The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II by Marina MacKay

Abstract

MLR, 105.2, 2010 517 amoving account of the illusion and redundancy overshadowing Heinrich Dren dorfs apparent fulfilment.Writing in beautifully elegant German, Matz gives us in his linking of Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Stifter three interconnected reasons for thinking of 1857 as a seminal juncture formodern literature. Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen Ian Cooper The Cambridge Companion to the Literature ofWorld War IL Ed. by Marina MacKay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. xx+234 pp. ?45 (pbk ?17.99). ISBN 978-0-521-88755-7 (pbk 978-0-521-71541-6). This Companion in the extensive Cambridge seriesmakes itsaims clear: to provide a comprehensive overview of the international literatures of thewar and to supply 'thenew reader with the tools needed for 'reading the literature of World War IF. The responsibilities are thus established and, with only 250 pages towork in, they are onerous. The international dimension recurs in the later essays on trauma theory and on theHolocaust, but I shall concentrate on the 'Global Perspectives' of Part 11. Here, my needs as a virtually 'new reader' were beautifully met by Debarati Sanyal's survey of 'The FrenchWar': valuable headings characterized thematerial, information was lucidly given, examples were well timed, and the structure re vealed the divisions and variations within that collective 'theFrench'. 'TheGerman War', however, the area perhaps ofmost ignorance to the British reader, devoted twelve pages to the topical question of the reluctance within Germany to take on thememory of theAllied destruction of its cities, Sebald's valuable offerings on this being a prompt for this author to take space from virtually everything anyone else wrote inGerman. Boll and Grass are discussed very briefly,yet the film-maker Wolfgang Staudte receives four detailed pages?'His combined documentary and artistic vision shared certain aspects of Sebald's attempts' (p. 103). Beside this travesty of an 'overview', unlike Sanyal who intelligently led us to deconstruct the false generality indicated by 'The FrenchWar', Dagmar Barnouw leaves intact the dangerously unscholarly collective 'The German', as in 'Only recently [. . .] have Germans begun to remember' (p. 101). On 'The Soviet War' Katharine Hodgson gives a useful account of the tightening and loosening of Soviet censorship but in her focus on the conditions ofwriting offers 'the new reader' few texts to follow up. Her surprising omission ofAkhmatova is symptomatic of a strange ignorance of poetry inmost of the 'Global' surveys. The otherwise excellent section on 'The JapaneseWar' by Reiko Tachibana has virtually no poetry in it;Donna Coates on 'War Writing inAustralia, Canada, and New Zealand' has virtually no space for the superb body of relevant poetry, but still finds room forone paragraph announcing its subject magnificently: 'Recently,war brides have appeared innovels and stories' (p. 159); and Robert S. C. Gordon, who does give a genuine survey on 'The Italian War', omits virtually all the poetry. Varying in emphasis, quality, and usefulness to the 'new reader', these 'Global Perspectives' are none the less supposedly all selected from a literary viewpoint. With such a viewpoint how can theCompanion findno place for the astonishingly 518 Reviews rich literature from 'The Polish* or 'TheHungarian' wars? If the coverage isworld wide, why are India and Africa (and that includes South Africa) not in this section? At the very least such selectivity should be boldly admitted and justified from the outset; as is the case with Gill Plain's later piece on 'WomenWriters and the War', which she acknowledges is on British writers (though once more poetry is not included). Of course suchmatters are of designation butwithin that, the potential purchaser's or reader's idea of the nature, scale, and coverage of the Companion is at stake. Part i concerns Anglo-American Texts and Contexts', and Imust preface my comments with an acknowledgement thatmost of theCompanion s authors far too rarelymake?my observations are personal and tentative as well as constrained by space. Rod Mengham's thoughtful essay on 'British Fiction of theWar' is limited towork produced during thewar. In contrast, JamesDawes's basic introduction to 'The American War Novel' concerns work mostly produced after i960. Margot Norris's similarly basic introduction to 'War Poetry in the USA' works from a formulaic selection of exemplary poems which brings its own...