'The silence of war', Antonio Monegal's plea against the epic of war

War, which is inherent to humanity, has a language that worked before and works now. It even has its structure to be told. Throughout history, the codes to represent it have not changed so much, as was already established in classical civilization and as Antonio Monegal explains in the adventure of knowing what

The Silence of War is.

“If we are marked to die, there are enough of us for our country to feel the loss; and if it is to live, the fewer men, the greater the portion of honor.” These are words from the monologue that the King delivers in the fourth act of

Henry V.

It is Saint Crispin's Day, the battle of Azincourt is about to begin and the French clearly outnumber them. The English monarch assumes his role as leader of the army and delivers a harangue that concentrates all the power of the heroic epic, which is the traditional and effective form of the best war propaganda. “The day of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispiano will never pass, from today until the end of the world, without us being remembered in it, we few, happy few, we, a group of brothers.” They are the patriotic values ​​and masculine camaraderie that mobilize the young man willing to fight and sacrifice his life.

In 2002 Monegal—professor of comparative literature and winner of the last National Essay Prize—published a first study on two works that addressed the Bosnian war: the film

Before the Rain

, by Milčo Mančevski, and the novel

The Siege of Sieges. ,

by Juan Goytisolo. In 2004, he curated the exhibition

At War

together with Francesc Torres and José María Ridao. Since then he has accumulated a very extensive archive of artistic objects—from literature to painting, from cinema to photography, even toys—that allows him to substantiate a powerful hypothesis.

The epic discourse, formalized by the

Iliad

and which has one of its peaks in those verses of Shakespeare, configured a system to recount the war that is ideological without seeming so because it is already a cognitive mechanism that we have ingrained through cultural tradition. to which we belong. But this system of representation has been questioned by a notable corpus of modern art with the purpose of raising awareness, beyond hymns, heroisms and epics, of what war is. The analysis of this corpus is the core of the book.

Before art and literature challenged the epic, Fabrizio's confusion at the Battle of Waterloo was already a warning of the advent of a new era of culture. “Who before him had described war like this, that is, how it really is?” Tolstoy asked himself in his diaries.

The Charterhouse of Parma

was published in 1839. In 1874 Félix Philippoteaux painted the Battle of Waterloo. It was still a historicist painting with the intention of showing the integrity of a combat. With the Great War, as the first modern war, that paradigm changed. More than a century ago, innovative solutions to display it coincided with the advent of the avant-garde, but also with the possibility of soldiers photographing the front. Since then, strategies to subvert the epic order of representation have continued to be explored. The disruption of

Guernica

's language would be the best example of how to make the viewer feel meaningless. Even silence is, as in Lanzmann's

Shoah

or in the tragedy

Fires

of Mouawad.

The way of telling about the war is ideological without seeming so because it is a cognitive mechanism rooted in cultural tradition.

One of the main attractions of

The Silence of War

is the connection that Monegal establishes between different fields of art. Photographs of the torture at Abu Ghraib, with critical resonance, reappear in an exhibition in New York or in a mural in Baghdad. The classic photograph of the taking of Iwo Jima was recycled by Eastwood in the cinema - the language that conveys the most epic today - but before the film he also had his statue in a memorial and that statue, in turn, was the subject of a re-inscription iconic by Ed Kienholz to denounce the atrocity of the Vietnam War, a fundamental moment in the evolution of the artistic treatment of war: “That of bringing the war home to provoke awareness.” What is our conscience today after the hell of Mariupol? What rhetoric to use to defend yourself when you have to fight?

Now that the discourse of war is once again normalized in our public conversation, because it is closer to us and we do not know to what extent it is stalking us, in some way we hear the return of the language of epic. This Monday, President Biden called the soldiers integrated into the 335th and 494th fighter squadrons. On the night from Saturday to Sunday they piloted their F-15E Strike Eagley and F-16 Fighting Falcon and shot down 70 drones launched by Iran to attack Israel . “Hey, guys, I'm the best thing in this damn world,” he told them. It is not so easy to know the words to use. There is no harmless option. “Not giving in to the temptation of the epic, turning away from it, is taking a stand against the glorification of war and the cult of heroism.”

The silence of war

Antonio Monegal

Acantilado, 2024

320 pages. 24 euros

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