- "Buoyed Up By That Coffin":Contemporary Soldier Poetry And The Poetic Prosthesis
The form of life created once a prosthetic limb is attached to the body is defined by unease since it is marked by both improved functionality and, at the same time, persistent dysfunction and pain. A life, in other words, defined by the discomfort resulting from the constant friction between the body and the artificial limb. Writing in his book Prosthesis, David Wills gives voice to this distress while discussing his father's peg leg, that object protruding from what was his leg, which at once serves as both prop and scar:
He is leaning on his elbows trying to decide whether to wait for another spasm, not that he has any choice, for it will come whether he waits or not; it is more a matter of deciding how to deal with it, in which position it would be preferable to receive it, so I am waiting too, pausing in mid-sentence when he bends over, never sure whether to let his controlled yelp interrupt the flow of my prose, never knowing if I will still be able to resume along the same lines, indeed in the same language, once the phantom has made its wretched pass.
(1994, 7)
Far from being a smooth transition from a "whole" or "organic" state into one involved in the inorganic or the manufactured, prosthetic existence is, at best, shaky. Shaky not just as a result of this physical discomfort but since that discomfort is unavoidable and constant. This unavoidability brings about a new understanding of life, one constantly interrupted by the persistent phantom of pain and loss. An ontological gap is torn with the loss of the limb, in other words, and a new form of life is created in its stead, one lived in proximity to, perhaps enabled by, the inorganic or dead prop.
In the next few pages I shall discuss contemporary English-language soldier poetry, most of which was published independently online by American and British veterans, in the context of the prosthetic, arguing that these poems function as prostheses enabling veterans to reconstruct a shaky link to language. The fact these works were published first online allows [End Page 389] serves to both contextualize the current wave of soldier poetry, as well as allows a view into the intimate workings of these post-war poetic machines. They provide context since they mark the period of their creation: soldiers coming back from war in the twenty-first century can publish and disseminate their writing without appealing to established publishing houses and editors. And, as a result of this independent nature these works provide access, unheard of since the wide reach of soldier writing following World War I, to what could be called prostheses "under construction," in various phases of development. I do not argue for the primacy, whether aesthetic or ethical, of the unadorned and primary work of art. However, I would argue that access to initial attempts at these poetic prostheses is very productive in terms of establishing both what these objects are meant to achieve as well as their basic makeup. Ultimately, these poetic objects are assembled in order to address the collapse of communication following war.
First-person contact with violence and death, what Simone Weil calls "Force," an event with the power of reducing human subjects to objects, whether through death, fear of death or injury (1965, 7), brings soldiers to doubt language's ability to faithfully describe wartime events, undermining their confidence in their own ability to communicate. The poetic prostheses constructed represent, then, an attempt to strike at a new way of communicating, one that I shall refer to as ironic language. Not ironic in a manner denoting a mere change in the style with which messages are transmitted, but a new mode of speaking that requires assembling of new relations between things and words. Soldiers, unable to reconcile personal encounters with violence with a general, community-based language, fashion a new verbal object in which words are used to both describe experience as well as demonstrate what that experience has done to words. That reconciliation is achieved...