Representations of Trauma in Contemporary American Literature and Film: Moving from Erasure to Creative Transformation Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Parziale, Amy Elizabeth Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 26/09/2021 13:06:35 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/301676 REPRESENTATIONS OF TRAUMA IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FILM: MOVING FROM ERASURE TO CREATIVE TRANSFORMATION by Amy Elizabeth Parziale _____________________ Copyright © Amy Elizabeth Parziale 2013 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2013 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Amy Parziale entitled Representations of Trauma in Contemporary American Literature and Film: Moving from Erasure to Creative Transformation and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy ___________________________________________________________Date: 4/5/2013 Susan White ___________________________________________________________Date: 4/5/2013 Sandra Soto ___________________________________________________________Date: 4/5/2013 Charles Scruggs Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. ________________________________________________ Date: 4/5/2013 Dissertation Director: Susan White STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Amy Elizabeth Parziale 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I cannot finish this chapter of my life without acknowledging the great debt I owe to my wonderful dissertation chair, Susan White, who challenged me while always being a tree with many branches, and to my committee members: Sandy Soto, whose quiet insights and meaningful advice kept me honest, and Charlie Scruggs, who took on this project halfway through and never missed a beat. Their feedback was always to help me steer my own ship, make my own discoveries, and challenge me to be a better scholar. Thank you for believing in this project, especially when I had doubts. This dissertation was strengthened by my University of Arizona cohort and our friendships: Marlowe, Laura, Jordan, Mike, Derek, Laura, and Kyle. Marcia Marma, Meg Lota Brown, Carlos Gallego, and Tenney Nathanson supported me without fail. I also sincerely thank the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and Fellowship Program, particularly Suzanne, Tara, Maggie, Sarah, and Vincent. My brief time there was inspiring. This is also the product of a life of learning, a life guided by amazing teachers and friends: Jessica, John, Chris, Amber, Bobbye Au (who convinced me to become an English major!), Bob Denham, Mike Heller, Virginia Stewart, and Paul Hanstedt at my alma mater Roanoke College; and Chris Moreno, Rachael Deagman, Mary Klages, Marty Bickman, and Vincent Woodard at the University of Colorado. My family never expressed any reservations through this difficult process: my parents, who called me “Dr. Parziale” when I was a kid (little did they know); my mother willingly and thoughtfully read every draft – warts and all; my brother, who has grown to love books; and my sister-in-law, who devours them more ferociously than I. And, of course, there would be no dissertation if it were not for Gavin, who kept me sane, fed, and safe – a tall order indeed. My little sunshines, Aedan and Yeats, may never know how much getting to go home to them changed my life, but they motivated me by reminding me what is really important. 5 DEDICATION For Gavin, always, and in memory of Vincent Woodard, who loved words. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………….....7 INTRODUCTION: FROM ERASURE TO TRANSFORMATION..….………………...9 ARCHIVING MEANING-FILLED GAPS: PRESENT/ABSENT TRAUMA IN CRISTINA GARCÍA’S NOVELS…………………………………………………...….42 THE DUAL AND DUELING REPRESENTATION OF TRAUMA IN IMAGE/TEXTS.……………………………..…………………….………………….…89 “AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE:” THE AESTHETICS OF TRAUMA IN AMERICAN NEO-NOIR FILMS..……………………………………………………………...……138 “MONOLOGUE NO DIFFERENT FROM A SHRIEK”: COMMUNAL RESPONSES TO TRAUMA IN TONI MORRISON’S NOVELS.……………………………….......199 CODA: BY WAY OF CONCLUSION.....……………………………………………..234 NOTES………………………………………………………………………………….235 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………..279 7 ABSTRACT This dissertation strives to redress the repeated erasure of trauma from public knowledge and social consciousness through an examination of how crisis events are represented in contemporary American literature and film. Intersecting archival, trauma, literary and film studies, this project highlights connections across politics of institutions and politics of identity by considering the creative transformation of trauma in representation. Considering how trauma is represented across a broad spectrum also illuminates the ways social structures are reinscribed, how trauma permeates and crosses borders in productive ways, and how race, gender, sexuality, and class relate to the traumatic. Each text included here also has an interesting relationship to cultural history and historic events, including the Holocaust, 9/11, and slavery, and problematizes accepted social narratives through their trauma aesthetics. After an introduction outlining the theoretical frameworks, the first chapter considers Cuban-American author Cristina García’s work; specifically how her first two novels – Dreaming in Cuban and The Agüero Sisters – attempt to resolve the traumatic pasts of female characters, while her subsequent two novels – Monkey Hunting and A Handbook to Luck – consider which stories are collected and which are lost. Reading novels as potential counter-archives envisions more inclusive understandings of truth, history, memory, and trauma. The two Holocaust novels and four American image/texts analyzed in the next chapter further this blurring of supposedly stable categories, like truth and history, through their duel narrative’s interpretative relationships. The third chapter argues that the archive created by films is not only citational and referential, but potentially rewrites history. The 8 fleeting traumatic revelations in Vertigo, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, The Searchers, Chan is Missing, and The Return of Navajo Boy acknowledge trauma’s impact and implications, while creating collective memories through cinema. Similarly, brief moments of idealized community in Toni Morrison’s novels move the readerly experience out toward the current sociopolitical moment. The ambiguous endings of The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and Paradise open quietly kept narratives to history and recuperate traumatized voices that represent our past and call us to our present. 9 INTRODUCTION: FROM ERASURE TO TRANSFORMATION1 Who still speaks of the extermination of the Armenians? – attributed to Adolf Hitler, August 22, 19392 Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. – Toni Morrison “Who still speaks of the extermination of the Armenians?” asked Hitler in his Obersalzberg Speech, twenty years after the inconsequential, in absentia trials of Turkish leaders and one week before the Third Reich invaded Poland with designs to annihilate its people and invade Russia. Who speaks of trauma that is not publicly acknowledged? Who can speak about a genocide that many insist did not occur? Ironically referencing the supposedly unspeakable and unspoken, Hitler’s rhetorical question implies that, just as with the systematic mass murder of Armenians and (re)traumatizing of survivor- victims, the international community will not act decisively when Germany invades Poland. He was correct. No one in power listened to the Armenians or consciously admitted the impact of their suffering, despite its reference as common knowledge. An estimated 1.8 million Armenians and other ethnic minorities were methodically slaughtered from 1915 to 1923,3 and the atrocities leading and subsequent to their deaths have been erased from official histories. The current Turkish administration continues to suppress any discussion of the Armenian genocide, using the official term “1915 Events” to avoid the label “genocide,” and only twenty nations have formally labeled what happened as genocide.4 As part of their continued institutional denial of the Armenian genocide, Turkey refuses to grant full access its archives to this day. 5 10 This brief,