The New Death by James Pearl;

Author:James, Pearl; [Pearl James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SUBJECT
ISBN: 3444111
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2013-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

“One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one’s words as to endure one’s thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; . . . . . . and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.”34

James’s complaint that war had “used up” language sounds a lot like Frederic’s. Indeed the comparison between the deterioration of language and “motor car tires” would be an apt one for an ambulance driver to make. The presence of this fragment as a potential epigraph reveals that Hemingway himself considered it worthy of quotation and repetition, foreshadowing the way his own words would, in turn, be used. In the published novel, of course, the insight does not appear in an epigraph, nor is it attributed to this other noncombatant writer involved in ambulance relief. The rare interview with James from which Hemingway took the quote had been granted by the older writer during the war, when he put fiction aside to organize and fund-raise as the chairman of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps.35 Not only was such war work not the sort with which Hemingway wanted to align himself, but he had openly impugned James’s masculinity in 1926.36 In A Farewell to Arms, James’s name is gone, and instead the epiphany about language is framed as a result of being at the front: “I had seen nothing sacred.” The novel’s final iteration privileges those who, like Frederic (and Ernest Hemingway), have experienced war for themselves and therefore understand how to write and speak about it. As a result, Hemingway avoids comparison with other men of letters, loses the reference to ambulance driving, and instead emphasizes the value of masculine war experience. From this vantage, the passage works from within the text to consolidate the author’s public persona with the authority of first-person war experience. The passage decries some myths only to shore up another: that of Hemingway, the war hero.37 Frederic’s famous protest served Hemingway’s self-interest as a supposedly authentic observer of war. Commentators ever since have invoked the passage to illustrate the split between combatant and noncombatants, between those who wrote about the truth of war and those who stayed at home, read newspapers, and generated propaganda. But recognizing that Hemingway’s text echoes Henry James’s complaint about the war’s effect on language underscores just how well home-front observers and noncombatant writers understood the problem.

Fussell’s paradigmatic interpretation of the protest is also ironic in that “irony” itself is not the solution Frederic imagines. It is true that he has an ironic perspective on propaganda. “Abstract” words and images have been so misused that they have surpassed cliché to become morally reprehensible. Frederic condemns romantic diction and hackneyed images of heroic masculinity (such as those offered in The Battle of the Somme) as vehicles used to misrepresent human slaughter.

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