The “Rotten” matter in A Farewell to Arms: An Ecological Gothic reading

“I was blown up while we were eating cheese”

The rotten food in the novel serves as a storied⁵ matter that makes the war’s monstrosity visible. In the novel, the most representative rotten-food episode is in chapter nine. Prior to Frederic’s injury and Passini’s death, the ambulance team is having some “rotten” macaroni, cheese, and wine at the front (AFTA, 46). Here, the awful condition of the macaroni and wine (“It tasted of rusty metal” (46)), the dirty cheese (“its smooth surface covered with brick dust” (46)), the lack of any utensils (“I put thumbs and fingers into the macaroni and lifted” (46)), and the awkwardness of eating the macaroni (“They were all eating, holding their chins close over the basin, tipping their heads back, sucking in the ends” (46)) make a mockery of the ideal heroism of soldiers and the absurd glamor of war.

Frederic’s linking of food to the war and its absurdity can be found in his description that “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it” (AFTA, 161). To Frederic, the meaninglessness of human sacrifice is derived from the absurdity of war itself. Indeed, several instances show that warfare is absurd. For example, the military department decides to decorate Frederic with a “silver medal” (105) even though he has done nothing heroic during the fight: “I was blown up while we were eating cheese” (55). The military department does this to enhance its image for civilians; on seeing his medal, one may imagine that Frederic, who represents the Italian army, had “killed two hundred Austrians or captured a whole trench” during the fight (105). The system of military decorations is, therefore, a fraud. Another episode that shows the war’s absurdity is during the Caporetto retreat when the Italian military police begin to fire on their own people suspecting, in their fear, that the Germans have donned Italian uniforms to infiltrate themselves among the Italian soldiers. Aymo, a comrade of Frederic, is shot to death due to this. Moreover, to hide their own mistake, those frightened Italian battle police will have to kill more of their own people: “They’d have to shoot us all to prove they were right the first time” (185). Acknowledging these absurd incidents, Frederic concludes,

In addition to the military reward system, the food distribution system in the military is also problematic. This aspect is revealed in the conversation between Frederic and Gino before the Caporetto retreat. According to Gino, there is an issue regarding the distribution of food: “The regiments in the line get pretty good food but those in support don’t get so much. Something is wrong somewhere. There should be plenty of food” (AFTA, 160-61). “The dogfish are selling it somewhere else,” Frederic then concludes (161). Agreeing with Frederic, Gino states, “[i] t is very bad for the soldiers to be short of food. Have you ever noticed the difference it makes in the way you think?” (161). While Frederic’s statement confirms the corrupted food distribution system as rotten, Gino’s description foreshadows the important role food plays in times of war. In other words, insufficient food distribution leads to starvation, representing a form of physical and mental violence—among the soldiers, which ultimately results in defeat in war. Historically, after the Caporetto retreat, Silvio Crespi, the head of the Commission for Procurement and Consumption in the Italian army, decided to change the soldiers’ diet as he believed that the retreat was caused by the soldiers’ poor nutrition (Dentoni, 2014). From this respect, the rottenness of the food in the novel underscores the absurdity of war and the corruption of military systems during the era of World War One.

“We are all cooked”

In the novel, the vicious quality of the war is further emphasized in Rinaldi’s symbolic joke in Chapter Twenty-Five. During dinner time, Rinaldi sarcastically jokes that the meat-stew they are eating is the body of a “dead Austrian” (152). Here, the act of eating cooked meat is juxtaposed with the act of killing living humans, leading one to see warfare as a form of cannibalism (and hence, barbaric). It is under this implication that the food is claimed as rotten since barbarity has become the main component of it.

Another symbolic instance of cannibalism is reflected in Frederic’s repetition of the phrase “am cooked” seven times in chapter twenty-one. According to the Farlex Dictionary of Idioms, the term means physically ruined, mentally depressed, and emotionally traumatized. In his conversation with Rinaldi, Frederic claims, “[w] e are all cooked. The thing was not to recognized it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war” (116). Following this, the key to winning the war is to repress the trauma suffered by a nation because of the war. That is to say, to win the war for one’s country, one must cook (traumatize) oneself by cooking (killing) the other and then pretend that one is not yet cooked (ruined). Indeed, this method is beyond human limits. As Rinaldi reveals, “this war is killing me … I am very depressed by it” (146). War is, therefore, a slow-cook process that transforms one into both the eater and the eaten. It is in this sense that warfare can be seen as cannibalistic and hence, monstrous.

“It was his knee all right. The other knee was mine”

Besides the rotten food, the wounded body represents another agentic matter that underlines the issue of war’s rottenness. In this case, it is necessary to explore the incident of Frederic Henry’s knee injury. Frederic gets injured when one of the Austrian’s trench mortar shells hits him during their mission to send four ambulances up to the river. When Frederic realizes that his comrade, Passini, is already dead and that the mortar shell has hit him on his knee, Frederic panics: “I looked at my leg and was very afraid”; “My knee wasn’t there. My hand went in, and my knee was down on my shin” (AFTA, 48). The uncanny out-of-body experience further enhances the panic Frederic had a moment ago: “I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind … I knew I was dead … Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back” (47). Here, Frederic’s helpless condition—his out-of-body experience and witnessing Passini’s death—makes him realize that he has no control over his own body and possible death. Moreover, Frederic’s experience of derealization/depersonalization⁶ leads him to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the latter part of the story.

Frederic’s PTSD symptoms⁷ can be found in several aspects. For instance, he suffers from sleeping problems and a disturbing nightmare: “I slept heavily except once I woke sweating and scared and then went back to sleep trying to stay outside of my dream” (AFTA, 77). He also suffers from excessive drinking, causing him to have “jaundice” (124) and attempts to numb his emotions as a way to avoid being reminded of the traumatic event: “The head was mine, but not to use, not to think with … [and] not too much remember” (199). This leads him to depression.

Frederic’s rejection of his wounded knee, his claiming its ownership to the doctor— “It was his knee all right. The other knee was mine” (199)—comes from his psychological disgust towards its foreignness. He begins to perceive the wounded knee as a grotesque Other after it is scanned by an X-ray machine and seen by the doctors. Through the “eye” of the device, Frederic notices that some “foreign bodies” have “invaded” and “penetrated” his body (AFTA, 82; Dodman 256). The doctor’s comment that “the foreign bodies were ugly, nasty, brutal. The Austrians were son of bitches” further indicates that his body had been penetrated by the enemy (82). Frederic’s bodily integration is hence undone not only by the trench mortar shell but also by the Austrians, the X-ray machine, and the Doctors; they represent the foreign Other that urge Frederic to reject his wounded knee.

From a different perspective, Frederic’s disgust towards his wounded knee can be understood as self-defense against his “disabled” condition. In Consuming Gothic, Lorna Piatti-Farnell notes that “disgust is deeply connected to notions of normality and appropriateness” (50). “Disgust,” Piatti-Farnell continues to write, “signals the breakaway point from what is proper and acceptable, from the very notion of safety and propriety” (51). Frederic’s regard of his wounded knee as Other can thus be interpreted as his attempt to perceive himself as able-bodied rather than recognize that he has become “disabled” or somehow deficient.

“All to bits”

In “Going All to Pieces,” Trevor Dodman stresses that the traumatic violence in the novel lies in the fragmentation of human bodies caused by weapons of mass destruction (249-256). Throughout the novel, a great variety of war weapons are introduced, which include artillery (AFTA, 158), rockets (47), big trench mortar shells (48), Skoda guns (47), grenades (106), rifles (106), pistols (130), naval guns (159), machine guns (162), iron shrapnel balls (162), cavalry (179), and so on. These destructive weapons blow Catherine’s ex-lover “all to bits” (17), injure Frederic’s knee, kill Passini, Aymo, and “one hundred and fifty thousand men on the Bainsizza plateau and on San Gabriele” and “forty thousand on the Carso” (116). Here, men’s bodies re spent in the war as if they hold little value: their bodies are fragmentized and their minds traumatized. This highlights industrial warfare’s fetishization of military technologies over human (living) bodies, leading to the massive production of destructive weapons and innumerable deaths.

In addition to military discourse, modern medical technologies (surgeries, x-rays) and doctors also play an essential role in creating fragmented disunity by imposing a mind-body dualism. As Emily Martin notes,

In the novel, Frederic’s statement that “[d] octors did the things to you and then it was not your body anymore” reflects Martin’s critique above (AFTA, 199). Another instance that mirrors Martin’s idea can be found in the episode that explains Rinaldi’s depression. “All summer and all fall I’ve operated. I work all the time,” as the military surgeon tells Frederic (146). Here, one understands that Rinaldi is forcefully turned into an anomaly, working like a machine. Moreover, he loses the human capacity for fundamental emotions: “I never think. No, by God, I don’t think; I operate” (147). This mechanization of Rinaldi reveals the military medical system as oppressive and inhuman. Frederic’s alienation of his wounded knee and Rinaldi’s repression represent a counter-narrative to industrial warfare that imposes technological fetishism.

