Contents
Introduction
I. The Power of the Image
II. Individual and Collective Trauma
III. The Belated Temporality of Trauma
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
When Susan Sontag said ‘Images transfix. Images anesthetize’, she anticipated the ways in which the transmission and processing of trauma have mutated in the digital age. Indeed, the rise of technology in the twenty-first century brings new digital modes of experiencing the world and connecting with others. With this, new conditions for experiencing catastrophe are formed and ‘vicarious trauma’ – personal traumatization borne out of empathetic engagement with others – pervades the contemporary consciousness. Considering this, I will be interrogating representations of mediatised trauma in contemporary anglophone fictions. I argue that modes of processing trauma have altered immensely in the modern age due to digital channels of vicarious traumatisation, and this change is reflected in contemporary fiction’s representation of media and catastrophe.
I will investigate how contemporary transatlantic fictions handle this phenomenon of digitally experiencing trauma, largely through literary depictions of 9/11. Authors depicting the mediatisation of the event rather than the event itself is significant, as much of the globe experiences catastrophe through remote and digital simulacra over direct witnessing. When images become the dominant mode of communication and sharing information, how do we configure the act of witnessing in the modern age? Witnessing catastrophe becomes a divided act split between two outcomes: vicarious traumatization through identification, or desensitisation – a cultural disconnect and sadistic voyeurism. This concern is echoed by Caleb Lewis writing about the Black Lives Matter movement: ‘The chief danger at this juncture, is voyeurism: when the urge to bear witness becomes disconnected from political action and all we’re left with is the urge to just watch’. The West engages in voyeurism of traumatic spectacle and holds a cultural detachment from witnessing other’s trauma on a screen. This is present in Don DeLillo’s writing, namely The Body Artist (2001) and Falling Man (2007); as well as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018); and Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005). These texts, despite spanning across two decades and transatlantic origins, highlight a spectrum of conflict across the twenty-first century. Analysing across a continuum of twenty years provides viewpoints of the pre- and post-9/11 moment and allows contrasts and connections to be drawn between the two, to illuminate how the event has changed cultural responses to images and trauma.
Crucial to the understanding of digital modes of processing trauma is the sovereignty of the image in the twenty-first century. The image’s superseding authority is a by-product of late-stage capitalism, as consumer images and representational simulacra have become more ‘real’ than ‘reality’ itself. This notion percolates Moshfegh’s novel as it fixates on images and appearances, and their authority over reality. The Accidental further invests in the authority of the modern image over contemporary life through the text’s obsession with documentation. Visual simulacra are crucial motifs in DeLillo’s work, as both Falling Man and The Body Artist explore the limits of visually representing a traumatic event and discuss the cultural fixation on images. The works of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek frame this argument and provide a theoretical lens to the examination of the image in literary representations of trauma. These critics respectively argue the image’s surpassing of reality, and the consequent formation of a hyperreality. The rising authority of the image and hyperreality in turn yields a modern crisis of personhood, as the act of vicarious witnessing confuses the boundaries of first-hand trauma, and as E. Ann Kaplan acknowledges, ‘private and public feelings become merged’.
Digitised trauma processing differs from previous physical channels as it works to blur the line between individual and collective traumatization, collapsing boundaries between the two. As technology is used to witness catastrophe through the eyes of others, the concept of selfhood becomes refracted in the age of globalised capitalism. This confusion occurs on a national and even global scale, as witnessing is no longer something exclusive to the individual and the lives of others can be visually transported with immediacy. Indeed, Susannah Radstone’s ideas affirm that ‘an events traumatic impact may be linked to its puncturing of a fantasy that has previously sustained a sense of identity – national as well as individual’. The narrator’s grief in MYRR over her parents’ death becomes entangled with the pregnant cultural despair in a New York on the cusp of catastrophe, which ultimately climaxes in 9/11 to end her hibernation. Smith echoes this in The Accidental through the symbol of the invaded nuclear family, under threat from mediatized images of catastrophe from the Iraq War, while also exploring the collision of public and private spheres through the relationship between sex and violence. Moreover, in Falling Man DeLillo speaks to the extension of personal grief into the collective through the lens of 9/11 as private notions of sex and death are expanded beyond the individual.
The temporality of self and nation becomes distorted through the blurring of individual and collective trauma. This crisis of selfhood extends into perceptions of time, how trauma penetrates the temporality of past, present, and future. Prominent trauma theory such as the work of Cathy Caruth provides a critical framework for this disruption. The immediacy granted by a culture enveloped by technology contrasts with the belated temporality of digitised trauma. This plays a key role in MYRR as the denouement of the text, written 17 years after 9/11, depicts the event as an awakening to end an epoch of ‘rest and relaxation’. Furthermore, time becomes fractured and warped by trauma in both The Body Artist and Falling Man, establishing a relationship between temporality and traumatic witnessing. The Body Artist, while written before 9/11, speaks to an America invigorated by the momentum of a new millennium, charged with the energy of imminent catastrophe.
Ultimately, visual and digital representations of trauma in the twenty-first century Western world – proliferated by an increased media presence – have surpassed the criteria for direct traumatic witnessing and engender a hyperreal existence in their governance over actuality. I will analyse how this phenomenon is represented in contemporary fictions and speaks to how we experience vicarious trauma in our current cultural moment.
I. The Power of the Image
The vicarious internalisation of digital trauma is enabled by the sovereignty of the contemporary image. The twenty-first century is dominated by images due to the increasing presence of social and broadcast media, facilitating a cultural fixation on aesthetics in the Western world. The authority invested in images is prevalent in my primary texts, which demonstrate how this environment cultivates a hyperreality. This has been anticipated by Jean Baudrillard, who argues that in the contemporary age signs and images create their own self-referential reality, which takes precedence over our ‘reality’. Hyperreality in the texts is shaped by the abundant media presence of the modern age, in which media provides the scripts for experiencing catastrophe. Thus, the image’s power enables the vicarious traumatisation of the masses, exemplified by the effects of 9/11 on the transatlantic psyche and identity.
Aesthetics and images have become the preoccupation of the Western contemporary moment, manufacturing a hyperreality where the image takes precedent. The term ‘hyperreality’ refers to Baudrillard’s definition: ‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality’. For him ‘the image medium, has imposed itself between the real and the imaginary, upsetting the balance between the two’. Through an aesthetic fixation, reality becomes secondary to the self-referential hyperreality of images. Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) characterises this fixation as the text centres around people ‘trapped in a world that value[s] looks above all else’. Reva particularly characterises this cultural vanity: ‘[Reva] was a slave to vanity and status, which was not uncommon in a place like Manhattan, […] She was so obsessed with brand names, conformity, “fitting in.”’’ (9). Yet the narrator exposes her own superficiality through her critiques of Reva, noting ‘her stupid knockoff Kate Spade bag’ and ‘her fake Louboutin stilettos’ (59). Moshfegh thereby comments upon the preoccupation with images in a society in which the visual power of 9/11 is prefigured and anticipated.
The Western cultural fixation on aesthetics invests power in signs and images, thereby creating an environment in which a hyperreality is borne. Ali Smith situates the The Accidental (2005) within a hyperreal framework as Magnus’ narrative centres on the superseding reality of images, as the fake pornographic image he creates pushes a girl to suicide. The hyperreal is recalled as the image creates its own fake, self-referential reality which overtakes and becomes superior to actuality: ‘Even though it was a lie it became true. It became more her than her’. Through this, Smith brings into question ideas of truth in conflict with the twenty-first century image. The status of the image is revisited in the text when Eve sees photos of the torture at Abu Ghraib in a newspaper: ‘although these photographs were a signal to the eyes about something really happening, the more she looked at them […] the less they meant something that had happened to real people’ (285-6). Eve acknowledges the tension between the image signalling ‘something really happening’ and as an unreal simulation. In ‘The Ruins of the Future,’ Don DeLillo says that trauma is an experience which is ‘too real, a phenomenon so unaccountable and yet so bound to the power of objective fact that we can’t tilt it to the slant of our perceptions’. This sense of the unreal marks a threat to Eve’s world driven by images and aesthetics over reality, and Smith uses this moment in the text to evaluate the status of traumatic images and demonstrate their ability to threaten such a society by exposing what is ‘too real’.
Moshfegh’s novel further invests authority in the visual medium as the narrator sets out to detach herself from the aesthetically fixated culture of pre-9/11 New York. The narrator confronts this hyperreality by refusing to empower signs and images. In the novel, celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg represent ‘proof’ of the meaningless of these images: ‘Wherever she went, everything around her became a parody of itself, gauche and ridiculous. That was a comfort to see. Thank God for Whoopi. Nothing was sacred’ (196). By acknowledging that media reality devolves into ‘a parody of itself’, the narrator speaks to Baudrillard’s notion of self-referential images ‘never again exchanging for what is real’. Thus, the text illustrates the aesthetic driven aspects of pre-9/11 New York, as an augury to 9/11’s visual power, substantiating the authority of the traumatic image. Slavoj Žižek affirms the visual impact of the collapse of the Twin Towers as he argues terrorism works ‘to awaken us, Western citizens, from our numbness, from immersion in our everyday ideological universe’. 9/11 as an awakening is a lens explored by Moshfegh as it brings the narrator and Reva out of their figurative and literal sleeps. The year of hibernation is ended by the events of 9/11, whilst Reva jumping from the twin towers is seen as ‘a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake’ (289). By ending the novel in this way, Moshfegh suggests this kind of trauma as a penetration in the fantasy of infallible America on the level of nation and citizen. Žižek counters this by arguing ‘It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality’. Thus, he makes the distinction between ‘our reality’ and how this is disrupted by the version of reality the image exposes. By situating the narrative in the run-up to 9/11, the text brings into focus a turning point in the transmission of images and their ability to traumatise.
