Regeneration - various extracts/articles

Regeneration – various extracts

Barker's Regeneration trilogy does not belong to the regenerative claims of cultural nostalgia (and this is why critics have often been hostile about her portrayal of the "facts" of the Great War). It displaces the scene of Englishness not by attacking what is remembered but by exploring the process of memory itself. Memory is the subject of the narrative, specifically the annulment of the past associated with the traumas of trench warfare commonly known as "shell shock." The first volume, Regeneration, focuses on the work of W.H.R.Rivers at the Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh and his attempts to restore or "regenerate" officers enough to return them to the front (treatment detailed in his book, Conflict and Dream). The title actually refers to a series of experiments that Rivers conducted with Henry Head on nerve regeneration, but Barker elaborates the physical process as a metaphor for Rivers' psychological therapies during the First World War. A close and critical reader of Freud, Rivers believed that the emergence of neurosis in the officers he treated was not the result of a single trauma but was part of an ongoing psychological struggle between an officer's desire to forget the horrors of war and his memory's insistence that these events are actually the substance of the what the war represents. In addition, Rivers also subscribed to the notion that shell shock was a product of trench warfare and extended periods of immobility coupled with fear. While Rivers' methods of treatment are historically interesting in their own right (particularly since his patients included Siegfried Sassoon, who also appears as a character in the trilogy) Barker imaginatively explores the subjective elements of the First World War and its symptoms, mixing real and invented characters and events in order to consider social conflicts and contradictions beyond the war psychosis that is its major theme. Not surprisingly for a social realist, Barker makes connections between the mutism, hysteria and nightmares precipitated by the experience of war and the social values and culture that pre-exist yet are foregrounded by this extreme situation. This is in part what I mean by "prior," which is a way to conceptualize how class and masculinity are figured into the very texture of the problem of representation. The conceit of "regeneration" is clearly that it depends on something that has already been generated, overdetermined, produced. It is not war that fashions a subject for annihilation, but the social that performs this task, and this is the process of memory that Barker is interested in writing into history.

Prior is not drawn as the locus of truth in the trilogy. Indeed, even in terms of class and masculinity much of Barker's social criticism emerges from the way she contextualizes his particular example. His girlfriend Sarah, for instance, works in a munitions factory and its depiction is just as good an indication of the war's complex articulations of class and gender:
The women sat at small tables, each table forming a pool of light under a low-hanging bulb. Apart from the work surfaces , the room was badly lit and so vast that its far end disappeared into shadow. All the women were yellow-skinned, and all, whatever their colouring, had a frizz of ginger hair peeping out from under the green cap. 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." (R 201)
[11] Sarah knows, like the other women, that the chemicals and dust in the factory are unhealthy but it means money and survival in the war and beyond. Other working-class women see this too. Beattie, now driving an ambulance and wearing short hair, is also a suffragette and a pacifist who helps "conchies" (conscientious objectors). She tells her daughter, "Hettie, for women, this is the first day in the history of the world." (E 101) This is one of the significant paradoxes of the war. Britain must generate a working-class male in accordance with its war aims: he is disciplined, patriotic, and aggressive. It must also produce officers who supervise these men and uphold the war machine's projected masculinity. But what happens? The men go off to war but the war itself undermines every formula of masculinity and class. The immobility of trench warfare, constant fear and massive casualties produce hysteria, a veritable emasculation that before the war had been designated a "female malady," as Showalter explains, of epidemic proportions. The proximity of bourgeois and proletarian males at the front confirms much class prejudice but challenges it too, not least because the conditions were intolerable to all. Meanwhile, working-class women prove to themselves and their communities that they can labor just as productively in the factory as they can in the household, and that this contradicts labor and sexual divisions deemed natural before the war.
http://www.genders.org/g35/g35_hitchcock.html
When we read a novel, we usually look for, and receive, a character with whom we can identify, a person who, even though he may be ordinary, we can call the hero, a person perhaps who learns or grows morally through the novel. With Barker it is very difficult to find a main character to latch on to and even to like. In the Regeneration trilogy we try to do it with Dr Rivers. He seems kind and sensible, but at the same time he is (to many modern eyes at least) morally weak, as he puts duty to country first and sends patients back to the front and to almost certain death despite moral scruples that the war might be wrong. We search for a strong lead from Sassoon, but again are confused when the noble pacifist agrees to go back to fight because his men need him.
Though Barker's books are not for the weak-hearted, there is the chance that we may learn from them not only more about how the human psyche reacts under pressure, but also more about ourselves. In the case of the Regeneration Trilogy, perhaps by facing up to the extremes of man's inhumanity to man and its aftermath we might better understand it and, just as importantly, never forget it, so that it stands as an example for humans to learn from. As Barker said, on receiving the Booker Prize in 1995 'The Somme is like the Holocaust. It revealed things about mankind that we cannot come to terms with and cannot forget. It can never become the past'.
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth15#criticalperspective

Pat Barker's brilliant novel "Regeneration' tells the stories of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and others who were treated for 'shell shock' during the first world war by the psychiatrist and anthropologist William Rivers at Craiglockhart hospital in Scotland. Rivers was influenced by Freud and in turn introduced Freud's work to the British medical establishment. He disagreed with Freud's view that neuroses were caused by sexual factors, but he argued that there was "not a day of clinical experience in which Freud's theory may not be of direct practical use in diagnosis and treatment". Freud provided a "working hypothesis", a "theory of the mechanism by which....experience not directly accessible to consciousness, produces its effect". Freud's principle merit, he felt, lay in his belief "in a process of active suppression of unpleasant experience" (that is to say, 'repression').
The poet Sassoon described this strange process in the following way:
"Shell-shock. How many a brief bombardment had its long-delayed after-effect in the minds of these survivors, many of whom had looked at their companions and laughed while the inferno did its best to destroy them. Not then was their evil hour, but now; now, in the sweating, suffocation of nightmare, in paralysis of limbs, in the stammering of dislocated speech. Worst of all, in the disintegration of those qualities through which they had been so gallant and selfless and uncomplaining - this, in the finer types of men, was the unspeakable tragedy of shell shock" (Siegfried Sassoon Sherston's Progress)
At Craiglockhart, a hospital for officers only, the patients were spared the electrical shocks and other tortures which were the usual form of treatment for sufferers of war neuroses. Instead they were greeted with sympathy and interest and encouraged to discuss their problems - an approach pioneered by Freud in his treatment of hysteria, of which 'shell shock' was a variant. Dream interpretation and the discussion of mental conflicts formed the staple subjects of conversation. Above all there was an attitude of conscious exploration (Why am I getting these terrors?, Why am I always seeing those things that happened in France? Why do I get so upset?). During an earlier experiment at Maghull hospital near Liverpool, one doctor called it 'a running symposium on the mind'. (Ben Shephard (2000) 'A War of Nerves' London: Jonathan Cape)
Although Freud himself wrote little about War Neuroses, the subject was taken up by others in his circle, which resulted in the publication of Psycho-Analysis And War Neuroses (1919). Freud wrote the introduction to the book. In the following passage he attempts to reconcile the existence of what he calls 'danger-neuroses' with his view that neuroses are caused by a conflict between repressed libidinal impulses and the 'ego instincts' of self preservation.
http://www.freud.org.uk/warneuroses.html