Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte
Matthias Leliaert
"A Harmless Young Shepherd in a Soldier's Coat" A Consideration of Pastoralism and Modernism in Edmund Blunden's War Memoir Undertones of War and a Selection of his War Poetry
Masterproef voorgelegd tot het behalen van de graad van Master in de taal- en letterkunde Engels - Duits
2015
Supervisor Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor Vakgroep Letterkunde
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank my promotor, Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor, for her guidance throughout the writing process of not only this master dissertation, but of the writing process of my bachelor paper as well. Whenever I had questions, she did not hesitate to answer hem. It is thanks to her that I was able to finish this dissertation in the form that it has today.
Secondly, I want to thank my parents for their enduring support throughout the year. The writing process has not always progressed easily, but thanks to the mental support with which they provided me, I managed to keep my focus on the work and get the job done. Thank you. Also, I want to thank my fellow students, who were in the same predicament as I was, and to whom I could complain or ask questions unscrupulously. Researching, studying, or writing together: it has all been a great pleasure.
I thank you all very much.
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What is it through the battle smoke the valiant soldier sees? The little garden far way, the budding apple trees.
Edgar A. Guest: The Things that Make a Soldier Great (1918).
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Table of Contents
Introduction ...... 1
Chapter 1: Edmund Blunden and his Undertone of The Great War ...... 4 1.1. A Succinct Biography of Edmund Blunden ...... 4 1.2. Contextualization: Undertones of War as an Undertone of the Great War .... 7
Chapter 2: Pastoralism ...... 11 2.1. What is Pastoralism? A Concise History ...... 11 2.2. Sentimental and Complex Pastoralism...... 13 2.3. Three Kinds of Pastoralism in Undertones of War ...... 14 2.4. Anti-Pastoralism ...... 18 2.5. Realism in the Descriptive Pause and its Implications ...... 20 2.6. From Pastoralism to Anti-Pastoralism: The Decay of the Royal Sussex Regiment ...... 24 2.7. Pastoralism as a Structuring Device in the Memoir as well as in Poetry ..... 29
Chapter 3: Modernism and Irony ...... 36 3.1. Voice and Persona ...... 37 3.2. The Use of Meta-Commentary ...... 42 3.3. “Theory of Modes” and Irony engendered in Undertones of War ...... 44 3.4. Closing Discussion: Modern versus Modernist ...... 54
Conclusion ...... 56
Bibliography ...... 59
Addendum I ...... 63
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Introduction1
In August, 1915, almost exactly 100 years ago, Edmund Blunden, a young man from Kent, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment. He fought both in Ypres and at the Somme, two of the bloodiest battles of the Great war the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) took part in, and in doing so, he earned himself the Military Cross. Now, almost one century after the Armistice, it is hard to imagine the ordeals Blunden and his fellow combatants had to go through, and this great feat warrants closer attention. The fact that this poet wrote his involvement at the front down in diaries enabled him, almost ten years after his harrowing frontline experiences, to compose his memoir Undertones of War, which has been exultingly called one of the best autobiographical accounts produced by writers of the Great War and has gained a well-deserved position in the British national canon. For me, it is a fantastic opportunity to combine my interest in history in general, and the Great War in particular, and my love for English literature in this dissertation. I have written my bachelor dissertation on a similar topic, but felt unsatisfied due to the fact that there was still plenty to research in this war memoir, which has received comparatively little critical attention, although the great literary critic Paul Fussell admits that “together with Sassoon’s or Graves’ memoirs” Blunden’s memoir Undertones of War “is one of the permanent works engendered by memories of the war” (Fussell 277)2. Being able to write about such a great book and an author who has received remarkably little critical appreciation is captivating, especially in the light of the general rise in interest in the Great War (literature) – in various media and in various countries worldwide – which has taken place now that the war has reached its centenary. In this dissertation I will engage most extensively with Paul Fussell’s findings on Undertones of War, as his writings tie in with my topic the most. Also, his work The Great War and Modern Memory is a very comprehensive work on prose, drama and lyrical work written during or engaging with the Great War. For further background on this topic I recommend Samuel Heynes’ book A War Imagined, as it also holds a treasure of information about not only the First World War, but also the literature that has spawned forth from it. However, I have observed that not much scholarly attention has been given to
1 The entire text of this dissertation is written in British English. However, when an American or Canadian author is quoted, his American spelling is taken over in that way, without changing it to British English. 2 Every time that a quote from Paul Fussell is used in this dissertation with the citation “Fussell [page number], I quote from his book The Great War and Modern Memory. If I use another source by the same author, I will indicate so clearly by adding the full title of the other source.
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Blunden’s war memoir, and even less on the topic of pastoralism. Therefore, some readers might believe that my work lacks references to secondary scholarly works. However, I can reply that I have used the material that has been written before to build a foundation extensive enough for my own thesis argument proposed here, and have infused the work already done with my own ideas. The thesis that I propose here, deals with Blunden’s prolific use of different kinds of pastoralism, and the uses, implications and consequences thereof. It is my belief that in Undertones of War, Blunden has used various forms of pastoralism as a structuring device and as a moral and formal framework. This wide application of pastoralism imbues the war memoir with a great sense of irony. This irony, along with other traits, give the book a modernist aspect. Thus, it is my thesis that Blunden uses pastoralism as a structuring device in such a way that it evokes irony, which leads me to believe that Blunden’s memoir can be seen as modernist. The structure that Blunden evokes in the memoir through his use of pastoralism goes as follows: first, he sets the scene by means of Nature imagery and pastoralism, only to then return to it to be able to destroy this sereneness in full force, by letting the war intrude upon Nature. Pastoralism is thus used to impose a kind of structure on the otherwise unstructuredness of the war. This very same structure is not only to be found in his prose, but also in a certain amount of his poetical work, which will also be discussed in this dissertation. Another function of pastoralism is, I believe, to foreground the gradual decay of the Regiment Blunden served in, namely the Royal Sussex Regiment. I believe to have discerned a parallelism between Blunden’s Nature imagery and the state of his regiment. The evocation of pastoralism has indubitably had a healing effect for Blunden, who countered the chaos of the war by hanging on to a firm belief in Nature and the structure that pastoralism can provide. The use of pastoralism and everything it entails will be discussed in the second chapter of this dissertating. However, it is true that this use of pastoralism necessarily imbues the memoir with a great sense of irony. When one exults in the beauty of Nature and its tranquillity amidst a war setting, only to obliterate that same peacefulness a few pages later, one cannot but see this as highly ironic. Undertones of War was written and published in 1928, so Blunden could employ an ex post facto view on the matter, which is necessary for to allow irony. I believe that Blunden’s charge against the war has to be found in this irony. He was such an ardent lover of Nature, that he could think of no stronger image or symbol for the vileness of war than the slow annihilation of Nature throughout his memoir. This irony permeating the book opens up the possibility to see this work as imbued with modernist traits. Other such traits, such as Blunden’s calling attention to the literary character of the book by means of his ample use of meta-commentary, or his special attention to voice
2 and persona, led me to believe that this book is indeed to be seen as a modernist work. This will be considered in the third chapter of this dissertation. In the first chapter, a succinct biography of the writer of this memoir will be given, as well as a brief contextualization of Undertones of War. I believe one has to look at Blunden’s memoir as an “undertone” of the war. It is not an open critique on it, nor is it defending the war or the men who instigated it: it is a deeply personal account of the war by an officer who served in it, and has never been able to let the war fully go. The methodology I have applied to discern what kinds of pastoralism have been used, and to what end, and, finally, what consequences their use has had, can be described as mostly text-based mixed-in with a discourse analysis. I have discussed Blunden’s work here without using his own explanations or clarifications, thus I was able to work free from the trap of authorial intention. Starting from the text itself, I have studied it closely and was able to draw conclusions that are given the foundation of textual evidence. Also, I have laid my focus clearly on pastoral discourse. To say that I have made a discourse-analysis of Undertones of War would go too far, as I have only discussed one work by Blunden, due to the simple reason he has only written one memoir of the Great War. In the method of discourse analysis, one usually strives to discern what discourses pervade the work. I have gone one step further, and have chosen one particular discourse, namely the discourse of pastoralism, and I subsequently have discussed this at length, in various forms and uses. The form of discourse analysis I have based my work on is a simplification of Foucault’s work. I have not studied the relation between e.g. power and language in Blunden’s memoir; I have rather focussed on the language of pastoralism and studied what this entails. I have also focussed on linguistic aspects of the memoir that make it, in my opinion, modernist. To summarize, I have made a text-based analysis of one discourse in one work. While doing so, I have closely examined this work and have selected key citations from it that deal with pastoralism, or the irony that this use necessarily evokes, in order to come to a coherent analysis of this particular discourse.
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Chapter One: Edmund Blunden and his Undertone of the Great War
1.1. A Succinct Biography of Edmund Blunden
In the first chapter of this dissertation, I will give a succinct biography of Edmund Blunden, because he is a great writer who, sadly and – as far as I can see, unjustly – has never received the appreciation and fame that he deserves. Edmund Charles Blunden was born in Tottenham Court Road, London as a son of a schoolmaster. His family soon moved from the capital to the rustic village of Yalding, Kent where young Edmund attended the local grammar school. Even at a young age, he was an “assiduous reader” (Fussell, “Modernism, Adversary Culture, and Edmund Blunden” 589) and excelled in his schoolwork. This won him a scholarship for Christ’s Hospital, were he continued his education. Blunden was a gifted student all around, but he stood out in Latin and Greek, two subjects he took a great interest in and liking to, and he could again reap the fruits of his clever proficiency: he earned the Classics scholarship at Queen’s College, Oxford. At this university he composed and perfected his poetic skills, which, as Paul Fussell notes, reflected his character exactly: “shy, modest, accurate, gentle, courteous, and a bit dreamy” (Fussell 277).
As Fussell notes, most, if not all, Blunden’s pre-war poetry is Georgian, and deeply permeated with pastoral and nature imagery. The greater part of these poems is published in the bucolically titled book of verses ‘The Waggoner,’ (1920) for which Blunden was awarded the Hawthornden Prize. This prize is the oldest British prize – it was established in 1919 by Alice Warrender – and it aims to encourage young authors, therefore only writers under the age of 41 are eligible. The Hawthornden prize is awarded annually to recognize the best work of imaginative literature published during the previous year (Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature 523). The remainder of his poems were published in ‘The Shepherd’ (1922). Blunden’s pre-war poetry will not receive notable critical examination here. Blunden’s long and most splendid poem ‘Third Ypres,’ (November 1917) will be discussed more at-length than the others, because this long poem, although published before in ‘The Shepherd’, it was added to the ‘Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations’ in Undertones of War and remains “one of Blunden’s essential war poems” (Silkin 107). Indeed, this poem is his most brilliant poetic achievement and deals with his experience of the war. A small subchapter of this dissertation will be dedicated to this outstanding war poem,
4 with special attention to how Blunden renders the war through a framework of pastoral imagery and what effect pastoralism has in the poem.
Blunden saw himself forced to cut his education at Oxford short, due to the outbreak of the First World War. In 1915 he joined the war effort and was commissioned as a subaltern in the Royal Sussex Regiment, where he would remain until he was invalided home in 1918, after having served almost two years at the front.3 During this period he was a casualty in a German gas-attack and barely survived – here it is interesting to note that Blunden was asthmatic – and he earned himself the Military Cross. Perhaps this is what Fussell meant when he called him “modest,” because Blunden neglected to mention either of these events in Undertones of War. Blunden was only nineteen when he was hurled into the war, making him one of the youngest serving officers. Moreover, Blunden had two years of active duty at the front, making him the longest-serving war poet. Due to his Georgian dreaminess, he was also seen as one of the “least-warlike officers” (Parker 2). Even though he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery, his shyness and gentle character earned him the nickname ‘Rabbit’ or ‘Bunny.’ However, Rennie Parker claims in a bookmark aiming to enhance awareness of Blunden’s work that the nickname ‘Rabbit’ actually “pinpoints his outwardly light and speedy manner, even though this would “bely his inward strength and determination” (2). Serving in the Royal Sussex Regiment, he fought battles both in Ypres and the Somme, without getting serious physical injury, but he was scarred mentally forever. Siegfried Sassoon, with whom Blunden was well acquainted, marked him as being the “poet of the war most lastingly obsessed by it.” (Granite. “Edmund Blunden. Biography). As both Silkin and Fussell observe, Blunden ironically anticipated this when he chose as epigraph for Undertones of War Bunyan’s line: “Yea, how they set themselves in battle-array/ I shall remember to my dying day;” which is a prophecy that does seem to fulfil itself abundantly (Fussell 277; Silkin 102).
In 1920, when the war had come to an end, Blunden started working for the Athenaeum Magazine as an assistant editor and writer of essays and reviews. In the same year his own literary career started off as well, with the publication of his critically acclaimed ‘The Waggoner’, and he would keep on writing up until his death. During his lifetime, Blunden produced sixteen volumes of poems, 4 collected volumes, 30 volumes of essays, criticism and
3 Blunden was at the (western) front line by 1916 and remained there until he was sent home in 1918, although it is necessary to know that he did not spend all his time in active front duty. In the British Expeditionary Force, a system of trench-duty rotation was in place. If one was ‘in the trenches,’ one only spent one third of the time in the front trench; the remainder of the time was spent in the support or reserve trench. Moreover, for every sentry bay, there were allocated three soldiers: one was on watch, while the other two could rest or sleep.
5 travel pieces, 15 edited volumes recommending the work of such fellow spirits as Clare, Christopher Smart, Collins, Lamb, Shelley and Keats, and introducing the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney (Fussell 278). In 1924 he took on a three-year stint as professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo, where he taught English and English poetry. In Tokyo, as well as in England, he was publically admired and well-recognized for his gentle character and he had a lot of friends (compare: Bergonzi: “Edmund Charles Blunden”). In Tokyo, as far away from France’s and Flanders’ war-haunted setting as possible, Blunden recalled his experiences of the Great War and penned them down in his (semi-) autobiographical memoir Undertones of War with “no other assistance than the old maps Hazebrouck 5a and Lens 11 and one of the Cemeteries in Ypres Salient” (Blunden, Preface to the second edition, xliii). His war memoir was published in 1928, a year after his return to England.
In the 1930s Blunden started writing for the Times Literary Supplement, at the same time that he was a fellow and tutor of Merton College, Oxford. Some of his students – who adored Blunden as a professor – included the Canadian Northrop Frye, one of the most influential literary critics and theorists of the twentieth century. I will discuss Frye further in this dissertation. There was also Keith Douglas, a war poet and memoirist of the Second World War, who died during the invasion of Normandy. Blunden kept teaching poetry at Oxford until the outbreak of the Second World War. Because he was an experienced soldier and had reached the respectable age of 48, he taught map-reading to young cadets stationed in Oxford, so he saw no more first-hand action in the Second World War. At the same time Blunden continued to labour on his academic work, writing, among other things, biographies of Leigh Hunt, Shelley and Hardy; editions of Christopher Smart and John Clare and William Collins; and critical studies of the essayists of the Romantic period (Fussell “Modernism, Adversary Culture, and Edmund Blunden” 592).
After the war, Blunden went back to Tokyo, where he was stationed as Cultural Liaison Officer with the British Mission. In this capacity he was lecturing on English poetry at universities all over Japan. From 1953 to 1964 he served as professor of English at the University of Hong Kong, before coming back to his native country, to settle down in Suffolk. His well-earned rest was only disturbed in 1966 by the (uninvited) “controversy between Ancients and Moderns culminating in his defeat of Robert Lowell for the position of professor of poetry at Oxford” (Fussell “Modernism, Adversary Culture, and Edmund Blunden” 592).
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Sadly, due to poor health, he had to give this position up after nearly a year. Blunden remained an active writer until his death, which came on 20 January 1974, in his country house in Suffolk, at the age of 80. Nowadays, he is still most remembered for his war memoir Undertones of War, and his pastoral poetry, which is somehow deeply English. Michael Thorpe remarks in his book on Blunden, that “despite those years in exile,” by which he means Blunden’s stay in Tokyo and Hong Kong, “Blunden’s sensibility has an undiluted Englishness; it stamps everything he has written and marks it off from the modern poetry of the ‘mainstream’” (Thorpe 10). The flowers that were laid on his coffin were not English pastoral flowers, but Flanders poppies, which is an apt way to remember his dutiful participation in the Great War (Paul Fussell: “Modernism, Adversary Culture, and Edmund Blunden” 592).
1.2. Contextualization: Undertones of War as an Undertone of the Great War
Undertones of War was started when Blunden was in Tokyo, where he had obtained a professorship and was teaching poetry and it was published in 1928 in London, where it sold out on the first day of its publication. This war memoir’s popularity hardly diminished in the later decades. Until now, the book has never gone out of print, although the audience has always remained rather a limited group of enthusiasts of the genre. I have examined possible reasons for this undiminished popularity in my bachelor paper, but its twofold reason can be summarized as following: firstly, the written word was still the main medium of conveying information at that time, and Blunden’s highly stylized work naturally drew a lot of attention; secondly, Blunden managed to alter the existing pastoral style – in vogue especially since 1911 – so that its bucolic character was applicable to the industrialized warfare that he describes. How he does this, will be one of the concerns of this dissertation. However, in recent years the popularity of this book did seem to recede, despite the rising interest for Great War literature in general. The works by e.g. Siegfried Sassoon or Robert Graves seem to be favoured over Blunden’s. It is my belief that this stems from a lack of awareness rather than depreciation for the work itself, and I hope a more favourable wind will blow up the sails for critical attention and praise for Undertones of War.
