Temporal and spatial dilemmas,chaotic struggles and collective disarray: Memory narratives in Henry Green’s Party Going

Introduction

Henry Green (1905–1972), originally named Henry Yorke, was a prominent figure among the ‘postwar literary generation’ (Ames, 1991: 175–176), which included notable authors like Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Anthony Powell. The Paris Review hailed Green as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’ (Southern and Green, 1993: 235), and Phelps regarded him as ‘unquestionably the finest English novelist of his generation’ (1953: 620). At the same time, such stylization is not purely inward-looking: the interplay between elliptical dialogue, interior monologue and narrative suspension reflects a broader cultural moment in which collective memory appears fractured and time itself becomes uncertain. Through literary language that is at once oblique and evocative, Green destabilizes any straightforward account of identity, suggesting instead that subjectivity is fluid, socially mediated and deeply enmeshed in the rituals and disjunctions of social clasp before the coming war.

Party Going, Green’s third novel following his modernist debut Blindness, has been said to mark the ‘high point of his literary career’ (McCrum, 2014). The novel, written over a decade (1931–1938) and published on the eve of World War II in 1939, serves as Green’s darkly comedic farewell to the 1930s and as a commentary on what Auden (1977) referred to as ‘a low, dishonest decade’ (1977: 245). Set in the early 1930s, the novel tells the story of a group of young people who, invited by the wealthy Max Adey, find themselves stranded at Victoria Station due to heavy fog while en route to a vacation in France. During this time, the privileged upper class enjoys the comfort of a hotel, engaging in party activities, while the poor are left to wait in the crowded station. Although Party Going is a concise novel, it proficiently captures a vast array of characters and sharp contrasts within a confined time and space, offering a complex depiction of social tensions and historical anxieties.

Critical reception of Party Going has generally followed two main strands: one focusing on the novel’s formal innovations and the other on its social themes, particularly class. On the one hand, Henry Green has long been praised for his experimental narrative style. Jeremy Treglown famously described Party Going as ‘a cubist book’ (Treglown, 2000: 113), noting its fragmented narrative perspective and abstracted temporality. The novel’s stylistic complexity – its delayed action, elliptical dialogue and recursive interior monologues – has drawn comparisons with high modernism and has been central to Green’s reputation as a ‘writer’s writer’. On the other hand, critics have also attended to Party Going’s ironic portrayal of British social hierarchies on the eve of World War II. Treglown emphasizes how the shifting relationships among the idle rich are placed in a comic but telling contrast with their long-suffering servants, many of whom are meticulously identified (Treglown, 1996: 6–7). He also characterizes the narrator as a ‘truant figure’ and underlines Green’s subtle sympathy with the characters’ psychological disarray (Treglown, 2000: 119). More recently, critics have read Party Going through the lens of class tension and moral disorientation in the interwar years. Hentea points out that the ‘Bright Young People’ who populate Green’s fiction provide novelists with access to the increasing fragmentation of British society ‘along class and generational lines’ (2014: 92). Shepley furthers this interpretation by arguing that the novel enacts ‘Green’s subtlest evocation of the multiplicity of class layers’ (2016: 105). These readings foreground the novel’s socio-political implications, particularly in terms of representing the decadence and anxiety of Britain’s upper classes during the empire’s decline. Despite these insights, relatively little attention has been paid to Party Going’s treatment of memory as a narrative strategy that links individual subjectivity with broader social and historical currents. While Victoria Stuart has analysed Green’s narrative techniques in Caught, noting how ‘present perception is often displaced by later remembrance or supplemented by it’ (Stewart, 2006: 89), such discussions remain limited to questions of temporal distortion or narrative technique. Stuart’s observation is equally applicable to Party Going, where the manipulation of memory – through narrative delay, deferral and retrospection – not only alters the temporal structure but also reveals how identity and perception are shaped by absence, repression and historical unease.

What remains underexplored, however, is the way Green’s memory-writing serves as a medium through which to engage with the historical crisis of British modernity – namely, the disintegration of imperial certainty, the spectre of war and the instability of class identity. Party Going’s hesitant temporality, its repetitive interiority and its portrayal of stalled travel can all be read as forms of collective memory in crisis. This article thus argues that Green’s aesthetics of memory-writing – far from being purely formalist – constitutes a mode of historical witnessing, through which he subtly registers the social and political tensions of the late 1930s. By foregrounding how memory functions in the novel not only as a personal phenomenon but also as a reflection of broader cultural dislocation, this study seeks to bridge the gap between stylistic analysis and sociohistorical interpretation.

