Disquiet on the
Western Front
Disquiet on the
Western Front:
World War II
and Postmodern Fiction
By
Laurel Brett
Disquiet on the Western Front:
World War II and Postmodern Fiction
By Laurel Brett
This book first published 2016
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2016 by Laurel Brett
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-9687-X
ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9687-0
For Mia and David
And everyone who has died in war
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix
Foreword .................................................................................................... xi
Part One: World War One and Modernism
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3
Wounded by War: The Sun Also Rises
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 11
The Absences of War: To the Lighthouse
Last Thoughts on Part One ........................................................................ 17
Part Two: World War II and Postmodernism
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 23
The Transitions of War: Nine Short Stories
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 31
The Insanity of War: Catch-22
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 43
The Dislocations of War: Slaughterhouse-Five
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 53
The Dissolution of War: Gravity’s Rainbow
Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 65
The Escapes of War: Going After Cacciato
Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 73
The Burdens of War: The Things They Carried
Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 81
The Deceptions of War: Hocus Pocus
viii
Contents
Last Thoughts on Part Two ....................................................................... 89
Conclusion ................................................................................................. 95
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 105
Index ........................................................................................................ 107
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No one studies anything in a vacuum and many people helped me
along the way. I want to thank James McPartlin of Syosset High School
for asking me to read Pynchon when I was still in high school and
introducing me to postmodernism. Joan Sevick of Nassau Community
College accepted me into a seminar to study postmodernism and sent me
hundreds of articles to keep me updated. She also invited me to teach
postmodernism, and as anyone who teaches knows, the best way to learn
anything is to teach it to others. I wouldn’t have written this book without
them.
Don Ihde and Dave Allison of the SUNY Stony Brook Philosophy
Department were my Virgils to study postmodern theory and introduce me
to phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism. In particular,
Dave Allison led me through Derrida and provided his own wonderful
translation of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of a
Human Science.” I also had fruitful talks with Hugh Silverman of the
same department.
My thanks must always go to Rose Zimbardo of the English
Department of SUNY Stony Brook for her valiant defense and direction of
the my doctoral thesis on Pynchon’s novels when gender politics
threatened to derail it.
I also wish to thank Bruce Urquhart for assigning me the summer class
in the summer of 2014 that led to this book. He has been an unflagging
supporter.
My thanks go to Minna Barrett of SUNY Old Westbury who took me
under her wing and showed me how academic writing is done when I was
struggling with Pynchon. Another colleague, Elizabeth Wheeler of Nassau
Community College, has been a constant friend and staunch ally since we
were in graduate school together and a sounding board for many of these
ideas.
I want to thank Roberta Israeloff for studying Pynchon with me when
we were both girls and Lynn Manning Valente for reading Vonnegut with
me during the same period. Sallie Sears of SUNY Stony Brook laid all the
secrets of Virginia Woolf at my feet, and I also wish to thank her.
I could not have done this without all the supportive folks at
Cambridge Scholars who reached across the pond with advice, reminders
and encouragement. They are Sam Baker for contacting me and making
x
Acknowledgements
this book possible, Victoria Carruthers for the thankless task of keeping in
contact with me, Amanda Millar for final suggestions, and Sophie
Edminson for the final look of the manuscript. Very deep appreciation
goes to Marlene deWilde for all the care she took with copy editing this
work and her generosity in actually reading it and letting me know that she
liked it.
I want to thank Dorothy Brett who awarded me a family grant that
allowed me a much appreciated semester free from teaching to write, and
Mark Kauffman who leant emotional support and diligently did too many
chores to even remember.
Finally, I want to thank Mia Brett and David Brett, both young
scholars. Mia for her historical perspective and large view, and David who
was my first reader and oversaw all the details of the project from the
index to the chapter names and even the format for these acknowledgments.
I am forever in their debt. They make all things possible.
And last, I wish to thank my future readers. I thought of you as I wrote
these pages.
FOREWORD
The postmodern sensibility resists easy definition. We can find
checkpoints that suggest elements of postmodernism but definitions vary,
as do ideas about the beginnings of the postmodern. At times it seems
easier to throw up our hands and agree that although we might not be able
to define the term or the zeitgeist, we definitely know it when we see it.
The postmodern was most comfortably used in architecture, in which it
is easy to see a rebellion against the strictures of International Modernism,
specifically the “box for living” as promulgated by Mies van der Rohe and
his followers. The postmodern reaction to these dogmatic minimalist
structures was the incorporation of historical elements and decoration used
in ironic ways that resurrected previous styles and artifacts, for example,
columns or Palladian windows used out of historical context as ironic and
decorative features that created a disjointed building style not tethered to a
particular time, place, or architectural style.
The term can be used to describe art forms that follow a similar
agenda. Ideas, designs, practices, and esthetic viewpoints of the past are
incorporated in ironic and self-referential ways that create an almost
collage-like voice when we talk about literature. It remains unclear
whether this postmodern esthetic is grounded in a historical period or
whether it is possible to explore the literature of the past to find examples
of the same esthetic. However, since art does not exist in a social and
political vacuum, it is fair to say that postmodern literature as a
widespread recognized phenomenon sprung into being in the period
following World War II and has dominated the literary landscape since
then.
