Ceci N'est Pas Une Poem of the Day

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

-- Wilfred Owen

I'm remembering a scene in a Simpson's episode, in which two teenage boys discuss the antics of Homer, who has gained sudden celebrity catching cannonballs with his stomach for a Lollapalooza-esque show. When the first boy says something like, "Dude, this guy is great!", the second boy asks, "Are you being sarcastic?", and the first boy replies, "Dude, I don't know anymore!"

"Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work. 'Total irony' - irony about everything - frustrates itself and becomes insipid. ... "
-- C. S. Lewis, A Note on Jane Austen, in Essays in Criticism (1954)

"But flippancy is the best of all [for the purposes of tempting souls to eternal damnation]. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour plating against the Enemy [God] that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it."
--C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Chapter XI

I am tired of irony -- bone-tired, weary to the core of my being. And that in itself is ironic, since I am an inveterate ironizer and an aficionado of all the virtuosi of irony, from Joseph Conrad to Bill Murray. Irony is a great black hole at the center of "sophisticated" culture; even the light of joy, or the honesty of self-examination, can no longer escape its gravitational pull. I live in a prison house of irony, and I find that all my gestures toward sincerity have to reach around the iron bars that my sensibility, and my culture, seem to have imposed upon me.

What does this have to do with Wilfred Owen and his magnificent poem? For all the greatness of the World War I poets and memoirists, I can't help suspecting that our irony-besotted age was bequeathed to us by Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg, and all the lovely, lost young men who manned the trenches and went "over the top" as testament to a tradition and a culture that had, in some respects, failed them. Or, to be more precise, the irony that enthralls us is less a legacy of those great writers and poets than of the war that forged their artistic sensibilities, and less a legacy of that war than of the modernism which laid the foundation for that war and its No Man's Land of physical and cultural devastation. As Modris Eksteins has argued in Rites of Spring, his brilliant book about the intellectual and cultural history of World War I, it was really The Waste Land (or its ideological forbears) which gave birth to No Man's Land, and not the other way around.

Hence the antipathy to Tolkien among many of the gatekeepers of the Academy arises, not so much from his putative "escapism," as from his rejection of modernism -- as a technique and as an ideology. Tolkien himself fought in the Great War, and, by 1918, as he points out, all but one of his closest friends were dead. But he dared to confront the seminal experience of his generation without recourse to irony, and he did it by using the language and the archaic conventions of the "old lie" that Owen admonishes us not to fall for. And, by the time Tolkien published The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954, people were hungry for it -- hungry because there are old truths as well as old lies, and they lived in a culture which was increasingly unable to distinguish between them.

In a recent comment in The Corner, John Derbyshire called Fabrizio Quattrocchi -- the Italian who defied the Islamo-fascist thugs who were videotaping his murder -- a hero of Western civilization. And so he was. However, I can't help imagining how Wilfred Owen, for all his artistry, would have portrayed Quattrocchi's final moments: the gasping horror, the blood, everything reduced to the brute physical facts of violence and death. All irony aside, we need to ask ourselves which characterization of Quattrocchi is closer to the truth, and if we believe it is the former, we must reject the pervasive irony which has -- ironically -- spawned its own brood of old lies.