This study examines how Green’s distinctive narrative form – marked by temporal suspension, fragmented recollection and spatial stasis – renders visible the tensions between individual and collective memory in pre-World War II British society. Set against the backdrop of the looming war and the declining British Empire, the novel reflects a moment of historical inertia in which class hierarchies are both exposed and destabilized. The central research question guiding this study is: how does Green use memory as a narrative device to register a crisis in collective identity and class consciousness within a decaying imperial order? In particular, the novel portrays how characters from the upper-class attempt to retreat into personal memory and trivial physical routines as a way of escaping an unstable social reality. Yet this retreat is ultimately undermined by the unreliability of memory itself, which exposes the erosion of a shared sense of history and community. Through this lens, Party Going is not merely a stylized modernist experiment but also a subtle witness to the psychological and ideological fragmentation of its time. This article argues that the formal techniques of memory-writing in the novel – especially its recursive structure and temporal ambiguity – function as literary strategies through which Green registers the fading of collective imperial memory and the emergence of class uncertainty. Moreover, it contends that Green’s sympathetic portrayal of marginalized or working-class figures signals a quiet ideological shift: a movement away from the elite milieu towards a broader social consciousness.

The dilemma of temporal and spatial memory

The wealthy travellers, originally planning to vacation in France, are trapped in a luxury hotel due to the delayed train. During this period, suspicion, emotional conflict and anxiety about the future ensnare them in a chaotic and absurd situation. Travel is the oldest form of narrative motivation, and a failed journey is a mature variation of it, effectively symbolizing life’s setbacks (Southern and Green, 1993: 247). The train delay not only places the characters in a dilemma of temporal stasis and spatial confinement but also creates a vacuum for the development of interpersonal relationships and plot. This scenario amplifies the atmosphere of fear surrounding the crisis of war and death, constructing a temporal and spatial framework of collective memory. Therefore, the chaotic state presented in the novel is not merely superficial farce but a profound reflection on the social turmoil and individual fate of the time.

In Party Going, the concept of ‘subjective time’ plays a crucial role in the characters’ experiences, offering a profound link to the novel’s exploration of memory. As the delayed train derails their original plans, the characters are pushed into a state of prolonged uncertainty, trapped in an unusually extended and chaotic moment. Despite the story unfolding over a single day, Green’s meticulous depiction of every passing moment causes time to stretch, creating a sensation of temporal stagnation. This elongation traps the characters within the present, making it difficult for them to transcend or escape the present moment. Their actions become entangled in the slow progression of time, mirroring the way memory itself can feel like a weight, immobilizing individuals in the past. In this sense, subjective time reflects the breakdown of linear, historical time – a key aspect of how memory operates. Time is no longer experienced as a continuous, progressive flow but as a disjointed, cyclical force. The characters’ inability to escape or transcend the moment mirrors the erasure of a coherent collective memory, particularly for the wealthy class. Their fragmented, disrupted memories, like the distorted sense of time in the novel, are caught in a web of confusion, marked by an inability to form a stable or unified recollection of their past. Green’s rejection of linear time thus foreshadows the crisis of collective memory within the novel: the wealthy class, much like the characters trapped in subjective time, faces the gradual dissolution of their social and historical memory. This collapse of memory reflects a broader, impending loss of identity and continuity, where past and present, self and other, become increasingly difficult to separate and comprehend.

By dividing space into inside and outside the train station and hotel, the fog drives the construction of a tense and oppositional social structure, forming a collective memory space where the wealthy class fears the future. In the novel, the masses are excluded from the train station and outside the hotel, bringing oppression to the wealthy with their inferior lifestyle and sheer numbers, forcing them to find a secure comfort zone – a closed space that aligns with their class-based collective memory. Green first uses a series of lowly images to metaphorically contrast the poor masses with the rich: ‘on the pavements within two miles of this station, crawling worms on either side’ (Green, 1970: 15); people lingered like ‘water beetles’ at the edge of a pond (Green, 1970: 27); they were like ‘sheep with golden tenor voices’ (Green, 1970: 152); the waiting crowd ‘stand like cattle waiting to be butchered in that yard beneath’ (Green, 1970: 169). These descriptions construct a space of social tension and opposition, forming a collective memory space where the wealthy class fears the future. The balancing effect brought by the fog forces the rich to stay together with them, leading to anxiety among the wealthy about the present situation. Moreover, the ever-increasing number of people also induces fear among them. The novel begins with ‘one day’, ‘one pigeon’, ‘one person’ and ‘one station’, quickly shifting to the noise of the crowd, highlighting the vastness and chaos of society. ‘Now they came out in ones and threes and now a flood was coming out and spreading into streets round’ (Green, 1970: 14). Mr. Roberts lives in his office, where he can see hundreds below, then ‘hundreds of thousands’ gathering at the station, until finally, they turn into ‘millions’. This depicts the rich’s fear of large crowds and their anxiety about the unknown.

