A Book proposal in search of a publisher
Copyright 1998.
Philip E. Kaveny
. The Shadow of The Great War
"Images of The Great War in Selected Works
of 20th Century Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature"
By Philip E. Kaveny
My book would focus on the images of The Great War in selected
works of 20th Century science fiction and fantasy literature. It would include work
I have partially presented at the l8th annual Conference of the Mythopoeic Society
at Marquette University, The 1988 Popular Culture Association Conference in New Orleans, and The International
Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Tenth Anniversary Conference Mar 15-19 1989 in Ft.Lauderdale.
My book would be divided into six chapters.
This chapter would both foreground the significance of the Great War and ground my work in historical context and establish my analytical framework.
Images of the Great War foreshadowed in the early works of Wells,
Days of the Comet, Land Ironclads, War In theAir, The War of the Worlds
and, The World Set Free.
Images of war realized in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Here we would
group J.R.R Tolkien with the war poets Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sasson.
Images of the Great War 50 years later in Walter
Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse Five, and Joseph Heller's Catch 22
Does Philip K. Dick write the last post WWI novel in Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
The language of exhaustion. That which is beyond words can
no longer be expressed in the form of the fantastic novel:
William Gibson Neuromancer, and the Bruce Sterling anthology
Miroshades.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
"Images of The Great War in Selected Works
of 20th Century Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature"
I would like to paraphrase Samuel R. Delany and William Carlos
Williams: the text of my paper is only intended to locate a
discourse in time.
My interest in the Great War stretches back across my life.
I was born in 1944 in the midst of another war, but my father was
born in 1898, the same year as Remarque. Incidentally, my father
was a World War I veteran (he was in OCS at Holy Cross University
where they trained with broomsticks) though he never saw the
European theater, as I was fortunate enough to never see Vietnam.
Seventy-five years later the Great War has almost fallen off
the event horizon, and yet its magnitude is such that it is a
cultural watershed of western civilization. Confounding the
understanding of World War I is a problem of numbers. It is
popular to talk of Vietnam and its costs to our generation; yet,
more soldiers died on two days during the Battle of the Somme
than the total American personnel loss throughout the course of
the Vietnam War, a fact forgotten by almost all except military
historians. While World War I is lost in the mists of popular
consciousness it still permeates the literature and literary
tradition of western culture. And in turn these images mediated
through the aesthetic of literature profoundly change the way we
look at and think about war. It is my intent to utilize various
conceptual approaches and analytical tools to discuss the way
this imagery operates through the craft of the artists to assert
their voice during the process of artistic creation.
The forty-some years from the end of the Franco-Prussian War
(1871) as described by such popular historians as Barbara
Tuchman, were a period of geometric acceleration of
industrialization. It would be too boring to make a point by
point comparison of western civilization in 1871 with that of
1914. However, the statistics are certainly available for those
that wish to do so. Perhaps most importantly, the west had
become mass producers and mass consumers. So the factories
turned to "producing death looking for more death." By 1914 it
begins to make sense to start talking about a post-industrial
infrastructure. All the economies, even Czarist Russia, were
engaged in exponential growth and transformation. With the advent
of Bernstein, even Marxist theorists had to redefine the
timetable for world revolution.
It seems that in August of 1914 the Great War was a war
which everyone wanted. International Socialism prostituted
itself by voting nationalism and war credits. Radicals became
patriots, and territorial claims generations forgotten were
resurrected by the necromancers of the newly developed mass
media. And yet it seems that almost no-one had any idea of what
these changes could mean for the nature of warfare. It was
expected that the war would be over by autumn.
What is now so apparent to all is that the energies of the
transformed economic infrastructure were mobilized for the
wholesale extermination of a generation. Some have suggested
that the Great War was fought by opposing boards of directors.
And yet, it was as if those who ran the war were still dominated
by the romantic imagery of an earlier age, calling out the flower
of a past age to stop the onslaught of the enemy.
The literature I am interested in is that in which the muted
voice of socio-economic reality asserts itself in the text. In a
sense, the literature I alluded to darkly reflects, as through
the stainless steel mirror in a field kit, the brutal totality of
modern war.
H. G. Wells certainly had a sense of the shape of things to
come in The Land Ironclads (publication date 1905) where he
predicts the importance of the tank in the Great War. He also
foreshadows the scope of the destruction of World War I in Days
of the Comet (publication date 1908), and War in The Air
(Copyright the same year, but published in 1910) . Here, though,
the vision is somewhat apocalyptical. My point might be
stretched a bit to include War of the Worlds (publication date
1896), but it certainly depicts a proud British Empire desolated.
In Tolkien's work we see World War I imagery realized in his
construction of the landscape of Mordor. What I am talking about
here is influence rather than some kind of mimetic ratio for the
reproduction of a particular reality. My original idea for this
paper came as I was going through 1917 National Geographic
magazines that contained aerial photographs of the Western Front.
The French forces in white are seen advancing across a landscape
devoid of vegetation, pocked with shell holes filled with
stagnant water and blocked with concertina barbed wire. It was
as if they were crawling across a landscape of the moon. The
Germans dressed in black were scrabbling out to meet them. It's
my observation that the scenes in these photographs sure as hell
look like Mordor.
