Trauma theory as an approach to analyzing literary texts
The following is the primary text of a presentation for academics in Kabul and Tehran, arranged by Dr. Nasir Arian, Assistant Professor of Persian Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at Penn State University. It was conducted via Zoom December 5, 2024. This text is excerpted and updated from a much longer article published by Eclectica Magazine, “Cultural Trauma and the Postmodern Voice” (April/May 2021), which was itself excerpted and updated from my book Trauma Theory as an Approach to Analyzing Literary Texts (2021).
In a writers’ symposium on postmodern literature at Brown University in 1989, Robert Coover, in his welcoming remarks, gave the impression the writing style that became known as postmodernism sprang up in the 1950s and ’60s almost by sheer coincidence. Among the symposium participants were Leslie Fiedler, John Hawkes, Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Donald Barthelme, and William Gaddis. Coover noted other writers who certainly would have fit in but were not in attendance, including John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, and Gunter Grass. Coover said, “[T]his group sought out some form, some means by which to express what seemed to them new realities.” However, Coover went on to suggest a remarkably thin theory as to why so many writers, all working in relative isolation, began constructing narrative in uncannily similar styles:
We felt we were all alone. No one was reading us, nor was anyone writing remotely like the sort of writing we were doing until, in the little magazines, we began slowly to discover one another. Few of us knew one another at the time we began writing. There was a uniform feeling among writers at that time that something had to change, something had to break, some structure had to go. And that was, I think, what most united us.
Even though the panel was intended to be a debate, and not merely a discussion, not a single writer challenged Coover’s explanation for the emergence of postmodern style. At first this assessment may seem startling—that some of the keenest and best-educated minds who were at the forefront of producing and (many) critiquing literary postmodernism accepted the premise that postmodern narrative style more or less just happened; essentially individuals writing in isolation on various continents, including North and South America, and Europe, just all happened to begin writing in the same sorts of ways, all in a narrow time span, from about 1950 to 1965. According to Coover, writers with virtual simultaneity decided to abandon modernist realism for something fragmented, repetitive, largely unrealistic and illogical, and highly intertextual.
Joe David Bellamy, in his preface to The New Fiction (1974), expresses a similar notion as to the origins of postmodern narrative style. Bellamy cites an essay by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who “described his sense that the most interesting writers (at that hour of the world [mid 1960s]) were in the process of struggling against a ‘whole way of using language . . . a whole way of giving order to experience,’ which had been imposed on the sensibility of the times by the great writers of the immediate past.” Again, Bellamy appears to support the idea that postmodern writers simply decided to rebel against modernist literary convention.
A more cogent explanation, I believe, rests with trauma theory. The trauma of the nuclear age, experienced by the entirety of Western culture, affected the psyches of these writers in a way that resulted in postmodern literary style—a style reflecting the traumatized voice. (More on this in a moment.) Historians Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, in Hiroshima in America (1995), make several assertions regarding the 20th-century’s zeitgeist as it suddenly evolved after the Second World War. One is the “[s]truggles with the Hiroshima narrative have to do with a sense of meaning in a nuclear age, with our vision of America and our sense of ourselves.” Another is Americans were deeply and immediately conflicted with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They experienced the “contradictory emotions of approval and fear the bomb evoked, a combination that has continued to disturb and confuse Americans ever since.” A third assertion is “[or]dinary people [. . .] experienced their own post-Hiroshima entrapment—mixtures of nuclearism and nuclear terror, of weapons advocacy and fearful anticipation of death and extinction.” And all of this internal conflict, much of which resides in the unconscious, has contributed to a “sense of the world as deeply absurd and dangerous.” Similarly, literary critic Ihab Hassan sees a connection between the horrors of the Second World War and postmodernism: “Postmodernism may be a response, direct or oblique, to the Unimaginable that Modernism glimpsed only in its most prophetic moments. Certainly it is not the Dehumanization of the Arts that concerns us now [1987]; it is rather the Denaturalization of the Planet and the End of Man.”
It is quite possible Coover and the other postmodernists at the Brown University symposium experienced the same sort of repression and dissociation individual trauma victims frequently do. We know it is common for people suffering the symptomology of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to have no conscious recollection whatsoever of the traumatizing event, or to have a dissociated recollection, so that trauma can be simultaneously indelible and forgettable. While the symposium participants did not seem to recognize post-nuclear cultural trauma as the source of their collective postmodern style, they inadvertently came near the mark—so much so that reading their comments from here in the 21st century, with our growing understanding of trauma theory, one experiences a sort of dramatic irony. An example is this exchange between Fiedler and Elkin regarding the role of the unconscious in narrative production:
Fiedler: [. . . The writer’s] possessed with certain hallucinations that he would like other people to take as real and to weep over and laugh over and shiver over. [. . .] One of the marvelous things about being a writer is many of the things you do you don’t know you’re doing until you get somebody’s response to it.
Elkin: I don’t believe that.
Fiedler: You don’t believe anything’s out of control in a writer?
Elkin: There’s plenty out of control, yes. Absolutely. But I don’t think there’s any such thing as serendipitous meaning.
Fiedler: Well, there’s meaning that comes from writers who are gifted, especially in writers who please many and please long—and it comes from levels deep within their unconsciousness.
