Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination

The Death Drive in Post-World War I British Fiction

Wyatt Bonikowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317055563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Looking closely at both case histories of shell shock and Modernist novels by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, Wyatt Bonikowski shows how the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and the symptoms of war trauma were transformed by the literary imagination. Situating his study with respect to Freud's concept of the death drive, Bonikowski reads the repetitive symptoms of shell-shocked soldiers as a resistance to representation and narrative. In making this resistance part of their narratives, Ford, West, and Woolf broaden our understanding of the traumatic effects of war, exploring the possibility of a connection between the trauma of war and the trauma of sexuality. Parade's End, The Return of the Soldier, and Mrs. Dalloway are all structured around the relationship between the soldier who returns from war and the women who receive him, but these novels offer no prospect for the healing effects of the union between men and women. Instead, the novels underscore the divisions within the home and the self, drawing on the traumatic effects of shell shock to explore the link between the public events of history and the intimate traumas of the relations between self and other.

Chapter 1Introduction: Shell Shock and the Traces of War

DOI: 10.4324/9781315608921-1

The emergence of shell shock during the First World War brought about a dramatic shift in the way we understand the effects of war. Soldiers’ symptoms of amnesia, mutism, anxiety, and various bodily dysfunctions with no apparent organic cause demonstrated that war's effects were not limited to bodily wounds. War also disrupted the mind and the individual's capacity for ordering and making sense of experience. As the twentieth century progressed through a series of wars and violent events, the questions that shell shock raised were posed repeatedly, culminating in the official recognition of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association. Unlike terms such as “shell shock,” “battle fatigue,” and “combat stress,” PTSD implied that not only soldiers but anyone could experience the effects of trauma and that these could emerge not only from war but from any number of events. Now in the twenty-first century, in the post-9/11 world of the war on terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have perhaps become too familiar with the language of trauma, a concept that, as some might argue, has led to a “culture of trauma” in which the term serves as a master explanation for all of our ills. If it hasn't already, “trauma” may become as banalized through repetition as “shell shock,” which has been used recently in the New York Times to describe the reaction of Hollywood executives to the box office sales of the final Harry Potter film (“Times Topics: Harry Potter”) and the state of a broken financial industry (“Times Topics: Presidency of Barack Obama”). It is all the more important, then, to return to the specific context out of which shell shock emerged, to trace the questions about trauma that still plague us to their origins, in order to discover what new light can be shed on them.¹

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¹ In focusing on “shell shock” specifically I am suggesting that one should not accept too readily the notion of a continuum of trauma from shell shock to PTSD. As Tracey Loughran writes in “Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and Its Histories,” “the historical construct of shell shock does not correspond to the historical construct of PTSD” (Loughran 103). The two categories arose from specific historical circumstances that call for careful examination of each and caution us not to assume continuity between them.

In this study, I argue for the importance of the shell-shocked soldier, as a historical and a literary figure, in raising the problem of the effects of war on the mind. The military and medical establishments were disturbed by this specter of traumatized masculinity whose symptoms were visible but the causes of which were difficult to locate. Moreover, the repetitive resistance of symptoms to treatment suggested to some psychoanalysts and military doctors the presence of a powerful force within the self that the war had somehow brought to the surface. What was the relationship between external events and internal, psychical processes? Did violent events affect the mind in the way a bullet or shell fragment wounded the body, or was there some more complex way of understanding this relationship? For the general public, shell-shocked soldiers must have represented something like a fascinating diversion from the seemingly endless casualty lists printed in the newspapers. The dead, as Allyson Booth has written in Postcards from the Trenches, were largely kept out of sight: not only were many bodies unrecoverable, but the Defense of the Realm Act of 1914 (DORA) had also banned photographs of the dead. The invisibility of the corpse, Booth argues, led to the erecting of numerous memorials in an attempt to represent absence, to make absence present: “A corpse can be understood as representing the conflation of absence and presence, embodying proof both that a person is here and will never be here again; so a war memorial can be understood as a civilian perception of war death, one that includes absence but stands in need of presence” (Booth 41). Photographs of shell-shocked soldiers, on the other hand, were printed for public consumption, showing blank faces and twisted limbs, suggesting a haunting excess written on the surface of the body but pointing to a deeper, invisible disturbance.²

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² See my discussion at the beginning of Chapter 2 of the photographs printed in a volume of The Times History of the War in 1916.

