More often than not, one uses “trauma” to describe a physical ailment. However, as we come to know more about trauma, describing a single event—physical or psychological, as ‘traumatic’ often ignores its role as a historical-political-social phenomenon that pertains to much more than an individual’s history. Scholars Neil J. Smelser and Ron Eyerman explain how trauma, as a historical-political-social phenomenon, can also be generational and cultural. When the specific trauma is cultural, “indelible marks upon [the victims’] group consciousness [are left], marking their memories forever, and changing their future in fundamental and irrevocable ways.” This chronic and cumulative trauma that has been “woven into the fabric of our societies”[1] does not elicit the same “shock” or surprise factor that trauma, as defined by Caruth, must. Due to the ways in which the trauma of racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, etc., has become naturalized, classified as social disturbances yet so distant that they still require excavation and estrangement on the part of the dominant culture, these acts of violence are not readily regarded as ‘traumatic.’ But it is. Perhaps it is the lack of appropriate language within the fields of trauma studies that has caused this sort of cognitive dissonance, disregarding the stories that are tossed aside as being ‘anomalous.’
Sigmund Freud defined trauma and its memory as “a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still as work”[2] –his definition stemming from his own experiences with trauma. However, because of his assertion that trauma remains dormant in one’s mind until ‘ready’ (which he describes as latency), much of the literary theory on trauma writing reflects such.[3] The cycle of repression, denial, numbing, recurrence, and working-through has primarily shaped contemporary literary trauma theory. Scholars such as Cathy Caruth[4] were responsible for much of the early scholarship, popularizing that trauma is an “unrepresentable event.”[5] Caruth furthers this by suggesting that trauma is “an unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language,”[6] arguing that a traumatic experience is not possessed by an individual or group. Hence, its impact is unable to be captured by direct reference. This classic theory mostly fails to note an agent’s responsibility, either an independent person or some traumatic event that actively causes the trauma experienced by a subject. Like Freud, Caruth’s perception of trauma, specifically trauma theory in writing, only accepts dissociation as an appropriate response to a traumatic event, claiming that “…trauma is never simply one’s own.”[7] Caruth’s dissociative model of trauma also supports the claim that “one’s trauma is tied up with the trauma of another,” that trauma “is not known in the first instance” but rather, it “returns to haunt the survivor later on.”[8] This paradoxical removal of agency, where survivors who have experienced a traumatic event have the “absolute inability to know it,” restricts trauma’s variability, claiming that it is literature’s indirectness—its figurative language, gaps in speech, and linguistic particularities— only that has the ability to transmit the force of a traumatic history. However, recently, scholarship has turned to look at trauma theory and, more specifically, trauma writing in a more pluralistic view. This view recognizes that although survivors may have had little agency in the moment of the traumatic event, there is variability in trauma, its definition, and representations, allowing for its determinant value and social specificity. By building off the previous explications of literary trauma theory to include the more mundanely catastrophic instances of trauma— “the violence not of lynching but of everyday racism,”[9] as these experiences also had a decisive and deforming effect on the psyche—one can begin to understand the variance of trauma expression.
This is why I chose to look at the trauma writings of the survivors of the Cultural Revolution and the Gwangju Uprising. Though the personal experiences of the individuals that have survived these events vary, they are undeniably tragic. Both resulted in the loss of lives of those who defied what the government declared as ‘correct’, were rooted in communist ideologies, and fundamentally changed the people of their respective nations’ identities.
As we advance towards the more pluralistic view on trauma and what it means to express oneself through writing, cultural competence and attention to humans’ diversity must be taken into account when analyzing and researching to understand responses to trauma. According to Laurence J. Kirmayer, the Director of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University, although Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) borne out of a traumatic experience may present similarly across cultures, the interpretations of these symptoms is varied and diverse[10]. The studies of trauma and trauma writing are currently quite limited to a Western-centered analysis, but utilizing textual analysis, topic modeling, and tracking the changes in responses over time (through Hierarchical Latent Dirichlet Allocation—hLDA)[11] may result in more accurate culturally-specific analyses of trauma.
[1] 2Greg. Forter, “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form,” Narrative 15, no. 3 (2007): pp. 259-285, https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2007.0022. p.60
[2] Neil J. Smelser. 2004. 2 Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkley, California: University of California Press, pg 33
[3] Balaev, Michelle. 1 Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered. In: Michelle Balaev, ed. Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory. Pallgrave MacMillan, Pg. 1
[4] Cathy Caruth can easily be regarded as one of the forerunners of literary trauma theory, and although I tend to agree with her notion that literature and trauma are intimately connected, she loses me when she describes trauma as being unknowable to the victim. I think there are many cases in which this can be seen as possible—the reliving of an event and realizing it was something traumatic, for example—however, the removal of a victim’s agency in the moment of is irresponsible and does not account for trauma that is not “shocking”. Punctual acts of violence, particularly those that are acted out against marginalized groups, have been “socially sublimated into ongoing, systemic practices and patterns of behavior.”
Forter, “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form,”p 260
[5] Michelle Balaev, “1 Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered,” in Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). pp 2-3
[6] Ibid, p 1
[7] Ibid, p. 7
[8] Ibid, p. 6
[9] Forter, “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form,”p 260
[10] Kirmayer, Laurence J. “Nightmares, neurophenomenology and the cultural logic of trauma.” Culture, medicine and psychiatry vol. 33,2 (2009): Pg. 323-31.
[11] Topic modeling refers to the process of unsupervised analysis of a corpus in order to pull out specific sets of keywords based on multiple scans of the corpus. The outputs for my topic modeling included clusters of words (topics) that the model put together to infer the relations. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) assumes that the corpus is composed of words that help determine the topics and maps documents to a list of topics by assigning each word in the corpus to different topics. When you run an hLDA analysis, the program generates a feature tree that includes two hierarchies, the feature hierarchy and the file structure hierarchy. This way, one can view and draw conclusions on how the topics changed over time.