Copyright by Michael Anthony Flynn 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Michael Anthony Flynn certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Contemporary Colombian Fiction Committee: ________________________________ Katherine Arens, Co-Supervisor ____________________________________ Gabriela Polit-Dueñas, Co-Supervisor ____________________________________ César Salgado ____________________________________ Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba ____________________________________ Thomas Palaima Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Contemporary Colombian Fiction by Michael Anthony Flynn; B.S.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2015 Dedication To my parents, Thomas and Ruth Flynn Acknowledgements Thanks to my wife and children, who make everything worthwhile and without whom nothing would be worth doing. Thanks my committee. Each member contributed to the project in his or her own particular way that was indispensable to bringing it to a close. Katie Arens shaped it from the beginning, taking it from the formless, schizophrenic mess that it was into what it is now – something much less schizophrenic, if not completely coherent. Her ability to comprehend the intellectual path I wanted to take and her patience to keep me on it, with a gentle nudge here and the harsh push there, helped things get going in the early stages and kept them going through to the end. As an editor, her turnaround time is faster than anyone’s, and she helped me to say what I wanted to say more clearly than I could have said it on my own. Were it not for Gabriela Polit, I would not have known anything about either the narcoliterature genre or contemporary Colombian literature. Her ethnographic research, ethical approach to literature that stems from her early training in philosophy, and erudition as a Latin Americanist allow her to put together some of the most interesting courses I have ever taken. She is a careful and astute reader, a tireless editor and wonderful mentor. Were it not for César Salgado, I would not have been at the University of Texas in the first place. His support for me never waned from his early advocacy for my admission to the program. As my graduate advisor with a complete understanding of the kind of research I wanted to do and dissertation I wanted to write, he guided my course selection from the beginning through to the end. v He urged me to take Gabriela’s class so long ago, and the books I read in that class are the very ones I write about here. He even made time in his extremely busy schedule one summer to design an acutely needed survey course in Latin American literature. Héctor Domínguez and Thomas Palaima were gracious enough to join my committee even though I had not taken a class with either of them. But Professor Domínquez’ expertise in the literature of violence in Latin America and Professor Palaima’s expertise in both the Greek classics and war literature were invaluable contributions to the project; their advice, guidance and teaching along the way taught me much more about my chosen subject than I could have discovered by myself. Everyone involved in the Program in Comparative Literature at UT Austin deserve my gratitude and thanks. There are others with whom I did not in the end work closely, but whose approachability, curiosity and wisdom helped the project along in various stages. Don Graham, Alan Friedman, James Pennebaker and Paul Woodruff were there when I needed them to be there. Their research inspired mine, and their help and guidance made my writing better. vi Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Contemporary Colombia Fiction by Michael Anthony Flynn, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 CO-SUPERVISOR: Katherine Arens CO-SUPERVISOR: Gabriela Polit-Dueñas This is a study of three contemporary Colombian novels using combat trauma theory as an interpretive model. Following the method of psychological literary criticism that psychiatrist Jonathan Shay used in his books Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002) to analyze the characters Achilles and Odysseus, I propose to analyze characters in Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios ‘Our Lady of the Assassins’ (1994), Darío Jaramillo Agudelo’s Cartas cruzadas ‘Crossed Letters’ (1995), and Juan Gabriel Vásquez El ruido de las cosas al caer ‘The Sound of Things Falling’ (2011) to extend Shay's theories of combat trauma to a broad cultural context. While Colombia has not been engaged in a conventional, state-to-state war, it has been at a constant level of large-scale internal violence for over fifty years, perpetrated by a complex mix of paramilitaries, guerillas, narcotraffickers, and state-sponsored organizations: Colombia has consistently ranked among the top countries in the world for rates of homicide and displaced peoples. Shay’s model allows me to argue this kind of radically epistemologically and phenomenologically destabilizing vii environment in which non-combatants as well as combatants live under the constant threat of violence as producing severe psychological trauma. These texts have an additional cultural-psychological function. Shay identifies as an effective coping strategy the victims' act of integrating the traumatic memory into a coherent narrative, in order to both regain authority over their consciousness and to give social testimony to the injustice of the traumatic event. I will show how the characters in the texts I analyze make themselves psychologically whole in direct relation to the success with which they can narrate the story of their own trauma: those who fail do so in large part because the discourses available to them are inadequate to articulate the profundity of the trauma; those who succeed do so because they have found a form and structure that allows them to construct a coherent narrative of Self that incorporates the traumatic memory of the nation's failure. viii Table of Contents List of Tables.....................................................................................................................................................................1 FOREWORD: How I Came to the Project................................................................................................2 INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................................................12 Chapter One: A Brief Genealogy of Trauma..........................................................................................27 Chapter Two: PTSD and Therapy..................................................................................................................63 Chapter Three: La virgen de los Sicarios ‘Our Lady of the Assassins’................................128 Chapter Four: Cartas cruzadas ‘Crossed Letters’...............................................................................207 Chapter Five: El ruido de las cosas al caer ‘The Sound of Things Falling’.....................279 Chapter Six: Trauma Therapy in The Sound of Things Falling.............................................336 CONCLUSION...........................................................................................................................................................389 APPENDIX....................................................................................................................................................................394 Bibliography..................................................................................................................................................................407 0 List of Tables Table 1: Hotspur’s PTSD symptoms as diagnosed Jonathan Shay.............................................106 1 FOREWORD: How I Came to the Project My interest in trauma literature was piqued when I came across two books on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) written by Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who worked at the Boston Veterans Affairs clinic treating Vietnam veterans in the eighties and early nineties. The books are Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002). The idea for the first book came to him while discussing Homer’s Iliad with his daughter, who happened to be reading it in a Harvard classics course at the same time Shay was treating some of his most troubled cases. Seeing a pedagogical potential in the striking similarities of the veterans’ accounts of their war trauma with Homer’s account of Achilles’ trauma, Shay followed up and published an article entitled “Learning about Combat Stress from Homer’s Iliad” in the Journal of Traumatic Stress (1991). Shay’s daughter gave it to her professor, Gregory Nagy, who, on reading it, presented himself at Shay’s apartment and urged him to write a book: Nagy claimed that “this has never been said before” by any critic of Homer’s epics – in centuries of scholarship, no one had read the Iliad from the psychological perspective of the combat soldier (Nagy, qtd. by Shay in Shattuck 6). 2 Like Sigmund Freud a century before him, Shay found that representations of trauma and symptoms of PTSD in imaginative literature augmented the testimonials