Notes 1 Introduction 1. See, for example, the Italian army at Caporetto in November 1917; the open mutiny of the Imperial Russian army in February 1917; the French army in May and June 1917; and the German navy refusing to continue fighting in the autumn of 1918. For a thorough treatment of the breaking apart of the armies see Keegan, 1999, ch. 9. 2. See, for instance, Sir Edward Grey’s famous sentence: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time’ and Roger Fry’s observation in a letter to a friend in August 1914: ‘It is over with all our ideas.’ 3. Winter, 1995, p. 2. See also Quinn, 1994, p. 23: ‘writing poetry became a form of mental therapy to expiate the haunting memories of the front and the nagging guilt at having survived’. 4. See Eksteins, 1989, p. 219 and Stephen, 1996, p. 200: ‘It is sometimes assumed that irony broke upon British poetry in 1916 like the plague on London in 1665. In fact the image is a valid one: irony, like the plague, had been around long before, but after the war achieved a strength and prevalence it had not reached for many centuries.’ However, Stephen also points out the indebted- ness of many poets to the English Romantic movement that did not automat- ically cease with the war. 5. Some of the main features of modernist poetry and painting – concentration, focus on processes of perception, fragmentariness – are already used exten- sively as means of intensification of expression. Despite the fact that many of the poets of the Great War cannot be called innovators in the strict sense of poetic technique or imagery, their role in the development of twentieth century poetry may nevertheless be qualified as decisive, as the poets were faced with subject matter that violently demanded new representational approaches. 6. A. P. Herbert, Open Warfare, ll. 1–3, however, describes the contrary: ‘I like a trench, I have no lives to spare;/And in those catacombs, however cramping,/ You did at least know vaguely where you were ...’ 7. The distinction of several phases of poetic responses to the war had largely been underlined by various anthologies up to the late 1970s. To avoid the suggestion of a linear development of antiwar sentiments, the most recent anthologies organise their material according to its topic or area of produc- tion rather than its attitude towards the war, a principle which should also be adhered to in this book. 8. Nevertheless, irony had already played a major role in the critical anti-Boer War poetry of Thomas Hardy, admired by both Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, among many others. 9. This emphasis on the subject of the poetry not only rendered it attractive for many generations, it also evoked severe criticism. W. B. Yeats, for example, 160 Notes 161 did not see war as an appropriate subject for poetry. On the basis of aesthetic criteria he excluded all war poems from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Whether one takes this position or not, any evaluation of poetry from the Great War must face the difficulties posed by the importance of its subject matter. 10. Grubb, 1965, p. 95, however, argued to the contrary: ‘Any artist who does not herald war – anyone who thinks critically about force outside war – argues for peace.’ And later on the same page: ‘Owen and Rosenberg are pacifists in an active state (...) They transcend “pacifism” and reach one of the strangest, and to the creative mind most indispensable, truths of life: the only way to convict evil with any authority worth respect is to suffer it yourself.’ 11. Hutcheon, 1994, p. 118, therefore rejects intentional/non-intentional as a false distinction and argues that all irony happens intentionally either on the side of the ironist or on the side of the interpreter. 12. Speech act theory underlines the performative aspect of language in empha- sising that speakers are doing something when using language, an assump- tion preparing the way for Sell’s communicative theory. Following Austin’s and Searle’s description of speech acts, one of the main questions of speech act theory with regard to irony is whether the irony affects the level of locu- tion or illocution. However, for a long time literature has not been perceived as a ‘real’ speech act between writer and reader, but as a fictional imitation of a speech act on the level of implied author and implied reader, or rather between various characters. 13. Grice, 1975, pp. 41–58. The principle is based on the distinction between conventional (semantic content of an utterance) and conversational impli- cature, of which the latter is of special relevance with regard to the coopera- tive nature of discourse. By removing the ‘safety net’ for conversations that words mean what they say, irony makes people feel uneasy. For a combin- ation of speech act theory and psychology with regard to irony see Groeben and Scheele, 1984. 