Witnessing Trauma in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life

ABSTRACT

This article explores the controversial reception of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) through the framework of trauma theory. The polarizing novel earned both acclaim and contempt for its extreme portrayal of sexual abuse in the protagonist Jude’s childhood and the haunting effect thereof on him as a self-harming adult. For many readers, the excessive amount of violence and the highly emotional tone of the novel simply became ‘too much to bear’. Contextualizing Yanagihara’s novel within current discourses on literary trauma, I argue that the book deliberately textualizes the affective incommensurability of Jude’s trauma into its melodramatically exuberant form and content. Negotiating between emphatic proximity and distance, Yanagihara enforces unto the reader a form of compassionate witnessing that may be too close for comfort and dares its witnesses to respond in an equally extreme manner. A Little Life thus opens up a thought-provoking perspective onto the status of narrative perspective and focalization in contemporary trauma fiction.

KEYWORDS:

• Hanya Yanagihara
• A Little Life
• trauma fiction, affect
• sexual violence
• reader response

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A Little Life was also shortlisted for the US National Book Award for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It won the Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the British Book Industry Award for Fiction Book of the Year. The book’s official Instagram account, @alittlelifebook, which shares fan content related to the novel that was previously posted by other users of the app, has over 20.000 followers as of September 2020.

2. Writing for The Times, Fiona Wilson called A Little Life “a singularly profound and moving work”, which “takes you so deeply into the lives and minds of these characters that you struggle to leave them behind”, a sentiment shared by similar raves in publications like The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, or Los Angeles Times (see Cha; Michaud; Sacks; Wilson). Contrarily, Daniel Mendelsohn in the The New York Review of Books panned the novel for what he considered its gratuitous depiction of violence and suffering, which sparked a debate between him and the novel’s editor Gerald Howard on whether or not the novel “‘duped’ its readers into feeling the emotions of pity and terror and sadness and compassion” (Howard, qtd. in Flood), among other issues. The novel’s complex stance toward the emotional responsiveness of its readership will be one of my concerns in the following.

3. Sean McCann has also taken issue with Yanagihara’s representation of traumatic suffering in relation to the increasing display of financial and social privilege as the narrative progresses, suggesting that “[t]he pathos of A Little Life is the sadness with which the fortunate watch the unfortunate falling through the net”.

4. Heather R. Hlavka has noted that “[s]exual violence is about supremacy and the sexualization of power so that multiple sites of inequalities can occur” (1971). Jude’s self-harming behavior as a response to this power imbalance is emblematic of more general self-harming tendencies that Laurie Vickroy has observed in trauma fiction: “The characters’ traumas become evident through their responses to nonrecognition [sic], manifested in wounded narcissism and in destructive attempts to reclaim recognition that tend to injure others and further isolate the traumatized.” (12). As the novel progresses, Jude’s self-violent habits become one of the main sources of conflict between him, his doctor Andy, and his eventual boyfriend Willem. Jude ultimately admits to Willem the discomfort he experiences during sex, which he can only endure by cutting himself afterward. The two subsequently cease to sleep with one another – a decision which notably improves Jude’s mental condition and bond to Willem.

5. The healing potential and limitations of testimony and narrative therapy, especially in cases of sexual abuse, have become a complex point of discussion in trauma studies. Kate Crowe, for example, has surmised that “[t]he therapeutic assumption that surrounds testimony is based on the notion that speaking about sexual assault ‘heals’ the victim-survivor” (407), while also acknowledging that “silence might be a comforting sanctuary to the violence voice represents to a victim-survivor’s subjectivity” (419; see also LaLonde 196–210). Notably, Jude only gives a written account of his childhood sufferings after his escape from Dr Traylor and never testifies against Caleb. Even his testimonials to Willem are less motivated by Jude’s need to talk than his wish to salvage their relationship after a fight about Jude’s self-harm. Following Willem’s death at the end of the fifth section, “The Happy Years”, Jude reluctantly agrees to regularly attend therapy sessions, which however are unable to ultimately prevent his suicide.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Jonas Kellermann

Jonas Kellermann is a lecturer of English literature at the University of Konstanz, where he received his Ph.D. in 2020 with a dissertation on the representation of love in musical and choreographic adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.