Rats, Gas and Shell-Shock

The "tea-tray" in Parade's End

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:50:00 +0000

One certain literary source to which Madox is alluding with the multi-layered iterations of the Tea Tray image in Parade's End is this poem from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll:

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat,
How I wonder what you're at:
Up above the world you fly
Like a tea tray in the sky.

On the Novel: W. Somerset Maugham

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:09:00 +0000

One major writer well in our period, but not associated with Great War fiction -- and certainly, deliberately, not with Modernism -- is W. Somerset Maugham. (At the outbreak of the War he served with a British Red Cross unit in France before taking up a far more interesting assignment as secret agent in Geneva and then Petrograd.)
I was idly looking at an abridged edition of his masterpiece Of Human Bondage today and found Maugham's 'Introduction' to it absolutely fascinating, and an important statement on the nature of the novel. It is worth posting here in full: I hope you have the chance to read it and find it, as I do, memorable.
CLICK HERE TO READ.

Modernism & the Impossible Present

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:51:00 +0000

A student last term sent me this useful poetic definition of Modernism:

"[M]odernism is the struggle of the future to free itself from the clinging hands of a dying past"- from "Modernism as a World-Wide Movement." A. Eustace Haydon, The Journal of Religion, January 1925.

You will notice the support this lends to my repeated thesis in lecture about Modernism's troubled position vis à vis the temporal present -- yet one more concept that analogises to shell-shock.

Copy-Editing Symbols

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:58:00 +0000

Update: third hotlink now fixed: thanks to "Editor" for the tip.

Follow this link for a legend of the standard copy-editing symbols. These can be used during successive editing of essay drafts.

More here. And here.

"Parade's End" -- Likenesses

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:20:00 +0000

From left to right, "McMaster" (Joseph Conrad), "Christopher Tietjens" (Ford Madox Ford), and "Sylvia Tietjens" (Violet Hunt.)

And the Weather is...

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:06:00 +0000

So, the weather, from my office today, in mid-March is....

Mr. Gore? Mr. Gore?

('Cosmic irony.')

And, yes, weather is not climate. We should all remember that...

"Causes" of the First World War

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:21:00 +0000

As argued in lecture, there was no cause to the First World War. The popular factoid that the death of a minor (though pleasant and competant) European royal in a dour Balkan capital caused the West to immolate itself in four years of a Dantean Inferno in French ditches is not false but merely silly on its face.
Talking to a classfellow in an Office Hour this week, it came to me that attributing a cause to the War is not an empirical or academical problem, but a historical-conceptual failure to use the term "cause" properly.
Before the putative Enlightenment, it was understood that there are four causes, delineated by Aristotle in his Physics, that together explain an event.

Material cause: the physical properties involved.
Formal cause: the aggregate of underlying properties which amount to its unique identity.
Efficient cause: the initial motion or action which began the event.
Final cause: the event's function or purpose -- its end.)

Take a simple illustrative example. I am about to pot the black in a game of snooker. Thwack! It's in; I win yet again. Material cause is the solid constrution of the table, balls, &c.: if the cue ball were tissue and the black jello, the event (the potting of the black) would not take place. Formal cause is the rules of billiards, the shape of the table, cue, rack, and all the other contributing elements that shape and frame -- i.e. that form -- the event. Efficient cause, of course, is the mechanics behind the cue hitting the cue ball. And final cause is Stephen Ogden winning the match and having his universal supremacy at billiards re-affirmed for posterity . Or something like that.

Applying, then, the robust pre-Enlightenment concept of causation to the problem of how and why the First World War began we see at once its great explanatory power as well as the relative feebleness of the Englightenment's shrunken understanding of "cause". The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by an inept Bosnian terrorist is efficient cause of the First World War: and a good efficient cause it is. But being stuck in Englightenment-Cause thinking has trapped the generations of post-War scholars in an impossible search for more, or for bigger, or for better efficient causes: impossible, because no efficient cause and no amount or quality of efficient causes can ever fully explain an event. Now, of course, if the event should happen to be small enough, and if the mind contemplating the case be sufficiently bereft of imagination (or, it might be said, of rigour), then an efficient cause can seem adequate. But events on a large or more significant scale reveal the impotence of the Enlightenment-Cause model.
Material cause of the War includes 1914 Europe's demographics, military technology & ordnance, national-geographical, and perhaps the crossover network of treaties in effect. Its formal cause can be summed up as the ethnic, cultural and political histories of the nations and Empires involved. And final cause was the Prussian militarism shaping, from cultural first principle, the ends and endeavours of that implacably bellicose Empire's leaders, diplomats, soldiery and citizenry alike toward hegemony as a national right, and thus to war. (Insipid utterances of debased clerks in our day moot other final causes than the German: banality of intellect and impotence with fact is a certain sign of an Age of La Trahison des Clercs.

