Construing and reconstruing the horrors of the trench: Siegfried Sassoon, creativity and context

1 Introduction

In a letter to his pacifist friend Lady Ottoline Morrell in October 1917, the First World War soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon included the poem ‘Death’s Brotherhood’. At that time, Sassoon had been hospitalized for neurosis at Craiglockhart Hospital after he had made a much-discussed declaration against the war. In a note that appeared at the end of the letter, he remarks that ‘This poem will show you what I feel like. And it is the truth’ (Sassoon 1983: 191). In fact, ‘Death’s Brotherhood’ is largely based on an earlier diary entry ‘In the ward ii’ (Sassoon 1983), written when Sassoon, having been wounded in action, was recuperating in London in April 1917. Intriguingly, ‘In the ward ii’ was also revised for Sassoon’s autobiographical novel Memoirs of An Infantry Officer (Sassoon 1930, hereafter Infantry Officer). There are therefore three separate, and creatively distinct, versions of the same series of events.

This paper explores the connections between these versions through the lens of Langacker’s (1987, 1991, 2008) Cognitive Grammar (henceforth CG). Specifically, I use CG to provide an analysis of how Sassoon presents the scene in his diary entry of April 1917 and then later re-presents the same details in two quite different genres and situations. This paper also aims to integrate a CG analysis into Kövecses’ (2015) model of contextual motivation to examine how the immediate context of Sassoon’s experience of war might be read as licensing the various options he has available to him for representing his experiences. In doing so, I argue that this integrated approach can help to interpret Sassoon’s representations as motivated by the particular physical, social and cultural environments in which they were conceived. In the first instance these contexts incorporate Sassoon’s interaction with the landscape of the trench and his consequent representations of the human body. In his later poetry and prose, I examine how further types of context may be understood as giving rise to the ways in which scenes are presented.

2 Construal, reconstrual and intentionality

An important claim in CG is that the meaning of an expression relies both on the conceptual content it evokes and on how that content is presented. Speakers and writers draw on a number of construal phenomena (Langacker 2008: 55–59) to present a conceived scene, which may include selecting a degree of specificity, focusing attention on one aspect that is foregrounded against a neglected background, imposing more dynamic or static conceptualisations of a scene, and providing a particular kind of viewing arrangement or vantage point from which a situation is presented. A fundamental premise of construal is that the selection of various lexical choices and grammatical configurations that frame the presentation of conceptual content, whether undertaken consciously or unconsciously by a conceptualising agent, is principled, motivated and meaningful, and reflects our basic experience of moving, perceiving and acting in the world (Langacker 2008: 4).

A reconstrual is a specific type of retelling that diverts a listener or reader’s attention at a later date through some further manipulation of any of the construal operations. Reconstruals may, for example, increase or decrease specificity, foreground some previously downplayed aspect of content, present a scene in a more or less dynamic way or reconfigure some part of the viewing arrangement so as to impose a different perspective. Indeed since any content contains the potential for numerous, alternative realizations through the situated selection of different lexical and grammatical choices by a conceptualiser (Croft 2001), reconstruals may be thought of more generally as the foregrounding of a construal that had been previously neglected. The fact that construals are conceptualiser-driven and, therefore socially-oriented and context-bound, means that it should be possible to account for possible motivations for both the initial construal and for any subsequent reconstruals in a systematic way.

Since any one construal can be understood as a matter of choice (Langacker 2008: 55) or as the organization and packaging of conceptual content (Evans and Green 2006: 536), they are evidence of authorial creativity and textual design; reconstruals of writing consequently are evidence of writerly reconfiguration of content and various degrees of intensification or reduction (Sotirova 2014: 147). West (2017), however, notes that literary applications of CG have yet to fully examine construal in terms of authorial creativity in any significant detail. Conversely, construal and reconstrual have been examined from the readerly end of the communication dyad (Forrest 1996; Harrison 2017; Browse 2018; Nuttall 2018; Harrison and Nuttall 2019).

