Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy is a series of novels exploring various marginalized topics in First World War Britain. Originally set in a mental hospital, it is particularly interested in exploring concepts of madness: how a society decides what constitutes madness and how madmen are subsequently treated. Through the use of 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 type of knowledge 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 places of cultural comparison – spaces to be controlled. However, through various subversive tactics, these characters begin to “talk back” to existing control systems. They transform and 'pervert' the very institutions that attempt to regulate their crazy behavior, reaching their maximum expression in Prior who manages to free himself (almost completely) from cultural limits, free to cross cultural, psychological and personal boundaries in an apparently contradictory way . way. 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Over the course of 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 ways of understanding. These discourses, when combined, create an episteme which in turn creates difference. Through this difference, the subject develops a categorical understanding of the world and communication with other subjects becomes possible. This is the simplest definition of “culture” (Foucault, The Order of Things 45). Foucault's main argument is that this episteme is necessarily limited: it is impossible for a given culture to allow every possible thought. However, on the periphery of culture, “outside,” so to speak, new combinations of thought develop: new definitions, identities, and understandings that push the boundaries of culture in new directions (Foucault, The Order of Things 67). It is on this periphery that the thematic action of the novels takes place. These peripheral characters are always seen as aberrant and damaged due to their countercultural behavior; if the culture of fiction dictates that a "normal" person is attracted to people of the opposite gender and supports their country in times of war, then those who do not conform to these categories must be "damaged" and are somehow "crazy ". The “mad” subject follows the line that divides the discursively possible from the discursively impossible. Barker is committed to recovering this madness and privileging its subversive potential, in the sense that Julia Kristeva uses in her essay Black Sun: “Modern political domination is massively, totalitarian, 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 novels admit, or conversely deny, a sexual attraction to other men. What is important is that this attraction does not necessarily constitute an identity, but can instead be constructed as such on a cultural level, as the culture develops ways to describe this attraction. In thenovels this attraction is described in terms of action, rather than identity. The use of the terms "sodomite", "bugger", and, perhaps more importantly, "abomination", focuses primarily on the sexual act rather than sexual preference. Towards the end of In 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 channels. I wrote to a girl named Nancy Nicholson. I really think you will like it. It's very funny. The only reason I tell you this is that I would hate for you to have the wrong ideas. About me. I would hate for you to think I was homosexual even in thought. Even if it didn't go any further.”(Barker 176) In this example, Graves implicitly allows for a certain degree of homoerotic desire. Whether that desire actually led to a sexual act doesn't matter. Deviance is found in the act and not in the subject. When these acts are voluntarily stopped, they are no longer a problem. The sexual relationship between Prior and Manning is ended with the return of his wife and children, and Manning's fears of persecution, like Graves', are allayed. Paradoxically, a similar deflection tactic is used when these acts are repeated. They are understood in terms of a psychoclinical discourse that treats deviance as symptomatic of some psychological malfunction. In the following example, Sassoon uses this concept of homosexuality as a malfunction when he tells Rivers about the end of a young gay man, Peter, after he was arrested: “Sassoon looked straight at Rivers. “Apparently they're sending him – the boy – to some psychiatrist or other […] 'To be treated.' A slight pause. “I suppose healed is the right word?” (Barker 180-81) Homosexuality as a category, therefore, is not constructed as opposed to heterosexuality. It's something more like heterosexuality gone wrong. Considering Sarah's colleague in the munitions factory's description of homosexuality, 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 perverse heterosexuality. As a result, the novel's dominant culture creates compulsory heterosexuality, while declaring the necessity of love between men-at-arms. Men who have homoerotic desires or even have sex with other men are believed to be heterosexual, on a deeper, more genuine level: “But you know, he never had sisters, so he never met any girl like that. He goes to school, no girls. He goes to university – no girls. It's time you finally set your sights on me, it's too late, right? It is gelled." (Barker 177-78) As Foucault says, "What is important is that sex was not only a question of sensation and pleasure, of law and interdiction, but also of true and