Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry CriticismAuthor(s): James CampbellSource: New Literary History, Vol. 30, No. 1, Poetry & Poetics (Winter, 1999), pp. 203-215Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057530Accessed: 08/06/2009 03:44

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Combat Gnosticism:

The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism

James Campbell

The war hastened everything?in politics, in

economics, in behavior?but it started nothing.

George Dangerfield1

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, main

stream 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 bor

row 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. Further

more, 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 under

gone 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

New Literary History, 1999, 30: 203-215

204 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

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 produc tion 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 knowl

edge. 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 trench lyric. The

trench lyric constitutes a formally conservative, realistic text based on

the direct combat experience of the junior officer class. "Trench," in this

formulation, calls attention to the poem's most common

setting, not

necessarily its scene of composition (in fact, few of the trench lyricists wrote finished poetry while physically in the trenches). The trench, with

its accompanying images of filth, shellfire, barbed wire, and so forth is of

course the dominant icon of the First World War. The trench lyric

portrays these distressing conditions in an unromantic light, thus

differentiating it from the more abstract and patriotic lyrics of the early war. The trench lyric as a genre is realistic in that it employs the

traditional styles and dictions of English poetry, especially as used in the

Georgian poetry movement that was gaining cultural momentum just

prior to the outbreak of the war, in such a manner as to be readily

COMBAT GNOSTICISM 205

accepted by a poetically, if not politically, conservative audience (that is, one with a low tolerance for avant-garde formal experimentation). Yet it uses these traditional poetic forms to portray the heretofore unknown

gruesome details of the physical and psychological situations of the

trench as seen from a participant's viewpoint.

Perhaps the single most important defining element of the genre is

this emphasis on personal experience. The trench lyric is written from

the point of view of a direct observer, and its legitimacy depends upon the putative accuracy of its representation of its writer's experience in

the trench. Therein lies its realism, the hallmark of the trench lyric and

its criticism. Yeats famously referred to Wilfred Owen's poetry as "all

blood, dirt, & sucked sugar stick."6 The ideal of realism covers the first

two-thirds of this formulation. The trench lyric rejects the Romantic

praise of beauty in favor of an emphasis on the sheer ugliness of front

line conditions in order to destroy the complacence of a sheltered

civilian readership. Owen's poetry, for instance, uses the linguistic sensuousness that he learned from Keats in order to invert Keats's most

famous poetic dictum, that beauty is truth. The trench lyric, as the

borderline oxymoronic term itself suggests, gives us visions of horror

that, because they are horrible, must be true. "The true Poets must be

truthful," in the words of Owen's Preface (CP 535). The trench lyric thus represents a revision both of the aesthetic

purposes of lyric poetry and of a naively optimistic attitude toward the conduct of the war. However, the equation of the trench lyric with war

poetry has recently come into question. Understandably, recent feminist criticism has attempted to circumvent the narrow parameters of the trench lyric by focusing on previously forgotten noncombatant writers,

especially women. The exclusive identification of war with combat results in a theory which would allow only combatants to write war

literature, for only they are really affected by war. Anyone out of the

trenches should not presume to infringe upon the direct, unmediated

experience of those who do the actual fighting. A feminist study of war

literature must necessarily question these claims. In expanding the war canon beyond its previous bounds, feminist critics have rediscovered an

immense body of texts. Catherine Reilly's 1978 bibliography of First World War-related poetry demonstrates that poetic reaction to the war was by no means limited to combatants;7 in fact, as Elizabeth Marsland

points out in her book, The Nation's Cause, Reilly's research makes unavoidable the observation that "the typical English First World War

poet was not a combatant but a civilian."8 With grounding in such

primary research, many critics have recently reopened the question of

women's reaction to war and the legitimacy and multifariousness of its

poetic expression. For instance, Nosheen Khan's Women's Poetry of the

206 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

First World War considers seriously the impact of war on women as

expressed in their poetry;9 moreover, she confronts the widely remarked

misogynist trope of the canonized combatant poets, demonstrating that

not all women war poets were, like Jessie Pope, the jingoist specifically addressed in early drafts of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est,"

rabidly pro-war activists who were eager to send men to die in a hellish

war from which their gender sheltered them. Likewise, Brian Murdoch's

Fighting Songs and Warring Words expands the definition of war poetry well beyond the combatant lyric and into even the popular songs of the

war era,10 while Elizabeth Marsland's aforementioned The Nation's Cause,

in offering a comparative study of French, German, and English war

poetry, broadly defined, demonstrates how the mainstream form of

English language war poetry criticism "has produced a decidedly warped

image of the English First World War poetry in general, and especially of

protest writing" (NC 144) by focusing exclusively on (necessarily) masculine combatants and their simplistically represented felix culpa from fervent idealism to bitter realism. Finally, Claire Tylee's The Great

War and Women's Consciousness explores the effects of the First World War

on culture;11 her representatives of culture, however, are women?

representatives that mainstream war literature covertly silences.

