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The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths
Meg Jensen
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THE ART AND SCIENCE OF TRAUMA AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
Negotiated Truths MEG JENSEN
SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT AND MAX SAUNDERS
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing
Series Editors
Clare Brant
Department of English
King’s College London London, UK
Max Saunders
Department of English
King’s College London London, UK
This series features books that address key concepts and subjects, with an emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers specialist but accessible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on connecting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars and students looking for clear and original discussion of specifc subjects and forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative risks with potent materials.
The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to refect the academic, public and global reach of life writing, and to continue its democratic tradition. The series seeks contributions that address contexts beyond traditional territories—for instance, in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. It also aims to publish volumes addressing topics of general interest (such as food, drink, sport, gardening) with which life writing scholarship can engage in lively and original ways, as well as to further the political engagement of life writing especially in relation to human rights, migration, trauma and repression, sadly also persistently topical themes. The series looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is understood and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that deepens and diversifes knowledge and perspectives on the subject, and which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the world relevance of life writing.
More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15200
Meg Jensen
The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical
Negotiated Truths
Meg Jensen
Kingston University
Kingston upon Thames, UK
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing
ISBN 978-3-030-06105-0 ISBN 978-3-030-06106-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06106-7
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To Professor Julia Watson, with gratitude for her professional inspiration and personal kindness.
P reface
On my desk is an old black and white composition notebook in which I once wrote the following: “How do writers write? What makes them want to tell their stories, especially the sad ones? Do they want people to feel sorry for them? Or are they talking to themselves when they write?” I asked these questions in October of 1975, when I was a thirteen-yearold seventh grader at St Ignatius Loyola School in Hicksville, New York and had been asked to participate in a Creative Writing class. To say that this class saved my life is no exaggeration (thank you Mrs. McEvoy wherever you are). But neither is it an exaggeration to say that the concerns I examine in this book are indeed the interests of a lifetime.
How and why do writers write, especially about their sad stories? is, in essence, my central research question. In various projects over many years I have tried to answer that question creatively, through fction and poetry, practically, through targeted and applied writing workshops in collaboration with groups in need of various kinds of support, and of course analytically. Firstly I drew on a paradigm of infuence and intertextuality that grew into an interest in all things autobiographical, and from there investigated the relation between various forms of writing and trauma which led, seemingly inevitably, to interdisciplinary research of the kind common to life narrative studies, research that included study of the biological, psychological, sociological, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and neuroscientifc models of what trauma is, does, and how it can be treated.
This volume is thus a distillation, not of everything I have learned, but rather of the connections and chasms I see among these subjects. Its aim is to foster discussion and enhance understanding of the complex relationship between the art and science of the autobiographical in order to add to critical and scientifc debates on the nature of PTSD, and to enhance the development of effective therapies for practical application. The work this book contains, however, also incorporates a much greater quantity of self-refection and examination than is normally the case in academic writing. I make no apologies for this. Like Clarissa Dalloway, I have often had the feeling “that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” My increased knowledge and understanding of current research on PTSD across these multiple disciplines has helped me enormously in my own recovery, and I hope that reading this work will help fellow PTSD survivors.
I am deeply grateful to a number of friends, family, and colleagues who have offered practical, emotional, and editorial support. In particular, I want to thank those colleagues at Kingston University whose goodwill and collaboration helped me to develop this project: Vesna Goldsworthy, Norma Clarke, Anne rowe, Jane Jordan, David rogers, and Patricia Phillippy. Special thanks to Martin Dines whose conscientious critique of an overly long, complicated and nearly unreadable draft chapter has greatly informed the whole of the volume. I owe you one. I thank the School of Arts, Culture and Communication research fund at Kingston University for fnancing a much-needed trip to the Berg collection at the New York Public Library, and for the generosity of the staff at the archive in helping me locate materials on Nabokov, Woolf, and Kerouac. The volume would not have been half as interesting without early collaborations on “Genres of Testimony” at Kingston University and University of Minnesota with Brian Brivati, James Dawes, Mark Muller, Eva Hoffman, Patricia Hampl, Barbara Frey, and Annette Kobak. Further collaborations such as work done as part of the Beyond Borders Festival in Scotland at Traquair House with the Women in Confict Fellows, coordinated by Director Mark Muller taught me much about the potential practical applications for my research.
Further infuential work has included conferences, workshops, and edited collections organised by and with Margaretta Jolly, and, more recently the expressive writing programs funded by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Offce Human rights fund, and developed and delivered with Siobhan Campbell alongside Dr. Ghassan Jawad Kadhim and
Asmaa al Ameen in Iraq, and Nadine Saba in Beirut as well as the training jointly developed and delivered with Siobhan Campbell, Catherine Moira Kennedy, and Sundus Abbas for the United Nations Development Program in Iraq. These collaborations have been central to my work and my thinking on the relation between trauma and life narratives. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. Membership of the International Auto/Biographical Association has been an intellectual inspiration and lifeline, and I am especially grateful for debates and discussions with Margaretta Jolly, Leigh Gilmore, Julia Watson, Craig Howes, Sidonie Smith, rosemary Kennedy, Tom Couser, Gillian Whitlock, Julie rak, and Clare Brant that informed this project and other related ones. Any value that this volume contains is heavily indebted to such discussions and to the prodigious research each of you has provided the feld. All errors or misunderstandings within this book are of course, my own. Personal thanks to my brothers, Kenneth and Paul and my sister Carolyn for their continued love and support and to Max and Hannah for letting me into their life. Lana and Scout—thank you for rearranging my papers and standing in front of my computer screen until you were fed. A huge thank you and much love and admiration to my editorial assistant and indexer extraordinaire Tessa Jensen-Hedgecock (and apologies that your mother wrote such a long book). Finally, to my hero Brian Brivati whose multiple intellectual challenges and suggestions on both the form and the content of this book (over three years’ worth of reading drafts) were as important to its completion as his cooking is to my survival and his love is to my life. Thank you my dearest friend. That Creative Writing class I took in grammar school not only taught me about the craft of turning lives into stories, but it got me to think about the how and why of that process in the context of suffering. In this book, I hope to fnally provide the young me with some answers and to generate more questions for the old me to think about. I think Mrs. McEvoy would have liked that.
Kingston upon Thames, UK Meg Jensen
a W ord a bout the c over
Vincent Van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890)
Irises, (detail) 1889, Oil on Canvas
74.3 x 94.3 cm (29 ¼ × 37 1/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
In 1987 I was working at Sotheby’s auction house in New York and was given the task of overseeing the production of the sales catalogue for the auction when Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises came up for sale. In doing so, I became one of the very few people to be able to engage closely with this masterpiece as it had previously been in private hands. Each day I went to see the painting in its temperature controlled room, checking the images we would use in the catalogue against the original. In those visits I began to feel a connection to the artwork. The shockingly beautiful and heartbreaking purple blossoms, the soothing green of the leaves and the chromatic genius of the yellow and single white fower in the background all crafted in thick textural brushstrokes: it was too much. One could not look at it for very long. And it was not only the color and the artistry that enthralled me. It was what happened when you stepped back. Forced to glance away from the overwhelming glory of this exquisite tableaux the eye was drawn down to something in the corner: the artist’s name, rendered in a childlike hand, Vincent
The catalogue I coordinated for the auction helped the painting become (at the time) the most expensive painting ever sold. But that wasn’t what mattered to me. In fact I didn’t even go to the auction as
I didn’t want to see it sold or see who would take my painting from me. Having had the privilege and the pain of contemplating this work at length, and both learning and feeling what it said about the relation between suffering and art, it became a key inspiration for my later academic career. The painting is aesthetically ravishing but despite the popular misconception that Van Gogh’s work resulted from a kind of mad, untrained genius, in fact he had worked for years to achieve the compositional perfection evident in Irises and many other paintings. His letters to his brother illustrate these concerns and discuss his habit of drawing preparatory studies before beginning a major work, and his creation of a mechanical device to help him measure perspectives and map out grid lines. Irises, in other words, is an apt as well as a majestic example of what can arise from the relationship between art, science, and suffering: powerful, affective and affecting autobiographical projects that show us the terrible pain and the unbearable beauty of life in the context of trauma.
CHAPTE r 1
The Negotiated Truth
narrative sWerves and holding sPaces
The purpose of art, according to the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, is that it has the “capacity to show that the world can be otherwise” (Marcuse 1977, 138). I was reminded of this idea in 2006 as I read an essay by the novelist JG Ballard. In it, Ballard describes the process of writing his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, a work of fction that draws heavily on his harrowing childhood experiences in the Lunghua Japanese prisoner of war camp. He begins the essay by refecting on the “huge staying power” of memories, noting that “like dreams, they thrive in the dark” (Ballard 2006, 1). Past experiences, Ballard observes, can survive “for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed,” and, if they are painful, bringing them into the light “can be risky” (Ballard 2006, 1). In Ballard’s case, that risk was so great that he avoided writing about his childhood for forty years: “[t]wenty years to forget, and then 20 years to remember” (Ballard 2006, 1). In fact, he confesses, he was entirely unable to bear witness to that time in his life until “it occurred to me to drop my parents from the story” just as “they had moved out of my life in Lunghua even though we were sharing the same room” (Ballard 2006, 1). removing his parents from the story, that is, enacted a narrative swerve that freed
Ballard to recount what he felt to be the truth of his “real existence”: his sense of surviving the war on his own (Ballard 2006, 1). “Once I separated Jim from his parents,” Ballard reveals, “the novel unrolled itself at my feet like a bullet-ridden carpet” (Ballard 2006, 1).
Thus, despite the signifcant change Ballard had made in representing the circumstances of his past, he found that “enough of it was based on fact to convince me that what had seemed a dream-like pageant was a negotiated truth” (Ballard 2006, 1). The art of Ballard’s novel, in other words, its narrative negotiation with the “risky,” “dark,” and “shipwrecked” memories of its author’s traumatic past, exemplifes the Marcusean capacity to show the world as “otherwise.” And it is precisely this strategy of negotiation with the truth, rather than its documentation, that I fnd in all the posttraumatic autobiographical projects I examine in the pages to come. From legal and rights testimony to traditional and graphic memoirs, from prison poetry to autobiographical fction, from virtual to material monuments to traumatic histories, I see Ballard’s “negotiated truth” as the key rhetorical fgure of the posttraumatic autobiographical. Indeed, it is an approach to recounting traumatic past experiences that I have used myself.
Let me tell you a story. When I was ten years old, two very bad, but entirely unconnected, things happened to me: the sudden death of a sibling and a violent sexual assault. The frst of these, my eldest brother’s fatal car accident, was shocking, tragic, and naturally had a very distressing effect on my family. Nevertheless, as the years passed, that loss began to heal. Now, more than four decades later, we miss Alan still and speak of him often, thinking of him especially on his birthday or at Christmastime, but there is no denying that the intensity of our grief has lessened. The other experience did not heal over time. For decades I sought help from various therapists for my crippling anxiety, periodic depression, and self-destructive behavior. In these settings, I was given reasons for my very different reactions to the two terrible things. It seemed that because my brother’s death could be explained, spoken of and shared with others, it could also be processed and eventually accepted. But the attack of which I could not speak continued to haunt me.
So, I took my therapists at their word and spoke. Time and time again I tried to tell them about that terrible experience, but for reasons I only now can understand, I found it impossible to do so. I was like a person recounting a dream: the sensory details were there, but I could not weave them into a story that would make sense to someone else. The
attack existed for me in vivid fashbacks as if projected on to multiple, non-synchronized planes from a variety of viewpoints, a private screening that admitted only me. In this narrative muddle, I sometimes contradicted myself, confating certain specifcs, backtracking to try and explain, and ultimately telling different versions of what happened. Often, my therapists would challenge me about which of these accounts was the “real” truth. But I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. For while they were concerned about the who, what, when, and where of what happened, all that mattered to me was the question that could not be answered. The ‘why.’
So, I gave up on therapy and I suffered. And I wrote. And through writing, I negotiated a way of raising my dangerous memories from the deep. I invented a character (Bernadette) with a past like my own and imagined what would happen to her in the future. I wrote this story as fction rather than fact because (as my therapy had shown) my grasp of the facts was unreliable. And anyway, in fction I could create my own answer to the unanswerable question.
Here is an excerpt from that work:
Bernadette’s Creative Writing Notebook
Date: October 22 1999
Title: Time Line
Bernadette was attacked when she was nine or ten years old. She can’t remember the exact date. That is, she can’t remember if it was before Andrew died or after—which probably means it was after—in the time when nothing much worth remembering in any linear way happened. Bernadette remembers this period in an audible, aural way instead. She remembers sounds, words especially, words that were spoken and words that were choked, and who said what to whom. But when, and in what order, or with what consequences—it doesn’t come back to Bernadette that way.
This lack of chronological sequencing doesn’t bother Bernadette—it didn’t really matter in which order the plagues descended did it? Was it locusts frst or foods? It is enough to know that they came. That the horrors did not desist. That some died, and others lived to write about it.
Her shrink didn’t see it that way, of course. resistance, defense mechanisms—these were the words that hung about the analyst’s offce. “But why were you there, Bea? In the park?”
Why indeed.
Bernadette could not follow. She did not want to remember, to place events in a continuum, to see their cause and effect. “Bernadette’s timeline” was the project her shrink wanted to her to complete. So, she did. On a big piece of white poster board, using black stenciled letters and a large, red line to connect the dots. She’d made most of it up.1
While much of my novel is fctionalized, the passage I cite here recalls something I did in real life. I was fed up with being questioned. But what I did not know when I handed over that half-made-up time line to my therapist was that my inability to offer a consistent chronology of events was itself a key symptom of what is known as posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
I began to learn about the constrained relationship between traumatic experience and life storytelling in 2014 when the anxiety I had suffered from all my life became intolerable: I could not sleep and was terrifed of travel and even of being on my own. I struggled to get to work and to care for my family. I decided (very reluctantly given my previous unsuccessful experiences with therapy) that I had to get some professional help. For the frst time, I received the diagnosis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, brought on by the violent assault in childhood. And I found out something else. Although I had many symptoms of PTSD, there was one that I did not have any longer: vivid fashbacks.
In my teens and early twenties, I had them all the time, especially at night. But more recently the images that chase me in my nightmares are vague and changing—not specifc and recurrent. My new therapist wondered why. And he asked me to tell him my story. But this time instead of recounting it all again, I gave him my novel to read. Afterwards, we talked at length about the relationship between my writing and my symptomology. And here is what we came to understand: although writing the novel did not completely “cure” me, it provided a “holding space” on the page for my traumatic memories.2 By integrating those memories into a partially imagined story with a beginning middle and end, I was able to place those terrifying events in the past to some degree. As I understood it, my writing formed a barrier between my present-day life and the pain of my past. It enabled me to get on with life: get an education, get a good job, raise a child, and maintain good relationships. Nevertheless, to borrow a phrase from Ballard, the events of my childhood had “staying power.” While once they had remained behind the barrier I constructed, my anxieties had now become overpowering: the door needed strengthening.
the “Why?”
At around the same time I was working through these issues, a colleague and I began to develop a research project for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Offce (FCO) that would adapt expressive life writing exercises for survivors of sexual violence in confict in Iraq. In the process, I read through the FCO’s International Protocol on the Documentation and Investigation of Sexual Violence in Confict (2014). As the Protocol makes clear, its central ethos is to “do no harm” to victims of such crimes in the process of investigation. The section on interviewing and collecting testimony, therefore, advises the interviewer that he or she should be sure to “cover the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ of the crimes (while remaining wary about asking the survivor/witness any ‘why’ questions, so as not to apportion blame to the survivor/witness)” (Protocol 2014, 114). When I frst saw the recommended list of questions for interviewers, however, I was thrown back into my own past, picturing the younger me offering her hurt, angry, and ironic time-line in response to just such interrogations. It occurred to me that the Protocol’s suggested interview approach was not only likely to unknowingly “do harm” to victims by forcing them to recount experiences, but it was also impractical in terms of data collection: a survivor re-traumatized in the act of witnessing cannot offer reliable testimony. I saw too that while the Protocol advises interviewers to avoid any considerations of “why,” research suggests that victims of trauma cannot begin to heal until they are able to construct some narrative of “meaning” for their experiences.3
And there is more. My educational background is eclectic to say the least: I am a bit of a magpie and have read and studied literature, cultural studies, creative writing, art history and philosophy as well as the biomedical sciences. My experiences of both psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and my recent contributions to applied psychosocial projects, have also given me deep understanding of the research emanating from those disciplines on traumatic injury, its causes, effects, and the effcacy (or otherwise) of a range of therapeutic interventions. In Isaiah Berlin’s famous formulation, I am much more “fox” than “hedgehog” (Berlin 1953).4 I am also very aware that despite my most earnest research, enquiry, and endeavor, in my fox-like rushing across multiple disciplines to draw connections and generate new ideas, I may succumb to the dangers of the wide-angle viewpoint. Details may be overlooked. Nuances missed. The disciplinary subtleties of biochemical theorems and neuroscientifc fndings blurred. Should any or all of these infelicities be
contained in this volume I would be grateful for constructive, elucidating clarifcations. I am not and do not claim to be an expert in all of these research areas and I defer to those who are. What my background does offer, however, is an ability to spot the signifcant gaps in knowledge in each discipline that might be aided by work being done in another, thereby providing an opportunity to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion, connection, and collaboration. Such exchanges, I hope, may lead to the creation of new knowledge and understanding of posttraumatic autobiographical narratives and the relations of these to mental illness and well-being.