I would call attention to Fiedler’s use of the word “possessed,” as we know trauma tends to possess its victim, distorting reality in numerous ways; and “hallucinations” of course are among the symptomology of the traumatized. Also, while Fiedler and Elkin disagree on specific points, they concur fiction is harvested in large part from the writer’s unconscious mind. Moreover, William Gass cited Gertrude Stein’s theory of composition and applied it to Elkin’s earlier statement where he imagined William Faulkner peering over his shoulder as he composed: “[Stein] wrote, she said, finally, for the human mind, which was the same in some remote, abstract sense. When Stanley [Elkin] says he’s writing with Faulkner looking over his shoulder, that’s the superego who’s telling you that your paragraphs are lousy.” Stein’s assessment gets at the notion of a collective unconsciousness, where writers and their readers are able to connect because all are tapping into the same neuropsychic substructures. Coover, meanwhile, referenced the nuclear-age zeitgeist of the 1960s:
I also wanted to get involved in telling stories. But we were in that period of time in the 1960s when telling stories was no longer so simple. A lot of people were telling stories, and it was getting us into wars. It didn’t seem to stop the growth of nuclear armaments in the world. The stories seemed to be contributing in some way to all those activities.
Coover also discussed writing as “a kind of therapy.” He said, “There are things you have to work your way through. There are issues that have to be confronted[. . . .] So you work that out in fictional forms, and you do feel that Freudian answer, that kind of power over what would otherwise be your impotent life.” Hence Coover recognized the unsettling cultural climate of post-Hiroshima America and how it contributed to narrative style; also, his view of writing-as-therapy is consistent with trauma theorists who suggest postmodern techniques are akin to victims’ struggling to transform traumatic memory into narrative memory. Even the Rubin quote Bellamy cites in The New Fiction—about writers “struggling” to find a “way of giving order to experience”—sounds very much like the difficult transformation from traumatic into narrative memory.
Characteristics of the Traumatized Voice
Before going further, let me take a step back to discuss, in brief, the correspondences between the postmodern narrative voice and the struggles facing the traumatized when trying to articulate the events surrounding their traumatic experience. To avoid the trap of making “postmodernism” into such an enormous net that, when cast into literary history, it ensnares virtually everything, I turn to the work of contemporary trauma theorists and limit, quite definitively, what it means to say a text is postmodern. Cathy Caruth and others have looked to psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan to illustrate the close connections between trauma and literature. Caruth writes, “If PTSD must be understood as a pathological symptom, then it is not so much a symptom of the unconscious, as it is a symptom of history. The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”
I want to call particular attention to Caruth’s statement that the traumatized “become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” as it implies a duality. The traumatized usually have a conscious awareness of the causal event, but it also colonizes their subconscious in a way beyond their control and quite possibly even their awareness (a common phenomenon, according to neuropsychologists). As a result of the trauma, points out Anne Whitehead, there are “[u]nsettling temporal structures and disturbing relations between the individual and the world.” That is, the victim of trauma is unable to perceive time and space normally. And, as psychologists Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart explain, the impediment to processing time and space perceptions normally are not limited to the traumatic event itself (if, indeed, there was a specific and singular event), but rather affect non-traumatic events as well (until such time that the PTSD can be effectively treated). Here, too, we must recall the group psyche operates much the same as the individual psyche. Whitehead reiterates, “[Traumatic] crisis extends beyond the individual to affect the ways in which historical experience can be accessed at a cultural level.” Ronald Granofsky is among critics who have studied the close ties between the traumatic events of the Second World War and the literature that emerged in its aftermath, with Granofsky coining the term “the trauma novel” to refer to the work of writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Thomas Pynchon. Moreover, Laura Di Prete explains, “all of these writers tackle the issue of trauma by depicting imagined collective disasters that only indirectly relate to real historical or personal traumas.”
Indeed, the emergence of postmodernism seems a direct reflection of cultural PTSD. Writes Whitehead,
[Postmodernism’s] innovative forms and techniques critique the notion of history as grand narratives, and it calls attention to the complexity of memory. Trauma fiction emerges out of postmodernist fiction and shares its tendency to bring conventional narrative techniques to their limit. In testing formal boundaries, trauma fiction seeks to foreground the nature and limitations of narrative and to convey the damaging and distorting impact of the traumatic event.
Professionals working with victims of trauma in an attempt to help them articulate and come to terms with their traumatizing event(s)—to relocate their “traumatic memory” to “narrative memory”—note the traumatized voice mirrors narrative techniques of postmodern writers. “[T]raumatic knowledge cannot be fully communicated or retrieved without distortion,” says Whitehead, who has identified key features of postmodern texts reflecting aspects of the traumatized voice: “intertextuality, repetition and a dispersed or fragmented narrative voice.” Here, then, is the vehicle for limiting my examination of “postmodern” texts. Or, said differently, the intersection of trauma and postmodern literature is at these key points:
1) intertextuality, that is, the use of various “texts” to create meanings when contextualized together that are somehow different from the meanings of those same texts when read independently
2) repetition, that is, the compulsion to return to images and events, particularly ones that at first blush may seem relatively insignificant but that gain significance(s) with each return, with each echo
3) a dispersed or fragmented narrative voice, that is, a style of narration that employs multiple authorial voices/perspectives, and/or a decidedly nonlinear emplotment (or even a decidedly “non-plotted” emplotment)
Whitehead explicitly names these three aspects of postmodern technique that mirror the traumatized voice, but I would augment the list with a fourth (implied) aspect: a search for language—if you will, for powerful, indeed, almost magical words—that will uncouple the traumatized from the traumatizing event. One significant aspect of this language-power is the act of testimony; in fact, some trauma theorists have dubbed the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st the Age of Testimony. Shoshana Felman writes, “It has been suggested that testimony is the literary—or discursive—mode par excellence of our times, and that our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony.” She goes on to compare writing about trauma in a testimonial mode as akin to psychoanalysis, in which patients confide to their therapist.
Development of the Apocalyptic Temper
In his examination of the apocalyptic temper in the American novel, Joseph Dewey theorizes about the literary community’s response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he describes as “slow in coming.” Citing the work of Paul Boyer, Dewey writes, “[T]he literary conscience of America did not seem ready in the 1940s and even in the 1950s to engage the menace of the mushroom cloud.” At first, writers, along with the rest of their culture, experienced a “psychic numbing [. . .] in the face of such catastrophe.” In the ’50s, notes Dewey, “the American literary community pondered the bomb only in tentative ways.” He references “a glut of forgettable speculative fiction” that appeared during the decade. In the early ’60s, however, “the American novel began to work with the implications of the nuclear age.” Dewey speculates the Cuban Missile Crisis—”the nuclear High Noon over Cuba”—may have acted as a catalyst for writers in general to “begin to think about the unthinkable.” Dewey does not approach his subject in this way, but he seems to be accounting for the dual starting point for American postmodern literary style, which some trace to the mid-1940s and others to the ’60s. Nor does Dewey tend to speak in psychological terms, but he seems to be suggesting American writers were by and large repressing the atomic blasts for nearly two decades, until nuclear Armageddon loomed in 1962, which caused the cultural literary psyche to begin to confront the source of its trauma, if only dissociatively. The scenario Dewey suggests corresponds with the way many individuals respond to a traumatic event. As Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane explain,
[p]eople’s interpretations of the meaning of the trauma continue to evolve well after the trauma itself has ceased. This is well illustrated by a case of delayed PTSD reported by Kilpatrick et al. (1989): A woman who was raped did not develop PTSD symptoms until some months later, when she learned that her attacker had killed another rape victim. It was only when she received this information that she reinterpreted her rape as a life-threatening attack and developed full-blown PTSD.
Perhaps the fear of nuclear Apocalypse was part of the American psyche since 1945, but it seemed unreal until 1962’s standoff with Cuba and its ally the Soviet Union. It is also useful to recall that groups—entire nations even—can respond to trauma just as individuals do. In fact, Neil J. Smelser, in his work on cultural trauma in particular, notes societies can undergo a delayed response to trauma akin to the Freudian notion of a breakdown in repression, which “only succeeded in incubating, not obliterating the threat”—though he qualifies the analogy as not being perfect.
The Leading Voices of American Postmodernism
There is more to be said regarding “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” and, indeed, the rest of Gass’s fiction, but in closing I would like to turn, more broadly, to other postmodern writers who emerged at about the same time as William Gass. As stated earlier, my choice to focus on the fiction of Gass is because of all the postmodernists I have studied, his work most readily and most consistently reveals the connective tissue between cultural trauma and postmodern narrative style. It is worth noting that among the leading voices of American postmodernism, narratives about the Second World War are plentiful. A short list includes Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). Interestingly, bombs and bombing play pivotal parts in nearly all of these novels: Gravity’s Rainbow centers on the rockets Germany is aiming toward the West, and the title itself refers to the parabolic arc of a rocket; the central event of Slaughterhouse-Five is the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, the site of an American POW camp; and Catch-22 focuses on an American bomber squadron stationed in Italy, and the kernel of the narrative returned to again and again happens on a bomber during a mission. So it seems these postmodernists are not only concerned with the events of the Second World War, but they are especially interested in bombs. None of the narratives mentioned deals directly with the bombings of Japan, but it is provocative that in each case Americans are harmed or even killed by the bombs. This indirect engagement of nuclear threat could be a dissociative response. “Avoidance may take many different forms,” write van der Kolk and McFarlane, “such as keeping away from reminders [. . .] or utilizing dissociation to keep unpleasant experiences from conscious awareness.”
In addition to these novels, there appeared a second wave of significant postmodern novels dealing with United States nuclearism, Cold War anxiety, and/or profound government mistrust. On that list would be books like Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), John Barth’s Sabbatical (1982), and Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and Underworld (1997). The Public Burning focuses on the Rosenberg espionage trial of 1951 in which Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were charged with selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Barth’s Sabbatical tells the tale of an ex-CIA analyst who has retired from the agency and written a book about government subterfuge, and who also suspects a cover-up of the murder of his brother and other former colleagues at the CIA. Libra, meanwhile, centers on Lee Harvey Oswald and his dealings with the Soviets and Cubans leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy; and Underworld involves a government nuclear testing facility and focuses in part on one of its employees.
Current Perspective
Sadly, 2024, on the brink of 2025, finds no shortage of trauma in the world, on both a personal level and a cultural level, which may explain the steady interest in my trauma-theory book. In addition to my academic work, I’m also a novelist, publisher, podcaster, librarian, and educator of new writers. As a consequence I’m very interested in and very aware of current trends in the writing and publishing world, as least in the U.S., where there are fewer and fewer readers of any sort, but especially the sort of writing that we may call “trauma texts.” Therefore, agents and commercial publishers are not interested in novels and story collections that may be written from a place of trauma. The writers and the books I have discussed here are mid- to late-twentieth-century authors. They had significant (even bestseller) readerships; they won literary awards; they gave readings and lectures; they taught young writers and offered workshops. All of which may have provided a kind of cultural catharsis, mass treatment of cultural posttraumatic stress.
As a writer and teacher of new writers, I know trauma texts are being produced, here in 2024; however, most such texts are not being published (unless they’re self-published), and they’re not finding a wide readership. Moreover, new writers who may be drawn to writing trauma-inspired texts could ignore those psychic impulses because of market pressures. The only writers who are being widely read now are producing simplistic, repetitive plots—escapist fiction composed with fast, shallow consumption in mind. If the writing and reading of trauma literature does act as a therapeutic response to posttraumatic stress, what will be the consequences to stifling the traumatized voice?
What is more, I wonder if future scholars will be able to gauge the amount of cultural trauma being experienced in the beginning decades of the twenty-first century if there is a dearth of trauma texts being published (and read, reviewed, critiqued, judged, promoted, etc.). Will scholars develop a skewed sense of our reality because of market pressures and readers’ tastes?
I also fully anticipate artificial intelligence taking over the production of popular fiction (which is already essentially the only kind of fiction being published by the five remaining major houses in the U.S.). How will AI-produced texts respond to our personal and cultural needs to voice and to process trauma?
The Beowulf Poet and His Real Monsters Introduction
The following is the Introduction to my monograph The Beowulf Poet and His Real Monsters: A Trauma-Theory Reading of the Anglo-Saxon Poem (Edwin Mellen Press, 2013). Please see the book’s page for further information, including reviews, a brief description, the Table of Contents, and a promotional flyer (flyer also available below).
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“[I]t is a drink dark and bitter: a solemn funeral-ale with the taste of death.”
Thus wrote J. R. R. Tolkien of Beowulf in his prefatory remarks for the republication of John R. Clark Hall’s 1911 prose translation (ix). The professor’s dramatic metaphor captures what many readers sense when they engage the text of the poem, either in the original Old English or in one of the myriad languages into which it has been translated since Sharon Turner began the process in 1803, whether it be a student’s first encounter or a scholar’s innumerable one. To extend Tolkien’s metaphor, the purpose of this monograph is to analyze the recipe of that dark and bitter brew.
The method by which I identify the various ingredients and discuss their influence on the poem’s morbid flavor is trauma theory, a term that Cathy Caruth is given credit for coining in her 1996 book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History—though the idea of literary trauma theory as a discernible critical model can be recognized earlier in the decade in such practitioners as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Of course, one can easily make a case for even earlier sightings of trauma theory, with Caruth herself pointing to Sigmund Freud’s marriage of psychoanalysis and literary study via terms like the Oedipus and Elektra complexes. However, in spite of trauma theory’s presence in the humanities for roughly two decades, a precise and universally acknowledged definition has yet to emerge, which provides me an opening to put forward a definition as I am using it in this work.
In the previous paragraph I quietly inserted literary as a qualifier to differentiate between trauma theory as it exists in the vocabulary of psychiatric professionals versus how scholars in the humanities may regard its meaning—though both groups are concerned with how traumatic experience affects the subject’s mind, and they borrow freely from one another, explicitly or implicitly, to advance and articulate their understanding of trauma. In psychiatric medicine, the overarching goal of trauma theory, broadly put, is to use that understanding to assist victims of trauma overcome its devastating effects. In literary scholarship, the goal of trauma theory, broadly put, is to use that understanding to document the effects of traumatic stress on language production. To state it simply (in fact, overly so), psychiatric professionals examine the speech of patients (perhaps “clients” is a better word), while scholars examine texts (e.g., Beowulf).
My specific purpose is to make the case that Beowulf reflects traumatic stresses which the anonymous poet and his fellow Anglo-Saxons felt in their day-to-day lives, and I concentrate my trauma-theory reading on the three monsters, who represented, in all likelihood unconsciously, particular sources of trauma to the poet: the terror of extreme violence, the dangers of sexual reproduction, and the deprivations of chronic disease. My training as a scholar is in English studies, a program that requires coursework in literature, linguistics, rhetoric, and pedagogy—also a program that has prompted me to draw from a wide range of fields, including medicine, history, anthropology, philology, sociology, and psychology, with special emphases on the branches of psychoanalysis and neuropsychology. In other words, English studies in general and this monograph in particular have allowed me to indulge my “attention surplus disorder,” a phrase I commandeered from Susan Sontag, who uses it to mean that she is basically interested in everything.1
What is more, I consider myself primarily a creative writer—a novelist, short-story writer and sometimes poet—which, I believe, gives me further insight into what I call “the psychic origins of creativity” when I take on the roles of critic and scholar, further, that is, than someone who has never tried to devise characters and plot and setting, and to coax them through a narrative arc via dialogue, metaphor and a plethora of other storytelling techniques. That is to say, I feel a brothers-in-arms kinship with the Beowulf poet and an affinity for the task he set before himself that many literature scholars, simply, do not.
In bringing to bear on the poem knowledge from so many different fields, my reading represents a departure from what has been the dominant discourse in Beowulf studies for at least the last thirty years, a discourse that has tended to focus on the extant Cottonian manuscript, a discourse that has resisted critical theory “in the name of empiricism, objectivity, or common sense,” according to John D. Niles (“Introduction” 9). However, as James W. Earl points out in his introductory remarks to Thinking About Beowulf (1994), intense study based on the extant manuscript has failed to yield much that is irrefutable about the poem and even less about its poet. In fact, Earl draws on the concept of the Strange Attractor from chaos theory, meaning “that underlying presence, or nonpresence, that gives its shape to chaos” (10), to conclude the following about new directions in Beowulf scholarship: “If we cannot anchor our thinking about Beowulf in history any longer, we may have to entertain at long last the freedoms of modern and postmodern critical thinking—at least within the parameters set by the fractal text, and its Strange Attractor, the poet” (27).
That is, to better understand the poem, we must do all that we can to better understand the poet.
The trauma-theory reading of the poem rests largely in Chapter 4 of this monograph, while Chapters 1, 2 and 3 lay the groundwork necessary to the reading. The first chapter, for example, discusses the close association between thought and language by examining the work of pioneering psychoanalysts Freud and Jacques Lacan, as well as contemporary trauma theorists and neuropsychologists. Key concepts in the chapter include the effects of trauma and how these effects can be passed from generation to generation, and from location to location. Integral to these concepts are discussions regarding the establishment of trauma cultures and the production of trauma texts. The next chapter focuses on the mimetic parallel between postmodern narrative technique and the narratival characteristics of someone who has been traumatized. In this chapter and elsewhere, the theories of Michel Foucault are engaged, especially those related to analyzing the minds of past peoples via the texts they left behind. When I introduce Foucault to my students, I use the model of the double helix with one strand representing thought and language the other. When a culture has passed, like the Anglo-Saxons’, it is as if its double helix has been stretched and flattened, and we view it from an angle that makes it appear as though only the language strand remains (i.e., its texts), but Foucault tells us that inseparably bonded to that language is the thought that shaped it; therefore, by studying a past culture’s language, we can come to know the culture’s thought as well. In short, the Beowulf poet’s mind produced the topography of the text, so by carefully studying the text we can discern the topography of the poet’s mind.
Chapter 3 is less theoretical and more practical as it examines aspects of the lives of Anglo-Saxons that likely would have resulted in traumatic stress and in particular the traumatic stress I believe to be represented by Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. That is to say, if the poet and his people were in fact traumatized, what events and day-to-day features of their lives could have caused that trauma? For this chapter, I rely principally on the writings of Bede and Eddius Stephanus, the anonymously composed Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the period’s medical texts: the Herbarium, Leechbooks, and Lacnunga. Then, finally, Chapter 4 brings all of this diverse knowledge together in a trauma-theory reading which focuses on the original language of the poem.
It is important to note, too, that while my reading is a departure from much of the traditional scholarship, I incorporate and build upon a great deal of that scholarship, bringing into the conversation (to name a few) Klaeber, Tolkien, Malone, Mitchell, Robinson, Niles, Bjork, Orchard, Kiernan, Earl, O’Brien O’Keeffe, Chance, Howe, Lerer, Lapidge, Liuzza, Acker, and Foley, as well as newer voices like Joy, Ramsey, Kim, Mizuno, and Warren. All of whom have contributed mightily to what we know about the poem, and thus contribute mightily to what we could possibly come to understand by pursuing critical approaches born of postmodernism, like trauma theory.
Feel free to share the following promotional flyer either electronically or in print.
Beowulf Poet – Morrissey flyer
Note
1. See “Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143,” interviewed by Edward Hirsch for The Paris Review, available online at theparisreview.org.
Works Cited
Earl, James W. Thinking About Beowulf. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994. Print.
Niles, John D. “Introduction: Beowulf, Truth, and Meaning.” Ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles. A Beowulf Handbook. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. 1-12. Print.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of Beowulf.” Beowulf and The Finnsburg Fragment. Trans. by John R. Clark Hall. 3rded. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950. ix-xliii. Print.
The True Intruder in William H. Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid”
The following paper — “The Trauma of Alcohol Abuse: The True Intruder in William H. Gass’s ‘The Pedersen Kid'” — was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, University of Louisville, Feb. 23, as part of the panel “Barthelme & Gass: Postmodern Fiction,” chaired by Hoang Thi Hue, Hue University, Vietnam. The other presenters on the panel were Nicholas Sloboda, University of Wisconsin-Superior, whose paper was “Image and Textual Play: Adventures in Donald Barthelme’s Alternative and Liminal Narratives”; and Jonathan Imber Shaw, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, whose paper was “Executive Function in Donald Barthelme’s Early Fiction.”
The Trauma of Alcohol Abuse:
The True Intruder in William H. Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid”
Though written in 1951 and therefore constituting one of William H. Gass’s earliest works of fiction, the novella “The Pedersen Kid” did not appear in print until a full decade later in John Gardner’s short-lived journal MSS. This paper is based specifically on the version of the novella that appeared in Gass’s seminal collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country in 1968. The title story of that collection and Gass’s long, dense novel The Tunnel (which appeared in 1995) have received the lion’s share of critical attention over the decades, while discussion of “The Pedersen Kid” has been meager to put it mildly. Some writers have noted the connection between Gass’s well-known miserable childhood—made miserable by Gass’s alcoholic mother and hateful bigot of a father—and the fact that the novella’s first-person protagonist is leading his own miserable life thanks mainly to his abusive and alcoholic “Pa”; but they have failed to go much beyond that obvious surface connection.
The purpose of this paper is to suggest that understanding the trauma of alcohol abuse within the context of a family is key to more fully understanding the enigmatic novella, whose final section in particular has left both casual readers and critics scratching their heads in puzzlement for more than forty years. In fact, Arthur M. Saltzman said that attempting to gain a clear view of the plot is “self-defeating” because “Gass steers us into cul-de-sacs, lets loose ends dangle, and plunges without warning into subjective distortions,” thereby leaving the two most suspenseful narrative questions unresolved and unrelieved (60).
Set in mid twentieth-century North Dakota, at the conclusion of a terrible blizzard, the novella begins with the farmhand Big Hans finding the boy from the neighboring Pedersen farm in the yard unconscious and nearly frozen to death as he apparently walked there through the previous night’s storm. Later, partially revived, the boy tells Big Hans (allegedly) that an intruder broke into their house and forced his parents into the frigid root-cellar, but somehow the boy escaped and managed to make it on foot all the way to the Segren farm in spite of the blizzard. Most of the novella centers around the three males of the Segren family—Big Hans, Pa Segren, and the young narrator (12 or 13?), Jorge Segren—making their way to the Pedersen farm through the frozen landscape to see if the boy’s story is true, though the act is more about Pa’s punishing Hans and Jorge than trying to do a neighbor a good turn; in fact, Pa seems to hate Pedersen even more than he hates everyone else around him, referring to him as a “cock,” a “bastard,” a “fool,” and a “shit”; and blaming Pedersen for every bad turn of events, including the previous summer’s grasshopper infestation and even the previous day’s blizzard.
At the root of Pa’s punishment, in addition to his natural mean-spiritedness, is the fact that some of his precious whiskey was found in what he thought was a secure hiding place and used to resuscitate the Pedersen kid without Pa’s permission. That seems to be the reason he keeps driving them forward, toward the Pedersen farm and its possible danger, in a horse-drawn wagon that can barely make it through the all but impassable roads and fields. The motivation is freshened part way there, when they are all so miserable with cold they are thinking of turning back, Pa’s whiskey bottle falls out of the wagon and is eventually broken by a wagon wheel. Even though he had nothing to do with breaking the bottle, Hans apologizes but to no avail: “Pa squinted at the snow [. . . and] drove” (44).
There have been several theories put forward to explain the novella, which at first suggests a distinct and straightforward narrative arc—namely answering the questions “Did an intruder break into the Pedersen house?” and “Are the Pedersens alive or dead?”—but which disintegrates by the end into ambiguity and downright confusion. Saltzman says it well: “Relentlessly convoluted in design, as though the all-compassing blizzard in the story were rendering all perception hesitant and indistinct, ‘The Pedersen Kid’ is replete with allegorical options for the discerning reader and is equally accommodating to Freudian, Christian, and heraldic archetypes” (59). Also well put, Patricia Kane writes, “One can locate several points in the story at which Jorge may have hallucinated the rest. Such alternatives provide semi-rational explanations, but the story remains enigmatic and fails to lend itself to neat exegesis” (90).
In a moment, I will put forward a theory based on the findings of professionals who work with families coping with the trauma of alcohol abuse—families which must have resembled Gass’s own growing up—and it is a theory that can account for some of the novella’s eccentricities, especially its seemingly unresolved resolution. First, though, it is worth looking at how the Segren family exhibits many of the characteristics of families traumatized by alcohol abuse, which adds credence to my use of the substance-abuse theory to examine this work of literary art. Even though alcohol abuse no doubt began almost as soon as the process of fermentation was discovered, culture by culture, seeing it as a “family disease” has been a common practice for only the last twenty to thirty years. In 1985, Stephanie Brown defined alcohol addiction as a family disease “with all family members suffering the consequences of one member’s alcoholism and all seen to play a role in maintaining the destructive interactional patterns that result from alcoholism” (qtd. in Brooks and Rice 92). Indeed, these destructive interactional patterns could easily account for Gass’s “miserable and damaging” childhood, as characterized by H. L. Hix, who quotes Gass as saying, “For a long time I was simply emotionally unable to handle my parents’ illnesses. [. . .] I just fled. [. . .] All along one principal motivation behind my writing has been to be other than the person I am. To cancel the consequences of the past” (2).
G. Harold Smith and his colleagues discuss various types of family structures that form around alcoholic parents, and we can see aspects of these structures in the Segren family. The “enmeshed family,” for example, seems especially applicable as it is extremely isolated and wants little to do with outsiders: “Within these highly self-involved families, children’s needs may be ignored because the family’s attention is focused on the parent who is abusing substances” (Smith et al. 47). The Segren family, of course, is isolated by the very fact they live on a farm in North Dakota, but Pa’s attitude toward the Pedersens suggests that the two families have been kept apart, thus exacerbating the geography’s tendency toward isolation. In spite of the tragic nature of the occurrence (the Pedersen kid nearly died in the blizzard and may die yet), the mother, Hed Segren, seems excited at the possibility of having company, wanting to put out coffee and fresh biscuits with elderberry jelly for Mr. Pedersen and his eldest son when they come to collect the kid. Pa, of course, ridicules her for her intentions.
