Second World War Fiction

6 Key excerpts on "Second World War Fiction"

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  Translating War

  Literature and Memory in France and Britain from the 1940s to the 1960s

  • Angela Kershaw(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  André Gide passed away in 1951.

  Literature, Memory, Translation

  In the preceding two chapters, we have considered militant war fiction, that is, fiction written during the events it depicts and conceived as a form of action. Militant fiction can become memorial fiction thanks to new modes of publication and transmission: 1945 saw the republication of Kessel’s L’Armée des ombres and Vercors’ Le Silence de la mer and the appearance of Elsa Triolet’s collection of clandestinely published Resistance stories , Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents francs .1 However, such republication entails a significant shift in function, since wartime and post-war war novels are very different phenomena. They are, nonetheless, connected. Post-war myths have their roots in wartime ones, and conceptions of the relationship between war and writing that were dominant during the war conditioned the way war was written about after the war. The process of representation is cumulative, and contemporary memories of the war have been generated from both wartime and post-war representations. As Mark Connolly remarks, ‘[t]he essentials of the British Second World War we know today were put together between 1939 and 1960. Our contemporary conception of the war is the result of a strange fusion of images produced in wartime and reactions to a glut of post-war remembrances’ (Connelly 2014 , 198). However as Alan Munton points out, it is obvious but crucial that writing literature about war once the outcome is known is a very different project from writing literature about war as it is happening:

  Fiction about the war written after it was over has a quite different structure. Once the outcome is known the experience of the entire war is open to interpretation in ways not previously possible. Post-war fiction is most characteristically structured on a large scale [...] The scale often implies that the war can now be seen in epic terms; but heroic deeds, the usual subject of epic, do not in fact predominate. These fictions are often about disillusionment with war, discovering in it futility or emptiness. (Munton 1989

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  Imagining the Unimaginable

  Speculative Fiction and the Holocaust

  • Glyn Morgan(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: Fictionalizing the Holocaust

  This book developed from my dual interests in representations of atrocity and trauma, and the manner in which alternate history manipulates historical narrative. In particular, over the course of my research it soon became evident that the critical dialogue surrounding the Holocaust, and its representation in fiction and art, provide a unique friction against the limitless possibilities of science fiction, fantasy and alternate history – genres which we can group, however loosely, under the label speculative fiction (SF). Yet the fictional texts which occupy this niche have received an uneven critical reception, with a few high-profile texts overshadowing what is in fact a broad selection dating back to the Second World War and continuing to attract new fictions today, ranging from science fiction pulp to literary fiction via bestselling popular thrillers.

  The Holocaust occupies a unique position in Western cultural thought: there is no other event in the common history of humanity which is so heavily studied and written about and simultaneously coded as uninterpretable and unapproachable. Nonetheless, attempts to interpret, approach and understand are legion, not least through the medium of fiction. It could be that these texts persist as an artistic development of Freud’s concept of durcharbeiten , or ‘working through’, an expression of Anglo-American readers’ continued fascination with not only the Second World War and the Nazis, but with the greatest crime of that conflict.

  Yet, the sheer weight of numbers removes none of the problems or controversies surrounding representation. Many representations of the Holocaust in fiction draw upon the implicit assumption that its traumatic experience cannot, and perhaps should not, be conveyed through art. This is a situation perhaps true of other traumatic and significant events both personal and societal, but in this as in many other things the Holocaust supersedes them. For example, in an influential and relatively early survey of the field of Holocaust literature, Alvin H. Rosenfeld wrote that the Holocaust ‘occupies another sphere of study’ compared to other topical literatures about ‘the family, of slavery, of the environment, of World War I or World War II’, continuing that Holocaust literature ‘force[s] us to contemplate what may be fundamental changes in our modes of perception and expression’.1

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  Narratives of War

  Remembering and Chronicling Battle in Twentieth-Century Europe

  • Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle, Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part III

  The Development and Deployment of War Narratives

  Passage contains an image

  7     The War Books Controversy Revisited

  First World War Novels and Veteran Memory Dunja Dušanić

  The sudden eruption of war books that swept through Europe at the end of 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s was one of the most widely discussed aspects of the ‘boom’ of cultural production prompted by the tenth anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. In those years, the literary market was overwhelmed to the point that Louis Aragon, complaining in 1930 of an offensive comeback of war literature, diagnosed that war was again à la mode. 1 Although almost every piece of writing published on the subject of the Great War seemed to get an unprecedented amount of attention from the readers and the press, in the copious and varied production of war books, novels tended to elicit the strongest emotional response and incite the loudest polemics.

  The debates on war novels, also known in Britain as the ‘War Books Controversy’, seemed to be centred on the representation of the First World War in recent fiction, particularly on its ‘truthfulness’. This highly elusive notion was used to refer to everything from the novels’ factual accuracy to their ideological content, but most often served as a pretext for moving the discussion away from the actual texts and onto a different, extra-literary terrain. At first glance, then, both the focus and the vigour of the controversy appear more as symptoms of a serious crisis of memory than as a reaction to any particular feature of the actual novels. And yet, while one might be inclined to agree that they were indeed signs of ‘a perplexed international self-commiseration’2 and ‘a deep anxiety about the future of the political, moral, and cultural order’,3 they were not generated by the political climate of the interwar years alone. The War Books Controversy was, as Samuel Hynes observed, ‘a quarrel over history; but it was also a literary dispute’.4

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  Japanese Visual Culture

  Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime

  • Mark W. MacWilliams(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8

  Framing Manga

  On Narratives of the Second World War in Japanese Manga, 1957–1977

  ELDAD NAKAR

     

