Communicating War through the Contemporary British Military Memoir: the Censorships of Genre, State, and Self

Abstract

This paper is about military memoirs—the published autobiographical reflections of those who have participated in armed conflict—as a mechanism for communication about war. In this paper, we consider the controls exerted by functions of genre, military organizational censorship and self-censorship as influences on the possibilities for the military memoir for communicating war. Drawing on memoirs published about experiences with the British Armed Forces from 1980 to the present and interviews with a sample of authors of memoirs, the paper considers the factors which shape and constrain the accounts these memoirs contain. We look first at the conventions of the genre, considering how authors may or may not accept or reject its established modes and forms, and consider censorship as a capacity of the conventions of the genre. Second, we consider the role of formal institutional censorship undertaken by the Ministry of Defence and by other military institutions in shaping what can and cannot be said within the memoir. Third, we consider the role of authorial self-censorship, and highlight this as a powerful force in shaping the final published narrative. We conclude with observations about the limits of the genre for speaking with veracity about war, and the potential offered by the turn to fiction by memoirists as a means of enabling a less constrained form of communication about their military experiences.