Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality By David Waterman

In other words, these characters are out of step with the natural order of things; they question cultural constructions like masculinity, heroism, the “unquestionable” rights of institutions, and they worry about their roles as members of the larger community (Kirby 101). Such questions are often, fundamentally, questions of representation: whether we examine how existing representations serve to maintain the status quo, or whether we are interested in how to represent the horrors of war or the “monstrosities” of civil life (Barker, “Another World” 3). Social representations may even give voice to trauma in an effort to approach something resembling truth—in other words, how best to represent the kinds of human experiences that resist representation. This book hopes to examine questions of social representation in Pat Barker's novels published over the last twenty-five years, from Union Street (1982) to Life Class (2007), and especially the ways in which Barker encourages us to interrogate the reality created by such conventionalizing, prescriptive representations in favor of a reality more accurately represented through a critical assessment of the uses and abuses of collective representations.

Although my own interest in social representation theory is indebted to the extensive work of Serge Moscovici, among others, any discussion of social representations must, at least briefly, acknowledge the role played by Emile Durkheim, not only as the founder of modern sociology, especially in terms of research methodology, but more specifically as the author of the 1898 article, “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives,” in the journal Revue de métaphysique et de morale, an article which broke new ground by giving social representations their due as sociological phenomena. Given our interest in the political aspects of social representations, in the sense of “hegemony” or “ideology,” Martha Augoustinos and Iain Walker remind us of Antonio Gramsci's contribution to the discipline as well: