Somewhere in Afghanistan, a story is stirring.
We don’t yet know what the story will be and we don’t know when it will be ready for the telling.
But we know the story is there, because all wars have stories. All wars end up in fiction. Sometimes the stories are written by the combatants themselves, such as Larry Heinemann’s novel “Paco’s Story” (1986), which deals with Vietnam; sometimes they are written many years after the event by people who weren’t there, such as Pat Barker’s “Regeneration” (1992), which deals with World War I.
The new story, though, is taking shape even as you read this. The result will be literature — a brutal and excruciating literature, perhaps, but literature all the same.
“War stories are the way we define, in a dramatic way, what the country is about,” said Richard Slotkin, an American studies professor at Wesleyan University who has written novels about the Civil War. “The content changes as the nation has evolved as a culture, but there will always be some constants in war stories — the test of manhood, the confrontation with death, the choice of whether to act or to suffer.
“What is more fundamental than making a life or death choice? What values are worth defending with your life? In war, you’re asked, `What do you owe the society? Do you owe it your death, do you owe it a murder?’ Different generations answer it in different ways.”
That is why, Slotkin and others say, each war produces its own special kind of literature, its own signature fictions. And while film “unquestionably” has become the dominant medium for the war stories of our age, Slotkin said, novels still will be written about war, including the current war on terrorism.
“Unfortunately, war seems to have a future,” Slotkin said ruefully. “And there are stories we need to tell.”
Heinemann, writer in residence at DePaul University, believes that fictional accounts of the present struggle with terrorism — which will necessarily extend beyond Afghanistan, according to President Bush — may startle us.
“Stories will certainly bubble up from it. I have a strong suspicion that since this isn’t close to a conventional war, the writing is going to be far less conventional than anybody supposes.
“The one thing I know for sure is that a war changes the culture in important, almost catastrophic ways. A culture is seriously different after a war. A war puts an acceleration to everything, including the arts.”
Heinemann, whose novel about a Vietnam veteran won the 1987 National Book Award, said the tradition of war novels is important for writers to understand.
“I got out of the Army in 1968 and took a writing course at Columbia College. I knew I had a story that nobody else had. And I would tell that story, if it was my last natural act on this earth. The second week of class, the teacher came in and said, `You want to write war stories? Here, read these,’ and he gave me `The Iliad’ and `War and Peace.'”
Every war is the same, he discovered, and every war is different. Out of that paradox came “Paco’s Story” — and out of it has come and will come every war story.
Despite their unique attributes and singular achievements, what unites novels about the Civil War such as Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895) and Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels” (1974) with novels about World War I such as “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1928), what links World War II novels such as “From Here to Eternity” (1951) with Vietnam-era novels such as “Buffalo Afternoon” (1989), is the experience of the individual. The battle sites change, the weapons are modernized, the issues are updated, but the view from a single seared soul remains paramount. No matter how many wars have been fought, someone is always going to war for the first time.
“The historian gives us the differences between a ground siege or an air war. Historians give us the distinctions. But for the artist, the individual experience is the same,” said Donald Anderson, an English professor at the United States Air Force Academy who edits a journal called “War, Literature & the Arts.” “Great art has to do with the individual dealing with destruction and great loss. You go in with a certain romanticism and an honorable view, but in the end it’s always about disillusionment.”
War fiction serves a different purpose from the memoirs, journalism or historical accounts that arise out of a conflict, Anderson said. “The intersection of art and war is probably the oldest intersection there is. In the long haul of art, we talk more about war than we do about anything else.”
Human beings in crisis
And it is art, Anderson said, that answers questions beyond the narrow range of the historian’s or journalist’s purview. “We already know all we need to know about bullets. We have to keep paying attention to the notion that there is a human capacity to love — and an incredibly elastic capacity for destruction.”
Paul Fussell, who wrote a seminal book on the poets of World War I, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” (1975), made a similar case for art’s primacy in depicting war. “Literature can’t be just reporting. We have a lot of good reporting. Literature must be something different,” said Fussell, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
War stories can deliver either the up-close chaos of battle or the distanced reflection after the fact, said Bruce Michelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The Red Badge of Courage” and its evocation of the Civil War is among the former; Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five ” (1969) and its memories of World War II, the latter.
Yet in the hands of a skillful writer such as Crane, readers might not know what they’re getting; what looks to be a soldier’s firsthand observation is actually the result of research and imagination. “Crane got letters from veterans asking what unit he was in,” Michelson said. The author had been too young to serve in the war.
But war literature, whether immediate or ruminative, is significant, Michelson said. “The fiction is a way of getting some kind of access to human beings in crisis, when their beliefs are under terrible challenge.”
