Sunrise, sunset
Rod, you say in your last comment that America hasn’t lost its belief in Progress, “whether it's the progressive idea of bringing liberal democracy to the benighted Iraqis at the point of a gun, or genetically engineering a Brave New World free of suffering. We believe in human potential in this country. We are optimists to the core. It's what gives America so much cultural vigor, but it's also what leads us into such tragedies.”
This passage shows both sides of the American coin, and you end by asking what I think is the key question for our age on this side of the Atlantic—how do you keep irony from going beyond skepticism to cynicism? By and large, the intellectual elite in our culture have gotten to cynicism (and cannot even defend the idea of value), but it’s not true of the American populace.
Fussell nags at us from somewhere beyond the questions you asked of your colleagues—what fundamental ideas have you lost to the debacle of the Iraq War? He suggests that decisive shifts in attitude and perspective steal upon us unawares and invade our categories of thinking and imagining. This bothers me because it suggests that in some matters of value we don’t have the freedom we’d like to believe in, that in some cases we only react unconsciously to events that we’re responsible for but can’t finally control. We innocently create a zeitgeist that changes everything in ways we couldn’t have guessed.
For one thing, would we have wanted a world in which Fussell’s main point is true: “that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War” (35).
This is a large claim we may want to dispute—I can be ironic or not, as I choose—but it’s not that easy: much of the slogging with Fussell is through his convincing arguments that this war changed the world in ways that are in our bloodstream and right now influencing what comes next. Take a question of nature, specifically of sunrises and sunsets, which he talks about at length in chapter 2.
He points out that attention to sunrise and sunset was actually a late phenomenon, brought to public awareness by the likes of John Ruskin’s very popular Modern Painters, published in the mid-1800’s, right in the middle of the Romantic and Victorian eras. Fussell notes especially a chapter in Ruskin called “Of the Open Sky” and says that painter J.M.W. Turner was “the great exponent of the sky’s moral work” before the war (a Turner exhibition will be featured at the Dallas Museum of Art in February 2008, by the way). Fussell says that “by the time the war began, sunrise and sunset had become fully freighted with implicit aesthetic and moral meaning” (55)
The trenches of WWI changed all that. The two most significant moments of any day in the trenches were the “stand-to” at dawn and again at dusk, when the risk of enemy attack was greatest. Thus, sunrise and sunset were continually before the eyes of the trench soldiers, only they evoked not hope (sunrise) or rest (sunset) but an ironic contrast with the blood and gore in the actual trenches. Whereas at the beginning of the war the rhetoric “signals a constant reaching out towards traditional significance,” revealing “an attempt to make some sense of the war in relation to inherited tradition” (58), by the end of the absurdity, “we are well past the moment when we can turn for comfort to the implications of the day breaking and the shadows fleeing” (58).
The Great War ushered us into a world where, by the time of WWII, “myth is of no avail and where traditional significance has long ago been given up for lost” (58).
“Dawn has never recovered from what the Great War did to it” (63); by 1917 we are prepared for T.S. Eliot’s famous description in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” of evening “spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table.”
The implication of Fussell’s claim is that we shape the world according to the way we view it, and the Great War altered everything of traditional value. How is a future contemplated beyond an experience that destroyed such things as sunrise and sunset? It’s like Newton’s simple revelation that the rainbow is not God’s promise set in the sky but an optical illusion; it no longer has ethical value, ie, value in determining our gestures toward the future. Is that an explanation of why Nature no longer holds a moral check or restraint on us? Maybe we can consciously decide that we no longer believe in this or that, but what would it take to give Nature back to us beyond the “value” of Hallmark sentimentality?