The Language of Siegfried Sassoon (Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style) 3030884686, 9783030884680

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction
1.1 Siegfried Sassoon
1.2 Style
1.2.1 Definitions of Style
1.2.2 Style and Language
1.3 Cognitive Stylistics
1.3.1 Cognitive Grammar
1.3.2 Readers
1.4 Modelling the Author
1.5 Chapters in This Book
Notes
References
2 Cognitive Grammar
2.1 Cognitive Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics
2.2 Cognitive Grammar: Basic Parameters
2.3 Construal
2.4 Construal Phenomena
2.5 Specificity
2.6 Focusing
2.7 Prominence
2.8 Perspective
2.8.1 Dynamicity
2.8.2 Reference Points
2.8.3 Vantage Point
2.8.4 Subjective/Objective Construal
2.9 Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics
2.10 Construal Constraints
2.10.1 Construal and the World
2.10.2 Cognition and Context
2.10.3 Creativity and Construal: The Case of Metaphor
2.10.4 Construal and Creativity
2.10.5 Embodiment, Construal and the First World War
Notes
References
3 Observation
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Sassoon the Georgian Poet
3.3 Experience and Prophecy: The Poetry of 1916
3.4 ‘A Working Party’
3.4.1 Background
3.4.2 Immediate Observation
3.4.3 Accessibility
3.4.4 Reference Point Relationships
3.4.5 Action
3.5 ‘The Rear-Guard’
3.5.1 Background
3.5.2 Movement
3.5.3 Textual Attractors and Reference Points
Notes
References
4 Trauma
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Trauma and the First World War
4.3 Mind Style
4.3.1 Parameters of Mind Style
4.3.2 Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar
4.4 ‘Repression of War Experience’
4.4.1 Background
4.4.2 Metaphor and Mind Style
4.4.3 Split Construal
4.5 Hauntings
4.5.1 Dreams and Visions
4.5.2 Absence
Notes
References
5 Blame
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Reacting Against the War
5.3 ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’
5.4 Cognitive Grammar and Agency
5.5 Clause Structure
5.6 Mystification
5.7 Intentionality
5.8 Assigning Blame
5.9 Blame in Counter-Attack and Other Poems
5.9.1 ‘Killed’
5.9.2 ‘Die’ and ‘Death’
5.10 Reading Blame Indirectly: ‘The General’ and ‘The Effect’
5.11 Reading Intentionality and Irony in ‘Does It Matter?’
Notes
References
6 Revision
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Two Prose Trilogies
6.3 War Books
6.4 Autofiction
6.4.1 The Sherston Trilogy as Autofiction
6.4.2 Cognitive Stylistics and Autofiction
6.5 Revision as Reconstrual
6.5.1 Literary Revisions
6.5.2 A Model of Reconstrual
6.6 Reconstruing Sassoon’s Diary in MFHM
6.6.1 Sherston and the War
6.6.2 Arriving in France and Dick Tiltwood
6.6.3 Omitting David Cromlech
6.7 Reconstruing ‘Died of Wounds’
Notes
References
7 Reflection
7.1 Introduction
7.2 The Heart’s Journey
7.2.1 On the Threshold
7.2.2 ‘Farewell to a Room’
7.3 Vigils and Rhymed Ruminations
7.3.1 Re-Journeying in Vigils
7.3.2 ‘My past has gone to bed’
7.3.3 Time and Rhymed Ruminations
7.3.4 The Past Reborn
7.4 Sequences
7.4.1 The Spiritual and Religious
7.4.2 Metaphorical Construals
7.4.3 Image Schemas and Force Dynamics
7.4.4 ‘A Chord’
Notes
References
8 Conclusion: Reading ‘Everyone Sang’
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Recentring Sassoon
8.3 The Experience of ‘Everyone Sang’
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND STYLE

The Language of Siegfried Sassoon Marcello Giovanelli

Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style

Series Editors Rocío Montoro, Dept de Filologías Inglesa y Alemana, University of Granada, Granada, Granada, Spain Paul Simpson, Department of English, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

This series offers rigorous and informative treatments of particular writers, genres and literary periods and provides in-depth examination of their key stylistic tropes. Every volume in the series is intended to serve as a key reference point for undergraduate and post-graduate students and as an investigative resource for more experienced researchers. The last twenty years have witnessed a huge transformation in the analytic tools and methods of modern stylistics. By harnessing the talent of a growing body of researchers in the field, this series of books seeks both to capture these developments and transformations and to establish and elaborate new analytic models and paradigms.

Marcello Giovanelli

The Language of Siegfried Sassoon

Marcello Giovanelli School of Social Sciences and Humanities Aston University Birmingham, UK

ISSN 2731-8265 ISSN 2731-8273 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style ISBN 978-3-030-88468-0 ISBN 978-3-030-88469-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book took a long time to complete and at one point, I wondered if it would ever get finished. But it is here now, and I would like to thank the following people for their support. First, I am grateful to Meg Crane, Jennie Giovanelli, Chloe Harrison, Robbie Love, Charlotte May, and Tim Penton, who read various earlier versions of the manuscript and provided supportive and very useful comments and feedback. Many thanks also to Kate Giles for answering queries I had on Sassoon’s prose writing. The research in the book has taken place over many years and I would like to thank all those who asked questions and provided comments on papers I have given on the contents of this book, from the very first at the Cognitive Grammar in Literature symposium at the University of Nottingham in February 2013. Since then, I have presented at numerous research seminar series and international conferences. My particular thanks go to those who provided feedback on papers at PALA 2018 in Birmingham and IALS 2019 in Reykjavík, which came to form the basis of Chapter 6. I would also like to thank the series editors Rocío Montoro and Paul Simpson, and Cathy Scott and all of the team at Palgrave Macmillan for their advice, support, and patience. The School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Aston University provided research start-up funding in 2017 which allowed me to undertake some of the research for this book, and then covered permissions fees. My thanks in particular to Phil Mizen for his support in this latter respect. Completing the writing of this book during long periods of lockdown came with many challenges, including not being able to access the library and archive material during that time. But I am grateful to John Wells at the University Library, Cambridge for answering queries, and to John Whale of Stand magazine. I would also like to thank members of the Brenchley and Matfield Local History Society for allowing me to spend some time in their

v

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sassoon archive, and Alison Gibbons for sharing her expertise—and numerous papers—on autofiction with me. Finally, my biggest thanks, as always, for their continued support rests with Jennie, Anna, Zara, and Sophia. I am grateful to be able to reproduce various poems, prose, and diary entries of Siegfried Sassoon throughout this book. These are reprinted with the kind permission of the estate of George Sassoon. Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in an earlier form in ‘Conceptual proximity and the experience of war in Siegfried Sassoon’s “A Working Party” in Cognitive Grammar in Literature’ (eds Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell, and Wenjuan Yuan, 2014) published by John Benjamins (https://benjamins. com/catalog/lal.17).

Contents

1

Introduction 1.1 Siegfried Sassoon 1.2 Style 1.2.1 Definitions of Style 1.2.2 Style and Language 1.3 Cognitive Stylistics 1.3.1 Cognitive Grammar 1.3.2 Readers 1.4 Modelling the Author 1.5 Chapters in This Book References

1 1 3 3 5 8 8 9 9 10 13

2

Cognitive Grammar 2.1 Cognitive Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics 2.2 Cognitive Grammar: Basic Parameters 2.3 Construal 2.4 Construal Phenomena 2.5 Specificity 2.6 Focusing 2.7 Prominence 2.8 Perspective 2.8.1 Dynamicity 2.8.2 Reference Points 2.8.3 Vantage Point 2.8.4 Subjective/Objective Construal 2.9 Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics 2.10 Construal Constraints 2.10.1 Construal and the World 2.10.2 Cognition and Context 2.10.3 Creativity and Construal: The Case of Metaphor

17 17 19 20 22 23 24 25 27 28 30 31 32 35 36 36 36 38 vii

viii

CONTENTS

2.10.4 2.10.5 References

Construal and Creativity Embodiment, Construal and the First World War

39 40 44 49 49 51 54 57 57 58 61 63 65 67 67 68 72 77

3

Observation 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Sassoon the Georgian Poet 3.3 Experience and Prophecy: The Poetry of 1916 3.4 ‘A Working Party’ 3.4.1 Background 3.4.2 Immediate Observation 3.4.3 Accessibility 3.4.4 Reference Point Relationships 3.4.5 Action 3.5 ‘The Rear-Guard’ 3.5.1 Background 3.5.2 Movement 3.5.3 Textual Attractors and Reference Points References

4

Trauma 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Trauma and the First World War 4.3 Mind Style 4.3.1 Parameters of Mind Style 4.3.2 Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar 4.4 ‘Repression of War Experience’ 4.4.1 Background 4.4.2 Metaphor and Mind Style 4.4.3 Split Construal 4.5 Hauntings 4.5.1 Dreams and Visions 4.5.2 Absence References

81 81 83 87 87 89 92 92 94 98 101 101 104 107

5

Blame 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Reacting Against the War 5.3 ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ 5.4 Cognitive Grammar and Agency 5.5 Clause Structure 5.6 Mystification 5.7 Intentionality 5.8 Assigning Blame 5.9 Blame in Counter-Attack and Other Poems 5.9.1 ‘Killed’

111 111 112 115 118 118 120 122 123 124 125

CONTENTS

ix

5.9.2 ‘Die’ and ‘Death’ 5.10 Reading Blame Indirectly: ‘The General’ and ‘The Effect’ 5.11 Reading Intentionality and Irony in ‘Does It Matter?’ References

127 131 134 141

6

Revision 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Two Prose Trilogies 6.3 War Books 6.4 Autofiction 6.4.1 The Sherston Trilogy as Autofiction 6.4.2 Cognitive Stylistics and Autofiction 6.5 Revision as Reconstrual 6.5.1 Literary Revisions 6.5.2 A Model of Reconstrual 6.6 Reconstruing Sassoon’s Diary in MFHM 6.6.1 Sherston and the War 6.6.2 Arriving in France and Dick Tiltwood 6.6.3 Omitting David Cromlech 6.7 Reconstruing ‘Died of Wounds’ References

143 143 144 146 148 148 150 152 152 153 154 154 155 159 163 170

7

Reflection 7.1 Introduction 7.2 The Heart’s Journey 7.2.1 On the Threshold 7.2.2 ‘Farewell to a Room’ 7.3 Vigils and Rhymed Ruminations 7.3.1 Re-Journeying in Vigils 7.3.2 ‘My past has gone to bed’ 7.3.3 Time and Rhymed Ruminations 7.3.4 The Past Reborn 7.4 Sequences 7.4.1 The Spiritual and Religious 7.4.2 Metaphorical Construals 7.4.3 Image Schemas and Force Dynamics 7.4.4 ‘A Chord’ References

175 175 178 178 180 184 184 185 187 189 192 192 193 195 198 200

8

Conclusion: Reading ‘Everyone Sang’ 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Recentring Sassoon 8.3 The Experience of ‘Everyone Sang’ References

205 205 206 207 211

Index

213

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 3.1

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

The construal configuration and its basic elements, adapted from Verhagen (2006, 323) The schematic-specific continuum Sequential scanning Summary scanning Reference point relationship (based on Langacker 2008, 84) Construal relationships (adapted from Verhagen 2007) Maximal and immediate scope in –ing forms (adapted from Langacker 1990, 92) The third person pronoun ‘he’ and the split referent The setting-subject construction at the climax of ‘A Working Party’ Complex relationship and trajector-landmark movement denoted by the proposition ‘along’ Clausal trajectors and landmarks as reference points in the opening of ‘The Rear-Guard’ Reference points and targets chain in second verse paragraph of ‘The Rear-Guard’ Global structure of ‘The Rear-Guard’ A cline of construals (adapted from Stockwell 2009, 124; Nuttall 2018, 81) Metonymic reference point-target (adapted from Langacker 1995, 27) Reference point and broader metaphorical construal Transferred second person narration and construal Reality and irreality (based on Langacker 2008, 301) ‘The soldier killed the enemy’ as two participant action chain (based on Langacker 2008, 356) ‘The soldier killed the enemy’ as canonical event model (based on Langacker 2008, 357) Absolute construal through intransitive verb with single participant (from Langacker 2008, 385)

21 23 29 30 31 34 60 63 66 69 74 75 76 90 96 97 99 106 119 120 128 xi

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.4 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

5.5 7.1 7.2 7.3

Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 7.7 Fig. 7.8

Atemporal and temporal relationships: ‘dead’ and ‘died’ (based on Langacker 2008, 102) Inferred intentionality as a reference point Text-world attentional shift as reference point relationship Conception of reality (based on Langacker 2008, 306) Image-schematic representation of ‘toward ungranted God’ in ‘Faith Unfaithful’ Image-schematic representation ‘O God within me […] speak […] Speak […] Speak’ in ‘The Need’ Force-dynamic representation of ‘The ball kept rolling because of the wind blowing on it’ Force-dynamic representation of ‘Someone invades me’ in ‘The Visitant’ Force-dynamic representations in ‘Resurrection’ Force-dynamic representations in ‘A Chord’

134 139 183 190 195 195 197 197 198 199

List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 6.5

Concordance for ‘killed’ in Counter-Attack and Other Poems Concordance for ‘die’, ‘died’, ‘dying’ in Counter-Attack and Other Poems Concordance for ‘Death’/‘death’ in Counter-Attack and Other Poems Top forty noun collocates of ‘lose’ in the BNC by typicality Reconstrual dimensions Comparison of accounts of Sassoon and Sherston arriving in France Comparison of diary entries and accounts in MFHM Reconstrued poems in MIO Comparison of ‘Died of Wounds’ and account in MIO

126 129 130 137 154 156 161 164 165

xiii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1

Siegfried Sassoon

In a letter to his long-time friend and fellow poet Edmund Blunden in 1965, Siegfried Sassoon bemoaned the fact that he was, some forty-six years after the First World War ended, still best known for his war verse. ‘I am weary of being a war poet. Will they ever read the rest of me?’ (Rothkopf 2016b, 275). A year later, he wrote that ‘My renown as a W.P. [War Poet] has now become a positive burden to me’ before admitting ‘But my detestation of that war remains as active as ever, and it returns to me at times almost as a morbid obsession. The experience is quite inescapable, and there is an awful fascination about it’ (Sassoon 1976, 14). This book focuses on the language of Siegfried Sassoon as it appears in the poems and prose which emerged initially from his experiences in the First World War, experiences which continued to influence his post-1918 output. Signing up to escape the boredom of pre-war existence and what he perceived as ‘a deplorably unfertile future’ (Sassoon 1942, 272), Sassoon’s experiences as a soldier were the single biggest influence on his development as a writer both within the years 1915–1918 and across his post-war work; for example, his autobiographical prose writing is largely centred around the build up to, engagement with, and immediate aftermath of the war years. According to his friend, Dennis Silk, Sassoon in his later years spoke ‘endlessly and unforgettably about the First World War’ (1996, 78). Sassoon’s pre-war work had been published in minor journals or else in privately printed editions or volumes with very small print runs until 1916 when his early war verse began to appear in more established journals such as The Cambridge Magazine and The Westminster Gazette. The Old Huntsman © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Giovanelli, The Language of Siegfried Sassoon, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7_1

1

2

M. GIOVANELLI

and Other Poems (Sassoon 1917) contained verse written before and during the war, while Counter-Attack and Other Poems (Sassoon 1918) contained largely war poems. Picture Show (Sassoon 1919) was privately printed with a general American edition appearing a year later. War Poems (Sassoon 1919) drew on the contents from these three volumes and was followed by subsequent collections of poetry that appeared in both privately published and trade editions. Selected Poems (Sassoon 1925) and the Augustan Book of Modern Poetry: Siegfried Sassoon (Sassoon 1926) drew together the war and early post-war poems in larger print runs. Sassoon’s work also appeared in general poetry anthologies that were published both during and after the war years. Published during the war, both The Muse in Arms (Osborn 1917) and Treasury of War Poetry (Clarke 1917) included two of Sassoon’s poems among what was otherwise largely patriotic verse. After 1918, anthologies of war poetry became more representative of collections that modern readers might recognize (see Haughton 2007 for detailed exemplification and discussion). In 1930, the seminal An Anthology of War Poems (Brereton 1930) included an introduction, ‘The soldier poets of 1914–1918’, by Edmund Blunden, which provided the template for what would become the conventional representation of Sassoon as the archetypal trench poet. Blunden (1930, 20–21) writes: It was his [Sassoon’s] triumph to be the first man who even described war fully and exactly and had description been all that he did, the feat would have been distinguished. The face of war is one of protean changes. In order to catch those countenances, a man has to be acute in a rare degree. A fighting man, too, is busy; the whirlpool of danger, and labour, and noise which has swallowed him is not of a sort to assist him in a plain observant report. No ferocity could deflect the passion in Mr Sassoon’s mind for a complete impression, such as must command the attention and understanding even of the uninitiated, of the fury […] He contrived to draw a sword for a greater ideal than the colours of a regiment, by recording what war does to ‘youth and laughter’ in poignant epithet and striking verb, in various rhythm and in dramatic narration. He showed in many passages how life had bloomed to these men […] He showed to what extreme the failure of nations to think calmly, to consider the obvious, had withered these men; he had the power of producing in a remark or detail the scorching hopelessness in which they were imprisoned.

Blunden’s description of Sassoon outlines characteristics that have now come to be recognized as typical of Sassoon’s writing: a poet of description; a soldier who can provide a ‘complete impression’ of the war and a record of its impact on the young men who fought in it; and a voice of revelation and protest, able to draw attention to wider political concerns through his writing. Sassoon’s status as a canonical war poet was established by anthologies that appeared from the 1960s onwards and emphasized above all the privileged position of the ‘soldier-poet’ as the authentic voice of war.1 On the memorial stone in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey in 1985, Sassoon is one of

1

INTRODUCTION

3

sixteen poets included and it is probably the case that Sassoon is second only to Wilfred Owen as the most anthologized poet of the war. His poetry and prose are regularly studied in schools and universities today; a recent anthology of poetry (O’Prey 2014), published to mark the beginning of the centenary of the war, includes ten of Sassoon’s poems, only Ivor Gurney and Wilfred Owen have more. There remains a considerable scholarly and public interest in Sassoon’s life and work. Since the first book-length critical study of his work by Michael Thorpe (1966), exceptional and important biographies by John Stuart Roberts, Max Egremont and Jean Moorcroft Wilson have appeared together with numerous literary-critical studies. Stephen Macdonald’s play, Not About Heroes (Macdonald 1983), which focuses on the relationship of Sassoon and Owen has enjoyed a succession of tours across the world, and Terence Davies’ biopic, Benediction, was released in 2021. There are very few signs that interest in Sassoon, his literary outputs, and the war that came to define him is likely to fade.

1.2 1.2.1

Style

Definitions of Style

The focus of this book is on Sassoon’s language, and so my interest is in providing a text-based account of Sassoon’s style. In using this term, I primarily draw on the definition provided by Leech and Short (2007, 9) who propose that style refers to the way that ‘language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose’. Highlighting the need to avoid crude generalizations regarding the ways in which an author uses language, and instead focus on specific instances, Leech and Short argue that style must be more than simply the ‘linguistic habits’ (2007, 10) of a particular writer.2 Instead, they propose a definition of style based on the analysis of texts across a writer’s work, since the text is the nearest we can get to a homogeneous and specific use of language. It is therefore the natural starting place for the study of style. In a text we can study style in more detail, and with more systematic attention to what words or structures are chosen in preference to others. We can exhibit our material on the page, and examine the interrelations between one choice of language and another. (Leech and Short 2007, 11)

An approach that focuses on one writer’s oeuvre allows for a comparative treatment of styles . Again, I am deliberate in my choice of the term since Sassoon’s language undoubtedly varies across the writing covered in this book: pre-war verse, poetry written in the immediate environment of the trenches and then during reflections on war at home, verse written after the war but still concerned with the war in a myriad of ways, post-war verse which

4

M. GIOVANELLI

addresses different personal and literary concerns, and varying degrees of autobiographical prose work. The development of style(s) is important in the study of Sassoon’s language. His early verse was criticized for its sentimentality and Georgian characteristics. One of his early mentors, Edmund Gosse, urged him to ‘not spend all your life among moonbeams and half-tones’ (Charteris 1931, 331) while another, Edward Marsh, argued that Sassoon’s early work contained ‘far too much of the worn-out stuff’ (Sassoon 1942, 139). In his autobiographical work Good-bye to All That , Robert Graves, himself a major influence on the development of Sassoon’s writing, had remarked that experience of the trenches would inevitably lead to Sassoon ‘soon change[ing] his style’ (Graves 1929, 146). Two years later, however, Graves had pleaded for his friend not to ‘send me any more corpse poems, stick to your splendid Thrushes’ (Graves 1982, 87). As Samuel Hynes (1990, 156) remarks, and as I explore in detail in Chapter 3, Sassoon ‘began 1916 as one kind of poet and ended the year as an antithetically different kind’. From the end of 1918, Sassoon set out on the process of ‘reorganizing a war-interrupted existence’ (Sassoon 1981, 17) and his writing generally settled back into a more sentimental outlook with the type of Georgian nostalgia which had typified his pre-war verse. His distrust of the Modernist movement had generally left him with little time for its poets whom he viewed as complicating the writing of poetry ‘with all this cleverness and technical ingenuity’ (Rothkopf 2016b, 21). Sassoon viewed his own verse style as more direct and straightforward; in a later letter to Edmund Blunden in 1962, he questioned the relative merits of Modernist poetry, comparing it to his own ‘heart language’, arguing that his poetry was more universal and timeless: […] will anyone in 2062 care one way or the other about any of us [poets]? But they’ll still have hearts, won’t they? And heart language always wins. So a hope for you and me. (Rothkopf 2016b, 233)

It is in this way that Sassoon’s styles connect to his poetic identity or what he called ‘being a poet pure and simple’ (Rothkopf 2016a, 129). He viewed himself as a poet-prophet in the literal sense, relaying his experiences to his readership in as much descriptive detail as possible (see Corrigan 1973, 21). The vivid descriptions of the Front in his diary entries of early 1916 form part of a series of identities that emerge through his writing through the war years and beyond: experiencer, protestor, satirizer, and reflector. His diaries and letters show a meticulous attention to detail and, as he put it, he saw himself as ‘a student historian of those tragic, vivid and profoundly moving scenes in the Somme country’ (Sassoon 1945, 18). Although as I discuss in Chapter 6, Sassoon was aware of the fragility of memory and of the difficulty in representing events many years after they had taken place, he was equally critical of writing about the war that he perceived as being deliberately untrue

1

INTRODUCTION

5

or else seemingly unconcerned with maintaining accuracy. For example, the breakdown of his relationship with Robert Graves in the late 1920s and early 1930s was partly due to what Sassoon viewed as Graves’ lack of care when representing war experiences: see Chapter 6 of this book and Graves (1982, 197–209). Drawing together style and identity results in a second workable definition of style that I utilize throughout this book. Borrowing a term from sociolinguistics, stylizing (Eckert 2008) is a process of identity formation in which an individual, in and through discourse, indexes a particular projection of the self. The communicative practices of speaking and writing are thus embedded in processes of identity building, themselves related to particular ways of thinking about the world and one’s position within it. As Eckert (2008, 456) states: Ideology is at the center of stylistic practice: one way or another, every stylistic move is the result of an interpretation of the social world and of the meanings of elements within it, as well as a positioning of the stylizer with respect to that world.

In this book, I consider the significance of language patterns that emerge through an analysis of Sassoon’s writing as ‘stylistic moves’ which in turn provide ways of conceptualizing a poetic identity for Sassoon and of responding to his work. Identities, however, are also readerly perceived phenomena and so a third and connected conceptualization of style acknowledges, as Chapman (2020, 68) suggests, ‘the relationship it [style] establishes between text, or narrator, and reader’. Broadly then, the study of style in this book is text-driven, multiple, and dynamic and is examined in the context of giving rise to particular interpretative effects and specific readings. This book takes, as a starting point, some fairly standard ideas from Sassoon scholarship and reconfigures them through the lens of cognitive stylistics to provide a fresh perspective on his style. These focuses are that Sassoon is an observational poet who presents scenes with close attention to detail (Chapter 3), that he is a poet concerned with the traumatic effects of war (Chapter 4); that he is a poet of protest and irony (Chapter 5), and that he is a writer who kept coming back, instinctively and obsessively to rewriting, making sense of, and moving beyond prior memories and experiences (Chapters 6 and 7). 1.2.2

Style and Language

Literary-critical studies of Sassoon, working with a looser definition of style, have suggested that there are particular characteristics that can be both broadly aligned with various stages of his war experience and tracked across his postwar writing. For example, Campbell (1999) argues that Sassoon develops systematically across time, while Moeyes (1997) discusses Sassoon’s pre-war, war, and post-war verse explicitly in terms of its various so-called ‘stages’. In the first book-length treatment of Sassoon’s work, Thorpe (1966) categorizes

6

M. GIOVANELLI

the war poetry as belonging to one of four descriptive styles, each related to an attitude or mental state towards the war: ‘happy warrior’; ‘bitter pacifist’; ‘himself bewildered’; and ‘a larger sympathy’. These studies, however, have paid little attention to the actual language that Sassoon employs. Within stylistics, quite remarkably, only a few studies of Sassoon exist (see for example Giovanelli 2014, 2019a, b, 2021). A quick analysis of Sassoon’s poetry demonstrates the value of a languagefocused approach. Printed below is ‘The General’, a poem written while Sassoon was at Denmark Hill Hospital, London in April 1917, and first published in Counter-Attack and Other Poems . ‘The General’

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said When we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead, And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine. “He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. But he did for them both by his plan of attack

The point of view in the poem is that of an unnamed speaker who adopts a knowledgeable and privileged perspective on the events that are narrated. The point of view remains consistent throughout through the use of the first person plural subject pronoun ‘we’ and the possessive determiner ‘our’. In the first line, the use of direct speech adds authenticity to the speaker’s words; the General’s ‘cheery’ nature contrasts with the curses of the speaker and the later grunting of Harry and Jack. The poem shifts tense from the past, ‘said’ and ‘met’, to the present signalled by the time adverbial ‘now’ and the participial form ‘cursing’, then back to the past, ‘grunted Harry and Jack’, ‘slogged’ and ‘he did for them both’. Sassoon also draws on a colloquial register to represent the soldiers. The use of ‘old card’, the speaker’s clipping of ‘‘em’, and lexical items associated with war such as ‘the line’, ‘cursing’, ‘slogged’, and ‘rifle and pack’ all echo the language of the working-class soldier and specifically the lexicon of the trenches. The fact that the General appears at a physical and emotional distance from the speaker and from Harry and Jack (the General is unnamed unlike the soldiers) is highlighted in his ignorance of the men’s plight and in the speaker’s evaluation of the ‘plan of attack’. Equally, the foregrounding of movement through the adverbial ‘on our way to the line’ and the phrasal verb ‘slogged up’ position the speaker and Harry and Jack increasingly away from the General. The final line, graphological separated, emphasizes further movement in that, the speaker is now detached from the scene. In my reading of

1

INTRODUCTION

7

the poem, this separation also highlights the irony of Harry’s previous words since the reader assumes that he and Jack are now dead. The phrase ‘did for them’3 is both colloquial, matching the speaker’s closer affiliation to Harry and Jack than the General, and euphemistic reflecting the common reluctance to talk directly about death in the trenches and in descriptions of war experience (see Walker 2017, 133, 284). At the same time, however, the poem very clearly blames the General for the men’s deaths and it would be difficult, I think, to argue against this reading. Both literary-critical and non-academic interpretations of the poem take this particular stance. The cheerful, trusting tommies become just another lifeless statistic in his [the General’s] “plan of attack’ (Campbell 1999, 59) ‘The General’ [is] arguably his fiercest attack on the incompetence of the military leadership (Moeyes 1997, 45) The sing-song rhythm of the first two lines conveys the brisk and casual manner of the general and also of the soldiers’ death. To change in the next two lines to the heavily accented “we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine” is a grim introduction to the easily moving fifth and sixth lines – the unquestioning willingness to serve and die – and the last line completing a neat triplet with the impression of the tidy dispatch of lives. the scathing ending is put into words of one wearily accustomed to such events. (Thorpe 1966, 23) For such a short poem it truly encapsulates the sheer embittered anger and irony that Sassoon felt about the futility of the tactics employed in The Great War. It does go to show that sometimes less is more. It highlights the cold detachment of the officer class from the plight of the common soldier despite attempts to put a friendly, chummy, fatherly veneer on for the sake of the troops. (Jones 2014) A General breezily greets a company of his men as they move up the line towards Arras. His incompetent planning will lead to their deaths. (Griffiths 2011)

. My brief analysis demonstrates that a close investigation of Sassoon’s language can account for, in a transparent way, textual and interpretative phenomena such as: close description; the adoption of a particular perspective or ideological stance; the replication of the language of the Front; the contrast between soldiers and those in charge; and the assigning of blame for specific actions. It is precisely how readers are directed towards these kinds of interpretations by Sassoon’s language or ‘stylistic moves’ that this book examines.

8

M. GIOVANELLI

1.3 1.3.1

Cognitive Stylistics Cognitive Grammar

This book uses methodologies and methods from cognitive stylistics, a discipline that draws on the broader fields of cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive literary studies to examine how texts are produced, received, and evaluated. Throughout the chapters that follow, I use Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) as a primary method of analysis. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 2, Cognitive Grammar offers a theory of language that draws together all its constituent parts in a unified model that is based on general principles of cognition and our status as social beings situated in and ‘moving, perceiving, and acting on the world’ (Langacker 2008, 4). It aims to offer a ‘psychologically plausible and linguistically revealing’ (Langacker 2008, 517) model for studying cognition and reading that stresses the meaningfulness of particular grammatical constructions. In modern stylistic scholarship, there is a growing number of researchers who have adopted Cognitive Grammar as a model in the study of contemporary fiction (Harrison 2017a, b; Giovanelli 2018; Nuttall 2018; Browse 2018; Harrison and Nuttall 2019), poetry (Stockwell 2009, 2017, 2020; Giovanelli 2014), and genre studies (Giovanelli 2019a, b, 2021). A wide range of approaches and text types including in non-literary and applied contexts can also be found in two recent edited collections (Harrison et al. 2014; Giovanelli et al. 2021). In this book, I demonstrate that Cognitive Grammar provides systematic ways of accounting for differing degrees of organization (at various language levels) in Sassoon’s work as well as offering a framework for re-evaluating discourse moves in their broader contexts of production as examples of creative and imaginative writing. These dual aspects of engaged (situated) and disengaged (imaginative) cognition (Langacker 2008, 535) form a central part of this study. I draw particularly on the Cognitive Grammar notion of construal , which accounts for the multiple, and inherently meaningful, ways that we might choose to represent the world through language. Such a view of grammar provides the basis for examining how language explicitly positions readers, whether literary-critical, non-academic, or indeed myself in my own introspective analyses, to infer meanings through particular stylistic patterns. It is my view that Cognitive Grammar’s attention to specific detail provides a nuanced account of textual phenomena and their effects. That said, throughout the book, I also acknowledge stylistics’ ‘eclecticism’ (Stockwell and Whiteley 2014, 6) and use other frameworks as a plug-in in order to explain a concept, principle, or textual feature should the need arise. I also hope to demonstrate how utilizing Cognitive Grammar in the service of literary criticism can result in new insights into the theory and its values, what Stockwell (2009, 121) refers to as a ‘virtuous feedback loop’ that is the result of the practical application of a theoretical, clause-level theory.

1

1.3.2

INTRODUCTION

9

Readers

Although this is a book about a particular writer, it is also a book about readers and readings. Cognitive stylisticians have increasingly moved away from generalized notions of the reader (often simply the analyst themselves) to a more explicit form of empirical stylistics that situates and discusses meanings as they are generated in the light of specific reader response data. Branching out from readings purely by published academics, such work has examined how interpretations arise and are expressed among non-academic readers in naturalistic settings such as reading groups (e.g. Peplow 2016) and online reading fora (e.g. Gavins 2013; Harrison 2017b; Nuttall 2018) or else, through experimental approaches, has generated reader responses through staged activities such as text manipulation exercises (e.g. Kuzmiˇcová et al. 2017) or questionnaires (e.g. Bray 2007). Rundquist (2018, 153) argues, however, that such a focus may result in less ‘argument-driven’ work so that the primary goal shifts from the study of style, aesthetics and literary-critical concerns to descriptions of readings.4 These concerns may be mitigated through combining text-driven analyses with accounts of the particular effects that language has on readers in order to triangulate the introspective critical interpretations of the analyst, which may be thought of as ‘indirectly empirical’ (Vandaele and Brône 2009, 7), and literary-critical and non-academic or natural reader responses, which represent a more directly empirical methodological approach. The result is thus ‘a middle ground between rich first person phenomenology and rigorous third person observation’ (Vandaele and Brône 2009, 6). I take this stance throughout the book, drawing on my own interpretations and analyses together with literary-critical work and non-academic responses to Sassoon’s work in the form of reader response data obtained from various sources.5

1.4

Modelling the Author

Generally speaking, reading any text involves the activation of relevant aspects of schematic knowledge that operate as an important meaning-making resource. Some of this knowledge is more general, but much of it is specific to the text and/or author and thus biographical. Given the ease with which we can delineate parts of Sassoon’s output and find connections between his writing and particular matters of biography (first arriving at the Front, experiencing loss, sick and home leave, his declaration against the War and time at Craiglockhart, his struggle with identity in the 1920s and so on), it seems to me impossible—and indeed counterproductive—to ignore these aspects of biography as integral to the process of reading Sassoon. As Stockwell (2017, 21–22) puts it. […] literary works arise from historical moments, are shaped by them, and – crucially – these facts are often known by readers and influence their readings.

10

M. GIOVANELLI

In short, it is as partial to disregard the culture of composition as it is to evade matters of textuality.

Despite this and following the New Critics’ caution over the ‘intentional fallacy’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946), stylisticians have been wary of speculating about the relationship between a writer’s life and their interpretation of their work. The cognitive turn in stylistics has, however, allowed such matters to be re-integrated into an overall analysis of the experience of reading literature. Stockwell (2009, 2016, 2017), for example, describes how readers (including academic writers and critics) engage in ‘mind-modelling the authorial voice’ (2017, 24), by building a mental representation of a human entity behind the production of a text, which is then fleshed out by drawing on various kinds of information, both textual and extra-textual. Mind-modelling may also help to explain our natural dispensation to impute intentionality onto an authorial figure and to infer reasons for particular micro and macrolevel textual choices. In my reading of ‘The General’ discussed earlier in this chapter, I run an authorial model based on a range of different kinds of knowledge that I hold about Sassoon. As I read and wrote about the poem for this chapter, I modelled an authorial mind, situated in the poem’s time and place of conception, drawing on what I know about the poem’s composition. So, my reading is necessarily informed by my knowledge that the first draft of this poem has the date ‘May 1917’ and is on headed notepaper from The Reform Club in London where Sassoon lunched having been granted dayrelease from his hospital in Denmark Hill, London. I also know that this poem was written shortly before Sassoon’s declaration against the war and thus infer that he was writing the poem in the context of holding what must have been very strong feelings. These details are not peripheral ones but rather form an integral part of the reading experience and play an important role in helping me to construct an intentional authorial presence behind the poem, which in turn both informs and shapes my interpretation and enriches my experience of it. When reading other examples of Sassoon’s work, I may equally draw on extra-textual material such as his diaries, biographies, other secondary reading and so on. In those instances where Sassoon revisits previous material (a phenomenon I discuss by drawing on the Cognitive Grammar notion of reconstrual in Chapter 6) reshaping it for a new context and set of discourse goals, it seems equally natural to assign some sense of intentionality to that act (see Sotirova 2014). Throughout the book then, I draw on what I perceive as relevant matters of biography as background context to my own discussion, to help support my own analyses, and to demonstrate how other readers use these details as a resource in their own interpretative work.

1.5

Chapters in This Book

The remainder of this book is structured as follows. In Chapter 2, I set out an overview of Cognitive Grammar outlining its parameters which provide

1

INTRODUCTION

11

the analytical method for the chapters that follow. In particular, I explain the notion of construal (Langacker 2008, 58), which accounts for the meaningfulness of specific lexical and grammatical choices that language users may draw on. Here I outline, with examples, the various construal phenomena, which provide a platform for my discussion of Sassoon’s writing in Chapter 3 onwards. In the second part of the chapter, I explore the relationship between construal and context and introduce the idea of construal constraints , extratextual factors that might be responsible for both for generating specific construals (creativity) and acting as the basis for readerly interpretations. The chapter ends with an extended discussion of embodiment and construal in First World War trench poetry to demonstrate the relationship between the physical context of the trench and the language used to describe (or construe) those experiences by poets engaged in battle. Chapters 3–7 are largely analytical chapters, although any new ideas and concepts not covered in Chapter 2 are also introduced, which apply Cognitive Grammar to analyse Sassoon’s language. Each chapter is centred on a specific theme and takes, either as their starting point or more generally throughout the discussion, interpretations that different readers have assigned to Sassoon’s writing. In Chapter 3, I analyse verse written during Sassoon’s time in the trenches between 1916–1917. The chapter contextualizes this poetry by first focusing on Sassoon’s writing before and up to 1915 including his juvenilia, which captures his sense of early poetic identity, and then by exploring a selection of Sassoon’s verse written in the first part of 1916. Starting from Sassoon’s own desire to ‘get as many sensations as possible’ (Sassoon 1983, 51), and using ‘A Working Party’ and ‘The Rear-Guard’ as extended case studies, I examine how Sassoon’s stylistic representation of immediate experience manifests itself in the reconfiguration of the human body during trench warfare and a perceived sense of proximity in its fine-grained detail of the ambience of the Front. My analyses show that Sassoon’s verse is marked by a style that results in a readerly effect of conceptual proximity to the physical landscape of war and to the actions, events and characters therein. In Chapter 4, I read Sassoon’s poems through the lens of trauma as a way of examining his shifting style and identity from 1916 to 1917. Aligning poems written between April-November 1917 with reader responses offering largely biographical readings that emphasize the perceived dissatisfaction with and mental anguish towards the war, I draw on the concept of ‘mind style’ to explore the specific states of mind that are made visible and attributed to the speaking voice in ‘Repression of War Experience’. Following this case study, I explore more widely the language of trauma in Sassoon’s 1917 verse. Chapter 5 examines the assigning of blame in Sassoon’s war poetry. Contextualizing my analysis firstly within Sassoon’s own ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ and then within academic and non-academic discussions of Sassoon which frame him as a poet of protest, I examine the extent to which blame and responsibility are manifest in the language of Counter-Attack and Other Poems . Focusing first on the entire collection and then providing extended analyses of

12

M. GIOVANELLI

two poems from the collection, ‘The Effect’ and ‘Does It Matter?’, I examine the degree to which agency is grammatically realized and then analyse the grammar in line with the interpretative effects that arise from such construals. In Chapter 6, I explore Sassoon’s rewriting of his diary entries across several episodes from the George Sherston trilogy (Sassoon 1937), a series of books in which Sassoon revisited the past and reshaped his war experiences through the narrating voice of his alter ego George Sherston. I discuss Sassoon’s use of Sherston as a type of autofictional strategy, which results in a series of complicated rewrites or reconstruals that blurs the ontological distance between Sassoon and Sherston. The chapter analyses diary entries which are revised in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (Sassoon 1928), and examines his 1916 poem ‘Died of Wounds’, reworked in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (Sassoon 1930). In both instances, I demonstrate how Sassoon’s reconstruals of experience are connected both to the new genre of war books that emerged in the mid-late 1920s and 1930s, and to the discourse function of the autofictional memoir. Chapter 7 ranges across Sassoon’s poetry from 1927 onwards, starting with The Heart’s Journey (Sassoon 1927) and ending with Sequences (Sassoon 1956). In this chapter, I examine Sassoon’s increasingly introspective and spiritual verse, which I argue may be understood as being underpinned by a range of metaphors that increasingly conceptualize identity as a journey along a path towards a specific set of goals. This chapter also draws more broadly on other cognitive-linguistic frameworks such as Text World Theory to examine hypotheticality, and force-dynamics to explore supernatural agency. The final chapter analyses Sassoon’s 1919 poem, ‘Everyone Sang’. In this chapter, I examine three responses to the poem that highlight a set of common interpretations and explain how these may be aligned to the language of the poem and, specifically, the construals that position readers to adopt particular interpretative stances. The chapter completes the book by bringing together matters of creativity, context and language and provides a final case study that exemplifies the usefulness of Cognitive Grammar for stylistic analysis.

Notes 1. See, for example, Up to the Line of Death: The War Poets 1914–1918 (Gardner 1964), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (Silkin 1979), The Oxford Book of War Poetry (Stallworthy 1984) and Poetry of the First World War (Kendall 2013). 2. See also Short (1996) who proposes the distinction between authorial style and text style. 3. In an original version, Sassoon had used ‘murdered’ but amended this on advice that it did not fit in with the rest of the poem. See Silk (1996, 64) for discussion and also Chapter 5 of this book. 4. Rundquist (2020a, b), for example, argues for a less reader-oriented and more text-based form of stylistics. My own feeling is that it really depends on what the analyst sets out to do, but also that a sensible middle ground can be achieved.

1

INTRODUCTION

13

5. In this book, I treat literary criticism as a specific type of reader response data in that it represents (as with other data types) examples of readers’ interpretations of particular texts. There are clearly methodological differences in generating these data in comparison to naturalistic or experimental studies but for me the main distinction is effectively one of genre.

References Blunden, Edmund. 1930. “The Soldier Poets of 1914–1918.” In An Anthology of War Poems, edited by Frederick Brereton, 13–24. London: W. Collins Sons & Co Ltd. Bray, Joe. 2007. “The ‘Dual Voice’ of Free Indirect Discourse: Report on a Reading Experiment.” Language and Literature 16 (1): 35–49. Brereton, Frederick. 1930. An Anthology of War Poems. London: W. Collins Sons & Co Ltd. Browse, Sam. 2018. “From Functional to Cognitive Grammar in Stylistic Analysis of Golding’s The Inheritors.” Journal of Literary Semantics 47 (2): 121–46. Campbell, Patrick. 1999. Siegfried Sassoon: A Study of the War Poetry. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Chapman, Siobhan. 2020. The Pragmatics of Revision: George Moore’s Acts of Rewriting. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Charteris, Evan. 1931. The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse. London: Harper and Brothers Publishers. Clarke, George, ed. 1917. A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War 1914–1919. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Corrigan, D. Felicitas. 1973. Siegfried Sassoon: Poet’s Pilgrimage. London: Victor Gollancz. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. “Variation and the Indexical Field.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 453–76. Egremont, Max. 2005. Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography. London: Picador. Gardner, Brian. 1964 Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914–1918. London: Methuen. Gavins, Joanna. 2013. Reading the Absurd. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2014. “Conceptual Proximity and the Experience of War in Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘A Working Party’.” In Cognitive Grammar in Literature, edited by Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell and Wenjuan Yuan, 145–59. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2018. “‘Something Happened, Something Bad’: Blackouts, Uncertainties and Event Construal in The Girl on the Train.” Language and Literature 27 (1): 38–51. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2019a. “Construing and Reconstruing the Horrors of the Trench: Siegfried Sassoon, Creativity and Context.” Journal of Literary Semantics 48 (1): 85–104. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2019b. “The Language of Siegfried Sassoon’s 1916 Poems: Some Emerging Stylistics Traits.” Siegfried’s Journal 26: 22–28 Giovanelli, Marcello. 2021. “Siegfried Sassoon, Autofiction and Style: Retelling the Experience of War.” In Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches, edited by Marina Lambrou, 113–128. London: Bloomsbury.

14

M. GIOVANELLI

Giovanelli, Marcello, Chloe Harrison, and Louise Nuttall. 2021. New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style. London: Bloomsbury. Graves, Robert. 1929. Good-bye To All That. London: Jonathan Cape. Graves, Robert. 1982. In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914–1946, edited by Paul O’Prey. London: Hutchinson. Griffiths, G. M. 2011. “‘The General’ Siegfried Sassoon.” Accessed August 19, 2021. https://carlcymrushistoryblog.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/the-gen eral-by-siegfried-sassoon/ Harrison, Chloe. 2017a. “Finding Elizabeth: Construing Memory in Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey.” Journal of Literary Semantics 46 (2): 131–51. Harrison, Chloe. 2017b. Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Harrison, Chloe, and Louise Nuttall 2019. “Cognitive Grammar and Reconstrual: Re-Experiencing Margaret Atwood’s “The Freeze-Dried Groom”.” In Experiencing Fictional Worlds, edited by Benedict Neurohr and Lizzie Stewart-Shaw, 134–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Harrison, Chloe, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell and Wenjuan Yuan. 2014. Cognitive Grammar in Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Haughton, Hugh. 2007. “Anthologizing War.” In The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, edited by Tim Kendall, 421–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hynes, Samuel. 1990. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: The Bodley Head. Jones, Carl. 2014. “‘The General’ by Siegfried Sassoon.” Accessed August 19, 2021. https://carlcymrushistoryblog.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/the-gen eral-by-siegfried-sassoon/ Kendall, Tim. 2013. Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuzmiˇcová Anežka, Anne Mangen A, Hildegunn Støle, and Anne Charlotte Begnum. 2017. “Literature and Readers’ Empathy: A Qualitative Text Manipulation Study. Language and Literature 26 (2): 137–52. Langacker, Ronald. W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald. W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol II: Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald. W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Leech, Geoff, and Mick Short. 2007. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, 2nd edition. Harlow: Pearson. Macdonald, Stephen. 1983. Not About Heroes: The Friendship of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. London: Faber and Faber. Moeyes, Paul. 1997. Siegfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory: A Critical Study. New York: St Martin’s Press. Moorcroft Wilson, Jean. 2013. Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend. London: Duckworth. Nuttall, Louise. 2018. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction. London: Bloomsbury O’Prey, Paul. 2014. First World War Poems from the Front. London: Imperial War Museum.

1

INTRODUCTION

15

Osborn. E. B., ed. 1917. The Muse in Arms. London: John Murray. Peplow, David. 2016. Talk About Books: A Study of Reading Groups. London: Bloomsbury. Rothkopf, Carol. Z. 2016a. Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 1919–1967: Letters 1919–1931. Abingdon: Routledge. Rothkopf, Carol. Z. 2016b. Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 1919–1967: Letters 1951–1967 . Abingdon: Routledge. Rundquist, Eric. 2018. “Book Review: Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction by Chloe Harrison.” Language and Literature 27 (2): 150–53. Rundquist Eric. 2020a. “The Cognitive Grammar of Drunkenness: Consciousness Representation in Under the Volcano.” Language and Literature 29 (1): 39–56 Rundquist, Eric. 2020b. “Literary Meaning as Character Conceptualization: Reorienting the Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of Character Discourse and Free Indirect Thought.” Journal of Literary Semantics 49 (2): 143–65. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1917. The Old Huntsman and Other Poems. London: William Heinemann. Sassoon, Siegfried, 1918. Counter-Attack and Other Poems. London: William Heinemann. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1919. Picture Show. Cambridge: Privately printed. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1925. Selected Poems. London: William Heinemann. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1926. The Augustan Books of Modern Poetry: Siegfried Sassoon. London: Ernest Benn Ltd. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1927. The Heart’s Journey, limited edition. London: William Heinemann. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1928. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. London: Faber and Gwyer. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1930. Memoirs of An Infantry Officer. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1937. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1942. The Weald of Youth. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1945. Siegfried’s Journey 1916–1920. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1956. Sequences. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1976. Letters to a Critic. London: John Roberts Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1981. Diaries 1920–1922. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1983. Diaries 1915–1918. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Short, Mick. 1996. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London: Longman. Silk, Dennis. 1996. “Siegfried Sassoon.” In Siegfried Sassoon: A Celebration of a Cricketing Man, edited by Andrew Pinnell, 57–82. Bristol: Making Space. Silkin, Jon, ed. 1979. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. London: Allen Lane. Sotirova, Violeta. 2014. “Production and Intentionality.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, edited by Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley, 132–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stallworthy, Jon, ed. 1984. The Oxford Book of War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

16

M. GIOVANELLI

Stockwell, Peter. 2016. “The Texture of Authorial Intention.” In World Building: Discourse in the Mind, edited by Joanna Gavins and Ernestine Lahey, 147–64. London: Bloomsbury. Stockwell, Peter. 2017. The Language of Surrealism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stockwell, Peter. 2020. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Stockwell, Peter, and Sara Whiteley. 2014. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, 1–10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stuart Roberts, John. 1999. Siegfried Sassoon. London: Richard Cohen Books. Thorpe, Michael. 1966. Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study. London: Oxford University Press. Vandaele, Jeroen, and Geert Brône. 2009. “Cognitive Poetics: A Critical Introduction.” In Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps, 1–32. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Walker, Julian. 2017. Words and the First World War: Language, Memory, Vocabulary. London: Bloomsbury. Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. 1946. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review 54: 468–88.

CHAPTER 2

Cognitive Grammar

2.1

Cognitive Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics

Cognitive Grammar is a ‘linguistic theory’ (Langacker 2008, 3) within the field of cognitive linguistics, a discipline that emerged during the 1970s and 80s from growing dissatisfaction among researchers with formalist and largely decontextualized approaches to language study. Lakoff (1987, xiii–viii), for example, argues against a view of language that treats thought as disembodied and the mind as a machine following abstract and logical rules that are isolated from other cognitive abilities. He instead proposes two ‘primary commitments’ (Lakoff 1990, 40) that underpin cognitive-linguistic principles: a generalization commitment that commits to ‘seek general principles’ about how language works; and a cognitive commitment that emphasizes continuities between language and other cognitive functions so as ‘not to isolate linguistics from the study of the mind’ (Lakoff 1990, 46). The commitment to generalization means that all elements of the linguistic system can be explained and examined using insights from cognitive science and cognitive psychology; the cognitive commitment views language as an integral aspect of general cognition, related to and drawing on the same mechanisms as a range of other cognitive activities that we engage in and use to make sense of our surroundings and experiences. These two commitments together posit that cognition is fundamentally embodied (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) in that it arises from our perceptual and social interaction with the physical world. Our perspective on reality is thus shaped by our bodies’ interaction in time and space and is reflected in the way we conceptualize events and experiences and articulate them through © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Giovanelli, The Language of Siegfried Sassoon, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7_2

17

18

M. GIOVANELLI

language. The version of reality that we perceive, conceptualize, and articulate is thus never objective but is always influenced to some degree by our ‘species-specific neural and anatomical architecture’ (Tyler 2012, 28). This ‘experiential realism (Lakoff 1987, xiv), however, is also subject to ideologies that are both idiosyncratic and socially grounded. Language formalizes our conceptualizations of experience, which necessarily arises out of the social and functional need to communicate in given situations. The principle of embodiment operates in tandem with other external contextual pressures such as social and cultural settings, any surrounding discourse and types of knowledge deemed to be appropriate at any given time (see Kövecses 2015 and further discussion in this chapter) that influence the decisions speakers/writers make in representing their experiences so as to make them available for their listeners/readers. Discourse in this respect can be viewed as the ‘directing of attention’ (Langacker 2008, 262) towards mental representations that communicative participants aim to share when they come together. In practice, cognitive linguistics is more of an ‘enterprise’ (Evans 2010, 46) or an ‘approach’ (Tyler 2012, 3) than it is a single unified theory, although cognitive linguistic concepts, frameworks, and methods do share philosophical and methodological principles. Broadly, the field can be divided into two main distinct but interrelated areas of study, ‘cognitive semantics and cognitive (approaches to) grammar’ (Evans and Green 2006, xix). Cognitive semantics focuses on operationalizing how the human mind works in terms of structuring and processing knowledge and in terms of forming meanings or conceptualizations and is concerned with those areas related to categorization (e.g. Rosch 1975; Lakoff 1987), the organization of encyclopaedic knowledge into frames or schemata (e.g. Fillmore 1968, 1982, 1985; Rumelhart 1975; Schank and Abelson 1977; Schank 1982), the role of embodiment in structuring mental templates of experience (e.g. Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987; Talmy 2000), and the explanation of the abstract in terms of the concrete through metaphor and conceptual integration (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Fauconnier and Turner 2002). In turn, cognitive approaches to grammar draw on principles from cognitive semantics and consequently reject the objectivism of generative linguistics. A central premise of such grammar is therefore that ‘linguistic organization and structure [have] a conceptual basis’ (Evans 2010, 47) and that grammar is inherently meaningful in its own right. One theory of grammar (not drawn on in this book) can be seen in a number of construction grammars (e.g. Goldberg 1995), which describe inventories of units that make up a language as constructions that are stored in memory and which draw on principles of embodiment in reflecting basic human experiences such as something moving, being in a state of location or having an effect on someone (see Goldberg 1995, 39). A second, theoretical approach is one which aims more explicitly and extensively ‘to delineate the principles that structure a grammar, and to relate these principles to aspects of general cognition’ (Evans 2010, 47). This theory is Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, which forms the basis of my discussion for the rest of this chapter.

2

2.2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

19

Cognitive Grammar: Basic Parameters

Cognitive Grammar draws on central premises in cognitive semantics and assumes those principles as a basis for providing a framework for describing and analysing linguistic forms. Cognitive Grammar is symbolic in nature (Langacker 2008, 14); linguistic units have both a phonological and a semantic structure which are incorporated into an integrated bipolar symbolic structure. For example, the morpheme ‘cat’ has a ‘phonological pole’ (its orthographical representation) and a ‘semantic pole’ (its meaning or conceptualization) (Langacker 2008, 15). Symbolic structures combine to make more complex ones (words, phrases and clauses) known as ‘symbolic assemblies’ (Langacker 2008, 16). Cognitive Grammar thus rejects the traditional distinction between lexicon and grammar and instead views the two as forming a ‘gradation consisting solely in assemblies of symbolic structures’ (Langacker 2008, 5). Through use in actual language events, these structures become entrenched and then acquire ‘unit status’ (Langacker 2008, 17), forming a set of resources, or ‘conventional linguistic units’ (Langacker 2008, 222) that become shared within a particular speech community. These linguistic units are patterns or schemas which provide structure for a range of expressions and act as a template against which language users base judgements about whether these expressions are ‘well-formed’ or not (Langacker 2008, 227). Novel or unconventional uses of language are judged in terms of the extent to which they conform to the ‘units invoked for this purpose’ according to that particular speech community. Cognitive Grammar views meaning as residing in conceptualization, itself a dynamic activity that unfolds through time and where step-by-step development is an integral part of the mental experience of conceptualizing a ‘scene’ (Langacker 2008, 8). For example, Langacker (2008, 32) provides the following pair of sentences that use the same words but have very different meanings. (1) (a) A line of trees extends from the highway to the river (b) A line of trees extends from the river to the highway In (1)(a), the line of trees is mentally scanned from the highway to the river, whereas in (1)(b) scanning operates in the reverse direction, beginning from the river and ending at the highway. As Langacker explains, these two conceptualizations offer subtly different ways of conceiving the scene (here possibly due to the speaker’s position at the time of speaking or even relating to the natural status of the trees) and are therefore ‘not semantically equivalent’ (Langacker 2008, 32). The above examples also demonstrate how conceptual structures draw on ‘image schemas’ (Johnson 1987), patterns of activity that we are exposed to from birth through our interaction with the immediate physical environment.

20

M. GIOVANELLI

These schemas are used as ways of understanding simple relationships and concepts and, in turn, provide structures for understanding more complex conceptual content. For example, a container image schema offers a mental template, derived from our experience of containment in the physical world, that may be expanded to conceptualize and articulate any relationship between two entities where one rests inside the other. Linguistically this is encoded at a basic level through the use of a preposition ‘in’ forming a prepositional phrase with an embedded noun phrase. This image schema also permits metaphorical projection into expressions such as ‘I’m in love’ and may also combine with other image schemas to form more complex structures. For example, the concept enter integrates the container schema with a source-path-goal image schema which denotes an object moving along a path from a starting point to an end position (Langacker 2008, 32–33). Given its emphasis on language in use and on the dynamic nature of conceptualization, a critical premise of Cognitive Grammar is that we encounter and represent the world in an active and generally creative way; ‘the world does not present itself to us as a finished, predetermined structure, nor is apprehending the world like xeroxing a document’ (Langacker 2008, 35). Conceptualizations are often underpinned by ‘fictivity’ (Langacker 2008, 524), given that we frequently draw on our imaginations and use imaginative devices such as hypotheticals, modal forms and figurative language to think, write and talk about events and entities that do not yet exist, and indeed may never exist. We often also refer to virtual instances (Langacker 2008, 36, 524–535) to describe scenes: for example, ‘dogs like bones’ contains two nouns but both refer to generalized concepts rather than a specific dog liking a specific bone. Finally, although not explicitly a discourse grammar, Cognitive Grammar’s focus on language as series of usage events necessarily implies a social dimension and thus considers the wider physical, cultural and social contexts of discourse including the different kinds of participant knowledge that are brought to, shared, used and updated in a communicative event. In Cognitive Grammar, this is acknowledged in the notion of a current discourse space (CDS) (Langacker 2008, 466), which comprises all the necessary information required for communication to take place, including the ongoing discourse and all previous and anticipated knowledge.

2.3

Construal

A key contention of Cognitive Grammar is that each symbolic structure presents or construes its content in a certain manner. Thus, ‘an expression’s meaning is not just in the conceptual content it evokes […] but how that content is construed’ (Langacker 2008, 55, added emphasis). A construal establishes a ‘construal relationship’ (Langacker 1987, 128) or ‘basic construal configuration’ (Verhagen 2006, 323) between the conceptualizers (speaker/writer and hearer/reader) and the conceived scene. Within this

2

Fig. 2.1 The construal configuration and its basic elements, adapted from Verhagen (2006, 323)

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

21

Conceived scene/object of conceptualisation

1

2 Conceptualisers/subject of conceptualisation

relationship, conceptualizers engage in shared mental coordination in their roles as the subjects of conceptualization ‘with respect to some object of conceptualization’ (Verhagen 2006, 324). This relationship is demonstrated in Fig. 2.1, adapted from Verhagen (2006, 323). A straightforward example of the construal phenomenon can be seen in the way that the use of the active voice and passive voice each offer different representations of a scene. (2) (a) The soldier killed the enemy (b) The enemy was killed by the soldier (c) The enemy was killed In (2)(a), the use of the active voice construes the event so that the entity responsible for the action, what Cognitive Grammar terms the agent , is foregrounded at the head of the clause. In contrast, the entity undergoing a change of state, the patient , is backgrounded through its position at the end of the clause. In (2)(b), the use of the passive voice reverses this configuration so that the patient is positioned as the clausal subject and the agent moved to the end of the clause and thus less prominent. In (2)(c), a more radical kind of reconfiguration of attention occurs since the agent is removed entirely. Although the transitive verb ‘killed’ implies an agent, this particular passive construction avoids identifying responsibility for the event in any way. It is important to note that each of the examples evokes the same conceptual content (the killing of a solider) but presents that content in different ways. And, crucially, these grammatical forms offer construals that are semantically distinctive. In (2)(a), the responsibility of the agent is highlighted; in (2)(b) the focus is more on the patient; and in (2)(c) responsibility for the action is entirely omitted. Each structure thus imports an inherent meaningfulness and offers one of several representational possibilities that a speaker or writer has when describing an event. As Langacker (2008, 368) notes, ‘[when construing

22

M. GIOVANELLI

an event] we have an option—for instance, we can use a passive to focus the patient rather than the agent’ (added emphasis). The notions of possibility and optionality are important aspects of construal since they reflect the potential for subsequent reconstruals of a particular scene. Importantly, a conceptualizer may reconstrue conceptual content according to their discourse goals. For example, a writer or speaker may choose to later reconstrue (2)(a) discussed above using the grammatical form in (2)(b) and thus foreground the patient. Such writer or speaker-produced reconstruals underpin the notion of rewriting where an author may return to previous material to reshape it within a new set of textual or contextual parameters. In Giovanelli (2019, 2021), for example, I use this idea to examine Sassoon’s rewriting of material from his diaries and verse into his prose memoirs. This focus is given further coverage in Chapter 6 of this book. Alternatively, a reader may revise their interpretation of an expression or larger stretch of discourse on re-reading (see for example Harrison 2017; Harrison and Nuttall 2019) driven by an ‘internally conceived discourse goal’ Forrest (1996, 158), or they may wish to challenge or impose an alternative construal on information presented to them. For example, a reader presented with the agentless passive construction of (2)(c) may wish to reconstrue the scene to factor in the role of an agent such as in (2)(a) and thus emphasize a different meaning. Indeed, such reader or listener-produced reconstruals underpin the process of resistant reading from a particular ideological vantage point: for example, Browse (2021) demonstrates how readers may reject and reconstrue the original conceptualizations offered to them in political discourse.

