If this makes me sound as though I am skeptical of patriotism (except where it avoids the jingoistic), that’s because I am. There are, it can be said, ‘just wars,’ and occasions when the use of violence to defend one’s self or others might be warranted, but to say that the world has lost all sense of proportion with regard to such a perspective is an understatement. Very likely there has never been a time when we abided by it. The story of the murder of Abel, at the hands of his brother, Cain, apart from what it might mean theologically, and for the individual soul, speaks to our collective inability to know peace, and to our willingness to make war for the ugliest of motives.
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Though I would not be so daft as to suggest that heroism in war depends merely on conditions that would allow for the personhood or instrumentality of the soldier, for that would be laughable. As if being killed or maimed in some ‘honorable’ mode of combat, which one had no interest in being installed in, or recruited for, anyway, is much preferable to being blown apart by a missile that one never sees coming. For surely the biggest lie that mankind perpetuates, with regard to war, is that it is as necessary as it is made out to be. The second biggest being that those who must fight it (the young, the unmoneyed, the disenfranchised) should care about it as much as those who instigate it or profit from it, but who rarely volunteer or are drafted for it (the old, the affluent, the connected).
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Not that instances of heroism cannot happen in war, for surely they can, but that the conditions of war, at least as we came to know them in the twentieth century, when mechanization depersonalized combat, and made of the soldier a kind of fodder, would seem to have so reduced the value or the integrity of the individual that to portray war with any degree of authenticity is to describe acts of valor only insofar as they exist within a larger abjection.
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Which itself is not a remarkable observation, but which I make, I suppose, because it speaks to the power of art to properly disillusion.
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Which is to say that these books are not about heroism, but inhumanity.
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Although ‘interesting’ seems like not the right word, for the events depicted in both books are so horrifying and sad that one can’t help but arrive at the conclusion that to be interested in war, even if the artful rendering of it can carry a kind of beauty, amounts to a sort of voyeurism.
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That novel by Céline that I mentioned, set during World War I, is interesting to think about in relation to All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, a novel that is also set during the war, but which is told from the perspective of a German infantryman, as opposed to that of a Frenchman.
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In other words, while their characters might debase themselves, or one another, these writers would not attempt to make a punchline of such debasement, but instead, through the constancy by which they would make a reader aware of the indifference of nature, or the universe, to the joys and travails that are particular to these characters, to produce a kind of humor that would suffuse the very fabric of the story, and that we sometimes refer to as ‘tragicomic.’
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And yet their sense of humor isn’t vicious or mean, but arises from a magnanimity that would not exclude from the circle of its liveliness anyone willing to admit to themselves the foibles of their own doing. Nor would it seek to diminish the dignity of the person or object whose circumstance or action precipitates the moment of laughter, but to allow that dignity to be dressed, if fleetingly, in the absurdity that belongs sometimes to our condition.
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And yet, thank God, these writers are never humorless.
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And, above all, there is a reverence for reality for which a reader is grateful, and of which they might be sensible without even knowing why.
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Ivan Turgenev (also Russian, not French) does the same thing in A Sportsman’s Sketches. Maybe it has to do with the naturalism or realism that these men had in common, as writers. There is, in their narrators, even when they are involved in the action of the stories being related, a power of observation that feels at once offhanded and precise, and a withholding of the tendency to moralize.
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Both he and Chekhov, to my mind, are kings of the story that feels like an anecdote; that seems to go nowhere, yet doesn’t leave you unmoved; that you mightn’t be able to explain, were someone to ask you why you found it so good; and that sounds to your ear, as you read it, as if it were being told to you, just now, in the voice of one of your own true friends.
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And a writer of short stories who I also love, who puts me in mind of Chekhov (the Russian), is Guy de Maupassant.
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Some time ago, before this, I was reading The Red and the Black, by Stendhal.
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For some reason (or, perhaps, for no reason) I keep coming across novels written by Frenchmen. I have a copy of Swann’s Way on the floor near my desk, which I’ll probably start reading after a while.
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The same novel can be found with a different image on the cover, and a different design, depending on when it was issued, and by which publisher. It is Journey to the End of the Night.
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That image of the map caused me to look at it closely, when I first picked up the novel, before turning to its opening pages and starting to read, because I found it unusual and striking, although I couldn’t be sure what area of France it portrayed, or why it had been chosen for the cover.
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On the cover of this novel by Céline I’ve been reading are, against a black backdrop, the meandering lines that would mark the routes or the byways of a roadmap of northeastern France, as it appeared, I imagine, at the time when the novel is set, during World War I.
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And then the monster appears, ready to tear them limb from limb.