The Great War and Modern Memory
In this classic work, Paul Fussell illuminates the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, focusing primarily on the literary means by which The Great War has been remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized. Drawing on the work of important wartime poets such as David Jones and Wilfred Owen, on the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden, and on numerous other personal records housed in the Imperial War Museum, this award-winning volume provides an intimate and intensely poetic account of the event that revolutionized the way we see the world. It has been hailed as "humanly wise and compassionate" (Saturday Review), "original and brilliant" (Lionel Trilling), "bright and sensitive" (The New Yorker), and "probing, sympathetic, and illuminating" (The New Republic). It is an undisputed classic of cultural criticism. (from Amazon)
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- The whole of the context* of the LOTR can best be understood through the lens of this comment by Tolkien:
> My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself
Paul Fussell in “The Great War and Modern Memory” (which I highly recommend) tied comments like these to the change in mentality of the (primarily) English upper classes and gentry. Just living and working closely with working and agrarian class soldiers led to a realization that yes, they struggled with poor boots through no fault of their own (an example Fussell quotes), only visible because for the first time they saw them as comrades due to the shared experience in the trenches.
And that changed the mentality of many in the upper classes, who came back from the war and voted liberal or even labour when before that would not have been even imagined.
This essay talks about the effect of capitalist colonialism in Viet Nam (I agree with the author’s point here) but Tolkien’s experience reflected the consequence of an interesting domestic shift in the British isles, as industrialization increased the separation between the classes. Contrast the comradeship of Henry V in Shakespeare’s eponymous play: a group of aristos and a mob of peasants looking for money and just a change of being stuck on the land: the trench experience was a forced reversion to a social propinquity common from ~800s to the 1700s.
* I don’t mean to imply there is a “correct” reading: it’s an adventure story, a masterful recreation of the tradition of the Sagas, and other things. But even as a naive 12 yo in the 1970s I realised it was a deeply conservative story.
Not a reactionary one: Tolkien doesn’t appear to want to go back. But a recognition of what (in his mind) was lost. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned!
That sense of loss IMHO is much better captured by T. H. White’s roughly contemporaneous “Once and Future King”, a much more sophisticated, but less filmable, book.
- Author of The Great War and Modern Memory [1], an amazing history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_Modern_Memor...
- You're right, The Great War and Modern Memory is not only an amazing history but it's also a remarkable bit of writing in its own right. It's one of those exceptional books on war and the history of warfare and up there with the likes of John Keegan's The Face of Battle and others that comprise the main text corpus about warfare. It's an essential read for anyone who's interested in the subject.
It's author, Paul Fussell, an educator in English, was a WWII veteran and in that nightmarish push across the border into Germany and so had firsthand experience of what it's like to be in battle. Fussell not only looks at the horrors of The Great War but also at those who participated in it, and of the social milieu that surrounded it.
Fussell not only speaks from experience but also from the heart, he dedicates the book to the memory of a companion who was killed nearby him. It's a very moving piece of writing.
I came to the book just by chance, I saw it on a pile of old books on a table outside a secondhand bookstore around two decades ago. My eye was drawn immediately to the remarkable photo of a tragic figure of a young soldier on its cover. The lost and dejected look on that soldier is forever fixed in my memory.
I doubt if that cover photograph could be bettered, it foretells the book's contents to a tee.
- For a handy view of the literature generally, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory is worth a look.
- I encountered this book at work in the early 1990s, where a remote and rarely-used conference room had a shelf full of paperback copies of it. I guessed that it had been used as a text in some sort of management seminar, as a practical guide for people who expected to be moving up in the world. I assume they either didn't perceive its satiric/critical tone, or didn't care and thought it to be informative enough regardless.
Anyway, I pilfered a copy and read it, mostly because I was already familiar with Fussel from his classic work _The Great War And Modern Memory_, about the damaging long-term psycho-social effects of WWI. I don't think the underlying anger and disdain of _Class_ can be readily perceived unless you've read that book.
I had also just read Douglas Coupland's _Generation X_, and Fussel's "X Class" seemed like an eerie prophetic vision of the 90's hipster.
- Fussell's book was a huge eye-opener for me. The mythological assumption in my family was that we were middle-class: small business operators in a poor, rural state. As such, we had very little visibility into higher classes and their practices and ways of life, outside of television programs.
It became clear, reading Fussell, that no matter what we thought about ourselves, our tastes, clothing and habits fit squarely into his high prole category, and everything suddenly seemed to make more sense, including the very belief that we thought we were middle class.
(Anyone hungry for more Fussell should read his classic: "The Great War and Modern Memory", about WWI and its place in 20th century Western society and literature. His book of essays "The Boy Scout Handbook and other Observations" is also great. It includes one about his personal experiences as a Princeton grad who went into WWII as an enlisted man.)
