Conflict, Facts and Fiction in Contemporary Rewritings of the Great War (original) (raw)
Related papers
Modernist Studies Association, 2019
1914-1945 -- the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a cemetery for the civilized delusions of the nineteenth century” -- saw millions of Britons fighting in two world wars and the Spanish Civil War, and marked a significant evolution in views about testimonial authority in wartime (Weald 274). Of prime importance is the changing status of frontline testimony exemplified by soldier-poets’ narratives of the Great War. In their commemorative writings, Sassoon and his peers argued for a radical shift away from the authority traditionally accompanying Government, Army, and journalistic accounts of war, and towards the direct experience of frontline combatants. While the protest-poet’s war-narrative and its discounting of homefront experience held a unique authority in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, recent scholarship has demonstrated that this authority was challenged in Britain’s succeeding wars. This panel proposes reading Britain’s evolving relationship to war and testimonial authority through three key writers who each survived multiple unique engagements with twentieth-century warfare. Less well-known than his poetry and memoirs, Sassoon’s autobiographies were composed from the uncomfortable position of “armchair-combatant” during the Second World War. Forced into the helpless position of those he had long rallied against, Sassoon-as-civilian reluctantly reoriented his approach to narrative authority by retroactively incorporating non-combatants’ experiences of war and suffering into his own autobiographical testimony. Another evolving perspective on narrative authority is that of Basil Bunting, who was imprisoned for refusing to be conscripted in 1918. His poem about this traumatic episode, “Villon,” is as physically personal as the protest-poets’ works. Bunting imbues his work with Eliotic references to the deep European past. Reflecting on Bunting’s position as conscientious objector, “Villon” interweaves that deep past in a way that combatant-poetry generally eschews. Despite his experience in WWI, however, Bunting later served as an intelligence officer in Persia during WWII. In “The Spoils”, and the autobiographic “Briggflatts”, Bunting refers to his time on the active side of military duty through allusions to Europe and Britain’s martial and epic-poetic past. Finally, George Orwell demonstrates an evolving position on frontline correctives to homefront propaganda in his writings on the Spanish Civil War. Homage to Catalonia emulates the soldier-poets’ “debunking” vision of war, suggesting an analogy between anti-fascist jingoism in 1937 Britain and homefront propaganda from 1914-1918. Orwell’s suspicion of atrocity propaganda leads him to modify his frontline testimony, effacing references to pain and suffering, and downplaying the dangers represented by bombing planes. In 1942, however, Orwell revisits this manipulation of testimonial authority with shame, recognizing that his (and others’) practice of lingering on the problematic effects of homefront propaganda had contributed to a culture of appeasement. Orwell’s mature perspective on atrocity propaganda illuminates key factors in the evolving relationship between frontline testimony and homefront culture between the wars. Thus, each of these writers used his own experience of Britain’s later conflicts to reconsider the testimonial authority staked by the soldier-poets of 1914-18. They advocate against any monumental war-myth, calling for a reconstruction of testimonial writing that relies upon polyphonic sources, including, but not limited to, frontline combatants.
Life Writing, Fiction and Modernism in British Narratives of the First World War
The RUSI Journal, 2014
For decades, Britain's cultural memory of the First World War has been dominated by poetry, the principal literary interpretation of the war taught in schools throughout the country. This poetry, argues Max Saunders, is often autobiographic and complements the memoirs that many writers penned in trying to express their experiences of the conflict -showing a complex and fluid relationship between autobiography and narrative. What is largely marginalised in British cultural memory is the novel; yet it is perhaps in this literary form, and in the work of Ford Madox Ford above all, that the most innovative interpretation of the conflict can be found.
Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2016
The present paper seeks to critically read Pat Barker's Regeneration in terms of Cathy Caruth's psychoanalytic study of trauma. This analysis attempts to trace the concepts of latency, post-traumatic stress disorders, traumatic memory, and trauma in Barker's novel in order to explore how trauma and history are interrelated in the narrative of past history and, particularly, in the history of World War I. The present paper also demonstrates how Barker's novel Regeneration acts as the narrative of trauma that vocalizes the silenced history of shell-shocked soldiers of World War I to represent British society, the history that has been concealed due to social and individual factors. The study thus investigates the dissociative disorders which are experienced by traumatized survivors of World War I as the aftermath of traumatic experiences of wartime. In addition, it argues how time moves for the traumatized victim and how the notion of latency in terms of Caruth's theory is traceable in Barker's novel. In Regeneration, the traumatized survivors are haunted with traumatic memory of past history; furthermore, past history constantly disrupts their present and the victims are in continuous shift from present time to past time. Time thus loses its linearity in the narrative of traumatized survivors.
