Editor’s Introduction: Wars

With this issue, jml contributes to the centenary remembrance of the Great War. The hostilities demarcated by that war, however, were not confined to 1914–1918. The current collection of essays treats aggressions (and not only armed ones) that, beginning on the threshold of World War I, reach all the way to the present. Our memorial purview takes for its object the impact on literature of a century of global conflict.

Jill Richards’s lead-off study, about the suffrage census strike in 1911, argues that the suffrage cause was betrayed by its enemies’ translation of women’s diverse aims into a mythical equivalent of a unified nation-state—a unity with no grounding in the cross-currents of reality. Perhaps, the essay suggests, war would be less thought of as an ultimate solution to conflicts if governments and populations patiently tolerated plural, contradictory phenomena. Luke Thurston’s account of May Sinclair implicitly reinforces Richards’s argument. It argues that Sinclair, bent on participating in the Great War, but blocked from doing so by women’s subordination to the male-centered effort, refused to recognize her disappointment. In Thurston’s view, Sinclair felt inward equivalents of Richards’s pluralities, none of which was rightly to be sacrificed to a masculinizing, coercive regulation. Outwardly, however, according to Thurston, Sinclair used her fiction to make the sacrifice, and thereby wrongly repressed the inevitable conflicts of self-division and public life.

But what of the soldiers who, traumatized by the battlefield, found their inward conflicts insupportable, and yearned to replace them with self-renewing psychological integration? Carolyn Steffens’s and Elizabeth Covington’s essays address the therapies that sought to heal combatants’ self-division, and that are portrayed in fiction about the Great War by Pat Barker and Rebecca West. The novelists, according to both essayists, replace orthodox (i.e., Freudian) ideas about trauma and therapy with unorthodox perspectives (for example, W.H.R. Rivers’s). The replacement—providing, in comparison with routine psychiatric case histories, “a competing … cultural logic”—suggests that literary historians who rely on present-day “trauma theory” have new things to learn from the fictions of 1918 and 1991–95.

Contrasts between unified and self-divided modes of consciousness unfold as our essays move towards representations of World War II and beyond it. Maria Lupas’s study of Eugene Ionesco’s career in pre-fascist Romania discovers the creative effect of Ionesco’s hitherto unrecognized anti-fascist integrity. But political integrity is not necessarily a model for the entirety of the psyche. In Rose Macaulay’s novel The World My Wilderness, a fragmented self is found to be a valuable adaptation to a disintegrated post-war world. Macaulay’s orphaned female protagonist, as Beryl Pong’s essay explains, realizes that “Growing up in the postwar world is akin to giving up one’s values, beliefs, and integrity.” The surrender appears to be anti-developmental, but such paradoxical Bildung might advantageously avoid the peril of an inhuman hubris that is inherent in development. It would thereby avoid ruining the world further.

The effects of ruination, epitomized by the Holocaust, stamp the poetry of Michael Palmer and Seamus Heaney, and the prose of Georges Perec. Patrick Pritchett traces a “midrashic braid” in Palmer’s poetry that, by the 1990s, led to “the primal scene of the [Mosaic] broken tablets,” providing readers with another version of patient submission to conflicts and ruin, and making meaning “by rupturing it.” Pritchett’s reading of Palmer also offers a new way to understand Theodor Adorno’s assertions about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. The impossibility of fiction after Auschwitz was Perec’s inspiration. Eric Beck Rubin’s essay meditates Perec’s way of fighting fire with fire: by ruining the very forms of language, Perec turned destruction into a newly constructive mode of narrative. Is Seamus Heaney oddly assorted in this company? Heaney’s District and Circle does not appear to evoke horizons beyond the poet’s Irish birthplace and personal history. Yet Onno Kosters reveals the poet’s uncanny allusions to a tradition of Holocaust poetry with which Heaney’s verse turns out...