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6 |
Sometimes the present is a dead end and there is no understanding,
no future except if we do as Walter Benjamin's angel of history
who turns his head and sees the flow of time rushing by him.
Understanding present wars might be helped by looking back. A
synthesis of poetry, facts, fiction and memory is the key to one
of the most hauntingly beautiful books on war that I know: Pat
Barker's trilogy The Ghost Road, whose subject is World
War I.
Pat Barker has recently published a volume of fiction (Another
World)on a British family and their dramas, but she is at
her best when her imagination is fueled by facts and when personal
conflicts are seen in the broader historical context.
Among
the most riveting characters of her trilogy are poet Sigfried
Sassoon and Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, a neurologist and social anthropologist
who treats him for mental breakdown but has to send him back to
the front. Says Rivers:
"Siegfried had always coped with the war by being two people:
the anti-war poet and pacifist; the bloodthirsty, efficient company
commander. The dissociation couldn't be called pathological, since
experience gained in one state was available in the other. Not
just available: it was the serving officer's experience that furnished
the raw material, the ammunition, if you liked, for the poems.
More importantly, and perhaps more ambiguously, that experience
of bloodshed supplied moral authority for the pacifist's protest....
He was finding it difficult to be both involved and objective,
to turn steadily on Siegfried both sides of medicine's split face."
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"Gentlemen,
you're now entering the dire sink of iniquity." |
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INDEX |
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