Trauma Room

ByDorian Stuber(March 1, 2013)2 Comments

Toby’s Room

By Pat Barker
Doubleday, 2012

Toby’s Room, the new book by British novelist Pat Barker, is a sequel to her previous one,Life Class(2007). Its ending leaves open the possibility of a third book, which would be unsurprising since Barker is best known for herRegenerationtrilogy (1991-95). Those books are about the Great War and shell shock; they count historical figures, such as the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the doctor W. H. R. Rivers, among their significant characters. The new books cover more or less the same period and use the same method. But they don’t feel like imitations, mostly because the focus has been shifted from the battlefield to the home-front worlds of art and surgical medicine.

Life Classintroduced readers to three students at the Slade School of Art: Paul Tarrant, Kit Neville, and Elinor Brooke, loosely based on the artists Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson, and Dora Carrington. The fictional characters study together under the acerbic, intimidating Henry Tonks, as did their historical counterparts. Tonks and the others return in the new book, which certainly stands alone and is to my mind much the better book. Even so, it is best characterized as a fascinating failure.

Henry Tonks

Barker is at her best when she is teaching us things about the early twentieth century, specifically its attitudes to physical and mental suffering. InToby’s Roomshe introduces the real-life surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, who pioneered the use of plastic surgery and facial reconstruction techniques on soldiers badly wounded during the war. These victims are not just wounded; they are disfigured. The term suggests at once an object, the human body, and an act, that of shaping or making. Or, rather, an act of un-making. These books contend, through the theory of Tonks and the practice of Gillies, that to make something we must first unmake or take apart something else. To draw the body we must know its anatomy; to repair its wounds we must create others. Barker is at her worst when posing but not grappling with the implications of these insights.

Early in the novel Elinor struggles through the dissection of human cadavers required by her anatomy course. She relies on that experience when, five years later, in the midst of the war, she is asked by Tonks to take a job as a medical illustrator at the newly constructed Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup, in what is now South-East London but was then open countryside. The hospital was designed specifically for those suffering from facial injuries. At the request of Gillies, who wanted them as a surgical aid, Tonks was asked to draw portraits of the patients at various stages of their excruciating “recovery”: it was not uncommon for patients to undergo twenty or even thirty separate surgeries. Elinor re-encounters her former teacher at the hospital where, in the company of Paul (himself invalided home from thefront), she has sought an audience with Kit—a patient there thanks to severe wounds suffered while serving under Elinor’s brother Toby in a medical unit on the front. This is the Toby of the book’s title, and, like the titular character of Virginia Woolf’s novelJacob’s Room(1922), after which Barker’s novel has surely been named, he is a shadowy figure, the bearer of secrets that explode like submerged mines throughout the novel.

And Toby has many such secrets. The first, known to him but not to Elinor, is that he was a twin, though his sibling, a girl, died late in the pregnancy. This so-called papyrus twin—the dead twin is flattened in the womb by the living one into the shape of a scroll—has been sent to a medical museum; the first instance in the novel of medical monstrosity, and of Toby’s violence. The second secret is one that Toby and Elinor carry with them: an incestuous sexual passion that overcomes them at the dramatic conclusion of the opening chapter. The third concerns the circumstances of Toby’s death, finally revealed by Kit to Paul and then, with some editing, to Elinor. There are other secrets in the novel as well, ranging from the mundane—Elinor’s father’s affair with a younger woman—to the miraculous—Gillies’s heroic effort to reconstruct faces damaged almost beyond recognition by shrapnel and mortar. These secrets become part of the novel’s rather conventional indictment of Edwardian-era morality and gender politics. As Elinor muses: “All her life… [she] had been brought up not to know things, but not knowing didn’t keep you safe.”

What Elinor most wants to know, to the point of obsession, is what happened to Toby, who has been declared, “missing, believed killed.” She is led to Neville not just because of their past acquaintance, but more urgently because of a letter she finds in the lining of Toby’s coat, sent home along with his other personal effects. In it, Toby bluntly states that he “won’t be coming back this time” and tells Elinor to ask Kit if she wants to know more about his, Toby’s, fate. Toby is sure Kit will survive, and the hint of bitterness in that suggestion is amplified in the next line, stricken through but still legible: “He’s been no friend to me.” The letter ends without salutation or signature, only the single word “Remember.”

