'For the duration of the war': The radical self-abnegation and anti-anthropocentrism of Munro/Saki's front-line writings. Issue 1 (2nd January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gibson, Brian
• Is Part Of: First World War Studies. Volume 11:Issue 1(2020)
• Page Start: 21
• Page End: 39
• Publication Date: 2020-01-02
• Subjects: Saki -- H. H. Munro -- literary representations of the First World War -- self-detachment -- anti-anthropocentrism; World War, 1914-1918 -- Periodicals; Periodicals; 940
• DOI: 10.1080/19475020.2021.1873161
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1947-5020

Abstract

ABSTRACT: With the advent of the First World War, H. H. Munro (1870–1916), eagerly enlisting at 43, attempted to patriotically simplify his selves, conscripting his authorial persona, Saki – whose fiction usually shimmers with metamorphosis and surprise – for jingoistic exhortations and denunciations of unmanly non-soldiers in 'An Old Love' (in the Morning Post ) and four pieces for the 22 nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers' Fortnightly Gazette, April to June 1915. Yet this reductively pro-Empire, pro-military stance turned into a self-distancing retreat from the front lines after Lance-Sergeant Munro arrived in Northern France in late 1915. In the radically self-reflexive and self-reflective story 'For the Duration of the War', Saki parodies the poem from which his pseudonym-persona had sprung, pokes fun at his fiction's dominant themes – especially Fate and savage nature – and even questions the point of literature at a time of war. And in his final two works, set near the front, Munro and/or Saki muddies the genre, removes himself far more from events (as if anticipating his death), and questions the artifice of writing itself amid his species' ravaging of the natural landscape. In 'The Square Egg', Munro/Saki offers one-part essay and one-part story, with the former written at a marked remove and the latter told by an unidentified 'Acquaintance'. In 'Birds of the Western Front', Munro/Saki relates a detached study of bird-life in and around the trenches, the 'one' of the narrative-voice no unitary, pro-England spokesman but a barely human observer of winged wild creatures. These final writings by Munro and/or Saki are both radical and transcendent, looking beyond the soldier-self and the author-self at the non-human world to offer a pointed, poignant selflessness at a time of mass European self-annihilation. There is a profound generosity through self-effacement that is not seen in any of the works by the major English writers of the war.