The Nature of Trauma in American Novels

Conclusion

115 Conclusion My aim in this book has been to widen the interpretive possibilities of literary trauma theory by introducing more models and approaches. However, I do not wish to argue that there is only one alternative theory that acts antithetically to the traditional model. Instead, I have suggested that another model is a pluralistic one that takes into account multiple theories, affording a greater emphasis on the contextual factors of trauma and the importance of place in fictional portrayals. As my discussion demonstrated, the heterogeneous representation of trauma in fiction requires an analysis that relies upon several different theories from psychology and literature as well as other disciplines to explain its expression. The use of psychological models provides the scholar with a specific set of interpretive tools to explain art and emotion, but one must remember that psychological theories originate to help people deal with feelings and behaviors, while literary theory focuses on texts and meanings in a philosophical exploration of knowledge and existence. In this regard, literary trauma theory must throw a wider net to catch the manifold representations of trauma in literature. In the preceding pages I showed that careful considerations of how memory functions and the ways that a traumatic experience influences subjectivity and consciousness are central to building a comprehensive methodology for literary trauma theory. Memory is of special importance to the debate on trauma and its representability because the traditionalist claims regarding the muteness, contagiousness, and shattering aspects of trauma lead back to theories regarding the process of 116 conclusion remembering. In addition, I suggested that observing the distinctions of traumatic experience and responses in fiction would help avoid a reductive methodology in literary trauma studies. Marking these distinctions allows a view of trauma beyond a pathological paradigm. Rather than narrowly focusing on the subject’s fragmentation, a pluralistic model encourages the scholar to broadly explore the role of social factors and cultural contexts that influence the meaning of the experience. Attention to the social dimensions of traumatic experience through an analysis of landscape points toward the view that responses to trauma are as much socially conditioned as they are influenced by idiosyncratic personality traits. In one of its many functions, landscape imagery displays the emotional action of the plot and the interplay between self, place, and society, further specifying the value ascribed to the experience and the act of remembering. In each chapter I demonstrated that trauma is a disruptive experience, yet one that propels the protagonist and the plot forward to contemplate new ways of knowing the self and world. Trauma in a novel can catalyze the reformulation of identity and the coherence of the self, rather than intrinsically acting to annihilate knowledge. A text may suggest that although trauma may assert a powerful role in changing perceptions, it is not the sole feature of the protagonist’s persona. The model of reconstitution indicates that trauma is a part of the self, but not the defining element, which is a view that privileges the inner constituency of an adaptive consciousness that ultimately overcomes threats. Moreover, the protagonist may convey a traumatic response to an overwhelming experience in microcosmic and macrocosmic ways in order to represent the cultural impact of the event. In different modes, the texts included in this study as well as other novels by such American writers as Dorothy Allison, Russell Banks, Edwidge Danticat, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others, demonstrate that trauma is understood in relation to cultural models of the self and suffering provided in the world of the novel. To emphasize the need to topple the godhead of trauma as unrepresentable or a “black hole” and its rhetorical figuration in literary scholarship today, I explored the diversity of representations in literature that articulate a number of meanings. My analysis emphasized that art in 117 conclusion the form of literature represents trauma as located in specific people, bodies, and physical places in which the meaning of the experience is varied and uneven due to myriad factors, not transcendent factors, such as the contextual factors of place and landscapes. The traditional model of trauma in literary studies leads not only to a misrepresentation of the variable experiences and meanings derived from and produced by trauma in fiction, but also narrowly defines the process of remembering. Based on the traditional abreactive model of trauma, literary theorists tend to conflate significant distinctions between the protagonist’s...