Fussell’s book is concerned with the literary frames within which the British experience on the Western Front was first perceived, later recollected in intranquility, and finally expanded, by men whose encounters with systematic social violence took place in other locales, into a total vision of modern existence. His sacrifice scene is the trenches of Flanders and Picardy; his off-balance chroniclers are the memoirists and poets—Sassoon, Graves, Blunden, Owen—who turned it into a labyrinth of ironies; and his latecomer heritors are the nightmare rhapsodists of endless war—Heller, Mailer, Hughes, Vonnegut, Pynchon. There seems to be, he says, “One dominating form of modern understanding; . . . it is essentially ironic; and . . . it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of The Great War” (p. 35).
Whether or not one wants to accept this argument in so unvarnished a form (just as there is more that is interesting to tell of Bali than immolation, rather more has gone into the making of the contemporary imagination, even the absurdist strain of it, than mustard gas and doomed athletes), its logic is of the sort which, once sensed, seems blankly obvious.
Fussell begins by placing the factual iconography of trench warfare—mud, rats, barbed-wire, shell-holes, no-man’s-land, three-on-a-match, morning stand-to’s, moving up, and over-the-top—against the background of the largely literary one of Asquith’s England—playing fields, sunsets, nightingales, Country Life, dulce et decorum est, and Shropshire Lad eroticism. The war thus becomes as much of a symbolic structure—or, more exactly, comes to possess one—as Balinese cremation, though of a rather different kind, with a rather different tone, engendering rather different reflections. It, too, arrives to us across a sequence of clashing imaginations and discomfited sensibilities, an interpretative career that makes it what it is—what, to us at least, it means. And setting the phases of that career in their social frames, bordering them with the tenor of the life around them, is not an exercise in sociological explaining away or historical explaining about: it is a way into the thing itself. What Fussell calls “the Curious Literariness of Real Life” is, if “literariness” be widened to accommodate all the forms of collective fantasy, a general phenomenon, embracing even Passchendaele or The Battle of the Somme.
The literariness of the real life of the men who went to France in the iron autumn after the gold summer of 1914 was largely late Romantic, a pastiche of pastoralism, elegy, earnestness, adventure, and high diction. “There was no Waste Land, with its rat’s alleys, dull canals, and dead men who have lost their bones.” Fussell writes, travestying (I presume intentionally) James’s famous passage on Hawthorne’s America, “. . . no Ulysses, no Mauberly, no Cantos, no Kafka, no Proust, no Waugh, no Huxley, no Cummings, no Women in Love or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There was no ‘Valley of Ashes’ in The Great Gatsby. One read Hardy and Kipling and Conrad and frequented the world of traditional moral action delineated in traditional moral language” (p. 23).
The inadequacy of such an imagination (though Hardy’s wormwood and Housman’s rue helped a little) to funk-holes and firing trenches was so vast as to be comic, and it shattered into a thousand pieces of sour irony; fragments of polished sentiment turned into hell-vignettes and horse-laughs. And it was these fragments—a world view in droplets—that the memoirists of the war tried, through the inversion of one received genre or another, to bring together into a once more graspable whole: Blunden in black pastoral, Sassoon in black romance, and Graves in black farce. And it was, in turn, that whole (half made and still trapped in traditional forms, traditional speech, and traditional imagery) upon which the later, more insurrectionary celebrants of dead men who have lost their bones afterward drew for what, by the time of The Naked and the Dead, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Gravity’s Rainbow, Fussell can properly call, because it is settled, formal, and obsessively recurrent: the ritual of military memory.
This is how anything imaginational grows in our minds, is transformed, socially transformed, from something we merely know to exist or have existed, somewhere or other, to something which is properly ours, a working force in our common consciousness. In the Balinese case, it is not a matter (not for us at least) of the past recaptured, but of the strange construed. Yet this is only a genre detail—a fiction framed as ethnography rather than history; a complicating matter but not a decisive one. When major cultural lines are traversed in the process of interpretive reworking, a different sense of discovery is produced: one more of having come across something than of having remembered it, of an acquisition than of an inheritance. But the movement from some scene of singular experience (Flanders, 1915; Gianjar, 1847), through groping representations of what went on there raised to figurations of collective life is the same. Nor is the matter seriously otherwise when the originating scene is artefactual rather than, as we say, “real”—Emma or Mansfield Park; or, for that matter, suttee. That but alters vocabulary. The passage is still from the immediacies of one form of life to the metaphors of another.
In charting that passage, purist dogmas designed to keep supposed universes of learning properly distinct are more than obstructive, they are actively misleading. The notions of the self-interpreting text on the literary side or of the material determination of consciousness on the social science side may have their uses, or they may not; but so far as understanding how the constructions of other peoples’ imaginations connect to those of our own, they head us off precisely in the wrong direction—toward an isolation of the meaning-form aspects of the matter from the practical contexts that give them life. The application of critical categories to social events and sociological categories to symbolic structures is not some primitive form of philosophic mistake, nor is it another mere confusion of art and life. It is the proper method for a study dedicated to getting straight how the massive fact of cultural and historical particularity comports with the equally massive fact of cross-cultural and cross-historical accessibility—how the deeply different can be deeply known without becoming any less different; the enormously distant enormously close without becoming any less far away.
Even unburdened by the cleverness that surpasseth all understanding of the more hermetic varieties of literary criticism or by the willed myopia, called realism, of the more hard-nosed varieties of social science, the thing is difficult enough. Faulkner, whose whole work was in some sense centered about it—about how particular imaginations are shadowed by others standing off in the cultural and temporal distance; how what happens, recountings of what happens, and metaphoric transfigurations of recountings of what happens into general visions, pile, one on top of the next, to produce a state of mind at once more knowing, more uncertain, and more disequilibrated—had as exact a sense for just how difficult it is as anyone who has written. In Absalom, Absalom!—that extraordinary interweaving of the manic narratives of various sorts of Sutpens, Coldfields, and Compsons over a century or so—he puts the matter with the sort of despair no one who engages in this sort of meaning chasing can ever entirely shake. Quentin Compson’s father is telling Quentin (who has just come from hearing Rosa Coldfield’s story about the Sutpen saga of miscegenation, near incest, fratricide, and murder) what his father, Quentin’s grandfather, told him, Quentin’s father, that old Sutpen a half-century earlier on told him, Quentin’s grandfather, about it all, when he breaks off in frustration:
Yes, granted that, even to the unworldly Henry, let alone the more travelled father, the existence of the eighth part negro mistress and the sixteenth part negro son, granted even the morganatic ceremony—a situation which was as much a part of a wealthy young New Orleansian’s social and fashionable equipment as his dancing slippers—was reason enough, which is drawing honor a little fine even for the shadowy paragons which are our ancestors born in the South and come to man- and womanhood about eighteen sixty or sixty one. It’s just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they don’t explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood