Introduction

1Besides their significance as literary documents of the First World War and notwithstanding their considerable stylistic diversity, a notable aspect of testimonies written by authors who had first-hand experience of the front is that they collectively refute the conventional academic narrative that the First World War was a catalyst for a systematic division between 19th–century and so-called ‘modernist’ writing styles, particularly in terms of representation. Writers who had a direct frontline experience certainly often felt compelled to renew the techniques they were developing before 1914, but this renewal did not lead to a repudiation of realism: when we divest ourselves of the consensual narrative of modernist aesthetics as forsaking mimesis and realism, we realise indeed that many authors who produced what has been commonly regarded as ‘modernist’ writing never relinquished the mimetic impulse. Additionally, in contrast to the traditional academic discourse which claims that within the context of modernist movements, the First World War played a major role in the breakdown of realism, I contend that the reverse was often true, and that the war experience fostered a reinvention of the relationship between literature and reality. In this article, I explore this aspect using Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone as a case study. The example of Borden’s war writing can contribute to demonstrating that authors who rendered their war experience through the format of literary prose were not concerned with a divide between ‘realist’ and ‘modernist’ practices. The techniques associated with modernism have tended to be identified as anti-mimetic and, as a result, have been regarded as incompatible with the impulse to bear witness that authors felt as they grappled with the realities of war as soldiers, officers, journalists, or nurses, and with the challenge of rendering these experiences in writing. Yet many of these authors clearly acknowledge the influence of earlier techniques on their own writing, even as they engage in a process of critical interrogation and renewal of their own writing technique. This generates what I propose to call an updated—yet persistent—mimesis that is inseparable from the combined challenge and compulsion to capture and convey the unprecedented experience of war.

2Going further, this article also proposes an analysis of Borden’s writing through the lens of recent revaluations of the relationship between human and nonhuman, using perspectives that have been recently developed to account for the practice of material realism in the contemporary novel. This approach proves strikingly illuminating in the case of The Forbidden Zone; it lends weight to the argument that focusing on continuities rather than on ruptures in early 20th-century to early 21st–century aesthetic practices of representation can prove extremely fruitful. On a broader timescale, paired with the aforementioned reassessment of the persistence of mimesis in texts aspiring to contribute to avant-garde literary aesthetics, this discussion may encourage a re-evaluation of the transition from 19th-century to contemporary literature from the perspective of representation.

3In this discussion, I distinguish between realism as a historically situated mode of representation dominant in 19th–century fiction, and mimesis as a broader concept that spans literary periods, including experimental writing of the 20th century. It makes no doubt that realism as a historical mode has been typically associated with 19th-century fiction, in which mimesis, typically translated as ‘imitation of reality’, is considered to lie at the heart of the representational process. The present article adopts a more dynamic understanding of mimesis rooted in its Aristotelian origin as the active configuration of experience into narrative form (muthos). Laying greater emphasis on the dynamism of the process helps to bridge the seeming divide between realist and ‘modernist’ aesthetics. I will thus defend that Borden’s testimonial writing contained in The Forbidden Zone, albeit formally experimental, still maintains a mimetic impulse that is grounded in experiential truthfulness.

5Despite the fact that first-hand accounts of the war by women were largely disregarded for the majority of the 20th century, with a greater emphasis placed on the testimonies of male combatants, there has been a growing acknowledgement both in historical and literary scholarship of the significant contribution made by nurses to the war effort, as well as of the wide range of texts they produced as a result of this contribution. The majority of research on women’s experience of the First World War has centred on gender-related issues, often from the perspective of cultural studies, or have examined women’s writing from a psychological standpoint, addressing questions of trauma and resilience. However, further consideration is needed regarding the form in which female witnesses of the war wrote about their experience.

