The Autobiography of a Substitute: Trauma, History, Howells

"The war has never fully panned out in fiction yet," observes the managing editor of a literary magazine in William Dean Howells's novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890).¹ The editor's judgment was Howells's own, and it has since been reiterated by generations of critics who have noted the nearly thirty-year gap between the first important novel about the Civil War, John de Forest's Miss Ravenal's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), and the second, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895).² As a result of this thirty-year gap, the great postbellum texts about the war tend not to be novels, and the great postbellum novels tend not to deal with the war: the project of memorializing the war was taken up by lyrics, memoirs, and diaries, while the novel took on instead the project of national reconstruction. In my attempt to account for this generic split, I turn to Howells in part because he was among the first to note the war's absence from the novel, but, more importantly, because he tried—and failed—to fill this absence.

In his editorial work, first at the Atlantic Monthly and later at Harper's, Howells called for novels to memorialize the war, even as he published and reviewed novels that worked instead toward national reconciliation. In his own novel writing, in A Fearful Responsibility (1881) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1886), as well as in A Hazard of New Fortunes, he attempted in various ways to bring the war into fiction. And in the memoirs that he wrote at the end of his life, he speculated about why his editorial calls had gone unheeded and why his novelistic efforts had failed. Taken together, these texts both enact and theorize the individual traumas and cultural repressions that marked the Civil War and its aftermath. In this way, Howells at times anticipates the canonical texts of twentieth-century trauma theory, particularly in his attention to the difficulties of representing a traumatic event; more often, however, he stands apart from the trauma theorists in his conviction that these difficulties, like the traumatic events themselves, take different forms in different historical contexts.³ For Howells, the trauma of the Civil War is caused less by the experience of war as such than by the particular circumstances under which this war was fought. As a consequence, he understands trauma to be contingent, not universal, remediable, not absolute, and, in so doing, he offers a model for what a historically-specific trauma theory might be.⁴

Howells comes closest to the canonical texts of trauma theory in the opening chapter of Silas Lapham, which attends to a veteran's difficulty in describing his experience of the war. A newspaper reporter has come to interview Silas Lapham for a series of articles on successful Boston businessman, and Lapham is able to speak fluently, if conventionally, about his steady rise from humble farmer to industrial magnate. About his war experiences, by contrast, he can barely speak at all:

"So I went. I got through; and you can call me Colonel, if you want to. Feel there!" Lapham took [the reporter's] thumb and forefinger and put them on a bunch in his leg, just above the knee. "Anything hard?"

"So I went. I got through." Three words mark the beginning of the war, and three words mark its end. In between, there is an absence, one of those "radical disruptions and gaps," those "void[s]" or "hole[s]," that constitute, for the theorist Cathy Caruth, the structure of traumatic experience.⁶

Caruth is referring to gaps in memory, but she could just as easily be referring to the gap in Lapham's narrative, for both share the same cause: the all too insistent presence of an event that is inaccessible to the transformations of either narrative or memory. The paradigmatic example of this insistent presence is the traumatic dream, which, Sigmund Freud had observed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919), rejects representation in favor of an intransigent literalness. Such dreams return to...