Seeing battle, knowing war: feminist re-visioning in Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu's "The Man Whose Heart They Could See".(Critical Essay)

Abstract

As an exploration of the themes of disillusionment and the failure of language, Romanian writer Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu's "The Man Whose Heart They Could See" would seem to share much with better-known men's writing on the war such as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms or Henri Barbusse's Le Feu: Journal d'une Escouade. But a careful reading of the text reveals some crucial differences from these works. Treating the subject of war not in terms of an easily definable "scene of battle" or "war front" but instead as a deeply entrenched cultural logic in which varied aspects of society are both affected and, in an important sense, complicit, "The Man Whose Heart They Could See" mounts a critique of language far more radical and modernist than that found in most war literature, one which explores the extent to which questions of historical memory are inextricably bound up with issues of gender and power.

Key Words: women and war, feminist literature, Papadat-Bangescu

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When Mary Lee remarked that a book about war "may not, perhaps, be written by a man" who "sees only one small corner of the army," she was working to overturn one of the moldiest assumptions of the war literature: that "first-hand" accounts of the scene of battle written by men constitute the only "authentic" writing on war. (1) If this idea rankled writers like Lee in 1929, little wonder that contemporary feminist scholars show concern when, as recently as 1990, Sam Hynes writes that the authentic texts about war "have the authority of direct experience," and that a woman's writing on war must be " about failure, a woman's unsuccessful attempt to enter the heroic world of war" (2). Fortunately critics and writers like Margaret Higonnet, Jane Marcus, and Elaine Showalter have contributed greatly to a new understanding of war--one that goes beyond the narrow focus of the "scene of battle" to examine, in Higonnet's words, "the broad social and economic mechanisms" deeply affected by war. (3) Viewed in this light, women's writing on war gains a long overdue legitimacy.

In the introduction to her valuable collection of women's writing on World War I, Lines of Fire, Ms. Higonnet notes that of women writers on the Great War who have been largely brushed aside by historians and cultural critics, those who wrote in languages other than English have received the least attention. "The historical documentation of the war," writes Higonnet, "has drawn freely on the published and unpublished memoirs and on the creative writing of men as soldiers and political leaders from many countries." The study of women's writing on the War "has by contrast been impoverished." (4) It is in part to redress this wrong that I offer the following discussion of "The Man Whose Heart They Could See," a chapter--the only one that has yet been translated into English--from Hortensia Papadat-Bengesgu's 1923 novel Belaurul, which takes as its theme the very concept of authenticity so central to literary modernism. Doubtless much of what I say here will bear revision in light of a much-hoped-for English translation of Belaurul in its entirety. In the meantime I ask pardon for dealing here with that most important metaphor of the Great War--a fragment.

"First man; then, when hit, animal, writhing and thrashing in articulate agony or making horrible snoring noises; then a 'thing.'" Thus Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, paraphrases the soldier-poet Charles Sorley's graphic description of the three stages of what Fussell refers to as "the transformation of man into corpse." (5) As a Red Cross nurse during World War I, the Romanian writer Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu was surely all-too-familiar with this transformation. She brings such experience to bear on "The Man Whose Heart They Could See," which takes as its subject the gradual decline of a soldier whose unique war wound has left his beating heart exposed. Told from the perspective of Laura, a young Romanian Red Cross nurse with a penchant for idealizing the patient into a martyr, the chapter explores two of the grand themes of literature concerning World War I: the failure of language to convey realities almost too horrible to imagine, and the sense of disillusionment brought on by the realization of just what kind of violence "civilized" humanity is capable of--the loss of humanity so poignantly represented by Fussell's "man" turning into corpse. As an exploration of these themes, "The Man Whose Heart They Could See" would seem, at first glance, to share much with better-known men's writing on ...