One challenge in writing about modern warfare is the sheer impossibility of adequately representing the dead and injured. An estimated 10 million men died in World War I and another 20 million were wounded; but statistics are abstractions, and the massive numbers of dead and injured soldiers overwhelm the imagination, making them impossible to grasp. In Writing War in the Twentieth Century, Margot Norris argues that this is a key difficulty facing anyone who attempts to write about modern warfare: “The census of the war dead resists and exceeds both representation and attempts at signification-particularly ontological signification” (3). Thus, novels about modern warfare must confront the difficult problem of how to represent and conceptualize it. If, on the one hand, the sheer scope of the losses is described, readers will find themselves unable to grasp the meaning of such huge numbers or to translate them into human terms. On the other hand, if the experience is individualized, the personal impact may be emphasized although the larger significance of the conflict will be lost. An interrelated challenge is countering the official military language often used to describe war. Military language distorts and justifies warfare by presenting it as a rational act: In the battle phase, it ignores mangled bodies and replaces them with discussions of strategy, gains, and losses. In the aftermath of battle, it idealizes warfare with terms such as honor, duty, and sacrifice. To achieve these definitions, military language must, above all, erase the body and its destruction and replace it with abstract concepts. For these reasons, in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry suggests that modern warfare has brought about an “utter derealization of verbal meaning” (133) in which “[l]anguage becomes increasingly severed from material substance” (135).
Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy-Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and the Booker Award-winning The Ghost Road (1995)- takes up the challenge of embodying the dead and wounded in unique ways. The trilogy has been recognized as an important contribution to the literature of war, particularly in its recovery of Dr. W. H. R. Rivers’s work. Barker could hardly have invented a more multifaceted figure for her trilogy than Rivers, who functions as an earlytwentieth-century Renaissance man and symbol of Western civilization. The reallife Rivers had a unique career, making important contributions to three separate fields: medicine, where he performed a famous experiment on nerve regeneration with Dr. Henry Head; anthropology, as a founding father of British social anthropology and inventor of the genealogical method that describes cultures through their kinship systems; and psychiatry, through his sensitive work with traumatized soldiers at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland.1 Barker draws on all three aspects of Rivers’s work throughout the trilogy.
The trilogy has contributed to a rebirth of interest in Rivers’s work.2 But its unusual and powerful evocations of the damaged and dead bodies produced by war have been largely ignored. Barker’s earlier novels, such as Union Street (1982) and Blow Your House Down (1984), also reveal a visceral emphasis on the human body. Blow Your House Down, for example, graphically presents the lives of working- class prostitutes, describing sex work through fleshly images that fall outside the typical categories of erotic-pornographic literature, forcing readers to confront them outside of those categories. Similarly, the Regeneration trilogy presents its readers with visions of human flesh, both through the haunted memories of its traumatized soldiers and, in The Ghost Road, Rivers’s memories of his 1907-08 anthropological expedition to Melanesia. In both cases, mutilation and death are re-presented in ways that escape warfare’s typical conceptual categories, thus, in Scarry’s words, “realizing” modern warfare by reconnecting language and material substance.
Representing the Dead
Set between July 1917 and early November 1918, just before Armistice was declared, Barker’s World War I trilogy dramatizes the last year of the war through the experiences of Rivers and his relationships with the shell-shocked soldiers he treats. Its struggle to “realize” warfare by reconnecting language and materiality is first addressed through indirection. Until the last chapter, when the narrative follows one of Rivers’s patients, Billy Prior, to his death by gas in the Battle of the Sambre-Oise Canal, the trilogy never directly dramatizes battle. In place of battle scenes, the trilogy presents fragmented memories of battle through their effects on traumatized soldiers. It repeatedly employs synecdoche to bring the mangled bodies produced by war into imaginative and psychological reality. The soldiers that Rivers treats with his talk therapy struggle to come to terms with repressed memories of the horrors that they have witnessed, horrors that involve direct contact with eviscerated human flesh. In Regeneration, one patient survived a mortar attack to find his mouth filled with the flesh of the man who had been standing next to him. Billy Prior had a similar experience when he found himself holding a human eye in his hand.
This focus on body parts performs two functions. First, it underlines the trilogy’s emphasis on memory and its contrast with typical war memorials. The war memorial marks dead bodies with a monument, erasing fragmented body parts and replacing them with stone structures that deny the fragility of human flesh. This type of monument is perfectly represented by the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, placed in Westminster Abbey in 1920. A solid slab of black marble, beneath which a single unidentifiable human body is buried, represents the many thousands of soldiers who were reduced to fragments of flesh. The monument’s lengthy inscription reads, in part,
Thus are commemorated the many multitudes who during the Great War of 1914-1918 gave the most that man can give-life itself-for God, for King and Country, for loved ones, home and empire, for the sacred cause of justice and the freedom of the world.
They buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward his house.
This inscription-a rope of abstractions-also serves to cover up the mutilated and dehumanized bodies it stands for. By contrast, the reader witnesses in the trilogy soldiers unable to speak as they struggle to remember and come to terms with the moments in which they held the body parts of their fellow soldiers in their hands.
Second, the trilogy uses those moments to unsettle Western conceptual categories. Ann Ardis interprets Blow Your House Down as repeatedly “challeng[ing] our attempts to classify human experience on the basis of binary oppositions” (52). To explain how the novel achieves this, she employs Hortense Spillers’s theoretical distinction between body and flesh. According to Spillers, “the body” is preconceptualized: it has a gender, a race, a class, a set of predetermined meanings; “the flesh,” however, is the “zero degree of social conceptualization,””a primary narrative” (67). Spillers argues that descriptions of whipped female slaves, for example, give us a “materialized scene of unprotected female flesh-of female flesh ‘ungendered'” (68). In a parallel move, Ardis interprets a scene of violence against a prostitute in Blow Your House Down as turning her into “flesh” and, thereby, taking the violence out of a preconceptualized category, such as “male violence against a woman,” and into “something more primary” (53).
Regeneration’s soldiers experience a similar “zero degree of social conceptualization” as they remember their physical contact with “flesh.” Billy Prior demonstrates the inadequacy of Western language in his responses to his experience.3 He first is sent to Craiglockhart Hospital for mutism, having lost the ability to speak after two of his men were killed in a mortar attack. When he regains the ability to speak, he is still haunted by nightmares and unable to recall the specifics of the attack that traumatized him. Finally, in a long and intensive therapeutic session, Rivers hypnotizes him to recover the memory. Prior had feared that some misjudgment of his own had led to his men’s death. Hypnosis revealed, however, that the traumatic incident occurred when Prior went to clean up the trenches after the attack. Suddenly, he finds himself staring at a human eye on the ground:
Delicately, like someone selecting a particularly choice morsel from a plate, he put his thumb and forefinger down through the duckboards. His fingers touched the smooth surface and slid before they managed to get a hold. He got it out, transferred it to the palm of his hand, and held it out towards Logan [another soldier]. He could see his hand was shaking, but the shaking didn’t seem to be anything to do with him. “What am I supposed to do with this gob- stopper?” (103).
Barker describes Prior’s picking up a slippery human eye without any conceptualization of what it means. Prior’s description of the eye as “this gob-stopper,” slang for a kind of candy, seems to make some sort of vulgar joke at finding the round eye, stressing the lack of language to deal with “flesh.” At the same time\, “gob” indicates a number of other, unsettling meanings: a mass, a mouthful, raw meat, something that chokes you (Oxford English Dictionary). These multiple, irreconcilable meanings focus the reader’s attention on the eyeball and its significance as mutilated flesh or what Spillers calls “a primary story.” At the end of the scene between Prior and Rivers, we learn that the eye belonged to a man named Towers: “He had very blue eyes, you know. Towers. We used to call him the Hun” (106). Prior’s re-membering this traumatic moment is, at the same time, a confrontation with “flesh” and with dismembering, making it impossible to place his experience within any preexisting conceptual category and thus dispose of it.
