WONDROUS CALS Book Club 2, 29-06-2024
The experience of war is impossible to convey. The pain, the sensory input and the emotional duress are too much for words to express. Literature can only capture very little of the intensity of war, but it cannot leave war untouched. There is an unresistable urge in survivors of war to share their experiences and try to convey the horrors of war, even when language falls short. This urge to speak the truth about violence struggles with a dual desire: to convince the outsiders of war that the death and destruction is not justifiable, but also to convince those that survived that their suffering can be justified. War entails meaninglessness, because people’s lives will be reduced to collateral damage in a struggle between factions, but suffering cannot be meaningless if people need to maintain a will to endure. Consequentially, war stories inject meaning into conflict, ranging from the heroism of individual soldiers and the nobility of fighting for one’s country to the necessity to carry the burden of violence or the wisdom in striking first. These attempts to impose meaning on war are the dominant voice in war representation, but their meaning is not true significance, but justification. The desire to make war appear as more than suffering and despair thwarts logic, rationalising the unjustifiable. Meaning dies in a war, but stories are born. In response to this phenomenon, writers that attempt to deconstruct the heroism imposed on war take different approaches to combat the twisted logic that leads to and prolongs war. World War One poets such as Wilfred Owen seek to reveal the reality of war to a propaganda-numbed homefront. Writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller undermine the notion of war heroes with parody and sharp criticism of the glorification of veterans. Writers like Han Kang, Simone Weil and Martin Amis aim to scrutinize the logic used to defend wars and expose the fallacies that result from violent thinking. Together, they show that war is inherently absurd and cannot be given true significance. In order to prevent the loss of meaning that comes with war, humanity has to resist the simplistic narratives and dangerous pseudo-logic of war heroism as well as notion that war is inevitable by fundamentally choosing to not prepare for war, but against war.
War has been a presence in history since the beginning of its representation, usually with a focus on the glorious victories. This reveals the desire to impose an idealised version of conflict, where heroes can emerge from the bloodshed having gained more than they have lost. The virtues of the war hero vary across time and space, but often include courage, selflessness, nobility, idealism, superior power and strategy, charisma or leadership and the willingness to sacrifice. Although many of these qualities are also celebrated outside of violent conflict, they are a necessary component of the representation of war, because they impose meaning on the suffering that was endured. From the legendary exploits of the heroes in Homer’s Iliad to the modern blockbuster, war becomes a proving ground for protagonists to show their comraderie, strength and valour. It almost makes it appear as if war is worth the pain. However, the “old lie”, as Wilfred Owen calls it, which claims it is sweet to die for one’s country, is opposed by the realities of suffering. Owen’s picture of the soldiers in “Dulce et Decorum Est”, stumbling through trenches, leaves no room for idealised heroism:
Bent- double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
These soldiers have been broken by the war, despite their strength and love for country. Later, when the gas attacks hit the trenches, they scramble for masks, but one of them is too late. The speaker describes his death, seen in “all my dreams”, where he is “guttering, choking, drowning.” The details of his death, “the white eyes writhing in his face” or the “blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”, make it impossible to look away from the suffering of war to the supposed heroism. The poem ends with the claim that if people could see and hear the suffering of soldiers dying at the front,
(…) you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desparate glory
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro Patria Mori.
Owen brings together the narrative of heroism with the realities of war and shows they cannot co-exist. Heroism is imposed onto war from the outside, hoping to instill bravery and readiness for war’s logic in new recruits and those at home. The meaning that is instilled in war is an illusion, a lie, for the sake of the nation’s ideals and hopes during a war.
A similar disillusionment can be found in the novels Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Both of the authors were in the American armed forces during World War II and use their own experiences to deconstruct the mythologising of American soldiers in the World War and by extension heroism in all wars. In both cases, the main characters are feeble, confused, afraid and moved by forces around them instead of by their own will. The cast of characters around them contains charicatures of every possible weakness found in humanity, such as the spineless cruelty of Roland Weary in Slaughterhouse Five or the selfishness, greed and hypocrisy of Milo in Catch-22. The war is portrayed as a chaotic mess of ineffectual attempts to destroy each other, with the only redeeming factor of the endless suffering that it is simply how things go. The motif of “so it goes” repeated after every death in Slaughterhouse Five, from the fire bombing of Dresden to the death of a fizzled drink, externalises the responsibility of Billy Pilgrim, the main character, and all other human beings, for the way things are. This is emphasised by the perspective of the Trafalmadorians, alien beings that perceive time not linearly, but all at once. There is no causality if all of time is always present. It remains ambiguous whether these aliens are a figment of Billy’s imagination, a result of his PTSS or an actual factor in the reality of the novel and possibly outside of it, but their perspective is the only solace provided to Billy Pilgrim after experiencing the horrors of the Second World War and continuing to face death and suffering afterwards. There is no heroism when all suffering and death is inevitable, but there is no need for guilt or shame, either. War and death are parts of existence that the Tralfamadorians would never deny, but spend as little time as possible concentrating on. A Trafalmadorian says to Billy: “There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments – like today at the zoo. Isn’t this a nice moment?” (117) Without the ability to perceive all of time at will, humans instead ignore the harsh realities of war by weaving stories around them, unconsciously or consciously.
In Catch-22, the tragedy of war is mostly experienced from a distance, as the characters are part of an American Air Force base in Italy and are sent on endless missions to bomb the enemy and support their allies. In Catch-22, heroism is inverted by showing the responses of a wide range of characters to the violence of the war, with not a single character able to approximate the heroic ideal of fiction and ideology.John Yossarian, the main character, is caught in the paradox called Catch-22. The constant life-threatening danger of the flights makes it obvious that anyone who still flies is insane, which would allow the doctor at the camp to keep them off the flights. However, as soon as they ask to be grounded, they are no longer insane, because the only sane response to the mortal danger and violence of deadly missions is to want to stop. When that happens, the doctor cannot keep them grounded on the basis of insanity anymore. “If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.” (52). This twisted logic, where insanity and the normal human response to death are necessary, inverted components to the war machine, show how war narratives rely on undermining common sense. In addition, Yossarian’s fear and resistance to self-sacrifice provide a more human picture than the sterile ideal, allowing audiences to feel both an urge to ridicule and a pang of sympathy. This applies to the entire menagerie of pilots, officers and crew, whose flaws and suffering illustrate the wide range of responses to the instution of war, which nevertheless grinds on, destroying lives when no one seems to want to. When Yossarian has been hospitalised again, he is psychologically analysed by Major Sanderson, who accuses him of many unhealthy dispositions: “You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions! (…) You’ve been unable to adjust to the idea of war. (…) You have morbid aversion to dying. (…) You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don’t like bullies, bigots, snobs and hypocrites.” (448) The reader understands that these are normal, benign behaviours in a mind untouched by war thinking, but in Catch-22, as in war, the normal world is flipped upsidedown. Everyday virtues and instincts are pathologies in times of war, revealing that an idealised soldier cannot be a sane human being outside of a war context. Beyond the army base, “mobs with clubs were in control everywhere” (477), showing how those Italians and Americans who have adapted to war mentality are abusing those who haven’t, uninterrupted by people like Yossarian, who are too afraid to interfere even though they know they should (475). Behind the parody and absurdity, Catch-22 presents a bleak picture of a world at war, incompatible with the image of heroes and glory. Both Slaugterhouse Five and Catch-22 show that the image of war heroes does not align with the brutalising grind of modern warfare. War is not glamourous. It is impossible for people to maintain honour and dignity during war, because war reduces people’s lives to immaterial accidents or tactical assets to achieve victory. No character can rise above the dehumanisation synonymous with war.
The notion that violence can be used and mastered is criticised incisively by Simone Weil in 1939, when she writes “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (original French: “L’Iliad, ou le poem de la force”), hoping to alter the way warmongers see their chances in war. Violence is not a one-way tool for submission, but enslaves and reduces its users, as well, as they become increasingly passive channels for self-perpetuating violence. In her essay, Weil first defines “force” as “that x that turns anybody who is submitted to it into a thing” (3). Violence turns a “man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him” (3). However, it can also be more subtle, as she provides examples of those who are enslaved and threatened, who lose their autonomy. She identifies this in the Iliad as people are paralysed by fear, submit to threats and violence or become pawns, lackeys, playthings or slaves to those who use force against them. However, her warning is also to those who would consider themselves the master of violence. There are no real heroes in the Iliad, she claims:
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagines it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. (3)
War is the ultimate power of objectification. On the side of the victims, humans are reduced to objects by limiting their ability to act freely. On the side of perpetrators, Weil shows that violence ultimately reduces them to automatons who cannot escape the violence they have used against others: “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it” (11). They will be victims, one day, or lose themselves in an endless struggle to prevent that situation. Their reasoning, their self-perception and their view of the world will be consumed by violence, until there is no alternative or other perspective. Weil writes: “The conquering soldier is the scourge of nature. Possessed by war, he, like the slave, becomes a thing, though his manner of doing so is different – over him too, words are as powerless as over matter itself. And both, at the touch of force, experience its inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb” (26). This way, they are lost to force, completely swallowed by war. There is no space for heroes in war. In the end, violence rules people.
