The way this essay both displays the reality of trauma on the writing process and describes the way such writing can go astray helped me to better understand my feelings of failure and vulnerability around my own writing. Thank you.
Beautifully put. I enjoyed the original essay but its a pleasure to read such a nuanced and well worded response, and I think the feeling that "bad writing in any genre or plot device is bad" is spot on, it's the artlessness that offends us rather than the subject matter. The shortcuts apparently taken to character development or pathos.
I also on some level related to your last few paragraphs. There is a lot of Irish literature about poverty, exile, domestic, institutional and religious sexual and physical abuse and I know it's powerful and well written work but I also know those things from being immersed in that Ireland and I've no interest in revisiting it in my reading.
You make a lot of clarity out of the muddiness of that original piece, and I spent a long time reading during breaks in my day and especially turning over the parts about aesthetics.
"Traumatic flashbacks were reported only after the invention of film." It's a strange and glib line in Seghal's original essay, implying film invented associative memory, which doesn't really make sense. Perhaps it's meant only to refer to visual flashbacks? People started reporting alien abductions only after it happened to Bugs Bunny in a cartoon (c.1950), but people reported other extraordinary horrors prior to that – all manner of monsters and torments by the devil and so forth. Maybe visual flashbacks are a change of mental storytelling vernacular, rather than a change in the possibility of trauma itself.
We seem to be in the grip of a continual cultural/social misunderstanding of the nature of trauma. A lot of the Sehgal essay seems to be about cultural constructions of trauma, these imaginary narratives around what it is rather than looking at, you know, what it actually is. How people live out their days, traumatized and otherwise (and for some of us in both states at once, or fluctuating between them; it seems like it's the in-between missing from aesthetically bad art that uses or deals with trauma).
What you wrote about the shrimp got to me, like as a person familiar with sensory flashbacks I felt it turning in my gut.
Because Mercury is retrograding, I feel compelled to clarify that I in no way compare or equate the emotional load of reading and writing about slavery to that of upper middle class white people. What resonated was how we internalize these beliefs about how we must participate in literature, as readers and writers, and it can be a great relief when we finally realize that we can engage with whatever we want however we want.
This was such a fascinating essay, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Before this week and the discourse it brought (lol, so much discourse), I hadn’t really considered the “trauma plot” as a cultural phenomenon, but it does seem really interesting that people are concerned about how trauma has infiltrated fiction in a time where more marginalized people than ever are writing mainstream fiction. You covered this issue so well, and gave me much to think about!
One of the several issue I had with the New Yorker piece was the short-hand way of referring to this constellation of stories with traumatized characters as having a "trauma plot". Is it not more a mode of creating a character than an actual mode of plotting the story (like the marriage plot)? In some near-plotless, solipsistic novels, you could argue that the fleshing-out of a character stands in for any plot, but I don't think all of the books she's wrestling with fit that.
Nor does she wrestle with a lot of books! She creates a general target, a work centered around a character giving off "a fragrance of unspecified damage," and asserts its dominance without many specifics. When she does get to specifics, they frequently lie far outside the bounds of the target she so witheringly draws (the Patrick Melrose novels e.g. are hardly about *unspecified* damage).
So so much better than the Seghal piece which I had put down with a little "bleh" sigh. Felt a palpable wash of relief as you engaged these questions with so much grace, humanity, and practical insight.
I remember almost dropping out of my lit crit studies (it was called Modern Letters, in France) when I realized that the way we were being taught to read, say, Proust, began to remind me of the way I was conditioned all my life to analyze and investigate every little thing a boyfriend would say or do: totally paranoid, totally crazy-making. I couldn't handle it anymore.
I didn't want to know if Albertine was really Albert, someone he might have known and loved in his real life, anymore -- not unless I was writing his biography. But this way of reading became the only way we read anything, forever, and, like I said, I couldn't take it anymore. I went into Medieval Anthropologie instead (AND dumped my enraging, emotionally distant boyfriend). And now I've come full circle and have started writing. I've been really wrestling with the "is this boring" question about the trauma, whether it's mine or intergenerational.
And yes, it did occur to me that a writer like Henry James may not be giving his characters flashbacks, but somehow those stories become flashbacks as they unroll? Surely The Heiress slowly approaching the top of the hallway stairs while her lover bangs at the front door downstairs has a backstory of trauma: we just read/watched it. Sorry to merge the book and the movie versions, but I went nuts over them, the good kind of nuts.
I guess good writing will always be good writing, and a good story is a good story, whatever the genre, and I hope I'll write something good and/or well, whatever niche someone puts it in.
I am a dumb white person for whom this was the only non-SF novel I read for all of 2021 and I am aware that Jones is making New Testament references, sometimes, but not why. But once I firmly decided that the political opinions belong to the characters and not the author, I had no trouble saying nice things about The Prophets at all and I would not describe it as a trauma plot. It helped me to pair the emotional atmosphere with the books by actual historians.
I was disconcerted that Parul Sehgal had to get up in the New Yorker and say that trauma is not a plot. The writers capable of winning and being nominated for Hugos nowadays are very concerned with representation and often representing traumatized characters, but these characters always have to find something heroic within themselves, and that takes a plot and a good story.
"reading like a prosecutor" strikes me as such a bizarrely hostile expectation for a fiction writing workshop. like, chill, Iowa -MFA-Teacher. creative writing isn't like the WeWork IPO. it's supposed to be fiction.
Well said, Brandon. I particularly agree with D'Ambrosio's statement and your formulation of it as "too much psychology in our work...reams of exposition and backstory trying to explain and justify our characters rather than attending to the basic surface facts of their existence." Vonnegut talked about this late in his life re: villains. Villains used to just be bad, but now, said Kurt, we need endless and exhausting "reasons" and "explanations" for why they're bad.
One word I was surprised to see missing from this essay is "Theory." There's no greater example of "on the hunt" reading than going in with a pre-defined (and often "virtuous") agenda, ie: feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, environmentalism, post-colonialism, Derridean deconstructionism, "Let's spend the whole class discussion of 'The Tempest' on Caliban," or just any damn thing that reeks of "let's look at this work of art through the 'lens' of X."
The way this essay both displays the reality of trauma on the writing process and describes the way such writing can go astray helped me to better understand my feelings of failure and vulnerability around my own writing. Thank you.
Beautifully put. I enjoyed the original essay but its a pleasure to read such a nuanced and well worded response, and I think the feeling that "bad writing in any genre or plot device is bad" is spot on, it's the artlessness that offends us rather than the subject matter. The shortcuts apparently taken to character development or pathos.
I also on some level related to your last few paragraphs. There is a lot of Irish literature about poverty, exile, domestic, institutional and religious sexual and physical abuse and I know it's powerful and well written work but I also know those things from being immersed in that Ireland and I've no interest in revisiting it in my reading.
From someone who is signed up to take your workshop this spring, I loved this and I'm so excited for you to read my little trauma stories
You make a lot of clarity out of the muddiness of that original piece, and I spent a long time reading during breaks in my day and especially turning over the parts about aesthetics.
"Traumatic flashbacks were reported only after the invention of film." It's a strange and glib line in Seghal's original essay, implying film invented associative memory, which doesn't really make sense. Perhaps it's meant only to refer to visual flashbacks? People started reporting alien abductions only after it happened to Bugs Bunny in a cartoon (c.1950), but people reported other extraordinary horrors prior to that – all manner of monsters and torments by the devil and so forth. Maybe visual flashbacks are a change of mental storytelling vernacular, rather than a change in the possibility of trauma itself.
We seem to be in the grip of a continual cultural/social misunderstanding of the nature of trauma. A lot of the Sehgal essay seems to be about cultural constructions of trauma, these imaginary narratives around what it is rather than looking at, you know, what it actually is. How people live out their days, traumatized and otherwise (and for some of us in both states at once, or fluctuating between them; it seems like it's the in-between missing from aesthetically bad art that uses or deals with trauma).
What you wrote about the shrimp got to me, like as a person familiar with sensory flashbacks I felt it turning in my gut.
I similarly realized I didn't have to read about white people whining their way through the suburbs if I didn't want to and it was such a relief.
Because Mercury is retrograding, I feel compelled to clarify that I in no way compare or equate the emotional load of reading and writing about slavery to that of upper middle class white people. What resonated was how we internalize these beliefs about how we must participate in literature, as readers and writers, and it can be a great relief when we finally realize that we can engage with whatever we want however we want.
