thinking out loud about the ethics of perpetrator trauma
- Tadhg Kearney
- Jan 26, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 25, 2024
Originally posted on the 26th Jan 2024. Edited on the 25th April 2024.
It’s been a hard readjustment back into college life. I intended to get a blog post out sometime last week, one that featured a short story. It was more of an excuse to actually write something in all honesty, but it didn’t turn out quite how I wanted it to. I don’t know, I might tweak it, edit it, do whatever it is I usually do when stories misbehave, and put it out in my next post. Stories have a way of running away from me, I have a bad habit of letting things get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until they just get overwhelming. I recently crossed the 50k mark on the first draft of my current W.I.P, a fiction novel, and there is just no end in sight whatsoever.
I did intend to write this post after a symposium at the Crawford Art Gallery, one called Perpetrator Trauma and the Irish Civil War. But no plan can survive contact with the real world (or maybe it’s just my boss, who scheduled me to work it even though I asked for an evening shift) so I’m going to do it now instead of after the event which I have to miss. Oh well.
(Art by Randy Vargas)
In a recent seminar on trauma theory, our class touched on both the logistics of and the complicated ethics accompanying perpetrator trauma. This is something I’ve been thinking about since, and it’s something I think a blog post is a good excuse to use to put my thoughts to paper. I also wanted to inject some more of the creative process into academia, or indeed my own academic practice, so I think I might explore this as if I was creating a character from scratch. But, this is predicated on the absurd idea that I would set out to create a character with perpetrator trauma as their central identifying motif in their construction.
The most obvious place to begin is WW2. That’s where my mind immediately drifted too. Okay, so we’re creating a character. We need a character with conflict. A Wehrmacht soldier is maybe a good place to start. We introduce conflict, maybe he doesn’t want to be in the army, is a consciousness objector or something, but let’s ham up the totalitarian aspect. If he doesn’t go to war, he and his family will be jailed or something. Boom, now we have motivation, and now we’re getting somewhere.
Immediately, we need to start adding layers to his character. Family is a good way of doing that, there’s immediately years of history and relationships to draw on. Let’s focus on a sibling relationship here. Maybe his brother is conscripted to fight alongside him. This brother has bought into the propaganda, he is ready and willing to fight for the Fatherland. Maybe our protagonist meets a friend who is also against the war, now we have a battle of philosophies. But war happens, maybe in a fight with the Russians his brother dies. Shit happens.
But now we introduce a crisis in our character- the people he thought were good killed his brother. Maybe he gets radicalised, totally buys into the war machine? We start a character with a belief and then we challenge that belief. That is the core of a great many stories, especially stories that focus on character development. Now we have a conflict with his friend. Now we have an arc… building and building… and now he’s a war criminal. Yikes. We have a person who dehumanises and kills communists (and subscribes to Aryanism in general, not a great look unnamed character, do better). How do we contend with that? I’m a communist, maybe anti-capitalist is more accurate but still, and the ethics of a fascist killing anti-capitalists is just a no-no. And we haven’t even touched on The Final Solution yet. This is only one hypothetical example of a brainstorming for a novel I’ll never write, I am not well read enough in this field to offer a commentary on any published works, but I definitely will read more in this area, especially with real world examples.
How do we maturely discuss and portray a character so in the wrong, but their actions are justifiable to themselves? How do we contend with the real world implications of fiction? Quite frankly, I’m of a mind to say that only victims of a traumatic event should be the ones writing about that trauma from the perspective of the perpetrator. But that is restrictive. A lot of times, these survivors cannot write these stories. This black-and-white morality would mean a lot of stories get swept under the rug, and that only benefits the perpetrator in the end. Only Nazis benefit from Nazi atrocities not being spoken about. Fuck, where does that leave us now? A person writing about these topics must be empathetic. We should strive to recognise that sensationalising or taking historical liberties with our depictions can have massive consequences. Not everybody is going to take years out of their lives to research these things. Not everybody even deserves to bear the responsibility of writing a book like this. Quite frankly, I count myself among the people who shouldn’t. So where does that leave us?
Better scholars than me can and perhaps have answered that question. But moving from the ethics to the function of fiction like this, Joanne Pettitt has an amazing article- the details of which can be found in the bib- where she says ‘perpetrator fiction works by drawing connections with the reader: the implication is that readers also have the capacity for wrongdoing and could, under the necessary conditions, act in atrocious ways. This has implications for reader responses, especially those concerning empathy and judgement’ (np). For now, I posit, let that be enough. Trauma narratives should do more, but in this case, I am unafraid in declaring that I have no clue what more is.
Another topic that I wanted to discuss in relation to this came from a conversation with somebody else in the class (thanks, Mia, if you’re reading this big thumbs up to you) was in relation to representations of perpetrator trauma in the YA context. I might leave this to another blog post (realistically not, who am I kidding?). So for now, I’ll let it sit on the back burner. Another topic I'd be interested in exploring arises from a really unlikely source, the new Ted television show. Here's a clip that highlights some of the absurdities of perpetrator trauma, and I'm sorry in advance if you watch this...
... but the writing is actually really intelligent. It satires a lot of stereotypical trauma stories. (Copyright for the clip is NBCUniversal)
So here we stumble onto the main point of the post. And it only took a thousand words to get here, I think that’s a record for me. I believe that the best, most ethical place to explore the nuances of perpetrator trauma is in the Fantasy or Sci-Fi genre.
This depends on the story of course, some fantasy novels have very clear real world allegories, but totally alien worlds crafted in Sci-Fi or Fantasy might be an ideal canvas to build on. Now, there are always the real world implications in, I don’t know… off the top of my head… how about a story centering a genocidal and brutal warmongering younger brother of a King colonising an entire continent? The third book of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series, Oathbringer happens to follow a genocidal and brutal warmongering younger brother of a King colonising an entire continent, what a happy coincidence.
Dalinar in the earlier books has been portrayed as a peace-seeking diplomat looking to unite a continent against a common threat. No spoilers, read the books, they’re great. In a moment of sheer lucidity, and perhaps undiagnosed mental illness, I read all 1,100 pages of the first book in seventeen hours, in one sitting. I even forgot to go to the bathroom. They’re good, folks. Get to reading, it’s only 5,000 pages of hard fantasy and, at times, utter confusion. Dalinar is kind of possessed by a magical entity when he commits genocide. That might lessen the impact of the redemption arc of a warmonger. But given the alternative solution of depicting genocide in the real world, of the slaughter of real people, this is the best solution, in my humble opinion at any rate.
But let’s view this on the other hand. How is a magical curse any different to, let’s say the childhood indoctrination of a Wehrmacht soldier? Both actions are inexcusable, but explainable. How can curses, and the fantasy genre as a whole, act as allegories for the worst parts of the real world? A question for another day. My head hurts. I’m done now. Bye.
WORKS CITED
Pettitt, Joanne. “What Is Holocaust Perpetrator Fiction?” Journal of European Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, Dec. 2020, pp. 360–372. Accessed 26 Jan. 2024.
IMAGES USED
All images accessed on the 25th April 2024.
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