The way war reduces people to things is visible in the writing of Vonnegut and Heller, but is also acutely explored by Han Kang in her novel Human Acts. Through a range of perspectives on both sides of the conflict, Kang portrays the violent suppression of the 1980s student revolt in Gwangju, South-Korea, and shows the long-lasting effects on Korean society. The physical pain and emotional trauma endured by the characters renders them almost catatonic, even years after the events occured. After earlier protest were suppressed through martial law, students protesting the martial law were attacked by the army, who were instructed to act with maximum force to discourage further protests. Han Kang describes how students, bystanders and family members are beaten, tortured and killed, specifically with the goal to reduce the uprisers to nothing. Jin-Su, one of the students who is captured and tortured, realises that they are underfed, humiliated and tortured for this reason: “We will make you realise how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking animals. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.” (126). This utter dehumanisation is designed to delegitimise the calls for justice and freedom that were at the basis of the protest, but also to undermine the notion of basic equality. Soldiers that were rewarded for excessive violence during the Vietnam War are again rewarded bonuses when they surrender themselves to “especially brutal actions” (141), encouraging a lack of self-control and autonomy on both sides. The characters in Human Acts are broken by the enduring legacy of violence and are unable to move on, either through the results of the inflicted torture, the unresolved mysteries of disappeared family members or the persisting censorship of the violence commited. In their different ways, they demonstrate how people are “turning into a thing” (Weil 3), destroying all the dignity, reason and potential of human beings through violence. These are the “human acts” of the title, when people become one with force.
The catatonia, apathy and reduction of human autonomy is visible in Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-22 and Human Acts, both during and after the wars they depict. Under the pressure of violence, in order to protect the mind, people become apathetic and distance themseles from their situation as a necessary means to survive. The pain and turmoil of constant threat of death makes people unable to see into the future and find a path towards peace. As Weil describes it: “The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward” (Weil 23). Being unable to look outward, people become the pitiable figures shown in these anti-war novels, where both perpetrators and victims are unable to control their situations or themselves.
This apathy and helplessness is mirrored by the modern audiences outside of war, witnessing the suffering through modern media, but unable to act in meaningful resistance to the violence they perceive. Even though the degree of suffering is incomparable, with those in war zones suffering from the acute dangers of war, the effect displays similarities: crisis fatigue is a reduction in autonomy under a barrage of pain and suffering experienced vicariously. Since there is an endless stream of war urgently communicated through the news, people find there is simply too much to care and worry about. As the suffering from a single war is already too much to consider or communicate, there being multiple wars at any given time, and war being far from the only category of crisis, it is no wonder people have a tendency to switch off after having seen too much suffering, especially if they consider compassion to be limited (Robson). There is also another important notion that increases a submission to apathy: the idea that wars are inevitable. If nothing can be done to prevent war, it allows for a justification of inaction and resignation.
Given the historical record, war indeed appears omnipresent and unavoidable, as is also affirmed by the Trafalmadorians in Slaughterhouse Five. However, it is worth questioning this logic, as it part of the narrative of warmongers and dictators. The inevitability of war too often precedes an argument for starting or prolonging a war. If war cannot be avoided, it is best to strike first and achieve the best possible situation. Martin Amis, describing the language used in military writing about nuclear war, summarises their style while painfully exposing its senselessness:
In the can-do world of nuclear ‘conflict management’, we hear talk of retaliating first; in this world, hostile provocative, destabilizing nuclear weapons are aimed at nuclear weapons (counter-force), while peaceful, defensive, security-conscious nuclear weapons (there they languish, adorably pouting) are aimed at cities (countervalue). (10)
In this twisted language and logic, “refusing to cooperate” (Amis 10), the absurdity of trying to discuss war through a coherent, positive perspective becomes apparent. However, in the discussions on the possibility of war, it is only through Mutual Assured Destruction, where the threat of complete annihilation is the only thing preventing an initiation of war from one party, that stability can be created. However, Amis provides the syllogism of Failed Deterrence: “’He, thinking I was about to kill him in self-defence, was about to kill me in self-defence. So I killed him in self-defence.’” (16). This logic is often seen as unavoidable, where only naive idealists would believe anything could be different. However, the reasoning rests on the flawed assumption of war-logic, where the fighting has already ruined thinking, empathy and choice, rendering human agents into a thing. The suffering experienced in wars can also create cynicism, leading people to accept war as an unavoidable consequence of human nature. In Human Acts, one of the tortured survivors asks:
Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered – is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable? (140)
This outlook is understandable, even likely, when looking at the unending suffering visible in the world. Peace is precarious and conflict escalates with an astounding force, almost impossible to resist. Heated arguments and wounded pride are more than enough to initiate war, let alone the misunderstandings and mistakes that are bound to occur in a complex system such as Earth. From that perspective, the suffering of war might never be gloriously overcome, so the ideal is reduced to a stoic and realistic endurance of wars that occur, with a specific mode of thinking that will aim to reduce the length, brutality and scope of wars that cannot be stopped, even if that includes starting wars.
