Vol. 30 | March 2022 | “Fact and fiction are so interwoven”: Corporeal Reimagining of Siegfried Sassoon as Poet and Patient in Pat Barker’s Regeneration | Basil N Darlong Diengdoh

Abstract

The paper attempts a close reading of the novel Regeneration by Pat Barker and locates it within representations of the body, trauma narrative and the philosophy of mind and body. The objective of such an exploration is to show how fiction reflects a more articulate reality in relation to deeply-affecting experiences such as the violence of war and the cultural understanding of the body during such events. By revisiting the historical figure of Siegfried Sassoon during his ‘treatment’ by W. H. R. Rivers, Barker reimagines a more nuanced relation between the men during one of the most significant events of modern history, namely, the Great War.

Keywords: Pat Barker, mind and body, trauma, corporeality, narrative.

This paper is founded on the premise that Pat Barker’s novel, Regeneration (1991), attends to both the psychological as well as corporeal aspects of the trauma and experience of the Great War, arguably a crucial pivot in the literary motivations and productions of the period of Modernism. Barker’s novel is part of a trilogy that is read as the continued cultural response to one of the most significant events of the twentieth century and forms a part of the kind of nostalgia wherein, as the historian Adrian Gregory noted, “The British still seem to take the First World War personally” (1) even as “[t]he words themselves conjure images of a pointless industrial war, directed by incompetent generals” (McCartney 299). Regeneration recreates this historical tension within the narrative itself, between the suffering and personal ethics of the soldiers “who fought in an alien landscape of muddy trenches and gaping shell holes for an unappreciative and uncomprehending public at home” (299) and the political and military leadership whose rhetoric served a different politics, which often echoed the masculinist and patriarchal construction of conflict.

Barker, for instance, highlights in the novel the problematic association of shell-shock as “just cowardice” (Regeneration ch. 3) and how the perception of the soldier-patients in wartime hospitals is problematically associated with notions of masculinity–– “[a]s if everybody who breaks down is inferior” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 5) and “that men who broke down were degenerates whose weakness would have caused them to break down, eventually, even in civilian life” (ch. 10). As noted by Jay Winter in his introduction to Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, “Men like Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Gurney…were victims of war just as surely as the men they killed and the men who died by their side” (“Introduction” x)

This point is re-emphasised through the figure of W. H. R. Rivers, the doctor who aims to address trauma from an accommodative, even ethical, consideration––that of conceding the vulnerability of the suffering subject––

Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures… Fear, tenderness – these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man. (Barker, Regeneration ch. 5)

While women would also continue to be defined according to prevalent societal values of the time, which the reader glimpses through the workers at the munitions factory, where there was “only silence and bowed heads and feverishly working fingers flicking machine-gun bullets into place inside the glittering belts” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 17), the paper focuses principally on the relationship that is developed between Rivers and the principal foil to Rivers in the novel, namely, Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), whose public protest and poetry as a war poet does not completely describe his literary oeuvre which included “fictionalised autobiographies, praised for their evocation of English country life” (“Historic Figures: Siegfried Sassoon”, n.p.).

Indeed, “[t]he war changed all that” (Fussell 99), and Sassoon went from “dreamy Keatsian and Tennysonian verse” (ibid.) to “the re-visiting of the war and the contrasting world before the war” (100) in his post-war writing. Sassoon and Rivers are described at “Craiglockhart,” the war hospital and sanatorium in Scotland, where the former “fought another duel, this time against a more sympathetic adversary, his attendant physician and psychologist, W. H. R. Rivers” (Winter, Remembering War 123). The relation itself is replete with the ironies of war but also signals the tenuous continuity of literary form that is represented through Sassoon. While consciousness and experience of the war informs Sassoon’s work, it also does not mean that there is a neat dichotomy between pre-war and the war periods that marks a definitive literary modernism––“[t]he soldier-poet was in the end a romantic figure… Their 'modernism' was the product of a recasting of traditional language, not its rejection” (Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning 221-222). Adds Vincent Sherry, “their actual writing—the ‘traditional’ forms, the ‘prudent’ style— did not alter in answer to that world-changing event” (8).

Sassoon remains a figure who is still “symbolizing for many all the heroisms and horrors of the Great War [but] he has also come to represent the craving for both sexual and spiritual fulfilment which marks our increasingly complex civilization” (Moorcroft Wilson, “Introduction”, n.p.).[i] In dramatizing the events surrounding Sassoon and the Great War, Pat Barker’s novel acts as a platform for “the diverse representations” of trauma within its narrative bounds, and “functions to portray trauma’s effects through metaphoric and material means” (Balaev 149). It also reiterates the importance of “the literature of war” as one of the means “to gain a purchase on experiences that lie outside the boundaries of text and narrative” (Leed, “Preface” ix).

Sassoon is driven by “a determination to convince civilians that the war was mad” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 3) who “made the justifiability of the war a matter for constant, open debate” (ch. 10) and in doing so, the novel is able to inscribe in its historical retelling a deeper sense of the ethical and emotional vulnerabilities of war, the ironies that emanate from its realities, and its traumatic effects that contest the political expediencies of conflict. Further, it sheds light on a rarer aspect of the Great War, that of mental health during the time period. The mind, a source of disembodied knowing in Western epistemology at least since the philosophical emphasis ascribed to René Descartes––and by extension, knowledge as imbricated in the disembodied self––came to be viewed in a dichotomous and tenuous relation with the body.

This binary is the culmination of a persistent separation of the body and the mind whereby, according to Robin Waterfield, “by virtue of having been born in a mortal body, the purity of soul has become contaminated by different desires” (Plato: Phaedrus Introduction xxvi). Plato’s transcendentalism, where “chief prominence is given to the soul's cognitive function: and in this connexion Plato lays stress upon the radical difference of nature that obtains between the soul and the body” (Roberts 372). Both Descartes and Plato locate the intellect in the soul, not the body, that is to say, in its immaterial and incorporeal referent.[ii] By extension, knowledge remained a disembodied endeavour and the body limited to a mechanistic, biological reality (Aho and Aho 16; Jonas 61; Carter 97).

It was the Great War that recast the philosophical and epistemological pursuits of the West as ineffectual in the face of conflict and power, and the collapse of the encounter with the Other into effacement and erasure is only made poignantly visible in the works of Siegfried Sassoon, who writes of the “Atrocities” of war, “where the narrator congratulates a soldier on ‘butcher[ing] some Saxon prisoners’ and confesses to ‘lov[ing] to hear how Germans die’” (qtd. in Moorcroft Wilson, “Siegfried Sassoon”, n.p.). Tellingly, Regeneration also charts out the impact of war beyond the immediate battlefield, describing in its representation of trauma “the interplay that occurs between language, experience, memory, and place” (Balaev 149). Thus, the patients undergoing treatment for war neurosis and shell-shock under W. H. R. Rivers’ care are traumatised subjects, portraying the deep impact of violence in their respective lives––and this is manifest, as the paper argues, in their bodily experiences as much as the psychological, extending into the corporeal descriptions embedded in the narrative of the text. Rivers himself stood as “something of a saviour and friend to his patients” (Moorcroft Wilson, “Dr W. H. R. Rivers” 3378).

Away from the immediate conflict, the suffering and traumatised subject is deeply conscious of the physicality of memory and place as much as its psychical roots. “People smelling of wet wool jerked and swayed against him, bumping his knees, and he tensed, not liking the contact or the smell” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 4) culminates in the sensory, visual, aural and otherwise corporeal emphasis Barker appends to the subject’s trauma. Trauma, in this sense, is embodied, manifested in a tenuous continuity between soldier’s psyches and their bodies.

Rivers’s approach at Craiglockhart War Hospital was underpinned, even influenced, by the growing realisation that the war had disturbed the neat dichotomy between mind and body. His relationship with his patients reveals that any expectation of a lasting, even permanent, recovery for the soldiers there had to accommodate the complicated links between corporeal existence and psychical balance, a field not entirely come to its own at the time and confronted by a medical profession obsessed with the finality wherein a “cure [could be] pronounced complete” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 21). This is highlighted in the novel in the Medical Board’s recommendation that Sassoon be allowed to continue to serve primarily because “he’s fit” (ch. 23).

Even though he “believes the war is being fought for the wrong reasons” (ch. 23), extraordinarily, Sassoon’s deep-seated conviction that he is responsible to his soldiers on the front remains his motivating force: “No doubts, no scruples, no agonizing, just a straightforward, headlong retreat towards the front” (ch. 23) as Rivers saw it. Eric J. Leed, in No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I which looks at “the world of myth, fantasy, and neurosis which soldiers constructed in order to escape from the terrible contradiction between expectation and reality” (Winter, “Review” 118) notes that the reason this could be is that “Siegfried Sassoon locates his own disillusionment in the perception that his home had been so radically transformed by war that there no longer seemed anything secure to which he might return” (Leed 22).

The narrative continues, “A branch rattled along the windows with a sound like machine-gun fire, and he had to bite his lips to stop himself crying out” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 4). Trauma communication, in a manner of speaking, becomes implied, and may also be discerned in the bodily actions and gestures that accompany the subject. This is a crucial aspect, as the text reiterates, as traumatic experiences become deeply entrenched within the psyche, affecting dreams and provoking unintended physical manifestations. The narrative also highlights another aspect of war, that of survivor’s guilt and internalised shame, whereby some of the soldiers at Craiglockhart such as Billy Prior, despite obvious physical and mental limitations, are keen to be approved to be sent back to the front. A “permanent home service” is viewed as antithetical to the necessary “sense of honour” and “frightfully bad form”[iii] (ch. 12), unbecoming of the “gentlemanly behaviour” (ch. 17) expected of soldiers. Prior tells Rivers, “If you were a patient here, don’t you think you’d feel ashamed?” (ch. 18).

Touch, sight, smell, sound, and taste––the body's tactile and tangible sensory field––were thought to be the result of mechanical principles that may disrupt the inner mental state of existence. The Cartesian cogito as the foundational area of knowing and truth was disputed by empiricists such as John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-1776). They thought that sensory perceptions are crucial in disrupting and forming the thinking mind. The mind was supposed to be a passive receptacle for experiences sent by the body, a tabula rasa or blank slate to be filled in this way. Nonetheless, the idea of the body as a measurable thing was maintained, and it may be argued that this viewpoint is still prevalent. The conflation between mind and reason would further relegate the body as an imperfect sensory and thereby troubled experiential field, or relegated to a mechanical understanding of its parts and their functions. If at all the body was to be viewed beyond this narrow perception, it was to adhere to the prescribed norms and conventions.

By extension, its corporeality would be melded into modes of civility, predictable and socially acceptable gestures and actions that would reaffirm the meaning of gender, social hierarchy and power relations between the sexes. The dehumanising effects of war affect not only the soldiers at the front, but the women, especially working class women. As a character muses in Regeneration,

We don’t look human, Sarah thought, not knowing whether to be dismayed or amused. They looked like machines, whose sole function was to make other machines. (Barker, Regeneration ch. 17)

It is unsurprising that any deviations from the conventional perceptions of the corporeal vexes this relation between mind and body, and involuntary impairments such as speech stammering or facial tics, muscle spasms and twitches may be routinely discriminated against (Pring n.p.) and assumed to representative of a lack or disorder of the mind. These stigmas come to be culturally and socially embedded and require articulation in order to be addressed.

The pathologization of abnormal bodily actions reaffirms this kind of stereotyping in different contexts. “Craiglockhart,” as Barker writes, became a “living museum of tics and twitches” (Regeneration ch. 18) and the text re-enacts the difficulties of speech and breath that trauma inflicts. A simple sentence such as “D-d-d-do w-w-w-wwe kn-kn-know wwhwhat’s t-t-t-t-taking s-s-so l-l-long” (ibid.) realises in narrative effect the problems that persist with the soldiers undergoing treatment at Craiglockhart. Additionally, the treatment of such patients confined their afflictions to their physical states, further evidencing the radical approach adopted by Rivers. Soldiers being treated at the National Hospital, for instance, had

[n]o questions… asked about their psychological state. Many of them, Rivers thought, showed signs of depression, but in every case the removal of the physical symptom was described as a cure… questions about the relapse rate, the suicide rate… Nobody knew. (Barker, Regeneration ch. 20)

Further, sexuality would come to be increasingly policed during wartime, affirming the body as signifying the cultural and social prescriptions of the age. Homosexuality, for instance, was viewed as a deviation owing to conditions external to the individual, an affliction to “be cured” even if it “gelled” because “you know he had no sisters, so he never met lasses that way. Goes to school, no lasses. Goes to university – no lasses. Time he finally claps eyes on me, it’s too late, isn’t it?” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 17). The “abominable thing” and “disgusting feelings” is viewed as a deformity of the mind, even as its evidence is realised through the body.

In the Great War period, stigmas around war traumas, disabilities, and sexuality that deviated from the hetero-normative expectations of society reveal the deep social insecurities and the general antipathy toward expressing, revealing, or unveiling experiences and actions contrary to accepted and expected notions of masculinity and femininity. The masochistic acceptance of suffering is also portrayed by Regeneration through figures such as Sassoon and Prior. The latter reveals the extent of the problem when

the three weeks they’d spent trying to recover his memories of France…He seemed to be saying, ‘All right. You can make me dredge up the horrors, you can make me remember the deaths, but you will never make me feel. (Barker, Regeneration ch. 8)

While the “etiological conception of wounds on the psyche shifted through the eras, bouncing between physical and emotional causes… the multifarious symptoms were not combined into a cohesive disorder” (Godvin n.p.) up until the 1980s, when trauma would emerge as a diagnosis, and contribute to perceptions of both stigma and care for “a disadvantaged and impaired group” (Johnson et al. 22).

The experimental “regeneration” experiments undertaken by W. H. R. Rivers and Henry Head was premised on the healing capacity of the body’s nerves but “many of the experiments had been extremely painful”––the novel recounts how “Head had volunteered himself as the subject of the proposed experiment, and Rivers had assisted at the operation in which Head’s radial nerve had been severed and sutured” which resulted in “severe and prolonged pain”––Rivers’ complicity in the experiments included the guilt and trauma of inflicting pain, and the “distress he felt at causing pain” would appear in a dream, “and, on waking, the affect had been one of fear and dread” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 5) describing precisely the depth of trauma and its effects upon Rivers. He discerned that “in advising them [the patients] to remember the traumatic events that had led to their being sent here, he was, in effect, inflicting pain” (ibid.).

The brain is “understood as the carrier of coherent cognitive schemata, to properly encode and process the event” of experience (Balaev 151). The recollection of experience is therefore an act of self-organising thoughts and cogent articulation of the same. However, in literary theory, traumatic experience is understood beyond this broad schema of language and memory, in that trauma tends to exceed both even as such experiences merit signification and representation in order to contend with its emergence in the meaning. As noted by Joshua Pederson, for proponents of literary trauma theory including its leading figure Cathy Caruth,

…trauma is an experience so intensely painful that the mind is unable to process it normally. In the immediate aftermath, the victim may totally forget the event. And if memories of the trauma return, they are often non-verbal, and the victim may be unable to describe them with words. (334)[iv]

The seminal works on the relation between trauma and language, and its literary representations, can be traced back to Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Geoffrey Hartman, Cathy Caruth, Kali Tal, Linda Williams, Victoria Bany, and Dominick LaCapra, among others.

Trauma, it is recognised, can lead to dissociations not only of language and memory, but also of cognition itself, disrupting the modes of remembering and articulating trauma. Trauma, in this regard, is claimed to be “nearly if not totally unspeakable” (Pederson 336) even as its representation in fiction attests to “the testimonial power of literature” (334). This aspect is revealed in the novel through Wilfred Owen, who, when he first encounters Sassoon, thought, “It didn’t matter what this Sassoon thought about him, since the real Sassoon was in the poems” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 8). If verbalising trauma is a means to negotiate it, then the efficacy of the “talking cure”, as Rivers saw it, depended on such “progress… You’ve recovered almost all your memory and you no longer lose your voice” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 9).

Barker’s novel, however, re-enacts this aspect of the difficulty of communicating trauma––between non-verbal signs marked by the actions and gestures of the body and its verbalisation, albeit the process is fraught with suspicion, even hostility, as is revealed in the dynamic between Dr. Rivers and the wards of Craiglockhart War Hospital which “does make the relationship of doctor and patient rather difficult” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 8). This foundational assumption around trauma and memory is challenged in newer studies in the field, particularly that of Richard McNally, as noted by Pederson, which re-orients “Caruth and Trauma Studies in the Nineties” (335) towards the view that “while victims may choose not to speak of their traumas, there is little evidence that they cannot” (334).[v] This tension between the communicative agency of the traumatised and their choice is highlighted by Barker in the relation between Rivers and Prior, a patient who does not easily acquiesce to the “talking cure” method employed by the former, which is presented as an approach that is “thoughtful, respectful, and gentle to the patient” (Barrett 237).

Remembering and talking itself presents complications, as shown in the novel–– “They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who’d been there” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 10). Nevertheless, Prior’s insistence that he does not “remember” is considered by Rivers as deliberate and antagonistic (Barker, Regeneration ch. 8). In fact, Rivers “said officers don’t suffer from mutism” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 9). Rivers extends his view,

Mutism seems to spring from a conflict between wanting to say something, and knowing that if you do say it the consequences will be disastrous. So you resolve it by making it physically impossible for yourself to speak. And for the private soldier the consequences of speaking his mind are always going to be far worse than they would be for an officer. What you tend to get in officers is stammering. And it’s not just mutism. All the physical symptoms: paralysis, blindness, deafness. They’re all common in private soldiers and rare in officers. It’s almost as if for the… the labouring classes illness has to be physical. They can’t take their condition seriously unless there’s a physical symptom. And there are other differences as well. Officers’ dreams tend to be more elaborate. The men’s dreams are much more a matter of simple wish fulfilment. You know, they dream they’ve been sent back to France, but on the day they arrive peace is declared. That sort of thing. (Barker, Regeneration ch. 9)

Scholarship around trauma and its figuration in academic discourse has been accompanied by change in “the contexts within which they are read and received” (Radstone 9) marked by “the codification of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” and the shift from “a Freudian emphasis on memory's relations with unconscious conflict, repression and fantasy” to a “neuroscientific approach” and an “understanding of memory as related to brain functioning” (Radstone 11). Barker’s representation of dealing with trauma in Regeneration dwells on the complexity and dynamic responses to language and memory that attempt to codify trauma––

…the risk of having the object and self-representations polarized into victim and perpetrators… and, with it, the longing to change places with the aggressor… the identification with the aggressor must remain unconscious or else it will flood the self-representation with psychotic rage. (Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory 84-85)

This may be witnessed in both Sassoon, as a patient­­––and how “he hated everybody, giggling girls, portly middle-aged men, women whose eyes settled on his wound stripe like flies” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 5)––as well as doctor, when Rivers was “suddenly…furious… His irritation, groping for an object, fastened on Sassoon” (ibid.).

Trauma, in the present, as a clinical and cultural category has been particularised to include individual experiences, in response to violence and abjection in everyday contexts, not only through generational experiences such as war and disaster that impact many. The “experience of trauma can be approached through the psychology of the survivor,” suggests Caruth, following after Robert Jay Lifton’s work on trauma and survival in relation to “Hiroshima, Vietnam, the Holocaust, the nuclear threat, and other catastrophic events of our age” (Trauma: Explorations in Memory 128). At the same time, the actions of the traumatised body also offer a means of discerning and eventually articulating the shifting mental and physical states and effects of trauma. The particularised sense of trauma is what Pat Barker denotes in Regeneration, whereby, through Dr. Rivers, “Every case posed implicit questions about the individual costs of the war” (ch. 10).

This paper is also focused on describing the body in its corporeality in the manner it figures in the narrative - in German philosophy, a Körper and “what it is to have a body (Körperhaben)” (Krüger 256)––and how it appears in the novel­­––but more crucially, as Leib, or “what it is to be a body (in German: Leibsein)” (ibid.).[vi] Trauma implicates both selves as well as others “by challenging fundamental assumptions about moral laws and social relationships that are themselves connected to specific environments… a work of fiction that conveys profound loss or intense fear on individual or collective levels” (Balaev 150). Hence, it is important for W. H. R. Rivers, as a doctor, to “try to get a history together” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 5) between himself and his patient. “Why do we have to do it? Because I need to know what’s happened to you,” Rivers answers (ibid.). Trauma retelling and recollection reveal the tactile and tangible aspects of the corporeal, a narrative of the Leibsen.

What it means to be a body, in Regeneration, describes a traumatised former soldier, whose “naked body was white as a root” and who “listened for the whine of shells” not far from the hospital. “[I]t was so long since he’d been anywhere alone” and “[r]aindrops dripped from the trees… finding the warm place between his collar and his neck” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 4). His body is no longer the sum of mechanistic impressions but a rich source of meaning that comes from embodied experiences––his hands “pressed”, his body was “trembling”, “a burning round the knees”, his skin “chafed”, breath “snatched”, “head bent”, and his “body was cold” as was

slipping and stumbling, his mud-encumbered boots like lead weights pulling on the muscles of his thighs… Every step was a separate effort, hauling his mud-clogged boots out of the sucking earth. His mind was incapable of making comparisons, but his aching thighs remembered, and he listened for the whine of shells. (Barker, Regeneration ch. 4)

Bodily vulnerability is attended to by an accommodating narrative that emerges from Barker’s attention to corporeal detail, concentrating on not just the body in its physical world, but abject and traumatised bodies, undergoing “brutish pain” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 3)[vii], bodies that are “Bleeding. Frantic with pain…” (ch. 4), “severe and prolonged pain” (ch. 5), “considerable pain” (ch. 20), at times “impossible to tell how much pain” (ch. 21).

The established significations of the body are brought to question. The body’s biological facticity, its naturalised and depoliticised cultural role in a patriarchal and masculinist construct of war is subverted by its very corporeality, when its embodiments are realised in the field of traumatic experiences. Rivers was very well aware that his patients had “been trained to identify emotional repression, as the essence of manliness” (ch. 5). In another instance, when this particular patient––Burns––“cupped his genitals in his hands, not because he was ashamed, but because they looked incongruous, they didn’t seem to belong with the rest of him” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 4). The sense of disjointedness of the body reveals the fractured sense of self that accompanies trauma. The tangibility of the body and its experiences also confront the inexplicability of language and memory, reaffirming the importance of trauma being articulated and expressed even if there is no final articulation or a finitude of expressible words.

In the novel, language is often confounded by the overwhelming corporeal and psychical suffering of its subjects, expressed through a note written by another patient named Prior, which simply states, “NO MORE WORDS” (ch. 5). The trauma of the event also imbricates the trauma of memory which is why the patient defiantly writes “I DON’T REMEMBER” (ch. 5) in response to Rivers’ queries and requests for remembering, which points to the difficulty of “coming to terms with the dynamics of memory that inform the new perceptions of the self and the world” (Balaev 150). The narrative realism depicting corporeal existence as pondered upon by the text––sweat, blood, tears, vomit, wounds, smells––and also reveals the abject body, the suffering body and the visceral manner of its reception in our field of view. This is important as it emphasises the point that trauma is not a disembodied event, and that the human subject is not a neatly dichotomized being, that is, one part mind, and the other, the body. The dissolution of this distinction, at least in textual terms, orients the meaning of the body in a more receptive capacity. It also points to, in the context of articulating trauma, “the extent of the internal conflict that was going on” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 18).

The paper has so far focussed on the descriptions of corporeal experiences that foregrounds the human subject at the heart of the literary re-imagination of war, highlighting the ethical aspects that are foregrounded in the relations that are formed and nurtured. Secondly, the corporeal descriptors may also be read through the frame of corporeal narratology. According to Daniel Punday’s work, Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology, textual bodies inhabit an imaginative space where “character bodies primarily enter into semantic relations, since by sorting bodies into types a narrative defines the contrasts that underlie thematic, symbolic, and psychological patterns” (61). Punday notes that there has occurred a shift in the focus on embodiment within the literary traditions of the novel. If “critics of the eighteenth-century novel have noted… the creation of central, relatively disembodied heroes or heroines, and more embodied peripheral characters for whom physiognomy is a far more important element of characterization” (14-15) constituting a “differential embodiment” (14) which “reflects the fundamentally corporeal nature of narrative” (15).

Following on this, while the differential embodiment in Barker’s novel also emerges, the shift of focus on the embodied experience of trauma and war of the novels’ central characters, and its effects as witnessed by other centrally positioned characters signals the importance of constructing embodiment as an integral part of understanding historical re-telling. Thus, graphic descriptions of corporeality are not limited to the signifier, but its attendant details. Blood, for example, does not remain enjoined in meaning within its bio-scientific significance, but goes on to signal traumatic experiences where a soldier “started to haemorrhage, and… It pumped out of him” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 4).

Significantly, “whatever traumatic events had precipitated…neurosis” was not limited “to that most characteristic symptom of war neurosis: the battle nightmare” (ch. 3). These nightmares had telling and lasting physical affects and corporeal manifestations––“nightly outburst”, “the extreme terror he’d felt on waking”, and “whether suicide was a possibility or not” (ch. 4) would accompany these troubled psychic states. Physical states, on the other hand, are not always about perturbation, rather, they reveal the vulnerability of the body in its corporeality­­–– looking at “the scar on Sassoon’s shoulder,” for instance, “was curiously restful…to submit to this scrutiny, which was prolonged, detailed and impersonal, like one small boy examining the scabs on another’s knee” (ch. 4).

The disjunction between the political and its disembodied rhetoric and the corporeal may also be found echoed in the epistemic roots of the polis in England––Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, for instance, distinguishes between nature and the social order in order to delineate a reasoning behind the warring capacities of the individual and the state. Hobbes conceived of a ‘body politic’ in the seventeenth century, using a corporeal metaphor to describe the contingent nature of life beyond the social order, terming the former as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 84). Without the reasonable restrictions of the social world, human life––and by extension, the human body––would be besieged by “continual fear, and danger of violent death” (84). Hobbes’ distinction correctly brought into question “the organic nature of the body politic” (Springborg 8) and refers to the body politic as “created” and “is but an artificial man” (Hobbes 7). In contrast, violence is rooted in nature, “which is a condition of war of every man against every man” (91) and in this kind of ‘war’ “Force, and fraud, are…the two cardinal virtues” (85). Conflict within the body politic is “a posture of war” attributed to the “continual jealousies” of “persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency” (85). Still, “Hobbes is addressing rational human beings aware of the potential for civil discord” (Gaskin, “Introduction”, xxxvi) which is why conflict[viii] that threatens the body politic precludes the conflict between civil states.

This aspect is brought to the fore in the novels through its intertextual invocation of the war poets Siegfried Sassoon, and also, Wilfred Owen. Parallel to this literary thread, the first novel of the trilogy also features the men of science, such as Rivers, who treat the trauma of war through a more nuanced view of the human subject–that is not solely rooted in “a biological model,” but in “social and psychological reasons” (Singsit-Evans n.p.). In Barker’s Regeneration, this can be witnessed and perceived as the ethical affects that are played out in the relationships that are developed between figures, for example, between Rivers and Sassoon, one a doctor and psychiatrist and the other his patient and confidante. It is these ethical affects that the paper aims to explore, revealing that the text enacts both bodily as well as psychological responses as a means to develop a sense of the other, between the subjects it draws the reader’s attention to.

This enables the reader to become involved in the “circuit of understanding”, as Emmanuel Lévinas noted about the intrinsic and necessary openness that approximates an ethics that precedes the ontology of the relationship between human beings between experiencing subjects (5). Bodily gestures, motions, and the corporeal minutiae are ambiguous actions, and this uncertainty is demonstrated in the novel through the embodiments of its characters. For Lévinas, this uncertainty offers a fundamental premise for how an ethical relation may be developed with the other, taking into account the fears, the embodied anxieties, bodily and psychological insecurities that accompany the encounter with the other, unencumbered by the rationale of the knowledge-power circuitry that circumscribes events of war and conflict. The body, under trauma, offers a more “volatile” presentation, using the frame suggested by Elizabeth Grosz, who stated, “No part of the body is divested of all psychical interest without severe psychical repercussions” (81).

Sassoon, when he first encounters Rivers, for example, showed “no obvious signs of nervous disorder. No twitches, jerks, blinks, no repeated ducking to avoid a long-exploded shell” (Barker, Regeneration ch. 2). However, the signs are more subtle and also elicit a boldily response from those who encounter him, such as Rivers. For example, when the latter “saw Sassoon noticing [his] stammer” he “made an effort to speak more calmly” (ch. 7). Similarly, Wilfred Owen had “[a] stammer. Not as bad as some, but bad enough” and “Sassoon exerted himself to be polite” (ch. 8) in response. Viewed through the lens of corporeality in relations, the trauma narrative of the novel enacts the effects of the experience of war and attends in great detail the notion of a bodily-bound and body-driven aesthetic that draws greater attention to the vulnerability of the human subject, on the one hand, and a sense of breaching of the impregnability of the British war effort, and consequently, its insecure and anxious modernity, on another level.

The Great War period oversaw a number of anxieties played out in the context of colonialism and Empire. The “first modern war… created social, political, and economic problems for Great Britain” (Allegretti n.p.) and firmly initiated the shift of the world order. In these momentous contexts, the individual subject tends to be reduced to abstractions, which literature contests through its sustained focus on the bodily, affective and psychological shifts of the person, unveiled and disabused from the overwhelming entanglements that conflict gives rise to. Sassoon’s character gives thought to this reductive aspect of war when he confides in Rivers, “I just don’t think our war aims… justify this level of slaughter” (Regeneration ch. 2). Sassoon takes exception to the rationale of war and its romanticisation by “old men you see sitting around in clubs, cackling on about ‘attrition’ and ‘wastage of manpower’” (Regeneration ch. 2).