In addition, Tylee's concerns, even her title, connote a response and a

refutation of the critic who has been most responsible for the construc

tion and popularization of what I have represented as mainstream World

War literary criticism: Paul Fussell. Fussell's immensely influential book

on the First World War, The Great War and Modern Memory, is a study of

the War's impact on British culture. Its focus is almost exclusively that of

the combatant: the experience of the First World War is synonymous with the experience of the trenches in Fussell's analysis. As is made

evident in his section on the home front, "The Enemy to the Rear," civilian reaction is seen only in terms of its inadequacies vis ? vis the

trenches. The combatants' resentment is the primary, privileged experi ence, while that of noncombatants is represented only as a foil to set off

the bitter and legitimate irony of the front-line troops. If civilians

reacted to the war in any terms other than wholesale enthusiasm, we do

not know it from Fussell. There is practically no mention of a pacifist movement (outside of the qualified involvement of the combatant-poet

Siegfried Sassoon) or the impact of the war on women, either in terms

of increased employment opportunities or effects upon the ongoing

suffrage movement. For instance, Sylvia Pankhurst is mentioned only in

connection with her agitation to inform the families of soldiers executed

for military crimes that their sons had died of wounds. In the context of

Fussell's argument, this is clearly not a good thing: it is presented in a

paragraph on military obfuscation and euphemism under the topic

COMBAT GNOSTICISM 207

sentence "No one was to know too much" (GW 176). For Fussell's

version of what the First World War meant and continues to mean to

English-speaking cultures, women figure only

as representatives

of

noncombatants and the linguistic violence they do to the stark reality of

combatant experience.

To put it in the terms of this project, feminist studies of war literature

have questioned mainstream criticism's contention that combat experi

ence is a direct conduit to a realm of gnosis. I wish to make a more direct

objection to the basic tenet of combat gnosticism, that the experience of

fighting provides a connection to Reality, an unmediated Truth to which

only those who have undergone the liminal trauma of combat have

access. The canon reformation of Khan, Murdoch, Marsland, and Tylee allows us to see that there is more to war literature than what commonly

goes under the title of war stories. War affects the civilian in different

ways, assuredly, but war is not an exclusively combatant, and thus not an

exclusively masculine, experience. Women's lives are affected, even

destroyed by war; culture involves women as well as men, and if war

helps to construct a culture, as Fussell indeed seems to argue, it

constructs feminine as well as masculine subjects. So, while I wish to

acknowledge this approach to questioning mainstream World War

literary criticism, I also wish to confront more direcdy the epistemologi cal assumptions upon which it rests.

Fussell dedicates The Great War and Modern Memory "To the Memory of/ Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, ASN 36548772 / Co. F, 410th Infantry / Killed beside me in France / March 15, 1945" (vii). I do not wish to cast aspersions on what I take to be a heartfelt gesture to a

victim of war. Yet I am also profoundly interested in how this dedication sets up the text that follows. Fussell is very careful to identify Edward

Hudson in standard military language and to place his death in

proximity to Fussell as author and authority. Hudson's death thus

becomes Fussell's way of placing himself: within the military, within a

war, and, most important, within combat. Fussell has seen combat, he

has seen death, his buddy was killed at his side: thus we are more

inclined to consider seriously the importance that he places upon combat experience in the subsequent 350 pages of text. That the war in

which Fussell places himself is the Second rather than the First World War seems not an

important distinction; the gnosis of combat may alter

slightly between different wars, but there is an essential core of knowl

edge that remains untouched by historical difference. The author

participated in combat (any combat): he has authority, so we who lack such experience should listen to the knowledge he provides.12

I do not want to imply that The Great War and Modern Memory is not in

many ways an important book, primarily because of its iconoclastic

208 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

stance toward received opinion. It is a significant piece of revisionist (in the broad sense) history. Nonetheless, in as far as it has been influential, it has furthered the uninvestigated myth upon which it is based. This

becomes more evident in Fussell's second scholarly war-related text,

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. The content

of this book is much less literary than The Great War and Modern Memory; there is not the same emphasis on biographically based summations of

the canonical literary figures. Instead, Fussell is much more overt about

reading the war as a text rather than reading texts about the war.

