World ouTlook: An UndergrAdUAte JoUrnAl of InternAtIonAl AffAIrs
“They come home Talking dirTy”:
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david Jones’ in ParenThesis and The language of The fronT
Sarah Hughes
War requires its own language--one that is often harsh, lewd, technical, and brutally honest. This so-called soldier language is essential for the military way of life, but while the foreign form of expression unites soldiers, it simultaneously estranges them from the world outside. Though sensible on the frontlines, war language becomes obsolete when soldiers return home, unable to adequately describe their experiences with everyday speech. The spontaneous creation of a soldier language, which results in further separation between combatant and non-combatant worlds, is as universal as war itself.
Never call a spade a spade when you can call it a goddam shovel. — Old Army adage2
There are few facts that are indisputably true of war. Even those who have been a part of it are inevitably left with keywords such as “undefinable” and “indescribable” to access their experience. Even with the strictly ordered and documented rules of military engagement, war itself is impossibly chaotic. But there are still patterns to be found, and they are often universal, reaching across boundaries of era and nation. There are patterns of social behavior, patterns of movement, patterns of traumatic reaction— and there are also patterns of communication. The warfront needs its own method of expression, its own way of relaying information and emotion; and “normal”, “everyday” speech cannot possibly suffice. Instead, we recognize a distinct type of “soldier language” that develops amongst fighting men on any warfront, a kind of “ ‘professional language’ that is more or less incomprehensible to those outside”.3 This language of war is characterized by several main elements. On a formal level, what is often referred to as “service talk” , makes
Sarah Hughes graduated from Dartmouth College in 2007 with a major in Theater and a minor in Creative Writing/Poetry. Sarah wrote this paper while enrolled in Proffessor Winograd’s “Theater 10: War Zones”. The paper won the Chase Essay Prize, a prize awarded annually by Dartmouth’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.
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liberal use of abbreviations and acronyms— something one would certainly expect in a situation where men are trying to convey life-or-death messages as quickly and clearly as possible. Speech is “terse, plain, and handy” ; it’s often technical even as it is simultaneously exaggerated and colorful.4 The tone of military language is generally lacking in sentimentality and sympathy, and the vocabulary is usually low, harsh, and full of taboo words and phrases; “a modern sociologist would dismiss service talk as racist, sexist, chauvinist, and scatological. ”5 So-called soldier talk is “frequently bawdy, often profane, sometimes foul”.6 Even so there is unmistakably present a sense of obedience, comradeship, and some kind of courtesy— a function of the ordered, hierarchical nature of military service. All of these features— the clipped, tight rhythm, the technical terms and abbreviations, the dirty vocabulary— make soldier talk its own, albeit somewhat isolated language: vibrant and necessary at the front, but useless and incomprehensible once the war is over. The introductory page to Frank Hailey’s 1982 glossary Soldier Talk captures some of this contradiction:
Whether you are a soldier, or an ex-soldier, you will draw enjoyment from these pages. If you are a soldier, these words will help you better understand the language of the “old soldier” who has gone before. Exsoldiers, whether they wore on their shoulders the stars of generals, or sported the chevronless sleeves of buck private will recall those days in uniform when they enjoyed that special kind of companionship they never knew before shouldering a rifle, and for all too many, have never experienced again after returning to civilian life.7