2.4

Construal Phenomena

In Cognitive Grammar, a visual metaphor underpins the description of conceived content as a scene and a given construal as a particular way of viewing it. This is unsurprising given that cognitive linguistics more generally understands the cognitive processes behind conception and visual perception as analogous; indeed Langacker originally describes construals as ‘alternative images’ of a particular scene (Langacker 1987, 110). Later, he uses a visual metaphor to set out the ways in which construals may come about as follows: In viewing a scene, what we actually see depends on how closely we examine it, what we choose to look at, which elements we pay most attention to, and where we view it from. The corresponding labels I will use, for broad classes of construal phenomena, are specificity, focusing, prominence, and perspective. (Langacker 2008, 55, original emphasis)

These construal phenomena, also known as ‘construal operations’ (Croft and Cruse 2004), offer a set of interpretative and descriptive ‘interrelated dimensions’ (Harrison et al. 2014, 4) that can be applied to describe any aspect

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

23

of conceptualization. Specificity, focusing, prominence, and parts of perspective relate to the ways in which the conceived scene is structured (the thick black horizontal line in Fig. 2.1), whereas the further aspects of perspective are also concerned with how the construal relationship between the subject and object of conceptualization is enacted (the broken vertical line in Fig. 2.1). In the following sections, I outline each of these construal phenomena in turn. Each sub-section thus introduces some central ideas from Cognitive Grammar, which act as the basis for more developed discussion in the main analytical chapters in this book.

2.5

Specificity

Specificity relates to ‘the level of precision and detail at which a situation is characterized’ (Langacker 2008, 55). For example, the use of the noun ‘soldier’ is one option from a range of possibilities available to construe the entity (a person who fights) conceived in a scene. Possible options, ranging from the more schematic to the more specific are highlighted in Fig. 2.2. living entity>>mammal>>human being>>adult>>soldier>>Siegfried schematic

specific

Fig. 2.2 The schematic-specific continuum

Maintaining the visual analogy, a phrase such as ‘living entity’ is schematic and offers only a ‘coarse-grained’ (Langacker 2008, 55) depiction at a more global level in low resolution whereas, at the other end of the continuum, ‘Siegfried Sassoon’ is more granular in terms of precisely highlighting the entity’s identity. Specific construals may demonstrate varying degrees of specificity across constituent parts as in 3(a), (3)(b) and (3)(c). (3) (a) Siegfried Sassoon killed the enemy (b) Siegfried Sassoon killed the man (c) The soldier shot the corporal in the blue jacket with the five silver badges The relationship between schematicity and specificity is captured in the notion of an ‘elaborative relationship’ that forms a set of ‘elaborative hierarchies’ (Langacker 2008, 56). Moving from left to right across Fig. 2.2, each subsequent entity elaborates the more coarse-grained nature of the one that precedes it; in turn, each one is schematic with respect to successive entities higher up the chain. In effect, an elaborative hierarchy allows a kind of

24

M. GIOVANELLI

zooming in and out to reveal as much or as little precise detail as possible about an entity and or scene.

2.6

Focusing

In Cognitive Grammar, linguistic expressions are viewed as a means of accessing various conceptual content in the form of ‘domains’ (Langacker 2008, 44), a term that is used to describe various concepts or degrees of experience. Usually, an expression will invoke a set of domains or a ‘conceptual matrix’ (Langacker 2008, 47) of several interrelated domains. Langacker provides the example of a ‘glass’ used for drinking, a word which may invoke a number of domains in its conceptual matrix: space, shape, and orientation; material and size; function of a container (including holding material, movement of material); function of drinking (including mechanics of the human body); manufacture, storage, and maintenance (including how glasses are made, purchased, stored, used, washed up, and so on). These domains ‘overlap with one another’ (Langacker 2008, 47) so that an expression can simultaneously invoke several domains with some being ranked more central than others on the basis that they are generally more integral to a lexical item’s meaning and are therefore likely to be activated in more contexts. An encyclopaedic and situated view of meaning accounts for the way in which conceptual material is selected and presented linguistically and, in any given usage event, how certain domains are foregrounded against unselected, and thus backgrounded, ones. For example, using the lexical item ‘glass’ when in a restaurant would activate those domains more concerned with shape and functionality (given the context) and less with manufacture, storage, and maintenance. In addition to the activation of domains, a linguistic expression will also focus on a particular portion of that domain which is used as the basis for meaning. Thus, an expression has ‘a scope consisting of its coverage in that domain’ (Langacker 2008, 62). Scope may be understood again with reference to a visual analogy; typically, our eyes can only focus at one time on a limited range within our surroundings. An expression’s content may therefore be divided into its maximal scope, the full extent of an expression’s coverage in a domain, and its immediate scope, the portion selected for attention, and which is ‘“the onstage region”, the general region of viewing attention’ (Langacker 2008, 63). Scoping operates in different ways across discrete word classes. For example, the noun ‘elbow’ has a central domain and concept of the human body in its conceptual matrix and generally activates that domain through use. However, the meaning of ‘elbow’ is more clearly understood in relation to the concept of arm, which is selected for attention and placed more explicitly onstage by the use of ‘elbow’. human body thus acts as the maximal scope for the ‘elbow’ and arm functions as its immediate scope (Langacker 2008, 64). With verbs, a distinction between maximal and immediate scope is most clearly seen when comparing a finite verb and a non-finite progressive form. A finite verb such as

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

25

‘runs’ that denotes a completed action in time does not distinguish between maximal and immediate scope since ‘the entire bounded event, including its endpoints, appears “onstage” within the temporal scope’ (Langacker 2008, 65). In contrast, a non-finite progressive form, for example ‘was running’, imposes a very different kind of construal on the conceptual content. In this case, the expression has a maximal scope of the entire event (the start and end of the run) but an immediate scope of some intermediate point between those times. In effect, the progressive form selects for attention some ‘internal portion’ (Langacker 2008, 65) of the entire event. I return to the conceptual effects of progressive verb forms in my discussion of Sassoon’s 1916 poems in Chapter 3.

2.7

Prominence

The notion of prominence relates to the asymmetrical relationship that is inherent in a prototypical figure-ground configuration, a central Gestalt principle on which we draw to provide a structure to perceptual input so as to ‘automatically segregate any given scene’ (Evans and Green 2006, 65) into foregrounded and backgrounded material. Focusing and its related notions of matrix activation and scope, all of which were discussed in the previous section, are good examples of how linguistic expressions provide cues for the organization of conceptual content. A further example resides in the notion of profiling. As previously discussed, an expression activates a domain within which a portion, its immediate scope, is put onstage and therefore foregrounded. This onstage portion provides a ‘conceptual base’ for the explicit part that is drawn attention to or ‘profiled’ (Langacker 2008, 66) through the use of a linguistic expression. For example, ‘elbow’ has the maximal scope of human body and the immediate scope of an arm, profiling a further portion of the immediate scope for attention. A profile then is a way of describing the greatest specificity that a linguistic expression can provide. For example, the expressions ‘elbow’, ‘hand’, and ‘wrist’ all share the same maximal and immediate scopes of human body and arm but have different profiles (see Langacker 2008, 67). Profiling provides the basis for distinguishing between different grammatical classes since a linguistic expression will profile either a thing or a relationship (Langacker 2008, 67). Whereas nouns such as ‘elbow’, ‘hand’, and ‘wrist’ profile things, other word classes, termed ‘relational expressions’ (Langacker 2008, 70) profile relationships of different kinds. For example, a process, occurs through time and is profiled by verbs; a second relation is nonprocessual and is profiled by adjectival and adverbial modifiers, prepositions, and participles (Langacker 2008, 99). Since they make connections between entities, relational expressions inherently confer another type of prominence on their participants. In Cognitive Grammar, this second type of prominence is known as ‘trajector/landmark alignment’ (Langacker 2008, 70). A trajector

26

M. GIOVANELLI

is the primary focal participant within the profiled relationship and is the entity ‘construed as being located, evaluated, or described’ (Langacker 2008, 70), whereas a landmark is the second participant and remains in the background. Broadly, the trajector/landmark distinction thus describes the same kind of relationship as denoted by the terms foregrounded/backgrounded and figure/ground. Trajector/landmark alignment can be used to explain how expressions may have the same conceptual content and profile the same relationship yet have different meanings. For example, both (4)(a) and (4)(b) profile a spatial relationship between two entities but assign prominence in different ways and so are not semantically equivalent. In (4)(a) the participant profiled as the spatially higher one is assigned trajector status whereas in (4)(b) the spatially lower participant functions in that role. (4) (a) The soldier (tr) was above the ground (lm) (b) The ground (tr) was beneath the soldier (lm) The prepositions ‘above’ and ‘beneath’ profile non-processual relationships. In (5), however, the relationship between the participants takes place through time. Here, trajector and landmark are more easily recognizable as the traditional grammar terms subject and object. (5) The soldier (tr) fired his gun (lm) Equally, the addition of an extra expression as in (6) shifts attentional prominence. In this instance, the entire clause ‘The soldier fired the gun’, a relational process developing through time, additionally functions as a participant in a non-processual relationship profiled by the preposition ‘against’. Here the relational process is assigned trajector status, with the secondary participant ‘the wall’ acting as the landmark. (6) The soldier fired his gun (tr) against the wall (lm) A discussion of profiling and trajector/landmark alignment can also help to explain the differences between the active and passive forms discussed earlier in Sect. 2.3. Reconfigured in terms of profiling, we can see that (7)(a) and (7)(b) profile the agent’s force and the process it brings about but that the construal assigns different trajector and landmark roles and thus the prominence afforded to each participant shifts. The passive form (5)(c) does not profile the agent and thus attention is focused is solely on the clausal patient.

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

27

(7) (a) The soldier (tr) killed the enemy (lm) (b) The enemy (tr) was killed by the soldier (lm) (c) The enemy (tr) was killed Returning to these sentences emphasizes an important point about prominence and about construal more generally. In conceiving a scene, we apprehend it in a certain way and impose a particular construal; the assigning of trajector and landmark roles in (7)(a), (7)(b), and (7)(c) is therefore inherent in the conceptualization of the scene rather than in an objective set of qualities that it holds: a speaker or writer using either (7)(a) or (7)(b) puts a primary focus on either the agent or the patient of the clause as trajector and by consequence positions the other as a landmark; the use of (7)(c) omits any secondary focal participant. Assigning prominence is then a contextualized discourse strategy. In keeping, however, with Gestalt principles of figure-ground, there will be certain entities that are more central candidates for trajector status. A relational participant will be a more natural candidate for having prominence assigned to them on the basis of one or more of these characteristics, which are outlined in Stockwell (2020, 36): ● it will be regarded as a self-contained object or feature in its own right, with well-defined edges separating it from the ground; ● it will be moving in relation to the static ground; ● it will precede the ground in time or space; ● it will be a part of the ground that has broken away, or emerges to become the figure; ● it will be more detailed, better focused, brighter, or more attractive than the rest of the field; ● it will be on top of, or in front of, or above, or larger than the rest of the field that is then the ground. The above would suggest that an expression such as the active voice of (5)(a) is a more natural construal of a scene than the passive voice of (5)(b) and that, consequently, an alternative construal might be viewed as stylistically deviant and worthy of further analysis. Thus, assigning prominence is a matter of foregrounding (either parallelism or deviation) in broader stylistic terms (see Nuttall 2018, 41–42 for discussion). I return to profiling and specifically trajector/landmark assignment in the context of these ideas in Chapter 5 where I explore the assigning of blame in Sassoon’s verse.

2.8

Perspective

Perspective relates to the ‘viewing arrangement’, the position that a conceptualizer takes relative to the conceived scene. Langacker divides perspective into

28

M. GIOVANELLI

several distinctive but interrelated aspects. In the following section, I outline each of dynamicity, reference points, vantage point, and subjective/objective construal. The first two phenomena relate, like the other construal dimensions discussed earlier in this chapter, to the structuring of content in the conceived scene (the bold horizontal line in Fig. 2.1); the latter two relate to the relationship of the conceived scene relative to the conceptualizer(s) themselves (the broken vertical line in Fig. 2.1). 2.8.1

Dynamicity

Cognitive Grammar views conceptualization as ‘inherently dynamic’ (Langacker 2008, 79) in so far as the processing of objects, scenes, and events occurs through time. Dynamicity is the construal phenomenon that relates to how a conceptualization unfolds through time as it is mentally scanned. In prototypical cases, scanning a series of events aligns the order of events as they occurred with how they are conceptualized so that the construal is temporally iconic (Langacker 2008, 79). For example, in (8) the soldier’s firing of his gun would normally be understood as occurring before—and indeed as bringing about—the death of the enemy; one clausal component is therefore the consequence of the other and the invitation to scan the scene in this way reflects this relationship. (8) The soldier fired his gun and killed the enemy In other examples, specific, distinctive construals of a scene are enacted through the order by which aspects of the scene are scanned. The difference between sentences (9)(a) and (9)(b) resides in the fact that in (9)(a) the location of the trench is mentally scanned first and given immediate attention but then acts as the ground for the introduction of ‘The soldier’. In (9)(b), however, the direction of scanning profiles the clausal subject/figure first. Although these two sentences describe the same scene, the difference in scanning means that in Cognitive Grammar terms they are not semantically equivalent since they give rise to different interpretative effects. (9) (a) In the trench sat the solider (b) The solider sat in the trench On other occasions, the direction of scanning imposed through the use of, for example, a particular preposition or participle form results in a similar semantic non-equivalence. Each of the following examples, taken from Sassoon’s diary entry of 1917 (10)(a) and his 1930 prose work, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (10)(b), describes a night-time scene in the hospital and provides an alternative construal of the ward. In (10)(a), ‘half glowing’ profiles the movement of

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

29

the firelight in a way so that it is scanned from bottom to top in an upwards motion. In (10)(b), however, ‘half sinking’ profiles its movement so that it is scanned downwards, from top to bottom. Thus, although the objective situation described remains the same, the alternative construals offer different meanings and arguably give rise to different interpretative effects.1 (10) (a) the ward is half shadow and half glowing firelight (Sassoon 1983, 161) (b) the wards were half shadow and half sinking firelight (Sassoon 1937, 453) In addition to the semantic non-equivalence resulting from the direction of mental access, Cognitive Grammar posits two further modes of scanning related to time (Langacker 2008, 111). Effectively, conceptualizers have a choice in terms of the construals imposed through various linguistic forms and therefore the type of scanning that dominates, resulting in a particular perspective being taken on a scene. When a scene is sequentially scanned, its discrete moments are followed as it unfolds through time; typically, this type of scanning is imposed by the use of finite verbs that profile the component state of a process one after another. Thus in (11), taken from Sassoon’s ‘A Working Party’, each moment of the soldier’s movement through the trench is profiled and the scanning of the entire event distributes attention in turn on each of these discrete points as they occur through time. This relationship is modelled in Fig. 2.3 wherein each successive state, a different part of the soldier’s movement (represented as a ball) along the trench (represented as a straight line) is successively profiled. (11) He blundered up the trench

TIME Fig. 2.3 Sequential scanning

30

M. GIOVANELLI

TIME Fig. 2.4 Summary scanning

The second form of scanning is where an event that has all of its states integrated into a ‘single gestalt comparable to a multiple-exposure photograph’ (Langacker 2008, 111). In this instance, each state is summarily scanned, and simultaneously activated so that that attention is distributed in an accumulative fashion as successive states are held in short-term memory. Typically, summary scanning is imposed by the use of non-finite verb forms or nominals. In (12), for example, the summary scanning initiated through the non-finite present participle ‘blundering’ results in a construal where each stage of the movement is now superimposed onto previous ones. This summative relationship is modelled in Fig. 2.4. (12) Blundering up the trench 2.8.2

Reference Points

A specific type of scanning in Cognitive Grammar relates to how we often ‘invoke the conception of one entity in order to establish “mental contact” with another’ (Langacker 2008, 83). In an expression such as ‘in the trench sat the soldier’, the lexical item ‘trench’ acts as an initial ‘reference point’ through which the ‘target’ (Langacker 2008, 83) ‘soldier’ is mentally accessed. A particular target may be one of many targets that exist within a reference point’s ‘dominion’ (Langacker 2008, 84); the reference point ‘trench’ has a dominion of anything that might be associated with it by a discourse participant and therefore available for mental access on cue (for example, guns, sandbags, duckboards, and so on). As each target is accessed, it, in turn, has the potential to become a new reference point with its own dominion and each successive target, therefore, forms a cohesive chain across discourse allowing attention to be drawn to successive entities in a scene along an established mental path.2 Figure 2.5 models this reference point relationship. R1 refers to the reference point first evoked that accesses a target within its dominion. That

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

T1/ R2

R1

1

31

T2/ R3

D2

D1

C = Conceptualiser R1 etc. = Reference point T1 etc. = Target D1 etc. = Dominion = potential mental path = accessed mental path to T

C

Fig. 2.5 Reference point relationship (based on Langacker 2008, 84)

target then has the potential to become R2 with its own dominion leading to a new target that has the potential to become R3 and so on. A discussion of reference points forms the basis of Chapter 3 where I analyse how Sassoon’s observational 1916 poetry invites the reader to adopt particular perspectives on the events being described, and Chapter 4 where I examine trauma and mind style in Sassoon’s 1917 verse. 2.8.3

Vantage Point

In the default or prototypical viewing arrangement, the conceptualizers of a scene are together and engage in a communicative event from the ‘ground’, the context or ‘platform’ (Langacker 2008, 78) from which discourse proceeds. Within the ground, any one of a number of viewing positions or vantage points may be assumed. In the default arrangement, the vantage point is the shared platform or location within which the conceptualizers communicate. As Langacker (2008, 75) notes, however, the ‘same objective situation can be observed and described from any number of vantage points, resulting in different construals which may have overt consequences’. These alternative vantage points may include examples where conceptualizers are separated in space or time. Often, the use of locative expressions such as prepositions automatically captures the vantage point assumed by a conceptualizer in relation to the elements of the scene. In (13)(a), the conceptualizer assumes a vantage point from which their ‘line of sight’ (Langacker 2008, 76) leads from an initial location to the trench, taking in the soldier at some intermediate point. The choice of whether to use ‘in front of’ (soldier = trajector; trench = landmark) or ‘behind’ (trench = trajector; soldier = landmark) as a particular construal therefore depends on the figure/ground configuration adopted by conceptualizer. In (13)(b), the conceptualizer has the same decision to make but here the choice of in front of’ (trench = trajector; soldier = landmark) or

32

M. GIOVANELLI

‘behind’ (soldier = trajector; trench = landmark) is based on the fact that the conceptualizer’s line of sight extends out from their location to the soldier, with the trench at some intermediate point. (13) (a) The soldier is in front of the trench; the trench is behind the soldier (b) The trench is in front of the soldier; the solider is behind the trench A vantage point does not need to be an actual one. A conceptualizer may adopt a fictive vantage point relative to a place or time, for example in (14)(a) and (14)(b) so as to construe and present a particular perspective on a scene. (14) (a) If you move over there, the solider is in front of the trench (vantage point shifts in space so as to form an alternative line of sight) (b) The lieutenant said that in two hours, the soldier would be in front of the trench (vantage point shifts in time to the moment that the lieutenant spoke: two hours before the soldier was in front of the trench) . 2.8.4

Subjective/Objective Construal

A further aspect of perspective relates to the degree to which the conceptualizers and the scene are subjectively or objectively construed (Langacker 2008, 77). Langacker uses the visual analogy of being in the theatre to explain that in any particular construal, an asymmetrical relationship often exists between the subject of conception (conceptualizer(s)) and the object of conception (the scene). Imagine yourself in the audience of a theater, watching a gripping play. All your attention is directed at the stage, and is focused more specifically on the actor presently speaking. Being totally absorbed in the play, you have hardly any awareness of yourself or your own immediate circumstances. (Langacker 2008, 77)

Langacker differentiates between what he terms an ‘optimal viewing arrangement’ and an ‘egocentric viewing arrangement’ (Langacker 1987, 129–130) both of which present a maximally asymmetrical ‘construal relationship’ (Langacker 1987, 128). In the former, typical of the theatrical viewing experience that Langacker describes, the subject of perception’s attention is so fully focused on the object of perception which is ‘on-stage’ that self-awareness

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

33

is minimized and the conceptualizer remains ‘off-stage’ so that profiling is limited to the ‘viewed’ rather than the ‘viewer’ (Langacker 2008, 77) The subject of conception is thus understood as being construed with maximal subjectivity and the object of conception with maximal objectivity; the ‘offstage’ role held by the subject in the construal at one end of the relationship operates in tandem with ‘profiling and explicit mentioning’ (Langacker 2008, 77) of the scene at the other end. As Langacker (1987, 129) puts it, ‘what S [subject of perception] observes is O [object of perception], not S observing O’. For example, in (15) taken from ‘A Working Party’, the poem’s speaker simply observes the object of perception; the subject of conception’s status remains unprofiled. Overall, this optimal viewing arrangement may be termed an ‘objective construal’ (Nuttall 2018, 46). (15) He was a young man An equally maximally asymmetrical construal relationship may occur when the subject of perception draws attention to themselves and thus positions themselves ‘onstage’ in varying degrees so that they are profiled as both subject and object of conception. For example, the egocentric viewing arrangement in (16) arises as a result of the use of the first person pronoun ‘I’. In this new instance, the object of conception is more subjectively construed since it is framed by the explicit onstage presence of the subject; in turn because the subject is profiled in the expression, they are construed more objectively. Overall an egocentric viewing arrangement may be termed a ‘subjective construal’ (Nuttall 2018, 47). (16) I thought that he was a young man The use of the first person pronoun is an obvious way in which a subjective construal becomes imposed on a scene. Additionally, the use of the second personal pronoun ‘you’ (which positions a second conceptualizing presence ‘onstage’), spatial or temporal adverbs or any modalized construction, quantifiers, or the use of tense, all of which act as grounding strategies (Langacker 2008, 259), will give rise to a subjective construal, whereas the absence of any subjective language and diversion of attention towards the conceptualizer whatsoever will result in an objective construal. In practice, however, purely subjective and objective construals are rarely present in stretches of discourse (see for example Verhagen 2007, 61–62; Langacker 2008, 262). For example, even a sentence like 12), which appears not to profile the subject of perception, does in fact contain the evaluative adjective ‘young’ and the noun ‘man’ both of which represent particular construal choices (each for example could have been replaced with another term such as ‘inexperienced’ and ‘lad’) on the part of the subject of conception and thus clearly encode ‘the speaker’s attitude towards an onstage element’

34

M. GIOVANELLI

(Langacker 2008, 262). Equally apart from ‘expressives’ (Langacker 2008, 475) such as ‘Hi’, ‘Thanks’, and ‘Yes’ which do not profile an object of perception and instead merely draw attention to the subjectivity of the language, it is difficult to find examples of purely subjective construals. Optimal and egocentric viewing arrangements are therefore best conceived as two ends of a continuum along which most construals rest. In (13) for example, attention is subtly redistributed between subject and object of perception since the sentence starts with the explicit positioning of the subject ‘onstage’ through the use of the first person pronoun ‘I’ and then profiles, with less attention afforded to the subject of perception, the object of perception. A construal relationship may be understood as ‘working in inverse tandem, depending on how prominent the speaker or conceptualiser is in relation to the scene being described’ (Giovanelli and Harrison 2018, 52) As Nuttall (2018, 47) explains using a metaphor: ‘allocating attention to one [role] reduces attention to the other; like a see-saw, one goes up as the other goes down’. This relationship is modelled in Fig. 2.6 where the bold depicts the allocation of attention across each of the roles. Optimal viewing arrangement (scene construed more objectively)

Egocentric viewing arrangement (conceptualiser construed more objectively)

Fig. 2.6 Construal relationships (adapted from Verhagen 2007)

2

2.9

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

35

Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics

Cognitive Grammar has developed as a critical tool for stylisticians, including, as I suggest in Chapter 1, as a part of an integrated approach in conjunction with other analytical frameworks and methods.3 Given that cognitive linguistic approaches more generally advocate a usage-based and functionally oriented theory of language, Cognitive Grammar may be aligned with other functional theories of language such as systemic functional linguistics (Halliday and Matthiesen 2014). Indeed Langacker (2008, 28–9) draws attention to the fact that Cognitive Grammar’s emphasis on cognition should not mean that its social dimension is backgrounded: The conceptualizations we entertain are undeniably internal, in the sense of taking place in the brain, they reach beyond it in the sense of being conceptualizations of some facet of the world. In speaking we conceptualize not only what we are talking about but also the context in all its dimensions, including out assessment of the knowledge and intentions of our interlocutor. Rather than being insular, therefore conceptualization should be seen as a primary means of engaging the world.

Although there are divergences such as the relative lack of attention that Cognitive Grammar places on the communicative aspects of language such as the interpersonal and ideological dimensions foregrounded in systemic functional linguistics, as Nuttall (2018, 52–53) suggests, there is nothing in Cognitive Grammar which precludes such an emphasis from being developed particularly given Langacker’s insistence on the relationship between conceptualization and social engagement. Stockwell (2014, 21) argues that although most clause-level analysis in stylistics has drawn on systemic functional grammar, a renewed attention to Cognitive Grammar ‘returns a psychological component to the centre of stylistics’. Some innovative recent work in contemporary stylistics has attempted to align the cognitive and functional paradigms and emphasize the added dimensions that an approach drawing on Cognitive Grammar can add to text and discourse analysis. Stockwell (2014), for example, provides a convincing account of the difference between tonal (the quality of the narrative voice) and atmospheric (the setting being presented) effects by reconfiguring them as distinctive instances of subjective and objective construal respectively in order to demonstrate how different construal patterns operate in H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds (Wells 1898). In non-literary contexts, Browse (2018) focuses on political discourse, taking a methodological approach that draws on existing functionally oriented critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics to propose a revised framework for the analysis of non-literary discourse, examining the ways in which foregrounds the role of audience in forming, accepting and rejecting particular responses to texts. This type of critical work that utilizes Cognitive Grammar to undertake the analysis of ideologies at play across various representations or construals in media texts is also found in the work of Hart (2013, 2021).

36

M. GIOVANELLI

Equally, some of the most promising work has resulted from ‘plugging in’ Cognitive Grammar to other cognitive linguistic frameworks. One of the most notable integrations has been with Text World Theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007), a cognitive discourse grammar that explains how readers build mental representations as they engage in discourse processing. I draw on some aspects of Text World Theory integrated into Cognitive Grammar in Chapters 4 and 7 of this book.

2.10

Construal Constraints

2.10.1

Construal and the World

A particular construal (within any of the four phenomena) is conceptual in so far as it arises as a result of ‘our apprehension of the world’ (Langacker 2008, 72) rather than simply a direct representation of the world itself. This premise broadly coheres with the principles of embodied cognition and experiential realism that were discussed at the beginning of the chapter and the roles that our species-specific architecture play in constraining those apprehensions, for example, in how generally we draw on the container-like and forwardfacing orientation of our bodies to understand abstract emotions such as being ‘in love’ and to project fronts and backs onto objects (see Johnson 1987). A trickier issue, however, relates to the degree to which any one construal might be influenced, shaped, or constrained by external factors beyond the body. Indeed Langacker (2008, 73fn) points out ‘the world imposes itself in particular ways, therefore constraining and biasing our apprehension of it’ (added emphasis), although he does not develop this idea in any detail beyond acknowledging that biases ‘are easily overriden’ (2008, 73fn). In fact, a full account of context is never really addressed in Cognitive Grammar, and Langacker does not elaborate what he means by ‘the world’. In the following sections, I examine possible ways in which external factors may influence construals in more detail and suggest that, in the spirit of stylistics’ eclecticism, integrating a more contextually aware framework into Cognitive Grammar can provide it with greater analytical potential. 2.10.2

Cognition and Context

Contextualized approaches to cognition outline how the mind comes into being in a series of transactional processes with the various environments or situations in which it exists. The mind is viewed therefore not as a series of preprogrammed templates working in isolation from its external surroundings but as a highly adaptable and creative entity working in tandem with them, what Barrett et al. (2010) term the ‘context principle’. As they explain: Mental events and human behaviors can be thought of as states that emerge from moment-by-moment interaction with the environment rather

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

37

than proceeding in autonomous invariant, context-free fashion from preformed dispositions or causes. Inherently a mind exists in context. (Barrett et al. 2010, 5)

A key element of the context principle is the idea of a transaction between mind and context, what Dewey (1896) refers to as primarily a symbiotic relationship or a ‘reflex arc’ so that each helps to ‘constitute each other’ (Barrett et al. 2010, 7). A context or situation in turn may be considered best not as a predetermined and stable set of external factors or as simply a physical environment but rather as ‘those aspects that are relevant to the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of that particular person at that particular point in time […] the mind determines the nature of the situation, so that a “situation” does not exist separately from the person’ (Barrett et al. 2010, 9). This idea coheres generally with theories that emphasize the dynamic processual nature of creativity (Carter 2011) and the transactional nature of the relationship that exists between a mind with the intention to create and the specific sociocultural contexts that form the situations within which creativity occurs (see for example Rothenberg 1990; Csikszentmihaly 2013) and within particular cultural parameters (Kövecses 2005). As I have previously discussed, the principle of embodied cognition emphasizes this transactional nature by refuting the idea that the mind is disassociated from and unmotivated by the body and instead acknowledges that the body itself provides the most obvious and immediate context for the mind. The body in turn is, in keeping with the ‘context principle’ an integral part of a larger dynamic context or situation that Lakoff and Johnson (2003, 248) term ‘embodied organism–environment interaction’ which gives rise to ‘interactional properties’ of objects and concepts which are understood through our interaction with them in the physical and social world. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) is one theory that articulates and discusses this mind–body relationship. In initial work on embodiment and metaphor, body-based metaphors such as happy is up (which is structured on the premise that our bodies when feeling happy tend to be upright and when sad the reverse is true) are understood to be universal or near-universal in that linguistic realizations appear in different languages. However, the inherent problems in such a universalist view of embodiment mean that variation may be downplayed or ignored. In a book-length study Littlemore (2019), for example, demonstrates how broad variables such as age, gender, body size, mental health, and personally, politically, and religiously informed ideologies all influence the kinds of metaphors speakers draw on to conceptualize and describe their experiences. Scholars examining the nature of metaphor in relation to, and within, ableist studies have similarly critiqued and drawn attention to the limitations of a universalist treatment of embodiment and the need to acknowledge the importance of variation. Vidali (2010) argues that the idea of universality in metaphor fails to capture the complex ways in which embodiment operates since it excludes those who are not able-bodied,

38

M. GIOVANELLI

and consequently cannot account for the myriad of ways in which alternative body configurations may inform conceptualizations. Vidali draws attention to how happy is up and its corresponding metaphor sad is down propose a universal construal that is problematic as a reference point for individuals who, for example, use a wheelchair and consequently view the world from a lower height than a non-user. And, she argues that another common metaphor, knowing is seeing, with its emphasis strictly on the visual channel as a source of comprehension, cannot account for the ways in which visually impaired people perceive and understand the world, and subsequently downplays ‘the complex ways in which we “know”’ (Vidali 2010, 44). In an illuminating discussion of Nick Flynn’s poetic representation of the experiences of the blind bee-keeper Francois Huber (Flynn 2002), Vidali demonstrates how a specific bodily context (in this instance being blind) reconfigures the sense of body and, in overriding a basic and universal sense of embodiment, allows it to be drawn on and utilized by a conceptualizer in a novel way. Thus, a different kind of body ‘interprets, challenges and articulates metaphors’ (Vidali 2010, 42). 2.10.3

Creativity and Construal: The Case of Metaphor

Kövecses’ (2005, 2015) work on variation and creativity in metaphor provides a platform for considering the symbiotic relationship that exists between the mind and various contexts. Kövecses argues that commonality in experience and bodily architecture cannot be considered to be the sole influencers on conceptualizers drawing on particular source domains to give structure to targets. Instead, he proposes that speakers are constrained by the ‘pressure of coherence’ (2005, 237) which makes them draw on their communicative context for resources to support their conceptualizations. The body and contexts thus ‘serve as [competing] sources or origins for the emergence of metaphors’ (2015, 14), as Kövecses explains conceptualizers try to be coherent both with their bodies (their basic embodied experiences) and their contexts (the various contextual factors) where the body and context function as, sometimes conflicting, forms of constraint on conceptualization. The outcome of the two pressures depends on which influence, or pressure, turns out to be the stronger in particular situations. (Kövecses 2015, 51)

Using the example of cross-cultural variation in metaphor, Kövecses (2005, 46) proposes a theory of ‘differential experiential focus’ to account for the ways in which conceptualizers may emphasize or downplay particular aspects of their embodied selves in specific contexts. Thus, contexts give rise to particular metaphorical construals, in what Kövecses (2015, 99), terms ‘context induced creativity’:

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

39

My concern here is with where people recruit the conceptual source materials from when they are engaged with all these phenomena. In other words, my main interest here is in the issue of motivation (conceptual licensing or sanctioning), and less so in structure, process, or meaning construction in metaphor. I define motivation as any of the bodily or contextual factors that trigger, prompt, or simply facilitate the selection and use of particular conceptual metaphors or their linguistic manifestations. In other words, I think of motivation as graded phenomenon that can affect the conceptualizer with various degrees of strength. (Kövecses 2015, 99)

Kövecses (2015, 186–7) outlines four categories of context that perform this kind of licensing role. First, there is the ‘situational context’, defined as the physical, social and cultural situation in which a conceptualization takes place. Second, there is the ‘discourse context’, the discourse or co-text that occurs immediately before a particular conceptualization. Third, there is the ‘conceptual-cognitive’ context, which contains the memories, knowledge and ideologies held by particular individuals or groups. Fourth there is the ‘bodily context’, a more immediate and idiosyncratic kind of embodiment which accounts for the ways that in more local contexts, particular aspects, configurations, perceptions, or ‘specificities’ (2015, 184) of the body become salient and influence and motivate particular metaphorical construals. Kövecses includes an example of the American poet Emily Dickinson some of whose poems, he shows, contain metaphors that may have been influenced by her optical illness. Clearly, this body context would also account for the kinds of variation on more conventional metaphors such as that proposed by Vidali. The body, outside of more universal states of embodiment, may therefore be considered as a motivating context in its own right. Embodied cognition as a concept then needs to be considered more widely as a form of ‘situated cognition’ (Clark 1996) in which various environmental factors including the body, reconfigure and influence mind, action and behaviour. 2.10.4

Construal and Creativity

There seems to me to be no reason why Kövecses’ schema for evaluating and analysing context should not also be applied to and useful for examining other kinds of construal, given that metaphor is simply one kind of construal operation (Croft and Cruse 2004, 55) and that the generalization commitment discussed at the beginning of this chapter posits that all instances of language may be described using a systematic set of general principles. Consequently, I argue that Kövecses’ model provides a useful resource for readers to draw on to infer relationships between contextual factors and different types of construal phenomena. My aim in the subsequent chapters of this book is to integrate a Cognitive Grammar analysis of various aspects of Sassoon’s writing into Kövecses’ model of context so as to examine how the linguistic and discourse patterns may be understood as subject to and motivated by what I am terming

40

M. GIOVANELLI

specific construal constraints . My discussion therefore aims to provide a more rounded analysis, integrating close textual, stylistic analysis with appropriate attention to contextual factors in light of the ways that these might be read as motivating and licensing particular construals. In this way, this book aims to counter one of the criticisms that has been levelled at analyses using Cognitive Grammar, that is that it has paid insufficient detail to connect construals of experience as acts of writer-focused creativity. In a review of Harrison et al. (2014), for example, West argues: […] I would have liked to have seen more focus on the first element in the triad of ‘literary creativity, patterning and readerly effects’ (p. 2). Such an omission might reflect the general orientation of cognitive stylistics towards the reader (and, indeed, the complete ignorance of the author in literary studies), but the question that kept occurring to me while reading the book was: how do writers manage to use grammatical constructions in such a way as to produce such patterning and such effects? What might this tell us about authorial creativity, and about human creativity in general? (West 2017, 68, added emphases)

In the following analytical chapters, I therefore acknowledge that as well as ‘default construals’ (Croft and Cruse 2004, 72) of experience, it is also possible to view more explicit, local, and textually retrievable contexts as affordances or limitations of creativity. Crucially, this book then examines how language positions readers and may be understood as arising from specific contexts, but also examines the creativity inherent in—as well as the contexts of—reader responses to Sassoon’s work. 2.10.5

Embodiment, Construal and the First World War

Towards the final pages of his first prose autobiographical novel, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Sassoon’s alter ego George Sherston is remembering life at the Front. I can see myself sitting in the sun in a nook among the sandbags and chalky débris behind the support line. There is a strong smell of chloride of lime. I am scraping the caked mud off my wire-torn puttees with a rusty entrenching tool. […] Now and again a leisurely five-nine shell passes overhead in the blue air where the larks are singing. The sound of the shell is like water trickling into a can. The curve of its trajectory sounds peaceful until the culminating crash. A little weasel runs past my outstretched feet, glancing at me with tiny bright eyes, apparently unafraid. One of our shrapnel shells, whizzing over to the enemy lines, bursts with a hollow crash. Against the morning sky, a cloud of dark smoke expands and drifts away. (Sassoon 1937, 277)

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

41

In this extract, the physical context of the trench clearly influences Sherston’s construals. As with much of Sassoon’s autobiographical prose, the scene is geared towards being more subjectively construed with Sherston explicitly ‘onstage’; here ‘I can see myself’ positions Sherston’s physical presence at the heart of the construal. The scene is also construed in a fine-grained rather than a coarse way with the intricate details of Sherston’s surroundings and possessions evident in the adjectival pre-modification of ‘chalky’, ‘wire-torn’, ‘rusty’, and ‘leisurely’ and the spatial prepositional phrases ‘in the sun in a nook’, ‘behind the support line’, and ‘in the blue air’. It is also striking that Sherston emphasizes the physical nature of the Front. Here meaning and experience are inextricably connected to the visual, ‘blue air’, ‘trajectory’, ‘a cloud of dark smoke’; to smells, ‘chloride of lime’; to sounds, ‘larks are singing’, ‘five-nine shell […] culminating crash’, ‘shells, whizzing […] bursts […] crash’; and to movement, ‘The curve of its trajectory’, ‘a little weasel runs’, ‘smoke expands and drifts away’. The direction of scanning inherent in the placing of the adverbial ‘Against the morning sky’ as the figure/trajector before the clauses ‘a cloud of dark smoke expands and drifts away’ inverts a prototypical trajector/landmark configuration and by consequence assigns focal prominence to the physical world itself rather than the actions and events taking place within it. For Sherston, memory is embodied, consisting of a three-dimensional, vivid set of multi-sensory experiences which he had termed the ‘the texture of trench-life’ (Sassoon 1937, 276). In this extract, Sherston emphasizes the epitome of a mind in context, its thought processes and conceptualizations constrained by the material situation so that it becomes ‘clogged and hindered by gross physical actualities’ (Sassoon 1937, 276). The extreme physical conditions that soldiers endured at the Front influenced writing about the war in numerous ways. Since life in the trenches was an amalgamation of dealing with not only the threat of death but also sickness, inclement weather, rats, lice, poor hygiene and disease, large periods of inactivity, and many other problems (Winter 1979, 80–106), there were potentially numerous ways in which contextual situations transacted with and shaped the mind and the perception of self. An important physical context was the landscape itself and particularly the seemingly ubiquitous mud of the front line that arose from the combination of rain and earth churned up as a result of digging or shelling. Soldiers’ accounts detail the battles that soldiers seemed to fight with the mud itself; for example, Lynch (2008, 51) describes how ‘Every time a boot goes to the ground it disappears with a noisy squashy sound and every lift of a foot is accompanied by the loud sucking sound of a cow pulling her leg out of a bog’. In some cases (see for example Orr 1966), mud pulled soldiers into the ground and resulted in horrific deaths as soldiers drowned. In Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (read in translation by Sassoon in August 1917), soldiers are ‘troglodytes half emerging from their caverns of mud’ (2003, 41). In his trench poems, Sassoon construes the mud in terms of physical agency, writing of how ‘the mire was deep’ and how ‘[soldiers] lugged our clay-sucked boots’ (‘The Redeemer’) and ‘plastering slime’ of the

42

M. GIOVANELLI

trench (‘Counter-Attack’), and draws on a common metaphor of the mud as a mouth in ‘Young faces bleared with blood/Sucked down into the mud’ (‘To the Warmongers’) and the ‘sucking mud’ (‘Counter-Attack’). In a letter to his mother, Wilfred Owen (1998, 213) develops Sassoon’s metaphor by describing how ‘the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud but an octopus of sucking clay, 3, 4, and 5 feet deep relieved only by craters of water. Men have been known to drown in them’. In Mary Borden’s ‘Song of the Mud’, the metaphor is at its most concentrated in the mud ‘that sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous lips’ and is ‘the vast liquid grave of our armies’. And Herbert Read’s ‘Kneeshaw goes to war’, emphasizes horror at its worst in its vivid description of how an unnamed soldier sinks in the mud up to his neck and, unable to be pulled out, is mercifully shot ‘through the head’ by an officer. In Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden (2010, 38) describes how ‘everything was mud and moisture’ and the heavily bombarded St Martin’s Lane trench with its ‘gluey morass’ leading to an ‘obliterated cocoon of trenches in which mud, and death, and life were much the same thing’ and dug outs where ‘Men of the next battalion were found in mud up to the armpits […] those who found them could not get them out’ (2010, 98). T.E Hulme even described seeing soldiers at the Front as having ‘faces and cloths a sort of pale mud colour’ (Cross 1998, 46). As Das (2005, 43) argues, the presence, effects, and perceptions of the body’s interaction with mud emphasized the ‘materiality and vulnerability of the flesh’ that was engulfed in a vast and merciless physical landscape. Most action at the Front took place at night-time and consequently within the dark or in very limited light. Night activities might include sentry duty, various types of movement along the trench lines carrying heavy equipment, night patrols to gather evidence about the enemy’s actions and plans and working parties (see Chapter 3) to repair shell damage to the trenches and its defences that might otherwise allow the enemy to get close to the front line. In Sassoon’s ‘The Redeemer’ the first and last lines of the opening stanza begin with the single word ‘Darkness’; Sassoon’s soldier struggles in the ‘black ditch’ while the brief light of a flare allows him momentary sight of the ‘Christ’-like soldier. In his diary entry of 25 May 1916 in which he recounts the actions for which he was awarded the Military Cross, Sassoon (1983, 65) emphasizes the night aspect of the men’s work as they set out to the front line to embark on a raid on German trenches, their journey taking place in darkness with only ‘A red flashlight winks a few times to guide us’ and the men ‘disappear into the rain and darkness’ and later talks of how ‘the night falls and the darkness of death and sleep’ (1983, 93). Soldiers’ embodied experiences thus provide specific local contexts for and frame the ways in which the self becomes reconfigured within the spatial parameters of the Front either at the time of composition or retrospectively. These contexts thus may be interpreted as licensing particular representations of the body in two key ways. First, the dimensions of trenches and the physical restrictions both moving within them and the muddy landscapes imposed

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

43

meant that a conventional body schema is reconfigured from a vertical to a horizontal one, as Das (2005, 44) explains: the absolute lowering of the body on the ground allies seeing with the ‘baser senses’ of touch and smell. The trench mud thus challenged the vertical organization of bodily Gestalt, and marked a regression to the clumsy horizontality of beasts. Rat, mole, earthworm and snail are recurrent similes that are used in trench narratives to describe the soldiers.

Second, these contexts also reconfigure the senses in that touch and other forms of perception become salient; the body’s proximity to the earth and its integration into the specificities of the landscape mean that meant that touch, sound, and feeling become important mediums of both experiencing and recounting phenomena. For example, Das (2005, 8) writes that ‘imaginative writing of the period repeatedly dwells on moments of tactile contact […] gathered into the creative energies of a text’. Both of these contexts, often integrated, are evident in descriptions of war. Sassoon, in a description of some of his first action at the Front, talks of ‘crawling about forty yards [to a crater] and then of how he ‘crept back’ (1983, 51); of Germans who ‘crawled out of their trenches’ (1983, 66) and, at the Somme, ‘twenty or thirty men […] crawling across to Sunken Road’ (1983, 84). Blunden (2010, 39) writes how ‘Sergeant May and myself crawled along […] we were pretty certain that German topographers were crawling from their end in like fashion’. T.E. Hulme writes about how the need to crawl made him wish for a reconfigured, more diminutive body, ‘I had to crawl along on my hands and knees through the darkness in pitch darkness and every now and then seemed to get stuck altogether. You felt shut in and hopeless. I wish I was about four feet (27 January 1915). Barbusse (2003, 297) describes soldiers ‘curled up and clinging like snails […] a motionless rank of clumsy lumps, of bundles placed side by side’ and Owen’s poem ‘Cramped in That Funnelled Hole’, drawing Under Fire, equally emphasizes both the reconfigured space of the body in a shell hole and the terror of the men within it who ‘felt/As teeth of traps’. In ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, Rosenberg describes how the ‘air is loud with death’, Blunden (2010, 100) describes ‘The smell of the German dugouts’, and in ‘God! How I Hate You, You Cheerful Young Men’, and Arthur Graeme West stresses how death reconfigures the body schema of the ‘huddled dead’, his dead sentry portrayed as ‘Hunched as he fell/His neck against the back slope of the trench, /And the rest doubled up between’ (West 1918). In a diary entry, Sassoon (1983, 87) describes two dead soldiers as ‘[one was] A dolllike figure. Another hunched and mangled, twisted and scorched’, and further ‘terrible and undignified carcasses, stiff and contorted’. The remaining chapters of this book analyse how various reconfigurations of the body and the mind appear in Sassoon’s construals of experience and are attended to by readers. In Chapter 3, I begin by examining Sassoon’s early

44

M. GIOVANELLI

interaction and transaction with the landscape of the Front and his own strategies of observation as key situational and physical contexts for creativity. In Chapter 4, these ideas are integrated into a study of the mind in trauma, and in Chapter 5, I consider the ways in which various contexts give rise to ways of construing—and reading—blame in Sassoon’s verse. Finally, both Chapters 6 and 7 examine how later vantage points provide contexts for readers to examine Sassoon’s revisions to previous experiences and to reflect on past, present, and future iterations of the self.

Notes 1. See Giovanelli (2019) for discussion of these alternative construals in the context of Sassoon’s writing, where I suggest that (10)(b) helps to overall create a much darker atmosphere. 2. See, for example, Stockwell (2009, 180) for extended discussion of this phenomenon. 3. At the time of writing, the most comprehensive examples of scholarly work in stylistics informed by Cognitive Grammar can be found in Harrison et al. (2014) and in Giovanelli et al. (2021). Both Giovanelli and Harrison (2018) and Stockwell (2020) contain detailed practical discussion of how Cognitive Grammar may be used broadly within stylistics together with analyses of a range of texts.

References Barbusse, Henri. (1916) 2003. Under Fire. Translated by Robin Buss. London: Penguin. Barrett, Lisa Feldman, Batja Mesquita and Eliot R. Smith, eds, 2010. The Mind in Context. New York and London: The Guildford Press. Blunden, Edmund. (1928) 2010. Undertones of War. London: Penguin. Browse, Sam. 2018. Cognitive Rhetoric. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Browse, Sam. 2021. “‘Hmmm Yes, But Where’s the Beef?’ Cognitive Grammar and the Active Audience in Political Discourse.” In New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style, edited by Marcello Giovanelli, Chloe Harrison and Louise Nuttall, 117–34. London: Bloomsbury. Carter, Ronald. 2011. “Epilogue—Creativity: Postscripts and Prospects.” In Creativity in Language and Literature: The State of the Art, edited by Joan Swann, Rob Pope and Ronald Carter, 334–344. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Clark, Herbert. 1996. Using Language. New York: Cambridge University Press. Croft, William, and D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cross, Tim. 1998. The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights, 2nd edition. London: Bloomsbury. Csikszentmihaly, Mihaly. 2013. Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins. Das, Santanu. 2005. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

45

Dewey, John. 1896. “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology.” Psychological Review 3: 357–70. Evans, Vyvyan. 2010. “Cognitive Linguistics.” In The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia, edited by Louise Cummings, 46–9. London: Routledge. Evans, Vyvyan, and Melanie Green. 2006. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Fillmore, Charles. 1968 “The Case for Case.” In Universals in Linguistic Theory, edited by Emmon Bach and Robert Harms, 1–88. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Fillmore, Charles. 1982. “Frame Semantics.” In Linguistics in the Morning Calm, edited by The Linguistic Society of Korea, 111–37. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Co. Fillmore, Charles. 1985. “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding.” Quaderni de Semantica 6 (2): 222–54. Flynn, Nick. 2002. Blind Huber. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. Forrest, Linda B. 1996. “Discourse Goals and Attentional Processes in Sentence Production: The Dynamic Construal of Events.” In Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language, edited by Adele Goldberg, 149–61. Stanford: CSLI. Gavins, Joanna. 2007. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2019. “Construing and Reconstruing the Horrors of the Trench: Siegfried Sassoon, Creativity and Context.” Journal of Literary Semantics 48 (1): 85–104. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2021. “Siegfried Sassoon, Autofiction and Style: Retelling the Experience of War.” In Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches, edited by Marina Lambrou, 113–128. London: Bloomsbury. Giovanelli, Marcello, and Chloe Harrison. 2018. Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics: A Practical Guide. London: Bloomsbury. Giovanelli, Marcello, Chloe Harrison, and Louise Nuttall, eds, 2021. New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style. London: Bloomsbury. Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood, and Christian Matthiessen. 2014. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar, 4th edition. London: Routledge. Harrison, Chloe. 2017. Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Harrison, Chloe, and Louise Nuttall. 2019. “Cognitive Grammar and Reconstrual: Re-experiencing Margaret Atwood’s “The Freeze-Dried Groom.” In Experiencing Fictional Worlds, edited by Ben Neurohr and Lizzie Stewart-Shaw, 135–54. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Harrison, Chloe, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell, and Wenjuan Yuan, eds. 2014. Cognitive Grammar in Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hart, Christopher. 2013, “Event-Construal in Press Reports of Violence in Political Protests: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to CDA.” Journal of Language and Politics 12 (3): 400–23. Hart, Christopher. 2021. “‘28 Palestinians Die’: A Cognitive Grammar Analysis of Mystification in Press Coverage of State Violence on the Gaza Border.” In New

46

M. GIOVANELLI

Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style, edited by Marcello Giovanelli, Chloe Harrison, and Louise Nuttall, 93–116. London: Bloomsbury. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kövecses, Zoltan. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kövecses, Zoltan. 2015. Where Metaphors Come From: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor. New York: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About The Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, George. 1990. “The Invariance Hypothesis: Is Abstract Reason Based on Image Schemas?” Cognitive Linguistics 1: 39–74. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003. “Why Cognitive Linguistics Require Embodied Realism” Cognitive Linguistics 13 (3): 245–63. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Littlemore, Jeanette. 2019. Metaphors in the Mind: Sources of Variation in Embodied Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, Edward. 2008. Somme Mud: The Experiences of an Infantryman in France, 1916–1919, edited by Will Davies. London: Bantam Books. Nuttall, Louise. 2018. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction. London: Bloomsbury. Orr, Boyd. 1966. As I Recall. London: Macgibbon and Kee. Owen, Wilfred. 1998. Selected Letters, edited by John Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosch, Eleanor. 1975. “Cognitive Representations of Semantic Categories.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104 (3): 192–233. Rothenberg, Albert. 1990. Creativity and Madness. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Rumelhart, David. 1975. “Notes on a Schema for Stories.” In Representation and Understanding: Studies in Cognitive Science, edited by Daniel. G. Bobrow and Allan Collins, 211–36. New York: Academic Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1937. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber and Faber Sassoon, Siegfried. 1983. Diaries 1915–1918, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Schank, Roger. 1982. Dynamic Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schank, Roger, and Robert. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

2

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR

47

Stockwell, Peter. 2014. “Atmosphere and Tone.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, edited by Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley, 360–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stockwell, Peter. 2020. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics: Vol. I. Conceptual Structuring Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press. Tyler, Andrea. 2012. Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Learning: Theoretical Basics and Experimental Evidence. London: Routledge. Verhagen, Arie. 2006. “On Subjectivity and ‘Long Distance Wh-Movement’.” In Subjectification: Various Paths to Subjectivity, edited by Angeliki Athanasiadou, Costas Canakis, and Bert Cornillie, 323–46. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Verhagen, Arie. 2007. “Construal and Perspectivization.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, edited by D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens, 48–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vidali, Amy. 2010. “Seeing What We Know: Disability and Theories of Metaphor.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4 (1): 33–54. Wells, H.G. 1898. War of the Worlds. London. William Heinemann. Werth, Paul. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman. West, Arthur Graeme. 1918. The Diary of a Dead Officer. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. West, David. 2017. “Book Review: Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell and Wenjuan Yuan (eds), Cognitive Grammar in Literature.” Language and Literature 26 (1): 66–8. Winter, Denis. 1979. Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

CHAPTER 3

Observation

3.1

Introduction

In 1939, reflecting on the characteristics of his work, Siegfried Sassoon stated that ‘Thinking in pictures is my natural method of self-expression. I have always been a submissively visual writer’ (1939, 19). His diary entries composed in the trenches were often accompanied by diagrams, sketches and doodles as he visualized the scenes before him. This chapter examines Sassoon’s early war poetry in the context of readings that argue that he is a poet of observation and experience, presenting scenes with acute attention to detail. It focuses on Sassoon’s poetry written between his arrival in France in November 1915 and his hospitalization in London in April 1917, offering both a general discussion of Sassoon’s style during that time and a pair of extended analyses of the poems ‘A Working Party’ and ‘The Rear-Guard’. Many readers have attributed a sense of closeness in terms of feeling and description to Sassoon’s trench poetry. For example, in his review of CounterAttack and Other Poems , Murry (1918, 398) writes that Sassoon’s verse is typified by ‘direct transcription of plain, unvarnished fact’, and that he was able to ‘convey the chaos of immediate sensation by chaotic expression’.1 Bergonzi (1965, 95) defines Sassoon as a ‘ruthless realist’ and Campbell (1999, 51), discussing how Sassoon drew on his diary entries and letters to support his writing of poems, or ‘reconstructions’, reads Sassoon’s work as motivated by an interest in ‘the immediate impact of events’. Thorpe (1966, 19) writes of the ‘vivid trench scene’ in ‘A Working Party’ that typifies his poetry of the time, Moeyes (1997, 38) discusses Sassoon’s ‘careful observation’ and ‘descriptive passages that give the reader a vivid impression of life (and death) in the trenches’, and Sternlicht (1993, 43) focuses on the emotional impact of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Giovanelli, The Language of Siegfried Sassoon, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7_3

49

50

M. GIOVANELLI

the trench poems: ‘tough poems for tough times […] they terrify, shock and numb’. In her analysis of Wilfred Owen’s war poetry, Zettelmann (2018, 1) argues that a defining feature of some of Owen’s poetry is that it simulates the experience of the Front; the reader feels that they are there taking part in events as they are narrated to us: The speaker’s sensual perceptions are the sensations of a body placed in a defined position: in a trench, in a German underground shelter, walking behind a cart. It is through its limited perspective and its concomitant restrictions of movement, perception, cognition and affect that Owen’s poetry emulates real-life experience in a convincing three-dimensional fashion. Reading Owen, we feel we know what being a soldier in the First World War was like.

Zettelmann’s claim, of course, is really an empirical question and needs testing with the responses of readers beside herself. In the following analysis, I undertake such a test, on this occasion for Sassoon’s verse, by briefly drawing on a small corpus of ninety-two combined reviews of Counter-Attack and Other Poems and War Poems collected from the book review website Goodreads . The website allows readers to post ratings and reviews of books, all of which are open-access. Using this corpus, I examine how non-academic readers respond to Sassoon’s trench poems by highlighting specific aspects of observation, detail, and precision and a felt sense of closeness that arises when reading them. My approach here codes the data to find emerging ‘themes’, topic descriptors by which repeating ideas may be organized and understood (Auerbach and Silverstein 2003, 38). The number in bracket after ‘R’ refers to the number of the participant relative to the corpus of responses.2 An analysis of the data demonstrates that two broad themes emerge: first around the technical aspect of Sassoon’s writing; and then discussion of the effects of his verse on the reviewer. In the first, a recurrent sub-theme relates to the precision of Sassoon’s style, with reviewers commenting on how Sassoon manages to ‘capture the utter horror’ (R85) and ‘convey the horror of war’ (R56), or on how ‘his thoughts and emotion are shown clearly’ (R26). The perception that Sassoon is able to describe his scenes precisely and in finegrained detail is evident in the following two reviews which draw on the metaphor of writing is surgery. ‘Sassoon is a surgeon of a poet’ (R10) ‘Sassoon is surgical in the precision with which he characterises human feelings and emotions, the futility of the war’ (R19)

Other reviews draw on the visual nature of the poetry that Sassoon himself identified. One reviewer writes that Sassoon’s verse is ‘like concrete’ (R61) in its realistic portrayal of events. Another reviewer specifically mentions the ‘visual and sometimes brutal realities’ (R4) of Sassoon’s verse while another

3

OBSERVATION

51

draws on their own experience of reading in describing Sassoon’s verse as ‘a true eye-opener’ (R39). The second broad theme may also be split into sub-themes, each outlining readerly effects. A recurrent response is to comment on a sense of closeness to the action when or after reading. At times, this is considered to be an essential part of the experience of reading war poetry per se as in this comment: ‘The reader approaches this text in an attempt to be present in war’ (R44). On other occasions, feelings of immersion and transportation are emphasized: ‘[…] his poetry takes the reader to the horror, futility and stupidity of war’ (R83). One reader specifically highlights the feeling of closeness to the events of war: The proximity to, and the close relationship with, the everyday possibility of death and oblivion, as well as the ghosts of comrades sadly departed – is sadly ever present throughout. (R3)

A more common sub-theme relates to the discussion of emotional impact where readers foreground their own responses: ‘incredibly emotional’ (R26); ‘shocking and haunting imagery concerning the horrors and the savagery of war’ (R64), ‘He ably captures the horrific experiences of a WWI soldier […] I kept returning to this brief glimpse of soldiers lined up, ready to battle (R66) and ‘its [the poetry’s] impact and strength letting the horrible images of this war unfold in the reader’s mind (R84). Reviewers also talk explicitly of being ‘moved to tears many times when reading this’ (R26) and of the ‘chilling “experience”’ (R45) of engaging with the verse. It is clear, then, that readers in these reviews connect emotionally and in multiple, embodied ways with Sassoon’s poetry in the same terms as that suggested by Zettelmann for Owen’s verse. The remainder of this chapter examines how the language of the poems specifically might be responsible for the kinds of readerly interpretative effects outlined above.

3.2

Sassoon the Georgian Poet

Sassoon’s early pre-war writing places him firmly as a Georgian (named after George V) poet, a term that generally refers to poets writing in the period 1912–1922 whose work moved away from the stylistic traits of Victorian and Edwardian versifiers. The Georgian period was notable for the publication of five anthologies edited by Edward Marsh, then secretary to Winston Churchill and whom Sassoon had first met in March 1913. Although drawing on many of the tropes and themes of the early nineteenth century, Georgians utilized a more simple, direct style of language and emphasized the pastoral, the dramatic, and the immediate above the abstruse, theoretical, and rigid form of later nineteenth-century verse. Broadly speaking the Georgians can be split into three groups of writers, all of whose work appeared in Marsh’s anthologies: proto-Georgians such as Harold Monro and Gordon Bottomley; war poets such as Sassoon and Robert Graves some of whose work

52

M. GIOVANELLI

was included in the third anthology, Georgian Poetry 1916–17 (Sassoon had eight poems from The Old Huntsman included); and the neo-Georgians such as John Freeman and J. C. Squire whose writing came to typify the final two volumes. Although, the anthologies sold well, made money for their contributors, and influenced other collections of poetry that began to appear in the pre-war and early war times, in the midst of war, the older poets’ work became viewed as outdated. Indeed, the inclusion of war poets in the third anthology seemed to make the series redundant as their gritty verse moved against the Romantic style of earlier volumes, and although Marsh published two more anthologies, Georgian Poetry 1918–19 and Georgian Poetry 1920–22, the style of verse that seemed out of place with the post-war world and the rise of Modernism.3 As Ross (1965, 165) argues, ‘In 1912 and 1915 Georgian had implied vigor, revolt and youth. After 1917 it was to imply retrenchment, escape and enervation’. Sassoon’s pre-war verse displays the characteristic hallmarks of early Georgian poetry with its references to the picturesque landscapes, birdsong, and dream worlds and significant nods to writers such as Swinburne and Rossetti; indeed, Sassoon himself later reflected that in his early writing ‘the two things about which I write with most fullness of feeling were music and the early morning’ (1942, 35–36). The characteristics of an idealistic early Georgian style are evident in some of the titles and first lines of poems in the collections Poems (1906), ‘A Thought’ (‘Last night I wandered out and passed along’, ‘After Dusk’ (When the last star hath faded—when we wake’, ‘A Song of Summer’ (‘Birds in the morning sky’), and Sonnets and Verses (1909), ‘Marsyas’ (‘A goat heard, at the leafy time of year), and ‘Grieg’ (‘When I first heard that northern music strange’). Some of the poems from these two collections were reprinted in Sonnets (1909), Twelve Sonnets (1911) and Poems (1911). A similar style is evident in Melodies (1912) with poems such as ‘Dusk in the Summer Garden Rich with Flowers’, and ‘You that in Moonlight Meadows Wander’. More experimental but equally effectively Romantic pastiches were the prose play Hyancinth (1912), a single poem ‘Ode for Music’ (1912) later published in T. W. H. Crossland’s magazine The Antidote in February 1913 and The Daffodil Murderer, Sassoon’s parody of John Masefield’s The Everlasting Mercy, which was also published by Crossland, this time as a single pamphlet. Two further collections, Discoveries (1915) and Morning-Glory (1916) included poems, most of which were published in The Old Huntsman. Interestingly Morning-Glory, described by Egremont (2005, 115) as ‘a mixture of his old and new selves’ contains two poems more indicative of Sassoon’s work in 1916: ‘To His Dead Body’, written on hearing of the incorrectly reported death of Robert Graves, and ‘Blind’, which focuses on the plight of a soldier who loses his sight. The remainder of the collection is typical of Sassoon’s older style of writing and over half of them are not about the war at all. His conviction to destroy most of the copies of Songs and

3

OBSERVATION

53

Sonnets —‘several of the short poems for the first time revealed their feebleness’ (Sassoon 1942, 25) reveals an anxiety over his own poetic identity and possible reception at this time. Sassoon’s first war poem was ‘Absolution’, written during mid-1915 and a poem which Sassoon himself admitted was influenced by the archetypal Georgian poet, Rupert Brooke. Typical of much pre-1914 war poetry that drew on classical archetypes, ‘Absolution’ construes the war in an idealized way, accepting the validity of death and sacrifice. The poem presents a series of abstract nouns ‘anguish’, beauty’, ‘scourge’, ‘freedom’, ‘horror’, and ‘anger’, many of which are foregrounded through occupying agentive subject positions in clauses, for example ‘The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes’, or else are prominent as the heads of descriptive clauses, ‘war is our scourge’. The emphasis on the first person plural pronoun, ‘we’, in ‘we know’ ‘what need we more’ in the second stanza is repeated in the final one together with the possessive determiner ‘our’ to emphasize a sense of shared commitment to the glory of war. There was an hour when we were loth to part From life we longed to share no less than others. Now, having claimed this heritage of heart, What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?

