Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature

Jean-Michel Ganteau, Susana Onega

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138108028
• eBook ISBN: 9781135104870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches including trauma theory, psychoanalysis, genre theory, narrative theory, theories of temporality, cultural theory, and ethics, this book breaks new ground in bringing together trauma and romance, two categories whose collaboration has never been addressed in such a systematic and in-depth way. The volume shows how romance strategies have become an essential component of trauma fiction in general and traumatic realism in particular. It brings to the fore the deconstructive powers of the darker type of romance and its adequacy to perform traumatic acting out and fragmentation. It also zooms in on the variations on the ghost story as medium for the evocation of trans-generational trauma, as well as on the therapeutic drive of romance that favors a narrative presentation of the working-through phase of trauma. Chapters explore various acceptations and extensions of psychic trauma, from the individual to the cultural, analyzing narrative texts that belong in various genres from the ghost story to the misery memoir to the graphic novel. The selection of primary sources allows for a review of leading contemporary British authors such as Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson, and of those less canonical such as Jackie Kay, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Justine Picardie, Peter Roche and Adam Thorpe.

Part I

Ghost Stories, Repetition and the Transmission of Trauma

1 “The past won’t fit into memory without something left over”

Pat Barker’s Another World, in between Narrative Entropy and Vulnerability

Jean-Michel Ganteau

Pat Barker’s Another World has received abundant critical attention since it was published in 1998, most of the reviews and commentaries focussing on the theme of trauma and finding their inspiration in trauma criticism and theory—Whitehead’s famous “The Past as Revenant: Trauma and Haunting in Pat Barker’s Another World” is a case in point. So why return to a narrative that has been so widely reviewed and commented on? The most obvious reason lies in the fact that even though the theme and literary inscription of trauma have been well researched, scant attention has been paid to the trauma-romance collaboration that informs the novel and provides the focus of this volume. In Trauma Fiction, Whitehead herself comments on the “disruption of referentiality” that lies at the heart of trauma and insists that trauma fiction in general, and Barker’s novel in particular, points to a “new form of referentiality” (28). The issue of representation is equally central to the article that Catherine Bernard devotes to Barker’s novels: she explains that in Barker’s production realism is “on trial,” and that even if self-reflexiveness is “harnessed to the mimetic agenda,” her work “shares with ‘historiographic metafiction,’ a same concern with the repressed voices of history” (174). Admittedly, the way in which Barker’s novels raise the issue of an ethics of representation—even if they are not overtly experimental and even though they remain reasonably metafictional—looms large on the critics’ agendas and appears as one of the novelist’s main preoccupations. This is made clear in an interview discussing Double Vision (2003), in which Barker confesses that she is more preoccupied with “the ethics of representation” than with the “ethics of action” (Brannigan 2), a concern that seems to dominate Another World.

My contention in this article is that one of the privileged modal means through which the ethics of representation as applied to the evocation of trauma is conveyed in Another Word—alongside historiographic metafiction and without radically turning its back on realism—is romance. This does not mean that I consider Barker’s narrative as an instance of pure romance. Rather, in line with the introduction to this volume, I shall argue that it imports what Barbara Fuchs calls “romance strategies” (Fuchs 2) whose disarticulating function warps and problematises the dominating realistic idiom from within. This is tantamount to signposting the limits of traditional mimesis and suggesting a way in which romance strategies amplify and buttress what critics like Hal Foster and Michael Rothberg have defined as “traumatic realism” (Foster 1996, Rothberg 2000). I am more specifically interested in the ways in which traumatic realism takes its power from contradiction, demanding both documentation and self-reflexivity, and shattering realism while refusing to “free itself from the claim to mimesis” (Rothberg 140), in a way that is reminiscent of the workings of romance, a mode that prises open the realistic idiom in its relentless ethical yearnings.¹

Another World has sometimes been read as undiluted realism,² but most critics take into account—more or less explicitly—its concern with the ethics of representation, as linked with the issue of the literary rendering of trauma, without invalidating a vision of the book as realistic, overall. Such a position is easily understandable, as Another World naturalises trauma in many ways, essentially by thematising instances of psychological duress. This is done most obviously through the character of Geordie, the WWI veteran whose last days and seconds are scrutinised throughout and whose health, past and present, is envisaged in terms of PTSD: he is prey to such early symptoms as bed wetting and stammering (59) or to more belated manifestations like nightmares, hallucinations, delusions and various forms of re-enactment of the traumatic scene of fratricide possibly perpetrated on the battlefield (62, 69, 74, 86, 146, and passim). The thematisation of his trauma is achieved by means of embeddings reproducing the script of Geordie’s interviews (148–58, 260–65), or also through the resort to authoritative voices—close to the narrator’s, in fact—conveying a great deal of technical information about PTSD and the collective reception of war testimonies. Thus Nick, Geordie’s grandson, who is a professor of psychology, and Helen, the colleague of his who conducted Geordie’s interviews, help naturalise the trauma issue in the novel, treating it in fairly documentary fashion.

Yet, in the following pages, I shall try to demonstrate that the novel displays features of a darker type of romance that work to bolster up the deconstructive inflexions of traumatic realism by privileging narrative verticality, temporal disjointing and hermeneutic failure.

NARRATIVE VERTICALITY

In his seminal study on the structure of romance, The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye sets up the romance paradigm in opposition to that of the novel in terms of structural development: while the novel favours horizontal action and causality—a narrative dynamics taking the reader to the end of the story—the romance aspires to a verticality—whose correlatives are sensationalism, discontinuity, and a narrative impulse taking the reader to the top of the story (47–52). Such a time-honoured distinction provides an economical way to account for the flaunted implausibility of romance narratives that are more concerned with the there and then than with the here and now, and that set great store by coincidences, correspondences, and other instances of improbability oblivious of phenomenal realism.³ And indeed, what should be pointed out is that repetition—the arch characteristic of trauma and traumatic realism—appears as the main modality of verticality, hence qualifying as one of the central poetic and structural devices that allows for the close collaboration of romance and trauma.

As exemplified in Another World, one of the tonal components of romance is the Gothic, whose ubiquity has been underlined by Sarah Gamble. She comments on the role of space, and focuses on the family home, Lob’s Hill—now inhabited by Nick’s family, and formerly the home of a local Victorian paterfamilias—as a stock Gothic mansion (Gamble 74), complete with dark recesses, haunted garden, and also shadows and reflections of various types. She is also quick to spot the various intertextual references to Gothic precedents, like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, and she devotes some textual space to the structural and thematic similarities with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (75–76), in so doing highlighting the borrowings from the fantastic in general and the ghost story in particular. This leads Gamble to uncover an “unsettling pattern of repetition” (79) that she envisages in the light of Gothic’s essential reliance on the staging of secrets that are concealed and revealed (71). Needless to say, the revelation paradigm crops up throughout the novel in the guise of the recurrent image of that which is hidden or held back and irresistibly returns to the surface as a metaphor for the manifestations of trauma. One may remember that Another World is organised around a series of traumas—individual and collective—that are presented as being both separated and connected. At the individual level, Geordie’s is the trauma most obviously thematised, but it must be considered alongside Gareth’s (Nick’s son in law), Miranda’s (Nick’s daughter), and Nick’s own traumatised states, the last one being presented in a more indirect way. One step further, this series of familial traumas echoes those of the Fanshawes—their Victorian predecessors—and, more widely, the social and cultural trauma of the First World War which finds direct echoes in the gratuitous violence of the contemporary urban and suburban worlds.⁴ Indeed, those traumas seem to be individualised and separated the better to be connected, which accounts for the proliferation of motifs and correspondences evoking the rising of colours and shapes behind screens or membranes of sundry types: from a girl’s breasts under her white cotton dress in the opening paragraph (1), to the central scene of the excavation of an obscene fresco representing the Fanshawe family from under the living-room wallpaper:

[Nick’s] last impression, before he drifts off into sleep, is that the portrait had risen to the surface of its own volition, that it would have been impossible to keep it hidden any longer, rather as a mass of rotten vegetation, long submerged, will rise suddenly to the surface of a pond. (43)

The archetypal water imagery, suggesting the return of memories long inadmissible, clinches the analogy between the two examples and contributes to the rather loud eloquence of the text that signposts its own paradigmatic organisation. Such a flaunting is made even more inescapable through the striking use of the present tense as associated with the pluperfect (“had risen”), when the simple past would be more natural, indicating the untimely though irrepressible emergence of the image, and singling it out as a powerfully visual event. The fact that allusions to the central scene of the emergence of the painting should crop up later as, for example, in the closing paragraphs (277), testifies to its haunting power and weaves its disrupting effects into the structure and rhythm of the text, thereby performing the symptoms of trauma on top of representing them.

In such passages, the multiplication of correspondences displays the vertical organisation of romance and contributes to the opaqueness of the text, in breach of realistic transparency, so as to evoke what Whitehead terms the “inexorable surfacing of consciousness” (23), soliciting the reader’s suspension of disbelief while at the very same time making traumatic repetition and obsession affect him/her. Throughout, the narrative compels the reader to experience emotion recollected in extremity, in conformity with romance’s logic of sensation, a trait shared with the mode’s inherent concern with paroxystic affect and the transports of passion. And passion might be adopted as a relevant term to evoke the compelling nature of trauma, in which the subject’s agentivity is eclipsed in favour of passivity and submission to the crushing power of traumatic recurrence, a suppression of agency not incompatible with the fundamental tenets of an ethics of alterity relying on the surrender of identity. Such profoundly destabilising effects are further performed on the reader in the abounding passages in which Gothic inflexions rely on the powers of the uncanny. This is obviously the case whenever the figure of the double is introduced through reflections in mirrors and darkened windowpanes, the characters failing to recognise themselves completely and being presented with a picture of the non-familiar within the familiar, as is the case with Nick peering into his grandfather’s mirror and seeing a face that is not really his own (164), or listening to his own voice on the answering machine (129). In all such episodes, the title of the novel reverberates with accrued meanings and points at the very proximity of some otherness situated in familiar contexts and faces, destabilising the same from within, performing the manifestations of traumatic re-enactment and thereby straining the mimetic logic to breaking point. This is achieved by means of powerful visual images that Barker, as mentioned in interview, has come to favour in her fictional presentation of trauma: “because [those icons are] beyond language, they’re beyond our control as well. It’s the image of trauma for which there is no talking cure.” (Brannigan 383). The logic of violent affect that traditionally inhabits romance comes to be felt in its raw power in such iconotextual moments, when the text seems to hesitate on the verge of spatialisation so as to tap the violence of the cumulatively iconic as a modality of the haunting visual nature of traumatic hallucinations.

This leads me to one of the most obvious loci that trauma and romance inhabit, i.e., the image of the ghost, and the ghost-story dimension of the narrative. For in fact, even if, in Gamble’s terms, Another World falls short of becoming a real ghost story (76), the ghost motif that has come to be associated with Gothic cannot pass unnoticed. Beside the recurring hallucinations that haunt Geordie’s nights, whose pathological nature is ascertained by the realistic, authoritative discourse of the narrative, a spectre haunts the pages of the narrative and hardly seems to be laid at the end of the novel. Nick, Miranda and Gareth do come to partially apprehend the elusive but forceful apparition of a girl whom Nick thinks he has run over when driving back home one night (87, 176–77, 190, 211). This girl may be a flesh-and-blood girl (the one whom Gareth has to come to terms with in a violent encounter on his way from school, or also Miranda, as she looks very much like her, especially during one of the uncanny sleepwalking scenes). But she may also be at least another weakly ontologised creature, i.e., the Fanshawe daughter, who presumably perpetrated a fratricide in 1904 and who is reputedly haunting the grounds of Lob’s Hill, as Gareth would have Miranda believe at the beginning of the novel (27, 36). Such an uncanny, fantastic character, in conformity with the topoi of the Gothic genre and of romance, provides a striking correlative for one of the salient features of trauma, and more especially of trauma of the trans-generational type, even while it strains the reader’s suspension of disbelief to breaking point.

As analysed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, the mimetically subversive image of the ghost or phantom would help illustrate the notion of “cryptophoria,” relevant to the extreme cases of impossible mourning turning into melancholia and leading to the setting up of a secret tomb or crypt for the objectal correlative of the loss within the suffering subject. In Abraham and Torok’s terms, the incorporated phantom dwelling in the crypt would come to haunt and obsess the suffering, traumatised subject transformed into a phantom bearer or cryptophore (266–67). And one must admit that it looks as though Another World were obsessed with the theme and related images of cryptophoria, and as if its protagonists were inhabited by “internal foreign bodies” (Press 69, translation mine; Steveker 31) without their knowing. It would appear that the common internal foreign body that has come to haunt the various characters is the same one: the lost Fanshawe daughter, for whom Nick and the family members of the next generation have become cryptophores. This is evidenced in all passages in which the latter are made to act compulsively, performing actions that escape their volition, as in the episode of the stoning of the baby already referred to (192, 232). Interestingly, this provides the reader with an instance of trans-generational haunting which is not to be accounted for in scientific terms and which strains the realistic logic even while it seems to respect it, as the only concrete link between Nick’s family and the Fanshawes is that they lived in Lob’s Hill at some point. Here, romance conventions take the upper hand over realism in investing the ghost image with the magical and supernatural powers of the traditional ghost story, as the only trans-generational connection is spatial and, on no account, emotional or psychological (neither Nick nor the children may have been in a position to mourn, or rather to fail to mourn). The narrative tricks the reader into admitting the possibility of a trans-generational case of haunting while at the same time asserting its impossibility. It seems as though the rule of contradiction according to which traumatic realism favours anti-mimetic devices without relinquishing mimesis (Rothberg 137) were brought in through the disarticulating power of Gothic romance. Such apparent derealisation of trauma would paradoxically lend realistic impetus to the evocation of extreme psychic states. By multiplying such instances, romance manages to assert the ordinariness of vulnerability that is also conveyed through a vision of disjointed time.

TEMPORAL DISJOINTING

As suggested in the Introduction to this volume, one of the main areas of natural collaboration between romance and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Traumatic Realism and Romance in Contemporary British Narrative
• Part I Ghost Stories, Repetition and the Transmission of Trauma
• Part II Narratives of Distress and Individual Trauma
• Part III Collective Trauma, History and Ethics
• Part IV Therapeutic Romance
• Contributors
• Index