Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing (review)

Arms and the Self is a collection of essays on military autobiography broadly defined. The contributors are predominantly Anglo-American, and so are their subjects. The collection has several virtues. It is widely gathered—eclectic is the word—while avoiding the trap of becoming either too perfunctory or too sprawling. It leans towards literary and cultural studies, but manages on the whole to avoid the unduly technical or excessively theoretical. It is keen to proselytize among those with an interest in this field, defined in the first instance as military life-writing (or self-authenticating), but extending naturally into the wider constituency of military history. It is uncommonly broadminded, not only as to sex—women's writing and women's experience feature strongly—but also as to age ("The Life Writing of a Military Child"). Not least, it tackles a variety of interesting and important works, from Xenophon's Anabasis through T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom to Anthony Swofford's Jarhead, as well as the unknown and the unsung, the unobtainable, and the unreadable.

Most of the chapters have an academic tone of voice—a more personal reflection on flagless memorial days past and present, by Pat C. Hoy, II, finely done though previously published, is a notable exception—and certain shared preoccupations. Perhaps this is just as it should be; but the academic manner is sometimes a little tiresome for the reader. The Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle used to describe himself as "philosophically eager." The contributors to Arms and the Self might be described as autobiographically eager. There is a tendency to promote or over-promote the importance of their own special interest. There is an over-concentration on taxonomy and textuality—or, worse, intertextuality—the déformation professionelle of the literary scholar. Thus eighteenth-century military autobiography resolves itself into three categories, the indirect, the purposive, and the mundane, while "Montgomery and [Frank] Kermode are ultimately being licensed to write their memoirs by the existence of a preceding textual network." There is a slightly desperate search for intellectual street cred, manifest in allusions to Nietzsche and Deleuze et al., even where their relevance is, to put it charitably, debatable. Poor Vera Brittain is taxed with the theory of nomadism. "Although Brittain makes no direct reference to Nietszche and could not have been aware of Deleuze's work, her Testaments clearly advance an innovative multilayered temporal perspective." Invoking these names, moreover, does not necessarily mean knowing how to spell them. In one of the more surreal juxtapositions, Ron Kovic finds himself next to someone called Julie Kristeva in the index.

The collection has a tutelary presence: not Paul Fussell, though he figures large, but Samuel Hynes and The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (1997). At the beginning of that scrupulous survey, Hynes makes two linked observations, characteristically acute and low-key: "War writing, it seems, is a genre without a tradition to the men who write it. Still, it has a place among established literary kinds: such writing, we might say, is something like travel writing, something like autobiography, something like history." That is the text for Arms and the Self.