Within the stagnant temporal memory framework, the wealthy attempt to escape reality through chaotic individual recollections and ineffective group rituals, though these efforts prove futile in the present. This also reflects the disconnection between collective memory from a stable era and individual memory within the current temporal impasse. Green emphasizes the limitations and relativity of class-specific personal memory by exposing the inconsistency between individuals’ memories of past experiences and the actual events that occurred. The dislocation and distortion experienced by the characters render their memories unreliable, incapable of accurately reflecting past realities, highlighting the confusion and disarray in their collective understanding and recollection of past events. His characters repeatedly attach erroneous meanings to the images and experiences they remember, revealing that these associations stem from an obsession with escaping reality, yet fail to disclose the essential meanings of those memories. Moreover, the characters’ inner worlds are shaped by this experience of subjective time. As they wait, their thoughts become scattered and restless, their minds shifting between memories, expectations and speculations. This non-linear flow of time, filled with interruptions and uncertainty, mirrors the fragmented nature of collective memory. The characters’ memories, no longer bound by a coherent narrative, become fragmented, reassembled and reinterpreted in response to the pressures of the present. This intertwining of the past and present, of memory and experience, reveals the chaotic, disorienting impact of subjective time on individual consciousness. When they attempt to reclaim childhood objects and past experiences in search of emotional support, they become lost in a bewildering ‘subjective impressionism’ (Brothers, 1977: 871). For instance, the timid and cautious wealthy woman, Julia, relies on childhood objects, ‘her charms’ (Green, 1970: 18) – ‘her egg with the elephants in it, her wooden pistol and her little painted top’ (Green, 1970: 18) – to comfort herself. The primary influence on each generation’s collective memory is the life experiences of their relatively young years, and ‘we remain attached to formulas, symbols, and conventions, as well as to rites that must be repeated and reproduced, if we wish to preserve the beliefs which gave them birth’ (Halbwachs, 1992: 207). Julia tries to find a passage back to the past through these objects to establish her sense of security and emotional support; however, the loss of these items causes her anxiety and distress, illustrating that the past cannot be reclaimed and that these memories offer no healing power. Moreover, Julia’s self-constructed memories and meanings prove futile: she incorrectly recalls that pigeons flew under the bridge on the way to the station. She then links the pigeons with her earlier meeting with Max, interpreting them as a good omen that they would be together forever on this journey. She also mistakenly remembers the wooden egg amulet saving her when she fell off a cliff, but in reality, she only fell three or four feet into a small puddle (Green, 1970: 110). Green writes, ‘Memory is a winding lane with high banks on which flowers grow and here she wandered in a nostalgic summer evening in deep soundlessness’ (Green, 1970: 198). Through Julia’s retrospection, significant nostalgic memory imagery is introduced in the novel, counteracting to some extent the recurring anxieties about death and the coming Second World War. However, James Hall observes that Green viewed the mind as a medium for generating symbols, and thus, his characters merge every object and every experience into their internal obsessions (Hall, 1963: 67). Julia’s disordered memories during moments of crisis limit her rational capacity, trapping her in an unreliable self. This aligns with Habermas’s observation that ‘The actual present can no longer gain its self-consciousness from opposition to an epoch rejected and surpassed, to a shape of the past’ (Habermas, 1998: 9). In Party Going, the disordered memories of the characters imbue the present with past expectations, revealing the confusion between past and present horizons of expectation in subjective perception. This complex relationship with memory is not centred on itself but is constructed from distorted expectations of the past and projections of unknown expectations. In evading the present and future, the collective memory of the past fails to provide a path to personal healing.

The anxiety caused by the unknown nature of time and the opposing spatial dynamics in Party Going leads the characters to distance themselves from collective memory, resulting in the failure of the party as a commemorative ritual. The party held at the hotel is, in fact, not enjoyable. The characters frequently quarrel out of dissatisfaction and often overreact in their conversations. Despite their efforts to force themselves into the party atmosphere by drinking tea or cocktails, this pretence of joy proves ineffective. This is because within a group that connects individuals of the same class, differences in wealth and conflicting interests cause people to oppose one another rather than unite them. The ‘Bright Young People’ from different social classes each harbour their own ulterior motives: Max, the unpunctual and philandering host, has no real concept of the party; newcomer Angela is critical of her boyfriend Robert as she struggles to fit into the circle; Annabel, deceived by her fiancé Max, goes to great lengths to disrupt the party; and Claire, pretending to patiently care for her aunt Miss Fellows, is actually frustrated at being held back from the party. The participants’ different social statuses and interpersonal conflicts ultimately lead to the party’s failure and chaos, reflecting what Durkheim termed ‘collective effervescence’ – the loss of a strong sense of social community (Durkheim, 1976: 218). In the wake of this decline, the group lacks a sense of camaraderie and fails to evoke any collective nostalgia: They were like ruins in the wet, places that is where life has been, palaces, abbeys, cathedrals, throne rooms, pantries, cast aside and tumbled down with no immediate life and with what used to be in them lost rather than hidden now the roofhas fallen in’ (Green, 1970: 201). Meanwhile, Green creates a contrasting memory community within the station. In this side portrayal, the failure of the workers’ collective singing underscores the death of the celebratory spirit within the wealthy community.

Again, being in it, how was it possible for them to view themselves as part of that vast assembly for even when they had tried singing they had only heard those next them . . . Then everyone knew everyone was singing but this feeling did not last and soon they did not agree about songs, that section would be going on while another sang one of their own. Then no one sang at all (Green, 1970: 200–201).

The discordant singing of the workers functions as an ironic counterpoint to the rituals of the wealthy class. Their inability to sing in unison metaphorically underscores the internal fragmentation of the group, revealing the absence of a shared emotional or ideological ground. Rather than fostering collective unity, individual characters remain preoccupied with their own desires and anxieties, which inhibit the possibility of genuine communal experience. This theme is echoed in Pack My Bag, where Green reflects more explicitly on Britain’s rigid and fragmented class structure: ‘There are not two or three social classes but hundreds well defined throughout Britain and not one of these escaped the effects of war’ (Green, 1992: 189). The passage highlights how deeply entrenched social stratifications impede any authentic sense of national or collective cohesion. In Party Going, this fragmentation is dramatized through the characters’ failure to transform social rituals – such as parties – into meaningful shared experiences. Instead of offering an escape from contemporary uncertainty, these rituals only further expose the fragility of collective identity in a time of impending crisis.

Maurice Halbwachs views the past as a social construct, shaped primarily by current concerns, reflecting a presentist approach (Halbwachs, 1992: 28), which he describes as the notion that ‘time is deeply embedded in society’ (Liu, 2016: 77). Presentism emphasizes the constructiveness of memory – memory is not a mechanical reproduction of the past but a reinterpretation of it based on current needs. In Party Going, time is briefly suspended in a single afternoon. During this period, the characters’ memories escape traditional frameworks, plunging them into subjective temporality and anxiety under the looming threat of war and death. This situation echoes Halbwachs’ view that the construction of memory is shaped by current concerns and needs, with this subjective, presentist constructiveness manifesting in the novel’s moments of stasis. The sick party member Miss Fellowes’s dream about old days, through its temporary avoidance of the present and the re-presentation and reinterpretation of past memories, constructs a memory framework that deviates from the stable past:

After a brief rest, the ailing Miss Fellowes slips into a dream, in which past memory images are newly interpreted in moments of anxiety and illness, constructing a temporal memory of fear related to war and death.

She was having a perfectly serene dream that she was riding home, on an evening after hunting, on an antelope between rows of giant cabbages. Earth and sky were inverted, her ceiling was an indeterminate ridge and furrow barely lit by crescent moons in the azure sky she rode on.(Green, 1970: 104–105)

The hunting scene in Miss Fellowes’s dream symbolizes the typical leisure activities of the wealthy class, yet in the current context, it foreshadows impending violence. The inversion of the earth and sky suggests a world in chaos, while the dim crescent moon illuminating the ceiling may represent hope and guidance, though its influence proves futile. Fragments of the past are reactivated in her dream, presenting a shifting and frightening memory landscape. In Halbwachs’ discussion of dreams and memory, he asserts that dreaming allows the mind to escape the present to its fullest extent. ‘In a way, contemplative memory or dreamlike memory helps us to escape society’. (Halbwachs, 1992: 49). In Party Going, Miss Fellowes’s dream reveals her avoidance of the bourgeois collective values of loyalty and hypocrisy represented by the wealthy relatives who barely care for her while fixated on the party. However, this escape is not peaceful; it foreshadows future chaos. The things that resurface in dreams are first triggered by images and memories (Halbwachs, 1992: 49). Miss Fellowes’s dream, though rooted in the past, is reinterpreted in the present by the presented self, reflecting the unique nature of individual memory outside grand narratives. In the transitional space between memory and forgetting, particularly at the intersection of consciousness and the unconscious, in what Jing Wendong describes as ‘those ambiguous, ambivalent, and obscure pregnant moments’ (Jing, 2006: 86), Miss Fellowes’s personal memories reflected in the dream faintly and indistinctly emerge, gaining new interpretations in the present. The faint light of memory in her dream resists and reconstructs the collective memory framework, disrupting the social narrative. The suspended time within the dream allows past memories to resurface but, more significantly, foreshadows the imminent arrival of war and death. Upon waking, the characters are filled with anxiety and apprehension, emphasizing the connection between memory, present experience and the looming sense of dread. This dynamic reflects Halbwachs’ presentist perspective, where memory is intertwined with the present and reinterprets past experiences in the context of current realities.

