Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy is a series of novels that explore various marginalized subjects in First World War Britain. Originally set in a psychiatric hospital, it is particularly interested in exploring the concepts of insanity – how a society decides what constitutes insanity and how the insane are then treated. By using two apparently mad protagonists, Siegfried Sassoon and Billy Prior, the author destabilizes traditional notions of madness and privileges the madman as a site of cultural subversion. In the trilogy, these characters represent emergent identities – a kind of knowing that develops at the edge of possible thought. Dangerous and frightening, these characters are marginalized by the cultural institutions of the time: the space they inhabit and their bodies become sites of cultural contestation – spaces to be controlled. However, through several subversive tactics, these characters begin to "respond" to existing systems of control. They transform and "pervert" the very institutions that attempt to regulate their crazy behavior, reaching their ultimate expression in Prior, able to free himself (almost completely) from cultural limitations, free to cross cultural, psychological and personal boundaries in a seemingly contradictory. path. Barker, however, seems to argue that these contradictions are inherent in society itself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Throughout the trilogy, Barker explores what exists “outside” a dominant cultural understanding. Foucault argues that at any given moment, a culture is composed of certain “discourses” or modes of understanding. These discourses, when combined, create an episteme which in turn creates a difference. Thanks to this difference, the subject develops a categorical understanding of the world and communication with other subjects is made possible. This is the simplest definition of “culture” (Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 45). Foucault's main argument is that this episteme is necessarily limited – it is impossible for a given culture to allow for all possible thoughts. However, at the periphery of culture, "outside" so to speak, new combinations of thought are developing: new definitions, identities and understandings that push the boundaries of culture in new directions (Foucault, L' order of things 67). It is on this periphery that the thematic action of the novels takes place. These peripheral characters are still seen as aberrant and damaged due to their countercultural behavior; If romance culture dictates that a "normal" person is attracted to people of the opposite sex and supports their country in times of war, then those who fail to conform to these categories must be "damaged" and, d 'one way or another, they are "crazy". The “crazy” subject follows the line that separates the discursively possible from the discursively impossible. Barker makes a point of recuperating this madness and privileging its subversive potential, in the sense that Julia Kristeva uses in her essay Black Sun: “The modern political domain is massively, totalitarianly, social, leveling, exhausting. Madness is therefore a space of antisocial, apolitical and paradoxically free individuation. (Kristeva, Black Sun 11) The issue of same-sex attraction falls into this area, in part because many men in the novels admit to, or conversely deny, sexual attraction to other men. What is important is thatthis attraction does not necessarily constitute an identity, but rather can be constructed as such at the level of culture, as culture develops ways of describing this attraction. In the novels, this attraction is described in terms of action rather than identity. The use of the terms "sodomite", "bugger", and perhaps most importantly, "abomination", focuses primarily on the sexual act rather than sexual preference. Towards the end of Regeneration, Graves implies a very specific construction of homoerotic desire: "It is fair to tell you that... since this happened, my affections have followed more normal paths. I wrote to a girl called Nancy Nicholson. I really think you will like it. She is very funny. The... only reason I'm telling you this is... I'd hate for you to have any misconceptions. On me. I'd hate for you to think I'm gay, even in thought. Even if it didn't go any further. » (Barker 176) In this example, Graves implicitly admits to a certain degree of homoerotic desire. Whether this desire actually led to a sexual act is not the point. The deviance is located in the act rather than in the subject. When these acts are deliberately interrupted, they no longer pose a problem. Prior's sexual relationship with Manning ends with the return of his wife and children, and Manning's fears of persecution, like Graves', are allayed. Ironically, a similar deflection tactic is used when these acts are repeated. They are understood in the terms of a psycho-clinical discourse which treats deviance as symptomatic of a psychological dysfunction. In the following example, Sassoon uses this concept of homosexuality as a dysfunction when he relates to Rivers the fate of a young homosexual, Peter, after his arrest: “Sassoon looked directly at Rivers. “Apparently he is being sent – ​​the boy – to a psychiatrist or something […] “To be cured. » A slight pause. “I guess cured is the right word?” (Barker 180-81) Homosexuality as a category is therefore not constructed as opposed to heterosexuality. Rather, it is heterosexuality gone wrong. Given Sarah's colleague's description of homosexuality at the munitions factory, the emphasis is on development; Homoerotic desire is described as frustrated or false heteroerotic desire. As with Graves' explanation of “normal channels,” this construction reinforces the notion of homoerotic desire as perverted heterosexuality. As a result, the novel's dominant culture creates obligatory heterosexuality, while declaring the necessity of love between men-at-arms. Men who have