Pat Barker's critical work of mourning: Realism with a difference

Choosing to turn to the fringes of England's social body or the dark recesses of collective memory, Pat Barker's has evolved a complex realistic writing. While trying to understand the mechanisms of ideological fashioning and the specific ways private psyche resists them, her realistic vision also takes the formulas of representation to a breaking-point. By coming face to face with what defies language, it paradoxically opens the way for a renewed form of discursive agency, in the very gaps left open by repressed collective traumas.