The autobiographical and the real in Apollinaire's war poetry.(Critical Essay)

[...] man goes only perpendicularly against

his fate. He was neither formed to know that

other nor compiled of its conspiracy.

(Djuna Barnes, Nightwood) (1)

The historical dislocation produced by the outbreak of war in 1914 poses a radical challenge to the ahistoricity assumed in Modernist writing. (2) The sense of a sudden break in the experiential narrative of human lives seeks consolation in textual narratives which are unbroken, monological, and chronology-bound: narratives in retreat from experimentalist values of spatiality, synchronicity, plurality, and inwardness. The richly textured war poetry of Apollinaire is a striking example of Modernist writing engaging with history and exploring its representability. (3) In the 'Poemes de la guerre' of Calligrammes (1918) the pressure to account for the historical, to reconstruct the realities of soldierly experience, is confronted in an autobiographical project which situates the fiction of the writing/written self in the nexus of history viewed, not as objective, transparent, and absolute, but as subjective and provisional. (4)

Classic autobiographical writing presupposes a consistently strong identity between the extratextual writer and the writing/written self. This identity equation surfaces in instances of explicit self-signature (the naming of 'Gui', 'Guillaume Apollinaire') and extends through references to known friends, close comrades, and distant lovers. (5) But identity textualized is identity enacted and problematized in writing which denaturalizes, fragments, and spatializes its subject. Thus, the poem 'Merveille de la guerre' offers a consciously performative instance in which the writing self ('je') signs the narrative of a third-person self constructed in memory and the imagination. The illusory 'oneness' of narrator and narratee is thus fractured:

Je legue a l'avenir l'histoire de Guillaume Apollinaire