The Anthropology of War
The trilogy’s final volume, The Ghost Road, develops this visceral approach to flesh by drawing on Rivers’s memories of Melanesia and what he learned there about tribal warfare and head- hunting. As the war nears its end, Rivers is transferred from Craiglockhart to the significantly entitled Empire Hospital in London, where he treats the physically, rather than psychically, wounded. Here, he begins to experience increasingly intense memories of his 1907-08 trip to Melanesia during which he and fellow anthropologist Arthur Hocart stayed for three months with a tribe of former headhunters. There he befriended his cultural counterpart, the witch doctor Njiru, who gradually revealed to him the secret rituals of a dying warrior society, thus juxtaposing Europe with its apparent anthropological opposite. In that juxtapositioning of Europe and Melanesia, The Ghost Road achieves some of its most disturbing effects, cutting through the outer surface of European civilization to suggest an inner core of connection to the rituals of headhunting. Melanesia breaks open modern abstractions that keep death and warfare at a distance with its visceral celebration of both. As Rivers’s memories begin to take on a more and more visual form, he experiences the same haunting that had traumatized his patients. Melanesian culture displays the very things-death and body parts-that the West buries. As The Ghost Road shifts between Rivers’s memories of Melanesia and his present life in the wards of Empire Hospital, he is challenged to come to terms with those memories and their relationship to the West’s experience of war.
At first, Rivers’s flashbacks to Melanesia seem relatively benign. On one occasion, visiting his landlady’s rooms and glimpsing her dead son’s portrait on the mantelpiece that is surrounded by flowers and candlesticks, he is reminded of Melanesian skull houses. This prompts him to think:
Difficult to know what to make of these flashes of cross- cultural recognition. From a strictly professional point of view, they were almost meaningless, but then one didn’t have such experiences as a disembodied anthropological intelligence, but as a man, and as a man one had to make some kind of sense of them. (117)
The part of Rivers that is “a disembodied anthropological intelligence,” a representative of the scientific, superior West, will be stripped away by these increasingly forceful “flashes of cross-cultural recognition.”
As Barker reveals in the Author’s Note at the end of The Ghost Road, Njiru, as well as other Melanesian characters, are based on actual people (277-78). In the 1920s, Arthur Hocart published his and Rivers’s work in several lengthy essays in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. The essays detail their life among the New Solomon islanders and emphasize ritual, warfare, and what Hocart calls “the cult of the dead.” They also reveal how closely The Ghost Road follows actual events in Melanesia, providing close analogues to all the events recounted in the novel. Rivers’s central published work on this Melanesian expedition, however, reveals only his “disembodied anthropological intelligence” and underlines the fact that in The Ghost Road, Rivers functions, in part, as a representative of Western rationalism. On returning to England in 1908, Rivers spent the next five years writing his massive two-volume history of Melanesia, the culmination of his genealogical work, published to acclaim in 1914. The History of Melanesian Society provides painstakingly detailed descriptions of kinship and marriage systems in Melanesian society. It barely mentions, even in passing, such topics as warfare, death rituals, and head-hunting. As Rivers admits in his introduction, much of it consists of “bodies of dry fact” (3), but he defends its usefulness as providing “a rough preliminary account of social conditions which will, I hope, be more thoroughly studied before it is too late” (2).4
The History of Melanesian Society does make for dry reading, and examining it gives a reader no hint of the intense images that appear in The Ghost Road or of the importance of the 1907-08 trip in Rivers’s psychological and emotional life. His trip to Melanesia points toward a transformation in his personality that would fully emerge only during his psychiatric work with soldiers during the war. Away from Europe, Rivers relaxed and became a happier man. He was open to identifying with his Melanesian interlocutors and became more aware of the significance of the unconscious mind in human life. As he describes it in Regeneration, “And do you know that was a moment of the most amazing freedom, [. . .] the Great White God de- throned, [. . .] And suddenly I saw not only that we weren’t the measure of all things, but that there was no measure” (242, emphasis in original).
Rivers’s flashbacks to Melanesia add another dimension to the trilogy’s efforts to realize death, bringing Rivers, like his patients, face to face with body parts and decomposing corpses. He remembers a culture that faces death nakedly, one that materializes both death’s meaning and the meaning of warfare. In one such memory, Rivers recalls his response to seeing the exposed corpse of Ngea, a chief who died during his stay. As a Western doctor, he is conditioned to think of a corpse as something that “neither fascinated nor frightened him. A corpse was something one buried or dissected. Nothing more.” Yet, when he approaches the stone hut in which Ngea’s body is propped up, he is overwhelmed by fear at the sight of the corpse covered with flies, so much so that it strips him of his rational defenses against confronting death as a reality and shakes him to his core: he feels “the sense of being unshelled, peeled in some way, [. . .] He was open to whatever might happen in this place, open in the way that a child is, since no previous experience was relevant” (Ghost Road, hereafter GR 189). Weeks later, he witnesses the ceremonial placement of Ngea’s now sun- bleached skull in the chiefs’ skull house and looks at the number of skulls that are hung up and scattered on the ground. Whereas the West memorializes its piled corpses with monuments, Melanesia marks them with skulls. In Melanesia, body counts were literal, with the heads of those killed being displayed around the huts of victorious warriors. The fact that the tribe itself is threatened with the extinction, not just of its warrior traditions, but of itself, points to the effort to come to terms with massive cultural destruction.
