Hoisted from Comments: Speaking About War
Hoisted from comments: md sends us to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory:
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A long paragraph from Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (pp169-170, 1975 pbk ed.) hits hard on some of this. Replace the antebellum faith in Progress with one in America.
One of the cruxes of the war, of course, is the collision between events and the language available--or thought appropriate--to describe them. To put it more accurately, the collision was one between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress. Logically there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of trench warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, sell-out, pain and hoax, as well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines gushing out over his hands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum and the like. Logically, one supposes, there's no reason why a language devised by man should be inadequate to describe any of man's works. The difficulty was in admitting that the war had been made by men and was being continued ad infinitum by them. The problem was less one of "language" than of gentility and optimism; it was less a problem of "linguistics" than of rhetoric. Louis Simpson speculates about the reason infantry soldiers so seldom rendered their experience in language: "To a foot-soldier, war is almost entirely physical. That is why some men, when they think about war, fall silent. Language seems to falsify physical life and to betray those who have experienced it absolutely--the dead." But that can't be right. The real reason is that soldiers have discovered that no one is very interested in the bad news that they have to report. What listener wants to be torn and shaken when he doesn't have to be? We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.
Posted by: md 20/400 | August 12, 2007 at 05:20 PM
