Issues of Psychopathology
Resurrection of Self through Trauma in The Appointment
Chitra.V.S.
Assistant Professor of English,
VTM NSS College, Dhanuvachapuram.
Contemporary fiction is enriched with narratives that limn traumatic situations and protagonists who demonstratethe psychoanalytical aspects of trauma that influence the reformulation of the self. Trauma and memory are so inevitably entangled that their boundaries have widened beyond the ambit of extremely severe or abnormal circumstances to accommodate many common distresses of every day life. Although traditional entries of war, violent rape, concentration camp experiences, sexual and psychological abuses during childhood, are labelled as ‘trauma’, it has now been effectively extended to many other experiences situated between either extreme. Trauma can become a condition of everyday life where the subject’s residence in a city that has experienced wars, terrorist attacks, ethnic or communal violence can trigger a series of narrative repetitions of the violence and the traumatic memories associated with it. Memories of a violent past can often obscure the fine line between reality and imagination, actuating a sense of confusion and incomprehension. Eyewitness accounts of genocides and other ethnic and communal conflicts testify to this state of delirium, indicative of the pervasiveness of assault that stretch beyond the realms of the physical to the psychological and the cultural.
Trauma theory, in relation to literature asserts that trauma creates a speechless fright that divides or destroys identity. Often identity is seen as a reflection of intergenerational transmission of trauma. The readings on trauma theory have lead to the categorisation of the ‘trauma novel’. The term ‘trauma novel’ refers to a work of fiction that conveys a profound sense of loss or intense fear at the individual or the collective level. In a novel where trauma plays a major role, the geographical location represents traumatic effects and events through metaphoric and material aspects. Geographicaldescriptions of the location of the traumatic experience and its remembrance in relation to a larger cultural context containing social values that influence the recollection of the event and reconfiguration of the self are the results of trauma. These novels represent the disruption between the self and others by carefully describing the place of trauma because the physical environment offers the opportunity to examine both the personal and cultural histories. The primacy of place in the representation of trauma anchors the individual experience within a larger cultural context and organizes the memory and meaning of trauma.
This paper is primarily concerned with the features of trauma novels, the aftermaths of trauma on victims, the complex fables of memory that impress upon and restructure the individual and collective identities. The paper also attempts to analyze how the aspects of trauma can be applied to literary texts, mainly Herta Muller’sThe Appointment, to unfold the underlying subtexts of individual memory that bearthe imprint of a troubled past, the effect of political persecution on individuals and how that experience and its memories shape the lives of those affected. Muller adopts as a strategy the articulation of trauma in The Appointment, which is attained through a rare economy of words. The effect of political persecution is most acutely felt in the novel in the loss of identity and orientation, in the dehumanizing attitude towards human aspirations.
Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) views that “the struggle of man against power is a struggle of memory against forgetting.” Authors and literary critics have extensively employed their works to provide a better knowledge of trauma, its symptoms and an illustration of how the human mind experiences and processes traumatic events. The literary texts representing trauma are not merely documentational narratives of trauma, but a realistic portrayal of the symptoms of trauma through the protagonist’s experiences and the images.Authors frequently utilize imagery to emphasize the theme: woven together into a complex structure, illustrations of personal traumatic experiences and national traumatic events represent the growing fear, helplessness and the isolation experienced by an individual during and after a traumatic event.
In her critical work Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth explains trauma and its symptoms: “In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (11). Learning about trauma allows for a better understanding of its effects on individuals and ways to reduce its impact on the victims. There are many formalistic features that could be used to express trauma. As Ann Whitehead describes in her work,Trauma Fiction, there are a number of key stylistic features which tend to recur in (trauma) narratives. These include intertextuality, repetition and a dispersed or fragmented narrative voice” (84). These stylistic features interrupt the text; act as intrusions on the story to illustrate traumatic symptoms and experiences by “mirroring at a formal level, the effects of trauma”, particularly the intrusive symptoms. Isolated pictures, divided by a gutter, tell a fragmented story and the reader has to put together the story and fill in the blanks. Judith Herman in her work Trauma and Recovery, views that “traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and content; rather they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images” (38). Images are immensely employed to emphasize the “frozen and wordless quality of traumatic memories….” (37). Emotional impact, repetition, compulsion, state of helplessness and other symptoms of trauma can all be delivered through visual clues, such as color, panel size and repetitive imagery. The combination of words and images provide many opportunities for illustrating the impact of traumatic experiences. Traumatic experiences alter the victims, causing a detachment from society, which make them feel isolated, utterly abandoned, with a sense of alienation and disconnection pervading every relationship from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community and religion. Post- traumatic symptoms in these novels are experienced at two formal stylistic levels: fragmented chronology and repetition of imagery. “Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure and therefore as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect .
Herta Muller’sThe Appointment is a realistic depiction of the unnamed protagonist’s disrupted self and her surroundings. The confrontation with the trauma she suffers prompts her resistance to it providing a resultant resurrection of her self. The transformation of the unnamed narrator’s self ignited by an external, often terrifying experience illuminates the process of coming to terms with the dynamics of memory that inform the new perceptions of her self and the world around her. Freudian concept of trauma and memory emphasizes the necessity to recall the experience. Trauma is brought out through repetitive flash backs that literally re-enact the event because the mind cannot represent it otherwise. The Appointment by Muller is conventionally structured around the events of one morning in the life of the central character, who is unnamed, takes a tram ride on her way to her regular interrogation. The trauma of the protagonist is brought out through the description of the journey being punctuated by flashbacks as she reviews her life and remembers the events which led her to this point in her life. She does not reach her destination, and the denouement of the last few pages undermines the basis on which she has found the courage to resist when she discovers that her beloved husband Paul, on whom she depends as her only ally has been spying upon her.
The effect of political persecution is most acutely felt in the novel, in the loss of identity and orientation, in the dehumanizing attitude towards human aspirations. For example, the buried layers of history are seen to impinge on the present when the narrator unwittingly marries the son of the man responsible for the forced deportation of her grandparents, and hear in detail of the material and emotional hardships of everyday life. Muller’s narration is a direct depiction of the political situations pervading in Romania which gradually filters to the collective conscious of an individual. The power of the state invades the private sphere of the unnamed narrator which leads her to a sense of insecurity and fear. She is haunted by the helplessness of her situation while undertaking the tram ride to her interrogative sessions. The protagonist of the novel is ever seen as suffering from the fear of being interrogated. The ‘crime’ for which she is being persecuted is that of placing notes ‘marry me’ with her name and address inside the clothing bound for Italy in the hope of escaping from the oppression of the state. The expression of desire is seen as subversive by the state. The lack of freedom to exercise her desire and the constant threat of interrogation by her interrogator, Major Albu seeks to instil fear in her through suspense and indirect threat of violence. The past is entwined with the present experiences to bring out the trauma experienced by the unnamed narrator. She is in many ways a weak person who is led by her desires, but gradually she realizes the absolute necessity of offering resistance. She compartmentalizes herself from the society which in turn helps her to overcome the trauma and reconfigure the ‘self’ to resist the power of the State. She remains in control by dividing her ‘self’ into the ‘stressed self’ whose actions are governed by a compulsive reaction to fear and the ‘detached, observing self’. The fragmented story of the unnamed narrator and the sense of isolation depict the real impact of trauma and its aftermath.
The aftermath of trauma watermarks a major departure from the familiar uniformity of mundane perceptions, often, to the alien and uncertain grounds of the surreal. It leads to differential interpretation of reality and the reformulation of memories and identities. It affects the perception of history and the past, in ways that may not always be immediately apparent. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Studies reveal that in the victims of trauma experience of violence has a profound influence on perception. The irony of trauma is that memory which is often considered to be the burden of our experience nurtures within itself the secrets of replenishment by offering resistance to the prevailing situations.
Works Cited
Muller, Herta. The Appointment. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. Print.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: 1981, 4. Print.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore:
John Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of violence - from Domestic
Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Print.
Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print.
Tangled: Nostalgia and Displacement in Amy Tan
Divya Johnson,
Assistant Professor of English,
St. John’s College, Anchal.
Establishing clear parallels between past and present, between historical events and contemporary problems, Amy Tan expresses the feelings of the lovesick Chinese immigrant making their exit from the life of a beloved; their homeland. Amy Tan is an Asian American writer who is considered a guide to the landscape of the Asian American experience. The tensions in her dual heritage eventually found their way into her novels in her portrayal of the generational conflicts in immigrant families. The multiple spaces she inhabits- Asia and America- raise important questions about belonging, identity, ethnicity, migrancy, diaspora, nation and multiculturalism. The vitality of her writing springs from the emphasis laid on the stark contrast in the histories, cultures, languages and politics of the two places that Amy Tan inhabits.
