The cover of the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Paul Fussell’s book, The Great War and Modern Memory, features a photo of an unknown British soldier who carries a very unique look on his face. It is a look of hopelessness and forlorn abandonment, both physically and mentally. One can see it in his eyes and in the very way he stands. He carries a look of visible disillusion, and yet, at the same time though, he seems prepared to fight, if only to survive. In this respect, he represents the idea that individuals can strain to survive the pure terror that was trench life on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918. And Fussell actually emphasizes this in his own afterward, noting how ’’I came across this picture by sheer accident in the War Museum, and sensed that the boy’s expression was unmistakably ’twentieth century.’ If anyone ever looked aware of being doomed to meaningless death, it is this boy’’ (342).
Fussell presents the main direction for his book in the very first sentence of his preface, stating that ’’this book is about the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 and some of the literary means by which it has been remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized. It is also about the literary dimensions of the trench experience itself. Indeed, if the book had a subtitle, it would be something like ’An Inquiry into the Curios Literariness of Real Life’’’ (ix). He also notes that ’’I have focused on places and situations where literary tradition and real life notably transect, and in doing so I have tried to understand something of the simultaneous and reciprocal process by which life feeds materials to literature while literature returns the favor by conferring forms upon life’’ (ix). And in some respects, he concludes that he has been ’’concerned with something more: the way the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical and artistic determinants on subsequent life. At the same time the war was relying on inherited myth, it was generating new myth, and that myth is part of the fiber of our own lives (ix).
Fussell’s book needs to be read as it politely challenges its readers to reconsider and question life. It does so by painting a number of very vivid portraits of soldiers who did just that - through the very words that formed the literature that they read and subsequently created - a literature borne of a time that would forever transform the individuals who experienced it. It also examines the war as a strange bridge between two distinct times: the naive, innocent, hopeful and romantic time of pre-World War I Europe, and the post-World War I Europe where literature and life took on a much more darker, ironic and doubtful tone.
It’s unfortunate that as a result of living in our fast-paced pop-culture society, the simple fact that life was once much more simple (especially in the realm of literature), can be very difficult to grasp. Fussell himself argues early on that ’’Indeed, the literary scene is hard to imagine. There was no Waste Land, with its rats’ alleys, dull canals, and dead men who have lost there bones: it would take four years of trench warfare to bring these to consciousness. There was no Ulysses, no Mauberley, no Cantos, no Kafka, no Proust, no Waugh, no Auden, no Huxley, no Cummings, no Women in Love, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There was no ’’Valley of the Ashes’’ in The Great Gatsby. One read Hardy and Kipling and Conrad and frequented the worlds of traditional moral action delineated in traditional moral language’’ (23).
Fussell works hard to place his readers into the mindset of a British soldier in 1914. And this is what The Great War and Modern Memory does - it brings us back in time and helps us to understand the context of this rapidly changing time, and how it took war to force men to question the very reality of their existence. ’’ ’The Culture of the past, ’ (Northrop Frye) says, ’is not only the memory of mankind, but our own buried life.’ And ’study of it leads to a recognition scene, a discovery in which we see, not our past lives, but the total cultural form of our present life’ ’’ (335).
And I believe Fussell is suggesting that by understanding how men questioned the world around them, perhaps we can also see how society remembers. The Great War and Modern Memory has been carefully and lovingly crafted, even though at first glance may seem too complex for the everyday reader.
But when carefully read and considered, its seemingly separate and incongruent ideas do come together nicely in the end, as everything relates back to the photograph on the cover of the book, of the soldier-boy lost in thought of a great hopeless, forlorn abandonment, who is very ’’aware of being doomed to a meaningless death’’ (342). The Great War and Modern Memory is complex and rich with vivid and telling details about the men and the literature of this time. The language is intense, strongly denoting that the modern memory of war can truly be transformative and all encompassing.
Grade: A