Aftermath

I’ve rarely devoted a post to criticizing one book.  But there are aspects of Aftermath that highlight all that’s wrong with the adoption of trauma theory by literary critics, a recurring theme of this blog. 

What makes Aftermath different is that it is engaged with an actual trauma.  Instead of using trauma theory to explain a text, it uses the literary imitation of trauma, above all the experience of fragmentation, to explain a genuinely traumatic experience, a double murder.  It doesn’t work.   

A highly regarded book

Preti Taneja, a British author of Indian descent, received the Gordon Burn Prize for Aftermath. The prize honors the year’s most dazzlingly daring and avant-garde work of English-language fiction and non-fiction.  Her first book, We That Are Young, a version of King Lear, set in a modern-day Indian business family, received the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was short-listed for several others.  I found it hard to find critical reviews. Critical comments yes, here and there, but no critical reviews. 

The most critical comments were reserved for Goodreads, a reader response website sponsored by Amazon.  Many readers stated that large parts of the book were incomprehensible due to its stylistic peculiarities: absent punctuation, large gaps between words and phrases, incomplete sentences, and so forth.  One reader says rip out 80 pages, presumably the ones written in an attempt to represent the traumatic experience as a textual one, and the book makes sense as a history and critique of the Muslim experience in India and England.  I agree.  The book gets better toward the end.

The Atrocity and its background

Though the book often reads as though Taneja was in the midst of the double murder, she wasn’t.  She didn’t learn about it until the next day when her partner read the newspaper to her over breakfast, and Taneja realized she knew the name of the attacker, Usman Khan.  The 28-year-old had taken the creative writing course Taneja led at a high-security prison two years earlier. The attack took place at a reunion of the program.  The newspaper reported that he had been shot dead by police, after stabbing five people, two fatally.  One was her colleague, Jack Merritt.  Darkly amusing to some was the fact that Khan was initially subdued by a participant using a Narwhal tusk fastened to the Cambridge conference room wall. 

Taneja had been invited, but stayed home, preparing for a literary festival. She says she feels both relieved and guilty to have missed the horror and has been left wondering how to make sense of her peripheral connection to the atrocity.

She tells me she has now come to call it “disenfranchised grief … for those who had known the perpetrator, it was something unspeakable”. She is now, she notes in Aftermath, writing “in the wreck”. (Guardian, November 27, 2021) *

“Astro-city”: the attempt to represent trauma in a text

The simplest way to convey the narrative style is to point out that “atrocity” is spelled “astro-city” every single time, I estimate well over one-hundred times throughout the book.  It took me 88 pages to figure out what she was trying to say with this affectation.   The state did it, creating the conditions that led to the atrocity.  One problem with this use is that it denies Khan his autonomy.  Furthermore, at other points she presents a nuanced account of the question of where the responsibility began and ended.  The narrative portion of the book is capable of subtleties the stylistic portion can’t capture. 

Taneja uses fractured form to reproduce in the text the experience of trauma.  Trouble is, actual trauma becomes confused with textual trauma, as when she refers to “the atro-city, this prison of narrative and counternarrative.” (p 60) Elsewhere she states that “prison is a palace made of narrative . . . nothing in there but narrative.”   No, prison is a place made of concrete and steel.  It’s hard and its real.  “Concrete Mama” it’s called by some prisoners (McCoy and Hoffman).  It’s hard and its cold but it’s always there, always waiting to take you back.  To be sure, prison is alive with stories.  I listened to prisoners’ stories for more than a year (Alford,1997).   But no one tells stories in solitary confinement (“administrative segregation”), and confined lives lead to confined stories, lacking in imagination.  Dreams, a realm of freedom, are the exception, and prisoners generally keep dreams to themselves. 

I’ve just told you a few things I learned about prison using conventional narrative form.  I think it’s more interesting and informative than attempting to imitate the trauma of imprisonment in the form of the text.  The same may be said for trauma generally. 

You know that fragments are often used in writing to evoke split consciousness; the near familiar; uncanny; a mind trapped in confusion; intoxication; in chains of memory; in pain. (Taneja p 41)

Taneja’s goal is to “reconstruct feeling for life through this form.”  To this end she writes in the second and third persons, omits punctuation, leaves long spaces, and just about every other trick the printed page allows. 

Far from adding to her account, it only detracts.  Compare Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, as it is titled in the United States.  Telling a straightforward story in a declarative but not detached narrative voice, Levi draws the reader into his experience of the concentration camp, not the experience of the text, and not just the experience of Levi himself.

For Tenja, on the other hand, not only do we learn little about Usman Khan, but his

victims are also strangely absent from Aftermath. Taneja . . . . worked alongside and was friends with Jack Merritt.  [He is] granted a paragraph of description early on before Taneja moves on to systemic racism and the problems of the prison industrial complex . . . . The omission creates a lacuna at the center of Aftermath, in which we deal only with Taneja’s internal landscape after the event. (Solomon)

This is why, she says, she often writes in the third person.  “Because trauma does that to you.  You’re not the same person as before the trauma.”