My reading of the FCO Protocol is an example of the necessity for such cross-disciplinary conversations, as it suggests that ideas commonly discussed in literary trauma studies and clinical psychology are not fully informing this aspect of applied human rights work. Other gaps of similar kinds will be explored in the chapters to come. Importantly for me, therefore, this project is not only concerned with what knowledge I might generate. Instead, I hope to foster discussions that will lead to practical applications of collaboratively developed, effective, and targeted narrative-based therapies for the treatment of trauma. The negotiation of my “truth” gave me a new story to tell—a new narrative identity: Bernadette, my character, was a victim. I, Meg Jensen, am a writer/survivor, in charge of the story of my life. And through my work on this volume, I have come to further understand that this cycle of representation, refection, and detachment from the past is a vital path toward well-being.
altered relations
Cultural critic Andreas Huyssen has argued that “survivors of traumatic experiences face the diffcult task of new beginnings,” as trauma by its nature must “necessarily remain unresolved, generating ever new attempts at resolution” (Huyssen 2003, 151). Autobiographical narratives composed in the aftermath of traumatic experience are part of that compulsion to resolve what cannot be resolved, to generate meaning, knowledge, and justice in the context of trauma. In this way, although the symptoms of traumatic injury inscribe serious constraints on autobiographical storytelling, they are also generative, forging new, identifable forms of expression across otherwise dissimilar narratives. To be clear
here, I am not suggesting that there is a simple cause and effect relation between traumatic experience and art or even traumatic experience and storytelling. Traumatic injury does not in and of itself produce art, artists or autobiographical projects of any kind. rather, representations of such experiences are composed within multiple and idiosyncratic familial, historical, economic, and political contexts including but not limited to the traumatic event and its aftermath. For the purposes of this study, however, I posit that there are striking similarities among literary, testimonial, generational, and memorial representations of traumatic experience that are in all other ways dissimilar, and that those similarities are created in the generative context of trauma.
In The Limits of Autobiography (2001), Leigh Gilmore explored representations of traumatic experience in a range of autobiographical texts, considering both the “coincidence of trauma and self-representation,” and what this relation reveals about “autobiography, its history and especially its limits” (Gilmore 2001, 36). Telling dangerous truths, Gilmore explains, calls forth “an alternative jurisdiction for self-representation” in which survivors can “produce an alternative jurisprudence about trauma [and] identity” (Gilmore 2001, 143). This notion that autobiographical representations forge an extralegal, “alternative jurisdiction,” suggests the complexity of such symbolic sites in which memory is not simply exercised but, to use Ballard’s term, negotiated. Narratives of the suffering self or the victimized community simultaneously enact commemoration of that suffering and are emblematic of avoidance.
In the “alternative jurisdiction” of posttraumatic representation, Gilmore argues, a distinction is drawn between “the sovereign self” who can articulate “who I am and how I came to be this way” and the “knowing self” who “does not ask who am I,” but instead “how can the relations in which I live […] be re-enacted through me” (Gilmore 2001, 43). Adapting Julia Kristeva’s observation of the altered relations to “power, language, and meaning,” translated by “sexual difference” (Kristeva 1981, 13), posttraumatic autobiographical narratives may be said to evoke a difference inscribed by the posttraumatic state: an altered relationship to meaning and to the body, and therefore to the experience of life itself. The discourse of such representations, whether voiced individually or collectively, articulates the violent incursion of the traumatic event(s) rather than representing a stable, sovereign voice that
has access to all the facts. Trauma narratives of all kinds are produced in the interrogative space between a haunted present and an unattainable future and concern the interplay between what can be known and remembered, and those sounds, images, and feelings trapped in the decontextualized echo chamber of traumatic memory.
While the negotiation of truth is the key strategy of such narratives in all forms, the character of that negotiation (whether in fction, poetry, testimony, or public memorial art) is questioning, interrogative, and generative of ambiguous responses. Their cultural value, moreover, comes precisely from this unique perspective. As Huyssen observes, if “we acknowledge the constitutive gap between reality and its representation in language or image” then we must also “be open to many different possibilities of representing the real and its memories” and accept that “the semiotic gap cannot be closed by any orthodoxy of correct representation” (Huyssen 2003, 19). In the case of traumatic histories, this semiotic gap is widened by diffculties in the processing and retrieval of memory that ultimately lead to boundary-breaking forms. These forms challenge representational and generic orthodoxies, and in doing so produce vital new understandings of what it means to be human in the context of trauma (Gilmore 2001).
In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth argues that what haunts the victim of traumatic experience is not only “the reality of the violent event” but also the way in which that violence “has not yet been fully known” (Caruth 1996, 6). The role of the posttraumatic autobiographical narrative, therefore, is to stand on the threshold asking questions at that locked door. In the pages to come, I will consider numerous such representations of traumatic experience, reading them not simply as “symptoms” but as complex interrogative negotiations of trauma and its aftermath, commemorative and performative sites that have been reached via insecure transit across networks of aesthetic, practical, cultural, economic, linguistic, and emotional pressures and inspirations.5 In order to make these arguments, it will be useful frst to offer an overview of “trauma” itself—both its historical origins and its development as a diagnosable condition, and the latest (though not uncontested) defnitions of what trauma is and does.
defining trauma
Throughout history, human beings have understood that there was a relationship between traumatic experiences and mental illness (Andreasen 2010). As early as 2000 BC, ancient Egyptians noted the adverse effects of warfare on soldiers. In 440 BC, Herodotus wrote in his Histories of a “marvel that occurred” in the Battle of Marathon. There, he told the story of an Athenian named Epizelos, who, “while fghting in close combat” lost “the sight of his eyes,” despite not having “received a blow in any part of his body” (Herodotus 440 B.C., trans. Macaulay 1890, 6:117, 1–3). In a diagnosis suggestive of our contemporary understanding of chronic PTSD, Herodotus observed that while not physically injured, Epizelos “continued to be blind” for “the rest of his life from this time” as a direct result of being witness to horrifc scenes (“Such was the number which fell on both sides,” Herodotus explained) (Herodotus 440 B.C., trans. Macaulay 1890, 6:117, 1–3).
In the seventeenth century, Swiss physician Johannes Hofer used the term “nostalgia” to describe a set of symptoms suffered by soldiers stationed in France and Italy who pined for their native mountain landscapes. They complained of “melancholy,” “insomnia,” “loss of appetite,” “anxiety,” “heart palpitations,” and “incessant thinking about home” (Hofer 1688). In the Napoleonic period, French physicians followed up Hofer’s observations, attempting to more clearly categorize both the symptoms of this illness and to identify those most at risk. In 1823, Napoleon’s chief surgeon Dominique-Baron Larrey prescribed exercise and music to treat this condition (Shorter 2015, 54–55), and by the late nineteenth century, similar observations of a long-lasting event-based disorder not predicated on physical injury were being made in many Western countries. In the United States, for example, Dr. Jacob Mendez Da Costa made note of what he called “soldier’s heart,” the symptoms of which included a thumping chest, anxiety, and breathlessness (Shorter 2015, 55). In Great Britain, a series of train disasters gave rise to a condition termed “railway Spine,” in which seemingly healthy and uninjured accident victims complained of a range of physical disorders (Harrington 2001).
The frst recorded breakthrough in understanding and treating conditions like these came from the research of French physician Jean Martin Charcot. Charcot worked with women who were diagnosed as “hysterics,” a term which suggested that their symptoms arose from a disease of the uterus (the Greek word for womb is “hystera”) (Goetz et al. 1995, 211).
