Dark Pits of War

War as a final, extreme form of violence has been considered by many an inescapable necessity of human history, indeed of human nature! One nineteenth-century tradition of Western humanism was based on the essential paradox of fragile cultural values surrounded by a thick stratum of phenomena threatening but, at the same time, formative to those values. From this point of view, war seems to be seminal for culture although it remains in dangerously dialectical opposition to it. War, referred to by Wilfred Owen as the Mouth of Hell, performs precisely the two functions usually attributed to a mouth-it speaks (produces, shapes, brings to light, forms), and it swallows (devours, digests, grinds, annihilates). In short, for this venerable argument, culture is but a transient form shaped by violence and developing in itself future violence. Culture is a transition from one form of violence to another. Moreover, culture might even be interpreted as a fragile armistice rather than a permanent disarmament-not truth but truce

Art · Hermeneutics · Literature · Poetry · Theology · Irish and British Studies · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Philosophy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact