The Spatial Practices Series The series Spatial Practices belongs to the topographical turn in cultural studies and aims to publish new work in the study of spaces and places which have been appropri-ated for cultural meanings: symbolic landscapes and ur-ban places which have specific cultural meanings that construct, maintain, and circulate myths of a unified na-tional or regional culture and their histories, or whose visible ironies deconstruct those myths. Taking up the lessons of the new cultural geography, papers are invited which attempt to build bridges between the disciplines of cultural history, literary and cultural studies, and geogra-phy.

Spatial Practices aims to promote a new interdis-ciplinary kind of cultural history drawing on constructiv-ist approaches to questions of culture and identity that insist that cultural “realities” are the effect of discourses, but also that cultural objects and their histories and geog-raphies are read as texts, with formal and generic rules, tropes and topographies. Robert Burden Stephan Kohl Founding Editors

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 9

Notes on Contributors 11

Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson Introduction: Framing and Reframing Land and Identity

17

Section A Land and Identity:

Theories and Philosophies

1 David Crouch Landscape, Land and Identity: A Performative Consideration

43

2 Fran Speed Nature Qua Identity: Nature, Culture and Relational Integrity

67

3 Donna Landry The Geopolitical Picturesque

91

Section B Landscapes of Memory:

Eschatology, Trauma, and Diaspora

4 Kirby Farrell Eschatological Landscape

117

5 Jenni Adams Cities Under a Sky of Mud: Landscapes of Mourning in Holocaust Texts

141

6 Moy McCrory “This Time and Now”: Identity and Belonging in the Irish Diaspora: The Irish in Britain and Second-Generational Silence

165

Section C Literary Landscapes:

Urbanism, Ecology and the Rural

7 Elsa Cavalié “And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past”: Recovering Identity in A Month in the Country

193

8 Monica Germanà Beyond the Gaps: Postmodernist Representations of the Metropolis

213

9 Brian Jarvis “It is always another world”: Mapping the Global Imaginary in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition

235

10 Alex Lockwood The Shore is Not a Beach

259

Christine Berberich & Neil Campbell Afterword: Lines of Flight: Unframing Land, Unframing Identity – Two Speculations

283

Index 305

SECTION C LITERARY LANDSCAPES:

URBANISM, ECOLOGY AND THE RURAL

“And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present

nor the past”: Recovering Identity in A Month in the Country

Elsa Cavalié

Abstract: A Month in the Country (1980) – J.L. Carr’s best known work – retraces the memories of Tom Birkin, a Great War veteran, as he spends a blissful summer in Ox-godby, Yorkshire, in order to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the vil-lage church. The novella then follows Birkin’s artistic progress, his friendship with fellow veteran Charles Moon, and the bonds he develops with the local community. Situated somewhere between L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1991), A Month in the Country is a curiously hybrid work, still imbued by nostalgia for the comforts of England’s ‘green and pleasant land’, but also borrowing the staple elements of postmodernist novels. Through the meticulous res-toring of the hidden 14th century mural and the frequent walks in the English country-side, Birkin tries to get in touch with a part of his identity that was buried under the fields of the Somme. Indeed, the novella emphasizes the fact that the First World War made the soldiers foreigners in their own country and probes into the ways in which personal and national identity may be restored, and trauma ‘worked through’. Key names and concepts: J.L. Carr - Michel Foucault - Dominick LaCapra - the First World War - heterotopia - landscape - lieux de mémoire - memory - pastoral - trauma.

J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country was published in 1980, three years before Graham Swift’s Waterland, a novel which also centres on the exploration of the British countryside and similarly questions the writing of personal and national history. Like its more famous coun-terpart, Carr’s novella (it is only 80 pages long in its British edition) revisits a pastoral topos deeply linked with the concept of Englishness, that of the ‘perfect summer’ glorifying the English countryside, a theme which can be traced back to Edward Thomas’s and Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry (“O thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free/And

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all the paths led on from hawthorn-time/Across the carolling meadows into June” [Sassoon 1983: 106]) but which has remained very much alive, from L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, to Ian McEwan’s Atone-ment (2001) and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. Like Thomas and Sassoon, but also McEwan, Swift, and Barker, Carr interweaves the evocation of a pastoral, regenerative countryside with the distress of shell-shocked veterans, as if the two worlds, in their almost ontologi-cal opposition (at least in British minds) were two sides of the same coin.1 As Paul Fussell famously put it in The Great War and Modern Memory: “Recourse to the pastoral is an English mode of both fully gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively protecting oneself against them.” (Fussell 1975: 235)

