Points Summer Book Club

Welcome back, all who participated in the blog on All Quiet on the Western Front, and welcome to those joining us now for Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. I look forward to some good discussion during the next two weeks, and we might aim for roughly a chapter a day, although we can certainly move back and forth as we want. A background note: in addition to winning numerous awards when it appeared in 1975, Fussell’s book is also on the Modern Library’s Best 100 Non-fiction Books of the 20th Century list.

Fussell’s consistent aim in The Great War and Modern Memory is to show how that unprecedented war came to be and is still imprinted on the collective imagination of the West. For Fussell, it is not that war of such scope and magnitude seeped into every corner of European life—clearly it did so—but that it permeated Western consciousness, remaking categories of thought and perception and changing our very language.

The Great War and All Quiet complement and shed light on each other in many ways. A common theme appearing early in each book is the irony of this particular war and, by extension, of all war. On p. 8 Fussell writes: “Every war is ironic, because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. In the Great War eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort, had been shot.” A little further on: “But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth which had dominated the public consciousness for a century. It reversed the Idea of Progress.” Fussell then goes on summarize the war in the next ten pages, ending with the death total—8.5 million—for the Central Powers and the Allies.

Is it conceivable to us that this could be—that all the cumulative promise of Enlightenment thinking and innovation since the time of Copernicus and the age of exploration could be overwhelmed by a single war, however big? If Fussell is right, then what was the Modern Age built on that it could be both so blind to the war it brought about and so wide of the mark in its vision of the future? This has always vexed me, and I hope we can give it a little thought since it’s the first premise of Fussell’s book. Have we lost forever the idealistic “innocence” that he says had reached its peak just before WWI?