8 - Atomising
from III - ‘PEACE’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
Summary
After five years of the breakdown of communications through war there has never been a time when countries were so isolated within their own separate experience, and yet never a time when they shared so completely the same realities.
One might compare the countries of the world to-day to clocks. Each country registers a different time, but outside their time there is one time for the whole world, registered on one clock, with a time-bomb attached to it. Unless the countries of the world can synchronise their time and their sense of reality, that time-bomb is likely to explode.
(Spender 1946: 96)But where can one get this idea of a new world and how can one believe in it?
(Smith 1949/1979: 92)As the previous chapters have suggested, both war and its aftermath challenge conventions of representation. The new ‘peace’ that followed the conflict would prove similarly difficult to negotiate, as writers struggled to make sense both of past atrocity and a present that seemed, if anything, still more difficult to assimilate. Britain was exhausted and bankrupt, Europe was devastated, its infrastructure destroyed and its national and cultural legibility erased. Stephen Spender's European Witness (1946), an account of his travels through Germany in 1945, tries to convey this extraordinary erasure through a corporeal metaphoricity. The bombed cities of England are wounded, they are a ‘scar which will heal’ (22), Cologne by contrast is a ‘putrescent corpse-city’, its people ‘parasites sucking at a dead carcase’ (1946: 22).
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- Literature of the 1940sWar, Postwar and 'Peace', pp. 239 - 272Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013