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WW I, Shell Shock, & the Death Drive Wyatt Bonikowski. Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in Post-World War I British Fiction. Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. 192 pp. $99.95 £55.00
WHEN PROFESSORS OF ENGLISH leave their field of expertise and speculate about medical diagnoses, the results can be both startling and troubling. Perhaps the most famous example of such an ambitious leap was Elaine Showalter's well-publicized assertion in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997) that the causes of the debilitating physical symptoms reported by United States veterans of the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf were not organic but psychological. This so-called "Gulf War Syndrome," she stated confidently, was merely a form of male hysteria linked to war neurosis and akin to shell shock in the aftermath of the First World War. Many of those affected by the illness reacted with outrage. As recently as June 2013, moreover, the New York Times cited a new study in which researchers at Georgetown University found neurological damage in the brains of some affected veterans-thus, potential evidence of a biological basis for their illnesses. Whether those trained in literary analysis are qualified to rule on matters related to medicine remains doubtful.
By no coincidence, the least convincing chapter of Wyatt Bonikowski's otherwise illuminating Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination is "The Invisible Wound: Shell Shock and Psychoanalysis," in which he moves farthest from discussing modernist authors and their novels and ventures into the practice of psychiatry. Bonikowski reanalyzes some of the soldier-patients whose case histories were recorded during World War I in the medical journal the Lancet as he seeks to counter the conclusions published at the time and to introduce instead a Freudian slant on the origins of "traumatic neuroses" (38). Using, for example, the dream that a particular soldier described while he was under hypnosis-a dream reported by Charles S. Myers "in the first medical article on shell shock" from 1915 (52)-Bonikowski decides that the details "resist the orderly narratives the doctors...