Reading behind the lines

Postmemory in contemporary British war fiction

Natasha Alden

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526102614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This book takes the concept of postmemory, developed in Holocaust studies, and applies it for the first time to novels by contemporary British writers. Focusing on war fiction, Alden builds upon current scholarship on historical fiction and memory studies, and extends the field by exploring how the use of historical research within fiction illuminates the ways in which we remember and recreate the past.Using postmemory to unlock both the transgenerational aspects of the novels discussed and the development of historiographic metafiction, Alden provides a ground-breaking analysis of the nature and potential of contemporary historical fiction. By examining the patterns and motivations behind authors' translations of material from the historical record into fiction, Alden also asks to what extent such writing is, necessarily, metafictional. Ultimately, this study offers an updated answer to the question that historical fiction has always posed: what can fiction do with history that history cannot?

2

Regenerating the past: fact and
fiction in the Regeneration trilogy

The way in which Pat Barker uses historical source material in her trilogy of First World War novels has fuelled a considerable amount of debate amongst historians and literary critics alike. As Barker herself says in the ‘Author’s Note’ to the first novel in the trilogy, Regeneration, ‘fact and fiction are so interwoven in this book that it may help the reader to know what is historical and what is not’.¹ In distinguishing between the fact and fiction in the novel, Barker acknowledges that the trilogy is a hybrid mixture of verifiable history and fictional interventions. This chapter addresses the question of what kind of fiction – specifically, what kind of historical fiction – Barker is writing by looking closely into ‘what is historical and what is not’ in Barker’s use of source material across the trilogy.

Pat Barker was born in 1943, and might reasonably be expected to show a greater interest in the war which shaped her childhood rather than the war preceding it, as many authors born in the war and postwar period do. Her biography gives us a clue as to why Barker’s postmemory relates not to her parents’ war but her grandparents’; by Hirsch’s definition, postmemory differs from a simple engagement with any period not your own by being ‘distanced from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection’.² Barker’s first-hand – and thereby quasi-second-generation – experience of the First World War came from living with her grandparents, rather than her mother, from the age of seven. She has traced her fascination with the First World War to growing up with William Dunne, her step-grandfather, who had fought in that war and had been deeply affected by it. When asked what had originally drawn her to write about the First World War, Barker replied:

A long-standing interest in the First World War. My grandfather . . . fought in that war, and my stepfather . . . also fought in that war. He was in the trenches as a boy of fifteen. So for me, in a sense, that was the war in terms of the conversations I had on a day-to-day basis. My father, of course, was involved in the Second World War, and my uncle, but these were not such salient people in my life, in my childhood. So the experience of the older war was paradoxically closer to me, in that sense. My grandfather had a bayonet wound that was something I noticed particularly as a small child, and he didn’t talk about it . . .³

On winning the Booker Prize in 1995 for the third novel in the trilogy, The Ghost Road, Barker’s acceptance speech made explicit the link between growing up with a veteran of the war and her later interest

[My step-grandfather] was the one who made me interested in the war. He was cheerful, wily, very short-tempered, tight with money and a lifelong Tory who never questioned whether the war was just or not. In my work, of course, I continually pose that question.⁴

Barker acknowledges the link between her childhood and her adult interests while also drawing her audience’s attention to the difference between her point of view and her step-grandfather’s. While Dunne’s experiences clearly inform her view of the war (his bayonet wound, for example, is echoed in Geordie’s identical wound in Another World), her interpretation of the war is shaped by cultural and political issues of the late twentieth century rather than the early.

One such issue which places Barker firmly in the last years of the century is her interest in trauma, particularly trauma arising from conflicts around gender and class. Her earlier novels, such as Union Street, Blow Your House Down and Liza’s England portray the lives of working-class women in the north and north-east of England across a period extending from the First World War to the Yorkshire Ripper murders in the 1980s.⁵ Barker depicts individual lives ruined by poverty and domestic conflict; men and women trying to survive both grand tragedy and the littler, longer tragedy of penury and disenfranchisement. Again, we can see the genesis of this in Barker’s own background; her novels are almost always set in the industrial north-east (Barker grew up in Teesside) and her characters’ lives, from Liza in Liza’s England, born in 1900, to the 1990s academic Nick in Another World, and influenced by the post-industrial decline of the region and the dispossession of the working classes. In terms of gender, Barker shows us how women in this world have to fight to survive – usually metaphorically, sometimes literally – against poverty, violence, and their powerlessness to escape their surroundings. In Blow Your House Down, one character, a prostitute who has taken the job in preference to a safer but much less lucrative one in a chicken factory, is told by the police not to try and cover up for anyone she might suspect of being the Yorkshire Ripper, because ‘the next girl he attacks might be somebody decent’, that is to say, not a prostitute like her.⁶

It is not a long step from an interest in this kind of trauma and powerlessness to the First World War. According to the prevailing view of that war as hugely wasteful of life, the war rendered large numbers of people passive, and caused extreme suffering. Barker is interested in the impact the war had on British society at the time, but, more particularly, in how that reaction resonates for us now:

