Entry 06: Trauma Narratives
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
A singular love story detailing, with microscopic precision, the emotional landscape of the main protagonist, Jude St. Francis, and his attempts to make sense of his troubled existence. Jude has endured a horrific childhood. In college, the arc of his life changes when he finds a core group of friends who will nurture him through the highs and lows of his lifetime. At times the author switches to the perspectives of these supporting characters, but Jude is the main focus here. Jude’s wretched childhood cannot help but shape the adult he becomes. Yanagihara shows how pain sears itself into the psyche, how Jude’s pain endures throughout the course of his life, and how this trauma alters his conception of himself. Jude has also sustained physical traumas, violent afflictions that mark his body and impact his ever-fluctuating health. This is a nuanced portrayal of a differently-abled protagonist, and A Little Life vividly imagines this life, showing how it evolves over time. The progression of time is important here, and Yanagihara’s novel is one of leisurely scope; it takes 700 pages to do her subject justice. Her subject matter, trauma and its aftermath, won’t appeal to all readers. For those who are willing to embark on this journey, her sensitive portrayal will resonate and linger. The day after I wrote this, Parul Sehgal’s “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” appeared in The New Yorker. Where Sehgal finds Jude to be a “chalk outline,” I find him well developed — although her complaint about the passivity of certain trauma protagonists is well taken.
Jude’s childhood trauma is revealed periodically as flashbacks. Raised in a monastery or religious order, the Brothers entrusted with Jude’s care beat and abuse him; these Brothers are so toxic they would almost strain credulity — except that my mother, raised in a backwater town, has similar stories of nuns shouting after an orphaned girl.
Star: A unique kind of love is on offer here in the enduring relationship between Jude and Willem. Here’s Yamahira’s summary: “[T]hey were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.”
Star: There are no quick fixes. Therapy isn’t the answer; notably, one of Jude’s childhood abusers was a psychiatrist. Willem, too, questions “the sinister pedantry of therapy…” Yamahira doesn’t condescend to her readers; there’s no “closure” to be found.
Wish: Is Willem too perfect? Throughout the novel, Jude is in extremis, while Willem, his foil, motors along on unflagging devotion and tepid reasonableness. What reserves of emotion does Willem draw upon in order to act? If Saint Francis provides hope to the despairing and to those who suffer, and Saint Jude represents the value in perseverance and endurance when all seems lost, then we understand how the author conceives of Jude. But Willem is a paragon.
Interesting Theme: Time impacts the way characters develop and the ways their relationships to one another change. We move with these characters through a sequence: “The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years.” Later, Willem will add “The Happy Years…” and Jude will wonder: “Isn’t that tempting fate a little?”
When Jude concludes “[T]here was normalcy, routine, both of which were better than sex or excitement” we understand it’s in such unexceptional moments, which comprise the meat of most lives, where joy is reliably found. “Life tethers life.” Until the end.
**** Recommend
The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories by Danielle Evans (2020)
A masterful collection of short stories anchored by a novella. Evans understands bureaucracies — “He wrote to whom it may concern but it concerned no one” — but her book speaks to “the daily trauma of the historical record,” so I’ve assigned it to trauma narratives, although it also speaks to the masks we assume. But among references to redlining and sundown towns, the point is that some Americans do not take safety for granted. “…[T]hey kept believing there was someplace in this country where they could be Black and be safe and make a home.” The protagonist of the novella is hired to handle situations “without drama.” But Drama will find us.
It’s exhausting, as a white reader, to realize how incessantly these protagonists strategize. They’re consumed with how to present themselves so that the medical establishment takes them seriously; so that the bride isn’t jealous; so that when they arrive in a strange town their lives aren’t threatened. Evans is a psychologically astute writer who lobs emotional truths. People don’t experience grief in the same ways; Americans don’t experience history in the same ways, not even within families. We want to make ourselves known, but we’re complicated, it takes so much effort to reveal ourselves — how much information do we share? With whom? 23 and Me proves our histories are more complex than was previously understood. Walt Whitman said it best: we contain multitudes. Those with lighter skin “pass,” blend in, assume new identities, whitewash or jettison their pasts. They seek a better life, but this comes at a cost: alienation.
Evans’ characters are frozen in grief. Loved ones succumb to cancer; a sister marries the boy next door, whom she’s known since childhood, yet this doesn’t shield her from domestic violence. Where, exactly, is the safe place? (This evokes Natasha Trethewey’s poems and Memorial Drive, her memoir.) Characters, gripped by trauma, are self-absorbed, they can’t think of anything else. Their grief is so all-consuming that they’re frozen, stuck. The white protagonist, Claire, is so wrapped up in recrimination and grief that she loses perspective, she’s incapable of understanding other points of view or of peering too closely at her own actions. Lacking insight, lacking awareness, she digs in.
Evans writes acerbically of women’s experiences — how women navigate sex, lying about being on the pill because it’s easier than the detailed story; the guy’s sole concern is whether she’ll come knocking in nine months. When Claire opens her door to find the campus libertarian offering moral support, she “gathers that she is supposed to find this endearing, that she is supposed to bite the apple and lick the caramel off her lips and ask him to tell her more about military strategy… and that sometime several hours into this discussion she is supposed to end up naked out of awe or gratitude. Instead, she sets the book and the apple on her desk, politely thanks him, tells him she is tired, and, when he finally leaves, locks the door behind him.”
If the unexamined life is not worth living, then America, too, requires a therapeutic intervention. The way forward, Evans suggests, is to understand the past. We must scrape away accumulated layers of falsehoods, whitewashing, and mythologizing. A new American narrative must be forged, one that incorporates disparate voices, that encompasses more nuanced perspectives. Our work isn’t done until citizens can let down their guard and navigate the public square without incessant strategizing. Shared humanity must be accepted as a given.
****Highly recommend.