Novels that Speak the “Unspeakable”: Meanings of Trauma in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Antanas Škėma’s White Shroud
Jūratė Dzemionaite Supervisor: Dr. R. Glitz Ma Literature and Education
University of Amsterdam 24 June 2019 Word count: 17001
Acknowledgements
I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Rudolph Glitz for all the support and guidance he has provided me throughout the years and during the process of writing this thesis.
Table of contents
Introduction ...4
1. Traditions of Silence ...9
1.1. Trauma and ‘the unspeakable’ in Slaughterhouse-Five ...9
1.2. Trauma and ‘the unspeakable’ in White Shroud ...13
2. Towards Trauma that Speaks ...16
2.1. Moral and Rhetorical Implications of ‘the Unspeakable’ ...16
2.2. Trauma Reconstructed ...19
2.3. Representations of Trauma ...30
3. Meanings and Representations of Trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five and White Shroud 35 ... 3.1. Society, Culture, and Meaning of Trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five ...35
3.2. Society, Culture, and How They Fail the Traumatised in Slaughterhouse-Five ...40
3.3 Society, Culture, and Meaning of Trauma in White Shroud ...43
3.4. Society, Culture, and How They Fail the Traumatised in White Shroud ...49
Conclusion ...55
Introduction
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
- John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
To this day, it is the twentieth century that is considered the most gruesome time in the modern Western history with World War I and II causing the greatest suffering our humanity has had to endure so far. It comes as no surprise then that it is during this time, the effects of war could no longer be ignored. A concept of being ‘shell shocked’ emerged after WWI and stirred a debate as to whether the roots of the condition lay in moral cowardice, or within one’s physical environment (McFarlane & van der Kolk 563). It is only in the 1980s, after the Vietnam War, that the notion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) officially entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Since then, events such as 9/11, The Holocaust, the fall of the Soviet Union, and slavery are now viewed through the lens of being traumatic on individual as well as national, communal, and racial levels: “People also have continually employed the language of trauma to explain what happens, not only to themselves, but to the collectivities to which they belong as well” (Alexander 2). As trauma appears to happen to an individual as well as to larger social structures, it is important to have effective and systematic tools to analyse it.
However, until recently, when it comes to the language of trauma, ranging from everyday use to denote rather mundane events to medical sphere, and also to trauma literature, trauma, as an analytical tool, appears to be deeply grounded in Freudian tradition—it is conceptualised as an event that renders individuals or whole nations speechless and shattered. This sentiment is famously echoed in Theodor W. Adorno’s statement of impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, which has been elaborated upon by Holocaust scholars, resulting in the rhetoric of ‘the unspeakable’ (Mandel 204). Thus, it is not surprising that the phenomenon of ‘the unspeakable’ has entered the literary
studies of trauma in the (post)modern era (Stampfl, “Parsing the Unspeakable” 16). It was pioneered by Cathy Caruth and her work Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History and Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. In her work, Caruth defines trauma in Freudian terms as being a “wound of the mind—the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” (62). In other words, it “is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that is very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 4). Caruth explains why trauma is unknown as being due to the mind realising the threat “one moment too late” (62) which renders the traumatised with an indirect experience of his or her own trauma. Since it is an indirect experience, “the survival of trauma is not the fortunate passage beyond a violent event, a passage that is accidentally interrupted by reminders of it, but rather the endless inherent necessity of repetition, which ultimately may lead to destruction” (Caruth 63). This view of trauma has been predominant since 1990s and still holds a relevant position today. Michelle Balaev, argues that the popularity of this view in literary studies is due to the “pairing of neurobiological theories regarding the processes of the mind and memory together with semiotic theories regarding the processes of language, associations, and symbolization” (“Literary Trauma” 1). What Balaev means is that the traditional Freudian view of trauma is accompanied by Lacanian poststructural tradition of language which allows to “portray traumatic experience as a pre-linguistic event that universally causes dissociation. In many ways the thrill of the classic model is the apparent marriage of psychological laws that govern trauma’s function to the semiotic laws that govern language’s meaning” (Balaev, “Literary Trauma” 1). However, in recent years, a variety of disciplines ranging from psychiatry, sociology, cultural, feminist and literary studies are causing a shift in conceptualisation of trauma. Looking at trauma from a single perspective no longer suffice as it has become important to distinguish and illustrate the relationship between collective and individual trauma, to identify social, geographical, and historical contexts within which trauma is situated, in order to discuss its
assorted meanings. A multidisciplinary approach to trauma prevents victimization of trauma survivors and the conflation of individual and collective trauma through the rhetoric of ‘the unspeakable’.
Using individual trauma in fiction in order to forward collective trauma narrative in the society may be observed as Loreta Mačianskaitė, one of the most prominent Antanas Škėma’s scholars, underlines the relevance of his novel to Lithuanian people. In the introduction to the first successfully translated White Shroud in English she states:
His work gains new existential and aesthetic meaning with each epoch. During the years when Lithuania was regaining independence, White Shroud was especially important for its harsh, evocative depiction of the Soviet occupation and how it damaged those who remained in Lithuania as well as the refugees who were forced to retreat. The massive wave of
economic emigration that Lithuania has experienced since it regained independence (500,000 people have left the country since the 1990s) highlights the conflict between individual aspiration and the need to make a living that often leads to the tragic but conscious choice of becoming a “cog in a wheel”, like Antanas Garšva. (xvii)
It can be seen that thus far the function of the protagonist trauma in the novel has been seen through a collective lens and employed to victimise an entire nation or a group of people. The conflation of individual to collective trauma denies the individuality of a traumatic experience. However, looking at the translated version of the novel today, through multidisciplinary, or as Michelle Balaev calls it, pluralistic model of trauma, allows, firstly, to root out White Shroud out of Lithuanian criticism, which, as may be seen from Mačianskaitė’s statement, is often considered solely vis-à-vis Lithuania. Recent publication (2017) in German, and English in 2018, slowly proves the notion that White Shroud “would have found its place in the Western literary avant-garde if it had been written
in, or translated into, English” (Mačianskaitė vii). Secondly, it allows to underline the fact that not only is trauma not unspeakable, but may even be translated - a process that “emphasize[s] communicability, interpretation, and transformation” and “offer[s] a counterpoint to trauma studies, which, undergirded by deconstructionist tendencies, tend to underscore the ‘unrepresentability,’, ‘ineffability,’ and ‘incommunicability’ of painful experiences” (Hron 291). Finally, by situating a Lithuanian novel within literary trauma studies would provide a counter-balance to a field largely concerned with Western literature. Thus, it is interesting to see the novel in a new, unexplored perspective and compare it to one of the most well-known trauma novels by Kurt Vonnegut— Slaughterhouse-Five. Whereas both novels have received a considerable amount of attention being classics in their worlds, comparing trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five and White Shroud through a new multidisciplinary lens allows to investigate both novels in a new light and analyse socially, culturally, and individually specific meanings of trauma.
This thesis will reconsider Caruthian approach to trauma which claims that “trauma is an unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language” (Balaev, “Literary Trauma” 1). In other words, the notion that “trauma creates a speechless fright that divides and destroys identity” (Balaev, “Trends in Literary” 149) will be elaborated upon by using the new pluralistic model of trauma. By applying the multidisciplinary model of trauma, this thesis will argue that both novels reveal the role of social and cultural contexts on specific trauma meaning creation as well as narrative techniques which allow representation of suffering which reach beyond ‘the unspeakable’. It will be argued that trauma shatters socially constructed meanings of oneself and the world while providing conditions for formation of new ones.
The first chapter illustrates the current literary context surrounding Slaughterhouse-Five and White Shroud. It shows that through the use of traditional trauma model, literary criticism produces homogeneous representations of trauma and renders trauma devoid of meaning.
The second chapter discusses the problematic aspects of the rhetoric of ‘the unspeakable’ and its underlying moral implications. Furthermore, through the employment of semiotic, sociocultural, and feminist theories, a new conceptualisation of trauma is established. Finally, narrative techniques such as evocations of feelings of suffering within the new pluralistic model of trauma are outlined.
Chapter three presents critical analysis of two novels Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Antanas Škėma’s White Shroud. The new trauma concept is applied in order to underline the importance of sociocultural factors in trauma formation and meaning to an individual and collectives as well as their importance in the aftermath process of healing. Furthermore, it will be argued that trauma serves as a catalyst for new meaning creation.
Conclusion addresses the findings and implications of the pluralistic model of trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five and White Shroud in light of the current social landscape of never-ending suffering and rise of nationalism in the western world.
1. Traditions of Silence
1.1. Trauma and ‘the unspeakable’ in Slaughterhouse-Five
Considering the incredible influence of Sigmund Freud in psychotherapy and Caruth in studies of trauma literature, it is not surprising that the current research tackling the issue of trauma in both Slaughterhouse-Five as well as White Shroud has largely been based on the traditional model of trauma and embodies the notion of ‘the unspeakable’. However, employing exclusively psychoanalytic approach and postmodern language theory produces criticism, which, instead of literary analysis, provides literary diagnosis and homogeneous representations of trauma despite the various differences in meaning and representations that novels display.
Susanne Vees-Gulani, for instance, uses psychiatric theory to diagnose not only the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five but also the author. Using psychoanalytical tools Vees-Gulani depicts trauma as causing dissociation which renders trauma to be inaccessible to knowledge and thus representation. This renders the person in a lifelong suffering of meaninglessly re-living the traumatic experience. Equipped with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), Vees-Gulani aims to systematically prove that Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim the narrator, and, by extension, Kurt Vonnegut, all suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The author argues that trauma is evoked by war experiences and reinforced by psychosocial factors in postwar America. Relying on the fourth edition of DSM, Vees-Gulani identifies post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as “the result of a ‘person experienc[ing], witness[ing], or [being] confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others and to which he or she responds with ‘intense fear, helplessness, or horror’” (177). The symptoms of
trauma include flashbacks, nightmares, general evasion of situations that might provoke memories of traumatic event, numbness, and heightened arousal (Vees-Gulani 177).
According to Vee-Gulani, the flashbacks are realised, through Billy becoming first “unstuck in time” and then being “spastic in time”. This means “He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between” (Vonnegut 17). Thus, Billy is portrayed as being permanently paralysed by what Caruth identified as ‘endless inherent necessity of repetition’ of the traumatic event. Indeed, according to Vees-Gulani, “Billy has never fully left World War II” (177). This is further elaborated upon by employing a scene, where, during his wedding anniversary, Billy has an odd reaction to a barbershop quartet singing. The scene reminds Billy of the German guards witnessing their hometown being bombed from the shelter. Billy’s “strong physical and psychological reactions” (Vees-Gulani 178) and the fact that he does not travel to the event, rather remembers it, is interpreted as being a sign of burying the traumatic event deep in “his Dresden memories” (Vees-Gulani 178). The avoidance as a symptom of traumatic experience is further pointed out as Billy is reluctant to talk about the events with his wife. However, despite all the avoidance techniques he employs, “it is impossible for Billy to stop the intrusion of his memories completely because the events have destroyed him inside” (Vees-Gulani 179).
Furthermore, the relationship between language, trauma, and memory is conceptualised in Lacanian terms. Vee-Gulani argues that because the traumatic event is a pre-linguistic event and is further “complicated by avoidance and denial” (180), the real healing is happening at the writer’s level rather than the character’s level inside the novel since in order to overcome one’s trauma one needs to narrate it (Vees-Gulani 182). Therefore, Billy, the character’s, experience of trauma is rendered with no other outcome but leaving Billy speechless and “mentally crippled by the war” (Vees-Gulani 178). Billy’s inability to recount the events is illustrated by the incident with the professor of University of Chicago. When the professor tells Billy about the horrific actions of the
Germans during the WWII after Billy tells him his own account of the events, Billy can only respond with “I know, I know I know” (Vonnegut 8). According to Vees-Gulani, Billy’s reluctance to engage in a conversation with the professor is “an acknowledgement of the difficulty and inability to talk or write about a topic that deeply affected one’s psychology” (181). It may be stated that Vees-Gulani’s analysis echoes the Caruthian conceptualisation of trauma. Trauma represented as a wound to the mind that shatters a persons identity, perception of time, the world, as well as renders memory ineffective but paralysingly repetitious. Finally, Billy’s incapability of witnessing the traumatic event is paralleled to him not being able to represent it. It is this way that trauma is conceptualised as ‘the unspeakable’.
