Cannons and Codes

War often appears to be definitionally outside the realm of structures such as law and literature. When we speak of war, we often understand it as incapable of being rendered into rules or words. Lawyers struggle to fit the horrors of the battlefield, the torture chamber, or the makeshift hospital filled with wounded and dying civilians into the framework of legible rules and shared understandings that law assumes and demands. In the West’s centuries-long effort to construct a formal law of war, the imperative has been to acknowledge the inhumanity of war while resisting the conclusion that it need therefore be without law. Writers, in contrast, seek to find the human within war—an individual story, perhaps even a moment of comprehension. Law and literature might in this way be said to share imperialist tendencies where war is concerned: toward extending their dominion to contain what might be uncontainable. This volume on war is the sixth in the University of Chicago Law School’s Law and Literature series. The papers are intended to address the many ways in which war affects human society and the many groups of people whose lives are affected by war. Some of the papers concern the lives of soldiers; others focus on civilians living in war zones who are caught up in the conflict; still others address themselves to the home front, far from the theater of war. By collecting such diverse perspectives within one volume, we hope to examine how literature has reflected the totalizing nature of war and the ways in which it distorts law across domains.