“This is the picturesque front”

The landscape of rotted and dead bodies represents another storied matter that showcases the horror of war. Unlike humans, who can speak for themselves, the natural world often remains a voiceless victim of war. Nevertheless, in A Farewell to Arms, a layer of non-anthropocentric consciousness resurfaces through the narrator’s descriptions, making the voices of nonhuman entities visible. Frederic’s non-anthropocentric consciousness is noticeable from the beginning of the novel. While observing Gorizia, Frederic states,

Although the army has transformed Gorizia into a military town that includes hospitals, artillery, cafes, the shell-marked iron of the railway bridge, the smashed tunnel by the river, broken houses with plaster and rubble in the gardens, Frederic claims that he is “very glad” only because the town has not been ruined completely. (AFTA, 5-6). Here, the sense of happiness embedded in Frederic’s description shows his hope for the end of the war (“if the war should end”) and his relief that not all-natural landscapes, especially “the mountains,” have been transformed into battlefields (AFTA, 5).

In the novel, a counter-narrative on human-centrism can be found in Frederic’s association between the human body and the natural landscape. While observing Gorizia, Frederic claims, “the forest had been green in the summer when we had come into the town but now there were the stumps and the broken trunks and the ground torn up” (AFTA, 6). Here, as Victoria Addis (2018) points out, phrases such as “stumps” and “broken trunks” recall “the male body, and more specifically, with the injuries and amputations that resulted from fighting in the war.” This linking of human bodies to nonhuman entities equalizes the subjectivity and agency⁸ between the two, showing that both human and nonhuman bodies are victims of industrial warfare. According to anthropologist Joseph P. Hupy, the result of this first industrial-scale mechanized warfare is so devastating in terms of human loss of life and environmental cost that the war is regarded as an “anthropogenic disturbance” (418). In the novel, this anthropocentric destruction is committed by combatants who “marched as though they were six months gone with child” (4). Here, as Aime L. Pozorski notes, the phrase “to be gone with child” means “to be pregnant” (79). This linking of soldiers’ arms to maternal arms serves as an ironic representation that indicates the murder of children by the military arms. Frederic’s juxtaposition of soldiers’ arms and the maternal arms thus implies the front as a field of sterility. Historically, the French writer Henri Barbusse who fought on the Western Front also identified the battlegrounds as “‘fields of sterility’ where ‘frightful loads of dead and wounded men alter the shape of the plain’ and ‘everything appears turned over … full of rottenness and smelling of disaster’” (qtd. in Keller). As Joseph P. Hupy in “The Environmental Footprint of War” also notes, the environmental consequences of The Great War “obliterated forests” and “significantly altered the landscape” beyond recognition, creating “wide swathes of destruction, limited only by the range of artillery shells” (412). “Perhaps the best-known example of this swath of destruction,” Hupy continues to claim, “is the Western Front, a sinuous line of trenches craters, bunkers, and barbed wire averaging 20 km in width and stretching from the English Channel to the border of Switzerland” (413). Indeed, when Frederic looks at Biansizza after the war, he laments, “I had not realized it was so broken up” (159). This description recalls Barbusse’s claim that “‘[w] here there are not dead, the earth itself is corpselike”’ (qtd. in Keller). Frederic’s referring to the battlefield as “the picturesque front” thus indicates the wounded and dead human bodies and the broken, rotten, corpselike landscapes destroyed by modern destructive weapons (17).

“I did not have the feeling that it was really over”

In the novel, Frederic’s frustration toward the anthropocentric destruction further increases when he sees that Caporetto has shifted from a charming “white” and “clean little town” to a landscape of death and chaos with “many sick” (AFTA, 144).⁹ This enhances his desire to escape toward the undisturbed land to “forget the war” and to have “a separate peace” (211). As he states, “I wanted to go to Austria without war. I wanted to go to the Black Forest. I wanted to go to the Hartz Mountains” (31).

Frederic’s impulse to escape the battlefields is linked to his witnessing the destruction of those towns. From the collapse of the older townscape to replacing the new landscape with fragmented and dead bodies, the whole process is mapped and set out as a visual geography of helplessness through Frederic’s eyewitness account. Here, the act of viewing is a “condition of passivity,” a form of violence one “can neither flee from nor defend against” (Nayar, 30). Furthermore, “[w] hat the eyewitness documents is a set of effects—primarily horror—and nothing beyond it. There is nothing intelligible about the events they see […] but what they apprehend is brutal, irreducible dying” (Nayar, 43). This, twinned with the fact that he is part of the destruction, makes Frederic feel extraordinarily helpless. Even after he flees the war with Catherine, this sense of helplessness continues to dominate him, making him think that he can never escape war: “I did not have the feeling that it was really over” (AFTA, 213). Here, Frederic’s case symbolizes not an individual but a collective post-war experience. All combatants and citizens who witness the landscapes of dead and dying bodies experience the collapse of recognition and intelligibility. The process of gazing at the dying landscapes and dead bodies on the battlefield strengthens the sense of helplessness through collapsing what is perceived as “normal” in oneself, confusing one’s recognition of the world. In other words, the documentation of an unmaking of the world leads to the unmaking of subjectivity, resulting in the formation of helplessness. From this respect, the monstrosity of war lies in the collapse of subjectivity caused by the forced view of the landscapes of dying and dead bodies.

