The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma [1 ed.] 9781138494923, 9781351025225

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction to literary trauma studies
PART I: Sources and inspirations
1. History of trauma theory
2. Philosophies of trauma
3. Trauma, poststructuralism and ethics
4. Theories of cultural trauma
5. Trauma and cultural memory studies
6. Testimony
7. Trauma, time and address
PART II: Key concepts
8. Victimhood
9. Perpetrator trauma
10. Witnessing
11. Screen memory
12. Working-through
13. Affect
14. Narrative
15. Gender
16. Intersectionality
PART III: Critical perspectives and future directions
17. Cosmological trauma and postcolonial modernity
18. Trauma and the implicated subject
19. Transcultural empathy
20. Cognitive approaches to trauma and literature
21. Trauma, critical posthumanism and new materialism
22. Trauma studies in the digital age
23. Reading literatures of trauma in the age of globalization
24. Trauma, illness and narrative in the medical humanities
25. Climate trauma
PART IV: Genres and media
26. Trauma and fiction
27. Trauma and poetry
28. Trauma and life-writing
29. Graphic narratives as trauma fiction
30. Trauma and drama/theatre/performance
31. Trauma and photography
32. Post-apocalyptic fiction and the future anterior
PART V: Places and events
33. Trauma in Holocaust literature
34. The German occupation of France, 1940–44
35. The Vietnam War
36. Narratives of the Rwandan genocide
37. 9/11
38. The Iraq War
39. Katrina
40. Transgenerational nuclear trauma
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND TRAUMA

Literary trauma studies is a rapidly developing field which examines how literature deals with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such historical and current phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides, 9/11, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments. It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma. Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to further the understanding of literature and other cultural forms across the world. Colin Davis is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku, Finland.

ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONS TO LITERATURE SERIES

Also available in this series: The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing Edited by Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics Edited by Matt Seybold and Michelle Chihara The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literature Edited by Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies Edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung and Takayuki Tatsumi The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature Edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities Edited by Paul Crawford, Brian Brown and Andrea Charise The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction Edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Andrew Pepper The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma Edited by Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability Edited by Alice Hall For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/literature/series/ RC4444

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND TRAUMA

Edited by Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-49492-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-02522-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgements

ix xv

Introduction to literary trauma studies Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja

1

PART I

Sources and inspirations

9

1 History of trauma theory Nicole A. Sütterlin

11

2 Philosophies of trauma Hanna Meretoja

23

3 Trauma, poststructuralism and ethics Colin Davis

36

4 Theories of cultural trauma Todd Madigan

45

5 Trauma and cultural memory studies Rosanne Kennedy

54

6 Testimony Meg Jensen

66

v

Contents

7 Trauma, time and address Cathy Caruth

79

PART II

Key concepts

89

8 Victimhood Susana Onega

91

9 Perpetrator trauma Erin McGlothlin

100

10 Witnessing Carolyn J. Dean

111

11 Screen memory Max Silverman

121

12 Working-through Jean-Michel Ganteau

131

13 Affect Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

141

14 Narrative Jakob Lothe

152

15 Gender Sharon Marquart

162

16 Intersectionality Kaisa Ilmonen

173

PART III

Critical perspectives and future directions

185

17 Cosmological trauma and postcolonial modernity Sam Durrant and Ryan Topper

187

18 Trauma and the implicated subject Michael Rothberg

201

vi

Contents

19 Transcultural empathy Katja Garloff

211

20 Cognitive approaches to trauma and literature Joshua Pederson

220

21 Trauma, critical posthumanism and new materialism Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim

230

22 Trauma studies in the digital age Anna Menyhért

241

23 Reading literatures of trauma in the age of globalization Kaisa Kaakinen

257

24 Trauma, illness and narrative in the medical humanities Jo Winning

266

25 Climate trauma Stef Craps

275

PART IV

Genres and media

285

26 Trauma and fiction Robert Eaglestone

287

27 Trauma and poetry Charles I. Armstrong

296

28 Trauma and life-writing Leena Kurvet-Käosaar

305

29 Graphic narratives as trauma fiction Katalin Orbán

317

30 Trauma and drama/theatre/performance Patrick Duggan

328

31 Trauma and photography Cécile Bishop

339

vii

Contents

32 Post-apocalyptic fiction and the future anterior Jouni Teittinen

349

PART V

Places and events

361

33 Trauma in Holocaust literature Sue Vice

363

34 The German occupation of France, 1940–44 Avril Tynan

374

35 The Vietnam War Mark Heberle

385

36 Narratives of the Rwandan genocide Josias Semujanga

395

37 9/11 Lucy Bond

407

38 The Iraq War Patrick Deer

418

39 Katrina Eric Doise

428

40 Transgenerational nuclear trauma Gabriele Schwab

438

Index

452

viii

CONTRIBUTORS

Charles I. Armstrong is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Agder. His publications include Figures of Memory: Poetry, Space and the Past and, as co-editor, The Legacy of the Good Friday Agreement: Northern Irish Politics, Culture and Art after 1998. Cécile Bishop is Assistant Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU, having formerly been Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. She is a specialist in francophone and postcolonial literature, and her publications include Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny (2014, Legenda). Lucy Bond is a Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster. Her previous publications include Frames of Memory after 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law (Palgrave 2015), Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (co-edited with Stef Craps and Pieter Vermeulen; Berghahn, 2016), Planetary Memory in Contempoary American Fiction (co-edited with Ben de Bruyn and Jessica Rapson; Routledge, 2018) and the New Critical Idiom Guide to Trauma (with Stef Craps; Routledge, 2019). Cathy Caruth is Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University. She is author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions (1995), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996; 20th Anniversary Edition, 2016) and Literature in the Ashes of History (2013), as well as co-editor, with Deborah Esch, of Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (1995) and editor of Trauma: Explorations in Memory and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (2014). Stef Craps is a Professor of English Literature at Ghent University, Belgium, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. His research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, memory and trauma studies, postcolonial theory and the environmental humanities.

ix

Contributors

Colin Davis is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. His research is principally in the field of twentieth-century French literature, thought and film, with interests including ethics, ethical criticism, trauma, Holocaust literature, recent fiction and the connections between philosophy, fiction and film. His most recent books include Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing (Liverpool University Press, 2018), Postwar Renoir: Film and the Memory of Violence (Routledge, 2012), Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell (Stanford University Press, 2010), Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories, Theory (Routledge, 2004). Carolyn J. Dean is Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French at Yale. She is the author of several books, most recently Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust and The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019). She has also published in the areas of interwar France and gender and sexuality. Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at NYU. He is author of Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009). His current book project is We Are All Embedded: Understanding America’s War Culture Since 9/11. Eric Doise is an Associate Professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University. His work has appeared in journals including The South Central Review, Extrapolation and Film Criticism. His current book project examines what testimonial fiction can reveal about testimony. Patrick Duggan is Head of Drama and Associate Professor of Performance and Culture at Northumbria University. He is an interdisciplinary researcher working across cultural geography, politics and performance studies. His research explores cultural production as a means of investigating the world, as well as object of analysis in it, questioning the place and geo-political function of contemporary cultural production in relation to trauma, resilience and contexts of crisis. He is author of Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Manchester University Press, 2012) and co-editor of two special editions of the journal Performance Research: with Mick Wallis, On Trauma (16(1), 2011) and with Gianna Bouchard, Staging the Wreckage (25(4), 2019). He is codirector of Performing City Resilience (www.performingcityresilience.com). Sam Durrant is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning (State University of New York Press, 2004) and co-editor of Essays in Migratory Aesthetics (Rodopi, 2007), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism (Routledge, 2014) and Refugee Imaginaries (EUP, 2019). He is currently writing a monograph on animist morphologies in contemporary African literature. Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. His publications include The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004), The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Literature: Why it Matters (Polity, 2019), and, as co-editor, The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism (Routledge, 2014).

x

Contributors

Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of English Literature at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France. He is the author of three monographs, has co-edited various collections of essays and published many articles on trauma, vulnerability and the ethics of literature. He is the editor of the journal Etudes britanniques contemporaines. Katja Garloff is Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers (2005) and Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture (2016) as well as the co-editor (with Agnes Mueller) of German Jewish Literature after 1990 (2018). Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim is a PhD candidate and a Fulbright Fellow in Comparative Literature Department at Washington University (St Louis). Her academic interests and research lie at the convergence of Anglo-African literature, Middle Eastern literature, trauma and memory studies, posthumanism and environmental humanities. By examining several cosmopolitan authors from contemporary Anglophone literature and Turkish literature, her dissertation project demonstrates creative strategies for traumatic experience and survival. Mark Heberle is Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and the author of A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam and editor of Thirty Years After: New Essays on Vietnam Literature, Film, and Art. Kaisa Ilmonen is a University Lecturer at the University of Turku. Her research interests include such topics as intersectionality, postcolonial literature and Caribbean literature. She has published in journals including Signs, Journal of European Women’s Studies, Journal of Literary Theory and Journal of West Indian Literatures. Meg Jensen is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University, London. She has published widely on trauma, the autobiographical and the advancement of human rights, including The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths (2019). Kaisa Kaakinen holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and is the author of the monograph Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary: Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She has taught comparative literature at Cornell University, University of Turku and University of Helsinki. Currently she works as Research Coordinator at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. Leena Kurvet-Käosaar is Associate Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Tartu, Estonia, as well as a Senior Researcher at the Estonian Literary Museum. She has published widely in life-writing studies, specializing in particular on Post-Soviet life-writing, personal narratives of Soviet deportations and the Gulag and trauma studies. Rosanne Kennedy is Associate Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality and Culture at the Australian National University. Her research interests include cultural memory studies, trauma and testimony; literature, law and human rights; gender studies and feminist theory; and environmental humanities. She has published widely in journals including Memory

xi

Contributors

Studies, Signs, Comparative Literature Studies, Studies in the Novel, Biography, Australian Feminist Studies and many others. Jakob Lothe is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oslo. His books include Conrad’s Narrative Method (Oxford University Press, 1989, reprinted as paperback 1991), Narrative in Fiction and Film (Oxford University Press, 2000; also published in Chinese by Peking University Press, 2011), Narrative Ethics (co-edited, 2013), Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust (edited, 2017) and The Future of Literary Studies (edited, 2017). He is also co-editor of four volumes in the series “Theory and Interpretation of Narrative” published by the Ohio State University Press. Lothe is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the leader of the Academy’s Committee on Human Rights. Todd Madigan holds a PhD in Sociology from Yale University and is a visiting assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His 2017 article “Cultural Trauma, Collective Memory, and the Vietnam War” is published in Croatian Political Science Review 54(1–2) (with coauthors Ron Eyerman and Magnus Ring). Sharon Marquart is Associate Professor of French and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College (USA). She is the author of On the Defensive: Reading the Ethical in Nazi Camp Testimonies (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and co-editor of a volume of essays on Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo. Erin McGlothlin is Associate Professor of German and Jewish Studies at Washington University in St Louis. Her research interests include Holocaust literature and film, GermanJewish literature, narrative theory, autobiography and the graphic novel. Anna Menyhért is a Professor of Trauma Studies at the University of Jewish Studies in Budapest. Between 2016 and 2018 she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Her research covers two main areas, trauma studies and women’s literature. Her monograph entitled Women’s Literary Tradition and TwentiethCentury Hungarian Writers was published in 2020 by Brill. Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory at the University of Turku (Finland), a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford (2019–2020) and a Visiting Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London (2019–2022). Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative studies, trauma studies and cultural memory studies. Her most recent books include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (coedited; Routledge, 2018) and Values of Literature (co-edited; Brill Rodopi, 2015). Susana Onega is Professor of English at the University of Zaragoza, head of a competitive research team working on contemporary literatures in English (http://cne.literatureresearch. net) and member of the Academia Europaea. She has written extensively on contemporary English fiction, narrative theory and criticism, ethics and trauma. She is the author of five monographs, including Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (UMI Research Press,

xii

Contributors

1989), Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (Candem House, 1999) and Jeanette Winterson (Manchester University Press, 2006). Katalin Orbán holds a PhD from Rutgers University. She is Associate Professor at the Institute of Art Theory and Media Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, having held prior positions at Harvard and NUS (Singapore) among others. Her publications on cultural memory and narrative include Ethical Diversions: The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman (Routledge, 2005, 2013). Her work on graphic narrative has appeared in Representations, Critical Inquiry and The Edinburgh Companion to Narrative Theories. Joshua Pederson is Associate Professor of Humanities at Boston University. He is the author of The Forsaken Son: Child Murder and Atonement in Modern American Fiction (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and numerous essays on religion and literature and trauma theory. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi is Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in narrative theory and rhetoric with an emphasis on Continental philosophy. Her research deals with questions of identity, exile and migration. She is the author of several books, including Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity; Paul Ricoeur: Rhetorical Theory between Tradition and Innovation; and Intimate Strangers: Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said in American Political Discourse. Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009) and The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2020). Gabriele M. Schwab is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in literary studies and critical theory at the University of Constance in 1976 and a PhD in Psychoanalysis from the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles in 2009. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Heisenberg Fellowship and her research interests include critical theory, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, literature and anthropology and twentieth- and twenty-first-century comparative literatures. Her monographs in English include Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction (1994); The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language (1996); Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (2010); Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Subjectivity, Culture (2012). Josias Semujanga is Professor of African literature and literary theories at the University of Montreal. His principal publications include Le roman francophone et l’archive coloniale (with Philippe Basabose) (2019), Narrating Itsembabwoko (2016), Intertextualité et adaptation dans les littératures francophones (with Isaac Bazié, 2013), Le génocide, sujet de fiction? (2008), Origins of the Rwandan Genocide (2003), Dynamique des genres dans le roman africain: Éléments de poétique transculturelle (1999), Les récits fondateurs du drame rwandais: Discours social, idéologies et stéréotypes (1998) and Configuration de l’énonciation interculturelle dans le roman francophone (1996).

xiii

Contributors

Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. He works on post-Holocaust culture, postcolonial theory and cultures and questions of trauma, memory, race and violence. His most recent monograph, entitled Palimpsestic Memory: the Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Berghahn, 2013), considers the connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary. He has recently published four co-edited books with Griselda Pollock on the theme of the ‘concentrationary’: Concentrationary Cinema (Berghahn, 2011), Concentrationary Memories (I. B. Tauris, 2014), Concentrationary Imaginaries (I. B. Tauris, 2015) and Concentrationary Art (Berghahn, 2019). Nicole A. Sütterlin is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of Poetik der Wunde: Zur Entdeckung des Traumas in der Literatur der Romantik (2019). In her work she explores the “poetics of trauma” in German literature from the eighteenth century to the present. Jouni Teittinen (University of Turku) is a comparatist whose expertise lies in the fields of post-apocalyptic literature, ecocriticism and human–animal studies. He is currently finalizing his doctoral dissertation on the uses of future anterior (“what will have been”) in anglophone post-apocalyptic literature since the Second World War. Ryan Topper is Assistant Professor of English at Western Oregon University. His articles in or forthcoming in journals such as English Language Notes, Moving Worlds and Research in African Literatures place African literature in dialogue with trauma and memory studies, political theology and new materialism. He is currently writing a monograph on trauma theory and animist cosmologies in African literature. Avril Tynan is a postdoctoral researcher in comparative literature at the Turku Institute of Advanced Studies (Finland). She completed her PhD on the works of Jorge Semprun at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2016. Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she teaches and researches contemporary literature, film and Holocaust studies. She is currently working on a book analysing the outtakes of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah. Jo Winning is Reader in Modern Literature and Critical Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. She is Director of the Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities.

xiv

ACKN OW LEDGE M E N TS

This volume is the product of our long-term collaboration on issues of trauma, narrative and memory, involving a group of scholars who attended two research events that we coorganized on literature and trauma. The first was a week-long summer symposium, “Trauma Narratives and the Ethics of Reading”, which was part of the summer session of the Nordic Summer University in Saulkrasti, Latvia, in July-August 2017. The second event was a three-day seminar, “Trauma and Literature: Prospects and Perspectives”, which took place under the auspices of the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in Spring 2018 (UCLA). Many of the contributors to this volume participated in them, and we are grateful to all the participants of these events for their valuable feedback and willingness to share their expertise in a series of stimulating, challenging discussions. An important framework for our collaboration has been the international research network “Narrative and Memory: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics”, which was funded in 2017–19 by the Nordic Council of Ministers and led by Eneken Laanes and Hanna Meretoja. The Saulkrasti event was the 2017 summer symposium of this network, and in summer 2019, as the volume was already nearly ready, we recruited the last contributors to the volume from another summer symposium of the network, “Victims, Perpetrators and Implicated Subjects: Rethinking Agency at the Intersections of Narrative and Memory”, which took place in Roosta, Estonia. The artist Nic Cooper gave a paper in this symposium on how they deal with trauma in their paintings, and we are very grateful to them for letting us use one of their paintings on the cover of this volume. It is an earlier version of a painting that they ended up naming “Continuity”. Cooper reflects on their painting as follows: In “Continuity” I was looking at archival images of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, imagery from WWII re-enactment styled “documentaries”, and current alt-right crimes and codes. I was looking again at this radical mobilization of resistance fighters as well as the continuities of oppression from the past to the present. The figures repeat in different iterations, showing a passage of time, the movement of walking together, of marching. The space is imaginary yet grounded in reality. LGBTQ+ people suffered alongside Jewish people in the Shoah, and I can imagine there were queer Jews like myself and my community at the time, not just separately Jewish or “homosexual” as it is often listed in museums. Of course, the gay xv

Acknowledgements

liberation movement and Jewish struggles were different, as well as the current realities and more recent histories of traumas and rights organizations. I do not wish to conflate this; I am holding queer history and Jewish history simultaneously, separately and at times together in my mind and embodied experience. We would also like to acknowledge that part of the editing work took place with the support of the Academy of Finland research consortium Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory (project number 314769). Moreover, we would like to thank our invaluable research assistants at the University of Turku, Liisa Määttä, Rosa Aphalo and Eevastiina Kinnunen, who helped us polish the manuscript, and Avril Tynan, who checked the language of some of the chapters. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their helpful suggestions and to Routledge for support and smooth collaboration. Finally, our greatest gratitude is to our families – to Alma, Eliel, Valtteri, Natasha and Jane – for all their patience, love and support.

xvi

INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY TRAUMA STUDIES Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja

A trauma originally referred to a physical injury requiring medical treatment. It derives from the Ancient Greek word for “wound” (τραῦμα, traûma). However, since the nineteenth century the term has mutated so that it is now primarily used to describe emotional wounds, traces left on the mind by catastrophic, painful events. Trauma refers to psychological injury, lasting damage done to individuals or communities by tragic events or severe distress. Over the past few decades, the term has spread so that our entire global culture is sometimes characterized as traumatic or post-traumatic. Our traumatized reality is explained by reference to catastrophic events that have had a broad cultural impact such as the Holocaust and other genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia or Rwanda, or the Vietnam War, or 9/11, or the still-unsettled legacy of colonialism, or to innumerable other occasions and sites of suffering. After terrorist attacks, school shootings and natural disasters, it has become commonplace to see horrific events as traumatizing and to offer psychological counselling or “debriefing” to survivors and witnesses. Important new, global sources of distress include climate change and the coronavirus pandemic. In the debate on “climate anxiety” the language of trauma is now starting to be applied not only to past and present harm experienced by individuals and communities but also to the perhaps irreversible damage we are doing to the environment and the prospects of human, non-human and post-human life on earth. As this book is going to press, references to “pre-traumatic stress” are also emerging in connection to the pandemic and “lockdown trauma”. Sometimes trauma seems to be everywhere. Nearly any minor setback can be casually described as “traumatic”, to the point that the term risks becoming useless. It is trivialized by being employed to refer to inconsequential, ultimately harmless niggles in our daily lives. Yet trauma is also real. To deny it risks perpetuating it. Victims, survivors and witnesses of traumatic experiences, as well as those who feel themselves somehow to have been affected or implicated by them, have wanted to talk and write about trauma, and to become involved in other cultural forms of remembrance and testimony. Moreover, legacies of violence that are traumatizing for those affected by them also concern those who are not directly affected. They raise issues of collective responsibility, such as the question of how to make sure that past atrocities are not repeated in the present and future and how to address the mechanisms of structural violence that we have inherited from the past and that we may be perpetuating in the present. One important forum for addressing these issues is literature. This Companion is concerned with the relation between literature and trauma; and we take 1

Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja

literature in a broad sense, to include testimonial and fictional work in written and visual media. In this introduction we will provide a brief genealogy of the concept of trauma (for a fuller account, see Sütterlin, Chapter 1, this volume), indicate some of the main challenges that trauma studies face today and outline the structure of the present volume.

The dual genealogy of trauma Trauma theory in its recent forms grows out of the medical and legal concerns of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution. The new technologies of the industrial age sometimes malfunctioned, producing victims who could often demonstrate no compelling visible cause for their distress; but they were traumatized nonetheless, and demanded medical treatment and financial compensation. Railway accidents played a particularly important role in the development of trauma theory (see Luckhurst 2008: 21–4). From the 1830s onwards, the expanding railway system brought with it injuries and deaths across Europe and America. Sometimes, survivors of crashes found their behaviour changed; they became unable to work or function normally, even if they showed no signs of physical injury. Medical experts nevertheless sought to find physical causes, albeit ones which at the time remained invisible. The surgeon John Erichsen (1866) propounded the theory of “railway spine”, suggesting that the traumatized victims of railway accidents suffered from spinal damage, which, in the absence of X-rays, could not be directly observed. A leading German neurologist, Hermann Oppenheim (1889), named this phenomenon “traumatic neurosis”, which he took to involve neurological damage. These approaches explained mental phenomena in terms of underlying organic, physical injury; but, after heated debates on the topic by scientists and scholars across Europe, trauma started to be seen, more and more, as a form of mental distress. One of the first to attribute a principal causative role to mental shock was the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1889), who emphasized the role of hysteria in understanding trauma. At the turn of the century, traumatic disorders were increasingly seen as different in nature from purely physical illnesses. In the twentieth century Sigmund Freud and other early psychoanalysts found themselves faced with the experience of soldiers returning from the trenches of the First World War, and the theory of trauma became increasingly psychological. It came to be seen as a form of lasting injury on the mind caused by a shocking event that tended to elude recall and representation. Trauma could now be acknowledged as a real condition even if no physical, bodily causes could be identified. The medical discourse on trauma was entangled with legal discourse as those affected, whether in the war or in factory or other workplace accidents, sought legal compensation for their psychological injuries. While after the First World War soldiers suffering from “shell shock” were sometimes suspected of simulating a neurosis in order to avoid having to return to the front or in the hope of getting reparation, after the Second World War and the Holocaust attitudes began to shift and trauma became a legitimate category to explain psychic injury, whether one had perpetrated, suffered or merely witnessed shocking violence. Such suffering was no longer contested: a discursive space had opened for it to be recognized as real and as something that required acknowledgement, treatment and compensation. As Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman show in their moral genealogy of trauma, there is a marked change in the “moral economy” of the West when the concept of trauma produced this “new condition of victimhood” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009 [2007]: 5). Through this social and cultural transformation, the position of a trauma victim came to be culturally available as a position in which one was legitimately entitled to sympathy and compensation. 2

Introduction to literary trauma studies

Another important step in this transformation was taken in 1980 when PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) was officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, in part as a way of explaining the alarming distress of US veterans of the Vietnam War. Once trauma could be named, described and diagnosed, suffering could be recognized as real rather than dismissed as imaginary or, even worse, as exploitative malingering. Moreover, sufferers could then receive the treatment, compensation and support that they needed. Trauma has therefore a dual genealogy: it has emerged as a medical, psychological and psychiatric concept that is now a universally recognized diagnostic category, but it has also emerged as a category of social discourse that has a strongly moral significance. The first concerns the history of medicine, the other the history of moral values and sensibilities. These genealogies are interlinked. The moral and social transformation had changed the cultural “space of possibility” so that the medical community was able to formulate and accept the new diagnostic category. The new medical category, in turn, reinforced the social recognition of trauma. Trauma discourse has now become so widespread in our everyday ways of making sense of both personal and collective experiences that it is rarely remembered or recognized how the emergence of this new category of thought marked a major social shift. This shift involved acknowledging how a painful past can resurface in the present, often through indirect symptoms, silences and repetitive patterns of thought and affect. It created a new vocabulary for explaining suffering and for approaching it both as an injury that requires treatment and as a resource that can be mobilized to claim rights. It created the subject position of a trauma victim that one can occupy as a patient in order to get help or as a political agent in order to ask for compensation and to fight for one’s rights. That trauma has become a common part of our everyday parlance also signals a shift in our general relationship to the past. There is now a wide recognition of how past violence leaves marks on the present and future, how the past haunts us and how past injustice needs to be remembered and worked through so that we can avoid repeating it. Trauma theory grows, then, out of the complex interaction of suffering, law, ethics and medicine. Literary trauma studies as a particular branch of work in the humanities has its own separate but related and interdependent genealogy. Several of the chapters in this book address the origins and development of literary trauma studies, out of Romantic aesthetics, nineteenth-century psychopathology and twentieth-century psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and more recently out of ethical developments in poststructuralism, Holocaust studies, memory studies and postcolonial studies, acknowledging that increasingly over the last few years it has been shaped by challenges posed by such new strands of thought as ecocriticism, posthumanism and medical humanities. The canonical works of trauma studies by literary critics and theorists Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996) and Shoshana Felman, the psychiatrist Dori Laub (Felman and Laub 1992) and the historian Dominick LaCapra (1994, 2001) laid the foundation for what would become the explosion of trauma studies. Since the current volume is concerned with trauma and literature, it is unsurprising that Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience and Felman and Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History are particularly frequent and important points of reference. These works develop some of the key theoretical positions, which subsequent literary critics have adopted, used, contested or nuanced. Caruth powerfully argues that what returns to haunt the victims in narratives of trauma “is not only the reality of the event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known” (Caruth 1996: 6). This approach emphasizes belatedness as constitutive of the temporal structure of trauma: trauma is 3

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characterized by a delayed response to an overwhelming event that cannot be processed at the time of its occurrence but manifests itself through intrusive thoughts, flashbacks or nightmares. Felman and Laub also reach out to something real but beyond expression, with their concern for the preservation “of the shock of the unintelligible in face of the attempt at its interpretation […] that is, of reality itself in the midst of our own efforts at interpreting it and through the necessary process of its textualization” (Felman and Laub 1992: xx). Many of the contributors to this volume engage with these positions, sometimes critically, but always with a sense that they have served pivotal roles in opening up immensely productive and ethically important avenues of enquiry. For literary trauma studies, a crucial question concerns the relationship between culture and trauma. While psychology has focused on the psychic traces left on the individual by a traumatic event, approaches focussing on literature and other creative media are often interested in the cultural and social dimensions of trauma. This can mean paying attention to various processes of cultural mediation. First, even individual traumatic experience is always culturally mediated – cultural discourse and its ways of giving meaning to particular forms of violence such as racial or gender violence or to serious illness affect the ways in which individuals experience and deal with their traumatic experiences. The discourse on trauma is now an important part of our culture, which can lead individuals to interpret as “traumatic” experiences that would be given different meanings in other cultural contexts (see LaCapra 2001; Kansteiner 2004; Kaplan 2005; Fassin and Rechtman 2009 [2007]). Second, sociocultural approaches have argued that many catastrophic events give rise to “cultural traumas” that affect a whole community and may lead to the need to reassess and renarrate collective identities (Eyerman 2001, 2019; Alexander 2012). Literary trauma studies has often focused on historical catastrophes and explored their impact on both individuals and communities. Like cultural memory studies, it has frequently been interested in how literature explores the interplay between the personal and the cultural in narrating particular experiences of trauma.

Problematizations: complex debates around trauma theories It would be misleading to give the impression that there is any easy consensus about the history, causes, meaning and applicability of the theory of trauma. Even if the brief history given above were accepted, searching questions have been posed to trauma studies. In certain of its influential forms, it has been accused of privileging a naively literal view of trauma’s psychic imprint and neglecting competing theories and of drawing a problematic parallel between individual, psychic trauma and cultural, collective trauma (see e.g. Leys 2000; LaCapra 2001, 2004; Kansteiner 2004; Rothe 2016); by attending primarily to the impasse of the individual psyche it risks neglecting the social field (see e.g. Kaplan 2005; Alexander 2012); by its focus on catastrophic events, much of trauma theory seems to ignore the traumatizing processes and structures to which women, various ethnic groups and other underprivileged people are subjected on a daily basis (see e.g. Herman 1992; Brown 1995; Rothberg 2009; Buelens et al. 2014); by stressing the unspeakability of trauma it may devalue the endeavours of those who have an urgent story to tell and overlook the possibilities of empathic sharing across a wide range of aesthetic forms (see e.g. Bennett and Kennedy 2003; Mandel 2006; Trezise 2013; Balaev 2014; Marquart 2015); it may encourage a victim culture and selling the pain of others for profit (see e.g. Farrell 1998; Kaplan 2005; Luckhurst 2008; Rothe 2011); and it can be fixated on melancholia and the endless repetitiveness of acting-out rather than the healing processes of mourning and working-through 4

Introduction to literary trauma studies

(see e.g. LaCapra 2001). Those embracing a recent “positive turn” in memory studies, an interdisciplinary field that trauma studies has significantly shaped, have similarly criticized the field for privileging traumatic aspects of the past (see e.g. Rigney 2018). Moreover, with its foundation in the medical and legal concerns of the industrialized West during a particular historical period of its development, can it then be applied to other periods and other cultures, or do such periods and cultures call into question the universalizing inclinations of some work in trauma studies? Could trauma studies be a new outgrowth of colonialism, claiming the still dominant ability of modern Western perspectives to explain other geopolitical crises (see e.g. Craps 2013; Buelens et al. 2014)? What are the benefits and limits of the concept of trauma in addressing legacies of violence in the contemporary world, and how should we rethink the notion of trauma in the light of recent debates on the inadequacy of the perpetrator–victim binary in dealing with these legacies (see e.g. Sanyal 2015; Meretoja 2018; Rothberg 2019), or with the prospect of climate catastrophe threatening the very survival of human life on earth (see e.g. Kaplan 2015; Craps and Crownshaw 2018)? Many of these concerns have been addressed by the discursive, cultural and social approaches to trauma that are sometimes called “trauma politics” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009 [2007]). These approaches have paid attention to how, despite the apparent universality of trauma, the way in which the social category of trauma is used is far from homogeneous or coherent across cultural and political contexts. Trauma theory tends to privilege Western experiences, and humanitarian psychiatry is more likely to be available in Western contexts than for victims of traumatic events in Africa or Asia, for example. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Western tourists found it easier to get access to trauma counselling than the local population and were more likely to receive compensation. Being recognized as traumatized is a privilege not equally available to all trauma victims. Asylum seekers, for example, are still treated with suspicion and their traumatic experiences are not as readily acknowledged as those of Western citizens who are victims of accidents, violent attacks or natural disasters. And even when the subject position of a trauma victim is socially available, one may not be comfortable in taking this position. A trauma survivor may feel reduced to the role of a victim while trauma is only one part of the agent’s life. The language of trauma runs the risk of homogenizing diverse experiences and their complex embeddedness in personal and collective histories. These are some of the key challenges that trauma theory faces today, and many of the chapters in this volume address these issues. Several chapters discuss ways of expanding literary trauma studies beyond the event-focussed approach linked to the status of the Holocaust as the paradigmatic traumatic event. Many contributors aspire to move beyond a Eurocentric approach and critically reflect on the pitfalls of universalization. Contributors are attentive to the mechanisms of structural violence that perpetuate everyday experiences of trauma, for example in relation to racialized and gendered violence. The chapters also address future trauma linked to climate anxiety or to the threat of serious illness or nuclear annihilation. While trauma theory inspired by psychoanalytic and poststructuralist approaches emphasize the inaccessible, unspeakable and unrepresentable nature of traumatic experience, many chapters in this volume contribute to problematizing this assumption and explore the diversity of different aesthetic forms and strategies of dealing with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma.

Outline of the book The aim of the current volume is twofold: to provide a guide to the history and theory of trauma studies as a central plank of current work in the humanities, which includes 5

Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja

consideration of criticisms and discussion of future developments, and to demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been and continues to be used to further the understanding of literature and other cultural forms across the world. We have not attempted to achieve a unified vision of either the history or the future of trauma studies and its entanglement with literature. Rather, what the reader will find in this book is a series of approaches, sometimes converging, sometimes diverging, to the fraught and urgent question of how literature and other artistic forms negotiate the reality of trauma. We have attempted to offer a broad coverage of the subject, but it could never be comprehensive or complete. The Holocaust comes up repeatedly in the following chapters. This is inevitable given that trauma studies was formulated in part in response to the problems of understanding and representing the Holocaust. But a problem arises about this reference point: does the Holocaust serve as a kind of paradigm of a traumatic event which can provide tools fit for analysing others, or do its very uniqueness and specificity risk giving a distorted view of atrocities and suffering in different historical times, places and cultures? Does the Holocaust help us understand Vietnam, 9/11, colonial violence and climate catastrophe, or does it stand in the way? This book does not purport to give definitive answers to these and other questions pertaining to the presence of trauma in literature; rather, it offers the reader informed accounts of the issues involved and work done in the relevant fields and suggests possible future developments in important, ongoing discussions. Similarly, the volume does not take a particular unified view on the role of literature in understanding, representing, addressing and thinking about trauma. The chapters represent diverse approaches to discussing the relationship between literature and trauma. But an undercurrent running through a number of the chapters is the view that literature has potential to deal with trauma in a way that does justice to the particularity of different kinds of traumatic experiences, from the loss of a loved one to living through a collective catastrophe like a genocide or a natural disaster, without forcing them in one category. If a key challenge of trauma theory is to avoid false universalism, literature has the advantage of drawing our attention to the unique nature of each traumatic experience and its social and cultural contexts. Trauma theory provides conceptual tools to analyse the intricacies of the traumatic experiences that literature explores, but instead of using them as pre-given categories it is more productive to take them as concepts that are in the process of being formed and to the formation of which literature can also contribute. As a “slow” cultural form that invites reflection on the internal tensions and contradictions of painful experiences and violent legacies, it can be particularly well suited to explore the complexity of traumatic experience without false universalism. Using trauma theory to study literature should be a dialogical, two-way process, in which the theory and the analysed objects mutually illuminate and enrich one another. The book is divided into five sections. Part I, “Sources and inspirations”, examines the history and development of modern trauma studies. It explores the genealogy of the concept in more detail than we have done in this introduction, analyses the philosophical underpinnings of trauma theory and discusses the relationship of trauma studies to such interlinked interdisciplinary fields as memory studies and testimony studies. Part II, “Key concepts”, focuses on the conceptual tools which guide work in the area, from victimhood to intersectionality. Some of these key concepts – such as narrative, affect and gender – are important across the humanities and social sciences, while others – such as witnessing, screen memory and working-through – have particular importance in trauma studies. Part III, “Critical perspectives and future directions”, outlines some of the challenges and opportunities facing 6

Introduction to literary trauma studies

literary trauma studies. These range from the issue of implicated subjects to climate change and medical humanities. Part IV, “Genres and media”, discusses how different artistic forms, from narrative fiction, poetry and drama to graphic narratives and post-apocalyptic fiction, have dealt with trauma. Part V, “Places and events”, examines particular traumatic sites and events, from the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide and Hurricane Katrina. The final chapter engages with transgenerational nuclear trauma, reflecting on traumatic hauntings from both the past and the future. Many topics that would have deserved a chapter of their own, such as sexual violence, the legacy of slavery and engagement with trauma in films, documentaries, journalism and social media, are discussed across the chapters even though they are not mentioned in their titles. Even so, many important traumatic histories, events and social phenomena are not covered in the volume, as no one book can be comprehensive and cover all the relevant issues. We are intensely aware that paying attention to one site of trauma risks distracting from another. The Holocaust, rightly and inevitably, looms large in this volume, but given more space and time we would also have liked to include extensive discussions of the Armenian, Cambodian, Bosnian and Darfur genocides, Soviet terror and other historical atrocities. It was important to include analyses of gender, intersectionality, globalization and climate trauma, but writing about the AIDS crisis, domestic violence or neo-imperialism also urgently demands respect and scrutiny. Fortunately, a number of monographs and edited volumes now offer accounts of the genealogy, current state and possible future(s) of trauma studies (see Leys 2000; Luckhurst 2008; Fassin and Rechtman 2009 [2007]; Buelens et al. 2014; Balaev 2014; Nadal and Calvo 2014; Kurtz 2018; Bond and Craps 2020). As part of an ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue, these works complement each other, so that trauma scholars, students of trauma and anyone interested in our traumatized era can navigate their way through the interdisciplinary and diverse field of contemporary trauma studies and its engagement with literature. This book is a companion, and we take that term very seriously. The chapters are written to accompany but not to coerce, to offer pathways and suggest possibilities but not to impose a single vision of the past, present and future of trauma studies. The overriding concern is to respect the experience and transmission of trauma, its massive impact on our cultures and cultural productions and the urgency of confronting it. Trauma matters, and the literature of trauma matters. We are diminished as moral subjects if we do not attend to that reality.

Bibliography Alexander, J. C. (2012) Trauma: A Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity. Balaev, M. (ed.) (2014) Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bennett, J. and Kennedy, R. (2003) “Introduction”, in J. Bennett and R. Kennedy (eds) World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–15. Bond, L. and Craps, S. (2020) Trauma, London: Routledge. Brown, L. S. (1995) “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 100–12. Buelens, G., Durrant, S. and Eaglestone, R. (eds) (2014) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Caruth, C. (ed.) (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja Charcot, J.-M. (1889) Leçons du mardi à la Salpêtrière, Paris: Bureaux du Progrès Médical, Lecrosnier & Babé. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Craps, S. and Crownshaw, R. (eds) (2018) “The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction”, A Special Issue of Studies in the Novel 50(1). Erichsen, J. E. (1866) On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System, London: Walton and Maberly. Eyerman, R. (2001) Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eyerman, R. (2019) Memory, Trauma and Identity, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Farrell, K. (1998) Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fassin, D. and Rechtman, R. (2009 [2007]) The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. R. Gomme, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York and London: Routledge. Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York: Basic Books. Kansteiner, W. (2004) “Genealogy of A Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor”, Rethinking History 8(2): 193–221. Kaplan, E. A. (2005) Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. ———. (2015) Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Kurtz, J. R. (ed.) (2018) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LaCapra, D. (1994) Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (2004) History in Transit. Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Leys, R. (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Mandel, N. (2006) Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Marquart, S. (2015) On the Defensive: Reading the Ethical in Nazi Camp Testimonies, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Meretoja, H. (2018) The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nadal, M. and Calvo, M. (2014) Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation, London: Routledge. Oppenheim, H. (1889) Die traumatischen Neurosen, nach den in der Nervenklinik der Charité in den letzten 5 Jahren gesammelten Beobachtungen, Berlin: August Hirschwald. Rigney, A. (2018) “Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism beyond the Traumatic”, Memory Studies 11(3): 368–80. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. (2019) The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rothe, A. (2011) Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ———. (2016) “Irresponsible Nonsense: An Epistemological and Ethical Critique of Postmodern Trauma Theory”, in Y. Ataria, D. Gurevitz, H. Pedaya and Y. Neria (eds) Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, Cham: Springer, 181–94. Sanyal, D. (2015) Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance, New York: Fordham University Press. Trezise, T. (2013) Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony, New York: Fordham University Press.

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PART I

Sources and inspirations

1 HISTORY OF TRAUMA THEORY Nicole A. Sütterlin

“Trauma paradigm”, “trauma culture”, “post-traumatic age” – these academic buzzwords capture the impact that the notion of the psychological wound has made within and beyond literary studies in recent years. Trauma has become a key interpretative category of our time. Ever since the American Psychiatric Association (APA) introduced the diagnosis “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) in the 1980 edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the concept of psychological trauma has virtually exploded, generating its own discipline and informing numerous others. Its exact nature has been debated in a growing body of handbooks, journals and studies. As newly built therapy centres treat trauma survivors all over the world, the concept has successfully entered the everyday usage of many societies. Indeed, trauma has been both hailed and condemned as an essential feature of present-day subjectivity. When did this new paradigm emerge and why? This survey traces the main developments in the history of trauma in four steps. (1) The first theories of this concept were developed by European and American physicians, neurologists and psychiatrists in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. (2) Recent discourseoriented histories of trauma have argued convincingly that these first diagnoses were constituted by and constitutive of specifically modern developments, such as the industrial revolution and the rise of modern nation states and welfare states. But if trauma is a product of modernity, this raises the question of whether genealogies of trauma should look beyond the established timeframe, locating the origin of this concept in discourses that emerged prior to 1850. (3) In the complex and turbulent history or, rather, politics of trauma, it is the establishment of the PTSD diagnosis in 1980 that marks a watershed moment, which heralded what has been termed a “shift in moral economy” and the advent of present-day trauma culture. (4) The pioneers of trauma theory in the humanities participated in this shift, but their contested ethical stance raises the question of the current and future role of literary criticism in reading the traumatic wound. By addressing, in passing, some key achievements and shortcomings of extant genealogies, this survey also offers a brief historiography of the histories of trauma.

From railway spine to war neurosis: the beginnings of trauma theory Isolated descriptions of what today we refer to as psychological trauma can arguably be traced all the way back to Homer’s Iliad (Shay 1994; Figley 2012: 454). Insofar as tragic 11

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events have caused humans immense and prolonged suffering since times immemorial, trauma may be deemed an “anthropological constant” (Fricke 2004: 9). But since Judith Herman’s, Bessel van der Kolk’s and Ruth Leys’ influential accounts of the history of trauma in psychiatry (Herman 1992; Van der Kolk, Weisaeth and Van der Hart 1996: 47–56; Leys 2000), the general consensus has been that the development of trauma as a scientific concept did not begin until the mid-nineteenth century. Marc Micale and Paul Lerner’s path-breaking interdisciplinary volume Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 and subsequent genealogies have foregrounded the context within which this concept emerged, particularly the context of the industrial revolution (Micale and Lerner 2001). The first systematic medical explorations of what would later be termed “trauma” began in the 1860s, when British medical practitioners investigated a mysterious condition called “railway spine”. This condition was ascribed to victims of railroad accidents who presented with physical disorders without having suffered any obvious organic injury. As a symbol of technological development and societal progress in the nineteenth century as well as of the dramatic changes brought about by modern life, the railway is intrinsically linked to the history of trauma. To a Victorian public rocked by frequent news of railroad collisions, the shocking arbitrariness and suddenness of railway accidents emblematized the dark side of the new golden age: an increased sense of vulnerability in the face of fast-moving technologies that exceeded human control and comprehension (Harrington 2001). From its very first theorizations, trauma has generated controversial views about its aetiology. While the physician John Erichsen (1866) prominently attributed the railway spine syndrome to organic causes, namely to a concussion of the spine, the surgeon Herbert Page attributed it to emotional and neurological factors such as fright and “nervous shock” (Page 1883). The Berlin neurologist Hermann Oppenheim coined the term “traumatic neurosis” for this paradoxical condition, in which victims of shock-like impact seemed physically unharmed, yet reported motor and sensory deficits such as paralysis and convulsions (Figley 2012: 455). In doing so, he introduced into psychiatry the Greek word for “wound”, “injury”, which until then had been exclusive to surgery, thus paving the way for the notion that a shattering life experience can cause neurological and indeed psychological wounds analogous to physical wounds. In an 1889 monograph that initially exerted considerable influence on German psychiatry and legislation, Oppenheim (1889) maintained that traumatic neuroses constituted a distinct diagnostic entity. The Parisian neuropsychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot, by contrast, subsumed them under the heading of the thenfashionable disorder hysteria. Although Charcot attributed hysteria to hereditary causes, thereby supporting the dominant neurophysiological paradigm of heredity, he associated cases of traumatic neurosis or “traumatic hysteria” with physical accidents. He eventually ascribed an increasingly prominent role to emotional factors or “nervous shock” – a term he adopted from Page – as causative agents (Charcot 1889: 30). He thus played an important role in the “process of psychologization” whereby what began as the concept of a somatic disorder developed into the concept of a neurological and, finally, a psychological condition (Micale, in Micale and Lerner 2001: 123). But it is Charcot’s student Pierre Janet who today is credited with discovering a key feature of psychological trauma: dissociation (Van der Kolk, Weisaeth and Van der Hart 1996: 53). In his 1889 dissertation, L’automatisme psychologique (1889), Janet developed an elaborate model of the psyche, a few years ahead of the model developed by his fellow student at the Salpêtrière in 1888, Sigmund Freud. Based on clinical observations of somnambulism, amnesia, “dédoublement de la personnalité” (“split” or “dual personality”) and other 12

History of trauma theory

seemingly hysteria-related phenomena, he identified the mechanism of dissociation as the process by which the mind “splits off” an event that is so violent or shocking that it cannot be integrated (“synthesized”) into consciousness. Though psychiatrists such as Moreau de Tours (1865) had already theorized notions of dissociation, Janet produced its first elaborate model. The dissociated information, he maintained, takes on a “parasitic” life of its own and recurs as autonomous “fixed ideas”, uncontrolled by the cognitive mind. His discovery was groundbreaking: in present-day psychotraumatology, dissociation is widely regarded as “the core pathogenic process that gives rise to posttraumatic stress” (Van der Kolk, Weisaeth and Van der Hart 1996: 53). However, the significance of Janet’s contribution was long forgotten. One of several reasons for this “amnesia” (Herman 1992: 7) was the advent of psychoanalysis. In their early Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud and Josef Breuer initially adopted Janet’s concept of dissociation. In “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), Freud even posited a bold theory that suggested the widespread existence of sexual abuse. Against Charcot’s hereditary framework, he elevated trauma to a primary aetiology of hysteria, arguing that traumatic neuroses originate in sexual assault in childhood (Freud 1953–74, vol. 3: 191ff.). But the following year, the psychoanalyst dismissed his “seduction theory”, positing instead that neuroses originate in a dynamic of drives present at infancy. Today, Freud is often discredited for abandoning the notion of real trauma as a pathological determinant and subsuming it into a model of intrapsychic conflicts. Yet psychotraumatologists such as Gottfried Fischer and Peter Riedesser, who advocate for a “relational model of trauma” that allows for objective as well as subjective causal factors, nonetheless rely heavily on the influential model of trauma that Freud developed in later years (Fischer and Riedesser 2009). In the years following the First World War, Freud returned to the subject of trauma once more, as the Great War left in its wake an epidemic of soldiers who presented with nonorganic nervous disorders. Neurophysicians increasingly recognized that so-called “shellshocked” soldiers suffered not from the concussive effects of exploding shells, but from extreme fear. In his aetiology of “war neuroses” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud described this traumatic impact as a breach of the psyche’s “protective shield” (Freud 1953–74, vol. 18: 29). Because of the event’s overwhelming force, Freud maintains, patients cannot integrate the experience into their psychic “economy”. They are condemned to reliving the event in “dreams which, with a view to the psychical binding of traumatic impressions, obey the compulsion to repeat” (33). Freud’s model of a breach in the protective barrier provided the starting point for the American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner’s systematic account of war neurosis (Kardiner 1941), which in turn became a source for the symptomatology of PTSD in current psychiatric nosology. Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion has been absorbed into a cluster of PTSD-symptoms termed “intrusions”. The notion of a “talking cure” that “binds” (Freud) or “narrativizes” (Janet) the overwhelmingly terrifying experience laid the groundwork for present-day trauma therapy, which emphasizes the importance of integrating the dissociated memory into “a personal narrative” (Van der Kolk, Van der Hart and Marmar 1996: 309). And it formed the basis for the interrelation of trauma and narrative as explored in literary trauma studies (discussed further below).

Trauma: a product of modernity Even this brief and selective survey of the first key steps in the development of trauma shows that this concept’s history is highly complex and discontinuous. Herman aptly characterized the history of trauma as fraught with “episodic amnesia:” “it has been periodically 13

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forgotten and must be periodically reclaimed” (Herman 1992: 7). She also pointed out that in order to understand these fluctuations between progress and regress, critics must take into account the political contexts within which theorizations of trauma have occurred (Herman 1992, 2014). Indeed, histories of trauma succeeding Herman’s have traced not only the political context but the many other discourses that have influenced the trauma concept. Interdisciplinary volumes from Micale and Lerner’s to J. Roger Kurtz’s Trauma and Literature (2018) have highlighted how the advent of the trauma diagnosis in the later 1800s was conditioned by major social, economic and political shifts, of which advanced industrialization, urbanization, technologization and modern warfare formed but one part. Other changes include the establishment of capitalist systems and the emergence of European nation states and welfare states, which in turn generated unprecedented innovations, such as health insurance and legal protections for a restive working class. We might call these contextual approaches to the history of trauma “discourseanalytical”. This term seems particularly appropriate since the founder of discourse analysis, the historian Michel Foucault, proffered one of the earliest of such approaches. To date, genealogies of trauma have largely ignored the fact that Foucault concluded his 1973/74 lectures on Psychiatric Power with a brief but significant reference to what he deliberately termed the “development” of trauma. Charcot, Foucault maintained, “developed the concept of trauma” because he needed an “assignable cause”, an “event” for hysteria: a manifest aetiology that would help build a rigorous pathological framework, which in turn would strengthen his anticlerical politics and consolidate psychiatry’s hold over a growing number of patients (Foucault 2006: 317). Pointing to other emerging power configurations, Foucault connected the advent of the railway spine diagnosis with the rising labour movement’s claims to welfare protections for the working class. For Foucault, trauma is essentially the product of a power struggle, that is, an “event” in a particular constellation of discourses. Foucault’s line of inquiry has held sway in the early twenty-first century. For example, scholars have highlighted the medico-legal and political context that spurred the railway spine diagnosis. The diagnosis was essential in enabling victims to bring claims against the railway companies. While doctors in the 1860s and 1870s testified to the seriousness of the illness, the lack of physical injury and the delayed onset of symptoms gave the railway companies grounds to dispute the veracity of such claims. Companies argued that cases were fake (imaginary) or even faked (consciously simulated). During this period, European socialist parties began campaigning for legal protections of workers. In the 1880s and 1890s, Germany and France passed laws guaranteeing health insurance for employees as well as statutory compensation rights in the event of work-related injuries. Thus workers suffering from traumatic neuroses due to factory, railway or other work-related accidents, as described in Charcot’s and Oppenheim’s casebooks, were eligible for compensation. But an epidemic of what sceptical voices termed “pension hysteria” soon swept the burgeoning welfare states, generating an atmosphere of suspicion toward victims that led to the widespread discrediting of trauma diagnoses like Oppenheim’s. Until PTSD was established as a medical category in 1980, theories of trauma would remain caught in political power struggles that pitted suffering against simulation, reality against imagination and truth against falsehood (see further below). The manifold developments that conditioned the emergence of the trauma diagnosis in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the welfare state, are modern phenomena. Recent genealogies, therefore, have conceived of trauma as the product of a specific historical constellation of discourses: modernity. Trauma is, Micale and Lerner argue, “simultaneously responsive to and constitutive of ‘modernity’” 14

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(Micale and Lerner 2001: 10). Roger Luckhurst concurs: “trauma can only emerge within modernity” (Luckhurst 2008: 19). And Karolyn Steffens recently reinforced this notion by regarding “modernity as the cultural crucible of trauma” (Steffens 2018). Discourseanalytical accounts such as these have provided us with a much deeper understanding of the complexity of the history of trauma: of trauma as an interface of specifically modern discourses and of the conditions that led to the “trauma paradigm” that has taken hold in Western societies over the past thirty years (see below). However, because trauma genealogies such as those mentioned above tend to limit their notion of modernity to the time period around 1900, as exemplified by the timeframe captioning Micale and Lerner’s volume (“1870–1930”), they have left the time period preceding the mid-nineteenth century largely uninvestigated. Such studies ignore the fact that many modern developments originated centuries earlier, and many emerged or took hold in the century of Enlightenment. The late 1700s, in particular, produced a technological, (medico-) scientific, legal, political and cultural revolution. The age of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars witnessed, for example, the advent of new scientific disciplines such as psychiatry and developmental psychology. It witnessed the newly established bourgeois nuclear family give birth to a modern subject shaped by the explosive growth of new technologies and a new mass medium: the book. Unprecedented major shifts such as these, I argue, generated the conditions for the emergence of trauma as a cultural syndrome in the late 1700s and early 1800s (Sütterlin 2019; see ib. for a detailed discussion of the issues discussed in this chapter). In late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Germany, for example, discourses such as Johann Heinrich Campe’s pedagogy, Karl-Philipp Moritz’s empirical psychology, Johann Christian Reil’s neurophysiology and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s idealist philosophy generated the concept of a modern subject that is inherently and necessarily vulnerable. In the literary texts of authors such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Clemens Brentano and E.T.A. Hoffmann, this notion of vulnerability as the foundation of the modern self gives rise to depictions of what later would be called trauma. Not only do they provide remarkably accurate descriptions of symptoms which today are associated with PTSD, but they connect these features with specific traumatic events such as physical or sexual assault in childhood. In developing this aetiology, they appear were one step ahead of the burgeoning psychiatry of their time. Hoffmann, for instance, modelled the split psyches portrayed in his famous doppelgänger narratives on cases of “duplicity of personality” as presented in Reil’s Rhapsodies on the Application of the Psychological Method for Curing Mental Disturbances, a foundational work in the discipline of psychiatry (Reil 1803: 82; my translation). While Reil’s pioneering diagnoses of phenomena of double consciousness anticipate Janet’s theory of dissociation, and may well be the first to do so, they lack the aetiology that Hoffmann’s poetics of trauma articulates: the traumatic event (Sütterlin 2017, 2019). If trauma is responsive to and constitutive of modernity, then discourses prior to 1850, including modern psychiatry and modern literature, call for further inquiry by historians of trauma.

From medical category to cultural paradigm: the PTSD diagnosis and its aftermath The APA’s third edition of its authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 1980, contained a revolutionary new diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder (APA 1980: 236–9). Unlike other mental disorders, PTSD is defined as being caused by the impact of an external agent, an “event” or “stressor”: “The essential feature is the 15

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development of characteristic symptoms following a psychologically traumatic event that is generally outside the range of usual human experience” (236). The DSM-III specifies that people who have suffered an extraordinarily terrifying and harmful experience such as rape, torture, combat or a natural disaster may develop immediate or delayed symptoms, ranging from recurring involuntary recollections of the traumatic event (“intrusions”), to persistent avoidance of stimuli that are reminiscent of the event, to hyperreactivity. The current edition of the DSM includes negative alterations of cognitions and mood as a fourth symptom cluster. Interestingly, the DSM-V (2013) eliminates the only symptom cluster, introduced in the DSM-IV (1994), that addressed the subjective category of the victim’s emotional response to the event: reactions such as fear, helplessness and horror. Some psychotraumatological handbooks, such as Charles Figley’s (1985) and Fischer and Riedesser’s (2009), have argued for a relational model that takes the subjective factor into account, defining trauma as “an emotional state of discomfort and stress resulting from memories of an extraordinary, catastrophic experience which shattered the survivor’s sense of invulnerability to harm” (Figley 1985: xviii; emphasis added). By contrast, the APA’s nosological language aims at a purely objective causal definition: the traumatic event. Because PTSD is caused by an external agent, this psychopathology possesses an unusual moral and ethical dimension. As José Brunner highlights in his Politics of Trauma, in many cases (except when natural disasters are involved) this diagnosis points to a “specific social agent – an individual, a social group or an institution – who can be held morally, politically and legally responsible for the suffering” (Brunner 2014: 23; my translation). Indeed, the notion of trauma has been enmeshed in debates about perpetration and victimhood, responsibility and credibility from its earliest conceptions. It is, as the French sociologist Didier Fassin and psychiatrist Richard Rechtman argue in their seminal study The Empire of Trauma (Fassin and Rechtman 2009), intrinsically bound to the dominant political and moral economy in a society. It is precisely this inherent moral and political dimension of trauma that has played a crucial role in its tumultuous history. And it played a decisive role in the advent and aftermath of the PTSD diagnosis. All major developments in the history of trauma were accompanied by debates about the credibility of the victims and the reality of their illness. Railway accident survivors in Victorian England, Charcot’s “traumatic neurosis” patients at the Salpêtrière, Freud’s hysterics suffering from apparent “fantasies” of sexual trauma, First World War soldiers incapacitated by shell shock, and Second World War soldiers disheartened by “combat fatigue” all faced scepticism as to the reality of their suffering. In the postwar period, the dispute surrounding traumatic neuroses continued when victims of Nazi persecution presented with symptoms of so-called “survivor syndrome”. The widespread – though not uncontested – consensus in the international psychiatric community was that the primary cause for survivor syndrome lay in inherited or developmental disorders or dispositions, rather than in the terrifying experiences of persecution, concentration camps and the deaths of loved ones. In the United States, meanwhile, soldiers returning from Vietnam presented with similar symptoms, termed “post-Vietnam syndrome”. In the absence of an official diagnosis that explained their symptoms, many veterans were bereft of adequate professional care. The introduction of PTSD in the DSM-III was, in part, the effect of intense advocacy work by mental health workers on behalf of veterans. It was also the result of lobbying by feminist critics on behalf of sexual assault victims suffering from “rape trauma syndrome”. The PTSD diagnosis offered an unprecedented classification for all these conditions. Although it was and still is a contested medical category due to the diversity of causes it incorporates – the World Health Organization’s 2017 edition of the International Classification of Diseases 16

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(ICD-11) addresses this multiplicity by including Complex PTSD or C-PTSD as a separate diagnosis – it has had a tremendous cultural impact. The PTSD diagnosis was both indicative and constitutive of a larger moral shift. Fassin and Rechtman argue that it was not so much new medical insights that lead to the establishment and acceptance of PTSD – indeed, many aspects of the diagnosis had already been developed by Janet, Freud and others – than a “major social shift” by which “a system of knowledge and values was shaken” and “one truth was overturned and another produced” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009: 7). The new nosology formed part of a reconfiguration of the public “moral economy” (8): from suspicion to empathy, from rejection to recognition, from hostility to, as Brunner puts it, “hospitality” (Brunner 2014: 51f.). By providing, for the first time, a nosological language that captured the suffering of victims of such varied experiences as physical or sexual assault, persecution and combat, it legitimated the victims’ claims. Since the advent of PTSD, sufferers have been less and less stigmatized as simulators or fantasists; rather, they have been increasingly regarded as victims. Fassin and Rechtman conclude their inquiry into the current-day “condition of victimhood” with the stunning statement: “Rather than a clinical reality, trauma today is a moral judgment” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009: 284). As a moral judgment, the trauma concept has come to serve as an empirical measure of societies’ responsibility toward their most vulnerable subjects. This recent moral turn in the history of trauma was echoed by what Aleida Assmann has called an “ethical turn in memory practice” (Assmann 2016). Assmann argues that in the 1990s, several nations, particularly post-wall Germany and post-apartheid South Africa, reformed their configurations of the past on an unprecedented scale, institutionalizing the remembrance of and responsibility for victims of the Holocaust and Apartheid, respectively. In a “post-traumatic age” still reeling from the lasting effects of unprecedented man-made disasters such as colonialism, segregation and the bureaucratically conducted genocide of the Holocaust, trauma has become an important category in the field of memory studies with which to explain the workings of both individual and collective forms of remembrance (see Kennedy, Chapter 5, this volume). Conversely, the fact that we come after these catastrophes has advanced seminal theories of trauma, such as the Holocaust historian Dominick LaCapra’s. In recent years, however, new approaches have opened up what has been a largely Eurocentric field, bringing the trauma concept increasingly to bear on postcolonial and global contexts (see below). Besides the booming field of memory studies, trauma has informed numerous fields and disciplines, including law, sociology, philosophy and literary studies. In the past three decades it has, furthermore, increasingly permeated popular consciousness. Contemporary trauma culture puts the idea of psychological woundedness front and centre, from appropriating the trauma of others in the form of mass media-projected “trauma kitsch” (Rothe 2016a) all the way to experiencing “climate trauma” as a “pretraumatic” response to the slow-moving effects of climate change (Kaplan 2016). A major problem of trauma culture, as numerous critics have pointed out, is that it blurs the distinctions between victims and non-victims, essentially universalizing the status of victimhood. “Trauma culture”, Anne Rothe summarizes, “is characterized by the conflation of suffering and victimhood as everyone who suffers is considered a victim” (Rothe 2016a: 52). Its quintessential notion is “‘I suffer, therefore I am,’” or rather “‘I suffer, therefore I am a victim’” (57). Like vocal critics of so-called “cultural trauma” such as LaCapra, Wulf Kansteiner and Harald Weilnböck before her, Rothe sharply criticizes poststructuralist trauma theory for having fostered this conflation (Kansteiner 2004; LaCapra 2004; Kansteiner and Weilnböck 2008; Rothe 2016b). Yet interestingly, none of these critics addresses the fact that the medical sciences 17

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played a significant role in expanding the trauma concept to an ever-larger portion of the population. In each edition of the DSM, the APA has broadened the definition of those who meet the causal criteria for PTSD. While the diagnosis initially only applied to those directly involved, it now also includes witnesses and bystanders to traumatic events, rescue workers and security forces, as well as family members affected by the death or injury of a lovedone. It even allows for media-transmitted trauma, provided that the exposure is workrelated (APA 2013: 271). Given that the private, professional and public spheres increasingly intersect in a digitalized environment dominated by social media, it will be interesting to see what stance the DSM-VI will take toward medial causes. So far, by consistently expanding the categories of those who might be affected by PTSD, the APA has helped consolidate a now-widespread paradigm which holds that trauma is constitutive of individuals and societies. The PTSD diagnosis appears to have functioned like a performative speech act, an “illness performative” that “contributed to the emergence of a particular kind of traumatized subjectivity in late modernity” (Diedrich 2018: 90). To many, trauma has become a formative condition, indeed the “truth” of the self. As precisely such a truth it was heralded by the pioneers of literary trauma studies.

Reading the wound: the advent of trauma theory in literary and cultural studies “A theory emerges focusing on the relationship of words and trauma and helping us to ‘read the wound’ with the aid of literature”, Geoffrey Hartman writes in a programmatic essay for trauma theory in the humanities (Hartman 1995: 537). The line of thought to which Hartman refers here took shape emphatically in the early 1990s with the works of Cathy Caruth (1991, 1995, 1996), Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992), all of whom stood in close association with the Yale School of deconstruction. What made trauma such an essential concept for these critics is that they perceived a close interrelation between “wounds” and “words”, trauma and literature, and even trauma and language. Moreover, Hartman and his colleagues insisted that this new awareness was “ethical as well as clinical” (Hartman 1995: 541; emphasis added). But critics have argued that this ethical impulse merely served as a “resuscitation of the allegedly textualist, ahistorical and apolitical theoretical discourse of deconstruction” after the widely proclaimed end of theory (Toremans 2018: 51). The poststructuralist fascination with trauma is indeed indicative of a wider “ethical turn” as well as a “realist turn” in poststructuralism after the proclaimed “end” of theory. As such, it has generated heated controversies about the genuine ethical import of trauma theory and raised fundamental questions about the scope of trauma studies. In a much-debated book that continues to be hailed as a foundational work of trauma theory in literary and cultural studies, Caruth defined trauma as an experience which, while remaining “unclaimed” by cognitive knowledge and literal language, attempts “to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (Caruth 1995: 4). Caruth’s understanding of trauma builds, in part, on a central paradox of traumatic memory outlined by the psychiatrist Van der Kolk. Many patients, Van der Kolk emphasizes with reference to Janet, struggle to narrate a traumatic experience coherently or remember it consciously, while simultaneously having to re-enact the event with uncanny precision in somatosensory intrusions (Van der Kolk, Van der Hart and Marmar 1996). For Caruth, trauma therefore signifies both the impossibility of representation and the possibility of accessing a non-symbolic, unmediated authenticity, “reality or truth”, the truth of the 18

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subject. It is precisely because of this representational paradox inherent to traumatic processes, Hartman argues, that literature offers a privileged medium for “testimony” to psychological wounds (Hartman 1995: 541). It expresses these wounds in figurative language and narrative structures that defy conventional modes of representation. In an age that urgently needs to address the “radical historical crisis of witnessing” caused by the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, Felman and Laub insist, literature carries an important ethical obligation to provide testimony (Felman and Laub 1992: xvii, emphasis in original). Although a strong ethical impetus drove deconstructive trauma theory, critics have radically questioned this basis in ethics (Radstone 2007). Kansteiner prominently voiced one of the most serious concerns: poststructuralists’ “aestheticized, morally and politically imprecise concept of cultural trauma” conflates the positions of victims, secondary witnesses and even perpetrators of traumatic events (Kansteiner 2004: 194). To counteract this problematic generalization of the status of victimhood, Dominick LaCapra (2001), one of the most important voices in literary and cultural trauma studies to date, established an influential yet increasingly contested distinction between “historical trauma”, real trauma in the clinical sense, and “structural trauma”, general experiences of absence as identified by psychoanalysis and considered “traumatic” by psychoanalytically oriented theorists such as Caruth, Slavoj Žižek or Judith Butler. More recently, Rothe condemned the appropriation of trauma as “a metaphor for a stipulated postmodern crisis of signification” as “unscientific” and “ethically irresponsible” (Rothe 2016b: 182). Against the aestheticism of poststructuralist trauma theory, LaCapra and others propose a “traumatic realism” (Rothberg 2000) that is more attentive to historic specificity. The critiques of LaCapra to Rothe are justified in many respects. For one, trauma theory ought to provide an in-depth foundation for its ethical aspirations (see Davis, Chapter 3, this volume). However, critics tend to be “unscientific” and “imprecise” themselves inasmuch as they ignore any medico-scientific contributions to the objectionable universalization of trauma. For instance, their critiques of so-called “vicarious trauma” make no reference to the expansion of the stressor criterion in the DSM, nor do they acknowledge the growing body of medical research that supports the legitimacy of secondary forms of trauma such as transgenerational transmission (Figley 2012: 600ff., 727ff., 671ff.). Psychotraumatology’s complicity in broadening the definition of trauma suggests that some ethical dilemmas are inherent to the trauma concept. Insofar as trauma is a product of modernity, it can even be argued that the ethical concerns it raises are constitutive of modern discourses (Sütterlin 2019). As such, a wider range of disciplines must seek to address the ethics of trauma. Both the aestheticist and the realist strands in trauma studies, however, attribute a crucial role to literature. Literature offers pathways for giving “testimony” (Hartman 1995) and creating “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra 2001). It is the “performative engagement with trauma”, LaCapra maintains, that allows the “posttraumatic writing” of writers as diverse as Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan and Toni Morrison to convey to readers a “‘feel’” for the terrifying experiences it contains (LaCapra 2004: 137; 2001: 13; emphasis added). Rather than representing it directly, literature can perform trauma by means of a range of complex narrative techniques that resemble traumatic processes such as flashbacks, re-enactments and dissociative states. I have called this a poetics of trauma (Sütterlin 2017, 2019). Joshua Pederson (2018: 101ff) has identified three prominent literary “tropes” of trauma, all of which were embraced by poststructuralist trauma pioneers as their analyses focused primarily on experimental, fragmentary and non-linear texts and films:

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1. Absence: the narrative eludes to a traumatic event by means of textual lacunae, gaps or silences (cf. e.g. Caruth’s interpretation of Hiroshima mon amour; Caruth 1996). 2. Indirection: the text focuses on an unrelated event that indirectly refers to a traumatic event (cf. e.g. Felman’s reading of Camus’s The Plague in Felman and Laub 1992). 3. Repetition: the text keeps circling back to the traumatic event (cf. e.g. Hartman’s reading of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; Hartman 1995. For a discussion of these examples, see Pederson 2018: 101ff). To these tropes I would add the technique of splitting: the splitting of the narrative voice such as, for instance, the doubling of the narrator’s perspective with his doppelgänger’s in Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs (Sütterlin 2017, 2019: 322ff ). The narrative perspective can further be split on a transgenerational level, as in novels with multi-generational narrative viewpoints such as Morrison’s Beloved or Ulrike Draesner’s Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt. As these novels perform the traumatic processes of intrusion and dissociation by circling an unrepresentable event buried in the older generation’s intrapsychic crypt (Schwab 2010), their intricate technique can be termed a poetics of transgenerational trauma (Sütterlin 2016). While early trauma theorists modelled their readings of tropes of repetition predominantly on Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion (on the psychoanalytic roots of trauma theory see Caruth, Chapter 7, this volume), the focus on strategies of splitting signals a move away from the psychoanalytical paradigm and toward a psychotraumatological framework inspired by Janet’s models of dissociation and “dédoublement”. The increasing attention to the concept of transgenerational transmission or “postmemory” (Hirsch 2012), in turn, departs from definitions of trauma as a condition of the self and advances toward social theories of trauma (Alexander 2012). As a social theory, the trauma concept has recently experienced a decisive turn toward transcultural approaches. Stef Craps called out the founding texts of trauma theory for making a “promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement”, which their Western-based trauma concept and modernism-based aesthetics failed to keep (Craps 2013: 2). Renouncing the hidden imperialism in Euro-American notions of mental illness, Craps compellingly called for a responsible, non-appropriative globalization of trauma studies that acknowledges minority and non-Western cultures on and in their own terms. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone’s interdisciplinary volume The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism (2014) took further steps toward a geographical and theoretical expansion of the scope of trauma studies. In recent years, critics have increasingly paid attention to postcolonial trauma narratives such as the Caribbean writer Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (Craps 2013) or the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Something Torn and New (Yusin 2018), to name just two of many newly recognized works from all over the world. Many chapters in this volume actively contribute to this transcultural approach (see Chapters 6, 16–19, 23 and 36, this volume). As the suffering of postcolonial nations, ethnic minorities and diasporic groups comes into focus, so too does the “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) inflicted on ethnic and social groups disproportionately affected by climate change and environmental pollution (see Chapters 25 and 40, this volume). By constantly evolving and expanding, trauma studies appear well positioned to address the pressing issues we face in a fast-changing twenty-first-century world. Histories of the trauma concept may similarly need to adopt a more global approach. Despite the intense and rapidly moving attention to trauma in the age of globalization, genealogical inquiries have predominantly seen trauma as a phenomenon of Western derivation. Yet, as the scope of trauma studies is expanding, the question arises whether other forms of what is now termed “trauma” were long developed in non-Western contexts. While this brief survey has broadened extant genealogies by extending their temporal reach from the mid-1800s to the late 1700s, its 20

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geographical focus remains limited to contexts connected with Euro-American psychiatry, psychology and other discourses of so-called modernity. Coming histories of trauma will need to explore the development of diverse concepts of psychological wounds in a wider range of cultural contexts.

Bibliography Alexander, J. C. (2012) Trauma: A Social Theory, Cambridge, Malden: Polity. American Psychiatric Association (APA). (1980) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd revised edition, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. ———. (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th revised edition, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. ———. (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th revised edition, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Assmann, A. (2016 [2006]) Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity, trans. S. Clift, New York: Fordham University Press. Brunner, J. (2014) Die Politik des Traumas: Gewalterfahrungen und psychisches Leid in den USA, in Deutschland und im Israel/Palästina-Konflikt, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Buelens, G., Durrant, S. and Eaglestone, R. (eds) (2014) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, New York: Routledge. Caruth, C. (1991) “lntroduction”, American Imago 48(1): 1–12. ———. (ed.) (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Charcot, J.-M. (1889) Leçons du mardi à la Salpêtrière, Paris: Bureaux du Progrès Médical, Lecrosnier & Babé. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Diedrich, L. (2018) “PTSD: A New Trauma Paradigm”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 83–94. Erichsen, J. E. (1866) On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System, London: Walton & Waberly. Fassin, D. and Rechtman, R. (2009 [2007]) The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, London: Routledge. Figley, C. R. (ed.) (1985) Trauma and Its Wake: The Study and Treatment of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, New York: Brunner & Mazel. ———. (ed.) (2012) Encyclopedia of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary Guide, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Fischer, G. and Riedesser, P. (2009) Lehrbuch der Psychotraumatologie, 4th revised edition, Munich: Ernst Reinhardt. Foucault, M. (2006) Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–74, trans. G. Purchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Freud, S. (1953–74) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press. Fricke, H. (2004) Das hört nicht auf. Trauma, Literatur und Empathie, Göttingen: Wallstein. Harrington, R. (2001) “The Railway Accident: Trains, Trauma, and Technological Crises in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, in M. S. Micale and P. Lerner (eds) Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 31–56. Hartman, G. H. (1995) “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies”, New Literary History 26(3): 537–63. Herman, J. L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York: Basic Books. ———. (2014) “The Politics of Trauma: A Conversation with Judith Herman (May 16, 2013, Cambridge, Massachusetts)”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 131–52. Hirsch, M. (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Nicole A. Sütterlin Janet, P. (1889) L’automatisme psychologique: essai de psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de l’activité humaine, Paris: Félix Alcan. Kansteiner, W. (2004) “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor”, Rethinking History 8(2): 193–221. Kansteiner, W. and Weilnböck, H. (2008) “Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma”, in A. Erdl and A. Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 229–40. Kaplan, E. A. (2016) Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction, New Brunswick, London: Rutgers University Press. Kardiner, A. (1941) The Traumatic Neuroses of War, Menasha: George Banta. Kurtz, J. R. (ed.) (2018) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LaCapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (2004) History in Transit. Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Leys, R. (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, London, New York: Routledge. Micale, M. S. and Lerner, P. (eds) (2001) Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moreau de Tours, J. J. (1865) De la folie hystérique et de quelques phénomènes nerveux propres à l’hystérie (convulsive), à l hystérie-épilepsie et à l épilepsie, Paris: Victor Masson et Fils. Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Oppenheim, H. (1889) Die traumatischen Neurosen nach den in der Nervenklinik der Charité in den 5 Jahren 1883–1888 gesammelten Beobachtungen, Berlin: Hirschwald. Page, H. W. (1883) Injuries of the Spine and Spinal Cord without Apparent Mechanical Lesion, and Nervous Shock, in Their Surgical and Medico-Legal Aspects, London: J. & A. Churchill. Pederson, J. (2018) “Trauma and Narrative”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 97–109. Radstone, S. (2007) “Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics”, Paragraph 30(1): 9–29. Reil, J. C. (1803) Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen, Halle: Curt. Rothberg, M. (2000) Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rothe, A. (2016a) “Popular Trauma Culture: The Pain of Others between Holocaust Tropes and Kitsch-Sentimental Melodrama”, in Y. Ataria, D. Gurevitz, H. Pedaya and Y. Neria (eds) Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, Cham: Springer, 51–66. ———. (2016b) “Irresponsible Nonsense: An Epistemological and Ethical Critique of Postmodern Trauma Theory”, in Y. Ataria, D. Gurevitz, H. Pedaya and Y. Neria (eds) Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, Cham: Springer, 181–94. Schwab, G. (2010) Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, New York: Columbia University Press. Shay, J. (1994) Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, New York: Atheneum. Steffens, K. (2018) “Modernity as the Cultural Crucible of Trauma”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 36–50. Sütterlin, N. A. (2016) “Trauma-Poetik: Ulrike Draesners ‘Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt’ und die Körperliteratur der 1990er Jahre”, Gegenwartsliteratur 15: 167–90. ———. (2017) “E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Development of Trauma”, Essays in Romanticism 24(1): 83–104. ———. (2019) Poetik der Wunde: Zur Entdeckung des Traumas in der Literatur der Romantik, Göttingen: Wallstein. Toremans, T. (2018) “Deconstruction: Trauma Inscribed in Language”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 51–65. Van der Kolk, B. A., van der Hart, O. and Marmar, C. R. (1996) “Dissociation and Information Processing in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, in B. van der Kolk, A. C. McFarlane and L. Weisaeth (eds) Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, New York: Guilford Press, 303–27. Van der Kolk, B. A., Weisaeth, L. and van der Hart, O. (1996) “History of Trauma in Psychiatry”, in B. A. van der Kolk, A. C. McFarlane and L. Weisaeth (eds) Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, New York: Guilford Press, 47–76. Yusin, J. (2018) “Postcolonial Trauma”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 239–54.

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2 PHILOSOPHIES OF TRAUMA Hanna Meretoja

“Philosophy of trauma” is not a widely used concept, and the topic is rarely discussed, despite the strong philosophical undercurrent of literary trauma theory and its genealogical link to poststructuralism. This is probably due to the fact that trauma is more commonly seen as a psychological or cultural rather than a philosophical concept. It could be argued, however, that precisely for this reason there is a need to explore the philosophical assumptions underlying trauma theory. These assumptions often remain unarticulated – they can be tacit and implicit – but they nevertheless structure different traditions of theorizing trauma. In this chapter, I approach philosophies of trauma precisely from the perspective of the philosophical assumptions undergirding different ways of engaging with trauma. These assumptions can take various forms depending, first, on how explicitly articulated they are and, second, on whether they emerge in the context of theoretical discourse or fiction. Drawing on these distinctions, I will sketch out four types of philosophies of trauma. In addition to this semantic categorization, I propose a substantial one, suggesting that the three main philosophical paradigms of trauma that underlie contemporary trauma theory can be called empiricism, poststructuralism and hermeneutics. I will then analyse in more detail the philosophical underpinnings of dominant literary trauma theory particularly concerning the concepts of experience and narrative understanding. The final part of the chapter elucidates these points through a discussion of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life (2015).

Philosophies of trauma: four semantic types and three philosophical paradigms The notion of a philosophy of trauma can be used with reference to, first, explicit philosophies on which trauma theories are based and, second, implicit philosophies underlying theoretical approaches to trauma. Third, a philosophy of trauma can refer to the ways in which writers or other artists explicitly philosophize about traumatic experience. Fourth, a philosophy of trauma may refer to implicit philosophies of trauma within works of art that deal with traumatic experience. These four types of philosophies of trauma, however, are not absolute, mutually exclusive or comprehensive. They overlap; not all cases fall neatly into any one of these categories; and some cases fall between them. The continuum from implicit to explicit is more of a spectrum than a dichotomy. This categorization is semantic 23

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as it pertains to different meanings of the concept without differentiating between the philosophical content or orientation of various approaches. Philosophies of trauma can also be grouped substantially, in terms of their underlying philosophical assumptions and commitments: I suggest that the main philosophical paradigms of trauma are empiricism, poststructuralism and hermeneutics. While poststructuralist philosophy is often explicitly embraced in literary trauma theory (although it can also remain implicit), empiricism and hermeneutics can mainly be seen in the tacit assumptions underlying various trauma theories. These three philosophical paradigms can also be used as analytical tools in the analysis of philosophies that emerge from fiction. In this section, I will give examples of the four types of philosophies of trauma and briefly indicate how the three paradigms can be used to analyse the philosophical assumptions involved in these examples. First, when it comes to explicit philosophies in trauma theory, the strand of trauma theory that has been most influential in literary studies, the one developed by Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman, has made clear, from its inception, that it is strongly based on poststructuralist philosophy. Caruth and Felman were students of Paul de Man at Yale University, and not only their vocabulary and idiom manifest a clear affinity with deconstruction, but both Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) and Felman’s chapters in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (Felman and Laub 1992) contain extensive discussion of de Man’s poststructuralist philosophy of language. It is precisely in their conception of language and representation that poststructuralism is most explicit. Drawing on de Man, Caruth emphasizes the performative dimension of language, in how it “does more than it knows” and how a horrifying event can function as “a deathlike break” that disrupts the language of representation and cannot be known but only felt (Caruth 1996: 87, 90). Joining the Freudian idea of belatedness (Nachträglichkeit) with poststructuralism, Caruth’s and Felman’s foundational work has made it a basic tenet of literary trauma theory that due to its structure of “inherent latency”, “the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs” but returns to haunt the subject of experience through “repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event” (Caruth 1995: 4, 8). For poststructuralist philosophy of trauma, trauma is fundamentally unrepresentable, unsayable and unspeakable – it eludes language, knowledge and narrative as systems of representation – a position that is linked to particular philosophical assumptions concerning experience and narrative understanding, which I will analyse in the next sections of this chapter. Among the first type of philosophy of trauma we can also count numerous other explicit engagements with poststructuralism by philosophically minded trauma scholars, such as Dominick LaCapra (2004, 2018), as well as work that explicitly brings together poststructuralist and hermeneutic strands of thought, such as Colin Davis’s “traumatic hermeneutics (2018: 29–45), or that draws on philosophical hermeneutics to develop a “hermeneutics of trauma” (Orange 2011) or a “hermeneutics of suffering” (Hovey and Amir 2013). Second, there are implicit philosophical assumptions and commitments underlying trauma studies. Indeed, much of the poststructuralist influence in literary trauma theory remains implicit. For example, a crucial ethical imperative for Caruth and Felman is the recognition of the fundamental otherness of the Other, which is the basic starting-point of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, highly influential among the poststructuralists, but Caruth and Felman refer to him only sporadically (see Davis, Chapter 3, this volume). I will here, however, focus on the empiricist and hermeneutic assumptions underlying trauma theory as they remain less acknowledged. 24

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Empiricism is a philosophical tradition according to which knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience, commonly understood in terms of what is directly given to the senses without mediation. Empiricism is rarely embraced explicitly in trauma theories, but it can be seen to shape the tacit assumptions underlying many approaches to trauma. It is particularly dominant in psychological, psychiatric and neuroscientific approaches that commonly identify with “cognitivism”. Bryan T. Reuther approaches philosophy of trauma in terms of philosophies of psychology – psychoanalysis, behaviourism, cognitivism and postcognitivism – and asserts that “the cognitivistic paradigm dominates in psychological and psychiatric diagnostic conceptualization” (Reuther 2012: 439). Cognitivist approaches tend to assume that the experiencing subject has immediate, direct sense experience (or “sense data”), which is then processed according to cognitive schemas. In comparison to social and cultural approaches, a cognitivist approach has remained relatively marginal in literary trauma studies, but it has received some interest from cognitivist narratologists. Joshua Pederson, for example, drawing on the work of Richard McNally and other cognitive scientists, argues against poststructuralist, Caruthian trauma theory: “traumatic amnesia is a myth, and while victims may choose not to speak of their traumas, there is little evidence that they cannot” (Pederson 2014: 334). Poststructuralist and hermeneutic approaches to trauma, in turn, might ask whether there is a somewhat voluntarist conception of subjectivity and agency underlying the idea of choosing not to speak about traumatic experience. Caruth’s critics, however, have observed that empiricist assumptions also underlie her approach insofar as she takes for granted that traumatic experience has “imprinted itself literally (a key term) on or into the subject’s mind and brain” in a form that is inaccessible to consciousness (Leys 2000: 304, see also 267) or what Susannah Radstone characterizes as a “reflectionist understanding of the mind’s relation to external events” (2000: 88). Caruth stresses repeatedly the “directness” and “immediacy” of the mind’s registration of the traumatic event: “the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it” (1996: 91–2). She defines trauma in terms of a situation in which “the outside has gone inside without any mediation” (59). The empiricist dimension of Caruth’s work is linked precisely to this emphasis on how the experience of trauma is a matter of unmediated registration of a horrifying event “that has not been given psychic meaning in any way” (59). But is it possible to avoid giving the traumatic experience any meaning? Hermeneutic philosophy of trauma, in contrast, problematizes the empiricist-positivistic assumption of direct, unmediated experience and emphasizes the temporal, cultural and social mediatedness of all experience, including traumatic experience. It argues that experience is always socially embedded, shaped by earlier experiences and involves meaninggiving, as I will flesh out in the next two sections. Many cultural approaches to trauma (including psychoanalytic and other strands of cultural psychology) are implicitly aligned with the philosophical hermeneutic tradition particularly insofar as they acknowledge the role of the traumatized subject as a (dialogically/relationally constituted) subject of interpretation and sense-making. They see the subject as not transparent to him- or herself but shaped by cultural and social forces that affect the experience of trauma – starting from the way a particular experience is interpreted to be “traumatic” in the first place – and suggest that improved understanding of these shaping mechanisms can help the subject to find new perspectives on the traumatic experience. Hermeneutic assumptions also play an important role in phenomenological trauma theories, such as Matthew Ratcliffe’s approach in which trauma is seen to involve a loss of trust in the world and other people and a diminished sense of agency, which implies “a perceived world that appears bereft of salient possibilities for meaningful action” (2017: 15). More broadly, I would count under the umbrella term 25

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“hermeneutic philosophy of trauma” what Reuther calls the paradigm of “postcognitivism”, which problematizes the “decontextualized schemas” of cognitivism and draws on Martin Heidegger and phenomenology in emphasizing our embodied experience of engaging with the world: In this perspective, contextualized practical engagements are the primary mode by which we come to understand ourselves, others, societal norms, and the like. Confrontation with a traumatic event shatters how individuals engage with the world and ruins their orientation to it. (Reuther 2012: 439) Third, when it comes to trauma fiction, at the explicit end of the spectrum are texts that present overt reflections on trauma. Such reflections are obviously central, for example, to Patrick McGrath’s novel Trauma (2008), which popularizes PTSD theory and thematizes the peculiar temporality of trauma: “It was the familiar horror, seeing the body as though for the first time. This is what trauma is. The event is always happening now, in the present, for the first time.” (McGrath 2008: 131) Such reflection features also in life-writing that can be called “trauma-writing”. For example, Christine E. Hallett looks at the trauma-writing of First World War nurses and writes about their “philosophy of trauma” by which she means their ways of attaching meaning or meaninglessness to suffering, for example “by describing suffering as an inescapable element of being human” (Hallett 2010: 76–7). Their philosophizing has links to theoretical work on trauma but is not properly theoretical – rather, it can be characterized as (self-)reflection on the nature of trauma and suffering. Like life-writing, traumawriting encompasses a wide spectrum of different modes of engaging with traumatic experiences, ranging from fictional to non-fictional writing that can nevertheless draw on literary devices and narrative strategies. The fourth type of philosophy of trauma is present in trauma fiction that conveys an implicit philosophy of trauma while dealing with traumatic experiences. For example, modernist and postmodernist trauma fiction have developed certain textual strategies to performatively give expression to trauma through fragmentary, non-linear style, by foregrounding repetition, disrupted temporalities, absences, gaps and silences that indirectly point towards the unsayable (see e.g. Whitehead 2004; Pederson 2018; Eaglestone, Chapter 26, this volume). This kind of aesthetics of trauma is often linked to the poststructuralist philosophy of trauma that presents traumatic experience as beyond representation, fundamentally unknowable and incomprehensible. Other literary trauma narratives, however, challenge the aesthetics of the unknowable and show an affinity with hermeneutic philosophy of trauma, which emphasizes the mediatedness of traumatic experience. A recent example is Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, to be analysed at the end of this chapter.

The conception of experience in philosophies of trauma There is little sustained comparative research on the basic philosophical assumptions underlying different trauma theories, in particular those concerning experience and narrative, despite the centrality of these concepts to trauma theory. While the next section explores narrative, in this section I will discuss two interlaced grounds for problematizing the Caruthian tenet that “the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs” (Caruth 1995: 8): it is

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based, first, on a privileging of exceptional events and, second, on an empiricist-positivistic assumption of direct, unmediated experience. First, due to structural violence – linked, for example, to social, racial and gender inequality – and long-term conditions such as living in the age of climate change and threat of nuclear extinction or with chronic illness, traumatizing experience can be a substantial part of one’s everyday life. For this reason, several trauma theorists question the dominant event-centred approach to trauma and emphasize everyday processes of violence and distress that do not involve a single spectacular event. Judith Herman (1992) and Laura Brown (1995) were among the first to stress that the diagnostic model of trauma (in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-III, 1980), which defined post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in terms of exposure to “a psychologically distressing event that is outside the range of usual human experience”, privileges the male experience of exceptional, violent events, thereby assuming that violence, oppression and harassment are not part of one’s everyday experience. As a result, girls’ and women’s “everyday assaults on integrity and personal safety”, their “secret, private, hidden experiences of everyday pain”, tend to be left outside the male-oriented “official lexicon” of “agreed-upon traumas” (Brown 1995: 101–2, 105). Since then, many scholars have drawn attention to the importance of structural violence for trauma studies, particularly in connection to racial violence (see e.g. Craps 2013; Rothberg 2009) and “slow violence”, especially linked to climate change (see Nixon 2011). It is equally important to acknowledge the effects of class and social inequality. The everyday experiences of millions of people in adverse conditions involve a traumatizing dimension that not only keeps them from flourishing but positively damages them. Living in poverty can cause deep-seated shame with profound effects on self-esteem. Intersectional approaches are attentive to the multiple mechanisms of (racial, class-related, gendered etc.) traumatizing violence that intersect in lived, embodied, individual experience (see Ilmonen, Chapter 16, this volume). In addition to societal structural violence, long-term adverse conditions linked to interpersonal relationships can make everyday life traumatizing. For example, long-term emotional abuse in childhood can damage one’s ability to see oneself as a person worth being treated with kindness and respect. A traumatizing childhood can be the sole reality for a child, forming the only world he or she knows. In such cases, traumatic experiences are not singular exceptional experiences that resist integration into one’s self-narrative. Instead, they are recurring, formative experiences that fundamentally shape one’s self-narrative and sense of self – to the extent that it may be difficult for such traumatized persons to imagine other kinds of selfnarratives or forms of agency that would allow them to better fulfil their potential. Another example of a traumatizing everyday experience that challenges the event-centred model is long-term illness. I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the final stage of editing this volume, and after going through the shock phase and internalizing that this is really happening to me, I have struggled with the difficulty to locate the trauma in time and space. The traumatic experience I am going through has no clear temporal boundaries. Getting the diagnosis, out of the blue, was a shocking, traumatizing event, but overall my cancer trauma is more about the future: despite a good prognosis, it is an experience coloured by intense anxiety about the possibility of recurrence, of a lost future, of not having a chance to see my children grow up. A similar anxiety about the possibility of having no future, but on a more collective level, pertaining to the possibility of our planet becoming uninhabitable, is integral to the phenomena that are discussed in this volume in connection to “climate trauma” (by Craps, Chapter 25; Durrant and Topper, Chapter 17; Teittinen, Chapter 32) and “nuclear trauma” as a form of “haunting from the future” (by Schwab, Chapter 40). 27

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Dealing with any kind of personal or collective trauma is always culturally mediated, and the cultural dimension of narrating and giving meaning also affects how the traumatizing event or process is experienced in the first place. For example, my traumatic experience of illness is embedded in a cultural context in which the dominant cultural narrative about cancer is that of battle or war (see Hansen 2018; Sontag 1978). An important aspect of my struggle has been the need to engage with this deeply problematic narrative that positions cancer patients as winners and losers, as if those who die did not fight hard enough, and with its underlying ideology of “normative optimism”, the pressure to be positive in the face of hardship, as if the “right attitude” could lead to healing. Similar problems pertain to the current cultural discourse that narrates the coronavirus pandemic as a war against an invisible enemy. Second, it can be argued more generally, against the claim that “the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs” (Caruth 1995: 8), that traumatic experience – whether exceptional or pervading the everyday – is experienced (and often intensely experienced) as it occurs. In the case of everyday experiences, trauma can colour one’s entire being in the world. Even when traumatic experience is exceptional and so terribly painful that it resists assimilation and integration into one’s narrative self-understanding, one can legitimately ask: is it not an experience all the same? In poststructuralist approaches, a traumatic experience is seen as a rupture that challenges one’s previous beliefs, that is, as a “breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” (Caruth 1996: 4). However, the suggestion that “the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs” seems to rest on the assumption that experience is a point-like event that happens here and now to a fully conscious subject of experience. If we understand experience as something that is without clear temporal boundaries, as pervaded by both the past and the future, as something that we go through as embodied beings, as only partly accessible to consciousness and as something that is constantly reinterpreted as it becomes part of new constellations of experience, it makes less sense to say that trauma is not experienced or that it is unambiguously separate from “normal” experience (Meretoja 2018: 114). What we face is more of a continuum than a dichotomy. From a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective, all experience extends in time: the present experience takes place from a horizon formed by our earlier experiences, and it is oriented towards a projected future (Heidegger 1927). Edmund Husserl (1991 [1893–1917]: 49) called retention the “just-passed” that is part of the present experience and protention the “not-yet” of the near future anticipated in the present. Rather than a dichotomy between fully integrated non-traumatic experience and not-at-all integrated traumatic experience, there is a continuum from integration to lack of integration. New experiences are integrated into old experiences to different degrees, and not only traumatic experience but also other types of experience can resist integration: for example, we use defence mechanisms to explain away phenomena that do not fit with our preconceptions and self-image. When one lives in traumatizing social conditions, everyday traumatic experiences can be well-integrated as they can be the sole reality for a person, but this does not mean that they would not cause hurt and damage. Thus, there are limits to the model of rupture in theorizing traumatic experience.

Narrative understanding in philosophies of trauma Philosophies of trauma lead to wildly divergent implications on the significance and potential of narrative in understanding and working through trauma. As Roger Luckhurst notes, there is a “flat contradiction between cultural theory that regards narrative as betraying traumatic singularity and various therapeutic discourses that see narrative as a means of 28

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productive transformation or even final resolution of trauma” (2008: 82). I propose that this contradiction becomes intelligible by looking at their different philosophical premises. In this section (drawing on Meretoja 2018: 107–16), I will particularly flesh out the main difference between the dominant poststructuralist trauma theory and a hermeneutic approach on the issue of narrative understanding. Poststructuralistically oriented trauma theorists tend to suggest not only that trauma is de facto inassimilable to narrative understanding but also that narrative form in itself is ethically problematic in its attempt to make sense of traumatic experience. This is because the act of storytelling is taken to force an irrevocably singular event into an account that appropriates it by subsuming it under a general meaning or explanation. Caruth, for example, suggests that narrating implies “forgetting of the singularity” (1996: 32) of the narrated event, such as the singularity of the death of the French woman’s lover in Caruth’s analysis of Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour. Caruth locates the narrative’s ethical potential in the “movement of her not knowing within the very language of her telling” (37) and in “the interruption of understanding” (42). Underlying Caruth’s argumentation, like that of many other poststructuralist thinkers, is the idea that narrative is ethically problematic precisely insofar as it is a form of understanding and that it has ethical potential insofar as it disrupts understanding. Scholars generally agree that narrative is a form of understanding, but those who see it as ethically problematic tend to subscribe to the poststructuralist criticism of understanding as inherently violent. This criticism is directed at what can be called a subsumption model, which has dominated the Western history of philosophy and which envisages knowledge and understanding in terms of conceptual appropriation, as an event in which something singular is subsumed under a general concept, law or model. Friedrich Nietzsche argued that concepts are violent because they mask the differences between singular things: “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent” (2001: 145). He uses as an example the leaves of a tree, all of which are different, but the concept of a leaf obscures those differences. Similarly, when we categorize people as “women” or “Asian”, we risk forgetting the singularity of each individual and crucial differences within each group. This Nietzschean tradition fuels twentieth-century poststructuralist suspicion towards narrative and understanding, such as Claude Lanzmann’s statements about the “obscenity of understanding” (1995: 200) in relation to narrative attempts to comprehend the Holocaust. The most influential figure in making the violence of understanding the central startingpoint for a new ethical sensibility was Levinas who rejected narrative and understanding as ethically questionable modes of appropriation: “In the word ‘comprehension’ we understand the fact of taking [prendre] and of comprehending [comprendre], that is, the fact of englobing, of appropriating” (1988: 170). On similar grounds, Jacques Derrida suggests that language as such, due to its universality, is inherently violent: what he calls “the originary violence of language” (or “arche-violence”) is the act of classifying and naming, of inscribing “the unique within the system” (1997: 112). Against the violence of language and knowledge, many poststructuralist thinkers endeavour to develop a mode of thinking in which the experience of the unintelligible is valorized as an ethical experience that entails openness to the unknown (see Lyotard 1991 [1988]: 74; Meretoja 2014: 86–91). The problem inherent in the poststructuralist criticism of narrative as a form of understanding is that dismissing the possibility of ethically sustainable narrative understanding can itself be violent in ruling out or foreclosing the possibility of genuine dialogue. The phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition provides a valuable alternative to the dismissal of 29

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narrative understanding tout court by allowing us to differentiate between violent, appropriative narrative understanding, on the one hand, and non-violent, dialogic narrative understanding, on the other. It argues that the structure of a hermeneutic circle characterizes understanding as we always understand something new in relation to our earlier conceptions, and the new, in turn, can challenge our pre-conceptions. The new experience is structured according to certain concepts, but at the same time the event of understanding leaves a mark on these concepts and can reshape them. Understanding is successful only when the concepts are transformed so that they do justice to whatever is being understood. Such events of understanding are possible because concepts are not fixed but only exist in the temporal process of being used. The Gadamerian negativity of understanding means that we properly understand only when we realize that things are not what we thought they were (Gadamer 1997: 353–61). Hence, instead of subsuming the singular under general concepts, in genuine understanding the singular shapes the general. This has important implications for narrative as a form of understanding. It allows us to acknowledge that not all narratives produce totalizing explanations or end up reinforcing violent practices of appropriation. Storytelling is a temporal process that has the potential to transform our conceptual frameworks, even if this potential often remains unrealized. Such an implicit philosophy can be seen to underlie, for example, Hannah Arendt’s view that “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it” (1968: 105). Traumatic experiences often resist assimilation due to the inadequacy of our earlier understanding in the face of an unbearably painful experience. While the subsumptive model of narrative presents storytelling as a way of assimilating new experiences into a pregiven mould, a traumatic experience can be so shocking that it cannot be appropriated into pre-given narrative scripts. From the perspective of narrative hermeneutics, however, narratives function as a vehicle of genuine (non-subsumptive) understanding precisely when, instead of a comfortable subsumption of new experiences into what we already know, they facilitate change (of pre-given categories, values, identities). Understanding is a temporal, two-way process that involves both interpretation of new experiences and reinterpretation and re-evaluation of one’s narrative preunderstandings, which can thereby be profoundly transformed. Leigh Gilmore (2001: 6) defines trauma as a “self-altering” experience of violence, injury or harm. If we take seriously the negativity that lies at the heart of the hermeneutic conception of understanding, all genuine understanding is self-altering in some sense; experience of a traumatic event and the process of dealing with it, however, is often selfaltering in a more radical sense because it can involve confronting a wounding or even paralyzing experience that fundamentally challenges one’s previous understandings and orientation to the world. Many therapeutic approaches start with the premise that making sense of a traumatic experience in narrative terms is a process of making a painful, distressing experience (partly) communicable and comprehensible by relating it to something. Such a process of relating can be necessary for survival as Dori Laub suggests: “The survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive” (Laub 1995: 63). The hermeneutic conception of the temporal and interpretative nature of narrating one’s experience implies that it is not just about applying pre-given narrative models to singular experience but a dynamic process of (re)interpretation that can involve learning something completely new that challenges one’s previous narrative understandings (see Ricoeur 1985). Therefore such a process of narrative working through is not inevitably ethically questionable. 30

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Recurring traumatic experiences can fundamentally shape one’s narrative selfunderstanding, resulting for example in a self-diminishing narrative that impedes one from flourishing. In such cases, working through traumatic experience requires the difficult task of reinterpreting one’s self-narrative and trying to renarrate it in less damaging ways that strengthen one’s agency. Both the task of integrating traumatic experiences to other experiences and the task of renarrating one’s (trauma-shaped) self-narrative require hermeneutic resources. According to Miranda Fricker, “hermeneutical injustice” is what occurs “when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (2007: 1). Literature as well as other arts and social movements can fight hermeneutical injustice by providing new vocabularies for dealing with traumatizing processes. They can have empowering potential by helping us to understand and articulate experiences that we have not been able to narrate to ourselves or others. The #MeToo campaign, for example, demonstrates how sharing personal stories can change the shared intersubjective space – or the “narrative in-between” (Meretoja 2018: 117–25) – in ways that make it possible for individuals to be heard and seen and to understand aspects of their past experience anew. Similarly, literary narratives have potential to provide hermeneutic resources not only for self-understanding but also for social change, in the struggle against traumatizing structural violence.

Hermeneutics of trauma in A Little Life Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life starts off as a novel about the friendship of four university students, Willem, Jude, Malcolm and Jean-Baptiste, focusing on their dreams, anxieties and existential search. As the novel progresses, however, Jude emerges as the central character: the narrative focuses on his struggle with his traumatic past, shaped by years of sexual abuse, the details of which gradually unravel as the narrative unfolds. The novel compellingly fleshes out the emotional, embodied and social effects of childhood trauma. The language of trauma is occasionally explicitly used by the characters, such as Jude’s doctor or when Jude cries in shame after letting Willem see his scarred body naked for the first time and Willem responds: “I didn’t know it was going to be so traumatic for you” (Yanagihara 2015: 456). But more important are the novel’s implicit ways of dealing with – and verbalizing – the struggles of a traumatized individual. The friendship of the four young men is marked by Jude’s inability to share his past with the others: “they developed a friendship in which the first fifteen years of his life remained unsaid and unspoken, as if they had never happened at all” (Yanagihara 2015: 128). He becomes Jude “who never shared stories of his own” (279). He experiences this not-sharing as a failure to reciprocate what his loved ones give to him: “the things Harold gave him so easily – answers, affection – he couldn’t reciprocate” (132). In relation to this inability, the narrative oscillates between the idea of the language of trauma as Jude’s ownmost language and the idea of lacking an adequate language. At times, the narrative implies that Jude would be capable of speaking about his traumatic past but chooses not to: “Although if he were to tell anyone, he knew it would be Willem” (95). Other passages, however, suggest that “he literally doesn’t have the language to do so” (299). But the novel also makes it clear that lack of language is not unique to traumatic experiences. Many kinds of bodily sensations (including positive ones) are difficult to bring to language: “the curious sensation he sometimes experienced – too indefinable and contradictory to even name it with language – that with every encounter they had, he was drawing closer to Jude, even as Jude pulled further from him” (519). 31

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Even though it is difficult for Jude to find the language to talk about his past, it is evident that he does remember what happened to him, even if it is too painful “to relive those years” (Yanagihara 2015: 105) by talking about them. By narrating a variety of life-trajectories, the novel reminds us that we all have memories that sustain and empower us and ones that haunt, hurt and oppress us. For a traumatized person, the weight of damaging memories is overwhelming and paralyzing. Jude is able to “erase” parts of his past and “edit” it to more tolerable versions (503, 540), but many of his memories refuse to be tamed and keep circling him like hyenas (380). The major problem is that what returns to him is not only a scene from a single traumatic event but “years and years and years of memories” (Yanagihara 2015: 389). The past haunts him but not in the form of an exceptional traumatic event that would stand out from the rest of his life; rather, it constitutes the first fifteen years of his life. What makes the traumatic past so overwhelming is the sheer scale of it – that it coloured his whole childhood, even his relationships with his most significant others, such as Brother Luke who gave him an education and never yelled at him but also organized the abuse that shaped his childhood and ultimately his narrative sense of self: “as much as he hated it, he also knew that they were right. He was born for this. He had been born, and left, and found, and used as he had been intended to be used” (401). This damaging self-narrative is so ingrained in him that he never really learns to shake it off. He is always haunted by the feeling that he is inherently evil and destined to be abused. So, although the traumatic images sometimes attack Jude as if they had a life of their own, in flashbacks and nightmares, his past is also an integral part of him – it has shaped who he is. Jude keeps asking himself, “who would he be, without the scars, the cuts, the hurts” (Yanagihara 2015: 143). He recognizes that the past has created harmful habits in him, such as constant vigilance, but eventually accepts them as “simply a part of life, a habit like good posture” (107). The most damaging pattern he has developed since early childhood is the self-narrative of himself as worthless: “I’m disgusting” (193). Precisely this shame, so integral to his narrative sense of self (456), makes it difficult for Jude to talk about his past. The problem is not a lack of access to his traumatic past or an inability to integrate it into his self-narrative but rather that the trauma forms the basis of his self-narrative, diminishing his sense of agency and overwhelming him with shame. Thereby the novel challenges the poststructuralist trauma aesthetics of the unexperiencable, unsayable and unknowable, in a similar vein as hermeneutic philosophy of trauma. An important aspect of narrative agency – our ability to navigate our narrative environments and find our own ways of narrating our experiences – is narrative imagination, the ability to imagine how things could be otherwise and different possible directions for one’s life. It is shaped by what I have called our “sense of the possible – our capacity to imagine beyond what appears to be self-evident in the present” (Meretoja 2018: 20). The traumatic past has diminished Jude’s narrative agency to the point that he is unable to imagine for himself a life involving happiness or love: “his imagination was limited” (Yanagihara 2015: 452). After the abusive childhood, “this idea that he could create at least some part of his own future” feels alien (545). His sense of agency is diminished to the point that, in his experience, “his life is something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any role in creating. He has never been able to imagine what his life might be” (691–2). With his diminished narrative imagination, Jude is struck by how his friends are able to imagine a different life for him, full of possibilities (692), and it is life-changing for him that “someone had seen his as a meaningful life” (687). He and Willem cultivate a relationship that requires extensive narrative imagination, as it 32

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does not conform to any pre-established relationship categories. They become acutely aware of the need to invent a new kind of relationship – and a vocabulary and narrative for it – because “friendship” is far too “vague, so undescriptive and unsatisfying” (569). What they have is romantic love but also an “extension of their friendship” (476): “I’m not in a relationship with a man, […] I’m in a relationship with Jude” (516). When Willem dies, for Jude the person he became with him dies as well (694), and he feels he does not “know how to be alive without him” (696): “Willem had so defined what his life was and could be” (641). Others also need to engage in acts of imagination, to be able to respond to Jude’s story. When he first tells Willem about his childhood, Willem finds the story unimaginable (Yanagihara 2015: 515) and needs to engage in “stretching his understanding past what is imaginable” (536). The key issue is that narrative imagination clearly has ethical potential in engaging with the trauma of another person – and it can lead to narrative understanding that is ethically productive. Those who love Jude engage in dialogical, non-subsumptive, non-appropriative narrative understanding based on listening and learning. It is crucial to Willem’s love that he accepts the lack of narrative mastery – that “he would never fully possess Jude, that he would love someone who would remain unknowable and inaccessible to him in fundamental ways” (624). Silence is first protective for Jude but then oppressive, and the novel suggests that ultimately struggling to share one’s experiences of pain with one’s loved ones, no matter how difficult, may be the only way to bear a traumatic past (299). The novel shows that narrative does not need to be subsumptive or appropriative; it can be a vehicle of stretching one’s imagination towards what feels incomprehensible. Ultimately, the whole novel attests to the power of narrative to function in an explorative mode, dialogically engaging with traumatic experience without pretending to master, explain, solve or redeem it. In sum, the novel’s implicit, hermeneutically oriented philosophy of trauma questions the aesthetics of the unsayable, emphasizing how trauma can profoundly shape one’s selfnarrative (and not merely disrupt it as poststructuralism suggests) – in a potentially damaging way. In exploring a spectrum from traumatic to non-traumatic experiences, the novel questions a clear-cut dichotomy between them. It shows how past experiences – both good and bad – mediate the experience of the present, giving it a complex multilayered quality. In the novel, memory is not merely traumatic but also functions as a resource for agency. For example, Jude commits a special moment with Willem “to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most” (Yanagihara 2015: 208). The novel also shows that although the past defines who they become – and their capacity for narrative agency – it does not determine their lives. Random chance affects the course of our lives as much as our own choices and inherited burdens. Love comes Jude’s way unexpectedly and transforms him; when his loved one dies in a random accident, he is lost to himself. The novel underlines the importance of narrative imagination to narrative agency and to the struggle with a traumatized, damaging self-narrative. All four of the central characters repeat patterns of behavior and affect, rooted in their earlier lives, but they are also capable of inventing new modes of being in relationships of love and friendship. How they become who they are only in relation to one another testifies to an ontology of relationality and interdependency (cf. Butler 2004; Cavarero 2000 [1997]; Meretoja 2018): we are fundamentally dependent on one another in becoming who we are, in finding ways out of the paralyzing grip of the traumatic past through new modes of narrating our lives and in transforming the intersubjective narrative inbetweens in which we are entangled. 33

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Towards hermeneutic trauma studies The distinctions outlined in this chapter have sought to clarify some of the implications of different philosophical traditions for conceptualizing trauma and provide analytical tools for exploring trauma in fiction. The chapter has also drawn attention to some problematic philosophical assumptions underlying dominant forms of literary trauma theory, particularly concerning experience and narrative understanding. I will conclude by summarizing two key arguments of this chapter, the first relating to experience and the second to narrative understanding. They are insights drawn from a hermeneutic philosophy of trauma, which would merit more attention in literary trauma studies. First, it is not necessarily true that trauma is not experienced when it occurs; it can be not only a complex, multilayered experience but an inextricable part of one’s everyday life. As the discussion of A Little Life elucidated, trauma is not only a disruptive, exceptional event; for some, a traumatizing, damaging everyday life is all they know. This suggests that traumatic experience should not be defined primarily in terms of disruption but in terms of how damaging it is. Overall, traumatic experience is a spectrum, like most things in life. Whether an experience should be called traumatic or not depends less on its integration to one’s self-narrative and more on the damage it causes to the subject of experience – whether it severely diminishes one’s sense of agency, self-worth and possibilities to act in the world. Such damage can be considered a necessary condition of trauma. Second, it is not necessarily true that attempts to narratively understand trauma are doomed to be ethically and epistemologically problematic. If we acknowledge that there are different modes of narrative understanding, on a spectrum from subsumptive (appropriative, totalizing) to non-subsumptive (animated by an ethos of learning, openness and dialogue), we can acknowledge that narrative understanding can sometimes be an ethically sustainable mode of working through traumatic experience or imagining the suffering of others. As the discussion of A Little Life showed, trauma can lead to a distorted narrative sense of self whereby what is required in attempts to amplify one’s narrative agency is learning to renarrate one’s past and imagine different futures. This is not always possible – sometimes the weight of the traumatic past is simply too debilitating – but when it does happen, it happens in a dialogic relation with others, and in this dialogue culturally available affective, imaginative, narrative and other hermeneutic resources play a crucial role.

Bibliography Arendt, H. (1968) Men in Dark Times, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Brown, L. S. (1995) “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 100–12. Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Caruth, C. (1995) “Trauma and Experience: Introduction”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–12. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cavarero, A. (2000 [1997]) Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. P. Kottman, London: Routledge. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Davis, C. (2018) Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Derrida, J. (1997 [1967]) Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Philosophies of trauma Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1997 [1960]) Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall, New York: Continuum. Gilmore, L. (2001) The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hallett, C. E. (2010) “Portrayals of Suffering: Perceptions of Trauma in the Writings of First World War Nurses and Volunteers”, Canadian Journal of Medical History 27(1): 65–84. Hansen, P. K. (2018) “Illness and Heroics: On Counter-Narrative and Counter-Metaphor in Discourse on Cancer”, Frontiers of Narrative Studies 4(1): 213–28. Heidegger, M. (1927) Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York: Basic Books. Hovey, R. B. and Amir, N. (2013) “The Hermeneutics of Suffering: Researching Trauma”, The International Journal of Person-Centered Medicine 3(2): 160–9. Husserl, E. (1991 [1893–1917]) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. J. B. Brough, Dordrecht: Kluwer. LaCapra, D. (2004) History in Transit, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. (2018) Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lanzmann, C. (1995) “The Obscenity of Understanding”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 200–20. Laub, D. (1995) “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 61–75. Levinas, E. (1988) “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas [Interview by T. Wright, P. Hughes and A. Ainley]”, in R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (eds) The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, trans. A. Benjamin and T. Wright, London: Routledge, 168–80. Leys, R. (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, London and New York: Routledge. Lyotard, F. (1991 [1988]) The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, Cambridge: Polity Press. McGrath, P. (2008) Trauma, London: Bloomsbury. Meretoja, H. (2014) The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2018) The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2001) The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, R. Geuss and R. Speirs (eds), trans. R. Speirs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Orange, D. (2011) Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice, London: Routledge. Pederson, J. (2014) “Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revisited Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory”, Narrative 22(3): 333–53. ———. (2018) “Trauma and Narrative”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 97–109. Radstone, S. (2000) “Screening Trauma: Forrest Gump, Film and Memory”, in S. Radstone (ed.) Memory and Methodology, London: Bloomsbury, 79–108. Ratcliffe, M. (2017) Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Reuther, B. T. (2012) “Philosophy of Trauma”, in C. R. Figley (ed.) Encyclopedia of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary Guide, London: Sage. Ricoeur, P. (1985) Temps et récit 3, Paris: Seuil. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sontag, S. (1978) Illness as Metaphor, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Whitehead, A. (2004) Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Yanagihara, H. (2015) A Little Life, London: Picador.

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3 TRAUMA, POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND ETHICS Colin Davis

This chapter examines a significant strand in the development of modern trauma studies as practised in the humanities, that is, its emergence out of what is sometimes characterized as an “ethical turn” in poststructuralism in the latter part of the twentieth century. Trauma studies brings with it an ethical summons; but I also want to ask to what extent it is equal to the task it sets itself. Does adopting the vocabulary of ethics equate to being ethical?

An ethical turn? In 1993 the French philosopher Alain Badiou wrote, with some exasperation, that ethics had become “the principal philosophical ‘tendency’ of the moment” (Badiou 1993: 5; translations from French are my own throughout this chapter). He was drawing attention to a renewed readiness, amongst Continental philosophers and those influenced by them in anglophone humanities departments such as those associated with deconstruction, to talk explicitly about ethics and about the ethical significance of their work. Actually, it can be demonstrated that the ethical interests of the disparate thinkers loosely grouped together as “poststructuralists” pre-date by far Badiou’s complaint. Jacques Lacan had dedicated his 1959–60 seminar to the ethics of psychoanalysis (Lacan 1986); and in 1964 a relatively unknown Jacques Derrida had published what is arguably still the single most important study of the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who would become the most prestigious reference point in ethical thinking informed by poststructuralism (reprinted in Derrida 1967: 117–228). Others associated with poststructuralism were politically militant through the 1950s and 1960s even if they were not explicit about the ethical underpinnings of their political commitments. And yet, poststructuralism was dogged by the charge that it was ethically irresponsible, maybe even nihilistic. Lacan and Derrida, as well as others such as Michel Foucault, JeanFrançois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari or Louis Althusser may have had little in common with one another (and in some cases may have been rivals or even openly hostile to one another), but common trends could be seen in their writing, trends which some critics found to be ethically disturbing. Their interest in flux, slippages, ambiguities, ambivalence and indeterminacy, and their repudiation of absolute truth claims or immutable values could be portrayed as undermining the very foundations of ethics. In particular, their assault 36

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on the autonomy of the human subject – leading to the so-called “death of Man”, the destruction or decentring of the subject – seemed to some to reject the possibility of human agency on which ethical choice and action depend. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, for example, spelled out at length the dangers of the “anti-humanism” of thinkers they associated with the protest movement of May 1968; and they attempted to re-build ethical possibilities by a return to the subject, conceived as the cornerstone of human ethical achievement (Ferry and Renaut 1988). In their book Impostures Intellectuelles Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont went even further in their denunciation of thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze, drawing attention to what they regarded as gross errors of fact and reasoning in their work and describing them as posing a pernicious threat to Enlightenment values of thought (Sokal and Bricmont 1997). Those sympathetic to poststructuralism, who had engaged with it more closely and attentively than most of its detractors, rejected such rash allegations. Catherine Belsey, for example, dismisses as a “common misreading” the claim that poststructuralist theory deprives us of the power to choose or to take action as agents in our own lives (Belsey 2002: 89). But the allegations stuck and gained popular currency. One point at which this view of poststructuralist thinking acquired some public visibility was in 1992, when Derrida was proposed for an honorary degree in Cambridge in the UK. This provoked a fierce polemic about the value or valuelessness of his work. The following extract, from a letter published in The Times in May 1992, signed by an array of international philosophers, is quite restrained compared to some of what was promulgated at the time: Many have been willing to give M Derrida the benefit of the doubt, insisting that language of such depth and difficulty of interpretation must hide deep and subtle thoughts indeed. When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, then it becomes clear, to us at least, that, where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seem to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university. (Smith et al. 1992) The claim here is clear: Derrida should not be taken seriously as a philosopher. Moreover, his work is dangerous because it undermines the values of reason, truth and scholarship, and by implication it is ethically noxious, nihilistic and corrupting. This has been echoed more recently by those who have seen a clear line leading from the academic querying of universalist truth claims to the flagrant propagation of falsehood, lies and unsubstantiated allegations in our modern post-truth political era. Some people seem to think that Trump is all Derrida’s fault. Stout defenders of Derrida and other poststructuralists insisted that this was a misreading and misunderstanding. But the attack on poststructuralism had been intensified by revelations which, a few years earlier, had provoked a crisis within circles which were intellectually favourable to it. The Yale professor Paul De Man was an influential critic and teacher, a key figure in the so-called Yale School, together with Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom. In his influential books Blindness and Insight (1971) and Allegories of Reading (1979) De Man had developed his own version of deconstruction through an intense, detailed intellectual engagement with the work of Derrida and other European thinkers. In 1988, five years after his death, it was revealed that as a young man in Nazi-occupied Belgium he had written numerous articles for a collaborationist newspaper, Le Soir, some of 37

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which could be accused of anti-Semitism. He emigrated to the United States after the war and never publicly discussed his wartime journalism. Colleagues, students and friends were shocked to discover what he had written. Major figures, such as Shoshana Felman, Fredric Jameson, Barbara Johnson and Derrida himself struggled to come to terms with the revelations. In an interview Johnson said that “[she] really felt that the person [she] had admired and respected was a different person from the one he had to be now that his whole life became visible” (Johnson 1994: 88). If De Man’s admirers found it difficult to deal with what they now knew, his detractors had an altogether easier time of it: De Man’s work, and along with it deconstruction and poststructuralism more broadly, could now be dismissed wholesale. Jeffrey Mehlman summed up the situation in unforgiving terms, even if he later insisted that his comment had been misrepresented, when he suggested that there were “grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II” (Mehlman 2010: 78). The De Man affair provoked a trauma within poststructuralism (see LaCapra 1994: 113). It became a matter of intellectual and moral urgency to demonstrate that the charge of irresponsibility or moral nihilism was not justified. This urgency became one of the sources of trauma studies.

Ethics and trauma studies In 1998 Dominick LaCapra wrote that “there [was] a need in critical theory for an explicitly ethical turn” (LaCapra 1998: 199). At that time, an ethical turn was already palpable in what would prove to be the canonical texts of trauma studies. Those founding works – Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), LaCapra’s Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994), Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) – all contain chapters devoted largely or wholly to Paul De Man, making it clear that the De Man affair was a defining feature of their immediate intellectual context. As Tom Toremans puts it, “To an important degree, trauma theory can be considered a response to the challenge of reading ‘after’ De Man – both chronologically and following his example” (Toremans 2018: 52). There are other points of convergence between the founding works of trauma studies: they all have history in their subtitles, and all contain substantial discussion of Holocaust material. It would be wrong to conflate these very different works and the approaches of their authors, but their shared features are nevertheless striking. If poststructuralism had been accused of the irresponsible celebration of free play and semantic indeterminacy, trauma studies entailed the recovery of historical referentiality, however problematic it might be. The Holocaust provides a topic which should be undoubted in its historical reality even as it poses major challenges to representation, reception and interpretation. One might say that trauma studies in its modern form comes into being, at least in part, through the encounter between Holocaust studies and sophisticated practices of reading influenced by poststructuralism. And the underlying justification for this is ethical. Commenting on De Man’s silence about the war and the Holocaust, Felman warns against hasty, oversimplifying judgements, but insists that “the question of ethics is indeed a fundamental and an urgent one” (Felman, in Felman and Laub 1992: 121). Trauma studies, then, is underpinned by an ethical claim. What is at stake is the possibility of an ethics of response, entailing an ability to listen to and be changed by traumatic narratives without appropriating them and claiming them as our own. Geoffrey Hartman calls for “a new awareness … which is ethical as well as clinical” (Hartman, 38

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quoted in Toremans 2018: 52). Caruth describes her project as “a new mode of listening across disciplines” (Caruth 2014: ix); and to respond effectively to trauma entails “[creating] the conditions by which the very possibility of collective social witness and response may finally take place” (xvi). One might see a sense of exasperation or impatience with her use of finally: we have been waiting too long, and it is now high time that critics should assume their ethical and social responsibility as witnesses to the trauma of others. The ability to respond to literature, to read well and attentively, is also an ethical accomplishment. Trauma studies is, I suggest, inseparable from a sense that literary and cultural criticism is worthwhile only if it can position itself as ethically responsible. Indeed, the language of ethics permeates the self-understanding of leading trauma theorists. A case in point is LaCapra’s notion of empathic unsettlement, which endeavours to describe how we can and should respond to narratives of trauma. It involves careful attention to traumatic experiences, a willingness and capacity to be unsettled by them, but without appropriation. The trauma of others is not my trauma. LaCapra refers to empathic unsettlement as “cognitively and ethically responsible” (LaCapra 2001: 42). Empathy, understood in this non-appropriative manner, is, he says, “important both in historical understanding and in the ethics of everyday life” (219). What I see here, as in other founding texts of trauma studies by Caruth and Felman, is an attempt to reclaim the ethical importance of work which might rapidly be described as poststructuralist. Thinking which might have been dismissed as arcane, obscure, irrelevant or even dangerous can now be re-framed as having important consequences on our values and identities as responsible citizens. Trauma studies entails, then, a more explicit engagement with ethics than had sometimes been the case in critical theory; or, to be more precise, I suggest here that proponents of trauma studies tend to use the vocabulary of ethics, but sustained discussions of ethics are less common. One of the significant achievements of trauma studies has been to make it possible to talk once again about right and wrong, moral judgement, justice, decency and responsibility, after a period when – at least in some branches of literary studies – such terms seemed to be quaintly or disastrously humanist: outmoded, inappropriate, ineffective or simply meaningless. Fassin and Rechtman conclude The Empire of Trauma by claiming that, “Rather than a clinical reality, trauma today is a moral judgment” (Fassin and Fechtman 2009: 284). It becomes acceptable again to talk about ethics, values, rights, responsibilities and respect. What is not so clear, in this return to ethics, is the extent to which such terms are effectively substantiated or problematized. The use of the word imperative in trauma studies can be used to illustrate the point. The final words of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience refer to “the ethical imperative of an awakening that has yet to occur” (Caruth 1996: 112). The context is massively complex. Caruth has been discussing Freud’s account in The Interpretation of Dreams of the dream of a burning child. This also brings in Lacan’s response to Freud’s account, the trauma of the loss of a child, the problem of the transmission of trauma and the theory of trauma, and the difficulties involved in any attempt to pin down memory, repetition and representation. And all this culminates in this “ethical imperative of an awakening that has yet to occur”. However, the status and meaning of this “awakening” remain unclear. Does the claim that it has “yet to occur” imply that it could in fact occur, or is it for ever deferred? Most of all, why is this awakening to be understood as an ethical imperative? The fact that, in her contribution to this volume, Caruth (Chapter 7) continues to reflect on this “awakening” indicates, I think, her own acute awareness that the full ethical significance of this passage has yet to be settled. 39

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Amongst innumerable other instances of the word imperative in the founding texts of modern trauma studies, Shoshana Felman refers to “the new moral and political imperative” of the age of testimony (Felman, in Felman and Laub 1992: 114). Dori Laub also talks of the “imperative to tell” (Laub, in Felman and Laub 1992: 78–9), even if it is coupled with an impossibility of telling. What kind of imperative are we confronted with here, where does it come from, what is its authority or force? It does not appear to be a command of God, neither is it a command of reason like Kant’s categorical imperative. If anything, it appears to be a command emanating from the experience of trauma itself, and from the traumatized Other, when Other has distinct echoes of the work of Emmanuel Levinas. I will come back to this in a moment. In a long endnote in The Juridical Unconscious Shoshana Felman gives a succinct and actually very powerful defence of Cathy Caruth’s work. Summarizing the third of her three main points about Caruth, Felman writes: Because the experience of trauma addresses the Other and demands the listening of another, it implies a human and an ethical dimension in which the Other receives priority over the self. This ethical dimension is tightly related to the question of justice. (Felman 2002: 173–4) To unpack these two sentences would be a difficult undertaking. The language is assertive, yet every part of this raises major questions. Does the experience of trauma always address the Other, or only sometimes? Might not trauma sometimes entail precisely an unwillingness or refusal to address the Other? If trauma demands the listening of another, what kind of demand is this? Should I pay any attention to such a demand, and if so, why? Not every demand is a good one. When my daughter demands more chocolate, her mother tells me I should not give in. “Tightly related” (“This ethical dimension is tightly related to the question of justice”) needs further precision and explanation. And the progression from “the experience of trauma” to “the question of justice” is highly suggestive, but also calls for more detailed justification and analysis. The claim is presumably not that, because some people have experienced trauma, we are all more moral beings and justice prevails. So what is the claim? My point is that in their foundational work Caruth and Felman make a demand for ethical seriousness, but do not for a moment purport to resolve the urgent issues they have raised. The words which describe “an ethical dimension in which the Other receives priority over the self” unmistakeably refer to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s ethics are focussed on the non-reciprocal relation of self and Other, in which the Other makes an unconditional demand on me. It would take a very long time to discuss what this demand is, why I do or should pay any attention to it, and why I might sometimes disregard it. In the current context, it is important to recognize that Levinas has been a key reference point – perhaps the key reference point – in the so-called ethical turn of poststructuralism. He provides an ethical vocabulary and decades of established philosophical prestige dating back to his studies with Husserl and Heidegger in the 1920s. But references or allusions to Levinas often do not go together with a deep immersion in his work, its complexities and its many problematic aspects. Levinas has been simplified and sanitized, but real engagements with his thinking are to say the least sparse. Levinas appears once in Felman and Laub’s Testimony (Felman and Laub 1992: 3), and also once – in an endnote – in Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience (Caruth 1996: 143–4); and yet both books, and the subsequent works they have inspired, subscribe to a vocabulary of the Other, otherness, alterity, responsibility and the 40

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demand of the Other upon the self. Levinas is an unnamed, largely uninterrogated presence. There are some notable exceptions, such as Robert Eaglestone’s The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004) and Thomas Trezise’s Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (2013), both of which include informed and profound discussions of Levinas. More commonly, however, Levinas serves as an authority underpinning the ethical claims of traumas studies without a significant degree of careful engagement with what he actually wrote. Despite the prestige of his thought in trauma studies and ethical criticism more generally, Levinas is, I suggest, to some extent a surprisingly untapped source. There are at least two areas from which trauma studies might be enriched though closer attention to his work. The first is his conception of the relation between self and other. This is at a far remove from a cosy relation of care and respect for the Other, as it is sometimes caricatured. It is, on the contrary, violent and disturbing. The self may find itself dispossessed, torn apart, obliged to accept responsibility for others without choice or reciprocity. My debt to the other is a limitless burden, but I can expect no such indebtedness in return. From this troubled relation emerges the second aspect of Levinas’s thought which I believe has been underappreciated in trauma studies, namely his conception of trauma itself, especially in his later writing. Levinas’s use of the term owes little or nothing to the psychoanalytic framework which proponents of trauma studies have used extensively. Rather, it returns to the older medical sense of wound. Levinas’s language draws upon the visceral, violent power of this meaning of trauma. The Levinasian subject, confronted with the unfathomable Other, finds itself traumatized, psychically and physically pained through its discovery of otherness. The encounter hurts; we can never be the same again as we were before. Trauma is associated with other key terms in Levinas’s later thinking, which convey the difficulty and distress of the subject exposed to otherness: obsession, accusation, persecution, vulnerability, expiation, exile, wounding (Levinas 1974: 31). Moreover, the trauma at the core of subjectivity is the painful foundation of my ethical responsibility to the Other. As Simon Critchley puts it, “Without trauma, there would be no ethics in Levinas’s particular sense of the word” (Critchley 1999: 240). So far, I have been talking about trauma studies rather than trauma literature, though the two are linked: the ethical claim of trauma studies rests on the ethical force of trauma narratives, which trauma studies analyses, theorises, mediates and transmits. The critical act is part of the ethical process. This is particularly evident in the study of testimony. There is a circuit of testimonial storytelling: the witness has a story to tell and requires a listener to receive it; by receiving it, the listener becomes witness to the witness, and thereby a bearer of testimony in his or her right. Witnesses follow an imperative to tell their stories, and witnesses to the witnesses are also subject to an imperative to re-tell the story. Describing the essential role of the listener in trauma testimony, Dori Laub says that “the listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event” (Laub, in Felman and Laub 1992: 57). I find this to be a problematic formulation. It may be psychologically accurate, but hermeneutically and ethically it raises huge questions: what does it mean for me to participate in and co-own a trauma which is not mine, what right do I have to claim a share of the pain of others? This is precisely where trauma meets ethics and leads to an unresolved dilemma. However, I would suggest that an uninterrogated commitment to the ethical value of secondary witnessing is the founding blind spot of trauma studies. To put it in other words, we like – perhaps we need – to believe that we are doing something ethically valuable when we immerse ourselves within, listen to, talk and write about, stories of unspeakable trauma. 41

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New versions of this position have subsequently emerged, for example in Aleida Assmann’s notion of the “empathetic listener” or Michael Rothberg’s “implicated subject”. Both of these notions draw upon important work on postmemory and secondary witnessing. For Assmann, a response founded in empathy involves “intellectual interest, active imagination, emotional investment” and – crucially – “ethical engagement” (Assmann 2018: 216). She goes on to argue that “Participation in such a memory creates an affective community that is independent of the filiations created by blood or nation or religion” (216). This suggests that there is a clear link between trauma, empathy and moral improvement, which has potentially universal relevance because it is not limited by any national, ethnic or religious boundaries. Rothberg’s “implicated subject” also makes significant claims about the significance of our direct or indirect involvement with trauma and injustice. The implicated subject is the cornerstone of a new theory of historical responsibility: through our opinions, lifestyles and cultural embeddedness, we are all implicated in violence even if we have no direct part in it, either as victims or perpetrators. Rothberg insists that recognizing this “will not automatically make us better people” (Rothberg 2019: 19). There is nevertheless the suggestion that understanding and embracing our implication will have beneficial social, political and ethical effects: “Recognizing collective responsibility, in other words, can lead to new versions of collective politics that build on alliances and assemblages of differently situated subjects” (21). From its early stages to its recent developments, literary trauma studies is, I suggest, driven by the urge to find in the difficulties and paradoxes of reading an ethical imperative which transcends narcissistic pleasure. If literature matters, then reading and interpreting literature matter as well. Our critical and readerly acts are justified, maybe even redeemed. To cite just one example, in her brilliant reading of Albert Camus’s novel The Fall (La Chute) Shoshana Felman builds paradox upon paradox: through the narrator’s tortuous, slippery, deceptive practice of witnessing and self-witnessing, we are called upon “to articulate the very inarticulateness of the narrative”, “to repeat its unrepeatability” (Felman, in Felman and Laub 1992: 202). By doing this, “Camus succeeds in giving to the very silence of a generation – to the very voicelessness of history – the power of a call: the possibility, the chance, of our response-ability” (Felman, in Felman and Laub 1992: 203). Felman here sets a model which raises the stakes of literary criticism. As critics, we become participants in a dialogue of the utmost importance. If we are response-able, we are responsible. We are actors in the urgent, vital project of giving voice to the voiceless.

Conclusion The language of ethics is integral to trauma studies and related areas of research such as memory studies. Leading scholars in the humanities have understood that, in increasingly difficult times, we need more than ever to engage with and to explain why the literary works which matter to us also somehow improve us, however terrible their subject might be. But my suggestion here is that using the language of ethics is not the same as exposing oneself fearlessly to the multiple ambiguities of literature, and to its gains and losses, its benefits and its risks. It is not self-evident that trauma studies and its related areas of study have escaped the “culture of consolation” diagnosed some time ago by Lawrence Langer (Langer 1995: 9, 11): we find value where there is none to find, perhaps because we cannot bear the implications of doing otherwise. As readers, critics and citizens desperate to secure our ethical groundedness, we may be driven to find something good even and especially when there is nothing good to find. However, Susannah Radstone has warned against the 42

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temptation of regarding trauma studies as more ethically secure than other approaches: “Trauma criticism has no greater claim to ethical purity than any other critical practice. Like any other intellectual endeavour, it is driven by a complex interweaving of scholarly, academic, political and psychical imperatives” (Radstone 2011: 87). Adopting an ethical vocabulary does not guarantee our moral superiority. The insufficiently interrogated language of ethics which runs through trauma studies may be a sign that we have not yet given up on the hope that the works we care for will somehow redeem us. This is a failure of reading, and it may be a failure which we have no option but to perform and repeat. We may be no closer to giving up on or going beyond the culture of consolation than we were when Langer first described it. Moreover, with its invocation of elusive ethical imperatives, empathetic gains and generalized responsibility, trauma studies risks being a symptom of that culture rather than an antidote to it. However, I do not want to end this chapter on a negative note. The gains of trauma studies have been substantial. It has demonstrated, palpably and (to my mind) irrefutably that ethical concerns can be and should be central to work in the humanities. Difficult and demanding critical practices should not be dismissed as ethically trivial or even nihilistic just because their conclusions are not glibly optimistic. If so far we have not dared to embrace some of the implications of trauma, it may be because we still have a long way to go before we find more viable ways of inhabiting traumatized or post-traumatic worlds.

Bibliography Assmann, A. (2018) “The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling”, in H. Meretoja and C. Davis (eds) Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, New York and London: Routledge, 203–18. Badiou, A. (1993) L’Ethique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal, Paris: Hatier. Belsey, C. (2002) Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (2014) Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Critchley, S. (1999) “The Original Traumatism: Levinas and Psychoanalysis”, in R. Kearney and M. Dooley (eds) Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge, 230–42. De Man, P. (1971) Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press. ———. (1979) Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Derrida, J. (1967) L’Ecriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil; Points edition. Eaglestone, R. (2004) The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Fassin, D. and Fechtman, R. (2009) The Empire of Trauma: An Enquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. R. Gomme, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Felman, S. (2002) The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York and London: Routledge. Ferry, L. and Renaut, A. (1988) La Pensée 68: Essai sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain, Paris: Gallimard. Johnson, B. (1994) The Wake of Deconstruction, Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell. Lacan, J. (1986) Le Séminaire, livre VII: L’Ethique de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil. LaCapra, D. (1994) Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. ———. (1998) History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.

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Colin Davis ———. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore, MA and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Langer, L. (1995) Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinas, E. (1974) Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; Points edition. Mehlman, J. (2010) Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments toward a Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Radstone, S. (2011) “Trauma Studies: Contexts, Politics, Ethics”, in M. Modlinger and P. Sonntag (eds) Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 63–90. Rothberg, M. (2019) The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Smith, B. et al. (1992) “Derrida Degree a Question of Honour; Letter”, The Times 9 May 1992. Sokal, A. and Bricmont, J. (1997) Impostures intellectuelles, Paris: Odile Jacob. Toremans, T. (2018) “Deconstruction: Trauma Inscribed in Language”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 51–65. Trezise, T. (2013) Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony, New York: Fordham University Press.

Further reading Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. (One of the founding works of trauma studies.) Critchley, S. (1992) The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford: Blackwell. (Illuminating discussion of the ethics of deconstruction.) Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York and London: Routledge. (Another of the founding works of trauma studies.) Miller, J. H. (1987) The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin, New York: Columbia University Press. (An important work in the development of ethical criticism.) Norris, C. (1994) Truth and the Ethics of Criticism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (A critique of some of the ethical claims made by poststructuralist literary theorists.) Rothberg, M. (2019) The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Develops the theory of the implicated subject and its responsibility.)

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4 THEORIES OF CULTURAL TRAUMA Todd Madigan

Introduction The theory of cultural trauma emerged from the social sciences in the early twenty-first century, and in light of the increasing interest in what has by now become an established research paradigm, scholars working within the field have lately begun taking stock (e.g. Sciortino 2018; Eyerman 2019; Woods 2019). In these works of reflexive scholarship, authors highlight a number of tensions, tendencies and diverging trajectories among the theory’s many practitioners, but they stop short of calling out anything irreconcilable within this growing skein of analysis. The purpose of the present chapter is to do just that: to argue that there are, in fact, two distinct and not entirely compatible concepts being used under the shared term “cultural trauma”. This has until now been unacknowledged, a fact that has led to considerable theoretical muddiness. In order to clear the water, we would do well to recognize that today it is more accurate to talk about the theories of cultural trauma and to encourage scholars in the field to be cognizant of which theory they are applying to their research.

Theories of cultural trauma While it has long been recognized that individuals can be traumatized, it was not until the latter part of the twentieth century that sociologists began to apply this notion to social groups, as well (e.g. Erikson 1976; Neal 1998). The theory of cultural trauma is an extension and refinement of this novel idea (i.e. that a collectivity might experience trauma), and it has been used to illuminate otherwise obscure social phenomena, including how individuals might be traumatized by an event they did not personally experience, why some catastrophic events are collectively remembered while others are seemingly forgotten, and how the boundaries of social inclusion are variously reinforced, constricted or expanded by this sort of experience. In what has become the standard definition of cultural trauma, Jeffrey Alexander asserts that “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable

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ways” (Alexander 2004: 1). In a crucial elucidation of this definition, he goes on to argue that “events are not, in and of themselves, traumatic” (8). Instead, they must be represented as traumatic. That is, they must be interpreted and articulated as such by members of society. This involves a complex, often contentious, social process through which the nature of the collective injury is described, victims and perpetrators are identified and consequences are meted out. The principal mechanism for this process is narration, and usually there are numerous incompatible narratives being put forward by competing social groups in an effort to establish the accepted version of the event in question. These narratives can be communicated through myriad modes of discourse, including political speeches, news articles, religious sermons, academic works, casual conversations, films and, of course, literature. Indeed, literature often plays an outsized role in its ability to represent and broadcast trauma at the cultural level. In his seminal book on the cultural trauma of American slavery, Ron Eyerman explores the literature of writers including Zora Hurston, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison; in doing this, Eyerman highlights the ways in which these writers’ works offer differing accounts of black American collective identity visà-vis slavery and how these accounts lead either away from or toward cultural trauma (Eyerman 2001). The critical point is that this mediated, narrated nature of cultural trauma reveals that such traumas are “made, not born” (Smelser 2004a: 37). While those who are engaged in empirical studies based on the concept of cultural trauma have often written as though they are all working within a single research paradigm, it does not mean they have taken this paradigm to be monolithic. While they would all accept the description of cultural trauma as set out above, there is still considerable difference of opinion regarding how it ought to be applied. For example, Boersema (2013) argues that there should be greater attention paid to the emotional experiences of individuals and to how social position, including race, class and gender, causes cultural trauma to be differentially experienced. Ron Eyerman, one of the original creators of the theory of cultural trauma, puts up some resistance to the theory’s constructivist tendencies, arguing for a more “realist” perspective on the emotional responses to traumatic events (Eyerman 2012, 2019). In Bernhard Giesen’s elaboration of a “latency period”, he suggests a much closer adherence to a psychoanalytic model than is typically followed in cultural trauma research (Giesen 2004a, 2004b). Furthermore, these three scholars at times invert the larger trend toward focusing solely on the victims of injustice. Instead, in some cases they delineate and explore a type of cultural trauma that is unique to those who commit acts of oppression and mass murder – a “trauma of the perpetrator” (Giesen 2004a, 2004b; Boersema 2013; Eyerman 2019; see also McGlothlin, Chapter 9, this volume). Inge Schmidt (2013) disputes the commonplace notion that traumatic events must occur, if not suddenly, then within discrete temporal bounds. She argues that there are “perpetual traumas” that are oriented toward a danger that is yet to come (e.g. injury or death as a result of drunk driving). Because the threat of certain types of suffering is always present, the resulting trauma is ongoing and indefinite. The forward-looking element of perpetual traumas also challenges the scholarly bias toward what Schmidt calls “retrospective traumas”, traumas that are understood to have already occurred (see also Chapter 25 by Craps and Chapter 32 by Teittinen in this volume). In her work on the racist acquittal of Emmett Till’s murderers, Angela Onwuachi-Willig (2016) questions the assumption that cultural traumas must be the result of an extraordinary event, one that defies expectations. Rather, she argues for the existence of a “trauma of the routine”, a cultural trauma that can occur even when routines are simply reaffirmed (e.g. that black Americans are oppressed by a race-based hierarchy). And finally, abandoning the 46

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requirement for direct human injury altogether, Mira Debs (2012) develops a “cultural trauma of objects”, one in which cultural trauma is produced in response to the damage or destruction of totemic items (e.g. world heritage sites, sacred objects, highly-valued works of art), as opposed to the loss of human life. With all these different perspectives on cultural trauma, it is no wonder Giuseppe Sciortino entitled his recent review of the concept in the plural: “Cultural Traumas” (Sciortino 2018). However, the primary innovations within most of these “cultural traumas” are still considered by their authors to fall under the same theoretical rubric. My claim is that there is a much deeper divide running through the heart of what is generally assumed to be a single theory, that in fact a conceptual speciation has occurred whereby two distinct theories of cultural trauma have evolved, theories that describe wholly different social phenomena. The importance of recognizing this distinction is that it leads to different social diagnoses. In other words, scholars who apply the theory of cultural trauma to the social world might reach opposite conclusions on such a foundational question as whether cultural trauma has occurred in a particular society, and they might reach those opposite conclusions based not on the empirical evidence, but for no other reason than that they are unwittingly applying two different theories of cultural trauma.

The theory of traumatic events For the sake of distinguishing the two theories of cultural trauma, I will refer to one as the theory of traumatic events and the other as the theory of traumatized societies. The theory of traumatic events focuses on the discursive struggle over the meaning of an event. In that struggle, various narratives claiming to accurately represent the truth of the event are put forward by different groups. In order for the event to be coded as “culturally traumatic”, there are several criteria that must be met: (1) the struggle over the event’s meaning must be significantly widespread throughout a society, (2) a narrative that frames the event as catastrophic must emerge as the most widely accepted way of understanding the event, and (3) this accepted narrative must become part of the collective memory of the social group (Alexander 2004). Scholars working within the field of cultural trauma often refer to this contentious process as a “trauma drama”, a play of forces contending with one another to establish a dominant narrative of an event as either traumatic or mundane. To see what an application of the theory of traumatic events looks like, we can look at any number of empirical case studies. Onwuachi-Willig applies this version of cultural trauma theory when she analyses the aftermath of the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy killed by two white men in Mississippi. She concludes that as a result of the allwhite jury’s acquittal of the murderers, African Americans suffered a cultural trauma. And she supports this claim by arguing that the concept’s criteria were met: “All four components of a master narrative for cultural trauma, as defined by Alexander, [were present …] after the acquittal of Milam and Bryant [i.e. the murderers]” (Onwuachi-Willig 2016: 344). These “four components” comprise the establishment of the following: the nature of the pain, the nature of the victim, the relation of the trauma victim to the wider audience and the attribution of responsibility (Alexander 2004: 12–15). In the meaning struggle that followed the acquittal, the event was narrated as a “trauma”, but the collective identity of African Americans was unchanged. In fact, the collective identity was reaffirmed: the “public discourse … about the meaning of the routine harm, [consisted] of public or official affirmation of the subordinated group’s marginal status” (Onwuachi-Willig 2016: 346). Onwuachi-Willig reiterates this finding in the following: 47

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For African Americans, continued stability meant exactly what the acquittal of Milam and Bryant had resulted in: a reminder to all black people that they were not part of the country’s or state’s core identity and that the laws of the nation and the state did not exist to protect them. (Onwuachi-Willig 2016: 347) As I will demonstrate below, the fact that the African American collective identity was not significantly revised in light of the traumatic event means that this historical case would not have been deemed a cultural trauma had the researcher been working with the traumatized societies iteration of cultural trauma theory. An application of the theory of traumatic events similar to Onwuachi-Willig’s can be found in Zhukova’s work on the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union. In summarizing the theory of cultural trauma she deploys in her analysis, Zhukova explains that cultural trauma is linked to a struggle over meaning in a public sphere about the nature of the pain, victims, and perpetrators. Trauma reaches a cultural level when questions about responsibility are raised in the public sphere: who or what can be blamed for causing the calamity, and who can be responsible for dealing with its aftermath? (Zhukova 2016: 336) Thus, in the case of Chernobyl, a narrative struggle played out in the public sphere after the catastrophe, a struggle that identified the nature of the pain, the identity of victims and ultimately the “construction of responsibility” (Zhukova 2016: 333). Zhukova states that a cultural trauma is created when “the responsibility for the causes and subsequent mismanagement of a traumatic occurrence is addressed in the national public sphere through a moral framework” (333). But again, just as in the previous example, there is no discussion of a need to re-narrate and re-establish a fragmented collective identity; indeed, collective identity is left relatively unscathed and unchanged in the wake of the disaster. The body of work that falls under the rubric of cultural trauma provides many examples of the implicit use of the theory of traumatic events. In her elaboration of the cultural trauma suffered by the Italian people after an earthquake in 1997 badly damaged the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi – and importantly, the Basilica’s fourteenth-century frescoes by the Renaissance master, Giotto – Debs states that in the public discourse, the “Basilica was quickly coded as the central site of symbolic injury” (Debs 2012: 482) and that “the trauma narrative centred on the frescoes” (482). Debs makes the point that in the event of damage to or destruction of a totemic object, “its loss becomes the trauma” (480). What’s more, because Debs is implicitly employing the theory of traumatic events, she can assert that “the cultural trauma of the Basilica lasted two years” (489); in other words, the traumatic event lasted for two years because the discourse about the nature of the symbolic injury – the trauma drama – lasted for two years. In Debs’s study there is no claim that the Italians felt compelled to change their collective identity in response to the earthquake. In Schmidt’s research on how ever-present risk can become traumatic, she writes that “perpetual traumas are ongoing, random, tragic events that plague everyday life – such as drunk driving, incurable diseases, or global terrorism” (Schmidt 2013: 243; emphasis added). In the case of drunk driving, Schmidt argues that the organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving “has successfully anchored their trauma narrative in the public eye” (252). The traumatic events version of cultural trauma Schmidt applies to this case “explains how individuals 48

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and societies interpret and understand their deepest fears and emotions”, and it does this in a way similar to what we have seen highlighted in the previous examples. The only difference here is that in Schmidt’s case, the traumatic event has not yet occurred. Instead, what she describes is how the dread of a future traumatic event leads to a trauma drama, the struggle to define the nature of the injury, the identity of the victim and perpetrator and the attribution of responsibility. The collective identity of the affected group (in this case, American society) is left intact.

The theory of traumatized societies In the theory of traumatized societies, the initial analytical steps are the same as those of the theory of traumatic events; however, in the case of traumatized societies, these steps – the trauma drama regarding which narrative will become the accepted version of the event – become repositioned. In the theory of traumatized societies, the struggle to define the nature of the injury, the identity of the victim and perpetrator and the attribution of responsibility is not the main event, but rather the play-within-the play. In other words, the trauma drama becomes a mere scene (albeit a critical one) in the society’s emergent, overarching narrative of collective identity. In determining whether a collectivity has been traumatized, the theory of traumatized societies examines whether the group in question has – in light of the socially constructed traumatic event – felt compelled to reconstruct its collective identity. In fact, from the traumatized societies perspective, this process of reconstructing society’s collective identity is the foremost factor regarding whether or not cultural trauma has obtained. As Eyerman and Sciortino put it, “a central aspect of the cultural trauma process is the attempt to re-narrate and reestablish collective identity” (Eyerman and Sciortino 2020: 209). And this factor, this “central aspect”, is one that, as we have seen in the preceding examples, is absent in social analyses that apply the theory of traumatic events. That the re-narrating of collective identity is the decisive factor in the theory of traumatized societies is not surprising, for it is the fundamental analogue with psychological trauma on which cultural trauma is based. To see this, we can point to the fact that over the course of an individual’s life, he or she will have many negative experiences, and some of these will be quite catastrophic. And of course, some number of these negative experiences will be etched into the individual’s memory, never to be forgotten. However, this fact alone – that a terrible event is not forgotten – is not sufficient to qualify it as psychological trauma. So while we often use the word “traumatic” to describe life’s many disappointing events (e.g. “I’ve overcooked the soufflé!”), this ordinary usage is not an argument for the clinical understanding of trauma. Instead, psychological trauma occurs as a response to an event (Caruth 1995: 4). And in the case of the theory of traumatized societies, the “event” that is responded to is a socially-mediated representation, a narrative construction. Put differently, if the original analogy from individual to cultural trauma is to hold, the public meaning struggle that defines a traumatic event is not a response to an event – it is the event. A society can be considered traumatized when, in response to this event, its collective identity [becomes] significantly revised. This identity revision means that there will be a searching re-remembering of the collective past, for memory is not only social and fluid but deeply connected to the contemporary sense of the self. Identities are continuously constructed and secured not only by facing the present and future but also by reconstructing the collectivity’s earlier life. (Alexander 2004: 22) 49

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Note that in this description of cultural trauma, Alexander asserts that when such trauma occurs, the collective identity will undergo significant revision, re-remembering and reconstruction. The research decision that leads toward either of the two distinct theories of cultural trauma – traumatic events or traumatized societies – hinges precisely on how the analyst interprets this significant revision, re-remembering and reconstruction of collective identity. Up until this decision point, the two theories are analytically identical. They both see cultural trauma as a “sociological process that defines a painful injury to the collectivity, establishes the victim, attributes responsibility, and distributes the ideal and material consequences” (Alexander 2004: 22). But once this is established, it is this crucial interpretation that will determine which path one follows. If one is content to allow this significant revision, reremembering and reconstruction of collective identity to mean simply that the event becomes a more-or-less permanent part of a society’s collective memory, then one will have settled on the theory of traumatic events. However, if one chooses a stronger interpretation of this response, one will have adopted the theory of traumatized societies. An instructive case of what this looks like in empirical research on cultural trauma is Volker Heins and Andreas Langenohl’s analysis of the Allied bombing of Dresden during the Second World War. In spite of the devastating conflagration and loss of life – an event that “clearly represents a historical instance of massive collective suffering” (Heins and Langenohl 2013: 21) – the authors argue that “the memory of the bombing war has not been turned into a national or ‘cultural trauma’” (4). From the perspective of the theory of traumatic events, the only way the bombing should fail to register as a cultural trauma is if it had either not been narrated as an instance of massive collective suffering or if it had been more or less forgotten. Yet this indelible memory of suffering in Germany’s collective memory is exactly what Heins and Langenohl assert: “images of the bombings and their human consequences are deeply ingrained in the political culture” (22). Instead, the authors argue that the reason the bombing “does not point to an ongoing cultural trauma process” (21) is because it is not an event that “fundamentally shapes the collective identity of modern-day Germans” (21); specifically, it has not been an “identitychanging event” (4). In other words, the reason they claim that the Allied bombing of Dresden failed to become a cultural trauma is because they use the theory of traumatized societies rather than the theory of traumatic events. The use of the theory of traumatized societies is ubiquitous in cultural trauma research projects. In her exploration of the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, Gülay Türkmen-Dervisoglu argues that “The assassination had undermined one of the fundamental tenets of Turkish national identity – the benevolence of Turks – and tore the national fabric” (Türkmen-Dervisoglu 2013: 684). In this way, “the idea of ‘Turkishness’ was brought up for public debate and reflection”, and as a result of the “fervent discussion of the meaning of Turkishness, the assassination initiated a cultural trauma” (675). Similarly, in the examination of another assassination – that of Mahatma Gandhi – Debs claims that because “cultural traumas influence national identity” (Debs 2013: 3), the assassination generated a cultural trauma, for it produced “a case of change and contestation in national identity” (2). And finally, Neil Smelser asserts that the cultural trauma associated with the 9/11 attacks on the United States resulted in the “sense that American identity had been altered fundamentally” (Smelser 2004b: 267). Throughout Jacob Boersema’s study of the cultural trauma of apartheid as experienced by Afrikaners living in post-apartheid South Africa, he states explicitly that the traumatic process is “about cultural and identity change” (Boersema 2013: x) and emphasizes that the trauma “destabilizes worldviews and shapes new ones” (234). He argues that within a traumatized society, “cultural habits have to be unknit and rewoven” (xiv) and asserts that the collectivity must “reconsider who [they] are as a volk or people” (xiii). Summing up his 50

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claims, Boersema explains that Afrikaners “share the common challenge of negotiating and contesting the cultural meaning of being Afrikaner after apartheid” (243). In much the same way, when Alexander and Rui Gao examine whether the emerging awareness and public discourse in contemporary China around the Nanking massacre presages the birth of a cultural trauma, they explore the “current, highly fraught process of negotiating and constructing a new collective Chinese identity” (Alexander and Gao 2012: 598). They remark that in light of the erosion of Chinese communist cultural foundations, the focus on the massacre “marks a response to deeper concerns about collective identity” (598) and wonder whether “the story of the massacre harbors the potential for constructing a new traumatic history for the Chinese nation, whereby a post-Communist and more nationalist collective identity is coming into being?” (598). And in a final set of examples, Eyerman and Sciortino explain in the conclusion to their edited volume that “For any event or series of events to result in cultural trauma, various factors have to align in a process that incorporates […] the search for a new collective identity” (Eyerman and Sciortino 2020: 208). True to this theoretical position, one of the contributing authors in Eyerman and Sciortino’s book asserts that France was traumatized by the Algerian War, for “The Algerian War entailed fundamental changes to the conception of French nationhood and national identity” (Choi 2020: 142). And another trio of contributing authors in the aforementioned book describe how, based on the same criteria that France is deemed traumatized, Portugal is not. The return to the metropole of some half million Portuguese citizens living in the country’s colonies did not instigate a cultural trauma: “This durable disruption of the national identity narrative, by confrontation with the traumatic experience of retornados, did not happen in Portugal” (Pires et al. 2020: 201).

Conclusion In his classic analysis of fiction and the human experience of time, Frank Kermode (2000 [1966]) explains how when we reach the conclusion of a narrative, we understand everything that led up to it a bit differently; we see it in a new light. It is as though the ending changes the past, rewrites it. We might say the same thing about a traumatized society. When a trauma narrative becomes the accepted understanding of an event, a new sense of “who we really were all along” dawns on the group. At the national level, this new understanding amounts to a significant “reconstruction of national identity” (Alexander 2004: 23). This narrative reconstruction is necessary, for the traumatic event is inherently unassimilable (Caruth 1996). That is to say, a traumatic event is traumatic precisely because it does not “fit” within the collective identity of the affected group. The collective response, then, is to re-narrate the group’s self-understanding in such a way as to make the trauma comprehensible – to assimilate it into the collective identity by recasting that identity. Giesen calls attention to this revision of collective identity by pointing to the cultural trauma suffered by Germany after their defeat in the Second World War: “Nazi Germany is a paradigm case of a society whose members imagined themselves as triumphant heroes but – after the collapse of its rule – had to realize that they had been perpetrators” (Giesen 2004b: 3). In this way the eventual recasting of its collective identity enabled a traumatized German society to make sense of their defeat – to assimilate the traumatic event. Both theories of cultural trauma accept the idea that the trauma in question “is not the result of a group experiencing pain. It is the result of this acute discomfort entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” (Alexander 2004: 10). But what does “entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” mean? The answer to this question – the same question we asked above regarding what it is to significantly revise 51

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a society’s collective identity – is the razor’s edge that separates the two theories of cultural trauma. The theory of traumatic events answers by asserting that it means an indelible mark on the group’s collective memory, while the theory of traumatized societies answers by asserting that it means not only an indelible mark on the group’s collective memory, but also a significant revision of its collective identity. The former understanding is quantitative; it augments collective identity by adding another memory to the store. The latter understanding is qualitative; it transforms the nature of the entire collective identity. Another place where we can see this ambiguity play out is in the application of the theory’s central metaphor. Cultural trauma is regularly described as a “tear in the social fabric”. Eyerman makes this explicit when he writes that a “cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric” (Eyerman 2004: 61). In this description, the “fabric” is understood to mean the collective identity of a social group. In a similar way, Türkmen-Dervisoglu describes how “the assassination [of Hrant Dink] tore the social fabric” (Türkmen-Dervisoglu 2013: 683) of “Turkish national identity” (684). Both of these examples are drawn from research projects that apply the theory of traumatized societies, and in both cases it is clear that “social fabric” is a metaphor for the society’s collective identity. Eyerman, Madigan and Ring spell this out when they assert that “A cultural trauma is a discursive response to a tear in the social fabric, occurring when the foundations of established collective identity are shaken” (Eyerman et al. 2017: 13). On the other hand, in her exploration of the cultural trauma of objects, Debs describes how “the damage to the Basilica [of St Francis of Assisi] powerfully affected the ‘social fabric’ of the Italian public” (Debs 2012: 482), and Onwuachi-Willig, in her work on the trauma of the routine, describes how the act of two black witnesses testifying in open court against two white male defendants “tore at the social fabric, which, though oppressive for African Americans, had once held these Southern societies together” (Onwuachi-Willig 2016: 342). In this second pair of examples, the scholars are employing the theory of traumatic events, and the “social fabric” is a metaphor for the status quo of public discourse. In other words, from this perspective the claim that a traumatic event “tears the social fabric” means that public discourse becomes agitated and focused on the struggle over meaning. This social cathexis is at the heart of the creation of the traumatic event – the trauma drama – but the ambiguity of this oft-cited metaphor obscures the fundamental differences between the two theories of cultural trauma. It is an accident of language that the term “trauma” has come to be used to describe both an injury and the source of that injury: both the effect and its cause. And while this accident is inconsequential in ordinary usage, research in the social sciences would do well to be chary of such accidents. When we ask, as Eyerman, Alexander and Butler Breese do, “Why do some events get coded as traumatic and others that seem equally painful and dramatic do not?” (Eyerman et al. 2013), a less-than-ideal answer is: “Because researchers unwittingly apply the term cultural trauma to denote two totally different social phenomena.”

Bibliography Alexander, J. (2004) “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma”, in J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1–30. Alexander, J. and Gao, R. (2012) “Remembrance of Things Past: Cultural Trauma, the ‘Nanking Massacre,’ and Chinese Identity”, in J. Alexander, R. Jacobs and P. Smith (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, 583–609. Boersema, J. (2013) Afrikaner, Nevertheless: Stigma, Shame, and the Sociology of Cultural Trauma, PhD Dissertation, Amsterdam: Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research.

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Theories of cultural trauma Caruth, C. (1995) “Introduction”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–12. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Choi, S. E. (2020) “Pied-Noir Trauma and Identity in Postcolonial France, 1962–2010”, in R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds) The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, New York: Palgrave, 137–68. Debs, M. (2012) “The Suffering of Symbols: Giotto Frescoes and the Cultural Trauma of Objects”, Cultural Sociology 7(4): 479–94. ———. (2013) “Using Cultural Trauma: Gandhi’s Assassination, Partition, and Secular Nationalism in Post-independence India”, Nations and Nationalism 19(4): 635–53. Erikson, K. (1976) Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood, New York: Simon and Schuster. Eyerman, R. (2001) Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2004) “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Foundation of African American Identity”, in J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 60–111. ———. (2012) “Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration”, in J. Alexander, R. Jacobs and P. Smith (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, 564–82. ———. (2019) Memory, Trauma, and Identity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Eyerman, R., Alexander, J. and Butler Breese, E. (eds) (2013) Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering, Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Eyerman, R., Madigan, T. and Ring, M. (2017) “Cultural Trauma, Collective Memory and the Vietnam War”, Croatian Political Science Review 54(1–2): 11–31. Eyerman, R. and Sciortino, G. (2020) “Conclusion”, in R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds) The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, New York: Palgrave, 205–28. Giesen, B. (2004a) “The Trauma of Perpetrators”, in J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 112–54. ———. (2004b) Triumph and Trauma, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Heins, V. and Langenohl, A. (2013) “A Fire That Doesn’t Burn? The Allied Bombing of Germany and the Cultural Politics of Trauma”, in R. Eyerman, J. Alexander and E. Butler Breese (eds) Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 3–26. Kermode, F. (2000 [1966]) The Sense of an Ending, New York: Oxford University Press. Neal, A. (1998) National Trauma and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century, New York: M. E. Sharpe. Onwuachi-Willig, A. (2016) “The Trauma of the Routine: Lessons on Cultural Trauma from the Emmett Till Verdict”, Sociological Theory 34(4): 335–57. Pires, R. P., Delaunay, M. and Peixoto, J. (2020) “Trauma and the Portuguese Repatriation: A Confined Collective Identity”, in R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds) The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, New York: Palgrave, 169–204. Schmidt, I. (2013) “Perpetual Trauma and Its Organizations: Mothers against Drunk Driving and Drunk Driving Revisited”, Memory Studies 7(2): 239–53. Sciortino, G. (2018) “Cultural Traumas”, in J. Hall, L. Grindstaff and M.-C. Lo (eds) Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 135–43. Smelser, N. (2004a) “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma”, in J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 31–59. ———. (2004b) “September 11, 2001, as Cultural Trauma”, in J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 264–82. Türkmen-Dervisoglu, G. (2013) “Coming to Terms with a Difficult Past: The Trauma of the Assassination of Hrant Dink and its Repercussions on Turkish National Identity”, Nations and Nationalism 19(4): 674–92. Woods, E. (2019) “Cultural Trauma: Ron Eyerman and the Founding of a New Research Paradigm”, American Journal of Cultural Sociology 7(18): 1–15. Zhukova, E. (2016) “From Ontological Security to Cultural Trauma: The Case of Chernobyl in Belarus and Ukraine”, Acta Sociologica 59(4): 332–46.

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5 TRAUMA AND CULTURAL MEMORY STUDIES Rosanne Kennedy

Introduction There are many ways of approaching the topic of trauma and cultural memory studies, not least because the “and” serves as a blank invitation to bring together two distinctive fields of scholarship, with their own histories, trajectories and methods, and consider how they inform the study of literature. Trauma theory, as it has come to be known, and cultural memory studies emerged – in their current form as interdisciplinary fields that are important for literary studies – in the final decades of the last century, as critics were seeking ways to bring the insights of poststructuralism into “real world” contexts. Whereas history is oriented to the past, a fundamental premise of both trauma theory and cultural memory studies is that “the act of remembering is always in and of the present” (Huyssen 2003: 3). The Holocaust, at the centre of transnational public remembrance in the 1990s, figured as a paradigm case and “limit event” in the formation of these fields. A series of events characterized by extreme and calculated violence and genocide in the heart of Europe, the Holocaust defied and undermined accepted understandings of the progress and humanism of Western civilization, and instigated a profound reconsideration of ethics, knowledge, memory and witnessing. Originating in the United States, literary trauma theory combined the insights of psychoanalysis and deconstruction to explore the linguistic markers, including gaps and absences in language, that characterized survivor testimonies, literature and film that sought to bear witness to and remember the Holocaust. By contrast, cultural memory studies emerged from discrete intellectual traditions and contexts in France, Germany, England and the United States, which were in the 1990s responding to the legacy of the Holocaust in and for national memory. Trauma theory and cultural memory studies intersect, but do not necessarily converge, in their shared concern with the remembrance of traumatic histories and events. Nonetheless, their differences are instructive. Trauma theory focuses on identifying the symptoms and traces of trauma in the past and the present and elucidating how traumatic memory disrupts the ability to bear witness to events (Felman and Laub 1992) and to narrate the past using familiar narrative sequencing of beginning, middle and end (White 1996). While a concern with the remembrance of traumatic histories has also been ubiquitous in memory studies, scholars have rightly argued that the study of cultural memory cannot be subsumed under 54

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the sign of trauma. As Andreas Huyssen argued at the turn of the millennium, “to collapse memory into trauma […] would unduly confine our understanding of memory, marking it too exclusively in terms of pain, suffering, and loss. It would deny human agency and lock us into compulsive repetition” (Huyssen 2003: 8). Although concepts of witnessing and testimony inevitably involved the faculty of memory, theorizing memory was not a core concern for trauma theorists. By contrast, cultural memory scholars have developed systematic approaches to the study of “memory in culture” (Erll 2011a; J. Assmann 2011 [2007]), including literature as a medium of cultural memory (A. Assmann 2011 [1999]). In recent years, however, there have been explicit calls for memory studies to move beyond violence, trauma and suffering to focus on futurity (Crownshaw et al. 2010) and to recover memories of hope and optimism in commemorative practices (Rigney 2018).

Trauma theory: literary approaches The origins of the discourse of trauma are typically traced back to the diagnosis of nervous disorders in the nineteenth century such as “railway spine” (Luckhurst 2008: 21–6). It was, however, Freud’s hypotheses concerning the unconscious and the workings of repression that laid the foundations for the medical and popular diffusion of the concept. In the twentieth century, research into the experiences of “shell-shock” in the First World War, the psychological aftereffects of genocide and dislocation following the Second World War and the post-traumatic experiences of returning Vietnam war veterans furthered understandings of trauma; in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association recognized the new diagnostic category of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the early 1990s, Judith Herman drew into a framework of “trauma and recovery” events as diverse as child sexual abuse, domestic violence and political terrorism (Herman 1992). While informed by these developments in the clinical symptomatology of trauma, what became known as “trauma theory” emerged through a deep engagement with literary theory. Trauma theorists in the 1990s drew on psychoanalysis and deconstruction to develop novel approaches to studying the ongoing effects of difficult histories in the present, with a focus on how they were remembered, represented and transmitted via cultural texts. Reconceiving of familiar concepts such as testimony and witnessing for a post-Holocaust era, trauma theory provided a rich body of theories and frameworks for reading cultural texts. The idea that literature could be read as a kind of testimony to unspeakable experience provided a new critical paradigm. Historian Dominick LaCapra’s elaboration of the psychoanalytic concepts of “acting out” and “working through” proved invaluable in discussions of the different ways in which national groups responded to legacies of violence (LaCapra 2001), which critics extended to readings of literature. This collective body of work proved to be enormously influential in the humanities, especially in literary and film studies, but also in the social sciences and law. For many critics who wanted to move on from the poststructuralist critique of representation, trauma theory held the promise of a mode of reading and listening that seemed especially attuned to questions of ethics and justice. Yet, over time, it became increasingly evident that certain presumptions of trauma theory – not only about trauma, but also about textuality, aesthetics, narrative form and the act of reading – were limiting for critics who wanted to explore the ways in which literary texts from a range of non-Western contexts and experiences bear witness to suffering, conflict and the aftermath of violence. For instance, post-colonial critics turned to Frantz Fanon’s (Fanon 1965 [1961]) work to develop approaches to trauma, racism and colonialism (Kennedy 2008; Khanna 2008; Rothberg 2009; Craps 2013). 55

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One of the most influential works of trauma theory, which provided a foundation for the new field, was Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992). Inspired by large-scale projects of recording survivor testimonies such as the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Felman and Laub framed their inquiry into the difficulty of comprehending the Holocaust and transmitting knowledge to future generations through a focus on witnessing and testimony. They innovatively reconceptualized testimony through a psychoanalytic lens, proposing that “one does not have to possess or own the truth, in order to […] bear witness to it […] the speaking subject constantly bears witness to a truth […] that is, essentially, not available to its own speaker” (Felman and Laub 1992: 15). In cases of extreme violence, testimony should not be conceived as a “simple” narrative account of an already digested experience that could be recalled on demand. Rather, it should be understood as a demanding and affecting process through which new knowledge emerges. For instance, in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film, Shoah (1985), survivors unexpectedly reveal deeply buried memories in the process of responding to Lanzmann’s intrusive questions. Shoah exemplifies the way in which “the concerns with trauma radiated out from a multinational, ever more ubiquitous Holocaust discourse […] energized […] by the intense interest in witness and survivor testimony” (Huyssen 2003; see also LaCapra 1998: 11). Felman later pursued these insights in a study of law’s encounter with trauma, which she mediated through literature (Felman 2002). Although testimony clearly emerges from individual acts of remembering, systematically articulating what was meant by “memory” and theorizing the transfer between individual psychic memory processes and cultural inscriptions of these processes was not a core concern of trauma theory. Felman, for instance, proposed that “[a]s a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by […] acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition” (Felman, in Felman and Laub 1992: 5). While this is a useful insight for analysing literary and cinematic texts, it does not clarify how individual memories of traumatic events contribute to the construction of collective memory. Not surprisingly, at the turn of the millennium critics lamented that “Nothing is more important for trauma discourse than the faculty of memory, yet nothing is so confused and confusing as the concepts of memory and their deployment [ … in] the discourse at this time” (Douglass and Vogler 2003: 14). Nonetheless, concepts of trauma, witnessing and testimony pervaded memory studies scholarship as they provided new avenues for studying the transmission of memory from private to public sphere. Additionally, Cathy Caruth’s idiom of the “belatedness” of trauma seeded new critical paradigms for analysing traumatic memory in cultural texts. Trauma challenges our understanding of how “normal” memory works. Memories of events that threaten our bodily and mental integrity resist being assimilated into a coherent life story and are repressed; they return, sometimes years later, as intrusive flashbacks, nightmares and fragments. As she explained: the pathology consists […solely] in the structure of its experience […] the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatised is […] to be possessed by an image or an event. (Caruth 1995: 4–5, see also, 1996: 1–24) Caruth rejected the idea that post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a neurotic illness stemming from the internal psyche alone, proposing instead that it results from an external 56

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event. “The traumatized”, she proposed, “carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (Caruth 1995: 5). This formulation enabled critics to read cultural texts for the techniques they used to convey the temporality of traumatic memory, returning characters to the scene of past events and in the process overwhelming and fragmenting the unity of character, plot and event. From a literary perspective one of the limiting factors of trauma theory was its antipathy to narrative. Observing that testimonies of trauma are fragmentary, non-linear and marked by absences and gaps, Felman argued that testimony should not be understood as “a completed statement, a totalizable account of events” since a coherent narrative is precisely what trauma blocks (Felman, in Felman and Laub 1992: 5). LaCapra (1998) maintained that redemptive narratives risked “fetishizing” trauma, and Hayden White (1996) proposed that modernist fiction was the literary form most suited to registering the explosive effects of trauma on representation, in contrast to realist forms such as the nineteenth-century novel. The anti-narrative tendency of trauma theory limited the kinds of literature that critics studied for insights into trauma (Meretoja 2018) and led to criticisms that trauma theory was Eurocentric (Bennett and Kennedy 2003; Craps 2013).

Trauma as a trope While psychoanalytic trauma theory dominated the field, others took a cue from Foucault and approached trauma as a discourse (Farrell 1998; Fassin and Rechtman 2009). For instance, Kirby Farrell (1998) articulated the way in which trauma functioned as a trope. He argued that when trauma moves from the psychiatric clinic to culture more broadly, as it did in the 1990s, its explanatory powers come to the fore: “whatever the physical distress […] trauma is also psychocultural, because the injury entails interpretation of the injury” (Farrell 1998: 7). At stake in the spread of trauma as a cultural keyword is how authoritative institutions and discourses interpret an event or injury: “Cultures not only report but classify traumatic events: a train wreck may be a ‘catastrophe’ or a ‘tragedy’ or merely an ‘accident’” (16). When an event is described as “traumatic” claims are being made about the deep and ongoing psychological impact on the affected population, including future generations, which raise issues of responsibility and reparation. Importantly Farrell’s insights into the ways in which the meanings of trauma are transferred from clinic to culture identified the metaphoric uses of trauma, which were widespread but not widely acknowledged at the time. Approaches that acknowledged the metaphoric dimensions of “trauma” tended not to be as prescriptive as trauma theory, which favoured modernist literary forms, and enabled the insights of trauma theory to be applied to a broader body of literature (Farrell 1998; Luckhurst 2008). An example of the status of trauma as a cultural keyword is the common usage of phrases such as “traumatic events” and “traumatic histories”. The adjective “traumatic” transfers meaning from the individual experience of PTSD to the events that produced the symptoms and their presumed effects on the collective body. For instance, to describe 9/11 as a “traumatic event” is to posit that the American public at large was traumatized by it. Such metaphoric transfers are one of the most contentious features of trauma theory, precisely because they presume an analogy between the individual psyche and the collective. Wulf Kansteiner (2004) argues that this kind of transfer is a “category error” – indeed, the idea of “cultural trauma” misleadingly correlates the level of the individual and the collective and creates confusion about how the effects of violent histories and events live on in cultures in 57

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the present. And yet, metaphors such as “traumatic event”, “post-traumatic culture”, “cultural trauma” and “postmemory” (Hirsch 2012) convey the shocking effects of an event in the present and its after-effects on future generations in ways that other concepts do not. Such concepts have enabled an impressive body of innovative work on the transmission of trauma in the present. Being precise about the metaphoric status of such terms and about the analogies being drawn between the individual and the collective is crucial, however, for avoiding confusion. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that the value of trauma as an interpretive tool may find more purchase in humanities than in the social sciences.

Waltz with Bashir: trauma, memory, responsibility A fundamental value of trauma theory was its re-working and energizing of familiar concepts such as testimony and witness, which it brought together with newer concepts such as trauma. Together, these seeded novel analytic frameworks which provided new insights into the construction and transmission of traumatic memory in cultural texts. For instance, the notion that trauma is manifested belatedly provides the premise for Ari Folman’s autobiographical film, Waltz with Bashir (2008). The film narrates the character Ari’s efforts to remember his experiences twenty-five years earlier, as a young Israeli soldier in the Lebanon War of 1982, and what he did during the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp. The film opens with a memorable scene in which Ari’s friend recalls a recurrent nightmare in which he is hounded by a pack of dogs; during the war, unable to kill humans, he was sent into towns to kill the dogs. Realizing that he has no memories of the war, Ari attempts to recover his lost memories by interviewing his peers. Using techniques of digital animation, Folman represents the belated and intrusive temporality of nightmares and traumatic flashbacks, and their hallucinogenic qualities, which would be unachievable using documentary footage. The film shows Ari plunged back into the war through a surreal, recurrent nightmare in which he walks out of the ocean, naked, a rifle slung over his shoulder, and approaches the scene of the massacre. If being “possessed by an image or an event” is a symptom of post-traumatic stress, viewers understand that Ari and his peers are traumatized. His avatar in the film has to do the work of piecing this nightmare and other “bits and pieces of memory” into a coherent narrative. Through animations of his own and his peers’ nightmares and memories, the film depicts a generation of Israeli soldiers suffering delayed traumatic symptoms, thereby supporting the observation that trauma extends the category of the victim to include perpetrators (Fassin 2008). Waltz with Bashir exemplifies the ways in which the concept of trauma moves from clinic to culture to create meanings about the contested memory of an event in the present. The figure of Ari’s therapist plays a vital role here; he fulfils the function of explaining trauma to the viewer, helping Ari interpret his dreams and memory fragments and place them in a broader historical context. He explains that memory is unreliable, and that people often assume more responsibility than is warranted by falsely “remembering” their presence at events. When Ari insists that he was at the scene of the massacre, his therapist explains that his feelings of guilt about his imagined role stem from his subject position as the son of survivors of that “other” camp – Auschwitz – and that he, through the work of the unconscious, sees himself as a (Nazi) perpetrator in the Lebanon War. Critics have slammed the film, however, for its evasion of the Israel Defense Forces’ responsibility for its supporting role in the massacre. Undoubtedly, the aesthetic techniques of animation, together with the shock created by unexpected documentary footage of the massacre, are affectively compelling and sear the film into 58

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the viewer’s memory. Part of the contention is precisely that the film, through its sympathetic representation of Ari and his friends’ wounded subjectivities, positions viewers to identify with them and forget the Palestinians. Through its aesthetics, the film has been a powerful medium and carrier of cultural memory which has re-opened and ignited debate, especially within Israel, about the memory of the Lebanon War, likened to America’s Vietnam War.

Cultural memory studies Cultural Memory Studies is a dynamic multidisciplinary field that has developed rapidly since the 1980s. It has introduced methods for studying the cultural forms and media – literature, film, photography, digital media, museums, memorials – through which memory is produced, constructed and shared publicly on local, national and global scales. The foundations for the field were laid in the 1920s by the pioneering work of the French social scientist Maurice Halbwachs on the “social frameworks” of collective memory, and his German counterpart, Aby Warburg, on the role of material culture such as artworks in transmitting images, symbols and icons across generations. In the 1990s, German scholars Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann introduced their theory of cultural memory, which provided a systematic foundation for further developments in the field (J. Assmann 2011 [2007]; A. Assmann, 2011 [1999]). They identified ways in which images of the past are constructed and communicated to the public through acts of remembrance such as literature (A. Assmann 2011 [1999]), and introduced core concepts and distinctions such as “communicative memory” and “cultural memory” (J. Assmann 2008) and “canon” versus “archive” (A. Assmann 2008). In the late 1980s, Pierre Nora’s work on “lieux de mémoire” or “sites of memory” in France provided a new paradigm for studying the formation of national memory. In more recent years, however, scholars have argued for a shift from studying the “sites” to the “dynamics” of memory (Erll and Rigney 2009) – that is, how memory is kept alive through ongoing engagement and investment. For instance, museums and schools work together to embed and circulate particular memories – typically national memories of war sacrifice – by organizing student visits. Without this kind of engagement, memory becomes dead and inert. Raymond Williams once said that “culture” was one of the most contested concepts in the English language. Thus, it is worth clarifying precisely what is meant by “culture” in the phrase “cultural memory studies”. Astrid Erll (2011a) approaches “memory in culture” through a semiotic lens – that is, analyzing the use of signs, symbols, genres and other modes of communication to construct personal and collective memory (Erll 2011a: 11). “Cultural memory” is communicated through and “unthinkable without media” (113). “Statues and literature”, she reminds us, are not ‘memory’, but rather media of cultural memory, which encode information and can prompt remembering or forgetting […] archives and universities are likewise not themselves memory, but rather can serve as institutions of cultural memory, which gather, preserve, administer, and impart culturally relevant information about the past. (100, emphasis added; see also Radstone 2005) While Erll’s semiotic approach, and her distinction between literal and metaphorical uses of the term “memory” (Erll 2011a: 100), introduces much-needed conceptual clarity, Susannah Radstone importantly reminds us that culture, including memory culture, is a site of

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struggle, a grey zone (Radstone 2008: 36). In other words, how the past is represented, remembered and invested with meaning through cultural media is always under negotiation. The term “cultural memory” refers to the ways in which acts of remembering and commemorating past events in the present are mediated through cultural forms and cultural media. If there is no cultural memory without media, mediation is also crucial to this process (Erll 2011a: 4). In other words, we humans do not remember in a vacuum, we remember in a symbolically rich culture, which is in part what Halbwachs meant by the “social frameworks” of memory. Both personal and public memories are mediated. Our personal memories and even our fantasies are mediated by shared signs, symbols and meanings. For instance, in a scene in Waltz with Bashir, Ari’s friend Carmi relays a dream-memory from the war, in which a “love boat” is transporting young Israeli soldiers to Lebanon to the soundtrack of pumping rock music. Carmi becomes ill and, anxious about his masculinity, dreams that a massive naked woman comes aboard, cradles him and sails him away from the exploding ship as he lays nestled between her breasts. This scene suggests that even something as intimate as fantasy – or especially fantasy – is shaped by images, signs, symbols and their shared cultural meanings. In this way, personal memory is shaped in and by culture. On a collective level, mediation refers to the ways that cultural media are used to construct stories and images of the past that circulate publicly and shape group memory in the present. It is through media such as films, photographs, novels, memoirs, exhibitions, artworks, podcasts, digital platforms and the like that “memory” is constructed and transmitted in the public sphere. In the case of Waltz with Bashir, Folman uses the genre of digital animation to construct and communicate a personal and generational memory of the Lebanon War. This genre provides him with a degree of imaginative license in how he expresses dreams, nightmares and memories of horror and terror; it enables him to represent traumatic flashbacks in ways that a conventional “talking head” documentary would not. While “the film is still a film” and must be studied as such (Radstone 2005), it constructs and contributes to a collective memory of the war and to contested meanings about Israel’s later wars. For instance, Waltz with Bashir was showing globally in January 2009 when the Israel Defense Forces were waging a war in Gaza (“Operation Cast Lead”). Undoubtedly memories of the Lebanon War, as mediated by Waltz with Bashir and other cultural memory texts, shaped the meaning of the later war. While also acknowledging the role of mediation in the construction of cultural memory, Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith highlight the transmission of memory between cultures and across generations. As they explain: “Always mediated, cultural memory is the product of fragmentary personal and collective experiences articulated through technologies and media that shape even as they transmit memory” (Hirsch and Smith 2002: 5). Their understanding of cultural memory is informed by Paul Connerton’s notion of an “act of transfer” (Connerton 1989: 39). As with all cultural memory, it is crucial to acknowledge the role of the receiver as an agent in making meaning. The “memories” that are shared through film or photograph albums, for instance, only become “memories” once a receiver internalizes, makes sense of and in the process activates these “memories”. In this regard, films enable individuals who have no direct experience of an event to acquire what Alison Landsberg calls a “prosthetic memory” (Landsberg 2004). In other words, films such as Waltz with Bashir may enable viewers to acquire “memories” and affectively invest in events that they have never directly or personally experienced.

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Literature and cultural memory By now, it is widely recognized that literature, especially when it is remediated and adapted in other media such as film or graphic narrative, is a powerful medium and carrier of cultural memory. If, however, a film or autobiographical narrative is not, “in any simple or straightforward way ‘memory’” (Radstone 2005: 136), what do we mean when we refer to a memoir, a novel or a film as “cultural memory” or as an “act of cultural remembrance”? Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney contend that literature is a medium of cultural memory which contributes, along with other media, to shaping collective memory and how societies remember their past (Erll and Rigney 2006). They identify three roles that literature plays in the production and communication of cultural memory: (1) as a medium of remembrance; (2) as an object of remembrance; and (3) as a medium for observing the production of cultural memory (112). Additionally, Rigney identifies the central role of narrativization as a mnemonic tool which contributes significantly to cultural memory: “Stories ‘stick’. They help make particular events memorable by figuring the past in a structured way that engages the sympathies of the reader or viewer” (Rigney 2008: 347). Paradoxically, while a factual account may produce “a more historical and authentic story”, it may be less memorable and affective than a fictionalized account in which aesthetic devices enable a writer to arouse “interest in the history of other groups” (347) and thereby create “new sorts of affiliations based on […] cross-border memories” (Rigney 2004: 389). These insights can be fruitfully applied to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), which both illustrates the ways in which memories of violence produce traumatic symptoms long after the event (a medium for observing the production of cultural memory) and contributes to a collective remembrance of slavery in the present (a medium of remembrance). Beloved becomes an “object of remembrance” when it is celebrated and remembered, as a cultural memory artefact, in the present.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a portable monument to slavery Toni Morrison drew inspiration for her acclaimed novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, from the true story of Margaret Garner, which she found in an old newspaper. An escaped slave, Garner killed her baby daughter and attempted to kill her young sons when they were threatened with being returned to slavery. Mediating this event through literature, Morrison constructs the novel around the fictional mother, Sethe, and her ghostly daughter, Beloved. Sethe’s husband Halle has been killed, her sons have deserted her, and she lives with her surviving daughter Denver. Morrison sees her task, as a novelist, as imaging the rich interior life – emotions, feelings and psychology – of the slave mother. She uses the genre of a ghost story to relay to the reader some of the ways in which Sethe’s past, representative of the horrors of slavery, haunts her and her family long after the killing. The figure of the ghost, who is neither real nor unreal, provides a vehicle for conveying the ways in which this past threatens and unsettles the present. As Rigney observes, in the case of traumatic events “fictional genres and literary modes […] may […] provide the only forum available for recalling certain experiences that are difficult to bring into […] public remembrance or […] to articulate in any other way” (Rigney 2008: 348). The ghost story functions in just this way; through the figure of the ghost and other literary devices the novel gains an affective intensity that makes the story far more memorable than reciting the facts alone. Additionally, the genre of the ghost story enables Morrison to tell a story that

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conveys the traumatic after-effects of slavery including racism and racist violence, which continue to haunt the American present today. At the time Morrison published Beloved, in 1987, there was little public recognition, discussion or remembrance of slavery in the United States or transnationally. She lamented the lack of memorials, or even a “bench by the side of the road” where people could go to reflect on those whose lives were lost to the horrors of slavery (Morrison 2008 [1989]). Morrison dedicated the novel, which she describes as a “memorial”, to the memory of the “sixty million and more”. She envisions the novel as a “monument to slavery” that, through its act of literary remembrance, would spur other acts of remembrance, thereby bringing slavery into the collective memory of the American nation and, through the travels of the novel, into global memory. Morrison’s notion of Beloved as a memorial anticipates and exemplifies Ann Rigney’s productive concept of literature as a “portable monument” (Rigney 2004: 383). As she explains, literary works are “textual monuments” which, like concrete monuments, provide “fixed points of reference” that may be kept alive by being reprinted in new editions (383). At the same time, literary works morph and change, taking on new meanings in new cultural and historical environments, as they are adapted into other genres, translated into other languages and travel across cultures. As a portable monument, Beloved constructs a memory of slavery as a haunting past that has contributed to reshaping the public memory of slavery in the present, in the United States and transnationally.

Trauma and cultural memory studies: new directions In both cultural memory studies and trauma studies, the new millennium has brought new concerns and new approaches. In an increasingly globalized world, both fields have experienced pressure to develop approaches that move beyond Europe and the Global North, which in memory studies is referred to as a “transnational turn”. Both fields have also faced an imperative to shift attention from the past to the future, including the threats of climate change and the Anthropocene (Rothberg 2014). Additionally, an important new “turn” in memory studies, facilitated in part by the emergence of affect theory, is an appeal to move away from acts of remembrance focusing predominantly on traumatic histories to consider how a more diverse range of experiences, events and emotions have shaped memory cultures (Rigney 2018; Anderson and Ortner 2019). Since around 2010, cultural memory scholars have broadened their focus beyond national memory to develop new methods for studying memory as it travels across local and national borders and circulates transnationally (Assmann and Conrad 2010). Transnational and transcultural approaches emerged from a critique of “methodological nationalism” in memory studies, challenging the presumed relationship between collective memory and national identity and the assumption that the nation is the self-evident scale on which to analyse memory formations (Erll 2011b). In response, researchers have cultivated analytic optics that seek to capture flows and interactions at a level below or beyond the national and to examine “the boundaries and borders that emerge at particular historical moments” (De Cesari and Rigney 2014: 5). Memory scholars have pioneered methodologies such as “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg 2009), “connective memory” (Hirsch 2012), “global memory” (Levy and Sznaider 2006), “travelling memory” (Erll 2011b) and “globital memory” (Reading 2017) that study connections, networks and entanglements, as well as the travels of memory across borders. For example, using a multidirectional framework which has proved widely influential, Rothberg (2009) argued that memory should not be viewed through 62

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a competitive either/or frame; he shows that memories of the Holocaust facilitated rather than silenced memories of colonialism. A group of feminist scholars, working across sites in North America, South America and Europe under the rubric of “connective memory” have shown how practices of memory activism – including citizen protests such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, memorial walks and on-site performances – have circulated transnationally, thereby revealing similarities, differences and connections in the ways in which local communities respond to traumatic events (Altinay et al. 2019). These approaches continue to work with concepts of trauma but are sensitive to local developments and mediations (see Taylor 2019). Engagement with developments on a global scale has also impacted on trauma theory. Perhaps because of its grounding in psychoanalysis and its focus on the Holocaust, trauma theory was criticized for Eurocentrism and attempts have been made to develop decolonizing approaches (Khanna 2003; Craps 2013). In recent years, however, “trauma theory” has broadened beyond its origins in psychoanalysis and literary theory to become an interdisciplinary approach better described as “trauma studies”. In the Empire of Trauma (2009), anthropologists Didier Fassin and Richard Recthman used an ethnographic approach to show how trauma discourse and practices of psychotherapy have spread around the world, giving new meanings to violent and catastrophic events and newly recognising and legitimating the suffering of victims. Their Foucauldian framework introduces methods for analysing subject positions produced by trauma discourse and can fruitfully be merged with transnational memory studies to develop new approaches to reading the inscription of trauma in literature of the Global South (Kennedy 2018). While trauma theory and cultural memory studies have in the past few decades shared an interest in the after-effects of violent histories and personal suffering, and both fields have become attuned to global developments that have called for new approaches, it is less clear if and how these fields will interact closely in future. Some of the new directions in cultural memory studies have less obvious intersections with trauma theory than previous directions. For instance, there has been a turn in cultural memory towards the Anthropocene and climate change (Crownshaw 2017; Craps et al. 2018). While extinction raises issues of loss and mourning, and climate change and its disasters produce fear and shock, it is not yet clear to what extent responses will be framed through the concept of trauma and the approaches it has facilitated (Craps et al. 2018; see also Rothberg 2014; Rapson 2018). Some scholars have argued for cultural memory studies to focus on the future, rather than retain a backward-looking orientation (Crownshaw et al. 2010). Trauma studies has also engaged with questions of futurity (Buelens et al. 2014). Where potentially the most significant divergence is now occurring, however, is in calls for cultural memory studies to shift from trauma, violence and suffering to study the role of positive emotions such as hope and joy in memory cultures (Rigney 2018; Anderson and Ortner 2019). Scholars making this call recognize the continued relevance of the concept of trauma in the contemporary world but seek to develop a broader array of concepts and approaches that might provide new tools for the future. As these fields move into the future, it is worth reflecting on what they can gain from each other. Trauma studies has produced valuable insights into the ways in which memory is blocked, silenced and avoided, as well as into the indirect and fragmented paths of memory at both the personal and collective levels. New insights into the global spread of trauma discourse, as well as engagements by authors, artists and activists writing about events in the Global South as well as Global North, continue to shape the ways in which the past is remembered in the present (Altinay et al. 2019). While so many communities around the world struggle for justice and redress in response to violent histories, it would seem that the insights of trauma theory into core issues such as witnessing, testimony and memory, 63

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especially as these are mediated online, will remain vital. While trauma studies offers a genealogy of trauma and its global travels (Fassin and Rechtman 2009), cultural memory studies provides trauma studies with nuanced understandings and analyses of the production of memory and its mediation through cultural forms and genres, including digital memory cultures (Reading 2017). Undoubtedly, exciting new cross-fertilizations will continue to develop as both fields anticipate and respond to emerging realities and planetary futures.

Bibliography Altinay, A., Contrera, M. J., Hirsch, M., Howard, J., Karaca, B. and Solomon, A. (eds) (2019) Women Mobilizing Memory, New York: Columbia University Press. Anderson, T. and Ortner, J. (eds) (2019) “Introduction: Memories of Joy”, Memory Studies 12(1): 5–10. Assmann, A. (2008) “Canon and Archive”, in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 97–107. ———. (2011 [1999]) Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Arts of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Assmann, A. and Conrad, S. (2010) Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Assmann, J. (2008) “Communicative and Cultural Memory”, in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 109–18. ———. (2011 [2007]) Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, J. and Kennedy, R. (2003) “Introduction”, in J. Bennett and R. Kennedy (eds) World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–15. Buelens, G., Durrant, S. and Eaglestone, R. (eds) (2014) The Future of Trauma Theory, London: Routledge. Caruth, C. (1995) “Introduction”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–12. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Craps, S., Crownshaw, R., Wenzel, J., Kennedy, R., Colebrook, C. and Nardizzi, V. (2018) “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable”, Memory Studies 11(4): 498–515. Crownshaw, R. (2017) “Cultural Memory Studies in the Epoch of the Anthropocene”, in L. Bond, S. Craps and P. Vermeulen (eds) Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, New York: Berghahn, 242–57. Crownshaw, R., Kilby, J. and Rowland, A. (eds) (2010) The Future of Memory, New York: Berghahn Books. De Cesari, C. and Rigney, A. (2014) “Introduction”, in C. de Cesari and A. Rigney (eds) Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1–25. Douglass, A. and Vogler, T. (eds) (2003) Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, New York: Routledge. Erll, A. (2011a) Memory in Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2011b) “Travelling Memory”, Parallax 17(4): 4–18. Erll, A. and Rigney, A. (2006) “Literature and the Production of Cultural Memory: Introduction”, European Journal of English Studies 10(2): 111–15. ———. (2009) “Introduction: Cultural Memory and Its Dynamics”, in A. Erll and A. Rigney (eds) Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1–14. Fanon, F. (1965 [1961]) The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington, London: MacGibbon and Kee. Farrell, K. (1998) Post-traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fassin, D. (2008) “The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, Cultural Anthropology 23(3): 531–58. Fassin, D. and Rechtman, R. (2009) The Empire of Trauma, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Trauma and cultural memory studies Felman, S. (2002) The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery, New York: Basic Books. Hirsch, M. (2012) The Generation of Postmemory, New York: Columbia University Press. Hirsch, M. and Smith, V. (2002) “Feminism and Cultural Memory”, Signs 28(1): 1–19. Huyssen, A. (2003) Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kansteiner, W. (2004) “Genealogy of A Category Mistake: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies”, History and Theory 41(2): 179–97. Kennedy, R. (2008) “Mortgaged Futures: Trauma, Subjectivity, and the Legacies of Colonialism in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not”, Studies in the Novel 40(1–2): 86–107. ———. (2018) “Reparative Transnationalism: The Friction and Fiction of Remembering in Sierra Leone”, Memory Studies 11(3): 342–54. Khanna, R. (2003) Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Durham: Duke University Press. ———. (2008) Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation: 1830 to the Present, Stanford: Stanford University Press. LaCapra, D. (1998) History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Landsberg, A. (2004) Prosthetic Memory, New York: Columbia University Press. Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2006) The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, London: Routledge. Meretoja, H. (2018) The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morrison, T. (1987) Beloved, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. (2008 [1989]) “A Bench by the Road”, UU World 11 August 2008. www.uuworld.org/articles/ a-bench-by-road Radstone, S. (2005) “Reconceiving Binaries: The Limits of Memory”, History Workshop Journal 59: 134–50. ———. (2008) “Memory Studies: For and Against”, Memory Studies 1(1): 31–39. Rapson, J. (2018) “Refining Memory: Sugar, Oil and Plantation Tourism on Louisiana’s River Road”, Memory Studies 11(4): 498–515. Reading, A. (2017) “Globital Memory Capital: Theorizing Digital Memory Economies”, in A. Hoskins (ed.) Digital Memory Studies: Exploring Paths in Transition, London: Routledge, 205–17. Rigney, A. (2004) “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans”, Poetics Today 25(2): 361–96. ———. (2008) “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality and Morphing”, in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 345–53. ———. (2018) “Remembering Hope: Transnational Activism beyond the Traumatic”, Memory Studies 11(3): 368–80. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2014) “Beyond Tancred and Clorinda: Trauma Studies for Implicated Subjects”, in G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone (eds) The Future of Trauma Theory, London: Routledge, xi–xviii. Shoah, (1985) dir. C. Lanzmann, New Yorker Films. Taylor, D. (2019) “Traumatic Memes”, in A. Altinay, M. J. Contrera, M. Hirsch, J. Howard, B. Karaca and A. Solomon (eds) Women Mobilizing Memory, New York: Columbia University Press. Waltz With Bashir, (2008) dir. A. Folman, Bridgit Folman Film Gang. White, H. (1996) “The Modernist Event”, in V. Sobchack (ed.) The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modernist Event, London: Routledge.

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6 TESTIMONY Meg Jensen

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel (1977: 9) famously observed that “if the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet”, then “our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony”. While historically associated with legal proceedings, scholars in numerous fields now define testimony as the emblematic literary and discursive mode of the past fifty years and counting (Felman and Laub 1992; Gilmore 2017; Rak 2013; Wieviorka 2006). But to what precisely does the term “testimony” refer in relation to literature and discourse? And how might those definitions be challenged and/or disrupted in the context of witnessing that testifies to traumatic events and experiences? This chapter explores various forms of eye-witness narrative constructed and performed in the aftermath of trauma encounters, considering the complex social, biological, rhetorical, psychological and cultural networks along which such narratives must travel (Gilmore 2017; Jensen 2019a; Whitlock 2014) in order to generate and disseminate meaning and, potentially, new forms of knowledge. Throughout history, human beings have understood that there was a relationship between traumatic experiences and mental illness, and that relationship was implicit in testimonies produced by traumatized people. In 490 BC, for example, Herodotus took note of the testimony of an Athenian named Epizelos, who, after the Battle of Marathon, permanently lost “the sight of his eyes”, despite not having “received a blow in any part of his body” as a direct result of witnessing horrific scenes (Herodotus 1890: 6:117, 1–3). Similar analyses of soldiers’ post-battle testimony in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across Europe led to identification of a long-lasting event-based disorder testified to by sufferers but not predicated on physical injury called variously “soldier’s heart”, “battle fatigue” and, later, “shell-shock” (Shorter 2015: 54–5). In 1893, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud observed from the testimony of their “hysterical” female patients that their symptoms comprised “the recurrence of a physical state which the patient has experienced earlier”, a definition similar to the one used to diagnose PTSD flashbacks today (Freud, quoted in Van der Kolk et al. 1996: 30). Later, Freud developed this work into the famous “talking cure” that claimed to deactivate distressing symptoms largely through the sharing of intimate testimony. Understandings of trauma developed greatly during the First World War when psychiatrists using treatments that drew on Freud’s theories encouraged soldiers to tell the story of what had happened to them, often several times, as a way of desensitizing themselves to the stressful memory. 66

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The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, however, was not used until the late 1970s when it was developed in relation to the sufferings of many returning Vietnam War Veterans with chronic mental health problems including depression, anxiety and flashbacks. PTSD was accepted as a discrete disorder as a direct result of the work of psychiatrists who organized “rap groups” in which these veterans shared their testimonies of traumatic experience and its aftermath. At the same time, trauma in women’s lives began to be studied as women’s consciousness-raising groups helped victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse share their testimonies with one another. Alongside and indeed in response to these clinical advances in understanding trauma, testimonies of traumatic experience became part of a larger “memory boom” affecting not only the worlds of psychology and justice but history, philosophy, science and the arts. The growth of digital culture and oral history archives such as the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) increased access to first person accounts of suffering, and such testimonies took centre stage in a new wave of rights activism and cultural memorialization that continues to the present day. The publication of several major critical studies on the relation between the psychoanalytic concept of trauma and literature, philosophy, politics and history, moreover, forged the foundations of the highly interdisciplinary field of trauma theory. Many of these texts, including Geoffrey Hartman’s “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies” (1995), Kali Tal’s Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1996) and Suzette Henke’s (1998) Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Writing, explored representations of traumatic experience in canonical literature and contemporary misery memoirs. But others such as Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), Dominick LaCapra’s Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994), Henry Greenspan’s On Listening to Holocaust Survivivors (1998) and Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999) drew directly on newly collected and readily accessible archival testimony, particularly narratives of trauma produced by survivors of the Holocaust, to reflect on the complex connections between eyewitnessing and history. Works such as these demonstrate the pivotal role that trauma testimony has played in the generation of new knowledge and understanding of the triggers and processes of traumatic injury in both individual and collective contexts, and the effects of these on memory, history, culture and justice. Testimonial forms of storytelling that attest to traumatic experience are as old as humanity itself. From ancient myths, legends and folk tales in all cultures, to songs of war, conquest, revenge and violence, both the power and the vulnerability of what it means to be human has been expressed through narratives with varying degrees of adherence to actual events and a strong compulsion to hold the attention of an audience. Often generated by marginalized populations in response to oppressive systems and institutions, such forms of testimony frequently constituted a “defiant and deadly act” (Todorov 2000: 112). From Homer’s tales of battle trauma to the painful self-examinations of medieval mystics and reformed sinners, from post-enlightenment confessional autobiography to narratives of colonial oppression and enslavement, from Holocaust and Soviet gulag survivor stories to collective narratives of state violence in Latin America, and from prison poetry scratched into Styrofoam cups at Guantánamo Bay (Falkoff 2007: 3) to the recountings of sexual violence circulated via the #MeToo movement, witnesses in the Western world have produced numerous forms of first-person trauma testimony for millennia (Smith and Watson 2010: 103–25). These testimonial narratives are not only inscribed with symptomatic evidence of the unequal power dynamics in which they were produced but also with the hesitance, fragmentation, incoherence and/or emotional detachment characteristic of traumatic storytelling 67

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(Henke 1998; Jensen 2019a; Whitehead 2004). As eyewitnesses recall their painful experiences against specific external cultural-historical and powerful internal biologicalpsychological pressures, these narratives illustrate both what trauma testimony is and what it does: how it simultaneously acts upon and documents traumatic memories and produces counter-narratives that amplify and/or contradict dominant understandings of history.

