Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
- 1 The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group
- 2 The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
- 3 Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life
- 4 Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War
- 5 The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
- 6 All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
- 7 The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
- 8 Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib
- 9 It's All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror
- 10 Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror
- Index
6 - All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
- 1 The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group
- 2 The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
- 3 Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life
- 4 Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War
- 5 The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
- 6 All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
- 7 The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
- 8 Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib
- 9 It's All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror
- 10 Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror
- Index
Summary
A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse -indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history … The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.
AristotleOnce upon a time, we used to read novels – Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy – to find out about the way we live now, in Trollope's phrase, or, rather, the way we lived then, and what it means to us now. We tend not to do that any more. We read history instead. Seeking to understand how it really was – that peculiar combination of pedantry and knight-errantry suggestive of the scholarly pursuit – we privilege the fact over the fancy, the documentary over the imaginary, the history over the poetry. We show and tell the truth – telling and retelling and retailing while there is some profit in it, as one might say. Perhaps, following Bakan, we need to make a distinction between literal truth and some deeper or higher truth: ‘There is an old tradition, going back at least to Plato, that there can be a truth in madness, dreaming, poetry, or prophecy, which is higher than literal truth.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- On Art and War and Terror , pp. 125 - 145Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009