14. Muecke distinguishes between three ‘grades of irony’ (overt, covert and private) and four modes (impersonal, self-disparaging, ingénu and drama- tised), all of which may be used in poetry as they are not genre-related. 15. For this reason, Fabb, 1997, p. 264, calls irony ‘a culturally specific notion rather than a universal’. 16. Whereas Derrida – together with Machin and Norris, 1987, pp. 3, 7 – concludes from this uncontrollability of readings that every interpretation can only be a misinterpretation, Sell argues that any readable text can be understood repeatedly by different readers in different circumstances (see also Culler, 1982, p. 176). Fabb, 1997, p. 259, takes a middle position here by focusing on the text itself: ‘It is always necessary to remember that texts do not determine their interpretations, but only provide evidence for them.’ 17. Jacobson’s model consists of six factors and their respective functions: sender (expressive), message (poetic), receiver (conative), context (referen- tial), contact or channel (phatic), code (meta-linguistic). Hutcheon, 1994, p. 6, considers the sender and the receiver to be the most important among these factors as they function as ironist and interpreter. The interpreter, however, does not necessarily need to be the intended addressee of the 162 Notes ironist’s utterance, but he is the one to attribute irony and to interpret the particular ironic meaning of the utterance. 18. Thus Fabb and Durant, 1987, p. 6 have argued against structuralist assump- tions by proclaiming that ‘it is difficult to identify any formal properties of literary language which do not also appear in non-literary language’. This argumentation is strengthened by the frequent occurrence of code-switching between different registers in literary works, including language usually classified as non-literary. Both literary and non-literary kinds of discourse, they continue, ‘share a common range of properties when considered prag- matically, from the point of view of the kinds of communicative acts they perform’. 19. Although Sell draws on Habermas’s communicative theory in most of his arguments, he differs from Habermas in this aspect. The latter qualifies liter- ary works as incomplete speech acts because they are robbed of their illocut- ionary force (1999, p. 390). According to Habermas, the only illocutionary force of literature is mimesis, that is the imitation of several speech acts. 20. See Hutcheon’s attempt (1994, p. 2), to theorise irony’s social as well as for- mal dimensions on the basis of verbal and structural ironies (rather than situational irony or irony of fate): ‘Unlike metaphor or allegory, which demand similar supplementing of meaning, irony has an evaluative edge and manages to provoke emotional responses in those who “get” it and those who don’t, as well as in its targets and in what some people call its “victims”.’ 21. Habermas, 1987, p. 376: ‘Schließlich ist kommunikatives Handeln auf situa- tive Kontexte angewiesen, die ihrerseits Ausschnitte aus der Lebenswelt der Interaktionsteilnehmer darstellen.’ 22. See also Habermas, 1999, p. 396: ‘It [literary criticism] is, however, not merely an esoteric component of a culture of experts but, over and above this, has the task of mediating between the cultures of experts and the everyday world.’ Habermas calls this the ‘bridging function’ of art criticism. 23. See Sartre, 1995, p. 229: ‘This is the measure we propose to the writer: as long as his books arouse anger, discomfort, shame, hatred, love, even if he is no more than a shade, he will live.’ 24. Sell, 2000, p. 26f.: ‘Whereas readers, if they are going to be affected, must obviously be still alive, there is nothing to prevent them from being affected by a writer who is already dead, and by a cultural formation no longer extant.’ 25. Fabb, 1997, p. 264: ‘ “Irony” is a name for various kinds of communication where the speaker dissociates herself from the thoughts communicated. The communicated thought is attributed to a third party, who may or may not be specified, and at the same time the speaker communicates one of a par- ticular range of attitudes of dissociation towards the set of thoughts. The dissociation might be mild disbelief or fierce disapproval.’ 26. Habermas identified ‘Verständigung’ (‘understanding’) as the main pur- pose of human communication in his Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 1987, p. 387: ‘Verständigung wohnt als Telos der menschlichen Sprache inne.’ Whereas understanding between communication partners is usu- ally achieved by a straightforward use of language (direct understanding), certain situative contexts require interpretation of figurative language and Notes 163 irony (indirect understanding). The various functions of irony identified in the following chapters may thus be subsumed under the primary aim of understanding.