The Biopolitics In Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy

The British woman writer Pat Barker（1943-）who won“The Booker Prize”for The Ghost Road,is one of the most insightful and original contemporary writers with great sense of social responsibility in the British literary arena.Barker’s three novels entitled Regeneration,The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road published in the1990s are named Regeneration trilogy.With the combination of the real historical figures and the fictional ones,taking the period of war time from September 1917 to November 1918 as time background and the British soldiers and officers who suffered shell shock and their psychiatrists as the main characters,the Regeneration trilogy reflected the destiny of tens of thousands of British young men who were consumed in the“sausage machine”of war like the“walking”beef.Through powerful depiction of the First World War,the trilogy has provided the most authoritative construction of the Great War in the literature of the 20th century,and made itself the world-class literary canon that cannot be ignored.The trilogy revealed with a great variety of details based on historical reality that the whole young generation in the Great Britain were confronted with the type of power that could completely deprive the individuals of their independent will,totally control them and even take their lives.The French philosopher Foucault indicated that the politics since the 19^thcentury has become biopolitics and fully controlled both the population and the personal bodies,and all the wars since the 19^thcentury have been concerning biopolitics.The Italian philosopher Agamben further pointed out that it is first of all the“bare life”of those who are deprived of all legitimate rights that has built the foundation of modern political communities in the Western World.Therefore,this dissertation studies Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy from the perspective of biopolitics elucidated by Foucault and Agamben with the aim to probe into the delicate and colossal apparatus of power,and to reveal its nature and operating mechanism.In addition to“Introduction”and“Conclusion”,the main body of this dissertation consists of four chapters.Chapter one explores the biopolitical mechanism of power presented in the Regeneration trilogy at the level of population.In Foucault’s view,the bio-power which aims to foster life can paradoxically become kind of thanatopolitics,for in the name of security and health of the whole population,part of the population can be required to die,therefore the power that has been supposed to take the responsibility for the human body and life can be operating in the way of“cancelling life”,and the operation can be realized by making use of the concept of“danger”and the“racialism”either between nations or within the nation.In the trilogy,it is in the name of defending the nation against the invasion of other nations and improving the racial hygiene via warfare that the young generation of British men were driven to the battlefield and got engulfed there.Besides,from the perspective of Agamben’s genealogical study,it can be seen that it was the modern biopolitical power with the patriarchal gene of Ancient Roman fathers who held the“life or death”power over their sons that made the sons of the political community the expendable part in the name of the security of the population.Barker strongly criticized the sacrifice of sons by calling it“the bloody bargain”on which the Western civilization is based.Moreover,as the archetypal form of bare life,Agamben’s“Homo Sacer”mirrors the destiny of countless soldiers who were deprived of all rights and reduced to bare life in the normalized state of exception（emergency）and the constant suspension of laws.They did not die as“sacrifices”for the country,but like the worthless“lice”.Furthermore,the laws and the state of exception announced by the sovereign power together formed the original structure of the Western communities,which has brought about the inextricable predicament for the Western coutries.The second chapter studies the operation of biopolitical power presented in the Regeneration trilogy at the level of personal bodies.Based on the measurements of male bodies,a set of grading standards concerning the biological features of men’s bodies and the related moral norms were first established with which male bodies were disciplined in an all-around way.At the same time,men’s senses of pride,competition and shame about their bodies were deeply stimulated,which thererfore helped capture and confine their bodies.In addition,a series of sport activities,military training and severe punishment imposed on the enlisted men were in reality the cultivation of the“absolute obedience”which derived from the Christian pastoral leadership in the middle ages.In such practices,it could be seen that the sovereign power in Agamben’s sense was permeating into the micro fields,announcing the decision on soldiers’lives,and even the most trivial violation of rules or orders of a soldier could put him into the hands of certain unlimited killing power.Meanwhile,in the British home front,in the process of all-around search for,surveillance on and punishment of people who opposed the war,the disciplinary power in Foucault’s sense has crossed the boundary of laws and norms,and began to have the tints of the sovereign power in Agamben’s sense,for it could suspend and announce laws,and make decisions on men’s lives.The transformation of the disciplinary power into the sovereign power at the level of personal bodies has marked out a new dark area on the modern Western biopolitical landscape.Chapter three probes into the way how psychiatry and homosexuality were used by power to help control life and bodies as depicted in the Regeneration trilogy at the level of both population and personal bodies.First of all,based on the need of the power,psychiatry purposefully played a role of confusing the symptoms of shellshock with cowardice and desertion to assist in selecting the bodies that could still be used in the most convenient way at the level of population.Then at the level of personal bodies,the sufferers of shellshock who had been thrown into the war hospitals were actually reduced to the“homo sacer”when their bodies were normalized and corrected.In the hospital,the doctors seemed to have played the role of the one with the sovereign power.Their violent medical practice created a new type of technology of power which“makes one live”in order to“make one die”.To“make live”no longer meant to“foster life”as Foucault had indicated,but meant to force one’s body to live while wiping off one’s subjectivity and independent will,so that one could die in the way as required.Meanwhile,the power made new use of sexuality.It first took advantage of not only the sexual charm and love myth of the females but also the homosexual elements in the name of brotherhood in public propaganda to urge,lure and force men to go to the war at the level of population.Then when the sharp increase of war casualties gave rise to a variety of social problems,especially the disappointment and anger of young men,certain females and males were taken as scapegoats and blamed by the public for homosexuality.Some“abnormal”women were thought to be the threatening force to men,and the homosexuals,especially the male ones,were seen as the corrupted traitors who had caused the loss in the war.Therefore at the level of personal bodies,with homosexual behaviors becoming the target of witch hunts,everyone found himself in the danger of being accused of“abnormal behavior”in the paranoid atmosphere.The confusion of the mentally ill with the cowards,the discipline imposed on the sufferers of shellshock in the war hospitals,and the fact that the sexual elements were encouraged at first and degraded at last in the public propaganda,all revealed that the mechanism of modern biopolitics is keeping evolving in a dangerous way and it has the nature of devouring life.Chapter four analyzes the possible ways of the individual to break away from the all-around controlling power of biopolitics in the Regeneration trilogy from the perspective of Foucault’s conception of“the technologies of the self”.To fight against the ruling of biopolitics,Foucault,Agamben and Barker all pin much of their hope on the lifestyle of the philosopher and emphasize the importance of autonomy,introspection and reflection.But different from the former two,by using neurological terms,Barker emphasized the importance of human feelings and emotions represented by the primitive form of innervation called the protopathic.She believes that only when the irrational part in one’s psyche represented by the protopathic and the philosophical rational part represented by the epicritic level of innervation get well integrated can the one free himself from the grip of power and thus achieve humane and independent subjectivity.In the“Conclusion”part,this dissertation points out that reading Barker’s Regeneration trilogy from the perspective of biopolitics helps us to see through the seemingly accidental and unordered phenomena to understand the nature and the operating mechanism of power.Meanwhile,the rich and vivid details tightly linked to historical facts in Barker’s novel have highlighted the new dark area and the unpredictable dangers on the landscape of modern biopolitics brought about by the new transformation of power.Barker’s Regeneration trilogy is not only the narration of history,but also the reflection and re-examination of the contemporary social problems.Today when local wars and terrorist activities keep happening around the world,and the governments of different countries and regions keep announcing the state of exception,to read Barker’s Regeneration trilogy from the perspective of biopolitics not only produces historical and literary meanings,but also makes great sense in terms of social and practical significance.And in this sense,all other books of Barker deserve a deep and careful study from the perspective of biopolitics as well,for they have provided for us a panoramic view of the vast social and political landscape of the 20^thcentury.