The proliferation of media presence of the contemporary era allows for this hyperreality to subsist. Mass media manufactures our reality and is defined by the self-referential versions shown on screens. Media prevalence is a concern for Smith in The Accidental as the text brings attention to CCTV and surveillance culture. CCTV cameras are repeatedly emphasised by Astrid as she fixates on modes of documentation when she goes out filming with Amber. Concerns over surveillance culture culminate when Astrid wonders about the supermarket employee in her own domestic space: ‘does she realize she is not being recorded anymore? Or does she think inside her head that she still is being recorded, by something that watches everything we do, because she is so used to it being everywhere else?’ (114). This indicates the erosion of the private domestic space because Astrid imagines that this woman cannot distinguish public and private spheres. Thereby, pervasiveness of recording in the contemporary is exposed on an individual scale, as it infiltrates from the public sphere into the domestic. Moreover, anxieties of surveillance culture are expressed as Astrid links ideas of CCTV and the documentation of violent crime, such as stabbing and kidnapping (113). By focusing on surveillance, Smith emphasises a culture of constant documentation where the boundaries between scripted media and surveillance filming dissolve. Baudrillard foreshadows this as he argues that our current relationship to reality is mediated through simulated media images. Amber makes Astrid film a CCTV camera and reverses the mode of surveillance as ‘the cameras were […] filming each other’ (126), staging defiance to constant observation. Smith’s discussion of surveillance culture and filming reveals the mode of continuous documentation in the contemporary moment and sets the scene for a culture in which visual documentation and the digital image surpass actuality.
Media thus infiltrates the cultural psyche to the extent that it scripts our responses to events, specifically catastrophe. MYRR demonstrates how the omnipresence of media invades the reality of pre-9/11 New York primarily through how it mediates the actions and emotions of the characters. This is particularly evidenced in Reva’s characterisation as ‘a little scripted’ in her emotions (112). The novel is saturated with an atmosphere of artificiality which only the narrator is aware of. Reva’s affiliation to scripted media is insisted upon throughout the text, as the narrator remarks on ‘how predictable Reva was – she was like a character in a movie. Every emotional gesture was right on cue’ (123). Thus, Moshfegh demonstrates how we internalise responses and experiences from media surroundings and use them to perform our own emotions. Baudrillard speaks to this phenomenon as he describes how ‘images become more real than the real; cinema becomes more cinema than cinema, in a kind of vertigo in which […] it does no more than resemble itself and escape its own logic’. The quote prefigures media tropes infiltration of the real by naming ‘cinema’ as well as the ‘image’ as a source for the hyperreal to be produced. Moshfegh interrogates this as the narrator relies on film to evoke feeling over her own traumatic experiences (192), which is indicative of scripted media’s negotiation of how emotions are processed and internalised. The narrator’s trauma is thus mediated through film and TV expectations: ‘I wanted to do what I thought I was supposed to do – to mourn. I’d seen it happening in movies’ (146). Here, the text examines how individual grief is accessed in the age of proliferated media presence, and how images have come to mediate reality in its emotions and experiences.
Media’s ability to code behaviour including responses to catastrophe corresponds to the experience of many witnessing 9/11 as a live TV event. Žižek affirms the pervasion of media tropes into reality by saying ‘corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots of the collapsing towers could not but be reminiscent of the most breathtaking scenes in big catastrophe productions’. The corruption of reality ‘by Hollywood’ which Žižek refers to is crucial to the permeation of media into the individual sphere and the national psyche. This is because as our experiences become anticipated, catastrophe becomes ‘reminiscent’ and consequently our responses to such become determined. Catastrophe is thus predated and facilitated by Hollywood’s ‘catastrophe productions’ as this trauma has already been internalised from media.
Ultimately, images’ ability to vicariously traumatise is facilitated by their authority over contemporary Western society. The West’s fixation on aesthetics promotes this authority, enabling the image to take precedent over actuality and promoting a hyperreality. This concurs with the constant media presence and mode of documentation which permeates the twenty-first century, scripting cultural responses to catastrophe. The effects of traumatic images can be most distinctively recognised in 9/11, explored by Mosfegh’s representations of witnessing catastrophe footage. MYRR marks the end of an epoch of relaxation with the climactic collapse of the Twin Towers. The narrator buys a new TV and VCR to record 9/11 footage, indicating a process of renewal for how we perceive visual and digital media. She watches ‘the videotape over and over to soothe’ herself (289), her repetitive voyeurism of catastrophe mirrors what Thomas Elsaesser calls ‘the obsessive time of trauma memory’. This means the past is constantly and intrusively brought into the present by trauma. Yet Moshfegh sets a conundrum as the narrator is comforted by the footage, suggesting trauma in the digital age occupies a new space between horror and desensitisation. Žižek extends this voyeuristic comfort to the general population by speaking about repetitious media cycles: ‘we wanted to see it again and again; the same shots were repeated ad nauseam’. This suggests the digital capturing and broadcast of 9/11 altered the way in which trauma is processed and internalised.
The act of witnessing catastrophe is crucial to DeLillo’s 9/11 fiction Falling Man (2007), as he explores how traumatic footage creates more than a neutral witness, but penetrates the individual in a corporeal way:
Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered her body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other distance, out beyond the towers. (DeLillo, 134)
This passage reveals how digital trauma merges with the body and gives a physical representation of vicarious traumatisation. The process of being remotely traumatised through an image is physicalised as DeLillo imagines the 9/11 footage as piercing ‘beneath her skin’. The corporeal effects of processing traumatic footage are affirmed by Hamilton Carroll, who explains that ‘Lianne comes to perceive viewing as a form of bodily experience’. Significantly, he further suggests that ‘It is the footage, and not the event itself, that enters Lianne’s body’. This distinction speaks to the crucial role of catastrophic footage in how trauma is being refashioned in the contemporary age. Indeed, this passage interrogates the psychological and physical effects of witnessing ‘repeated ad nauseum’. These effects are demonstrated as Lianne is seemingly entranced by the image on the screen and she becomes immobilised by the enchantment of the videotape. Yet it is not simply the footage which enters her body, but the ‘lives and histories’ of herself and the victims of 9/11, revealing the demolition of singular selfhood and merging of discrete identities in the wake of cultural trauma.