In his discussion of Blunden and Undertones of War in particular in the seventh chapter of The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell calls Blunden’s book “an extended
7 pastoral elegy in prose” (Fussell 277). Blunden himself, in Overtones of War, calls this book “a sort of long poem” (18). Most of the times, it is described as an autobiographical memoir, but Bernard Bergonzi denotes it as “much less than a full autobiography,” and says it is a “severely selective account of Blunden’s experiences as a very young subaltern, on the Somme and at the Third Battle of Ypres” (Bergonzi 143). To make some comment on the question of the genre of this work does indeed seem warranted here. In my opinion, Undertones of War may be called a pastoral semi-autobiographical memoir in lyrical prose. As Bergonzi has noted, it is not a “full autobiography,” but Blunden had no ambition to write his book as such. One follows Blunden only at the front; no account of his peace-time or leisure time is given. The book purposefully focusses on the wartime experience. Blunden wrote the book in a highly stylized language, of which the pastoralism and its imagery is the most present feature. To the subject of Blunden’s lyrical style and idiosyncrasies a small subchapter later on will be dedicated. One can argue that in order to write about the Great War, a whole new language was required, because not only “Georgian complacency died in the trenches” (compare Fussell 39), but with them, their language, too.
The Great War had obviously shaped the geo-political outlines of Europe anew. The tensions between nations this provided may well be seen as the fertile ground on which the Second World War was fought. Additionally, this was the first time mass-produced weapons of great destructive power (e.g. the British Vickers machine gun, which wreaked havoc among soldiers in the field) were used on a massive scale. Naturally, this industrial war had a great influence on language as well. Not only had the almost mechanical mass murder of soldiers in the trenches proven that the ideals of the Enlightenment, which proposed a social order imposed on rationalism and technical improvements, could no longer be upheld; the Georgian style, which was in vogue since 1911 for lyrical poetry in particular and which propagated a “poetics of elegant simplicity, where a classical transparency in literary vocabulary combined with a steady grace of verbal music and the deep appeal of pastoral’s imaginative prospects” was thought to have outdated itself by being applied to writings of a modern, mechanically- fought war (Sherry 4). This gentle, rhythmic style was quickly found unbefitting for describing the current events, because it relied too strongly on the past styles which were believed to be no longer relevant for describing the modernity of the war. However, in Undertones of War Blunden altered the Georgian and pastoral style that permeates the book with great success, so that this “outdated” style regained a new valued position and was, in fact, everything but obsolete. The pastoralism remains very palpable and relevant in his poetry
8 as well. I agree with Thorpe, who says that Blunden is one “who kept nature poetry alive when its traditional ‘pananthropic’ function had come to seem utterly irrelevant” (Thorpe 11), though I think he did more than just keep it alive; he invented a new function for it. Indeed, even today, the book remains a valuable source and an agreeable read for World War One literature enthusiasts and it remains as relevant as ever. The way in which Blunden altered the pastoral was not just an artist’s whim, but indeed a necessity. The Great War, being a “watershed event” (Sherry 1) in many ways - primarily geo- and socio-politically, but also on the technological or medical front - called for a “revaluation” of values, and a corresponding change in the language to describe them, as Edwards notes:
As with the poetry of these memoirists, one of the chief literary interests of their work is the way traditional generic or formal literary features (corresponding broadly with a set of received values about masculinity, heroism, the countryside, and so on) are twisted into something different by the necessity of representing experience that compels a revaluation of all such values. (15)
Blunden indeed seems to have mastered the “revaluation of all such values” in an adequately, by “necessity” adapted language. Blunden’s use of pastoral imagery and language is so extensive, that it cannot be pin-pointed to only one use. As mentioned before, pastoralism is employed here as a framework, to structure the war memoir, in very much the same way that Blunden structures some of his war poems. Also, the recurrent reverting to pastoralism as well as myth makes this memoir in my opinion modernist. I have devoted a whole chapter of this dissertation to a consideration of this aspect of Blunden’s work.
In what follows, I will present a brief discussion of this book’s function. I believe that Undertones of War is an ‘undertone’ of the war. By that I mean that it is a story that will add to the version of events that can be found in history books. It is not an official account of the war, but a deeply personal interpretation of one young subaltern’s war. I believe that this is what Blunden meant by contemplating in his ‘Preliminary’ whether or not it is “useless” to write, because “those who have gone the same journey” will already know what he is writing about, and the others will not understand. In his ‘Preliminary’ he wonders:
Why should I not write it? I know that the experience to be sketched in it is very local, limited, incoherent; that it is almost useless, in the sense that no one will read it who is not already aware of all the intimations and discoveries in it, and many more, by reason of having gone the same journey. No one? Some, I am sure; but not many. Neither will they understand – that will not be all my fault. (xli)
Yet, this personal account of the war is very much relevant, in the sense that for Blunden it was a therapeutic activity” (Bergonzi 142); his works of art were “therapeutic procedures for
9 regaining his humanity” (Fussell “Modernism, Adversary Culture and Edmund Blunden 589). As Bergonzi notes, “Blunden […] was writing in an attempt to make sense of his own experiences, to trace a pattern in the scarifying events that had impinged on his formative years.” (142-143). Thus, one can conclude that this memoir was a way for Blunden to cope with the reality of the war that he had experienced. I believe that imbuing this reality with pastoralism was, in fact, also part of the “therapeutic” method of writing. The pastoralism, used as a framework, also imposes a structure on the war, something which it otherwise would lack. By imposing an (artificial) framework of any kind on the chaos of war, its arbitrariness is, at least for the writer, alleviated. Indeed, when one looks to Undertones of War in this light, one can understand the healing effects of writing it for Blunden.
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Chapter Two: Pastoralism in Undertones of War
2.1. What is Pastoralism? A Concise History
I will begin my discussion of Blunden’s pastoralism with a short consideration of what pastoralism actually is, and how it positions itself in the history of English literature. As for most – if not all – genres of literature, it is not feasible to provide a conclusive definition of what pastoral literature is. In the case of defining a literary concept like this, it is most appropriate to define it in terms of a cluster of distinctive features. One attempt at a definition can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It defines pastoral or bucolic literature as a “class of literature that presents the society of shepherds as free from the complexity and corruption of city life.” (Sampaolo, Young “Pastoral Literature). The image of this society is usually infused with a glorification of life in the country or an idealization of Nature as beneficial. The traditional pastoral literature can be traced back to poem, often written as the “singing matches” between two shepherds, who in the form of song exult in country life and usually contrast it to urban life, although love and death are notable themes as well (Sampaolo, Young “Pastoral Literature”). Another definition can be found in “Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory” by Cuddon, defining pastoralism as “a minor but important mode which, by convention, is concerned with the life of shepherds […]. For the most part pastoralism tends to be an idealization of shepherd life, and, by being so, creates an image of a peaceful and uncorrupted world” (517). The origin of the pastoral tradition is usually attributed to Theocritus, who in his Bucolics or Idylls, both written in the third century BC, established the first pastoral poetry with two shepherds – one of whom is said to be Theocritus himself – mulling over an idealised rural life in Sicily. So began the long tradition of pastoral writing. Virgil soon continued in the tradition Theocritus had established, in that he also praised the bucolic countryside by returning to a memory of a Golden Age in his volumes Eclogues (Latin: Eclogae) and Georgics (Latin: Georgica). Virgil provided farmers with advice on husbandry and how to live in harmony with nature, as well providing them with instructive moral stories about the Gods. However, Virgil added a political side to the pastoralism, and at times problematized the contrast between the urban and the rural as well. We will come to see that, in effect, Blunden engages with pastoralism in the same way as Virgil did, namely employing pastoralism to convey a message otherwise impossible to express, albeit for different reasons. Virgil’s main concern was censorship; Blunden faced a
11 wholly different kind of language problem (see below). Many lesser known poets kept writing pastoral poetry, but no major innovations took place until the Renaissance. Dante and Petrarch in Italy, and Pierre de Ronsard in France visited the pastoral themes in the Renaissance, and infused and expanded on them with Christian themes. During the same period Sir Phillip Sydney, who wrote The Lady of May and Arcadia, both lyrical works, and Edmund Spencer, whose principal pastoral poetic work was The Shepheardes Calender, were the most influential writers of pastoral poetry in England. Pastoral writing in the form of a novel originated in England with the works of John Green and Thomas Lodge. In the form of drama Ben Johnson, John Lyly and others made the pastoral popular. Shakespeare subjected the new vogue of the pastoral to some satirical comments in As You Like It, which is itself a pastoral play (Sampaolo, Young “Pastoral Literature). Although some novels and plays appeared, the pastoral remained the most popular in lyrical form. Andrew Marvell, whose poetry comprised of a “unique blend of freshness and learned imitation” (Sampaolo, Young “Pastoral Literature) is considered to have achieved the height of this mode. The Romantics employed pastoral motifs and themes often, though they added no major innovations. After the Romantic Period the pastoral receded in popularity and frequency. It had to endure more and more criticism, and had to give way to more modern modes of writing. In his book about pastoralism called Pastoral, Gifford questions the statement that the “historical form of the pastoral is dead […] since the late nineteenth century, when the distinction between the country and the city collapsed” (Gifford 3).4 Gifford is a literary theorist and research coordinator at the School of English, Bretton Hall College of Leeds University and author of Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. For my brief study of the genre of pastoralism is, I have drawn mostly on his work. John Barrell and John Bull, who edited The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse maintain the view that “[t]he separation of life in the town and in the country that the Pastoral demands is now almost devoid of any meaning. It is difficult to pretend that the English countryside is now anything more than an extension of the town.” (Barrell, Bull 432). Gifford correctly maintains that that statement has proven to be false, due to the fact that Bull and Barrell hold on to the definition of the pastoralism in its strictest sense. We will come to see that the pastoral comes in many forms, and has evolved away from its original meaning into different branches. Also, Blunden uses pastoralism in a new and innovative way, which is the most obvious proof that pastoralism can still be used
4 Every reference to Terry Gifford indicated in the text as “Gifford [page number], then I quote from his book Pastoral (2010). If I use another source by the same author, I will indicate that clearly by adding the title of the work.
12 and is far from being “devoid of meaning.” I will begin the consideration of all its forms with a short consideration between sentimental and complex pastoralism. According to Gifford, there are three kinds of pastoralism, which I have discussed and examined here in Blunden’s Undertones of War, in the next part of this chapter. In addition to the three kinds, there is also an anti-pastoral mode. This will be explained in a few paragraphs as well. There, it will become clear that Blunden uses pastoralism and its counterpart, the anti-pastoral, as a motif to accentuate the gradual decay of not only the fields of France and Flanders, but also of the regiment he was serving in, the Royal Sussex Regiment. Finally, I aim to prove my thesis that Blunden makes use of pastoralism as a structuring device throughout his war memoir, in very much the same manner that he does in his war poetry, which consequently engenders irony. The irony that permeates the book will be discussed more in-depth in another chapter, namely the chapter on Blunden’s modernism. Finally, different kinds of pastoral imagery in terms of their symbolic value will be explored, in order to make clear how they add another layer of meaning to Blunden’s work.
2.2. Sentimental and Complex Pastoralism
The division between sentimental, or simple, and complex pastoralism is to be traced back originally to Leo Marx’ book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) which deals with the trope in American literature that represents the disruption of nature and the pastoral by technology, due to the gradual industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In this seminal study, the trope of technology intruding into nature is discussed in works of a variety of eminent authors, such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Twain, Melville, Whitman, Hemingway, James, Cather and Frost. Gifford explains that the difference between sentimental and complex pastoral should be observed in terms of the insights, the ‘return’ (see below) it delivers. Sentimental pastoralism delivers none of these, but indulges in a state of escapism by means of a one-sided idealisation of the splendours nature or the rural life has to offer. By contrast, complex pastoralism offers a ‘return,’ insights of lessons learned, which are to be brought back from the retreat to nature into the urban setting or normal life. Thus, the retreat into nature is seen as temporary, and is then a time to not only delight in nature but also be taught by it, to subsequently return to the previous state of life enriched by the gifts nature bestowed upon you. As one should suspect, Blunden engaged with complex pastoralism in his war memoir. As I aim to show, he employed the pastoral as a structuring device and to add another layer of symbolic meaning. Of course, the
13 question whether Blunden infused his work with pastoralism only for the sheer aesthetic value, or as simple escapism, to get away from the horrors of the war, is one that has kept many scholars occupied. Perhaps this is the reason Blunden is not read as often as e.g. Sassoon: his clever engagement with pastoralism is rather all too often classified as sentimental escapism. However, I agree with Fussell who rejects the idea that “Blunden [is] “escaping” into the past.” Fussell provides another reason why Blunden engaged with pastoralism so profusely. He is rather “engaging the war by selecting from the armory of the past weapons against it which seem to have the greatest chance of withstanding time. In his own shy way, he is hurling himself totally and emotionally into opposition” (Fussell 292). And indeed, Blunden’s pastoralism has withstood time; his memoir is as relevant and intriguing as ever. Bergonzi also defends Blunden against “the charge of escapism, of retreating from the reality of battle into a pastoral dream-world,” (Bergonzi 62) albeit in his poetry. On the same page he notes that Blunden “accepted the war as one of the basic data of experience that could not be evaded, even though it was always fundamentally less ‘real’ than the sights and sounds of rural England.” This reduces Blunden’s view to be restricted to rural England and indeed escaping from the war, but a few pages later Bergonzi explains Blunden’s use of the pastoral and “manifestations of nature not as ‘escape’ or marginal illustration,” but rather in a “deliberately sanative way.” (Bergonzi 64). Bergonzi thus refers back to the healing effect writing had on Blunden, which will be discussed in the chapter on modernism of this dissertation. So, as will be shown, Blunden’s use of pastoralism is complex indeed, and it provides the necessary insights, or ‘return’ in order for it to be able to be classified as complex. Blunden indeed comes back from his war experience into war-free normality, with insights he gained from nature. Otherwise he would not be able to have written his war memoir imbued with the abundant pastoralism.
2.3. Three Kinds of Pastoralism in Undertones of War
In this part of my dissertation, I will examine the three kinds of pastoral that Gifford distinguishes in his book Pastoral, and I will subsequently discern how these three different categories are represented in Undertones of War because it is important to see how Blunden deliberately chose how he adapted these different forms of the pastoral. I have done so already in my bachelor paper, so here I only aim to summarize my previous findings. Gifford has established that there is a threefold distinction between the different forms of the pastoral in terms of the themes they address. Because he describes pastoralism as a mode of writing
14 rather than a genre, the pastoral mode in all three kinds can be found in drama, prose and poetry.
The first kind is the oldest one, and is found most frequently in works in Antiquity or works drawing on ancient Roman and Greek works. The main characteristic of these works is that they concern “life in the country, and about life of the shepherd in particular” (Gifford 1). Most works are lyrical, and country life is highly idealised in its portrayal. All works written in this kind of pastoralism were of a didactic disposition. They all share the recurrent theme of retreat and return. The goal of this kind of pastoralism, marked by this retreat and return, is articulated by Gifford as following: “The pastoral retreat returned some insights relevant to the urban audience.” (Gifford 3). These insights usually prove to be necessary to (re)gain a feeling of inner harmony. The narrator always returns from his bucolic experience or escapade to his prior life, which is usually an urban setting. It is not uncommon that the narrator of these works retreated into nature because he faced a problem in the urban society, and after having pondered over it in the serenity of a pastoral setting, and having seen how harmoniously nature works, he finds a solution for whatever conundrum he faced before. This relatively simple kind of pastoralism is the one that Blunden uses in his war memoir the most frequent. It can be detected easily, especially in the first few chapters, where the landscape is not corrupted by war as much as in the later chapters. The French countryside surrounding the picturesque villages in which Blunden and his regiment are billeted in 1916 seems to be described from an idealised perspective. This blissful indulging in Nature’s beauty contrasts starkly with the grim and down-to-earth realism Blunden maintains when he describes the course of action in the war. This gritty realism is a necessary component for any offering of an account of the war, because it imbues the war memoir with the necessary credibility and the integrity one expects to find in a narrative of this sort. I will illustrate Blunden’s use of the first kind of pastoralism by means of one excerpt that can be found in the third chapter, called ‘The Cherry Orchard.’ Here, nature and the machinery and the man-made practices of war blend in together perfectly and harmoniously, just like the “empty farmhouses” that dot the landscape blend in with it. The first clue of the pastoral harmony between the war and the men fighting it and Nature is given by Blunden on the first page of the chapter, in that he remarks that “[h]istory and nature were beginning to harmonize in the quiet of that sector.” (Blunden 20-21). I believe that this “history” Blunden is referring to should be understood as the proceedings of war in 1915, before Blunden and his regiment arrived. Blunden sees some farm waggons and agricultural gear huddled together as to form a barricade, and he “felt that
15 they should never be disturbed again, and the memorial raised near them to the dead of 1915 implied a closed chapter.” (Blunden 21). Therefore, all the previous actions of war seem distant, and blended in with the landscape in full harmony. War and its horrors do not make an intrusion here; the setting is serene, peaceful, and indeed pastoral. Blunden goes on describing the farmhouses from the curious ex post facto view that enables irony, as will be discussed later, and also gives him the opportunity to comment on the future state of these farmhouses. His simple “not yet” draws attention to the fact that he already knows what will happen to them as the war progresses. But for now these farmsteads are described as very picturesque, and serve as the pastoral retreat from the war that the soldiers need. Life is abundant there, as well as a feeling of homeliness. They are indeed an ideal retreat from the war:
The empty farmhouses behind were not yet effigies of agony or mounds of punished, atomized materials; they could still shelter, and they did. Their hearths could still boil the pot. Acres of self-sown wheat glistened and sighed as we wound our way between, where rough scattered pits recorded a hurried firing-line of long ago. Life, life abundant sang here and smiled; the lizard ran warless in the warm dust; and the ditches were trembling quick with odd tiny fish, in a world as remote as Saturn. (Blunden 21)
War seems far away at this point, because the stress lies on “life.” The word is repeated twice, followed closely by examples of this “warless” life running or swimming about. The “hurried firing-line of long ago” seems to be nothing more than a pathway now, on which the soldiers can amble along peacefully. The battalion followed the trenches to the village of Hinges. This village became “one of the happiest to which my [Blunden’s] battalion ever went” (Blunden 22) ,a statement that only reinforces the image of it as a retreat from the war. Nonetheless, the inevitable return must arrive, which this time comes the next morning in the shape of “a training programme [that] was put into force” (Blunden 22). Moreover, this retreat has brought an insight, in the form of a solution to a problem, namely that of the ’eyewash,’ in the term that was then current. This ‘eyewash’ is explained as the artificial part of the military life, e.g. the bronzing of buttons, the shinning of shoes, etc. This has set the men in Blunden’s regiment to grumbling for months, and has infringed on their rest-time, but after having undergone this pastoral retreat, they need not concern themselves with the eyewash anymore, as there was a relaxation of this part of Army orders. So in effect, the pastoral retreat has provided a ‘return.’ As explained above, this oldest kind of pastoralism requires at least one, but mostly two shepherds in order to be completely in line with the tradition. To be sure, Blunden has provided this compulsory element as well. In the same village of Hinges, Blunden for the first time evokes an image of himself as a shepherd, leading his men. He
16 strolls along the canal, “swinging [his] stick,” while at the same time paying attention to nature, as he is “noticing the ‘twined flowers,’ the yellowhammer and the wagtail” (Blunden 23). The stick he is carrying is easily identified as a shepherding staff. It is a stick he found in nature, as his grandfather’s walking stick that he had brought with him, is stolen (see below). The “twined flowers” that Blunden evokes, are a reminiscence of Keats’ ode ‘To Autumn.’ (Fussell 172). In this poem Keats pays homage to the Goddess of Autumn, with its abundancy in fruits and blossoming trees. The speaker is calm and gentle, and observant of nature, in very much the same manner that Blunden is when he is taking a walk in nature, observing pastoral scenes with delight. Just like Blunden wants the reader to be observant of the pastoralism, ‘To Autumn’ is “concerned with the […] activity of daily observation and appreciation” (Sparknotes). Blunden eats his rations under a knotty willow, while observing the water that is brimming with young jack, “as an angler of sorts” (Blunden 24). What else is an angler but a shepherd of the fish? In addition, the book ends with Blunden identifying himself still as a “harmless young shepherd in a soldier’s coat” (Blunden 191), reinforcing this image and thus providing the compulsory presence of a shepherd in the oldest pastoral tradition.
The second kind of pastoralism that Gifford distinguishes differs from the first more with respect to the content than in form. This kind has been described by Gifford as “any literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban” (Gifford 3). The speaker may still rejoice in Nature, or celebrate its beauty, but here the shepherding element is not necessary, nor is the almost blind idealisation present. The focus in this kind of pastoralism is rather on the didactic aspect a return to the urban setting presents. The rural and the urban are contrasted, and although Nature is still presented as beneficial, it can at the same time be presented as problematic, due to the impact civilization, technology, or the urban setting has on it. This kind of pastoralism is present in Undertones of War as well. On page seventeen Blunden describes the company headquarters. This place is a good example of the second kind of pastoralism. Blunden uses idyllic nature descriptions – “our garden was lovely, with flowering shrubs, streaked and painted blossoms, gooseberry bushes, convenient new gaps and paths, and walks between evergreen hedges” but the idealisation is broken due to the “monstrous rusty shell” which cannot be exploded, and provides for a constant exposure to danger. I quote the entire excerpt here:
Our company headquarters in the hulk of a once pretty house could show two or three magnificent examples [of enormous holes caused by German shelling] at its threshold, round the marble steps, and in one of these pits lay a monstrous rusty shell, which, it was said, our
17
Engineers would not attempt to explode. […] Apart from this, our garden was lovely, with flowering shrubs, streaked and painted blossoms, gooseberry bushes, convenient new gaps and paths, and walks between evergreen hedges – ‘unsafe by day’, as the notice –boards said. Not far down the road was a wooden bathhouse, where one splashed in cold water agreeably, yet with a listening ear. Not far, again, was a red brick wall, to which fruit-trees reached their covert; this red wall was an instance of man’s duplicity, for part of it, being but painted wood, presently swung open, and a field battery glaring brutally out would ‘poop off.’ (Blunden 17)
Also, Blunden’s description of the “wooden bathhouse” is done in the same manner. The men can play idyllically in the water, yet they have to keep “a listening ear” at all times. It is this warning, the “listening ear” that breaks through the idealisation of nature which is so typical for the second kind of pastoralism. Moreover, the “red brick wall” works according to the same principle: rather than protecting the fruit-trees, it is but a device of war, designed to hide the artillery. Thus, Nature is constantly intruded upon by war, providing a warning and a disenchantment with nature not only for the soldier, but for the reader as well.
The third kind of pastoral draws even more on the aspect of danger, offering in some ways a more modern critique of the simplification of rural life, which was strongly felt in the previously discussed modes of pastoral. Here the ‘return’ aspect is given even more importance, in that an ecological concern is voiced in the depiction of rural life. According to Gifford, pastoral in this critical sense is used here as a pejorative. He provides the example of a Greenpeace supporter who might use the term critically for a poem addressing trees, if it would ignore the presence of pollution or the threat to urban trees from city dwellers. He would see the evocation of pastoralism as too simple and one-sided, as it does not do justice to the reality or does not represent the peril Nature is in accurately. Since this kind of pastoral literature concerns itself almost exclusively with ecological and environmental issues, this will not be discussed more in depth here.
2.4. Anti-Pastoralism
In the paragraphs above I have shown that out of the three kinds of pastoralism that can be differentiated; two are clearly and prominently present in Undertones of War. Of both types I have provided one example, but this does not mean that these are the only instances present in the war memoir. The third kind of pastoralism is not present, due to the fact that this modern take on pastoralism is so radically different from its predecessors. This kind of pastoralism relates to ecological and environmental concerns. Obviously, this element is not present in Blunden’s war memoir. In the next few paragraphs I will first explain what anti-pastoral is,
18 and subsequently prove the thesis that Blunden evoked a shift in his memoir from pastoralism to anti-pastoralism, from idealisation to its reversal, in order to show the gradual decay of the mental and physical state of his regiment, the Royal Sussex Regiment. In addition, I will insert a short consideration of how Blunden was constrained in the realism with which he imbued his war memoir, and how he finally managed to add realism to his description. This becomes most clear in the descriptive pause, so I will only discuss realism in the descriptive pause defined by Gérard Genette.
In this paragraph, I will explain what the anti-pastoral mode is. In Pastoral, Gifford explains the anti-pastoral as a mode of writing which goes against the naïve idealisation of nature in the previously discussed modes. He says that this tradition appears to be “based simply upon exposing the distance between reality and the pastoral convention when that distance is so conspicuous as to undermine the ability of the convention to be accepted as such” (Gifford 128). This means that an anti-pastoral text or the use of anti-pastoralism in a text is evoked in order to show that the illusion that the pastoralism creates, is not in line with reality. Gifford goes on saying on the same page that this distance can be caused by cultural uses of the pastoral, and that it is up to the anti-pastoral(ist) to expose this distance. Gifford wrote an essay supplementing his book Pastoral, titled Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral as Reading Strategies. In this essay he summarizes six features of the anti-pastoral mode, of which a range of one to all can be present in an anti-pastoral text. These properties are an often explicit corrective take on pastoral imagery and themes, which is the most common aspect; an un-idealised presentation of the subject; an emphasis on realism, rather than idealisation, so effectively linking the second and third feature closely together; showing discords and problems in the pastoral; challenging literary constructs as false distortions of reality; and finally demythologizing such constructs as Arcadia, Garden of Eden and other mythological wonders of nature (Gifford: “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral as Reading Strategies” 19). However, it must be noted that the anti-pastoral is not an entirely new mode of writing. It is, in fact, the negation of the pastoral and therefore has been coinciding with the former ever since the beginning. I agree with Gifford who argues that “as long as there have been idealised pastoral texts there have been elements of anti-pastoral in literature (Gifford “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral as Reading Strategies” 19). Gifford provides ample examples; he clearest of which can be found in the already introduced work by Theocritus, namely The Idylls. This is attributed to be the first pastoral text, but even here elements of the anti-pastoral are already present. When the two shepherds amble barefoot
19 across the slopes of a Mediterranean hillside, one warns the other: “You shouldn’t go barefoot on the hillside, Battus. / Wherever you tread, the ground’s one thorny ambush” (Theocritus 71). In this simple uttering, many of the anti-pastoral features are present. Most importantly, the take on the pastoral and idyllic setting of the sunny slope of the hill is immediately corrected. The illusion of an ideal setting is taken away, and the reality that Nature can be dangerous too is foregrounded. This notion of danger amidst the quietude of nature is typical for the anti-pastoral. The hillside may seem idyllic, but the reality is that is not only beneficial and beautiful, but that “thorns” may lie in “ambush” as well. This portrayal of Nature as able to harm the shepherds is the clearest of anti-pastoral motifs. Yet, this may not only be a simple warning against walking barefoot on a leafy slope, but this may be easily recognized as a parable-like warning. Perhaps Battus is not only reminded to watch his step, but also that he has to consider carefully what his next step in life should be. This way, the aim of the anti- pastoral has been reached, in that the pastoral convention – here, ambling blissfully along on a hillside – is questioned, and the harsh reality is foregrounded, by way of the metaphor of thorns on the ground. In his essay, Gifford furthermore explains that the aim of this mode is to “correct the idealisation of the pastoral by presenting counter evidence that emphasises the opposite features in a gritty ‘realism’” (Gifford: “Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral and Post-Pastoral as Reading Strategies” 18). So the (agricultural) reality should be shown, rather than a celebration of Nature’s splendour. And indeed, this is what happens in Undertones of War. In the following subchapter, I will briefly consider Blunden’s realism where it is most clear, namely in the descriptive pause. After that, I will explain how Blunden makes a shift from pastoralism to anti-pastoralism in his war memoir, in order to foreground the decay of both the landscape and his battalion.
2.5. Realism in the Descriptive Pause and its Implications
Blunden harmoniously combines pastoralism with a gritty realism. Blunden’s acute realism becomes most clear in the descriptive pauses in his book. Gérard Genette has differentiated in his study Narrative Discourse between four types of narrative movement which characterize the “relations between the time of the story and the (pseudo-) time of the narrative” (35) in terms of speed. Where the narration goes the fastest is called ellipsis. Here, the discourse time is much more rapidly than the narrative time. In the types of summary and scene the narration is the discourse time is faster in the former, but slower in the latter than the narrative time, although they are not easily distinguishable. Then, lastly, in the descriptive pause, the
20 narration comes practically to a halt, which allows for the possibility to provide extensive description and the insertion of symbolism. Additionally, it allows for readers to gain access to the realism Blunden was confronted with in real life, because he can describe everything as extensively as he pleases. Due to the descriptive pause, Blunden is given a window to tell his story and at the same time depict the circumstances of his life in the trenches. However, as Cobley poignantly points out, this affects certain problems, too. She summarizes the problem as following: “Although description provides access to life at the front, it obstructs the narrative dynamics” (Cobley 38). Indeed, the narrative action is suspended when the descriptive pause is featured. Even so, the descriptive pauses in Blunden’s war memoir prove to be a fruitful field of research, as it is in these instances that the full extent of his pastoralism as well as the level of realistic detail become very clear. Upon a closer consideration of Blunden’s realism, we see that he engages with lexical ostentation. Of course, lexical ostentation is impossible to omit even in the most objective accounts (compare Cobley 39). Lexical ostentation is what I believe to be one of the main motivations for his stylistic construction of certain passages. By this I mean that Blunden at times favoured descriptions of a high literary quality over truthfulness. This does not mean that what Blunden wrote is false, but rather that his descriptions favour literary quality over accuracy in details. Cobley has shown that “description can ultimately be differentiated from narration because description is primarily retrospective and contingent” (Cobley 34-35), whereas narration focusses on the propulsion of the plot. What concerns me most in the descriptive pauses, is the fact that it activates referential, phenomenological and semiotic codes, due to its necessarily retrospective character, according to Cobley (35). This means that it automatically refers back to an ‘encyclopaedic’ store of knowledge the reader possesses. This has been a vivid topic of investigation for structuralist scholars. In this frame I would like to quote Cobley again who says that descriptions ask “to be consulted like an encyclopaedia and thereby serve to reassure readers of the text’s factual accuracy” (37). This means that by giving retrospective descriptive details, the factual accuracy, the illusion of truth, is being upheld. Thus, necessarily, Blunden has to make a selection process of which details he will provide. This selection consequently invites the act of lexical ostentation. To illustrate this, I would like to discuss following passage. When Blunden describes “the old German front line” on page 18, he speaks of “the lightnings of explosive which it had swallowed month after month.” Blunden not only linked the force of nature “lightnings” to human explosions caused by shelling, he also personifies the trench, saying it “swallowed” the explosions. This is a clear example of how literary effect is a motivation for Blunden when considering how to
21 describe certain aspects (qtd. in Cobley 18). Furthermore, Blunden had to take another criterion that motivates his choice of words in realistic descriptions in consideration, namely the factor of coherence. Descriptions have no applicable natural constraints, obviously, but the reader expects some degree of coherence nonetheless, so that they come across as plausible. Cobley has argued that there are three constraints which can imbue a descriptive passage with the necessary coherence, which are referential, phenomenological and semiotic constraints.5 I will briefly elaborate on these constraints in the next few paragraphs.
The first is the referential constraint. This is the constraint the easiest applicable for a writer and the easiest detectable for a reader. If a description is referentially constrained, it means that the narrator kept his description of things that he can see, rather than making comparisons to other objects or events which are out of the line of sight. To apply this constraint means that the narrator aimed at an accurate depiction of the world. For example, when Blunden describes war-struck villages, he often describes the church spire first, for the simple reason that this meets the eye first. I will illustrate this by providing the excerpt when Blunden enters the village of Mailly-Maillet:
Mailly-Maillet was reported to have been until recently a delightful and flourishing little place, but it was in the sere and yellow; its long château wall had been broken down by the fall of shell-struck trees; its church, piously protected against shrapnel by straw mats, had been hit. On the road to the town, we had spelt out on almost every cornfield the advertisement of ‘Druon- Lagniez, Quincaillier à Mailly-Maillet’ […]. (Blunden 66)
It is notable that Blunden only described the tall buildings in this village, rather than the common house or the village main square. The motivation for his choice of description here is the referential constraint, in that he only commented on the clearly visible and memorable referents in the village.
The second is the phenomenological constraint. This type of constraint still depends on the referent, but takes into account how the referent is perceived, namely the focalization. The focalization integrates descriptive elements in the narrative, which means that actions in the narrative open up opportunities for descriptive pauses. These are necessary causes for enabling a description. According to Phillipe Hamon, a literary theorist, there are three descriptive topoi: ‘doing,’ ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ (compare: Cobley 46). Blunden uses all three of these topoi to allow the narrative, or the action, to provoke a description. For example, in the following excerpt, Blunden makes a comment on the landscape by means ‘doing’ something in the narrative – here, the action opening up a window for a descriptive
5 For further reading on this, see Cobley pp. 42-53.
22 pause is taking the road through the woods: “Escaping as hastily and inconspicuously as our slight local knowledge allows, we wind through the wood again, and over the causeway through the morass, while the scattered roaring lessens in our ears, and the voices of waterfowl just reach our numbed attention.” (Blunden 115; also discussed in Cobley 46). So, an action in the narrative actively allowed for a description of the scattered landscape. This kind of constraint on a description is called the phenomenological constraint.