Ford Madox Ford in Parade's End puts one conviction of WWI's final cause -- the Tories' -- into the mouth of the protagonist Christopher Tietjens; and that would be the altruism of England. Tietjens is Ford's literary manifestation of Tory England, so when it is said of him that "....it is, in fact, asking for trouble if you are more altruist than the society that surrounds you," [Penguin, 207] it is actually England that has asked for trouble (and will, in fact, be smashed -- insofar as its Tory character is concerned) by entering the War altruistically to defend the "surrounding" societies of the Belgians and the French primarily for the sake of (to Madox Ford, cricket-inspired) Duty.

[Tietjens'] mind was at rest because there was going to be a war. From the first moment of his reading the paragraph about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand he had known that, calmly and with assurance. Had he imagined that this country would come in he would not have known a mind at rest. He loved this country for the run of the hills, the shape of its elm trees and the way the heather, running uphill to the skyline, meets the blue of the heavens. War for this country could only mean humiliation, spreading under the sunlight, an almost invisible pall over the elms, the hills, the heather, like the vapour that spread from .... oh, Middlesbrough! .... But of war for us [i.e. Britain] he had no fear. He saw our Ministry sitting tight till the opportune moment, and then grabbing a French channel port or a few German colonies as the price of neutrality.

And to conclude, there was indeed no "cause" for the First World War: but there were, as for everything, four causes.
Update: Click this link for a typical school history attempting to explain the First World War in terms limited to efficient causes. It is actually a fairly sophisticated attempt of its type, differentiating as it does between "long term" and "short term" [efficient] causes.

Of Mrs. Melrose Ape

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:20:00 +0000

For a winningly burlesque website on all things Aimee Semple McPherson, the original of Evelyn Waugh's parodic creation Mrs. Melrose Ape, click here. The original, by the bye, was Canadian-born ....

On Cynicism

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:56:00 +0000

À propos our discussion in Monday's lecture on cynicism, here is Douglas Coupland:

"I am the most uncynical person on Earth," he says, earnestly. "I'm ironic. I admit that. I'm Joe Irony. But people confuse irony with cynicism, which is like battery acid. It just wrecks everything."

Final Essay

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:31:00 +0000

The Final Paper -- three thousand five hundred words due April 6th in the Instructor's Department mailbox -- is open topic. You have every encouragement to exercise your creativity in the choice of topic, which will be directly responsive to course themes, ideas or lecture information and will engage any two course texts in manner which advances academic understanding of the material and its historical and in intellectual context.

Imagism & Vorticism (& Fascism)

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:47:00 +0000

Here are the links I mentioned in lecture: of Imagism, and a scan of the Blast vanity publications of 1914-15.
Let me repeat that I entirely reprudiate, deplore & deprecate the loathesome and inexcusible anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound that so evidently animated the Blast tract.

Nature of Modernism

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:58:00 +0000

There is a certain uncertainty about the nature of the concept of modernism: the dominant literary mode of 'Twentieth Century British Literature to 194. We have explored its nature as the course has progressed, but you may additionally want to read this engagement with the issue of modernism & personal identity, especially important in Woolf and Madox Ford, from a Marxist angle: especially the key passage quoted here.

