are insensible to soldiers’ suffering that the war continues. In the trenches,
the only internal consistency is that of the insensible soldiers, who can
reconcile interior feeling with exterior duty because they have no inter-
iority left at all, not feeling ‘even themselves or for themselves’. In
reaction, Owen’s style maximises its exteriority, its unnatural intensity,
in order to insist that no reconciliation can take place; it is an aesthetic
which, in the very act of vivifying, calls attention to the emotional
necessity of its own failure.
bad tasteBehind Heaney’s anxiety lies a question of taste, a worry that Owen might
be ‘over-doing it’ because he doesn’t know how much is too much. This
question of artistic good taste has its roots in Kant’s founding definition
of truly aesthetic judgement, whose basic criterion is disinterestedness.
For Kant, taste is ‘the ability to judge an object, or way of presenting it, by
means of a liking or dislikingdevoid of all interest’, rather than liking it
because it agrees with morality or satisfies our appetites.^14 Both of these
would make the aesthetic subservient to some relation of interest (} 4 ),
whereas true aesthetic taste is free from such contamination and thus
reflects a more universal and less self-interested way of thinking (} 6 ). The
covertly bourgeois standard of ‘disinterest’ has been much discussed
recently, but the more directly Kantian politics of taste have always been
a vital question for Heaney’s own work, because the possibility of disin-
terestedness indicates an implicitly detached position where judgements
can be made about proportions and construction of the whole. Drawing
on the story of Jesus delaying, then averting, the stoning of an adulterous
woman by writing in the sand, Heaney has called the act of writing itself a
pause, a ‘break with the usual life’ of accusation and judgement.^15 Ironic-
ally, the supposedly non-political act of artistic taste itself would in
Heaney’s case protest against the compulsory division of Northern Irish
politics and its denial that anyone could stand outside one side or the
other. For Owen, though, standing outside the situation is exactly what
the civilian population must not be allowed to do (and in Heaney’s
defence, it should be added that in poems such as ‘Whatever you Say,
Say Nothing’ and section VIII of ‘Station Island’, he has not failed to
explore his own unease about the complicity between his artistic taste
and a refusal to tell the truth of the situation). Bad taste – in the Kantian
sense – would be, for Owen, committed writing. And we know that
Kantian disinterest is more or less the opposite of Owen’s belief, because
The passions of Wilfred Owen 191