Humouring a lost cause

Humorous accounts of war date back to the Middle Ages at least, but have become particularly frequent in the twentieth century. The Spanish Civil War created a focus for these, given the appreciable number of accomplished writers who participated in it, particularly on the Republican side, and given the incongruous experiences they underwent. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell, enlisted in the POUM militia, gives memorably comical accounts of his experiences in training, at the front and on leave, which, while occasioning a disillusionment with many aspects of the cause, only reinforced his faith in humanity. Malraux, active in the Republican air force, projects a similar experience. The conflict threw up many paradoxes and incongruities, particularly owing to the poor state of equipment which he had to confront. Alternatively he shows in his novel L'Espoir/Hope how humour can reinforce morale when directed at the enemy and how that absurdity which for him underlies the human condition need not, given the response of humour, bring humanity into disgrace. Finally, in Dialogue with Death, Koestler, never an active soldier in Spain, but a professional journalist and at the time a committed Marxist ideologue, gives a memorable account of his arrest and imprisonment by the Fascist authorities in which he uses humour as a defence mechanism, distancing himself from the traumas of isolation and persecution, whilst also highlighting the derisorily inadequate resources of the Republican armies. In each case the authors remain sympathetic to what is eventually a lost cause, while using irony to guarantee the lucidity of their accounts of that cause and generating a comic vision whose human element helps secure their conviction that both the individual and the race can survive humiliation and defeat

Absurdity · Adversary · Aesthetics · Art · Faith · Humanity · Ideology · Irony · Isolation (microbiology · Literature · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Humor Studies and Applications · Memory, violence, and history · History · Law · Philosophy

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• An essay on the meaning of the comic.

  Henri Bergson, Cloudesley Brereton et al.•1911

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• Arthur Koestler

  Robert Legvold, David Cesarani•Foreign Affairs•1999

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