On the other hand, under the time-memory framework of fear and anxiety, the real-world time outside the dream also seems to stagnate for the indefinite delay of the train. Robert ‘thought there was no hurry, no trains were running yet’. (Green, 1970: 48) This temporal stagnation is evident in the predicament of the wealthy class within Bergson’s (1944) concept of duration, leading to the disruption of previously stable memory frameworks. Bergson states, ‘Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances’ (1944: 7). Bergson’s concept of duration expands the creative potential of literature’s ‘time processing’, making time no longer a linear, irreversible sequence of past, present and future but a dynamic and transformative entity. Regarding the literary conception of time, American existentialist philosopher William Barrett once said, ‘for us mortals, reality and time are inseparable, and the novelist. . . inevitably gets caught up in the illusion of time’ (Barrett, 1972: 10). Green successfully escapes this cliché through his indifference to clock time and his disregard for background details. Green rarely focuses on historical events as mere backdrops; instead, he centres on individual responses to atmospheric changes. These actions continuously evolve with the subtle shifts of psychological moments. By compressing time, Green allows his characters to transcend themselves within, creating real-time subjective experiences in an otherwise stagnant external world. As Barbara Brothers observes, Green’s characters are like flies caught in the web of the self, unable to escape the temporal bonds that imprison them in the present, and due to Green’s rejection of linear time, the present seems to exist in a void (Brothers, 1977: 864).

In discussing the moral memory of wealth within social classes, Halbwachs posits that people generally recognize the propertied class as possessing more self-respect and self-sacrifice, while poverty becomes synonymous with immorality. These ideas, preserved in collective memory, find their foundation in the moral experience of wealth, or at least in its moral expressions (Halbwachs, 1992: 59). This moral collective memory profoundly reveals society’s discrimination against the lower classes while reinforcing the wealthy class’s confidence and justification in their status and behaviour. In Party Going, Green intricately engages with these dynamics, showing how memory, both individual and collective, is shaped by class and how the wealthy class constructs its own moral identity through its memory of privilege. Green’s depiction of the divide between the rich and the poor further reinforces this connection between memory and class. He writes, ‘Money always goes to money, the poor always marry someone poorer than themselves, but it is only the rich who rule worlds such as we describe and no small part of the party host Max’s attraction lay in his having started so well with someone even richer than himself’ (Green, 1970: 89). This statement highlights how wealth and social position are perpetuated through relationships and memory, where the rich remember their world as one of exclusivity and self-reinforcement. The rich, through their collective memory, maintain an imagined continuity of privilege and power, while the poor are confined to a memory of limitation and exclusion. Green underscores this by noting that ‘Rich people cling together because the less well off embarrass them and there are not so many available who are rich for one rich man who drops out to be easily replaced’ (Green, 1970: 134). Here, Green illustrates how class identity is reinforced through social exclusion and collective forgetting of those who fall outside the narrow confines of affluence. This dynamic is further reflected in his semi-autobiographical reflection: ‘If, owing to the lucky chance that we lived in luxury we did not experience hardship. . . all we heard about it, were uneasy and wondered whether our parents would be allowed to keep their money and whether we really ought to inherit when they died’ (Green, 1992: 191). Such passages reveal the tension within the elite’s collective memory – a simultaneous awareness of unearned privilege and the anxiety over its moral and historical legitimacy.

The concept of memory is also tied to the novel’s symbolic use of space, especially the fog that envelops London, which causes traffic paralysis and marks ‘a moment of class privilege’s liberation and loss’ (Chaudhuri, 2017). The fog serves as a metaphor for the erosion of the boundaries between social classes, obscuring the clear distinctions the wealthy take for granted. The fog also represents a loss of control, a disruption of the privileged space the wealthy occupy in society. It signals a moment when collective memory – the memory of unchallenged class privilege – begins to dissolve. The memory of London as a place of opportunity and order, as seen in works like Mrs. Dalloway, is replaced by a more ominous recollection of societal breakdown and uncertainty. Faced with this erasure of their accustomed social space, the wealthy characters in Party Going retreat to a hotel, attempting to construct a memory space of their own, isolated from the chaos outside. In doing so, they seek to preserve a collective memory of security and privilege, retreating into a ‘non-place’ (Augé, 2009: 34) that allows them to maintain a sense of continuity. This ‘non-place’ is a space devoid of emotional connections or meaningful social interactions, where the wealthy can, for a time, preserve their memory of a world where they are in control, untouched by the eroding forces of class and history.

In this context, the hotel becomes more than just a physical space with ‘management shut[ting] the steel doors down’ (Green, 1970: 99); it is a symbolic construct designed to protect the collective memory of the upper class. It is a space where the rich can hold onto their memories of privilege, even as the larger social order collapses. The retreat into this memory space is an attempt to safeguard their identity, to protect their social memory from the encroaching threat of social change and to ensure that their moral memory of wealth remains intact. The hotel represents a last stand for the wealthy’s memory of their status, a collective retreat into a space that reflects both the fragility and the persistence of their class memory.

