Paul Fussell the Great War and Modern Memory Review
Perhaps the best style to write about Paul Fussell'southward 1975 masterpiece "The Great War and Modernistic Retention" would exist to but list willy-nilly some of the myriad insights, observations, facts, quotations and other interesting stuff that Fussell artfully, with ever so much care, throws on the page.
When he died in May, i of the many British obituaries for Fussell, an American, described "The Great War and Mod Memory" as "magisterial."
I'k afraid, though, that the give-and-take suggests that Fussell's volume in some manner gives a consummate motion-picture show of World State of war I and its bear on the past century, that it in some way fits all that into an understandable context, a frame in which the events of the war and its subsequently-furnishings all take a identify.
Really, though, "The Bully War and Modern Memory" is something very different — a hodge-podge of material. And that's a good thing.
The knowledge of adept and evil
There is an over-arching idea to the book, and it'due south contained in a quote that Fussell uses from English poet Philip Larkin:
Never such innocence once again.
Before the war, life was seen to have meaning. Reason was in control, and faith dealt with any reason couldn't handle. People knew their place.
The war, particularly for people in Britain, shattered all of that. The war was chaos. The war was devastation without purpose. The war was death without purpose. The war was living without purpose.
Fussell writes, "The innocent army fully attained the noesis of good and evil at the Somme on July i, 1916." And he quotes Edmund Blunden, i of the most eloquent memoirists from the state of war, regarding the first day of the battle:
By the end of the day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken globe and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning.
"The cruel fact"
And information technology wasn't every bit if War could be personified in Mars, as the Greek myth-makers did. War, in this case, was mindless, omnivorous, ferocious and something like an act of God — except how to believe in God in the face up of such destruction and murder?
And it wasn't as if the soldiers were taking part in a tragedy. The War didn't merit that status.
The War was doing to the soldiers. They could play no Othello-similar role. They could take no fatal flaw considering, to have a fatal flaw, they would need to control events.
That was not the instance.
To attempt to address the war through the orderliness of literature, Fussell writes, is to move then far from the feel as to make the effort seemingly worthless.
Is there any way of compromising betwixt the reader's expectations that written history ought to be interesting and meaningful and the cruel fact that much of what happens [in war] — all of what happens? — is inherently without "pregnant"?
Disorderly and apt
And so, although he doesn't say then directly, Fussell's approach in "The Great State of war and Modern Memory" is to throw in everything, including the kitchen sink and refrigerator and java-grinder. It is a disorderly — and apt — method.
At points, Fussell is a literary critic spending pages and pages on four writers and their very different means of writing virtually the war — Blunden, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. He too makes diverse side trips to talk over authors of later generations, such as Norman Mailer and Thomas Pynchon, whose subjects were the First or 2nd World War.
At others, he is a armed services historian, noting, for instance, that cleaning one'south article of clothing of lice was chosen "reading one'south shirt" and that, contrary to the propagandists, the employ of gas warfare wasn't the horror it was made out to exist. He writes:
Every bit [military historian and Great War veteran B. H.] Lindell Hart points out, gas is "the least inhumane of modern weapons" [since it doesn't rip autonomously a body the way a bullet or shrapnel does]. Its bad press was the result of its novelty: "Information technology was novel and therefore labeled an atrocity by a world which condones abuses but detest innovations."
Fussell as well points out that, except at sunrise and sunset when information technology was relatively condom to look out over No Man'due south State, a soldier in a trench had an extremely limited view of the world:
To exist in the trenches was to experience an unreal, unforgettable enclosure and constraint, every bit well as a sense of being unoriented and lost. One saw two things only: the walls of an unlocalized, undifferentiated world and the sky in a higher place…
What a survivor of the Salient remembers l years later are the walls of dirt and the ceiling of heaven, and his eloquent optative cry rises as if he were yet imprisoned there: "To be out of this present, ever-present, eternally present misery, this stinking world of viscid, trickling world ceilinged by a strip of threatening sky."
What language to use?
Oft, Fussell is a social critic, examining how the Keen War stretched, deformed and, in some cases, broke British society — and Western culture in general.
For Americans whose wars, since the Ceremonious War, take been "somewhere else," it is startling to have Fussell point out how close to home the Earth War I troops were. A soldier could exit the front line in the morning, and exist in London that evening. This increased the disconnect between what the soldiers experienced and how the home folks saw the war. What language could a visiting son utilize to explicate to his parents, his friends, what it meant to exist in the trenches?
