1. introduction main part

2.2 American Modernism and the Great War
Having looked at the representation of the Great War in representative works belonging to the British modernist canon, it is time to examine some selected works from the American modernist tradition and in terms of their social commentary on the Great War and its aftermath. John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer (1925) represents the complex, speedy urban experience of life in New York. Plot in the traditional sense is absent behind overlapping narratives of many characters, something to capture the transfer stations of the New York subway system. The view is a pessimistic one of a decadent city. Although not primarily about the war, the novel depicts, in its fragments, the plight of poor returning soldiers, shows the excitement people feel at the beginning of the war, and shows the disillusionment with the war’s aftermath and the lack of change the war effected. The critique of a disorientating modernity is intertwined with a critique of the war. The novel is more concerned with the impact of the war on modern life and individuals. Dutch Robertson is a returning veteran who is poor and becomes a prisoner for crime. Other returning veterans ask for bonuses for the missed economic boon. Others go to Europe during the war to work for the Red Cross. The representation of the war is in line with the novel’s whirlwind style of throwing many things and not exhausting anything. There is much left to the reader to infer and connect. We never leave New York. We just hear about the war or encounter the disillusioned returning veterans who unavailingly seek privilege or jobs. However, the gap between classes continues after the war and jobs remain scarce. Captain James Merivale calls it “a great little war while it lasted” (p. 256). Elmer, a radical believer in revolution, tells his girlfriend Ann that the war continues and is not simply over. The war is thus offstage, constantly alluded to yet never seen in its action. We hear about the war every now and then from characters discussing politics, often in passing. The war haunts them, but the novel does not document war action for a historical end.
By the time the war breaks out, one character, Jimmy, decides to go to Europe to work as a war correspondent, and another, Ellen, wants to serve in the Red Cross as a nurse (p. 214). Referring to the war, one character reveals how it preoccupies people's lives: “This war. I can’t think of anything else” (p. 205). Congo, a Frenchman who came to work in New York, says that he won’t go to the war and that “A working man has no country” (p. 214). He wants to be an American citizen instead to move upwards and thinks the war is being fought “So that working men all over won’t make big revolution. . . . Too busy fighting” (p. 214). Joe O’Keefe, a returning soldier, and Joe Harland discuss the war. “I don’t see how this can last long,” says Harland (p. 224). O’Keefe, now a Sergeant-major, and Private 1^st Class Dutch Robertson, his friend, return ambitious, wanting jobs, marriage, and a good life at home. O’Keefe leads a meeting for an organization of fellow ex-veterans and is mad at the scarcity of jobs and bonuses. He says: “We fought for ‘em didn’t we, we cleaned up the squareheads, didn’t we? . . . And now when we get home we get the dirty end of the stick” (p. 267). He rants about lack of jobs and losing their girls who married other men during their absence. He stirs people against the government. Gus McNeil warns O’Keefe against agitation committees and subsequent violence like raids on the Garment Workers’ Ball. He tells him: “I tell you, Joe, the people of this country are pretty well fed up with war heroes” (p. 295). And he adds that “A national bonus means taxes to the average business man and nothing else. . . . Nobody wants no more taxes” (p. 295). However, all this zigzag talk about the war never reaches a satisfactory sense of closure, and the novel offers just snapshots about the war. Each time the war is mentioned, Dos Passos transfers the discussion immediately to other things. So, the war is seen as part of the fragmented, speeded up experience of modernity. The point is not to render war action but to contextualize war within changing times and human relations. That is, the impact of the war is more important than the war itself as the war is politically over now. Violent deaths through drowning or fire recorded in the novel and a speedy, fragmented life are in tune with the war atmosphere and its effects. The novel recreates the experience of a modernity shattered by the war. The violence and destruction of the war are made sudden and sweeping, which is in line with the novel's swift nature.
Ernest Hemingway similarly shows how the war impacts human life and relationships, but he seems less concerned with the experimental spirit of Dos Passos. In The Sun Also Rises (1926), we clearly see the effects of war on a whole generation. The war is in the background, in the memory of characters, in their conversations, in their outlook, and in their allusions. Jake Barnes and his coterie in Europe stand for post-war disillusionment, cynicism, loss, spiritual void, and ennui. This generation lost its faith in such values as love, religion, womanhood, and manhood. Jake’s physical wound he received fighting with the Italians is symbolic of the psychological, physical, and moral damage of the war on an entire generation—the expatriate group. Jake’s wound that rendered him impotent is a physical manifestation of what other characters suffer emotionally and socially. He becomes Hemingway’s postwar Fisher King in his impotence/emasculation that is symptomatic of the sterility around him. His personal plight that he carries from the war action contrasts with the emotional plight of other survivors who are intact in body yet touched in soul. War made these young expatriates homeless, faithless, restless, hollow, alcoholic, and emotionally paralyzed. It made them without families and without a near past aside from the war. Their sexual and social roles were changed by the war as well. Their possible redemption in an amoral world lies in sports, nature, stoicism/moral strength, skill, and true friendships. With an epigraph and a title from the Book of Ecclesiastes and another epigraph from Gertrude Stein about the lost generation, “You are all a lost generation,” the novel comments on an entire generation destroyed by the war, a commentary that provides the social context for the war. However, the futility of sex, alcohol, and violence will not eradicate all human values, as something will inevitably endure. The abiding sun and the passage of time and generations in the second epigraph offer some hope: “One generation passes away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abides forever. . . The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose . . .” For Hemingway, consolation lies in transcending a traumatic history.
Hemingway still captures the essence of the postwar modernist sensibility in terms of disillusionment with the war and cultural dislocation/decay. The sickness motif generalizes the decay and destruction of the war and highlights the impotence it effects or the heroism it takes. Jake accidentally meets a prostitute in Paris. They take a cab ride and she tries to touch him. He takes away her hand affirming he is sick. “Everybody’s sick. I’m sick, too” she replies (p. 16). Jake, in his alienation, picked her because “of a vague sentimental idea that it would be nice to eat with some one” (p. 16). When she asks about the nature of his sickness, he just says “I got hurt in the war” (p. 17). The ambiguous war injury is meant to allegorize the whole sickness of war and the botched civilization it resulted in. She responds “Oh, that dirty war,” and Jake says: “We would probably have gone on and discussed the war and agreed that it was in reality a calamity for civilization, and perhaps would have been better avoided. I was bored enough” (p. 17). Masculinity had to be redefined as the injury done to the male body in a mechanized war made it weak and impotent. Hence, the new woman represented by the English Lady Brett Ashley, Jake’s counterpart, is a reaction to the disrupted gender roles. Heroism now is in dignity, precision, honesty, direct confrontation with reality, and passion, all embodied in bullfighting.
The cynical, disillusioned attitude characters have is typical of the postwar lost generation. They are the generation that fought the war in France and then expatriated themselves from America and Britain. Bill Gorton, a war veteran, captures the essence of expatriate life when he tells Jake: “You’re an expatriate. You have lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés” (p. 115). However, Jake is more pragmatic and morally stronger than other Paris café society expatriates. Cohn sees in him his only friend and begs him for forgiveness after he insults him (p. 194). Others express to him their anxieties and fears, even beat him and apologize; and he accepts. Unlike other expatriates who turn to alcohol, sex, art, and violence as alternatives in the postwar cultural futility, he finds meaning and order in bullfights, bravery, earnestness, self-control, grace, and integrity. The code of values of the bullfighter seems to be untouched by the destruction and loss of values left after the war that made people aimless. The owner of a hotel, Montoya, considers Jake an “aficionado”: “Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about bull-fights” (p. 131). Jake is able to find purpose in life by learning from bullfighters. For example, he observes that “Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time” (p. 168). He learns from Romero that even if his body is hurt his soul should remain intact: “The fight with Cohn had not touched his spirit but his face had been smashed and his body hurt. … Each thing that he did with this bull wiped that out a little cleaner. It was a good bull, a big bull, and with horns, and it turned and recharged easily and surely. He was what Romero wanted in bulls” (p. 219). A fishing interlude with Bill Gorton in the Spanish countryside and bullfighting are, temporarily for Jake, a way out of the sexual restlessness and violence of the expatriates. When he goes fishing in the Irati River in Burguette, he is at peace: “There was no word from Robert Cohn nor from Brett and Mike” (p. 125). He and Bill lose track of time in the countryside. The English man they meet during fishing is named Harris. We know he was in the war and Bill and Jake find affinities with him. Male friendship is redeeming in keeping friends and providing them with comfort.
In the absence of conventional morality and religious sentiments, characters seek individualistic salvation, especially after the war effected a loss of faith in divine benevolence. Although Jake sometimes hates Cohn’s superiority and sexual vigor, and likes the insults other characters hurl sat him as a Jew, he then feels “disgusted” at himself: “That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterward. No, that must be immorality. That was a large statement. What a lot of bilge I could think up at night” (p. 149). In Spain, Jake attends church a couple of times, once with the secular Brett. She has blurred notions of religion. She wants Jake to “go to confession” (p. 150), and Jake tells her that a confession would be “impossible” and also “in a language she did not know” (p. 151). In a San Fermin chapel in Pamplona where the fiesta started and where Brett wants to pray for Romero, they enter, and she gets nervous and leaves immediately: “I’m damned bad for a religious atmosphere,” she says. “I’ve the wrong type of face” (p. 208). And later she says: “Never does me any good. I’ve never gotten anything I prayed for” (p. 209). She decides to give up Romero so that she does not destroy him: “I’m thirty-four, you know. I’m not going to be one of these bitches that ruins children” (p. 243). Mike is her “sort of thing” (p. 243). She thinks that deciding not to be a bitch is what “we have instead of God” (p. 245). These characters are not able to have stable relations in the aftermath of the war. Jake’s war injury terminated the possibility for a fruitful relationship with
Brett. Brett herself had lost a lover in the war through dysentery and then married and left another man traumatized by his war experiences to the extent of sleeping with a loaded revolver to his side. She is waiting for divorce so that she can marry the alcoholic Mike. In the meantime, she is prostituting herself with other men. Jake’s impotence represents that of an entire lost generation, which in turn takes the impact of the war from the private plight of an individual to the public sphere. The broad social vision Hemingway offers is privileged over any factual or even fictional treatment of the war.