Narrative Swerves and Holding Spaces
The purpose of art, according to the philosopher Herbert Marcuse , is that it has the “capacity to show that the world can be otherwise” (Marcuse 1977, 138). I was reminded of this idea in 2006 as I read an essay by the novelist JG Ballard . In it, Ballard describes the process of writing his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun , a work of fiction that draws heavily on his harrowing childhood experiences in the Lunghua Japanese prisoner of war camp. He begins the essay by reflecting on the “huge staying power” of memories, noting that “like dreams, they thrive in the dark” (Ballard 2006, 1). Past experiences , Ballard observes, can survive “for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed,” and, if they are painful, bringing them into the light “can be risky” (Ballard 2006, 1). In Ballard ’s case, that risk was so great that he avoided writing about his childhood for forty years: “[t]wenty years to forget, and then 20years to remember” (Ballard 2006, 1). In fact, he confesses, he was entirely unable to bear witness to that time in his life until “it occurred to me to drop my parents from the story” just as “they had moved out of my life in Lunghua even though we were sharing the same room” (Ballard 2006, 1). Removing his parents from the story, that is, enacted a narrative swerve that freed Ballard to recount what he felt to be the truth of his “real existence”: his sense of surviving the war on his own (Ballard 2006, 1). “Once I separated Jim from his parents,” Ballard reveals, “the novel unrolled itself at my feet like a bullet-ridden carpet” (Ballard 2006, 1).
Thus, despite the significant change Ballard had made in representing the circumstances of his past, he found that “enough of it was based on fact to convince me that what had seemed a dream-like pageant was a negotiated truth” (Ballard 2006, 1). The art of Ballard ’s novel, in other words, its narrative negotiation with the “risky,” “dark,” and “shipwrecked” memories of its author’s traumatic past, exemplifies the Marcusean capacity to show the world as “otherwise.” And it is precisely this strategy of negotiation with the truth, rather than its documentation, that I find in all the posttraumatic autobiographical projects I examine in the pages to come. From legal and rights testimony to traditional and graphic memoirs , from prison poetry to autobiographical fiction , from virtual to material monuments to traumatic histories, I see Ballard ’s “negotiated truth” as the key rhetorical figure of the posttraumatic autobiographical . Indeed, it is an approach to recounting traumatic past experiences that I have used myself.
Let me tell you a story. When I was ten years old, two very bad, but entirely unconnected, things happened to me: the sudden death of a sibling and a violent sexual assault. The first of these, my eldest brother’s fatal car accident, was shocking, tragic, and naturally had a very distressing effect on my family. Nevertheless, as the years passed, that loss began to heal. Now, more than four decades later, we miss Alan still and speak of him often, thinking of him especially on his birthday or at Christmastime, but there is no denying that the intensity of our grief has lessened. The other experience did not heal over time. For decades I sought help from various therapists for my crippling anxiety , periodic depression , and self-destructive behavior. In these settings, I was given reasons for my very different reactions to the two terrible things. It seemed that because my brother’s death could be explained, spoken of and shared with others, it could also be processed and eventually accepted. But the attack of which I could not speak continued to haunt me.
So, I took my therapists at their word and spoke. Time and time again I tried to tell them about that terrible experience, but for reasons I only now can understand, I found it impossible to do so. I was like a person recounting a dream: the sensory details were there, but I could not weave them into a story that would make sense to someone else. The attack existed for me in vivid flashbacks as if projected on to multiple, non-synchronized planes from a variety of viewpoints, a private screening that admitted only me. In this narrative muddle, I sometimes contradicted myself, conflating certain specifics, backtracking to try and explain, and ultimately telling different versions of what happened. Often, my therapists would challenge me about which of these accounts was the “real” truth. But I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. For while they were concerned about the who, what, when, and where of what happened, all that mattered to me was the question that could not be answered. The ‘why.’
So, I gave up on therapy and I suffered. And I wrote. And through writing, I negotiated a way of raising my dangerous memories from the deep. I invented a character (Bernadette ) with a past like my own and imagined what would happen to her in the future. I wrote this story as fiction rather than fact because (as my therapy had shown) my grasp of the facts was unreliable. And anyway, in fiction I could create my own answer to the unanswerable question.
Here is an excerpt from that work:
Bernadette ’s Creative Writing NotebookDate: October 22 1999Title: Time LineBernadette was attacked when she was nine or ten years old. She can’t remember the exact date. That is, she can’t remember if it was before Andrew died or after—which probably means it was after—in the time when nothing much worth remembering in any linear way happened. Bernadette remembers this period in an audible, aural way instead. She remembers sounds, words especially, words that were spoken and words that were choked, and who said what to whom. But when, and in what order, or with what consequences—it doesn’t come back to Bernadette that way.This lack of chronological sequencing doesn’t bother Bernadette —it didn’t really matter in which order the plagues descended did it? Was it locusts first or floods? It is enough to know that they came. That the horrors did not desist. That some died, and others lived to write about it.Her shrink didn’t see it that way, of course. Resistance, defense mechanisms—these were the words that hung about the analyst’s office. “But why were you there, Bea? In the park?”Why indeed.Bernadette could not follow. She did not want to remember, to place events in a continuum, to see their cause and effect. “Bernadette ’s time-line” was the project her shrink wanted to her to complete. So, she did. On a big piece of white poster board, using black stenciled letters and a large, red line to connect the dots. She’d made most of it up. 1
While much of my novel is fictionalized, the passage I cite here recalls something I did in real life. I was fed up with being questioned. But what I did not know when I handed over that half-made-up time line to my therapist was that my inability to offer a consistent chronology of events was itself a key symptom of what is known as posttraumatic stress disorder , or PTSD .
I began to learn about the constrained relationship between traumatic experience and life storytelling in 2014 when the anxiety I had suffered from all my life became intolerable: I could not sleep and was terrified of travel and even of being on my own. I struggled to get to work and to care for my family. I decided (very reluctantly given my previous unsuccessful experiences with therapy ) that I had to get some professional help. For the first time, I received the diagnosis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, brought on by the violent assault in childhood. And I found out something else. Although I had many symptoms of PTSD , there was one that I did not have any longer: vivid flashbacks.
In my teens and early twenties, I had them all the time, especially at night. But more recently the images that chase me in my nightmares are vague and changing—not specific and recurrent. My new therapist wondered why. And he asked me to tell him my story. But this time instead of recounting it all again, I gave him my novel to read. Afterwards, we talked at length about the relationship between my writing and my symptomology. And here is what we came to understand: although writing the novel did not completely “cure” me, it provided a “holding space” on the page for my traumatic memories. 2 By integrating those memories into a par...