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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because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale | because of the psycho-social need to repress traumas and keep morale well-tempered”(13). Scenes of trench warfare populated by dead and decomposing bodies, blind stares of the veterans marching out of battle, and bombed-out ruins of buildings are imprinted in the fabric of the culture as collective images of the trauma of this war. These scenes operate as a cultural palimpsest employed by the authors of the time, exerting incredible influence on the structures of the narratives that attempt to fully engage the trauma of the period. | ||
War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ( | War fiction following World War I illustrates a tension between the repression of objective experience and the repetition of the subjective effect of war trauma. Narratives following World War I illustrate subjects who display the interior affects of an exterior encounter with trauma. The narrative presentation of this experience is often described by literary critics as a tendency for the fiction of the time to focus on the “fragmentation of the self.” This tension corresponds to the newly emerging study of the effects of trauma on war veterans. Sigmund Freud’s theories of trauma and “shell-shock” appear during World War I. Freud, along with other psychoanalytic researchers and physicians such as Charles Meyers, W.H.R. Rivers, and Elmer E. Southard, begins to explore the lingering mental effects of war trauma on veterans and witnesses to the traumas of war. Novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1934) ''Tender is the Night'' and Virginia Woolf’s (1925) ''Mrs. Dalloway'' explore shellshock and the effects of war trauma within the structure and mode of point of view. James H. Meredith observes that these subjects mourn a loss of the traditional meaning of loss. The expression of this loss appears in the narratives following World War I in a discontinuity and, indeed, a fragmentation of plot, character, and narrative. Sharon Ouditt observes that narratives following World War I Freudian ideas are alluded to as a “means of representing a world fragmented and disjointed in which narrative progression is frequently disrupted by stories that compete with it for attention” (255). The disruption of the narrative structural unity vis-à-vis the emphasis of subjectivity in post-WWI fiction references a shift in narrative structure—authors engage the traumas of the war both in stories’ content and structures. | ||
Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of | Fiction appearing during World War II and in the post-war period (less than five years following the Armistice of 1945) engages in attempting to address—in narrative form—the atrocious events of World War II, compounded by the cultural hangovers of the Civil War and World War I. World | ||
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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. | |||
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). | |||
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