Trauma

Trauma is a major recurring trope within almost all of Faulkner's works. It may be defined as a disturbing, distressing, perhaps even violent event that an individual (or social) psyche may repress. Repression of the event results from being unable to fully integrate the disturbing event into one's conscious psychological identity, and therefore may remain dormant until a subsequent triggering event recalls the initial trauma. In Faulkner's works, trauma plays an implicit yet important role in character and narrative development. It may explain how certain characters are behaviorally conditioned to act, think, and feel the way they do. Specifically, character's sense of identity, pre-destination, experience of time, and other psychological frameworks may all be affected by traumatic events. Trauma, as a literary trope, may also be structurally important within other literary tropes utilized by Faulkner's texts, such as history, time, and memory.

An example of individual trauma triggered by a singular event is evident in //The Sound and the Fury// when Benjy hears the word "caddie," triggering memories of his sister Caddie whose loss profoundly distressed him. In Benjy's section of //TSAF//, Faulkner's use of italics to shift the stream-of-consciousness narrative between non-chronological events demonstrates the power of triggering events to affect and direct Benjy's psyche, further demonstrating the potential for latent and unconscious (especially traumatic) memories to reemerge and "color" events that are happening in "real-time."

However, a trauma may also operate continually within an individual's psyche, continually modifying conscious life as a foil to behavior and understanding. For instance, the symbolic trauma of Caddie's loss of virginity becomes a traumatic event which Quentin in //TSAF// cannot process fully, and therefore continually haunts his psyche, perhaps leading to his suicide.

//Quentin is torn apart by grief over his sister, and his mind runs in grooved channels as he wanders aimlessly around Cambridge. He recalls past scenes over and over, examining them from every angle, as if to extract a final measure of torment from each one. Although the reader is made privy to Quentin's thoughts for only that final day, it is clear that Quentin has been agonizing over these same remembered sequences for months.// (Fennell, 45)

The continuous presence of trauma affecting a character's development is also preeminently evident in the figure of Joe Christmas in //Light in August//. One of his first memories, seeing a sexual encounter between Miss Atkins and a doctor, symbolically arranges his unconscious predisposition towards sex, gender, and race (as Miss Atkins later threatens to reveal the secret of his supposed racial identity) to signify negativity. Thus, it may be inferred that his subsequent struggles with his identity, violent behavior (especially with regards to women), and social alienation may perhaps all be a function of a past event continuously informing the present. "Faulkner's characters do not gain psychological distance from past events as they move forward through time; not only do certain memories leap out again and again regardless of the temporal distanced traversed, such memories can at times completely arrest all forward motion" (Fennell, 36).

While one may tend to think of a trauma as a individually experienced psychological phenomenon, it may also take place within a greater social context such as a historical event (the American Civil War, slavery, patriarchy) that affects a large social system. As Greg Forter suggests, the events that culminate in the murder of Joanna Burden, may stem from a shared socio-historical trauma:

//The central even around which this novel turns is the murder of Joanna Burden at the hands (apparently) of her lover, Joe Christmas. To explain this murder, Faulkner elaborates an ever more complex and deeper personal past for each of his main characters, as if to suggest that an event of this kind can be understood only by tracing its root in the histories of all those involved in it. This excavation reveals, in turn, how these character's apparently "personal" stories cannot be told independently- are, indeed, inextricably intertwined, regardless of whether the characters know each other- precisely because all are implicated in the social history and legacy of slavery, the bloodshed of Civil War, and the violent suppression of Reconstruction.// (Forter, 270)

The lasting traumatic effects of large socio-historical events such as slavery, the Civil War, reconstruction, patriarchal socialization, and modernity is thematically important in most if not all of Faulkner's works.

Trauma, as a literary function, may also serve to complicate generic motifs. For instance, many characters experience a sense of predestination and inevitability in their lives (I.E. Quentin Compson, Joe Christmas), however, at times, Faulkner's almost explicit rendering of psychology demonstrates that such feelings of predetermination may be psycho-socially produced and not necessarily an unavoidable event preordained historically or metaphysically, "...while Faulkner's characters frequently seem powerless to elude their destinies, a close reading of the novels suggests that this is due not so much to malevolent cosmic forces of fate, but to the almost hypnotic force of memory. If a Faulkner character is a plaything [predetermined destiny], he is, in the words of Andre Breton, 'above all the plaything of his memory'" (Fennell, 40-41).

//Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders// (LIA 119).

"Wait a minute." Luster said. "You [Benjy] snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail." //Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through.// (TSAF 4).


 * Works Cited**

Faulkner, William. //Light in August.// Vintage, 1985.

Faulkner, William. //The Sound and the Fury.// Vintage, 1984.

Fennell, Lee Anne. "Unquiet Ghosts: Memory and Determinism in Faulkner," //The Southern Literary Journal//, vol. 31, no. 2, Spring, 1999, pp.35-49.

Forter, Greg. "Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form." //Narrative,// vol. 15, no. 3, October, 2007, pp. 259-285.