Mt’s Reviews > The Great War and Modern Memory > Status Update

“And that new dimension is capable of revealing for the first time the full obscenity of the Great War. The greatest irony is that it is only now, when those who remember the events are almost all dead, that the literary means for adequate remembering and interpreting are finally publicly accessible.”

“As we perceive in the work of Mailer and Pynchon and James Jones, it is the virtual disappearance during the sixties and seventies of the concept of prohibitive obscenity, a concept which has acted as a censor on earlier memories of ‘war,’ that has given the ritual of military memory a new dimension.”