Phoebe Ng Hui Yin
HL2024 Approaches to Literature (Q4)
Professor Wernmei Yong Ade
5 November 2018
Ghosts of the Past: The Uniqueness of Trauma
In Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (2009), Barry attributes unconscious repression to having a “decisive role” (Barry 92) in our lives. Barry defines Freudian repression as being “linked with [the] ‘forgetting' or ignoring of unresolved conflicts, traumatic past events… forced out of conscious awareness [into] the realm of the unconscious” (Barry 92). This suggests that hidden secrets abound in the unconscious psyche of the characters, and that there is also a conscious effort to repress these secrets, otherwise known as denial. This is significant in both Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) (henceforth SH and God respectively). Vonnegut’s novel centers on Billy Pilgrim’s attempts to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of his experiences in Dresden while Roy’s novel focuses on childhood trauma that affects the twins, Estha and Rahel. This essay attempts to present repression of childhood/adolescent emotional trauma, long after the physical traumatic act, that surfaces arbitrarily. It is a lifelong haunting from which the characters attempt to grapple with but fail to overcome. Both novels indirectly chart the childhood/adolescence to adulthood of their characters and arguably, could be a record of how these characters attempt to come to terms with their numerous traumatic events by expressing their internal thoughts and feelings, or in Freud’s words, ‘verbalising’ (Barry 92) their repressed emotional trauma. In Language and Historical Representation, Hans Kellner argues that ‘the invention of stories is the most important part of human self-understanding and self-creation’ (Kellner 128). Storytelling deals heavily with the idea of self creation, that is inadvertently unravelling one’s character and self to the reader. Kellner rejects the idea of an ‘absolute’ history, noting that historical events are accepted to be ‘crooked’ because of how it is only accessible through an individual’s lens of understanding, subject to bias or cultural implications. This idea pays homage to the uniqueness and intimacy of trauma because it is experienced on an individual level, filtered and expressed through one’s own personal lens perhaps, by which we understand the persons themselves. If we take Vonnegut and Roy’s act of storytelling as ‘verbalising’ through characters giving words and defining their trauma, we see that their experiences are unique and ultimately alienates us. SH straddles a thin line between perceived fact and fiction as Vonnegut inserts autobiographical elements into the novel. Vonnegut shares his traumatic experiences with readers through revealing the process of forming constructing the science-fictional world of the Tralfomadarians, which acts as a coping mechanism. In both his attempts at expressing and coming to terms with his trauma, he mixes reality with fiction by textualising himself. He inserts himself into the novel as a narrator, perhaps reflecting the textuality of reality. Billy’s severe repression coincides with the start of his wartime experiences as he references the time when he dissociated was when he “first came unstuck while World War Two was in progress” (Vonnegut 70). One could say that perhaps this form of dissociation serves to highlight his severe repression on his psyche because it is only through his warped creation he manages to come to terms with his experiences and understand himself. He comes to the Tralfamadorian’s defence, saying that “The Tralfamadorians didn’t have anything to do with his coming unstuck. They were simply able to give him insights into what was really going on”. Taking this into account, it seems as if Billy, through the medium of the Tralfamadorians, tries to understand the world. His repressed guilt and trauma manifests in his form of creative self expression that is uniquely his but alienating to the reader. Using the medium of Tralfamadorians, he reveals what he cannot consciously admits, through seemingly outlandish claims when he claims to have “been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967” (Vonnegut 21) and his subsequent stint in the Tralfamadorian Zoo, it does not take the readers to realise that his claims bear little to no resemblance to his actual experiences in Dresden. Yet Billy is still “full of secrets” (Vonnegut 59) he does not have the sympathy of others evident when he gets expelled from the radio studio when he talks about the Tralfamadorians.
God on the other hand is less explicit. In order to cope with their trauma, the twins turn to each other, culminating in incestuous sex. The twins “shared … hideous grief ”(Roy 147) in an opaque scene where God does not describe the twins’ private attempt at emotional healing at the end of the novel. Grief still exists. The novel reinforces the confidentiality of trauma in this mutually exclusive act as they comfort each other by saying “no Watcher watched through Rahel’s eyes” (Roy 147) by barring the reader from witnessing the twins’ actions. We as readers, supposedly trying to relive Rahel’s trauma is unable to fully understand her trauma, and only her other half, Estha, who also went through the traumatic process could understand her.
The novels highlight the fact that these characters suffer trauma during a tender age reflecting both a lack of agency and circumstances that enforce repression. In SH, the paratext title compares World War 2 with the disastrous Children’s Crusade in 1213. Through bookending the Narrator’s wartime experiences with the grim comparison to the Children’s Crusade, we know it was a “pathway was one of blood and tears” (Vonnegut 11) and that “half of them drowned…the other half… were sold [as slaves]” (Vonnegut 12). Transposing such an effect of war in modern day context, perhaps for the World War 2 soldiers, the two results of wartime experiences were either death or trauma. Billy Pilgrim who experience a lifetime of emotional slavery, not to slavers, but to his traumatic experiences of war. By comparing the logical non-fictive prose of Charles Mackay’s text with the narrator’s conspicuous lack of emotional vocabulary, the narrator’s lack of interiority describing his war experiences hints at repression. War veterans seem unable to articulate wartime trauma because of their need to seem tough, encapsulated by Valencia saying “You must have secrets about the war… things you don't want to talk about” (Vonnegut 59). She hints at the existence of secrets that she knows exist but is kept in the dark by the narrator’s inability, or reluctance to verbalise their secrets. SH does not tell us how old the narrator (implied as representative of Vonnegut) was when he went to war, but we are able to deduce his mental and developmental state when he fights the war from Mary’s own words, “You were just babies then!” (Vonnegut 11). The italicised word ‘babies’ is hyperbolised, infantilising the soldiers through highlighting their lack of empowerment and by extension, suggesting their contribution to the war as misdirected, or as a result of mindless fanaticism that glorifies the idea of war referenced in “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (Vonnegut 11). Mary criticises the romanticisation of war because soldiers will “pretend [they] were men instead of babies” (Vonnegut 11) which associated with toxic masculinity, glorifies the heroism of war and alternatively prevents them from criticising the war by talking about their wartime experiences and emotions. Due to Mary’s third-person perspective, the narrator is forced to admit that he was “right at the end of childhood” (Vonnegut 11) which undermines the romance of war by admitting the loss of agency accompanied with age Similarly, Estha and Rahel are children who are conditioned by society follow the adult’s will, which reflects the lack of agency children possess. For example, Estha is blindly obedient to Ammu. Ammu commands him to thank the Lemondrink-Orangedrink man even after he sexually assaulted Estha. The novel takes pains to illustrate the way “Okay? Okay” (Roy 44, 50) is drilled into Estha’s consciousness. Whenever he is questioned if he is “Okay, Esthappen?” (Roy 44). Estha automatically replies “Okay” (Roy 44). What we notice this conditioning that children are subject to — that is, the adult’s will overshadows the childs’. This loss of agency reflects disempowerment and we are able to deduce a repression in children, because they are not seen as their own person, when we see that the child blindly parroting whatever the adult asks and answers in the adult’s expectations of a certain type of reply. Estha represses his true feelings and emotions that is later revealed in his vomiting experience. The novel says “Estha convulsed, but nothing came. Just thoughts. And they floated out and floated back in” (Roy 50) which hints at an emotional sickness through the word ‘float’ which suggests an intangible concept. His thoughts significantly but then ‘floated backed in’ which suggests that his sexual assault trauma was internalised, and that he had no avenue to come to terms with it. His experience seems like an out-of-body dissociation from his traumatic event tied to his consciousness as it moves in and out of his mind. He is unable to divest himself of his traumatic experience because of how he is unable to tell Ammu or comprehend the gravity of what happened to him, prolonging his emotional trauma long after the physical traumatic act. We see that repressed trauma is entrenched in the psyche through the arbitrary resurfacing of memories at any one time, and that this resurfacing is involuntary. It is clear that repression is the reason why the narration of the stories seem so disjointed. Both novels exemplify this fragmented and non-linear structure of narrative, as well as disjointed sense of time. Ann Rigney’s “All This Happened, More or Less: What a Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden” comments on the storytelling of SH “[which] opens up alternative views of temporality that are tied to the experiences of his main character: certain past moments continue to persist in the present because they