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.

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... beyond our control" and therefore also beyond the "talking cure" of psychotherapy (Brannigan 2005a, 383). Quite fittingly Stephen states in a talk with a colleague during 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 journalistic 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).

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 shocking 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 traumatic reenactment remain accurate and precise, they are largely inaccessible to conscious 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 "flashbacks" 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 machetes did this [probably in the civil war in Ruanda] (DV, 41). Memories of the same war are the origins of a nightmare Stephen lives through again and again in which he lies buried in a mass grave, the blood from the corpses above him running over his body, while he is forced to lie quite immobile: "Being buried alive […] only the knowledge that […] if he moved or stirred, the people up there, the people he never saw, were waiting with knives and guns and machetes to finish the job" (DV, 72). Talking to his new girlfriend Justine Stephen diagnoses these symptoms coldly and with clinical precision: Nightmares. The usual. If you want the label – post-traumatic stress disorder. I don't know. I decided in the end it [i. e. therapy] just wasn't for me. After all, nobody forced me to go to these places. Some of them I actually begged to go to – it was my idea. And if you bring it on yourself, like that, I don't think you have any right to complain. You've certainly no right to expect sympathy. (DV, 84) According to this (non-professional) diagnosis Stephen inflicted this complaint on himself. Kate Adie, a well-known foreign correspondent, claims, that only journalists who carry “quite a lot of unresolved personal baggage”, develop this illness, while the majority of her colleagues stay "firmly in the commonsense groove" (Adie 2008, 12). This diagnosis is correct in as far as Stephen's experience of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York coincides with the discovery of the infidelity of his wife. On the other hand, his major traumatic shock, the confrontation with a raped and murdered girl in the streets of Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia, is definitely earlier. It is clearly a fact that many foreign correspondents, Kate Adie included, had to endure horrible experiences which obsessed them for the rest of their lives. John Simp-

son confessed that the massacre in Palestine refugee camps near Beirut by Christian militias burdened his consciousness for years to come. It was "the biggest news story" of his career, but "I would willingly have exchanged my primacy for peace of mind and the chance to sleep at night" (Simpson 1998, 284). Barker has studied the books of these journalists, as she acknowledges in the afterword to the novel. Stephen at least knows his diagnosis and realizes that he has to undergo a sort of "de-briefing" to prevent the repetition of his nightmares immediately after he has gone to sleep. Espe- cially one traumatic episode recurs again and again in "flashbacks," the discovery of a dead girl in Sarajevo. This uncontrollable recurrence of experiences is a typical feature of traumata (Caruth 1996, 11; 57-58; LaCapra 2001, 89). Stephen transmits his report to London from the television center of the besieged town just like every day and misses the safe transport back to the Holiday Inn in the UN armoured personnel carrier. He has to walk, a dangerous thing to do in this war. John Simpson includes a very impressive description of exactly this "nocturnal walk" in Strange Places, Ques- tionable People (1998, 431). As Stephen starts off on this journey, which has to cross "Sniper's Alley" where Serbian riflemen with their telescopic sights fire at any passer- by, he is joined by his friend Ben, the press photographer. He is quite cross with him as a single pedestrian has a better chance to get safely across if the sniper is inatten- tive; the second man is doubly in danger. With their body armour and their flak jackets they feel clumsy and slowed-down. This beginning is the ideal medium for the following traumatic experience, because fear, helplessness, loss of control and mortal danger are the perfect conditions for a serious psychic injury (Farrell 1998, 5). Just before they come to the dangerous intersection they press their backs against the wall of a house and find the door unlocked. In the light of their torch they see a stairwell and hear noises from above: In the corner of the landing, away from the danger of flying glass, a girl huddled on a mattress. She didn't speak or cry out or try to get away. Ben swung the beam along the wall till it found her face. Eyes wide open, skirt bunched up around her waist, her splayed thighs enclosing a blackness of blood and pain. (DV, 52) Stephen tries to close her dead eyes, but cannot bring himself to touch her face, and pulls down her skirt instead. The sight is doubly shocking not only because of its brutality, but also because of "the very public dishonouring of the private, the personal and what should be tender and meaningful" (Tew 2007, 198). The two friends do not know why the girl was raped and killed: No way of telling whether this was a casual crime – a punter wanting his money back, a drug deal gone wrong – or a sectarian killing linked to the civil war. Increasingly crime and war shaded into each other, Stephen thought. No difference to their victims, certainly, and not either in the minds of their perpetrators. Patriot, soldier, revolutionary, freedom fighter, terrorist, murderer […]. (DV, 53) Stephen and Ben proceed on their way, quite conscious that they can do nothing; the girl is dead and the police probably not interested in investigations – too many corpses littering the streets of Sarajevo. Safely back in the Holiday Inn Stephen relax- es, eating, drinking and talking to colleagues, but the following night he already dreams of the girl lying next to him or even under him in his bed, "as dry and insatia- ble as sand" (DV, 55). Since this night the picture of the girl has been staying with him, although he saw even worse things: "She was waiting for him, that's the way it felt. She had something to say to him, but he never managed to listen, or not in the