I chose the First World War because it’s come to stand in for other wars, [and] the sort of idealism of the young people in August 1914 in Germany and in England, it was a very idealistic response. They really felt this was the start of a better world. And the disillusionment, the horror and pain that followed that. I think because of that it’s come to stand for the pain of all wars . . . what is still relevant today is the attitudes of people to the war and to the suffering the war costs, whereas the ideology of the time seems so dated. There were four Empires desperately trying to maintain their status in the world. And to go into the politics of that would not be of any interest for the people of today, when we all accept that imperialism is a bad idea anyway.⁷

Societies under stress feature repeatedly in Barker’s work. In the case of the Regeneration trilogy, a very particular example of societal conflict provided the genesis of the whole trilogy. The novels spring from Barker’s interest in the anthropologist and psychologist W.H.R. Rivers’s difficulties in reconciling his job as a military psychologist (dedicated to sending men with shellshock to recover so that they can rejoin the fighting), with his ambivalence about the justness of the war. Rivers himself is relatively well known due to his appearance in his most famous patient’s memoirs. That same patient, Siegfried Sassoon, intensified Rivers’s sense of conflict when the anti-war arguments he put forward in his therapy sessions with Rivers began to sway Rivers’s opinion.

‘It was the relationship between Rivers and Sassoon which was the genesis of Regeneration,’ says Barker. ‘I read the war poetry at school but that would not have been enough to make me want to write about the First World War. If anything it would have been a deterrent because obviously it’s been so powerfully written about . . . But I didn’t feel that the experience of shell shock had been written about in quite this way. I was interested in the dilemma of the doctors who had to send people back – which is only a dilemma, of course, if you are sensitive and compassionate.’⁸

Barker’s interest in Rivers came from two sources, one neurological and one literary:

Her husband David, a professor of zoology at Durham University, had told her about neurological experiments Rivers had conducted: ‘But I didn’t realise the Rivers he was talking about was the Rivers Sassoon had met at Craiglockhart, and I didn’t connect that Rivers with the anthropologist. When I put the three of them together it started getting interesting. What fascinated me was the interaction between Rivers and Sassoon,’ – Rivers argued that the war was worth fighting, Sassoon that it was unnecessarily prolonged – ‘each tried to persuade the other, and each succeeded. It gave me the shape of the book.’⁹

Regeneration, the first novel in the trilogy, is structured around Sassoon’s time at Craiglockhart Military Hospital for Officers, near Edinburgh, where he was treated by Rivers and met Wilfred Owen. Barker’s choice of these individuals, and this particular situation, is revealing of more than her interest in conflicts in society, though; to understand why Barker might have been aware of, and interested in, these people, it is helpful to look at Owen’s and Sassoon’s reception history, and their place in the war’s wider cultural history.

Sassoon and Owen dominate the literary canon of the First World War, and their writing and biographies have come to represent, for many people, academics and the public alike, the typical experience of the war. Hynes defines the story Owen and Sassoon are seen to embody as the ‘Myth of the War’: idealistic young men went to fight in pointless and stupid battles planned by incompetent generals, and came back – if they came back at all – shell shocked and embittered.¹⁰

In his influential study, Hynes outlines the evolution of our current understanding of the war, tracing literary responses to it from 1919 until the 1930s. The ‘myth’ he argues, is a product of the 1930s war books such as Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Sassoon’s three volumes of memoirs, and Blunden’s Undertones of War, amongst others.¹¹ Even if the authors of these books had not intended them to be read as anti-war novels (as in Graves’s case), the horror of the conditions they describe over-rode any ambivalence towards the war in the texts as received by the public. Recent scholarship on the reception history of the literature of the First World War has confirmed Hynes’s belief that the work of Sassoon, Owen and other war poets was increasingly neglected and unpopular until the post-1945 period, when their fortunes changed dramatically. Brian Bond, a military historian, suggests that ‘[current] popular notions of the First World War . . . were largely shaped in the 1960s, in part reflecting the very different concerns and political issues of that turbulent decade, but in part resurrecting “anti-war” beliefs of the 1930s’.¹² This chapter examines how Barker’s work stands in relation to these received ideas about the First World War, and how she uses historical material to investigate both contemporary and modern themes. Any analysis of the historicity of the Regeneration trilogy must account for the prominence of issues such as gender, sexuality and class. What I argue is that Barker is not appropriating the past to explore modern concerns, but that what attracted her to Rivers’s and Sassoon’s meeting were the aspects of it which still resonate today; only by examining Barker’s use of source material can we fully understand the extent to which a historically verifiable version of events relating to the historical characters can sit alongside a retelling of the same story which dwells on more modern concerns. One critic of Barker’s use of history, Martin Löschnigg, partially excuses what he sees as Barker’s historical inaccuracy by saying that ‘fiction begins with the novelist’s freedom to invent a psyche for her characters’; this chapter examines how Barker uses this freedom in relation to the source material she uses, showing how she treats different historical characters differently according to how much is known about them.¹³ Rivers, for example, left very few personal documents after his death, and is a different kind of fictional creation to Barker’s Sassoon and Owen, about whom much more is known. My approach is therefore two-fold. I show how thematic interests shape Barker’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Regenerating the past: fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy
• ‘In the beginning was the word; and to that it came back in the long run’: Briony Tallis and Atonement
• Lesbian postmemory: haunted ‘history’ in The Night Watch
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index