Chapter 9 - War and Aesthetics

Summary

The notion of an ‘aesthetics of war’ immediately raises questions about how artistic cynosures concerned with order, beauty, and the discernment of taste can be applied to the ignoble horrors of modern warfare. For that very reason, modern literature has striven to find aesthetic alternatives to the mandates of direct representation. In the first half of the twentieth century, this striving is starkly visible, as an aesthetics of realism (practiced by the War Poets) vies with an aesthetics of indirection (evident in the modernist works of Yeats and Woolf). In the second half of the century, in the shadow of nuclear terror, there is a turn to the satirical and the scabrous – most notably, in the trio of American World War II novels that defined the field for a generation or more: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Subsequently, wars in Vietnam and Bosnia prompt writers to use field reportage in resourceful, post-realist ways, sometimes echoing modernist poetics. Examining the aesthetic changes noted above, this chapter shows how the formal conundrum of representation has been illuminated, engaged with and, ultimately, used to productive ends in modern war literature.