Thus, Green’s narrative illustrates the dynamic relationship between memory, class and identity. The fading of collective memory for the wealthy is not just the loss of historical facts, but the dissolution of the moral framework that sustains their sense of superiority. As the fog and the looming war threaten to erode the comfortable boundaries of the upper class, the characters’ retreat into the hotel symbolizes their desperate attempt to preserve their collective memory of privilege in a world on the brink of transformation. Memory, in this sense, becomes both a tool of resistance and a sign of fragility, revealing how the wealthy’s understanding of themselves is deeply intertwined with their ability to preserve and protect their social and moral memories in the face of historical change.

However, within this spatial impasse, the memory spaces constructed by the affluent are actually breeding grounds for a sense of death and anxiety. They gaze upon their luggage piled in the courtyard, ‘like an exaggerated grave yard, with the owners of it and their porters like mourners with the undertakers’ men’ (Green, 1970: 40). This imagery conveys a sense of desolation and loss, starkly contrasting with the memory spaces they strive to create. Moreover, the large crowds gathered at the station push the characters to the brink of panic. The timid and pampered girl of the group, Julia, looking down from the rooftop of the hotel, feels threatened by the shouts of the crowd demanding trains. In these enclosed spaces surrounded by people, the characters at times feel as if they are already in a realm of death. The group member Alexander ‘likened what he saw to being dead and thought of himself as a ghost driving through streets of the living, this darkness or that veil between him and what he saw a difference between being alive and death’ (Green, 1970: 37). Certain events, whether significant or minor – such as the onset of war or the mere arrival of a dense fog – carry implications of chaos and death from the old world. For them, the fog-covered railway terminus represents ‘death’s dream kingdom’ (Stokes, 1959: 145), a hellish place outside of time and space, a place of living oblivion. They remain uncertain about when the lower classes might overrun the hotel, or when war, and consequently death, might arrive. As a result, when the new social memory framework touches upon the subject of death, the characters’ thoughts shift from historical reflection to a focus on the present. They stand before a network of symbolic mediators dormant at the depths of their rational, material and historically oriented minds, forming a kind of stored knowledge (Wall, 1983: 341). In the novel, enclosed and passive spaces are not just physically isolating but also serve as psychological barriers. As a result, ‘they could never get out of their hotel to go home’ (Green, 1970: 151). This psychological closure causes them to form a unique mental network, storing the knowledge acquired in this confined environment. This network of thought is not merely a record of individual experiences but constitutes a collectively hidden cognitive structure that reflects the collective understanding of social opposition, the unknown and change, resonating with the deep concerns of 1930s English society.

In sum, seemingly minor interruptions – the arrival of fog, a delayed train – turn the setting of Party Going into what Victor Turner described as ‘moments of liminality’ (Turner, 1974: 25), states of being that exist outside of conventional social structures. During such moments, individuals or groups detach from their previous social identities or states and enter an intermediate phase, not yet fully integrated into a new identity. This moment is viewed as a turning point, marking the beginning of a transformative process. In this state, social norms and structures become blurred, providing an opportunity to re-imagine and reshape new identities.

Beyond their disordered memories, the wealthy class’s obsession with hosting parties within confined spaces functions as a bodily practice that highlights the futility of their attempts to escape the anxieties of the present. These parties, held in waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, or during delayed departures, are marked not by joy or communal warmth but by restlessness, physical malaise and emotional detachment. This effort to construct a community of shared memories ultimately collapses under the weight of its own artificiality. Christopher Ames points out that, in the interwar period, the use of parties in literature often became a specific theme and object of satire (Ames, 1991: 175). Works such as Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921), Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) and Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men (1931) portray parties as the primary social activity and narrative backbone for their characters. As Powell recalls, these novels typically represented the lives of Green’s generation in the early 1930s (Powell, 1978: 155). Connerton argues that collective memory requires the maintenance of social rituals and bodily practices: ‘Our bodies, which in commemorations stylistically re-enact an image of the past, keep the past also in an entirely effective form in their continuing ability to perform certain skilled actions’ (1989: 72). Social gatherings, as a form of social ritual, provide a platform for collective participation. In such settings, individuals collectively create a unique retrospective memory through interaction, communication and shared experiences. In Party Going, parties are depicted as carefully orchestrated social rituals. However, despite Connerton’s emphasis on the importance of social rituals and bodily practices for sustaining collective memory, the party scenes in the novel reveal a false collective experience due to group disintegration, a failed attempt at nostalgic collective memory.

As Turner notes, in Party Going, the structural and anti-structural phases overlap (Turner, 1974: 249). In this work, the disordered memories and ineffective parties can be understood as the characters’ attempts to find meaning between structured and anti-structured eras. This positions the novel as not only containing elements of traditional collective memory but also as subverting these structures. By depicting the act of hosting parties, the novel presents a nostalgic and symbolic social setting. However, through a deeper exploration of the characters’ inner worlds, the novel further reveals their blurred memories of the past and their struggles with the present – elements that reflect the characteristics of an anti-structural era. The characters are trapped in subjective time at the party, with their memories and perceptions distorted, signifying a subversion of traditional time and structure. Thus, Party Going creates a unique literary experience that straddles the line between structure and anti-structure, preserving certain traditional elements while simultaneously expressing scepticism and subversion of those elements. This positions the novel as a point of tension in the history of literary development, embodying the dual impact of an era in transition.

