William March’s Company K: history, memory, and metafiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite enjoying a sustained readership, William March’s Company K remains a surprisingly understudied examination of American soldiers in World War I. To date, just a mere handful of critical articles or book chapters have examined the novel in detail. March’s relentlessly anti-heroic themes, which now seem overly familiar (even clichéd) thanks to the popularity of works like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (the bestselling war novel of all time) and Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Paths of Glory, are perhaps part of the problem. But Company K is more than a war novel: on many levels, the book is about war writing. Indeed, March’s metafictional narrative plays with notions of representation and truth-telling in war literature in ways that anticipate Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. This essay offers a new appraisal of Company K by focusing on its metafictonal features, which include the deployment of a novel-within-a-novel structure, and its iconoclastic form. To underscore the originality of March’s approach, as well as his implied scorn for the critical standards of his day, the essay first summarizes attempts by leading war-literature critics in the 1920s and 1930s to nail-down the relationship between war fiction and truth. This section of the essay spotlights the controversial French expert on literary testimony, Jean Norton Cru, as well as the English military historian Cyril Falls and two distinguished American men of letters, Archibald MacLeish and Malcolm Cowley, both of whom had strong opinions about what constituted a truthful depiction of the Great War. The essay then demonstrates how March’s novel rejects most of the assumptions put forward by these critics, both through its reflexive recognition of its own fictionality and through its subversive form, a transmedia blend of devices drawn from early cinema, modernist painting, and historical writing.