Features of the author's prose about the First World War

Pokhalenkov Oleg Evgen'evich Doctor of Philology Professor, Department of Literature, Kaluga State University named after K. E. Tsiolkovsky 248002, Russia, Kaluzhskaya oblast', g. Kaluga, ul. Nikolo-Kozinskaya, 56, kv. 8 olegpokhalenkov@rambler.ru Other publications by this author

For more than a hundred years after the end of the First World War, literary studies have been arguing about the genre of the works of its participants, the object of which is such an ambiguous image as war. Discussions abroad began almost immediately after the end of the battles and the appearance of the first books, which some critics attributed to autobiographies, while others, on the contrary, did not accept this point of view, saw them more as fiction. For example, Bernard Bergonzi in "Twilight of Heroes" ("Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War") shares such texts as "I'm Sorry, Goodbye to all That" by Robert Graves, "Death of a Hero" by Richard Aldington and "War" by Ludwig Renn. The critic considers Graves in the autobiography section, and Aldington and Rennes in the fiction section, i.e., the novel (fiction). Paul Fassel in the monograph "The Great War and Memory" analyzes "Sorry-goodbye, all this" in the chapter "Theater of military operations" and says the following about him: "Of all the war memories, the most "scenic" is the book by Robert Graves "Sorry-goodbye to all that" ("Good-bye to All That")" ^{[4, p. 271]}. Another researcher, John Agnens, completely excludes such texts as, for example, "I'm Sorry, goodbye to all that" by Robert Graves from "English Fiction and Drama of the Great War, 1918-1939", but includes "Death of a Hero" by Aldington ^[12].

There is also no consensus among Russian literary critics. It should be noted that, despite the popularity of Ludwig Renn, his work "War", as British "trench" poetry and prose, was practically not analyzed from the point of view of genre affiliation. Domestic criticism (P.M. Toper ^[3] and others) attributed Rennes's "War" to fiction, i.e., to the novel. L.B. Karaev in his doctoral dissertation "English literary autobiography: the transformation of the genre in the XX century" gives an assessment of "I'm sorry, goodbye to all that" from the point of view of the influence of the theory of psychoanalysis Z. Freud's view on the evolution of the genre: "In the 20s of the XX century in English literature, autobiography as a form of psychotherapy was used by direct participants in the battles on the Western Front during the First World War by poets Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden. It is most clearly presented in the polemical autobiography of Robert Graves "Goodbye to All That" (1929)" ^{[1, p. 14]}. We also note the authoritative opinion of B. Fanny, who "refers literary biography to the subgenre of autobiography, then defines it as a special form of autobiography and characteristic of the XX century, and calls it subjective" ^[8].

The contradictory views of critics, in our opinion, stems from the ambivalence of the genre characteristics of the works themselves, since, on the one hand, they are documentary, and on the other – fictitious. Documentality or factuality is set by the specific biography of the self-revealing "I" of the author. The basis of retrospective reflection in the autobiography is the phenomenon of "memory", which, in turn, is the engine of the recollection processes, which are reflected in the depiction of events related to military everyday life on the Western Front. Astrid Earle notes that "The images of the future heroes of the works had in most cases real front-line prototypes" ^{[7, pp. 27-43]}. However, she further stipulates that "no one went to war without certain plots, stereotypes about what it is. This leads to a collision of "how I imagined the war" with "what I actually saw" ^{[7, pp. 27-43]}. The autobiographer, in this case, exists simultaneously in two time layers, making jumps from one time to another.

Fictionality grows out of the absolute possession of the speech structure of the work, the author, the subject and the object of the narrative. The inner world of the work is created by the author through the prism of reality and creative imagination. And, in this case, the world of the work ceases to be documentary. Thus, fictionality is one of the characteristics of attributing a text to an artistic one – "the fact that the world depicted in the text is fictitious, fictitious," and it is based on fiction as an "artistic construction of a possible reality" ^{[5, p. 22]}. V.Yu. Kleimenova notes that "in an artistic text, fiction it can be life-like" ^{[2, pp. 94-102]}. It is this characteristic that allows the stylistic features of the author of the memoirs to manifest themselves, since memories of himself and others combine autobiographical prose into a peculiar phenomenon in which the narrative develops against the background of a certain cultural and historical context (in our case, the First World War) and a social context – the experience of the trauma of the military past. Sh. Montey notes: "The First World War began to acquire mythological features in the minds of the population thanks to the so-called "literature of memories". Through the use of texts such as personal memoirs, autobiographies and autobiographical poetry, historical events acquired a new meaning" ^{[10, p. 53]}.

Thus, the hypothesis reflected in the presented work boils down to the following: the authors in question managed to create an alternative genre that accumulated and erased the traditional boundary between fiction and autobiography. This genre synthesized the features of both and became semi-autobiographical/semi-artistic.

