WW I: The Peculiar Sanity

Book Reviews WW I: The Peculiar Sanity Celia Malone Kingsbury. The Peculiar Sanity of War: Hysteria in the Lit erature of World War One. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2002. xv +181 pp. $29.95 KINGSBURY takes her title from Joseph Conrad's 1905 essay on the Russo-Japanese war, "Autocracy and War": "It seems that in armies, many men are driven beyond the bounds of sanity by the stress of moral and physical misery," Conrad wrote. "Great numbers of soldiers and regimental officers go mad as if by way of protest against the peculiar sanity of a state of war." This observation might seem prophetic, but it aids Kingsbury's point that to understand the lunacies of the Great War it is necessary to read it as the product of the Edwardian era. The War to End All Wars was not a traumatic rupture, blighting a mythical Indian summer , but existed in continuity with the social, political and psychological paradigms of late-Victorian and early twentieth-century European culture . Hence, Kingsbury structures her five chapters along a trajectory that starts with pre-war repressive forces of social convention and National Purity campaigns (contexts explored in Conrad's 1897 story, "The Return " and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier), through the murderous logic of European imperialism (Heart of Darkness ) and the callous indifference of wealthy Americans to a European war seen only as a disruption to aesthetic education (Willa Cather's One of Ours). Her third chapter then explores how numerous writers were affected by the announcement of war in August 1914, tracing how a kind of war-mania affected even those writers who might be considered more liberal: H. G. Wells, Henry James, Edith Wharton. The fourth chapter mainly examines the domestic front, arguing that propaganda and widely circulated tales of war atrocities created a "peculiar sanity" away from the battlefields too. The principal example here is the way the rumors beset Tietjens in the Parade's End tetralogy, restaging those that dogged Ford. The paranoia and escalation of irrational fears of the Other are also pursued through a reading of Conrad's only war-time story, "The Tale." The final chapter addresses the discourse around shell shock, with Kings409 ELT 46 : 4 2003 bury anxious to confirm it as an authentic response to traumatic war experiences , as opposed those "mad with the urgency of war" who declared it cowardice or desertion. After a tour of the medical approaches to shell shocked soldiers (pinpointing the now standard opposition between the therapies of Lewis Yealland and W H. R. Rivers), this chapter offers capsule readings of Rebecca West's Return of the Soldier and Ford's Parade 's End. Again, though, she extends the boundaries to consider how civilians might suffer a version of shell shock, either from bombing raids or a brutalisation through forms of propaganda. This is explored in the work of the Imagist poet, H.D. (particularly the story "Kora and Ka" and her autobiographical novel, Bid Me to Live) and Kipling's two bizarre tales of home-front hysteria, "Mary Postgate" and "A Madonna of the Trenches." These are relatively familiar texts and contexts for students of the literature and cultural history of the Great War; the test is whether the "peculiar sanity" thesis allows new insights or connections to be made. In a pleasingly unassuming way, and in an admirably lucid prose style, the book does allow many diverse areas of inquiry to cohere. There is no single radical new reading, and this is not a study likely to transform scholarship in the area, but the way in which texts are networked together is always absorbing. The movement between pre-1914 and post-1914 texts, particularly, is handled in a way that quietly reinforces the premise that war narratives need to be read within a wide cultural continuum. Perhaps the most interesting thread running through the book is the work around rumor, gossip and propaganda. Kingsbury has unearthed a number of stark exemplars of poster art from the era ("Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds"), and ties this insistent popular discourse to a diversity of literary texts. There is some excellent and sympathetic...