Although the term postmodern was used as early as World War I, the
term is most useful when juxtaposed to ideas of modernism. If we conflate
the terms modernism and postmodernism, we lose a useful tool in
discussing the literature of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
and we flatten the differences in style, intent, and philosophical
implications of first modernist and then postmodernist works. The closest
analogy might be the way we view the literature of the long nineteenth
century in which neoclassical ideas of the human condition are followed
by romantic ideas, but both exist together throughout the period to define a
complex view of the world in which neoclassicism and romanticism define
each other in a dialectical manner.
xii
Foreword
In much the same way, modernism and postmodernism create a similar
dialectic. Because modernism has been so associated with the dislocations
of the modern world, it is uncomfortable at first to see this modernist
response supplanted by the more nihilistic implications of postmodernism.
Initially it would seem there is nothing more radical than a cubist
deconstruction of the physical planes of space, for example.
It is a commonplace and universally accepted element of literary
criticism to see modernism arising from the radical changes in society
created by the dislocations of World War I. First and foremost was the
destruction of a European society with stable ideas of class and privilege.
An impoverished Germany, the Russian revolution, the death of almost an
entire generation of young men, the end of land as an important economic
asset, the rise of the United States as a world power, and, perhaps most
importantly, the end of heroic understandings of war created a voice of
dislocation and interiority in which the inner lives of characters became
increasingly important as a subject of fiction and a point of stability in an
increasingly shifting social and economic landscape.
However, what remains intact, at least in my reading of modernism, is
the idea of a heroic inner self that is fairly stable and generates an inner
monologue that creates a coherent, albeit often dense and difficult,
narrative. Although Hemingway is often mentioned as a postmodern
writer, his characters are heroes, or at least failed heroes, whose wounds
are tragic in that they imply, or even insist upon, the possibility of moral
coherence. They are judged by their failures, but the very judgment of the
characters as failed heroes surely establishes a moral compass to use when
evaluating their shortcomings. Thus, Hemingway (as an example) writes
modernist tales of characters who are not moral exemplars because the
circumstances of the modern world won’t allow them to be. Thus,
modernism embraces its legacy of the dream of moral coherency and sees
tragedy where postmodernism might see farce.
Postmodernism, in contrast, denies the heroic. I do not mean to say that
it posits an anti-hero who is a tragically heroic, a failed everyman, hero,
but that it denies a coherent self who might carry the banner of the heroic,
or anti-heroic. In postmodern literature, the protagonist is often not a
coherent self but rather a collection of selves. Modernist fiction showcases
conflicts between concepts of the heroic that seem impossible or outdated
in the world of mechanized warfare, mass dislocations, and the cynicism
born of the devastation of the First World War with its mustard gas, noman’s land, and enormous body count.
The atmosphere of postmodern fiction is the result of a different
tension – the difficulties of holding onto a centered self against the noise
Disquiet on the Western Front: World War II and Postmodern Fiction
xiii
and static of increasing information, mechanization, and commodification.
We see this tension reflected in a defining characteristic of postmodern
narrative whose surface is a collage – a pastiche of earlier styles strung
together without thought to historical function in the same way a
postmodern building may have columns that are not necessarily loadbearing but exist merely as a historical decorative element. Postmodern
fiction marries high and low culture and blends fragments and references
from many disparate sources, the narrative mirroring the fragmentation of
self expressed by many of its characters. Modernism deconstructs a
privileged omniscient narrator. Whereas in modernism the narration is
deconstructed, in postmodernism the narrator is deconstructed.
Postmodern fiction amplifies the process modernism began.
The idea for this study came from a class I taught in the summer of
2014. My previous work was on the integration of art and science in some
postmodern novels as well as the epistemological implications of some
postmodern novels, Pynchon’s in particular. A survey course required
more varied materials, both historical and stylistic. To extend the reach of
the curriculum, I used movies in addition to texts. Catch-22 was the only
film that caused the students difficulty. The discomfort of the class and its
inability to understand the thematic points of Catch-22 were quickly
evident. The movie, released in 1970, directed by Mike Nichols, and
faithful to the novel, is set in Italy during World War II, and explores the
nonsensical and downright sinister behaviors and values of the American
Army, particularly the colonels and generals. Yossarian is the everyman in
the Air Corps whose humanity is always at odds with those in command.
It surprised me that very early into the movie, students called out with
great disapproval, admonishing him for his rule-breaking. They seemed
particularly agitated by the scenes in which he goes about his duties as a
captain in the Air Corps stark naked. Another scene that provoked intense
and vocal student disapproval was the one in which Yossarian, as head
bombardier, drops his payload over the water, thus signaling for all the
other bombardiers in his formation to follow suit, to avoid bombing a
small civilian village of no strategic value. The village is being bombed as
a result of mistaken coordinates.
