Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and the State of Exception

• Main Author: Catherine Lanone
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2020-03-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: anachronism; Barker (Pat); Briseis; Iliad; intertextuality; parody
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/8286

Pat Barker’s 2018 novel The Silence of the Girls revisits the Iliad to expose the unspoken tale of Briseis, Achilles’ captive. The novel explores Achilles’ wrath and Agamemnon’s decision in terms that recall Agamben’s definition of the state of exception. Rejecting romance, Barker revisits the Trojan war through the prism of World War One, with uncanny rawness. While using realism to deconstruct the epic mode and focus on the plight of women, Barker unexpectedly considers Achilles as a killing machine, but also an anomaly, a fluid amphibian character. The image of the sharp pebble, an exception on the beach, becomes an objective correlative for Briseis’s ability to endure and survive, for her dry irony, but also for her ability to heal and to piece together the fragmented tales of broken lives. Thus Barker plays with intertextuality to engage both with the great epic cultural tradition and with the violence of today’s world.