Forgetting to remember
Fussell is relentless about the Great War’s impact on Europe and, with only a little delay, America. “Lingering” is too weak an adjective to put with “impact.” “Systemic” would get closer to his point—this new kind of war went to the bone and the heart, no way to avoid its effects. Fussell makes the argument that even though we call WWII the “good war,” it was a direct descendant of the Great War’s absurdity—new vistas of suffering made possible by science and technology. One of his key pieces of evidence is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, specifically the scene Fussell treats on p. 34 describing Yossarian’s attempt to help the mortally wounded tailgunner Snowden: “a terrible dynamics of horror, terrified tenderness, and irony.”
As Fussell’s book progresses, the impression grows: Europe was headed toward something cataclysmic and unavoidable because it was completely wrong about the assumptions of its way of life and completely blind to the collision around the next curve, or the next. Santayana’s aphorism about history’s repeating itself has a limit: while we’re busy avoiding this or that thing from our past, the next thing is sneaking up on us. The great Yale scholar Paul de Man spoke of it as “blindness and insight”—our very insights blind us to something else, which turns out to be the thing we most needed to see. “I didn’t see it coming” is another aphorism that will never be a cliché because it will always be true.
The title of Fussell’s chapter 3 is “Adversary Proceedings,” and it has an eerie feel of the present about it. The Great War produced what he calls “gross dichotomizing,” the practice of simplifying conceptions of the enemy, or as we postmoderns would say, the Other: “‘We’ are all here on this side; ‘the enemy’ is over there. ‘We’ are individuals with names and personal identities; ‘he’ is a mere collective entity. We are visible; he is invisible. We are normal; he is grotesque. Our appurtenances are natural; his, bizarre. He is not as good as we are” (75).
Fussell traces this to the trenches, which rendered the enemy anonymous, disembodied, for the first time in the history of war. We hear stories of pilots—technological warriors—feeling detached from the suffering they inflict, but the trenches universalized the experience. I recall the episode in All Quiet on the Western Front when Paul finds himself in a shellhole with a dying French soldier whom he’s stabbed in hand-to-hand fighting. Being so close to the enemy is traumatic for Paul, and he can’t resist finally going through the dying man’s pockets to give him an identity and a history.
The point of that episode in the novel is that Paul’s experience was an anomaly in a faceless war, a freak occurrence; the ordinary state of things was what Fussell calls “binary deadlock, the gross physical polarization, of the trench predicament” (77). Pushed to its extreme over the course of four years, the situation resulted in “the modern versus habit: one thing opposed to another, not with some Hegelian hope of synthesis involving a dissolution of both extremes (that would suggest ‘a negotiated peace,’ which is anathema), but with a sense that one of the poles embodies so wicked a deficiency or flaw or perversion that its total submission is called for” (79). This sounds very familiar.