Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WW1 to Present. David F. Eisler. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2022.
In his new book, Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WW1 to Present, David F. Eisler grapples with one of the most complex questions in war fiction studies: Who can and should write a war story? Throughout the 20th century, scholars have maintained that personal experience is essential to an authentic tale of combat and military service. As Samuel Hynes explains, soldiers’ perspectives supersede that of civilians for the simple fact that they were “there, in history.”[1] And while Paul Fussell suggests the “real war is unlikely to be found in novels,” he also maintains that literary representations should be left to the actual “participants.”[2] As leading critics in the field, Hynes and Fussell’s positions have influenced scholarly consensus on the matter of authorship within the genre. Only those who have worn the uniform earned the right—and trust among readers—to fictionalize their experiences.
In Writing Wars, however, Eisler—a veteran himself—views the authority of experience as an outdated premise with serious ethical shortcomings. Instead, he avers that both soldiers and civilians have the ethos to tell war stories, and society at large has a need to read them. While his argument is largely theoretical, tracing how the cultural capital of soldier-authors’ experiences changed over time, it hinges on a critical moment in American military history: the abolition of conscription in 1973. Without a military draft, the all-volunteer force led to a “growing abdication of responsibility” among civilians, thereby increasing the “separation between the military and American society,” which is known as the civil-military gap.[3] Whereas civilians bought war bonds or took factory jobs during earlier campaigns, they could now participate, if at all, to the extent they felt comfortable doing so. As a result, veteran-authors were left to grapple with the social and political implications of their nation’s wars. Through a series of cultural and close readings, Eisler outlines how veterans have responded to this dilemma, slowly relinquishing their cultural capital to let—even encourage—civilian-authors to tell their own war stories. This shift in authorship allows veterans “to share the experiential and interpretative burden of the conflicts with the disconnected population.”[4] Moreover, in addressing the vast ramifications of each war, civilian-authors also take responsibility in narrowing the civil-military gap that has adversely influenced society’s perception of soldiers and the military in recent years.
To this end, Eisler’s book posits a radical intervention among the current debates on the topic. Kate McLoughin and Jennifer Haytock, among others, suggest reading works by noncombatants such as nurses or engineers for a nuanced and diverse portrait of combat and military service. Eisler redefines the boundaries of the necessary experience for writing war stories altogether by accounting for civilians among this group of writers. His argument, then, opens the floodgates for waves of new critical analyses of war fiction old and new, which is a feat only trumped by the stakes of Writing Wars. In finding the historical justification to include civilian works, Eisler likewise finds a way to address the growing fissure between the military and society. Whereas the authority of experience once helped veterans find jobs and publishing opportunities, it has since become counterintuitive, marginalizing those on the other side of the conflict and insulating those with no service experience. Writing Wars shows how the “dispersion” of authority can potentially triage this issue and breathe new life into a genre that many scholars fear was growing stale and myopic.[5]
To realize his argument, Eisler applies pressure to combat gnosticism, a theory developed by Jeffrey Campbell to account for the specific military context of a veteran-author’s ethos. Combat gnosticism first gained traction during the early 20th century when critics assumed soldiers’ experiences translated to more authentic representations in fiction. With more wars came more war stories, and combat gnosticism snowballed into a hallmark that defined the genre. Writing Wars adopts this historical development for its structure and methodology. That is, Eisler dissects the credence attributed to veterans’ experiences through a cultural survey of 20th and 21st century politics, conflicts, and a miscellany of literature. Working chronologically, he deftly elucidates the rise of combat gnosticism in the fiction of World War I and World War II to its gradual destabilization during the Vietnam War years and finally its diminishing relevance in representations of the Global War on Terror. This approach serves Eisler’s culminating argument well, as it contextualizes later readings that examine how veteran and civilian authors have developed narrative techniques to address the civil-military gap. All of this makes for an organic and logical presentation, allowing readers to delve into the nuanced histories and literary analyses laced throughout the book.
The first half of Writing Wars historicizes soldier-authors’ monopolization of war fiction in the 20th century. In the first chapter, Eisler traces the origins of combat gnosticism back to representations of World War I. When several inaccuracies called the integrity of John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921) into question, veterans were hired to determine the integrity of his novel, which they reviewed favorably on the grounds that he—in some capacity—served in the war. This decision adversely impacted the reception of civilian-authored war stories, which were previously well received by critics and readers, and enshrined combat gnosticism as the paramount qualification in the burgeoning genre. Eisler explores how this preference evolved during World War II in his second chapter. During the mid-century period, creative writing programs touted personal experience as the single most important factor in crafting a story. For thousands of veterans enrolling in such programs on the GI Bill, their military service gave them the ethos necessary to tell war stories. Eventually, their academic networks led to job opportunities in publishing houses and colleges across the country, where they could further act as gatekeepers of war fiction against civilian-authors. In his third chapter, Eisler analyzes how Vietnam veterans consolidated their personal experiences over other forms of knowledge. Through close readings of literature, interviews, and conference proceedings, Eisler explains how soldiers developed formal innovations such as a “rhetoric of trauma” to push back against sordid anti-war narratives and instead help readers get as close as possible to the truth of the war.[6] As a result, “personal experience was no longer the primary source of narrative authority, it was the only source.”[7]
The midpoint of Writing Wars marks a shift in argumentation. Whereas previous and subsequent chapters deftly analyze the implications of authorship within the genre, Chapter 4 is the book’s fulcrum, explicating why there was a theoretical shift away from the preference for veteran-authored fiction following the Vietnam War. The abolition of the draft was likewise the abolition of combat gnosticism. While it seems the turn to an all-volunteer force would only strengthen soldiers’ grip on the genre, Eisler contests that it had the opposite effect. Veteran-authors were now compelled to “share the experiential burden of their memory with the rest of society.”[8] This dispersion of authority served as a counterbalance to the consequences of the all-volunteer force; it invited civilian-authors to grapple with the physical, emotional, and mental hardships of wars from which they were now safeguarded. Additionally, at this point in history, the numerous cultural representations of 20th century wars formed an epistemological archive that imbued civilian-authors with what Eisler describes as the “extratextual sources of authenticity” necessary to pen war stories.[9]
With the theoretical shifts in the authorship of war fiction outlined, Eisler turns his focus in the books’ final chapters to analyzing post-Vietnam literature. In Chapter 5, he explains how civilian-authors relied on their own experiences to tell stories about soldiers’ homecomings. Their representations of characters struggling to reacclimate posed a necessary critique of the nation’s superficial bloviating and thank-you-for-your-service culture. Eisler’s sixth chapter examines how the formal techniques developed by veteran-authors expressed a “more complex ethics of literary representation.”[10] In an effort to include previously overlooked identities, they remediated the “Other”—the marginalized non-U.S. character defined by malevolency or an uncivilized demeanor. Resisting such tropes, veterans illustrated more humanizing portraits, which encouraged readers to think about the consequences of U.S. military interventions and sympathize with those from nations affected by such campaigns. As Eisler argues in the seventh chapter, though, there are consequences to the dispersion of authority. Novels such as Jon Chopan’s Veterans Crisis Hotline depict characters whose only option in life was military service that left them physically and emotionally scarred. These depictions undermine public confidence in its military, framing the armed forces as a social wastebasket that exploits the bodies and minds of outcasts and criminals.
