The Literature of Absolute War

Nil Santianez's book-length study of the literature of the Second World War, under his conceptual umbrella of “absolute war,” is an impressive academic feat. The breadth and scope of the book itself seem appropriate, given the immensity of the event itself as well as the wide array of literary responses to it and the overall lack of academic studies focused on the literature of the Second World War. The book's three main parts deal with the three main aspects of World War II–related literature; namely, the scope and tone that literature takes on, the immense impact of aerial warfare on the war experience and on the literature written in its wake, and the uncanny aftermath of the “absolute” nature of war. The literature surveyed and expertly read and analyzed comes from a background as wide as the war itself, including mostly novels written by British, German, Russian, and Japanese authors. The source material is rich, as is the discussion of those elements that highlight the Second World War as a watershed moment in military history and, specifically, war writing.Most importantly, The Literature of Absolute War provides much-needed clarity regarding the conceptual difference between the oft-used but seldom-explained concept of “total war” and the manner in which it is categorically different from “absolute war.” Here, the book is at its most convincing, elegantly and rigorously arguing for the need for a different concept of war—its size, its ramifications, the enmity involved, it's impact on survivors—that would make some headway in explaining the world-altering effect of World War II. As Santianez argues, it was not just another world war but a different beast altogether, one that is absolute, to use his term, in its destruction. It is a book and study without which any study of the literatures of the twentieth century and more precisely of the history and literatures of war would be woefully incomplete.However, the conceptual and historical monolithic aspects of the book also spell its weaker points, even if far outweighed by its strengths. Namely, the intense focus on identifying World War II and its literatures as a unique, watershed event also downplays and even omits other relevant contexts such as literary postmodernism and the question of the psychology of personal participation. Despite the fact that the book does attempt to link the literature of the Second World War to the modernist literary tradition, the connection is made somewhat ambiguously using Wittgenstein's idea of “family resemblance,” and furthermore it seems odd to discuss such a monumental event in world and literary history without addressing the obvious literary outcrop of that age, which is postmodern writing. While the author is hardly required to put forth a causal relationship between the war and the shift from modernism to postmodernism, a recognition of that shift could have linked Santianez's argument regarding the stylistic characteristics of the literature of absolute war to an existing literary discussion. Even more so since at least some of the stylistic and formal qualities of the literature Santianez identifies as being unique to “absolute war” bear a striking resemblance to central characteristics of postmodern literature.A second, and perhaps more important omission is the lack of clarity regarding the role of personal participation in the development of this new kind of literary reaction to war. And, again, I do not claim that Santianez should have argued for a link between participation and the stylistic and formal shifts he identifies in Second World War literature, but more could have been done to solidify the connection between the experience of the catastrophe, and the various modalities of experience, and the act of writing, especially since it seems that connection is made tacitly throughout the book. Does it matter, in Santianez's wonderful analysis of Life and Fate, that Vassily Grossman was a firsthand witness to the war, and if so, why? Or, conversely, is the claim that the war was an event of such magnitude, was so “absolute,” to alter the way in which we tell stories about war related to whether the writers have firsthand contact with the destruction of the war or not? And finally, to perhaps combine the point made about the missing connection to aesthetic postmodernism, how does one account for the role Santianez claims literary modernism has had in shaping this new, more radical form of literature when many of the most influential figures of that tradition—Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, and others—were not firsthand witnesses to the destruction of war? One easy answer to this query would go along the lines of the “obliteration of experience,” a tried and true position in trauma studies regarding the ability or inability to narrate traumatic events. And indeed this is a position Santianez takes from time to time. But the original concern remains: If indeed the war had forced narratives to change, have different experiences produced different shapes of telling, and why?These last concerns, however, should not detract from the importance of this impressive work of scholarship, and from its immediate entrance into the canon of writing about war and war literature in the twentieth century. They do, however, draw attention to the gaps in The Literature of Absolute War that may be filled with what I hope may be scholarship of equal quality

Art · Asymmetric warfare · CLARITY · Decolonization · Epistemology · Interwar period · Just war theory · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Total war · World War II · History · Law · Philosophy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact

• Introduction

  Pedro A Aguilera-Mellado, Antonio Córdoba et al.•Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies•2024

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