Mainstream Criticism Of World War I Poetry example essay topic

Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism The war hastened everything-in politics, in economics, in behavior-but it started nothing. George Dangerfield 1 In The Romantic Ideology, Jerome McGann famously proclaimed that the criticism of literary Romanticism (that of M.H. Abrams in particular) was more concerned with promulgating the worldview of its topic than subjecting it to rigorous critique. For McGann, mainstream Romantic criticism was not criticism at all, but the application of literary / aesthetic criteria to a period of literary history that that period had itself generated: "the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated by a Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption inRomanticism's own self-representations". 2 I want to borrow McGann's terms, if not his entire methodology, to make some similar inquiries into the criticism of First World War poetry. I see a comparable genealogy operating within this critical discourse: the mainstream criticism of FirstWorld War poetry, most conspicuously Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, has formed itself around a certain set of aesthetic and ethical principles that it garners from its own subject. 3 In other words, the scholarship in question does not so much criticize the poetry which forms its subject as replicate the poetry's ideology.

I see this ideology primarily in two forms: anaesthetic criterion of realism and an ethical criterion of a humanism of passivity. Furthermore, these criteria are combined by both the poets and their critics to create an ideology of what I term " combat gnosticism", the belief that combat represents a qualitatively separate order of experience that is difficult if not impossible to communicate to any who have not undergone an identical experience. Such an ideology has served both to limit severely the canon of texts that mainstream First World War criticism has seen a legitimate war writing and has simultaneously promoted warliterature's status as a discrete body of work with almost no relation to non-war writing. The critical tradition that I identify as mainstream and dominant is [End Page 203] one that equates the term "war" with the term "combat". As a result, what it legitimates as war literature is produced exclusively by combat experience; the knowledge of combat is a prerequisite for the production of a literary text that adequately deals with war.

This is what I mean by combat gnosticism: a construction that gives us war experience as a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge which only an initiated elite knows. Only men (there is, of course, a tacit gender exclusion operating here) who have actively engaged in combat have access to certain experiences that a reproductive of, perhaps even constitutive of, an arcane knowledge. Furthermore, mere military status does not signify initiation, but only status as a combatant. It is not the label of "soldier" that is privileged so much as the label of "warrior". The results of such a construction are fairly obvious: the canonization of male war writers who not only have combat experience but represent such experience in their texts. Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves become the exemplary figures of the genre.

The attitude toward war of any particular writer is less an issue than his first-hand experience; Sassoon's use ofhis war experience to promote a sort of pacifism and his friend Graves's opposing occasional retention of militarism are seen less as contradictions than contrasting uses of a commodity (war experience) that remains essentially unaltered. 4 To use the language set forth in Eric Leed's NoMan's Land, combat is a liminal experience that sets the veteran irrevocably apart from those who have not crossed the ritual threshold of war. 5 It can, indeed has, been seen as the ultimate rite of passage: a definitive coming to manhood for the industrial age, in which boys become men by confronting mechanical horror and discovering their essential masculinity, perhaps even their essential humanity, in a realm from which feminine presence is banished. The primary type of literary text that generates this ideology of combat gnosticism is what I would like to refer to as the trench lyric. The trench lyric constitutes a formally conservative, realistic text based on the direct combat experience of the junior officer class.

"Trench", in this formulation, calls attention to the poem's most common setting, not necessarily its scene of composition (infact, few of the trench lyricists wrote finished poetry while physically in the trenches). The trench, with its accompanying images of filth, shellfire, barbed wire, and so forth is of course the dominant icon of the First World War. The trench lyric portrays these distressing conditions in an unromantic light, thus differentiating it from the more abstract and patriotic lyrics of the early war. The trench lyric as a genre is realistic in that it employs the traditional styles and diction's of English poetry, especially as used in the Georgian poetry movement that was gaining cultural momentum just prior to the outbreak of the war, in such a manner as to be readily [End Page 204] accepted by a poetically, if not politically, conservative audience (that is, one with a low tolerance for avant-garde formal experimentation). Yet it uses these traditional poetic forms to portray the heretofore unknown gruesome details of the physical and psychological situations of the trench as seen from a participant's viewpoint. Perhaps the single most important defining element of the genre is this emphasis on personal experience.

The trench lyric is written from the point of view of a direct observer, and its legitimacy depends upon the putative accuracy of its representation of its writer's experience in thetrench. Therein lies its realism, the hallmark of the trench lyric and its criticism. Yeats famously referred to Wilfred Owen's poetry as "all blood, dirt, & sucked sugar stick". 6 The ideal of realism covers the first two-thirds of this formulation. The trench lyric rejects the Romantic praise of beauty in favor of an emphasis on the sheer ugliness of front line conditions in order to destroy the complacence of a sheltered civilian readership. Owen's poetry, for instance, uses the linguistic sensuousness that he learned from Keats in order to invert Keats's most famous poetic dictum, that beauty is truth.

The trench lyric, as the borderline oxymoronic term itself suggests, gives us visions of horror that, because they are horrible, must be true. "The true Poets must be truthful", inthe words of Owen's Preface (CP 535). The trench lyric thus represents a revision both of the aesthetic purposes of lyric poetry and of a naively optimistic attitude toward the conduct of the war. However, the equation of the trench lyric with war poetry has recently come into question. Understandably, recent feminist criticism has attempted to circumvent the narrow parameters of the trench lyric by focusing on previously forgotten noncombatant writers, especially women.

The exclusive identification of war with combat results in a theory which would allow only combatants to write war literature, for only theyare really affected by war. Anyone out of the trenches should not presume to infringe upon the direct, unmediated experience of those who do the actual fighting. A feminist study of warliterature must necessarily question these claims. In expanding the war canon beyond its previous bounds, feminist critics have rediscovered an immense body of texts. Catherine Reilly's 1978 bibliography of First World War-related poetry demonstrates that poetic reaction to the war was by no means limited to combatants; 7 in fact, as Elizabeth Marsland points out in her book, TheNation's Cause, Reilly's research makes unavoidable the observation that "the typical English First World War poet was not a combatant but a civilian". 8 With grounding in such primary research, many critics have recently reopened the question of women's reaction to war and the legitimacy and multifariousness of its poetic expression.

For instance, No sheen Khan's Women " poetry of the [End Page 205] First World War considers seriously the impact of war on women as expressed in their poetry; 9 moreover, she confronts the widely remarked misogynist trope of the canonized combatant poets, demonstrating that not all women war poets were, like Jessie Pope, the jingoist specifically addressed in early drafts of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce etDecorum Est", rabidly pro-war activists who were eager to send men to die in a hellish war from which their gender sheltered them. Likewise, Brian Murdoch's Fighting Songs and Warring Words expands the definition of war poetry well beyond the combatant lyric and into even the popular songs of the war era, 10 while Elizabeth Marsland's aforementioned The Nation's Cause, in offering a comparative study of French, German, and English war poetry, broadly defined, demonstrates how the mainstream form of English language war poetry criticism "has produced a decidedly warped image of the English First World War poetry in general, and especially of protest writing" (NC 144) by focusing exclusively on (necessarily) masculine combatants and their simplistically represented felix culpa from fervent idealism to bitter realism. Finally, Claire Tylee " the Great War and Women's Consciousness explores the effects of the First World War on culture; 11 her representatives of culture, however, are women-representatives that mainstream war literature covertly silences. In addition, Tylee's concerns, even her title, connote a response and a refutation of the critic who has been most responsible for the construction and popularization of what I have represented as mainstream World War literary criticism: Paul Fussell. Fussell's immensely influential book on the First World War, The Great War and Modern Memory, is a study of the War's impact on British culture. Its focus is almost exclusively that of the combatant: the experience of the FirstWorld War is synonymous with the experience of the trenches in Fussell's analysis.

As is made evident in his section on the home front, "The Enemy to the Rear", civilian reaction is seen only in terms of its inadequacies vis vis the trenches. The combatants' resentment is the primary, privileged experience, while that of noncombatants is represented only as a foil to set off the bitter and legitimate irony of the front-line troops. If civilians reacted to the war in any terms other than wholesale enthusiasm, we do not know it from Fussell. There is practically no mention of a pacifist movement (outside of the qualified involvement of the combatant-poet Siegfried Sassoon) or the impact of the war on women, either in terms of increased employment opportunities or effects upon the ongoing suffrage movement. For instance, Sylvia Pankhurst is mentioned only in connection with her agitation to inform the families of soldiers executed for military crimes that their sons had died of wounds. In the context of Fussell's argument, this is clearly not a good thing: it is presented in a paragraph on military obfuscation and euphemism under the topic [End Page 206] sentence "No one was to know too much" (GW 176).

For Fussell's version of what the FirstWorld War meant and continues to mean to English-speaking cultures, women figure only as representatives of noncombatants and the linguistic violence they do to the stark reality of combatant experience. To put it in the terms of this project, feminist studies of war literature have questioned mainstreamcriticism's contention that combat experience is a direct conduit to a realm of gnosis. I wish to make a more direct objection to the basic tenet of combat gnosticism, that the experience of fighting provides a connection to Reality, an unmediated Truth to which only those who have undergone the liminal trauma of combat have access. The canon reformation of Khan, Murdoch, Marsland, and Tylee allows us to see that there is more to war literature than what commonly goes under the title of war stories. War affects the civilian in different ways, assuredly, but war i snot an exclusively combatant, and thus not an exclusively masculine, experience. Women's live sare affected, even destroyed by war; culture involves women as well as men, and if war helps to construct a culture, as Fussell indeed seems to argue, it constructs feminine as well as masculine subjects.

So, while I wish to acknowledge this approach to questioning mainstream World War literary criticism, I also wish to confront more directly the epistemological assumptions upon which it rests. Fussell dedicates The Great War and Modern Memory "To the Memory of / Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, ASN 36548772 / Co. F, 410th Infantry / Killed beside me in France / March 15, 1945 (vii). I do not wish to cast aspersions on what I take to be a heartfelt gesture toa victim of war. Yet I am also profoundly interested in how this dedication sets up the text that follows. Fussell is very careful to identify Edward Hudson in standard military language and to place his death in proximity to Fussell as author and authority.

Hudson's death thus becomesFussell's way of placing himself: within the military, within a war, and, most important, within combat. Fussell has seen combat, he has seen death, his buddy was killed at his side: thus we are more inclined to consider seriously the importance that he places upon combat experience in the subsequent 350 pages of text. That the war in which Fussell places himself is the Second rather than the First World War seems not an important distinction; the gnosis of combat may alter slightly between different wars, but there is an essential core of knowledge that remains untouched by historical difference. The author participated in combat (any combat): he has authority, so we who lack such experience should listen to the knowledge he provides. 12 I do not want to imply that The Great War and Modern Memory is not in many ways an important book, primarily because of its iconoclastic [End Page 207] stance toward received opinion. It is a significant piece of revisionist (in the broad sense) history.

Nonetheless, in as far as it has been influential, it has furthered the un investigated myth upon which it is based. This becomes more evident in Fussell's second scholarly war-related text, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. The content of this book is much less literary than The Great War and Modern Memory; there is not the same emphasis on biographically based summations of the canonical literary figures. Instead, Fussell is much more overt about reading the war as a text rather than reading texts about the war. Nevertheless, combat gnosticism still remains: the line between combatant and noncombatant is, if possible, drawn even more strongly here, despite the breakdown of clear distinctions between combatant and civilian in the Second World War. Fussell turns away from combatant fiction and poetry and privileges the combatant war memoir.

In his final chapter, entitled " 'The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,' " he describes the best American examples of this genre as "conveying their terrible news... by an uncomplicated delivery of the facts, conveyed in a style whose literary unpretentiousness seems to argue absolute credibility". 13 To a great extent, this kind of formalist hierarchy signals a further gnostic development, for only the most unmediated statements, those which come straight fromthe heart of combat experience without the intervention of literary or poetic form, can be trusted. Fussell wants us to apprehend combat directly; he wants his combat memoirist's to transcend language and give the Truth to us directly so that we too will have experienced what it means to know combat. Yet is such a thing possible I am thinking here less of the rather naive epistemological assumption that because a text is less overtly literary it must therefore lie closer to the truth; rather I am asking whether the apprehension of direct combat experience by the noncombatant is possible givenFussell's construction of combat gnosticism. In order to answer this question, I want to turn to on eof Fussell's non-academic books, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays. 14 First, we need to understand that the title of this collection is not as ironic as one might assume: Fussellactually is thankful for the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for he believes that they hastened the end of the war and thus saved many lives, his own included.

Moreover, in the title essay Fussell leads with his combat experience and belittles the arguments of those who now question the ethics of the atom bombs, portraying them as self-satisfied moral hypocrites because, due to age or social class (gender is not even mentioned as an issue), they did not have combat experience and thus cannot understand what the atomic explosions meant to those who expected to invade Japan. Experience marks the great divide between those who understand what the atom [End Page 208] bombs really meant and those who, "remote from experience", idly philosophize about them. Clearly, combat is the experience that counts, the only experience worthy of the word. Other kinds of experience are not experience at all. But can we benefit from Fussell's combat gnostic experience Solipsism remains a constant threat in such a position. Initiates like Fussell may or may not choose to enlighten noncombatants; moreover, it may not ultimately be possible for them to do so.