The age of testimony The age of testimony has arisen alongside a century of global conflict in which eyewitness accounts in real time and in archival material including letters, diaries, photographs and other personal ephemera constitute vital building blocks for the writing of history. Such material, when read alongside public documentation like court records, laws, edicts, maps, birth, death, marriage and prison records enable historians to develop a plausible narrative of an historical event or era. In order for that narrative to attain the status of historical accuracy, however, the testimony it draws upon must be accepted as truthful and authoritative: the voice of the witness must be believed. As Leigh Gilmore (2017: 9) has observed, first person accounts twin “the ‘I’ who narrates with the ‘I’’s narrative”. When that narrative “conforms to dominant notions of legitimacy”, she argues, “the ‘I’ who narrates it will accrue authority” (9). If, however, the events recounted contest dominant social, cultural or political narratives, presenting details contrary to those circulated by groups in power, then even sworn testimony can fail to accrue the status of plausibility. The history and reception of slave narratives demonstrates the pressures upon testimony that challenges the accepted rhetoric of powerful institutions. Despite the publication of numerous such autobiographical texts testifying to the multiple horrors of slavery, from the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Written by Himself (1825) to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861), defenders of the institution “were fiercely invested in debunking” their “authenticity” (Smith and Watson 2010: 35). And because slave narratives often obscured names and details for the sake of safety and secrecy, and were helped into publication by abolitionists, apologists for slavery “found grounds on which to challenge the credibility and veracity” of these texts, and thus the “whole enterprise of abolition” (35). As this example illustrates, the ability of a given testimony to accrue the power and authority of truth-telling is subject to the position of subject/narrator within complex social, historical and cultural spaces. Testimonial narratives present the autobiographical subject as “an actor in the world” whose testimony recounts how the subject became “embedded” in the “material conditions of history” by which that testimony itself is greatly informed, impacted and sculpted (Smith and Watson 2010: 108). In the second half of the twentieth century, hundreds of works explored the oppressive “material conditions of history” through first person accounts of traumatic experience. Works such as Tadeuz Borowski’s This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1946), Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (1947; If This is a Man [1959]) and the diary of Anne Frank, first published as Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942–1 Augustus 1944 (1947; The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942–1 August 1944 [1952]), for example, bore witness to the Holocaust, while Czesław Miłoz’s Zniewolony umysł (1953; The Captive Mind [1953]), Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha (1962; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [1963]), Eugenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind (1967) and, later, Against all Hope: The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares (1986) and Kang Chol-Hwan’s The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag (2000), attempted in their very different ways to convey the multiple horrors of the Soviet system (Jensen 2019b). 68

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In the capitalist West, the systemic racism and economic oppression of black Americans were analysed and contested in autobiographical texts such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Etheridge Knight’s Poems from Prison (1968) and Jack Henry Abbot’s In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison (1981). During the postwar era, feminists decried Western gender politics in works such as Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex [1953]), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970). Elsewhere in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, as China and Cuba intervened in battles in Rhodesia, South Africa and the Portuguese colonies, testimonial forms of literature belied dominant narratives of Africa as the puppet of superpower interests. Influential works such as Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957), Hugh Levin’s Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison (1974) and Polish journalist Ryszard Kapucinski’s collected eyewitness accounts of the Angolan battle for independence, Jeszcze dzień życia (1976; Another Day of Life [1987]), powerfully highlighted the determination, courage and agency exercised by Africans throughout the Cold War. Contemporary historian Annette Wieviorka (2006) has argued that the 1961 televised trial of Adolf Eichmann for crimes against humanity, which broadcast the testimony of 111 survivors of Nazi atrocities, gave rise to a “Taste for Testimony” that continues into the present day. The Eichmann trial’s privileging of first person accounts of suffering over objective, fact-checked reflection, she claims, not only “freed the victims to speak” but also “created a social demand for testimonies” and enabled the widespread recognition of a “new category of identity”: “the survivor” whose function was “to be the bearer of history” (Wieviorka 2006: 87–8). Throughout the late twentieth century, ever more such survivors published their accounts of suffering. While these texts recounted sometimes vivid and sometimes fragmented memories of an individual’s experiences of traumatic events, the material contexts in which such testimonial narratives were constructed and performed were those of rights violation. These testimonial contexts had a direct impact not only on the content of the memory fragments generated within them but also on the form through which such post-traumatic narratives were articulated. Since the 1970s, for example, a form of historically laden, post-traumatic testimony has developed in Latin America called testimonial literature or testimonio that draws directly upon the representative power of testimony to challenge traditional narratives about colonization and its aftermath. In contrast to conventional writing about colonization, composed by those in positions of power or privilege, testimonio is “produced by subaltern” peoples (Gugelberger and Kearney 1991: 4). Such texts, moreover, draw upon “popular oral discourse”, through which the “witness portrays his or her own experience as a representative of a collective memory and identity” (Yudice, quoted in Gugelberger and Kearney 1991: 4). Both the subject and the aim of testimonio, therefore, are communal, forming a claim in which “truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or exorcising and setting aright official history” (Yudice, quoted in Gugelberger and Kearney 1991: 4). In this way, testimonio stands in direct opposition to traditional forms of life-writing such as memoir and autobiography which seek to celebrate individualism and can be understood as a development of capitalist conceptions of the value of the individual in society. Historically, such texts were written by authors who possess certain kinds of cultural authority, “like Augustine or Goethe” (Gugelberger and Kearney 1991: 9–10). By contrast, the form and performance of testimonio erodes the centrality of the author figure, and therefore traditional understanding of textual authority. Moreover, the often “ambiguous collaboration” (10) 69

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between editor, translator and witness in testimonio raises questions about the accuracy and authenticity of the events they describe (Kurz 2015). The collective voice of testimonio, therefore, problematizes Western notions of authority, authorial status and the very idea of individual identity, upending the subject position of a testifying “I”. The opening lines of the most well-known testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchú and Burgos-Debray 1984: 1), offers a clear example of the form’s defiance of the traditional singular autobiographical voice: “I’d like to stress that it’s not only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people”, the text begins; “My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people.” The aim of testimonial literature, as this key example demonstrates, is not to uphold western notions of truth, identity or justiciable evidence, but rather to “show that the self cannot be defined in individual terms but only as a collective self, engaged in a common struggle” (Gugelberger and Kearney 1991: 9). By enabling marginalized voices to speak with a unique collective voice, testimonio makes numerous political, philosophical and existential interventions into Western discourses about individual agency in the aftermath of trauma, turning “victim” into activistpropagandist and the silenced into published spokesperson.

Definitions and disruptions Definitions of testimony orbit around two key characteristics: evidence and attestation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “personal or documentary evidence or attestation in support of a fact or statement; hence, any form of evidence or proof” (Simpson and Weiner 1989: 833). Testimony, in this reading, is not a thing but a process: a very specific kind of speech act that vows to “tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth” (Felman and Laub 1992: 5). Whether justiciable or otherwise, testimony is never simply “the observing, the recording, the remembering of an event” as evidence, because it must also attest to its “utterly unique and irreplaceable topographical position” with respect to that evidence (206). Thus to bear witness through testifying is to publicly attest to evidence constructed within one’s singular relation to a past event: “this is what I observed from where I stood”. The very idiosyncrasy of the witness position, therefore, marks it as necessarily subjective and potentially unstable (the witness is by definition the only one who observed the event from their point of view). Moreover, in the moment of testifying to past experience, whether in a court-room, a confessional or on a therapist’s couch, the witness is no longer present to the moment s/he recalls. Testimony is always an act of memory, removed in both time and space from the evidence to which it attests and can, therefore, never confirm “I prove”, but rather states “I swear” (Derrida 2005: 75–6). While speech acts labelled “testimony” are generally understood as adhering to the events they recall to a high degree, and those labelled “sworn testimony” are presumed to represent the “truth” of the event as observed from the point of view of the witness, all such acts must also be understood as potentially fallible memory narratives constructed in retrospect for a public audience by a mind and body no longer present to that which it attests. The fragility of both aspects of testimony (the forms of evidence it generates and the complex, value-laden contexts in which attestation must occur) has been dramatized in a spate of hoax testimonials and false or exaggerated witnessing published in the past few decades. In texts such as Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), life-writing scholars have identified certain narrative practices within the “production, marketing and circulation of witness narratives” that have “come 70

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to be associated” with credible first-person witness (Smith and Watson 2012: 591). These and other hoax testimonials succeed by imitating the dynamics of genuine witness narratives by, for example, creating an “aura of authenticity”, through the construction of a “composite figure of the victim” whose identifying characteristic is vulnerability (595). Many well-known genuine testimonial narratives, that is, follow a widely recognisable three-part victim story trajectory in which the first 20 per cent speaks to the time before the victimization, the core 60 per cent is concerned with details of suffering and the final 20 per cent recounts the time after when justice and/or recognition is sought for and/or gained (Shenker 2015). This stereotypical structure, moreover, mimics that of the bildungsroman, a literary form influenced by Enlightenment conceptualizations of the inherent dignity and essential good of the rights-bearing citizen-subject (Slaughter 2007: 43; Kurz 2015; Jensen 2015). As these analogously shaped testimonial narratives circulate over time, the singular victim story often evolves to become representative of a larger, silenced or marginalized community of which the victim is or was a member. When this happens, the “personal idiosyncratic experience” and the complex and unique “experiential history” of the eyewitness may be simplified and even diminished by the demands of representing the suffering of others (Smith and Watson 2012: 595). In this way, for example, the diary of an educated teenage girl who writes prior to any experience of life in Nazi camps came to represent the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust (Frank 1947), the translated, edited narrative of Valentino Achak Deng, as novelized by Dave Eggers, became the symbolic life story of the lost boys of Sudan (Eggers 2006) and the ghostwritten memoir tracking Somaly Mam’s journey from Cambodian child prostitute to well-known global activist (Mam and Marshall 2008) became an emblematic victim redemption story in the sphere of global human trafficking (Kurz 2015: 167–70). This totalizing, homogenizing dynamic in the reception of testimonial narratives oversimplifies the complexity of their construction: the editorial processes and socio-cultural power relations that impact in each individual case and the intersectional realities of how suffering individuals in any community experience their identities. As a given testimony travels from individual memory to public attestation, therefore, multiple challenges and disruptions to testimony’s defining characteristics of “evidence” and “attestation” take place. The relationship between history, truth-telling and all forms of testimony is therefore complex and interactive, simultaneously challenging, contradictory and symbiotic. In the courtroom, for example, testimony is necessary precisely when “historical accuracy is in doubt” and “the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question” (Felman and Laub 1992: 6). Legal trials stage such “crises of truth” as they call upon the testimonial, performative and relational act of witnessing to transform doubt into verdict (6). Likewise, literary forms of testimony are not simply transcribed statements of experience but enact a “performative engagement between consciousness and history”, through emplotted telling of remembered events, formatted with particular audiences in mind (6). In “the context of claim” moreover, that event-story is transformed into a narrative of appeal, moving from “story into testimony” in search of justice and recognition (Jolly 2014: 10). In the case of post-traumatic testimonial, the figure of the witness is further challenged by powerful internal psychological and biochemical disruptions that impact on the formation of memory and the ability to construct a narrative of the traumatic experience (Jensen 2019a; Pennebaker and Seagal 1999; Strickgold 2002).

Categories of pressure As the cases of Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford and the thousand voices of the #MeToo movement have so poignantly demonstrated, the testimony of women victims of traumatic 71

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sexual harassment and sexual violence is often “tainted” as unreliable in both social and legal settings (Gilmore 2017). Such trauma testimony emerges not only through public interactions along “testimonial networks” between witnesses and their interlocutors in courtrooms, publishing houses, refugee camps, campaign trails and digital platforms (Gilmore 2017: 5), but also through private negotiations of multiple traumatic memory effects (Jensen 2019a). These internal and external pressures can be categorized in roughly three ways: memory effects, the psychological and physiological negotiation between a traumatic event and the formation of a memory; dialogue effects, the interactions that arise in the act of telling one’s trauma-memory-stories in intimate dialogue; and finally procurement for specific audiences, the process of identifying, collecting, editing, shaping, translating and making public a private experience of suffering via the practice of constructing representative “evidence”, aimed at certain listeners (Jensen 2019a). As scholars of such post-traumatic testimonies have found, to publicly testify to one’s private suffering is to adhere to contrasting demands: the pressure to tell traumatic memories as chronological, coherent stories while also gauging the ability of the listener to bear its painful details and the post-traumatic compulsion to speak of past suffering in the context of disrupted memory (Gilmore 2017; Henke 1998; Jensen 2019a). Moreover, within the heavilyladen context of “survivor testimony”, there are certain characteristics created by both tellers and listeners that comprise what can be called tellability: a narrative state in which a story with a beginning, middle and end is composed in the absence of chronological memory cues, and unspeakable suffering is simplified, potentially censored and/or edited in order to be spoken. Because bearing witness to trauma is “a process that includes the listener”, testimonies “are not monologues” (Felman and Laub 1992: 70–1). But when that listener appears, the speaker, traumatized by their experiences, may hesitate, backtrack, disregard or overwrite the details they share. At the same time, those listening may have certain expectations regarding the testimony they are about to hear, so that survivors, anticipating those anticipations, may further edit and construct their painful experiences into a form they consider “bearable” for their audience (Greenspan 1998: xvi). Thus while the word testimony suggests a “formal, finished quality”, this almost never characterizes trauma survivors’ remembrance narratives (xvii). Nevertheless, the fragmentation, lapses and silence of what is left unsaid in such narratives highlight the extent to which survivors choose “how and what” they recount (Greenspan 2014: 230). Those choices are not only influenced by fear, reticence and post-traumatic memory effects, but also the testimonial context itself: the “very fact of inviting someone to speak ‘as a survivor’” (230). Whether in an interview or on the witness stand, that is, the survivor/speaker is hyperaware of the listener’s interest in only some, not all, of their life story. In this way, the unsaid, edited, carefully chosen, retold and contingent nature of survivor’s trauma testimony is both vital to understanding traumatic experience while also being direct evidence of that experience.

Trauma, meaning and the body Testifying in the aftermath of trauma is a dangerous, destabilizing matter in which “the price of speaking is re-living” the past, “not relief, but further retraumatization” (Felman and Laub 1992: 67). There are, however, forms of trauma-telling that may support healing. A key characteristic of these involves the survivor ascribing some form of meaning to their traumatic experience(s) (Agger and Jensen 1990; Blackwell 1988) This approach takes meaning itself to be “socially and subjectively constructed”, rather than “inherently given in any 72

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particular act or situation” (Blackwell 1988: 1). In the case of post-traumatic testimony, meaning is produced in two ways: first, privately, through the construction of a coherent, listenable narrative of a traumatic experience, and second, publicly, by sharing that narrative through a testimonial act. One example of this process can be seen in the testimonial narrative of Nazeeha Saeed (2014), a Bahraini journalist detained and tortured for reporting the gratuitous murder of an old man by a member of the police forces during a demonstration near Manama following the national uprising in February of 2011. As Saeed recounts, “destiny chose” that she should be “burdened with the memory of an old man’s head exploding twenty metres” in front of her (Saeed 2014: 55). A few weeks after reporting on what she saw, Saeed was summoned to the West Riffa police station where she was interrogated, humiliated, beaten and threatened for hours on end for “tarnishing the reputation of Bahrain” (65). Even now, she notes, it hurts “terribly to write and remember these things”, but she does so in the hope that her testimony will be “used by an international community” to “create a better Bahrain” (66). Nazeeha Saeed’s testimony, in other words, forges meaning out of her traumatic experiences, allowing her to remain in Bahrain to fight for justice. As Richard Carter-White (2012: 287) suggests, while post-traumatic testimonies like Saeed’s are powerful and compelling, the fragility of the speaker and the fallibility of their memory processes leave the genre “predisposed towards generating disruptive encounters” that establish “a space of uncertainty” wherein audiences must interpret the testimonial text “without authorial guarantee”. In such narratives, he claims, the radical temporal and spatial disjuncture between witnessing and recollection interferes with “representational closure” (Carter-White 2012: 288) and therefore the transfer of meaning from speaker to audience. Moreover, the extremity of traumatic experience, while making the events “so real” to the survivor, “threatens at the same time to render them the product of a self-enclosed, alien and absolutely distant world” (287). This unstable, fluctuating and symbiotic relationship between the uniquely terrifying events of a survivor’s life, the meanings the survivor constructs for them and those that are constructed by anticipatory listeners, comprise a series of dynamic and often contradictory pressures on mind and body, memory and story. The very complexities of these dynamics, as Leigh Gilmore (2017: 5) observes, means that “the person who has suffered harm” and “writes, speaks, displays bodily, or otherwise performs a first-person representation” about that injury, will be “tasked with doing more than bearing witness” to it. Other recent work in the field of testimony, literature and trauma also reflects on this interplay between the material body and the event(s) to which that body testifies. Scholars like Cassie Premo Steele (2000: 2), for example, assert that trauma does not consist of an event or experience, but rather “marks the painful aftereffects of a violent history in the body and mind of the survivor”, while Michael Bernard-Donals (2009) observes that details lost in the telling of trauma through verbal testimony can sometimes be found in the gestures of the speaker. “The distance”, he writes, “between what was seen and what can be said – is often wide and always palpable” and is communicated through “the shrugged shoulders, the winces, the tears and the silences that punctuate oral testimonies” (Bernard-Donals 2009: 11). One famous example of such embodied testimony was offered by Yehiel Dinur, a witness at the Eichmann trial in 1961. Dinur, an Auschwitz survivor, trembled and spoke with great hesitance during his testimony, at times mumbling or swaying in the witness box, seemingly both distracted and ill. When shown a camp inmate’s uniform, Dinur responded gnomically that it was “the garb of the planet called Auschwitz … I believe with perfect faith … that this planet of ashes, Auschwitz, stands in opposition to our planet earth, and influences it …” (Eichmann 1992–5, vol. 1:324–6). Dinur then recounted seeing row after 73

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row of soon-to-be-murdered prisoners gathered before him. “I can still see them gazing at me”, he said. A moment later, he left the witness box, then stopped abruptly, disoriented. The court officials prompted him with further questions, but Dinur did not answer, instead muttering, “I saw them in the queue …” (324–6) before fainting to the floor. By every measure, Dinur’s testimony was broken, confused and verbally incoherent. But at the same time his experience of traumatic suffering was clearly communicated through the sign of his trembling and collapsed body. Dinur’s annihilated figure and hesitant, dreamlike and disconnected speech formed ample evidence of what he had witnessed and his ongoing post-traumatic state as well as testifying to the multiple pressures on trauma testimony that seeks public recognition and/or justice. As Dinur’s body recounted and performed trauma’s key sensations (crying, trembling, fainting, flashbacks, incoherence etc.), the figure of the witness literally bore witness and rendered meaning.

Trauma and justice As we have seen, concerns about the complex relation between the “truth” of an event and the eventual form of its telling are central to the study of testimony. In the case of testimony that seeks recognition and justice for traumatic experience, those concerns are exacerbated by fear of not being believed (on the part of the witness) and fear of being lied to (on the part of the listener). Witnesses and those who advise them seek to construct consistent, listenable testimonial narratives in forms that enhance the ability of their intended audience(s) to not only hear but believe. Lawyers aim to extract evidential facts from first-person testimony, identifying time, place and incident so that these will be justiciable, verifiable and in line with, or in consistent contention against, the accounts of other witnesses. Scholars preparing historical narratives of recognition for widespread suffering also aim to extract factual evidence, but in addition may be listening for some kind of “feel” for the wider context in which they took place. Trauma psychologists to whom victims may turn for recognition through validation may listen for lapses and repetitions, drawing connections between the trauma story and other autobiographical narratives shared by the patient/survivor in order to establish patterns of reticence and disclosure. While such patterns in post-traumatic testimonial may arise from the characteristic disruptive impact of traumatic experience on memory, it can also be inscribed by the testimonial process. Primo Levi (1988: 11–12) for example, observed that “a memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype” which, once “crystallised, perfected, adorned” is installed “in the place of the raw memory and grows at its expense”. That stereotypical testimonial story, moreover, often takes the form of a “journey from suffering to recovery” (Andrews 2014: 33): a collaborative construction, produced by those who bear witness and those who listen to such testimony. Testimonial audiences, no less than witnesses themselves, “encourage a traditional emplotment” and “even when this is not offered” organize what they hear “to fit such a mold” (33). Even before a testimony is transmitted, that is, listeners may tell themselves that the testimonial process will be healing (33). The multiple public and private/internal and external pressures on the testimonial act lead Jacques Derrida (2005: 68) to question whether “the concept of testimony or bearing witness is compatible with a value of certitude, of warrant, and even of knowing as such”. Shoshana Felman (in Felman and Laub 1992: 5) develops Derrida’s query by observing that because testimony is “composed of bits and pieces of a memory” that “have not settled into understanding or remembrance”, it comprises “events in excess of our frame of reference” 74

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and cannot, therefore, “be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition”. As a result, she argues, all forms of testimony fail to offer “a totalizable account” of events, because in the testimonial act “language is in process and in trial” and “does not possess itself as a conclusion” (5). The testimonial condition is, instead, an act, an interactive, relational, contextual performance, in which “the decontextualized individual who stands apart from histories of oppression to assert the right to speak and to claim political and personal freedom is a fiction” (Gilmore 2017: 9). Despite these significant challenges to the communication of truth and meaning through first-person testimony of traumatic experience, all forms of such narratives continue to wield power (Kobak 2014). Contemporary works of art often use testimony as both the “subject of their drama” and “the medium of their literal transmission” and in doing so highlight the testimonial mode of our “relation to the traumas of contemporary history” (Felman and Laub 1992: 5). In the current digital age, moreover, in which the “internet increasingly determines the terms of publication”, testimony itself is everywhere “‘remediated’ in unpredictable forms” (Jolly 2014: 10). In the service of justice, rights defenders have increased access to a variety of digital tools for collaborative trauma testimonial projects with marginalized populations that enable “vulnerable groups to articulate difficult and complex personal experiences” by employing non-verbal forms of life storytelling (Donovan and Ustundag 2017: 222). The speed of technological change and development, however, and the relocation of much witnessing to digital media and “ubiquitous video cameras” raises new questions about the future of both testimonial acts and bearing witness (Smith and Watson 2010: 286). Will digital forms of witness increase reliability and accuracy, or simply form a new genre of problematic and contestable evidence? There are, of course, no easy answers, especially when the “truth” to which the witness (digital or otherwise) attests is trauma and its aftermath. Testimony in the aftermath of trauma should be understood “not as a mode of statement” but “a mode of access” to painful truths, a matter of attestation in which the witness as evidence “begets the truth, through the speech process” (Felman and Laub 1992: 16) of their testimonial performance.

Bibliography Abbot, J. H. (1981) In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, New York: Random House. Agamben, G. (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books. Agger, I. and Jensen, S. (1990) “Testimony as Ritual and Evidence in Psychotherapy for Political Refugees”, Journal of Traumatic Stress 3(1): 115–30. Andrews, M. (2014) “Beyond Narrative: The Shape of Traumatic Testimony”, in M. Jensen and M. Jolly (eds) We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights, Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 32–47. Bernard-Donals, M. (2009) Forgetful Memory: Representation and Remembrance in the Wake of the Holocaust, Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press. Blackwell, R. (1988) “Testimony and Psychotherapy: A Comment on Buss and Agger: The Testimony Method”, Refugee Participation Network Paper 3: 1–4. Borowski, T. (1946) This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, New York: Viking. Carter-White, R. (2012) “Primo Levi and the Genre of Testimony”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 37(2): 287–300. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. De Beauvoir, S. (1949) Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1953), Paris: Gallimard. Derrida, J. (2005) Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, T. Dutoit and O. Pasanen (eds), New York: Fordham University Press.

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Meg Jensen Donovan, C. and Ustundag, E. (2017) “Graphic Narratives, Trauma and Social Justice”, Studies in Social Justice 11(2): 221–37. Douglass, F. (1845) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Boston, MA: The AntiSlavery Office Publisher. Eggers, D. (2006) What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, New York: McSweeney’s. Eichmann, A. (1992–5) The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, 9 vols, Jerusalem: Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial, in co-operation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority. Falkoff, M. (2007) Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Frank, A. (1947) Het Achterhuis. Dagboekbrieven 14 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (The Annex: Diary Notes 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944, 1952), Amsterdam: Contact Publishing. Frey, J. (2003) A Million Little Pieces, New York: Doubleday. Friedan, B. (1963) The Feminine Mystique, New York: W. W. Norton and Co. Gilmore, L. (2017) Tainted Witness: Why we Doubt what Women Say about their Lives, New York: Columbia University Press. Ginzburg E. (1967) Into the Whirlwind, trans. P. Stevenson and M. Harai, London: Harcourt. Greenspan, H. (1998) On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History, London: Praeger. ———. (2014) “The Unsaid, the Incommunicable, the Unbearable, and the Irretrievable”, Oral History Review 41(2): 229–43. Greer, G. (1970) The Female Eunuch, London: Palladin. Grimes, W. (1825) Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Written by Himself, New York: William Grimes. Gugelberger, G. and Kearney, M. (1991) “Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America”, Latin American Perspectives 18(3): 3–14. Hartman, G. (1995) “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies”, New Literary History 26(1): 557–63. Henke, S. (1998) Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Herodotus. (1890 [440 BC]) The History of Herodotus, book 6, parallel English/Greek, trans. G. C. Maccaulay, London: Macmillan. Jacobs, H. (1861) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, L. M. Child (ed.), Boston: Thayer and Eldridge. Jensen, M. (2015) “The Legible Face of Human Rights in Autobiographical Fiction”, in S. A. McClennen and A. S. Moore (eds) The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, London: Routledge, 184–92. ———. (2019a) The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths, London: Palgrave. ———. (2019b) “Speaking Trauma and History: The Collective Voice of Testimonial Literature”, in A. Hammond (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook to Cold War Literature, London: Palgrave. Jolly, M. (2014) “Introduction: Life/Rights Narrative in Action”, in M. Jensen and M. Jolly (eds) We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights, Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 3–22. Kang, C.-H. and Rigoulot, P. (2000) The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, trans. Y. Reiner, New York: Perseus. Kapucinski, R. (1976) Jeszcze dzień życia (Another Day of Life, 1987), Warsaw: Czytelnik Publishing. Knight, E. (1968) Poems from Prison, Detroit, MI: Broadside Press. Kobak, A. (2014) “I-Witness”, in M. Jensen and M. Jolly (eds) We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights, Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 25–31. Kurz, K. (2015) Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. LaCapra, D. (1994) Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levi, P. (1947) Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man, 1959), Turin: Da Silva. ———. (1988) The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal, London: Abacus. Lewin, H. (1974) Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison, London: Barrie & Jenkins. Malcolm, X. and Haley, A. (1965) The Autobiography of Malcolm X, New York: Grove Press.

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Testimony Mam, S. and Marshall, R. (2008) The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine who fled Sexual Slavery and Now Devotes Her Life to Rescuing Others, London: Virago. Menchú, R. and Burgos-Debray, E. (1984) I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala, trans. A. Wright, London: Verso. Miłoz, C. (1953) Zniewolony umysł (The Captive Mind, 1953), trans. J. Zielonko, London: Secker and Warburg. Nkrumah, K. (1957) Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, New York: International Publishers. Pennebaker, J. and Seagal, J. (1999) “Forming a Story: The Health Benefits of Narrative”, Journal of Clinical Psychology 55(10): 1243–54. Rak, J. (2013) Boom!: Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market, Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Saeed, N. (2014) “The Price of Words”, in M. Jensen and M. Jolly (eds) We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights, Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 53–60. Shenker, N. (2015) Reframing Holocaust Testimony, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Shorter, E. (2015) What Psychiatry Left Out of the DSM-V: Historical Mental Disorders Today, London: Routledge. Simpson, J. A. and Weiner, E. S. C. (eds) (1989) XVII The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Slaughter, J. (2007) Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, New York: Fordham University Press. ———. (2012) “Witness or False Witness: Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony”, Biography 35(4): 590–626. Smith, S. and Watson, J. (2010) Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd ed., Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Solzhenitsyn, A. (1962) Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963), Moscow: Novy Mir. Steele, C. P. (2000) We Heal from Memory: Sexton, Corde, Anzaldua, and the Poetry of Witness, New York: Palgrave. Strickgold, R. (2002) “EMDR: A Putative Neurobiological Mechanism of Action”, Journal of Clinical Psychology 58(1): 61–75. Tal, K. (1996) Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture 95, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todorov, T. (2000) Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, trans. D. Bellows, London: Atlantic Books. Valladares, A. (1986) Against all Hope: The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares, trans. A. Hurley, New York: Knopf. Van der Kolk, B., Weisaeth, L. and van der Hart, O. (1996) “History of Trauma in Psychiatry”, in B. van der Kolk, A. McFarlane and L. Weisaeth (eds) Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Soul, New York: Guildford Press, 47–76. Whitehead, A. (2004) Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Whitlock, G. (2014) “Protection”, in M. Jensen and M. Jolly (eds) We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights, Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 80–99. Wiesel, E. (1977) “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration”, in E. Lefokowitz (ed.) Dimensions of the Holocaust, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 4–19. Wiesenthal, S. (1967) The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs, New York: McGraw Hill. Wieviorka, A. (2006) The Era of the Witness, trans. J. Stark (ed.), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wilkomirski, B. (1995) Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, New York: Schoken. Wright, R. (1945) Black Boy, New York: Harper and Bros.

Further reading Agamben, G. (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, New York: Zone Books. (An ethical and philosophical study of the testimony of the survivors of Auschwitz.) Bennett, J. (2012) Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11, New York: I.B. Taurus. (Bennett considers the capacity of art to offer new and original understandings of historical events, and identifies forms of testimonial representation that foster affective engagement in the beholder.)

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Meg Jensen Bradley, M. P. and Petro, P. (eds) (2002) Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. (This scholarly collection brought together for the first time a wide range of interdisciplinary and geographic perspectives exploring the contexts in which human rights testimonies must form claims.) Gigliotti, S. (2009) The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity and Witnessing in the Holocaust, New York: Berghah Books. (Gigliotti contends that much more attention must be given to the role of senses other than the visual in narratives of Holocaust experience, and explores testimonies giving evidence of ‘somatic trauma’ experienced by those who told of their terrifying boxcar journeys to the camps.)

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7 TRAUMA, TIME AND ADDRESS Cathy Caruth

The theory of trauma, as it arose in Freudian psychoanalysis just before the turn of the twentieth century, is distinguished by its focus on an inherently temporal structure: the delay, within the experience of catastrophe, that defers its occurrence to the future. This temporal delay, named in Freud’s early work by the word Nachträglichkeit (deferred action, afterwardsness), involves a fundamental paradox at the heart of trauma: it is the most immediate experience and yet the least accessible; its deferral is also an endless return of what was never fully experienced in the first place. In the last several decades this combination of insistence and unassimilability, as it emerges in the symptoms of traumatic nightmares and other forms of repetition described by Freud, has frequently been characterized in terms of a problem of representation: as the non-representability of the event that prevents its adequate assimilation to knowledge and transformation. I will suggest in what follows that the notion of trauma, as it arises in Freud’s work and the tradition that follows it, is not, fundamentally, a problem of representation, but a question of address. It is the collapse of address – of the ability to hear, or to address, another – that returns repeatedly, in trauma, to demand a response. What does it mean, then, to rethink trauma around the failure of address? And how might a new kind of address arise at the site of its very loss?

Awakening In order to answer these questions I will return to a theoretical text by Jacques Lacan that has been central to my own writing and thinking and that demonstrates, in ways I had not fully understood, the complexity of address at the heart of Freud’s notion of trauma. I will then juxtapose this with a contemporary case history that resonates with Lacan’s text and that illuminates, concretely and movingly, the clinical significance (and indeed the inescapable clinical dimension) of reframing trauma in this manner. In a well-known essay from his seminar XI entitled “Tuché and Automaton”, Lacan (1998 [1973]) focuses on the nightmare as a means of interpreting the significance of Freud’s notion of traumatic repetition, or “repetition compulsion”, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In this great postwar text, Freud exemplifies the repetitive, traumatic symptoms of soldiers coming home from the battlefield by comparing these symptoms to the traumatic nightmare of an accident, a dream that “brings the patient back into the situation that caused him to fall ill, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright” (SE 1953–74, vol. XVIII). For Freud, the repetition of the nightmare – its “bringing the patient back” to what seems to be the 79

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unsymbolized situation of the crisis – exemplifies the peculiar temporality of the trauma as an encounter with an event (here, death) that has happened too soon to be fully grasped, and that then returns over and over, as a missed event, to haunt the survivor. The awakening from the nightmare repeats, that is, the grasping too late of the encounter with death. In Lacan’s essay the traumatic temporality of the nightmare is exemplified by an earlier dream related by Freud, in his foundational text The Interpretation of Dreams: the dream of a father who has lost his child and who awakens just as he hears, in the dream, the voice of his child calling to him (SE 1953–74, vol. V; see also Caruth 2016 [1996]). The father, like the accident survivor, awakens too late: but in this case, it is not simply too late to see, properly, what is in the dream, but, more fundamentally, too late to respond, adequately, to the address of the dead child. At the heart of the temporality of trauma, in Lacan’s (1998 [1973]) reading – at the core, indeed, of its very incomprehensibility – is an address that cannot, by its very nature, be heard in time. What kind of address arrives, in such a manner, always too soon? Lacan can be said to point us toward this question in Freud’s text by shifting the emphasis, slightly, from Freud’s own account – a story in which repetition occurs in multiple forms. In Chapter Seven of The Interpretation of Dreams the dream is recounted as follows: A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them. The explanation of this moving dream is simple enough. […] The glare of light shone through the open door into the sleeping man’s eyes and led him to the conclusion which he would have arrived at if he had been awake, namely that a candle had fallen over and set something alight in the neighbourhood of the body. […] the words spoken by the child must have been made up of words which he had actually spoken in his lifetime and which were connected with important events in the father’s mind. For instance, “I’m burning” may have been spoken during the fever of the child’s last illness, and “Father, don’t you see?” may have been derived from some other highly emotional situation of which we are in ignorance. But, having recognized that the dream was a process with a meaning, and that it can be inserted into the chain of the dreamer’s psychical experiences, we may still wonder why it was that a dream occurred at all in such circumstances, when the most rapid possible awakening was called for. (SE 1953–74, vol. V 509–10) For Freud – whose interest, in the dream book, is in demonstrating the function of dreams as wish-fulfilments – the question of “this moving dream” is primarily about the role of the dream in preserving sleep. The father, he will ultimately suggest, dreams – in spite of the burning around him – in order to see his child once again: in order to see, in the dream, the dying child (“to show the child as once more alive”). For Lacan, however, the question raised by the dream is not fundamentally about sleep, but about awakening: it is not, “why 80

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does the father sleep in spite of the fire burning the dead child outside the dream?” but rather, “why does the father wake up in spite of the plea of the child, to be seen, within it?” In Lacan’s (1998 [1973]) reading, the father awakens, indeed, not from the burning outside the dream, but from the words of the child within it. The dream is constituted, therefore, by the awakening from it: an awakening that, leaving the child in the dream behind, repeats the inability of the father to respond to the plea of the child in the dream to see him in his burning. In awakening the father repeats, that is, what he could not respond to adequately before: the dying child’s words to see him as he burned “of fever”, as Freud suggests – as he died; to save him, or to witness him, to be present with him, in the vulnerability of his mortality. But the father is also too late to prevent the burning of the corpse of the child outside the dream, to which he wakes after the candle has fallen upon it. The awakening, that is, is simultaneously the too-late of the response to the burning in the dream – when the father did not see, or save, his child – and the too-late of the response to the burning outside the dream – when the father has awoken too late to stop the burning of the corpse. Awakening constitutes the repetition of the too-late of seeing both inside and outside the dream; it annihilates the difference between them in a repetition that both abbreviates and reiterates the nightmare. And this takes place, specifically, around the child’s appeal, and the failure of the father to respond to the address of the child’s words. In focusing on the awakening, and suggesting that it comes from within the dream itself, Lacan (1998 [1973]) thus displaces the cause of the awakening from the empirical fact – the accident – of the candle falling on the bedclothes over the corpse, and the light that, Freud had proposed, ultimately causes the father to wake up. It is something, rather, in the nature of the address itself, Lacan seems to suggest, that awakens the father; something in the address that, Freud tells us, was whispered by the child, to the father, “reproachfully” (vorwurfsvoll) – a tone that already suggests that the father has been missing something, that he has not seen something in time: “There is more reality in this message”, Lacan writes, “than in the noise by which the father also identifies the strange reality of what is happening in the room next door. Is not the missed reality that caused the death of the child expressed in these words?” (Lacan 1998 [1973]: 58) Indeed, in the movement between the child’s words and the father’s awakening, as Lacan helps us recognize, there is a peculiar relation between address and response that emerges, it would seem, only in this unique situation of a father listening to a child’s dying plea: [F]or no one can say what the death of a child is, except the father qua father, that is to say, no conscious being. (58) No conscious being – no “subject”, indeed, in his or her power to listen, to respond, or to save – can properly hear the words of a dying child. Not to see in time means, in the dream, not to be able to hear this address as an address, not to be, properly, the addressee of these words. In being spoken by the dying child, as they resonate in their reproach, the father, the listener, is undone as addressee, as “a conscious being”, in Lacan’s (1998 [1973]) words. As such, we might add, this child becomes, through his very appeal, the one whose words can never properly be heard; the one who, in his anguish, cannot address another. The awakening from the dream, the father’s response to the child’s plea to be seen in his burning, is thus also the moment at which both father and child lose the possibility of a reciprocal address and response. The child speaks, that is, and the father hears; but the address and response are no longer reciprocal, they are not adequate to the appeal. The awakening is, in this sense, a gap at the heart of the relation between father and child constituted as a disrupted relation between appeal and listening; a gap that has already taken 81

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place in the very utterance of the child’s words. When the father awakens to a burning corpse – to a double burning, in a sense, an excessive burning: a child being burned again, as a corpse; the child in the dream reduced to the burning, lifeless and speechless thing outside it – something is repeated that has already taken place in the structure, or tone, or utterance of the address, a collapse of address between child and father. Lacan’s focus on the words of the child thus also leads us to the recognition of a more profound possibility inscribed within “living” language – the words of a living child, for example–the hearing of which was, for Freud, the goal of the father’s sleep. For the structure of address and response, and the possibility of their permutation in this dream, are also fundamental to what we think of as “living” relations between speaking beings. What the nature of the father’s response, as an awakening, leads us to, in fact, is a very specific aspect of speech that was analysed by the ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin, in terms of the element of “force” in every utterance: the way speech not only means but acts, and especially acts upon another (Austin 1975 [1962]). Understood as an ordinary exchange of utterance and response between a child and a father, the child’s words, “don’t you see?”, whispered reproachfully, do not operate so much as a question, but rather as what Austin called the “illocutionary force” (the way an utterance acts) of a complaint, which is also a command: “See me!” (Or a complaint: “You haven’t seen me!”) And under ordinary circumstances, the father’s response would be considered the “perlocutionary force” (the effect of an utterance upon another) of this command: the father is persuaded to look, and to see (or to help). The address and response, the force of the communication between addressor and addressee, thus ordinarily takes on a certain temporality: in this case the question or command or reproach of a child followed by the response of a father. But in the dream of the burning child this structure has changed. For the (illocutionary) force of the address of mortality – “see me dying!” – cannot be heard as such; it has, in being uttered, precisely undone its addressee as addressee: no one, “no conscious being”, Lacan (1998 [1973]) says, can hear these words. The (perlocutionary) force of these words, their effect, is thus to eliminate the conditions by which they might be heard: to undo the very capacity to listen of the one who might hear them. When the words arrive, they fall upon a being who has already been disabled as a true listener, who is, in this sense, always “too late” to hear the words because he or she is no longer their proper addressee. And there is no one else, indeed, who could be the addressee in this case: for the only one who must, who should, who could truly respond is the father, the parent, the one absolutely responsible to hear and to save, and this is the dilemma of the child’s appeal. Death arrives, that is, in this breaking of the conditions of address, in this utterance that destroys both addressee and addressor and thus can never properly be heard. The father awakens, indeed, not through a choice, in a timely fashion, to a timely call: but rather as the one who has already failed; whose power, as listener and saver, has been lost. The temporality of the awakening, that is, is structured by this disabling of the response that has already taken place within the heart of the child’s mortal call. It is this undoing of address, within the very appeal of the child, that thus, in this dream and this awakening, constitutes and determines the temporality of trauma, and binds it, more fundamentally, to the language ordinarily exchanged by the living. The trauma, in other words, is no longer constituted simply as an “accident” of mortal illness for which one was not prepared. It is not the apparently empirical reality of the “unexpectedness” of the accident, the model by which Freud attempts to exemplify the traumatic nightmare. The trauma is also the collapse of address inscribed as a possibility within every appeal as it crosses, not fully heard, just whispered, from mortal speaker to the one he or she would address, 82

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a mortal call to a mortal listening. This is, perhaps, why Lacan turns to this dream under the rubric of the “ethical”, and which allows us to rethink traumatic temporality – here and maybe more generally – in terms of the failed address, or the “collapse of witness”, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s words, which is also the world in which “there was no longer an other to which one could say ‘Thou’ in the hope of being heard […]” (Felman and Laub 1991: 82). And to place this notion of trauma in relation to another “call” that is always heard too late, and which, for the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, constitutes time as “responsibility” and as ethics – as an “event” that is also “an awakening that remains a first movement toward the other […] a traumatism secretly striking the very subjectivity of the subject” (Levinas 2000). It is at this very point of collapse, however, that another way of reading the child’s words emerges: not as a call to see the burning inside the dream, but to see the burning outside: to wake up, to leave the child within the dream, to depart from him in order to see – to bear witness to – another burning. The command, that is, directs itself not to the fiction of the father listening in the dream, but to the dream itself, or to the father as dreamer, to the one who would bury the child’s death within his wish to hear him speak once more. The “I” of the child in this address thus moves from inside to outside the dream and calls upon the “I” of the father to follow him there. In this movement, father and child no longer address each other in their living presence but through a language of awakening that now, differently, addresses us. The father, in this scenario, does indeed respond, but no longer with his eyes pointed to the burning that he can only miss. He rather passes on the child’s sentence that, as Lacan (1998 [1973]) says, “brings fire where it falls”: a burning that, in the new language of the psychoanalyst who has received these words, attains a potential, figurative possibility, an uncertainty of reference, that passes the awakening to the future. This awakening, we might say – the father’s response to the child’s imperative to awaken, to leave the dream – is intricately entangled with the awakening of the failed address – the father’s belated response to the child’s imperative to see. These two awakenings constitute two temporalities that meet, and part, around the missing of the burning: the anguished appeal to see what can never be, precisely, seen; and the command to awaken, to leave the site of the burning, to depart from the child and to bear witness, no longer as the one who sees, but as one who passes on the burning words. Is it not this double gesture, this impossible awakening, that touches us in this “moving” (rührend) dream, as Freud calls it? For the words of the dream are indeed, in the locution of the psychoanalysts Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, “summoning us to respond […] from the place where there is no other responding” (Davoine and Gaudillière 2004). Yet Freud’s response to the touch of the dream also signals another gesture of address that accompanies the words and also passes, and changes, from within the dream to without, though it has no words of its own: the touch of the child, who “takes the father by the arm” – ihn am Arme fasst – as he utters the stirring words. “The terrible vision of the dead son taking the father by the arm”, Lacan (1998 [1973]) writes, “designates a beyond that makes itself heard in the dream”. The touch of the child’s hand emerges, he suggests, in and through the language of the child’s appeal. This is a touch that cannot be heard, or felt, as such: for in the awakening, the child’s “taking” (fassen) is also left behind, as it becomes the gentler and figurative “moving” or “touching” (rühren) that Freud feels. This touch releases the grip of trying to see and know – erfassen or ergreifen – and allows for a response that passes out of the dream. It is indeed a touch that gestures, within the awakening itself, toward another mode of address. To what language does this gesture, and the awakening 83

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through which it emerges, summon us? What kind of language both emerges from and moves “beyond” trauma?

Rishard’s hand To approach this question I would like to turn to another child and another nightmare, one that is, precisely, about a gesture, the story, told by a therapeutic team-worker at the Boddaert Center in Roermond in the Netherlands, of two children who were students at the centre. In the therapy book De Mens als Verhaal (The Storied Nature of Man) by Jan Olthof and Eric Vermetten, the therapist Susan Housman-Kessels recounts the experiences of two eleven-year-old boys, Mario and Pascal, who, on a school trip to a recreation park, witnessed a terrible accident (Olthof and Vermetten 1994). As they passed a sand pile they saw two children playing on top of it and called out to them to be careful; the children ignored them and the sand suddenly came crashing down, burying the children alive. Mario and Pascal tried, desperately, to dig them out, succeeding in freeing one child. Only the hand of the other child stuck out of the sand. Eventually help arrived and the other child was freed and both rescued children, who turned out to be brothers, were rushed to the hospital. Mario and Pascal returned to the school and were hailed as heroes. The next day, however, the paper reported that one of the rescued children had died. Nothing was spoken of by the boys at the school and “the heroes”, Housman-Kessels reports, – “disappeared like snow in the sun”. Pascal, a leader of the group of boys, expressed some guilt, but Mario did not speak about it at all. A few weeks later, however, Mario’s mother contacted the school: Mario’s mother called in concern and told of the nightmares that her son had been having ever since the accident. Bathed in sweat, he would awaken at night and tell her that he kept seeing the hand of the boy who had died. Mario had also become scared of the dark, scared of sand piles, and scared of anything that resembled them. He also passed out on occasion during the day when he saw the image of the boy’s hand before him. The image of the dead boy’s hand – awakening Mario from sleep, and knocking him out when he is awake – appears to take over the capacity of the living boy to separate himself from the dead child; his inability to have held onto, to have saved the child whose hand he could not grasp adequately in time, returns as a repetition of this missed event, this encounter around something that cannot be grasped, in both sleep and waking. The dead hand that reaches out in what would seem its appealing, reproachful, or accusing muteness, indeed, seems to leave the living child unable to reach out in his own turn. While it does not include verbal language, the image of the dead boy’s hand, in awakening him (or knocking him out), in causing the “fright” Freud associates with the suddenness of an unprepared death encounter, seems nonetheless to involve the temporality of the failed address and response, one that precisely eliminates Mario’s own ability to address others. This problem of address emerges explicitly in the first exercise of the therapy that ensues, which enlists Pascal (who had a leading role in the group of boys) to help Mario by bringing him to, and joining with him, in the therapeutic work. In the first session, the boys are asked to draw a picture of the event – a picture dominated, notably, by the dead boy’s hand. Whereas Pascal suggests to the therapist, while reflecting on the picture, that an “RIP” sign would be appropriate at the site where the hand appears, Mario is able to say of 84

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the appropriate inscription for that place, only the word “dead”. In contrast to Pascal’s more typical marking of the site as a grave – with a sign that addresses the dead boy with the typical “Rest in Peace” – Mario’s curious “dead” does not appear to address anyone in particular, and seems to describe not only the state of the child but also of Mario’s own feeling. The therapy, interestingly enough, will proceed to focus explicitly on an exercise involving the language of address, in an apparent attempt to allow Mario to tell his story. The team-worker has both boys place the dead boy symbolically in an empty chair in a room in which they all meet. In a sequence of sessions the children are first asked to write letters to the dead child, which they read to him and then “mail” behind the chalkboard in the room. In later sessions Mario and Pascal are asked to write letters from the dead child; in these sessions, they will help the dead child out of his chair so that each of them may take his place as they read the letters from his spot. At the heart of the therapy, then – which is chosen intuitively by the therapist, though based on experience with children at the school who feel they cannot speak to adults – is the attempt to help Mario re-enter the world of living dialogue, of address and response, by first establishing the fictional possibility of such an exchange between him and the dead child. In the difference between Pascal’s and Mario’s letters, I would suggest – and in the creative way in which Mario’s letter alters, and implicitly, rethinks the very goal of the therapy – we can discern, concretely, the nature of a new kind of language that might emerge from the trauma. The linguistic device that is used in the exercise of writing letters is, in fact, a classical rhetorical device generally associated with the figure of address, though it specifically comes up in relation to the absent and the dead: the figure of “prosopopoeia”, or, in the literary theorist Paul de Man’s words, “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech” (De Man 1984: 75–6). According to this fiction, as it is ordinarily understood, the living speaker provides the speechless dead with his or her own living voice, and thus receives a reply in a dialogue in which both entities are, more or less, specular reflections of each other. This is, in fact, just what happens in Pascal’s letters to, and from the dead child. In his first letter, written to the dead child, Pascal expresses feelings of guilt and compassion toward the child:

… I feel really bad for you. But I feel guilty for what happened. I find it coincidence that this happened. But I would want to be your friend. And I would like to know what your name is. I am writing this for you friend. Have fun up there. Pascal’s fictional address to the dead child is returned, appropriately, by a similar letter “from” the dead child:

My name is …? And I want to be your friend. Me too. I am writing this for you. [He continues in broken English:] I am yur frend I kum as wel from England. You ar my best buddy goodby. 85

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In his address to the dead boy, Pascal receives a reciprocal reply. Pascal writes a letter that expresses his feelings and receives a letter “from” the dead child that in many ways mirrors his address. But Mario cannot write a letter that expresses his feelings. Although he names the child “Rishard”, he “writes only a factual story”: Rishard, Schatberg 1991 Friday We were with school on a trip there was a little mountain 8, 9 meters high me, Pascal and me Mario were jumping down the mountain of sand and I saw 4 boys standing on a part of the mountain of sand boys were on that part and 2 boys were in a cave there were 2 big ones and a boy at the right side and the others on the left side I said careful it can fall in and the boy said to me … happy dog and then I went away and 5 minutes later it falled in and I started to dig with Pascal. Mario’s letter makes use of language – and is literally, in its heading, written to the child’s address at the site he died – but we could argue that the language of this letter, in its blank factuality, in its flatness, in its lack of feeling, does not truly address the dead child (or anyone at all). Rather than giving voice to the dead boy, that is, the muteness of the dead child has taken over Mario’s own words. In the flatness of its tone, Mario’s letter thus attests to what cannot be grasped within the gesture of the dead boy’s hand: the too-late of Mario’s attempt to give a hand to the boy, to save him from his plight; the muteness of the boy whose speechless hand is all that remains above the sand. It is the language of the letter itself, in its very lack of address, that repeats the failed appeal of the hand that haunts Mario in the dream. How is it, then, that Mario is able to write a letter also from the dead child? We recall that in the case of Pascal, the reciprocity of address and response in the fiction of the prosopopoeia had allowed the dead child to “respond” to Pascal’s expression of guilt and sorrow for the child by a mirror of his address: by giving the dead child his own voice as a living child, Pascal receives a letter that affirms his imagination and his life: “I am writing this letter for you”, Pascal writes; and he receives back, “I am writing this for you”. But it is different in Mario’s case. Mario has not expressed regret for the death of Rishard, and his own writing takes on the mute lack of address of the other child’s death. Yet surprisingly, Mario does produce a letter in return, and one that tries to comfort him: hi Mario I’ve been ded for a few months now and I am really proud of what you did for my brother and me I write this letter to you cause you dream the whole time about my hand and I feel bad that you do this, you gave a lot of courage to save me and I really think that is nice of you and I am glad that you saved my brother i am really grateful to you for everything that you did Risard By emphasizing the saving of his brother in order to comfort Mario, “Rishard” does seem to assert a kind of life – the exchangeability of the brother for himself, along with his own capacity to express feelings of brotherliness – but he does so in a strange way that is also mixed in with the explicit reiteration of his death. The assertion of life, moreover, does not appear to derive from Mario: since it does not respond to any feelings Mario has expressed to him, the dead child’s words cannot be said to reflect the consciousness, the responsiveness or voice that would presumably be lent to him by the living child. Rather than respond to the letter from Mario, indeed, the letter from the dead boy – a letter about the dream of his 86

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hand – rather responds to – and derives from – the very dream that appears to eliminate Mario’s capacity to address Rishard. It is precisely, in other words, from the unconsciousness and the speechlessness of the dream itself that the letter seems paradoxically to arise. Indeed the image in the dream is, as the letter implicitly tells us – in its very lack of knowing and inarticulate repetition – not simply about a death, but most centrally about a problem of response that also entangles the living child inextricably with the dead one around a lack of consciousness and voice. For Mario’s inability to grasp – to know or master – the image of the hand as it returns repeats the inability to grasp that constituted the original scene of death. At the moment when the difference between the living and the dead is confronted, in the original exercises of the therapy, the buried child’s deadness is assumed by Mario, who turns mute in his inability to voice the trauma. Mario exemplifies and inhabits, then, a possibility of language that is inscribed in the fiction of the prosopopoeia as the fiction of the living who give voice and thus life to the dead, who can then respond. Mario’s language seems to exhibit “the latent threat in prosopopeia”, which de Man writes of, “that by making the death speak, the symmetrical structure implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death” (De Man 1984: 78). The figure of prosopopoeia, in its general characterization, thus carries within it a mortal possibility Mario now lives as the failure of address that emerges when his own language is invaded by the dead boy’s muteness. How, then, does Mario produce an address from within this muteness? “Rishard’s” letter to Mario signals – because it does not respond to the letter that Mario wrote to him – the absoluteness of the death that had returned as Mario’s loss of voice in his repeated dreams. And yet, in Rishard’s letter another possibility also opens up from within this very site: for if the living child falls mute, it seems, the dead child’s hand – which in reality can no longer grasp – begins to take on the living child’s desperate attempt to reach out to save the other child. Indeed, in the words of Rishard, as he addresses Mario – “I write this letter because you dream about my hand” – the dead child does not simply lose his voice, but the hand of the dead child begins to write. It is in the writing of the letter that the dead child can be said to take leave of the living, even as he joins with him in this very parting. For in this act of writing, in the concreteness of the living boy’s hand and words, the dead child’s hand can be said, finally, to join the hand of the living child in a passage from the dream to the letter that also creates a bridge between death and life. The dead child’s hand is thus no longer the site of an accusation, the failed appeal to be saved, but of another appeal that begins to move outside the trauma. And this is also Mario’s plea to be saved, in his own turn, from the mute repetition and deadness of the dream. The letter that responds to the dream thus emerges from within the trauma and from within the death: while Mario has been deprived of a voice in the encounter with the child that died, the letter from “Rishard” creates a language that addresses Mario from within his very muteness. Mario’s inability to assimilate the image of the hand to a meaning is also the beginning of the possibility of another language of response. This language arises from within the confusion between the one who dies and the one who remained alive, in allowing the living child to address himself from his own psychic death, a death that no longer permits a straightforward language of the living. In responding as “Rishard”, Mario may be said, finally, to begin the process of coming out of the dream, but only insofar as his language – and the gesture of his writing hand – now echoes and bears within it the unanswerability of the dead child’s mute appeal. In the last session of the therapy Mario and Pascal are brought together again with the team-worker Susan Housman-Kessels who now, herself, takes the seat of the dead child. Pascal has not named the dead child in his letters yet, so Susan, from the dead child’s seat, 87

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asks him to give her a name: “Look at me and give me a name. What is a good name for me?” With little hesitation, Pascal replies, “Frank”. But with Mario, the response has already been given. “I changed places”, Susan says, “and became – in the eyes of Mario – Rishard”. Then she asks about his dreams: I told him that I saw that he kept dreaming about my hand. I said that I really found this horrible for him and that I also didn’t like it for myself. I indicated that the hand belonged to me and that I would therefore like it back. I asked him to give the hand back. Mario declared that he had already done this as he no longer dreamt of the hand. Mario’s response has already taken place within the letter. He does not need to give the hand back in the therapy because he has already given it back in writing: a writing that is also a joining of the two children’s hands; a joining that, itself, serves as a release. As the hands join in the writing, they do not grasp each other, they do not erase the barrier they can never cross; they rather release each other in this very coming together. “I feel bad … you dream about my hand”, Rishard writes, thus gently taking his own hand back even as it joins in the writing with Mario. In the joining of the hands, the grasp is ultimately released and the hand of the living child, no longer paralysed by the nightmares, now writes a letter that not only joins but separates him from the one who can no longer write. This writing, I would argue, is also a language that establishes a new figure of address, which is also a new gesture of writing. Just as, in the first story we discussed above, the words of the burning child move out of the dream and into the language of the father, and of Freud and Lacan, and of all those upon whom their “burning falls” (Lacan 1998 [1973]: 59) so in the story of Mario, the hand moves out of the dream and into the writing that is, and is not, a writing of death, for it is also an appeal to life. And it is in this new awakening to life that the appeal within the trauma is passed on.

Bibliography Austin, J. L. (1975 [1962]) How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caruth, C. (2016 [1996]) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Anniversary Edition with new Afterword, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Davoine, F. and Gaudillière, J.-M. (2004) History beyond Trauma: Whereof One Cannot Speak … Thereof One Cannot Stay Silent, Revised edition, trans. S. Fairfield, New York: Other Press. De Man, P. (1984) “Autobiography as Defacement”, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1991) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Freud, S. (SE) (1953–74) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. under the general editorship of J. Strachey in collaboration with A. Freud, assisted by A. Strachey and A. Tyson, 24 vols, London: Hogarth. Lacan, J. (1998 [1973]) “Tuché and Automaton”, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton. Levinas, E. (2000) Entre Nous, trans. M. B. Smith and B. Harshav, New York: Columbia. Olthof, J. and Vermetten, E. (1994) De mens als verhaal: narratieve strategieen in psychotherapie voor kinderen en volwassenen, Amsterdam: De Tidjstroom. All translations in the text were provided by the authors.

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PART II

Key concepts

8 VICTIMHOOD Susana Onega

The consideration of suffering under the trauma paradigm A simple perusal of the history of Western culture would show the importance literature and art have always had in the representation of suffering. From Homer’s narration of the War of Troy in the Iliad to the recent upsurge of (pseudo)autobiographical and testimonial works on the Holocaust, sexual abuse or incest, Western literature and art are full of more or less overt allusions to the unspeakable experiences and memories of victims of collective or individual traumas which demand to be written and read or recorded and watched. The potential for resilience and working through of psychic trauma by means of different literary manifestations and artistic expressions has been amply documented throughout centuries. Yet, our present globalized society, with its alienation of affects caused by the combination of evermore sophisticated technological advances, the consumer society and the exponential increase of violence, corruption, fragile politics and natural disasters, together with such socio-cultural and historical factors of our recent past as the two World Wars, the clash of civilizations and the processes of decolonization and globalization, has brought about the generalized perception that Western culture is dominated by the trauma paradigm (Luckhurst 2008: 5; Onega 2014: 491–503). This paradigm shift would explain the transference of interest in “the trauma question” (Luckhurst 2008) from corporative and socio-political fields like industry, bureaucracy, medicine, law and social welfare to the cultural and literary realms. As Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman argue in The Empire of Trauma: An Enquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (2009), the realization that individuals and groups are susceptible to wounding has led the general public to move from suspicion to sympathy in the attitude to victims of trauma, and the institutions from a politics of silence and illegitimacy to a “politics of reparation, of testimony and of proof” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009: xi). Thus, the struggle for recognition of the psychic effects of trauma initiated by the mental medical sciences in the late nineteenth century (Luckhurst 2006: 498) was followed by a progressive change across the twentieth century “from a realm in which the symptoms of the wounded soldier or the injured worker were deemed of doubtful legitimacy to one in which their suffering, no longer contested, testifies to an experience that excites sympathy and merits compensation” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009: 5). After the Vietnam War, a new interpretive grid was applied to the 91

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symptoms of shell shock or, in the new psychiatric terms, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): the victims were no longer asked to convince the medical judges of their traumatized condition and professionals became actively engaged in spotting potential signs of psychic trauma among veterans. In the political and legal realms, this change of attitude in the consideration of victimhood was followed by an era of repair of large-scale traumatic events such as the measures taken by the Canadian and Australian governments to compensate for the damage done to aboriginal victims of residential schools who had been systematically abused and subjected to an explicit policy of assimilation. The same change of attitude may be said to lie behind the breaking of silence about such colossal historical traumas as the Middle Passage, the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Apartheid or the Soviet Gulag, as well as behind the general public’s mobilizations and social protest movements seeking reparation after terrorist attacks, sexual harassment, fatal accidents or natural disasters, thus extending the notion of victimhood to refer to all kinds of direct and indirect suffering and loss.

