Essay: Trauma and Modernism

1. Mental illness as a social construct

I do agree that mental illness is variable rather than constant, that it is a function of many elements in the ever-changing cultural and social discourse. Definitions of mental illness are also influenced greatly by scientific, but mostly para-scientific and pseudo-scientific discourse. That is, psychologists and psychiatrists feign to know much more than they do about the workings of the brain and mind. However, along with the negative aspect of social stigmatizing and overmedicating, the plurality of mental illnesses is not entirely a negative phenomenon. Women who were once burned at the stake as witches are today considered to have schizophrenia; people who were lazy or stupid now have learning disabilities; post-partum depression is an acknowledged phenomenon and there are rather more humane resources available to these new mothers. In addition, the profusion of mental illnesses results in (almost) everyone having some mental handicap or another, or at least a therapist. Again, though laughable, this phenomenon is not all bad: it alleviates the stigma that was historically often the most damaging counterpart of mental illness.

Also, actual change in mental states within society should not be entirely dismissed as a frivolous phenomenon instigated by psychologists. It is not impossible to conceive that with drastic changes to our diet via artificial augmentation of food, and increasing prevalence of white collar behaviors like workaholicism, people really have reason to be more depressed today than they were thirty and eighty years ago. It may be that grieving is more acute because of a social support system that has become digitalized and effectively fallen into disrepair.

2. Trauma on a cultural scale

When considering personal trauma, the bounds of the phenomenon are quite clear. An event, external to a particular individual, causes a change in that particular individual in such a way that his behavior or perception is altered. The subject or receptor of the trauma is clearly defined: a single individual.

What is the meaning, then, of trauma on a "cultural scale"? Is it a redundant concept that simply points to multiple instances of individual trauma in a small period of time? Is there a threshold fraction of the population above which a certain society is claimed to have experienced "cultural trauma"? Such consideration of the phenomenon is meaningless.

For the concept of "cultural trauma" to be significant, the receptor of this trauma has to be defined. For this, the essence of culture, or society, as a body capable of change must be examined. The vehicle of cultural trauma is, perhaps, the discourse, or discursive formations, or trends in cultural production and socio-political formations. 

Cultural trauma is certainly associated with large amounts of individual traumas. However, while in individual trauma the receptor is a body in which changes in behavior can be (relatively) easily gauged, assessing cultural trauma calls for an abstraction of these concepts and their application to the much more complex, and less discernible, system of culture and society themselves.

3. The collapse of the meta-narrative and the subsequent return to self (and Descartes)

Motivations for fighting in the First World War were rather weak. Soldiers entered the war with a vague appetite for thrill, violence, danger and glory. Siegfried Sassoon's "Memoirs of an Infantry Officer" illustrates the initial excitement regarding warfare and the subsequent disillusionment: "I wanted to be able to say that I had seen 'the horrors of war'; and here they were, nearly three days old." (Sassoon)

Suddenly, after the experience of actual war, and constant confrontation with mortality, the desire for thrill falls away, leaving behind a vague emptiness and stunned confusion:

I thought of the huntsman walking out in his long white coat with the hounds; of Parson Colwood pulling up weeds in his garden till tea-time; of Captain Huxtable helping his men get in the last load of hay while a shower of rain moved along the blurred Weald below his meadows. It was for all that, I supposed, that I was in the front-line with soaked feet, trench-mouth, and feeling short of sleep. (Sassoon)

The reasons Sassoon's narrator gives for the narrator are pathetically weak. They are certainly not adequate in justifying the horrors of the trenches or in accounting for the massive trauma experienced after warfare.

Robert Graves' "Goodbye to All That", too, betrays the vacuity of the war. "…We all agreed that regimental pride remained the strongest moral force that kept a battalion going as an effective fighting unit; contrasting it particularly with patriotism and religion". Religion and patriotism, the official reasons for the war, were irrelevant to the soldiers as motives for warfare. "Regimental pride" became the motivation for continued fighting, and ironically so: regimental pride would not have existed without a regiment, which was formed for a purpose in which the soldiers do not believe any longer.

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, both in style and thematic, reflects the fragmentation and disillusionment caused by the war. Most striking, however, is the breaking down of structures at the level of the sentence and paragraph known as "free-indirect style". The literary style is considered to have emerged as a response to the First World War. The horrors of the war necessitated a reinvention and reinterpretation of language because existing modes of expression were insufficient in describing these.

In 1641, René Descartes published his "Meditations on First Philosophy". In its six volumes, he purported to demonstrate philosophically that God exists, and that the soul is immortal. This undertaking was a response to the threats to his worldview by atheists, who questioned the premises of Christianity. In his quest for these truths, he felt that his senses were deceptive. Refraction of light (as it is known today), for instance, caused a straight stick half-submerged in water to appear bent. Thus, two very basic paradigms of Descartes' world views were at risk: his religion and his senses, on which he was dependent to an extreme.

The strategy used by Descartes to defend his worldview was to strip his world down to its bare essentials. He strove to arrive at a truth that was irrefutable. Descartes began to cast doubt on everything around him, including his senses, for these were only mediators between his surroundings and his mind, and he could not be certain of the verity of the interpretations of his senses. The one thing which he could not doubt was his own self. The more he tried to doubt his own existence, the more firmly he established himself as a doubting being. He became certain that he was a doubting, thinking being, and therefore that he existed. This affront to the things Descartes held dear caused him to use his existence as a grounding point from which he could reconstruct his worldview. 

A similar attempt is reflected in Woolf's free-indirect* style. The horrors of the war caused in those who experienced it a fundamental uncertainty of purpose, a doubt of all that they had thought to be true – the glory and excitement of war. The solution is a return to immersion in the self. Looking outward for ontology and epistemology, for world views or paradigms no longer sufficed, and so the styles of stream of consciousness and the free-indirect style emerged, as an indication of a return to the exploration of the individual mind. 

She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her, it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that. (Woolf)

The mind, the self's own thoughts, became the grounding point for a new worldview. Even the self is not completely fixed, but it must be explored and experienced so that rehabilitation and healing might be made possible.

Image by Jan Canty