7The notion of ‘reality’ also necessitates preliminary consideration, if only to concede that its elusive and polymorphic nature defeats any attempt at a stable and satisfactory definition. In the same way that memory is inevitably subjective and incomplete, likewise, ‘reality’ is unique to each individual. The perspective adopted on reality in this study is phenomenological, in the manner favoured in the early 20th century, and is concerned with what appears to every consciousness as real. The lens of phenomenology can be considered as a useful perspective when we wish to grasp what is at stake in the evolution of representation in prose testimonies of the war, because the point for the witnesses of the war was not so much to render ‘reality’ as their experience of it. Moreover, it can be argued that this emphasis on phenomenology a century ago, that is, on the interrelations between a consciousness and its environment, may well be a precursor of the current interest in the ‘entanglement’ of human and nonhuman entities (to borrow from Stacy Alaimo), of the ‘transcorporeality’ of experience (following Karen Barad’s thought), and, more importantly for the topic at hand, of the ‘embodied’ and ‘embedded’ experience of history, to use Rosi Braidotti’s concepts (2019).

8In reflecting about realism in relation to Borden’s war writing, I first wish to revivify the concept of mimesis, using this notion in its dynamic Aristotelian sense, which is different from the Platonic conception of copying. A reconsideration of the mimetic impulse that is fundamental to realism can yield useful insights into delineating what is at stake in representation. Therefore, this article will first tease out the relationship between muthos and mimesis before turning to Michael Rothberg’s concept of traumatic realism as a possible mode of reconciliation of the Aristotelian muthos and mimesis pair in the context of representing a world in crisis. I will then explore Borden’s synesthetic phenomenological representation of war to demonstrate that explorations of vital materialism and transcorporeality were already well at work in literary representations of the First World War. Finally, I will argue that Borden’s unconventional representation of the war nurse also anticipates posthuman considerations.

The Tension Between Myth and Mimesis

10The emphasis on a dynamic relation between mimesis and muthos thus proves particularly useful when it comes to analysing the representational challenges posed by war writing. As has just been developed, in Ricœur’s reading of Aristotle, muthos is what implements the shaping of disorder into narrative; but trauma tests the limits of that process. This tension is especially acute in literary accounts of the First World War, which vibrate between the compulsion to bear witness and the impossibility of making the authors’ experience intelligible. Rather than wholly letting go of realism, however, I argue that some of these texts generate an updated mimetic mode in which fracture, lacks, and silence are acknowledged as being intrinsically part of the representational process. I suggest that Borden’s writing matches this description, as her fragments stage a conflict between muthos as structuring logic and the collapse of coherence under the weight of critical and/or traumatic experience. This unresolved tension is manifest in ‘The Square’, which conveys an antithetical presentation—presented as a ‘struggle’—between the movements of ‘the machines of war’ and the activities of everyday civilian life, i.e. ‘the people of the town’:

Below my window in the big bright square a struggle is going on between the machines of war and the people of the town. There are the motor cars of the army, the limousines, and the touring cars and the motor lorries and the ambulances; and there are the little bare-headed women of the town . . . .

The motors come in and go out of the four corners of the square, and they stand panting and snorting in the middle of it. The . . . touring cars . . . are full of uniforms, but on the faces of the young men who drive there is a look of exhaustion and excitement. The motors make a great noise and a great smell and a great dust. They come into the square, hooting and shrieking; they draw up in the square with grinding brakes. The men in them get out with a flourish of capes: . . . they salute one another stiffly like wooded toys . . . . (Borden 17)