At this point the students became almost riotous. One thing we can
conclude from this is that great art does produce strong reactions, and for
this reason the humanities must remain a vital part of any college
curriculum. But I digress. Why were the students so upset? When
questioned, they revealed that they found it intolerable that Yossarian
broke rules, and they found it emotionally unbearable that, in their words,
he could get in trouble and presumably suffer punishment. It hadn’t
xiv
Foreword
seemed to penetrate their understanding that by being forced to fly an
increasing number of dangerous missions, any punishment the army might
mete out would prove less injurious.
At this point, I turned off the film. I explained that I felt that were
missing Heller’s point and perhaps it would be better if we did not watch
the end of the movie. I reasoned that this would be a relief to them.
Instead, they engaged me in a freewheeling discussion of rulebreaking, civil disobedience, the taboos around nudity, personal morality,
and institutional blindness. Then they demanded that we watch the rest of
the movie. In the end, the students were able to get past the horror at rulebreaking that they’d brought with them from childhood and enter fully into
Heller’s critique. At the end of the course, when we evaluated the works
we’d explored, many students identified Catch-22 as their favorite.
This was a profound experience for me as a teacher, and thinking about
Catch-22 and its ability to teach students a completely new point of view
dominated the next two months of my summer, and these meditations
extended into my fall semester although I was no longer teaching the same
material. I don’t think any other choice would have stimulated the
discussions we had in class. In the end, the students unanimously affirmed
the idea that Catch-22 had clarified the sixties’ protest period for them in a
way nothing else had. They understood the opposition to the Vietnam War
in a new way and retroactively understood the meaning of Thoreau’s Civil
Disobedience as well.
The resonance the novel had in class caused me to think about the
importance of the post-World War II postmodernist narrative in shaping
culture.
The most searing novels of Heller and Vonnegut were their war
novels: Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, respectively. During the
generational wars of the sixties, Heller and Vonnegut had already distilled
their war experiences into a way of seeing institutions and social life that
made prewar ways of life and belief systems outdated, irrelevant, and
faintly sinister. The long sixties became a tug-of-war between these
outdated mores and the postmodern world that had suddenly appeared on
the horizon. These novelists, who were midwives to the postmodern era,
discovered lessons in their war experiences that shaped the zeitgeist that
followed.
War is often a crucible for change and invention. Under its duress,
medicine and engineering often advance. In the same way, the two big
wars of the twentieth century created enormous shifts in thought and
culture. World War I, the first example of war in the mechanical age,
announced that human life would never be the same. The agonies of
Disquiet on the Western Front: World War II and Postmodern Fiction
xv
mustard gas, the annihilation of a generation, and the puncturing of the
idealist notions of war brought with them social upheavals and a
redefinition of class. The unthinkable realities of war in the age of
commodification and nuclear weapons brought the undeniable horrors of
concentration camps, mass firebombing of civilian targets, and the nuclear
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following World War II, changes
were reflected in political upheavals, economic changes, and a growing
postmodern zeitgeist that expressed itself first in the war novels of those
who had seen absurdity up close.
World War I ushered in a disillusioned response to a glorified,
bombastic understanding of war. We have only to think of Vera Brittain’s
famous Testament of Youth or Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the
Western Front to understand the bitterness and sense of betrayal World
War I left in its wake. World War II created a different reaction. Writers
experienced a free-floating anxiety created by its horrors, which suggested
that human life and institutions were beyond our control. Helplessness and
a sense of absurdity were more typical reactions, as we see in Heller and
Vonnegut.
As a poststructuralist, I believe that we understand and define ideas
through comparison. By comparing two post-World War I novels with
post-World War II novels, I hope to demonstrate the way each war created
a new narrative style that had epistemological, ethical, and emotional
implications as well as literary directives.
The methodology of this volume was borrowed from D.H. Lawrence’s
text, Studies in Classic American Literature, a critical milestone. Like
Lawrence, I take a very focused approach and turn my gaze to extended
analyses of representative novels as a way of discussing a wider field.
Other studies are often peripatetic, taking a bird’s eye survey approach
covering a lot of ground in lieu of in-depth literary analysis. I moved away
from cultural analysis and used traditional literary analysis to carefully
delineate the differences between modernist and postmodernist esthetics
and to demonstrate how each was a response to war, World War I and
World War II, respectively.
First, I will explore two modernist novels that respond to World War I.
Then I will explore postmodern novels written by those who fought in
World War II and created a new voice, and finally I will examine the
influence of postmodernism in the novels that followed.
PART ONE:
WORLD WAR ONE AND MODERNISM
CHAPTER ONE
WOUNDED BY WAR:
THE SUN ALSO RISES
In Ernest Hemingway’s famous novel The Sun Also Rises, World War
I never appears; readers are not taken to the front nor are we regaled with
discussions of battles, losses, or political fallout from the war. Instead, the
story is suspended in a vague landscape of anomie in which the war is a
constant presence. The novel was published in 1926, just eight years after
the war ended, and its footprint is felt throughout the novel.
The novel follows the exploits of expatriated American and English
thirty-somethings as they congregate in Paris and make their way to
Pamplona for the bullfights. The action is minimal and the focus is on the
emptiness of their lives, which is revealed throughout the novel by long
descriptions of the alcohol consumed by the characters; the types of drinks
and the quantity are detailed as faithfully as Homer describes the vast
world rendered on Achilles’ shield.
