Writing War in Literature

Sumit Chakrabarti

[War resists telling, yet demands to be written. Literature becomes the imperfect vessel–preserving trauma while acknowledging all it cannot hold. Between memory and gaps, words perform their necessary failure. –Ed]

Is it not imperative that a professor of literature must talk about war? Both the imperative and the inevitability would provoke a revisiting of the canon which we have been taught, and which one carries as a continuous disturbing memory of the violent in literature. Some of the earliest epics and lyrics from Old English, let alone the literatures of the Greeks and the Romans–Beowulf, The Seafarer, The Wanderer, or epics from our own lands–The Mahabharata or The Ramayana are narratives of war, dissent, loss and revenge. It is possible, I contend, to think of literature as an expression of a psychopathology of loss, an economy of anxiety that is born of a dysfunction that is historically embedded within the mind as a continuous reminder of that which cannot not be unforgotten. War remains as a testimony of violation that the subject of war has to write in order to unforget that which is difficult to remember and cannot not be remembered at the same instant. Writing becomes the sane other of war. Writing is creative unforgetting–an objective distillation of the moment that needs closure without erasure. Literature must write war, because the memory of war cannot go anywhere else. Literature is what I call a museum of nurture and a site of unforgetting–a testimonial to the abstraction of human grief.

Literature And Testimony
In one of his deeply philosophical essays, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Jacques Derrida deliberates on the question of testimony and fiction. Interestingly, the reader will notice how at one point in the essay Derrida talks of literature through the metaphor of war. He writes how “literature can say anything, accept anything, receive anything, suffer anything, and simulate everything; it can even feign a trap, the way modern armies know how to set false traps”. It is not difficult to see what Derrida is trying to do here. The metaphor of the army is a deliberate act of unforgetting whereby the simulacrum itself is a reminder of the deceit or the betrayal or the unuttered violence of the moment of war. The ‘false trap’, almost a tautology, rattles the reader into a realisation of the deceitfulness of submitting to literature, a realisation which is private, secret, and unutterable. At the same moment, the complete contingency of the moment of submission–that it can say, accept, receive or suffer anything–makes literature the necessary simulacrum that guards the private, secret, and unutterable. The paradoxical is therefore the crux of literature–making it both testimony and fiction, investing the word ‘literature’ with an unforeseen and unforeseeable contingency, both expressing and keeping the secret at the same time, and releasing the subject of immediate responsibility for that which is said, or that which has been left unsaid. This momentary freedom from claiming memory both as ‘truth’ and as one’s own, that literature makes possible, is why I have called it the museum of nurture.

Testimony remains one of the crucial limbs through which the act of war is memorialised. The juridical trope embedded in the idea of the testimony invests it with an insurmountable secrecy, a contract that is ethically impossible to violate. It is a contract bound, sealed, and signed by law–and hence, by its very nature, inviolable. As Derrida notes, “…all testimony essentially appeals to a certain system of belief, to faith without proof, to the act of faith summoned by a kind of transcendental oath…”. This suspension of disbelief is a given both because of the catastrophic nature of the event and the catatonic predicament of its singular subject who testifies. The one who testifies, the one who replays memory, the one who recounts is also, simultaneously, uttering the autobiographical. Testimony is therefore also inevitably anecdotal, subject to elision, forgetting as much as unforgetting, deferred and contingent. The moment of testimonial therefore demands expression of traumatic experience, but that experience in itself inevitably drives the suppression of it. It is also a moment of rhetorical anxiety, characterised by the use of ‘language’, whose contingent nature makes the narrative of testimony continuously vacillate between autobiography and fiction. Derrida writes, “…there is no testimony that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, and perjury–that is to say, the possibility of literature.” Literature, therefore, becomes the refuge, and the testifying subject, the refugee. The word ‘refugee’, unerringly invested with a symptom of abandonment, homelessness, or precarity, is refracted through the lens of literature, into one of agency and power through the abstraction of the body (literature) that holds it, withstands it, suffers it, or accepts it. There is no need for a cosmopolitan hospitality in this refuge, as the refuge itself, the body that accepts, nurtures, withholds, is itself invested with a contingency that contains all symptoms of an event.