The changing definition of “victim” and the birth of the victim society In the Introduction to The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe, 1970–2005, Fatima Naqvi describes the current Western attitude to suffering and loss as a paradoxical “millennial appeal to victimhood” coupled with a “persistent anxiety about victims and victimhood that has been present in a variety of cultural manifestations over the past thirty years” (Naqvi 2007: 3), this fact leading Jean Baudrillard to assert that we live “in and as a ‘victim society’ (‘société victimale’)” (Naqvi 2007: 1). Naqvi finds this label somewhat contradictory, as “the West is still, in economic and political terms, in a position of superior power and, if anything, victimizer rather than victim” (1). In order to puzzle out this apparent contradiction, Naqvi sets out to analyse the meaning of the term “victim” in Western culture, beginning by underlining the multivalence of its dictionary definition. As she explains, in the 1989 edition of The Oxford English Dictionary she consulted, the primary definition of “victim” is linked either to the pagan sacrificial ritual (‘1.a. a living creature killed and offered as a sacrifice to some deity or supernatural power’) or the Christian religious context (‘b. applied to Christ as an offering for mankind’). (Simpson and Weiner 1989: 607) This primary definition is followed by three subsidiary ones: 2.a. A person who is put to death or subjected to torture by another; one who suffers severely in body or property through cruel or oppressive treatment […]. 2.b. one who is reduced or destined to suffer under some oppressive or destructive agency […]. 2.c. [someone who] perishes or suffers in health [or because of] some enterprise or pursuit voluntarily undertaken. (Simpson and Weiner 1989: 607) Clearly, in this 1989 definition, the most important element is the association of victims with sacrifice. The primary definition of “victim” that appears in the 2018 edition of the 92

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Oxford Living English Dictionaries reads as follows: “A person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action.” This primary definition is then related to three main areas of signification: 1.1 A person who is tricked or duped. […] 1.2 A person who has come to feel helpless and passive in the face of misfortune or ill-treatment. […] 1.3 A living creature killed as a religious sacrifice. (Oxford Living English Dictionaries 2018) The entry ends with an indication that the origin of the English word “victim” (denoting a creature killed as a religious sacrifice) goes back to the late fifteenth century, and is derived from Latin victima (Oxford Living English Dictionaries 2018). If both definitions are compared, it becomes evident that the sacrificial element that featured so prominently in the 1989 primary definition has been relegated to the third subsidiary area of signification in the 2018 definition, and the “living creature” in 1.a. has been substituted by “person” in 1.1. What is more, besides the cruel suffering imposed on an unwilling victim by some oppressive or destructive agency or illness, the 1989 definition included another form of suffering: that provoked by the victim’s voluntary undertaking of some enterprise or pursuit. By contrast, in the 2018 definition, the suffering of those killed or tortured against their will and the voluntary victims have been suppressed, and the extreme cruelty and oppressiveness of the destructive agents drastically reduced: in 1.1 the torture and death imposed on the involuntary victim has become a sheer case of deception by a trickster, while in 1.2 the victim simply is a helpless and passive toy buffeted by misfortune or ill-treatment. These striking differences between the two dictionary entries point to a significant depolitization of the concept, now applicable only to human beings considered apart from power relations, and to the unwillingness to assign responsibilities, including ecological ones. In an article published in 2009, Jan van Dijk, member of the International Victimology Institute at the University of Tilburg, explains that the definition of “victims” as “the sacrificial ones” is a common practice in all Western languages as well as in modern Hebrew and Arabic, that “seems to originate from the association of the plight of victims with the suffering of Jesus Christ” (Van Dijk 2009: 1–2). As he argues, unlike languages that use more neutral terms to designate the harmed party, the sacrificial element is conveyed both by the Latin victima (slaughtered animal) and the Christian conception of Jesus as the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei) (3). Although this conception of victimhood is positive in that it precludes the threat of retaliation and endless violence, to van Dijk it has a negative side in that, by calling them victims, the survivors of crime are assigned a social role of passivity and forgiveness that “precludes any hope of a rapid recovery, or, in fact, any recovery at all” (2), thus denying them the capacity for agency and resilience. What is more, by calling the affected persons sacrificial objects, the perpetrator is granted “higher, unselfish motives” and put “in the venerable position of the sacrificial priest” (2). As van Dijk notes, “[t]he same objection has been raised against the use of the word holocaust for the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. Holocaust means a sacrifice by fire” (2). This is also the reason why many survivors of sexual harassment have refused to be labelled as victims. As Julia Ormond, UN goodwill ambassador for the fight against human trafficking, puts it in The Forgotten Ones, a documentary made to illustrate the UN Declaration of Basic Principles for the Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power,

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There is a kind of stigma that victims feel uncomfortable with; the use of the terminology “victim” is synonymous with weakness, synonymous with shame. The people that I have met who are victims, are survivors, they are resourceful, alive and productive. (Ormond, quoted in Van Dijk 2009: 25n1) A further danger of misrepresentation and stigmatization conveyed by the association of victimhood with sacrifice is the implicit danger of society “tend[ing] to turn from sympathy into antipathy when victims defy the expected victim role” and refuse to perform their duty to forgive their enemies (Van Dijk 2009: 3, 5). While the survivors’ refusal to assume the helplessness, passivity and lack of agency attributed to victims in the 2018 dictionary definition may be said to point to a steady process of banalization and desacralization of victimhood in Western culture, society’s tendency to change its attitude to victims of trauma or loss if they do not fulfil their expected sacrificial roles, may be said to evince a lack of empathy for the suffering of others as well as a covert fear of the victims’ potential for social and political change that run pari passu to the generalized waning of affects, indifference and disaffection attributed by Jean Baudrillard to the postmodern condition in the age of information technology. As he famously argued in The Perfect Crime, the murder of reality and the extermination of the vital illusion of the world brought about by the new technologies has given rise to a “new victim order” (Baudrillard 2002 [1995]: 131–41) characterized by general indifference, profound disaffection and “a phobic relationship with an artificial other, idealized by hatred” (132). In our desperate need to define ourselves as subjects we have “liquidated the Other […] in its irreducible singularity” and substituted it for an artificial “Other as different” (137), with the single function of establishing a world-wide fetishistic system of differences. The millennial appeal coupled with anxiety that, as Fatima Naqvi noted above, Western society feels for victimhood, may be said to stem, then, from a vital need to define ourselves as subjects: We explore the wretchedness of others to prove our own existence a contrario. The new identity is the victim’s identity. Everything is organized around the deprived, frustrated, handicapped subject, and the victim strategy is that of his acknowledgement as such. […] So we move into a situation of the celebration of one’s deficit, one’s misfortune, one’s personal insignificance – with the intellectual and media discourse, by its simultaneously sadistic and sentimental takeover of these matters, sanctioning people’s right to their own suffering, their consecration as victims and the loss of their natural defences. The victims themselves do not complain, since they get the benefit of confessing their misery. (Baudrillard 2002 [1995]: 137–8) Thus, while in the natural order “as we see in anthropological accounts up to the eighteenth century and into the colonial phase” (Baudrillard 2002 [1995]: 132) – or also in sacrificial narratives like Freud’s Totem and Taboo – our aim would be “to kill the other, devour it, vie with it or hate it” (115), in the victim society we establish a phobic relationship with an ideal Other created by ourselves: And because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual extrapolation of the same from the other. […] 94

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All forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning, a mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference. (Baudrillard 2002 [1995]: 132) The problem with this fetishistic Self/Other system of differences is that the two terms are not opposable (Baudrillard 2002 [1995]: 122), as the whole effort is to reduce the singularity of cultures to a simple question of difference: “All that seeks to be singular and incomparable, and does not enter into the play of difference, must be exterminated” (128). Here lies the reason for the paradoxical coexistence of racism and humanitarianism in the victim world: The same indifference can give rise to exactly opposite behaviour. Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of a victim to aid. Idealization plays for the better or the worse. The scapegoat is no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat. And he is still the same person. (Baudrillard 2002 [1995]: 132) This need of the victim society to construct a phobic artificial Other to prove its own existence a contrario would explain its tendency to turn from sympathy into antipathy whenever survivors fail to fulfil their expected roles as victims, since, according to Baudrillard, once the irreducible singularity of the Other is denied, human relations can only be ruled by violence and the collective “mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference” (132).

Violence and the ethics of mourning and (un)grievability in the victim society Baudrillard’s characterization of the victim society as dominated by violence and mourning may be said to provide the starting point for Judith Butler’s reflection, in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), on the ethical limits of power in the global context of violence that culminated in the attacks on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 and the ensuing Iraq War and War on Terror. The aim of her study is to answer the vital questions: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?” (Butler 2004: 20). As she explains, the collective shock produced by the terrorist attacks in New York took the United States out of its secular narcissism, forcing it to contemplate its own vulnerability and experiment the grief of loss. But instead of realizing that, despite differences in location and history, all human beings “have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody”, and that we are “socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure” (20), the United States opted for the creation of a national sense of identity based on retaliation and “the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which subject must not” (xiv). This distinction between grievable and ungrievable victims, like the creation of an artificial Other-as-different by the victim society, may be said to constitute a phobic process of dehumanization and derealization of the Other that renders the human relations of the natural order impossible, thus perpetuating a system of violence: 95

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If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never “were”, and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. This derealisation of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. (33–4) Butler places the responsibility for the creation of this nationalist process of dehumanization and derealization of the Other on the role played by the media in the suppression of any internal dissent to the political and military discourses and practices (Butler 2004: 38), such as “the refusal to include the important critiques of the US military effort by Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky […] in the mainstream US Press” (3). Other key factors in this process are the elimination of the separation between the juridical and the executive power, and the Government’s tactical use of the law as an instrument of power. This allows, for instance, to keep the (often innocent) victims of the War on Terror in a regime of “indefinite detention” (50–100) in prison camps outside the United States like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, where, being beyond the protection of the Geneva Convention, the detainees can be submitted to all forms of physical and psychic torture. As Butler notes, this situates the detainees in a paralegal universe of infinite waiting, in the position that Giorgio Agamben calls in Homo Sacer (1998) the “suspended zone” of “bare life”, that is, the life of “a subject deprived of rights of citizenship [… and] conceived as biological minimum” (Butler 2004: 67). This atrocious process of dehumanization is rounded off – in a way that echoes the chilling technique employed by Nazi propaganda to dehumanize the Jews – by the discursive regime employed by members of the US Department of Defence such as Secretary Rumsfeld to describe detainees as “killing machines”, “animal[s]”, or “vessels of violence” (74, 78, 88), in order to justify the need to maintain the state of emergency. The importance Butler attributes to the control exerted by the mass media on the dissemination of the discourses of power and so, on the collective creation of spectral phobic Others, echoes Baudrillard’s contention in Simulacra and Simulation that the development of information technology in our globalized capitalist society has led to the generation of a territory, a referential being, or a substance “by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1994 [1981]: 1). The incapacity to distinguish the real from the virtual brought about by this model of reproduction would explain the fascination for the atrocious episodes of violence and the mass attraction for atrocity exhibitions transmitted in real time by the media in our “wound culture” (Seltzer 1997). As Mark Seltzer argues, the current “public fascination with torn and opened bodies” and the “collective gathering around shock, trauma and the wound” (1), also point to a collapse of the distinction between the private and the public spheres: “One discovers again and again the excitation in the opening of private and bodily and psychic interiors: the exhibition and witnessing, the endless reproducible display of wounded bodies and wounded minds in public.” (1) The danger of transforming these endlessly reproducible mediated episodes of violence into addictive spectacles is tackled by Luc Boltanski in a book fittingly entitled Distant Suffering, where he sets himself the task of responding to the moral questions posed by the sight of real time suffering through the media, when the viewer cannot act directly to affect the circumstances in which the suffering is taking place. His response is that spectators can actively involve themselves and others by talking about what they have seen and how they were affected by it, thus avoiding the danger of collusive silence denounced by Primo Levi in the Afterword to If This is a Man with respect to Nazism: 96

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In Hitler’s Germany a particular code was widespread: those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. In this way the typical German citizen won and defended his ignorance, which seemed to him sufficient justification of his adherence to Nazism. Shutting his mouth, his eyes and his ears, he built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door. (Levi, quoted in Boltanski 2004 [1999]: ix)

Conclusion: the role of literature and art in a new cultural politics of emotion Boltanski’s and Levi’s view on the importance of putting suffering into words is echoed by Geoffrey Hartman in “Trauma within the Limits of Literature” (2003). After endorsing Boltanski’s remark that “If there is a failure of language, resulting in silence or mutism, then no working through, no catharsis, is possible” (Hartman 2003: 258), Hartman points to literary verbalization as “a basis for making the wound perceivable and the silence audible” (258). This role of literature and, it may be added, of art in general, in the representation and working through of trauma would explain the adaptability of literary and artistic forms according to the requirements of the society that creates them. As Fredric Jameson pointed out in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, while Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, was meant to transmit to viewers the human inner experience of “the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation” (Jameson 1992: 11), the depthlessness of Andy Warhol’s portraits of “human subjects: stars like Marilyn Monroe who are themselves commodified and transformed into their own images” (11) expressed the insignificance of the individual subjects reduced to statistical numbers of employers and consumers in the era of corporate global economy and unmitigated capitalism denounced by Baudrillard. However, as Hal Foster convincingly argues in The Return of the Real (1996), the incongruous effect produced by Warhol’s endless repetitions of apparently emotionally flat, simulacral faces of stars expresses not only the commodification and lack of agency of the postmodern individual subject, but its traumatized condition as well: Warhol’s repetitions not only reproduce traumatic effects: they also produce them. Somehow in these repetitions, then, several contradictory things occur at the same time: a warding away of traumatic significance and an opening out to it, a defending against traumatic affect and a producing of it. (Foster 1996: 132) Foster’s description of the contradictory evocation of traumatic affect and unemotionality produced by Warhol’s endlessly reproduced, depthless faces may be said to provide an excellent visual image of the helplessness, passivity and lack of agency not so much of trauma victims but of the subject in Baudrillard’s victim society, dominated by indifference and mourning for the death of Otherness. The characteristics of Warhol’s faces acquire a larger significance when they are set in the context of Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of “the face” (Levinas 1981 [1974], 1991 [1961]). As Butler notes in Precarious Life, Levinas’s face conveys the radical otherness, precariousness and inscrutability of the Other. As such, it raises the (natural) impulse to kill motivated by the fear of being murdered and the promptings of self-defence, but it simultaneously exerts “a demand for peace” conveyed by “an agony, an injurability [that] bespeaks a divine prohibition against killing” (Butler 2004: 135). Central to Levinas’s conceptualization of the face is its resistance to be represented. Its unrepresentability not only allows us to perceive the Other’s suffering, it also 97

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awakens us to our own precariousness: “to respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be aware of what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself” (Butler 2004: 133). It is the perception of this shared precariousness that can take us beyond the system of violence ruling the victim society: Suffering can yield an experience of humility, of vulnerability, of impressionability and dependence, and these […] can move us beyond and against the vocation of the paranoid victim who regenerates infinitely the justifications for war. It is as much a matter of wrestling ethically with one’s own murderous impulses, impulses that seek to quell an overwhelming fear, as it is a matter of apprehending the suffering of others and taking stock of the suffering one has inflicted. (Butler 2004: 149–50) As this quotation suggests, Butler’s reading of Levinas points to the centrality of emotions in the configuration of Self/Other relations. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014 [2004]), Sara Ahmed develops this insight further by analysing the role of emotions in the creation of cultural politics. As she forcefully demonstrates by reading a selection of texts aimed at generating phobic relationships with artificial Others, such texts assume a discourse of victimization extended to all areas of subjectivity, inviting readers to establish an oppositional difference between “you” and “‘the others’, who are named as illegal immigrants and bogus asylum seekers threat[ening] to overwhelm and swamp the nation” (Ahmed 2014 [2004]: 1). Thus, “becoming this ‘you’ would mean developing a certain rage against these illegitimate others”, while feeling love for the nation “is also to feel injured by these others, who are taking what is yours” (1). By so doing, such narratives generate “a subject that is endangered by imagined others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs, security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject” (43). Surely, here lies the reason for the overwhelming feeling of victimhood felt by contemporary Western society that Naqvi found so contradictory, given its economic and political superiority (see above). Among other forms of cultural politicization of the concept of victimhood analysed by Ahmed are the extension of Butler’s concept of ungrievability to queer subjects who died on 11 September 2001 (Ahmed 2014 [2004]: 156–7) and the commodification of suffering carried out by institutions such as the Australian Government in response to the injuries inflicted on the Aboriginal population, since they “involve the fetishization of the wound as a sign of identity [… that involves] making indigenous others fit into the white nation or community” (32, 35). Ahmed’s way out of this endless process of dehumanization and fetishization of the wounded Other is that we generate a new cultural politics of emotion, based on the renunciation of violence and hate (precisely the positive side of the Western association of victimhood with sacrifice), and undertake the reading of the testimonial writings of the survivors as if they were “about our feelings”, so as to develop “our ability to feel the feelings of others” (35). If we are to find a way out of the victim order, we should extend Ahmed’s advocacy of an emotionally charged, ethical reading of testimonial writings to all sorts of representations of trauma and loss.

Acknowledgement The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (code FFI2017-84258-P); and of the Government of Aragón and the ERDF 2014–2020 programme “Building Europe from Aragón” (code H03_17R), for the writing of this chapter. 98

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Bibliography Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, W. Hamacher and D. E. Wellbery (eds), trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ahmed, S. (2014 [2004]) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Baudrillard, J. (1994 [1981]) Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. Glaser, Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press. ———. (2002 [1995]) The Perfect Crime, trans. C. Turner, London: Verso. Boltanski, L. (2004 [1999]) Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. G. Burchell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Fassin, D. and Rechtman, R. (2009) The Empire of Trauma: An Enquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Foster, H. (1996) The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hartman, G. (2003) “Trauma within the Limits of Literature”, European Journal of English Studies 7(3): 257–74. Jameson, F. (1992) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso. Levinas, E. (1981 [1974]) Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. (1991 [1961]) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Luckhurst, R. (2006) “Mixing Memory and Desire: Psychoanalysis, Psychology, and Trauma Theory”, in P. Waugh (ed.) Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 497–507. ———. (2008) The Trauma Question, London: Routledge. Naqvi, F. (2007) The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe, 1970–2005, New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Onega, S. (2014) “The Notion of Paradigm Shift and the Roles of Science and Literature in the Interpretation of Reality”, European Review 22(3): 491–503. Oxford Living English Dictionaries (2018) “Victim.” www.lexico.com/en/definition/victim. Seltzer, M. (1997) “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere”, October 80 (Spring): 3–26. Simpson, J. A. and Weiner, E. S. C. (eds) (1989) The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Van Dijk, J. (2009) “Free the Victim: A Critique of the Western Conception of Victimhood”, International Review of Victimology 16: 1–33.

Further reading Fohring, S. (Guest ed.) (2018) “Victim Identities and Hierarchies”, International Review of Victimology 24(2). (A special issue on the identification and identity formation of various forms of victimization.) Ganteau, J.-M. (2015) The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability: Contemporary British Fiction, New York: Routledge. (A study on vulnerability as a central issue of contemporary culture.) Ganteau, J.-M. and Onega, S. (eds) (2017) Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction, New York: Routledge. (A collection of essays on victimhood and vulnerability in relation to contemporary literature.) Jacoby, T. A. (2015) “A Theory of Victimhood: Politics, Conflict and the Construction of Victim-based Identity”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(2): 511–30. (This article formulates a political theory of victimhood driven by the distinction between victimization as an act of harm, and victimhood as a form of collective identity.) Letschert, R. and van Dijk, J. (eds) (2011) The New Faces of Victimhood: Globalization, Transnational Crimes and Victim Rights, Heidelberg: Springer. (A study of transnational crimes and victims’ rights from the perspective of globalization.) Wilson, J. K. (ed.) (2009) The Praeger Handbook of Victimology, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO Ltd. (An overview of the development of victimology since the coinage of the term in 1947.)

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9 PERPETRATOR TRAUMA Erin McGlothlin

The vexing problem of perpetrator trauma Although from the standpoint of common sense it might seem obvious and uncontroversial to state that perpetrators of extreme violence might experience psychic repercussions as a result of the commission of their crimes, contemporary trauma theory, with its hitherto near-exclusive focus on the victim as the sole sufferer of the traumatic effects of violence, has had very little to say about either the phenomenon of perpetrator trauma or its representation in literature. According to Kjell Anderson, “There is little research or academic literature on genocide perpetrator trauma. The act of perpetration is itself morally repugnant, and thus it seems dissonant to consider the trauma suffered by some perpetrators as being worthy of concern” (Anderson 2018: 226). In other words, although trauma is “a diagnostic rather than a moral concept” (Vice 2013: 16), scholars of trauma have, in the last several decades, committed themselves to a normative and evaluative position whereby “we […] empathize with those who are seen as most deserving of our empathy” (Leake 2014: 175), namely persons who can unambiguously be regarded as victims of violence. In this way, argues Saira Mohamed, trauma has shifted from a neutral category that identifies an experience that is universal (at least in its possibility) to a label that validates, even extols, the suffering of those whose experiences warrant recognition. Trauma is not merely a psychological disorder; it is a moral category that identifies its subject as a person who merits empathy and deserves to be heard. (Mohamed 2015: 1173) By virtue of its accrued moral and ethical dimensions, trauma discourse has been “gradually dissociated from the field of medicine and inserted into the social domain to become a platform for political claims”, whereby victimhood and suffering have acquired a “prescriptive, normative function with symbolic, but also material, results” (Sanyal 2015: 184). The experience of perpetrators, on the other hand, has fallen outside of this normative trauma paradigm, which, by virtue of the greater cultural commitment to and even identification with victims’ experience of suffering, has largely remained insensible to both the specific ways in which perpetrators experience trauma through their very commission of

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violence and the myriad manifestations of that genus of trauma in literature. Even the surge in scholarly attention to what has been termed the “turn toward the figure of the perpetrator in recent historical fiction” (Crownshaw 2011: 75) such as Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2009) or Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest (2014) has neglected to consider the ways trauma operates in literary representations of perpetration. At the same time, however, the notion of perpetrator trauma has not been altogether absent in trauma discourse; on the contrary, it has uncannily but obscurely shadowed theories of trauma since their inception. As “an unwelcome ghost” (Morag 2013: 4), the spectral presence of perpetrator trauma has produced a fundamental tension in the theorization of trauma, which continues to manifest on the part of trauma scholars both discomfort with the idea of the traumatized perpetrator who suffers precisely on account of his infliction of violence and anxiety about the breakdown of the dichotomy between perpetration and victimization within the trauma paradigm. In recent years trauma theorists have begun to take steps to expand their perspective to include the trauma of perpetrators, although this work is still in its infancy, has yet to be accepted broadly within the field and raises for the time being more questions than it is able definitively to answer. One of the most vexing issues involved in the discussion of perpetrator trauma is the apparent simplicity of the term in relation to the staggering diversity of experiences covered by the umbrella concept of perpetration, which includes both the collective commission of mass crimes and cruelties, whether punctual or sustained, intentional or structural (such as military violence; state-sanctioned mass atrocity; genocide; oppression and expropriation associated with colonization; terrorism; and institutionalized racism, sexism and economic inequality) and violence originating with and committed against individuals (including murder, sexual assault, domestic violence and other forms of personal terrorism, such as bullying). Compounding the variegation of the violent acts themselves is the acute heterogeneity of the persons who commit such violence, which in terms of factors such as age, gender, profession, nationality, race and ethnicity, religious identity, history of violence, etc. is seemingly boundless. Moreover, the relative relationship between a perpetrator and the commission of violence can also vary greatly; the spectrum can include both people who engage in violence autonomously and people compelled – as part of a social or military hierarchy, for example – to perpetrate crimes against their inclination, with various degrees of self-volition, commitment, and reluctance in between. For these reasons, it is impossible to represent adequately in such a limited forum the ways in which perpetrator trauma can play out in the diverse contexts where violence happens on every corner of the planet, both historically and in our present moment. Moreover, no single scholar can possibly do justice to the myriad forms and forums in which perpetrator trauma occurs. My discussion of perpetrator trauma here emerges from my work in my field of expertise, Holocaust Studies, particularly Holocaust literature and film. By virtue of the reified image of the figure of the Holocaust perpetrator in contemporary culture, which often regards it as the unambiguous embodiment of evil, this field and the corpus of work it examines have been viewed – for “obvious” and “understandable” reasons (Gibbs 2014: 18–19) – as especially resistant to considerations of the traumatized perpetrator of violence. However, in spite of – or even because of – its perceived extremity, this figure provides a good example through which we can begin to consider the vexing problem of perpetrator trauma. I will thus focus on the question of perpetrator trauma mainly with regard to the state-sanctioned act of killing civilians – particularly in the context of the Holocaust – while at the same time acknowledging the ways which the issues play out in very different ways in other collective scenarios of violence, particularly modern combat warfare. In this, 101

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I remain mindful of recent critiques of the “psychological universalism” (Andermahr 2016: 906) attendant to the trauma theory that originated in the 1990s, which took the Holocaust as its singular reference point and applied, with a kind of intellectual colonialism, the theoretical models developed from that framework to a host of other historical traumas and their literary representations without regard for their specific cultural contexts. In positing the figure of the Holocaust perpetrator as my exemplar of perpetrator trauma, I emphatically do not claim its universal applicability; rather, I argue, it provides us but one specific lens through which we can perceive some – but certainly not all – of the dynamics of the phenomenon.

Modern trauma theory and the perpetrator of violence The perpetrator has been a covert feature of modern trauma theory from the start in its two most notable manifestations: psychoanalysis, which forms the basis of much recent cultural theory on trauma, and the clinical development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which has relied in particular on studies of trauma suffered by combat soldiers. The spectre of perpetrator traumatization attended early psychoanalytic theorization of trauma, especially in Freud, who is foundational for early psychological investigations of trauma. Throughout his scattered work on trauma – in Studies in Hysteria (1895, with Josef Breuer), in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and in Moses and Monotheism (1939) – Freud worked to develop what are now considered the hallmarks of the psychoanalytic account of traumatic neurosis, including the functions of initial repression of the traumatic event, an essential latency period in which the event remains unassimilated in the psyche, the sufferer’s compulsion to repeat aspects of the trauma and the return of the repressed in various guises. Importantly, Freud’s examples of traumatization were not limited to the victims of violence, but included the perpetrators of it as well (although, as Sigrid Weigel points out [2003: 90], this aspect of his work has remained until recently largely unnoticed by scholars of trauma). Thus, for example, he derives his discussion of repetition-compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle from Torquato Tasso’s tale of Tancred in La Gerusalemme liberata (1581), in which Tancred “unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight”; later, in his grief, Tancred “slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again” (Freud 1920: 16). The distraught Tancred is thus compelled to repeat an essential aspect of his original trauma; however, this trauma is rooted in his experience not as a victim of violence but as a perpetrator of it. In his Moses and Monotheism as well, Freud posits an alternative myth of the origins of Judaism as the traumatic reaction to the Israelites’ alleged murder of Moses; in this, “it becomes evident that Freud’s examples refer to the traumatization of the perpetrator”, whereby “the murders of the primal father and of Moses leave traces in the psyches of the perpetrators” (Assmann 2006: 50). At the same time, however, Freud himself declined to take up the trauma of the perpetrator as a distinct phenomenon, nor did he articulate the difference between the kinds of trauma suffered by the victim of violence and those experienced by the perpetrator. Freud’s psychoanalytic model of trauma has had a profound impact on more recent cultural work on trauma, especially Cathy Caruth’s enormously influential work from the early 1990s. Caruth begins her study Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996), which characterizes trauma as a phenomenon that can be neither known nor assimilated, that is defined by its belatedness and that defies language and narrative representation, with

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an analysis of Freud’s story of Tancred and Clorinda. However, as Sigrid Weigel (1999, 2003) and Ruth Leys (2000) have pointed out, although Caruth recognizes the doubled act of violence committed by Tancred, she curiously considers him a “survivor” (Caruth 1996: 2) of violence rather than its instigator: The story of trauma, then, as the narrative of a belated experience, far from telling of an escape from reality – the escape from death, or from its referential force – rather attests to its endless impact on a life. Tancred does not escape the reality of death’s impact – of the wounding accident and of Clorinda’s death – but rather has to live it twice […]. Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it? (Caruth 1996: 7) Caruth also takes up the concept of trauma in Moses and Monotheism, but here as well, as Leys points out, she transforms the violent murder of Moses on the part of the Israelites into “a history of Jewish survival” (Caruth 1996: 68). With her conflation of the trauma of survival with the act of perpetration in these two examples, Caruth thus inadvertently introduces the figure of the perpetrator into the paradigm of trauma. In Leys’s view, Caruth’s interpretive moves not only are problematic in their own specific contexts, but applied to other historical events – in particular, to the Holocaust – they also imply the unthinkable, namely that the perpetrator can also be traumatized: “On Caruth’s interpretation, what the parable of Tasso’s story tells us is that not only can Tancred be considered the victim of a trauma but that even the Nazis are not exempt from the same dispensation” (Leys 2000: 297). For Weigel, on the other hand, the latent figure of the perpetrator in both Freud and Caruth functions as an “an uncanny or ghostly presence” (Weigel 2003: 94), whereby the repressed motive of a culture of memory – one which has hitherto for the most part represented itself in terms of an identification with the perspective of the victims and has become more and more interested in trauma – returns to the scene of the perpetrator: a case of the compulsion to repeat in the theoretical discourse. (Weigel 2003: 91) According to this view, Leys’s outraged reaction to Caruth’s unintentional conflation of perpetrator and victim is itself a symptom of the conceptual, ethical and affective challenge that the trauma of the perpetrator poses to contemporary trauma theory. The perpetrator has also inhered in psychiatric accounts that form the basis of PTSD, which draw to a great extent on the traumatization of soldiers in combat. Psychiatric interest in trauma emerged during the First World War, when military physicians and psychiatrists – Freud among them – observed among soldiers on both sides of the conflict a marked spike in mental disorders that they ascribed to “combat stress” or “shell shock”. These conditions were attributed to “implied cowardice” (MacNair 2001: 273) not only by the military leadership and in the greater public imagination but also often by doctors as well. Psychiatrists generally assumed that the men who presented with such disorders suffered from the stress of constant bombardment and from having witnessed the death of comrades; in other words, such men were usually presumed to be the victims of or witnesses to violence, not the instigators of it. Soldiers’ own experiences of killing – a duty that was, after all, their raison d’être as soldiers – were generally not taken into account; it was accepted that one experienced psychological stress only in response to threats to one’s own life. (Such a view 103

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continues to linger in assessments of historical combat trauma today; for example, in their brief chronicle of the development of the psychiatric response to psychological casualties of modern warfare, Crocq and Crocq 2000 do not mention the function that killing or the perpetration of other acts of violence have played in such a history.) Psychiatric attention to combat stress and other psychological disorders generated by warfare continued to grow during the Second World War, but it was not until after the US conflict in Vietnam (1955–75), when “the late and delayed effects of combat exposure in the form of PTSD were a significant source of suffering and disability among veterans in the United States” (Crocq and Crocq 2000: 53), that psychiatric definitions of trauma were codified. In fact, the prevalence of symptoms among veterans of this conflict played a major role in the invention and development of PTSD, which was first introduced to the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980 in response, in part, to political advocacy on the part of veterans’ groups. However, even though “half of Vietnam combat veterans reported taking the life of an enemy combatant and just under one third reported witnessing abusive violence, which included mistreatment of civilians, killing of prisoners, use of chemicals or bombs on villages, and mutilation of bodies” (Maguen et al. 2009: 435), the definition of PTSD, which “emphasizes the perspective of experiencing or witnessing of trauma in contrast to taking actions that bring about [traumatic] conditions” (Van Winkle and Safter 2011: 107), focuses “primarily on the experience and aftermath of severe deprivation, victimization, and personal life-threat [rather than on] the moral conflict, shame, and guilt produced by taking a life in combat” (Maguen et al. 2009: 435). Thus, while PTSD as a mental disorder was initially developed in no small part in response to the trauma suffered by perpetrators of violence, its definition – and consequently the cultural discourse on trauma that has developed in its wake – has effaced to a large extent the aetiology and symptomatology of perpetrator trauma. As Gibbs argues, “Ironically, then, while PTSD depended as a concept upon the lobbying of perpetrator trauma sufferers, their particular condition has been marginalized in the years since the acceptance of PTSD as the principal trauma paradigm” (Gibbs 2014: 166), leading to “the repression of perpetrator trauma in research” (Morag 2013: 4), which continues to be “haunted by this ghostly shadow” (9). Much like the psychiatric assessment of combat trauma following the First World War, contemporary researchers of PTSD in the context of warfare have largely persisted in the belief “that all PTSD symptoms must relate to what the enemy did, not what the soldier did” (MacNair 2002: 162).

Defining perpetrator trauma Due to the ambiguity with which trauma discourse has responded to the figure of the perpetrator, there has yet to emerge a clear concept of what exactly defines and constitutes perpetrator trauma, how it differs from the trauma experienced by victims of violence, and how it plays out as a distinct dynamic in cultural products. This deficiency in the scholarship pertains not only to the cultural and literary conceptualization of perpetrator trauma, which according to Morag, remains markedly “under-theorized” (Morag 2013: 3), but also to clinical research, which has yet to elaborate a precise, comprehensive aetiology and symptomatology. In terms of the killing of combatants and civilians in warfare, for example, “[b]ecause there are relatively few scientific studies of the impact of taking a life in war, we do not know whether this act is associated with a unique pattern of chronic maladaptive reactions” (Maguen et al. 2009: 435–6); Anderson likewise claims that “[l]ittle research has been conducted on post-traumatic stress among perpetrators of genocide and other mass atrocities” (Anderson 2018: 227). Indeed, the taxonomic definition 104

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and diagnostic criteria of PTSD specified in the recent DSM-5 (2013), like those in the third and fourth editions, do not specifically mention the perpetration of violence as an aetiological factor for PTSD, even though by virtue of their vague linguistic articulation – “Exposure to actual or threatened death”, “Directly experiencing the traumatic event(s)”, “Witnessing, in person, the event(s) as it occurred to others” – they do not strictly rule out such activity either (Black and Grant 2014: 158). The absence of institutional recognition of perpetrator trauma as a distinct subset of PTSD thus functions in tandem with the cultural understanding of trauma to render this dynamic for the most part invisible. At the same time, however, beginning in the early years of the current century trauma theory has begun to become conscious of the repressed figure of perpetrator trauma and to slowly shed light on it not only as a psychological phenomenon, but also as a cultural and literary trope. In particular, MacNair’s comparative, synthetic study from 2002 of the psychological impact of killing in a variety of contexts and groups (military combat, capital punishment, genocide, law enforcement, abortion practitioners), through analysis of the available historical and clinical evidence, provides a taxonomic and conceptual paradigm for considering the ways in which the commission of violence can have traumatic repercussions for its agent. MacNair coins the term “perpetrator-induced traumatic stress” (PITS) to describe “any portions of symptomatology of PTSD, at clinical or subclinical levels, which result from situations that would be traumatic if someone were a victim, but situations for which the person in question was a causal participant” (MacNair 2002: 7), thus clarifying, rather than obscuring (as PTSD does), the psychological consequences that can – but not necessarily will – result specifically from the perpetration of violence (especially mass killing). As MacNair’s quote indicates, PITS largely aligns with PTSD in terms of its standard symptomatology, but it diverges from it radically by virtue of its aetiology.

The aetiology of perpetrator trauma According to Mohamed, “Trauma as a psychological condition refers to a response to an experience that renders an individual unable to properly process that experience” (Mohamed 2015: 1770); for perpetrators of mass atrocities such as the Holocaust, the unprocessable and thus unintegrable experience – the chief aetiological factor – is the act of actively terminating another person’s life. (In this, they differ radically from victims of violence, whose trauma derives from their experience of mortal danger.) For first-time perpetrators who are compelled or encouraged to participate in mass violence – especially “ordinary” or “normal” persons who exhibit no marked psychological pathologies or criminal behaviour prior to the initiation into violence – the experience of killing, especially of unarmed civilians, “may be associated with terror and horror” (Maguen et al. 2009: 442) as well as with physical disgust and moral abhorrence (Munch-Jurišic 2014), all of which are linked to traumatic stress. At the same time, however, even ideologues committed to genocidal projects, such as the SS Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler, may experience similar feelings of distress while observing mass shootings, which underscores the fact that such reactions are not restricted to persons who object to the violence they witness. For this reason, as Munch-Jurišic argues, “we should be very cautious when we attribute a moral character to abhorrence responses” (Munch-Jurišic 2014: 275). Further, the initial act of perpetration can constitute a sudden shock whereby the agent of violence enters a new dimension of human experience, one that not only violates powerful social and moral taboos but also must transcend cognitive and psychological barriers, since “the human mind, contrary to certain political ideologies, is not well suited for killing” (MacNair 2002: 170). The act of killing thus represents the 105

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immutable transgression of a radical experiential threshold that, once crossed, cannot be re-traversed. According to Anderson, such a traumatic breach “relate[s] to the moment in which the meaning of the events changes: for example, the point at which a victim stops moving and breathing. In this moment, the perpetrator has fully transitioned to becoming a murderer” (Anderson 2018: 228). The moment of this transition is often a foundational one in the traumatic memory of perpetrators of mass violence, as for example, in the recollections of former SS guard Franz Suchomel, whom Claude Lanzmann clandestinely interviewed for his 1985 nonfiction film Shoah. As Suchomel describes his first day of his posting at the National Socialist killing centre at Treblinka in the chaotic period of the first months of the camp’s existence, My first impression of Treblinka, and that of some of the other men – was catastrophic. For we had not been told how and what … that people were being killed there. They hadn’t told us […] So Stadie, the sarge, showed us the camp from end to end. Just as we went by, they were opening the gas-chamber doors, and people fell out like potatoes. Naturally, that horrified and appalled us. We went back and sat down on our suitcases and cried like old women. (Lanzmann 1985: 53–4) As Suchomel’s description of his immediate reaction to the operation of mass murder in which he was expected to participate expresses, his initial encounter with Treblinka provoked in him, who had previously considered himself an upright person, an acute identity crisis. The shock of traumatic ingress into the perpetration of violence thus marks a moment of no return, in which one suddenly (or in reality perhaps gradually, but perceived of as suddenly) finds oneself on the other side of an existential divide, an experience that occasions a break with “one’s moral code” (MacNair 2002: 131) and a disruptive threat to one’s psychological integrity and personal identity. Such a situation may, according to Anderson, “produce cognitive dissonance, as individuals seek to reconcile positive views of their group and family with acts of tremendous evil” (Anderson 2018: 227). Efforts to reduce the mental discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance can in turn lead to traumatic stress, especially if one neither acknowledges the discord between one’s self-image and one’s actions nor admits a sense of guilt but instead pursues a “mental strategy of denying the discord of the action with the moral code” (MacNair 2002: 131). On the other hand, “for perpetrators who already regard themselves as violent, it will be much easier to integrate the ‘perpetrator self’ into their overall self-concept” (Anderson 2018: 227). Yet even perpetrators who become habituated to killing may continue to feel acute or traumatic stress about their commission of violence, which they then often project away from their acclimatized “perpetrator self” back to the original moment of trauma, when they first crossed over into the realm of killing, as demonstrated by the fictional SS officer and narrator Maximilien Aue in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. Aue, who witnesses and eventually participates on a daily basis in mass shootings of mostly Jewish civilians, reports, I went back regularly to witness the executions; no one required it, but I went of my own free will. I didn’t shoot, but I studied the men who did […] By inflicting this piteous spectacle on myself, I felt, I wasn’t trying to exhaust the scandal of it, the insurmountable feeling of a transgression […], but rather, this feeling came to wear out all by itself, one got used to it, and in the long run stopped feeling much; thus what I was

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trying, desperately but in vain, to regain was actually that initial shock, that sensation of a rupture, an infinite disturbance of my whole being. (Littell 2009: 178–9) In a kind of repetition compulsion, Aue thus paradoxically returns to the violence in a futile attempt to undo the effects of its traumatic breach.

The symptomatology of perpetrator trauma While the aetiology of trauma is very different in the case of the perpetrator of violence than it is in the case of the victim, the symptomatology in both contexts is quite similar, including psychic and somatic aspects such as anxiety, panic, depression, irritability and physical complaints. Further, a key symptom of perpetrator trauma is recurrent intrusion, which refers to the involuntary, often highly distressing disruption of thought by undesired cognitive content, particularly memories that relate to the traumatic event. Such intrusive imagery in the form of unwanted thoughts, nightmares and flashbacks is “especially strong in perpetration-induced trauma” (MacNair 2002: 136) and is often accompanied by strategies of avoidance, whereby the perpetrator attempts to evade distressing reminders of the original trauma. Avoidance manifests itself in particular in “coping mechanisms” (Anderson 2018: 227) such as neutralizations, which include “denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim” and are expressed as “verbalizations actors use to tell themselves that their actions are not in violation of the norms they are otherwise committed to” (Presser and Sandberg 2015: 6), and rationalizations, which are interpretations employed by perpetrators to “rationalize their acts – to justify them as the right thing to do or to excuse them as forgivable or understandable in light of the circumstances” (Mohamed 2015: 1185). Strategies of rationalization and neutralization have long been observed in the language of perpetrators of mass atrocities (in particular, the Holocaust), which invariably illustrates, to some degree, “the psychological or social structure of denial and of a specific absence of truth and conscious experience” (Schmidt 2017: 102). To be sure, the notion that the denial of the nature and severity of a violent crime might be linked to the perpetrator’s own traumatic reaction to his commission of violence – in other words, that a perpetrator might disavow parts of the crime in order to avoid unwelcome, intrusive memories of it – is a potentially controversial one, not least because it threatens to overwrite perpetrators’ refutations – whether deliberate or unconscious – of victims’ experiences with an exculpatory narrative of traumatization. However, to recognize that some manifestations of denial might be linked to traumatic avoidance need not necessarily imply an erasure of culpability; rather, such recognition can help explain how the dynamics of denial – both “the denial of responsibility” and “the denial of memory” (MacNair 2001: 275) – relate to the perpetrator’s attempts to preserve and project a sense of self uncorrupted by a personal history of the commission of violence. Alongside such strategies of avoidance, which aim to integrate image of the self in the aftermath of the traumatic breach, the sufferer of PITS may exhibit dissociation, which Ervin Staub describes as the “disconnection between events, experience, and consciousness” (Staub 2001: 246). One symptom of this phenomenon is depersonalization, i.e. “the experience of looking on from the outside, as if the person was an observer, not an agent doing the killing” (246); another is derealization, or “the profound sense of unreality associated with the commission of these acts” (Maguen et al. 2009: 441). As Robert Jay Lifton discovered in his study of doctors who engaged in “killing related work” (MacNair 2001: 277) in Auschwitz, the latter symptom can express itself as “psychic numbing”, or “suppression of feeling” (Lifton 1986: 420), while 107

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the former may manifest itself as “doubling”, in which the perpetrator’s self is divided “into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self” (418) and the person can both “function psychologically in an environment so antithetical to his previous ethical standards’ and continue to see himself as humane physician, husband, father” (419). Martin Amis famously takes up Lifton’s concept of doubling and translates it through aesthetic and narrative means in his fictional portrait of an Auschwitz doctor in Time’s Arrow, or the Nature of the Offense (1991), which is narrated by the perpetrator’s sundered soul. Like avoidance, dissociative strategies aim to “minimize distress, guilt, and other negative emotions” (Staub 2001: 246) associated with killing, especially during the perpetration of atrocities; they likewise serve in the aftermath to seal the self from the implications of the commission of violence: “Especially with repeated killings, and then being called to account for it, feelings may in general be inhibited, giving rise to a flatness of emotions” (246). Such insensibility is exhibited, for example, by Littell’s narrator, who, as quoted above, “stopped feeling much” in response to his participation in mass killings. At the same time, however, while a lack of affect and an attendant deficiency in empathy for others may be symptoms of perpetrator trauma, they are not necessarily such; on their own – that is, unsupported with other evidence of traumatic stress – they may just as well indicate a perpetrator whose psyche is untroubled by the experience of committing violence.

The challenge posed by perpetrator trauma This last point – the difficulty of correctly identifying trauma in the agent of violence in the first place – raises a final issue, that of the ambiguity of perpetrator trauma, which is, as Morag argues, riddled with “profound moral contradictions” (Morag 2013: 16). On the one hand, viewed from the perspective of the aetiology and symptomatology of PITS, it is clear that we need to shift our understanding of the ways in which perpetrators – in this case, perpetrators of the Holocaust – relate to and narrate their experience of violence. What may appear to an outsider to be denial, disinterested disengagement or a disturbing lack of emotion could indeed be the manifestation of trauma, which would – and should – change how we conceptualize and respond to the perpetrators’ experience. On the other hand, the recognition that perpetrators may indeed suffer from trauma as a result of their commission of violence should not change how we view their moral responsibility and legal culpability for their crimes; for this reason, the question of trauma needs to be disconnected as much as possible from issues of guilt and accountability. But if we are committed to fully understanding the psychological, social and cultural legacies of violence, we cannot ignore the powerful effects that such violence has on the persons who commit it.

Bibliography Amis, M. (1991) Time’s Arrow or the Nature of the Offense, New York: Vintage Books. ———. (2014) The Zone of Interest, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Andermahr, S. (2016) “Decolonizing Trauma Studies Roundtable Discussion”, Humanities 4: 905–23. Anderson, K. (2018) Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account, London: Routledge. Assmann, J. (2006) Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. R. Livingstone, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Black, D. and Grant, J. (2014) DSM-5® Guidebook: The Essential Companion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing. Breuer, J. and Freud, S. (1895) Studies in Hysteria, trans. A. Brill, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Perpetrator trauma Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Crocq, M. and Crocq, L. (2000) “From Shell Shock and War Neurosis to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A History of Psychotraumatology”, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 2(1): 47–55. Crownshaw, R. (2011) “Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory”, Parallax 17(4): 75–89. Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. J. Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton. ———. (1939) Moses and Monotheism, trans. K. Jones, New York: Vintage. Gibbs, A. (2014) Contemporary American Trauma Narratives, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lanzmann, C. (1985) Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the Film, New York: Pantheon Books. Leake, E. (2014) “Humanizing the Inhumane: The Value of Difficult Empathy”, in M. M. Hammond and S. J. Kim (eds) Rethinking Empathy through Literature, New York and London: Routledge, 175–88. Leys, R. (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lifton, R. (1986) The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, New York: Basic Books. Littell, J. (2009) The Kindly Ones, trans. C. Mandell, New York: Harper Collins. MacNair, R. (2001) “Psychological Reverberations for the Killers: Preliminary Historical Evidence for Perpetration-induced Traumatic Stress”, Journal of Genocide Research 3(2): 273–82. ———. (2002) Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing, Westport, CT: Praeger. Maguen, S., Metzler, T., Litz, B., Seal, K., Knight, S. and Marmar, C. (2009) “The Impact of Killing in War on Mental Health Symptoms and Related Functioning”, Journal of Traumatic Stress 22(5): 435–43. Mohamed, S. (2015) “Of Monsters and Men: Perpetrator Trauma and Mass Atrocity”, Columbia Law Review 115(5): 1157–216. Morag, R. (2013) Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris. Munch-Jurišic, D. (2014) “Perpetrator Abhorrence: Disgust as a Stop Sign”, Metaphilosophy 45(2): 270–87. Presser, L. and Sandberg, S. (2015) “Introduction: What Is the Story”, in L. Presser and S. Sandberg (eds) Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime, New York: New York University Press, 1–20. Sanyal, D. (2015) Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance, New York: Fordham University Press. Schmidt, S. (2017) “Perpetrators’ Knowledge: What and How Can We Learn from Perpetrator Testimony?” Journal of Perpetrator Research 1(1): 85–104. Staub, E. (2001) Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Winkle, E. and Safter, M. (2011) “Killing versus Witnessing Combat Trauma and Reports of PTSD Symptoms and Domestic Violence”, Journal of Traumatic Stress 24(1): 107–10. Vice, S. (2013) “Exploring the Fictions of Perpetrator Suffering”, Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 2 (1–2): 15–25. Weigel, S. (1999) “Télescopage im Unbewussten: Zum Verhältnis von Trauma, Geschichtsbegriff und Literatur”, in G. Koch (ed.) Bruchlinien: Tendenzen der Holocaustforschung, Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 255–79. ———. (2003) “The Symptomatology of a Universalized Concept of Trauma: On the Failing of Freud’s Reading of Tasso in the Trauma of History”, New German Critique 90: 85–94.

Further reading McGlothlin, E. (2016) “Empathic Identification and the Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction: A Proposed Taxonomy of Response”, Narrative 24(3): 251–76. (An analysis of the dynamics of reader empathy with regard to narrative depictions of the perspective of Holocaust perpetrators.) Meretoja, H. (2018) The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An exploration of the ethical complexity of perpetrator fiction.) Schmidt, S. (2017) “Perpetrators’ Knowledge: What and How Can We Learn from Perpetrator Testimony?” Journal of Perpetrator Research 1(1): 85–104. (A consideration of the moral and psychological dimensions of perpetrator testimony.)

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10 WITNESSING Carolyn J. Dean

The witness is both someone who testifies about an event, whether a crime or an ordinary occurrence, and a moral figure of extraordinary power. The witness’s origins are Biblical: bearing false witness, according to the ninth commandment, is a sacrilege. Indeed, the Greek word for martyr means witness, a term employed by early Christians to define those who lived and died for their faith. This combination of juridical and moral registers of witnessing only took on its modern and increasingly secular meaning when the witness became central to social movements in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both victims and humanitarians, including former slaves and abolitionists, used the religiously inflected “bearing witness” to attest to the suffering of slaves, the exploited and the wounded. By the interwar period, combat soldiers who fought in the trenches testified to the horror and tragedy of a European war of unprecedented scale and were called “witnesses”. Both the combat veteran and the Jewish Holocaust survivor have also been called “moral witnesses”, a description used by the philosopher Avishai Margalit to define the particular moral role and authority of Jewish Holocaust survivors (Margalit 2002: 163–8; Winter 2007). Witnessing is thus a religious and secular moral practice, and it establishes knowledge about an event or events. Testimony may be sacred (witness to God), morally neutral (witness to a natural catastrophe), juridical (testimony in court) or moral and ethical (witness to extreme suffering), and it generates moral and factual truths (Assmann 2007). The speech-act of testifying forges legal and moral community by creating a relationship of trust between the witness and those who listen and is often referred to as the performative force of the testimony. Philosophers analyse this relationship by focusing on epistemological questions assessing testimony’s veracity, and literary theorists often emphasize how traumatized victims’ testimony expresses a failure of words. But, as Sybille Krämer and Sigrid Weigel write, testimony is most importantly a social relation that is “the incarnation of knowledge without proof […] new knowledge only arises out of a constellation between witness and addressee that rests on social recognition and epistemic trust” (Krämer and Weigel 2017: xv). Witnessing thus refers to the establishment of empirical truth and the reliability of a story, but also evokes a potentially transcendent truth in the context of social recognition and trust, especially when the witness testifies to God or to extreme physical and psychic suffering (Léon-Dufour 1980 [1975]: 430–1). Though witnessing has long been an important moral and ethical force, in contrast to witnessing practices used in religious, community 111

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or courtroom contexts and even testimony conveyed in third-party published documentation, “the practice of recording testimonies first became common” during the First World War (1914–18), and mass media has rendered the figure of the witness ubiquitous (Wieviorka 2005 [1998]: xi). The overview that follows embeds the meaning of witnessing in changing cultural forms over the course of the twentieth century in order to assess the emergence of the pervasive contemporary trope “to bear witness”, which is now bound up with reflections on humans’ recent capacity for self-destruction. It assesses how and why moral truths come to be embodied symbolically by some witnesses and not others, for the question of credibility is always caught up in historical and cultural processes and is not easily extricable from the witness’s moral stature. By historicizing the link between the modern moral, juridical, memorial and historical dimensions of witnessing, this chapter traces the cultural preeminence of the moral witness as a historically particular ethical gauge that symbolizes and assesses our obligations toward other human beings. The chapter also places recent theories of witnessing as they have appeared in literary theory and philosophy into the historical context in which they emerged.

Witnessing between history and memory In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century condemnations of mass violence, witnesses were dismayed spectators rather than victims themselves because the credibility of testimony was associated with distant reserve. William Gladstone’s 1876 British broadside against Ottoman massacres of Bulgarian Christians, “Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East”, as well as the 1899 and 1907 The Hague Conventions’ recognition of “laws of humanity” exemplified an imperialist view of Western nations bemoaning barbarism elsewhere; the witness represented “human conscience” embodied by an abstract comity of “civilized” nations and empires (Gladstone 1876). Though victims of Jewish pogroms and the Armenian genocide carefully documented their suffering, the public gave more credibility to public protestations by outsiders who testified to Jews’ and Armenians’ plight than it did to victims’ own testimony (Garbarini 2015). The abstract commitment to “human conscience” rather than a concrete focus on victim testimony began to shift toward the victim’s experience after the First World War, when war veterans testified to the horror of technologically-enhanced killing. But veterans were still caught up in ideological battles. Political parties appropriated their experiences and whatever moral lessons they taught to argue for and against war – did war waste young men’s lives in the name of the nation or redeem them? It was only after the Second World War (1939–45) that victims’ voices became credible evidence of injuries suffered, as credible as the“civilized” spectator’s dismay. French and Italian anti-Nazi resistance members, like war veterans, were called “witnesses” to the camps (Rousset 1947). In 1961, the Jewish Auschwitz survivor and humanist Primo Levi wrote: “anyone who recounts massacres of women and children, by the hand of whomever, in whatever country, in the name of whatever ideology, is our brother, and we will be in solidarity with him” (Levi 2015: 70). In spite of Levi’s expansive rhetoric, Jewish Holocaust survivors rather than resistance fighters or “anyone” who suffered became iconic witnesses some decades later. Following Margalit’s distinction between the “political witness” and the “moral witness” – one uncovers the truth, and the other draws his or her authority from “the ability to ‘describe this’” suffering – the Jewish Holocaust survivor became a symbol not only of a witness to genocide but also of the moral imperative to bear witness to a particular 112

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experience only he or she could convey, including its ineffability (Margalit 2002: 168). Jewish survivors were assigned this role in spite of other genocides that had been perpetrated against Armenians, an ethnic and religious minority in the Ottoman Empire and colonized peoples – the Herero of Namibia and the Kikuyu of Kenya. Western populations rarely questioned the legitimacy of imperial violence until the 1960s, especially when it was a response to anti-colonial rebellions. Moreover, the Turkish state still denies the Armenian genocide of 1915, insisting that Armenians represented an internal threat during wartime. The US government too defined the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as necessary to save American lives. In contrast, the Holocaust generated a Western self-reckoning about the horror of genocide and thus a thin and belated moral consensus about its absolute wrongness, one that was extremely fragile and subject to denial. Most accounts date the emergence of this consensus to the 1961 Jerusalem trial of the SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann. The trial illuminated the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust, about which there had been little discussion until then (Yablonka 2004). Eichmann had been head of the section of the Gestapo responsible for “Jewish Affairs” in 1941 and played an important role in organizing transports of Jews from Vienna, Berlin and Budapest to death camps in the East. The trial was translated simultaneously into several languages, covered internationally and broadcast all over Europe and the United States; it focused extensively on victim testimony. Witnesses testified about their personal interactions with Eichmann, but also about all other dimensions of the Holocaust. The prosecutors sought to represent the State of Israel as symbolically rectifying victims’ statelessness, but also to demonstrate that Jews had been stripped of their humanity so dramatically that resistance was driven by desperation when it emerged at all (Douglas 2001). The witnesses spoke of degradation, suffering and forms of annihilation that went beyond the most horrific violence of warfare. The trial restored dignity to every style of dying or enduring – suicide, exploitative or senseless labour, gas chambers and bare survival, most of which, other than desperate resistance, had until then inspired no broad understanding and even stigmatization. Jewish memory of Nazism was most dramatically embodied by the trial’s climax: the speech and subsequent collapse of survivor and writer Yehiel Dinur, known by his evocative pseudonym K-Zetnik, which referred to the German initials KZ for Konzentrationslager (concentration camp). Reluctant to appear in court, Dinur could not sleep and fasted for days before he was called to the stand – he told friends that the spirits who visited him at night had starved in Auschwitz. When he testified, he referred to having lived on “Planet Auschwitz” and did not respond properly to questions. Dinur became so overcome with emotion that he fainted and, before his stunned audience, was rushed out of the court. After a long hospitalization, he recovered (Yablonka 2004]: 109). K-Zetnik’s psychic and physical collapse expressed a dissonance between survivors’ will to testify and the vocabulary available to survivors to describe their experiences. This dissonance now constitutes the implicit or explicit conceptual starting point of most commentary on survivor testimony, which focuses on the moral rather than judicial dimension of witnessing. Hanna Yablonka writes that K-Zetnik “was destined”, “not by his speech, but by his very being […] to serve as spokesman for the hundreds of thousands who died at Auschwitz” – he was their “symbol” (Yablonka 2004]: 109). His testimony, Lawrence Douglas claims, represented a “juridical failure”, the point at which the crimes to which he bore witness were incommensurable with any punishment (Douglas 2001: 149). The meanings attributed to K-Zetnik’s collapse transform his testimony into a form of symbolic speechlessness that conveys an otherwise unimaginable experience. Holocaust survivors bore witness to being constrained by terror and despised by an enemy committed to their annihilation; 113

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their revelations derived not only from the senselessness of war and persecution, but from their experience of extreme degradation and near-annihilation. The Eichmann trial had its most dramatic impact in Israel. But it also raised international and public consciousness for the first time not only about the Holocaust’s Jewish victims, but also of the crime of genocide, embodied by the haunted witness to Nazi camps whose entire life purpose, as Primo Levi insisted, was to bear witness: the experience of the Auschwitz death camp, he said, “conferred a purpose on my life, that of bearing witness so that nothing of the sort would ever happen again” (Levi 2015: 189). American thinkers in particular elaborated this figure of the witness as impossibly burdened by the memory of the dead like K-Zetnik, and as typical of a particular historical moment in the history of human-made catastrophe. Scholars like the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton and the literary critic Terrence Des Pres linked survival and witnessing specifically to mass murder and to the specific injuries and responses it generates. Lifton focused on survivors tormented by their guilty relationship with those who perished while they lived; the traumatized victims, he argued in 1969, experienced no release from death other than by “render[ing] significant the deaths they have seen” (Lifton 1970: 204). He insisted that bearing witness forged a bond both between the survivors and the dead and between the witness and those to whom he or she testified, and helped remedy the breakdown in trust engendered by the Nazi camps and the nuclear bomb. In 1976, Terrence Des Pres claimed that “The will to bear witness is a typical and in some sense necessary response to extremity. Confronting radical evil, men and women instinctively feel the desire to call, to warn, to communicate their shock” (Des Pres 1976: 33). Bearing witness was not only an individual, meaning-conferring release of the survivor from a world of death, but also a moral and social imperative “commensurate with the sweep of ruin of our time” (6). Witness testimonies cast genocide as a special violation of humanity and attributed a new meaning to survival, which was no longer only a reference to bare physical sustenance but also to the particular ravages of genocide. Both Lifton and Des Pres depicted survivors’ testimonies as essential lessons about extremes of human suffering, though Lifton imagined surviors as damaged people who needed psychic relief while Des Pres depicted their compulsion to bear witness in heroic terms. Neither focused exclusively on Holocaust survivors – Lifton wrote about victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They both conceived bearing witness as an obligation not only of all genocide survivors but also of publics who sought to diminish extreme suffering. According to them, the witness was a historically particular incarnation of human conscience who served as a reminder of all the evil in the world against which we are called to be vigilant.

Witnessing and traumatic memory This image of the witness who speaks with the dead and is impossibly burdened by the weight of his or her memories became even more important after the 1970s, as Western European nations began their own reckonings with past complicity in the Holocaust. Bearing witness to the Holocaust became a historical and moral imperative. For their part, Americans embraced their past role as liberators, which they conceived belatedly not only as fighting Nazism but also as ending the Holocaust; they embraced the Auschwitz survivor and memoirist Elie Wiesel as the public embodiment of the Holocaust witness. Publics increasingly learned to recognize Holocaust survivors through film and literature – in particular the American television mini-series Holocaust (1978), which is credited with breaking through Germans’ resistance to acknowledging the scope of Nazi destructiveness, and later, 114

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Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1994). Readers devoured survivors’ memoirs, which circulated far more widely in the late twentieth century than at the end of the war. In order to preserve Holocaust testimony as many survivors were passing away, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University (1980) and, later, the Spielberg funded USC Shoah Foundation (1994) conducted thousands of interviews with Holocaust survivors on video and preserved them in digital form (Shandler 2017). Widespread awareness of the genocide of European Jewry developed rapidly after Wiesel declared in 1977: “We have all been witnesses and we all feel we have to bear testimony for the future” (Wiesel 1977: 9). Terms like survivor, trauma and witness became part of Holocaust pedagogy from museums to memorials that have made up the memory culture of the West since the 1970s. The biblical quotation “You are my witness” (Isaiah 43:10) now adorns the walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, and, as many scholars have noted, combines religious and secular meanings: images and artifacts of twentieth-century suffering constitute a sacred presence to which visitors must testify. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s 1992 foundational Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History was part of this cultural development: the book identified traumatic witnessing as a source of truth and sparked an extensive scholarly literature (Felman and Laub 1992). Laub, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the Fortunoff Archive, which used deeply knowledgeable, volunteer interviewers and let the survivors determine the course of the interview, discussed Holocaust testimonies from that collection. Felman, also on the faculty at Yale, taught a course using the videos. Felman and Laub conceived testimonial practice as a joint endeavor between survivors and listeners who participated in bearing witness to atrocities, one group directly, and one indirectly by enabling the testimony. Their relationship, modeled partly on the psychoanalytic encounter, fostered the performative reenactment of the survivor’s experience. In Felman and Laub’s telling, such testimonies unsettled boundaries between survivors and witnesses conducting the interviews, leaving secondary witnesses exposed to the effects of speaking and listening even as they sought to control, constrain and analyse their responses: “The professionally trained receivers of testimonies which bear witness to the war atrocities […] cannot fulfill their task without, in turn, passing through the crisis of experiencing their boundaries, their separateness, their functionality, and indeed their sanity, at risk” (Felman and Laub 1992: xvii). Felman and Laub interpret survivor testimony, but also literature and film (notably Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah) as belated testimonies to the Holocaust’s obliteration of a framework that could account for the destruction it wrought; the Holocaust, they argue, was an “event without a witness” (Felman and Laub 1992: 80). Their claim shifts our focus away from eyewitness testimony about the event. Instead, it emphasizes witnesses’ vulnerability to the Holocaust’s traumatic impact and to the their inability to “step outside of the coercively […] dehumanizing frame of reference in which the event was taking place” (81). The Holocaust can only be witnessed belatedly as an event whose assault on victims’ psyches fragments coherent memorial narratives – hence the “crises of witnessing” to which the book’s title refers. Felman, evaluating K-Zetnik’s testimony in this light, argues not only that the Eichmann trial was a juridical failure and a moral message, but also that “confronted through K-Zetnik’s testimony, the law had a dialogue with its own limits”. His collapse on the stand was a “missed encounter” between the trauma intrinsic in survivor testimony and the cohesive language of legal interpretation, a moment that “articulate[s] the difficulty of articulation of the catastrophic story” (Felman 2002: 156, 144, 159). 115

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In this view, testimony not only describes and conveys but is also constituted by an incommensurable gap between the survivors’ experience and the language available to relay it; bearing witness expresses a “truth” that remains beyond the witness’s comprehension and is only knowable as its unsettling effects on the victim’s grasp of reality. The literary theorist Cathy Caruth argues that traumatic experience is by definition “unclaimed” because its painful revelations are endlessly deferred and repeated in other, fragmented forms – literature, like psychoanalysis, is a privileged form of witness – but the truth of trauma is never accessible as such (Caruth 1996). Felman, Laub and Caruth’s conceptualization of witnessing as a dissonant, discontinuous and fragmented narrative whose traumatic effects were transmissible to secondary witnesses has been highly influential. Marianne Hirsch has called the memory lived by survivors’ families a form of “postmemory” and emphasizes the generational transmission of trauma (Hirsch 1997). Froma Zeitlin too argues that some of the most important forms of Holocaust representation involve “vicarious witnessing” – a belated, “transferred or inherited memory” that links past and present (Zeitlin 1998: 10). And closer to Felman and Laub’s perspective, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben theorizes the Holocaust as an event that was “impossible” to witness. Taking Primo Levi’s insistence that the true witnesses were those who perished, Agamben interprets the Muselmann – an idiom in the Nazi camps for dying but not yet dead victims who appeared as if they were bent in prayer – as the true witness. Levi’s claim expressed the survivor’s bond with the dead and the guilty burden of being alive. Agamben argues instead that the Muselmann symbolizes the interstice between death and survival of which the extermination camp Auschwitz is, he claims, paradigmatic; the inmates hovering between life and death represent modernity’s capacity to reduce human beings to “bare life” (Agamben 1999). Unlike Felman and Laub, Agamben’s “witness” is not a survivor. But for Agamben too the witness bears little relation to the history of a particular event. All of Felman, Laub and Agamben’s claims about the fundamental opacity of the Holocaust have been controversial, but not because critics contest trauma’s effects; they believe rather that such arguments overplay the extent to which survivors lose access to their past and risk transforming Holocaust trauma into a sublime experience or generalize it to encompass all modernity. Dominick LaCapra argues that Felman, Laub and Caruth recast historically particular genocides in terms of the “truth” of trauma rather than as objects of analysis; in this perspective, the Holocaust of European Jewry not only loses its specificity but is also transformed into an awe-inducing object. According to LaCapra, Felman and Laub mimic trauma’s effects in their own work and develop a quasi-liturgical relationship to the event in their interpretations of texts, Lanzmann’s film Shoah and survivor testimonies. He believes that Agamben too treats the genocide as a purely traumatic rather than historical event and thus downplays the particular ideological impetus of Nazism (LaCapra 1998: 110–16; 2001: 106–11, 2004: 111–23). Thomas Trezise asks instead how testimony to whose truth the witness has no access can relieve her isolation; he asks if the truth she relives through traumatic repetition is hers to know or not? (Trezise 2007: 40–62). He focuses on how witnesses testify, under what circumstances, on the responsibility of the listener not to appropriate others’ suffering, and on the conditions that constrain and enable different kinds of witnessing. And Hannah Pollin-Galay insists that witness testimony is shaped by cultural narratives particular to the location in which they have lived since the war (Pollin-Galay 2018).

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The era of the witness By the 1990s, Jewish witnesses had thus moved from the margins of the Holocaust to become icons of suffering humanity; their image became shorthand for the moral obligations of western populations to remedy the suffering of others. Scholars refer to this process as the “globalization of Holocaust memory”. Holocaust memory – especially as construed in American exported media – stands in for western moral conscience. By 2000, at a meeting of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, sponsored by member nationstates and international organizations, the Holocaust was, according to two sociologists, declared to be “free of any moral ambiguity, and its universal form, coming out of America, has helped Europeans redefine themselves” (Levy and Sznaider 2005: 184). In her account of the “era of the witness”, French historian Annette Wieviorka argues that this development is deeply problematic: traumatic memory, she argues, is in danger of replacing history and distorting it, transforming witness testimony into kitsch (Wieviorka 2005 [1998]). The boundary between history and memory culture, between the juridical and the moral registers of witnessing, she claims, blurred for the worse in the widespread memorialization of the Holocaust. Hollywood movies about the persecution and annhiliation of European Jewry sensationalized and commercialized the event; survivors’ trauma became an object of consumption as publics focused less on the history of events and more on survivors’ traumatic experiences. Wieviorka castigates the USC Shoah Foundation because in its zeal to interview every last Holocaust survivor, it developed a standard interview protocol insensitive to the vast cultural and experiential differences among witnesses and provided interviewers with only the most rudimentary knowledge of the Holocaust (Wieviorka 2005 [1998]: 107–44). Others, such as Gary Weissman, argue that many Jewish Americans had “fantasies of witnessing”; in quest of their own Jewish identities, they wished to experience vicariously the suffering of survivors, and were often disappointed by their failures to feel trauma (Weissman 2004). Some scholars have pushed back against this notion that audiences’ desire for testimony is a “morally murky enterprise” involving the prurient consumption of others’ experiences and have pointed to new sorts of “hybrid testimony” that combine first and second degree testimonials of trauma – by forensic experts, journalists and novelists – and take on popular forms (Kilby and Rowland 2014: 2–8). The task of bearing witness now extends to forensic witnesses who interpret the claims of inert objects, from Joseph Mengele’s skull to the buildings demolished by the Israeli army in Palestinian territories (Weizman 2011; Keenan and Weizman 2012). The underscoring of more mediated and public-facing versions of testimony comes as the Holocaust survivor’s exemplarity has diminished in favor of a victim of genocides and mass murder everywhere, and who is a symbol of an increasingly global moral culture. A new international human rights infrastructure has developed to prosecute crimes against humanity and aid victims – the International Criminal Court, nongovernmental organizations, exhibitions, museums and other humanitarian and human rights’ institutions. This infrastructure is a symbol of the urgency, cultural preeminence and necessity of witnessing, and it provides literal forums for bearing witness. It places victims’ sufferings center-stage as the moral challenge of our time and conceives survivor testimony as necessary for the restoration of witnesses’ psychic health and dignity. In this context, the trauma diagnosis increasingly began to describe the symptoms not only of Holocaust survivors, but also of Vietnam war veterans and others who experience sudden catastrophe. Around this time, in the late 1990s, a bevy of experts and organizations emerged to aid the traumatized. All survivors, not only Jewish Holocaust victims, became 117

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symbolic mainstays of a global, post-Holocaust discourse about bearing witness. There has been a general recognition of the limits imposed by the Holocaust conceived as a paradigm of genocide: the USC Shoah Foundation takes testimonies from survivors of ethnocide and genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere, and Holocaust memorial institutions like the Simon Wiesenthal Institute and the USHMM regularly address racism and genocides in the rest of the world. Amidst ongoing struggles about colonial and postcolonial legacies in the West, critics have repeatedly taken Felman, Laub and Caruth to task for privileging the Holocaust, even though they proposed a general theory of testimony not limited to that event, and Caruth has written about Vietnam veterans (Caruth 2017). Michael Rothberg stresses the “multidirectional” relationship of Holocaust and postcolonial memories like the civil war in Algeria, suggesting that they are mutually constitutive. In so doing, he insists that the universal memory of the Holocaust must be reimagined in terms of a more fluid relationship between history and memory (Rothberg 2009). He also conceives witnessing beyond the framework of the survivor-listener dyad to the witness and his or her public. The characterization of the witness has also changed since the turn of the twentyfirst-century. Didier Fassin maintains that we are experiencing “the second age of humanitarianism [ … one that] corresponds to the emergence of the witness – not the witness who has experienced the tragedy, but the one who has brought aid to its victims” (Fassin 2012: 207). The task of bearing witness to atrocity is now assigned not only to traumatized victims, but also to lawyers, doctors and activists who fulfill the widespread political, social and ethical commitment to victims’ care and empowerment; James Dawes calls them “surrogate voices” (Dawes 2007: 4). After the Biafran War, in 1971, the French humanitarian medical organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans frontières) broke with its conventionally neutral stance and condemned the Nigerian government for imposing famine on a separatist group and manipulating humanitarian aid. The doctors defined their activism on behalf of victims as a form of witnessing, contrasting their work with that of organizations like the Red Cross, whose religiously infused witnessing strives to remain apolitical. Journalists and photographers now similarly bear witness (Dawes 2007). Away from danger zones, exhibits also “bear witness” to photographs, videos and artefacts, transforming spectators into witnesses of human rights’ violations from a distance and also via interactive internet platforms (Givoni 2016). Paradoxically, as witnesses have proliferated and such moral obligations have been universalized, the invocation of the witness is once again an abstract appeal to “human conscience” on behalf of a generic victim rather than a victim of a particular event. Secondand third-party witnesses now all participate in a recent global commitment, within the parameters of geopolitical power balances, to repairing the seemingly endless injuries inflicted by war, crimes against humanity and genocide. They document, alleviate and mobilize on behalf of victims’ suffering as often as they represent the shock of its traumatic effects. The witness delineates parameters of moral responsibility and accountability within which victims’ suffering is acknowledged and mourned. In so doing it symbolizes not only a moral cause, but also the ubiquitous violence that we now perceive as a permanent, recurrent feature of our world. Whether such crimes actually occur more frequently than in the past is impossible to say, but they now have names that date to the aftermath of the Second World War, as do their victims’ suffering. Traumatized witnesses are now pervasive, and bearing witness is a western-inflected institutionalized and globalized moral imperative (Dean 2019). 118

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Bibliography Agamben, G. (1999 [1998]) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books. Assmann, A. (2007) “Vier Grundtypen von Zeugenschaft”, in M. Elm and G. Kössler (eds) Zeugenschaft des Holocaust: Zwischen Trauma, Tradierung, und Ermittlung, Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (2017) “A Perverse Quest for Meaning: False Witness in Vietnam and Beyond”, Continuum 31 (5): 610–18. Dawes, J. (2007) That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dean, C. J. (2019) The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Des Pres, T. (1976) The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Douglas, L. (2001) The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust, New Haven: Yale University Press. Fassin, D. (2012 [2010]) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, trans. R. Gomme, Berkeley: University of California Press. Felman, S. (2002) The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Garbarini, A. (2015) “Document Volumes and the Status of Victim Testimony in the Era of the First World War and Its Aftermath”, Études arméniennes contemporaines 5: 113–36. Givoni, M. (2016) The Care of the Witness: A Contemporary History of Testimony in Crises, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gladstone, W. (1876) The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, London: John Murray. Hirsch, M. (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keenan, T. and Weizman, E. (2012) Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Kilby, J. and Rowland, A. (eds) (2014) The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing, London: Routledge. Krämer, S. and Weigel, S. (eds) (2017) Testimony/Bearing Witness: Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture, London: Rowman & Littlefield. LaCapra, D. (1998) History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. (2001) Writing Trauma, Writing History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (2004) History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Léon-Dufour, X. (1980 [1975]) Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. T. Prendergast, San Francisco: Harper & Row. Levi, P. (2015) Così Fu Auschwitz: Testimonianze 1945-1986, Turin: Einaudi. Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2005) The Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age, trans. A. Oksiloff, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lifton, R. J. (1970) History and Human Survival: Essays on the Young and Old, Survivors and the Dead, Peace and War, and on Contemporary Psychohistory, New York: Random House. Margalit, A. (2002) The Ethics of Memory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pollin-Galay, H. (2018) Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place, and Holocaust Testimony, New Haven: Yale University Press. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rousset, D. (1947 [1946]) The Other Kingdom, trans. R. Guthrie, New York: Reynal Hitchcock. Shandler, J. (2017) Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Trezise, T. (2007) Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony, New York: Fordham University Press. Weissman, G. (2004) Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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11 SCREEN MEMORY Max Silverman

In 1899 Sigmund Freud published a paper called “Screen Memories”. A Dictionary of Critical Theory gives this succinct definition of Freud’s term: A childhood memory that is paradoxically vivid and inconsequential. Because of the apparent banality of these memories there does not seem to be any reason for them to be preserved in the memory, a fact that psychoanalysis latches on to as an important clue to their deeper importance. Sigmund Freud theorized that such memories are compromise formations, or symptoms, like parapraxes, meaning they function to disguise or conceal a trauma of some kind, usually of a sexual nature. (Buchanan 2010) In his paper, Freud clarifies “the concept of a ‘screen memory’ as one which owes its value as a memory not to its own content but to the relation existing between that content and some other, that has been suppressed” (Freud 1966–74a: 320). As he published the more significant The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1966–74b) the same year, the paper on screen memories was rather overshadowed and did not receive the attention it perhaps deserved. However, it contains, in briefer form, some of the principal findings of the longer work: the idea that a clear and rather banal memory in the conscious mind might be a cover (a substitute, a symptom) for something else more profound located in the unconscious, and a way of reading, or interpreting, the visible signs of consciousness symptomatically in order to reveal the invisible meanings they convey. Freud mentions the concept again in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914 [1901]; see especially chapter 4, “Childhood and Concealing Memories”) and, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (published in 1917), he drew attention to the similarity between screen memory and the process of condensation and displacement in dream-work: Through the processes, already familiar to you, of condensation and more specifically of displacement, what is important is replaced in memory by something else which appears unimportant. For this reason, I have called these childhood

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memories “screen memories”, and with a thorough analysis everything that has been forgotten can be extracted from them. (Freud 1978 [1917]: 237) However, despite these direct references to the paper on screen memories, Freud rarely referred to it (Sprengnether 2012: 215), and, according to Gail Reed and Howard Levine, “clinical interest”, on the whole, “dropped out of the mainstream of analytic discussion – and with it close study of Freud’s original paper” (Reed and Levine 2015: 27). The rise, in recent decades, of trauma studies and cultural memory studies has, however, been accompanied by renewed interest in Freud’s paper, or at least in the term itself, “screen memory”. As, broadly speaking, trauma studies and cultural memory studies have been closely associated with the ways in which traumatic events – especially those of extreme violence connected with the histories of slavery, colonialism and the Holocaust and other genocides – continue to affect the present, and emphasize the importance of preserving the memory of those events as a challenge to official narratives that seek to repress them, it is unsurprising that Freud’s term has frequently been mobilized as a polemical weapon in the effort to expose ideologically-motivated histories and give voice to the silenced victims of violence and racism. In this scenario, “screen memory” is interpreted as an instrumentalist manipulation of the truth, or a form of censorship, by dominant groups who wish to suppress alternative versions of the past and deflect accusations of guilt and responsibility for past actions. The critic’s task, like that of the analyst in Freud’s description, then becomes one of reading cultural works symptomatically in order to recover what has been covered over, the repressed and hidden memories of trauma beneath the normalized narrative. In this sense, then, one can describe all those histories which “write out” or “whitewash” “troubling” moments in the past – whether they relate to slavery, colonialism, genocide or treatment of minorities – as screen memories. More intriguing examples, though, (and perhaps most common in recent uses of the term) are those in which one formerly repressed memory is itself perceived as hiding others for which it has become a proxy. In The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Peter Novick argues that the American fascination with the Holocaust displaces concern with more worrying events in America’s own history, such as racism towards Blacks and indigenous Americans and the catastrophe of the Vietnam War. Similarly, the work of Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider on how the globalization of Holocaust memory can become a “cosmopolitan memory” for our age – that is, a source of moral and political support for victims of racialized violence elsewhere (Levy and Sznaider 2006) – has been criticized for universalizing the Holocaust as the single model by which other moments of extreme violence should be judged. In the Francophone context, a version of this critique has been voiced by those who see, in analogies made by French left-wing intellectuals between the atrocities committed by the French (especially the use of torture) at the time of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) and Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, a trivialization of the true import of the Algerian War in Western eyes and an inability to confront its specificity. The French historian Henry Rousso, for example, observes that “the Algerian War, seen from the metropolis, is […] really just a replay of the Franco-French War” (Rousso 1987: 94), while, in his discussion of the Holocaust and the Algerian War in Albert Camus’s La Chute/ The Fall, Dominick LaCapra states that “the attention paid to earlier events may […] serve as a screen to conceal both the significance of recent, and, in certain respects, more pressing events and the limitations or inadequacy of one’s response to them” (LaCapra 1998: 73–4; 122

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see also Golsan 2000). The lawyer Jacques Vergès used a similar analogy, though for very different reasons, in defence of his client Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon” in Nazioccupied France, at the time of the Barbie trial for crimes against humanity (1987). In the 1950s, the French survivor of Buchenwald, David Rousset, and the Russian writer Vasily Grossman were accused by some of deflecting attention from Nazi crimes by comparing them with those of Soviet Russia (Todorov 2004: 46–9). In a revisionist twist to this comparison, German right-wing historians in the famous “historians debate” in Germany of the 1980s, the most prominent of whom was Ernst Nolte, excused German war crimes and German guilt by pointing out that Stalin murdered more people than Hitler. When screen memory is used in this comparative and analogical way, all sorts of political and ideological motives (some highly dubious) can be at work. A brief return to Freud’s original thesis, however, can point us in a different direction.

Return to Freud In a general sense, the above use of the term “screen memory” is consistent with a major aspect of Freud’s theory. Screen memory, as defined by Freud, is a myth and a defence mechanism that hides something else of greater significance that, once revealed, would threaten the stability of the ego (or the nation etc.) and its power base. This interpretation, however, does not capture the full import of Freud’s discovery. First, and perhaps most significantly, it fails to acknowledge the complex and dynamic relationship between the profound (often traumatic) moment covered up and its substitute, conceiving of this relationship, instead, purely in terms of ideology, power and politics – invariably a politics of competition between different narratives of the past (Rothberg 2009; Silverman 2013). Freud’s interest in the screen memory is, however, part of his broader interest in the relationship between the conscious mind and the unconscious, the symptom and the affect, the visible and the invisible, that is, the complex ways in which the mind processes raw experience, especially traumatic moments at which, according to Cathy Caruth, the subject was never fully present in the first place (Caruth 1996). Seen in this light, the material and mundane substitute (be it a fetish object, a landscape, a bodily movement, a smell, a “false” memory and so on) is not simply a cover for something else but is, as Freud observes, part of a process of displacement from one thing to another. The substitute is, therefore, profoundly attached to and impregnated with the immaterial drives in the unconscious (Eros and Thanatos) in a way that makes the drive and its proxy two sides of the same coin: the latter carries the charge of, and is doubled by (Themistokleous 2015), the former. The composite nature of the memory thus constructed – an assemblage of the visible and the invisible – has very specific consequences for our understanding of the time and space of memory (as I shall discuss). Second, the competitive interpretation of screen memory understands the falsification at its heart in purely negative terms, that is, as a manipulation of the truth: the truth has been covered up because we have something to hide and our power base to protect. This may well be the case in many instances. However, Freud’s interest in falsification is not in terms of a distortion of the truth but rather in terms of the psychic ruses contained in repression and displacement and the indirect ways in which the unconscious “speaks”. Freud suggests that we take these falsifications seriously, as the fantasy, or the fiction, “with no concern for historical accuracy” (Freud 1966–74a: 322), can allow us a deeper insight into the “truth” than fact itself (see Freeman, Nienass and Melamed 2013). Freud’s screen memory thus destabilizes conventional ideas of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, even reversing them 123

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to suggest that we only have access to the truth indirectly via the fantasies that we construct. As Michael Sheringham observes, “(Freud) invites us to distrust our memories. The innocuous and trivial, if insistently remembered, is probably a screen-memory concealing something emotionally important” (Sheringham 1993: 298). Third, as a corollary to the previous point, the competitive interpretation of screen memory privileges political instrumentalization over creative production, and concealment over appearance. This productive side to the work of screen memory is, however, an important part of Freud’s argument. In assembling the shapeless affect into a form, albeit one less troubling to the psyche, screen memory involves a dynamic transformative process of figuration. As Reed and Levine observe, the concept of screen memories led Freud to an extraordinary conjecture that perhaps all memories did not consist of the retrieval of pristinely stored veridical, objective, immutable perceptions, and “facts”, but were instead assembled and shaped at each moment with a specific set of dynamic needs in mind. (Reed and Levine 2015: 28) Screen memory is, then, a performative act in the present; it paves the way for thinking of memory as a creative process of “assemblage” rather than simply as the retrieval of forgotten moments in the past. It is also a concept based on ambivalence rather than the certainty of political instrumentalization in that it both covers over the open wound of trauma and, carrying its charge and bearing its imprint, expresses it in indirect form. As I shall argue below, it is thus aligned not only with the ambivalent mechanics of trauma itself but also with art forms that attempt to figure the wound of trauma.

Memory, time and space My argument is, therefore, that the recent return of the concept of screen memory in relation to questions of trauma and history should be seen as a very partial and slanted view of Freud’s original theory. It is determined largely by the competitive memory wars of recent decades which have accompanied the postmodern relativization of narratives of history and the rise of cultural difference and identity politics. In a sense, the concept has been hijacked by this agenda – for better or for worse – and weaponized in the struggle for group identity. Returning to Freud’s paper, however, gives us the chance to recontextualize it within a different understanding of the workings of memory. Freud’s interest in the unconscious process of memory work (repression, displacement, condensation) suggests that memory does not simply operate according to the logic and chronology of rational recall. Freud formulated his ideas on screen memory at the same time that the French philosopher Henri Bergson was formulating his own ideas on memory (Bergson 1965 [1896]). Although there is little evidence to show that Freud was aware of Bergson’s work at this time – and, according to Frédéric Worms, there are very few critics who have drawn parallels between them (Worms 2018) – we can say that they are both interested in the ways in which memories are transmitted beyond or beneath the conscious mind, and especially beyond the social construct of linear time that underpins it. Bergson’s notion of “durée” – an idea of the mobile and fluid nature of time which escapes the quantifiable divisions of clock time – is premised on the persistence of time as one moment inhabits another. The coexistence, in Freud’s screen memory, of “deep” buried memory and the “false” memory of consciousness 124

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that carries it, also implies the temporal sliding, simultaneity and superimposition that defines Bergson’s “durée” and is completely alien to mechanistic clock time. This line of thought on Freud’s screen memory situates the process within the nonpositivist and non-linear practices of major strands of turn-of-the-century modernist art and thought, especially those art forms in which times and spaces appear to overlap and flow into each other, hence disrupting the clarity of rational thought. Marcel Proust’s involuntary memory, by which past experience unexpectedly returns in the present when triggered by a taste, touch or sound, consequently blurring the distinctions between past and present and here and there, owes much to Bergson’s concept of “durée”, while also having affinities with Freud’s vision of banal objects as the containers and carriers of repressed but latent memories. Surrealism, of course, actualizes this process most spectacularly by overlaying the present everyday with the drives and fears of the unconscious to produce uncanny assemblages, resembling Freud’s description of displacement and condensation in dreams. The art historian Aby Warburg describes something very similar (at least in temporal and spatial terms) by suggesting that cultures leave traces in images to constitute a sort of invisible montage (as exemplified in his Mnemosyne Atlas project). For Warburg it is not a question of interpreting images for what they mean or symbolize, or viewing art history in terms of chronological progression and teleology; rather, it is a question of excavating what one might call the unconscious of the image, that is, what has survived of the past in the present (Didi-Huberman 2002). Walter Benjamin historicizes this spatialization of time in his notions of the “constellation” and the “dialectical image” underpinning his monumental Arcades Project. And Gilles Deleuze returns to the Bergsonian idea of “durée” (“a coexistence of sheets of pasts”) in his analysis of the time-image in cinema (Deleuze 1985: 160). Despite their differences, these ideas and practices all share a number of the characteristics that we see in Freud’s early paper on screen memory: the displacement of affect from one thing to another and one time to another in a chain of association; the overlaying and condensation of different elements in the same “space” to produce a hybrid configuration; the rupture of the notion of the discrete nature of memories and moments. The ambivalent relationality produced by this process means that the substitution of one thing for another at the heart of screen memory is never simply a conscious manipulation of the truth. When Freud returned to the question of memory in the 1920s he chose the spatial metaphor of the children’s mystic writing pad to explain its mechanics (Freud 1997 [1925]). The process he described, however, was very similar to what he had proposed a quarter of a century before. Just as, Freud suggests, the inscriptions of the child’s drawing on the magic pad are not completely erased when the celluloid sheet is lifted from the pad below, as the traces are still visible there, so our perceptions have left their mark in the unconscious and are latent (though not visible) in our present lives. The surface sheet may have covered over the initial impulse but that impulse is nevertheless present through the unconscious associations it has instigated. Jacques Derrida would later question the distinctions Freud makes between surface and depth, pure perception in the world and the traces it leaves in the unconscious, by suggesting that “pure perception does not exist” as we are already “written on” in an infinite chain of traces within traces. He observes, “[t]he subject of writing is a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the world” (Derrida 1978 [1967]: 226–7). Derrida’s “radicalization” of the Freudian conception of the trace is an important correction to any sense of a primary source: it deconstructs the dichotomy between origin and substitute by suggesting that the so-called “origin” is itself a substitute for something else in an endless chain of deferral and displacement. This allows for a consideration of the fluid 125

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relations between psychic memory and cultural memory, and a challenge to the binary opposition between the singular and the universal that is largely unexplored in Freud’s theory. Derrida’s approach also questions Freud’s faith in the ability of the analyst to extract from the trace “everything that has been forgotten” as there is no possibility of a complete interpretation (or complete representation, as we shall see in the literary and filmic examples to be discussed). It does not, however, detract from Freud’s hypothesis about memory but simply extends it: memories contain the traces of previous experiences which cannot simply be traced back to one traumatic moment but are ever-present in an unending chain of association. In his influential book Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg argues convincingly about the need to reflect on the process of displacement that occurs between event and substitute in screen memory in order to avoid the sort of competitive memory stakes that I mentioned above and rethink memory in “multidirectional” terms (Rothberg 2009: 12–16; see also Sanyal 2015: 85). In her study of the transgenerational and transhistorical aspects of trauma, Gabriele Schwab also suggests that we cannot comprehend the process of transmission of traumatic events “according to a simple logic of cover-up or substitution” and without an awareness of the unconscious operation of repression, splitting and displacement (Schwab 2010: 28). She invokes Andreas Huyssen’s notion of “transnational palimpsests of memory” to describe “condensed or syncretistic memories that operate according to a logic of the unconscious with displacements, substitutions, fusions and condensations” (30). My concept of palimpsestic memory is, similarly, founded on what I term a composite poetics of memory whose political dynamics are aligned not with a notion of competition between discrete historical legacies but one that conceives of the intersections between them (Silverman 2013; see also Rothberg, Sanyal and Silverman 2010). These approaches to screen memory all suggest not only that we need to understand the complex relationship between the conscious and unconscious at its heart, and the chain of (disparate) associations that underpins it, but also that it is only by reframing screen memory in this way that we can formulate memory in general across the divides of culture, nation, history and generation rather than within these silos. The palimpsest is, I believe, particularly attuned to this redefinition of screen memory. Viewed palimpsestically – that is, as a spatial metaphor to capture the complex relationship between surface and depth and the overlapping layers of time – the screen can no longer be viewed simply as a political and ideological manoeuvre but, according to Derrida’s “radicalized” version of Freud’s mystic writing pad, as “a system of relations between strata” (Derrida 1978 [1967]: 227). We need to elaborate further on the multi-dimensional and paradoxical nature of the screen to realize the radical potential of Freud’s theory that is often occluded in recent appropriations of the term.

The ambivalent screen I suggested earlier that, in his paper on screen memory, Freud points up two different but linked processes at work: the first is the way something is covered over and concealed from view, the second is the way something is produced or revealed, albeit in fictional form. Recent uses of the term screen memory have tended to concentrate on the former but the latter is equally as significant. The two processes can be captured in the double meaning of the screen itself: in the first, something is “screened out” and rendered invisible, in the second, the screen – like the television, film or mobile phone screen – is the site, the space or the stage on which something is projected or performed and rendered visible. 126

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Although, as Patrick ffrench observes, the second meaning of “screen” as referring to “the projection surface rather than the function of covering” (ffrench 2018: 157) is not explicitly contained in Freud’s original German term Deckerinnerung (literally, “cover memory”), the implications of his theory that I have drawn out above nevertheless allow us to read the term in this way too (as, indeed, ffrench does himself in his fascinating discussion of the relations between cinema, memory and the work of Marcel Proust: see ffrench 2018: chapter 6, “Screen Memories/Screen Histories”). This idea of the ambivalent screen – combining visibility and invisibility, absence and presence – allows a more complex model to emerge in which the screen is always a composite assemblage and superimposition of conscious and unconscious elements and different times and spaces. It also aligns with the mechanics of trauma – in which banal actions, objects and landscapes in the present can be the visible sites for the acting out of invisible wounds from the past – and with art forms that attempt to figure the paradox of showing the invisible. This sense of the ambivalent nature of the screen – concealing and revealing at the same time – allows us to read it as the stage on which the human drama of figuring trauma is acted out and worked through. It resembles Freud’s description of the child’s game of fort/ da in which the absence and presence of an object is the displaced staging, negotiation and working through of the child’s sense of pain and loss on separation from the mother (see Santner 1992: 145–6). I will take two examples, one from literature and one from film, to highlight the notion of the ambivalent screen. In his 300-page novel La Disparition/The Disappearance (1969), the French writer Georges Perec does not use the letter “e”, the most common letter in the French alphabet. The missing vowel is therefore, paradoxically, only made visible as an absence. What cannot be spoken – the “e” whose French pronunciation resembles “eux”/“them”, the parents who disappeared during the Second World War (the mother at Auschwitz, the father as a soldier) – thus contaminates the writing as a whole, a metaphorical gesture to the absent presence of the parents that writing is made to embody. In W ou le souvenir d’enfance/W or the Memory of Childhood (1975), Perec reworks the theme of the absent presence by placing, on a blank page at the centre of the text, the typographical mark of an ellipsis, a visible textual sign which references what is missing. In this “elliptical” way, the unbearable wound and trauma of the missing parents is, as in La Disparition, registered as an absence, what cannot be spoken directly but is always allusively and obliquely present. In both works, language is made to play a paradoxical double role: it cannot show what has disappeared (no full testimony is possible) yet must bear the imprint left by the disappeared on its inscriptions. Writing therefore acts like an ambivalent screen memory, as words become both the substitutes for the wound (hence covering it over, like a scar on the body) and the displaced expression, in condensed form, of that pain (hence revealing it). I suggest that a fuller discussion of screen memory would therefore benefit from being inserted into the wider debate about absence and representation (that would include, amongst others, theorists such as Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, Deleuze and Lyotard). Film can present us with a more literal example of the ambivalent screen. In A Perfect Day (2005) by the Lebanese film-makers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, made fifteen years after the end of the civil war in Lebanon (1975–90), Malek has a sleep disorder called sleep apnea syndrome, which causes him to fall asleep when he is not moving and interrupts his breathing while he is asleep. Malek’s body is, then, the site on which the memory of the absent father (missing for fifteen years since the civil war) is enacted, the body’s unconscious demonstration of its incorporation of a loss that it can never properly assimilate. In a scene in which Malek discusses his sleeping disorder with the hospital doctor, the unconscious Malek is displayed on a screen in a ghostly and grainy 127

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Figure 11.1 The interrupted present

black-and-white which contrasts with the colour of the main image (see Figure 11.1). The overlaying of one screen with another (the monitor in the image and the cinema screen we are watching as spectators) palimpsestically performs the “system of relations between strata” described by Derrida, not only drawing together the conscious and the unconscious, and absence and presence, but also dramatizing the ambivalent role of the screen itself in this process. A similar staging takes place when Malek is shown asleep on the construction site where he works as site manager, and is awoken to the news of the discovery of a corpse, unearthed during the excavation of the site. Malek receives the news flash on his phone: the message “Shia worksite closed. Corpse found” literally flashes up on his screen, reminding us of Walter Benjamin’s description of History “flashing up” in the here and now to constitute a dialectical image (see Figure 11.2). As with Perec’s writing in the examples above, the literal screens in A Perfect Day function both to screen out and project traumatic memory: they are the figurative sites of a complex performative process of displacement and condensation of elements in the

Figure 11.2 The flash of history

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present. In their combination of deception and revelation, these screens approximate another of Freud’s crucial terms, the parapraxis or slip of the tongue (and, in chapters 4 and 5 of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1914 [1901]], Freud discusses screen memory and parapraxis consecutively). Parapractic memory would also be an apt way to define the works mentioned above, as Perec constantly confuses one word for another and one story for another, while Hadjithomas and Joreige substitute one image for another. As with screen memory, parapractic memory not only informs us about the strange ruses of overwhelming affective moments but also the migrations of word and image across different historical contexts, rendering the “truths” they tell far less evident and far more imbricated than at first glance (see Elsaesser 2014). The film screen’s ability to conceal and reveal at the same time – to masquerade as the image of the real while interrupting its own secret suturing to reveal its “unconscious” – draws us, finally, to make the intriguing connection between Freud’s discussion of screen memory and trauma and the birth of cinema itself at the end of the nineteenth century. Is it pure coincidence or was Freud’s use of the term “screen memory” influenced (even unconsciously) by the new medium, as what is projected onto the cinema screen are our coded fantasies, fears, desires and memories, a process that is as revelatory as it is deceptive. Dijana Jelaca reflects on the parallel between screen memory and “the dynamics of the cinematic screen” (Jelaca 2016: 13; see also Bullock 2016: 314), while Thomas Elsaesser draws attention to the way in which the new medium instantiated “an ontology of trace and imprint” crucial to Freud’s theory of memory (Elsaesser 2009: 103). This understanding of a screen memory – both concealing and revealing, the paradoxical site of an absent presence, like the cinema screen itself – would seem to approximate Freud’s original description more faithfully than recent uses of the screen memory, which fail to keep alive the ambivalent (and poetic) double language of the screen in favour of a more prosaic and mechanistic vision of effacement for ideological and political ends. It rescues the idea of substitution from its entrapment within an instrumentalist framework by highlighting the complex relationship between the substitute and its originating affect; it brings back the work of the unconscious into a field which has largely ignored it; and it reads the process of trauma and its figurations in art across the intersections between times, spaces and cultures.

Bibliography A Perfect Day. (2005) dir. J. Hadjithomas and K. Joreige, Mille et Une Productions, Abbout Productions, Twenty Twenty Vision. Bergson, H. (1965 [1896]) Matière et mémoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Buchanan, I. (ed.) (2010) A Dictionary of Critical Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. www.oxfordre ference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199532919.001.0001/acref-9780199532919 Bullock, M. (2016) “Screen Memories: Film’s Knowing and Historical Trauma in The Tracker”, Studies in Australian Cinema 10(3): 306–23. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Deleuze, G. (1985) L’Image-Temps (The Time-Image, 1989), Paris: Editions du Minuit. Derrida, J. (1978 [1967]) Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Didi-Huberman, G. (2002) L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris: Editions du Minuit. Elsaesser, T. (2009) “Freud as Media Theorist: Mystic Writing Pads and the Matter of Memory”, Screen 50(1): 100–13.

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Max Silverman ———. (2014) “Migration and Motif: The (Parapractic) Memories of an Image”, in G. Pollock and M. Silverman (eds) Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 47–58. ffrench, P. (2018) Thinking Cinema with Proust, Cambridge: Legenda. Freeman, L., Nienass, B. and Melamed, L. (2013) “Screen Memory”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 26(1): 1–7. Freud, S. (1914 [1901]) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. A. A. Brill, New York: The Macmillan Company. ———. (1966–74a) “Screen Memories [1899]”, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. III, trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 303–22. ———. (1966–74b) “The Interpretation of Dreams [1899]”, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols IV–V, trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press. ———. (1978 [1917]) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, vol. I, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. (1997 [1925]) “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”, in General Psychological Theory, New York: Touchstone, 207–12. Golsan, R. (2000) Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Jelaca, D. (2016) Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. LaCapra, D. (1998) History and Memory After Auschwitz, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2006) The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Novick, P. (1999) The Holocaust in American Life, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Perec, G. (1969) La Disparition, Paris: Gallimard. ———. (1975) W ou le souvenir d’enfance, Paris: Denoel. Reed, G. S. and Levine, H. B. (2015) “Screen Memories: A Reintroduction”, in G. S. Reed and H. B. Levine (eds) On Freud’s “Screen Memories”, London: Karnac Books, 27–35. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, M., Sanyal, D. and Silverman, M. (2010) “Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Post-War French and Francophone Culture”, Yale French Studies 118/119: 1–2. Rousso, H. (1987) Le Syndrôme de Vichy (1944–198 … ), Paris: Editions du Seuil. Santner, E. L. (1992) “History Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma”, in S. Friedlander (ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 143–54. Sanyal, D. (2015) Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance, New York: Fordham University Press. Schwab, G. (2010) Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. Sheringham, M. (1993) French Autobiography: Devices and Desires, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Silverman, M. (2013) Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film, New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Sprengnether, M. (2012) “Freud as Memoirist: A Reading of ‘Screen Memories’”, American Imago 69(2): 215–39. Themistokleous, G. (2015) “Folding and Doubling: Re-Visiting Freud’s Screen Memories”, Io Squaderno 10(37): 39–44. Todorov, T. (2004) Les Abus de la mémoire, Paris: Arléa. Worms, F. (2018) “Le parallèle Bergson/Freud”, in A. Compagnon and C. Surprenant (eds) Freud au Collège de France, Paris: Collège de France. http://books.openedition.org/cdf/5660

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12 WORKING-THROUGH Jean-Michel Ganteau

Working-through is a fairly complex, at times controversial category, not only because its punctuation is not entirely stabilized but also because it straddles various theoretical fields and hails from diverse approaches. I have retained here the punctuation used in the translation of Freud’s seminal “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psychoanalysis II)” (1914), even though the non-hyphenated version appears in many recent works, among which Dominick LaCapra’s, whose contribution to the manifestation of the notion in the field of trauma studies cannot be overlooked (LaCapra 1998, 2001). This may be in part due to the fact that the way in which the notion has been used in trauma studies reflects its various origins, that is, the psychoanalytic one and a more specifically ethical, even political one. Such a hybrid nature appears clearly when considering the German original. In fact, when Freud elaborated the notion in 1914, building on observations made in his “Studies on Hysteria” (1895), he used the term durcharbeiten or, in its nominal form, Durcharbeitung, to describe a repetitive, lengthy psychic process – or work – during which the resistances affecting a patient are overcome, at least partly (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967: 305). Here are the concluding words of Freud’s 1914 article that provide an effective definition of the notion and an evocation of the specificity of the treatment as opposed to earlier techniques of suggestion whose purpose was to short-circuit resistances – through hypnosis, for instance – suspending them but only provisionally: This working-through of the resistances may in practice turn out to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience for the analyst. Nevertheless it is part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion. (Freud 1950: 155–6) In the preceding lines, the idea of effort and working towards an improvement in the patient’s life are prevalent and established as central in the psychoanalytic process, hence the category’s later associations with healing. Still, working through – most often without a hyphen – is also present in distinct yet related contexts, within trauma studies. The Israeli historian and specialist of the Shoah, Saul Friedländer, for one, contributed to the field in many ways, and most notably through his 131

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article “Trauma, Transference and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah”. The inverted commas around the notion signpost its well-established status. In fact, Friedländer quotes from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (a text in which no occurrence of “working-through” or derivative spellings is to be found) to substantiate his take on trauma and he elaborates on the complex nature of working-through without reference to Freud’s own texts directly addressing the notion. He considers that historians documenting the trauma individually or collectively experienced by the direct witnesses of the Shoah or their descendants should strike the right balance between the “necessary distancing or ‘numbness’ [and] elements of intense emotion” (Friedländer 1992: 52). In so doing, he contributes to making the notion edge into the arena of historiography, thereby confirming its status in the field of narrative analysis. Friedländer’s contribution develops a consideration of the ethical implications of the writing of history, and narrative ethics feature prominently in relation to working-through in recent analyses. For this reason, Friedländer’s article may be considered in relation to Theodor W. Adorno’s influential definition of the concept in his “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” (1959), in which he inveighed against what he saw as a “modish slogan” (Adorno 1959: 89) that acts as a symptom of a “weakened memory that glorifie[d] the National Socialist past” through the “effacement of memory” (92, 91). He considered that some politicians in postwar Germany were active in re-fashioning the Nazi past, a process that led him to insist that “fascism live[d] on, that the oft-invoked working through of the past ha[d] to this day been unsuccessful and ha[d] degenerated into its own caricature, an empty and cold forgetting” (98). Against such a situation he advocated a fight against propaganda and the need for an efficient pedagogy based on re-education and the promotion of psychoanalysis (100–1). As made clear in this briefest of summaries, and similarly to what surfaces in Friedländer’s own definition of working-through, psychoanalysis as a science instrumental in recapturing and addressing memories is also solicited by Adorno, even if he makes no direct reference to Freud's original definition. As in Freud’s original definition, the effort to recapture memories is seen to be at the heart of the process, but the original Freudian model is used analogically to define a type of social working through – without a hyphen. It should be noted that the original German term translated into “working through” here is different from Freud’s original word. In fact, Adorno did not use the term Durcharbeitung but rather Aufarbeitung, whose meaning is less specific than the former and corresponds to a situation in which someone is “getting through an unpleasant obligation” (Adorno 1959: 337n1) – even though, according to Horsman, it comes from Durcharbeitung (Horsman 2011: 3). As may have appeared above, working-through is not the easiest concept to grasp, its orthographical fluctuations, not to mention variations in translation or rather the conflation of diverse German words into a single one in English, pointing at terminological differences, distinct realities and heterogeneous though compatible disciplines and areas of application. It has been used in ways related to distinct acceptations and there has been a certain degree of overlap and dilution in scholarly usage. What remains common though is the relevance to such key parameters as memory, healing, ethics, addressing both individual and collective cases, in which a certain degree of effort is involved, so as to produce a representation of a narrative nature, most often. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition: “to resolve or to come to terms with (an emotional or psychological problem) often by thinking or telling about it; (also) to surmount or deal with successfully”. The unhyphenated form has thereby percolated into ordinary, non-technical language as, in everyday parlance, “working through” a problem has become a synonym of “addressing and resolving” it, making the notion notoriously complex, all the more so as Freud’s original precautions and mitigated 132

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explanations about the systematic success of working-through during treatment seem to be no longer heeded. In the following pages, I attend to the issue of working-through and its currency in the fictional representation of trauma, paying attention, in turn, to resistance, tensions and problematical closure.

Resistance Over the years, working-through has ceased to be associated with one of the key notions that brought it into existence, that is, resistance. As indicated above, it is originally defined within the context of the treatment of patients who, for some reason, fail to recapture their memories. One should note in passing that Freud does not explicitly associate workingthrough with the treatment of trauma. In his “Remembering, Repeating and WorkingThrough”, he is more specifically concerned with conditions of another type. On the one hand, he mentions very early memories that are suppressed at a later juncture: There is one special class of experiences of the utmost importance for which no memory can as a rule be recovered. These are experiences which occurred in very early childhood and were not understood at the time but which were subsequently understood and interpreted. (Freud 1950: 149) On the other hand, he references the case of obsessional neurosis in which “forgetting is mostly restricted to dissolving thought-connections, failing to draw the right conclusions and isolating memories” (149). The figure of isolation (even though the latter is not directly referred to here) runs through the article, the goal of the treatment being to get memories to connect and link up. The bulk of the text, then, is devoted to the description of the resistances that affect the patient and bar him/her from access to the lost memory (one may remember that in the case of trauma, memories are not lost but are rather fragments from the past that were never assimilated by the subject and were therefore inaccessible to his/her consciousness and recall). Typically, the resistances are seen under the guise of what he will later call the compulsion repetition, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). This is how this symptom is analysed: the patient leads to the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulsion to remember, not only in his personal attitude to his doctor but also in every activity which may occupy his life at the time […]. The greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering. (Freud 1950: 151) The rule according to which what cannot be identified as belonging to the past is repeated in the present (Freud 1955a: 12) is intuited here in terms of resistance. The effect of such a resistance is to make both the patient and the analyst embark on a chaotic but guided course compounded of discoveries and advances, immediately countered by lapses and regressions and whose purpose is to achieve “reconciliation with the repressed material” (Freud 1950: 152). Still, identifying the resistance is not sufficient, Freud warns us. Once this stage has been reached, the way towards healing is still long and arduous: The analyst had merely forgotten that giving the resistance a name could not result in its immediate cessation. One must allow the patient time to become more 133

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conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work. (Freud 1950: 155) The accumulative syntax of the last sentence is an obvious index of working-through’s painful and agonistic nature: not only does it take time, but it also requires exertion, as clearly signposted in a later text, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926), in which Freud underscores the ego’s difficulty in defeating the repressions that translates into a “period of strenuous effort” (Freud 1955b: 78). Other psychoanalysts have contributed to the definition of working-through among whom, quite eminently, Melanie Klein, in her work on children and more especially in “Narrative of a Child Analysis” where she recommends that the analyst pay attention to the variations in the patient’s attitude, “following these fluctuations closely and analysing them” (Klein 1961: 465). This implies a prolonged treatment, full of peripateia, a roller coaster of advances and retreats, which underpins her own definition of working-through: Working-through was one of the essential demands that Freud made on an analysis. The necessity to work through is again and again proved in our day-to-day experience: for instance, we see that patients, who at some stage have gained insight, repudiate this very insight in the following sessions and sometimes even seem to have forgotten that they had ever accepted it. (Klein 1961: 12) Repetition, protraction, the experimental approach of trial and error here again appear as the main ingredients of working-through, which designates the potential positive outcome of the treatment (the core notion at the heart of today’s acceptation of the term) but also takes on board the lengthy, demanding way towards it. Repetition may not be an ingredient of it but it is undeniably present in the process. Contemporary psychoanalysts have also underlined the arduous way of working-through, as is the case with René Roussillon who builds up on Freud’s tripartite evocation of resistances as expounded in his “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” and elaborates on the three types of working-through predicated on them. Beyond differences appear common features centring on the progressiveness of the process, since he sees the nature of working-though as “de-condensing psychic matter fragment by fragment”, a course of action that requires the collaboration of the patient and the analyst so as “to transform everything into psychic and verbal representations […] through repetition fragment by fragment” (Roussillon 2008: 862; translation mine). A far cry from the euphoric notations giving pride of place to success and healing, canonical descriptions of working-through showcase its demanding nature, metaleptically insisting on its strenuous quality to circuitously evoke what lies at its origin, that is, resistance(s) and the failure to bring back repressed memories, together with the ambivalent nature of repetition as both hampering and somehow necessary. Seen in this light, working-through lays the stress on the subject’s frailty and vulnerability, a tentative link to a past that fails in surfacing to consciousness. What this category draws our attention to is the always already compromised nature of the subject’s relation to the past, especially of a violent, wounding nature, hence the association with trauma in the contemporary theoretical and critical literature on the subject. Extenuating the upbeat associations favoured in ordinary parlance, working-through originally includes imperfections and failures of various

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types and is part and parcel of a conception of the individual as vulnerable, hence of representation and testimony as inherently flawed or incapacitated. This is probably one of the main reasons why fictional presentations of trauma have given pride of place to the evocation of symptoms accruing in the wake of traumatic breakthroughs. This is notoriously the case with Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007), a Man Booker Prize-winning novel concerned with its narrator’s first-person chronicle of her coming to terms with her younger brother’s suicide. Situated in the Dublin of the Celtic Tiger years, it addresses the theme of paedophilia and rehearses the tortuous way in which the narrator and protagonist, in her lengthy, chronologically broken confession, evokes her family history and, allegorically, the fate of a nation “drowning in shame” (Enright 2007: 168). In this agonizing confession that is also an elegy, the narrator gropes her way through fantasies and fragmented memories of her past, unearthing piece after painful, meaningful piece, the better to relapse into tormenting doubt in the next instant. Rarely does she achieve a moment of revelation and manage to link up the isolated fragments, most of her fumblings leading to negative epiphanies: These are the things I do, actually know. I know that my brother Liam was sexually abused by Lambert Nugent. Or was probably sexually abused by Lambert Nugent. These are the things I don’t know: that I was touched by Lambert Nugent, that my Uncle Brendan was driven mad by him, that my mother was rendered stupid by him, that my Aunt Rose and my sister Kitty got away. (Enright 2007: 224) Once again, the repetitive, interrupted patterns syntactically mimic the ebb and flow of hardly glimpsed, half-ungraspable memories, in a traumatic context that leaves little room for linking. In the first 36 chapters (in a novel made up of 38 chapters), fragments fail to appear and cohere, making the narrator toil towards revelation and consistency. In such a narrative, working-though is fictionally captured to evince the agonising nature of the piecing together and its Sisyphean dimension.

Tensions Working-through may equally owe its complexity to the fact that it is a category defined in relation to another one and to its being determined by another couple of Freudian concepts, when used in the field of trauma studies. In fact, early in his career, LaCapra addressed the issue of the historian’s responsibility in producing testimonies of traumatic periods. In his History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998), he gives a definition of working-through as opposed to acting-out. He defines both categories in relation to one another, using the latter term in the same acceptation as Freud in “Remembering, Repeating and WorkingThrough” (one that is not always privileged by contemporary psychoanalysts), that is, with reference to the repetition in the present of events that took place in the past and that cannot be (re)claimed. He also draws on another seminal text by Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915). In LaCapra’s view, acting-out, in its incessant play on repetition and its sudden, compulsive iteration of past events, points at the incorporation of a traumatic memory which, as an internal foreign body, cannot be integrated in the subject’s consciousness. Acting-out therefore becomes an effect of melancholia. To this he opposes working135

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through, which he considers to stand on the side of mourning, a process in which the traumatic memory is introjected and processed by the subject. In mourning and workingthrough, a new relationship to the past emerges “that recognizes its difference from the present and enacts a specific performative relation to it that simultaneously remembers and takes leave” (LaCapra 1998: 45). What appears in this influential definition is an image of working-through that sets great store by healing and the termination of the post-traumatic symptoms of splitting, fragmentation and isolation. In line with Freud’s descriptions in his 1914 article, then, workingthrough points towards resolution. The difference lies in the fact that while “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” insists on the acting-out process and leaves little textual room for the description of the eponymous category itself, making it more tentative, the oppositional model of “Mourning and Melancholia” lends more edge to the definition of the term and underscores its resolutely positive aspects. In fact, while melancholia corresponds to a pathological reaction to the loss of a loved object, in which the subject “kills[s] itself” (Freud 1957: 252), in mourning the aggressiveness is turned towards the lost object. This means that melancholia is a grievous pathology, more often than not integrating manic phases, while mourning may be considered as a necessary moment, full of suffering and turbulence, which ultimately opens up to a healing and a return to normalcy. Now, the association with introjection and mourning fundamentally activates the positive pole of workingthrough, downplaying its relation with resistance and insisting on its euphoric closure. In so doing, it becomes closely associated with healing, which in many ways justifies the ordinary use of the notion as encapsulated in the above-quoted Oxford English Dictionary entry. Still, the definitions get somewhat more confused as the two categories, delineated contrastively for clarity’s sake, become dependent on one another in their application to specific cases. LaCapra, once again, has commented on their collaboration, insisting on the “need to articulate acting out and working through” (LaCapra 1998: 55) and even considering that the former is a condition of the latter (LaCapra 2001: 66–7n32). Admittedly, LaCapra himself had already insisted that working-through does not necessarily come to emphatic fruition and “does not provide full enlightenment” (LaCapra 1998: 186). And this is confirmed by later commentators like E. Ann Kaplan, for whom the move from acting-out to working-through “does not mean that there is a cure or healing effect”, but rather an “ongoing mourning” whose outcome contributes to “keeping the wound open” (Kaplan 2005: 135), the latter phrase being generally associated with melancholia. This is what she confirms in her analysis of representations of post-9/11 trauma in New York City where an ambiguous vision of working-through is evinced, as it implies accepting what has happened and “mourning the various kinds of loss” while “providing – not closure or healing […] – but a fitting witness” (136). In such evocations – and admittedly in most of them – melancholia and mourning on the one hand, and acting-out and working-through on the other are seen to persistently bleed into one another, which is perceptible in the testimonial representations of post-traumatic situations. One of the consequences is to blur what is originally presented as a clear-cut distinction and to problematize our response to an already fairly intricate category. Such a collaboration has been envisaged by literary critics like Stef Craps in his monograph on Graham Swift. The outline of this study is tripartite, as Craps successively analyses three stages of trauma – following in LaCapra’s steps – which are denial, acting-out and working-through, each phase corresponding to a period in the novelist’s production. For clarity’s sake, the separation between these three groups is presented as watertight, but the author concludes on the tensions between acting out and working through in Swift’s novels 136

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(Craps 2005: 183), considering that they collaborate and seep into one another. Now, this is certainly reminiscent of the workings of some contemporary forms of elegy, a genre notoriously associated with the fictional presentation of the trauma of loss. In fact, traditional elegy, as indicated by many commentators, is a form that thematizes mourning and that gets the reader to share in the mourning process. It is based on a set of conventions like lamentation, bouts of anger against the departed and final consolation (Kennedy 2007: 6–8), a structure vividly reminiscent of that of mourning, with a strong painful attachment to the past giving way to a return to normalcy. Still, some critics, like Jahan Ramazani, have argued that the modern elegy (or anti-elegy) turns its back on mourning and edges towards melancholia, imbuing the narrative with what he oxymoronically describes as “melancholic mourning” (Ramazani 1994: 4). I would argue that this is what is to be found in a novel like Graham Swift’s Last Orders, whose action spans a day when a group of mourners go on a trip to Margate where they are to scatter their friend Jack’s ashes into the sea. The bulk of the narrative is devoted to the winding pilgrimage that the mourners go through, an obvious metaphor of the psychic and emotional journey that they are performing, together with the reader. Such an excursion, complete with revelations, doubts and to-and-fro movements between past and present, is evocative of the rhythms of acting-out. After a multitude of hesitations and reversals, the novel seems to end on a possibly hopeful note, with an in extremis evocation of possible release, as Jack’s ashes are seen to blend into the sky. Still, this very tentative ending that is also an opening, besides extending the poetics of vulnerability that is so characteristic of the novel, does not seem to privilege so much the chronological or temporal domination of acting-out over working-through as the refusal to let go of the dead. The impression that the reader may be left with is that faithfulness to the departed is given pride of place, in this context. In such elegiac novels, a poetics of melancholic mourning seems to operate, underlining an opposition between the clinical and the ethical, since healing does not seem to be given priority over some form of faithfulness to the departed, acting-out and workingthrough seeming hardly distinguishable.

Problematical closure A far cry from the image of working-through peddled in everyday parlance, resolution or healing are a moot point in most theoretical and fictional evocations. The emphatically euphoric structures of melodrama, romance or elegy are rarely to be privileged in novelistic representations, as if the promise of a positive resolution had to be taken with an ethical pinch of salt. One possible explanation may lie in Friedländer’s analysis of narratives addressing the issue of historical testimony. This he makes emphatically clear when analysing a salient trait of working through: A main aspect of working through […] entails, for the historian, the imperative of rendering as truthful an account as documents and testimonials will allow, without giving in to the temptation of closure. Closure in this case would represent an obvious avoidance of what remains indeterminate, elusive and opaque. (Friedländer 1992: 52, emphasis added) Friedländer then moves on to the definition of the modalities of such an avoidance of closure that he locates in an “ever questioning commentary” (52) so as to avoid “a naive historical positivism leading to simplistic and self-assured historical narrations and closures” (53). 137

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This prompts him to give certain prescriptions, whose objective is to warrant the ethicality of historical accounts concerned with the process of working through the past of the Shoah, a situation that in many ways constitutes a model: The commentary should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narration, introduce alternative interpretations, question any partial conclusion, withstand the need for closure. Because of the necessity of some form of narrative sequence in the writing of history, such commentary may introduce splintered or constantly recurring refractions of a traumatic past by using any number of different vantage points. (Friedländer 1992: 53) Such an idea crops up in LaCapra’s writings as he specifies that “working through does not provide full enlightenment” (LaCapra 1998: 186) or when he describes narratives of working through as “anti-totalizing” texts (LaCapra 1999: 20). And we have already seen that Kaplan evokes working-through in terms of tentativeness and openness, indicating that they provide “not closure of healing” (Kaplan 2005: 136). Similarly, Eaglestone, displacing his focus towards the evocation of the “‘awkward poetics’” of working-through, reminds the reader of one of its most recurrent traits: its “interminable and inconclusive nature” (Eaglestone 2008: 20). In between faithfulness to referential details and self-conscious commentary lies the precarious balance of working-through, neither completely weighing on one side or the other, and compiling both. Struck between the desire for completion and healing and the impossibility of closure and resolution, the precarious equilibrium of working-through has to be fumblingly achieved, narratively and aesthetically duplicating the “strenuous effort” lying at the core of Freud’s definition of the term (Freud 1955b: 78). Such a preference for opening and irresolution clearly resonates with the ambivalence inherent in working-through, both dynamic and hampered by repetition, taking on board melancholia and acting-out even while striving towards a positive ending. In such a wavering seems to be inscribed the impossibility to take complete leave of the traumatic past and of its victims. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the model of working through that has come to be most influential in trauma studies is predicated on historical evocations of the Shoah, with their ethical imperative to avoid embellishment and simplification, and to attend to the singularity of the event and of each victim. Such an ethical imperative seems to have left its mark on the contemporary vision of the concept, as if avoiding closure were tantamount or at least formally connected to the principle of faithfulness to the wound, or “keeping the wound open” (Kaplan 2005: 135), as a reference to the melancholic figure of the open wound. I would argue that such an ethical orientation is instrumental in setting up a poethics (Cassigneul 2013) of vulnerability. In fact, texts addressing the issue of trauma are inherently concerned with the subject’s capacity to be wounded, which provides the grounds for ontological vulnerability. In trauma literature, every subject is liable to wounding and is therefore characterised by his/her exposure to violence, as if such vulnerability defined the essence of what it is to be human. And the reader, dispossessing him-/herself in front of the text, performs what may be called an identification work feeding on his/her own situational or diffuse traumas. Fittingly, such ideas are given literary form through a poetics of vulnerability that seizes hold of trauma narratives, more specifically in their rendition of working-through. Strikingly, relatively few literary commentaries on trauma fiction (apart from such exceptions as Craps’s works, for instance) have laid emphasis on the evocation of working-through – I have in mind here Anne Whitehead’s (2004) seminal work, which remains fairly discreet 138

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on the subject – while the category has been essentially exploited by historians and psychoanalysts. As suggested above, most of them are rather concerned with the representation of acting-out that, even if enmeshed with working-through, lends itself more easily to the literary form, whose propensities for the imitation of rhythms and rhyming it naturally taps. Still, in many contemporary novels the structural characteristics of working-through are presented and even performed narratively, among which the problematical closure that is such a constituent of the poetics of vulnerability. This is clearly the case in one of Pat Barker’s most famous novels, Another World (1998), which addresses individual, family and societal trauma. It is concerned with the protagonist’s grandfather, Geordie, a First World War veteran injured on the battlefield whose more recent wound, due to an operation on his cancer, reactivates the first one, metaphorically incarnating and enacting the Freudian principle of Nachträglichkeit. His grandson Nick, the protagonist, attends to him while looking after a very dysfunctional reconstituted family in which the menace of fratricide looms large. As the narrative unfolds, the reader has access to Geordie’s spectacular acting-out of terrible events that took place on the battlefield, and even to a recorded confession in which he admits to killing his brother who had been badly wounded by the enemy. Yet, after a very chaotic narrative ending up in Geordie’s death, a sense of peace and resolution dominates the conclusion of the story where all narrative threads are convincingly and euphorically tied up. At first glance, the novel would seem to conform to the pattern of workingthrough taken in the ordinary acceptation of the term. Still, the alert reader realizes that this is certainly too good to be true, and that the ending is probably ironical, permeated with a radical yet subtle irony, one that precludes easy detection. This is all the truer as the reader is close to the protagonist and shares most of his perceptions and ponderings, even while Nick apparently also suffers from trauma, and more precisely from a compulsion to denial and repetition. Ironically, in their evocation of oncoming bliss the last lines of the novel may be read in a radically opposite light, as promising more of the same, that is, more traumatic repetition. From this point of view, I would say that Another World provides a very fitting fictional evocation of working-through as it captures the ambiguity of the notion by showing its opposed valences as two faces of the same coin. In so doing, it taps the powers of antiphrasis in order to get the reader to share an experiential knowledge of what trauma and workingthrough may be. The literary text solicits the powers of a frail form to evoke the extreme vulnerability characteristic of traumatic states: when addressing the issue of working-though and providing a narrative presentation of it, fiction contributes to the experiential knowledge of an apparently simple but fairly ambivalent and complex category.

Bibliography Adorno, T. W. (1959) Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. H. W. Pickford, Columbia: Columbia University Press. Barker, P. (1998) Another World, London: Viking. Cassigneul, A. (2013) “A Far Cry from Within: Virginia Woolf’s Poethics of Commitment”, Études britanniques contemporaines 45. Craps, S. (2005) Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Eaglestone, R. (2008) “‘Working Through’ and ‘Awkward Poetics’ in Second Generation Poetry: Lily Brett, Anne Michaels, Raymond Federman”, Critical Survey 20(2): 18–30. Enright, A. (2007) The Gathering, London: Jonathan Cape. Freud, S. (1950) “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psychoanalysis II) [1914]”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of

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Further reading Ataria, Y., Gurevitz, D. D., Pedaya, H. and Neria, Y. (eds) (2016) Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, New York: Springer. (With a chapter on television and working-through.) Felman, S. (1995) “Education in crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 13–60. (For some reflections on working-through and language.) Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. (For a punctual use of the notion in LaCapra’s wake.) Van der Merwe, C. N. and Gobodo-Madikidela, P. (2007) Narrating Our Healing: Perspectives on Working through Trauma, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. (An evocation of working-through in post TRC South Africa.) Žižek, S. (2017) Lenin 2017: Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through, London: Verso. (An application of Freud’s 1914 text to Russia’s relation with its history.)

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The affective turn As an umbrella term, “affect” can cover an array of concepts – emotions, feelings, moods, passions, sentiments – that have increasingly over the past two decades become analytic tools and cornerstones of theoretical approaches in the study of literature and culture broadly conceived. What these concepts have in common, beyond the shared psychological dimension, is the theoretically and methodologically complex ways in which they inform approaches to literature that challenge the hegemony of rational deliberate thought. All these concepts, and especially the catchall “affect”, focus on embodiment, the visceral, and on the diffusiveness of experience and its recalcitrance to norms, laws and systems. The definitions various scholars provide to differentiate one of these concepts from the others, and most significantly to distinguish affect (especially from emotions) can vary, but they all help concretize affect as an operational category despite its abstraction. The theoretical density of both trauma studies and affect theory has made both of them vulnerable to charges of conceptual confusion. In some studies, critics have charged, empirical claims become conflated with speculative assertions. Critics of trauma studies and affect theory note the “tendency to reject the idea that trauma and the affects involve any kind of cognition and to treat them instead as physiological processes of the body” (Leys and Goldman 2010: 666). Much of the conceptual effort in affect theory goes toward naming these physiological processes with taxonomic precision and differentiating them from similar phenomena. Charles Altieri provides a heuristically helpful way to situate affect in connection to feelings, emotions and moods, by drawing on the various degrees to which they involve senses, the imagination, awareness and intention: emotions, in his view, are “modes of affect” that place the “ego […] as a psychological unit in relation to the conditions that move it” (Altieri 2003: 72). By contrast, for Brian Massumi affect is autonomous, the product of visceral responses to experience that escapes analysis and reflection (Massumi 2002). Despite such differences, affect theorists share a commitment to the political significance of emotion and affect, thus moving us “beyond the realm of the interior subject and into that of inhabited place” (Bennet 2005: 151). The Latin root of the word “affect”, which connotes both passivity or receptivity (to be affected by) and a disposition (affectus) is invoked by many scholars as a way of staking 141

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affect’s conceptual territory. From early studies in psychology that viewed affect as a property of conscious experience (James 1890; Wundt 1897; Titchener 1910) to more recent scholarship that emphasizes the undifferentiated, fluctuating, non-intentional aspects of affect, the intellectual trajectory of the term has mirrored and responded in part to other epistemic shifts, such as the linguistic turn, the crisis of the concept of subjectivity and the challenges to the priority of reason. Careful, detailed and probing summaries of the scholarship on affect can be found in the landmark collections The Affect Theory Reader (Gregg and Seigworth 2010) and The Affective Turn (Clough and Halley 2007), or the May 2017 special issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology (White 2017b). Scholars interested in larger questions of modernity, of aesthetics, in the return to form in cultural criticism or in postmodernism have oriented their inquiry toward affect in a way that has produced substantive theoretical and analytical innovations. As new technologies continue to promise a way to detect and control emotions, or robots who can feel emotions, and as fear and anger become dominant in political rhetoric across the world while depression and anxiety are increasingly the affective mark of the neoliberal West, we can agree that “the rise of affect theory [is] an effect of the world as much as a frame for viewing it” (White 2017a: 176). It is no surprise then that affect theory covers a vast territory. Rather than an exhaustive review, here I focus on some of the key intellectual assumptions and implications of the turn to affect for our understanding and use of literary and cultural texts. The explosion of the term “affect” in the past decades across different disciplines, from literary and cultural studies to psychology, political philosophy, media studies, anthropology, archaeology and law points to a fundamental theoretical need that goes beyond a particular disciplinary paradigm, and amounts to a methodological turn. The rise of affect theory has to do with a need to recognize, as one scholar has put it, that dichotomies such as subject– object, intimate–impersonal or rational–irrational are both simplistic and often inaccurate. While the routes via which various scholars offer a way to overcome such binaries, approaches to affect have consistently looked beyond cognition, below the threshold of ideas that we reach through discourse and below signification. In terms of the methodological contribution, the study of affect marks a departure from, if not rebellion against, the linguistic turn and the “automatic anti-biologism” (Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 512) characterizing much of post-structuralism. Eve Kossofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank take to task the theoretical legacies of psychoanalysis, new historicism and structuralism for their exclusive focus on language as a model for understanding representation, for a mode of analysis too focused on binaries (subject–object, self–other, active–passive) and for pushing away the biological (Sedgwick and Frank 1995). Affect theory is a broad indictment of theory in social constructivist mode, and a shift toward understanding the role of the body in framing experience. Analytically, affect theory orients us toward studying cultural formations as sites of representing embodied experiences and as deep influences on the bodily lives of readers. Moving beyond linguistic legibility should not mean that we leave behind any claim to analytic purchase, but it does require different analytic tools and even new styles of writing theory. Many studies that trace affect in specific cultural contexts – novels, film, politics – also tend to loosen the distinction between affect and emotion, mood and feeling. For Altieri, affect “provides a means of referring to the entire range of states that are bounded on one side by pure sensation and on the other by thoughts that have no visible or tangible impact on our bodies” (Altieri 2003: 2). The connection between affect and thought is important to a tradition of political philosophy rooted in the Enlightenment view of passions as moral 142

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sentiment. We see this tradition shaping a contemporary political philosophy of affect like Sharon Krause’s, who argues that the affective tissue of citizens’ lives includes all the things that make us care or concerned (Krause 2008). These affectively charged concerns ground our shared political settings and become frameworks for decision-making and action (3). William Connolly similarly sees affect as politically salient, but insists on not making affect subservient to thought (Connolly 2011). Drawing on neuroscience, Connolly rejects any simple separation between the visceral and the intellectual, instead paying attention to the “thought-imbued feelings of attachment, faith, disgust, shame, ambivalence, love or disdain that influence action and judgment but fall below direct intellectual regulation” (Connolly 2002: xviii). In this chapter, I adopt the distinction between affect and emotion, as residing in a differentiation between “non-intentional corporeality” as a characteristic of affect and intentionality as the characteristic of emotion. However, I also consider the contributions made by scholars for whom the distinction between affect and emotion is lax, but who focus on the embodied nature as well as the broadly symbolic (rather than psychological) dimension of both. From such a perspective, scholars like Sara Ahmed, Charles Altieri, Lauren Berlant, Patricia Clough, Brian Massumi, Eve Kossofsky Sedgwick and Kathleen Stewart, among others, can be situated, despite the subtle and important differences among their approaches, in the general camp of affect theory. Their contribution can be briefly summarized as assigning the body the ability to respond to the world around it through its own “kind of ‘thinking’”, as Ruth Leys has put it (Leys 2011: 450), in a way that has important consequences for how we understand representation, and thus culture and politics at large. The controversies existing in affect theory – briefly reviewed below – indicate that this is a robust field with strong positions and high intellectual stakes. Indeed, affect theory challenges us to re-think big questions, from how we live our lives to the nature of subjectivity, and to reflect on our methods of inquiry, from how we integrate empirical findings into theoretical speculation to how we take into account the physicality of human experience (outside a scientific context), as well as the symbolic configurations of political life and sociality (without making them a fallback for everything else).

Finding affect The differentiation between affect and emotions has led to what some critics call the affectemotion gap, as a way of signalling the break with a tradition of research that sees emotions as enhancing rational thought. But while emotions as an object of study have seen their own shift away from the “soul” and into the “mind”, affect’s location in the body is a shift toward materiality and away from beliefs and intentions, toward pre-reflective physiology – twitches, tears, gasps, startles, moans, forming along with others an “affective table of elements” (Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 521), the scientism of affect in marked contrast to the rhetoricality of emotions. The connection between affect theory’s claims about perception, sensation and embodiment on the one hand and experimental observations made by neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists on the other hand is not a straightforward one. Leys has charged that affect theory tends to mis-read and mis-apply (potentially wilfully) scientific experimentation. While most affect theorists believe in a broader re-engagement with questions of embodiment and matter and assume that affect is biologically registered, they are not concerned with situating affect in the body in any directly observable and measurable way. Affect theory encourages us, rather than seek a definition of what affect is, to consider what affect does – in culture, politics and society. Although she uses the term “emotion”, 143

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Ahmed illustrates this approach, as her work examines how emotions circulate among bodies, “making” and “shaping” them in ways that pre-determine their role in a political system and network of power (Ahmed 2014). Emotionality, for her, is not a psychological dimension, but a symbolic assignment that defines and positions bodies in relationship to other bodies. Menstrual pain, to use her example, not only triggers a particular awareness of the body by channelling attention to sensations – “tingles, pricks and then cramps” (27) – but also qualifies the body in contrast to other bodies (as the body of a woman), within epistemic and cultural norms (that define menstruation). Even a deeply intimate and physiological experience, such as that of pain, is not individual and personal in its meaning and significance. Following Ahmed, we can think of affect as the force that creates “the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well as through orientations towards and away from others” (4). Focusing on how emotions are produced through circulation (rather than residing in an individual subject), Ahmed offers an account of “affective economies” and insists on a social dimension of analysis that explicitly challenges the assumptions of interiority and individuality commonly associated with emotion. The frequent use of the adjective “affective” rather than the noun “affect” is revealing: in order to avoid reifying and reducing affect to emotions, such as by focusing specifically on fear, anger or optimism, the adjective allows us to capture a process that is emotionally infused yet also irreducible to one or even a cluster of distinct emotions. What matters most then becomes the noun to which the adjective “affective” is adjoined: more often than not, the noun is “politics”. The rise of affect in theoretical investigations is comparable to that of memory as a collective and cultural phenomenon, as both push beyond the site of the individual and into the community, the polis, beyond the private and into the public. Berlant’s interest in the “historicity of collective affect” could possibly even be subsumed under or productively merged with some of the classic work on memory by Maurice Halbwachs. Massumi questions the binary one-many or individual-collective, in favour of the “in-between”. Where Ahmed sees emotional contagion, Massumi insists on the circulation of affect. Likewise, Berlant subscribes to the idea of an “affective commons”, where the “unstated residue of collective life” sediments (Berlant and Greenwald 2012: 77). We see a different epistemic model in David Miall’s work, which also uses scientific findings focusing specifically on the mechanism of mirror neurons (Miall 2011). Miall is interested in empathy – arguably an emotion rather than affect – but his conceptual premises and method are consistent with some of the affect scholarship, insofar as he is concerned with an emotional flow from narrative to readers. When we read a story, Miall argues, we experience empathy toward the characters in a story via a process of cognitive simulation that operates at large in our everyday interactions and is what allows us to make assumptions about other minds. Miall offers an “enactive account involving the body” (296), but his approach does not require that we keep affective states at bay from intention or verbalization. His model of simulation emphasizes “the generalizing power of feeling” (294), but it is nonetheless different from contagion: an affective state, as he sees it, does not take over a subject; we can reflect on and ultimately distance ourselves from another’s affective state. Both simulation and contagion, as models that seek to make the circulation of affect more concrete, can be problematic: one for being too focused on similarity rather than difference and the other for suggesting a certain powerlessness and lack of agency. These are not unintended consequences but rather philosophical commitments. For Massumi, especially, it is important to situate affect outside the realm of agency in order to point out its 144

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economic-political value and potential for subliminal manipulation. From commercials that exploit hunger to political slogans that incite anger and violence, the materializations of affect create networks of power that control and take over lives. The equation of affect with “atmosphere” harkens back to Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling”, which, as Berlant explains, places the historical present in the affective presence of an atmosphere that is sensed rather than known and enacted, a space of affective residue that constitutes what is shared among strangers. It indicates a collective experience that mostly goes without saying of something about belonging to a world. (Berlant 2015: 194) Ann Cvetkovich’s “archive of feelings” approach seeks to create a repertoire of affect encoded in texts as well as in the production and practice of texts, and furthermore places “moments of extreme trauma alongside moments of everyday distress” (Cvetkovich 2003: 7). Affect not only circulates but also accumulates over time, yet it emerges less through explicit naming of states (I am disgusted or I feel sad) as it does through enactment and performance. Affect does not reside “in” anything, texts or subjects, but represents effects of naming practices that often function as “attributions of causality” (Ahmed 2014: 13). It is indicative of the different ontological assumptions behind affect theory that the verbs used to attribute affect suggest instability and precariousness – such as “stick and slide”, to mention Ahmed’s terms – rather than ownership and choice, as verbs like “display” or “manifest” would do.

