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Literatures of Trauma and The Trauma of Literature

The attacks on the WTC on 9/11 serve as an obvious starting point for confronting trauma in the twenty-first century, but they hardly represent the only instance of the destabilization of institutional politics in America. This study addresses political trauma through literature of the last four decades, attempting, first, to reveal the modes of political control that are embedded in contemporary life and, second, to discuss how trauma is mediated by the spaces we inhabit every day. Political trauma affects individuals in a number of contexts, from the socially-dislocating urban spaces of Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them to the politically-charged domestic spaces of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Like these two novels, the primary texts in Narrative Exploits deal with the trauma arising when individuals are deprived of political agency as a result of the state’s increasing control over public and private spaces. In every example, conflict arises not between individuals, but between individuals and their environment, which, in the age of biopolitics, serves metonymically as an extension of the state; the “home” becomes the “homeland.” Trauma narratives

frequently utilize first-person or limited third person narration to slowly reveal the traumatic event through its traces in the narrator’s psyche and, subsequently, the narrative, and, indeed, several of the texts I discuss—from Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves to Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers—use such formal strategies to reveal and simulate the psychological effects of institutional trauma.
The conflict between the individual and the institution is certainly not a new concept in American literature; this study attempts to understand the relationship between the individual and the institution in terms that are specific to the American experience at the turn of the century. During the 1950s and 60s, in particular, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others associated with the Beat movement explored the power dynamics at play between the individual and complex, oppressive systems of control. What these writers could not have anticipated, however, is the extent to which biopower would govern and preside over our experience of reality here in the twenty-first century. Individuals are no longer merely positioned against institutional power; individuals are institutional power, channeling the politics of the state in their everyday lives through “technologies of the self.” More often than not, it is individuals who bring exclusionary politics to the urban and domestic spaces they inhabit, and the laws of the state are merely formalities that outwardly legitimate political discourses that have been transmitted and naturalized through far more complex techno- socio-cultural processes. Confronting this political landscape, the individual is
faced with the impossible task of challenging political power that is networked, dispersed, and faceless. We no longer have the Nurse Ratcheds of the world to rail against; instead we have The Matrix. Furthermore, in the past few decades, trauma and memory—perhaps emerging from the burgeoning interest in Holocaust studies in the 1970s and 80s—became increasingly relevant to notions of how we understand America and its place in history, and these concepts have infiltrated contemporary literature in ways that cannot be ignored.
As a work of literary criticism, this study’s primary aim is to provide new ways of looking at these texts and, subsequently, new ways of understanding the American experience. As I have outlined above, America has entered uncharted territory in the age of biopower, and the institutional politics that were once visible have largely become embedded in our everyday lives, naturalized and therefore transparent. These texts provide valuable points of entry to discussions on the difficulty of negotiating this kind of contemporary environment, and they emphasize the pressures individuals face—both material and psychological—that come part and parcel with biopower and institutional authority. Seeing trauma both as a result of oppressive spatial politics and as an opportunity for reclaiming political agency is critical to the way we position ourselves politically against and within systems of power.
The question arises: why look to literature for answers to the complex questions at the heart of trauma and the political? Since trauma in many ways escapes conventional modes of examination, we must look to approaches that take
us outside of practical and intellectual models and move us toward experiential and psychoanalytical models. Cathy Caruth explains, “literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is, indeed at the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet” (3). Shoshana Felman makes the claim that trauma is fundamentally embedded in processes of testimony; as witnesses to a traumatic event narrate their experience, the listener, too, bears witness to the narration and opens herself to the experience of trauma. Literature, especially trauma narratives concerned with the personal or collective processing of a traumatic event, involves an immersive testimonial encounter as the reader (listener) confronts the text (witness) as a site of trauma. Felman writes, “texts that testify do not simply report facts, but, in different ways, encounter—and make us encounter—strangeness” (7). Furthermore, literature offers us roundabout ways of confronting the political milieu that is at once immediately present in the everyday and, simultaneously, obscured by our modes of understanding and intellectual processing. As I explain in the chapters ahead, viewing narrative as a spatial practice provides opportunities for generating critical distance from state-endorsed narratives that often produce harmful cultural imaginaries. Examining representations of trauma through literature provides a starting point for addressing the relationship between trauma and the political.
Beyond forwarding discussions on literature’s representations of trauma, a concept that, as I will demonstrate, is inherently limited by the failures of language, Narrative Exploits is interested in addressing how literature may produce trauma through formal strategies that invite readers into immersive spatial environments. If, as Freud implies in his writings on the uncanny, traumatic repetition occurs in space and in the individual’s psychological associations with space, then, if literature is to accurately represent the experience of trauma, it, too, must engage the spatial. Trauma theorist, Kali Tal, writes,
Trauma is enacted in a liminal state, outside the bounds of ‘normal’ human experience, and the subject is radically ungrounded. Accurate representation of trauma can never be achieved without recreating the event since, by its very definition, trauma lies beyond the bounds of ‘normal’ conception. Textual representations—literary, visual, oral—are mediated by language and do not have the impact of the traumatic experience. (15)
Elaine Scarry takes this concept further: “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4). In order to confront and simulate trauma, then, we must find ways of articulating the experience of psychological pain outside the boundaries of language.
Unlike conventional representations of trauma (which are bound to language), formal strategies, such as satire, adaptation, and performativity, immerse readers in spatial environments and similarly propel them into ungrounded, liminal states, thereby simulating the experience of trauma. Caruth writes, “In trauma…the outside has gone inside without any mediation” (59). The traumatic event, an unanticipated moment of violence originating “outside” the individual’s psychic space, bypasses the normal modes of psychological processing and penetrates the individual’s interior space. Because these modes of processing information have not detected the traumatic intrusion, witnesses have no recollection of the event, which results in the eventual appearance of repetitive neuroses and dreams that unconsciously reenact the event. Space, however, provides an alternative avenue—one that eludes language—for confronting traumatic events; Pierre Nora’s term for sites of memory, “lieux de mémoire,” establishes the critical connection between material, inhabited spaces and memory practices that link individuals to the past. Considering the difficulty of unearthing, confronting, and articulating political trauma, especially through texts grounded in language, it is imperative that we develop new modes of representing trauma that give readers critical distance from institutional narratives. I argue that literature, as a medium particularly conducive to generating spatial environments, provides valuable opportunities for representing and simulating trauma, and in doing so removing readers from the political narratives of the state. These kinds of immersive formal strategies utilize space as a means of simulating the
experience of trauma, which—if paired with the political content of the narrative—offer critical ways of understanding literature, trauma, and our political environment. Scholarship that overlooks spatial approaches to experimental narrative forms simply cannot engage trauma literature with the depth that it requires.