Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality By David Waterman

usual ways of knowing. Critical thinking is about doubt, about looking from another perspective, and about refusing the “common sense” of our surrounding environment. In the novel, Kate, already accustomed to thinking outside the frame as an artist, has come even further toward uncovering “truth” as a result of Peter's intervention, recognizing that the only damage “was to her belief in herself and in the project” (184), a distancing that allows for “self-preservation and adaptation,” rather than “redemption or regeneration” (Monteith and Yousaf 296).

Pat Barker is known for her refusal to neatly separate the public sphere of war from the private sphere of everyday life, insisting that war “gets into everything” (Barker, “Life Class” 242). The recurrent question throughout Barker's work: how does one give voice to trauma, a trauma that extends its battlefield into the individual and collective psyche, across divisions between the public and private spheres? Social representations come under pressure in a time of national crisis. Representations can reinforce normative codes of heroic masculinity or, alternatively, can be put to use by the engaged artist to ask, in Catherine Belsey's words, “Is it happening?” (126). This question of representation seems to follow two intersecting paths in Life Class, firstly in terms of self-representation, the subject as intersubjective, a being-among-others in this society on the verge of World War I, and secondly, the relevance of visual art in a time of war, even as an attempt is made to represent the suffering of others without falling into the trap of voyeurism. It also leads one to ask, If the self and the other are produced/reflected entities, where does truth and/or reality ultimately come into play in this formula of representation, and, indeed, which reality might we be talking about, given that subjects do not necessarily share the same realities (see Berger and Luckmann 196; Eber and Neal, “Search for Identity” 176)? Ultimately, the shifting perspectives that come to light in the novel serve to interrogate notions of subjectivity, truth, and reality, since ways-of-knowing and ways-of-being are relational, sensitive as they are to the evolving social/historical context. The trio of artists—Elinor, Paul, and Neville— each respond to the question of relevance in modern society, though in different ways, but for each of them the importance of painting