Again, Scarry’s discussion of the significance of the dead body in culture and warfare sheds light on these cultural differences. Scarry examines the dichotomous relationship between on the one hand, the abstract ideals for which a war is said to be fought, for example, “to make the world safe for democracy,” and, on the other hand, the number of wounded and dead bodies that the war produced. Her argument is that the dead or wounded body is used to confer reality on or to “substantiate” the abstract claim (125). Thus warfare is a process by which disembodied ideas are laid side by side with mangled bodies, and the reality of the latter is conferred upon the former. As Scarry explains:
That is, instead of the familiar process of substantiation in which the observer certifies the existence of the thing by experiencing the thing in his own body (seeing it, touching it), the observer instead sees and touches the hurt body of another person (or animal) juxtaposed to the disembodied idea, and having sensorially experienced the reality of the first, believes he or she has experienced the reality of the second. (125)
In a move similar to The Ghost Road’s flashbacks to Rivers’s Melanesian experience, Scarry turns to ancient cultures for examples that clarify the relationship between abstract claim and mutilated body: a prophet splitting open a body and reading its entrails, a sacrificed body buried in the foundation of a city gate to make it impregnable, an oath taker dipping his hand in blood. In all of these practices, a body is used to make real the immaterial claims of prophecy or power: “[T]hus pain is relied on to project power, mortality to project immortality, vulnerability to project impregnability” (126). Each of these examples demonstrates the power of the human body as a signifier, just as Melanesian headhunting societies needed a head to launch a new canoe or to bury a chief properly. But, Scarry goes on to point out, many cultures gradually replaced human sacrifice with animal sacrifice and then with other rituals. War is the one area in which that substitution has never been made.
This anthropological view of warfare is implicit in the growing intensity of Rivers’s flashbacks in The Ghost Road and the ways in which he himself is implicated in the legacy of the West’s destructiveness. At first, almost as if by reflex, Rivers tries to retreat into claims of Western superiority when such parallels occur to him. He recalls a Melanesian custom in which an illegitimate boy was adopted by a leading man who brought him up as his own. When he reached puberty, the boy was given a great ceremony wit\h gifts and the honor of leading the sacrificial pig, and, then, in front of the whole community who knew what was going to happen, the adoptive father crushed his son’s skull with a club. Rivers contrasts this ritual to the image of Abraham and Isaac that was represented on a stained-glass window in his father’s church. Abraham has raised his arm to slay his son; but below the human figures, is the ram caught in the bushes, indicating the ultimate message of the story: God will not demand the sacrifice of the son, an angel will stay Abraham’s hand, and the ram will be substituted. Rivers thinks reassuringly, “The two events represented the difference between savagery and civilization” (GR 104). The two contrasting stories also recall Scarry’s argument about the substitution of animal for human sacrifice in most parts of culture. But the exception, of course, is warfare. In the midst of World War I, therefore, Rivers cannot comfortably retreat behind notions of his own culture’s superiority: Fully aware of his fatherly relationships to the soldiers that he rehabilitates for the front, Rivers’s reaction to the two juxtaposed images quickly becomes complicated by recent events: “Perhaps [. . .] it was because he’d been thinking so much about fathers and sons recently that the memory of the two sacrifices had returned, but he wished this particular memory had chosen another moment to surface” (GR 104).
Although he finds it too dangerous to pursue these thoughts about fathers, sons, and sacrifice, Rivers touches the outer edge of an image that poet Wilfred Owen explores more fully in his bitter sonnet, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” The poem employs the Abraham-Isaac story as a metaphor for the fathers and sons of the World War I era and thus gestures to the same civilized hopefulness represented in the church window. Surely, “civilized” Judeo-Christian Europe has moved beyond primitive human sacrifice and can find some other substitute to lay upon the altar. But Owen’s poem concludes bitterly with Abraham’s refusal to obey the angel’s command: “But the old man would not so, but slew his son, / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.” Owen’s words point to an ultimate irony: Although, in many instances, Western culture has abandoned primitive sacrifice, it has not only been retained in warfare but also brought to new levels of destructiveness and horror.
The most complex parallel established between Europe and Melanesia, however, is the personal one between Rivers and his main native informant, Njiru. Even at their first meeting, Rivers responds strongly to Njiru’s powerfully concentrated personality:
A man in early middle age, white lime streaks in his hair, around the eye sockets, and along the cheek and jaw-bones, so that it seemed-until he caught the glint of eye white-that he was looking at a skull. [. . .]
Njiru was deformed. Without the curvature of the spine he would have been a tall man-by Melanesian standards very tall-and he carried himself with obvious authority. [. . .] The eyes were remarkable: hooded, piercing, intelligent, shrewd. Wary. (GR 126- 27)
In “The Cult of the Dead in Eddystone of the Solomons, Part I” Arthur Hocart describes Njiru in ways that are strikingly similar to the descriptions in the novel:
Njiruviri [. . .] turned out in the end to be not only the best interpreter, but head and shoulders the best informant. It is a pity that, being in possession of much secret lore, he carefully disguised his knowledge and was therefore long wasted as a mere channel of communication, when he could have been used as an original scholar and thinker. The eldest son of the chief who controlled the most important cults in the island, debarred by being a hunch-back from great physical activity, he had devoted himself to thought and learning. His knowledge was not only vast, but most accurate [. . .]. Had he been a European he would have ranked high among the learned. (72-73)
As Hocart’s descriptions of Njiru indicate, the Europeans are empowered by their ability to define, judge, and record with their scientific technologies. They also indicate that the Europeans, too, are headhunters, scientifically speaking.
Even at their first meeting, the parallels between Njiru and Rivers are notable. Like Rivers, Njiru is tall, middle-aged, and authoritative. Like Rivers, Njiru is a healer, and Rivers observes his medical practices as he performs rituals, chants, and massages for his various patients. Like Rivers, Njiru is a scholar with much complex and obscure knowledge. Finally, Njiru is single, an isolated figure, set apart from the rest of his society, both because of his special knowledge and because he is deformed with a hunched back. Rivers lives a celibate life as a Cambridge don, and he, too, is aware of a sense of personal deformity-he suffers from a stammer and is unable to remember things visually. Also, he is troubled by his inability to relate openly to people.
Rivers’s connection to Njiru grows more profound during the war years, a development that is marked by his increasingly intense memories. Treating his patients, using the early tools of psychiatry- suggestion, talk therapy, hypnosis-he thinks, “A witch-doctor could do this [. . .] and probably better than I can” (GR 49). As Njiru heals by magic, exorcising the evil spirits that the Melanesians hold responsible for illness and death, so Rivers, too, tries to exorcise the nightmares and hallucinations that haunt his patients. Western medicine and science, what Rivers represents, might seem the opposite of Melanesian practices, but increasingly Rivers recognizes the ways in which twentieth-century medicine has come full circle, back to psychological connections that have much in common with magic, ritual, and religion. In his 1919 lecture, “Mind and Medicine,” Rivers relates psychiatry to medicine’s cultural roots in magic and religion and concludes, “One of the most striking results of the modern developments of our knowledge concerning the influence of mental factors in disease is that they are bringing back medicine in some measure to that co-operation with religion which existed in the early stages of human progress” (253).
Rivers’s war work also highlights the contradictory nature of the two men’s relationships to their cultures. They are healers but also supporters of war, although Rivers becomes a more ambivalent one. In fact, many of Rivers’s memories of Njiru have to do, not with healing, but with head-hunting and its vanishing rituals. The Ghost Road describes Njiru as the descendent of some of the most famous headhunters in the Solomons-his grandfather, Homu, is remembered for having taken ninety-three heads in a single day. The fact that head- hunting has only recently been suppressed-by force-adds still another layer of complexity to the relationship of Europe and Melanesia.5 As the representative of this recently repressed head- hunting culture and the repository of its rituals reveals to Rivers the occasions on which a new head used to be necessary-to launch a war canoe, to celebrate the death of a chief, to free the chief’s widow from her mourning confinement-Njiru embodies both the roots of warfare and the grief of a culture threatened with extinction. As Rivers moves between his memories of life and death in the New Solomons and his present work in the Empire Hospital, he is implicitly confronted with the question-which is easier to believe: that a human head secures the invulnerability of a war canoe or that 10 million dead and 20 million wounded men will make the world safe for democracy?
