Self at War

Abstract

If exceptional writers like Conrad, Eliot and Joyce were beginning to ‘dissolve’ Western selfhood from the turn of the century onwards, it was the 1914–18 War which precipitated many less hypersensitive individuals into the existential reality of self-fragmentation. Much of the terminology which could be used about crisis in the self had a literal meaning in battle experience — an experience which in its modern, mechanised form was shared by millions of citizen-soldiers:

To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is a fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the bombardment.²