Models of narative representation of trauma

Abstract

This article explores models of narrative representation of trauma explored within the methodological framework of trauma theory. In this sense, the article offers a diachronic overview of the development of this theoretical discipline and examines its contribution to the interpretation and analysis of literary works. The development of the theory of trauma offered authors new interpretive models based on the relationship between trauma and fiction, but also a relatively new vision of the theory of trauma, which opened the possibility to expose the cultural and social processes and tendencies of the whole history of the twentieth century and their impact on individuals and society. A step towards a new model of persuasiveness in the literature of so-called private genres would present a kind of narrative of trauma that, among other things, would signify personal, that is, individual reactions to the growing awareness of the catastrophic effects of war, poverty, colonisation and domestic violence on the person's psyche. Such accounts would need to point not only to the sources of individual suffering and problems that caused the trauma, but also to the harmful and devastating consequences of the traumatic event and the further life development of individuals and people in their near surroundings. Initial trauma research was traditionally placed in the relevant field of medicine, and trauma was approached primarily as an individual and purely intimate clinical state. As trauma was discovered and researched through psychoanalytic therapeutic methods, in particular the dialogue-analytic processes of inference through direct conversation, i.e. the transfer of one's own psychic reality, the first and key connection between the trauma phenomenon and language as the primary means of information transfer was established. Therefore, in the early stages of the development of trauma theory, trauma was seen as a separate phenomenon (more often related to childhood experiences), and its consequences were thought to be solved by simply transmitting the entire traumatic experience through language communication. The development of trauma theory has offered authors new interpretive models based on the relationship between trauma and fiction, but also a relatively new vision of trauma theory, has opened up possibilities for exposing cultural and social processes and trends throughout twentieth-century history and their consequences on individuals and society. In the modernist literature, the phenomenon of trauma is approached somewhat differently, mainly through textual representations of the subjects' inner struggles to cope with the subconscious defence mechanisms they have created to protect themselves from re-experiencing traumatic content through memory and rationally conscious instinct and desire to recover and heal through an articulated confession about trauma, i.e. a psychoanalytic conversation about it.