The New Death: American Modernism and World War I by Pearl James (review)

Pearl James, associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, continues her work on World War I in The New Death: American Modernism and World War I, where she examines the representation of war in the novels of four modernist writers: Willa Cather’s One of Ours (1923), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), and William Faulkner’s Sartoris (1929). Adopting Winifred Kirkland’s term “the new death,” which refers to the unprecedented scale of death caused by the War, James enquires into modernism’s vision of the New Death that highlights a cultural paradox: the presence and invisibility of death caused by war.

Through historicization and close reading of these canonical novels, James shows how these narratives “refigure, omit and aestheticize the violent death of young men in the aftermath of World War I” (9). Her ambition is to include the war in the interpretation of these novels in terms of melancholia and loss since it “shapes the thematic and formal ways that these writers represent damage, loss and wounded masculinity in their texts” (9). Thus James pores over the historical source of death but also involves the gender dimension tracing how cultural norms of masculinity complicate the work of death, which can only be an “unsatisfactory business” (22) within the context of war. As male characters cannot tell their stories and cultural norms forbid the representations of abject male bodies, suffering is displaced onto the female ones.

Not only suffering but responsibility for the war seems to be transferred onto women. In her feminist reading of One of Ours, James underlines Cather’s ambivalent depiction of gender which pictures women both as empowered by the war yet also monstrous, thus ironically authorizing “the misogyny that has marked [the novel’s] critical reception” (60).

If the porousness of Cather’s war narrative absorbed the era’s anxieties, The Great Gatsby also absorbed and regendered the violence of war. Using trauma theory and genetic criticism, James presents Nick Carraway as a shell-shocked soldier who through Gatsby’s story can remember and partially heal from his trauma. The violence of war death is displaced onto the grotesqueness of Myrtil’s dead body.

Likewise, in A Farewell to Arms the most “memorable death in the novel is Catherine Barkley’s” (120); Heming way relocates the abject on the “figure of the nurse […] and away from men” (121). If Nick Carraway is for James a homodiegetic narrator, Frederic Henry is an emotionally unreliable narrator, as his factually accurate account of the war downplays the killing that occurred there. Hemingway, a war hero, “hews to the line of his culture’s notions of war and masculinity” (137). It is quite interesting the way James uses narratology to back her readings.

James is among the few scholars who consider the World War I as “the crucial context for Faulkner’s development as a modernist writer” (164). Her analysis of Sartoris is introduced by an original architectural analogy which drives home “the inherent difficulty of representing the missing dead” (162). James, using Freudian concepts, digs into the “historical roots of Bayard’s inability to mourn” (175) but sounds a bit contradictory when it comes time to assess the extent of mourning. As in the previous novels, the issue of gender is equally under scrutiny (i.e., women enforcing the codes of masculinity in Sartoris).

James’s study paves the way for further examination of New Death in American literature. In her conclusion, James suggests an enlargement of scope into crime fiction and gangster films, whose consideration as postwar texts could deepen our understanding of how the First World War changed death’s cultural meaning.