belong to a traumatic past that refuses to become past” (Rigney 16). Billy relives his past in the future, blurring temporal boundaries. Vonnegut establishes the effects of trauma on Billy as a shackle throughout the rest of his life through the character of Ronald Weary and Bill Lazzo whose constant presence in his thoughts and flashbacks serve as a reminder of Billy’s survivor guilt of finding himself alive at the end of the war against all odds even though “ he [didn’t] wanna live” (Vonnegut 108). Billy becomes “spastic in time, [and] has no control over where he is going next… he is in a constant state of stage fright [because] he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next” (Vonnegut 27). We notice Billy’s palpable fear in his perpetual state of fright, because he reflects a loss of agency. He has no control over his own experiences and his reactions. Calhoun and Tedeschi calls this“a pervasive disorganisation of the survivor’s self-narrative following exposure to a traumatic event” (Calhoun and Tedeschi 72). Certainly, we see this when Billy comes ‘unstuck in time’, following a mental breakdown hinted to be traumatic in origin when he is admitted to a mental hospital for wartime veterans. Similarly, Elizabeth Outka’s Trauma and Temporal Hybridity in Arundhati Roy's ‘The God of Small Things’(2011), touches on the punctuated form of the novel with “repeated flashbacks and images… echoes the way [Roy’s] characters are experiencing the present moment, one always already haunted by past and future events” (Outka 26). This form of narrative both replicates and expresses the difficulties trauma survivors try to to reconstruct or remember repressed traumatic memories, not in a linear, logical way, but through analepsis and prolepsis. For example, the twin’s witnessing of Velutha’s abuse is reflected in the Kathakali performance in an earlier chapter. To the twins, the Kathakali “was no performance… They had seen its work before. Another morning. Another stage. Another kind of frenzy (with millipedes on the soles of its shoes)” (Roy 109). The repetition of ‘another’ reflects the familiarity of this memory to the twins, emphasising the way they relive their past. Moreover, the reference to millipedes is intentional – Roy describes the millipede visual imagery during Velutha’s assault. The twins witness one policeman as he “lifted his boot (with millipedes curled into its sole) and brought it down [on Velutha]” (Roy 141). What this evokes is an association, what Freud terms as displacement. The twins associate Velutha’s abuse with the Kathakali performance through the millipedes which remind them of past memories. Repressed trauma still lurks under the conscious mind, resurfacing arbitrarily through mnemonic visualisation. The way these characters recount and face trauma challenges Freud’s method of treating repression by “[getting] the patient to talk freely, in such a way that the repressed fears and conflicts… are brought into the conscious mind and openly faced” (Barry 92) as ineffective and trivialising, because of the severity and uniqueness of trauma that destabilises them for the rest of their lives. Barry also touches on the Derridean idea of “constructing the text, [rather than] deconstruction" (Barry 53) which reinforces the idea that we are unable to interpret the text perfectly in the way the author intends, because meaning encompasses the individual’s understanding, and that meaning and word choice cannot fully represent what the author intends. Even though they try to take control of their situation through storytelling, they do not receive closure. Both novels tell feature a terminal end, that is, we know the grim ultimate fate of the characters — Billy is shot by Paul Lazzo sometime after the war, and we know that Estha and Rahel are disgraced in adulthood. What we do notice, is the destructive force repressed trauma represents in their lives.
Word Count: 2189
Works Cited
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed.,
Manchester University Press, 2009.
Calhoun, Lawrence G., and Richard G. Tedeschi. Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006. Web. 4 Apr. 2016.
Kellner, Hans. “Language and Historical Represenation”, The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins, Routledge: London and New York, 1997. Web. 4 Apr. 2016.
Outka, Elizabeth. “Trauma and Temporal Hybridity in Arundhati Roy's ‘The God of Small
Things.’” Contemporary Literature, vol. 52, no. 1, 2011, pp. 21–53. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org.ezlibproxy1.ntu.edu.sg/stable/41261824.
Rigney, Ann. “All This Happened, More or Less: What a Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden.” History and Theory, Vol. 48, No. 2, Theme Issue 47 (May, 2009): 5-24. JSTOR. PDF File.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. 1997. Random House, 2008.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. 1969. The Dial Press, 2009.