WWI Trauma's Influence on Modernist Literature

The years that inspired and ultimately shaped modernism are ones characterized by brutality, death, and perhaps most hauntingly, silence. From 1914 until 1918, the European continent became a theater for a new type warfare that utilized the recent innovations of mechanics and technology to create massive and unprecedented numbers of casualties (Norris 34).

Throughout Europe and even in the United States, where no battles had been fought, societies were confronted and ultimately preoccupied with the physical and psychological horrors of destructive warfare and extremely violent deaths (Pearl 1).

For example, when photographs of mutilated corpses circulated around the world, the graphic images were able to make the realities and implications of war palpable to the civilian population (Norris 35). These silent yet somehow clamorous images of what we refer to as the “new death” were traumatic in their power to make the war a more tangible and thus more terrifying concept, affecting anyone regardless of soldier or civilian status, economic class, or other social barriers. Such experiences and interactions with the “new death” are what undoubtedly characterized much of the enduring trauma of the World War I era.

Furthermore, the reality of such destructive and dehumanizing death naturally prompts the incomprehensible revelation that war cannot and does not exist as an idealized struggle for glory or honor. The new death prompted a new and far more upsetting understanding of war which ultimately disturbed an entire culture’s sense of reality. A universal confrontation between Western culture and mechanized death, World War I must be remembered as a conflict that prompted widespread revelations about the dehumanizing, violent, and brutal essence of modernity.

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The sheer psychological and emotional force of this new consciousness obviously contains extraordinarily high degrees of trauma, the enduring effects of which would inspire the cultural and artistic revolution that was eventually known as modernism.

The application of trauma theory to an analysis of A Farewell to Arms is especially justified because of the exceptional historical context in which the novel is set. World War I is the first major global conflict which placed a disturbing emphasis on the effort to maximize human destruction (Norris 3), a horrific fact that assists in our attempts to diagnose the mentality of those who witnessed its grisly effects firsthand. The particular mentality that is most relevant in this discussion was initially termed “shell shock,” a concept that speaks to a mental and emotional anguish of soldiers that had no apparent connections to physically traumatizing events (Luckhurst 50).

Shell shock is a historically significant term in that it marks the introduction of trauma into cultural discourses on a massive scale, allowing damaged psyches to be analyzed in a different and more thorough manner. Furthermore, the “discovery” of shell shock among soldiers was significant because it was arguably the first time that trauma became a condition applicable to a collective group of people, which then revealed the effect of the war upon the psychology of the masses (Luckhurst 51). Still, the concept of shell shock was a perceived threat to military institutions of the time because focusing on the afflictions of the individual was considered disruptive to the military ethos of collective discipline and the necessity to commit acts of violence.

For this reason, military institutions throughout the West were reluctant to buy into the notion of psychological trauma and preferred to brand cases of it as cowardice or dissimulation (Luckhurst 51). These responses to shell shock imply that the modern conception of warfare was one that was impervious to the ethical, psychological, and emotional implications of its violence. Though trauma had still entered the cultural lexicon with great force, conceptions of substantial mental anguish were still met with degrees of indifference, and this indifference helps to explain why so much of modernist literature would focus upon the individual’s internal experience of trauma.