. Print. Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa 1876–1912. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991. Print. Wrong, Michela. In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo. London: Fourth Estate, 2000. Print.

chapter 10

“A Boy and His Dog…”: The War in Afghanistan and Storytelling Claire Bowen Abstract At the time when hostility to British engagement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was growing, the repatriation of British soldiers killed in action became the object of public ceremonies and extensive coverage by the tabloids in a characteristic displacement of interest from information about the war to representation and celebration of “ordinary” heroes. This chapter focuses on the exceptionally popular case of Lance Corporal Liam Tasker and his working dog killed in Afghanistan in 2011. Using Foucault’s concept of “regimes of truth” and Christian Salmon’s Storytelling (2007), the study analyses the visual and textual techniques which transform a report of war ­casualties both into a story about an ordinary man and his dog, and a narrative of national i­ dentity confirming the fundamental nature of the British soldier. R ­ epetition, expansion, embellishment and audience participation generate a narrative spiral strengthening shared beliefs and assumptions.



Prologue: Storytelling

On March 1st, 2011 Lance Corporal Liam Tasker of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps was killed by a Taliban sniper while on patrol with an infantry unit in Helmland. His Springer Spaniel explosives sniffer dog was not hurt but died later that day, reportedly of a seizure. Tasker and his dog, Theo, were deployed to Afghanistan in September 2010 to perform the task of accompanying foot patrols to detect explosive devices and stores. During their tour Tasker and Theo became the best detection team in Afghanistan with fourteen finds in five months. On March 9th, the ashes of the dog and the body of his handler were repatriated on the same flight. L/Cpl Tasker’s funeral procession then took the usual route to the mortuary in Oxford, passing through the village of Wootton Bassett where locals and visitors greeted military funeral processions with a public display of mourning. Liam Tasker was the 358th member of the United © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004353244_012

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­ ingdom’s military personnel to die in Afghanistan since 2001 and among the K last to be given a Wootton Bassett commemoration. The circumstances of the deaths and repatriations of man and dog were covered extensively by national and local press and television in the United Kingdom and the story also appeared in the American media. Interest was rekindled over the next eighteen months as both Tasker and Theo were decorated, the former Mentioned in Dispatches and the latter awarded the Dickin Medal for gallantry in service. It was inevitable that the tabloids – and, indeed, the rest of the press – should pay particular attention to Tasker and Theo. They had been ­photographed and Tasker interviewed at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan for a Ministry of Defence press release, Theo the superhero dog, published on 14 February 2011 and were, therefore, already on the media radar before they died. The story of their deaths was sufficiently out of the ordinary to merit better than average coverage of the repatriation ceremony and further information provided to the press and the public by the Army and Liam Tasker’s family after his death was sufficiently rich in facts, anecdotes and imagination to sustain the sort of narrative about service, courage, youth, passion, loyalty and love that the tabloids and their readers wanted to be told and, in turn, to retell. The case was manna from heaven to those editors who otherwise signally ignored the war in Afghanistan as such and neglected a wider informational narrative about the theatre of operations, strategy, even fighting itself, in favour of anecdotes about individuals and moments in time. Reporting Afghanistan was often reduced to the fabrication of highly constructed and often sentimental narratives about individuals who would shoot – if at all – only in self-defence or to protect their colleagues. The Tasker/Theo case is an excellent illustration of this journalistic strategy of displacement in which the soldier adumbrates the war. Michel Foucault observes that truth is variable and created and expressed according to the interests of a group. “Truth is a thing of this world […]. Each society has a régime of truth: that is the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true” (131). He adds that truth “is the object of immense diffusion and consumption” and that it is produced and transmitted by a few great political and economic institutions among which he includes the army and the media (131). The Tasker/Theo narrative is very much part of the “régime of truth” about the Afghan and Iraqi wars which was conveyed by, but not confined to, populist newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mail as well as the Conservative Daily Telegraph. By spring 2011, the anti-war position was, indeed, at least partly a conservative and populist one founded on two beliefs: that British interventions in Iraq and especially Afghanistan were irrelevant, politician’s wars conducted in places that were none of Britain’s business, and that the subsequent fatalities and casualties were a waste of the lives of the

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best of the nation’s youth. The strategy of The Sun and its colleagues was to repeat these assertions and to illustrate and thus “prove” them with references to specific examples of what were presented as unnecessary losses. Fatalities led to reports on the repatriation ceremonies, the personalities and service records of the deceased and the circumstances leading to death. Casualties led to a different sort of coverage with The Sun, particularly, reporting often and energetically on the Help for Heroes campaign which was intended to raise money for the wounded of Iraq and Afghanistan and, incidentally, raise the paper’s profile. The tabloid press, then – and, to a lesser and more discreet extent The Daily Telegraph – constructed a régime of truth about the British presence in the Middle East and Afghanistan resting on the repeated publication of essentially the same stories about individual soldiers rather than informational reports on the fighting. “Truths”, in Foucault’s sense of the word, and by extension régimes of truth, filter easily through a society in which consumers of information are members of a participatory culture. They “collaborate” (Benjamin 359) with the press in the sense that they read the newspapers that reflect and confirm their own opinions and also become responsible for communicating, commenting upon and reinforcing information and analyses through social media and in the comments section of the electronic press. The public, in other words, adds its own stories to those made available by institutions. This appropriation and sharing of truths and the narratives that contain them suggest not only the existence and cultivation of a knowledge community but also of a certain moral cohesion or, in Henry Jenkins’ words, “[there is] a faith in values and the values are in the stories” (18). They may also suggest a willingness to accept and even encourage a degree of fictionalization or “storytelling [which] sticks artificial narratives onto reality […] it shows actions and directs the flow of emotions” (Jenkins 16–17). Naturally, storytelling also increases profits by increasing circulation because “facts talk but stories sell” (Salmon 118).1 There is nothing new in the use of storytelling in written or graphic war narrative spirals. The photographs of Roger Fenton and the articles of William Russell in the Crimea, the pictures taken by Felice Beato on the tracks of the British Army immediately after the Indian Mutiny, the American Civil War photographers of both sides and the journalists and Official War Photographers and Official War Artists of the two World Wars, for example, all present stories about war, each of which is told and retold in constant reprintings. Repetition, what Salmon calls the “Scheherazade effect” (139), is essential in successful storytelling in that it confirms 1 All translations from Salmon are mine.

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what is already known to the reader/observer and also defines expectations which will be met and confirmed at each retelling of the tale. The repetition of the narrative allows the reader/viewer to come to possess its essential truth and to understand the way in which elements of a particular story fit into larger stories which contribute in turn to the expansion of régimes of truth. The photographs and films made in real time of the commemorative repatriation ceremonies in Wootton Bassett were the first elements in the construction of the major displaced narrative about the Iraq and Afghan wars. The ceremonies, which took place from April 2007 to August 2011 and saw the repatriation of 345 men and women, began as a spontaneous manifestation of respect by locals who abandoned their daily activities to come into the High Street and simply acknowledge the passage of hearses carrying the coffins of fallen soldiers. Over the four-and-a-half-year period of their existence they increased in volume and intensity, becoming complex, highly choreographed performances that attracted not only local residents but, towards the end, coach loads of visitors. The impact of the ceremonies grew as the British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan produced more and more fatalities but also because the media, most significantly The Daily Mail and The Sun, the United Kingdom’s two best-selling newspapers, took them as a basis upon which to construct and maintain a discourse that criticized the nation’s involvement in two unpopular wars. Whether the ceremonies would, in any case, have become more complex and ritualized with the passage of time or whether the media, by their repeated and extensive coverage of the repatriations and their attention to the personalities and biographies of the dead were responsible for their inflation is a matter of debate. In any event, the repatriation performances were clearly and increasingly the starting point for the nation’s most important popular narratives about the futility of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the nature of soldiering and, indeed, about being British. The ceremonies provided the basis of a good story but, being necessarily limited in time and space and homogenous in content, required reinforcement to better the narrative. They required, in other words, a good back story. 1

Filling Out the Back Story

The Fatality Notice, which is published by the Ministry of Defence on the death in the field of every serviceman and woman, provides the makings of a back story for every casualty. The victim is identified by name, rank and regiment and there is an account of the date, time and circumstances in which his or her death took place. A photograph of the deceased – which may be a head and shoulders shot with the subject in formal uniform, a more relaxed ­portrait

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taken while the soldier goes about everyday business or simply an o­ ff-duty picture – is also placed at the top of the page. The bulk of the text consists of comments from the soldier’s superiors, subordinates and colleagues and, ­sometimes, family members. It ends with a testimonial by the Defence Secretary. The nature of the comments varies relatively little from one notice to another, although they may be more or less abundant, and those made by other service personnel focus on the deceased’s qualities as a professional soldier and also as a comrade-in-arms. Liam Tasker, for example, described like many of his colleagues in the notices as “a rising star”, is praised extensively for his professionalism and said to be “the best” and “dedicated” (Fatality Notice, Tasker). He is also “exceptional”, “outstanding”, “an inspiration” and “talented” in his trade as a dog trainer and handler and, as a friend and colleague, he is described as “outgoing, jovial and friendly”, “extremely popular”, “larger than life”, well able to make his companions laugh. There are seventeen testimonials altogether in Tasker’s Fatality Notice, which is longer than many others, two of them from his family and girlfriend who express their love for and pride in a man who “died a hero doing a job he was immensely passionate about”. Yet, what emerges beyond the factual picture of a highly competent soldier who is much admired and liked by his companions, is the suggestion of a man made exceptional by his generosity in risking his life for others. His comrades say that, “he was here to save lives” and that “the work he did in his five months in Afghanistan saved countless lives”. They suggest extraordinary, inspirational, almost superhuman qualities – “he met his fate […] leading the way that we might be safe […] [his] selfless generosity […] must serve as a beacon to us all”, “lt never met anyone without touching their lives in some way” and “he died a hero”. Finally, they also find him to be exceptional in his empathy with the animals with which he worked and especially in his relationship with Theo – “he had an affection for his dog that was a window to his soul”. And Theo himself is named three times in the Notice, first as Tasker’s “faithful search dog”, secondly as one half of “an exceptionally strong search team”, finally as a creature who “did a brave job together” with his handler. All the elements of a potential hero story, then, are contained in the Fatality Notice and many of them appear in the press accounts of Tasker’s death and repatriation. All the media quote statements about Tasker’s professionalism and perfectionism, his talent as a dog handler and his passion for his job, his partnership with Theo, his good nature, his promising future in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps and his qualities as a son and partner.2 The Fatality Notice is 2 See especially The Guardian 2 Mar. 2011, The Sun 3, 10 and 22 Mar. and 14 July 2011, The Daily Telegraph 10 Mar. 2011 and 25 Oct. 2012, The Washington Post 10 Mar. 2011, and The Scotsman 21 Oct. 2012.

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about a man who was clearly very able at his profession and also much liked and loved but it remains that the Army’s presentation of its dead soldier is formulaic, exclusively positive and therefore incomplete and already, at least in part, an artificial narrative of the kind described by Christian Salmon that lights the reality of Tasker’s life and death from a certain angle. The press, in borrowing remarks about Tasker verbatim from the official texts, also borrows a portrait of the perfect soldier. Tasker, presented as a man with a great deal of talent, a sense of professionalism, a passion for his work and a capacity for generous friendship, is the embodiment of everything that the Army expects and, in turn, that the Nation expects of its Army. The selections made by the television commentators and the press alter this narrative again. The life-saving achievements of the man/dog team and the emotional connection essential to such success are foregrounded in all the reports, and speculative statements as well as the relatively factual ones are repeated from support to support. This repetition over time, the “Scheherazade effect”, is enhanced by the longevity of the Tasker/Theo narrative which begins with the Ministry release about the pair in February 2011, covers the deaths and repatriation of Tasker and Theo, the funeral, the formal inquest in July 2011, Tasker’s mention in dispatches in September the same year and Theo’s Dickin Medal in October 2012. The “Scheherazade effect” “sets up a narrative spiral” and “individuals are caught up in the spiral and they identify with models and recognize acceptable types of behaviour” (Salmon 16–17). The tendency to improve the story begins quite early in the reporting and may involve a distortion of the facts or the introduction of a new approach to the originally expressed facts and opinions. The Sun, for example, could be said to imagine the news rather than report it in the following short paragraph: “An Army dog handler was killed by a Taliban sniper trying to assassinate his record-breaking bomb-hunting Spaniel. And hours after Lance Corporal Liam Tasker was gunned down, brave sniffer hound Theo also died – from a seizure”. The text is headlined “Hero killed as Taliban sniper targets his dog” (Sun 2 Mar. 2011). It would, of course, make perfect sense from the Taliban point of view to kill any working explosives identification dog, especially one known to be particularly efficient, but neither the Fatality Notice nor the statements of Tasker’s comrades who were on patrol with him on the day he died contain any indication that the target was the dog rather than the man, still less that Theo had been specifically identified by the sniper. Not only does The Sun invent the makings of its story, it also turns to hyperbole (the sniper tries “to assassinate” Theo and the pair are “gunned down”) and anthropomorphism. Theo, described as “brave”, is humanized to the same moral level as the “hero”, Tasker. His professional credentials (“record-breaking”, “bomb-hunting”) are

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­established in the first sentence, his nature and closeness to his human companions in the use of the, in British English, affectionate “hound” rather than “dog”. The final dash delays the outcome of the story adding a degree of suspense to what is constructed as an astonishing and tragic story about a team of equals in which both members die, the one of a bullet meant for the other and the survivor, by implication, of grief. A degree of inventiveness crept into even the soberest reports from the first. The Guardian of 2 March 2011 took most of its copy from the Fatality Notice but the title of the article, “An inseparable pair: dog collapses and dies after army handler is killed”, although true in the second phrase is doubtful in the first as the “inseparable pair” – an expression which will appear time and time again in the media but which is never, in fact, used as such by Tasker’s colleagues in their Fatality Notice testimonies – in itself leads the reader, albeit gently, into a world of invention. Most of the narrative invention in the Tasker/Theo story is to do with the dog. As we have seen, the Fatality Notice contains statements about the relationship between Theo and his handler but more emotional and speculative comments are provided by Tasker’s parents and family, foregrounded and repeated by the press and entirely taken up and absorbed by public opinion. Anthropomorphism is a constant in the family’s account of events. Appearing on itv News before the repatriation ceremony, Tasker’s father said: “My honest opinion on this is, when Liam went down, that Theo didn’t have the comfort from Liam to calm him down. I truly believe when Theo went back to the kennel that would have a big, big impact because Liam wasn’t there to comfort him”. His mother Jane Duffy added: “I would like to believe he [Theo] died of a broken heart to be with Liam” (Telegraph 20 Mar. 2011). There is an insistence on the equal affection between man and dog. Tasker’s sister, Laura, says that “They weren’t just handler and dog. They were friends” and this is confirmed by his mother who describes Theo as her son’s “best mate” (Telegraph 25 Oct. 2012). His sister adds that “The only consistent person in Liam’s time out in Afghanistan was Theo […]. They shared a bed, shared the day there”. Military reality was harsher – Theo, as a trained and successful working dog, was a valuable piece of equipment and was to remain in Afghanistan for a month beyond his handler’s return to the u.k. According to Tasker’s uncle, Billy McCord, quoted in an Associated Press report published in The Washington Post, “this was preying on his mind”. The same-day deaths cancelled the imminent separation, of course, and this was seen by the family as a manifestation of some sort of supernatural compassion, “not that we wanted Theo to die, but we kind of took a bit of comfort in the fact that the two of them were together […]. He didn’t have to leave his dog after all” (Jane Duffy,

