In his previous book, Like the air we breathe: the sense of culture (Acantilado), 2023 National Essay Award, Antonio Monegal (Barcelona, 1957) defined culture as a toolbox for life. Now the professor of Comparative Literature at the Pompeu Fabra University puts one of those tools at the center of his new essay: war. “People find it very uncomfortable to say that war is culture. And they say: no, man, culture is what will save us from war, it is the opposite. But since we have been a civilization, there has been war, it is so deeply rooted in our way of organizing ourselves and imagining that it is one of the tools in the repertoire. When faced with a certain type of conflict, the option that is quickly resorted to is to resolve it through violence. Since we are little we are taught to accept it as normal. Nations are built from the memory of wars. Or from his oblivion,” he admits.
In The Silence of War (Cliff), on the cover of which those old toy soldiers appear that today, he says, have been replaced by video games, he examines how cultural creation, from Homer to Saving Private Ryan, passing through Stendhal, Kurt Vonnegut or Guernica, has explained the war to those of us who have not experienced it, shaping our vision of it. For millennia, and until very recently, glorifying it through a genre, the epic, “which is war propaganda,” he insists.
“All of us from my generation, children of people who have lived through war, have heard people say: 'You don't know what that was because you weren't there.' “How do we come to that knowledge of something so elusive,” he asks. And, he reflects, “when the government tells us that we must rearm, invest more in defense, the position of each citizen depends on a vision of what the war means that has come from somewhere. This is what I try to cover in the book. There is no neutral representation of war, none,” he emphasizes.
And it starts, as it could not be otherwise, with Homer and the Iliad. For the Trojan War. A Homer who, with his verses of conflict, inaugurates the epic tradition in the West, which has not left us. “Homer provides the narrative framework by which the explanation of what happens in wars is organized. In the epic story there is no silence, they tell you everything, it has a beginning, development and conclusion. Almost a rationality, which always depends on the end: war is explained in one way if you win and in another if you lose,” he reasons.
And he points out that “today the epic is still there because, if not, no one would go to war. You need to convince part of the population that a war must be fought. And that requires an epic speech, glorifying the cause. What has changed from the 19th century until now is that until then there was nothing negative associated with war. The ruling class was a warrior class. The war justified that they were the ruling class, they were needed. Until the 18th century, the aristocracy was always the people capable of waging war. Today war is seen as something catastrophic, as a lesser evil or something inevitable, but the discourse has changed. The images in the media are not soldiers in battles but victims of bombings, dead children. The change comes in the First World War with the mechanization of war, which leaves no room for individual heroism. Today the hero is the one who saves someone.”
And he points out that “one of the effects of the fall of the epic is that it is much more difficult for European countries to recruit soldiers. The country where the epic endures best, and this is seen in its cinema, is the United States. The epic of its western, its war or science fiction films continues to have a power that it has lost in the European worldview, and as a result He is capable of taking his soldiers to war with very little social resistance. And that has to do with the hegemony of an epic discourse."
In that sense, he says, "the cinema is the one that supports it the most. There is the collaboration between the big production companies and the Pentagon, which for Top Gun provides the planes and pilots. But the military has the right to veto the script." Monegal ventures that “video games today take the place of much of this war cinema, there is a brutal percentage of video games that rely on the representation of violence. You have the film and it is also immersive, you get used to the fact that you are the one who does it. shoot, and in fact the American army recruiting website has a free video game.”
In his book he collects the long tradition of creators who have fought against the warrior exaltation of the epic. That they have tried to interrogate the silence of war, the distance between real experience and its representation, what remains outside of it. “Is an anti-war cinema possible – he asks – given the visual fascination that violence has? Without news on the front, in the version they just made, it is no longer an anti-war film. The novel was, the first film version of the year 29 as well. The latter is fascinated by that aesthetic."
Yes, there are films that are clearly against it. Abel Gance's J'accuse, when the dead of the First World War rise to call the living to account. Or Johnny took his rifle. And today there are good works in the field of documentary, such as the film about Mariupol. "They seek to contrast the epic discourse that is even in Saving Private Ryan, which begins as a great denunciation of violence and ends like a John Wayne film."
Along these lines, he points from the experience of war photographers who today try to show the experience of anonymous victims to proposals such as that of Kurt Vonnegut in Matadero Cinco, “a novel that in theory wants to bear witness to the author's experience in the Second World War in the bombings of Dresden and becomes a work of science fiction so that there can be no epic story. He makes a complaint about the senselessness of war, making us laugh. And, of course, he addresses tragedy, from Euripides' The Trojan Women to Wajdi Mouawad's theater: “The Greeks give us the epic but also the tragedy. They tell us, hey, look what happens to the losers, they show that war is meaningless and that violence only leads to horror and destruction.”
