Against Against Trauma 2

Parul Sehgal makes some points I agree with in her “Critic at Large” column in the January 3/10, 2022 issue of The New Yorker: yes, the trauma explanation of character development in narrative fiction is overdone, and, yes, good writing creates an air of mystery; it’s subtle, complex, and presents individuals whose stories we can believe in. It’s also true that not everyone has the same reaction to trauma: yes, post-traumatic growth is possible (though her assertion that it’s the norm is questionable).

In fact, I am an example of post-traumatic growth.

But along the way, like Will Self in his screed against trauma in Harper’s, and whose name she drops and whose work hers largely replicates, Sehgal manages to be utterly dismissive of the lives and real experiences of actual trauma survivors. Like Self, she goes so far as to question trauma’s legitimacy while complaining about the trauma theory of Cathy Caruth, implying, ironically in true postmodern fashion, that trauma is a modern invention, the product of obscure 19^th century medical musings about train travel (to which again, I react with a visceral “WTF???”) that just happened to have ballooned in the 20^th century, by some historical accident, in order to explain away the experiences of war veterans and survivors of sexual abuse.

Sehgal traipses through the by now expected avenues of Freud and the DSM’s definition of PTSD—which she gets wrong, by the way: the current DSM does not acknowledge traumatic events as etiology but defines PTSD in purely symbolic terms. Sehgal does the de rigueur bashing of Bessel van der Kolk and the standard invocation of Shakespeare, all while studiously avoiding the voices of the traumatized except to expressly dismiss calls for the online collection of their stories.

For traumatized people like me, this comes as no surprise. Sehgal is just yet another prominent and well-regarded person brushing off our experiences or redefining them in ways that suit her purposes. She doesn’t speak for me any more than the DSM committee does or Bessel van der Kolk does or the writers of Ted Lasso do. The fact that trauma is having its day in popular culture right now is no reason to deny its reality; the fact that most of the writing about trauma is bad is no reason to throw the whole concept away.

Indeed, there are whole genres dedicated to unrealistic depictions of romantic relationships and science and war, but their existence does not mean that people never fall in love or do groundbreaking research or engage in combat, still less that those are modern inventions—just read the Greeks! Sure, not every scripted drama should use trauma as character development, just as not every home decorating show shouldn’t feature shiplap; for a while they all did, though, and, the case remains, shiplap is an actual thing.

Amid Sehgal’s calls for more subtlety, she also commits the fallacy at the heart of most explanations of trauma by the untraumatized, vacillating between “Oh, poor baby!” at one moment and “Just get over yourself!” at another. (To her discredit, Sehgal settles on the latter.) The truth is even more subtle and complex than Sehgal seems to be able to understand: you can be both forever changed by trauma and you can grow from it. I have spent 45 years learning from my traumatic experiences, but I also still get triggered. These seemingly paradoxical responses might make for good writing, but they wouldn’t be believed, either by editors at major publications like The New Yorker or by critics like Sehgal.

This paradox is only one of many reasons I’ve spent those 45 years avoiding dealing with “my trauma” (scare quotes Sehgal’s) in my writing; another (maybe more important) one is that trauma doesn’t define me as a person or as an artist. That Sehgal would approve of that is immaterial; her own opinion is invalidated, in my mind, by her dismissive tone and lack of a desire to understand what the lived experiences of trauma are really like.

Imagine, if you will, if an “able-bodied” (scare quotes mine, this time) writer presumed to know everything about the life and experiences of a wheelchair user or, as is the case here, merely dismissed these experiences as a cheap way to develop a character. It wouldn’t work— neither The New Yorker nor Harper’s would never publish it. Yet that is precisely what Sehgal and Self do in their essays on trauma.

We should also make a distinction Sehgal fails to make: legitimate criticism of an overused trope is one thing, but the kinds of trauma stories people share or create for therapeutic purposes are not intended to be great art, and they should not be read that way. That they do not rise to the level of complexity and sophistication she expects is no fault against them, and faulting them on artistic terms is simply cruel to those creating them. They exist solely for the purposes of healing and validation by the individuals who create them and by their peers, not for critics to leverage in lamentation over the way a trauma subplot has hijacked her favorite show on Apple TV .