Gertrude Stein famously called this group of expatriates the “lost
generation”: and Hemingway uses her turn of phrase as the epigraph to his
novel. Why are they lost? Clearly, the war has robbed them of a moral
compass and a focus for their rather shapeless existence. And yet, the war
stands at the edges of the narrative, a silent hulking presence that is
alluded to only in the most oblique ways.
Although Hemingway himself was rejected for military service, he
spent time during the war as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. He
was wounded and saw plenty of action. We can see this most clearly in his
short story “In Another Country” and his next novel A Farewell to Arms.
The short story concerns a young American and an Italian major who have
been sidelined due to injuries and are being treated by an experimental
machine to heal their war wounds and restore function in their injured
body parts. The American sustained an injury to his knee, and the Italian
major was injured in his hand, which has shriveled to one-sixth its normal
size. The treatment has never been shown to work, and the major, whose
hand has been rendered unusable, is naturally skeptical of its efficacy. The
war exists nearby as the place of pain and loss that the two characters will
4
Chapter One
no longer have to return to. The irony of the novel is that the major has
recently lost his young wife, and her death delivers a greater injury to his
spirit than the war has to his body.
A Farewell to Arms is an idolized and romanticized version of
Hemingway’s war service. Here, he calls himself Henry (echoing
Hemingway, of course) and transforms from an ambulance driver (which
he remains in the short story) into a young lieutenant who has seen action
and killed an insubordinate sergeant. He depicts a romance in the novel
that echoes his own with the nurse Agnes Von Kurosky, whom he fell in
love with. The novel romanticizes the relationship. Whereas Agnes
spurned Hemingway’s proposal of marriage, here the nurse, Catherine,
finally accepts Henry. The horrors of the war drive them to escape
together to Switzerland where they live an almost idyllic life that
eventually bores them, inviting them into fantasies of an even more
pastoral and perfect life. Catherine dies after painfully delivering their
stillborn child and the novel ends with Henry, rather melodramatically,
walking off alone into the rain.
All three works are clearly commenting on and reacting to the
historical realities of World War I. I chose The Sun Also Rises as the
center of this chapter even though A Farewell to Arms also has a strong
antiwar subtext. However, the war novel is a romantic work. Although the
war may have destroyed social coherence, it hasn’t destroyed the notion
that love can be redemptive in A Farewell to Arms. In fact, Henry and
Catherine’s love seems more the stuff of Verdi than a bracing modernist
narrative. Although Hemingway’s original manuscript is filled with offcolor language, prudishly removed by censors, even the grittier narrative
can’t drown out the romanticism of Hemingway’s heavy-handed use of
rain imagery to describe Catherine’s fear of childbirth, her death during
the rain, and Henry’s uncertain and empty future. It isn’t the war that robs
him of his fiancée and his child, it’s nature.
“In Another Country” also promotes itself as a sad comment on the
war. Hemingway’s opening line “In the fall the war was always there, but
we did not go to it anymore” situates us in the midst of the hostilities.
However, our narrator is now safely sitting out the war, at least for the
time being. The ineffectualness of the machine under consideration would
lend a resigned modernist atmosphere to the piece if that were its real
target. After all, although the machine might hope to restore the narrator’s
damaged knees through exercise, it certainly will never restore the major’s
shriveled hand.
Thus, the antiwar sentiment devolves into a cynical comment about
medical charlatans. The war puts the narrator and the major in this
Wounded by War: The Sun Also Rises
5
somewhat bogus facility but it hasn’t created the false optimism, or
downright quackery, of the mechanized therapy the men are put through
daily. Furthermore, the climax of the story reveals that the major is not
despondent about the war or his injury; instead, he is mourning the death
of his young wife, who was, like Catherine, a casualty of nature and not
bullets. His advice to the narrator, to never marry, at first appears a cynical
comment on love but later reveals the major’s dashed romanticism, and
reflects his sad conclusion that deep love leads to deep hurt. Henry learns
this same lesson in A Farewell to Arms.
This is not a particularly modernist lesson. Certainly we can imagine a
prewar hero drawing the same conclusion from a failed love affair.
Hemingway’s work is a delicate balancing act between sentiment and
cynicism. In contrast, the power of The Sun Also Rises comes from its
rejection of sentimentality.
The Sun Also Rises speaks of the war in a symbolic and occluded way
that avoids romanticism. The protagonist, Jake Barnes, has war injuries
that prohibit him from performing sexually, a plot point that subtly
generates the action. It is clear that he is impotent, although Hemingway
makes it explicitly clear that he has not been castrated in battle by
asserting that Jake has balls. This nondescript wound stands for all the
ways men can no longer perform within their own lives after being injured
in war. These wounds are physical and psychological. None of the men in
the novel, even those who haven’t fought in the war, perform as they
would have had the war not happened. For instance, Robert Cohn, often
the scapegoat, spends his time with injured expats and absorbs some of
their nihilism while simultaneously becoming the butt of their barbed
jokes and the target of their disrespect.
