~ Sceopellen ~

Here comes the next essay, which I am starting one day into the holidays – aren’t I good! Well, actually, it’s an amazing essay which I have a really good idea for, although i’m not sure I can pull it off.

The question:

‘The sense of the gap in history that the war engendered became a commonplace in imaginative literature of the post-war years. Poets and novelists rendered it in images of radical emptiness – as a chasm, or an abyss, or an edge – or in images of fragmentation and ruin, all expressing a fracture on time and space that separated the present from the past… The gap in history had entered post-war consciousness as a truth about the modern world. (Samuel Hynes).

Discuss the validity of this comment with reference to at least two of the writers you have studied. 2000-2500.

I am planning on answering this via an imaginary soldier, opening the essay creating a metaphorical soldier that I spend the rest of the essay breaking apart – physically and metaphorically.

1. Physical malformity

- Physical

- Losing limbs, injury physically – physical restriction and fragmentation.

- Effects of this on home life
- Images of physically broken soldiers and limbs in the texts – both mention of lost limbs and emphasis on certain limbs.
- Reference to images of hands!

- Plastic surgery

- Reconstructions of faces – role of Project Facade.

Fragmented uniform, broken faces, but patched up with images and words – very much what was happening – a catharsis in writing.
Catharsis of healing itself? Was physical healing viewed as catharsis, and thus all that was focussed on?

- Images of face as representative of identity.

- Identifying bodies via the face, replaced by identification via tags – a red and a green tag…
“Dog tag: all soldiers wear a dog tag on a cord around their neck for the identification of dead bodies. In World War 1, a dog tag consisted of one circular
red tag and one octagonal green tag, both made of a thick fibrous substance, rather like cardboard. The soldier’s name, regiment, number and religion
were stamped on both tags. The red tag was cut off and collected to count casualties, and the green tag was left on the body. The popular story during
WW1 was that the red tag was the same colour as blood, the green one was the colour of the grass which the body would be buried in

- Da Costa syndrome

- Psychology affecting the body, causing the heart to race.

- Neurasthenia, shellshock.
- Physical conditions of the trenches
- Physical conditions of returning home! Sense of difference.

FRAGMENTATION:
- Of self
- Of others
- Temporal displacement
- Spatial displacement
- Fragmented lives – sense of being unable to ‘live’, (e.g. returning to those who do not understand, returning injured (psychol. and physically), Project Facade.)

- A gap in history?

- A gap suggests a void, that nothing was being expressed. But much was being expressed – perhaps not in literature as there was a distinct gap,
but within the home, when men were unable to return to full functionality and women were forced to return to a repressed existence.
- It could be argued that there was a sense of emptiness left behind, however it is more a sense of chaos and precicely the opposite – a busyness.
The shell-shocked soldiers were not reacting to emptiness to to an abyss, but rather to an overstimulation, a sense that they are in a void of inaction
when their body is telling them to react.
- The soldiers who were physically broken were certainly in a void in that they were often unable to speak, drink or eat and were shunned by their
families and local communities as damaged goods. They were placed into a void outside of society. However, it is this inability to speak which is
most striking. Would they really have spoken had they had the chance?
- Such is the image of radical emptiness – the soldiers who had their faces disfigured were placed behind masks – they became the radical emptiness – there was nothing behind the mask.

In conclusion:

- Certainly a sense of a gap/void in history, and many soldiers experienced this on their return, hence the symptoms of shellshock and neurasthenia.
- Emptiness and ruin were certainly key traits of literature and art during this time.
- Indeed, the sense of a gap being a ‘truth about the modern world’ is also key to the development of both, particularly theories which look beyond a text to what is
unsaid.
- However, there was no gap, but rather intense physiality in all areas, even temporal displacement reflected physically on the bodies of soldiers, the writings in log books and diaries, and the developing comprehension of the world.

I think it’s time for tea!