The shell-shocked soldier was not dead, but he was not quite alive either since he seemed to be inhabited by some alien force encountered at war and brought home with him. If, as Robert Graves put it, “England was strange to the returned soldier,” it was also true that the returned soldier was strange to England (Graves 171). Jay Winter in Remembering War writes that to civilians who encountered shell-shocked soldiers, “their illnesses were so odd, so frightening, that their presence was always a problem…. To see such men was to encounter a side of war no one wanted to confront” (Winter 59). The return of the shell-shocked soldier, I argue, brought home a disorder that, while more visible than death, presented a problem of representation and memorialization. The symptoms of shell shock included amnesia and mutism, rendering soldiers silent about their war experience, as well as repetitive nightmares of war memories, which often led, as the military psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers observed, to repression and avoidance of thoughts of war. In taking up symptomatic memory loss and speechlessness into the fabric of their novels, writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf turned the figure of the shell-shocked soldier into the embodiment of anxieties the war had brought to England, particularly anxieties about the ability to represent experience to oneself and communicate it to others.

Silence after War

In 1926, in a review in the Criterion of Herbert Read's war memoir In Retreat (1925), Richard Aldington writes of the “torturing sense of something incommunicable” in war experience (Aldington, “Review” 363). There are at least two aspects to this incommunicability. First, war experience has a traumatic aspect: there is something in the nature of modern war experience, both physical and psychical, that resists representation; it overwhelms the senses, disturbs memory, and leaves traces in the form of disruptive symptoms that persist years after the events have passed. Second, war experience has a social aspect, which is linked to the traumatic: the intensely private experience of war cuts the individual soldier off from those who have no experience of war, creating an unbridgeable gap between combatants and non-combatants. There is, we might say, a silence within the experience of war, a sense of something that cannot be spoken or represented either to oneself or others. This silence manifests itself most emphatically upon the soldier's return from war, in his encounter with a home that has become strange.

Aldington describes the effort of the soldier who, on leave from the front, attempts to relate his experiences to those who have not experienced war:

For the first day or two on leave one would make serious efforts at communicating with the other sort of human being. Sometimes the efforts almost seemed to be meeting with success, there was quite a sympathetic atmosphere. Then some extraordinary and irrelevant question-assertion—“But surely our men are much braver than the Germans?”—would shatter it. It wasn't a question of anyone's being brave; it was a question of trying to communicate the incommunicable. There was no ratio between the two races of men—those, I mean, in the line and those who had never touched it. I say “touched” because it was so physically penetrating. (363)

Aldington's metaphor of “touching” the front line has an oddly paradoxical quality, since touch does not necessarily imply physical penetration. Touch may be seen as a form of reality-testing, where the border of the body meets the external world and subject comes into contact with object in order to judge the relation between them. But in war experience, for Aldington, touching the line means the violation of the body's boundaries, as if the normative processes for judging the relationship between body and world have collapsed and the outside has penetrated the inside prior to any attempt to defend oneself against it.³ Having been penetrated by war, the soldier feels as if it inhabits him, unlike those at home who have no knowledge of war, whose perspectives have been shaped by propaganda and censorship. It is, Aldington suggests, as if combatants and non-combatants are separate “races” with no possibility of relation.

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³ Santanu Das's Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature examines the various representations and meanings of touch in writings of soldiers and civilians, men and women. Cathy Caruth describes the repetitive nightmares of those who have experienced trauma “as the absolute inability of the mind to avoid an unpleasurable event that has not been given psychic meaning in any way. In trauma, that is, the outside has gone inside without any mediation” (Caruth 59).