The symptoms of “hysteria” included sudden paralysis, amnesia, sensory loss, and convulsions and the usual treatment was hysterectomy. Charcot was the frst to understand that the origin of these symptoms was psychological rather than neurological—and that they arose as a result of terrifying and often violent experiences. In the 1880s, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud likewise concluded that hysteria was caused by psychological trauma. In Freud’s view, hysteria might be the result of a traumatic experience, but was more likely to arise from repressed and socially unacceptable desires. In 1893, Breuer and Freud developed Charcot’s ideas in their “Studies on Hysteria,” and took particular note of what they called “an hysterical attack,” observing that it comprised “the recurrence of a physical state which the patient has experienced earlier,”6 a defnition similar to the one used to diagnose PTSD fashbacks today.
Further development of treatments for trauma came during the First World War when psychiatrists observed soldiers suffering from what was then termed shell-shock, or battle fatigue. Symptoms of shell-shock were like those of hysteria in that they included uncontrollable weeping, screaming, memory loss, and physical paralysis (Herman 1992). Doctors discovered that quick intervention near the battlefeld could enable some traumatized soldiers to return to the front, while those who could not be cured were usually branded as weak or cowardly. The treatment used on these soldiers drew on Freudian psychoanalysis: the patient told the story of what had happened to him, perhaps several times, as a way of desensitizing himself to the stressful memory. In 1923, however, psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner, himself a former patient of Freud’s, observed that in some cases it was best not to encourage the soldiers to revisit their harrowing experiences. reexposure of this kind often slowed recovery, Kardiner found, and he further theorized that by telling their stories, the soldiers reawoke their suffering (van der Kolk et al. 1996, 60). Kardiner thus argued that traumatic symptoms were not related to an individual’s cowardice or moral weakness but were instead a normal and understandable result of exposure to suffering and atrocity.
During World War II, psychiatrists relied on hypnosis as a treatment for trauma, and, after the war, a new category of patient was described: survivors. Multiple studies were undertaken of the impact of long-term stress on prison and concentration camp detainees as well as combat veterans. Psychoanalyst Henry Krystal, for example, studied prolonged traumatization in concentration camp survivors. He argued
that many of them lacked the ability to imagine, to symbolize and to dream. As a result, they experienced emotions through the body, “without being able to interpret the meaning of what they are feeling” (van der Kolk et al. 1996, 60). The traumatic experiences these survivors had undergone, Krystal suggested, brought about an inability to imagine the future or refect on the past as past .
In Boston in 1942, four hundred and ninety-three people died in a fre in the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. Studies of this terrible event further developed trauma theory in a civilian context. Dr. Erich Lindemann, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical school, treated many of the survivors of that fre and in doing so laid the groundwork for our contemporary understanding PTSD in his 1944 paper “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief.” In it, Lindemann identifed some of the symptoms we recognize today as the effects of trauma, such as expressions of guilt and hostility, low mood, anxiety, disorganization, and certain physical complaints.
Ptsd and contemPorary understandings
The past four decades have witnessed a tremendous growth in our understanding of traumatic disorders, their symptoms, and their treatment.7 Investigations into the causes of trauma have led to great advances in our ability to map its psychological processes. Most recently, through research in neuroscience, knowledge of how the delicate circuitry of the brain is affected by traumatic events has increased hugely.8 As these developments have coincided with a sustained period of global confict and the consequent mobilization of international rights activism and public health interventions, this same period has also seen a dramatic increase in the incidence and diagnosis of traumatic disorders in general and PTSD in particular.9 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder was frst used as a diagnosis in the late 1970s mainly in relation to the sufferings of large numbers of US military veterans of the Vietnam War who returned with, or later developed, chronic mental health problems including drug and/ or alcohol abuse, violence, inability to sustain employment, depression, anxiety, and fashbacks.
Psychiatrists Chaim Shatan and robert J. Lifton were anti-war activists who became involved in organizing “rap groups” with returning veterans in the New York City area during this period. These discussion
groups enabled veterans to share their problems with one another in the hope of recognition and healing. Shatan and Lifton campaigned for a new diagnosis that would enable the veterans to receive publicly funded treatment for their symptoms. They went on to identify twenty-seven common effects of what they called “traumatic neurosis,” which eventually informed the frst formal diagnostic criteria for PTSD (Shatan 1974). At the same time, as a consequence of the women’s movement in America in the 1970s, trauma in women’s lives began to be studied. Women’s consciousness-raising groups, like the “rap groups” established for war veterans, helped victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse to discuss their experiences publicly and “overcome barriers of denial, secrecy and shame” (Herman 1992, 29). In the 1980s, Dr. Diana russell conducted a survey of more than nine hundred women chosen at random that revealed then-shocking statistics. One woman in four of those questioned in the survey had been raped. One woman in three had been sexually abused in childhood. russell’s study eventually gave rise to further investigations of the frequency and long-term effects of sexual and domestic violence on women’s mental health (russell 1982, 1983).
In 1980, the term PTSD entered modern psychology in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Third Edition of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-III, APA). The current edition of this manual (DSM-V, 2013) used by clinicians and researchers to diagnose and classify mental disorders, contains an entire chapter devoted to trauma-related disorders. This addition refects advances in knowledge and understanding of trauma, and the variety of ways it might present itself in different people at different times. According to the DSM-V (2013), PTSD is a stress-related disorder that arises from involvement in certain kinds of traumatic events. PTSD can arise from being a victim of such an event, or from witnessing it. The trigger for developing PTSD and related disorders is “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violation.”10 regardless of which kind of exposure was the trigger, PTSD goes on to cause signifcant distress to those who suffer from it, interfering not only with emotions, but also with the executive functions that control behaviors like social interactions, self-care, reasoning, and problem-solving.
It is worth noting here, however, that most people who witness a traumatic event will not develop PTSD, and that at present there is no clear agreement among mental health practitioners about precise or
discreet risk factors.11 recent research shows that approximately 25% of people may be more likely to become traumatized than others, whether through a genetic predisposition, gender, or because of their early life experiences. As we shall see in Chapter 7, more work is being done to identify most those at risk, thereby predicting and possibly preventing them from developing traumatic disorders.
date stamPing
One compelling psychological model of PTSD’s mechanisms comes from clinical psychologist robert Strickgold. Strickgold argues that the defning characteristic of PTSD is “failed memory processing,” which is characterized by the “inappropriate dominance of specifc episodic memories of traumatic events” (Strickgold 2002, 63). In Strickgold’s account, traumatic symptoms are the effect of biochemical processes in the brain that are triggered by the traumatic event, disrupting memory, and the ability to produce a coherent, chronologically accurate, account of that event: an autobiographical narrative. Autobiographical narratives are composed of memories, and memories are produced by a complex set of systems in which both sensory and semantic perceptions are processed in different areas of the brain and then stored. In the frst instance, they are either stored as declarative “episodic memories”—those specifc events that we can remember clearly—or as “general knowledge” or “semantic content” only—for example the general knowledge that enables us to drive a car without necessarily being able to recall all the moments in which we learned each element of driving (Strickgold 2002, 63).
In normal memory processing, our memories are “date-stamped”: our brain fles them chronologically so that we know that the events of Monday came before the events of Tuesday and so on (Strickgold 2002, 66). That system allows us to remember a specifc experience, such as our frst day of school or the last time we ate sushi, and at the same time to understand that this experience was in the past. If we had to, we could probably put a date and time of day on such memories. In PTSD, on the other hand, the brain does not integrate the episodic memory of a traumatic event into the semantic memory system properly. This lack of consolidation means that links do not develop and the memory of the event is created in an “inappropriately strong and affectladen form” that can neither be refected on, nor fade in the usual
way (Strickgold 2002, 67).12 While normally processed memories are ascribed a context in which they can be read (my childhood, my school years, my trip to California, etc.) traumatic events are stuck as unprocessed sensory perception, and can reemerge at any time and place as if they are occurring right now. Moreover, because these traumatic experiences are not “date-stamped” as past experiences that are no longer threatening, they can easily trigger distress in the present. research by neuroscientists suggests that this processing failure occurs because trauma causes the complex circuitry of the brain to break down in several ways. The lateral, prefrontal, parietal, and posterior midline structures of the brain become structurally remodeled by traumatic stress experiences. As these regions are particularly involved in episodic memory, emotional processing, and executive control, these changes might form the physiological substrate of PTSD symptoms (Schauer et al. 2011, 21). Firstly, in trauma, the amygdala, the part of our brain responsible for reacting to fear, overreacts (LeDoux 2000; Shin et al. 2006). The functions of the amygdala are related to basic survival emotions: threat detection and the fght or fight response. People with PTSD tend to have a chronically overactive amygdala that exaggerates fear responses even to things that are not in and of themselves threatening: triggers such as bright lights, motorcycle engines, or stern facial expressions. At the same time, the hippocampus, another part of the brain that is related to processing memory, is underactive in many cases of PTSD (Bremner 1999). As I will explore in the pages to come, normal brain functioning requires a complex set of interactions between these parts of the brain and the cerebral cortex or executive branch. When any one part of this system breaks down, as it does in PTSD, the results are wide-ranging. There may be disruptive “active” symptoms such as hyperalertness, exaggerated anxiety fashbacks, or sleeplessness as well as “de-activating” symptoms such as emotional numbing, low mood, and unreliable or fragmented memory.
