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Accounting for war: what can an 'embedded' description of war tell us about life in civilian societies?

Article Excerpt
In our hyper-visual culture, where the hidden lenses of reality television shape the domestic lansdscape, where even cruise missiles have cameras attached to them, what significance can we afford to a written record of wartime combat? Traditionally, there has always been a strong relation between war and literature. Nineteenth-century wars of nationalism and/or liberation formed the key setting for writers such as Tolstoy and Stendahl, while the major wars of the twentieth-century provided new creative possibilities for writers as diverse as Hemmingway, Junger, Celine, Joseph Heller and Claude Simon, to name only a few. Arguably there is a strong affinity between the experience of combat and the aesthetic project of modernism--both concerned themselves with situations where the coherency of the individual subject broke down. Under combat conditions, normal sensory patterns of orientation foundered and, when not directly using military metaphors, modern writers and artists aimed for an analogous derangement of the senses. Modern combat and modern culture expressed a similar yearning for the sublime, where irrespective of the decline of traditional forms of authority there seemed to remain a desire for the individual subject to be overwhelmed by experiences which could not be contained within modern forms of reason.

The radical states enabled through modern combat and envisaged in modern aesthetics have to some extent been normalised within contemporary culture. Being immersed within an ever-shifting culture of images and consumption means that...

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