rev. _The Language of War_

[pynchonoid]

James Dawes. _The Language of War: Literature and
Culture in the
U.S. from the Civil War through World War II_.
Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002. x + 308 pp. Notes, index.
$41.00 (cloth),
ISBN 0-674-00648-8; $18.95 (paper), ISBN
0-674-01594-0.

Reviewed for H-War by Richard B. Megraw, American
Studies,
University of Alabama

War of the Words

[...] Suffice to say, few subjects more broadly
contextualize the postwar
American experience than words, warfare, and their
relationship, the
subject of James Dawes's ambitious study of "the
reimagination of
literature and culture in the United States in the
wake of the Civil
War, World War I, and World War II" (p. 1).

[...]  Long before jetliners whisked American grunts
from
rice paddy fire fights to beach front bars, Flanders
Field was at
times audible from Piccadilly Circus.  After months of
muddy
stalemate in the summer of 1917, the British offensive
ended only
after the fall of Passchendaele.  And Paul Baumer died
"almost glad
the end had come" on a day "so quiet and still" that
the army report
confined itself to a single sentence: All quiet on the
western
front."[2] Yet nothing, it seems, can ever or will
ever outdistance
the estrangement of experience and explanation
attained during World
War II.  George Steiner and Hannah Arendt, among
others, offer the
Holocaust as archetype with much justification.  But
we should also
confront the scale of the pattern, how for Allies and
Axis alike so
much of the war effort, large and small, depended on
the systematic
subversion of language through rumor, acronym,
encryption,
euphemism, and propaganda--the way language sanitized
the
apocalyptic intent and other-worldly effects of Bomber
Command
(survivors at Hamburg had to create a word for "fire
bomb victim,"
literally unspeakable horror), or how false identities
assigned to
corpses delivered phony invasion plans to the enemy. 
The architects
of the "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere"
brutalized Korean
"comfort girls," the gates of Auschwitz linked labor
and freedom,
and the telegram sent Harry Truman announcing the
success at
Alamogordo disguised its contents in the syntax of a
birth
announcement.

Along with its tragic toll of lives lost and cities
shattered, the
war exacted a fearsome price on language.  The
"rationalized
organization of violence in World War II," Dawes
writes, "saw
language shattered in the centralizing bureaucracies
of the
military-industrial complex" (p. 23), and its
reconstitution remains
the on-going project of the post-war world. William
Faulkner in _A
Fable_, Joseph Heller in _Catch-22_, and the rise of
Organizational
Sociology all affirm the concentrated power of
bureaucratic
organizations to compartmentalize communication, crush
autonomy,
stifle dissent, and abrogate moral responsibility. 
The question
remains, for Dawes as for us all: what to do with the
wreckage?  How
do we reconstitute language, restore meaning, and
reconcile his
opposing speech models now embodied by postwar human
rights doctrine
on one hand and on the other by post-structuralist
theorists?
Pitfalls accompany each.  The epitome of human rights
doctrine, the
Geneva Conventions, operates on faith in language, the
power of
naming to restrain violence.  Clear labels universally
recognized
and accurately applied, the doctrine maintains, impart
humanity to
enemy citizens otherwise dismissed as verminous
creatures deserving
wholesale slaughter.  But troubles arise when
universal symbols fail
to penetrate local conditions or accommodate unique
circumstances--witness the ensuing catastrophe when
Colonel
Nicholson confronts Colonel Saito over who can and
cannot construct
the Kwai Bridge. Moreover, human rights doctrine
demands the
acceptance at face value of belligerent promises to
limit warfare,
an act of incredible faith in a deeply cynical age. 
Can we really
trust "smart bombs" to contain violence in a world
still haunted by
"relocation," "special treatment," and the rumble of
"trains bound
for the east"?  Meanwhile, post-structuralist
theorists reject
naming out of hand as an inherently violent act. 
Naming is power,
the extension of authority, this argument maintains,
and those named
become victims as real as butchered children or
ravaged nuns.
"Regimes of power" control through language, clearly
an ominous
development; yet post-structuralists offer an
unworkable strategy of
resistance.  We must, they insist, "wage linguistic
guerilla
warfare" (p.  197) by learning "to speak a language
power does not
know" (p. 197), whatever that is.  Who will create
this language and
by what justifying authority no one says. 

[...]  James Dawes is right: clean language, concise
words, and clear
expression are of paramount importance to our
individual well being
and our collective social future.  But his message
comes cloaked in
thick, sometimes opaque, clouds of puffery and
theoretical jargon,
the very syntax he warns against.  Also, by focusing
on the
increased rationalization of modern society and
emphasizing the
essential amorality of bureaucratic management, Dawes
overlooks the
important influences of reform enthusiasm and
religious fervor in
shaping a distinctively American brand of modern
warfare.

The Civil War generation with which this study begins
embraced
combat as a regenerative social force.  Northerners
and southerners
alike fantasized about apocalyptic vengeance visited
upon the enemy
as a way simultaneously to defeat external foes and to
purify
internal corruptions.  This climaxed an "Era of
Reform" noteworthy,
among other things, for the development of the modern
social
statistic, a way not only of identifying problems but
measuring
progress toward their eradication.  Cloaked in
rhetoric drawn from
evangelical Protestantism and personal accountability,
it may be
less ironic, if more chilling, that the body count
began with them,
less to distance the battlefield than measure the
Almighty's
approach.  A generation later, when he pursued a right
"more
precious than the peace," Woodrow Wilson became at
once the father
of twentieth-century international human rights
doctrine _and_ a
former college professor determined to "win the minds
of the
American people" through a disciplinary message
linking number and
noun: 100% Americanism.  FDR reduced fourteen points
to four
freedoms; but in the immensely popular illustrated
versions of
Norman Rockwell, two of the four--people at prayer and
the
Thanksgiving dinner--were openly pious.  And while the
President and
the OWI struggled to express the war in more secular
terms, the
unambiguous message making "unconditional surrender"
the sole basis
for its satisfactory conclusion not only emphasized
its manichean
character, but intensified the violence and prolonged
the suffering.
Similarly, in more recent times, for all the power of
bureaucratic
organization and corporate rationality, despite the
triumph of
machine-dominated consumer society, postwar Americans
remain very
much their fathers' children.  Robert McNamara tracked
the campaign
against "Godless Communists" in Southeast Asia with
pie charts and
bar graphs, measuring "pacification" through
percentage.  So, too,
today, when reform and religion, numbers, naming, and
regenerative
violence form the root issues among those who support
and those who
oppose the determination of a self-professed
born-again Christian to
make a better society and a freer world by waging war
on
"evil-doers." Perhaps before clicking our heels, we
might cast one
more weather eye at forces responsible for sending the
cyclone
careening across Kansas. [...] 


...read it all:
<http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=240281082974303>


	
		
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