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.