However, such a synthetic genre is not at all new in the history of world literature. It is worth remembering that most of the novels of the XIX century were semi-autobiographical in nature. Goethe himself called his autobiographical work "Dichtung und Wharheit" (1811-1831) – "Poetry and Truth". But it was in the works of the writers of the First World War that this synthetic genre acquired a new round of development, which, by its nature, can be attributed to the modernist wave with its tendency to revise the internal structure of the work.

The presented study will analyze "I'm Sorry, goodbye to all this" (1929) by the British Robert Graves, who even subtitled his work "autobiography" and "War" (1928) by the German Ludwig Renn.

I. Robert Graze "I'm sorry, goodbye to all this"

From the very beginning of the narrative, Graves strives to emphasize that his narrative has the character of an autobiography, and not an artistic fiction. It should be noted that the category of space and time in autobiographical texts turn into the category of chronotope, an integral connection of temporal and spatial relations. Markers of autobiographical space and time are dates, toponyms, realities, specific names, etc. Graves, for example, begins the narrative with childhood memories: he talks about meeting the poet A. Swinburne (Swinburne, Algernon Charles – English poet (1837-1909)) when he was a child. But his narration bears parodic features: The same Swinburne is characterized as a lover of stopping a mom with a baby stroller and blowing a kiss to a child ("invite pram-stopper" and children-kisser).

Next, the author proceeds to describe youth, but, again, presents it in an ironic form: his stay in different private schools, the class division of British society, conservatism – all that Britain was criticized for before the outbreak of war [seenote:4]. However, starting from chapter 10, Graves proceeds to describe the depiction of military everyday life, of which he was a direct participant, emphasizing the authenticity of the description. For example, he recreates portraits of historical figures: the Prince of Wales or the English "trench" poet Siegfried Sassoon, even gives examples of real front-line reports, newspaper articles, his letters home and photographs from the front.

The emphasis on the fact that the narrative is more of a historical chronicle than an artistic fiction is indicated by the author himself, saying that at an early stage of the narrative he began to write an autobiography, but then his original intention changed: "[I was] ashamed at having distorted my material with a plot, and yet not sure enough of myself to turn back into undisguised history, as here" ^{[9, p. 191]}. It should be noted that Graves was not the only one who realized that the traditional form was not suitable for the subject of the narrative. Richard Aldington, in the part devoted to the description of the image of war in the novel "The Death of a Hero", stressed that "It is [...] not a novel at all. Certain conventions of a form and method in the novel [...] are entirely neglected here ^{[9, p. 79]}. But all this does not mean that Aldington abandoned the traditional form of the novel.

It should be noted that Graves, unlike Aldington, tried to find a connection (coupling) between the traditional form of the plot and the description of individual military experience. The discrepancy is found at the level of transmission of memories of being at the front, since they are given from the point of view of a simple soldier who "translates" only what he sees around him and, most importantly, for whom battles and the war itself are not an "everyday" process. This is confirmed by the fact that Graves makes more generalizations than those that correlate with his personal military experience or his colleagues. That is why his narrative is somewhat fragmented – it resembles a certain number of episodes that are interconnected only by the topos in which the hero and other characters reside – the Western Front. But even these incoherent episodes are sarcastic in nature, which is confirmed by the words of Graves himself, who calls them "caricature scenes": "Two young miners [...] disliked their sergeant, who had a down on them and gave them all the most dirty and dangerous jobs. When they were in billets he crimed them for things they hadn’t done; so they decided to kill him. Later, they reported at Battalion Orderly Room and asked to see the adjutant. […] The adjutant […] asked: “Well, what is it you want?”

Smartly slapping the small-of-the-butt of their sloped rifles, they said: “We’ve come to report, sir, that we’re very sorry, but we’ve shot our company sergeant-major.”

The adjutant said: “Good heavens, how did that happen?”

“It was an accident, sir.”

“What do you mean, you damn fool? Did you mistake him for a spy?

“No, sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant.”

The two soldiers are court-martialled, and when they are shot by a firing-squad, an officer makes a little speech saying how gloriously British soldiers can die" ^{[9, p. 94]}.

Another "cartoon scene": "Bloke in the Camerons wanted a cushy, bad. Fed up and far from home, he was. He puts his hand over the top and gets his trigger finger taken off, and two more beside. That done the trick. He comes laughing through our lines […]. “See, lads”, he says, “I’m off to bonny Scotland. Is it na a beauty” But on the way down the trench to the dressing-station, he forgets to stoop low where the old sniper’s working. He gets it through the head, too. Finee. We laugh, fit to die!” ^{[9, p. 95]}

Graves' entire narrative is riddled with such anecdotes, tall tales, and farce scenes that resemble more scenes from the theater of the absurd. The author introduces a special method of fixing reality – he describes real military everyday life in an anecdotal form.

It is worth noting that many researchers have pointed out that the work, like "I'm sorry, goodbye, all this", resembles a novel-upbringing (Bildungsroman), but not in a traditional form, mainly in a negative one, where the hero does not integrate into society at the final stage of initiation. Similar elements of the parenting novel can be found in Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). But, in our opinion, Graves deliberately distances himself from such a form, since it leads to a certain development of the hero.

