DL: War Flashcards
Lola Serraf says that the fantasy of Kor becomes a…
“becomes a private place to escape”
How does Bowen challenge the politicised image of war?
Lola Serraf: “London in ‘Mysterious Kôr’ does not match Churchill’s description of the courageous city”
What did Bowen say in the 1945 postscript?
“Walls went down; and we felt, if not knew, each other. We all lived in a state of lucid abnormality.”
What did Bowen say in her 1945 publication in Orion II - ’Notes on Writing a Novel’?
“The either concentration or even or uneven spacing-out of events along time is important”
How does Bowen play with time in ‘The Little Girls’?
- plays with the speed of the narrative
- full of temporal gaps
What does the letter do in Bowen’s work?
- can invoke love but can also make connections with a traumatic past
How does Bowen summarise the relationship between past and present?
- the present is always informed by the past
What does Bowen say about violent destruction and war?
that the war created the “the violent destruction of solid things”
Who were able to see beyond the propaganda myth of the war?
- wartime writers
What is notable about physical destruction in the work of Bowen?
- its absence is notable - her work is more about the war as a means of rupture or as something altering reality - not merely as an occurrence of physical destruction
- what she is doing is “excluding war’s human calamities”
Bowen could be said to be reusing some of the dark literary fantasies of the end of the nineteenth century because authors in fin-de-siècle London such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and more importantly H. G. Wells, also shared “a preoccupation with the prospect of apocalyptic future war” - why do this?
- connects her work as part of a legacy and so connects the war to the equivalent of the apocolypise that H.G. Wells anticipated - WW2 is the prophecy coming true - explains why Eliot’s later literature is so hopeless and elegaic because - you lose the playfulness of TWL because ultimately now Madame Sosostrise’s dictum “fear death by water” has either come true, or worryingly is wrong, she said “death by water” but now society is not drowning but actually being obliterated
Although she avoids any physical death in the story - what does London become?
- everybody’s murdered corpse
Why does Bowen lack of representation of physcial death actually have more resonance?
- reflects the very nature of trauma itself
- she is merely suggesting death and despair by virtue of the fact that it goes unnamed
What is the ‘moral problem’ that civilians faced every day?
“day by day you either believed the evolving Myth (which showed at each stage how Britain was invincible), or you relapsed into scepticism and fears”
