Literary Expressions of Trauma

Trauma can be so terrifying or indescribable in ordinary terms that it can be expressed only indirectly. The arts, with their use of symbolic, disguised, or nonverbal language, can therefore express some very powerful images of trauma. This entry explores the expression of traumatic experiences in literature, covering representative examples of different types of trauma, historical periods and locations, and the therapeutic uses of these expressions.

An early and very influential depiction of trauma was from the medieval poet Dante Alighieri, who vividly described the realms of Hell and Purgatory in The Divine Comedy. Other notable descriptions come from Samuel Pepys's account of the catastrophic 1666 London fire and Arthur Koestler's description of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s in his novel Darkness at Noon. A well-known semiautobiographical account of the Italian campaigns during World War I is Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, a fictional treatment of Vonnegut's experience of the firebombing of Dresden in which thousands of civilians died, and Joseph Heller's tragicomic Catch-22 told readers about the horrors and insanity of World War II. The most famous diaries recounting life in hiding and in a concentration camp came from Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, and Primo Levi. After the Holocaust, German literature confronted the role of shame and guilt in postwar Germany, the task of dealing with destruction at the end of the war, the construction of a German identity before and after unification, and the international reactions to the war.

Literary expressions of trauma in Japan explore the role of the arts in “constituting” traumatic historical events so they can be assimilated and integrated. The representations of the Asia Pacific War experience through various Japanese media helped readers respond to images of extreme violence. Haruki Murakami, winner of the Franz Kafka prize and the Jerusalem prize, used the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to look at the violence of the war years as a root of Japan's malaise. Medoruma Shun, winner of the Akutagawa Prize, showed how the battle of Okinawa carries memories of the war forward to new generations. The appearance of the atom bomb signaled unimaginable higher stakes and a new willingness to risk annihilation. These themes were unforgettably explored in John Hersey's nonfiction book Hiroshima, published in 1946 and widely taught in journalism schools as a classic of in-depth reportage. Since then, many books, articles, and testimonials express survivor guilt, secondary trauma, and the use of literature to work through trauma, bear witness, bring agency, and fulfill responsibility to future generations. In 1984, the first 15-volume compendium was published in Japanese; in 1995, John Whittier Treat's Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb was the English equivalent.

In Vietnam, the history of trauma literature is relatively recent. Tim O'Brien, perhaps America's leading Vietnam writer, covered such topics as post-traumatic stress disorder and the act of writing, self-representation of the soldier versus the writer, and the recovery of personal experiences by capturing and disguising them over and over.

To explore how South Africa is still dealing with its traumatic past 20 years after the end of apartheid, 14 South African experts—authors, psychologists, and politicians—were interviewed to provide insights into the South African soul, hopes, and anxieties. Topics discussed included imagining the real, the tricks of memory and risks of false remembering, the importance of autobiographies in the reconstruction of history in South African Truth and Reconciliation process, the need for new modes of reading and listening to understand these stories, and the way in which fiction can mirror the relationship between concealing and disclosing. This collection of interviews illustrates the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the many layers of trauma and the use of literature to transform trauma memory (hot) into narrative memory (cool) through the telling of a story.

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