Journal Article

WAR AND DIVISION IN \PARADE'S END\

Piette, Adam

2014

Overview

The chapter provides a close reading of the Vorticist opening scene of No More Parades featuring the death of O Nine Morgan, drawing specific parallels between Ford's staging of the three male couples and Wyndham Lewis's play The Enemy of the Stars. This great sequence leading up to the terrible death instances a division of the mind beyond the pseudo-couple and towards a multiplex of fragmented war consciousness. Developing the Conradian male-male dualism characteristic of Ford's pre-war fiction, the chapter argues that Ford is here in very detailed terms updating that homo duplex theme as a Lewisite master-slave life and death struggle, rewriting the Arghol-Hanp relationship as a common condition of all fighting men's minds under war conditions. It is shown at work in this chapter in McKechnie's gabbling self-dialogue, in Tietjens' own tormented duplicate torment of mind, in the class relations and co-dependency of officers and men, in the shell-shocked hunger for love of these trench-exiled combatants, in the terrible division of body suffered by O Nine Morgan. The chapter ends with consideration of the way these couples transform into triangles through absent others; and then adds a fourth element, the iron brazier at the heart of the hut and the shell fragment that kills O Nine Morgan, signifying the inhuman, post-human killing technology of war.

• Publisher: Rodopi
• Subject: SECTION 2: PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHY OF WAR