The Price of Suffering and the Value of Remembering: Patrick McGrath's Trauma

Structured as a confessional narrative and written in a spare prose, Trauma is an eloquent exploration of memory and suffering, love and self-delusion. More than anything, as the title most unequivocally indicates, it addresses with clinical lucidity, as well as with emotional involvement, the psychological disruptive experience of trauma and the connected issues of survival and guilt. Drawing on Freud, Caruth, LaCapra and other leading scholars in trauma studies, and focusing in particular on the psychoanalytic notions of acting out and working through, which are different but interrelated modes of responding to trauma, I argue that McGrath’s novel illustrates not only the narrator’s eventual coming to terms, affectively and cognitively, with his unrecognised and displaced traumatisation, but the ways in which trauma may be induced by the perception of another’s wound, by the identification with another’s traumatic story. As such, Trauma reads as both a novel of remembering and as a parable of psychoanalysis itself.