treatments for trauma
Several kinds of therapy have been shown to be effective for many people with a history of traumatic experience, whether they are victims of, or witnesses to, violence in combat, sexual assaults, accidents, natural disasters or other traumatic events. The treatments used most commonly are Exposure Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Treatment
(CBT) (Bichescu et al. 2007).13 Exposure Therapy targets the unhelpful learned behaviors that many survivors engage with in order to avoid situations or thoughts that are reminiscent of the original trauma. Through this therapy, survivors undergo careful and controlled confrontation with sensory experiences or fearful triggers so that they can become desensitized to them (Mørkved et al. 2014). Trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has also been shown to be effective (Bisson and Andrew 2007). CBT is based on the idea that a person’s thoughts and beliefs about themselves and others, and about their past and future, will have major impact on how they feel (Galovski and Gloth 2015). This treatment thus focuses on processing the trauma survivor’s memory of the traumatic event and challenging the validity of their thoughts and beliefs about that event and its power in the present (MacPherson 2012, 30).
In addition to these treatments, the past ten years have seen great advances being made in the mapping of neurological, chemical, and biological causes of PTSD and its symptoms in the hope that such knowledge will aid in the development of more consistently effective interventions. Nevertheless, neurologically based treatment is only in its early phases. Likewise, at present, there is no straightforward psychopharmacological remedy for PTSD—no single drug therapy works for a convincingly large number of patients (Bowirrat et al. 2010). And while CBT is the most well-studied and most common treatment, research shows that it is effective in only about 50% of patients. While it has been proven to help many people with PTSD and often improves their lives very quickly, half of sufferers feel no relief from their symptoms at all after receiving CBT (Scaglione and Lockwood 2014, 40).
Narrative forms of therapy offer a signifcant alternative for many of these patients for whom these other treatments fall short. One of the key aims of this volume, therefore, is to provide a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary consideration of the relationships between trauma narratives of many kinds and contemporary models of the complex science of trauma so that we may identify the most promising narrative modes of support for survivors. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy did not help me, for example, or rather was not, on its own, enough. Like many other survivors, I needed a combined approach that drew on a range of psychological, therapeutic, and neurological methodologies, and composing autobiographical narratives that represented my experiences in imaginative ways formed an important part of that combination.
narrative-based theraPies
Despite some signifcant recent challenges, mental health professionals generally agree upon the centrality of narratives of identity, however fuid or fragmented, to our experience of self-hood.14 Martin Payne, in an excellent overview of narrative therapeutic approaches, highlights the “common ground” between what are now called “narrative therapies” and more traditional psychoanalysis, observing that the idea of “narrative” provides a “place where therapeutic minds can meet” (Payne 2006, 8). I will be looking in greater detail at narrative-based therapies in Chapter 7 of this volume, but for now I will note briefy that the overall aim of this approach is to reduce suffering by helping patients produce a clear, detailed, and chronological narrative of the events of their lives. As we shall see, when survivors of traumatic experience seek healing, social recognition or legal justice, they must fnd a form of words to articulate their experiences, however complex that process may be.
In the last two decades, much work has been done by clinical psychologists, narrative therapists, and literary critics considering the complex structural and epistemological relations between the experience of a traumatic event and the narrative form used to articulate it. In 1999, for example, studies by psychologist James Pennebaker and his colleagues clearly demonstrated the benefts of “writing therapy” for both physical and mental health, while at the same time concluding that they were “not entirely clear why it is effective in bringing about such striking physical health and behavior change” (Esterling et al. 1999, 85). More recently, Celia Hunt at Sussex University has shown that imaginative forms of life storytelling may be particularly useful in increasing an “awareness of spontaneous bodily feelings and emotions” (Hunt 2010, 232). Traumatic experience, Hunt argues, can limit access to one’s bodily perceptions and this “stuckness” blocks cognitive processing. Imaginative forms of life writing, in Hunt’s account, enable “a closer engagement” and a more “refexive relationship between different aspects” of the self, which in turn supports recovery (Hunt 2010, 232).
Works of literary theory and criticism have likewise engaged in exploring the connections between traumatic experience and its representation in narrative. Suzette Henke’s Shattered Subjects (1998), Leigh Gilmore’s The Limits of Autobiography (2001), and Anne Whitehead’s Trauma Fiction (2004) all offered groundbreaking and insightful analyses of
posttraumatic texts and are profoundly important resources for my own work. As I refected on the ideas raised in these works alongside Hunt’s reading of the transformative relationship between creative writing and the body, I began to see connections among trauma narratives forged in a range of autobiographical forms from witness testimony to prison poetry to graphic memoirs and public memorials. The complex pressures on such representations of suffering, as Leigh Gilmore explains, lead some “away from recognizably autobiographical forms, even as they engage autobiography’s central questions” (Gilmore 2001, 7). This volume examines and compares just such rhetorical, stylistic and meaningmaking swerves in textual, visual, and performative posttraumatic narratives, considering their negotiations of autobiographical questions in the aftermath of trauma.
melville, meaning, and that story of narcissus
In Herman Melville’s autobiographical fourth novel, Redburn: His First Voyage (1849), he points to the grief and hardship that impel the naïve and fatherless Wellingborough redburn to the join crew of a merchant ship. As the protagonist considers his future, he refects that he “must not think of those delightful days, before my father became a bankrupt” because when he does so “something rises up in my throat and almost strangles me” (Melville 1849, 4: 10). In this passage and others in Melville’s novel, redburn’s woes are depicted as not merely emotionally or psychologically painful but as a physically dangerous and chronic affiction: “never again can such blights be made good” redburn cries, “they strike in too deep and leave such a scar that the air of paradise might not erase them” (Melville 1849, 4: 11). The nature of the torment Melville describes here, I would argue, comprising fragments of terrifying memory that bring on bodily symptoms that can never be “made good,” is a prescient depiction of PTSD.
Certainly, Melville’s own childhood was marked by traumatic events very like those of his protagonist, including exposure to the mental illness which led his father to bankruptcy and early death. Indeed, throughout Melville’s life he was terrifed that he had inherited this so-called madness.15 Page after page of Melville’s work, moreover, from “Bartelby the Scrivener” to Billy Budd, depicts fgures suffering inconsolably in the aftermath of shocking early life experiences. That he
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MICHAEL IVANOVITCH KALININ
AND THE PEASANTS
There have been two presidents of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic; only recently we have become vaguely aware of one of them. Ever since the Bolshevik coup d’ état America has spoken of the Soviet Government as “the government of Lenin and Trotsky.” America was right in so far as these men enjoy immense power, and wrong in so far as she imagined it would have been possible at any time, and less so now, for either of these men or both of them to have abruptly changed the government’s policy from right to left or left to right without first receiving indisputable orders from the masses.
Relatively, Lenin has more power than Lloyd George and Trotsky considerably less; while President Kalinin, who began his office as little more than a figure-head, has been saved from the emptiness of such a position because he is so symbolic of the growing power of the peasants. Already more power has been bestowed upon him through the course of events than perhaps he himself realizes. Surely when he set out in his painted train on his first journey through the provinces three years ago, he could hardly have foreseen his place in history as one of the greatest influences in molding the new state.
Kalinin’s growing influence is a true barometer of public opinion or, to be more exact, of the reassertion of public opinion. And it is interesting to note that while many of the stars in the Communist sky are considerably dimmed by the ascendancy of Kalinin, Premier Lenin’s position is only made stronger. This is because the new pressure from below is for compromise, and public men go down under retreat much faster than when their banners are flying
triumphantly in advance. Lenin is practical enough to understand the advantages of a well-ordered retreat above those of a rout; he will save all he can of the Socialist state instead of abandoning it on the fields of battle.
It was the question of private property which became the vital issue in 1920 inside and outside of Russia. The abolition of private property was made possible by a determined, conscious minority. It was re-established by the pressure of a slow-moving, solid, unconscious majority; that majority was the peasants. I do not mean that the peasants are now actually in control of the state. I merely wish to point out that they already hold the balance of power and that they move towards control with the crushing surety of a glacier. They hold, strategically, the same position that the Bolsheviks did under Kerensky, but they will never pursue the same tactics; they will assume power gradually just because they are the majority; it is only a minority which must act with dramatic haste, counting on brains, daring and psychological moments.
