Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mary A. Favret is associate professor of English at Indiana University. She is the author of "Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters".

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"This book is a masterpiece. Brilliant, brave, and beautifully written, it combines precision with lyricism. It will be required reading for scholars and students in Romantic studies, but its appeal will hardly be limited to them, since the topic is relevant to anyone interested in the nature and effects of war in our own time."--Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley

"War at a Distance is an important, exquisite, and thoughtful consideration of the affective experiences of wartime. Favret helps us to reconsider the Romantic imagination as one haunted by the measurelessness of war's effects."--Celeste Langan, University of California, Berkeley

"Favret's vividly realized and impeccably argued analysis demonstrates that state-sponsored violence was not merely a political or military matter, but had profound consequences for how Romantic thinkers--many living far from the ground zeroes dotting the globe--imagined and conducted themselves, experienced time, and thought about the future. War at a Distance is not only a sobering reflection on what it means to live with oneself and with others amid military modernity, but also an irrepressible call for peace."--David Clark, McMaster University

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WAR AT A DISTANCE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations...............................................ixPRELUDE A Winter's Evening..........................................1CHAPTER ONE Introduction: A Sense of War............................9War Mediated........................................................12Worlds Without and Within...........................................22Wartime Without Limits..............................................30War as All Wars.....................................................40World Wars..........................................................43CHAPTER TWO Telling Time in War.....................................49Wartime.............................................................49Modes of Temporality, Structures of Feeling.........................53The Post-Boy and the News...........................................59The Meantime........................................................68Prophecy............................................................81INTERLUDE Still Winter Falls........................................98CHAPTER THREE War in the Air........................................119Live Air............................................................120Beyond Control......................................................123Early Weather Science: Grounding the Weather........................126A Georgics of the Sky...............................................131Voices in the Air...................................................138CHAPTER FOUR Everyday War...........................................145A History of Suffering..............................................146No Peace............................................................151Diverting Away the Time.............................................161A Broken Story......................................................165INTERLUDE A Brief History of the Meaning of War.....................173CHAPTER FIVE Viewing War at a Distance..............................187War in Pictures.....................................................190Worlding India......................................................198The Historical Sublime..............................................212The Rope-Bridge.....................................................220CODA Undone.........................................................230Acknowledgments.....................................................235Bibliography........................................................239Index...............................................................255

Chapter One

This book considers how war becomes part of the barely registered substance of our everyday, an experience inextricable from sitting at home on an evening, recalling absent friends, staring at a fire, gazing out a window. As it looks back over two centuries, War at a Distance tells how military conflict on a global scale looked and felt to a population whose armies and navies waged war for decades, but always at a distance. For those at home, the task was to find sentient ground for what often appeared a free-floating, impersonal military operation, removed from their immediate sensory perception. The literature and art produced in Britain during its twenty-year conflict with France cultivated this ground obsessively—and in doing so, it established forms for how we continue to think and feel about war at a distance. As a wartime phenomenon, British Romanticism gives its distinctive voice to the dislocated experience that is modern wartime: the experience of war mediated, of time and times unmoored, of feeling intensified but also adrift.

Modern wartime refers first to the experience of those living through but not in a war. As writers in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century went about their everyday routines, their country was sending men to kill and be killed across the globe. In the course of the eighteenth century the newly United Kingdom had crushed two armed rebellions at home; participated in a half dozen wars on the continent; expanded its imperial holdings on the Indian subcontinent, in the Caribbean, and in Africa; increased and then lost a good portion of its North American colonies—through warfare. At the turn of the new century, Great Britain entered a worldwide campaign, fighting first against regicides and Terror and later against an evil despot (the French Revolution and Napoleon, respectively), emerging in 1815 as the world's dominant military power. The intensity and length of fighting have led historians to refer to the eighteenth century as a "Second Hundred Years War," and Linda Colley has shown that British national identity was decisively forged through this century of nearly constant military action. But that military action, again, was undertaken at a remove: after the defeat of Stewart loyalists at Culloden in 1745, distance—either geophysical or temporal—was increasingly built into the British nation's understanding of war. War on home turf happened back then; it was history. If it occurred now, it occurred beyond the reach of eyes and ears, somewhere else, over there.

In trying to capture this modern wartime, the chapters of this book take up materials as varied as meditations on The Iliad, the history of meteorology, landscape painting in India, popular poetry in the newspapers and periodicals, theories of history and the everyday, the work of dictionaries, and various modes of prophecy and prognostication; they contemplate forms of war and wartime that range from the early years of the eighteenth century to the present. Yet their primary material (their "hearth" as it were) is the literature of romantic wartime. This material makes clear that wartime responses move in several directions. In some instances the experience of war at a distance prompts a move toward abstraction, an increasing distance from the human body. Here the consolations of system, idea, and purpose hold sway: as from a bird's-eye view, you see patterns emerge; you comprehend why and when, where and how war operates. War becomes an object of knowledge, a universalizing abstraction; indeed, in wartime it threatens to become all you know. In other instances, the reverse occurs: wartime promotes a sense of atomism and despair which folds into the body so completely that inertia and apathy— lack of feeling—are its only signs. Wartime here defeats human responsiveness. There is a third, perhaps more productive response, suspended between and resistant to the polar pulls of abstraction and numbness. The last chapter of this book locates this third response visually and spatially in a "middle distance." But it surfaces throughout the book as a poetic or aesthetic response, a response that strives to produce and give form to feeling. And it is this third term, the productive aspect of wartime writing, which opens wartime—and the romantic writing that conceived it—to the present.