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mother, Scotsman). Finally, the question of the last resting place of the dog is shrouded in mystery. Tasker was given a military funeral in Tayport in the Scottish region of Fife. Theo’s ashes were repatriated with his handler’s remains and were presented to the family in a private ceremony. There is no evidence that the story ended with the burial of the pair in the same grave, however Tasker’s mother’s remark, “They’re where they should be […] Liam and Theo are where they should be”, leaves an open ending to the story that sits well with almost any set of beliefs and desires. She herself is reported in The Scotsman as quoting from Rainbow Bridge, written by an unknown author for bereaved pet owners and widely circulated on Internet in which deceased animals, made whole and happy again and living in a limbo “just this side of heaven”, wait for their human companions with whom they will finally cross a rainbow bridge into the afterlife. The family’s version of events with its emphasis on the “human” qualities of both man and dog enriches the Fatality Notice narrative and its insistence on Tasker as a model soldier. It is probably the transformation of the death of an Army dog handler and his animal into “a kind of moral lesson teaching us about bravery and loyalty and grief, and teaching us too that the qualities we mean when we use the word ‘humanity’ are not displayed solely by humans” (Ross) and the moment of its telling that makes the Tasker/Theo story stand out. There had been a previous identical event, the deaths in action of Lance Corporal Kenneth Rowe and his dog Sasha in 2008, an event which probably possessed far greater storytelling potential than its successor. Rowe, the father of a baby daughter, had volunteered to stay in Afghanistan beyond his deployment because he was concerned that the number of dogs and handlers was insufficient to guarantee the safety of his comrades. He and his dog were killed on the day that he should have returned to England. The Rowe/Sasha team was highly talented, making a record number of finds during their period of deployment. They were also extremely popular, the final detail – that might have been picked up by the tabloids but which was scarcely covered – being the return to England on the same aircraft of Rowe’s body and his dog’s ashes, the latter packed in a specially made shell-case container carried off the plane by his former and female handler. They died, however, before Britain’s worst years for fatalities (2009 and 2010) and also before the repatriation ceremonies had reached the intensity of emotion – and of coverage – of later years. Rowe and Sasha did not become the object of any extensive account of their lives and deaths beyond that of the Ministry of Defence Fatality Notice. Tasker and Theo, however, were killed at a time when increasing, and increasingly emotional public hostility to British involvement was being echoed, especially by

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the tabloid press which pursued its own agenda – and sales figures – by telling stories about “our boys”. It is not unreasonable to ask why the dog trope is so successful in media storytelling. It may be simply that, “there is something of the dog […] in most Englishmen” (Jerome 108). The British are indeed fond of dogs, the statistics show that they are especially attached to Labradors, Cocker Spaniels and Springer Spaniels and Theo, like many of the Army’s explosives detection dogs, was a Springer Spaniel. The nature of his work also made him especially appealing. Military dogs, particularly those trained for detection work, save lives and they are admired accordingly. They can only do their job if they work well with their human handler and the “man and his dog” trope so frequent in popular music and fiction3 has a powerful resonance. Working dogs are appreciated by the soldiers with whom they patrol and for whom they are “the front man” and they enjoy the very ordinary presence of dogs around the base. They may be loved and respected by their handlers and given human qualities and characteristics by them – Tasker says of Theo, for example, that “He has a great character […] he can’t wait to get out and do his job” (Theo the Superhero Dog). Ashes are repatriated and ceremonies held for fallen animals that copy the rituals of last farewells for the human deceased. In Britain, they may be rewarded with the Dickin Medal, “the animal’s Victoria Cross”. The media attention to Theo was predicated, above all, on the existence of a knowledge community in which anthropomorphism is a given. This national tendency to attribute all that is human to the animal, is applied here not only to the manner of the dog’s death but to every aspect of the partnership with his handler. In such circumstances, and with such a collaborative audience, it was extraordinarily easy for the press to direct “the flow of emotions” (Jenkins 17) towards their particular régime of truth about the war in Afghanistan and its British victims. The success of the operation can be measured to some extent by the number and nature of comments that followed the on-line publication of the various chapters in the story, virtually all of which approve the media narrative and which, in general, take the same shape. The comments on the Daily Mail report on Tasker’s funeral, published on 23 March 2011, will serve as an example. Most of the correspondents felt that the man and dog should have been buried together and echoed the anthropomorphic Rainbow Bridge narrative (“Together in life, together in death, should be together interred, together in heaven”). They also adopted the political position of the tabloids, many of them thanking “a brave young man and his lovely brave dog” for their “bravery and ultimately helping 3 Elvis Presley’s recording of Old Shep and the tv series Lassie, Belle and Sebastian and Rin Tin Tin come to mind, for example.

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to keep this country safe”. There is one clear rejection of the war (“They should never have been sent to Afghanistan in the first place”) and also an assertion of the patriotic values incarnated in Tasker and Theo (“They make us so proud to be British”). Interestingly, two of the readers speculate on the possibility of transforming the media’s storytelling into more permanent form. “This could be a really lovely touching film” says Fed Up Of Money Grabbers [sic] and Pete’s opinion that “There should be a statue made of that photo of the two of them” attracts one of the largest numbers of “likes” in the thread. 2

Putting a Face on It – Iconography

Portraiture is a two-way process of fabrication of identity according to a series of socio-aesthetic codes and expectations that are understood both by the makers of the pictures and their audience. Walter Gombrich observes that the portrait “is not a faithful record of a visual experience but a faithful construction of a relational model” (Gombrich quoted in Brilliant 39). Portraits, then, are representative of status and values recognized and shared by the particular group (social, national and so on), capable of decoding and, by extension, adding layers of meaning to the picture. War portraits, both those made during wars for propaganda purposes or afterwards, for commemorative purposes, are elements in the construction of a relational model between members of a given society and portrait painting and photography in wartime are, most spectacularly “at the interface between art and social life” (Brilliant 39). By encouraging an easy passage from designation (the representation of an individual) to denotation (the presentation of a type), they allow the observer to participate in the production of a simple account of a complex situation. Often, the designated subject of the portrait is, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant. What matters is the myth from which the portrait is created and which it sustains in turn. The majority of modern war portraits are not portraits of men called to heroism by their status of General or Admiral, but portraits of people generally defined as heroes, modern heroic behaviour being that of an ordinary person called to great things by exceptional circumstances but, above all, possessed of qualities shared by all the other members of his or her national and/or ­social group. The place of the hero in the mass of available information about modern wars is crucial. Practically any front page of the contemporary Daily Mail or The Sun taken at random, for instance, uses the word at least once and illustrates it with a portrait. In a very literal sense, modern heroes are poster children, advertising the virtues of their culture and environment. They create cohesion and a sense of possibility in the most desperate ­circumstances.

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In celebrating “ordinary” people, depictions of heroes echo elements of a visual and textual discourse on the British soldier that has existed since the Crimean War and which contributes to the national régime of truth concerning national identity and continuity.4 With the transposition by his handler, his handler’s family, the media and the general public of human qualities to the dog, the Tasker/Theo narrative provided two heroes rather than one and, in consequence a double subject for portraits. The first series of pictures was taken during the February 2011 Ministry of Defence media team visit to Camp Bastion which led to the Theo the Superhero Dog press release. They were taken by a Logistics Support Photographer of the Royal Logistics Corps. The brief of these professional military photographers is to take pictures of official ceremonies and army life in general for distribution to the press and magazines. Tasker, because of his record-breaking finds, was interviewed and also filmed and photographed at work with Theo. The video, still available on YouTube, shows the pair, manifestly enjoying themselves, hunting planted targets. A series of photographs, published extensively in the contemporary media and also still available on Internet, were taken of the team in action. They are photographed together with the dog often preceding Tasker, sniffing or bounding into the foreground while his handler in full kit with helmet, goggles and rifle follows laughing. The setting is the training area with its white buildings and rubble, red desert earth and bright sunlight. These are action photographs and the approach is informational. They are meant to show the general public how an explosives detection dog team works and, in this sense, are utterly concerned with designation. But they also record a sense of energy and fun to the point that the “boy and his dog” trope dominates the pictures at the expense of what might be supposed to be the “real” subject, the extremely dangerous process of detecting hidden lethal weapons. The most published – and copied – photograph of Tasker and Theo clearly opts for denotation rather than designation. The image, which shows them resting together in the shade at Camp Bastion is a concentration of every single element in their narrative and, as such, an allegory of youth, friendship and duty. The photograph is taken from Tasker’s left side. The man sits on the ground, leaning against his pack, in uniform and with his rifle on his shoulder but with his helmet and goggles removed so that his face – boyish and with an expression of great gentleness – is completely visible. He is stroking his dog, 4 The Crimean War was the first to be reported by a correspondent in the field. The ensuing sympathy for soldiers and veterans was crucial in turning public opinion away from the early nineteenth century “scum of the earth” perception of the military and towards an appreciation of the individual soldier as a member and defender of the community.

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who is still wearing his working harness and who stands with his front paws on his handler’s chest, close and still but visibly more disposed to leap into action again than rest. Theo’s head, seen in profile, is bent towards Tasker’s face which is three-quarters turned to the camera as he looks up into the dog’s eyes. The white wall behind the pair is particularly obvious in the top half of the picture and provides a bright and neutral background for the two heads, both possessed of a certain beauty. The photograph is that of an affectionate moment between a sweet-faced young man and his Springer Spaniel, both made exceptional by the clothing and equipment that suggest active service and therefore moral commitment and the possibility of danger. The portrait was used by the Ministry of Defence to illustrate the Fatality Notice. It has been republished again and again by the commercial media, circulated on Internet memorials and working/military dog sites, posted in electronic picture galleries and copied if not into statue form, certainly into paintings. One of them, by James Richardson, available on Internet and printed by the Fife newspaper, The Courier on the occasion of Tasker’s funeral, deepens the close-up, reproducing only the top half of the photograph and replacing the white masonry behind and to the side of Tasker with a birch tree and a generous ray of sunshine – or divine light – which makes a diagonal across the pair’s faces from the top right. The painting, made after the deaths of its subjects, drains away all the aesthetic impact of the photograph, putting the image firmly into Rainbow Bridge territory and filling it with a mishmash of visual signifiers of the heaven, friendship, sacrifice and duty tropes that had become common in the media storytelling and in the public’s reception of the tale. This said, the photograph itself had an extraordinary resonance, not just because it touched the very British “boy and dog” chord but because the back story added levels of symbolism that placed it well beyond simple designation. The Camp Bastion pictures suggest a change in military photographic style since 2008 and the deaths of Ken Rowe and Sasha. The few available images of Rowe include a head and shoulders formal photograph from his Fatality Notice and another, published in The Telegraph of 26th July 2008 showing him with Sasha resting before or after work. Although there is other evidence of great affection between Rowe and his dog – a poem to a canine “best friend” published in the Order of Service at Rowe’s funeral, statements by the embedded journalist who was the author of The Telegraph text for example – this photograph is taken almost casually with no apparent desire to represent anything other than a dog and his handler, both stretched out on the ground, not touching and connected only by the lead. On the other hand, the choices made by the Tasker/Theo photographer, even in the training pictures, capture multiple levels of meaning. In this sense, they are similar to those made by civilian

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photographers who often emphasize the affection between dog, handler and other soldiers rather than their work. Army photographers are more likely to photograph “furry alligators”5 in action or in training while civilians tend to take pictures of dogs and handlers sleeping, watching television and playing together or of the humans caring for the animals. (Aiello and Bacon 57, 72, 86, 90, 96, 118, 124, 136). Tasker’s photographer errs towards a more civilian way of expressing the work of an explosives detection team with an emphasis in action scenes on energy, youth, enthusiasm, laughter and play and on affection and trust.

Epilogue: Changing the Story

Reports on the war in Afghanistan and its consequences were of interest to the Army as long as they were more or less consistent with the Ministry of Defence’s régime of truth at the core of which was the proposition that the best of Britain’s youth were soldiers. The media régime of truth agreed with this but added a further proposition – that the best of Britain’s youth was being sacrificed by irresponsible politicians in ill-considered campaigns. The Tasker narrative was a milestone in media storytelling about the war because it was both complex and long-lived. It came, however, at a time when a number of questions were being asked about the real value of the existence and reporting of the repatriation processions. There were doubts about the spectacular nature of some of the later Wootton Basset repatriations which were often perceived as being excessive and the situation was further complicated when the British National Party and Islam4UK both used the ceremonies as a platform for their political views. In August 2011, and largely at the instigation of the Ministry of Defence, the repatriations and, by extension, the reports and the stories they engendered came to an end. From the military point of view the repatriation phenomenon had been both good and bad. Commenting on changes in public opinion, soldiers interviewed for the 2012 Ashcroft Report on the Armed Forces and Society found that “before it was about drunken squaddies rampaging” and that now people “supported the forces, even if they did not agree with recent operations on which they had been deployed” (Ashcroft 18). The influence of the press in forming this positive opinion becomes evident when civilians are asked to provide the first words or phrases they associate with the military. Unsurprisingly 5 According to aarse (the Army Rumour Service website), a “furry alligator” is any military dog while a “land shark” is specifically trained to attack.

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the tabloid favourites, “brave”, “courageous”, “dedicated”, “professional” and “heroes”, are at the top of the list (Ashcroft 14). The servicemen worry, however, about the danger of attracting too much civilian sympathy. The members of the interviewed focus groups say that they appreciate the expressions of solidarity at Wootton Bassett, but they are concerned that the image of service personnel is too often linked to “dreadful injury” and death (Ashcroft 16) and that an excess of sentiment in the face of military casualties is not helpful. A Ministry of Defence think tank study of 2012 agrees, and observes that it is necessary to “inculcate an attitude that service may involve sacrifice and that such risks are knowingly and willingly undertaken as a matter of professional judgement” (Ashcroft 6). Tasker himself had prepared for the eventuality of his own death, leaving a letter to his parents and a list of the music he wished to be played at his funeral (Scotsman). But to achieve a wider public acceptance of mortal risk suggested a sea-change in attitudes formed by a discourse of performance, text, and image that had set up the soldier to be “just like us” but also much better to the point of being heroically different and so doubly wasted if lost. Now, this way of creating classic hero figures and martyrs is of no particular use to a technologically sophisticated modern army and the members of its hunter-killer elite special forces do not lend themselves to the sort of narrative created for Tasker and Theo. Ashcroft quotes the think tank as suggesting that “the profile of the repatriation ceremonies” should be reduced (Ashcroft 6) and this was indeed a reasonable first step in destroying a major narrative spiral about Britain in Afghanistan and soldier fatalities in general. The end came, in any event, with the final withdrawal of British troops in October 2014. Local, national, supranational and institutional régimes of truth continue to exist, however, and there is accordingly still ample opportunity for ­media story telling. Future stories about war may continue to adopt the ­strategies of displacement used in the reporting of the war in Afghanistan. But all ­representations of war are displaced to some extent in that accounts – even those of the same-day Great War regimental diaries – are made b­ efore or after the battle during which, in the nature of things, the protagonists are scarcely concerned with narrative. What is interesting in the Tasker/Theo case as in the other stories emanating from the repatriation performances is the ­nature of the displacement. The tabloids’ decision to foreground the soldier/victim ­rather than provide information about the war was politically and ­commercially ­motivated, set up to service a régime of truth. All war narratives service a r­ égime of truth to some degree and this, in itself, neither lessens nor enhances them. It is simply useful to keep in mind that in war representation especially, “truth is a thing of this world”.

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Works Cited Books

Aiello, Ronald L. and Lance M. Bacon. les Chiens soldats. Vercelli: Edizioni White Star, 2012. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London/New York: Verso, 1991. Print. Ashcroft, Michael (Lord). The Armed Forces and Society: The military in Britain through the eyes of Service personnel, employers and the public. London: Lord Ashcroft Polls, May 2012. Web. Benjamin, Walter. “The Newspaper”. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge Mass./London: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2008. Print. Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. London: Reaktion, 1991. Print. Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power”. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Print. Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York/ London: New York UP, 2006. Print. Jerome, Jerome K. My Life and Times. New York/London: Harper, 1926. Web. Lévy, Pierre. L’intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace. Paris: La ­Découverte, 1997. Print. Salmon, Christian. Storytelling: la machine à fabriquer les histories et à formater les esprits. Paris: La Découverte, 2008. Print.

