Memory, War and Trauma in Late Modernism

This paper deals with Henry Green’s Caught (1943), with occasional references to Green’s previous novel, Party Going (1939), examining how the war setting influences the nature of remembering and how remembering is traumatised by these circumstances. The paper ultimately argues that in the 1930s and 40s a definite shift may be detected from the High Modernist, epiphanic, revelatory, transcendental kind of remembering, initiated by the Proustian “mémoire involontaire” towards traumatic modes that enact the invasion of the present by the past, rather than their happy co-existence in a moment of epiphany. The essay introduces elements of trauma in Green’s novels in general and then moves on to identify the three main facets of traumatic narratives: their ontological, epistemological and narrative paradoxes. Most of the characters in Caught can be regarded as strange survivors of traumatic occurrences, who have to bear the consequences of this ontological dilemma and fight against the principles of fluidity and the danger of invasion that seem to threaten the boundaries of the past, the present and the future. The essay also presents the three main strategies of coping or failing to cope with trauma, exemplified by the three main characters, Roe, Pye and Christopher.