In 1915, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had enlisted in the cavalry in late 1914, wrote a poem called “Guerre” (”War ”), which begins:

To Anglophone readers, whose touchstone for the poetry of the GreatWar isthe lyric of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, or Siegfried Sassoon, the apocalypticsentiments expressed in Apollinaire’s “War” must seem all but incomprehensible.Did les jeunes de la classe 1915 really believe that the war wouldprovide entrance to a Brave New World in which the heights of the heavensand depths of the earth would be sounded?

In his acceptance address for the 1980 Theodore Adorno Award, the widely influential essay “Modernity - An Incomplete Project,” Jöurgen Habermas marks the twentieth century as the historical moment during and after which widespread faith in the progressive improvement of human culture through the means of secular enlightenment becomes increasingly untenable. In his context, he is stating an obvious fact and thus provides no details. Yet it is useful occasionally to belabor the obvious: what specific events of the twentieth century have made the project of modernism, understood as a trajectory of historical improvement, so vexed? Certainly, the Holocaust is one inevitable meaning of this twentieth-century interruption. The specter of the tools of enlightened technology turning the factory from a site of production to a site of sheer destruction haunts any subsequent evocation of the inevitability, or even probability, of human progress. No other single event of the twentieth century may have the interruptive power of Auschwitz. Yet in many ways the unprecedented mass slaughter of the First World War inaugurates the twentieth century as a disruption of enlightenment. The products and techniques of industrial culture turn on their users: what had been tools for the efficient production of goods become weapons in the efficient production of death. Mass armies of draftees are marched to their mechanized destruction with all the organization that industrial capitalism has learned from the factory and the abattoir.

A consensus understanding continues to represent the Great War of 1914-18 as the signal event of artistic modernism. In this account, the war stands as a watershed episode: it draws a line through time, dividing the nineteenth from the twentieth centuries; thus it provides the shaping occasion for artists who take novelty, invention, and precedent-dismaying energy as their establishing aim and motive. The readiness of this connection does not discredit it. Global in scope, shattering in its impact on national traditions as well as class structures and gender identities, this first world war scored a profound disruption into prevailing standards of value and so opened the space in cultural time in which radical artistic experimentation would be fostered. Yet the self-evident element in this reckoning has allowed literary historians to be content with the generalized formulation, taken at somewhat distant retrospect. The relative dearth of work in a historically informed understanding of the “modernist war” has been furthered by the fact that much of this modernist writing came out of a civilian circumstance, whereas readers' attention has been drawn understandably to the dramas attending the production of combat narratives (novels and memoirs) and trench poetry. No less compelling, however, are the conditions impinging on the modernist literature of the war.

The fifty-month-long Great War affected France as no other country. With dozens of major battles on its territory, greater losses per capita than any other nation in men wounded and killed (some 1,385,000 dead out of 39 million in 1914), countless villages destroyed or disfigured and woods, fields, orchards ruined, France, the chief prize, was also the chief casualty of the war, both physically and emotionally. The effects persisted for decades and indeed last until this day. The scars left on the countryside and the national consciousness were deep, and few aspects of French life were left untouched. No town or village is without its memorial, prominently located. Some areas were permanently depopulated: twelve villages destroyed around Verdun, the site of the bloodiest battle, which France fought alone for over 300 days, have never been rebuilt, although a chapel has been erected on each site, and thousands of acres there remain off-limits because of live shells. The number of deaths and mutilations contributed to a serious decrease in the birthrate, already much lower than Germany's before 1914, and to national obsession with natality. Maurice Barrès, a militant nationalist from Lorraine,whose wartime journalism fills fourteen volumes, wondered whether Francecould recover from the bleeding. The French recoiled from the idea of furtherfighting on their territory; the rapid collapse of 1940 is not unrelated to awfulmemories of the previous war. Early in World War II, for instance, peasantsremoved army mines strategically placed to help protect against invasion.

Arms and the muse

In the BBC TV series Blackadder Goes Forth the flying-ace Lord Flasheart says: “I'm sick of this damn war - the blood, the noise, the endless poetry.” This echoes satire during the Great War itself, as when the Wipers Times ”regrett[ed] to announce that an insidious disease is affecting the Division, and the result is a hurricane of poetry.” Since a “strange scabies scribendi”also afflicted “civilian verse-makers,” and newspapers printed poems, poetry virtually became a mass medium in Britain - a phenomenon unmatched in other combatant countries. Catherine Reilly's bibliography lists 2,225 published poets and (1914-22) about 50 anthologies with titles like Soldier Songs, The Muse in Arms, From the Front: Trench Poetry. While most of this outpouring has been remaindered by history, it set the scene for poetry conditioned by the war, poetry that internalized the war, poetry that remains a model for public poetry. Great War poetry is read, imitated, and quoted in shifting contexts. Before the Iraq War, the anthology 101 Poems Against War appeared. Its cover quotes Wilfred Owen ( “All a poet can do today is warn ”), as does an afterword by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion: “Towards the end of the First World War, amidst the squalor and tragedy of the Western Front, something fundamental changed . . . The patriotic imperative 'Dulce et Decorum Est' became 'that [sic] old lie,' and . . . our sense of 'a war poet' was transformed.”

In James Hanley's The German Prisoner (1930), two defiantly proletarian British soldiers, O'Garra and Elston, lose contact with their unit during an assault on the German lines. The “fog of war” has had the effect, it seems, of putting them once and for all beyond authority's reach. They capture a young German soldier called Otto Reiburg whose fair hair and fine clear eyes represent to them a provocatively bourgeois “grace of body.” The buried “rottenness” in O'Garra shoots up like filth from a sewer in a deathly premature ejaculation. O'Garra and Elston begin to beat Reiburg unconscious. Elston urinates on him. O'Garra drives a bayonet into his anus. “Elston laughed and said: 'I'd like to back-scuttle the bugger.'” And that appears to be that. The worst obscenity, in a performance obscene from beginning to end, is that Reiburg remains unraped. The Sadean utopia O'Garra and Elston have built for themselves inside war's thickening excremental fog is dedicated to the pursuit of death alone. A shell duly puts an end to them both.

Gunn, the veteran protagonist of Liam O’Flaherty’s Return of the Brute(1929), is another man subject to deathly ejaculations. The object of Gunn’sdesire is a raw recruit feminized by cowardice, whose timidity becomes to hima “seductive temptation.” He at once gives in to and overcomes temptationby murdering a sadistic corporal, as it were on his friend’s behalf, while theyare out on a raid. “Now he was really an animal, brutish, with dilated eyes,with his face bloody.” Gunn has joined O’Garra and Elston inside the fogof war.

In an important sense all German literature after 1914 is literature written in the aftermath of the Great War, since it can be held to reflect the horror, despair, and doubtful glory of this event or else to have repressed it. This chapter has much to choose from among “war writings”and has selected those that are explicit in referring to the frontline experience of soldiers, along with other types of writing that arise in an acknowledged, immediate relation to the Great War, including the works of ideological writers, like Thomas Mann, who consider themselves, in Mann's phrase, “soldiers of ideas.”

The general reaction to the outbreak of war with Serbia, Russia, France,and England in the great cities of Germany and Austria was a display ofenthusiasm in public places by massed crowds so huge as to have the powerto draw all observers into their camp. Franz Kafka, for one, was swept alonginto the street crowds in Prague, in 1914 the capital of the Bohemian Landsof the Austro-Hungarian Empire; but what he afterwards marveled at wasthe crowd factor, the degree of cohesion, and less the substance of its giantyawp. All throughout Central Europe the weather that summer had beenbrilliant – unmatchably brilliant in recent memory; and so it is thinkablethat if the weather had been foul, and the opportunity for crowds to exertpressure on their rulers less available, the foulness of the war might havebeen averted: historians like Reiner Stach and Modris Eksteins hold thisview.

The genre, “memoir,” is an odd one, encompassing simple chronicles and more elaborate, analytic or poetically structured accounts. Those First World War memoirs that have become canonical in literary studies have, not surprisingly, been the more structured work of poets. These are the main focus of the present chapter, but other, less-known work will be touched on. As with the poetry of these memoirists, one of the chief literary interests of their work is the way traditional generic or formal literary features (corresponding broadly with a set of received values about masculinity, heroism, the countryside, and so on) are twisted into something different by the necessity of representing experience that compels a revaluation of all such values. These memoirs are the work, mainly, of writers who do not otherwise conspicuously engage with modernity, perhaps because they were too young to have reached any sort of maturity as writers before their war experience. And after the war that experience remained as their most intense reality – despite the efforts of Robert Graves, for example, to say “good-bye to all that.” The stress that traditional forms undergo in these memoirs (as in the war poetry of the same and other poets) is sufficient to turn the writers into something very close to modernists, almost against their will, and in relation to the war only. Still, they form a kind of “alternative current” of modernism in England by virtue of which the movement is sometimes seen as largely a response to the upheaval of the war. The prototype of such understanding is the public response to the official exhibitions of war paintings held in London in 1919. “Cubism” could now be “understood,” even if it was not liked.