Periodicals

“Dickin Medal Honour for sniffer dog killed in Afghanistan”. The Telegraph 25 Oct. 2012: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “Dog lovers gather for repatriation of soldier and spaniel from Afghanistan”. The Telegraph 10 Mar. 2011: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “Fallen Hero and His Dog Return”. The Sun 10 Mar. 2011: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “Hero Dog Handler is Laid to Rest”. The Sun 22 Mar. 2011: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “Lance Corporal Kenneth Rowe killed in Afghanistan”. Ministry of Defence 26 July 2008: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “Lance Corporal Liam Tasker killed in Afghanistan”. Ministry of Defence 2 Mar. 2011: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. Norton-Taylor, Richard. “An inseparable pair: dog collapses and dies after army handler is killed”. The Guardian 2 Mar. 2011: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. Ross, Peter. “Afghanistan: A mother’s story”. The Scotsman 21 Oct. 2012: Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

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“Tayport funeral for war hero Lance Corporal Liam Tasker”. The Courier 22 Mar. 2011: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “Theo the superhero dog”. Ministry of Defence 14 February 2011: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “Together … our hero son and loyal dog”. The Sun 14 July 2011: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “UK soldier, loyal dog, make final journey together”. The Washington Post 10 Mar. 2011: Web. 20 Apr. 2016. Wheeler, Virginia. “Hero killed as Taliban sniper targets his dog”. The Sun 3 Mar. 2011: Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Other Electronic Sources

“The Family of Liam Tasker Receive his Medal”. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 7 Apr. 2011. Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “Liam Tasker Images”. Online photographs. images.google.fr. Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “L/Cpl Liam Tasker Remembered by Family”. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 27 Mar. 2014. Web. 20 Apr. 2016. “The Repatriation of L/Cpl Liam Tasker”. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 19 Mar. 2011. Web. 20 Apr. 2016. Richardson, James. “Till Death Do Us Part”. Oil painting. paintingsilove.com n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Part 4 Experiencing War and Bearing Witness

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chapter 11

Aphonic Images: Aurality and Silence in Civil War Photographs William Gleeson Abstract The American Civil War was the first conflict to be massively documented by photographs. Yet, this visual record is by no means comprehensive especially since the war was mostly photographed from a Northern perspective. Apart from the near absence of images of the Confederacy, other absences haunt the photographs and invite reflection: the physical absence of the living bodies, sometimes the complete absence of human bodies leaving only the scarred landscape left by war, and above all the absence of sound. This chapter ponders the difficulty of conveying the sounds of war in photography and seeks to discover in these inherently silent images the brutal indiscriminate noises engendered by the Civil War. This also involves analysing the gradual alteration of war sounds by the widening temporal distance between the photographs and their audiences.

If ever there was something that qualified as an archive of heterogeneous images, as Georges Didi-Huberman defines it (26–27), it would be that u ­ nwieldy mass of photographs documenting the American Civil War. “Rhizomatic”, “labyrinthine”, filled with lacunae of time and space, the images from the War are by no means comprehensive, despite the astonishing number of ­images that have come down to us; the Eastern Theatre was ­comparatively well covered unlike the Mississippi campaign (much of this having to do with distribution channels of both ­photographic material and the resulting images, channels that were c­ oncentrated principally in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, d.c.). Our vision of the war is skewed by the very images that were expected to recount it. If the photographs from the Civil War have served as a template for viewing and visually narrating ­future wars, it is no less true that our look at the Civil War is heavily influenced by the images from those future wars.

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The real war will never get in the books, Walt Whitman reminds us (80–81);1 defining the war as an accumulation of battles and manoeuvres denies the individual suffering or just the individual within the machinations of political and military gamesmanship. And Whitman is obviously correct. The “real” war, as opposed to the war being played and mapped out by tacticians and strategists in smoky chambers and draughty tents, pushes us to rethink where the boundaries of war can be placed and how society has come to define it, and urges us to enquire about what we can really know about a war in its wake. Just like a wake, what we know after the fact is the visible passage of the event, but a visibility rendered diffuse by the distance of time and space from the event. In this chapter, I would like us to think about this lapping of waves trailing behind the war as a kind of fluid “silent imprint”. For Michel de Certeau, this imprint, the leaving of a physical trace, meets up with the production of a discourse around that which is absent, leading, to a certain degree, to the creation of history (Certeau np). As academics in the humanities, chasing absence based on what has been left is what we do best.2 If nothing else, the photographs from the Civil War revolve around a plethora of absences. Certainly, the physical absences of the living body rendered visible by the camera as cadavers are those that viewers often think of first when they imagine the war in their photographic scrapbook imaginaire. Bloated corpses or rag-dressed skeletons, dotting the fields or lined up artistically, have come to typify the Civil War experience for the twenty-first century viewer: these lifeless bodies, at once individuals and stand-ins for the anonymous masses of the dead, suggest a veiled humanity at the centre of the war. Powerful as these images are in their confrontation of the grisliness of war, the total absence of bodies, living or dead, may in fact be even more powerful and representative of the human devastation that the Civil War was capable of inflicting – rendering absent that which was necessary to the conduct of the war, namely the bodies of men, replacing them with the scarred landscapes where the war had passed, landscapes that had already been created or reshaped by human passage prior to the war. Absent as well are images of the Confederacy, at least a similar depiction of its military and political structures to that of the Union. This is obviously due to the embargo placed on chemicals headed to the South, which thus impeded Southern photographers from capturing the army’s work. This is also linked 1 Whitman suggests that the Civil War was, among other things, made up of a soldier’s “friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp”. 2 See for example, Gaddis’s The Landscape of History.

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to the capitalist ventures undertaken most famously by Mathew Brady (and later Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan and George Barnard, but also by local entrepreneurs in Gettysburg) where money and political sway allowed the war to be photographed from a Northern perspective. It also underlines the way that our vision of the military is often mediated by civilians. We might postulate that, if Southern bodies are often absent (except as leaders or prisoners), the images of the war do in fact present the Confederacy through the very backgrounds and the very landscapes shown in the photographs. The Civil War was “about” the military conquest of a land whose very contours and presence were defined by slavery. Another absence to be taken into account in slightly greater depth is that of sound. It goes without saying that these images are, as are all still images, inherently silent and in the case of images of death or destruction, this silence confers an elegiac quality onto the photographs – a horror beyond words. But our goal is to try to find the role that silence and sound play in these images, digging to discover not so much the sounds of bands and drills but the indiscriminate noises that the Civil War engendered and the many forms that silence took to define the war. It seems appropriate that these images of the Civil War remain attached to an aphonia, that inability to produce language, given the role that language played in the leading up to the war. War in general concerns the failure of ­language to avoid or resolve conflict, but as is often the case, this is a two-way street, for the failure of language, language which is the very essence of politics, was the direct conduit to the Civil War (Belohlavek np). The representation of the war through imagery of “unknown” soldiers or places seems to me particularly important. The early years of American photography are linked to representations of self-identity through portraiture, a process of democratizing the image; in addition, we have the beginnings of an image-driven celebrity craze, fuelled by the major portrait photographers as a means of attracting customers, a craze that will boom with the advent of the carte-de-visite and cabinet card formats along with the growing ease in photographic reproducibility. What the images from the Civil War would seem to suggest is that anonymity, or perhaps interchangeability, allowed viewers to decipher the war on both a personal level and a national level, and that that fluidity will allow viewers to respond to the images in various ways. In the review of the 1862 Brady show “The Dead of Antietam”, the New York Times’ reviewer commented on the almost peculiar appeal of photography’s ability to combine these two levels: Of all objects of horror one would think the battlefield should stand preeminent, that it should bear away the palm of repulsiveness. But, on the

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contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loth to leave them. You will see hushed, reverent groups standing around those weird copies of carnage, bending down to look at the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes. It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the faces of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas, and give them perpetuity forever. But so it is. “Brady’s Photographs” np.

The reviewer goes on to suggest that a “close” reading would insert us into the unbearable intimacy that recognition imparts: By the aid of the magnifying glass, the very features of the slain may be distinguished. We would scarce choose to be in the gallery, when one of the women bending over them should recognize a husband, a son, or a brother in the still, lifeless lines of bodies, that lie ready for the gaping trenches. “Brady’s Photographs” np.

A sentiment that the reviewer had already expressed a few months earlier about Brady’s “Incidents of War” show: Here, for instance, is a brigade of New-York Volunteers, drawn up on a photographic ground that your two hands’ breadth will cover. But watch the countenances of the group that bend over it, and you will see some maiden’s eye light up as she recognizes a lover among the many, some matron’s lip quiver as her eye detects the form and features of husband or son. “Photographic Phases” np.

One of the remarkable things that occurs in these shows is that they are the scenes of the shift from the heretofore primacy of the written word to the ­newly-adopted centrality of vision. The dead of the battlefield come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type. The roll we read is being called over in Eternity, and pale, trembling

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lips are answering it. Shadowy fingers point from the page to a field where even imagination is loth to follow. Each of these little names that the printer struck off so lightly last night, whistling over his work, and that we speak with a clip of the tongue, represents a bleeding, mangled corpse. “Brady’s Photographs” np.

The specificity that language confers upon the dead, the naming of names, the identification that we the living apply to the dead, actually renders the dead anonymous: the names we read aloud at the breakfast table in no way resurrect the slain. But an image of the dead, anonymous for most viewers, a particular person for those who knew him, makes language incidental: our reaction is “hushed, reverent”, the viewer is “chained by a strange spell” before the photograph. Robert Platt has written in another context that “Silence is itself duplex: it withholds and enables, it negates and posits, shows and says” (347). To what degree was this awed silence attributable to the temporal proximity of the image to the war? Would the distancing in time give voice back to the language of war? Would reverence give way to the quiet of a cultural amnesia? In the twenty-five years after the Civil War, the photographs published and collected by Brady led a restless existence, a portion of them finally ending up with a Connecticut firm, The War Photograph & Exhibition Company, managed by two veteran Union soldiers, William Huntington and John Taylor (Foley 189–207). In a blatant form of the commodification of catastrophe, Huntington and Taylor cashed in on the stereopticon rage in the late 1880s and early 1890s, proposing a package kit of prosthetic memory of illustrated lectures, complete with images to be projected. By this point in time, many people attending the shows would not have been alive during the Civil War or little aware of the war if they had been alive, a fact that the promoters were quick to point out to the grandfatherly target audience. For the power of the images to have an impact, it was necessary to give a voice to the photographs. One way they accomplished this was by providing not just titles but also three-line synopses of the images that they sold in addition to the presentation package. The immediacy of dead bodies that stirred New Yorkers to stillness a quarter of a century before gave way to the larger than life projections to an audience of several hundred-strong replete with patter and song. Entertainment necessitated the filling in of the silence: We will furnish a printed descriptive talk about each view, so that the lecturer can have the scenes all arranged to come on the canvas just as he wants them, and can have something ready to say about each. One

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view may call for a pathetic little story, another view is best described by a funny incident of army life, another view brings out a ringing old army song, and so the evening slips away before your audience knows it. Every minute is occupied, and they go home feeling that they have been splendidly entertained. taylor and huntington 28

One can almost hear the hundreds of voices singing along to “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp the Boys are Marching”– the reedy-voiced spinsters and the huskyvoiced scions of local society – vocally illustrating the projected image of a generic camp scene and showing how deeply ingrained the music from the war had entered the general consciousness. But at the same time, far from the local lyceums, individuals were reliving the war through the newly-marketed images. An old veteran, crippled by injuries and the passage of time and victim of that social aphonia if we are to believe his wife, reconnoitres with the past by thumbing through images (stereoviews, cabinet cards or cartes-de-visite, it is not quite clear) purchased from Taylor & Huntington. This commingling of personal memory and general (almost stock) imagery unleashes sound back onto the war for him, but the undamming releases not words, not description but the onomatopoeia of the Civil War that defied transcription: No one but an old soldier can form any idea how vividly these views bring back old times, and as I look into the past they represent, I can hear the singing of bullets, the boom of artillery, and the screaming of shells mingled with the shouts of the soldiers and the groans of the wounded and dying. taylor and huntington 15

The image allows the old soldier to escape from a world of silence, of absence, to come into one of unintelligible sound. Ironically neither the language of description nor the “veracity” of the image holds the soldier’s claim to removal to the past. His “true” war, one that probably won’t be found in the books ­either, is the one of sound mediated by the images of a shared ­public history. It is the complex duality of silence that Platt talked about earlier that the photographs from the war seem to negotiate. In addition, silence acts as a kind of switch b­ etween the unstructured noises of war – think of Stephen Crane’s “The U ­ pturned Face” with its nonsensical funeral rites and the three great “Plops” that end the story and that act as a kind of parody of Mozartian ­Masonic initiation – and the silence that the Civil War seems to have begotten.

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The ­inarticulate noises that drift back to the old soldier before his images find an echo in the description of the wild ravings of Sherman’s Army in reaction to the surrender of the Confederacy as related by Walt Whitman: When Sherman’s armies (long after they left Atlanta,) were marching through South and North Carolina – after leaving Savannah, the news of Lee’s capitulation having been receiv’d – the men never mov’d a mile without from some part of the line sending up continued, inspiriting shouts. At intervals all day long sounded out the wild music of those peculiar army cries. They would be commenc’d by one regiment or brigade, immediately taken up by others, and at length whole corps and armies would join in these wild triumphant choruses. It was one of the characteristic expressions of the western troops, and became a habit, serving as a relief and outlet to the men – a vent for their feelings of victory, returning peace, &c. Morning, noon, and afternoon, spontaneous, for occasion or without occasion, these huge, strange cries, differing from any other, echoing through the open air for many a mile, expressing youth, joy, wildness, irrepressible strength, and the ideas of advance and conquest, sounded along the swamps and uplands of the South, floating to the skies …. This exuberance continued till the armies arrived at Raleigh. There the news of the President’s murder was receiv’d. Then no more shouts or yells, for a week. All the marching was comparatively muffled. It was very significant – hardly a loud word or laugh in many of the regiments. A hush and silence pervaded all. (86) George N. Barnard, photographic chronicler of Sherman’s March, produced ­ rofound visions of silence. I suspect that Barnard understood that the end p of the war was about silence, that the sounds of war were too personal to ­convey. In the images of the Campaign, our gaze is directed not to revelry or to ­camaraderie celebrating the end of a long conflict; instead we are asked to contemplate the measure of our inability to avoid war. One of the last photographs in Barnard’s album is the justifiably famous “Ruins of Charleston, sc” (Figure 11.1). The ­romantic trope of the solitary presence within the landscape, meditation on passage, takes on a partner: a child, back turned to us, joins the pipe-smoking man in profile. Ruins and regeneration share the picture frame. After so many views of desolation and destruction (fifty-nine photographs precede this particular one), we have become saturated; Barnard has saturated us. We are invited to sit and wonder. The sounds of war, the r­ umblings of guns and groans, give way to new sounds, equally impervious to transcription: the drawing of a pipe and the brushing off of the dust of ruins as we stand up.

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Figure 11.1 George Barnard, “Ruins in Charleston, s.c.”, from Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign. Courtesy United States National Archives, photo 165-SC-60

Works Cited Belohlavek, John M. Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 2005. Print. “Brady’s Photographs. Pictures of the Dead at Antietam”. New York Times 20 Oct. 1862, np. Print. Certeau (de), Michel. Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Print. Didi-Huberman, Georges. “L’image brûle”. Penser par les images. Autour des travaux de Georges Didi-Huberman. Ed. Laurent Zimmermann. Nantes: Editions Cécile Defaut, 2006. 11–52. Print. Foley, Jeana K. “Recollecting the Past: A Collection Chronicle of Mathew Brady’s Photographs”. Mathew Brady and the Image of History. Ed. Mary Panzer. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1997. 189–207. Print. Gaddis, John Lewis. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print. “Photographic Phases”. New York Times 21 July 1862, np. Print.

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Platt, Robert. “Aesthetic Crises and Artwork”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44/4 summer (1986): 339–349. Print. Taylor, John C. and William Huntington. War Memories: Catalogue of Original ­Photographic War Views. Hartford: War Photograph & Exhibition Company, 1891. Print. Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days & Collect. Philadelphia: Rees Welsh & Co., 1882–1883. Print.

chapter 12

Profiles of War by Hayashi Fusao: A Writer’s Approach to War Guillaume Muller Abstract Hayashi Fusao’s Profiles of War, studied in this chapter, is a compilation of texts published between August and October 1937 following the author’s visit to China to report on the aftermath of the “China Incident” which triggered the Second Sino-Japanese War. The book, one of the earliest pieces of World War ii literature, written by a ­leading figure of the Japanese Romantic School, is structured in a way that invites readers to consider the texts as so many profiles of a war approached from a multiplicity of ­angles and genres. War, to Hayashi, is both a perceptual experience and an inner ­experience inducing reflection on himself as a subject and a writer. Ultimately, H ­ ayashi’s texts ­vindicate, by their very heterogeneity, the superiority of the civilian writer over the combatant in providing a more exhaustive representation of the p ­ rotean and ­fragmented realities of war.

Introduction Profiles of War is one of the very first Japanese war accounts of World War Two:1 Hayashi Fusao (1903–1975) was one of the few writers sent to the Chinese front by newspapers and magazines in the first months of the war.2 By the end of the year 1938, the military were more directly managing and controlling the production of war literature, as illustrated by the creation of the ephemeral but famous Pen Corps (22 voluntary writers sent for a couple of weeks to follow the army and navy, at the request of the authorities). Profiles of War, however, was written at a time when the military was not actively involved in war ­literature. 1 In the case of Japan, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (July 7, 1937) is usually considered as the beginning of World War Two, even though historians frequently question this chronology (see for instance Tsurumi). 2 This first wave amounts to a dozen of writers, among which are Ozaki Shirō, Hayashi Fumiko, and Ishikawa Tatsuzō.

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Hayashi’s 440-page book, like most war accounts published in the first year of war, is a heterogeneous compilation of texts previously published in the press. Independent from each other, seemingly random, and ranging from diary to report or essay, these eleven texts of various lengths are indeed like so many profiles of the war. Heterogeneity appears to have been the by default form of the first war accounts.3 It illustrates the difficulty of reporting such a radically new (and often short, as the writers’ stays on the front seldom lasted more than a month) experience in the form of a single coherent account. It also signals a sense of urgency among the publishers, who needed those books to be published quickly so that they would not lose their news value. This was indeed their main selling point, since such writing conditions made it difficult to present them as timeless works of art. As a matter of fact, war accounts of this first period had met with little ­success at the time and remain mostly unknown to this day. With the notable exception of Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s Living Soldiers,4 which became famous in 1937 not so much for its literary qualities as for the fact that censorship p ­ revented its publication, and is nowadays considered a textbook case of Japanese ­writers’ inability to freely report on war, Ozaki Shirō5 and Hayashi Fusao’s6 texts seem to be the only ones to stand out. In 1938, poet and literary critic M ­ iyoshi ­Tatsuji gave Profiles of War a laudatory review, praising the writer’s ability to ­convey, through literature, a sense of reality absent from press r­eporters’ ­articles (138). Since 1945 however, Japanese World War Two literature has been mostly studied in a historical perspective, its texts being read as evidence of w ­ riters’ ­support for the war effort and as part of a broader reflection on ­relations ­between ­politics and literature known as the “Politics and Literature Dispute” ­(Rosenfeld 73). This debate led many Japanese intellectuals to consider that war literature written during the war had actually not been literature,7 a ­conclusion ­ironically similar to the general opinion on war literature between 1937 and 1945, according to which war had renewed l­iterature and cleared it from its superfluous literariness, ultimately bringing about a paradoxically non-literary literature (Itō 6). There is no question that the war literature field was characterized by an especially strong heteronomy, to borrow Bourdieu’s words (355), which modified 3 4 5 6 7

Ozaki Shirō and Sugiyama Heisuke’s books, for instance, followed the same pattern. Living Soldiers was properly published for the first time after Japan’s defeat. See Tsuzuki 125–167, or Keene 84–90. See Long, or Hoshō. Hirano Ken referred to the whole wartime period as a “non-literary period” (50), while Komatsu Shinroku called wartime war literature a “zero literature” (194).

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the criteria for evaluating literature. Yet, denying these texts’ l­ iterary value often leads to underestimating their complexity. The literary status of war ­narratives is indeed problematic, but those writers were sent to the front p ­ recisely ­because they were literary authors. As Miyoshi Tatsuji’s review i­ mplied, writers had to prove that they were worthy of the task and that literature actually had something specific to say about war. Unlike most of his colleagues reporting the first months of the war, who were a few years older than him, Hayashi led what can be considered the t­ ypical life of a young Japanese intellectual born in the first years of the ­twentieth ­century: he met leftist students in university, took part in the ­proletarian literature movement, was imprisoned following the passing of the Peace Preservation Law8 and renounced the left in 1932 (such conversions, frequent at the time, are known as tenkō, literally “change of direction”). The 1930’s wave of ­conversions in Japan is a complex historical phenomenon that exceeds the boundaries of this chapter, but some of its aesthetic consequences, which shaped the ­Japanese literary world as it was about to go to war, are worth m ­ entioning. Conversions were publicly justified by former leftists as a d­ eliberate and enlightened choice: public opinion thus tended to see them as ideological defeats of Marxism rather than the consequences of political ­oppression. As far as ­literature was concerned, the defeat of proletarian ­literature implied the idea that its writers, educated and cultivated members of the upper classes, were ontologically unable to grasp and understand the proletarian world because they were not part of it. It should not come as a surprise that war literature writers – most of whom were former leftists – were under similar suspicion when they set about describing the life of soldiers on the front. The ­foundation of the Japanese Romantic School, of which Hayashi was a major member, was another consequence of the decline of proletarian literature. Aiming for a “cultural renaissance”, this movement was based on the historical novel as ­re-­appropriation of a national and nationalist history through literature, and on a renewed stance of authors regarding their works which reduced ­proletarian literature to a literature that confined authors to the role of observers of the world. On the contrary, Hayashi saw the author as both the source and object of artistic production (Doak 109; Hayashi “For writers” 5). For a writer like Hayashi, the outbreak of war with China was therefore an exceptional opportunity for new literary experiments, where this emerging conception of literature could be confronted with an intense reality. Profiles of War, subtitled “What a Writer Saw at War”, is the result of these experiments. In an article issued at the time of the book’s publication, Hayashi wrote: 8 Promulgated in 1925, this law was used as a way to suppress political dissent.

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The resolve one brings with oneself when leaving the homeland is pulverized once on the battlefield. Facing this reality is, in itself, a valuable experience. Like archetypes of a “pulverization school”, people like me, at the head of timid war reporters, panicked; but even so, we could not not go. By observing war and observing ourselves, we managed to come back with something that crystallized in us. “War and Writers” 1399

This puzzling “pulverization” can be interpreted in multiple ways. From a literary point of view, it may refer to the diversity of the profiles that make up the book, as if the ideal and consistent war report expected by Hayashi had indeed been shattered. In the perspective of the Japanese Romantic School, it is the very idea of a homogeneous ego founding the relationship to reality that seems to be in question. These two “pulverizations” will guide us through this analysis, the purpose of which is to find, in the heterogeneity of the book, an author’s exploration of his own relationship to war. In this perspective, three levels of the range of Hayashi’s war experience are particularly interesting: as a perceptual experience, war leads Hayashi to expose the limits of his perceptions when they are faced with indecipherable or even invisible signs; as an inner experience, war inspires a fear that allows Hayashi to rediscover himself through writing; as an experience shared by soldiers and civilians, war turns Hayashi into a spokesperson and eventually leads to a redefinition of the writer’s mission and legitimacy. 1

War as a Perceptual Experience

The first text in Profiles of War is “Shanghai Battlefront”, a seemingly conventional war report. Composed of chapters in a chronological order, it starts on the 3rd of September 1937, one week after Hayashi reached Shanghai, and ends with a trip to a war zone on the outskirts of the city. For the most part, it alternates scenes of bombing during which Hayashi looks for cover, and visits to different places under Japanese control such as a consulate or a field hospital. It has now been one week since I made it to Shanghai. Yet, it feels like a month has passed. Days and nights, full of incidents, follow each other like bad dreams. For me, who was born and raised in the homeland, 9 All translations from the Japanese are mine.

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e­ verything is a new experience. Outbreaks and occurrences of incidents are beyond anything I had imagined. Amid such relentless tension and anxiety, people must age three times faster than usual. (3) This incipit is typical of a war report: it is written from a war zone in the first person, authored by Hayashi in his name, and based on his personal experience. These first words even sound a little clichéd, even though it is as a writer supposedly able to bring an original perspective to this new war that Hayashi was sent to China. As we shall see, it is precisely behind the falsely naïve tone of a typical war report that the originality of the text is to be found. There lies another narrative: the uncovering of the narrator’s incapacity to grasp the reality he came to seek. The most obvious prerequisite to report on war is to be able to see it, and yet Hayashi’s field of vision is problematic throughout the text. During his stay in Shanghai, he frequently goes to the top of the buildings he lives in, as if he was literally trying to rise above himself and get a better understanding of his surroundings. In Poétique du récit de guerre, Jean Kaempfer identifies the “point of view of a character overwhelmed by the events” (9),10 that is to say the fact that war is seen at man’s height, as a characteristic of modern war narratives where soldiers are thrown into conflicts that overwhelm them and are beyond their understanding: causality ceases to exist, and one cannot but passively register sensations or phenomena. Thus, the focus on individual perspectives enables modern writing to depict the incapacity to understand the violence of battle. As such, Hayashi’s will to raise his point of view can be interpreted as an attempt to revive, or at least play with, the codes of a literature that asserted war’s intelligibility. Yet, the attempt is vain: one does not become omniscient by rising above men. Yesterday again, we went to the roof. Going up there when night falls has become a habit of our troglodyte life. The blackout is complete. The city is covered with a uniform black coat. One wouldn’t think the city is alive. Neither is it a sleeping city, it is a city that chose by itself to fall into lethargy. Lethargy is seeping out of the black coat. But there are lights. They are stars in the sky. They are fires on the ground. They are searchlights of the war ships on the river. Fire surrounds the Hongkou district and keeps burning every night. Yesterday night, a red dot was burning on the west side, beyond the river, and there was 10

My translation.

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a­ nother one in what is probably part of Yangshupu. […] Above a ­building in the north, a red shooting star rose suddenly. It is a firing signal. At the beginning of the incident, enemy soldiers in civilian dress apparently used these signals a lot in order to announce bombing raids. This time, we didn’t know if it was an enemy signal or a friendly flare, but most of the time when you see this it means bombs are going to start howling. If we stayed there, bullets shot by a friendly sentry would reach the roof even before the enemy bombs. We withdrew. (42–44) Watching from above does not enable Hayashi to get a better understanding of the military situation, to consider the strategic moves at play, to comprehend what is unseen at man’s height. On the contrary, Hayashi offers the reader an almost abstract scene: some places can be seen in the dark background, some even have names, but apart from these rare spots most of the landscape is illegible, as if Hayashi were trying to read a torn map of the area. Whether one considers this poetic tone as the only way the narrator can describe scenery he cannot practically understand, or simply as a choice made by Hayashi to better convey his experience, such a passage does remind us that the narrator is indeed a literary writer whose war report is bound to be more than a mere chronicle. By substituting metaphorical aesthetics for the prosaic fighting occurring in the city, the narrator asserts himself as the one able to see lethargy seep out of a black coat where others, left in the dark by the black-out, cannot see a thing. The roofs are reachable when the situation is calm but the imminent threat of bombings, read here in signs so ambiguous that Hayashi cannot tell whether they indicate imminent danger or not, forces him down. In this text the ­violence and danger, usually constitutive of war reports, actually seem to circumscribe Hayashi’s narrative by delimiting what he can experience. The author is as far as it is possible to be from the war that contemporary readers have come to expect by reading the literature of the Great War or the press. We had turned the lights on because the room was dark even in the middle of the day, put together some chairs, and while we were talking there was a third bombing: a rumble on the left of the house, a zoom next to the roof, then a thunder clap! It was a great explosion. I had never been that close to an explosion. I wrote “rumble” and “zoom”, but a fully equipped sound recorder would be needed to accurately convey this sound. No, one must hear it with his own ears. In the talkies, no matter how many bullets whistle, no matter how many bombs howl, there are no victims among

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the audience. But here, just hearing this sound, you can feel your skin peeling off and your nerves breaking down. […] There were two more explosions. They were a little further away. Then two more. Violently close ones. A noise to burst your eardrums. To speak of a hammer knocking on a metal plate right beside my ear might give an idea of that noise. The windows rattled, I heard debris hitting on the roof. (11–12) The mutual exclusion of the narrator and violence reappears at the lowest end of the field of vision, the highest point of which is the roof. When the bombings start, Hayashi has to stay shut away in his hotel room, under cover and unable to see anything. War becomes less visible as it gets closer or, in other words, when the violence of war physically expands and confines Hayashi to closed in spaces (a phenomenon so common that Hayashi lives a “troglodyte life”). In such moments when the field of vision is extremely reduced, hearing becomes the main sense to use. Sound becomes the sole object of the narrative, it seems to saturate the narrator’s conscience as well as the text itself to the point that language is unable to fully grasp it. What’s more, this overflow of sound also is an overflow of meaning: the noise is not only, as one would expect, the signifier of a possibly lethal explosion, it literally becomes what it should signify when it can, by itself, give a sensation of “skin peeling off” and of “nerves breaking down”. In the last part of the text, Hayashi finally goes to visit the front-line but even there, the fighting remains inaccessible to him. Here, a soldier reports the presence of an enemy who disappears as soon as Hayashi tries to see him (73). There, a gunshot is heard but no one can tell where it came from or what it was aimed at (75). There are various reasons to explain why the enemy keeps avoiding Hayashi’s gaze during this visit, but in the end, they all depend on a single, though implicit, fact: for safety reasons, the army had decided to send Hayashi to a relatively calm part of the front-line, in the middle of the day, when the enemy does nothing but wait for the night to come. Despite Hayashi’s obvious will to serve his country and be appreciated by the army, such writing conditions strengthen the image of Profiles of War as war literature that cannot grasp its object. This may also be considered as a more general image of the relationship between writers and the army at the time: by letting Hayashi into nothing but a toned-down version of the front-line which is as safe as possible, the army validates, if not determines, the writer’s inability to understand the extent of the violence of war. Yet, mutual exclusions are also, inevitably, mutual definitions. The fact that the writer’s conscience and the violence of war are mutually exclusive may as well be interpreted not as the sign of any deficiency

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on the part of the former, but on the contrary as a discovery of what it means to be a writer. In this sense, it may be argued that the heuristic value of war paradoxically reveals itself when war seems the most impenetrable. 2

War as an Inner Experience

Hayashi wrote the second text of Profiles of War, “Visiting an airport”, after he came back to Japan. Starting with a long digression about fear, during which Hayashi remembers the bombings he has been through, this text focuses on the narrator’s conscience and how war modified it: Now that I am back in the homeland and live in a too calm valley, I sometimes mistake the wind outside the window for the throbbing of a plane at low altitude, which takes me aback. I dreamt of war twice, and each time it was a dream of air raids. Instead of dreaming of flowers, I dreamt of enemy planes raiding and had cold sweats. I haven’t dreamt of shells or machine guns. Psychologists say that the human mind has the property of quickly forgetting fear and disgust. If this is true, maybe this means that I have already forgotten the terror of shells. Is it then because I haven’t been able to forget the fear of air raids yet, that I dreamt twice about it? (80–81) Even when he considers war as an inner experience, Hayashi sets up some sort of a blind spot, an area that his consciousness cannot reach. Mentioning dreams he has not had, and the absence of which is itself part of the narrative, he points at a failure not of the writing process (nothing here is inexpressible), but of the consciousness of self as war has shaped it. Just as war existed outside him as an inaccessible object, it generated something inconceivable in him. This admission may very well call the status of the whole text into question: what credit can the reader give to an account whose writer admits he might be hiding parts of his own experience to himself? Once again, Hayashi’s text begs the question, since its actual focus is not on war itself, but on the way Hayashi sees it. This blind spot, then, has to be considered as just another brush stroke on the self-portrait Hayashi is painting throughout the text: from this point of view, the absence of these dreams does have informative value. What is more, this retrospective introspection takes place at the time of writing, a time the genre of war report never specifically mentioned. Here, the reader sees Hayashi observing himself through a writing process that gains its own heuristic value: as far as the narrator is concerned, confessions or

