Coda

The coda briefly recapitulates the central concerns of this book by discussing Second World Wartime in relation to the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from Ernst Bloch’s conception of time as a river, and Walter Benjamin’s theory of historical materialism, it discusses why post-war literature and culture looked back to the wartime period through the trope of unexploded bombs, which functioned as mnemonic time capsules. It ends by considering Second World Wartime’s broader relationship to the later chronophobia of the Cold War, when advancements in nuclear technology created a newly fraught relationship between anticipation and retrospection.

The Literary Cartography of Ruins

After air raids destroyed much of London’s landscape, there were attempts at not only material but imaginative reconstruction. Books of photographs comparing London’s landmarks before and after ruination were made; maps of ‘ruin-walks’ were created for tourists to follow; and new editions of past histories of London were reissued without incorporating present-day damage, as if to elide and erase the wartime years. The intersection between memory and ruins is of primordial concern in a post-war Bildungsroman by Rose Macaulay, whose young protagonist remains unable to assimilate into her post-war landscape. Through the chronotope of ruin, Chapter 9 explores how Macaulay combines London’s landscape with that of her character’s traumatized childhood in Vichy France. In doing so, she explores the limits of the Bildungsroman, in its emphasis on individual-social formation, as a genre for the post-war world.

The Ecology of English Time

At a time when the English landscape was mobilized—both materially and in the cultural imagination—for fighting the Second World War, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot fashioned their most ‘English’ works, Between the Acts (1941) and Four Quartets (1935–42) respectively. Building on extant scholarship surrounding the writers’ temporal and environmental concerns, Chapter 6 provides an alternative account of the writers’ supposed national insularity as one inflected by pacifist and internationalist motivations. Tracing the study of ecology as it was historically intertwined with cosmopolitical inquiry in the twentieth century, the chapter reveals ways in which the writers’ late modernist works uphold Anglocentric exceptionalism but, also, provide diversified understandings of time and place to convey international belonging.

La France à l’heure anglaise

During the Second World War, Germany often imposed its own time zone onto those countries it occupied. Chapter 5 looks at the case of France, and examines responses to a perceived temporal misalignment with Britain which occurred with its capitulation to Germany in June 1940. Surveying a series of wartime propaganda films, including those by the GPO Film Unit, the chapter demonstrates how war time was expressed through pastoral tropes, and through notions of Allied temporal guardianship. It turns to the activist writer Storm Jameson, whose novel Cloudless May (1943) conveys a kind of ‘international regionalism’ to cultivate British support for France. Through affective, embodied landscapes, she reinforces what she sees as modernism’s strengths, and revises what she sees as its weaknesses, for a geopolitical agenda.

Introduction

The introduction examines how writers anticipated the Second World War in the interwar period, and why dread became a pervasive experience in the 1930s and 1940s. Beginning with the problem of how to define the spatio-temporal boundaries of modern wartime, it argues that, with war looming, modernist time philosophy gradually shifted focus from the past to the future. The chapter then presents a model for understanding Second World Wartime through the concept of late modernist chronophobia. As a war understood to be a repetition of the First World War, but whose effects were expected to be more catastrophic and total, it is characterized by a fear of time itself. During the Blitz, this is enacted on a local level on the home front, through the temporalities of aerial bombardment. The chapter discusses why, as a bridge between the memory of the First World War and the incipient temporalities of the Cold War, the Second World War is crucial to understanding how modern wartime developed in the twentieth century.

The Archaeology of Ruin-Time

Chapter 7 addresses the peculiar archaeology of the blitzed landscape, when air raids made new ruins out of modern-day infrastructure, even while revealing older ones from London’s Roman past. Theorists have often conceived of the temporality of ruins as a dialectic between pastness and futurity, ending and return, and these tensions pose representational challenges in the wartime present, when ruins from different eras populated the visual landscape. This chapter argues that wartime works responded to this environment by engaging in their own acts of imaginative archaeology, excavating past ruins to find continuity with those of the dislocated present. It reads a wide array of visual and literary texts: from the romantic paintings of the Recording Britain scheme to portraits of bomb damage made by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, and from the paratactic poetry of H.D. to the hallucinatory short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen.

The Neutral Hour

Taking as its context and metaphor the dislocated time zones of the Second World War—where neutral Ireland progressed on a different time zone from Britain—Chapter 4 addresses why neutrality was such a fraught political decision. Independence, for Ireland, was often couched in the rhetoric of youthful potential, but this theme came to suggest political irresponsibility in being ‘off war time’ instead. Examining Henry Green’s ‘fairy tale’ about neutral Ireland, Loving (1945), and Elizabeth Bowen’s non-fiction writings and short fiction, as well as her novel The Heat of the Day (1949), the chapter delves into the contradictory circumstances of neutral Ireland during the Emergency. Two competing understandings of the politics of time—as the temporality of colonial independence, on the one hand, and as the temporality of global war, on the other—created a situation that these writers found difficult to reconcile.

Stopped Clocks

Chapter 3 begins by examining a prominent trope in photographs of the home front: the stopped clock. Unpacking the manifold, often competing, meanings of this image—by turns denoting suspension and dislocation, but also temporal resilience and transcendence—it underscores how the photographic medium corroborates or problematizes the temporalities portrayed within its frames. The chapter then turns to the short stories of Elizabeth Bowen and William Sansom, both of whom variously conceived of their own writing as ‘photographic’. Rendering a temporality somewhere between what Frank Kermode, in narratological terms, called ‘tick-tock’ and ‘tock-tick’, Bowen’s and Sansom’s fragmented short stories blended fiction with non-fiction, and were ultimately anthologized as ‘records’ of the war.

Wartime Presentness

Chapter 1 offers a theoretical account of how aerial violence solicits a temporality of dread, as a present upended by the fear of past trauma and the expectation of future trauma. It argues that Second World War writing is defined by a desire to manage anxieties about death, and, drawing from theories of autobiography, it examines why there was an outpouring of autobiographical narratives at this historical juncture. Comparing Henry Green’s self-portrait Pack My Bag (1940) to Arthur Gwynn-Browne’s Dunkirk memoir F. S. P. (1942), the chapter identifies a ‘wartime style’ that renders, while trying to assuage, the experience of dread experienced on both home front and war front. This focus on life-writing and dread is theorized through Sigmund Freud’s diagnosis of anxiety’s simultaneously injurious and inoculating effects.

Children of the Ruins

This chapter explores anxieties surrounding war-torn childhood, both in terms of juvenile delinquency and as a metaphor for uncertain post-war reconstruction. Films were especially evocative in this respect: they captured not only the faces of war-traumatized children but the material ruins which often became their playgrounds and homes before these were cleared away. Alberto Cavalcanti’s and Humphrey Jennings’s films highlighted the tensions underpinning the use of youth as a national metaphor. But it is Ealing Studios’ first feature films, Hue and Cry (1947) and Passport to Pimlico (1949), despite being seen as nostalgic depictions of the People’s War, that best capture the ambivalent ways in which youth represented and problematized visions of the national future in ruins.