Schleter 1

Brooke Schleter
Dr. Hoeness-Krupsaw
ENG 437.001
Research Paper
2,286 Words
04/28/2015
Trauma Theory and Enon
In his article entitled Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of
Literary Trauma Theory, Joshua Pederson proposed a new method of approaching a
text from the perspective of literary trauma theory that set aside old methods in favor
of those that reflect the most recent advancements made in trauma research. Rather
than approaching a text according to Caruth, Herman, or van der Kolks definitions of
trauma, Pederson suggested that scholars attempt to perceive a literary text according
to the latest definition laid out by Richard McNally (338). In utilizing his method of
approach to analyze the contemporary trauma narrative in Paul Hardings Enon, it
became apparent to me that the novels protagonist, Charlie Crosby, exhibits the exact
characteristics of recent trauma research findings, and none of the characteristics
described in older definitions, leading me to assert that Hardings understanding and
depiction of trauma reflects modern research, perhaps suggesting that he studied
modern trauma theory in preparation for writing this novel.
It is relevant to note that Harding wrote this novel during a very controversial
time in trauma literary theory. This controversy is sparked by recent developments in
the field of psychology suggesting that older definitions of trauma are no longer
believed to be accurate. Therefore, literary theory based on those outdated definitions
is no longer based on valid research, and thus no longer carries its original value.

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Cathy Caruth is the most popular of the literary theorists who have followed the original
definitions of trauma. Basing her definitions on the work of psychiatrists Judith Herman
and Bessel van der Kolk, Caruth essentially believes that trauma is the result of an
event that causes pain so excruciating that the brain cannot process it as it would other
information. Because of this, a victim of trauma completely forgets the event initially,
and if the memory does return, the victim often cannot describe the memory in words.
Scholars following this definition refer to the phenomenon of losing memory of a
traumatic experience as traumatic amnesia (Caruth 6). In total opposition to Caruths
findings, Richard McNally believes trauma to be not only memorable, but even more
vivid than commonplace memories. He writes in Remembering Trauma that recent
and, in his opinion, more professionally executed studies do not suggest that traumatic
amnesia is a real phenomenon:
Events that trigger overwhelming terror are memorable, unless they occur in the
first year or two of life or the victim suffers brain damage. The notion that the
mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering
them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of
convincing empirical support. To be sure, people may deliberately try not to
think about disturbing experiences, and sometimes they may succeed.
He also asserts that elements of victims memories are sometimes distorted, with
victims often describing instances of time seeming to move more slowly, and of feeling
as if they were watching events unfold as if in a play (275).

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It is with this background that Pederson suggests forward-thinking trauma
literary theorists do the following:
1. Turn [their] focus from gaps in the text to the text itself, (338).
2. Seek out evidence of augmented narrative detail, (339).
3. Focus on depictions of experiences that are temporally, physically, or
ontologically distorted, (339).
With this method and a background of trauma theory from literary and
psychological scholars in mind, I began my analysis of Enon by looking at the most
obvious symptom of trauma displayed by Charlie after the loss of his daughter: vivid
memory of the event. Charlie does not forget anything about the event, as Caruths
theory suggests, but rather he displays McNallys definition in that he remembers and
transcribes in great detail every moment surrounding the event, often showing
characteristics of distorted memory. For example, Charlie remembers not just taking a
sip of water as he listened to the voicemail informing him of Kates death, but he
specifically remembers that it was spring water that had warmed in the heat so it
tasted stale and slightly impure. He remembers specifically that the woman yelled at
him for nearly hitting someone as he was backing out of the parking space, then he
heard his wife say on the voicemail that she was at home with two police officers, then
the woman beat on his window. If the event werent traumatic, or if the traumatic
event followed older ideas about trauma, Charlie might only have remembered that he
got a voicemail from his wife and that he almost hit someone in the parking lot, but he