It was logical that the first President should have been a man who represented the city workers and the second President, a peasant; for in such wise did the revolution settle itself.
Most of the Communists did not approve of Kalinin’s election. Lenin alone sensed the proper time to place a peasant as nominal head of the Soviets; a peasant who should begin as Master of Ceremonies and who, in his peasant’s garb and with his peasant’s tongue, should bring Lenin’s ideas to the people; a peasant who would never cease being a peasant and who would come back to Lenin and say, “This and this they will have, here they cannot follow and there they will lead.” Lenin gazed at Russia through Kalinin’s eyes as one gazes in a crystal.
In 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized control of the state, a delicate little man called Jacob Michaelovitch Sverdlov, a chemist by profession and a revolutionist by conviction, was Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Workers and Soldiers Deputies; this meant that he controlled the Red Guards, the conscious workers
and the revolting soldiers; it meant he held a position of such tremendous authority that he could not be ignored by anybody. So when the first Council of the People’s Commissars was formed, which is really no other than the cabinet of the Russian Government, Sverdlov was the first person taken into consideration by them. And in order to find a place for him they created the office of President. When he accepted that office he gave up his direct control and became but one voice in a group. Nevertheless, all through the barricade days he continued to act as the spokesman in the cabinet for the Petrograd workers who were, for at least the first year, a power above the cabinet.
In the winter of 1918 Sverdlov died of typhus and was buried on the Red Square in Moscow.
During the time Sverdlov was president the government was in continual difficulty with the peasants. They resisted the government’s requisitioning expeditions, retreated within themselves and almost ignored the central power until the provinces were in a continual state of guerilla warfare. They managed their local Soviets with little or no thought of the Moscow Government. Civil war continued and, with the aid of France and England, grew apace; hard dark days settled over Russia. Sverdlov looked about for an entering wedge which would somehow pierce the way to an eventual understanding and co-operation with the local and central Soviets. In this search Sverdlov discovered Kalinin. Kalinin was already immensely popular with the peasants; he had been on every Land Committee of importance since the beginning of the first revolution, under both Miliukov and Kerensky. During his term of office Sverdlov used Kalinin as a mediator in many difficult situations and Lenin watched his work with interest. An old Communist explained Kalinin’s election in these words: “He was a ‘find’ of Sverdlov’s, but it was Lenin alone who realized that days might come when he would be invaluable in holding Russia together.” Those days have come; they came with the tightening of the blockade and continued with the famine.
Kalinin is a Communist, a brand of Communist differing as much from Zinoviev or Litvinov as Borah differs from Hughes or Hughes
differs from Root; yet Hughes and Borah and Root are Republicans steeped to the bone in party discipline, rampaging now and then, but never dreaming of breaking away from the party. Kalinin believes in a kind of Communism, modified enough to suit the peasants, and Zinoviev believes in a kind of Communism that is suited, at any time, only for the advanced and conscious city proletariat.
Kalinin was born in the little village of Volost and still calls it his home, still has his little strip of land there. He was brought up religiously, and understands what the Church means to a devout Russian and never throws aspersions on it. Though not religious himself, he tolerates religion with the grave tolerance which never offends.
His old mother is outspokenly anti-Bolshevik, yet very much likes to have her say in the Volost Soviet. She is angry with the Bolsheviks because they are not religious. She scolds her son and pretends that she is not at all flattered because he is President of Russia and obviously believes that no honor is too great for him. She is always glad to talk to visitors about him and goes on monotonously repeating the same ideas in the manner of the aged: “No, I am not surprised,” she will say, “that Michael Ivanovitch has gone so far. He was always studious, sitting up reading by candle-light after everyone else was in bed. And he was always saying to me, ‘Don’t bother me, mother, I’ve got lots of work to do.’ That’s the way he talks to me now when I lecture him about religion. But he’s a good son and kind to everybody ... only he certainly ought to think more about God.”
I don’t believe that Kalinin is ambitious; I think he would like nothing so much as to go back to his farm and live there the simple life of the village. When Lenin convinced him that it was his duty to be the voice of the peasants, he accepted the post in the quiet way of a man who has no thought of personal glory There is nothing in his record that would prove him to be anything but entirely unselfish, and I have seen him when he was like one inspired. During the Kronstadt revolt he walked into that hostile city as he might walk into the mouth of a cannon. Yet no one dared or desired to harm him!
Kalinin is an old revolutionist. In his early youth he found himself unable to tolerate, without protest, the tyranny of the Tsar’s government which manifested itself in such brutal cruelty towards the peasants. He has always been desperately poor, a real proletarian peasant, hoping to be rid one day of his endless debts and support himself and his family honorably and decently. He was forced through poverty to go to the city, where he worked in factories in winter; only the summers he spent with his family. These winters in the city, where he was thrown in contact with city workers, gave him an understanding of the psychology and desires of the city workers as well as of the peasants.
He was exiled to Siberia but not to hard labor, and he spent this enforced and only leisure of his life rounding out his education; mixing the classics with his dreams of freedom for Russia.
Kalinin’s wife is an educated, energetic peasant, who has by her own ability become a figure of importance in her village; capable and strong and intelligent, she has managed her tiny farm just a little better than her neighbors and has been elected President of the Volost Soviet. It is a position of which she is immensely proud.
Madame Kalinin is an individualist; a modern feminist of the type of professional woman who, in America, insists on keeping her name and continuing her work after marriage. During the last three years she has been so busy that she has had no time to visit Moscow. Kalinin, on his rare vacations, has had to go to her. If she ever does visit Moscow she will surely wear her kerchief and her sheepskin coat. No doubt supercilious Russians are already saying that “Main Street has arrived in Moscow,” just as we have been saying since March, 1921, that “just folks” are in the White House.
And there is a curious similarity between President Harding and President Kalinin; both were elected to represent the average citizen. In Russia average citizens are peasants—a ninety per cent average. Both presidents go about their home towns slapping fellow citizens on the back. Both were elected as figureheads for a party and both
have already proven themselves a little more forceful and important than the party reckoned.
If Russia continues in the path where it is now, in fifty years the Kalinins will have become Hardings, at home in silk hats and frock coats, as well as in sheepskins and high boots. But it is hard to predict where Russia is going or where the world is going.
When Kalinin rides through the provinces on his propaganda train carrying stocks of literature, a motion picture apparatus and his official seal, with the outside “done” by some futurist artist in garish colors and depicting a millennium in which Kalinin would not be at home, he is “Comrade” Kalinin to the whole train; he takes his meals with the train crew, the porters and the secretaries; all share alike. But the remarkable thing is that when he gets back to Moscow he makes no effort to shake the dust of the provinces from his boots, he rather makes a point of remaining distinctly a villager. He receives you in his Moscow office wearing the same old mended spectacles, the same threadbare coat and, I am sure, the same heart and mind. He brings the country along with him, invades the city with it, permeates it, overcomes it....
This attitude is characteristic not only of Kalinin, it is characteristic of any peasant. I have often noted the delegates at the Congresses. They are neither shy nor bewildered, they sit solemnly in their places in the great hall, pondering all that Lenin says of trade or reconstruction, approving or disapproving; getting closer every day to the idea that Russia is theirs.
It is generally believed that the line between the city workers and the peasants is wide and irreconcilable, whereas there is actually no line at all. The city workers are only peasants who have gone to the city just as Kalinin did, when they could not make a living in the villages. Russian peasants never get over being farmers. Last winter I came upon an excellent example: Some three hundred skilled Russian mechanics from Detroit arrived in Moscow; they were sorely needed in the Russian factories. Without a single exception they refused to remain in the city! And when they learned that they might be
conscripted and forced to stay they fled hurriedly in every direction. With one voice they exclaimed, “We came home to the land!”
Naturally, the government was in despair; officials were at a loss as to what measures could be taken to bring pressure and a sense of duty upon the returning Russians. Orators were sent to argue with the next group, but without success. The only solution the government found workable was to organize them before they arrived; to see that they brought tools from America and came with the definite idea of remaining in the cities for a fixed period; for only the country is real to the peasant, the city is forever an artificial, unhealthy invention.
Kalinin’s office in Moscow is not in the Kremlin. To get into the Kremlin requires too much red tape. Therefore, while the President eats in the Kremlin dining-room which is just an ordinary Soviet mess-room, and sits in the Councils of the People’s Commissars, he receives his army of callers in an ordinary office building in the heart of the city. One needs no pass or credentials to get in; one needs simply to walk up a flight of stairs, open a door and emerge into a large bare reception room full of noisy peasants; here he inevitably turns up.
I have often thought that Kalinin’s office is the most curious place in which I have ever been in my life; it has the atmosphere of a Russian railway train deep in the heart of the provinces where every passenger talks to every other passenger and where formality is not just overlooked or forgotten but has simply never existed.
All day long he receives the never-ending string of peasants in the manner of a village priest, giving consolation and advice—and something more solid and satisfying than a prayer, for he is obligated to make an immediate decision in each case on hand or a promise that it shall be taken up through his office. Under no circumstances can he appear indifferent or helpless.
I remember arriving early one morning to find about twenty peasants ahead of me. When Kalinin came in everyone got up and there was a sudden general stampede in his direction and a sort of clamor
which arises in any Russian household over any sort of argument. Kalinin’s voice could be distinctly heard above the others shouting, “Comrades, comrades, I must take you in turn.” Then, as he crossed the floor towards his private office, a frail, middle-aged woman sitting near the door burst into tears. I can see him now with his narrow Slav eyes, his broad nose and rumpled hair, his work-knotted hands and faded blouse, stopping to look through his spectacles at the woman before him, kindly, sympathetic, puzzled....
I think that he knew even before he began to question her that hers was one of those unavoidable, personal tragedies that are part of change and war and revolution. She had owned a big country house, but the peasants had taken it when they divided the land and they had allotted her but two rooms to live in. She was humiliated, discouraged and resentful. She cried out, forgetting that Kalinin was also a peasant, “I can’t bear to see those creatures using my pretty things, walking with great muddy boots in my house. My soul is in that house!”
Kalinin shook his head. He seemed willing and even anxious to help her but he seemed more like a doctor in that moment than an executive. Very gently he asked her to remember that two rooms were more than most people had now in Russia, that these were difficult times; even so they would go over the case together if she would wait her turn. But no sooner had he closed the door than every peasant in the room began addressing the bewildered woman. They said that she should be ashamed of such petty complaints and accused her of asking for “special privileges.” The widest range of arguments were put forward, from the man who had lost a cow and considered the government responsible to the woman whose two sons had been killed at the front.
I was not so much interested in the arguments as in the remarkably true reflection which the scene presented of what had happened all over Russia. I had never realized before how completely submerged the upper classes had become; how ruthless and inevitable was the vast upward surge of the peasantry. Here was this woman, one time
barishna (lady), crushed and defeated in her own village, finding the same thought in Moscow as in Nizhni-Novgorod or Kazan or Baku.
When Kalinin called her she went forward but one could see that she had already given up hope and would not fight any further; perhaps for the first time the real significance of the revolution had become clear to her.
It is hard for Americans, where a peasant population has never existed, to realize the position of the peasants in a revolution. They are the rock in the whirlpool. They are the great levellers, the great destroyers as well as the great builders. In Russia they pulled down everything about them and they were not always gentle in their wrath. Often they ruined wilfully and needlessly In the cities, practically no buildings were destroyed and no treasures looted, but in the provinces men often remembered the knout with red flames of fire and even with death.
Because the peasants’ desires are simple, the world is apt to give them credit for a deep, political wisdom which they do not possess and while there is no doubt about their taking the business of government seriously, their inexperience often leads them into grave blunders. It was the peasants, and not the Communists, who most stubbornly opposed recognition of the foreign debts. It was the peasants who demanded from every government since the Tsar’s, schools, hospitals and protection from invasion, but who always resented the most ordinary and reasonable tax put upon them by the central authorities. Until Kalinin had educated them they were wont to ask like children, “Aren’t we free now? Can’t we be left alone?”
The great irony about the rising of the peasants is that they were the first to abandon the very equality they fought for. The equalization of property in the provinces was brought about through the workings of peasant proletariat organizations known as Committees of the Poor, which not only divided the estates of the rich landlords but broke the power of the kulaks (rich peasants). When the whole country was reduced to the same status, the peasants were faced with the necessity of a great decision. There were no longer rich peasants or
proletarian peasants but only what is known in Russia as the “middle” farmers. The question of how to maintain such an equality now arose. The Communists urged them to abandon the idea of private property and work the land in communes, pointing out that any other course must inevitably lead to the re-establishment of all the old values and a new bourgeoisie. But the peasants were afraid of this new and untried road of Socialism. Their demands for trade, silver money, the opening of markets and stores, are ample evidence that they have turned back on to the old familiar road of capitalism. If Russia had been an industrial instead of an agricultural country, the decision of the masses might have been quite otherwise.
Even our own presidents know the value of a lecture tour in a national crisis. In our immediate political past, we have the memory of presidents who took “issues” to the people, but it is hard to conceive of a Chief Executive lecturing almost steadily for over two years. Yet that is even a short estimate of the time actually spent by Kalinin in going from one end of Russia to the other, shuttling in and out of Moscow.
His meetings were more like tribunals, people’s courts, than ordinary political assemblies. The peasants gathered at the railway stations, in the village squares or even in the fields. They heard what he had to say and then he heard them. They argued, complained, demanded, compromised. Always some sort of understanding was arrived at. This was partly due to Kalinin’s wonderful tact, his almost divine reasonableness which never allowed an argument to develop into a quarrel. And partly because he knows the peasant mind which is easily touched by stories of suffering, by flattery or tears, but impossible to move by threats. But fundamentally, the secret of Kalinin’s success is due to the fact that he himself is a peasant and no walls of caste can exist between him and the people.
I can illustrate this feeling of complete contact best by the story of an actual occurrence in a remote province. It happened in what are now known as the worst of the “requisitioning days” when the Soviets were holding hundreds of miles of battle front and the peasants were taxed almost beyond endurance.
One day a Lettish officer, who was also a Commissar in some Red Army division, arrived in a remote village and rang the church bell to summon the people. He read a list of the goods to be requisitioned. This village had been taxed only a short time before and there were murmurs of dissatisfaction in the crowd, murmurs which grew into roars. Then happened one of those savage, elemental tragedies which even we in America have never been able to eliminate from our national life. Threats against the Commissar were followed by sudden violence; he was literally trampled to death.
The Lettish officer had been accompanied by a young peasant soldier, who had been a sort of orderly to him for nearly a year In the struggle the boy escaped. All night he lay weeping and thinking of his dead comrade. The officer had taken an interest in him, had taught him to read and write and imbued him with the ideals of the Red Army. The peasant boy had been an orphan, lonely and unhappy and a victim of brutality. He thought now of the dead man as he thought of a saint, and by the time morning came he had resolved on a curiously brave act. Creeping into the church he rang the bell; the crowd gathered, and he mounted the platform and began to tell them of the dead man and the Red Army It was not hard for him to explain that unless the Red Army was supported, the White forces would very soon take away by main force the very food they now refused to their brothers. It did not take very long to convince the crowd of peasants, and not only to convince them but to reduce them to tears. They gave all that the peasant boy asked, and more than that, they went solemnly in a procession to the fresh grave of the man they had murdered, laid wreaths upon it, and paid homage, saying: “Brother, forgive us, we could not see your heart.”
This feeling accounts for the lack of resentment towards Kalinin when he goes into the famine area. He walks among the starving peasants, saying, “Who lies down, dies. I know, I have hungered, I am one of you.”
In prosperous districts he uses the same tactics in overcoming opposition to collections for the famine. Whenever he finds local Soviet officials unwilling to part with their last surplus grain, he
mournfully exclaims, “Ah, well, I am sorry to hear this! Last week I saw with my own eyes thousands dying of hunger. They were peasants like ourselves and they were calling to us to help. Will you send me back now with empty hands?” The peasants can never resist his appeal; it comes too close to them, it is like refusing one’s father.
While the peasants were not able to bring themselves to renounce their title to the land, they have otherwise quite whole-heartedly accepted many broad formulas of the Socialists. They unanimously approved of revolutionary Russia’s offer to the world in 1917 to build a peace on the basis of “no annexations, no indemnities and the right of self-determination.” It is a curious and sad reality that the richer nations become and the more cultured, the less they find it possible to comprehend such a simple recipe for justice and brotherly love. The world was too educated or too selfish or too frightened to accept Russia’s magnanimous offer. And how much agony and bloodshed it might have saved!
