The Poetics of Otherness: War, Trauma, and Literature

Despite the breadth suggested by the title of Hart's book, it does not sufficiently convey the scope of his study, in which both “poetics” and “otherness” are very broadly defined. “Poetics” here is roughly equivalent to “language,” and “otherness” refers to relationships ranging from opposing sides in war and other violent conflicts to geographical differences that do not produce violence to spatial and temporal differences to divergent literary modes to translation and multilingualism. The study also traces a wide chronological arc, from the genocide of New World colonization to the genocide of the Holocaust. The theme at the book's center is trauma, which Hart defines as the “rubbing or turning of a wound” (13), above all, the trauma of war. But as the previous list shows, he is interested in nonviolent forms of otherness as well.Hart's volume is so eclectic and erudite that a brief chapter summary will be helpful for orientation. Following an introductory overview in the first chapter, the second chapter plunges the reader into a subject on which Hart has written a good deal, colonialism, specifically, the global trauma of indigenous peoples in the West Indies as colonized by the Spanish. Chapter 3 suggests what poetry can do better than other genres, drawing on another of Hart's principal areas of expertise, Shakespeare. The fourth chapter treats violence in Shakespeare with regard to war and colonial expansion. Chapter 5 surveys a “geography of otherness” (69) in its account of the early seventeenth-century journal of Father Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit who cofounded a mission in China, recounting his experiences in Nanjing and Beijing. The sixth chapter takes the war poetry of British writer T. W. H. Crosland, writing in 1916, as the point of departure for a discussion of intertextual representations of war ranging from the Bible and Homer to modern poetry. Chapter 7 surveys a detailed account by Duncan Campbell Scott, a clerk in the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs in the late nineteenth century, which focuses on Native American soldiers in the Great War. The eighth and ninth chapters treat poetry of the First and Second World Wars, respectively. The final chapter offers brief stories of individual Holocaust survivors. These chapters are tied together less by a thesis than a theme: the manifold forms of otherness and discord—the “fallenness or unpeace of the world” (9)—they express.One rarely encounters studies of comparative literature as heterogeneous as this one, treating poetry, drama, nonfictional prose, and a journal; multiple literary traditions; and canonical authors rubbing shoulders with much lesser-known writers. Added to this is Hart's alternation between intensive and extensive treatment of the many texts he considers. Interestingly for an author who is also a poet himself, the three most intensive discussions deal with nonfiction prose texts. The first of these is his gruesome and memorable portrayal of the treatment of the West Indian natives by the Spanish as recounted in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. Las Casas depicts the brutality of the Spanish invaders as virtually gleeful as they cut off the hands and noses of the natives, impale them on spikes, butcher them to feed their dogs, rape their women, grill their babies or smash them against rocks, set their dogs on them to be dismembered, or massacre them en masse. Hart stresses that this account, while it may seem hyperbolic, graphically conveys Las Casas's critique of the sexual, military, and economic exploitation exercised by the Spanish, forms of oppression that prefigured similar abuses continuing to the present day.We encounter a similarly intensive treatment of a nonfictional text in Hart's discussion of Ricci's journal. Father Ricci wrote his journal in Italian, but it was translated into Latin and edited by Father Nicola Trigault, a Portuguese Jesuit who served the China Mission for nearly thirty years. Trigault brought the journal from Macao to Rome, publishing it in 1615. Although the work appeared subsequently in several further Latin editions as well as in French, German, Spanish, and partially in Italian and English, the original Italian version was not published until the early twentieth century. Hart uses this work and its transmission to illustrate the way translation and its context have a particular geography and history. He cites Trigault's editorial comment, for instance, that his completion of the translation was impeded by the fact that he made the difficult return voyage from China to Europe first by sea and then by land rather than completely by sea. Hence, as Hart observes, the translator's travels become part of the manuscript and its history. Hart's close analysis of Trigault's commentary illuminates Trigault's mediation between the manners and customs of China as recounted by Ricci and the European audience to which his translation is addressed. The journal's “travels”—from composer through editor and subsequent translators—shed important light on East–West relations in the age of global colonization.The third intensive discussion of otherness in the volume is Hart's reading of a single chapter in volume three of the six volumes in Canada in the Great World War (1918–21), “The Canadian Indians and the Great World War” by Duncan Campbell Scott. Hart highlights two themes in the chapter in particular, Scott's patriotism as an enemy of Germany and his ambivalence toward the Indians who are fighting on behalf of Canada. Alongside a good deal of direct quotation from the chapter, Hart engages in close linguistic analysis, such as when he notes that Scott's tortured syntax seems to be satirizing German propaganda against the natives. Yet while Scott praises the loyal and generous contributions of the Canadian Indians to the war effort and tells a number of their individual stories, he describes some of their rites as “weird” and “strange” (146) and believes that they should and will eventually assimilate into white culture.I have elaborated on these examples since they are likely to be less well known to the typical comparatist, but what Hart describes as the “heart of this book” (184) is a section in which he treats diverse war poetry, proceeding from intertextual resonances of Homer. He compares several well-known translations in English of the opening of The Iliad, including his own, to show the way these translations are differently conditioned by divergent sociohistorical contexts. His look at the intertextuality of Homer culminates in close readings of poems by Keats and Yeats. The remainder of the chapter moves from The Aeneid to Anglo-Saxon battle poetry to war poetry by John Donne, Victor Hugo, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, and Andrei Voznesensky. Hart's description of his procedure in this central chapter can be seen to characterize the activity of the book as a whole: “shifting languages and times as a kind of estrangement effect, an otherness in search of otherness, a way of coming to terms with violence, trauma and war across time and place through poetry and translation” (109).In contrast to the three intensive treatments discussed earlier, his chapters on the poetry of the two World Wars present extensive surveys: of poets writing in English about the First World War and of European poets responding to World War II. In both instances Hart's range, as in the book in general, is impressive, as he analyzes the way language works to convey the experience of war and, in the case of the Second World War, of atomic war and the Holocaust as well. In his final chapter, Hart expands on stories of individual Holocaust survivors, as edited by writer and Jewish archivist Sylvia Rothchild, to convey a sense of the humanity of Jews in the Holocaust.Because of its considerable eclecticism, it is difficult to contextualize Hart's book within comparative studies or to assess its usefulness within a particular literary field. It contains no reference to the theory of postcolonialism or trauma, but this is not its orientation: its focus is on an abundance of primary materials. Given the scope and volume of these materials, the study will be of interest to anyone working in the literature of war.

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