Update

So I reread most of Jünger’s Storm of Steel, bits of Keegan’s Face of Battle, some essays by Benjamin, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and for new books finished the Harari I described in the last post, The Ultimate Exprience, which was excellent, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, which was very disappointing.

I got all my PhD apps in, and the supplementary shit, which is good. Now I just wait to hear back. I’m reading all kinds of stuff, and I hope to discuss some of it in more detail soon. I got a lot of reading to do in the next three weeks.

The Ultimate Experience

Harari, Yuval Noah. The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000. Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2008.

"The incredible massing of forces in the hour of destiny, to fight for a distant future, and the violence it so surprisingly, stunningly unleashed, had taken me for the first time into the depths of something that was more than mere personal experience,” writes Ernst Jünger in his memoir of WWI. “That was what distinguished it from what I had been through before; it was an initiation that had not only opened the red-hot chambers of dread but had also led me through them."

Jünger sees his war experience as an existential crucible, a test and a vision of the future. Tim O’Brien, another veteran from another war, sees his war experience as a profound and wounding disillusionment:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. looked back on his experiences in the Civil War as not only formative but one of the few final moments of real truth in his life. Edmund Wilson writes “The young Holmes’s experience of the Civil War, besides settling for him the problem of faith, also cured him, and cured him for life, of apocalyptic social illusions.” His wounding and fighting formed the basis of what he later called his soldier’s faith:

If you wait in line, suppose on Tremont Street Mall, ordered simply to wait and do nothing, and have watched the enemy bring their guns to bear upon you down a gentle slope like that of Beacon Street, have seen the puff of the firing, have felt the burst of the spherical case-shot as it came toward you, have heard and seen the shrieking fragments go tearing through your company, and have known that the next or the next shot carries your fate; if you have advanced in line and have seen ahead of you the spot you must pass where the rifle bullets are striking; if you have ridden at night at a walk toward the blue line of fire at the dead angle of Spottsylvania, where for twenty-four hours the soldiers were fighting on the two sides of an earthwork, and in the morning the dead and dying lay piled in a row six deep, and as you rode you heard the bullets splashing in the mud and earth about you; if you have been in the picket-line at night in a black and unknown wood, have heard the splat of the bullets upon the trees, and as you moved have felt your foot slip upon a dead man's body; if you have had a blind fierce gallop against the enemy, with your blood up and a pace that left no time for fear—if, in short, as some, I hope many, who hear me, have known, you have known the vicissitudes of terror and triumph in war; you know that there is such a thing as the faith I spoke of.

If you’ve been there, that is, then you can know the truth. I could pile on further examples, from J. Glenn Gray, Wilfrid Owen, Michael Herr, Chris Hedges, from several wars, from novels and memoirs and films, from psychological analyses of trauma and recovery, from considered literary exegeses, from anthropological studies, and even from my own work, that neither argue nor examine but rather take as an a priori assumption the notion that war is an authentic site of revealed truth, and that the first-hand, physical, subjective experience of war and combat gives the subject of such experience a privileged moral authority. Whether war reveals the bedrock of faith or a vision of the future, tears aware the veils of social illusion, or enlightens us to “momentous truths about ourselves,” in every case it is unassailably real.

Yuval Harari, in his book The Ultimate Experience, argues that such authority is based in “flesh-witnessing,” and sees it as a historical product of the European Enlightenment. His main argument, put concisely, is this:

War became a revelatory experience in the period 1740-1865. Before the eighteenth century combatants almost never interpreted war as a revelatory experience…. It was during the second half of the eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century that the Enlightenment, the culture of sensibility, and Romanticism led soldiers to begin seeing war as an agent of revelation…. Romanticism highlighted ‘sublime’ experiences as privileged sources for knowledge and authority, and war experience fitted perfectly to the Romantic definition of the sublime.

Central to Harari’s argument is a narrative about changing conceptions of truth, the body, and subjectivity. In the medieval and early modern era, Harari argues, the the military body was subject to the rule of the mind. This conception achieves perhaps its clearest articulation in Maurice of Nassau's army and Descartes’ res cogitans. Truth is something the mind perceives, and bodily or sense data was inherently suspect and fallible. There were a variety of ways to interpret the experience of war in the early modern era, but none of them focused on the bodily sensations of the experience, or accepted that the body was a worthwhile site of truth. The mind or soul ruled, and whether the early modern narratives were exploits of martial honor, recountings of personal achievements, or stories of some collectivity such as a “nation,” they shared certain understandings of how war worked: “1. Knowledge of military ideals and of the essence of war was the prerogative of the mind…. [and] 2. The quality of a mind could be judged by its ability to master bodies and direct them in the right way. It was consequently enough to describe bodily movements in order to evaluate mind. The ethics of intention… was rejected by military culture.”

With the development of the conception of human identity as essentially embodied, through the eighteenth century’s complex cultural interplay that resulted in what is called “the culture of sensibility,” a new realm of truth came to dominate the interpretation of war experience. In effect, as Harari has it, bodies began to think. Beginning with such thinkers as Julian Offray de la Mettrie, a French doctor who scandalized his contemporaries with treatises such as Histoire naturelle de l’âme and L’Homme-machine, which “abolished the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body, denied the existence of mind and soul alike, and argued that thinking and feeling were done by matter,” and carrying through to contemporary theorists such as Elaine Scarry and writers such as Jünger and O’Brien, Harari traces the development of the war’s revelatory potential as it grew from the new truths of sensation, experience, and the body.

While Harari’s argument is built upon a narrative of the wider cultural changes we call The Enlightenment and Romanticism, what it is built with is the stuff of rigorous historical scholarship: a masterly grasp of a breadth of primary source material. If the book had a serious fault—which is no fault at all since, in fact, Harari is a military historian and not a cultural critic—it would be that it is full to bursting with examples from military memoirs from the relevant eras. He makes his argument both by telling a convincing story about how conceptions of war changed in relation to other contemporary cultural changes, and by citing one military memoir after another that clearly show what he is talking about. He also shows a respectable restraint in his argument, for while he certainly argues that the revelatory interpretation of war has become predominant, he recognizes that even still it is not the only one. Early modern interpretations of war as “an honorable way of life,” as “an instrument for personal advancement,” and as a national or collective enterprise continue to show up in the memoirs of soldiers, even if they have been eclipsed by the interpretation of war as an experience of truth, a sort of Bildung.

Of great interest is not just Harari’s genealogy of the soldier’s faith, as it were, but his analysis and typology of the forms the narrative of war-as-truth takes. First he looks at how “Sensationism and Romanticism transformed military memoirs by changing their language, their scenery, and their imagery” by examining four central themes: “sensations, nerves, sympathy, and nature.” He then unpacks the “key experiences of war” in the narrative of war-as-Bildung: 1) Basic training; 2) Baptism of fire; 3) The eve of combat; 4) Combat; 5) Injury and brushes with death; 6) Inflicting death; 7) Witnessing death; 8) The wake of battle; 9) The joys of comardeship; and 10) Returning home. He analyzes the importance of “flesh-witnessing,” or the idea that “those who did not undergo the key experiences of war cannot understand these experiences and cannot understand war in general.” Finally, he delineates the “master narratives of late modern military experience” as follows: 1) War as a positive revelation; 2) Disillusionment; 3) Combinations; and 4) Desensitizing. I cannot in this brief space hope to do justice to his typology, but it seems to me both thorough and convincing.

Harari argues that the changes he describes began around 1745 and achieved a high point in 1865, with the publication of the first volume of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. What is most striking about his argument for my interests is what it says about war culture in the twentieth century:

All the essential features of the revelatory interpretation of war were already in place before 1914, and therefore cannot be construed as the product of twentieth-century developments. In particular, they were not a reaction to the technologization of war.

To cite one last example, in 1903 Rudyard Kipling published ‘The Return,’ a poem about the return of the British soldiers from the Boer War. In it a British common soldier describes how he returns from war to London, ‘but not the same’ because ‘Things’ ave transpired which made me learn / The size and meanin’ of the game.’ The narrator tries to track the sources of the change war wrought in him: ‘I don’t know where the change began; / I started as an average kid, / I finished as a thinkin’ man.’

First, he notes the impact of “nature.” He describes the rivers, the wide plains, the wilderness, and the mountains of South Africa, speculating that ‘These may ‘ave taught me more or less.’ Then come the ravages of war, the burnt towns, the starving stray dogs, the homesick men, the missing comerades. ‘They taught me, too,’ he says. Finally, he writes about ‘the pore dead that look so old / An’ was so young an hour ago, / An’ legs tied down before they’re cold—/ These are the things which make you know.’

The entire spectrum of twentieth-century war stories, from Wilfrid Owen to Adolf Hitler to Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, is encapsulated in Kipling’s poem. If this conclusion is correct, it means that the famed late modern revolution in the culture of war should be predated to c. 1750 rather than 1914, 1945, or 1968. Nothing essentially new was invented or discovered in the twentieth century itself. What was new is the way in which the revelatory interpretation, which previously was only partially developed and which was still eclipsed by the instrumental and honorary interpretations, spread to become the most popular interpretation of all, and in the process acquired both artistic and political powers that it hitherto lacked.

Twentieth-century stories of martial revelation, and particularly of disillusionment, were certainly far more powerful and moving than anything written in the Romantic period. Yet the increased force of these stories emanated not from some new ingredients, but largely from the fact that they spelled out in full what was only latent in most Romantic memoirs. The basic ideas of twentieth-century war stories remained those of Sensationism, of Bildung, and of the sublime. However, twentieth-century memoirists pursued these ideas with far greater devotion than their predecessors, which gave their narratives unprecedented clarity and power.

Further, Harari points out important struggles within this interpretation, including that “between the image of the wise veteran and the image of the crazy veteran.”

Indeed, the traumatized soldier, who became a stock figure of military culture in the last few decades, is probably the best representation of the double-faced Romantic approach to war…. Their problem is exactly that they were given a peep behind the curtain of ignorance that shields society from the harsh reality of injury and death…. Because they were traumatized by a sublime experience… traumatized soldiers often appear in Western culture as ‘holy fools,’ bearers of a potent and sacred wisdom.

Such clear explications of the fraught relationship between experience, truth, witness, and social discourse that I’ve experienced myself as a war vet come almost as a balm, even while I cannot divorce myself from believing somehow that however historically contingent and socially constructed is the truth-value of my experience at war, it is still something incontrovertibly authentic. Perhaps something like believing in a dead god, I still have the soldier’s faith. Yet after reading Harari I cannot ever again accept unquestioningly the claims to truth, authenticity, and moral authority adverted by those who have done nothing more transcendent than walk around in a place where people get shot.

Harari, a young Israeli scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has contributed substantially to clearing out some of the stale cant and tired pieties surrounding the notion of war in scholarly discussion, and given us a firmly grounded account of how we’ve come to view war as the site of revelatory truth.

Academic Freedom

So I read a bunch of stuff, took the GRE Subject Test for Literature in English (which was lame), marched in the Veteran's Day parade down 5th Avenue, went into a fairly mild drunk which has taken a surprising three days to recover from (33 is not that old--maybe I have cancer?), and have been generally busy, all of which I'm not going ot talk about now. Instead I want to link to Michael Berube's blog post about Garcetti v. Ceballos, which looks like it might constrain academic freedom for tenured public university professors. The AAUP has this and this to say:

I don't know what to do about any of it, but it looks like trouble.