The Nature of Trauma in American Novels

Introduction

xi Introduction This book examines literary trauma theory from its foundations to its implementations and new possibilities. What began as a concern with the limited potential that trauma theory seemed to offer literary scholarship soon turned into excitement with the discovery of its many formulations and applications. I decided to flesh out a more nuanced and flexible concept of trauma after I found a discursive dependence upon a single psychological theory of trauma in literary criticism. This reliance produced a homogenous interpretation of trauma in literature and narrowed the interplay that occurs between language, experience, memory, and place. I embark here on an analysis that reconsiders the meaning and value of traumatic experience by demonstrating the diversity of its forms in contemporary American novels in an effort to deepen the discussion of trauma beyond that of the disease-driven paradigm in literary criticism today. My critique of the traditional conceptualization of trauma as an inherently unintegrated event that pathologically fragments the self leads me toward the articulation of a new model and approach. This model views trauma and the process of remembering within a framework that emphasizes the multiplicity of responses to an extreme experience and the importance of contextual factors in determining the significance of the event. In order to demonstrate this new approach, I focus my discussion on late-modern canonical and emergent American novels that deal with trauma. In analyzing the narrative methods authors employ to portray suffering , I found two major patterns: the use of landscape imagery to convey the effects of trauma and remembering, and the use of place as a site that shapes the protagonist’s experience and perception of the world. The focus on place in these fictional descriptions brought me to the xii introduction significance of contextual factors in determining the value of trauma. I discovered that an environmental ethos takes shape in fiction and forms a geographically specific contextual factor of place that influences the representational contingencies of trauma, memory, and the self. What I mean by an environmental ethos is the way in which landscape in the world of the novel creates and defines notions of culture, identity, memory, and place, along with the contradictions of such imaginings. The landscape is shown in the novel as a source, however partial or ambivalent it may be, that expresses epistemological constructs, thus developing the value of experience. The novels under discussion express trauma through a range of values that include negative, positive, neutral , or ambiguous connotations, thereby displacing the dominant claim that attaches only a negative value to trauma. The plethora of different images of trauma in fiction provides diverse views regarding the role of loss and pain in a society and the ways that a society’s ethical values are conveyed through the description of suffering. Trauma commonly refers to an individual’s emotional response to an experience that disrupts previously held perceptions of one’s self and others. Psychologist Richard McNally suggests three variables that may figure into defining trauma: “an objectively defined event, the person’s subjective interpretation of its meaning, and the person’s emotional reaction to it. The definitional process is fraught with complexities” (78). Part of the problem of defining trauma arises due to the fact that the European etiology of trauma has been studied without identifying an ultimate cause of symptoms or providing an ultimate solution to symptoms . Nonetheless, profound events are ascribed value by individuals and societies, and the novel as a cultural artistic production puts into play these variations of value. The novel itself offers its own theories, as I delineate in the following chapters, including the view that trauma may cause pathology or may transform consciousness and catalyze a change in perception that allows one to reconstitute identity in a nonpathological fashion. I show that in the novels under discussion, the reorientation of perception is expressed through landscape imagery. Literature elicits numerous representations of trauma, often emphasizing the contextual factors and place-based aspects of an extreme experience. The terms of trauma in literature vary tremendously, especially in fic- xiii introduction tion, yet there is little debate in literary studies about the concept of trauma or how psychological theories are implemented. I refer to the currently popular employment of only one psychological model of trauma by literary critics as the traditional model because of its dominance and canonization. Most literary trauma scholars have relied exclusively on the traditional model of...