From page 14 of The Chronicle of Higher Education issue (April 25, 2003)

By SCOTT McLEMEE

War reduces human beings to things -- and not just by killing

them. So wrote Simone Weil, a French thinker who died in exile

during World War II, in her essay "The Iliad, or, The Poem of

Force." But as dehumanizing as warfare may be, it remains

among the oldest (yet also the most urgent) concerns of the

humanities.

In the pages of the journal WLA: War, Literature, and the

Arts, reflection on armed conflict is often closely linked

with the experience of having survived it. Many contributors

have lived through battle, often as combatants.

A semiannual publication featuring poetry, fiction, and memoir

as well as critical essays and graphic art, WLA is edited by

Donald Anderson, a professor of English and writer in

residence at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Q. Literary creativity and military destruction ... that seems

like a contradictory mixture, somehow.

A. I believe that art, at its deepest level, is about

preserving the world. And that makes art about war all the

more important. We need to know what we're capable of -- in

all the positive and all the negative senses -- when it comes

to war. In my book Fire Road [published by the University of

Iowa Press], I have a piece called "Twenty Ways of Looking at

Fire," about methods of destruction. One of the things in

there about the paradox of destruction goes: "The power of the

atomic bomb comes from the forces holding each atom of

substance together." That's the awful paradox of war.

Q. You edit WLA while teaching literature and creative writing

at the Air Force Academy. Doesn't that "embed" the journal in

military culture, so to speak, in a way that might look

dubious to antiwar people?

A. WLA isn't anti-military, but I do think that it's antiwar.

I spent 22 years in the service and was never around pro-war

people. Soldiers, more than anyone, know what the deal is.

When I teach here, I'm trying to make military leaders more

thoughtful -- to be mournful warriors, rather than killing

machines. We have to do everything we can to develop our

capacity for ambiguity, our notions of ethics and justice.

Because of the efficiency with which man can now destroy man,

that's our only hope.

Q. Does any particular work of literature from the past seem

to speak to the events of the last few weeks?

A. No, not really. War never changes. A stone ax crushing a

skull is no different from a Tomahawk missile, except in its

efficiency. We have as much to learn from The Iliad as we do

from Black Hawk Down.

Q. Or as little? Poetry hasn't stopped much bloodshed, so far,

anyway.

A. Well, if art were as powerful as we'd like to think, there

wouldn't have been any more wars after The Iliad.