The dream of the Great War

This article explores the idea that what Samuel Hynes has described as ‘The Myth of the (Great) War can be analysed both as a trauma narrative and as a cultural dream. The argument draws upon Lacan’s proposition in Seminar XVII that the Oedipus complex is ‘Freud’s dream’, an idea which Lacan develops within the context of his theory of the four discourses. Just as Lacan argues in the Seminar that ‘Freud’s dream’ is an attempt to ‘save the father’ from symbolic castration, the argument put forward in this paper is that the Myth of the Great War is an attempt to ‘save’ the upper and upper-middle class culture of late Victorian and early Edwardian England from its own form of symbolic castration. As a trauma narrative it can be seen as an attempt to give meaning to a meaningless experience, but as a dream it becomes possible to identify, within its ‘manifest content’, what Freud called the ‘navel of the dream’, the point where interpretation reaches its limit and which in Lacanian terms can be defined as the Real of the dream. This is illustrated through the analysis of a famous Great War poem by Wilfred Owen.