II. Individual and Collective Trauma
The contemporary mode of processing digital trauma confuses the boundaries between the individual and collective through its immediacy, as borders between internal and external spheres of personhood and nation are disassembled. This argument is sustained by E. Ann Kaplan, who argues that ‘in our era of proliferation of traumatic images, private and public feelings become merged’. The image’s authority in contemporary culture enables vicarious trauma to be more extensively spread, as to vicariously experience something in itself is to challenge notions of singular selfhood and the individual. The digital transmission of images refracts selfhood and individual trauma into that of the national and the global. The trauma of the collective thus invades the personal sphere, primarily evidenced in the texts through the infiltration of the domestic space.
National and personal anxieties become confused and intertwined in the wake of mediatised traumatic events. This phenomenon is most notably discussed in relation to 9/11, which Kaplan refers to as ‘perhaps the supreme example of a catastrophe that was experienced globally via digital technologies’. This embodies the experience of vicarious and first-hand trauma becoming entangled in the twenty-first century. Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) follows a woman’s journey overcoming the trauma of losing her parents; the insertion of 9/11 in this arc indicates the confusion between personal and collective trauma. Her personal grief acts as an augury for the national grief to come as the text builds towards 9/11. The narrator’s hibernation is mingled with dreams of rebirth as she sleeps for the chance to ‘become a whole new person’ (26). Her personal trauma drives her actions as her sleep recalls childhood memories of her mother (46), suggesting her ‘self-preservational’ sleep is rooted in response to her traumatic childhood (7). Yet, this individual journey of renewal becomes nationalised as she desires ‘[a] good strong American sleep’ (252), transforming her need for renewal into a desire for America as a whole and translates her personal trauma into a collective suffering. Moshfegh however sets a conundrum in her presentation of personal and national trauma, as the narrator heals from her parental trauma and reawakens in time for the 9/11 attacks. This suggests that a tale of wholly individual trauma cannot be situated post-9/11, because of the severe collision of public and private realms which followed.
The blending of national and personal models of selfhood is demonstrated by the vulnerability of the United States post-9/11 integrating into the selfhood of the individual citizen. Susannah Radstone connects trauma to the dissolution of both these forms of identity: ‘an events traumatic impact may be linked to its puncturing of a fantasy that has previously sustained a sense of identity – national as well as individual’. The ‘puncturing of a fantasy’ correlates with MYRR’s depiction of the collapse of the Twin Towers as the jolt to end the narrator’s period of hibernation. The narrator’s awakening is echoed in Reva jumping ‘wide awake’ from the Twin Towers, ‘diving into the unknown’ (289). The narrator’s fantasy of sleep is punctured by her loss and the cultural impact of 9/11, as she wakes up to the reality of American fallibility.
Confused models of selfhood are extended beyond nation in the age of global capitalism, in which the individual sphere becomes indecipherable from the global moment. Selfhood becomes displaced as mediatisation collapses the proximity of traumatic events. MYRR illustrates a loss of singular personhood as the narrator often becomes momentarily absorbed by sensationalist news headlines which she lists with apathy: ‘The new president was going to be hard on terrorists. A Harlem teenager had thrown her newborn baby down a sewage drain. A mine caved in somewhere in South America’ (104). The headlines then devolve into tabloid celebrity culture; the infusion of pop culture and catastrophe shows the interests of the contemporary moment, while hinting at the disconnect between global catastrophe and trivial tabloid news. The text insists upon halting the personal narrative through the relation of news headlines, as Moshfegh draws attention to a pre-9/11 sense of detachment to catastrophe. This is resonant with Žižek’s assertion that ‘the [Twin Towers] stood for the center of the virtual capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production’. 9/11 destroyed this disconnect between the virtual and material and brought the rest of the globe into the Western sphere. Thus, the novel demonstrates a pre-9/11 detachment from the globe to indicate the dismantling of national and global spheres as an effect of digital trauma. This is similarly presented in DeLillo, who uses elements of both narrative and form to illustrate the collision of the ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’.
Don DeLillo’s Falling Man depicts 9/11 as an event which left ‘millions of people, dispossessed, their lives, their consciousness’ (47). By specifically invoking ‘their consciousness’, DeLillo speaks to digital catastrophe refashioning concepts of selfhood into collective grief. The displacement of singularised identity is particularly prevalent as Lianne states that ‘[i]t was a rainy Monday in the world’ (151), extending the localised weather globally. This quote further speaks to a collective sense of mourning and grief over 9/11 which goes beyond the space of the individual, Lianne expands her ‘rainy Monday’ to a larger population which shares her trauma. The dissolution of public and private spheres is presented in the text as a direct result of catastrophe: ‘since that day in September, all life had become public’ (182). This demonstrates the infiltration of global concerns into the quotidian space and reflects the fragmentation of selfhood from experiencing digital catastrophe.
DeLillo further renders post-9/11 modes of selfhood as indiscrete and overlapping. Identities are not concrete or distinct in the text as trauma works to fragment them. Lianne’s thoughts are indicative of this fracture, as she is plagued with ‘[t]houghts I can’t identify, thoughts I can’t claim as mine’ (125). Her mind is occupied and extended to global concerns, as she no longer has ownership or recognition of her thoughts. Digital experiences of catastrophe unravel received ideas of individual selfhood, observed in the text through Rumsey’s death: ‘[t]he whole business of being Rumsey was in shambles now’ (243). The language of discussing identity and personhood, in particular ‘business’, reveals the effects of global capitalism on models of selfhood as it suggests a collective enterprise rather than a singular self, and how 9/11 and other forms of mediatised catastrophe reduces this to ‘shambles’. Thus, national and personal concerns collide, and throw received modes of discrete selfhood into crisis.
The blurring of collective and individual boundaries is revealed in the texts as national concerns infiltrate the intimate spaces of the citizen. Ali Smith exposes this in The Accidental (2005) as the characterisation of Michael connects the national and personal libido. Imperial and sexual conquest are linked through his desire for male sexual power, about which Michael describes himself as ‘a ruined nation, and obscene’ (175). By invoking the image of the nation, Smith speaks to the Western imperial indifference to the rest of the world. Emily Horton affirms this argument as she says, ‘Michael’s shameless professorial coquetting relates the entrenchment of Western imperialism, which both performs and celebrates the West’s enduring libido’. Horton thus explains how the text fuses public and private spheres of the national and the intimate. Amber’s presence divorces these realms as she exists outside his imperial libido. She heals the national invasion of the intimate sphere as Michael can’t imagine Amber sexually (75) and doesn’t think about sexual conquest once she leaves (263). Amber thus allows for the conscious separation of national and individual spheres, placing her as a resolution to the effects of trauma. Furthermore, Magnus’ narrative trajectory examines the relationship between sex and catastrophe. Magnus is traumatised after he doctors a fake pornographic image of a classmate which pushes her to suicide, yet Amber brings sexual freedom and liberation to his life and helps him resolve his guilt. Smith thus connects the unreality of sex, through motifs of pornography and the fake pornographic image, to its intimate reality which Magnus discovers with Amber. Magnus further demonstrates the junction between intimate sexual spaces to global events and war, as he says everybody is broken from Middle East tyrants to girls in porn (149). This connection binds together the spectacle of pornography and war. The relationship between sex and global violence is something Amber brings into focus, as Horton notes, ‘Amber draws a special connection between fantasy, sexuality, and war. […] In this way she politicizes her own appearance’. War indeed becomes sexualised and given an erotic appeal as Magnus links the ‘Middle East’ to ‘Amber’s middle’, her sexuality and points of international conflict becoming conflated in Magnus’ view (147). Amber further describes bombs as curved ‘at their heavy ends like the naked breasts of women’ (210), suggesting war and sex as similar acts of male conquest. By connecting war to sex, it is explored across the same divide of unreality as the West disengages from global realities and conflicts in wilful ignorance. This relationship between war and the (un)reality of sex is something Smith directly links to trauma as Magnus gets an erection thinking of his dead classmate (45). This moment is significant because in sexualising his trauma, Magnus cannot separate acts of violence with sex. This suggests trauma as the key mediator of this clash between private intimacies and violence on an individual and imperial level.
The relationship between sex and trauma is crucial to DeLillo’s Falling Man which interrogates this tension: ‘Sex was everywhere at first, in words, phrases, half gestures, the simplest imitation of altered space’ (7). By highlighting sex within the traumatic effects of 9/11, DeLillo suggests the absolute infiltration of collective trauma into the intimate, sexual space, and refracts the private space to ‘everywhere’. Lianne further exhibits sexual voyeurism, indicating an association with catastrophe through a shared spectacle as she defines sex as ‘the movie on TV when the woman comes into the room […] as long as she’s alone and they are watching’ (7). This is significant because the spectacle and witnessing become fundamental to the act of sex as a result of trauma. Private and public spheres are altered through trauma as the text links intimate sexual spaces to the voyeurism of catastrophe, specifically in relation to 9/11: ‘“So many watching.” […] “Watching those buildings fall”’ (11). Thus, worlds of public and private concerns are brought into crisis through the digital experiencing of trauma, encapsulated by Smith and DeLillo’s figuration of the relationship between sex and catastrophe.