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i­nterrogations only start existing the moment they take shape in words. This effect is emphasized in Japanese by the use of polite forms, required when addressing someone in formal situations, which explicitly figure a recipient and refer to a situation of utterance at the time of writing. In the final analysis, it is an approach to war (or its effects on its witness, supposing that those are two different things) exclusive to the writer that appears in the text, under the paradoxical guise of an expression of introspection addressed to others. The reader takes on a different role in the passage immediately following the previous one, where Hayashi describes an actual bombing: I couldn’t get a wink of sleep, I was restless. My mind, no, every vein of my body was saturated with ominous imagination. Wasn’t it Allan Poe who said “fear is the product of human imagination”? What if a bomb fell through the roof? Or a hundred meters away? What if splinters broke through the window? What if my arm was hit? What if my jaw was hit? What if my stomach was hit? All possibilities were dashing through my imagination, forming a large and dense squadron, and assailing me suddenly. (81–82) In a radically different way from the previous excerpt, this passage is the account of a war happening in Hayashi himself, a product of his mind and his body. The veins “saturated with imagination” are an especially strong image of fear, that opens up a series of hypotheses as so many potential narratives are reduced to an arid expression (“what if my arm was hit?”), violent in itself. Fear takes the shape of predictions of catastrophic futures that, precisely because they are narratives, lose nothing of their evocative power when they reach the reader: they are revealed to him in the exact same way that they were revealed to Hayashi. The final image of a writer assailed by a squadron of narratives takes to its extreme the idea of inner war: the experience of fear, because it is a creation of those who are subjected to it, leads to a splitting of the narrator, at once victim and executioner, writer and reader, enduring a violence he imagined himself. Paradoxically, these fictions thus become much more present, to Hayashi and to the reader, than the actual violence he is exposed to at the time, and the evasiveness of which has already been discussed. The text entitled “The effects of war”, halfway between essay and report, focuses exclusively on fear. The text opens with a relatively common yet paradoxical statement: Hayashi writes that he wanted to come back to Japan when he was in China, and to go back to China when he was in Japan (381). Hayashi then leads the reader to find the reason for this contradiction in the s­ ensation

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of fear. There is no becoming accustomed to fear: on the contrary, Hayashi stresses fear’s capacity to remain vivid and never disappear. The reason he wants to go back to the front seems to lie precisely in this never-ending trial, for it provides those who experience it with an opportunity to gain access to a new understanding of themselves through an unbearable yet seductive ­dividing of the ego: In the end, I got angry. I wasn’t angry at the enemy planes, I was angry at my own cowardice. The psychology of intellectuals moves in a mysterious way. You might say I had objectified my own fear and got angry at it. […] The people who had been staying at the same hotel since the beginning of the incident were not as distraught as me. There were two or three people who couldn’t sleep, but there were also some brave men who snored gallantly on the floor. What would have happened if, inside the public hall on which bombs were raining down, these brave men and I had discussed the fate of mankind? However correct my reasoning may be, it can’t rival guts. If they can’t rival guts, my reasoning or my ideals are no better than farts. I went so far as to wonder if the fate of the human race didn’t depend on the guts of brave men. The thought is absurd when it goes so low. Doubting one’s own valor, doubting the reality of one’s ideals, nothing is more miserable for a human being. That’s how miserable a night it was. (383–386) Here, too, the experience of fear reveals its qualities in retrospect: it is in the process of writing that Hayashi comes to question the doubts he felt at the time. In the final analysis, this cathartic phenomenon highlights a profoundness specific to the writer’s experience of war. During the war years in Japan, the (partly promoted by the army) ambient discourse on writers tended to discredit their ability to understand war on account of them not having direct access to the experience of battle; in such a context, claiming that writers’ experience of war actually has exclusive qualities was also a way to redefine writers’ social role in war. A little further in “The effects of war”, Hayashi adds another layer to the relationship between fear and writing, when he reports the words of a soldier he met: “But if war wasn’t scary, the feats of arms done there would be ­meaningless” (388). After shifting his attention from the world to himself, Hayashi comes back to the world by making fear a condition of his ability to give the actions he observes their proper value – and by extension the ­condition of a right war narrative. Furthermore, it is the fear of a non-combatant, specifically that of a writer, that gives meaning and value to the feats of arms: far from being a world

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where values would be distributed autonomously according to their own market, war here appears as a domain in which the non-professionals, writers more than most, have a right, or maybe even a duty, of inspection. 3

War as Narratives

Profiles of War also includes a number of personal war stories told to Hayashi by soldiers, journalists or civilians. With these stories, Hayashi seems to move away from his ambition as a war reporter to take on the role of a spokesman, aiming to relay voices from the front to the home front. Despite increasingly omnipresent propaganda – or maybe because of it – communication from the front to the home front was more often than not considered as unreliable, even in 1937. Writers of war literature made use of this context in order to emphasize their ability to offer a discourse different from the homogeneous and predictable one of the journalists, and Hayashi’s text also fell within this myth. The focus here will be on the reproduction, in Hayashi’s own text, of texts written by others: this specific type of story magnifies the relationships between the writer, his text, and the war he aims to report on. The section called “Shanghai defence diaries” relies almost exclusively on the reproduction of written material. It consists of three diaries supposedly found by Hayashi, written respectively by a civilian, a policeman and a soldier killed in action. It is hard to know whether or not these diaries are fictions, considering how unlikely the circumstances in which Hayashi claims to have obtained them are,11 even though he insists on their authenticity. These diaries are of little interest in themselves, but this is actually part of Hayashi’s play with the text: supposedly written for no one but their own authors, and thus freed from the need to interest readers, these diaries appear as an immediate access to the experience of their authors, re-enacting a clichéd opposition between authenticity and literary work. As an introduction to the section, Hayashi explains why he included the diaries in his own text: Because I was unqualified as a front-line journalist, I applied myself to gathering material documenting the activities of these “backline troops”. The more I advanced in my research, the more I grew conscious of the nobility of these activities. The following diaries are part of this material, 11

One of those diaries, for instance, was supposedly found lying on the ground by one of Hayashi’s friends (140).

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and even though they are insufficient, I believe they vividly show the collaboration between the front line and the rear. (136) In the aesthetic context mentioned in the introduction, the need to directly reproduce these texts rather than turn them into narratives relates to the notion that personal experiences are best related by those who lived through them. Here, the integration of other people’s writing into the texts aims to compensate not only for the shortcomings of the general discourse on war (accused of focusing exclusively on military aspects), but also for the flaws of Hayashi’s own book (consequences of his incompetence as a “front-line journalist”). Yet, the figure of the spokesman, apparently reduced to the mere reproduction of voices he cannot absorb in his own narrative, is not as simple as it seems: what Hayashi writes is actually his own reading of those texts. By placing on an equal footing the diaries of a civilian and of a soldier as war narratives, Hayashi leads the reader to re-evaluate the very idea of war, and in particular the place of combat. Combat becomes but one aspect of war among others, which eventually takes away from soldiers the ascendency over writers their experience has conferred upon them. In the final analysis, Hayashi brings to light everything the soldier, because he is a soldier, cannot know of war. Because he can give narratives their meaning, the writer becomes the one most capable of offering the least incomplete overview of war. An even more interesting use of the figure of writer as spokesman can be found in another text, entitled “Military police officers who will not return”. Its very first lines imply that the text was commissioned by the army: The Shanghai incident broke out on the “Friday the 13th” of August; I promised the head of military police in Shanghai, Captain Tsukamoto Akira, that I would represent in a text of some form, and convey to the population of Japan, the unknown sacrifice of Military Police Sergeant Ōsaki Akira and Interpreter Kumano Toshio, who disappeared on the grounds of the North Depot in the afternoon the day before, the 12th, and still haven’t returned. I had since then come back to the homeland and gone through the days without finding such an occasion, when the following article was published in the Tōkyō Asahi Journal of November 23. This happened on the day of the taking of Shanghai, due to the fierce attack of the Kawanami unit. A Military Police Captain dashed through the Zhongshan road with swift vigor and, in a demonstration of heroic resolve, took the head of the X tanks assaulting the town of Longhua. It was Captain Tuskamoto, of the Shanghai Military Police […]. (275)

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Paradoxically, while both title and incipit seem to prefigure an account of the disappearance of two soldiers, as promised to Captain Tsukamoto, the text immediately turns into a long portrait of Tsukamoto, as met by Hayashi after said incident. This eulogistic portrait carefully avoids explicit mentions of the disappearance of the two soldiers, which leaves the reader anticipating throughout the text a conclusion he already knows, and which casts something of a tragic shadow on the model Captain. The last third of the text is introduced as follows: As for the circumstances of the tragedy, I have with me an official report. I think that publishing it as is can pass on the truth better than resorting to ornaments, which is why I chose to reproduce it below. The officer mentioned in the text refers of course to the author of the report, Captain Tsukamoto. (297) A ten-page military report, to which Hayashi delegates the task of relating the promised story, follows. For writers to basically let the army write their own texts was not rare in wartime Japanese literature: the extremely synthetic style of military writing exerted some sort of fascination on writers (it is for instance used by Niwa Fumio in a text published the year following Profiles of War (30)). This style exists for the sole purpose of describing war and does so efficiently, without resorting to literary writing techniques Hayashi here calls “ornaments” – such techniques became increasingly considered as superfluous in the mythology of wartime literature. Hayashi hints at the fundamental problem of his text in its very first lines: how does the combination of a portrait and a war report become what he promised Tsukamoto, something that “represents in a text of some form” the incident? The writer’s role is to give its meaning to the text offered to the reader, since the presence of a portrait implies that the report, as efficient as it may be, is not self-sufficient. There is a clear parallel between this report, reproduced at the end of the text after Hayashi introduced it, and the newspaper article that initiates the text and motivates its writing. The article has meaning for Hayashi (and not, in the first instance, for the reader) because he already knows Captain Tsukamoto. As a prerequisite for comprehension, the portrait is to the report as Hayashi’s experience was to the article. What’s more, Hayashi doesn’t portray the soldiers who disappear, but the author of the report: military writing is efficient but impersonal, and cannot achieve by itself the production of its author within his text – the production Hayashi longed for in the 1930s, as explained in introduction. By dignifying the dry style of military reports, Hayashi thus reveals himself as the one who enables Tsukamoto to embody his text. In a context where the ratio of power between writers and

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the military was already imbalanced, and was about to become much more so, Hayashi’s literary device may very well be seen as an outright demonstration of writers’ strength. Conclusion The cliché according to which non-combatants are unable to grasp the reality of war because they are not part of it was active from the very first weeks of the war. It can be explained by Japanese literary history or by the relationship between the military and writers, but the extent of its complexity can only be perceived by reading the war literature of the time. For those who try to understand the extreme tension to which literature is subjected when it is war literature, this cliché can neither be ignored, nor taken at face value: war literature does exist, and was, in fact, quite successful at the time. Narratives making use of this cliché cannot work if they don’t include some sort of antidote to it – which is precisely what Hayashi did in his text. Profiles of War’s originality lies in the way Hayashi negotiates with this cliché: the building of the narrator’s identity blends into a discovery (for the reader) and a production (for the author) of the war literature writer’s role. Writing about war becomes writing about oneself writing about war, all the while examining one’s capacity to do so. Hayashi’s identity embodied in the profiles is at the root of their heterogeneity: whether war is seen as a perceptual experience, as an inner experience, or as another’s text, Hayashi brings his own limits to light in order to surpass them through literary writing. Hayashi’s text paradoxically gives the writer tremendous power by making the ability to see and write war in profile, rather than full-face, the guarantee of a more exhaustive approach to war. Yet, this position was hardly fruitful to Hayashi, and he spent the following years writing mostly historical novels, Profiles of War being his only war narrative. From summer 1938 until 1945, war literature was dominated by a new type of writer, the “soldier-writer”: writers such as Hino Ashihei12 or Ueda Hiroshi, empowered by their experience as soldiers, were able to offer a much more straightforward answer to the questions of a mass readership looking for information on the war their country was engaged in. The Japanese population’s desire to see full-face a war sometimes waged thousands of kilometres away was bound to limit the success of Profiles of War and similar war accounts that, in this regard, provided the wrong answer to a good question. 12

David M. Rosenfeld wrote the only book available in English on Hino, the most important wartime Japanese war literature writer.

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Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre. Les règles de l’art, genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Print. Doak, Kevin Michael. Dreams of Difference, The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Print. Hayashi, Fusao. “Sakka no tame ni” [“For writers”]. Tōkyō Asahi Shinbun 19 May 1932: 5. Print. Hayashi, Fusao. Sensō no yokogao [Profiles of War]. Tōkyō: Bungei-sha, 1937a. Print. Hayashi, Fusao. “Sensō to bungakusha” [“War and Writers”]. Bungaku-kai Dec. 1937b: 136–148. Print. Hirano, Ken. Gendai Nihon bungaku nyūmon [Introduction to Japanese Contemporary Literature]. Tōkyō: Kaname shobō, 1953. Print. Hoshō, Masao. “Shōwa jūni nen: Shimaki Kensaku ‘Saiken’, Hayashi Fusao ‘Shanhai sensen’” [“Shōwa 12: Shimaki Kensaku’s ‘Reconstruction’, Hayashi Fusao’s ‘Shanghai Battlefront’”]. Koku bungaku kaishaku to kanshō August 1938: 28–29. Print. Ishikawa, Tatsuzō. Ikite iru heitai [Living Soldiers]. Tōkyō: Kawade shobō, 1945. Print. Itō, Sei. Sensō no bungaku [Literature of War]. Osaka: Zenkoku shobō, 1944. Print. Kaempfer, Jean. Poétique du récit de guerre. Paris: Corti, 1998. Print. Keene, Donald. “The Barren Years: Japanese War Literature”. Monumenta Nipponica, Spring 1978: 67–112. Print. Komatsu, Shinroku. “Sensō bungaku no tenbō” [“Prospects of War Literature”]. Shōwa bungaku jūni kō [Shōwa Literature, Volume 12]. Ed. Ara Masahito. Tōkyō: Kaizō sha, 1950. 189–218. Print. Long, Jeff E. “The Japanese Literati and the ‘China Incident’: Hayashi Fusao Reporting the Battle of Shanghai”. Sino-Japanese Studies April 2003: 27–44. Print. Miyoshi, Tatsuji. “Hayashi Fusao, ‘Sensō no yokogao’” [“Hayashi Fusao, ‘Profiles of War’”]. Bungaku-kai March 1938: 138–139. Print. Niwa, Fumio. Kaeranu heitai [Soldiers Who Will Not Return]. Tōkyō: Chūō kōron-sha, 1938. Print. Ozaki, Shirō. Hifū senri [A Thousand Miles of Plaintive Winds]. Tōkyō: Chūō kōron-sha, 1937. Print. Rosenfeld, David M. Unhappy soldier – Hino Ashihei and Japanese World War Litterature. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002. Print. Taya Cook, Haruko. “Many Lives of Living Soldiers: Ishikawa Tatsuzō and Japan’s War in Asia”. War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920–1960. Ed. Marlene Mayo and Thomas Rimer. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2001. 149–175. Print. Tsurumi, Shunsuke. Senjiki Nihon no seishin shi [Intellectual History of Wartime Japan]. Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten, 1982. Print. Tsuzuki, Hisayoshi. Ozaki Shirō. Tōkyō: Sankō-sha, 1975. Print.

chapter 13

Ōoka Shōhei’s Democratization of the Self Misako Nemoto Abstract This chapter offers a reading of Taken Captive: A Japanese p.o.w.’s Story (1948–1951), a generically unclassifiable work by essayist and Stendhal scholar Ōoka Shōhei relating his wartime experience. Ōoka was drafted at the age of thirty-five and sent to the Philippines in mid-1944 to fight a war he knew to be a lost cause. Although there are no scenes of battle and bloodshed in his war writing, the author emphasizes another form of violence inflicted by the State on an individual forced to take part in the war. In his effort to convey this violation of his inner self, Ōoka paradoxically adopts a distanced point of view, as if considering his experience from the outside. This reflects a process of “democratization of the self” by which Ōoka attempts to overcome his feeling of intellectual superiority and become merely one among all those caught up in the violence of war.

