“The Foul System”: The Great War and Instrumental Rationality in Parade’s End

Abstract

Wyndham Lewis's 1919 painting A Battery Shelled is a mural-sized warscape of grey and green, billowing with brown smoke. In center, a handful of enlisted men load shells into great guns, but their bodies are shaped into their machines' tubes and angles. Meanwhile, left foreground shows three officers in loose posture of human beings wearing soft caps; they look on while their men change into war machines. Lewis's Vorticist abstraction delivers battlefield and enlisted men in hard lines of industry. But, war's administrators watch comfortably from left frame--one even smokes a pipe--and their recognizable human features distinguish them as a different species from their soldiers. Lewis's work hangs in Imperial War Museum in London but offers a version of Great War different from museum's authorized exhibits and explanations: in this painting, enemy forces are those that reshape human beings according to a logic of production. A Battery Shelled gives us one artist's vision of modern efficiency transforming people into machine-like objects, and an image of army institutionalizing these relations between human beings. A pointed anxiety about instrumentalizing relations is also at heart of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End. My essay's project is to show that critique implicit in Lewis's A Battery Shelled is fully enacted in Parade's End's evocation of wartime Britain. When Wilfred Owen promised to make his poetry's subject the pity of war, he was targeting sufferings of trench life that we see also in Parade's End. The crucial difference is that Parade's End targets industrial, bureaucratic society behind war. (See also Macauley vi.) In Ford's fiction, Great War empowers an intellectual formation of instrumental, means-ends rationality that becomes dominant structure of feeling for both Britain's soldiers and civilians. In my reading, novels illuminate a massive shift in lived experience, otherwise obscured by dust and sorrow of conflict. Parade's End is a series of war novels--Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), and A Man Could Stand Up (1926)--and these three novels tell story of a changing Britain in first part of twentieth century. (1) The main character, Christopher Tietjens, is carefully positioned between old Britain of his family's feudal estate and modern Britain of his job at new Imperial Department of Statistics. In Parade's End certainties of old Britain unravel around Tietjens, while momentum of new Britain threatens to crush him. One current of Parade's End is broad flow of social history--Tietjens laments dissolution of traditional values, and he protests expanding power of modern ones. The second current of Parade's End is a domestic stream--Christopher Tietjens has a wife named Sylvia who has alienated him with her indiscretions, and a love named Valentine Wannop whose affections he cannot claim without sinning against gods of his tradition. Christopher Tietjens is, therefore, a man displaced in all aspects of life. He joins army as an escape but in that escape finds both his societal and personal problems intensified. However, this intensification proves key to novel, because army at war distills forces acting to destroy Tietjens into an essence of instrumental rationality he can identify and resist. By instrumental rationality I mean shaping of human will to designs of technical administration. This idea is most fully theorized by Frankfurt School critics Theodor Adomo, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer. Their historical long-view focuses on instrumental reason as primary tool of bourgeois subject--that independent, self-actualizing monad of age of capital--and also trap that subject springs to ensnare itself in industrial modernity's iron cage. (See Horkeimer, Adorno, and Jay.) Here twentieth-century subjects' rational thinking leaves them dependent cogs in encompassing machine of modernity. …