homoerotic desires or even engage in sexual acts with other men are considered heterosexual, on a deeper, more authentic level: "But you know, he never had any sisters, so he never met girls that way. Go to school, no girls. Go to college – no girls. It's time he finally looked at me, it's too late, isn't it? It's gelled. (Barker 177-78) As Foucault says, "What is important is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and prohibition, but also of truth and fake. » The reason for Sassoon's attitude. commitment is also worth considering. He is primarily indicted for his defiance of military authority, a position evidenced by his anti-war declaration, which is seen as proof of his insanity (Barker 5-6). Specifically, it is determined that he suffers from neurasthenia or "shell shock". As with homoerotic desire, this anti-war stance is seen as a character flaw. At the beginning ofRegenerating, Sassoon says: “'You can't put people in insane asylums like that. You have to have reasons. [to which Graves responds:] 'They have reasons'” (Barker 9). For the categories “homosexual” and “pacifist”, the novel asks the question: as opposed to what? There is of course no real alternative to homosexual or pacifist in the language of these characters, unless it is a generalizing “normal”. Kristeva uses the term abject to describe these impossible half-identities. For her, the abject is what exists somewhere between the subject (what I am) and the object (everything I am not). The existence of the abject challenges the distinction between subject and object and threatens to undo the perceived coherence of the subject (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 3-4). At the individual level, the abject is realized in the body emission: blood, vomit, urine, shit and more graphically in the dismembered member: “Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of the pre-objectal relationship, in violence immemorial with which a body separates itself from another body in order to be” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 3). It is therefore entirely appropriate that Craiglockhart's establishment is occupied by patients captivated by symbols of the abject; Anderson cannot stand the sight of blood, urinating on himself when his roommate cuts himself while shaving, and Burns vomits uncontrollably when he eats. Prior develops similar behavior that divides his personality after seeing compatriots dismembered, creating a "new" Prior who attempts to blame his weaker self. As their subjectivity is threatened by their “crazy” deviance, the characters’ bodies react by attempting to symbolically maintain their own subjective integrity. This very technical and specific use of the word “abject” plays on its more conventional meaning of “rejected” or “excluded from all”. We can consider the half-identities mentioned above as abject in the second sense because they are marginalized by the dominant discourse of novelistic culture. Cultural abjection, like its psychological counterpart, is abhorred because it threatens the unity of the subject; more precisely, it causes the subject to reevaluate itself and thus it is “concealed” and excluded from cultural thought. But it is precisely because the abject is so odious that it cannot be directly approached. The repression of the abject is unpredictable and riddled with contradictions inherent in the dominant culture, as demonstrated by Barker's description of the Pemberton Billing affair. The manifesto “As I See It – The First 47,000” attacks these abject elements of society and effectively confuses them all into a nebulous “not us”. This is not an attempt to describe, but rather an attempt to cover up and ignore behaviors that the culture refuses to recognize. Here, Billing draws attention to many "despicable" groups: those who practice the "evils which all honest men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia", who are encouraged to adopt anti-war sentiment by corrupt German agents by "fear of being exposed" and located more specifically in the artistic community of London, affiliated with Robert Ross and Maud Allan. The political mechanisms aligned against these groups recognize a natural and progressive index between them; that is, to be one is equivalent to being another. This seemingly logical clue reaches its most absurd expression in the ritual killing of Miss Burton's dog: "It was a dachshund." One of the enemies. In this way, the details of the transgression are deferred, but not entirely, and the abject is concealed and transformed into a subversive German object which, although hated, is describable, knowable and killable, certainly having nothing to do with the homogeneous. The “I”cultural. The concepts of space and boundaries are of particular importance to Barker in his exploration of these phenomena. Barker is particularly adept at addressing the issue of boundaries in Prior and Rivers' relationship. His depiction of their relationship shows how that which is abstract and cultural can transition between mental and physical interpersonal zones. The practices of dominant culture may attempt to control the abject through its ability to define space, through the ability to say, “This is your body and we have created a territory in which you are allowed to exist. In this way, the abject begins to emerge as an object. Obviously, this does not happen universally or uniformly across a culture. In the worst cases, the body is a locus of control, a space in which dominant ideologies can reside; definitions and understandings refer to the individual organs, bones and muscles that make up the body as a whole. Foucault suggests a similar concept when he says, “The soul is the prison of the body” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 30). In his book, Foucault is particularly interested in the way in which a bodily act such as "sodomy" can give rise to the creation of cultural consequences. Describing the creation of "the homosexual", he says: "Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it is transposed from the practice of sodomy to a sort of inner androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the 'soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. » This is an evolution of the psychological definition described above, although in a more extreme form; what was previously abject is relegated to the realm of philosophical understanding. Over the course of the Regeneration Trilogy, we see the various psychiatric, legal, and socio-sexual discourses of the time converge to create an emerging homosexual identity. Barker names Robert Ross as the principal propagator, with his host of homosexual writers and poets, of a perceived homosexual agenda; duly noted by his strong support of Oscar Wilde's play, Salome. From this point on, everyone apparently associated with Ross, whether sexually or otherwise, is considered to be of the homosexual persuasion. In this case, homosexuality disperses from the sexual act and is localized in a range of behaviors and indicators. The characters in the novel begin to attribute a particular physiognomy to the homosexual man: he walks a certain way, speaks a certain way and even looks a certain way. The construct of anti-war sentiment is constructed in the same way: it is a physically observable and physically treatable disease. This concept is explored most vividly through the question of electroshock treatment. In many ways, electroconvulsive therapy perfectly represents the attempt to transpose the cultural into the body by reducing human consciousness to a series of physically observable electrical impulses and then controlling that body. Barker explores this notion through the characters of Yealland and Callan, who are directly comparable to Rivers and Sassoon, respectively. Here, Yealland aggressively uses electroshock treatment to try to cure Callan's mutism: "As soon as he could pronounce words clearly at a normal tone, he developed a spasm or tremor – much like a agitating paralysis – in his left arm. Yealland applied a roller electrode to the arm. The tremor then reappeared in the right arm, then in the left leg, and finally in the left right leg, each appearance being treated by application of the electrode. Finally, therecovery was declared complete. Callan was allowed to stand. » (Barker 205) In this passage, Barker's use of language is quite peculiar and reflects Yealland's dehumanizing brutality. The sentences, interrupted by punctuation, take on the appearance of a list. This reflects the way in which Callan's body is anatomized by the treatment: it is reduced to its constituent parts. Aside from the obvious cruelty of such treatment, it is worth thinking about what kind of statements this treatment makes about Callan's body. He is his body, his body is deviant and he is subject to the bodily control of dominant cultural powers. This method of electroshock treatment is an exercise in bodily control and psychological manipulation. When asked if he is happy to be cured, Callan smiles. Yealland finds his smile "reprehensible" and therefore decides that he must be "cured" of it. Among the different disciplinary mechanisms described by Foucault in his History of Sexuality, an important mechanism is what he calls "confession", or the passive affirmation of the subject's discipline: "The most defenseless tenderness and the powers the bloodiest have the same need for confession. Western man has become an animal who confesses. (Foucault, History of Sexuality 59) So now the confessing subject, Callan, must respond to his oppressor and assert his oppression. In this way, he has denied even internal resistance to Yealland, and the doctor goes further by explicitly stating: "You must speak, but I will not listen to anything you have to say" (Barker 203). The asylum, or “crazy” space, also deserves to be considered as a space of discipline and control throughout the trilogy. Yealland National Hospital is an excellent example of this control. Barker constructs the different spaces within the asylum to regulate the movement of patients. These spatial relationships shape, mold and discipline the subject through the power of the gaze. In the opening chapters of “Eye in the Door,” Prior describes the panoptic surveillance of subversive prisoners: “He found himself looking into a richly painted eye. The peephole formed the pupil, but around it someone had taken the time and trouble to paint a veined iris, the white of an eye, eyelashes and an eyelid. » Foucault calls this situation “the unequal gaze”: the constant possibility of being looked at. The actual presence of the unequal gaze ultimately becomes unnecessary because the subject being looked at ends up internalizing their own discipline and becoming “docile bodies,” a regulated part of the asylum (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 114-17). Yealland used the physical disposition of his patients to fulfill a “desired impression of cleanliness” (Barker 198). In this sense, the patients are decorative elements of the physical landscape of the asylum. They become an aesthetic for the viewer and impose a certain discipline on them. It therefore seems that Barker and Foucault leave the reader with a decidedly negative vision. Subject formation is created through systems of discipline and control. Even positions superficially favored by these systems of control are nonetheless implicated. Rivers describes himself and Yealland as being “locked in, just as much as their patients.” However, Sassoon and his predecessors employ a tactical subversion comparable to Michel de Certeau's ideas of consumption described in his essay The Practice. of daily life (Certeau). He describes the way in which dominated subjects “operate (tinker with) countless and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules”. In other words, these emerging categories of "homosexual" and "anti-war" can use, 1992.