For the Duration: Global War and Satire in England and the United States
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Date
2015-02-19
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
“For the Duration” moves to unsettle some regnant assumptions about the ways in which historical experience shaped the formal choices and political investments of modernist writers. While recent critical work has focused on the influence of the Great War either on non-combatant authors or on minor memoirists and poets of the trenches, little attention has been given to the war’s effect on modernist authors who saw combat and thereafter crafted narratives distinguished by their satirical innovation. In my first three chapters, I concentrate on works by Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Evelyn Waugh to suggest that these soldier-authors’ experience of temporal duration in war led them not, as one might expect, to emphasize Bergsonian durée in the novelistic presentation of experience but rather to reject it. Concerned that Bergsonism and its literary offshoots offered no foothold for critical engagement with post-war reality, these writers dwelt on the importance of clock-time, causality, and material reality in providing a grounding for historical responsibility; moreover, they strove to exploit the political potential of satire, a genre that has a peculiarly temporal character.
Satire was especially attractive to these writers, I argue, not only because they saw in the interwar world a dispiriting unconcern with the causes and consequences of World War I but also because the genre’s dependence on barbed, multi-front attacks mimicked a key feature of modern combat. Relying on recent psychiatric and psychological studies, I argue that soldier-authors’ attention to elapsing clock-time reflects a protective hypervigilance that, when redeployed in satirical form, enables the meticulous exposure of contemporary social and political vices. Noting as well the extreme length of these works, which I classify as “durational satires,” I suggest that their effectiveness largely depends upon their ability to import the experience of wartime duration into their structures and thus to make the act of reading an exercise in maintaining critical attention while managing personal exhaustion. In my final chapter, I demonstrate that this correlation between the duration of combat and the duration of the reading experience extends beyond English satires written in the wake of World War I. Turning to the novels of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, I argue that durational satires also appeared in the United States in the aftermath of World War II.
First Reader: Douglas Mao; Second Reader: Eric Sundquist
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Keywords
World War, Satire