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Modernism/Modernity 9.1 (2002) 75-89



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"A Peculiar Power about Rottenness":
Annihilating Desire in James Hanley's "The German Prisoner"

Anne Rice


We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drops from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? Formerly we should not have had a single thought in common--now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so intimate that we do not even speak.

--Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on
the Western Front
1

There is a peculiar power about rottenness, in that it feeds on itself, borrows from itself, and its tendency is always downward. That very action had seized the polluted imagination of the Irishman. He was helpless. Rottenness called to him; called to him from the pesty frame of Elston.

--James Hanley, "The German Prisoner" 2

In the classic scene of male bonding from the great novel of World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer and his comrade, Kat, prepare a meal and find themselves sharing "a more complete communion . . . than even lovers have." 3 As Jane Marcus asserts, Remarque's enormously influential novel (translated into English in 1929) changed the perception "of war fictions roughly from epic invocations of individual heroism to initiations into brotherhood." 4 Further, Samuel Hynes declares that [End Page 75] in the late 1920s and early 1930s, "the classic war books were published" and "the Myth of the War was defined and fixed in the version that still retains authority." 5 At the center of this myth is the idea that the "experience of battle was incommunicable" to those outside the "exclusive, quasi-mystical fellowship" of men who had seen action. 6 Written primarily by gentleman officers and middle-class soldiers, the war "classics" describe British soldiers as innocent victims, sacrificed by callous old men and especially by the women they were supposed to protect. In this familiar narrative the camaraderie between soldiers overcomes regional and class divisions, providing solace amidst the madness and horror. And while such love often produced passionate, homoerotic descriptions, critics have generally followed Paul Fussell's lead in perceiving homosexual desire at the front as resembling "the 'idealistic,' passionate, but non-physical crushes which most officers had experienced at public school." 7

A little-known war story by a working-class Irish veteran challenges the canonical version of what happened between men in World War I. 8 Privately published in 1930 and out of print for decades before its reissue in 1997, James Hanley's "The German Prisoner" undermines the idea of British soldiers as innocent victims, showing rather how the war machine exploits class divisions, misogyny, homophobia, and repressed homosexual desire, inciting soldiers to the vicious slaughter of other men. "The German Prisoner" describes in graphic detail how O'Garra and Elston, two Tommies lost in "the fog of war," take mutual pleasure from beating, torturing, raping, and murdering an enemy who has surrendered to them. The narrative culminates in their destruction when a shell blows them into the muck as they grapple together in a murderous paroxysm of desire. Despite its disturbing resemblance to postwar narratives that glorify an aesthetic of violence, Hanley's story exposes and indicts rather than celebrates theculture of war through its emphasis on the release of repressed desire through atrocity.

"The German Prisoner" speaks the language of the trenches--the language of bodies at war--and provides a rare glimpse of killing's emotional charge. Challenging the myth of the war's indescribability, Fussell insists that the English language could "perfectly well render the actuality of trench warfare," offering as proof a list that includes terms and phrases such as "blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty...

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