Book Review: Waging War on War

By Brady Harrison, University of Montana

In the Preface to Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature, Giorgio Mariani lets readers know they should not expect an exhaustive study of the American literary tradition of anti–war writing, but rather a careful study of how a handful of works—some well–known, others less so—may be read as opposing war and violence: “I realize that some may find my choice of texts eclectic, as I move across historical periods and through many genres (epic and lyric poetry, short story, and novel)” (xi). Rather than proposing an anatomy of American peace writing, Mariani argues that his choices provide “an opportunity to comment on how the attempt to denounce and condemn war and violence is either enabled or complicated by a specific cultural context as well as by the use of a given literary form” (xi). In contrast, say, to Richard Slotkin, who provides, in his famous gunfighter nation trilogy, a sweeping study of violence and war in American literature, Mariani models how to sift through the complexities of individual works that have a place in what he terms “a national countertradition of peace seekers and justice seekers who oppose war and try to practice or imagine non–violent ways to transform the world” (xiii).

The book is divided into two sections, Part I: Theory and Part II: Readings, and in the three chapters that make up the first section, Mariani argues that although readers, film audiences, and scholars often refer to “anti–war” literature or films, the term remains largely undertheorized and that our sense of whether a work may be anti–war or not depends a great deal on our cultural contexts and reading strategies. Building on the work of Kate McLoughlin, Cynthia Wachtell, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Jacques Derrida, and others, Mariani asserts that the “critique of war can never come from a standpoint wholly external to it” (19): “As I will insist throughout this book, if we wish to grasp the critical (anti–war/ pro–peace) aspects of war literature, we cannot restrict our analysis to the ways in which war is represented. We must also investigate how peace is implicitly (as is often the case) or explicitly constructed” (25). Contending that readers and scholars “should never obscure the rich, and by no means naïve, tradition of anti–war thinking visible in many strains of U.S. culture” (36), Mariani focuses, in Part II, on works that build upon and engage the intellectual and moral foundations of a robust, energetic ethic of nonviolence and peacefighting set forth in the work and example of Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi, Addams, William James, and King and that seek (and perhaps stumble or contradict themselves) to think past or transcend war and to imagine (and explore the meanings of) peace. He reads, in turn—and here we readily see the author’s eclectic approach—Joel Barlow’s Columbiad, Melville’s Moby–Dick, La Motte’s The Backwash of War, Faulkner’s A Fable, O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace, two of Brian Turner’s poetry collections, Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise, and Helen Benedict’s novel, Sand Queen.

Among the readings—Mariani devotes a chapter to each of the works, save for the final chapter, “Literature and the Iraq War,” where he analyzes Kingston, Turner, and Benedict in turn—most impressive, perhaps, is the chapter on La Motte’s underappreciated collection of short stories, The Backwash of War. In “‘Curious Anesthetics’: Ellen La Motte and the Wounds of the Great War,” Mariani analyzes several of the stories in The Backwash of War, and he finds in the tales, based upon La Motte’s experiences as a volunteer nurse behind the French lines between 1915 and 1916, an “anatomy” of the Great War. Here, Mariani nicely sounds the complexities of La Motte’s work and explores the myriad strategies she employs to register her disgust with the war and its violences and disfigurements; as he remarks, her stories are “animated by a sense of moral indignation” that one does not find so readily in works by Crane, Bierce, or Hemingway. Her collection amounts to an “anatomy” of ways to protest war and fight for peace, and Mariani finds that La Motte expertly details how combatants and leaders on all sides of the war practiced “a campaign of systematic devastation of women’s minds and bodies” (144). The chapter, to say the least, is a major contribution to the study of La Motte’s work, and readers will find much to admire (and to apply to their own thinking about how different texts wage war on war and fight for peace) in the chapters on Faulkner’s (often dismissed) tale of mutiny, O’Brien’s twists and turns in one of the most famous stories in The Things They Carried, and Turner’s complex, “cosmopolitan” poetry about U.S. (and coalition) intervention in Iraq.