Healing as horizon: narrating trauma in the age of PTSD
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Citation
Abstract
In this project, I employ feminist interventions to illuminate how contemporary literature challenges culturally dominant narratives on healing. In 1980, PTSD was incorporated into the DSM and granted medical legitimacy, but this description put forward a reductively linear model of narrating trauma. I explore texts that instead offer a sustenance model for narrating healing, in which meaning is multiple and multidirectional. I develop the concept “healing as horizon” to complicate the extant assumption that trauma ends in cure. Instead, I find that select literary fiction effectively constructs healing as an ideal toward which we move but never attain, and so better reflects embodied experience as one of vulnerability and variability. Furthermore, such “healing as horizon” narratives imagine ways to inhabit a space of possibility rather than one of certain doom or certain deliverance. They thereby engage their readers in the arduous processes of continuing to make meaning amid and after trauma. I begin by demonstrating how trauma has become pathologized and pervasive, and then go backward in time to illustrate a conception of trauma that precedes PTSD. I show how, in James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The LastSeptember (1929), trauma functions as a void into which all narrative collapses. Subsequent chapters return to the present-day context to show how Jesmyn Ward, Anna Burns, and Lydia Davis make meaning from and about structural trauma, the traumatized body and traumatic loss, respectively. My second chapter on Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) illustrates how Ward’s characters generate narrative from material and sonic wreckage, finding in the fragments—borne from their ancestors and ecosystems—a way to recount structural racism. In chapter three I turn to Anna Burns’s novels Little Constructions (2007) and Milkman (2018) to show how trauma narratives must remain revisable, with expansive meaning to express the ever- changing bodily experience. “Healing as Horizon” concludes with a chapter on Lydia Davis, where I contend that her archive of short stories on loss consistently resists the capitalist progress narrative that presumes individuals and societies alike must always be getting better. Ultimately, “Healing as Horizon” not only recognizes the totalizing impulse toward cure as a false promise but also puts forth another response to trauma, one in which readers become comfortable inhabiting a space and sense of possibility.
Description
2024
License
Attribution 4.0 International