Nevertheless, combat gnosticism still remains: the line between combat ant and noncombatant is, if possible, drawn even more

strongly here,

despite the breakdown of clear distinctions between combatant and

civilian in the Second World War. Fussell turns away from combatant

fiction and poetry and privileges the combatant war memoir. In his final

chapter, entitled "The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,'" he

describes the best American examples of this genre as "conveying their

terrible news ... by an uncomplicated delivery of the facts, conveyed in

a style whose literary unpretentiousness

seems to argue absolute cred

ibility."13 To a great extent, this kind of formalist hierarchy signals a

further gnostic development, for only the most unmediated statements, those which come straight from the heart of combat experience without

the intervention of literary or poetic form, can be trusted. Fussell wants

us to apprehend combat directiy; he wants his combat memoirists to

transcend language and give the Truth to us directly so that we too will

have experienced what it means to know combat.

Yet is such a thing possible? I am thinking here less of the rather naive

epistemological assumption that because a text is less overtly literary it

must therefore lie closer to the truth; rather I am asking whether the

apprehension of direct combat experience by the noncombatant is

possible given Fussell's construction of combat gnosticism. In order to

answer this question, I want to turn to one of Fussell's non-academic

books, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays.14 First, we need to

understand that the tide of this collection is not as ironic as one might assume: Fussell actually is thankful for the atomic destruction of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for he believes that they hastened the end of

the war and thus saved many lives, his own included. Moreover, in the

tide essay Fussell leads with his combat experience and belittles the

arguments of those who now question the ethics of the atom bombs,

portraying them as self-satisfied moral hypocrites because, due to age or

social class (gender is not even mentioned as an issue), they did not have

combat experience and thus cannot understand what the atomic

explosions meant to those who expected to invade Japan. Experience marks the great divide between those who understand what the atom

COMBAT GNOSTICISM 209

bombs really meant and those who, "remote from experience," idly

philosophize about them. Clearly, combat is the experience that counts, the only experience worthy of the word. Other kinds of experience are

not experience

at all.

But can we benefit from Fussell's combat gnostic experience? Solip sism remains a constant threat in such a position. Initiates like Fussell

may or may not choose to enlighten noncombatants; moreover, it may

not ultimately be possible for them to do so. If understanding is truly based merely on experience, it remains impossible to tell others of one's own experience unless these others have also undergone identical

experiences. Thus talking about war becomes an exclusionary activity in

which only those who already know can speak to each other. Those on

the outside, without experience, cannot learn; whatever experience they do have lacks validity. Those on the inside, on the other hand, cannot

tell one another anything they did not already know.

Fussell's experience is a form of presence (in the poststructural sense

of the term): presence in combat gives one an aura of knowledge, the

ability to speak without (literary) form, the exclusive ability to know and to tell the (extratextual) truth. Yet, as is the case with presence, there remains always

a trace of what is excluded, in this case civilian experi ence. That women have no voice in mainstream World War literary criticism is due to the exclusive primacy it grants to a mythical direct access to

experience and presence. To put this in psychoanalytic terms,

combat is phallic: it allows one to speak while those without the phallus must stay silent. My purpose here is not to demolish the validity of combat experience but to suggest that it is not the phallus, or that if it is, it functions as other phallic discourses: to make something appear to be

whole. Combat experience by itself cannot tell the whole story: it cannot make any one speaking subject the monolithic authority who controls what atomic bombs really mean, what language really means. It is simply an experience among other experiences, a (gendered) voice among other (gendered) voices.

Yet how did we get the idea that it was the only voice, that it was

exclusively valid? I wish to suggest that the genealogy of such a position rests on the literature around which the discourse first formed. Modern

war criticism began with the First World War because it was the first war which included among its combatants a significant number of educated writers with access to means of publication. I am thinking mostly of the

two poets whose names are synonymous with war poetry, yet who

considered themselves poets well before they became combatant officers. Both Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen wrote poetry which privileges direct combat experience whose ostensible purpose is to educate an

ignorant civilian populace of brutal realities it would prefer to ignore,

210 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

yet both poets also become caught in an epistemological trap: they cannot truly inform an audience who lacks the experiential basis for

understanding their work, and the only way an audience can acquire such a basis is to experience combat, at which point they are no longer the noncombatant audience the poetry

assumes. I am not saying that

this invalidates their poetry, only that this inevitable tension runs

through all of their most famous texts. What is more objectionable is the

uncritical acceptance of such a problematic paradigm of knowledge on

the part of critics who have addressed this poetry. Mainstream criticism of First World War poetry has been primarily

biographical in approach. Such an approach has tended to result in a

criticism that implicitly (or occasionally explicitiy) argues for its subject. In other words, war poetry criticism has not so much read its subject in

a critical manner as it has presented various apologies for its subject, that

subject being both the war poem and the war poet. Like Sassoon and

Owen going back to the trenches to make an effective protest on the

behalf of their men, war poetry critics have protested the sufferings of

their subjects, Sassoon and Owen themselves. At least since Bernard

Bergonzi's Heroes' Twilight, first published in Britain in 1965, critics have

argued for the acceptance of war poetry on its own terms.15 A poetry of

pity, a poetry of political protest (the latter especially prevalent in Jon Silkin's Out of Battle, first published in 197216): this is what war poetry criticism has offered us. But most of all, trench lyric critics have stressed

the importance of the poet as witness to the slaughter of the Western

Front, the man whose biography remains important because he was

actually there and can thus provide us with the Truth of War (to borrow

the tide of Desmond Graham's text on the subject17). Mainstream war

poetry critics have thus absorbed rather than critiqued the ideology of

their subject, and they continue to replicate this ideology to the

exclusion of other voices.

I would like now to make the discussion a bit more concrete by

placing it in terms of two particular poems by Wilfred Owen. When Yeats

wrote his withering damnation of Owen and the other war poets to Lady

Wellesley, he referred to "Strange Meeting" as Owen's "worst & most

famous" poem (L 124). Qualitative judgments aside, it is certainly no

longer his most famous text. The anthology piece of choice today is

"Dulce et Decorum Est," and the change is, I think, a notable one.

"Strange Meeting" is a dream vision: in it a soldier confronts the enemy he has killed and this enemy articulates his lost hopes that any real

wisdom will arise from this war. The irony here is subdued, a quiet

resignation in the knowledge that subsequent generations will learn

nothing from the carnage of the trench. "Dulce et Decorum Est," on the

COMBAT GNOSTICISM 211

other hand, allows Owen to describe trench life at its least heroic and

most ironic: tired and dirty troops slog away from the front line when

they are attacked by gas shells. The meticulously realized death of one of

the soldiers, complete with "blood gargling from the froth-corrupted

lungs" (CP 140), leads to the angry conclusion in which civilians are

blamed for holding unrealistic assumptions about the war while the

Latin tag, a popular gravestone motto for the war dead, is twisted for all

the irony it can muster. It is this kind of situational irony of which

mainstream war criticism strongly approves. To put it simply, war poetry criticism has come to favor the realistic ("Dulce et Decorum Est") over

the visionary ("Strange Meeting").

Underlying this shift is the epistemological question of representa tion. Does the trench lyric give us the most accurate, the most mimetic,

representation of actual trench conditions, or does it offer a particular construction of them? The novelty of Sassoon's and Owen's descriptive poems has led them to be seen as pieces of reportage, a kind of poetry of witness to the horrors of modern technological warfare. And this version of them is not, of course, wrong. Yet it is limited. Owen and Sassoon not only represent war; in

representing it they also construct it

by giving it meaning. The rather simple ironic meaning produced by a

poem such as "Dulce et Decorum Est," a variation on "reality is not as

you like to think it," fits rather effordessly into mainstream war criticism's metanarrative of irony ?ber alles, but some of the less obviously descrip

tive pieces remain a bit more difficult. "Strange Meeting" is less a

rehearsal of the horrible realities of war than an interpretation of what the war means to those who find themselves victims of it. Most

important, in constructing the war as a fantastic encounter in hell

between two dead soldiers, Owen removes most questions of realism, defined as a

representation of an unconstructed reality, instead con

structing a dream world that literally and figuratively underlies the

realities of combat. Owen thus does not so much bear witness to a

particular representation of the reality of combat as he constructs a

world in which he can explore the meaning of war.

