The Argonauts of the Western Front – Poets as Ethnographers of the Culture de Guerre in the First World War

Abstract

For over a century, historians and literary critics appear to have been at odds regarding the poetry of the First World War. This schism owes itself to processes of canonization which restrict (in Britain) or completely ignore (in France) the full extent and diversity of wartime poetic practices. Investigating a new corpus of French poets of the First World War, and considering poetry as a social and cultural category and as a wartime practice whose functions go beyond literary value, this article argues that war poets can be read as ethnographers of wartime culture. In proposing this analogy, it aims to present the ethnographic conventions as a common ground where History and Poetics can establish a dialogue. For scholars aiming to investigate how cultural production shapes experiences of armed conflict, this ensures poets are seen as the producers of interpretive knowledge of war and poems as more than either transparent documents or hermetic lyrical creations.

KEYWORDS:

• poetry
• First World War
• France
• ethnography
• corpus
• experience of war
• History

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the Association des amis de La Contemporaine and the Historial de la Grande Guerre for supporting this research. She would also like to thank Ann-Marie Foster for valuable input regarding earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Both terms will be used interchangeably in the present article, as the poets’ attention to cultural differences leads to considerations about humanity itself.

2 All translations are non-literary and my own, unless otherwise stated.

3 Translated by Anne Hyde Greet.

4 Et faisant plus sanglants toujours nos crépuscules,/Marchant parmi l'affreux comme des somnambules,/Irons-nous au néant,/Sans qu'un homme, un colosse amer comme Shakespeare,/Ne réveille soudain par son éclat de rire/La Raison sommeillant ?//Ah ! qu'il soit, ce railleur ! et devant l'agonie,/La rage et le désastre, oppose l'ironie/A nos cris furieux !/Comme on rit aux combats des fourmis sur le sable,/Qu'il rie à nos combats ! Que son rire effroyable/Nous dessille les yeux !//Qu'il soit celui qui voit parce qu'il se recule,/Qu'il montre le spectacle immonde et ridicule/Que nos batailles font ;/Et puisque en notre cœur nulle pitié ne monte,/Que la confusion, la stupeur et la honte/Montent à notre front !

5 Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology has been rightfully criticised over the past thirty years, particularly because his hermeneutic stance, and therefore the idea of a thick description, focuses on the researcher and how they translate culture instead of on indigenous categories and on how cultural actors understand their own culture (Levi 1985). However, this article’s focus on French war poets writing poetry to understand culture allows for a rehabilitation of some of the tools from Geertz’s interpretive anthropology without falling into the traps of a theory based on looking over the native’s shoulders and reading an other’s culture as a text this other seems to be completely unaware of. On the contrary, my main argument here is that poets themselves were looking at the culture of war and writing thick descriptions of it.

6 Translated by Ron Padgett.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Ribeiro S C Thomaz

Julia Ribeiro S C Thomaz is a PhD candidate in French Literature at the CSLF - Université Paris Nanterre and in History at the CRH - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She is a member of the Digital Humanities project Poésie Grande Guerre and cofounded the ECR network Une Plus Grande Guerre.