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Remarque's All Quiet on theWestern FrontThomas C. Ware aa University of Tennessee , ChattanoogaPublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Thomas C. Ware (2005) Remarque's All Quiet on the WesternFront, The Explicator, 63:2, 99-100, DOI: 10.1080/00144940509596905

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Remarque’s ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

In one of the most graphic scenes in Erich Maria Remarque’s generally gory novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the first-person narrator, Private Paul Baumer, finds himself suddenly caught in a bombardment, in a little grove of trees where he and his fellow soldiers “know every foot of ground here. There’s the cemetery with the mounds and the black crosses” (65). The ferocity of the explosions, the rain of clods, and the flames, however, prevent them from escaping from this place. The only possible cover, it appears, will be the graveyard. Baumer is hit twice and fights against losing consciousness. Crawling desperately through the mud, he blindly claws his way toward cover, feels something yielding, and shoves in under it.

Protected momentarily from the bombardment, he opens his eyes only to discover that the thing he lies beneath is not a wounded man, as he first thinks, but a corpse dislodged from its tomb. He tries to recoil, but his instinct for sur- vival is stronger than his sense of revulsion.

My hand gropes farther, splinters of wood-now I remember again that we are lying in the graveyard.

But the shelling is stronger than everything. It wipes out the sensibilities. I merely crawl deeper into the coffin, it should protect me, and especially as Death himself lies in it too. (67)

“[. . . A]s Death himself lies in it too.” Baumer and his companions do survive the shelling, but only because other coffins are also disentombed and provide shelter: “The graveyard is a mass of wreckage. Coffins and corpses lie strewn about. They have been killed once again; but each one of them that was flung up saved one of us” (70-71). This scene constitutes a vividly ironic and yet quite believable variation on the motif of Et in Arcadia Ego, which occurs with startling frequency in the literature of World War I, as discussed in such models as Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modem Memory, especially his chapter on “Arcadian Resources.” This pastoral tradition, in its terse Latin phrasing, had apparently been long interpreted in England, and blandly so, as “And I too dwelled in Arcadia”; but as discovered by Erwin Panovsky, its deeper significance in classical literature meant “Even in Arcadia, I, Death, hold sway” (or more appropriate here, “I, who am now dead, also once lived in Arcadia”), with such visual elements as a half-hidden tomb, a skull, a fly, and sometimes a mouse, with surprised shepherds marveling at the discovery (depicted, for example, by Giovanni Guercino and at least twice by Poussin).

Remarque’s depiction of Private Baumer’s encounter with the unearthed corpses not only partakes of this classical tradition-reminding his readers of the bizarre characteristics of “the Great War” being fought in the bucolic set- ting of the Western Front-but also anticipates Baumer’s senseless death, as

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objectively reported at the close of the novel, in the final days of the war, immediately after he has been reveling in the autumn beauties of the country- side and vaguely hearing “the canteens hum like beehives with rumours of peace” (29 1 ).

-THOMAS C. WARE, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

WORKS CITED

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1975. Panovsky, Erwin. “Et in Arcadia Ego.” Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cas-

Remarque, Erich Maria. Al l Quiet on the Western Front. 1928. Trans. A. W. Wheen. Boston: Lit- sirer. London: Oxford UP, 1936. 295-320.

tle, Brown, 1956.

Williams’s THE GLASS MENAGERIE

Although Amanda Wingfield, the embattled mother of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, possesses admirable qualities, her personal- ity is a formidable obstacle to sympathy. In Nancy Tischler’s words, Amanda is “a disillusioned romantic turned evangelical realist” (32). Although end- lessly elegizing the neiges d‘antan of her Mississippi girlhood-with its sev- enteen gentleman callers-she labors grotesquely to mold the lives of her adult children into American success stones through nagging and moralizing, an attempt epitomized by the unendurable cheery “Rise and shine!” with which she awakens her son Tom each morning and which grates on our ears like fingernails on a chalkboard. Not content to carp on Tom’s eating habits, his smoking, his lack of interest in his job, his late hours, and his insatiable appetite for movies, she tries to impose her Puritan morality on him by cen- soring his reading of D. H. Lawrence (one of Williams’s own favorite novel- ists). Further, as Signi Falk observes, Amanda is unjust to Tom in blaming him for the failure of her ham-handed campaign to ensnare a suitable husband for daughter Laura, unreasonably faulting him for not knowing that the gentleman caller was engaged to be married and forgetting that Tom tried to dissuade her from the ill-fated scheme in the first place. Amanda is no less overbearing and ill-advised in her attempts to manage her daughter’s life, and although her dis- appointment upon learning that Laura has stopped attending business college is understandable, the lugubriousness of her dismay and recriminations neu- tralize the compassion we might otherwise have felt for her plight.

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