Affect in the age of neuroscience From Aristotle’s concept of catharsis as a fundamental feature of poetic expression, or his views on emotions as forming a category of proof (pathos), to Descartes’s view of the passions as enhancing cognition, David Hume’s perspective on moral sentiment, Spinoza’s concept of conatus and its later influence on Deleuze and Guattari, one can trace an intellectual history of affect that has increasingly recognized the importance of an emotional dimension of the human experience, gradually bringing them closer in epistemic significance to (and eventually superseding) belief, rationality and cognition. Martha Nussbaum’s phrasing, “the intelligence of emotions”, is perhaps best known across disciplines and even to a more general public and the message it carries is that emotions are a form of “intentional awareness”, with “a rich cognitive structure” (Nussbaum 1996: 303, 309). If we approach affect from a genealogical perspective, apud Michel Foucault, as not just a continuous lineage but as a problematic with many fault lines, divergences and convergences, the picture that emerges shows, paradoxically, on the one hand a return to the body, which is in a way connected to the individual, and on the other hand a growing interest in the social rather than the personal. The turn to materiality and the body marked by affect theory has been possible against the backdrop of technologies that make the body into a visible domain, observable and measurable. While some affect theorists, such as Rei Terada (2003), have been in dialogue with psychoanalysis rather than neuroscience, some of the key tenets of affect theory result from arguments that build upon, even when deviating from, experimental findings. In his well-known reading of the so-called “snowman story” experiment designed by a team of German psychologists, Massumi (2002) argues for the “primacy of the affective” by 145

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emphasizing the gap between content and effect in our response to stories. The snowman story, about a man who had built a snowman that started to melt and then moved and left the snowman to the cool of the mountains where it stopped melting, when presented to nine-year-old children, elicited slightly different responses based on whether it was told strictly visually, verbally but strictly factually, or with verbal commentary noting the emotional tenor of an event (such as, it was sad that the man had to leave the snowman). The experiment revealed that while children remembered worst the “factual” version, they also found it least pleasant, not only preferring and recalling the emotional version, but also seeing it as most pleasant. The measurement of the physiological responses of the children revealed a more surprising finding: the children’s heartbeat increased when hearing the “factual” version, but that reaction was short-lived (as indicated by galvanic skin response). The emotional version had a more long-lasting impact, while also being perceived as pleasant despite the fact that the emotion in question, sadness, is (for Massumi at least) not a pleasant emotion. Massumi draws a number of important conclusions from his analysis of this experiment: (1) that there is a difference between the content of an image, which determines its quality through “its indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective context” and the intensity of an image, or the “strength or duration of the image’s effect” (Massumi 2002: 247) and (2) that intensity is an emotional state of “suspense, potentially of disruption” (276), “an echo of irreducible excess, of gratuitous amplification […] bringing a tinge of the unexpected […] the unmotivated, to lines of action and reaction” (277). Affect, in Massumi’s vocabulary, is equivalent to intensity in the sense I presented above, but also in a more intuitive sense of the term, as amplification and elevation, especially as affect circulates and picks up different emotional layers that activate more and more senses in a synesthetic effect. Consider, for example, the affective dynamic associated with immigration and the bundle of feelings, emotions and sensations it continuously connects: fear, hate, pity, contempt, anger, sadness and repulsion. This view complicates, for example, an understanding of attitudes toward immigrants as falling into a pro-or-against logic, but it also questions the heuristic value of frameworks such as “politics of fear”, which tend to smoothen over contradictions and ambivalences. As White notes, the role of affect is that of “an intensity that variously energizes, contradicts, deconstructs and overwhelms the narratives through which we live” (White 2017a: 178). Stewart’s understanding of “ordinary emotions” is consistent with this view, and as she points out, “they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas and social worldings of all kinds. Their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible” (Stewart 2007: 3). Affect stretches, expands or shrinks the socio-political space, by orienting us toward one another in what Ahmed aptly calls an “affective politics”. Massumi’s notion of intensity is not limited to a hold texts and images might have on their audience, but tries to capture also contradictoriness and obfuscation as part of that hold: the children’s pleasure in the snowman experiment is disconnected from, if not opposed to anything that would index pleasure in a conventional way. Leys has criticized Massumi’s use of scientific experiments, claiming that he mistakenly idealizes “the mind by defining it as a purely disembodied consciousness” (Leys 2011: 456). At the same time, implicit in Massumi’s view is the potential for a quite radical autonomy of minds, consistent with the autonomy of affect. His reading of the snowman experiment, then, is substantively different from views informed by the traditional Aristotelian concept of catharsis, as emotional identification with another’s feelings on the basis of a direct correspondence model: whatever the valence of your affective state is, I too, through catharsis, will experience that valence. The conceptual premise at the basis of catharsis is that emotions can reach and flow 146

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through us, via crafted expression, from another assumed to be experiencing those emotions as part of their situated lives. Hence, as Paul Ricoeur states, catharsis “addresses itself directly to the passions, not only in provoking them but in purifying them as well” (Ricoeur 1995: 242), which constitutes for him the ethical foundation of deliberation. The ability to feel with and for another is a precursor for ethics, but only insofar as it provides understanding to inform reasoned choice rather than a complete identification with another subject. Psychologists have coined the term “affective forecasting” to describe the ability to form an accurate representation of future events and have argued that when an inaccurate representation is formed, the reason could be focalism: the tendency to make an affective forecast that isolates an event and fails to anticipate how – or even that – its emotional valence will be influenced by other experiences that precede it or accompany it and that might dominate our thoughts and feelings (Wilson and Gilbert 2003: 15). By this account, events do not have an affective autonomy but rather an affective history. This view is in contrast to understanding affect as emanating from an event or situation, such as sadness from the event of someone’s death, or happiness from winning the lottery, etc. Reflecting on the public discourse surrounding Osama Bin Laden’s capture and killing, Berlant asks what affective status can we assign to this event. Her response is that “being in discussion about how and whether to ‘care’” “about an event manifests already caring about something else, the sense, the affectivity of being-in-common” (Berlant and Greenwald 2012: 77). Consistent with Massumi’s interest in the role of affect in creating a politics of fear, Berlant’s claims challenge what I would call the Aristotelian view that has been enduring throughout Western philosophy: that beliefs elicit or enlist affect in teleological fashion. Osama Bin Laden’s death is an occurrence that emerges into eventhood before it even actually takes place, throughout affective routes that position us over time, fearfully, angrily and hatefully toward other events and circumstances that can all co-exist, overlap and even contradict each other as they take shape into a revenge, a punishment, a defence or a war casualty. Affect seeps through these shapes and creates a simultaneity of effects rather than a string of moments, each with its distinct emotional coloratura. Affect theory, thus defined, is averse to questions of discrete meaning and intention. Leys’s observation that affect theorists and the neuroscientists share a commitment to anti-intentionalism (Leys 2011: 443) comes as an indictment of both the method – use of experimental findings – and of the ontological premises of affect theory. Leys takes issue especially with the framing of affective processes as independent of intention and meaning, but Altieri has replied that her notion of intentionality (and thus her understanding of what would count as anti-intentionalism) is too narrow (Altieri 2012: 881). Leys’s criticism of affect theory is consistent with the objections she also raised against trauma studies, especially her concern with the predominance of anti-cognitive models that explain traumatic memory in neurobiological terms. However, by other accounts, the focus on affect depicts trauma in realist terms as made of “real-time somatic experience(s)” and hence no longer subject to an inquiry focused on representation (Bennet 2005: 23). Both affect theory and trauma studies have raised questions about the limits of symbolic representation, the privileging of language as a mode of signification and the usefulness of seeking to understand experience by scrutinizing its meaning. It is precisely the somatic dimension that trauma studies pursue, as a methodological consequence to the their main conceptual assumptions. Vacillating from mimetic models of representation, which claim that trauma repeats the event that created it, to anti-mimetic models, which posit that trauma blocks cognitive access to the triggering event, trauma studies consistently assume that the traumatic experience triggers an interruption of consciousness. The ontological assumption that trauma 147

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has an unspeakable aspect requires an analytic shift from representing the events that triggered it to understanding the embodied response to events, through a complex configuration of emotional and sensorial factors. Trauma involves senses – smells, sounds and taste – rather than conscious reflection – words or thoughts. The meaning of trauma, insofar as such a term can still apply, resides in an affective halo that surrounds the traumatic event, keeping it alive and thus subject to repetition. Affect theory can help us parse the various affective dimensions of traumatic re-enactment, covering a complex emotional landscape that incorporates more than one affective dimension – fear, shame, guilt, anger, revulsion and others. The exact nature of such affective dimensions, as well as a discovery procedure that reveals them, is part of what affect theory seeks to establish. Silvan Tomkins’s (2003) stipulation that there are six basic emotions situated subcortically in the brain, which becomes axiomatic for Sedgwick, has also been contested empirically, but it resonates with Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis and the latter’s claim that our core consciousness operates based on emotional programs that are connected to hard-wired responses and behavioural processes (Damasio 1999). When we grimace, for example, we might be expressing bodily and involuntarily a sensation – repulsion, disgust – that obtains through an evaluation that need not reach the level of reflection and articulated discourse. For some affect scholars, the analytic goal is to capture the circulation of affect in this pre-reflexive, pre-linguistic, unstructured stage. For other theorists, though, affect can also be understood as legible, purposeful and self-aware. Massumi himself, in drawing upon Spinoza, agrees that one can have “an idea of the idea of affection”, producing what he calls an “infolding” (Massumi 2002: 281). An “affect burst” (such as involuntary grimace) can become an “affect emblem” functioning as a strategic display “with the aim of bestowing greater authenticity” in how one relates to others (Sander and Scherer 2009: 11). The focus on embodied experience in affect theory brings along some interesting opportunities for re-thinking subjectivity. Affect theory is not an intellectual site for identity politics, but the attention it has given to gender and queer identities has produced theoretical insights that challenge conceptions of subjectivity focused primarily on consciousness, agency and power. Through its indebtedness to Deleuze and Guattari, affect theory stresses the primacy and priority of the body over “the knowledge that we have of it” (Deleuze 1988: 18–19), but also the relational nature of the subject against its autonomy. Some theorists go as far as to describe affect theory as an “escape from subjectivity” (Egginton 2012: 30) and as such, consistent with Jacques Rancière’s substitution of subjectivity with subjectivization as a process involving a constant engaging with the positions systems and institutions force us in and the positions we desire. Affect theory pushes against the subject-object distinction, but it cannot circumvent “the constitutive limitations of structuring a subject’s experience and knowledge of itself and others” (Egginton 2012: 30). Egginton’s notion of a “horizon of opacity” (33) between one person and another person – or a body and another body – lets us realize that no matter how much we might agree that we are all, taken as individuals or as communities, shaped and re-shaped by affective economies and an affective politics we inhabit, each of us remains a separate entity from another. Even as you and I get caught in the affective circulation of fear of foreigners, or anger at the rise of unemployment, I still cannot feel exactly what you are feeling, though perhaps I can imagine it; and I can never know exactly what you are thinking, though perhaps I can seek such knowledge, and with it, an understanding of your perspective. Rather than discard it conceptually, then, we need to re-think subjectivity in

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more attunement to affect, following the work of Kathleen Stewart, for example, and her observation that affect adds an affirmative critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen. It waits to see as things unfold in a moment, notes points of contact, recognizes the weight or smell of an atmosphere, or traces the spread of intensities across subjects, objects, institutions, laws, materialities, and species. (Stewart 2017: 194–5) Such a concession also suggests that we might worry less about a gap between the order of signification and an affective order, and focus our attention more toward the hermeneutic nature of affect as constantly inviting interpretation broadly conceived – of one’s experience, of other minds, of the world around us. Rather than situate affect on the surface of social encounters and exchanges, we would need to consider the possibility that affect is embedded in broader structures of intelligibility forming around intersubjectivity. Nonetheless, the question remains: if affect does not reside inside the subject, or in a text (writ large as cultural formation rather than particular literary discourse), as affect theorists widely agree, what is the analytic purchase of affect? What does it mean to study affect in terms of our operational abilities? To answer this question, we need neither return to nor amend Monroe Beardsley and William K. Wimsatt’s “affective fallacy” (Beardsley and Wimsatt 1946). We do not have to choose between assuming an affective intentionality or purposefulness in order to reconstruct it, as some narrative scholars might encourage us to do (Hogan 2011). We also do not have to assume there is no effect in affect: we can think of intentionality, along with David Herman, as ascription of reasons for actions, always amenable to revision and re-interpretation (Herman 2013). For Eugenie Brinkema, to focus on affect is to return to form, attending to tropes and construction without falling prey to the assumption that they form an invariable structure, transferrable across genres or across traditions (Brinkema 2014). We can also continue to pivot from making sense of broad affective configurations such as “sentimentalist reparative fantasies” (Berlant and Greenwald 2012: 86) to adding what Sianne Ngai (2004) has called non-cathartic “ugly feelings” (envy, irritation, paranoia) to an analytic repertoire focused still mostly on large-scale, socially and politically galvanizing affective energies found in fear, anger or hate. If structures of feeling, as Williams defined them, operate “at the edge of semantic availability” (Williams 1977: 134), affect can emerge at the juncture between persistent legible cultural practices and interruptions marked by the unexpected and unpredictable, embodied and not always intentional responses.

The legacy of affect The affect turn proposes some important modifications to key theoretical assumptions across the humanities and social sciences, including: (1) Affect theory has consistently argued that what binds us is not our rational deliberations, explicitly shared values, or even dialogue and discourse, but rather much more diffuse, emotionally charged, ties. (2) Affect charges us to find a new “zone for analysis” (Stewart 2007) in literary and cultural study, in ways that need to be explored fully for those of us who wish to take the affect turn seriously rather than merely adjust slightly our terminology while simply continuing to study emotions in the more traditional sense. Given my space 149

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constraints, I can only mention two possible ways in which the affect turn might require us to re-think key analytic assumptions. One: we should revisit how we approach emplotment, by both no longer focusing on the idea of a sequence of events (which implies that events are partially pre-defined, like falling in love, breaking up, etc.) and examining instead the very emergence of an event from a variety of affective responses and investments across characters and situations. Patrick Colm Hogan’s contribution to an affective narratology, in this regard, is important, as it shows how experience gets encoded through a temporal organization and by “reference to emotional response” (Hogan 2011: 66). Second, there are also potential implications for trauma studies, regarding a reorientation away from “exceptional shock” to “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant 2011: 10). Affect theory’s attention to dynamic phenomena such as the circulation and transmission of affect rather than the individual experience makes it into an appropriate analytic framework for trauma studies. Trauma simultaneously blocks and provokes memory, demanding remembrance while also hoping for forgetting as a form of healing. This contradictory dynamic creates a psychological charge that can be explained in the terms of affect theory, especially through recourse to the concept of circulation. While trauma studies have always been interested in the experience of witnessing, as conceptualized in the work of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992), affect theory emphasizes the role played by the circulation of affect in spreading trauma beyond an individual subject. Reviewing several studies that examine the circulation of negative affect from victims to their social networks – including family members and medical professionals in whose care the victims find themselves – Theresa Brennan concludes: “trauma, very directly, is linked to the transmission of affect” (Brennan 2004: 47). Re-cast in the terms of affect theory, witnessing trauma becomes a form of being drawn into it and thus becoming morally responsible. (3) Attention to the circulation of affect encourages us to attend to ambiguity and contradiction, in a way that is reminiscent of the intellectual sensibility of deconstruction, as Terada (2003) shows, but nonetheless still within a context of critique, often sharp critique. It is not easy to balance an exploration of ambiguity and contradiction with political concern and not fall prey either to sterile abstraction or pontification. The masters of affect theory are not only sophisticated thinkers but also remarkable writers.

Bibliography Ahmed, S. (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. (2003) The Particulars of Rapture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Altieri, C. (2012) “Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys”, Critical Inquiry 38 (3): 878–81. Beardsley, M. C. and Wimsatt, W. K. (1946) “The Intentional Fallacy”, The Sewanee Review 54(3): 468–88. Bennet, J. (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke University Press. ———. (2015) “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin”, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 28(3): 191–213. Berlant, L. and Greenwald, J. (2012) “Affect in the End Times: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant”, Qui Parle 20(2): 71–89. Brennan, T. (2004) The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Affect Brinkema, E. (2014) The Forms of the Affects, Durham: Duke University Press. Cvetkovich, A. (2003) An Archive of Feelings. Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clough, P. T. and Halley, J. (2007) The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Connolly, W. E. (2002) Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, Expanded edition, Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (2011) “The Complexity of Intention”, Critical Inquiry 37(4): 791–98. Damasio, A. (1999) The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotions in the Making of Consciousness, New York: Harcourt Brace. Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza. Practical Philosophy, San Francisco, CA: City Lights. Egginton, W. (2012) “Affective Disorder”, Diacritics 40(4): 24–43. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, London and New York: Routledge. Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. (eds) (2010) The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Herman, D. (2013) Storytelling and the Sciences of the Mind, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hogan, P. C. (2011) Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories, Lincoln: Nebraska University Press. James, W. (1890) The Principles of Psychology, New York: Dover Publications. Krause, S. (2008) Civil Passions: Moral Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leys, R. (2011) “The Turn to Affect: A Critique”, Critical Inquiry 37(3): 434–72. Leys, R. and Goldman, M. (2010) “Navigating the Genealogies of Trauma, Guilt, and Affect: An Interview with Ruth Leys”, University of Toronto Quarterly 79(2): 656–70. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miall, D. (2011) “Enacting the Other: Towards an Aesthetic of Feeling”, in E. Schellekins and P. Goldie (eds) The Aesthetic Mind. Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ngai, S. (2004) Ugly Feelings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (1996) “Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion”, in A. Oksenberg Rorty (ed.) Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 303–23. Ricoeur, P. (1995) Oneself as Another, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Sander, D. and Scherer, K. R. (2009) The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. and Frank, A. (1995) “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins”, Critical Inquiry 21(2): 496–522. Stewart, K. (2007) Ordinary Intentions, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. (2017) “In The World That Affect Proposed”, Cultural Anthropology 32(2): 192–98. Terada, R. (2003) Feeling in Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Titchener, E. (2010 [1910])) A Textbook of Psychology, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. Tomkins, S. (2003) Shame and Her Sisters, E. Kossofsky Sedgwick (ed.), Durham: Duke University Press. White, D. (2017a) “Affect: An Introduction”, Cultural Anthropology 32(2): 175–80. ———. (ed.) (2017b) “Special Issue: Affect”, Cultural Anthropology 32(2). Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, T. D. and Gilbert, D. T. (2003) “Affective Forecasting”, Advances in Experimental and Social Psychology 35: 345–411. Wundt, W. (1998 [1897]) Outlines of Psychology, Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press.

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14 NARRATIVE Jakob Lothe

The relationship between trauma and narrative is close but problematic. On the one hand, a person who experiences an event in his or her life as traumatic, and who feels a need to tell others about the experience, may choose, and be able, to do so. On the other hand, a different person who experiences the same event may not feel the same need, or be able, to talk or write about it. While our memory of a traumatic event may prompt narration, it may also thwart narration. Moreover, although a person who tries to tell about a traumatic event may find the narrative activity helpful, narration inevitably takes him or her back to the event, thus perhaps making the person remember what he or she wants to forget. This chapter will discuss three narratives that attempt to come to terms with the Holocaust as an example of human agency that resulted in the murder of millions of innocent victims. There are two main reasons why I want to highlight the Holocaust. First, it is a test case for the way in which different kinds of narratives are linked to, present and represent a particularly gruesome, in one sense unspeakable, series of events in recent European history. Second, there is a heuristic justification as I take a particular interest in the ways in which different ways of presenting and remembering the Holocaust illustrate narrative’s ethical dimension. Of the narratives I propose to discuss, one is filmic and two are verbal (written) accounts; moreover, while two of the narratives are non-fictional and one is fictional, they are told (and shown) by both women and men. The discussion will identify and discuss elements of trauma that necessitate, problematize and characterize narration in all three texts. My understanding of narrative is linked to, and aided by, helpful definitions given by Mieke Bal, Ernst van Alphen and Hannah Arendt. For Bal, storytelling is “the presentation in whatever medium of a focalized series of events” (Bal 2018: 37). She identifies two properties of storytelling that make its ethical aspects more specific: “It concerns others, and it is always, at least in part, fictional” (37). All constituent elements of Bal’s definition prove relevant to the following discussion. Emphasizing narrative’s temporal dimension, van Alphen finds that “narrative can be seen as an existential response to the world and to the experience of that world” (van Alphen 2018: 68). Narrative, he observes, has functioned as “the medium of identity” (68). Referring to Paul Ricoeur, van Alphen calls this notion of identity “narrative identity” (68).

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Although, as van Alphen notes, ongoing historical and cultural changes challenge the notion of narrative identity, this challenge does not in itself make the notion less significant – either generally or with a view to the relationship between narrative and trauma. Ricoeur’s understanding of identity becomes more, not less, pertinent when seen in the light of the challenge that historical changes pose to narrative identity. Similarly, there is a sense in which the challenge makes Arendt’s interlinking of human identity and narrative particularly relevant to a Holocaust survivor’s painful experience. Developing an argument based on premises and observations quite different from Ricoeur’s, Arendt claims that “Who somebody is or was we can only know by knowing the story of which he himself is the hero – his biography, in other words” (Arendt 1998: 186). I agree with Hanna Meretoja that Arendt’s understanding of narrative identity tends towards, or aims for, a non-subsumptive, dialogic understanding of narrative communication and exploration that does justice to the other’s individuality instead of subsuming it under a general explanatory grid. I also concur with Meretoja that this kind of understanding is closely linked to narrative’s ethical dimension (Meretoja 2018b: 107). Both of these notions are illustrated and supported by the narratives considered in this chapter. Implicit in these comments on narrative and identity is a sense that memory, including traumatic memory, is closely linked to both. It appears impossible to come to terms with the concepts of narrative and identity without activating, implicitly or explicitly, aspects of memory. If I cannot conceive of narrative divorced from memory, neither can I think of my own identity without remembering something of myself before the point or stage of my life where I am now. This point also applies to a survivor of the Holocaust. If the concept of memory, in common with that of identity, is complicated because of the complexity of the mental processes to which it refers, it becomes even more difficult to understand when it describes, or aims to describe, a Holocaust survivor’s attempt to remember a succession of traumatic experiences. I would argue, though, that seen from the perspective of narrative – which, as Jens Brockmeier convincingly argues, is associated with the process of remembering (Brockmeier 2015) – memory is also a resource. Even though there is something frustratingly elusive about memory, and even though the concept resists any precise definition, aspects of memory prove indispensable conceptual tools as we attempt to improve our understanding of narrative and identity. Moreover, I agree with Ricoeur that we should not only consider memory “on the basis of its deficiencies” but also “approach the description of mnemonic phenomena from the standpoint of the capacities”. As he notes, “to put it bluntly, we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place, has occurred, has happened before we declare that we remember it” (Ricoeur 2006: 21). These observations on narrative, memory and identity underlie my understanding of narrative and trauma, which I provisionally define as the lasting effect(s) of a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. This working definition includes aspects of trauma as understood in disaster psychiatry (Ursano et al. 2017 [2007]: 6–7). Many Holocaust survivors were injured both physically and mentally; their wound is often, as the original Greek meaning of “wound” indicates, also physical. It does not follow that traumatic experience is inaccessible – the following narratives do not indicate that there is a stable or unchanging break between word and world, or between word (or narrative) and wound (Pederson 2018: 100). What the narratives to be considered do suggest, though, is that while narrative – including the decision to narrate, the attempt to narrate and constituent elements of narration – can enable a Holocaust survivor to come to terms with aspects of his or her traumatic experience, other aspects of that experience, 153

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including the way it is remembered, resist narrativization. One reason for this kind of resistance – in spite of the fact that, as Brockmeier has noted, even latent memories include narrative elements – is that the attempt to narrate blends into an act of remembering that activates, or intensifies, painful memories of the traumatic experience (Brockmeier 2015: 119). For a Holocaust survivor, this experience includes being deported to the concentration camp, living (or existing) in the camp, and escaping from the camp – where, for many survivors, family members were murdered. Attempting to use words to tell about, and thus remember, a wound he or she has experienced in the world, a Holocaust survivor may thus be inclined to consider narrative both as resource and as a challenge involving an element of risk. Importantly, both the possibility of gain and the potential risk of narration change over time. Before turning to my first text, I specify my understanding of narrative by stressing that narrative is a language of, and a tool for, “existential meaning-making” (Brockmeier 2015: 51). This narrative process of meaning-making includes a communicative aspect – the communication of a message (however vague or confusing) from a sender (author or film director) to a receiver (reader or viewer) and, importantly, the receiver’s response to and interpretation of that message. Moreover, a narrative is told or shown by one or more narrators and characters from a given perspective or combination of perspectives. And, as it is temporally situated, a narrative “has at its core a dimension of distance” (Freeman 2010: 175). In all the texts that revolve around traumatic experiences discussed in this chapter, combinations of narrative perspective and distance engender and shape a range of ethical questions and effects. Moreover, the Holocaust survivor’s decision to narrate – his or her attempt to transform a traumatic experience into a narrative – is also one possessed of an ethical dimension. Seen thus, this discussion of narrative and trauma is linked to, and aims to contribute to, narrative ethics, which, as James Phelan puts it, is “specifically concerned with the intersection between various formal aspects of narrative and moral values” (Phelan 2014).

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah A nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust, French film director Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) has become a key reference point in a thematic strand of film studies increasingly concerned with ethical issues (Grønstad 2016). The film is a “mixed generic performance” (LaCapra 1997: 134) in which Lanzmann not only rejects the use of archival film footage but also refuses an explanatory (and thus unavoidably didactic) voiceover commentary. Instead he makes himself (as interviewer and listener) a major presence in the film. His interviewees are mainly Holocaust survivors, partly bystanders (notably Poles who lived close to the concentration camps) and Holocaust scholars (especially Raul Hilberg). There are also interviews with a few perpetrators, that is, people who contributed to the crime of the Holocaust. Provocatively stating that the film “is not a documentary”, Lanzmann (1991: 96) says he wanted to transform the witness into an actor, albeit of the witness’s own life and story, thus enabling him (as a director) to make a film that is not about remembering but about reliving. This narrative strategy is strikingly apparent in the film’s opening, which I choose to comment on here. As the film begins, Lanzmann, making use of written text on the screen, informs the viewer that During the night of January 18, 1945, two days before Soviet troops arrived, the Nazis killed all the remaining Jews in the “work details” with a bullet in the head. Simon Srebnik was among those executed. But the bullet missed his vital brain centres. 154

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This information, which the viewer has just read, simultaneously introduces and serves as a reference point for the first filmic images: I see a man sitting in a small river boat, singing a song in a language I cannot understand. When Lanzmann interviews the man, I learn that his name is Simon Srebnik, and that he was one of the very few (probably fewer than ten) survivors of approximately 150,000 Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Chełmno extermination camp in Eastern Poland. Since Srebnik had a good voice, the Nazis forced him to sing while rowing the boat from which they used to throw ashes from the crematoria into the river Ner. Lanzmann thus begins Shoah by making Holocaust survivor Srebnik repeat an action he repeatedly performed for the Nazis as inmate of an extermination camp thirty years earlier. There is something uncanny, ghostlike, about this form of repetition. Srebnik does not, or cannot, talk much, but his singing is remarkably suggestive. In addition to its intrinsic value as a narrative fragment and an act of memory, it becomes an important leitmotif. In the filmic present, Srebnik is singing as a free man; when he sang the same song for the Nazi guards, he knew that his death was imminent. As a viewer I can see Srebnik in a small boat framed by a beautiful and peaceful landscape, but I cannot see the extermination camp that he miraculously survived. And yet in a way I can, for Srebnik’s song in the filmic present establishes a forceful link to the same song sung by him for the Nazis; moreover, that particular temporal connection is strengthened by the fact that, in spite of the beautiful landscape, we are in the same place. This kind of tension is an essential part not just of the beginning but of Shoah overall. Lanzmann creates a powerful narrative beginning in which constituent elements of film aesthetics challenge the viewer to ask ethical questions, including difficult questions about the connections between moral values and human action. One element of film form that contributes significantly to Shoah’s ethics is Lanzmann’s insistence on the present both as starting-point and as point of reference. The written text I have quoted from the film’s opening rolling title is preceded by this sentence: “The story begins in the present at Chelmno, on the Ner river, in Poland.” Observing that the construction of a plotted series of events is a key feature of both factual and fictional film, Jacques Rancière has found this beginning “provocative” (Rancière 1996: 158), and in a way it surely is. Is Lanzmann morally justified to make Srebnik repeat what the Nazis forced him to do? His act of singing must be painful for him as it brings back, and probably intensifies, a traumatic experience. Yet his singing may also be a way of dealing with that experience. There is something enigmatic about Srebnik, whose experience is described as if he died – he “was among those executed”. For me as a viewer, there is a strong sense in which our confrontation with his unique individuality reminds us that there were six million other individualities that were ended by the Holocaust. This kind of representation is constituted by the combination of his song (both the words, which I cannot understand, and the melody), the place and the way in which features of Srebnik’s face are accentuated by his singing. The aesthetic impact of the filmic representation is strengthened by, and in one sense predicated on, the extra-textual information about Srebnik that Lanzmann gives the viewer as written text on the screen. Linking Srebnik’s song to the narrative of Shoah, the information enhances the narrative dimension of the film’s opening scene while at the same time problematizing narrative progression. This effect, which contributes to Lanzmann’s exploration of trauma, is fortified by Srebnik’s appearances later in the film. Although, or because, he says very little, the camera repeatedly focusses on his face; thus, for me as a viewer, it is as though his song, the act of singing that constitutes the film’s beginning, continues. Thus 155

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there is a sense in which the opening song, which is already a repetition, is repeated over and over again. If the song is, or becomes, part of Srebnik’s narrative identity, it also problematizes that identity by demonstrating his memory of a repetitive event he might intensely want to forget. While it proves a great resource for Lanzmann as filmmaker, for Srebnik the act of singing must have been inordinately difficult – as I think, though I cannot be sure, I can glean from his facial expression. In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas highlights the importance of the human face, stressing the ethical challenge and responsibility represented by my encounter with the face of the other. I hasten to add that, for Levinas, the other’s face is not an object; rather, it is, or represents, an expression that affects me in a face-to-face encounter. Seen from Levinas’s phenomenological perspective, human beings, and characters who represent human beings in narrative fiction, are involved in projects directed towards others, and towards the world. This kind of relational project – which assumes the form of intentional orientation in the world, and which thus expresses a desire to achieve or accomplish something – is radically challenged in the face-to-face encounter (Levinas 1991: 194–219; cf. Davis 2018: 25). When, using filmic repetition, Lanzmann activates this radical challenge for me as a viewer, he invites me to reflect on the fact that the Nazis who forced Srebnik to sing must also have seen his face while listening to his singing – and yet they attempted to execute him. Demonstrating that there are different ways of responding to the challenge Levinas identifies, the viewer’s encounter with Srebnik accentuates the importance of a third temporal layer in Shoah: if Lanzmann makes Srebnik repeat, and thus in one sense relive, the traumatic experience of singing in the boat, my experience in 2020 of seeing, and reflecting on, the narrative presentation of Srebnik furthers my understanding of his trauma while simultaneously reminding me how much of that traumatic experience I cannot understand. The Holocaust was a massive historical event that stretched over three years. But no single narrative could hope to capture the enormity of this event. As Zdenka Fantlová puts it in her testimony in Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust (Lothe 2017 [2013]), “There were six million murdered. If they all survived, there would be six million different stories” (156–7). While in one sense this comment would seem true, in a different sense it is not. It is true that the narratives would have been different, but not all Holocaust survivors are able to transform their experience into a narrative. Whether this kind of inability or failure reduces their identity I am not sure, though it may problematize their narrative identity by making it more fragmented and less coherent. There is even a troubling sense in which it may problematize the experience: although experience extends beyond narrative, once (or if) remembered it tends to take on narrative shape. The enormous challenge of transforming a traumatic experience of this kind into a narrative (however fragmented and disconnected) is a warning against indiscriminate use of the concept of narrative identity. Yet although human identity is not dependent on narrative, narrative can make aspects of human identity clearer to the narrator – and to the listener or reader or viewer.

Edith Notowicz’s testimony in Time’s Witnesses In order to illustrate this point I want to briefly discuss a passage from the testimony of Edith Notowicz. Notowicz is one of ten Jewish women who relate their stories from the Holocaust in Time’s Witnesses. Before turning to the relevant passage I need to say a few 156

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words about the book, which was prompted by my wish to document the Holocaust as a multifaceted historical event. During the autumn and winter of 1942–43, 772 Norwegian Jews were deported from Norway to the Nazi concentration camps, most of them to Auschwitz. Of these, 34 survived. These 34 survivors were all men. Of the Jews deported from Norway, no children and no women survived Auschwitz. For that reason, there are no witnesses for these two groups of Norwegian Jews. The approximately 300 women and children who were deported to Auschwitz were murdered. Here there is a narrative void – a silence. However, four Jewish women who survived the Holocaust and who settled in Norway after the war were willing to meet me and tell me their stories. One of them was Edith Notowicz, who was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944. That Notowicz had not published her story prior to our meeting in 2013 is unsurprising given the content, and the implications, of the following quotation from her narrative: her Holocaust experience was, and still is, traumatic. Partly for that reason, I had to ask her a few questions in order to invite her to talk – even though, born after the war and with no camp experience, I could not be sure what questions it was appropriate to ask. The following passage is part of Notowicz’s response to the question: “Can you tell me how you experienced your imprisonment?” The notorious Doctor Josef Mengele, also known as the “Angel of Death”, operated in Auschwitz. I soon made his acquaintance. Mengele used children in his medical experiments. He had a special predilection for twins, but I can’t go into details here. It is too horrible for me. He was also interested in finding new methods of sterilization and thereby preventing the Jewish race from procreating. In the camp he had more than enough test subjects, and I was one of those who were used in Mengele’s sterilization experiments on Jewish girls. The pain is still with me, and in the dead of night it sometimes is as if I am back in the experimentation room in the camp. (Notowicz 2017 [2013]: 96) If we did not know that Notowicz was one of the Jewish girls used in Mengele’s sterilization experiments in Auschwitz, then this passage would be a glaring example of abuse of storytelling. In a way this part of her narrative is beyond belief, and one indication of the force of this possibility, the possibility of fictional intrusion into a first-person narrative that claims to be a testimony, is that Edith Notowicz asks herself that very question in the next paragraph: Is it true or not? What was the driving force behind the Nazis’ intense attempt to exterminate other people? Is it possible that humans can be like this? Often I cannot believe it. But I have been there, so I know it happened. (Notowicz 2017: 96) Although there is a sense in which “I cannot believe it” either, I choose to do so. For me, the trustworthiness of Notowicz’s story is strengthened by her own disbelief and by the questions she asks. Moreover, the reliability of her narrative is paradoxically strengthened by a narrative ellipsis. Mengele “had a special predilection for twins, but I can’t go into details here. It is too horrible for me.” This ellipsis approximates to a paralipsis – a textual lacuna that takes on a particular significance precisely because something is omitted. Notowicz indicates that she knows “details” of Mengele’s experiments with twins that that she cannot, 157

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and does not want to, narrate. As a listener and reader, I respect her decision not to elaborate. I would even argue that the choice of excluding these details from her story increases her authority as a witness who recounts. The omitted parts of her memories of Mengele are reserved for, or cannot be excluded from, her thoughts and dreams “in the dead of night”. That these memories are deeply traumatic does not, however, render Notowicz’s account of Mengele’s experiments on Jewish women and children in Auschwitz less credible, or less important.

W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz I now turn to a fictional rendering of a traumatic Holocaust experience. For W. G. Sebald, the German-British author who was born in Bavaria in 1944, emigrated to the UK in the 1960s and died in a traffic accident outside Norwich in 2001, the Holocaust is a phantom that infiltrates his writings. Apparently irrepressible, traces of this multifaceted historical event are scattered across his work. In Austerlitz (2002), Sebald’s last completed narrative and a major novel of the early twenty-first century, the Holocaust becomes an empty centre, a void towards which the narration hesitantly yet inevitably gravitates. The Holocaust is even inscribed in the novel’s title: it is not coincidental that the first three and last three letters of Austerlitz and Auschwitz are identical. This link is strengthened by the main character’s name, which is identical with the novel’s title. It is also furthered by Sebald’s narrative strategy of presenting the narrative as a prolonged negotiation between Austerlitz, a British historian of architecture who turns out to be the child of parents who apparently died in the Holocaust, and an anonymous listener or narratee, who also lives in England but turns out to be German. Austerlitz discovers his true origin only as an adult: a Czech Jew, he was saved by his mother, Agáta, who managed to secure a place for her son on a Kindertransport from Prague to England in the summer of 1939, just before the beginning of the Second World War. Realizing that “his own idea of himself was based […] on an autobiographical void, a narrative lacuna, he faces dramatic psychological and psychiatric consequences” (Brockmeier 2015: 291), prompting him to embark on a search for his parents even though, on a rational level, he knows that in all probability they were both murdered in Auschwitz. Austerlitz is a victim of the Holocaust because both his parents were murdered and because he finds it extremely difficult to localize the traumatic experience in time and place. Yet as the narrative situations in the novel show, this difficulty, which may prove insurmountable, motivates Austerlitz to narrate while at the same time motivating the German frame narrator to listen. Although Sebald’s narrative rhetoric includes elements of manipulation, and although narrative manipulation may involve an abuse of storytelling, I consider the narration of Austerlitz and his narratee who becomes a frame narrator – and of Sebald as the implied author representing both of them – to be ethical in the positive sense of the word. The values of narrative are not necessarily “good” values – or values I share and to which I subscribe. And yet, as far as this novel is concerned, there is a link between the values associated with Austerlitz, and increasingly with the frame narrator as an “empathetic listener” (Assmann 2018: 210), and Austerlitz as a storytelling project. There is even a sense in which the novel’s narrative’s ethics is an integral part of both narrators’ attempt to give aspects of traumatic experience narrative form. Strikingly, however, the character who most forcibly and unambiguously represents the moral values promoted by the narrative is absent from it. This character is Agáta, Austerlitz’s mother, who saves her son’s life. Agáta’s ethics is diametrically opposed to that of the Nazis. 158

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Although we should be wary of comparing directly narratives as different as Edith Notowicz’s testimony and Sebald’s novel, there is a sense in which Austerlitz’s and the frame narrators’ storytelling represent the ethics of Austerlitz’s parents, while Edith Notowicz’s storytelling represents the moral values of the 300 Norwegian Jewish women and children who could not bear testimony because they were murdered on arrival in Auschwitz. If Austerlitz is a fictional account of a traumatic experience, the complexity of that experience is enhanced by the way in which Sebald punctuates the verbal narrative by including a number of black-and-white photographs and illustrations. These uncaptioned illustrations are linked to, and thus in one sense purport to represent, places or elements of space in historical reality. While the photographs figure, as Samuel Pane has suggested, as a particular locus of trauma (Pane 2005: 39), that locus gradually becomes indistinguishable from that of the narrative discourse as a whole. This effect, which I consider as an effect of trauma as Sebald presents it, includes a still from a film – that is, an artificially frozen image from a medium that demands movement, and thus temporal progression, to operate. Searching for Agáta in Theresienstadt, Austerlitz manages to obtain a copy of a film made by the Nazis in the camp in 1944, “Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt”. Watching the film, he cannot see Agáta anywhere. But when he sees an artificially extended version he notices the face of a young woman. The visual image is accompanied by this passage: Around her neck, said Austerlitz, she is wearing a three-stringed and delicately draped necklace which scarcely stands out from her dark, high-necked dress, and there is, I think, a white flower in her hair. She looks, so I tell myself as I watch, just as I imagined the singer Agáta from my faint memories and the few other clues to her appearance that I now have, and I gaze again and again at that face, which seems to me both strange and familiar, said Austerlitz […] (Sebald 2002: 350–1) It turns out that the woman probably is not Agáta, since Vera cannot recognize her, and since the words “imagined” and “faint memories” suggest that Austerlitz is not sure either. In my reading of this passage, the narrative presentation of Agáta’s face becomes a fictional illustration of Levinas’s description of the face-to-face encounter. Even though the need to remember seems momentarily to triumph the process of forgetting, thus signalling, for Austerlitz, a possible defeat of time, there is a sense in which his failure to identify the woman as his mother makes the face in the image express an encounter with the other. While unidentifiable, this other – or more precisely, the way the other reveals itself in, and through, the facial image – is imbued with an ethical urgency that justifies Austerlitz’s search for his mother just at the moment it fails. Thus Austerlitz’s traumatic experience, which prevails throughout, is generalized in a way that affects not just the frame narrator but also the reader and (as I can see the image) the viewer. It is illustrative of the novel’s storytelling resources that a fictional character such as Austerlitz thinks he can recognize his mother in a non-fiction film made by the Nazis. Thus there is a sense in which the historical film is fictionalized, while at the same time linking Austerlitz to historical reality. Moreover, fictionalization is also very much part of the film itself: as a Nazi propaganda film, it presents a picture of Theresienstadt that is entirely false. It was made to show how well the Nazis were treating Jews, while in actual fact weeks after the film was made many of those pictured were murdered. Sebald’s incorporation of this film image into the fiction of Austerlitz testifies to a strong ethical concern which builds on, and combines, the ethics of Agáta, who is absent from the 159

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narrative, the ethics of her son Austerlitz, who is searching for her, and the ethics of the German narrator, who as an empathetic listener becomes Austerlitz’s friend and proves himself to be worthy of his trust by passing the narrative on to the reader. Sebald’s novel investigates not just the relations between history and fiction but also the relations between truth and falsity: the nonfiction film made by the Nazis has a historical existence but its purpose was not to fictionalize but to lie, while Sebald’s narrative is fictional but its purpose is to capture truths and ask ethical questions that the propaganda film either denies or neglects. Sebald’s fictional exploration of trauma – of Austerlitz’s traumatic experience, which also comes to colour the listener’s and frame narrator’s experience – becomes indistinguishable from, and contributes significantly to, the novel’s ethics. A feat of Sebald’s imagination, Austerlitz gives narrative form to painful memories, thus endowing “the vicissitudes of individual lives with collective meaning” (Suleiman 2006: 10).

Conclusion I make three concluding comments based on, and proceeding from, this discussion. First, in different ways all three narratives – Lanzmann’s filmic presentation of Srebnik’s Chełmno experience, Notowicz’s testimony from Auschwitz and Sebald’s fictional rendering of Austerlitz’s search for his mother in Theresienstadt – support Meretoja’s point that “the interplay between storytelling and silence is woven into their fabric so intimately that one does not exist without the other” (Meretoja 2018a: 305). While valid as a general observation about narrative, this insight is particularly pertinent, and critically helpful, with regard to narrative and trauma. Second, the discussion has suggested that narrative – or perhaps more precisely, attempts to narrate, whether orally or visually or by writing – are an asset and a resource, possibly even an integral aspect of a human life – and that, understood thus, narrative is a resource also with a view to the uphill task of coming to terms with, and living with, a traumatic memory. Implied in this concluding point is the accompanying one that, partly because narrative means so much to us, storytelling can be not only ethically dubious but dangerous, creating myths and constructing lies that are politically or ideologically motivated. An illustrative example is the Nazi propaganda film briefly considered above. Finally, the narratives by Lanzmann, Notowicz and Sebald suggest that although there is a link between narrative and traumatic experience, elements of trauma can complicate attempts to give them narrative shape. For example, not all aspects of Notowicz’s Auschwitz experience can, or should, be narrated. This said, “the dialogicality of narrative and subjectivity” (Meretoja 2018a: 303) in the three narratives considered in this chapter suggests that experience, including traumatic experience, is not stable or constant but changing over time. In combination with memory, and as an integral aspect of memory, experience can thus enable Srebnik to repeat in 1985 the song the Nazis forced him to sing on the river Ner in 1944, it can make it possible for Notowicz to tell, in Trondheim in 2013, about her meeting with Mengele in Auschwitz in 1944, and, in the realm of narrative fiction, it makes the fictional character Austerlitz embark – as an adult, many years after his mother saved his life – on a search for his parents although, and because, he knows that they were both victims of the Holocaust.

Bibliography Alphen, E. van (2018) “The Decline of Narrative and the Rise of the Archive”, in H. Meretoja and C. Davis (eds) Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, London: Routledge, 68–83. Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

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Narrative Assmann, A. (2018) “The Empathetic Listener and the Ethics of Storytelling”, in H. Meretoja and C. Davis (eds) Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, London: Routledge, 203–18. Bal, M. (2018) “Is There an Ethics to Story-Telling?” in H. Meretoja and C. Davis (eds) Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, London: Routledge, 37–54. Brockmeier, J. (2015) Beyond the Archive: Narrative, Memory, and the Autobiographical Process, New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, C. (2018) “Truth, Ethics, Fiction: Responding to Plato’s Challenge”, in H. Meretoja and C. Davis (eds) Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, London: Routledge, 23–36. Fantlová, Z. (2017 [2013]) “Zdenka Fantlová”, in J. Lothe (ed.) Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust, trans. A. M. Hagen, Edinburgh: Fledgling Press, 132–57. Freeman, M. (2010) Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward, New York: Oxford University Press. Grønstad, A. (2016) Film and the Ethical Imagination, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. LaCapra, D. (1997) “Lanzmann’s Shoah: ‘Here There Is No Why’”, Critical Inquiry 23: 231–69. Lanzmann, C. (1991) “Seminar with Claude Lanzmann, 11 April 1990”, Yale French Studies 79: 96. Levinas, E. (1991) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Lothe, J. (ed.) (2017 [2013]) Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust, trans. A. M. Hagen, Edinburgh: Fledgling Press. Meretoja, H. (2018a) The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, New York: Oxford University Press. ———. (2018b) “From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration: A Non-Subsumptive Model of Storytelling”, in H. Meretoja and C. Davis (eds) Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, London: Routledge, 101–21. Notowicz, E. (2017 [2013]) “Edith Notowicz”, in J. Lothe (ed.) Time’s Witnesses: Women’s Voices from the Holocaust, trans. A. M. Hagen, Edinburgh: Fledgling Press, 92–101. Pane, S. (2005) “Trauma Obscura: Photographic Media in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz”, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 38(1): 37–54. Pederson, J. (2018) “Trauma and Narrative”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 97–109. Phelan, J. (2014) “Narrative Ethics”, in The living handbook of narratology. www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/ narrative-ethics (accessed 30 August 2019). Rancière, J. (1996) Film Fables, trans. E. Battista, Oxford and New York: Berg. Ricoeur, P. (2006) Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sebald, W. G. (2002) Austerlitz, trans. A. Bell, London: Vintage. Shoah (1985) dir. C. Lanzmann, New Yorker Films. Suleiman, S. R. (2006) Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ursano, R. T., Fullerton, C. S., Weisaeth, L. and Raphael, B. (eds) (2017 [2007]) Textbook of Disaster Psychiatry, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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In a passage titled “The Same Day” from her Nazi camp testimony Auschwitz and After (Delbo 2014 [1995]), Charlotte Delbo describes a moment in which she and her fellow deportees bear witness to a collective punishment they endure just weeks after their arrival in Auschwitz. After standing at a special, exceptionally long roll call outside the camp’s gates, all of the women of Auschwitz are forced to run through lines of SS officers who beat down on them with clubs and belts as they re-enter the camp, an event Delbo’s group will later name “The Race”. Each surviving member testifies to her experience once they return to the safety of their barracks. They begin by accounting for their losses and by inquiring about the aged, the sick and the weak. Fourteen women from their community have not made it through the selection. As they wait in hopes that the missing will return, they share the information and reactions they each have about what they have all just witnessed. “They only allowed the young ones through. Those who were good runners”, notes one woman (Delbo 1970 [1965]: 64; my translation). “Madame Brabander ran well”, notes another in reference to one of the older women still missing (64; my translation). One sister says to another, “If something like this were to happen again, don’t bother about me. Keep running. Think only of yourself” (64; my translation). The group quickly begins to speak of its missing members in the past tense. Only one woman from Delbo’s group, Cécile, sees what happens to the women who have not returned. Cécile is visibly distraught when she rejoins the rest of the group and struggles as she tries to relay the information she has on to others. Delbo writes: When she returned her teeth were chattering. In the literal sense, making the sound of castanets. She was frozen. And she was crying. We rubbed her to warm her up, to stop the shuddering that we felt with her. And we questioned her the way one questions a child, with simple words. (Delbo 1970 [1965]: 65–6; my translation) The group eventually learns through their supportive interventions that Cécile was tasked with carrying the bodies of all the women murdered in the selection to block 25, the special barracks in Auschwitz’s women’s camp where deportees were held without food and water for anywhere from days to weeks before being murdered in the gas chambers. Cécile came 162

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across a woman still clinging to life while moving the corpses of fallen internees. “She was begging, hanging onto us”, Cécile manages to explain (66; my translation). “We wanted to carry her off, when someone shouted: ‘Take off. Run […] Run for your life.’[…] So we left them there and ran. The dying woman was holding on to my ankles” (66; my translation). All fourteen of the missing women from their group will never return. Those who were not already murdered during “The Race” will soon be murdered in the gas chambers. Recent trauma studies highlights the essential role that the construction of narratives plays for unearthing and defusing traumatic memory in the aftermath of disasters (Brison 2002; Caruth 1996; Felman and Laub 1992). As Susan Brison explains, survivors need empathic listeners to hear and acknowledge their testimonies, so that survivors can recognize the harm that has been done to them, can let go of the past and can figure out how to carry on after their experiences (Brison 2002: 102). Scholars note, however, that, when confronted with the kinds of existential questions that traumatic experiences raise, readers and listeners often engage in an array of defensive behaviors that can potentially harm victims because of a need to maintain a sense of safety and control in the face of such atrocity (Brison 2002: 9; Felman and Laub 1992: 72–3). The role of readers and listeners, instead, should be to serve as “blank screens” on which a traumatic event comes to be inscribed for the first time (Felman and Laub 1992: 57), and to intervene as, in the words of Dori Laub, “one who knows” when witnesses struggle to find their words (Laub 1992: 63). But trauma studies has paid scant theoretical attention to the roles that testimonial narratives play while traumatic events are unfolding for victims, and to the forms of listener and reader engagement that such interactions demand. The moment of collective witnessing Delbo records in “The Same Day” demonstrates that testimonial narratives can also be a crucial source of evolving knowledge for communities in the midst of disasters. Moreover, rather than seek to flee these narratives, listeners actively inquire about the information and understandings testimonies provide precisely because of what they do not know. I want to suggest here that the lack of critical attention paid to this particular kind of trauma narrative is linked to the fraught history of gender as a category of analysis in Holocaust and trauma studies. I will then argue for using gender to elaborate a new reader-text framework for trauma narratives, one that draws from conceptualizations of testimony in contemporary feminist philosophy, in particular Miranda Fricker’s highly influential work on the “hermeneutical injustices” to which marginalized communities are subjected when they bear witness to their experiences.

Gender in Holocaust and trauma studies The subject of gender has a complex and contentious history in the fields of Holocaust and trauma studies. There has been a significant body of scholarship that seeks to distinguish the experiences of men and women in the face of Nazi oppression in particular, as well as scholarship that contests the relevance of discussing gender given the racial categorizations that Nazi Germany used to dehumanize its victims. Critical work focused specifically on the experiences of women in the Holocaust first emerged in the early 1980s and was immediately met with resistance (Bridenthal, Grossman and Kaplan 1984; Heinemann 1986; Katz and Ringelheim 1983; Laska 1983; Ringelheim 1984). As Zoë Waxman has recently shown, early scholars of gender were accused by some survivors, artists and scholars of seeking to appropriate the Holocaust and the experience of the Nazi camps to further a feminist agenda in their work, and similar criticisms have often re-emerged in the decades since (Waxman 2017: 1). 163

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“I think you are asking a morally wrong question, a question that leads us still further down the road of eradicating Jews from history”, wrote Cynthia Ozick in a letter to Joan Ringelheim, one of the earliest scholars of women’s experiences in the Holocaust, and an organizer of the first major conference on the topic in 1983 (Ringelheim 1998: 348–9). “The Holocaust happened to victims who were not seen as men, women, or children, but as Jews” (349). The literary scholar Lawrence Langer echoed such sentiments fifteen years later in an essay for Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman’s edited collection Women in the Holocaust, suggesting “that nothing could be crueler or more callous than the attempt to dredge up from this landscape of universal destruction a mythology of comparative endurance that awards favours to one group of individuals over another” (Langer 1998: 362). Such open hostility to gender as a category of analysis has now become much less prevalent, and work on gender and the Holocaust has paved the way for numerous studies of the relation between gender, genocide and trauma more broadly (Bemporad and Warren 2018; DiGeorgio-Lutz and Gosbee 2016; Jones 2004, 2015; Randall 2015; Totten 2012). However, the important insights that have been gleaned from this scholarship remain marginalized within the broader field, a fact Waxman attributes to men’s experiences of genocidal trauma ultimately being viewed as universal and normative while women’s experiences are perceived as an addendum to the overall experience (Waxman 2017: 6). Contrary to Langer’s and Ozick’s claims, scholars of gender and trauma establish different aims for studying their relation than creating a “mythology of competitive endurance” or subordinating questions of gender to questions of race in the face of atrocity. Amy E. Randall, for example, posits, straightforwardly, that “the purpose of this scholarship is to use gender as a lens for better comprehending the seemingly incomprehensible crime of genocide” by acknowledging “differences in men’s and women’s experiences” and how the unfolding of genocide has involved, in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, “events that specifically affect men as men and women as women” (Randall 2015: 1; Hilberg 1993: 126). Most of the work in this vein has been devoted to better understanding women’s experiences as victims of traumatic events, and has focused on issues such as women’s roles as caretakers in genocidal contexts, women’s memory practices and survival strategies, how traditional expectations for female behavior influenced women’s responses to historical trauma, and also on topics particular to women’s lives and bodies such as pregnancy, fear for one’s children, rape and sexual violence, forced prostitution, forced sterilization and abortion (Baer and Goldenberg 2003; Bemporad and Warren 2018; Goldenberg and Shapiro 2013; Hedgepath and Saidel 2010; Kaplan 2018; Waxman 2017). Much more recently, men’s experiences in traumatic contexts have also emerged as a focus for gendered analysis. The more limited number of studies undertaken from this perspective have tended to emphasize men’s roles as perpetrators of sexual and genocidal violence, men’s status as early victims of genocidal killing and the behavioural norms expected of and displayed by male victims of genocide (Haynes 2015; Jones 2004, 2015; Theweleit 1987 [1977], 1989 [1978]). This scholarship on gendered experiences of atrocity puts trauma into dialogue with key feminist concepts such as intersectionality – the idea that those who occupy multiple marginalized identities confront multiple connected and interacting forms of oppression simultaneously (Crenshaw 2012; Bemporad and Warren 2018; Griffiths 2018; Ilmonen, in this volume) – and also reflects feminist methodological concerns for developing our understandings of the details of everyday, embodied experiences of men and women in order to “restore individuality and humanity to the victims” of atrocity (Ofer and Weitzman 1998: 14). A guiding theoretical and conceptual thread for scholars of gender (and in line with feminist scholarship more broadly) has been to insist on the particular and the everyday in order 164

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to challenge the universalized approaches to trauma and the overgeneralizations about the experience of historically traumatic events that otherwise dominate the field. Joan Ringelheim’s pioneering essay from the early 1980s, “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust”, immediately established this critique of universals as a goal of deploying gender as a category of analysis, arguing that a focus on women’s experiences and survival strategies in the Nazi camps leads us to rethink “all generalizations and genderneutral statements about survival, resistance, the maintenance or collapse of moral values, and the dysfunction of culture in the camps and ghettos” (Ringelheim 1984: 69). As Ringelheim herself later noted, however, some early studies, including some of her own, tended to homogenize and valorize women’s distinct experiences of atrocity (Ringelheim 1993). This has led much recent scholarship on gender to foreground more consciously how, to paraphrase Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, gender can instead be used as a category that “emerges as significant, tangible, only to recede again, making space for other concerns” (Hirsch and Spitzer 2006: 378). The goals of such an approach, Hirsch and Spitzer suggest, are both to avoid “an unfortunate and all too common polarity between erasing difference and exaggerating it to the point of celebrating the skills and qualities of women over those of men”, but also “to get beyond ‘relevance’ or ‘appropriateness’ as categories” for studying gender in the context of trauma (357). Such studies interrogate gender but are “also more broadly inspired by feminist assumptions and commitments” that unsettle dogmas, expose the unexpected, and acknowledge subjectivity, positionality and vulnerability in their theoretical and methodological frameworks (358–9). Hirsch’s own work on the memory of the children of Holocaust survivors, which she dubs “postmemory”, and on relations between trauma, transmission, cultural memory and feminist reading practices, are particularly influential examples of this form of gendered analysis (Hirsch 1997, 2002; Hirsch 2012; Hirsch and Smith 2002; Hirsch and Spitzer 2006). Hirsch proposes that the way the “postgeneration” identifies with the Holocaust can be seen as a “living connection” between the generation of witnesses and the generation after that helps us gain access to “the emotional fabric of daily life in extreme circumstances” (Hirsch 2012: 48, 76). These empathetic responses that identify with family members’ experiences are analogous to how the “protective shield of trauma” also functions in survivors: they absorb the shock, filter and diffuse the impact of trauma and ultimately diminish its harm (48). Such connections relate to feminist reading, listening and knowledge production practices “that are embodied, material, located, and […] responsive and responsible to the other”, while further highlighting the risks of appropriation that come with wellintentioned responses based on empathy (Hirsch and Smith 2002: 13). Feminist scholarship on trauma and sexual assault offers further development of gender’s use as a mode of theoretical and methodological inquiry. A major contribution in this vein is Susan Brison’s analysis of rape trauma, which makes use of a first-person trauma narrative in the feminist tradition to act as an “antidote to scholarship that, in the guise of universality, tends to silence those who most need to be heard” (Brison 2002: 6). Brison draws from recent psychological research as well as from the experience of her own rape and attempted murder to challenge some of the entrenched views of trauma theory, most notably Cathy Caruth’s highly influential conceptualization of trauma as an “unclaimed” or “missed experience” that is recognized too late by the mind (Brison 2002: 32). Brison introduces a useful distinction between the emotional impact of trauma and the cognitive experience of it: she demonstrates that, “although the full emotional impact of […] trauma takes time to absorb and work through”, different categorizations of an event influence victims’ perceptions of their experiences and their strategies of defence while events are unfolding (32). Judith 165

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Herman’s seminal work in contemporary psychology further develops an array of concepts that apply equally to the traumatic experiences of groups as diverse as sexual assault victims, political prisoners and combat veterans (Herman 2015 [1992]). Herman advocates, in particular, a collaborative patient-therapist dynamic informed by feminist consciousness-raising practices and the early works of Freud that aim to lift “the barriers of denial and repression” in relation to trauma (2). A shared concern for all of these recent uses of gender as a category of analysis could be understood, in sum, as drawing from feminist theories and methodologies in order to make us aware of stories and details that lie outside of or are repressed by universalizing narrative and conceptual frameworks.

Gendered speech and Nazi camp trauma The example of collective witnessing from Delbo’s Auschwitz and After with which I began this chapter leads us to grapple in a potentially more contentious way with how feminist theories and methodologies challenge dominant theorizations of atrocity in the fields of Holocaust and trauma studies, most notably the widely-held view of trauma as an unspeakable, unimaginable or unrepresentable experience (Caruth 1996; Lang 1999, 2000). But some care is needed in conceptualizing how a gendered analysis of this knowledge production practice relates to theorizations of trauma’s unspeakability. The specific behaviour that Delbo’s group displays in the aftermath of “The Race” – the creation of a collective account of the horrors of camp life that seeks out the perspectives of all group members – does not universally apply to how all women in Auschwitz and other Nazi camps confronted the traumatic events unfolding before them. While scholars have demonstrated that social bonding and collective modes of survival appear to have been more prevalent among women in the camps than they were among men (Pine 2015), Delbo’s group offers a particularly poignant example of collaborative behaviour in the Nazi camp system. This was due, in part, to the fact that many of these women were political deportees who had already developed close bonds with each other while they were imprisoned prior to their deportation and internment in Auschwitz. As Delbo further stresses in her own writing on the subject, the fact that these women shared the same language and already knew each other allowed them to coordinate their actions and care for each other in ways that were nearly impossible for Jewish deportees (Delbo 1966). Among other important differences between these groups, Jewish women did not tend to know the other women with whom they were rounded up and deported, were subjected to comparatively worse living conditions than political deportees, and were not interned in blocks in which many people were part of the same linguistic communities (Delbo 1966). However, the way Delbo’s community of women speaks about camp trauma here departs radically from the ways groups of male political deportees speak – or rather do not speak – about the horrors of camp life in survivor testimonies. And this fact points, I argue, to how a gendered way of speaking that is displayed by the male political deportee community intersects with a universalized understanding of trauma as an unspeakable experience. I have argued elsewhere that the group behaviour of male political deportees makes visible ways in which influential understandings of the ethical elaborated by theorists such as Giorgio Agamben (1998 [1995], 1999) and Jean-Luc Nancy (1991 [1986]) contribute to the repression and denial of the experiences of atrocity victims (Marquart 2015). The speaking style of this community plays an important role in the particular form of denial in which its members engage. The works of Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprun in particular bear witness to a series of interactions in which political prisoners, including Semprun himself, 166

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ignore or seek to discipline and correct the narratives of community members who are unable to speak in masterful and authoritative ways about their experiences (Semprun 1982, 1997 [1994]). I have argued that, unlike the egalitarianism on display amongst the members of Delbo’s group that seeks to construct a multiperspectival account of trauma, in the moments of collective witnessing recorded in Semprun’s work, masterful voices intervene to centralize and synthesize meaning for the male deportee community, and to use previously articulated theorizations and concepts to speak about the experience of atrocity (Marquart 2010, 2011, 2015). These epistemic habits are understood as ethical within the male deportee community because they help to shape survivors’ narratives in ways that can better engage readers and listeners who are outsiders to traumatic events. Yet such knowledge production practices clearly exclude and silence the experiences of less articulate or relatively less healthy deportees from the larger narrative (Marquart 2015). Other major works from survivors of the Nazi camps offer further insights into how the speaking style of the male political deportee community marginalizes the perspectives of struggling witnesses during the experience of trauma. Robert Antelme’s The Human Race, for example, paints admiring portraits of those deportees who best exemplify solidarity in Buchenwald by suffering their fate in silence and by calling on all other deportees to do the same (Antelme 1992 [1957]). Antelme matter-of-factly states at the start of the text: “Our struggle, the best among us were only able to wage it in an individual manner. Solidarity itself became an individual affair” (5). This proclamation is reinforced throughout the work in descriptions that valorize deportees who retreat into themselves, like a disciplined political prisoner named Jo who cuts off all talk of hunger within the community in spite of his own clear emaciation from malnutrition. Yet, in a way similar to Semprun’s work, The Human Race also valorizes relations that depart from this logic, perhaps most notably in descriptions of an afternoon of singing and poetry recitals in which the community engages when a deportee named Gaston Riby implores them all to talk to each other in an effort to combat their dehumanization. “We’ve got to talk”, Gaston insists, “each one of us has got to get out of himself” (Antelme 1992 [1957]: 195–6). This leads to one of the rare instances in which Antelme describes his community finding collective relief from their miserable existence. As he symbolically comments on the afternoon: “Light had returned to the block” (217). Primo Levi’s canonical text Survival in Auschwitz displays a similar contradictory dynamic that defends individualism and silence while simultaneously pointing towards the need to speak to others (Levi 2008 [1947]). Levi explicitly links his community’s retreat into individualism in the camps to its members’ inability to speak to each other in the face of their growing vulnerability and weakness. Early in the text, he notes that the community of Italian deportees in Auschwitz quickly stopped the weekly meetings they had decided to hold: because it was too sad to count our numbers and find fewer each time, and to see each other ever more deformed and more squalid. And it was so tiring to walk those few steps and then, meeting each other, to remember and to think. It was better not to think. (Levi 2008 [1947]: 34) Levi’s community stops speaking to each other because, understandably, they cannot bear to see the effects that the dehumanizing conditions of their internment have on them all. The work’s major theoretical reflections on “the Drowned” – deportees who are overcome by the camp’s conditions before they can adapt – and “the Saved” – deportees who were obliged to renounce their responsibilities to others in order to survive their traumatic 167

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environment – further develop these ideas about the necessary individualism of survival into the essential lesson of survival in Auschwitz. These reflections echo broader trends scholars have identified in men’s behavior in Auschwitz and the expectation that men display qualities such as strength, hardness, toughness and stoicism (Pine 2015). And yet, throughout Survival in Auschwitz, Levi also expresses his own longing for different kinds of group dynamics in which deportees could open up about their weaknesses and offer each other support. He states, for example, at the end of a detailed description of the routine slave labour to which deportees were submitted: “Oh, if one could only cry! Oh, if one could only affront the wind as we used to, on equal terms, and not as we do here, like cringing dogs” (Levi 2008 [1947]: 78). The deportee communities described in these works retreat into silence and repress their emotions in response to their collective weakness. But survivors like Semprun, Antelme and Levi further point to the need to speak from weak and vulnerable states in order to combat dehumanization. The men in their communities do not speak because of their weaknesses, but they recognize that they need to speak to find emotional relief from their traumatic experiences. What distinguishes the behaviour of the male political deportee community from the behaviour of Delbo’s group in these examples? Most obviously, we see that, as a collective, the members of Delbo’s community continue speaking to each other and can externalize their struggles in the face of the physical and emotional vulnerabilities their traumatic experiences expose. The group offers support when its members struggle and seeks to draw their different perspectives out, but does not intervene in ways that discipline, repress or correct others’ speech in order to conform to a masterful norm. Delbo’s writing registers each survivor’s contribution to the group’s understanding of “The Race” as a separate statement in a dialogue, and no one insight or interpretation stands out from, centralizes or synthesizes the rest into a single narrative of their experience. By preventing the imposition of one viewpoint, such writing further makes readers complicit in this community’s struggle to articulate meanings, and places us on the same epistemic level as deportees who are denied full knowledge of the Nazi camp system.

