Beyond trauma: provisional networks and eccentric forms in fiction of the blitz

ABSTRACTIn many novels set in London during and after the Blitz, such as The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, Caught by Henry Green, Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark, and Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald, traumatic experiences are often subordinated to concerns that have received comparatively little critical attention. This article argues that a strain of Blitz fiction is primarily engaged in the mapping of ad hoc social networks that emerged during the Blitz. Mass evacuation, destroyed homes, and shifting wartime posts resulted in provisional domestic arrangements, micropolitical tensions, and networks of care that abruptly emerged and disappeared. The fictional representation of these unusual social structures demanded unconventional narrative techniques. A strain of Blitz fiction adopted the formal structures of network narratives in order to render distributed, dynamic, and dislocated social topographies. This article moves beyond the well-established association of wartime literature with representations of trauma in order to bring into focus a strain of network narratives that reflect a cultural logic of contingency under the Blitz.KEYWORDS: TraumanetworksmasculinityLondon BlitzWorld War II Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The psychological effects of the Blitz are foregrounded in works such as William Sansom, ‘The Wall’ and Blitz: Westminster at War (London: Faber and Faber, 1947); Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (London: Heinemann, 1943), Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948); and James Hanley, No Directions (London: Faber and Faber, 1943). For scholarly discussions of wartime anxiety and trauma, see Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Paul Crosthwaite, Trauma, Postmodernism and the Aftermath of World War II (London: Palgrave, 2009); Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1995).2 The Mass Observation Archive, housed at the University of Sussex, is accessible at https://www.amdigital.co.uk/primary-sources/mass-observation-online. Blitz-era samples from the archive are available in Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz (New York: Schocken Books, 1976).3 Franco Moretti, ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’, New Left Review, 69 (2011), pp. 80–102; Sianne Ngai, ‘Network Aesthetics: Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation and Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social’, in Cyndy Weinstein and Christopher Looby (eds), American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); David Ciccorico, Reding Network Fiction (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).4 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005).5 Scott Selisker, ‘The Bechdel Test and the Social Form of Character Networks’, New Literary History, 46.3 (2015), pp. 505–23, p. 510.6 Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 3.7 For a discussion of the opportunities for social movement as well as the persistent restrictions on such movement within the social space of London under the Blitz, see Kristine A. Miller, British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (London: Palgrave, 2009). For more on literary representations of social space under the Blitz, see Mark Rowlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Beryl Pong, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration (Oxford University Press, 2020).8 Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices (London: Fourth Estate Press, 2014), pp. 143–4.9 Kelly M. Rich, ‘“Nowhere’s Safe”: Ruinous Reconstruction in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means’, ELH, 83.4 (2016), p. 1194.10 For a foundational discussion of women’s wartime experiences, see Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).11 Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (New York: New Directions, 1998), p. 17.12 See also Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011).13 Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), p. 7.14 Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (Europa Editions, 2006), pp. 30–31.15 John Mepham, ‘Varieties of Modernism, Varieties of Incomprehension: Patrick Hamilton and Elizabeth Bowen’, in Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge (eds), British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (New York: Palgrave, 2007), p. 63.16 On the mythologizing of wartime community, see Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991) and Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London: Routledge, 2000).17 Eluned Summers-Bremner, ‘“Drinking and Drinking and Screaming”, Wartime Sociality in Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude’, in Petra Rau (ed.), Long Shadows: The Second World War in British Fiction and Film (Northwestern University Press, 2016), p. 94.18 Thierry Labica argues that the affective and linguistic reactions to the Blitz are often displaced into less dramatic, domestic spaces in the novel, but Labica reads these responses primarily as verbal symptoms of trauma. See Labica, ‘War, Conversation and Context in Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude’, Connotations, 12.1 (2002–2003), pp. 72–83.19 Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz, p. 314.20 Miller, British Literature of the Blitz, pp. 33–4.21 Henry Green, Caught (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), p. 48.22 In an alternative approach which underscores the traumatic elements of abduction, sexuality, and bombings in the novel, Stonebridge (2007) observes, ‘Caught begins with an abduction scene and ends with a description of the Blitz: the two blocks of narration are typographically and stylistically equivalent; both cut up Roe’s free-indirect discourse … ’ (72).23 For more on representations of masculinity and heroism during the second world war, see Lucy Hall and Gill Plain, ‘Unspeakable Heroism: The Second World War and the End of the Hero’, in Barbara Korte and Stephanie Lethbridge (eds), Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction Since 1800: Case Studies (London: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 117–34.24 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 115.