War and education
It seems unnatural to me to live life as a soldier, or to use a more glorified term, a "warrior." Maybe some few of us are made like that, but clearly Paul and his buddies are not. Isn't that the real conflict? Yes, they have to trained as Paul describes and as Rod talks about in order to survive, to succeed as fighters, and to preserve nations.
But what about after the war if they do survive? Is it possible to resume an ordinary life in civilized society? The part in chapter 2 about their training hit hard for me because of its contrast to what we call formal education. Here's Paul: "We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer."
He describes a progression: "At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent...." A little further on: "With our young, awakened eyes we saw that the classical conception of the Fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants."
This is pre-Front, and as Rod says, it's the necessary preparation for survival at the Front. But what about afterward, if there is an afterward? How possible is it to retrieve all that came before? I know Vietnam vets who are still not okay and never will be.
Comments
True. This is why the mythology of "the soldier's valor" must be maintained. It is a safe harbor--a stop gap, for all the unspeakable truths that persist in the minds of victims though the history books and politicos declare the most recent war has ended.
The "genuine works of art" you mention, have the ability of exposing all things that are given safe harbor in the concept of the soldier's valor. Joseph Conrad said something to the effect that art has inherent properties very akin to human psychology, it can experience and, if willfully present, expose manifold realities. A soldier, in general concept, is conditioned to view events and his/her place in it, as a single realm of "us" and "them;" "the victorious" and "the defeated."
Posted by: laray polk | June 20, 2007 11:00 AM
Laray, your comments are eloquent and very helpful to me. War dichotomizes necessarily (a point Paul Fussell makes more than once in the book we'll do next). The "soldier's valor," then, is like Plato's "noble lie," a fiction that must be maintained--but to what end? To redeem to some degree a human action that results in suffering and cannot in and of itself be "made good." For whom? Those who suffered both directly and indirectly (all of us?). Art is more truthful than factual. Art is truer than fact.
Posted by: Larry Allums | June 20, 2007 04:38 PM