The reasons for a lack of focus on the production end of communication appear straightforward since stylisticians have tended to be wary of the theoretical naivety associated with biographical speculation and of assigning intentionality to literary discourse. However, as Sotirova (2014: 138) notes, studying the process of revision itself demands that authorial intentions are treated seriously; for Sotirova, it is impossible to engage in any discussion of revision without placing an authorial figure at the heart of that production process. This is also a stance taken by Herman (2013). Arguing against a reaction by structural narratologists to the intentional fallacy (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946), Herman critiques the division of an authorial figure into ‘real’ and ‘implied’ versions (Booth 1961) and consequent models of narrative communication (e.g. Chatman 1978) on the basis that such a divide misaligns a reified, and superfluous entity (the implied author) with what is essentially an inferential process. Instead, drawing on research from a range of disciplines that demonstrates the human tendency to assign causes of acting to events, Herman argues for a theoretical model that proposes that readers infer reasons for authorial decisions from ‘defeasible, context-bound ascriptional practices’ (Herman 2013: 62). In a similar way, Stockwell (2009, 2016, 2017) argues that readers mind-model authorial figures, investing in them intentions and a range of attributes and behaviors, drawing on the general cognitive ability to build mental representations of others, fictional or otherwise. Both Herman and Stockwell therefore recognize the author as part of ‘the texture of literature’ (Stockwell 2016: 161), whilst acknowledging ‘the readerliness of authorial intention modeling’ (Stockwell 2016: 153) and the ‘variability in ascriptive practice’ (Herman 2013: 68) that different readers will assign. Their work provides a usable framework that avoids the interpretative cul-de-sac the analyst may face when attempting to deal with the conundrum of accounting for the presence of a creative source without resorting to claims of telepathy or certainty regarding intention. As Sotirova (2014) argues, such a framework also replicates models of spoken communication with their emphases on co-ordinated joint action and the co-negotiation of meaning discourse, as well as more broadly being aligned to attentional models of language (e.g. Clark 1996; Marchetti 2006). The importance of authorial design is highlighted in sociolinguistic research on the retelling of stories (e.g. Polanyi 1981). And, Lambrou (2014) demonstrates how, when revising stories, speakers assimilate new narratives into older ones on the basis of perceived importance and relevance. Speakers thus retell and arrange stories so that they are ‘tailored for the occasion’ (Lambrou 2014: 36).

In this paper I integrate Kövecses’ (2005, 2015) work on the influence of context into my text-driven CG analysis in order to examine and account for the licensing of authorial creativity. That is, I ascribe reasons for authorial decisions in line with what seem to me salient contextual factors that appear to constrain potential construal operations. Furthermore, I argue CG, with its ability to account explicitly for various ways in which experience can be represented, provides a welcome analytical apparatus for examining First World War poetry, a genre that has largely come to be almost always defined and situated in relation to its historical moment (Winter 2014), and which is usually read through a contextual lens. In fact, it is generally difficult to find literary-critical material that examines war poetry outside of its immediate biographical, cultural and historical contexts (see for example Thorpe 1966; Moeyes 1997; Campbell 1999 on Sassoon; and, more broadly, individual chapters on Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg and Jones in Das 2013).

3 Context: embodiment and creativity

Recent work in cognitive science, psychology and linguistics has stressed the influential role of context on creativity and linguistic expression. For example, Barrett et al. (2005: 5) arguing for the ‘context principle’, posit that all mental events emerge from the environment symbiotically through a series of transactional processes that emphasize the relationship of mind and thought to the body and its surroundings. Indeed creativity itself can be understood as both a ‘dynamic process’ and a ‘completed product’ (Carter 2011: 340) that arises from the interaction between a mind with an intention to create and the specific sociocultural contexts that shape and influence that intention (Rothenberg 1990; Csikszentmihaly 1997). Within cognitive psychology and linguistics, one manifestation of the mind-context relationship is the principle of embodied cognition (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Gibbs 2005). Taking embodiment seriously means acknowledging how the inherent and immediate physical and social contexts that the human body is placed in directly influence cognition and provide structures that allow for the organization and representation of the world through language.