However, an even more tragic trait of the enmeshed family is the alcoholic’s tendency toward violence. Smith and his colleagues write, “Often that parent’s behavior has to be monitored carefully to avoid negative consequences. For example, much family effort may be expended to avoid provoking a violent reaction from a parent who is intoxicated” (47). Clearly, all three members of Pa Segren’s household are afraid of him, and several instances of his cruel and violent nature are recounted at various points in the story, including references to his emptying a chamber-pot filled with diarrhea on Hans’s head and his destroying Jorge’s favorite picture book and dropping the pieces of torn paper in the privy. In our very first view of Pa in the novella, Jorge is struck in the neck for waking his father to inquire where there is some whiskey with which to try to revive the nearly frozen Pedersen kid. And poor Hed Segren is as skittish and defeated as an abused wife can be; she may even have turned to drinking, too, to cope with her miserable existence.
Because of the enmeshed family’s preoccupation with the alcohol abuser, children are often neglected and fall prey to all sorts of deprivations and depravations. Smith and his colleagues report that sexual abuse is “common” in households where substances are abused by one or both parents (48). In “The Pedersen Kid,” sexual abuse is not obvious, but Big Hans’s relationship with Jorge is questionable and even highly suspicious at times, showing him pornographic magazines, telling him stories about Japanese prostitutes, and even measuring the length of Jorge’s penis. As Ripatrazone puts it, “Jorge stops short of claiming physical abuse, but the actions are grossly inappropriate, perhaps the reason why ‘pa took a dislike to Hans.’” However, Gass may imply that Jorge—our omnisciently very limited, first-person narrator—is repressing more than he is telling as he seems fixated on penises: the Pedersen kid’s, his father’s, his own; and he imagines the intruder’s assault on his mother as more of a sexual assault as the stranger “wav[es his gun barrel] up and down in front of ma’s face real slow and quiet” (19).
There isn’t time to go further into detail here, but there are numerous other elements of the novella that seem to reflect the experiences of someone growing up in a household traumatically affected by alcohol abuse. For example, the creation of the narrative about the Pedersen family’s intruder, which is pulled together from mere scraps of details, may suggest a family’s inclination to invent an alternate narrative about their traumatized existence to fit into their community more easily. Also, there are several spaces brought up in the story that have a duality about them, usually coldness versus warmth, which may suggest the duality of an alcoholic’s home that is supposed to provide familial warmth and comfort (and may even do so at times), but that also breeds hostility, mistrust, and often emotional and physical abuse.
Throughout my paper I refer to the trauma of alcohol abuse, but trauma is a subjective term. At what point, in other words, does a really terrible situation become a genuinely traumatic one? From the Greek for “wound,” trauma originally meant a physical wound. Over time, and especially with the horrors of the First World War, our sense of trauma was extended to include a wound of the mind or psyche as well. Even more recently, the definition of trauma has been expanded to include being subjected to an oppressive and reoccurring situation, like being married to an abusive or potentially abusive spouse, who may have never actually become violent, but whose constant threat of violence creates a traumatic environment. Certainly being a member of a family with a parent who abuses alcohol or other substances constitutes a traumatic situation, and in “The Pedersen Kid” William Gass gives us one of the most poignantly accurate extended metaphors of trauma in American literature:
It’s more than a make-up; it’s more than a dream. It’s like something you see once and it hits you so hard you never forget it even if you want to; lies, dreams, pass—this has you; it’s like something that sticks to you like burrs, burrs you try to brush off while you’re doing something else, but they never brush off, they just roll a little, and the first thing you know you ain’t doing what you set out to, you’re just trying to get them burrs off. I know. I got things stuck to me like that. Everybody has. Pretty soon you get tired of trying to pick them off. (17)
This passage illustrates the intrusive and haunting nature of trauma, its tenaciousness, its ability to disrupt your concentration, and ultimately your life—and the fact that from Hans’s perspective, everyone is traumatized, which makes sense since the novella implies that Hans is a veteran of the First World War. Moreover, this passage suggests that Pa’s drinking has, indeed, traumatized the Segren family, and perhaps especially Jorge, who has grown up with his father’s capricious personality due to the whiskey that is ubiquitous in the novella, from nearly the first page to the last.
Now for that substance-abuse theory that seems to help us to understand “The Pedersen Kid,” especially the ambiguities of its final section.
In 1979, Sharon Wegscheider identified four roles that are often played by children of alcoholics, and it seems that Jorge has assumed each of these roles at some point in “The Pedersen Kid,” with the final one casting light on the novella’s enigmatic ending. The roles identified by Wegscheider are family hero, scapegoat, lost child, and mascot (Ackerman 52-53). The family hero “displays behaviors that are extremely mature” (53), and this role is manifested when Jorge is given the responsibility of making sure the Pedersen kid is still alive before they begin their journey to the Pedersen farm, and especially when Jorge is given Hans’s .45-caliber pistol to load, which he then carries in his belt, even though “the gun felt like a chunk of ice against [his] belly and the barrel dug” (34). Because of the adventure they are about to embark on, Jorge thinks, “It was like I was setting out to do something special and big—like a knight setting out—worth remembering” (32-33). Later, Jorge wants a drink of Pa’s whiskey to warm him, claiming that he has drunk whiskey before; but the request only provokes his father’s sarcasm: “Ain’t you growed up—a man—since yesterday!” (38). In a truly heroic vein, Jorge dreams about confronting the Pedersens’ intruder, wrestling him to the ground and “beating the stocking cap off his head with the barrel of the gun” (33).
An only child, like Gass, Jorge also embodies the family scapegoat, who is often the target of “frustrations and confusions” and as a result may “outwardly [display …] negative behavior” (Ackerman 53). Jorge is often ridiculed by both Pa and Hans; examples are copious in the novella. In the scene mentioned earlier, when the whiskey bottle falls from the wagon, Jorge is forced to search for the bottle in the snow in spite of his being painfully cold already. Frustrated at Jorge’s not finding the bottle, Pa calls him a “smart-talking snot” and threatens to hold him down under the snow until he drowns (37). Meanwhile, Jorge’s negative behaviors are varied, and perhaps his most negative behavior comes in the hallucinatory final section and may or may not happen. An example in the beginning of the story, though, is Jorge’s resentment of the attention being paid to the half-frozen Pedersen kid, especially by his mother. Jorge imagines the boy is actually dead and not just near death, consequently dropping him so that his head hits the kitchen table hard (10). In the final section of the novella, however, it seems that Pa is shot dead just outside the Pedersen house. It may have been the intruder who shot Pa, or it may have been Jorge paying Pa back for years of cruelty and abuse. Patricia Kane seems to lean toward the latter interpretation, thinking that Jorge has become mad by the end of the novella (90); while Nick Ripatrzone, writing in The Quarterly Conversation, believes that Jorge only wishes his father dead and does not actually shoot him.
Jorge also resembles the lost child, who suffers “the most role inconsistency” in the family of an alcoholic (Ackerman 53). At times, Jorge tries to shield his mother from Pa’s abuse, but she also scolds Hans for “pester[ing] the boy” (19)—so when it comes to his mother, he is both a mature protector and a child who needs protection. Even still, he imagines his mother coming to harm, and her fantasized death completes his sense of freedom from his oppressively abusive family. But it is via metaphor that we can see Jorge’s lost child status most clearly. In the beginning of the novella, it is, quite literally, the Pedersen kid who is lost. In fact, the Segrens entertain the idea that the kid merely wandered off in the blizzard of his own accord, and the Pedersens will come looking for him now that the blizzard has stopped. By the end, however, Jorge, now occupying the Pedersen farmhouse by himself, believes that he and the Pedersen kid have “been exchanged, and we were both in our new lands” (73). And by the very end, Jorge and the Pedersen kid are more than exchanged; it is as if they are living parallel lives in their new lands. Thus, Jorge has in essence become the novella’s original lost boy.
It is also via this exchange that we can see Jorge as the mascot, the child who “may be overly protected from the family problems” (Ackerman 53). After Pa has been killed, Jorge takes refuge in the Pedersens’ root-cellar, waiting to be killed himself by the intruder (assuming the version of the story that there is an intruder who has killed the Pedersens and now Pa too). After what seems a long time, the intruder stops waiting for Jorge and leaves the Pedersen house with a slam of the front door (66). So, from this perspective, both Jorge and the Pedersen kid have been spared by the intruder, and in fact Jorge has been protected in a sense because the source of his misery—his alcoholic father—has been permanently removed from his life.
Throughout the novella, the intruder is a vague but ominous figure, with only a handful of descriptors attached to him which are repeated again and again (the black stocking cap, the yellow gloves, the green mackinaw, the gun), just as the whiskey is an object known chiefly by its fecal color, its omnipresence, and its desirability as all the Segrens (even the mother) seem to thirst for it, or at least for the power it lends tyrannical Pa. Thus in my reading of “The Pedersen Kid” the true intruder, the true menace is the whiskey-induced alcoholism. We note that it is en route to the Pedersen farm that whiskey, as an object, disappears from the narrative as Horse Simon shatters Pa’s bottle, which had fallen from the wagon, into the snow. Its destruction propels Pa toward his own demise, empowering or at least enabling Jorge to overcome him in the end. The intruder (whiskey) and his minion (Pa) destroyed, Jorge is overjoyed at the end of the novella; he is “burning up, inside and out with joy,” and joy is, in fact, the novella’s final word (79).
In addition to Wegscheider’s four roles, Norman Garmezy also coined the category of invulnerables: “These are the children, that despite all the family problems, have not only survived, but also have grown into healthy adults” (Ackerman 53). Garmezy estimated that about ten percent of children in homes with an alcoholic parent prove to be invulnerable. It seems that perhaps Gass himself fits this category in that he managed to take his miserable childhood and create from it an illustrious writing and teaching career. What will almost certainly be his last work of fiction and perhaps his last book-length publication, period, the novel Middle C, will be released March 12, and no doubt it will draw on many of the same images and themes his creative genius has tapped into for more than half a century. I preordered the book several months ago and rest assured that I will be watching my mailbox hawkishly come the 12th.
Works Cited
Ackerman, Robert J. Children of Alcoholics: A Guidebook for Educators, Therapists, and Parents. 2nd ed. Holmes Beach, FL: Learning Publications, 1983. Print.
Brooks, Carolyn Seval, and Kathleen Fitzgerald Rice. Families in Recovery: Coming Full Circle. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes, 1997. Print.
Gass, William H. “The Pedersen Kid.” 1961. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 1981. Print. 1-79.
Hix, H. L. Understanding William H. Gass. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002. Print.
Kane, Patricia. “The Sun Burned on the Snow: Gass’s ‘The Pedersen Kid.’” Critique 14.2 (1972): 89-96. Print.
Saltzman, Arthur M. The Fiction of William Gass: The Consolation of Language. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986. Print.
Smith, G. Harold, et al. Children, Families, and Substance Abuse: Challenges for Changing Educational and Social Outcomes. Baltimore, MD: Paul. H. Brookes, 1995. Print.
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