War, Violence and HF

gothicangel

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I've just been reading this article, it's about teaching WWI in schools, but I thought it raised some interesting points about war in fiction (especially HF)

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-e...-world-war-perspectives-literature?CMP=twt_gu

Over the years, I have come to understand that these students expect any truthful representation of the war to be dominated by scenes of horror. For it to be realistic and "true", it must be bloody, graphic, have a high body count and represent an assault on the senses (rather like a video game). For them, war writing should be visceral and direct; it should fill them with revulsion and "pity".

When faced with students who claim to be thwarted (and mysteriously silenced) by Blunden's narrative, I push them a little further. I know that for these clever and articulate individuals, who can willingly embrace the triple-decker Victorian novel and revel in Joyce's word play, something more is at stake here.
"It's just not violent enough!" one reluctant student finally volunteers, to the relief of the others who, it seems, share his view. I am grateful for this student's honesty, because it allows us to move on to a discussion about art and violence and about how our expectations have been shaped by a century of myth-making.
This is challenging for us all. It forces us to ask questions about what we think we know, and how we react when something invites us to see the war differently, whether it's Sassoon's exhilarated response to battle ("I thought he was anti-war!"), Tolkien's epic rendition of his own war experience ("Oh yes, the Dead Marshes!"), or Blunden's description of a ruined church and the constant stream of soldiers who are inexplicably drawn to the "bones and skulls and decayed cerements" which spill from the shattered vaults.

I found it very interesting, as I begin to write my WIP I've made a conscious decision that I don't want to write something that glorifies war and no boys-own antics. I want something that is brutal and real, that more resembles Apocalypse Now (having read a lot on the Bar Kokhba Revolt, I would call it the Roman Vietnam. I think I should go back and read some War Poetry again) :)

Thoughts?
 

Maxx

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I found it very interesting, as I begin to write my WIP I've made a conscious decision that I don't want to write something that glorifies war and no boys-own antics. I want something that is brutal and real, that more resembles Apocalypse Now (having read a lot on the Bar Kokhba Revolt, I would call it the Roman Vietnam. I think I should go back and read some War Poetry again) :)

Thoughts?

I guess this has been something of a narrative problem since Homer put the Iliad together. There are moments of graphic shattering violence in the Iliad, but they are distanced for the audience by all kinds of frames and conventions as in fact to some degree is real violence for real soldiers. Even in Robert Graves story of his WWI experiences -- Goodbye to all that -- he keeps to the realm of generalizations for the most part and only occasionally goes into every twist and turn of some horrific set of events.
Oddly enough, last time I read Goodbye to all that, I noticed a point where Graves tries to explain Siegfreid Sassoon's passion for systematic explosive violence against the Germans as a response to their friend's being killed while watching a strange peripheral slaughter. Sassoon's own account occurs twice: once as fiction and once as his memoires and in neither case is Sassoon's rather Achilles-like madness explained as well as Graves explains it.

I've also heard a number of horrific war stories straight from soldiers and as a rule the more sane the narrator, the more abstract the narrative. Some kind of distancing intervenes to keep the narrator intact so to speak.

So in my own fictional tales of violence from duels to small battles, there is not much glory, plenty of signals and plans going wrong, lots of unexpected explosions and accidents, and plenty of narrators who are either creepily absorbed in the tales of horrific violence or changed for the worse or both.

On the other hand, I'm about to have a character have some peripheral encounter with the Armee de Sambre-et-Meuse as the Austrians are driven from Maastricht and Liege in September 1794, and I'm not sure how that is going to go.
 

snafu1056

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To me it seems like an intellectual way to have your cake and eat it too. All human beings enjoy violence to some degree. But a lot of people, especially educated people who see themselves as knowing better, consider it beneath them to just blatantly enjoy bloodshed. Thats for the morons who watch wrestling and slasher movies. Smart, civilized people need there to be a message behind the carnage. What is all this blood and guts really saying? That violence is bad! Perfect! Now I can embrace my bloodlust and distance myself from it at the same time! I'm not watching and enjoying excessive violence, I'm watching and enjoying a meditation on excessive violence!

I say just embrace the bloodlust.
 
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Maxx

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To me it seems like an intellectual way to have your cake and eat it too. All human beings enjoy violence to some degree. But a lot of people, especially educated people who see themselves as knowing better, consider it beneath them to just blatantly enjoy bloodshed. Thats for the morons who watch wrestling and slasher movies. Smart, civilized people need there to be a message behind the carnage. What is all this blood and guts really saying? That violence is bad! Perfect! Now I can embrace my bloodlust and distance myself from it at the same time! I'm not watching and enjoying excessive violence, I'm watching and enjoying a meditation on excessive violence!

I say just embrace the bloodlust.

I suppose that's the idea. Though it leaves you wondering why Sassoon -- who literally loved killing Germans -- in the end (so to speak) finds the whole project of WWI curiously uninviting and writes about it without explaining himself at all. While Graves has an incredibly ambivalent response that sort of amounts to: "I'm sorry I missed Sassoon's murderous antics, but maybe he was just upset."
 