The crisis of collective memory

When individual retrospection fails, the collective memory of a class or nation is further weakened and eroded by the confusion of individual experiences and disordered interpersonal relationships, potentially leading to its complete disappearance. ‘The individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory’ (Halbwachs, 1992: 303). In Party Going, Green creates two opposing memory communities – the affluent class and the workers’ collective – showcasing different facets of the wealthy class’s memory. The wealthy community attempts to escape reality through collective memory, yet their practices demonstrate the gradual fading of class memory. Critic V.S. Pritchett argues that Green’s writing explores ‘the injury done to certain English minds by the main, conventional emphases of English life’ (McCrum, 2014). The affluent class in Party Going fails to find enduring truth within the values of collective memory of glory days that supposedly give meaning to their lives. This indicates that collective memory among the wealthy is unable to provide refuge for individuals in the face of present anxieties; like flowing water, it cannot be solidified in memory. As Durkheim observes, ‘In so far as he belongs to society, the individual transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he acts’ (Durkheim, 1976: 16–17), collective memory in society is composed of shared history, culture and experiences. The collapse of social structures leads to the confusion of shared memories among characters, rendering collective memory ineffective. The failure of individual actions may also prompt a questioning of collective identity, ultimately leading to the disintegration of class-based collective memory.

As a response to the threat posed by the working class to the British upper class within a decade, Party Going becomes a novel that depicts the ‘chaos of upper-class rituals’ (Schorer, 1949: 22). Green uses scenes of fog erasing social differences, plunging the upper class into division and helplessness. Green describes the two classes as ‘Like two lilies in a pond, romantically part of it but infinitely remote, surrounded, supported, floating in it if you will, but projected by being different on to another plane, though there was so much water you could not see these flowers or were liable to miss them’ (Green, 1970: 27). This depiction highlights the fluctuating yet inseparable distance between the classes. The upper class’s life is only ‘apparently serene’ (Green, 1970: 27), as they are constantly threatened by the unseen forces of the working class. Peter Hitchcock considers Green’s focus on the British working class as ‘a quintessential modernist displacement’ (Hitchcock, 1994: 16), where ‘spirit has broken with the previous world of its life and ideas, and is on the point of submerging it in the past; it is at work on its own transformation’ (Hegel, 2018: 8). Modernity is called a new era because it increasingly distances itself from all previous experiences, and a characteristic that sets Green apart among contemporary novelists is his ability to transcend aristocratic identity and explore different social classes with a ‘double vision’ (Stokes, 1959: 30). As a reviewer for Time magazine noted, Green’s novel is like a social melting pot, where everything is condensed (Green, 1949: 42). Although the global order was also disintegrating at this time, Green clearly recognized that the disintegration of British society began with the decline of the English class system after World War I. By focusing on the panic induced by the working class within the upper class, Green reveals the impotence of the wealthy’s collective memory. He writes:

In the war people in our walk of life entertained all sorts and conditions of men with a view to self-preservation, to keep the privileges we set such store by, and which are illusory, after those to whom we were kind had won the war for us (Green, 1992: 64).

While the upper-class attempts to preserve its privilege through social isolation, this separation proves futile, as retreating into the comfort of past collective memories cannot shield them from the unavoidable realities of the present. Through the characters and scenes in the novel, Green presents the upper class’s ignorance of social unrest and their helplessness regarding the future. Amid the impending upheaval in London caused by the working class, the lack of common beliefs and the loss of collective connection prevent the upper class from finding comfort among their peers; instead, they view each other as symbols of threat. The ‘chaos of upper-class rituals’ also indicates the disarray and instability in the social and cultural experiences of the wealthy, reflecting the disintegration of class-based collective memory. Halbwachs notes that collective memory has a dual nature – a collective remembrance has a double focus – a physical object, a material reality such as a statue, a monument, a place in space and also a symbol, or something of spiritual significance, something shared by the group that adheres to and is superimposed on this physical reality (Halbwachs, 1992: 204). Through the characters’ memories and perceptions, Green presents a collective memory that is shaped by their class status and the social divisions of the 1930s, offering profound reflections on social, cultural and political changes and exploring how collective memory is expressed in different periods, ultimately providing an examination of humanity and history.