Aldington wrote this review before the “flood of war books” arrived in 1928 and of which his own Death of a Hero would be a part.⁴ Perhaps the silence of the years following the end of the war reinforced a sense of the incommunicability of its experience.⁵ And yet, even in the midst of the flood of memoirs and diaries and histories and novels, the notion of a peculiar silence persists. In Herbert Read's own review in 1929 of six war books, he quotes from Rudolph Binding's Aus dem Kriege (1925), published in English as A Fatalist at War (1929). Binding relates a story of one of the “strangely silent folk among us,” a Captain who speaks of his experience of battle in only a few words, all the while seeming to hold “a picture inside his mind [that] was keeping him from speaking” (qtd in Read 546). Like Aldington, Binding understands war experience as something that inhabits the soldier, the incommunicable picture attesting to a traumatic real that resists speech. “[O]nce again I realized,” Binding continues, “that experience makes one silent, or, at least, sparing of words. The history of this war will never be written. Those who can write it will remain silent. Those who write have not experienced it” (546). Only those who have experienced war would be able to capture its truth, Binding suggests, but these same cannot speak or write of it. Here, the ability to write about war is contingent upon not having experienced it. The quotation raises the question of whether the “spate of war-books,” in Read's phrase, marks the end of this silence or whether something in the experience of war remains silent and resistant to representation even while more and more war books continue to flood the market. Is it possible that those who did undergo the experience of war may have also, in some sense, not experienced it, may have missed the experience, as Cathy Caruth has characterized the experience of trauma (Caruth 62)? And if so, do traces of this missed experience, and of the silence surrounding the experience, somehow appear or make themselves felt in the writings of these soldiers?

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⁴ The quoted phrase is from Walter Benjamin's “The Storyteller” (1936), in which the mute soldier returned from war stands as a poignant example of the incommunicable nature of modern experience: “What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth” (84).

⁵ Samuel Hynes writes in A War Imagined of the 10-year gap before “the flood of war books,” “English publishers were persuaded that their readers were tired of war writing, or at least of writing of a realistic, anti-monumental kind, and books that are now considered classics of English war literature were refused publication” (Hynes 298). Hynes discusses the difficulties of Herbert Read and Ford Madox Ford in getting their books In Retreat and No Enemy, respectively, published in the first year after the war ended. See, too, Hynes's discussion of A.P. Herbert's The Secret Battle (1919) and Herbert Read's Naked Warriors, 304–7. Hynes writes, “in 1919 the English public was evidently not ready for the story that Herbert had to tell, and though the book received some favourable reviews … it did not sell. When it was reissued in 1928 the public was ready” (306). See also 423–5 for a discussion of the “conspiracy of silence” before the major prose works of the First World War were published.

For Herbert Read, the publication of war books means the 10-year silence is over, a silence sustained not by some existential quality in the soldier's own experience but by the public's unwillingness to listen. If silence surrounding war experience attests to a war neurosis, Read locates the neurosis not on the side of the soldier and the experience of war but on the side of the public and its own sense of shame about its responsibility in supporting a war that resulted in the death and wounding of millions: “It must have been the experience of many men, when the war was over and they came back with minds seared with the things they had seen, to find a civilian public weary and indifferent, and positively unwilling to listen. The public was, indeed, suffering from a war-neurosis far worse than any the active soldier had contracted” (544). Read's provocative statement seems to imply that soldiers returned willing, and perhaps needing, to speak about their experiences, but were silenced by the public's “shame-neurosis” (544–5). With the distance of ten years, the public's sense of shame has lessened and a new generation has become interested in hearing about the war; the spate of war books means that soldiers are taking advantage of the new willingness to listen.

