Photography, Trauma and the Politics of War in Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie

Résumé 0

In her neo-Victorian novel Master Georgie (1988), Beryl Bainbridge uses narrative plurality and the verbal description of photographs to probe epistemological issues and to approach the trauma of the Crimean War from a deliberately oblique perspective. By choosing marginal characters whose voices have not been recorded by official history, she proposes a more personal and at the same time cynical portrait of the horrors of war. The photographs alluded to in the text are often the result of manipulation and deceit meant to hide the squalid truth, and therefore raise questions as to what can be perceived of the original trauma, interrogating the import of this new medium in the Victorian period and in times of war. In the light of Cathy Caruth's contention that trauma presents a crisis of truth, this paper examines the dialogue between two heterogeneous semiotic codes (text and narrativised image) and discusses its validity as a mode of representation of personal and collective tragedies.