In his chapter, Luke Gibbons examines artists and writers who take up the subject of the “great scar” of the Civil War, and in their work he finds silence, misdirection, and the kind of temporal indeterminacies that are characteristic of so much revivalist cultural production. By examining literary and cinematic works by Louis D’Alton, Liam O’Flaherty, John Ford, and Dorothy McCardle, Gibbons argues that temporal discontinuity has a positive role to play by reactivating that which history has deactivated. Civil War literature invites the reader to go beyond the surface realism of the text in a way that provides an opening to the real, which in Lacanian terms is foreclosed and mapped over by imaginary constructs. Gibbons’s consideration of Irish literature and film strongly suggests an alternative to conventional realist accounts beholden to historical causality, a way of reading the temporal discontinuity in way that offers a fresh perspective on the trauma of the Civil War.