The traditional model of trauma may also be perceived in Nil Santiáñez’s work as she furthers the idea of ‘the unspeakable’ and depicts it as a ‘void’. According to her, “The inscription of a void in the psyche of the traumatized individual is a phenomenon widely known by medical practitioners and theorists of trauma alike” (404). Therefore, following Caruthian tradition, trauma in literature may be realised through the concept of the void that keeps haunting an individual later on in life:
Given the fact that the traumatic event is inscribed as a void in the psyche of the traumatized individual, as something that resists memory and comprehension while
claiming, simultaneously, its continued presence in the life of the patient, the transmission of trauma may be ultimately characterized as the transmission of a gap. (Santiáñez 405)
The problem of representation arises from the fact that trauma escapes not only memory and comprehension, but also language: “If the first reason that explains the voiding of the traumatic event has to do with the repression of memories, the second one is connected to the insufficiency of language for capturing trauma as well as extreme, catastrophic events such as aerial
bombing” (Santiáñez 414). In the case of Slaughterhouse-Five, Nil Santiáñez sees the solution to these problems as omitting the actual event of the bombing of Dresden and the use of the “language of silence” (406). The ellipsis of the bombing as a reflection of the void in Billy’s psyche is depicted in chapter 8 by employing the same scene discussed by Vees-Gulani—the provoked remembrance of the night of the bombing by the barbershop quartet: “he could find no explanation for why the song had affected him so grotesquely. He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was” (Vonnegut 126). According to Santiáñez, the secret that Billy speaks of is “the unacknowledged—and unwitnessed—traumatic event” (412). Thus, the traumatic event of “The bombing of Dresden may be viewed as a sort of black hole in Slaughterhouse-Five: in spite of its psychological and textual importance, it takes place outside the narrator’s visual field” (Santiáñez 414). Since trauma is portrayed as impossible to know, it cannot be expressed either. Thus, the ‘unspeakability’ of trauma is portrayed by the silence after the bombing: “Nobody talked very much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say” (Vonnegut 131). Furthermore, ‘the unspeakable’ is represented by the extradiegetic narrator at the beginning of the novel as he explains his book to his publisher: “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds” (Vonnegut 14). Thus, Santiáñez can conclude:
The inexpressibility of the bombing relates to the unsayability of trauma. Slaughterhouse- Five formally duplicates the structure of trauma, for it builds upon a void by means of excluding from memory and narrative discourse the representation of the core event of the traumatic experience—aerial bombing. (415)
1.2. Trauma and ‘the unspeakable’ in White Shroud
When it comes to Antanas Škėma’s White Shroud, academic criticism surrounding the topic of trauma is rather scarce despite the multiple traumatic experiences of the main protagonist poet Antanas Garšva. Firstly, as a child, Garšva repeatedly witnesses his mother being beaten by his father, his father threats to kill himself, and his mother’s mental decay. Forced by his father’s decision, young Garšva takes his own mother to the psychiatric hospital where she is left to die. In addition, when Lithuania is occupied by the Soviets and Garšva is a young adult he is tortured by the Bolsheviks and becomes a partisan, which eventually leads him to killing an unarmed Russian man in a skirmish. Finally, he is forced to run away from his homeland to Europe, where he further witnesses World War II and finally takes refuge in America. However, despite all these traumatic events, when it comes to Garšva’s mental health, critics such as Laurušaitė and Ramūnas Čičelis tend to identify Garšva as a schizophrenic who suffers from neurasthenia. Laurušaitė even goes as far as to claim that Garšva’s pathology of schizophrenia is mirrored in the structure of the novel (12), which is comprised similarly to Slaughterhouse-Five — short chapters that depict past and present events.
The fact that these diagnoses were not contested, or systematically analysed, is rather surprising, especially, when considered the fact that Garšva is never explicitly diagnosed with schizophrenia in the book. Instead, it is his mother who is diagnosed or rather speculated as suffering from schizophrenia — an issue in itself that will be discussed later in this thesis. Also, neurasthenia is no longer considered as an illness in the Western Medicine as it encompasses a plethora of symptoms such as “Depression, irritability, insomnia, lethargy, indigestion, pain” (Schuster 1) in addition to “lack of ambition, an inability to concentrate, anxiety, headaches, muscle and joint pain, weight loss, impotence, amenorrhea, and both mental an physical collapse” (Schuster 1). According to Schuster, the condition was relevant between 1869 and 1920
especially in America and was comparable to today’s phenomenon of a burnout: “Neurasthenia had become a ubiquitous and commercialized condition” (56) and was already losing its “medical and cultural relevance” (Schuster 6) by 1920. Despite the inconclusiveness of Garšva’s schizophrenia as well as ambiguous definition of neurasthenia, Laurušaite as well as Čičelis add both diagnosis to Garšva’s pathology. Whereas Laurušaitė does not delve deep into her analysis vis-á-vis trauma, Čičelis treats Garšva’s traumata by relying on traditional Caruthian perspective and postmodern language theory rendering Garšva’s traumatic experiences as unrepresentable.
Ramūnas Čičelis, similarly to critics discussed above, treats trauma through psychoanalytical and postmodern approach. Relying on theory by Lacan, Čičelis looks at “psychoanalytical character’s behaviour, thinking, and feeling models” in order to understand the 1
protagonist’s character (87). As a starting point, Čičelis sees trauma in Caruthian tradition as an external event that causes internal trauma afterwards. Discerning between the Lacanian ‘real’, which stands for ‘discursive reality’—a reality which is rendered subjective through language— and the ‘Real’ as the ‘non-discursive’ one—the real reality which is not modified by human systems, Čičelis argues trauma to be realised as a “non-discursive phenomena of Reality, rather than discursive phenomena of reality” (85). Čičelis identifies the traumatic events mentioned above and argues that they have a direct effect on Garšva’s pathology and renders Garšva’s ego shattered (90). According to him, due to his traumatised character, Garšva is no longer capable of communicating to the world which, as a result, forces him to turn inwards (Čičelis 91). Thus, Čičelis perfectly echoes Caruth’s idea of the gap between the event and the trauma which explains the failure of language to encapsulate the traumatic experience. Čičelis draws conclusions that have already been drawn before for Slaughterhouse-Five — the protagonist ends up stuck in uncontrollable reliving of his experiences that fail to give meaning to the experience. As Čičelis explains it, the protagonist
This and subsequent quotations are my own translations from the original Lithuanian language.
1
Original text: “Šiame straipsnyje didžiausias dėmėsys bus kreipiamas i psichoanalitinius veikėju elgesio, mastymo bei jausmu modelius.”
fails to express his trauma in the discursive reality which shows that trauma is situated in the non-discursive Reality (99). Therefore trauma is represented as unreachable and impossible to transfer to the discursive reality despite the efforts of the protagonist to do so. Trauma is depicted as pathological and as Čičelis describes it as an “inner [jail]” (99). 2
It may be concluded that the current research on trauma in both novels is largely based on the traditional model of trauma. Relying on Caruthian model allows critics to identify symptoms of PTSD in the protagonists as they are laid out in traditional western medical studies and relate it to postmodern theories of language. It also further reinforces the image of trauma as an external event which causes dissociation and shatters individuals psychologically. Thus, it presents protagonists incapable of witnessing the traumatic events which in turn renders traumas as unrepresentable. Trauma embodies as the ‘unspeakable’ - a speechless event that evades knowledge as well as language. Whereas such conceptualisation of trauma is relevant when underscoring the horrific nature of human suffering, it does come with a restrictive outlook towards it. It can be observed that the focus falls on the description of the void instead of the meaning of trauma and creates homogenous representations of trauma and suffering.
original Lithaunian: vidiniai kalėjimai.
2. Towards Trauma that Speaks
As sociocultural climate changes, the memories of the World War II atrocities are no longer generally denied but remembered and commemorated, the conversation around the subject of trauma is rapidly shifting as well. This new development in trauma studies may be attributed to the increasing interest in the subject of trauma that emerges from fields outside psychology. Engagement of various disciplines allows to reconsider trauma vis-à-vis moral, social, and literary scopes. Scholars of diverse academic areas discuss moral implications of “Adorno’s influential pronouncement that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” (Stampfl “Parsing the Unspeakable” 15), reevaluate the process of trauma through semiotic, sociocultural, and feministic perspectives in order to establish morally responsible, scientific, and ‘depathologised’ definition of trauma that allows assorted meanings and representations in literature.
2.1. Moral and Rhetorical Implications of ‘the Unspeakable’
Mandel discusses ethical implications of the prevalence of the rhetoric of ‘the unspeakable’ in the discourse surrounding the Holocaust. In her work “Rethinking ‘After Auschwitz’: Against a Rhetoric of the Unspeakable in Holocaust Writing”, Mandel argues that “Auschwitz, in particular, and the Holocaust, in general, are commonly referred to as unspeakable, unthinkable, inconceivable, incomprehensible, and challenging … the ‘limits of representation’” (204). However, she points out the paradoxical nature of such a proclamation as while being unspeakable, it is a topic that is infinitely spoken about. Also, according to her, it is fairly simple to encapsulate “the sheer magnitude of the destruction (in Poland alone: 5000,000 by mobile operations, 550,000 in the ghettos, 1,950,000 in the camps, three million all together)” (205). These contradictions, Mandel suggests, forces to question whether ‘the unspeakability’ of the Holocaust is indeed an issue
of linguistics or rather of societal norms. She concludes that it “is a cultural construct, replete with the interests and assumptions that govern any cultural construct, less a quality of the event itself than an expression of our own motivations and desires (205). The tendency to depict trauma as unrepresentable is due to the fact that it allows the speaker to claim a higher moral ground. Mandel explains:
what makes the unspeakable especially compelling is our sense that applying language to the event involves a certain violation of its victims: To speak their experience would run the risk of understanding that experience, with its concurrent possibilities of trivializing or betraying it. Thus, the unspeakable is imbued with an ethical imperative: It frees language from potential complicity in the evil to which it has been fettered, and it serves as a space in which our relation to, and responsibilities toward, the dead are enacted. (222)
Furthermore, Mandel reveals the similarities between workings of individual and collective trauma. She argues that the Holocaust gains a status of a collective trauma as it mirrors its psychological effects: “psychic dimensions of the unspeakable are echoed in the taboos or injunctions against certain speech acts by the community: our reluctance to shout “Auschwitz” on a crowded street corner, or to force Holocaust survivors to address what they prefer not to speak about” (212). According to Mandel, “In such cases, the unspeakable takes the form of trauma, not merely for the individual survivors but for a collective post-Holocaust culture, which is perceived to be traumatized by the presence of the Holocaust in its past” (212). Thus, it can be concluded that cultural trauma is not the event itself. Rather, it is socially constructed by means of transferring pathology of individual trauma to a collective scope through the rhetoric of ‘the unspeakable’.
The process of ‘unspeakbility’ and transference of trauma from an individual to a cultural level comes with certain implications. Mandel states that the rhetoric of ‘the unsepakable’ yield
conceptualisation of trauma where parties involved are categorised into discernible roles of victims and perpetrators and “explicitly effaces the potential of complicity — of the victims with their persecutors, of the Allies with the operation of genocide, of bystanders who claimed ignorance” (226). Thus, ‘the unspeakable’ reinforces the use of rhetorical tools as ethical practice which instead of encapsulating the effects of trauma, veils its specificity and a chance to engage with “morally ambiguous reality in which there never is, and never has been, a ‘moral high ground’” (Mandel 228).
While Mandel takes a firm stance denouncing the rhetoric of ‘the unspeakable’, Stampfl, as well as other theorists such as Balaev and Alexander adopt less radical and more balanced approaches to it in lieu of individual trauma in order to contest Cathy Caruth’s idea of trauma as unrepresentable and pathological phenomena — an idea that has largely influenced and shaped the notion of ‘the unspeakable’ in literary trauma theory. Stampfl agrees with Mandel’s claims “that those who wield the rhetoric of the unspeakable are both showing off and putting themselves on, posing moralistically while taking the easy way out” (“Parsing the Unspeakable” 17). Indeed, according to Stampfl, they are convinced that by doing so they show “solidarity with the suffering victims” (Stampfl, “Parsing the Unspeakable” 18). However, Stampfl suggests that ‘unspeakability’ may be a part of traumatic experience when it is the victim that claims that ‘unspeakability’. Stampfl bases his argument in the fact that “Holocaust victims, as well as survivors of other atrocities, typically insist that words cannot convey the enormity of their experiences” (“Parsing the Unspeakable” 21; emphasis in original). However, being only a part of the entire process of trauma, “traumatization need not necessarily conclude in a state of involuntary, deeply conflicted silence” (Stampf, “Parsing the Unspeakable” 15). In fact, what Stampfl suggests is that pointing out the ‘unspeakability’ of horrific events may be used as a rhetorical tactic, which, instead of claiming a higher moral ground, as argued by Mandel, has dual functions. As Stmapfl explains, evoking ‘the unspeakable’ “serves to lower expectations in auditors —who are warned not to expect a snappy,
‘well-shaped’ account—while in the same breath also points to the overwhelming, soul-destroying quality of the experiences that have been undergone” (“Parsing the Unspeakable” 20). In addition, it also “creates tension likely to summon forth further attempts at exploration and communication” (“Parsing the Unspeakable” 22). The use of ‘the unspeakable’ as a rhetorical device that sets in motion further communication rather than embodies the definitive state of it, is illustrated by Stampfl as he compares it to evocations of it in literature concerned with romantic love and the divine: “the lover, after all, continues to try to describe the loved one, even though (or because) he/she has just said it cannot be done, or when the seeker after the divine produces parables or allegories” (22). Thus, it may be stated that “Evocations of the unspeakable often give rise to paradoxical attempts to speak the unspeakable” (“Parsing the Unspeakable” 22).
2.2. Trauma Reconstructed
Stampf deciphers the ‘unspeakable’ not only in terms of its rhetorical function in relation to trauma, but also, by combining Peirce’s model of abduction and Janoff-Bulman’s cognitivist approach to trauma, which allows him to reestablish trauma as meaning-making process. In Pierce’s model, abductive inference is “a third type of logic, complementing the traditional dyad of deduction and induction. Abduction is intended to explain the generation of new ideas: it is a ‘logic of discovery’, also conceptualized as ‘inference to the best explanation’” (Stampfl, “Traumatic Creativity” 132). Applying the concept of abduction to trauma theory, according to the author, would allow to solve the
fundamental problem that has troubled our theories of trauma: namely, the difficulty of comprehending the events and experiences we gather under the rubric of trauma solely in terms of woundedness - that is, in terms of suffering, impaired functioning and pathologic symptomology. (Stampfl, “Traumatic Creativity” 131)
Stampfl explains abduction to be the process that allows figuring out premises and “the basis of the interpretive reconstruction of causes and intentions, as well as of the inventive construction of theories” (“Traumatic Creativity” 138). Thus, abductive inference occurs backwards “from consequent to antecedent” (“Traumatic Creativity” 138). Peirce’s model, is explained by Stampf as follows: “the abductive inference begins with the perception of a ‘surprising fact, C’ - something that contradicts a background presupposition in the mind of the observer, thus creating real doubt and discomfort and requiring an effort of accommodation” (“Traumatic Creativity” 139). In comparison, DSM-IV definition of a traumatic stressor, “seems guaranteed to involve sensory impressions at odds with habitual assumptions of personal security and well-being” (“Traumatic Creativity” 139). The similarity of the two concepts allows Stampf to draw a conclusion that “traumatization begins as a special case of surprising fact abduction” (“Traumatic Creativity” 140). Thus, trauma is conceptualised not as the event itself, rather what the event means to the particular individual. In fact, the concept of the traumatic event as it is generally understood in psychology to be “actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others and to which he or she responds with ‘intense fear, helplessness, or horror’” (Vees-Gulani 177) is redefined as well. The new trauma concept allows phenomenon such as lower socioeconomic status, racism, other “mundane quotidian processes of traumatization” (Stampfl, “Parsing the Unspeakable” 24) to be included in the equation and, as a consequence, legitimised as traumatic.
Stampfl illustrates the process of traumatisation through a depiction of a traumatic experience in William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom!. The main protagonist Thomas Sutpen experiences a traumatic event when, on a plantation, he is asked to use the entrance that is specifically designed for servants. Confrontation with racism comes as a surprise to the protagonist: “The idea of humiliatingly low status is “new” in the sense that Sutpen previously has never thought of it” (Stampfl, “Parsing the Unspeakable” 33). This event stirs memories that carry
meaning but would have been neglected in the traditional model. In this model, however, “episodes illustrative of the systematic operation of classist, sexist, and racist presupposition in plantation culture throng to his mind” (Stmapfl, “Parsing the Unspeakable” 34) become central to understand trauma’s meaning. Such reconstruction of trauma coincides with cognitive psychologist Jonoff-Bulman’s explanation:
within the mind of a single individual, there are times when one’s guiding ‘paradigms’ - one’s fundamental assumptions - are seriously challenged and intense psychological crisis is induced. These are times of trauma. The new data of experience do not resemble grist for the mill of ‘normal change’. […] The assault on fundamental assumptions is massive […] Core assumptions are shattered by the traumatic experience. (qtd. in “Traumatic Creativity” 140)
Thus, it is suggested, when previous assumptions are shattered, conditions for new meanings emerge.
Whereas Stampfl contests the Caruthian definition of trauma through semiotic approach and only shortly mentions the social aspect of trauma formation, Alexander and de Vries tackle the naturalistic assumption that the model is based upon and discuss sociocultural processes of trauma. To begin with, naturalistic approach to trauma refers to the idea that trauma events are “naturally occurring events that shatter an individual or collective actor’s sense of well being. In other words, the power to shatter—“trauma”— is thought to emerge from events themselves” (Alexander 2). Alexander explains that ‘lay trauma theory’, which includes ‘enlightenment’ and ‘psychoanalytic’ versions of trauma theory are based on this naturalistic fallacy. The enlightenment version rationalises trauma as “When bad things happen to good people, they become shocked, outraged, indignant” (3). On the other hand, while maintaining the naturalistic approach, the psychoanalytical tradition takes the concept of trauma a step further by conceptualising it as “When bad things
happen to good people … they can become so frightened that they can actually repress the experience of trauma itself” (Alexander 5). Thus, both ‘enlightenment’ and ‘psychoanalytic’ versions see trauma as merging from naturally occurring events. However, Alexander suggests that this is a fallacy due to the nature of how people experience things: “It is only through imaginative process of representation that actors have the sense of experience” (Alexander 9). While Alexander looks at the naturalistic fallacy from epistemological perspective, de Vries suggests more philosophical explanation of its existence. According to him, the naturalistic claim of trauma is based on the assumption that humans have control over their fate (399). de Vries postulates that such a claim is not only an ‘optimistic position’ but may be seen as an ‘illusory hope’ which may possibly be caused by diminishing importance of religion in our society (399). Thus, instead of relying on the naturalistic approach, Alexander and de Vries illustrate that societies not only constructs their traumas but also provide or deny means to individuals to cope with their traumatic experiences.
To begin with, Alexander claims that cultural trauma occurs when it goes through what he calls ‘social process of cultural trauma’. Alexander explains that it starts with a ‘claim’ that is carried out by the agents who “broadcast symbolic representations — characterizations — of ongoing social events, past, present, and future” (11). These claims tell “about the shape of social reality, its causes, and the responsibilities for action such causes imply” (Alexander 11). Thus, the process of trauma starts when a claim “to some fundamental injury, an exclamation of the terrifying profanation of some sacred value, a narrative about a horribly destructive social process, and a demand for emotional, institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution” (Alexander 11). The claims are then carried out by ‘carrier groups’, who “are situated in particular places in the social structure, and they have particular discursive talents for articulating their claims—for what might be called ‘meaning making’ —in the public sphere” (Alexander 11). Finally, the aim of the carrier groups is to convince the audience that they have been indeed traumatised. In order to
achieve that “the carrier group makes use of the particularities of the historical situation, the symbolic resources at hand, and the constraints and opportunities provided by institutional structures” (Alexander 11). Alexander suggests, that the construction of cultural traumas are important because “social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering but ‘take on board’ some significant responsibility for it” (1). Thus, the social process of cultural trauma allows Alexander to argue that events themselves are not inherently traumatic, rather,
Trauma is a socially mediated attribution. The attribution may be made in real time, as an event unfolds; it may also be made before the event occurs, as an adumbration, or after the event has concluded, as a post-hoc reconstructions. Sometimes, in fact, events that are deeply traumatizing may not actually have occurred at all; such imagined events, however, can be as traumatizing as events that have actually occurred. (8)
This, as Alexander refers to, constructivist approach looks at “how and under what conditions [trauma] claims are made, and with what results. It is neither ontology nor morality, but epistemology, with which we are concerned” (Alexander 9). Thus, instead of focusing solely on the event itself, the central role in the conceptualisation of trauma becomes society and culture. As Smelser suggests, even Freud, on whom Caruth largely relied on while establishing her trauma theory, “was beginning a journey that would lead to the conclusion that trauma is not a thing in itself but becomes a thing by virtue of the context in which it is implanted” (34).
While Alexander explains the process of how society constructs its cultural traumas and the importance of such a process in terms of creating solidarity and taking responsibility for those traumas, de Vries examines how cultures may protect individuals during the process of traumatisation. As Alexander, de Vries holds that “PTSD can occur after a particular event within a
particular historical and ontogenic context” (de Vries 399). Thus, situating trauma within specific time and place, allows scholars to investigate “the person’s experience and the meaning which he or she assigns to it” (de Vries 399). de Vries summarises the role of culture on an individual as follows:
Culture plays a key role in how individuals cope with potentially traumatizing experiences by providing the context in which social support and other positive and uplifting events can be experienced. The interactions between an individual and his or her environment/
community play a significant role in determining whether the person is able to cope with the potentially traumatizing experiences that set the stage for the development of PTSD. Thus, PTSD reflects the sociocultural environment in which it occurs. (400)
According to deVries, culture provides means to cope with stressful situations “by means of furnishing social support, providing identities in terms of norms and values, and supplying a shared vision of the future” (400). This may be achieved through “Cultural stories, rituals, and legends highlighting the mastery of communal trauma”, as well as “the relationship to the spiritual realm, and religion” (de Vries 400). de Vries explains that the role of the spiritual is important because it “allow[s] individuals to reorganise their often catastrophic reactions to losses” (401) and because it may “explain the causes of traumatic events” (402). According to de Vries, “Such concepts of external causation have the social function of linking an individual’s experience of illness and trauma directly to the larger society” (402). Finally, “Culture, as a source of knowledge and information, locates experience in a historical context and forces continuity on discontinuous events” (de Vries 401). Medical institution, for example, plays a key role in managing societal understanding of trauma:
Every culture has its own medical system that embodies ideas of illness and health, as well as hope and the expectation for solutions. The medical system is delicately interwoven with the group’s ideas and feelings about the entire range of physical and social events possible or tolerable within the group. (de Vries 403)
Culture not only identifies illnesses and serves as a safety net in times of trauma for the traumatised individuals, but also allows the rest of the society to understand and tolerate the traumatised (de Vries 407). Thus, ideally, society “organizes the process of suffering, rendering it a meaningful mode of action and identity within a larger social framework” (de Vries 402).
The need to integrate individual’s suffering into larger social frameworks is an idea also propagated by a feminist academic Root through the concept of the ‘human spirit’. The ‘human spirit’, in the feminist model of trauma theory refers to individual’s interrelatedness:
Feminist portrayals of spirituality may be connected by the premium places on our
interrelatedness, conveyed in words such as dignity, respect, empowerment, humanity, and hope. Damage to this connectedness or larger sense of being in this world is connoted in words like oppression, evil, isolation, and dehumanization. (239)
The need to incorporate the ‘human spirit’ in trauma theory, which, according to Root, is largely based on white male experiences of war, is crucial because “one of the prominent wounds of trauma is the crushing of the human spirit … which may indeed be the hardest wound to heal” (Root 239). Thus, according to feminist theory, in order to heal from trauma one must integrate the “spirit in the healing process” (Root 239). It is important because spirit “may play a prominent role in finding meaning in one’s life, instilling hope in the future for oneself or people or humanity, and connecting one with a larger sense of life” (Root 239).
While society and culture provide means to cope with traumatising events, through providing values, identities, spiritual realms, and medical taxonomy as well as securing human dignity, they may also create environments where suffering emerges or is prolonged. According to Alexander, this is done by societies “refusing to participate in … the process of trauma creation” (1), which results in “social groups restrict[ing] solidarity, leaving others to suffer alone” (1); when culture is not capable of rendering the suffering meaningful, does not provide the values or identities that are strong enough to allow individuals to endure trauma, or when the medical system fails, “individuals are left unprotected and left to their own devices” (deVries 405); and, according to Root, factors such as isolation, blame, loss of social status, and effect on ability to take care of one’s self and or family add to the trauma of the original event (237). The case when society fails its victims is illustrated by Vickroy’s analysis of two novels concerning incest.
Vickroy illustrates that sometimes societies my fail to protect and provide support when needed on purpose. Vickroy argues that “The environment of social relations and cultural values can be a source of trauma or a force that silences victims out of denial or guilt” (131). This might happen when “Societies, communities, or families may want to preserve stability or be willing to sacrifice victims for other goals” (Vickroy 131). In the case of the novels Vickroy analyses, how cultural values are constructed and how they hinder victims from speaking out about their traumatic experience: “Jane Smiley and Margaret Atwood establish well the social contexts of individual trauma by demonstrating how groups become invested in discouraging victims from speaking out” (133). Such social context is established and described, for instance, in Margaret Atwood’s case as “the plight of sexually abused and cancer-ridden women threaten a farm community’s respect for the appearance of un-conflicted family life and the men who have built their farms from the raw earth, even if they had to use toxic chemicals to do it” (Vickroy 133). According to Vickroy, the setting for trauma is created through “an intricate social web of gender conformity in the Canada of her youth (the 1940s and 1950s), expressed in a range of forms from schoolgirls’ rules of dresses
and conduct, to enforcement of adult cultural and religious ideologies, to media warnings of surveillance regarding proper female domestic practices” (Vickroy 133-4). Vickroy notes, that “Such social demands and punishments contextualize the protagonist Elaine Risley’s traumas (134). Thus, seeing individuals who experience trauma as deeply embedded in social and cultural networks, Vickroy shows the role of society and culture as it creates conditions for trauma as well as its prominence in furthering those traumas. Thus, it can be concluded that trauma is conceptualised not as a pathological and isolated, but as socially mediated not only when it comes to the causes but also “the outcomes of traumatic experience in a variety of ways” (Vickroy 132). According to Vickroy, the conscious silencing or ignoring of the victims suffering further damages the individual.
