Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Limping Back to Life after War
- 1 Index, Ghost, Dream
- 2 Reality, Disillusionment, Play
- 3 War Life, Life as War
- 4 Prosthetic Irony – The Ghost in the Machine
- 5 The Prosthesis and Burial, Or Caring for the Dead
- 6 Body and Metaphor
- Conclusion: Leaving the Island
- Index
Conclusion: Leaving the Island
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 June 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Limping Back to Life after War
- 1 Index, Ghost, Dream
- 2 Reality, Disillusionment, Play
- 3 War Life, Life as War
- 4 Prosthetic Irony – The Ghost in the Machine
- 5 The Prosthesis and Burial, Or Caring for the Dead
- 6 Body and Metaphor
- Conclusion: Leaving the Island
- Index
Summary
People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly
not going to do it anymore.
I’ve finished my war book now. The next one
I write is going to be fun.
This one is a failure, and it had to be, since it was
written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
It ends like this:
Poo-tee-weet?
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse FiveI will begin this somewhat odd concluding chapter to my book by stating what may have been obvious to some of my readers until this point: the work of prosthesis-making and the mechanical vocabulary it seems to invite, including, as I have mentioned, my own use of the term ‘prosthesis’, is not without its limits. I do not write this to be contrary to my own argument and in that way perhaps controversial, but because I find, as I have hinted, a few unresolved issues and limits not only to the work of prosthesis-making but also to the very discourse of the prosthesis. And while I stand behind my description of the prosthesis and its inner workings and the manner in which I describe the actions taken by soldiers to return to society and language through the mechanism of poetry, I would like to articulate the possible costs that description, reliable as it may be, may incur. These concerns include, but are not limited to: firstly, the mechanical breakdown that is part and parcel of Peirce’s analysis of language and Wills’s discussion of the prosthesis exposes a predominantly masculine propensity for discussing injury, disability, trauma and their relation to language in explicitly mechanical terms in a manner that may result in aversion to ‘non-mechanical’ or ‘organic’ aspects, including, but not exclusive to, sexuality; secondly, the work of constructing prostheses necessarily involves the begrudging endurance of the familial or social security network that is, for the most part, left out of the work of prosthesis itself, with family members often portrayed as malicious agents who, in some cases, brought about the soldier’s decision to enlist; thirdly, emphasis is placed on the most extreme of encounters with the dead and thus the most extreme linguistic shifts and, as a result, I too am propping up the myth of the (male) soldier and his bewildering encounter with death; and fourthly and finally, the notion of care I advance in this book, as it relates to a care for the dead, both includes men only and bears noxious resonances of ancestor worship.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Poetic ProstheticsTrauma and Language in Contemporary Veteran Writing, pp. 225 - 248Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022