Both Paul Fussell and Samuel Hynes have written of the negative view soldiers held of the public during the war, an attitude reflected in both Aldington's and Read's reviews. Soldiers had the tendency to hold the public in contempt for its lack of knowledge about the war, sustained by the censorship and propaganda of the government and media. This attitude reinforced the notion of the special and extraordinary nature of the battlefield experience, as opposed to the safe and ignorant lives of civilians in England. Antagonism on the part of soldiers toward women and “Old Men” who supported the war split off the public as utterly separate from the damaged masculinity victimized by their support.⁶ Recent scholarship has helped to expose the gender ideology sustaining this attitude by broadening the notion of “war experience” to include the experiences of civilians, especially women, during wartime. This scholarship has enabled us, without reducing the enormity of the battlefield experience, to recognize that civilians also suffer from the traumas of war. Trudi Tate, for instance, examines the idea of “civilian war neuroses” brought about by either direct contact with wartime violence, such as bombing raids, or more indirectly, through hearing of the deaths of loved ones, reading letters sent home from the front, or being overwhelmed by war reporting in newspapers, casualty lists, and “war-films,” the images of which Jenny, the narrator of Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier, revisits in nightmares (Tate 11–15). Rebecca West's letters of 1917 contain descriptions of German Gotha aircraft dropping bombs on London while she tries to find a safe place for herself and her young son: “I suddenly found,” she writes to Sylvia Lynd in October, “that though I had never been consciously afraid I was simply gibbering and swept my young off to Watford without quite knowing what I was doing” (Scott, Selected Letters 28). H.D. linked her miscarriage in 1915 to the sinking of the passenger liner the Lusitania, which resulted in the deaths of almost 1200 civilians (Tate 10). Rather than maintain a false dichotomy between the “two races” of combatant and non-combatant, we must acknowledge that, however different and incommensurate their experiences of wartime, a certain link exists between these two groups based on the traumatic nature of war experience.

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⁶ On the hostility between soldiers and civilians, see Fussell 86–90. On “Old Men” and “damaged men” see Hynes, A War Imagined, 246–8 and 304–7, respectively. For a nuanced examination of the relationship between soldiers and women, see Susan R. Grayzel 11–49.

We may regard Herbert Read's view of the burden the public bore for the soldier's silence with some skepticism as a projection of the soldier's own repression of war experience, to borrow W.H.R. Rivers's phrase. But even so, Read's diagnosis of a civilian war neurosis goes some way toward extending the effects of war to the home front, in his sense that civilians are just as capable of suffering from the psychical defense mechanisms of repression and denial. While Aldington sees a complete separation between combatants and non-combatants, Read understands that while soldiers may have had their minds seared by war, civilians were affected with their own silence and psychical resistances. In fact, if we take Read's and Aldington's views together, we might say that, on the one hand, the war neuroses of soldiers and civilians contributed to a lack of communication between the two groups, but, on the other, they also mutually reinforced one another, as if the relationship between the two groups depended upon the conflict, perhaps irresolvable, between speaking and listening. If there is a relationship between combatants and non-combatants, then, it may be best described as a traumatic relation, one fraught with conflict and miscommunication.

One of the tasks of this study is to examine this traumatic relation between soldiers and civilians, men and women, front line and home front, by focusing on the figure of the shell-shocked soldier and his encounters with those at home. These encounters must be viewed not just from the side of the soldier, for whom home has become strange, but also from the side of those who receive him, since they also receive the war that inhabits him as an incommunicable and perhaps incurable silence. The persistent silence surrounding war experience, defined broadly here as the experience of wartime whether in the trenches or at home, structures the attempts at communication between t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Shell Shock and the Traces of War
• 2 The Invisible Wound: Shell Shock and Psychoanalysis
• 3 Transports of a Wartime Impressionism: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End
• 4 The “Passion of Exile”: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier
• 5 “Death was an attempt to communicate”: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
• 6 Conclusion: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the Death Drive
• Bibliography
• Index