DR.

HERNÁN LARA ZAVALA

SEMINARIO DE LITERATURA

WILLIAM TREVOR: AFTER THE RAIN

COLEGIO DE LETRAS MODERNAS

“HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE”: TRAUMA AND THE WORK OF MOURNING IN “A DAY” BY WILLIAM TREVOR

Trevor’s stories open a realm very much like the one we are living. This realm, this frail paradox, in

which the phrase: “you can’t always get what you want” –deprived of its poetic and somewhat

sublimated state– becomes the most common rule and truth of everyday life. We have seen how

Trevor, masterfully, delivers his pieces with a taste of “everydayness” that we can only attempt to

grasp. Nevertheless, why sometimes his stories are so sad or so cruel? In “A Day”, it seems that little

by little a dictum of experience becomes present to us: the fear of loss and the fear of failure is what

maintain the little motion inside the lives of the characters of this story. These statements that articulate

life as we know it could serve us to travel, in this particular reading, between the notions of trauma, the

concept of the work of mourning and melancholy that detach from the relationships contained within

“A Day” by William Trevor.

1. Narrating Trauma: glimpses of the past

“A Day” is one of the last stories of the book After Rain. The story deals with a woman named

Mrs. Lethwes and her everyday routine. Bit by bit, we learn that her marriage has become the

inescapable experience of the eternal return. The image that opens the story is that of a marital room

separated with a twin bed (one for her husband and one for her) and the installment of a routine that

begins when she wakes with “fleeting thoughts and fragments of memory that dissipate swiftly…food

recently consumed … uneasily digested [and the suffering of] a moment of cramp” (Trevor 132). One

line after the other, we see the frail balance of a marriage being struck by the presence of a third party:

a woman named Elspeth.

 Trevor uses a free indirect speech to develop his narrative.1 In his story, the narrator speaks as if

it were the character in question: this voice transmits to us what the character feels and thinks; the

narrative voice reproduces the feelings, the expectations, in concrete: a world and a self. At the same

time, it appears that the narrator does not have access to the whole time spectrum per se but delivers us

glimpses so that the reader can complete the formal meaning of what is happening: “In another of her

dreams during the night that has passed he carried her, and his voice spoke softly, soothing her. Or was

it quite a dream, or only something like one? She tries to smile; she says she’s sorry, knowing now”

(Trevor 133).

We have to comment on this Trevorian narrator in order to elaborate into the notion of trauma

that detaches from the statements that opened this analysis. Trevor defines the short story as: “el arte de

atisbar...[of] Decir lo mínimo de una historia para forzar al lector a completarla” (Lara Zavala 64). We

have to consider this because of the auratic qualities of the narrative: Trevor’s voice wanders between

the inner thoughts of his character (these glimpses) and the distant events that lead to the specific

condition in which she finds herself. How to introduce a notion like trauma from this kind of narrative?

In a few words, the concept of trauma is the entrance of an unknown object in the process of the

self. In that sense, Freud links the experience of trauma with sexuality but always stating that the

traumatic event is traumatic because a second event connects with the previous event that appears to be

undetermined, repressed, and silenced.2 In the story, the distant event takes place when Mrs. Lethwes

and her husband are in a trip in France: “It was in France, in the Hotel St-Georges during their

September holiday seven years ago, that Mrs. Lethwes found out about her husband’s other woman.

There was a letter, round feminine handwriting on an air-mail envelope, an English stamp: she knew at

1
We could also use the term Trevorian narrator given the specific manner in which Trevor narrates a story: free indirect
speech and at the same time a commentary on the “everydayness of cruelty” that characterize him as a writer.
2
Sigmund Freud, “Neurosis y Psicosis (1924 [1923])”, Obras completas. Volumen 19, (Argentina, Amorrortu, 1992). P
155-160.
once… From the letter itself, which she read and then destroyed, she learned all there was otherwise to

know” (Trevor 134, emphasis is mine). Why thus this silence?

The neurotic conflict, summarizing Freud’s investigation, installs in the self because we desire

and we prohibit the same things. If we desire something and we prohibit another all is well; since we

are unable to escape our own instincts, we have to negotiate with the impulse that drive the instincts

and the social constructs that instruct our behavior in society. In “A Day”, Mrs. Lethwes recognizes

herself as a barren wife; the social construct that pervades society is the localization of womankind as

the givers of life. In the face of the construct, Mrs. Lethwes is a failure in the eyes of society: “Of

course was what she’d thought on the terrace of the Hotel St-Georges: a childless marriage was a

disappointment for any man. She’d failed him, although naturally it had never been said...” (Trevor

135, emphasis is mine). We gently learn how the silence that initiated the neurotic conflict irrupts as a

form of social demarcation, that is, what is expected of Mrs. Lethwes –as a wife but also as a woman–

at the hands of her own mother:

Silver-framed, a reminder of her wedding day stands on a round inlaid surface among other photographs near by August

26th 1974: the date floats through her midday thoughts. ‘I know this’ll work out,’ her mother - given to speaking openly -

had remarked the evening before, when she met for the first time the parents of her daughter’s fiancé. The remark had

caused a silence, then someone laughed.

