War Novels

[theorist]

Two of the most celebrated novels that use the Second World War as a backdrop are Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Both are decidedly anti-war with the focus tending to be on the unsung costs of warfare: atrocities against civilians and the psychological impact on the surviviors.

Both of these novels were also written through the lens of American involvement in Vietnam. Especially in Pynchon's masterpiece, the reader is led through a tangled web of paranoia that is represented more in the feelings inspired by our Southeast Asian conflicts of the sixties than the liberation of Europe in the forties.

I'm curious as to how our current military endeavors will be portrayed artistically in the coming decades. Are there any indicators yet that point to an answer? Do you think the next great war novel will even be written by an American?

[Journeyman]

1. I've no concept for how it will be portrayed. . .

Gertrude Stein said: "A creator is not in advance of his generation but is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation."

With the incredible range of information available to us all, and the immediacy between competing ideals and ideologies we've had during this war, I too am curious to both how and when the first great novel will be written -- if for no other reason than I'd like for someone to finally make sense of what's swirling about us.

It's a good question, theorist. I suspect the authors of the better books about the IraqAttak are still in its midst, mulling its consequences while they observe its madness first hand.

I hope I live long enough to read some of those novels that most likely haven't been started yet. Slaughterhouse-Five was published 23 years after the war ended, Gravity's Rainbow appeared five years later.

There's hope it may not take so long, however. Books about Vietnam came somewhat quicker. Both Dispatches and A Rumor of War were published within three years of the helicopter evacuation of the Embassy -- and portions of both books were published while the War raged. Maybe we'll begin to see the first glimpses early on.

And as I write this, I'm struck with the idea that the best takes on this war may not come from its combatants. We are all so closely involved with the madness in Iraq -- through bloggers and other internet sources, and from the immediacy with which the attack was met by those who questioned its basic premise -- that the best books about the Attak (or at least the first published) may come from those who've never been on its fields.

An aside to show how this may be: I was in the Air Force in October, 1973, stationed in Minot, North Dakota, the morning the original White House Dick, Nixon, placed us on nuclear alert over actions by the Soviets in regards the October Mid-East War. I remember standing in my duty station, looking out a barred window, wondering when the missiles might fly (I'd already seen the bomber pilots take off, and at that time, NoDak was the third largest nuclear power in the world -- behind only the rest of the US and the Soviet Union). As I stood there that morning, a thought occurred to me -- later confirmed, when I spoke to my family in California -- that the only difference between the home front and the front line was a matter of perception. I knew the alert was on, so I was on the front line, while my family in California was ignorant of even the idea they were part of a 'home front.' It's all different today. We are all on the front line, as recent events in London make clear. So keep your head down and your wits about you, for if you let your wits down your head may end up all around you.

Peace.

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" was much earlier, yeah?

For the First World War, it took until 1929 for a publisher to pick up Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues, afterwhich a flood of memoirs appeared (including Graves' classic Goodbye to All That).

[theorist]

4. E.E. Cumming's The Enormous Room

Cumming's only novel was published in 1922 and detailed his experiences during the Great War. Very interesting story behind this book. It also has a very strong anti-war sentiment.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enormous_Room

[alcibiades_mystery]

5. Yeah I've read The Enormous Room

Apparently, it didn't sell very well until the early 30's and afterwards (but never sold very well at all). Remarque, on the other hand, sold like hotcakes, even in England.

[alcibiades_mystery]

2. Both of these novels were written in a culture that

was more or less entrenched in perpetual war. While our culture has lately come to the bizarre idea of a "war on terror" we have by no means attained the cultural war saturation that informed those novels. Love that the epigraph for the "Counterforce" section inGravity's Rainbow is simply

"What?"
-Richard Nixon

Fucking hilarious Pynchon. Love it.

[BrotherBuzz]

6. Johnny Got His Gun - by Dalton Trumbo

A WWI anti-war novel published on the eve of WWII - 1939. Interesting, no?

[MelissaB]

7. I read that book twice for different classes and blocked it out.

It was powerful.

[BrotherBuzz]

8. Powerful, yes...

You're better then me for being able to block it out....it haunts my dreams...

[Journeyman]

9. The "companion" piece to Johnny is equally captivating. . .

unfinished at the time of his death, Night of the Aurochs would have ranked among Trumbo's greatest.

Aurochs tells the other side of Johnny's story: What kind of man allows others to suffer for his own beliefs? Trumbo sought the answer in the story of an SS officer named Grieben.

"The thing I am after here," wrote Trumbo, "the devil I am trying to catch, is that dark yearning for power that lurks in all of us, the perversion of love that is the inevitable consequence of power, the exquisite pleasures of perversion when power becomes absolute."

Because of his legal troubles that stemmed from the Hollywood 10 persecution, because he devoted too much time and energy getting Johnny filmed (1971), and because he desperately needed money all his life and so had to pen screenplays when he wanted to work on his novel, Dalton Trumbo died with Aurochs barely one-third complete. Robert Kirsch then took on the herculean task of pulling all his notes and drafts together into as near a complete book as he could. The result is astounding. Even incomplete, it recounts a compelling tale and can be confidently placed on the shelf next to Johnny.

Said Trumbo's good friend and fellow Hollywood 10 cellmate, Ring Lardner, Jr.: "Completed, Night of the Aurochs would have been a major event in American literature. In its present form, it combines a look into the darkest recesses of the human spirit with superlative prose and one of the most fascinating revelations of a writer's mind ever published."

Trumbo may not be one of the great writers of the 20th century -- most of his output was film, and his books were an uneven effort -- but he easily ranks among the giants in his courage, his faith in the American Constitution, and his steadfast belief in the capacity of free men to alter their circumstances. He's one of my personal heroes. I named my son after him.

[scarletlib]

10. "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Eirch Maria Remarque

Written about WWI from the german point of view. at the end the protagonist of the story is dead as are all of his friends. very sad and ultimately anti-war as the book is about how the hero Paul comes to realize the futility of all the death and destruction he sees. (I read this many years ago -- just as Vietnam was really heating up -- and have never forgotten it. It was incredibly sad story.

The Desert of Wheat by Zane Grey also deals with WWI and the aftereffects of the war on the hero. (This was my first Zane Grey novel that I got hold of as a teenager. I was excited to begin reading what I thought would be a traditional western novel. It wasn't but I finished the novel because it was good. Learned about Wobblies, shell-shock as ptsd was known then.)