While veteran-authored works such as Roy Scranton’s War Porn posit countervailing narratives, illustrating how civilians’ overzealous contempt of modern wars wears on returning soldiers, Eisler argues more needs to be done. If the genre is to thrive, it must evolve beyond the “metonymic archetypes” of trauma narratives to forward more complex portraits of military personnel and civilians on all sides of a conflict.[11] As messy as it might sound, that approach is the pathway to an authentic representation, a concept that may further ameliorate the current fissure in the civil-military gap.
As successful and thrilling as Eisler’s book is in reaching this culminating reflection on the state of the genre, it falters in a few areas of its execution. At the local level, the literature reviews that preface each chapter—particularly the latter entries—bog down and stall what are otherwise engaging discussions. On a larger scale, Writing Wars struggles to find a balanced narrative through-line. The first three chapters focus on the cultural and historical circumstances that engendered veteran-authors’ monopoly on the genre while drawing measured attention to the primary sources. The last three chapters reverse this dynamic, emphasizing the war literature following Vietnam. As a result, readers make a jarring pivot during the fourth and middle chapter, jumping from the historically based arguments of the first half to the more formal series of close readings in the second. The shifting methodology, at times, creates a sense of unevenness in the reading experience.
These minor flaws, however, do not overshadow the redeeming qualities and overall success of Writing Wars. For one, Eisler avoids retreading familiar ground in his close readings. While the quintessential veteran-authors—names that include Hemingway, Mailer, Jones, and O’Brien—occupy some room, they are not the focus. Rather, Eisler opts for lesser known texts, which makes for a refreshing discussion. What is more, he gracefully synthesizes his materials. Typical in works of scholarship on war fiction, historical miscellany is often used to prop up close readings. In Writing Wars, however, Eisler manages these materials in tandem with the literature, riffing them off of each other. In slowly tracing this dichotomy over the course of the book—from its historically focused first half to his literary centric second half—he illuminates a critical terrain that scholars working along similar lines have gestured toward but never exclusively tackled: War fiction and society are so deeply interwoven at this point in time that they must be discussed in proximity to each other to excavate the varying political critiques underscoring each work.
And perhaps the most remarkable attribute is the book’s readability. As dense as some of the arguments can be, Eisler’s prose remains lucid and precise. Not only does his firm grasp on the written language help him cogently unpack complex theories and ideas, but it also distills the stakes of this argument with sobering clarity: war fiction can play a critical role in closing the civil-military gap that skews society’s perception of the armed forces and their service members’ individual experiences.
Simply put, Writing Wars is necessary reading for scholars and writers working at the intersections of literary, military, and American studies. The interdisciplinary nature of the book also makes it well suited for a variety of classes. In addition to American Literature and History courses, select chapters on higher education’s influence on the genre and the ethics of authorship would make for insightful reading in creative writing classes that consider the history of writing programs or how identity politics figures into the ethos of storytelling. This potential widespread readership of Writing Wars is timely. With the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine and the reverberating effects of the U.S. campaigns in the Middle East, there is a need for a new wave of war fiction and, perhaps more importantly, a diverse collection of voices to tell such stories. Eisler’s book emphasizes the critical importance of this need and illuminates how those diverse voices can effectively address it.
Jared Young is an instructor in the English Department at SUNY Orange. He received his PhD from Oklahoma State University. His interests include 20th century war fiction, disability studies, and modernism. His works has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, H-War, and The Mailer Review.
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Header Image: The only photo taken during World War II of J.D. Salinger. (Denise Fitzgerald/PBS)
Notes:
[1] Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1997), 2.
[2] Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding the Behavior in the Second World War (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), 270, 291.
[3] David F. Eisler, Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2022), 6, 4.
[4] Eisler, Writing Wars, 16.
[5] Eisler, Writing Wars, 5.
[6] Eisler, Writing Wars, 81.
[7] Eisler, Writing Wars, 67.
[8] Eisler, Writing Wars, 85.
[9] Eisler, Writing Wars, 88.
[10] Eisler, Writing Wars, 142.
[11] Eisler, Writing Wars, 185.