(137)

Following Freud’s concepts, one of the mechanisms of self-defense is repression, that is: to live as the

desire and instinct does not exist: “Mrs. Lethwes said nothing in the Hotel St-Georges and she hasn’t

since. He doesn’t know she knows; she hopes that nothing ever shows… Driving up through France,

and back again in England, she became used to pretending in his company that the person called

Elspeth did not exist, while endlessly conjecturing when she was alone” (136). The destruction of the

letter and the silence that follows represents Mrs. Lethwes inability to enunciate her desires. It
represents the mechanism of repression. She enters in a downward spiral that can be read according to

another Freudian concept: melancholia.

2. The same day: melancholic processes

Trevor builds his stories according to a certain kind of poetics. Following the interview that he held

with Lara, we can start to name them as the poetics of the glimpse. Along this story, Trevor’s glimpses

present to us with Mrs. Lethwes chronic symptomatology: “She feels blurred and headachy, as she

always does at this time, the worst moment of her day, Mrs. Lethwes considers” (Trevor 132). The

mere glimpse of her condition becomes reinforced as the story advances: “The house is silent when

Marietta has left, and Mrs. Lethwes feels free again. The day is hers now, until the evening… She

doesn’t have much lunch. She never does during the week… Then the first sharp tang of the Martini

causes her, for a moment, to close her eyes with pleasure” (136-137). The silent repression of her

desires has taken the form of a chronic alcoholism: “‘No more. That’s all.’ On her feet again to pour

her second drink, Mrs. Lethwes firmly makes this resolution… But a little later she finds herself

rooting beneath underclothes in a bedroom drawer, and finding there another bottle of Gordon’s and

pouring some and adding water from a bathroom tap” (137). Her everyday becomes a cage in which

she wanders between the desire to enunciate and the possibility of losing what she loves if she does so.

Then, what is losing?

Mourning, following Freud, is the loss of a loved object or its abstraction (that is: A person

(death or separation), the homeland, an ideal, an identity).3 The psychoanalyst portrays the mourning as

a normal process: a work. The works responds to a reality principle: we realize that the object is lost

and place our libido in another object. In the case of Mrs. Lethwes, she loses her agency to speak about

what it is that she lost. If we follow this train of thought, her fear of failure and her inability to cope

3
Sigmund Freud, “Duelo y melancolía (1917 [1915])”, Obras completas. Volumen 14, (Argentina, Amorrortu, 1992). P.
238-245
with the loss of a loved one traduces to an abnormal affection. Melancholia reveals when the affected

does not know what it is that she –in this case– has lost. Her repression becomes a spiral towards

alcoholism and the negation of her self-agency and the ulterior lowering of self-regard where affections

such as self-reproach, guilt, failure, a fracture in time take a hold of the subject that lives the process.

The process becomes not the loss of an object but loss of the self. An impossibility to place the libido

in another object, in turn places its shadow upon the self: turning it in the loved and lost object. The

alcoholism of Mrs. Lethwes becomes the only way that she can postpone her own work of mourning

but, at the same time, it negates the process and cancels all possibilities of enunciation of the loss itself:

The noisy up-and-over garage door falls into place. In a hurry Mrs. Lethwes raises the green bottle to her lips because

suddenly she feels the need of it. She does so again before there is the darkness that sometimes comes, arriving suddenly

today just as she is whispering to herself that tomorrow, all day long, she’ll not take anything at all and thinking also that,

for tonight, the open wine will be enough, and if it isn’t there’s always more that can be broached. (140).

We wander through a social demarcation that installs expectations and ways of being in and

with the world. Trevor uses these mechanisms in his stories to portray the barbaric normality by which

we live our lives. Through the story of Mrs. Lethwes we can glimpse the terror of abandonment –its

traumatic qualities– and our inability to sometimes cope with the processes that affect us. At the same

time, he is showing how ludicrous and how dangerous our golden cages can be. Writing is a mean to

break the silence of society. It can be an impulse to narrate our common flaws and maybe, one day,

overcome them. Trevor’s poetics verse around the salt of the earth and, by doing so, he tries to reflect

in the motives and forces that gave us our rules and demarcations: his literature speak to the common

because we have live these stories.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. “Neurosis y Psicosis (1924 [1923])”, Obras completas. Volumen 19. (Argentina,

Amorrortu, 1992).
--------------------- “Duelo y melancolía (1917 [1915]), Obras completas. Volumen 14, (Argentina,

Amorrortu, 1992).

Lara Zavala, Hernan. “Entre Inglaterra e Irlanda: William Trevor.” México. Vuelta Nº171. 1991.

Trevor, William. “A Day.” In After Rain. Amazon Kindle, 2010.