War in literature - Part 2 of 2
Is war inevitable? Is violence intrinsic to human nature?
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Just over two years after the sinking of the Titanic, the First World War broke out. Then World War II will break out. And the price of blood, massacres, horrors is so high that it undermines all the hopes and illusions of modernity.
The racial laws, Nazism, fascism, the concentration camps, the Jews in the crematoria, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then Stalin, the gulags with millions more deaths.
Time began to accelerate.
“Whereas at the beginning of this period (300 years ago) the rate of new discovery and invention was such that the digestion of a major change extended over the better part of a century, it has steadily increased until the process of digestion must now be accomplished within a decade.
This is something new in history. The better part of a century is a long human life-time, and within that span, adjustment both personal and social is comparatively easy.
When the time available for digestion of a change is reduced to a single generation, then, though individual adjustment is more of a problem, social adjustment is still not too difficult.
But once the rate of major change has overtaken the rate of social reproduction, and is down to a half or a third of a generation, a new and formidable problem is introduced. The individual himself is asked to recast his ideas and his attitudes once or even twice within the space of his active working life.”
Julian Huxley1
If there is a spirit of history, it is not a merciful God, but a divinity, an evil god who has created us wrong. Creation is flawed and men belong to the cruelest species ever to appear on earth. Here is the plan totally reversed compared to Victor Hugo’s time.
Obviously between the First and Second World War and in the following years there were many writers and philosophers who measured themselves with this new and shocking evidence.
Reality of war
Louis-Ferdinand Céline in Journey to the End of the Night tells the passage from illusion to despondency very well. In the first unforgettable chapter of the novel, Bardamu, a boy, a rather light-hearted student, the writer’s alter-ego, enlists as a volunteer in the First World War.
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