Photo: She Counseling
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so stupefyingly cruel, that—unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, rights, or the good will of others—art alone can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
Toni Morrison, Roundtable on the Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World
Many victims of trauma never accede to wisdom. And many of the wise have never experienced significant personal trauma. Yet there remains, both in the psychological literature and in the popular imagination, a persistent tendency to see wisdom as arising from a positive adaptation to traumatic events.
Examining the hypothesis that wisdom is “partly forged in the crucible of difficult life experiences,” psychologists Jeffrey Webster and Xiaolei Deng have shown that, “for some, traumatic life events can produce, after painful periods of profound reflection and struggle, positive psychosocial outcomes such as wisdom, post-traumatic growth, and intrapersonal strengths” (254, 263). L. Alex Linley has likewise argued that “self-knowledge… borne of hard fought experience, in which the trauma survivor is rich” facilitates a “connected detachment that is a prerequisite for the development of wisdom” and that the “development of coherent life narratives facilitates recovery and positive adaptation… through the integration of fragmented memories” (607f.). It would seem, to riff on Nietzsche’s aphorism, that what does not kill you makes you wiser.
In an important study of the role that narrative processing plays in the overcoming of trauma and transgression, Cade Mansfield, Kate McLean, and Jennifer Lilgendahl examine participants’ accounts of challenging life events for a “kernel of meaning that is more than the sum of its parts,” with particular attention to those accounts’ “depths of thought and nuance” (“complexity”), evidence of “personal growth,” and sense of “resolution” (250). Contrary to their peers, Mansfield et al. find that personal growth in the aftermath of trauma is not “significantly and positively correlated with the overall wisdom score” (261). Wisdom, they write,
is best predicted by the narrative processing of transgressions, [personal] growth in particular, and not by the narrative processing of traumas. Well-being, on the other hand, is best predicted by resolution in transgressions and the combination of narrative processes in traumas. (269)
Reviewing the state of wisdom studies in 2020, Igor Grossman and colleagues effectively split the difference, suggesting that “a moderate number of positive or negative life challenges might be the optimal experiential context for wisdom development” (“Science” 116).
Notwithstanding their lack of consensus on the linkage of trauma and wisdom, each of these studies adopts a common vision of wisdom as primarily an attribute of individuals, not cultures or communities. In one crucial respect, this might seem self-evident. To the extent that traumatic experience disrupts normal modes of intimacy and emotional processing, as well as collective memory, values, and meaning, it is often—at least initially—disruptive of community. The traumatized subject’s anxiety-driven compulsion to repeat leaves little room for that openness to others upon which community is built. And yet, the communicative function of narrative—be it in the form of a literary work, a parable, or a simple story told among peers—nonetheless allows for the (re)constitution of memory and meaning, and hence of community, on the far side of traumatic events.
Photo: Arts Midwest
At a 2005 roundtable on the future of the humanities in an increasingly fragmented world, Toni Morrison remarked:
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so stupefyingly cruel, that—unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, rights, or the good will of others—art alone can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination. (“Guest Column” 717)
I read Morrison here to suggest that there are forms of collective trauma—such as those triggered by slavery, genocide, and colonialism—that transcend the individual traumas that Mansfield et al. are focused on. These traumas are “so deep, so stupefyingly cruel” as to best be approached with the emotional distance that art—in this case, literature—can provide. It is not just that the experience of others’ life narratives in fiction provides, as Chinua Achebe puts it, “the closest approximation to experience that we are likely to get” (qtd. in Gagiano 1078). Literary narrative allows readers to experience traumas that, experienced directly, are well-nigh insufferable. And it does so in ways that effectively build community.
This post, and the three that follow, argue that literature’s capacity to sharpen the moral imagination on the far side of traumatic experience enables the development of wisdom, both individual and collective. What is lost with respect to direct experience in the act of reading a literary trauma narrative—it is still an “approximation,” in Achebe’s words—is counterbalanced by the expansion of the reader’s lived horizons and sense of common humanity. If “culture” in its sociological sense is crucial to the development and sustenance of wisdom, as indeed it can be in the proliferation of non-wisdom, artistic “culture” plays a critical role in shaping that moral imagination on which wisdom depends.
Photo: Oedipus Rex, Athens Epidaurus Festival
I begin with work by two of Nigeria’s most celebrated novelists, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, with special attention to their triangulation of wisdom, community, and trauma in the face of the tragedies of colonial (Achebe) and postcolonial (Adichie) experience. Achebe’s Arrow of God—arguably his most realized and difficult novel—parries the trauma of colonial dispossession through a concerted foregrounding of the collective wisdom embodied in Igbo language and culture. Yet the plot of Arrow hinges on competing visions of collective wisdom as its hitherto wise protagonist—the village priest Ezeulu—comes ironically to exacerbate the colonial threat by pursuing a decidedly unwise conflict with his fellow clansmen. Achebe’s wisdom thus lies in part in knowing how wisdom is always at play, always subject to community renegotiation.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun is a searing account of couples, families, and communities trying to hold themselves together under the horrors of the Biafran war of secession. More overtly novelistic in its treatment of that conflict than Achebe’s subsequent There Was a Country, Half explores the commonalities between trauma and transgression, while making the case—thanks in part to a readerly trap—for a vision of writing as an act of detraumatization. In so doing, Adichie subtly reaffirms the power of her novelistic “showing” over the more expository “telling” of Achebe’s Biafra book.
Despite their markedly different novelistic styles, both Achebe and Adichie write squarely in the realist tradition, showing how complex, imperfect characters negotiate the constitutive tensions of their cultures’ no-less-complex recent past. Toni Morrison’s Beloved clearly breaks with realism in its treatment of the traumas of antebellum slavery, but it does so in a way that retrieves literary community—a bond between storyteller and audience—on the far side of trauma and radical dispossession. In that, and not in the published compendia of Morrison’s wise sayings, I argue, lies the unparalleled wisdom of her work.
