“Old Soldiers Never Die, They Simply Fade Away” The Modernist Mythopoeia and the War Myth in David Jones’s In Parenthesis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Resisting the Hero's Tale: The Trope of the Cowardly Soldier in the Literature of the Great War
Among the experiences of otherness that unsettled the imperial trope of the warrior hero, this paper focuses on the representation of the coward in three autobiographical responses to the Great War. By following the traces of the malingerer, the deserter and the psychologically injured soldier in Herbert's The Secret Battle (1919), Aldington's Death of a Hero (1929) and Manning's Her Privates We (1930), the hero-other distinction induced by Victorian standards will be explored as a popular theme that becomes problematic on the Western front, as the figure of the (heroic) self and of the (antiheroic) other start to move away from the rigidity of the binary system. While Herbert, Aldington and Manning keep a strong component of their own class and patriotic identity both in their novels and in their lives, the Great War experience suggests the possibility of removing the association traditionally maintained between heroism and the Victorian notions of manliness. Such openness not only challenges the norm, but paves the way for the elaboration of a new sense of heroic selfhood. Particular attention is given to the representation of the shell-shocked soldier as a site of struggle and negotiation between the trope of cowardice and its reality.
Who lied? Classical heroism and World War I
Classical Receptions Journal, 2018
Owen's rejection of Horace's dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as 'the old lie' prompts for me two questions: i) Who exactly does Owen think lied? And is he justified in thinking this? ii) To what extent does Owen's rejection of Horace's words also amount to a critique of the classical tradition more generally, on the grounds that classical conceptions of war and heroism have proved utterly inadequate to the task of articulating the horrors of twentieth century trench warfare? I argue that Owen's main target is a number of poets, including Jessie Pope and Henry Newbolt, who recruited sanitized receptions of the classics to exhort young men to lay down their lives for their country. However, it is not clear that any of these, or Horace himself, is actually lying.
Drawing on some of the autobiographical narratives written by the war poets, this article focuses on the ghost not only as the clearest expression of the myth of the Great War but also as a counter-model undermining traditionally heroic patterns and unmasking certain narratives and identities that had been mar-ginalized, excluded, or repressed. By assessing the ghost as a shadow of the hero, the ghost as a vehicle between life and death and the ghost as haunting memory, it will be possible to contextualize and explore the meanings and experiences of the hero in relation to the antihero, cross over the boundaries between the two and enable a more complex analysis of the real Great War soldier. The article will also study how the memory of war and of war heroisms is rethought and worked over by the veteran as witness and what writing as remembering might entail in terms of the expression of the self in relation to the dominant war myths. Bearing in mind that memory speaks through the texts, sometimes against the writer's will, particular attention will be given to how the reworking of the past shaped heroic masculine identity and to what extent the veteran's identity was determined by what of the war experience he incorporated into the text.
Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures, 2022
Kevin Powers is a war veteran, who employs his experience as a war veteran in the American army in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 to narrate his debut novel, The Yellow Birds (2013). This study investigates Powers' portrayal of post-heroism in the context of the Second Gulf War. This novel illustrates the deformed face of war within an emerging post-heroic atmosphere. Post-heroism, instead of bravery and chivalry, signals the decline of heroic ethos in the context of war, in which soldiers are left to question the true value of sacrifice in the battlefield. The narrative's battlefield imagery, emotive repercussions of those involved and motives of war are examined by referring to the soldiers' post-heroism. Albeit war is personified as a looming figure at the onset of the narrative, Powers' post-heroic narrative leaves little doubt of the futility of engaging with war.
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 LEGACY OF WAR IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD"
(co-written with Larry Tritle), “The Legacy of War in the Classical World,” in Brian Campbell and Larry Tritle eds. The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World (OUP) 726-742, 2013
Roman legionaries advancing against a hillside of Germans chanting their famous baritus war cry (cf. Tac. Germ. 3) captivated audiences around the world in the opening scene of Ridley Scott's Hollywood blockbuster Gladiator (2000). Zack Snyder's animated (and cartoonish) 300 drew equally huge crowds that watched the heroic deaths of the Spartans at Thermopylae, inspiring too young American leathernecks, that is, Marines, to tattoo themselves with images of ancient Greek warriors (2006). Such is the continuing attraction of battle in the classical world. In this short discussion Tom Palaima explores the literary impact of classical war, warriors, and authors into the modern world, while L. Tritle traces more historical traditions.
S. Ni Fhlainn (ed.) Dark Reflections, Monstrous Reflections: Essays on the Monster in Culture. Oxford: The Interdisciplinary Press, pp. 285-298.
Throughout human history societies in a state of war have often found it necessary to cast their enemies as barbarous, amoral or monstrous, in an attempt to persuade itself that they are fighting 'the good fight.' This is especially the case during conflicts of the twentieth century, where mass media enabled the dissemination of propaganda regarding the activities of their enemies in wartime. During the First World War British propagandists regularly used tales of German atrocities against Allied soldiers, nurses and civilians as a means to bolster the war effort and commit the public for the fight ahead. These stories were also released to the British soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front, where they were circulated widely by word of mouth and indeed embellished. For some of the British soldiers on the Western Front the idea of the enemy as monstrous or sub-human was a very real concept; an idea easily incorporated as they witnessed the devastation and death caused by the conflict. This paper aims to address the results of believing in monsters, by examining how the British soldiers reacted to the belief that what they were fighting was less than human. Through combining anthropological and historical approaches with the study of the various archives in Britain containing personal documents of Great War soldiers this paper will discuss how the construction of the enemy as 'the other' contributed in turn to acts of violence and aggression by British soldiers. This contributed to what Taussig has described as a 'space of death', a self-perpetuating system where the belief in the monstrous in turn creates equally monstrous acts. Through this examination this paper can cast light on atrocities committed in wartime, by emphasising that it is in the belief of the monster which unleashes the monstrous.