Introduction: “We Are Also Hospital”1. Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of War and Peace (1
E-rea, 2020
The present issue “Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of War and Peace (1914-1950)” continues the probe into modernist prose begun in a previous issue of E-rea “Modernist non-fictional narratives” (Paterson and Reynier). The focus has narrowed to examining British and Irish modernist writers’ non-fictional writings about war and peace. All kinds of essays, reviews, pamphlets, diaries, autofiction, reportage, letters, and so on, produced between the beginning of the First World War to the aftermath of the Second World War, are examined here. These texts, featuring more or less fugitive writings, have sometimes seemed peripheral to the poetry and fiction that made these writers famous. However, there are good reasons to examine them. In considering what constitutes an author and an oeuvre, Foucault concludes “the author is a particular source of expression who, in more or less finished forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in a text, in letters, fragments, drafts, and so forth” (127). Moreover, there persists an intuition that in this period, non-fictional prose can be particularly illuminating. Something about the pressures of the times created an impulse towards – and effect upon – non-fictional prose. Broadly speaking, our contributors conclude, it is possible to divine two trends, not entirely contradictory: the first towards sober practical purposeful prose that does something in the world; the second toward prose that is disrupted, elliptical, generically fluid, or otherwise multilayered or difficult. Our contributors find these texts provide new insight in the way they represent and appraise their subjects, especially when it comes to narratives of war and peace. 2Why war and peace? A wider justification for this issue is that which surely colours all critical perspectives. It records a twofold response: to what was happening then, and to what is happening now. Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. (ix) 3So writes Hannah Arendt in the “Preface” (1950) to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the date of 1950 conveniently marking the end of our survey. If anything here should sound familiar, it might be remembered that a belief in the cyclical nature of history was resurgent precisely in the period under discussion. Even Samuel Beckett chose to frame discussion of modern understanding not only through ‘the new thing that has happened’ but ‘the old thing that has happened again’ (Disjecta 70).) From our perspective, then, examining non-fictional narratives of the period 1914-1950 seems peculiarly cogent. Their prescience should not be overemphasized: historical parallels have a tendency to be overwrought, in both senses. We remember Arendt herself was trying to understand the present by looking back at the past. The particular past she reflects upon in the first half of the twentieth century appeared uniquely ravaging and violent. Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third Word War between the two remaining world powers. (ix) 4This period under discussion, containing the First World War, many subsequent revolutions and civil wars, the march towards the Second World War and its aftermath, is both varied and unparalleled. Following Eric Hobsbawm’s demarcation of what he calls ‘the age of catastrophes’, we argue, therefore, that it makes sense to consider the period, as Arendt does here, as a time which changed civilization and in consequence changed non-fictional prose. 2 The major art installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London marked one hund (...) 3 See for instance, the work of Jay Winter, Tom Slevin and the Atlas of the Irish Revolution (Crowley (...) 4 Claire Wills’s excellent cultural study stresses the perhaps surprising fertility of the literary s (...) 5No doubt this period reemerges now with particular urgency because of the number and significance of recent commemorations and cultural events that have sought to remember, recover, re-evaluate, reinterpret, and reimagine this past, both officially and unofficially. In Ireland, for instance, the ongoing government-sponsored Decade of Centenaries (1912-1923, covering the period from the Ulster Covenant to the end of the Civil War) has contributed enormously to new understandings of the complexities of the conflicts of that period: notably, bringing new focus on the place of women in rebellion and social change, unearthing details of forgotten atrocities, and drawing attention to the fate of the enormous number of Irish participants (both nationalist and unionist) in the First World War. In Britain and France (and beyond) centenaries surrounding the First World War have been marked in a number of ways, through official commemorations and cultural responses. There have been new exhibitions in the Imperial War Museum, and public installations, such as Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London.2 In the cinema, Peter Jackson’s lovingly colourized documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and Sam Mendes’s dramatic 1917 (2020), have in different ways highlighted individual and colonial participation in the war, joining new productions of old classics such as R.C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End (1928). Multiple publications by historians and cultural scholars have brought new meanings and complexity to a wider period still very much close to mind.3 The First World War has never been far away from the popular imagination, not least because of the continuing effects of the prose (and poetry) of this period. And in Britain, at least, the Second World War has retained a central place in popular culture (in Ireland that period of neutrality during what was dubbed euphemistically “the emergency” still requires attention).4 Anniversaries, recreations, histories and films have, if anything, gathered a new impetus, perhaps because survivors of this war are every year getting fewer.
The English literary canon of the Great War has been traditionally shaped by the poetry of the poets who fought the war on the basis of their having seen and experienced its full horror, which attested truthful representation. This premise excluded women writers, whose participation in and experience of the war was obviously very different. Feminist research on the literary contribution of female writers to the representation of the conflict based on the plurality of experiences of many women that challenge that assumption have effectively worked to redress the balance. In this context, the war novels of contemporary female writers with male protagonists are negatively judged for miming the male gaze. In this article I would like to show that far from it Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, whose third volume was awarded with the Booker Prize, uses the male gaze precisely to unveil and expose the war entrenched patriarchal discourse and practices. Key words: canon, WWI, male gaze, patriarchal discourse and practices, gender.
Mapping Trauma and Memory : A Study of Fictions of Great World War Period
2015
The two world war brought heavy onslaught on the nurturing illusion of a whole generation of people of the world. People realised that so-called heroism and cleanliness of the mythic world is now gone .So now modern 'hollowman' has to establish a new history to live in the 'wasteland' of civilisation. The two world wars brought a break in the traditional flow of writing and a new course of works were under survey. Generally critics have given much attention on the poetical outputs during this period. As a result, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Siegfried Sassoon got the most limelight during this period. But the novels which were written during this period may claim equal status. If we look into the thematic texture of the novels we discern morbid tone of the society, the soldier's helpless voice which often gets silenced. The totalitarian war-mongers took the role of the armchair critics and dictated the war for their own ben...
Writing War, Wronging the Person: Representation of Human Insecurity in War Literature
Journal of English Language and Literature
This paper presents a survey of literature written in response to wars throughout the world. The paper argues that plays, poems, memoirs and novels have been written to celebrate combatants as heroes; war literature has also been written to overcome the trauma of war while other literature has been written to underscore the effects of war and to speak out against wars. The paper also discusses the rationale for studying war literature and argues that as creative expression, literature allows us, through the imagined world of the author, to identify social trends and structures that shape the world, in particular, the factors that lead to and sustain conflict, as well as experiences of war and its long term individual and general effects. Also, literature's aesthetic quality and its capacity to engage its audience makes it easier to transmit war time experience, and hopefully the wisdom gained from that experience, from one generation to another.