Histry Nerd

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One thing I think most stories leave out (you touched on it above, Maxx) is how godawfully boring the long stretches between violence are. Even during the exceptions that jump out at us--Virginia in 1864-65, the Western Front in 1916, Normandy in 1944--the average soldier spent a lot more time marching and digging than fighting.

Of course, it's hard to capture the boring parts of life in a story without making it a boring story, so it's in our nature to write about the violence. But just about every veteran I've ever talked to was much more likely to tell a funny story about his buddy than a story about a battle.

That's something I've tried to capture in my Civil War novel. My narrator disguised herself as a man to fight in the war, and is relating the story fifty years later to her grandson, but to her, the story of the war is really the story of how she met his grandfather. She describes the battles in a very matter-of-fact way without much in the way of gory details, and goes on at length about the time she spent with him.

There's a place for visceral and direct battle stories, for sure. But soldiers, and sailors, and marines, and airmen, and colonial space-Janissaries spend months or years far from home and only hours or days in combat. Seems to me a real war story should acknowledge that, as well.

HN
 

Maxx

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One thing I think most stories leave out (you touched on it above, Maxx) is how godawfully boring the long stretches between violence are. Even during the exceptions that jump out at us--Virginia in 1864-65, the Western Front in 1916, Normandy in 1944--the average soldier spent a lot more time marching and digging than fighting.

Of course, it's hard to capture the boring parts of life in a story without making it a boring story, so it's in our nature to write about the violence. But just about every veteran I've ever talked to was much more likely to tell a funny story about his buddy than a story about a battle.

That's something I've tried to capture in my Civil War novel. My narrator disguised herself as a man to fight in the war, and is relating the story fifty years later to her grandson, but to her, the story of the war is really the story of how she met his grandfather. She describes the battles in a very matter-of-fact way without much in the way of gory details, and goes on at length about the time she spent with him.

There's a place for visceral and direct battle stories, for sure. But soldiers, and sailors, and marines, and airmen, and colonial space-Janissaries spend months or years far from home and only hours or days in combat. Seems to me a real war story should acknowledge that, as well.

HN

Having read Graves and Sassoon, but not Blunden, it seems the place to look for what to do with the "reality" of violence is in the accounts of people who were on the front lines. Graves does in fact spend a lot of time on small-scale tales of lost horses and accidents and so on. I don't remember Sassoon's narratives as well, but they were just as soaked with little stories IIRC.

Of course there is the further irony from the OP: literary kids make a lot of assumptions about war and violence that are based on a view of violence that sort of leaves out the fact that violence has active participants and hopefully some surviving witnesses -- it's like violence suddenly defines a realm of pure objectivity whereas -- from what I've seen -- the reverse is closer to the truth. I always recall one guy -- very successful once he got out of Vietnam and out of the hospital in Japan and spent a few years drinking hard day and night in Copenhagen -- who repeatedly told me the story of how they gave him a psych-discharge because he kept saying, "You don't understand, they were REALLY TRYING to Kill ME!" And how he like to say that, quoting himself over and over. It was a strange protective magical utterance, I guess.
 

gothicangel

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Thanks for the replies. My stupid Broadband supplier locked me out for days, but I will com back once I've formulated my replies better.
 

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I write in the Napoleonic Wars period where violent death and often a lingering one were almost inevitable. To shirk away from that would defeat any attempt to tell a story
 

Flicka

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But isn't the whole point that there isn't just one narrative of war, and not one experience? There is violence, yes, but not all of the time, and different people will tell very different stories when recounting their experiences. The reality of a war is much more complex than any one narrative, which I suppose is what the article tries to say; that WWI has been reduced to one narrative (of trench suffering; of mutilated bodies and mustard gas). Historical retelling (as in non-fiction) needs to be much more complex than that and acknowledge the myriad of different (and sometimes incompatible) experiences.

Fiction on the other hand, may focus on one narrative, since it tells only a tiny slice of the story (that of the MCs). That's not to say a writer needs to adhere to a stereotypical narrative of a historical incident or experience. But to write war as horrid and gory and terrible... I don't find that to be a problem or something HF should needs to avoid. That doesn't mean that it's the only way to write it, but I still think it's a legit way of writing it, and in line with how many people have retold their experiences.

Randomly, I just came from reading The Sun Over Breda by Arturo Pérez-Reverte which takes place in Holland during the Thirty Years War. It was definitely a narrative about the horrors of war, and very, very well-written, IMO.
 

Maxx

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I write in the Napoleonic Wars period where violent death and often a lingering one were almost inevitable. To shirk away from that would defeat any attempt to tell a story

No doubt. I've been reading up on the early armies of the Republic. They seem to have heavily outnumbered their opponents and all of those new soldiers (dentists turned cavalrymen and all) seem to have been much more courageous than the men of say 20 years later (say 1794 to 1814). I suspect the really brave ones were all dead by say 1810. (eg Desaix, Bonnard). And others learned not to be so brave (eg St Cyr, Kleber). And some never learned (eg, Ney, Murat).
 

