Visions of War in France: Fiction, Art, Ideology (review)

Brosman, Catherine Savage. Visions of War in France: Fiction, Art, Ideology. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. Pp. Xxiv + 240. ISBN 0-8071-2346-3

For better or for worse, war is one of the oldest and most pervasive of literary topics. In Visions of War in France: Fiction, Art, Ideology, Catherine Savage Brosman focuses on what is perhaps its most important manifestation since the chanson de geste: the modern war novel. In a book that brings together threads of her previous scholarship, the author delineates a general taxonomy of war narrative from the teleological novel of the Romantic period to the indeterminate and indetermining forms of the post-World War II era. Ably blending literary and cultural history, Savage Brosman presents both a sweeping overview of the war novel in France and a theorization of its development over varying historical and epistemological periods. Beginning with an overview of the increased debate during the Enlightenment surrounding political and philosophical questions of military action and the individual, Savage Brosman situates the "birth" of the modern war novel in the aftermath of the Revolution. After providing this important contextualization, she moves to a discussion in the ensuing chapter of many of the icons and symbols of war in nineteenth-century France, including depictions of the body and the accoutrements of war, images d'Epinal, and figures of Napoléon and Jeanne d'Arc. The examination of such figurations evokes certain particularities which then allow her to propose a typology of the genre in the third chapter.

Adopting what she terms a "pragmatic approach to classification," (64) Savage Brosman explores and identifies the structures of what she distinguishes as the war novel, pointing out its status as a sub-genre of the historical novel and stressing recurring patterns found throughout the nineteenth century. She then focuses on thematic and stylistic issues, in particular the historical and ideological concerns of the genre. This pivotal chapter builds the theoretical framework that will subtend her discussion, in the remaining chapters, of novelistic representations of particular conflicts.

The author moves chronologically from the Napoleonic wars to the Franco-Prussian conflict, the two World Wars and, all too briefly, the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, simultaneously highlighting contemporary issues surrounding the novels discussed and tracing a more global view of the evolution of the genre. Particularly compelling is the way in which Savage Brosman consistently forges a link between developing military technologies and strategy, the developing genre of the war novel, and the ideologies underlying them both, tracing the move from the individual to the collective and from the hero to the martyr across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She employs the war novel as a sort of mirror for changing ideologies and for the evolution of narrative itself, arguing the centrality of its concerns to both. Rather than viewing particular works exclusively in the context of their periods, Savage Brosman argues that the war novel is most profitably examined in its "conversation" with previous works and, indeed, with previous wars. Narratives focusing on WWI, for example, are seen as constituting a break with the tradition established by representations of the Napoleonic and Franco-Prussian wars, even as they display a palpable nostalgia for the type of war waged in the nineteenth century.

From the nearly overwhelming number of war novels the author has pain-stakingly selected examples which give the reader a clear sense of the genre's evolution. Her analysis of depictions of the Napoleonic wars is anchored by comparisons of Vigny, Stendhal and Hugo, much as discussions of Maupassant and Zola form the central part of the examination of the Franco-Prussian War. Venturing into the twentieth century, Savage Brosman gives us Duhamel, Romains, Cé1ine and Proust on WWI. In the penultimate chapter, she tackles the difficult question of WWII in works by Claude Simon, Jules Roy, and Marguerite Duras, among others, evoking this period as...