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Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in Post-World War I British Fiction. Wyatt Bonikowski (Burlington, VT; Famham, UK: Ashgate, 2013) viii +192 pp.
"The emergence of shell shock during the First World War brought about a dramatic shift in the way we understand the effects of war," Wyatt Bonikowski's highly readable study begins. And, in producing the shell-shocked soldier "as a historical and a literary figure," this shift raised "the problem of the effects of war on the mind" (1). Through readings of post-war fiction by Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf as well as of the writings of psychoanalysts and military psychiatrists, Bonikowski teases out some of the intriguing complexities embodied in the returning shell-shocked soldier, who not only brought his war experience back to the home front but also encountered the challenges of wartime traumas experienced by civilians, especially women. "Return" did not always mean soldiers going home after fighting in the trenches. As Bonikowski notes in a rewarding discussion of West's The Return of the Soldier, it could also refer to soldiers being sent back into action once their wounds had been mended or their psychological disorders cured. In their attempts to grapple with the returning shell-shocked soldier, Bonikwoski argues, modem authors employed new literary methods in order to reshape and refigure material that otherwise would have eluded literary representation.
The key to these literary variations on the central theme of traumatic wartime, according to Bonikowski, is Freud's theory of the death drive. Manifesting itself in wartime experience and in writing about that experience, he contends, the death drive provided authors with the ultimate challenge because, "resistant to representation and communication, [it] reveal[ed] itself only indirectly, through silence, dismption, or figuration" (172). Put this way, the death drive seems to confer theoretical coherence on the study as a whole while suggesting an array of epistemological and expressive complications. That the book doesn't always display such coherence is the result of a failure to integrate the theoretical material as fully as it might be into the central chapters on war fiction. Those chapters usually move along under their own steam. Each, to be sure, includes crossreferences to Freud, often to quite illuminating effect, as in...