V.W.Singer

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But when concentrating on this "realism", it should not be forgotten that there were and have always been some soldiers who actually did glory in combat, all the way from the "champions" who would step out of the ranks to challenge the enemy to single combat, to the cavalrymen who insisted on death defying (or death embracing) charges into enemy positions even when their commanders tried to call them back.

Despite almost certain death, men have volunteered to be the first up the ladder in a siege, or to be part of a Forlorn Hope that charged the breach in the fortress walls. This is not to "glamourise" warfare, but recognise the wild madness that comes upon some of us in those circumstances. Pre WWI warfare was a hell of death, disease, and horrible crippling injuries, and yet men who could have afforded to retire still answered the call to battle until they were killed or too old to fight. Obviously they saw something more than horror or even money in what they were doing, and few in those days even thought of "patriotism" as we do now.
 

sunandshadow

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If I were the teacher in the article linked, I'd want to add to the curriculum a single page of material that really helped my understanding of war - an anthropologist's description of a small band of chimpanzees going on a raid, finding a chimp from a neighboring tribe alone, beating him to death, then going back to their normal lives. They didn't do it for wealth, they didn't do it for ideology, they didn't do it for revenge or out of prejudice, because those concepts don't really exist without language. So, why? They did it because they, like humans and other primates, have instincts for hunting and killing, spreading our "selfish genes" and judging the mere existence of a rival with a rival territory to be a threat.
 

Maxx

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If I were the teacher in the article linked, I'd want to add to the curriculum a single page of material that really helped my understanding of war - an anthropologist's description of a small band of chimpanzees going on a raid, finding a chimp from a neighboring tribe alone, beating him to death, then going back to their normal lives. They didn't do it for wealth, they didn't do it for ideology, they didn't do it for revenge or out of prejudice, because those concepts don't really exist without language. So, why? They did it because they, like humans and other primates, have instincts for hunting and killing, spreading our "selfish genes" and judging the mere existence of a rival with a rival territory to be a threat.

It seems like this would only add to the students' demand that narratives of war provide the expected dose of objectively present and necessary gruesome violence.

On the other hand, human behavior is conditioned by all kinds of other cultural factors. For example, one might acknowledge the power of a vanquished foe by eating him or by saluting him and letting him go without killing him.
 

gothicangel

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Obviously they saw something more than horror or even money in what they were doing, and few in those days even thought of "patriotism" as we do now.

I have to disagree there. You can easily go back to the Romans and find soldiers who where honoured for 'devito' - willingness to give up your life for your country. I'm sure the Athenians at Marathon though along the same lines.
 

donroc

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Write about war honestly with no agenda. There is glory or ptsd for the survivors, exultation and hell on earth, just causes or foolish ones.

My recently released novel about fighter aces from both the USAAF and Luftwaffe traces those who idealized "Knights of the Air" from WWI as boys to WWII aces. Yet they disillusioned during WWII because of political and command decisions that go against their codes of honor.

Close to The Sun - Kindle and soft cover edition by Donald Michael Platt. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
 

flapperphilosopher

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But isn't the whole point that there isn't just one narrative of war, and not one experience? There is violence, yes, but not all of the time, and different people will tell very different stories when recounting their experiences. The reality of a war is much more complex than any one narrative, which I suppose is what the article tries to say; that WWI has been reduced to one narrative (of trench suffering; of mutilated bodies and mustard gas). Historical retelling (as in non-fiction) needs to be much more complex than that and acknowledge the myriad of different (and sometimes incompatible) experiences.

Fiction on the other hand, may focus on one narrative, since it tells only a tiny slice of the story (that of the MCs). That's not to say a writer needs to adhere to a stereotypical narrative of a historical incident or experience. But to write war as horrid and gory and terrible... I don't find that to be a problem or something HF should needs to avoid. That doesn't mean that it's the only way to write it, but I still think it's a legit way of writing it, and in line with how many people have retold their experiences.

I agree it is important to note this key difference between teaching history and writing historical fiction. If you're teaching good history, you are showing a whole bunch of different narratives and points of view. If you're writing historical fiction, you might only be writing one (or possibly a couple). A work of historical fiction (or the memoirs or poems or stories of a fellow who was there) can't even try and say "this is what WWI was like"-- at most it's "this is what WWI was like for this one person, in this specific situation, with their particular personality and life history." No one person's experience of any event is the "right" one, nor is their way of telling it. As a writer I don't think you have any responsibility try and tell "the whole story" (as if that's ever possible anyway). You should work to get an idea of the different things people in the same situation dealt with, and, if possible, how they told them, but what you create certainly doesn't have to address all that. If your story deals with the bloody and miserable parts of WWI, yes, there were bloody and miserable parts. If there are more boring parts and funny stories, well, there were those too, and lots of writing I've seen from WWI vets focuses more on these than the bloodiness. If it's exciting sometimes, or surreal, yep, that was part of it too. I don't think anyone should take one story-- whether fictional or non-fictional-- and regard it as a statement about the subject matter.
 

Flicka

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You put it better, flapper, but yes, that was pretty much what I meant. Reality cannot be captured in one story, but hist fic is essentially about telling just one story. So truth is, if not stranger, so at least more complex than fiction.