Modernism is a term used to lump together an enormous body of artistic work in all forms--poetry, cinema, painting, architecture--that was produced roughly between the 1890s and the mid 20th century. General definitions are difficult, but modernist work tends to be formally experimental and highly self conscious--think of the Cubist paintings of Picasso or the 'flow of consciousness' of James Joyce's novels. Gareth Jenkins is right to emphasise dislocation and fragmentation as characteristics of modernism. The 'high period' of modernism from 1900-1930 was of course a time of unmatched upheaval, in which the promises of the bourgeois revolution were finally shattered by war, slump and workers' revolt. The accelerating development of technology and the penetration of mass production techniques into every sphere of life added to a deep sense of uncertainty. In Perry Anderson's words, 'European modernism in the first years of this century thus flowered in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present and a still unpredictable political future'.
It has been very tempting for Marxist criticism to glorify modernism given its origin in such a period of upheaval, and its--at least formal--rejection of the past. After the Russian Revolution the intellectuals of Proletkult argued for a rejection of all previous culture, claiming that modernist techniques were the basis for a brave new working class art. Such a simple minded response misses the contradictory nature of all modernism. Gareth is right to point out that modernist work often appears as a retreat from society. Its emphasis on dislocation and alienation could open the way to a kind of rampant subjectivity. His criticism of Virginia Woolf, for example, is telling: 'one cannot escape the feeling, beneath the richness of language, of artistic impoverishment which follows from impoverished grasp of social reality'.

Eveleyn Waugh's Prophecy

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:49:00 +0000

Adam Fenwyck-Symes, writing as "Mr. Chatterbox" creates a person -- Mrs. Andrew Quest -- in his column for the sole purpose of writing gossip about her. In 1930, when Waugh wrote Vile Bodies, this was high satire.
It is now real-life.

Sony pays $1.5m over fake critic.
A judge has finalised a settlement in which film studio Sony will pay $1.5m (£850,000) to film fans after using a fake critic to praise its movies. In 2001, ads for films including Hollow Man and A Knight's Tale quoted praise from a reviewer called David Manning, who was exposed as being invented.

Diana Mitford-Guiness-Mosley

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:45:00 +0000

Careful step is needed through biographical sewage, and the prophylactic scholarship only just keeps back the diseased vapour.

From a succinct and comprehensive article in the online Telegraph at the death of the odious Hitlerite Diana Mosley:

One of the funny, charming, intelligent and glamorous Mitford sisters; a denizen of the "Hons' cupboard''; a dedicatee of Vile Bodies; a beautiful woman whom Churchill called "Dinamite''; an inspired interior decorator; a steadfast friend to a wide galère (including some Jews); a fine autobiographer and loving mother; yet Diana Mosley was also a woman who could - when she was inadvisedly invited to appear on Desert Island Discs - describe Adolf Hitler in almost wholly positive terms.

When Evelyn Waugh dedicated Vile Bodies to Bryan and Diana Guinness, the future Lady Mosely was still married to the likeable Guinness heir -- later a novelist, playwrite and poet -- and one of society's belles. This was a decade before she would abandon the future 2nd Baron Moyne and, in Joseph Goebbels' front room with Adolf Hitler the Best Man, marry Sir Oswald Mosley; founder and head of the British Union of Fascists; ordinary hero and wounded veteran of the Trenches; buffoon; sycophant; imitator; rank traitor who would have been shot had he not been English and thus forced to suffer, for him, fate worse than death -- his countrymen's derisory farce, ridicule, mockery and lampoon (indeed, imortalised in ignomy by the Master, P.G. Wodehouse.)

Mid Term Topics

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:59:00 +0000

For the mid-term essay, select one of the following three topics and write a two-thousand word essay, using the stipulation in the English Department's published Style Guide, to be handed in the lecture of March 11th.

The General has a narrative structure that, matching on the surface the convention of popular fiction, seemingly ignores the rejection by literary Modernists of the facile narrative voice in literature. C.S. Forester, however, writing the decade following the ascendancy of High Modernism, is a subtle and deceptively complex author, well-aware of the new artistic range afforded by the Modernist experiments. Support this claim with a textual analysis that interprets Forester's narrative as being informed and shaped by some of the specific devices and methods of Modernists such as Woolf and Madox Ford.
Explain how Rebecca West uses the well-worn literary device of the unreliable narrator in a radically inventive way to express the concepts of social class, shell shock and sexual deviancy in explicitly Freudian terms. Limit your argument to a rigourous analysis of the text of The Return of the Soldier.
As we have seen, Jacob's Room can be understood to be formed in a telescoping fashion, where each successive structural component of the text is a macrocosm of the microcosm which precedes it; starting from the smallest microcosm which is the title, to the first sentence, then the first paragraph, then first section, then first chapter, and so on. Show, then, how Virginia Woolf designed the book as a whole as the ultimate textual macrocosm for all the sections preceding it.