In his critique of a universalist view of embodiment, however, Kövecses (2005, 2008, 2015) argues for a broader and more sensitive treatment of social, cultural and historical variation; his theory of ‘differential experiential focus’ (Kövecses 2005) posits that different contextually-driven aspects of embodiment may be drawn on by groups or individuals to trigger and structure metaphorical mappings. In Kövecses (2015), he argues that contextual factors have a ‘priming effect’ (2015: 49) and sanction the selection of a particular source domain, providing a theoretical and practical framework that separates out more ‘basic’ embodied influences from those that are triggered by specific contextual factors; the latter give rise to what he terms ‘context induced creativity’ (2015: 99). In the process of conceptualizing content, he argues that conceptualisers are faced with a pair of oppositional forces that offer different degrees of strength and may therefore impact on the conceptualizer in varying ways:

Conceptualisers try to be coherent both with their bodies (their basic embodied experiences) and their contexts (the various contextual factors) where the body and context function as, sometimes conflicting, forms of constraint on conceptualization. The outcome of the two pressures depends on which influence, or pressure, turns out to be the stronger in particular situations. Kövecses (2015: 51)

These various contextual factors (further differentiated in terms of being global or local) are summarized (Kövecses 2015: 184, 186) as follows:

1. the situational context: including the physical, social and cultural settings;

2. the discourse context: the surrounding discourse, including the co-text;

3. the conceptual-cognitive context: the memories, domains and knowledge and ideologies held by individuals and groups.

4. the body context: the explicit and immediate sense of the body in space.

In his final context type, Kövecses suggests that a more radical sense of the body may override primary and basic notions of embodiment. That is, the body may act in more local and idiosyncratic ways to license particular construals. Although Kövecses focuses on metaphor in his study, there seems to be no reason why such a context schema might not be used to examine the motivation for other kinds of construal, given that metaphor is one type of construal operation (Croft and Cruse 2004: 55). Consequently, I argue that Kövecses’ model is useful for examining the motivation for and licensing of construal operations more generally, and that recognition and discussion of these contextual factors may give insights into how these construals are understood and interpreted.

Indeed in his comprehensive discussion of the importance of touch in First World War poetry, Das (2005) highlights the body as a specific and important local context. Das demonstrates that many of those who experienced the war at the Front both drew on and represented reconfigured senses of the body in their writing. In the trenches, the physical landscape, an abundance of mud and the restricted use of artificial light at night meant that touch became an important communicative register for soldier-writers. In this haptic world, conceptual motivation and licensing – and therefore creativity – derive from immediate embodied experience, from the realignment of the body and the foregrounding of touch, and from the transformation of the human form. Das supports his argument by drawing on the sheer volume of references to horizontal, animalistic movement in various forms of writing from the Front to suggest that the geography of the trenches reconfigured the body from a conventional vertical schema to a horizontal one. This shift provided an immediate local context for the motivation of particular representations of experience as Das (2005: 44) explains.

The absolute lowering of the body on the ground allies seeing with the ‘baser senses’ of touch and smell. The trench mud thus challenged the vertical organization of bodily Gestalt, and marked a regression to the clumsy horizontality of beasts. Rat, mole, earthworm and snail are recurrent similes that are used in trench narratives to describe the soldiers.

My first analysis of Sassoon’s representation of experience in his first diary entry is informed by this initial observation. It aims to account for Sassoon’s construal of the scene relayed in the diary entry by combining a CG-led analysis with an appeal to wider contextual motivations. My later analyses draw on a similar method to account for the differences evident in Sassoon’s revisions to his earlier material and thus aim to provide a contexualised account of the process of reconstrual. I therefore argue that it is possible to identify textual patterns that demonstrate how experiences and content are variously magnified, downplayed or substituted for previously occluded content. I argue that as well as acknowledging default (Croft and Cruse 2004: 72) construals of experience, it is possible to ascribe more explicit, local and textually-retrievable contexts that can be understood as licensing more idiosyncratic construals and can be used as part of the process of ascribing intentionality to textual revisions.

4 Construing and reconstruing war experience: From diary entry to prose memoir

5 ‘Death’s brotherhood’

‘Death’s Brotherhood’ was published in The English Review in January 1918 and then, later that year, with some very minor alternations, as ‘Sick Leave’ in Counter-Attack and Other Poems. The poem is reprinted below as it originally appears in Sassoon’s letter of October 1917.

