TRAUMA IN THE LINE OF BEAUTY

Trauma in the Line of Beauty

Trauma in the Line of Beauty

Introduction

The famous researcher Alan Hollinghurst's pioneering study of trauma and the posttraumatic forges a connection between the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the literary as such. Since trauma defies linguistic processing, she explains, the language used to describe it will always be figural. For this reason Hollinghurst's privileges imaginative literature, with its highly mediated nature, as a means of representing the otherwise unclaimed experience of trauma. The influential reflections inform a crucial direction within trauma studies: the search for a narrative voice that articulates trauma effectively. Over the last twenty years trauma scholarship has explored how trauma outstrips discursive and representational resources, but has only begun to address the ways gender, race, and class must complicate our understanding of the posttraumatic. The feminist psychotherapist Maria Root has developed an idea that she calls insidious trauma to refer to the cumulative degradation directed toward individuals whose identities, such as gender, color, and class, differ from what is valued by those in power. Though not always blatant or violent, these effects threaten the basic well being of the person who suffers them. Root's conceptualization provides a useful framework for understanding certain long-term consequences of the institutionalized sexism, racism, and classism that systematically denigrate the self worth of the socially othered who are rendered voiceless. Therefore, all the issues related to trauma in the line of beauty will be discussed in detail.

Overview of Trauma

If one is to examine the long and convoluted history of literary and cultural trauma, it is necessary to first define exactly what trauma is, a task certainly easier said than done. The difficulty in defining the experience of being traumatized is due to both the elusive nature of trauma itself, and the fact that existing attempts to define the condition are as varied as its multitude of symptoms and representations. For example, consider the diagnosis currently known as post-traumatic stress disorder. Before arriving at its current incarnation, PTSD was known as neuro psychiatric casualty, nervous shock, hysteria, soldier's heart, railway spine, combat fatigue, hysterical neurosis, war neurosis, traumatic neurosis, neurasthenia, and shell shock. Many of these denotative discrepancies stem directly from the work that contemporary trauma theorists have done in their other scholarly endeavors that is, one's other areas of expertise inevitably influence the ways in which each has informed his or her own perception of what trauma is. For example, clinical psychologist Judith Lewis Herman defines trauma as a threat to bodily integrity, or a personal encounter with death. The author known as Chaim Shatan contextualizes trauma as having one's reality torn asunder, leaving no guideposts or boundaries, a definition which is surely influenced by his work with Vietnam veterans (Allen, 1995, 113).

In Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, literary scholar Kali Tal defines trauma as a life-threatening event that displaces one's preconceived notions about the world. Tal also stresses that traumatic events must be experienced firsthand, whereas in ...