Gothic Misdirections: Troubling the Trauma Fiction Paradigm in Pat Barker’s Double Vision

ABSTRACT

Trauma theory has traditionally positioned itself as an ethical mode of critique. Theorists have since criticized the development, born out of trauma theory’s ethical imperative, of a dominant trauma fiction aesthetic seeking to mimic the inaccessibility of traumatic memory, advocating the use of genres like the Gothic to voice otherwise unspeakable subject matter. However, implicating the Gothic in trauma theory’s ethical project ignores the voyeuristic impulse that drives audiences to seek out the Gothic’s pleasurable excesses.  These tensions collide in Pat Barker’s Double Vision (2003), whose seemingly clichéd use of Gothic conventions belies a sophisticated metafictional interrogation of trauma fiction’s ethical complexities.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Dr Diana Austin for her insightful feedback on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ashlee Joyce http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1616-554X

Notes

1 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 3.

2 Hartman, 549.

3 Sontag, 13.

4 LaCapra, 182.

5 Radstone, 84.

6 Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 1.

7 Luckhurst, “Beyond Trauma: Torturous Times,” 12.

8 Ibid., 17.

9 Ibid.

10 Bomarito, 2.

11 Ibid.

12 Sedgwick, 13–4.

13 Luckhurst, “Beyond Trauma,” 17.

14 Spooner, 20.

15 Hogle, 18.

16 Beville, 8.

17 Barker, 119.

18 Koustinoudi, 24.

19 Mars-Jones, n. pag. In his review from the 17 August 2003 issue of The Guardian, Mars-Jones calls the shift in narrative perspective a gradual “usurpation of perspective”, noting with dismay that “Kate’s experience is somehow demoted or outflanked” by Stephen’s.

20 Barker, 64–5.

21 Baldick, xix.

22 Barker, 307.

23 Koustinoudi, 23.

24 Ibid., 24.

25 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 71.

26 Barker, 2; 1; 2; 174; 29; 3; 116.

27 Freud, 345.

28 Barker, 89.

29 Ibid., 32.

30 Haider, 59.

31 Leith, n. pag.

32 Barker, 8.

33 Ibid., 21.

34 Ibid., 143.

35 Ibid., 177.

36 Freud, 143.

37 Barker, 178.

38 Freud, 141–42.

39 Caruth references the work of neurobiologist Bessel A. van der Kolk, which focuses on observable neurobiological changes that occur within the brain of trauma victims and impede memory consolidation, to support her own theory of trauma. Traumatic memory is, for van der Kolk, experienced much like a foreign and unassimilable body lodged in the victim’s consciousness. Cf. van der Kolk.

40 Spooner, 30.

41 Ibid., 27.

42 Barker, 163.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid., 163; 164; 163.

45 Barker, 163.

46 Southward, n. pag.

47 Aguirre, 12.

48 Barker, 164.

49 Aguirre, 6.

50 Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 1.

51 Koustinoudi, 24.

52 Cohen, “Museums of the Mind,” 883.

53 Barker, 55.

54 Schafer, 44.

55 Barker, 214.

56 Ibid., 215.

57 LaCapra, 45.

58 Barker, 59.

59 Ibid., 58.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid., 53.

63 Ibid., 94.

64 Ibid., 55.

65 LaCapra, 45.

66 Barker, 265.

67 Ibid.

68 LaCapra, 45.

69 Barker, 60.

70 Ibid., 165.

71 Ibid., 60.

72 Ibid.

73 Modlinger and Sonntag, 10.

74 Ibid., 9.

75 Sontag, 75.

76 Burke, 12.

77 Sontag, 78.

78 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 8.

79 Sedgwickx, 13.

80 LaCapra, 182.

81 Ibid.

82 Radstone, 88.

83 LaCapra, 183.