HalfComic and HalfTragic: Irony in PostWorld War II Literature

In their 1982 January issue, Harper's Magazine published Paul Fussell's essay "My War: How I got irony in the infantry." Fussell served as a lieutenant in the American infantry during World War II and afterwards became an academic, eventually receiving widespread praise and literary awards for his 1975 study, The Great War and Modern Memory, investigating World War I and its force in altering aesthetics. Seven years later, Harper's published "My War," documenting Fussell's own shift in personal aesthetics as a result of his World War II experience. Fussell begins by disclosing a few responses from readers repulsed with his depiction of warfare. "Whenever I deliver [an] unhappy view of the war, especially when I try to pass it through a protective screen of irony, I hear from outraged readers" (40). Fussell admits to an emphasis of the "noisome materials" of the war in his treatments, the "corpses, maddened dogs, deserters and looters, pain, Auschwitz, weeping," and the list goes on. By refusing to ignore the cruelty and suffering of the war, and by rendering it ironic, Fussell has been labeled, "callous," his "black and monstrous" work revealing an "overwhelming deficiency in human compassion" (40).