The third constraint on descriptions that will be discussed is the semiotic constraint, which operates on the thematic or symbolic level. Cobley states here that “the description interprets what an object means and indicates how it fits into the narrative structure” (Cobley 50). This means that it is the reader’s duty to interpret the description on a symbolic level. For example, in the following excerpt, the potential for symbolism is very high. Therefore, it seems plausible to say that this description is motivated by the semiotic constraint. Ideally, the reader charges the descriptions with symbolic value, such as the “great bell,” the “rusty shell,” and the “effigy” in the following excerpt:
The large church, and the almost rococo churchyard, astonished everybody: they had been bombarded into that state of demi-ruin which discovers the strongest fascination. At the foot of the monolith-like steeple stood a fine and great bell, and against that, a rusty shell of almost the same size; the body and blood of Christ, in effigy of ochred wood, remained on the wall of the church. Men went to contemplate that group, but more to stare into the very popular tombs all round, whose vaults gaped unroofed, nor could protect their charges any longer from the eye of life. Greenish water stood in these pits; bones and skulls and decayed cerements there attracted frequent soldiers past the ‘No Loitering’ notice board. (Blunden 47)
When Blunden wrote his memoir of the war, as all writers of the Great War did, he inevitably faced the problem of language and rhetoric that has already been cited, namely the problem of how to use the same language and rhetoric to describe and criticize the war with the very same language that has been used to promote the ideas that caused the war. Blunden put a lot of thought in it and has come up with a brilliant answer. A particular problem Blunden faced was to find a way to combine pastoralism and the many ways in which he engages with it, with the necessary realism in order to keep his work coherent and factually accurate. The things that he wrote went to a careful selection process, so that the essential realist aspect of his work was not neglected. Moreover, this selection process invited lexical ostentation and imbued Blunden’s work with a very high literary quality. Undertones of War is filled with references to other works, both classical and modern. This too would provide a fruitful field of research, although they are not discussed here. Blunden’s style has been called “mature” by Fussell on account of the “literary culture implicit” (282) in his work and its rhythmic qualities have been praised, but at the same time Fussell calls out Blunden’s
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“fatal Cleopatras” as his using too many jocular words or “even mock-pedantic elevated diction” (291). One of the archaic engagements with language that Blunden indulges himself in, is his habit of often using “personifications,” which “give[s] the prose a mock-epic dimension redolent of the eighteenth century” (Fussell 291). Indeed, his style does seem full of references to older works, both direct quotes and stylistic allusions. In addition, Blunden’s style has been criticised as well on account of the many old-fashioned, cantankerous archaisms, such as adumbrated, or his (too) extensive use of exclamations and rhetorical questions (Fussell 291). Also, on more than one occasion he favours inverted word order, without any immediate cause. However, Blunden’s realism did not suffer under his quirky stylistic constructions, thanks to the three factors of coherence that Blunden has employed. He abides by the laws of the referential, phenomenological and semiotic constraints of coherence, which imbue this work with a realistic feeling. Besides, Blunden’s focus on the past and its form of writing is not simply pedantry; Blunden has done so purposely. He actively engages with past forms of writing – pastoralism in particular – in a new way, in order to impose a structure on the otherwise unstructured nature of the war presented in his book, without putting the factor of realism at risk. This way, pastoralism provides for Blunden a multi- purposeful moral and formal framework throughout Undertones of War, which is something much sought after by any writer of the Great War. It is my belief that Blunden not only shapes his poetry in this manner, but his war memoir as well, which will be discussed later. This inevitably engenders irony, which is discussed in the chapter on modernism. In the following chapter, I will show another use of Blunden’s pastoralism, namely how he constructed a shift in his pastoralism to its opposite, that is anti-pastoralism, in order to foreground the simultaneous decay of the landscape and the state of his battalion.
2.6. From Pastoralism to Anti-Pastoralism: The Decay of The Royal Sussex Regiment
I will now elaborate on how Blunden constructed the aforementioned shift from the first and second kinds of pastoralism discussed above to a form of anti-pastoralism. The reason that he does so is to foreground not only the gradual decay of the fighting power and moral of his battalion but also the ever more destroyed landscape of France and Flanders. Because war always takes place outdoors and in a natural setting, Fussell believes that war represents the “ultimate anti-pastoral” (Fussell 231). setting due to the continuous ravaging of this natural setting. Blunden tells his own story of the war, but in doing this, he necessarily gives an
24 account of how his battalion fared. Undertones of War is as much about its author as it is about the experience of the 11th battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment. It is initially a “happy battalion” (Blunden, throughout Chapter VIII) but one whose history could be described as a series of grim disillusions bravely borne (Fussell 260). Indeed, the battalion starts off cheerfully, but its moral and fighting power are reduced over the course of the time described by Blunden in his memoir in four stages. After each one of a total of four pivotal points the battalion reduces in strength. The battalion starts their exploits at Etaples – or Eatapples, is it was known among the British soldiers during the Great War6 - where the setting seems peaceful and still unspoiled by war. Yet, ominous indications of an anti-pastoral seem already to creep into the tale, as e.g. Blunden’s ebony walking stick, which I have previously attributed as a shepherding staff, is stolen. Then, near La Bassée, the regiment suffers greatly from an attack for the first time. This was the first of four attacks that decimated the battalion, both mentally and physically. The other three events occurred at Hamel on September 3, at Thiepval in the Somme during late October and early November, and finally in July, 1917, at Ypres, the beginning of the action called Passchendaele (Fussell 260). Before all four of these attacks, the setting is described as relatively peaceful.
Before the attack near La Bassée – in which Blunden himself had no part, but many of his comrades did – he describes the surroundings and setting as a “melodious existence [that] should have lasted longer” (Blunden 35). But, before long, the attack orders came, with the phrase: “The following officers and men have been carefully selected to participate,” or, as Blunden adds, “some such honorific proscription” (Blunden 39). This is another instance of the irony that his post ex facto view permits, because these men were not carefully selected and no honour was to be gained in the coming attack. The attack failed, with a great cost in men and material. When Blunden prompts him on how things, one retreating soldier explained that the attack had miserably failed, and that “none had returned without bullet- holes in their caps, uniforms or equipment” (Blunden 41). The reason for this slaughter lies here: “In No Man’s Land a deep wide dyke had been met with, not previously observed or considered as an obstacle, which had given the German machine-guns hideously simple targets; of those who crossed, most died against the uncut wire […]” (Blunden 41). This could be seen as a charge against the staff’s inability to provide correct information on the ground of attack, or the artillery’s inability to cut the barbed wire enough as to allow a passage for the
6 Many a trench or town was given an unofficial name that reminisced of the country back home. For a full explanation of the use of vernacular names, see Fussell 194.
25 men. Blunden concludes the description of the attack with a lamentation in his typical elegiac, brief style: “So the attack on Boar’s Head closed, and so closed the admirable youth or maturity of many a Sussex and Hampshire worthy” (Blunden 42). The “melodious existence [that] should have lasted longer” is now not only the peacefulness before the attack, but also the lives of the soldiers lost. It is now compared to an “Aceldama” (Blunden 42) which means ‘field of blood’ in Greek (Blunden, Glossary xxi). However, there was still a sense of hope in the battalion, and moral did not suffer. Another raiding party did book some success further along the line. Yet, despite the success, Blunden’s view on Nature and the landscape never recovered fully. His descriptions grow ever grimmer when the book progresses.
The second attack, near Hamel, is already described in grimmer terms compared to the previous. Blunden notes the difference explicitly: “This country was truly in military hands,” whereas up until now, Blunden rejoiced in the liveliness of Nature rather than paying too much attention to the military proceedings. However, the pastoral is still sought out, even in the Mesnil end of Jacob’s Ladder, place that Blunden describes as the most “vile, unnerving and desperate place in the battle zone.” His pastoral here imagery is superb to make his point:
Jacob’s Ladder was a long trench, good in parts, stretching from Mesnil with many angles down to Hamel on the river Ancre, requiring flights of stairs at one or two steep places. Leafy bushes and great green and yellow weeds looked into it as it dipped sharply into the green valley by Hamel, and hereabouts the aspect of peace and innocence was as yet prevailing. A cow with a crumpled horn, a harvest cart should have been visible here and there. The trenches ahead were curious, and not so pastoral. Ruined houses with rafters sticking out, with half-sloughed plaster and dangling window-frames, perched on a hillside, bleak and piteous that cloudy mourning; half-filled trenches crept along below them by upheaved gardens, telling the story of wild bombardment. Further on was a small chalk cliff, facing the river, with a rambling but remarkable dugout in it called Kentish Caves. The front line was sculptured over this brow, and descended to the wooded marshes of the Ancre in winding and gluey irregularity. (Blunden 64, my italics, ML.)
I agree with Fussell who notices that this trench “seems to extend from the pastoral past to the industrial present” (Fussell 262). Even though the “aspect of peace and innocence was as yet prevailing,” due to the green and yellow coloured plants, the livestock roaming free and the harvest cart, which suggest a pastoral scene, the destruction that the shelling or “wild bombardment” has brought forth makes for a “not so pastoral” scene. All the beauty of nature seems to have been eradicated by the war, juxtaposing the pastoral side on the one hand to the anti-pastoral setting on the other. Moreover, I believe this is also a perfectly fitting description of the state of the battalion. At first, they are all huddled up in a serene state, awaiting combat. The work continuous as normal, e.g. digging the defensive trenches – which is easily compared with the ploughing of the fields that the farmers did – and Nature is still vibrant and
26 alive. While digging, the engineers are plagued by lively wasps and men passed “an agreeable evening” (Blunden 67) in an orchard, watching the sky. But then, the attack order is issued, and a “general miasma” of chaos erupts among the soldiers. They run here and there, and no one seems to know what is going on. The result is terrible: hundreds are dead, and no land is won from the Germans. Strikingly, the “winding and gluey irregularity” of the trench called Jacob’s Ladder is the same irregularity in the state of the battalion. “All was in ominous discommunication;” during the attack, just as irregular and chaotic as the trench. The pastoral illusion of the officers and staff as shepherds taking care of the men, the flock under their care, is devastated by the German shells. In the third and fourth attacks the same pattern reoccurs: At first, the scene is relatively peaceful, but this is only an illusion. Blunden ponders over this on a pastoral stroll:
Fine days succeeded, and moonlit nights, temperate nights with their irresistible poetry creating a silver like in the borders of Thiepval’s lunatical wood, a yellow harvest on the downs towards Mesnil the mortuary. It was possible for me with my odd jobs ‘to go for walks’ in these hours of illusion, and seldom were they spoiled by direct opposition. (Blunden 86)
During active battles, these illusions are indeed “spoiled.” As Nature and the landscape are incessantly blown to pieces, after having been portrayed at length as peaceful and pastoral, the same thing happens to the state of the battalion. First, all seems organized, but during and after an attack, the battalion never seems to recover fully. Not only are there fewer men, also the moral is lowered. It is not only the men’s equipment that is pierced by bullet-holes; it is also the general state and fighting power of the entire battalion that is pierced. This is explicable as a shift from pastoralism to anti-pastoralism, due to the devastating effect of the war not only on the landscape, but on the men in the trenches as well. The first kind of pastoralism I have discussed never comes into play anymore, whereas the second kind, and especially the anti-pastoral mode of writing are all over the place. Exemplary for this shift from pastoral to anti-pastoral are Blunden’s descriptions of the sky. Fussell explains that there is a long tradition of describing the sky and amplifying it with meaning, starting with Ruskin’s Modern Painters. The effects of the sky, Ruskin says, are “intended” by their “Maker and Doer” for our pleasure as well as our moral instruction. […] The sky speaks universally to the human heart, “soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust” (Fussell 52). By the time Undertones of War appeared, the sky had already been an established bearer of symbolism. After the well-known “particularly ghastly” (Fussell 55) battle of Ypres, in which Blunden’s regiment took part, Blunden describes the sky as following: “The eastern sky that evening was all too brilliant with British rockets, appealing for artillery assistance. Westward, over blue hills, the sunset was all seraphim and cherubim” (Blunden 120). This
27 religious notion of angels is to be understood as highly ironic, given that the sky is full of rockets, intended to destroy the enemy trenches and kill the German soldiers. Here, even the sky is presented as beautiful, though dangerous, because the rockets make for a spectacular sight. Blunden realized that, after having described nature as beautiful, that, as the war progresses, this just doesn’t make sense anymore. He might have idealized nature to make sense of what is going on around him and to keep him sane, but this has become highly ironic, because nature gets ever more destroyed. In addition, the weaker the battalion gets, the more destructive nature is represented. Thus, a shift to an anti-pastoral seems to have been an inevitable choice for Blunden, when he engages himself with pastoral imagery. In this respect, I disagree with Fussell, who claims that the general threefold structure or “paradigm” of the war memoir applies here, too. He maintains that “[t]he “paradigm” of war memoir can be seen to comprise three elements: first, the sinister or absurd or even farcical preparation […]; second, the unmanning experience of battle; and third, the retirement from the line to a contrasting (usually pastoral) scene, where there is time for quiet consideration, meditation, and reconstruction” (Fussell 141). I do agree that this could be present in the war memoir, but I maintain my thesis that Blunden did much more than that. He constructed the memoir so, as to consist of a great many lesser parts, which can be designated as satires of circumstance (see above), which are all structured according to the principle of shifting from pastoralism to an anti-pastoralist setting. On top of that, this imagery is used to show the gradual decay of Blunden’s battalion. Fussell furthermore states that the “tripartite experience resembles the psychological scheme of the lost and regained paradise posited by traditional literary Christianity,” or even that it resembles the most universal kind of allegory, namely that “[m]ovement up the line, battle, and recovery become emblems of quest, death and rebirth” (Fussell 141). This does seem to tie in with the remythologizing aspect that is under discussion in the chapter on modernism of this dissertation, but I believe that Blunden uses a different kind of myth than Fussell proposes here, namely the myths actually concerning the war, e.g. the myth of the German officer-spy. As the setting in the trenches formed a new kind of setting for the soldiery, separate from the world-at-home, it seems logical that these ‘new’ war-related myths populate the newly mythologized world as presented in the memoir.
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2.7. Pastoralism as a structuring device in the memoir as well as in poetry In the previous paragraphs I have established that Blunden uses pastoralism, a shift from pastoral to anti-pastoral imagery to be more precise, to foreground the decay of his battalion. He does this by portraying Nature and the surroundings of the battalion in a manner corresponding with the state of the battalion, which is for example the case in Jacob’s Ladder, but also in other instances. In addition to this, I believe that Blunden has a variety of roles for the pastoralism he persistently engages with. First, it imposes a structure on the otherwise essentially unstructured nature of the war. The absence of a consequent narrative structure requires this alternative structuring device. By employing the structure that pastoral elements provide, the fragmented nature of the plot is countered, in a way that will be discussed below. To be brief: The memoir is constructed as a whole set of short or longer fragments, which are each built up by beginning with a description in compliance with pastoral scenes or imagery – setting the scene, so to speak – only to then fully engage with the horrors of the war, by showing how the previously established pastoral setting literally gets blasted to bits. This allows for a strong contrast, and makes Blunden’s vivid description of active fighting even more terrifying. Yet, as shown above, this is done so cunningly, that this structure not only portrays how Nature is destroyed, but also how the state and fighting power of the Royal Sussex Regiment gradually decays. Moreover, the use of pastoralism also imposes a structure on the fragmented mind-set of the writer, which allows modernist aspects in the memoir. This is in correspondence with the healing effect that the writing of a memoir of the war has. However, this kind of structure necessarily engenders irony. The irony that permeates the entire memoir is discussed in the chapter on modernism. The structuring device that Blunden unfolds in Undertones of War is the same as the one he uses in much of his poetry. Rather than discussing the poems separately in a different chapter, I will engage with a few exemplary poems, all of which can be found in Blunden’s Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations that is accompanying the memoir. The poems that are considered here will be included in full and in that version in Addendum I of this dissertation.
Just as Undertones of War was not written as a charge against the war in the way that for example Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, or Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms were, so were Blunden’s poems not either. As Desmond Graham points out, his critique is more subtle. He says that both Blunden’s war memoir and its accompanying poems “are not written in the voice of protest” although the “ironies there
29 sharpen towards a sarcasm which does protest.” This is indeed true for both kinds of Blunden’s work, on account of how they are both structured. He goes on saying “that the note of dismay to which Blunden is drawn at the close of a poem takes on a pitch which invites the reader not only to question but to demand an answer in justification for such suffering, and know that none can be found” (Graham 84). Indeed, the reader will not find an answer or validation of the war experience, in either his prose or lyrical work. What he does seem to provide, is a way of how to cope with the war, by imposing a structure on the otherwise incomprehensible by means of his pastoralism. As shown above, Blunden’s pastoralism necessarily had to shift from the first and second kind of pastoralism towards more anti- pastoral imagery, due to the devastating effect the war has. The pastoral is indeed a very old form of writing and has gone out of fashion, but I agree with Thorpe who also believes that Blunden “kept nature poetry alive when its traditional ‘pananthropic’ function had come to seem utterly irrelevant” (Thorpe 11). This function needs to be explained as the calming effect that this frame of reference provides, but it is indeed not a lasting solution for seekers of justification of the war, as “Nature can calm, not cure” (Thorpe 22). It should be noted here, however, that the writing of a war memoir actually can cure the writer, on account of the healing effect it has, as I have pointed out above. Because the heroic and patriotic myth- patterns obviously had become obsolete as the war grew ever more violent, the gap that this effected “left all the best poets of that time disoriented and in search of a more valid frame of reference” (Bergonzi 59). This desperately sought after framework so as to be able to allow some structure in the memoir is given by Blunden by means of his pastoralism and its subsequent shift to anti-pastoralism. The structure that Blunden unfolds throughout his memoir is the same as he uses in some of his poems.
