Tonight’s essay might just as easily be called “The Trauma Plot and Realism Crossover.” At the beginning of this month, literary critic and staff writer at The New Yorker, Parul Sehgal wrote a lengthy essay about trauma in fiction, titled “The Key to Me,” online titled “The Case Against the Trauma Plot.” In it, she notes that trauma is now a foundational event in a character’s life, and has become the primary driver of narrative in mainstream fiction. With its roots in the advent of psychology as a discipline, the trauma plot emerged as a way of generating compelling characters, explaining them, accounting for their passions, drives and nervous tics.
Trauma as a narrative device was adopted enthusiastically by filmmakers who could insert flashbacks at will in order to explain their characters’ dark motivations. Without the trauma plot, there would be no Batman. And we would never have seen Heath Ledger’s Joker, or Joaquin Phoenix’s, either, both characters born in trauma. In fact, I can’t think of any Batman villain who wasn’t born in trauma. And, like Batman, both the hero and the villains waltz in a cycle of crime and crime-fighting, never moving past their respective founding events, endlessly circling their traumas.
“Trauma came to be accepted as a totalizing identity,” Seghal writes (page 64). Trauma “annihilate[s] the self, freeze[s] the imagination, force[s] statis and repetition” (page 65), which is where, Seghal implies, most contemporary narratives are centered — not in overcoming trauma, which would be a narrative that moves forward, but on understanding it, creating a narrative that circles back on itself. Think Dexter (or any flavor of True Crime, an easy target but overwhelmingly popular). Dexter Morgan was born at age 3 with his mother’s gruesome murder, and his career as a serial killer is a recursive reenactment of that founding trauma. It’s his reason for being.
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...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. (page 65)
More than that, Seghal writes that “To question the role of trauma is to oppress,” citing Melissa Febos in an upcoming book on trauma who writes that people who question the efficacy of trauma memoirs participate in the “classic role of perpetrator: to deny, discredit, and dismiss victims in order to avoid being implicated or losing power” (qtd on pp. 65-66).
But are traumatized people (and we are expert these days at identifying trauma) nothing more than the sum of their torments? Is questioning the ability of some people [most people, I would think] to come to terms with their traumas and move on with their lives despite their scars — is that discounting itself not oppressive? It’s a question Sehgal asks, wondering along with excellent writer Brandon Taylor, whether reducing people to their worst experiences has become, in society and in fiction, a shorthand that blurs away all nuance and chance for growth. Both essays are well worth reading and pondering.
What has this to do with fantasy, you might ask, or in other words, will she ever get to the point? It’s a simple one: insofar as mainstream fiction leads fantasy — and it does, or we would never have left Middle Earth and Narnia for the back alleyways of dark fantasy, alternate history, speculative fiction, and other flavors of psychological realism — how does the trauma plot intersect with fantasy?
I can think of a few examples. Who would Thomas Covenant have been without his leprosy — but is the fact of the disease that has so scarred him sufficient to explain him?
Thanks to the prevalence of psychology as a motivator in fiction generally, and the trauma plot specifically, we have stories where we understand characters, but too often that’s where the narrative energy falters. Is merely understanding sufficient, or do we expect characters in fantasy to do something despite their trauma? Do we expect Kvothe in the Kingkiller Chronicles to come out from behind his alter-ego Kote and take charge of his fate, or will he slink away into myth the same fundamentally damaged person he is now?
I’m in mind of Carol Berg’s Lighthouse duology Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone, and a story that I quite like about a character I quite like — Valen. But at its base, over the two novels, the primary narrative energy is not in the civil war that ravages a kingdom, but in Valen’s coming to understand himself and to understand the trauma that made him. The series ends with him poised to do awesome things.
That cuts against the general grain in fantasy, which is about people actually doing awesome things.
I don’t have a conclusion to these musings, but I do wonder how much the trauma plot that holds such power in mainstream fiction is going to affect fantasy. Some time ago, a prominent fantasy writer (don’t ask me, I don’t remember who. I follow a lot of writers and have a terrible short-term memory) wrote that the way they structured plots was to take a character who was generally likeable and do terrible things to them, to see how they dealt with it and how they got out of the terrible circumstances the author put them in, and with what damage they emerged.
For the record, I don’t think fantasy is ever going to go all Feast of Snakes on us, mostly because the genre is rooted in storytelling and storytelling moves forward, not in a circular movement — mostly — any more that it’s likely to produce a fae Portrait of a Lady. I’m not even sure the infiltration of the trauma plot isn’t a good thing in that it demands that story pay attention to a character’s psychological reality. In creating a second reality that mirrors primary reality, there’s lots of room for shadows that act independently of their casters. Will we ever get to a point, though, where the shadows are demanding primacy and want to delve into their own backstories?
I don’t know. The trauma plot is a trend that’s powerful enough in mainstream fiction to warrant significant attention and critique. And I think it’s undeniable that genre fiction responds to the mainstream, inasmuch as what I’m calling “mainstream” is just another kind of genre. All forms of fiction are branches of the same tree, and we define each with regard to all the others. A form that cooks its elements in Tolkien’s Cauldron of Story is bound to pick up the trauma plot and remake it, but what flavor of fantasy will we get when we get there? It’s been something to muse on while navigating 19th century property tax records and trying to see motivation behind official records. Which is itself a kind of storytelling.