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Article Excerpt
This essay examines the dominant psychology model of trauma in literacy criticism, especially intergenerational trauma theory, introducing alternative approaches for analysis of trauma in literature, including place theory. The essay analyzes the function of the traumatized protagonist in fiction and discusses the influence of place in the reformulation of the self.
A central claim of contemporary literary trauma theory asserts that trauma creates a speechless fright that divides or destroys identity. This serves as the basis for a larger argument that suggests identity is formed by the intergenerational transmission of trauma. However, a discursive dependence upon a single psychological theory of trauma produces a homogenous interpretation of the diverse representations in the trauma novel and the interplay that occurs between language, experience, memory, and place. Considering the multiple models of trauma and memory presented in the trauma novel draws attention to the role of place, which functions to portray trauma's effects through metaphoric and material means. Descriptions of the geographic place of traumatic experience and remembrance situate the individual in relation to a larger cultural context that contains social values that influence the recollection of the event and the reconfiguration of the self.
The trauma novel demonstrates how a traumatic event disrupts attachments between self and others by challenging fundamental assumptions about moral laws and social relationships that are themselves connected to specific environments. Novels represent this disruption between the self and others by carefully describing the place of trauma because the physical environment offers the opportunity to examine both the personal and cultural histories imbedded in landscapes that define the character's identity and the meaning of the traumatic experience. The primary of place in the representations of trauma anchors the individual experience within a larger cultural context, and, in fact, organizes the memory and meaning of trauma.
Trauma, in my analysis, refers to a person's emotional response to an overwhelming event that disrupts previous ideas of an individual's sense of self and the standards by which one evaluates society. The term "trauma novel" refers to a work of fiction that conveys profound loss or intense fear on individual or collective levels. A defining feature of the trauma novel is the transformation of the self ignited by an external, often terrifying experience, which illuminates the process of coming to terms with the dynamics of memory that inform the new perceptions of the self and world. The external event that elicits an extreme response from the protagonist is not necessarily bound to a collective human or natural disaster such as war or tsunamis. The event may include, for example, the intimately personal experience of female sexual violence, such as found in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, or the unexpected death of a loved one, as found in Edward Abbey's Black Sun.
The popular trauma theory employed today depends upon the abreactive model of trauma, which is used to assert the position that traumatic experience produces a "temporal gap" and a dissolution of the self. For example, in Worlds of Hurt Kali Tal writes: "Accurate representation of trauma can never be achieved without recreating the event since, by its very definition, trauma lies beyond the bounds of'normal' conception" (15). This Freudian concept of trauma and memory emphasizes the necessity to recreate or abreact through narrative recall of the experience. Yet, at the same time, this model claims, as Tal makes clear, that the remembrance of trauma is always an approximate account of the past, since traumatic experience precludes knowledge, and, hence, representation. The literary trauma theory articulated by Kali Tal, and critics such as Cathy Caruth, considers the responses to traumatic experience, including cognitive chaos and the possible division of consciousness, as an inherent characteristic of traumatic experience and memory. The idea that traumatic experience pathologically divides identity is employed by the literary scholar as a metaphor to describe the degree of damage done to the individual's coherent sense of self and the change of consciousness caused by the experience. For this reason, I refer to the employment of the abreactive model in literary criticism as the shattering trope.
The prevalent view of literary studies that "trauma stands outside representation altogether" imagines an intrinsic epistemological fissure between traumatic experience and representation (Caruth 17). This notion of trauma leads to the basic framework of the dominant literary trauma theory best articulated by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience when she says that "trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature--the way it was precisely not known in the first instance--returns to haunt the survivor later on" (Caruth 4). Traumatic experience becomes unrepresentable due to the inability of the brain, understood as the carrier of coherent cognitive schemata, to properly encode and process the event. The origin of traumatic response is forever unknown and unintegrated; yet, the ambiguous, literal event is ever-present and intrusive. This theory argues that trauma is only known through repetitive flashbacks that literally re-enact the event because the mind cannot represent it otherwise: "The historical power of trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all" (17). Traumatic experience is understood as a fixed and timeless photographic negative stored in an unlocatable place of the brain, but it maintains the ability to interrupt consciousness and maintains the ability to be transferred to non-traumatized individuals and groups. Moreover, this concept of trauma perceives responses as fundamentally pathologic and privileges the act of speaking or narration as the primary avenue to recovery. In other words, presenting trauma as inherently pathologic perpetuates the notion that all responses to any kind of traumatic experience produce a dissolute consciousness.
Caruth's formulations of trauma and memory, based on the abreactive model and informed primarily by Freud, have become an important source for the theorization of literary trauma studies, especially as a source to support the notion of transhistorical trauma. This form of literary trauma theory makes several important claims about trauma, stating that traumatic experience is repetitious, timeless, and unspeakable, yet, it is also a literal, contagious, and mummified event. Caruth argues that "the experience of a trauma repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his very will" (2). Caruth understands external events happening to a pure subject, upon which infectious pathogens wiggle into the mind, take a seat, and cause harm. While the experience is isolated in the brain, it still carries the potential to infect another pure and integrated subject through the act of narration, or based upon a shared ancestry or ethnic origins. Caruth suggests that traumatic experience is contagious by stating that trauma "is never simply one's own [...] [but] precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas" (24). This contagion theory of an unidentifiable, yet infectious pathogen leads literary...
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