right way" (DV, 55). In this way the dead Bosnian woman develops into Stephen's leading image of all wars and into his major trauma. He usually succeeds in suppress- ing her memory during daytime, but this is offset by her dominance during his sleep; this pattern accords with the interpretation of dreams by Rivers, the historical model for the psychiatrist with the same name in Barker's Regeneration Trilogy (Whitehead 1998, 680). The main problem with Stephen's traumata is, according to Barker, their visual character, which produces "immense subversive images," which "simply destroy people […] it doesn't become something that people can assimilate and control […]. It's simply there, and the horror is just a fact" (Brannigan 2005a, 384). With this definition she is in accord with current medical teaching: "the memory of one particular event comes to taint all other experiences," as L. Vickroy points out in Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (2002, 12). As long as these experiences have to be relived without control in the person's present life, they remain destructive; only by being transformed into language and stored in memory can they be assimilated and coped with (Whitehead 1998, 690; Troy 2005, 89ff.). Stephen will be persecuted by the trauma of the dead girl for years, for instance at the moment of the first kiss he gives to Justine, the au-pair of his brother. It is typical for traumata to interfere with basic human relationships (Herman 1997, 51). A repetition of overwhelming force occurs when Stephen observes burglars robbing the farmhouse of his brother just as Justine enters the building from the opposite side. On the basis of his trauma he is instantly convinced that Justine will be also raped and killed and that he will be unable to help because he is too far away on the top of the next hill: All the way down the hillside he'd flashbulbs exploding in his head. So many raped and tortured girls – he needed no imagination to picture what might happen to Justine. It would not have surprised him to find her lying like a broken doll at the foot of the stairs, her skirt bunched up around her waist, her eyes staring. (DV, 250) Traumatized people – this is the main tenet of research – live in constant fear that the catastrophe they experienced will repeat itself (Laub 1992, 67). When Stephen eventually reaches the house and sneaks into it he grabs a bronze statuette and hits the first criminal he meets, firmly resolved to kill him. In the history of trauma treatment this reaction is known as "berserking," massive waves of aggression on the basis of the original experience which lead to overreaction (Farrell 1998, 6-7). Stephen's resolution to hand in his resignation as a foreign correspondent, to give up his permanent position with its regular salary and to write a book instead, is the first step to cure his post-traumatic stress disorder. To find the leisure to write he decides to retire to the countryside; this rural retreat was considered a cure of "shell shock" as early as the 'Great War.' In fact this could only work with officers as members of the middle or upper class, who had experienced a peaceful countryside during their childhood; common soldiers were usually drafted from the working class who had grown up in the industrial midlands and therefore were generally familiar with a milieu similar to the battlefield (Brannigan 2005b, 100). Barker alludes to this concept already in The Eye in the Door and lets Billy Prior, himself an offspring of working class parents, state that only gentlemen could believe in the curative effect of the countryside (Barker 1994, 115; see also Szczekella 2013, 33). A stay in the country was part of the treatment of war neuroses during the First World War in England; doctors sent these patients to work on farms or simply to live with villagers (Leese 2002, 61-62). Similar ideas cross Stephen's mind when travelling north to his brother:

A man gets off a train, looks at the sky and the surrounding fields, then shoulders his kitbag, sets off from the station, trudging up half-known roads, unloading hell behind him step by step. It's part of English mythology, the image of the soldier returning, but it depends for its power on the existence of an unchanging countryside. Perhaps it had never been true, but only been a sentimental urban fantasy, or perhaps something deeper – some memory of the great forest. Sherwood. Arden. (DV, 201) By alluding to the locality of the ballads celebrating Robin Hood and to the Forest of Arden as the opposite to the corrupt court in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Stephen already distances himself partly from the stereotype of the English countryside as a cure against war neuroses. Nevertheless he believes in the beginning in the healing properties of healthy food, good air, sound sleep and a reduction of his drinking hab- its. He knows his dead friend Ben followed the same method when returning from his missions. As Kate, his widow, explains: "Buried himself in the country. He didn't see people when he came home. He just went to ground" (DV, 155). The landscape of Northern England and his brother's old farm building, "a grey stone house […] fitting so seamlessly with the surrounding fields that it scarcely seemed to have been made by human hands" (DV, 39) seem to confirm his hopes. Even the cottage he rents, with its comfortable rooms and small garden protected by a high hedge, fits the pastoral concept. A first warning is delivered by the hoot of an owl he hears in the first night. He waits for the death cry of the prey which does not follow, but occurs later when he watches the bird searching a snow-covered pasture: A barn owl […] was hunting, quartering the frozen fields, relentless in its precision. Nothing that lived and moved could hope to escape its beak and feathered claws […]. At last it detected movement and stooped to the kill, scattering snow, huge wings flap- ping and beating the air as it struggled to lift off, something small and warm wriggling in its claw. (DV, 104) Justine calls the incident "bloody horrible”. The call of the owl, which has its nest in the trees up the hill behind his cottage, reminds Stephen of the old proverb that it indicates the violent death of a person, but he rejects this idea quickly: […] nobody had died here […] no violent deaths since the union of England and Scot- land brought the long centuries of border raiding to a close. No skulls in the grass, no girls with splayed thighs and skirts around their waists, revealing what had been done to them before they died, even in the early stages of decomposition. No smell of decay clinging to the skin. (DV, 49) But Stephen is only partly comforted by the fact that border raids ended centuries ago. The red-haired sailors who operate the excursion boat to the Farne Islands re- mind him immediately of the medieval Vikings; their first raid was aimed at Lindis- farne monastery close by in the North. Collecting his nephew Adam from school he finds to his astonishment that even ten-years-old pupils wait for their parents, when he and his brother were allowed to walk home on their own at the age of eight. The gardener and help of the sculptress Kate is a criminal on probation who killed an old lady when still a child, and the novel starts with Kate's car crash which could easily end in her death or paraplegia because the first witness who arrives at the accident only looks, but does not help. Fittingly the story ends with a burglary, in the course of which Justine is severely beaten up. Worse consequences are only stopped by Ste- phen's intervention. Double Vision is defined by a "liminal setting" which contradicts

the stereotype of rural innocence and harmony (Brannigan 2005a, 376; Monteith and Yousaf 2005, 290). All this is unknown to Stephen on his arrival. Nevertheless, he quickly realizes that the countryside is not a safe and healthy environment. On the drive from the stations he sees dead rabbits and pheasants on the shoulder of the road. Later he finds baby rabbits hopping fearlessly across the tarmac, "quivering bags of blood" (DV, 87), which can easily find their death under the wheels. Arriving at the house of his brother he is welcomed by his nephew who has dragged home the corpse of a badger, its fur still warm, the yellow eyes staring angrily (cf. Monteith and Yousaf 2005, 292). A few days later Stephen runs over a fox when taking Justine, his brother's au-pair, home in the evening. This is only the usual road-kill in a forest area. But in fact the county (in reality the whole of Great Britain) suffers from the consequences of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, which veterinarians, with the help of the police and the army, tried to eliminate by systematically killing and burning cattle, sheep and goats, "the burning pyres of animal carcasses dotted across Barker's Northumbrian landscape" (Brannigan 2005a, 360). From the top of the hill Stephen regularly crosses when jogging he can still see three large areas where the corpses were incinerated (DV, 203). Robert tells him about the stench of the burning bodies which hung over the area for weeks; Angela, a neighbour, still mourns the loss of her four sheep who kept the grass short on the local churchyard. She called them Thomas, Rufus, William and Harry, her "boys", who followed her call bleatingly whenever she appeared. She defended them vigorously against the police when they came to take them away, "displaying her knickers to the whole nation" on TV (DV, 16). The farmers lose their income, not yet daring to restock their farms, footpaths are closed, at the stable doors mats saturated with disinfectant lie rotting and weekenders stay away. Restaurants and shops shut down because customers fail to come, even the sawmill in the forest runs out of business (Brannigan 2005b, 156; Szczekella 2013, 36). The social order of the village proves to be hollow; the vicar's wife has run away and he is now divorced; the marriage of Robert and Beth is near its end. Beth cannot forgive her husband that he is working with cells from human embryos and compares him to Dr. Mengele, the infamous Nazi-doctor experimenting on prisoners in the concentration camps (DV, 205). He has frequent affairs on his travels to medical congresses and she only works full-time as a hospital administrator because of the social recognition it conveys; she would rather be a gardener with a proper greenhouse. Their son Adam suffers from Asperger disease and is unable to feel empathy towards other people. He is mobbed in school and thinks he deserves it because he feels "weird" (DV, 240). Thus he serves as a parallel character to Peter Wingrave, who arrives first at the site of Kate's accident, but does not help (Brannigan 2005a, 380). Asked by Stephen which animals he loves best Adam answers without hesitation: "dead ones" (DV, 45). Stephen wins his affec- tion when he brings him owl pellets [i.e. the indigestible parts of their prey owls re- gurgitate]. Adam immediately separates the tiny skulls from other bones, fur and feathers and starts to work out a statistics of the owl's diet. The hollowness of the social order becomes fully apparent when Justine is beaten up by burglars: "She might feel happy again, but she would never again feel safe" (DV, 254). When looking at the photographs Ben took Stephen finds many pictures showing untouched nature: They were supposed to be peaceful, these photographs, a break from the subject he spent most of his life pursuing, but they weren't. You always knew, looking at these empty fields, these miles of white sand with marram grass waving in the wind, that

somewhere close at hand, but outside the frame, a murder had been committed. (DV, 64-65) More and more he is obliged to acknowledge that the violence he became familiar with in Bosnia is also present in Britain (Tew 2007, 20). Within a few weeks Stephen realizes that his hope to recuperate from his illness just by the influence of country life is an illusion. In a talk to the village rector, Jus- tine's father, he sketches a program to surmount his post-traumatic stress syndrome: "'Create something. Almost anything. Get your body moving. Have sex.'- 'Sex? Not love?' – 'Love is a bonus'" (DV, 214). With the addition of sex to his scheme Stephen is in accordance with trauma research which stresses the importance of human relations in the treatment of the disease (Vickroy 2002, 22). Creating "anything" develops into a book on the visual representation of war which has to be more than the usual collection of amusing anecdotes some minor journalists might turn out, and sex occurs almost automatically with Justine. In the beginning he thinks her a girl still at school, even though her well-developed bosom warns him; she turns out to be nine- teen, finished school the previous year, passed her finals with honours and has been accepted as a medical student by the University of Cambridge. After their first kiss they proceed quickly to intimate relations, Justine generally taking the initiative. Ste- phen protests against this: He found the sex extraordinary, like nothing he'd ever experienced. Foreplay? He want- ed to croak as Justine got over her leg the second time that night. What happened to Romance? OK, he found the idea of impersonal sex as exciting as the next man, but he didn't want it in his own bedroom night after night with somebody he knew. (DV, 138) Nevertheless they quickly fall into the speech routine of an old married couple. The beginning of a deeper connection becomes visible as Justine shows symptoms of raging jealousy when Beth and Robert give a dinner party, Stephen is seated with Kate and she is put next to a graduate student of Robert's. Ruefully she complains later to Stephen: "Nobody loves me." She rejects his tepid reassurance that she is loved by her father and himself: "You don't have to say that" (DV, 223). That he really loves Justine Stephen realizes when he is afraid to have lost her. From the top of the hill he sees that she enters Robert's house without apprehension when it is being robbed by burglars. He is convinced that she will be raped and killed: That moment, careering down the steep hillside, knowing that however hard he ran he wouldn't get there in time, had taught him more about his feelings for Justine than months of introspection could have done. All along the back of his mind he'd been aware of his priorities in life rearranging themselves without any conscious effort on his part. You thought you cared about that? Don't be silly. The girl. She's what matters. (DV, 265) For the first time Stephen feels clearly that it is not the dead girl from Sarajevo, but Justine alive who is the most important person in his life. His traumatized past loses its power over him and he now has a positive future, which marks an essential step in his healing process (Herman 1997, 133; LaCapra 2001, 22). Justine and Stephen celebrate this newly discovered relation by an outing to the Farne Islands she used to visit regularly with her parents. It is the breeding period of the sea birds and the islands are a favorite place to visit for people in the vicinity. Puffins with their big beaks, round bodies and decorative feathers are the most popu- lar birds; even Stephen feels compelled to buy a picture postcard of them, although he

is highly critical of the validity of photographs. Nevertheless, it is a celebration of the new life he plans to start with Justine. Therefore, he feels resistance instead of resignation when the boat loses its course in the fog and scrapes quite audibly across rocks under the surface: "This is a wake-up call. Or a go-to-sleep call, his brain replied, indifferent. He recognized the indifference, the feeling of his life balanced like a feather in the palm of his hand. But then he looked at Justine and thought, no. Not yet" (DV, 295). The penultimate scene of the novel underlines this change. Justine waits naked for him in bed in the hotel room and asks: " 'Do you love me?' – 'Yes.' – 'Good. I love you too'" (DV, 302). The other part of Stephen's plan how to fight his post-traumatic stress disorder is to create something. He has decided to write a book about the "representation of war," by which he means its description in pictures. He worked as a journalist who wrote reports about wars; his editors often combined them with photographs by other people. Thus, he was a person who was not forced to go right up to the front line; camera men and photographers often sneered about this group of colleagues who could gather their information by interviews and telephone calls from the safety of their hotel rooms. But Stephen was not the sort of reporter who keeps away from danger and approaches combat areas on his own or in the company of photographers, for instance his friend Ben. In this way his articles and the pictures of his colleagues enter into a closer relation; they work as proofs, as illustrations, as starting-points and generally as a kind of verbal-pictorial dialogue. By writing his book Stephen translates his traumata into language; they are shifted from the present into the edited past of his memory. John Simpson, one of the sources Pat Barker used, describes this procedure and its healing effect on his psyche: "Writing did something else for me, I found; it cauter- ized what emotional wounds I suffered in my travels. When friends of mine were killed, when I watched a public hanging or the judicial chopping off of a right hand, writing about it exorcised the ghosts" (Simpson 1998, 429). Stephen knows that the reading public expects a collection of episodes to the tune of "Amusing Mass Mur- derers I Have Met" (DV, 118) and feels uneasy in respect of his chosen job: "More than an unshelled nut lying on the ground, any hope of future germination a lot less convincing than the prospect of being snuffled up by a passing pig" (DV, 38). His starting point is his criticism of the so-called "television war," 24-hour TV-coverage especially of the first Gulf war, broadcast for instance by CNN: […] a discussion about the bombardment of Bagdad in 1991 – the first war to appear on TV screens as a kind of son et lumière display, the first where the bombardment of enemy forces acquired the bloodless precision of a video game. He'd found it disconcert- ing at the time, and still did. What happens to public opinion in democracies – tradi- tionally reluctant to wage wars – when the human cost of battle is invisible? Of course there was nothing new in strict wartime censorship […]. What had been new about Baghdad and later Belgrade was the combination of censorship with massive, one-sided aerial bombardment so that the allied casualties were minimal or non-existent and 'col- lateral damage' couldn't be shown. These were wars designed to ensure that fear and pain never came home. (DV, 241-242) Stephen's massive criticism is especially aimed at the video pictures of the precision sights of the pilots and their "smart bombs" and "cruise missiles," which insinu- ate that a "surgical war" is possible: On the screen set up in the briefing room, and on the television screens [at home], puffs of brown smoke appeared underneath the cross-hairs of the precision sights. Doubly