I will first discuss the poem ‘Illusions’ in terms of its content and structure. It consists of fourteen lines, and there is no rhyme scheme. The poem kicks off with a sestet, followed by two quatrains that make up an octave, both in form and content. Thus, the traditional Petrarchan sonnet form is reversed. I believe that the reason that Blunden used this familiar- looking yet reversed form is to subtly foreground the topsy-turvy nature of the war. This ties in well with the content, because at first, the trench’s “earthy lanes” (l.3) are described with terms that are also familiar for non-combatants in the sestet, only to be then disturbed in the following quatrains by first the illusion of danger, i.e. “Death’s malkins dangling in the wire,” (l. 13) and then finally by “the dissipation of the illusion of menace into an illusion of quiet ironic horror” (Fussell: Modernism, Adversary Culture and Edmund Blunden 597),
30 effectively destroying the illusion of peacefulness that gives the poem its title. Fussell also acknowledges that “Blunden’s way [in this poem] is quietly to astonish the reader by reversing the normal procedure” (Fussell: Modernism, Adversary Culture and Edmund Blunden 597), both in form and content. So in effect, the poem follows three stages: First, the illusion of the pastoral scene, followed by the illusion of danger in the form of an imaginary enemy stuck in the barbed wire, followed again by realisation that this has all been an illusion, which Fussell calls the “illusion of quiet ironic horror.” The beauty and peacefulness in the first stage is constructed by means of pastoral imagery. The trenches, which are basically dug- out pits where soldiers cowered for shells, are described as “earthy lanes” (l. 3) with “dewy grasses” (l. 2) dancing in “lulling moonlight” (l. 1). Also, the idea of the pastoral rather than simple nature imagery is reinforced by man’s presence in harmony with Nature: in the man- made “sighing orchard” (l. 6) one can hear the flute of a “brave bird” (l. 5) over a “weedy well” (l. 6). Man’s presence seems perfectly harmonious and in tune with Nature. The fluting of a bird also reminds of a shepherd’s flute, which would be present in a traditional pastoral scene. The second stage, where the illusion of menace disturbs this peaceful setting, is in turn infused with anti-pastoralist imagery, in that he “enemy’s best” (l. 11) is at once “animal and angel” (l. 12). Blunden compares the enemy with a predatory animal, which has the effect that Nature should be seen as possibly dangerous. Yet, the reader is made aware of the fact that both the pastoral portrayal and the thought that menace is lurking are in fact but illusions in a way typical of Blunden, with the exclamation “But O no, no” (l. 14), followed by the reality. Yet, this ‘reality’ is immediately problematized again, because “Death’s malkins dangling in the wire” (l. 13) are just as much “[f]or the moon’s interpretation” (l. 14) as the “trenches in the moonlight” (l. 1). Fussell concludes his consideration of this poem by saying that this is a characteristic Blunden poem, because “we think we know where we are, and we become comfortable with the tone and the movement, and then we learn that we’ve not known all the time what we might have known” (Fussell: Modernism, Adversary Culture and Edmund Blunden 597-598) .The structure of this poem can be summarized as starting from a retreat in pastoralism, the reader is then guided from this pastoralism through a shift towards anti- pastoral elements, to be made aware of reality. In this poem, the reality is problematized, but only in order to demand of the reader to actively engage with and think about what this reality really is. The structure of ‘Illusions’ is very similar to the structure of another war poem by Blunden, namely ‘Concert Party: Busseboom.’ First, the scene is set literally for some sort of concert. The “dance” (l. 5) and dazzling “rhythm” (l. 7) that both the “generals and lame privates” indulge themselves in harmonically reflects the dancing and amity that shepherds in
31 the pastoral tradition engage with. At first, everything indeed seems harmonious. But then, just as in ‘Illusions,’ war creeps in unexpectedly. The soldiers, previously enjoying the show, now faced a different kind of show: “We heard another matinee,/ We heard the maniac blast/ Of barrage south by Saint Eloi” (ll. 14-16). The “maniac blast” of this ‘show’ is a mirroring of the “laughter” that “thundered” in the first stanza for the show that the famous troop performed. This increases the ironic effect that is prompted by the final stanza:
To this new concert, white we stood; Cold certainty held our breath; While men in tunnels below Larch Wood Were kicking men to death.
The irony in the fact that the men who were previously enjoying a show, now stand breathlessly watching a stage of war, is indeed almost too much to handle. So, the structure of the poem is summarized by Fussell: “[T]he first half of the poem conducts us into the delight of a soldier show behind the lines, full of laughter and singing, but the second half, depicting the audience leaving, dispels the illusion that in such a world escape from horror is possible […].” So again, the reader is first assured of a peaceful setting, often pastoral, only to then be surprised by the creeping up of war’s devastation. This generates a highly ironic effect, as the scene is first construed only to be able to destroy it later to a fuller effect. The fact that Blunden engages so profusely with pastoral imagery is not an ‘escape’ into nature at all, it is in fact its direct opposite: I believe that he uses pastoralist imagery in a deliberate and subtle way to foreground the horror that the war afflicts. He carefully constructs a pastoral setting, to let it all go to waste again by the war. This structuring device is not only used in a variety of Blunden’s poems, but also in Undertones of War. I believe that this memoir of the war is constructed out of a great many short and longer excerpts, which all follow up on one another chronologically, but with gaps in time that are not present in the memoir. For example, leisure time or time off when Blunden is back in England is not mentioned. The reader only gets to hear about time at the front, as explained elsewhere in this dissertation. The excerpts that make up the memoir are all to be considered as greater or lesser satires of circumstance, which are all structured according to the principle of shifting from pastoralism to an anti- pastoralist setting, in exactly the same way that e.g. the poem ‘Concert Party: Busseboom’ is structured. First, a general description of the setting is provided, which is imbued with pastoral imagery and its symbolism, as will be discussed in the next subchapter. Following that, the destructive nature of the war is foregrounded by means of anti-pastoral imagery,
32 destroying the previously (relatively) peaceful setting. This kind of structuring inevitably engenders irony, which is the reason why I call all excerpts structured like that satires of circumstance. It is in this irony permeating almost every aspect of the book that Blunden’s subtle critique on the war should be situated, albeit not as explicitly as for example Owen or Sassoon uttered their critique in either their prosaic or lyrical work.
Blunden’s most direct charge against the war is to be situated in his long poem ‘Third Ypres.’ This poem is generally seen as Blunden’s finest war poem, although not everyone agrees with that premise. Silkin, Bergonzi and Fussell agree that it is his finest and most central war poem, but Cecil Day Lewis disagrees and proposes ‘1916 Seen from 1921’ as his finest. Bergonzi says that Blunden uses the same “slightly archaic diction and phrasing that he habitually employs” (Bergonzi 63) and that is one point of critique against his war memoir, but he “nevertheless achieves an impressive strength and starkness” in this poem he calls “without a doubt, his finest war poem” (Bergonzi 63). Thorpe calls this poem “his most sustained poetic attempt to convey the feel of action” (Thorpe 22) and I cannot but agree with him. Indeed, the directness and closeness one feels when reading the poem, is never again achieved in another by Blunden’s hand. For example, when reading the climactic moment in the poem where four soldiers are cowering in a pillbox, trying to find protection from shelling, it is almost as if you are right there in the middle of the action, too. I speak of the following excerpt:
The demon grins to see the game, a moment Passes, and — (still the drum-tap dongs my brain To a whirring void) — through the great breach above me The light comes in with icy shock and the rain Horridly drips. Doctor, talk! talk! if dead Or stunned I know not; the stinking powdered concrete, The lyddite turns me sick — my hair's all full Of this smashed concrete. Oh, I'll drag you, friends, Out of the sepulchre into the light of day, For this is day, the pure and sacred day. And while I squeak and gibber over you, Look, from the wreck a score of field-mice nimble, And tame and curious look about them; (these Calmed me, on these depended my salvation.)
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Silkin argues that “[t]he enjambments and the break-up of the syntax expresses a corresponding disintegration of the mind’s control” (Silkin 114). This “emotionally climactic moment” (Thorpe 22) that is caused by seeing the mangled bodies of his fellow soldiers indeed shows how the poet is losing control over his mind. However, it is Nature that saves him. The most innocent of creatures, “a score of field-mice nimble and tame” (l. 103) have the ability to calm the poet and allow for him to see that salvation is still possible, thus adhering to Nature’s calming effect in that “recalling nature and all that is benign, restores a mind fast losing sanative control over itself” (Silkin 115). The poem immediately opens with a stark contrast and almost irreconcilable contrast between war and nature:
Triumph! How strange, how strong had triumph come On weary hate of foul and endless war When from its grey graveclothes awoke anew The summer day.
And throughout the poem, one cannot but notice the pastoral elements that continue upon this contrast. In fact, I believe that the contrast between the war and nature and the immediate effect this has on the mind is the most prominent theme in this poem. The most obvious contrast between war and a typical pastoral scene, namely that of a ploughman, is the following:
The hour is come; come, move to the relief! Dizzy we pass the mule-strewn track where once The ploughman whistled as he loosed his team; And where he turned home-hungry on the road, The leaning pollard marks us hungrier turning. We crawl to save the remnant who have torn Back from the tentacled wire, those whom no shell Has charred into black carcasses — Relief! They grate their teeth until we take their room, And through the churn of moonless night and mud And flaming burst and sour gas we are huddled Into the ditches where they bawl sense awake, And in a frenzy that none could reason calm, (Whimpering some, and calling on the dead) They turn away: as in a dream they find Strength in their feet to bear back that strange whim Their body.
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It is in these lines that the traditional, pastoral use of the land in the form of the ploughman is contrasted to the ploughing up and detriment of the land “to no useful end” by its present occupants (compare Bergonzi 63). In addition to this strong pastoral image, Blunden employs others as well. In line five and six, the “light” is being personified in that it is “pleering” and looking down on the soldiers while “[h]alf-smiling.” Faith is being linked to the light, in that it “smiled” (l. 18) too. In this respect, the lines “Oh, I'll drag you, friends,/ Out of the sepulchre into the light of day” (ll. 99-100) show that for the speaker faith is still possible, even though he has just witnessed the death of four of his comrades. This faith, or salvation, is enabled by Nature, in the form of the mice, because “on these depended [his] salvation” (l. 105).
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Chapter Three: Modernism and Irony
In this chapter I will discuss whether Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War can be seen as a modernist work or not. Critical opinions are divided on this point, but I definitely agree with Paul Edwards that “despite staking a claim on Romantic ground Blunden is really occupying modernist territory.” When Edwards refers to the “Romantic ground” Blunden is occupying, he raises the point of Blunden’s “literary revivalism,” which he sees as a “recollection of an ‘unfallen’ state” (Edwards 18). This unfallen state may easily be recognised as the Arcadian, and at times as the idyllic pastoralism Blunden engages with. Also, Edwards remarks that Blunden is very modern in the use of his voice. He comes to the conclusion that Blunden does indeed seem to occupy modernist ground on account of how he carefully constructs and unfolds his voice, his mode of speaking, throughout his war memoir and the way in which he revisits the pastoral theme. Furthermore, I believe that Undertones of War has other modernist traits as well, such as Blunden’s abundant meta-literary comments throughout the work. These comments draw attention to the literary and artificially constructed character of the memoir. Additionally, I believe it can be recognised how Blunden’s work represents a fragmented state of mind, something that is typically modernist. Lastly, I will apply Northrop Frye’s Theory of Modes to Undertones of War. Paul Fussell was the first to see the correlation between Frye’s theory and Blunden’s memoir, but I will expand upon his preliminary findings. I will especially engage with the irony that permeates the book. When this is carefully considered, one cannot but argue that Blunden’s book is modernist, on account of the persistent irony in it. This be discussed in this chapter. In Frye’s Theory of Modes, which he puts forth in Anatomy of Criticism, there are five modes that historically alternate each other in the form of a circle. Blunden’s memoir is to be situated in the last of these five modes, in the so-called ironic mode. Works that are situated there revert back to myth, usually in an ironic way – hence the name of the mode. It is my belief that Blunden’s work is modernist, due to this special and persistent use of irony that is created by the reprise of myth, or in this case, pastoralism. All these modernist traits will come under discussion and will be explained in this chapter, as well as the question whether these modernist traits actually do make the work modernist. As I have mentioned before, not all critics believe Blunden to be writing in the modernist mode. One of these is Paul Fussell, who makes a founded distinction between ‘modernist’ and ‘modern,’ in
36 his essay Modernism, Adversary Culture, and Edmund Blunden. According to Fussell, Blunden is ‘modern,’ but not ‘modernist’ (583-601). I do not agree completely, but he raises a point well worth of closer attention. This will be considered in the last subchapter of this chapter.