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wouldnt have specifically remembered the order in which he heard each womans
interaction with him in that moment (7-8).
In addition to exhibiting detailed memory, distortion comes into play when
Charlie views the second trauma of his wife leaving him from a perspective as if he is
watching a movie. Of the specific event that seems to initiate the separation, Charlie
writes:
That image of Susan, at the top of the stairs in her bathrobe, her face ravaged
and pale, holding the shirt a fitted white T-shirt with a pattern of flowers and
vines embroidered in black around the neck and sleeves and a small yellow bird
embroidered just above the left breast seemed like a photograph from a movie
or play that you see in a magazine youre leafing through while waiting to have
your teeth cleaned or blood taken, and you think to yourself, Oh, I remember

that scene; thats when it all comes apart; thats when he puts his hand through
the wall and she runs out of the bedroom and stands there at the top of the
stairs (17-18).
He continues this description, particularly this exact sentence for another half of a page,
vividly describing the scene as if he were watching it from out of his own body, as if it
were in a movie. This passage also fits exactly with McNallys description of trauma and
opposes older definitions.
Charlie and Susans overall inability to cope with their circumstances, as a
couple, falls under Howard Parad and Gerald Caplains five components that affect a
victims ability to cope:

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1. The stressful event poses a problem which cannot be solved in the immediate
future.
2. The problem is far beyond a familys traditional problem solving methods.
3. The situation is perceived as a threat to life goals of the family members.
4. The crisis period is characterized by tension that mounts to a peak then falls.
5. The situation awakens unresolved key issues from both the near and distant
past (Parad, Caplain 5-7).
Naturally, Kates death cannot be solved in the immediate future. In fact, because it
can never be resolved, the couple has an even harder time coping with it. Far beyond
what tactics they would normally use to solve problems, handling the fact that their
daughter has died is far beyond their coping ability as a couple. Presuming that their
life goals are similar to that of typical parents, I would imagine that Susan and Charlie
had life goals of experiencing their daughters major life events with her such as
moving out on her own, marrying, and having children. Her death made these goals
unattainable for them. The crisis period of their relationship peaked right before Susan
left, but the crisis period for Charlie as an individual didnt fall until the very last chapter
of the novel when he described what seemed to be him coming to terms with Kates
death and his new life without her and Susan. Finally, and most interestingly, the
reason that Susan and Charlie are unable to continue their relationship is because
Kates death awakened unresolved key issues in their marriage. Charlie writes that
when Susan was pregnant with Kate he started to say something to her about how
[he] was sorry [he] wasnt as good a husband as she deserved, or as good a partner, or

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as successful or ambitious, (27). This suggests that Charlie was either doing
something in their marriage that he believed warranted an apology, or Susan, for one
reason or another, didnt give him the impression that she was genuinely happy to be
with him. Charlie notes feeling that he and Susan were drifting apart right before Kate
was born and says that Kate bound us back together. Or, really, we were each
separately fully bound to Kate and thereby to each other through our single, cherished
daughter, and that was fine by us, (29). These lines indicate that the two of them
were good parents, but not necessarily good partners for each other. Among all of the
reasons that they were unable to cope with Kates death as a couple, their underlying
marital problems seemed to be the main reason that they separated.
Charlie also has recurring nightmares and imaginings about his daughters death,
suggesting that he may be experiencing a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is
beautifully and painfully described in Charlies description of the three Kates. In his
increasing madness, Charlie talks of reliving Kates death as if she didnt die, but in fact
multiplied into three happy versions of herself, and he envisions the three of them
dancing in the living room, vibrant and full of life. But later, it almost seems that he
has no control over this imagining when it turns bad and he writes All three girls died
as the sun set, and instead of mourning one daughter, right away, I gained a night of
fraudulent joy at the cost of losing three the next day, (149). Feeling that he has no
control over these flashbacks and re-enactments is another symptom of PTSD.
Kates death isnt the only traumatic event in the novel. When Charlie describes
Aloysius Shank, the cemetery caretaker of Enon, he informs readers that Aloysius

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experienced a traumatic event of his own, centered around World War II, in which
shrapnel from an enemy planes attack caused him to lose his leg, sense of smell, and
part of his red-green color vision. It is significant to note that when discussing trauma,
many scholars attribute the massive growth of trauma studies in the last century to
events such as World War II. While at Yale, Dr. Geoffrey Hartman wrote in Trauma
Within the Limits of Literature that the rapid growth of trauma studies is surely linked
to a specific ethical or sociocultural tension. This arises from an awareness of the
persistence of violence in a culture that no longer condones the martial virtues of war.
After Nazisim, and totalitarianism generally, yearning for the arts of peace has never
been greater (269). While it is agreed that the literary field of trauma theory emerged
in the 1980s, it did so on the basis of studies that were conducted in the psychological
community across both world wars and the war in Vietnam. The fact that Aloysius is a
survivor of World War II does not seem coincidence given the trauma theme of this
novel and this background from which trauma theory emerged.
In the readers guide included in my copy of Enon, Harding describes Charlies
narrative as a confession in which Charlie speaks directly, in good faith, to the reader,
(244). In doing so, Charlie puts his narrative into words, a task that is only considered
possible by the new definition of trauma. Whereas the old definition argues The
ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness, (Herman 1) new
theorists suggest that retelling the events surrounding a traumatic occurrence enables
survivors to gain more control over the traces left by trauma, (Brison 71).

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In Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, Laurie Vickeroy writes that a
trauma narrative demonstrates how a traumatic event disrupts relations between the
victim and others while guiding readers through the narrative via the disorientations
and conflicts of traumatic memory, (3). Hardings Enon exceeds this definition, taking
readers on a difficult journey through the separation of Charlie from all of his loved
ones, the changes to his personality that occur as a result, and the means by which
Charlie must cope with his loss. One of these coping mechanisms involves Charlie
pursuing an enactment of the triadic self, a topic Dennis Miehls writes on in his article
Contemporary Trends in Supervision Theory: A Shift from Parallel Process to Relational
and Trauma Theory. In it, Miehls explains that The triadic self refers to the welldocumented clinical concept which describes that trauma survivors internalize all parts
of the victim-victimizer-bystander/rescuer dynamic. He then writes The survivor does
not stay fixed on one aspect of the triadic self; rather, he shifts between the identities
of victim/victimizer/bystander, (374). This is displayed when Charlie is initially victim
of the traumatic event of losing his daughter, victimizer when he breaks into Mrs. Hales
house, and bystander when he watches while the underage girls drink in the cemetery.
Overall, the novel displays a shockingly accurate depiction of trauma theory as
defined by the most recent research in the field. This depiction defines Enon as a
contemporary trauma narrative, allowing readers to experience the effects of trauma as
the newest definition describes it: an event of devastation that is both memorable and
describable for the victim. The accuracy in which Charlie exhibits symptoms of this
definition of trauma theory does not prove, but perhaps suggests that Paul Harding did

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his research when writing this novel. Regardless of whether Harding was aware of this
or not, the fact that Enon was published during such a controversial time in trauma
theory studies makes the novel seem to be taking a side. Taking a moment to
experience the novel from this perspective proves both interesting and useful to those
interested in both contemporary fiction and trauma theory.

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Works Cited
Brison, Susan J. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 2002. Print.
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
Print.
Harding, Paul. Enon. Paperback ed. New York: Random House Trade, 2014. Print.
Hartman, Geoffrey. "Trauma Within the Limits of Literature." European Journal of

English Studies 7.3 (2003): 257-74. Web.

Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York, NY: Basic, 1992. Print.
McNally, Richard J. Remembering Trauma. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP,
2003. Print.
Miehls, Dennis. "Contemporary Trends in Supervision Theory: A Shift from Parallel
Process to Relational and Trauma Theory." Clinical Social Work Journal 38.4
(2010): 370-78. Web.
Parad, Howard J., and Gerald Caplain. "A Framework for Studying Families in
Crisis." Social Work 5.3 (1960): 3-15. JSTOR. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.
Pederson, Joshua. "Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary
Trauma Theory." Narrative 22.3 (2014): 337-40. Project Muse. Web. 15 Apr.
2015.
Vickeroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2002. Print.