screened from reality, the audience watched, yawned, scratched and finally switched channels. Who would blame them? War had gone back to being sepia tinted. Sanitized. Nothing so vulgar as blood was ever allowed to appear. And all the while, under the little spurts of brown dust, this. A child torn to pieces. Human bodies baked like dog turds in the sun. (DV, 131)2 Stephen's criticism is comparable to the argument of Robert Fisk who accuses the big networks, the BBC included, not to show "headless corpses, eviscerated children, desert dogs tearing apart the bodies of the dead: this would be in bad taste" (Fisk 2008, 145-146). Kate Adie, herself a war correspondent covering the conflict in Bos- nia, agrees with this verdict: It was a dirty, mean and vicious conflict, and as the months went by, the audience at home grew tired of it: not out of inhumanity but from a combination of irritation, despair and distance. 'A plague on all their houses' was the reaction to the attempt to explain the complexity of Balkan hatred. (2002, 312) Krista Kauffmann stresses the difference between "looking" and "looking after" in contrast to "looking at" or "overlooking" (2012, 80). Martin Bell, one of the sources Pat Barker explicitly mentions, explains the effects of TV-images of wars in the "third world" on the British spectator as follows: 'Oh my God!' we say to one another, and 'How terrible!', as the images of battle cascade into our living room from Iraq, or of atrocities from Mombasa or Bali or Casablanca […] and then, because we find these things strangely unreal, we take refuge in 'reality TV' and […] Big Brother. (Bell 2004, 6) Susan Sontag refers generally to the impact of "photographs of atrocities" as not calculable by the cameraman: "A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply be- mused awareness that […] terrible things happen." Especially 24-hours news channels present "conflict and violence […] to which the reaction is compassion, or indigna- tion, or titillation, or approval, as every misery heaves into view" (2003, 13). Justine, Stephen's lover in the novel, pronounces a radical verdict on TV news of violence and war: I don't see the point. There's nothing I can do about it. If it's something like famine, OK, you can contribute, but with a lot of this there's nothing anybody can do but gawk and say, 'Och, isn't it awful!' when really they don't give a damn. It's all pumped-up emo- tion, like these families come on TV because somebody's missing […]. It's just wanking. It's the voyeurism of looking at it, that's what's wrong. (DV, 140-141) With this judgment she is in accord with Susan Sontag, who thinks that war images easily induce spectators to switch off their TV sets because there is no way to show one's compassion and there is no chance for them to stop the conflict (2003, 100). Stephen becomes more and more sceptical regarding the ability of photographs to document reality. He is surprised when attending the trial of the Serbian president Milosevic before the International Court at The Hague to find out that the pictures on the closed-circuit TV are more life-like than the direct look at the accused sitting behind a bullet-proof glass window. The pane has a slight fault distorting the face and therefore Stephen prefers the TV image (Monteith and Yousaf 2005, 297). Both sides in the trial work with photographs to prove their arguments: the prosecution shows the

2 Compare this to Korte (2007, 190); Kauffmann (2012, 89); radical in its criticism: Baudrillard (1991).

picture of a person who was tortured before his death. The corpse is blindfolded "because it is easier to torture a man whose eyes you cannot see" (DV, 130). Stephen can vouch for the authenticity of the photograph because he was present at the exhuma- tion of the corpse. He remembers the heat, the stench, the flies and the face of the man when the earth covering the mass grave was removed (DV, 134). This is one of the examples of the correspondences between Stephen's own tormenting memories and official press photographs. The defense counters with the picture of a severed child's head which they claim was taken in Belgrade. "You had to take the child's nationality on trust, though it might equally well have been the head of a Bosnian child lying in the market place of Sarajevo. […] People shuffled their papers, turned pens round and round in the fingers, ashamed of their inability to go on feeling" (DV, 130). In the real prosecution against Milosevic the same picture of a dead child was used by both sides (Sontag 2003, 10). Caution was recommended especially in the case of the Serbian president who tried again and again to manipulate Western public opinion with "nightly stories of civilians carbonized in bombed trains," although NATO finally had to admit to have flown such an attack (Ignatieff 2000, 52; McLaughlin 2002, 110 ff.). When Stephen submits his report to his publisher from the Hague he is asked to change the beginning because the newspaper has acquired a sensational photograph from the proceedings: Ted was right, it was a terrific photograph. A dramatic moment. Unfortunately it had never happened. He had been watching Carla del Ponte, her helmet of blonde hair gleaming under the lights, sharing a joke with the other prosecuting attorneys, wholly absorbed in that conversation. Not only had she not laughed at Milosevic's downfall – she hadn't even noticed him. So much for photography as the guarantee of reality. It pissed him off. […]. Image before word every time. And yet the images never explain anything and often, even intentionally, mislead. (DV, 135) His publisher has been taken in by a photomontage and asks his reporter present at the trial to alter his report to be able to use the fabricated image. Susan Sontag generally comments on the problem of photographs as part of an argumentation: "Harrow- ing photographs […] are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us" (Sontag 2003, 89). A still worse experience for Stephen is the attack on the World Trade Center. He spends the whole day with his friend Ben taking pictures of the Twin Towers and the people dying inside. In the evening they realize that exactly this had been the inten- tion of the terrorists, because only in this way could they achieve their maximum effect: This was designed as a photo–opportunity, and what have I done? I spent the whole day photographing it. Along with everybody else. Because we can't escape from the need for a visual record. The appetite for spectacle. And they have used that against us, just as they used our own technology against us. (DV, 101) The attack of the terrorists is effective because it has been transmitted worldwide by every TV station in real time. Instead of condemning the assault the transmission of the catastrophe on every channel as its "unwitting witness" multiplies its impact. Barker lets Stephen use the same arguments as the leading journalists and historians (Carruthers 2011, 177; Münkler 2002, 50; 89; 196ff.; Bell 2004, 67; 70f.).

