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The military historian Yuval Noah Harari accounts for the enduring allure of war by calling attention to a change in soldiers' memoirs that occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. Soldiers began to describe how they felt rather than what they did. Harari introduces the term flesh-witnessing to distinguish inner experience from eyewitness testimony. Flesh-witnesses speak of combat as a transformative and indescribable experience comparable to the sublime. This view is often attributed to militarists, but Harari shows that it also motivates pacifists. Even antiwar arguments like those of Erich Maria Remarque are based on the authority of the flesh-witness. To test Harari's claims, I invited ROTC officers to speak to students enrolled in a course titled British Literature: The Twentieth Century about their military experience. The juxtaposition of Harari's research and the officers' comments provided a framework for teaching All Quiet on the Western Front and other texts about war. Whether war is portrayed as painful or exhilarating, degrading or ennobling, it is widely idealized as a crucible for the development of the self. This view makes war stories irresistible, whatever political views writers and readers may hold.

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The extremity in modernism signals indeterminate symbolic meanings. Now that the explicit sex and other forms of extremity that modernists used are no longer shocking, however, their symbolic function must be reconstructed. As Foucault, Freud, and Kandinsky argue, transgressive symbols evoke the immanence of non-empirical experience in empirical reality. Thus modernist extremity provides secular alternatives to materialism by symbolizing non-empirical experience that is not supernatural, not subjective, and not grounded in a particular belief. D. H. Lawrence's use of sex illustrates the symbolic indeterminacy of extremity. Although some critics argue that he regards sex as a new religion, Lawrence does not grant sex the stability of a creed or the efficacy of a ritual. In The Rainbow sex is an indeterminate symbol that accumulates contradictory meanings ranging from transcendence to degradation. By daring to write about the unspeakable, Lawrence and other modernists also represent the unsayable.