A Month in the Country is the autobiographical story of Tom Birkin, a Great War veteran who comes to a remote Yorkshire village named Oxgodby in order to restore a recently discovered fresco in the village church. There, Birkin meets Charles Moon – fellow veteran and archaeologist – who has been hired in order to find the grave of one Piers Hebron. Birkin becomes friends with the villagers and falls in love with the vicar’s wife, although his love will eventually remain unfulfilled, another of the fond memories he will cherish for the rest of his life. It is in art, not love, that Birkin finds fulfilment: the fresco he thought to be mediocre is revealed to be a stunning work of art, even though the restorer remains puzzled by the identity of the falling man represented in the bottom right hand corner of the fresco, a mys-tery that brings dynamic suspense to the novel.

In order to depict Birkin’s gradual process of recovery, this chapter will first analyse the stereotypical depiction of the English countryside as a comforting haven soothing the broken psyche of the veterans. Then it will evoke the English landscape as a “shard of the past” (Nora 1989: 12) or, according to Foucault’s terminology, a hete-rotopia. The chapter argues that it is only through a heterotopia within the heterotopia (the fresco inside the church) that apparently incom-patible spaces open up an access to what J. Hillis-Miller names the

1 In Regeneration Sassoon fictionally opposes the relief provided by the English

countryside when coming back from the Somme front: “He remembered the silvery sounds of shaken wheat, the shimmer of light on the stalks. He’d given anything to be out there, away from the stuffiness of the carriage, the itch and constriction of his uniform.” (Barker 1992: 6)

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“atopical” (1995: 52), a place that is everywhere and nowhere, and that allows Birkin to recompose his identity. Indeed, only through the uncovering of that ‘other space’, or ‘space other’, will Birkin be able to revisit the battlefields of France and recover a sense of his own identity.

In his preface to the novel, Carr explains that he intended to write A Month to the Country as a homage to Hardy: “[M]y idea was to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll along the lines of Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree” (2000 [1980]: xxi), thus inscribing it in the tradition of English pastoral literature. Indeed, the opening of the novel, where Birkin’s train stops in a quiet village during a peaceful June afternoon, might remind the reader of Edward Thomas’s ‘Adle-strop’ where a train stops in a West Country village during the sum-mer, causing the poet to marvel at the beauty of the landscape: “One afternoon/Of heat the express-train drew up there/Unwontedly. It was late June.” (Thomas 2004: 27) However, very much unlike Thomas’s poem, Birkin’s first vision of Oxgodby is far from idyllic: rain is pour-ing down, he has no idea where the church is and consequently finds himself lost in the small village. Furthermore, because of the nor-therners’ thick accent, Birkin does not understand a word they are say-ing: “‘Thoo’s ga-ing ti git rare an’ soaaked reet doon ti thi skin, maister,’ he said and shut the window in my face.” (3) Carr’s attempt at recreating the local accent, by no means meant in a derogatory sense as Carr was a proud Yorkshireman himself and believed in the moral superiority of the North over the South, seems meant to under-line the fact that Birkin is isolated and alienated from his ‘home coun-try’ – the South: “If this was a fair sample of northerners, then this was enemy country.” (3)

The village of Oxgodby itself seems to be in a derelict state that reflects Birkin’s own mental and emotional strain:

And there was a single building; it turned out to be a dilapidated farmhouse, its bit of front garden sulking behind a rusting cast-iron fence. A dog, an Airedale, dragged on its chain, howled half-heartedly and ran for shelter again. After that, there was a couple of hen-huts collapsing amongst nettles in the decaying orchard. (5)

The description appears almost exaggerated in its effort to convey a sense of decay and weariness: rust, the howling dog and the decaying orchard seem to fit perfectly with what Birkin himself expected to find

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in Yorkshire. As in many works of War literature, the landscape ap-pears to function as a mutable space in which Birkin projects his own anxiety and trauma, maybe reminding him of the battlefield he has just left.2

For it is soon obvious that Birkin’s traumatic war-time past is a burden to him: right from his first morning in Oxgodby, the recurrent mention of the word field in the description of the landscape hints at the time Birkin has spent on another ‘field’ – the battlefield. Still, Birkin’s deep shell-shock appears to wear off when soothed by the English countryside and the ominous “field” (19) is soon transformed into a much more welcoming “meadow” (28).3 Moreover, when Birkin and Moon have become friends, the field even becomes “Moon’s magic meadow” (28). From grim battlefield to “magic meadow” the charm surrounding these summer days seems to gradu-ally endow this remote corner of England with an enchanting, regen-erative virtue:

Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage magic – “Now you don’t see; indeed there is nothing to see. Now look!” (61)

Here the English landscape appears to be endowed with magical, oth-erworldly regenerative virtues. Its apparition every morning is felt as miracle by Birkin, something supernatural that might be able to coun-teract the supernaturally horrific experience of the trenches. And, in retrospect, it seems that the rain that welcomed the weary veteran must be interpreted as purifying rather than ominous, for the same

2 One can here think of Barker’s trilogy again, and especially of Regeneration,

in which WHR Rivers, witnessing one of his patients, Lieutenant Burns, ex-perience a regression into trauma, realizes just how the Suffolk coast resem-bles a battlefield in France: “A resemblance that had merely nagged at him be-fore returned to his mind with greater force. This waste of mud, these sump holes reflecting a dim light at the sky, even that tower. It was like France. Like the battlefields.” (1992: 179)

3 A very British motif that one can find in Sassoon’s and Brooke’s poetry (‘The Old Vicarage, Granchester’) as well as Larkin’s famous ‘Going, going’: “And that will be England gone/The shadows, the meadows, the lanes” (Larkin 2003: 133).

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landscape he first encountered when arriving from the station is trans-formed:

And beyond lay the pasture I had crossed on my way from the station with a bell tent pitched near a stream, then more fields rising towards a dark rim of hills. And, as it lightened, a vast and magnificent land-scape unfolded. I turned away; it was immensely satisfying. (19)

Although it may retain a trace of its ‘northerness’ in the “dark rim of hills” the landscape offers all the conventional attributes of the mythi-cal English countryside: hills, rolling fields, a stream. One might even add that although the scene is situated in Yorkshire it belongs to the ‘mythical South Country’ defined by Alun Howkins as an ideological rather than geographical entity:

[I]t is important to remember […] that the ‘South Country’ rapidly lost its real existence in the sense that Thomas meant it. What was substituted were a set of yardsticks of ‘rurality’ by which the observer judged landscape. Thus Shropshire could be incorporated into the ‘South country’ but Cornwall could not. (Howkins 1986: 63)

Furthermore, one might significantly notice that the final adjective Birkin uses is “satisfying” – a term not conveying vision but feeling: nothing in the description attempts at faithfully rendering the visual details of the landscape and it is precisely that narrative void that opens up a space of projection for Birkin and the reader. It is this same visual void which allows one to emotionally invest this indefinite landscape and project into it what Ford Madox Ford called one’s “own heart of the Country”: “Each man of us has his own particular heart.” (2003: 115) This may remind one of Bachelard’s notion of “intimate immensity” (2004: 193) – a regenerative place where identity may be rebuilt thanks to the proximity with an ideal landscape.

As Birkin discovers the mythical landscape of timeless En-glishness, one has the feeling that his summer in the country is a mo-ment out of the conventional flow of time. For instance, his day off – spent having a picnic with the villagers in the countryside – poignant-ly conveys this ambivalent feeling of timelessness and fugacity: “For me that will always be the summer day of summer days – a cloudless sky, ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars.” (102) One might incidentally notice the presence of poppies in the description, a dis-

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crete but vivid reminder of the battlefield, made emblematic by John McCrae’s 1918 ‘In Flanders Fields’: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row” (McCrae 2008: 13). Still, the afternoon might also be considered as what Pierre Nora calls a “shard of the past” (1989: 17) – expressing the idea that the past is an en-closed space that cannot be re-created or re-lived through the means of nostalgic memory.

Yet, the timelessness we evoked seems to be undermined by the consciousness of death and presents this seemingly perfect summer af-ternoon as a powerful memento mori:

Then, as the first star rose and swallows turned and twisted above the bracken, our wagons rumbled down from above the White Horse and across the Vale towards home: the Sunday School Treat was over.

And when we reached Oxgodby, we heard that Emily Clough had died this afternoon. (103)

The death of a young girl puts an end to his perfect, idyllic afternoon, as if only the spectral presence of Death could endow these days with their unique, magical fleetingness. Similarly at the end of the novel, the landscape is magnified by the impending coming of autumn: “I knew now that this landscape was fixed only momentarily. The mar-vellous weather was nearing its end.” (130) As Paul Fussell notices, the irruption of death into an Arcadian English landscape is very cha-racteristic of British Literature: “Skulls juxtaposed with roses could be conventionally employed as an emblem of the omnipotence of Death, whose power is not finally to be excluded even from the sequestered, ‘safe’ world of pastoral.” (1975: 246)

Caught between life and death, timelessness and transience, this suspended moment in time seems to have all the characteristics of Foucault’s heterochrony – a different time/a time Other – which, ac-cording to Foucault, is a corollary to the heterotopia:

The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance. (Foucault 1967)

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And it is indeed in a church and a cemetery that Birkin and Moon work, places that are simultaneously separated from the space of the living (here, the village and the English countryside) but which are al-so connected to it, for they belong to what Nora calls lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’, Nora 1989: 7). According to Nora: “[I]n certain sites […] a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.” (Nora 1989: 7) The ceme-tery’s symbolic force is all the greater since War has shattered the tra-ditional organisation of beliefs and the very existence of God. Birkin’s sense of being lost in his own country comes from the fact that society does not provide him with a milieu de mémoire (a “real environment of memory”): he therefore needs to find a lieu de mémoire favourable to the reconstruction of his identity. Because England strives to forget the great massacre of the Somme, Birkin needs a place to mourn and ‘work through’ his trauma.4 As Dominick LaCapra has it: “Mourning brings the possibility of engaging trauma and achieving a reinvest-ment, or recathexis of, life which allows one to begin again.” (LaCa-pra 2001: 66)

Indeed, protected by this ‘other space’ – the heterotopia – the veterans’ identities can be cured from the sufferings of the trenches and trauma worked through in order to “begin again” and regenerate the self. However, Carr is not univocal in his representation of ‘work-ing through’ trauma, insofar as his novel presents several types of re-generations. The first of these is achieved through the proximity with the English landscape, allowing Birkin a symbolical rebirth. His very first night in Oxgodby is ambiguously presented as a death followed by a rebirth: “[F]or the first night during many months, I slept like the dead, and the next morning, awoke very early.” (18) It seems that the veteran needs to ‘re-live’ or ‘re-enact’ the traumatic events (what La-

4 In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominic LaCapra elaborates the concept

of “working through” (as opposed to “acting out”) trauma after Freudian the-ory: “Working through is an articulatory practice: to the extent one works through trauma […], one is able to distinguish between past and present and to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with opening to the future.” (2001: 22)

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Capra would identify as “acting out”5) in order to work through trau-ma and be freed from it. The feeling of symbolic rebirth is indeed reinforced by the strange scene in which, during a hot afternoon, Bir-kin takes a nap, of all places, on the tomb of one of the villagers fond-ly referred to as Elijah:

It was here, above Elijah, that normally I sat and ate, looking across to Moon’s camp, letting summer soak into me – the smell of summer and summer sounds. Already I felt part of it, not a looker-on like some casual visitor. […]

So I nudged back my bum and lay flat on the stone table, cov-ered my eyes with a khaki handkerchief and, doubtlessly groaning gently, dropped off into a deep sleep. (41)

The ambiguity of Birkin’s ‘resting place’, where he is represented as-leep, as it were, on top of a dead comrade, offers a strange anamor-phosis of the horror of the trenches, where that situation was painfully familiar, an anamorphosis in which one can read another instance of the process of ‘acting out’ or ‘re-enacting trauma’. As often with shell-shocked veterans, sleep, meant to soothe and regenerate, is the privileged site of haunting dreams and nightmares. Although it is the Great War that sleep is meant to erase, the khaki handkerchief – cov-ering Birkin’s eyes – points to the difficulty to eliminate it from his consciousness and to stop seeing things ‘as a soldier’. Despite the sounds and smells of summer, war still veils his gaze, and sleep is still described as ‘dropping off’, a verb that could be read as a marker of the re-enactment of trauma. Birkin’s ‘resting place’ – intermingling sleep and death – may also remind the reader of Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘A Terre’ evoking the ground of the battlefield as a soft, comfortable bed: “I shall be better with plants that share/More peaceably the mea-dow and the shower./Soft rains will touch me” (Owen 1963: 65). De-spite the positive influence of the English landscape, the battlefield is still very much present in Birkin’s mind and surroundings. As LaCa-pra explains it, ‘acting out’ trauma and ‘working through’ it are not necessarily mutually exclusive processes, and indeed, ‘acting out’ may be considered as a prerequisite to ‘working though’: “[T]he muting or mitigation of trauma that is nonetheless recognized and, to some ex-

5 “In acting out, tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past

reliving the traumatic scene.” (LaCapra 2001: 21)

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tent, acted out may be a requirement or precondition of working through problems.” (LaCapra 2001: 71) As the English landscape pro-vides a first tentative way out of re-enacting trauma, it is the hetero-topic quality of the place Birkin has chosen that will eventually offer a basis for ‘working through’ it.

