Antiwar Literature

History

There is a long history of war in literature, with many different styles and aims. Rather than glorifying the romance of combat, antiwar works demythologize war by illustrating the debilitating effects of warfare on the individual combatant (most commonly a young man whose wartime experience leaves him psychologically or physically shattered, although perspectives have diversified over time). Antiwar literature aims at debunking popular myths about war: the soldier as romantic hero, war as a proving ground for manhood, and death in combat as the patriotic ideal. Antiwar literature subverts these illusions about war through realistic, frequently first-person portrayals of the horrors of combat and its destructive aftermath. Although some writers have a discernible political perspective, most antiwar texts share a broader concern for exposing the horror and brutality of all war. Thus, there is a timeless, universal quality to antiwar literature that aims to provoke a rejection of, rather than a fascination for, war and warfare.

Writings that oppose violence date back to ancient times, as seen in religious texts from around the world espousing peace. However, antiwar literature in the modern sense is a relatively recent phenomenon, developing in tandem with both mass-market literature and large-scale, industrialized warfare. For centuries many stories and myths glamorized warfare as a noble or patriotic pursuit, and a necessity to maintain society against enemies. However, opposing perspectives gained wider attention as literacy increased and combat became more and more devastating. By the nineteenth century a growing number of novelists, poets, essayists, and other writers were challenging the legitimacy of warfare on various levels. This progression is clear in American literature, where the unprecedented destruction of the US Civil War gave rise to a new body of starkly realistic antiwar works.

Among the most powerful antiwar statements to emerge from the American Civil War are the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). In "Chickamauga," the inarticulate horror of the story's protagonist, a deaf-mute child surveying the carnage of the battlefield, bears poignant witness to the war's human toll. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (1895) similarly evokes the wasting effects of the war. Henry Fleming enlists in the Union Army dreaming of heroism, but the terror of the battlefield transforms his quest for personal identity into a cynical rebellion against war and, ultimately, into cowardice. Henry's identity is shaped by his painful struggle for personal integrity after he deserts his regiment.

World War I had a similar galvanizing effect on antiwar literature, especially as many people came to oppose the war as a purely political power struggle with little moral or security imperative. Huge numbers of troops on both sides were killed both due to advancements in weapons technology and the manipulations of leaders who were themselves safely removed from battle. The horrors of the so-called Great War are captured in works such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and William March's Company K (1933). Similarly, Johnny Got His Gun (1939) by Dalton Trumbo is widely regarded as the quintessential antiwar novel. Narrated by a young soldier who has returned from battle hideously disfigured, Trumbo's work delivers a stark and profoundly pacifistic message about the dehumanizing effects of combat.

The dislocating effects of the United States' entry into World Wars I and II provided particular fodder for both fiction and drama. For example, John Dos Passos provided three decades of sustained literary protest against the social upheaval of war. In Three Soldiers (1921), his acclaimed trilogy U.S.A. (1937), and such later works as Mr. Wilson's War (1962), Dos Passos exposes the political corruption and profiteering spawned by America's war industry. Using techniques of documentary realism, he captures the breakdown of the nation's social and moral order in wartime. On the stage, Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo (1919) and Maxwell Anderson's What Price Glory? (1924) dramatized the human costs of America's involvement in World War I.

The rise of dictatorships in Europe and sympathy for the Loyalist resistance in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 produced an array of antiwar literature by a number of America's most distinguished writers. Among those who published protest works during these years were novelists Sinclair Lewis, who wrote It Can't Happen Here (1935), and Upton Sinclair, who wrote A World to Win (1946). Poet Stephen Vincent Benét wrote Burning City (1936), and Millay, Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939). Playwright Clifford Odets wrote the antiwar Till the Day I Die (1935). Paradoxically, ardent opposition to fascism propelled many left-wing writers to advocate the use of force to end tyranny.

The dropping of the atomic bomb that ended World War II in 1945 and the United States' entry into the Korean War prompted a number of critiques of American militarism, among them Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children's Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death (1969), darkly comic novels exposing the absurdity of the American military bureaucracy and the destructive power of the air war in Europe. Around the same time, Norman Mailer provided an increasingly cynical perspective on American Cold War politics. The Naked and the Dead (1948), his romanticized novel of the war in the Pacific, was followed by two dissident works, Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) and The Armies of the Night (1968), potent statements against the war in Vietnam.

No previous war in which the United States was involved produced so large a body of antiwar literature as the war in Vietnam. Written mainly by veterans, these works angrily indict US military policy and the nation's failure to support its soldiers. Novels such as Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (1978), Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers (1979), and John Del Vecchio's The Thirteenth Valley (1982) capture the grim reality of the combat experience, while memoirs such as Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War (1977), Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July (1976), and Michael Herr's journalistic exposé Dispatches (1977) detail the loss of innocence and identity experienced by the war's combatants. Similar themes dominate the poetry collections of John Balaban (After Our War, 1974), W. D. Ehrhart (To Those Who Have Gone Home Tired, 1984), and Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm, 1988). David Rabe's trilogy of plays, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1973), Sticks and Bones (1973), and Streamers (1976), produced between 1969 and 1976, voice the anguish and bitterness of America's returning soldiers. Collectively, these and similar works not just chronicle the tragic history of the Vietnam War itself, but in many ways represent the culmination of over a century of American literary protest against war.

Antiwar literature would continue after Vietnam, but many critics note that few works of the next few decades matched the cultural impact of earlier classic protest writings. It has been theorized that this was due to several factors. For example, the lasting impact of previous wars—particularly World War II and the Vietnam War—meant that many major writers who did confront warfare continued to focus on those eras, especially given the relative lack of traditional wars in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first. A prominent example is Tim O'Brien's story collection The Things They Carried (1990), which became a staple of school reading lists. Yet while such historical fiction (or drama, poetry, etc.) could be undoubtedly powerful, it did not always capture public attention to the same degree as works covering new ground or about a current conflict. The discontinuation of the US military draft also meant that the American antiwar movement in general declined as most families were less directly affected by combat action. In contrast, growing attention to world literature meant antiwar works from around the world found wider audiences.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and ensuing global War on Terror marked the beginning of a new wave of literature focusing on war. However, critics again note that the strongly antiwar protest writing in this era was notably low-profile. This has been credited to a wave of nationalism and public belief in the necessity of rooting out terrorism, as well as the nontraditional manner of the military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Still, as these conflicts dragged on, various authors did begin to reckon with their costs. Many works showed strong similarities to their counterparts from the Vietnam War era, often written by veterans and focused on physical and psychological horrors representing a breakdown of humanity. Memoirs such as Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq (2005); novels such as Fobbit (2012) by David Abrams, The Yellow Birds (2012) by Kevin Powers, and War Porn (2016) by Roy Scranton; and short story collections such as Phil Klay's Redeployment (2014) all earned critical attention for their takes on the modern soldier's experience.

Bibliography

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