However, war isn’t inevitable. Admittedly, under current circumstances, it would be naive to claim that everlasting peace is possible, but this is due to a conceptualisation of humanity and an organisation of physical reality, both of which can be changed. Claiming that war is inevitable is avoiding the responsibility of preventing it. People are to blame for making the decisions that lead to war. In Catch-22, Yossarian realises that there is blame on everyone involved in the world as it exists when he is blamed for the death of Nately by his lover:
It was a man’s world, and she and everyone younger had every right to blame him and everyone older for every unnatural tragedy that befell them; just as she, even in her grief, was to blame for every man-made misery that landed on her kid sister and on all other children behind her. Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all. (465).
Submitting to the idea that war cannot be stopped or prevented is to continue the “lousy chain of inherited habit”. It is not war that is inherent to humanity, but conflict. When people can re-imagine their language and reasoning to account for ways of resolving conflict that need not escalate to war, it becomes possible to consider a world where peace is much more strongly guarded against the impulses that generate war. This includes resisting the false narratives and broken logic of war. Bringing meaning into peace is essential to make war avoidable. This can be achieved by bringing the appropriate responses to the clichés of warmongers. Life matters. War is illogical. Remember every war should be stopped. Consider the costs of war and never consider them acceptable. Weapon oneself against the rule of violence by staying a person, armed with logic, compassion, reason. Humanise all victims, not only the ones that resemble us. Prioritising some wars over others is part of a loss in significance. War is not justifiable, but defence is necessary. In short, do not prepare for war, but prepare against war.
It will remain necessary to train soldiers and stock weapons and ammunition as long as there are aggressors with weapons, which will be for a long time, if not forever. Still, they must not be prepared for war, they must be prepared against war, educated on the deterioration of meaning during battle and infused with the most powerful weapons against the loss of autonomy: critical thinking, compassion, understanding of and appreciation for different perspectives. In Human Acts, one of the students, Jun-Li, speaks about this to a professor investigating the violence: “I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race” (141). In the novel, this carries the double load of sympathy and fear. After all, humans committed all the atrocities Jun-Li experienced. Still, it embodies the necessity for a constant protection of meaning, exchange and the recognition of others that lies at the core of a preparation against war. Han Kang also speaks through Ms. Lim, another witness of the massacre, who voices the need for meaning at the foundation of war stories: “We needed the national anthem for the same reason we needed the minute of silence. To make the corpses we were singing over into something more than butchered lumps of meat.” (181). The representation of war should always serve to prepare against war whether through the restoration of dignity, the approximation of the suffering endured or the examination of the falsehoods and glorification of war heroics. Considering the tragedies of war, it is essential to reduce the grip force has over humanity, and the stories told about war are essential in resisting it.
The absurdity of war can be explored through a range of perspectives. Wilfred Owen exposes the lies of war propaganda, whereas Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller deconstruct the image of the war hero and Han Kang aims to show the depth of suffering that abounds in violent conflict. Simone Weil and Martin Amis address the absurdity of war logic to refute the cynical view that war can be justified. In all cases, the absurdity of war is impressed on the reader, even if the reader cannot know the pain and trauma directly. Every attempt to reach those outside of war without succumbing to the narratives of glorification and justification helps in preparing against war in the future. Authors and readers need to constantly work to restore meaning to the senselessness of suffering, while resisting the pull to invent meaning in the act of war. When stories do not work to make war more likely, but to make humanity better equipped to resist war, it becomes possible to imagine a future where war is no longer considered an inevitability, but a grim reminder of the dangers of stories.
Works Cited List
Amis, Martin. “Unthinkability.” Einstein’s Monsters. 1987. Vintage, 2003.
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. 1955. Vintage, 2011.
Kang, Han. Human Acts. 2014. Translation Deborah Smith. Granta Publications, 2016.
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The War Poets: An Anthology. 1992. Parke Sutton Publishing, 2015.
Robson, David. “The Big Idea: Is Compassion Fatigue Real?” The Guardian, 2-2-2024.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. 1969. Dell Publishing, 1991.
Weil, Simone. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” Original: “L’Iliad, ou le poem de la force.” 1943.
Other sources
Alexievich, Svetlana. The Unwomanly Face of War. 1985. Translation Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Penguin, 2018.
Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. 1938. Penguin, 1974.
Homer. The Iliad.
