The transgenerational transmission and poetics of trauma : a fictional-conceptual manifesto

‘The Transgenerational Transmission and Poetics of Trauma: A Fictional– Conceptual Manifesto’ is a non-traditional PhD thesis, advancing both by practice-led research and scholarly-led practice. It explores the transgenerational transmission and poetics of trauma creatively and theoretically by way of a poetic prose and experimental novel titled ‘Luna Alaska’ (PhD thesis, UWS, 2013), and a five chapter dissertation in which I present my hypothesis of ‘the poetics of trans-trauma’ (trans-trauma being my abbreviation for the familial transgenerational transmission of trauma and its relations with cultural and collective trauma; poetics refers to the writing of trans-trauma). I particularise my thesis question from a Dori Laub quote in which he cites massive psychic trauma as ‘a record that has yet to be made’ (Felman and Laub 1992, 57). This thesis addresses the expanded question of how and why a writer chronicles a transgenerational record yet to be made, and how such a record illuminates the processes of transmission and the cultural conditions and collective trauma associated with it, thereby becoming writing as a social force of political import. My aim was to experimentally demonstrate the ways in which a record of this kind might be chronicled in the novel as well as to theoretically substantiate the basis for that chronicle in the dissertation. My interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary intervention straddles the fields of trauma theory, affect theory and writing, drawing on research conducted within literature, literary and feminist theories, continental philosophy and cultural psychoanalytic theory. The present day research methodology for this thesis was entirely text-based, involving creative practice, textual analysis and interpretation. My textual analysis is focused on four texts: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Hélène’s Hyperdream (2009), Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (1992), and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1991). I also engage with some critical reflection of my own novel ‘Luna Alaska’. ‘Luna Alaska’ was constructed on an historical foundation of memoir and lived/therapeutic experience. Conducting this research with a practice-led methodology involved working with lived experience as a critical research strategy, which enabled a richer and more organic examination than research in a traditional scholarly manner alone would have allowed, and, as I maintain in the dissertation chapters, this writerly embodiment of traumatic experience is fundamental to the practice of the poetics of trans-trauma. In its depiction of the transmission of trauma between three generations of women in an Australian family over the last decades of the twentieth century, ‘Luna Alaska’ charts third generation tribulations through a fluid narrative structure that shifts back and forth in time and tense, reflecting the temporal nature of traumatic memory and the challenges of attempting to understand it. Guided by her therapist, a maturing Luna struggles to put her family history into perspective by reviewing material from her old journals, written during early adulthood when undiagnosed symptoms of chronic trauma first manifested, triggering a descent into addiction and instability — a rapid downward spiral in which the pleasures and passions of poetry, music and a heady, turbulent affair with an ageing underground musician are brought undone by the sudden onset of panic attacks, obsessive jealousy, compulsive and dissociative states, substance abuse and phobias. Luna’s post-traumatic symptoms appear shortly after she leaves home in an attempt to escape the relationship between herself, her beautiful, narcissistic and sex-addicted mother, her frigid and glamorous grandmother — the daughter of a shellshocked World War 1 veteran and binge drinker — and her mysterious and beloved Burmese step-grandfather, who lives at the edge of this feminine triangle, gradually becoming the focus of a torturous suspicion that increasingly plagues Luna as she both loses (in the past), and regains (in the present), her grip on reality. Though the narrative focuses on Luna’s story it also gestures well beyond it. Luna’s inner-city milieu acts as a metaphor for the psychic labyrinth of the self and the family with its layered and multifaceted dynamics, highlighting the way networks of trauma are formed both within and outside the biological family, while her remote life in Alaska acts as a metaphor for the exile of the post-traumatic experience. Through its rendering in poetic experimentation the novel challenges solipsistic assumptions around trauma, suggesting that we are all implicated in its transgenerational transmission and the complex dynamics between internal and external, subjective and social, realities, and that we are each called to realise its potential for transformation. It is my contention that the production of the novel bears out the findings I present in my hypothesis of the poetics of trans-trauma. Having positioned the poetics of trans-trauma in relation to the writing practice known as écriture feminine,1 exploring the similarities and differences between the two via the theories of Cixous and Julia Kristeva, and having examined the poetics of trans-trauma in terms of ethics, drawing on Spinoza’s affect theory (1982), I engage in a critical reflection of ‘Luna Alaska’ in light of two theories of hauntology: Abraham, Torok and Rand’s psychoanalytic concept of the ‘phantom’ (1994) and Derrida’s deconstructionist figure of the ‘spectre’ (1994). Finally I map out further implications and bring these lines of enquiry together in the framework of ‘cyclical haunting’. In evaluating the above I confirm my findings in affirmation of a particular practice of poetics capable of chronicling a transgenerational record yet to be made that illuminates the processes of transmission and the cultural conditions and collective trauma associated with it, and that demonstrates traumatic writing as a social force of political import