His "negative" development eventually turns him into a socialist and pacifist and forces him to say goodbye to England and leave it forever. However, after the war, his socialism was no longer so pronounced. As well as his pacifist views, which have also changed over time. It is appropriate to recall his famous speech, which was dedicated to the brave death of the soldiers of his platoon and was received with a bang ^{[9, p. 235]}. Such an inclusion of psychologism, which makes it possible to judge the narrator's condition at the end of the novel, is quite unique for a parenting novel, however, it is also unusual for an autobiography. As Roy Pascal noted: "[Autobiography] implies descriptions of a life pattern that follows from a consistent narrative" ^{[13, p. 6]}.

The examples described above show that Graves' narrator is portrayed as someone who has not been able to find a consistent attitude to what is happening after the war and, therefore, these fluctuations and contradictory attitudes to his own experience are visible in the plot itself, which, in turn, is reflected in the oscillation between autobiography and fiction. In his narration, we notice that Graves goes to the splitting of the autobiographical "I" in reasoning about the creation of a biography, about the processes of narration and awareness of his past.

II. Ludwig Renn "The War".

Ludwig Renn's novel "The War" was published in 1928, i.e. a year earlier than "I'm Sorry, goodbye to all this" by Robert Graves. Rennes, like Graves, came from the aristocracy, and, like the Englishman, based his work on the same military experience: he was an infantry officer, survived the battles in northern France.

Let's turn to the consideration of typological similarities between the texts. It should be noted that, despite the different nationalities, the texts have a lot in common, if we analyze their genesis.

Initially, Ludwig Renn "recorded his impressions of military everyday life in the form of diary entries, then transformed them into memoirs, and after that into a novel" ^{[11, pp. 1069-1083]}. Thus, Renn transformed his diary entries into a work of fiction, and Graves, on the contrary, his novel into a chronological narrative. This is confirmed by the decision of Renn himself, the German–born aristocrat Arnold Friedrich Fit von Golsenau, not only to publish the novel under the pseudonym Ludwig Renn (following the advice of his publisher), but also to distance himself from his protagonist, Renn. The differences pointed out by the author begin with the rank: Renn is a private, while Golsenau is an officer. The author does not talk about the origin of the hero, indicating only that he is a carpenter. It should be noted that the writer gives his hero a unique writing style that would immediately betray his origin: the book is replete with short and simple sentences, colloquialisms, etc. For example: "Sch! S! S! S! kam es von vorn und rauschte hinter. Ram! Ra! Ramm! hinter im Grunde. SsSsSsSs! Ging es rechts hinüber. Pst! Machte Ziesche» ^{[14, c. 101]}. As can be seen from the text, Renn deliberately tries to create the impression that his protagonist (of low origin) cannot find the right words, while Graves' hero has always stuck to his cynical and caustic tone, not leaving him even in the heat of battle.

Rennes does not use the authentication methods used by the English author: maps, fragments of documents, memories of historical figures. However, this does not give "War" the distinctive features of "Sorry-goodbye to all this." Golsenau was not the first to create a personality for himself – Ludwig Renn – for the narrative. Bergonzi says that Graves also created such a personality, which he describes as follows: "an extremely eccentric personality, almost unbearably omniscient and self-confident, with ironic self-control" ^{[3, p. 155]}. The main reason for the appearance of such a fictional personality is the fact that neither Golsenau nor Graves could no longer associate themselves with their social identities: Graves could not do this because his father was British and his mother was German. Golsenau, on the other hand, tried to renounce his status as a Prussian aristocrat and went even further – he began to call himself Ludwig Renn in everyday life and continued to publish under this name.

Another feature that unites these two works is the first–person narration, which gives the reader the most famous point of view of an ordinary soldier: "Ich sah das alles und sah es nicht" ^{[14, p. 118]}. Like the authors, both protagonists were disoriented, crushed and in a state of despair during the war. However, at the end of the novel, Renn does not become a communist and a pacifist, as the author of the work, but loses his last hopes, as the hero of Graves.

This loss is reflected in the plot of the works. We can say that "The War" and "I'm sorry, goodbye to all this" does not have a plot in the traditional sense of the word - these are episodes and scenes connected by the figure of the hero and the place – the Western Front. From time to time, Renn shows us the central character in various military companies, on the front line, on leave, and when almost all of his colleagues are dead, his image practically does not change.

This may be explained by the fact mentioned earlier, Graves changed the novel into a documentary narrative, and Renn, on the contrary, transformed diary entries into fiction. The aim of both authors, as Renn himself pointed out, was to show the war as it really is: "wie der Krieg wirklish ist" ^{[14, p. 13]}.

Thus, if the spatial and temporal pointers coincide, then nevertheless space and time in autobiographical texts do not coincide with the real one, since the recalled chronotope is not perceptual, i.e. specifically given, it has the character of a reconstructed in the memory of the author-the subject-protagonist. That is why we are talking about the synthesis of genres in the works of Graves and Rennes, which accumulated features of both autobiography and fiction.