For the Duration: Global War and Satire in England and the United States

FOR THE DURATION: GLOBAL WAR AND SATIRE IN ENGLAND AND THE UNITED STATES by Elizabeth Steedley A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland February 2015 ABSTRACT “For the Duration” moves to unsettle some regnant assumptions about the ways in which historical experience shaped the formal choices and political investments of modernist writers. While recent critical work has focused on the influence of the Great War either on non-combatant authors or on minor memoirists and poets of the trenches, little attention has been given to the war’s effect on modernist authors who saw combat and thereafter crafted narratives distinguished by their satirical innovation. In the first three chapters of this dissertation, I concentrate on works by Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Evelyn Waugh to suggest that these soldier-authors’ experience of temporal duration in war led them not, as one might expect, to emphasize Bergsonian durée in the novelistic presentation of experience but rather to reject it. Concerned that Bergsonism and its literary offshoots offered no foothold for critical engagement with post- war reality, these writers dwelt on the importance of clock-time, causality, and material reality in providing a grounding for historical responsibility; moreover, they strove to exploit the political potential of satire, a genre that has a peculiarly temporal character. Satire was especially attractive to these writers, I argue, not only because they saw in the interwar world a dispiriting unconcern with the causes and consequences of World War I but also because the genre’s dependence on barbed, multi-front attacks mimicked a key feature of modern combat. Relying on recent psychiatric and psychological studies concerning Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the human perception of duration, I argue that soldier-authors’ attention to elapsing clock-time reflects a protective hypervigilance that, when redeployed in satirical form, enables the meticulous exposure of contemporary social and political vices. Noting as well the extreme length of these works, which I classify as “durational satires,” I suggest that their effectiveness largely depends upon their ability to import the experience of wartime duration into their structures and thus to make the act of reading an exercise in maintaining critical attention while managing personal exhaustion. In my final chapter, I demonstrate that this correlation ii between the duration of combat and the duration of the reading experience extends beyond English satires written in the wake of World War I. Turning to the novels of American authors such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, I argue that durational satires also appeared in the United States in the aftermath of World War II. First Reader: Douglas Mao; Second Reader: Eric Sundquist iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to Douglas Mao, my advisor, and Eric Sundquist, my second reader. Eric has offered extremely valuable comments throughout the dissertation process. In particular, I am grateful that he told me several years ago during a mock job interview that I really needed to do some research on Bergson. That advice played a pivotal role in changing the shape of this dissertation. To describe Doug’s contributions to this project is nothing short of a Herculean task. Doug has been an advisor, a critic, and a friend. I cannot thank him enough for the help and moral support he has offered me over the past eight years. He’s kind of my hero, a hero whose superpowers include never letting me know that reading (and re-reading) drafts of my dissertation was as much an “exercise in duration” as reading the novels discussed therein. My final thanks go to my parents, Rebecca (Becky) and Wheeler Kimball (Kim) Steedley. My mother has been my best friend and laughing buddy throughout my graduate studies. What’s more, any time I remotely begin to doubt myself, she (not entirely accurately) assures me that I am the best thing that has ever happened to academia. Who am I to argue? As for my father, I would first like to thank him for his support, emotional and financial, during my time at Hopkins. (Indeed, without his help, there would be no copies of this “paper” for my committee members to read.) I would also like to thank him for his service during the Vietnam War, which in many ways, and whether he knows it or not, influenced the direction of this project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract/ ii Acknowledgements/ iv List of Tables/vii INTRODUCTION 1 How to Do Things with Wars: Turning Against Bergson and Toward Satire Duration and Its Neglect: The Experience of War and the Rejection of Bergonsism 10 À la Reprise du Temps Perdu: Satire as Temporal Training Ground 37 CHAPTER ONE 67 Impressionist Impoverishment: The Pre- and Post-War Satires of Ford Madox Ford Fordian Confiteor: Reading The Good Soldier as “Second-Phase” Satire 75 Sound Off: The Troubled Times and Tortured Thought of Parade’s End 108 CHAPTER TWO 153 Making the World Safe for Some Mockery: The Post-War Memoirs and Fiction of Geoffrey Keynes, Robert Graves, and Wyndham Lewis Three Lives: The Gates of Memory, Good-bye to All That, and Blasting and Bombardiering 157 Condemned and (Self-)Condemning: The Post-War Durational Satire of Wyndham Lewis 187 CHAPTER THREE 229 Heures de Combat: The Durational Satire of Evelyn Waugh “Il Faut en Finir”: Literary Phoniness in Put Out More Flags 235 Onward, Christian Soldier: Attending to Time in Sword of Honour 262 CHAPTER FOUR 314 Paying It Forward: American Durational Satire and World War II Arms and Mailer: The Influence of Spengler and Bergson 322 Heller Skelter: Satirized Circularities and the Privileging of Attention 335 in Catch-22 Insidious Imaginings: Temporal Responsibility in Vonnegut’s Post-War Satires 355 v Appendix A 378 Appendix B 380 Appendix C 384 Appendix D 389 Bibliography/ 401 Curriculum Vitae/ 416 vi LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Timeline of the Crete Episode in Officers and Gentlemen 384 Table 2: Side-by-Side Timelines of Catch-22 389 Table 3: Doug Gaukroger’s (Timeless) Timeline of Catch-22 397 vii INTRODUCTION How to Do Things with Wars: Turning Against Bergson and Toward Satire To note the influence of World War I on modernist literature is to restate a commonplace. Indeed, to note the existence of that commonplace is itself a commonplace. Yet, in most accounts of modernism, critics seem to assume that they need not elaborate on the specific ways in which the Great War influenced the direction of twentieth-century English poetry and prose. 1 Even those critics who do examine in detail the relationship between modernism and the war tend to limit their analysis of that relationship in one of two ways: either they concentrate on the memoirs and poetry of lesser-known writers who served in the trenches or they focus on the poetry and novels of high modernists who never saw combat. This dissertation aims to begin to fill the gap in critical accounts of modernism by considering the memoirs and novels of authors who not only served in the war but also secured a place at the frontlines of literary modernism before or after the war. More than just considering soldier-authors who are regularly overlooked, however, I argue in this dissertation that those soldier-authors‟ experiences of combat directly affected the content and form of their works and did so in a way that challenges traditional understandings of modernism‟s concern with time. While many critics have drawn attention to the influence of Henri Bergson‟s influence on modernist representations of temporality, the soldier-authors of World War I (and, later, World War II) rejected Bergsonian characterizations of time and consciousness and, in some cases, offered a scathing critique of Bergson‟s concept of durée in their nonfictional works. This antipathy toward Bergson and the literary techniques, including interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness, that seem to owe a debt to his philosophy might 1 Vincent Sherry makes a similar point in The Great War and the Language of Modernism: “Indeed, these sayings [i.e., “The Lost Generation,” “The Men of 1914”] have gained the status of numinous rubrics. They have been used routinely in a sort of ritual invocation, which serves to silence, not to stimulate and certainly not to organize, further inquiry. The actual dearth of commentary on the modernist war—as a historical subject, as an event reconstructed from its record in contemporary political and intellectual culture—is remarkable. How easily these formulas are set aside by critics unwilling to grant their major premise, in fact, indicates all too clearly that „the modernist war‟ owns a coherence that is wholly rhetorical, or plaintive. It has established no solid scholarship, no language of factual basis and rational elaboration, no thickness of intellectual resistance” (7). 1 at first appear counterintuitive, especially since those techniques seem suited to capturing the minute-to-minute uncertainties of combat and the lasting effects of war trauma. Nevertheless, as I argue throughout this dissertation, soldier-authors such as Ford Madox Ford, Wynham Lewis, and Evelyn Waugh used their post-war works to underscore the limitations of Bergson‟s philosophy, which, on their understanding, dangerously privileged the time of the mind over the socially agreed-upon time of the world. What‟s more, these authors reconceived the genre of satire along anti-Bergsonian lines by penning long or multi-volume works that strove to encourage in their readers both a critical attitude toward war-torn England and a temporal vigilance that depended on paying attention to the clock, not to the temporal peculiarities of consciousness.

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