Truth, Art, and War in Pat Barker's Life Class

The Artist's Obligation to Truth

The response of a visual artist does not differ fundamentally from that of a journalist or even a civilian in the face of wartime atrocity. The response should always be one of truth. The journalist responds with words meant to depict the true reality of what is happening. The civilian tries to gauge the truth through all the senses and means available, responding in whatever ways are open to him — seeking help, giving help, seeking justice, offering mercy, and so on. The response of the visual artist is simply to show what is there: not in words, but in image.

This is indeed what Paul begins to achieve in his own art, which in the wake of the war experience "is imbued with a hitherto absent authority" (Scott). In other words, he begins to see and to realize the deeper realities of life. That which eludes him at the beginning of the novel — in Tonks' life art class, his inability to draw the line below the skin — is later reflected in an art purified through intense experience of ultimate realities: life and death.

Paul's Transformation Through Engagement

At the heart of Life Class is the idea that life is about being engaged — in one way or another. The novel is filled with complicated characters, from Paul to Neville to Elinor, all of whom are trying to find their way while seeming more or less capable, confident, or lucky than they might actually be. The point is that life comes at everyone, and everyone responds differently — some engaging with it, as Paul learns to do with the Red Cross, and others hiding from it, finding the engagement too intense or frightening.

The point of the artist, however, is to have an unflinching gaze — eyes that penetrate and see, and the skill to recreate and represent the reality taken in by the immersive experience of engagement. The whole point of being an artist is to represent reality, to tell the truth about it. This is what Paul begins to do at the end of the novel. He writes to Elinor:

"I've taken to getting right away on my days off, can't stand the place, can't work (draw, I mean, the other sort of work I do in a trance). I managed to get an ambulance driver to take me up to the front line, promising if he was full on the way back I'd walk. He's called Guy and he's a Canadian, very dark skin, furrowed cheeks, he looks too old to be here, but here he is. And taciturn in the extreme, which suited me. I didn't want to talk, I wanted to look." (Barker 246)

With those words — "I wanted to look" — Paul reveals the artist within. The artist is there to look, and so, too, is the journalist. The civilian cannot really help but look either, but sometimes relies on the artist to give focus or framing to the reality of what is happening, because otherwise that reality can be too overwhelming. That is another function of the artist: to take reality and distill it into manageable portions, so that the average person can better process and handle it in an honest and constructive manner.

Conclusion: Life as the Ultimate Classroom

Life Class, as the title suggests, explores the notion that life itself is a class, and those who show up and engage are the ones who learn to see most deeply. Artists may grapple with their talent and their responsibility to represent war, as do journalists, but in the end all are trying to focus, to live, and to be true. Everyone is trying to contribute to something higher in this way — something unchanging and eternal. Anna Scott's review in The Guardian captures this precisely in noting the new authority that hard experience lends to Paul's vision, an authority earned not in any studio but in life itself.

Works Cited

Barker, Pat. Life Class. Doubleday, 2007.

Scott, Anna. "Life Class: Review." The Guardian, 2008.