MMooddeerrnniissmm AAnndd TThhee FFiirrsstt

WWoorrlldd WWaarr

MMeehhddii HHaassssaanniiaann eessffaahhaannii ((GGSS2222445566))

MMooddeerrnniissmm aanndd BBeeyyoonndd ((BBBBLL55110066))

MMrr.. RRoohhiimmmmii NNoooorr

JJaannuuaarryy 22000099

[2]

IInnttrroodduuccttiioonn

The period of the World War One, which took place between July 28th, 1914

and November 11th, 1918 may seem short in the history of human being or art,

but its influence on technology, politics, people, their lifestyles and art was so

huge that the war was called The Great War of all the history. A part of this

effect was on literature. World War One changed people and their point of

views; writers changed their subjects and their literary techniques, readers

changed their expectations and changed their taste.

Peter Childs explains that “class system was rocked by trade unions and

the Labour party; beliefs in King and Country, patriotism and duty were

betrayed by the carnage of the war; the strength of patriarchy was challenged as

women went to work outside the home and the suffrage movement gained hold

… [as a result] it became absurd to celebrate noble ideas like human dignity in

art, or blithely to assert a belief in human progress” (20).

The following essay, as an assignment (and not a research paper on war

poetry), discusses the third chapter of Modernism by Steven Matthews

(published by Oxford Brookes University, UK: 2004) regarding the influence of

War on literature of war time, and also its impact on after-war period. The book

Modernism would be considered the main text, or the framework and I will not

cite it every time, unless there is an emphasis on it.

[3]

LLiitteerraattuurree aanndd tthhee FFiirrsstt WWoorrlldd WWaarr

The Great War between Central Powers (including the German Empire, the

Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria)

and Allies or Entente Powers (including the Russian Empire, France, the British

Empire, Italy, the Empire of Japan, and the United States) started in July 1914.

The progress of war implied that there wouldn’t be a soon ending for it and the

mass slaughter (and technology of reaching this aim) should be planned for. The

result was over 40 million casualties (including about 20 million dead).

Thousands and thousands who did not died in fronts, suffered from shell-shock,

which haunted them in their post-war lives.

This instigated radical incident, changed the form and content of literary

texts in English. Matthews explains that American émigrés like T. S. Eliot and

Ezra Pound insisted and used their innovative literary techniques they have

experienced in the previous years, but changed the subject matter. They moved

from highly concerns about aestheticism, to the nature of ‘civilization’ which

the war was fought for to preserve. Fears about cultural degeneration and

‘civilization’ (as opposed to barbarism) were the keywords of literary reviews at

that time. War brought the requirement of stylistic and formal change in the

works of emerging English novelists, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia

Woolf.

[4]

Wyndham Lewis was the one who first pointed out the romance of war.

Perhaps the resemblance of the nature of the pastoral landscape in France in

which the fighting was taking place, and that of certain milder landscape in the

south of England was the reason that the scene at the Front was, therefore, a

relatively familiar one to the soldiers in the early stages of war, and the reason

that writers worked initially in a Romantic or a post-Romantic style. Lewis

recalls in his autobiographical Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) that “… we

plunged immediately into the romance of battle. But all henceforth was

romance. All this culminated, of course, in the scenery of the battlefields, like

desolate lunar panoramas” (114).

Edmund Blunden, remembering his experience of the battle of Ypres,

states that he cannot, as a writer, distinguishes between the incidents, sights,

faces, and words to narrate only some of them, perhaps the most important ones,

as if the ability of the artist to select materials, and to order them into coherence

is lost in the shock of the events. He would refute the appropriateness of

Lewis’s idealizing term ‘romance’, but he would not deny that art was

irrevocably altered (local, limited, incoherence) by the conflict.

It is worth noting that the style of Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering is

founded upon his belief that modern art is similar to the war. He insists that

instead of thinking of the influences of the war just-finished on the art, one

should demonstrate (and concern about) what a war-about-to-start (i.e.

[5]

Modernism) can do to art. Even though, he claims that war has succeeded in

bringing about the end of war itself: ‘it altered the face of our civilization. It left

the European nations impoverished, shell-shocked, discouraged and unsettled.

