Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

All literature is supposed to be “deconstructed” these days, and
Evelyn Cobley duly applies the approach to World War I narratives. Her
main thesis is that these texts “remain complicitous with the
Enlightenment values which the experience of war can do nothing but
undermine.” This is a version of the old philosophical chestnut that
good requires evil in order to be recognized; similarly, deconstruction
has no raison d’кtre without something to deconstruct. These are
paradoxical insights, but hardly useful ones.

Cobley knows her literary theory; what else she knows is more
“problematic.” Objections could be raised to many of her discussions
in this book (why ignore Henry Williamson? why fail to distinguish
between the two radically different texts of Graves’s Goodbye to All
That?), but I shall limit myself to the treatment of David Jones’s In
Parenthesis, a fair test-case since she gives it the unique distinction
of a chapter to itself. Surely here she must have done her homework.

On page 63 she complains that Jones’s intertextual allusions are
“often quite obscure and sometimes simply private,” mentioning
specifically “the sixteenth-century Welsh epic Y Gododdin.” But what
is private about that, and is it Jones’s fault if Cobley finds it
obscure? Consider the storms of protest if she had criticized an African
writer for referring to his ancient heritage. Why should not a Welshman
have the same rights? Moreover, Aneirin’s poem is from the sixth
century, not the sixteenth—but who cares about such details as an
error of a thousand years? Later, on page 115, she refers to “the
story of ... Llywelyn from Y Gododdin,” bizarrely introducing into the
poem a historical Welsh leader (Cobley calls him “legendary”) who
died seven centuries later. (On page 110 she has had the gall to use the
word “ahistorical” when discussing Jones!)

Possibly literary theorists aren’t expected to know any history, but
for most of us this revealing ignorance disqualifies her book from
serious attention.