Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory is a classic in the scholarship of the First World War for many reasons, including his insightful and interdisciplinary approach in telling the history of the war by examining the literature its participants composed. But one standout feature of his book is the focus on the dynamism of cultural memory at work during the First World War and in the long decades after it.
He argues that the men wrote to give expression to the incommunicable. He presents for readers today the voices of authors whose memories may have faded in our culture: Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen, among many others. Conveying the ineffable sits at the heart of Fussell’s approach. How do you express the unimaginable horror of mechanized war, the destruction, the carnage, the apparent meaninglessness? But then again, for the writers among the veterans, how could they not try to express it? These men wrote because they are writers, and they had to write.
But they also wrote to place their experiences in the long chain of cultural memory, that their experiences might be understood and acknowledged. In presenting the lives and literary works of these men, Fussell recalls the literary works of writers who came before them, and who influenced them, such as Bunyan, Hardy, and of course the Romantic poets. Likewise, he demonstrates the vitality of cultural memory in showing how the writers of the First World War profoundly impacted later war-tested writers, such as Mailer, Heller, and Waugh, in expressing wartime experience. Fussell reveals that the writers of the First World War often sought to frame their ineffable experiences of the war in reference to the cultural memory of the past, to give shape, meaning, and intelligibility to their memories. “Unprecedented meaning thus had to find precedent motifs and images” (150).
To take one chapter, Fussell’s “Myth, Ritual, and Romance” explores the First World War as a world of “reinvigorated myths” (124). The romantic quest virtually everyone knew and read was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a tale of the hero, Christian, carrying a great burden during his trials and travels to the Celestial City. This story was referred to in myriad and sundry ways in the works of Anthony French, R.H. Tawney, and Siegfried Sassoon. Likewise, the story of Jesus Christ reverberated throughout the literature of the First World War as soldiers came to see their suffering in light of Christ’s suffering. Fussell writes, “[Christ] is the pattern of all suffering.” For example, Fussell explores the significance of images or references to crucifixion on the front, ranging from the stories of atrocities committed by enemy soldiers, to the suffering of the soldiers themselves, to finding solace in Christ's suffering for all humanity upon the cross. To help readers understand their experiences, to give some attempt at expressing the ineffable, soldiers such as Robert Nichols and Wilfred Owen remember Christ and his suffering. Fussell argues, “In one sense the movement [of the literature] was towards myth, towards a revival of the cultic, the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental, and the universally significant. In short, towards fiction” (142). Fussell’s book is an examination of these reverberating themes of the First World War in the form of memories shared in literature by soldiers who wanted people to glimpse the unimaginable.
Fussell’s work is a vivid reminder that when we read one great work of literature we are witnessing a writer standing on the shoulders of giants. We are reading a writer in conversation with those who have gone before them. The problem is, for those who have not read the writers of the past, for those who have not read the national literature the soldiers of the First World War engaged with, they will not grasp the intended range and depth of meaning. And this means that we will be even further away from understanding the ineffable experience they wish to share. Fussell’s work makes a good case for the importance of a canon and how the experiences of men may be lost if we do not keep reading the great works in our own tradition. Fussell's work suggests that the intergenerational dynamism of cultural memory loses its verve and clarity in a society that does not read well or reads the wrong books.
William Skiles is Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean of Academics at Regent University, in Virginia Beach, Virginia. His research focuses on the cultural and religious history of modern Germany. He is the author of Preaching to Nazi Germany: The Pulpit and the Confessing Church (2023).