It is the time, when T. S. Eliot changes his key essays to questioning the

civilization which had suffered four years of World War One. He asks,

furthermore, what ‘civilization’ is in fact, if it can lead to such devastation

between notions. His style changes as well. Bradshaw believes that the title of

The Waste Land (1922) refers to the mass destruction, to the slaughter which

was enormous in size and “like never before, [had ever] large parts of Europe

been subjected to [such a] methodical destruction” (69), which as Cunningham

added in his book, “sounded the death knell for the world of settled values” and

“made a mockery of patriotic slogans” (559).

In the 1921 essay of Eliot, Matthews observes that, he established his

ideal poetry as one in which ideas and physical sensations are united, where

‘there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought or a recreation of thought

into feeling’. Eliot, additionally, praises James Joyce’s (and Yeats’s) use of the

‘mythical method’ of writing, which brings “artistic order to the chaos of

modern life” (Childs, 100) and suggests a continuous parallel between

contemporary and antiquity. Eliot implies that the shapelessness of history (or

as Blunden says, its ‘incoherence’) can hope only to be partially restored

through literary means which bridges such gaps or dissociations.

[6]

At the same time, the same tension can be observed in the sequence of

poems by Ezra Pound. This sequence created the poet’s farewell to England,

before moving to Paris in early 1920s. His war poem, Hugh SelwynMauberly,

published in 1919, used, according to Bradbury, “fractured forms to express his

enraged reaction to the war, and explore the spectacle of a once-great artistic

culture destroyed through commercialism and nationalism, producing a

collapsed civilization” (7). Life and Contacts and E. P.’s Ode for His Choice of

Burial Place are the other notable ones which imply that the cost of human life

on the battlefields in France was not worth it. Pounds conclusion, as Matthews

states “seem to be that civilization from the perspective of England has achieved

little – certainly not enough to warrant the sacrifice of ‘the best’, including some

of his best friends” (68).

British poets who served at the fronts (also called the war poets),

experienced a huge change in the form and the content of their poetry. They had

found smooth rhythm of Romantic or post-Romantic style suitable, but it was

before the brutal alienating realities of newly technologies modern warfare.

Sassoon was one of the first poets, who described the after-war situation and

wounded, disabled soldier who cannot return to their previous lives. His

language “is deliberately anti-Romantic in its rejection of conventional poetic

diction in favor of sharp and biting colloquialism” (Carter, 332).

[7]

As an example, we may find in Sassoon’s Break of Day, ‘a distinct sense

of the literal dislocation enforced upon the individual by the war, the destruction

of all remnants of benevolent experience.’ The poet, here, asks for an Edenic

place (an ideal peaceful place) which is colorful in opposition to the gray and

brown barren landscapes of battlefields. According to Matthews,

“Much of the power of these poems of the First World War comes from

the dramatization of such contrasts. These are contrasts between England

and the Front, between the assumed radiant past and the horrific present,

between pastoral and the ‘angry guns’, between hitherto-held beliefs and

the grasped-out questionings of faith of the dying” (71).

Shocking and realistic war poetry of Wilfred Owen, influenced by his friend

Sassoon and his first hand experience of war, was also in contrast with the

heroic patriotic verses written by earlier. His realistic view of war resulted in

disillusionment which became the “spirit of frivolity to him, and caused

“bitterness and cynicism about anything connected with military glory”

(Cunningham, 559).

Even the title of his most famous work, Dulce et Decorum Est (meaning

‘it is sweet and right to die for one’s country’) is ironic, when it starts by some

grotesque opening lines: ‘Bend double, like old beggars under sacks, / knocked-

[8]

kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge…’ His detail of a gas

attack discloses the hellishness and evilness of war, as at the end of the poem,

the reader is convinced that the title was ‘the old lie’.

Earlier war poetry, like Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, was written from

another point of view, to encourage the reader and glory the sacrifice of soldiers

at the fronts. Carter quotes the first part of The Soldier, as “If I should die, think

only this of me / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever

England”, and explains that at the beginning of World War One, “the

characteristic response to it was that to serve in the war was a matter of duty”

(331). But again this tradition it changed by soldier/poets like Owen, who

according to Carter, “came to see it … as a duty to warn of the horrors of war

and to ask why political rulers allowed such mass destruction to continue for so

long” (332).

