The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead: Difference between revisions

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-World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.
+World War II, described by Studs Terkel as the “Good War,” exceeds all prior boundaries and expectations of war. The scope of World War II generates an almost unfathomable, pervasive emphasis on the relationship between “thought” and experience in the narratives chronicling the experience of war. James Dawes observes that artists reflect on this oppressive pervasiveness through a literary style equal to the task of witnessing the unbounded and unprecedented events of World War II (157). The aftermath of the trauma of World War II—the mass genocide of the Holocaust combined with the mass atomic decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima—introduces a set of tragic circumstances into the cultural fabric. The trauma of World War II operates on a scale that encompasses an unimaginable subjectivity— war simply pervades all perceptions of experiences—there is no outside war and there is no inside war. There simply is war. The question then arises as how do writers create narrative subjects in a period of total trauma and war.{{efn|This question differs from Fredric Jameson’s view of narratives as socially symbolic acts in his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act in that the question of narrative subjectivity is focused on the manner in which trauma impinges on the narrative of the text. However, the question still reflects Jameson’s desire to link narrative evolution with social change in the culture.}}
 The question posed at the beginning of this essay is a critical one—how might a body of literature deal with subjects who are speaking from the “abject” position of trauma. The experience of trauma operates as a complex play between knowing and not knowing that occurs in reaction to a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world. The awareness experienced in relation to trauma is abject (see Kristeva’s discussion of the abject). Modern and contemporary narratives embody the trauma and traumatic experiences of war through the treatment of an experience that cannot occur within normal subjective or objective narrative understandings or expressions of understanding. The narratives engage a structure that differs from previous narrative structures’ reliance and adherence to the myth of stable subjectivity and objectivity. In this engagement, the narratives draw on the previously silenced and abjected voice of trauma to generate a different narrative presence in the fiction following war. The fiction of war involves the placing of narrative authority in a voice of trauma. In giving voice to the trauma of war in the narratives, war fictions engage a previously silenced portion that allows the presentation of a reconstruction of an interior experience of trauma and reveals a necessary component of war. In this narrative reconstruction, the war narratives of trauma create a necessary counter-critique to the hegemonic war narratives that Paul Fussell in Wartime Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War argues have turned the experiences of trauma in World War II into sanitized, Norman Rockwell-ized narratives of war (267).