Trauma and the Achronological Novel, Part Five

by | Sep 6, 2015 | Plot, Techniques of Fiction

This is my fifth and last post on Trauma and the Achronlogical Novel. To sum up, I’ve looked at three novels that have a trauma at the center: Beloved, The God of Small Things, and The Yellow Birds. All of them have similarities in the way the stories are told. They are told in fragments, narrative passages of relatively short length, and the fragments are not presented chronologically. Rather, they skip around, from past to present to future, so that readers often know more about the outcome of events than the characters in scene. I argued that the achronological presentation has real advantages. Among other things, it allows for dramatic irony. The soldiers training to go to Iraq, for instance, are ignorant that one of them will die, whereas readers know that their actions take place under a sign of doom. Thus, readers understand that the promise that one soldier makes to the mother of another soldier that he’ll bring her son home safely is fated to be broken. I also argued that, for a trauma to be “novel-worthy,” it is best if the trauma somehow brings into play larger social and historical issues. In Beloved, the trauma stems from America’s history of chattel slavery; in The God of Small Things, the trauma stems both from India’s history as a British colony and from India’s caste system; in The Yellow Birds, the trauma stems from America’s invasion of Iraq. My last point was that, despite the fragmentary and achronological presentation of events, a comprehensible plot will eventually emerge. In the end, when readers have completed the book, a cause...

Trauma and the Achronological Novel, Part Four

by | Jul 16, 2015 | Plot, Techniques of Fiction

The King died, and then the Queen died because of grief. Most will recognize this as a quote from E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, in which he is distinguishing between story and plot. In plot, he claims, the emphasis falls on a chain of cause and effect. Some would want to refine and extend his point, and claim that plot also requires action with intention and desire, and that only actions undertaken with intention and desire can give rise to consequences that are substantial enough to create a plot. However, let’s leave things simple for this post, and discuss his notion in relation to the kinds of novels I’ve been discussing: Novels that are fragmentary in construction, that do not depict scenes in chronological order, and that have a trauma at their center. Specifically, I’ve been discussing The God of Small Things, Beloved, and The Yellow Birds. Despite their construction, a cause and effect chain, and hence a comprehensible plot, is evident in each of these novels. It’s true that the plot is not discernible until the novel is read through to the end. It’s also true that, in the experience of reading each book, a reader will read scenes out of order, and hence not immediately understand the cause of each of the events. Yet at the end, in each novel, the cause and effect chain clacks into place. And I believe that novels with a trauma at the center are especially suited to this kind of achronological, fragmentary aesthetic. It’s almost as though the trauma, like a dark center of gravity, keeps the fragments from...

Trauma and the Achronological Novel, Part Three

by | Jun 25, 2015 | Plot, Techniques of Fiction

I’ve been discussing three novels in this thread – Beloved, The God of Small Things, and The Yellow Birds – and each one has a traumatic event at the center. They are each achronological, with narrative segments set in various time periods coming in an order not in accord with calendar time, so that readers are presented with the aftermath and origins of the trauma prior to understanding what the trauma consisted of. My goal in this post is to contemplate what makes the traumatic event in each of these books novel-worthy. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, discusses the ‘traumatic neurosis’ that can occur after a railway disaster or some other accident that threatens life, and he goes on to describe the lasting effects of being at war in ways that coincide with present day notions of PTSD. And Cathy Carruth, in Unclaimed Experience, expands on Freud’s notions by discussing how the accident can become “the exemplary scene of trauma par excellence” because it illustrates how a traumatic event is not grasped and comprehended in the moment but instead “returns to haunt the trauma victim.” Without disagreeing with either Freud or Carruth, I’d like to suggest that for a traumatic event to be novel-worthy, to be substantial enough to sustain a novel, it must be something more than an accident. There is one very well-known and celebrated short story that has an accident at its very beginning: “The Country Husband,” by John Cheever. The story begins with its main character, Francis Weed, surviving the crash landing of an airplane in a cornfield in Pennsylvania. Ironically, as he is...

Trauma and the Achronological Novel, Part Two

by | Jun 16, 2015 | Plot, Techniques of Fiction

This is my second post on Trauma and the Achronological Novel. As I stated in the previous post, Cathy Carruth’s book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History gives some key insights into the meaning of trauma through her readings of Freud, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Lacan, and others. Let me make clear what I mean by trauma. I am not referring simply to an awful thing that happens to a person. For instance, the death of a parent in old age may be a terrible event. However, it does not lend itself to being at the center of the kind of narrative I’m discussing. Why? Because it is possible to make sense of it. It’s possible to think of the death of a parent as part of a meaningful narrative. If an event can be made comprehensible within a story, it is not the kind of trauma referred to by Carruth and Freud. If an event can be made comprehensible, it can be consigned to the past. The kind of event that is truly a trauma, in the terms I’m using, is one that resists comprehension.  It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Freud’s work that an event that is repressed will inevitably return. And Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, states that someone who has experienced trauma “is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past.” If one could make sense of an event, it could simply be remembered as something that happened in the past. The...

Trauma and the Achronological Novel, Part One

by | May 22, 2015 | Plot, Techniques of Fiction

When Kevin Powers came to visit the campus here at Bowling Green State, he seemed a little tired of discussing his novel The Yellow Birds. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, made more than twenty “Year’s Best Books” lists, and won the Pen/Hemingway Award. He had probably been on the road constantly and had heard every question possible about the book multiple times. He was actually more enthusiastic about discussing the new book he’s working on. Yet he was gracious with all our questions, and I’m sure that the students enjoyed talking with him. Some of the questions about The Yellow Birds centered on narrative structure, which led me to think about plot, trauma, and the achronological plot. If you haven’t read the book, I’ll give a quick summary, though it has some mild spoilers. Two young soldiers, Bartle and Murphy, are sent to the war in Iraq. And before they go, Bartle promises Murphy’s mother that he will bring Murphy safely home. In Iraq, Murphy becomes increasingly unstable, and finally puts himself in a position in which it is impossible for Bartle to save him. And in the aftermath of Murphy’s death, Bartle makes a choice that comes back to haunt him. The Yellow Birds does not follow a chronological sequence. It has sections that move back and forth in time, from 2004 in Iraq, to 2003 in New Jersey, to 2005 in Germany, to 2009 in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Most significantly, the book reveals very early on that Murphy will die in Iraq. It does not reveal how, but it makes very clear...