However, while social relations may crush the human spirit this way hindering the healing process, it may also provide a place to heal. As Vickroy argues, “The mechanisms of trauma, how it is caused and perpetuated, and the possibilities for healing often depend upon social interconnections, through acts of witnessing or sympathy” (137). In Antwood’s novel, the possibilities for healing from trauma are created when “one sympathetic ear or one different variable in the environment that invites memory and telling one’s story can alter a character’s defensive patterns, which brings them through a process of resituating themselves in relation to their traumatic experience and society” (Vickroy 140). Thus, Vikcroy argues “though it is isolating, trauma makes us confront how the individual mind is situated in larger contexts because its causes and consequences are rooted in the social world” (Vickroy 139). According to her “By analyzing the social influences on these character’s thinking, readers can link some of these to the causes of traumas, and consequent coping mechanisms. And yet social connections can also provide pathways toward awareness” (139).
As academics discussed above challenge the widespread treatment of trauma by utilising the traditional trauma model popularised by Cathy Caruth, so does Balaev. Balaev elaborates on critics’
contestation of the ‘unspeakable’ supported by “psychoanalytic poststructural approach that suggests trauma is an unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language” (“Literary Trauma” 1). According to Balaev, such “Lacanian approach crafts a concept of trauma as a recurring sense of absence that sunders knowledge of the extreme experience, thus preventing linguistic value other than a referential expression” (“Literary Trauma” 1). This model of trauma renders literary criticism that focuses on “linguistic indeterminacy, ambiguous referentiality, and aporia” (“Literary Trauma” 1). This tendency could be observed in analysis of both Slaughterhouse-Five and White Shroud in the first chapter, and by the rhetoric of ‘the unspeakable’ discussed in the second. The only way to escape this “conceptual stagnant pool” (Stampfl, “Parsing the Unspeakable” 22) of talking about the unspeakable, which somewhat ironically reminds of the discussed pathology itself, is to re-examine the definition of trauma. Combining theories of trauma from various disciplines, allows to steer away from “trauma as unrepresentable and toward a focus on the specificity of trauma that locates meaning through a greater consideration of the social and cultural contexts of traumatic experience” (Balaev, “Literary Trauma 3). By moving away from the idea of trauma as an isolated, speechless, and pathological phenomena, other disciplines may enter the discourse. Balaev, suggests a new “pluralistic model of trauma” (“Literary Trauma” 3) that includes psychoanalytic theory, social, and cultural studies, which will be able to answer not only how but also why trauma is represented in literature (Balaev, “Literary Trauma” 3). Informed by various trauma theories, Balaev re-defines trauma as follows:
Trauma causes a disruption and reorientation of consciousness, but the values attached to this experience are influenced by a variety of individual and cultural factors that change over time. … trauma’s function in literature and society is more varied and curious than first imagined by early theorists. The idea that knowledge of the past, not just any past but a
particular type of past experience, can never be known or remains forever unclaimed by either the individual or society is being challenged by critical approaches that elucidate other possibilities regarding the value of trauma in terms of psychological, linguistic, and social mechanisms. (Balaev, “Literary Trauma” 4)
The pluralistic model of trauma allows to look at various places for the meanings and values of trauma, particularly “within and between the spheres of personal and public worlds” (Balaev, “Literary Trauma” 5). This, in return, allows to draw conclusions about “the individual and society” (Balaev, “Literary Trauma” 5). Thus, even though Balaev clearly holds a position against the Caruthian conceptualisation of the muteness of trauma, but similarly like Stampfl and Vickroy, does not define it as absolute, states that a new approach may “consider linguistic relationships but not at the expense of forgetting that trauma occurs to actual people, in specific bodies, located within particular time periods and places” (Balaev, “Literary Trauma” 7).
From above laid out theories of trauma, a new, specific pluralistic model emerges. Firstly, to start the discussion of the pluralistic model of trauma vis-à-vis trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five and White Shroud, it is important to set a clear definition of what trauma means within this model. Balaev defines trauma as a phenomena which “refers to a person’s emotional response to an overwhelming event that disrupts previous ideas of an individual’s sense of self and the standards by which one evaluates society” (Balaev “Trends in Literary” 150). Elaborating this definition with Stompfl’s pronouncement that it not only disrupts but creates conditions for new ideas, as well as taking into account sociocultural function before as well as after trauma, this thesis re-defines the traditional model of trauma, and argues that trauma is a process which not only disrupts a person’s view of himself as well as the world as it was established through society and culture but further forces a person to reconstruct its identity and ‘the meaning of life’ through the process of remembering. The importance of sociocultural factors in the stage of healing is underscored as one
of the defining factors whether the person is further traumatised or is afforded the means for healing. Compared to the previous Caruthian definition, which started from the concept that hindered any speech or meaning, the new model for theory sets meaning as a starting point: “the pluralistic approach highlights the ranging values and representations of trauma in literature and society, emphasizing not only the harm caused by a traumatic experience but also the many sources that inform the definitions, representations, and consequences of traumatic experience. (Balaev, “Literary Trauma” 6).
2.3. Representations of Trauma
Trauma narratives reveal not only how traumas are constructed and what effects society and close social networks have on an individual that reveal trauma meaning, but also individual responses to those traumas that go beyond silence and unrepresentable. According to Vickroy, “Fiction that depicts trauma incorporates varied responses and survival behaviours within the characterizations of survivors” (130). These may be “expressed through behaviors, bodies, provisional identities, and survival strategies” (Vickroy 130). One of the ways that trauma is depicted is through narrative techniques that invite the reader to engage in the traumatic experience: “Authors who want to adapt readers’ cognitive frameworks towards victims must signal for readers the effects of trauma on characters by engaging readers’ cognitive and emotional responses in their depictions. Thus writers can affect the ways readers usually attribute mental states to characters” (Vickroy 138).
This notion is furthered by Keith Oatley, who in her book on psychology of fiction, argues that fiction allows readers to build mental models of others and their experiences. Being, mostly, empathetic human beings, she argues, reading fiction serves as a simulation of a possible reality for the reader. It mirrors not only mental models of the world and people that are already known to the reader, but has a capacity to expand those models into new ones. One of the key notions of this
process is identified as empathy. Kevin Goldman, describes empathy as arising “from simulation, that is from imaginatively adopting the perspective of another. Such initial ‘pretend’ states are then operated upon by psychological processes, which generate feelings, attitudes, or affects that are similar to, or homologous to, the target individual’s states” (29). Oatley refers to Goldman and explains two ways empathy is evoked. Empathy may be either a
simple case of recognizing an emotional expression. This, he says, involves low-level mind- reading, that is to say, attributing a certain emotion to the person who has made an
expression. Recognition is based, he says, on being able to feel (simulate) the corresponding emotion in oneself (as in mirroring). (Oatly 113)
On the other hand, empathy may also be achieved when it is not directly observed and instead of involving ‘low-level mindreading’, calls for ‘high-level mindreading’ or, in other words, ‘imaginative empathy’. Oatley explains:
The process has two parts. One part is that, by simulation within ourselves we infer what emotion the other person is feeling and we impute it to that person. The second part, which occurs at the same time, is that, because of the simulation, we feel a corresponding emotion in our self, in a way that can make for social coordination. This imaginative mindreading can be based on a wide variety of information about the other. It can occur both in the moment during an interaction, and over the longer term as one forms mental models of people we know. (114)
Vickroy, by analysing a trauma novel, reveals how conditions for reader empathy are established. She argues that when the protagonist’s story is portrayed in unsympathetic
environment, “fiction tries to produce in the reader a locus of understanding” (148) of the protagonists’ emotional state of being. This is done by “directing readers to be invested” (Vickroy 148) in protagonists’ point of views. However, according to Vickroy, sympathy is not the most preferred tactic. In fact, “Effective trauma texts engage readers in a critical process by immersing them in, and yet providing perspective on, the flawed thinking, feeling, and behavior of the traumatized individual” (138). Thus, multiple perspectives in the narrative may denote not only a shattered personality, but also allows the reader to be effectively engaged with the protagonists and build a realistic model of them.