The poem compresses the conceptual content of ‘In the ward ii’ to foreground a more specific kind of detail: the relationship between the speaker and the visiting ghosts. In a similar way to the extract in Infantry Officer, the poem bears the explicit marking of a dream frame, ‘When I’m asleep, dreaming’, although the negative aspect of the dream which marked Infantry Officer is omitted. The scene is also subjectively construed from the beginning, like Infantry Officer, but unlike ‘In the ward ii’. The high initial schematicity of ‘In the ward ii’ is replicated in the personal pronoun ‘They’, which cataphorically references the two noun phrases with near rhyming post-modifying adjectives, ‘the homeless ones, the noiseless dead’. However, unlike ‘In the ward ii’, the construal does not increase in specificity; in fact, the bodies of the soldiers are not mentioned at all and any further reference to them as entities is simply through the use of the pronoun ‘They’ and the possessive determiner ‘their’. The low granulation afforded to the soldiers is in contrast to that afforded to the setting. Unlike in Infantry Officer, the setting is construed in greater specificity with an emphasis on the movement and sounds of the storm. Although the horizontal schema, so evident in ‘In the ward ii’ and Infantry Officer, is entirely omitted, the relative deictic positioning of the soldiers who, ‘out of the gloom’, move towards the speaker remains the same. Here the ghosts are construed in a way that emphasizes their more sinister presence: the use of the preposition ‘about’ represents the trajectors (ghosts) completely enclosing the landmark (bed) rather than being positioned at a relative distance from it.

Sassoon’s decision to use a dream frame thus gives structure to the entire poem; lines 1–8 consist of the speaker’s dream vision ^[3] and lines 9–13 revert to the speaker’s waking world, likely to be understood as taking place in the hospital ward (here readers drawing on the discourse context are likely to identify the location of the poem as Craiglockhart rather than Denmark Hill Hospital). In lines 5–6, the pattern of pronouns suggests that the ghosts of ‘Death’s Brotherhood are closer to the speaker, unlike the soldiers in ‘In the ward ii’ and Infantry Officer, who initially appear to haunt the speaker from a distance. The repetition of ‘They…my’/‘their…mine’ in ‘Death’s Brotherhood’ highlights this proximity: in line 7 the ghosts later point, using the proximal deictic ‘here’, to the speaker’s closeness to them but to his remoteness to soldiers that are still alive and serving in France. The dream ends with the waking clause ‘I awake’ prefaced by the adverbial ‘In bitter safety’. The disappearance of the ghosts alters the state of the speaker’s now ‘unfriended’ mind in waking consciousness. The disarming nature of the ghosts’ visit is evident in the emotional and physical distance the speaker now feels: the specific construal offered in the noun phrase ‘slashing rain’ contrasts with the more schematic, remote landscape, realized in the prepositional phrase ‘in the mud’.

Assigning a voice to the final two lines remains somewhat problematic. Framed within speech marks, lines 12–13 appear to mirror the direct speech of lines 7–8 and could be a continuation of the ghosts’ words albeit in the speaker’s waking rather than dream state. Equally, the reporting clause ‘I think’ could legitimize a reading that places these words as the speech/thought of the speaker. In these competing readings, different prominence is assigned depending on the referents we choose to assign to the pronouns ‘you’, ‘them’ and ‘they’ and the possessive determiners ‘your and ‘our’. In CG, pronouns (and their derivatives) may be used with varying degrees of delimitation (Langacker 2007), referring to the extent to which a pronoun designates a smaller (high delimitation) or larger (low delimitation) set of referents. In ‘Death’s Brotherhood’, ‘you’ and ‘your’ appear to be highly delimited since their referent is the poem’s speaker both in a reading that assigns the lines to the ghosts and to one that assigns them to the speaker. The situation with ‘them/they’ is similar. Regardless of how we assign the final lines, ‘them/they’ appear highly delimited (the referents here are the speaker’s fellow soldiers). It is possible, however, to read these pronouns with lower delimitation: ‘them/they’ may have the broader referents of soldiers in general. The case with ‘our’ is more complex. Assigning the lines to the ghosts means that ‘our’ designates a larger group (to include the ghosts, the speaker and the men still in France) whilst assigning the lines to the speaker designates a smaller group of just the speaker and his men (excluding those who are now dead). The ambiguity perhaps also rests on whether we read ‘blood’ literally (the blood of the ghosts) or at a more symbolic level, as a schema that connects speaker and soldiers. Deciding on who speaks these lines also means deciding on the organization of the end of the poem: assigning the lines to the ghosts means integrating them into a sudden flashback to the dream via a world-switch that may be read simply as a fleeting one or else leaves the speaker deictically stranded from the opening of the poem.