Stephen prefers to use Ben's photographs for his book. They are not meant only to prove his line of argument, but to serve as part of a dialogue between the two media, as a "double vision […] no matter how much [they] overlap they never quite resolve into one (falsely) unified perspective" (Kauffmann 2012, 88). Therefore, he visits Ben's widow Kate to ask for her approval. She consents and Stephen opens Ben's well-organized pictorial archive, starting with the box on Bosnia: A chandelier in a devastated ball-room; an old Serbian woman surrounded by icons, scraps of food on the table in front of her; a queue of women and children waiting their turn at the tap; an old Muslim woman tottering down the street with a milk bottle full of water, the only container she was strong enough to carry, and then, without warning, there she was: the girl in the stairwell. He gaped at the print, unable to understand why it was there. Obviously Ben had gone back the next morning early, before the police ar- rived, to get this photograph. He'd restored her skirt to its original position, up around the waist. It was shocking. Stephen was shocked at her behalf to see her exposed like this, though, ethically, Ben had done nothing wrong. He hadn't staged the photograph. He had simply restored the corpse to its original state. And yet it was difficult not to feel that the girl, spread-eagled like this, had been violated twice. (DV, 121) Once again the connection between official media documentation and Stephen's personal load of traumatic images is made obvious. Years after the discovery of the raped and killed girl he finds himself confronted with his trauma by the photograph Ben took as a professional cameraman. He is doubly surprised because sexual violence is banned from official representation, a taboo observed till the present day (Ignatieff 1998, 29). By Ben's violation of this prohibition Stephen is confronted right at the beginning of his search with his main psychological problem. He realizes what impact a truthful and honest photograph can produce on a spectator. By restoring the skirt of the girl to its original position around her waist Ben opens the way to recognition and knowledge (Waterman 2009, 11-12). Ben has violated no rule of his profession; he has not staged a photo like many of his colleagues. Ben, on the other hand, has broken a taboo which is valid until today to represent a true and honest image of war. As Stephen and Kate agree it was only Goya who consistently and consequently portrayed rapes in his etchings. But most of his violated women remain fully clothed; the single exception in Desastres No. 30, "Estragos de la Guerra," a woman with a pushed-up skirt and a torn blouse, is not the victim of a rape, but of an explosion. Ben has transcended frontiers in his other photographs too. Two of his pictures from Afghanistan show an execution. This motif is quite frequent in Goya's works; Desastres No. 2, 15, 26, 34, 35, 36 and 38 show it. In the history of war photography the famous picture of Eddie Adams stands out, who photographed the shooting of a Vietcong prisoner by the police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan in 1968 (Rawlinson 2010, 129; Brothers 1997, 203). Don McCullin, who worked in Vietnam at this time, claims that this picture caused a historic change in public opinion: "[…] my friend Eddie Adams […] took the decisive pictures of the police chief, in public, shooting a bound Vietcong prisoner in the head. More even than the My Lai massacre, that picture was the turning point in the hearts of the Americans" (1990, 100). McCullin witnessed several public executions, the most memorable also in Vietnam. The prisoner was bound to a post, shouting slogans against the West, till the firing squad shot him. Afterwards an officer approached him and put a bullet into his head. After the remov- al of the body the fire brigade hosed down the pavement. "This was the French way of doing things." As he explains, McCullin took no photo of the proceedings because he

did not have the permission of the condemned person (2010, 103). Ben does something unusual in his pictures – he adds his own shadow: A man on his knees staring up at the men who are preparing to kill him. But Ben had included his own shadow in the shot, reaching out over the dusty road. The shadow says I'm here. I'm holding a camera and that fact will determine what happens next. In the next shot the man lies dead in the road, and the shadow of the photographer, the shadow of the man with a deformed head, has moved closer. (DV, 123) By the inclusion of his shadow, generally a mistake which should not happen to a professional, Ben demonstrates that he was a witness of the execution and that quite a few of these killings, if not exactly this one, were arranged for the press and the general public (Waterman 2009, 137; Kauffmann 2012, 93). In the second photograph the shadow of the head and the shadow of the camera are enlarged and overlap, thus pro- ducing the image of a man with a deformed head. Ben insinuates only somebody ill and dehumanized should want to take such a picture. In this way the conception that photographs are neutral and reliable documentations of reality is queried and the role of the press as a possible accessory to crimes is indicated. These two and an additional third photo are pinned to a screen in Kate's study and always present during her work. Ben's third image on Kate's wall is the last one he shot and paid for with his life. It shows military scrap which the Soviet army left behind in their withdrawal from Af- ghanistan: This mass of military debris filled most of the frame, so from the viewer's angle they seemed to be a huge wave about to break. Behind them was a small white sun, no bigger than a golf ball, veiled in mist. No people. Hardware left behind after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan: the last war. But the composition was so powerful it transcended the limits of a particular time and place, and became a Dies Irae. A vision of the world as it would be after the last human being had left, forgetting to turn out the light. (DV, 123) Ben's photo shows abandoned military vehicles from the last war, not from the current conflict of the West with the Taliban. It is unimportant of what kind these vehicles are. It is also insignificant why they were left at exactly this place. They are rusting steel, stranded in the countryside, and there are no people around – neither victorious Afghans, defeated Russians or simply civilian travellers. Stephen passed this place several times without recognizing its symbolic potential, but Ben went back to it on his own, ducked into a hollow to get the proper perspective and took his picture. Immediately afterwards he was killed by a sniper. Stephen and his companions were stopped a short distance away, but he ignored the warning and ran to his friend to check whether he was still alive. Finding him dead he returned with the camera and an amulet Ben treasured as a lucky charm, expecting every second to be shot himself. Barker chose a similar experience described by Don McCullin as her inspiration. McCullin's friend Nicholas Tomalin got trapped between the Israeli and the Syrian troops during the Yom Kippur war on the Golan hills and was killed by rocket fire. McCullin was warned not to proceed to the place of the accident, but ignored the warning, snatched a tin hat and ran to check on his friend. Finding him dead he took back his glasses as a keepsake (McCullin 1990, 193). Ben's photograph turns into a symbol of the world's end after the death of the last human being (Brannigan 2005b, 154; Rawlinson 2010, 129; Hubble 2011, 115). The debris of one of the countless

wars humanity waged till it exterminated itself is illuminated by a tiny, burnt-out sun. It is a pictorial rendition of the dies irae, the day of wrath of the Last Judgment, the biblical version of the end of the world. Barker alludes additionally to the 13th- century Latin hymn of the same title which became part of the service for the dead in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church. Non-catholic people are familiar with it via the work of two famous composers, Mozart and Verdi, who set the service to the dead to music. Thus this photograph is a fitting climax to Ben's work as a war photographer, who took a last picture to end all wars, a fitting legacy for his wife, his friends and the general public. From the beginning it was Goya and not the images of contemporary photographers and cameramen who proved central to Stephen's project. The etchings of the Desastres de la Guerra are the earliest and most important examples in his discussion of the possibilities of representing war and violence. Goya also became the model for Otto Dix, who fought in the First World War as a gunner, and his collection of engravings Der Krieg (Winter 1995, 161); later on photographers like Don McCullin took pictures of wars after Goya's manner. For Stephen Goya is an artist who tackles the conflict between the horror and disgust caused by scenes of violence and the duty to represent them because they should lead to moral reactions in the spectator (Korte 2007, 192; Kauffmann 2012, 81). He stresses the importance of Goya for his project to Justine right at the beginning of their relationship: "Goya seems to be squatting over it at the moment. He was too – like a monstrous jewelled toad" (DV, 57-58). When Stephen visits Kate to ask her permission to use Ben's photographs he tells her about another cameraman who refused to take pictures of the people jumping from the Twin Towers on 9/11: "'Nobody should have to see this.' And of course immediately I thought of Goya.' – 'One Cannot Look at this?' Yes, but then 'I saw this.' 'This is the truth'" (DV, 119). Barker uses these captions from Goya's etchings Desastres numbers 23, 44 and 82 as the motto of her novel (Rawlinson 2010, 126). It's the argument he's having with himself all the time, between the ethical problem of showing the atrocities and yet to say, 'Look, this is what's happening' … and I thought, my God, we're still facing the same problem. There is always his tension between wanting to show the truth, and yet being sceptical about what the effects of showing it are going to be. (DV, 119) "Goya's Horrors of War and Picasso's Guernica confront his desire to evade the testimony of our own eyes by grounding the horror in aesthetic forms and force the spectator to see it as if for the first time," is Michael Ignatieff's commentary on the procedure (Ignatieff 1998, 29-30). The reference to Goya is logical for Kate, with her familiarity with the history of European art, as she has to cope with the futile and meaningless death of her husband in Afghanistan (Bernard 2007, 176). Ben's death is especially shocking and devoid of meaning as he did not die in a regular military conflict like Don McCullin's friend, but was shot by terrorists, although he was not an ordinary combatant, but a member of the press. With this profession he should have been at least potentially useful to the enemy as he would have reported neutrally on the situation. He did not get caught between the fronts of opposing forces, but was killed by somebody hiding in a seemingly peaceful countryside. He was not shot in a fight with an ordinary group of guerillas, but by a sniper who should have been able to ascertain through his telescopic sight that Ben was not a soldier, but an unarmed member of the media. This group usually wears steel helmets and flak jackets in areas of danger, but are always clearly identifiable by "Press" or "TV" in big letters on their

breasts and backs. Barker makes use of the bad reputation of snipers in general as assassins both in the episodes in Sarajevo and in Afghanistan, although these special- ists became members of regular armies as early as the First World War (Seaton 1999, 59). For Barker and her main characters Goya is the perfect starting point for the discussion of the representation of truth. Her own interpretation of the Desastres (with a reference to the long period of its creation and possibly to its posthumous publication) is as follows: It's Goya grinding away at those etchings of the disasters of war, showing them to nobody throughout his life, not even planning or trying to do. Six years of work, and he is doing it for himself […] it's an act of witnessing which has no courtroom. You're not witnessing publicly, you're witnessing privately. (Brannigan 2005a, 372) The main problem with descriptions of war and violence is the horrible character of the events which makes them difficult or impossible to portray. This was the reason why Ben's photographs never fitted properly into an exhibition. This dilemma is also the main problem behind Goya's etchings in the Desastres de la Guerra. This is the reason why Barker chose three of Goya's captions as the motto of her novel: "No se puede mirar. One Cannot Look at It. Yo lo vi. I Saw It. Esto es la verdadero. This Is the Truth" (Desastres no. 26, 44 and 82). No. 26 depicts an extremely horrible scene, the execution of a group of civilians including not only men, but also women and at least one child (Kauffmann 2012, 87). No. 44 describes people flying from the enemy, a fat man clutching a thick purse of money and a woman turning back to help a small child. No. 82 is not included in many editions of the Desastres, but can for instance be studied in the collection of Goya's work in the Prado in Madrid. It shows a young woman in a luminous aureole like the virgin Mary in traditional religious paintings, next to her a large basket and a sheep. She is met by a man with long hair and beard hiding his face, a big hoe over his shoulder. Goya's captions to his pictures are not titles or descriptions of content, but commentaries on the events shown in the etchings. The three chosen by Barker are so general in nature that they could be used for any picture of the collection. Especially the last one stresses the importance that all the horrors of war, famine and post-war repression in Spain should be looked at "in the light of truth." The first 47 picture represent the atrocities both sides committed in the Franco-Spanish war; nationality and affiliation to parties make no difference. Traditional pictures of battles as well as heroic attitudes are missing, with possibly one exception, no. 7 "Que valor!," probably depicting Agusta de Aragon, who fires a cannon after the complete artillery team has been killed. But you see her only from the back and have no chance to look into her face to find out what her feelings are at this moment (Williams 1976, 142; Tomlinson 1989, 27). The scenes presented are shocking, although the subjects change; after pictures of fighting and murder there follow images of dying people, corpses and mutilated bodies. Women are presented regularly, both as fighters and victims. Men are killed, hacked to pieces or castrated. There are no good or bad parties; the series presents a sequence of crimes and suffering: The basic meaning of the series is clear and remains unchanged […] the brutal lunacy of war, the murderous inversion of values, the meaninglessness. The savage irony is all the more effective because of the particular historical irony of this bloody war in Spain. (Williams 1976, 148; see Sontag 2003, 44)

