Abstract
The present article analyses the first part of Pat Barker’s trilogy Regeneration (1991-1995), of the same title. It is set in the First World War and turns around the encounter between psychiatrist E. M. Rivers and War poet Siegfried Sassoon when the latter suffers from shell shock and publishes a complaint against the war politics of the British government. From the analysis of Sassoon’s Declaration, my main contention is that the novel addresses the liminal territory between “truth” and “lying” when representing and memorialising a traumatic event like WWI. In the second part, I delve into the poetics of psychoanalysis and (poetic) language as the narratives Barker uses to articulate the rapport between generations: fathers furthering a war in which their sons are involved. With this in mind, the paper analyses their oedipal conflict, as well as that between healer (Rivers) and trauma victim (Sassoon) both at a personal and national level.
Highlights
Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1995) gained its author international acclaim
The paper will delve into the poetics of “truth” and “lying”, and health and disease concerning war neurosis from Sassoon’s protest against war politics
Regeneration works as a liminal territory for current readers to bear witness to their own temporality and agency, which helps renegotiate the dynamics between discourses of memory, “lying” and “truth”
Summary
Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1995) gained its author international acclaim. Its first part, Regeneration (1991), was made into a film in 1997. The article will move into the liminal and blurring territory between science and affects in the context of the Oedipal battle of trauma victims and second-hand witnesses With all this in mind, when acts of remembrance for the victims, heroes and veterans of the Great War recur, my paper delves into Regeneration as a trauma-inflected literary reappraisal of the conflict. It is a “historical” trilogy; yet, the events recalled are so close (they constitute the beginning of the Western conception of a worldwide conflict and presentness) and so far (their first-hand witnesses being dead) that our identification with the victims is as powerful as our disengagement from a world our own and not our own any more. Sassoon and Owen use poetry to overcome trauma and re-articulate masculinity, emasculation and, Oedipal “conflicts” which transcend themselves
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