“There is no such thing as getting above the rain”

Rain’s destructive-creative agency, together with its random, wild, and unsympathetic qualities, emphasizes the fact that “there is no such thing as getting above the rain” (Cathcart, 95). Indeed, rain appears not only in the realm of reality but also in the world of fantasy. While taking a short break during the retreat, Frederic falls asleep and dreams of Catherine being brought to him by the western wind and rain:

In Frederic’s dream, the association between Catherine and rain is once more emphasized. However, rain is romanticized this time: “That my sweet love Catherine down might rain” (172). As Tait Keller points out, “[t] he war’s impact on the land horrified university-educated soldiers groomed in the romantic appreciation for nature.” Even though the romanticization of the rain is itself an anthropocentric perception, it still overturns the idea of nature as a passive background, a view strengthened by the development of industrialization and mechanistic science (Merchant, 293, 294). In Frederic’s dream, the romanticized rain and wind are variable, creative, and lively. They save Frederic by blowing his lover to him and hence, blowing away the horror and pressure of being in war. Frederic’s romanticization of the rain and wind can thus be seen as his emotional resistance against the cruel, cold, mechanic war.

In the novel, Frederic’s mental resistance against the monstrosity of war is further reflected in his juxtaposition of the stormy weather and the weapons of war. Standing at the front line the day before the retreat begins, Frederic notes, “[i] t stormed all that day. The wind drove down the rain and everywhere there was standing water and mud” (AFTA, 161). Under this stormy weather, Frederic and the others fight “in the dark in the rain” (161). According to Frederic, “[t] here were much shelling and many rockets in the rain and machine-gun and rifle all along the line … and between the gusts of wind and rain we could hear the sound of a great bombardment far to the north” (162). Here, there are two kinds of war going on. While the storm is a nonhuman disturbance generated by wind and rain, the battle is an anthropocentric assault marked by machine guns, rifles, smoke balls, and bombardments. However, these forces possess a different nature and impact. Firstly, rain is indifferent, while guns and bullets, on the other hand, are often used to fulfill egoistic delusions of domination. Secondly, rain’s autonomous forces resist drawing “the separations between climate and culture, life and matter, and subject and object” (Duckert, 116). In the novel, rain not only blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality, allowing Frederic to reconnect with Catherine but also keeps on living its life: “It rained all night” (171). In contrast, war weapons are objects used to objectify, disconnect, and eradicate all forms of life. In this respect, Frederic’s juxtaposition of the stormy weather with war weapons seems to propose a non-anthropocentric view that highlights the egoistic nature of warfare.

“I … walked back to the hotel in the rain”

Toward the end of the novel, rain further points toward the naturalist philosophy of human existence. After Catherine dies, Frederic leaves the hospital and walks back to the hotel “in the rain” (AFTA, 284). This recalls Catherine’s line, whereby she sees herself dead in the rain: “I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it” (110). Nevertheless, there’s nothing intrinsically evil about the rain as Catherine’s hemorrhages occur randomly: “It’s just nature giving her hell” (274). After all, as Frederic comes to realize, whether, in war or love, his influence upon the outcome of events is insignificant.¹² Eventually, the universe kills indifferently. “You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They … killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you” (280). Here, Frederic’s use of the term “they” reveals his realization of one’s place in the more-than-human (their) world. More specifically, human agency is conditioned by the natural laws of cause and effect beyond humans, and nobody can transcend these forces.

Just like one cannot stop the rain from falling, the death of Catherine will not stop the world from moving forward. “Things happen all the time. Everything blunts and the world keeps on … It never stops” (AFTA, “Appendix II” 312). As for Frederic, who is still alive, he understands that he must move forward in his life: “[t] he rest goes on and you go on with it” (312). However, in defiance, Frederic also writes, “you have to stop a story. You stop it at the end of whatever it was you were writing about” (312). Following this, the ending scene, whereby Frederic leaves the hospital and walks back to the hotel “in the rain,” embodies two layers of implication (284). On the one hand, it can be interpreted as Frederic’s attempt to move forward in his life, as stopping the story here involves moving on rather like the indifferent rain. On the other hand, the scene also reveals a difficulty to move on, as Frederic ends the story in a rather sudden, silent, and abrupt¹³ way, which might imply his inability to process his grief. However, ironically, since the living memory of Catherine is associated with rain, the only way not to forget about Catherine is, hence, to remain in the rain. Following this, while it seems to rain on Frederic’s behalf,¹⁴ it also rains indifferently. In fact, it simply rains when it rains.