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Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi
51, 1 (2011) 65-88
IN SEARCH OF THE UNCANNY IN THE NARRATIVES OF
THE GREAT WAR
Taner CAN∗
You through the Gate of Death have come to Life
John Oxenham (“Little Crosses in the Snow”)
Özet
Birinci Dünya Savaşı Anlatılarında Tekinsizliğin İzinde
Savaş şiiri, genellikle şiddet, kan dökme ve ölüm gibi temaları dile
getirdiğinden karanlık ve kasvetli bir tona sahiptir. Bu durum özellikle kanlı
çatışmaların yaşandığı siperlerde yazılan şiirlerde daha yoğun hissedilir. Dehşet
verici siper deneyimi nedeniyle ruhsal yıkıma uğramış olan savaş şairi yaşam ve
ölüm arasındaki eşikte konumlanmıştır. Kimi zaman kendini ölü olarak tasavvur
eder, kimi zamansa ölülerle konuşur veya ölüler, rüyalar ya da karanlık hayaller
aracılığıyla onunla konuşurlar. Ölmüş askerler, parçalanmış bedenler, tanınmaz
haldeki cesetler gibi süreklilik gösteren imgeler ve travma geçirmiş zihnin ürettiği
korkutucu düşler bu dünyaya ait olmayan bir atmosfer yaratarak, savaş şiirini
genellikle gotik ve fantastik edebiyatla ilişkilendirilen “tekinsizlik” kuramının
konusu haline getirir. Bu çalışmada, tekinsizlik kuramının Birinci Dünya Savaşı
şiirlerinde işlenen travmatik savaş deneyiminin ve milliyetçilik fikrinin
incelenmesinde sunacağı yorumsal olanaklar ele alınmıştır. Birinci Dünya Savaşı
sırasında yazılan şiirler çalışmanın odak noktasında yer almaktadır. Ancak, savaş
etrafında şekillenen farklı söylemlerin karşılaştırmalı olarak incelenmesi amacıyla
savaş hatıraları, anıtlar ve cehpheden yazılan mektuplar gibi diğer savaş anlatıları
da çalışma kapsamına dâhil edilmiştir.
Anahtar Sözcükler: Savaş Şiiri, Savaş Anlatıları, Yapısalcılık Sonrası,
Psikanaliz, Tekinsizlik, Ulusal Kimlik, Ölüm Temasının Temsili.
∗
Doktora Öğrencisi, Ankara Üniversitesi, Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi, İngiliz
Dili ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı. taner_can@hotmail.com
Taner Can
66
Abstract
War poetry, particularly the poems scribed in the trenches - the burning centre
of the combat, generally has a dark and sombre tone as it speaks of violence,
bloodshed and death. Psychologically devastated by the appalling experience of the
trench warfare, the war poet occupies the liminal space between life and death. He
sometimes imagines himself dead; sometimes he converses with the dead, or
conversely the dead communicate with him through dreams or phantasms. The
recurrent images of dead soldiers, detached body parts, unrecognisable corpses,
and ghostly imaginings of traumatised mind create an otherworldly atmosphere,
drawing the genre into the terrain of the uncanny, which has been conventionally
associated with gothic and fantastic literature. The present study explores the
interpretive possibilities that the theory of the uncanny may offer in analysing the
traumatic war experience and the presentation of the idea of nationalism in the
poetry of the First World War. The present study, as indicated in the title, is a
search for the uncanny presented in the poetry of the Great War; however, it also
includes other forms of war narratives, such as memorial monuments, memoirs and
letters in order to compare different discourses that came together around the war
and its rhetoric.
Keywords: War Poetry, War Narratives, Post-structuralism, Psychoanalysis,
The Uncanny, National Identity, Representation of Death.
The uncanny has been part of critical thinking since 1906. It was in that
year that German psychologist Ernst Jentsch published an article applying
the term to a mild form of anxiety. It is hard to imagine Jentsch
comprehended the extension and debate his study would cause. The uncanny
has moved beyond its origin in psychology and become an interdisciplinary
concept in critical scholarship, incorporated into such diverse fields of study
as literary theory, photography, cinema, architecture and cultural studies.
Today, a simple search for ‘the uncanny’ on the Modern Language
Association Database will reveal over three thousand articles. Anneleen
Masschelein notes that “the growing interest in the uncanny in the fields of
study other than psychology first occurred in the late sixties, early seventies
and coincided with the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism”
(Masschelein, 2003). The notorious difficulty to define the uncanny made it
an epitome of the signifier’s relational status and its inevitable failure to
reach a perfect meaningful closure. Masschelein observes, “[a]lthough the
history of its conceptualisation can be clearly traced because it is a relatively
young concept, the uncanny has gradually come to signify the very problem
or even impossibility of clearly defined concepts as such” (Masschelein,
2003).
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 67
Literature, unlike other fields of study, has been the double of the
uncanny right from its inception. First Ernst Jentsch and then Sigmund Freud
presented an analysis of E. T. A. Hoffman’s fantastic story, “The Sandman,”
in their studies in order to exemplify the instances of the uncanny. These
initial applications of the concept, as Masschelein points out, “insured a
lasting interest in the uncanny in the context of the genre study of the
fantastic, the gothic and other related genres, which is still a vivid tradition
in literary theory and criticism” (Masschelein, 2003). This paper, however,
attempts to consider the concept within the context of the First World War
poetry and aims at exploring the interpretive possibilities that it may offer in
analysing the traumatic war experience and the presentation of the idea of
nationalism in poetry as well as some other forms of war narratives,
including statues, memoirs and letters. Such an attempt may look puzzling
given the concept’s traditional association with the fantastic and gothic
literature. Hence, there seems to be a preliminary question to be answered
from the outset to justify such an attempt: What characteristics of war poetry
make it compatible with the theory of the uncanny?
