Death and Desire
Some writers are critical of the war and the role they are expected to play; others are critical also of the ways in which the war and their role are represented. I am interested in how this critique is conducted. My readings of some of these novels and short stories indicate that the connections writers make between desire, love, and death during war reveal profound opposition to a war that was destroying their society.
Most people most of the time function as though Eros, or the sexual instinct as the embodiment of the will to live, and Thanatos, or death as libidinal sublimation, were completely separate. Yet Freud insists, only "by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts—Eros and the death instinct—never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life" (quoted in Boothby 1991, 4). Gray elaborates the consequence of this interplay when he writes that Freud's belief in the eternal enmeshment of Eros and Thanatos made him "pessimistic about ever eradicating war as an institution. Men are in one part of their being in love with death, and periods of war in human society represent the dominance of this impulsion" (Gray 1970, 53–54). War provides opportunities for such close, charged encounters.
Freud claims that war produces three reactions to death: anxiety, fear, and fright. Anxiety "describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. 'Fear' requires a definite object of which to be afraid. 'Fright,' however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it" (Freud 1961 [1919], 6). To these three categories I now add a fourth: denial.[14] Denial manifests itself in two ways: a reckless embrace of danger; a pretense that control has not been lost. Denial of death is a crucial aspect of wartime behavior because it accounts for the ways in
which individuals function in an otherwise impossible situation. War—in preparation and in metaphor—has become part of everyday life, another, if more extreme manifestation of systemic violence become ordinary. War can be war without feeling like war. It is best survived, for a while at least, if it is denied. More concretely, combat pilots deny death in war least fear and anxiety make them impotent.
Combat pilots in postmodern wars fight alone, seeing the enemy only as an electronic target. In a death-charged landscape they must overcome this alienating distance so as to remain alert and effective. Many pilots, actual as well as in films and novels, speak of an intense aliveness that translates into erotic fantasy. Wendy Chapkis describes the language that pilots use in the film Top Gun as eroticized and she quotes one as saying that viewing training films of F-14s in action gives him a "hard-on." Another pilot remarks that the enemy aircraft "'must be close, I'm getting a hard-on'" (Chapkis 1988, 109–10). They fight virtually alone and with the illusion of power and immortality because of their distance and situation above the enemy. They must not focus on death lest they lose their effectiveness. They must tap into what is most alive in them. Eros—desire for life experienced as sexual desire—is the body's most resilient resource against Thanatos.
The novels and short stories of men like Salah al-'Ansari and Dawud Salman al-Shuwayli interweave desire and death. The eroticism of fright confirms the appropriateness of such a death. Men who die suffused with love and excitement without fear and anger are real men who have not given in to the feminine within because they have directed the masculine out on to a feminized other. These two writers depict several men, often officers directing rather than engaging in combat, at the moment they realize that they have been mortally hit. They almost invariably hallucinate or project images of their beloved. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra labels this use of flashback, nearly always to a woman, a simplistic escape from dealing with trauma (quoted in Hammudi 1986, 208), whereas I read such flashbacks as serving an important function within this literary economy: death is enmeshed with fantasies that provide a libidinal sublimation. Stanley Rosenberg quotes a U.S. Air Force pilot who
had done duty in Vietnam: "First, just flying the airplane is a thrill. Then, you need to be dropping bombs. Then, you have to see what you're dropping bombs on. Then, to feel the thrill, you have to see that you've hit what you're dropping bombs on. Then, you need to be getting shot at while you see what you've blown up. Then, you have to be getting hit to feel the thrill, and the last thing is, to get dead" (Rosenberg 1993, 62–63).[15]
Sexual arousal is associated with risking death. Gray tries to theorize away the connections between death and desire as though afraid that such a connection might dilute the greatness of communal participation, of the loss of the ego in moments of ecstasy. Yet later in his analysis of erotic love in war he describes the soldiers' preoccupation with the need for women that derives from the desire for conquest of an interchangeable partner or enemy (Gray 1970, 45, 67). War writers like the Algerian Mohamed Dib and the German Freikorps of whom Theweleit wrote emphasize the connections between fear of death and erotic arousal. They create combatants whose fright is accompanied by erotic fantasies that counterbalance the threat of disintegration, physical as well as psychological, by producing an illusory unity, a reinforced masculinity so as to withstand the threat of dissolving into the feminine. Desire is good as long as it is not allowed release.
Dawud al-Shuwayli dedicates his 1988 novel Ababil (Flocks) to the heroic pilots, officers, engineers, and technicians of the 29th Air Unit, "emblems of Saddam's glorious Qadisiya."[16] This novel places in high relief the Eros-Thanatos construct. Yasin, an ace pilot on his mission over Iranian territory, is the hero. The planes take off in perfect flying formation, reach their target, drop their payloads, and then turn back. Yasin's plane is hit. Defying commands to bail out, he keeps on course and steers back home. Spartan warrior to the last, we assume that he will not risk being taken prisoner, perhaps even being raped or dying on enemy land. He will return dead or a hero (al-Shuwayli 1988, 74, 84, 92). The novel ends with Yasin's ecstatic dying utterance: "God is great!" This war cry, which has become emblematic of Islamic holy war, seems to mark the author's approval of death in a just war such as this one is for this man.
His inspiration for such bravery is Sausan. The echo of this woman's words reassures him not only of his masculinity but also of his potential heroism. For had he not been a hero she "would not have accepted to be related to you" (75). Then there is Amal, who is not merely inspiration, she is also an erotic presence from the moment that he is about to drop the bomb until his realization that he is going to die. The narrative fragments into a staccato alternation between descriptions of the present operation and flashbacks to encounters with Amal that become increasingly physical. He conflates signifieds as he interchangeably calls his plane and his fiancée his beloved (ya habibati ). As the crisis climaxes, he hears Amal again urging him to hold her tightly: "O, Yasin, embrace me . . . ! Stretch out your hands! Hold me close to you! Don't leave me like this! Without hope! Hold me to you!" (93). Frantically, he tries to grab hold of the 'atala . Although the reader assumes that what is referred to by 'atala is the pilot's "joystick," its actual meaning (according to Hans Wehr's Arabic-English Dictionary ) is a "crowbar" or (according to E. W. Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon ) a "large, or thick, rod of iron, having a wide head. Or, a thick staff of wood." Since the term is left imprecise, it is hard within this eroticized context not to assume a phallic referent. Yasin finally gives up, frozen with fright that, as Freud describes it, is "a lack of hypercathexis of the systems that would be the first to receive the stimulus. Owing to their low cathexis those systems are not in a good position for binding the inflowing amounts of excitation and the consequences of the breach in the protective shield follow all the more easily . . . the mechanical violence of the trauma would liberate a quantity of sexual excitation" (Freud 1961 [1919], 25, 27). Yasin has lost control of himself and of his plane. He swoops so low over the earth that he can see everything clearly. Then, at the height of the trauma, he is overwhelmed by a sense of dissolving: "The earth welcomes me. I see her opening her arms . . . she is calling to me" (al-Shuwayli 1988, 94). The association of danger, death, desire, and release in union is at once orgasmic and Oedipal—the son returning into the embrace of the mother.
