A small infinity: Expressing generational trauma through artistic method and experimental form

Abstract

How can a narrative work convey more than its conceptual and factual meaning? How does one express not just the details of what happens, but how it feels? A small infinity is a moment of trauma. It is a poetic term that seeks to express the experience of a traumatic event. Often confounding in its dichotomy of understanding, of actuality versus concept, the profundity of trauma is perceived by the survivor as more than its factual happening. Perception and memory occur contrary to empirical notions of time and space, so a trauma narrative should acknowledge the way that the form of a written work is fundamental to the representation of these paradoxical aspects of lived experience. This work is a hybrid text; a compilation of critical text, creative prose and verse created through artistic autoethnographic method. Incorporating theories from Norman K. Denzin and his concept of ‘epiphanic’ or interpretative autoethnographic research and John Van Maanen’s method of ‘impressionist ethnography’, I seek to express the factual research in a creative form that mirrors the difficulty in effecting the translation of experience into text. For this hybrid text, its own form should describe its content to the reader, possessing and projecting the gestalt of its existence. The narrative content follows the form of its topic, and more: the form is the topic. A study of trauma. A collection of traumas. A map of each small infinity.