Rewriting the American Soul

Trauma, Neuroscience and the Contemporary Literary Imagination

Anna Thiemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351846967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Rewriting the American Soul focuses on the political implications of psychoanalytic and neurocognitive approaches to trauma in literature, their impact on cultural representations of collective trauma in the United States, and their subversive appropriation in pre- and post-9/11 fiction. Anna Thiemann connects cutting edge trauma theory with the historical context from which it emerged and shows that contemporary novels encourage us to reflect critically on the cultural meanings and political uses of trauma. In doing so, it contributes to a new generation of trauma scholarship that challenges the dominant paradigm in literary and cultural studies. Moreover, the book intervenes in current debates about the relationship between literature and neuroscience insisting that the so-called neuronovel scrutinizes scientific developments and their political ramifications rather than adopting and translating them into aesthetic practices.

1 Introduction

Re-Visioning Trauma

Trauma criticism has no greater claim to ethical purity than any other critical practice. Like any other intellectual endeavour, it is driven by a complex interweaving of scholarly, academic, political and psychical imperatives.

—Susannah Radstone, “Trauma Theory” (2007)

Thinking genealogically about trauma is one essential means of opening it towards possible, alternative futures.

—Michael Rothberg, “Beyond Tancred and Clorinda” (2014)

In their immediate aftermath, the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington were conceived and reconfigured as a collective trauma. Within a matter of days, if not hours, national and international media reached consensus that this enormous tragedy would affect the lives of millions of Americans. Psychiatrists and sociologists have since cautioned against conflating individual and collective trauma and scrutinized the constructedness and mediation of the latter.¹ Despite its critical potential, however, this ongoing debate has consolidated rather than undermined trauma’s status as “a new master narrative.”² The “century of historical trauma”³ may have ended, but books such as The Empire of Trauma (2009) and Popular Trauma Culture (2011)⁴—not to mention myriad essays published elsewhere—attest to trauma theory’s continuing importance for public and academic discussions of contemporary culture and September 11, 2001.

Since the first poems, plays, short stories, and novels about 9/11 came out, literary and cultural critics have likewise adopted trauma theory as the most plausible tool for approaching these texts. One obvious reason for this decision is the widespread consensus that contemporary authors conceptualize and represent trauma according to the latest developments in trauma research. Following this assumption, many studies on post-9/11 fiction have drawn on current definitions of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and corresponding neurobiological and poststructuralist theories that stress the disruptive effects and unspeakability of trauma. To mention but one among many examples, Kristiaan Versluys’s Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (2009) describes the terrorist attacks as an “unpossessable […] limit event that shatters the symbolic resources of the culture and defeats the normal processes of meaning making and semiosis.”⁵ Versluys’s argument resonates with Anne Whitehead’s widely shared notion that contemporary literature conveys the incomprehensibility of trauma and its unavailability for conventional representation by devising ‘symptomatic’ narrative forms, which are characterized by repetition, indirection, and a breakdown of temporality.⁶

The emergence and enduring appeal of literary trauma criticism can be attributed to several factors. In the 1990s, trauma theory infused the study of literature with new significance as it removed the stigma of apolitical escapism that clung to poststructuralist theory, the dominant paradigm of the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, its theoretical framework was readily adaptable to literary studies, which soon developed a set of axiomatic assumptions and a method for analyzing literary texts about trauma. Last but not least, trauma theory asserted the value of literature at a time of crisis, the heyday of the so-called science wars. Trauma studies assume that trauma narratives offer unique insights into the psyche, thus complementing rather than illustrating scientific perspectives on the human mind-brain. The downside of its success and adaptability, however, is that trauma theory tends to lack critical self-reflection. Many scholars in the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies are unaware that its greatest strengths are also its weaknesses. In postulating a ‘convergence’ between trauma narratives and science, literary trauma criticism runs the risk of reducing literature to an accomplice or handmaiden of psychiatry. Moreover, literary critics promote narrow and exclusivist notions of trauma fiction when describing the genre as a variety of fragmented (post-)modernist writing. In recent years, postcolonial critics have become increasingly alert to this issue, accusing trauma theory of obscuring its Eurocentric bias.⁷ The widespread acceptance of trauma theory has also obstructed critical analyses of its history and origins. Many scholars in literary studies have closed their eyes to the fact that contemporary trauma theory resulted from a significant paradigm shift in trauma research. This shift did not occur in a historical vacuum but in a specific cultural context, the post-Vietnam era, where the new ‘trauma doctrine’ served therapeutic and political purposes. In other words, research on trauma fiction in general and post-9/11 literature in particular tends to ignore the epistemological and ethical implications of a theory that has been appropriated by intellectuals and political leaders since its inception in the aftermath of one of the most controversial conflicts in US history.

The present study scrutinizes the contemporary trauma paradigm, a dominant cultural discourse since the 1980s, which I perceive to be deeply entangled in Cold War and post-Cold War memory politics and national mythmaking. More specifically, I will investigate how writers of pre- and post-9/11 literature respond to this paradigm and what their literary exploration suggests about trauma theory and the cultural meaning of September 11, 2001. Contrary to what many critics have proposed, I contend that contemporary novels challenge current trauma theory rather than simply adopting and translating it into aesthetic forms. The texts I am going to analyze are aware of the historical development of trauma research, which originated in the late nineteenth century, and they strategically juxtapose past and present trauma paradigms to highlight their contingency and their political implications for understanding national trauma.

