Toward a holographic puzzle box theory of fiction, part II
prisms and anchors and problems with the trauma plot
I wrote my graduate exam at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop about fragmented narrative in the work of Lorrie Moore, Renata Adler, and Mary Robison. My paper was, unfortunately, totally bonkers because I was like three weeks sober when I wrote it, and I was coming off of a kind of fucked-up detox side effect of seeing tiny invisible bugs crawling in the carpet.
Anyway, I wanted to write about those elliptical, difficult narratives because, for one thing, there was something about the fractured narrative mode that just made so much sense to me. It made sense in my bones. It made sense in my heart. It still does. It doesn’t feel like hectic opaque arty bullshit, the way it apparently does to some people. It feels like a mind that is trying to be here when being here is hard. Like a brand-new sober mind, for example. No, there isn’t a conventional plot in Speedboat or Pitch Dark. You find the plot by echolocation; it’s located the way the character’s point of view selects and arranges moments, and you realize eventually that there is some painful organizing principle driving the selection of those moments.
We were not yet, at that moment, using trauma to talk about everything. But if we were, I would have used it. Maybe not so much in the shorthand Parul Senghal supplies (“What happened to her?”) but in the ongoing question: How will this character reconcile themselves to their present when they struggle to (or don’t want to) present themselves as legible human beings because their perception of the world has been so altered? Let’s call it trauma as prism: ordinary daylight goes in one side, and a rainbow comes out the other.
But this, I have come to realize, is not everyone’s model. It certainly isn’t the trauma mode that Senghal references in her New Yorker essay. In one of the strange logical lapses in the eponymous New Yorker essay Senghal notes that in the D.S.M. IV, “some 636,120 possible symptom combinations can be attributed to P.T.S.D.,” but then goes on to generalize about this narrative phenomenon called the trauma plot. I mean, I guess that’s the whole point of the article: to compare recent narratives in which a past trauma is revealed in an obligatory way, implicitly structuring the narrative as a reveal of what happened.
And I completely agree. The trauma plot as Senghal describes it has two interesting functions: It shrinks a story down to the size of the human (perhaps even narcissistically) and it makes the trauma a metonym for the character it’s attached to. And somewhere in there, I think, there’s the problem that we may have come to see trauma as a necessary feature to characterize a human, or make it possible for a reader to care. It’s not hard to connect this form of storytelling to the extremely defensive, highly attenuated form of writing that has come about thanks to Twitter, in which people list some shorthand of their qualifying experience before venturing to say anything. (Mea culpa, I’ve done it, too: “As a person with bipolar disorder, blah blah blah.”) Trauma is an unquestioned and final conclusion. It shuts people up. Nobody gets to boss you around about your trauma.
Requiring backstory as a way of empathizing with a character and reducing backstory to trauma collapses the potential for mystery—Senghal’s main argument. And that is absolutely one reason that we might want to use something other than trauma as a narrative anchor. But the other is that a narrow literary horizon doesn’t stay on the page: It becomes central to the way we produce our identities. And if we don’t eventually develop a story of ourselves that moves past trauma, it becomes a stand-in for ourselves.
I didn’t realize this at the time, but I wanted to write about fragmentary narratives and the prismatic effect of an unnamed trauma because I wanted to make sense to people. That prismatic effect is mine, too, you see—what I write has been described in workshops as mysterious, opaque, cold, quirky, and weird. I have been told that it’s impossible to empathize. Too much on the surface, not enough backstory. Or too much memory, not enough surface. Basically these are all forms of “I don’t get it,” which I internalized as the fact that I myself was illegible.
Trying to fix this, readers have basically asked me over and over again to provide some trauma—to give it all an anchor in the bad, bad past. Trauma is a way to establish your reasons for doing X Y and Z, for not making sense. (Otherwise not making sense is simply not allowed.) This was a substantial part of the reason my second novel was rejected. I withheld the existence of trauma, because that is central to the main character’s point of view. The book is essentially about a character who wants to make sense, and doesn’t. (Wow, I know.)
It also turned out, by the way, that the book needed a massive, massive rewrite, and that it didn’t do a good enough job of angling itself away from the expectation of a certain kind of trauma plot. I am extremely grateful to get another chance at it, and it really wasn’t ready. In large part because I was still working out these issues, and the question of whose art gets to make sense is the book.
So that’s why I’m calling for an antidote to the trauma plot. I want there to be more ways that more facets of us can make sense. I don’t want to keep anybody from exploring trauma in their work. I agree that the cultural disposition to hide the human experience around a thousand forms of shame is a harm to us all. But I do object when any narrative form becomes a totality. I object to the lack of curiousness. And at its heart, the meta narrative of “hurt people hurt people” can present a pretty narrow narrative horizon. Even my prism model of trauma can’t escape the gravitational pull of a hidden hurt. So what else is there?
And that’s where the holographic puzzle box theory of fiction comes in … next time.