Prosthetic Agency
Professor Gill Plain's new book asks what happens to men after war? How do they make sense of their experiences, and how do they begin to construct new identities suited to the very different demands of peace?
Exploring the aftermath of the Second World War – a war which made combatants of millions of unlikely men – this book looks at the popular stories that tried to imagine new modes of ‘man-making’ better suited to an age of national reconstruction. The book explores adventure fiction, thrillers and melodramas, by hugely successful writers including Hammond Innes, Nevil Shute, Nigel Balchin and John Wyndham. It also examines British cinema’s response to the need for new narratives, and the autobiographical writing of disabled veterans – men who tried, through telling their own stories, to assert their place in a world that would rather forget about the war.
From imagining new technological frontiers waiting to be conquered, to romanticising the legend of amputee airman Douglas Bader, postwar British culture worked energetically to imagine man-making adventures appropriate to a new age of ‘domestic citizenship’.
Professor Plain has written a related post entitled "Picturing Postwar Disability" for the Cambridge University Press blog.
Prosthetic Agency: Literature, Culture and Masculinity after World War II is available from Cambridge University Press.
>> DINA: Hello everyone, welcome back to St Andrews and to the School of English.
Well, we're going to start off our series of conversations with our faculty about their work with Professor Gill plain who's here with me today in Edinburgh.
Hi!
>> GILL: Hi
>> DINA: Welcome to my office.
>> GILL: It's delightful to be here, thank you.
>> DINA: Thank you so much.
So, Professor Plain has a new book out that has just come out this month it's called Prosthetic Agency: Literature, Culture and Masculinity after World War II and look at that.
It's beautiful.
A beautiful cover, and it's just come out from Cambridge University Press.
>> GILL: That's right, it's about what happens to men and masculinity when war ends.
If you think about it, war, the Second World War in particular, is a huge thing.
People who'd never have dreamt of becoming soldiers are conscripted and become military.
>> DINA: Yeah
>> GILL: They spend, you know, the better part of six years being trained how to kill people, or possibly how to peel potatoes, but it doesn't really compare.
>> DINA: Yeah
>> GILL: But in any case, it's a radical rupture in their lives.
They're actually living stuff from adventure narrative - they're going to war.
>> DINA: Yeah
>> GILL: You know it may be a horrific experience for some of them but it's undoubtedly a male experience.
>> DINA: Yeah
>> GILL: No doubt about the masculinity.
So, the war comes to an end, and we have demobilization and suddenly, all these men are expected to go home and become ‘domestic citizens’.
>> DINA: Yes.
>> GILL: Back to the home, wife, children, going to the office – if they even have a job – and they are disorientated, maybe lonely.
They've been living in big male groups.
>> DINA: Yes.
>> GILL: That's a culture and that's all changed and now they're breadwinners, they're responsible for everything, they're not looked after by the army anymore and so many men are a mess and trying to adjust.
You also find that the stories culture is telling start to change - they have to change.
They start looking... you can sort of imagine... “well, we don't really want them to be soldiers anymore, we want them to be domestic citizens – but equally we need them to be real men”.
>> DINA: Yes
>> GILL: Because men have to be men and women have to be women, right? This is the 1940s…
So, we need new adventures.
What adventures can they have instead?
So you get test pilot stories, the dawn of the Jet Age.
You have heroic… chemists, heroic… geologists.
Nothing like sending off a man to chip at a rock.
For a brief period, war stories disappear from the cinema.
>> DINA: That was very surprising to me when I read that - why did war stories disappear from cinema?
>> GILL: Well, it's the people on the home front are bored rigid by it, they've had enough.
They don't want to see any war stories, they want frivolity.
They want something to take their mind off the drudgery of austerity.
There's a really bonkers thriller that I read.
In case anybody wants to buy it, it's called The Angry Mountain by Hammond Innes.
It's written about 1950-1951 and its hero is a real classic demobilized, disorientated figure.
He's lost a leg, it was in fact cut off by a fiendish Nazi.
He amputated it without anaesthetic.
>> DINA: Wow!
>> GILL: Yes! He drinks far too much, he's lonely and he gets caught up in some kind of smuggling, Cold War narrative. [And there’s an exploding volcano in the background]
He encounters the fiendish Nazi that...
>> DINA: That cut off his leg!
>> GILL: He's horrified.
The Nazi is pretending to be something else altogether - a very respectable citizen.
So we're in this kind of, obviously... this is set up to be a revenge tale.
>> DINA: Yes, of course.
>> GILL: The hero needs to be vindicated.
The Nazi needs to die.
>> DINA: I mean, in an American story he would just take out a knife and stab him, right?
>> GILL: Exactly, that's entirely reasonable.
>> DINA: Yeah.
>> GILL: But no, this is Britain.
Or at least it's British masculinity and British men are supposed to be emotionally restrained, collected... they do not take violent revenge.
I think the volcano stands in for everything that this poor British one-legged man cannot express in life.
>> DINA: So it has to be expressed symbolically?
>> GILL: Exactly!
Yeah, so nature's doing the sort of emotional heavy lifting for him and there's molten lava everywhere and he's in great peril, great jeopardy.
In fact, the Nazi has stolen his artificial leg now so he's kind of...
>> DINA: Wait, the Nazi takes off his artificial leg?
>> GILL: The Nazi thinks there are diamonds hidden in the artificial leg.
That's a whole other plot point that we don't need to go into.
The Nazi once again amputates his leg - this time his artificial one.
The man is seemingly doomed - the lava's advancing, he's stuck there, he can't go very fast because he's only got one leg.
But fortunately, there's a mule trapped there as well, so he gets on the mule.
The mule and he stagger off out of the way of the lava, but they’re still stuck and there's a plane.
Unfortunately, only one person can fly this plane and that is our poor one-legged man and he's gonna fly them out but he says the mule has to come - "The mule saved my life - I want that mule on board."
So, the mule's on board, the Nazi's on board, a few other collateral people are on board.
The plane takes off during turbulence and, lo and behold, the mule kicks the Nazi to death.
>> DINA: Fabulous!
>> GILL: Fabulous!
We have had the desire for revenge, the desire for so much pain to be expressed, channelled through a volcano and a mule.
>> DINA: Wow!
So, this idea that the British man - the British hero - cannot take revenge...cannot be in this way base, but these things appear to do it for him.
>> GILL: Yeah exactly, signifying objects.
>> DINA: Exactly!
>> GILL: So it's almost as if the mule is prosthetic agency in the story.
>> DINA: Yes. How would people of this time feel about say, a film like Inglourious Basterds?
[LAUGHTER]
>> DINA: Would they respond well to that kind of literal…
>> GILL: A literal eventuality…
>> DINA: Exactly, yeah.
>> GILL: It's also a kind of sense of American culture hegemony – this kind of sense that American movies, American global power, American soda, American teenagers...
They're all kind of taking over the world and everything, you know a lot of British writers, not just thriller writers, but people like Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, JB Priestley...
They all voice a certain kind of anti-American sentiment or just kind of resentment because America's so loud
>> DINA: Yes
>> GILL: And I think that might be how they would feel about something like Inglourious Basterds… Oh, "too much!"
>> DINA: "Too much"
>> GILL: It's really quite difficult to talk about the war after the war.
Their middle-class British culture, and in a different way, in working class cultures, there isn't really a language to talk about emotions.
I mean, it's a joke to talk about the "stiff upper lip" but that was a real thing in terms of people resorting to euphemism.
>> DINA: Yeah.
>> GILL: They kind of said "Oh, I had a bad time" or “I pranged my kite” for "I crashed my plane", you know, "I got a bit beaten up" to mean "I lost two legs", you know, this kind of massive understatement.
>> DINA: This created, I guess, the culture of a certain kind of man in a domestic sphere. What would that lead to?
>> GILL: There were a lot of divorces.
[LAUGHTER]
>> GILL: You'll find them writing their narratives almost as a form of self-assertion.
Saying, "I'm still... I'm still who I used to be", "I still matter", "I can be a domestic citizen too!"
>> DINA: Yeah
>> GILL: Because just as this culture didn't have much of language of emotions, they didn't have very constructive way of talking or thinking about disability.
They preferred to keep disability out of sight, and yet the wounded soldier has more cultural value than somebody who's born disabled.
>> DINA: Yeah
>> GILL: A famous example is probably Douglas Bader.
Who some people may have heard of.
He was in the RAF before the Second World War and he was a right cocky bastard.
He's showing off in his plane one day and he crashes it catastrophically and loses both his legs.
>> DINA: Oh gosh!
>> GILL: So unsurprisingly, he gets the boot out of the RAF.
But come the second world war, Britain’s short of manpower, it desperately needs pilots, and you don't actually need legs to fly a plane.
>> DINA: Oh, is that right?
GILL: And so Bader, who in effect had this kind of very forthright arrogant personality and he argues his way back into the RAF and he flies.
He can get into a plane, he's an experienced pilot, he's invaluable, and it doesn't matter.
And it leads to this utterly absurd situation which is written about in the biography but he's simultaneously classified as 100% disabled and 100% fit to fly a plane.
>> DINA: Exactly
>> GILL: So, we're living in a topsy-turvy world around disability and we find men writing these narratives in which they assert “I may look different, I may be unrecognizable but I'm still a man, I’m a body that matters and I count.”
>> DINA: Thank you so much Professor Plain.
The book, again, is Prosthetic Agency: Literature, Culture and Masculinity after World War II and that was fascinating.
Thank you for being here.
>> GILL: Thank you so much for talking with me.