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In Writing Wars, however, Eisler—a veteran himself—views the authority of experience as an outdated premise with serious ethical shortcomings.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.
