Language and the First World War

My name's Peter Mess isn't and I'm an emeritus professor

at the University of Nottingham.

I'm going to be speaking about Ernest Hemingway's novel

A Farewell to Arms

Fell Two Arms was published in 1929.

That's, of course, a decade after the war.

But like so many war novels and one could think of the Vietnam novel,

it took some time for writers

to process the experience

of that event.

Hemingway

and many of his post war writers were reacting against and rejecting

the rhetoric associated with the First World War.

And in this section, I want to talk about the novel

in terms of language and World War one,

Hemingway and his fellow writers.

Then we're rejecting what they saw as the language of excess,

a language which lacked moderation,

a language out of kilter with reality.

In part, this type of rhetoric

resulted from

the allied control of the communications system

across

the Anglo American world

and the propaganda

that was being deployed in a kind of war of words,

both for a home audience but also to try and persuade America

to enter the war.

Such propaganda

represented the Germans as a sexually perverted,

godless racially depraved monster.

So, for example,

if Wennington Ingram,

the bishop of London,

I would say,

kill Germans,

kill them

not for the sake of killing them,

but to save the world,

kill the good as well as the bad.

Kill the young men as well as the old

kill those who have shown kindness

to our wounded.

I look upon it as a war for purity.

I look upon

everyone who dies in it

as a martyr.

This type of language had lost touch

for Hemingway's literary generation

with actual experience.

Reality was something very different

from the way it was represented in the propaganda machine

as a glorious crusade

for democracy,

with the Allied soldiers as sole allied troops as soldiers of Christ

acting as a very Saviours of civilisation

and its values.

Modernist writers

had a very different version

of late Victorian values,

those values

for which the war was fought.

So, for example, you get Ezra Pound

and his damning indictment of Victorian values.

In his poem Hugh Selwyn Mobili, which came out in

1920. I just read a a bit of it

there, died a myriad

and of the best among them

for an old bitch got in the teeth

for a botched civilisation

charm. Smiling at the good mouth, quick eyes gone under earth's lid

for two gross

of broken statues

for a few 1000

battered books.

Pounds spits out the words here

as he contrasts the vitality

and promise of those who were killed in the war with the outmoded

culture and the outmoded values

for which they died.

Words associated in 1914 to 18 with an

enthusiastic war response with establishment values had then

lost their meaning.

Hemingway and others saw an irreparable gap between signifier and signified

that is, between

the mental construct by which reality was named and shaped

and the actual reality itself.

The material were world of

unembellished facts and events.

This is

especially true with regard to easily used a motive. Abstracts,

patriotism,

honour,

glory, holy,

etcetera all trigger words for an enthusiastic war response

in 1917

1917, of course, was the year that America entered the war.

Hemingway would volunteer

for the war the next year, when he was just 18

and would serve

as an ambulance hman

in Italy and get wounded on the Italian front.

So there is a kind of autobiographical element to this text.

But but Frederick Henry is not Ernest Hemingway, and the events of this novel

take place sometime before the time that Hemingway actually went to Italy

in farewell, then

farewell to arms. Then Hemingway

sums are per generations need

to escape

the misuse of language

to escape cliches language.

So in the retreat from Cap Pareto,

the very centre of the novel book three of the novel, we see such cliche phrases

in action as the Italian Battle Police question,

a fat,

grey haired little lieutenant colonel who has been

picked out from the column of retreating troops

and where the dignity of the Colonel Lieutenant Colonel, is set against

the overblown

and stale language of his accusers.

The questioners

had all the efficiency, coldness and command of themselves

of Italians who were firing

and are not being fired on

your brigade,

he told them

Regiment. He told them,

Why are you not with your regiment? He told them.

Do you not know that an officer should be with his regiment? He did.

That was all.

Another officer spoke.

It is you and such as you

that have let the barbarians onto the sacred soil of the Fatherland.

I beg your pardon? Said the Lieutenant Colonel.

It is because of treachery such as yours

that we have lost the fruits of victory.

Have you ever been in a retreat?

The lieutenant colonel laughed.

Italy should never retreat.

We stood there in the rain and listen to this.

We were facing the officers, and the prisoner

stood in front of the little to one side of us.

If you're going to shoot me, the lieutenant colonel said,

please shoot me at once without further questioning.

The questioning is stupid.

He made the sign of the cross.

The officers spoke together.

One wrote something on a pad of paper,

abandoned his troops,

ordered to be shot

earlier.

And just prior to the retreat,

we've seen Frederick Henry

in conversation with Gino,

an Italian patriot.

Again.

Our attention is focused on the need

to re examine

the way

language is actually used.

We won't talk about losing. Genus says

there's enough talk about losing

what has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain.

I didn't say anything.

I was always embarrassed by the words

sacred,

glorious and sacrifice

and the expression in vain.

We had heard them,

sometimes standing in the rain, almost out of earshot,

that only so that only the shouted words came through

and had read them on proclamations that was

slapped up by Bill posters over other proclamations.

Now, for a long time

and I'd seen nothing sacred

and the things that were glorious had no glory,

and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago.

If nothing was done with the meat except to bury it,

there were many words that you couldn't stand to hear,

and finally, only the names of places had dignity.

Certain numbers were the same way in certain dates,

and those with the names of the places were all you could say

and have them mean anything.

Abstract words such as glory, honour,

courage or hallow were obscene.

Besides the concrete names of villages,

the number of roads, the names of rivers,

the numbers of regiments

and the dates,

there's a call here

echoed by so many of Hemingway's generation

to reject meaningless words, to reject abstractions,

to strip language back to its bare essentials.

The facts,

the things we see immediately before us,

the names of concrete objects,

roads, rivers, villages,

the basic defining qualities of things. We know

the numbers of regiments, the dates.

It's this emphasis that marks Hemingway's distinctive style.

And I'll talk more about that

in my next section

in Paris in the twenties,

at the hub of modernist experimentation,

Hemingway worked to mould a new fictional language,

understated

and anti rhetorical,

to replace

the false and overly florid

public rhetoric of the war

and of the pre war years.

Frederick Henry's something of a special case

in that Hemingway's using

the first person narrative

of someone who is learning what a mature response to life

might mean

as the narrative unwinds.

Nonetheless, the book ends on just such an anti rhetorical note,

with its use of spare, minimalistic dialogue

and Frederick Henry's recognition

of the absolute finality of death.

And this refers back to the religious motif sounded throughout the book.

This all expressed

in a completely

low key

and downbeat manner.

You can't come in now,

one of the nurses said.

Yes, I can. I said,

You can't come in yet.

You get out, I said

the other one, too.

But after I got them out

and shut the door

and turned off the light,

it wasn't any good.

It was like

saying goodbye to a statue.

After a while, I went out

and left the hospital

and walked back

to the hotel

in the rain.