Indeed, the church, the field and the cemetery have another property belonging to heterotopias: they are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in them-selves incompatible” (Foucault 1967), for the church might be consi-dered as an interface between the mythical regenerative English land-scape and the trenches.

Set a few years after World War I, in 1920 (113), the novel does not offer any direct images of the battlefield: the Somme, Ypres and Arras are always represented in absentia, through the silences of Tom Birkin and the screams of Charles Moon. While it seems that, similar-ly to the process of talking cure, reconstructing one’s identity and ‘working through’ entail the metaphorical revisiting of the geographi-cal and metaphorical places of trauma, Carr offers two different pers-pectives on the psychological aftermath of war and trauma through the examples of Birkin and Moon. One should however notice that the two characters are contrasted, not drastically opposed. Although the reasons for their visits to Oxgodby are similar, their attitudes towards the war are different: Charles Moon is (officially) searching for the tomb of one of the influential local heiress’ ancestors (“the grave of Miss Hebron’s forebear, one Piers Hebron, 1373” [25]), while Tom Birkin has been hired in order to uncover a medieval Judgement in the local church. Interestingly enough-h, Moon’s and Birkin’s physical positions in the church and the yard are related to their respective po-sitions during the war, which could be considered another form of re-enactment of the war trauma. From his days in the trenches, Moon has kept the habit of digging in order to feel safe, just as Birkin does the opposite and goes to live in the church belfry:

To my astonishment [his tent] was pitched over a pit. “It’s better insu-lated,” he said. “And besides, it’s like old times: I developed a great affection for holes. You up your ladder, me down my hole… we’re survivors.” (28)

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Like his way of entering the church and his posture (“[he] stood as though he’s taken root” [24]), Moon’s relationship to his war memo-ries is very straightforward insofar as he outright and frankly refuses to dwell on the trauma. Charles Moon may be considered as a literary avatar of John Bull: of average height, sturdy, his blue eyes and the clarity of his voice (22) make him look like a good comrade, a confi-dante to whom Birkin might start to open up about his war memories. Still, one may notice “the three holes in his tunic’s shoulders where his captain’s pips should have been” (24) – discreet war wounds that underline his being a veteran and emphasize the indelible physical and emotional scars war inevitably leaves.

Like Moon’s, Birkin’s past as a soldier is revealed in an oblique way; his too big an overcoat catches the eye while protecting him from inquisitive looks: “[It was] wonderful material, the real stuff, thick herring-bone tweed. It reached down to my ankles; its original owner must have been a well-to-do giant.” (4) Birkin’s overcoat, like his stammering and his nervous twitches, represent the externalisation of his experience of war and seem to signal the difficulty in accepting shell shock which mark him as stuck in the ‘acting out’ phase of trau-ma. Unlike him, Moon reveals the reasons why he placed his tent on top of a hole on his very first meeting with Birkin and seems to be able to verbalize his experience of war: “‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to be told you didn’t catch that twitch on the North-Eastern Railway, so we may as well start straight away swapping stories about the same bloody awful place.’” (25) If putting trauma into words is the first step towards working it out, Moon seems to be more likely than Birkin to find a new start in Oxgodby.

As the novel unfolds, Moon appears to represent an interme-diary between the reader and Birkin, who verbalizes what the shell-shocked veteran cannot bring himself to express. Still, in the same way Moon the archaeologist refuses to dig in the field he is supposed to excavate, Moon the veteran has no intention of ‘unearthing’ the re-mains of his painful war memories. Those should remain buried and be progressively washed away by time: “I tell myself it will be better as time passes and it sinks further back.” (97) The ghosts from the past are to be forgotten: “But I remember them less well now… they’re dwindling.” (98) The power of shell shock and repression is reflected in the veterans’ relationship to language, for even Moon cannot direct-ly name the battlefield: it needs to be referred to through periphrases

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(“the same bloody awful place” [25]) – a symbolical distancing from the reality of war. Indeed, for both veterans striving to emerge from shell shock, the consciousness of war is frequently encapsulated in pe-riphrases like “What befell you Over there” (32) or “it came out I’d been Over There” (88), which underline the ominous capacity of lan-guage to summon the ghosts of the past.6 Similarly, the aposiopesis in one of Moon’s comments about Miss Hebron’s brother opens up the dark vortex of trauma: “Her brother, the Colonel… no, no, Boer War” (24), as if the Boer War could actually be named, while only uttering the word ‘Somme’ could render it too close for comfort. Alternately, one may detect in the same aposiopesis the trace of Birkin’s telling of the dialogue, hinting at the fact that Moon’s openness in discussing the war experience was not (yet) shared by his friend.

The unsaid – participating in the First World War’s great mas-sacre – cannot be written into the text: that liminal place of trauma brings about what LaCapra describes as “a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel” (LaCapra 2001: 42). This non-place of representation has been defined by J. Hillis-Miller as the atopical:

[…] a place that is everywhere and nowhere, a place you cannot get to from here. Sooner or later, in a different way in each case, the effort of mapping is interrupted by an encounter with the unmappable. The to-pography and the toponymy in each example, in a different way in each case, hide an unplaceable place. It was the locus of an event that never ‘took place’ as a phenomenal happening located in some identi-fiable spot and therefore open to knowledge. (1995: 7-8)

Confronted with the atopical, Birkin thus refuses to relive the traumat-ic scenes, as Reverend Keach notices it: “You have come back from a place where you have seen things beyond belief, things you cannot talk of yet can’t forget.” (119-20) Therefore, revisiting the space of trauma needs to be mediated by the contact with another space – the fresco inside the little church which offers a physical and artistic inter- 6 The names of places and battles themselves might indeed be considered

evocative enough to bring back painful memories from the front. As Sassoon has it in Barker’s Regeneration: “Language ran out on you, in the end, the names were left to say it all. Mons, Loos, Ypres, The Somme.” (Barker 1992: 90)

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face between past and present. One might consider the fresco a meta-phor, or mise en abyme, of the recreation of the past in the novel. Representing history means bringing the picture in the fresco back to life, an image of the English past which appears simultaneously close and remote from Birkin (and the reader) as it is impossible for the art-ist (Birkin the church restorer or Carr the novelist) to know when his task is finally complete.7 Then, the unmappable limit between past and present connects time and space for the veteran in order to reunite “af-fect and representation” (LaCapra 2001: 42).

The church in the middle of the fields indeed functions as a he-terotopia within the heterotopia and recreates the comforting familiar-ity of a bygone past. Thus, when Birkin discovers the baluster of the church, his youth instantly comes back to him:

There, almost scraping my nose, was a baluster. And I began laughing. Although I’d never seen one before, I recognized it immediately from good old Bannister-Fletcher, our bible in Miss Witherpen’s English Architecture class. “Draw a baluster,” she used to chide. “Go on, never mind fiddling about with fancy Corinthian capitals – draw an English baluster.” (21)

The baluster seems to represent the epitome of Englishness and to of-fer a direct access into Birkin’s peaceful pre-war days. According to Foucault, “[h]eterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (Foucault 1967). In the novel, Birkin’s physical position – isolated on top of the scaffolding, where no one can join him but where he can be seen and communicate with people (“So, even if King George came, he’d have to look down on Mr Moon and up to me. Absolutely no exceptions” [36]) – very much illustrates that concept. Indeed, while somewhat ‘isolated’ from other human beings, Birkin is still in contact with the regenerative landscape evoked before: “It was very pleasant sitting on the boards, leaning against a wall, because through my window I still could see the hills heaving up like the back of some great sea-creature, dark woods washing down its sides into the Vale.” (19)

7 An idea that can similarly be found in Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over, where

the heroine also is an art restorer: “It’s an artistic rather than a scientific deci-sion, when to stop […]. There’s no ‘real’ picture under there waiting to be re-vealed.” (Barnes 1991: 122)

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As he begins to work on the fresco, Birkin finds himself in a liminal space – a heterotopia poised between the present and the past:

You know how it is when a tricky job is going well because you’re do-ing things the way they should be done, when you’re working in rhythm and feel a reassuring confidence that everything’s unravelling naturally and all will be right in the end. (46)

Both values around which the space is built – the tranquil rhythm of the craftsman and the satisfaction found in a well-executed job – seem dated and reassuring and thus point to the heterotopic function of the space in which Birkin finds himself in. While working on the uncover-ing of the Judgement, Birkin discovers what Foucault describes as “another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (Foucault 1967) – that of the memorial and artistic puzzle of the fresco where the key to his identity seems to lie: “It would be like a jigsaw – a face, a hand, a shoe, here a bit and there a bit.” (43) The patient reconstruction of the bodies of the characters in the painting may be thought of as exorcising the scenes of horrific dismemberment experienced in France and thus metaphori-cally bringing together the pieces of his identity in a process of ‘work-ing through’ trauma.

Still, in the first weeks of work, Birkin appears to be opaque to himself, unaware of the double meaning of his quest, and it is once again Moon who notices the proximity between the fresco and the ex-perience of the trenches:

“Amazing! Do you know, in some ways, it brings back the whole bloody business in France – particularly the winters? Those red even-ings when the barrage was starting up and each man wondered if this was to be the night…” (76)

Yet, it seems that even before Moon verbalizes the ‘uncanny’ feeling of familiarity, Birkin had had intuitions of the double meaning of his work, for instance when he described the dammed in the fresco as “fire fodder” (74) – a phrase that recalls the terrifying feeling of being nothing but “cannon fodder” evoked in the first words of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’: “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle ?/Only the monstrous anger of the guns” (Owen

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1963: 44).8 Still, once the parallel between the vision of hell as de-picted in the fresco and the carnage of the trenches has been estab-lished, their similarity becomes obvious. Birkin’s patient uncovering of the fresco reveals “torrents of human flesh” that very clearly point out the dual symbolic value of the fresco: “So each day, I released a few more inches of a seething cascade of bones and worm-riddled vi-tals frothing over the fiery weir.” (74)

Becoming an artist thus allows Birkin to escape his condition as a victim and, through the fresco, to recreate a scene where he has the power to preside over the destiny of men who are (literally) in front of him. To draw a parallel with a more famous war novel – Pat Barker’s Regeneration – the passivity felt by the men at the front seems to have been the most painful element: “The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activities had actually delivered ‘feminine’ pas-sivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down.” (Barker 1991: 107-8) Conse-quently, ‘doing things’, instead of just being subjected to the implaca-ble unfolding of events opens the path towards psychological recov-ery. Trusting his artistic knowledge, Birkin soon guesses that the fres-co he is uncovering is, in fact, a Last Judgement, and, in order to con-firm his hunch, decides to start his restoration work with the figure of Christ – usually situated at the centre of such a fresco. And while he actually discovers a Christ in majesty, Birkin is, for the first time, sur-prised by the fresco: he does not find the expected “cinnabar” (33) on the lips of a Christ proving to be very different from what he foresaw. The ‘modernity’ of the figure is indeed striking: “This was no cata-logue Christ, insufferably ethereal. This was a wintry hard-liner. Jus-tice, yes there would be justice. But not mercy.” (33) The harshness of Christ’s features, the feeling that mercy has disappeared from the world, resonate with Birkin’s war experience. Oxgodby’s Christ does not exude benevolence and compassion, and, because of that, can somewhat justify the horrors of war: “This was the Oxgodby Christ, uncompromising… no, more – threatening. ‘This is what you did to me. And, for this, many shall suffer the torment, for thus it was with me.’” (33-4) Through the representation of Christ, Birkin finds a rea-

8 Freud defines the Uncanny as “something that was familiar to the Psyche and

was estranged from it only through being repressed” (Freud 2003: xlii), it is often evoked in the ‘presence’ of ghosts.

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son for his own sufferings, an almost divine justification of the in-comprehensible carnage of the Somme in a world where God seems to have abandoned men.

The uncanny emotional proximity to the fresco Birkin experi-ences thus provokes an interest in the Last Judgement that turns into an obsession (“Bringing back that dead man’s apocalyptic picture into daylight obsessed me” [47]) for through it, the young man literally widens his horizons: “It was like a window in a filthy wall which every day or two, opened a square foot or so wider.” (46) The window opens up on a wealth of colours – contrasting with the greys and browns associated with the landscape of the trenches – which soothes the young man’s tormented soul. The vitality of the reds and blues breathes life into him, and replace the “cascade of bones and worm-riddled vitals” with a torrent of colours: “A tremendous waterfall of colour, the blues of the apex falling then seething into a turbulence of red; like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole be-fore beguiling you with its parts.” (75) The re-discovery of the beauty of the world – however close to its horrors – regenerates Birkin’s psy-che and allows him to stop escaping his memories in order to be fi-nally able to put the ineffable into words, when questioned by Alice Keach (the vicar’s wife):

“Do you believe in hell, Mr Birkin?” Now that was a thought! Hell? Passchendaele had been hell.

