On the 13th March Dr. William Blazek
(Liverpool Hope University) presented the eleventh contribution to the Centre for American Studies’ 2013-14
seminar series, entitled, Killer’s Home:
The Returning First World War Veteran in Modernist Literature. In a deeply engaging, thorough and times
rather moving analysis of the veteran experience in World War One, Blazek
diverted from typical scholarship that focused primarily on the veteran for one
that examined the effects their return had on their respective communities.
Blazek opened his discussion by noting that comedy
has strongly skewed our perceptions of World War One, creating what he argued
was a Blackadder-esque distortion that has omitted the darker qualities of the
veteran experience. He noted that the
blurring of legal and illegal frameworks once veterans returned home caused one
of the first initial contrasts between war and peacetime life, where in the
example of murder, veterans found themselves lifted out of the legal status of
killing. It is this example, amongst
many others that Blazek illustrated how the returning soldier posed a threat to
the construction of the ideal of home or family life.
This irreconcilability between war-time behaviour
and peacetime norms was further demonstrated in his analysis of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934),
and the two veteran characters of Abe North and Tommy Barban. Both North and Barban find it difficult to
adjust to life after returning home from the war, but utilise different
strategies to deal with it. North finds
himself susceptible to the climate of post-war debauchery, and exhibits a sort
of comic surrealism, what Blazek described as a Marx Brothers-like anarchic
dynamism in his behaviour. These comical
qualities are however evidence of North’s status as a veteran, qualities Blazek
argued were borne out of the chaos of the war and the lack of meaning that
confronted the veterans of the war on their return home. North’s nonsensical qualities, rather than
being trivial, emerge from a hard cynicism that many veterans felt in realizing
that they were never going to be able to adjust to the stability of peace-time
life. Barban in sharp contrast to North
utilises his experiences of the war to control his behaviour. In addition to this, he seizes the
opportunities of post-war Europe, whilst North ignores it. Barban’s showmanship and incessant machismo is in itself its own defence
mechanism against the dissonance he finds in peace-time Europe, where Blazek’s
description of Barban as the professional soldier is confronted by a world he
finds difficult to adjust to. Although
both adopt different strategies to cope within post-war Europe, they both
resign to the irreconcilability of peace-time life as men who have been
permanently tainted by the horrors of warfare, what Blazek noted as their recognition
of never being able to find new or unpolluted identities amidst the ashes of
the war.
In another example from Ernest Hemingway’s Soldier’s Home (1925), Blazek discussed
the main character Harold Krebs’ own alienation from his home town after
returning from the war. Kreb’s inability
to communicate his experiences of the war in his home-town, to voice the dark,
sinister actualities of battle, leaves him retreating into an eternal silence. Dr Blazek provided a further example in Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and the
character of Septimus Warren Smith, who suffers shell-shock and hallucinations
of his deceased friend Evans. In his
analysis of Septimus’ incapacity for emotional intelligence, Woolf’s
description of Septimus’ perception of viewing beauty through a pane of glass,
Blazek noted that the returning veteran often stood as a reminder of the
fragility of life in their local communities, and perhaps more starkly, as a
reminder of a form of death that cannot be buried. He continued with an example from Rebecca
West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918). Following the shell-shocked character of
Captain Chris Baldry as he returns home from the war, Blazek noted the stark
irony in Baldry’s treatment of his home and local community as a form of
certain death compared to the horrors of war.
This text, as Blazek noted, depicted the home and the local community as
something not just alien to the returning veteran, but sometimes entirely
threatening compared to the abnormal normalcy of warfare. This was later reinforced in his examination
of the classic returning veteran narrative in Homer’s Odyssey. Blazek commented
that Odysseus’s war-like manner shaped by combat is displayed in his dissonance
upon returning home, which leads him to seek out additional adventures to
quench his warrior-like thirst.
Additionally, and one that ties into his analysis of West’s The Return of the Soldier, Odysseus’
slaying of the suitors in the text’s conclusion once again signifies that even
the home for the returning veteran is far from safe.
In what was one of the most well-received segments
of his paper, Blazek concluded by discussing his own experiences of working
alongside students and professors at university, a large number of whom were
veterans of the Vietnam War. He noted
that the inconspicuous signals between veterans, often no more than a nod, were
enough to identify themselves amongst civilians. This fraternal marking of each other in
peace-time America and within their new identities as professors or students
was, Blazek noted, a reminder of the inimitable relations many veterans
cultivated after the war towards each other.
It was also one that many, including Blazek, recognised and respected in
those who had seen and returned from the horrors of warfare. Dr. Blazek presented an enlightening analysis
of World War One literature and the treatment of the returning veteran. With reinforcement from post-war writers such
as Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Woolf, and peppered with interesting and touching
personal accounts of his own family’s involvement in the Great War, Dr. Blazek
provided an excellent contribution to the Centre
for American Studies’ 2013-2014 seminar series.
- By James Nixon
PGR at the University of Glasgow
The
Centre for American Studies 2013-14
seminar series at the University of Glasgow returns with Dr. Hazel Hutchison: “The
Turn of the Page: Henry James in the 1890s” on Thursday 27th
March. This will be hosted in Room 202,
4 University Gardens at 5.15pm. All very
welcome!
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