Ken Burns and The War, #3

More than a few people are surfing in looking for info, so here are a few things about Ken Burns’ The War from youtube.

The trailer…which includes a bit from Paul Fussell, veteran and noted writer highlighted on these pages.

An interview… from Ken Burns that aired on PBS…

My previous two entries here highlighted some of the criticisms associated with the project. Make no mistake…I’m excited to see this.

Shark Week, #5

I got to thinking about a passage I read in Fussell’s Wartime (I keep going back to that, I know, but it’s a great read) about public discourse (or what people could/would actually say in the 1940s regarding the actualities of conflict). Much of F’s argument has to do with light v. heavy duty, his metaphor for addressing how Americans conceived the war at the start v. what they discovered along the way (those many hard lessons).

The passage from the chapter Accentuate the Positive I’m thinking of connects to Ocean of Fear (Shark Week!) and has to do with morale. Fussell writes:

Another way for those in charge to raise service morale is by outright lies, as in the US Navy’s assuring its personnel that danger from sharks has been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the Navy said, “Sharks are amazingly overrated, there being only three cases of shark bites in all records” (emphasis is mine).

Fussell’s footnote leads to a source called Service Newspapers of the Second World War by M. Anglo, page 130. So this quote appeared in a news rag consumed by the service masses. It’s interesting that this kind of idea was “out there” as a way helping/persuading sailors to do their job and have one less thing to worry about. After all, if you knew differently, that there was a chance you’d be ripped to shreds after surviving the sinking of your ship, would you ever go near the ocean again?

I know many would, since that sense of duty (”this has to be done”) was firmly built into the culture then. But perhaps a less than forthright message in many circumstances helped to do this.

Paul Fussell

Way back in the day, I read The Great War and Modern Memory. That was grad school in a class called Continental European literature. We read a wide variety of texts there, but Fussell’s stood head and shoulders above all others. Much later, I came to Fussell’s other works, notably Wartime and his memoir Doing Battle.

Fussell is veteran of WW2 and this obviously colors his writing. His work isn’t so much about battles, but about culture, history, language. He is after all, a Harvard PHD, English professor type. In a 1996 interview, he said this:

Hackney: Is it also true that you find language so inadequate to describe war, disproportionate?

Fussell: Right. And after every war, there’s an immense overhaul of language, which in the Western world has created really the cultural and artistic phenomenon of what we call modernism; that is, a paring down of everything to minimal size, including language and ideas of grandeur, and ideas of a possibility of the state making everybody happy, and things like that. That modernism is really a form of skepticism or minimalism. You cut out everything that has deceived you and throw it away, and that leaves you with things like the Eames chair and Picasso and numerous other outcrops of modernism.

Many other gems are in the full interview here.

Image source: scan from Doing Battle back cover. His list of works is here, too.

Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965)
The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (1965)
Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (1966)
Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1969) editor with Geoffrey Tillotson and Marshall Waingrow
Samuel Johnson: The Life of Writing (1971)
English Augustan Poetry (1972)
The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
The Ordeal of Alfred M. Hale: The Memoirs of a Soldier Servant (1975) editor
Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980)
The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations (1982)
Sassoon’s Long Journey (1983) editor, from The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston
Class, A Guide Through the American Status System (1983)
Caste Marks: Style and Status in the USA (1984)
The Norton Book of Travel (1987) editor
Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (198
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989)
BAD: or, The Dumbing of America (1991)
The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War (1991)
The Norton Book of Modern War (1991) editor
The Anti-Egotist. Kingsley Amis: Man of Letters (1994)
Doing Battle - The Making of a Skeptic (1996) autobiography
Uniforms : Why We Are What We Wear (2002)
The Boys’ Crusade : The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 (2003)

Source: wikipedia