Conclusion

Abstract

In the second decade of the twentieth century a number of European poets and writers, members of artistic movements including the Futurists, Imagists and Dadaists, declared in their manifestos the limits and inadequacies of language.¹ In 1912, for instance, the Russian Futurists invented the term ‘zaum’, which expressed ‘the crisis of confidence suffered by language when confronted with the modern world’; two years later British soldiers on the Western Front invented another term which described that same emergency.² Yet while ‘zaum’was a metaphor, audible in the artist’s salon and a public performance hall in Moscow or St Petersburg, ‘shell shock’was a bodily collapse of reason and language to be heard first in the trenches of the Western Front, and later, by private appointment only, in the consultant’s clinic or in the veteran’s suburban home. It was in these shut-off spaces that the stutterers, gaggers and forgetters of the First World War failed to articulate their trauma, and demonstrated more eloquently than any artistic statement the modern era’s failure of words.