“Prolonged
trench warfare, with its collective isolation, its ‘defensiveness,’ and its
nervous obsession with what ‘the other side’ is up to, establishes a model of
modern political, social, artistic, and psychological polarization. Prolonged
trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama,
which I take to be a primary mode in modern writing. Mailer, Joseph Heller, and
Thomas Pynchon are examples of what I mean. The most indispensable concept underlying
the energies of modern writing is that of ‘the enemy.’”
—By
Paul Fussell in his classic analysis of the cultural impacts of the First World
War: “The Great War and Modern Memory,” Oxford University Press, 1975.
Doesn’t it still grab
headlines, raise money, inflame the social media, and make minor talents into
major politicians, nearly a century later?
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