Culture in Camouflage , and: Media, Memory, and the First World War (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Culture in Camouflage, and: Media, Memory, and the First World War Debra Rae Cohen Culture in Camouflage. Patrick Deer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 329. $125.00 (cloth). Media, Memory, and the First World War. David Williams. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 321. $59.95(cloth); $29.95 (paper). These two imperfect but fascinating books—each hugely ambitious, each offering a model that only partially contains its material, each implicitly addressing the lacunae of the other—meet on the plane of war and representation. David Williams argues that film precipitated, in the First World War, a new kind of cinematic remembering, in which visual images of the past catapulted violently into the present; Patrick Deer deploys a potent set of visual tropes—blackout, camouflage, oversight—to trace the growth of war culture, and literary resistance to it, in the years and the war that followed. Though Deer's book is by far the more satisfying and substantial, both books show the extent to which the study of war literature and war culture has become increasingly nuanced and theoretically inflected over the past decade and more. Williams has in the past been a sensitive commentator on the relations of media and literature; his 2003 book, Imagined Nations: Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction, deftly negotiated both the problems of tracing a mediated nationhood and the McLuhanesque paradox of doing so in print. Much like this one, that book cast a wide net, harking back to the Aeneid to make claims for the entwined genealogy of communications and community. Here, he begins with Homer's Achilles, spending two chapters discussing the transition from oral to written memorialization of the warrior figure before chronicling the unsettling advent of cinema. The new medium, he reminds us, "overturned familiar notions of temporality . . . for a past actualité appeared actuellement (at present), here and now, to invade the present, making the pastness of the past seem 'unnatural'" (109). This created, argues Williams, "a new verb tense in the grammar of existence [End Page 195] . . . the past-progressive-present tense" (30), soon to be deployed in the syntax of war memory. The Battle of the Somme, however real or staged, serves for him as a key moment in the history of remembrance, as a mediatized link between combatant and noncombatant. Matt Matsuda's The Memory of the Modern (1996) is the touchstone for this argument, as central to this book as Harold Innis to Imagined Nations; one wishes that Williams had also interacted with Mary Ann Doane's discussion of the afterimage in The Emergence of Cinematic Time (2002), which seems inescapably germane to his thesis. Given Williams's obvious concern with the national particularities of Canadian First World War memory—which often seems to contradict his Fussellian claims of a broader epistemic shift—it's both telling and unfortunate that his central chapters on the literature of the war largely center on Owen and Sassoon. Yet these rereadings of canonical works are in many respects the strongest in the book; they are certainly the most convincing in regard to his thesis about cinematic epistemology. Grounding his interpretation in Owen's letters, including his references to film, Williams recasts "Dulce Et Decorum Est" as both an example of cinematic focus and as a reader-implicating enactment of the moment of "filmic" invasion of the present. Sassoon's Sherston trilogy, as translated from his war diaries, becomes, in Williams's reading, an example of the "ontological doubling" that bemused early cinema-goers, with Sassoon positioned as both narrator and diarist, "soldier-camera" and "poet-projector" (147). These two solid chapters carry the weight of the argument vis-à-vis cinema, which Williams largely abandons later in the book, examining more recent works of First World War memory such as Timothy Findley's novel The Wars (1977). In his last section—comprising a nuanced close reading of the six-part For King and Empire (2001), made for Canada's History Television, and less convincing analyses of three First World War museum exhibitions—Williams comes full circle, arguing that the "liveness" of television enables "a new Homeric mode" of war memory...