[From a 1996 Humanities interview with Paul Fussell by Sheldon Hackney] – Everybody believes that life is pleasurable, and they should. They have a right to believe that, especially if they’re brought up under a Constitution that talks about the pursuit of happiness. To have public life shot through with that kind of optimism and complacency is the grounds for horrible, instructive irony when those generalities prove not true. War tends to prove them not true. War is about survival and it’s about mass killing and it’s about killing or being killed – that is, in the infantry – and it is extremely unpleasant. One realizes that a terrible mistake has been made somewhere, either by the optimistic eighteenth century or by mechanistic twentieth century. The two don’t fit together somehow, and that creates, obviously, irony.

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.

Hackney: You think that it is impossible to live that way? You find modernism in that sense — the stripped-down, convenient version of life — wrong or missing?

Fussell: It’s a jettisoning of high expectations — I’d put it that way — the kind of expectations that propelled late Victorian and Edwardian literature and late- nineteenth-century culture in this country.

Hackney: Historians tend to see World War I as the great cultural divide for the West.

Fussell: I would certainly agree. One of the functions of The Great War and Modern Memory as a book was to emphasize that point, to emphasize that after the Great War, everything had to start again in Germany and in Britain and in America, even though we hadn’t been in the war very long. People like Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos – I’m just talking about writers now – helped to start it again.

Hackney: Can we be more specific about the attitude toward life as becoming more ironic after World War I?

Fussell: Irony in the Victorian age is a pretty rare commodity. You do have Mark Twain, thank God, and you have Ambrose Bierce and a few other naysayers of that kind. But it doesn’t determine the course of a whole literature as it does after the Great War.

Hackney: You begin The Great War with some mention of Hardy, and you end there. Hardy, you think, was out of sync with his times or ahead of his time?

Fussell: Well, he was ironic, but his irony was of a certain noble kind. His assumed that society would always go on in the same shape he found it in, whereas after the Great War, everybody knew — as Pound said when he insisted that the artist must make it new — everybody knew that a new order of things was necessary, or at least desirable. The new order didn’t really take place, and the old order persisted. But it was certainly hacked and ridiculed and satirized and objected to much more than it ever had been before.

Hackney: You refer, in one of your essays about World War II, to what you call the protective screen of irony through which you pass your bleak view of the war. Who are you trying to protect there? The reader or yourself?

Fussell: Myself. It protects one from emotional openness which might destroy or just weaken one, and it turns the experience toward intellect and away from emotion. I learned that by my long immersion in eighteenth-century literature, where the urge is constantly outward from oneself; that is, not to try to undertake deep voyages into the self, but, rather, to escape the self, look out at society, see what’s going on, and then comment on it. Irony is a great help there, to protect oneself from self-regarding emotion, which has always been an enemy of mine from the start.

Continued at an archival page hosted by Brigham Young University | More Chronicle & Notices.

Paul Fussell died 23 May 2012. Obituary [The Telegraph].