Trauma Theory As an Approach to Analyzing Literary Texts: An Updated and Expanded Edition, with Readings by Morrissey Ted

Author:Morrissey, Ted [Morrissey, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Twelve Winters Press
Published: 2021-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Twentieth-Century

Postmodern Literature

In a writers’ symposium on postmodern literature held at Brown University in 1989, Robert Coover, in his welcoming remarks, gave the impression that the writing style which became known as postmodernism sprang up in the 1950s and ’60s almost by sheer coincidence. Among the symposium participants were Leslie Fiedler, John Hawkes, Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Donald Barthelme, and William Gaddis. Coover noted that other writers who certainly would have fit in but were not in attendance included John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, and Gunter Grass. Coover said, “[T]his group sought out some form, some means by which to express what seemed to them new realities” (“‘Nothing’” 233). However, Coover goes on to suggest a remarkably thin theory as to why so many writers, all working in relative isolation, began constructing narrative in uncannily similar styles:

We felt we were all alone. No one was reading us, nor was anyone writing remotely like the sort of writing we were doing until, in the little magazines, we began slowly to discover one another. Few of us knew one another at the time we began writing. There was a uniform feeling among writers at that time that something had to change, something had to break, some structure had to go. And that was, I think, what most united us.

Even though the panel was intended to be a debate, and not merely a discussion, not a single writer challenged Coover’s explanation for the emergence of postmodern style. At first this assessment may seem startling—that some of the keenest and best-educated minds who were at the forefront of producing and (many) critiquing literary postmodernism accepted the premise that postmodern narrative style more or less just happened; essentially that individuals writing in isolation on various continents, including North and South America, and Europe, just all happened to begin writing in the same sorts of ways, all in a narrow time span, from about 1950 to 1965. According to Coover, writers, with virtual simultaneity, decided to abandon modernist realism for something fragmented, repetitive, largely unrealistic and illogical, and highly intertextual. Joe David Bellamy, in his preface to The New Fiction (1974), expresses a similar notion as to the origins of postmodern narrative style. Bellamy cites an essay by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who “described his sense that the most interesting writers (at that hour of the world [mid 1960s]) were in the process of struggling against a ‘whole way of using language . . . a whole way of giving order to experience,’ which had been imposed on the sensibility of the times by the great writers of the immediate past” (ix-x). Again, Bellamy appears to support the idea that post modern writers simply decided to rebel against modernist literary convention.

Trauma Theory and Postmodern Style

A more cogent explanation rests with trauma theory: The trauma of the nuclear age, which was experienced by the entirety of Western culture, affected the psyches of these writers in a way that resulted in postmodern literary style—a style, as we have seen, that reflects the traumatized voice.

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