Event And Singularity
Let us begin with a question: “What does the author or the poet do in a time of war?” As one begins to answer this apparently simple question, the entire genre of war literatures appears to the reader as manuscripts in archives, or bound volumes in libraries or personal possessions, or for the students of literature–the poems, perhaps, in their syllabus, that they have to read and answer questions on. The simple answer to the question is, “They write”. The implicit homogeneity of the phrase ‘war literature’, however, is immediately compromised as we begin to sift through the texts in our archives: Anne Frank writes a diary; Winston Churchill writes history and fiction; Primo Levi writes a memoir; Wilfred Owen writes war poems; Paul Celan also writes war poems, but of a very different kind. We will all agree however, that in spite of the commonality of experiences (war, for example) and the differences of form or genre, each one has their singular place as an event, or as Terry Eagleton might put it, “an endlessly repeatable encounter”. But whereas it is easy to contemplate on the encounter between the text and the reader, it is more crucial, perhaps, to deliberate on the encounter of the author (as both the subject and object of war) and their testimony–the work that is produced.

Derek Attridge, in his book The Singularity of Literature, examines the literary work as an event that is both ‘performative’ and ‘ethical’ and resists the symptomatic notion of reading the literary work as a piece within a larger discursive network. He resists the idea of treating the literary text “as a means to a predetermined end: coming to the object with the hope or the assumption that it can be instrumental in furthering an existing project, and responding to it in such a way as to test, or even produce, that usefulness. The project in question may be political, moral, historical, biographical, psychological, cognitive, or linguistic.” By divesting the literary text of its symptomatic instrumentalism, Attridge foregrounds the performative or the ethical as a form of radical alterity that invests the literary text with an unforeseen singularity. As I try to read the relationship between literature and war, I find Attridge’s formula of singularity as an ally to unlearn the repeatability of metaphors in the classroom and submit to the performative at the moment of the testimony. The rhetorical anxiety I have mentioned earlier invests the language of the performance with its uniqueness, with its sense of the singularity of the experience–an experience that is mine and none others, an experience that I cannot express in words, an experience that I cannot not unforget. Yet the moment of articulation of that experience is one of radical alterity where the inexpressible is expressed, the unsayable is said, and through the medium of language the ‘other’ of the subject is born. There is no escape from language in expression, and thus the moment of the testimony (or literature, as one may choose to see it), is also the moment of the birth of the other.

Derrida says something on these lines in the beginning of his slim volume titled Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin. The essay dallies with a fascinating notion of alterity intrinsic to the use of language:

…anyone should be able to declare under oath: I have only one language and it is not mine; my “own” language is, for me, a language that cannot be assimilated. My language, the only one I hear myself speak and agree to speak, is the language of the other.

In the context of the ownership of language, and nation, and identity, Derrida refers to a cultural colloquium being held in the USA that discusses war across the world and particularly in the Middle East. And he refers to his good friend Abdelkebir Khatibi, who identifies himself as a Franco-Maghrebian. Derrida raises the important question of language, of how identity is continuously being negotiated through language, particularly in war-torn states, and asks, “What is the nature of that hyphen? What does it want? What is Franco-Maghrebian? Who is a “Franco-Maghrebian”?” He goes on to deliberate how these questions would reach their culmination in such articulations as “what is it to be Franco-Maghrebian?” or “who is the most Franco-Maghrebian?” Derrida reads the hyphen as an act of silencing through language, of a promise that will never be fulfilled, and even if it is, it would not affect in any way the singularity of the suffering:

The silence of that hyphen does not pacify or appease anything, not a single torment, not a single torture. It will never silence their memory. It could even worsen the terror, the lesions, and the wounds. A hyphen is never enough to conceal the protests, cries of anger or suffering, the noise of weapons, airplanes, and bombs.

The radical otherness of language is emphasised, and, at the same time, language as promise, language as politics, language as polemic is undermined. The language of literature, however, is the one that remains with its contingent alterity, as the paradox of the said/unsaid. Literature and testimony address the affective in language to elicit a confession that is memory and fiction at the same moment of enunciation. The completely contingent moment of the saying of that which cannot not be said, and once said, cannot be unsaid at the same time creates the necessary paradox in literature (as well as in testimony) at the moment of enunciation. Derrida returns to this problem or contradiction of the language of confession in Monolingualism of the Other:

The performative gesture of the enunciation would in the act prove the opposite of what the testimony claims to declare, namely a certain truth…The one who speaks, the subject of the enunciation, yourself, oh yes…is understood as doing the opposite of what he says. It is as if, in one and the same breath, you were lying by confessing the lie. A lie from then on incredible that ruins the credit of your rhetoric. The lie belies itself by virtue of the deed it does, by the act of language. Thus, it proves, practically, the opposite of what your speech intends to assert, prove, and give to be verified. People will not stop denouncing your absurdity.

As one would notice, the moment of enunciation is a supreme act of lie or perjury, where the subject, in a gesture of supreme sacrifice, gives up experience to literature, and at the same time, eliciting from literature the vow of absolute secrecy. Here is the moment of radical awareness.

In order to elaborate further on this, I will use an example, one of the foundational voices on thinking about war and literature from the twentieth century–the poet Paul Celan. In 1960, Celan gives a speech at the German Academy of Language and Poetry, on the occasion of his receiving the Georg Buchner Prize for literature. This speech is famously called The Meridian. In this speech Celan speaks of the idea of the ‘encounter’ of experience with poetry. He says that “the poem has always hoped…to speak…on behalf of the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other.” He argues that the poem heads straight for this otherness so that “it can reach and be free”. While calling this inevitable reaching out to the other the ‘mystery of encounter’, Celan contends, “The poem intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it.” One notices how the phrase ‘bespeaks it’ transforms the testimony completely to the experience of the other, thereby creating the deliberate falsity, the perjury, the act of violation that Derrida talks about. The philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe takes up for analysis this Meridian speech by Celan in his slim volume titled Poetry as Experience. Lacoue-Labarthe takes up for analysis one single sentence from Celan’s speech: “The poem is alone”. I would like to quote at length what he writes on this sentence:

“Alone” is a word that says singularity–or at least, it makes no sense here except in reference to singularity, to the singular experience. “The poem is alone” means a poem is only effectively a poem insofar as it is absolutely singular. This is undoubtedly a definition of poetry’s essence: there is no poetry, poetry does not occur or take place, and is therefore not repeatedly questioned, except as the event of singularity.

It is fascinating to notice how the moment of the writing of poetry is described as a singular event, an encounter, an enunciation of otherness, a radical alterity by many philosophers, poets and theorists–in the case of this paper, by the likes of Derrida, Attridge, Celan or Lacoue-Labarthe.

The Poetry Of War
What is it like, then, to write the poetry of war? What is, then, the relationship between literature and war? Earlier, I have referred to literature as a ‘museum of nurture’. Nurture presumes an intimacy, and museum as a distant register of memory. The testimony or confession that is at the heart of the poetry of war, or the literature of war, is essentially a polychrome of distant intimacy. There is an oxymoron at the heart of the phrase ‘museum of nurture’. As Lacoue-Labarthe also points out in terms of the intimacy of literature or art, “…we must think, in art’s greatest intimacy and as this intimacy itself, of a sort of spacing or hiatus. A secret gaping”. This space, or hiatus, or fissure, is the moment of enunciation where the contingency of meaning transfers memory to literature, or transforms testimony to poetry. Lacoue-Labarthe says, “…poetry, if it ever occurs, occurs as the brutal revelation of the abyss that contains art (language) and nevertheless constitutes it, as such, in its strangeness… The place of poetry, the place where poetry takes place, every time, is the place without place of the intimate gaping…”. Poetry happens at the instant of the defamiliarisation of memory–and it is no surprise that Lacoue-Labarthe uses both the words ‘unheimliche’ and ‘augenblick’ to describe this moment–the process of defamiliarisation that happens at the wink of an eye.

On a similar note of defamiliarisation, but investing it with a political intent, I will briefly refer now to the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah where he recounts coming back to his own city after thirty years of exile. As he stands in front of the Allenby Bridge he realises that his only constant companion in all these years has been his writing. He writes:

Writing is a displacement, a displacement from the normal social contract. A displacement from the habitual, the pattern, and the ready form. A displacement from the common roads of love and the common roads of enmity. A displacement from the believing nature of the political party. A displacement from the idea of unconditional support. The poet strives to escape from the dominant used language, to a language that speaks itself for the first time. He strives to escape from the chains of the tribe, from its approvals and its taboos. If he succeeds in escaping and becomes free, he becomes a stranger at the same time. It is as though the poet is a stranger in the same degree as he is free. If a person is touched by poetry or art or literature in general, his soul throngs with these displacements and cannot be cured by anything, not even the homeland. He clings to his own way of receiving the world and his own way of transmitting it.

The displacement that Barghouti categorically emphasises is the continuous desire for the place without place, the fissure of intimate gaping. The very act of writing, to desire the possibility of writing in the middle of war, is the unheimliche–both the uncanny and the unhomely–that makes the poet a stranger and sets him or her free.
To end my essay, I’ll try to relate this idea of the unheimliche and the augenblick taken together as the moment of writing under duress to an idea that Maurice Blanchot puts forward in his very short piece titled The Instant of my Death and which Derrida takes up for a lengthy discussion in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Blanchot elaborates on the idea where someone is “prevented from dying by death itself.” Blanchot relates an incident taking place in a remote village in France towards the end of the Second World War. The Germans were fast losing ground by then, but this news had not yet reached this remote corner of France. A Nazi lieutenant and his soldiers surrounded a house and ordered all the inhabitants to come out. As they were about to shoot the young man who had opened the door for them, the man requested that he be shot away from the eyesight of the other family members: his aunt, his mother, his sister, and his sister-in-law. In this moment he was not dead, but never more sure that he was about to die. Blanchot writes:

I know–do I know it–that the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting but the final order, experienced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however)–sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death?... Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.

This young man was saved by providence or chance, and later in Paris met the author Malraux. Malraux narrated to him how, when he was escaping, he had lost a manuscript that could not be revived. And this is how Malraux narrated the event of the loss:

What does it matter? All that remains is the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance.

The moment of the testimony (or literature, as one would put it) is always, inevitably, also the instant of death, of giving oneself or one’s experience up to rhetoric and expression and metaphor at this instant of performance. The literary, or what we have named ‘literature’ is born at this instant of ‘death henceforth always in abeyance’, where the subject would confess, but the confession is always, inevitably, false, a perjury, a lie in language. As Derrida says, people will not stop denouncing your absurdity. Literature thus remains both as the inevitability of the artist’s expression, and as its limit, something that one cannot not do, and yet is always fiction and never confession. Writing about war carries this vulnerability to its extreme length, to the instant of its death, to the moment of writing that which the subject wants to unforget by forgetting it in the absurdity of expression.

Bibliography
Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004.
Barghouti, Mourid memoir I Saw Ramallah. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Instant of My Death. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Celan, Paul. The Meridian: Final Version–Drafts–Materials. Translated by Pierre Joris. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Derrida, Jacques. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
—Monolingualism of the Other or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Eagleton, Terry. The Event of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Poetry as Experience. Translated by Andrea Tarnowski. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

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