3.1. Voice and Persona
I will begin the discussion of Blunden’s modernism in his memoir by elaborating on the concepts of voice and persona. He draws attention to the problem of voice twice in Undertones of War: he does so first in his ‘Preliminary’, and a second time in a chapter called ‘Domesticities.’ Both excerpts dealing with the problem of voice in terms of modernism will be included here. In his ‘Preliminary’ Blunden mentions that he “tried once before” (Blunden xli) to write down his war experiences. This is a reference to his failed attempt to write about his exploits in the year 1916 in a book called De Bello Germanico. The title is an emulation of Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, a book he had taken with him when he was fighting at the front (Blunden viii). He wrote this in 1918, but it was not published until 1930, when his brother got this prose account of his experiences eventually published. Blunden was unsatisfied with this early attempt, and explains that “the events were not yet ended” (Blunden xlii) for him and that he needed more temporal distance to be able to render his account the way he wanted to. He apparently also needed geographical distance, because he only managed to write everything down when he was in Tokyo, Japan. Blunden explains his method, saying that he “must go over the ground again” (Blunden xlii) to recount everything the way that he wanted to. Evelyn Cobley has found that there are two reasons for writing a memoir, a thesis she puts forward in Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives. On the one hand, writers want to “tell the truth;” on the other hand they want to “commemorate the dead.” She goes on to say that one can only achieve this through “documentary realism” or “experimental modernism” (Cobley 5). I believe Blunden engaged in a mixture of both, with an added layer of pastoralism, as explained elsewhere. What Cobley left out of her consideration is the “therapeutic activity” (Bergonzi 143) and healing quality of writing one’s experiences down. However, she does consider the concept of survivor’s guilt thoroughly. She writes the following:
In the war memoir, the writer expresses pity as well as resentment towards the dead he commemorates and towards himself as a survivor. The memoir thus functions as an apology and excuse. The narrator feels ashamed that he has survived when so many perished. This sense of guilt is frequently dramatized in scenes in which survivors of battles express relief that death
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has picked on someone else at the same time as they feel ashamed of harbouring such ignoble thoughts. (Blunden 109)
I do not believe that this is the main goal of Blunden’s war memoir, yet some kind of survivor’s guilt is definitely present. Many of Blunden’s fellow combatants from the Royal Sussex Regiment are being remembered with reverence throughout the book. In these instances it becomes clear that Blunden felt great companionship for them, and he expresses sorrow in his recognizably highly literary style. For example, in the following excerpt Blunden remembers – or commemorates, as Cobley would call it – Corporal Frank Worley. By telling an anecdote about this corporal and the exclamation “Where now, Frank Worley?”, Blunden in effect does the two things Cobley pointed out as the goal of a memoir: He tells the truth of the war as it was – he provides a realistic account of a particular moment in the war - while he at the same time commemorates the deceased by praising them. Moreover, he expresses fondness over the fact that shells are dropping, but that they fail to hit him or his friend. In this instance, Blunden continues his “meditative way” untroubled. This is reinforced by the gentle scene that follows. In the midst of shells dropping – in effect killing of fellow soldiers – he drinks a “friendly mug” together with Corporal Worley and he compares Worley’s “courtesy and warm feeling” and the gentle character of the scene with a nature scene, namely of a butterfly settling on a flower. However, Frank Worley is dead or missing nonetheless, while Blunden is still alive. He laments this, and in his exclamation “I should like an answer” the reader can recognize Blunden’s desire to not only know where Worley is, but also a desire to get an answer to the question of why Worley is not there anymore. Blunden immortalizes him, by lyrically saying about him that “A kinder heart there never was; a gentler spirit never.” This reminds us of the elegiac function a war memoir fulfils for its writer. Worley will live on in Blunden’s memory, while consoling the writer and easing his conscience that he lives while others have fallen. This is the excerpt in its entirety:
It was my turn for trench watch, one grey morning; I walked to our left-hand post, and talked to our sentry there, when whizz-crunch, whizz-crunch, two small trench mortar shells of the kind called ‘pine-apples’ fell on the covering above us, broke it half down and strewed the place with fragments. The immediateness of these arrivals annulled fear. Taking my meditative way along to the other extremity of our trench, I was genially desired by Corporal Worley to take cocoa with him; he was just bringing it to the boil over some shreds of sandbag and tallow candle. Scarcely had I grasped the friendly mug when a rifle-grenade burst with red-hot fizzing on the parapet behind me and another on the parados behind him; and we were unhit. Worley’s courtesy and warm feeling went on, undiverted as though a butterfly or two had settled on a flower. A kinder heart there never was; a gentler spirit never. With his blue eyes a little doubtfully fixed on me, his red cheeks a little redder than usual, he would speak in terms of regret for what he thought his roughness, saying dolefully that he had been in the butchering trade all this time. Where now, Frank Worley? I should like an answer. He was for ever comforting those youngsters who were so numerous among us; even as the shrapnel burst low
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over the fire-bay he would be saying without altered tone, ‘don’t fret, lay still,’ and such things. (Blunden 45)
Another instance where survivor’s guilt becomes apparent is in an excerpt on pages 164-165. Here, the deaths of Lieutenant Naylor and Sergeant Clifford are remembered. Blunden admits that he felt those losses, but “with a sensibility blurred by the general grossness of the war.” He expounds on the “general grossness,” defining it as “[t]he uselessness of the offensive, the contrast in the quality of ourselves with the quality of the year before, the conviction that the civilian population realized nothing of our state, the rarity of thought, the growing intensity and,” finally, the “sweep of destructive forces.” He goes on by saying that all these moods brought about a mood of “selfishness.” This mood of selfishness can be explained in two ways. First, as Blunden himself proposes, this mood could be fed by a sense of acquiescence to the belief that they “should all die, presumably, round Ypres” at any rate, and that it therefore does not matter if one would perish before that. Secondly, this selfishness could also be fed by what Cobley called “ignoble thoughts”, that is, a feeling of happiness that when a shell falls, it is someone else who dies, rather than one self. Later, these selfish feelings may well prove to be problematic, even when they are commonly accepted during wartime. Therefore, it is a good and even necessary therapeutic activity to write down one’s experiences of the war, as Blunden did. The excerpt I used is quoted here in full:
1t was that evening that a shell fell among the headquarters staff on the way up, and killed Naylor, the philosophic and artistic lieutenant who had served in the battalion almost all my time, whose quiet presence was a safeguard against the insolence of fortune. I do not see many allusions to him in these memoirs, but he was one of those silent, modest, and ubiquitous men whose quality is consistent and therefore taken for granted. Another shell, bursting on a small party of non-commissioned officers as they were about to leave the trenches after relief, robbed us instantly of Sergeant Clifford, a man of similar sweetness of character and for months past invaluable in all necessities. Those losses I felt, but with a sensibility blurred by the (pg 165) general grossness of the war. The uselessness of the offensive, the contrast in the quality of ourselves with the quality of the year before, the conviction that the civilian population realized nothing of our state, the rarity of thought, the growing intensity and sweep of destructive forces – these moods brought on a mood of selfishness. We should all die, presumably, round Ypres. (Blunden 164-165)
Bergonzi was the first to explore the idea of writing a war memoir as part of a therapeutic healing process. He says that “Blunden […] was writing in an attempt to make sense of his own experiences, to trace a pattern in the scarifying events that had impinged on his formative years” (Bergonzi 142-143). I concur with this idea, because, ten years post facto, Blunden wrote an amazingly literary account of the war. Indeed, one of the reasons that he wrote was to “make sense” of the war, which is why I believe to be the reason why he added the pastoral element, in order to impose structure on an unstructured war, or, as Bergonzi notes, to “trace a pattern” in what has happened. Therefore, he “must go over the ground again,” to retrace his
39 steps, and find that “pattern.” He can only do so when he places himself in the mind-set that he then must have had, which ties in with Edwards consideration that in Undertones of War he who goes “over the ground again,” is – and in fact must be – a “personation of his earlier self,” which the author sees as a “”harmless young shepherd in a soldier’s coat,” still unpoisoned by the war’s worst horrors as the memoir closes” (Edwards 18). Blunden’s use of voice, or his persona, through which he renders his account of the war, becomes clearer when we consider his poems as well. “In poetry,” he says, he has “been attempting ‘the image and horror of it,’ with some other personations” (Blunden xlii, my italics, ML). The poems, thus, have another “personation”, or voice, through which an account of the war is given, than the – also necessarily artificial, artistically constructed – voice in the memoir. This way, it becomes clear that Blunden’s voice in the memoir is not his own, but of a persona that he has chosen to render his wartime experiences in words. This attention to voice and persona is a typical trait of modernist writing. Moreover, Blunden comments on whom he is writing for. He begins his ‘Preliminary’ by asking (himself?) “Why should I not write it?” and he goes on:
“I know that the experience to be sketched in it is very local, limited, incoherent; that it is almost useless, in the sense that no one will read it who is not already aware of all the intimations and discoveries in it, and many more, by reason of having gone the same journey. No one? Some, I am sure; but not many. Neither will they understand – that will not be all my fault” (Blunden xli, my italics, ML)
Here it becomes clear that Blunden writes for a specific audience: people who have “gone the same journey.” Only they can fully comprehend what Blunden means in his writing. The smells, the sounds, the feeling of the war: only someone who has experienced the same can grasp the full meaning of Blunden’s words. Hew Strachan articulates the problem faced not only by Blunden, but by many writers of the Great War, in an introduction to Undertones of War: “The challenge was how to convey war’s varied and rapidly changing characteristics to those who had never experienced it” (Blunden vi). So Blunden himself anticipated the problems of what he was writing, namely that for one who had not been actively engaging in the war, it would be hard to understand the full meaning and implication of his work. His audience, he thought, would consist mainly of veteran soldiers of the Great War. Furthermore, he anticipated the problem of conveying the truth of the war. Undertones of War is not fully autobiographical, but it is a deeply personal account: it is Blunden’s very own version of the war. Bergonzi calls it “much less than a full autobiography: it is a severely selective account of Blunden’s experiences as a very young subaltern, on the Somme and at the Third Battle of Ypres” (Bergonzi 143) .In addition to this personal element, he has imbued his work with a framework of pastoralism and his words ring with a great lyrical quality. Therefore, this work
40 cannot be objective. That is one of the reasons why Blunden had such a hard time deciding what he would tell, and what he would not. Moreover, he touches on the problem of understanding what he has written in his memoir, too. He calls attention to the fact that only they who “have gone the same journey” will be fully able to understand what he has written, and others – non-combatants, or a later readership – will not fully understand. However, Desmond Graham believes that, through art, the “gap may be narrowed” (Graham 13) between the author’s experience and ours. He says that thanks to art, or “through a man’s attempt to employ all the resources of his art to convey his experience,” we are able to understand nonetheless.
In the eighteenth chapter of his memoir, called ‘Domesticities,’ Blunden returns to the literary problems outlined in the ‘Preliminary’. In the next rather long excerpt, he explicitly reflects on his mode of writing:
Do I loiter too long among little things? It may be so, but those whom I foresee as my readers will pardon the propensity. Each circumstance of the British experience that is still with me has ceased to me to be big or little, and now appeals to me more even than the heaven of adoration incarnadined with Desdemona’s handkerchief. Was it nearer the soul of war to adjust armies in coloured inks on vast maps at Montreuil or Whitehall, to hear of or to project colossal shocks in a sort of mathematical symbol, than to rub knees with some poor jaw-dropping sentry, under the dripping rubber sheet, balanced on the greasy fire-step, a fragment of some rural newspaper or Mr Bottomley’s oracle beside him? That thrusting past men achingly asleep in narrow chilly firetrenches, their mechanical shifting of their sodden legs to let you go on your way, pierced deep enough. That watching the sparks of trench mortar bombs converge on some shell-hole a few hundred yards towards the still dawnless east, with their fiendish play on Aristophanes’ comic syllables ‘tophlattothratt, tophlattothratt,’ the lunge and whirr of such malignity against a few simple lives, pierces deep enough. (Blunden 14-141)
He raises the issue whether he “loiters too long among little things” and should be more concerned with the bigger picture of the war, which is exemplified by “adjust[ing] armies in coloured inks on vast maps at Montreuil or Whitehall”, but actually responds to this question himself, by saying that “[e]ach circumstance of the British experience that is still with [him] has ceased […] to be big or little”, thus assigning as much value to the “little things” as to the bigger picture of the war. The particulars of the war, some of which Blunden in this excerpt has summed up, all “pierce deep enough”, in order that one is not in need of the ‘whole story’ or the bigger picture. In fact, Blunden realizes that it is not possible to speak about ‘the’ war, only about his war; and that consists of an account of the “little things”. He foresees that his readership, the people “having gone the same journey”, will understand this: they, too have their own version of the war in mind, and thus agree that there is no gain in recalling the grand narrative of the war. In fact, Blunden returns to the point of the grand narrative when he recalls the particular story of a sentry who died in a shell explosion. His method here is put to
41 words accurately by Edwards: “By enacting in miniature its own slighting, Blunden’s argument quietly draws attention to the fact that there is actually no larger argument (or “grand narrative,” in today’s terminology) in which the boy’s death makes sense” (Edwards 20). The scene is as follows:
Toward Hooge one brazen morning, running in a shower of shells along ‘The Great Wall of China’ (one dud shell struck within a rifle's length of us, and exploded something else), Kenward the corporal and I saw a sentry crouching and peering one way and another like a birdboy in an October storm. He spoke, grinned, and shivered; we passed, and duly the sentry was hit by a shell. So that in this vicinity a peculiar difficulty would exist for the artist to select the sights, words, incidents, which seem essential. The art is rather to collect them, in the original form of incoherence. (Blunden 141)
The death of the birdboy-sentry is one of the many instances of the pointlessness of the war, or, as Edwards puts it, the lack of a grand narrative. Yet, it is Blunden’s point that it is precisely in these occurrences that the “soul of the war” lies. For Blunden, the war is a concatenation of events, without any real causality, reason, or indeed bigger picture. I believe, in order to make sense of the war, Blunden does impose a framework, namely the framework provided by pastoral writing, but that will be discussed in another chapter. This consideration of voice and persona may help understand what Edwards means by saying that Blunden occupies “modernist territory.” In Undertones of War, “an unknowable person” (Blunden’s “personation” of himself; the unknowable voice through which he speaks) conveys “an unseizable truth” (the varied and forever changing nature of the war, which is perceived differently by everyone) to “a[n] […] audience that must select itself” (Edwards 18). Indeed, this use of voice is what we today would call modernist.
3.2. The Use of Meta-Commentary
Another modernist trait of Undertones of War is Blunden’s use of meta-commentary. On different occasions Blunden draws attention to the fictionality of what he is writing. Therefore, even though one might read his work as a novel, Blunden reminds us incessantly and intentionally of the fact that this is a war memoir, written in retrospect of the events described. When Blunden narrates about his shipping out for France, he seems to deliberately not dwell on it. Here, as well as in the entire book, he keeps the attention focused on the war itself, rather than the surrounding circumstances. Indeed, never do we see Blunden when he is on leave in England, or do we learn anything of his life before or after the war. On page 4 he recalls his mother who “went to the station with [him]”, but immediately revokes this on the ground that “the war must be attended to” (Blunden 4). Further down on the same page we then hear clearly that Blunden is writing in hindsight: “Light does not gleam upon the
42 immediately following journey; surely I shall recall, from that crisis of my life above all, the evanescence of England beyond the grey waves, and the immininence of France” (Blunden 4). Blunden knows perfectly well whether or not he “shall recall” this, since the facts have long since passed. For what other reason does he then insert these meta-commentaries in his work, than to draw attention to the fictional character, drawn from his memory, diaries and letters to his mother of his memoir? This passage is particularly interesting in terms of modernism, because it has an intertextual reference in it as well. The reference to the “evanescence of England beyond the grey waves” clearly recalls Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (1851). The speaker in this poem, as well as Blunden when he is about to leave the London Victoria train station, is musing on England. In Undertones of War England is evanescent, and in ‘Dover Beach’ “the cliffs of England stand/glimmering and vast.” In this poem, as well as in Blunden’s memoir, the retreating character of the action stands central. The tide goes up and down, as well as the fighting in the war. Another point of similarity may be the loss of faith: the speaker in the poem struggles with his faith, and so does Blunden. Religion in Undertones of War, however, will not be examined in this dissertation.
The reason why Blunden evokes a reminiscence of this poem here is, I believe, to be found in the way he structures his entire war memoir. It is again Edwards who puts his finger on the point exactly, and phrases Blunden’s method this way:
“[In Undertones of War] Romance is forced to accommodate a grim realism, just as the idyllic pastoral arcadia of France and Flanders is knocked to pieces by high explosives. Time and again the memoir returns to the beauty of the French landscape, villages, farms, and churches, and as the war proceeds […] the violence and destruction become more terrible.” (Edwards 20)
Blunden evokes pastoral, idyllic images only to show how they are “knocked to pieces” by the violence of the war. He depicts pastoral particularities, to be able to express later on how they are destroyed, due to the war. Michael Thorpe argues that “[i]n none [of the war poets] is the theme of warring man’s devastation so pervasive as in Blunden’s war poems” (Thorpe 22), but I believe that this theme is equally apparent in his war memoir. In his war poetry, one of his structuring mechanisms is that the reader at first gets a feeling of security, usually through pastoral imagery, only to get surprised by the violence of warring man’s devastation in the next stanza. This is the case in a great many poems, but most prominently in ‘Concert Party: Busseboom’ (1928). The poems and their structure, as well as the similarities with Undertones of War will be discussed in full elsewhere. For now this short introduction suffices to arrive at the reason why Blunden would evoke such an idyllic view of England. It is again an example of showing the beautiful, idyllic, Arcadian (England) only to contrast it
43 with the destruction of the landscape later on. Indeed, the idyllic reminiscence of England provides a stark contrast to the absurdities and devastations of the French countryside.
In addition, this kind of meta-commentary may be seen as evidence of Blunden’s working method, as will be explained below. Consider the following excerpt:
[The] orchards yet clung to some pale apples, but the gunners were aware of that, the twelve- inch gunners, whose business here seemed like a dizzy dream. Under several splendid untrimmed trees, among full-flooding grass, shone certain rails, and on these rails were some tremendous iron engines, with gaping mouths; standing behind, if you could keep your eye unblurred at the titanic second of their speaking, you could see their mortal monosyllables of inferno climbing dead straight into the sky. But these metaphors occurred later. (Blunden 150- 151, my italics, ML)
Blunden’s elaborate description of artillery guns is given by means of a masterful metaphor. He explicitly comments on it, saying that “these metaphors occurred later.” This way, we are made once again aware that Blunden wrote this book ten years after the war, which puts him in the position to be able to add stylistic elements, such as this metaphor. Blunden’s mode of writing relies on recalling certain events, but then stylistically altering them, so as to make them fit in the bigger picture of the entire memoir. It is in instances like this, that we are made aware of his method.
3.3. “Theory of Modes” and Irony Engendered by Pastoralism
In Anatomy of Criticism, a work which draws exclusively on literature and attempts to convey a view on the scope, theory, techniques and principles of literary criticism, Northrop Frye has come up with a theory of modes, which divides tragic, comic and thematic literature into five modes. These modes are related to specific literary epochs: the mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic and ironic mode. In Frye’s view, “fictions” may be classified “not morally,” but “by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same” (Frye: “Anatomy of Criticism”). I paraphrase Frye’s classification into five thematic modes here, in order to explain why I believe Blunden’s war memoir can by classified under the fifth mode, the ironic one. Due to the irony Blunden employs in his work,. Blunden’s work is imbued with a modernist quality. Furthermore, Frye proposes that these five modes form a historical cycle, which repeats itself indefinitely. Thus, the fifth mode, the ironic one, reverts back to the traits of the first mode, the mythic one, in order to construe its irony. This is clearly the case in David Jones’ In Parenthesis, but I propose that this is also the case in Undertones of War. This will be considered below. For a fuller consideration of Frye’s theory of modes, I recommend reading page 33 until 42 in Anatomy of Criticism.
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The first mode Frye proposes is the mythic mode. Here, the power of action of the hero of the story is not only greater than that of its readership but also than that of the hero’s environment and other men in the story. He is usually a “divine being”, and the story “will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god.” Often the death of a god is at the centre of the plotline. When thinking of myths, not only the Greek or Roman myths are to be considered, but also the myths in the Celtic tradition.
The second mode is the romantic mode, which includes the romantic hero, “whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being,” thus delineating itself from the previously discussed mythic mode. Similar to both modes is that the hero’s power of action is greater than ours. In the world of the romance, the laws of nature seem suspended; what is unnatural to us is natural to the hero. “[P]ostulates of romance” have to be established first, in order for the story not to violate the “rules of probability.” This way, the magic or that, what seems unnatural to us, becomes part of the natural world order in the romantic mode. The Arthur-legend or the Beowulf sagas serve as classic examples of this mode.
The third mode is the high-mimetic mode. The hero’s power of action here is, again, superior to ours. His “authority, passions, and powers of expression” greatly exceed ours. The hero is a “leader”; he is superior to men in his (fictional) world, but not to his natural environment. This means that he is a leader of men, but he is still subject to the natural laws, which are suspended in the world of romance and are replaced by postulates. The same rules of the world apply to the hero as well as to us. Frye mentions this is the hero of most epic and tragedy.7 Othello, which deals with the death of a gallant human, who is indeed superior to men, but evidently not to his natural environment and its rules, is a representative work for the high-mimetic mode.
The fourth mode is the low-mimetic. In this thematic classification “the hero is one of us.” The hero is in no way superior: not to the other men inhabiting his world, nor to his natural environment. By classifying the hero as “one of us,” Frye means that we can relate to the hero in the sense of a shared, “common humanity,” because he is subjected to the “same canons of probability that we find in our own experience.” Frye also takes up succinctly a discussion of
7 For the classification of tragedy, epic and the others, Frye follows the Aristotelian genre-classification, and I will do the same.
45 the word “hero”, in that in the low-mimetic mode, the word does not have the same general connotation as that is applicable in the three previous modes. “Hero” could well be replaced by the word “protagonist.” This hero is the kind that prevails in comedy and realist literature. Frye himself mention’s Thomas Hardy’s Vanity Fair as an example for this mode.
The fifth and final mode in Frye’s thematic classification is the highly interesting ironic mode. As Fry puts it succinctly: “If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode.” This means that the hero is not equal to us, nor that he is superior to us, but that he is “inferior” to us. It is from this inferiority of the hero to the readers that irony in the work ensues, according to Frye.