The use of the first person pronoun will automatically impose, in Cognitive Grammar terms, a more subjective construal of a scene where the speaker or speakers are onstage in an egocentric viewing arrangement. Wales (1996, 63) notes that generally ‘the actual discourse referents for we are seemingly limitless’; the first person plural pronoun ‘we’ thus carries a degree of flexibility in its scope in that it may designate any number of conceptualizers onstage. ‘We’ may be used exclusively, referring simply to the speaker, or with degrees of inclusivity, referring to both conceptualizers (speaker and hearer) or else the speaker, hearer, and any number of other textual or extra-textual participants. Langacker (2007, 179) differentiates between these uses of ‘we’ in terms of delimitation, ‘a matter of how a linguistic expression projects to the world’. For example, in a given expression ‘we’ may have high delimitation in having a small set of referents, or with an increasingly more generic and inclusive sense, have low delimitation. At the extreme end, ‘we’ could be wholly undelimited, referring to everyone in the world. The use of the first person forms ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘our’ are largely generic and match the abstractions identified at the beginning of the poem. For modern readers (particularly given the obvious connections to Brooke’s verse), it is hard not to read ‘we’ as being wholly undelimited. The same can be said for ‘our’, a possessive determiner in a noun phrase that positions the possessor as a reference point from which the following head noun is singled out as the target within its dominion. Despite the shifts into what, on the surface, are more specific, and consequently more highly delimited pronouns, ‘my’ in ‘my

54

M. GIOVANELLI

comrades’ and ‘my brothers’ both of which appear to designate more concrete and personal addressees, the construals offered by the poem are largely abstract and disconnected from the world of experience.

3.3

Experience and Prophecy: The Poetry of 1916

In November 1915, fifteen months after initially signing up for the war, Sassoon arrived in France. In July 1916, he was injured, returning home where he would stay on a combination of sick and annual leave until February 1917. Sassoon’s first eight months in France would have a significant impact on his growth as a poet and his late 1915 and early 1916 diary entries provide a useful insight into how this time in France gives rise to a way of presenting and capturing his new surroundings. His diaries are full of description, focusing on intricate, vivid details of scenes surveyed, ‘The heavy transport-horses plodding through the sludge, straining at their weary loads; the stolid drivers munching, smoking, grinning, yelling coarse gibes; worried officers on horses; younglooking subalterns in new rain-proofs’ (Sassoon 1983a, 22) and decorative depictions that provide minute details of observed scenes, ‘[…] the whole region becomes an interminable dusk of looming slopes, with lights of village and bivouac picked out here and there, sparks in the loneliness and serenity of time’ (Sassoon 1983a, 43). In a letter to Edward Marsh, Sassoon had emphasized his desire to represent his experiences in verse, writing ‘How I long to be a painter of some skill; everything out here is simply asking to be painted or etched: it is wildly picturesque’ (in Ross 1965, 148). Later descriptions focus on the horrors of war but do so in a way that is emphatically poetic; the Romantic becomes interwoven with a more gritty, precise, and yet overtly artistic construal of war: Bullets are deft and flick your life out with a quick smack. Shells rend and bury, and vibrate and scatter, hurling fragments and lumps and jagged splinters at you; they lift you off your legs and leave you huddled and bleeding and torn and scorched with a blast straight from the pit. Heaven is furious with the smoke and flare and portent of shells, but bullets are a swarm of whizzing hornets, mad, winged and relentless, undeviating in their malicious onset. (Sassoon 1983a, 48)

Sassoon’s experiences and observations result in an emerging style that focuses on the interaction of human body and trench, fuelled by his desire to ‘record my surroundings’ (Sassoon 1945, 17) and position himself as ‘a student historian of those tragic, vivid and profoundly moving scenes in the Somme country’ (Sassoon 1945, 18). In a letter to Marsh in early 1916, he wrote ‘I am going up to the trenches very shortly; […] and I mean to suck in all I can when I get up there. I am always trying to impress things on my memory, and make as many notes as I can’ (in Ross 1965, 149). Sassoon’s identity as an emerging war poet becomes centred on his ability as a teller; later in life,

3

OBSERVATION

55

reflecting back on his work he wrote that ‘As a poetic spirit I have always felt myself – or wanted to be – a kind of minor prophet’ (Corrigan 1973, 61). Although the shift in Sassoon’s style is not completely clear-cut—early 1916 poems such as ‘To Victory’ and ‘The Dragon and The Undying’ largely retain the stylistic traits of his pre-war verse as well as its sentiments, his 1916 poems become increasingly liberated from the stylistic constraints of his prewar verse, most probably due to his experiences, the growing influence of Robert Graves on his style, and by his increasing awareness of the ubiquity of serious injury and death. Some clear emerging properties include an emphasis on the vernacular and direct representation of individual soldiers’ words and thoughts, such as ‘In the Pink’, which Sassoon (1983b, 10) described as the ‘first of my outspoken war poems’, and ‘Died of Wounds’, examined in detail in Chapter 6, where the dramatic language of the dying soldier, ‘They snipe like hell!’, is based on Sassoon’s own experience of seeing a young man die in the New Zealand Hospital at Amiens in late July. Landscapes also become important in 1916, but instead of the neutral pastoral descriptions of Sassoon’s pre-war verse, these are now increasingly reconfigured to represent the immediate brutality of war. In ‘Golgotha’, written in March 1916, Sassoon’s consistent use of present tense forms gives the impression of following events in real time as the reader’s attention is directed from the poem’s starting point, ‘Through darkness curves a spume of falling flares’, briefly illuminating the sights and sounds of the landscape to the striking final, static images of the lone sentry and ‘the brown rats, the nimble scavengers’. The absence of any verb in the poem’s final line, however, halts the movement of the poem and provides a final, permanent portrait of the scene. In other poems, action and high energy are more pronounced and landscapes act as backdrops for high drama. These narratives detail the injury or death of a soldier in the trench (‘A Working Party’, ‘A Night Attack’, ‘The Road’), or in hospital (‘Died of Wounds’, ‘Stretcher Case’), or present stories that emerge out of alternative perspectives on war (‘The TombstoneMaker’, ‘Two Hundred Years After’). Each poem builds towards a climax, which reveals either a catastrophic event (usually the death of a soldier) or else indicates some final solemn evaluative comment on behalf of the speaker. These 1916 poems display high levels of what in narrative studies is known as ‘tellability’ (Sacks 1992) in so far as they detail character, actions, and events that are inherent narrative qualities: they provide an answer to the question ‘so what?’ (Labov 1972, 326). The 1916 poems (see Giovanelli 2019 for an overview) thus become an important platform from which Sassoon bases his later, more mature war poetry (see Chapters 4 and 5), his post-war writing (see Chapters 6 and 7) and from which he assumes further distinctive identities. Sassoon’s prophetic narrative voice gives rise to another prominent identity, an increasingly detached witness to events or what Crane (2014, 66) calls being ‘psychologically solitary’. In ‘A Letter Home (to Robert Graves), the speaker is ‘in the gloom’ while ‘France goes rolling all around’; later he speaks of ‘watch[ing] the spark/Lit to guide me’ highlighting how he is both

56

M. GIOVANELLI

close to and removed from the experiences that is described. In ‘To His Dead Body’, the speaker assumes a vantage point from which his dead companion moves away from him, evident in the deictic patterning of ‘I speed you on your way/Up lonely, glimmering fields’. Other poems from mid-1916 to early 1917 such as ‘the Death-Bed’, ‘The Distant Song’, ‘When I’m Among a Blaze of Lights’ all contain strikingly vivid descriptions of experience which end with the speaker emphasizing a similar distance and detachment from the scene. These poems anticipate, for example, 1918’s concise ‘The Dug-Out’, in which the sleeping soldier is closely observed and yet viewed as distant, reminding the speaker of the omnipresence of death and previous losses that he has experienced as he addresses him: ‘And when you sleep you remind me of the dead’. ‘The Poet as Hero’, published in December 1916 in the pacifist-supporting The Cambridge Magazine, embodies the shifting sentiment and style of Sassoon’s 1916 verse. The poem was placed directly beneath a letter that criticized the publication in the same magazine of an earlier piece, ‘The Hero’, where Sassoon had bitterly attacked the hypocrisy and faked sympathy of an officer reporting the death of a soldier to his mother.4 Here, the lines ‘Of my old, silly sweetness I’ve repented-/My ecstasies changed to an ugly cry’ emphasize the redirection of his personal and poetic energies; the poem’s last line of ‘And there is absolution in my songs’ neatly echoes and marks a departure from the title of the 1915 poem ‘Absolution’. On arriving at the Front in late 1915, Sassoon had understood the experience of war as the start of a new life, far removed from the identity he had forged for himself living in Kent and in London: ‘I have found my peace here, anyhow, and the old inane life of 1913–1914 seems lopped right off – never to return, thank heaven’ (Sassoon 1983a, 26). By the end of 1916, the style and identity of Sassoon the poet have also radically changed. In the reminder of this chapter I provide detailed analyses, drawing on some of the Cognitive Grammar concepts outlined in Chapter 2, of two of Sassoon’s poems: ‘A Working Party’, written in March 1916 and therefore one of Sassoon’s early poems on arriving at the Front; and ‘The Rear-Guard’, written in April 1917 while Sassoon was based in Denmark Hill Hospital in London. Taken together, these poems bookend a period of Sassoon’s work which is characterized by close observation and an increasing gritty realism that presents with shocking horror the grim conditions at the Front. Each poem is used as a case study that examines how Sassoon’s stylistic representation of immediate experience manifests itself in the reconfiguration of the human body during trench warfare and a perceived sense of proximity and observation in its fine-grained detail of the ambience of the Front. My analysis draws primarily on the Cognitive Grammar notions of scanning and reference points to demonstrate how the poems project the physical landscape of war and the actions, events and characters therein as ‘up close’ in ways that align with readers’ responses to his verse. These construals may, in turn, also be

3

OBSERVATION

57

interpreted and read as enacted through the transaction between the poetic mind and the contexts that constrain creativity.

3.4

‘A Working Party’ 3.4.1

Background

‘A Working Party’ is an important poem in the development of Sassoon’s war verse. As Campbell (1999) notes, although the poem was not Sassoon’s first to focus on the trenches, it did draw extensively on the impact of them on soldiers’ lives in a way that his other writing pre-1916 did not. The poem details the experience of a single soldier who is a member of a working party, a group of men sent out above ground either to repair parts of a trench that had been damaged by shells or to consolidate reinforcements preventing enemy penetration. This work was an integral part of ensuring that the trenches remained operational (see Fussell 1975, 47); Sassoon himself writes extensively of being part of these in numerous diary entries throughout his diary entries (see for example Sassoon 1983a, 46, 51, 67, 73). As a poem that is exclusively centred on one individual and the impact felt by his death, ‘A Working Party’ may also be read as the beginning of a journey that marks Sassoon’s own preoccupations with the haunting resonance of closely observed trauma. As a poem of early experience, it represents what Das (2005, 77) suggests is the essential quality of realistic war writing where ‘poetry is refashioned as missives from the trenches’, and the attention afforded to the destruction of the individual human body challenges previous literary representations of war as noble and heroic. ‘A Working Party’5

Three hours ago he blundered up the trench, Sliding and poising, groping with his boots; Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk. He couldn’t see the man who walked in front; Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet Stepping along barred trench boards, often splashing Wretchedly where the sludge was ankle-deep.

Voices would grunt ‘Keep to your right—make way!’ When squeezing past some men from the front-line: White faces peered, puffing a point of red; Candles and braziers glinted through the chinks And curtain-flaps of dug-outs; then the gloom Swallowed his sense of sight; he stooped and swore Because a sagging wire had caught his neck.

58

M. GIOVANELLI

A flare went up; the shining whiteness spread And flickered upward, showing nimble rats And mounds of glimmering sand-bags, bleached with rain; Then the slow silver moment died in dark. The wind came posting by with chilly gusts And buffeting at corners, piping thin. And dreary through the crannies; rifle-shots Would split and crack and sing along the night, And shells came calmly through the drizzling air To burst with hollow bang below the hill.

Three hours ago he stumbled up the trench; Now he will never walk that road again: He must be carried back, a jolting lump Beyond all need of tenderness and care. He was a young man with a meagre wife And two small children in a Midland town; He showed their photographs to all his mates, And they considered him a decent chap Who did his work and hadn’t much to say, And always laughed at other people’s jokes Because he hadn’t any of his own.

That night when he was busy at his job Of piling bags along the parapet, He thought how slow time went, stamping his feet And blowing on his fingers, pinched with cold. He thought of getting back by half-past twelve, And tot of rum to send him warm to sleep In draughty dug-out frowsty with the fumes Of coke, and full of snoring weary men. He pushed another bag along the top, Craning his body outward; then a flare Gave one white glimpse of No Man’s Land and wire; And as he dropped his head the instant split His startled life with lead, and all went out.

3.4.2

Immediate Observation

‘A Working Party’ is split into six verse paragraphs. In the first, the opening lines set up the temporal and spatial parameters within which the narrative action takes place. In this instance, the temporal adverbial ‘three hours ago’ acts to set up a ‘viewing frame’ (Langacker 1995, 196) as the setting within which the profiled relationship between the participants, the soldier, and the trench is situated. Initially the soldier, anonymous and referred to simply

3

OBSERVATION

59

through the use of the third person pronoun ‘he’, has his movement conceptualized and tracked as he makes his way in darkness along the walls of the trench. A clustered pattern of three post-modifying participle clauses in the poem’s second line, in contrast to the finite verb form ‘blundered’, is used to describe the first action event of the poem. In Chapter 2, I explained that Cognitive Grammar makes a distinction between the type of mental scanning imposed by finite and non-finite forms. In sequential scanning, a conceptualizer follows an event state by state as it occurs through conceived time, so that these states are viewed as unfolding in a sequence as part of an ongoing and dynamic process. In this respect, sequential scanning operates in the same way as a motion picture does, simulating real-time viewing. In Cognitive Grammar, finite verb forms such as the past tense ‘blundered’ are processes that both construe an event as extending temporally and offer mental accessibility through conceptualizing events as though they are occurring in real-time. Alternatively, events can be construed and mentally accessed through summary scanning where successive stages of an event are accumulated holistically and projected into a single ‘snapshot’ in a manner that is analogous to the viewing of a still photograph. In contrast to finite forms, non-finite infinitives and participle -ed and -ing forms suspend sequential scanning and instead impose a summary view on the verb process. So, in the opening lines of the poem, ‘sliding’, ‘poising’, and ‘groping’ despite all having the same conceptual content as their finite-form counterparts, are construed holistically in a single gestalt-form rather than a successive sequence of states occurring through time. It is significant that this type of scanning and mental access afforded to the reader is given prominence in the opening lines of the poem. In the absence of the visual (the poem’s events take place at night and the opening verse paragraph’s action takes place exclusively in darkness), the emphasis is very much on what can be felt and heard, and it is these sensory modes that construct the world of the trench for the reader. The opening lines of the poem both emphasize physical interaction and reflect chaotic body movements that oppose a conventionally balanced and vertically oriented notion of a body. They are responsible for the construction of what Rodaway (1994, 41) terms a ‘haptic geography’, the establishing both of a sense of place, and of an individual’s relationship within that place through the ‘tactile receptivity of the body’. As well as suspending sequential scanning and imposing a summary view on conceptual content, -ing participle forms also crucially alter the vantage point from which the profiled content is viewed. In the instances of ‘sliding’, ‘poising’, and ‘groping’, the shift from sequential to summary scanning imposes a limited immediate scope (Langacker 2008, 63), which places a constraint on the range of attention and observation that can be possibly afforded to the verb process. As Langacker (2008, 120) explains:

60

M. GIOVANELLI

Since the limited scope is the ‘onstage’ region, the locus of the viewing attention, those portions of the processual base that fall outside its confines are excluded from the profile.

Consequently, the start and end points of the summarily scanned event are not present, and instead remain part of the unfocused and unavailable off-stage maximum scope. Since an -ing participle excludes the start and end points of the verb process, indicating simply that the event itself has begun, the form acts as a type of self-limiting ‘zoom in’ (Langacker 2008, 65). In Fig. 3.1, the onstage immediate scope (IS) that is foregrounded through the use of such a form is shaded, with its excluded points X and Y remaining in the expression’s maximal scope (MS). Using Langacker’s distinction, Verspoor (1996, 438) argues that –ing forms necessarily construe an event as being ‘very close by’. Here, as well as suspending the verb’s sequential scanning, the –ing form becomes meaningful in its own right as a point of access for viewing the semantic content denoted by the verb. The use of the -ing form is effectively a kind of syntactic iconicity that reflects a sense of proximity; the effect on conceptualization is to promote the sense of taking an ‘internal perspective’ on the conceptual content and viewing those actions as up close. The poem’s grammar presents the observed as near-by; the suspension of sequential scanning and the atemporality afforded by the pattern of participle clauses offer the reader, as conceptualizer, the opportunity to pause and afford attention to the soldier’s actions. In simple terms, it can be viewed as not just being close to an event but simulating the experience of that event. The type of mental scanning, however, does vary across the verse paragraph as a whole. Although the chaotic and dehumanized actions remain, sequential scanning returns from lines 3 to 7, from which point two further participle forms ‘stepping’ and ‘splashing’ mark a return to summarily accessed content. Since these forms again impose an internal perspective, the actions they denote are also construed as close by, in contrast to the finite forms/actions that precede them. In addition, the description of the trench is made to appear familiar rather than distant, with the emphasis on creating a landscape that relies on what appears to be easily understood. The sustained use of the definite article ‘the’ in the noun phrases ‘the trench’, ‘the walls’ ‘the sodden bags of chalk’ ‘the drum and rattle’, and ‘the sludge’ suggests that the poem’s

Fig. 3.1 Maximal and immediate scope in –ing forms (adapted from Langacker 1990, 92)

MS IS

X

time

Y

3

OBSERVATION

61

speaker places all of these as readily accessible, since definite referencing is generally used when specific referents are understood by the reader. This pattern of imposing different modes of scanning is also evident at the end of the poem. In verse paragraph four, ‘piling’, ‘stamping’, and ‘blowing’, temporarily suspend sequential scanning while the sole participle clause in the final verse paragraph affords attention to the action of ‘craning’ itself and positions the conceptualizer-reader as occupying an internal perspective. Similarly, the iconicity inherent in this verb form is in imitation of a conception of reality. Read in conjunction with this textual detail, the overall effect of these shifts in the type of scanning that is undertaken would appear to be analogous to the experience of moving from a broader to a more finely tuned detail; the poem’s grammar offers an invitation to shift from following action events at distance to observing them at close hand. As I explained in Chapter 2, it is not the case that sequential and summary scanning are mutually exclusive but rather offer different ways of conceptualizing the same event along a continuum; the dominant mode chosen for a particular conceptualization will thus foreground either the intention to replicate the real-time viewing of an event or impose summative scanning so that the construal offers an internal perspective on the scene. In this instance, the adjustment in viewpoint as a result of construals moving between imposing summary and sequential scanning (see Wójcik-Leese 2000, 175) mirrors the process of the closely observing eye that shifts to take in discrete aspects of movement in the immediate landscape, and the mind that registers those movements as both salient and as conceptually close. 3.4.3

Accessibility

A second way in which I suggest that the poem’s grammar evokes a sense of closeness is in the exclusive use of the third person pronoun ‘he’. Pronouns can be used to refer to a potentially opened-ended number of candidates, with only some obvious limitations, such as those that are specific to person and gender. So, for example, the third person pronoun ‘he’ generally has as its referent any individual male human entity. The type of open-endedness that is a feature of pronouns is in contrast to a definite article + lexical noun construction, which allows either the selection of a unique referent or at the very least, a narrowing down of potential candidacy. In the case of third person pronouns, it is usually the surrounding discourse that provides the context for enabling the singling-out of the referent. As Langacker (2007, 177) explains: as an inherent aspect of its meaning, a third person pronoun presupposes that a referent can be identified with a particular entity sufficiently salient in the linguistic or extralinguistic context to offer itself as the only obvious candidate. (added emphasis)

62

M. GIOVANELLI

However, there is no ‘particular entity’ or ‘obvious candidate’ in the poem and instead, despite some added descriptive detail in the second verse paragraph (although even here we get minimal modification and the use of the indefinite ‘a young man’ rather than ‘the young man’), its central protagonist is identified in a very generalized way. At one level, and with such a large number of potential candidates as the referent of ‘he’, this might mean reading the poem schematically. In this instance, there is the possibility that any of the candidates available as potential referents might be understood as being identified, and consequently the pronoun refers to what Langacker (2009, 115) terms a ‘generalized participant’. This is the type of position that is emphasized in those readings which suggests that the soldier is the archetypal ‘everyman’ affected by the war (see for example Moeyes 1997). An alternative way of explaining the use of the third person pronoun draws on accessibility theory (Ariel 1990), which proposes that a discourse participant will use language with varying degrees of specificity depending on whether the context allows another participant to access the referent and thus accurately construct a mental representation. At one extreme, the use of a proper noun with some modifying description such as ‘Siegfried Sassoon, the war poet’ has maximum specificity (there is—as far as I know—only one potential referent) and indicates low accessibility since it would be assumed that the discourse context, either linguistic, extra-linguistic or both, would be insufficient to provide straightforward access. Alternatively, markers such as ‘Siegfried Sassoon’, ‘Sassoon’, ‘that soldier, who fought in the First World War’, and ‘that soldier’ decrease in specificity but indicate increasing accessibility. The pronoun ‘he’ represents the least specificity but the greatest accessibility of all since its use assumes that a reader/listener is able to identify its referent in a straightforward manner. The sustained use of the third person pronoun in ‘A Working Party’ therefore implies high accessibility; the pronoun may have the effect of anonymizing or providing a universal archetype, but it can also denote a clear and easily accessible mental representation of that entity. In these terms, ‘he’ may also give the impression of an individual of whom we sense that we are aware. The way in which the poem invites awareness of this type may be further examined using Langacker’s stage model (Langacker 2008, 356). Drawing once more on the visual analogy described in Chapter 2, the use of a third person pronoun suggests conceptual proximity by placing in the onstage region a conception of a person who is also clearly known to the off-stage discourse participants and, in this instance, is also off-stage and/or physically accessible. The use of the third person pronoun thus results in a ‘split view of the referent’ (van Hoek 2003, 174), which is modelled in Fig. 3.2. As van Hoek (2003, 175) explains: because a third person pronoun indicates that the person is part of the off-stage region, part of the intimate conceptual world shared between the speaker and addressee, it indicates a subtle sense of closeness or intimacy.

3

OBSERVATION

63

Speaker ‘he’

Addressee ‘he’

Off-stage region

On-stage region

Fig. 3.2 The third person pronoun ‘he’ and the split referent

(added emphasis)

Read in this way, the solider, being configured as part of the same off-stage region as the speaker and addressee, is positioned as physically and/or mentally close. Thinking about degrees of awareness in this way also legislates for how readers might identify the referent in this poem and similarly stylized war poems based on their own background knowledge, and personal histories and memories. Of equal interest here is the fact that this type of referencing appears to be an important feature of Sassoon’s style across his other war poems composed during or after 1916.6 Indeed, Moeyes (1997, 38–9) distinguishes ‘A Working Party’ and other poems from 1916 onwards from the ‘first phase of his war poetry’ on the basis that the use of first person pronouns is replaced by the poet adopting an alternative vantage point from which the individual soldier, identified simply through ‘he’, is now the centre of focused attention. 3.4.4

Reference Point Relationships

As I discussed in Chapter 2, reference point relationships operate across discourse to form a cohesive and dynamic chain that allows for mental access across a specified path, providing progression from an initial entity, the reference point (R), to a series of potential targets (T) that are part of its dominion. Links are subsequently made across a series of reference points as targets subsequently become reference points themselves with their own dominions and set of further, potential targets. As Stockwell (2009, 177–81) argues, tracing paths within and across dominions allows for the systematic identification and discussion of important markers of textual and thematic coherence. Since in Cognitive Grammar, reference points are selected initially on the basis of their prominence (van Hoek 2003, 182), a simple figure/ground

64

M. GIOVANELLI

distinction within the clause can be used to identify two obvious starting points in ‘A Working Party’ that extend out and may be scanned along a mental path. First, ‘He’ and ‘trench’ stand out for selection on the basis that together with the verb process ‘blundered’, they are primary clausal participants and ‘textual attractors’ (Stockwell 2009, 20) that function as figures against the more peripheral time adverbial ‘three hours ago’ which may be viewed as the static ground. Following this initial identification, we can follow the respective thematic paths as the poem progresses. In the first verse paragraph, the potential targets in the dominion for the reference point ‘he’ are reduced to single out parts of the soldier’s body, ‘boots’, and hands. When another soldier, simply referred to as ‘a man’ becomes first the target within the dominion and then a new reference point, subsequent targets remain a body part ‘feet’ and associated movements, ‘stepping’, ‘splashing wretchedly’, and ‘ankle-deep’. The emphasis here then is on embodiment, the experience of the trench through a range of sensory modes, and the extremes of the working-class soldier’s body that are accessed along a mental path and rendered close and immediate. A similar pattern emerges towards the end of the poem. In the final two verse paragraphs, the selected targets within the dominion activated through the consistent third person pronoun ‘he’ remain those related to either the body or its constituent parts. The pathway here extends to extremes, ‘feet’, ‘fingers’, ‘body’, and finally the ‘head’, emphasizing the body and its primary capacity for locomotion, and its dominant non-visual sensory modes of touch, hearing, taste, and smell. Consequently, the line of sight through activated dominions around the primary reference point ‘he’ not only provides a tight textual coherence but a thematic one as well. The second initial reference point set up in the first verse paragraph is ‘trench’, which broadly sets up the spatial deictic parameters from which the main world of the poem is fleshed out. Despite the fact that a typical First World War trench would have been densely populated with soldiers and their associated possessions and objects and would have been busy with activity (Fussell 1975, 36–51), the ‘fleshing out’ is very specific and again, access is provided along a very selective mental path. So, in the first verse paragraph, the line of sight extends across three targets within the activated dominion and the only access afforded to the trench is that of the ‘walls’ and then the carefully modified—and consequently explicitly detailed—‘sodden bags of chalk’, and ‘barred trench boards’. This narrowly defined space, profiling the relationship between what touches and what is touched, emphasizes the physical aspect of experience, the coming together of soldier and landscape, and the observational proximity that these construals allow. Although the poem opens out in its middle section to provide a wider-ranging description of the surrounding environment in which the action takes place, the emphasis on a restricted mental path is a distinct feature of the final two verse paragraphs. Here, the selected path contains only the ‘parapet’ and the ‘bags’ that the soldier uses to reinforce it. Strikingly, an alternative desired state of future

3

OBSERVATION

65

affairs is set up in the mind of the soldier as he comforts himself by thinking of ‘a tot of rum to send him warm to sleep’, which exists as part of a more richly defined mental path through a series of reference points and their subsequent targets with the ‘draughty dugout’, its ‘fumes of coke’ and its ‘snoring weary men’. However, this only represents a fleeting departure from the main event of the poem; in this instance, the unrealized potential of the denied desired path is later understood as tragically ironic given the sudden death of the soldier that follows five lines later. In the discussion above, I have emphasized the restricted nature of readerly access in scanning paths from the initial reference point. Since a reference point’s dominion consists of the entire range of its associated knowledge, the way access is controlled, here in the deliberate choices made by the poetauthor Sassoon, seem worthy of attention and comment. Of course, the solider and the trench could have been described in any number of ways drawing on the various possibilities afforded by readers’ schematic and encyclopaedic knowledge; indeed, this kind of restricted and minimalist description of a trench is not necessarily representative of the poetry of either Sassoon or his peers. This kind of dominion control then might not only be considered an integral part of authorial style, but in the context of this poem, be viewed as fundamentally important in explaining how Sassoon captures the minute and focused details of close observation, rather than the broader all-encompassing panoramic sweep of the trench, its human subjects and their actions within it. 3.4.5

Action

The setting of the trench and its participants are organized into various relationships within clauses which portray the events of the poem. Action chains model interactions between participants where degrees of energy are transferred from one to another in what is known as a force-dynamic event (Talmy 1988). Within these chains, participants may be designated one of several archetypal roles (Langacker 2008, 356). In the ‘canonical event model’ (Langacker 2008, 357), an agent is responsible for carrying out actions as a source of energy output, while a patient typically is the participant affected by the source of energy through undergoing some internal change of state. In the first verse paragraph, the soldier is profiled at the head of an action chain and given focal prominence as the primary participant or trajector moving against the trench, which has secondary focus and is the landmark. This pattern is replicated through to the end of the verse paragraph, with a series of explicit movements that convey the transmission of energy from an agentive source that is absorbed by the various parts of the trench. Here the trench is profiled as more than just a setting since its ‘walls’, ‘sodden bags of chalk’ and ‘barred trench boards’ are the end points of the various action chains; in Langacker’s terms they represent an ‘energy sink’ (2008, 356). However, this configuration of action chains and participants is reversed by the end of the second verse paragraph, where the soldier assumes a different

66

M. GIOVANELLI

participant role as a patient and the focus moves to the energy that stems from the trench itself, evident in the agency implied in the processes ‘swallowed’ and ‘caught his neck’. In the third verse paragraph, this shift is complete. Here the energy emanates not from the soldier but from alternative sources: the flare that spreads its ‘shining whiteness’ but then fades out ‘in the dark’; the wind that exerts ‘chilly gusts’; and ‘rifle shots’ and ‘shells’ stand as subjects at the head of profiled action chains that semantically carry a high amount of energy, all of which is absorbed into the environment that surrounds the trench. At this stage, the soldier’s initial role as a prominent agent is downplayed to the extent that he is not mentioned at all. Although he forms part of the surrounding area that is now the landmark to the various trajector movements, he also verges on adopting a ‘zero role’ (Langacker 2008, 356) in that he is understood as simply being in a particular setting, and arguably undertakes no role as part of any energy chain. This is maintained throughout the section of the poem that merely describes and provides information about his background. The last verse paragraph is structured in a similar way to the beginning of the poem, consisting of a temporal process that is scanned sequentially followed by the participle ‘craning’ as part of a clausal adverb that suspends that mode of scanning temporarily. In the initial clause of this final verse paragraph, the soldier is the agent in the action chain ‘he pushed another bag along the top’, but there is a significant reversal in participant roles and a shift in energy that are marked grammatically by the way in which the soldier’s death is construed. A single flare halts the soldier’s mundane and repetitive actions before he is shot and dies instantly. Subsequently, the soldier fulfils the patient role in this final action chain as the very obvious recipient of and final resting place for energy although crucially the agent of the chain is not specified. This particular construal can be examined using Langacker’s (2008, 389–90) notion of a ‘setting-subject construction, which is modelled in Fig. 3.3. In this example, ‘the instant’ refers to the immediate spatial and temporal parameters of the trench, which hosts the occurrence and indicates that anyone in that bounded area could have carried this out. In this way, the status of the

setting/time (the trench)

TR

unspecified

LM (the soldier)

primary focal point

Fig. 3.3 The setting-subject construction at the climax of ‘A Working Party’

3

OBSERVATION

67

trajector shifts from a particular participant and instead is conferred on the setting itself. Since agency subsequently is stated in a general and non-specific fashion rather than being attached explicitly, its prominence is downplayed. This way of construing the climatic event of the poem ensures that the soldier remains the primary focal participant, before the final summary of action ‘and all went out’. This final focus on the soldier, and on his death as a result of being the ‘energy sink’ diverts attention to stasis rather than action, to the loss of life, and to the sense of absence that follows. Consequently, this primary focal point, just like the observed experience of the soldier’s death, is a force that has the potential for resonance once the poem has ended.

3.5

‘The Rear-Guard’ 3.5.1

Background

The Rear-Guard was written in April 1917 (it appears in a diary entry dated 22nd April) and was edited with slight amendments in October of that year before being published in Counter-Attack and Other Poems . On 16th April, Sassoon was shot in the shoulder by a sniper, which resulted in his being sent back to England considered wounded and unfit for action. The poem is possibly the first one that Sassoon wrote following his hospitalization in London on 20th April and therefore provides a good example of verse written following the important eighteen months that span Sassoon’s arrival at the Front and early 1917. It also complements the early 1916 poem ‘A Working Party’ as a case study for analysis in this chapter. Sassoon’s diary entries around April 1917 provide a useful context for understanding his changed perspective on the war. The entries move from their usual combination of descriptions of the countryside, details of army movements, and (increasingly) subjective views on the morality of war to singularly intense outlines of activity at the Front. On 14th April, he wrote: I have seen the most ghastly sights since we came up here. The dead bodies lying about the trenches and in the open are beyond description – especially after the rain. (A lot of the Germans killed by our bombardment last week are awful.) Our shelling of the line – and subsequent bombing etc. – has left a number of mangled Germans – they will haunt me till I die. And everywhere one sees the British Tommy in various states of dismemberment – most of them are shot through the head – so not so fearful as the shell-twisted Germans. Written at 9.30 sitting in the Hindenburg underground tunnel on Sunday night, fully expecting to get killed in Monday morning. (Sassoon 1983a, 154–55)

‘The Rear-Guard’ traces the movement of an unnamed soldier, again represented using the generalized participant ‘he’, who moves through an underground tunnel before emerging to the surface. Both Campbell (1999) and Hipp (2005) draw attention to the way that the poem is structured around

68

M. GIOVANELLI

the soldier’s movement both within the tunnel itself and beyond it, up and out into the open where ironically the war responsible for the horrors below is taking place. The poem has been read as a depiction of a ‘Dantesque Inferno of underground shafts’ (Campbell 1999, 142) and ‘the place of nightmare visions’ (Hipp 2005, 159). And, in a letter to Ottoline Morrell, Sassoon called it his ‘best “horrible poem”’ (cited in Campbell 1999, 142). ‘The Rear-Guard’

(Hindenburg Line, April 1917)

Groping along the tunnel, step by step, He winked his prying torch with patching glare From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know; A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed; And he, exploring fifty feet below The rosy gloom of battle overhead.

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie. Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug. And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug. ‘I’m looking for headquarters.’ No reply. ‘God blast your neck!’ (For days he’d had no sleep.) ‘Get up and guide me through this stinking place.’ Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap, And flashed his beam across the livid face Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore Agony dying hard ten days before; And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

Alone he staggered on until he found Dawn’s ghost that filtered down a shafted stair To the dazed, muttering creatures underground Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound. At last, with sweat and horror in his hair, He climbed through darkness to the twilight air, Unloading hell behind him step by step.

3.5.2

Movement

A broad cognitive poetic account of the poem might start by accounting for the comments made by Campbell and Hipp on the significance of the poem’s

3

OBSERVATION

69

contrasting locations, effectively here ‘underground’ and ‘overground’ or ‘in the tunnel’ and ‘above the tunnel’. The poem’s structure is underpinned by a containment image schema and a further embedded source-path-goal schema. In the poem’s first line, the spatial preposition ‘along’ denotes the movement of a trajector within the landmark and profiles a complex relationship (Langacker 2008, 117), modelled as in Fig. 3.4 to show the series of states that constitute the ‘along+NP’ structure. I return to the global significance of this initial construal in Sect. 4.2. The first verse paragraph opens with a present participle, ‘groping’ before continuing with two finite verbs ‘winked’ and ‘sniffed’, surrounding two participle forms ‘prying’ and ‘patching’ which act adjectivally to pre-modify nouns. Since participles, acting either adjectivally or at the head of a subordinate clause, impose summary scanning, the opening of the poem projects a sense of immediacy into the scene, indeed probably more so than in ‘A Working Party’. Given that some sense of temporality is restored through the finite forms that impose sequential scanning, the overall pattern in the first verse paragraph shifts between scanning modes. In Chapter 2, I highlighted that conceptualizers have optionality when it comes to imposing scanning in so far as they can highlight the sequencing of an event unfolding through time or present a more holistic representation of that event depending on the linguistic form used. As discussed in Sect. 4.1, Langacker views sequential and summary scanning not as mutually exclusive but rather as two ends of a continuum, or ‘two facets of the normal observation of events’ (2008, 111) where such events may be conceptualized ‘by focusing selectively on either mode of scanning’ (2008, 112). In reality, this means that conceptualizations often move between imposing degrees of scanning on a scene which give rise to particular interpretative effects; in this instance, the movement of attention from a holistic summation (e.g. ‘groping’) to sequence scanning (e.g. ‘winked’) and back again seems to me emphasize both the immediacy of the tunnel with the close-up confines of the underground space and the beginning of the soldier’s journey through it. The poem’s spatial aspect is additionally foregrounded in the use of ‘side to side’ and ‘step by step’ which evoke scanning paths but in different directions: ‘side by side’ invites scanning in a horizontal dimension whereas the scanning in ‘step by step’ evokes a path leading from the soldier outwards along to an as yet undefined destination point. Together, these paths invite the reader to pay attention to the contained, claustrophobic nature of the tunnel.

tr lm

Fig. 3.4 Complex relationship and trajector-landmark movement denoted by the proposition ‘along’

70

M. GIOVANELLI

In the second verse paragraph, summary scanning dominates and here the scene is construed in a way that promotes an intensified experience of immediate observation as the reader is positioned to view the contents of the tunnel ‘up close’. In this instance, one participle form ‘exploring’, post-modifying ‘he’, works in conjunction with a series of noun phrases that construe varying degrees of information and specificity. These range from single nouns, ‘tins’, ‘boxes’ ‘bottles’ which are fairly general to the highly schematic ‘shapes too vague to know’ to items given more description and post-modified through either a stative-adjectival participle, ‘a mirror smashed’, or an embedded prepositional phrase, ‘the mattress from a bed’. In this construal of this particular part of the tunnel, the reader is invited to scan the items individually; the pattern of nouns graphologically separated by a comma results in a series of discrete attentional frames (Langacker 2008, 482). The grammar here is iconic, reflecting as it does the real-time movement of the speaker whose view within the tunnel, afforded by the ‘prying torch’, rests first on one item and then on another. In each successive frame, the profiled noun becomes the figure of the scene and taken together the frames accumulate and are scanned holistically to form a backdrop to the tunnel. Over the course of reading the poem, the opening verse paragraphs thus form an important background to the rest of the poem, read as a coherent progression modelled by the poem’s grammar. Each noun in the first line of the second verse paragraph is ungrounded (Langacker 2008, 259). In Cognitive Grammar, the ‘ground’ refers to a particular context, effectively ‘the speech events, its participants [speaker and hearer], their interaction, and the immediate circumstances’ (Langacker 2008, 259) in which discourse takes place. In order to draw attention to specific instances of entities rather than more general types within the discourse context, conceptualizers utilize different nominal grounding elements such as definite and indefinite articles, distal and proximal demonstratives, quantifiers, and possessive nominals and determiners in a process known as ‘instantiation’ (Langacker 2008, 266). In the first line of ‘The Rear-Guard’, however, the first three nouns have no grounding element and so remain conceived as more abstract instances; I would argue here that the absence of grounding works in conjunction with the lack of specificity to create an overall construal where vagueness and a genuine lack of precise details prevail. The path in scanning the remaining noun phrases, again across separated attention frames, takes in overt grounding elements that that bring into the current frame of attention more specific, singular items. The fact that ‘mirror’ and ‘bed’ are grounded using the indefinite article ‘a’ invites the reader/conceptualizer to understand these as new and unknown rather than part of a location that is familiar. A final comment about the opening of the poem relates to the way in which the grammar works to promote close observation through highlighting the embodied experience of the soldier whose movement the reader is asked to imagine and track. In an attempt to represent a soldier moving through a dark underground tunnel (imagined or otherwise), the description of the objects

3

OBSERVATION

71

in the second verse paragraph must attempt to represent to some degree the random nature of the torch shining across the darkness and onto particular objects, before moving quickly to others. It is precisely this effect that I think is created by the grounding strategies used that I have described above. The poem’s grammar displays what Enkvist (1981) terms ‘experiential iconicity’; each construal feeds into a natural path that when scanned mirrors the mental operations of the soldier in the tunnel as his line of sight extends across its various components. The experience is also crucially of the observer and of the prophet-poet whose own subjectivity is placed onstage as the shaper of the events onto which he wants the reader to focus their attention. This is evident in some of the evaluative lexis used to describe the soldier, tunnel, and its entities, for example, ‘winked’ and ‘prying’, and in more obvious examples such as ‘Dawn’s ghost that filtered down a shafted stair’. Here, the emerging daylight is construed using both a metaphor, ‘Dawn’s ghost’, and fictive motion (Talmy 2000). Evoked by the phrasal verb ‘filtered down’, the latter is used to conceptualize and scan a static scene as an object (light) moving along a path so as to build up ‘a full conception of the object’s spatial configuration’ (Langacker 2008, 529). The subjectivity inherent in reimagining the scene also emphasizes a different kind of movement: vertical as opposed to horizontal, prefiguring the soldier’s movement upwards at the end of the poem. In the third verse paragraph, this movement between participle forms (either as clauses or as stative-adjectival modifiers) continues. The soldier’s experience is punctuated by direct speech forms, ‘I’m looking for headquarters’, ‘God blast your neck!’ and ‘Get me up and guide me through this stinking place’. As the verse paragraph progresses, the soldier and the man he finds are construed in contrasting ways. The former is largely presented as the head of action clauses. ‘And stooped […] he kicked […] and flashed’ whereas the latter is presented as the patient of those clauses and more schematically, ‘the sleeper’ and ‘a soft unanswering heap’. Here there is a subtle shift in the mode of scanning, initially sequential ‘And flashed his beam’ but then suspended to a summative holistic form from ‘across the livid face/Terribly glaring up’ through the non-processual complex relationship denoted by the preposition ‘across’ and the present participle ‘glaring’. Similar to ‘along’ which opens the poem, ‘across’ profiles multiple configurations of the trajector (the beam) moving against the landmark (the face) which are scanned as a continuous action with its multiple states simultaneously activated (see Langacker 1986, 24–26 for discussion of ‘across’ as a complex relationship). Equally, the moment when the dead man’s face is revealed appears intimate and close up due the scanning inherent in the present participle ‘dying’ and the adjectival form ‘blackening’. Subtle shifts in scanning are also evident in the final verse paragraph where the reader is first positioned to follow the soldier’s movement by sequentially scanning the states identified by the verbs ‘staggered’ and ‘found’ and ‘climbed’, and then the other soldiers, unnamed and construed more schematically as ‘creatures’, through the imposition of summary scanning, ‘dazed,

72

M. GIOVANELLI

muttering’. This pattern results in a degree of symmetry by the end of the poem: the final line ‘Unloading hell behind him step by step’ mirrors the poem’s first line in starting with a present participle and ending with the vertical path denoted by ‘step by step’ and a zooming-in on the actions of the soldier, inviting the reader to take up a close vantage point from which the events described may be viewed. 3.5.3

Textual Attractors and Reference Points

Cognitive stylisticians recognize that lexico-grammatical features have the ability to attract our attention in the same way as other aspects of our material world do. In keeping with the ‘cognitive commitment’ that I outlined in Chapter 2, the process of navigating language in a text is therefore an extension of our embodied experience in the temporal-spatial world. Stockwell (2009, 25) presents a taxonomy of characteristics of good textual attractors which taken together provide a series of dimensions along which the manipulation of attention in a text may be analysed. ● newness (currency: the present moment of reading is more attractive than the previous moment) ● agency (noun phrases in active position are better attractors than in passive position) ● topicality (subject position confers attraction over object position) ● empathetic responsibility (human speaker > human hearer > animal > object > abstraction) ● definiteness (definite (‘the man’) > specific indefinite (‘a certain man’) > non-specific indefinite (‘any man’) ● activeness (verbs denoting action, violence, passion, wilfulness, motivation, or strength) ● brightness (lightness or vivid colours being denoted over dimness or drabness) ● fullness (richness, density, intensity, or nutrition being denoted) ● largeness (large objects being denoted, or a very long elaborated noun phrase used to denote) ● height (objects that are above others, are higher than the perceiver, or which dominate) ● noisiness (denoted phenomena that are audibly voluminous) ● aesthetic distance from the norm (beautiful or ugly referents, dangerous referents, alien objects denoted, dissonance). Drawing on Stockwell’s framework, it is possible to identify the entities that stand out as good attractors in ‘The Rear-Guard’ and are therefore marked as textually salient. One obvious observation is that the soldier moving along the tunnel is textually foregrounded in terms of newness, agency, and topicality.

3

OBSERVATION

73

Indeed the ‘ongoing’ nature of the participle ‘groping’ and the spatial markers ‘along’, ‘step by step’, and ‘side by side’ arguably maintain a sense of activeness. Although ‘he’ is less definite, as I discuss in relation to ‘A Working Party’ earlier in this chapter, the accessibility indicated by the use of a third person pronoun makes the soldier a potential textual attractor. The isolated nouns of verse paragraph 2 shift attention momentarily, but as previously indicated, these are left as largely ungrounded and therefore conceptually vague entities. Instead the poem is underpinned and driven by a source-path-goal image schema as the soldier moves along the tunnel which ensures that the reader is invited to maintain attention on the process of the journey. Within this journey, the soldier’s movement is foregrounded in contrast to the dead man he encounters who is motionless and ‘unanswering’. The soldier invites readerly attention along the dimensions of height, ‘he stooped’ and brightness and visibility: the man that he finds is ‘half-hidden’ and a ‘heap’. The four lines afforded to the description of the dead soldier at the end of the third verse paragraph, which position him as a good attractor in terms of definiteness, ‘the livid face’, agency and topicality ‘terribly glaring up’, and activeness ‘fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound’ are temporary, and the final verse paragraph, as previously discussed, reconfigures attention back on to the soldier’s movement up out of the tunnel and into the world above. In this instance, the noise of the war above into which the soldier enters is contrasted to the quietness of the ‘dazed muttering creatures’, and the ‘boom of shells’ outside which is construed from the point of view of the other soldiers as ‘muffled sound’ within the tunnel. The brightness of the emerging daylight shining down into the tunnel, discussed in Sect. 5.2 as an example of fictive motion, shifts attention to the outside world and is the end point of the schema driving the poem. Cohesion in the poem can also be explained using Cognitive Grammar’s reference point model, this time scaled up to account for cohesive ties across the entire poem (see also Harrison 2017; Stockwell 2009). As in ‘A Working Party’, the soldier provides the initial reference point in the poem and provides a clear ‘starting point’ to a ‘natural path’ (Langacker 2008, 501). As Langacker explains, ‘the starting point is often either the conceptualizer or something to which the conceptualizer has access’ (2008, 501) in ‘The Rear-Guard’, it seems that a natural assumption is that the initial reference point is Sassoon as prophet/teller/observer. The initial target within the reference point’s dominion is therefore some aspect of the story being told, in this case, the soldier moving through the tunnel. As I have discussed at length in this chapter, ‘The Rear-Guard’ is driven by a sense of movement where the events of the poem are underpinned by a principle of iconicity so that conceived experience is mirrored in the language and structure of the poem. In terms of reference point relationships, each successive reference point and target within that reference point’s dominion is tied to a series of dynamic processes and movements as we mentally scan the movement of the soldier along the tunnel. Langacker (2008, 517) suggests that we can reconfigure the notions

74

M. GIOVANELLI

of trajector and landmark as primary and secondary focal points within a clause by identifying them as reference points profiled in a particular way so as to highlight their relationship as participants in a process that is the target within their dominion. So, for example in ‘He winked his prying torch’, the trajector ‘He’ and the landmark ‘torch’ are reference points that provide mental access to the ‘target process’ (Langacker 2008, 518): the overall conceptualization of the shining of light within the dark tunnel. In the first instance, modelled in Fig. 3.5, R1 is ‘he’, the trajector of the opening clause, ‘Groping along the tunnel’ and R2 is the landmark, ‘tunnel’. Together these reference points are the primary and secondary focal points that act to construct the conceptualization of the profiled relationship. The target within the dominion of R1 is therefore the process profiled through this trajector-landmark relationship. R1 also acts as a reference point for the second target process, T2, indicated this time through a different secondary focal participant/landmark, ‘prying torch’, R3. In this instance, a further cooccurring process, T3, that of the torch emanating light, is a result of a second part of the overall conceptualization which results from a mental path from R1 to R3 and therefore consequentially from T2 to T3: the soldier moves the torch; the torch gives out light over the walls of the dark tunnel, R4. A further target process, T4 (not included in Fig. 3.5), ‘sniffed the unwholesome air’ completes the first verse paragraph. Figure 3.5 models the cohesive pattern that appears to emerge across the poem: a single reference point, ‘he’ that gives rise to a number of target processes with a number of co-clausal participants acting as secondary reference points within its initial dominion. Focus is therefore maintained almost continually throughout the poem on a single entity, defined in close observational detail. There are two further aspects of the poem where a reference point analysis can be useful. The first concerns the string of noun phrases at the beginning of the second verse paragraph where, as previously discussed, the conceptual

tr

lm T1

R1

T2 tr

tr

R2 R3

lm T3

R4

lm

C

Fig. 3.5 Clausal trajectors and landmarks as reference points in the opening of ‘The Rear-Guard’

3

OBSERVATION

75

vagueness afforded by the lack of nominal grounding operates in conjunction with a path of mental access where each object is construed singularly and at speed. Here, the scanning may be understood as a series of reference point relationships where each successive noun phrase acts as a new reference point/target that both allows readerly access to the developing scene and simulates the embodied experience of accessing each item in turn through the shifting light of the torch within the dark tunnel. Figure 3.6 models this structure. Finally, the cohesion and symmetry of the whole poem may be read by upscaling the model so that a series of more global reference points, targets, and themes underpins the poem’s entire structure. As in ‘A Working Party’, moving through and reading ‘The Rear-Guard’ may be understood as the process of accessing various conceptual entities, processes, and locations along a discrete series of mental paths, all of which are underpinned by the journey of the solider through the tunnel. The image-schematic structure of movement along a path from a source towards a goal that I have discussed throughout this section is modelled in Fig. 3.7, where the chain of reference point relationships sketches out the entire content of the poem. The final target, T5 is the final ongoing process where the soldier emerges into the scene of war taking place above ground. The grammar of the poem, then, is a remarkable exercise in piecing together scenes into a convincing whole as we follow the soldier ‘step by step’ to the end. My discussion in this chapter has focused on providing a cognitive poetic account of the phenomenon described by literary critics and non-academic readers alike: that reading Sassoon’s trench poems can give rise to the feeling of being close to the scenes described within them. In this respect, reading Sassoon’s trench poems is a form of embodied simulation (Barsalou 1999; Bergen 2012) of the actions, events, and feelings outlined in them, through

R11

C

T1/R21

T2/R31

T3/R41

T4/R51

T5/R61

R1 = ‘Tins’ T1/R2 = ‘boxes’ T2/R3 = ‘bottles’ T3/R4 = ‘shapes too vague to know’ T4/R5 = ‘A mirror smashed’ T5/R6 = ‘the mattress from a bed’

Fig. 3.6 Reference points and targets chain in second verse paragraph of ‘The RearGuard’

76

M. GIOVANELLI

R11

T1/R21

T3/R41

T2/R31

T4/R51

T5/R61

R1 = Soldier T1/R2 = Trench T2/R3 = Objects T3/R4 = Dead soldier T4/R5 = Stairs T5/R6 = Above ground

C

Fig. 3.7 Global structure of ‘The Rear-Guard’

which readers are immersed in the world of the text and to the point of experiencing the poem as real and close by. Since these effects are a result of language and, importantly, grammatical structure, Cognitive Grammar thus offers a way of examining how specific construals evoke strong mental images. Interestingly, as demonstrated in my reader response data, the felt experience of reading Sassoon is seen as resonating (Stockwell 2009) some time after the literary reading itself. In addition, as I argue in Chapter 2, it is possible to view the production of these poems as motivated by the specific physical conditions in which they emerge, as a result of the symbiotic relationship between the mind and its context as the experience of war licences particular construals. In the poems discussed which focus on Sassoon’s emerging trench style to his more mature mid-1917 verse, this manifests itself in observable ways: precise description, and a vantage point which feels ‘close by’ in ‘A Working Party’; and the structure of ‘The Rear-Guard’ in which the relationship of the grammar to narrated events is iconic, mirroring the experience of observing the soldier in the tunnel. In both poems, Sassoon’s experiences at the Front may be understood and interpreted as salient construal constraints which licence particular ways of responding to extreme conditions. In this way, they represent very real instances of what Barrett et al. (2010, 9) term a unique ‘situation’ in the sense that it is the transaction between conceptualizer and scene that results in a prominence attached to certain aspects of the physical surroundings and give rise to idiosyncratic ways of conceptualizing scenes in specific times, dynamically captured in and interpreted through the form of verse.

Notes 1. Murry was reviewing Counter-Attack and Other Poems . Despite the points made here, his comments on the collection are generally negative.

3

OBSERVATION

77

2. See Nuttall (2018, 9) for a discussion of methodological and ethical issues around using these kind of data. 3. Georgian Poetry 1918–19 did contain nine poems from War Poems by Sassoon as well as poems by Robert Graves. Graves and Edmund Blunden were also included in Georgian Poetry 1920–22. 4. The letter can be read in Hynes (1990, 155). 5. This the published version of the poem as appearing in The Old Huntsman and Other Poems . The original in Sassoon’s diary has some slight differences and an additional final verse paragraph. 6. A review of Collected Poems (Sassoon 1961) shows that of the fifteen poems in the ‘war poems 1915–1917’ section of The Old Huntsman and Other Poems that explicitly describe the trench-life of a soldier, twelve rely solely on the use of ‘he’, with no signalling of a clear referent through an alternative accessibility marker. There is a similar pattern in Counter-Attack and Other Poems , where nine out of thirteen poems exclusively use the high accessibility marker ‘he’.

References Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing Noun Phrase Antecedents. London: Routledge. Auerbach, Carl and Louise B. Silverstein. 2003. Qualitative Data: An Introduction to Coding and Analysis. New York, New York University Press. Barrett, Lisa Feldman, Batja Mesquita and Eliot R. Smith. 2010. “The Context Principle.” In The Mind in Context, edited by Batja Mesquita, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Eliot R. Smith, 1–22. New York and London: The Guildford Press. Barsalou, Lawrence. 1999. Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22: 577–609. Bergen, Benjamin. 2012. Louder Than Words: The New Science of How The Mind Makes Meaning. New York: Basic Books. Bergonzi, Bernard. 1965. Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of Literature of the Great War. London: Constable. Campbell, Patrick. 1999. Siegfried Sassoon: A Study of the War Poetry. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Corrigan, D. Felicitas. 1973. Siegfried Sassoon: Poet’s Pilgrimage. London: Victor Gollancz. Crane, Meg. 2014. Siegfried Sassoon: A Solitary Witness. Use of English 65 (3): 65– 75. Das, Santanu. 2005. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Egremont, Max. 2005. Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography. London: Picador. Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1981. Experimental Iconicism in Text Strategy. Text 1 (1): 77–111. Fussell, Paul. 1975. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2019. The Language of Siegfried Sassoon’s 1916 Poems: Some Emerging Stylistics Traits. Siegfried’s Journal 26: 22–28. Harrison, Chloe. 2017. Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hipp, Daniel. 2005. The Poetry of Shellshock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon. Jefferson: Macfarland and Company.

78

M. GIOVANELLI

Hynes, Samuel. 1990. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: The Bodley Head. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Langacker, Ronald, W. 1986. “An Introduction to Cognitive Grammar.” Cognitive Science 10: 1–40. Langacker, Ronald. W. 1995. “Viewing and Cognition in Grammar.” In Alternative Linguistics: Descriptive and Theoretical Modes, edited by P.W. Davis, 153–212. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Langacker, Ronald. W. 2007. “Constructing the Meaning of Personal Pronouns.” In Aspects of Meaning Construction, edited by Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Thomas Berg and Peter Siemund, 171–188. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Langacker, Ronald. W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Langacker, Ronald. W. 2009. Investigations in Cognitive Grammar. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Marsh, Edward Howard. 1917. Georgian Poetry 1916–17 . London: The Poetry Bookshop. Marsh, Edward Howard. 1919. Georgian Poetry 1918–19. London: The Poetry Bookshop. Marsh, Edward Howard. 1922. Georgian Poetry 1920–22. London: The Poetry Bookshop. Moeyes, Paul. 1997. Siegfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory: A Critical Study. New York: St Martin’s Press. Murry, John Middleton. 1918. “Mr Sassoon’s War Verses.” The Nation, 13 July 1918: 398. Nuttall, Louise. 2018. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction. London: Bloomsbury. Rodaway, Paul. 1994. Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Space. London: Routledge. Ross, Robert H.. 1965. The Georgian Revolt: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal 1910– 1922. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1906. Poems. London: J. E. Francis and Company. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1909a. Sonnets and Verses. London: The Athenaeum Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1909b. Sonnets. London: Hatchard. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1911a. Poems. London: Chiswick Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1911b. Twelve Sonnets. London: Chiswick Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1912a. Hyancinth. London: Chiswick Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1912b. Melodies. London: Chiswick Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1913. The Daffodil Murderer. London: John Richmond. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1915. Discoveries. London: Chiswick Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1916. Morning Glory. London: Chiswick Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1917. The Old Huntsman and Other Poems. London: William Heinemann. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1918. Counter-Attack and Other Poems. London: William Heinemann. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1939. On Poetry: The Arthur Skemp Memorial Lecture. Bristol: University of Bristol.

3

OBSERVATION

79

Sassoon, Siegfried. 1942. The Weald of Youth. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1945. Siegfried’s Journey 1916–1920. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1961. Collected Poems 1908–1956. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1983a. Diaries 1915–1918, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1983b. War Poems. London: Faber and Faber. Sternlicht, Sanford. 1993. Siegfried Sassoon. New York: Twayne. Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Talmy, Leonard. 1988. Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition. Cognitive Science 12: 49–100. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics: Vol. I. Conceptual Structuring Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press. Thorpe, Michael. 1966. Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study. London: Oxford University Press. van Hoek, Karen. 2003. Pronouns and Point of View: Cognitive Principles of Coreference. In The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, vol. 2, ed. Michael Tomasello, 169–194. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Verspoor, Marjolijn. 1996. The Story of -ing: A Subjective Perspective. In The Construal of Space in Language and Thought, ed. M. Putz and R. Dirven, 417–454. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Wales, Katie. 1996. Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wójcik-Leese, Elzbieta. 2000. Salient Ordering of Free Verse and Its Translation. Language and Literature 9 (2): 170–181. Zettelmann, Eva. 2018. Wilfred Owen and the Culture of Commemoration, http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/memoryofwar/wilfred-owen-and-the-cul ture-of-commemoration/.

CHAPTER 4

Trauma

4.1

Introduction

As much as 1916 was a pivotal year in the development of Siegfried Sassoon’s style, the events of 1917 led to an output of writing that, arising from his emerging dissatisfaction with the war, gave rise to a voice of protest and of reflection that would remain, in varying degrees, throughout his post-war output. At the end of 1916, Sassoon returned to duty following a long leave of absence as the result of contracting trench fever and then a series of sick leave extensions. Initially only passed fit for home service, on 16 February 1917 Sassoon returned to France where he remained until April of that year. By June 1917, he had written and made public his statement against the war, ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’, which was read out in the House of Commons the following month. By that time, Sassoon had been before a medical board and been sent to Craiglockhart Hospital where he would arrive on 23 July 1917 and remain until being passed fit for service on 26 November of that year. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Sassoon’s diary entries from February 1917 shift from general observations on the French landscape and on the morality of war to highly focused descriptions of death and horror from the moment that he recounts his experiences at the Hindenburg Line (see for example Sassoon 1983, 152–56) up to the point where he was wounded in the shoulder, an injury which resulted in his being sent back to be hospitalized in England. Strong images and explicit horror appear in diary entries that immediately follow Sassoon’s return to England. For example, during his first few days in hospital at The Fourth London Hospital in Denmark Hill, Sassoon describes a night-time vision when, trying to get to sleep, he sees ‘parcels of dead flesh and bones, faces glaring at the ceiling, faces turned to the floor, hands © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Giovanelli, The Language of Siegfried Sassoon, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7_4

81

82

M. GIOVANELLI

clutching neck or belly’ crawling across the floor of his hospital room towards him (1983, 161). In Giovanelli (2019), I examine the various construal phenomena in this passage, identifying an overall pattern of increased specificity, an emphasis on construing the human body horizontally (e.g. the use of the deictic verb ‘come creeping’ and the prepositional phrase ‘across the floor’), mimicking crawling along a trench or within a tunnel), and the imposition of summary scanning which construes the events described as being immediate and up-close and, by consequence, strikingly horrific. Drawing on Kövecses’ notion of different context types that I explained in Chapter 2, I argue that these construals lend themselves to adopting a reading strategy that contextualizes Sassoon’s writing within his immediate experiences at the Hindenburg Line recounted a few days earlier as well as within the discourse context of an earlier diary entry that outlines an equally horrific image of a dead soldier whose ‘two mud-stained hands’ are sticking out of the mud (Sassoon 1983, 159). The events leading up to Sassoon’s arrival at Craiglockhart are welldocumented and complex (see Egremont 2005, 133–58 for a good overview). Broadly marked by ongoing conflict between his own need to survive and a sense of attachment to the men under his command, Sassoon had spent time recuperating at Chapelwood Manor in East Sussex, and meeting friends in London and at Garsington Manor House in Oxfordshire, the home of Philip and Ottoline Morrell where he was influenced by anti-war stances held by visitors there including the philosopher and academic Bertrand Russell. In May and June 1917, he drafted his statement against the war influenced by an increasing sense of needing to ‘write something more definitely antagonistic’ (Sassoon 1945, 48). A draft declaration was worked on with the journalist John Middleton Murry who helped to edit the statement to a ‘more condensed form’ (Sassoon 1945, 52), and later, with the support of Russell who had persuaded a Labour MP, Hastings Lees-Smith, to read the statement out in the House of Commons. Reading Sassoon’s own reflections on the events leading up to his statement against the war and his arrival at Craiglockhart, it is difficult to ascertain the extent of his suffering even if his diary entries provide a clear discourse context within which to read his work. Indeed, literary-critical responses, modelling an authorial mind deeply affected by trauma, attribute Sassoon’s anti-war statement as the primary influence for his subsequent output of poetry in the remainder of 1917. Cole (2013, 95), for example, states that ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ offers a prism for reading Sassoon’s poetry, a body of verse that installs dissent against the war at its center’. Hipp (2005) provides extensive autobiographical readings of the Craiglockhart poems in particular arguing that the poems in Counter-Attack and Other Poems (the volume in which the 1917 poems would appear) are marked by a more acute sense of personal involvement and ‘guilt for having survived when many under his watch had not’ (2005, 156). Hipp’s reading of Sassoon across the February-April diary entries emphasizes tension, conflict, and trauma as ways of explaining the

4

TRAUMA

83

declaration; his version of Sassoon is framed in a way that reflects this such as ‘stresses’, ‘conflicting roles’, ‘psychological constitution’, ‘competing impulses’ (2005, 157). Campbell (1999) makes broadly the same point, arguing that the Craiglockhart poems are both confessional and show evidence of the emerging influence of Sassoon’s physician, WHR Rivers, working out the trauma and conflicting tensions in Sassoon’s mind by suggesting that he would be better placed back in France looking after his men. These readings are supported by Sassoon’s own reflections on events nearly thirty years after the writing of his statement when he suggests that his anti-war stance may simply have been a response to not being able to rejoin his men ‘[…] there seemed no likelihood of my being sent out again for several months so I plunged headlong into my protest’ (Sassoon 1945, 56). Just as academic readers of Sassoon’s work written in the mid to late 1917 period emphasize competing loyalties, tensions, and dissatisfaction with the war as central concerns through which Sassoon’s poems are read and interpreted, non-academic readers express similar sentiments. Here for example is part of a blog post on ‘Repression of War Experience’ which represents a fairly typical response to the poem. […] His mind is torn apart by the many feelings of hatred and the memories of war. Sassoon gives the reader a sense of what each war veteran feels upon returning home from a war of glory. The lack of purpose to a war that caused so much death destroys the minds of those who fought. There is no graspable victory, instead only a questioning of faith, morals, and purpose. ‘Repression of War Experiences’ (sic) shows the reader the mind of a returning soldier, a mind torn apart, struggling to cope. With this, Sassoon captures the concept of lack of purpose, a feeling within society preceding the First World War, and allows the reader to experience it. (McManus 2011)

Trauma is therefore an important contextualizing frame through which Sassoon’s work is read.

4.2

Trauma and the First World War

The readings proposed by the readers discussed in the previous section all draw on what are generally conventional aspects of trauma theory in that they make links between an undesired experience and a subsequent manifestation of that experience as a literary response. That is, the poems are viewed as a result of some attempt to deal with the traumatic memories that have been re-narrativized through the act of writing. In general, trauma studies in literature have their roots in Freudian psychoanalysis (see Barnaby 2018 for an overview). In a more specific way, trauma studies in First World War literature have focused on the relationship of writing to war neurosis or ‘shellshock’, a phrase first used in the medical literature

84

M. GIOVANELLI

by Charles Myers (the term was common parlance in the Army) in 1915 to describe a condition where soldiers had suffered severe mental trauma as a result of the war. The study of psychological ailments where there was no obvious evidence of physical injury had been observed and discussed in those who had been in railway or industrial accidents from the middle of the nineteenth century (Hemmings 2008, 30), with an understanding that psychological trauma was largely underpinned by some physiological condition even if this remained invisible. Myers’ work helped to change this view. His fieldwork in France, where he saw thousands of soldiers diagnosed with psychological conditions, led him to believe that the condition was more complex than simply a mental neurosis aligned to some physical event. As Shephard (2000, 30) explains, work by F.W. Mott, a leading and influential pathologist of the time began to support a growing shift in thinking that some kind of psychological trauma might be responsible for so called shellshocked victims. Further support came in the form of an extended study by Harald Wiltshire, who like Myers had extensive experience of treating men in hospitals in France. Wiltshire’s observations concluded that soldiers with shellshock had often not experienced shelling and were, in comparison to their physically wounded colleagues, likely to demonstrate a melancholic disposition unrelated to any possible physical injury. In turn Myers, had concluded that as well as being a secondary symptom of physical trauma, shellshock could be exclusively the result of ‘an emotional disturbance or mental strain’ (Myers 1940, 25). As doctors, both Wiltshire and Myers came to regret the subsequent use of ‘shellshock’ by the media, general public, and within the Army itself; Myers (1940, 25) referred to is as ‘the ill-chosen term’ since it implied some physical cause, notably the connection to being exposed to shelling. Although many of the soldiers seen by doctors at the beginning of the war had actually been mentally incapacitated as a result of being in proximity of an exploding shell (Feiling 1915), the term became so ubiquitously used so that confusion arose regarding exactly what could and could not be classified as ‘shellshock’, which in turn did little to help the medical treatment that soldiers then received (Holden 1998, 18; Shephard 2000, 29). Despite this problem, Myers’ suggestion of the terms ‘concussion’ and ‘nervous shock’ to cover examples of psychological trauma was not taken up by the Army and ‘shellshock’ continued to be used (Shephard 2000, 32). The image of the ‘shellshocked’ soldier has dominated First World War literature, occupying what Showalter (1987, 62–63) calls ‘a unique mythology’ within the genre. This figure thus offers a contrast to pre-war discourses that centred on heroism and the need to maintain a strong mental state regardless of the difficulties faced, ideals that were often used in war recruitment, in propaganda and also in the ways that the concept of war and its literary representations were taught in schools pre-1914 (see Parker 1987; Vandiver 2013). ‘Shellshock’ is also strongly enduring in ways that we memorize war (see for example Whitehead 1991; Minogue and Palmer 2018) and thus has

4

TRAUMA

85

a strong readerly dimension. Drawing together the production and reception of traumatic texts, Bayer (2018) uses the work of Susan Sontag (2003) on the nature of representations of suffering and our reactions and relationships to them as readers to argue that within the First World War literature particularly (although not exclusively as the same could be argued for other literary genres), there is a tension in the power of the literature to be attractive and at the same time present the traumatic in a way so that it shocks; what he terms the ‘gray zone’ (Bayer 2018, 213). Bayer gives an example of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, which he suggests oscillates between more distal and proximal representations of trauma where the overtly and admired poetic is clearly enacted in the service of the horrific. In fact the poem’s impact, I would argue, results from the introduction of the second person pronoun in the third verse paragraph 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;

Here Owen’s evaluative lexis combines with the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘we’ to offer a more subjective construal of the scene. The pronoun ‘you’ positions the addressee of the poem ‘on stage’ as both subject and object of conception. This dual role means that the reader is invited to simultaneously be part of the world of the poem and a spectator, reacting to its horror and sharing the speaker’s subjective evaluation. The same effect occurs in Sassoon’s ‘Does It Matter’ written at Craiglockhart and published in the Cambridge Magazine in October 1917. Here, however, the trauma is more direct and less layered than Owen’s poem and the reader is placed ‘on stage’ right from the beginning of the poem. The use of two questions and the second person possessive determiner in ‘Does it matter? – losing your legs?…’ immediately construe a situation that, I think, invites us into the ‘gray zone’ that Bayer describes. Sassoon was treated at Craiglockhart by WHR Rivers, who had worked with Charles Myers before the war. Rivers’ treatment of Sassoon is welldocumented by Sassoon’s biographers (e.g. Egremont 2005, 159–82; Moorcroft Wilson 2013, 247–50, 267–68), in literary-critical accounts (Hemmings 2008, 41–46) and in literary fiction (Barker 1991) as well as extensively by Sassoon himself in Sherston’s Progress (1937, 516–57). Rivers, who when working with shellshocked soldiers at Maghull Hospital in Liverpool, had been drawn to Freud’s work on dreams and wish fulfilment, later used his readings of psychoanalytical theory to develop an approach to treatment once he had been transferred to Craiglockhart in October 1916, nine months before Sassoon would arrive. At Craiglockhart, Rivers used parts of Freud’s research, namely his work on repression and the unconscious (in Rivers’ treatment, patients were encouraged to face their fears rather than confront them) together with a re-evaluation of Freudian dream theory not as wish fulfilment

86

M. GIOVANELLI

but as a way of reconciling internal tensions, as well as his own ideas on autognosis, a theory of internal analysis and self-awareness and discovery. Sassoon valued both Rivers’ friendship and the effects of the treatment he had received from the physician. Writing in May 1918, back at the Front five months after his departure from Craiglockhart, he writes ‘I must never forget Rivers. He is the only man who can save me if I break down again. If I am able to keep going it will be through him’ (Sassoon 1983, 246).1 Reading Sassoon’s diary entries today, it is plausible to conclude that he displayed signs of war neurosis, for example in his account of his nightmarish vision at Denmark Hill and other symptoms he described such as insomnia, changing moods, and irritability that appear in entries from the period February-May 1917. In Siegfried’s Journey, Sassoon extended his concerns outwards to the men under his command, writing that ‘my mind had dwelt continually on the battalion with which I had been serving’ (Sassoon 1945, 48). Increasingly, his self-descriptions also appear to conform to classic cases of war neurosis as described here by the American doctor John MacCurdy (in Holden 1998, 19) A frequent problem was the hopelessness and shame for their own incompetence and cowardice, accompanied by obsessive thoughts about the horror they had seen on the battlefield.

On arriving at Craglockhart, Sassoon wrote to Robbie Ross. The letter was headed with ‘Dottyville’, with Sassoon suggesting that ‘No doubt I’ll be able to get some splendid details for future use’ (Sassoon 1983, 183). Regardless of the extent of his own mental condition, it seems clear that his stay at Craiglockhart had a profound influence on his writing and provide a context for understanding the set of poems he composed during his five months there. In Sherston’s Progress , George Sherston reflects on Craiglockhart at night-time when […] the hospital became sepulchral and oppressive with saturations of war experience. One lay awake and listened to feet padding across passages which smelt of stale cigarette smoke; for the nurses couldn’t prevent insomnia-ridden officers from smoking half the night in their bedrooms, though the locks had been removed from all the doors. One became conscious that the place was full of men whose slumbers were morbid and terrifying – men muttering uneasily or suddenly crying out in their sleep. (Sassoon 1937, 556–57)

In this instance, trauma of others is reconfigured through the narrator’s viewpoint and mediated into the written form. As I discuss in Sect. 4.2, these kinds of memories (bad dreams, insomnia, guilt, crying) thematically underpin the set of poems Sassoon composed at Craiglockhart as well as being typical more generally of poems written from the mid to late 1917.

4

TRAUMA

87

As their responses demonstrate, readers do use Sassoon’s time at Craiglockhart as a situational context for interpreting the poems and for assigning a particular state of mind to Sassoon. As in Chapter 2, where I argued that the perceived senses of proximity and close observation could be explained by various grammatical realizations in the poems which impose construals that are constrained by physical and mental contexts, in the remainder of this chapter I examine trauma as a broad, encompassing set of contexts. This means moving across Kövecses’ types of context (situational, discourse, conceptual-cognitive and bodily) to examine the projection of various states of mind as articulated and interpreted in Sassoon’s verse. To do so, I draw on the stylistic notion of mind style, which is introduced in the following section.

4.3 4.3.1

Mind Style

Parameters of Mind Style

The study of fictional and non-fictional minds is captured in the concept of mind style, originally coined by Fowler (1977, 103) to describe ‘any distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual mental self’. Grounded in Halliday’s ideational function of language where the ‘speaker or writer embodies in language his experience of the phenomena of the real world’ (Halliday 1971, 332), Fowler argues that a character’s distinctive language patterns provide insight into how they organize their thoughts and various aspects of their mental behaviour including ‘preoccupations, prejudices, perspectives and values which strongly bias a character’s world-view’ (1977, 103). As Semino (2002, 97) puts it, mind style encompasses all those aspects of particular ‘characteristic cognitive habits, abilities and limitations’. The term has been used broadly to refer both to the linguistic patterns found in texts that together present these characteristics, and to the process itself by which readers attribute a ‘mind’ to a particular (see Semino 2007, 169; Nuttall 2018, 19). Over time, Fowler’s original notion of mind style has been developed and nuances in definition and scope have emerged. For example, Fowler (1986) later distinguishes mind style per se from both psychological and spatiotemporal point of view, which cover narrative voice and its position relative to time and space. Defined in this way, mind style captures a more ideological point of view (see also Uspensky 1973), relating to the belief systems that the speaker holds and is therefore concerned with the specific content of what is said or thought; the ‘what’ rather than the ‘who’ (Nuttall 2018, 17). The scope of mind style may, however, be fairly broad. Fowler (1977, 103) states that mind style ‘may be concerned with relatively superficial or relatively fundamental aspects of the mind’ whereas Leech and Short (2007, 151) argue that since ‘there is no kind of writing that can be regarded as perfectly neutral and objective’, mind style may be observable in both broader ‘cumulative tendencies of stylistic choice’ (2007, 151) and in isolated, striking instances. In effect this means that both foregrounding in the form of larger

88

M. GIOVANELLI

scale parallelism (Semino 2007), and more localized, small-scale examples of deviation may potentially give rise to mind style effects (Semino 2014, 154). Leech and Short (2007, 151) argue that although mind style may be related to the idiosyncratic ways in which a writer conceives of the world and thus, language reflects to some extent the broader ‘world-view’ of the author, it may also relate to a more singular instance such as that of a particular character and/or narrator in a novel or poem. Although both Fowler, and Leech and Short use ‘mind style’ and ‘world-view’ fairly interchangeably and in conjunction with ‘ideological viewpoint’, others separate them more clearly. For example, Semino (2002, 97) uses the umbrella term ‘world view’ and distinguishes between on the one hand, ideological viewpoint which captures views which are ‘social, cultural or political in origin’ and thus likely to be shared within wider groups and, on the other hand, mind style which covers ‘views that are primarily personal and cognitive in origin’. Drawing on McIntyre (2006) who argues that collective and idiosyncratic views are often interrelated and interdependent, Stockwell (2009, 124) proposes a ‘worldview scheme’ that places ‘ideological point of view’ and ‘mind style’ as two ends of as a cline, allowing for a distinction between, in a given speech community, the social and consensual and the more personal and thus unusual. For Stockwell (2009, 125), a strict definition of mind style is ‘the presentation of a highly deviant or at least unusual worldview’, which crucially is judged ‘by a reader against his own set of cultural norms’. I return to this distinction in Sect. 3.2. Generally, studies of mind style within stylistics have focused on characters who are cognitively unconventional in some way, often having an impairment that results in extreme unreliability (Bockting 1994; Semino and Swindlehurst 1996; Harrison 2017), criminal behaviour (Gregoriou 2020) or a combination of an impairment and a deliberate choice to mislead (McIntyre 2005; Giovanelli 2018). Leech and Short (2007, 152–62), however, use ‘mind style’ in a more general way, arguing that it is possible to see ‘normal’, ‘unusual’, and ‘very unusual’ mind styles at work in fiction. This model allows for a comparison of mind styles across and within texts so as to distinguish between mind styles that are more or less ‘normal’ or simply to play fictional minds off against each other. As Leech and Short (2007, 162) put it, ‘we often have the mind styles of other characters as a comparative yardstick’. Sassoon’s poem ‘Supreme Sacrifice’ contrasts the direct horror of loss of life with the view that somehow dying for one’s country is noble and that dead soldiers move on to a better spiritual pace. Written at Chapelwood Manor and published in the Cambridge Magazine in June 1917, the relative mind styles of the speaker and the unnamed female character (probably modelled on Lady Brassey, Chapelwood’s owner, see Sassoon [1983, 164–67]) are brought together for the purposes of satire. The speaker’s words ‘Six officers were killed; a hopeless show!’ offer a striking semantic contrast to ‘But they are safe and happy now’ and represent two distinctive ways of conceptualizing the deaths of the soldiers and thus two distinctive mind styles which are played off

4

TRAUMA

89

against each other to demonstrate a lack of belief in the attitude ‘when people think it’s pleasant to be dead’. Sassoon similarly uses direct speech in other poems to distinguish between the speaking-I and other characters. In ‘Base Details’, an early 1917 poem, the speaker’s description of the Major’s ‘puffy petulant face’ is in stark opposition to direct speech attributed to the Major, ‘Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap’. Here the perceived tension between the Major, presented as removed from reality, and the speaker is effectively a difference in a view of the world and their respective mind styles can thus be attributed through their language patterns. In ‘The Optimist’, another poem composed and published in early 1917, the direct speech of the unnamed optimist, ‘got the Germans absolutely beat’ is placed in contrast to other soldiers who view the war as a ‘senseless, bloody stunt’. In the final stanza of the poem, the speaker attributes the optimist’s belief to a head injury he received and so the implication is that while the speaker has a normal mind, the optimist is deviant (illogical in some way).2 The playing off of multiple and often conflicting voices are therefore one way through which mind style becomes observable in the poems. In ‘In an Underground Dressing-Station’, for example, the voice of the soldier who has been horrifically wounded is juxtaposed with the doctor treating him and the speaker whose evaluative lexis, ‘burden’, ‘shot horribly’, and ‘he was dying’ provide a more specific construal of the scene. 4.3.2

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar

Specifically related to Cognitive Grammar, the most recent developments in mind style have appeared in the work of Nuttall (2018, 2019), who demonstrates that it is possible to examine a range of linguistic features from across the construal phenomena, for example lexical choices and degrees of specificity, action chains, and metaphors. These can account for ways in which we track and attribute particular viewpoints to narrators and characters. Two particular developments to mind style theory proposed by Nuttall are especially relevant to this chapter. First, Nuttall reconfigures Stockwell’s viewpoints cline into a ‘cline of construals’ (2018, 80–81), so as to place the model more explicitly into the machinery of Cognitive Grammar and give emphasis to the range of construal phenomena that enact particular viewpoints. Following Stockwell, a construal may be more or less idiosyncratic (a mind style) and may, over time and through repeated usage events within a speech community become schematized (Langacker 2008, 17) so that it represents a widely shared way of conceiving the world that is social, cultural, and political in origin. Nuttall’s reworking refocuses attention on the notion of a construal being psychologically and socially motivated to various degrees and being realized linguistically. We can exemplify this reconfiguration by returning to the notion of construal constraints that I discussed in Chapter 2. The use of a more horizontal schema to denote the human body, as was discussed as being common in writing set in the landscape of the trenches would originally have

90

M. GIOVANELLI

been viewed as a more idiosyncratic construal but over time—and repeated use as a way of representing embodied experience—become schematized so that this particular construal becomes a culturally shared way of representing reality and effectively normalized. Construal constraints may also, alternatively, be understood as a kind of pressure (Kövecses 2015, 51) that prevent an idiosyncratic construal from being reconstrued into something more collective and keep it more resistant to dominant ways of viewing the world, for example when the experience is more personal. In this chapter, and as demonstrated in Fig. 4.1, I largely retain Nuttall’s reworking of mind style with its emphasis on construal as well as the cline which positions construals as more or less idiosyncratic (at the left-hand side of the cline). However, I drop the terms ‘ideological’ and ‘political’ as descriptors for the more conventional construals (at the right-hand side of the cline) since to me, idiosyncratic construals may also be grounded in ideology and politics. My feeling is that the distinction between ‘mind style’ and ‘point of view’ is also unnecessary. First, because it seems to me that a mind is still a mind regardless of whether it is more or less aligned to the thinking of others; this seems to be the position of Leech and Short’s (2007) ‘normal’, ‘unusual’, and ‘very unusual’ mind styles. Second, the use of ‘style’ captures the sense of identity projection or formation that I discussed in Chapter 1 as stylizing (Eckert 2008), a distinctive and socially motivated move. Again, this stance aligns neatly with Cognitive Grammar’s notion of construal. My working cline thus differentiates between construals which are the consequence of and may be attributed to mind styles which are, at one extreme, idiosyncratic and, at the other, completely conventionalized. For me, this also captures Leech and Short’s notion of ‘normal’, ‘unusual’, and ‘very unusual’ as perceived by a particular reader and captured at different points on a continuum. The second development Nuttall makes to mind style theory is her suggestion that our capacity to shift between different construals in a text may be understood through the subjective–objective construal continuum that I introduced in Chapter 2. In Nuttall’s framework, any close engagement with a fictional mind is modelled as an objective construal of that mind. In essence, Construal

Mind style

Individual personal; idiosyncratic

Shared social and cultural; conventional

Fig. 4.1 A cline of construals (adapted from Stockwell 2009, 124; Nuttall 2018, 81)

4

TRAUMA

91

the conceptualizing pairs of writer-reader, narrator-narratee, and characterreaderly enactor in the construal relationship can all be viewed as different levels of narrative mediation which are assigned prominence at various stages across a text. As Nuttall (2018, 58) argues, ‘the more conceptualizers which mediate a construal, the more distributed our attention’. A range of intersecting subjective construals of a scene that occur, such as those discussed in the poems at the end of the previous section, thus distribute attention across the multiple perspectives where specific mind styles become more prominent and objectively construed than the events of the poem themselves. Thus, reading a poem such as ‘Supreme Sacrifice’ brings into immediate focus the competing construals of the speaker and female character, whose viewpoints we are invited to share. Conceived as minds along the construal cline, the poem’s speaking voices position us to read one of them as a more idiosyncratic construal in opposition to, and resisting, the other more conventional one. The attribution of a particular mind to a speaking voice may more broadly be read as the process of mind-modelling (Stockwell 2009, 2016), which was introduced in Chapter 1. As I have discussed in this chapter, the modelling of an authorial mind for Sassoon often draws on autobiographical details, particularly so for the poems written at Craiglockhart. For example, in his reading of ‘Death’s Brotherhood’, a poem which was published in Counter-Attack and Other Poems as ‘Sick Leave’, Hipp attributes the various construals offered by the speaking voice to a mind in trauma and aligns these via biography to the authorial presence ‘Siegfried Sassoon’. Hipp uses both the physical context of Craiglockhart and the discourse context of an earlier diary entry, ‘in the ward ii’ (see also the discussion in Giovanelli 2019), to read the poem as a ‘psychological reconciliation’ (2005, 165) in which Sassoon aims to ‘bridge the psychological distance he perceived between himself and his memories of his fallen conscripts’ (2005, 166). These observations are then integrated into a broader modelling of Sassoon’s traumatic mind. The struggle to rejoin his men in France is a battle waged within and against his mind; the speaker can interpret safety and solitude only as markers of his own abandonment of responsibility […] Through the blood of the dead the speaker remains connected in the “blood” of the brotherhood to the living men, and through the blood of the dead he will become capable of returning in hopes of preventing further loss of shedding blood of his own. The image of blood within the hallucination in the diary was symbolic of the disconnection between Sassoon and his men, living and dad as the blood spilled like ink and cut short the gesture of communication represented by the private’s letter to his officer. (Hipp 2005, 166–67)

‘Death’s Brotherhood’ offers a good example of what, in literary trauma studies, Vickroy (2014) terms ‘thick description’ in that it provides an abundance of rich detail (the thickness) related to characters and traumatic events

92

M. GIOVANELLI

so that readers are able both to align themselves empathetically with the character(s) and to attribute some wider significance to those characters’ actions.3 Vickroy argues that thick descriptions invite readers to immerse themselves in rich textual worlds, identifying with the traumatic experience, and viewing it as some kind of critical reflection or commentary on a broader set of affairs. In the remainder of this chapter, I use my discussion of trauma and mind style to provide more extensive analyses of Sassoon’s poems. I first examine ‘Repression of War Experience’, a poem written just before Sassoon arrived at Craiglockhart, that seems to offer a good example of thick description described by Vickroy. In my analysis, I draw attention to the ways in which the poem invites us to attend to different kinds of construals and argue that these mediations may be read as indicative of a traumatic mind. In Sect. 4.5, I range more broadly across several of the poems written at Craiglockhart, drawing attention to the various ways in which negation operates within specific construals in Sassoon’s verse.

4.4

‘Repression of War Experience’ 4.4.1

Background

Campbell (1999, 151) calls ‘Repression of War Experience’ a ‘watershed poem, as significant, in terms of its exploitation in psychic development, as anything Sassoon wrote during the war’. Written in July 1917 while Sassoon was home at Weirleigh, the poem’s title came from a lecture that Rivers gave to the Royal Society in December 1917. It is unclear whether Sassoon waited until then to give the poem its title or whether the title arose from his discussions with Rivers at Craiglockhart. Read against Sassoon’s earlier work—and even compared with the main bulk of poems written while he was at Craiglockhart—the poem’s free verse structure and fragmented style mark it as strikingly different. Readers tend to interpret the poem in psychological terms. According to Leffler (1987, 45) its ‘pre-Joycean use of the stream-ofconsciousness mode provides an effective access into the mind of the soldier’. Moeyes (1997, 98) sees the poem as the playing out of a ‘mental process’ by which the speaker attempts to introduce specific images into his thinking so as to repress the trauma of shellshock. Others see it undeniably as a poem of a mind in trauma: Sternlicht (1993, 51) views the poem as ‘hysterical in intensity’ with its series of surreal but shocking images, which appear in a dream-like state to the speaker through a series of associations. Hipp (2005, 176) argues that the torment of the images reaches an unmanageable point where ‘reality and hallucination seem indistinguishable’. ‘Repression of War Experience’

Now light the candles; one; two; there’s a moth;

4

What silly beggars they are to blunder in And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame— No, no, not that,—it’s bad to think of war, When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you; And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts That drive them out to jabber among the trees.

Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand. Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen, And you’re as right as rain … Why won’t it rain? … I wish there’d be a thunder-storm to-night, With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark, And make the roses hang their dripping heads.

Books; what a jolly company they are, Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves, Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green, And every kind of colour. Which will you read? Come on; O do read something; they’re so wise. I tell you all the wisdom of the world Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out, And listen to the silence: on the ceiling There’s one big, dizzy moth that bumps and flutters; And in the breathless air outside the house The garden waits for something that delays. There must be crowds of ghosts among the trees,— Not people killed in battle,—they’re in France,— But horrible shapes in shrouds–old men who died Slow, natural deaths,—old men with ugly souls, Who wore their bodies out with nasty sins.

*

*

*

You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home; You’d never think there was a bloody war on! … O yes, you would … why, you can hear the guns. Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft … they never cease— Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out And screech at them to stop—I’m going crazy; I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

TRAUMA

93

94

M. GIOVANELLI

4.4.2

Metaphor and Mind Style

The poem’s speaking voice opens with the proximal temporal deictic ‘now’ and a series of imperative forms, ‘light the candles’, ‘light your pipe’, ‘draw a deep breath’, ‘stop thinking’, ‘count fifteen’. It is striking that in the first verse paragraph, the scene is construed with high specificity. First, the adjectival pre-modification of noun phrases, ‘silly beggars’, ‘liquid flame’, ‘ugly thoughts’ mean that the images are construed less schematically both in terms of their physical characteristics and in terms of the speaker’s evaluation of them. Second, the speaker’s verb choices are specific: ‘blunder’ (a commonly used word by Sassoon), ‘scorch’, ‘gagged’, ‘scare’, ‘jabber’, again all highly evaluative, impose very precise construals. The terms also present different degrees of negativity in some way, largely related to some bad action being undertaken by or on the body. These are examples of implicit or lexical negation (Hidalgo-Downing 2000) or inherent negation (Givón 1993; Giovanelli 2013). The poem models the traumatic mind given that the speaker makes an association between the moth and soldiers who are also ‘silly beggars’ as they ‘blunder in’ for ‘glory’ attracted by something which ultimately deceives them and destroys them. Both literary-critical (see Hipp 2005; Campbell 1999, 2001) as well as non-academic readers of the poem highlight this metaphor as a key part of the poem. A metaphor is a particular type of construal where one domain of knowledge is used to understand another (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In a metaphor, a source domain (generally more concrete and readily available) lends its structure to a target domain (generally more abstract) so as to provide greater richness and interpretative clarity to it. In Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), the source and target are realized as two input spaces, whose shared properties are captured in a generic space which then gives rise to a blended space in which the new construal is made visible. In the example from ‘Repression of War Experience’, the input spaces of ‘moth’ and ‘soldier’ share some commonalities: they move quickly, possibly without thinking, and are attracted towards some kind of glory. In the blend, this gives rise to a more complex structure in which soldiers are construed as moths, who ‘blunder in’ towards the brightness of a candle (glory) and get burnt and presumably die. In turn this emergent structure allows us to read the soldiers, or at least the speaker’s construal of them, as insignificant, short-lived, and destroyed by a naïve desire to be in the spotlight. Langacker (2008, 58) argues that ‘the source domain provides a conceptual backdrop in terms of which the target domain is viewed and understood […] we can also say, with equal validity, that the source and target domains jointly constitute the background from which the blended conception emerges’. In turn, McLoughlin (2021, 58) suggests that a metaphorical construal necessarily means re-conceptualizing the target domain in some way so that this domain, as well as the blend, has high attentional salience whereas the source moves into the background. Read in this way, attention is therefore drawn,

4

TRAUMA

95

through the blend, both on the emergent structure (the men as moths), and crucially to the soldiers themselves (in contrast the death of the moth, although initially foregrounded, is largely irrelevant). Such a reading largely aligns with interpretations of the opening of the poem in that readers generally focus less on the moths and more on the soldiers and consequential meaning of the blend. I want to suggest that the explicit way that the poem’s free style and associations operates can also be explained by outlining how the metaphorical construal first relies on metonymic mapping, which in turn can be explained using Cognitive Grammar’s reference point model so as to model, in mind style terms, the connections the speaker makes between observable physical phenomena in his immediate surroundings and the trauma of war. Whereas metaphor involves cross-domain mapping, metonymy occurs through source-target mapping within a domain so that one aspect of an entity is used to provide mental access to another part of it. Common examples of metonymy include part for whole (e.g. ‘all hands on deck’) and whole for part (e.g. ‘to fill up the car’) (Ungerer and Schmid 1996, 116) where an expression is used to access some other aspect of the same domain: ‘hands’ referring to people and a desired action of help; and ‘car’ to provide access to a more specific part, the petrol tank. In Cognitive Grammar, metonymy is treated as a reference point phenomenon (Langacker 1993). As with the reference point model more broadly, a reference is selected on the basis of its attentional salience and therefore its ability to provide mental access to any number of targets in its conceptual region or dominion. As a target is accessed, it assumes figural prominence with the potential to function as a further reference point in its own right and the original reference point fades into the background. As Langacker (1993, 30) explains: By virtue of our reference-point ability, a well-chosen metonymic expression lets us mention one entity that is salient and easily coded, and thereby evoke - essentially automatically - a target that is either of lesser interest or harder to name.

The soldiers are moths metaphor is operationalized as a result of an initial reference point construction. The reader initially models the mind of the speaker whose stream of consciousness focuses on the wings of the moth. The metaphor becomes possible because the notion of the wings being scorched is a part for whole metonymy where ‘wings’ acts as a metonymic reference point to provide access back to the whole concept of the moth as an unknowing victim of the flame (the entire moth after all is in danger not simply its wings) or the broader ‘active zone’ (Langacker 1991). The active zone may be conceived as a more specific part of an entity that takes part in the profiled relationship for whole for part metonymies, and a wider conceptual scope for part for whole metonymies. The salience of ‘wings’ is due to both their functional significance given that moths fly, and to the candles to which they are attracted. The reference point (R) in Fig. 4.2, as modelled in

96

M. GIOVANELLI

Fig. 4.2 Metonymic reference point-target (adapted from Langacker 1995, 27) R

T/AZ

C

the mind of the speaker, selects as its target the broader action zone (T/AZ) of the whole moth within its dominion as a naïve, unknowing victim of glory more broadly. Metaphor may also be considered in reference point relationship terms since the source domain (here the damaged moth) provides mental access to the target domain (the soldier) which is one of any number of possible targets within the reference point’s dominion. Its selection is therefore the basis for the metaphorical construal. In ‘Repression of War Experience’, the description of moth is a strong textual attractor and candidate for a reference point. It is physically present, construed as close and given attentional space and agency. Here the initial introduction of the moth as a new and immediate experience within the scene (hence the nominal grounding through the use of the indefinite article ‘a’) is a striking textual attractor in Stockwell’s characteristics of textual attractors (discussed in Chapter 3) in that it has newness, agency, activeness and brightness, and is novel and animate. The moth’s cognitive salience thus draws attention to its physical characteristics and actions and, in turn, is used to access an as yet less salient target within its dominion. The entity in the source domain is clearly present and observable but the metaphor is operationalized through the emergence of the target within the particular dominion of the initial reference point. As Langacker (1991, 170) explains ‘the dominion of a reference point can be characterized in either of two ways: as its neighborhood […] or as the set of objects it can be used to locate’. My discussion of cohesion in Chapter 2, drew on the former in order to explore the way in which the reader is given access to the ongoing scene of the tunnel in a structured way that is coherent in terms of the scene being described. Here, however, the dominion is, I think, characterized in the latter respect as a looser set of associations that are available to the speaker in the context of this particular poem and emerge through the part for whole metonym which provides the basis for the metaphor per se. The target accessed through the original reference point of the ‘moth’ is both the soldier and the metaphorical process by which the two input spaces ‘moth’ and

4

TRAUMA

97

Fig. 4.3 Reference point and broader metaphorical construal R

T

C

‘soldier’ and their subsequent blend occur. The resulting salience, modelled as the mind of the speaker rests with the target and within the blend and, for this speaker at least, all other available targets fade away. This is modelled in Fig. 4.3, the heavy-line circle around the target indicates the salience afforded to both the target and the blend. Of course, an important aspect of the poem’s opening metaphor is that once mental access to the target happens, it is then quickly negated, No, no, not that,—it’s bad to think of war’. The construal, although powerful, novel, and representative of a particular kind of cognitive processing, is thus a fleeting one, as the speaker moves on into the second verse paragraph, the turn of attention realized through the discourse marker ‘Now’. Across the remainder of the poem, the speaker’s capacity to make idiosyncratic associations continues and may also be understood as a series of reference points that provide mental access to particular targets within their respective dominions. For example, in the fourth verse paragraph, a similar kind of metaphorical construal occurs, this time ‘books’ is the source domain/reference point through which the target of soldiers is accessed. Again, as with the moth, the line of access begins with a metonymic mapping here a physical object stands for its characteristics so that ‘books’ is understood as projecting the appearance and attributes of the books as its active zone, rather than simply the physical things themselves. Overall, the metonymy leads to the metaphorical construal soldiers are books, the visibility of the metaphor facilitated by phrases that represent shared characteristics of the two domains: the ‘jolly company’ (in the friendship and army sense), the books ‘standing’ on the shelves (mirroring the soldiers ‘standing’ in file), the ‘dim brown’ (both the colours of the spines and the soldiers’ uniforms), and the remaining colours which denote the shifting colours of the soldiers’ faces in death (Campbell 1999, 155). Later in the same verse paragraph, ‘on the ceiling/There’s one big dizzy moth that bumps and flutters’, invites the reader to return to the initial metaphor of the poem; in this instance a common literary-critical reading is

98

M. GIOVANELLI

to align the single moth’s jagged movements with the speaker’s own anxiety and isolation (see for example see Campbell 1999, 155). And, towards the end of the verse paragraph, the speaker’s attempt to self-placate draws on the idiomatic phrase ‘right as rain’. The phrase’s salience is as a result of being at the end of a line followed by an ellipsis, possibly mirroring the associative chain of thought. In reference point terms, the target of ‘rain’, accessed in the dominion, is the literal sense of ‘rain’ as precipitation, later extended to refer in more negative and destructive senses in ‘a thunder-storm’ and ‘bucketsful of water to sluice the dark’. In this instance the target ‘rain’ represents a significant conceptual leap from its idiomatic ‘pick me up’ use in the reference point, outlining a mind that is unable to turn away from the horrors of war. Taken together, these examples may be read as a series of creative, if horrific associations, indicative of a particular set of cognitive characteristics and manifest in Cognitive Grammar terms as a series of reference point relationships. The speaker’s inability to reject less familiar associations and the more creative construals that are presented throughout the poem is modelled by the reader as an idiosyncratic mind style that is revealed to the reader as unfolding as the poem progresses. A key question in this poem is to consider from where and how this particular target arises since generally soldiers are not moths and the metaphor may be viewed as a novel and creative one. The association and metaphorical construal that the speaker makes works by presenting access in ‘real time’ as the speaker narrates and then inviting us as readers to understand the realization of the target is part of an idiosyncratic construal. In this way, the construal of the soldiers as ‘silly’ and going to their death represents an individual mind style and is in contrast to a more shared, conventional point of view. I return to this issue in the next section in my discussion of split construal. 4.4.3

Split Construal

A further striking feature of the first two verse paragraphs is the use of second person narration, which is then followed by a shift to the first person in the third verse paragraph. More generally, second person narratives unless they are directly addressing an extra-textual reader are defined by the fact that the ‘experiencing you’ Mildorf (2012, 96), referred to by the second person pronoun, is both addresser and addressee of the speech act, what Richardson (2006, 20) terms ‘standard’ second person narration. In these cases, second person narration may also be what Margolin (1990) terms ‘transferred’ since it exists as a form of internal self-reflection and dialogue as a narrator speaks to and about themselves. Thus, as Fludernik (1994, 450) argues ‘[in these narratives] an “I” splits into two voices that interact dialogically’ (see also Lakoff 1996; Emmott 2002) and, in some instances, this may give rise to particular interpretative effects. For example, in her analysis of the second person in Joyce Carol Oates/short story ‘In a Public Place’, Fludernik (2009, 50) argues that

4

TRAUMA

99

‘by using the pronoun you […] the effect of internal focalisation is enhanced and takes on an almost hypnotic quality’. In her analysis of the diary entries of Sylvia Plath, Demjén (2011) demonstrates how the shift from first to second person corresponds to an increased emphasis on mental states and ‘emotional depth’ rather than physical activities and events. As she argues: One is left to wonder why I has become you. It is natural to assume that such changes do not occur at random, so one will try to interpret the psychological significance – for the protagonist/writer/narrator – of writing about oneself in the second person in a journal. Is it an attempt to look at oneself through the eyes of others? Is it an attempt at distancing and retrospection? Or could you meaning I be indicative of an inner struggle and upheaval? (Demjén 2011, 5)

In Cognitive Grammar terms, the use of the second person reconfigures the construal relationship so that the addressee is placed ‘on stage’ in a similar way to the use of the third person pronoun discussed in Sect. 4.3. Given the preferred reading of this poem is to view the speaking voice as split, such a ‘transferred’ second person narration places a second conceptualizer on stage but unlike where the referent of the pronoun is a second conceptualizer (hearer), ‘you’ in this instance simply refers back to the speaking conceptualizer. This particular narration then gives rise to shared mental co-ordination internally as the speaking voice is split into two conceptualizing presences, with a third (reader/hearer) off-stage and only implicit in so far as the poem, in this case, is in a literary form and thus has a number of potential audiences (readers). This is modelled in Fig. 4.4.

Speaker ‘you’

Speaker

On-stage region Hearer

Off-stage region Fig. 4.4 Transferred second person narration and construal

100

M. GIOVANELLI

The mind style in ‘Repression of War Experience’ moves across various idiosyncratic (first person) and conventional (second person) construals, with discrete moments in the poem representing key points of transition. For example, the shift in construal between the second and third verse paragraphs is triggered by the word ‘rain’, which was discussed in terms of the reference point-target relationship in the previous section. Here, the switch in narration is marked by the selection of a more idiosyncratic target within the dominion of the reference point ‘rain’, which had, itself, formed part of a more conventional idiomatic construal. This is seen in the marked difference in register, ‘right as rain’ to the more poetic and associative ‘sluice the dark/And make the roses hang their dripping heads’. The end of the poem operates in a similar way. Here the switch to the first person which occurs two and a half lines from the end of the poem occurs through a number of lexical and grammatical shifts, for example: the contrasting semantics of ‘quiet’, ‘peaceful’, ‘summering safe’, ‘quite soft’ and ‘screech’, ‘crazy’, ‘stark staring mad’; and the shift from epistemic, ‘You’d never think’, ‘yes you would’, to boulomaic modality ‘I want to go out’. The nature of two conceptualizing presences in transferred second person narration, understood as the positioning onstage of a split conceptualizer, also highlights conflicting mind styles. Indeed in the construals discussed in the previous section, we can see the dialogic nature of the transferred construal from the idiosyncratic metaphorical construal of the moth, to its (more conventional) rejection ‘No, no, not that’ in second person, and in the way in which the second—and again idiosyncratic—metaphorical construal of the books is more extensively rejected in favour of the more conventional literal construal, ‘they’re so wise/I tell you all the wisdom of the world/Is waiting for you on those shelves’. In effect then, the whole poem can be read as a series of competing mind styles, both explicitly across the first to second person narration and, more subtly, within the transferred second person narration as more idiosyncratic construals compete with more conventional ones. This playing off of mind styles, initially discussed in Sect. 3.1, is prominent in other Craiglockhart poems. For example, in ‘Survivors’, written in October 1917, the more conventional perspective on the traumatized soldier ‘No doubt they’ll soon get well […[/Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again’ progressively gives way to a series of more idiosyncratic construals that highlight the speaker’s attitude towards the effect of war on the soldiers whose ‘dreams drip with murder’ and ‘glorious war that shatter’d all their pride’. Equally, in ‘Frailty’, published in December 1917, the competing construals represent a conflict between a conventional concern for one’s own family and a wider—and here more idiosyncratic—rejection of the basis of war regardless of personal involvement. The competing construals of women each of whom ‘prays for peace’ when their husband or son is fighting but then ‘forget the doomed and prisoned men’ when their loved ones are safe, and the speaker who condemns this perspective, ‘they don’t care’. The irony that emerges as a result of these competing construals is also seen in ‘Does It Matter?’,

4

TRAUMA

101

published in October 1917, a poem completely in the second person and a good example of transferred narration (or a separate narratee), the traumatized soldier’s internal dialogue ending with ‘And no one will worry a bit’. It is also possible to draw on the situational context within which Sassoon was working to infer a particular mind style to Sassoon as an authorial presence. Sassoon’s diary entries from April 1917 up until his arrival at Craiglockhart outline the conflict he felt between wanting to return to the Front and making a protest against the war. For example, in an entry on 16 May 1917, Sassoon construes himself as two separate entities, the ‘I’/‘Siegfried Sassoon’ of the present in England and the ‘me’/ ‘Siegfried Sassoon’ of the past in France: ‘For a while I am shaking off the furies that pursued me […] I no longer visualise the torment and wretchedness there’ (Sassoon 1983, 167, added emphasis). This manifestation of a divided person metaphor (Lakoff 1996) is apparent in other entries where Sassoon construes himself as being torn between taking two possible paths of action, for example in this entry on 21 May 1917, ‘I still think I’d better go back to the First Battalion as soon as possible, unless I can make some protest against the War’ (Sassoon 1983, 171). And of course, readers draw on these insights to inform their own interpretations of the poems and to attribute mind styles of the poems’ speakers and other characters. Indeed I would argue that it is both relatively easy and uncontroversial to read ‘Repression of War Experience’ biographically through drawing on the situational context such as outlined in Sassoon’s diary entries or in his later diagnosis and treatment by Rivers. This is certainly the dominant reading in literary-critical responses to the poem. For example, Campbell (2001, 223) writes: the ‘I’ [speaking voice in the poem] of the present, apparently relaxed moment is constantly pressured by another self that is traumatized by invasive memories of an ineradicable past. Such ‘disassociation’ or ‘splitting of consciousness’ was, in Rivers’ estimation, often exacerbated by ‘some shock or illness.

4.5 4.5.1

Hauntings Dreams and Visions

In Sherston’s Progress , George Sherston’s account of his stay at Craiglockhart includes a description of the hospital at night where patients existed in an ‘underworld of dreams haunted by submerged memories of warfare’ and who suffered ‘in the sweating suffocation of nightmare, in paralysis of limbs, in the stammering of dislocated speech’ (Sassoon 1937, 556–57). Such images appear across Sassoon’s verse during the period in which he was at Craiglockhart and beyond, frequently presenting places, events, and characters in ways which emphasize negative aspects, and reconfiguring the descriptive landscape poems of early to mid-1916 into verse that brutally evokes the horror of the scene described. The speaker’s mind is thus construed as traumatized by war in a more explicit manner.

102

M. GIOVANELLI

‘Counter-Attack’ is a poem that offers a haunting re-imagining of the battleground. In the first verse paragraph, the following description of the trench appears. The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud, Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled; And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair, Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.

The poem reads like a more intense version of the 1916 poems, which had outlined the landscape in intricate detail but lack of the horror of the poem here. The speaker is haunted by the memory of the place ‘rotten with dead’, their lifeless bodies described using a range of lexis that carry negative connotations: ‘rotten’, ‘clumsy’, ‘grovelled’, ‘wallowed’, ‘sodden’, ‘slept’. Givón (1993) argues for three different types of negation: syntactic, morphological, and inherent. Syntactic negation is realized through negating particles such as ‘not’, and morphological negation through the addition of prefixes such as ‘un-’, ‘no-’, and ‘dis-’ that invert the meaning of a lexical item. Inherent negation, discussed earlier in this chapter, remains the loosest of the categories but typically is represented by lexis that contains some internal negative quality and semantic value, for example ‘sad’ equivalent to ‘not happy’. In ‘Counter-Attack’, inherent negation dominates, a pattern that returns in lexical choices such as ‘lost’, ‘down’, ‘sank’, ‘failed’ at the climax of the poem. […] … then a bang Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom, Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans … Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

A cognitive stylistic analysis generally would view these as mental spaces or text-worlds (Werth 1999) that have high negative content. Their negative intensity marks ‘Counter-Attack’ as a poem that positions the reader to attribute a mind style that is haunted by the horrors of war. In this instance, the poem represents a dream vision that is more like a nightmare (see Giovanelli 2013). The vivid intensity of ‘choked’, ‘smothering gloom’, ‘groans’, ‘sank and drowned’, and ‘death’ is embedded in a pattern of multiclause structures; this pattern is broken through deviation to a single clause which ends to the poem ‘The counter-attack had failed’. Another Craiglockhart poem that projects a haunting memory and a haunted mind, and which offers a series of bleak, personal construals is ‘Prelude: The Troops’, the final stanza of which Wilfred Owen described as ‘the

4

TRAUMA

103

most exquisitely painful war poem of any language or time’ (Owen 1998, 275). The desolate landscape of the soldiers waking at dawn and anticipating battle is evoked in the first stanza with its bleak and desperate tone: ‘shapeless gloom’, ‘disconsolate men’, ‘sodden boots’, ‘sunken faces’, ‘Haggard and hopeless’, ‘Their desolation in the truce of dawn,/Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace’. The whole poem is nightmarish first as the speaker recounts the soldiers engaged in fighting in ‘trench-lines volleying doom for doom’, and then later in death. The penultimate line summarises the poem’s sentiment and contains a striking example of morphological negation, ‘The unreturning army that was youth’. The vision—and indeed the poem itself—hinges on this line. The soldiers, imagined before (stanza 1) and during (stanza 2) the battle are now dead and the final image of horror that haunts the speaker’s mind takes the form of a negated construal that provides the climax to the poem. In Cognitive Grammar terms, the salience of the negation may be understood by viewing it as a perceptual figure that ‘evokes as background the positive conception of what is being denied’ (Langacker 2008, 59). As Langacker (1991, 133–34) explains, the background conception forms a mental space, M , which is then denied, in that the negation instead positions onstage a scene in which M does not occur. ‘Unreturning soldiers’ thus presents as actual and salient a situation in which the backgrounded positive counterpart of the soldiers returning does not happen. The prominence afforded through negation thus inverts normal expectations. In other poems, a waking vision more explicitly shatters the illusion of a perfect and peaceful present. For example, in ‘The Dream’, written in January 1918 while Sassoon was posted in Limerick, the speaker is out walking when ‘the rank smell’ of ‘a squalid farm’ initiates ‘A dream of war that in the past was hidden’ which is then recounted in varying degrees of specificity. The trigger for the haunting vision in this literary representation is similar to the process Rivers came to describe in Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psychoneuroses: This discomfort and depression tend to crystallise round some unpleasant experience, either some painful or horrible incident, some fault which has been committed by the sufferer or some misfortune which has come into his life. (Rivers 1920, 78)

The unpleasant experience in this instance is the reminder of the battlefield and the associated guilt the speaker feels that he must take his men ‘to the accursed line’. Across four parts, the poem outlines the dream through a series of textworlds in which the speaker initially watches from afar ‘I saw the tired troops trudge’(here construed schematically) and then increasingly moves closer to his men ‘I’m looking at their blistered feet; young Jones/Stares up at me, mud-splashed and white and jaded’ (now construed with greater specificity). In the fourth part, the speaker now ‘cannot hear their voices’ and sees only ‘dim candles in the barn’. Here the granularity decreases evidently in the

104

M. GIOVANELLI

syntactic negation, the use of the third person plural possessive determiner (as opposed to the more specific construal using the proper noun ‘Jones’ earlier), and the modifying adjective ‘dim’. This less vivid and more schematic construal gives way to the realization that the speaker will inevitably have to lead his men back ‘To the foul beast of war that bludgeons life’. 4.5.2

Absence

One of the effects of negation, as described above, is that it foregrounds absence through the shifting of attention away from its positive counterpart which consequently becomes backgrounded and out of focus. Absence, then, is a phenomenon that is recognized or ‘felt’ (Giovanelli 2013, 136) in literary reading. Absence is a key theme in the Craiglockhart poems, often presented in literary-critical readings as the effect of Sassoon’s own well-documented inner struggle to reconcile his stance against the war with his sense of loyalty towards his men. Sassoon (1983, 190) also emphasized this point. […] I have told Rivers that I will not withdraw anything that I have said or written, and that my views are the same, but that I will go back to France if the War Office will give me a guarantee that they will really send me there […] After all I made my protest on behalf of my fellow fighters and (if it is a question of being treated as an imbecile for the rest of the war) the fittest thing for me to do is to go back and share their ills.

These words appear in a letter to the pacifist Lady Otteline Morrell, in which ‘Death’s Brotherhood’, later published in Counter-Attack: And Other Poems as ‘Sick Leave’, first appears in October 1917. The poem is a reworking of an earlier diary entry when Sassoon was haunted by nightmares in hospital in April 1917, and was later rewritten in Memoirs of An Infantry Officer.4 Reading the poem with this contextual information inevitably involves modelling the traumatic mind of the speaker-poet through its various construals of absence. At the beginning of the poem, the absence of consciousness is foregrounded since the speaker is asleep, ‘dreaming and lulled and warm’. The figures of the soldiers then appear to him as ‘noiseless’ and ‘homeless’, the morphological negation placing onstage their ghostly, nonhuman characteristics. The ghosts emerge ‘out of the gloom’ to address the speaker and question his absence from his men, the deictic adverb ‘here’ highlights the speaker’s proximity to them in England but distance to the soldiers in France. The end of the dream results in a form of distress, typical of nightmares (Wood and Bootzin 1990) where the disarming nature of the ghosts’ visit is evident in a construal which again foregrounds absence, here both physical (the comparison of the speaker’s ‘bitter safety’ with the soldiers ‘in the mud’ of France) and emotional (the question that the speaker is asked to consider by the ghosts ‘Are they still not your brothers through our blood?’).5

4

TRAUMA

105

Similar examples of absence appear across other poems. In ‘Banishment’, which shares the sentiment of ‘Death’s Brotherhood’, the speaker’s construal relies on inherent negation that foregrounds absence against its positive counterpart. And, in ‘Twelve Months After’, the speaker describes in detail his platoon, who are then now revealed to be ‘knocked over to a man’. In other poems, the speaker’s construals project other kinds of absence. In ‘Does It Matter?’, absence is felt through the participial form ‘losing’, which is repeated across the opening to the first two stanzas. In each instance, the absence of something (‘legs in stanza 1 and ‘sight’ in stanza 2) in relation to a human body schema becomes the focus of attention and the full schema itself provides its conceptual background. The shocking irony of the poem’s titular question becomes realized through the fact that the absence can only be understood by evoking the positive schematic counterpart. Loss then involves ‘inherent reference to’ or ‘co-construal’ of (Langacker 1991, 133) the scene which is being denied. In two of the Craiglockhart poems, dreams or, more specifically, reveries cue up alternative states of affairs and so temporarily provide respite from the horrors that their conceptualizers are experiencing. In ‘Dreamers’, the soldiers ‘gnawed by rats/And in the ruined trenches’, dream of their home lives, their ‘firelit homes, clean beds and wives’ and ‘Bank-holidays, and picture shows and spats/And going to the office in the train’. In ‘Break of Day’ the soldier, anticipating the ‘damned attack’ of the next day, dreams of ‘riding in a dusty Sussex lane/In quiet September and then taking part in a hunt. In each of these cases, the conceptualising mind, here the soldier-focaliser filtered through the narrating speaking voice of the poem, shifts between what Cognitive Grammar terms conceived reality and irreality’ (Langacker 2008, 301). Since our perception of experience is relative to our embodied status in the world as beings moving sequentially through time, the past and the future are inaccessible to us except through memories and imaginative projections. Figure 4.5 outlines this relationship. The conceptualizer (C) moves through unfolding time and is aware of both their conceived reality (what they accept to be generally true) and their current reality (the immediate moment in time that forms the basis for future knowledge to be integrated into conceived reality). Outside of these regions is irreality, defined as the space in which a profiled process is not accepted as being real. At clause level, grounding through the use of modality places a process in irreality. For example, ‘the soldier may survive’ projects a state of affairs (the survival of the soldier) which has not yet happened (and may not do) and thus is unverifiable in terms of conceived or current reality. In both ‘Dreamers’ and ‘Break of Day’, the modality is scaled up to profile mental spaces in which desirable but as yet unrealized states of affairs (being at home, going about daily business, hunting) are conceptualized and thus give rise to specific construals of mind styles. I would argue that these departures from reality are close to desire worlds in Text World Theory (Giovanelli 2013) in that they project richly detailed (particularly in ‘Break of Day’) imaginative spaces which provide some scope of release from reality but

106

M. GIOVANELLI

Current Reality

Irreality

Conceived Reality

(C)

Irreality Time

Fig. 4.5 Reality and irreality (based on Langacker 2008, 301)

which are, equally, unable to form part of reality. In ‘Dreamers’, the soldier’s thoughts are described as ‘hopeless longing’; in ‘Break of Day’, the imagined memory/projection of the hunt is broken by the sound of the battle horn, in this instance also realized by the dinkus that signifies both textual and spatiotemporal deictic shifts and marks the soldier’s return to the immediate reality of his own situation. The absence in these poems, it seems to me, is the felt sense of what cannot be actualized and the trauma in these poems is the realization of impending death as ‘citizens of death’s grey land’ as in ‘Dreamers’ or, going over the top in ‘Break of Day’, as likely to die as the hunted fox cub in the preceding dream.6 Finally, at other times absence or absences arise through the act of narration itself. In ‘Lamentations’, based on Sassoon’s experience at a Base Camp at Rouen in February 1917, the speaker finds himself unable to react in full to the horror of the soldier he sees breaking down in front of him on hearing of his brother’s death. Scaling up negation from a Cognitive Grammar perspective here provides a neat way of demonstrating how what cannot be told because it is too traumatic, inexpressible or beyond words, effectively combining what Warhol (2005) terms the ‘antinarratable’ and ‘supranarratable’, may act as a more global schema for reading a poem which models a deeply traumatized mind. And finally, in a post-Craiglockart poem, ‘The Dug-Out’, written in July 1918, the speaker construes a scene in which the sleeping soldier’s body schema is inverted by the constraints of the trench dug-out, and described using the inherent negation of ‘sullen’, ‘cold’, and ‘exhausted’. Here, the soldier is still alive and yet the speaker’s reference to his potential fate ‘You are too young to fall asleep for ever’ serves as a reminder of the ubiquity of death. Here, it is the absence of the narrated event that serves as a warning of the relative potential of its occurrence in the future, ‘And when you sleep you remind me of the dead’. In this poem, the mind style construed is highly idiosyncratic

4

TRAUMA

107

and connects the two possible states of the soldier that are brought together in the poem’s final striking image.

Notes 1. Rivers’ sudden death in 1922 affected Sassoon tremendously (see Sassoon 1981, 163–70). The poem ‘Revisitation’, written about Rivers, appears in Vigils (Sassoon 1934). 2. The poem’s ultimate power, of course, comes from the ironic suggestion that the very opposite is true. 3. The opposite of ‘thick description’ is ‘thin description’ where events are recounted in a fairly factual or neutral way so as not to draw attention to the behaviour of characters within the events and the psychological impact on them of any actions. 4. See Giovanelli (2019) for detailed discussion and comparison. 5. In Giovanelli (2013), I adopt the idea of ‘nightmare distress’ to account for the effect of the nightmare on the waking dreamer in Keats’ poetry and the thematic significance of the felt experience of trauma for the narrator or character across the remainder of the text. 6. See Campbell (1999, 170–71) for this interpretation of the poem.

References Barker, Pat. 1991. Regeneration. London: Viking Press. Barnaby, Andrew. 2018. “The Psychoanalytical Origins of Literary Trauma Studies.” In Trauma and Literature, edited by J. Roger Kurtz, 21–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bayer, Gerd. 2018. “Trauma and the Literature of War.” In Trauma and Literature, edited by J. Roger Kurtz, 213–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bockting, Ineke. 1994. Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner: A Study in Psycholinguistics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Campbell, Patrick. 1999. Siegfried Sassoon: A Study of the War Poetry. Jefferson: McFarland and Company. Campbell, Patrick. 2001. “‘Thoughts That You’ve Gagged All Day’: Siegfried Sassoon, W. H. R. Rivers and ‘[The] Repression of War Experience.’” In The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered, edited by Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout, 219–29. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cole, Sarah. 2013. “Siegfried Sassoon.” In The Cambridge Companion to The Poetry of the First World War, edited by Santanu Das, 94–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Demjén, Zsófia. 2011. “The Role of Second-person Narration in Representing Mental States in Sylvia Plath’s Smith Journal.” Journal of Literary Semantics 40 (1): 1–21. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. “Variation and the Indexical Field.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 453–76. Egremont, Max. 2005. Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography. London: Picador. Emmott, Catherine. 2002. “‘Split Selves’ in Fiction and in Medical ‘Life Stories.’” In Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, edited by Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, 153–81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

108

M. GIOVANELLI

Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Feiling, Anthony. 1915. “Loss of Personality From Shell Shock.” The Lancet 186: 4793: 63–66. Fludernik, Monika. 1994. “Second-Person Narrative as a Test Case for Narratology: The Limits of Realism.” Style 28 (3): 445–79. Fludernik, Monika. 2009. An Introduction to Narratology. London: Routledge. Fowler, Roger. 1977. Linguistics and the Novel. London: Methuen. Fowler, Roger. 1986. Linguistic Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2013. Text World Theory and Keats’ Poetry: The Cognitive Poetics of Desire, Dreams and Nightmares. London: Bloomsbury. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2018. “‘Something Happened, Something Bad’: Blackouts, Uncertainties and Event Construal in The Girl on the Train.” Language and Literature 27 (1): 38–51. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2019. “Construing and Reconstruing the Horrors of the Trench: Siegfried Sassoon, Creativity and Context.” Journal of Literary Semantics 48 (1): 85–104. Givón, Talmy. 1993. English Grammar: A Function-Based Introduction: Volume 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gregoriou, Christiana. 2020. “Schematic Incongruity, Conversational Power Play and Criminal Mind Style in Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs.” Language and Literature 29 (4): 373–88. Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood. 1971. “Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language of William Golding’s The Inheritors.” In Literary Style: A Symposium, edited by Seymour Chatman, 330–68. New York: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Chloe. 2017. “Finding Elizabeth: Construing Memory in Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey.” Journal of Literary Semantics 46 (2): 131–51. Hemmings, Robert. 2008. Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hidalgo-Downing, Laura. 2000. Negation, Text Worlds and Discourse: The Pragmatics of Fiction. Stanford: Ablex. Hipp, Daniel. 2005. The Poetry of Shellshock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon. Jefferson: Macfarland and Company. Holden, Wendy. 1998. Shellshock: The Psychological Impact of War. London: Channel Four Books. Kövecses, Zoltan. 2015. Where Metaphors Come From: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor. New York: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, George. 1996. “‘Sorry I’m Not Myself Today’: The Metaphor System for Conceptualizing the Self.” In Spaces, Worlds and Grammar, edited by Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, 91–123. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol II: Descriptive Application, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1993. “Reference-point Constructions.” Cognitive Linguistics 4: 1–38. Langacker, Ronald W. 1995. “Raising and Transparency.” Language 71(1): 1–62.

4

TRAUMA

109

Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Leech, Geoff, and Mick Short. 2007. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. 2nd ed. Harlow: Pearson. Leffler, Konnie. 1987. “Sassoon’s Repression of War Experience.” The Explicator 45 (3): 45–47. Margolin, Uri. 1990. “Narrative ‘You’ Revisited.” Language and Style 23 (4): 425–46. McIntyre, Dan. 2005. Point of View in Plays: A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to Viewpoint in Drama and Other Text-Types. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. McIntyre, Dan. 2006. “Logic, Reality and Mind Style in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van.” Journal of Literary Semantics 34 (1): 21–40. McLoughlin, Nigel. 2021. “Construal, Blending and Metaphoric Worlds in Francis Harvey’s ‘The Deaf Woman in the Glen.’” In New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style, edited by Marcello Giovanelli, Chloe Harrison and Louise Nuttall, 51–74. London: Bloomsbury. McManus, Naoise. 2011. “Repression of War Experience.” https://naoisemcmanus. wordpress.com/2011/11/10/repression-of-war-experience/. Mildorf, Jarmila. 2012. “Second-Person Narration in Literary and Conversational Storytelling.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 4: 75–98. Minogue, Sally, and Andrew Palmer. 2018. The Remembered Dead: Poetry, Memory and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moeyes, Paul. 1997. Siegfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory: A Critical Study. New York: St Martin’s Press. Moorcroft Wilson, Jean. 2013. Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend. London: Duckworth. Myers, Charles S. 1915. “A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock.” The Lancet 1: 316–20. Myers, Charles, S. 1940. Shell Shock in France 1914–18 (Based on a War Diary). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nuttall, Louise. 2018. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction. London: Bloomsbury. Nuttall, Louise. 2019. “Transitivity, Agency, Mind Style: What’s the Lowest Common Denominator?” Language and Literature 28(2): 159–79. Owen, Wilfred. 1998. Selected Letters, edited by John Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parker, Peter. 1987. The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos. London: Hambledon Continuum Richardson, Brian. 2006. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Rivers, William H. R. 1920. Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psychoneuroses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1934. Vigils, limited edition. Bristol. Douglas Cleverdon. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1937. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1945. Siegfried’s Journey 1916–1920. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1981. Diaries 1920–1922. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1983. Diaries 1915–1918. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber.

110

M. GIOVANELLI

Semino, Elena. 2002. “A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to Mind-style in Narrative Fiction.” In Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, edited by Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, 95–122. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Semino, Elena. 2007. “Mind Style 25 Years On.” Style 41 (2): 153–203. Semino, Elena. 2014. “Pragmatic Failure, Mind Style and Characterisation in Fiction About Autism.” Language and Literature 23 (2): 141–58. Semino, Elena, and Kate Swindlehurst. 1996. “Metaphor and Mind Style in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Style 30 (1): 143–66. Shephard, Ben. 2000. A War of Nerves. London: Jonathan Cape. Showalter, Elaine. 1987. “Rivers and Sassoon: The Inscription of Male Gender Anxieties.” In Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet, 61–69: New Haven: Yale University Press. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Gilroux. Sternlicht, Sanford. 1993. Siegfried Sassoon. New York: Twayne. Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stockwell, Peter. 2016. “The Texture of Authorial Intention.” In World Building: Discourse in the Mind, edited by Joanna Gavins and Ernestine Lahey, 147–64. London: Bloomsbury. Ungerer, Friedrich, and Hans-Jörg Schmid. 1996. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. Harlow: Longman. Uspensky, Boris. 1973. A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vandiver, Elizabeth. 2013. “Classics in British Poetry of the First World War.” Remaking the Classics: Literature, Genre and Media in Britain 1800–2000, edited by Christopher Stray, 37–56. London: Bloomsbury. Vickroy, Laurie. 2014. “Voices of Survivors in Contemporary Fiction.” In Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, edited by Michelle Balaev, 130–51. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Warhol, Robyn. 2005. “Neonarrative; Or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, 220–31. Oxford: Blackwell. Werth, Paul. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman. Whitehead, Winifred. 1991. Old Lies Revisited: Young Readers and the Literature of War and Violence. London: Pluto Press. Wood, James M., and Richard R. Bootzin. 1990. “The Prevalence of Nightmares and Their Independence from Anxiety.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 99, 64–68.

CHAPTER 5

Blame

5.1

Introduction

This chapter examines Sassoon’s protest poetry, drawing more widely across his war output to examine the ways in which specific representations of blame and responsibility appear in the poems. Even though criticism of the war emerges in Sassoon’s early 1916 verse, poems such as ‘In the Pink’, ‘Golgotha’, and ‘A Working Party’ are mostly observations on scenes and the participants within them described by the poet-speaker rather than explicit attacks on war itself. In ‘A Letter Home (to Robert Graves)’, the horrific description of the effects of war where ‘Bones are smashed and buried quick’ is compensated somewhat by the speaker’s assertion that despite the horror, ‘Dreams will triumph, though the dark/Scowls above me’. Even at the Somme, Sassoon’s descriptions of horror appear to be more concerned with trying to capture the essence of the scene; his description of the dead soldier ‘hunched and mangled, twisted and scorched with many days’ dark growth on his face, teach clenched and grinning lips’ (Sassoon 1983, 87) is artistic rather than critical. In his poems from mid-1916 onwards, however, Sassoon’s focus appears to move in a different direction and his time in the New Zealand military hospital at Amiens in July 1916, in particular, appears to influence his outputs which become more explicit in highlighting the damaging effects of war. For example, poems such as ‘Died of Wounds’, ‘To His Dead Body’, and ‘The Death-Bed’ focus on suffering in ways that move beyond observations of landscapes that I discussed in Chapter 3. ‘A Night Attack’, written in July 1916 but not published until 1970 when it appeared in the literary magazine Stand, is a poem which may be considered a turning point in Sassoon speaking out against the war. The initial focus on the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Giovanelli, The Language of Siegfried Sassoon, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7_5

111

112

M. GIOVANELLI

English soldier surveying his own troops changes halfway through the poem when he is reminded of seeing a German soldier ‘Dead in a squalid, miserable ditch’. The poem’s narrative viewpoint then shifts for some twenty lines so that the German soldier, from whose perspective the reader now views the events that led to his death, becomes the focalizer. Referring to ‘the damned English’, the German soldier describes his fellow countrymen who began to blunder down the trench’ before he is suddenly killed. The narration immediately moves back to the perspective that began the poem and yet, crucially, the poem ends by returning to the German soldier, this time with a simple and striking description of him with his face ‘in the mud [and] one arm flung out’. There is no celebration of victory; instead, the poem emphasizes, regardless of nationality, the sheer horror and futility of the taken life. It thus presents sentiments that appear more forcefully in ‘The Poet as Hero’ later in 1916, and which come to dominate Sassoon’s writing through to 1918. From mid-late 1916 and into 1917, Sassoon effectively moves from a poet of observation and description to a poet who reacts against the moral validity of war, expressed through representing its effects on those at the Front. Writing back against the war permeates his work written across the time from his return to France in early 1917 to his experiences at Arras in April of that year, and during periods of hospitalization first in London, and then for a longer time at Craiglockhart. It is during this period when the majority of poems included in Counter-Attack and Other Poems, were written, many of them having previously been published in the anti-war periodical The Cambridge Magazine from late 1917 to early 1918.

5.2

Reacting Against the War

As I suggest in the previous section, the shift in Sassoon’s style from observation to reaction seems to occur gradually but steadily over the twenty months or so from his arrival in France in November 1915 to his arrival at Craiglockhart in July 1917. The major biographers broadly agree on the significance of the horrors of Arras in April 1917 and Sassoon’s subsequent return to England and hospitalization at Denmark Hill which came with significant anxiety and nightmares, on his increasing outspoken output. Sassoon was also reading antiwar literature such as Bertrand Russell’s 1916 collection of essays Justice in War Time, which argued that war was both unethical and futile and Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, a harrowing account of the horrific conditions at the Front told through the experience of a French squad (Moorcroft Wilson 2013, 222, 236). In turn, news of casualties in France dampened his spirits during a time of recuperation at Chapelwood Manor. Writing in his diary, Sassoon contrasts his own safety ‘lying in my clean white bed’ with that of the men in France who ‘were blundering about in a looming twilight of hell lit by livid flashes of guns and hideous with the malignant invective of machine-gun fire’ (Sassoon 1983, 170–71). At Chapelwood, Sassoon found his host Lady Brassey’s spiritualism equally alarming and depressing; her reaction to death captured in

5

BLAME

113

‘Supreme Sacrifice’ (which I discussed in Chapter 4) in which she remarks of the dead soldiers: ‘But they are safe and happy now’. The publication of The Old Huntsman and Other Poems on 8 May 1917 provided an explicit platform for some of his 1916 poems which veered towards explicit critique (for example ‘In the Pink’, ‘A Working Party’, ‘Died of Wounds’, and ‘The Hero’) and gave Sassoon visibility and a wider recognition both as a poet and as a commentator on the war. Reviews of the collection were largely favourable. In May, Virginia Woolf wrote in The Times Literary Supplement that ‘What Mr Sassoon has felt to be the most sordid and horrible experiences on the world he makes us feel to be so in a measure which no other poet of the war has achieved’, remarking on ‘Mr Sassoon’s power as a realist. It is the realism of the right, of the poetic kind’ (reprinted in Sassoon 1983, 168). Another important review came in June from M.W. Massingham in The Nation who had remarked that Sassoon’s war poems in The Old Huntsman were of ‘honest rage and scorn, heartfelt bitterness and indignation’ (see Egremont 2005, 140). Sassoon and Massingham met that month and Massingham introduced Sassoon to Bertrand Russell. Both men had a profound effect on Sassoon’s writing of his ‘A Solder’s Declaration’. Today, Sassoon is more generally badged as a poet of protest. A quick Google search of ‘Siegfried Sassoon’ brings up various websites which largely make reference to Sassoon being angry or a protestor or an anti-war poet. A selection reprinted below demonstrates how powerful this narrative has become over the years: Siegfried Sassoon is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems about World War I (Poetry Foundation); […] one of the best-known - and most controversial - poets and novelists to emerge from the First World War as a result of his increasingly anti-war stance. (Imperial War Museum); Poet Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated war hero, expressed doubts about the purpose of the war, and the complacency of the commanders (from BBC Teach GCSE History); He [Sassoon] did not believe that war was necessary and thought it was wrong for humans to fight each other. When his friend died fighting beside him, he became angry and upset. (from BBC Bitesize Key Stage 2 History)

In a similar way to Wilfred Owen, mythologized as the archetypal tragic soldier-poet hero whose work is viewed in the shadow of his tragic death a week before the war ended, the common epithet ‘poet of anger’ has been applied to Sassoon. In fact, it has become conventional and convenient to read him in this way and both academic and non-academic readers appear to do so. For example, here is one reader’s review of Sassoon’s Collected Poems 1908–1956 (Sassoon 1961).

114

M. GIOVANELLI

There is an anger to Sassoons (sic) poetry that like a riptide can make a shortcut directly into your brain, the visualisations that his words can create sting, sometimes unpleasantly, but always with an energy that is startling. The poems can catapult you into a trench or into a green village, and these written snapshots of Sassoons (sic) life often grant you an insight into your own. Anger, rage, humanity and humour combine with each word, and within them a man chained by reality speaks to you directly from one hundred years ago. Whilst one hundred years later his words still ring true as we still fight one another with a rhythmic regularity. If you like real history then these poetic snapshots will vividly create the war to end all wars, but because it didn’t end all wars, then these poems will be as relevant today as they were then. (Merrick 2015)

The framing is replicated in literary-critical treatments of Sassoon. Thorpe (1966) calls his chapter on the war poems ‘Effective Protest’, with a subsection on the poetry of the second half of 1916 and 1917 entitled ‘Bitter Pacifist’. Thorpe even argues that ‘Almost every poem Sassoon wrote from “Stand-to” (written in April 1916 and published in The Old Huntsman) onwards is a form of protest against the War’ (1966, 19) and that ‘Bitterness is the keynote of the satires that occupy the central place in The Old Huntsman and CounterAttack’ (1966, 18). Moeyes (1997, 32) calls Sassoon ‘an angry war poet’ with an ‘angry voice’ (53) and an ‘angry prophet’ (62). Similarly, Silkin (1971, 37) talks of ‘the ferocity of attack in the war poems of Sassoon’. Hipp (2005, 153) writes of how Sassoon’s strategy of juxtaposing events (one of which was usually the death of a soldier) was responsible for the ironic nature of the poems which ‘privileges their political statements over any chance for personal or emotional exploration that they may offer for the poet’, although he later concedes that this is not the only strategy used by Sassoon. In her discussion of Sassoon’s poems, Crane (2014) also focuses on detachment and irony, commenting on the journey Sassoon makes from pre-1916 poems to those which bear the ‘the angry and satirical tone which became his hallmark’ (2014, 67). She argues that the poet becomes an increasingly solitary—and angry—figure across the 1916 and 1917 poems; the poet-speaker’s detachment from the landscapes and scenes he describes give rise to an ironic and satirical detachment from the situations discussed. I return to these aspects of Sassoon’s work at the end of this chapter but, briefly, it is worth mentioning here the set of pre-Craiglockhart poems from ‘The Hero’ and ‘The Onelegged Man (both August 1916) to ‘Base Details’ (March 1917) and ‘The General’ (April 1917), which led to the increased intensity of the Craiglockhart poems such as ‘Does It Matter’ and ‘Glory of Women’ (published in October and December 1917, respectively) and then to poems written once Sassoon had returned from France for the final time. For example, in ‘Great Men’ (published in August 1918), the speaker reports on ‘The great ones of the earth/Approve, with smiles and bland salutes, the rage/And monstrous tyranny they have brought to birth’.

5

5.3

BLAME

115

‘A Soldier’s Declaration’

Aside from Sassoon’s verse, anger and protest against the war are most closely associated with his ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’, completed in June 1917, which I discussed in the previous chapter. In the last chapter, I discussed the declaration in the context of Sassoon’s own traumatic response to the war and his arrival at Craiglockhart Hospital where he stayed for most of the rest of 2017; here I return to it briefly to consider its place in the context of what would become a poetic output increasingly concerned with protest and bitter irony. A final draft of ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ was completed on 15th June 1917 and read as follows. A Soldier’s Declaration I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize. (reprinted in Sassoon 1983, 173–74)

The declaration itself is stylistically interesting. Sassoon’s focus initially is on the act of defiance itself; the reason for the defiance (the prolonging of war) is positioned later in the clause and, interestingly, in the passive voice ‘the war is being deliberately prolonged’. The entities responsible are never specifically mentioned; the use of subject pronoun-relative pronoun construction ‘those who’ merely assigns agency in a general way and the construal here is thus more schematic than fine-grained. It is apparent on reading through the remainder of the declaration that although Sassoon clearly outlines what he is protesting against (the suffering of the soldiers, the shifting sense of what

116

M. GIOVANELLI

war has become, the ignorance of those at home), there is little explicit blame attached. He draws on constructions that position war as self-transformative ‘this War […] has now become’, further passive constructions that conceal agency ‘should have been so clearly stated […] to be changed’ and ‘is being practiced on them’, and nominalizations that present abstract ideas rather than identifying actions and those responsible for them ‘sufferings’, ‘ends’, political errors’, ‘insincerities’, and ‘deception’. In short, linguistically it is a protest in which anger is foregrounded but explicit responsibility is downplayed. Although the declaration itself is not explicit in terms of its assigning of blame, a diary entry that appears on 19 June 1917, four days after the finalized declaration offers a fascinating, quite astonishing, and certainly a more definitive indication of the focus of his anger. Here, clearly fuelled by his various experiences since returning to England in April, Sassoon directs his anger in turn to politicians and policy makers, the Army and soldiers, women, and the general public (and specifically the older male generation); the assigning of blame demonstrates that Sassoon’s anger is multi-directional and the issue itself, as he sees it, complex. Explicitly, he blames patriotism, the rhetoric of war, and the discourses of classical warfare, perpetuated by ‘Jingos who […] do not truly know what useless suffering the war inflects’ (1983, 175) and whose ‘empty words […] mean the destruction of Youth’ (1983, 175). As well as policy makers, Sassoon (1983, 175) aims his anger at the Army: And the Army is dumb. The Army goes on with its bitter tasks. The ruling classes do all the talking. And their words convince no one but the crowds who are their dupes.

Sassoon highlights the plight of the soldiers by drawing on two explicit metaphors. First, he construes the soldiers in terms of a hunting metaphor (in itself reliant on a container image schema) as they are as ‘willingly trapped by the silent conspiracy against them’ (1983, 175). In the second, he suggests that soldiers are ‘fooled by the popular assumption that they all are heroes. They have a part to play, a mask to wear’ (1983, 175), here using the metaphor of theatre and performance and equally positioning soldiers as victims, but only partly as their inability to see through and react to the discourse presented to them is also responsible for them taking on these roles. In contrast, Sassoon explicitly evokes rebellion in imploring the soldiers to ‘speak out; and throw their medals in the faces of their masters’ (1983, 175). This call to arms is not, however, simply reserved for soldiers. Sassoon broadens the scope of his anger by suggesting that the continuation of war is also due to the public’s ignorance and inability to see through the discourse that, like the soldiers, forces them into a state of passive acceptance. In a similar vein to his appeal to the soldiers, Sassoon frames his thoughts within the language of rebellion and revolution: ‘If the crowd could see into these cynical hearts it would lynch its dictators’ (1983, 175).

5

BLAME

117

The diary entry also references a group who would later become the targets of anger in Sassoon’s verse.1 Placed between his call for soldiers and the general public to rebel, Sassoon (1983, 175) directs his attention to the female partners and wives of the soldiers. He implores the soldiers to […] ask the women why it thrills them to know that they, the dauntless warriors, have shed the blood of Germans. Do not the women gloat secretly over the wounds over their lovers?

The final group attacked by Sassoon are those civilians at home and specifically the older male generation. In points which mirror sentiments later expressed in poems such as the late 1917 ‘The Fathers’ where the speaker describes two fathers ‘Gross, google-eyed and full of chat’ regarding exploits of their sons in the war, Sassoon (1983, 176) writes Of the elderly population I can hardly trust myself to speak […] They glory in senseless invective against the enemy. They glory in the mock-heroism of their young men […] In every class of society there are old men like ghouls, insatiable in their desire for slaughter, impenetrable in their ignorance.

The 19th June entry, one of the last three surviving entries before Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart, provides remarkable insight into the strength of his feelings, particularly when read alongside the more restrained public message of the declaration. It is also clear to see why Sassoon may have wanted not to include some of the direct anger and attacks that appear in his diary. The sentiments seem far removed from the Sassoon of early 1916; those who would have seemed unlikely targets for his anger then are now explicitly blamed. These feelings also feel far removed from the more naive emotions that typified his pre-war verse and thoughts, retrospectively captured by Sassoon in The Weald of Youth when he recounts his perspective on the eve of war as he cycles through the countryside near his home village. The years of my youth were going down for ever in the weltering western gold, and the future would take me far from that sunset-embered horizon. Beyond the night was my new beginning. The Weald had been the world of my youngness, and while I gazed across it now I felt prepared to do what I could to defend it. And after all, dying for one’s native land was believed to be the most glorious thing one could possibly do! (Sassoon 1942, 278)

Regardless of Sassoon’s political astuteness and the declaration’s accuracy (Egremont 2005, 145 for example calls it ‘quite startingly naïve’), both the sentiment expressed in the declaration and the elaborations that follow in Sassoon’s diary entry of the 19th June provide an interesting context for an exploration of his subsequent verse, in which anger towards the war, an increasing detachment from his early war sentiments, and the emergence of an identity (and style) as an anti-war poet become apparent.2

118

M. GIOVANELLI

5.4

Cognitive Grammar and Agency

Cognitive Grammar deals with agency through its taxonomy of clause types. In Chapter 2, I explained profiling and trajector-landmark alignment as ways in which Cognitive Grammar accounts for the difference between clauses that in traditional grammar would be conceived as the active and passive voice, and thus highlight or background agency. These ideas were also used to sketch out some observations on Sassoon’s ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ earlier in this chapter. I now return in more detail to clause structure in Cognitive Grammar as a way of explaining how attention is focused more or less on particular entities within a conceived scene. In Chapter 3, I drew briefly on the canonical event model to explain how Cognitive Grammar models transitivity within the clause as the transfer of energy from one participant to another. This model is now discussed in more detail in the following sections, which draw on Langacker’s (2008, 255) discussion of three prominent aspects of the clause. The first relates to the role of nominals which take on functional significance around the verb process and align with traditional grammatical notions of subject and object. The second relates to the number of different clause types which represent various aspects of human experience such as action, perception, and movement. The third relates to the relationship between the clause and its wider discourse context, including the influence of various contextual factors and discourse needs and goals that the conceptualizers have.

5.5

Clause Structure

The structure of a clause is image-schematic, ‘grounded in basic human experience’ and shaped through reference to ‘conceptual archetypes’ (Langacker 2008, 355) which provide templates for the organization of clauses and the participants within them. A basic archetype contains a setting with a number of participants (which may be either animate or inanimate) and is grounded in our experience of physical space and interaction with others and objects within it. A further basic archetype is the ‘billiard-ball model’ (Langacker 2008, 355) which derives from a common force image schema where entities move through space, physically interacting with each other in terms of energy release and transmission. The billiard-ball model is in itself underpinned by a source-path-goal image schema, where the ‘source and goal are both participants’ (Langacker 2008, 356) in a process in which one transfers energy to another as part of a number of ‘forceful interactions’ or an ‘action chain’ (Langacker 2008, 355). Within the action chain, participants who take part in the transfer of energy have ‘archetypal roles’ (Langacker 2008, 356): the agent is the entity who is the energy source and thus the ‘starting point’ (Langacker 2008, 372) of the action chain; the patient is the entity that changes status as a result of being affected by the action or events of the chain and, as the receiver of energy from the agent, is generally the end part of the chain or

5

Fig. 5.1 ‘The soldier killed the enemy’ as two participant action chain (based on Langacker 2008, 356)

119

BLAME

A

P

soldier

enemy

the ‘energy sink’ (Langacker 2008, 356). A simple action chain, involving two participants (an agent and a patient as energy sink) is modelled in Fig. 5.1. The transmission of energy is highlighted through the double arrow. Although Fig. 5.1 shows two participants, it is possible for an action chain to have multiple participants (agents and/or patients) within a single clause structure or a series of clauses each involving separate transfers of energy as part of a longer chain. Equally, it is possible to have a one participant action chain, for example, ‘The soldier shot himself’ where a single participant is both energy source and energy sink. A third participant, an ‘instrument’, may also be profiled as a resource used to mediate the transfer of energy from agent to patient. For example, ‘The soldier killed the enemy with a gun’, includes an instrument ‘a gun’, realized adverbially at the end of the clause. In this way, the relationship between agent and patient is the same as that of the actor-goal pairing in a material action process in the transitivity system outlined in functional grammar (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014). Cognitive Grammar also distinguishes between other process types and participants roles although these are set out in less detail than in functional grammar. For example, Cognitive Grammar includes non-agentive roles that act as participants in a ‘thematic process’ (Langacker 2008, 370), the basic types of which are: an ‘experiencer’, generally a sentient human entity who is the primary participant in some kind of mental or emotional process; a ‘mover’ (either an animate or inanimate object) which shifts location through its role as a participant in a process; and a ‘zero participant’, characterized by its stasis or simply through being construed as existing rather than being an active participant within the clause. Overall, the canonical event model offers a way of ‘apprehending what is arguably the most typical kind of occurrence’ (Langacker 2008, 357) and thus provides a template for a prototypical clause. Here, as modelled in Fig. 5.2, an agent (A) acts on a patient (P) through a process in which energy is transmitted from the agent into the patient (energy sink) which undergoes some change of state as a result. The viewer (V) remains off-stage conceptualizing the event that is onstage in the immediate scope, hence the usual linguistic coding in the third person. The maximal scope is the entire discourse event as available to the conceptualizer (hearer/reader) and from which a portion is profiled for viewing. Clausal elements in the canonical event model generally assume ‘prototypical values’ (Langacker 2008, 358). For example, a prototypical clause has an agent as its subject/trajector, a patient as object/landmark and a verb

120

M. GIOVANELLI

Fig. 5.2 ‘The soldier killed the enemy’ as canonical event model (based on Langacker 2008, 357)

MS Setting IS

A

P

soldier

enemy

V

that denotes some energy transfer between the two and therefore ‘codes’ (Langacker 2008, 357) a conceived event or situation. Other participant roles and different grammatical configurations may also give rise to differences in focal prominence and so impose alternative construals. For example, in a passive construction such as ‘The enemy was killed by the soldier’, the patient assumes the position of grammatical subject and therefore has trajector status. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the imposition of a particular construal is an inherent characteristic of conceptualizing a scene and not related to an objective set of properties that the scene holds. Thus while (1)(a) adheres to the canonical event model and might seem a more natural, and indeed iconic, construal, (1)(b) is also perfectly possible; here the shift in trajector-landmark alignment that the passive voice imposes results in a construal that is both meaningful and likely to be goal-driven in that it has an ideological and contextual basis. This point forms my discussion in the next section. (1) (a) The soldier killed the enemy (b) The enemy was killed by the soldier

5.6

Mystification

Mystification is an effect felt when some aspect of a clause is omitted so as to exclude completely or background information that would highlight responsibility for an action or series of actions. Mystification strategies include the exclusion of an agent, nominalizations, and vague terms that provide insufficient details for the reader to assign blamefully. Mystification may be both agent-based and patient-based. As Hart (2021, 100) explains

5

BLAME

121

In agent-based mystification the role and identity of the agent is obfuscated. In patient-based mystification, the agent is identified but the force of the action in which they are agentive is modulated downward and/or the impact of the action on the patient is ambiguated.

(2) (a) The (b) The (c) The (d) The (e) The (f) The

soldier killed the enemy enemy was killed by the soldier enemy was killed bullet killed the enemy killing of the enemy enemy died

(2)(a) adheres to the canonical event model and profiles both participants in an action chain in which energy is transferred from agent to patient. (2)(b), however, is an example of agent-based mystification since, although the profiled participants remain the same, the patient is in subject position and has trajector status. In (2)(c) agency is omitted altogether in what Shibatani (1985) terms ‘defocusing’, so that the patient remains the sole participant or theme profiled. In (2)(d), agent-based mystification occurs through the profiling of a different part of the action chain. Here, the instrument (the bullet) rather than the entity responsible for firing it (the soldier) assumes agent-like status as energy source, clausal subject and trajector; the effect of this mystification strategy is to direct attention on to the manner in which an action was carried out and away from the agent.3 In (2)(e), the action chain is subsumed into a nominalization so that the participants (and any assumed transfer of energy is concealed). And in (2)(f), an intransitive verb ‘died’ also obscures any notion of the agent; this coding ‘construes a thematic process in absolute fashion, without reference to the force or agent that induces it’ (Langacker 2008, 385). (3) (a) The (b) The (c) The (d) The

soldier soldier soldier soldier

fired the gun killed someone fired the gun at the enemy fired the gun towards the enemy

(3)(a)–(d) all contain examples of patient-based mystification in which the effect of an action on the patient is downplayed or obscured to some extent. (3)(a) profiles only the agent and the transfer of energy mediated through the instrument and does not specify the patient (although one is implied). In (3)(b), the patient is referred to using the indefinite pronoun ‘someone’. In this instance, the mystification that arises is a result of reduced specificity in that a more schematic construal of the patient is opposed (in contrast to a

122

M. GIOVANELLI

common or proper noun). (3)(c) and (3)(d) differ in their use of prepositions. A preposition encodes spatial relations and a directional preposition such as ‘at’ or ‘towards’ acts as the head of a prepositional phrase that denotes the path taken by an entity in relation to a landmark as part of a source-path-goal schema. As Hart (2021, 107) explains Mystification comes in as the path expressed by a preposition can be more or less precise with respect to the landmark. That is, the goal, as the place where the mover ‘lands’ can be the point or points in space occupied by the landmark, or it can be a region of space around the landmark. (original emphasis)

In both examples, the agent fires a gun which, by implication, launches bullets along a path towards the goal. In (3)(c), ‘at’ aligns the goal precisely with the space occupied by landmark ‘soldier’ and so identifies the landmark/patient as the intentional target of the action of firing. In contrast, ‘towards’ is a more expansive preposition and its meaning derives not from a precise alignment of goal/landmark but with a looser sense in which the goal is not exactly specified and is simply an area in the vicinity of the landmark. This latter construal thus is more vague in terms of identification of the landmark/patient as the intentional target of the action of firing (see Hart 2021, 106–8 for extended discussion).

5.7

Intentionality

Although Langacker (2008, 356) explicitly states that ‘an agent is an individual who wilfully initiates and carries out an action’, a construal such as that in (3)(a) could conceivably involve little or no intention on the part of the clausal subject (i.e. the soldier may have fired the gun by accident). Indeed, Cognitive Grammar offers no systematic way, unlike for example the distinction in systemic functional linguistics between material action intention and material action supervention processes, of accounting for such instances where intentionality may be ambiguous or disputed in the canonical event model even if the various mystification strategies discussed in the previous section may impose construals that aim to position a reader to assign agency in some way. This problem is covered at length in Voice (2021) who argues that intentionality needs to be treated beyond the examination of discrete clauses as a discourse phenomenon. Voice demonstrates how readers’ perceptions of intentionality rely on a range of textual features (for example modifying adjectives and adverbs that explicitly state or downplay intentionality, the positioning of participants within a clause) and schematic knowledge brought to the reading event (for example, the knowledge that a soldier firing a gun will probably do so intentionally). Taken together these wider contextual matters are used by the reader to infer varying degrees of intentionality. For example, Voice explains how inferring intentionality for the clausal agent/subject in ‘I squeezed the trigger’ involves identifying ‘I’ as an animate actor capable of

5

BLAME

123

intention, ‘squeezed’ as a deliberate action, semantically distinct from other verb choices that could have been used, and the clause itself as part of a larger event and therefore construed and understood as the immediate scope in relation to the fuller discourse-level maximal scope. As Voice (2021, 143) explains: […] the process of engaging with discourse is not merely the sequential process of interpreting one sentence at a time [..] as more information is revealed to the reader in the course of reading, possible interpretations of character intentions narrow down, and patterns of activity can be recognized.

In turn, and over time, inferences regarding intentionality may be used by a reader to make sense of characters and events as they develop. The intention to kill, inferred from the discourse context, thus acts as a reference point in Cognitive Grammar terms from which further discrete clausal units are used to make sense of the wider narrative and ‘the actor as a character across the discourse’ (Voice 2021, 149). Crucially such judgements may change over the course of a single reading, for example when some new information is revealed, or across multiple readings, as when a reader draws on some new extra-textual knowledge or when their emotional response to a character or events within a text alters in some way. The contextualizing of discrete clausal units and the nature of global intentions acting as reference points to ensure discourse cohesion are important aspects of reading the poems that I analyse in the remaining sections of this chapter. In these sections, I argue that a key aspect of Sassoon’s style is the way in which grammatical configurations draw attention to and mystify in equal measure degrees of agency and responsibility. In turn, I suggest that Cognitive Grammar can help to explore the ironic nature of Sassoon’s poems and explain how, in spite of their grammar, these are commonly read as poems of protest.

5.8

Assigning Blame

In the sections that follow, I examine more closely how aspects of blame are manifest in Sassoon’s poetry by exploring how particular explicit construals related to the deaths of soldiers, and deaths more generally, appear in CounterAttack and Other Poems . Sassoon often redrafted parts of his poems, especially those written in note form at the Front and there are several examples of important changes to particular words or lines so as to mitigate some aspect of the message or divert attention in some way. One famous example is ‘The General’, discussed in Chapter 1. In Sassoon’s draft version, the final line of the poem reads ‘But he murdered them both by his plan of attack’. In the published version in Counter-Attack, as well as some other relatively minor changes, ‘murdered’ is replaced by ‘did for’. This change was suggested by Edward Marsh who feared ‘murdered’ was too direct; in contrast the

124

M. GIOVANELLI

euphemistic and informal ‘did for’, although suggesting deliberateness, is more ambiguous in directly apportioning blame to the General. Another poem provides a further interesting example of changes that were made prior to publication. ‘A Murder Case’ was written at Craiglockhart in 1917 but rejected by Heinemann for Counter-Attack and Other Poems ; in a manuscript book of poems for that collection, Sassoon crossed the poem out and wrote ‘This was too much for Heinemann’ (Farmer 1969, 19). ‘A Murder Case’ contained the lines ‘you’re great at murder’ and ‘How did you kill them?’, the latter changed (in a similar way to ‘The General’) to ‘How did you do them in?’ when the poem was later published, with further edits, as ‘Atrocities’ in War Poems and then in the following year in the American edition of Picture Show. The poem also appears to have been sent to C.K. Ogden, editor of The Cambridge Magazine with an accompanying letter in which Sassoon wrote4 I know of very atrocious cases. Only the other day an officer of a Scotch regiment … was regaling me with stories of how his chaps put bombs in prisoners’ pockets & then shoved them into shell-holes full of water. But of course these things aren’t atrocities when we do them. Nevertheless, they are an indictment of war – some people can’t help being like that when they are out there. (quoted in Alberge 2013)

5.9

Blame in Counter-Attack and Other Poems

In this section, I use a corpus-informed approach to examine aspects of blame. Corpus stylistics draws on larger datasets of language that can be analysed using a computer software programme and integrated into ‘the application of theories, models and frameworks from stylistics’ (McIntyre and Walker 2019, 15) This section therefore differs from the other analytical sections in chapters in this book in that it focuses more broadly on a range of poems within a collection rather than using individual poems as case studies. A corpus stylistic approach mitigates against what Mahlberg and McIntyre (2011, 205) term ‘the problem of length’ when analysing more substantial texts and allows, through quantitative methods, a more nuanced analysis by highlighting patterns that would be difficult to see using a manual approach. These patterns can then be explored and interpreted qualitatively, in my case by drawing on Cognitive Grammar. The dataset I use, amounting to a small corpus of just under 6000 words, is Counter-Attack and Other Poems , chosen because it contains most of Sassoon’s poems written during his time at Craiglockhart as well as many written a few months either side of his stay there.5 The collection is representative of the writing undertaken in the period in Sassoon’s life when his anti-war sentiment was at its highest. The next sections use the concordance tool in AntConc (Anthony 2014) to analyse Sassoon’s use of ‘kill’, ‘die’, and ‘death’ in the collection in relation to how blame is assigned. These keywords have been chosen since they seem to me to be those which are most likely to appear in construals relating to the death of soldiers.

5

5.9.1

BLAME

125

‘Killed’

Table 5.1 shows a Key Word in Context (KWIC) concordance (the instances of the word in the context in which it appears) for ‘killed’ in the corpus of poems from Counter-Attack and Other Poems .6 The word appears five times in the collection and the lines are ordered as per the appearance in the collection. As previously discussed, ‘killed’ is a transitive verb that forms a prototypical action chain with an agent as energy source, a patient as energy sink, and an optional set of other circumstantial information, such as an instrument (e.g. ‘with a gun’) or some adverbial of time, place, degree, or manner. The construal effects which are generated as a result of the various grammatical profiles can be analysed as follows. The concordance highlights that each of the instances contains agent-based mystification and that four also contain patient-based mystification. In the first, from ‘Glory of Women’, a passive agentless construction profiles the patient as clausal subject. The person plural subject pronoun ‘we’ may be considered a type of patient-based mystification since its referent is less explicitly marked than it would be if a proper noun were used. As I discussed in Chapter 3, pronouns are an interesting phenomenon in Cognitive Grammar since they are used with varying degrees of delimitation (their scope of reference). So ‘we’ may be inclusive or exclusive since it may include both conceptualizers (speaker and hearer) and may similarly refer to any number of additional participants and so an increasingly more generic and inclusive ‘we’ (with low delimitation) is a way of construing a set of participants in more schematic terms.7 In the second instance, taken from ‘Repression of War Experience’, ‘people killed’ construes a transitive process as a completed event; the stative-adjectival participle ‘killed’ imposes summary scanning on the scene. This instance also contains patient-based mystification in that the patient in the implied process, now acting as clausal subject is referred to using the schematic noun ‘people’ and so forms part of an ‘impersonal’ (Langacker 2008, 384) construction. Although the prepositional phrase ‘in battle’ provides greater specificity to the overall scene, it does nothing to mitigate the mystification strategy. This same strategy is used in the fifth instance, taken from ‘Trench Duty’. In this context, ‘Someone’ is a more schematic construal of the scene than offered by ‘people’ since in this instance there is no adverbial to provide higher granularity. The third instance, taken from ‘The Effect’, is once more an example of agentbased mystification. In contrast to the other examples, the full but agentless passive ‘Dick was killed’ is used which profiles the patient, who in this instance is construed with maximum specificity through the use of the proper noun ‘Dick’. The adverbial ‘last week’ presents more information in terms of the process, but here significantly again, the removal of agency downplays blame, placing attention instead on the patient. Together these instances, then, all profile only part of the action chain, defocusing the agent completely; not one of these instances contains a ‘by’-adverbial.

mourn our laurelled memories when we’re of ghosts among the trees, - Not people back to life again. When Dick was the dark. Cheero! I wish they’d Wire. “What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Someone

killed killed killed killed killed

. You can’t believe that British troops In battle, - they’re in France, - But last week he looked like that, Flapping you in a decent show ?” Five minutes ago I heard a sniper

Table 5.1 Concordance for ‘killed’ in Counter-Attack and Other Poems ‘Glory of Women’ ‘Repression of War Experience’ ‘The Effect’ ‘To Any Dead Officer’ ‘Trench Duty’

126 M. GIOVANELLI

5

BLAME

127

It is only in the fourth instance, taken from ‘To Any Dead Officer’ that a prototypical action chain is profiled. Here, an agent-process-patient construction, however, is embedded in an emotion process as a noun clause with the poem’s speaker as the experiencer ‘I wish’. The construal, similarly downplays agency first through the embedded clause structure, which explicitly profiles the speaker, and then through the agent-based mystification in which the third person plural pronoun ‘they’ is used. In a similar way to ‘we’, the use of a pronoun here results in a more schematic construal; the pronoun and its consequent ambiguous referent draw attention away from the entity. My analysis demonstrates that of the instances of ‘killed’ across the poems in Counter-Attack and Other Poems , there are no prototypical action chains, and, in every instance, agent-based mystification occurs. It seems that Sassoon, the poet of protest, does not apportion blame and instead directly obscures responsibility for the deaths of others. The grammar of the poems therefore imposes construals in which the reader is encouraged to profile (with relative degrees of specificity) the patients of processes but not the agents responsible for actions. Indeed, a further search of the corpus reveals, perhaps surprisingly, a general absence of synonymous or near synonymous words. For example, murder, erased from both ‘Atrocities’ and ‘The General’, appears only once in the collection and in this instance, in the following line from ‘Survivors’, is construed as a noun and atemporalized: ‘their cowed/Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died, -/Their dreams that drip with murder’. 5.9.2

‘Die’ and ‘Death’

In contrast to ‘kill’, a transitive verb which normally is coded in an agentpatient action chain, ‘die’ is an intransitive verb that is construed in absolute fashion since it is conceived independently of any external force or agency. This is an important and interesting type of construal because in this instance only one participant is profiled as the passive sole actor in a thematic process. The implications of this construal become clear when compared to an alternative. (4) (a) The soldier killed the enemy (b) The enemy died In (4)(a), both agent (energy source) and patient (energy sink) are profiled as part of the full action chain. In (4)(b), the absolute construal offered by the intransitive only profiles the patient with no evoking of an energy source. As Langacker (2008, 371) states, however, agency is still implied to some degree in that ‘background forces’ are assumed to be responsible. In the case of ‘die’, we know that people die as a result of some external causation (e.g. murder, disease), but the intransitive verb downplays the participation of another entity and construes the act of dying as a somehow independent act. An absolute construal thus represents a good example of agent-based mystification given

128

M. GIOVANELLI

that it excludes any energy source and attention is therefore placed exclusively on the thematic process (dying). This construal is modelled in Fig. 5.3. Table 5.2 shows the concordance of variations of ‘die’, ‘died’ together with ‘dying’. These are sorted to show ‘die’ first followed by’died’ and then by ‘dying’. There are five instances each of ‘die’, ‘died’, and ‘dying’. Of the instances of ‘die’, the first four involve a single participant or a group of participants with the actors largely impersonally construed either through the use of pronouns or a generic noun phrase ‘old soldiers’. The fifth example contains the infinitive ‘to die’. A similar pattern emerges with the past tense form ‘died’, which tends to occur as a process in a relative clause, although here the subjects tend to be personalized: ‘Husbands and sons and lovers […] They’, ‘heroes’, ‘my friends’, ‘friends’ here form the clausal subjects. A number of the instances, particularly those using ‘died’, have additional adverbial detail, ‘while sorrowless angels’ (‘The Investiture’), ‘not one by one’ (‘Banishment’), ‘Slow natural deaths’ (‘Repression of War Experience’) or else are followed by an additional information-giving clause, ‘Their dreams that drip with murder’ (‘Survivors’). Given the absolute construal of the intransitive verb inherently omits any external force from the scope of attention, the greater specificity attached to the patient in these examples offers a way of further foregrounding the soldiers as victims while not assigning blame for their deaths on any particular entity. The five instances of ‘dying’ occur either as present participles in clauses, ‘dying hard’ (‘The Rear Guard’, ‘from dying’ (‘Fight to a Finish’), ‘dying slow’ (‘To Any Dead Officer’) or else adjectivally ‘dying heroes’ (‘Remorse’) and ‘The dying soldier’ (How to Die’). Again, these forms grammatically draw attention to the patient in the thematic process and given that participle forms impose summary scanning on a scene as a result of designating only the limited immediate scope of a bounded event (as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3), additionally foreground the attribute of dying as perceived ‘up close’. Table 5.3 shows the concordance of ‘death’/’Death’ (and variations), the nominalization which reifies a process and, as with a participle form, imposes summary scanning on a scene. The concordance shows that ‘Death’/’death’ tends to be used adverbially ‘with death’ (‘The Triumph), ‘of death’s’ (‘Dreamers’), ‘of death’ (‘Prelude: The Troops’) ‘of stifling death’ (‘Invocation’), ‘to death’ (‘Base Details’ and ‘Counter-Attack’). In the other cases, ‘deathless’ pre-modifies a noun ‘deeds’ (‘Remorse’), or as noted before is the head of a noun phrase acting adverbially ‘Slow natural deaths’ (‘Repression of War Experience’). In the two

Fig. 5.3 Absolute construal through intransitive verb with single participant (from Langacker 2008, 385)

tr

dead, I’d toddle safely home and At every lurch; no doubt he’ll Boche front line. ***** “Old soldiers never . Husbands and sons and lovers; everywhere They ; who lie in outcast immolation, doomed to hand Sits welcoming the heroes who have They went arrayed in honour. But they brought No memory of my friends who horrible shapes in shrouds – old men who Subjection to the ghosts of friends who glaring up, whose eyes yet wore Agony cheer the soldiers who’d refrained from When lads are left in shell-holes sitting safe at home, who reads Of While down the craters morning burns. The

die die die die die died died died died died dying dying dying dying dying

– in bed to-day. But we can say the ; they simply fide-a-why!” That’s ; War bleeds us white. Mother and wives Far from clean things or any hope , While sorrowless angels ranked on either side , - Not one by one: and mutinous I . III For when my brain is on Slow, natural deaths, - old men with ugly , - Their dreams that drip with murder; and hard ten days before; And fists of , And hear the music of returning feet.” slow, With nothing but blank sky and heroes and their deathless deeds.” soldier shifts his head To watch the

Table 5.2 Concordance for ‘die’, ‘died’, ‘dying’ in Counter-Attack and Other Poems ‘Base Details’ ‘Wirers ‘Twelve Months After ‘Their Frailty’ ‘Break of Day’ ‘The Investiture’ ‘Banishment’ ‘Dead Musicians’ ‘Repression of War Experience’ Survivors’ ‘The Rear-Guard’ ‘Fight to a Finish’ ‘To Any Dead Officer’ ‘Remorse’ ‘How to Die’ 5 BLAME

129

wild beast of battle on the ridge, . If I were there we’d snowball that troubles the faces of men. With Soldiers are citizens of stubborn hands, Can grin through storms of Chokes, and through drumming shafts of stifling speed glum heroes up the line to down, he sank and drowned, Bleeding to , who reads Of dying heroes and their shrouds - old men who died Slow, natural

Death Death death death death death death death deathless deaths

will stand grieving in that field of with skulls; Or ride away to hunt in the terrible flickering doom of the ‘s grey land, Drawing no dividend from and find a gap In the clawed I stumble toward escape, to find the . You’d see me with my puffy . The counter-attack had failed deeds.” , - old men with ugly souls, Who wore

Table 5.3 Concordance for ‘Death’/‘death’ in Counter-Attack and Other Poems ‘Prelude: The Troops’ ‘The Investiture’ ‘The Triumph’ ‘Dreamers’ ‘Prelude: The Troops’ ‘Invocation’ ‘Base Details’ ‘Counter-Attack’ ‘Remorse’ ‘Repression of War Experience’

130 M. GIOVANELLI

5

BLAME

131

instances where it is personified and construed as a proper noun, it occurs once as an experiencer, ‘Death will stand grieving’ (‘Prelude: The Troops’), and once as the patient and energy sink ‘we’d snowball Death with skulls’ (‘The Investiture’). Overall these findings demonstrate that there are more instances of absolute construal where thematic processes are presented using variations of the intransitive verb ‘die’. The downplaying of agency is evident in the number of construals that impose summary scanning on the process of ‘dying’ and foreground the patient, or else reify the process as a noun which is atemporalized and viewed as a thing, concept, or theme rather than an event in which agent-patient interaction is highlighted. In turn, the transitive verb ‘kill’ which would prototypically profile both agent and patient occurs with varying types and degrees of mystification. The clause-level grammar of Counter-Attack and Other Poems would then suggest that blame in the poems is largely not directly assigned and that responsibility for the events which marked some of Sassoon’s most explicit and celebrated war poems is downplayed. Although explicit in their presentation of death and suffering, instead of assigning blame, the poems largely appear to conceal it.

5.10 Reading Blame Indirectly: ‘The General’ and ‘The Effect’ My discussion in the previous sections raises interesting questions about the language of Sassoon’s poems in relation to his identity as a poet of protest. On the one hand, both literary-critical and non-academic readers read Sassoon as an angry anti-war poet. On the other hand, the grammar of the poems shows evidence of agent-based and patient-based mystification which has the effect of obscuring responsibility. If anger is directed, then it is not always explicitly clear from the language of the poems whom the target is. Of course, a reader may draw on extra-textual knowledge, likely in the form of the situational context, to examine these construals as constrained by Sassoon’s need to self-censor given the need more generally for writers and their publishers to be wary of the reception of anti-war verse among the patriotic public. One obvious example of this strategy is the more schematic construal of content so as to avoid mentioning specific examples. As discussed in this chapter, the downplaying of agency in ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ compared to the more explicit diary entry that was written just after it, attends to this need for care even when the overall message is clearly overtly critical. In ‘The General’, ‘did for’ in the published version still profiles the same agent-patient relationship as the more explicit term ‘murdered’ in the draft; the difference here is in the semantic ambiguity and less forceful nature of ‘did for’ rather than its grammatical configuration as the energy source in an action chain. The poem also, I think, works in a number of other ways to present blame in a more indirect manner. The narrative events of the poem are as follows (although Sassoon presents them in an achronological manner):

132

M. GIOVANELLI

The soldiers meet the General; Harry and Jack go to Arras; Harry and Jack die; The speaker blames the General.

The poem contains a series of narrative gaps (Bell 1986; Hardy 2005) which detail more explicitly what happened to Harry and Jack (for example, their deaths) and which are, in Warhol’s (2005) term, ‘antinarratable’ since they concern traumatic events. In Cognitive Grammar, the limiting of the scope of attention on certain parts of a scene (narrative) is generally captured in the construal phenomena of focus and prominence, and more specifically in the notion of figure and ground in which one portion of a scene is selected for attention (the figure) while others remain backgrounded (see my discussion in Chapter 2). As Harrison (2014, 55) notes, Langacker’s theory, however, does not deal explicitly with this aspect of selective attention or ‘gapping’ and she consequently integrates the process of ‘attentional windowing’ (Talmy 2000) into Cognitive Grammar to account for this aligning of readerly attention more clearly, scaling up the concept for account for beyond sentence-level phenomena in a form of narrative editing or ‘splicing’ (Harrison 2014, 56; Talmy 2000, 270). In ‘The General’, the windowed sections are those parts of the scene which are included in the poem and thus to which our attention is diverted while the gapped sections are those parts which are excluded, remain in the ground and are thus defocused. Across the entire narrative from start to finish (construed as a source-path-goal schema of motion), the poem thus selects, or windows, only one part of the path for attention (Harry and Jack walking to Arras), while the goal (their deaths) is summarised in the euphemistic ‘did for’. In turn, the actual deaths themselves and the processes by which they came about are omitted from the poem; the horror of the deaths is implied and generally understood through a reader’s drawing on a relevant war schema which is likely to include knowledge of death being as a result of military action through the process of ‘medial gapping’ in which the middle sections of the narrative are ellipted and only the goal profiled. The final line of the poem also subtly shifts the blame through the addition of the adverbial ‘by his plan of attack’ which introduces an instrument as an additional clausal participant. Since an instrument mediates in the energy transfer from agent to patient, attention is drawn to the plan, which presumably needs to be enacted by others. Blame therefore is here more subtly and indirectly specified. A second example of a more indirect labelling of blame is evident in ‘The Effect’, written in the period between Sassoon’s return from France in April 1917 and his arrival at Craiglockhart that year. ‘The Effect’

“He’d never seen so many dead before.” They sprawled in yellow daylight while he swore

5

BLAME

133

And gasped and lugged his everlasting load Of bombs along what once had been a road. “How peaceful are the dead.” Who put that silly gag in some one’s head?

“He’d never seen so many dead before.” The lilting words danced up and down his brain, While corpses jumped and capered in the rain. No, no; he wouldn’t count them any more... The dead have done with pain: They’ve choked; they can’t come back to life again.

When Dick was killed last week he looked like that, Flapping along the fire-step like a fish,

After the blazing crump had knocked him flat... “How many dead? As many as ever you wish. Don’t count ’em; they’re too many. Who’ll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?”

As Langacker (2008, 384) argues: When one participant is left unspecified, the other becomes more salient just through the absence of competition. On the other hand, augmenting the salience of one participant diminishes that of others (in relative terms) even when they are fully specified’.

In ‘The Effect’, blame is shifted away from the actual entity (the German enemy) responsible for the various deaths of the English soldiers and so agency is mystified. The forms of mystification that occur here are similar to those discussed earlier in the chapter. In some instances, the profile is shifted from the process (of being killed, or dying) to characterize a non-processual relationship, in the form of the ‘dead’, which in this poem is used nominally to head a number of noun phrases, ‘the dead have done with pain’ and ‘so many dead’. When construed as a mass noun, ‘dead’ highlights an atemporal relationship, profiling a set of things (bodies) which are assigned some specific characteristic (being dead) through being named, and are viewed within a particular spatial location. In contrast, the use of a verb as in ‘the soldier died’ profiles this characteristic as a process taking place through time and so foregrounds the trajector’s shift in state (from being alive to being dead). This distinction is modelled in Fig. 5.4. As previously discussed, nominalizations reify actions and omit any profiling of clausal participants. The use of ‘dead’ as a noun thus equally downplays the process of dying, even if it derives, like its adjectival counterpart, from an

134

M. GIOVANELLI

time Dead

C

C

Dead

C

tr

‘The dead’ (mass noun)

‘The soldier died’ (process through time)

Fig. 5.4 Atemporal and temporal relationships: ‘dead’ and ‘died’ (based on Langacker 2008, 102)

intransitive process that would prototypically mystify agency; the effect here then is to shift attention away from the process completely and give salience simply to one participant. The use of ‘corpses’, although profiled as trajectors in a clause, this time conceals a previous action (how the soldiers died) instead shifting attention onto the characteristic of being dead. These subtle shifts in diverting blame also appear in ‘who put’, where the relative pronoun conceals agency, in the passive ‘Dick was killed’ which profiles simply the patient as clausal subject and in ‘blazing crump knocked him flat’ in which a full action chain is profiled but where, here, agency is delegated to a tertiary participant, the sound of war rather than the entities responsible for causing the sound: bombs, guns, shells, and so on. Taken together, the poem’s construals are fascinating. Of course, in the context of the poem, the entities responsible for the deaths of the English soldiers, for the ‘sounds’ of war, and for the more individual focus on Dick would be the German soldiers who are never mentioned. This seems to me to have the dual effect both of foregrounding other participants and of positioning and inviting the reader to infer some other indirect agency.8 Of course, for a twenty-first-century reader armed with extensive contextual knowledge about Sassoon, it does not take much to interpret this poem in a way that frames the government, the press, and the general public at home in 1917 as to blame for the events described, although I would also argue that the framing of blame in this poem positions the reader to examine where the poet-speaker’s sentiments lie even if the poem is read in a decontextualized manner. The direct attack on the war correspondent in this poem then becomes a vehicle for attaching blame in more indirect ways; the grammar of the poem and its examples of agent-based mystification or diversion fail to blame the enemy and instead hint at broader and more sinister forces at work.

5.11 Reading Intentionality and Irony in ‘Does It Matter?’ ‘The Effect’ is a poem which relies on irony manifest in the disjunct between grammatical form and how the reader might be indirectly positioned to assign

5

BLAME

135

blame for the actions described not at the ‘enemy’ per se but at those closer to home. It seems to me that this is a frequent phenomenon in those poems written by Sassoon that have come to be read and understood as ironic. In this final section, I examine this phenomenon in more detail in relation to Sassoon’s 1917 Craiglockhart poem ‘Does It Matter?’. ‘Does It Matter?’

Does it matter?—losing your legs?... For people will always be kind, And you need not show that you mind When the others come in after hunting To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter?—losing your sight?... There’s such splendid work for the blind; And people will always be kind, As you sit on the terrace remembering And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit?... You can drink and forget and be glad. And people won’t say that you’re mad; For they’ll know that you’ve fought for your country, And no one will worry a bit.

In her discussion of the poem, Crane (2014, 72) comments on the ‘ironically hectoring manner’ of the poem given that the three stanzas, despite appearing to push the addressee towards an acceptance of their post-war existence, openly mock the value of the sentiments expressed. Reflecting on her personal experience of teaching the poem, Crane writes: A pupil of mine once challenged me by asking how I knew it was ironic – how could I be sure that Sassoon hadn’t intended it literally? Perhaps some early adult readers might have asked the same question – in the corpus of English poetry there are, after all, a number of admonitory poems about how to behave. Part of the answer may lie in the pronoun – Sassoon seems to be addressing someone who has had his own experiences: a former huntsman who is haunted by “dreams from the pit”. If Sassoon is in part addressing himself, then split, ironising feelings – the compassion on the one hand and the sense of self-pity and self-contempt on the other.

The pupil’s question here is a good one. Crane’s own response is to draw attention to the poem’s use of the second person pronoun ‘you’ (and the possessive determiner ‘your’). The second person pronoun reconfigures the

136

M. GIOVANELLI

construal relationship so that the addressee is placed onstage, either when ‘you’ refers back to the speaking conceptualizer, conceived as two conceptualizing presences (the speaker is self-addressing), or where the pronoun represents an instance of double deixis (Herman 1994) in that it references two separate entities (the speaker self-addresses but also addresses a more general ‘you’ outside of the poem). In this sense, it is the double deixis that gives rise to an ironic interpretation of the opening lines in each of the three stanzas. Another way of explaining the ‘ironic interpretation’ that Crane suggests is to examine how blame is, as in ‘The Effect’, indirectly assigned. In the following analysis I demonstrate how the poem’s grammar combines with possible readerly inferences and schematic knowledge to position a non-literal reading of the speaker’s logic to each of the questions as the preferred reading of the poem. My analysis begins with the opening line, ‘Does it matter? losing your legs?…’. A search using the British National Corpus (BNC) for noun collocates (words which co-occur) of the node ‘lose’ and its variations reveals that ‘leg’ occurs sixty-five times as the object of the verb and is placed thirty-sixth in terms of its typicality score, which takes into account how many other nodes the collocate combines with.9 An analysis of the concordances for ‘leg’ shows that it collocates with ‘lose’ and its variations within one of three main areas of use, all of which relate to the physical loss of a leg either through direct injury or amputation following an injury. These areas relate to personal accidents, illness (usually cancer), and war. Only two instances in the whole corpus relate to other senses and in both cases reflect loss of physical ability rather than the limb itself: ‘lost movement in one leg’ and ‘lost control of his leg’. Of course, the loss of a leg is literal in that it physically occurs, but it is also a construal that draws on the metaphor a body part is an object. Furthermore, ‘leg’ seems to be one of the very few collocates that is a concrete noun. For example, the top forty collocates of ‘lose’ and its variations, shown in Table 5.4, are mostly abstract nouns and/or used metaphorically. It is also clear that ‘lose’, (and its derivatives) tends to attract semantically negative collocates and thus has negative semantic prosody (Louw 1993; Hunston 2007), with even seemingly positive lexical items such as ‘weight’ which often have a negative discourse function, such pertaining to the loss of weight through illness. More specifically, an analysis of the concordance lines for the collocate ‘leg’ highlights that to ‘lose a leg’ is generally used as a more polite and socially acceptable way of referring to an injury that could have been expressed using a more explicit construal. ‘Does It Matter?’ similarly construes the injury suffered by the soldier/soldiers in this vague way. Of course, such a construal follows the general convention both during and after the war of presenting the multiple ways in which human bodies were damaged in euphemistic ways (see Walker 2017, 130–38 for discussion), and indeed part of the power and horror of ‘Does It Matter?’ comes from the way in which the injuries are

5

Table 5.4 Top forty noun collocates of ‘lose’ in the BNC by typicality

Job Weight Sight Control Temper Interest Seat Money Touch Battle Life Ground Confidence Balance Sense Patience Power Grip Lot Contact Faith Time Track Game Opportunity Election Vote Everything Pound Stone Count Nerve Right Way Sleep Leg Baby Ability Home Love

BLAME

137

Frequency

Typicality

660 401 343 384 242 314 213 307 168 168 206 127 109 98 123 81 130 78 151 86 78 228 77 94 97 77 75 90 74 69 62 57 99 162 56 65 64 61 97 59

9.5 9.33 9.2 9.06 8.82 8.54 8.41 8.27 8.24 8.19 7.81 7.62 7.53 7.35 7.34 7.25 7.22 7.17 7.16 7.14 7.11 7.07 7.07 7.06 6.98 6.98 6.97 6.91 6.89 6.88 6.85 6.71 6.7 6.68 6.68 6.68 6.67 6.65 6.64 6.6

138

M. GIOVANELLI

downplayed and presented as something to be accepted in the post-war experience projected by the poem’s speaker. But the grammar is also important here: the opening line construes the agent and patient of the participle verb form ‘losing’ as the same entity and the energy inherent in the process is thus conceived not as emanating from an external source but as internal; in other words, intention and responsibility for the soldier’s (or soldiers’) injuries is omitted. It seems to me that the key to understanding the question posed by Crane’s student rests on the interplay between the grammatical construal, the likely discourse knowledge that is used by a reader and the kind of reference point relationship with regards to intentionality as discussed by Voice (Sect. 4.3) that is set up to guide the reader in the poem. As I have previously discussed it is almost impossible, for modern readers at least, to read Sassoon’s war poems in any other way than as anti-war literature, given the status of Sassoon as a canonical poet of protest and the fact that that war poetry is generally packaged up in certain ways as a particular kind of cultural product—in schools, in anthologies, read at memorials and so on. Greater specific contextual knowledge, such as the fact that the poem was written at Craiglockhart in 1917 alongside Sassoon’s more obviously outspoken poems, that Sassoon was labelled as ‘essentially a satirist’ by Edmund Gosse (Gosse 1917, 314) and identified by an article in The Nation (Lynd 1919) under the heading ‘The Young Satirists’ only strengthens this reaction in relation to ‘Does It Matter?’. Contextual knowledge thus may act as a way of ‘pre-figuring’ (Giovanelli and Mason 2015) a particular way of interpreting the text. As Voice (2021, 136) argues: it is the construal of events and their perspectivization in language which inform judgements regarding whether a described action was performed for a reason, and consequently whether or not the agent of the actor should be considered responsible for it.

The construal ‘losing your legs’ thus draws attention more fully to its own indirectness in that it conflates agent and patient. In turn, the generally negative semantic prosody that is associated with units of meanings in which ‘losing’ occurs, together with the euphemistic nature of loss associated with ‘legs’ lead to the strong readerly inference that this is not intentional: one doesn’t desire to ‘lose’ one’s legs. In Voice’s terms discussed, this lack of intentionality acts as a discourse reference point that guides interpretation of the rest of the poem. In this case, if a reader holds the knowledge that this is a poem written by Sassoon, then that too is likely to guide their inferences. In this instance, and as modelled in Fig. 5.5, ‘Siegfried Sassoon’ acts as a reference point (RP), with specific knowledge (Sassoon as anti-war poet, Craiglockhart, and so on) which emerges as a target and is accessed within the dominion. All of this accrued knowledge in conjunction with the grammar becomes a way of making sense of the opening line and, indeed, the remainder of the poem.

5

R1

BLAME

139

T/R2

D

R1 = ‘Siegfried Sassoon’ T/R2 = inference about anti-war stance/intentionality

C Fig. 5.5 Inferred intentionality as a reference point

To model the mind of the author Sassoon is therefore to read against the poem’s grammar. In a similar way to ‘The Effect’, the temptation is to look for blame for the loss of legs, sight, and ‘those dreams from the pit’ elsewhere. But in a poem which construes all of the other participants in an equally nonspecific fashion (‘people’, ‘others’, and ‘they’), blame is not directly attributed and instead must be inferred. It seems to me, then, that reading ‘Does It Matter?’ as an angry poem, as a poem of protest, as a poem of blame, and as an ironic poem means re-evaluating and reconstruing each of the questions that begins each stanza in turn, guided by the initial reference point so that the conditions offered as mitigations to the questions are ignored, the evidence presented for them rejected as false, and blame attached not to the injured body part but to those who both cause the injuries to occur through supporting war and try to downplay the effects of those injuries. In short, this means rejecting the entire discourse of war as patriotic endeavour. The poem neatly exists then as an example of Simpson’s (2011, 39) definition of irony as the ‘perceived conceptual space between what is asserted and what is meant’. This ironic interpretation is evident in numerous literary-critical readings of the poem; indeed there is not a single one that I have found that interprets the poem in an alternative way. My own experience of teaching the poem with students and of seeing it being discussed in non-academic contexts is that its sentiments are commonly read as ironic and that Sassoon/the speaker is viewed as outlining an anti-war stance. For example, the comments reproduced below are from poemanalysis.com, a website offering analyses of poems for the general readers. ‘Does it Matter?’ by Siegfried Sassoon is a moving anti-war poem that describes injuries, physical and mental, that men receive in war […]

140

M. GIOVANELLI

The poem takes the reader through three different scenarios. In the first, a man loses his legs, in the second: his eyes, and in the third: his mind. In each of the stanzas, the speaker suggests, sarcastically, that these injuries don’t matter because there are kind people in the world and drink to soothe the pain. By approaching this topic in this way the poet is able to emphasize the truth of these sorts of injuries and allow the reader to understand that they’re never going to heal like the public might like them to. https://poemanalysis.com/siegfried-sassoon/does-it-matter/

Of course, and as I have discussed throughout my analyses in this chapter, this interpretation is privileged in that it draws on, even if implicitly, a range of extra-textual knowledge which allows readers to infer intentionality and assign an ironic meaning to a text. Readers thus draws on these various contexts which act as constraints in the same way as those which operate in relation to the production of the poems in that they license particular construals. This also accounts for why Crane is able to argue persuasively for the non-literal meaning of the poem (strongly mind-modelling Sassoon the anti-war poet) but her student, without such background knowledge, is as yet unable to do so.

Notes 1. Females are largely absent in Sassoon’s poetry. For example, in Counter-Attack and Other Poems the word ‘woman’ doesn’t occur at all and the pronoun ‘she’ only four times (three of those are in one poem). Where women are represented, this tends to be in negative terms: see for example ‘Glory of Women’, ‘Their Frailty’, and ‘Reconciliation’. ‘The Hawthorn Tree’, however, offers a more sympathetic representation. 2. The sentiments described here are captured in ‘To the Warmongers’, a poem written while at Denmark Hill Hospital in April 1917, but which like ‘NightAttack’ was not immediately published. 3. Other grammatical configurations can still identify the instrument as agentive in a prepositional phrase, e.g. ‘by the bullet’. 4. It is not clear why Ogden did not publish the poem. Although the poem was claimed to have been found in 2013, a draft version is mentioned as being in the Sassoon catalogue at the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas at Austin and exhibited just after his death in Siegfried Sassoon: A Memorial Exhibition. See Farmer (1969, 19). 5. Indeed, Sassoon himself undertakes a quantitative analysis of sorts of the collection, writing about the number of references to death in a letter to Osbert Sitwell: ‘The word death, die, dead, recurs more than 40 times in the 39 poems – Dark and darkness 16 – War 15. Night: 13. Gloom: 9. Doom: 7. Killed: 5. Corpses = only 3, I am afraid’ (quoted in Moorcroft Wilson 2013, 307). 6. The actual search made was using the wildcard setting ‘kill*’ to cover all morphological variants (e.g. ‘kill’, ‘killing’, ‘killed’, and so on). Only ‘killed’ appears in the corpus. The same wildcard operation is used for the other concordances in this chapter.

5

BLAME

141

7. The use of a pronoun, however, also assumes high accessibility, which may mitigate to some degree any explicit mystification strategy. 8. ‘Germans’ only occurs once in Counter-Attack and Other Poems , in ‘Remorse’, where they are construed as the victims of violence: ‘Remembering how he saw those Germans run/Screaming for mercy’ and ‘Our chaps were sticking ‘em like pigs’. ‘Enemy’ does not occur in the corpus at all. 9. For example, ‘job’ has the strongest relationship with ‘lose’ in so far as they are often found together and there are relatively fewer nodes that ‘job’ combines with or else its frequency score with others is low. The data in the table were generated using SketchEngine.

References Alberge, Dalya. 2013. “Draft Siegfried Sassoon Poem Reveals Controversial Lines Cut from Atrocities.” The Guardian, February 3. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2013/feb/03/siegfried-sassoon-poem-atrocities. Anthony, Laurence. 2014. AntConc (Version 3.4.1w) (Windows). Tokyo: Waseda University. http://www.laurenceanthony.net/. Bell, Millicent. 1986. “Narrative Gaps/Narrative Meaning.” Raritan 6 (1): 84–102. Crane, Meg. 2014. “Siegfried Sassoon: A Solitary Witness.” Use of English 65 (3): 65–75. Egremont, Max. 2005. Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography. London: Picador. Farmer, David. 1969. Siegfried Sassoon: A Memorial Exhibition. Texas: The Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Giovanelli, Marcello, and Jessica Mason. 2015. “‘Well I Don’t Feel That’: Schemas, Worlds and Authentic Reading in the Classroom.” English in Education 49 (1): 41–55. Gosse, Edmund. 1917. “Some Soldier Poets.” Edinburgh Review 226: 314. Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood and Christian Matthiessen. 2014. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. 4th ed. London: Routledge. Hardy, Donald. 2005. “Towards a Stylistic Typology of Narrative Gaps: Knowledge Gapping in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction.” Language and Literature 14 (4): 363– 375. Harrison, Chloe. 2014. “Attentional windowing in David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’.” In Cognitive Grammar in Literature, edited by Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell and Wenjuan Yuan, 53–67. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hart, Christopher. 2021. “‘28 Palestinians Die’: A Cognitive Grammar Analysis of Mystification in Press Coverage of State Violence on the Gaza Border.” In New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style, edited by Marcello Giovanelli, Chloe Harrison and Louise Nuttall, 93–116. London: Bloomsbury. Herman, David. 1994. Textual “you” and Double Deixis in Edna O’Brien’s ‘A Pagan Place’.” Style 28 (3): 378–410. Hipp, Daniel. 2005. The Poetry of Shellshock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon. Jefferson: Macfarland and Company. Hunston, Susan. 2007. “Semantic Prosody Revisited.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12 (2): 249–68.

142

M. GIOVANELLI

Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Louw, Bill. 1993. “Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer? The Diagnostic Potential of Semantic Prosodies.” In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, edited by Mona Baker, Gill Francis, and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, 157–76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lynd, Robert. 1919. “The Young Satirists.” Nation 26: 351–52. Mahlberg, Michaela, and Dan McIntyre. 2011. “A Case for Corpus Stylistics: Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale.” English Text Construction 4 (2): 204–27. McIntyre, Dan, and Brian Walker. 2019. Corpus Stylistics: Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Merrick, Steve. 2015. “Review of Collected Poems 1908-1956 by Siegfried Sassoon.” Accessed August 19, 2021. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1812959. Collected_Poems_1908_1956. Moeyes, Paul. 1997. Siegfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory: A Critical Study. New York: St Martin’s Press. Moorcroft Wilson, Jean. 2013. Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend. London: Duckworth. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1942. The Weald of Youth. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1961. Collected Poems 1908–1956. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1983. Diaries 1915–1918, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1985. “Passives and Related Constructions: A Prototype Analysis.” Language 61: 821–48. Silkin, Jon. 1971. “Siegfried Sassoon: Keeping the Home Fires Burning.” Stand 4 (3): 37–38. Simpson, Paul. 2011. “‘That’s Not Ironic, That’s Just Stupid’: Towards an Eclectic Account of the Discourse of Irony.” In The Pragmatics of Humour Across Discourse Domains, edited by Marta Dynel, 33–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics: Vol. I. Conceptual Structuring Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press. Thorpe, Michael. 1966. Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study. London: Oxford University Press. Voice, Matthew. 2021. “Modelling Intentionality in Cognitive Grammar.” In New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style, edited by Marcello Giovanelli, Chloe Harrison and Louise Nuttall, 135–56. London: Bloomsbury. Walker, Julian. 2017. Words and the First World War: Language, Memory, Vocabulary. London: Bloomsbury. Warhol, Robyn. 2005. “Neonarrative; Or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film.” In A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, 220–31. Oxford: Blackwell.

CHAPTER 6

Revision

6.1

Introduction

Although Siegfried Sassoon’s role in the conflict ended in July 1918 when he was accidentally shot in the head by one of his own soldiers, the war would continue to influence his remaining literary output. In the latter part of 1918, Sassoon recuperated at the American Red Cross Hospital for Officers in London before spending time at Weirleigh, at Garsington, and at Max Gate near Dorchester where he met Thomas Hardy for the first time. In his diary entry of 11 November 1918, Sassoon (1983, 282) records his reaction on arriving back in London and witnessing the Armistice Day celebrations, an experience that he records with little hint of joy: ‘It is a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years’. In the immediate years afterwards, Sassoon became literary editor of the Daily Herald, toured America reading his poems and moved to London permanently. His immediate postwar collections of verse included Picture Show (1919), Recreations (1923), and Lingual Exercises for Advanced Vocabularians (1925), which formed the basis for Heinemann’s collected Satirical Poems in 1926. Two other volumes, War Poems (1919) and Selected Poems (1925), both of which repackaged previous material, were also published. In February 1926, Sassoon received an invitation from his old medical officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Dr. James Dunn, to contribute to a history of the Second Battalion by writing a description of his bombing raid in the Hindenburg Trench in 1917. Sassoon initially composed a response in verse, ‘A footnote on the war (on being asked to contribute to a regimental history)’, in which he directly addresses Dunn’s request and reflects on his ability to revisit the past, ‘He asks me to contribute my small quota/Of reminiscence. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Giovanelli, The Language of Siegfried Sassoon, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7_6

143

144

M. GIOVANELLI

What can I unbury?’. The poem’s speaker reflects on the capacity of the mind to review and represent events in the past, remote as they are in the ‘entries moribund’ of the diary, in faulty memory, and in the now removed context of the horror of the battle where the speaker sits ‘in Sunday morning peace’. In an apparent rejection of the invitation to contribute, the poem concludes ‘And I’m going onward […] /And what remains to say I leave unsaid’. The next month, Sassoon met his fellow RWF officer, Ralph Greaves, after which he composed ‘To one who was with me in the war’, which he later claimed was his first poem about the war for seven years (Sassoon 1976, 11). In this poem, the past is also remote and beyond straightforward recollection: ‘It was too long ago […] We call in back in visual fragments’. By the end of the poem, however, the speaker agrees to play ‘the game of ghosts’ and imagines himself and the poem’s addressee back visiting the landscape of the trenches where the past is reanimated complete with previous versions of their selves and other soldiers and officers. In the same month, and unlikely coincidental, Sassoon changed his mind about Dunn’s request and wrote a twelve-page prose account of his war experience. This piece was eventually published in The War the Infantry Knew 1914–1919 in 1938, although by then Sassoon’s contribution had been revised and published in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (Sassoon 1930). Later that year, he began the first of six autobiographical prose works, all of which focus on an obsession with reconstructing—and revising—the past. This chapter examines the process of revision in Sassoon’s prose work, focusing extensively on the first three volumes, known and brought together as the Sherston trilogy (Sassoon 1937). In keeping with other chapters in this book, I take an approach that considers both the contexts of production and reception of Sassoon’s work, focusing on revision and rewriting generally and, specifically, examining the Sherston trilogy as an example of autofiction, a genre that distorts the perceived relationship between the factual and the fictional. The case studies in this chapter are drawn from two instances in which events originally produced in one genre are later reconstrued into another genre. Here I examine Sassoon’s reconstruals of his diary entries in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (Sassoon 1928), and of his poetry in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

6.2

Two Prose Trilogies

Sassoon had been contemplating a shift to prose writing for some time (see Moorcroft Wilson 2013, 435–39 for discussion) and later claimed that his poems written and published years between 1919 and 1926 were little more than ‘a process of getting the war out of my system (which I finally did through the Memoirs)’ (Sassoon 1976, 13).1 Initial attempts, however, to move into the new genre were unsuccessful in terms of finding a specific focus and narrative viewpoint through which he could present his ideas (Egremont 2005, 278). Sassoon also found a tension between his desire to re-invent his identity as a poet and acclimatize himself to a new way of writing; the sheer length

6

REVISION

145

of the task seemed to disturb him. In a letter to Edmund Blunden in March 1928, a month before he completed Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, he wrote ‘I wish I could write poems instead of this rigmarole which afflicts my days and nights. But I am still 15,000 [words] from the end […] the tedium is terrific’ (Rothkopf 2016, 190). The three books of the Sherston trilogy, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (henceforth MFHM ), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (henceforth MIO), and Sherston’s Progress (henceforth SP ) published between 1928 and 1936 were based on a combination of Sassoon’s own memories of his childhood but also—and increasingly across the trilogy—on his war diaries and letters, what he later came to call his ‘assiduous diarising’ (Sassoon 1976, 13). Together, the books map out the experiences of the I-narrator, George Sherston, from his childhood growing up playing cricket, hunting and racing in the Weald of Kent, his arrival in France, battles and injuries, his declaration against the war, arrival at Slateford War Hospital (Craiglockhart), his subsequent reintegration into the army and further injury and return to London. The gentler idyllic narrative episodes of the first two-thirds of MFHM shift to a grittier and more harrowing recount of experiences in MIO, and the more contemplative reflections of SP. The trilogy, narrated from the perspective of the innocent but increasingly self-aware Sherston, provides not just a fascinating re-presentation of the past (see Giovanelli 2021b for a summary of the overall themes of the book) but also ruminates on the very essence and experience of re-imagining the self in a distant time. As Sherston explains: And now, as I look up from my writing, these memories also seem like reflections in a glass, reflections which are becoming more and more easy to distinguish. Sitting here alone with my slowly moving thoughts, I rediscover many little details, known only to myself, details otherwise dead and forgotten with all who shared that time; and I am inclined to loiter among them as long as possible. (Sassoon 1937, 11)

A crucial characteristic of the Sherston trilogy is that it is narrated by George Sherston, a part-fictional version of Sassoon. Places and people from Sassoon’s life are either renamed or are assigned a different status in relation to Sherston: Sassoon’s mother, for example, is reimagined as Aunt Evelyn (Sherston is an orphan). Sassoon, probably for both practical and personal reasons, chose to downplay or else entirely omit particular aspects of his life, most notably in the absence of any love interest (and certainly any mention of his homosexuality) as well as in the almost complete avoidance of any mention of his identity as a writer—although Sherston does read literature. Instead, the outdoor aspect of Sherston is emphasized across the trilogy, most notably in the hunter, rider, and cricketer of MFHM which in turn manifests itself in the heroics in the trenches described in MIO and the more world-wise reflection of SP.

146

M. GIOVANELLI

Later, Sassoon again returned to the past. A second and more obviously autobiographical trilogy, although still omitting vast amounts of personal detail, appeared between 1938 and 1945, acknowledging his ‘queer craving to revisit the past and give the modern world the slip’ (Sassoon 1938, 140). These books, the two part The Old Century; and Seven More Years (OC) (Sassoon 1938), The Weald of Youth (WoY) (Sassoon 1942), and Siegfried’s Journey (SJ) (Sassoon 1945) have less of their focus on the war years: OC covers Sassoon’s childhood up to 1907; WoY ends with Sassoon contemplating the future on the eve of war; and in SJ (covering the period 1916–1920), Sassoon devotes only around one-third of the book to the war years, mostly providing commentaries on some of his poems and their composition and publication histories, reflecting on the writing of his war declaration and, in a quite astonishing chapter, on his first meeting and subsequent friendship with Wilfred Owen. Sassoon began work on a seventh book in 1949 but this was abandoned and never published.2

6.3

War Books

As Hynes (1990, 423) notes, between 1919 and 1926 new writing about the war (as opposed to the repackaging of previously written material) was scarce. From that point onwards, however, and up to the early thirties, a boom in prose war memoirs resulted in a set of ‘classic war books’ which defined the ‘Myth of the War’ (Hynes 1990, 424).3 Sassoon’s first trilogy therefore appears at a time when there was a clear market for writers who had engaged in various kinds of ‘war work’ (Watson 2004, 2) and now came to produce books based on their experiences. In his seminal annotated bibliography, Falls (1930) surveys the different kinds of war writing that were published, which ranged from official records of operations, general surveys of the war, divisional histories, studies of particular battles, personal reminiscences, and fiction. The latter two categories, or what Falls (1930, x) categorizes together as ‘war books’, proved the most expansive and popular and were largely written by junior officers or infantrymen whose experiences became came to embody what Watson (2004, 195) calls the ‘soldier story’. Here, narratives emphasized the inadequate behaviour of the British military leadership, the slaughter of naïve and innocent men, and a post-war legacy of disillusionment. As Falls points out, however, these representations, satisfying an appetite for war narratives which could now be read at some degree of distance from the event itself, were often economical with the truth, appealing to ‘emotions rather than to reason’ (1930, xii). Indeed the degree to which these books were faithful representations of experience was at the heart of a series of controversies over the validity of war narratives. For example, Falls is critical of what he views as a cynical strategy of writers to accentuate the dramatic in an attempt to produce a bestseller:

6

REVISION

147

The falsest of false evidence is produced in another way: by closing up scenes and events which in themselves may be true. Every sector becomes a bad one, every working party is shot to pieces; if a man is killed or wounded his brains or his entrails always protrude from his body; no one ever seems to have a rest. (Falls 1930, xi)

All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque 1929), with its singular focus on the war is an example of what Hynes terms the first kind of war book: a narrative that ‘takes individual experience of war as its entire subject, beginning when the narrator’s personal war begins and ending when it ends’ (1990, 425). Here, there is little attempt to conceive the war in wider socio-historical terms and instead the story’s immediate scopes falls within the start and end of the war for a particular individual whose viewpoint is subsequently limited and may appear naïve and even incoherent. Hynes identifies a second kind of narrative, however, which is wider-ranging, offering a perspective of war that is ordered within a broader chronology of the writer/narrator’s personal history. In these books, typified by Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That (Graves 1929), the scope extends to allow for reflection on the effect of war on the individual and on society in what is ostensibly writing that brings into sharp focus the differences between pre-war and war/post-war worlds. War books written by combatants, regardless whether their accounts were distorted or not, became legitimized by what Hynes (1990, 158) calls ‘the authority of direct experience’, a phrase that captures what came to be the prevailing belief that a war narrative only had value if only if its writer had experienced action of some kind at the Front. As Watson (2004, 4) recognizes in her distinction between ‘war experience’ (the experience itself) and ‘war memory’ (the reconstructed narrated version of that experience), however, the representation of a direct experience, reimagined and recontextualized at a later date, is not the same as the experience itself. Indeed, questions of reliability, authenticity, and credibility appeared at the centre of a series of disputes between Sassoon and Robert Graves over the accuracy of their respective war books. Graves had been critical of MFHM , and Sassoon’s use of Sherston, instead of himself, as the book’s narrator. In turn, Graves’ memoir angered Sassoon due to its journalistic style, perceived inaccurate accounts of events at the Front, and material that Sassoon found personally insulting such Graves’ suggestion that Wilfred Owen was concerned about accusations of cowardice, the printing of a private verse letter Sassoon had written Graves in 1918 following being hospitalized in London, and a recount (thinly disguised) of a night Graves had spent at Weirleigh when he was woken up by the sound of Sassoon’s mother trying to make spiritual contact with Sassoon’s dead brother.4 More generally, work in narrative studies has outlined how the rewriting of experience depends on the specific discourse goals that motivate a writer or speaker in the new context of production. As Lambrou (2021, 1) states, such ‘retellings’ inevitably involve the original source ‘reconstructed or reimagined

148

M. GIOVANELLI

into a new text where original elements, such as characters and plots, may or may not be recognizable’. Studies in memory studies emphasize that a specific perception of the self at the time of retelling influences the remembering of past experiences (Wilson and Ross 2003), and that truth (the essence of the Sassoon-Graves argument) is little more than a subjective piecing together of events as reflected on and shaped by an individual rather than an objective set of properties (Linde 1993). As Watson (2004, 220) makes clear, war writing often sheds light on its ‘relation to contemporary moments rather than to the war itself’; that is, the reworking of war experience is always motivated by the newly emerging and specific vantage point from which that experience is now reviewed.

6.4 6.4.1

Autofiction

The Sherston Trilogy as Autofiction

The issues of ‘truth’ and narrative reliability are more complex in the Sherston trilogy than, in say, Graves’ Good-Bye to All That because of the degree of fictionality that Sassoon deliberately embedded into his work with the introduction of George Sherston rather than himself as narrator.5 Sassoon’s reluctance to initially fully reveal himself in MFHM meant that the first impression of 1500 copies was published anonymously with Sassoon’s name only added to the title page halfway through the printing of the second following the disclosure of his identity as author in The Daily Mail . Published by Faber and Gwyer on 28 September 1928, one of the very first reviews by J.C. Squire in The Observer stated that ‘its anonymous author is very far from being an ordinary author’. On 11th October Cyril Falls, reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement , suggested that ‘One would be prepared, indeed, to wager that the author of certain passages in this book has served an apprenticeship to literature’ (Falls 1928, 727). By 18th October, however, MFHM was being advertised as written by Siegfried Sassoon. In November 1928, Sassoon started to write the second Sherston book, which would become MIO, and in early 1929 he learnt that MFHM had been awarded both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize, presented to the author of the best literary book of the year. The Sherston trilogy, with its deliberate blurring of fact and fiction and its narrator who is both Sassoon and yet not quite him is an example of a genre that has come to be known as ‘autofiction’ (Doubrovsky 1977), defined as ‘a form of autobiographical writing that permits a degree of experimentation with the definition and limits of the self, rather than the slavish recapitulation of known biographical facts’ (Dix 2018, 3). Autofiction is ‘a loosely autobiographical genre in which a homodiegetic narrator represents the author of the work’ (Gibbons et al. 2019, 176) in some way and yet also distorts ‘reality and textuality by conflating the authorial signature of the self (auto-) with a character (-fiction)’ (Gibbons 2018, 75–76).

6

REVISION

149

Autofiction may be read as an authorial strategy since it is grounded in the explicit questioning of ‘selfhood, ontology, truth and memory’ (Gibbons 2018, 76). Sassoon’s own awareness of the experimental nature of his writing, its allusions, and its recognition of the fragile and subjective nature of memory is apparent in his defence of his approach and his comment to Graves that Sherston’s tale was ‘carefully thought out and constructed’ (Graves 1982, 208). Indeed in WoY , the second in the post-Sherston trilogy, and a book which he called ‘this “real autobiography” of mine’ (Sassoon 1942, 70), Sassoon toys with the fictional status of characters in the Sherston books by stating this new autobiography should not have ‘in any way impaired his [Sherston’s] reality in the minds of his appreciative friends, for many of whom he is, perhaps, more alive than the present writer’. Then describing an episode, imagined as a ‘collision between fictionalized reality and essayised autobiography’ (1942, 73), Sassoon turns his attention to Aunt Evelyn, ‘a lady I couldn’t possibly run the risk of offending’. In an ontological twist that conflates fact and fiction, Aunt Evelyn and his mother appear in the garden at Weirleigh ‘back in 1911’ where ‘George [is] lugging in the garden roller to and fro on the tennis lawn after tea’, and the two women discuss the ‘late spring frosts’ (1942, 72). Aunt Evelyn later retires into the house, getting ready for dinner and reminding herself of Sherston playing in the garden fifteen years ago. As Sassoon (1942, 71) remarks, she [Aunt Evelyn] is just the sort of lady who might quite well be staying with my mother – in fact I could swear that I’ve seen them sitting with their sunshades up while I was batting in one of our village matches, talking about politics and gardening.

Generally, autofiction operates along what Gibbons et al. (2019, 176) term ‘a referentiality-fictionality continuum, which relates to how explicitly the central protagonist can be identified with the real author of the work’. In this sense, works at one extreme have a narrator/protagonist who shares a name with the author, while at the other, the protagonist/narrator will have a completely different name or remain anonymized. Works in the middle of the continuum will have some kind of variation in naming, although this will largely still recognizable as equivalent to the author. In all cases, readers make inferences based on details in the text which they believe may or may not align with extra-textual knowledge (e.g. biography) so as to determine whether the protagonist/narrator corresponds to the author. In the first, anonymized impression of MFHM , the book’s autofictionality was signalled in a short message on the inner dust jacket which read ‘This is fiction, but with a difference–for the author, who wishes at present to remain anonymous, has himself lived the life of his hero’. Of course, the book’s first readers would have been unaware of the book’s authorship and so the aligning of correspondences between author and protagonist/narrator would have effectively been impossible. For subsequent readers of the Sherston trilogy,

150

M. GIOVANELLI

however, such connections would have become more likely, although still varying according to the degree of knowledge held about the ‘real life’ Sassoon and how this corresponds to the various events in the Sherston memoirs. In assigning autofictional status to a text, readers thus ‘cross check’ (Lejeune 1989, 12–13) against other knowledge available to them and, as Gibbons (2019a) explains, the assigning of autofictional status is therefore more accurately understood as a readerly construct rather than a characteristic inherent in the text itself. To exemplify this, Gibbons examines how readers’ responses to Elena Ferrante’s autofictional Neapolitan novels (where the narrating character also has the first name Elena) are influenced by ‘text-internal’ (2019a, 408) phenomena such as paratextual matter, continued references to writing and autobiography and parallels in settings, which may cause readers to equate the narrator with a mind-modelled author. Gibbons highlights how readers draw on contextual knowledge about authors and map narrator-character traits onto these so as to assign autobiographical status. Of course, with the Sherston trilogy, there is for the modern reader (if not for Sassoon’s contemporaries) a wealth of extra-textual resources (his published poems, major biographies, Sassoon’s published diaries, literary-critical treatment of his works, and so on) that can be drawn on to find ‘autobiographical trace[s]’ (Gibbons 2019a, 400). The ‘reading strategy’ (Gibbons 2019a, 411) of assigning autofictional status becomes visible in the ways that readers refer to a text. In 1930, Falls labelled MFHM as ‘Fiction’ in contrast to Undertones of War and Good-Bye to All That which were categorized under ‘Reminiscence’, presumably because the latter books made no attempt to distance author with narrator-character. In the second edition of War Books (Falls 1989), where R.J. Wyatt made additional entries of books published from 1930 onwards, MIO is also classified as ‘Fiction’ with the comment (which seems to emphasize the autofictional nature of Sassoon’s work), ‘His [Sassoon’s] books merge fiction with autobiography; how much, one wonders, is the direct experience of that Royal Welch Fusilier, and how much is the fictitious George Sherston’ (1989, 307). Today, publisher marketing and reader reviews across various platforms equally oscillate between categorizing the trilogy as a collection of ‘novels’, ‘memoirs’, ‘semi-autobiographical’, or fully ‘autobiographical’; at times Sherston is explicitly referred to as an authorial construct and at other times, this construct is ignored or dismissed. Marriott (2017), for example in a review of the re-issue of MFHM refers to the book’s final third simply as ‘Sassoon heading off to the war’. 6.4.2

Cognitive Stylistics and Autofiction

The most innovative and developed work on autofiction within cognitive stylistics has been carried out by Gibbons (2018, 2019a, 2019b), who demonstrates that cognitive stylistic methods provide a useful framework for

6

REVISION

151

examining the ways in which fictionality is signposted textually and conceptualized by the reader in order to make judgements about the referentiality of autofictional texts. In Giovanelli (2021a), I build on Gibbons’ (2018), reconfiguration of autofiction through the lens of cognitive deixis, drawing on her work on perceptual deixis, the pronoun system, and degrees of subjectivity. In doing so, I integrate ideas from the Cognitive Grammar’s notion of perspective, a construal phenomenon, which as I discussed in Chapter 2, relates to the viewing arrangement that profiles relationship between subjects of conceptualization (writer/reader or speaker/hearer) and the object of conceptualization (the scene) and concerns matters such as scanning, reference points, vantage points and subjective and objective construal. I specifically examine Sassoon’s rewriting of his 1917 poem ‘Lamentations’ in MIO, an extract from which is reprinted below. Sometime in the second week of February I crossed to Havre on a detestable boat named Archangel. As soon as the boat began to move I was aware of a sense of relief. It was no use worrying about the War now; I was in the Machine again, and all responsibility for my future was in the haphazard control of whatever powers manipulated the British Expeditionary Force. Most of us felt like that, I imagine, and the experience was known as ‘being for it again’. Apart from that, my only recollection of the crossing is that some- one relieved me of my new trench-coat while I was asleep. At nine o’clock in the evening of the next day I reported myself at the 5th Infantry Base Depot at Rouen. The journey from London had lasted thirty-three hours (a detail which I record for the benefit of those who like slow-motion wartime details). The Base Camp was a couple of miles from the town, on the edge of a pine forest. In the office where I reported I was informed that I’d been posted to our Second Battalion; this gave me something definite to grumble about, for I wanted to go where I was already known, and the prospect of joining a strange battalion made me feel more homeless than ever. (Sassoon 1937, 396)

The revision here is interesting since the events described (Sherston/Sassoon coming across a soldier in the middle of a breakdown following the news of the death of his brother) occurred in February 1917 but were not given form by Sassoon until they appeared in ‘Lamentations’ in July 1917, at the height of Sassoon’s own breakdown and admission to Craiglockhart. I argue that whereas ‘Lamentations’ offers an increasingly objective construal of the scene given the poem’s speaker remains largely ‘off-stage’, the version in the Sherston book offers a more complex treatment of events since Sassoon more explicitly objectifies the conceptualizer, Sherston, and in doing so draws greater attention to the act of retelling itself and to Sherston’s/Sassoon’s role as a mediator of the narrative. The autofictional status of the novel is made more complicated by the fact that the narrative is split across different versions of Sherston (present narrator and past selves) so that readerly attention is

152

M. GIOVANELLI

distributed across these different layers of perspective through the explicit signposting as Sherston recounts the events to us, ‘my only recollection’, ‘I imagine’, and ‘I record’ (Sassoon 1937, 396). The reader thus has to keep track of these different ‘Sherstons’ as well as aligning correspondences—or not—in order to mind model the authorial presence, Siegfried Sassoon. In Cognitive Grammar, then, revision is best considered as a kind of reconstrual. In Chapter 2, I differentiated between what I termed writer or speaker-produced reconstruals, where a text producer returns to previous material to reshape it within a new set of textual or contextual parameters, and reader or listener-produced reconstruals, where a text receiver may revise their interpretation of an expression or larger stretch of discourse in reaction to or on re-reading a text. In both cases, reconstruals are subject to particular discourse goals or motivations that a conceptualizer has and are subject to the influence of specific construal constraints. The next section considers the process of revision as reconstrual in more detail.

6.5

Revision as Reconstrual 6.5.1

Literary Revisions

In general, literary revisions may form an integral part of a writer’s drafting process or be the result of editorial work that seeks to provide the best possible version of a text. Sullivan (2013) argues that literary revision is a period-specific phenomenon, suggesting, for example, that it was more a practice adopted by Modernist writers than those, for example, of the nineteenth century. In her book-length treatment of rewriting in the work of George Moore, Chapman (2020, 3) argues that the study of literary rewriting can offer an insight into the creative process itself since ‘individual instances of rewriting can be considered […] as specific linguistic acts’. Studying texts which have been reshaped from existing material offers a comparative methodology which can be used to examine the stylistic differences between initial and final published pieces (see Short and Semino 2008) and the potential interpretative effects that they give rise to. Such an approach is also useful in analyzing published work which is then reshaped at a later date, what Chapman (2020, 3) terms ‘post-publication literary rewriting’ (see also Ho 2012 for specific effects of such work). Literary rewriting can reveal interesting insights regarding the creative process and how these relate to motivations that a writer might have. Although readers have no direct access to a writer’s intentions, they may make inferences to ascribe intentionality to specific communicative acts, discussed elsewhere in this book as ‘mind modelling’ (Stockwell 2009). Furthermore, as Sotirova (2014) argues, any act of rewriting is effectively a signposting of intentionality; to revise is to signal to the reader that a change is purposeful and significant in some way. As Chapman suggests, ‘Examining the results of creativity offers

6

REVISION

153

an indirect but a legitimate means of commenting on the creative act (2020, 22, added emphasis). Sassoon’s rewriting in the Sherston trilogy is not consistently postpublication writing in the sense proposed by Chapman. In some instances, it may be—the rewrite of ‘Lamentations’ in MIO discussed earlier in this chapter is one such example—but more often, Sassoon is rewriting from diary entries and other personal material which had yet to be published (although they are of course available to the modern reader). And, as with ‘Lamentations’, Sassoon is also writing across genres rather than simply revising within an existing format, so his process of rewriting also needs to consider and draw on the affordances and constraints of the new genre. In Giovanelli (2019) I examine this very phenomenon in Sassoon’s work, by looking specifically at episodes of rewriting that took place across time and across genre. I view rewriting in terms of reconstrual as the systematic revision and repackaging of an event within the context of Sassoon’s likely discourse goals at certain moments in time. My analysis centres on the rewriting of a diary entry from April 1917, written while hospitalized in London, in which Sassoon describes a nightmare scene where corpses of soldiers move across the floor towards his bed. This experience was later rewritten into the poem ‘Death’s Brotherhood’ (subsequently republished as ‘Sick Leave’ in Counter-Attack and Other Poems ) in which the ghosts of soldiers visiting the speaker cause intense feelings of guilt. In the second rewriting in MIO, the vision is more explicitly framed as a nightmare and the scene is more subjectively construed with increased modality, past tense forms, and a first person viewpoint that highlight the separation in time from the source material. In both instances, I draw on the notion of construal constraints, identifying the contexts of production (Sassoon at Craiglockhart in the first instance; and the continuation of the autofictional Sherston narrative in the second) as significant influences on the ways we come to understand Sassoon’s acts of rewriting and the creative processes behind them. 6.5.2

A Model of Reconstrual

In the remainder of this chapter, I analyse two examples of rewriting as reconstruals, drawing attention to the specific ways in which the source texts have been reshaped and integrating this textual analysis into a consideration of context, and the autofictional status of the memoirs. The analyses thus offer a way of exemplifying specific instances of what Sassoon came to call his ‘recreative exercise’ (Rothkopf 2016, 195). The model I use for my analysis, following my discussion in Chapter 2, draws on what I term reconstrual dimensions, which relate to the various ways in which conceptualizations may be reworked along each of the four construal phenomena. These are summarized in Table 6.1. In my analyses, I argue that each dimension has two distinct but interrelated strands. First, the reconstrual will have a text effect in that it will reshape, at

154

M. GIOVANELLI

Table 6.1 Reconstrual dimensions Construal phenomena

Reconstrual dimensions

Specificity

Respecifying (granular v schematic construals)

Focus

Rescoping (immediate and maximal scope)

Prominence

Reprofiling (onstage attention)

Refiguring (figure-ground)

Realigning (trajector-landmark)

Perspective

Rescanning (summary v sequence scanning)

Retargeting (reference points)

Relocating (vantage points)

Reviewing (subjective and objective construal)

a local level, the text in some way. This may, of course, be as simple as a revision that makes a section more readable or improves some aspect of the original construal in any number of ways. Second, the reconstrual will, either individually or as part of series of other connected reconstruals in a cumulative manner, have a wider discourse function. In this instance, the reconstrual will serve some wider and often radical discourse goal in so far as it repackages material to profile some previously backgrounded part of the original construal or downplays some aspect or introduces a new perspective into the discourse. The discourse function, then, is a more global phenomenon and specifically related to the contexts in which the reconstrual takes place and which are, in turn, inferred by readers as relevant to understanding the newly revised material. The analyses that complete this chapter focus on two case studies which represent different kinds of rewriting. In the first, I examine Sassoon’s reconstruals of scenes first described in his early war diaries in MFHM , highlighting how these revisions shift the attention afforded to Dick Tiltwood and David Cromlech, characters based on David Thomas and Robert Graves. In the second, I analyse Sassoon’s reworking of the poem ‘Died of Wounds’ into his account of his stay at the New Zealand Hospital in Amiens in MIO.

6.6

Reconstruing Sassoon’s Diary in MFHM 6.6.1

Sherston and the War

As I have previously discussed, it is only the final third of MFHM , Parts 9 and 10, that focuses on Sherston’s experiences in the war. Part 9, ‘In the Army’ describes his time as a Yeomanry trooper, a broken arm which interrupted his service, his joining the Royal Flintshire Fusiliers (Royal Welch Fusiliers), and continuing his training at their depot in Clitherland (Litherland). Sherston’s desire to experience action by joining the RFF is made possible through his connection to Major Huxtable (based on Captain Julian Henry Hay Huxton) who is able to secure him a commission in his old regiment. The narrative of the final part of MFHM centres on the change from pre-war England

6

REVISION

155

to the battle landscapes of France and Sherston’s subsequent transformation from fox-hunting man to infantry officer. The second section of Part 9 moves quickly to set the scene for Part 10, ‘At the Front’, with Sherston outlining his initial meeting and subsequent friendship with Dick Tiltwood, and the announcement of the death of Stephen Collwood, based on Gordon Harbord, Sassoon’s hunting friend but whose fictional death—Harbord actually died in action in August 1917—aligns with that of Sassoon’s brother Hamo. ‘At the Front’ begins with Sherston arriving in France and ends with the death of Dick Tiltwood, highlighting its subsequent impact on Sherston. These are the focuses of the next section. 6.6.2

Arriving in France and Dick Tiltwood

The following section analyses the differences between Sassoon’s diary entry of 17 November 1915 detailing his arrival in France and the description of that journey in MFHM . As previously discussed, Sassoon’s use of his diary to inform his writing would naturally have resulted in some immediate revisions simply due to genre differences: a diary is a private document and so reworkings will necessarily involve some degree of alteration to make that writing public. Such alternations might involve, for example, the playing down of omission of material considered to be too personal or the embellishment of scenes, characters, and events for dramatic and aesthetic reasons, and all of these are common features in the Sherston books; in MFHM , for example, Sherston’s account of his leave in England between 23rd February to 5th March is not covered in Sassoon’s diaries (or at least a record of this coverage has not survived) and across MIO and SP, diary entries that were originally written by Sassoon are presented by Sherston as his own with varying degrees of revision. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Sassoon’s reconstruals of his diary entry in the light of Sassoon’s representation of Dick Tiltwood and Tiltwood’s significance to Sherston. For practical reasons, the diary entry, which is the source material but was published later, is presented first in Table 6.2. I have focused my analysis at the levels of lexis and syntax along the reconstrual dimensions and, again for practical purposes, have ignored any minor punctuation revisions which may have been the result of editorial decisions. Some immediate and obvious differences emerge. The diary entry is clearly shorter and contains more abrupt and single clause sentences (as well as some minor ones), and the simple past tense of the diary entry is replaced with the past perfect to give the impression of greater temporal remoteness. A more significant change is the introduction of the first person plural pronoun ‘we’ into Sherston’s account. The pronoun has the explicit referents of Sherston and Dick Tiltwood (with other, unnamed soldiers implied) and thus gives rise to a more subjective construal of the scene since Sherston as a conceptualizing presence is placed onstage and construed objectively. This instance of realigning also makes more visible the relationship between trajector and landmark since instead of an ellipted/implied subject, the first person plural

156

M. GIOVANELLI

Table 6.2 Comparison of accounts of Sassoon and Sherston arriving in France Diary (Sassoon 1983, 19)

MFHM (Sassoon 1937, 244)

November 17 1.15 Victoria. Got to Folkestone pier 6. Boat, Victoria, sailed about 7 in bright moonlight; for Boulogne. Changed course after an hour and reached Calais 9.30. Last hour rough. Went ashore about 1 and slept on floor in hotel

[…] For the first time in our lives we had crossed the Channel. We had crossed it in a bright moonlight on a calm sea—Dick and I sitting together on a tarpaulin cover in the bow of a boat, which was happily named Victoria. Long after midnight, we had left Folkestone; had changed our course in an emergency avoidance of Boulogne (caused by the sinking of a hospital ship, we heard afterwards), had stared at Calais harbour, and seen sleepy French faces in the blear beginnings of November daylight

pronoun ‘we’ now has attentional prominence at the head of a number of clauses. The more subjective construal with its framing device means that the reader is positioned to construct and follow a series of nestled viewpoints: ‘Sassoon observing Sherston observing Sherston observing the scene’ rather the more straightforward objective construal of the diary entry. In keeping with the affordances of the genre, the reconstrual provides greater initial co-text: the chapter opens with Sherston recalling leaving Clitherland and a ‘strained twenty-four hours in London’ (Sassoon 1937, 244) and includes a flashback to recall Aunt Evelyn and Canon Tiltwood saying goodbye to Sherston and Dick at Victoria. Equally, the part and section headings, and graphology (the initial letter of the first word of the chapter is a drop cap) explicitly signals, through its design, the objectification of the subject of conceptualization. The major change from diary to memoir is the inclusion of Dick Tiltwood. Based on David Thomas, whom Sassoon had first met at Litherland and to whom he had become close. Dick is at the centre of a process of refiguring in which he becomes the prominent character and, I will argue, the thematic focus of the scene described in MFHM . In MFHM Sassoon presents the crossing to France as an explicit joint experience; David Thomas did indeed cross with Sassoon to France, but he is not mentioned in Sassoon’s diary and indeed does not appear there until an entry of 5th December. Dick’s inclusion in MFHM appears through a series of reconstruals along different dimensions. As well as those already mentioned (reviewing and refiguring), the scene is respecified as it is fleshed out and described in greater granularity. At one level, this occurs through the more elaborate narrative framing, ‘For the first time in our lives we had crossed the Channel’, which rationalizes the event’s importance and tellability as well as evaluative comment such as the outlining of the reason for the diversion away from Boulogne to Calais. At a more local level, specific instances of more granular description provide a more microscopic

6

REVISION

157

construal of the scene. These occur in the form of prepositional phrases ‘on a calm sea’ and ‘On a tarpaulin cover in the bow of a boat’. The respecifying elaborates the scene through the inclusion of noun phrases that are modified to provide details of weather, the texture/fabric of the cover, and the location within the boat. In this description, ‘Dick and I’ assume trajector status at the head of a non-finite clause, which rescans the scene through the imposition of summary scanning, and internally deviates from an established pattern of sequence scanning to provide an intimate ‘close-up’ view of the two men. These discrete reconstruals accumulate to provide a more elaborate and visual conceptualization of the scene, centred on Sherston and Dick and their experience of crossing the Channel. Indeed, the repeated use of ‘crossed’ which profiles the whole path of movement drawing on a source-pathgoal image schema, draws attention to the intermediate parts of the journey, whereas Sassoon’s diary had simply outlined the significance of the start and end points. Two other reconstruals are also worth highlighting. The first is the shift in timeframe that Sassoon employs in MFHM where the boat journey sets off from Folkestone ‘Long after midnight’ whereas in his diary entry Sassoon had noted that they had ‘sailed about 7’. The reasons for this revision are unknown (it may be, of course, that Sassoon simply got the time wrong in his original account of the event) but the resulting construal for the reader is, in my reading at least, one that foregrounds the significance of midnight and its associations: mystery, adventure, darkness, and intimacy. The second revision is an omission: there is no mention of the rough journey or uncomfortable hotel stay of the diary entry, instead MFHM ends with from the vantage point of the collective Sherston and Dick staring out across to the Calais harbour and seeing ‘sleepy French faces’. The cumulative effect of these reconstruals in MFHM seems to me to serve a wider discourse function in terms of foregrounding Dick’s personal significance to Sherston at this stage of the book. In a second, later reconstraul of a diary entry, Sherston recounts visiting the town of Amiens and its Cathedral. Sassoon did visit Amiens in January 1916 and his diary entry offers a very detailed account of the Cathedral’s architecture, the sounds of the organ and choir within it, and the various locals and visiting soldiers he sees inside, although crucially, there is no mention of David Thomas. In MFHM , however, the scene is refigured so that the description of the Cathedral is considerably shorter and less poetic than in the diary entry and the emphasis instead is on Dick accompanying Sherston. The reconstrual in MFHM places Dick as the attentional figure against the ground of the stained-glass windows and sound of the organ and choir, ‘I glanced at Dick and thought what a young Galahad he looked (a Galahad who had got his school colours for cricket)’ (Sassoon 1937, 258). The relative attention afforded to Dick Tiltwood may be interpreted within the discourse context of Sassoon’s own relationship with David Thomas. The reconstrual of Dick as a key figure in Sherston’s early Army life hints at a more personal, intimate affection and importance for Sherston at a time of important

158

M. GIOVANELLI

transition from the idyll of the Weald of Kent to the new landscape of France. Although the relationship between Sassoon and Thomas remained a platonic one (Thomas was heterosexual), Sassoon’s biographers, for example, generally agree that Sassoon was in love with his fellow soldier (Egremont 2005, 75; Moorcroft Wilson 2013, 114–15). Although there are possible reasons why Sassoon might want to downplay and conceal aspects in a published account, one possible interpretation of the discourse function of the reconstruals is that they allow Sassoon to emphasize the intimacy between him and David Thomas within the ontological distortions afforded by autofiction as a genre. There is also, I think, a second discourse function, specifically related to how Dick’s death is treated in MFHM compared to Sassoon’s diary entry on hearing about the death of David Thomas. In the latter, Sassoon writes So, after lunch, I escaped to the woods above Sailly-Laurette, and grief had its way with me in the sultry thicket, while the mare champed her bit and stamped her feet, tethered to a tree: and the little shrill notes of birds came piping down the hazels, and magpies flew overhead, and all was peace, except for the distant matter and boom of guns. And I lay there under the smooth bole of a beech-tree, wondering, and longing for the bodily presence that was so fair. Grief can be beautiful, when we find something worthy to be mourned. Today I knew what it means to find the soul washed pure with tears, and the load of death was lifted from my heart. So I wrote his name in chalk on the beech-tree stem, and left a rough garland of ivy there, and a yellow primrose for his yellow hair and kind grey eyes, my dear, my dear. (Sassoon 1983, 45)

Sassoon also describes Thomas’ funeral elaborately and poetically in his diary, ‘And tonight I saw his shrouded form laid in the earth’ (1983, 45). In MFHM , however, although Sherston gives Dick’s death a backstory that does not appear in the diaries, the personal reaction that appears in the diary entry is missing and he describes the burial in a largely schematic way, ‘A sack was lowered into a hole in the ground. The sack was Dick. I knew Death then’ (Sassoon 1937, 274). In the context of MFHM , Dick’s death becomes the motivation for Sherston to leave his Transport Officer role and is thus presented as a turning point that acts as a platform for the more horrific descriptions of war that follow in MIO. The shift from the emphasis on personal affection (Dick crossing the Channel and at the Cathedral) to the thematic (Dick’s death as springboard for Sherston’s development into MIO) is captured then as an instance of thematic rescoping. Taken together, these reconstruals provide a way of accounting for Dick’s representation in MFHM . Across the book, his significance shifts so that attentional prominence is first on the intimacy he shares with Sherston, and then on his function across the trilogy more broadly. It may be, of course, that Sassoon reworked his diary entries in light of his later reflections on Thomas’s

6

REVISION

159

significance to him in the story of his war experience more broadly (see Marsh Penton 2021, 12), reflections which would not of course have been made in his diary entries which capture the dynamics of the relationship of the two men as they occurred. And the raw emotion of the loss of Thomas may be read, in purely pragmatic terms, as a distraction from the narrative trajectory that Sherston needs to take, although he does recall Dick at dramatic moments in MIO: for example at Clitherland on the verge of returning to France in 1917 where Sherston recalls the ‘shining evidence of youth in his [Tiltwood’s] face’ (Sassoon 1937, 393); and on a trip to Heilly in March of that year where he fondly remembers ‘going there with Dick Tiltwood, just a year ago’ (Sassoon 1937, 411). 6.6.3

Omitting David Cromlech

A week after arriving in France, Sassoon (1983, 20) wrote in his diary ‘Arrived Béthune 10.15 and found Battalion in billets there’. In MFHM , Sherston also recounts his arrival at Béthune, ‘We got to Béthune by half-past ten: I am well aware that the statement is, in itself, an arid though an accurate one’ (Sassoon 1937, 245). For some reason, Sassoon thus decides to alter the time so that Sherston arrives at Béthune fifteen minutes after Sassoon actually did. There seems no obvious reason why Sassoon would choose to reconstrue the event in this way, and it may well be that it is so insignificant a change that most readers, even modern ones with knowledge of the diaries, would hardly notice. As a modern reader, however, it is tempting to read this difference as an explicit autofictional strategy, where Sassoon attempts to distance himself, albeit subtly, from his fictional self, and to recognize the distancing as an overt attempt to draw attention to the fuzziness around the relationship between Sassoon and Sherston. The revision is made even more interesting since, given that Sherston has already indicated that the information that he has provided is ‘accurate’, he again directly addresses the reader two pages later. To revert to my earlier fact, “got to Béthune by half-past ten”, it may well be asked how I can state the time of arrival so confidently. My authority is the diary which I began to keep when I left England. Yes; I kept a diary, and intend to quote from it (though the material which it contained is meagre. But need this be amplified?... (Sassoon 1937, 247–48)

Once again, the time is altered. In this instance, Sherston refers to his diary as an ‘authority’; as a witness of direct experience, the diary (fictional or not) mitigates against the passing of time and the failure of memory. As with the previous revision, the change in time may well be interpreted in several ways, possibly either simply a mistake, a conscious ploy to maintain some distance between Sassoon and Sherston, or else drawing attention to the war memoir

160

M. GIOVANELLI

which, some ten years away from immediate experience, rewrites time and reconstrues the past in a subtle way. Whichever way the revision is read, what follows in MFHM is clearly a more carefully crafted reconstrual of a series of events that Sassoon outlined in his diary between 25 and 29 November 1915. Table 6.3 presents a comparison of these entries (again placed in the left-hand column) and those from MFHM . The corresponding pairs of texts are numbered for ease of reference. Sassoon’s replicates the form of the diary in MFHM although the dates are omitted (again I read this as a strategy to create a sense of distance between Sassoon and Sherston). At a micro-level there are some interesting reconstruals, some of which appear to simply offer better descriptions of the scene but some also repackage those descriptions in interesting ways. In pair 1, for example, Sassoon tidies up the double noun phrase by replacing Festubert village; a ruined place with ‘Festubert, a ruined village’, the respecifying of ‘village’ for the more schematic ‘place’ in the second noun phrase may draw attention to the human cost of war. Other changes may be read as possible errors (three-quarters of a mile’ becoming ‘half a mile’) or corrections (tram-lines’ becoming ‘railway-lines’). The shift in tense in MFHM , where ‘Flares go’ and ‘finally emerge’ are relocated to ‘Flares went’ to position the narrating voice looking back and so maintain consistency with the rest of the extract, occurs with an additional non-finite clause which both respecifies the scene and temporarily imposes summary scanning with the perceived proximity associated with participle forms (again here the effect is largely an aesthetic one). And an interesting realignment in which the active voice ‘where we are digging new trenches’ is reconstrued to shift the trajector-landmark relationship through the agentless passive ‘new trenches […] are being dug’, invites the reader to divert attention to the trenches themselves and their emerging structure within the landscape rather than the soldiers responsible for digging them. Here again, I interpret ‘high-command breastworks’, placed in direct quotation marks, as an autofictional strategy. A similar reconstrual occurs in pair 2. ‘Go out again’ is rescanned to the summative noun phrase ‘Working-party again’, the change here probably one of consistency since ‘working-party’ is used across the other extracts. The entry in MFHM is also relocated in terms of the temporal position of the narrator (again possible for reasons of consistency): ‘get soup’ becomes ‘got soup’. And ‘The moon shines’ is rescanned as ‘with the shining moon’, which promotes a sense of proximity and ongoing detail to the conceived scene. The other revision in this pairing is the omission of ‘inhuman forms going to and from inhuman tasks’, again conceivably just a part of his original construal that Sassoon did not like. The most striking reconstrual, however, occurs in pair 3. Sassoon’s diary is an intriguing document because it contains details of his first meeting with Robert Graves; two-thirds of the diary entry recounts Sassoon’s initial meeting with and feelings about his fellow Royal Welch Fusilier. The meeting with Graves (recast in the Sherston trilogy as David Cromlech), however, is omitted

6

REVISION

161

Table 6.3 Comparison of diary entries and accounts in MFHM Diary (Sassoon 1983, 20–21)

MFHM (Sassoon 1937, 248)

1.

November 25 Went on working-party 3–10.30 p.m. Marched to Festubert village; a ruined place, shelled to shreds. About 4.30, in darkness and rain, started up three-quarters of a mile of light tram-lines through marsh, with sixty men. They carried hurdles up the communication-trenches about three-quarters of a mile, which took two hours. Flares go up frequently, a few shells go high overhead: the trenches are very wet; finally emerge in a place behind the first and second-line trenches, where we are digging new trenches with high-command-breastworks

“Thursday. Went on working party, 3 to 10.30 p.m. Marched to Festubert, a ruined village, shelled to bits. About 4.30, in darkness and rain, started up half a mile of light railway-lines through marsh, with sixty men. Then they carried hurdles up the communication trenches, about three-quarters of a mile, which took two hours. Flares went up frequently; a few shells, high overhead, and exploding far behind us. The trenches are very wet. Finally emerged at a place behind the firstand second-line trenches, where new trenches (with ‘high-command breastworks’) are being dug

2.

November 27 Go out again, starting 9.45 p.m. in brilliant moonlight. Dig from 12 to 2. Home 4.15. Men get soup in ruined house at Festubert. The moon shines through matchwood skeleton rafters of roofs. Up behind the trenches the frostbound morasses and ditches and old earthworks in the moonlight with dusky figures filing across the open, hobbling to avoid slipping, inhuman forms going to and from inhuman tasks

“Saturday. Working-party again. Started 9.45 p.m. in bright moonlight and iron frost. Dug 12–2. Men got soup in ruined house in Festubert, with the moon shining through matchwood skeleton rafters. Up behind the trenches, the frost-bound morasses and ditches and old earthworks in moonlight, with dusky figures filing across the open, hobbling to avoid slipping. Home 4.15

3.

November 28 Walked into Béthune for tea with Robert Graves, a young poet, captain in Third Battalion and very much disliked. An interesting creature, overstrung and self-conscious, a defier of convention. At night went up again to Festubert with working-party. Dug from 12 to 2 a.m. Very cold. Home 4.15

“Sunday. Same as Saturday. Dug 12–2. Very cold

4.

November 29 Went with working-party 3 o’clock. Wet day. Awful mud up in trenches. Tried to dig till 7.30 and came home soaked. Home 9.45. A shocking night for the men, whose billets are wretched

“Monday. Went with working-party at 3 p.m. Wet day. Awful mud. Tried to dig till 7.30, and came home soaked. Back 9.45. Beastly night for the men, whose billets are wretched”

162

M. GIOVANELLI

entirely from MFHM and instead the day’s activities are described as ‘Same as Saturday’, before the repetition of ‘Very cold’ with ‘Home 4.15’ moved back to the ‘Saturday’ entry. The sequence ends with some minor revisions in pair 4: the fragmentation of syntax from ‘Awful mud up in trenches’ to ‘Awful mud’ (ironically this appears to make Sherston’s account appear more ‘diary-like’); and two lexical substitutions, ‘Home 9.45’ to ‘Back 9.45’, and ‘A shocking night’ to ‘Beastly night’, probably made for aesthetic purposes. As with the attention afforded to David Thomas/Dick Tiltwood, Sassoon’s reworking of the four-day period in late November to omit details of his meeting with Robert Graves (arguably one of the most important literary meetings of the First World War) is significant. Graves was also close to David Thomas and despite being explicitly mentioned in Sassoon’s diary as being present at Thomas’ burial, ‘Robert Graves, beside me, with his white whimsical face twisted and grieving’ (Sassoon 1983, 45), Cromlech does not appear in the reconstrual in MFHM , nor indeed at any point in that first book. His first appearance in the Sherston trilogy is not until a quarter of the way through MIO where he is portrayed as ‘big and impulsive’ and someone with whom Sherston admits to being friends although he indicates that ‘somehow or other I have hitherto left him out of my story’ (Sassoon 1937, 354).6 The omission of Cromlech is clearly striking and Sassoon’s strategy, whatever might have influenced it, of compressing the accounts of those two days into one has the effect of denying a significant part of his personal story to Sherston. Delaying Cromlech’s arrival in the Sherston narrative also results in attention being singularly afforded to Dick Tiltwood and his impact on Sherston being accentuated. Of course, readers in 1928 with no access to Sassoon’s diaries and limited awareness of Sassoon’s life (particularly given the initial anonymous publishing) would not have paid any attention to what now appears to be an important aspect of Sassoon’s reconstrual in MFHM . Equally, it is arguably the case that most modern readers of MFHM would be unaware of the omission of Cromlech unless they both are familiar with Sassoon’s diaries and choose to sit and read them side by side as I have done for the purposes of this chapter. The significance of the omission of Cromlech then rests in my own readerly awareness of the kind of extra-textual knowledge that I examined in Chapter 5, this time framed within the parameters of what I see as a deliberate autofictional strategy both perceived intentionally in my mind-modelling of Sassoon as the authorial presence behind MFHM , and the connections I make across a range of extra-textual information that affects my experience of reading the two extracts together. My own response is inescapably grounded in background knowledge such as the fact that Sassoon and Graves had argued since the end of the war and the two had become increasingly distant due to their obviously differing literary tastes and philosophies, and aspects of their personal lives; Sassoon was suspicious, for example, of Graves’ relationship with the American writer Laura Riding. I know that an argument over a book review and, following the death of Thomas Hardy in January

6

REVISION

163

1928, a letter from Graves which suggested that Sassoon might want to write a commercial biography of Thomas Hardy (instead of Graves who had been invited to do so), angered Sassoon. And my reading of an editorial note by Paul O’Prey in Graves’ published letters tells me that Sassoon and Graves did not communicate with each other for over two years following that disagreement (Graves 1982, 183). I also know that Sassoon was working on parts 9 and 10 of MFHM in March 1928 and so it seems plausible to me in making sense of the omission that his anger towards Graves was responsible for his radical reconstrual of those events at the beginning of his time in France, even if Cromlech is later brought back into the Sherston narrative in MIO where his role in supporting Sherston following his declaration against the war is highlighted, just as Graves had done for Sassoon in 1917. And, I interpret this specific reconstrual within the wider context of Sassoon and Graves’ relationship, their heated correspondence following the publication of Good-Bye to All That , later references to each other in correspondence with others7 and in interviews, and even more broadly within the context of what to me seems a very sad but probably inevitable story of two close friends (and one of the most significant literary relationships of the First World War) falling out. All of these represent a range of perceived contexts (situational, discourse, and conceptual-cognitive) that I draw on as important resources to guide my reading and provide a rich sense of significance to the rescoping of attention that I have discussed in this section, a reconstrual which I have interpreted as being subjective, selective, and constrained by particular discourse goals and personal motivations.

6.7

Reconstruing ‘Died of Wounds’

MIO covers the period from when Sassoon attended the Army training school in Flixécourt8 in March 1916 until the medical board in July 2017 from which he was sent to Craiglockhart. Due to its time frame, Sassoon is able to draw more extensively than he had done in MFHM on a number of his poems as source material alongside his diary entries and war correspondence. ‘Died of Wounds’ was written in July 1916 and recounts an incident in the New Zealand Hospital at Amiens where Sassoon had been admitted with a high temperature. The poem is one of a number, initially published in either The Old Huntsman and Other Poems or Counter-Attack and Other Poems , which Sassoon draws on and reconstrues in MIO. These are outlined in Table 6.4. Sassoon generally reworked the material in his poems to fit into the broader pattern of the Sherston narrative and events are frequently expanded and given a broader context so that the overall scene is presented in a more complex way. In my comparative analysis that follows, I highlight the ways in which the reconstrual in MIO operates both to downplay some aspects of ‘Died of Wounds’ and to more sharply define others. The two versions are presented in Table 6.5.

164

M. GIOVANELLI

Table 6.4 Reconstrued poems in MIO Poem

Reconstrual in MIO

‘The Kiss’ (written in March 1916 based on bayonet training at the Army School in Flixécourt)

Built into Sherston’s account of adjusting to being at the Front and reflecting on death (1937, 288–90)

‘Died of Wounds’ (written in July 1916 in Oxford based on an incident at New Zealand Hospital in Amiens)

Built into Sherston’s account of being hospitalized in Amiens (1937, 365–66)

‘Lamentations’ (written in the summer of 1917, based on an incident in Rouen in February 1917)

An extended account of the incident where Sherston sees a crying soldier at the Base (1937, 396–97)

‘Base Details’ (written in March 1917) and following extended diary entries/vignettes (‘Reinforcements at Rouen’ and ‘Lunch on Sunday in Rouen’) on Sassoon’s time in Rouen

Extended across two separate stories: the Medical Officer and Major who talk to Sherston following a bout of German measles; Sherston’s visit to the Hôtel de la Poste in Rouen where he sees various senior officers (1937, 401–3; 405–6)

‘The Optimist’ (written March/April 1917)

Built into an account of Sherston getting his hair cut in Rouen before he visits the Hôtel de la Poste. A Captain in the next Barber’s chair is given the voice of the ‘Optimist’ (1937, 403)

‘The Rear-Guard’ (written April 1917), a first draft of which appears in a diary entry of 19th April

A shorter version appears as part of Sherston’s account of the Hindenburg trench (1937, 437)

‘Supreme Sacrifice’ (written June 1917 at Chapelwood Manor) and also outlined in the vignette ‘A Conversation’ about Lady Brassey in his diary

Built into an extended account of Sherston’s stay at Nutwood Manor and his conversations with Lady Asterix (Lady Brassey) (1937, 461–70)

‘To Any Dead Officer’ (written June 1917) addressed to E.L. Orme

Built into the Nutwood Manor narrative to explicitly mention the deaths of Ormand (Orme) and Dunning (Conning) (1937, 470)

‘Does It Matter?’ (written September/October 1917)

Built into an account of a lecture that Sherston attends on trench warfare while on sick leave in London. Among the audience, Sherston sees soldiers with amputated legs, some who are blind, and some who have ‘tortured nerves’ (1937, 459)

‘Died of Wounds’, originally titled ‘In Hospital’ and a much longer poem which Sassoon edited down to three quatrains, offers a precise, bleak and dramatic portrait of suffering in a way that comes to typify Sassoon’s war poetry from mid-1916 onwards (see Chapter 3). Witten while at Oxford in August 1916, the poem gives attentional prominence to the anonymous soldier whose physical condition is figured at both the beginning and end

6

REVISION

165

Table 6.5 Comparison of ‘Died of Wounds’ and account in MIO ‘Died of Wounds’

MIO (Sassoon 1937, 365–66)

His wet white face and miserable eyes Brought nurses to him more than groans and sighs: But hoarse and low and rapid rose and fell His troubled voice: he did the business well.

A breath of wind stirred the curtains, blowing them inward from the tall windows with a rustling sigh. The wind came from the direction of the Somme, and I could hear the remote thudding of the guns. Everyone in the ward seemed to be asleep except the boy whose bed had screens around it. The screens were red and a light glowed through them. Ever since he was brought in he’d been continually calling to the nurse on duty. Throughout the day this had gradually got on everyone’s nerves, for the ward was already full of uncontrollable gasps and groans. Once I had caught a glimpse of his white face and miserable eyes. Whatever sort of wound he’d got, he was making the most of it, had been the opinion of the man next to me (who had himself got more than he wanted, in both legs). But he must be jolly bad, I thought now, as the Sister came from behind the screen again. His voice went on, in the low, rapid, even tone of delirium. Sometimes I could catch what he said, troubled and unhappy and complaining. Someone called Dicky was on his mind, and he kept on crying out to Dicky. ‘Don’t go out, Dicky; they snipe like hell!’ And then, ‘Curse the wood…. Dicky, you fool, don’t go out!’… All the horror of the Somme attacks was in that raving; all the darkness and the dreadful daylight…. I watched the Sister come back with a white-coated doctor; the screen glowed comfortingly; soon the disquieting voice became inaudible and I fell asleep. Next morning the screens had vanished; the bed was empty, and ready for someone else

The ward grew dark; but he was still complaining And calling out for ‘Dickie’. ‘Curse the Wood! ‘It’s time to go. O Christ, and what’s the good? ‘We’ll never take it, and it’s always raining.’ I wondered where he’d been; then heard him shout, ‘They snipe like hell! O Dickie, don’t go out… I fell asleep … Next morning he was dead; And some Slight Wound lay smiling on the bed.

of the first stanza, ‘His wet white face’, ‘His troubled voice’. The speaker’s attitude towards his injuries is ambivalent; ‘he did the business well’ might suggest that the soldier’s behaviour is performative, or else it might highlight his position as a prototypical sufferer. The second stanza outlines a nighttime scene with over half the stanza containing the soldier’s direct speech as he calls out to ‘Dickie’. Described by Robert Graves (1982, 70) as ‘the best stanza in this book [The Old Huntsman], probably in any book of war poems […] It knocks me more every time’, the soldier relives the horrific moments of the past in the present context of the hospital bed, which in turn are relayed to us afterwards by the speaker. As Minogue and Palmer (2018, 71) point out, the poem’s manipulation of time and the soldier’s cries to Dickie to not go out are shocking since ‘the gap in time means that Dickie has gone out to whatever fate’ (original emphasis). In the third stanza more direct speech, narratorial comment, and reporting clauses construe the scene more explicitly subjectively since the conceptualizer-speaker is placed onstage and objectified through the

166

M. GIOVANELLI

use of the first person pronoun ‘I’. The ending of the poem explicitly informs the reader that the soldier died and that a new occupant has arrived, ‘And some Slight Wound lay smiling on the bed’. Construed as a clear contrast to the ‘dead’ soldier, the speaker’s evaluation of ‘Slight Wound’, capitalized to metonymically refer to the soldier through his injury, nonetheless could equally be interpreted as trivializing the new patient. The reconstrual in MIO is more complicated. The brutal depiction of the soldier of the poem remains but the incident is embellished and integrated into the broader context of the Sherston narrative. The extract in MIO begins with a description of the wind from the Somme outside and the ‘remote thudding of the guns’ that Sherston can hear. The rescoping and refiguring of attentional prominence to the hostile environment of the war provides a context for the description of the injured soldier that follows. In turn, Sherston as narratorconceptualizer is consistently construed more objectively and placed onstage through the extended use of the first person pronoun ‘I’ as clausal trajector: ‘I could hear the remote thudding of the guns’ ‘I had caught a glimpse of his white face and miserable eyes’ (an almost echo of the noun phrases in the first line of ‘Died of Wounds’). ‘He must be jolly bad, I thought now’ ‘Sometimes, I could catch’. ‘I watched the sister come back’.

The soldier is respecified through the use of the noun phrase ‘the boy’, which replaces the pronoun in ‘Died of Wounds’. Rescoping brings the boy’s backstory into the immediate scope of the discourse along with a further manipulation of time so that events are presented in a non-chronological fashion and retargeted so that the target of the initial discourse reference point of the ward at night is an earlier one in the day and equivalent to the narrative events of the first stanza of ‘Died of Wounds’. The time shifts back to night through Sherston’s use of ‘now’ as he sees the Sister coming from being the screen. A more finely granular description of the soldier’s bed with its ‘screens of red and a light glowed through them’ is provided and even the evaluation of the soldier’s ‘gasps and groans’ (replacing ‘groans and sighs’) is embellished and respecified so that Sherston assigns the evaluation of the soldier’s performativity to ‘the man next to me’. The final revisions occur towards the end of the extract. First, the direct speech of ‘Died of Wounds’ is modified, initially in the revised spelling of ‘Dicky’ and then a reprofiling of the soldier’s words beginning with a line from the final stanza, where the original clauses are reversed ‘Don’t go out, Dicky; they snipe like hell!’ followed by ‘Curse the wood…Dicky, you fool, don’t go out’ which takes a line from the second stanza, adds in ‘you fool’ and then repeats ‘don’t go out’. Dickie’s two final lines from the second stanza are omitted entirely. The direct speech, positioned within the dramatic ‘Don’t go out’ in MIO thus profiles and refigures Dicky as the centre point

6

REVISION

167

of the soldier’s cries; the backstory, hinted at in the second half of the second stanza in ‘Died of Wounds’ is left as thematic ground through omission. The second, and possibly most notable, revision concerns the ending of the extract. Following Dicky’s speech, the scene is construed more subjectively with Sherson’s evaluation in his brutal ‘All the horror of the Somme attacks was in that raving’ and description as ‘I watched the Sister come back with a white-coated doctor’. The ‘I fell asleep’ of ‘Died of Wounds’ is repeated but the extract ends with a description of the ‘empty’ bed the next morning, ‘ready for someone else’. By choosing not to explicitly indicate that the soldier had died, Sassoon instead invites the reader to infer his fate. Whether the reconstrual provides a more disturbing and effective representation of the horrific scene will depend on the reader, of course, but it seems to me that Sherston’s lack of explicit reference to the death of soldier is once again significant. The distribution of attention across these accounts can be explained as instances of attentional windowing and conceptual splicing that I first discussed in Chapter 5. As in that chapter, I scale up the original analytical apparatus (Talmy 2000), following Harrison (2014). The narrative section at the end of each of the two versions can be broadly understood as existing along an open path event frame (Talmy 2000, 265) with initial, medial, and final points along a source-path-goal image schema, which outline a progression, in this case a series of events through time following the speaker/Sherston falling asleep. A. Soldier dies/seen as dead B. The bed is empty and ready for someone else C. Another patient is in the bed. The narrative, conceived as a path, may have various kinds of windowing and gapping imposed on it by linguistic forms. ‘Died of Wounds’ and MIO differ in how attention is distributed across the scene in terms of which aspects of A, B, and C are profiled and therefore the kinds of initial, medial and final windowing and gapping that are apportioned. ‘Died of Wounds’: MIO:

initial and final windowing; medial gapping. medial windowing; initial and final gapping.

The distinction between the two versions may therefore be read as a difference in what is profiled. ‘Died of Wounds’ was later described by Sassoon (1945, 19) as displaying ‘graphic sincerity’ but the medial windowing in MIO, removing the explicit shock of the soldier’s death and replacement with another and instead positioning the reader to infer both the death and inevitable recycling of pain and suffering as patients arrive and leave (either alive or dead) captures the day-to-day business of a war hospital in a more expansive manner and matches the ongoing process of reflection through writing that Sherston recounts to his readers.

168

M. GIOVANELLI

The overall reconstrual in MIO needs to be read in terms of the discourse context of the novel and of the Sherston trilogy. MIO is the middle book of the trilogy and the events at Amiens occur at a critical time marking the end of Sherston’s initiation into the Front and the Somme in July 1916, outlined in the long and demanding Part 4 ‘Battle’. The hospital incident occurs just after Sherston hears of the deaths of Allgood and Cromlech (the news of Cromlech’s death is later reported as erroneous) and, reflecting on the loss of men at the Somme battle fears that ‘Sooner or later I should probably get killed too’ (Sassoon 1937, 365). Across MIO, Sherston appears to be torn between the different worlds of home and the Front. His own perspective on the war gradually unfolds and matures across the novel’s parts, each focusing on a significant set of self-contained episodes. The journey that Sherston undergoes is thus his ‘own story [an attempt to shows its [war’s] effect on a somewhat solitary-minded young man’ (1937, 291), the limited viewpoint at the beginning increasingly opened up through action, deaths, and reflection as he changes his attitude towards the war across his time in France. At Clitherland, waiting to return to France, Sherston emphasizes the dramatic, performative aspect of this journey. It was natural that I should remember Flixécourt. Those four weeks had kept their hold on my mind, and they now seemed like the First Act of a play—a light-hearted First Act which was unwilling to look ahead from its background of sunlight and the glorying beauty of beech forests. Life at the Army School, with its superb physical health, had been like a prelude to some really conclusive sacrifice of high-spirited youth. Act II had carried me along to the fateful First of July. Act III had sent me home to think things over. (Sassoon 1937, 394)

In labelling the stages of his experience as acts, Sherston draws attention to the search for meaning inherent in his narrative; his story is a quest for identity, but it is also a way of telling, of stylizing, so that the events as told become repackaged in a way that suits the grander narrative design and its narrator’s identity formation. Part of this repackaging therefore must involve some degree of artistic licence, not least because the past is not easy to recapture, as Sherston himself emphasizes towards the opening of the novel. Moments like these are unreproduceable when I look back and try to recover their living texture. One’s mind eliminates boredom and physical discomfort, retaining an incomplete impression of a strange, intense, and unique experience. (Sassoon 1930, 45)

Sherston’s awareness of the situational aspect of memory and of the difficulty of recovering the past is highlighted across MIO, with numerous references to the problems inherent in writing a war memoir from a new and distant vantage

6

REVISION

169

point. Sherston highlights the writing of a memoir as a process of reconstruction and concomitant identity formation. The trilogy provides a neat example of what Singer (2004) terms ‘narrative identity’, which recognizes that in life stories more generally, individuals draw on and integrate different senses of the self both synchronically and diachronically to present a meaningful sense of the self and a ‘temporally organized whole’ (McAdams 2001, 102). The autofictional nature of the Sherston trilogy, of course, offers both affordances and complications. At once autobiography and fiction, the narrative stance taken by Sassoon allows for a significant degree of selectivity in projecting his ‘organized whole’ through the omission of certain aspects of his life (e.g. his sexual and literary selves) and embellishing or downplaying others (e.g. the significance of Tiltwood/Thomas and Cromlech/Graves). The ‘degree of experimentation’ (Dix 2018, 3) afforded by the autofictional stance thus allows for various degrees of re-assigning prominence or discourse reprofiling that I have discussed in this chapter. Sassoon had originally intended to include Sherston’s time at Slateford in MIO but, weary of the story, decided to end the book with Sherston’s arrival there, informing Blunden of his decision ‘to spare myself the torment of writing my epilogue about Craiglockhart’ (Rothkopf 2016, 278–79). The story is taken up again in Sherston’s Progress , the final and shortest book of the trilogy, which does cover Sherston’s time at Slateford (Rivers is the only character in the trilogy to retain the name of their real-life counterpart) as well as his subsequent time in Ireland, Palestine and back at in France. The book ends with Sherston being visited by Rivers in hospital in London 1918. Significantly, the end of Sherston’s narrative coincides with the end of Sassoon’s direct involvement in the war.9 In a letter to Michael Thorpe in 1966, Sassoon (1976, 14) expressed his admiration of the Sherston trilogy, stating that ‘I am inclined to think that the war poems (the significant and successful ones) will end up as mere appendices to the matured humanity of the Memoirs’. The reconstruals of experience are thus Sassoon’s attempts, through his autofictional alias George Sherston, to present a unified and coherent narrative that simultaneously engages with and remains at a distance from the past.

Notes 1. In a letter to Edmund Blunden on 19 March 1921, Sassoon writes ‘I must try to enlarge the autobiography. But I am terribly afraid of blathering loosely on about intimate irrelevancies’. Rothkopf (2016, 11) suggests that this refers to MFHM but Sassoon’s diary entry of 22 March 1921 (following a response from Blunden) indicates that the discussion was instead about ‘autobiographical poems’ (Sassoon 1981, 51). It is clear, however, that Sassoon had been contemplating writing a prose memoir/autobiography for some time before MFHM was started: see for example, Sassoon (1981, 53; 1985, 234). 2. See Sassoon (1981, 15–22) for an extract from the manuscript.

170

M. GIOVANELLI

3. Hynes lists several key texts published between 1926 and 1931 as examples of these ‘classic books’; interestingly he includes Edmund Blunden’s 1931 edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems (Owen 1931). 4. In response to the incident and to the comment that he had been critical of his mother’s behaviour, Sassoon remarked, ‘what you did was to exploit (and betray) something private in order to add a sensational page to your book’ (Graves 1982, 207). Graves later said he was ‘ashamed’ (1982, 220) of some of the reporting in the book of events and situations which he admitted was based on hearsay. Reflecting on Graves’ criticism of the less dramatic nature of his Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden complained that ‘Robert Graves wanted me to speak of things I never saw’ (Rothkopf 2016, 209). 5. Indeed, responding to Graves’ criticism of MFHM , Sassoon defending his approach by emphasizing that ‘Sherston is only 1/5 of myself but his narrative is carefully thought out and constructed’ (Graves 1982, 208). 6. Graves did detail the friendship between himself, Sassoon, and Thomas during the period November 1915–March 1916 in Good-Bye to All That ; see Graves (1929, 229–31, 248–52). 7. See Rothkopf (2016, 180–81) Where Sassoon outlines his feelings to Blunden about Graves’ conduct. 8. The spelling of ‘Flixécourt’ follows that in the published version of MIO. Sassoon used an acute accent on the ‘e’ in the name, a practice followed by most of his biographers and critics. Although the use of an accent can be seen very occasionally in French renderings, it is largely omitted. I am grateful to Tim Penton (private correspondence) for this information. 9. SJ is an interesting book because it does retrace some of the Sherston trilogy even though the inner sleeve notes state that ‘there is no repetition of anything already said’. The book skips over 1915 and first part of 1916, omitting the Somme and Arras battles, but covering Sassoon’s time in England in late 1916 and 1917, his declaration against the war, and parts of his time at Craiglockhart (although these are largely concerned with meeting Wilfred Owen). Maintaining his autofictional stance and explaining his decision not to describe the first half of 1918 that had formed the backend of SP, Sassoon (1945, 69) claims of Sherston ‘His experiences were mine, so I am spared the effort of describing them’ before shortly after stating that ‘Sherston was a simplified version of my “outdoor self”. He was denied the complex advantage of being a poet’.

References Chapman, Siobhan. 2020. The Pragmatics of Revision: George Moore’s Acts of Rewriting. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dix, Hywel. 2018. “Introduction: Autofiction in English: The Story so Far.” In Autofiction in English, edited by Hywel Dix, 1–23. London: Palgrave. Doubrovsky, Serge. 1977. Fils. París: Gallimard-Folio. Dunn, J. C. 1938. The War the Infantry Knew 1914–1919. London: P.S. King. Egremont, Max. 2005. Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography. London: Picador. Falls, Cyril. 1928. “Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man’.” The Times Literary Supplement 1393 (11 October): 727.

6

REVISION

171

Falls, Cyril. 1930. War Books: A Critical Guide. London: Peter Davies. Falls, Cyril. 1989. War Books: An Annotated Bibliography of Books About the Great War, new edition with introduction and additional entries by R. J. Wyatt. London: Greenhill Books. Gibbons, Alison. 2018. “Autonarration, I, and Odd Address in Ben Lerner’s Autofictional Novel 10:04’.” In Pronouns in Literature: Positions and Perspectives in Language, edited by Alison Gibbons and Andrea Macrae, 75–96. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gibbons, Alison. 2019a. “The ‘Dissolving Margins’ of Eleanor Farrente and the Neapolitan Novels: A Cognitive Approach to Fictionality, Authorial Intentionality, and Autofictional Reading Strategies.” Narrative Inquiry 29 (2): 412–37. Gibbons, Alison. 2019b. “Using Life and Abusing Life in the Trial of Ahmed Naji: Text World Theory, Adab and the Ethics of Reading.” Journal of Language and Discrimination 3 (1): 4–31. Gibbons, Alison, Timotheus Vermeulen, and Robin van den Akker. 2019. “Reality Beckons: Metamodernist Depthiness Beyond Panfictionality.” European Journal of English Studies 23 (2): 172–189. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2019. “Construing and Reconstruing the Horrors of the Trench: Siegfried Sassoon, Creativity and Context.” Journal of Literary Semantics 48 (1): 85–104. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2021a. “Siegfried Sassoon, Autofiction and Style: Retelling the Experience of War.” In Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches, edited by Marina Lambrou, 113–28. London: Bloomsbury. Giovanelli, Marcello. 2021b. “Siegfried Sassoon: War Poems and The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston.” In Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War, edited by Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter, 423–34. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Graves, Robert. 1929. Good-Bye to All That. London: Jonathan Cape. Graves, Robert. 1982. In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914–1946. Edited by Paul O’Prey. London: Hutchinson. Harrison, Chloe. 2014. “Attentional Windowing in David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’.” In Cognitive Grammar in Literature, edited by Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell, and Wenjuan Yuan, 53–67. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ho, Yufang. 2012. Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice: A Stylistic Exploration of John Fowles’ The Magus. London: Bloomsbury. Hynes, S. (1990). A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: Pimlico. Lambrou, Marina. 2021. “Introduction to Narrative Retellings: Stylistics Approaches.” In Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches, edited by Marina Lambrou, 1–22. London: Bloomsbury. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. On Autobiography. Translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Linde, Charlotte. 1993. Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

172

M. GIOVANELLI

Marriott, J. 2017. “Review of Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon.” The Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-memoirs-of-a-fox-huntingman-by-siegfried-sassoon-q33v0qs3p. Marsh Penton, Anne. 2021. “‘Wilton Villa’, Goring Road, Llanelli: House, Home and a Connection to the War Poets.” Siegfried’s Journal 39: 9–14. McAdams, Dan P. 2001. “The Psychology of Life Stories.” Review of General Psychology 5 (2): 100–22. Minogue, Sally, and Andrew Palmer. 2018. The Remembered Dead: Poetry, Memory and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moorcroft Wilson, Jean. 2013. Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend. London: Duckworth. Owen, Wilfred. 1931. The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Edited by Edmund Blunden. London: Chatto & Windus. Remarque, Eric. (1929). All Quiet on the Western Front. Translated by Arthur Wesley Wheen from the German Im Westen nichts Neues. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Rothkopf, Carol Z. 2016. Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 1919–1967: Letters 1919–1931. Abingdon: Routledge. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1928. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. London: Faber and Gwyer. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1930. Memoirs of An Infantry Officer. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1936. Sherston’s Progress. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1937. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber and Faber Sassoon, Siegfried. 1938. The Old Century and Seven More Years. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1942. The Weald of Youth. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1945. Siegfried’s Journey. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1976. Letters to a Critic. London: John Roberts Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1981. Diaries 1920–1922. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1983. Diaries 1915–1918. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1985. Diaries 1923–1925. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Short, Mick, and Elena Semino. 2008. “Evaluation and Stylistic Analysis.” In The Quality of Literature, edited by Willie van Peer, 117–37. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Singer, Jefferson A. 2004. “Narrative Identity and Meaning-Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction.” Journal of Personality 72: 437–59. Sotirova, Violeta. 2014. “Production and Intentionality.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, edited by Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley, 132–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sullivan, Hannah. 2013. The Work of Revision. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics: Vol. I. Conceptual Structuring Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press.

6

REVISION

173

Watson, Janet. 2004. Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Anne, and Michael Ross. 2003. “The Identity Function of Autobiographical Memory: Time Is on Our Side.” Memory 11 (2): 137–49.

CHAPTER 7

Reflection

7.1

Introduction

In his discussion of what he calls Sassoon’s ‘early stages’ of meditative poetry, Thorpe (1966, 207) reads the post-war Sassoon as a poet beginning a journey of reflection. He argues that Sassoon’s work takes an increasingly introspective stance moving away from war poet mode through a broad set of reflections on past, present, and future iterations of the self in the process of his ‘Catholic evolution’. This process of examining and comparing different versions of the self is neatly captured in the 1920 poem ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’, privately published in Recreations (Sassoon 1923), in which the speaker moves across time to engage first with his 1910 self, ‘Then You come/And stand before me’, and then ‘ten years more’, his 1930 counterpart. Equally, in ‘Apocalypse’, first published in The Observer as ‘Apocalyptical Indiscretions’ on 14 September 1924 and then both in Lingual Exercises (Sassoon 1925) and in The Heart’s Journey (Sassoon 1927, 1928), the opening lines ‘In me, past, present, future meet/To hold long chiding conference’ project a splitting of the speaking voice into three distinctive and temporally bound iterations that nonetheless are able to converse. Both poems provide good examples of two organizing metaphors, which appear in both Sassoon’s poems and in literarycritical interpretations of them, and which form the basis of my discussion on this chapter. The first is a life is a journey metaphor (and its elaborations), in turn underpinned by a source-path-goal (or simply path) image schema, in which the selves are construed as travelling along discrete points of a path in order to meet; the second builds on what Lakoff (1996) refers to as an overarching ‘divided person metaphor’, which relates to the general capacity that humans have to understand the self as a number of distinctive but © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Giovanelli, The Language of Siegfried Sassoon, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7_7

175

176

M. GIOVANELLI

interrelated parts and to represent these different conceptualizations through language. This chapter focuses on Sassoon’s verse that starts with The Heart’s Journey and moves across the remaining decades of his writing career. The Heart’s Journey was followed by The Road to Ruin (Sassoon 1933), Vigils (Sassoon 1934, 1935), and Rhymed Ruminations (Sassoon 1939a, 1940) The next three collections Common Chords (Sassoon 1950), Emblems of Experience (Sassoon 1951) and The Tasking (Sassoon 1954) were initially printed privately and then collected in Sequences (Sassoon 1956). Following the postconversion Lenten Illuminations (Sassoon 1958), The Path to Peace (Sassoon 1960a) reprinted poems from collections going back to The Heart’s Journey as well as including some earlier material from Sonnets (Sassoon 1909), MorningGlory (Sassoon 1916) and six previously unpublished poems. Sassoon’s final collection, An Octave (1966), was a privately printed collection which brought together eight of his poems for a group of subscribers.1 Generally, these collections have received relatively little critical attention compared to Sassoon’s other work; on online fora for example there are barely any reader reviews of Sassoon’s work after War Poems (Sassoon 1919), the two proses trilogies aside. Some limited literary-critical analysis appears in Moeyes (1997) and in Hemmings (2008), with more detailed and significant discussion in Thorpe (1966) and Corrigan (1973). Both of the latter two studies frame the post1927 poems within a wider journey metaphor: the title of Corrigan’s book, Siegfried Sassoon: Poet’s Pilgrimage, an anthology of Sassoon’s poems, letters, and diary entries across a number of years, explicitly makes this construal, while Thorpe (1966, 208) argues that ‘an understanding of the nature of his [Sassoon’s] religious poetry’ becomes possible by conceiving it as a progression across time. Elsewhere, Brearton (2007, 225) uses the metaphor to construe both the stylistic and thematic characteristics of Sassoon’s post-war verse and the act of reading it when she writes ‘The journey through Sassoon’s poems can feel like a journey backwards rather than forwards in time’. The remainder of this chapter draws on these overarching interpretations of Sassoon’s verse from The Heart’s Journey onwards. Thorpe explicitly draws on a path schema incorporating a journey metaphor to conceptualize The Heart’s Journey, Vigils, and Rhymed Ruminations as discrete points along the ‘spiritual journey upon which Sassoon embarked in the nineteen-twenties’ (1966, 208). Thorpe (1966, 208) argues that ‘each volume […] is essentially a sequence of lucid meditations, bound together by a unity of mood and integrity of feeling’. Likewise, his analysis of the later collections construes Sassoon’s verse as progression along a path towards a resting goal; the opening poem of Common Chords is read as presenting ‘a fresh voice and a new departure’ (1966, 228), and the collection as a whole as ‘denot[ing] a new tranquility, born of a mind no longer struggling for “stillness” (1966, 233, original emphases). Together with Emblems of Experience, Thorpe reads Sassoon as ‘working towards a greater austerity of style’ and ‘a growing sense of freedom’ (1966, 239). Equally, he draws

7

REFLECTION

177

on journey and growth metaphors and a path schema in his discussion of The Path to Peace, which he describes as being distinctively ‘designed to give retrospective shape to Sassoon’s spiritual journey’ (1966, 250). Overall, Thorpe presents Sassoon’s poetry as a neatly defined fit within his progression towards conversion, a seemingly natural narrative for Thorpe given that he is writing in 1966, and so has the benefit of retrospection across the previous forty years in order to impose a sense of cohesion to Sassoon’s output. Thorpe corresponded with Sassoon from 1963 until Sassoon’s death. The poet’s own reflections which he outlined to Thorpe also retrospectively conceptualize his verse from the mid-twenties as a journey of kinds, understood as discrete points along a path.2 One thing is that, as I always tell people, I was never a professional writer, and in some ways a complete amateur. In 1919 I was still in “the Lower Fifth”, and the next six years were spent in trying to get into the “Upper Sixth” […] There was as you observed in Picture Show, (a production imposed on me by Bartholomew at Cambridge, and my sole lapse into premature publication) a transitional period of escapist poetizing (I burnt a lot of them) – though my “unregenerate diction” had been there all the time – I did not find my real poetic voice until 1924, with the H. Vaughan sonnet, Alone, Stonehenge and Grandeur of Ghosts – all written at the same time. This was the turning point, which led to The Heart’s Journey, Vigils etc. Up to 1926 I was just muddling through, and it was the most unsatisfactory and unsettled period of my post-war life. (Sassoon 1976, 13, formatting as in original)

As Thorpe does, Sassoon also construes his writing career as points on a path, from apprentice (“the Lower Fifth” and ‘muddling through’) to mature poet (‘Upper Sixth”, the ‘turning point’). Elsewhere, he draws attention to the perceived meditative nature of his verse; in a letter to Geoffrey Keynes (Sassoon 1939b), he states that the The Heart’s Journey and Vigils were ‘essentially private communications’. Of course, the titles of the collections (where ‘journey’, ‘road’, ‘path’ are explicitly mentioned) themselves also represent variations of on progression and movement as well as sustained reflection and identity-formation (again explicit in some of the titles, ‘ruminations’, ‘tasking’).3 Thorpe also draws on a number of other contexts that he uses to model the Sassoon of the late poetry. One such discourse context is Sassoon’s On Poetry (Sassoon 1939c), a printed version of the Arthur Skemp memorial lecture that he gave at the University of Bristol in March 1939. Setting out what is effectively his poetic manifesto, and often rallying against his Modernist contemporaries with their ‘dehumanising logic’ (1939c, 12), Sassoon draws on a neo-Romantic view of the power of humankind’s transaction with the natural world, the importance of personal experience, growth and reflection and the very essence of poetry as ‘Direct utterance’ (1939c, 10, original emphasis). As he explains

178

M. GIOVANELLI

By direct utterance I mean a full and living voice, seemingly natural, though often using the language of a personal poetic idiom. I mean the true vocal cadence of something urgently communicated – the best words in the best order – yes – but empowered also by sincerity and inspiration. (Sassoon 1939c, 11)

The twenty-six page lecture ends with a discussion of Donne, Dryden, Shakespeare, Herbert, Vaughan, and Browning with Sassoon thanking ‘all those poets who have written not only with their hands but with their hearts’ (Sassoon 1939c, 26). As a document, the ‘manifesto’ is interesting given as Thorpe (1966, 181) indicates, that it represents the only sustained published outlining of Sassoon’s views on poetry and composition. Crucially, Thorpe illustrates the lecture’s importance to his own study by framing it as ‘a preface to the religious poetry of almost forty years, which has developed in accordance with these views’ (1966, 181) and by dedicating a whole chapter to it, placing it at the beginning of ‘A Religious Concern’, the fourth and final part of his study of Sassoon’s work. Integrating his views on Sassoon as a ‘contemplative, a storer, and an interpreter of accumulated personal experience into his narrative of representation wherein he concludes that the poet’s ‘exploration of this subject-matter led him eventually to a religious standpoint’ (Thorpe 1966, 206). The analyses that follow in this chapter examine, in turn, The Heart’s Journey, Vigils , Rhymed Ruminations, and Sequences , and explore the extent to which underlying path and container schemas, and integrated journey and divided person metaphors can help to explain the interpretations of Sassoon’s verse discussed in this introduction.

7.2

The Heart ’s Journey 7.2.1

On the Threshold

On 1 May 1922, reflecting on his productivity, Sassoon wrote in his diary that he had ‘only manufactured seventeen poems’ since 1919, insisting that his output since September 1920 had been ‘sapless and over-ingenious […] Of course I’ve written and destroyed a lot of slushy stuff’ (1981, 151). Almost eighteen months later, the ‘slushy stuff’ seemed to be more appealing and on 5 October 1923, he indicated that he had ‘decided to call my next book (love and lyrical poems) The Heart’s Journey, and publish it in October 1926 (after my fortieth birthday)’ (1985, 56, original emphasis). On 26th October, ‘Song be my soul’,4 which Sassoon viewed as ‘quite pleasant’ (1985, 60) appears in his diary. The poem, which ultimately opened The Heart’s Journey, addresses the speaker’s desire to return through the verse to ‘The childhood’s garden’ to ‘Bring back the summer dawns’. One of several key themes in the collection, and also addressed by Sassoon in his prose trilogies, the nostalgic yearning for what he termed ‘old days in the garden at Weirleigh’ (1985, 60) is explicitly

7

REFLECTION

179

framed within a journey metaphor as the speaker presents himself as ‘Time’s way-worn traveller’ and captures the quest to return to a set of previously experienced set of events and identities. Eventually privately published in a ‘limited’ edition in 1927 and then in an ‘ordinary’ edition in 1928 with seven additional poems, the collection marks an explicit turning away from the satirical poems of the early and mid-twenties and, as Moorcroft Wilson (2013, 431) suggests, projects ‘a poetic voice quite different from the angry tones of the war satires’. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement , Bailey (1935, 894) argues that only a ‘few of the poems […] were comparable in force and intensity of feeling, to the poems written during the War or immediately after it’. Taken together, the poems address a range of themes that can be broadly understood within the overarching journey metaphor, underpinned by a path schema and its various elaborations. For example, the opening sentiments of ‘Song be my soul’ are replicated in ‘Strangeness of Heart’, where the speaker reflects on his ability to reimagine his former self himself ‘in childhood when I woke/And heard the unheeding garden bird’. The poem’s temporal parameters shift so that the speaker is pulled back to the present ‘And I’m no more the listening child’ before projecting a reality in which his whole sense of being is compromised by an inability to continue to reimagine a past that ‘stirred/My being’. The reader is thus invited to model the speaker’s consciousness at discrete, although non-linear, points along a path; the failure of the fading poetic imagination is construed simply as the end point, as ‘Death’. Similar returns to childhood are presented in ‘As I was walking in the gardens’ where the speaker imagines the garden where he ‘stood with Youth’, and in ‘Alone, I hear the wind’ where the wind first ‘recalls/Youth’ but ultimately reminds the speaker of the ‘gardens where I’ll nevermore return’. The windowing of attention on the end point of the path or journey also occurs in ‘One Who Watches’, a poem written in anticipation of the deaths of Edmund Gosse and Thomas Hardy but which also hints at a regeneration of sorts in the memories of the dead that will ‘lie/Hoarded like happy summers in my heart’. A cyclical path is profiled in ‘A Midnight Interior, where the speaker, reflecting on the effects on his imagination of ‘a circle of brightness’ made by his lamp on the ceiling yearns for ‘Release’ to discover a similarly new personal and poetic identity. Change is also a thematic figure in “When I’m alone” in which a new vitality comes through spiritual growth in solitude, and in ‘A flower has opened in my heart’ where growth also comes from within, this time, drawing on a body is container metaphor, in the ‘flower of spring’ which emerges within the speaker. In other instances, time itself is profiled for attention as the thematic target within the dominion of an initial reference point as in ‘What is Stonehenge?’, and ‘When Selfhood can discern no comfort’, where the speaker turns to music ‘Timeless, eternally true’. The two war poems in The Heart’s Journey present time in ways that are effectively reconstruals of previously experienced events or sentiments. In the first, ‘To One Who Was With Me in The War’, briefly

180

M. GIOVANELLI

discussed in Chapter 6, time is brought back in ‘visual fragments’. Here, more explicitly than the other memory poems, time is construed along two distinctive narrative paths: first as the processing time of the reading of the poem; and then as conceived time, construed objectively by the poem’s speaker and listener and captured in the flashback to the war (see Langacker 2008, 79). And, the second, ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, both recalls the horror of the victims of war and angrily dismisses the Ypres memorial commemorating the dead, a ‘sepulchre of crime’, now repackaged as a tourist attraction. Thorpe’s reading of the collection praises its ‘unity of mood’ (1966, 209). Elaborating the life is a journey metaphor, he reads the poems as ‘preparations for the journey: setting the house in order, checking its contents, deciding what will be needed and what can—and must—be left behind’ (1966, 209, original emphasis). In the following section, I provide a detailed analysis of ‘Farewell to a Room’, drawing attention to the poem in the light of more general stylistic characteristics of The Heart’s Journey. 7.2.2

‘Farewell to a Room’

‘Farewell to a Room’ is generally read as Sassoon’s farewell poem to 54 Tufton Street in London, which housed the small flat where he lived from August 1920 to the end of November 1925 (Sassoon 1985, 297). Sassoon had mixed feelings towards the five years he spent at Tufton Street according to Moorcroft Wilson, who nonetheless reads the poem as ‘nostalgic’ and indicative of ‘the change of style his change of situation would develop, a move away […] to a more meditative, inward-looking verse’ (2013, 427).5 ‘Farewell to a Room’

Room, while I stand outside you in the gloom, Your tranquil-toned interior, void of me, Seems part of my own self which I can see....

Light, while I stand outside you in the night, Shutting the door on what has housed so much, Nor hand, nor eye, nor intellect could touch, — Cell, to whose firelit walls I say farewell, Could I condense five winters in one thought, Then might I know my unknown self and tell What our confederate silences have wrought.

The poem begins with the speaker’s address to the room, ‘Room’. The initial subordinate clause ‘While I stand outside you in the gloom’ contains two embedded prepositional phrases ‘outside you’ and ‘in the gloom’. Both of these are underpinned by an explicit container and an implicit path

7

REFLECTION

181

schema. In the first, the speaker (trajector) has become detached from the landmark (room) while in the second an inverse relationship exists so that the speaker is now positioned within ‘the gloom’ (landmark). These alternative conceptualizations are also thematically distinctive: the voice is addressed in the second person ‘you’, hinting at familiarity and intimacy while the more schematic construal through the noun phrase ‘in the gloom’ is less so, with the emphasis on darkness drawing on a conventional light/dark schema (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 57) which provides structure for an overarching light is good; dark is bad metaphor (see Forceville and Renckens 2013). The distinction made between the room, conceived as an attractive space, and the speaker who now stands ‘outside’ is emphasized in the poem’s second line, which repeats the initial trajector-landmark alignment so that the room, again addressed using the second person, is construed in a more granular manner and positioned as clausal subject for maximum attentional focus, the effect heightened by the alliteration and clustered vowel sounds across the noun phrase ‘tranquil-toned interior’. The movement and in–out elaboration thus explicitly evokes the movement of the self as part of a broader journey metaphor. At this point, the poem poses a conundrum for the reader. The speaker emphasizes his distance from the room and yet highlights that the room is ‘part of my own self’, which reconstrues the self as a container and presents it as both disconnected from and connected to the room. The puzzle can be solved by examining how the poem draws on a divided person metaphor, Lakoff (1996, 102), facilitated both by the explicit trajector-landmark alignment within the container schema and by a further part-whole schema. Lakoff argues that a person is an ‘ensemble’ of an experiencing consciousness or ‘subject’ which conceptualizes and objectifies a ‘self’ (understood as one of several possible versions in the physical world possessed by the ‘subject’). The pronouns ‘I’ and ‘myself’ in the expression ‘Sorry, I’m not myself today’ reflect this distinction in that they have the different referents of ‘subject’ and ‘self’. A construal that explicitly draws out these possible ‘selves’ as in, for example, ‘I keep going back and forth between my scientific self and my religious self’ (Lakoff 1996, 105) results in a split self metaphor since that the selves that are construed are incompatible or ‘inconsistent aspects of oneself’ (Lakoff 1996, 105). Offering a broader discourse-based approach, Emmott (2002, 154), however, defines ‘“split self” very broadly to include all cases of a character or real-life individual being divided and/or duplicated in any way in a narrative’ such as distinctive temporal or spatial iterations that become manifest in some way during self-representation. Similarly, Demjén (2011, 18) argues that the ‘notion of split selves needs to be understood as a wider umbrella term’ to capture the multiple ways that a self may be construed as fragmented in some way. The split selves in this case, and understood in broad terms, are the iterations of the speaker, the first spatially and temporally removed from the room; the second, observed and construed objectively as a separate container and

182

M. GIOVANELLI

landmark within which the trajector, in itself another iteration of the room, is enclosed. My own interpretation of the poem’s first verse paragraph rests on this moment of revelation for the speaker who, removing himself from a physical space is now able to reflect on that space’s effect on him over time. The emerging understanding of the self as a growing phenomenon, construed as a bound state with movement across and within, a series of thresholds is articulated in ‘I can see’ which reconfigures the light/dark schema of the first line and, drawing on the metaphor understanding is seeing (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 48) foregrounds the speaker’s newly discovered insight. For me, this appears to align neatly with the overarching journey metaphor that Thorpe has claimed for The Heart’s Journey more generally. The emphasis on sight provides a cohesive link with the second verse paragraph, whose first line also repeats the structure of the opening of the poem. In this case, the two embedded prepositional phrases ‘outside you’ and ‘in the night’ are underpinned by path and container schemas. In the first, the speaker (trajector) stands outside the landmark (light) while in the second the inverse relationship positions the speaker within ‘in the night’ (again echoic of ‘in the gloom’). The container schema provides a structure for the remainder of the poem. First, the speaker emphasizes his remoteness ‘outside’ through a further subordinate clause, summary scanned through the use of the participle ‘shutting’, in which he acts as the clausal subject, trajector, and energy source of an action chain with the ‘door’ as landmark and energy sink. The relationships profiled thus far in the poem are centred on the speaker, the room, and different iterations of the self, understood as being contained by or outside the physical room. Yet, the poem also progressively emphasizes a move, through its shifting clausal subjects, ‘hand’, ‘eye’ ‘intellect’, from a physical to a more spiritual connection that the speaker has felt. The word ‘cell’ appears in the next line, again construed within a path schema as the trajector (speaker) sets off to end outside of the landmark (room) but this time through the reporting of the speech act ‘I say farewell’. In this instance, ‘cell’ may be read as synonymous with ‘room’ but construed with greater granularity to profile a more meditative monk-like existence or even one of incarceration. Indeed, in his own account of his time at Tufton Street, Sassoon’s writes of ‘the hermitage of my private self’ (1981, 18), which aligns with the interpretation proposed by Thorpe.6 The ending of the poem brings together the overarching ideas into a single image that defines its message. The speaker sets up a hypothetical situation, again drawing on a container schema in which five years (winters)7 are brought together, compressed, and integrated into ‘one thought’. These kinds of attentional shifts to conceptualize possible states of affairs are generally wellhandled by Text World Theory’s treatment of hypotheticality (Werth 1999, 239–48; Gavins 2007, 118–25). Werth (1997, 252) argues that a ‘theoretical situation’ is evoked through the outlining of a proposition denoting a state of affairs and a remoteness (hypothetical) marker highlighting its potential existence, which is then fleshed out in a new remote alternative text-world

7

REFLECTION

183

as unrealised yet potential epistemic modal-world (Gavins 2007, 120). In this poem, ‘could’ triggers the remote situation, which initially builds a new textworld which in turn is then developed into a fuller mental representation of a potential situation in which the speaker knows ‘my unknown self’ and tells ‘what our confederate silences have wrought’. This attentional shift may also, I think, be explained as a reference point relationship. The hypothetical clause triggered ‘could’ thus acts as a reference point within the dominion of which two specific targets are accessed and brought into attentional focus as part of a possibilities along a mental path. This relationship is modelled in Fig. 7.1. The poem’s ending, then, outlines the speaker’s desire to bring together a fully defined version of the self, one that is aggregated rather than disaggregated, so that the various iterations of the self over time are conceived as whole again, united in the use of the first person plural possessive determiner ‘our’. And yet, the poem also presents a set of apparent inversions and contradictions, evident in the lexical contrasts of the unknown becoming known and the silences becoming told, construed not as certainties but as possibilities; the distinction here between what is known and what might simply be only possible is therefore important. I began my discussion of the poem by quoting Moorcroft Wilson’s reading of it as an example of inward-looking meditation. My analysis demonstrates Text-world

HYP

1

hypothetical/epistemic modal-world

R

(condense five winters)

T1/T2 know my unknown self tell what our confederate silences

Fig. 7.1 Text-world attentional shift as reference point relationship

184

M. GIOVANELLI

that the language of the poem repeatedly profiles both the split self, which has multiple iterations standing within and outside bounded spaces, and its various states of completeness and fragmentation. These iterations are construed via a container metaphor, and overall identity is conceptualized as shaped and reshaped through time along an ongoing path. The increasingly abstract nature of the poem, moving as it does from the speaker’s physical detachment from the room to the more hypothetical—and mentally if not physically possible—situation that ends the poem, thus represents such a ‘meditative’ stance which gives structure to the whole poem, read as a grander set of physical and mental movements. In returning once more to his diaries and poems in 1949, for what would become an incomplete and unpublished attempt to write a seventh book of autobiography, Sassoon (1981, 18), echoing some of the sentiments and phrases of the poem, wrote: It represented the part of me which I had always instinctively tried to keep separate. In that room I should be a single-minded poet. Elsewhere I should be the person who went about experiencing things and reacting in different ways to the various people he was with. Wherever I went, I should leave my private self behind in that room, in whose confederate silences, through many a night-time, he had sought to discover and develop such talents as were his, and to understand and express the finer elements of his being.

His retrospective analysis offers a neat if simplified view of the poem, highlighting as it does an explicit emerging concern with identity and its relationship to other selves across time.

7.3

Vigils and Rhymed Ruminations 7.3.1

Re-Journeying in Vigils

In many ways, the poems in Vigils may be interpreted as a straightforward continuation of the ideas and themes raised in The Heart’s Journey. For example, Corrigan (1973, 31) uses her analysis of ‘Apocalypse’/‘In me, past, present, future meet’ to argue that Sassoon returns, from 1934 onwards, to a central question raised in that earlier poem: ‘What is then meant by ‘self’?’. Thorpe’s interpretation of Vigils resurrects the journey metaphor: reading Vigils as the next step to self-discovery, he suggests that ‘the emphasis […] is upon the uncertainty of the direction heart and mind must take in search of the true self’ (1966, 214). The collection reads as a restarting and reshaping of the sentiments expressed about the status, identity, and direction of the self in The Heart’s Journey. The years between 1927 and 1935 had been difficult for Sassoon with failed relationships, his marriage to Hester Gatty in December 1933, and a return to war poems of sorts in The Road to Ruin in the same year, which he later referred to as ‘just a nightmare’ (quoted in Moorcroft Wilson 2013, 601). Sassoon later came to call Vigils ‘undirected emotional aspiration’

7

REFLECTION

185

(Corrigan 1973, 166); Egremont (2005, 399), highlighting its retrospective stance, describes the collection as ‘middle-aged melancholy, of pastoral charm and beauty’, and Wood (1936, 139) reads Sassoon ‘in a ruminative, reminiscent mood, where the coming of middle-life has overshadowed the more joyous spirit of […] youthful verses’. In another contemporaneous review, Bailey (1935, 894) simply labels the poems as ‘backwards-glancing’. The poems in Vigils do reach back to, yearn for and reconfigure the past, particularly childhood, as a way of understanding and navigating both the present and future. In many cases, the poems’ speakers again construe their identities via a split self metaphor. For example, in ‘Vigil in Spring’, the explicit memory of youth brings with it for the speaker an ability to revitalize aspects of the natural world, ‘The night air […]/And dark twigs of towering trees’. In ‘It was the love of life’, the speaker construes ‘the love of earth’, first experienced ‘when I was young’, as a guide through life. ‘They were not true’, explicitly draws on a journey metaphor for the speaker, as ‘the traveller’, leaves home ‘along the road to search for freedom’ but ‘worldwise’ and disappointed by experience, reverts ‘in remembered eyes of youth’ to his childhood dreams. Journeys, quests (and wrong turns) are also foregrounded in ‘Long Ago’, in which the speaker finds ‘Sudden Elysium’, having previously taken ‘all wrong roads’ in life. And in ‘Down the glimmering staircase’, childhood (presumably here the imagined or remembered childhood of the speaker) escapes the house in search of ‘the strangeness of the garden air’, the poem ending with the speaker fragmented across these two temporally separated iterations. At other times, split selves are re-aggregated, if only temporarily. ‘Long Ago’ ends with the speaker seeing in ‘in this moment’s vision’, a younger and re-energized iteration of himself. And in ‘Unwisdom’, the speaker who walks ‘in childhood’s land’ is able to unlearn the experiences of adulthood; here the return to a greater sense of innocence or state of ‘unwisdom’, brings with it ‘Release […] beyond the years’. In ‘Farewell to Youth’, however, the future is more uncertain since the past and childhood move out of sight and touch to ‘my heart’s mysterious walls’ where ‘Youth lies dead’. In ‘Ultimatum’, the speaker looks to the future which remains markedly uncertain and beyond any power of recollection or visionary foresight. In the following section, I analyse ‘My past has gone to bed’, a poem which I think captures many of the aspects that I have discussed above. 7.3.2

‘My past has gone to bed’

My past has gone to bed. Upstairs in clockless rooms My past is fast asleep. But midnight reillumes Here in my ruminant head the days where dust lies deep.

Sleep-walkers empty-eyed come strangely down the stairs. These are my selves, - once proud, once passionate with

186

M. GIOVANELLI

young prayers, Once vehement with vows. I know not when they died, Those ignorant selves…Meanwhile my self sits brooding here In the house where I was born. Dwindling, they disappear. Me they did not foresee. But in their looks I find Simplicities unlearned long since and left behind.

The poem opens with an explicit construal of the split self metaphor as the speaker presents iterations of the self as temporally, ‘My past has gone’, and spatially, ‘Upstairs in clockless rooms’, divided. The journey metaphor is aligned with another set of metaphorical construals, here related to the spatial and temporal orientations of time. The reillumination (an echo of many poems in The Heart’s Journey), also defined here temporally, at ‘midnight’ and with greater spatial proximity, ‘Here in my ruminant head’, gives rise to a vision in which the speaker now more explicitly views and connects different versions of the self so that they are temporally and spatially co-existent. In effect then, this impossible situation is made possible through our ability to conceptualize the different input spaces in which the selves exist and then blend them (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) into an emergent singular frame. The poem foregrounds the past selves as moving entities and the speaker as a more static, contemplative self and, in doing so, conceives their relationship to time in different ways. More generally cognitive linguistics distinguishes between two models of time, which represent different ways of construing a particular scene. In the moving time model (Evans and Green 2006, 84), the experiencer or ego, from whose vantage point events are experienced, remains static with time conceived as moving towards or away from them along a line from the future into the past, for example in expressions such as ‘his birthday was coming up’ or ‘the time had gone’. In the moving ego model, however, the ego and time are conceived in an inverse relationship and deictically positioned so that the ego moves through time, which is understood as discrete and static points along the path schema. Expressions that draw on the moving ego model, for example, are ‘He reached his fiftieth birthday’ and ‘I’m heading towards next week’s meeting’.8 In ‘My past has gone to bed’, the different selves, representing aspects of the speaker’s past are viewed as moving, both literally down the staircase and as conceptualizations as the past is recalled. The speaker in contrast, remains static in the scene and so the overall construal is one which draws on a moving time model. In this particular instance, the scanning of time operates in the opposite direction to what would normally be perceived as a ‘natural path’ of access (Langacker 2008, 501–2) so that the earlier iterations, ‘My pasts’, are profiled. The speaker’s vantage point, shared by the reader through the use of the first person pronoun, means that the line of sight extends outwards to the selves coming down the stairs, construed through the use of the deictic adverb ‘down’ and the demonstrative ‘these’ which position the selves with

7

REFLECTION

187

increasing proximity to the speaker. The temporal distance, however, is emphasized through the repeated adverb + adjective structure ‘once proud, once passionate […] once vehement’, and a more distal demonstrative in the noun phrase ‘Those ignorant selves’. The shift from proximal to distal deixis aligns with the contrast inherent in the next construal: the selves are opposed to ‘my self’, now construed with greater specificity ‘brooding here/In the house where I was born’ and more objectively. The toggling of attention between these iterations also represents, it seems to me, a recognition of the mobility of the ‘selves’ and the stasis of the speaker, whose inability to move, mentally and physically, is matched by a similar mental inertia, evident in the lack of certainty demonstrated through the subjective construal of ‘strangely’ and the negation of the epistemic lexical verb ‘know’. In the final part of the poem, the speaker’s vision fades so that the vantage point assumed in which the selves move towards the speaker now is a position from which they decrease in size and ultimately in focus, moving out of the visual field so that they (trajector) are consumed by the landmark (the background of the staircase). The distinction is emphasized in the use of first and third person forms, ‘me’ and ‘they’, and the inverted clause structure in which first the selves and then the speaker is positioned in the experiencer role in the clauses ‘Me they did not foresee’ and ‘But in their looks I find’. The object of the second clause, ‘simplicities’ figured for attentional prominence at the head of the final line of the poem, emphasizes a lost past as well as a more straightforward (and possibly attractive) one. The participle form ‘unlearned’ suggests both a process and set of experiences but is framed temporally ‘long since’ and conceived along a path schema. Interestingly, time is now conceived through the moving ego model so that at the climax to the poem, the selves and the time that they represent remain static in contrast to the moving experience of the speaker. The speaker is thus, in line with the literary-critical interpretations of the collection discussed more generally in this chapter, construed as a mover with a journey ahead, although the direction of the path remains unclear. Despite being construed as a moving ego, the speaker, retaining the ‘ruminant’ and ‘brooding’ qualities of earlier in the poem, has an unknown future; the poem thus profiles the past and the immediate present while the future, although understood within the broader conceptual base of the speaker’s life, is left off-stage outside of the immediate scope of attention. 7.3.3

Time and Rhymed Ruminations

Rhymed Ruminations was published in a limited edition in 1939 followed by an ordinary edition in 1940. The poems, written between 1932 and 1939, continue the themes of The Heart’s Journey and Vigils , with a more focused emphasis on the past, viewed from a series of vantage points that appear both nostalgic and yet decidedly more certain than the poems of Vigils , even if, in places, the final tone appears less positive. Indeed, reader responses to the collection posit a more confident if a somewhat resigned voice. One review

188

M. GIOVANELLI

interprets the collection as having ‘a mood of contemplative retirement’ (The Times Literary Supplement 1940, 688), while another comments on the cohesive nature of the collection as ‘a sequence’ (Palmer 1941, 193) through time. Hemmings (2008, 104) also argues that the collection offers a thematic treatment of time, in which the past ‘is invoked archaeologically and personally’. Thorpe (1966), continuing his reading of Sassoon’s work through a journey metaphor, finds the collection as a temporary pause in terms of style and direction. For him, the collection has ‘a marked slackening of spiritual tension. There is no fresh direction, no increased urgency concerning the questionings and doubts previously expressed’ (221). It is hard to find a poem in Rhymed Ruminations that does not specifically profile some aspect of time and relate it to the multiple shifting selves that the speakers construe, evident in the speaker’s labelling in ‘Old World to New’ of ‘myriad Me’. The opening and closing poems, ‘Brevities’ (the last poem in the collection Sassoon composed), and ‘Eyes’ (previously published in 1924), provide a pair of complementary construals of the self as discrete points through time. Again, the speaker consistently draws on a series of construals underpinned by a split self metaphor in order to profile different iterations of the self. For example, in ‘A Picture of the Muses’ the speaker, differentiates between the nostalgia of the past world invoked by his mother’s paintings and his current physical and mental situation. The present self, contained as a trajector inside the landmark of the ‘empty room and evening’, is bound within his own timeframe in contrast to the ‘unframed’ paintings. A focus on ageing and different selves appears in ‘Heart and Soul’, where ongoing physical age is compensated by greater spirituality, ‘the eye sees clearer […] the soul grows stronger’. The speaker’s identity captures the two aspects of self, necessarily split into heart and soul, which ‘estranged yet one’ make their way as part of the speaker through time. In ‘Outlived By Trees’, the lifespan of the trees the speaker views in the garden are construed through a journey metaphor. The beech, cedar, and lime trees themselves will all outlast the speaker, yet somehow his spirit will live on within them, ‘while you last/I shall survive’. In other poems, the construal is modelled as moving time: In ‘Midsummer Eve’, it is a ‘bringer of breath’; while in ‘A Local Train of Thought’, the sound of a local train, late at night and moving across the landscape, comes to represent the passing of time in that the speaker imagines it repeatedly returning to him, its ‘habitual travelling’ construed as a comfort. Similarly, in ‘Doggerel About Old Days’, time is explicitly construed as a train, which ‘puffed on through landscapes’, and carries the speaker/passenger back to his past. A further set of poems are centred around places construed as sites from which the past is reimagined with the speaker assuming a vantage point that is close in some way, often highlighted in an explicit prepositional phrase in the poem’s title, or in the use of the proximal spatial deictic pairs ‘here’ and ‘there’ and the temporal deictic ‘now’. In these poems places also evoke the memories of those associated with them in the past. In ‘Eulogy of My House’, the

7

REFLECTION

189

speaker ruminates on the vast number of lives that the house has accommodated over time, its ghosts returning to spread themselves spatially within its parameters ‘From room to room’. Ghosts also return in ‘In Heytesbury Wood’ in which the ‘slow old lord’, evoked by the speaker moves ‘Along that path we call the ornamental ride’. Both ‘On Edington Hill’ and ‘878–1935’ reimagine the journey of King Alfred back in time, set against the present moment and the imminent threat of war, while in ‘A Remembered Queen’, the speaker imagines Queen Matilda from eight hundred years before, when late at night he listens to the ‘atmospheric cracklings’ of the wireless radio. In ‘Prehistoric Burials’, the speaker’s felt proximity to Stonehenge, ‘These barrows of the century-darkened dead’, brings with it a sense of the expansiveness of time and a yearning to be connected somehow to ‘those burials that began/Whole history’. 7.3.4

The Past Reborn

In this section, I range across five poems that appear towards the end of Rhymed Ruminations , which together examine the relationship between the self and time, viewed initially through the ongoing relationship with a young child. The first four poems, ‘Meeting and Parting’, ‘To My Son’, ‘A Blessing’, and ‘The Child at the Window’ have a second person addressee and are generally interpreted as reflections on fatherhood, written for Sassoon’s son George, who was born in October 1936. The fifth, ‘Progressions’, offers an overall construal of a life moving through time that captures, in a summative fashion, the ideas presented in the other poems. In this section, I draw on Langacker’s ‘conception of reality’ (Langacker 2008, 301), which I first introduced in Chapter 4 to describe our evolving knowledge in the world and to distinguish between ‘reality’ (what we know) and ‘irreality’ (what is beyond our current domain of knowledge). Langacker refines this model to account for how we perceive conceived reality (the knowledge we have at a given point) as having ‘evolutionary momentum’ (2008, 306) so that a conceptualizer may understand certain future events as paths that are more or less possible within ‘potential reality’, with some particularly likely outcomes construed as ‘projected reality’. These pathways are modelled in Fig. 7.2, where projected reality extends naturally along the path from conceived reality whereas the less likely paths diverge from the line into the area marked as a potential reality. In ‘Meeting and Parting’, a poem about a father and son looking at each other for the first time, the relationship between father (speaker) and son (addressee) is examined by drawing on the split self metaphor, evoked in the very first words of the poem, ‘My self reborn’. The parallel syntax that construes both father and son to look at each other only differs in the preposition used to describe the behaviour of each conceptualizer: the father is construed as trajector moving ‘into’ the landmark of his son’s eyes while the son, assuming a more detached stance, looks ‘on me’. The more perspective gaze of the speaker projects both himself and his son across time so as to

190

M. GIOVANELLI

Potential Reality

Conceived Reality

Projected Reality

C

C

Potential Reality

Time

Fig. 7.2 Conception of reality (based on Langacker 2008, 306)

imagine the moment when the son sees his father die. In this instance the separate iterations or enactors (Emmott 2002; Gavins 2007) of the father and son assume a moment in projected reality (Langacker 2008, 208) but, crucially, at different points along their own life journey metaphor or path schema. The immediate reality in which the ‘meeting’ takes place thus profiles the two paths (at initial point for the son and medial point for the father) intersecting; the projected reality of the ‘parting’ profiles a further two intersecting paths (at medial point for the son and final point for the father). The poem’s focus and power, it seems to me, arises from this revelation presented as an immediate response to the birth of the speaker’s son and the connection that is made between the two, both ‘alone’ and with different futures ahead of them. The profiled relationship is expressed just as explicitly in ‘To My Son’ in which the speaker addresses his son through a series of imperatives ‘Go, and be gay’, ‘[…] be wise’ ‘[…] be strong’, ‘[…] be brave’, each followed by an initial position declarative ‘You are born’. In each instance the deictic verb ‘Go’ projects a movement away from the vantage point assumed by the speaker, addressee (and reader) so that the future is conceived as a path stretching out into projected reality. The imperatives suggest a bold voice; the only caution appears in an additional imperative, followed by a modalised structure that deviates from the pattern set up in the poem, ‘Possess your soul; that you alone can save’. ‘A Blessing’, framing the birth of the son within several clear references to religion and spirituality, similarly projects a future, this time with the initial metaphorical construal of the child as a ‘flame of life’ that is guarded by his parents. The projected path is again profiled from its initial point and specifically construed through ‘your way’, ‘pilgrimage’, and ‘go on’, with the

7

REFLECTION

191

speaker again profiling his own anticipated absence ‘And when these guiding hands are gone’. The deictic movement inherent in the pre-modifying ‘guiding’ and the post-modifying ‘gone’ outlines the initial connected lives of the father and son, yet also projects a state of affairs in which the parental support has disappeared. The final image of the poem is then the singular path to be taken by the son without the father whose absence is profiled and figured in the penultimate line. For me, the father’s absence, occurring following a series of construals involving verbs denoting togetherness, ‘guard’, teach’, see’, leaves a felt absence, or what Stockwell (2009) terms a textual ‘lacuna’. The negative predicate ‘are gone’, given that it is followed by a further imperative in the final line ‘go on’, hints strongly at a powerful resonant memory of the father (captured effectively of course in the writing of the poem). Unlike ‘To My Son’, ‘A Blessing’ thus highlights the enduring spirit of the father in the child’s ongoing journey. ‘The Child at the Window’ also projects a future beyond the vantage point of immediate reality from which the speaker addresses his son. The speaker compresses past, present, and future into the opening stanza as he asks the son to first project into the future drawing on a spatial deictic marker of movement along a path, ‘far away’, and then an unspecified moment in the past when the son looks down from the ‘house-top window’ at the father returning from riding ‘On the great lawn below you’. The orientation of the observed and the observer is configured so that the reader is positioned in the same vantage point of the child, spatially above the father, later reflected in the second stanza where the child is ‘Up in your nursery world’ and the father looking up ‘all heaven for me’, these iterations all framed by the observing figures of the father and child. The timeless of the initial image of the title, construed as it is as a non-processual noun phrase in which the passing of time is defocused, gives way to a series of future situations across both projected and potential reality. These are understood as a series of temporal world-switches triggered by prepositional phrases, ‘In far off springs’, ‘beyond bewildering years’, and modal worlds ‘you must learn’, in which the innocence of the child and the ‘brave March day’ are tempered by both the father’s own weariness of the world and an understanding of the recycling of the father and son relationship. The poem ends, repeating the imperative of the initial line, with the father evoking a further text-world, in some largely unspecified future time in which he is absent and the enactors present are instead his son, now fulfilling the role of the father with his own son, deictically positioned as the focaliser.9 ‘Remember this, some afternoon in spring, When your own child looks down and makes your sad heart sing.

