![]() The carnal wit of Prior's voice marks out The Ghost Road as an important book. Elsewhere, Rivers draws women's stockings on the legs of a patient with hysterical paralysis to shock him into motion, bringing the death-sex connection full circle. The word 'mate', he discovered, meant death in the local language - which brilliantly foreshortens the sexualised view of 'matey' masculine camaraderie in Prior's trench scenes. Rivers, whose ethnographical activities are interpolated into Prior's narrative and journal, pondered questions of human universality on Eddystone Island, Melanesia, where he studied the kinship systems of headhunters. 'By which I mean that in my present situation the only sane thing to do is to run away, and I will not do it. ![]() 'My nerves are in perfect working order,' Prior writes to Rivers. Just as sexuality works along a spectrum, so human sensibility in the face of war cannot be divided into 'officer' or 'Tommy', 'enemy' or 'ally' nor can the shell-shock victim be labelled 'sane' or 'mad'. Yet one soon realises this is not a retreat into smutty semantics, but part of an artistic structure. ![]() ![]() Indeed, given his sexual ambiguity, there is much play with the words 'front' and 'back'. In The Ghost Road, Prior, returning to France in 1918, seems an 'uncharitable bastard' as he puts it, at least in the brutal male and female sexual liaisons he packs in before he is due back at the front. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |