Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War

Harriet E. H. Earle

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496812476
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di fumetti e graphic novel

Conflict and trauma remain among the most prevalent themes in film and literature. Comics has never avoided such narratives, and comics artists are writing them in ways that are both different from and complementary to literature and film. In Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War, Harriet E. H. Earle brings together two distinct areas of research--trauma studies and comics studies--to provide a new interpretation of a long-standing theme. Focusing on representations of conflict in American comics after the Vietnam War, Earle claims that the comics form is uniquely able to show traumatic experience by representing events as viscerally as possible.Using texts from across the form and placing mainstream superhero comics alongside alternative and art comics, Earle suggests that comics are the ideal artistic representation of trauma. Because comics bridge the gap between the visual and the written, they represent such complicated narratives as loss and trauma in unique ways, particularly through the manipulation of time and experience. Comics can fold time and confront traumatic events, be they personal or shared, through a myriad of both literary and visual devices. As a result, comics can represent trauma in ways that are unavailable to other narrative and artistic forms.With themes such as dreams and mourning, Earle concentrates on trauma in American comics after the Vietnam War. Examples include Alissa Torres's American Widow, Doug Murray's The 'Nam, and Art Spiegelman's much-lauded Maus. These works pair with ideas from a wide range of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Fredric Jameson, as well as contemporary trauma theory and clinical psychology. Through these examples and others, Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War proves that comics open up new avenues to explore personal and public trauma in extraordinary, necessary ways.

1

Representing the Traumatic

In Henry IV, Part I, William Shakespeare presents an accurate description of the effects of war-induced trauma on an individual. Lady Percy, wife of Henry Percy, questions her husband as to his behavior following frequent military campaigns (Act II, scene iii). She speaks of him refusing his wife’s company (line 39–40), losing his appetite (42) and turning very pale (45). She goes on to describe him talking in his sleep and having nightmares (50–56), crying, “Courage! To the field!” (51), and sweating profusely (60). Percy is an able soldier (nicknamed “Hotspur”) and so it seems unusual to her that such a man would be given to nightmares and distant behavior; indeed, the notion of the brave soldier as immune to trauma and the traumatized soldier as weak and cowardly was common well into the twentieth century. He does not give in to his wife’s questions (though she threatens to break his finger) and so the trauma remains secret and untreated. Lady Percy’s appraisal of her husband’s condition can be seen as an early record of the symptoms of a traumatic rupture arising from violent military conflict.

Shakespeare artfully presents a character traumatized by the rigors of war but in the 400 years since his death, trauma has become a byword for any distressing or negative experiences in the modern world. This lumping together of emotions and reactions devalues the impact a traumatic experience can truly have on an individual; it also groups all manner of other emotions under one umbrella that may not accurately describe the emotional experience. In this chapter, I navigate the discursive field of trauma studies, considering two models of trauma theory. The first is the “classic” model of trauma that finds its core in the works of Sigmund Freud and many of his ideological descendants, most notably Cathy Caruth and Jacques Lacan. Although this model no longer constitutes the main thrust of trauma theory, it cannot be doubted that the theorists whose work forms its body are key figures in the development of trauma theory in toto. The second model, which Michelle Balaev calls the “pluralistic model,” “challenges the traditional concept of trauma as unspeakable by starting from a standpoint that concedes trauma’s variability in literature and society” (2014: 4). This model “highlights the ranging values and representations of trauma in literature and society … Rather than claiming that language fails to represent trauma, pluralistic approaches 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, 2014: 7).

The aim of this chapter is to lay out a trauma theory framework that will open a dialogue between the classic and pluralistic models. These two models do not necessarily sit comfortably together—indeed, many of the key facets of the latter flatly contradict the former. That said, there are still parts of the Freudian model that can be used as effective analytical tools for comics and there are many persuasive arguments in the pluralistic model for moving beyond the classic Freudian definition of trauma as “unrepresentable.” It is my contention that there are two key shifts from the classic to pluralistic model in terms of representation of traumatic experience. The first is the shift from seeing trauma as an “unclaimed experience” that fragments psychic functioning and demands reintegration to a consideration of trauma’s “deeply contested ownership” and an understanding of “healthy” mental operations that do not necessarily demand psychic unity; the second moves from a focus on symptomology and a mimicry of medical presentation to a more nuanced focus on affect and personal emotional engagement. Before focusing on these key shifts, I wish to lay out the basic framework of the classic model.