Furthermore, according to Oatley, juxtaposition serves as the narrative tool to convey emotion in fiction. This is because “Emotions in ordinary life typically occur with juxtapositions, for instance of an expectation with an event” (127). Thus, in order to convey an emotion, a narrative has to go through a process of two parts. Firstly, a writer has to provide “events (predicaments) liable to cause emotions in the characters” and “the second is that we readers and audience-members appraise these events, and recognize what emotions they would cause” (Oatley 119). This results in identification and empathy with the character. Thus, “Emotions of identification and sympathy are fresh emotions. They occur as a result of events in the story”. Oatley explains the theory of rasas - literary emotions or “the experience of emotion in a work of literary art” (120). According to Oatley, “Rasas differ from everyday emotions in that we can experience them with deeper insight” (121). The deeper insight might come from the memories of readers that are associated to the events in a text. This is illustrated by Oatley as she explains the process of memory through Marcel Proust:
for the most part we don’t fully engage with our experience. It may happen too quickly, or we may just not think about it. Proust thought that it is rare for an experience to connect
with its meaning, but that when this occurs, for instance by connecting the pattern of a memory to its meaning, the conjunction can create a deeply moving understanding. (123)
Oatley illustrates such a case by presenting a scene from Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, where the protagonists experiences unexpected joy while drinking tea, an emotion that envelopes him, yet he cannot understand where it comes from. Next, “Marcel spends the next two and a half pages of the novel trying to discover the origin of his profound joy” until “suddenly a memory occurs” (Oatley 123). Oatley suggest that together with memory, meaning is attributed to the original event: “The taste of tea in adulthood … had summoned a moment from the past, and with it a seed of meaning” (124). Thus, Oatley suggest that reading fiction prompts not only emotions of identification and sympathy, but also memories of emotions in readers that allow them to assign meaning to the text which is being read. This is best achieved through juxtaposition:
The extraordinary property of juxtaposition and of gaps - between words, between film shots, between scenes, between schemas - is that what fills the gaps is the reader’s or audience member’s mind. In these gaps, the imagination can expand. In them emotions — whether of identification or of sympathy, or of rasas or relived memories — as well as thoughts associated with them, can grow and be experienced, sometimes in new ways. (128)
According to her, this narrative method of juxtaposition may be employed “at the levels of words, paragraphs, and scenes” (127):
When the reader makes the creative connection, there may be an emotion of surprise, and also a sense of aptness, which can be profound, sometimes sublime. How does this occur? One possibility is that the words connect several intuitions (in the intuitive-associative
layer), and thereby juxtapose intuitions had not been connected before, in a way that seems right. The words articulate a relation between the intuitions, and this constitutes the insight. With it one can hold on, also, to the words that make that connection. (129).
3. Meanings and Representations of Trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five and White Shroud
In order to portray the meanings that are shattered during the traumatic experiences, both Slaughterhouse-Five and White Shroud illustrate how the primary meanings are first created by society, and then affected by it in traumas aftermath. This allows to see trauma as embedded in specific sociocultural environments and assign meanings and discuss its representations. Kurt Vonnegut and Antanas Škėma represent individual trauma within sociocultural contexts by depicting how social ideologies and meanings are created and spread within society and permeated to its individuals. Furthermore society and culture do not provide means to render their trauma meaningful thus failing the protagonist to integrate their suffering within a larger societal framework.
3.1. Society, Culture, and Meaning of Trauma in Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five depicts Billie’s trauma within a particular historical time and society which propagates the idealised war hero myth and creates an image of war as an adventure, which allows Billie’s trauma to gain political meaning. To begin with, the war hero myth is shown to be generated through the narratives of movies, literature, and history. This is illustrated, firstly, by a historical war movie Billy sees before he is first abducted by the Tralfamadorians. The movie is about “American bombers in the Second World War” (Vonnegut 53), in which “gallant men who flew them” (Vonnegut 53) are depicted. The narrator reveals how a particular perspective is created of the process of war as he sees the movie backwards. For instance, it is not the men that are shown to be dropping the bombs on German cities, but the bombers: “The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes” (Vonnegut 53). While Americans
are depicted as the ones who are “wounded” (Vonnegut 53), the Germans are the ones who, in the movie seen backwards, “made everything and everybody as good as new” (54). In this scenario, it is clear that the Americans are the heroes and Germans the villains. Not only is the agency in the killing is diminished when it comes to Americans who actually carry them out, but also the sheer destructive purpose of the machines is obscured and cushioned as they are shown to be assembled from parts which are created by women: “Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work” (Vonnegut 54).
Furthermore, the role of literature in creation of the myth is revealed by Mary, to whom the book is dedicated. When Billy comes to visit O’Hare, his “old war buddy” (Vonnegut 1) in order to reminisce about the war so he could accumulate material for it, his wife Mary clearly shows her disdain towards Billy. After murmuring under her breath for some time, she finally states: “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies” (Vonnegut 11). In addition, the perpetuation of such ideals in the culture is hinted by a candy bar “The Three Musketeers” who is first eaten by Nancy, Billie’s colleague and, towards the end of the novel, by his mother.
Finally, the narrative of America’s involvement in the war as a celebratory event is secured through historical narratives. While history is supposed to be objective, through professor Rumfoord the narrator reveals that it is in fact subjective. In the view of Rumfoord, the bombing of Dresden is seen not only as justified but even celebrated:
Rumfoord had a problem about Dresden. His one-volume history of the Army Air Force in the Second World War was supposed to be a readable condensation of the twenty-seven- volume Official History of the Army Force in World War Two. The thing was, though, there
