From Form to Feeling: Trauma and Affective Excess in Art & Lies

Abstract

During the 1990s, heyday of academic trauma studies and trauma fiction, Jeanette Winterson seemed more preoccupied with challenging the philistinism that she perceived in contemporary society. Reading had become ‘a leisure toy’ rather than ‘a cultural occupation’, and by and large, she argued, ‘the idea of art is debased’ (Winterson, 1995: 34, 43). Winterson acknowledges that ‘[o]urs has not been an easy century for art. At times, to talk about it at all has seemed crass’ (1995: 41). Whereas it is particularly the Holocaust that has prompted this existential challenge — Theodor W. Adorno’s notorious statement that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (1951: 34) is the obvious reference point — Winterson, while mentioning the two World Wars, primarily looks further back to ‘the Spanish Civil War, the General Strike of 1926 and the Depression of the 1930s’ as the defining events that ‘cut short those experiments in language and in thought that human beings perpetually make and perpetually need’ (1995: 41). Thus, despite embracing a characteristically postmodernist aesthetics in her earlier work, the mid-1990s saw her embark on two artistic projects in defence of what Andreas Huyssen has called ‘the great divide’: ‘the kind of discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture’ (1988: viii). Art, Literature and the Word, in capitals, had to be restored.