• • •

In her 1992 book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman writes that “the ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness … Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried” (1992: 1). Herman’s comment stands as a fitting summary of a century of psychological scholarship concerned with the “unknowability” of the traumatic. It is from this central issue—the persistence of atrocity within consciousness—that trauma theory takes its lead. As is commonly observed, the word “trauma” finds its root in the Greek word “τραῦμα” (“wound”). The term was initially a physical one (as one still finds it in much medical literature) but it has become widely adopted in psychological and emotional discourse. The following quotation from Cathy Caruth has become something of a benchmark definition for the classic model of trauma:

The wound of the mind … is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that … is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor. (1996: 19)

Caruth’s definition raises many points that are central to discussions of trauma. We are aware of the wound-like nature of psychic trauma; Caruth makes the point that this wound is not “healable,” positing that it is not possible fully to be healed of a psychic trauma, though the condition can be ameliorated to some degree. She also writes that trauma is “experienced too soon.” This statement is curious in itself but speaks to the shattering of normal temporality that is common in traumatic experience. The event is not experienced as it happens. Rather, the mind works to protect itself and it is only after the event that the individual begins to witness it; hence, “it is not available to consciousness” and the individual may only begin to experience the event retroactively “in nightmares and repetitive actions.”

Freud writes at length of the repetition compulsion found in individuals with psychic trauma.¹ The individual is compelled to return to the traumatic event over and over in nightmares and flashbacks, with no control over the recurrence of these phenomena. These “traumatic returns” are not complete; the individual will not experience the whole event nor will any coherent narrative be presented. Flashbacks may be a series of images or feelings with very little context; nightmares will be experienced in a similar fashion. Speaking as a psychiatrist, Herman corroborates much of what Freud says, writing that the symptoms of this traumatic rupture include repetition of the event, flashbacks, nightmares, hypersensitivity, hyperarousal, unprovoked violent outbursts, evasion of certain situations or sensations, irrational anger, emotional and psychological numbing, and a disrupted sense of personal time (Herman, 1992: 35). Coming from a similar medical background, L. S. Brown writes that traumatic events exist “outside the range of human experience” (1995: 35); victims do not have the mental capacity and built-in strategies to process and “cope with” these events—to assimilate them into our understanding of a normal human experience—thus permanently keeping the traumatic experience apart from consciousness.

In her detailed study of Freudian trauma theory, Caruth uses the term “survivor” rather than “victim.” The concept of survival creates complex issues for discussions of trauma. The traumatic event has placed the survivor in a situation of serious risk to their life which, possibly by chance, they have overcome. They are then left with the shadow of this “near-death experience” awakening the “peculiar and perplexing experience of surviving” (Caruth, 1996: 61). Survival becomes a part of the trauma because one is left with the knowledge of impending mortality and an intensified apprehension of the fragility of existence. The survivor “[oscillates] between … the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (Caruth, 1996: 7). Robert Jay Lifton claims that “any focus on survival puts the death back into the traumatic experience, because survival suggests that there has been death and the survivor therefore has had a death encounter, which is central to their psychological experience” (1995: 128). This phenomenon goes some way in explaining the large numbers of soldiers who commit suicide after returning home.² The failure to reintegrate into “normal” life suggests that the basic survival instinct of the individual is irreparably damaged. The heightened “fight or flight” response that is noted in many traumatized individuals would attest to this.

For scholars of the classic model, a traumatic event is one for which the mind has no integrating coping mechanism and thus remains apart from the survivor’s psychic functioning, recreating itself within the mind but independently of consciousness. The symptoms of this traumatic rupture relate directly to the individual’s inability to understand and find ways mentally to process their experience: “Trauma … overwhelms the individual and resists language or representation” (Whitehead, 2004: 3). Here is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the classic model: the suggestion that trauma resists language. The classic model suggests that this is an axiomatic part of trauma and a part that affects all traumatized individuals equally, a fact that is quite simply not true. While many individuals may face similar experiences of an inability to express their trauma, the degree to which this occurs is unique to the individual. In her 2000 book Trauma: A Genealogy, Ruth Leys suggests that trauma theory threatens the ideal of individual autonomy and responsibility (2000: 9). That the subject is considered to be involuntarily mimicking a past traumatic experience suggests a destabilization of the subject’s sovereignty. It is pertinent here to note, as Claire Stocks does, that the original testing grounds of trauma have significantly marked all theories that grew from it. Stocks makes the point that one of the central issues regarding the classic model is that it originally derives from work with combat veterans from the late 1970s onwards; this narrow clinical focus can “[obscure] specificity.” She adds that “the historical reality is that the war veteran is predominantly male” and so basing all trauma theory on the historically and culturally specific experience of one group of society does not assist in creating a universally applicable approach. A method that is “translatable across traumas tends to erase rather than enforce any specificity” (Stocks, 2007: 75–76).

In fact, in addition to eradicating all traces of difference and personal variance in traumatic experiences, the suggestion that all trauma resists interpretation and representation removes the trauma from the individual. As Balaev writes, “One result of trauma’s classic conundrum accordingly removes agency from the survivor by disregarding a survivor’s knowledge of the experience and the self, which restricts trauma’s variability and ignores the diverse values that change over time” (2014: 6). This is not to say that there is not an inherent crisis of representation at the core of trauma, but it does suggest that this crisis is not entirely insurmountable, as the classic trauma model seems to insist. More accurately, the crisis of representation may be said to ask how individuals represent to others an event that affected them in deeply personal and complex ways, a suggestion that is subtly different than the belief that the crisis is of all representation.

The classic model places great emphasis on the “event” as the seat of traumatic memory. For Freud (and also Caruth), it is a prelinguistic event that facilitates dissociation and refuses to be assimilated into typical psychic functioning. According to Laplanche, the event is secondary to the meanings conferred on it “afterwards”; it is these meanings and post-event psychic developments that make a particular memory traumatic (1988: 467–68). In removing the focus from the event itself, Laplanche’s theory removes the traumatic experience from the realm of “unclaimed experience” and returns it to the sovereign individual, a key aim of the pluralistic model.

Freud and his Ideological Children

In his 1920 book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes and interprets a game played by his grandson at the age of eighteen months. Ernst was a “good little boy,” manifested no particular symptoms, was of calm disposition, and “never cried when his mother left him for a few hours” (Freud: 2001, 14). However,

he had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed … As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out “o-o-o,” accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and [Freud] were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word “fort.” (Freud, 2001: 14)

Freud interpreted this behavior as a way of obtaining satisfaction by causing things to be “gone.” A short time later, he observed the child playing with a reel that had a piece of string tied around it: He would toss the reel away from him to where it could no longer be seen, before pulling it back into view and hailing its reappearance with a gleeful “Da!” (“There!”). Freud also noticed that the boy would utter his “o-o-o” sound with reference to himself—notably when, by crouching down below a mirror, he made his image “gone.” Freud stresses the fact that the fort part of the game was much of the time sufficient unto itself, and was “repeated untiringly” by the child.

These observations led to a number of fundamental questions. Is this a method of mastering a painful experience by reproducing it in an active and playful manner? Or is the child literally taking revenge for the treatment visited upon him (according to Freud, the departure of his mother) by redirecting it onto an object (the reel)? These questions aside, the main issue is the contradiction between the compulsion to repeat and the pleasure principle, the basic human drive to attain pleasure and avoid suffering. How is satisfaction to be derived from repeating actions that have been sources of unpleasant feelings? A child cannot understand death or disappearance but can form an idea of these concepts through a visual relationship to objects, so the child transforms the traumatic departure into a satisfying return, mastering the traumatic experience and regaining pleasure: “fort” becomes “da.”

Freud postulated that, in a healthy and untraumatized mind, the repetition of loss and return is a positive experience, allowing the development of methods for processing unpleasant and potentially traumatizing events. In a traumatized mind, the repetition compulsion behaves very differently. Unlike Ernst, who is delighted to see his wooden spool return to him, the constant return of the traumatic experience in “the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” neither delights nor comforts (Caruth, 1996: 4). Freud is clear to state that this repetition is truly compulsive, writing that “no lesson has been learnt from the old experience of these activities … they are repeated, under pressure of a compulsion” (2003: 290). This “driven, tenacious intrusion of traumatic experience” is one of the most visceral and explosive symptoms of trauma-and so often paired with the nightmares and flashbacks that become its medium (Herman, 1992: 41). For Freud, this repetition sits at the heart of the experience he calls “traumatic neurosis” (2003: 16). Furthermore, as “traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context … they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images” (Brett and Ostroff, 1985: 417). This is a particularly compelling theory for this study as these images translate into the world of comics; indeed, it is because of the intensely visual nature of the comics form that it can be used to such good effect in representations of conflict trauma. I give detailed explanations of how Freud’s theories—in conjunction with theories of affect—can be used to analyze comics in the latter part of this chapter.

According to a Caruthian reading, central to Freud’s theories of traumatic neurosis is the innate unknowability of the experience. In part, this stems from the underlying concept of the “Pleasure Principle”;—namely, that “the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle” but that this is “the most obscure and inaccessible region of the mind” (2003: 7). If the psychological concept that underpins the entire basis of Freud’s work on trauma is largely inaccessible, then all works arising from this principle must be similarly compromised. This leads us to a key issue in the creation of trauma texts. If the trauma that is central to the text is “unknowable,” then how can the artist recreate it in a way that will be intelligible to the reader?

For Freud, the symptomatic picture of a traumatic neurosis can be reduced to two key factors. First, he discusses “fright, the factor of surprise” and makes it clear that this is to be kept separate from fear and anxiety:

“Fright” … is the name we give to the states a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it. I do not believe that anxiety can produce a traumatic neurosis. There is something about anxiety that protects its subject against frights and so against fright-neuroses. (Freud, 2003: 7)

The unexpectedness of the traumatic event, then, is key to the creation of the traumatic neurosis. It is the fact that the individual is struck as if out of nowhere by the trauma that creates the initial traumatic rupture. Secondly, Freud suggests that the presence of a physical wound “works as a rule against the development of a neurosis” (2003: 8). In Moses and Monotheism, he writes:

It may happen that a man who has experienced some frightful accident—a railway collision, for instance—leaves the scene of the event apparently uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he develops a number of severe psychical and motor symptoms which can only be traced to his shock. He now has a “traumatic neurosis.” It is a quite unintelligible—that is to say, a new—fact. (2001: 309)

It is the apparent survival—and the accompanying incomprehensibility of that survival—that breeds the traumatic neurosis. Furthermore, it is this unquenchable need for psychic healing that leads to the symptoms of traumatic rupture that are noted by Herman and Caruth. Many years previous to this, in Studies in Hysteria (1896), Freud had written of Nachträglichkeit, “deferred action”:

There is in principle no difference between the symptom’s appearing in a temporary way after its first provoking cause and its being latent from the first. Indeed in the great majority of instances we find that a first trauma has left no symptom behind, while a later trauma of the same kind produces a symptom, and yet the latter could not have come into existence without the co-operation of the earlier provoking cause; nor can it be cleared up without taking all the provoking causes into account. (2000: 30)

According to Freud, it could be that a person is seemingly unaffected by, for example, a mugging but the traumatic response becomes apparent after the person experiences some other relatively insignificant event, such as colliding with someone in the street. This deferred action is something that is commonly reported by combat veterans. It is similar to the more common response of psycho-physical numbing that many individuals experience after a particularly distressing event. However, rather than seeming to be emotionally “dulled” and devoid of desire or sensation, those whose response is delayed will not appear to be affected at all and will carry on as usual.

Jacques Lacan takes his primary lead from Freud’s work on trauma in relation to the pleasure principle:

In effect, the trauma is conceived as having necessarily been marked by the subjectifying homeostasis that orientates the whole functioning defined by the pleasure principle. Our experience then presents us with a problem, which derives from the fact that, at the very heart of the primary processes, we see preserved the insistence of the trauma in making us aware of its existence. The trauma reappears, in effect, frequently unveiled … emerging repeatedly—if not its...