Here’s my take on it: if you’ve never experienced trauma—and I mean real wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-screaming trauma, not just the a-sad-thing-once-happened-to-me-once trauma—don’t write about it. That’s my advice if you’re a critic, a journalist, a novelist, a poet, a show-runner, a researcher, a therapist.

Just stay the fuck away from it.

If for whatever reason you feel you have to, privilege the voices of actually traumatized people, consult them in a genuine way in the creation of your work. Bring them in. It will be scary, yes, but anything less merely perpetuates the damage.

On Reading the Long Novel

by Lael Ewy

When one references War and Peace, one does so in order to invoke a cliché. War and Peace is the quintessentially long novel. It is known for that and for nearly nothing else—certainly not as something anyone would actually read.

In fact, the cliché itself is really not about the length of the book; the cliché is about the impossibility of reading it, and the disdain the speaker has for long novels.

For these reasons, among others, I set out to actually read it.

I suppose people hear the call to engage in physical challenges such as running marathons to prove something to themselves (or others), or the call to climb mountains “because [they are] there,” but I set out to read War and Peace in order to try to restore reality to it. For at least one living member of the species, it would become a novel again.

Since you probably won’t read it, here’s what you need to know from someone who has:

1. It’s good. For the most part. It’s not the novel you’d think it should be at least in part because novels weren’t what you now think they are when Tolstoy wrote it. Hundreds of pages are devoted to the analysis of the individual’s place in history and the minutiae of the War of 1812. The latter was of great importance to his expected audience, and it might still be of interest to scholars of military history. The former should be of interest to anyone with a pulse. But

2. no doubt all that would annoy contemporary readers. I honestly have no idea what contemporary readers want out of a novel these days. Apparently, they want to be terrified by the prospect of a dystopian future. To me, this seems silly given that the prospect of a dystopian present is quite frightening enough. However,

3. it’s not a “hard” read. There’s merely a lot of it there. Tolstoy, as is typical of the great Russian writers, draws characters who are detailed and complex, so if you put the book down for a while, it’s easy to pick back up. Like with old friends, you may not recall every detail of their lives since you saw them last, but you’ll always remember who they are.

Few western European writers create characters who are this fully realized. Perhaps Dickens’ main characters, but he also populated his book with caricatures in a way that Tolstoy never would. Even soldiers we meet for only a few pages seem like real people we might know. In the US, maybe Hurston Henry James, or Melville (at his best) were capable of such things, as, perhaps, the greatest of the French. 

4. It’s a romance, historical novel, and philosophical treatise. And that’s probably why it’s so long. The historical figures, including Napoleon himself, as the other characters, come across as actual people. The book’s philosophy, while I disagree with it, must be defended, and the novel almost achieves that as well. To a degree, the characters themselves might contradict the philosophy it seems to promote, but perhaps Tolstoy intended that, pitting the lived experiences of the humans against the cynicism and determinism of the narrator.

At any rate, it’s ambitious. That’s in its favor overall, but it also means that there is a lot for the book to do.

5. Reading it is familiar if you’re used to 19h century novels and philosophy. Most people these days aren’t, I guess, and maybe that’s why they should read more 19^th century novels and philosophy.

Reading War and Peace will change your orientation to time, people, and thought, and that’s a good thing. The thinking that most people are able to do is severely compromised by the media they have chosen to consume. We’re unable to think long thoughts because we seldom encounter them. We’re distracted because we surround ourselves with distractions. And consume media we do: popping tweets like we do Skittles and gnawing video games like endless bags of chips. This has reinforced our inability to think in a coherent way. We may have deep maps in our minds of a million virtual adventures, but if we’re unable to appreciate the lives of those we believe are not like us—the Russians of 200 years ago or a Black laundress in the Jim Crow South—maybe we’re wasting our time. Perhaps we’ve “escaped” during the time we’ve played, but we haven’t really prepared ourselves to make the world we inevitably re-enter a better place.

On Ward C

Fiction by Doug G.



Again the click-clack and the doors open.

Voices down the hall and it don’t smell like pee.

It don’t smell so bad here as you might think, though sometimes it smells real bad.

Sometimes, I think I smell it—blood, dirt, gunpowder, what-have-you.

I can smell the bad coffee now, and my stomach goes whooom it wants it so bad, but a few more doors need to click-clack open before all that can happen.