  Introduction

  Remembering is as much a collective as a personal act. Society has the power to frame people’s individual memories by providing the means to classify and condense particular historical situations, actions, events, and experiences into organized and meaningful wholes (Snow and Benford 1992, 137). This chapter explores how society frames individuals’ memories in a Japanese context. I examine how Japanese remember World War II, an epochal event in modern Japanese history that divides what came before and after it. Of course, one possible means of exploration is looking at various portrayals of the war in places such as school textbooks, monuments, and memorials. For example, Yasukuni Shrine offers one highly controversial particular perspective—an ultra-nationalist one—as a shrine for spirits of Japanese soldiers lost in battle. Yasukuni’s sacred precincts and rituals, along with its war museum’s jingoistic exhibits, which attempt to highlight Japan’s “glorious” and controversial militaristic past, offer what Christian Smith has called a “living narrative” to visitors, providing them a particular story deemed collectively important about “what is real and significant, to know who [they] are, where [they] are, what [they] are doing and why” (Smith 2003, 67).

  However, there are other equally powerful ways to access the Japanese people’s recollections of World War II. One key means, which scholars have generally overlooked, is popular manga. In the postwar period, Japanese publishing houses produced many manga that explicitly dealt with the war. Japanese manga about World War II, which I am defining here as tales that take place during the war, first appeared in the late 1950s. Such works were first published and distributed through the kashihonya (pay-libraries), and later in the weekly boys’ magazines that were created as early as 1959. In both places, works were classified by the Japanese term senki mono

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  The Poetics of Otherness

  War, Trauma, and Literature

  • J. Hart(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 9 Representing the Second World War

  S o much attention is given to the poetry of the First World War that I thought it important to remember poetry from the Second World War or about it.1 Although in the chapter on war and violence from Homer and the Bible onward I have paused to foreground translation, and its violence and trauma of loss and gain, here, partly for the sake of space and for the flow of this chapter, I will largely set aside the question of translation. The violence of the twentieth century, in war and revolution, was such that the sum of brutality is hard to reckon. Here, only a few voices will represent war and the kind of otherness, estrangement, and alienation it inflicts on humans, on individuals, and communities. The shock of war and the after-shock of war stay with them who were there as witnesses and continue to shape our psyches and world.

  Sometimes in war the same side kills its own by mistake or has to bomb the enemy in its own territory or that of allies. There is a liminal or threshold space between self and other, we and they. Samuel Beckett, who helped James Joyce with research on what was to become Finnegans Wake , chose, in time, the opposite of expansion and amplification. I begin with Beckett because of his pared down language in the face of catastrophe, individual and group, in the modern world. Beckett writes, in his brief four-line poem “Saint-Lô,” about a place he served in the war.2

  The poem begins with the River Vire that winds. This is another river poem. In English, Chaucer and Spenser had sung the Thames, and often cities and towns line those rivers, so they become metaphors for time and civilizations, something that can also be observed in “The

  Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes. Near Saint-Lô, the Norman town of Vire, which shares its name with the river, was almost entirely destroyed by British bombing on D Day, June 6, 1944. The River Vire “will wind in other shadows,” not these shades but ones that are “other.” Rivers are watery and have depth and surface: they mirror and flow. Shadows reflect in the river. These shadows are “unborn,” a word that Beckett uses to connect the first and second lines, and he employs the word to begin the phrase “through the bright ways” until the verb “tremble” comes to describe the quaking of the shadows. These shades not yet born lead to “the old mind ghost-forsaken,” so the lines represent the potential and the ancient forsaken by wraiths. Perhaps the key word in the poem is “sink” because the reader might expect it to be “sinks”—that is, the singular to modify “mind.” That puzzle leads to two options: either “sink” harkens back to the subject “Vire,” or loosely (and poets do such things), the “will” is implied from the construction of “will wind” in the first verse as an elision to be inserted before “sink” to modify “old mind.” The logic would be: Just as Vire will wind, so too will the old mind sink, or, if contrast is implied between the unborn and the old: whereas Vire will wind, the old mind will sink. Beckett ends the poem with the old mind sinking into its “havoc,” perhaps a little like Vire, but the choice of word is suggestive and delicate because “havoc” shifted its meaning from plunder to destruction and devastation, but it can also mean confusion, disorder, and disarray, which would be appropriate for a mind.

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  The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

  • David L. Hoffmann, David L. Hoffmann(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part II

  Soviet and post-Soviet war memory

  Passage contains an image

  6  Veterans remember the war in Soviet and post-Soviet fiction

  Angela Brintlinger

  In the 1980s, Svetlana Alexievich, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature some 30 years later, realized that living memory about World War II was on the brink of extinction. “War,” she wrote, “was the shared biography of an entire generation of wartime children.”1 In her powerful book Last Witnesses, Alexievich used oral history techniques to capture children’s experiences and record them for posterity. These children, she argued, saw the Second World War through “unchildlike” eyes. But what of the very youngest soldiers, those who were still almost boys when they were called up to fight?

  Vasil’ Bykau, the prolific Belarusian war novelist known as Bykov in Russian, dubbed his cohort the “slain generation” (“ubitoe pokolenie”), in analogy to Remarque and Hemingway’s “lost generation.” A number of Second World War veterans of Bykau’s era—who were still almost boys when they served—went on to become important war writers whose impact was felt even after the Soviet Union had dissolved, but now this particular generation of writers has passed away, taking with them the perspective of witnesses whose “shared biography was war,” in Svetlana Alexievich’s words. Writing in the year 2000, Bykau quoted Ernest Hemingway to remind his readers:

  When a man goes to seek the truth in war he may find death instead. But if twelve go and only two come back, the truth they bring will be the truth, and not the garbled hearsay that we pass as history.2

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