The Poetry of Shell Shock

ELT 49:3 2006 The Poetry of Shell Shock Daniel Hipp. The Poetry of Shell Shock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland , 2005. vi + 281 pp. $35.00 THIS IS a richly informative and thought-provoking book. If one were to teach it in a literary survey course, one might helpfully begin with a viewing of Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement ), a 2004 film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet that conveys the Great War's atmosphere of mental stress and breakdown. When the young Breton woman Mathilde, in the 1920s, finally and against all odds locates her missing-in-action fiancé Manech, he has total amnesia, an affecting instance of what in medical case histories of the time was called "deferred shell shock" (the name given to Sassoon's ailment). Yet even before the young man leaves for the front, Mathilde already practices a reassurance technique as irrational as the symptoms of the war neuroses Hipp will explore: she tells herself that if by taking a running shortcut she reaches a bridge before the departing vehicle does, Manech will return home safely. All mentalities are "touched" by the uncanny madness that was the Great War. Yet because the war may well be seen as a collective bloody madness ("sanguinary imbecility," as Conrad said) it is hard for Hipp to demonstrate his thesis that the three poets whose work he examines achieved a significant redemption or transcendence in their development. The psychologists who treated the two officer-poets at the Craiglockhart hospital, Owen's Dr. Arthur Brock and Sassoon's Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, oriented their psychotherapies to the goal of making their patients well enough to resume fighting. So Hipp admits that the "healing" he extols is in part an ominous equivocation, though he carefully distinguishes the softer approaches of Brock and Rivers from those of such cruel physicians as Dr. Yealland with his all-purpose repeated electroshock "faradism." The war was unprecedented in the psychological misery it inflicted—more than eighty thousand cases of what was called "shell shock," a term that Hipp, like the soldiers themselves, employs as a shorthand sign for war neuroses generally. Hipp sees mental "healing," and the "transcendence" or "redemption" he thinks it implies, in religio -moral terms. He wants to show that the three poets increasingly discarded class-based resentment in order to feel a oneness with the collective body of fighting men and with individual soldiers. He asks, in any given poem, to what extent sarcastic or indignant irony may over350 book reviews power tenderness and empathy, or the reverse; and if empathy is more powerful, the lyric is judged more healing. The argument is at times problematic. It is hard to gauge what kind or degree of irony is proper; such evaluations are more ethical than aesthetic and may often be irrelevant in the atmosphere of the collective amorality called the Great War. Hipp conducts a thoughtful dialogue with many critics in his subtle discussion. Yet the focus on "healing" may have led him at times to underestimate dark mental undertows that pull against willed affirmations. Owen's "The Sentry" is felt to indicate the poet's healing reconciliation . When his blinded fellow soldier shouts, "I see your lights!" after all lights have been quenched, this "light of a different sort" is one that "the reader takes to mean his removal from suffering through death, perhaps to an afterlife." But why couldn't it be a hallucination, or the last optical aftergleam of expiring sight? Owen had tried to move the sentry out of harm's way and had failed; for this he feels guilty. The possibility of both a heavenly and a coldly realistic reading hints that the feeling of guilt has not been removed. In "Anthem for Doomed Youth," Hipp usefully shows how Sassoon had helped his friend Owen realize "the real enemy was not Germany but the senseless slaughter of the men." The ironically "Sassoonish" poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" shows identification with "collective experience," and "Insensibility" even affirms "The eternal reciprocity of tears"—I hear Vergil's lacrimae rerum. The purgatory of "Mental...