Traumatic Re-enactments: Portraits of Veterans in Contemporary British and Canadian First World War Fiction

Authors

  • Anna Branach-Kallas Department of English, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland, Poland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2018.31.09

Keywords:

Veterans, First World War Fiction, Britain, Canada, Trauma

Abstract

The paper focuses on the portrait of the First World War veterans in selected British and Canadian novels published at the turn of the twenty-first century. The authors use various means to depict the phenomenon of trauma: from flashbacks disrupting the present, through survivor guilt, nightmares and suicide, to aporia and the collapse of representation. The comparative approach used in the article highlights national differences, yet also shows that the discourse of futility and trauma provides a trasnational framework to convey the suffering of the First World War. As a result, although resulting in social castration and disempowerment, trauma serves here as a vehicle for a critique of the disastrous aftermath of the 1914-1918 conflict and the erasures of collective memory. Re-enacting traumatic plots, the British and Canadian novels under consideration explore little known facets of the 1914-1918 conflict, while simultaneously addressing some of our most pressing anxieties about the present, such as social marginalization, otherness, and lonely death.

Funding

This research was supported by grant DEC–2013/11/B/HS2/02871 from the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki)

References

Branach-Kallas, Anna and Piotr Sadkowski (2018): Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977-2014). Leiden: Brill/Rodopi. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004364783

Caruth, Cathy (1995): Introduction to Part I: “Trauma and Experience”. In C. Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 3-12.

Caruth, Cathy (1996): Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Caruth, Cathy (2013): Literature in the Ashes of History. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Coates, Donna (2016): “No Peace in Silence: The Return of the Traumatised Great War Soldier in Francis Itani’s Tell”. In D. Owen and C. Pividori, eds., Writings of Persuasion and Dissonance in the Great War. That Better Whiles May Follow Worse. Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 49-64. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004314924_005

Cohen, Deborah (2001): The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

Donaldson, Allan (2005): Maclean. Halifax: Vagrant Press.

Dunmore, Helen (2014): The Lie. London: Windmill Books.

Fitzsimmons, Phil and Daniel Reynaud (2014): “Comics/Graphic Novels/Bandes Dessinées and the Representation of the Great War”. In M. Löschnigg and M. Sokołowska-Paryż, eds., The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 187-200. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110363029.187

Gordon, Neta (2014): Catching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to World War I. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Grace, Sherrill (2014): Landscapes of War and Memory: The Two World Wars in Canadian Literature and the Arts, 1977-2007. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.

Herman, Judith Lewis (1992): Trauma and Recovery. The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.

Hodgkin, Katharine and Susannah Radstone (2003): Introduction: “Contested Pasts”. In K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone, eds., Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory. London: Routledge, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203391471_INTRODUCTION

Hynes, Samuel (1990): A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: The Bodley Head.

Itani, Frances (2014): Tell. Toronto: HarperCollins.

LaCapra, Dominick (2001): Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Laub, Dori (1992a): “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening”. In S. Felman and D. Laub, eds., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge, 57-74.

Laub, Dori (1992b): “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival”. In S. Felman and D. Laub, eds., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge, 75-92.

Leed, Eric J. (1979): No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lifton, Robert Jay (1996): The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. Washington and London: American Psychiatric Press, Inc.

Luckhurst, Roger (2008): The Trauma Question. London-New York: Routledge.

Montgomery, Adam (2017): The Invisible Injured: Psychological Trauma in the Canadian Military from the First World War to Afghanistan. Montreal & Kingston, London, Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Morton, Desmond and Glenn Wright (1987): Winning the Second Battle: Canadian Veterans and the Return to Civilian Life, 1915-1930. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.

Ouditt, Sharon (2005): “Myths, Memories, and Monuments: Reimagining the Great War”. In V. Sherry, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 245–260. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521821452.011

Rothberg, Michael (2011): “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory”. Criticism, 53(4): 523-548. https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2011.0032

Sokołowska-Paryż, Marzena (2015): “Re-imagining the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in Contemporary British Writing”. In A. Branach-Kallas and N. Strehlau, eds., Re-Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture. Ed. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 92-109.

Sokołowska-Paryż, Marzena and Martin Löschnigg (2014): “Introduction: ‘Have you forgotten yet?...’”. In M. Löschnigg and M. Sokołowska-Paryż, eds., The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter,1-13.

Tal, Kali (1996): Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Todman, Dan (2005): The Great War: Myth and Memory. London and New York: Hambledon.

Urquhart, Jane (1998): The Underpainter. London: Penguin Books.

Vance, Jonathan F. (1997): Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Wilson, Ross J. (2014): “It Still Goes On: Trauma and the Memory of the First World War”. In M. Löschnigg and M. Sokołowska-Paryż, eds., The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 43–57. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110363029.43

Winter, Jay. (1996): Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Winter, Jay (2015): “Shell Shock”. In J. Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol. 3: Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 310-333.

Young, Louisa (2014): The Heroes’ Welcome. London: The Borough Press.

Downloads

Statistics

Statistics RUA

Published

15-12-2018

How to Cite

Branach-Kallas, Anna. 2018. “Traumatic Re-Enactments: Portraits of Veterans in Contemporary British and Canadian First World War Fiction”. Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina De Estudios Ingleses, no. 31 (December):149-63. https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2018.31.09.