An exploration of the ways in which Siegfried Sassoon in his poetry and Pat Barker in her novel Regeneration present the psychological trauma of the Great War.Trench poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon produced their work perhaps as a kind of therapeutic self-expression; the poems have a sense of confession and authenticity though their striving for a poetic language that can articulate the trauma of the trenches. Conversely, Pat Barker seeks to revivify the shock value these poems had on their first audience by setting them against the context, not so much of the battlefield, but of the psychological landscape those battlefields produced. Sassoon and Barker come from different perspectives and understanding of the world and of the psychological impact of war.
The novel Regeneration centres on the relationship between Siegfried Sassoon and Captain W.H.R Rivers, an army psychologist (based on the real psychiatrist and anthropologist who worked at Craiglockhart Hospital). The novel explores the psychological impact of war, as Sassoon (interned for going public with his anti-war views) and his fellow patients struggle to make sense of their experience on the front line. The novel also explores Sassoon’s first attempts, with Wilfred Owen, to develop a new poetic language to communicate the horror of trench warfare. As a major voice of dissent against the war, Sassoon used his poetry and literary skills to make political statements about the futility of war.
Barker explores the psychological impact of war on individual characters rather than setting her narrative in the trenches themselves and perhaps this tends to de-emphasise the traumatic reality and violence of trench war that is so well expressed in Sassoon’s work. The counter argument to this is that Sassoon strives to give an account of the violence and promote anti-war opinions without exploring the psychological impact, often favouring a emotionally distant, ironic tone, for example in passages like this one:
I wondered where he’d been then heard him shout
‘They snipe like hell! O Dickie, don’t go out’
I fell asleep……Next morning he was dead,
And some slight wound lay smiling on the bed.
[1]The last line portrays a shocking juxtaposition between the words ‘wound’ and ‘smiling’ which contradicts the image of pain and death. The reason for Sassoon’s unusual wording may be to describe the curved shape of the wound which looked as though it was smiling, almost smugly at how it has killed while being so apparently minor. The poem presents the immediacy and shock of trench violence but lacks the more subtle, tentative exploration of the long-term consequences that typifies Regeneration.
In this quotation there is a very casual and unemotional comment when the poem’s voice saw his friend’s dead body. This may be because at the time the voice was suffering from shock. The war not only hardened the soldiers’ emotions but numbed them completely, an idea which is also portrayed in Regeneration, where for instance Prior can make a joke about a dismembered eyeball: “What am I supposed to do with this gob-stopper?”
[2] His grief and compassion is numbed by prolonged exposure to the horrors of the trenches and it is his own disgust with this callousness, rather than the shock of seeing the eyeball itself, which causes his neurasthenia. This detailed exploration of the psychological trauma of the trenches is missing from the bitter, brief, and in some ways simplistic protest poems that made up much of Sassoon’s work.
“Stammering, disconnected talk”
[3] a failure to string sentences together coherently and being mute are symptoms that are explored in Regeneration. They are attributes to shell shock or ‘neurasthenia’ which manifests differently depending on the social background and education of the individual. When Rivers says to Prior “We-ell it’s interesting that you were mute and that you were one of the very few people in the hospital who doesn’t stammer.”
[4] Rivers saw that a majority of the working class soldiers made themselves subconsciously mute in contrast to ‘public school’ officers who seemed to stammer. Rivers explained to Prior that “for a private soldier the consequences of speaking his mind are always going to be far worse than they would be for an officer.”
[5] Private soldiers also had a prevalence of physical symptoms such as paralysis, blindness and deafness, Rivers believes that the working classes would never accept a soldier suffering from a mental illness because of their lack of education.
Prior especially brings to the novel an examination of social class from the time. His relationship with Rivers is confrontational. When Prior met Rivers he communicated by writing in capitals which implies that, had he not been muted by his psychological trauma, he would be shouting. This demonstrates that at first Prior’s character was rude and extremely defensive. Barker’s programme is to portray social comments mainly, in comparison to Sassoon who tended to concentrate more on the political side of the war in his poems. Rivers also suffers from the symptom of stammering and Price responds to his observations regarding his having been mute and officers stammering by saying “It’s even more interesting that you do’……..Rivers was taken aback, ‘that’s d – different”
[6] Rivers listens to secondary information about various experiences that happened during the war from traumatised soldiers. Listening to each story made Rivers suffer through similar symptoms to the soldiers, such as stammering and having nightmares.