Here it is interesting to group Tolkien with two of his
contemporaries: the war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sasson,
who both served at the front line at the Somme. Siegfried
Sassoon served with his battalion at the front line at the Somme,
during the first few days. Wilfred Owen also served on and off
there for two years. I am choosing these two poets for two
reasons. First and most obvious, they, along with Tolkien,
served during the Great War. Second and more important, they
were artists whose work directly reflected their Great War
experience. In fact I only mention the two poets in passing as a
benchmark to locate the works of Tolkien.
Shaun Hughes has argued in an unpublished paper "The Battle
of the Somme and the Fall of Gondolin" that Tolkien drew directly
from his 1916 experiences at the Western Front in the tales of
Beren, Luthien, Turin, and most particularly Tour.
But Tolkien, unlike his contemporaries, leaves us with more
than these images of desolation. Evil must not have its way, the
forces of good and evil must be in balance. There is more to
hope for than a mere possibility of escape in Tolkien's work,
there is the quest and the marvelous journey. Some of us chose
to drink straight double shots of despair and others chose to mix
it with a little hope.
At Sarajevo, according to Bothilo, also a veteran of trench
warfare, in his Twelve Against the Gods the assassination of the
Archduke was like a note struck by an invisible orchestra. It is
that invisible orchestra which interests me and has for as long
as I can remember. It is this conceptual framework that was
instrumental in the development of my view of literature.
I have a kind of utilitarian view of literature, a view
which has its roots in my early study of platonistic philosophy.
Platonism professes an underlying reality of the world as a pure
form, such as can be expressed in mathematics, with apparent
reality only a replication of that purer higher form. Therefore
that which is real to our senses is only the faded copy of the
real world. What this means is that a work gets interesting when
a masked historical reality manifests itself in an artistic
creation.
There is a section of Moby Dick where Ahab tells Ishmael why
he hunts the whale. He alludes to a universe of forms which
underlies apparent reality. For most of the time the underlying
reality is not accessible to us except for certain rifts. The
whale, Moby Dick, was such a rift, through which the Captain
could reach and smite the heart of pure evil.
In All Quiet on the Western Front there is a low key passage
in which the company gets double rations. Why? Because the
other half of the company has been killed. The poignancy lies in
the reader's overt knowledge of the brutal slaughter that is
unshared by the characters, except subliminally.
In Catch 22, Yossarian is trying to face the wound that the
turret gunner has suffered. He treats the superficial wound,
then finds the morphine styrette. The horror of war only becomes
apparent when Yossarian finds a small hole in the gunner's flack
jacket. He opens the gunner's jacket, only to watch the gunner's
stomach and its contents come rolling out, stewed baby tomatoes
and all.
As the image progresses it certainly asserts itself in a
progressively more visceral manner; this underlying historical
process asserts itself in a progressively more didactic manner.
What I am seeking to do is find a bridge between the first and
the last quarter of the twentieth century. I think, perhaps,
that this bridge exists in T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
published in 1922; perhaps (on a cultural level, rather than
intellectual level) the most pervasively influential poem in the
English language. It is not so much that the various landscapes
presented in "The Waste Land" are the Western Front in terms of
the recreation of a physical set of cartographic features against
which humanity must wander; it is more an expression of cultural
influences, which carry on the desolation that is felt after The
Great War on to mid and late twentieth century. For example,
when ex-Federal Communication Chief Newton Minnow is describing
American television in the early sixties it is no accident that
he calls it a "vast wasteland." When a Hipster poet from the
50's appeared on the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air"
she told how she was inspired by "The Waste Land" to write her
first song. Or, when we compare the minimally connected images
that appear on M/TV with the minimally connected images that
Eliot's poetry is characterized by, pervasive is the appropriate
word.
If we telescope twenty-two years ahead , from the
publication of The Waste Land, to Walter Miller's tour of duty at
the battle for the monastery at Casino in Italy in 1944, we see
another author influenced by his expiernce with combat. Casino
was one of the few American battles of World War II that was
reduced to the bloody stagnation of the Western Front from
twenty-eight years before.
Over the next decade Walter Miller wrote one of the master
works of the whole science fiction genre; A Canticle for
Leibowitz published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction in 1955 and 1956. In A Canticle for Leibowitz we see a
version of "The Waste Land" amplified by the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and extended for twelve centuries. Miller
trained as an engineer, and was aware of the implications of
nuclear war more accutely through his combat experience than many
of his contemporary academic theorists--for example, Herman Kahnn
and Bernard Brodie.
Miller is able to reduce the unthinkable to human rather
than statistical level. Monastic figues wander across the wasted
landscape of post-flame-deluged western United States, which is
only representative of the world-wide nuclear destruction. Their
goal is spiritual salvation and the conservation of secular
knowledge in a world of simpletons who have in retribution for
nuclear holocust revolted and murdered all who were responsible
for purveying the knowledge that desolated the world.
