The Great War and Modern Memory

"This is the perfect book to end on. Every page is a revelation. It’s for anyone who wants to understand this notion that the war was the fulcrum of modernity. It was a turning point. The entire idea of the 19th century – which was an idea of progress, optimism and the notion that you can always better yourself economically, spiritually, socially – was crushed on the fields of Flanders. And in the wake of the war we encounter the nihilism and chaos of the 20th century. That war indeed gave birth to people like Hitler, Mao and Stalin and everything else that tormented, and what Churchill called, this “blood-stained century of violence”. What Fussell does is to reveal the impact of the war on literature, on the arts and on the rise of Surrealism. He has a wonderful phrase, “the cruel proximity of the front”. The fact that you could be in the trenches, eye-deep in hell, in the morning and be whisked away by train and be having tea at Claridges by early afternoon. The fact that 25,000 Welsh miners spent the war underground, setting charges of TNT beneath enemy lines which when blasted would send shock waves that could be felt on Hampstead Heath in London. The fact that 10,000 young subalterns were required every month, just to replace the litany of the dead and wounded. And so schools like Winchester, Uppingham, Marlborough, Eton and Harrow literally graduated their entire senior and sometimes junior classes not to Oxford, Edinburgh, Cambridge or the University of London but directly to the front. Marlborough had 733 old boys killed in the war, and that’s typical. So I think if you want to understand the sociological impact of the war, not just in arts but in politics and in terms of the entire shift of the centuries, Paul Fussell’s book is simply the greatest source."

"Fussell’s book brilliantly articulates many views which were inchoate in me before I read it. It’s ostensibly literary criticism, but it does much more than that. His thesis is the juxtaposition of the great powers marching off in August 1914, with their banners and tootling – “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” – and the reality of war. They expected a swift victory by Christmas, but got bogged down on the Western front in the worst kind of mechanised slaughter that the world has ever seen. The reversal between those two states is what created the ironic cast of the 20th century. I think that’s a very powerful argument, with a lot of explicatory force. In 20th century culture – certainly in Europe after the First World War – saying one thing and meaning another became the standardised form of discourse. An assumed disjunction between demonstrative acts and cover acts was the stuff of all sorts of cultural production. It percolated right down, and spread right through society in all kinds of ways. The most obvious was a deepening and darkening of absurdist and satirical cultural discourses. It’s very difficult to think of Beckett, and that particular articulation of nihilism, without the First World War. Melancholy is just fine. Melancholy is good. It’s the black and the absurd which started with World War I. From the stand point of the 20th century, to be melancholic is good mental health. Depression. Despair. Complete embitterment. Insanity of one form or another. Obsessive compulsive states of mind. This is all a function of modernity. The kind of hysteria that afflicted people in the late 19th century now looks like a walk in the park. Oh no, I’m melancholy. I’m an anarchist. I’m implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest."