Regarding violence in Pat Barker's Double Vision

Regarding violence in Pat Barker's Double Vision

Francisco de Goya's testimony to trauma, The Disasters of War (1810–20), is conditioned by the paradox of bearing witness; it insists on its own horror, insists that that horror exceeds the viewer's empathic capacity, and insists that the generalised one' avert their gaze, while at the same time it swears to an individual act of seeing by the I', and by the eye, of the artist. Both Goya's and Pat Barker's works figure an ethical dilemma of tremendous contemporary importance: the representation of trauma and violence. These visual and literary texts consider not only what it means to see violence, but the ethical and social implications of the re–presentation', the repeated presentation, of physical and psychological pain. This essay is concerned with precisely this dilemma as it is considered in Double Vision, not only in terms of the various relationships between art and violence the novel posits, but the ways in which this arises as a dilemma for the novel itself. This essay argues that Double Vision is self–reflexively concerned with its own relationship to violence, with its own representation of violence, and with what art might be able to offer in this context beyond the possibility of redemption.

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