Mary Favret, associate professor of English at Indiana University, began work on War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime after coming across “a big anthology by Betty Bennett with a generic title.” British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism compiled war poems published in newspapers and periodicals, written by the famous and the anonymous. After studying the material through the first Gulf War and beginning writing around and after 9/11, Favret said, “I realized then that this material matters – it’s not just academic.” Below, she discusses with Zócalo the concept of distant war and how we experience it.

Q. What is a distant war? It seems that ancient wars could be considered as such, but you focus on more modern conflicts.

A. A lot of it has to do with mass media. Wars can be conducted at a distance and the general population doesn’t have to pay attention to it without mass media. It wasn’t really until you had daily newspapers that they had to pay attention, and this happened toward the end of the 18th century. People became accustomed to the idea that the news would come every day, and bring you word of war, and that was a new historical phenomenon. You could read about war conducted elsewhere.

Q. How did ordinary lives change as a result of mass media and war reporting?

A. It’s hard to reconstruct absolutely, but there were signs that people were uneasy and anxious in new ways about being at war. There are various places to look for this evidence. All of a sudden everybody was reading the news, when before, they couldn’t. All of a sudden everyone had a newspaper subscription because they had a brother fighting in North America in the Revolutionary War, or fathers and uncles in the Napoleonic Wars. There was an eagerness for news. It became part of the rhythm of the day – everyone would routinely read the paper in the morning, and that routine continued for a long time. There is the moment you devote to reading the news – or in later years to watching the evening news – and during wartime that intensifies. As people started to read the news, they began to reflect on war and think, “What is happening to our lives? – we’re consuming news about war as people are dying?” As early as the 1790s, people wondered about what it meant that war was becoming a form of entertainment. Coleridge even discussed this – that our daily entertainment was to read about people dying.

Q. In what other ways was the war mediated, and did the type of media matter to how people experienced war?

A. In this period, it’s kind of different. The main medium was the newspaper. There were also pamphlets that people would distribute, especially in the city, or government reports. Poems showed up on newspaper editorial pages, even by major poets. The big difficulty for us to comprehend is the huge time lag. Quite a lot of time would pass, perhaps months, for the final result of a major battle to be confirmed and reported back home. The daily news was news that was very delayed.  But news of the war also appeared on stage, in theatrical production, and in exhibitions of paintings and panoramas. There were re-enactments of major naval battles on the Thames, along with fireworks, etc. So war 200 years ago was a media event, broadly conceived.

Q. How did Romanticism change the way war was seen?

A. I think traditionally we haven’t thought about Romanticism as being about war. This is something I argue – it’s not necessarily about romanticizing war, which I think would be the customary thing to assume. It’s actually a very complex cultural formation. There is, in particular, the elevation of the hero. You have very famous heroes like Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington who were held up as these heroic, almost mythic figures. But at the same time – and this is one of the very modern things about it-you have mass warfare, you have mass conscription instituted for the first time. So there is a sense that anonymous hordes are being slaughtered. There is a tension between the single hero, and this recognition that nameless bodies are just serving as cannon fodder. That tension is romanticism: the grim reality versus the mythicism. Most intelligent people were quite aware of this, and trying very hard, though without great success, to reconcile these two things. We still see it now. It’s easy to name a single individual and create a sense of emotional attachment to that person. It’s much harder to do so with 10,000 people we don’t know.

Q. How does that tension play out today?

A. You do get occasional accounts of the lone hero. The media does this, and with good reason. They’ll feature a profile, usually of a young man who has died, and his family’s response. It’s a scenario that we can all identify with, it is very moving and very real, and it puts a human face on the war. We need that, emotionally. But it also allows us to forget for a moment (if I can put it this way) the inhuman face of war – the fact that modern war is deeply impersonal and destructive of individuals. Masses of people get killed and are not recognized. All we read are numbers – sometimes divided into how many Americans and how many Iraqis. But it’s very hard to respond emotionally to a number.

Q. How has visual media changed the way we understand war?

A. Through all media there is the illusion of immediacy. We think that technological innovation has brought war closer to us and made it more immediate. But in fact what most of us living far from the battlefields, our experience of war is  highly mediated. We think it’s happening in real time, and we think we have access. It is in fact filtered through many, many channels and many, many machines. When people read news reports in the newspaper 200 years ago, they may have felt that was fairly immediate. They may have believed they were getting close to the experience of war in the same way we can flip on a YouTube video and think we’re getting close. We have to be cautious about that assumption. We are not closer just because we have more advanced technology. We just have a different media experience. If you watch war on your computer screen, it is still small and contained and you can turn it off when you want.

