On Hannah Pittard: Narrative and Trauma

Abstract: I provide a brief critique of Hannah Pittard’s book presentation for Listen to Me; I further use Pittard’s work as a basis to analyze the role of “trauma” in narrative structures more generally.

After getting gold fiducials placed in my pancreas at Hopkins yesterday (in prep for stereotactic radiation), and after the anesthesia wore off, I went to Politics and Prose to see Hannah Pittard read from her new book, Listen to Me. If watching Jennifer Close (whose new book, The Hopefuls, has its moments of genuine Washingtonian satire, but ultimately falls a little flat) the night before was like watching someone who was self-aware, witty, thoughtful and confident, Pittard was the exact opposite: turning virtually everything into a forced joke (almost all of which fell dead-flat; a compulsive behavior that bordered on the over-defensive), she seemed deeply uncomfortable in her own skin, overplaying the interview format—and her position viz. the audience—to an embarrassing degree. Her own experience losing her adoptive father to pancreatic cancer seemed naturally rough, and I sympathize for all the obvious human and personal reasons, but ultimately it seemed to go without much reflection, only the sign-post for a type-of pain that she tried to subtlety leverage into authority. To this end, the theme she stressed in her talk about her book—trauma in relationships, or, rather, how trauma can impact a relationship—is interesting and well-met, but its actual execution a bit hollow: she essentially asks the question, “what happens when one person has experienced trauma, and another has not?” more specifically: “what happens when the latter asks the former to “move on” or “get over it”? While I again believe this is a topic deeply worth exploring, I also think its familiarity hampers its actual literary efficacy—that is, I think that we might “explain this away” without much difficulty. This type of behavior might simply be written off as the problem of isolated consciousness, or what Sontag called “the problem of pain.” I think, too, of Wittgenstein’s “beetle in a box.” That character B, who has not experienced the trauma, might ask character A, who has, to “move on” from mourning/grieving/reliving the trauma—well, does this really tell us anything new about trauma, relationships, etc.? It announces that character B is naturally isolated from character A; that, on account of this isolation, character B lacks a patience appropriate to match character A’s expectations—and this is of course to say nothing of the objective legitimacy of character A’s mourning, or what legitimate vs. illegitimate forms of mourning might look like (here, I would note that human mourning in response to trauma is a wide, but still limited, spectrum of accepted responses-but that it is a spectrum where the response, even if it does not conform to one’s own, in another is usually recognized and respected: “let them mourn as they please” discloses an oddly privileged realm of human empathy, permitted freedom, and recognized pluralism). The point remains: Pittard’s focus on trauma amounts to a real-world response of: “well, that’s shitty, but humanly understandable, of character B to treat character A like that; I suppose character B isn’t that patient of a person, and is unwilling to alter themselves in response to character A’s needs; character A should probably find someone new, as hard as any serious break-up is.”

Pittard’s employment of trauma as a literary device seems to grant us a limited window into less the nature of trauma, and more the general problem that people are isolated from one another, that this isolation remains the root of complications and miscommunications; and that not everyone is necessarily compatible/right for everyone else (it takes a specific type of partner willing to “deal with” the traumatic baggage of another). Given my own experience with pancreatic cancer (a subject I did not broach in the talk), I think a much more unusual and compelling and original take on trauma—one which would draw out its status as an effective literary trope—would consider it from the opposite angle of Pittard, exploring the role of trauma in human relations from the standpoint of those who have experienced trauma and are relatively unaffected, while those around them are—my cancer, which has demanded very little from me psychologically, has demanded much from my family and closest friends, and thus offers something of a model. The question: rather than how others fail to empathize with the traumatized on their own terms (they are not close enough to care; they do not have the patience to listen to the story of the infirmed/traumatized; etc.), which is easy, low-hanging fruit, the real question concerns how it is that trauma is 1. Dealt with by some people with ease, and 2. Transferred to others via an overabundance of/overactive empathy.

The more general point is not to replace Pittard’s employment with this one, but to exaggerate how much more substantial her contribution might have been through an artistic comparison of the different valences/manifestations/definitions of trauma[1], and further to begin to explore the relation between a literary theme/trope—trauma—and its appropriate treatment/deployment in the context of a given story—more specifically, what it means to treat a theme “on its own terms,” to draw it out not as a proxy for a more general and average problematic (e.g. how Pittard makes the exploration of trauma really an exploration of isolation), but rather as a unique form unto itself. Behind all of this is my perennial concern regarding the role of the artist’s self-erasure, the art of selecting form-substance (judgment in literary form), and the practice of letting a subject speak for itself, on its “own terms” and “as is”—the corresponding ethics might link David Foster Wallace’s idea of attention to Heidegger’s idea of care and Woolf’s notion of art as self-erasure.

Relatedly, I am reminded how there exist certain cultural “works,” such as John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, that I would describe as “emotional gore,” since their use of an inherently dramatic device (cancer, for instance) is so exhaustive of the material’s natural capacity to inspire discomfort and sadness that it shares more with Tarantino’s unique brand of ultra-violent tragicomedy than it does any of the more robust and traditional “dramas” it aspires to emulate. And, like Tarantino’s work, one can only respond appropriately to the absurdity of both not with tears, but laughter. “Trauma” here hollows itself of substance, subsuming the narrative to a pre-given emotional apparatus rather than subsuming any emotional “force” to the narrative—the “story” becomes merely a matter of manipulating emotional shocks, removed from any and all “messiness” of lived experience, abstracted and made the autonomous playthings of your average Sophist. Here is the great difference between the originality of a true artist and the gimmicks of a quack, a trickster or illusionist. Green’s works, as all overtly sentimental works of similar nature, are utterly cloying, low-hanging and over-ripe fruit—saccharine Pharisees of the soul.

[1] I here think of trauma studies and especially the work of Avital Ronnell.