'Shell-Shocked'
The adjective ‘shell-shocked’ is a largely recent journalistic invention, one that ignores the original trauma as a shorthand for the state of being confused or disoriented. It is not only carelessly used with respect to the original pain, it is also misapplied: the ‘shell-shocked’ often used tropes of the grotesque rather than of confusion to communicate their experience.
#EdmundBlunden ∩ #language ∩ #shellshock
Katie Martin has a piece in today’s Financial Times titled, ‘Advice to shell-shocked Americans from Brexit Britain’.
It’s a crass metaphor, no? A cheap headline deploying an overused adjective to garner attention?
Perhaps Martin’s defence is that the term is now part of the vernacular. But it’s kind of a weak argument; plenty of terms have become part of the ‘vernacular’ to devastating effect. The history of things matters. Perhaps Martin claims it’s just a comic effect, a stylistic flourish, or an ironical glance?
This doesn’t wash to me. It’s simply careless.
Martin is not alone. Public use of the noun ‘shell shock’ and the adjective ‘shell-shocked’ has surged since the mid-1990s.
Not many of the ‘shell-shocked’ lived to 1990 to be insulted. Time passes. Memories fade. But, I also wonder how much of the increased usage we can trace to Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991), perhaps Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), although ‘shell shock’ relates explicitly to the First World War? Perhaps, wars in Kosovo (then, ‘Yugoslavia’) and renewed conflict in Iraq matter here? Either way, the Ngram for ‘shell-shocked’ certainly accelerated in 1999.
Notably, as clinical use of the noun decreased, the adjective has reached new highs. ‘Shell-shocked’ is a decidedly contemporary phenomenon. It’s everywhere, from Pep Guardiola to the stock market. Picking randomly from Google News over the last few days, we even find a restaurant in Lincoln, Nebraska, that’s ‘shell-shocked’ by the price of eggs. What is it with modern America and the cost of eggs?
In the cases of Pep, the S&P 500, and Penelope’s Lil’ Cafe, ‘shell-shocked’ is used as journalistic shorthand for feelings associated with confusion and disorientation. It’s bizarre that we casually use a term that:
has the actual perceived cause of the trauma within it. That shell of shell-shocked is right there, it’s hard to avoid. It’s not egg-price-shocked; and
has enormous emotional content. Since when has losing a soccer match, or losing 15% in a market that’s ripped for a decade been traumatic? Martin seems to think that some equation exists between the adjectives ‘Brexit’ and ‘shell-shocked’. Only one of these adjectives relates to trauma. And only one relates to stupidity.
If you want a term to describe the feeling of being confused and disoriented by contemporary events, how about ‘confused’ or ‘disoriented’? They work pretty well. Why the need for extra emphasis? Because it’s worse than confused, but not quite as bad as a trauma that we’ve forgotten about because it happened over a century ago? Ok. Rattled? Not strong enough. Overwhelmed? Harder, harder. Numb? Frozen?
We can use the word ‘shell-shocked’. We ought even to be able to laugh about it, if not at it. Context always matters. But to deploy it so carelessly negates the appalling suffering of ‘shell shock’.
Let’s remind ourselves of the numbers.
In the year following the end of the First World War, the British armed forces demobilised almost three million soldiers. 200,000 of these were suffering from shell shock. There were 41,000 amputees, 272,000 injured in a single limb, 65,000 carrying a head or eye injury, and 89,000 carrying other bodily injuries. By 1918, no less than twenty shell-shock hospitals existed in Britain, offering over 6,000 beds, in addition to the more traditional recovery homes offering massage- and electricity-based ‘cures’.
And this is what ‘shell shock’ often looked like.
Many soldiers didn’t experience ‘shell shock’ as confusing or disorientating. That is actually how witnesses mainly described the ‘shell-shocked’, or how they attempted to imagine the experience of someone suffering from ‘shell shock’. It is an outsider’s perspective. Tropes of confusion are then merely a further confusion, since most first-person narratives of war trauma describe it as a profoundly grotesque experience.
Take for example, one scene from Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928):
Not far from [the] shafthead, a young and cheerful lance-corporal of ours was making some tea as I passed one warm afternoon. I went along three firebays; one shell burst behind me; I saw its smoke faint out, and I thought all was as lucky as it should be (Blunden 1928, 62).
There can hardly be a more quintessentially English scene than tea in the afternoon.
Except, of course, for the shell that flies overhead. Artillery shells should not ordinarily drop on anything as homely as a British tea party.
As Blunden watches that shell smoke ‘faint out’, and counts his luck, he finds that the shell has struck his trench. It does so with devastating power: ‘Its butting impression was black and stinking in the parados [the rear of the trench] where three minutes ago the lance-corporal’s mess-tin was bubbling over a little flame’ (Blunden 1928, 62).
In a moment, what was human, what is mud, and what remains of machine are yoked together into this stinking indeterminable thing. The shell’s impact has caused not only its own disintegration but also the disintegration of the ‘cheerful lance-corporal’. That things should happen like this, according to these odds, at a tea party with the ‘mess-tin […] bubbling’ (Blunden 1928, 62) of all places, threatens comedy whilst simultaneously disintegrating it with horror. That is the grotesquerie of it all.
Blunden inserts an appallingly graphic rhetorical question into the soldier’s absence: ‘For him, how could the gobbets of blackening flesh, the earth-wall sotted with blood, with flesh, the eye under the duckboard, the pulpy bone be the only answer?’ (Blunden 1928, 62-3).
Of course, there is no answer to this question. Even the rhetorical implication dissolves.
These bodily fragments seem to originate from some unworldly place. We don’t find recognisable pieces of the body, its limbs, the head. Instead, we have muscle, fat, skin, and organ; ‘gobbets’, pieces, mere lumps of matter. Blunden reminds us twice: this is all now just ‘flesh’; the flesh of the desiring body, ripped of all its wants and needs, instantly intoxicating (‘sotted’ is the odd word Blunden uses) the mud. The shell has reduced muscles to hunks of meat, the organs to corpuscles, the bone to its marrow.
‘The eye under the duckboard’. You may be something. But you are not shell-shocked.
Bibliography
Blunden, Edmund. 1928. Undertones of War. Cobden-Sanderson.