What is it good for?

John Dewey, in 1927, on WWI, offered as a corrective (or, if you like, addition) to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory:

"The extent of that war is unparalleled, because the conditions involved in it are so new … We think of all wars as much the same thing, only the last one was horrible beyond others. Colonies were drawn in: self-governing ones entered voluntarily; possessions were levied upon for troops; alliances were formed with remote countries in spite of diversities of race and culture, as in the cases of Great Britain and Japan, Germany and Turkey. Literally every continent upon the globe was involved. Indirect effects were as broad as direct. Not merely soldiers, but finance, industry and opinion were mobilized and consolidated … Extensive, enduring, intricate and serious indirect consequences of the conjoint activity of a comparatively few persons traverse the globe. The similes of the stone cast into the pool, ninepins in a row, the spark which kindles a vast conflagration, are pale in comparison with the reality … The consolidation of peoples in enclosed, nominally independent, national states has its counterpart in the fact that their acts affect groups and individuals in other states all over the world. The connections and ties which transferred energies set in motion in one spot to all parts of the earth were not tangible and visible; they do not stand out as do politically bounded states. But the war is there to show that they are as real, and to prove that they are not organized or regulated." (The Public and Its Problems, 127-128)

Dewey's idea here not that the war was meaninglessly destructive, which is mostly how Fussell sees it, but that it was terrifyingly meaningful: the war as the global spread of consequences beyond prediction, the realization that the world forms more of a system and that that system is less thoroughly understood than had previously been imagined, the war as the beginning of a new world order which is not in order; in short, a harbinger of globalization avant la lettre. With this vision in mind, one might say that English poets like Wilfred Owen ("What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? / Only the monstrous anger of the guns") wrote like soldiers; Apollinaire (“Le tonnerre des artilleries qui accomplisent / le terrible amour des peuples”) wrote like the war itself.

Yeats on Owen

"My anthology continues to sell, & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum — however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology — he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him." (from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 113)

With that, I will arise and go now, and go to Nantucket.

World War Wha?

Question for Greg: what Great War poets are you reading/have you read? I'm just about finished with Fussell's book, and I'm planning on taking a look at Brooke, Graves, Sassoon and Owen afterwards. Anybody else I should check in with before I bid goodbye to all that for good?

Renaissance to Reconnaissance

In the past two weeks I'd focused my reading around the Irish and Harlem Renaissances, and now I move to the blow-up of Nationalism that sits right between the two, in some respects: WWI.

But last night I took a break from one war of attrition to entertain myself with another, watching Neil Jordan's 1992 film The Crying Game (it's on my Irish list and thus, technically, "work"). [I'm assuming we've all got the Boy George goods on this film, but in case I'm mistaken: SPOILER ALERT.]


The film begins with the seduction and kidnapping of Jody (a British soldier, originally from Antigua, played by Forest Whitaker) by the IRA, who will shoot him unless one of their political prisoners is freed. Eye-for-an-eye. Stephen Rea's character Fergus begins to identify with this soldier, another colonial, and befriends him. Jody tells Fergus about his "girl" in London, Dil. When the time comes to shoot the captive, Fergus hesitates, Jody runs, and is "hit by a Saracen" as the British pull up to blow the IRA holdout to pieces. Fergus escapes to London where he assumes the name Jimmy and seeks out Dil, with whom he begins an affair; he is constantly asking questions about Jody and having visions of him wearing cricket whites, pitching a wicked "wrong 'un". Then there's the big penis-reveal (actually, not that big) and Fergus's past comes back to haunt him (another dominatrix Kathleen ni Houlihan in the form of Miranda Richardson), and so on. (I don't want to spoil the whole thing.)

What I noticed on a second viewing of the film is the way the retributive economy of the opening scenario (eye-for-an-eye) is tested and rethought in the films second and third acts as the characters attempt to take one another's places, subjectively crossing divides of gender, race, nationality and sexuality (I-for-an-I). The plot is an ingenious attempt to extricate a "mate" from "stalemate", and it possesses all the optimism, ultimately, of a romantic comedy (an alternate ending, included on the new DVD of the film, ends with Jimmy/Fergus telling Dil, "nobody's perfect," a la Some Like It Hot; the true ending blares "Stand by Your Man" with a triumphant wink).

Insofar as Fergus, calling himself Jimmy in London, wants to take care of Dil in Jody's place, he continually speaks from the position of the dead, with whom he can never entirely identify. This is something I'm working through right now, especially in relation to poets like Owen and Rosenberg, and for my elegy list. So more on it soon.

But the film also comes in a tradition of cross-dressing and gender play in Irish drama which may have it's best start in Synge's Playboy of the Western World (where Christy exits in drag, having cocked up his stab at Oedipal violence) and continues in the plays of Frank McGuinness. McGuinness's 1985 play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme provides a shrapnel-scarred narrative of homosocial institutions and homosexual prohibitions in the traumatic landscape of "No Man's Land." McGuinness, like Jordan and Synge (and, I think, like Owen too, in his melodramatic, sado-masochistic anti-elegies), is investigating the potential for "camp" to subvert nationalism (by, as they say in the trenches, "going over the top") when he stages the ghosts of the 36th Ulster Division.


[[Of course, the name "Fergus" brings me to look back at Yeats's "Who Goes with Fergus?" and, though it doesn't connect particularly, it has one great effect worth noting here: check out how Yeats collapses all the sounds of "dance upon the level shore" in line 3 into the single word "dishevelled" (as in "dishevelled wandering stars") in the last line. Neat!]]