Trauma and Horror: Anguish and Transfiguration

Later nineteenth-century psychology appropriated the term trauma, used in medical practice to denote a wound derived from the violent piercing of the skin, to describe a violent breach of subjectivity. Thus trauma came to refer to the violation of psychic boundaries (often conjoined with a physical violation as in the case of railway and industrial accidents), the event that caused the breach, and the symptoms that accrue after the breach. As the psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis describe it, trauma is an “event in the subject’s life defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organisation.”¹ The event instantiating psychic trauma is so shocking, so devastating, that the ego’s defenses are broken down, and the subject is powerless to resist the overwhelming impressions that flood over its barriers, or to manage the swell of affective distress that results. Moreover, trauma is a kind of infernal mechanism that cannot be stopped once it is set into motion; symptoms themselves (nightmares, hallucinations, psychosomatic illnesses, stress-induced illnesses) become in their turn instruments and agents of further trauma.

The abreaction (working-through) of trauma, one would think, should be furthered by the most painstakingly accurate representation of its inception and effects. However, contemporary trauma theorists have described the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of a “true” representation of traumatic events, given that the very experience of trauma involves the derangement, even the shattering, of the subjective apparatus designed to process it. Traumatic events can only be understood belatedly and imperfectly; they give rise to repetitive dreams and uncontrollable flashbacks and generate this-is-what-happened stories characterized by disjunction and distortion and that describe, sometimes in great detail, things that never happened at all.

Thus, some trauma theorists argue, artistic works should not look to traditional representational strategies such as realism to describe the ways in which traumatic events break open and damage human subjects. The most faithful accounts of traumatic experiences, perversely, can be rendered only by means of narrative breaks and refusals, hyperbole and other modes of distortion, and displacement at one or more removes. Roger Luckhurst describes such a strategy, an emerging “trauma aesthetic” in the contemporary novel: “Because a traumatic event confounds narrative knowledge, the inherently narrative form of the novel must acknowledge this in different kinds of temporal disruption. . . . Disorders of emplotment are read as mimicking the traumatic effect.”²

Horror, a genre whose stock-in-trade is ferocious excess, can be said to generate such perversely accurate representations of trauma almost naturally, one might say. Horror specializes in hyperbolic scenarios of human subjects in the throes of excruciating physical and psychic pain, and develops these scenarios by means of phantasmatic images and hallucinatory narrative sequences. Horror’s métier is the violent breach of body and psyche and the lurid display of the breach’s aftereffects: psychic entrapment, repetition compulsions, uncanny returns in the shape of literal monsters.

The genre is a savage one, hardly a diagnostician. It sets out cause and effect and aftereffect of traumatic experience but seldom offers anything in the way of a cure. In David Cronenberg’s 1979 film The Brood, it is not childhood trauma that births monsters but the therapeutic abreaction of childhood trauma accomplished under the supervision of a psychologist. In the horror text, once set in motion, the infernal mechanism of trauma can seldom be brought to a halt.

Trauma and the Regional

The two essays in this section, while concerned with the traumatizing impact of large-scale disasters (civil war, economic collapse), suggest that one must focalize that impact more carefully by analyzing it within its specific regional context. Adam Lowenstein’s article on Martin is concerned with unsensational, slow-moving traumatic events, like the collapse of the Pennsylvania steel industry, that are not necessarily understood as traumatic despite bringing devastation in their wake. Interweaving fantastic elements (vampirism) with quotidian reality, George A. Romero’s film positions Martin as a kind of “vampire documentarian” whose sympathetic outsider-observer status...