Wow this 100% closed the loop on the unease I felt since reading the Seghal piece. Thank you
This was such a fascinating essay, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Before this week and the discourse it brought (lol, so much discourse), I hadn’t really considered the “trauma plot” as a cultural phenomenon, but it does seem really interesting that people are concerned about how trauma has infiltrated fiction in a time where more marginalized people than ever are writing mainstream fiction. You covered this issue so well, and gave me much to think about!
One of the several issue I had with the New Yorker piece was the short-hand way of referring to this constellation of stories with traumatized characters as having a "trauma plot". Is it not more a mode of creating a character than an actual mode of plotting the story (like the marriage plot)? In some near-plotless, solipsistic novels, you could argue that the fleshing-out of a character stands in for any plot, but I don't think all of the books she's wrestling with fit that.
Nor does she wrestle with a lot of books! She creates a general target, a work centered around a character giving off "a fragrance of unspecified damage," and asserts its dominance without many specifics. When she does get to specifics, they frequently lie far outside the bounds of the target she so witheringly draws (the Patrick Melrose novels e.g. are hardly about *unspecified* damage).
Well said.
So so much better than the Seghal piece which I had put down with a little "bleh" sigh. Felt a palpable wash of relief as you engaged these questions with so much grace, humanity, and practical insight.
Thank you, the trauma plot essay made good points but felt very cynical to me. Reading this resolved those contradictions.
I remember almost dropping out of my lit crit studies (it was called Modern Letters, in France) when I realized that the way we were being taught to read, say, Proust, began to remind me of the way I was conditioned all my life to analyze and investigate every little thing a boyfriend would say or do: totally paranoid, totally crazy-making. I couldn't handle it anymore.
I didn't want to know if Albertine was really Albert, someone he might have known and loved in his real life, anymore -- not unless I was writing his biography. But this way of reading became the only way we read anything, forever, and, like I said, I couldn't take it anymore. I went into Medieval Anthropologie instead (AND dumped my enraging, emotionally distant boyfriend). And now I've come full circle and have started writing. I've been really wrestling with the "is this boring" question about the trauma, whether it's mine or intergenerational.
And yes, it did occur to me that a writer like Henry James may not be giving his characters flashbacks, but somehow those stories become flashbacks as they unroll? Surely The Heiress slowly approaching the top of the hallway stairs while her lover bangs at the front door downstairs has a backstory of trauma: we just read/watched it. Sorry to merge the book and the movie versions, but I went nuts over them, the good kind of nuts.
I guess good writing will always be good writing, and a good story is a good story, whatever the genre, and I hope I'll write something good and/or well, whatever niche someone puts it in.
Thank you, Brandon! So helpful in many ways
OK, fine, Sarah Pinsker's "Two Truths And A Lie" is legitimately a trauma story and won a Hugo.
I am a dumb white person for whom this was the only non-SF novel I read for all of 2021 and I am aware that Jones is making New Testament references, sometimes, but not why. But once I firmly decided that the political opinions belong to the characters and not the author, I had no trouble saying nice things about The Prophets at all and I would not describe it as a trauma plot. It helped me to pair the emotional atmosphere with the books by actual historians.
I was disconcerted that Parul Sehgal had to get up in the New Yorker and say that trauma is not a plot. The writers capable of winning and being nominated for Hugos nowadays are very concerned with representation and often representing traumatized characters, but these characters always have to find something heroic within themselves, and that takes a plot and a good story.
"reading like a prosecutor" strikes me as such a bizarrely hostile expectation for a fiction writing workshop. like, chill, Iowa -MFA-Teacher. creative writing isn't like the WeWork IPO. it's supposed to be fiction.
Well said, Brandon. I particularly agree with D'Ambrosio's statement and your formulation of it as "too much psychology in our work...reams of exposition and backstory trying to explain and justify our characters rather than attending to the basic surface facts of their existence." Vonnegut talked about this late in his life re: villains. Villains used to just be bad, but now, said Kurt, we need endless and exhausting "reasons" and "explanations" for why they're bad.
One word I was surprised to see missing from this essay is "Theory." There's no greater example of "on the hunt" reading than going in with a pre-defined (and often "virtuous") agenda, ie: feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, environmentalism, post-colonialism, Derridean deconstructionism, "Let's spend the whole class discussion of 'The Tempest' on Caliban," or just any damn thing that reeks of "let's look at this work of art through the 'lens' of X."