Civilians at home would never understand the mental trauma the soldiers went through and because of the lack of knowledge, this created a growing division between the soldiers and civilians. Sassoon in his ‘Declaration’ uses dramatic techniques and emotive, destructive language to emphasise his bitterness and portrays sarcastic remarks to highlight the lack of imagination “those at home”
[7] had.
“I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise”
[8]In the poem ‘Does it matter?’ Sassoon, writes about society’s patronising sympathy towards those who have become disabled as a result of the war:
“Does it matter?- losing your leg?….
For people will always be kind”.
[9]The opening line is ironic as it in sharp contrast to the psychological and physical debilitation of losing a leg implied by the following lines:
“when the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.”
[10]Sassoon seems ignorant of class and only applies his ideas to his own experiences and way of life: the working class veterans, disabled or otherwise, who would never go ‘hunting’ or eat ‘muffins and eggs’. In Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man Sassoon talks of the merits of an upper middle class life and ease as a fox hunter and loafer, but in a way Sassoon can be seen as being arrogant throughout his poems as he assumes he speaks for all men.
The opening line of Sassoon’s poem ‘Survivor’ gives the reader a sense of misleading hope:
“No doubt they’ll soon get better”,
[11]The throw-away feeling emphasised by the assured “No doubt’ calls to mind the sinister complacency of ‘Does it matter?”, and the general tone of ironic distance in Sassoon’s poetry is perhaps a way of distancing himself from the horror of his trench experience which, while it fuelled his poetry, had to be handled carefully because it also fuelled his nightmares. These nightmares continued during his convalescence at the hospital, and if it were not for the pioneering work of Rivers it is probable that his decline would have led to a total break-down.
Sassoon expresses guilt in the poem ‘Sick Leave’. Here Sassoon falls asleep, pictures ‘the noiseless dead’ (L.2) who seek him out, reproaching him for not being back at the front with his Battalion. “- and they’ll be proud/of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride”
[12] Again the poet presents us with a sense of hope, immediately reversed by a harsh reminder of brutal reality. The survivors, once they have managed to reflect on the ‘glorious war’ with pride; but this, in turn, will remind them of their time spent overcoming the horror, when they had no self-esteem having been reduced to helpless children.
“with eyes that hate you”
[13] Sassoon ends the poem in an accusatory manner, no doubt directed at the supporters of the war, the people who can easily push soldiers back to the front without ever knowing the horrors of trench warfare.
A typically disassociated, unfeeling voice makes its presence felt in this line from the poem ‘Survivor’, “of course they’re longing to go out again”
[14]. The flippant remark, implying that all soldiers were willing to return to the front, is typical of the attitude Sassoon perceived in the non– combatants at home. The phrase, “These boys with old, scared faces”,
[15]emphasises the youth and innocence of the soldiers with the ageing process of the war. Yet, although these men are made old before their time, they are also reduced to infants; they are decribed as ‘Children’ (L.10) having to re-learn such basic processes as how to walk, showing again the debilitating psychological consequences of the trenches.
In Regeneration Pat Barker describes the social rather then psychological repression of the truth of the battlefield, by using the character Sarah Lumb, who stumbles upon a group of disabled veterans. “Simply by being there, by being that inconsequential, infinitely powerful creature: a pretty girl, she had made it worse.”
[16]Her presence made their lives seem worse, because of their freakish appearance created from the war. Sarah concludes: “If the country demanded that price, then it should bloody well be prepared to look at the result,”
[17]Not only does this show the psychic damage to the veterans but allows Pat Barker to indirectly comment on how society at the time refused to look at the result of the war, especially the men who were missing limbs and were isolated from the rest of the world, “They’d been pushed out here to get the sun, but not right outside, and not at the front of the hospital where their mutilation might have been seen by passers-by.”
[18]Sassoon and Barker both explore the male ego and the damage done to it by the war in very different ways. Barker’s most interesting and complex characters are men: Prior, Rivers and Sassoon. In her writing Barker often explores male characters and the way the war endangers the soldiers’ sense of masculinity in roles and situations where they play the traditional female role: passive, immobile, sitting trapped in one place, mending their own clothes, sharing talk, until the orders come from a superior man to do different. “The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activities had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. Know wonder they broke down.”
