Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (review)

"Touch," Santanu Das writes in his first book, "is the most intimate and elusive of the human senses" (20). He proceeds to give a moving account of the centrality of touch during the First World War, and the fraught and potent language soldiers and nurses found to give voice to their experiences. Das contributes to two different critical trends: the first, a developing interest in the phenomenology of the senses, and the second, the project, which has been going on for over twenty years, of the recovery and inclusion of lesser-known participants—nurses, privates, forgotten soldiers—in the First World War. Alhough Das's book contains previously unknown letters and diaries, his focus is less on the retrieval of lost material than the recuperation of a lost tactile experience. To crouch, cold, wet, and frightened, beside a friend in the mud of a trench; to hold the head of a dying comrade; to, as Vera Brittain writes, "dress unaided and without emotion, the quivering stump of a newly amputated limb" (175); Das focuses on the intensity and ubiquity of these brief and powerful moments of human contact, in a brutal, depersonalized, and industrialized war.

The book is divided into three sections, suggestively titled "Trenches," "Intimacies," and "Wounds." Each section is split into two chapters, the first wide-ranging and historical and the second based on the war writing of English modernists. He examines some familiar names, including Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Vera Brittain, and Mary Borden, and treats less familiar writers and material with an equivalent sensitivity. The theoretical framework of the book is similarly eclectic. Das evokes phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics alongside his own very careful close readings. He accompanies his analyses with war photographs and reproductions of primary material carefully chosen to emphasize the haptic rather than the visual mode; in his photographs of trench postcards from the Imperial War Museum you can almost feel the soft folds of the worn paper. Das writes perceptively and often beautifully. He has a good eye for the telling anecdote, the significant moment, and the meaningful slip. His book brims over with vivid excerpts and examples, frequently poignant but sometimes also quite funny: he tells us of one officer who, when ordered to consolidate his troops during the torrential rainstorms of the third battle of Ypres, shot back, "It is impossible to consolidate porridge" (41).

Das begins in the porridge, the mud and mess of what he calls the "slimescapes" of the trenches. "The experience of trench mud," Das writes, "brought the soldiers to the precipice of non-meaning in a world that was already ceasing to make sense" (37). The mud itself was a kind of simile for the experience of being immersed in a war that was borderless and all-encompassing; at the same time "war literature reveals a mode of thinking about mud, a way of giving linguistic shape to formless matter" (40). Before and beyond this mud was a physical, tactile, material presence. It was and it existed: writing about it and around it and even in it, writers were still trumped by its brute, silent force.

This brings us to the central difficulty and challenge of Das's book, and more generally, of the project of writing the body. How does one chart, in writing, the non-verbal immediacy of lived experience without collapsing the body back into language? Das demonstrates how writers struggle with finding the verbal equivalents of the haptic and the sensual; he works hard at showing us the textual mimesis of physical experience, how writing can make us feel. These readings are original and frequently instructive. Focusing on one of the most famous trench poems, Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est," he writes, "The opening lines, through their alliterative and visual force, situate the bodies in our field of perception: bent-double, knock-kneed, they continue to limp on with their bloodied feet as iambs and trochees straggle within the pentameter in order to keep...