Pack Up Your Troubles: PG Wodehouse and the Great War

The Great War touched more lives than those of the thirty-seven million that it claimed. It was a war felt 'round the world, and not a soul was left unaffected. Beyond its socio-political and economic repercussions, The War left the creative world reeling. This unexpected shock to an otherwise tranquil centennial passage provided impetus for the Dadaist movement in art and the post-modernist movement in literature. Geometric shapes and disjointed prose symbolized tragedies more vivid than realist or impressionist art could ever depict.

And then there was PG Wodehouse[1], comic author and paragon of the Victorio-Edwardian eras who wrote well into the 1970s. His postwar work bore little resemblance to that of contemporaries such as TS Eliot and Frederico Garcia Lorca, and yet his writing underwent a significant change. Between 1910 and 1924, his work evinced an historical regression and geographic repatriation. While the postmodern authors dealt with the Great War directly, Wodehouse hardly ever mentions it in his writing, drawing instead from his Victorian upbringing of "earls and butlers and younger sons" to create an "ahistorical world of an arcadia" (McCrum 93, Mooneyham 13). This generic shift towards an idyllic world is significant in that it is diametrically opposed to that of his contemporaries, who in the same period moved towards irony, sarcasm, and symbolism. PG Wodehouse used this "[leaping] out of history" as a shelter from a modernity that jarred on him- a world that had quite suddenly become, as this argument's exemplary character Bertram Wooster would put it, "a bit thick" (The Inimitable Jeeves, 159).