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  • Erotohistoriography and War’s Waste in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy
  • Sean Francis Ward (bio)

No man likes to think he’s sliding in on another man’s leavings.

Pat Barker, Regeneration

Like a Wood’s lamp in the hands of a forensic investigator, Pat Barker’s late-twentieth-century trilogy of historical novels—Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995)—throws a peculiar light on the residua of past sex. Set in Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart War Hospital, in London, and on the Western Front during the later years of World War I, Barker’s trilogy scrutinizes the effects of total mobilization on sexual intimacy. As the war encroaches on almost every aspect of public and private life, nearly subsuming the latter into the former, sex, too, bears the mark of public catastrophe; it is no longer experienced as simply a private act shared by mutually consenting subjects. Whether arriving as memory, as a symptom of post-trauma, or even as the abject matter of sexual waste, the war’s living and dead multitudes keep forcing their way into the bedroom. Intriguingly, this strange company is not always greeted with horror or disgust in Barker’s novels. In fact, as I will argue, it performs a vital social and narrative function throughout the trilogy. More than a metaphor or a metafictional dirty joke, the war’s dead and its wounded survivors, as well as their respective “leavings” (Regeneration 194), relay erotic encounters across the novels’ chronotopes and the lives of the characters that populate them.

Indeed, while sex is never reproductive in Barker’s trilogy, it is occasionally productive in an alternatively social sense. Practiced [End Page 320] during a time when queer affinities were not only criminalized in Britain but denounced as traitorous, illicit sex and sociability—and their material, affective, and psychological remnants—foster forms of intimacy that are set to another social logic and temporal rhythm. These instances of countersociality suggest that queer “sexual enjoyment” might not be “non-generative,” as Lee Edelman contends, but rather differently generative.1 Marked by shared waste and the conceptual possibilities that arise from it, sex becomes a means of being with past and present generations rather than an act directed toward reproductive futurism. In this way, the trilogy calls attention to forms of collective life that have not been, and perhaps cannot be, integrated into official British histories or commemorations of the war. As the state’s unwelcome and unwelcoming excess, the remains of Barker’s queer groups linger outside national narratives of mourning or redress. From here, they not only illuminate the inescapably political—which is also to say presentist—aspects of narrating the past but ask readers to question their fidelity to the familiar, grand-scale concepts (nationalism, liberal democracy, reproductive futurism, and so on) that typically frame twentieth-century social and political discourse.

For Barker, I will argue, such a task demands significant tinkering with the generic conventions of historical fiction. In her trilogy, beleaguered small groups—rather than the classical historical novel’s unexceptional protagonists or its character-types representing whichever national (or subnational) community—become the focus of historical inquiry and fictional supplement. As John Marx asserts, this attention to “alternative sorts of assemblage” has been a feature of the European historical novel since its inception (193).2 [End Page 321] However, portraying the escalated social coercion of World War I, and written amid the British New Right’s partial return to Victorian values in the late twentieth century, Barker’s texts imply that alternative assemblages—particularly those deemed inimical to state power—carry an even heavier critical load in moments of ostensible political unity. Her accounts of minor, queer groups erode those linked grand narratives of past national crisis and consequent social progress that one might find in classical historical fiction (if one were to read like Georg Lukács) or, ironically, in British neoliberal discourse.3 Rather than attempting to register the place of outlying individuals or groups within a greater national totality, Barker’s historical novels imagine the collective life of those who are at odds with narratives of national totality, now as well as then...

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