Heartbreak and Heroism: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom andLawrence’s Legacy in Arabia

Abstract

While evaluating the deep impact of the First World War on the imagination of the modernist literature produced in the 1920s, critic Samuel Hynes was drawn to the abiding tension between the yearning for a Romantic semiotic structure for the conduct of the war and the grim realities of modern warfare and imperialism in Thomas Edward Lawrence’s seminal Great War memoir The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, originally published in 1922. For Hynes, Lawrence’s writing embodied one of the key conflicts within the experience of the Great War that would go on to play a seminal role in the shaping of the modernist imagination; the desire for a counter to the deracination produced by the organization of industrial society in the modern West and the imperatives of realpolitik. This article will analyze this most influential specimen of war literature from 1922 as a point of departure to both re-evaluate the continuing fraught legacies of the Great War in the Middle-East, whilst also attempting to deconstruct the tension within Lawrence’s narrative of finding a means of return to a more authentic, affective and communal culture he felt he encountered in Arabia against the larger imperialist project of the British Empire. In this conflict of the legacies of modern civilization in the backdrop of a thoroughly horrific yet unfailingly modern world war, this article will aim to re-evaluate and relocate the legacies of the Great War in literary imagination while also locating Lawrence’s memoir as a key entry point into conflicts shaping the modernist imagination, and of its continuing effects on geopolitics a century later.