‘Is Owen over-doing it here?’ I would ask. ‘Inside five lines we have “devil’s sick
of sin”, “gargling”, “froth-corrupted”, “bitter as the cud”, “vile, incurable sores”.
Is he not being a bit over-insistent? A bit explicit?’ However hangdog I might feel
about such intrusions, I also felt that it was right to raise questions.^12
Heaney does not have an answer to his questions, except perhaps a
good deal of his own poetry. Indeed, the question of ‘over-doing it’ is
begged by the war itself; what could possibly count as aesthetic excess,
faced with the unimaginable situations of the trenches? But the reply is
that given such horror, there is excess in making any sort of poetry at all,
since no aesthetic form could be adequate to the situation. This is why no
argument that discusses Owen’s aesthetics only in terms of realism will
ultimately be adequate to them. When Keith V. Comer states that
‘Owen’s intent is to confront the reader with as much reality as he is able
to create...inOwen’s poem we are supposed to hear as well as see the
“blood / Come gargling”’, we are entitled to wonder how ‘reality’ can be
‘created’: the very unrepresentability of traumatic experience emphasises
the general situation of the aesthetic, rather than overriding it.^13 Of course,
Comer is right to say that Owen is aiming for vividness, but his aesthetics
are not simply a signal booster for his poetic content-transmission. Rather,
they bind content together in a form that calls attention to its own
intensity as form, as if the very act of unifying drew attention to its
own flagrant contradiction, resulting in an aesthetic for which it is vital
notto harmonise or simply fit with its content.
For a harmony of aesthetics and situation, of experience and treatment
of that experience, would imply a harmony of the two things Owen had
to keep separate; his fighting self and his writing self, his exterior partici-
pation in killing and his interior feeling of sympathy. Owen’s conscience
demanded he make the readers see the horror, but his conscience also
demanded the utter rejection of it, and simply bringing the war to life
would suggest some mental accommodation to it. Rather, Owen’s artifi-
cial intensity simultaneously vivifies warandinsists on its unimaginabil-
ity, the impossibility of its assimilation. Given his situation, emotional
consistency, harmony, or integrity are Owen’s enemies, a conflict which
lies behind ‘Insensibility’. Owen distinguishes between the soldier who
cannot help but be numb and the civilian or general in safety who can
(‘dullards whom no cannon stuns’). But Owen’s irony is the parallel
between them, that there is no difference in situation between the blessed
and the cursed, and hence it is insensibility that is the necessary sustaining
condition of the War itself. It is because soldiers have stopped feeling that
they can continue to live with themselves, and because non-combatants
190 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism