Editor’s Introduction

Are fiction and poetry modes of therapy for trauma or emotional injury, imitating them in order to overcome our wounds in real life? Or do fiction and poetry rehearse trauma, or hurts in general, for the sake of bringing us closer to pain, without assuagement? Such questions, harking back to Aristotle’s idea of tragedy’s therapeutic nature, have been renewed by English studies’ recent interest in trauma. In this issue of jml almost every contributor assesses a literary response to disaster or injury, and a literary artifact’s capacity to represent, or symbolically enact, a therapy. The assessments often are driven by contributors’ interest in ethical dimensions of the enactment.

Half of our present collection of essays argues on the side of literature’s therapeutic function. To do so they variously enlist Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Kafka, Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man, Philip Roth’s experiments in autobiographical fiction, Coetzee, and Jonathan Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated.

Two therapists in West’s novel administer to a war-traumatized soldier protagonist. One is a professional psychologist, the other is Margaret, the soldier’s first love. Margaret has been condescended to by critics. Steve Pinkerton’s essay reverses the condescension. Pinkerton, newly noticing that the soldier’s shell shock intensifies the soldier’s loss of an infant son and that Margaret too has lost a son of the same age, argues that Margaret is West’s ideal therapist: a ritual double of the soldier. Doesn’t West use fiction, Pinkerton suggests, to correct professional therapy, and to indicate an alternative treatment for real-life wounds? A therapy-centered moral also guides Guy Davidson’s essay on Delany’s novel. Davidson deftly insists that the purport of The Mad Man is therapeutic-utopian, even if its author has declared otherwise in interviews. The mode of therapy, Davidson suggests, is identical with a “utopian potential of urban queer sexual relations.” Delany’s fiction, however fictive, refers that salutary potential to living practice.

Our essayists who affirm literary discourse’s therapeutic power emphasize its instrumentality: it is not, and should not be, they argue, an end in itself. Some of Philip Roth’s intricate interminglings of life and art are, according to David Gooblar, Roth’s mode of catherizing two apparent ends in themselves: his self-preoccupation and his fiction’s autonomy. The autonomy usually allows Roth to say anything he wants, no matter what violence his freedom does to real persons whom his fiction uses as source material. But, Gooblar argues, in The Facts, Deception, Patrimony and Operation Shylock, Roth enacts a self-punishing release from the artistic license he takes elsewhere. At last he gives others their due; and ethics trumps art. It does the same in Foer, whom Francisco Collado-Rodrigues celebrates for his morally responsible inventive freedom. Foer’s interweaving of magical realism and ordinary realism intends to picture rebirth after trauma, and to enhance, Collado-Rodriguez says, “the ethical implications of the work.”

Collado-Rodriguez could not be more definite about fiction’s relation to trauma and ethics: Foer’s narrative “matches the structure of trauma as disruption of history and temporality”; his novel “evokes again our free will” and the capacity of literature “to be ethically exemplary.” If this is so, then even difficult and dark stories can drive out anxiety, making us feel peacefully at home in the world. Eric Paul Meljac’s essay, applying Heidegger’s “poetics of dwelling” to Kafka and Coetzee, reminds one of literature’s aptitude for therapeutic illuminations.

But fictions do not always justify confidence about their high and healthy effects. In this issue’s review of an anthology of readings about theories of memory — of which “trauma theory” is an ally — Ariela Freedman regrets the anthology’s omission of excerpts from literature. The absence might be a compounded result of the anthologists’ therapeutic interests and of literature’s resistance to restorative function.

The other half of our group of essays assume a contrastive, less sanguine view of literature’s healing or ethical agency. Todd Carmody’s essay about Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust powerfully cautions against reducing trauma...