Although the novel is not a first-person narrative as Hemingway
originally conceived it, we see the mise-en-scène and the action through
Jake’s eyes. He is an expatriated American reporter we see occasionally at
his office and occasionally in his apartment, but more often in bars and
cafes, ordering and consuming food and drink. Once the novel moves to
Spain, we see him outdoors fishing, observing the fiesta, attending the
bullfights, and picnicking and eating. We also see him in his hotel, a
makeshift representation of his apartment. In all these iterations, Jake is
the moral center of the novel. His wound has rendered him an observer
with the mien of objectivity.
Bill, Mike, and Robert Cohn, companions and drinking buddies, and
Romero, the young bullfighter, are all subtly dissected by Jake’s gaze. He
serves as a perennial host, a point of welcome, the glue for a motley social
group; a man who is friendly, protective, and rescuing at most points of
6
Chapter One
the work. Only Jake’s relationship with Cohn challenges his bonhomie. He
and Cohn scuffle in one scene, and Jake often complains about him, as do
the other men, his crime his earnest Jewishness. All of the men, except
Bill, fall under the spell of the female protagonist of the work, Brett
Ashley. Although she and Jake are obviously in love with each other,
Jake’s wound makes him unacceptable to the sexually voracious Brett.
The war is obliquely discussed in the novel in three ways: through
Jake’s war wound, the lassitude and aimlessness of Jake’s set, and the
discussion of bullfights.
Jake’s wound is not only physical. Its results permeate the entirety of
his way of life. First, Jake is hopelessly in love with Brett, who, as I’ve
said, rejects his offer to try and make a go of their relationship despite his
sexual inadequacy. Only a very normative view of sexuality would
staunchly insist, the way Brett does, that only conventional intercourse can
be satisfying and qualify for a sexual relationship. Unless we assume that
Brett is very conventional and inexperienced, which we know she isn’t,
she is quite the opposite in fact, Jake’s physical wound becomes a
synecdoche for the spiritual wound he endured while fighting in the First
World War.
Although he is generally affable, we see Jake’s inadequacy in quite a
few places. For instance, Bill, Jake’s novelist friend from New York,
points out his failures as a writer. In a matter-of-fact manner, with no
particular intent to wound Jake, Bill explains, “There you go. And you
claim you want to be a writer, too. You’re only a newspaperman. An
expatriated newspaperman. You ought to be ironical the moment you get
out of bed” (Hemingway, 119). Although Bill may not explicitly want to
hurt Jake, certainly his remarks call into question the wounded man’s
ability to perform in an entirely different area. Jake ought to be indignant
but, in fact, he is as unflappable as always. Indeed, Bill’s injunction that he
become ironical the moment he gets out of bed has become all too real. At
only rare moments does Jake rise to any real emotion.
He rouses himself to intense antipathy for Robert Cohn, the priggish
Jew whom, as we have seen, the company resents as much for his
Jewishness as his priggishness. He has also bedded Brett, and Jake admits
that, “I was blindly unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him . . .
. I certainly did hate him” (105). Jake doesn’t eliminate Cohn from their
party as both Mike and Bill wish, but he does begin to share in the antiSemitic baiting of Cohn, and eventually Cohn and Jake come to blows. To
be fair, Cohn is rather insufferable and spectacularly blind to the effect he
has on others, but we can’t help but feel that Jake is lowering himself a bit
to indulge in this ineffectual vendetta. It would seem that his quarrel
Wounded by War: The Sun Also Rises
7
should be more with Brett rather than with Cohn. Perhaps he wants to
establish a greater camaraderie with Bill and Mike. In any case, we see his
stoical, ironic mask slip and the real depth of his affliction reveals itself,
which can be expressed only through an ineffectual hatred.
By the novel’s iconic climax, Jake’s habitual irony has reasserted
itself. Brett, as miserable as she can be, taking up with man after man,
blames not only Jake’s emotional inertia but also her despair on the wound
the war inflicted on Jake. “Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such
a damned good time together.” To this, after being jostled and pressed
against Brett in the car they’re in, Jake replies, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
(251). This conclusion has resonated with readers since the novel was
published in 1926. Here, through his stand-in, Hemingway suggests the
nihilist cynicism that followed the First World War that he himself must
have felt. Brett refers to the specific wound Jake sustained and opines that
had he not been physically wounded, they would have had their happyever-after ending; he would not be ineffectual, ironic, and blasé, and she
would not be insatiable and restless. Jake sees this as a romantic delusion.
The war has wounded them in such a way that even without his actual
physical injury, neither would be able to sustain the relationship they
desire.
A Farewell to Arms does not sustain the same open-ended alienation.
Although the later novel suggests cynicism in some of the dialog between
Catherine and Henry, Hemingway introduces a standard plot that
sentimentalizes the ending of the novel. It is possible to cry at the death of
Catherine and Henry’s baby and Catherine herself; it is not possible to cry
for Brett and Jake, who may be victims of the war but, as Jake intimates,
are also the architects of their situation.
Hemingway labored over the last line of The Sun Also Rises. His use of
the adjective “pretty” both dims and heightens the nihilism of their final
stalemate. Nothing can rescue either of them from their postwar alienation.
