Surviving the Wreck: Post-traumatic Writers, Bodies in Transition and the Point of Autobiographical Fiction

ABSTRACT

In autobiographical fiction, the repetition of specific ‘unprocessed’ tropes wherein contextual meaning remains unclear can be likened to the symptomatic ‘flashbacks’ endured by victims of trauma. Virginia Woolf's compulsive use of images of sea, mirrors, and unspoken shame, Jack Kerouac's brothers and angels, J. G. Ballard's empty swimming pools, Melville's tropes of Narcissus and madness and my own return to images of blood and wounding in my work, are part of each writer's attempt to construct a new post-trauma narrative identity. Writing fiction enabled these writers to shake off the fixed subject position dictated by their pasts and construct new and more multifaceted identity narratives as survivor-writers. As Maggie Schauer's work demonstrates, through narrativisation a new ‘sense of perceived identity may emerge: ‘who I am now’ and ‘who I was’ when trauma struck. These narratives comprise the past as a story written post-traumatically, and a new identity (as a survivor/writer) they have narrated for themselves. Autobiographical fiction, therefore, may be central to understanding the function of self-narrative in the construction of post-trauma identities. This essay considers what such texts can tell us about trauma and the body, trauma narratives and autobiographical fictions, and writing and post-traumatic identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Trauma
• narrative
• autobiography
• identity

Notes on contributor

Meg Jensen (Associate Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing) is a novelist, researcher and well-published academic writer. She is Director of Kingston's Life Narrative Research Group. Her particular area of research interest is the relationship between trauma and autobiographical writing and she also teaches women's writing, American literature and modernist experiments. Her creative non-fiction ‘Something Beautiful for Mary' appeared in New Writing in 2012, and in 2014 she co-edited a major collection for University of Wisconsin, Life Narratives and Human Rights, to which she contributed a chapter on the science of traumatogenic writing. Jensen's work includes ‘The Legible Face of Human Rights in Autobiographical Fiction’ in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights (2015) and ‘Post-Traumatic Memory Projects’ in Textual Practice (2013). She has recently completed a third novel, Swimming in Hurricanes.

Notes

1. The ongoing effect of Melville's childhood difficulties on his psychological state and his writing life are explored in all recent biographies. See for example: Delbanco; Parker; and Rogin. The psychotherapist Edwin Shneidman reads several passages in Redburn as evidence of Melville's suicidal thoughts (161).

2. Following suit, the treatment literature regarding PTSD has changed drastically from the previous focus on more traditional cognitive and exposure therapies to the point to where even genetic testing to determine the appropriate psychopharmacological intervention has been recommended (Bowirrat, et al. 2010).

3. For further reading on this finding, see Robjant and Fazel, 1031; Nicholls, 173–4; and MacPherson 30.

4. Here, Schauer et al. draw on Bessel van der Kolk's study of memory fragmentation in trauma.

5. Here Nicholls draws on both Dale Winnicot's notion of ‘a holding space’ and McLoughlin's study of poetry in hospice care.

6. For an overview, see Payne and the following website: http://www.narrativetherapycentre.com/index_files/Page378.htm

7. Galen Strawson among others has dismissed the primacy of narrative identity and argues instead for two possible cognitive states which he calls the ‘Episodic’ and the ‘Diachronic’. See also an overview of challenges to narrative identity in Eakin (8–17).

8. John Tytell has noted that after his brother's death, Kerouac, suddenly an only child, wrote stories as a ‘systematic pursuit’ recording daily the number of words (64).

9. Such details, Douglas notes, are presented by authors for ostensibly therapeutic purposes, although the opportunity for ghoulish voyeurism may be what has propelled some of these texts to the bestseller list (150–69).

10. See examples of trauma represented through fictive means in Gilmore; Caruth; and Whitehead.

11. Here I am drawing on Nicholls (174); Robjant and Fazel (1030–1031) and Hunt's concept of ‘psychic stuckness’ and its relief through ‘transformative learning’ enabled by creative life writing (232).

12. For a further discussion of these debates, see Gudmundsdottir (112–21) and more recently, Smith and Watson (243–52).

13. Woolf's repeated use of these tropes is discussed in Jensen (‘Writer's Diary’); Squiers; and Bradshaw.

14. This idea is explored in detail in Gilmore.