April 18, 2004

The Great War and Modern Memory

Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory is a survey of literature about World War I and written in reaction to it. That's an incredibly broad topic, so Fussell has narrowed his focus. He's writing almost entirely about British authors (Gravity's Rainbow, a recent phenomenon when Fussell wrote this book in 1975, crops up a few times despite being about the wrong war entirely, and Mailer and Ginsberg are unnecessarily wedged in), and he's concerned almost exclusively with line officers in the British army. The Navy and such air combat as there was in World War I is entirely ignored. Fussell explains this, sensibly enough, as a product of personal interest: he was a line officer in the infantry in World War II, so the literature of his predecessors of a generation earlier was what fascinated him. I can't say that this is a bad decision; the war poets and their novelist and memoirist brethren were largely officers in the infantry. It does mean that the brilliant Isaac Rosenberg -- a working class, enlisted Jew, and thus an outlier from the rest of the war poets -- gets slighted, despite Fussell's entirely defensible claim that Rosenberg was the best poet of the war. Still, that's an incredibly broad topic, so Fussell divides it further; each chapter is devoted to a particular motif that Fussell sees as broadly shared across the British literature of the Great War: satire, irony, and gallows humor; the tunnel-dwelling underground (literally as the trenches and figuratively as the grave); a sense of Germans as both twins and diametric opposites; mythic allusion; self-consciously literary allusion (and shaping of the narrative); theatrical touches (not just in the literature of the war, but in the many contemporaneous references to music hall by the soldiers themselves); homoeroticism; an attention to the pastoral; and the explicit investigation of memory.

I haven't read the war memoirs of Blunden and Graves and the like, from which Fussell draws a significant portion of his material, but based on the war poetry and novels I have read, everything seems logical, almost inarguable (except for the bits when Fussell talks abou dualism and propaganda -- the Great War may have marked the dawn of modern war propaganda, but it's simply unbelievable to think that it was the first instance of inhumanizing the enemy). I assume that this is because Fussell's views have become the dominant the thirty years since he published, but there's very little to say against the fact that, for instance, a number of the most influential writers on the war were gay and their work was intensely homoerotic. (Not even the most reactionary critic, I trust, would argue that conditions in the trenches weren't primed to produce intensely emotional bonds between men.) So I'm not sure that I learned a great deal from this, although it made an valuable counterpoint to Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, an earlier book written by a historian, not a literary critic; Tuchman's book, entirely concerned with the first month of the war, still has a hint of respect for war as a noble endeavor and the "plucky, can-do deaths," as the Onion put it. Fussell's book is looking back in sorrow, and by and large it's concerned with artistic works that were doing the same, even if (as with Wilfred Owen's poetry) it was written during the height of the War. The Great War and Modern Memory provided a few thoughtprovoking new ways to look at the literature of World War I that I'm familiar with -- "In Parenthesis", the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg, the Lord of the Rings trilogy (which, more than ever and despite Tolkien's claims to the contrary, I am convinced can be read as centrally located within the context of the Great War; ignoring the homoeroticism, nostalgia and pastoralism, and obsession with food and the good cheer of companions that fit Fussell's analysis of the war literature, the Scouring sequence seems undeniably a response to Tolkien's very real sense that the world had changed forever when his best friends were killed at the Battle of the Sommes). And Fussell made me want to read Sasssoon's Memories of an Infrantry Officer and, particularly, Goodbye to All That. I'm not an academic; what more can I ask out of literary criticism than new tools to use on familiar works and recommendations for something new?

posted at 5:54 PM | 2 comments

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