Writing trauma: aesthetic experience, projection and the mechanics of representation

Edgar Allan Poe’s tales represent one of the most finely-wrought conjurings up of trauma-generated fears in literature. Like the writings of Melanie Klein, Poe’s fiction offers a way of getting inside dread, of writing it, re-creating it, and of transforming it into a beautiful thing. In Klein’s intensely lived dramas of objects transformed through destruction and reparation, dread—of persecutors from outside, of fragmentation from within—is experienced with devastating rawness. Viewed in this light, Poe’s discourse of trauma can be seen to re-figure, over and over again, the painful struggle of acknowledging disintegration in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. By plunging the narrator so completely into the subjective viewpoint of his narrator, Poe dramatises uniquely phantasies of omnipotence and the struggle, not only to acknowledge that which lies outside the self, but to preserve the ego from the threat of internal disintegration.