The kinds of complexities I have been discussing can also be seen in literary-critical responses to the poem that suggest Sassoon’s guilt and a growing tension between adhering to his original pacifism and a sense of duty to the men he commanded influenced the writing of the poem. For example, Thorpe (1966: 29) argues that the poem deals with ‘the betrayal of comradeship’ and Campbell (1999: 104) posits that the poem represents ‘a figurative encapsulation of the tension he [Sassoon] is having to deal with’. I believe any interpretation of the poem is enriched by reading it in this contextualised manner and by accounting for specific construal operations in the light of the various situational, discourse and conceptual-cognitive contexts that surround the production of the poem. Indeed the complexity of the poem is evident in the fact that it appears in a letter to Ottoline Morrell, a well-known influence on and sympathizer with Sassoon’s anti-war sentiment, and that elsewhere in the letter there are conflicting indications of both his desire to return to the Front and his unswerving commitment to pacifist principles. Sassoon (1983: 190) writes:

[…] I have told Rivers that I will not withdraw anything that I have said or written, and that my views are the same, but that I will go back to France if the War Office will give me a guarantee that they will really send me there […] After all I made my protest on behalf of my fellow fighters and (if it is a question of being treated as an imbecile for the rest of the war) the fittest thing for me to do is to go back and share their ills.

I think that this duality of sentiment is central to the poem and to understanding how it differs in its complexity from the arguably more basic construals of experience in ‘In the ward ii’ and in Infantry Officer. The construal in ‘Death’s Brotherhood’ with its clear focus on the framing of the dream, the detailed description of the speaker’s waking state, its more ambiguous representation of ghosts, and its manipulation of the pronoun system is more nuanced. The ghosts here are, it seems, a more finely-tuned and realized representation of an inner turmoil in the speaker. In short, as in Infantry Officer, Sassoon abstracts actual instances of soldiers into a virtual instance, this time to present a more personal and focused representation of a mind that is torn between two sets of principles (see for example Hipp 2005: 165 for a literary-critical analysis of this idea).

6 Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that contextualizing these three separate versions of the same event offers a way of understanding the creative energies behind the retelling of events. This paper has also argued that CG’s notions of construal and reconstrual provide a systematic way of examining the production end of the communicative chain as part of a fully contextualized yet text-driven stylistic practice. Integrating CG as an analytical method with Kövecses’ model of different contextual constraints thus offers a way of combining text-driven analysis with legitimate enquiry into the various influences of extra-textual events. In ‘In the ward ii’, an understanding of Sassoon’s construals can be enriched by considering the degree to which preceding events, captured in his diary, provide a discourse context and by the way in which the construal of the body might be read in light of the spatial parameters of the trenches and tunnels at the Front. The later reconstruals of this initial depiction can be examined in a similar way, using Kövecses’ framework, through the conceptual-cognitive and situational contexts of Sassoon’s time at Craiglockhart and his possible shifting concerns between 1917 and 1930.

It is therefore possible to approach reconstruals as the motivated, principled, linguistic realizations of other potential ways of shaping content. A contextualized stylistic account thus allows the sensible discussion of those motivations as a way of demonstrating ‘how literary intention can be brought back into our discussion and interpretation of literature without thereby compromising the accuracy of the linguistic analysis that formalism can offer’ (Sotirova 2014: 138). In doing so it provides a way of considering the kinds of construal constraints that influence and license creative practice. ^[4]