In an essay on British literature about the First World War, Paul Fussell discusses “cultural paradigms,” defining them as “the systems of convention and anticipation that determine which of the objective phenomena of experience will be registered by the individual―what we ‘make of things,’ and how we fit them into the conceptual frames our culture has taught us to consider important.”ii Together with the personal experience and individual vision of the author, and the powerful influence of literary convention,iii these cultural paradigms establish specific symbol-systems that provide the conceptual framework for “fictional responses”iv to particular historical situations―situations that, effectively, require the suspension of norms crucial in peaceful societies and sanctify the use of collective violence. Thus, the literature of war brings forth models of a nation’s (or a people’s) “storifying of experience:” acts of “literary sense-making”i (or the lack of it) performed in response to problems of national or group importance. So conflict becomes the occasion for questioning the validity of those individual and collective values and concepts of self and other in whose name one might die prematurely―especially at moments when victory is uncertain. In the extreme situation of war, society demands that its (mostly young) citizens risk their lives for the common good.
Stories of war display essential cultural concepts, expectations, and self-images more prominently than other kinds of literature.
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