May Sinclair’s Carnivalesque Non-Narrative of War
Résumé
Sinclair’s most immediate text on her experience of the war, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, is a riddle: on the one hand, it tells of Sinclair’s failure in the war, and openly asks the question of the text’s failure as a document of the First World War. On the other, the text does exist, and it is a fascinating account of the chaos of invaded Belgium in the autumn of 1914. My main challenge in approaching this text has been to delineate whether and to what extent Sinclair’s account could indeed be considered as a testimony of the war, and to reappraise its importance within Sinclair’s career, as it has been seldom studied. In my view, these challenges are due to the profoundly dialogic nature of Sinclair's Journal of Impressions.
I take a look at some of the textual detail of the Journal in order to explore how Sinclair's writing allowed her to confront and navigate her awkward position in invaded Belgium. This close reading reveals a profoundly complex and uncomfortably ambivalent text, utterly unconvincing as a war diary, overtly failing and even sabotaging itself as a reportage of war. Yet irony, humour and the carnivalesque mode surface as an improbable overtone that in turn subverts the journal’s negativity and interrogates conventions of war writing.