The infiltration of collective trauma into the personal sphere is further illustrated through the penetration of the domestic space. Smith thematises this in The Accidental, as Horton explains how the text merges ‘individual crisis and collective catastrophe, […] represented through the organising motif of the invaded nuclear family’. Amber plays a central role in allegorising the collision between public and private spheres through media catastrophe, as she begins to occupy the Smart family’s summer home and challenges how they perceive themselves and the world they inhabit. Horton notes the text’s concerns with how individual and collective spheres are combined, by saying the text has a ‘central interest in both personal and public catastrophic experience’. Amber’s crossing from the exterior world to the interior family home functions as a microcosm for global catastrophic experience infiltrating the quotidian space, as it is covertly worked into the text through mediated channels. The intrusion of mediatised catastrophe into the nuclear family is exposed through Iraq War TV news coverage throughout the text. By organising the timeline of the Iraq War alongside the family narrative Smith speaks to the subliminal incursion of mediatised catastrophe and trauma into the family home.
As a result of Amber’s and media’s infiltration, the Smarts become more conscious of public spheres and are brought out of their individual crises. Eve particularly becomes more conscientious through Amber’s arrival as she thinks of writing about someone who ‘will be dead tomorrow morning’ in Iraq for her next autobiotruefictinterview (198). This is extended as ultimately Eve infiltrates another family after being mistaken for the cleaner, inhabiting the role of Amber. Similar growth is shown in Astrid as she empathises with tragedies in her local area and people currently dying in the Iraq War, whilst trying to imagine herself as an Iraqi child (128), as the family starts to situate themselves outside of their individual spheres. This consciousness of distinct public and private spheres reveals healing from personal and cultural trauma, suggesting that their collision is indeed an outcome of the digital trauma Smith explores. Smith thus organises Amber’s invasion of the Smart family to signal the infiltrating effects of mediatised catastrophe on the domestic scene and refracts concerns of the collective into the quotidian space.
Ultimately, digitally experienced catastrophe allows for the collision of collective and individual spheres. Caruth speaks to this conflict by saying: ‘In trauma, that is, the outside has gone inside without any mediation.’ This displays the interpenetration of the ‘outside’ going ‘inside’ in the wake of twenty-first century trauma, mediated through the screen. By refracting these spheres, the individual and collective sense of temporality is distorted and disturbed through trauma.
III. The Belated Temporality of Trauma
The temporality of self and nation become distorted through the merging of individual and collective trauma. The crisis of personhood which trauma induces extends into perceptions of time; it penetrates the temporality of past, present, and future. My primary texts indicate the impact of cultural traumas spread through media in the twenty-first century by representing the contemporary moment as constituted of fragmented temporalities. Trauma enables the past to insistently recur alongside the present moment, allowing temporalities and realities to become mixed. Traumatisation further facilitates the present moment in becoming belated and elongated in the texts, ranging from an individual to international scale.
A fractured temporality is thematised within my texts as a central aspect of the contemporary moment. This is evidenced in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) as its formal elements display a temporal rupture between the narrative’s pre-9/11 timeframe and the publication year. This aspect of the novel speaks to Cathy Caruth’s comment on a text’s ability to represent trauma, ‘as the narrative of a belated experience’. MYRR explores the temporality of trauma not only through narrative but additionally through form, by belatedly representing 9/11. Caruth explains the return of the traumatic experience as ‘not the signal of the direct experience but, rather, of the attempt to overcome the fact that it was not direct, to attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place’. This suggests that Moshfegh’s decision to situate the novel in the lead-up to 9/11 is to overcome an event which was culturally ‘never fully grasped in the first place’. The text uses this fracture in temporality to build tension in the novel as it hurtles towards 9/11, shown as the narrator senses a great cultural shift is imminent: ‘[s]omething had to be burned and sacrificed. […] when I woke up at last, everything – the whole world – would be new again’ (261). The image of something being ‘burned and sacrificed’ for the creation of a new world suggests that Moshfegh is offering a retrospective view of 9/11 as fundamentally changing how knowledge about trauma, time, and selfhood is received.
The novel further illustrates a fractured temporality through the narrative, as the narrator uses sleep to remove herself from her temporal reality. She demonstrates her ability to control time through her hibernation, as a method of reclaiming some agency in her life: ‘The speed of time varied, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep’ (71). This reveals the narrator’s trauma coping mechanism to be directly tied to the mastering of time and its passing. Moshfegh thus uses a motif of figurative and literal sleeping and awakening to demonstrate this traumatic fragmentation of linear time, as the narrator says ‘when I’d slept enough – I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn’ (51). Specifically, the narrator implies that being ‘reborn’ underscores a command of temporality and the healing of linear time. This is substantiated through Reva’s journey in the text, as the narrator comments that ‘[m]aybe a baby would wake her up’ (209). The motif of being awoken is recalled Reva is ultimately ‘wide awake’ moments before her death on 9/11 (289). Caruth’s explanation of Freud’s ‘death drive’ speaks to the relationship between trauma and a figurative awakening, as she says that ‘[l]ife itself, […] is an awakening out of a ‘death’ for which there was no preparation’. Thereby, Moshfegh reverses this by signalling that death and catastrophe is an awakening out of an apathetic life. The fractured temporality of the contemporary moment is recalled, as the text keeps images of sleep and awakening in proximity to a trauma-mediated temporality to suggest a culture of fragmented time.
