Conflict in Regeneration (Regeneration - Pat Barker)

Member Name: E OTF

Product:	Regeneration - Pat Barker
Date:	04/08/01 (6978 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fascinating, Challenges the mind

Disadvantages: Not packed with excitement

‘Regeneration’ by Pat Barker is set over four months in a psychiatric hospital at Craiglockhart, Edinburgh, in 1917, which attracted me to the novel as it is close to the village where I live and I find the subject matter of the first world war and its psychology interesting. The novel has many interrelated themes concerning the memory of World War One, memory itself, masculinity, masculinity in war, the morality of military conflict, military and civil hierarchies, and poetry. Barker seamlessly interweaves fact and fiction while focusing on the conflict between Dr William Rivers’ efforts to ‘cure’ those traumatised by the war, and his duty to prepare them for returning to the front. Rivers’ method of treatment, psychoanalysis, is portrayed, as a new alternative to religion, the answer to everything. The author’s portrayal of Rivers’ methods thus encompasses conflict in the novel’s themes, seen in conflicting loyalties between personal views and patriotism, and between expression of distress and ability to cope with it against the background of military conflict.

This treatment contradicts social attitudes in the 1910s and the masculine ideal embedded in patients, showing them that men who break down, cry, or admit fear are not failures, but that expression rather than suppression is a more effective way of coping with grieving. However, despite acknowledging their feelings, patients are still expected to do their duty and return to the front at the end of their stay. Rivers’ rationale for his treatment is that those who accept their emotions are less likely to break down again, but his conflict arises from his guilt at helping men become sane in order to be killed in Europe.

Rivers’ patients include the asthmatic Billy Prior, a fictional character who was rendered mute by his handling of a human eyeball, whose lungs can not cope with even low concentrations of gas or smoke. Such
trauma is portrayed by Barker as everyday activity and all part of a soldier’s job. The central figure is Siegfried Sassoon - a true life British soldier poet campaigning for the war’s end, suggesting that Britain only entered the war to honour the Treaty of London, which guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality. Sassoon really did meet Dr Rivers at Craiglockhart in 1917 - arguing that the war had become a war of conquest, not liberation, and that Britain should play no further part in the conflict.

Sassoon is branded insane and is allocated to Rivers, who realises that although not insane, Sassoon seems inconsistent by throwing away his medal for gallantry, despite not being a pacifist. Rivers thought that “Even the most extreme pacifist could hardly be ashamed of a medal for saving a life” and concluded that Sassoon’s ‘illness’ suited the government as ‘any man opposing the war was trouble, but much less trouble if he was ill’. Rivers therefore shows sympathy, and wants Sassoon to be ill, in order to avoid court martial, analysing his dreams and discussing his views. At first, Rivers tries to fulfil his patriotic duty by opposing Sassoon’s view, believing that “the war must be fought to a finish, for the sake of the succeeding generations.” and that“It’s his duty to go back, and it’s my duty to see he does.”

However, his conversations with Sassoon bring about conflict in his own beliefs, and despite his duty, Rivers also shows protective respect for Sassoon’s views, indicating that Sassoon should keep his homosexuality from others: “There’s nothing more despicable than using a man’s private life to discredit his views...” Rivers also respects Sassoon too much to manipulate him:
“You seem to have a very powerful anti-war neurosis...You realize, don’t you, that it’s my duty to try and change that? I c
an’t pretend to be neutral.”
Despite this statement, Rivers admits internally that he has had doubts about the effects of the war for some time. He realises that, as the vast majority of his patients have no previous record of mental problems, the issue causing them must be the war itself. The therapy then, was a test of the extent of the patient’s symptoms and the validity of the demands the war was making on him. Rivers’ growing empathy with Sassoon however, forced Rivers to think about this issue more openly, making suppression of his own feelings impossible. Rivers wonders “how much easier his life would have been if they’d sent Siegfried somewhere else”. He becomes more stressed about his job throughout the novel , as well as more interested in Sassoon’s case, and explores and expresses his own feelings to a greater extent: - “(Sassoon) made the justifiability of the war a matter for constant, open debate... suppression was no longer possible”. Just before Rivers is allocated leave against his wishes due to stress, he realises the conflict within himself as his job forces him to experience the ‘discomfort at having to express views he was no longer sure he held’.

