Attending to Ghosts: Some Reflections on the Disavowals of Great War Historiography

Attending to Ghosts

In Elizabeth Bowen’s terrifying 1941 short story of the London Blitz, ‘The Demon

Lover’, the ghost of a Great War soldier returns to haunt his former lover, Mrs.

Drover, amidst the ruins of a London laid waste by another global conflict. By

its impertinent demand that the home front of 1939-1945 address the claims of

an earlier generation who had fought, suffered and died, Bowen’s story offers a

starting point for a conversation about the spectral forces that haunt the established

historiography of the First World War. Drawing on the notions of spectrality and

hauntology as deployed by poststructuralists Jacques Derrida and Fredric Jameson

(and reinforced by Freudian psychoanalysis), this paper uses the notion of the

ghost to highlight the disavowals and confinements that continue to characterize

much of the historical writing about 1914-1918. In particular, it employs Bowen’s

story as a metaphor for the necessity of the historian attending to the disturbances

created by subjective, affective and psychic forces that refused to be beholden

to official and public rubrics that separated, and attempted to dichotomize, the

experiences and meanings of the two world wars. For, as the brief case study

(namely the mental and affective worlds of Britain’s military and political leaders

in 1939-1945) included in this paper suggests, while Second World War rhetoric

attempted to impose a critical distance from the earlier conflict, leading military and

political figures found it impossible to repudiate psychic intrusions rooted in the

formative global trauma of the century. Like Bowen’s Mrs. Drover, historians may

find it advisable to heed the entreaties of ghosts, even if these particular specters

haunt, neither the battlefields of Flanders nor the rubble of blitzed London, but

rather the pages of our written histories of the Great War.