Abstract
This study aims to investigate John Barth’s The Development in the light of trauma theory. Traumatic events were firstly discussed in Freud’s Studies in Hysteria, and then were revisited in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. They can have happened in the past life of a subject, can be unacceptable to their consciousness, and yet they can return in the form of compulsive and repetitive behaviors. Possible symptoms may be more the result of the subject’s repressed desires than traumatic events. Moreover, traumas are not only the result of the subject’s personal experience but the ramifications of the historical context and past environment to which the subject is bound. In Barth’s The Development: Nine Stories the tales are narrated by aging people who struggle with forces around them which affect their lives. These forces compel a couple to a pact of spontaneous suicide. Loss, family, and social dysfunction are among the other outcomes of trauma which are satirised in a conspiratorial tone. Symbolised in Heron Bay Estates, the American society is depicted as a gated community that must come to terms with the illusions of safety and conspiracy, for they are not walled off traumas that lurk in their most private moments. Barth demonstrates that a gated community can never protect its members from possible traumas. An analysis of traumatic experiences should be considered along with the linguistic and non-linguistic means of representation through which an event is recollected because the event is reconstructed to reach equilibrium to comprehend the occurrence of the trauma. In the stories of The Development such verbal representations of temporality are enslaved to traumatic events. And this will explore how the narrative of a past history and temporality through traumatised subjects enable the representation of the hidden aspects both of history and the subconscious. Keywords: inability to recall; detachment; betrayal; sense of loss; fear of loss
Highlights
Some unpleasant and violent parts of the human experience can be analysed in the light of trauma theory
Feeling the gravity of some historically disastrous events like the Holocaust and the two World Wars, many philosophers, psychologists, and medical doctors still find themselves concerned with trauma theory which is recently even more developed. The ramifications of these traumatic events and the effects which they leave on the psyche have concerned even clinicians
In the closing lines of it, he desperately tries to find a way to kill himself or become free from the awful post-traumatic consequences. He searches for his salvation on the keyboard of his computer. This commentary can support a previous claim : that the sense of loss may appear in the past, present, and future of a subject when he tries to reconstruct the event, counterfeit memories that explain it, and question him/herself to get a psychical balance
Summary
Some unpleasant and violent parts of the human experience can be analysed in the light of trauma theory. The first tendency includes the theories of pivotal figures like Herman and Bessel van der Kolk It advocates that long-lasting and horrifying traumas leave the patients, both children and the adults, more willing not to remember the traumatic situations unless they consult therapists. Culler presents logic of signification that would force the subject to construct a certain manifestation of events of the past to meet the demands of a present meaning in a narrative (2001) This is to say that a trauma in a literary work could be considered a cause of narrative, and the subject might be prone to the implantation of memories that would show it in a post-traumatic state. Barth tends to mock this sort of security and order; this will be clarified in the present study
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