At this point, it is important to note that according to Frye these five different modes follow up on each other historically. The mythic mode is the first, and also the oldest. It has to be situated in Antiquity, closely followed in time by the romantic mode, which can be situated near the Middle Ages. The high- and low-mimetic modes are in between the Middle Ages and the Victorian Age. Finally, the ironic mode is situated around the early twentieth century. However, it is of key importance to see these modes as in a historical “cycle.” Fussell summarizes this cycle perfectly: “In literature a complete historical “cycle” […] comprises something like [a] sequence of prevailing modes (a sequence betokening, in part, a progressive secularization)” and he goes on describing this sequence of modes: “[M]yth and romance in the early stages; high and low mimetic in the middle stages; ironic in the last. Thus the course of ancient literature from Hebrew scriptures to Roman comedy, or of (338) modern European literature from medieval through Renaissance (myth, romance, and high mimetic) to bourgeois (low-mimetic) to modern (ironic)” (Fussell 337-338). He briefly touches on the topic of gradual secularization in the course of the history of the modes, which is undoubtedly true, but to go deeper into this would bring no benefit here. What is interesting for this dissertation is the assertion that the five modes “go round in a circle” (Frye: “Anatomy of Criticism”). The ironic mode “moves steadily towards myth” again, and the same elements – Not only “sacrificial rituals and dying Gods,” as Frye points out, but also a similar structuring of the theme and plot of the book – begin to re-emerge.
It is my belief that Blunden’s war memoir Undertones of War can be classified under the fifth category, the ironic mode. In the following paragraphs I will illustrate how a sense of irony
46 permeates this book and it is due to this reason, that it becomes even clearer that this book is imbued with modernist traits. I believe that a lot of books concerning the Great War are to be classified in the ironic mode, because of the titanic problem of language writers of the Great War faced. “One of the cruxes of the war,” Fussell argues, “is the collision between events and the language available – or thought appropriate – to describe them” (Fussell 184). Hew Strachan recognizes the same problem in the introduction to my copy8 of Undertones of War as well, remembering that Blunden wrote in 1918 to his mother that “[w]ar’s classical name should have been Proteus,” who could, according to Greek legend, alter his form at will. Strachan goes on saying that “[t]he challenge was how to convey war’s varied and rapidly changing characteristics to those who had never experienced it” (Compare: Blunden vi). Indeed, how can one describe a war – the pinnacle of man’s violence; the greatest and most brutal war man had yet seen – with the same language that has been used to describe if not promote the idea of mechanical progress, which is exactly that, that made this kind of industrialized warfare possible? Many writers of war prose and poetry tackled this question. The answers they found were various, and not all of them can be discussed at length here. Two of them – Blunden’s method, and the typical modernist way of writing – will come under scrutiny here. Howarth claims that in poetry war can only be described by modernist techniques, but I believe that what he says is true – at least in part - for the war memoir or narrative as well. He proposes the following:
[W]hat we see in much First World War verse is the struggle of older forms [of writing] with a reality [i.e. the war] which cannot be ‘contained’ by them, and with which twentieth-century poetics spent much of its time trying to catch up. It follows that only modernist fragmentation can really convey the derangements of the war on the psyche, or the abandonment of any moral scheme of overall justification for war.” (Howarth 53)
It is indeed true that modernist fragmentation is superbly suited to convey the disorderliness of the war, or the confusion it undoubtedly had to bring about in the minds of the soldiers. However, soon after the war was over, modernist poetry found itself set back, in favour of formally more traditional modes of writing. The enormous successes of, amongst others, but most prominently Wilfred Owen’s traditionally versed war poetry, e.g. the vast success of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (1917), stands testimony to this. Nonetheless, because writers had to come up with new ways of representing the war in language, I believe that some modernist techniques were applied to portray the war, be it in verse or prose. This is definitely the case in Undertones of War, as I explained before. The most striking is the use of irony in the book. I share Fussell’s point of view that “the potential for ironic meaning” (Fussell 9) in the war
8 My version is the following: Blunden, Edmund: Undertones of War. London: Penguin Classics, 2010.
47 emerges due to the ex post facto view a writer like Blunden has. In retrospect, one can identify mistakes leading up to tragedy, which at the time were seen as good decisions. Fussell provides the example of the “Great Fuck-up”, as it was later to be called by the soldiers, but best known as the Somme Offensive. The commander-in-chief, General Haig, ordered a bombardment of the enemy trenches lasting for over a week, firing approximately a million and a half shells from 1537 guns, with the goal of cutting the German defensive barbed wire and allowing for an open passage of the British attacking force. The attack order was finally given on July 1, at 7:30. At 7:31 the Germans re-emerged from their – mostly undamaged – reinforced trenches with their machine guns, and mowed down the rows of British soldiers who were struggling before the mostly uncut German wire. More than 110.000 British troops attacked, and in one day, 60.000 of them were killed or wounded. This was “the largest engagement fought since the beginnings of civilization,” according to Fussell, and he goes on to say that “[t]he innocent army fully attained the knowledge of good and evil at the Somme on July 1, 1916. That moment, one of the most interesting in the whole long history of human disillusion, can stand as the type of all the ironic actions of the war.” The description of the Somme Battle before it actually happened can only be seen as ironic, now that we know the appalling result. Thus, “[b]y applying to the past a paradigm of ironic action, a rememberer is enabled to locate, draw forth, and finally shape into significance an event or a moment which otherwise would merge without meaning into the general differentiated stream” (Fussell 31). These instances where irony ensues are called “satires of circumstance” (Fussell 6). Although the Somme Offensive is the largest – and most deadly – of them, a great many lesser satires of circumstance permeate Blunden’s work. One of them takes places early on in the book, in the “prosperous looking (but deserted)” French village of Richebourg St. Vaast. In this village, the “large church, and the almost rococo churchyard […] astonished everybody,” because the many tombs and vaults have been knocked to pieces, and “could protect their charges any longer from the eye of life.” Many a soldier stopped to gape at this morbid yet appealing spectacle:
Greenish water stood in some of these pits; bones and skulls and decayed cerements there attracted frequent soldiers past the ‘No Loitering’ notice-board. Why should these mortalities lure those who ought to be trying to forget mortality, ever threatening them? Nearly corpses ourselves, by the mere fact of standing Richebourg Church, how should we find the strange and the remote in these corpses? (Blunden 37)
The irony ensues here due to the fact that a great part of the soldiers loitering in this churchyard would soon fall in the war themselves, and would become objects of fascination and memento mori themselves for other soldiers in the future. It is indeed strange that soldiers
48 who are “[n]early corpses” themselves gape at bones and skulls. However, Blunden provides one explanation for this. He noted that the church and churchyard were badly battered and had been bombarded into a state of “demi-ruin which discovers the greatest fascination” (Blunden 37). This fascination can be recognized as a captivation for the grotesque: it at once fascinates as well as repulses, because it reminds the person of his mortality or corporality. Indeed, a beat-up churchyard sprayed with cerements and skeletons is of a grotesque stature. Blunden’s dark humour becomes apparent in this excerpt as well. The buried bodies are lying spread-out across the churchyard. In effect, they are loitering in a place with a “No Loitering” sign, forbidding just that. In Undertones of War bones and skulls appear in other passages as well. On page twelve one reads about the Old British Line in Festubert, which had
[…] the appearance of great age and perpetuity; its weather-beaten sandbag well was already venerable. It shared the past with the defences of Troy. The skulls which spades disturbed about it were in a manner coeval with those of the most distant wars; there was an obstinate remoteness about a skull. (Blunden 12)
Here, the skulls of recently fallen soldiers are immediately dismissed as memento mori, because to them, there is an “obstinate remoteness about a skull.” They are linked to the glorious past, such as the Greek war of Troy, rather than with the war Blunden and his fellow combatants are presently engaged in. So in effect, the irony arises because of a failure to recognize that the soldiers are mortal too, and that their own bodies could lie in a trench in the very same manner. Moreover, they actually serve as a memento mori themselves, as Blunden, full well knowing many of them will not survive the war, depicts them as such.
The satires of circumstance can be very shocking as well. It is then the task of the memoirist to recall them, and formulate them in a way so that they are imbued with meaning. One of the most upsetting of these satires of circumstance is the one dealing with a “young and cheerful lance-corporal.” His death is described by Blunden with the most vile of images, only to then ask how this could be “the only answer” to war. Blunden here effectively formulates an attack on war itself. Yet, the most important of this excerpt is its structure. The structure of this excerpt stands exemplary to both his poetry and his entire memoir. Blunden first sets the scene, describes the gentle-hearted lance-corporal, only to then furiously spew forth the horrors of the war and destroy whatever he had first built up. This kind of structuring will be discussed elsewhere in this dissertation. This is the discussed excerpt:
Cambrin was beginning to terrify. Not far away from that shafthead, a young and cheerful lance-corporal of ours was making some tea [in the trench] as I passed one warm afternoon. Wishing him a good tea, I went along three fire-bays; one shell dropped without warning behind me; I saw its smoke faint out, and I thought all was as lucky as it should be. Soon a cry from
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that place recalled me; the shell had burst all wrong. Its butting impression was black and stinking in the [back of the trench] where three minutes ago the lance-corporal’s mess-tin was bubbling over a little flame. For him, how could the gobbets of blackening flesh, the earth-wall sotted with blood, with flesh, the eye under the duckboard, the pulpy bone be the only answer? At this moment, while we looked with dreadful fixity at so isolated a horror, the lance- corporal’s brother came round the traverse. (Blunden 45-46)
In terms of irony, the horror is heightened as well. Blunden first thought that the shell fell without harm, and that “all was as lucky as it should be.” However, this is not the case, as a lance-corporal was hit. Not only was this poor soul completely blown to bits by a German shell, but at that moment where they all “looked with dreadful fixity at so isolated a horror,” it so happened that the dead lance-corporal’s brother arrived at the scene. “Irony engenders worse irony” (Fussell 34), as Fussell succinctly phrased. A similar casualty of war is the ‘birdboy’ who exploded in a shell as well. We first read the following:
Toward Hooge one brazen morning, running in a shower of shells along ‘The Great Wall of China’ (one dud shell struck within a rifle's length of us, and exploded something else), Kenward the corporal and I saw a sentry crouching and peering one way and another like a birdboy in an October storm. He spoke, grinned, and shivered; we passed, and duly the sentry was hit by a shell.
The scene is very similar to the previously discussed excerpt. Yet here, Blunden discusses his method of writing explicitly, stating next that “in this vicinity a peculiar difficulty would exist for the artist to select the sights, words, incidents, which seem essential. The art is rather to collect them, in the original form of incoherence” (Blunden 140-141). In this respect, Blunden’s method of writing is not to “select” what he wants to write down in his memoir, but rather to (re-)”collect them, in the original form of incoherence.” This way, his entire memoir should be seen as structured without causality, but that it is one long chain of ironic events, which are only given meaning by the irony of war. Indeed, Blunden’s memoir is not structured causally, and there are many gaps. For instance, we only hear about Blunden’s experiences at the front or not far from it; when he is on leave or home again is left out. This idea reinforces the premise that Blunden tried to captivate the unstructured nature of war, by not writing his exploits in a structured way. He did impose a structure, however, but not by means of the content, causality or chronology, but by imposing the structure of pastoralism, as I have discussed elsewhere.
To turn back to Frye’s theory of modes; this memoir belongs to Frye’s ironic mode, which is intrinsically modernist by the very definition of it. In the late phase of this mode, “demonic” imagery is drawn upon, in order to intensify the irony ensued from the hero’s inferiority to both man and nature in his environment, or world. This domain of demonic imagery, denoted
50 by Frye as “the world that desire totally rejects”, is classified in five areas: the divine world, the human, the animal, the vegetable and the mineral (Fussell 338). Frye’s description is a literary category, but, as Fussell brilliantly detected, the domain of demonic imagery in the ironic mode resembles the Western Front strikingly:
Opposed to apocalyptic symbolism is the presentation of the world that desire totally rejects: the world of the nightmare and the scapegoat, of bondage and pain and confusion; … the world … of perverted or wasted work, ruins and catacombs, instruments of torture and monuments of folly … . just as apocalyptic imagery in poetry is closely associated with a religious heaven, so its dialectic opposite is closely linked with an existential hell, like … the hell that man creates on earth… (Fry, qtd. by Fussell 338)
All five said demonic areas are represented in Undertones of War, and will now be more closely examined in terms of their relation with the Great War, and how they are represented in Undertones of War. Many of these (symbolical) representations will be discussed more fully in terms of how they fit in with the larger structure of pastoralism, so their consideration here will be rather brief. I will begin with the divine world. In Blunden’s war memoir this is represented by the sky, and its inaccessibility and remoteness in particular. The portrayal of the sky over Flanders and France throughout the memoir seems especially loaded with symbolic meaning. After a particularly bloody battle, of which Blunden says that “[t]he estimate of our casualties was 400, and although the real number was 280 or so, the battalion had had enough,” (Blunden 170) and thus in effect amplifying the weight the heavy German bombardment had had, he goes on saying, and therewith closing the chapter: “The eastern sky that evening was all too brilliant with British rockets, appealing for artillery assistance. Westward, over blue hills, the sunset was all seraphim and cherubim” (Blunden 172). By doing so, he effectively links the sunset in the sky with the heavenly “seraphim and cherubim.” Thus, the divine is represented in Blunden’s war memoir. Yet, the irony is very poignant; it is the glow of the “British rockets” which renders the world in a mythical glow. These rockets, similar to the German shells and rockets, are only meant to wreak havoc, as the description of the destruction the German bombardment caused, goes on to show. That these instruments of war are linked to angelic beings is exemplary of the divine aspect of Frye’s demonic world.
Next is the human aspect of the demonic world. Obviously, the army stands central here. Not only is the army full of superstitions, myths, and rituals – think of the “rule of threes,” or the myth of the international community of deserters living in no-man’s-land – it is also the pinnacle of the loss of individuality in favour of a hierarchically structured organization. These and other myths will be discussed in another chapter. “The demonic human world is,”
51 according to Frye, “a society held together by a kind of molecular tension of egos, a loyalty to the group or the leader which diminishes the individual, or, at best, contrasts his pleasure with his duty or honour” (Fry, qtd. by Fussell 338). Indeed, in the army the majority of the common soldiers were bound together by loyalty to either England, which presents itself as patriotism, or to a specific “leader” or officer. Moreover, the individuality of a soldier in the trenches is indeed diminished, as the soldiers were seen as replaceable, as the abstract notion of the Regiment or even the Army always lives on, although there is an ever changing supply of soldiers fighting for it.
The animal aspect of the demonic world is clearly present in Undertones of War as well. Most of these are already discussed in the chapter of pastoralism, so they will only be summarized here. There are birds, such as the lark and the nightingale, that were given a special status in the trenches. Their song usually signified dawn or dusk, and with it came the obligatory stand- to. This meant a “heightened ritual anxiety” (Fussell 56) at a time that has been glorified by Romantic poetry for over a century. The birds that were seen in the French and Flemish trenches received a similar ambiguous symbolic status, in that they were linked to danger or the coming of a storm. In addition, the insect-world ties in perfectly with Frye’s demonic animal world. Blunden describes bullets as “insect-like zips,” (Blunden 10) effectively linking the two. Less ominous are the “sheep:” on more than one occasion the common soldiery is compared to sheep. This is the opposite of the demonic animal world, but serves to emphasize the innocence of the fighting men. In contrast to this, animals as wild dogs, rats and lice are described as indeed counter-productive and dangerous to the task of the soldiers.
With regard to the demonic vegetable world we can be brief as well, as most of this imagery has already been discussed, too. When discussing the demonic vegetable world, it is easy to recognize this as the deliberately destroyed nature that Blunden describes. He first describes nature’s beauty, only to then let it be destroyed by the proceedings of war. In this way, the woods and forests exulted in by Romantics for over a century, become horrible and ominous. When Mametz or Trones Woods are evoked, only death comes to mind. The evocation of flowers, red flowers such as the poppy or the rose in particular, simultaneously evokes blood and death. It is true that the “blood-colors” of roses and poppies “would become an indispensable part of the symbolism of the war” (Fussell 264). In addition, the natural vegetable world seems to be replaced by the steely gear of war: Blunden speaks of barbed wire as if it contains and delineates them, much in the same way that garden hedges do. This
52 is in agreement with Michael Thorpe, who claims that “[Blunden was] striving to naturalize the scenes and weapons of war” (Thorpe 22).
Finally, the demonic mineral world will be considered. In this respect, Blunden’s poem ‘Rural Economy’ (1917) will be drawn into this consideration briefly. The poem can be found in full in Addendum I. It is about a group of soldiers lying at rest in a wintery wood, watching a farmer. Yet, another kind of husbandry outdoes the farmer, namely the war. The “bone-fed loam” makes for excellent ground for the “iron seeds.” The war ploughs up the fields, and is reaping a human harvest. In this poem it becomes apparent what Frye’s demonic mineral world is. The acres of fields, planted with blood and iron, or the “bone-fed loam” are a perversion of the peaceful, idyllic and pastoral farmer’s fields. Also, as Fussell indicates, the trenches themselves are dug out in the ground, and could make for some sort of maze, which in turn makes the soldiers lose their sense of direction. Moreover, the pickets and shovels that built the trenches are the very same tools that in peacetime were reserved for mining or construction.
To summarize, it becomes clear that the Western Front was indeed surprisingly similar to Frye’s domains of the demonic in his ironic mode. Fussell believes to have found the explanation for this. He first states that the major modernist innovations came from people not actively engaged in the war – Pound, Yeats, Lawrence, Woolf, Eliot and Joyce – and goes on to say that
It was left to lesser talents – always more traditional and technically prudent – to recall in literary form a war they had actually experienced. Sassoon, Graves, and Blunden are clearly writers of the second rank. But their compulsion to render the unprecedented actualities they had experienced brought them fully to grips with the modern theme which we now recognize as the essence of Frye’s ironic mode. (Fussell 340)
Also, Blunden uses pastoralism as a structuring device and moral and formal framework. This fits in well with the “transitional” character of the book, “pointing at once in two opposite directions – back to the low mimetic, forward to the ironic,” and, portraying the circularity of Frye’s modes, pointing “to that richest kind of irony proposing, or at least recognizing, a renewed body of rituals and myths” (Fussell 150). If this theory is applied to Undertones of War, it is easy to make out the “renewed body of rituals and myths” as a return to pastoralism. In this light, Blunden’s continuous use of structured pastoralism is, in fact, modernist: he uses the old form of the pastoral in a new, modernist way to structure his book, and imposes an organized composition on the otherwise chaotic disarrangement of the war. He does so in a way which ties in perfectly with Frye’s ironic mode.
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3.4. Closing Discussion: Modern Versus Modernist
Above I have argued that Blunden’s war memoir has modernist traits, so for me his work can be classified as modernist, even though not everyone agrees. The most prominent modernist aspect of this work is its constant use of irony, as a way to structure the entire war memoir. As explained, one could see the whole as a chain of big or smaller ironic satires of circumstance. The most brutal is Blunden’s portrayal of the Somme Offensive and the lead-up to it, but many other themes, such as the death of the sentry or the ‘birdboy’ are structurally the same, and they all add up to the general ironic view on the war which nowadays has become almost the norm. Blunden calls his process of writing, and his method of selection twice to attention; first in his ‘Preliminary,’ where he explains the problems, and another time in a chapter called ‘Domesticities,’ where he goes deeper into these problems. He prays attention to his reason of writing, but he explains and problematizes it at the same time. The same goes for his audience. Blunden’s critical attention to his audience and how he writes appropriately for them, as well as his constant meta-commentary throughout his war memoir provide his book with a particular modernist flavour. Moreover, Blunden is making use of older, or even archaic forms of writing, myth, and normative concepts – pastoralism the most prominent and most easily recognizable – and changes it in a manner so that it serves a different function in his war memoir than it previously had in literature in general. I believe that therefore Undertones of War is deeply anchored in what Frye calls the modern ironic mode. In his essay Modernism, Adversary Culture and Edmund Blunden Paul Fussell, who shows himself to be a prolific writer when it comes to Edmund Blunden, makes a distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘modernist’. He defines a Modernist as “a late nineteenth- or twentieth-century artist or artistic theorist who has decided to declare war on the received, the philistine, the bourgeois, the sentimental, and the democratic.” (Fussell: “Modernism, Adversary Culture and Edmund Blunden” 583). As early examples of modernists he offers Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, who “declared war” on realism. Fussell’s later examples are James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, who made an enemy of “religion, family, and nation” and “not to mention the conventions of emotional, especially sexual repression adhered to by their forefathers” (Fussell: “Modernism, Adversary Culture and Edmund Blunden” 583). In this respect, Blunden’s gentle ironic style does not seem to fit in with Fussell’s Modernism. Instead of antagonizing the past, he invented a new use for it. Therefore, he much rather fits in with Fussell’s definition of a Modern, that is someone who “is capable of incorporation into his work contemporary currents of thought and emotion without any irritable need to quarrel with
54 the past – intellectually, psychologically, or technically” (Fussell: “Modernism, Adversary Culture and Edmund Blunden” 584). In short, a Modern can “embrace the past and not just feel but enjoy its continuity with the present” (Fussell: “Modernism, Adversary Culture and Edmund Blunden” 584). Again, some exemplary Moderns are provided, namely Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, Edwin Muir, Louis MacNeice, Conrad Aiken and Elizabeth Bishop. Blunden indeed embraces the past, without seeking to diminish its qualities or challenging it. He lifts the pastoralism out of its past context, and places it in the context of war, for a variety of reasons discussed elsewhere. By doing so, he renders – at least part of it – ironic, due to the stark contrast between the pastoral setting and the chaos of war. So in fact, what Blunden does in his memoir is not entirely in line with Fussell’s definition of Modern. He does not “enjoy [the past’s] continuity with the present,” but rather uses past forms of writing in a new and modern way, to be able to describe the otherwise indescribable. This was necessary, because one should not forget the titanic problem of language writers of the Great War faced, as explained above. Fussell concludes his essay with an open question with regard to the valuation of Blunden in the Modern field:
What place are we to find in the canon for those modern writers who either work in relatively disvalued genres – the memoir […]; the essay […]; the travel book[…]; - or who, without specifically rejecting the thematic and stylistic urges of the Modernists, pursue a way which does not make an enemy of the usages of the past? (Fussell: “Modernism, Adversary Culture and Edmund Blunden” 601)
No definitive answer can be given to this question, but for me it is a fact that works like these, which do not discard the past, nor get carried away with the novelties of current times, should hold their own place in the cannon. They are of equal value as works radically Modernist, or deliberately conventional in form or content. Perhaps even more so because Blunden so delicately added different layers of meaning and at the same time employed these as carefully deliberated structuring devices, so this work has become the timeless masterpiece that it is. Today, exactly 100 years after the war, we can still enjoy and comprehend what Blunden strived to convey. The work should not be equated to the true Modernist works in every sense, such as for example Joyce’s work, but the fact does remain that Blunden engaged with several writing techniques that imbue his work with a Modernist sense.
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Conclusion
To conclude, I will briefly recapitulate the ideas put forward in this dissertation. In the first main chapter I have provided a biography of Edmund Blunden, as well as some context in which he has created his great war memoir, Undertones of War. I have argued there that this work should be seen as an ‘undertone’ of the war, which means that it is a personal account of Blunden’s version of events based on facts, rather than a factual history of the war. Due to the personal capacity in which he has written his work, I have argued that we can see this work as a therapeutic activity, that has helped Blunden process his experiences. In the second chapter, I have discussed at length the pastoral elements that Blunden frequently employs. I have first given a short historical overview of what pastoralism is. Secondly, I have discussed sentimental and complex pastoralism and have made a distinction between three kinds of pastoralism, of which two are very prominently present in Blunden’s war memoir. It is important to see the variety of pastoral elements that Blunden has used throughout his work. Furthermore, I have discussed the mode of anti-pastoralism. I have done so to argue that Blunden made a shift in his use of pastoralism towards anti-pastoralism, in order to accentuate the gradual decay of his regiment, the Royal Sussex Regiment. He has linked the state of Nature together with the state of this regiment in a remarkable fashion. In a subsequent subchapter, I have argued that Blunden uses pastoralism to impose a structure and a moral and formal framework on his memoir and the otherwise – by necessity – unstructured nature of the war and the telling of the war. In doing so, he countered the fragmented nature of the plot of his work. The structure that he uses allows for a break-down of the memoir into a vast set of short or longer satires of circumstance, or excerpts, that are all built-up in the same fashion. That is, he first sets the scene in compliance with pastoral themes, motifs and imagery, only to then return to it in full force, to destroy the previously set scene, by means of letting the war intrude upon nature. This imagery is very strong, as Blunden saw Nature as intrinsically ‘good’, and it is man that perverts it. Blunden’s true charge against the war can or should thus be found in this use of pastoralism as a structuring device, as he valued Nature as the best the world has to offer. Blunden not only used this structure in his war memoir, but in several of his poems too. These are ‘Third Ypres,’ ‘Illusions,’ ‘Rural Economy’ and ‘Concert Party: Busseboom.’ They are all discussed in this dissertation as well. This kind of structure that Blunden has imposed on his memoir of the war necessarily evokes a deep sense of irony, as the entire memoir is written from an ex post facto viewpoint, allowing the reader to see the senselessness of certain decisions or courses of action. This irony, in turn, refers back to the
56 satires of circumstance. This irony is one of the main reasons that I began to see Blunden’s memoir of the war as leaning towards modernism. Upon closer observation, I was able to confirm my suspicion by means of several arguments. First and foremost, Blunden has a peculiar use of voice and persona, which is in fact very modern to say the least, or even modernist. Shaping himself in the memoir as a “harmless young shepherd in a soldier’s coat,” (Blunden 191) he allows his book to be told by this impersonation of himself, and allowing for the pastoralism to be added to the factual account of the war. This kind of use of a persona and well-developed voice is indeed modernist. Moreover, Blunden uses ample meta-literary commentaries throughout his work, to draw attention to the literary character of his work. Yet, it is his persistent irony permeating the memoir that is the clearest argument for seeing his work as adhering to modernism. It allows for his work to belong to Fry’s ironic mode, while at the same time, the pastoralism, or the shift from pastoralism towards anti-pastoralism to be more precise, fits in perfectly with both his charge against the war as well as the demonic natural work described by Frye. It is my sincerest hope that this dissertation has awakened an interest not only in Blunden’s war memoir, but in his war poetry as well. Blunden has never been a popular writer, but this does not mean that he does not deserve recognition for his amazing work. I have only discussed a small number of aspects of his work, such as his varied use of different kinds of pastoralism in order to show the gradual decay of his regiment on the one hand, and to impose a structure on the war whilst highlighting the destruction that war brings forth by means of his nature imagery. These devices naturally engender irony, and on account of this and the previously discussed arguments, I believe that Blunden’s work is modernist, although, as I have shown, not everyone agrees. I can only hope to have persuaded readers of this dissertation of my opinion.
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Sassoon, Siegfried: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber and Faber, 1931.
Silkin, Jon: Out of Battle. The Poetry of the Great War. London: Oxford University Press 1972.
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Keats’s Odes.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Last seen 9 July 2015.
Thorpe, Michael: The Poetry of Edmund Blunden. Chatham: W. & J. Mackay & co ltd. 1971.
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Addendum One9
Third Ypres
Triumph ! How strange, how strong had triumph come On weary hate of foul and endless war When from its gray graveclothes awoke anew The summer day. Among the tumbled wreck Of fascined lines and mounds the light was peering Half-smiling upon us, and our new-found pride; The terror of the waiting night outlived, The time too crowded for the heart to count All the sharp cost in friends killed on the assault. No sap of all the octopus had held us, Here stood we trampling down the ancient tyrant. So shouting dug we among the monstrous pits. Amazing quiet fell upon the waste, Quiet intolerable to those who felt The hurrying batteries beyond the masking hills For their new parley setting themselves in array In crafty forms unmapped. No, these, smiled faith, Are dumb for the reason of their overthrow. They move not back, they lie among the crews Twisted and choked, they'll never speak again. Only the copse where once might stand a shrine Still clacked and suddenly hissed its bullets by. The War would end, the Line was on the move, And at a bound the impassable was passed. We lay and waited with extravagant joy.
Now dulls the day and chills; comes there no word
9 All poems represented here are to be found in Blunden, Edmund: Undertones of War. London: Penguin Classics, 2010. All poems are represented in the form that they have in that book.
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From those who swept through our new lines to flood The lines beyond ? but little comes, and so Sure as a runner Time himself's accosted. And the slow moments shake their heavy heads, And croak, "They're done, they'll none of them get through,
They're done, they've all died on the entanglements, The wire stood up like an unplashed hedge and thorned With giant spikes — and there they've paid the bill." Then comes the black assurance, then the sky's Mute misery lapses into trickling rain, That wreathes and swims and soon shuts in our world. And those distorted guns, that lay past use, Why— miracles not over! — all a firing, The rain's no cloak from their sharp eyes. And you, Poor signaller, you I passed by this emplacement, You whom I warned, poor Daredevil, waving your flags,
Among this screeching I pass you again and shudder At the lean green flies upon the red flesh madding. Runner, stand by a second. Your message. — He's gone, Falls on a knee, and his right hand uplifted Claws his last message from his ghostly enemy, Turns stone-like. Well, I liked him, that young runner, But there's no time for that. O now for the word To order us flash from these drowning, roaring traps And even hurl upon that snarling wire? Why are our guns so impotent? The grey rain, Steady as the sand in an hourglass on this day, Where through the window the red lilac looks, And all's so still, the chair's odd click is noise — The rain is all heaven's answer, and with hearts
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Past reckoning we are carried into night And even sleep is nodding here and there. The second night steals through the shrouding rain. We in our numb thought crouching long have lost The mockery triumph, and in every runner Have urged the mind's eye see the triumph to come, The sweet relief, the straggling out of hell Into whatever burrows may be given For life's recall. Then the fierce destiny speaks. This was the calm, we shall look back for this. The hour is come; come, move to the relief! Dizzy we pass the mule-strewn track where once The ploughman whistled as he loosed his team; And where he turned home-hungry on the road, The leaning pollard marks us hungrier turning. We crawl to save the remnant who have torn Back from the tentacled wire, those whom no shell Has charred into black carcasses — Relief! They grate their teeth until we take their room, And through the churn of moonless night and mud And flaming burst and sour gas we are huddled Into the ditches where they bawl sense awake, And in a frenzy that none could reason calm, (Whimpering some, and calling on the dead) They turn away: as in a dream they find Strength in their feet to bear back that strange whim Their body. At the noon of the dreadful day Our trench and death's is on a sudden stormed With huge and shattering salvos, the clay dances In founts of clods around the concrete sties, Where still the brain devises some last armour To live out the poor limbs. This wrath's oncoming
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Found four of us together in a pillbox, Skirting the abyss of madness with light phrases, White and blinking, in false smiles grimacing. The demon grins to see the game, a moment Passes, and — (still the drum-tap dongs my brain To a whirring void) — through the great breach above me The light comes in with icy shock and the rain Horridly drips. Doctor, talk! talk! if dead Or stunned I know not; the stinking powdered concrete, The lyddite turns me sick — my hair's all full Of this smashed concrete. Oh, I'll drag you, friends, Out of the sepulchre into the light of day, For this is day, the pure and sacred day. And while I squeak and gibber over you, Look, from the wreck a score of field-mice nimble, And tame and curious look about them; (these Calmed me, on these depended my salvation.) There comes my sergeant, and by all the powers The wire is holding to the right battalion, And I can speak — but I myself first spoken Hear a known voice now measured even to madness Call me by name. "For God's sake send and help us, Here in a gunpit, all headquarters done for, Forty or more, the nine-inch came right through, All splashed with arms and legs, and I myself The only one not killed or even wounded. You'll send — God bless you ! The more monstrous fate Shadows our own, the mind swoons doubly burdened, Nay all for miles our anguish groans and bleeds, A whole sweet countryside amuck with murder; Each moment puffed into a year with death." Still wept the rain, roared guns, Still swooped into the swamps of flesh and blood,
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All to the drabness of uncreation sunk, And all thought dwindled to a moan, Relieve! But who with what command can now relieve The dead men from that chaos, or my soul?
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Illusions Trenches in the moonlight, in the lulling moonlight Have had their loveliness; when dancing dewy grasses Caressed us passing along their earthy lanes; When the crucifix hanging over was strangely illumined, And one imagined music, one even heard the brave bird In the sighing orchards flute above the weedy well. There are such moments; forgive me that I note them. Nor gloze that there comes soon the nemesis of beauty, In the fluttering relics that at first glimmer wakened Terror – the no-man’s ditch suddenly forking; There, the enemy’s best with bombs and brains and courage! Softly, swiftly, at once be animal and angel – But O no, no, they’re Death’s malkins dangling in the wire For the moon’s interpretation.
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Concert Party: Busseboom The stage was set, the house was packed, The famous troop began; Our laughter thundered, act by act; Time light as sunbeams ran.
Dance sprang and spun and neared and fled, Jest chirped at gayest pitch, Rhythm dazzled, action sped Most comically rich.
With generals and lame privates both Such charms worked wonders, till The show was over lagging loth We faced the sunset chill; And standing on the sandy way, With the cracked church peering past, We heard another matinee, We heard the maniac blast
Of barrage south by Saint Eloi, And the red lights flaming there Called madness: Come, my bonny boy, And dance to the latest air.
To this new concert, white we stood; Cold certainty held our breath; While men in tunnels below Larch Wood Were kicking men to death.
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Rural Economy There was winter in those woods, And still it was July: There were Thule solitudes With thousands huddling nigh; There the fox had left his den, The scraped holes hid not stoats byt men.
To these woods the rumour teemed Of peace five miles away; In sight, hills hovered, houses gleamed Where last perhaps we lay Till the cockerels bawled bright morning and The hours of life slipped the slack hand.
In sight, life’s farms sent forth their gear; Here rakes and ploughs lay still; Yet, safe some curious clods, all here Was raked and ploughed with a will. The sower was the ploughman too, And iron seeds broadcast he threw.
What husbandry could outdo this? With flesh and blood he fed The planted iron that nought amiss Grew thick and swift and red, And in a night though ne’er so cold Those acres bristled a hundredfold.
Why, even the wood as well as field This ruseful farmer knew Could be reduced to plough and tilled, And if he planned, he’d do; The field and wood, all bone-fed loam, Shot up a roaring harvest –home.
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