In his recent discussion with Dustin Illingworth, Mauro Javier Cárdenas has this to say about the literature of trauma:
I hate the automatisms of trauma. As soon as I hear that dreadful word, henceforth to be replaced with the word demipenteract, I see a hand with ruler & pencil drawing a straight line between demipenteract and present dramatic circumstances, and I hear a voice, stylized for your pleasure — it’s not self-help it’s literature, doctor — that explains the sadness of the demipenteracted. You can’t even watch an airplane movie without poor Mad Max having flashbacks to his demipenteract, which, paradoxically, is supposed to complexify him? And yet of course our demipenteracts, if you’re unlucky enough to have had them, do tend to have an outsized impact, so I am not trying to dismiss them or minimize them but instead I am trying to ask myself how to represent what’s so boringly linear. … In other words my answer to the question of the representation of demipenteracts is to represent the not thinking about demipenteracts.
Yeah, that’s the point I’ve come to as well. Which is to say that my first review of 2021 is a long, very personal, very anxious and ambivalent response to Trauma, a new anthology published by Dodo Ink. Here’s my take:
I’m sympathetic to the value of testimonies of trauma in the cultural discourse. If to speak of trauma is to speak of things done to objectified bodies, those bodies are by definition minoritised: therefore generally not male, white, straight, cisgendered, able, and at least middle-class. When people thus traumatised speak out about their trauma, they do important work for those who are similarly traumatised but remain silent. They create channels for dialogue. They build permission structures for the airing of experiences that would otherwise remain suppressed. They destigmatise trauma. They help to diminish the sense of shame that many survivors carry with them. They agitate for a cultural sphere in which those who testify to their trauma are acknowledged — “seen” — and, if victimised with intent, then believed. They prompt reconsiderations of experiences that sufferers may not have previously seen as traumatic. And they establish new bonds of solidarity, as those with no direct experience of trauma may understand it more keenly if they encounter the testimony of someone with whom they can identify in a bodily sense.
But it’s important as well to view the discourse with scepticism. Any system of validation, no matter how informally structured, inevitably creates perverse incentives and often arbitrary hierarchies of value. If, for instance, this discourse encourages the validation of testimonies of trauma, then doesn’t it ask careerists in pursuit of cultural prominence to embellish their testimonies, to exaggerate their claims? Jeanine Cummins is a glaring example of one who has fallen for the lure, but not everyone who seeks a public platform has to go as far as she did. Perhaps, amid fierce competition for the attention of readers, it can be helpful to characterise an experience as traumatic when it is not clinically so; but then, perhaps, to use the term in this way is to dilute a reader’s understanding of what trauma is, what constitutes it.
And thus begins this year’s coverage of new titles from small presses at Splice.
Infinite Patience 