Walter Miller is unique among his contemporaries because of
the question he poses through all three sections of the novel,
which are set six centuries apart. He asks to what end is
civilization regenerated, only to fall back into oblivion.
In Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,
published in 1968, we see a very different world from that
represented by Walter Miller. The stakes that the characters are
playing for have been both raised and lowered.
In the case of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the
heroic is expressed in the mundane; yet there is this central
core which links it to A Canticle for Leibowitz. Both are still
set against the backdrop of "The Waste Land." The physical
setting of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a novelistic
realization of the landscapes which permeate T.S. Eliot's "The
Waste Land." T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is profoundly
influenced by landscapes of trench warfare, and in turn T.S.
Eliot influenced Philip Dick. I think that it would not be an
understatement to say that Philip K. Dick's novel literally reeks
with imagery from "The Waste Land." The following are examples:
1. I will show you fear in a handful of dust (Eliot line 30).
2. The morning air, spilling over with radioactive motes, gray
and sun-beclouding, belched about him, haunting his nose; he
sniffed involuntarily the taint of death (Dick 5).
3. Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
(Eliot lines 331-336).
4. The visual image congealed; he saw at once a famous landscape,
the old, brown, barren ascent, with tufts of dried-out bonelike
weeds poking slantedly into a dim and sunless sky. One single
figure, more or less human in form, toiled its way up the
hillside: an elderly man wearing a dull, featureless robe,
covering as meager as if it had been snatched from the hostile
emptiness of the sky (Dick 18).
5.Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
(Eliot line 339).
6. In the early morning light the land below him extended
seemingly forever, gray and refuse-littered.Pebbles the size of
houses had rolled to a stop next to one another and he thought,
It's like a shipping room when all the merchandise has left. Only
fragments of crates remain, the containers which signify nothing
in themselves. Once, he thought, crops grew here and animals
grazed. What a remarkable thought, that anything could have
cropped grass here (Dick 202).
Dick's protagonists are wandering across a physical
landscape of despair, rather than through eighteen centuries of
future history.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, images of the Great
War manifest themselves through shared imagery which has become
part of the popular consciousness. This imagery was defined and
expressed by Eliot. This same imagery was drawn upon, I think
intentionally by Philip K. Dick throughout Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep.
Imagery of the Great War manifests itself in the landscape
of the San Francisco Bay area after World War Terminus in 2021,
one hundred and three years after the end of the Great War.Life
other than human is almost nonexistent in 2021; nonhuman life
forms, no matter how repulsive, have become a symbol, desperately
held of value from a previous world. Deckard, one of the main
characters, is a bounty hunter whose job it is to issue a Voight
Comp test to distinguish humans from androids. The test is
similar to the touring test that was proposed to distinguish a
human from a computer in a veiled situation. Rick Deckard
perhaps represents humanity's last attempt to maintain itself
separate from the landscape of death. The key here is that in
"The Waste Land" figure wanders across the ground; in Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep figure and ground have become inseparable
from the landscape of death. Truly Rick Deckard faces the gray
lead sky protected with nothing but his lead lined jock strap.
Perhaps the tragedy of this situation is delineated in
particular in the spiritual Doctrine Of Mercerism. This is the
most difficut and least discussed aspect of Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep. Key to Mercerism is the empathy box by which all
join together to experience a kind of spiritual unity. The
object is to make the dead bones live; so, in a desparate hope of
regeneration, the life and world that was lost can be restored.
Thus Mercerism becomes some sort of travesty of spiritually in
communion.
This is juxtaposed with the presence of a pervasive talkshow
host, Buster Friendly and his friendly friends. Fifty-three
years later than the Great War, and set fifty years in the future
the landscape, figure and ground are merged into one. We can
only wonder at Phil Dick's sardonic irony in which Deckard seems
to have found a toad, thought to be extinct, in the desert which
was northern California. Deckard's salvation hangs on whether
the toad is real or false (that is to say a electro-mechanical
replica of a live toad).
Though Philip K.Dick did not have any direct experience with
the Great War, his father was a veteran of the Western Front and
his biographers have cited direct WWI imagery in a number of his
works.
Let me restate that I am interested in effect imagery rather
than actual portrayals of combat. I would argue that there is a
particular problem in expressing that which is beyond, but must
be expressed in language.
In the late twentieth century, in the world of Blip Verts
(an image drawn from the "Max Headroom" television show), the
problem of expressing the scope, horror, and effect of war are
even more difficult, since attention spans have been shortened,
and since what Kurt Vonnegut has called the death of the modern
novel.
What is required is a renovation of the Jamesian aesthetic
to make these experiences commonly accessible: an aesthetic
which removes one from the immediacy of experience. It is with
the proliferation of mass media technology that we are brought
more into contact with the images of war and at the same time
removed from them. Electronically mediated experience projects a
world that appears inseparable from the real world; thus through
overexposure, mass media numbs us to the impact of reality and
causes us to distance ourselves in protective reaction.
Science fiction and fantasy as a genre allows a more
interesting interaction with the images of war by the reader than
any other genre. In the late twentieth century we search for a
world whose boundaries are not defined by a twenty-five inch
video monitor.
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