The Gory Glorification of Misery Media
/(TW: Mentions of murder and lynching)
Fiction. Is it a tool for readers to escape from real life trauma, or to face it through characters in gratuitous pieces of literature? Today, I will be exploring the phenomenon of “trauma porn” in literary fiction: What is it? And importantly, why can’t we look away?
To start, what is trauma porn? It refers to any media that aims to depict suffering of one or more people for entertainment, or to evoke emotional responses into viewers. Not all media that puts a spotlight onto trauma is classified as trauma porn, it depends on impact, how it’s consumed, and audience.
Image courtesy of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
A notorious example is A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara which was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize and is a modern cult classic. However, it is used when discussing trauma porn. Nearing 800 pages, A Little Life tells the story of Jude St Francis, a wise man with a horrific past and found family being as vital as blood.
However, this novel doesn’t just mention the traumatic past, it starts to document pages of St Francis’ past in unflinching detail from Yanagihara, leaving readers in emotional despair or question the purpose of brutality.
Many reviewers express how it is important to showcase trauma, but in tasteful manners. Expressing that the way Yanagihara relentlessly zones in on St Francis risks the desensitization of readers due to the repetition of scenes. This creates a cycle of pain where any hope is shattered for “one-dimensional” shock rather than exploration.
The Real World
Outside of literature, black communities have expressed their discontent for trauma porn, stating that while content consumption of black pain isn’t new, it draws comparison to the early 1800s when lynchings in America were public events.
Ashlee Marie Preston, a black activist and journalist states, "the extreme discomfort you may have felt [reading] the details of last century's lynchings is similar to the discomfort many Black people feel when viral videos of us being publicly murdered are shared.”
I mentioned this because while consuming trauma porn can enact change, it’s not what often happens. Awareness ends after a repost of another’s efforts, because of what the definition of porn is. “Porn is by its very nature, passive, whether you enjoy watching it or not. Comparing real oppression to porn suggests it can or, worse, should be watched passively.”
Appraisal
Despite this many praise A Little Life or the memoir Five Star White Trash by Georgiann Davis. An article written by Priyanka Chakrabarty, uses an argument by Stella Young, a disability activist, saying trauma porn is “Inspiration porn” and countering the “overarching narrative that differently-abled people exist to inspire and motivate the able-bodied.” Chakrabarty adds that marginalized groups reduced to their wounds cause “physical, emotional [and] intergenerational injury.”
Victoria Abbott, production therapist for the stage adaptation of A Little Life, expresses fondness, “what Hanya depicts is this gloriously nuanced, beautiful, difficult but meaningful connection between four men. [T]he theme of never quite feeling like you’ve made those ‘friends for life’ is a familiar one in my therapy room. Perhaps A Little Life reveals that it is possible to create a loving chosen family even amidst adversity.”
Image Courtesy of New york university (nyu) press
Abbott later elaborates that the novel would reflect trauma that a reader might resonate with. Five Star White Trash is interesting because, Davis has studied the human behaviour and sprinkles her knowledge throughout her memoir, justifying her actions about the people who inflicted trauma onto her; however, this means her debut is not for shock, everything has syntactical tightness that many argue Yanagihara lacks.
This could be because of what I call the “slam poetry” effect. Slam poetry frequently attracts trauma poems with judges scoring them higher, because no one wants to give a 7/10. This leaves poets or fiction writers feeling competitive, which makes us question if it’s written to process pain, or to score points in the literary sphere.
Ultimately, whether we agree with trauma porn or enjoy works about it, it does not erase issues that become interwoven into our lives and binds us as the humans that we are. Things are sad, messy and traumatic, making it, fiction or not, life.
Cheyenne Marks is a local Ottawa Mohawk writer with a knack for scrapping and redoing every idea that sparks her mind, except for opinion pieces. Currently a student in the Professional Writing program at Algonquin College, Cheyenne has a goal to be an Indigenous author and essayist, and a voice for Indigenous communities when they feel the least heard. She enjoys sweet treats and has a belief that taking photos of the books she reads with her daily coffee in it makes her seem cool. So, join her as she expresses her thoughts over the literary community and shares her sweet treats.
