Affect and Absence: Irony in Siegfried Sassoon’s War Poetry
Avinash Antony & Somak Mukherjee On 13th July 1918 Siegfried Sassoon, now a decorated war-hero, was shot in the head near Arras, France. Ironically, it was not the enemy but a British soldier who shot him, thinking him to be a German soldier. This is one of the very many instances of irony that The First World War is replete with. In fact, in his seminal work Great War In Modern Memory, Paul Fussell points out “… every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. In the great war, eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort, had been shot.”[i] This piece, however, is not an essay on irony; neither is it an essay on the Great War and Modern Memory, the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, or war poetry in general. To be frank, this essay deals only fleetingly with some of the poems that Sassoon wrote in the years between 1914-1918.What this paper attempts to indicate is how affect is conveyed through absence: how the use of the ironic mode allows the reader to understand precisely because the poet does not speak. In the poem “The Dugout”[ii] written in July 1918, Sassoon has the speaker tell a fellow soldier not to sleep because “you are too young to fall asleep forever/and when you sleep you remind me of the dead.” One notes that almost everything remains unsaid in this poem. Except for the title, there is nothing in the poem to indicate where the speaker is, whom he is addressing, and in what conditions they are. Apart from an underground shelter, ‘dugout’ could also mean ‘a canoe’ as well as ‘a marijuana container.’ Divorced from context, it is perfectly legitimate to think that the speaker is either on a boat or in a den of vice. The poem could well be one that indicates the horrors of narcotic consumption. However, when it is put in context, one remembers the conditions the soldiers faced in the trenches. Sassoon describes these conditions in “Dreamers”[iii] I see them in foul dugouts gnawed by rats and in the ruined trenches lashed with rain. In the latter poem, Sassoon evokes the soldier’s traumatic experience in a far more straightforward manner. The poem is visceral precisely because it reveals; “The Dugout”, on the other hand, is affective precisely because it refuses to reveal. One is aware of the intensity of the trauma the speaker has suffered only when one questions why a sleeping youth reminds him of the dead. Is the speaker so affected because he has seen so many young men lying in the same manner on the battlefield? Or does the youth’s gesture while he sleeps remind the speaker of a state of innocence that, he recognizes, is long dead? The violence with which the speaker shakes the youth by the shoulder then, indicates how horrified the speaker is by the memory of death. And again, all this is indicated without once telling us whether the speaker is a soldier. Sassoon’s “Everyone Sang”[iv] also forces us to confront a strange ambiguity. It speaks about the first Armistice at Compiegne, 11th November 1918. Here he says Everyone suddenly burst out singing: And I was filled with such delight As prison birds must find in freedom Winging wildly across the white In the second stanza, the poem changes tone remarkably. Although he does say that everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted (which corresponds to the joyful tone of the first stanza), he now compares the beauty of the moment to a setting sun. He then reveals My heart was shaken with tears and horror Drifted away …O but everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing Will never be done. One isn’t sure why exactly why the singing will never be done. Is it because the joy that was felt at the end of the war will last forever? Or is it that the dead soldiers now sing as angels in heaven; their songs both wordless and inaccessible to us humans? Is the phrase “wordless songs” a contradiction? Taken by itself, the phrase “the singing will never be done” could also be a more tempered version of Adorno’s claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”[v] Barbaric, as we know, was used to refer to those considered devoid of language. Are the songs wordless, then, because no words can bear the weight of testimony? And can we ever be sure? Irony, as a rhetorical device as well as a philosophical trope, has been discussed to death. In fact, one can recall at least one death that was caused by an excess of irony: the death of Socrates. Over the years, scholars have identified many different kinds of irony, each defined in different ways. In an attempt to avoid all of these, let us propose a simple working definition of the term. If an utterance, when taken out of context, means something completely different from (and usually the opposite of) what it means when the context is considered, that utterance is ironic. Of course, situations can be ironic too, but even in such cases, there is a duality of meaning and a context that effects the difference. The etymology of the word seems to support this: ‘irony’ comes from the Greek eironeia which meant ‘deceit’ but then came to mean ‘pretended ignorance’ usually used to prove a point. One recalls Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”[vi] where it is the knowledge that cannibalism is considered an insurmountable social taboo that allows us to understand that the text is a satire. An interesting view of irony, and one that seems most apt, is presented in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony.[vii] In positing that irony is absolute negation, Kierkegaard alerts us to the fact that the ironic statement refuses to take a stance. Logically speaking,