ABSTRACT
Focusing on the prose that Ford Madox Ford wrote during the First World War, this chapter investigates the reasons for Ford’s representational aporia while in active service and nuances this aesthetic draught. Among the texts studied are ‘A Day of Battle’, ‘Trois Jours de Permission’, ‘Epilogue’, ‘Pon… ti… pri… ith!’, essays for literary magazines and letters. This chapter surveys the multifarious tensions within Ford’s war prose and brings to light their paradoxical fertility and long-lasting consequences on his post-war writing. Ford’s initial literary response to the war is marked with a variety of scopic, narratological and psychological predicaments that seem to defeat his writing endeavours. The ethical pull intrinsic in Ford’s writing led him however to persevere and to build an alternative ethos to the totalising morality enforced by war propaganda. The works of Levinas, Adorno and Butler are used to elucidate this aspect. Out of this ethical shift emerges a reinvestment of Ford’s principles of literary impressionism. Against the common and now vastly questioned notion of the autonomy of modernist aesthetics, Ford’s updating of his technique at the contact of the war stemmed directly from his impulse to write for the sake of humanity. Ethics and aesthetics are indivisible in his representation of the war.
