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Violence and Its Visual Representation in Pat Barker's Double Vision

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Violence and Its Visual Representation in Pat Barker's Double Vision ARTICLES WALTER KLUGE Violence and Its Visual Representation in Pat Barker's Double Vision No experience is valid without the accompanying image, Stephen thought, though he bought a postcard of the puffins too. (Double Vision, 293) Pat Barker's fictional world is not conceivable without the motif of violence. This starts with her early novels about working class women in the North of England and continues right to the latest of her published works. The serial killer in Blow Your House Down who murders prostitutes, the little girl raped in Union Street, or the old woman born in 1900 in The Century's Daughter, living in a derelict house due to be pulled down, who is killed by a juvenile gang, are only the most prominent examples. In her Regeneration Trilogy the horrors of the First World War on the Flanders front and their consequences for British soldiers are represented, and in Another World old Geordie still suffers from the memory of his brother he killed in the Great War, while his great grandson almost murders his half-brother with a stone throw. In Double Vision a new aspect is added to the motif of violence, viz. the problem of its visual representation. Both main characters wrestle with this question, but there are also additional parallels in their lives. Kate has lost her husband, Stephen's marriage has broken up. Both are obliged to cope with their loss and to find a new meaning in their lives (Monteith and Yousaf 2005, 284). Both suffer from a double trauma, because Kate was seriously hurt in a car crash and the first witness of the accident did not help her, and Stephen was subjected to examples of extreme violence in his work as a foreign correspondent covering wars (Kauffmann 2012, 83). Both characters are obliged by their professions "to play out their inner fears and concepts as part of their public identities, a context where both their privacy and the stability of the self are subject to extreme external forces" (Tew 2007, 197-98 ). Stephen covered wars as a journalist and, as a consequence, was traumatized by the violence which he had to observe; to stop this strain he resolved to quit his profession and to write a book on the visual representation of war, "the way wars are represented" (DV, 57). To ensure the necessary rest and quiet for this project he rents a cottage from his brother who lives in the rural vicinity of Newcastle, Pat Barker's home country. Quite close to this place lives Kate Frobisher, the widow of his friend Ben, a war photographer who frequently joined him in his appointments. Stephen plans to use Ben's pictures as examples and proofs of his arguments. On the other hand, Kate is a sculptress who has agreed to create a statue of the risen Christ and is busy completing this project. The similarity between war photographs and pictures of martyrs is a fact which has been stressed by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), a book Barker knows and quotes in her afterword to the novel. She uses it as a bracket between the two plot lines. Stephen reported on several wars and military conflicts during his professional duties and commented on them in his articles. He insists that he should Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 29.2 (September 2018): 105-126. Anglistik, Jahrgang 29 (2018), Ausgabe 2 © 2018 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 106 WALTER KLUGE not to be called a "war correspondent," because it was other people but not he who started the wars: They [i. e. the wars] were there to be covered. I didn't start them […] Why did I do it? Adventure, proving yourself, proving that I could take it – and once that wore off, which it does very quickly, being in the know. That sort of thing. […] There's plenty of good reasons for being a war correspondent. Witnessing. Giving people the raw materi- al to make moral judgments. (DV, 226-7) In a similar way Martin Bell, one of the journalistic models of Pat Barker, claims to work voluntarily in war areas. He reduces himself to the observation of facts, like Stephen. He wants to report the truth and therefore researches the political, social and historical contexts of the conflict in question, but in his autobiography In Harm's Way he admits to exceptions: I am not by temperament the campaigning sort of journalist. Reporting is what I do for a living. It is a job, not a jihad. But this [thousands of fleeing muslims on the road from Sarajevo] was clearly more than just another news story, and I knew that I had a re- sponsibility to these people beyond the mere professional business of describing what became of them. (Bell 1996, 22; see also 86; 142) The problem of foreign correspondents is the extraordinary character of the events they report on in the case of war: Winter Journals As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrances, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge or assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference. (Felman 1992, 5-6) Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) By his definition of objective reporting Stephen is comparable to historical foreign correspondents, as for instance Robert Fisk, who describes his professional work as follows: "We are witnesses and we write our testimony and we name, if we can, the for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution bad guys. Then it is for the world to act" (Fisk 2008, 398). Kate Adie goes a bit fur- ther in stressing that it is not sufficient just to deliver a "string of facts:" "If you learn of injustice, do you not reinforce the discovery with a sense that injustice ought not only be exposed, but dealt with?" (2002, 167). Pat Barker's Stephen worked in Ruan- da, Bosnia and Afghanistan and was an eyewitness of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, according to the author an icon "beyond language... be- yond our control" and therefore also beyond the "talking cure" of psychotherapy (Brannigan 2005a, 383). Quite fittingly Stephen states in a talk with a colleague dur- ing the law suit against Milosevic at the Hague: "I've had enough […] I think it is decision time. I am forty this year. I don't want to spend the rest of my life trotting off to other people's wars till I'm only fit for the knacker's yard" (DV, 133). In spite of Stephen's fairly conservative concept of keeping to the facts in his jour- nalistic work, he suffers from the traumatic consequences of his profession. With this motif Baker returns to the central theme of her Regeneration Trilogy and Another World. Stephen does not exhibit the severe symptoms of paralysis, blindness, amne- sia, vomiting, hallucinations or speech handicaps ranging from stuttering to complete speechlessness as the patients of the Craiglockhart Hospital in Regeneration.1 War neuroses were a frequent complaint during the Great War; in 1916 40% of the patients 1 See for instance the list of typical symptoms in Healy (1993, 92). Anglistik, Jahrgang 29 (2018), Ausgabe 2 © 2018 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) VIOLENCE AND ITS VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN PAT BARKER'S DOUBLE VISION 107 in British hospitals in France suffered from "shell shock" (Showalter 1985, 168; Bourke 1996, 109). In spite of the fairly moderate form of his malady Stephen was exposed to shock- ing experiences he did not understand and was not able to cope with and which perse- cute him and intrude upon his psyche. "Perhaps the most striking feature of traumatic recollection is the fact that it is not simply a memory […] while the images of trau- matic reenactment remain accurate and precise, they are largely inaccessible to con- scious recall and control" (Caruth 1995, 151; 1996, 2; Whitehead 2004, 12). Stephen did not only report on wars and other violent conflicts, but their pictures remain in his psyche against his will and reappear before his inner eye without conscious control. He suffers from cold sweat without apparent cause (DV, 49) and experiences "flash- backs" and nightmares. Exactly these visual impressions which make him ill are, next to the pictures photographers and cameramen produced about wars, provide the topic of the book he plans to write about the representation of violence, because they haunt him and burden his daily life. When he is offered a well-lit place for writing next to a window in his brother's cottage he turns it down: much too dangerous because of splintering glass in the case of gunfire. Stephen, long after his return to peaceful England, is "at war, in a survival mode, unable to come to terms with that original horror" (Farrell 1998, 11). As he walks through high grass in England he remembers skulls he stumbled over in the savannah. Past and present coincide for him, "[…] one is haunted or possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the compulsive repetitions of traumatic scenes in which the past returns […] in feed-back loops" (LaCapra 2001, 21). When Adam, the son of his brother, wants to keep the skull of a dead badger and his father Robert, a surgeon, states that it is quite difficult to cut off the head because of the strong sinews in the neck, Stephen recalls how easily machet- es did this [probably in the civil war in Ruanda] (DV, 41).
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