Writing: The Trauma Plot

I knew nothing about trauma plots until I read Parul Sehgal's The Case Against the Trauma Plot in The New Yorker. I am not sure that I approve of the trauma plot - that story which wallows in the trauma of its characters. I have known people who have been traumatized but were interesting beyond their traumas. Frankly, who has not experienced some trauma in their lives? Is not the building of character the interplay between trauma and one's own will and/or ambition? I admit my own background does not favor accepting victimhood as the only state of being, let a preferred state.

Bear with the long quotes, this was after all a New Yorker essay, since I do not wish to misrepresent the essay's argument.

The prevalence of the trauma plot cannot come as a surprise at a time when the notion of trauma has proved all-engulfing. Its customary clinical incarnation, P.T.S.D., is the fourth most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder in America, and one with a vast remit.... 

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Trauma has become synonymous with backstory, but the tyranny of backstory is itself a relatively recent phenomenon—one that, like any successful convention, has a way of skirting our notice. Personality was not always rendered as the pencil-rubbing of personal history. Jane Austen’s characters are not pierced by sudden memories; they do not work to fill in the gaps of partial, haunting recollections. A curtain hangs over childhood, Nicholas Dames writes in “Amnesiac Selves” (2001), describing a tradition of “pleasurable forgetting,” in which characters import only those details from the past which can serve them (and, implicitly, the narrative) in the present. The same holds for Dorothea Brooke, for Isabel Archer, for Mrs. Ramsay. Certainly the filmmakers of classical Hollywood cinema were quite able to bring characters to life without portentous flashbacks to formative torments. In contrast, characters are now created in order to be dispatched into the past, to truffle for trauma. 

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And never mind pesky findings that the vast majority of people recover well from traumatic events and that post-traumatic growth is far more common than post-traumatic stress. In a recent Harper’s essay, the novelist Will Self suggests that the biggest beneficiaries of the trauma model are trauma theorists themselves, who are granted a kind of tenure, entrusted with a lifetime’s work of “witnessing” and interpreting. George A. Bonanno, the director of Columbia’s Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab and the author of “The End of Trauma,” has a blunter assessment: “People don’t seem to want to let go of the idea that everybody’s traumatized.” 

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Stories rebel against the constriction of the trauma plot with skepticism, comedy, critique, fantasy, and a prickly awareness of the genre and audience expectations. In the Netflix series “Feel Good,” the protagonist, Mae, a comedian dealing with an addiction and disorienting flashbacks, struggles to fit their muddled feelings about their past into any straightforward diagnosis or treatment plan. (“People are obsessed with trauma these days,” Mae says ruefully. “It’s like a buzzword.”) The protagonist of Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You,” learning that she has been drugged and sexually assaulted, also finds the ready-made therapeutic scripts wanting; some of the show’s most interesting strands follow the ways that focussing on painful histories can make us myopic to the suffering of others. Conversations about trauma in Anthony Veasna So’s “Afterparties” are seasoned with exasperation, teasing, fatigue. “You gotta stop using the genocide to win arguments,” Cambodian American children tell their refugee parents.

Having gone so far, I will close by mentioning how almost 30 years ago I read Robert Hughes’s Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America. About that book you might read this essay.

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1/16/22