Plots of War: Modern Narratives of Conflict by Isabel Capeloa Gil and Adriana Martins, eds (review)

How are war narratives emplotted? Do they require a distinctive form and style because of their content? To answer this question one need not import all of the baggage of narrative theory but could simply approach novels as one would the struggle to acquire terrain: the novel can be seen as a conflict, either between two protagonists or – even more dramatically – between the novelist and the reader. Along these lines the editors of the present volume suggest that the very structure of representation may be “warring” (they use the term guerroyant, which is here attributed to Michel Foucault). Moreover, what does it mean to go beyond the claim that representing war requires a specific mode of representation, and to say instead that war itself is representation? Foucault presented a form of this question in his 1975–76 lectures at the Collège de France, when he asked whether war provides a uniformly valid analysis of power relations and whether it serves “as a matrix for techniques of domination.”¹ His question boils down to one of whether war can be extended into all forms of society, whether Carl von Clausewitz’s famous assertion ought to be carried this far, and whether war is an adequate metaphor not simply for politics but for bio-politics as well. Is war, in other words, just like life itself?

Although the present study makes reference to this question, it could have delved more deeply in pursuit of its answer. Its twelve chapters are each brief, akin to conference papers, and they are somewhat eclectic. They rely on what the editors describe as chronologically varied post-memory narratives, which could be more simply described as a broad range of war-related texts, and the contributors’ laudable intentions consist of considering the array of material in terms of overarching questions that include collective imaginaries and the social politics of memory. The editors also assert that ethical perspectives are central to their pursuit, but because the choice of texts is so idiosyncratic, it is difficult to discern a consistent ethical position. Most readers will concur: war is bad, no one likes it, and literature is obliged to present readers with an opportunity to reflect on that certainty. It is difficult to disagree, but in most cases this collection’s authors would have benefited from some added editorial prompting and encouragement to go further than that well-established point.

Of the book’s three subsections – “Post-memory Narratives,” “Othering the Battleground,” and “Emplotting the Nation”–the second is the most compelling. Vera Nünning briefly examines in her chapter how the First World War alternately appears and remains in the margins of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, and she then explores other war novels, noting the means by which violence and the extent to which human beings are the victims of combat tend to be glossed over. She mentions a range of Second World War novels including, for example, William E. Johns’s Spitfire Parade (1941) and remarks that British representations of the Second World War are frequently coloured by nostalgia, “recalling gallant deeds by patriotic Englishmen.” She comes to the conclusion that “reader expectations and the politics of the market seem to combine in an unholy alliance which continues to favor idealizing narratives of the myth of the Battle of Britain in popular literature” (84). The chapter is intriguing owing to its provocation, which runs somewhat against the grain, that literature might not be up to the task of representing war. Her most explicit statement about it comes in one of her footnotes, where she observes that “the experience of war, the placing of man against a violent fate, [may be] achieved in a more visible way in other genres – in poetry, or in works which are not concerned with a particular war, but with...