Q. Do more people ignore war today because we can access it in so many different ways?

A. Absolutely. It’s certainly not undertaken as a national effort. There is a famous line from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, about the daily ritual of reading the newspaper, of everyone in the national community reading the same thing at the same. War was much more of a national event then, and even during the Vietnam War, when everyone was simultaneously watching Walter Cronkite, or listening to the radio during World War II. It was a communal experience, and it was understood as such. We don’t have that communal sense. Everybody could be doing anything at any time of day – or not. And there are so many other competing things, so maybe no one is doing it at all. On YouTube, you can flip from a clip of war to a clip of Michael Jackson singing when he was 15. War now is so mixed up with everything else, and so many other things can take our attention.

Q. Are we more likely now to see war as entertainment?

A. People were fully aware 200 years ago that this was a form of entertainment. There were plays about war, there were big pageants of mock battles, reenacted with fireworks . I’m not sure we’re any worse in that regard, we just have a more saturated media world.

Q. How does the nature of the war on terror, and how diffuse and ubiquitous it is, change how we experience it? Is it bad that it is so distant?

A. I talk about that a lot in War At A Distance. This is an effect of distance, per se, that war is always happening but you don’t see it. It infiltrates your daily life in a way that makes it ubiquitous but also invisible. From reading poets from 200 years ago, or reading Jane Austen, you get the sense that war doesn’t necessarily call attention to itself. It’s just always there. You assume that is how it is. I think they were more conscious than we are of living in a militarized society, however.

To be at war was to have soldiers encamped down the street, or have alarms raised regularly, (though they didn’t use the color system – orange, red – we have). They had a constant sense of threat they lived with every day: violence is happening in the world and it might come home. That is the experience of modern war in the West.  In the U.S. I think we know that experience acutely, because we’ve fought most of our wars elsewhere. War has become pervasive, it has helped build our universities and our way of life. There are all these quiet, everyday sort of ways that we’re indebted to it. We don’t really notice.

Q. Does it make a difference who mediates war – that is, we can watch American news or we can watch Al Jazeera?

A. I think about distance not as a fixed position but as a mobile position. So it’s one thing to be at a distance, say, as an American watching American media, but it’s another thing to be at a distance watching Al Jazeera. You’re positioned differently in relation to the event or experience. But ultimately, you are not in fact in war, unless you travel there. You can only take different positions in relation to the war.

Q. How does the distance of war and its mediation impact policy?

A. I don’t go there in this book. That’s an interesting question. You have to think about how policymakers respond to the mediation of war. I wonder what kind of accounts or evidence you would use to arrive at a position. I could speculate…. Think of the mediating work of the military academies. There you’re given a certain training and a certain version of history. It is focused in a particular way, with certain goals and aims to the instruction. Let’s say the assumption there is, there will be war. (Obama said this in his Nobel speech, which is a remarkable thing to hear him say). And it’s true – we have a highly-trained professional class of military officers. That is the legacy of the last 200 years, when they first started building these military academies. This class weighs in on policy quite powerfully.

For me I think it’s too easy to respond only to the particular aspects of war that the media survives on: it’s flashy and very exciting because it’s violent. That side of war is always easier to see and react to than the more subtle, ongoing day-to-day conditions that make for war. Now I’ll be wildly speculative. Take the war on terror: there’s the option of going and rooting out the terrorists. That’s exciting and direct. But there is this whole other side of why terrorism happens, and what conditions produce this conflict. It’s a much more difficult thing to attack. Policy people certainly think about it, but it’s hard for the media to show that because it is complex. Images are instant, and they demand a quick response, which has its dangers.

I should give Raymond Williams credit for this, he has a great essay on distance in response to the Falklands War. His understanding was that there is this loop between policymakers and media. They feed each other. You get a kind of barrage of images of violence, and the effect of that is to urge a quick response. You want to get rid of it. You want to solve it. Politicians live with the desire or need to fix things quickly. They want to send an army and fix it. But problems are of course much more complex. You may get immediate action, but you don’t really get a solution.

*Photo courtesy postaletrice.