The Making of Torture in Pat Barker's Regeneration

Abstract

This article examines the depiction in Pat Barker's Regeneration of Dr. Lewis Yealland, notorious First World War disciplinary therapist. I demonstrate how Barker attunes her novel to contemporary discourses of torture and witnessing in order to update a long tradition of opposing Yealland with his contemporary, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, putting Regeneration at the intersection of lively debates about trauma, psychoanalysis, and the psychology of torture.

Keywords::

• torture
• trauma
• psychoanalysis
• W. H. R. Rivers

Notes

Notes

¹ A continuation of the reading of the novel that I perform here might take account of Barker's other First World War novels, Life Class (2007) and the recently published Toby's Room (2012), in order to track how her changing attitude toward the First World War reflects shifts in the way the war and the people who took part in it have been remembered over the last two decades.

² For a discussion of the questionable tendency of modern readers to understand Rivers as epitomizing liberal, progressive ideas, see Allan Young, especially 80.

³ Oddly, the concept of trauma Barker puts forward here, in contrast to Rivers's therapy, is actually more closely related to Pierre Janet's ideas than it is to Freud's. For a succinct comparison of Janet's and Freud's ideas, see van der Kolk and van der Hart.

⁴ Although, in fairness, Showalter does worry that “the reprogramming of the patient's consciousness was more profound and longer-lasting than in Yealland's electrical laboratory” (178).

⁵ Slobodin's account gives an overall impression of Rivers as a hardworking, innovative, and unconventional but rigorous academic, who took the views and ideas of his colleagues seriously, even when he found himself in disagreement with them. There is no reason to suspect otherwise in this particular case.

⁶ The fact that Callan's bed is “the last” in the ward is interesting from a narratological point of view: it is one of the many subtle and not-so-subtle devices Barker uses to build suspense leading up to the scene in which Callan is treated. By putting him in “the last” bed and stressing that Rivers was “aware of him” the whole time, Barker emphasizes Callan's significance not simply as the last in a series of equally interesting cases but as the culmination of the patients who have preceded him on the ward—the trophy case (no pun intended). The fact that something (bad) is going to happen to him seems inevitable, and this foreshadowing is excruciatingly borne out by the torture scene that follows.

⁷ There is a comparison to be made between Rivers and Barker's fictional character Billy Prior in this respect. Karen Knutsen argues that by virtue of being “unstuck in time,” Billy Prior (one of Rivers's patients introduced in Regeneration as suffering from nightmares, aphasia, and memory loss) is used by Barker “both to explicitly thematize attitudes to class within the fictional timeframe of the narrative, and to implicitly critique both past and contemporary class assumptions” (79). He is at the heart of Barker's cross-temporal engagement with sexuality, class, and gender issues, just as Rivers is central to Barker's cross-temporal engagement with psychoanalysis.

⁸ One is reminded of Dominick LaCapra's distinction between empathy and vicarious victimhood: “The response,” he writes, “of even secondary witnesses […] to traumatic events must involve empathic unsettlement”; that is, the witness must “feel” in some way the trauma of the victim in order for the witnessing to be effective. However, “a difficulty arises when the virtual experience involved in empathy gives way to vicarious victimhood, and empathy with the victim seems to become an identity” (699). Due to his extreme empathy, Rivers arguably crosses the line at this point.

⁹ For a discussion of “the transformation of the physician […] from healer to killer” (5) in the Nazi camps, from which the mad doctor figure gained much of its impetus, see Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.

¹⁰ On the subject of Callan's unwillingness to participate in the treatment, David Waterman, in Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality, observes that “Callan is the subject of a ‘scientific’ experiment for which he has not given consent, and it is exactly the absence of choice that qualifies this therapy as torture” (68).

¹¹ I have alluded several times to the similarities between Freud's and Rivers's psychoanalytic methodologies. In stark contrast to Yealland, both Freud and Rivers relied on getting their patients to articulate—to represent and make present—the traumatizing events that led to the formation of their symptoms, to work through their memories rather than repressing them in a bid to continue functioning “normally.” This is the “talking cure” practiced by both doctors. Where Rivers notably parted ways from Freud was in his skepticism regarding the seduction theory and—as Regeneration demonstrates through Rivers's treatment of Billy Prior—his reluctance to employ hypnosis as a method of memory recovery, except as a last resort.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Toby Smethurst

Toby Smethurst is a PhD student of English literature at Ghent University, Belgium. His thesis investigates the under-theorized potential of video games to represent psychological trauma in ways that “traditional” trauma-fiction media such as novels, films, or autobiographies cannot.