SubStance

Rachel Galvin’s News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945 is a focused and forceful study of six major modernist poets who crafted similar styles in response to WWII and the Spanish Civil War: César Vallejo, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Queneau, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. A chapter is dedicated to each of these poets, with the exception of Auden, in many respects the book’s central figure, who is treated in two consecutive chapters. As can be seen in her choice of poets, Gavin’s approach is transnational and multilingual. This allows her to draw startling parallels between poets who, though given ample critical attention individually, are rarely mentioned in the same breath. It also allows her to raise an important ethical question that haunts writers from many historical periods and cultural traditions and continues to resonate today: what is the poet’s responsibility during wartime? Galvin offers a provocative and unconventional answer to this question by broadening the category of war poetry and troubling the way literary authority is ascribed. As such, this work is an invaluable contribution to scholars and students of comparative literature, poetry and cultural studies.

In treatments of war, as with any issue with social relevance, there is tendency to privilege the stories of those with first-hand (read: bodily) experience. For instance, World War I poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney are afforded a special authority on the subject due to their status as combatants. Their writing has the mark of authenticity, not because of anything it says or does, but because of their physical experience as soldiers. To be there (the frontlines, in the trenches) is to know. Anyone who wasn’t there lacks the authority or clarity to speak on the matter. Throughout her study, Galvin refers to this as “flesh-witnessing,” a term she borrows from the historian Yuval Noah Harari. She convincingly demonstrates the pervasiveness of this conceptual paradigm. Galvin traces it back to cultural shifts in the 17^th and 18^th centuries when the concept of truth became tied to the sensory experience of a feeling subject. This sort of “naïve empiricism” (Géralidine [End Page 112] Muhlmann’s term) or “sensualist positivism” (Michael Schudson’s) spurred the development of the Bildungsroman and other first-hand narrative accounts. Most notably, it forms the basis of journalistic practice.

During the Spanish Civil War and World War II, civilians were principally informed about the war via newspapers. Its claims to objectivity and truth often went unchallenged. Its discursive forms were made to seem transparent, so that it appeared as though the news being conveyed was direct and unmediated. Civilian or noncombatant poets (Galvin uses the terms interchangeably) could not compete with the combatant’s, or even the embedded journalist’s, claims of authority. But they continued to write about the war nonetheless. Why are they deserving of our attention, and what, as noncombatants, do they contribute to our understanding of war?

Galvin’s answer is multi-faceted. First, during the wars in question, the division between combatant and civilian became less clear. Aerial bombings forever reconfigured the relation between the two (even precision drone strikes have proven to be far less precise than they were initially claimed to be). Second, war changes the very nature of daily life for noncombatants, too—shortages of food, material and labor give rise to a new pattern of daily routines and rituals. What’s more, an indirect consequence of privileging stories of combatants would be the neglect of accounts from noncombatant survivors of war, such as those from the Holocaust or Hiroshima whose stories force us to confront its unspeakable horror. But the poets of this book are not survivors of war in this sense, and their voluntary or involuntary proximity to its horror is relative. Stein chose to stay in Occupied France, but the events she bore witness to may be less shocking than newspaper accounts Moore read back on the home front...