Poetry was one of the few aspects of social life that the First World War
did not stop. On the contrary, poetic output accelerated as literally almost
everyone started to write poems with the outbreak of the war. In English
Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography, Catherine W. Reilly (1978)
has listed 2.225 published poets (1914-1922), 1.808 of whom were civilians.
The present study, in particular, focuses on the poems written by combatant
soldiers in the trenches. Contrary to the body of work produced by armchair
poets, trench poetry reported the immediate experience of a radically new
form of warfare with all its violence and bloodshed. In an attempt to explain
the significance of trench poetry, David Roberts notes:
The biographies of the war, the dairies, the histories, novels, films,
museums, cemeteries and monuments all contribute to our grasp of it,
but the poetry of the First World War has a special significance.
Written, in the main, by soldiers who had experienced the burning
centre of the action, and in language which is intensely conceived, it
encapsulates and communicates much of what is humanly important and
deeply moving of that vast war experience. (Roberts, 1996:14-15).
As shall be shown in the following pages, the Great War bred a culture
that tried to erase the facts of death (photographs of dead soldiers were not
allowed to be published in the papers, for instance) or mystify it in different
forms of national narratives, such as war memorials. Trench poetry sustained
humane feelings for the dead when the military culture exploited and
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propagandised those very feelings for political purposes. That trench poetry
spoke of death, the dead and dying in a militarised culture that forbade it
shows that it shares the subversive quality of the literature of the uncanny,
which, as Rosemary Jackson (1981:72) points out, “by permitting an
articulation of taboo subjects which are otherwise silenced, threatens to
transgress social norms”.
War poetry is also similar to the literature of the uncanny with respect
to its distance from the mundane. Simon Featherstone points out, “…war
poetry is largely separated from the literary and intellectual cultures of the
society which produced it and seems to come from what Keith Douglas
terms ‘another place,’ unaffected by the historical and social forces of the
peacetime” (Featherstone, 1995:1). It is easier to understand what Douglas
means by ‘another place’ if one looks into poetry written during the Great
War. The war poet occupies the liminal space between life and death. He
speaks about and through the dead. He sometimes imagines himself dead;
sometimes he converses with the dead, or the dead communicate with him
through dreams or phantasms. The recurrent images of dead soldiers,
detached body parts, unrecognisable corpses, and ghostly imaginings of
traumatised mind create an otherworldly atmosphere, drawing the genre into
the terrain of the uncanny.
The present study is a search for the uncanny presented in the poetry of
the Great War; however, it also includes other forms of war narratives, such
as memorial monuments, memoirs and letters in order to compare different
discourses that came together around the war and its rhetoric. The critical
argument in this paper unfolds in three parts. The first part presents a brief
historical survey of the concept of the uncanny from Ernst Jentsch to Hélène
Cixous. The second part of the study focuses on the ghostly design of war
memorials and presents a discussion of the relationship between war
memorials and the uncanny. The third and final part is devoted to an analysis
of the postcards, letters and poems composed in the trenches, describing the
war poet’s liminal space between life and death, between the paper and the
gravestone.
1. The Theory of the Uncanny from Ernst Jentsch to Hélène Cixous
The concept of the uncanny was introduced to the field of psychology
by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 article titled “Über die Psychologie des
Unheimlichen” (“On the Psychology of the Uncanny”). Nevertheless, the
concept is generally attributed to Sigmund Freud who wrote an essay in
1919 as a response to Ernst Jentsch’s study. The following comparative
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 69
analysis of the two respective studies and their repercussions on twentieth-
century theory, particularly on Hélène Cixous’s poststructuralist
reconceptualisation of the term, will not only show the dramatic change in
the understanding of the concept in such short span of time, but also provide
a practical framework for its spectral presence that eschews any theoretical
closure.
Although both Jentsch and Freud agree that the uncanny is a specific
form of fear and anxiety caused by certain phenomena in real life or certain
themes in art, they differ in their views as to the essential cause of the
production of the uncanny sensation. For Jentsch, the excitement of the
uncanny sensation is bound to certain external circumstances under which
consciousness fails to master its physical environment. As a result of this
intellectual confusion, something hitherto considered to be
old/known/familiar seems new/foreign/hostile to the mind and thus evokes
fear and anxiety in the individual. According to Jentsch, the most successful
device to create uncanny effects, particularly in literature, is to blur the
boundaries between the animate and the inanimate. Therefore, the automaton
with its disconcerting effect on intellectual certainty becomes the epitome of
the uncanny in his theory. Although his examples are drawn from works of
literature, Jentsch considers the uncanny in purely scientific terms and
claims that the conditions culminating into the uncanny sensation disappear
with the introduction of “sufficient orientation with respect to psychical
processes, and enough certainty in the judgement of such processes outside
the individual” (Jentsch, 1997:14). In other words, the uncanny, for Jentsch,
is as a kind of mild psychological disturbance that can be explained and
treated scientifically.
Freud finds Jentsch’s conceptualisation of the term ‘uncanny’
theoretically insufficient to explain its essence since the psychic conditions
leading to this particular form of feeling are more complicated and need to
be assessed in a broader scope. Freud asserts,
On the whole, Jentsch did not get beyond this relation of the uncanny
to the novel and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential factor in the
production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so
that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not
know one’s way about in. The better orientated in his environment a
person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something
uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it… It is not difficult to
see that this definition is incomplete, and we will therefore try to
proceed beyond the equation ‘uncanny’ as ‘unfamiliar.’ (Freud,
2001:931).
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Freud’s critique of Jentsch is, as will be shown, based on his simplistic
conclusion that it is possible to efface the uncanny sensation through
intellectual orientation of the individual. For Freud, the uncanny is a
symptom of psychic processes beyond conscious control. Nevertheless, he
does not reject Jentsch’s conclusions altogether. Rather, he offers a new
definition of the uncanny and a completely different understanding of its
psychic production, which includes Jentsch’s own argument, but goes
beyond it.
Unlike Jentsch, the feeling of the uncanny, for Freud, does not result
from what is new or unfamiliar; on the contrary, “[it] is that class of the
frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”
(Freud, 2001:930). Something seems uncanny or arouses the feeling of
uncanniness only because it has been repressed from consciousness and
made strange. It is nothing but the reappearance or reanimation of the
familiar yet repressed feelings that evoke the feeling of uncanniness in the
individual. In other words, “the unheimlich” as Freud puts it, “is what was
once heimisch, familiar” and thus, the prefix “un” is not a sign of opposition,
but “the token of repression” (Freud, 2001:947). Freud, thus, comes to the
conclusion that “an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile
complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some
impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem
once more to be confirmed” (Freud, 2001:950). For Freud, there are four
common instances of uncanny experience: a) the confusion between animate
and inanimate (automaton), b) the double, c) animistic beliefs (primitive
beliefs that one’s wishes or thoughts come true) d) experiences related to
death and mental disturbances.
Evidently, Freud shifts the emphasis in the excitement of the uncanny
feeling from external stimuli to internal psychic factors. Freud dedicates the
remainder of the essay to the discussion of the uncanny examples drawn
from literature and real life. Here, Freud refers to Jentsch’s study once again
only to challenge and surpass his precedent’s conclusions. Particularly, he
makes a lengthy analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fantastic tale The Sandman
in order to demonstrate that Jentsch’s interpretation of the story is
theoretically impertinent to the uncanny effect the text creates. In view of his
theory of automaton, Jentsch claims that the uncanny effect in Hoffman’s
story is the beautiful robotic woman called Olympia. Freud, however,
relocates the uncanny kernel of the text in a mythic figure, Sandman, who is
believed to tear out children’s eyes. He justifies his conclusion, arguing that
the fear of losing one’s eyes is a substitute for the fear of castration in
psychoanalytic theory. He also relates other examples of the uncanny drawn
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 71
from everyday life, myths and literature to repressed infantile complexes or
primitive beliefs. As primitive beliefs coincide with infantile complexes;
fiction mixes with reality, the Freudian distinctions collapse and blur into a
set of heuristic fictions. The Freudian theory of the uncanny thus casts
considerable doubt on the usefulness of the concept: Is the prefix “un-”
really a sign of repression as Freud claims it to be, or is it an empty space
providing the writer-psychologist the opportunity to create yet another
fiction?
It is clear from the picture drawn so far that the uncanny is a highly
elusive concept. It eschews any full definition, theoretical closure, or neat
categorisation. Its borders grow larger and its definition gets more
ambiguous with each attempt to pin it down to a stable theoretical paradigm.
The dissatisfaction seems to stem form the restrains of the structuralist
ambition to classify natural phenomenon in order to explain it rationally. It
is, therefore, wise to look for the essence of the concept in some other
paradigm of thought; one that works not in the direction of mastering it, but
formulating a theory that reflects the very vagueness/indeterminacy inherent
in it. As Anneleen Masschelein notes, such a transformation in the
characterisation of the concept did not take place until the introduction of
post-structuralism in the late sixties (Masschelein, 2003).
Theoretical use of the concept as such proliferated in the twentieth
century with a number of important readings of Freud’s “The Uncanny”
from post-structuralist perspective.1
One notable example is Hélène Cixous’s (1976) feminist deconstructive
reading of Freud’s essay: “Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s
Das Unhiemlich”. Through playful language of parody, Cixous uncovers the
contradictions in Freud’s essay and reveals the fact that the Freudian theory
works against its grain. In an attempt to provide a scientific account for the
uncanny, Freud creates yet another piece of fiction about a fiction. Freud re-
writes Hoffmann’s tale, transforming the story into “a linear, logical account
of Nathaniel... strongly articulated as a kind of case-history, going from
childhood remembrances to the delirium and the ultimate tragic end” so as to
1 Anneleen Masschelein (2003) lists a number of studies: “Freudian Reading,
Analytical and Fictional Constructions” (Moller), “Reading Freud's Reading”
(Gilman), “Quatre Romans analytiques” (Kofman), “Freud's Masterplot” (Brooks),
and “Freud's Uncanny Narratives” (Lydenberg), “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a
Canny Moment” (Weber), “L'inquiétante étrangeté. Notes sur l'unheimliche”
(Mérigot), and “Quelques notes de lecture concernant “Das Unheimliche”” (Van
Hoorde).
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thread his theory of castration into the narrative (Cixous, 1976:533). Having
substituted the complex story of “The Sandman” with his own
straightforward summary, Freud redistributes the roles among characters to
justify his own interpretation of the story. Cixous regards Freud’s selective
account of the story as an indication of his search for a unifying answer to
the enigmatic question of the uncanny, and relates his dissatisfaction to the
impossibility of capturing subjective experience of uncanniness.
Thus, for Cixous, Freud manages to convey the sense of uncanniness,
not so much by what he writes, but by what he does not or cannot possibly
write. Informed by poststructuralist theory, she contents that the feelings of
instability and uncertainty evoked by the uncanny does not stem from the
anxiety of castration, but its status as a “relational signifier” (Cixous,
1976:536). It is a concept that can only be relationally defined, and as such it
is of essentially unrecognisable origin. Freud himself cannot steer clear of
this characteristic of the uncanny in his study, and ends up thematising the
very process he is supposed to define: “This text [Freud’s study] proceeds as
its own metaphor… as if one of Freud’s repressions acted as the motor re-
presenting at each moment the analysis of the repression which Freud was
analyzing” (Cixous, 1976:526). In her view, the instances of uncanniness
(the automaton, the fantasy of intra-uterine existence and ghosts) are not
uncanny in themselves. They are designated as such because they help to
reveal the ambivalence and instability of the uncanny as a relational
signifier.
For Cixous, death and thoughts of mortality present the epitome for the
uncanny: “[t]he relationship to death is the highest degree of the
Unheimlich” (Cixous, 1976:542). As it is impossible to know the experience
of death, it is always and only relationally represented. Cixous argues,
Death does not have any form in life. Our consciousness makes no
place for the representation of our mortality. As an impossible
representation, death is that which mime, by this very possibility, the
reality of death. It goes even further. That which signifies without that
which is signified. What is an absolute secret, something absolutely
new and which should remain hidden, because it has shown itself to
me, is the fact that I am dead; only the dead know the secret of death.
Death will recognize us, but we shall not recognize it. (Cixous,
1976:543) [emphasis added]
This experience is most commonly manifested through the ghost or
spectre: “The Ghost is the fiction of our relationship to death, concretized by
the spectre in literature” (Cixous, 1976:542). By shifting the focus of
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 73
attention away from the uncanny as a sensation, Cixous paves the way for
thinking of the concept in relation to the problems of representation. Her
study generates several questions on the representational possibilities of
death: Who or what represents the corpse? Who gives voice to the dead?
And above all what difference does it make if the corpse in question belongs
to a soldier? The remainder of this paper will seek answers to these questions
in the context of the First World War narratives: war memorials, letters and
particularly poetry.
2. War Memorials and the Uncanny
Today it has become almost axiomatic in academia to think of nations
fundamentally as fabrications rather than as natural formations. That is, the
nation, like other social organisations, is invented, constructed and formally
instituted by political authority. One of the most influential accounts of this
critical formulation was proposed by Benedict Anderson in his seminal book
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism. Anderson defines the nation as an imagined political
community because “the members of even the smallest nation will never
know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in
the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 1983:6).
The existence and continuation of a nation depends on its citizens’
unyielding belief that they are part of a community which shares a “deep,
horizontal comradeship” (Anderson, 1983:7). Thus, the notions of
collectivity and belonging need to be sustained habitually by various forms
of national narratives, symbols, emblems, and rituals so as to unite
individuals as the members of a greater collective, called the nation.
The idea that nations are invented has also found its expression in some
other studies. One notable example is Eric Hobsbawn’s The Invention of
Tradition, which traces the historical development of the means of
constructing national symbols. In his introductory essay to the volume,
Hobsbawn proposes that some of the national symbols that seem to be linked
to an immemorial past are in fact comparatively recent inventions with a
traceable history. Hobsbawn coined the term “invented tradition” to refer to
“a set of practices… which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of
behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the
past” (Hobsbawn, 1983:1). Hobsbawn notes that the majority of invented
traditions, such as the national anthem, the national flag, or the
personification of ‘the nation’ in symbol or image (Marianne and Germania,
John Bull, the lean Yankee Uncle Sam or the German Michel) came into
existence with the birth of national movements and nation states (Hobsbawn,
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1983:7). It was a period of time when many new nations were emerging
from the dust of crumbling empires throughout Europe, demanding self-
determination. Newly formed nation states attempted to assert their
autonomous national identity, and the political authority built up the nation’s
future by inventing its traditions, a traceable past. Ritualised and
institutionalised in time, the invented traditions help impose a collective
sense of national belonging among citizens.
Corresponding to Hobsbawn’s examples, war memorials where
selective moments from a nation’s history are utilised for their mythic appeal
as a catalyst to invigorate the nation’s collective memory have been
complicit in forging national identity as well. They share the same ritualistic
quality as other components in the inventory of national symbols, such as the
national flag or the national anthem. They create powerful ritual spaces
where citizens gather to celebrate the nation’s victories, commemorate its
losses and memorialise its heroes. In view of this, Benedict Anderson
regards war memorials, particularly cenotaphs or the tombs of the Unknown
Soldiers, as one of the most important symbols of modern nation states.
Anderson maintains,
No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist
than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public
ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because
they are either deliberately empty or no-one knows who lies inside
them, has no true precedents in earlier times....Yet void as these tombs
are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are
nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. (Anderson,
1983:9) [emphasis added]
Although Anderson does not mention it explicitly, it is evident that
monumental space draws its power from its ideological aura imbued with an
uncanny sense of liminality in terms of architecture, ceremonial and
location. Erected in remembrance of the nation’s losses, war memorials are
always and necessarily designed in a way to incorporate in a ritualised
ceremony the living members of the nation with those who died elsewhere.
While the living folk stand still mimicking the dead, the dead soldiers’
presence is strongly felt. In other words, they produce, what Hélène Cixous
calls, a fiction of our relationship to death, but this time on an ideological
base. Given that war memorials are a common practice among nation states,
it is surely not incongruous to suggest that one common way of producing
the senses of collectivity and belonging is to conjure up the absent occupants
of the nation, its communal ghosts. It is therefore necessary to probe into a
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 75
discussion of how this spectral architecture functions, which will help
understand what Anderson means by ‘ghostly imaginings’.
Whitehall Cenotaph, erected in 1919, presents a typical example of the
ideological politics behind the construction of war memorials as national
symbols. This thirty-five foot monolith is probably one of the most
important monuments in Britain. Like other national monuments, it
celebrates a pivotal moment in the nation’s history and is the focus of an
annual ritual, honoured with a minute of silence at 11 a.m., on 11th
November every year: Remembrance Day. In his book Postcards from the
Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World
War, Allyson Booth (1996) presents a detailed historical account of the
Cenotaph interspersed with anecdotes and authentic accounts of important
public transactions. In his vigorous study, Booth manages to draw attention
to the fact that the Cenotaph operates on a liminal space in terms of
architecture, ceremonials and location; however, he, just like Benedict
Anderson, overlooks the interpretive possibilities that the theory of the
uncanny may provide in explaining the reasons behind the construction of
war memorials as such.
The story of the construction of the Cenotaph is well known. In July
1919 the Prime Minister, Lloyd George petitioned Sir Edwin Lutyens to
produce a temporary monument, a catafalque, for the Peace Celebrations to
act as a tribute to the nearly million dead of the Empire. Lutyens, however,
responded that a cenotaph would be more appropriate (Booth, 1996:32).
“Presence and absence of a corpse,” Allyson Booth notes, “marks the
essential difference between catafalque and cenotaph: a catafalque is a
platform made to hold a coffin, while a cenotaph is a memorial to someone
whose corpse lies elsewhere” (Booth, 1996:33). Lutyens must have felt that
a symbolic coffin placed on a catafalque would not create the same effect on
the participant crowd as a cenotaph, “an empty tomb” in Greek (OED),
would do. It provides a substitution for dead soldiers that are physically
absent, but powerfully felt through the psychological investment of the
crowd attending remembrance ceremonies. A Cenotaph is a ghostly design
then, for it evokes a feeling of presence paradoxically by speaking of an
actual absence.
This ghostly architecture can better be understood if one looks into
Remembrance Day ceremonials. Booth relates a historical anecdote about
how Sir Lutyens organised the initial military ceremony held at the
Cenotaph: “[m]any have suggested to me to place bronze figures,
representing sentries, round it. This I would greatly regret: it would prevent
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living sentries being posted on days of ceremony” (Booth, 1996:33). Just
like his preference for an empty tomb rather than a catafalque with a
symbolic coffin, Lutyens sought a means of producing an emotionally
activating scene for the public by incorporating the dead soldiers and their
living fellowmen. “His [Lutyens’s] notion of commemoration,” Booth
argues, “blends concepts we ordinarily think of as mutually exclusive: the
guards must mimic the stony inaccessibility of the dead, but not permanently
as sculptures would. They must fluctuate ceremonially between life and
death” (Booth, 1996:33-34).
At this point, one might ask, what is the role of the individual in this
ceremonial ritual? In an attempt to analyse the relationship between
monuments and production of subjectivity in his study “Monumental Space
and the Uncanny,” Derek Hook addresses a similar question and maintains
that people attending ceremonials “think of space as itself possessing a kind
of imaginative persona” (Hook, 2005:693). However, this is, as Hook puts it,
“a presence without a real, corporeal embodiment… a paradox, in short, of
disembodied presence” (Hook, 2005:698). For Hook, this is one of the
rudimentary elements of the uncanny as in other instances where we see
human forms, figures, bodies without attached subjectivities. In other words,
the imaginative presence the crowd brings to bear on monumental space, in
turn, incurs a moment of ontological error, which disturbs the ego because as
socialised and rational human subjects, we think of soul and body always
together. This is the natural ontological coupling of the human reasoning, the
disturbance of which troubles the ego (Hook, 2005:696). Hook further
explains the effect of the imagined subjectivity of a given monumental place
on the ego as follows,
A disquieting ontological gap is opened, which vexes and troubles the
ego, and which the subject would see resolved, even if an imaginative
contribution is required on their part, and even if an element of their
own subjectivity, their own imaginative or actual involvement (or
participation) is required. The ‘gravity’ of this restorative urge to re-
couple psychological presence with a bodily dimension has hence
taken on an ideological force, such that it itself becomes an
interpellative force in the case of uncanny monuments. (Hook,
2005:696) [emphasis original]
The uncanny dissonance is closed only with the completing
involvement of the individual, which entails an identity transaction, a sort of
intersubjectivity, between monumental space and the individual. One is
reminded here of the return of the dead since in this imagined communion
with the dead soldiers, our animistic conception of the world peopled with
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 77
spirits is exploited through the ideologically regulated power of monumental
space.
Last but not least, the location of the Cenotaph is indicative of its
uncanny design that attempt to incorporate the dead and the living. Whitehall
Cenotaph, like many other Great War memorials, occupies a busy public site
rather than a secluded one like a park and a military cemetery, which, as
Allyson Booth puts it, helps “reconstruct the inherently contradictory
relationship between life and death as we intuitively apprehend it through
corpses: death can only occur at the site of life” (Booth, 1996:41). Seen in
this light, it is reasonable to suggest that monumental space presents one of
the most pertinent examples of Cixous’s understanding of the uncanny as a
relational signifier that merges at a liminal intersection: “death within life,
life in death, nonlife in nondeath... a bit too much death in life; a bit too
much life in death, at the merging intersection” (Cixous, 1976:545). To
recapitulate, war memorials are architecturally ceremoniously and
locationally designed in a way to erase the distance between life and death,
bringing the living into a closer intimacy with the dead. It follows that the
war memorial is not an ordinary monument. Nor is it a burial ground, as the
names, cenotaph (an empty tomb) or tomb of Unknown Soldiers, suggest.
Rather, it is a ritual space that draws its ideological power from its uncanny
design.
3. The Poetry of the Great War
Although it is a common practice to create narratives that speak of and
through the dead in the post-war era, such an attempt was almost forbidden
in wartime. During the war, the British government introduced certain
regulations to keep the nation’s dead away from home. Allyson Booth notes,
“[t]he governmental policy dictated that the corpses would not be shipped
home for burial and that photographs of corpses would not be circulated”
(Booth, 1996:11). In other words, back home the corpses appeared only in
the form of casualty lists. The government also invented some other
strategies to dominate the war narratives, thereby keep all the suffering of
the war in the battlefield. One such example is the government-generated
post cards: Field Service Post Card. The soldiers were required to send
printed post cards to their families immediately after a battle that they took
part in (Fussell, 1975:184). Just like the image of the martyr that speaks for
nearly a million dead soldiers, the post card presents an official
representation of the war, not allowing dissident individual voices to be
heard.
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78
Field Service Post Card 2
The note at the top of the card shows how strict the military censorship was.
The message was complied by crossing out the irrelevant sentences. The
brief and neutral sentences on the card gave a far more optimistic picture of
the trench warfare than it was experienced by the soldiers. As a result,
soldiers turned to poetry and letter writing as a means of self-expression.
However, in contrast to the Cenotaph or the pre-printed post cards, the
thematic issues in their poetry vary from patriotic fervour to growing despair
and disillusionment.
Most of the poems written by combatant soldiers are of a sombre tone,
for they deal with the funerary issues of death, graves, headstones, cadavers,
coffins, skeletons and rot. Hence, the most common rhetorical device used in
these poems is the speaking of the dead. John McCrae’s “In Flanders
Fields,” (1915) is perhaps the most famous war poem with a dead soldier as
its persona. McCrae, Canadian physician and Lieutenant Colonel, wrote it on
3 May 1915 after witnessing the death of his friend, Lieutenant Alexis
Helmer, only 22 years old. McCrae himself performed the funeral ceremony
2 Paul Fussell used a reproduction of Field Service Post Card with no marks on it.
The example presented here was taken from the digital library of Emory University
(Field Service Post Card).
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 79
in the absence of the chaplain. The poppies referred to in the poem grew in
Flanders in the battlefields and cemeteries where war casualties were buried
later became a national symbol of Remembrance Day (Ruggenberg, 2008).
The poem opens with a pastoral portrayal of Flanders fields covered
with wild red poppies. This relatively serene scene is abruptly cut short with
the intrusion of a dead soldier’s anonymous address: “We are the Dead”
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields (McCrae, 1996:262).
The short and syntactically broken sentences in the second stanza
reflect the sacrifice and sorrow of war, pleading for brotherly love and
affection for the dead soldiers. With the third stanza, however, the diction of
the poem shifts from brotherly love to official military discourse, detached
and dictating. It reads like a recruiting rhetoric applicable to any war, calling
new recruits to the mission, to be ready to sacrifice their lives as their
fellowmen did before them:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
in Flanders fields (McCrae, 1996:262).
McCrae’s wayward diction of brother love and military rhetoric
destabilises the tone of the poem. Critic Paul Fussell, in The Great War and
Modern Memory, points out that the last six lines of the poem are
“grievously out of contact with the symbolism of the first part” and
considers the final stanza “a propaganda argument” (Fussell, 1975:262). The
word ‘ye’ particularly stresses the collectivity of the message the poem
delivers in the last stanza. Fussell thus concludes that appearing in 1915, the
poem might have been written in opposition to a negotiated peace that would
end the war (McCrae, 1996: 250). The significance of the poem for this
study, however, lies in the tension the between the poet’s private self and
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public role as a soldier. As Simon Featherstone notes, the poetry of the war
signifies “a negotiation between… personal experience and the public role of
the poet” (Featherstone, 1995:18). That is, the war poet, as in the case of
McCrae, does not always speak for himself, but also for his fellowmen and
nation, or conversely his private voice is transformed into an instrument of
nationalist propaganda by military authority. It seems that McCrae’s private
imagination is coloured and controlled by military rhetoric that does not
allow any elegiac voices to be heard. The poem, therefore, illustrates an
early example of military propaganda that transforms the dead into an
immortal symbol signifying the fallen hero.
The individual responses to the war and the suffering it caused did not
always reflect the military discourse of honour and heroism. As the war
raged on, it was no longer seen as an adventure by soldiers on the front, but
rather as their patriotic duty. In his last poem “Fragment” Rupert Brooke
(1986:62) demonstrates the fact that the soldierly spirit dictated by the
recruitment office was not enough for new recruits to take up action. They
should first come to terms with the idea of death. Like most of the poems
written by combatant soldiers, “Fragment” is also based on a true story.
David Roberts relates the anecdote that inspired the writing of the poem: “As
Rupert Brooke and his friends sailed towards Gallipoli, he watched them
with a detached gaze that saw them turning into ghosts before his eyes: and
then, at the last moment, he accepted simply that he might share their fate”
(Roberts, 1996:185). The poem is an exact description of the scene. In an
introspective mood, Brooke describes his psychological struggle to face the
reality of war and death. Under the pressure of fear of death, his imagination
finds a way out of this moment in an uncanny fantasy by translating his
comrades into ghosts.
I strayed about the deck, an hour, to-night
Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped
In at the windows, watched my friends at table,
Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway,
Or coming out into the darkness. Still
No one could see me.
………….
Only, always,
I could but see them—against the lamplight—pass
Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass,
Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave’s faint light,
That broke to phosphorus out in the night,
Perishing things and strange ghosts—soon to die
To other ghosts—this one, or that or I. (Brooke, 1986:62).
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 81
This uncanny experience can also be seen as a symptom of the loss of
identity experienced in army life where personal identity is sacrificed to the
organisational discipline of the army. As the army takes over the control of
the individual’s body, personal identity, memory and imagination are all
erased. It is a body not to be owned, but to be sacrificed: “This gay machine
of splendour’ld be soon broken” (11).3 Brooke describes himself and the
soldiers around him as martyrs at stake since death was considered to be
imminent end for the soldiers at the front. His deliberate choice of the word
‘ghost’ rather than the words ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ with more positive religious
connotations recalls this liminal position of the soldier, constantly
fluctuating between life and death.
Trench soldiers inhabited the world of the dead in the literal sense
of the word. While dead soldiers’ bodies sprouted from their shallow
graves, live soldiers covered in mud and dirt were almost buried alive.
The accounts of the trench warfare in private letters and war memoirs
show that the proximity of dead bodies and the possibility of getting
killed in action made the distinction between life and death unclear. In
many cases, the corpses were perceived simultaneously as animate
and inanimate, which reminds the uncanny figure of the automaton in
Jentsch and Freud’s theories. In an oft-quoted anecdote, Leonard
Thompson, a veteran of the Great War, recollects an uncanny incident that
took place while they were burying the dead soldiers in Gallipoli:
We set to work to bury people. We pushed them into the sides of the
trenches but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like
people in a badly made bed. Hands were the worst; they would escape
from the sand, pointing, begging – even waving! There was one which
we all shook when we passed, saying, “Good morning,” in a posh
voice. Everybody did it. The bottom of the trench was springy like a
mattress because of all the bodies underneath (qtd. in Carey,
1987:452).
For those in daily contact with rotting corpses, the idea of death
became uncannily familiar. Modris Eksteins, in his cultural history of the
war and its consequences, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of
3 According to the infantry training, the first and quickest method of teaching
discipline is close order drill... it secures the whole attention of the man to his
commander by requiring: i) Absolute silence, ii) The body controlled and
motionless, iii) Eager expectation of the word of command and instant readiness to
obey it (qtd. in French, 2005:64).
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the Modern Age recounts a similar incident experienced in the Ypres where
soldier started to shake hands with a severed arm lying on the sandbags used
to reinforce trench work: “In the Ypres salient at one point men being
relieved all filed past an arm protruding from the side of the trench and
shook hands with it – ‘Tata, Jack.’ Those effecting the relief did the same on
arrival - ‘ello, Jack’” (Eksteins, 1989:151). The uncanny effect caused by the
proximity of the dead was sometimes compounded by harsh weather
conditions. In a letter to his mother (4 February 1917), Wilfred Owen (1986)
describes the landscape of trench warfare in bleak winter conditions. As the
poet distances himself from the official discourse, the idealised view of the
battlefield, as reflected in “Flanders Fields,” turns into a barren wasteland
with all its grotesque ugliness.
We were marooned on a frozen desert. There is not a sign of life on
the horizon and a thousand signs of death. Not a blade of grass, not an
insect; once or twice a day the shadow of a big hawk, scenting carrion.
I suppose I can endure cold, and fatigue, and the face-to-face death, as
well as another; but extra for me there is the universal pervasion of
Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language and nothing
but foul, even from one's own mouth (for all are devil-ridden),
everything unnatural, broken, blasted, the distortion of the dead,
whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug-outs all day, all night, the
most execrable sights on earth... In poetry we call them most glorious.
But to sit with them all day, all night… and a week later to come back
and find them still sitting there in motionless groups, THAT [sic] is
what saps the “soldierly spirit” (qtd. in Roberts, 1996:177).
This is a letter of a young soldier shocked into the realisation that he
might die a violent death, frostbitten in a barren wasteland. It has got a
deathly voice born out of war, a voice that the poet needed to narrate perhaps
one of his worst experiences in the trenches. Here, Owen sets his stance
firmly against the propagandist poetry: “[i]n poetry we call them [the dead
soldiers] most glorious” as his prose slips into a gothic style, inflected with
gruesome realism.
“Exposure,” a poem Owen wrote the following year also gives the
reader insights into the wretchedness of everyday life in the trenches. He
describes a group of soldiers waiting for a possible attack on a snowy winter
night. Nature itself is depicted as the enemy in the poem, suggesting that the
soldiers did not only die because of battles. Owen uses the first person plural
throughout the poem in order to reflect the shared fate of the soldiers in the
trenches on a frozen battlefield: “Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east
winds that knife us…” (Owen, 1986:80). He repeats the sentence “but
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 83
nothing happens” in the final lines of four stanzas to show the mental and
physical exhaustion caused by the tedium of the trench routine. The soldiers
are deadened into mere perceiving dullards by nerve-racking, treacherous
immobility of the trench warfare: “we only know war lasts, rain soaks, and
clouds sack stormy” (Owen, 1986:81). The only way to fight this ghostly
existence is nostalgia for peacetime, so they dream of home as if in a
hallucination:
Pale flakes with lingering stealth come feeling for our faces -
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare,
snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.
Is it that we are dying?
Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires glozed
With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors all closed: on us the doors are closed -
We turn back to our dying (Owen, 1986:80-81).
The ghostliness needs to be understood in the context of the general
feeling of radical displacement and estrangement. Fighting in the foreign
lands, the soldiers belonged to nowhere and had nothing but their memories
to cling to. They try to find comfort in contemplating home. However, as
they are living deads or dying soldiers, the dream of home does not bring
any hope to mend the broken soldierly spirit, and the poem ends with a grim
picture: “The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp,/Pause over
half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,/But nothing happens” (Owen,
1986:80-81). The depiction of the soldiers awaiting death in a half-dreaming
state, along with those who have already died of cold, creates a stark contrast
with the image of the heroic martyr in war memorials and thus offers a
subversive counternarrative to the dominant military discourse.
The uncanny experiences caused by encounters with the dead and the
confusion between the animate and the inanimate form part of a considerable
body of the trench poetry. Like the image of the ghost, corpses provided the
trench soldiers a ghastly vocabulary to speak of their fearful imagination. In
his poem “A Dead Boche” (1916), Robert Graves addresses to pro-war
advocates who want to hear only blood and fame and offers a cure for their
blood thirstiness. The pacifist tone in the first stanza does not prepare the
reader for what follows. Graves goes on to describe a fallen German soldier
that he found in Mametz Wood at the Somme in July 1916. The cure he has
found is the corpse of a dead German soldier itself:
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Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard (Graves, 1986:70).
