It has been a while since my ASTU course touched on literary scholar Hillary Chute’s essay on the graphic narrative Persepolis, but nonetheless I have decided to go back to it. In her paper, Chute is especially interested in the memory of trauma within the story of Persepolis. For instance, Chute explained how the black and white visual Satrapi uses for her story is a deliberate plan to emphasize the “horror of history” through “a pointed degree of abstraction” (98). Since I was also intrigued by the topic of trauma, I explored other ways of representing traumatic messages. Today, I’d like to introduce a particular way of doing so, that I found interesting.
The advancements in trauma studies in recent decades, has led to the heightened understanding of traumatic experiences being overwhelming and incomprehensible. This created the need to interpret the situation in a different way from the past. Literary scholar Laurie Vickroy, in her book Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, argues that “trauma narratives” – A form of fictional story-telling that helps readers in understanding traumatic experiences – is the answer to that need of an alternate interpretation, as it has assembled “an important place among diverse artistic, scholarly, and testimonial representations” (1). She argues that the style clarifies “our relationship to memory and forgetting within the complex interweavings of social and psychological relationships”.
Trauma narrativists try to reach out to their audiences (readers) in various ways. One-way of doing so is to make the story personal to the audience by presenting a character in a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions and beliefs (2). Briefly going back to the story of Persepolis, this method can be seen when Marji, the main protagonist, struggles with the understanding of her own religious beliefs, because of a traumatic experience of her uncle getting killed (71). Another possible method is what I call, “fill in the blank”. Authors draw readers in by deliberately, or unintentionally, not giving the full story in the book. Because the author does not give the whole picture to the reader, the readers are forced into imagining the picture themselves; consequently getting more involved with the story. Again, this can be found in part of Persepolis, for example when Marji saw her friend dead after getting hit by a missile (142). Satrapi does not give any descriptions on what it was like; sometimes, silence speaks more then words. This could also be connected with one of the topics we are tackling in class right now, “trauma and forgetting”.
The idea of using fiction for this particular topic did not seem adequate to me at first, but after giving more thought to it, I came to the conclusion that it is better for traumatic stories to have fictional parts in it to some extent. I say this because once trauma stories become completely non-fictional, not only does it become a very sensitive read for the audience, but also the writers will have to recollect every single detail of their traumatic experiences, which could be extremely taxing to them mentally. For both writers and readers, the inclusion of a bit of fiction could prove to be beneficial.
Works cited:
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (2004)
Laurie Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (2002)