The Great War and Modern Memory

The Great War and Modern Memory - Paul Fussell

This literary study examines how young, impressionable, highly literate Britons described their experience in the trenches of Flanders and Picardy during the First World War.

Fussell explicates the work of soldier-poets and memoirists such as Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. A combat veteran himself, Fussell has insight into war from the infantry soldier’s point of view and examines the effect of prolonged combat on a man’s sense of dignity, individuality, privacy, and meaning in situation where he must accept his death as inevitable, probably in the next week.

In essay-like chapters, Fussell covers themes such as lofty diction (“peril” for “danger”), irony as the hallmark of the modern sensibility, and the complexity of remembering. Fussell also mentions writers we associate with the Second World War, such as Norman Mailer. James Jones, Keith Douglas, and Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow. Doing so, he illustrates the ways in which the rhetoric, imagery, and myth obtained from the First World War have permeated subsequent literary and popular culture.

This 1975 book was an early example of how critics and historians examine the idea that how we remember history is often as, or even more, important than what events we remember. Other books along these lines are  The War Complex: WWII in Our Time – Marianna Torgovnick; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory - David W. Blight;  The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution - Alfred F. Young and  Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America  - Sarah J. Purcell