Rigenerazione: Pat Barker racconta Sassoon

Pat Barker’s 1991 novel, Regeneration, introduces the reader to the Craiglockhart mental hospital for officers, where in 1917 the war hero and celebrated war poet Siegfried Sassoon met doctor W. H. Rivers. Rivers was among the first neurologists to identify as ‘shell-shock’ those severe mental disorders commonly affecting soldiers after their trenches experiences during the Great War, and too often easily dismissed as cowardly behavior back in those times. Though unnoticed in Barker’s novel, Rivers, who treated the poet for some months in 1917, gave his innovative report on mental disorders the same title as one of Sassoon’s poems, Repression of War Experience. Sassoon’s poetry, with his concise, ironic, yet sensitive language, was indeed giving voice to the daily horror experienced in the First World War trenches, as well as to the bodily and inner devastation of shell-shocked soldiers. In this essay, I am suggesting to read Barker’s novel, with its vivid depictions of places and characters, accurately based on the doctor’s reports and other accountable sources about those tragic war times, as a complex intertextual evocation of Sassoon’s poem Repression of War Experience.