Writing War in the Twentieth Century (review)

Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Margot Norris. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Pp. 320. $59.50 (cloth); $19.50 (paper).

Writing War in the Twentieth Century is a simultaneously objective and impassioned analysis of the relationship between modern art and mass warfare. Like Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain (1985), which is an influential presence in the book, Margot Norris's work is concerned with how the contradictions and disjunctions of war--particularly those that emerge in response to the fact of war's injuriousness to the human body--are either grappled with or disavowed (and often both) in particular acts of representation. Norris continues this important work with originality and clarity as she explores the relation between modern art and mass warfare. Did war influence and stimulate new approaches to and forms of art, or was art and its ability to represent defeated by war? And how, she asks, might a critic attempt "to retrieve from military logic and artistic representation reference both to the material body of entire populations as well as to the subjectivity that modern warfare's death event destroys" (15)?

The book's scope, ranging from the trench poetry of World War I to the discourse of military policy in the Persian Gulf war, is impressive. Norris's scholarship shows a deep immersion in a range of texts attesting to the complex relationship between war's materiality and its literary and cinematic representation: poetry, fiction, memoir, popular films, journalism, military and diplomatic history, and public policy documents. She produces historically informed and theoretically sophisticated close readings not only of Wilfred Owen's poetry and the First World War fictions of Hemingway and Remarque, but also of policy and personal documents emerging from the Manhattan Project and the U.S. government's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Moreover, she addresses a literature relatively unknown to western readers: the hibakusha, or survivor, literature produced by Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb blast.

Writing War is not, however, meant to function as a survey, despite its overall chronological structure. In her introduction, Norris acknowledges and briefly explores the ethical problems involved with selecting texts to analyze in her book. She deliberately eschews a single overarching thesis in favor of what she calls "a more nuanced ethical reading" (9). This ethical reading is based on her observation that the difficulties of representing modern mass warfare result from the convergence of several problems: the generic limitation involved in the linguistic or visual representation of dead populations, the epistemological crises involved in attempting to apprehend mass death, and the ideological pressures that result in artistic "disavowals and legitimations of mass violence" (11).

Norris's readings of the canonical literary texts directly dealing with or often linked to World War I (British and German trench poetry, The Waste Land,A Farewell to Arms,All Quiet on the Western Front) are fresh and engaging. The first chapter traces how trench poetry and the work of German expressionist poets inscribed the material body damaged in warfare and examines the modernist reception (or, rather, rejection) of trench poetry as bad sentimental art. It explores how the modernist aesthetics of Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis tended to suppress the linguistic representation of the dead and indirectly associated mass killing with unruly urban masses, anarchy, and filth. The chapter on Farewell to Arms rejects what have emerged as standard--though opposed--readings of Hemingway's novel as either a stripped-down modernist/heroic narrative or an exemplar of modernist masculinism. Instead, she reads the novel as one that establishes a textual conflict between its narrator and its protagonist's actions, forcing readers to occupy the uncomfortable position of "colluding with the specific atrocities and hypocrisies in the narrative" (72).

The focus shifts as Writing War moves forward in the century, turning from canonical literary texts to mainstream narrative film (Schindler's List and Apocalypse Now) and policy documents. The chapters on the Manhattan Project and...