The Great War and Modern Memory

published	March 2nd 2000 by Oxford University Press, USA
first published	1975
binding	Paperback
isbn	0195133323 (isbn13: 9780195133325)
ebook
pages	384
literary awards	National Book Critics Circle Award Winner (1975); National Book Award for Nonfiction (1976)
description	The year 2000 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Great War and Modern Memory, winner of the National Book Award, the Nationa...more [close] The year 2000 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Great War and Modern Memory, winner of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and recently named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books. Fussell's landmark study of WWI remains as original and gripping today as ever before: a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who most effectively memorialized WWI as an historical experience with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning. For this special edition, the author has prepared a new afterword and a suggested further reading list. As this classic work draws upon several disciplines--among them literary studies, military history, cultural criticism, and historical inquiry--it will continue to appeal to students, scholars, and general readers of various backgrounds. [close]
date added	02-23-07 edit book

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Tim rated it:

05/05/08

Read in April, 2008

In reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which is about World War I, I did compare it with his book Wartime, about World War II. The first is literary criticism and explores the themes in poetry and memoir that begin in and grew out of that war. I appreciate this work, but in the end find Wartime more compelling, probably because it is history and reaches to a broader and more diffuse set of sources than this literary analysis. I am true to the historian's guild. But that ...more In reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which is about World War I, I did compare it with his book Wartime, about World War II. The first is literary criticism and explores the themes in poetry and memoir that begin in and grew out of that war. I appreciate this work, but in the end find Wartime more compelling, probably because it is history and reaches to a broader and more diffuse set of sources than this literary analysis. I am true to the historian's guild. But that said, Fussell's description of the war in the book's early chapters is compelling as is his description of the way it signaled the end of European innocence and the beginning of the age in which we dwell.
Fussell finds Thomas Hardy's pre-war poetry ushering in the irony that points to the future. "Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its ends are so melodramatically disproportionate to its proposed ends." (7) Then begins his recounting of the horrible experiences of the Great War that made it the most ironic of all time becase "it reversed the idea of progress." (8)
He makes the claim, maybe too wide for the historian, that the "one reason the Great War was more ironic than any other is that its beginning was more innocent." (18) The course of the war destroyed hopes of progress and memories of innocence. He discusses trench warfare, the modern weaponry (barbed wire and machine guns) that made the war so deadly, and the growing resignation and fear among the soldiers that the war would be endless, despite the "ridiculous proximity" of the trenches to home.
The front ate away at the aura of home by creating community and experiences that could never be understood at home. "What we can call gross dichotomizing is a persisting imaginative habit of modern times, traceable, it would seem, to the actualities of the Great War." (75) Fussell claims the us and them of more recent times began then, with the enemy first of all, but spreading beyond the Germans in their trenches. "One of the legacies of the war is just this habit of simple distinction, simplification, and opposition. If truth is the main casulty in war, ambiguity is another." (79) All distinction became simple antithesis, not just in feelings towards the enemy, but also towards commanders and the "complacent, patriotic, uncomprehending, fatuous civilians at home." (86)
Fussell describes a myth-ridden world, full of religion (conversion experiences, real and literary) and superstition. "The prevailing opinion in the trenches," he notes, "was that anything might be true, except what was printed." (115) English poetry of WWI always echoed the past, because the war caused a collision between events and language, especially the 19th c. language in praise of progress. "Soldiers have discovered that no one is very interested in the bad news they have to report.... We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty." This change of language was accompanied by the British use of euphemism, the passive voice, and even the rhetorical style of the latter 20th c. "It was perhaps the first time in history that official policy produced events so shocking, bizarre, and stomach-turning that the events had to be tidied up for presentation to a highly literate mass population." (178) Soldiers became unflappable and masters of understatement, further traits only encouraged by pre-printed military form postcards that allowed a soldier to tick through a short list that described his attitude as "am quite well" or "admitted to hospital," but refused to allow any distinctions.
The final three chapters deal with theater, the soldier's view of their actions as on stage, arcadia, the anti-pastoral writing of the time, and sexuality, especially homo-erotic language in poetry. These chapters all pushed literary ideas even more forcefully to the fore. The poetry has power and Fussell shows where in history much of that power originates....less

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