Bearing Witnessing with What We Cannot Speak: The Use of the Abject and Figurative Language in Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Union Street

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay builds upon Joshua Pederson’s article, “Speak Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory,” published in Narrative in 2014. While Pederson’s three dicta for analyzing trauma are useful, his exclusive use of war-related trauma literature ignores the way in which hegemonic masculinity and public and private memory influence victims’ ability to tell their stories. Scholars also need to examine what the body “speaks” and the use of figurative language. If trauma is public, figurative language is used to describe an internal conflict and signals transformation. If trauma is private, figurative language is not transformative. Instead, it moves from ambiguity to silence, and the body becomes the only form of speech others can hear. Judith Herman proposes that psychological advances on trauma are dependent on political movements. She outlines three key movements: the study of hysteria at the end of the 19th century, the response to shell shock in World War I, and the women’s rights movement in the 1970s. I use two of Pat Barker’s novels—Regeneration and Union Street—because they mirror two of the movements Herman identifies: World War 1 and the 1970s. This essay illustrates the problems in assuming that victims have a choice in speaking about their trauma when it is private while also highlighting how the body speaks when language is limited or absent.