In the following two parts of Desastres Goya shows the sufferings of the famine in etchings 48 to 64, and in 65 to 82 the consequences of the counter-revolution and the return of the ultra-conservative clergy with the reinstitution of the inquisition (Paulson 1983, 338). Goya's etchings demonstrate the inherent cruelty of mankind, its irration- ality and its loss of humanity. Symptomatic are leaves no. 10, 18, 21, 22, 24, 30 and 39, which show only corpses or parts of bodies (Shaw 2003, 480; 484). Kate as well Stephen are familiar with Goya's treatment of the problem and realize that it has dis- turbed artists as well as the public long before war photographs were taken and published. They know that the Desastres are the locus classicus to start from when you plan to discuss the representation of war and violence. Therefore, it is natural for Kate to take the Londoner Stephen to the Bowes Museum in Newcastle to show him a picture by Goya. It was so small, not much larger than a sheet of typing paper, all the colours subdued. The interior of a prison, seven men in shackles, every tone, every line expressing despair. She stood back. Knelt down. Stared. And because she'd only been recently talking to Stephen, she wondered whether any photograph, however great, could prompt the same complexity of response as this painting. Photographs shock, terrify, arouse compassion, even drive people to take action, but does a photograph of an atrocity ever in- spire hope? This did. These men have no hope, no past, no future, and yet, seeing this scene through Goya's steady and compassionate eye, it was impossible to feel anything as simple as despair. (DV, 153) Goya creates a "double vision" of horror and hope in his works. "Goya's art is un- derstood as an achievement in attending to otherness, in seeing desolation, murder, rape, imprisonment through a 'steady and compassionate eye'" (Brannigan 2005b, 158). Looking at the picture in the Bowes Museum both realize that the arch in the background is similar to the backdrop in two representations of rape in the Desastres. This is correct; the etchings with the arch are no. 11, "Ni por esas," and no. 13, "Amarga presencia" ("Goya en El Prado" museodelprado.es; accessed 28. April 2016). A check on the painting in the Bowes Museum confirms this comparison (the- bowesmuseum.org.uk; accessed 28. April 2016). Both agree that it was Goya who dared to represent rapes for the first time; this idea causes a flashback to the dead girl in Sarajevo. Kate and Stephen wonder how Goya managed to draw these topics and to keep his sanity at the same time; they recall his preference for "circuses, freaks, mar- kets, fiestas" (DV, 154), a therapy Stephen copied immediately before this meeting as he went to look at the preparation of a calf with two heads and a collection of the death masks of executed criminals which are still shown in the Bowes Museum, which first started as a natural history collection. Later on he copies another passion of Goya's and accompanies Justine and Adam to the local fair in Newcastle (Branni- gan 2005b, 159). In his talk with Kate Stephen recalls the painter's wife who probably helped to keep him sane. This is similar to the relationship he tries to build up with Justine. Anyway he thinks Goya a better guide to sanity for a person suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder than any modern psychiatrist (DV, 155). Barker uses Kate Frobisher, Ben's widow and a sculptress, as the counterpart to Stephen in her "double vision." She starts the novel with her and thus puts her immediately into the centre of the narration; Stephen appears much later in the story. By this procedure the interest of the reader is centered on her, although her profession is much less exciting than that of a foreign correspondent. She lives in an old farmhouse in the middle of the forest and uses the buildings as studios for her work and Ben's

photography. In her part of the workshop Ben is permanently present in the form of a very expressive bust and by three of his photographs from Afghanistan, the execution and the "dies irae". Additionally, she created busts of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center simply on the basis of her imaginative interpretation of these young men, not relying on any photographs she might have used: […] the young men at the controls who'd seized aeroplanes full of people and flown them into the sides of buildings. There they were, lean, predatory, equally ready to kill or die. She thought they might be rather good in the end. They certainly frightened her. (DV, 66) Her profession and the job of her dead husband obviously overlap. Her current commission, a statue of the risen Christ, seems to be more conventional but is definitely a symbol of the immemorial suffering of mankind and therefore comparable to the biblical tale of the Abraham-Isaac-sacrifice or the motif of Melanesian headhunting, both dominant icons of Barker's Regeneration Trilogy (Bernard 2007, 177; Waterman 2009, 1; Kohlke 2011, 146). This statue is to stand in front of one of the most beautiful cathedrals in England. Kate lives near Newcastle, which has three cathedrals, the oldest and most beautiful being the Gothic church of Saint Nicholas. But this building does not meet Kate's description, which states that her statue will be erected on the approach to the cathedral on a hill: "A wonderful site if you didn't mind making a total prat of yourself" (DV, 68). If one wants to stay in the vicinity, Durham Cathedral suggests itself, which is situated on a rocky hill in a bend of the river Weir and definitely merits her praise. Before she is able to start on her work in earnest she crashes her car on an icy road. She immediately knows that she is seriously hurt and must not move head or shoulders to avoid paraplegia. Shortly afterwards a person in a white van arrives and looks, but does not help. She can only see his body, but not his face. Later other people passing the scene of the accident call an ambulance. During her first few days in hospital she remains unconscious and then starts her fight back to life. She is deeply worried about her commission because time is running out and she is still not able to raise her right arm above shoulder height. Therefore, she resolves to hire some help; the local vicar recommends one of his group of criminals on probation, Peter Wingrave, a graduate in English who earns his living by gardening. They quickly agree and Peter starts to build a scaffold, constructs an armature of wire mesh to stabilize the plaster and does all the manual jobs Kate is unable to perform. The first few problems are trite, but essential, for instance the construction of the legs – they must be solid to make sure the statue will not topple over. Kate knows this to be rather funny as a requirement for modern art, but it is nevertheless important. The second problem is the point of view from which spectators will see the statue; as it will be fifteen feet high people will have to look up at it: People would be looking up at it – well, obviously – from the foot of the plinth. But the plinth itself stood on a small hill to the right of the path that led to the West door, and it was from that vantage point the majority of people would first see it – still looking up- ward, but from a greater distance and from a much less acute angle. (DV, 68) Because of its size the head of the statue must be larger and its eyes much bigger than their plausible anatomical proportions to be visible from a low position. Kate therefore lies down on the floor in front of Peter to make the necessary calculations.