If understanding is truly based merely on experience, it remains impossible to tell others of one's own experience unless these others have also undergone identical experiences. Thus talking about war becomes an exclusionary activity in which only those who already know can speak to each other. Those on the outside, without experience, cannot learn; whatever experience they do have lacks validity. Those on the inside, on the other hand, cannot tell one another anything they did not already know. Fussell's experience is a form of presence (in the post structural sense of the term): presence in combat gives one an aura of knowledge, the ability to speak without (literary) form, the exclusive ability to know and to tell the (extra textual) truth.

Yet, as is the case with presence, there remains always a trace of what is excluded, in this case civilian experience. That women have no voice in mainstream World War literary criticism is due to the exclusive primacy it grants to a mythical direct access to experience and presence. To put this in psychoanalytic terms, combat is phallic: it allows one to speak while those without the phallus must stay silent. My purpose here is not to demolish the validity of combat experience but to suggest that it is not the phallus, or that if it is, it functions as other phallic discourses: to make something appear to be whole. Combat experience by itself cannot tell the whole story: it cannot make any one speaking subject the monolithic authority who controls what atomic bombs really mean, what language really means. It is simply an experience among other experiences, a (gendered) voice among other (gendered) voices.

Yet how did we get the idea that it was the only voice, that it was exclusively valid I wish tosuggest that the genealogy of such a position rests on the literature around which the discourse first formed. Modern war criticism began with the First World War because it was the first war which included among its combatants a significant number of educated writers with access to means of publication. I am thinking mostly of the two poets whose names are synonymous with war poetry, yet who considered themselves poets well before they became combatant officers. Both Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen wrote poetry which privileges direct combat experience whose ostensible purpose is to educate an ignorant civilian populace of brutal realities it would prefer to ignore, [End Page 209] yet both poets also become caught in an epistemological trap: they cannot truly inform an audience who lacks the experiential basis for understanding their work, andthe only way an audience can acquire such a basis is to experience combat, at which point theyare no longer the noncombatant audience the poetry assumes. I am not saying that this invalidates their poetry, only that this inevitable tension runs through all of their most famous texts. What is more objectionable is the uncritical acceptance of such a problematic paradigm of knowledge onthe part of critics who have addressed this poetry.

Mainstream criticism of First World War poetry has been primarily biographical in approach. Such an approach has tended to result in a criticism that implicitly (or occasionally explicitly) argues for its subject. In other words, war poetry criticism has not so much read its subject in critical manner as it has presented various apologies for its subject, that subject being both the war poem and the war poet. Like Sassoon and Owen going back to the trenches to make an effective protest on the behalf of their men, war poetry critics have protested the sufferings of their subjects, Sassoon and Owen themselves.

At least since Bernard Bergonzi's Heroes' Twilight, first published in Britain in 1965, critics have argued for the acceptance of war poetry on its own terms. 15 A poetry of pity, a poetry of political protest (the latter especially prevalent in JonSilkin's Out of Battle, first published in 1972 16): this is what war poetry criticism has offered us. But most of all, trench lyric critics have stressed the importance of the poet as witness to the slaughter of the Western Front, the man whose biography remains important because he was actually there and can thus provide us with the Truth of War (to borrow the title of DesmondGraham's text on the subject 17). Mainstream war poetry critics have thus absorbed rather than critiqued the ideology of their subject, and they continue to replicate this ideology to the exclusion of other voices. I would like now to make the discussion a bit more concrete by placing it in terms of two particular poems by Wilfred Owen. When Yeats wrote his withering damnation of Owen and the other war poets to Lady Wellesley, he referred to "Strange Meeting" as Owen's "worst & most famous" poem (L 124).

Qualitative judgments aside, it is certainly no longer his most famous text. The anthology piece of choice today is "Dulce et Decorum Est", and the change is, I think, a notable one. "Strange Meeting" is a dream vision: in it a soldier confronts the enemy he has killed and this enemy articulates his lost hopes that any real wisdom will arise from this war. The irony here is subdued, a quiet resignation in the knowledge that subsequent generations will learn nothing from the carnage of the trench. "Dulce et Decorum Est", on the [End Page 210] other hand, allows Owen to describe trench life at its least heroic and most ironic: tired and dirty troops slog away from the front line when they are attacked by gas shells. The meticulously realized death of one of the soldiers, complete with "blood gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs" (CP 140), leads to the angry conclusion in which civilians are blamed for holding unrealistic assumptions about the war while the Latin tag, a popular gravestone motto for the war dead, is twisted for all the irony it can muster.

It is this kind of situational irony of which mainstream war criticism strongly approves. To put it simply, war poetry criticism has come to favor the realistic ("Dulce etDecorum Est") over the visionary ("Strange Meeting"). Underlying this shift is the epistemological question of representation. Does the trench lyric give us the most accurate, the most mimetic, representation of actual trench conditions, or does it offer particular construction of them The novelty of Sassoon's and Owen's descriptive poems has led them to be seen as pieces of reportage, a kind of poetry of witness to the horrors of modern technological warfare. And this version of them is not, of course, wrong. Yet it is limited.

Owen and Sassoon not only represent war; in representing it they also construct it by giving it meaning. The rather simple ironic meaning produced by a poem such as "Dulce et Decorum Est", a variation on "reality is not as you like to think it", fits rather effortlessly into mainstream warcriticism's meta narrative of irony ber alles, but some of the less obviously descriptive pieces remain a bit more difficult. "Strange Meeting" is less a rehearsal of the horrible realities of war thana n interpretation of what the war means to those who find themselves victims of it. Most important, in constructing the war as a fantastic encounter in hell between two dead soldiers, Owen removes most questions of realism, defined as a representation of an un constructed reality, instead constructing a dream world that literally and figuratively underlies the realities of combat.

Owen thus does not so much bear witness to a particular representation of the reality of combat as he constructs a world in which he can explore the meaning of war. The second or ethical half of the ideology foregrounds what I want to call an ethic of passive humanism. The mature trench lyrics of Owen and Sassoon are commonly read as poems of ethical protest. Where the more stereotypically Georgian Edmund Blunder and Edward Thomas object to war on an aesthetic level, protesting its ugliness as compared to the beauty of an unconstructedand un destructed nature, Owen and Sassoon object to war because of its human cost in terms of both the wasted lives of soldiers and the callous and willful misunderstanding of staff officers and civilians. As Owen put it in his justifiably famous [End Page 211] formulation, "Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. The Poetry is in the pity" (CP 535).

Such statements bring ethics to the forefront of the trench lyric, where it cannot be ignored. Again we can take Yeats's objections as a starting point: in excluding the trench lyric from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 18 in 1936, he declaimed that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry" ( iv). The ethics of the trench lyric lies not only in portraying the passive suffering of the victims of war, but also in actively articulating that suffering. Owen speaks often in his last letters of pleading the case of his men, of returning to the trenches in order to witness and protest their trials.

One of the standard tropes of the trench lyric is the Crucifixion, with the men playing the silent and suffering victim to the willfully ignorant civilian Pilates. 19 All noncombatants become the beneficiaries of the sacrifice of the silent young men, leaving it to the trench lyricist to point out the immorality of the situation. The trench lyricist as ethicist, then, acquires the moral high ground in order to point an accusing finger at those who sacrifice their sons for their own benefit. He constructs an asymmetrical relationship: he accuses while we, the noncombatant audience, hear the sentence passed on us.

Thus the ethic of passive humanism, in the hands of the poet, necessarily betrays itself. In order to articulate the case of those silent sufferers who become the victims of civilian complacency, thetrench lyricist must give up his own passivity and actively blame others. In fact, the situation becomes inverted: the noncombatant is robbed of her voice (or occasionally, in Sassoon's case, given a few transparently vapid lines) 20 while the warrior inflicts punitive suffering for the sake ofhis troops. And I am using the feminine pronoun advisedly here; as often as not, the representative of all things civilian is a woman, either benefiting from a lover or son's suffering or rejecting him upon his return from the front. "Dulce et Decorum Est" can again serve as an example.

After the end of the opening sonnet section, Owen introduces the second person pronoun and the poem turns from a description in toan accusation. If you could see the realities of war, you would not promulgate the ideology that allows this to go on. By extension, you bear the responsibility for the passive suffering from the " vile incurable sores" on this "innocent tongue". And the officer poet is going to make you quite aware of this predicament that you have gotten yourself into.

Moreover, as anyone who has read this poem in an annotated anthology knows, the original recipient of the accusation was "a certain poetess", Jessie Pope, the writer of patriotic children's war rhymes. She calls the trench poet out of his passivity so that he might confront her face-to-face and force her to see the harsh realities of war. [End Page 212] On the other hand, there remains an important sense in which the epistemology of "Dulce etDecorum Est" is not quite as unproblematic as traditional war poetry criticism would seem tosuggest. In fact, the poem resembles "Strange Meeting" in that the second, accusatory half of " Dulce" takes place in a dream vision. The first fourteen lines, comprising a traditionally self-contained sonnet, can easily be read as straight reportage. Immediately following this, however, and compromising if not breaking the formal self-sufficient.