Similarly, Sassoon realises the true significance that Rivers has in his life, as he tries to catch Rivers before he leaves, by running to his office at 8 o’clock in the morning. When he is informed that Rivers left two hours prior to this, he can not account for his sense of loss. He’d known Rivers was going, and even then, only for three weeks, but Sassoon still experienced a great sadness which tweaked a memory, surfacing for the first time in years :-

“A day of shouts and banged doors and tears in rooms he was not allowed to enter. The day his father left home.” It was only at this moment that he realised how much Rivers had come to replace his father, but it was all right, 
220;if it came to substitute fathers, he could do a lot worse.” This incident shows how an event such as the war can cause a man as independent as Sassoon to require a father figure, showing his insecurity in his situation of conflict between intellectual individualism and the expectations of his country.

Sassoon is not the only patient to relate to Rivers in this way, although Billy Prior only gradually accepts Rivers, which he does not admit until their final conversation. Barker’s most developed fictional character is grafted beautifully into the events of ‘Regeneration’, with her descriptive style breathing life into him with his personality being detailed down to the “faintest trace of sibilance” in his “Northern accent... with the vowel sounds distinctly flattened”. The lifelike character created here is a credit to Barker, who writes flawlessly from a masculine point of view. The first meeting between Prior and Rivers is a brief encounter, as a stubborn Prior, having lost his voice, decides that he does not want to recover it, but instead writes a few notes on a piece of paper before turning over and ignoring Rivers. The second meeting between them can at least boast conversation, but Prior, still on edge with his psychiatrist, is sarcastic and uncooperative. Barker’s portrayal of trauma underlined as Prior criticises the untruthful letters sent to the families of those killed on the front by stating the truth: -

“Dear Mrs Bloggs, Your son had the side of his head blown off by a shell today and took five hours to die.”

Prior is reluctant to show weakness by admitting his feelings, but shows interest in Rivers’. He obstinately asks Rivers questions, in the name of creating an equal relationship, as he would “rather talk to a real person as opposed to an empathetic strip of wallpaper.” It is Prior’s questioning of Rivers’ stammer
that forces Rivers to admit that it usually comes from “a conflict between wanting to speak and knowing w-what you’ve got to say is unacceptable.” Prior then implies that Rivers should what he has “spent fifty years trying not to say”, proud of finding a weakness in his doctor. This is a significant moment for Rivers as he realises that he is suppressing his true views, but despite this he must continue to show Prior how to realise his distress and help him deal with it. Prior’s dislike for his military superiors, and their tactics becomes evident adding more fuel to Rivers’ burning disharmony.

Ultimately, Rivers’ meeting with another doctor working with traumatised patients causes him to wonder if it is his influence that has caused Sassoon to give up his protest against the war, as his ‘confrontation’ with Dr Yealland shows Yealland’s forced suppression of his patient’s emotion as he makes him speak physically during hours of torture with an electrode. Rivers accuses himself of suppressing Sassoon but his friend, Dr Henry Head, tells him otherwise, if only partially successfully. His efforts to unravel his patients’ nightmares, muteness, stammering, and paralysis begin to shake his own psychic strength and lead him to doubt the rationality of restoring them to service. He admits to himself that his views have been changed about the war, and that a negotiated peace with Germany would be the right thing to explore. The irony is that Rivers has been changed by his patients, without their conscious intent, regenerating his own psychic strength and reconnecting him with his original research - the regeneration of nerve cells in Cambridge. Ironically, also Rivers’ regeneration of the soldiers, sending back to the Front.

As a young man, Rivers had always been “deeply conservative”, but his encounters with Sassoon, Prior, and all of his other pat
ients have brought about conflict in him, and not only on the military front. It shows him, as it has me, that things can change internally that will not change on a wider scale, leaving Rivers at a loose end, asking himself why he should pledge unquestioning allegiance to “a society that devours its own young”.

Summary: