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The Sound of Ford Madox Ford: War-Time, Impressionism, and Narrative Form

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The Sound of Ford Madox Ford: War-Time, Impressionism, and Narrative Form The Sound of Ford Madox Ford: War-Time, Impressionism, and Narrative Form Rachel Kyne ELH, Volume 87, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp. 211-244 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2020.0007 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751744 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] THE SOUND OF FORD MADOX FORD: WAR-TIME, IMPRESSIONISM, AND NARRATIVE FORM BY RACHEL KYNE “It is rather curious, the extra senses one develops here,” Ford Madox Ford wrote to Lucy Masterman in August 1916 from the Ypres Salient.1 “I sit writing in the twilight &, even as I write, I hear the shells whine & the M. G.’s [machine guns] crepitate & I see (tho’ it is hidden by a hill), the grey, flat land below & the shells bursting. Thanks so very much for the Echo de Paris.”2 Musing on the coexistence of the sounds of war and the activity of writing, Ford inadvertently slips from the audible landscape of the front to the literary Echo of the page. Ford’s experience of war sounds in the summer of 1916 awakened him to the literary possibilities of an auditory impressionism. Between mid-July and mid-September 1916, he was deployed to France, partici- pated in his first active combat at the Battle of the Somme, suffered a concussion caused by an exploding shell, lost his memory for three weeks, returned to his battalion in the Ypres Salient with a renewed devotion to capturing the war in writing, and suffered a second collapse attributed to shell shock.3 Between the recovery of his memory in August and his eventual medical evacuation in late September, Ford produced some of his most conceptually significant writing about the war, germinating a set of methodological and thematic concerns that he would devote the next decade of his life to exploring.4 In these few weeks of fragile, alert receptivity, Ford wrote three remarkable letters to Joseph Conrad that he described as “notes on sound.”5 These letters inaugurate Ford’s adoption of sound as the medium of an unprecedented, attritional war that resisted visual capture and made duration itself into a weapon. This essay argues that sonic consciousness came to structure the time of war for Ford while he was a combatant and in the 1920s, during the writing of Parade’s End. Compelled by circumstance to pay attention to sound, Ford found his aural experience of the Great War rich in the sensory intensity appropriate to impressionist writing—an intensity notably lacking in the war’s restricted visual field. More importantly, at the front Ford discovered the degree to which sound could affect temporal experience. The continuous sound of artillery located the ELH 87 (2020) 211–244 © 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press 211 war’s apparent endlessness in the auditory body.6 Complementing this numbing perpetuation were the sudden interruptions of sharp, loud, or proximate sounds that seemed to signal some event, and could be accompanied by traumatic shock. As Ford found over years of convalescence, the effects of such shocks lingered in the body over long periods of time, like the vibrations of a struck bell. In sound, Ford discovered a narrative tool with which to articulate the sudden interruptions of shock, the corporeal hum of “the eternal waiting that is war,” and the psychic echoes of trauma.7 Ford’s discovery of sound’s narrative possibilities in the summer of 1916 dramatically reconfigured his understanding of impressionist writing. In a radical dismantling of impressionism’s historical privileging of vision, Ford’s postwar writing embraced the audible as a primary mode.8 His recourse to sound as a diegetic and narrative device opens new avenues for sound studies to consider how sound suggests plot, and how literary renderings of sound can articulate corporeal and non-discursive experiences of war and traumatic aftermath.9 Ford redeployed the convergence of sound, event, trauma, and temporality that he encountered in 1916 in the third novel of Parade’s End, A Man Could Stand Up. In this depiction of the Armistice and its uncertain aftermath, passing time—how to pass time, and how to let time pass away—poses major problems for characters and communities whose minds and bodies remain attuned to the noise of war. By using sound in thematic, structural, and onomatopoetic ways, Ford mires his reader in a non-progressive temporality of continuous interruption that insists on the war’s non-resolution. Ford’s World War I sound studies thus offer a prehistory to the audition of more recent conflicts and their after- math, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—wars whose similar convergences of sound, trauma, and duration have been investigated by literary as well as legal scholars.10 By making the relationships of sound to psyche for bodies in warzones an integral part of his postwar writings, Ford asks whether trauma—like sound—can be overheard. To ground the sonic impressionism of A Man Could Stand Up in Ford’s 1916 experiences, I provide a brief aural history of World War I before turning to the representational problems posed by this war and Ford’s struggle to represent it. I. THE SENSES OF SOUND In a 1913 treatise, Futurist composer Luigi Rossolo anticipated the extent to which the sense data of modernism would arise from the 212 The Sound of Ford Madox Ford cacophony, and not the sight, of war: “In modern warfare, mechanical and metallic, the element of sight is almost zero. The sense, the significance, and the expressiveness of noise, however are infinite. There is no movement or activity that is not revealed by noise.”11 Rossolo’s analysis was prescient for the war that broke out the following year. The war of attrition introduced new synthetic sounds while also producing new scenes and conditions of listening. The most obvious and paradigmatic of these was the audition of massive, long-range artillery fire. “[M]y first experience of the realities of war was to be patiently suffering an awful inactivity while the artillery on both sides belched destruction on the men facing each other in the trenches,” The Daily Telegraph quotes an unknown soldier in 1915.12 For frontline soldiers, the sound of artillery could manifest as a mere background rumble— the “unintermittent thudding and throb of the engines of war”—or as “hell let loose. Inferno—inferno—bang—swish!”13 The guns of northern France and Belgium could at times be heard in London and Paris.14 Scientific American reports in amazement that during the final British offensive of 1918, “700,000 tons of artillery ammunition were expended by the British army on the Western front.”15 The specifically sonic element of these explosions becomes apparent when we consider that “a majority of [shells] fired actually killed nobody.”16 Critics describe the war as an “incubator of sonic-mindedness” not only because it produced sounds of extraordinary volume and duration but because trench warfare “rapidly cultivated alertness to sound” as a conduit of information for combatants.17 Sound was the most avail- able sense capacity in the trenches, where visibility was hampered by smoke, darkness, rain, and fog, and where a vantage point for vision could offer a target to enemy snipers.18 The Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler believed “that his musical training certainly contributed to his survival, for he was able, by ear alone, to single out the shells that were coming closest, gauge their trajectory, caliber, and speed.”19 This “‘mobilization of the ear’ as a military cognitive organ” encouraged an emergent “trend toward audio perception” as trench soldiers were forced to rely on the ear instead of the eye for potentially life-saving information.20 For the fortunate, attention to sounds might mean the difference between life and death. At the least, a reactive engagement with aural signals sustained a necessary fiction of agency within an industrial forcefield that inaugurated new scales of injury and made this war “the war to end all wars.”21 By the end of 1914, after just five months of fighting, both France and Germany had almost a million casualties.22 The 7th Division of Rachel Kyne 213 the British Expeditionary Force landed in France in October; after eighteen days in the fields of Ypres, over three quarters of its 12,000 men and 400 officers were dead.23 With the slaughter of professional armies, forces were supplemented, and eventually replaced, by volun- teers and conscripts. The paradigmatic trench soldier—a “Tommy,” “poilu,” or “Jerry”—found himself immobilized in shambly pits before the combined assaults of enemy artillery, gas, and snipers, gnawed by cold, mud, hunger, and rats, and sent on suicidal sallies “over the top” through the barbed wire barricades and corpse-ridden shell holes of No Man’s Land.24 Everywhere at the front the trench soldier was subjected to the war’s sonic assault. “The dark, flaming storm never ceases. Never,” writes Henri Barbusse in a 1916 trench memoir read by soldiers at the front.25 At close proximity or under severe bombardment, the sound of the artillery became an obstacle to perception, exemplifying Aristotle’s argument that an excess of sensation cripples sense.26 “In the trench you could see nothing and noise rushed like black angels gone mad; solid noise that swept you off your feet. Swept your brain off its feet,” Ford wrote. “Someone else took control of it. You became second-in-command of your own soul” (M, 492).27 We call excessive sound “deafening” because it overloads our capacity to hear it; such sound stimulates other senses.
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