A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway)

"The poetry of heroism appeals irresitably to those who don't go to a war, and even more so to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy" - Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Since I'm pretty late to the game, I'm sure many people already know the basics of this book (Henry is an American acting as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during WWI, he falls for an English nurse, leaves the service, and they abscond to Switzerland), so I won't go into it at great length. Instead, I'd like to look briefly at a few literary analogues, and see how the war affected much of the literary consciousness of the time.

There are two other novels which strike me as going through similar movements via WWI: German Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel, and Frenchman Louis-Ferndinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night. All three of these novels involve young men enlisting in their respective countries' armies, and all three problematize this immediately. Hemingway's Henry seemingly arbitrarily joins in the Italian army. Céline's Bardamu enlists anarchically, to prove a point to his friend. And Jünger's memoir immediately belies a breakdown of language--what is seen cannot be said, and what is said has nothing to do with what is seen.

Though these novels all come from different sides of the war, all result in the absurd, and all explode the concept of heroism (I think, despite Jünger's beliefs). Hemingway's Henry is very nearly murdered by members of his own army, simply because of his rank (and he, himself, only kills an Italian during the whole war). Céline's Bardamu comments, while fighting, that he has never been hurt by a German before, and can't understand why he must now kill one (I would quote this, but I can't seem to find my copy at the moment). And Jünger comes out of the war a hero, simply by dint of the fact that he was injured 14 times and survived.



The first two thirds of A Farewell to Arms deal directly with the war. Henry relates much of the day to day life he leads, which primarily involves drinking, going to whorehouses, chatting with a priest in the canteen, and joking with his close friend Rinaldi. Hemingway's Henry doesn't seem to particularly think about the war too much at this point: it is simply something that he is caught up in. Even after he is injured, he goes back to the front and takes place in the massive retreat. As his final action in the service, he is literally forced to go AWOL to save himself from being executed by a group of young Italian soldiers who are murdering all officers they come upon.

For Bardamu in Journey to the End of the Night, escape comes only from injury. Unlike the other two protagonists, Bardamu is free from the immediate grip of the war after being wounded only once. It is at this point, however, that we see the real affect that the war has had: Bardamu is cracked open by the experience, and nearly every other experience he has is an hallucinatory frenzy of senselessness. The brute truth of death and destruction caused by one man to another is felt in every lingering action afterward; from the French colonies of Africa, to the Ford Motor plant in America. Bardamu sees it all as cruelty. And he generally engages in cruelty himself, finding it the foundation of all human action, and finding death as the concrete reality waiting at the end of all human action.



For his part, Hemingway's protagonist is a bit more bright-eyed than Céline's. Henry and Catherine Barker (the English nurse who becomes his constant companion) make it to Switzerland. They are optimistic about their future and look forward to raising their child. But, again, the ground is unsettled beneath civilian society after having seen the massive senselessness of the war. It seems to open up a chasm beneath all who enter it, revealing death as the only reality left. As Henry states:

You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

They, in this instance, is not the opposing army: it is the formless They which perpetrates bad deeds on the innocent. It is the They which kills and inflicts diseases and leaves people homeless and hungry. And it is this They which is forever on the edge of the page in both A Farewell and Journey.

Yet somehow, in the end, Jünger comes to a slightly different conclusion than Hemingway and Céline. Many people have criticized him for being a proponent of war--or, at the least, not damning enough--and he does seem to cling to the "poetry of heroism." After the initial publication of Storm of Steel, he added to the introduction the lines:

Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart.

Though the others have been ripped free of any form of nostalgia, I do believe that all three considered the war a thickly cerebral form of schooling. However, if Jünger found it schooling for the heart, Hemingway and Céline can only be said to have found it schooling of the absurd, and a schooling in cruel mortality.

A Farewell to Arms is a good book, I've decided after much thought. Hemingway fans will tell you that he's the best writer who ever lived. Personally, I'm still only an initiate to his writing, however, I can say that the last 20 pages of this novel nearly knocked me out. Even if I don't count his as high in the ranks of authors yet as other people, I do see much merit in his writing. Though his works seem un-poetic in their simplicity at times, there is a poetry to their pointedness. He exemplifies another quote by the furious Céline:

If you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you. - Louis-Ferdinand Céline