War at a Distance works, then, at the intersection of two academic fields: the study of wartime literature and the study of affect. The scholarship on wartime literature and culture—for example, Paul Fussell's masterpieces, The Great War and Modern Memory and Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War; Bernard Bergonzi's important Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and Its Background, 1939–60; Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert's No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century; Jay Winter's Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History; or more recently, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-century British Culture by Lindsey Stonebridge or Grief in Wartime: Private Pain, Public Discourse by Carol Acton—has been weighted heavily toward the two world wars of the past century. In recent years, the categories of "wartime" and "wartime literature" have been extended to the period of the American Civil War when, as Drew Gilpin Faust puts it, "the United States embarked on a new relationship with death." Even as I learn from this work, I reach back to a yet earlier, but still self-consciously modern period of war, to acknowledge its continued currency.

Reaching back brings up a question all these studies tend to overlook: the question of "war time" itself. How do we know or measure, how do we tell the time of war? What sort of historiography does it require? My answers to these questions derive in part from recent work in the second of the fields I mention, the history of affect, which studies modes of response or apprehension that lie outside of cognition per se. Affect often eludes the usual models for organizing time such as linearity, punctuality, and periodicity; it eludes as well the usual models for organizing history. If we take wartime less as an object of cognition bounded by dates—a period—and more as an affecting experience which resonates beyond the here and now, then wartime literature becomes an attempt to trace and give shape to such affect, to register its wayward power.

This introduction will begin to spell out some of the human consequences of war at a distance. These consequences were of the most fundamental sort: most strikingly, we will see that distant war unsettled basic temporal experiences of the British population. How time and knowledge were registered in daily life became newly uncertain. And with that uncertainty came a set of disturbing affective responses, including numbness, dizziness, anxiety, or a sense of being overwhelmed. In taking romantic writers as architects of modern wartime, I want to bring forth these relations of distance, temporality, epistemology, and affect: the felt distance from crucial events, the limits of knowledge in a mediated culture, the temporal gaps in the transmission of information, and, finally, the difficulty of finding sounds or forms to which feeling can attach itself.

The chapters which then follow divide themselves into three parts. The first deals in particular with the conversion of war at a distance into a matter of time, into wartime. Wartime, as many romantic writers realized in their work, was the effect of war mediated, brought home through a variety of instruments. As the poems discussed in the prelude already suggest, a mediated war sets in motion various and conflicting senses of time, and unsettled times unleash unsettled feelings. This opening section, therefore, sets out the complex temporal structure of wartime, understanding it as a zone of affect which troubles what we can know and especially what we can know of history. The second section, while still underscoring how war conducted at a distance intensifies time-consciousness and charges it with affective resonance, concerns itself more with the ways distant war invades and becomes implicated in the most familiar forms of the everyday. The chapters of this section center on the thought that the everyday itself, its peculiar status in modern thought, derives from its intimate relationship with war. Indeed, writing in the romantic period illuminates how war invades thought itself, threatening to become the very ground of thinking, understood in ways that make it—like the everyday—familiar and routine, easy to overlook. The final section of the book then turns from written to visual texts, in part to demonstrate continuities and discrepancies between romantic mediations of war at a distance and more contemporary mediations which privilege the visual and televisual: our own "films upon the grate." But in directing attention to representations of the landscape of war-torn India in the 1790s, my goal is also to insist upon the global nature of a war often taken to concern only Europe. The very idea of a world war, as it emerged in this period, poses anew a question which lurks throughout the study: the question of our modern intimacy with and response to the suffering stranger who, though seen perhaps fleetingly and at a distance, nevertheless comes almost daily into our homes.

War Mediated

Taking up "modern wartime," let alone something called "wartime literature," means entering into the history of war and mediation. When war is conducted at a distance, how one can know or learn of war becomes massively important, as do the obstacles (psychological, ideological, practical) to such knowledge. The epistemology of modern wartime is an epistemology of mediation. Consider again C. K. Williams's "The Hearth," written in the wake of television reports; consider too his poem "Doves," a 2003 response to media reports on the war in Iraq:

    So much crap in my head,
    So many rubbishy facts,
    So many half-baked
    theories and opinions, ...
    So much political swill.
    So much crap, Yet
    so much I don't know
    and would dearly like to.... (1–4, 8–11)

Or consider the familiar stories of soldiers found in remote places, still primed to fight because they have not heard what those back home know already, that peace treaties have been signed months before. These stories, circulating widely in the media, not only advertise the more "accurate" knowledge of the viewer or reader compared to the benighted warrior ("too close" to the action); they also provide an ironic fable of the larger indeterminacies of wartime (when does wartime begin or end? where exactly does it take place?) and their tight links to the work of communication.