Speaking of linguistic communication, at that place was a whole vocabulary of knightly words used past those at habitation, particularly the propaganda boosters, to describe what was happening on the front end lines that were fantastical and obscene in their blindness to the realities.
Fussell employs nearly a full page of his volume to list the euphemisms: "A horse is a steed, or charger. The enemy is the foe, or the host. Danger is peril. To conquer is to vanquish. To attack is to assail……"
How totally beside the betoken such euphemisms were tin can exist seen from this story related by Blunden:
A young and cheerful lance-corporal of ours was making some tea [in the trench] when I passed one warm afternoon. Wishing him a practiced tea, I went forth 3 fire-bays; i shell dropped without alarm behind me; I saw its smoke faint out, and I idea all was as lucky as it should be. Soon a cry from the place recalled me; the shell had burst all wrong. Its butting impression was black and stinking in the parados where 3 minutes ago the lance-corporal's mess-tin was bubbling over a little flame. For him, how could the gobblets of blackening flesh, the globe-wall sotted with claret, with flesh, the centre under the duckboard, the puply bone be the only answer?
But there was more.
At this moment, while one looked with dreadful fixity at so isolated a horror, the lance-corporal's brother came round the traverse.
Someone else
No wonder, so, that soldiers saw the war as a play and themselves equally actors — not really themselves. Or saw themselves every bit if from a distance, every bit another person.
Fussell quotes one veteran regarding the last minutes of the War:
On the Fourth Regular army front, at ii minutes to eleven, a automobile gun, almost 200 yards from the leading British troops, fired off a complete belt without a interruption. A single machine-gunner was so seen to stand beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow, and turning about walk slowly to the rear.
Sassoon, Fussell notes, described how he played various roles for unlike visitors to his hospital room:
If the audition is "Some Senior Officer under whom I'd served," Sassoon is "minor, politely subordinate…quite set to go out again." His central line here is: "Clumsily nice of you to come and see me, sir." Confronted by some "centre-aged or elderly Male Civilian," he notes in himself a "trend….to assume haggard facial attribute of one who has 'been through hell.' " The line to exist delivered now is: "Oh, yes, I'll be out there again by the autumn."
And so on.
Then Fussell points out:
The "real" Sassoon, he perceives, is the one that surfaces when the audiences have all gone, the one "mainly disposed toward a self-pitying estrangement from everyone except the troops on the front line."
Polarization and angst
One legacy of the Great State of war axiomatic today, Fussell argues, is the polarization of public life and argue.
"We" are all here on this side; "the enemy" is over there. "We" are individuals with names and personal identities; "he" is a mere collective entity. We are visible; he is invisible. We are normal; he is grotesque. Our appurtenances are natural; his, bizarre. He is not as good equally we are….
"He" is the Communist's "Capitalist," Hitler's "Jew," Pound's Usurer, Wyndham Lewis'southward Philistine, the Capitalist's Communist…He is Faulkner's Snopeses, Auden's "trespasser" and "ragged urchin," Eliot's Sweeney and boyfriend carbuncular, Lawrence's overnice sexless Englishman, Roy Fuller'south barbarian, and Anthony Burgess's Alex and his droogs.
And today — Fox News' Barack Obama, MSNBC'south Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party's Democrats and the Occupy Move'due south One Percentage.
And another legacy is an angst-ridden way of life for modernistic humans.
"The parapet, the wire, and the mud," [H.Thousand.] Tomlinson posited in 1935, are now "permanent features of man existence. Which is to say that anxiety without stop, without purpose, without reward, and without pregnant is woven into the textile of contemporary life. Where we find a "parapet" nosotros find an occasion for anxiety, cocky-testing, doubts about i'due south identity and value, and a fascinated love-loathing of the threatening, alien terrain on the other side.
There is much, much more than in "The Great War and Modernistic Retention." Just, maybe, it would be best to close this await at the volume.
And close it with one sentence from Fussell:
In the Dandy State of war viii million people were destroyed because two persons, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort, had been shot.
Patrick T. Reardon
vii.22.12
Source: https://patricktreardon.com/book-review-the-great-war-and-modern-memory-by-paul-fussell/