Trauma allows the past to repeatedly recur alongside the present, which distorts and disturbs individual and collective notions of temporality. Caruth defines trauma as ‘an overwhelming experience of sudden, catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena’. Crucially, she emphasises the ‘delayed’ and ‘repetitive’ response to the event. These aspects of trauma’s relationship to temporality are prominent in The Body Artist (2001) through the characterisation of Mr. Tuttle. This figure embodies trauma’s ability to allow the past to unexpectedly recur in the present, as his presence blends these planes of temporality. He further represents the novel’s attempt to reconcile the traumatic experience to the sensory passing of time, producing a disjointed version of temporality. Like traumatic experiences, Mr. Tuttle resists categories of representation and speaks the remembered words of Lauren’s late husband. This allows for the interpretation of his character as a manifestation of her trauma through his resistance to temporal linearity and fusion of the past and present.
Time is thereby warped in language, as when Mr. Tuttle speaks in Rey’s voice the past is not simply recalled but reoccurs alongside the present moment and Rey is temporarily resurrected in Mr. Tuttle: ‘It did not seem an act of memory. It was Rey’s voice all right, it was her husband’s tonal soul’ (93). This reveals the past and present moments to coexist on the same temporal plane through Lauren’s grief. Moreover, a confused, mixed sense of time is established in his speech: ‘Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left’ (78). His use of language and combination of the past, present and future tenses contests notions of linear time, as these temporal planes coexist among each other. Lauren significantly says his speech allows her ‘to fall in and out of time’ (78), strengthening the relationship between trauma’s effect on time and language. DeLillo insists on this juncture between trauma’s language and temporality as Lauren imagines ‘a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and [Mr. Tuttle] is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings’ (106). As a manifestation of trauma, Mr. Tuttle’s resistance to representation as a ‘stranger’ to language and time speaks to trauma’s ability to distort and disrupt linear temporality. DeLillo thereby suggests that the traumatic condition, without relationship to language or representation, dissolves the individual relationship to linear time.
Smith similarly presents a mixed sense of temporality in The Accidental (2005), as Magnus illustrates the intrusive repetition of the past alongside the present. His repeated use of the refrain, ‘They took her head. They put it on the other body. They sent it round the email list. Then she killed herself’ (36), demonstrates how trauma allows for the past to violently infiltrate the present. The repetition increasingly lessens into fewer words throughout the chapter: ‘First they. They then. Then they. Then she.’ (38), revealing the dwindling of language in relation to trauma time, as the traumatic event lacks the adequate vocabulary for representation. The fragmented repetition further suggests the disruption of the present as it becomes intercut with the past making a disjointed temporality. Ultimately, DeLillo and Smith respectively demonstrate how trauma allows the past to occur belatedly alongside the present moment, fracturing the individual sense of linear time.
The present moment thus becomes belated and is experienced in constant delay. DeLillo uses this to further represent the dislocation of temporality in the aftermath of traumatic events. Caruth’s trauma theory provides the framework of how time in the novel is mediated through the temporalities of belatedness. The representation of trauma, according to Caruth, ‘insists, precisely, on the inescapability of its belated impact’. The Body Artist concurs with the belated representation of trauma through Lauren’s narrative present and the exploration of her grief. Caruth speaks to this as she claims that traumatic experience ‘suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness’. Indeed, the contrast between traumatic temporal delay and the immediacy granted by technology is explored within the text through the news reporting of global catastrophes. This speaks to the fracturing of time and the present through trauma and globalisation, and indicates the overlapping of the past, present and future. The present in The Body Artist is experienced through repetitive delay as Lauren’s moment is always belated by the past trauma of her husband’s death. Thus, DeLillo demonstrates how trauma de-centres the subject’s ability to narrativize time and disrupts a linear sense of time and progression. Lauren ultimately resigns to a fragmentary sense of time, as through the text she accepts the state of mixed temporalities accompanying trauma. She is split between walking into the present room and walking into her memory: ‘[s]he’d known it was empty all along but was only catching up’ (132). This moment suggests the present moment 'catching up’ as trauma causes it to suffer a constant delay and produces an interrupted form of temporality.
In addition to belatedness, trauma works to immobilise temporality, as the present moment is prolonged in DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). This elongation of the present coincides with Thomas Elsaesser’s definition of trauma as ‘the delay between an event and its (persistent, obsessive) return’. DeLillo expands his exploration of time warped by individual trauma as he shows how this can manifest on a national and even global scale. The text displays how the present moment becomes continuous through trauma as Keith says: ‘I feel like I’m still on the stairs. […] If I live to be a hundred I’ll still be on the stairs’ (57). DeLillo’s use of repeated phrasing works to further emphasise this mode of stasis in traumatic experiences, as a traumatic sense of time is incorporated beyond narrative to the text’s stylistic elements. Thus, Keith shows how the traumatic experience is elongated into the present moment, breaching linear modes of temporality.
