Poetic Address and the Universalisation of Conflict in Christopher Logue’s War Music

Abstract

This essay explores the various, and temporally distinct, reader-text relations which Christopher Logue’s War Music generates via its differing modes of direct address. These relations, it argues, enforce upon the reader a complicity in the generation of the text’s conflict and a greater awareness of the universality of conflict itself. In order to demonstrate the ways in which this enforcement occurs, direct address as a poetic structure is first defined, with recourse to the poetics of William Waters and Johnathan Culler. Thereby the importance of acknowledging the reader as intimately related to and implicated by the text is stressed, pace the traditional formulations of address by John Stuart Mill and his successors in mimetic theories of lyric. And, once this intimacy between reader and text is established, the differing ways that War Music engages this intimacy, stretches the reader’s attention across spatiotemporalities, and thus universalizes conflict, are fully elucidated.