Combat stress reaction (in the pas commonly known as shell-shocked)

was a problem of during and after war period. Childs goes through the clinical

view and indicates its importance in psychology (Freudian analysis) and

literature of the time. He points out Mrs. Dalloway as an example in which a

shell-shocked is described whose marriage is destroyed by the conflict and who

eventually commits suicide. Owen’s compassion to victims of shell-shocked,

who were once his friends as he was a soldier and was killed in the battlefield,

[9]

is presented in his poem Mental Cases in which he directly addresses the reader

and talks about this madness.

Apart from poetry, war also changed fiction. The character of a shell-

shocked or a disabled person was much tangible at that time. The only different

is that, as Carter says, war poetry is written in trenches in the middle of a

battle, but novels were composed in an after-war period. Rebecca West’s The

Return of the Soldier and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover both

narrate the impact of trench experience upon those left behind at home,

principally upon their gender relations. There is a same sense of remoteness in

the returned soldier of both novels.

West’s shell-shocked soldier suffers from a loss of memory which means

that he thinks he remains in love with his first love, Margaret, rather than with

his wife, Kitty. Matthews clarifies that dividing and labeling society by class

definitions was another result of war, and the desire of Chris, the shell-shocked

soldier, for Margaret and his ignorance toward his marriage to the middle-class

Kitty is a return to the cross-class relationship his marriage had eradicated.

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the central female character, Connie, does

overlook her wounded and incapacitated ex-soldier husband for the ‘whole’

man, Mellors, the gamekeeper on Sir Clifford Chatterley’s estate.

[10]

Matthews suggests that in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “the tragedy of

World War One is reflected by the ‘sex war’ being enacted at home. [When] in

male novelist’s eye, the sense of tension between the sexes is clearly

exacerbated by the new-found freedom and independence amongst women

brought about amongst other things by the rise of the women’s movement in the

immediate pre-war years” (81). Quoting the scene when Connie experiences

and feels the sweetness of having sex with the ‘complete’ man, Bradshaw

comments that this novel describes sex “as a strange union of historical forces

and individual fulfillment”, where having sex with the gamekeeper “summons

up a primeval past and sparks Connie’s birth as a ‘woman’” (149).

In his semi-autobiographical novel Kangaroo, Lawrence describes how

the war changed (and changed other things) and sums up the view that ‘It was

in 1915, the old world ended’. “Picking a date of far more historical moment,

the point when an entire cultural tradition seemed to end in war (Bradbury,

16)”, he writes:

In the winter of 1916-16 the spirit of the old London collapsed, the

city, in some way, perished, perished, perished from being a heart of the

world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and

horrors. The integrity of London collapsed, and the genuine debasement

began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and the public voice.

[11]

Most significantly, perhaps, the war brought a real change in women’s statues

as they took over vital jobs vacated by men who went to the Front, particularly

after the introduction of conscription, whereby men were forced to enlist for

service, in 1916. Women were already increasingly taking up employment

before the war, but the years 1914-18 saw over e million women working in

engineering, munitions, transport and commerce, and on the land, for the first

time. There was a shift from domestic service to other employment which was

never to be reversed. Women suddenly found themselves independent in new

ways, as the average wage for working women nearly doubled from pre-war

levels.

Accordingly, as Childs quotes from Lawrence, the writer’s attempt was to

concentrate most fully on the theme of “woman becoming individual, self-

responsible, taking her own initiative” and “establishment of a new relation …

between man and woman” (142).

[12]

WWoorrkkss CCiitteedd

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern World. Ten Graet Writers. Great Britain:

Penguin Books, 1989.

Bradshaw, David and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. A Companion to Modernist

Literature and Culture. UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Carter, Ronald and Malcolm Bradbury. The Routledge History of

Literature in English. London: Routledge, 2001.

Childs, Peter. Modernism. USA: Routledge, 2000.

Cunningham, Lawrence and John J. Reich. Culture and Values: A

Survey of the Humanities. USA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005.

Matthews, Steven. Modernism. UK: Oxford Brookes University, 2004.

Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering. London: John Calder

Publishing, 1982.