Remembering Through Void — Kate Symondson

This article was commissioned by the Times Literary Supplement Online, and published on 11th November 2016. The original article can be found here.

Today, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of November, many British people will have – as they have done every year since 1919 – observed a two-minute silence, remembering those who fought and fell in the First World War. During Sunday’s memorial service, wreaths will be placed on the cenotaph in Whitehall – Edwin Lutyens’s geometrical, abstract icon of remembrance for the “glorious dead”.

Across art and literature, however, we tend to remember the war differently. It is visualized for us. While cultural commemorations tend to ask for quiet reflection, war paintings, poems and prose ask us to see and hear. We are now 102 years removed from the beginning of the war. As well as text books, historical polemics, documentaries and so on, it is very important that we return to the art and writing that viscerally details the muddy, bloody, tragic experience of trench warfare. John Singer Sargent’s painting “Gassed”, for one, shows us what we (and those others not in the trenches) didn’t see: a convoy of mustard-gassed soldiers treading blindfolded and blind through injured and dead bodies. But although this painting is illustrative and poignant, is there not something discomfiting about observing a scene recorded from first-hand experience (in Sargent’s own words, a “harrowing sight”) rendered with utter clarity, when the subjects themselves are blind? Or, put another way, how much can we understand of these unseeing soldiers’ plight when we observe them through Sargent’s eyes?

In the wake of tragedy, we make collective cultural promises. “We will never forget” (as in response to the attacks of 9/11). “We will remember them” (as Laurence Binyon promised in his poem “For the Fallen”). The burden of recording the reality of a tragic event (so that we can remember) falls as much to the artist as it does the historian. And the same problem faces both: the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of capturing the inexpressible nature of tragedy.

The recent critical revision of the British Modernist approach to this problem, however, exposes an alternative strategy to showing and telling – one that hoped to avoid the pitfalls of the lucid, exacting attempts to describe, and figurative, detailed attempts to depict. Curiously, revising our understanding of the Modernist approach to writing the First World War contributes to our understanding of the commemorative culture of observed silences.

I speak of the “modernist approach to this problem”, but it is fair to say that, until the past few years, this discussion began and ended with Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. In 1916, Ford served in the line. He fought in the Battle of the Somme and the Ypres Salient. He endured concussion, shellshock and lung damage. Aged forty-two, however, Ford was one of the few writers of his generation to see active service. The rest of his literary coterie experienced the war from home, and have long stood accused of being too quiet on the subject of the Western Front (in their art, that is). But publications such as Kate McLoughlin’s Authoring War (2011) and Seamus O’Malley’s Making History New (2014), as well as an upcoming symposium, “Historical Modernisms”, at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House on December 12 are reinterpreting Modernist reticence. Rather than shirking the need to speak of the war, various authors devised narrative methods that spoke through absence. As O’Malley argues, “modernist histories often narrate by absence, but that is still a form of narration”.

Writing as “Miles Ignotus” (“The Unknown Soldier”), Ford finds he can “write nothing” about his war experience in the essay “A Day of Battle”, dated September 15, 1916.

I used to be able to visualise things […]. I could make you see the court of Henry VIII; the underground at Gower Street; palaces in Cuba; the coronation – anything I had seen and still better, anything I hadn’t seen. Now I could not make you see Messines, Wytschaete, St Eloi; or La Boiselle, the Bois de Becourt or de Mametz – altho[ugh] I have sat looking at them for hours, for days, for weeks on end.

In his attempt to make his reader see, Ford abandons his characteristic impressionist style of writing, crafting instead a fragmented, oblique, abstract aesthetic. His prose is shot through with ellipses – pockmarking the text, creating holes on the page. The visual ricochets from the inconceivably large scale – “a million men, moving one against the other” – to the limited range of observation of a rifle sight. The abstract prose pulses with physical and psychological derangement. There is much that Ford cannot see, cannot say.

“Day of Battle” shows how “not saying” can be a powerful method of conveying the incomprehensibility of war. It makes the apparent reticence of his peers on the home front more relatable. If Ford finds he can “write nothing” of his active service, then there is an added impossibility, or perversion even, in attempting to render the fighting from the even more unseeing position of home. More than that, though, the “holes” left by Ford’s ellipses and obscured perspective ask something of the reader, rather than telling her something.

In the central section of To the Lighthouse (1927), time passes over the First World War. In the entire novel, there is only one direct reference to the war, and it appears parenthetically in the book’s abstract middle section:

[A shell exploded. Twenty or Thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsey, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]

It is perhaps not surprising, based on this momentary, fragmentary nod to the war, that even Virginia Woolf’s own nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, accused her of being un-political and failing to engage with it. However, like Ford, in the face of the inexpressible, Woolf harnesses the power of the unsaid.

These brackets disrupt. They create a sense of a void, an abruption in the narrative flow. Not only are they void-like in their sheer starkness of form, they bristle with what is not said. Siegfried Sassoon once wrote that “when all is said and done, the war was mainly a matter of holes and ditches”. But those holes and ditches – those absences – speak volumes for the loss and destruction of the war, more so, perhaps, than any detail, lists, quantification, or narrative could convey.

One of the more avant-garde war artists, Paul Nash, called his 1918 exhibition Void of War: An exhibition of pictures. In it, he primarily depicts his experience of the Front in terms of lacunae, ruin and loss. In his prefatory note to the exhibition catalogue, Arnold Bennett wrote that “the convention [Nash] uses is ruthlessly selective”. The undeniable expressive power of Nash’s ruthless selection – particularly his use of absence – is akin to the effect of Woolf’s minimal, parenthetical narrative of the war. In his painting “Void”, each of the multiple littered, discarded objects speaks of loss: figureless clothing, branchless splintered trees, unmanned vehicles and heavy artillery in disarray, inexplicable, un-navigable terrain, holes blown in the ground, broken and breached defences, and a couple of faceless, indistinguishable figures, either lone, or carrying a barely discernible body. Nash communicates the horror of the Front by not showing the bloody, corporeal detail. Instead, he tells via absence, using abandoned, mutilated, destroyed items to synecdochically speak of the loss and tragedy.

Woolf’s minimalist approach to reporting Andrew Ramsey’s death and the war leaves a lot to the reader’s imagination. So, too, does the two minute commemorative silence. In today’s cacophonous age, “remembering” the unspeakable experience of war quietly might well achieve more for less.