| Chapter : | Introduction |
Old Man and the Young,” wherein Abraham prefers to sacrifice his son rather than offer the “Ram of Pride” (42). Fear, according to John Brannigan, is what motivates Abraham, and by extension the other fathers as well: “Abraham's paralysed arm, his silence before the voice of God, his fearful obedience, testify to his interpellation as a faithful subject. Fear is the sign of his obedient subjectivity, the sign that God has sought in order to confirm Abraham's inheritance” (“Pat Barker” 108). For W. H. R. Rivers, the physician/anthropologist in the Regeneration trilogy, the myth of Abraham and Isaac is, quite simply, “The bargain…on which all patriarchal societies are founded,” an unspoken contract that binds the members of a community through consensus, a common accord on what we agree to call reality (Barker, “Regeneration” 149). Such an agreed-upon reality is achieved in large measure through social representations, and result in what Paul Connerton (in a discussion of ritual performance) calls “encoded quasi-textual representation,” the kinds of narratives that help to define collective reality on a large scale (49). Such a large scale, in fact, that these social representations often escape critical examination by virtue of their seemingly natural and universal character (because subjects are born into a pre-existing reality and generally see it only from the inside); they are born into what Jeffery K. Olick calls a dialogue—in the Bakhtinian sense—wherein “no utterance can be understood outside of an ongoing discourse…dialogue is always simultaneously deeply conditioned by its past as well as ‘unfinalizable’ in the present” (10–11). Social representations are the condition of this ongoing discourse that permits communication among and between groups, a communication based on what is taken for granted and what goes without saying, which very often serve the interests of a dominant elite—it is no coincidence that Rivers qualifies such a society as patriarchal in the Regeneration trilogy. Pat Barker's work does nothing if not interrogate the foundation of such everyday common sense, questioning the illusions that we create and maintain in order to mask what Eric Fromm calls the “socially patterned defect” of our culture (“Sane Society” 23; original italics). Throughout the novels in this study, Barker's principal characters possess what Kathleen Kirby refers to as “vertigo.”