In the novel, the after-effects of World War I can be seen both
stylistically and thematically. The most arresting and oblique reference to
the war is Hemingway’s use of the bullfight ring as a dominating metaphor
in the second half of the novel. The little expatriate troop straggles into
Pamplona, leaving behind their rather unfocused Parisian lifestyle. At first
they encounter the fiesta, which goes on all night. The color, congestion,
and vitality of the fiesta contrast markedly with their wan nights of
drinking in scattered Parisian bars. Hesitation, indecision, and apathy are
replaced by a breathless engagement. Someone is trampled in the
excitement. At first, this intense engagement seems to banish the wounds
of the war. For just a moment, it seems that life will triumph and the chaos
8
Chapter One
and fragmentation of the war will be replaced by the Spanish sun,
flamboyant music, and intense colors. However, this illusion is only
momentary. The bullfight, of course, brings the omnipresence of death.
Someone will die, either the bull or the bullfighter.
The dissipated Mike, Brett’s fiancé and an aimless wealthy veteran,
surveys the bulls and comments on their dominance. “The steers took them
in, in the end,” Mike said. “It took about an hour.” “Oh go to hell,” Bill
said. “You’ve been in the war. It was two hours and a half for me” (204).
Jake’s war wound changes the way he experiences the bulls. Having
survived a serious injury, the bulls’ power is less daunting to Jake, and he
experiences their parade as less significant. In fact, his voice is not even
present in this exchange. In contrast, Bill, who has not seen a battlefield, is
the most shaken by the immanent threats that parade before him in the
bullring in Spain.
Hemingway insists we fully realize that the arena of the bullfight, like
a warzone, is an arena of hulking death. In his description of one aging
bullfighter, we are told that, “Fifteen years ago they said if you want to see
Belmonte you should go quickly, while he was still alive. Since then he
has killed more than 1,000 bulls” (218). Just as on a battlefield, someone
will be killed in the ring. Hemingway underscores this point when Bill
answers Robert Cohn’s question of whether or not one may bet on a
bullfight. “You could,” Bill says, “but you don’t need to.” He adds, “It
would be like betting on the war” and then concludes, “You don’t need
any economic interest” (104). Thus, death’s omnipresence eliminates the
need for the excitement that betting might add to the confrontation. For
Bill, the ring becomes a way to share the experience of his friends who
have been to the front; for them, it is a way to journey to a site where
familiar feelings they can’t escape are completely appropriate.
Belmonte, an actual historical figure, sustained twenty-four serious
wounds during his career. Thus, not only does the ring recall the
battlefield, the wounded matador recalls Jake, whose wound does not keep
him from life only from what he wants most in life, the love of Brett.
Although Bill instructs Jake to remain ironic at all times, where Brett is
concerned, he cannot. On two occasions he runs to rescue her and pledge
his love to her. Unlike Belmonte, his wound does keep him out of the ring
he most wishes to enter; thus Hemingway’s novel flirts with tragedy
despite its cynicism.
Hemingway’s style in The Sun Also Rises is very much part of the
modernism movement of its day. The short journalistic sentences and the
way much of the story is told through dialog fragments the narrative in
much the same way a modernist painting analyzes space. Hemingway
Wounded by War: The Sun Also Rises
9
admired Cezanne and wanted to write the way he painted. The novel has
no conventional plot, merely a series of vignettes, and at the end of the
novel, we are in the same place that we were in the beginning of the story.
No one has learned anything, and no one has changed their way of life.
Jake and Brett will continue their tragic relationship, and the others will
continue much as before. Although the novel is narrated largely from
Jake’s point of view, there are many scenes in which he is merely a
bystander and the action is forwarded by the dialog of the others. We are
in a fragmented space without a hero. We may identify most closely with
Jake but there are several scenes in which he loses our sympathy. He
shares Bill and Mike’s anti-Semitic disdain for Robert Cohn, and he drifts
aimlessly through long nights of drinking with his friends with no real
goals in mind. The best we can say of him is that he is a bit nicer to
women, including the prostitute he takes up with as a lark in the beginning
of the novel, than the others. However, Victorian moralizing, heroics, and
a conclusive ending are all absent from the novel.
Hemingway states his esthetic preferences twice within the text. Early
in the novel, when speaking of Cohn, he suspects his story to be bogus,
which makes him appreciate Cohn more. Jake insists that he prefers stories
that don’t cohere, which Cohn’s, as he tells it, does. Hemingway does not
anchor his novel to a central incident or revelation. He offers no Joycean
epiphany, merely a decentered narrative that we step into in medias res in
an almost ironic, epic fashion. Before the action begins, the characters
were much the same, and will continue in this way after the novel
concludes. The most definite acts within the novel are Brett’s sexual
encounters with Robert Cohn and Romero, the nineteen-year-old
bullfighter who falls in love with her. Brett tells Jake she broke up with
Romero to save him but we are unsure whether we should believe her, or
if it matters if we do or not. She has slept with other young men and will
continue to, something her fiancé, Mike, is quite aware of.
Therefore, even these seemingly defining moments fade into the
quotidian narrative. Part of the modernist surface of the novel is the
matter-of-fact tone and the lack of a traditional story arc. In assessing
Romero and his form in the ring, Jake observes his simplicity and purity of
line. We can recognize this as a description of Hemingway’s writing style
in this novel. We know that Hemingway revolutionized English prose with
an economy of expression, learned as a war correspondent, that rendered a
prewar flowery style dated and irrelevant. Gertrude Stein as a mentor and
F. Scott Fitzgerald as a sometime editor both helped push Hemingway
toward the iconoclastic style that became his signature and his legacy. A
world smashed by the shocking violence of the first modern war could no
10
Chapter One
longer be voiced by the elegancies and moralities of earlier writers. The
wound Jake bears represents the wound to culture that the war delivered.
The novel introduces a new language for the aimlessness of the postwar
generation and its androgynous protagonists, the boyish Brett and the
wounded, impotent Jake. They inherit a world with entirely different rules.
The wounds of war created a new narrative, and the failed romance of
Brett and Jake and their drifting adventures created a new paradigm.
CHAPTER TWO
THE ABSENCES OF WAR:
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
Although some scholarship has been done on Virginia Woolf as a war
writer, her work is not often read through the lens of war even though her
novels make frequent references to it. Between the Acts, published
posthumously in 1941, contains heightened, though oblique, references to
the war still being fought. The panoramic, The Years, looks at England’s
wars, including the Boer War. However, her mid-career novels Mrs.
Dalloway and To the Lighthouse bring the losses of war vividly to us. In
Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith, a stand-in for Woolf herself, has lost his
reason to war. He is hounded to death by birds that speak Greek to him
because Harley Street doctors can’t cure his shellshock. He jumps to his
death the same day Mrs. Dalloway is giving her famous dinner party.
Woolf’s technique here is to juxtapose Septimus’ psychological war
wounds with the wounds her confining life inflicts on Mrs. Dalloway.
Woolf also uses this conflation of war and the little murders of domestic
life in her next novel, To the Lighthouse. To the Lighthouse does not give
as vivid a picture of the wounds that war inflicts as those of Septimus’ but
its oblique style suggests the losses of war with a palpable poignancy.
To the Lighthouse translates the losses of war into domestic losses that
symbolically represent the absences created by World War I. The Woolf
family had suffered its own losses. Before the war, Virginia’s older
brother died of typhus. Leonard, her husband, lost one of his brothers to
battle and another came home wounded. Woolf finds a new voice to
express these losses. To the Lighthouse is Woolf’s most modernist streamof-consciousness novel. The novel’s entire opening section, “The
Window,” occurs during one day, a day that will decide the fate of the
expedition to the lighthouse young James Ramsey is looking forward to
making. The tension resides in the question of whether or not the weather
will be fine enough for the expedition to proceed. The luminous, poetical
Mrs. Ramsey expresses conviction that it will, mostly to encourage the
hopes of her dear youngest child. Mr. Ramsey, pragmatic to a fault and
oblivious to the feelings of those around him, is equally convinced that it
12
Chapter Two
won’t, as is his protégé, the pedantic Charles Tansley. The hopes and
dreams of little James do not figure in their calculations. They prize
themselves on their philosophical objectivity.
Woolf creates a binary universe at the beginning of the novel in which
the world is separated into a cozy domesticity and a striving
intellectualism. The narrative of the first section of the novel is a detailed
representation of thinking and emotional states that react against the dry
intellectualism of Mr. Ramsey and his student. Woolf unmasks the cruelty
of their obliviousness to other people and the resentment they provoke
with their pragmatism, particularly in little James.
Later sections depict the empty life of the summer home that is the
setting of novel when the family no longer visits, and a day ten years later
when we see much of the action through Mrs. Ramsey’s earlier guest, Lily
Briscoe, a family friend who has been commissioned to paint James’
lighthouse.
The author stops just short of first-person narration, preferring a very
involved third-person narrative. Readers are treated to anthropomorphized
and imaginatively subjective renderings of the experiences and sensations
of the vacant house in the second section, and then, on a day ten years
later, the experiences of the small party that has returned. Most of the
action is observation and emotion; the plot is minimal. The author presents
a rendering of the workings of consciousness and the inner narrative that
each conscious mind generates.
Thus, To the Lighthouse takes its place alongside Ulysses and Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying and The Sound and Fury as one of the great internal
modernist novels. Mrs. Dalloway is modernist in a different way.
Although it too talks about World War I, Woolf’s aims in this novel are
different and her technique is not so highly symbolic. Although, as we
have seen, her character, Septimus Smith, a troubled veteran of World War
I, comments on the war, Woolf has other themes at play in the novel.
Similarly, at first blush, To the Lighthouse is not about the war at all.
Its ostensible subject is the segregated worlds of female and male
consciousness. In this novel, female consciousness creates the world, and
male consciousness analyzes and in this way dismantles it. To the
Lighthouse is Woolf’s most autobiographical novel; in it, she recreates the
summers of her childhood spent on the island of St. Ives. She recreates her
mother’s luminous beauty, her domesticity, the love between her parents,
and the restless, challenging mind of her father, who sets himself in
opposition to the experiences of his wife and children. The losses the
fictional Ramseys suffer mirror exactly the deaths of Woolf’s mother,
half-sister, and brother. Thus, to almost the last detail, the world in the
The Absences of War: To the Lighthouse
13
novel recreates the world of Woolf’s youth. The striking difference
between Woolf’s original experiences and the experiences recounted in the
novel is that To the Lighthouse looks at these early experiences through
the lens of the postwar world many years after the actual time in St Ives.
Testifying to her consummate skills as a novelist, Woolf balances personal
losses against the losses of war and keeps each in perfect proportion within
the book’s narrative. Without at all diminishing the anguish of battlefield
losses, Woolf is able to demonstrate that the grief suffered by her
characters from family deaths, such as death in childbirth, mirrors the grief
over death on the battlefield. Deep emotion is not the prerogative of war.
Without dishonoring the horrendous experiences suffered by soldiers
during war, Woolf demonstrates the commonality of human experience.
She demystifies war, and at the same time elevates private experience. In
refusing to privilege the experiences of war, Woolf denies war-mongering
its political cover. In her novel, loss and grief are not the result of their
pedigrees.
For Mrs. Ramsey, the outer world fades in the background to the
domestic world. We see the world through her eyes, through the momentto-moment treacheries of all those around her. Mr. Ramsey and Charles
Tansley’s callousness to little James and their oppositional assertions to
herself kill joy, hope, and optimism. Woolf would not be so silly to
suggest that a little boy’s dashed hopes were the same as a soldier’s lost
limbs. However, she does see the same masculinist forces at work. The
men who would send young soldiers to war have a lot in common with
men who would conspire to ruin the hopes of a little boy. In contrast, Mrs.
Ramsey envisions a kinder world, and struggles to bring it about in the
face of Mr. Ramsey and Charles Tansley’s male authority. As she says to
James, her youngest child, “And even if it isn’t fine tomorrow . . . it will
be another day” (Woolf, 26). Thus, all of Ramsley’s brutality and
Tansley’s negativity are recast in a soft, hazy optimism that spares the
feelings of her little boy.
At first glance, it may seem far-fetched to analogize hurt feelings with
war wounds but Woolf pleads her case as the novel progresses. For Woolf,
the world of her mother, thinly disguised as Mrs. Ramsey, is a prewar
world that will never and can never be restored. The poignancy of the
novel comes from the universality of its themes, i.e., this family’s
happiness has been destroyed by Mrs. Ramsey’s death; the death of the
oldest son, Andrew (in the novel an implied casualty of war but in life a
victim of illness), represents all the world’s lost; and finally all the lives
lost to the mustard gas and brutality of the First World War. The novel
draws a curtain across this vanished world. Here Woolf’s vision is
14
Chapter Two
radically binary: the prewar world of Mrs. Ramsey and the postwar world
without her bear little resemblance to each other. The casual niceties and
centered life with Mrs. Ramsey presiding, a metaphor for the prewar war
world, has been lost forever. We see this when Woolf says
So with all the lamps put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on
the roof, a down pouring of immense darkness began. Nothing it seemed,
could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which creeping in at
keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms,
swallowed up here a jug and there a basin, there a bowl of red and yellow
dahlias, the sharp edges and firm build of a chest of drawers. (125)
The fog of loss and passage of time are the agents that swallow up the
St. Ives world in the novel, but for Woolf it’s her way of reimagining the
maw of war sucking up her past. At the end of this misty interlude, Woolf
tells us that, “Then indeed peace had come. Messages of peace breathed
from the sea to shore” (142). In this way Woolf announces her allegorical
project. The cruel ten years that swallow her childhood vision are
analogous to the cruel years of the war that swallowed up a way of life and
a generation of young men.
We can only wonder why Lily Briscoe remains impervious to the
losses suffered. In the “To the Lighthouse” section of the novel, its
somewhat anticlimactic third act, she, Mr. Ramsey, Mr. Bankes, and the
remaining children, Cam and James, return to the island to resurrect
what’s been lost. This proves impossible, of course, but they must carry
on. Lily finds herself unemotional when she reflects, “Mrs. Ramsey dead,
Andrew killed; Prue dead too – repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling
in her” (146). At first, we are shocked and dismayed by Lily’s coldness. In
one stroke, Woolf has her resemble her quasi-villains from the first section
of the novel, “Through the Window.” Suddenly it is Lily, not Mr. Ramsey
or Charles Tansley, who has removed herself from a life of feeling. Are
we meant to wonder about the schematic distinction between female and
male consciousness that seemed so obvious at the beginning of the novel?
Well, we may. However, we quickly discover that Lily is not quite
being open about her own version of events and lack of emotion. Later on
in the section, we see that she is bruised by her longing for Mrs. Ramsey.
Her longing echoes Mr. Ramsey’s empty arms when we discover that Mrs.
Ramsey has died; the most powerful parenthetical remark in all of English
literature. The brave front Lily is putting on seems to protect her until her
feelings of bereavement and desolation set in.
Why is Lily so undone by Mrs. Ramsey’s death? One immediate
explanation is that here Woolf is playing with female homoerotic feelings,