Clearly there is a camaraderie felt by all soldiers as they speak their common language, and a sense of linguistic isolation they can feel upon returning home. Shared language becomes representative of shared experience. This passage also brings up an important point about the universality of this soldier language. It suggests that new soldiers will find common threads between the language they speak and that spoken by their predecessors; with only a few clarifications they will find a universal version of “soldier talk” that transcends time. This makes sense— all wars perform the same general function, summed up well by one of the characters on FX’s new Iraq war drama “Over There”: “[I’m] not here to die for my country. [I’m] here to make the other guy die for his.”8 A war language must be clear and concise, and it must also contain elements of the degrading and dirty. In a war zone nothing else is pretty, so why should the language be? On top of these features, most military language is riddled with euphemisms. For soldiers on the front lines, these are necessary lies. Soldiers need to think of their enemies as others, not as individuals, in order to be effective in destroying them. Robin Lakoff addresses this in her article “The Power of Words in War”:
In wartime, language must be created to enable soldiers and nonsoldiers alike to see the other side as killable, to overcome the queasiness over the taking of human life. Soldiers, and those who remain at home,
sArAh hUghes
learn to call their enemies by names that make them seem not quite human— inferior, contemptible, and not like “us”.9
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Euphemistic, substituting language is a means to an end; in order to gain support and strength, military operations need to be defined by terms that don’t emphasize their violence and destruction. Nobody’s going to support a campaign called “Bomb and Kill Everyone Now”, that’s too graphic and it offends our sensibilities. We need to numb ourselves to a certain extent to what’s really going on in a war zone (or, to use another commonly-employed euphemism: “over there”, a term that delocalizes and over-generalizes the site of the killing); otherwise we might become outraged and lose faith in the fight. An article in The Washington Post describes how “warfare…generate[s] linguistic Novocain…designed to numb”:
Language in a time of war can be illuminating or obfuscating, depending on your perspective…To twist the cliché, the first casualty of war is language, “casualty” being an ancient euphemism for “killed” or “maimed” or “psychologically damaged beyond repair.” War language can be especially monstrous in that it is designed to disguise, neuter and deflect the chaos it describes. As George Orwell once wrote, “When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”10
War is so extreme, then, that it requires the creation of a whole new language and set of terms to describe it. William Lutz, a professor of linguistics at Rutgers, explains that “language works best when it paints a mental picture for us, when it palpably and vividly creates a reality in our minds. When you want it to do the exact opposite, you create a new language for that…Things are only what we label them.”11 This new “war language” comes into play both for the troops on the front line and for those at home. Military terms often spread quickly into use in noncombat zones, oftentimes losing most of their original meaning on the way. For instance, the term “shock and awe”, coined in the current Iraq war, refers to a campaign of air-bombing designed to intimidate an enemy into submission (once, the term for a similar operation was “blitzkrieg”). Its use has expanded into all areas of “homefront” life, appearing in a news piece about the Oscars and on Rush Limbaugh’s Web site, where he claimed to have “shocked and awed” the liberal media.12 War terms often show up in sports, too. Sportscasters use terms like “throwing bombs” and “sudden death” to describe sports moves and plays.13 But do all these mixed meanings carry with them mixed messages? Robert Lipsyte, a writer for USA Today, thinks so; he feels those at home are beginning to blur the lines of reality with their overuse of multi-meaning war words:
The confusion of war reality and sports fantasy already is claiming casualties among the most vulnerable Americans. Miletic was watching CNN the other day when his 6-year-old son ran past the TV, took a quick look, turned to his dad and asked, “What’s the score?”14
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The military euphemisms that reach homefront ears may have lost their power to offend us, but non-combatants are still horrified when faced with the everyday, nitty-gritty “soldier talk” of the front lines, a different sort of war language altogether. For instance, when “Saving Private Ryan”, Steven Spielberg’s violent depiction of American soldiers on the Normandy beaches, was to be shown in the U.S. on Veteran’s Day 2004, many television stations refused to show the film for fear of losing their licenses due to the harsh language spoken by film’s soldier characters.
