The essential rupture in "modern memory," he argued, came with the Great War, as high- and low-mimetic gave way to ironic tragedy, in literature and in history. And I did keep slogging toward the end despite my waning interest.
By the author of The Great War of 1914-18 was called “The War to End All Wars” – though it wasn’t, and it didn’t. "35 "Morale," civilian or military, was simply the creation of the evil geniuses of Madison Avenue, who would become the scourge of the postwar con- sumerist United States. Fussell makes draws some very broad conclusions that aren't necessarily convincing given the evidence that he cites. "36As in The Great War and Modern Memory, soldiers in Fussell's new book appeared far more often as the victims of violence than its perpetrators. Need help?
: Cambridge University Press, 1995).Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mirnoire (Paris: F. Alcan, 1925), and La Mimoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950).16. Archival research became a wonderfully self-fulfilling prophecy. To him, the writing of history is not a science but distinctly one of the humanities, and only those with deep feelings for the human predicament should try it.
Through some stroke of good fortune, I read his work first before beginning my other readings on WWI. Oxford could have added that no book did more to reawaken historical interest in the conflict of 1914-1918, and to get historians thinking about the Great War as more than one long prelude to World War 11. He is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society, or living in a world where such injustices are an inescapable part of exi~tence. Plainly something both- ered them beyond how well or poorly Fussell practiced the "scientific" or "empirical" aspects of the historian's craft. Despite the accolades, this fine work is for specialized tastes.
Fussell lamented in the Afterword written for the 2000 edition: "The last twenty-five years have seen the English literary tradition grow increasingly irrelevant, a fact seeming to suggest that lit- erary relevance and world political and military power are perhaps two faces of the same thing." If the Japanese tortured and killed the wounded, then cut off their penises and stuffed them in the mouths of the corpses, the Americans extracted teeth from living victims and sent home Japanese skulls as souvenirs. No soldier in the book could both detest "chickenshit" and remain committed to winning the war as a struggle with imperfect but real ideological significance. The Great War and Modern Memory is not perfect, but it almost seems ungrateful to mention it. At times it reads like someone's brilliant dissertatioBefore tackling Paul Fussell's book, it's useful to understand that this is in no way a conventional history of World War I. "What could be truer, after all," she rhetorically observed, "than a subject's own account of what he or she has lived through?" It proved a solid foundation to pursue the poetry and fiction that came from those horrible years, and also a foundation for works that dealt with geopolitical and military events.
There is a straightforward relationship here among words, litera- ture (at least as decoded by the critic), and reality.
And civilians could support the war-its deprivations, its demands in the work place, and most of all the sacri- fice of their loved ones-only if they took gullibly and at face value what pro- paganda told them.Such a message proved deeply at variance with the way American society wanted to remember World War I1 at the end of the twentieth century. Consequently, Fussell can allow himself breathtahng assumptions that no historian would ever seek to prove or disprove. Heroes supe- rior to ourselves who cannot master these circumstances appear in the high- mimetic mode, the predominant mode of epic and tragedy. I recommended it to a hard core history/literature buff (a Professor nonetheless) who was equally taken with this little book's scope and depth. Living veterans of the conflict were still a visible but aged and gradually fading presence, much like World War 11 veterans today.
Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends."'
Fussell read this photograph as summarizing the message of his book, and the moral of his story: "I came across this picture by sheer accident in the [Imperial] War Museum, and sensed that the boy's expression was unmistakably "twentieth century." I, (1994), 67.object worth attaining, if it requires the caste-ridden, power-abusing, chicken- shit-worshipping British and US armies to accomplish it. "36As in The Great War and Modern Memory, soldiers in Fussell's new book appeared far more often as the victims of violence than its perpetrators. Historians of war also know better than to dispute the transformative nature of experience on the battlefield. Fussell read this photograph as summarizing the message of his book, and the moral of his story: "I came across this picture by sheer accident in the [Imperial] War Museum, and sensed that the boy's expression was unmistakably "twentieth century." Omnipresent death, mutilation, horrible loss of friends and comrades, we have been instructed, ulti- mately defy verbal, aural, or visual representation-most of all by those who have not lived through it.