Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction by Mark D. Larabee (review)

In The Front Lines of Modernism, Mark Larabee seeks to redefine the way modernist literature is read. Diverting attention away from the traditional focus on the alienation of war literature and its attendant fragmentation of plot and narrative, Larabee instead looks at the way the topography of the war shaped modernist sensibilities. In his introduction, Larabee clarifies his use of the concept in several ways. First, he establishes the overlap of the terms “‘space,’ ‘place,’ ‘landscape,’ and ‘topography’” as they appear in his study (6). Relying on the critical underpinnings of J. Hillis Miller’s Topographies, which defines the concept as not only a graphic representation, such as a map, but also representations in words, and as the space which is described or mapped, Larabee, as he explains, uses topography “to refer both to physical configuration and … the writing about place” (6). Prior to World War I, positivism, a concept Larabee traces to Enlightenment thinking, governed the prevailing world view that maps were representations of scientific principles and therefore true and accurate representations of landscape. Larabee turns often to Paul Fussell’s seminal work The Great War and Modern Memory for background on the war and war literature, including that dealing with the landscape of the trenches or other landscapes affected or informed by that shifting landscape. Central to his argument is the question “What happens when authors attempt, through works of the imagination, to attribute meaning to a reality that could scarcely be seen?” (11). Toward answering that question, Larabee examines mapping, verbal description, visual art, and globalizing geography instead of viewing modernist works in terms of style or ideology, approaches which he finds lacking.

In his first chapter, Larabee examines the works of Edmund Blunden, Richard Aldington, and Ford Madox Ford against the backdrop of mapping, or attempts to map, battlefield space. Initially, using the most current scientific tools for mapping and the infallible Cartesian grid for aiming artillery, military strategists proceeded as if World War I was like all other wars. Shifting landscapes, however, made mapping problematic. In Larabee’s words, World War I “was the locus of spaces that disrupted and frustrated a given logic of visual comprehension and depiction” (21). The war made mapping difficult because both the battlefield and surrounding terrain—towns and villages—shifted and disappeared. Trying to see from a trench also disrupted visual perceptions of what was happening. Blunden, Aldington, and Ford dealt with the “breakdown of cartographic logic of visualization” (25) because they had been in combat and had been trained in mapping. Each constructed his own logic of visualization in literary form, and Larabee’s examination of Blunden’s Undertones of War, Aldington’s Death of a Hero, and Ford’s No Enemy, a work he refers to as a “strange book” (41), offers insight into the consciousness of former soldiers. Aldington’s terrain is the streets of London, where the ‘hero’ takes his own life because he cannot describe what he sees, and he believes the war will never end. Aldington’s “ironic literary topography” (38) supplies what is lacking from objective or scientific representations. All works shift focus from topography to examining human consciousness, what Larabee calls “human redemption” (54).

Larabee devotes most of Chapter 2, one of his most illuminating discussions of literature, to the positivist guide books, Baedekers, which in shutting out room for discovery in travel, ultimately became obsolete, as did cartographic representations of the battlefield. After the war, Baedeker’s popularity was diminished by British travel guides. World War I and its constantly changing battlefields, its devastated villages, ultimately proved the unreliability of scientific representations of the kind Baedekers advanced. Here Larabee examines two pre-war novels–Forster’s A Room with a View and Ford’s The Good Soldier. Key to his discussion is Baedeker’s reliance on preparation and study before travel and objectivity in selecting travel sites that will allow...