팻 바커의 『갱생』 삼부작 -정신병리학과 사회비판

Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy: Psychopathology and Social Criticism

While Lukacs advocated the progressive effect that Darwin's evolutionary theory had on Goethe and Balzac, he was convinced that the "influences of Nietzsche, Freud, or Spengler on the writers" of his own time were "devastating." He maintains that to the "'vacuous' reality" of bourgeois life, "the bourgeois writer counterposes 'the life of the soul,' which is 'alone decisive.' This life of the soul then becomes the centre of gravity, and sometimes the sole content of his portrayal." Naming this creative tendency psychologism, he warns against the danger of "depicting only the 'inner life,' and carrying on a more or less conscious education in the direction of political and social indifferentism, of ignoring and pushing aside the 'inessential,' 'external' struggles of the world, in favour of the 'life of the soul,' which is all that matters." However, Frantz Fanon's analysis of the psychology of the colonized in Black Skin, White Masks displays that after all, "the life of the soul" cannot be separated from the "external' struggles of the world." Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which criticizes the conduct of World War I by British leaders and the British society in general with its patriarchal, gender, and class repression by depicting the psychopathology of the shell shock victims of the same war amply shows the possibility of portraying the "external struggles of the world" through the in-depth probing into "the life of the soul" and finding political and social relevance in the process.