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to read Ōoka Shōhei’s Taken Captive: A Japanese pow’s Story from the point of view of the individual, following Ōoka’s own approach to his war experience. Ōoka is one of the most prominent Japanese post-war writers who started their career after the end of World War ii, writing about the war they lived through. While the whole Japanese war literature produced immediately after the war, tended to wallow in victimization, and to create a national community of sorrow, Ōoka distinguished himself by analysing the war he was swallowed in as objectively as he could, representing himself not as a victim, but an actor, a human being struggling with the overpowering violence of States in conflict. His work is to be differentiated from a mere autobiographical report which would refer to the self as a person who holds the overall view of the experience. That person would then be the main character as well as the narrator and writer of this war account in the first person, recounting his experience from his position, remembering the entire event as facts and deeds that can be described from his own particular point of view. Ōoka’s writing goes totally against the grain of such a comfortable narrative

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possibility. His self is certainly situated at the centre of his writing, but not as a representation of his person. On the contrary, he focuses on his self in order to be able to put a distance between him as a citizen and his inner self with all its needs and desires. Keeping his ego at a distance will allow him to consider his self as just a random person, an individual among other individuals, crushed like others under the overwhelming weight of raison d’État. 1

Modern War and the Intimate

Before coming to Ōoka’s text, however, let us linger on a photograph. It is of rangers of the 15th Company of the French Army during World War i. There are about fifty of them, in uniform, all facing the camera and gathered around the key figure of an officer. The homogeneity of the entire group, the same pose and the same uniform with frogs, is stunning. Pierre Pachet, reproducing this picture in his essay “Quelqu’un” (“Someone”), writes: Why in front of the rangers of the 15th Company am I able to feel so strongly the crude pressure of differentiation, passing from face to face, lips to lips, beyond all determined human relationships? The most intimate, the unknown is screaming out behind these peaceful faces. (189)1 As Pachet so accurately points out, when the individual is totally immersed in a homogeneous collectivity, the most intimate paradoxically stands out with all the more intensity. Pachet does not explicitly refer to modern war as generating the most collective situation of our times. But the picture speaks for itself. These men are all captured in this instant as soldiers of equal standing in front of death with the exception of the officer. And at this precise moment, “the most intimate, the unknown screams out”. 2

Literature and Modern War According to Ōoka: A Writer’s Intimate Experience of War

The relation between modern war and the question of intimacy constitutes the core of Ōoka’s reflections: 1 Unless otherwise stated all translations are mine.

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What nowadays is called war literature emerged only after the introduction of conscription [i.e. after the French Revolution]. Traditionally, war stories were written by the military and consisted in describing where and how people fought. […] The question of human beings arises when with conscription, people who in normal times live just like us, abiding by the law which forbids killing, are dragged out to battlefields with the duty to kill. […] This is followed by a struggle between State ethics and individual ethics. And this is where we enter the realm of literature. “My Intentions in Leyte’s War Chronicle” 23–24

In other words, modern war represents a case of absolute equality in the face of the fundamental question of life and death. And if our gaze at the aforementioned picture flinches, it is because of this violence done to the intimate which comes to the surface on each of these faces. It is highly significant then that Ōoka started his life as a writer only after he came back from war, by exposing this core intimacy of the self facing its own death in his Taken Captive. Twenty years later, in Return to Mindoro Island, he harked back to his first work in poignant terms, when he explicitly refers to the intimate personal experience of facing death. The following excerpt ­occurs immediately after a passage where Ōoka mentions kamikaze pilots and what they might have felt, deprived of the possibility of coming back alive to testify: Soon the American Army reached us. Suffering from malaria and unable to stand on my feet, I was left alone in a bush. I too then entered a world from which nobody returns. Nobody should ever know what I thought, what I saw and did during these 24 hours. By a very unusual chance, I came to survive and I have told about that world in many ways since then. I told about the enemy’s voice as it reverberated across the desolated bush, the pink cheek of the young American soldier, the distorted moon that appeared between two showers, reaching almost its zenith, the buffalo that cast its mild look on me in the white light of dawn and then went on its way, I told all about these. I told about the effect on a man of losing all meaning of existence. I told what should not have been told, just as the soul of the kamikaze would not be told. Since then, I have been punished and have lived continuously with death. For me, existence constantly lacks meaning. Things filling everyday life and standing in front of my eyes are shadowed by the vision of a curiously desolate world…. (23–24)

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The intensity of these moments before what seemed like his own imminent death is kept vividly alive in these words still full of pain after twenty-four years. Ōoka told of these most personal moments and he still regrets having done so. Why? He even uses the term “punished” for revealing what should not have been told. He spoke for himself, while all his comrades in arms who died took their private experience of death into everlasting silence. His account is valid only for himself and is completely egoistical as, necessarily, each ­individual faces death alone. But here we must consider another dimension of his narrative. His sense of guilt in sharing these personal moments exists only because he has shared his fate with his comrades, a fate imposed upon all these men by State violence. Politics have penetrated through these individuals to the marrow, to the heart of their intimate being, to where one faces his own death. Ōoka had to testify to this penetration of politics into the most private sphere, even though it would have been much more comfortable for him not to speak of these moments. He had to pay the price personally, living “continuously with death” during all those years, a personal experience he first revealed to the public after twenty-four years. The most remarkable fact about Ōoka’s literary career, is that he became an author by writing such testimony about war in Taken Captive,2 although he had already established something of a reputation on the pre-war literary scene in Japan, as a close friend of famous writers and critics of the time such as Chūya Nakahara and Hideo Kobayashi. He never became really significant before the war however, probably overwhelmed by his elders (Kobayashi was seven years senior to him) and also because of the increasingly restrictive militarist ­ideology, which led him to what he called voluntary “domestic exile”. His exile took him to Kobe, far from the literary circles of Tokyo, where he decided to become an ordinary wage-earner, to marry and start a family. He nevertheless continued to publish translations of Stendhal, his mentor, and a few essays on that novelist. War found him in this situation in the summer of 1944, when he was finally called up: he was 35 years old, the father of two children, and knew that the war was already lost for his country. When he was drafted, this fine Stendhal-scholar and egotist experienced, with an excruciating lucidity and intensity, the confrontation of the individual 2 The first chapter was written in the course of a few months at the beginning of 1946 (Ōoka came back from war on the 10th of December 1945). But Taken Captive as a whole was only published in 1948 because of American censorship.

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with the violence of a collective cause. The tortuous reflection he developed once on the front affords a glimpse of this: I had long since given up believing in Japanese victory. I held nothing but contempt for the General Staff who had dragged our country into such a hopeless fight. Yet, since I had not had the courage to take any action toward preventing that fight, I did not feel I could claim any right, at so late a stage, to protest the fate to which they had consigned me. This reasoning, which placed a single powerless citizen on an equal footing with the massive organization by which an entire nation exercises its violent power, seemed almost comical to me; and yet, had I not taken such a view, I could not have kept from laughing at the predicament in which I found myself, traveling rapidly toward a meaningless death. Taken Captive. A Japanese pow’s Story 5

3

Taken Captive: From the Need to Confess to Distancing Analysis

The Need to Confess Back from the front, Ōoka felt an irrepressible urge to confess, which caused him to write Taken Captive immediately after his return.3 He made it clear that Taken Captive is not a novel although it was acclaimed as one, but a confession: Taken Captive was never written as a novel. […] But it was awarded a prize for novels and therefore the press expected me to follow it up with more novels.’ “My Confiteor” 291

Neither is it a “diary” as the French translation’s title might suggest; the original title Furyoki refers literally to writings (ki) of a pow (Furyo). In Furyoki, Ōoka states clearly that he never kept a diary in the camp. He even says specifically that at the beginning, he felt repulsed by that activity, indeed very common in the camp, which he found petit bourgeois and narcissistic (“My Confiteor” 276).4 He just made some notes on the ship back to Japan, listening to v­ eterans from the battle of Leyte (the island situated to the south-east of Mindoro 3 See “Diary of demobilization days” 5. 4 In this text, Ōoka admits that he had had some vague ideas of writing novels while on active service. But once in the prisoners’ camp, this was no more than a tendency to summarize all

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where Ōoka was on duty; it was there that the bloodiest battle in the Pacific took place) testifying to the atrocities they had been through. Neither a diary, nor a novel nor a mere report: how are we to understand such work then? What kind of war representation is this? First, we must bear in mind that Ōoka writes in order to understand: I had to understand at all costs, be it by writing or by any other means. If not, my war experience may haunt me like a nightmare and my present life may amount to little more than sleepwalking. To fully account for that past which is now an integral part of my present self, I will have to take on all the root causes that produced it, even those beyond the sphere of my own personal responsibility. Why must an untalented man like myself do such a thing? Is there no one else? “Saikai”. osz 3:378; The Burdens of Survival 20 [trans. partially modified]

What gives him the first incentive to write is the irrepressible need to understand and to confess5 what he had lived through: to confess not only in order to open up what he had experienced to others, but also to submit himself to their judgment. It is clear that the other is already present in the gaze Ōoka casts upon his own self while writing. For one of the most distinctive characteristics of his works is this external perspective he adopts with regard to himself, which enables him to situate his self and his past in the greater socio-geo-politicohistorical context in which he finds himself. This is no mean feat, and Ōoka is well aware of the scale of his enterprise as can be seen in the passage cited above: “Why must an untalented man like myself do such a thing? Is there no one else?” Under such pressure and tension, Ōoka set himself to write the first chapter of Taken Captive in one sitting. The result was immediate. He became an acknowledged writer the instant the text was published. The chapter would not only be the core of Taken Captive, but of all his works to come. This text is innovative in every respect. Neither an essay, nor a diary nor a chronicle, its style is also thoroughly new: his sentences are clear-cut, modelled his life: “Instead of this [trying to produce his novel], the habit of writing gave way to the idea of revisiting my past”. 5 Ōoka writes in his diary of the period just after returning when he tries to find a way of writing about his experience: “my present state does not allow me to write about the others. I am full of this desire to confess”. osz 14; 5 (entry of the 27th of June 1946). Or see for example “People I cannot forget”. osz 3; 567.

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on French (a language with which he was familiar as a scholar and translator of Stendhal before the war). Following a rigorous logic, the sentences express truthfully his determination to clarify his experience, to understand it as precisely as possible, and to resituate it in this world with the utmost accuracy. The scene he reports will become in his own words the Urszene, to which he will constantly return throughout his life. “My Capture” Let us read the “seminal” chapter in which this Urszene first appears, and from which all his work to come will ensue. After a very matter-of-fact incipit that informs the reader that the narrator was taken captive on 25 January 1945 on the island of Mindoro, the author soon returns to the moments preceding the capture, when he lies forlorn and in agony on the ground back in the hills, as he suffers from malaria and is not able to catch up with his retreating Company. He then confirms that lying alone in the grass, and contemplating the possibility of a gi coming up on him, he resolves not to shoot him. The decision is soon put to test. He overhears in the distance a conversation in English, and the rustling of grass as someone makes his way through. He sees an American soldier emerge, who himself, cannot see Ōoka. He notes immediately: “I had no desire to shoot” (17). The soldier closes in fast as Ōoka observes him, amazed by so much carelessness. The tension rises to the point of becoming unbearable and Ōoka almost loses his breath. He knows that he cannot miss his target from where he lies. He writes: “My right hand moved instinctively to release the safety catch on my rifle” (17). At this precise moment, a burst of gun-fire comes from the opposite direction and the gi, turning around, moves away from the spot where Ōoka is lying. All the elements composing the Urszene are given in the details mentioned above. Ōoka will examine them over and over again, shifting his point of view, going back to some to see if there are no other clues left, if he has exhausted every possibility of understanding and analysing what really happened between the moment he became aware of the gi’s presence and the latter’s disappearance from his sight. Through this thorough examination, Ōoka discovers a moment of blankness just after he released his rifle’s safety catch and before he saw the soldier move away, a blankness that prevents him from knowing for certain that he would have persevered in his decision not to shoot the enemy, had the gi not turned away at the last moment. As for the nature of his initial decision, Ōoka dismisses any possibility of a fraternal love for humanity, and links it, without any complacency regarding himself, to “a kind of visceral instinct. Our universal abhorrence of killing is in

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all likelihood merely a reflection of our desire not to be killed ourselves” (18). Yet this general assertion obviously does not satisfy his quest for truth. He cannot help asking whether he would have maintained his pacific attitude to the very end, whether his individual will would have resisted the logic of war at the last moment. This unflinching pursuit of objectivity, of rightness of judgement and righteousness, of correctness which has something to do with justice in the last resort, compels him to go over the sequence again and again, enriching his analysis each time he revisits it.6 One example will suffice to indicate the thoroughness of Ōoka’s procedure: in one instance, he is certain that he was struck by the fresh rosy cheek of the young soldier. The fragment of memory leads him to believe that the reason for his forbearance was definitely not philanthropic but that “some personal reasons made him like this boy”, and that he was willing to “acknowledge that I may have felt that I did not want to shoot” for that very personal reason (the complexity of the expression mirrors the remarkably complex self-reflexivity of Ōoka’s thinking). This never-ending analysis, thoroughly pitiless and scrupulous, without any complacency, resumes two chapters later: My present thinking about the encounter goes roughly like this: Japan’s industrialists sought to solve their economic crisis through expansion on the continent, and the Japanese Imperial Army recklessly embraced their cause. This ultimately led to my arrival in the Philippines armed with a Model 38 rifle and a single hand grenade. Meanwhile, Franklin Delano Roosevelt determined to save the world for democracy by means of military force, and this brought that innocent young man into the meadow before me with an automatic rifle in hand. Thus were we placed in the position of having to kill each other, even though neither of us had any personal reason for wishing the other dead. Government policies had ordained our encounter on the battlefield—though we had not necessarily had any voice in choosing those government policies. […] Ultimately, all I can establish with certainty is the existence of a moment in which I did indeed forsake the opportunity to shoot my 6 See for instance: “Now I found myself returning repeatedly to the question of what had really kept me from shooting the gi in the mountain meadow. No matter how many times I replayed the scene in my head, I could not determine whether my actions through the entire encounter remained consistent with my decision beforehand to refrain from shooting. […] each new effort at introspection seemed only to obscure further the shades of my intentions […]” (62).

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state-designated “enemy”. I believe the most crucial determinant lay in the fact that he was not an enemy of my own choosing—which is to say, in effect, that my action had been predetermined before I ever departed for the battlefield. (65) As clearly seen in this passage, Ōoka succeeds in the end in extracting his experience from the heart of his intimacy at the moment when he was facing his own death as he lay starving in the middle of a battlefield, and holding it at such a distance from himself, with such objectivity that it becomes possible for him to relocate it in the politico-historical context that determined it. From that point onward, his task will be to place his initial experience within a panoramic perspective. His subsequent works will be a continuous zooming out from that seminal experience, culminating in his great The Battle of Leyte.7 With this experience, there is no doubt about the fact that Ōoka found politics at the heart of his existence. The absolute loneliness that surrounded him as his “I” awaited its own death, led him to discover the question of the political that permeates the intimacy of one’s own flesh, its longing for life, its negotiation with death. In front of this unveiling of the individual, the soothing comfort of the “­domestic exile” is torn to pieces. Ōoka is then able to observe the very point from where, as Claude Lefort has put it, “the boundaries between “interior” and “exterior”, between personal existence and politics vanish”.8 4

Towards a Democratization of the Self

One of the peculiarities of Taken Captive is that although it is a war narrative, war figures only briefly in the first chapter as well as in the remainder of the book. But this succinct reference more than adequately accounts for the “democratization of the self”, originating in the Urszene. Ōoka’s most striking effort in this work is his attempt to understand his most intimate experience as an objective fact in the course of history. This intellectual task requires a distancing from oneself, an objectivation of the self. This means a tearing away from oneself, in a constant ethical concern to consider oneself as one among others, one who did share the same fate with them, the same violence inflicted on the individual by politics. I would like to call, 7 Published from January 1967 to July 1968 in the periodical Chyuo Koron, and as a book only in 1971, twenty-six years after the defeat. 8 See Claude Lefort’s remarkable analysis of 1984 in “Le corps interposé” 17.

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­somewhat awkwardly, this intellectual as well as ethical attitude, “democratization of the self”. To “democratize the self” is to try to annihilate its irrepressible human tendency to consider itself special, and to let the self “explode” into others. In other words, this effort implies a virtual silencing of the self, a killing of oneself. In fact, after this original explosion-exposure-publishing of the most intimate aspect of the self, Ōoka was able to adopt in the remainder of the book, the most external point of view possible in order to return to his self and Japan, in an account of the life of a pow. In the camp, he is directly confronted with a feeling hitherto unknown to him, the feeling of having something in common with his Japanese companions whom he has, as a member of an intellectual elite, always avoided up to that point. He discovers through this new experience that the Stendhalian individualism which governed his pre-war life and which led him into “domestic exile” was deprived of any ideal, any moral values worth fighting for. Talking about his “domestic exile” he explains for example that: I felt keenly how stupid my situation was. I could do nothing, though, since it was the natural consequence of my life deprived of any ideal. I keep on living without an ideal. Only, I can’t allow myself to get into such nonsense ever again in my life. That would be too humiliating. Return to Mindoro Island 39

This lucid and courageous remark was made many years later, but already during the war, he was well aware of this lack and regretted it bitterly. The regret was all the more acute as it originated from a sense of uneasiness: Ōoka felt sincerely uneasy about being a realistic, if not always cynical, intellectual in the presence of his comrades-in-arms, mostly of peasant stock and whose ­beliefs were still deeply rooted in traditional ethics. These he defines as ­Confucian ­consisting essentially in filial piety and the value of work well done, an ­originally non-belligerent ideal but easily recuperated by the all too ­paternal figure of the Emperor. Forged in this ethic and torn from their ancestral Japanese land, these soldiers are ready to suppress their individual desire for survival in favour of the collective cause. Ōoka is surely at the other end of the spectrum. But that does not stop him from observing and understanding with remarkable insight, his fellows in spite of all. His understanding can be seen, for example, in the description of soldier Kobayashi who dies shouting “Long Live the Emperor!” thrice in a short novel entitled “The Attack”. For the author, to be saluting the Emperor while dying in this war is obviously unthinkable. Nonetheless, he tries to

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understand this soldier whose mentality is so alien to his own. Here is his commentary: The “Long Live the Emperor!” must have been the result of education from the Meiji era which implied the adoration of the emperor’s p ­ ortrait. From the moment politics interferes with education, there is only ­hypocrisy. But the people are not so easily deceived. If political hypocrisy was transformed into truth in the case of soldier Kobayashi it is because this young man possessed ethical values such as filial piety and love of job well done that called, at the last moment, for the paramount figure of the Emperor, since the Japanese people do not believe in God. (88) Ōoka himself certainly does not adhere to these collective ethics. However, he is well aware that he has no alternative value to offer his ignorant companions whose self-effacement he admires. This feeling of shame and guilt for having survived, for having kept to his individualism, is at the heart of all the war writings of Ōoka Shōhei. It is a contradiction that requires of him scrupulous self-scrutiny, a distanced point of view to see himself as only one among others, one among his semblables,  his fellows. His unfailing individualism paradoxically compels him to turn to his  battle companions, within the confines of a community sealed by the mark of death. Ōoka perceives this community with a poignant sense of failure on his part: he is unable to blend into it although tightly caught within it. As one of his peasant companions dies, he cannot hold back his tears: Once again, someone who had finally started to rekindle a feeling of human warmth in my heart had been abruptly snatched away from me. […] I consoled myself that I really had no cause to be upset. We had in fact had nothing to talk about—just like the soldier from northern Tsugaru whom I had been drawn to before. In neither case were we very likely to have truly opened our hearts to each other or to genuinely rejoice in each other’s joys. In neither case had our friendship been based on anything more than sentimentality. Furyoki 163–164; Taken Captive 90

This poignant feeling is not only a sense of loneliness that one experiences while facing a community with which one is not able to identify. For this community lies there, overpowering: it is the community of death. Be they intellectuals

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or uneducated peasants, there is no difference in the face of death. They are all equal. Modern war makes no difference between them. Some died, and he survived. Ōoka knows that if he survived, it was by no means because he had been in any way superior to others or just special. He survived only because of a chain of coincidences while most of his companions perished. This equality before death which implies a sharing of the intimate, is the link that bounds Ōoka, the intellectual who otherwise is wholly unable to embrace his country’s cause, to the fate of his comrades, dead or alive. There is a striking scene in Taken Captive, when Ōoka joins other prisoners in their camp after staying in the field hospital for five days. After having been isolated, he finds himself among his fellow captives. His first reaction is shame, an unexplained feeling of shame which suddenly overwhelms him. As he lay in his bed at the hospital surrounded by American staff, individualists like himself, he had, for the first time in his life, felt understood by his fellow men. In the prison camp he realizes, all at once, that his fate is not with these American fellows but with his compatriots with whom he shares only a shameful complicity. From political democracy as a moral and intellectual value that he recently experienced with the Americans in the hospital, a democracy that preserves intimacy from politics, Ōoka is abruptly thrown back to the democratization of the self whose intimacy is invaded by politics. Political democracy is not enough to protect him, to protect his dignity. Individualist as he may be, Ōoka must face this burning truth: he shares his compatriots’ fate. He ought to force the democratization of the self to its ultimate consequences. The result will be this sober observation, striking in its simplicity, deprived of any complacency. It occurs to him as he spends his pow’s idleness in mentally revisiting his past and condensing it: I ultimately arrived at the conclusion that I was, in essence, nobody—I could die a meaningless death on an unknown island in the southern sea and not be missed one whit. Furyoki 277; Taken Captive 157

Natsuki Ikezawa observes of this passage: he [Ōoka] finds [at the bottom of his experience], not himself, but man. If ever the “I” were an exceptional being, if ever he were a saint, his holiness would have a meaning only in his eyes. But if the “I” is a man among

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others, if he is only a man among others, his holiness is to be shared by all human beings and will brighten the future of humanity […] “Facts, dejection and tenacity” 99–100

We may not be as optimistic as Ikezawa, but this attitude, this looking back on oneself as just one among others, this democratization of the self, may be the most meaningful lesson modern war has taught us through the scrupulous writer that was Ōoka Shōhei. Works Cited Ikezawa, Natsuki. “Facts, dejection and tenacity”. Ōoka Shōhei, Shincho Nihon Bungaku Album. Tōkyō: Shinchō, 1995. Print. Lefort, Claude. “Le corps interposé: 1984 de George Orwell”. Écrire. À l’épreuve du politique. Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1992. 15–36. Print. Ōoka, Shōhei. “Diary of demobilization days”. OSZ 14. Print. Ōoka, Shōhei. Furyoki. 1951. Tōkyō: Shinchōsha, 2005. Print. Ōoka, Shōhei. “My Confiteor”. Bungaku no unmei [On My Writing.]. Tōkyō: Kōdansha Bungei Bunko, 1990. Print. Ōoka, Shōhei. “My intentions in Leyte’s War Chronicle”. (1970). Bungaku no unmei. [On My Writing.] Tōkyō: Kōdansha Bungei Bunko, 1990. Print. Ōoka, Shōhei. OSZ: Ōoka Shōhei Zenshu [Complete Works of Shōhei Ōoka]. 23 vols, Tōkyō: Chikuma Shobo, 1994–1996. Print. Ōoka, Shōhei. Return to Mindoro Island. Tōkyō: Chuko Bunko, 1969. Print. Ōoka, Shōhei. Taken Captive. A Japanese POW’s Story. Trans. Wayne P. Lammers. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1996. Print. Ōoka, Shōhei. “Shugeki”. [“The Attack”]. 1950. Kutsu no hanashi [Story of a pair of Shoes]. Tōkyō: Shūeisha-bunko, 1996. Print. Ōoka, Shōhei. The Burdens of Survival. Trans. David C. Stahl. U of Hawai’i P, 2003. Print. Pachet, Pierre. “Quelqu’un”.Aux aguets: Essais sur la conscience et l’histoire. Paris: Maurice Nadeau. 2002. 173–193. Print.

Conclusion Catherine Hoffmann Representing Wars from 1860 to the Present was conceived and appears at a time when the temporal and spatial demarcation lines between war and peace, combatants and non-combatants, are increasingly blurred. As Brad Prager observes: Representations of war are determined not only by the ages in which they appear, but also by the boundaries understood to define war. The idea, for example, that it is not battle but war itself that leaves behind scars presumes that war has both a beginning and an end, or that we can differentiate between the event and its traces. War is, however, an extended process, one that can hardly be isolated or made wholly distinct from peace. The vagueness of the concept suggests that much remains unknown about its limits. (65) If the limits of war are hazy, or pushed further by the day in a context of protracted civil wars and regional conflicts often taking the form of asymmetrical wars, the field of war representation is likely to become so protean and fragmented that no single work can hope to embrace its various facets. The present volume, with its emphasis on peripheral and idiosyncratic perspectives, under-represented conflicts, distancing strategies, deliberately sets out to offer a selective take on war representation. While this entails a certain distortion, it makes it possible to foreground a number of features and issues which, beyond the specificities of the works examined in each chapter, constitute the network of echoes mentioned in the introduction and challenge our familiarity with prevailing modes of war representation. It is, in particular, striking that many of the works studied eschew direct depiction of combat and glamorized representation of heroic action. Some, such as Rosler’s photomontages, Gerhardie’s novels or the Iraq war films analysed by Michlin are, in fact, openly anti-war and/or anti-militarist. This may in part reflect the contributors’ own ideological position and related aesthetic preferences. It may also simply be a manifestation of the fundamental cultural shift away from the epic or heroic mode of representation although this traditional mode is still thriving in many verbal and visual productions such as videogames and fantasy television series (Game of Thrones comes to mind) which lie outside the scope of this ­collection. Many historical factors, especially the unprecedented scale of destruction and loss of

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lives in the two World Wars, go some way towards accounting for this – partial – desertion of the field of epic representation. Another factor is mentioned by the Japanese writer Ōoka, quoted by Misako Nemoto (211), who attributed to conscription the change in focus in war stories from fighting to individual experience, viewed by him in terms of an inner moral conflict rather than in terms of action: The question of human beings arises when with conscription people who in normal times live just like us, abiding by the law which forbids killing, are dragged out to the battlefields with the duty to kill. […] This is followed by a struggle between State ethics and individual ethics. And this is where we enter the realm of literature. “My Intentions” 23–24

The individual figures – whether the victims in Rosler’s montages, the soldier and his dog in the British press, the protagonists in Lartéguy’s novel, Ōoka ­himself – all somehow stand for whole groups, communities, sides, interests: in other words, they “represent” them within and in relation to the war context. Some of these figures – Lartéguy’s mercenaries and Liam Tasker, the young soldier killed in Afghanistan and hailed as exemplary by the British press – are presented as exhibiting traditional heroic qualities. Yet, those qualities are, it is suggested, wasted in wars which appear morally and politically dubious. In other words, individual heroism appears divorced from the cause and military undertaking in the furtherance of which it is enlisted. It seems paradoxical that, while much of the demythologizing of war in twentieth-century representations may be attributed to the experience and works of soldier-writers of World War i, later writings, such as the post-World War ii French novels analysed by Clément Sigalas, are haunted by the “heroic representational model” (64) of the Great War soldiers. Those novels vindicate Adam Piette’s conception of war writing as being “always ­implicitly a matter of painful recall, of repetition of other wars dramatized as a guilty working through, repression of, and struggle with the terrible deaths of other past combatants” (43). The nostalgia and guilt induced by the haunting presence in cultural memory of past heroic warriors are compounded in our times by new forms of ­warfare in which technology screens the soldier from the fighting and turns the attacker into a spectator, in a position comparable to that of the characters watching war from their window (Sigalas) or the tv viewer of the Baghdad bombing, placed by the combination of visibility and distance “in a witness position that turns the reality of war into a tableau vivant” (Chouliaraki 121).

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Besides, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars, although combatants still suffer injuries and death, the mass of victims are civilians, whether they belong to the category “collateral damage” or whether they are deliberately targeted. Their fate is at the heart of the work of Martha Rosler (Chapter 7) and of the Iraq War films analysed in Chapter 1, and its representation raises crucial issues. One concerns the difficulty of conveying the atrocities committed by combatants on civilians without producing representations that are received as war-porn, however sophisticated in their reflexivity, as the critical reception of De Palma’s Redacted shows (Michlin 22). This relates to the more general ethical problem of representing the sound and the fury of war in such a way as to raise the audience’s awareness and hold its attention without enthralling it. Another issue concerns the limits of representation as a weapon in the political field of action. Representing “the pain of – distant – others” in Vietnam or Iraq, as Rosler’s work does to shake audiences at home out of their complacency and persuade them to take militant action, may not, in fact, have any substantial and direct effect on the viewers’ political commitment. This is Jacques Rancière’s argument in The Emancipated Spectator, quoted by Éliane Elmaleh (133). Interestingly, it echoes, in a very different context, Marie-France Courriol’s observation about the effects and reception of the militant documentaries on the Spanish Civil War, the propaganda value of which was essentially to strengthen and justify already firmly held opinions. Running through most of the chapters in this volume, is the question of the relationship between fact and fiction and the attendant issue of “truth”. That fiction may be a powerful instrument to reveal unpalatable, “redacted” truths about wars is, for instance, amply demonstrated by the films studied by Monica Michlin, while the press coverage analysed by Claire Bowen plays an essential role in confirming and amplifying what Foucault called “a regime of truth”, acceptable to and shared by the community, and, in the specific context of war and its representations, often buttressing national myth. Given the intricate interweaving of history and histrionics in the referent itself, it is not surprising that the boundary between fact and fiction in its representation should be especially porous, begging to be crossed and re-crossed, or that hybridity should characterize many of the works examined in this volume. Thus, the non-­fictional examples, such as the documentary films on the Spanish Civil War or the British press reports on repatriation of dead soldiers mobilize an array of modes of presentation and narrative devices associated with fiction, while, in Rosler’s case, photomontage is used to subvert the realist assumptions of documentary photography. In the works of fiction, hybridity ranges from the classic technique of roman à clef with its thinly disguised historical protagonists, used by Lartéguy in Les Chimères noires, and the appearance, under their

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real names, of historical figures among the cast of characters in Gerhardie’s novels to the use of pseudo-documentary techniques as in the “faux found footage” of De Palma’s Redacted or the map of the imaginary area of Región, accompanying Benet’s Herrumbrosas lanzas, and the detailed maps of military movements and operations inserted in the text of the novel. These simulacra draw our attention to the literally mimetic sense of representation in striking gestures of meta-coding and reflexivity, since the imitation in both cases is not a mimesis of reality but of its visual representation. In Benet’s novel, the device has far reaching effects in that it amounts to sabotaging both the reality of the war itself and the attempts to represent it. The question of “truth” is indissociably linked to the credentials of the ­authors of the account of war1 and to audiences’ expectations. Establishing one’s legitimacy in representing war may, as in Hayashi’s case (Chapter 12), involve c­ hallenging the idea that only soldier-writers are capable of reporting war truthfully. In the Japanese context of World War Two, however, it seems that ­Hayashi’s literary skills, introspection and reflections on the perspectival ­aspects of war representation, failed to meet the readers’ expectations, their desire to “see” war “full-face” rather than “in profile” (Muller 207). One of the strongest reasons for the public’s persistent attraction to representations of war appears to be the desire to know what war is like, or was like. The time factor here plays a crucial role in that expectations and reception will vary depending on whether the war represented is an on-going or recent one, or one which is temporally too distant for any witnesses or participants to be still alive. For instance, the photographers of the American Civil War recorded what they saw of the war and, though their field of vision was necessarily limited, their credentials as eye-witnesses of the field of action were not in doubt. Yet, the photographs could only convey the sensations of the battlefield to veterans who had experienced its sights, smells and noises. To later audiences, the photographs, as W ­ illiam Gleeson argues, remain forever silent. In some of the works studied in this volume – Joris Ivens’s Spanish Earth, or some of the ­War-on-Terror films mentioned in Chapter 1 – i­mmersive techniques are used to provide the viewer with the illusion of experiencing war at close q­ uarters, whether as civilian ­victim or combatant. ­Interestingly, immersion and ­reconstruction of sensory perception also characterize c­ertain multi-­media ­installations such as the Trench ­Experience and the Blitz ­Experience at the ­London Imperial War Museum, ­intending to bring home to ­contemporary visitors wars that are i­ncreasingly ­remote in time, and thus to fulfil their e­ xpectation of ­finding 1 On this point, see Kate McLoughlin’s chapter “Credentials” in Authoring War, especially the notion of autopsy or first-hand experience (42).

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out what it was like. The question is necessarily reductive since it leaves out the perspectival aspect – “for whom? where from?” – so that mimetic immersive representations can, at best, only provide a very partial answer, and, even ­within the chosen restricted field of perception, certainly avoid subjecting the visitors or viewers to the most atrocious assaults on the senses (smells especially) experienced in the field. In contrast to these ­imitative representations, most of the works analysed in this collection eschew literal mimesis: the commemorative sites to Japanese-Americans, for instance, aim, through symbolic means and spatial ­organization, to elicit reflection on c­ ollective responsibility for past and future actions. Most works, as suggested earlier, frustrate traditional expectations as to what constitutes both war and its representation. In some cases, besides, they include comments which expose the discrepancy between the realities of war for the soldier and the versions of it which audiences have, through cultural familiarity, or connivance with official narratives, come to e­ xpect. William Gerhardie expressed this, with a mixture of humour and bitterness, in a passage about his time in the British Army during World War One, briefly quoted in Chapter 4 (76): How I hated the return from leave! I daresay some of my readers would prefer to see me expose myself without delay to shrapnel fire and high explosives, whatever my own view of a foolish world. I, however, felt about the war then much as most people think of it now. What were the old ladies who felt so keenly on the question of “duty” actually demanding of one? This – the surrender of one’s private universe to a formal, nominal quarrel pluming itself with patriotic feathers, only to become, when the real life has been offered up to it, a tarred and feathered object for laughter and contempt. Memoirs 121–122

Another, fictional case, quoted in Chapter 1, is that of soldier McCoy in De ­Palma’s Redacted who, when asked for a “war story” at a homecoming party, summarizes his experience in Iraq in terms that denies his listeners the thrills they looked forward to, and, for a brief moment, brings home to them the atrocities committed in their name: “Everywhere you look is death and s­ uffering […] the killing I did do made me sick” (Michlin 22). Studying war representations leads, unavoidably, to the intricate matter of their reception and to the question of why, beyond their political, cultural, artistic or historical interest, they continue to exercise such fascination. Their range and potential for hybridization with various genres, their combination of the individual and the collective, their strong perspectival component,

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are such that they may appeal to pacifists and anti-militarists as well as to ­audiences eager for adventure stories of high deeds and courage, for narratives or pictures of explicit physical violence and destruction. In Vanity Fair, ­Thackeray, or rather his benign authorial persona, offered a tentative explanation for the persistence through the ages of a war writing tradition: Time out of mind strength and courage have been the theme of bards and romances; and from the story of Troy down to to-day poetry has always chosen a soldier for a hero. I wonder is it because men are cowards in heart that they admire bravery so much, and place military valour so far beyond every other quality for reward and worship? (356) We need not, of course, take this suggestion too seriously, but it does have the merit of reminding us of our own safe distance from war, which, apart from l­ eaving our courage untested, allows us to think in peace about representing wars. Works Cited [Contributions to this volume cited in the conclusion have been omitted from the list of Works Cited] Chouliaraki, Lilie. “The Aestheticization of Suffering on Television”. Fighting Words and Images. Representing War Across the Disciplines. Ed. Elena V. Barbaran, Stephan Jaeger and Adam Muller. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 110–131. Print. Gerhardie, William. Memoirs of a Polyglot: The Autobiography of William Gerhardie. 1931. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973. Print. McLoughlin, Kate. Authoring War. The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Ōoka, Shōhei. “My Intentions in Leyte’s War Chronicle”. Bungaku no unmei [On My Writing]. Tōkyō: Kōdansha Bungei Bunko, 1990. Print. Piette, Adam. “War Zones”. The Cambridge Companion to War Writing. Ed. Kate McLoughlin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 38–46. Print. Prager, Brad. “Occupation as the Face of War: Concealing Violence in the Diary A Wom­ an in Berlin”. Fighting Words and Images. Representing War Across the Disciplines. Ed. Elena V. Barbaran, Stephan Jaeger and Adam Muller. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 65–84. Print. Rancière Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. Print. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. A Novel Without a Hero. 1848. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Print.

Select Bibliography This short bibliography provides a selection of essential and/or recent ­theoretical works on war representation and also includes general studies on representation of direct relevance to the subject of the present volume. Some of the works are listed in the individual bibliographies of the essays. Others are additional suggestions for further reading. Barbaran, Elena V., Stephan Jaeger and Adam Muller, eds. Fighting Words and Images. Representing War across the Disciplines. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Print. Bates, Milton J. The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. ­Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Ed. John B. Thompson. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993. Print. Chapman, James. War and Film. London: Reaktion, 2008. Print. Delaplanche, Jérôme and Axel Sanson. Peindre la guerre. Paris: Nicolas Chaudun, 2009. Print. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Quand les images prennent position. L’Oeil de l’histoire I. ­Paris: Minuit, 2009. Print. Eberwein, Robert. The Hollywood War Film. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. 1975. Revised ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print. Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. London: Pimlico, 1998. Print. Kaempfer, Jean. Poétique du récit de guerre. Paris: Corti, 1998. Print. Lamberti, Elena and Vita Fortunati, eds. Memories and Representations of War. The Case of World War I and World War II. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Print. McLoughlin, Kate. Authoring War. Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. McLoughlin, Kate, ed. The Cambridge Companion to War Writing. Cambridge: ­Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. Mitchell, W.J.T. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: U of ­Chicago P, 2011. Print. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Print. Mondzain, Marie-José. L’image peut-elle tuer? Paris: Bayard, 2015. Print. Rancière, Jacques. Le Spectateur émancipé. Paris: La fabrique, 2008. Print.

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Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. Print. Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 1994. Print. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Print. Stahl, Roger. Militainment, Inc.: War, Media and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print. Tagg, John. The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Print. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. New York: Verso, 1989. Print. Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural H ­ istory. 1995. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. Print.

Index Abu-Ghraib 16, 21, 22, 27, 127, 128, 130 Afghanistan 4, 6, 19n, 90, 158, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 179, 180, 223 Al Jazeera 16, 20, 26 Al Qaeda 23, 24 Armistice 69, 74, 75, 82n, 85 Ashcroft, Lord Michael 179, 180 Atwood, Margaret 4, 5, 89–101 Bodily Harm 90, 96n Cat’s Eye 90, 97n, 99 Dancing Girls (“The Man from Mars”; When It Happens”) 91, 92, 92n, 93 Life Before Man 90, 93, 94, 99 MaddAddam Trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam) 90, 90n Morning in the Burned House (“The Loneliness of the Military Historian”) 97 The Blind Assassin 89, 90, 93, 100, 101 The Robber Bride 89, 90, 96, 97, 98, 99 Wilderness Tips (“Uncles”; “The Age of Lead) 95, 96, 96n Bainbridge Island Japanese Exclusion Memorial (Washington) 103, 106, 109, 111, 112 (Fig.), 114, 115 (Fig.), 116 Barnard, George 187, 191, 192 (Fig.) Baudouin, King 156 Beck, Béatrix 51, 52, 58 Léon Morin, prêtre 51, 52, 58–60, 63 Benet, Juan 5, 31–49, 225 Cartografia personal 31, 32n, 48, 49 Collages 41n El ángel del señor abandona a Tobias 34 Herrumbrosas lanzas 31, 32–33, 35–48, 225 La inspiración y el estilo 34, 35 La moviola de Eurípides 34 Saúl ante Samuel 49 Una medìtación 48 Volverás a Región 36, 48 Benjamin, Walter 38, 123, 169 Bigelow, Kathryn 13, 15, 16n The Hurt Locker 13, 21, 27 Zero Dark Thirty 15, 16 Bory, Jean-Louis 51, 52, 53n, 60

Mon village à l’heure allemande 51, 52, 52n, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60 Bosquet, Alain 51, 52, 56, 64 La Grande éclipse 51, 52, 52n, 56, 59, 61–63, 64 Les Fêtes cruelles 64 Bourdieu, Pierre 132, 195 Brady, Matthew 187, 188, 189 Broomfield, Nick 13, 14, 16, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26 Battle for Haditha 13, 14, 16, 19, 23–26 Burke, Kenneth 108 Bush, George W. 14, 20, 22, 24, 24n, 127 Cameron, James 13 Avatar 13, 27 Chekhov, Anton 72, 73, 75, 77, 79 Three Sisters 73, 75 China 194, 196, 198, 202 Incident 7, 194 Civil War American 4, 6, 169, 185, 186, 186n, 187, 189, 190, 225 Russian 4, 5, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 80, 81, 83 Spanish 1, 4, 5, 6, 31, 32, 33, 33n, 35, 37, 39, 43, 45, 46, 48, 90, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 146, 148n, 150, 224 Clos, Max 154, 159 Congo 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 158n, 159, 159n, 160, 161, 164, 165 Conrad, Joseph 158, 159n, 164 Heart of Darkness 158, 164 Coverdale, John F. 137, 140, 143 Curtis, Jean-Louis 51, 52, 53n Les Forêts de la nuit 51, 52, 53, 54 Daily Mail 168, 170, 175, 176 Daily Telegraph 168, 169, 171n, 173, 178 Davies, Dido 72n, 75, 75n De Gaulle, General Charles 63 De Palma, Brian 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 22n, 25, 224, 225, 226 Casualties of War 19 Redacted 13, 14, 16, 19–23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 224, 225, 226

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Index

Deleuze, Gilles 39, 39n Didi-Huberman, Georges 38, 185 Dos Passos, John 141

House Beautiful 123, 124, 125 Hudson, Miles 70, 81, 84n, 87n Huntington, William 189, 190

Eberwein, Robert 14, 15, 15n Executive Order 9066 103, 104, 105, 111

Ikezawa, Natsuki 220, 221 Imperial War Museum (London) 225 Imperiale, Stefania 38 Iraq 1, 4, 6, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 27, 90, 123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 131, 158, 167, 168, 169, 170, 224, 226 War 5, 13, 14, 15, 16n, 17, 18, 19, 22, 26, 127, 128, 129, 134, 168, 170, 222, 224 Ishikawa, Tatsuzō 194n, 195 Living Soldiers 195, 195n Ivens, Joris 6, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 225 Song of Heroes 141 Spain in Flames (dir. Helen Van Dongen) 140 The Spanish Earth 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 225

Ford, President Gerald 105 Foucault, Michel 15, 167, 168, 169, 224 Foulkrod, Patricia 18, 26 The Ground Truth 18, 26 Franco, General Francisco 140, 145, 150 Gaida, General 74, 84n García Lorca, Federico 35 Gascar, Pierre 52, 64 Le Temps des morts 52, 64 Gerhardie, William 5, 69–87, 222, 225, 226 Futility 69, 70, 71, 72, 72n, 73, 74, 75, 76, 76n, 77, 80n, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86 Memoirs of a Polyglot 71n, 76, 79, 81, 85, 86, 87, 226 “My Literary Credo” (Anton Chehov: A Critical Study) 79 The Polyglots 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85 Goya, Francisco 42, 43 Gracq, Julien 51, 52, 57, 59, 60, 63 Le Rivage des Syrtes 57 Un balcon en forêt 51, 52, 55, 56–58, 60, 61, 63 Guadalajara, battle of 141, 142, 143, 146 Guardian 22n, 171n, 173 Gulf War 90, 97, 99

Kabila, Laurent 155 Kasavubu, President 156, 157, 157n Katanga 154, 156, 157, 157n, 158, 158n, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163 Secession of 4, 6, 154, 156, 163 Kinvig, Clifford 70n, 71, 71n, 74n Kisangani, Emizer François 155, 156, 163n Knox, General Sir Alfred 70, 77n Kolchak, Admiral Aleksandr 73, 77, 77n, 84n

Haggis, Paul 13, 14, 16, 16n, 18, 19, 19n, 25 In the Valley of Elah 13, 14, 16, 17, 20 Hayashi, Fusao 7, 71n, 194–207, 225 “For Writers” 196 Profiles of War 7, 194, 195, 196, 197–207 “War and Writers” 197 Hemingway, Ernest 141, 142, 145, 148 Hernandez, Miguel 35, 42 Hino, Ashihei 207, 207n Hoare, Mike 160, 163, 164 Congo Mercenary 163 Horvat, General 73

Lartéguy, Jean 6, 154–155, 157–165, 223, 224 Les Centurions 154, 158 Les Chimères noires 6, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160–163, 164, 165n, 224 Les Prétoriens 154, 158 Lefort, Claude 217, 217n Leopold ii, King 155 Life 123, 124, 132 Lucan 43, 43n Pharsalia (The Civil War) 43 Lucretius 59 Lumumba, Patrice 156, 157, 157n, 160, 161, 165

Jenkins, Henry 169, 175 Johnson, President Lyndon 126

233

Index Manchuria 73, 74 Marcellini, Romolo 6, 136, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147, 148n Documentario di Guerra sul fronte dell’ Africa Settentrionale 141 Legionari al secondo parallelo 141 Los novios de la muerte 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150 Marias, Javier 33, 41n Mayo, James 109, 112 McLoughlin, Kate 1, 7n, 71, 81, 225n Memorial to Japanese-American Patriotism in World War ii (Washington d.c.) 106, 110, 110 (Fig.), 113, 116, 117 (Fig.) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 40 Miyoshi, Tatsuji 195, 196 Mobutu, Joseph 155, 156, 157, 164, 165 Napolitano, Gian Gaspare 141, 142, 143, 147 Nichols, Bill 146, 147 O’Brien, Conor Cruise 160, 163, 163n To Katanga and Back: a un Case History 160 Ōoka, Shōhei 7, 209–221, 223 On My Writing (“My Intentions”: “My Confiteor”) 211, 213, 223 Return to Mindoro Island 211, 218 Taken Captive: A Japanese pow’s Story 7, 209, 211, 212, 212n, 213–220 The Battle of Leyte 217 The Burdens of Survival 214 Ozaki, Shirō 194n, 195, 195n Pachet, Pierre 210 Philippines 7, 209, 216 Leyte, battle of 213 Mindoro Island 213, 215 Phoney War 53, 54, 55, 56, 61, 64 Portland, Oregon’s Japanese American Historical Plaza 105, 106, 109, 111, 114, 116, 116 (Fig.) Powell, Anthony 71, 75 Rancière, Jacques 132, 133, 224 Reagan, President Ronald 105 Roosevelt, President Franklin Delano 103, 148, 216 Rosenfeld, David M. 195, 207n

Rosler, Martha 6, 123–134, 222, 223, 224 Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful 123, 124, 125, 129, 130, 131, 132 Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful. New Series 123, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132 Rowe, Lance Corporal Kenneth 174, 178 Russia 69n, 70, 71n, 73, 75, 77, 81, 124n, 141 Allied intervention in 4, 5, 69, 69n, 70, 70n, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82n, 86, 87 Russian Revolution 70, 72, 75 Salmon, Christian 167, 169, 169n, 172 Sasha (explosives sniffer dog) 174, 178 Schiffrin, Deborah 107, 108 Schoots, Hans 139, 141, 148, 148n Scotsman 171n, 174, 180 Seattle Nisei Veterans Committee Memorial 109, 111 Seattle, Washington’s memory wall 106, 111, 113, 113 (Fig.), 114, 116 Sherman, General William 191, 192 (Fig.) Siberia 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 74n, 76, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84 Sino-Japanese War, Second 4, 194, 194n Sontag, Susan 16n, 128, 128n Spain 31, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 136, 137, 137n, 138, 140, 140n, 141, 141n, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 157 Stendhal 209, 212, 215, 218 Stewart, Garrett 13, 18, 25, 26, 27 Sun 168, 169, 170, 171n, 172, 176 Taliban 167, 172 Tasker, Lance Corporal Liam 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 223 Taylor, John 189, 190 Thackeray, William Makepeace 227 Theo (explosives sniffer dog) 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180 Tolstoy, Lev 73 Tshombe, Moïse 156, 157, 157n, 160, 163, 164, 165 Ueda, Hiroshi 207 Velasquez, Diego 42 Vietnam 6, 20, 91, 92n, 123, 126, 129, 131, 224 War 4, 19, 90, 98, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 134

234 Vietnam Veterans Memorial 112, 113 Virilio, Paul 15, 26, 26n, 145 War on Terror 4, 5, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 24, 225 Washington Post 171n, 173 Whitman, Walt 186, 186n, 191 Wootton Bassett 167, 168, 170, 179, 180 World War One 1, 2, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 87, 90, 93, 100, 124, 145, 169, 180, 199, 210, 223, 226

Index World War Two 1, 4, 5, 6, 51, 59, 60, 65, 89, 90, 92, 92n, 93, 94, 95n, 96, 97, 98, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 117 (Fig.), 118, 156, 169, 194, 194n, 195, 209, 212, 215, 218, 223, 225 Young, James 106, 109, 118