Narrating Modern War: Technology and the Aesthetics of War Literature

This essay analyses how since the early twentieth century war novels and memoirs have reflected the challenges which modern warfare poses to narrative. Mechanized warfare, I argue, resists the narrative encoding of experience, creating a crisis of narrative that is frequently made explicit in the assertion, on the part of novelists and memoirists, that the actual experience of combat cannot be narrated. Thus, for instance, the nature of warfare on the Western Front 1914–1918, characterized by the fragmentation of vision in the trenches and the exposure of soldiers to a continuous sequence of acoustic shocks, had a disruptive effect on perceptions of time and space, and consequently on the rendering of the chronotope in narrative accounts of the fighting. Since then, modern military technology has increasingly generated a sense that wars have acquired a dynamic of their own. The “cinematic” nature of technological warfare and the resulting loss of individual agency have suspended the order-creating and meaning-creating function of narrative, leading, in extremis, to the representational impasse emphasized by trauma theory. In my discussion of selected war writings, I shall show how the “cognitive narratology” of modern warfare can be applied to the analysis of aesthetic manifestations in war literature and the “crisis of language” underlying (literary) modernity and postmodernity.