A matter of expectations
In terms of the kind of fiction it might inspire, the present conflict differs in a crucial respect from previous wars, he added. “One of the things that generates good writing about the war is shattered expectations — thinking the Civil War would last six weeks, World War I and all of those eerie festivities and marching through the streets shouting about beating the Huns and having it all over by Christmas. Vietnam was the same way. We were serenaded and euphemized into it by public officials, believing we were going to accomplish something and come home quickly and in one piece.
“But listening to Bush and [Vice President] Cheney, who are writing the preface to the narrative of this war, they’ve been a lot more cautious and less buoyant. We’ve been warned that it will be a protracted affair. It may be that the initial losses — almost 5,000 in less than two hours — has thrown us into another mood, reminding us that this is not a video game.”
More than just our moods are challenged by war stories. For obvious reasons, tales of combat often have run counter to publishing prohibitions on language and subject matter. How could a writer convey the horror of a battle or the authentic dialogue of a soldier under the genteel rules of a typical novel? A soldier hit by shrapnel doesn’t yell, “Darn it!”
George Hendrick, an emeritus professor at the U. of I. and member of the James Jones Society, pointed out that Jones’ novel “From Here to Eternity” pushed the boundaries of language more than any previous war novel.
“Jones is in the great realistic tradition of Tolstoy in dealing with the defining moments of history,” Hendrick said. “[Ernest] Hemingway’s characters all speak a kind of Hemingway language that is essentially a literary language instead of language as it was spoken. Jones tried to be realistic and in doing so, he had to break the barriers of language. He wasn’t trying to write for a sleazy audience. It was, `This is how we talked then.'”
“From Here to Eternity,” which chronicles the attack on Pearl Harbor and its aftermath, “tried to depict the world as it was,” Hendrick said.
The public’s appetite for the literature of war is not always ravenous, noted Jeff Shaara, a novelist who has set stories in both the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. His father, the late Michael Shaara, wrote “The Killer Angels” (1974), a highly acclaimed novel that was the basis for the cable TV movie “Gettysburg.”
Stories worth telling
While novels about wars generally have been popular through the years, because they combine adventure stories with topical events, the Vietnam War seemed to change things, Shaara said.
“In 1974, when my father was trying to get `The Killer Angels’ published, no one wanted to read about war. We’d had enough of that. An entire generation had gotten away from thinking of America as being worth telling about or worth honoring.”
What the success of “The Killer Angels” and other war-themed novels demonstrated, Shaara said, is that war stories aren’t about wars — they’re about people fighting in wars. “I don’t get inspired by battles. I get inspired by people.”
Yet while all war stories are the same, all war stories also are different. The presence of a clear enemy made World Wars I and II distinctive from Vietnam, where the cause seemed murky and ambiguous. The Civil War pitted citizen against citizen. And the present war on terrorism, while provoked by the mass murder of Americans, lacks a simple enemy or an easily defined resolution. Its literature presumably must reflect that reality.
“There are recurring universal themes, but the particular flavor of the experience is different between wars, and within a particular war, different for the genders, for social classes and for nations,” said Barker, author of a trilogy of novels set during World War I, via e-mail from her home in England.
A new challenge
The war against terrorism, Barker added, poses an unprecedented challenge for the novelist. “For the first time, a crime against humanity was played out on television in real time. It’s a long way from those sepia-tinted photographs of First World War trenches, where the living already look like ghosts.
“This is the most visible war — to people outside the immediate war zone — in history. But it also contains the least visible threat. You could smell poison gas in the trenches [of World War I]. It smelled sweet, like flowers. You can’t smell, taste or see anthrax spores. Nor smallpox bacteria.
“This combination of shock at visual images and fear of the unseen is the particular texture of this war, and I do think writers will rise to the challenge — but not immediately.”
Major wars, major works
CIVIL WAR
“The Red Badge of Courage”
Stephen Crane, 1895
“The Killer Angels”
Michael Shaara, 1975
“Cold Mountain”
Charles Frazier, 1997
WWI
“All Quiet on the Western Front”
Erich Maria Remarque, 1928
“A Farewell to Arms”
Ernest Hemingway, 1929
“The Ghost Road”
Pat Barker, 1995
WWII
“From Here to Eternity”
James Jones, 1951
“Catch-22”
Joseph Heller, 1961
“The Naked and the Dead”
Norman Mailer, 1948
VIETNAM
“Paco’s Story”
Larry Heinemann, 1986
“Going After Cacciato”
Tim O’Brien, 1978
“Buffalo Afternoon”
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, 1989