false." commitment is also worth considering. He is essentially committed to his defiance of military authority, a position highlighted by his Declaration against the war, which is taken as evidence of his folly (Barker 5-6). suffer from neurasthenia or “shell shock.” As with homoerotic desire, this anti-war stance is seen as a character flaw this way. You have to have reasons.' [to which Graves responds:] 'They have reasons'” (Barker 9). For the categories of “homosexual” and “pacifist,” the novel raises the question: Of course, there is no real alternativeto the homosexual or the pacifist in the language of these characters, unless it is a generalized “normal”. Kristeva uses the term abject to describe these impossible half-identities. For her, the abject is that which 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 nullify the perceived coherence of the subject (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 3-4). At the individual level, the abject is realized in the body: blood, vomit, urine, shit and more graphically in the dismembered limb: "The abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of the pre-object relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body separates from another body to be" (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 3). It is fitting then that the Craiglockhart facility is occupied by patients trapped in symbols of the abject; Anderson can't stand the sight of blood, urinates on himself when his roommate cuts himself while shaving, and Burns vomits uncontrollably when he eats. Prior develops similar personality-splitting behavior after seeing fellow countrymen dismembered, creating a "new" Prior who attempts to criticize his weaker self. While their subjectivity is threatened by their “crazy” deviance, the characters' bodies respond by attempting to symbolically maintain their subjective integrity. This highly technical and specific use of the word “abject” plays on its more conventional meaning of “excluded” or “excluded from the whole.” We can consider the half-identities mentioned above as abject in the second sense in that they are marginalized from the dominant discourse of novel culture. Cultural abjection, like its psychological counterpart, is abhorred because it threatens the unity of the subject; specifically, it causes the subject to re-evaluate himself and therefore be "covered" and excluded from cultural thought. However, it is precisely because the abject is so abominable that it cannot be approached directly. The repression of the abject is unpredictable and full of the inherent contradictions of the dominant culture, as evidenced in Barker's depiction of the Pemberton Billing affair. The “As I See It – The First 47,000” manifesto rails against these abject elements of society and effectively conflates them all into a nebulous “not us.” This is not an attempt to describe, but above all an attempt to hide and ignore behaviors that the culture refuses to recognize. Here, Billing draws attention to numerous "abject" groups: those who practice the "evils which all good men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia", who are encouraged towards anti-war sentiment by corrupt German agents through the " fear of being exposed" and located more specifically in London's artistic community affiliated with Robert Ross and Maud Allan. The political mechanisms aligned against these groups recognize a natural and progressive index between them; that is, being one is as good as being another. This seemingly logical index reaches its most absurd expression in the ritual killing of Miss Burton's dog – “It was a daschund. One of the enemies." In this way, the specificity of the transgression is deferred, though not entirely, and the abject is covered up and transformed into a subversive German object that, although hated, is describable, knowable, and killable, certainly not having nothing to do with the homogeneous, cultural "I". Of particular importance to Barker in his exploration of these phenomena are the concepts of space and boundaries. Barker is particularly adept at addressing the issue of boundaries within the relationship between Prior and Rivers. His depiction of their relationship shows how the abstract and cultural can transition between mental and interpersonal zonesphysical. The practices of dominant culture may attempt to control the abject through its ability to define space, through the ability to say, “Your body 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. Of course, this does not occur universally or uniformly across a culture. At worst, the body is a site of control, a space where dominant ideologies can reside; the definitions and interpretations concern 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 Punishment 30). In his book, Foucault is particularly interested in the way in which a bodily act such as "sodomy" can foster the creation of cultural consequences. Describing the creation of the homosexual, he says: “Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it has been transposed from the practice of sodomy to a kind of internal androgyny, to 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, albeit in a more extreme form; what was previously abject is pushed into the realm of philosophical understanding. Over the course of the Regeneration Trilogy we see the various psychiatric, judicial and socio-sexual discourses of the time converge