The Ventriloquised Corpse and the Silent Dead : Gothic of the British First and Second World War

Wasson, Sara (2024) The Ventriloquised Corpse and the Silent Dead : Gothic of the British First and Second World War. In: Graveyard Gothic :. Manchester University Press, Manchester. ISBN 9781526166319

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Abstract

During the First and Second World Wars, the British government took numerous steps to minimise signs of civilian and combatant death. War Artists were forbidden from representing dead bodies and photographs of the dead were barred from public circulation. Yet although government measures rendered mass death as invisible as possible, the dead nonetheless had an oddly vital presence within national discourse. Throughout both wars, there was substantial popular and government appetite for the trope I have called the ‘ventriloquised corpse’, ‘in which, in the imagination of the living, the dead declare that their sacrifice was willing and worthwhile’. This chapter examines literary engagements with this problematic trope, then troubles this cultural narrative through texts using a Gothic mode to disconcert state-sanctioned narratives of national commemoration of war death. Existing criticism within Gothic studies has considered the soldier revenant – the veteran returning, either dead or alive, who resents their sacrifice and bears malice toward the living. This present chapter, too, shows how Gothic representations may undercut glib national story of war or commemoration, but here I explore this with a different emphasis, and this different emphasis stems from my taking, as my focus, war graves and burial places—including of burial alive—and other sites where the dead were taken into the earth. The concept of interment becomes a fulcrum on which, in the writing of the time, trenches and bombed streets edge towards ‘grave’. Rather than the speaking spectre, this chapter concerns the silent corpse—rotting and speechless, it, too, cannot be recruited to narratives of national glory. As such, it disrupts those mythologies, while simultaneously bringing awareness of the grief, chaos and squalor of war. Moreover, by locating their horrors so vividly within place, these works frame a place for remembering that which is easier to forget, and as such become a kind of twist of Pierre Nora’s lieux de memoire, places of memory, which enshrine a community’s story of itself. These works offer, rather, lieux d’oubli, in Nancy Wood’s formulation coinage—sites of selective forgetting. Even more precisely, I will suggest these works offer lieux d’oublié, sites of the forgotten, insofar as they relentlessly bring attention back to the specific detail of the decay of particular bodies. In the process, the texts refuse to elide the material impact of war. Texts explored include work by Frederic Manning, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Mervyn Peake, Rose Macaulay, Cyril Connolly and John Piper.