Remember: this injunction is as much Barker’s preoccupation as it is Elinor’s. Barker’s perennial theme is our response to overwhelming, traumatic events. She is a leading exponent of a robust tendency in contemporary literature—the novel of mourning. (Toni Morrison, W. G. Sebald, and Rachel Seiffert are other practitioners.) Memory is so central to our cultural moment, and Barker’s fiction is so representative of how we think about suffering today, that I wonder how much staying power her work will have. Unlike those other writers, Barker doesn’t attempt to mimic the gaps or elisions of trauma in her style. Plot isn’t scrambled, point of view isn’t distorted. All shifts are clearly, even rigidly or mechanically marked. Barker’s discussions of trauma are just that—discussions, confined to the realm of content, never infiltrating and infecting her form. Metaphor appears in only the most minimal, banal way. Responding to her sister’s criticisms that she is morning her brother’s death as though she were his widow, Elinor thinks, “There it was again: the shadow under the water that none of them ever admitted seeing.” It might have been a line like this that prompted the biographer Hermione Lee, in a review ofToby’s Room, to call Barker’s prose “ordinary,” adding “you don’t go to her for fine language, you go to her to plain truths.” You go to the dictionary or the encyclopedia for plain truths, too, and it’s as a plainspoken presentation of engaging historical material that this novel works best. It’s hard to see anyone reading these books in a hundred years except as literary-historical evidence for late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century preoccupations about our relationship to the events of a century ago.

Toby’s Roomis an engrossing, disquieting book. It reads quickly and seems straightforward, but it lingers in the mind long afterwards, like a pleasanter version of the belatedness characterizing the trauma Barker so often writes about. But the book is almost perverse in its quotidian presentation of extraordinary events: the book itself isn’t strange, though the things in it are. It’s hard to see anyone reading these books in a hundred years except as literary-historical evidence for our current fascination with the events of a century ago.

Of course, we don’t only or even mostly read novels with an eye to literary posterity or canonicity. But Barker herself seems to think so—she is preoccupied with such questions. From the title onward, the book is an investigation into literary and artistic history, specifically the movement known as modernism.

1922 is often taken as the pivotal year of literary modernism.Ulysseswas published that year, as wasThe Waste Landand D. H. Lawrence’s indelible collection of stories,England, my England. Also published that year—by the Hogarth Press, established by the author and her husband five years earlier—was Virginia Woolf’s third novel,Jacob’s Room, the first expression of her mature style. By self-publishing the book, Woolf was free to give free rein to the formal experimentation she had been developing in a series of unusual short stories written in the late teens. Indeed, of all the books named here, even the more canonical ones,Jacob’s Roomis the most unconventional. It is in part an elegy for her beloved older brother, Thoby, who died in 1906 from typhoid contracted on holiday in Greece. But it also memorializes all the young men killed during the war. Jacob’s last name is Flanders and the novel ends with an allusion to his death in its fields. The novel’s most striking feature is its near-effacement of its ostensible protagonist. Jacob appears in many of its scenes, but always obliquely. We seldom see him do anything, and even more rarely know what he is thinking. The novel challenges our ideas of what literary characters ought to do or be like. How minimal can characters be before we cease to identify with them? It similarly challenges our understanding of narrative progression and even of syntax.

When we compare Woolf’s novel to Barker’s, as her title asks us to do, we see the former not as a shadowy companion but rather an opposing, even negative example to the latter. Barker’s many references to modernism aren’t just local color or historical context or even name-dropping—“See how much I know about the period!” Rather they amount to a sustained critique. For Barker, modernism is exemplified by the Bloomsbury group, the set of writers, artists, and intellectuals centered in the neighborhood around the British Museum, to which Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, later Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, first moved in 1905 after the death of their father. There they mixed with the friends Thoby had made in Cambridge in 1899. After Thoby’s death, the friends became ever closer, living and working together, even marrying, as in the case of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia and her upstairs lodger, a poor Jew recently returned from Ceylon named Leonard Woolf. In a sense, then, Bloomsbury itself could be called “Thoby’s room.”

InToby’s Room, Bloomsbury is invoked through repeated references to Woolf’s work. A single page, only ten pages into the book, alludes to three of her works. Elinor, spending a stifling weekend at the family home, goes to bed early where she sits in the dark so as to keep out the moths that terrify her sister. Moths feature regularly in her work, not least in her essay “The Death of a Moth” and inThe Waves, the working title of which wasThe Moths. InJacob’s Roomthe young Jacob goes hunting for moths, including one that the definitive field guide misidentifies. Later on the page and in the evening, Elinor listens to the noises of the house, which culminate: “Then silence, gradually deepening, until at last the old house curled up around the sleepers, and slept too,” a direct reference to the famous “Time Passes” section ofTo the Lighthouse. A few lines later, Elinor herself settles down to sleep, hearing only silence, not the usual night noise of “a susurration of leaves, sounding so like the sea that sometimes she drifted off to sleep pretending she was lying on a beach.” The lines allude to the well-known beginning of Woolf’s autobiographical fragment “A Sketch of the Past,” where she describes falling asleep in her nursery in Cornwall to the sound of the sea.

This hectic flourish of allusions is all the more unusual in that they are not intended admiringly. In this regard the indirect references to Woolf are like the direct mentions of Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury is addressed critically, and not just through individual characters. When Kit says that only “a few nancy boys in bloody Bloomsbury” would understand Toby’s death, he speaks for his historical model, Nevinson, who (under the influence of the artist, novelist, and all-around nut Wyndham Lewis and his Vorticist movement) reacted violently against Bloomsbury’s ideas of art. But he also taps into the novel’s broader anti-modernism.

Resistance to modernism is typically expressed in characters’ reactions to the war. Particularly important here is Elinor’s growing distaste for the pacifism and conscientious objection of Bloomsbury, made evident through walk-on appearances by Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whom she meets while volunteering at Charleston, Bell’s country place in Sussex. Elinor writes bitterly in her diary that she suspects Bell and her set are talking about her abortive relationship with Paul; she feels herself “gossiped about, fingered, passed round, pawed at, the way the Bloomsbury crowd always do.” Bloomsbury acts here as a synonym for ineffectualness bordering on cowardice. The novel never tries to imagine what conscientious objection might look like, doesn’t even think of it as war work.

That might explain the affectionate portrayal, in Elinor’s diary, of Ottoline Morrell, the real-life hostess and patron pilloried in D. H. Lawrence’sWomen in Love. Elinor praises her for being, “underneath all the vapors, all the nonsense” of the modernist art world, a “very practical, shrewd, hardworking woman.” She wonders how Morrell can “put[ ] up with the pacifists who are supposed to be working the farm.” The only pacifist given a speaking part in the book doesn’t really want to speak at all; he launches a desperate and poorly received kiss at Elinor. The moment is condemned as feeble rather than inappropriately lascivious—further proof of Bloomsbury’s weakness. A different attitude, however, is expressed to those, like Catherine Stein—a German citizen deemed enemy alien during the war and a friend of Catherine’s and lover of Kit’s at the Slade—who can’t help their distance from the war effort. They are forgiven, but those who can are not.

I’m disturbed by the implied connection Barker makes between the titular Toby and Bloomsbury in particular and modernism in general. When Toby’s final secret is revealed—he desires other men, especially men of other classes—he responds by endangering himself (and the men in his unit) by volunteering for increasingly risky missions until he is killed. It could be argued that this outcome merely expresses the prevailing beliefs of the period: the shame of homosexuality is so great that suicide is the only honorable recourse. But Toby is so unlikeable that his death seems a judgment. Where Woolf’s Jacob is callow, Barker’s Toby is disreputable: snobbish and careless of others. More to the point, he’s an ineffectual, even negligent leader. Kit, wounded as a result of Toby’s insistence on taking extraordinary risks, is understandably bitter towards the other man. But the book seems to be too. It’s as if Bloomsbury, famously welcoming of queer desire, is being punished along with Toby.