Double Sorrow: Proleptic Elegy and the End of Arcadianism in 1930s Britain

Abstract

Yes, we are going to suffer, now; sky Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real; groping searchlights suddenly reveal little natures that will make us cry, Who never quite believed they could exist, Not where we were. They take us by surprise Like ugly long-forgotten memories ... --W. H. Auden, Time of War, 1938 (English Auden 256) Hands of longed, withheld tomorrow Fold on hands of yesterday In double sorrow. --Stephen Spender, The Separation, 1939 For countless citizens in Britain in late 1930s, looming confrontation with Hitler produced an uneasy sense of deja vu. Premonitions of commingled with memories of endured in Great War. Faces were lit with conscience past or future / Of men gone, eyes filled with tears of twenty-four years (Hendry). (1) At Armistice Day services and military exercises, Britons watched who [were] about to die try out their paces alongside ghosts of Gallipoli and Flanders (MacNeice 39). (2) Coming to terms with this prospect ofdouble sorrow was a great and linguistic challenge, as poets and politicians struggled to enroll words of for a second round of suffering. I would like to propose a term for texts that voice this Janus-faced on and for wider cultural syndrome of which they were a part. I define as consolatory writing produced in anticipation of sorrow, where expected loss is of a familiar kind. Its occasion is need for psychological rearmament in face of a threat, its opening strategy pragmatic one of marshaling resources already known to be useful in of mourning. It records and responds imaginatively to anticipatory grief (Woodward 88). (3) commingling of remembered and anticipated is hardly unique to this period (indeed, Jacques Derrida has located a measure of grieving at heart of all human friendship (4)), but there is evidence to suggest that it was especially prevalent in Britain during late 1930s. Those who had fought in trenches, or who had loved and lost those who had, greatly feared the repetition of salutes (Skelton 185). (5) For them, prospect of enduring of war again so soon produced both intense anxiety and what Fredric Jameson, discussing roots of utopian impulse, has called a glacial perspective (122) on consolatory narratives: a cold distance enabling them to weigh both their validity and their efficacy. It put extraordinary pressure on hearts, minds, and language of Britons, pressure so great that many familiar consolatory strategies could not withstand it. works from which I derive my generalizations are written by men too young to fight in Great War but whose fathers and older brothers and friends died in trenches. They include also works by women, of a range of ages, who lost sons, loves, brothers, and husbands in that conflict. Though I shall derive defining characteristics, in first instance, from poetry, I shall extend category of proleptic elegy to fiction and, eventually, to political polemic. texts I shall consider are fascinating in themselves, but they also contribute to our understanding of modern in general. It has become a truism about modern that it is typically antielegy: it expresses a refusal to mourn (6) or rejects what Freud called therapeutic work of (Mourning 245). Because it cannot accept traditional religious and ethical certainties, it disowns the ... propensity of [elegiac] genre to translate into consolation (Zeiger 15). (7) It rejects valuation of mourning that would see the obliteration of dead by socioeconomic laws of exchange, equivalence, and progress . …