But she wasn’t there.  She was home, not learning about it until the next day. Surely, she can’t be writing about her own trauma, what she calls “disenfranchised grief.”  She must be trying to recreate trauma in general, the trauma of those wounded, or at least those present.  That, or the term trauma has no limits. **

She also briefly writes about trying, not very seriously, to kill herself by walking into the sea, an experience she attributes to the trauma of having taught Usman and having a colleague killed.  Unlike Virginia Woolf, she carried no stones in her pockets and rather quickly decides to return to shore when she tastes salt water (p 88). 

My theory regarding why Taneja writes this way 

Taneja doesn’t theorize.  She relies on the theories of others, as many of us do.  In an interview she refers to “intertextuality,” which strictly speaking means that texts can only refer to other texts.  They never have direct access to the world.  For Taneja it means simply that she quotes others to make her main theoretical points (with one important exception noted below). 

Quoting Jan Philipp Reemtsma, she writes about Theodor Adorno’s moral judgment that “all culture and cultural criticism after Auschwitz is garbage.” (Taneja, p 117; Reemtsma, p 8). This isn’t what Adorno says.  He states in Negative Dialectics that writing lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric (p 469).   What Adorno means is that beautiful form, especially when writing about atrocity, is bound to rob it of some of its horror, no matter what it’s content or intent.  Taneja certainly doesn’t fall into this trap. 

The difference between Adorno and literary critics is that Adorno was a cultural Marxist.  His was the critique of domination, not the critique of the text.  The critique of man over man, capitalism, and bureaucracy over the individual.  No matter how much he wrote about aesthetics, it was always in the service of human liberation from servitude.  This is Taneja’s aim as well.  She just gets lost in the presumed power of disruptive form. 

The book gets better as it goes along

The book gets better when she writes about the experience of Muslims in India and upon arrival in England, an account that she develops at some length.  Aftermath is not really about trauma at all, it turns out, at least not as we ordinarily think about it. It’s about the experience of being marginal, never feeling comfortable in her own brown skin in a white world, even as she is remarkably successful, first at Cambridge, then as a university professor. *** She remains what one British politician calls “funny tinged,” referring to a British Asian journalist (pp 124, 242).  Taneja isn’t even seen as brown.  She’s just funny looking, and she feels it no matter how well she appears to fit in.   

Taneja also has some interesting thoughts about prison reform, including its abolition.  While not original, they do not depend upon the theoretical work of others any more than most who write on the subject.  My experience is different.  Many men need to be contained for their own and others protection.  They need a time out to collect themselves.  Needed are good prisons, humane prisons, prisons that don’t make their inmates worse people than before they went in.  But on this Taneja and I would be able to have a conversation, for it involves an argument with some shared assumptions, not a staccato account of one person’s trauma. (But whose?  Hers?  Everyman’s?)

Conclusion: Why the imitation of trauma?

This is really the question.  Taneja has something to say about the immigrant experience.  She was not the victim of PTSD, even if one could say, in an everyday way, that she was traumatized.  Nevertheless, she was not there; she learned about it from the newspaper the next day.  The answers are two:

Literary criticism has become obsessed with trauma theory, and hers is probably the most extreme example of attempting to reproduce the experience of trauma in the text itself.  In other words, she is writing for other literary theorists and those who read them. 

Other than observations about the immigrant experience, and to a lesser degree prison reform, everything that she has to say that could count as an original theoretical observation about the atrocity is taken, with due credit, from the work of others.  Intertextuality she calls this in an interview.  That’s not the meaning of the term in most literary discourse, where it refers to the claim that texts can only refer to other texts, never to the world itself.  Taneja tries to capture the reality of trauma in the form of her text, and at least in this case the usual use of the term intertextuality wins.  She can’t do it. 

The most sympathetic reading is that it’s really two books.  The reader for Goodreads had it right: throw away about 80 pages, those that attempt to mimic trauma on the page.  What remains is her account of the immigrant experience and the theoretical observations of others, above all Reemtsma, and to a lesser extent Judith Butler (pp 10, 241), well known literary critics.  The book can be saved from itself, but only by recognizing its failure. 

___________________

Notes

* Disenfranchised grief is a widely recognized concept in trauma studies, for it contributes to PTSD.  It refers to the experience of other people not recognizing your grief, or if you think they may not feel comfortable sharing your grief.    

** The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM 5) states clearly that watching an event unfold on television is insufficient to cause PTSD.  Learning about it the next day from a newspaper would be even less so.

***Taneja studied theology and philosophy at Cambridge University.  Subsequently she completed a doctorate in creative writing from Royal Holloway University in London.  She is a professor at Newcastle University.

References

C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us. Cornell University Press, 1997.

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5).  American Psychiatric Association, 2013.  [The more recent (2022) text revision makes no difference in this regard; it is limited to minor changes not relevant here.]

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton.  Seabury Press, 1973. 

Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.  Verso, 2004.

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz.  Simon and Schuster, 1996.  [The English translation is titled “If This is a Man.”].

John McCoy and Ethan Hoffman, Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla.  University of Washington Press, 2018. 

Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Trust and Violence, translated by Dominic Bonfiglio. Princeton University Press, 2012.

Kat Solomon, Writing the Unspeakable. 2021 (Chicago Review of Books)