The narrative draws the attention of the reader to the corporeal effects of war, bodily significations that attempt to articulate the affective aspects of trauma. Fiction, within its imaginative scope, enables the approximation of experience that can be narrated, allowing for meaning-making in its orientation of the signs and significations of language. As the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy noted,

[L]iterature offers us one of three things: either fiction which is by definition bodiless, with its author whose body is absent… or bodies covered with signs… Literature mimes the body, or makes the body mime signification, or mimes itself as body. (Birth to Presence 193)

The corporeal, in its articulation, thus necessarily insists on “bodies covered with signs”, and by extension, significations of the body, whether narrated or imaged, also extends a plethora of meaning, of signs, beyond its bodily limits. The body in the text is thus not bound by its textual constructedness but informs of its social, political and corporeal constructs within the signification of language.

Embedded in this sense of the body is also its irreducibility to fixed meaning, especially concerning the abject body, which overwhelms the bounds of its signification. The body in the text thus exceeds its textuality. In the novel, for instance, death does not amount to corporeal erasure, in fact, the figures of corpses, “their twisted and blackened shapes,” with “[n]o way of telling if they were British or German” (Regeneration ch. 2) continued to supply the abject descriptions of war on the battlefield, or the corporeality of the soldiers under hospice care, continued to signify the war beyond the heavily contested strips of land that marked the frontlines of the Great War. Hence, when Rivers sees one of the admitted patients named Burns, he also sees the following: “collar bones and ribs were clearly visible beneath the yellowish skin… arms were goose-pimpled, though the room was not cold. The smell of vomit lingered on his breath” (Regeneration ch. 2) which creates a vivid image of the suffering subject.

To conclude this preliminary reading, corporeal affect is thus traced in the abject subject matter in the novel. “Burns,” for example, had been “thrown into the air by the explosion of a shell and had landed, head-first, on a German corpse, whose gas-filled belly had ruptured on impact. Before Burns lost consciousness, he’d had time to realize that what filled his nose and mouth was decomposing human flesh” (Regeneration ch. 2). Abject bodily experiences, at one level, and abject descriptions of war, on the other, emphasise the experiential gap between those traumatised by war and those who witness its effects, first hand. Thus, Rivers, confronted by the abject after-effects of war in the figure of Burns, even though the former “had become adept at finding bearable aspects to unbearable experiences, but Burns defeated him” (ch. 2).

The corporeality of suffering exceeds the capacity of sensible meaning, even as it appears fully unsheathed for the experiencing subject––Rivers can only be “plagued by questions… which in wartime, in an overcrowded hospital, were no use to him at all” (ch. 2). Rivers, at this point, speculates whether Burns is irrecoverable, which the suffering body all but indicates, even as the patient himself remains cogent and conscious. The abject description of war, wherein corporeality is threatened by constant erasure, serves to dramatise the body covered in signs, revealing that “[f]act and fiction,” are indeed, “…so interwoven” (Barker, Regeneration “Author’s Note”) that reconstructing the traumatic events surrounding World War I and the morbid undercurrents to modernity that preceded and followed it must be appended by an imaginative corollary to history.

Endnotes

[i] The paper has taken recourse to the “true magnum opus” (Anderson, “Book review”, n.p.) of Siegfried Sassoon’s life and experiences as a war poet, namely, Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend (2013). Citations that have been derived from e-book versions of texts have been appended with the acronym n.p. and the respective chapter name or number is mentioned in place of the page number.

[ii] While there are differences in the construct of the dichotomy by Plato and Descartes, they remain widely referred to “as the two most eminent dualists of our Western tradition” (Broadie 295) where “[b]oth philosophers argue that we consist of something incorporeal, whether one calls it ‘mind’ or ‘soul’, which for the time being is somehow united with a body that is part of the physical world” (295).

[iii] Emphases within quotations are author’s, unless specified.

[iv] As Pederson notes, this foundational aspect of literary approaches to trauma is based on Caruth’s adoption of the work of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists such as Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk.

[v] Original emphasis.

[vi] This distinction is attributed to “the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner” who “introduces the distinction in an essay from 1925—written in collaboration with the Dutch behavioral researcher Frederick Jacob Buytendijk” (Krüger 256).

[vii] Quoted from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “To the Warmongers”. As mentioned previously, in-text citations of the novel are from the e-book version, hence chapter number is used instead of page number as recommended by the MLA guidelines.[viii] Hobbes’ definition of violence that is rooted in the nature of man encompasses three kinds, namely, “competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory” (83).

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