War, Memory and Scriptotherapy in Barker’s Regeneration

Abstract

Literary depiction of violent historical trauma can be taken as a response against violent oppression. This study aims to explore trauma, testimony and witnessing as depicted in Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991). This novel deals with historical atrocities of the First World War. The novelist wrote this novel from a belated position trying to understand, to comprehend and to mediate a memory which had no direct experience. The novel is framed by the intention of bearing witness as a writer and to use fictions as a means to create and transmit knowledge of genocide. The present research work makes a modest investigation into the ethical role of memorization through the means of trauma narrative in Pat Barker’s Regeneration and argues that the fictional way of memorizing the violent historical trauma of World War I. It further explores that Barker’s intention of bearing witness as a writer holds the ethical value for her fictional narratives of memory creates and transmits the knowledge of genocide. Likewise, it investigates the therapeutic elements, by bringing the insights from Julia Watson, Scriptotherapy, in the novel. It argues that Regeneration is a book that inscribes scriptotherapy and offers the possibility of healing both to the author and her audience. In doing so, the research incorporates the theoretical insights from Avishai Margalit’s The Ethics of Memory in order to strengthen the major argument. It also includes the theoretical ideas of trauma theory by Dominick LaCapra to discuss on the importance of trauma narrative as a tool for 'working through' and bearing the witness to trauma. In this way, act of memory contains the ethical responsibility that will contribute to the domain of knowledge in the field of traumatic memory.