The Russian peasants, who for so many centuries have struggled and sacrificed themselves to possess the land, are strangely lacking in national pride, as we know it. They are not envious of other countries. They could not conceive of an aggressive policy If you say to them that America is far richer and more progressive than Russia, they will tell you they are very glad to hear it and are glad you are happy. They ask of the foreigner only to be let alone and not to send any more White generals against them; they ask to be allowed to develop their own political institutions. Obviously our only duty is to help them through their terrible struggle against the great famine which has come upon them like a curse through no sins of their own.
It is no miracle that President Kalinin can go freely about Russia, for no one is thinking of assassinating him. What would it profit enemies of Soviet Russia to kill a peasant like Kalinin? Are there not a million Kalinins? To sweep the Kalinins out of Russian political life would be like sweeping back the sea. To destroy the Soviets would be to destroy Russia. Even Sir Paul Dukes, of the British Secret Service,
agrees that Soviets are the natural offspring of the revolution, conceived years ago under the Tsardom. Michael Ivanovitch Kalinin reflects the new Russia more faithfully than any other Government official.
MADAME ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI
AND THE WOMAN’S MOVEMENT
KOLLONTAI
MADAME ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI
AND THE WOMAN’S
MOVEMENT
Madame Alexandra Kollontai believes that everything which exalts is good; being a feminist, she exalts women. She tells women that they are capable of a new freedom, beautiful and unexampled. She is so carried away by her enthusiasm that she is unmindful of how easily wings are broken in this age of steel. But if her inspiration, which aims to lift women to the skies, lifts them only from their knees to their feet, there will be nothing to regret. Civilization, in its snail-like progress, is only stirred to move its occasional inch by the burning desire of those who will to move it a mile. And when faith is pure enough it does not demand realization.
Kollontai is like a sculptor working on some heroic figure of woman and always wondering a little why the slim, inspired, unmaternal figure of her dreams is forever melting back into a heavy, earthy figure of Eve.
It often happens that a character is best portrayed by conversations which show the manner of mind. In this chapter I have quoted Madame Kollontai at some length because she is the only articulate voice of the new order for women which has been so greatly misunderstood outside of Russia; that order which claims that by consecrating oneself to the state one lives truer to oneself and to others.
As champion of her sex, she cries to the women of Russia: “Cast off your chains! Do not be slaves to religion, to marriage, to children. Break these old ties, the state is your home, the world is your country!”
And who are the women she thus extolls? They are the women of the factories and the fields; the women who sweep the streets, who scrub, who carry heavy burdens, who plow and weave and drudge. Will they be able to follow her to such heights? By our logic, no, but Kollontai preaches a new logic for Russia.
Besides, we must consider just what she means by “casting off chains.” I have heard her say all this another way and it did not sound so lofty or impossible. To an individualist, it did not even sound attractive. Last summer she admonished a women’s congress in this manner: “We must build a new society in which women are not expected to drudge all day in kitchens. We must have, in Russia, community restaurants, central kitchens, central laundries— institutions which leave the working woman free to devote her evenings to instructive reading or recreation. Only by breaking the domestic yoke will we give women a chance to live a richer, happier and more complete life.”
The material which Kollontai is so passionately attempting to mould is the peasant mind. It seems to me that peasant women are naturally slow-moving and stolidly honest and will accept only as much of Kollontai’s philosophy as they find compatible with or necessary to the immediate situation; not because they are lacking in spirituality, for they are capable of deep religious fervor, but simply because much of it would be inharmonious and artificial to their normal development. At present her mission is to awaken them so that they may build a truth of their own which need by no means be a lesser truth than Kollontai’s. If she attempts to make them swallow her formula intact she will certainly fail. If she compromises as Lenin compromises and as Kalinin does, she will perform for Russia a never-to-be-forgotten task. To-day everything has been melted down in the crucible of the revolution. The only banner-bearer who counts is the one who will give to the great mass of those emerging into the new day the broad fundamental things of life.
Madame Kollontai is the only woman who has ever been a member of the Russian Cabinet. She puts forth the argument that women have more conscience than men and therefore do not attempt to
obtain offices which they are not fitted for by previous training, and that this is the reason woman’s influence is so slight in Russia today. But her history refutes her theory. She herself was particularly fitted for the position of Minister of Welfare. Her record was splendid. She lost her post because she was a woman and allowed her love for her husband to interfere with her political judgment.
Early in 1918, Madame Kollontai, who was the widow of a Tsarist officer, married Fedore Dubenko, the picturesque leader of the turbulent Kronstadt sailors. Dubenko is a handsome, daring young man, some years her junior. Shortly after the wedding Dubenko was arrested. He had entrusted certain ships under his command to officers of the old régime who had pretended loyalty to the Soviets, but who had turned the ships over to the Germans without a struggle. Certainly Dubenko had no intention of betraying the revolution, he was merely trying to make use of skilled officers, of whom there was a pressing dearth. Nevertheless, he was held responsible.
While he was in prison awaiting trial, Kollontai made rather violent and conspicuous protests both publicly and privately. As a result she was removed from office. Revolutionists have no tolerance for romance among their leaders during critical moments; they place the revolution far above personal relationship. From the beginning they looked with disapproving eyes upon Kollontai’s infatuation for Dubenko.
When Dubenko was released, Kollontai went abroad and spent some months in Sweden. On her return she threw herself into a new work—that of educating her own sex to take an active part in politics.
Rightly speaking, there never was a woman’s movement in Russia until after the revolution. Equal suffrage came first and political education afterwards. This condition appears particularly curious when one recalls that, during some years before the revolution, even more women than men were sent to Siberia for plots against the Tsar’s government. Yet when the revolution came women sank mysteriously into the background. Russians explain this by various
theories. One was that Russian women possess the fervor necessary to martyrs, but little of the balance needed for practical reconstructive work. Personally, I think it is entirely a matter of experience and education, for it is evident that women enter politics everywhere with great hesitancy. Even in America where equal suffrage has been a fact in some states for many years, we have only one or two women to point to as having attained political prominence.
Madame Kollontai possesses much charm. She is slim and pretty and vivacious. With a little too much the manner of a public speaker she talks so easily on any subject, even to reporters, that it almost gives an impression of insincerity. Her open mind is in reality an evidence of the kind of sincerity which has no fear of publicity. She likes Americans and knows more about this country than most Russians. But she has not always known. Some years ago, when lecturing here, she happened to be in Paterson during the great strike there. When she saw the workers marching through the streets, she rushed into a room full of people and exclaimed: “A revolution has begun!” Last year, in speaking of America, she said it was the country least agitated by revolutionary thought.
Like all enthusiastic Communists, she follows Lenin’s lead in striving to westernize Russia. One day she very greatly surprised me by saying, “Why don’t you write a series of articles about America? Write for Russia about America as you now write for America about Russia.”
“What good will it do?” I asked.
“A great deal,” she replied. “It is time Russia got acquainted with America. Because of the old censorship we never learned the value of reporters. And now that we are through forever with isolation, except when it is forced upon us, we ought to acquaint ourselves thoroughly with other countries. The women ought to know, for example, how American women got suffrage and what part women take in public affairs. We ought to know the status of the immigrants and of the Negroes, how you solve your unemployment problems,
the status of farmers, of city workers, the percentage of wealth controlled by rich people. We ought to know about your schools and colleges. It ought to be explained to us just what the real difference is between the Republican and the Democratic Party and how much influence the Socialist Party has. Yes, there are a thousand things we ought to know.”
I did not write the articles, but in explaining American ideas and institutions to Kollontai it somehow placed my country in a curious new light in my own eyes. I began to realize that things which have grown quite ordinary and familiar to us may appear entirely absurd and unreasonable to foreigners. Kollontai said that she hoped Russia would some day have reporters in America cabling home as busily as our reporters do from Russia. Russians, she thought, have in so many ways remained ridiculously provincial in spite of their ideas on internationalism.
Her feminist heart was deeply touched when I told her about a group of American women who had paraded on Fifth Avenue carrying signs of protest against the blockade. Tears came to her eyes. “You can’t imagine,” she said, “how much courage such a little act of sympathy gives us. What a pity that the story of those women is not known in Russia and not read by every peasant mother.”
She was openly indignant about the stories circulated abroad that Russian women were “nationalized” When we first discussed this rumor she refused to believe that anybody in America could have seriously considered it, but when I explained about the Overman Committee and other official and semi-official affairs, she flew into a rage against the narrowness and prejudices of some of our statesmen. She claimed that the simplest peasant would not believe such indecent lies against American women. “Your senators,” she said, “could very well have acquainted themselves with the real facts about our women, who have always taken such a glorious part in every movement for emancipation.
“American men,” continued Madame Kollontai, “are known the world over as kind and chivalrous. But chivalry can be a little old-fashioned
