Describing trauma

Toni Morrison has said that the only way to depict a moment of trauma is not to. Trauma is the absence of words. It is the darkness of terror. She also uses symbols and time - think of Beloved or Song of Solomon. The act of killing one's newborn baby - slitting its throat - rather than allowing her to grow up a slave, tells the reader how traumatic the experience of being a slave must be as words never could.

Trauma, in this sense, is objectively traumatic - not the divorce of one's parents, the loss of one's home and other possessions, a break-up. This is violent trauma, unspeakable trauma. One person exerting power over another. Abuse. The kind of thing that pushes you to your knees, puts a gun in your mouth and explodes a hole in the back of your head.

Other authors choose other ways (and there are as many ways as there are means of trauma - I chose an imaginable terror, death (the true absence) and shock - an amateur tactic).

Czeslaw Milosz (whose book The Seizure of Power instantly took the field when I read it - see archived post) also chose absence - showing the movement of the troops and a brief moment when they crawl through besieged and ravaged Warsaw. He also uses another common tactic: bureaucracy and guilt. This last shook me because, as a regular reader will know, one of the main characters was me - his doubts were mine.

At the moment I am reading Where the Air is Clear by Carlos Fuentes. I am less than 50 pages in, but absorbed in the brutality of his prose. From the first pages, he shocks you with violence - violence of words and common, daily, urban traumas. Until you are carried along by them, expect them.

Then comes the musings of one of his characters, a preening fatcat who was once part of the revolutionary movement. The style of this monologue is immediately conspicuous. It begins simply and uses relatively (for Fuentes) subtle descriptions. Then... The things he describes, paragraph after paragraph, are unspeakable.

Yet, he says them.

This monologue is maddening - the nostalgia of this preening, fat, content man, whose brothers gave their lives in the most horrific ways. What is this but another approach to trauma?

I can't imagine what Fuentes has waiting for me next. But, like Milosz, I know my own sense of culpability - guilt and doubt - is about to be exploited until I experience the trauma of standing by while others suffer.