The four poems discussed above, ordered as they are within Rhymed Ruminations , offer a clear sequence in their construal of the father-son relationship and parenting generally across time: initial reaction; caring, teaching and growing

192

M. GIOVANELLI

independence; growing up, reflecting, and anticipating the future. These ideas are visibly connected in ‘Progressions’, the poem that follows ‘The Child at the Window’, in which the temporal and mental progression through each of the stanzas consists of a focus on different iterations of the self, first as ‘a lovely child’, then ‘a youth’ then ‘a man’. Each stanza presents a textworld that is marked by the characteristics of age: the innocence of the child playing in the garden, the ‘ignorance’ and ‘dreams’ of youth, and the man ‘confounded by the facts of life’. In the final stanza, attention is shifted to the ‘mind, matured in wearying bones’, which both looks back to the past nostalgically and with a greater understanding of their significance, and finds contentment in the memory of ‘lost loves’. Overall, this introspective poem, probably more than any other that I have discussed in this chapter, draws on what Lakoff (1996, 103) terms the objective-subject metaphor, another subtype of the divided person metaphor, and a construal in which the conceptualiser conceives the self as a container that may be objectified by stepping outside of it and viewing it onstage. This construal, from a vantage point that assumes an inherent ability to conceptualize the self at different spatio-temporal moments, is thus captured as a maximally subjective construal of the scene in Cognitive Grammar terms, and as a maximally inward-looking ‘rumination’.

7.4 7.4.1

Sequences

The Spiritual and Religious

Writing about The Path to Peace, Thorpe (1966, 250) argues that the collection provides ‘retrospective shape to Sassoon’s spiritual journey’. Despite Sassoon’s intention ‘to put myself among the Catholic poets’ (Sassoon 1960b), Dubois (2011) points out that he actually produced very little postconversion verse; he criticizes both Lenten Illuminations and The Path to Peace, arguing that rather than motivating Sassoon to write, his conversion ‘became more of a refuge from poetry’ (83). Dubois describes the new poems in The Path to Peace, for example, as ‘insipid’ (82); the use of alliteration in ‘Rogation’ is dismissed as ‘wince-making rather than enlivening’, and the new poems more generally are described as ‘similarly strained and exaggerated’ (83). For Dubois, ‘What is perhaps most noticeable about Sassoon’s post-conversion poetry is the absence of any shadow of the conflict that had shaped his life and art for the previous 40 years’ (84). In many ways, the previously privately published Common Chords , Emblems of Experience, and The Tasking , the three collections brought together by Sassoon to make up Sequences , are more interesting in terms of how they construe the final stages of his reflections leading up to his conversion to Catholicism in 1957, a year after Sequences was published. Each of the individual collections had originally been conceived as a ‘sequence’ (Corrigan 1973, 141) in its own right form and was intended to give shape to his journey

7

REFLECTION

193

towards spiritual salvation.10 In a diary entry of March 1951, Sassoon variously wrote that ‘I muddle along, still trying to evolve my spiritual faith […] They [the poems] are part of my spiritual autobiography. They are part of my human cry for salvation and my reaction against the modern denials of religious faith’ (Corrigan 1973, 140), that he was on an ‘‘endless quest for spiritual illumination’ (Corrigan 1973, 141), and that his verse was ‘an exhibition of the spiritual and intellectual shortcomings of a man trying to find things out for himself—attempting to formulate his private religion step by step’ (Corrigan 1973, 154, original emphasis). Edmund Blunden, on reading The Tasking , proclaimed that Sassoon was ‘the English mystical poet of our days’ (Rothkopf 2016, 99), and, sixth months prior to Sassoon’s conversion, commented that the poet of Sequences was as ‘in pursuit of the divine, sometimes almost a church […] poet’ (Rothkopf 2016, 154). Sassoon clearly valued the poems in Sequences and viewed them as part of this personal progression. Writing to Dame Felicitas Corrigan in 1959, he indicated that ‘some lines in The Tasking read strangely prophetic of my release’ (Corrigan 1973, 166). The fact that ‘A Chord’, the final poem in The Tasking and one I return to later in this chapter, was kept as the last poem of Collected Poems in 1961 is indicative of the value he placed on both the collection and the poem. Generally, the direction of the poems in Sequences matches those from The Heart’s Journey onwards, and are arguably even more inward looking. In ‘The Question’, for example, the speaker opens with the abrupt ‘What am I then?’, a puzzle which might conceivably be the focus of all of the sixty-two poems in Sequences . The metaphor of the split self appears as a way of construing different iterations of identity perceived across time, for example in ‘Travelling Library’ where the speaker, playing on the near rhyme of ‘selves’/‘shelves’, remarks ‘What an old library of life I am!’ and ‘A Dream’, in which the speaker ‘on the brink of sleep’ meets ‘a stranger’, later recognized as an iteration of himself. In other poems such as ‘Another Spring’ and ‘The Half Century’, the speaker’s passing through time is emphasized. The remainder of this chapter examines poems in relation to metaphor construal and to image schemas and force, the latter integrating Langacker’s work on action chains with Talmy’s (1988) complementary notion of force dynamics. The chapter ends with an analysis of ‘A Chord’, which I demonstrate exemplifies many of the ideas and features discussed in prior sections. 7.4.2

Metaphorical Construals

Given that the poems in Sequences are generally more spiritual in nature, it might be expected that they draw more explicitly on conventional metaphorical construals. As Richardson et al. (2021, 5) suggest, the supernatural nature of religious and spiritual thought means that its associated discourse ‘invariably draw[s] on the physical world to convey the metaphysical’. One illustration of this is in how the Christian God is commonly construed through the god is

194

M. GIOVANELLI

human metaphor (Barcelona 2018), evident in so-called sub-metaphors such as god is father (Charteris-Black 2004) but also in several other construals that evoke common human areas of experience as source domains such as movement, space, light, directionality, events, causation, emotions, and social roles (Barcelona 2018, 356). For example, in ‘The Making’, positioned immediately after and offering an answer of sorts to ‘The Question’, a creator metaphor is used as the speaker plays off the respective roles of God and the self as shapers of his destiny, ‘Me He made/And left to build my being’. This chapter has already explored in detail the ways in which journey metaphors are drawn on both in construals of scenes in Sassoon’s poetry and in readerly interpretations (including Sassoon’s own) of his body of work post-1927. In his analysis of journey metaphors in The Bible, CharterisBlack (2004, 205) highlights two specific elaborations, spiritual life is a journey and spiritual life is salvation, arguing that ‘the destination is one of spiritual fulfilment culminating with the goal of a place in paradise, or salvation, rather than social progress’. These metaphors appear across the poems in Sequences , for example in ‘A Prayer to Time’ where the speaker addresses ‘Time’ as a mysterious, ubiquitous force. The final two lines of the poem explicitly construe the speaker’s quest in life (through time) as a spiritual journey that will end in absolution: Time, on whose stair we dream our hopes of heaven, Help us to judge ourselves, and so be shriven.

Similarly, in ‘The Tasking’, the speaker construes his ‘tasking’ in terms of a quest, drawing on the verbs ‘find’, ‘seeking’, ‘put’, and ‘catch’ and the prepositions ‘through’ and ‘behind’ to evoke the nature of his spiritual journey ‘to divine God’s presence’. And in, ‘Faith Unfaithful’, the speaker’s entire spiritual salvation is mapped out as the end point or goal on a journey, ‘Toward ungranted God’. A further metaphorical construal draws on the domain of light as a way of expressing spiritual epiphany, often as a way of requesting enlightened release away from ‘the mountain gloom’ (‘Befriending Star’), ‘the doom-darkened place’ (‘The Need’), ‘the outer gloom’ (‘The Messenger’), ‘through darkness to divine God’s presence’ (‘The Tasking’) and ‘Blind […] Through this gloom’ (‘Faith Unfaithful’). As with some of the earlier poems in The Heart’s Journey, this metaphor largely operates in conjunction with another, understanding is seeing, so that greater self-knowledge is construed as embodied in the shift from darkness to light, ‘Lift by the light’ (‘Can It Be?’), ‘Your light of life’ (‘The Need’).11 In this way, a grander overarching metaphor of spiritual knowledge is light underpins the entire sentiment of the poems.

7

7.4.3

REFLECTION

195

Image Schemas and Force Dynamics

As discussed throughout this chapter, various types of journey metaphors appear in Sassoon’s post-1927 verse. These are generally underpinned by a path schema and often a container schema that construes the body as bounded in some way relative to its external environment; this phenomenon can be seen, for example, in ‘Human Bondage’ where the speaker’s body both contains ‘a night of stars’ and understands ‘a universe beyond me’. As discussed in the previous section, the metaphor spiritual life is a journey may at times evoke either the speaker or God (or some form of spiritual energy) as conceived as the end point of a path. In ‘Faith Unfaithful’, ‘toward ungranted God’ first profiles a trajector (the speaker) closing in on the landmark (God as the goal of the path), before the final line ‘One with Him in me’ denotes the final resting place of the trajector inside the landmark. This construal then positions the speaker and God at discrete points along the path and profiles a specific relationship between them. In other instances, a different image schematic pattern profiles an inverse trajector-landmark alignment. For example, in ‘The Need’, the speaker calls out, in a state of mystery and uncertainty, to God so that spiritual energy is construed as being made visible from the speaker’s body itself, with the trajector emerging from part of the landmark, ‘O God within me […] speak […] Speak […] Speak’. These two separate construals are modelled in Figs. 7.3 and 7.4. In both cases, the speaker-conceptualiser either adopts or wishes to adopt a largely passive role in that the spiritual force is given implied agency either in drawing the speaker along the end point of the path, evident in the directional aspect of the preposition ‘toward’ in ‘Faith Unfaithful’, or in assigning

Fig. 7.3 Image-schematic representation of ‘toward ungranted God’ in ‘Faith Unfaithful’

Fig. 7.4 Image-schematic representation ‘O God within me […] speak […] Speak […] Speak’ in ‘The Need’

196

M. GIOVANELLI

of the ability to speak to God in ‘The Need’. In what Richardson et al. (2021, 67) term ‘reverse transitivity’, the supernatural agent is thus construed as a powerful force acting on the human entity that fulfils the role of the passive believer. In Chapter 5, I explained how Cognitive Grammar treats the notion of force as modelled through an action chain underpinned by a force image schema. In the canonical action event (Langacker 2008, 357), an energy source (trajector) distributes energy through the chain which is consumed by an energy sink (landmark). In his own force-dynamic system, Talmy (1988) highlights that an oppositional force can be understood as part of the whole conceptualization of a larger more complex construal where two entities are profiled either explicitly or are more implicitly understood: the agonist, which has force potential; and the antagonist, which represents an oppositional force. As (1)(a)–(1)(d) demonstrate, an agonist will have tendency towards either movement or rest while the antagonist exerts a counter-force that may overpower the agonist and cause some change in state. Talmy (1988, 55) outlines four basic ‘steady-state’ patterns that typically profile the relationship between agonist and antagonist as follows. (1) (a) The ball (ago) kept rolling because of the wind (ant) blowing on it The ball’s tendency towards rest is opposed by the stronger wind

(b) The shed (ago) kept standing despite the gale wind (ant) blowing against it The shed’s tendency towards rest is stronger than the wind’s force and so resists it

(c) The ball (ago) kept rolling despite the stiff grass (ant) The ball’s tendency towards movement is stronger than the grass’s force and attempt to restrict

(d) The log (ago) kept lying on the incline because of the ridge there (ant) The log’s tendency towards movement is opposed by the stronger force.

In each of the examples, it is the stronger force of the agonist or antagonist that ultimately prevails. Talmy models the relationship diagrammatically by representing the agonist as a ball, the antagonist as a concave shape, the tendency towards movement as a ‘>’, the tendency towards rest as a dot, and the stronger entity of the agonist and antagonist marked using ‘+’. The result of the force interaction is either movement, highlighted by a line with an embedded arrow, or rest, highlighted by a line with an embedded diamond. For example, diagrammatically (1)(a) would appear as in Fig. 7.5. Two particular poems from Sequences exemplify the way in which supernatural agency is evoked. In the first, ‘The Visitant’, again framed by a split self metaphor, the speaker’s sense of identity is temporarily disrupted by an

7

Fig. 7.5 Force-dynamic representation of ‘The ball kept rolling because of the wind blowing on it’

Fig. 7.6 Force-dynamic representation of ‘Someone invades me’ in ‘The Visitant’

REFLECTION

197

+

Ant = speaker’s current ‘self’

Ago = spiritual force; new ‘self’

+ >

unknown force which takes over him late at night and influences his writing. The more spiritual, mystical force is construed as moving into the speaker through the use of the explicitly intrusive verb in ‘Someone else invades me’. In this instance, then, the spiritual force is the stronger agonist and the speaker’s sense of (previous) self the antagonist; here, the agonist’s tendency to movement is stronger than the resistance offered by the speaker, who describes himself as ‘clocked and occluded’. The poem ends with the speaker uncertain as to both the force’s identity and to the extent of the power that the spirit will have on him. This is modelled in Fig. 7.6. In the second, ‘Resurrection’, which Sassoon described as ‘the first “spiritual poem” of those in the book [Sequences]—by which I mean the first which “cried out for the Living God” in me’ (Corrigan 1973, 130, original emphases), the speaker, ‘sauntering in the primrose wood’ is the agonist with a tendency towards movement, whose path is blocked by ‘a voice’, a mystical antagonist, ‘And I that instant stood’. The impact of the voice on the speaker results in an inverted force-dynamic in the second stanza, construed as a ‘resurrection’, where the agonist, now realized as a renewed self within the speaker, is enabled by the antagonist, ‘the word heard within’ to move towards a state of forgiveness and spiritual rebirth. These two force-dynamic representations are modelled in Fig. 7.7. My final analysis, in the section that follows, draws on a range of phenomena and ideas discussed in this chapter to examine ‘A Chord’, which was arranged as the final poem both in The Tasking and then in Sequences .

198

M. GIOVANELLI

Ago = speaker

Ant = ‘a voice’

Ant = ‘the word heard within’

+

Ago = speaker

+

>

Fig. 7.7 Force-dynamic representations in ‘Resurrection’

7.4.4

‘A Chord’

‘A Chord’

On stillness came a chord, While I, the instrument, Knew long-withheld reward: Gradual the glory went; Vibrating, on and on, Toward harmony unheard, Till dark where sanctus shone; Lost, once a living word.

But in me yet abode The given grace though gone; The love, the lifted load, The answered orison.

The poem describes the resonance and ongoing effect of a chord (multiple, connected single notes which together form a rich composite sound) long after it has been played. The speaker’s body is first construed metaphorically as the ‘instrument’, while an unknown spiritual force is implied as fulfilling an agentive role. The equilibrium of the poem ‘on stillness’ is broken in both senses of the word given that the playing of the chord may be read as both interrupting the stasis and the silence of the speaker. Initially then a force-dynamic relationship profiles the speaker as the agonist and the speaker’s body as the antagonist. In this instance, the speaker’s tendency to rest is broken by the stronger spiritual energy through which the chord ‘comes’. As in ‘Resurrection’, however, this initial construal is then inverted so that an alternative force-dynamic is brought into focus. Now, the vibration of the chord is reconstrued as the agonist against a broader, unspecified antagonist, which provides no resistance whatsoever in that ‘the glory went/Vibrating, on and on’. An alternative and plausible candidate for the antagonist role is the speaker himself, now reconstrued not as the medium of but as the entity acted

7 Ant = spiritual force

Ago = speaker’s body

Ago = the chord

+

REFLECTION

199

Ant = (speaker’s body)

+ >

Fig. 7.8 Force-dynamic representations in ‘A Chord’

on by the chord. The force-dynamic relationships in the poem are modelled in Fig. 7.8. The chord’s ongoing vibration that becomes over time only gradually but not fully occluded is indicative of its mysterious nature and lexically realized through a series of contrasts, ‘harmony’/‘unheard’, ‘dark’/‘shone’ and ‘lost’/‘word’ that reflect its characteristic of continuing sound that is beyond normal human perception. It is this resonance that provides the final, revelatory image of the poem. In the second quatrain, the speaker’s body, construed as a container through the prepositional phrase ‘in me’ highlights the power of the deeply embodied experience that is the ‘given grace’ which now rests inside the speaker. Here, the inherent image schema involves the trajector (the resonance of the chord) moving into coming to rest within the landmark (the speaker) to become a permanent part of it, a trajectory and resting point which are, crucially, felt but not externally audible. It is, in effect, a perfect unified construal of grace, love, and the ‘answered orison’, which provides a new energized sense of spiritual equilibrium, the perfect counterbalance to the speaker’s initial stasis at the beginning of the poem. My analysis demonstrates how the language of the poem positions the reader to accept the speaker’s final self-construal as one of epiphany. This is also the preferred literary-critical interpretation; Thorpe (1966, 245), for example, argues that ‘A Chord’ is a poem where ‘the long-felt desire for spiritual certainty has been answered’. For a modern reader, it is also tempting to retrospectively interpret the poem within a wider discourse context, like Thorpe, of Sassoon’s near-ending spiritual journey. It was after reading Sequences in January 1957 that Mother Margaret Mary McFarlin, Mother Superior of the Convent of the Assumption in London, contacted Sassoon and thus began, in earnest, his conversion to Catholicism (Moorcroft Wilson 2013, 554). And, in a letter to Dame Felicitas Corrigan in May 1964 in which Sassoon outlined being asked by Faber and Faber if he wanted to add anything to a reprint of his Collected Poems , he wrote ‘I don’t want to. Seems somehow wrong’ (Corrigan 1973, 232, original emphasis). It seems that ‘A Chord’ provided the perfect end point for thirty years of reflection.

200

M. GIOVANELLI

Notes 1. Collected Poems , initially published in 1947 and updated in 1961 covers the verse up to Sequences . The chronology presented here, however, is not complete. Sassoon also published several other editions, sometimes of single poems including several in the Ariel series published by Faber and Gwyer/Faber and Faber, and other privately arranged collections. The Heart’s Journey, Vigils, and Rhymed Ruminations were published in ‘limited’ and ‘ordinary’ English editions (hence the double dates) as well as American ones. See Keynes (1962) for a more accurate representation of Sassoon’s publications, and David Gray’s website (Gray 2021) for an updated bibliography. 2. In fact, Sassoon commented in considerable detail on several aspects of the first edition of Thorpe’s book, pointing out what he perceived as errors or ‘Things that might be altered’ (Sassoon 1976, 18, original emphasis). See also Thorpe (1976, ii). 3. Continuing the journey metaphor, The Proposal (announcement of publication) of The Path to Peace stated that the volume was ‘a designed sequence [that] traces his spiritual pilgrimage from the somewhat dreamy pantheism of youth through long years of lonely seeking to ‘life breathed afresh’ in acceptance of the gift of faith’. 4. Titles of poems are presented as they appear in the published collections. In some cases, the poems have a full title, e.g. ‘Strangeness of Heart’, but in others the poems are simply numbered with no title and so are generally known by their first few words/line, e.g. ‘Song be my soul’. In the latter instances, only the first word is capitalised. 5. Moorcroft Wilson, emphasizing her reading of Sassoon’s unhappiness at Tufton Street, calls her chapter on Sassoon’s time there ‘Tufton Street Blues’. 6. Hemmings (2008, 143) reads ‘cell’ in a different way as ‘the constitutive unit of all organic life, and as such, [it] invokes the idea of the poet’s own self as organic, with the unconscious as the ‘unknown’ part’. 7. Here understood as referring to the five years that Sassoon spent at Tufton Street. 8. A further model, the ‘temporal sequence’, relates to the organization of events in relation to other events but does not include any experiencer as part of the construal. For example, ‘February comes after January’; see Evans and Green (2006, 86). 9. I would argue here, however, that the reconfiguration of roles brings with it the type of lacuna effect that I think is present at the end of ‘A Blessing’. 10. Sassoon writes both of his desire to frame the poems into a coherent whole and of the difficulty in doing so; see Corrigan (1973, 130, 141, 154). 11. In a diary entry of 1951, Sassoon speaks of trying to find God while being ‘in the dark night of the soul’ (Corrigan 1973, 143).

References Bailey, Ruth. 1935. “Poems by Mr. Sassoon.” The Times Literary Supplement 1769, 28 December, 894. Barcelona, Antonio. 2018. “Metaphor and Metonymy in Language and Art: The Dogma of the Holy Trinity and Its Artistic Representation.” In Religion, Language

7

REFLECTION

201

and the Human Mind, edited by Paul Chilton and Monika Kopytowska, 353–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brearton, Fran. 2007. “A War of Friendship: Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon.” In The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, edited by Tim Kendall, 206–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Corrigan, D. Felicitas. 1973. Siegfried Sassoon: Poet’s Pilgrimage. London: Victor Gollancz. Demjén, Zsófia. 2011. “Motion and Conflicted Self Metaphors in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Smith Journal’.” Metaphor and the Social World 1 (1): 7–25. Dubois, Martin. 2011. “Siegfried Sassoon’s Release and David Jones’s Formation.” Literature and Theology 25 (1): 79–91. Egremont, Max. 2005. Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography. London: Picador. Emmott, Catherine. 2002. “‘Split Selves’ in Fiction and in Medical ‘Life Stories’: Cognitive Linguistic Theory and Narrative Practice.” In Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, edited by Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, 153–81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Evans, Vyvyan, and Melanie Green. 2006. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Forceville, Charles J., and Thijs Renckens. 2013. “The ‘Good Is Light’ and ‘Bad Is Dark’ Metaphor in Feature Films. Metaphor and the Social World 3 (2): 160–79. Gavins, Joanna. 2007. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gray, David. 2021. “Siegfried Sassoon: His Life and Illustrated Bibliography.” Accessed April 8, 2021. http://siegfried-sassoon.firstworldwarrelics.co.uk/index. html. Hemmings, Robert. 2008. Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Keynes, Geoffrey. 1962. A Bibliography of Siegfried Sassoon. London: Rupert HartDavies. Lakoff, George. 1996. “‘Sorry I’m Not Myself Today’: The Metaphor System for Conceptualizing the Self.” In Spaces, Worlds and Grammar, edited by Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, 91–123. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Moeyes, Paul. 1997. Siegfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory: A Critical Study. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Moorcroft Wilson, Jean. 2013. Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend. London: Duckworth. Palmer, Herbert. 1941. “Poetry by Divers Hands.” English: Journal of the English Association 3 (16): 193–95. Richardson, Peter, Charles M. Mueller, and Stephen Pihlaja. 2021. Cognitive Linguistics and Religious Language: An Introduction. Abingdon: Routledge.

202

M. GIOVANELLI

Rothkopf, Carol Z. 2016. Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 1919–1967: Letters 1951–1967 . Abingdon: Routledge. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1909. Sonnets. London: Privately Printed. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1916. Morning Glory. London: Privately Printed. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1919. War Poems. London: William Heinemann. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1923. Recreations. London: Privately Printed. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1925. Lingual Exercises for Advanced Vocabularians. Cambridge: Privately Printed. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1927. The Heart’s Journey, limited edition. London: William Heinemann. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1928. The Heart’s Journey, ordinary edition. London: William Heinemann. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1933. The Road to Ruin. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1934. Vigils, limited edition. Bristol: Douglas Cleverdon. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1935. Vigils, ordinary edition. London: William Heinemann. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1939a. Rhymed Ruminations, limited edition. London: Chiswick Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1939b. “Siegfried Sassoon to Geoffrey Keynes, Letter, 1 May 1939, Papers of Siegfried Sassoon MS Add 8633.” Manuscript Department, Cambridge University Library. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1939c. On Poetry: The Arthur Skemp Memorial Lecture. Bristol: University of Bristol. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1940. Rhymed Ruminations, ordinary edition. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1950. Common Chords. Stanford Dingley: Privately Printed. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1951. Emblems of Experience. Cambridge: Privately Printed. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1954. The Tasking. Cambridge: Privately Printed. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1956. Sequences. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1958. Lenten Illuminations. Cambridge: Privately Printed. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1960a. The Path to Peace. Worcester: Stanbrook Abbey Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1960b. “Letter to Mother Margaret Mary McFarlin, Papers of Siegfried Sassoon MS Add 7935.” Manuscript Department, Cambridge University Library. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1961. Collected Poems 1908–1956. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1966. An Octave. London: Shenval Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1976. Letters to a Critic. London: John Roberts Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1981. Diaries 1920–1922. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1985. Diaries 1923–1925. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber and Faber. Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Talmy, Leonard. 1988. “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition.” Cognitive Science 12: 49–100. The Times Literary Supplement. 1940. “Mr. Sassoon: Peace Remembered.” 2022, 2 November, 588.

7

REFLECTION

203

Thorpe, Michael. 1966. Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study. London: Oxford University Press. Thorpe, Michael. 1976. “Introduction”, to Letters to a Critic, i–iii. London: John Roberts Press. Werth, Paul. 1997. “Conditionality as Cognitive Distance.” In On Conditionals Again, edited by A. Athanasiasdou and R. Dirven, 243–71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Werth, Paul. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman. Wood, Frederick T. 1936. “Fiction, Drama and Poetry.” English Studies 18 (1–6): 128–40.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Reading ‘Everyone Sang’

8.1

Introduction

In a letter to Edmund Blunden in which he reflected on the style and sentiments of his poetry, Sassoon wrote ‘I have never claimed to be an innovator in verbal adornments. What matters is the humanity which I have communicated, and the spiritual content of my poems’ (Rothkopf 2016, 302). As I have highlighted throughout this book, academic and non-academic readers alike have commented on specific linguistic characteristics of Sassoon’s work, seen as forming the basis of a perceived style or set of styles. These characteristics and the interpretations that arise from them formed the basis of my analyses in Chapters 3–7. In Chapter 7 I also outlined how, from the late 1920s onwards, Sassoon’s poetic output became highly stylized in its retrospective and introspective outlook and a ‘spiritual content’ which was often in direct opposition to what he saw as an alienating Modernist movement. As the chapters in this book have outlined and exemplified, a cognitive stylistic account of Sassoon’s work demonstrates that the language of his poetry and prose can be examined to help to explain the specific, demonstrable, and powerful effects of his work has had on different kinds of readers. This concluding chapter offers a further example of this phenomenon by drawing on three responses to Sassoon’s (1919) poem ‘Everyone Sang’, offered as a final case study in the context of Sassoon’s own comment about communicating ‘humanity’. Demonstrating how readers’ responses can be aligned with the language of the poem, I provide a final Cognitive Grammar analysis to outline how the poem positions its readership to respond to it in particular ways. First appearing in the privately published Picture Show (Sassoon 1919), ‘Everyone Sang’ is an interesting poem not least because Sassoon later decided, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Giovanelli, The Language of Siegfried Sassoon, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7_8

205

206

M. GIOVANELLI

in Siegfried’s Journey (Sassoon 1945), to provide a substantial account of its composition and offer his thoughts on what he saw as the poem’s central message. His account explains how, following a frustrating night unable to write anything, the opening two lines came suddenly, and he was then able to complete the poem quickly. The next day, he sent the poem to his fellow poet John Masefield, who claimed that it was ‘the only adequate peace celebration he had seen’ (Sassoon 1945, 141). Rejecting the common interpretation of the singing voices in the poem as marching soldiers, Sassoon’s instead offers ‘Everyone Sang’ as a forward-looking post-war vision for a new type of world: The singing that would ‘never be done’ was the Social Revolution which I believed to be at hand. (Sassoon 1945, 141)1

‘Everyone Sang’ has since become one of the most quoted of all of Sassoon’s poems. It was reprinted in numerous periodicals and poetry anthologies. It was also one of the poems Sassoon himself read out during his contribution to a Peace Pledge Union (PPU) rally in London in 1935 set up to further the pacifist movement with the threat of another war looming.2

8.2

Recentring Sassoon

There is a long history of writers and their texts being adapted and appropriated so as to recentre their work within new contexts and address concerns relevant to new times and groups of readers. Recentring most commonly occurs in canonical writers whose longevity is largely related to receiving the most coverage in school curricula, being staples of anthologies, and being labelled as having an inherent literary value in some way. First World War poetry, with its strong narrative of sacrifice and revelation, seems particularly open to recentering given how it is often read by successive generations as a very precise form of cultural memorial (Minogue and Palmer 2018) and thus extends its interpretative significance beyond an initial frame of reference. There also appear to be specific characteristics of literary authors and their works that enable them to reach out more readily to readers. For example, Ryan, writing about the enduring relevance of Shakespeare’s plays, argues that [Shakespeare’s] drama is shaped and phrased in such a way as to activate our awareness of the potential we share with the protagonists, and with all human beings then and now, to live more fulfilling lives than those we find ourselves compelled to live by the place and time we happen to inhabit. (Ryan 2015, 14, original emphasis)

An awareness of potential, in these terms, seems bound up with our more general capacity to align the text-worlds of a literary text with the current situation of reading as a form of extended metaphor so that the events of the

8

CONCLUSION: READING ‘EVERYONE SANG’

207

former give structure to the context of the latter. A recent example of this phenomenon that involved one of Sassoon’s poems, ‘The General’ (previously discussed in Chapters 1 and 5), occurred in March 2020 when a reader wrote a letter to The Financial Times in which he admonished both the government’s handling of social distancing measures during the initial stages of the Covid19 pandemic, and the newspaper’s coverage of the matter. In the final part of the letter, the reader draws explicitly on ‘The General’: As an example of leadership, when so much was at stake, it beggared belief. And your reference to Mr Johnson’s “sunny rhetoric” reminds me of the “cheery old card” in Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘The General’ who, we learn in the last line, did for his infantry by the plan of his attack.

The recentering here is operationalized by aligning the behaviour of the then Prime Minister and his government with the content, style, and tone of Sassoon’s poem. The bringing together of the two contexts through analogy is a metaphorical construal in which the source domain of the poem provides structure to the target domain of the political situation in 2020. Here the writer’s feelings about the likely effect of the government’s actions are brought into focus as a result of the blend formed from the two input spaces of the events in 1917 and in 2020. In this emergent structure, the Prime Minister, like the General is deemed responsible for the demise of those he ought to protect.

8.3

The Experience of ‘Everyone Sang’

‘Everyone Sang’

Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: 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.

The various responses (literary-critical, online reader blogs and reviews and so on) to ‘Everyone Sang’ that I have read echo, I think, Sassoon’s broader evaluation of his work, ‘the humanity which I have communicated, and the spiritual content of my poems’, the quotation with which I began this chapter. There appears to be a very clearly defined preferred response (Stockwell 2013) to

208

M. GIOVANELLI

this poem that places it as a poem of hope, as a poem about liberation, and as a poem about groups of people coming together to celebrate. It is frequently drawn on by readers as a source domain that provides structure to specific modern contexts exemplifying, in Ryan’s terms, its significant potential. In the remainder of this section, I briefly outline three interpretations of ‘Everyone Sang’ before providing my own analysis of the poem to align those readings with aspects of the poem’s—and Sassoon’s—language and style. In early 2020, countries around the world began to enter periods of lockdown or ‘stay at home’ quarantines due to the Covid-19 pandemic. During this state of emergency, the St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia continued to publish its weekly poetry pamphlet, Wellspring: Poetry for the Journey, a two-page resource for its members which included a poem with some reflections on its significance in the context of current day issues. The March 30th edition focused on ‘Everyone Sang’ and the commentary, written by Allison Seay the Church’s Associate for Religion and the Arts and herself a poet, began with her rationale for the choice of poem. Seay reflects on the poem’s capacity to capture the feelings and hopes of those in lockdown, and specifically connects Sassoon’s verse to the television images, viewed on news channels around the world, of communities in mainland Europe overcoming the burden of physical isolation in their homes by opening their windows and engaging in communal song. Emphasizing a message of liberation and quoting ‘Everyone Sang’ in full, Seay presents the poem as offering a highly salient message in the context of a pandemic. Sassoon’s poem, though one hundred years old and a response to a different kind of war-time than our current pandemic, strikes me as profoundly in tune with our present global crisis. Ours is a climate of fear and anxiety as we further isolate and the death toll rises, yes, but ours is a climate too of peculiar unity, hopeful longing, and some almost-forgotten love song for one another made all the more evident now in the face of peril. What a comfort that the song of a century ago might be echoed in a song we sing today. (Seay 2020, 1)

It is unsurprising that ‘Everyone Sang’ might resonate with readers coming to terms with the first difficult months of the pandemic, and the sense of spirit that emerged from the footage and still images of communities coming together in the song are easily aligned with what is undoubtedly a central theme of the poem. And it is equally unsurprising that the poem was referred to by other readers during the pandemic as a poem of hope. For example, the journalist Martin Bell chose ‘Everyone Sang’ to read as part of the #poemsfromlockdown Twitter initiative run by King’s College, University of Cambridge in which contributors were asked to recite a poem that meant something to them during the time of the pandemic. Introducing the poem, Bell drew explicitly on the poem’s message of freedom and its hope of a brighter future when he stated that ‘it was about liberation from war in 1918.

8

CONCLUSION: READING ‘EVERYONE SANG’

209

In our case, we hope it’s about liberation from pestilence’ (King’s College 2020). The poet and academic John Burnside offers a similar perspective on ‘the poem of his [Sassoon] that I most love’ (2019, 45) across a whole chapter in his book-length survey of poetry of the twentieth century. Framed within his account of his journey as a reader of poetry, Burnside’s analysis, like the others that I have outlined, contends that the reader is positioned to find comfort in the poem’s emphasis on community, spontaneous joy and ‘a powerful sense of common cause’ (2019, 47). Burnside argues that ‘Everyone Sang’ has the magical quality of universality in that the speaking voice remains detached and ‘throughout a spectator’ (2019, 46) and so the power of the poem comes from the potential it holds for readers to align themselves with the poem’s singing voices and thus connect the poem with their own perspectives and situations. For Burnside, the singing voices are at once spontaneous, collegiate, and in their ‘profound fellowship’ (2019, 49); the song is ‘open to everyone because it is wordless’ (2019, 48) and so inclusive and rich in possibility. It is above all a poem about renewed unity following division, ‘a peace poem’ (209, 45). These three readings, drawn from a church group aiming to provide comfort and support to its members, a social media initiative, and an academic reflecting on his own personal journey as a reader of literature, demonstrate the universal appeal of ‘Everyone Sang’ and highlight what appear to be standard responses centred—and recentered—around the themes of community, hope, and peace. My final section in this book draws on several concepts from Cognitive Grammar that have been discussed and used in previous chapters to demonstrate how these responses may be understood as fundamentally text-driven and therefore analyzable through scrutiny of the poem’s language. The poem begins with the indefinite pronoun ‘Everyone’, itself the combination of the pronoun ‘one’ and the grounding element ‘every’. A pronoun inherently provides a more schematic construal given that it stands in for a noun or series or nouns; here, of course, the schematicity also highlights inclusivity in that ‘every’ construes all items within a set (here all of humankind) collectively as one composite whole. The effect is thus to profile the collective. ‘Everyone Sang’ is also underpinned by a container image schema where the human body is realized as a bounded space into or out of which events or emotions enter. In the first line, the singing bursts out from within the voices, while in the second line, this trajectory is inverted in that the speaker construes himself as being ‘filled with such delight’. In the third line, the birds are construed as trajectors enclosed and ‘prisoned’ within an undefined landmark, while the remaining lines of the first stanza draw on a more elaborate sourcepath-goal image schema to project the path of the birds, now freed, moving across the orchards and fields and ‘on-on-and out of sight’. The prepositional phrase ‘across the white orchards and dark-green fields’ invites the reader to scan the movement of the birds (trajector) against the landmark (orchards and fields) with increased granularity evident not only in the pre-modifying adjectives of the respective noun phrases but also through the complex preposition

210

M. GIOVANELLI

‘across’, which construes a more textured view of the birds’ path, compared to, for example, ‘along the white orchards and dark-green fields’ which would simply outline a more rudimentary line of travel.3 Overall, the first stanza thus evokes the speaker’s feelings and position as part of a wider community of voices and the poem specifically draws on the metaphorical construal emotion is a bird to project the individual, idiosyncratic joy of the speaker but also to the position that joy clearly as dependent on and guided by communal actions. This emphasis on the collective is reinforced by the fact that the birds are construed in plural form rather than as a single entity. The second stanza of the poem repeats the indefinite pronoun ‘Everyone’ and draws on the common orientational metaphor good is up to highlight the emotional impact of the situation on the singing voices. In this stanza, the agency is defocused across the two construals ‘Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted’ and ‘My heart was shaken’ to emphasize the patient as a clausal subject. These appear in proximity to two single-participant absolute construals ‘And beauty came’ and ‘horror/Drifted away’. In these instances, the profiled subject is conceived without any explicit mentioning of an energy source and so are understood as thematic processes (Langacker 2008, 370), which emphasize ‘a self-contained whole, conceptually coherent in and of itself’. The sense here, it seems to me, is of instantaneous and unexplained euphoria. The stanza also relies on movement along a path schema and other construals that bring together a more complex series of spatial orientations: the lifting of the voices in line one, the deictic verb ‘came’ which construes movement towards the speaker and the noun phrase ‘setting sun’ which invited scanning in a downwards motion in line two; and the phrasal verb ‘Drifted away’ which construes movement away from the speaker in line 4. These movements may also be understood in force dynamic terms as the tendency to rest of the agonists—voices, the speaker’s heart, and the horror—are overpowered by a more powerful antagonistic, but unnamed, force. The poem ends with a further explicit metaphorical construal a person is a bird, which brings coherence to the various types of movement in the second stanza and invites the reader to align these to the movement of the freed birds that were described in the first stanza. The final line relies on two instances of negation: first, the morphological negation of ‘wordless ’; and second the syntactic negation of ‘will never be done’. In each case, I think, the poem offers an inherent contradiction in the dissonance that exists between the song and its characteristics: it is a song yet contains no words, and, instead of being temporally bound with a discernible beginning and ending simply continues forever; like the birds, it goes ‘on—on—and out of sight’, yet its sound resonates for all time. The negation here serves to emphasize its non-prototypical attributes and the timelessness of the song appears to invite the reader to import their own words into the poem and frame the poem’s message within their own context of reading. My discussion above of ‘Everyone Sang’ naturally aligns the language of the poem with how those readers, as discussed earlier in this chapter, have

8

CONCLUSION: READING ‘EVERYONE SANG’

211

interpreted the poem in particular ways, importing its messages of hope into new contexts and highlighting how, as Seay suggests, the poem might well be the ultimate ‘love song for one another’. My discussion demonstrates how readers are thus positioned to engage with ‘Everyone Sang’ and make meaning by using a range of additional resources including drawing on their own discourse, and social and physical contexts. Throughout this book, I have highlighted how Sassoon’s styles of writing may be explained by drawing of the machinery of cognitive stylistics, and specifically on Cognitive Grammar as a method for analysis. The case studies and more general surveys of Sassoon’s poetry and prose presented in this book have examined both the key stylistic traits of Sassoon’s writing and the themes and concerns that they address. In doing so, I have demonstrated that Sassoon’s styles, and the identities that they project, are best understood as emerging from the language of his work, recoverable through both close textual analysis and through consideration of readers’ responses. It is the language of Siegfried Sassoon’s writing that gives rise to specific and analyzable interpretative effects, and this book has emphasized that it is the scrutiny, above all, of language that provides the best insights into Sassoon’s significant literary and linguistic achievements, and into his enduring appeal to different readers.

Notes 1. Of course, Sassoon’s comments in Siegfried’s Journey come twenty-five years after writing ‘Everyone Sang’, so may not accurately reflect his thinking at the time of composition. 2. For overviews of poetry anthologies that include Sassoon’s work see Keynes (1962) and the website run by David Gray. Sassoon also spoke at PPU rallies in 1936 and 1937: see Moorcroft Wilson (2013, 504). 3. See Croft and Cruse (2004, 52) for a discussion of prepositions and their relationship to spatial construals.

References Burnside, John. 2019. The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century. London: Profile Books. Croft, W., and D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gray, David. 2021. “Siegfried Sassoon: His Life and Illustrated Bibliography.” Accessed April 8th 2021. http://siegfried-sassoon.firstworldwarrelics.co.uk/index. html. Keynes, Geoffrey. 1962. A Bibliography of Siegfried Sassoon. London: Rupert HartDavies.

212

M. GIOVANELLI

King’s College. 2020. “King’s Alumnus and Former War Reporter Martin Bell Reads ‘Everyone Sang’ by Siegfried Sassoon for King’s New Poetry Initiative #poemsfromlockdown […]”, 23rd April, https://twitter.com/Kings_College/status/125 3330486610415617. Langacker, Ronald. W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Minogue, Sally, and Andrew Palmer. 2018. The Remembered Dead: Poetry, Memory and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mooney, Tom. 2020. “Johnson should have ‘got a grip’ way back in February.” Letter to The Financial Times, 27 March 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/0b705e9e6f59-11ea-9bca-bf503995cd6f. Moorcroft Wilson, Jean. 2013. Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend. London: Duckworth. Ryan, Kiernan. 2015. Shakespeare’s Universality: Here’s Fine Revolution. London: Bloomsbury. Rothkopf, Carol. Z. 2016. Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 1919–1967: Letters 1951–1967 . Abingdon: Routledge. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1919. Picture Show. Cambridge: privately printed. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1945. Siegfried’s Journey. London: Faber and Faber. Seay, Allison. 2020. Wellspring: Poetry for the Journey, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. https://www.ststephensrva.org/download_file/view/2675/. Stockwell, Peter. 2013. The Positioned Reader. Language and Literature 22 (3): 263– 277.

Index

A accessibility theory, 62 active voice, 21, 27, 160 All Quiet on the Western Front , 147 An Anthology of War Poems , 2 attentional windowing, 132, 167 autofiction, 12, 144, 148–151, 153, 155, 158–160, 162, 169, 170 auto-gnosis, 86

B Benediction, 3 biography, 3, 9, 10, 91, 149, 150, 163 Blunden, Edmund, 1, 2, 4, 42, 43, 77, 145, 169, 170, 193, 205 Bottomley, Gordon, 51 British National Corpus (BNC), 136, 137 Brooke, Rupert, 53 Burnside, John, 209

C Catholicism, 192, 199 Chapelwood Manor, 82, 88, 112, 164 Churchill, Winston, 51 cognitive commitment, 17, 72 Cognitive Grammar agent, 21, 119

canonical event model, 118, 122 conceived scene, 20, 23, 118 conceptual base, 25 conceptualization, 18–21, 23, 28, 35 construal, 8, 11, 12, 20, 22, 23, 25–28, 30, 35, 36, 38, 40, 53, 89, 90, 95, 103, 122, 132, 151 construal constraints, 11, 36, 40, 90, 152 construal relationship, 20, 23, 34, 99 Current Discourse Space, 20 delimitation, 53, 125 disengaged cognition, 8 domains, 24, 95 dynamicity, 28 energy sink, 125 energy source, 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 131, 182, 196 fictivity, 20 figure-ground, 25 focusing, 24 maximal and immediate scope, 24, 25 non-processural relationships, 25, 26 patient, 21, 119, 125 perspective, 27 processes, 22, 59 profiling, 25, 118 prominence, 25, 63, 132 reality/irreality, 105, 106 reconstrual, 10, 12, 152

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Giovanelli, The Language of Siegfried Sassoon, Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7

213

214

INDEX

reference point relationship, 30, 31, 63, 73, 96, 98 sequential scanning, 29, 59–61, 69 setting-subject construction, 66 situated cognition, 39 specificity, 23 subject/object of conception, 32, 33, 85 subjective and objective construal, 28, 32, 35 summary scanning, 30, 59, 61, 69, 71 trajector/landmark alignment, 25, 26 vantage point, 22, 28, 31, 32, 56, 59, 192 cognitive linguistics, 8, 17, 18, 22, 35, 186 cognitive stylistics, 5, 8, 40, 150, 211 Conceptual Metaphor Theory, 37 context bodily, 38, 39, 87 conceptual-cognitive, 39, 87 discourse, 87 situational, 39, 87, 101, 131 context-induced creativity, 38 corpus stylistics, 124 Corrigan, Dame Felicitas, 4, 55, 176, 184, 185, 192, 193, 197, 199, 200 Craiglockhart Hospital, 81, 115 creativity, 11, 12, 37–40, 44, 57, 152 D Daily Herald, 143 ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, 43 Denmark Hill Hospital, 6, 56, 140 divided person metaphor, 101, 175, 178, 181, 192 Dunn, Dr James, 143, 144

fictive motion, 71, 73 First World War, 1, 11, 40, 50, 62, 64, 83–85, 113, 162, 163, 206 force dynamics, 193, 195 foregrounding, 6, 27, 87, 128, 134, 157 G Garsington, 82, 143 generalization commitment, 17, 39 Georgian Poetry 1916–1917 , 52 Georgian Poetry 1918–1919, 52, 77 Georgian Poetry 1920–1922, 52, 77 Georgian poets, 51–53 ‘God! How I Hate You’, 43 Goodreads , 50 Gosse, Edmund, 4, 138, 179 Graves, Robert, 4, 5, 51, 52, 55, 77, 111, 147–149, 154, 160–163, 165, 169, 170 Good-bye to All That , 4, 147, 148, 163, 170 Greaves, Ralph, 144 H Harbord, Gordon, 155 Hardy, Thomas, 143, 162, 163, 179 Hawthornden Prize, 148 Hindenburg Line, 68, 81, 82 Hulme, T.E., 42, 43 hypotheticality, 12, 182

E Egremont, Max, 3, 52, 82, 85, 113, 117, 144, 158, 185 embodied simulation, 75 embodiment, 11, 18, 37–40, 64 experiential iconicity, 71

I image schemas container, 20, 116, 178, 182, 195, 209 enter, 20 force, 118, 196 source-path-goal, 20, 69, 73, 118, 122, 132, 157, 167, 175, 209 intentionality, 10, 122, 123, 134, 138–140, 152 irony, 5, 7, 100, 105, 114, 115, 134, 139

F Fall, Cyril, 146–148, 150

J James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 148

INDEX

K ‘Kneeshaw goes to war’, 42 knowledge, 9, 10, 18, 20, 35, 39, 63, 65, 94, 105, 122, 123, 131, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 149, 150, 162, 189, 194

M Marsh, Edward, 4, 51, 52, 54, 123, 159 Masefield, John, 52, 206 McFarlin, Mother Margaret Mary, 199 memory studies, 148 metaphor, 12, 18, 22, 34, 37–39, 42, 50, 71, 89, 94–98, 116, 136, 175–177, 179–182, 184–186, 188–190, 192–196, 200, 206, 210 metonymy, 95, 97 mind-modelling, 10, 91, 140, 162 Modernism, 52 Monro, Harold, 51 Moorcroft Wilson, Jean, 3, 85, 112, 140, 144, 158, 179, 180, 183, 184, 199, 200 Morrell, Ottoline, 68, 82 Morrell, Philip, 82 Myers, Charles, 84, 85 mystification, 120–122, 125, 131, 133, 141 agent based, 120, 121, 125, 127, 131, 134 patient based, 120, 121, 125, 131

N New Critics, 10 nightmares, 104, 112 Not About Heroes , 3

O Owen, Wilfred, 3, 42, 50, 51, 85, 102, 103, 113, 146, 147, 170 ‘Crammed in that Funnelled Hole’, 43 ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, 85

P passive voice, 21, 27, 115, 118, 120

215

pronouns, 6, 33, 34, 53, 55, 59, 61–64, 73, 85, 98, 99, 115, 121, 125, 127, 128, 134–136, 140, 141, 151, 155, 156, 166, 181, 186, 209, 210

R readers, 2, 5, 7–13, 18, 22, 31, 36, 39, 40, 43, 49–51, 53, 55, 56, 59–63, 65, 69–73, 75, 76, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90–92, 94–99, 101, 102, 112, 113, 120, 122, 123, 127, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138, 140, 149–154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 166, 167, 176, 179, 181, 186, 187, 190, 191, 199, 205–211 rewriting, 5, 12, 22, 144, 147, 151–154, 160 Riding, Laura, 162 Rivers, W.H., 83, 85, 86, 92, 101, 103, 104, 107, 169 Ross, Robbie, 86

S Sassoon, Hamo, 155 Sassoon, Siegfried ‘878–1935’, 189 ‘A Blessing’, 189–191, 200 ‘Absolution’, 53, 56 ‘A Chord’, 193, 197–199 ‘A Dream’, 193 ‘A flower has opened in my heart’, 179 ‘After Dusk’, 52 ‘A Letter Home (to Robert Graves)’, 55, 111 ‘A Local Train of Thought’, 188 ‘Alone, I hear the wind’, 179 ‘A Midnight Interior’, 179 ‘A Murder Case’, 124 ‘A Night Attack’, 55, 111 An Octave, 176 ‘Another Spring’, 193 ‘A Picture of the Muses’, 188 ‘Apocalypse’, 175, 184 ‘Apocalyptical Indiscretions’, 175 ‘A Prayer to Time’, 194 ‘A Remembered Queen’, 189

216

INDEX

‘As I was walking in the gardens’, 179 ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’, 11, 81, 82, 115, 118, 131 ‘A Song of Summer’, 52 ‘A Thought’, 52 ‘Atrocities’, 124, 127 Augustan Book of Modern Poetry: Siegfried Sassoon, 2 ‘A Working Party’, 11, 29, 33, 49, 55–58, 62–64, 66, 67, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76, 111, 113 ‘Banishment’, 105, 128, 129 ‘Base Details’, 89, 114, 128–130, 164 ‘Befriending Star’, 194 ‘Blind’, 52, 194 ‘Break of Day’, 105, 106, 129 ‘Brevities’, 188 ‘Can It Be?’, 194 Collected Poems , 77, 113, 193, 199, 200 Common Chords , 176, 192 ‘Counter-Attack’, 42, 102, 128, 130 Counter-Attack and Other Poems , 2, 6, 12, 49, 50, 67, 76, 77, 91, 123–127, 129–131, 140, 141, 153, 163 ‘Dead Musicians’, 129 ‘Death’s Brotherhood’, 91, 104, 105, 153 ‘Died of Wounds’, 12, 55, 111, 113, 154, 163–167 Discoveries , 52 ‘Does It Matter?’, 12, 100, 105, 135, 136, 138, 139, 164 ‘Doggerel About Old Days’, 188 ‘Down the glimmering staircase’, 185 ‘Duck in the Summer Garden Rich with Flowers’, 52 Emblems of Experience, 176, 192 ‘Eulogy of My House’, 188 ‘Everyone Sang’, 12, 205–211 ‘Eyes’, 188 ‘Faith Unfaithful’, 194, 195 ‘Farewell to Youth’, 185 ‘Farewell to a Room’, 180 ‘Fight to a Finish’, 128, 129 ‘Frailty’, 100 ‘Glory of Women’, 114, 125, 126, 140

‘Golgotha’, 55, 111 ‘Great Men’, 114 ‘Grieg’, 52 ‘Heart and Soul’, 188 ‘How to Die’, 128, 129 ‘Human Bondage’, 195 ‘In an Underground Dressing Station’, 89 ‘In Heytesbury Wood’, 189 ‘In the Pink’, 55, 111, 113 ‘Invocation’, 128, 130 ‘It was the love of life’, 185 Lenten Illuminations , 176, 192 Lingual Exercises for Advanced Vocabularians , 143 ‘Long Ago’, 185 ‘Marsyas’, 52 ‘Meeting and Parting’, 189 Melodies , 52 Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, 12, 40, 144, 145 Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 12, 28, 104, 144, 145 ‘Midsummer Eve’, 188 Morning-Glory, 52, 176 ‘My past has gone to bed’, 185, 186 ‘Ode for Music’, 52 ‘Old World to New’, 188 ‘On Edington Hill’, 189 ‘One Who Watches’, 179 ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, 180 On Poetry, 177 ‘Outlived by Trees’, 188 Picture Show, 2, 124, 143, 205 Poems (1906), 52 Poems (1911), 52 ‘Prehistoric Burials’, 189 ‘Prelude: The Troops’, 102, 128, 130, 131 ‘Progressions’, 189, 192 ‘Reconciliation’, 140 Recreations , 143, 175 ‘Remorse’, 128–130, 141 ‘Repression of War Experience’, 11, 83, 92, 94, 96, 100, 101, 125, 126, 128–130 ‘Resurrection’, 197, 198 ‘Revisitation’, 107

INDEX

Rhymed Ruminations , 176, 178, 184, 187–189, 191, 200 Satirical Poems , 143 Selected Poems , 2, 143 Sequences , 12, 176, 178, 192–194, 196, 197, 199, 200 Sherston’s Progress , 85, 86, 101, 145, 169 ‘Sick Leave’, 91, 104, 153 ‘Song be my soul’, 178, 179 Sonnets , 52, 176 Sonnets and Verses , 52 ‘Stand-to’, 114 ‘Strangeness of Heart’, 179 ‘Stretcher Case’, 55 ‘Survivors’, 100, 127–129 ‘The Child at the Window’, 189, 191, 192 The Daffodil Murderer, 52 ‘The Death Bed’, 56, 111 ‘The Distant Song’, 56 ‘The Dragon’, 55 ‘The Dream’, 103 ‘The Dug-Out’, 56, 106 ‘The Effect’, 12, 125, 126, 131–134, 136, 139 ‘The General’, 6, 7, 10, 114, 123, 124, 127, 131, 132, 207 The Heart’s Journey, 12, 175–180, 182, 184, 186, 187, 193, 194, 200 ‘The Half Century’, 193 ‘The Hawthorn Tree’, 140 ‘The Hero’, 56, 113, 114 ‘The Investiture’, 128, 131 ‘The Making’, 194 ‘The Messenger’, 194 ‘The Need’, 194–196 The Old Century; and Seven More Years (OC), 146 The Old Huntsman and Other Poems , 2, 77, 113, 163 ‘The One-legged Man’, 114 ‘The Optimist’, 89, 164 The Path to Peace, 176, 177, 192, 200 ‘The Poet as Hero’, 56, 112 ‘The Question’, 193, 194 ‘The Rear-Guard’, 11, 49, 67, 68, 70, 72–76, 129, 164

217

‘The Redeemer’, 41, 42 ‘The Road’, 55 The Road to Ruin, 176, 184 The Tasking , 176, 192–194, 197 ‘The Tombstone Maker’, 55 ‘The Triumph’, 128, 130 ‘The Undying’, 55 ‘The Visitant’, 196, 197 The Weald of Youth, 117, 146, 149 ‘They were not true’, 185 ‘To Any Dead Officer’, 126–129, 164 ‘To His Dead Body’, 52, 56, 111 ‘To My Son’, 189–191 ‘To One Who Was With Me in The War’, 144, 179 ‘To Victory’, 55 ‘To the Warmongers’, 42, 140 ‘Travelling Library’, 193 ‘Trench Duty’, 125, 126 ‘Twelve Months After’, 105, 129 Twelve Sonnets , 52 ‘Two Hundred Years After’, 55 ‘Ultimatum’, 185 ‘Unwisdom’, 185 ‘Vigil in Spring’, 185 Vigils , 107, 176–178, 184, 185, 187, 200 War Poems , 2, 50, 77, 124, 143, 176 ‘What is Stonehenge?’, 179 “When I’m alone”, 179 ‘When I’m Among a Blaze of Lights’, 56 ‘When Selfhood can discern no comfort’, 179 ‘Wirers’, 129 ‘You that in Moonlight Meadows wander’, 52 schemas, 19, 20, 39, 43, 73, 89, 105, 106, 132, 176, 179, 181, 182, 186, 187, 190, 195, 210 semantic prosody, 136, 138 shellshock, 83–85, 92 Silk, Dennis, 1, 12 Stuart Roberts, John, 3 style, 3–6, 9, 11, 31, 49, 51, 52, 54–56, 63, 65, 76, 81, 87–92, 95, 98, 100–102, 105, 106, 112, 117, 123, 147, 176, 180, 188, 205, 207, 208, 211

218

INDEX

stylizing, 5, 90, 168 systemic functional linguistics, 35, 122 T Talmy, Leonard, 18, 65, 71, 132, 167, 193, 196 tellability, 55, 156 Text World Theory, 12, 36, 105, 182 The Cambridge Magazine, 1, 56, 85, 88, 112, 124 the context principle, 36, 37 The Daily Mail , 148 The Financial Times , 207 The Muse in Arms , 2 The Nation, 113, 138 The Observer, 148, 175 ‘The Song of the Mud’, 42 The Times Literary Supplement , 113, 148, 179, 188 The War of the Worlds , 35 The War the Infantry Knew 1914–1919, 144

The Westminster Gazette, 1 thick description, 91, 92, 107 Thomas, David, 154, 156–158, 162 time moving ego model, 186, 187 moving time model, 186 trauma studies, 83, 91 Treasury of War Poetry, 2 U Under Fire, 41, 43 Undertones of War, 42, 150, 170 W war books, 12, 146, 147 war experience, 5, 7, 12, 86, 138, 144, 147, 148, 159 war memory, 147 Weirleigh, 92, 143, 147, 149, 178 Wellspring: Poetry for the Journey, 208 Wiltshire, Harald, 84