A couple guys got a puzzle going, and maybe I’ll help them after breakfast and group. They got ladies here, too, and I see them sometimes when we do classes, like we have one on anger management and there’s some in there.

One day, the girl with the green hair was wearing a space kitten t-shirt—like it had on it a kitten in space with Saturns and stuff and glitter on it that I guess they let her keep.

Cracked me up, for sure, but I knew I had to raise my hand to say anything—them are the rules—and I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I hushed up.

Later on I had a laugh.

Sometimes, I think about Greengrass and how we used to have horses there we could keep and pet. The work wasn’t all that bad—I don’t mind working, like I keep sayin’—and the horses were always right there, waiting for us.

I turned a hitch at Greengrass, then on the street. Then here.

John, he’s my therapist, is not so bad as everyone says he is. And the psychiatrist sees me once a month or so and adjust my meds.

Which I guess I’m doing better now.

Once, they brought in some people from the outside for a class. All the people they brought said they were like us, but they didn’t look too much like it.

There was an older gentleman who didn’t say much, and a bigger lady with a pretty face and a black lady, and they talked about how they rebuilt their lives. And the old man said he was better now that he got his correct diagnosis and the black lady started to cry when the topic of hope came up.

And it hurt to see that. She seemed so nice.

She had nice clothes—real put together—and good hair and a badge on. Not just the visitor badge, but one from where she worked outside. I bet she smelled good too.

It’s the smells I miss: nice perfumes from the business ladies downtown or good coffee or even the street smells like the exhaust smells for the parking garage where I used to flop or the asphalt or bricks.

See, I got my hitch, and it’s time I got to to do, then John says involuntary for a while and then, John says, “Well, we’ll see.”

He says that a lot—doesn’t want to promise anything—and sometimes that gets under my skin a little and sometimes not.

Once, when we were all still kids—there were five of us kids—and we were living in that trailer outside Wamego, and we find a hole full of baby bunnies,and we pulled them out. We was just playing around with them, not hurting nothing. We was just kids, but I remember the little rabbits and how they felt just struggling against my hand and how soft.

Then Big Mike came out the back door and yelled at us and the bunnies just start jumping everywhere and we all ran back inside.

Next day, the hole was empty. The bunnies were gone, and Sam said they were dead or got eaten by coyotes ‘cause they smelled like people now, not bunnies, and their momma would never take them back.

Sam was a liar. A natural-born liar.

But he might of been right about that.

Next day, Big Mike was gone, too, and Catherine, too, but I could see she’d busted up her compact and dropped her lipstick in the toilet because if Big Mike was going to have her all to hisself, he was going to have her “warts and all.” Which is how she described herself when she was in curlers and her bathrobe in the IGA and had been crying all night.

I didn’t hear her say it that night, but I knew she would. I didn’t see she ever had any warts, neither, but she always tried real hard with us kids.

She left a note and everything, with the social services number on it, and I bet Big Mike beat her bad for that too, but it was all she could do, and I knew she wouldn’t just up and leave us and not do it.

We lost the note, but I hung on to the Bic pen laid next to that note for a long, long time.

John says I got PTSD, and he wants to do some eye thing with me, but the psych says I’m schizo, and he won’t ever budge.

Once I met a guy in here got TD real bad, been on Haldol so long he could barely talk, but he could tell you every Top 40 hit for every week from, I swear, 1956 to 2104, when he says his radio broke and nobody to fix it.

He could sing some of ‘em, too, but ‘cause of the TD, he’d sing it real bad. But, thing of it is, nobody here made fun of him. It’s like that in here, since we all know that in a few years, who knows? That could be us.

The other day, I heard one of the ladies had a baby in here. They had to rush her over to the clinic as if they couldn’t see it coming. But then, she wasn’t due for a long time yet, I guess, and they had her so wacked out on Risperdal that she couldn’t tell them she was havin’ contractions, then her water broke, and all hell broke loose.

She’d just cry anyway when anybody asked her anything at all.

So they rush her over, and a OBGYN from town rushes in in the middle of the night, and he gets in past security faster than anything, is what I heard.

But I never heard what happened to the kid.

What could happen to you when you’re born and your mom’s in a place like this?