Modernism & World War I

ELT 42 : 2 1999 ernism. But he himself says nothing about his own work in the context of today's multiple modernisms. In this case only, I wish he had broadened his scope; in all other ways, it seems to me, his choices served his purpose well: the terms in his title no longer seem incongruous. Beth Rigel Daugherty ______________ Otterbein College Modernism & World War I Trudi Tate. Modernism, History, and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. vii + 196 pp. Cloth £40.00 Paper £11.99 AT FIRST GLANCE, a critical work examining the connections between literary modernism and the first world war would seem to have little new to say, the territory being fairly well mined in the last few years. However, Trudi Tate's new study of the relationship between modernist fiction, cultural history, and World War I offers fresh and engaging insights into the ways in which the experience of the war and the cultural output of the period interact and are inextricably bound together . Her concern is with the difficulties of bearing witness to an event that was at once profoundly traumatic and only partially seen, and she investigates how both civilians and combatants struggled to make sense of the violence they experienced but only understood "through a fog of ignorance , fear, confusion, and lies." Examining various forms of writing produced during and after the war, Tate revisits the work of modernists such as Woolf, HD, Lawrence, Ford, and Faulker, and places them alongside the war writings of Blunden, Graves, Barbusse, and Remarque. Reading them beside each other, the categories of "modernism" and "war writing" begin to elide, and after the war the fictions of literary modernism begin "to look like a peculiar but significant form of war writing." Indeed, Tate seems interested in complicating the convenient categories that have become regarded as axiomatic when examining works of the period, whether those categories are "modernist" and "nonmodernist " or "women's writing" and "men's writing," for she argues that "this kind of catergorising obscures more than it illuminates." The emphasis here is on how individuals saw themselves in relation to the historical events they were engulfed in and how the awareness of "total war" impacted ideas of personal autonomy, attitudes toward government , and perceptions of the human body, so vulnerable to the force of modern technology and weaponry. In the period during and just after the 184 BOOK REVIEWS war, Tate argues that these concerns far outweigh the more frequently asked questions about gender or aesthetic difference. Part I of the work examines the difficulty of bearing witness to an event that was deliberately obfuscated by official information sources yet the effects of which were powerfully felt by all segments of society. Through the lens of the HD's poetry and fiction and Kipling's disturbing "Mary Postgate," Tate reveals the trauma suffered by civilians during the war, as violent public events, such as the sinking of the Lusitania and the drowning of 1200 civilians on board, penetrated their private lives. There has been a substantial amount of work done on the war neuroses of soldiers, but here Tate argues that the trauma of war had similar effects on civilians. HD purportedly miscarried her baby upon hearing the news of the attack on the Lusitania, and Tate uses this incident as her point of entry into an examination of the ways in which civilians too were casualties of the war, despite the indirectness of their experience with the war's violence. In Tate's view, this kind of physical trauma connects the experiences of soldiers and civilians in complicated ways that do not fit easily into reductive divisions of gendered difference . Tate thoroughly researches the medical writings of the period to support the claim that the medical community was aware of the "nervous effects of war strain on civilians," and her reading of these texts alongside numerous works of fiction suggests that the anxieties which haunt modernist writings can be seen as responses to being an indirect witness to war. The stories that circulate in a society can do real damage, both psychologically and physically, to the people who hear them, and Tate further...