My analysis focuses on six novels that embed 9/11 in national and transnational contexts: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American (2008), and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011). These literary works inspired my project and my main argument is directly derived from them—not least because I assume that they renegotiate current trauma theory rather than provide a mere testing ground for its application. What intrigued me when reading these novels was their surprising combination of two themes: Except for Franzen’s The Corrections, they obviously deal with the events of September 11, 2001, which either drive the plot, as in DeLillo’s Falling Man, or hover in the background, as in most of the other works. But secondly and even more strikingly, the novels revisit the tension between neuroscience, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis, on the other, thereby offering alternative readings of trauma and national history. Far from merely commenting on scientific developments and medical ‘curiosities,’ as contemporary critics of the neuronovel would have it,⁸ my primary texts are thickly allegorical works about the political significance of trauma theory in the biotechnological age. In literary and cultural discourse, PTSD and Freud’s trauma theory figure as alternative conceptual frameworks that mediate history and the interpretation of catastrophic events. According to my reading of the genealogy of trauma research and the literary texts to be discussed in the course of this study, the neurocognitive paradigm represents and intersects with a powerful American master narrative: the myth of innocence and the culture of amnesia, which have been reinvigorated in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, offers a revisionist perspective on US history that brings ‘unconscious’ motivations and guilty acts to the surface. Depending on whether one takes a neurocognitive or psychoanalytic approach, national trauma is interpreted as an inexplicable external event that ‘befalls’ a passive victim and needs to be rewritten or forgotten, or as an event that depends on inner conflicts and past traumas to be integrated into collective history and identity.

Trauma Theory and Treatment: From Freud to PTSD

My insistence on a distinction between neuroscience and psychoanalysis may come as a surprise in view of the fact that Freud is apparently a staple in contemporary trauma theory. After all, he serves as a starting point for almost every discussion of trauma. As a matter of fact, however, Freud’s original model of memory and the mind has been largely abandoned in psychiatry and significantly transformed in cultural theory, which makes for a stark discrepancy between psychoanalytic and contemporary notions of trauma. The disagreement between Freud and the current paradigm is mainly about the causes of trauma. Freud believes that the traumatic effect does not depend on an external event alone but also on the individual’s psychic history. A blow to the psyche activates previous traumas and early identity-forming experiences, which enter into consciousness and determine how the current event is perceived and remembered. This belated re-cognition of repressed traumatic experiences reveals the continuity of psychic life and the malleability of traumatic memory. Rather than disrupting the individual’s foregoing personality, trauma very much depends on it.⁹ By contrast, the current paradigm conceives of trauma as an incomprehensible event that is utterly external to the passive yet sovereign human subject.¹⁰ This fundamental reinterpretation of trauma has been heavily influenced by neurocognitivism, which has dominated trauma research at least since the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called Decade of the Brain. Taking a decidedly anti-psychoanalytic approach, contemporary neurologists hold that traumatic events leave an unmediated “reality imprint” on the brain, inaccessible to consciousness and dissociated from all verbal-linguistic terms.¹¹ Their argument rests on the assumption that the traumatic event is encoded as so-called procedural or implicit memory, which operates at a sensorimotor or iconic level in the limbic and subcortical structures of the brain. Prominent researchers in the field claim that traumatic memories are “unspeakable” not because they have been forgotten or repressed, but because they are stored and experienced as intrusive visceral sensations that cannot be properly communicated and integrated into the history of the psyche. Extreme traumatic experiences may even lead to total amnesia.¹² Summarizing the epistemological implications of neurocognitivism, the historian Ruth Leys points out that trauma “creates a structural deficit, wound or ‘hole’ in the mind where representation ought to be.”¹³ With the help of modern neuroimaging technologies, this “hole” can even be visualized. Jasmeet Pannu Hayes from the Memory Laboratory at Boston University maintains that PTSD causes changes in brain structure and activity.¹⁴ The increasing influence of scanning technologies, which assume to render the mind visible and transparent, illustrates the systematic displacement of the Freudian unconscious in all areas of psychiatric research.

The ontological and epistemological foundations of trauma theory have far-reaching practical implications. In the clinical context, psychoanalytic and neurocognitive trauma theories have engendered vastly different therapeutic approaches, which have a significant impact on the meaning of trauma in the patient’s life. Psychoanalysis aims to recover trauma-related memories and to integrate them into the subject’s identity. The Freudian talking cure and other psychodynamic approaches use self-scrutiny and free association to explore the patient’s conscious and unconscious emotions, defensive maneuvers, and patterns in his or her thoughts and actions. The therapist encourages the patient to link feelings such as guilt to past events and behavior in order to reveal repressed or hidden problems in the latter’s life.¹⁵ Unlike Freudian psychoanalysis, contemporary approaches tend to deny that the traumatic event is or can be meaningfully related to the subject’s past and identity, and state-of-the-art therapy aims to alter or, preferably, eliminate disturbing memory fragments. Cognitive behavioral therapy, the most influential and ubiquitous form of psychotherapy today, turns its attention to the present and the future, targeting ‘dysfunctional’ thinking and behavior rather than the complex causes of trauma. Instead of exploring the meaning of traumatic events and why they continue to haunt the patient, therapists seek to recode or rewrite the horrifying experience and to alleviate the symptoms of trauma. Treatment usually consists of three steps—exposure or reliving the traumatic event, cognitive restructuring, and anxiety management—which are meant to achieve desensitization and elimination of distressing thoughts and feelings.¹⁶ The long-term goal of neurobiological resear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Re-Visioning Trauma
• 2 Posttraumatic Culture and the Repressed Memory of Freud
• 3 Memory and the Myth of Innocence: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001)
• 4 Resuming the Cold War Game: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007)
• 5 The Trauma of Self-Recognition: Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006)
• 6 Life Writing and Black Counter-Memory: Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American (2008)
• 7 From Science to Archeology: Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)
• 8 Cartographies of Diasporic Trauma: Teju Cole’s Open City (2011)
• 9 Conclusion: Forgetting Therapy and Trauma’s Ends
• Bibliography
• Index