Irrationality as Metaphor: The Second World War and the American Novelist

The Second World War raised some fundamental questions in the American mind and “The meanings of individualism, communism, humanism, progress and democracy were pondered. Aesthetic and religious doctrines received new emphasis, as did the nature of man and of the universe itself.” Moreover as Nazism negated the freedom of inquiry and the search for truth it stripped man of his essential dignity; hence the creative writers also accepted the validity of internationalism and “one world was a slogan almost everywhere”.

It became the need of the hour that academicians, artists and writers contribute their might to the war effort. Many creative persons actually fought in the armed forces or like Earnest Hemingway, John Steinbeck or John Dos Passos became war correspondents.

To these writers war was no heroism but an act of irrationality. Therefore in his introduction to Men at War (1942) Hemingway most eloquently showed his disgust of war:
The editor of this anthology, who took part and was wounded in the last war, hates war and hates all the politicians whose mismanagement, gullibility, cupidity, selfishness and ambition brought on this present war and made it inevitable. But once we have a war, there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in a war.

Hemingway’s evaluation of war operates on two levels. First it reveals the irrationality of war and secondly the emphasis on victory has elevated the second World War to a metaphor of the positive values of the human race in general. That is why Hemingway goes on to say.

‘I have seen so much war in my lifetime and I hate it profoundly. But there are worse things than war, and all of them come with defeat. The more you hate war, the more you know that once you are forced into it, for whatever reason it may be, you have to win it. You have to win it and get rid of the people that made it and see that, this time, it never comes to us again. We who took part in the last war to end wars are not going to be fooled again. This war is going to be fought until that objective is achieved, if it takes a hundred years if necessary, and no matter whom we have to fight to gain that objective in the end’.

Hemingway’s criticism of the Second World War as an irrational act and the need to win it to put an end to all future wars is shared by John Steinbeck, who collected his dispatches from the war front to The New York Tribune and other papers in Once there was a War. In its introduction he describes the Second World War in all its unique features:

“I attended a part of that war. Since I would in the costume of a war correspondent and certainly did not fight”. “The War I speak of, however may be memorable because it was the last of its kind . . . . the so called Second World War was surely the last of the long global wars. The next war, if we are so stupid as to let it happen, will be the last of any kind.

Steinbeck not only shares Hemingway’s negative perspective towards war and writes that
. . . . all war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking assigned, still there was in these wars some gallantry, some bravery, some kindliness.

Steinbeck’s The Moon is Dawn (1942) is a novel which describes the horrors of the Norwegians under the inhuman Nazi regime. But his Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947) and The Wayward Bus (1947) show scathing criticism of the inhuman profit motive and the avarice of those people who were responsible for the suffering of the human beings.

Similarly James Jones who was a soldier during the Second World War wrote a book WWII (1975) an illustrated history of the world war second for which he also wrote the text. In it he emphasized that the Second World War had not been able to put an end to all the problems it had claimed to do. In his novel From Here to Eternity (1951) he scrutinized the role of fate, politics and social dynamics in relation to soldiers and the army hierarchy. In it his favourite theme of “overpowering injustice of the world he could not stomach nor understand, nor explain, nor change” is depicted through the metaphor of an impending war.
Norman Mailer, who was a soldier himself shocked the Americans with his The Naked and the Dead. Some critics tend to believe that it “laboured the thesis that the war merely revealed the worst that was in men in their earlier civilian life”.

But a careful analysis of the novel reveals that this novel is a metaphor of destruction and “the killing of Lt. Hearn, Mailer’s spokesman for liberalism”, by General cummings a homosexual and sergeant Croft whose control over his platoon is threatened, is symbolic of the absurdity of war itself. The entire incident is absurd and irrational. He too believed that the won should be war. Therefore he narrates how the war correspondents undertook self imposed censor in their bid to help the high morale of the home front:
We edited ourselves much more than we were edited.

We felt responsible to what was called the home front. There was a general feeling that unless the home front was carefully protected from the whole account of what war was like, it might panic. Also we felt we had to protect the armed services/from criticism, or they might retire to their unit to sulk like Achilles.
The Americans at home never could get the feel of the harsh realities of the irrationality of war. Therefore after the war was won the novels based upon the experiences of the Second World War shocked the reading public. Steinbeck points out this specific aspect of the American situation:

Yes, we wrote only a part of the war, but at the time we believed, fervently believed, that it was the best thing to do. And perhaps that is why, when the war was over, novels and stories by ex-soldiers, like The Naked and the Dead, proved so shocking to a public which had been carefully protected from contact with the cozy systematical mess.

The use of the Second World War as a metaphor of the indomitable will of man as well as the metaphor of the complex and multifaceted problem of existence authority and the spiritual cravings of man is evident in the novels of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Jones and Norman Mailer. Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees (1950) sensitively portrays the last three days in the life of an American Colonel in Venice and Environs. The Colonel’s evaluation of the irrationality of the whole situation is rooted in Hemingway’s mocking and scornful approach towards the war. For Mailer the military is favourite metaphor standing for organised national violence and collective repression”.

To conclude, it is significant to take note of the fact that the American novelists accepted the challenge of fighting for the cause of humanity and liberty. They contributed their creativity and actually participated in the Second World War in different ways. Their writing during that period attacked the irrationality of war but also emphasized the need for victory. But in post-war years the 2nd World War became a metaphor for different novelists to evaluate and explore the various social institutions, political behaviours and the meaning and purpose of human existence itself. Therefore Steinbeck pleads for freedom from fear which is the basis of violence and repression:

Now for many years we have sucked in fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoned in our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic fear.

Writer- Dr. Shaileshwar Sati Prasad
M.A. (Bihar) M.A. (Wales), Ph. D. (Pat.)
HEAD AND UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
SCIENCE COLLEGE, PATNA UNIVERSITY-800 005