ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the textual detail of A Journal of Impressions and explores how May 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, blatantly 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. Despite the deep unconventionality of her account, Sinclair captures the unofficial ‘high comedy of disaster’ (159) that the war could occasion at times, whilst rendering in an oblique manner devoid of pathos the sense of chaos, trauma and horror that it caused. This chapter demonstrates that despite the generally accepted view of Sinclair’s status on the avant-garde scene as marginal and fragile, her Journal of Impressions succeeds not as a war journal, but as a fascinating exercise in literary impressionism and modernist experimentation.
