Book Review: Partisans & Poets

[osprey_archer]

Reading Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War, in which the author uses a Gramscian analysis to prove that the pacifists and radicals didn’t accomplish anything in their opposition to the war. The fact that they kept the US out of war until 1917 and remained powerful enough then that Wilson delayed for nearly two months after the Germans restarted unrestricted submarine warfare before he finally declared war does not apparently count as an achievement.

Do the radicals ever actually accomplish anything in this kind of analysis? It always seems to boil down to “The radicals did this which may seem like an achievement, but they didn’t manage to create utopia and also anyway their achievement was totally co-optable by the Conservative Forces of Evil so it doesn’t count.”

It is super boring reading books when I can basically summarize the argument of every chapter before I even read it.

Also, I’m pretty sure that if we make “completely non-co-optable” our standard of success, then every reform movement - nay, every movement in the history of the world, anywhere on the political spectrum! - was a failure, because people are capable of interpreting art in ways that seem diametrically opposed to any straightforward reading of it. Look at Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the US,” which Reagan used as his campaign song!

Left-wing academics really ought to know this. Isn’t the eminent slipperiness of meaning one of the main points of deconstruction theory? Saying, “This kind of imagery would later become a staple of pro-war propaganda” is all but meaningless, because any kind of imagery can be twisted to mean almost anything you want it to.

***

The valiant author also seems to have decided that any response to World War I other than doctrinaire pacifism was a priori wrong, and, moreover, that anyone who changed their mind about the was not responding to the fact that the war kept changing, but had simply allowed themselves to be brainwashed by propaganda.

He doesn’t present this as a proposition that he intends to defend, mind; he simply assumes that it is true and bases his analysis on it. Because clearly the highest duty of the historian is to strap historical figures to a Procrustean bed composed of modern-day, left-leaning, social justice morals and assail them for failing to fit. All while piously insisting that it is not the historians’ place to judge.

Postmodern histories overflow with sort of contradiction. (I would call it hypocrisy, but I’m not sure these historians are sufficiently self-aware to be hypocrites.) They have a pious horror about the idea of judgment, but that doesn’t prevent them from judging the hell out of everything.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Absolutely agree! In addition to the problems you point out, there's the problem of temporal scope of judgement. If you make your scope too broad, then everything's going to fail--or at the very least, analysis of something's success or failure will flip-flop several times. Take your pacifist example. For the years before the US entered the war, they were successful. Oops, but then we entered the war, so they failed. Oh, but pacifism contributed to the forming of the League of Nations, so success! Oops, no, because that thing had no teeth: fail. And so on.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes, right? There's actually a really good example of this in the book; he argues that the British anti-war poets, Sassoon and so forth, failed because they failed to galvanize an audience to stop or even oppose the war.

Which is true, but...later on, their poems became the canonical vision of the war. They not only changed the way we view World War I - they are part of the reason that "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" and that whole way of thinking has lost so much of the cultural validity it once had. They undermined the vision of the glory of war itself.

That doesn't seem like failure to me.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

I'm as Postmodernist as they come, but I gotta admit, when it comes to reading history I am down with Whig history and pop-hist paperbacks. Because their authors own their judgmental snark.

I'd be fascinated to know what the pacifists did after the US declared war. This is partly because I know someone who is a very ardent pacifist, so zie spent much of the past decade helping American military war refusers across the border to Canada and finding them food/housing/legal aid/medical services. Sooo... what did these pacifists do? Did they help veterans who came home? Provide services to conscientious objectors? What?

(Have you read Laurie R. King? This makes me remember her Mary Russell books, especially A Monstrous Regiment of Women, which is about feminists and military veterans in post-WWI London.)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It depends on the pacifists. A lot of them turned away from pacifism in 1917, partly for political reasons: many of the suffragists thought supporting the war would help them get votes, many of the African-American civil rights activists thought supporting the war would help them get civil rights, certain segments of labor figured that supporting the war would prove that they were loyal Americans, even if they did want to be paid a reasonable amount of money and only work eight hours a day...

And many of these people, particularly after the first Russian Revolution in March 1917 ushered in liberal democracy in Russia, had come to really believe that the Great War was a fight between democracy and autocracy, and that winning it would usher in a new birth of freedom and an age without war.

Of the ones who remained pacifists, a lot of them - particularly if they were associated with labor - got thrown in jail or, if they weren't US citizens, deported. Otherwise they wrote scathing poems in tiny anti-war journals, which eventually closed up because the US postal service had been granted powers not to send seditious materials through the mails and had decided that pacifist magazines counted.