[19]Sassoon ignored any sense of sexual confusion within his poems (possibly as a form of self protection) whilst in contrast, in Regeneration there are many references about sexuality between the officers. “There was an enormous emphasis on love between men-comradeship-and everybody approves. But at the same time there’s always this little niggle of anxiety. Is it the right kind of love?”
[20] Society didn’t except homosexuals at that time and a man who was ‘found out’ would have to face many penalties, including a possible prison sentence. During the war ‘comradeship’ also made emotions blurred, “one of the paradoxes of the war-one of the many-was that this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was………domestic and caring.”
[21] In parallel to this, in Sassoon’s poem, The Death - Bed, the poem’s persona shows compassion for his men this reveals femininity, which can be interpreted as being a male - mother figure, “Someone was holding water to his mouth.”
[22]War writers such as Sassoon had an important case to make against the war and were aware that they needed to use dissembling techniques in order to do so. For example phrases like, “The counter attack had failed”.
[23] Impact and technique was important, so poets like Sassoon could tell the nation how they had deliberately had the wool pulled over their eyes about the realities of war and the psychological traumas it caused. It is particularly important to note that in order to do this they actually edited the truth and used falsehood. In this sense Sassoon’s work is no more a reality than the novel of Barker: both are motivated to communicate messages about the psychological trauma of the war from their own social and historical perspectives.
In this respect Barker re-imagines real people and her setting is during the war, not its aftermath. She does not distinguish between reality and fiction and there is a danger that this undermines the reader’s understanding of the issues she is trying to examine. It is as if Barker wants to make important points about the psychological fallout of the war that she feels have not been covered before, perhaps because she understood that the war writers exaggerated and lied to make their points. However, Barker seems to want her readers to assume that the war writers speak the truth in order that she can enlarge on her arguments in a modern context, taking the names of Sassoon and Owen in her texts as some sort of guarantee of historical accuracy.
Another aspect of Regeneration is that Pat Barker expects us to believe that in 1918 doctors and officer-patients in shell-shock hospitals were discussing the finer points of Freudian psychology with each other. Many, including the neurologists advising The War Office, had poor medical education. It is therefore a highly unlikely that every one shared this view or that psychotherapy became generally available in the way it is in Barker’s novel. However, Barker artfully ignores this so that the modern reader, who probably is equipped with some awareness of Freudian theory, can be easily and fluently involved in the examination of the psychological consequences of the war that are the novel’s main theme. This is in sharp contrast with Sassoon’s poetry, which, in its ironic tone, can be seen more as a product of psychological trauma than an exploration of it.
Bibliography
Regeneration Pat Barker Penguin Books London 1992
Siegfried Sassoon-The War Poems Siegfried Sassoon Faber London 2002
Word count: 2,360
[1] L9 -12 Died of Wounds - Sigfried Sassoon
[2] Page 103 Paragraph 2 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[3] L 2 Survivor - Siegfried Sassoon
[4] Page 97 Paragraph 2 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[5] Page 96 Paragraph 5 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[6] Page 97 Paragraph 2 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[7] Page 3 Paragraph 5 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[8] Page 3 Paragraph 5 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[9] L 1-2 Does it Matter - Siegfried Sassoon
[10] L 4-5 Does it Matter - Siegfried Sassoon
[11] L 1 Survivor - Siegfried Sassoon
[12] L 7-8 Sick Leave - Siegfried Sassoon
[13] L 10 Sick Leave - Siegfried Sassoon
[14] L 3 Survivor - Siegfried Sassoon
[15] L 4 Survivor - Siegfried Sassoon
[16] Page 160 - Paragraph 3 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[17] Page 160 - Paragragh 3 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[18] Page 160 - Paragraph 2 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[19] Page 107 Paragraph 4-3-2 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[20] Page 204 Paragraph 5 - Regeneration - Pat Barker
[21] Page 107 - Paragraph 4- Regeneration - Pat Barker
[22] L7 The Death - Bed - Siegfried Sassoon
[23] L 39 The Counter Attack - Siegfried Sassoon