…Defenders of “Saving Private Ryan”…say that its use of the “f” and the “s” words and the gut-spilling are hardly gratuitous. But stations are nervous of losing their licenses when they come up for renewal if they go along with ABC’s decision not to replace the swearing with polite alternatives.15
Sometimes, though, the media will acknowledge, emphasize, and purposely include “real soldier language” in their depictions of war situations. This serves to make their representations of war seem more realistic—which in turn makes good drama. An example of this is FX’s recent show about the Iraq conflict, “Over There”. A review of the show’s first episode describes the harsh, unedited violence and states that
…the language is just as raw. There is almost unbearable tension in any war zone (and particularly in a theater like Iraq where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys), and that is often reflected by the way soldiers talk and the words they use. The language on “Over There” may not be what viewers necessarily want to hear, but the characters are honest in their emotion.16
“Over There” seems to be doing its best to give an honest portrayal of the realities of life on the front lines, complete with the soldier talk that accompanies on-the-ground action. “Gunner Palace”, a recent Iraq documentary, has the same aim except that here the soldiers are not actors but real men under fire. This has caused an unusual reaction amongst the normally conservative motion picture ratings board; they’ve given the piece a PG-13 instead of an R rating. Apparently the board appreciates the need to realistically portray warfare and “the raw language of real American soldiers in Baghdad” to a younger audience “who themselves might be considering joining the armed forces.”17 Documentary director Michael Tucker agrees:
This is not about the number of times they use [a particular expletive], it’s about soldiers…The cultural landscape is shifting. You need to keep each film in context. There’s nothing we should be ashamed of. These are important words. And this is how soldiers express themselves during war.18
This is, indeed, how soldiers express themselves during war. In the Iraq war, just as in those before it, a harsh language is required for the harsh situations ordinary men and boys find themselves in. So if this kind of “soldier talk” is how soldiers express themselves to each other
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during a war, what kind of language do they use afterwards—to express themselves to others, to describe their experiences, and to come to terms with what they’ve seen? David Jones, a Welsh writer who served in World War I, is a unique source for the answers to these questions. In Parenthesis, the book he published some twenty years after his WWI experience, describes a six-month stint on the front lines from the point of view of Private John Ball, a semi-autobiographical version of the author. The writing in In Parenthesis is unlike any other war book, and it is one of the most effective pieces of writing I’ve come across, in that it describes an impossible-to-describe experience in a language which bridges the gap between soldier and non-combatant, warfront and homefront. Thomas Dilworth, in his book The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones, describes the enormous range of Jones’ writing:
In language, modality, and content In Parenthesis is so varied that it is difficult to classify…it modulates between the narrative mode, in which events are related in the second or third person; the dramatic mode, in which infantrymen speak or think; the lyrical mode, in which images are vividly perceived, sometimes with subjective intensity; and the associative or allusive mode, in which a personal or cultural past is evoked.19
Each of these “modes” serves a purpose in the writing, and each brings the reader closer and closer to an understanding of the text and of the author’s experience. The book begins with a soldier dialogue in “dramatic mode”, situating us immediately with its strong voices and characters: “ ’49 Wyatt, 01549 Wyatt./Coming sergeant./Pick ‘em up, pick ‘em up—I’ll stalk within yer chamber…”20 This “mode” continues throughout the book, some passages with more graphic speech than others, although from his comment in the preface it seems Jones may have edited much of the very dirty language out: “I have been hampered by the convention of not using impious and impolite words, because the whole shape of our discourse was conditioned by the use of such words.”21 The best examples of “narrative mode” often come at times when the characters seem lonely or quiet; when it is night or they are on patrol. In Part 3 of the book, entitled “Starlight Order” and set in the trenches at night, we get a good example of the narrative mode’s evocative and fragmented nature:
Now when a solitary star-shell rose, a day-brightness illumined them; long shadows of their bodies walking, darkening out across the fields; slowly contracting with the light’s rising, grotesquely elongating with its falling— this large lengthening is one with all this other. Machine gunner in Gretchen Trench remembered his night target. Occasionally a rifle bullet raw snapt like tenuous hide whip by spiteful ostler handled. On both sides the artillery was altogether dumb.22
The third mode, the “allusive/associative”, is also important. Jones is a strong lyrical and poetically allusive writer, and these passages tie
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this war experience in with classical Greek literature, medieval folklore, and Jones’ own Welsh storytelling tradition in a fascinating way, while still keeping us grounded in the thoughts and minds of the men in the trenches:
She’s the girl with the smiling eyes,/ she’s the Bracelet Giver,/ she’s a regular draw with the labour companies,/ whereby/ the paved army-paths are hers that grid the island which is/ her dower./ Elen Luyddawg she is— more she is than/ Helen Argive.23
All of these modes come together to describe Jones’ war experience in a way that both situates and displaces us. The voices here are strong— it’s clear that Jones was “over there”, that he lived through the war and saw firsthand everything he describes. It’s as though he observed his experience so well that he was able to write about it from a multitude of perspectives, rather than being limited only to what he saw from the trenches. In the preface he explains what it was like to watch how the war affected his comrades and himself:
It was curious…to watch them, oneself part of them, respond to the war landscape, for I think the day by day in the Waste Land, the sudden violences and the long stillnesses, the sharp contours and unformed voids of that mysterious existence, profoundly affected the imaginations of those that suffered it. It was a place of enchantment…that landscape ‘spoke with a grimly voice’.24
Jones captures both that sense of “enchantment” and that “grimly landscape” of war in In Parenthesis. This range of ability in his writing, stems from his uses of the multiple voices and modes. But his ability to synthesize them is what gives Jones the authoritative voice that pulls the reader into the writing and into the world of war. In his preface, Jones does a lot of explaining. It’s enlightening to read what he has to say about the process of writing a war book, especially his explanation for the choice of title:
This writing is called ‘In Parenthesis’ because I have written it in a kind of space between— I don’t know between quite what— but as you turn aside to do something; and because for us amateur soldiers (and especially for the writer…) the war itself was a parenthesis— how glad we thought we were to step outside its brackets at the end of ’18— and also because our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis.
One of the “spaces between” to which Jones may be referring is that of language. At times the writer seems to perceive of this specific war as part of a universal human experience, an ongoing war story represented in In Parenthesis by sections of heightened, poetic, almost musical language (Dilworth’s so-called “lyrical” and “allusive/associative” modes). In these parts of the writing, Jones constantly alludes to and draws parallels between World War I and history’s other great wars, stretching the universality of war back through a chivalrous, heroic past.
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As W. S. Merwin describes in his foreword to the book: “All [the] ancient presences—Shakespeare, Welsh tradition, the Roman heritage—inform the resonant language of In Parenthesis and give it its pace and power and scope.”25 Paul Fussell, in his book of essays The Great War and Modern Memory, also recognizes the sense of experiential universality that it sometimes seems Jones is aiming to demonstrate in In Parenthesis: “In all his work…the experience of The Soldier is taken…as representative of essential human experience. We are all on a hazardous advance through ‘a place of enchantment’…”26 There is obviously something in Jones’ “writing” that wants to show war as a common experience that stretches across boundaries of time and place; he uses the allusive/associative language mode to do this. But there is a divide, a “space between”, a tension in his writing. He uses several modes, not just one. Even as he wants to emphasize war’s universality, Jones can’t let go of the individuality of this particular Great War. He is loath to isolate himself and his comrades in their experience at the front, but he must acknowledge this war’s uniquely modern nature. He is unable to fully leave out the true language of the front in favor of more poetic words, and in the preface he in fact makes a point of emphasizing its importance: “…the whole shape of our discourse was conditioned by the use of such [impious and impolite] words.”27 Jones uses the specific language and words of his comrades and himself to create a distinction, to separate this war story from the greater “universal history” of warfare. There is, then, a “space between” the two main voices in In Parenthesis: the reflective, lyrical voice that anchors us in history and tradition; and what is the true voice of the poem, the “narrative/ dramatic” one that, rough and broken, moves through a first-hand experiential description of fragmented battle images and a familiar, quick and dirty soldier dialogue, giving one a sense of the confusion and displacement of this man’s particular experience in this particular modern war. But this “narrative/dramatic” writing mode in and of itself situates us and ties Jones’ story and experience to any other soldier’s. Unique as his writing may be, there is still an inevitable connection between Jones’ soldier talk and the words of the characters in “Over There”. Both are part of that universal “soldier language”, the code of discussion, of description, of “a special kind of companionship” different from that of the homefront. Jones himself acknowledges that despite the roughness of his soldiers’ dialogue, their voices still bear some relation to the universal and allusive poetry of the rest of In Parenthesis:
The very repetition of them made them seem liturgical, certainly deprived them of malice, and occasionally, when skillfully disposed, and used according to established but flexible tradition, gave a kind of significance, and even at moments a dignity, to our speech. Sometimes their juxtaposition in a sentence, and when expressed under poignant circumstances, reached real poetry….I say more: the ‘Bugger! Bugger!’ of a man detailed, had often about it the ‘Fiat! Fiat!’ of the Saints.28
The real “space”, then, is between combatants and non-combat-
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ants—all wars are parenthetical, completely disconnected from any sort of “normal” day-by-day experience. There must, then, be a language created to speak in and about this parenthetical experience, the aforementioned “soldier language”. Language can be a bonding, equalizing, cohesive force—it creates groups who identify with each other in the most basic of ways: through communication. But in joining it also divides; a united group can only be created by the exclusion of its nonmembers. The soldier speaks a different language because he exists in a different world; he is “othered” and estranged from anyone outside of a war experience, from anyone who has never been to the front. While each war, be it World War I or Iraq, is unique; war itself, and the phenomenon of a spontaneously created “soldier language”, is universal.
endnotes
1 Tim O’Brian, The Things They Carried, (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990): 76-77. 2 John R. Elting; Dan Cragg; and Ernest L. Deal, A Dictionary of Soldier Talk, (New York: The Scribner Press, 1984): ix. 3 4 5 6 7 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid, xi. Frank Hailey, Soldier Talk, (Massachusetts: D. Irving & Co, 1982): i.
8 “A Brave New War Drama,” San Jose Mercury News [California], 27 July 2005. 9 Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. “The Power of Words in War.”Wordplay. Feb/Mar (2005): 6-7. 10 “The Soothing Sound Of Fighting Words,” The Washington Post 26 March 2003: C01. 11 “The Soothing Sound Of Fighting Words,” The Washington Post 26 March 2003: C01. 12 “Picking Up War Language in Other Venues,” Morning Edition (NPR) 24 March 2003. 13 14 “Sports Metaphors Trivialize War.” USA Today 7 April 2003: 15A. Ibid.
15 “TV Stations Drop Private Ryan Over Bad Language,” The Times [United Kingdom] 12 November 2004: 41. 16 “A Brave New War Drama,” San Jose Mercury News [California] 27 July 2005.
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17 “Raw Language Of War Will Fall On PG-13 Ears,” The Washington Post 25 February 2005. 18 “Raw Language Of War Will Fall On PG-13 Ears,” The Washington Post 25 February 2005. 19 Thomas Dilworth, The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988): 38. 20 21 22 23 24 25 David Jones, In Parenthesis, (New York: New York Review Books, 2003): 1. Ibid: xii. Ibid: 42-43. Ibid: 81. Ibid: x-xi. Ibid: v.
26 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000: 145. 27 28 David Jones, In Parenthesis, (New York: New York Review Books, 2003): xii. Ibid: xii.
BIBlIogrAphy
“A Brave New War Drama.” San Jose Mercury News [California] 27 Jul. 2005. Dilworth, Thomas. The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Elting, John R; Dan Cragg; and Ernest L. Deal. A Dictionary of Soldier Talk. New York: The Scribner Press, 1984. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Jones, David. In Parenthesis. New York: New York Review Books, 2003. Jones, David. “On the Difficulties of One Writer of Welsh Affinity Whose Language is English. In The Dying Gaul. Ed. Harman Grisewood, London: Faber and Faber, 1978. 30-34. Hailey, Frank. Soldier Talk. Massachusetts: D. Irving & Co, 1982. Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. “The Power of Words in War.” Wordplay. Feb/Mar (2005): 6-7. O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990. “Picking Up War Language in Other Venues.” Morning Edition (NPR) 24 Mar. 2003. “Raw Language Of War Will Fall On PG-13 Ears.” The Washington Post 25
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“Sports Metaphors Trivialize War.” USA Today 7 Apr. 2003: 15A. “The Soothing Sound Of Fighting Words.” The Washington Post 26 Mar. 2003: C01. The Spoken Word: Poets. London: The British Library Board, 2003. “TV Stations Drop Private Ryan Over Bad Language.” The Times [United King dom] 12 Nov. 2004: 41. Winograd, Annabelle. Notes from 6/-8/23 lectures. 2005.