to create an emerging homosexual identity. Barker names Robert Ross as the principal propagator, along with his cohort of homosexual writers and poets, of a perceived homosexual agenda; duly noted by his strong support for Oscar Wilde's play, Salome. Since that time, all people apparently associated with Ross, whether sexual or otherwise, are considered to be of homosexual persuasion. In this case, homosexuality is dispersed from the sexual act and localized in a series of behaviors and indicators. The characters in the novel begin to attribute a particular physicality to the homosexual male: he walks in a certain way, talks in a certain way and even appears in a certain way. The construction of anti-war sentiment is constructed similarly: it is a physically observable and physically treatable disease. This concept is most vividly explored through the question of electroshock treatment. In many ways, electroshock therapy perfectly represents the attempt to transpose culture into the body by reducing human consciousness to a series of physically observable electrical impulses and subsequently controlling that body. Barker explores this concept through the characters of Yealland and Callan, who are directly comparable to Rivers and Sassoon respectively. Here, Yealland makes aggressive use of electroshock treatment in an attempt to cure Callan's mutism: “As soon as he could speak words clearly in a normal tone, he developed a spasm or tremor – not unlike paralysis agitans – in left arm. Yealland applied a roller electrode to his arm. The tremor then reappeared in the right arm, then in the left leg and finally in the right leg, each aspect being treated with the application of the electrode. Eventually the recovery was declared complete. Callan was allowed to stand.”(Barker 205) In this passage, Barker's use of language is quite unique and mirrors 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 treatment: it is reduced to its constituent parts. Apart from the obvious cruelty of such treatment, it is worth considering what kind of statements thistreatment he does on Callan's body. He is his body, his body is deviant and is subject to bodily control by dominant cultural powers. This method of electroshock treatment is an effort at body control and psychological manipulation. When asked if he's happy to be cured, Callan smiles. Yealland finds his smile "objectionable" and therefore decides that he must be "cured" of that. Among the various disciplinary mechanisms outlined by Foucault in his History of Sexuality, an important mechanism is what he calls 'confession', or the passive affirmation of the discipline of the subject: "The most defenseless tenderness and the most bloodthirsty powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal." (Foucault, History of Sexuality 59) So now the confessing subject, Callan, must respond to his oppressor and affirm his oppression. In this way he also denied an 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 a great example of this control. Barker builds the various spaces within the asylum to regulate the movement of the patients. These spatial relations shape, shape and discipline the subject through the power of the gaze. In the opening chapters of “Eye in the Door,” Prior describes the panopticon-like surveillance of the subversive prisoners: “He found himself looking into an elaborately painted eye. The peephole formed the pupil, but around this someone had taken the trouble to paint a veined iris, a white of the eye, some eyelashes and an eyelid. Foucault defines this situation as 'the unequal gaze': the constant possibility of being looked at. The actual presence of the unequal gaze is ultimately unnecessary as the observed subject ultimately internalizes their own discipline and becomes “docile bodies,” a regulated part of the asylum (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 114-17). Yealland used the physical disposition of his patients to satisfy a sort of “desired impression of order” (Barker 198). In this sense, patients are decorative parts of the physical landscape within the asylum. They become an aesthetic for the viewer and impose a certain discipline on him. It seems that both Barker and Foucault, therefore, leave the reader with a decidedly negative outlook. The training of the subject takes place through systems of discipline and control. However, even the positions superficially privileged by these control systems are implicated. Rivers describes himself and Yealland as "locked in, as much as their patients were." However, both Sassoon and his predecessors make use of a tactical subversion that is comparable to Michel de Certeau's ideas of consumption as outlined in his essay The Practice. of daily life (Certeau). In it, he describes the ways in which dominated subjects “carry out (bricolent) countless and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and rules.” That is, these emerging categories of “homosexual” and “anti-war” can use the same systems of control in a “perverse” way and subtly reassert their autonomy. We might take as an example the complex power dynamic that exists between Prior and Rivers, particularly their ambiguous separation at the end of the third novel. Having agreed to therapy and 'playing along', he maintains his moral opposition to the war effort but is nevertheless considered 'solved': “Rivers saw that he had reached Sassoon's dossier. He read, 1992.