The second or ethical half of the ideology foregrounds what I want to call an ethic of passive humanism. The mature trench lyrics of Owen and Sassoon are

commonly read as poems of ethical protest. Where the

more stereotypically Georgian Edmund Blunden and Edward Thomas

object to war on an aesthetic level, protesting its ugliness as compared to

the beauty of an unconstructed and undestructed nature, Owen and Sassoon object to war because of its human cost in terms of both the wasted lives of soldiers and the callous and willful misunderstanding of staff officers and civilians. As Owen put it in his justifiably famous

212 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

formulation, "Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. The Poetry is in

the pity" (CP 535). Such statements bring ethics to the forefront of the

trench lyric, where it cannot be ignored.

Again we can take Yeats's objections as a starting point: in excluding the trench lyric from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse18 in 1936, he

declaimed that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry" (xxxiv). The

ethics of the trench lyric lies not only in portraying the passive suffering of the victims of war, but also in actively articulating that suffering. Owen

speaks often in his last letters of pleading the case of his men, of

returning to the trenches in order to witness and protest their trials.

One of the standard tropes of the trench lyric is the Crucifixion, with the men playing the silent and suffering victim to the willfully ignorant civilian Pil?tes.19 All noncombatants become the beneficiaries of the

sacrifice of the silent young men, leaving it to the trench lyricist to point out the immorality of the situation. The trench lyricist as ethicist, then,

acquires the moral high ground in order to point an accusing finger at

those who sacrifice their sons for their own benefit. He constructs an

asymmetrical relationship: he accuses while we, the noncombatant

audience, hear the sentence passed

on us.

Thus the ethic of passive humanism, in the hands of the poet,

necessarily betrays itself. In order to articulate the case of those silent

sufferers who become the victims of civilian complacency, the trench

lyricist must give up his own passivity and actively blame others. In fact, the situation becomes inverted: the noncombatant is robbed of her

voice (or occasionally, in Sassoon's case, given a few transparently vapid

lines)20 while the warrior inflicts punitive suffering for the sake of his

troops. And I am using the feminine pronoun advisedly here; as often as

not, the representative of all things civilian is a woman, either benefiting from a lover or son's suffering

or rejecting him upon his return from the

front.

"Dulce et Decorum Est" can again

serve as an example. After the end

of the opening sonnet section, Owen introduces the second person

pronoun and the poem turns from a description into an accusation. If

you could see the realities of war, you would not promulgate the ideology that allows this to go on. By extension, you bear the responsibility for the

passive suffering from the "vile incurable sores" on this "innocent

tongue." And the officer poet is going to make you quite aware of this

predicament that you have gotten yourself into. Moreover, as anyone who has read this poem in an annotated anthology knows, the original

recipient of the accusation was "a certain poetess," Jessie Pope, the

writer of patriotic children's war rhymes. She calls the trench poet out of

his passivity so that he might confront her face-toface and force her to

see the harsh realities of war.

COMBAT GNOSTICISM 213

On the other hand, there remains an important sense in which the

epistemology of "Dulce et Decorum Est" is not quite as unproblematic as

traditional war poetry criticism would seem to suggest. In fact, the poem resembles "Strange Meeting" in that the second, accusatory half of

"Dulce" takes place in a dream vision. The first fourteen lines, compris

ing a traditionally self-contained sonnet, can easily be read as straight

reportage. Immediately following this, however, and compromising if

not breaking the formal self-sufficiency of the first part, appear two lines

that make the persona's relation to the events themselves more com

plex: "In all my dreams, before my helpless sight / He plunges at me,

guttering, choking, drowning." The poem thus brings in its own distance

from the actual experience of the events: the text is less a "direct"

representation of the soldier's death than a representation of dreams

based on the inevitable though consciously repressed memory of events.

Similarly, the accusation of the final twelve lines continues this use of the

dream as a removal from the reality of actual experience; the persona

wants not so much to put his civilian audience into the trench and thus

burden them with the gnosis of combat as to saddle them with the

dreams that such experience causes: "If in some

smothering dreams you

too could pace . ..." To put it as

plainly as

possible, even the

exemplary

poem of trench realism seeks not to provide the experience itself, but

only the lingering psychological effects of it. To classify "Dulce et

Decorum Est" as a direct representation of warfare is to stop reading the

poem halfway through. Nevertheless, this removal of the combatant persona and his civilian

audience from direct experience of the events themselves does litde to

compromise the vehemence of the poem's final accusations. And as I

have already pointed out, this accusatory stance represents a compro

mise, if not an outright betrayal, of the passive humanism upon which

the trench lyric is based. The suffering of the men is so unobtrusive, so

essentially passive, that we on the home front will miss it unless one of

the sufferers casts off his silence and confronts us with the truth of war.

And the persona must have the experience of suffering, or we will

dismiss his validity. His must be a voice from the other side of the liminal

experience of combat?mere imagination is insufficient. Hence the

criterion of first-hand witness, which is one that has been not so much

promulgated as followed by postwar critics. Robert Graves, for instance, considered Robert Nichols a poseur for writing and (professionally)

reading trench poetry when he lacked the experience of what he

wrote.21 In order for the ethics of the trench poetry to work, the

aesthetics must remain intact. If we are to take the trench lyric seriously, it must emanate from a passive sufferer who has cast off his passivity long

enough to accuse. Any ironic tension resulting from the trace of this

214 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

abandoned passivity is not the kind of irony in which trench lyric criticism has traditionally been interested.

I am not accusing mainstream war poetry criticism of a failure to

transcend ideology per se, and I certainly am unprepared to idly

speculate as to whether such a move is even possible. What I am accusing it of is losing itself within the ideology about which it writes, the

metanarrative it derives from the trench lyric?of failure to move

outside of one ideology into any other. This failure represents not only the further replication of ideas that need to be critiqued, but also the

implicit restatement of the ethics of the trench lyric. Fussell's exclusive

identification with the soldiers is of a piece with that of Owen and

Sassoon. His construction of combat experience as a

wholly separate

realm of gnosis leads him, as well as other critics taking up the poetry of

the First World War on its own terms, to replicate the ideology of what

he purports to critique. Put simply, trench lyric criticism has itself striven

to become the trench lyric in prose form.

University of Central Florida

NOTES

1 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York, 1961), p. viii.

2 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, 1983), p. 1.

3 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, 1975); hereafter cited in text

as GW.

4 Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London, 1983); Wilfred

Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy, 2 vols. (London, 1983), hereafter cited in text as CP; Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That, 2nd ed. (New York, 1957). For the limits of Sassoon's, as well as Owen's, pacifism see Adrian Caesar, Taking It Like a

Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets: Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Graves (Manchester, 1993).

5 Eric J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979).

6 William Butler Yeats, Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (London, 1940),

p. 124; hereafter cited in text as L.

7 Catherine Reilly, English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography (London, 1978). 8 Elizabeth Marsland, The Nation's Cause: French, English and German Poetry of the First World

War (London, 1991), p. 18; hereafter cited in text as NC.

9 Nosheen Khan, Women's Poetry of the First World War (Lexington, Ky., 1988). 10 Brian Murdoch, Fighting Songs and Warring Words: Popular Lyrics of Two World Wars

(London, 1990). 11 Claire M. Tylee, The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and

Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914-64 (Iowa City, 1990).

12 Fussell's recent autobiography, Doing Battle, reinforces this conclusion (Paul Fussell,

Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic [Boston, 1996]). It begins with an elaboration on

Hudson's death and continually references and explains Fussell's Second World War

experience in terms of the First World War (for example, pp. 6, 63,105). Fussell often goes so far as to use quotations from First World War sources while claiming that they perfectly

encapsulate his own experience. Furthermore, Fussell often describes discoveries of texts

COMBAT GNOSTICISM 215

from earlier wars that precisely sum up his own experience, but he never considers that

such texts might also be (re)constructing that experience as he remembers it in the

present. 13 Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York,

1989), p. 292.

14 Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York, 1988).

15 Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Great War (New York, 1966).

Bergonzi's text has been twice been revised, a second edition appearing in 1980 and a

third in 1996.

16 Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War, 2nd ed. (London, 1978).

17 Desmond Graham, The Truth of War: Owen, Blunden, Rosenberg (Manchester, 1984).

18 The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, ed. William Butler Yeats (New York, 1936);

hereafter cited in text.

19 See, for instance, Owen, "At a Cavalry Near the Ancre," in The Complete Poems and

Fragments, p. 134; and Sassoon, "The Redeemer," in War Poems, pp. 16-19, "The Prince of

Wounds," p. 19, and "Golgotha," p. 24.

20 See, for instance, Sassoon, "The Hero," in War Poems, p. 49 and "Return of the

Heroes," p. 146.

21 Graves, Good-Bye to All That, pp. 295-96.