Beyond the fading of class-based collective memory, Party Going also foreshadows the impending war and the anxieties surrounding the erasure of the British Empire’s memory. The novel allegorically portrays the war crisis of 1938. Although the story is set on the brink of war, the author does not directly mention the war itself. Instead, he subtly conveys the tension and social unrest of the time through the preparations for and occurrences during a party, as well as through the relationships between the participants. In the 1920s, London was a place full of possibilities and fluidity, as depicted in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In such works, crowds were imagined as vibrant and full of opportunity. In 1930s London, however, The decade-long creation of Party Going deeply reflects the turbulence and transformation of British social strata: this period was haunted by the spectres of mass unemployment, appeasement policies and the rise of fascism at home and abroad (Stevenson and Cook, 1977: 1). The description of how ‘last time there was bad fog and a lot of people were stuck here’ (Green, 1977: 61) echoes the memory of World War I. The British government’s free distribution of steel shelters, although not overtly linked to the war, signals the inevitability of conflict, mirroring the anxieties of a nation bracing for another global crisis. The omnipresence of pigeons and the recurring references to bombs further heighten the sense of impending disaster, as they evoke the looming threat of German bombers and the collective fear that accompanies it. These subtle references work together to create an atmosphere of historical uncertainty, in which both personal and collective memories of the past – particularly the imperial past – are being erased, transformed and forgotten in the face of a new and uncertain future. In this way, the novel engages with the dynamic relationship between individual memory and historical change, showing how the fading of the British Empire’s memory is inseparable from the tensions of a world on the brink of war.

In the novel, the siege of the train station and the impending social upheaval foreshadow death in war, though its exact timing remains unknown. Discussing the possibility of Miss Fellowes’ impending death, Alex remarks, ‘We’ve all got to come to it some time, though why it should be here of all places I can’t imagine’ (Green, 1977: 190). During World War II, Britain not only faced massive casualties but also underwent a profound imperial crisis, leading to the deaths of individuals who carried the memories of the British Empire. This loss directly contributed to the gradual erasure of both individual and collective memory.in reality, 60,000 British civilians perished throughout the entire war (Stansky, 2007: 12). The scale of this devastation was so immense that Britain even faced a shortage of wood to properly bury the dead, as the country lacked the resources to produce enough coffins (FitzGibbon, 1957: 7). Such material shortages reflect a larger symbolic crisis – the breakdown of social order and the fading of imperial memory. As those who once upheld and transmitted the memory of empire disappeared, the imperial narrative began to fade, displaced by the urgency of survival and reconstruction. Green’s depiction of the upper class in Party Going underscores this historical transition. The old aristocracy, once the custodians of imperial identity, appear helpless in the face of war’s approach and the dissolution of the world they once dominated. Their retreat into isolated spaces and reliance on outdated collective memories proves futile, as the war exposes the fragility and illusion of their privileged reality. The loss of individual memories through death not only diminishes the coherence of collective memory but also signifies the end of an era. In this sense, Party Going captures the moment when the imperial past begins to dissolve under the pressure of historical transformation, and the collective memory of class – once grounded in stability and continuity – gives way to disorientation and forgetting.

Conclusion

In the novel, individual memory is not a static, isolated entity but is shaped and distorted through its interaction with class and nation, reflecting Gadamer’s concept of ‘effective history’. As Gadamer asserts, ‘The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship that constitutes both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding’ (Gadamer, 1989: 299). This dissolution of the subject-object dichotomy in history is essential to understanding how memory operates within the narrative. In the context of the novel, memory is not simply a personal recollection but is constantly redefined through the broader forces of social and national identity. The characters’ memories are intertwined with the collective experiences of their class and nation, and these collective histories – shaped by power, ideology and conflict – erase or transform individual recollections. The fading memory of the upper class in the narrative highlights the fragility of imperial memory. This fading is not just about the disappearance of objective historical facts but also involves the relationship between the individual and the collective. The interplay between individual memory and the failure of collective memory creates a dynamic historical process, revealing the complex interaction between the subject and object of history. This dynamic not only reflects the evolution of historical facts but also encompasses the shifts in historical interpretation and understanding. The truth of history resides in the relationship between the individual and the collective, between self and other. This relationship is continually evolving, leading to diverse interpretations of history.

Henry Green is in the list of 27 ‘most celebrated and enduring novelists from the British Isles’ (Poole, 2009: i), a recognition that underscores his unique contribution to British modernist fiction. In Party Going, Green masterfully depicts individual memory as a microcosm of collective memory. As time’s uncertainty unfolds and confined spaces increasingly entrap the characters, the wealthy class attempts to evade reality through chaotic recollections and ineffective bodily practices. However, these efforts are ultimately futile in the face of social turmoil and collective disarray. Through the novel’s plot and character portrayals, Green reflects on how the frameworks of collective memory may shift, and how national and class memories might gradually fade during times of historical transformation. This insight reflects a deep concern for the state of English society, transcending the novel’s narrative to offer a profound meditation on social change and the evolution of collective memory. Consequently, the novel stands not only as a literary masterpiece but also as a meticulous and profound exploration of human existence, memory mechanisms and societal development.