Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism

From war memoirs to milblogs: Language change in the witnessing of war, 1914–2014

“…The textual manifestation of irony is, according to Fussell, speech from a future anterior position, where the facts of war are witnessed through the prism of a belatedly acquired bitter wisdom, as a ‘dynamics of hope abridged’, thereby emphasising the random and futile character of death in battle (Fussell, 1975: 41). His interpretation, albeit challenged (Campbell, 1999), has remained dominant in studies of the language of all subsequent wars, reproducing what Harari calls ‘the thesis of disillusionment’ from the Western Front to Hiroshima and from Vietnam to Iraq (2005).…”

“…My selection of two key texts from each war follows the twin criteria of popularity and endurance in the Anglo-American world. My First World War texts are the two established literary classics on the Western Front (Moorcroft Wilson, 2003: 238), still figuring in best-selling lists around the world: Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That (1929That ( /1999 and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930/1997). 4 Given that the Second World War did not produce a similar literary canon (Mosse, 1986), I use two texts that turned into international mega-hits on the television screen: David Kenyon Webster's Parachute Infantry (1994/2002), which was one of the volumes that inspired the HBO mini series 'Band of Brothers' ( 2001) 5 and Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow (1957/2010), which was one of the two books used in the sequel HBO series 'The Pacific' (2010).…”

The Great War and Modern Memory

“…43 His position in 'Thank God for the Atom Bomb', which is what The Great War and Modern Memory is also founded upon, makes Fussell an acolyte of 'combat gnosticism', the phenomenon identified by Campbell as 'the belief that combat represents a qualitatively separate order of experience that is difficult if not impossible to communicate to any who have not undergone an identical experience'. 44 As Campbell observes, the ideology limits the canon of texts seen as 'legitimate war writing', notably excluding from it anything produced by that section of humanity traditionally denied access to the combat zone: women. 45 Painters, and they spend a lot of time noticing the sky'), his 'disregard for sequence and geography' and his failure to notice any of his own limitations.…”

‘I felt like a man’: West Indian troops under fire during the First World War

“…James Campbell has suggested that both the war poets and their critics, particularly Paul Fussell, have created an ideology of what he terms 'combat gnosticism': that fighting in war was an exclusive experience made only understandable and communicable to those who had also taken part in combat. 33 Reports of the war in the West Indies had created a particular focus on France and the Western Front and in their desire to reach France, many of the men revealed that they were unaware of the restrictions placed on their service in Europe. Private Elmo Sweetland, for example, wrote home in July 1916 that, 'we will soon be sent to the firing line.…”