By the novel’s conclusion, the relative positions of Europe and Melanesia have been reversed. As an anthropologist, Rivers had once believed in and exercised the power to define Melanesian culture through Western concepts and words. Now, at the war’s end and watching a patient die, Western language fails him and both he and the novel turn to Melanesia for the words to name Western culture’s experience and for the ritual that might provide some response to it. Treating a soldier whose skull is half blown off while the young man’s family looks to him for help, Rivers knows that his medical science can do nothing; he can only wait for death. He remembers a Melanesian word-mate-which has no English equivalent, one of those Melanesian terms that stands outside of Western conceptual categories, such as life and death. Mate means dead but also means being in a state in which “death is the appropriate and therefore the desirable outcome” (GR 264). If he were a Melanesian doctor like Njiru, the proper treatment would be to aid death, but Rivers remains loyal to his Western training, waiting passively for the end, even while aware of the kernel of truth in the Melanesian attitude. Then, to his horror, his patient regains consciousness and begins to speak, shouting what sounds like “Shotvarfet, Shotvarfet,” over and over again. Soon, all the soldiers on the ward take up the cry. When the dying soldier’s father asks, “What’s he saying,” Rivers manages to translate it as “It’s not worth it.” But the father cannot accept this judgment and insists, “Oh, it is worth it, it is” (GR 274; emphasis in original). When the soldier finally dies, Rivers can only speak the words of Western science and logic: “6:25,” he says, recording the time of death (GR 275). Like Billy Prior’s response, “What am I supposed to do with this gob-stopper?” the words of both the soldiers and Rivers are incommensurate with the experience, underlining the failure of Western language in the face of cultural destruction.
After this draining experience, both Rivers’s memories and the trilogy culminate in the image of Njiru. Rivers hallucinates seeing Njiru, walking through the hospital ward chanting the exorcism of the Melanesian spirit, Ave. When he arrived in the New Solomons, one of the first things that Rivers had been told was tha\t Njiru “knew Ave.” Ave is the most feared of the Melanesian spirits, the bringer of epidemic disease and warfare, “the destroyer of peoples” (GR 268). The words that the healer chants to exorcise Ave are also the last, most secret ritual that Njiru reveals to Rivers. The Western language of science and protest having failed, it is Njiru’s chant that names the state of the West at the trilogy’s conclusion. This is a chant that Barker draws almost word for word from Rivers’s Medicine, Magic, and Religion (48): “O Sumbi! O Gesese! O Palapoko! O Gorepoko! O you Ngengere at the root of the sky. Go down, depart ye. [. . .] There is an end of men, an end of chiefs, an end of chieftains’ wives, an end of chiefs’ children-then go down and depart. Do not yearn for us, the fingerless, the crippled, the broken. Go down and depart, oh, oh, oh” (GR 276). In his essay, Rivers explains that the first part of the chant is a list of “the names of certain ghosts, probably those of his predecessors in the knowledge of the rite” (Medicine 48). Thus the chant begins with a rope of names that calls on past generations, even while it goes on to cite the destruction of the living generations-chiefs, chieftains’ wives, chiefs’ children. Hocart also transcribes this chant and suggests that its penultimate line means “there are none but cripples left; do not love them, and stay” (“Cult, Part II” 268). One can contrast this chant-with its list of specific names, its images of broken bodies, its embodied sense of grief-with the abstractions of the inscription on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. When he visited Melanesia ten years earlier, Rivers wielded the tools of Western culture to define the natives and their history. Now, Njiru’s secret knowledge and words are the only ones commensurate to the West’s experience; he finally turns the tables on the anthropologists and names the devastation that the West has inflicted on itself.
The ways in which these Melanesian memories of ritual, violence, and death are interwoven with the European experiences of World War I suggest that part of what is driving Rivers’s “flood of nostalgia” in The Ghost Road is an attempt to come to terms with massive cultural destruction. It is also Rivers’s quest to understand these experiences as a man. In labs and on dissecting tables, he is familiar with skulls and corpses in the Western scientific sense, as a “disembodied intelligence.” In Melanesia, he experiences the embodiment and the reality of death in ways that parallel the visceral shocks his patients have undergone. Barker’s use of Rivers’s anthropological work also shatters Europe’s position of superiority by juxtaposing it to images of Melanesian warfare and ritual and emphasizing that Europe’s disembodied responses make even more destruction possible. So, in modern civilization, Abraham will sacrifice, not just one son but “all the seed of Europe, one by one.” Barker’s trilogy as a whole works through these contradictions, remembering war by dismembering it. It strips away disembodied abstractions to reveal an eyeball, a head, pieces of flesh, reconnecting language and material substance.
THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY AT HARRISBURG MIDDLETOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
NOTES
1. Although today, largely because of Barker’s trilogy, Rivers is remembered as a psychologist and for his impact on war poet Siegfried Sassoon, during his lifetime, he was best known as an anthropologist. Between 1906 and 1930, Rivers’s work dominated the emerging field. He participated in four early European anthropological expeditions-the famous expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898, a 1901-02 stay with the polyandrous Todas tribe in southwestern India, and two trips to Melanesia in 1907-08 and 1914. Rivers’s study The Todas was considered a classic when it was published in 1906 and established his genealogical survey work as the dominant method in anthropology until Bronislaw Malinowski championed the concept of intensive fieldwork (Langham 50). In fact, Malinowski, who, as a fledging anthropologist, accompanied Rivers on his last trip to Melanesia in 1914, saw himself as competing with Rivers, writing in a letter to a fellow anthropologist, “Rivers is the Rider Haggard of Anthropology: I shall be the Conrad!” (quoted in Clifford 96). Rivers’s year-long stay in Melanesia in 1907-08, however, took him into Conrad territory, especially in Pat Barker’s version of it. See Slobodin for a detailed examination of Rivers’s anthropological work, as well as his other “careers.”
2. A number of articles on Regeneration, the first novel in Barker’s trilogy, have been published. In particular, see Whitehead and Harris, both of whom analyze the role of Rivers in the novel, especially in relation to his medical and psychiatric work. Also, see Monteith, Wyatt-Brown, and Brannigan for overviews of the Regeneration trilogy as a whole, including comments on how the treatment of Rivers’s anthropological work in The Ghost Road develops the trilogy’s overall themes.
3. See articles by Mukherjee and Newman for analyses of the breakdown of language in other novels by Barker. Barker’s concern with language and questioning of abstractions connects her with the practice of the Great War poets, as demonstrated by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory, as well as modernists who wrote in its aftermath.
4. In his History of Melanesian Society, Rivers announced plans to co-author a second book on Melanesia with Arthur Hocart that would focus on their fieldwork on Eddystone Island and the topics that were excluded from the History-warfare, headhunting, death rituals, magic, witchcraft, and medicine. This work never materialized because of the war and Rivers’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1922. Both during and after the war, however, Rivers delivered lectures and published essays that record some of the experiences that appear in The Ghost Road.
5. During the nineteenth century, the European powers gradually annexed the Melanesian islands: the Dutch claimed the Western half of New Guinea in 1828; the French, New Caledonia in 1853; and the British, Fiji in 1874. The Solomon Islands were the last part of Melanesia to be declared a European colony when the British established a protectorate over them between 1893 and 1900 (Sillitoe 26-27). European annexation was motivated by a variety of desires, including pacifying the islands in response to attacks on Europeans and laying the basis for stable plantation economies. The Melanesians’ reputation for violence and “black” customs, such as head-hunting and cannibalism, added urgency to these developments. Beginning in the 1870s, British gunboats regularly visited the Solomons to punish attacks on Europeans by shelling villages. This kind of “pacification” proved to be a long and difficult process, however. As one official noted in 1911, “[O]ne of the cardinal principles upon which the administration of a new country should be based is that the ‘Pax Britannica’ must be enforced. It is useless to endeavor to educate a savage people in order to lift them to a higher plane of civilization unless it is demonstrated that the Government can and will make the King’s peace respected” (quoted in Boutilier 44).
WORKS CITED
Ardis, Ann. “Political Attentiveness vs. Political Correctness: Teaching Pat Barker’s Blow Your House Down.” College Literature 18.3 (1991): 44-54.
Barker, Pat. Blow Your House Down. New York: Ballantine, 1984.
_____. The Eye in the Door. New York: Penguin: 1993.
_____. The Ghost Road. New York: Penguin. 1995.
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