The scene is imbued with the silence of death; the only movement is the
black blood dribbling from the body’s nose and beard. In a steady scrutiny of
the rotting corpse, Graves stresses the inaccessible and separate destiny of
each particular death. Written during the battle of the Somme, one of the
bloodiest military operations ever recorded, Graves manages to capture the
portrait of one and half million of forgotten and unmourned soldiers in this
relatively short poem. Similarly, in “Dead Man’s Dump,” perhaps one of the
most disturbing war poems, Isaac Rosenberg presents a photographic view
of the dead troops as they drive over a battlefield to deliver some supplies to
the front. It is a complete carnage, and Rosenberg does not censor any detail
that the military authority would find disturbing: “A man’s brains splattered
on/A stretcher-bearers face” (Rosenberg, 1986:82). The wheels of the truck
crushes the bones on its way: “The wheels lurched over the sprawling dead”
(Rosenberg, 1986:82) until they hear a dying soldier yell, stretching his hand
weakly out for help. The cart rushes towards the dying soldier only to hear
him murmur his last words: “We heard his weak scream/We heard his very
last sound,/And our wheels grazed his dead face” (Rosenberg, 1986:83). The
three poets, Owen, Graves and Rosenberg, present a significant rejection of
the ideals and abstractions of the propagandist rhetoric with their un-heroic
portrayals of the dead and the dying on the battlefield.
Trench poets witnessed so much violence and bloodshed that black
humour became the only defence against hysteria. For instance in “The
Trench Poets” Edgell Rickword (1986) tells the story of how he has made
friends with a rotting corpse stuck on the wire near his trench. The neutral
tone he employs in describing the corpse shows the banality of death in the
trenches:
I knew a man, he was my chum,
But he grew blacker every day,
And would not brush the flies away
Nor blanch, however fierce the hum (Rickword, 1986:79).
He reads the dead soldier excerpts from John Donne and Alfred Lord
Tennyson’s poems, expecting him to rouse, but finally leaves the corpse to
be eaten by rats: “He stank so badly, though we were great chums,/I had to
leave him, then rats ate his thumbs” (Rickword, 1986:79). The poet’s
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 85
indifferent attitude shows the impossibility of mourning the dead when
habitually exposed to rotting corpses. A similar feeling of indifference seems
to inform Arthur Graeme West’s (1986) poem, “The Night Patrol.” In a
letter of 12 February 1916, West recounts the event that inspired the poem:
“…I had rather an exciting time myself with two other men on a patrol in the
‘no man’s land’ between the lines. A dangerous business, and most repulsive
on account of the smells and appearance of the heaps of dead men that lie
unburied there as they fell, on some attack or other, about four months ago”
(qtd. in Housman, 2002:289). A month later, in March 1916, Graeme West
wrote “The Night Patrol,” describing his experience in the no man’s land. As
the poem opens, a group of soldiers infiltrates into the no man’s land with
the command they have received over the radio. They start to crawl through
the valley of death itself. The poem unfolds as they progress among the
decomposing bodies. The poet’s description of the scene is unrelentingly
realistic.
Only the dead were always present — present
As a vile sickly smell of rottenness;
The rustling stubble and the early grass,
The slimy pools — the dead men stank through all,
Pungent and sharp; as bodies loomed before,
And as we passed, they stank: then dulled away
To that vague fœtor, all encompassing,
Infecting earth and air. They lay, all clothed,
Each in some new and piteous attitude
That we well marked to guide us back... (West, 1986:76-77).
The dead here are neither to be pitied nor to be glorified. They have
been turned into familiar objects despite their terrible stench and repulsive
sight. The three soldiers make a path in order to find their way back to their
trenches by marking the corpses. Graeme West amuses himself by talking
about the peculiar positions of the dead bodies: “as he, outside the wire, that
lay on his back and crossed/His legs Crusader-wise: I smiled at that” (West,
1986:76-77). The facetious tone in this part of the poem, as in Edgell
Rickword’s “The Trench Poets,” is symptomatic of the soldiers’ endeavour
to master the traumatising terror they felt upon encountering the dead. The
soldiers are forced to go back to their trench when a flare bursts and
illuminates the landscape:
We turned and crawled past the remembered dead:
Past him and him, and them and him, until,
For he lay some way apart, we caught the scent
Of the Crusader and slide past his legs,
And through the wire and home, and got our rum (Rickword, 1986:79).
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Like other examples of trench poetry analysed in this paper, West’s
“The Night Patrol” offers a criticism of the propagandist military discourse
simply by describing the battlefield with all its revolting and unacceptable
sights of violence, its dead and mangled bodies. That is, trench poetry retains
the silence of the dead only to remind us of the horror and devastation of war
that we all too readily tend to forget in the glorified image of the fallen hero.
Afterword
The epigraph to this paper, a line from the war poet John Oxenham’s
“Little Crosses in the Snow,” also reads like an afterword, bringing the
critical discussion pursued thus far into a closure. Dead soldiers do come to
life. The most common example of their revival is war memorials. The
architecture and location of these memorials as well as the ceremonials held
there are patently marked with an uncanny design that attempts to
incorporate the dead and the living. The psychological investment of the
crowd gathered for remembrance ceremonial imbues the monumental space
with a sense of presence, whereby the revenant, the heroic figure of the
fallen soldier, returns to the land of the living. In this imagined communion,
various national ideals and aspirations are communicated to the living
generation through the glorified and exemplary deaths of the soldiers.
However, this single and homogenous image of the heroic martyr cast in
stone shatters and breaks into thousands of individual stories of suffering and
death in combatant soldiers’ poetic testimony to the war. The realistic
portrayal of the dead soldiers lying on frozen battlefields, detached body
parts and corpses left to rot in the woods shows the horror and the futility of
war. In other words, trench poets form their subversive narratives around a
theme index conventionally associated with the literature of the uncanny:
ghosts, corpses and detached body parts. However, the uncanny here is not
simple optical illusions or phantasmagorical allegories that inform Jentsch
and Freud’s theories. They are genuinely born out of the trauma and tragedy
of the trench warfare constantly surrounded by the dead and dying. It can
therefore be argued that the uncanny finds one of its most salient literary
representations in trench poetry.
In Search of the Uncanny in the Narratives of the Great War 87
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