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Article Excerpt
In addition to writing Wilfred Owen's persona and poems into her novel, Barker reworks two of his poems without identifying her source. Though these narrative strategies rely on Owen's eyewitness perspective and canonical status, Barker's revisions destabilize the authority of direct experience by emphasizing the accessibility of text.
Pat Barker narrates First World War events, both historical and fictional, more than seven decades after the conflict's conclusion. Consequently, she relies on a variety of interdisciplinary sources and intertexts, including poetry, histories, and literary criticism. For contemporary writers and readers trying to understand the First World War, access to the past is inevitably textual; thus, a recreation like Barker's is almost necessarily intertextual. This essay explores how Barker's use of Wilfred Owen's poetry simultaneously reinforces and challenges the authority of his combatant perspective. Although Owen published only a few poems before his death, posthumous publication has made him pre-eminent among British First World War poets. Representations of the First World War--including literary anthologies, histories, public remembrance, and other forms of cultural production--often depend on Owen's textual artifacts, and Barker's Regeneration trilogy is no exception. Because the trilogy's first novel, Regeneration, deals primarily with the relationship between Siegfried Sassoon and W.H.R. Rivers, Owen is in some ways a peripheral character in the novel; nevertheless, his role in Regeneration is central to Barker's treatment of the First World War. Specifically, Barker revises Owen's poems in order to incorporate his eyewitness perspective into her retrospective narration. In addition to including Owen as a character and recreating the revisions he did with Sassoon, Barker rewrites Owen's poems without identifying him as her source. By downplaying her reliance on Owen and revising his verse, Barker uses subtle intertextuality to destabilize eyewitness privilege and emphasize narration's accessibility.
Beyond the intertextual nature of the novel's basic premise, there is a great deal of obvious intertextuality in Regeneration, such as the inclusion of Sassoon's 1917 protest against the war, "A Soldier's Declaration," as the novel's opening passage. In describing Barker's trilogy as a "tour-de-force of well-researched intertextuality" (Brown 188), Dennis Brown references Linda Hutcheon's statement that we can only know the past through "its discourses, through its texts" and other "traces" (Hutcheon 36). I agree with Brown's view that historical texts are vital to Barker's treatment of her central themes: war, memory, history, injury, and healing. Further, I would note that, by acknowledging her use of war poetry, biography, historical events, and medical documents, Barker recognizes what Hutcheon calls "the inevitable textuality" of contemporary approaches to history (127). Those of us who cannot remember the First World War--a category that includes Barker and, presumably, nearly all of her readers--must access history through the texts it has produced. Sharon Monteith points out that Regeneration's publication coincided with increased cultural focus on remembering the First World War as its veterans succumbed to old age (4). Though Monteith specifically mentions veterans, I think we should also be concerned about the loss of civilians who remember the war. The disappearance of collective First World War memory makes us increasingly reliant on history's textuality. For Barker, it should be noted, such textual dependence is an opportunity rather than a limitation. Indeed, Alistair Duckworth argues that Regeneration's most powerful representations are based on Barker's use of "attested facts" that "are already aesthetically shaped" (67) in other texts. Barker identifies W.H.R. Rivers, Jon Stallworthy, Eric Leed, and Elaine Showalter as sources for Regeneration (Regeneration 251-52), and Duckworth posits Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That and Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War as other sites of Barker's "possible borrowings" (63). This essay focuses on Barker's "borrowings" from Owen, including two scenes in which Barker recreates the setting, content, and meaning of Owen's poems with no obvious indication of having done so. Owen does not appear in these subtly intertextual scenes, nor are there any references to his poetry as a source. While Barker clearly reworks Owen's "The Dead-Beat" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth" into narrative, she uses "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" and "Disabled" without drawing attention to her intertextual actions.
This subtle intertextuality may be Barker's way of dealing with what she described in an interview as Owen's "preexisting myth" (Stevenson, "Listener" 176). In the same interview, Barker describes Owen's death as "one of the great tragedies of the war--you know, a week before Armistice Day, and he was a personal voice of the compassion and the anger and the pity of war" (183). Owen's iconic status as an expressive exemplar of the war's tragic losses complicates Barker's revisions, as does his authority as an eyewitness. When Owen's poems are used as intertexts, will his "preexisting myth" overshadow Barker's narrative? By using Owen's poems without identifying her source, Barker loosens the bonds of mythology that defines Owen as one of the war's definitive eyewitnesses. The authority of Owen's perspective is part of what Samuel Hynes calls the "aesthetic of direct experience" (154). The idea "that only those who fought could speak the truth about war" (158) suggests that only soldiers are able to produce significant war art. Consequently, an "absolute separation between the men who fight and those they are fighting for" becomes the basis of an aesthetic (Hynes 159). Barker enters this aesthetic tradition by using some of the First World War's most celebrated poets and poems, but her revisions disrupt the exclusionary division between combatants and civilians. Barker's more subtle intertextuality, in which neither Owen nor his poems are identified, challenges the authorial privilege conferred by the aesthetic of direct experience. Barker recasts Owen's eyewitness perspective using non-combatant characters whose knowledge of the war is second hand and extends this perspective to also encompass her readers, who can only access the First World War via text.
Barker's intertextual relationship with Owen (1) is clear in her reconstructions of his relationship with...
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