New Literary History

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 in Romanticism’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 First World 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: an aesthetic 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 as legitimate war writing and has simultaneously promoted war literature’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 are productive 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 of his 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 No Man’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...