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The Great War narrative has been the subject of wide scholarship but there have been no studies that have specifically focused on understanding the ethical and aesthetic struggles of the artist in war, the artist’s dilemma. The generation that experienced the Great War included many giants of twentieth-century intellectual, cultural, and political life, many of whom wrote personal narratives of their experiences. These narratives have contributed to shaping familial stories and the meta-narratives of nation states for generations—sometimes limiting a fuller understanding of the war. Through this thesis I aim to open the field of narrative investigation into a wider inquiry through applying what Brian Lande identifies as the ‘sensual and moral conversion’ of the soldier in war, to the artistic actor in the theatre of war. The proposition is to identify and read beyond generic conventions, then to observe the process, the tasks, and the moral, psychosocial, and aesthetic dilemmas of the artist in the theatre of war. To do this, the work focuses on three robust texts of the Great War: Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That (1929), Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), and David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937). The project explores not only the nuance of creative witness, self-witness, and testimony, but proposes a fuller empathic engagement with the narrative within the social contract of war writing. After developing a model of the formal conventions which structure the genre of war writing, and building on the work of Max Saunders, Henri LeFebvre, and others, I have carried out close readings of the three authors’ Great War narratives and related works. With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses literary, artistic, historical, ethical, and sociological studies, and with extensive archival research, I propose to introduce another perspective on reading between the lines of Great War narratives. This perspective encompasses the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas that faced the artists of the war generation as they acted and reacted to war, a generation that shaped the intellectual, political, scientific, and artistic life of the twentieth century, and the lives of generations to follow.

La présente recherche interroge l'écriture littéraire de la Grande Guerre et de la guerre Iran-Irak, vecteurs de choc et de bouleversement, qu'a racontée maint récit et roman, partagés entre restitution et invention. L'enquête porte sur la capacité de la fiction à dire le phénomène guerrier. Après avoir démêlé les contextes littéraires, elle établit les tendances majeures de la poétique du genre du récit de guerre et scrute alors les récits du front. Dans le feu de l'action, une première vague de textes est marquée du souci de témoignage dans une optique réaliste. Malgré leurs divergences de style et d'axiologie, Le Feu de Barbusse, récit à la fois concret et symbolique, et Le Voyage de Déhghân, plus sommaire et documentaire, traduisent le même désir à dire l'indicible du feu et de l'horreur. Ces récits proprement mimétiques suivent la logique linéaire du souvenir et se veulent lisibles. Mais une deuxième vague de textes, postérieure aux combats, privilégie le fictionnel sur le factuel. Cris de Gaudé et Le Scorpion d'Abkénar, avec leur approche post-apocalyptique de l'événement, renouvellent le genre. La mise en scène de la guerre, loin d'être véridique ou vérifiable, est ici fragmentaire, voire lacunaire, avec des éléments de rupture et d'incohérence. Le soldat progresse dans un monde d'errance et de cauchemar. Plus ou moins adossée à une nouvelle image de la guerre, la narration contemporaine défie la possibilité de totaliser l'expérience de guerre et dénonce le vide qu'elle a causé. Mais la fiction romanesque table sur ce vide pour renouveler l'esthétique du sujet. / This research investigates the literature of the Great War as well as Iran-Iraq war, instigators of shock and disruption, narrated by a myriad of novels and fictions which are shared between restitution and invention. It focuses on the expressive capacity of fiction to illustrate the phenomenon of war. By unraveling contexts of the comparing literatures, the major tendencies of poetic of the novel of war are established first. Then the frontline stories are studied. In the core of the action, the first movement of the texts has testimonial and realistic concern. Under fire of Barbusse is a realistic and symbolic novel, while Journey of Dehghan is more brief and documentary. Despite their differences in terms of style and axiology, both have been contributed with the same desire to demonstrate inexpressible fire and horror of war. This part of literary war novels follows the mimetic pattern of the logic of memories and expected to be legible. But the second movement of texts – written following the end of main battles - favors the fictional to factual form. Screams of Gaudé and The Scorpion of Abkénar with their post-apocalyptic perspective comprise a new kind of fiction. The staging of war - far from being accurate and verifiable - is fragmented and even lacunar with signs of bursting and incoherency. The soldier rises through wandering and nightmare. Almost based on the new image of war, the contemporary narratives challenge the possibility of depicting a complete panorama of war and denounce the vacuum it leaves behind. The novelistic fiction, however, avails itself of such vacuum to revive the aesthetics of the subject.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis applies the ontological turn to the war fiction of veteran authors, Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien. It argues that some veteran authors desire to communicate truth through fiction. Choosing to communicate truth through fiction hints at a new perspective on reality and existence that may not be readily accepted or understood by those who lack combat experience. The non-veteran understanding of war can be more informed by entertaining the idea that a multiplicity of realities exists. Affirming the combat veteran reality—the post-war ontology—and acknowledging the non-veteran reality—rooted in what I label “pre-war” or “civilian” ontology—helps enhance the reader’s understanding of what veteran authors attempt to communicate through fiction. This approach reframes the dialogic interaction between the reader and the perspectives presented in veteran author’s fiction through an emphasis on “radical alterity” to the point that telling and reading such stories represent distinct ontological journeys. Both Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien provide intriguing perspectives on reality through their fiction, particularly in the way their characters perceive and express morality, guilt, time, mortality, and even existence. Vonnegut and O’Brien’s war experiences inform these perspectives. This does not imply that the authors hold an identical perspective on the world or that combat experience yields an ontological understanding of the world common to every veteran. It simply asserts that applying the ontological turn to these writings, and the writings of other combat veterans, reveals that those who experience combat first-hand often walk away from those experiences with a changed ontological perspective.