Transgenerational Trauma and Cyclical Haunting in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy

Abstract

‘The poetics of trans-trauma’ is my abbreviation for writing that embodies the familial transgenerational transmission of trauma and its relationship to cultural and collective operations of trauma and affect. Drawing primarily on Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, this essay explores the poetics of what I call ‘cyclical haunting’—a term that describes the way historic and social traumatic affect feeds into subjective and familial experience, and in turn plays out past these interpersonal realms to networks beyond: events, movements, collectives, institutions, milieus, trends, communities, politics, creeds, religions, genders, sub-cultures, nations and relations between humanity and the planet it inhabits. I argue that Barker's trilogy, though apparently conventional, if masterful, in form and language, is radical in its testimony to the complexity and of such cycles, and that as such it stands as a vital cultural analysis and political account.