Narratives of Trauma and the Production of Traumatized Narratives As Contexts for Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy
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NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA AND THE PRODUCTION OF TRAUMATIZED NARRATIVES AS CONTEXTS FOR PAT BARKER'S REGENERATION TRILOGY Ro berta Joan Jackson Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English December 2003 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgment. 1 Acknowledgments I would like to express my deep appreciation to the following people who have contributed their support and encouragement: Dr. Murray McGillivray, Dr. Susan Rudy, Dr. Jeanne Perreault, Dean Pierre-Yves Mocquais and Vice-President Ronald Bond from the University of Calgary; the Wednesday Circle, Audrey Andrews, JoAnn McCaig, and Elaine Park; Ingrid Gunby; Katherine Zelinsky; Bertha Jackson; Doreen Macdonald Zaharuk; Peter Zaharuk, and especially to my supervisor, Dr. Lynette Hunter. 11 Abstract Narratives of trauma and the production of traumatized narratives as contexts for Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy. This thesis investigates the production of a progressively traumatized narrative, beginning with narrative repression in Regeneration, moving to narrative dissociation in The Eye in the Door, and ending with narrative trauma in The Ghost Road. Analysis of these texts reveals that the author's meticulous and extensive historical research brings questions of historicity to the fore, since in these novels, more research does not shore up the received narratives, rather it undoes them, leaving gaps in what had been a coherent narrative of the past. The author's innovative narrative structure embodies an early twentieth century trauma theory within itself, then uses that structure to repress its own trauma narratives. These repressed narratives constitute a subtext of unintegrated material that requires a creative act of witnessing on the part of the reader in order to fill the missing material in. As each novel moves to encompass a higher level of trauma, the narrative structure becomes progressively tenuous. The individual trauma narratives repressed from Regeneration do not significantly threaten the empiric narrative; however, by The Eye in the Door, the social trauma of the two trials is barely contained by a badly dissociated narrative. By The Ghost Road, the narrative has split into two unconnected strands, each inflected with an allegory: Lewis Carroll's alternate worlds for Billy Prior's journey back to the front, and pre-war Melanesia for W.H.R. Rivers. Each of these allegories is a site of a British national trauma, Carroll signifying child abuse and Melanesia signifying the trauma of colonialism, and, by extension, Britain's post-imperial status. As the novel's narrative structure breaks up, visual artifacts of these cultural traumas are revealed, marking them as cultural trauma memories of still ongoing traumas. Ro berta Jackson Doctor of Philosophy December 2003 111 Table of Contents Acknowledgements . 1 Abstract . 11 Table of contents 111 Introduction . v Chapter 1: W.H.R. Rivers, an introduction . 1 Chapter 2: War neurosis and post-traumatic stress disorder . 40 Chapter 3: Narrative repression in Regeneration . 52 Epicritic narrative structure. 56 Chapter 4: Narrative dissociation in The Eye in the Door . .... 68 Narrative dissociation .70 The hidden history of social abuse .74 The poison plot trial .. ..... 78 The libel trial of Noel Pemberton Billing, MP ...... 89 Rivers's patients: Charles Manning, Siegfried Sassoon and Billy Prior 95 Conflict and Dream . .... 108 Oedipus Re[du]x ...................... 121 Chapter 5: Allegory, ethnography and narrative trauma in The Ghost Road. ... 127 Alfred Cort Haddon and the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait. ................ 130 Ethnographic allegory ................... 138 IV Rivers as failed allegorist: Eddystone Island in the Empire Hospital 144 "Savage" medicine. 151 "Alice in Hysterialand" 161 Visual artifacts of cultural trauma . .. 170 The photographic legacy of Charles L. Dodgson 175 Chapter 6: Witnessing the trilogy . 183 The eye in the jar. 183 I-witnessing . 184 The writer as witness. 191 The reviewers and critics as witnesses. 198 Conclusion . 214 Appendices. 219 Works Cited . 223 1 Chapter 1 W. H. R. Rivers, an introduction William Halse Rivers Rivers had one of the most wide-ranging careers in western science (Langham 50). His friend and anthropological colleague, Charles Seligman, wrote that "perhaps no man has ever approached the investigation of the human mind by so many routes" (qtd. in Langham 51). Rivers was a physician, experimental psychologist, ethnologist, anthropologist, and finally a psychiatrist. When he died, he was preparing to stand for the general election of 1922. Ian Langham sees Rivers as an example of "role-hybridization," which he defines as a process in which an individual, in moving from one profession or academic field to another, simultaneously relinquishes some of the attitudes and behaviours appropriate to the old role, and adapts some of the methods and techniques of the old role to the materials of the new one. (Langham 51). Typically, the role-hybrid begins in a "hard" scientific field, then moves towards disciplines that are "softer" and less scientific. In his various roles, however, Rivers never abandoned the theory that he and Henry Head proposed to explain the regeneration of nerves, published as "A Human Experiment in Nerve Division" in 1908. This hierarchical evolutionary theory influenced his writing and thinking until very near the end of his career, when he began to understand its implications for research and question its validity. 2 Rivers attended the University of London before entering St. Bartholomew's Hospital, which was one of three teaching hospitals attached to the University. He received his Bachelor of Medicine in 1886 and was the youngest graduate from Barts until recently (Slobodin 9). In 1887, he took a position as ship's surgeon, then tried private medical practice and a number of posts as resident physician at various hospitals. During his time at Barts and at the National Hospital for the Paralyzed and Epileptic, Rivers met two men who would become his mentors--the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson and the physiologist Michael Foster (Slobodin 11): Jackson adapted [Herbert] Spencer's over aching theory in tracing an evolutionary hierarchy of the nervous centers, finding that from the lowest to highest centers there is increasing complexity, increasing specialization, and increasing interaction .... The most important of Jackson's Spencerian concepts in neurophysiology were those of integration and dissolution; integration accompanies and signalizes [sic] evolution ... while dissolution is its reverse. In the individual, dissolution is "loss of control" by higher centers, or hyperactivity of lower ones .... Mental illness is dissolution, beginning in the highest of all nervous centers, "that is, in the anatomic substrata of consciousness" (Riese 1967:100). (Slobodin 12) Jackson's ideas underpin all of Rivers's thinking from neurology to psychiatry and social anthropology. Not until the end of his career do we see Rivers questioning them. 3 In 1892, Rivers left the National Hospital and went to Germany to attend lectures in experimental psychology and psychiatry. Towards the end of his stay, he wrote in a diary that he had decided to "go in for insanity" and experimental psychology when he returned to England (Slobodin 13). At this time, experimental psychology placed great emphasis on empiricism and would have been considered a "hard" discipline. River's seduction into anthropology began when he signed on as experimental psychologist with A. c. Haddon's 1898 expedition to the Torres Straits, although he continued his work in experimental psychology until about 1910 (Langham 51). Following the first world war, Rivers's interests again shifted towards "softer" disciplines, and during this time he produced his works on mental illness (Langham 51). From 1906 to 1930, "Rivers' work was probably the most talked about in academic anthropology" (Langham 50) .. Before Malinowski could make his mark, Rivers was recognized for his new approach to doing fieldwork. He was known for the development of the genealogical method, which gave "the confused and infant science of man a method" for uncovering the social organization of indigenous societies (50). A very conservative young man, Rivers was profoundly changed by his trips to Melanesia and by his experiences as a psychiatrist during the war when he treated both soldiers and officers for war trauma. Just before his sudden death in 1922, he was preparing to stand as a Labour Party candidate in the upcoming general election. The following discussion is a review of Rivers's writings and is intended to provide an outline of the ideas that informed his work. It breaks down into five sections: in the first section, "Neurology," I use references provided in Barker's 4 author's note to critique the theory he and Head extrapolated from their nerve regeneration experiment. In a critique of the experiment, Jonathan Miller argues that social factors blinded Rivers and Head to obvious flaws in their formulation, undermining their theory at what they would have thought was its strongest point--the claim to a scientific truth that is detached, rational,