The crucial events in Tan's novels are contained within definitive boundaries: a circumscribed Chinatown neighborhood, the tiny village of Changmian, one-room accommodations for Chinese pilots and their wives or a stuffy apartment crammed with elderly mah-jongg enthusiasts. Juxtaposing events separated by decades, Tan parallels the dislocations experienced by emigrants from a familiar culture into an alien one with their daughters' painful journeys from cultural confusion to acceptance of their dual heritage.
Tan's protagonists--members of that diaspora community called Asian Americans--represent two groups: Chinese-born immigrants imperfectly acculturated despite decades of life in America, and American-born women of Chinese ancestry, uncomfortably straddling the border between their ethnic heritage and the American milieu that is their home. Enmeshed by their shared histories in California's ethnic neighborhoods, the women in Tan's novels struggle to create personal identities that reflect their lives, needs, and desires.
The Kitchen God's Wife which explores the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship in the context of cultural and ethnic disjunctions, focuses on a woman's journey to wholeness after an eventful life that replicates the Chinese immigrant experience in microcosm. In contrast to Winnie Louie's version of the story of the Kitchen God who achieves deity status when he proves to be capable of shame upon discovering that the wife he has mistreated still cares about his welfare, Amy Tan depicts an alternate version where Winnie, the Kitchen God's wife is denied membership in the Chinese pantheon of deities despite her fidelity.
Presenting a widening rift between Winnie and her daughter, Pearl Tan has succeeded in narrating the fully developed chronicle of Winnie's life in China. Through her story, Pearl contextualizes Winnie's reminiscences, describing a series of events and revelations that ultimately changes their relationship. Required by family obligations to attend the funeral of an ancient "aunt" and the engagement party of a "cousin," Pearl spends more time with Winnie than she has in many months, and the enforced companionship prompts the younger woman to examine the roots of their estrangement. Winnie, goaded to action by a letter from China that closes a painful chapter in her past, decides to tell Pearl about her life in China. Being a member of a native-Chinese community that had to face too many predicaments related to cultural identity, her behavior is hybrid. In order to settle down in the new environment, her nativeness is suspended to align herself to western environment. Counter discourse happens and reflects the domination of Kwan Li over the Americans.
Although she has interwoven her cultural identity with colonial behaviour, it is done in order to influence and alter their culture. Besides, she is able to make the alien environment believe in her at the end of story, instead. Thus, her migration as a part of the first generation of diasporic people results in the contrary effect of migration. Her existance threats western’s domination as Young (2004) points out thoroughly within his book : “...characteristics of cultural movements became visible to Europeans in two ways: in the disruption of domestic culture and in the increasing anxiety about racial difference and racial amalgamation that was apparent as an effect of colonialism and enforced migration”.
As it is stated by Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994) : “Transnational dimensions of cultural transformation –migration, displacement, diaspora, relocation- makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of cultural signification.” (172) Back to the concept which has been revealed by Said, colonizer –occident- use to be superior to colonized people. Normatively, the Occidents is upper than the Orients.
Even though mixing of races frequently happens resulting in the formation of cross cultural identities, occident is still supposed to be superior. It becomes conspicuous when the Orient enacts a counter-discourse toward the colonizer’s reign, and dominates them back. It is because transmigration of the colonizer or colonized people is based on colonial desire as it is mentioned in Colonial Desire (1994) : “Transmigration is the form taken by colonial desire, whose attraction and fantasies were no doubt complicit with colonialism itself .“(2) Colonized is only an object, but in many cases, colonized is always able to give response. Despite of their inferiority, they do move across cultural identities and sometimes even resist the colonizer’s culture. Moreover, they are also able to create domination over colonizer’s power.
Tan examines identity--its construction, boundaries, and contexts. Indelibly branded by their visible ethnicity, Tan's characters daily negotiate the minefields of cultural disjunction and tensions between Chinese tradition and Americanization in family connections and individual desires. These tensions inevitably surface, causing intergenerational conflict and the disintegration of family relationships as the motherbelongingto the older generation, looks back to China while her daughter remains firmly connected to the new land. Unable to discover common ground, the two groups of women speak different languages, embrace different values, nurture different ambitions, and lead divergent lives.