Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to show that using war (here, the Second World War in Europe as fictionalised by Edward James in his 1939 surrealistic novel Richman, Poorman, Beggarman, Wop) as subject matter for fiction does not always aim to reveal heroic values and virtues, or even to sublimate collective human tragedies, but can also show nothing but a heterogeneous mindset that tackles festering ideologies which are on the decline and displaces them into a non-cathartic situation. The product at the end of the fictional assembly line is no longer a representation but a vain and simulated attempt at a matter-of-fact presentation (however impossible this is in the absolute). This insight is then used to tackle a few problematic examples, taken from the field of contemporary visual arts, of recent grotesque treatments of war.
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