Narrating the horrors of civil war: Laurie Lee’s A Moment of War, Picasso’s Guernica and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings

   This paper examines Laurie Lee’s A Moment of War (written in 1991 about the writer’s experience in the Spanish Civil War), Guernica which embodies Picasso’s shock at the fierce bombing of the defenseless citizens of Guernica, and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (1936). Though the latter musical composition was written and performed on another funerary occasion one year before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, it is, indeed, a true dirge for the tragic loss of lives ensuing from war; in Thomas Larson’s words, “the saddest music ever written”. The three artistic oeuvres in question, though belonging to different media, could well be seen as profound “evidence of the wound”. They may have been produced during the third decade of the last century. However, their timeless, universal appeal lies in their surprising relevance to their expression, albeit through three different artistic vehicles, of insurmountable grief at the devastation and loss of innocent lives caused by wars in general, and civil wars in particular. In fact, it suffices to look around us at Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lybia and, indeed innumerable parts of the world to realize the repetitive pattern of senseless victimization of innocent peoples to fulfill wicked political ambition; a pattern that has persisted since the beginning of history, through the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), World Wars I and II, and up till the very present day. How powerful and how pertinent these three works emerge as reminders that address the human conscience by raising issues that are very much alive in the morose reality we are living nowadays.
   The paper will basically deal with the above-mentioned works in view of Roland Barthe’s discussion of image, music and text, and  Carolyn Forché’s notion of the “poetry of witness,” though expanding the term to include art and music of witness.