Post-traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties

by Kirby Farrell

According to Kirby Farrell, the concept of trauma has shaped some of the central narratives of the 1990s―from the war stories of Vietnam vets to the video farewells of Heaven's Gate cult members, from apocalyptic sci-fi movies to Ronald Reagan's memoir, Where's the Rest of Me? In Post-traumatic Culture , Farrell explores the surprising uses of trauma as both an enabling fiction and an explanatory tool during periods of overwhelming cultural change. Farrell's investigation begins in late Victorian England, when physicians invented the clinical concept of "traumatic neurosis" for an era that routinely categorized modern life as sick, degenerate, and stressful. He sees similar developments at the end of the twentieth century as the Vietnam war and feminism returned the concept to prominence as "post-traumatic stress syndrome." Seeking to understand the psychological dislocation associated with these two periods, Farrell analyzes conflicts produced by dramatic social and economic changes and suddenly expanded horizons. He locates parallels between the cultural fantasies of the 1890's in novels and stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde, and novels and films of the 1990's that explore such issues as child sexual abuse, domestic violence, unemployment, racism, and apocalyptic rage. In their dependence on late-Victorian models, the cultural narratives of 1990s America imply a crisis of "storylessness" deeply implicated in the sense of injury that haunts the close of the twentieth century.

440 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 1998

Reviews

[Kali · Rating 2 out of 5]

An unsuccessful attempt to create a grand theory of "post-traumatic culture." The first 150 pages are the best, and focus on readings of Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells and Oscar Wilde. These clearly reflect the author's interest and are well-supported by primary readings. Farrell takes a psychoanalytical approach and, like many such critics, he spins his rather narrow observations into a skein of weak thread out of which he tries to weave a net to catch a broad and arbitrary range of "examples" that "prove" his thesis: that our current culture has a "post-traumatic theme".

The largest fault of the book is that it does not offer an orderly presentation of materials designed to lead one gracefully from his assumptions to his conclusions. Sources seem, at minimum, idiosyncratic, and, at worst, entirely random. For such a broad ranging study, he refers again and again to the same critics, all of whom share both his psychoanalytic bent, and his own practice of shallow sourcing. Statistical claims are not based on solid peer-review or government-collected data, but by newspaper articles in, for example, the Toronto Star, leading the reader to believe that the book was not so much researched as noticed in passing. Other footnotes seem random: he footnoted a book that I wrote, for instance, but the page he noted has nothing to do with the claim he makes; in fact, I never wrote anything at all about the topic he references.

Even within the psychoanalytic tradition, his references are sadly lacking, and there's no evidence he knows Alice Miller or Klaus Theweleit exist, despite the fact that he incessantly psychoanalyzes Hitler. One lengthy section of the book is devoted to attacking two children's books he probably discovered in his daughter's library: Virginia Hamilton's Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, and Cynthia Grant's Uncle Vampire. Uncle Vampire is about incest, and Farrell has made his feelings about incest survivors quite clear in his introduction, when he describes a book as having been written by "incest survivors" (his quotation marks, not mine). He also makes it clear that he sees contemporary culture as "manage[ing] competition while insidiously fostering self-disablement." Self-disablement, in his eyes, is being "shattered" by trauma -- the shattering is optional, apparently, and a victim could resist it if they had been given proper instruction in a more ideal culture. In his eyes, Sweet Whispers is an insidious story of Oedipal reenactment in which the abused child displaces the mother without -- gasp! -- having a proper Father figure to turn to. Forcing a psychoanalytic reading from a book that clearly emanates from another tradition is offensive enough. Buying into the myth that the novel supports the so-called pathology of the black family (long discredited as a racist trope itself) is even worse. His final, deeply paternalistic admonition that the main character (and, apparently, all black people today) "badly needs to live in the present in order to forge a role for herself in a demanding society," echoes all of the "put the past behind you" arguments of the right against reparation for victims of any sort.

As an insight into the mind of a contemporary psychoanalytic critic, this is fascinating. As a book about the nature of trauma, it is almost useless.