World War II and SFnal Memory
Apr. 18th, 2016 02:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeWhen I was growing up in the 1960s, it was World War I that had all the literary heft: Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Jones, Remarque, Céline, Ford.[1] By contrast, the Second World War seemed to have generated much in the way of history but little in the way of literature, aside from F.T. Prince's "Soldiers Bathing": Isherwood's Goodbye To Berlin was pre-war; Smith's Last Train From Berlin and Shirer's Berlin Diary are both more at the journalism end of the memoir scale than the literary one. If we half-discount Michener's Tales of the South Pacific (1947), at the popular novel end of its spectrum, the major exception was Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-1961); Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet was set during the war but was not principally concerned with it. During the 1960s this was joined by the third "season" of Dance to the Music of Time (1964-1968) and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969). Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, arguably the most important literary work dealing with WWII, came out in 1973, nearly thirty years after the war ended: by contrast, In Parenthesis, the last of the major literary works on the Great War, came out just under twenty years after its end.
There is a sense in which "Little Gidding" is a Second World War poem; the same can be said of The Pisan Cantos. In neither case, however, is the core subject matter the war, even though they incorporate experiences directly tied to the war. Auden grapples with facets of it, and its precursor and successor events, in short poems -- "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "September 1, 1939", "The Shield of Achilles". The war as a whole may have seemed too large, too terrible, for a writer to attempt to deal with it, as such, until considerable time had passed.
Speaking from the present, though, the stream of written works on the war became a flood long ago. At the documentary level, it's become almost a joke: the typical history section in a bookstore is weighed down by WWII books. Novels set during the war -- military, spy, fictional memoirs -- are a dime a dozen, and this has spilled into speculative fiction as well.
There may be an argument to be made that speculative fiction, partly because its conterfactuals allowed it to get some sort of parallax on what was seen as a unique event, and partly becuase it could handle the absurd, was the natural choice for handling the war. The Pynchon and the Vonnegut are both, inarguably, speculative fiction.
These days, we have a good sheaf of speculative fiction regarding WWII to look at. If we use award-related examples (only) as an index, 1970 has a Hugo nomination for Slaughterhouse Five, Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula in 1973, and then a gap of nearly thirty years passes, followed by Cryptonomicon (Hugo nomination) in 2000, Blackout / All Clear (Hugo winner) in 2011. Atkinson's Life After Life (2013: multiple awards) and A God in Ruins (2015, Locus long list) are focussed on the war.
Also, although there is ample evidence that The Lord of the Rings is not a product of WWII (but rather of the Great War), there is an argument to be made that the set of LOTR-successors with dark lords being defeated by the forces of good are refracting the experience of the fight against Nazism into a medium which could replicate the white (or at least light) against black narrative of that war in another context. (One has only to look at Eddison to see the earlier "standard" heroic model, derived from Homer, of two matched sets of heroes fighting each other.)
There's even a significant subgenre of purely alternate history WWIIs. The Man in the High Castle (1963) and The Iron Dream (1972) (neither of which deal directly with the war as such) are the obvious examples, followed by the beginning of Stirling's Draka series (Marching Through Georgia, 1988) and Turtledove's reworking (1994-1996): Life Beyond Life is merely the most recent of them. (For that matter, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August takes place largely over the span of WWII, though its primary focus is elsewhere.)
But Turtledove, Stirling, Stephenson, Willis, North, and Atkinson are all too young to remember the war. Has it gone from being too major a thing to encapsulate in writing to become a permanent constellation in the cultural firmament as it passes out of living memory?
[1] This was topped off and encapsulated by Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory in 1975.
There is a sense in which "Little Gidding" is a Second World War poem; the same can be said of The Pisan Cantos. In neither case, however, is the core subject matter the war, even though they incorporate experiences directly tied to the war. Auden grapples with facets of it, and its precursor and successor events, in short poems -- "In Memory of W. B. Yeats", "September 1, 1939", "The Shield of Achilles". The war as a whole may have seemed too large, too terrible, for a writer to attempt to deal with it, as such, until considerable time had passed.
Speaking from the present, though, the stream of written works on the war became a flood long ago. At the documentary level, it's become almost a joke: the typical history section in a bookstore is weighed down by WWII books. Novels set during the war -- military, spy, fictional memoirs -- are a dime a dozen, and this has spilled into speculative fiction as well.
There may be an argument to be made that speculative fiction, partly because its conterfactuals allowed it to get some sort of parallax on what was seen as a unique event, and partly becuase it could handle the absurd, was the natural choice for handling the war. The Pynchon and the Vonnegut are both, inarguably, speculative fiction.
These days, we have a good sheaf of speculative fiction regarding WWII to look at. If we use award-related examples (only) as an index, 1970 has a Hugo nomination for Slaughterhouse Five, Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula in 1973, and then a gap of nearly thirty years passes, followed by Cryptonomicon (Hugo nomination) in 2000, Blackout / All Clear (Hugo winner) in 2011. Atkinson's Life After Life (2013: multiple awards) and A God in Ruins (2015, Locus long list) are focussed on the war.
Also, although there is ample evidence that The Lord of the Rings is not a product of WWII (but rather of the Great War), there is an argument to be made that the set of LOTR-successors with dark lords being defeated by the forces of good are refracting the experience of the fight against Nazism into a medium which could replicate the white (or at least light) against black narrative of that war in another context. (One has only to look at Eddison to see the earlier "standard" heroic model, derived from Homer, of two matched sets of heroes fighting each other.)
There's even a significant subgenre of purely alternate history WWIIs. The Man in the High Castle (1963) and The Iron Dream (1972) (neither of which deal directly with the war as such) are the obvious examples, followed by the beginning of Stirling's Draka series (Marching Through Georgia, 1988) and Turtledove's reworking (1994-1996): Life Beyond Life is merely the most recent of them. (For that matter, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August takes place largely over the span of WWII, though its primary focus is elsewhere.)
But Turtledove, Stirling, Stephenson, Willis, North, and Atkinson are all too young to remember the war. Has it gone from being too major a thing to encapsulate in writing to become a permanent constellation in the cultural firmament as it passes out of living memory?
[1] This was topped off and encapsulated by Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory in 1975.