11The square itself, with its geometry evocative of classical organisation and balance, might be initially considered as a metaphor for narrative coherence. Yet this potential logic is invalidated by the scene that unfolds within this space. Cars ‘come in and go out of the four corners of the square’, only to ‘stand panting and snorting in the middle of it’. If we prolong the metaphor of the square as a textual space, and of the movement occurring within it as the narrative process, this circularity suggests that narrative progression is disrupted. Although the scene is saturated with mimetic detail, with sound, smell, and texture pervading the description—something that is typical of Borden’s style throughout the collection—, it remains nonetheless devoid of causal development. This is confirmed by the fact that, while the vehicles are named discretely (‘motor cars’, ‘limousines’, ‘touring cars’, ‘motor lorries’), human figures are rendered more vaguely, in collective terms: ‘the little bare-headed women of the town’, ‘smart men in uniforms’, ‘the young men who drive there’, ‘the men’. This oscillation between the overdetermined visibility of the machines and the anonymisation of the people becomes invested with an ontological dimension: the motors are associated with verbs such as ‘panting’, ‘snorting’, ‘or shrieking’ that subvert the traditional opposition between inanimate and animate entities, in a manner redolent of futurism. Conversely, the human figures tend to be objectified, with ‘uniforms’ used as a metonym for the officers and their being later assimilated to ‘wooden toys’. On the one hand, a clear logic is at work in this fragment, through which humans are systematically divested of their status as animate beings endowed with agency, whereas machines are consistently granted the attributes of living beings. Yet on the other hand, this growing focus on the ‘machines’ as endowed with an animate quality does not lead to their gaining any agency: their movement and activity do not seem to be prompted by any will or purpose, as is evidenced by the paratactic syntax and their circular motion. A form of stasis, or suspended movement, is thus being performed. There is therefore a constant oscillation in the text between some form of logic—albeit one that is deeply disruptive of the expected order of things—and an ultimate resistance to causality.

12Thus, in this fragment, as in many others, mimesis endures whilst muthos is challenged. In this respect, Borden’s writing appears to enact a form of realism that remains committed to rendering her experience, while it also acknowledges and underscores the disruptions caused by trauma and crisis. This updated form of realism can appear to exemplify Michael Rothberg’s notion of ‘traumatic realism’.

Traumatic Realism

13Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘traumatic realism’ offers indeed a valuable theoretical framework to help us bridge the theoretical gap between 19th-century realism and the urge of representing reality that is simultaneously at its most potent and at its most fraught in wartime. Traumatic realism stems from an ethical ‘demand for documentation’ combined with ‘a demand for reflection on the formal limits of documentation’ (Rothberg 7). In his introduction to Traumatic Realism, Rothberg first opposes realist and ‘antirealist’ modes of representation of the Holocaust, with the initial, accepted idea that a realist approach would rest on ‘an epistemological claim that the Holocaust is knowable and a representational claim that this knowledge can be translated into a familiar mimetic universe’ (3–4), whereas the antirealist approach would rest on the ‘claim that the Holocaust is not knowable or would be knowable only under radically new regimes of knowledge and that it cannot be captured in traditional representational schemata’ (4). ‘Realism’ and ‘anti-realism’ are thus first contrasted along the lines of traditional vs. experimental epistemological and representational modes, which matches the conventional opposition in the history of European arts and literature. Rothberg however quickly questions this divide, as he intimates that ‘[P]erhaps the frequently intoned “impossibility” of comprehending the Holocaust arises in part from the preservation of traditional disciplinary boundaries and structures of knowledge’ (6) and invites us to challenge these structures. The point for Rothberg is to neither dismiss the emotional disruption caused by traumatic historical events, nor to veer towards a sublimation of the traumatic event that would transcend a realist account and lapse into the field of legend. The dynamics of ‘traumatic realism’ as defined by Rothberg consists in forgoing any form of ‘passive mimesis’: instead, traumatic realism ‘is an attempt to produce the traumatic event as an object of knowledge and to program and thus transform its readers so that they are forced to acknowledge their relationship to posttraumatic culture.’ Traumatic realism thus works as a fertile concept to bridge the gap between reality and composition and validates the relevance of Aristotle’s conception of mimesis as an active process.

14What is particularly fruitful in Rothberg’s definition of traumatic realism is the fact that traditional realism becomes associated with a more obvious self-reflexive quality in its relation to reality: this metatextual dimension has been considered as central to representational modes developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. When we read Borden’s The Forbidden Zone, we realise that this process was already at work in literary testimonies of the First World War, where reality acquired an unprecedented substance and reached the limits of bearable and conveyable experience. The dialectic relationship to reality that came to be considered as intrinsic to contemporary forms of realism can find its ferment in writing written from the thick, excruciating reality of the war.