Bodies split, heads blown off, grovelling fear, shrieking fear, unspeak-able fear! The World made mud!

[…] “Then what about hell on earth”, she said. I told her I’d seen it and lived there and that, mercifully, they

usually left an exit open. (95) If hell seems to belong to an improbable future for Mrs Keach, it ex-ists in a very concrete way in Birkin’s past. The triple repetition of the word ‘fear’ brings the three qualifiers (“grovelling”, “shrieking”, “un-speakable”) into semantic collision: the fear Birkin felt in the trenches is defined as simultaneously silent and ineffable (“unspeakable”) but also painfully loud (“shrieking”). It is therefore both indescribable and personified – a presence lurking in the shadows of one’s conscience ready to leap out unexpectedly. In Paschaendale – “the World made mud” – Birkin’s identity was unbound and he became opaque to him-

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self as he experienced the “dissociation of affect and representation” described by LaCapra. The man, the soldier and the artist could no longer be one therefore causing a war-induced ‘schizophrenia’. As Sassoon explains it in Barker’s Regeneration: “‘It was like being three different people and they all wanted to go different ways.’” (Barker 1991: 35)

Nevertheless, this split identity entails a closeness with the painter of the fresco – the mysterious medieval artist whose footsteps Birkin follows in: “But also about the nameless man who’d stood where I stood. Not his technical abilities although, quite properly, these were extremely interesting to me. […] No it was his quirks which really fascinated me.” (91) Intrigued by the “quirks” of the painter, Birkin tries to solve the mystery of his own identity and, at the same time, to understand why one of the characters of the Judgement is represented with a crescent-shaped scar on his forehead: “And he, I could have sworn, was a portrait – a crescent shaped scar on his brow made this almost certain.” (74)

In the last pages of the novel, the mystery of the fresco is brought full circle by the discovery of the falling man’s identity: Moon unearths Piers Hebron’s tomb in the churchyard and it is dis-covered that he, the mysterious character in the fresco and the painter are, in fact, the same person. Yet, even at that crucial moment, it is once again Moon who enlightens Birkin:

“But first we’ll climb your ladder and have a look at his face before it fell off.”

Do you know, until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that this bundle of bones was my falling man. (127)

Piers Hebron’s triple identity – soldier, painter and character in his own fresco – fascinatingly reflects Birkin’s triple identity – soldier, artist, and character in his own novel. Having finally ‘brought togeth-er’ Piers’s three identities endows Birkin with a bittersweet sense of completion, for the fleeting moment of wholesomeness soon gives way to the consciousness of an inescapable ending. Yet, as Rosemary McGerr notices, the recovering one’s identity cannot mean a reverting to an original, prelapsarian state: “Like their search for the medieval past, their personal recovery does not completely restore an original state.” (2005: 358) Just like it is not possible to ‘bring back’ the past

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in the fresco, the part of his identity that has been shattered by time and suffering is now irretrievable: “It simply isn’t possible to return a five hundred-year old wall painting to its original state. At best, I aimed at approximation, uniformity, something that looked right.” (46) To quote Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy hinges on very similar themes: “Regeneration is very substantial, you get a lot of sen-sation back, but at the same time, regeneration is never complete.” (Barker 2001, video Interview)

When uncovering the mystery of Piers Hebron’s identity, Tom Birkin recovers a sense of his own identity – shattered by the war. In that process, the English landscape plays a crucial part, for it offers both a protective space in which to recover from one’s psychological wounds and an opportunity to safely revisit traumatic events. Still, it is only through the mediation of the fresco – an interface between two countries, England and France – and two periods – the past and the present – that Birkin is able to face the events that haunt him and to put his trauma into words.

The brevity of Carr’s novella – mirroring the fleetingness of Birkin’s summer in Oxgodby – makes it a fascinating object, halfway between nostalgia and postmodernity. Although it rests on familiar themes, establishing the bygone magic of Englishness, it does surpris-ingly not advocate an open, regressive nostalgia. As the elderly ver-sion of Birkin has it at the end of the novel:

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours forever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. (135)

Reminiscent of L.P. Hartley’s famous opening to The Go Between (“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there” [2000: 5]), the ending of Carr’s novel underlines the pain felt when youth is irretrievably lost and creates a literary heterotopia: a closed and open space where past territories are both visible and inaccessible.

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