On Virginia Woolf & Jokes about God

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:52:00 +0000

I thought that this past exchange with a student regarding Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room may be of wider benefit.

I am hoping to use Jacob's Room my paper topic and I came to the part in the novel about the Scilly Isles and how they "shake the very foundations of scepticism and lead to jokes about God" (42). I remember you had said something in lecture that provided a lot of insight into this passage and I can't remember exactly what it was, perhaps you could remind me?

Well, on the principles of the Freudianity which underlies Jacob's Room, laughter is in part how human beings react to uncomfortable encroachment or threats or perceived danger to deeply-seated beliefs & values. In the jargon of Freud, this is covered under the concept of tabou. Thus, where the rises of the Scilly Isles invoke the sense of the noumenal which similar British phenomena are recorded to have done through so much of the nation's literature and folk tales, forms of disbelief (such as scepticism) among vestigal Victorian and Edwardian casts of mind are challenged. One result of this, then, is internal discomfort, impinging on the individual's idea of God -- still strong by virtue of its historical foundation in the national character -- and producing uncomfortable jokes as a (Freudian) means of dealing with the inner dis-ease.

Modernism Is ... OCEL

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:33:00 +0000

From the Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Margaret Drabble:

MODERNISM: an omnibus term for a number of tendencies in the arts which were prominent in the first half of the twentieth century: in English literature it is particularily associated with the writings of V. Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Pound Joyce, Yeats F.M. Ford & Conrad. Broadly, modernism reflects the impact upon literature of the psychology of Freud and the anthropology of J.G. Frazer as expressed in The Golden Bough.... it was marked by a persistent experimentalism; it is 'the tradition of the new' in Harold Rosenberg's phrase. It rejected the traditional .... Although so diverse in its manifestation, it was recognised as representing as H. Read wrote (ArtNow, 1933) , 'an abrupt break with all tradition ...'Modernist works (for instance, the poetry of Elot & Pound) may have a tendency to dissolve into a chaos of sharp atomistic impressions.

Modernist Diction

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:33:00 +0000

A recent article elaborating one cause of the elevated diction in High Modernist literature is one James Miller's "Is Bad Writing Necessary" and can be read online at the Lingua Franca mirror site here.

WWI Photographs

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:01:00 +0000

I came across this website with photographs of the First World War that strongly evoke a sense of the trench experience, due in part to their high quality. It is on an American history site, but their are many photographs of the English soldiery, some of the Germans, Italians & one Canadian (the latter taken in the aftermath of the Halifax explosion.)

By the bye, Canadian author Hugh MacLennan has a novel set around the Halifax explosion, Barometer Rising.

Course Film Choice

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 02:57:00 +0000

There are some appealing alternatives for a film to be viewed throughout the second half of our course. Here are precis with hotlinks to reviews, clips, &c.

The Return of the Soldier. 1982: An strong cast and effectively set and costumed as a period piece. Faithful, more or less, to the surface of Rebecca West's masterpiece.
A Quiet on the Western Front. 1930. An artistic triumph of the film medium, this depiction of the German side in the Great War has matchless evocation of trench warfare. The film is captivating and fast paced, without gore.
Passchendaele. 2008. Hard not to respect a hard-working Canadian who rises above the limitations of the acting profession to independently craft an homage to his family heritage and a well-intentioned contribution to Candian identity. The film combines war and romance.
Bright Young Things. 2003. Stephen Fry's adaptation of our course novel, Evelyn Waugh's between-war satire Vile Bodies. Comedic with a move to tragedy, the movie is an implied satire on the Paris Hilton set. Evocative of the period, and redolent (to use a synesthetic adjective) of many of the novel's ideas.

So, I'll hear your preferences this week in class.

Reading Break

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:54:00 +0000

All teasing aside, my best wishes for an enjoyable and fun-filled reading break: you are all doung great work in this class and deserve it for that alone. For your additional enjoyment, classfellow Dana W. sent me the following very apt and helpful reference from "my-day" former punk Morrissey (correctly dating me to the late 70s...):

....I came across some Morrissey lyrics that fit very well with your lecture on Monday. In the song "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get," there is a line that reads "I am now an essential part of your mind's landscape / whether you care or do not." This relates to your point about how we all make impressions on each other that fundamentally change our consciousness.

Freudian Slip...ers

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:27:00 +0000

From classfellow Brett J., this link to his Freudian slip...ers -- a Freudian slip being, as he gives the exquisite quip, 'saying one thing but meaning your mother.'

Update: classfellow Joyce N. sends along the link to "The Unemployed Philosophers' Guild" which has online sales of the Freudian slippers & more.

Support for Course Thesis on WWI

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:10:00 +0000

The indispensable Arts & Letters Daily has linked two articles that support my course thesis about the WWI horrors: one from a centre-left journal and one from a centre-right.

From the left, you heard this nearly verbatim in our opening lecture:

It is now conventional wisdom that the First World War and its senseless, unimaginable slaughter was the Ur-catastrophe of the last century. It brutalized a Europe that before 1914, though deeply flawed by injustice and arrogance, also contained the promise of great emancipatory movements, championing the demands for social justice, for equality, for women’s emancipation, for all of human rights. The war radicalized Europe; without it, there would have been no Bolshevism and no Fascism. In the postwar climate and in the defeated and self-deceived Germany, National Socialism flourished and ultimately made it possible for Hitler to establish the most popular, the most murderous, the most seductive and the most repressive regime of the last century.

From the right, an analogy between England before, after and during the First World War with the United States of America today:

At the beginning of the 20th century, the British Empire was an unopposed hyperpower (much as the United States has been since 1989). As historian Colin Cross observes: "In terms of influence it was the only world power" .... But after the conclusion of the first World War, Britain's imperial psyche began to fracture" .... Why did it all crumble? Several interrelated reasons - among them the grisly fact that England had lost virtually an entire generation of future leaders in the trenches of Europe. But another important cause was the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites .... In an important sense, the British Empire's strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.

Most pertinent for us in the article from which this quotation is taken -- most especially in relation to Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End -- is the writer's premis (and our own course's thesis!) that England was irrecoverably ruined by the First World War: the Great War, that is, still directly effects all that is English -- its literature very much included.

Images of a Forgotten War

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:01:00 +0000

The Royal Canadian Legion gives a link to an excellent NFB website dedicated to remembrance of "the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the Great War"-- "Images of a Forgotten War."
Click through to the pop up menu and select from various types of material. Best for me was the now-digitised archive of Film from the Great War.

Edwardian echoes

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Stephen Ogden) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:54:00 +0000

If we keep our ears to the ground, we can hear echoes, though faint, of some of the attitudes from Edwardian and Georgian times in contemporary English culture.

Here are two examples.

The perennial and deep-rooted English attitude that all the world's troubles are ultimately the result of French perfidity or decadence is evident in Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton's new book Holy Terror. The left-wing (formerly Manchester) Guardian describes Eagleton as "the High Priest of Lit Crit .... a Catholic-turned-Marxist from a working-class background." Nonetheless, Eagleton's thesis in Holy Terror is that "Terrorism itself may be a new concept – it arose with modernity in the French revolution."

And in general, the English perennially fret about decadence. Theodore Dalrymple merely continues a type. And it's in the water there. Madonna - yes, that Madonna - has now married an Englishman and is evolving herself into a model of English country life propriety: literally, modelling herself on the cover of Ladies Home Journal.
The English press have re-christened her with the very English name "Madge." And in due course she has delivered a screed against .... decadence: "Madonna warns how people 'are going to go to hell, if they don't turn from their wicked behavior;" protests that "most priests are gay;" and, waxing eschatological, declares that "'The Beast' is the modern world that we live in."

And it is like way that the English class system, so strong a concern in our course texts, will persist despite official policy designed to eradicate it.