ABSTRACT
Patrick McGrath’s novel Trauma (2008) and his novella Ground Zero (2005) both deal with two events in American history that resulted trauma, or rather post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to spread like a disease among society. Trauma depicts a post-Vietnam War New York, whereas Ground Zero is set only a few days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This chapter will discuss these stories in order to analyze how trauma is portrayed as a collective condition in McGrath’s writing and whether McGrath is actually demanding a different approach to trauma. In his fiction, McGrath incorporates Freudian psychoanalytic theory, yet he also understands its limitations and highlights them by portraying the reconfiguration of trauma in cognitive terms: PTSD. Considering current research in the medical humanities, there is a new understanding of what trauma does to the subject, combining both older Freudian models and modern neuroscience. Catherine Malabou’s understanding of trauma suggests a new paradigm. According to Malabou, those suffering from both organic trauma (e.g., Alzheimer’s) and sociopolitical trauma (e.g., terrorist attacks) transform into a new being: the new wounded. Do war and terror traumatize us collectively, and do those suffering from sociopolitical trauma, ultimately, become, what Malabou calls, “living figures of death” (Malabou 2012a, 209)?
