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The explosion of interest in trauma theory among literary and cultural critics would seem to confirm Kirby Farrell's claim that the United States is a “post-traumatic culture.” While not a new diagnosis—Elaine Showalter reads the epidemiology of United States culture and calls it “history”; while others, like Robert Hughes, label it a “culture of complaint”—Farrell asks how trauma, a concept invented a century ago, has become a central trope in the cultural imagination of the late twentieth century. His answer, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties, is a capacious and, at times, deeply engaging analysis of an archive that spans two continents and several centuries.
The book's structural trope is to juxtapose fin de siècle Britain and 1990 America, calling the resemblance between the decades the “return of the repressed” (29). The figure of St. George, with whom Kirby begins the book, is read, for example, as an early figure of traumatic heroism, a fallen martyr who, in the 1890s, symbolically justifies British imperialism, and who returns, nearly a century later, as a warrior-saint capable of saving America from the “evil empire” in the likes of Rambo and Ronald Reagan. Indeed, the iconography of St. George and the “mood of traumatic rescue” he inspires permeates several of Farrell's astute analyses, from the politics of Vietnam and Reaganomics to the film Pretty Woman. The vocabulary of trauma in Post-traumatic Culture is, in other words, as ubiquitous as it is equivocal. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—a familiar clinical diagnosis for Vietnam veterans—becomes more sinister in its symptoms as Farrell demonstrates, for example, how the nation's sense of “traumatic victimization” in the post-war years could come to justify the traumatic economic policies of the Reagan years. These are compelling arguments; trauma, in Farrell's analysis, often receives its most salient inflections from the mouths of the privileged and the powerful: “The conc