The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical by Meg Jensen

Author:Meg Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030061067
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

How They Said It

As we have seen in this chapter, while the act of writing hurt them, Woolf, Nabokov, Alvarez, and Kerouac, all also found it necessary. Kerouac expressed this idea with typical lyricism in The Subterraneans as Leo Percepied complains of “the pain of telling these secrets which are so necessary to tell” (Kerouac 1958a, 17). That pain, Percepied goes on to explain “impels me to write this even while I don’t want to” and even while he knows that the pain “won’t be eased by the writing of this but heightened” (Kerouac 1958a, 17). “If only” he laments, “it were a dignified pain” it could be “placed somewhere other than in this black gutter of shame and loss” (Kerouac 1958a, 17–18). If only. But while trauma shuts some doors, it opens others, and posttraumatic writers like those I have examined here walk across those thresholds in remarkable ways: masterfully negotiating real feeling via fictional renderings of qualia ; reseeing the past through multiple, imagined, sometimes ironic, points of view; detaching from painful event memories by repeating them in different contexts until they lose some of their power; and fighting against the silencing inherent in trauma by superhuman prolixity. On the other side of that door, a public persona emerged: a voice no longer silenced, private suffering tucked aesthetically inside artful, often shocking and groundbreaking, fiction .

As Colin Davis argues, the violent incursion of trauma on the body is the “real event” “locatable in history,” that is repeatedly narrated in posttraumatic autobiographical fictions, even if the whole truth of those memories can never be “fully contained in any one version” (Davis 2016, 45). Indeed, it may be only in the realm of imagination that victims can ascribe meaning to meaning-less traumatic event memories. If inscribing significance to one’s experiences is a key function of life narrative, then it makes sense that the pressure to find meaning in traumatic experiences , particularly those that arise as random violence or loss, may force the teller to exceed the boundaries of factual documentation: metaphor, imagination, and the symbolic are needed most where the significance of experience is least clear. 16 As we have seen, Woolf, Nabokov, Kerouac, and Alvarez each took pains to remind their readers (and perhaps themselves) that these posttraumatic novels were, after all, inanimate, fictional, art: “statues against the sky.” Bearing witness to their pain and their artistry, these works reflect and interrogate the details these writers could remember and those that they could not, and all that they could and could not say of their delayed and deferred suffering.

And oh, how they said it. Like Woolf herself, I will forever be haunted by the brackets that surround the deaths of Prue, Andrew, and Mrs. Ramsay, and like Alvarez I continue to see the tortured lurking “cat” at the end of Garcia Girls, “her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art” (Alvarez 1991, 290). Similarly, in novel after novel, Vladimir Nabokov points to the writerly, fictional quality of what might otherwise be read as autobiography .

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