“Painting and War Don’t Go Together”: Images and the Unarticulated Affect in Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916)
Résumé
Written in the second half of 1915 and published in 1916, in the middle of World War One, Non-Combatants and Others by Rose Macaulay registers the reluctance of non-combatants to acknowledge the true experience of the battlefront, which remains absent from the novel. However, images of war do appear in the novel in the form of vivid and bluntly realistic visions of the battlefield and the trenches, and in the form of war news and propaganda posters that cover the walls of London. Images of war trigger violent affect and subsequent bodily reactions in the main character, a woman and art student who consequently becomes unable to paint. These reactions can be read as instances of what Lyotard calls an “affect-phrase”, which is always “unarticulated”, and which suspends the incessant discourses of non-combatants on the war. Through the attempted transcription of affect, Rose Macaulay tries to negotiate contemporary paradoxes. She invents adequate forms and metaphors that bear testimony to her experience of the troubled times she lived through. Her creation of a new aesthetics fraught with “unarticulated” affect earns her a place both within the canon of First World War literature and within the modernist canon.