The novel holds up for scrutiny the idea of ‘after’ and interrogates how linear time is compromised by the presence of trauma and catastrophe. DeLillo encapsulates this as he writes, ‘[e]verything is now measured by after’ (138), suggesting that the traumatic event causes a rupture and dislocation in the boundaries between the past, present, and future. This is displayed by the reconfigurations of measurement, as the language for which we perceive time is too altered by trauma. This sense of the ‘after’ is established as the text illustrates Keith’s traumatic experience as an almost rebirthing: ‘Keith had been alive for six days now’ (47). This suggests that trauma brings an intangible death, and the survivor continues in a purgatorial state. Trauma produces a purgatorial existence outside of linear time, an argument strengthened when Keith asserts that ‘Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next.’ (10). The merging of tenses creates a thickened sense of time in which past and future combine and coexist in the present moment. Moreover, reconfiguring temporal measurements into ‘before’ and ‘after’ traumatic events is expanded and explicitly nationalised as the text asks: ‘What comes after America?’ (192). Extending this elongated disrupted temporality to the whole of America speaks to the idea of collective trauma and how trauma can vicariously alter temporality on the level of the individual, the national, or the global.
An elongated present moment is embodied by the titular figure of the Falling Man, central to the text. The Falling Man and his performance art physicalises the intrusive repetition of traumatic memories and renders the present moment static. Lianne makes this clear as she says, ‘[The Falling Man] brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump’ (33). Thus, the performance imitates traumatic memories, pulls them into the present and holds them in stasis as he remains in an atemporal state of suspension. The temporality of ‘after’ is further explicitly linked to this figure as DeLillo writes, ‘These were the days after and now the years, a thousand heaving dreams, the trapped man, the fixed limbs, the dream of paralysis, the gasping man, the dream of asphyxiation, the dream of helplessness’ (230). The rupture of temporality into a binary of ‘before’ and ‘after’ is thereby linked to the role of the Falling Man as a reminder of the present in traumatic stasis. Trauma causes temporality to be viewed through the lens of before and after as linear time is broken and repetitions of the past are all-consuming.
Ultimately, digitised reproductions of trauma enable a distortion of linear temporality to both an individual and a transnational extent. The fractured temporality of the contemporary moment speaks to this culture of digital traumatic witnessing, as my primary texts display the fragmented condition of the globalised, traumatised present. The texts further illustrate the way in which trauma delays the present moment, distorted and experienced through a constant belatedness. This present moment consequently becomes elongated and static in the aftermath of digitally transmitted trauma for both the individual and the collective.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the proliferation of technology has fundamentally altered the modes of transmitting and processing trauma. I set out to examine the digital transmission of trauma through images of catastrophe and how this is represented in contemporary fiction. 9/11 and surrounding conflicts are those most memorably experienced by many through a screen, and thus for this project epitomise contemporary modes of experiencing trauma. By including representation of the Iraq War and the UK viewpoint, digital trauma can be examined across a spectrum of mediatised conflict and this allows for a greater perspective into a Western imperial mode of exceptionalism in regard to catastrophe. This perspective comes as these events greatly changed the Western consciousness of catastrophe and brought the ‘elsewhere’ to ‘here’. This is shown in Don DeLillo’s novels The Body Artist (2001), and Falling Man (2007), Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005), and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018). These texts represent a spectrum of temporal and transatlantic perspectives on twenty-first century Western conflict, and challenge received ideas of trauma and information.
Crucial to this interrogation is to look at how my primary texts speak to the power of the image in the contemporary age. The texts’ concordance with concepts of hyperreality, and the Western contemporary mode of aesthetics, demonstrate the authority the image holds and how this allocates media the power to traumatise. This is further demonstrated through the proliferation of the modern image. The constant surrounding presence of media, and images means this becomes the way in which reality is mediated, and thereby scripts responses to traumatic experiences. This enables the vicarious transmission of trauma through the medium of the image and through digital means, and furthermore produces bodily responses to trauma as the image infiltrates the psyche.
As a result of this, individual and collective spheres of trauma collide and converge with one another. These spheres converge as national concerns intertwine with the personal in my primary texts. National trauma becomes confused and manifests itself in conjunction with individual trauma. Through a process of selfhood refashioning itself to correspond to the fragmentary condition of globalised capitalism, the texts narrate the experience of becoming lost in the global moment. The motif of sex verging on the space of catastrophe illustrates this intersection of public and private spheres of traumatisation. Moreover, catastrophe infiltrates domestic spaces through channels of digital media, allowing the global realm to become indistinguishable from the quotidian and family space.
Thus, the belated temporality of trauma is refashioned in the contemporary age of digital traumatisation as something seen in both the individual and the national mindset. My primary texts coalesce in their presentation of the twenty-first century as a temporally fragmented epoch, as our contemporary moment is fractured through new and more immediate forms of transmitting individual and collective trauma. Consequently, the past runs alongside the present moment repeatedly and violently through repetitious media cycles, allowing for a belated experience of the present. This aspect of trauma theory is translated to the digital world and reflected in contemporary fiction. Moreover, the experiencing of the present moment is distorted by trauma as it becomes elongated and stagnant. This occurs as linear categories of temporal structures such as ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ collide into one another and blend into traumatic temporality.
My research project’s significance extends beyond the academic and into the practical as it examines how individuals and collectives are impacted by normalised aspects of contemporary culture and transmission. By looking to literature to represent and reflect on changes and progressions to contemporary practices of trauma, my project asks for greater inquiry through the literary tradition into the impacts of modern traumatisation, and how this affects paradigms of the image, selfhood, and time. Ultimately, catastrophe on a screen and representations of digitised trauma in twenty-first century literature enable us to examine how models of trauma should be adapted to fit the requirements of the contemporary moment.
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