In August 1993 I was interviewed by Wayne Ponds of National Public Radio's "Soundings." He was asking me about Gendering
War Talk , a collection of essays that I had edited with Angela Woollacott and that Princeton had just published. The following week, the Southern author Clyde Edgerton contacted me in connection with the program. He sent me a copy of a story he had written about his experience in Vietnam, a story he had never liked enough to publish. I was startled by the parallels between it and the Iraqi men's stories that I had analyzed. Briefly, "Search and Rescue" is about what a pilot believes to be his last moments. Fact is interspersed with fantasy. At the critical point, he flashes to a pornographic film he had once seen. A woman enters a room, takes off her long white robe. She sits naked on a couch, rubs her breasts, and "wets her lips. . . . The woman gets down on her hands and knees in front of the couch and looks behind her. A pig walks on screen from behind her and sniffs at her butt, which she wiggles back and forth." After a flash back to reality, the narrator returns to the pig, its penis, and the woman it is mounting.[17]
Not only male protagonists experience arousal in war, women do also. For women the stimulants are different. Wendy Chapkis notes that women in real life may be as susceptible as men to the eroticism of the military myth, but for different reasons. She writes that when women become combatants, the military myth provides "an avenue to personally transgress gender boundaries or as a means to project the eroticism of power on to male objects of desire" (Chapkis 1988, 111).
Although women were involved in the war—in 1976 Iraqi women were enrolled into the popular militia forces that, by 1982, had 40,000 women combatants (al-Khalil 1989, 92)—the novels and stories I have read do not describe military women. Military service is not necessarily key. As I have already argued, war literature can be the site for the transformation of a women into a combatant. These women challenge gender norms by refusing society's rules of proper conduct for women. The change from observer to combatant is often erotically marked, strikingly so in the literature on the Lebanese civil war. After bidding her husband farewell, Nuha Samara's protagonist of "Two Faces One Woman"
(1980) finds herself alone in the war. It is the first time that she has ever had the opportunity to think for herself, to make her own decisions. From this new vantage point, she begins to assess her situation rather differently. It is suddenly unacceptable that her husband should have left her in this dirty war, suddenly evident that she is not waiting passively. She is expected to cope alone in the chaos. Although at the time she had not objected to his decision to go, people's comments make her realize that staying alone involves responsibilities and self-defense. She cuts her hair, a literary convention that marks women's assumption of control over their lives, and enrolls in military training. The metamorphosis is erotically marked: looking at her newly masculinized image in the mirror, she masturbates. She then determines to find a lover and calls up her husband's best friend (Badran and Cooke 1990, 304–13).
The heroine of Hanan al-Shaykh's Story of Zahra also experiences sexual pleasure as she moves from the margins of the war to its center. When her neighborhood is plunged into a violence over which a sniper reigns supreme, Zahra begins to move out of her shell of pain and madness. Seeing others in pain makes her feel less alone, more willing to be touched. With time she adopts responsibility for those around her. Despite warnings, she ventures out into the menaced streets and makes her way to the building out of which the sniper is said to be functioning. If she can distract him even only for a while she will have saved one innocent person's life. Day after day, she trudges back to the building and up the stairs for a ritual reenactment of the first encounter. Finally, one day it is as though the sniper is actually making love to her, and he gives her pleasure. Zahra, like the woman in "Two Faces One Woman," has become a combatant who has found erotic pleasure in that role. She has not witnessed death while being constantly in its presence. She can thus imagine that the emblem of war's senseless killing is not a death machine but rather Sami, a man she would like as a husband for herself and as a father for their unborn child.
Likewise when Layla in al-Dulaymi's Seeds of Fire (see below) turns her job in the advertising agency into a site for the construction of a dissident discourse, she feels powerful and able to love Yasir. It is at the moment that these heroines recognize that
participation in the war always under the shadow of death gives them freedom, self-control, and the chance to affirm themselves as other than expected that they experience erotic desire and pleasure. These non-military women combatants bear out Chapkis's contention that making themselves into warriors allows women "to project the eroticism of power onto male objects of desire."
The difference between men's and women's erotic reactions to death in war is that whereas men's desire is activated by battle participation that confirms gender identity, women's desire marks the assumption of a role that contradicts social expectations of how they should behave. Each is in some ways overcoming the feminine condition that disables the warrior spirit. For men, the fantasies dissipate in the light of reality. For instance, the soldier in Salah al-'Ansari's "The Two Walls" tells his wife, "I loved a woman other than you" and it seems that this other woman was in fact her, but only when she was not who she was then (al-'Ansari 1988, 82).