”Of all the arts,” Modris Eksteins writes, “the one that may best express the conflicts in the twentieth-century soul is film.”The years of World War I were those in which film was becoming increasingly accepted as a legitimate source of entertainment, as a serious art form, as a crucial medium for education, and as the most effective propaganda instrument. In one sense, the relationship between World War I and cinema is a matter of historical and temporal concurrence or coincidence; in another, modern war and film have a complex and profound interconnection, as twin technologies of modernity. World War I was, Paul Virilio has argued, not only “bloody conflict” but a pyrotechnic “lighting war,”a “continuous performance, all day and all night.”

The question of what defined “war films” during the years of the FirstWorld War is a complex one. In her study of US cinema and World War I,Leslie Midkiff DeBauche notes that film producers, distributors, exhibitors,and reviewers took up varying positions on the question of the role of popularculture in periods of national crisis, and were often divided between the viewthat films should provide escape from contemporary realities, with comedytending to be favored as the proper film genre in wartime, and the convictionthat it was the role of film to reflect historical immediacies.

When considering the legacy of the Great War, one is inevitably drawn to consider why that war is so frequently reimagined by modern writers. What is to be gained, after nearly a century, from resurrecting the stories embedded in the work of Owen, Sassoon, and Graves? Why does this war haunt the English cultural imagination? And why, specifically, is it the story of the infantry officer on the Western Front that is told and retold by writers as diverse as Stuart Cloete, Susan Hill, and Jennifer Johnston, by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and the writers of Blackadder Goes Forth, and, in the 1990s, by Sebastian Faulks, Pat Barker, and Kate Atkinson?

There are, of course, exceptions to and variations on the theme of subalterndisillusion, some of which are included in the work of writers named above.And there are alternative perspectives – those of women, of the colonialregiments, of the working classes, and of the other fronts on which thewar was fought. Even in the 1920s and 1930s, when the rash of memoirsemerged that seemed to solidify the subaltern’s story, its universality wasquestioned. Douglas Jerrold, for instance, objected to what he called the“anti-war” stance as unrepresentative of the young men who experiencedthe war positively, in terms of adventures and action hitherto unknown. The narrative of bitter disillusionment, according to him, was not the onlystory.

SUHRAWARDĪ AND HIS CAREER

One is tempted to romanticize Suhrawardī. Indeed, there is no particular reason to avoid romanticizing him as a personality. He lived the life of a wandering wise man, and his story involved a prince, a magic gem, the fabulous Saladin, and a tragic early death. We can see him as his contemporaries saw him - probably as he saw himself - as a figure out of philosophical folklore, the like of whom had not been seen since Apollonius of Tyana. However, in my view it is a grave error to examine his philosophy, Illuminationism, through romantic spectacles, for Suhrawardi, despite his own attempts to mystify his project, was a hardheaded philosophical critic and creative thinker who set the agenda for later Islamic philosophy. Al-Ghazāli’s attempt to make religion independent of reason and Averroes' Aristotelianism left little trace in later Islamic thought, but Suhrawardi’s critique of Avicenna’s ontology and of Aristotelian epistemology and his solutions to these problems were his successors' starting points. The modern description of his philosophy as “theosophy” does not do justice to the rigor and philosophical influence of his thought.

Suhrawardī was probably born around 1154 in the village of Suhraward near Zanjān in northwestern Iran. We know nothing of his family or ethnic background. He first appears in Marāgha, a nearby city, where he studied logic and philosophy with Majd al-Dīn al-Jīlī, a scholar of moderate prominence who also was the teacher of the famous theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī.

In a monotheistic culture of the “examined and contemplative life,” the central intellectual challenge for a thinking, experiencing believer is to address the question: how can I know God? and concomitantly, how can I know what God means? In the classical period, Muslim thinkers approached this question by delineating four possible paths toward realizing, understanding, internalizing, and implementing the “truth” or “reality.” These four ways are succinctly and importantly examined in the famous “autobiography” of the theologian and Sīfī Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), al-Munqidh min al-dalāl (The Deliverer from Error): the imitation of infallible authoritative example (ta'līm, following the infallible Shī'ite Imām), acceptance of prophetic traditions and norms (taqlid of the Sunna), rational and discursive argument ('aql, naz. ar), and ineffable “pure” experience or “taste” (dhawq). So the first question that needs to be considered is the method of acquiring truth and certainty. In the context of this chapter, the options that I shall consider are reason and experience. In al-Ghazālī’s account, the use of philosophical reason is denounced for its failure to conform to “revealed truths,” while mystical experience is lauded: the difference is, as he puts it, that reason is an indirect means of acquiring truth through the verification of arguments, while “taste” experiences and directly takes on the state of truth, effecting a critical complementarity between knowledge and action. “Taste” has the added advantage of being a Qur’ānic concept and became the commonplace nomenclature for experience in Sīfī circles. Thus it would seem that early on in Islam, we find reason and experience pitted against each other.