Telephone

Not referring to the incident Graves describes wherein he was shocked by lightning while on the phone, but rather to the unreliable qualities of transmitted information at which Graves repeatedly wonders. It is a foundational wonder of memoir and autobiography, as we saw in Lifton's book, but also pertains to journalism and seemingly objective military/bureaucratic correspondence. The seminal example of this for Graves was his being officially declared dead of his lung wound. The officials declared him dead, their word made his family think he was dead--so much authority behind the pronouncement and yet it was a lie. In defiance/acceptance, Graves invokes the challenging conventions of autobiography from the first sentences--he offers his two earliest memories--first of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee (if you recall the poem/video I played during my brief introduction last week, Graves was still fascinated with this image long into his life. In that poem he wrote "I pause with razor poised, scowling derision At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention, And once more ask him why He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption, To court the Queen in her high silk pavilion.") and of seeing his father's Shakespeare collection. Both the Queen and Shakespeare embody the authority-resting-on-pageantry that Graves confronts throughout the war. Other examples include the contested spelling of "Welch" or "Welsh,"the newspaper headlines from the invasion of Belgium that reported increasing editorial flourish with each cycle and with each intermediate source cited (Bell tower not rung as Antwerp falls! --> Heroic priests hanged and used as clappers for defiance of orders to ring bells). At school, Graves got his housemaster kicked out of his position by believing in a rumor that he had kissed a boy Graves was amorous toward, a rumor he learned later to be false. Graves tells the reader that Chapter XII was originally written as a novel and that he has to "retranslate it into history." Graves states that it was easier on him that his parents were two generations older than him. It created less conflict. The authority of the generation older than Graves was upset by the war, as were the expectations of Graves' generation. With such huge casualties, transmission of information failed on even the genetic level.