15The Forbidden Zone has been celebrated by some scholars for its modernist style. Ariella Freedman deems it ‘one of the most powerful and one of the most experimental pieces of writing to have emerged from the war’ (Freedman 110). Yet others have conversely discussed that Borden’s attempt at modernist aesthetics fell short in her collection of fragments, precisely because she refused to let go of a mimetic approach. Ann-Marie Einhaus thus considers that Borden’s writing in The Forbidden Zone expresses ‘an attempt and a failure to employ new, innovative techniques to the desired effect of communicating personal impressions’ (Einhaus 302). To her, Borden’s failure resides in her attempts to combine mimetic and modernist approaches. I contend that Borden’s simultaneous engagement with experimental forms and with reality is what renders her representation of her war experience so potent and successful, because this dual engagement allows her to make her experience as tangible as possible to the reader. The very negativity of Borden’s fragments, for instance, works as a paradoxical trigger for representation. The very first of Borden’s fragments, ‘Belgium’, reads like an inverted Baedeker guide and sets the tone for the whole collection:

On our right? That’s the road to Ypres. The less said about that road the better: no one goes down it for choice—it’s British now. Ahead of us, then? No, you can’t get out that way. No, there’s no frontier, just a bleeding edge, trenches. That’s where the enemy took his last bite, fastened his iron teeth, and stuffed to bursting, stopped devouring Belgium, left this strip, these useless fields, these crumpled dwellings. (Borden 7)

16The description of the frontline as ‘a bleeding edge’ portrays the persona, and consequently the reader, as standing on the brink—not of nothingness, but of the unwatchable, the uninhabitable, the unsayable: that which Borden can only write around. This matches Michael Rothberg’s initial description of traumatic realism: ‘the very absence of the events signals their overwhelming impact’ (Rothberg 1). Borden’s geography of lack is most obviously conveyed by the accumulation of forms of negation; yet these negations lead to a more loquacious few lines, where nouns are systematically paired with adjectives, thus implying a greater precision: ‘bleeding edge’, ‘last bite’, ‘iron teeth’, ‘useless fields’, ‘crumpled dwelling’. In a process that may recall Blanchot’s poetics of negativity, it seems that naming absence frees up speech. The combined devices of asyndeton and accumulation generate a sentence that keeps growing, feeding on itself, in a manner akin to that of the enemy feeding off Belgium. The obstacles to representation lead to updated means of expression that nevertheless still serve the same mimetic purpose.

17I now propose to examine just how Borden in The Forbidden Zone manages to engage with the materiality of the experience of the war and to convey the thickest reality of that experience through experimental writing.

Transcribing an Embodied Experience

18Besides the creative tension between representation and its negation, between traumatic block and the testimonial impulse that is inherent in traumatic realism, one of the most striking aspects of Borden’s fragments is the manner in which they render the nurse’s deep embeddedness in the materiality of war, which in turn generates a focus on her experience as embodied. This focus is not merely thematic: it also has a formal corollary. The intense materiality conveyed in Borden’s writing, through a constant emphasis on tactile, olfactory, auditory, and visual impressions, invites us indeed to consider anew the relationship between the embodied experience of war and its literary representation. From a phenomenological perspective, the real is encountered not as a coherent and directly approachable totality, but as a flux of sensations that resists any form of organised and straightforward representation. In this sense, materiality exerts pressure on the conventions of the type of realist writing inherited from the 19th century, which presuppose continuity, causality, and a certain distance between subject and world that allows literary writing to act as a medium in the literal sense, a mediation between both entities. In contrast, Borden’s fragments aim to convey an embedded perception of wartime: what it feels like to inhabit a space of war and to care for the wounded. The saturation of sensory elements contributes to undermining narrative stability: in the process, a form of realism emerges that does not ambition to directly reconstruct a world through words, but that seeks to convey—if only partially and through indirection—the disorientation of experience. Thus, the mimetic process is not being renounced, but it has been updated.

19It is necessary at this point to interrogate more directly the relation between realism and mimesis. As the phenomenological dimension of Borden’s fragments grows more apparent, it becomes clear that her representational strategy veers away from external, stable and objective realities: it turns instead towards the rendering of a consciousness embedded in and shaped by the sensory world. This might recall to a degree techniques that Auerbach has identified in Virginia Woolf’s fiction in his study Mimesis (1946); but in Borden’s text, these techniques, grounded as they are in the precarious position of a subject who both experiences and testifies, signal a distinct reworking of realist representation.

20The ‘I’ in Borden’s pieces exists mainly as a watcher, as a gaze framing the scene. Yet although the persona is often passive and contemplative, her five senses, as the point of contact between the war and the reader, become endowed with a powerful agency: the persona becomes the very site of sensory mediation between what she witnesses and the reader. Beyond conveying her experience, Borden also aims at having the readers themselves sense the thick materiality of war: the sticky, oozy, lethal mud that pervades the environment, as in ‘Belgium’ or ‘The City in the Desert’; the medical utensils that fills war hospitals, as in ‘Paraphernalia’; and most brutally, the ubiquitous limbs and mangled bodies that interrogate the divide between human and nonhuman. The paradigm of the wounded body first appears metaphorically in Borden’s collection, through the ravaged landscape: the ‘bleeding edge’ of the country in ‘Belgium’, ‘where the enemy took its last bite’ (1–2); or the town in ‘Bombardment’, who turns from a body ‘asleep, . . . pillowed on the secure shore’ (6), to ‘wounded earth’ (7), and finally shows a ‘convulsed face’, ‘attacked by an invisible and gigantic beast’ (9). The collective bodies of the country or town herald the ravaged bodies of soldiers that become prominent in the following fragments, particularly in Part Two. This form of anthropomorphism achieves what Jane Bennett has defined as ‘isomorphism,’ in which shared regimes of existence between ‘variously composed materialities’ are highlighted:

A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations. In revealing similarities across categorical divides and lighting structural parallels between material forms in ‘nature’ and those in ‘culture’, anthropomorphism can reveal isomorphisms. (Bennett 2010, 99)

21Besides the connections between humanity and its natural environment that are foregrounded in many fragments, other pieces focus on objects: ‘Paraphernalia’ thus develops as an inventory of the implements of war nursing whose materiality aims, but fails, to resist death, which is described as dwelling in the void:

Here are blankets and pillows and tin boxes and needles and bottles and pots and basins and long rubber tubes and many little white squares of gauze. Here are bottles of all sizes filled with coloured liquids and basins of curious shapes and round shining boxes and square boxes marked with blue labels, and here you are busy among your things. . . .
Death is inexorable and the place of Death is void. . . . Why do you crowd all these things up to edge of the great emptiness? (Borden 83)

22Materiality thus appears as a would-be refuge against death. Borden’s synesthetic phenomenology also works as a forceful expression of Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action, as she makes the reader inhale ‘the foul odour of . . . festering flesh’ (Borden 44–45) and listen to ‘the little whimpering voice of a man who is going to die in an hour or two’ (39). The nurse’s embodied experience is one where the abject and dying, as they are seen, heard, touched, and inhaled, become an intrinsic part of herself.

23Borden’s evocative phenomenology of war also challenges the disavowal of women as witnesses of war that was then widespread. Although Borden declares in her preface that she can only describe a ‘dimmed reality’, she asserts that it would be nonetheless ‘recognise[d]’ by the poilus: emphasising a shared space of knowledge with the soldiers is a means for Borden to ‘claim . . . the legitimacy of what she has seen, and at the same time an equality and kinship with the combatant gaze’ (Acton 57). Opting to remain encamped in a realist mode of representation, notwithstanding the struggles inherent in this practice, also operates as a mode of empowerment and legitimation of the female embodied presence in a space that has for a long time been claimed as solely belonging to men.

Posthumanist Explorations

24Furthermore, in Borden’s fragments, the inert, the dead and the living coalesce in a manner that anticipates Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality, where human and nonhuman emerge as inextricably enmeshed:

At midnight we always have cocoa in there next to the operating room, because there is a big table and boiling water. We push back the drums of clean dressings and the litter of soiled bandages, and drink our cocoa standing round the table. Sometimes there isn’t much room. Sometimes legs and arms wrapped in cloths have to be pushed out of the way. We throw them on the floor—they belong to no one and are of no interest to anyone—and drink our cocoa. The cocoa tastes very good. (Borden 41)

25This entanglement is one of the strategies through which Borden’s resistance to the conventional representations of women in the context of war and contributes to her deconstruction of the consensual, ethereal figure of the nurse—who does experience the war in a fully embodied manner, through sight, hearing, smell, touch, and even taste, as the last sentence makes clear. Due to this sensory excess, this surplus of reality, the nurse attempts to shield herself from the suffering of her patients, because detachment from her own affect is the only way to make herself available to others:

She is no longer a woman. She is dead already, just as I am—really dead, past resurrection. Her heart is dead. She killed it. She couldn’t bear to feel it jumping in her side when Life, the sick animal, choked and rattled in her arms. Her ears are deaf; she deafened them. She could not bear to hear Life crying and mewing. She is blind so that she cannot see the torn parts of men she must handle. Blind, deaf, dead—she is strong, efficient, fit to consort with gods and demons—a machine inhabited by the ghost of a woman. (Borden 43)

26This passage is relevant to my argument on various counts. Firstly, this reverberation of death onto the life of nurses matches Cathy Caruth’s description of the dual temporality of trauma:

The crisis at the core of many traumatic narratives . . . often emerges as an urgent question: Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it? At the core of these stories . . . is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival. (Caruth 7)

27Secondly, since all senses are suppressed, the nurse becomes a machine, in a manner that, as noted earlier about ‘The Square’, cannot fail to evoke futurism. The convergence of the human and the mechanical that pervades The Forbidden Zone, in which the nurse is not merely compared to a machine, but becomes one, while machines throughout the collection are imbued with human-like vitality, culminates in this fragment. Here, the use of techniques associated with avant-garde aesthetics is precisely what allows Borden to resolve the aporia of representation. Formal experimentation is not at odds with the aims of realism, but in effect enables it, as it allows Borden to convey her experience to the reader.

28However, this convergence is not simply a comment on the modernisation and mechanisation of warfare. I argue that it anticipates a more fundamental collapse of ontological boundaries between subject and object that has become central to more recent fiction. In this fragment, as in others such as ‘Paraphernalia’ or ‘In the Operating Room’, the nurse is presented not only—and not even primarily—as an agent of care, but as a cog within a military and medical system: she is ‘efficient’; her actions are described with mechanical precision. Conversely, in fragments such as ‘Bombardment’, where the plane bombing the scene is ‘watching’ (Borden 12) and ‘laugh[ing]’ (13), as well as in ‘Moonlight’, in which lorries and ambulances are ‘large creatures . . . panting and snorting’ (Borden 46), machines are endowed with a form of vitality and agency. In my view, these figures reach beyond metaphor. In this light, I wish to discuss that the dissolution of the divide between human and nonhuman entities in Borden’s account can find a resonance in recent posthumanist literature.

29A compelling comparison may first be drawn with Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier (2016), which likewise challenges conventional focalisation by narrating the experience of war through the perspectives of inanimate objects. Parker’s strategy, in which the human subject is displaced as main focaliser while the text retains its testimonial quality, echoes Borden’s foregrounding of objects and matter as more potently evocative of the experience of war and violence than the nurse’s perspective can fully articulate.

30In addition, Borden’s insistence on the obsolescence of boundaries between humans and machines can find a resonance in recent posthumanist speculative fiction, such as Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). In these novels, perception, labour, and care are mediated through artificial forms of subjectivity, whereas human characters appear mostly unable to channel and articulate these modes of being. I contend that these texts may help us refine our analysis of Borden’s mimetic project in The Forbidden Zone, which is not relinquished, but reconfigured in response to evolving relations between technology, trauma, and care.

31The blurring of boundaries between machines and humans may be usefully approached through the lens of attention, as has been recently developed by Jean-Michel Ganteau in The Poetics and Ethics of Attention (2023). In an excerpt from ‘Moonlight’ quoted earlier, Borden explains that the nurse’s humanity is shutting down because an excess of attention to the wounded would jeopardise her efficiency: ‘Her ears are deaf; she deafened them. She could not bear to hear Life crying and mewing. She is blind so that she cannot see the torn parts of men she must handle. Blind, deaf, dead—she is strong, efficient’ (Borden 43). This resonates with Jean-Michel Ganteau’s reading of Machines Like Me, in which he underscores the opposition in the novel between human consciousness vs. that of the machine. The humanoid’s attention in Machines Like Me, Ganteau explains, is precise yet ‘lacks fluidity and falls short of . . . the “modulatory,” or “cyclical,” or “oscillatory” model of attention’ (Ganteau 107, quoting Depraz 122, 176, 179). Conversely, McEwan’s human characters are defined by embodied attentiveness:

The human mind and human life are presented in their complexity and contradictoriness, which is due to their embodied nature, i.e., their embedding and embodiment in an organic soma that is the seat of needs, sensations and emotions. (Ganteau 110)

32In a reversed dynamic, Borden explores in ‘Moonlight’ a posthuman mode of existence in which the nurse, adopting a ‘mechanical’ mode of attention, ultimately relinquishes her embeddedness and embodiment as a paradoxical means of survival: she ceases to feel in order to function. The paradox here is that the nurse forgoes any form of human attention precisely because the wounded soldiers need her to be efficient. Detachment from her own affect is the only way to make herself available to others.

33Borden’s futuristic nurse thus stands as the symmetrical opposite of the attentive and caring humanoid focaliser in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021); yet both figures ultimately define quality of attention as a crucial marker of humanity, which is singularly lacking in Borden’s nurse while it unexpectedly abounds in Ishiguro’s humanoid. Despite the century-long interval between these texts, both explore the fluidity of identities and the erasure of boundaries between organism and technology that Donna Haraway has foregrounded in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985).

34And yet, behind the nurse persona of ‘Moonlight’ is Borden, the nurse author, who appears to inhabit both conditions simultaneously. The fact that she points out the persona’s blocked perception even as she is describing the scene betrays a more complex mode of existence where the mechanical and the sentient, the numb and the sensitive, coexist in the focaliser. While some critics might deem this a failure of representational consistency, I argue that this paradoxical representation reveals the contradictory energies that inform her pieces, in which she strives to approach as closely as possible the core of her war experience whilst retaining—and conveying—the essence of her numb helplessness in reproducing the phenomenology of war.

35As a result, Borden may be considered a precursor of contemporary material-realist literature, as she consistently engages with the materiality of the experience of war and manages to convey the thickest reality of that experience through experimental writing. I hope this analysis contributes to challenging the idea of an inherent incompatibility between representational and reflexive modes of writing in early 20th-century aesthetics. More broadly, it may prompt a reconsideration of the divide between 19th-century and early 20th-century practices, as well as between ‘modernist’ and more recent modes of representation. Reading Borden alongside later works does not amount to an anachronistic gesture: rather, it allows us to trace an archaeology of posthumanism that reaches further back than is usually acknowledged. The Forbidden Zone initiates a remarkably early reflection on the dissolution of boundaries between the human and the nonhuman that lies at the core of the nurse’s embodied experience of modern war. In this respect, Borden’s work bears witness not only to the lived experience of war, but also to the crucial aesthetic challenge of representing such experience—one that calls for a redefinition of the mimetic process, which evolves yet does not entirely break from earlier forms of realism.