Psychological Blackout

Abstract

Chapter 2 examines the fear of ‘civilians with shell shock’ that pervaded the interwar and early wartime years, through the imagery and metaphor of the blackout. It considers the divided subjectivities and temporalities featured in three novels: Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941), Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943), and Henry Green’s Caught (1943). Through memory loss or amnesia, these novels create recursive, discontinuous, or abortive narrative temporalities where the past, contrary to how it is portrayed in propaganda, creates problematic legacies for the wartime present. With a particular self-reflexivity about the role of literature and narrative, these novels address and critique how the ideology of the People’s War came to be told and represented.