The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II (review)

The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II. James Dawes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 308. $39.95.

At its broadest, James Dawes's The Language of War is a fascinating study of the relationship between war and language—both in the sense of what war does to language and in the sense of what sort of power language has to intervene in war. The materials for this study are widely drawn from history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and legal studies; generally located in the United States; and addressed to the culture and language that emerged after the Civil War, after World War I, and after World War II. Its most provocative and illuminating discussions occur at the beginning and the end, where Dawes's focus is at its broadest and the issues are posed in their most globally significant terms. His Introduction establishes two conflicting models of the relationship between language and violence. The first is an "emancipatory" model based on the premise that language and violence are mutually exclusive, and that as a result "social structures built around democratic language practices emancipate us from the reign of force" (1). The second is a "disciplinary" model premised on the notion that language and violence constitute each other. As a result language functions "as a disciplinary regime premised on the use of force and as a method of disciplining and controlling violence in order to concentrate its effects" (ibid.). His intervening chapters take up an array of related issues ("counting and discrimination, objects and objectivity, autonomy and the problem of consequences, the solidity of conceptual borders, the referentiality of language" [23]) before returning to these models at the end of the book. In the last chapter, "Total War, Anomie, and Human Rights Law," he conducts a stunning theoretical analysis of the Geneva Conventions. He begins by tracking how the conceptual maneuvers of international law governing the conduct of war achieve their aim:

The conventions thus prioritize the basic forms of language itself, defending the rights of prisoners to communicate, for instance, or insinuating themselves into the behavior of belligerents by requiring exercises in language (trials, warnings) to precede exercises in force (executions, bombings). The conventions replace discourse-as-coercion—as threats, intimidation, or lies—with morally coercive discourse. They use language to interfere with force. . . . [208]

This seemingly emancipatory project inevitably slips into what Dawes terms a "category crisis" in human rights discourse, because its strategies for controlling and regulating violence simultaneously legitimate and justify it.

In his chapter on the Civil War, Dawes focuses on the language that emerges after the war in conjunction with Americans' increasing sense of themselves as an actuarially significant population. The huge numbers of Civil War dead and wounded presented historical, literary, and philosophical writers with the problem of how to negotiate what Dawes calls "the problem of 'the one and the many'" (55). Bracketing his discussion with the war representations of Stephen Crane, Dawes produces an intriguing set of pairings—the memoirs of Generals William T. Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant, Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches (1863), Walt Whitman's Civil War diary Specimen Days (1883), and the philosophical disputes between William James and Josiah Royce. The tension between counting and naming, between the objectification of the many and the effort to detach the self from subjectivity, between pluralism and pragmatism, is explored through these pairings. For example, Sherman—like the bank manager he once was—treats men as supplies and body counts as resource checklists; Grant's objectivity, in contract, functions as an act of self-effacement that prevents subjectivity from serving as a centering perspective. Dawes ends his discussion of the Civil War by describing the reestablishment of war's romantic image that followed the "swift...