Humility and Perspective-Taking: Ford’s Ethics and Aesthetics of War Writing

In an essay written sometime in 1917 or 1918, unpublished during his lifetime and only discovered in 1980, Ford Madox Ford reflects on what his war experience in France taught him: “above all things—humility”. This article argues that Ford’s writing about humility and perspective-taking in his wartime essays, which he connects to unstinting attentiveness to the particularities of place and people, can be read through an ecocritical lens that sees an ecological humility as central to reorienting human relationships within the natural world. In reflecting on both the lessons of war and the causes of such conflicts, Ford highlights humility in terms of perspective-taking and, in a related move, foregrounds the necessity for the precise use of language—both he sees as key to representing and preventing war. In so doing, I argue, Ford calls for an aesthetics and an ethics of war writing. Such literature must realize the impossibility and hubris of the bird’s-eye view, instead rooting itself in the ground, both literally and linguistically, while using a precise language that emerges from a clear awareness of this limited perspective.