Short Story: The Open Wound: Trauma and Witnessing in Short Narrative

Session Coordinator: Susan Rochette-Crawley
Univ. of Northern Iowa

Session A

Afterwards: Narrative Ghosts and the Belatedness of Understanding

Wharton’s “Afterwards” (1910) demonstrates the structure of trauma itself--that is, trauma as the experience of an event that remains precisely unassimilable to narrative memory at the time of its occurrence, an experience that, as Cathy Caruth observes, is “belated,” not known in the first instance but that returns to haunt the survivor later on. On the level of Wharton’s personal history, I suggest that the trauma of a near-death experience brought about by a burning fever reenacts itself in the burning of books about ghosts, the spectral presence of death, and then is “worked through” through the writing of ghostly tales.

However, on a more general level, Wharton’s “Afterwards” functions as an allegory of trauma that prefigures in uncanny ways contemporary discussions of the phenomenon and reveals the intrinsic relationship between ghosts and trauma, the ways in which the account of psychic trauma is always inscribed within a narrative of hauntings and of specters. What “Afterwards” demonstrates is that the traumatic encounter with death will always be a missed encounter that reasserts itself through a structure of haunting and only becomes intelligible belatedly.

Jeffrey Weinstock
Central Michigan University
Jeffrey.Weinstock@cmich.edu

The Wound of Race: Ethnicity and Trauma in the Works of Sui Sin Far

Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) published her collection of short stories, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, in 1912. This collection is remarkable for its insight into the traumatizing wounds inflicted by acculturation and the resistance to acculturation experienced by Asians and Asian Americans in the United States. Far defies binary structuralist politics that violently circumscribe identities in her writing, which results in an endorsement of ambiguities pertaining to subjectivity. Moreover, Far’s autobiographical essay, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909), witnesses Far’s own traumatic experiences as an Asian American and Asian Canadian while concomitantly giving authority to her short stories and validating her as author of such works. This paper examines Far’s work from a post-structuralist framework and argues for an elimination of binary structuralist politics when assessing ethnic literature and assigning ethnic identity.

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick
Ball State University
jegoodspeed@bsu.edu

Session B

Re-membering the Past: Re-presentations of Trauma in Edwidge Danticat’s Short Stories

Throughout her writing career, Edwidge Danticat, a Hatian-American writer, has persistently narrativized both individual and collective traumas. Her Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones exemplify her attempt to re-presenting the traumatic history especially through female bodies. For my paper, though, I will focus on some of Danticat’s short stories such as “Children of the Sea” and “Nineteen Thirty-Seven” (stories collected in Krik? Krak!). Danticat’s stories demonstrate her intense awareness that the true choice in regard to historical traumas is not the one between remembering or forgetting them, and that traumas we are not ready or able to remember haunt us all the more forcefully. I argue that Danticat’s stories narrativize the paradox, a paradox that, in order really to forget a traumatic event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly. I will also explore the poetics of Danticat’s magical trickstery, especially in “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” a story of trauma on the massacre of thousands of Hatian sugarcane cutters in 1937 at the Dominican border under the reign of Trujillo.

Chae-Pyong Song
Marygrove College
csong@marygrove.edu

‘Tis But A Scratch: The Disparaged Wound’s Sick Joke and Revenge

Complicating this emphasis on what has been called “the narrative cure,” many stories in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried invite readers to question the narrator’s comforting view (supported by Judith Herman) that “stories can save us.” “O’Brien” (the fictional narrator) implicitly warns us to distrust a war story (we might say, any trauma narrative) that offers a moral, that instructs or leaves “you feel[ing] uplifted”; instead, we can recognize a trauma story’s truth, he suggests, as the narrative displays “allegiance to obscenity and evil” and evokes responses of embarrassment or unease. Hence, while O’Brien’s fragmented, mutually contradictory stories capture the compelling need for short narratives and storytelling among those dealing with traumatic events, The Things They Carried also repeatedly presents the story that can not be told, the testimony that is not understood, the wound that is not healed. My paper contends that “The Ghost Soldiers,” the only story within The Things They Carried that describes the writer-narrator’s physical wounds, makes the open wound a symbol of disparaged, alienating, and thus unhealed psychological trauma.

Sheryl Stevenson
University of Akron
ssteve3@uakron.edu

Barbara Honigmann’s Damals, dann und danach: Exile and Familial Discontinuity among Post-WWII East German Jews

Lauren Hahn
Loyola Univ., Chicago