But the roots of these familiar stories about the mediation and uncertainties of war reach down to an earlier period. If modern wartime is the experience of noncombatants in a time of war, it is worth recalling that it was in fact during the Napoleonic period that the term "noncombatant" as well as the popular understanding of "civilian" as nonmilitary first emerged in English; and the notion of "wartime" as a distinct category emerged along with them. With the advent of mass media, in the print culture that rose in the eighteenth century, and in an increasingly popular visual culture of prints, panoramas, and theatrical performances, wartime stepped forth as a mediated relationship to distant violence.

Caught within these examples is the revelation that, by calling up questions of epistemology, of certainties and doubts, a mediated war evokes as well the unsettled terrain of wartime affect. Within such conditions of mediated knowledge, feeling responds not only to the war itself but to one's privileged experience of it—the privilege of knowing war at a distance. A 1798 pamphlet, written to raise the alarm of invasion by French forces, could invoke this privilege almost smugly, insisting on the war's distance and invisibility:

[I]t has been our peculiar privilege, through the whole of this unprecedented War, to triumph over our enemies without ever seeing them, without any exposure of our personal security, without any interruption of our domestic quiet, while a great part of Europe has experienced all the horrors of War, while its cities have been sacked, and its fields drenched with blood.... [W]e have it in our power to frustrate the designs of the enemy without seeing our Country become the seat of War,—without, even any violation of our Coasts.

This sense of privileged security sits uneasily, though, in a work dedicated to rousing its countrymen to a constant vigilance. Elsewhere, the author paints scenarios of "violence and rapine" on British soil and reports on incendiary speeches in Paris, making visible and proximate the very violence it hopes to defend against. The picture of domestic quiet remains meaningless without this threat of "interruption." Pamphlets like this one—and there were dozens— mediated between the known and the unknown, seen and unseen, prompting wild fluctuations of feeling. They could, for instance, be at once contemptuous of France's ability to fund an invasion, and certain that the threat was real and imminent. They offered the feeling of security always bundled with the feeling of vulnerability.

The arrival—or not—of news from abroad was one determining factor of wartime experience, of what you might know and how you might feel. Already in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge could lament that reading the morning news only dampened his ability to respond feelingly to distant warfare: the papers offer "dainty terms for fratricide; ... mere abstractions, empty sounds to which / We join no feeling and attach no form!" (113, 116–17). Coleridge's "un-joined" feelings"—un-articulated affect—were encouraged not only by the newspapers' euphemism and abstraction but also by the sheer facts of physical and temporal distance. In the late eighteenth century, news of war came with considerable lag time; reports of a particular event, the loss of a battle or the death of your brother, could take months to be communicated home and confirmed. Today we depend on the illusion of immediacy granted by instantaneous and unceasing news reporting, as if we can always know what is happening elsewhere in the world as it occurs; yet un-joined feelings persist. Such feelings—empty, lacking solid attachment—contribute to the experience of any war at a distance. The wartime writing of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period gives expressive form to this experience of mediated distance—distance spatial, temporal, epistemological, and, in the end, mortal—and the responses it generates. For these reasons, reading this literature has taught me that wartime is not just a period of time that can be got over or settled, but rather a persistent mode of daily living and a habit of mind.

In such circumstances, mediation itself becomes an object of emotion: of comfort, complacency, relief, anxiety, impotence, complicity. In response to the mediated versions of war we receive, we may admit, as William Cowper did while reading his newspaper in 1783, that "The sound of war / Has lost its terrors ere it reaches me; / Grieves, but alarms me not" (IV: 100–2). Yet, at the next moment we may discover in the safe space of our living rooms, as he did, the fleeting presence—however imagined—of towering warriors and cities in flames, or towers in flames and cities full of warriors. Distant violence becomes at once strange and familiar, intimate and remote, present and yet not really here. "Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country," Susan Sontag noted, "is a quintessential modern experience." In saying this, she echoes a well-known radical preacher of the romantic period, Joseph Fawcett, who published his famous anti war poem, The Art of War, in 1795. In his later War Elegies (1801), Fawcett put succinctly the operation of wartime affect as it fluctuates somewhere between minds, hearts, and bodies, here and elsewhere. The misery of war, he remarks, consists in part "in the pain it inflicts upon the mind of every contemplator of its ravages, at whatever distance he stand from its theatre ... whose heart can bleed at home along with the thousands whose bodies are bleeding in the field." Appealing without apology to the bleeding heart in wartime, Fawcett asks us to reexamine this overworn figure as it presses closely on the problem of mediation: of what is far brought close, what outer made inner. Fawcett expects hearts and minds to respond to war conducted anywhere at all, at whatever distance from "home"—and yet it is difficult to pinpoint where and when such misery takes place. For Fawcett, what is at a great distance seems also somehow (through some unspoken mediation) to penetrate us.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from WAR AT A DISTANCEby Mary A. Favret Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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