Death Is Elsewhere: The Shifting Locus of Tragedy in Belgian Great War Literature

Abstract

Belgian First World War literature (whether fiction or semifiction, memoirs, poetry, or drama) was, in its early phase, and like much of European war literature, overwhelmingly written in the heroic mode. This heroic mode represented the war as meaningful (if terrible), a crusade for civilization in which Belgium's role was an emblematically valorous one, that of civilization's first champion and martyr in 1914. But the heroic momentum proved hard to sustain over four years of attrition and mass death; and the end of the war proved a bitter anticlimax. The heroic mode gave way to a disillusioned mode of writing about the war, a mode that emphatically rejected the confident use of "1914" shibboleths (such as, precisely, civilization). The war-both trench warfare and life under military occupation-now came to be represented as a degrading experience. The disillusioned representation reached a peak around 1930. This was the time of the "war boom" in Western European literature generally, with disenchantment the dominant mode everywhere. Other Western European literatures however, replacing the heroic with the tragic, were able to persuasively recrystallize around the theme of the condemned generation. Belgian war literature was not. It never quite succeeded in formulating a lasting, compelling vision of doomed Belgian youth. Two factors-one international, one domestic in nature-may account for this elusiveness. The international element is Belgium's loss of status in postwar Europe. Belgium's relatively low death toll provided a jarring contrast to the argument of Belgian victimization that had bolstered the European mobilization rhetoric of 1914-a rhetoric that was now hotly repudiated. Belgium, as a result, utterly lost its tragic aura. The domestic factor is language. In postwar Flemish representation, the "war genera-