Presenting the risen Christ or any martyred saint raises problems which are similar to the injunctions against war photographs uttered, for instance, by Justine. She rudely calls the reactions of the ordinary public "just wanking," a condemnation picked up in a discussion between Stephen and Peter: 'I mean, look at the way painters display martyrdom. You almost never see a woman saint being martyred, because it wouldn't be the same. A naked man being tortured is a martyr. A naked woman being martyred is a sadist's wet dream.' Stephen thought for a moment. 'Suppose you're gay?' 'Ye-es?' 'A tortured male nude might be a bit of a turn- on.' 'Only if you're a sadist as well.' 'Be a real challenge, though, if you were a Chris- tian, wouldn't it? Crucifixions, beheadings, floggings, breaking on the wheel, roasting on spits –' (DV, 149) This problem is not discussed with Kate, but it is nevertheless explicitly intro- duced into the novel. In Great Britain it may not be as prominent as in central or Southern Europe with its dominantly catholic history, where altarpieces, ceiling fres- cos in churches and statues in monasteries and other religious buildings are omnipres- ent. Nevertheless religious representations of torture and death are to be found in Britain as well as the same topic in war photographs. For Kate, on the other hand, the relationship of her statue to the age-old tradition of portrayals of Christ and Christian saints is more important. Visiting the village church she sees Christ on the cross and behind that another picture of him in the glass window: Christ in Majesty, surrounded by concentric circles of apostles, prophets, patriarchs and saints. At the moment she hated all representations of Christ, impartially and with great venom. If they were good, they underlined the folly of her thinking that she had anything new to contribute to a tradition that had lasted 2,000 years. If they were bad – like that in the Lady Chapel of Christ in a chiffon nightie, its diaphanous folds failing to hide that there was nothing to hide – they seemed to invite her mockingly to add to their number. (DV, 29) Neither a traditional Christ as king of heaven nor as a post-romantic sentimental and sexless saviour are possible models for her project. She decides to represent him as a male nude, a motif she is famous for and probably the reason for the awarding of her commission. Her main problem is the question of dress: The grave cloths were the problem. All her instincts had been for a nude figure – there's no logical reason why the Risen Christ should go on wearing the dress of a first-century Palestinian Jew for the rest of eternity, and even less reason for him to have got stuck in the robes of a medieval English king, and yet she knew that a naked Christ would cause uproar. A lively faith in the incarnation goes with a marked disinclination to have the anatomical consequences staring one in the face. She'd compromised by having him tearing off the grave cloths vigorously, but not vigorously enough to uncover those parts that occasion letters to The Times if they were revealed. She was becoming middle-aged. Once she might have fought for the purity of her original conception. These days she just didn't think cocks were worth the bother. (DV, 66) Because Kate is handicapped after her accident Peter has to do all the manual work. "Normally she had the conception clear in her head from the beginning, so that the process of carving seemed almost, like the uncovering of a figure already there, waiting to be released. Peter had destroyed that" (DV, 107). She feels a growing suspicion that the emerging work does not fit the initial conception from which she had started: "They [i.e. her original sketches] worried her, because they had an energy that

she knew the finished, or nearly finished figure lacked. She spent a couple of hours working out what had gone wrong, increasingly convinced that something had and knowing that there was very little time left to put it right" (DV, 173-74). Kate wakes up during the following night and realizes that somebody has got access to her study. A storm has cut off her house from electricity and telephone so she decides to check on the intruder herself. In the study she finds Peter in her working clothes – fur cap, smock and the bottom of her track suit – standing on the ladder and hammering on a chisel. She is shocked because she thinks he is about to destroy her work, but then she realizes that he is only miming the procedure: "He was stealing her power in an almost ritualistic way. She couldn't confront him, because she couldn't begin to understand what she was dealing with – she couldn't foresee what his reaction would be" (DV, 178). Puzzled, she believes that Peter has turned into a "deranged double" demonstrating her own "insanity and incompetence" (DV, 179). She resolves to give him notice, but is told by the vicar that Peter is still on probation and must not be accused of a new crime. As for the cause of his original verdict the vicar stays vague, but "murder" seems to hover in the background. The vicar explains that Peter has difficulties with "boundaries between people" (DV, 188) and therefore excels in imi- tating persons. Peter used to impersonate him in his behavior, his voice and even his Christian belief (DV, 272). As far as he is concerned Peter is a person without an identity of his own, "clingfilming himself around other persons to acquire a shape" (DV, 272). Exactly this happened to Kate the previous night. Nevertheless, Peter should not be thought to be harmless; in a conversation with Stephen he confesses "we all have a dark side" (DV, 199). Both Kate and the reader sustain the suspicion that it was him who found her after her car accident and did not help – he is obviously completely devoid of empathy. The nocturnal encounter with Peter has radically changed Kate's stance towards her work. Because he took over her role as a sculptor she is able to see the statue objectively and like a stranger for the first time (Rawlinson 2010, 134). Coming to her studio next morning she achieves a new perspective: The huge figure towered over her. It had changed and yet there were no fresh chips of plaster on the floor, and no chisel marks she couldn't remember making herself. If it looked different, it must be because her way of seeing it had changed. The belly was scored in three, no, four different places. She put her hand into one of the cracks. Chest and neck gouged – it looked like a skin disease, bubonic plague, a savagely plucked bird. Pockmarks everywhere. Slowly she raised her eyes and looked at the head. Cheekbones like cliffs, a thin, dour mouth, lines graven deep on either side, bruised, cut, swollen. Beaten up. Somebody with a talent for such things had given him a right going over. This was the Jesus of history. And we know what happens in history, the strong take what they can, the weak endure what they must, and the dead emphatically do not rise. (DV, 180-81) Nevertheless, Kate carries on with her work because she has the impression that the statue resembles a fish gasping for breath or an insect in transformation from caterpillar to butterfly: "[…] more like a pupa starting to hatch, grave cloths peeling away to reveal new skin […] Oh God. Didn't look human even from down here. Strong, though. She felt its strength. Christ in a nightie it was not" (DV, 289). A fish suffocating helplessly on dry ground because its gills cannot absorb oxygen from air and an insect in transformation from caterpillar to pupa to butterfly serve as biological metaphors for the death and resurrection of God and Christianity. The real change in

Kate's attitude to her work comes when Peter, although dismissed, asks to see the statue he helped to create. He is deeply astonished: "My God […] He hasn't forgotten anything, has he? Betrayal, torture. Murder. And none of it matters" (DV, 291-92). Kate has created a timeless figure of human suffering. It might as well be a victim of torture from Ruanda, Bosnia or Afghanistan and thus is the perfect equivalent to Ben's war photographs. In their separate ways and within the possibilities of two different media Kate and Stephen realize very similar ideas. Both are helped by Goya and his etchings on their path to knowledge. Barker did not stop her analysis of the relationship between war, violence and their visual representation with Double Vision, but carried on her discussion of this topic in her next three novels, Life Class, Toby's Room and Noonday, presenting the career of three British painters during the First and Second World War.

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