Gender as a future category of analysis I want to consider in the remainder of this chapter how the concept of “hermeneutical injustice” that has been elaborated in contemporary scholarship on testimony in feminist philosophy might help to illuminate our understanding of this knowledge production practice in Delbo and its differences from the speaking styles on display in the works of survivors such as Semprun, Levi and Antelme. In the process, I will argue that such an approach can also point us towards a future for gender as a category of analysis that allows us to conceptualize more egalitarian reading and listening practices that we can activate in the face of trauma than the ones based on the knowledgeable therapist role articulated in recent trauma theory. Though it refers to a phenomenon that marginalized social groups have long called attention to, the concept of hermeneutical injustice comes to us from Miranda Fricker’s pathbreaking book on testimony, Epistemic Injustice (2007), which has received widespread attention in contemporary philosophy (Kidd, Medina and Pohlhaus 2017). Fricker focuses overall in this work on the particular forms of identity prejudice and discrimination to which marginalized groups such as women and racial and sexual minorities are subjected when they bear witness to their experiences. Hermeneutical injustice occurs, she argues, because our shared meanings and conceptual resources have been developed from the perspective of dominant social groups; it is, in the words of José Medina, a kind of discrimination “built 168

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into the very structure of our communicative exchanges” because our collective understandings are not articulated from the perspective of marginalized communities (Medina 2017: 42). Oppressed groups thus struggle to frame meanings and to make their experiences intelligible to others because they have fewer conceptual resources on hand to articulate their experiences than the powerful do. Well-known examples of this sort of injustice in the literature on the subject include experiences like sexual harassment and postpartum depression prior to the time we had standard formulations for speaking about them. The overall point is that, in these cases, the lack of a critical concept keeps marginalized subjects from articulating their experiences in meaningful ways to others, and we must recognize that people are struggling with an objective difficulty and not an individual or subjective failing when they try but are unable to bear witness to their experiences. This difficulty stems from the hermeneutical marginalization to which they are subjected because they have been denied equal participation in the collective meaning-making practices of society at large. In an extensive response to Fricker, Medina argues that an important way in which we can combat hermeneutical injustice is to engage people in ways that guarantee they have full epistemic agency in our testimonial encounters – that is, in ways that guarantee that marginalized subjects participate equally in meaning-making practices (Medina 2013). To do this, we must avoid reducing witnesses to only their roles as informants, and engage them instead as inquirers about their own experiences. Medina explains: The epistemic agency of an informant qua informant is limited and subordinated to that of the inquirer’s […]. When one is allowed to be an informant without being allowed to be an inquirer, one is allowed to enter into one set of communicative activities – those relating to passing knowledge and opinions – but not others, precisely those others that are more sophisticated, happen at a higher level of abstraction, and require more epistemic authority: formulating hypotheses, probing and questioning, assessing and interpreting knowledge and opinions, and so on. (Medina 2013: 92) Medina proposes that, in order to treat hermeneutically marginalized subjects as agents capable of both informing and inquiring about their experiences, we must display qualities such as humility, curiosity and open-mindedness when people struggle to speak. What is needed, he further posits, is to develop “a hermeneutical sensibility with respect to embryonic and inchoate attempts at communicating about experiences that do not yet have standard formulations” (99). This would combat the dismissive treatment and devaluation of marginalized subjects’ status as knowers to which they are submitted when they struggle to articulate their experiences to others. The concept of hermeneutical injustice does not explicitly address the question of trauma or the Holocaust, but introducing its terminology into discussions of trauma testimony allows us to articulate an expanded, more egalitarian role for witnesses, one that reflects the agency they display when confronting atrocity and when articulating meanings about their experiences. It further allows us to shift our focus to the everyday, social needs of trauma witnesses when they struggle in communicative exchanges in ways that the patient-therapist model of trauma theory, with its unequal power balance of knowledgeable therapist and traumatized patient, cannot. The response to others’ struggles is, in fact, the key issue of concern that a gendered analysis of group dynamics in the face of trauma reveals. Delbo’s description of “The Race” gives us a clear example of a community that conceives of all of its members as full epistemic agents equally engaged in the construction of narratives no 169

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matter how weak or undisciplined they or their voices become. The group makes space for vulnerability and struggle in a way that is not on display in the male deportee community, where weakness is an occasion for policing or repression that enforces the traditional masculine ideals of stoicism, mastery and strength. In response to trauma, in other words, the male deportee communities depicted by Semprun, Antleme and Levi engage in meaning-making practices that produce and enforce hermeneutical gaps and guarantee the continued hermeneutical marginalization of certain sorts of experiences because of gendered social behaviours. There would be no place for the perspective of an emotionally distraught witness like Cécile in such a community in spite of her being the only source of crucial knowledge about the trauma she and her comrades all experience as a group in the “The Race”. The framework of hermeneutical injustice can further point us to new ways to conceive of the role trauma narratives play both in the midst of traumatic events and for those who have not directly seen or experienced the events that witnesses recount. We read and listen to trauma witnesses and help them find their voices when they struggle because we need them to help us understand and make sense of traumatic events, not just because they need us to help articulate and heal from trauma in the aftermath. The social space of trauma testimony becomes, therefore, one in which we support others as equals in the construction of knowledge because our understandings quite literally depend on what emerges from their acts of witnessing. Struggle is at the heart of this conceptualization of trauma testimony: we struggle together to make sense of events from a shared position of hermeneutical vulnerability and lack. As a category of analysis, then, gender can help to further develop how we understand the behaviours in which we should engage when trauma survivors bear witness in order to assure their full epistemic agency in our communicative exchanges. A focus on the speaking practices of the male political deportee community in particular forces us to rethink universal statements about trauma’s unspeakability. This focus demands that we ask, instead, how the gendered meaning-making behaviour of male deportee communities has limited the range of witness narratives produced about the trauma of the Nazi camps and other moments of historical trauma, and the range of witnesses who will speak about them. Feminist methodologies and assumptions can be further deployed, that is, to elaborate better knowledge production practices in the face of trauma that draw out the particular voices of subjects marginalized by the conceptual order of the socially dominant. Directing our attention to gender can make us responsive to those voices and experiences that lie outside our prevailing frameworks, and help us to elaborate new, more inclusive concepts for making sense of trauma.

Bibliography Agamben, G. (1998 [1995]) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone. Antelme, R. (1992 [1957]) The Human Race, trans. J. Haight and A. Mahler, Evanston, IL: Marlboro Press, Northwestern University Press. Baer, E. R. and Goldenberg, M. (eds) (2003) Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Bemporad, E. and Warren, J. W. (eds) (2018) Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bridenthal, R., Grossman, A. and Kaplan, M. (eds) (1984) When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, New York: Monthly Review Press.

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Gender Brison, S. (2002) Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Crenshaw, K. (2012) “From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally about Women, Race, and Social Control”, UCLA Law Review 59: 1418–71. Delbo, C. (1966) Le Convoi Du 24 Janvier, Paris: Minuit. ———. (1970 [1965]) Aucun de nous ne reviendra, vol. 1 of Auschwitz et après, 3 vols, Paris: Minuit. ———. (2014 [1995]) Auschwitz and After, trans R. Lamont, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. DiGeorgio-Lutz, J. and Gosbee, D. (eds) (2016) Women and Genocide: Gendered Experiences of Violence, Survival, and Resistance, Toronto: Women’s Press. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York and London: Routledge. Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldenberg, M. and Shapiro, A. H. (eds) (2013) Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Griffiths, J. (2018) “Feminist Interventions in Trauma Studies”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 181–95. Haynes, S. R. (2015) “Ordinary Masculinity: Gender Analysis and Holocaust Scholarship”, in A. E. Randall (ed.) Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, London, New Delhi: Bloomsbury Academic, 165–88. Hedgepath, S. M. and Saidel, R. G. (eds) (2010) Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Heinemann, M. (1986) Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust, New York, Westport: Greenwood Press. Herman, J. (2015 [1992]) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York: Basic Books. Hilberg, R. (1993) Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1935, London: Harper Collins. Hirsch, M. (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. (2002) “Marked by Memory: Feminist Reflections on Trauma and Transmission”, in N. K. Miller and J. Tougaw (eds) Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 71–91. ———. (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press. Hirsch, M. and Smith, V. (2002) “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(1): 1–19. Hirsch, M. and Spitzer, L. (2006) “Testimonial Objects”, Poetics Today 27(2): 353–83. Jones, A. (ed.) (2004) Gendercide and Genocide, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. ———. (2015) “Masculinities and Vulnerabilities in the Rwandan and Congolese Genocides”, in A. E. Randall (ed.) Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, London, New Delhi: Bloomsbury Academic, 62–84. Kaplan, M. (2018) “Gender: A Crucial Tool in Holocaust Research”, in E. Bemporad and J. Warren (eds) Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 97–110. Katz, E. and Ringelheim, J. (eds) (1983) Women Surviving the Holocaust, New York: Institute for Research in History. Kidd, I. J., Medina, J. and Pohlhaus, J. G. (eds) (2017) The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, London and New York: Routledge. Lang, B. (1999) The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. (2000) Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Langer, L. (1998) “Gendered Sufferings? Women in Holocaust Testimonies”, in D. Ofer and L. Weitzman (eds) Women in the Holocaust, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 351–63.

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Sharon Marquart Laska, V. (1983) Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses, New York, Westport: Greenwood Press. Laub, D. (1992) “Bearing witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening”, in S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises in Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York and London: Routledge, 57–74. Levi, P. (2008 [1947]) Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man, trans. S. Woolf, New York: Orion Press. Marquart, S. (2010) “Writing Collective Experience in Jorge Semprún’s Buchenwald Narratives”, in A. Gómez López Quiñones and S. Zepp (eds) The Holocaust in Spanish Memory. Historical Perceptions and Cultural Discourse, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 87–102. ———. (2011) “Authoritative Witnessing and the Control of Memory: On Jorge Semprun’s L’écriture ou la vie”, French Forum 36(2–3): 147–61. ———. (2015) On the Defensive: Reading the Ethical in Nazi Camp Testimonies, Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Medina, J. (2013) The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2017) “Varieties of Hermeneutical Injustice”, in I. J. Kidd, J. Medina and G. Pohlhaus Jr. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, London and New York: Routledge, 41–52. Nancy, J. L. (1991 [1986]) The Inoperative Community, trans. P. Connor (ed.), L. Garbus, M. Holland and S. Sawhney, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Ofer, D. and Weitzman, L. J. (eds) (1998) Women in the Holocaust, New Haven and London, Yale University Press. Pine, L. (2015) “Gender and the Holocaust: Male and Female Experiences of Auschwitz”, in A. E. Randall (ed.) Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, London, New Delhi: Bloomsbury Academic, 37–61. Randall, A. E. (ed.) (2015) Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, London, New Delhi: Bloomsbury Academic. Ringelheim, J. (1984) “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust”, Simon Wiesenthal Annual 1: 69–87. ———. (1993) “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research”, in C. Rittner and J. K. Roth (eds) Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, New York: Paragon House, 374–418. ———. (1998) “The Split between Gender and the Holocaust”, in D. Ofer and L. Weitzman (eds) Women in the Holocaust, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 340–50. Semprun, J. (1982) What a Beautiful Sunday!, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. (1997 [1994]) Literature or Life, trans., L. Coverdale, New York: Viking. Theweleit, K. (1987 [1977]) Male Fantasies. Vol 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (1989 [1978]) Male Fantasies. Vol. 2: Psychoanalyzing White Terror, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Totten, S. (ed.) (2012) Plight and Fate of Women during and Following Genocide, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Waxman, Z. (2017) Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History, New York: Oxford University Press.

Further reading Rittner, C. and Roth, J. K. (eds) (1993) Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, New York: Paragon House. Tec, N. (2003) Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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16 INTERSECTIONALITY Kaisa Ilmonen

The genealogical roots of intersectionality are connected to African American feminism and its writers’ need to express cumulative oppressive practices hidden at the intersections of identity categories. Intersectionality combines a variety of ideas already articulated by Black and Third World feminists of the 1980s. Audre Lorde, for one, described her dis/identification with African American, feminist and lesbian identity political milieus in Sister Outsider (1984), while Alice Walker outlined womanism (1983) to articulate the particularity of African American feminism, Angela Davis connected Marxism to African American feminist resistance, and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) defined the New Mestiza consciousness to describe the act of negotiating the simultaneous ambivalences of everyday life for those who do not fit into cultural norms. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a wide corpus of fiction − essays, novels, manifestos, short stories and poetry − began to emerge in an effort to address the forms of multiple oppression experienced by women of color (see e.g. Ilmonen 2019; Lutz 2014; Nash 2008), and the term intersectionality arose. Originating in legal discourse, the term was first coined by law scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” published in University of Chicago Legal Forum. However, Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix (2004) connect intersectionality to famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speeches by Sojourner Truth given as early as the late nineteenth century. The plethora of Third World feminist fiction articulated the experience of simultaneous oppressions neglected by feminist theory of the time, uttering “what so far has remained unnamed, but not for this reason non-existent” (Covi 1997: 26) in order to express the ethos of intersectionality. The unnamed, but not for that reason non-existent is what I try to capture in this chapter by defining intersectional trauma. Intersectional trauma gives an academic name to something that Anzaldúa described as a Coatlicue state, a paralysis caused by a contradictory third perspective, “something more than mere duality or a synthesis of duality” (Anzaldúa 1987: 46–8), or that Erna Brodber in her novel Jane and Louisa will Soon Come Home (1980) called Kumbla, a metaphor utilized a lot in Caribbean feminism. Kumbla is a calabash used to protect precious items, but since Brodber, “Out of the Kumbla” has referred to movement towards one’s own voice and self-definition; a self that is not protected or dominated anymore. By definition, intersectionality explores injustices caused by the co-conditional, 173

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discriminatory effects of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, social status, geographical location, bodily experience, disability or any such factor that are crucial to our social and psychic experiences. Intersectional experience should not be considered solely in terms of individual identity but also as socially structured and in terms of a historically constituted sense of self, regulated and organized by larger institutional frames which themselves are imbued with racial, sexual or class-related bias. Nira Yuval-Davis (2006: 199) talks about intersectionality as an outlook for “different kinds of differences” having organizational, intersubjective, experiential and representational forms. Racism, for example, appears differently on individual, social, psychic, institutional or representational levels of society, and it coincides differently with sexism, for example, on each of these levels. Intersectionality studies the combined effects of these different kinds of differences which may not be detected by single-axis analyses, such as feminist or queer studies. Intersectionality throws a crosslight on the blind spots in between single-axis logic; it tries to reach the extra-friction, or co-effects, created by the simultaneous operation of multiple axes of power. I suggest that the intensified effect of oppression and un-belonging occurring at the intersection of identity categories – the unspeakable, but not for that reason non-existing – is potentially a traumatizing experience. Thus, in this chapter I seek an intersectional understanding of trauma in two novels by authors of Caribbean origin, Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015) and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987).

Traumatic intersectionality in Caribbean writing Caribbean migrant writing has been a worldwide phenomenon since the 1930s. Jean Rhys’s peculiarly intersectional novel Voyage to the Dark (1936) pioneered a description of the alienating and traumatizing experiences of Caribbean Creole travellers in the UK, and this theme reappears in other literary cornerstones such as Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956) and George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960). From the 1980s, a strong front of female migrant authors of Caribbean origin described the multiple intersecting cultural identities of their characters. Carole Boyce Davies uses the term “migratory subjectivity” for describing Caribbean women’s identity, which exists in multiple places and positions, even in ambivalent and contradictory ways. Davies connects this sense of subjectivity to Caribbean writing, which should be read as “a series of boundary crossings and not as a fixed, geographical, ethnically or nationally bound category of writing” (Boyce Davies 1994: 4), thereby getting close to intersectional points of view. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Michelle Cliff (1946–2016) belongs to the aforementioned generation of Caribbean women writing in the 1980s. She has examined the Caribbean migrant experience in her novels, collections of short stories and prose poems. Her characters struggle with identity borders, and they often refuse to choose a single identity, living in between races, cultural backgrounds, class positions and even genders. However, transnational solidarities between minorities and Caribbean-Jewish relations are strongly present in her works. In Cliff’s most famous novel No Telephone to Heaven (1987), the main character, Jamaican-born, upper-class Clare Savage embodies an intersectional identity as a light-skinned Creole, an ambivalently gendered and sexualized migrant, not at home either in Jamaica, the United States or the United Kingdom. No Telephone to Heaven is a fragmented and nonlinear story depicting Clare’s life from the age of fourteen until her untimely death at the age of 36 from a gunshot wound in Jamaica. The various scenes and flashbacks reflect Clare’s split sense of self and search for identity as it evolves through border-crossings and intersections. Her journey towards a rebellious identity committed to resistance as part of a Jamaican guerrilla group is juxtaposed with her 174

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travels between the USA, Europe and Jamaica. The novel presents the fluctuating identity of a light-skinned, Creole woman obscuring and undermining positions reserved for either the “self” or the “other” in colonial discourse. She is an inappropriate other, a woman searching for a place she can call “home”. The novel’s narration leaps from one scene to another, occasionally concentrating on minor characters, such as Clare’s best friend, ethnically Creole, transgendered Harry/Harriet, who is both a nurse and a traditional healer. Their gentle character transcends the borders of race, gender, sexuality and Western and local heritage rendering the binary models of identity obsolete. No Telephone to Heaven’s nonlinear structure, an intersecting polyphony of voices, recalls the logic of re/membering, which Fiona R. Barnes interprets as mirroring Jamaican cultural hybridity (Barnes 1992: 29). This structure is a symbol for the impossibility of single-voiced, linear synthesis in a postcolonial condition. Clare’s story begins with her migration to the USA with her family. Clare’s father assimilates quickly as he finds employment and friends, finally breaking all ties to Jamaica. He is constantly reminding Clare about the importance of passing: “Through all this − all this new life − he counsels his daughter on invisibility and its secrets. Self-effacement. Blending in. The uses of camouflage” (Cliff 1996: 100). Clare’s mother Kitty, on the other hand, grows alienated and withdrawn in the USA. She finally leaves her daughter and husband and decides to return to Jamaica, taking along only Clare’s “darker-skinned” younger sister and dividing the family through internalized colour-lines. Clare is traumatically left alone, forced to forget her African-self and her sense of Caribbeanness. She feels like an “albino gorilla […] hiding from the poachers who would claim her and crush her” (91). Clare’s inbetweenness, displacement and sense of unbelonging come to a head in her choice to study at a British university, where she enrols in the hopes of finding a place to belong, “choosing London with the logic of a Creole. This was the mother country. The country by whose grace her people existed in the first place. Her place could be here” (109). However, Clare’s sense of displacement is intensified in England, and her sanity is threatened. Sliding more deeply into her traumatizing sense of in-betweenness, she starts to identify with Bertha Mason, the mad woman in the attic in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Clare feels herself particularly anxious in situations where her light skin-color and academic records are the only traits that characterize her; her ability to pass makes her disappear. Clare is wounded by the master narratives defining “endorsed” positions; her elite, school-taught British accent separates her from the vital patois of her home country, and she is separated from her mother and sister by her white skin. Kim Robinson-Walcott writes about “the peculiar loneliness of the white Jamaican” (Robinson-Walcott 2003: 98) and explains that “history has burdened the white West Indian with his own peculiar set of baggage: as past oppressor and present threatened minority, saddled with collective guilt but still holding the reins of power” (96). Clare breaks down because of this guilt and loneliness. After years of aimless wandering around Europe, she decides to travel back to Jamaica with the encouragement of Harry/Harriet who embodies a wide range of deconstructions and intersections envisioned in the novel. Later on, it is Harry/Harriet who guides Clare to educate herself in Caribbean history and to join the little guerrilla group. In the end, this is a paradoxical site of radical agency and healing for Clare, that ultimately leads to her death. Born in St Kitts, Caryl Phillips examines questions of cultural identities, alienation, displacements and traumatic histories in his novels that challenge notions of “roots”, “origins” and “ethnic backgrounds”. Phillips’s novel The Lost Child also summons the legacy of the Brontës by returning to Heathcliff’s story from Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë. Origins, the transatlantic slave trade, alienation, abuse and fundamental estrangement from 175

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society caused by intersecting vectors of class, gender, race and sexuality are explored on several fictional and historical levels in the novel. Heathcliff’s slave mother is traumatized by enduring sexual and racial violence as she is displaced first from Africa to the Caribbean, and later to England, embodying the trauma of the Triangle Trade: The least of the female litter, she mounted a wooden platform and waited until all the others had been taken. […] Soon they were too nauseated to eat, and most were too grief-stricken to cry, and she lay surrounded by the doleful mourning of those who rotted in the darkness (of the slave ship). […] During her second voyage she remained anchored to the splintered floor of the captain’s cabin unless he had business with her. (Phillips 2015: 4–5) Besides the stories of Heathcliff, his mother and Earnshaw, Emily Brontë’s own story is threaded into the novel. In The Lost Child, Emily is slowly fading with illness in a house on the moors despite her sister’s care. As a daughter of a clergyman “Emily” feels restricted by her gender and as if she were, to her beloved Papa, a poor substitute for her drunkard brother Branwell. However, the main story in the novel, taking place from the 1950s to the 1970s, describes the sad life of Monica Johnson, an upper-class daughter of “a schoolmaster in one of the most highly considered grammar schools in the north of England” (Phillips 2015: 15). Monica’s story is framed with seemingly unrelated stories of a rewritten Wuthering Heights and fictional depiction of Emily Brontë’s last days – intersectionalizing the themes of Monica’s story. Monica falls in love with the fiery Caribbean independence activist Julius Wilson in Oxford where she goes to study. They marry and have two boys, and Monica quits her studies, also severing all connections with her family. Monica’s slow decline into madness, alienation, poverty and depression begins as they separate; Julius moves back to the Caribbean, and she moves to Leeds where she lives in a dismal apartment. Her sons, Ben and Tommy, suffer racism, poverty, harsh bullying and social marginalization, while Monica herself is abused by the man she is dating. Finally the social services take away her sons and Monica becomes distanced from reality altogether, like Heathcliff’s mother earlier. Tommy is the ultimate lost child in the novel as he disappears on the moors and dies, and the narrator hints that he is also sexually abused by the male friend of his mother. A hint of reconciliation, however, appears in the last pages of the novel as Ben gets acquainted with his schoolmaster grandfather. Phillips’s novel links the historical trauma of slavery to the traumatic everyday and displays the intersections of racial, gendered, sexual and class-based forms of oppression operating co-conditionally, making everyday life unliveable. Thus, the novel contains three story lines: the rewriting of Wuthering Heights, the story of (fictional) Emily Brontë and Monica’s story.

Intersectional revisitations to trauma In her book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003), Ann Cvetkovich explores new methods for tackling what is sometimes called “trauma culture” – by which she refers to “a quick-fix naming of the zeitgeist that misrecognizes a structural condition as a feeling” (Cvetkovich 2003: 15). Cvetkovich carries on by reading Lauren Berlant who views nation (USA) “as a space of struggle violently separated by racial, sexual, and economic inequalities that cut across every imaginable kind of social location” (Berlant 176

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1997: 4; Cvetkovich 2003: 16), reminding us of the amnesiac force of national culture which constitutes itself around one kind of trauma story to suppress others. For her, new methods are needed in order to reach the “less dramatic terrain of everyday experience” (Cvetkovich 2003: 16) which may also be a site of trauma due to structural, yet collectively unacknowledged, inequalities. “National trauma cultures” may easily turn into near-patriotic sites blurring the mundane mechanisms of hurtful inequalities. I suggest that an intersectional perspective enables the unearthing of these mundane inequalities and the recognition of painful stories lost in the master narrative of national trauma. Cvetkovich adopts Laura Brown’s term “insidious trauma” to describe everyday manifestations of trauma, “especially those emerging from systemic forms of oppression” that compel us to move beyond medicalized articulations (Cvetkovich 2003: 32–3). Through intersectional trauma studies I want to emphasize the multiple simultaneous forms of insidiously operating systems that coincide in individual everyday lives. For Vivian May, intersectionality is about matrix thinking in its focus on how “lived identities, structural systems, sites of marginalization, forms of power and modes of resistance intersect” (May 2015: 21). Intersectionality rejects oppressive legacies, universalities and politics based on sameness, focusing rather on solidarities. Intersectionality de-homogenizes identity political groupings and captures the dynamics of oppressive structures that are overlooked in monocular vision. It concentrates on convergences and overlaps, exposes interactive energies, and takes a stand against inequality. Intersectionality responds to single-axis identity politics and considers social subject positions as relational and ambivalent. Intersectionality considers the everyday experience as a/the negotiation between several positions that are shaped by social institutions respectively imbued with intersecting powers (see Dhamoon 2011; Lutz 2014; MacKinnon 2013; Nash 2008). These negotiations are embodied in and lived through particular cultural historical situations. May summarizes several views by defining intersectionality as (1) an epistemological practice that interrogates conventional knowledge practices, (2) an ontological project that “accounts for multiplicity and complex subjectivity”, (3) a radical coalitional political orientation and (4) a resistant imaginary, which is a way of “intervening in historical memory or interrupting the dominant social imagination by thinking ‘otherwise’” (May 2015: 34). In pondering trauma and narrative intersectionally, we should ask: What do we see if we focus on the intersections of everyday living? Whose trauma goes unnoticed if we consider trauma as national, or in terms of “collective memory”? Who belongs to this collective and in what way? As Momin Rahman claims, intersectionality is not interested in questioning who belongs, but how one belongs (Rahman 2009: 359). In a legal context, Kimberlé Crenshaw has pointed out the specific circumstances that black women face when the law only recognizes discrimination based on gender or race. One of the court cases Crenshaw analyses in her groundbreaking article defining intersectionality is DeGraffenreid vs. General Motors that concerned the discrimination suit of five African American female employees of GM. The court stated that “this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both” (see Crenshaw 1989: 141). In later works, Crenshaw’s metaphor of intersecting axes of experience has been greatly disputed. Our social life is much more complex than the separate yet intersecting vectors of race, class, gender etc. However, as a disciplinary system, the law needs clear-cut identity categories in order to trace discrimination; the law does not operate in intersectional terms. The law cannot define complex, co-conditional or ambivalent systems of inequalities without creating more classificatory categories. In this context Emily Grabham suggests the intertwining of intersectionality and trauma theory. Grabham identifies the near-impossibility of 177

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conducting a successful prosecution based on intersectional discrimination, and she suggests that “discrimination claims as expressions/impressions of trauma may, paradoxically give us new ways of viewing complex inequalities, shifting the focus of intersectionality away from disciplinary identity categories and toward the cultural circulation of emotions” (Grabham 2009: 200). Cvetkovich’s agenda of acknowledging the traumatic, insidious nature of everyday experiences of systemic violence may be captured with intersectional conceptualizations of trauma. Intersectional trauma studies reaches into the multiple simultaneous mechanisms that silence, hurt and injure a subject, like Cliff’s Clare or Phillips’s Monica. Stef Craps’s work in decolonizing trauma theory has been ground breaking. In Postcolonial Witnessing (2014) he revises Caruthian trauma theory by focusing on cross-cultural ethical engagements and solidarity beyond Eurocentric, event-based modes of trauma. For Craps, trauma theory must not ignore or marginalize the traumatizing experiences of the Global South. Moreover, trauma theory must not take for granted the recovery and testimonial practices of Western Modernity expressed in art forms created by the same culture and inclined to be seen as “universal”. Craps claims that Eurocentric trauma theory tends not to see “the connections between metropolitan and non-Western or minority traumas” (Craps 2014: 2). Intersectionality multiplies the narratives and interpretative structures attached to nodal types of traumas. As Ananya Kabir proposes, the narrative modes surrounding trauma highlight certain reactions, affects and responses colonizing other kinds of local, embodied or untranslatable forms of trauma (Kabir 2013). Kabir refers to “non-narrative works of the imagination” that foreground the void that is not translatable into Western, event-based conceptualizations of trauma. She portrays several non-Western responses to trauma that undo the binary silence-testimony interpretative structures attached to trauma narratives, including embodied practices, lamentations, fragmented teleologies, songs, vernacular mythopoeses and rhythms (65–6). In line with recent calls to pluralize and reconceptualize trauma theory (e.g. Craps 2014; Kabir 2013; Rothberg 2013), I suggest the potential usefulness of the concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality recognizes the cumulating effects of unevenly operating axes of everyday life that emerge differently on different social levels. For instance, homophobia is experienced differently by individuals because it operates differently on experiential, institutional, representational, historical or social levels, and these experiences may be intensified by racism, classism or ableism. Intersectionality grasps the problematics Laura Brown (2008) introduced into trauma studies, namely that the dominant understanding of trauma is preoccupied with white, middle-class, straight men who are well-educated and able-bodied. Intersectional trauma theory invests in solidarity rather than sameness, as each traumatic experience is different, experienced in different spatial, temporal, cultural and social contexts. Intersectionality grasps what remains hidden and undiscernible if trauma is seen as a collective event, rather than reaching towards intra-group differences. Craps, for instance, reads feminist trauma scholars who argue that domestic abuse might echo the trauma of war – or even be caused by those traumatized in wars (see Craps 2014: 22–5). Intersectionality resists psychiatric universalisms, multiplying the levels through which traumatic experiences may be lived. In Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, Clare may not be traumatized simply by the cultural dislocation she experiences in England, but rather her sense of displacement becomes an unbearable ordeal when her racial, gendered and sexual identities are shattered. Intersectionality becomes a decolonizing tool for trauma studies as it considers the particularity of each traumatic experience. Both No Telephone to Heaven and The Lost Child illustrate the effects of what Craps calls “insidiously cumulative micro-aggressions” resulting in trauma (Craps 2014: 26). I argue that intersectional analysis may capture the interrelated 178

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nature of particular cultural, political and social frames that enable these micro-aggressions. Crenshaw and many others emphasize intersectionality as a heuristic device, a provisional conceptualization focusing on the complexities between single-axis views (Crenshaw 2012; Davis 2008; May 2015). Its heuristic nature might be applied to what is considered as the main cause of trauma. If something is seemingly about class, like in Phillips’s The Lost Child, an intersectional question would be how racism conditions poverty, or how gender is coconditional with class and race. Intersectional trauma theory asks how traumatic situations take effect, rather than what traumatizes an individual.

Multidirectional memory, intersectionality and healing In his oft-quoted study Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009) Michael Rothberg challenges a type of remembering he considers as “competitive memory”. For him, competitive memory reflects “a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources” in the commemorative public sphere, where Holocaust memory, for example, would be literally “crowding the memory of African American history” (Rothberg 2009: 2–3). Instead, he envisions multidirectional memory, emphasizing dialogue, interaction, and productive social memory work that has the potential to “create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice” (5) out of empathy and a shared sense of trauma. With multidirectional memory Rothberg seeks to unveil historical relatedness, ethical cross-references between traumatic experiences, commonality with others, and multifaceted struggles, whereas competitive memory emphasizes boundaries of memory which also constitute the boundaries of group identities (5–6). These kinds of bordered identities compose a foundation for identity politics, highlighting the sameness of a particular group and a fixed, essential identity. Intersectionality, instead, is always a coalitional political praxis basing its politics on solidarity between, and beyond, identity political groupings. Hence, intersectional considerations on trauma and memory resonate with multidirectional collective memory politics and solidarity. Interestingly enough, Rothberg himself discusses both Michelle Cliff and Caryl Phillips, including the former among those “obviously multidirectional writers” (Rothberg 2009: 27) who connect the Jewish experience to that of the Caribbean. (For more on Caribbean–Jewish relations in literature, see Phillips Casteel 2016.) I see an intersectional ethos in Rothberg’s multidirectional memory. Multidirectionality disengages itself from exclusive versions of cultural memory, acknowledging the memory work “across diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites” (Rothberg 2009: 11). Memory’s multidirectionality manifests itself in convoluted back-and-forth movement and comparisons; it is not “afraid to traverse sacrosanct borders of ethnicity and era” (17). This kind of multitemporal travelling and intersectional sense of trauma is clearly displayed in The Lost Child. Heathcliff’s mother is traumatized by transatlantic slavery and sexual abuse while her son’s fundamental sense of displacement is set on a British-imperialist scene, the fictional Emily Brontë suffers from the limited space possible for artistic women, and a modern character such as Monica is paralysed by her class status, poverty and external prejudice. At the same time, her boys face everyday racism, and their Caribbean father gets lost in the political turbulence of his home island on the verge of independence. In the end, Heathcliff, Monica’s younger son Tommy and Emily disappear from the reader’s sight into windy moors – connected by their trauma beyond fictional realms and historical periods. History, colonialism, race, ethnicity, class, wealth, gender, social status and geographical location all create a texture of multidirectional and intersecting traumatic experiences. The alienation felt by 179

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Heathcliff in the original Wuthering Heights emblematizes an intersectional sense of trauma linking several historical, psychic, social and individually experienced oppressions. The Lost Child draws a parallel between Monica and the slave mother which illustrates the ways in which the traumatic fragmentation of identity is often framed by the urtrauma of slavery and colonialism in Caribbean writing. Their destiny is to fall into numbing sickness while their Creole sons carry on, in spite of their sense of loss and otherness. This temporally multi-levelled trauma is also highlighted in the multi-levelled structure of the novel. Intersectionality, I suggest, illuminates Monica’s traumatically fragmented identity and the ontological insecurity, the silencing effect of ambivalent negotiations between race, class, gender, cultural placement, social position and sexuality, recalling Cvetkovich’s definition of trauma as something that challenges “distinctions between the mental and physical, the psychic and social, and the internal external as locations or sources of pain” (Cvetkovich 2003: 18). While Monica’s original class status, white skin and university education give her certain privileges, her brown children, the racism of the social security services, her current poverty and her fragile gender and sexual identity complicate her precarious everyday life which is difficult to unravel without intersectionality. Without actually referring to intersectionality Cvetkovich herself argues that critical race theory, African American studies, Marxism, queer theory and feminism must all be drawn from in order to “seize authority over trauma discourses from medical and scientific discourse” (20). Intersectionality may capture something that, to borrow Cvetkovich’s words, “is hidden in the sphere of the personal”, not collective and national but operating insidiously, like sexism (cf. 30, 32). By framing The Lost Child with the history of colonialism through references to Wuthering Heights, Phillips articulates the dual nature of trauma as both trans-historical and particular, something that must be affectively negotiated in culturally specific ways. Trauma narratives have the possibility not only to render intersectional wounds graspable but also to envision healing storytelling and multidirectional places for memories. In postcolonial – and particularly Caribbean – feminist writing the author becomes a healer as she imagines healing stories for a diasporic community. As the feminist scholar Gay Wilentz emphasizes in her influential study Healing Narrative: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-ease (2000), an author drawing from her cultural storytelling traditions may become a collective healer for her people, curing culturally constituted dis-eases. Wilentz acknowledges that women’s storytelling and knowledge of “the secrets of life and death” counter “the patriarchal structures of modern medicine” (Wilentz 2000: 12). Wilentz uses the term “dis-ease” in order to describe the traumatic sense of history in minority groups (3). Narrative healing differs from what Karen McCarthy-Brown considers as colonial healing. She addresses the problems of Western medical sciences and their ways of viewing the human body as a passive “physical machine”, healed through the mastery of special discourses and possession of degrees, diplomas, instruments, medications and white coats. She regards Western medicine as a potential capitalist enterprise within which the “right to heal” is considered a proprietary right (see McCarthy-Brown 1997: 123–4; Ilmonen 2017: 168). This view differs radically from postcolonial and intersectional healing narratives which often represent individual healing intertwined with symbolic, collective cures for colonial traumas. Intersectional healing narratives re-negotiate the abject or appropriated body beyond oppressive social borders. In No Telephone to Heaven Clare’s and Harry/Harriet’s wounded, subaltern bodies become finally materialized without the social boundaries which categorized them as unwanted when they commit to the resistance movement in Jamaica. 180

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Conclusion Narratives might heal the wounded memory of the colonized. However, I suggest that intersectional healing narratives create historical and discursive spaces not only for their characters but also for their readers. First, by creating manifold historical narratives and multidirectional memories they enable new kinds of introspective possibilities for those who identify with the protagonists. Second, they widen the historical horizon of the reader who did not know the stories beyond a colonized sense of history or who felt unconnected to them. And third, by focusing on hidden versions of cultural memory, they “hail” the kinds of readers who are willing to forge new coalitions and solidarities across intersectional boundaries. While there is no healing in The Lost Child, Clare in No Telephone to Heaven is ready to reconcile her compositional fragments and return to Jamaica to reclaim her grandmother’s heritage. The reconciliation is achieved through re-claimed memory, decolonized history, rebellion and the acceptance of her queer sexuality (Ilmonen 2017). Thus, intersectional trauma narratives may (re)tell the hidden archives of pain that are not considered to be “national”. The healing, intersectional memory has the ethical potential to grow beyond and in between the dominant master narratives composing the trauma archives of oppressed people. In his preface to The Future of Trauma Theory (2013) Michael Rothberg, following Roger Luckhurst, refers to trauma as an array of problems of modernity – best thought not as a singular object or an event but as knots and assemblages that tangle up modern challenges marked by law, technology, capitalism, politics or medicine (Rothberg 2013: xi). These kinds of assemblages are graspable with/through/in intersectionality and intersectional trauma theory. In envisioning trauma theory’s future Rothberg raises the issues of structural violence and globalized scenarios of exploitation that reject the basic categories of victims, perpetrators and bystanders (xii–xv). Investment in secure subject positions, events, testimonials and Western psychiatry cannot reach nodal phenomena in the era of the Anthropocene, such as climate trauma, or systemic oppressions such as racism in the nexus of capitalism and heterosexism. For Rothberg, the future of trauma theory lies in developing a trauma theory that exceeds these obsolete categories, and focuses, instead, on implicated subjects such as the beneficiaries of neo-liberal capitalism (cf. Rothberg 2013: xvii). I conclude by stating that trauma narratives should be self-reflexive toward their own master narratives which highlight certain (psychiatric) responses to trauma: testimonials, closures, victims and perpetrators or overcoming hardship. I suggest that intersectional trauma theory addresses implicated subjects, often negotiating between some privileges and some oppressions. Trauma narratives must not colonize other kinds of expressions of trauma or insidious, traumatizing structures that operate through body, affect, positionality and the transparent institutions attached to everyday living. I argue that these systems may be rendered comprehensible with the help of/in/through/with intersectional trauma studies. Clare’s trauma of displacement, Monica’s prolonged fading or Tommy’s mundane suffering become graspable in terms of intersectionality.

Bibliography Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands, La Frontera. The New Mestiza, San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Barnes, F. R. (1992) “Resisting Cultural Cannibalism: Oppositional Narratives in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven”, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 25(1): 23–31. Berlant, L. (1997) The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Kaisa Ilmonen Boyce Davies, C. (1994) Black Women, Writing and Identity. Migrations of the Subject, London: Routledge. Brah, A. and Phoenix, A. (2004) “Ain’t I A Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality”, Journal of International Women’s Studies 5(3): 75–86. Brodber, E. (1980) Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, London: New Beacon Books. Brown, L. (2008) Cultural Competence in Trauma Therapy: Beyond the Flashback, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Cliff, M. (1996 [1987]) No Telephone to Heaven, New York: Plume. Covi, G. (1997) “Decolonialized Feminist Subject”, in G. Covi (ed.) Critical Studies on the Feminist Subject, Trento: Dipartimento di Scienze Filologische e Storiche, 19–56. Craps, S. (2014) Postcolonial Witnessing. Trauma Out of Bounds, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Crenshaw, K. (1989) “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67. ———. (2012) “Postscript”, in H. Lutz, M. T. Herrera Vivar and L. Supik (eds) Framing Intersectionality. Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies, Farnham: Ashgate, 221–33. Cvetkovich, A. (2003) An Archive of Feelings. Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Durham: Duke University Press. Davis, K. (2008) “Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful”, Feminist Theory 9(1): 67–85. Dhamoon, R. K. (2011) “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality”, Political Research Quarterly 64(1): 230–43. Grabham, E. (2009) “Intersectionality. Traumatic Impressions”, in E. Grabham, D. Cooper, J. Krishnadas, D. Herman (eds) Intersectionality and Beyond. Law, Power and the Politics of Location, Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 183–201. Ilmonen, K. (2017) Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff. Intersectionality and Sexual Modernity, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. (2019) “Identity Politics Revisited: On Audre Lorde, Intersectionality, and Mobilizing Writing Styles”, European Journal for Women’s Studies 26(1): 7–22. Kabir, A. J. (2013) “Affect, Body, Place. Trauma Theory in the World”, in G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone (eds) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, London: Routledge, 63–75. Lorde, A. (1980) “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, April 1980. ———. (1984) Sister Outsider, Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Lutz, H. (2014) “Intersectionality’s (brilliant) Career – How to Understand the Attraction of the Concept?” Gender, Diversity and Migration. Working Paper Series 2014(1): 1–19. MacKinnon, C. A. (2013) “Intersectionality as Method: A Note”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38(4): 1019–30. May, V. M. (2015) Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries, New York: Routledge. McCarthy-Brown, K. (1997) “The Power to Heal. Haitian Women in Vodou”, in C. López Springfield (ed.) Daughters of Caliban. Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 123–42. Nash, J. C. (2008) “Re-Thinking Intersectionality”, Feminist Review 89: 1–15. Phillips, C. (2015) The Lost Child, London: Oneworld Publications. Phillips Casteel, S. (2016) Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination, New York: Columbia University Press. Rahman, M. (2009) “Theorising Intersectionality: Identities, Equality and Ontology”, in E. Grabham, D. Cooper, J. Krishnadas and D. Herman (eds) Intersectionality and Beyond: Law, Power and the Politics of Location, Cavendish: Routledge, 352–73. Robinson-Walcott, K. (2003) “Claiming an Identity We Thought They Despised: Contemporary White West Indian Writers and Their Negotiation of Race”, Small Axe 7(2): 93–110. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. (2013) “Beyond Tancred and Clorinda – Trauma Studies for Implicated Subjects”, in G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone (eds) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, London: Routledge, xi–xvii.

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Intersectionality Walker, A. (1983) “Definition of Womanist”, in G. Anzaldúa (ed.) Making Face, Making Soul. Haciendo Caras. Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 370. Wilentz, G. (2000) Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Disease, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006) “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3): 193–209.

Further reading Buelens, G., Durrant, S. and Eaglestone, R. (eds) (2013) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, London: Routledge. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing. Trauma Out of Bounds, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cvetkovich, A. (2003) An Archive of Feelings. Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Durham: Duke University Press. Hill Collins, P. and Bilge, S. (2016) Intersectionality, Cambridge: Polity Press. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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PART III

Critical perspectives and future directions

17 COSMOLOGICAL TRAUMA AND POSTCOLONIAL MODERNITY Sam Durrant and Ryan Topper

In this essay we make two seemingly contradictory arguments regarding the relationship between trauma and postcolonial theory: trauma theory has always been postcolonial, and it is not yet postcolonial. By highlighting the similarities between Cathy Caruth’s and Edward Said’s readings of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1990b), we show how both trauma theory and postcolonial critique have been centrally concerned with the traumatic origin of racial and cultural difference and the undoing of identitarian binds. We therefore suggest that Caruth’s theory of implicated subjectivity, which she pulls from Freud, is much more in line with postcolonial theory than critics of her Eurocentrism have recognized. At the same time, her theory of implication must become more postcolonial, we argue, by moving beyond its anthropocentric coordinates to consider our implication in the more-than-human world. Here we return to the debate within trauma studies surrounding Freud’s reading of Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated to expand the question of who/what is wounded when Tancred slashes at the magical forest. We then turn to two postcolonial literary texts that illustrate our expanded sense of implication, focusing on the opening of Derek Walcott’s celebrated (anti-)epic poem, Omeros (1990) and the ending of Uzodinma Iweala’s child-soldier novella, Beasts of No Nation (2005). Both of these passages concern the ancestral spirits that reside within trees and accordingly the cosmological violence involved in hacking them down. By placing Walcott’s and Iweala’s writings in dialogue with Freud’s reading of Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated, we propose our concept of cosmological trauma, which names the rupture in relational networks produced by colonization. A postcolonial approach to trauma studies must begin by apprehending the cosmological damage wreaked by colonial modernity, which implicates not only humans, but entire systems of relations amidst the cosmos. The two Freudian texts that inaugurate Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience, namely his discussion of Tasso’s account of the Crusades, and his discussion of the origins of Judaism in Moses and Monotheism, are concerned with the violence involved in the shift from a belief in a multiplicity of spirits to monotheism. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, rather more explicit than Freud in their critique of Western civilization, frame this transition as part of a wider shift from an enchanted, magical worldview to a disenchanted, logocentric worldview, a shift in which nature is emptied of spiritual meaning and reduced to “mere objectivity”: “In their mastery of nature, the Creative God and the ordering mind are alike. Man’s likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command” 187

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(1947: 6). What is lost in this hierarchical separation of culture from nature is animism, that principle of a mutually animating and multiply ensouled natureculture common to so many indigenous cosmologies (Soyinka 1992; Bird-David 1999; Rooney 2000; Harvey 2013). Cosmological trauma names this loss, this fall from a mutually animated world. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, “The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism” (1947: 2). The multiple acts of “extirpation” which accompanied European colonialism were the literalisation of this drive towards disenchantment. However, as the dialectical reading of Enlightenment advanced by Horkheimer and Adorno suggests, there is no absolute break between the world of myth and the ostensibly rational world of modernity: animism has only ever been repressed rather than extirpated and continues to inform (albeit unevenly across different cultures and communities, something which Horkheimer and Adorno’s Eurocentric account obscures) what Achille Mbembe has described as the “entangled” temporality of postcolonial modernity (2001: 14). A postcolonial approach to trauma studies, we submit, cannot simply entail a shift of focus towards “non-Western” trauma victims, but must begin by apprehending the cosmological damage wreaked by the deanimating (and/or falsely animating) forces of modernity and thus by questioning the ostensibly rational, secular coordinates of psychoanalysis. Our first thesis is partially intended as a nuancing of recent calls for the decolonization of trauma theory, a call emblematized by Stef Craps’ Postcolonial Witnessing (2013). Craps indicts (Caruthian) trauma theory on four counts: [T]he founding texts of the field […] marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures, they tend to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity, they often favour or even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation […] and they generally disregard the connections between metropolitan and non-Western or minority traumas. (Craps 2013: 2) We agree with Craps’ core argument: trauma theory must expand its gaze. However, all but the last of the four charges he lays above rely on a stable opposition between a hegemonic Western subject and a non-Western or minority subject whose traumas have been overlooked or misapprehended. The first charge glosses over the ambivalent status of Jews as both and neither Western and non-Western, as Said describes in Freud and the Non-European (2014). The second takes Western modernity as a discrete category, as if Western modernity had not emerged precisely through the violent construction (both discursive and material) of the non-West. The third leads to a championing of realism, that form which, as human rights theorists such as Joseph Slaughter have demonstrated, is irrevocably tied to the universalization of Enlightenment concepts of the human, personhood, self-determination and statehood (and thus to the Eurocentrism Craps attempts to dismantle). Finally, Craps’ fourth critique is for us less a critique than a reaffirmation of Caruth’s argument about co-implication. Indeed, Craps positions his work as making good on the “promise of ethical cross-cultural engagement” that Caruth’s theory suggests but does not, for him, deliver (Craps 2013: 6). In this sense, he, like us, seeks to extend Caruth’s insights, particularly in the later chapters of his book, which offer nuanced readings of the ways different traumas interconnect. The problem comes in the initial, overly Manichean division of “Western” from “postcolonial and minority” subjects. This framing is symptomatic of US academic culture in particular, where postcolonial studies is often understood as driven by an identity politics that seeks to combat hegemonic subject positions. This identitarian battle also structures the current 188

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academic “trauma industry,” to use John Mowitt’s phrase (2000: 277). Drawing on Wendy Brown’s States of Injury (1995), Mowitt (2000: 282) argues that trauma has come to name the enviable wound that “produces moral authority” in the empowered victim who implicitly operates as the subject of both radical and neoconservative politics (consider how the men’s movement and white supremacy discourses are founded on injury claims that mimic those made by feminist and anti-racist movements). Although trauma-informed identity politics has a powerful role to play in highlighting hegemonic forms of violence, the project of decolonizing trauma studies must go beyond a focal shift towards marginalized subjects if it is to break the cycle of ressentiment in which critique (reproducing the rhetoric of the public sphere) remains locked. Here, the anti–identitarian insights about the nature of subjectivity that shaped the foundational texts of both postcolonial theory and trauma theory have renewed importance. In our view, decolonizing trauma studies must entail both insisting on, and extending, these insights. Emerging at roughly the same moment, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, both postcolonial and trauma theory are indebted to the poststructuralism that preceded and made possible their institutionalization within the humanities. Caruth’s famous dictum that “history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (1996: 24) echoes Edward Said’s insistence on a contrapuntal humanism, Homi Bhabha’s emphasis on the belatedness of postcolonial modernity, and Gayatri Spivak’s reading of the non-representable subaltern histories that haunt the annals of both colonial and postcolonial history. More explicitly than Said, Spivak and Bhabha cast the postcolonial as traumatic in what later becomes the Caruthian sense of the term. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak famously argues that subaltern subjectivity emerges as trauma, while Bhabha shifts the focus onto how such subjectivities traumatize the nation-state. Most notably, in “DissemiNation” (1990), he casts the postcolonial migrant as the return of the nation-state’s repressed colonial history, someone who de-seminates or undoes a national community’s imagined homogeneity, revealing it as “implicated” in the traumas of those it seeks to exclude. This structure of disavowed implication is at the heart of contemporary politics: the failures of multiculturalism, the virulence of xenophobic populism and the peculiarly amnesiac power of slogans such as Make America (and now Britain) Great Again all gain cultural impetus through identitarian claims to traumas that must be repaired. As S.S. “Whiskey” Sisodia puts it in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, “The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means” (Rushdie 1988: 317). For Rushdie and Bhabha colonialism is constitutively traumatic for the colonized and the colonizer, albeit, we would hasten to add, in asymmetrical ways. As an animalized migrant puts it in the same novel, “[T]hey have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct” (168). We have no wish to flatten out the very different nature and effects of empire and racism. The work of the Martinican psychiatrist Franz Fanon, on which both Rushdie and Bhabha draw, is foundational to any postcolonial trauma theory. His work on the colonial gaze and the traumatic relegation of the racially marked to objecthood remains as salient today as it was when Black Skin, White Masks was first published in 1952. For Fanon, it is the Manichean nature of colonialism that necessitates the revolutionary violence that he advocates in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), but his own thought remains dialectical (rather than oppositional or essentialist) in nature. “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World” as less-than-human, he argues, casting the racial, territorial trauma he spent his career examining as constitutive not only of the colonies, but of the world (Fanon 2004: 58). If both Europe and the “Third World” are constituted through Empire, then colonialism marks the moment in which

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modernity becomes irrevocably implicated in non-European history, and postcolonial theory is the attempt to excavate this traumatic history of implication. In this light, the focus of “Yale-school” trauma theorists such as Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman on the Holocaust is a complementary attempt to excavate the moment at which, in the words of Aimé Césaire, the white man “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the niggers of Africa” (Césaire 2000: 36). This framework (shared by Hannah Arendt) is not how Holocaust scholars typically present their work. The insistence of some commentators on the exceptionality of the Holocaust—an insistence that the Israeli state has repeatedly used to obscure its ongoing implication in “colonialist procedures”—sets up an antagonistic relationship between Holocaust and postcolonial studies that Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory (2009) is a welcome attempt to alleviate. Indeed, this essay is aligned with Rothberg’s work—including his recent Implicated Subjects (2019)—in calling for a return to what we would suggest is the fundamentally postcolonial impulse of Caruth’s insistence on mutual implication. Our second thesis, that trauma theory is not yet postcolonial, takes a rather different tack from previous critiques. Following their institutionalizations, both postcolonial theory and trauma theory have been subject to internal and external critique from theorists broadly suspicious of poststructuralism. So-called “pomo poco” theory has been attacked by Marxist theorists such as Neil Lazarus (1999) and Benita Parry (2004) for its alleged betrayal of the nationalist anti-colonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to being critiqued for its seemingly Eurocentric focus, critics such as Ruth Leys (2000) and Lauren Berlant (2011) suggest that trauma theory’s poststructuralist bent severs the discourse from realpolitik. In spite of these critiques, we believe that the most profound insights of both movements derive directly from their engagements with poststructuralism. More specifically, while nationalism was central to anticolonial struggle, the “worlding” of trauma theory must retain its deconstructive, anti-identitarian impulse if it is to combat the virulence of contemporary nationalist movements. While acknowledging the central complaint of the Warwick collective, that “pomo poco” fails to take into account the uneven distribution of wealth produced by global capitalism, we would insist that this failure has to do with not being anti-identitarian enough (Deckard et al. 2015). As we have intimated in our initial citation of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is the domination of nature, or what current commentators have dubbed “extractive capitalism”, that continues to drive imperialism. The domination of certain peoples by others needs to be placed within the context of man’s domination of the earth and the concomitant taboo against anthropomorphism (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 4), understood not as the projection of human qualities onto the non-human or inanimate world but as an insistence on our co-animacy, on the distributed, more-than-human, nature of personhood (Abram 1996; Plumwood 2003). Indeed, for Horkheimer and Adorno, racism is the result of man’s domination, and traumatic disavowal, of his own nature, a disavowal that then leads to the projection of unwanted animal qualities onto other humans. The taboo on anthropomorphism leads directly to racism, to the refusal to attribute personhood not simply to the non-human but also to certain categories of human being. From this perspective, trauma theory is not yet postcolonial in so far as it continues to understand trauma as the breaching of the boundaries of an otherwise bordered or individuated human subjectivity. For many of the peoples and cultures subject to European colonialism, subjectivity is not only not individuated, but also not simply human: the “we” that becomes implicated through colonialism needs to include the “more than human” world if trauma theory (and indeed postcolonial theory) is to be fully decolonized. To say that trauma theory is not yet postcolonial is thus to say that it has not yet caught up with the environmental, posthumanist or planetary “turn” in critical theory. This turn is of course no 190

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turn at all if we begin from the perspectives of indigenous knowledge systems or animist epistemologies. Even within Western academia, critics such as Sylvia Wynter (2003) have long been arguing that colonialism is coextensive with Man’s domination of nature through His epistemic “overrepresentation”. Similarly, anthropologists such as David Abram, Tim Ingold and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro have argued against the bordered Cartesian subject and for our irreducible enmeshment in the world, an enmeshment that undoes distinctions not only between one culture and another, one people and another, but between nature and culture, the human and the non-human. This enmeshment in the world extends Caruth’s theory of implication beyond the humanist coordinates of psychoanalysis. Ingold (2011) and Viveiros de Castro (2014) explicitly link the enmeshed ontologies of indigenous peoples to Deleuze’s rhizomatic model of subjectivity. Reconsidering Deleuze’s attempt to deterritorialize psychoanalysis in dialogue with indigenous ontologies, and tracing how this reconsideration might recast Caruthian implication, thus appears to us a vital step in the attempt to produce a genuinely postcolonial trauma theory, one that might allow us to ask what kind of breach trauma constitutes for those who do not understand themselves as bordered, individuated human subjects. Implication is central to understanding how trauma inflects diasporic as well as indigenous subjectivities. As Petar Ramanadovic points out, “The subject in or of trauma is […], for Caruth, culturally and politically a diasporic subject, en route toward subjectivity” (Ramanadovic 1998: 55). One could read Caruth and Ramanadovic as “universalizing” the Holocaust and the experience of the Jewish diaspora as constitutive of “modern” subjectivity, but theorists of the African diaspora have made analogous claims about what it means to have survived the trauma of the Middle Passage. Paul Gilroy, for instance, quotes Toni Morrison’s claim that “modern life begins with slavery”, that the slave developed “strategies for survival [that] made the truly modern person” (Gilroy 1993: 221). While the Middle Passage marks the particularity of black experience in the New World, for Edouard Glissant it also constitutes an “abyssal” history, a non-narrativisable anti-history that simultaneously grounds and ungrounds racial identity. Glissant argues that the trauma of the Middle Passage both defines Caribbean culture but also links it to the rest of the world: For though this experience made you, original victim floating toward the sea’s abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on exception. […] This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange. (Glissant 1997: 8) Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990) can thus be read as an important precursor of Caruth’s theory of traumatic implication. However, Glissant, like Ingold and Vivieros de Castro, draws on Deleuze rather than Freud, casting his theory of relationality as rhizomatic (Glissant 1997: 11). What is important for us is not the choice of Deleuze over Freud, but rather Glissant’s related call for a deterritorializing “aesthetics of the earth” (151) in which trauma becomes the link not simply between different peoples and cultures but between the human and the non-human, culture and nature—which moves beyond trauma theory’s myopic focus on the human. As we shall suggest in our reading of Tancred and Clorinda, and in our readings of Omeros and Beasts of No Nation, traumatic wounds are not something to be claimed exclusively by this or that (human) subject (and that then become, following Mowitt, the subject of trauma envy): wounds are inherently and unendingly relational, or, to use our own phrase, cosmological. 191

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Cosmological trauma thus emerges as the key term for a properly postcolonial trauma studies in so far as it extends the very principle of extension at the heart of Caruthian trauma theory. For Caruth, trauma is not something that happens to subjects (whether individual or collective) but something that happens between subjects, something that exposes the subject’s inaccessibility to itself, its radical incompletion. Cosmological trauma extends this sense of irreducible implication beyond the human subject to which Caruth remains anchored even in her more recent shift toward the “life drive” (2013). In its narrowest definition, cosmological trauma simply constitutes another category of trauma, denoting a rupture within a non-Western, non-secular belief system—for example, the breakdown of animist worldviews that canonical African texts such as Things Fall Apart and Death and the King’s Horseman take to be central to the trauma of colonization. Following Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and many other postcolonial writers towards a broader definition, one might say that cosmological trauma is the direct result of colonialism and the destruction of indigenous belief systems. In this sense cosmological trauma might also be termed ancestral trauma, denoting both a breach in the relation between the present and the past, the living and the dead, and a rupture of the mechanisms by which a culture inherits itself. Mbembe describes the necropolitical conditions of postcolonial life in similar terms: extending Foucauldian biopolitics, he argues that the postcolony is governed not (only) by the political capture of life itself under the logic of sovereignty, but of death—including the agency of those long dead: the ancestors. More perverse than biopolitical subjection, the aim of necropolitics is “to abolish any idea of ancestry and thus any debt with regard to the past” (Mbembe 2002: 269; see also Durrant 2018; Topper 2019). In its broadest definition, in so far as animacy is a principle of life or “spiritedness” rather than a specific human belief system that “endows” non-human entities with spirit, all trauma is cosmological (Rooney 2000; Ingold 2011). While this last definition potentially eclipses the specificity of (post)colonial trauma, it also points most strongly towards a postcolonial world view in which the deanimating trauma of modernity takes centre stage.

Freud and Monotheism Freud spent his final months attempting to uncover the origin of Judaism. This project was his psychoanalytic response both to the anti-Semitism at the heart of the Third Reich’s mass psychology and to his own diasporic displacement from Vienna to London. In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, he calls this origin the “historical truth”, as opposed to the “material truth”, of monotheism (Freud, quoted in Santner 1999: 4). This historical truth is revealed, he argues, by unraveling the unspoken yet foundational truth of the biblical narrative: Moses was not a Jew. As he admits in the opening sentence of Moses and Monotheism, aiming such a depropriative act at a prophet is risky, but necessary. “To deprive a people of the man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons is not a thing to be gladly or carelessly undertaken,” he writes, “least of all by someone who is himself one of them. But we cannot allow any such reflection to induce us to put the truth aside in favour of what are supposed to be national interests” (Freud 1990b: 243; emphasis added). Instead of defending Jewish cultural purity, Freud exegetes from the biblical narrative an original impurity, emblematized by Moses’ position as both a gentile and the first prophet of the Jews. Contra the Nazi insistence on Jewish impurity to which he is responding, however, Freud celebrates this lack by pinning the “historical truth” it reveals against the desire for purity within the mass psychology of fascism and, in the quote above, the nation-state. This celebratory depropriation, in other words, casts Jewish monotheism as a tradition built upon the undoing of identitarian binds, thereby demonstrating a foundation for community beyond the parameters of communitarianism. 192

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As Said points out, Freud’s argument is profoundly anti-Zionist. “[I]n excavating the archeology of Jewish identity”, Said writes in his late work Freud and the Non-European, “Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself but, rather, with other identities”—better yet, with an Arab (Said 2014: 44). This view of “Moses as both insider and outsider” (16), Jew and Arab, suggests, Said writes, [T]here are inherent limits that prevent [community] from being incorporated into one, and only one, Identity. Freud’s symbol of those limits was that the founder of Jewish identity was himself a non-European Egyptian. In other words, identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood […]. (54) Consequently, for Said, Freud leaves us with urgent questions that reach beyond the Israel/ Palestine debate: “[C]an so utterly indecisive and so deeply undetermined a history ever be written? In what language, and with what sort of vocabulary?” (55). Such questions resonate with those Caruth raises in the first chapter of Unclaimed Experience. Like Said, Caruth argues that Freud’s Moses and Monotheism reaches beyond Jewish history, demonstrating a more universal historiography rooted in the idea that “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own” (Caruth 1996: 24). Many critics have faulted Caruth for positing through such seemingly universalizing claims an apolitical theory of trauma. According to Dominick LaCapra (2001), for example, Caruth fails to differentiate between structural and historical trauma. For Ruth Leys, she fails to differentiate between victim and perpetrator. And for Craps, as previously noted, Caruth’s universalization of Jewish trauma is a sign of its irrevocably Western focus. But Said’s convergence with Caruth complicates such claims. If Freud excavates from Jewish history a “diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside his or her community”, as Said puts it, then the Judaic bent of trauma theory is less a sign of its Eurocentrism than a sign of its interest in histories that destabilize identitarian claims (Said 2014: 53). If Caruth construes this destabilisation in terms of poststructuralist historiography, Said does so in more explicitly political language. Furthermore, given that Freud’s focus is monotheism, Caruth’s and Said’s readings of Freud imply a similar paradox: monotheism is unconsciously animist—at least in structure: Judaic monotheism is animated not by a sovereign voice, but by an enmeshment of multiplicities. For Freud, the nomology of Western culture is a Judeo-Christian inheritance formed around the trauma of being subjected to the sovereign —be it the father (as in the Oedipal family structure), or, more effectively, an archetypal presence of the father (as in monotheistic theology). But Freud’s thesis that Moses was not a Jew, Caruth and Said argue, casts this inheritance as fictive, and in reality a process of becoming traumatically co-implicated in fictive formations of sovereignty. The problem for a fully decolonized postcolonial theory, the problem so presciently raised by Horkheimer and Adorno, thus becomes how to go beyond the logic of (human) sovereignty. Perhaps the strongest sense in which trauma theory is inherently postcolonial is thus that it presents trauma as an opening up of the self to the world, as an undoing of the fiction of sovereignty Freud places at the core of Western culture’s monotheistic structure. This opening explains the recent appeal of Judith Butler’s work to both trauma and postcolonial theorists. As she argues in Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009), trauma constitutes a 193

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political opening, a potential opening of the polis to that which, and those who, lie outside its walls. By destabilising the fiction of a bordered, sui generis subject, trauma reveals the implicated nature of our existence, something often elided by our culturally bordered subject positions. Butler’s call to embrace our “common corporeal vulnerability” is powerful precisely because it frames itself in more directly political terms than Caruth’s, speaking as it does to 9/11, the subsequent war on terror and xenophobic reaction to the so-called refugee crisis. But there is also a sense in which Butler’s work is limited by its desire to turn a deconstructive ethics into a political opening. As Pieter Vermeulen (2014) points out, borders have a crucial function in mediating the relation between the outside and the inside; even in the Freudian model, it is precisely the process of exposure to external excitation that deadens or “bakes” the outer layers of the organism and thus reinsulates the internal layers of the psyche. What is needed—and here Vermeuelen is decisively influenced by Hartman’s claim that Wordsworth’s poetry mediated the trauma of modernity and thereby inoculated Britain against the pastoral idealisations at the heart of Fascism—is an aesthetic framing device that can allow a working through of our constitutive vulnerability, our co-implication, without provoking the violent immune reactions that currently structure our political landscape. For us, this is the impulse behind what Graham Harvey terms the “new animism”: to find a way of defusing the pathology of human exceptionalism by re-imbedding subjectivity, or better, our co-spiritedness, in the world. Soyinka describes this co-spiritedness as “the animist interfusion of all matter and consciousness” (Soyinka 1992: 145). Only though an understanding of our irreducible interfusion or co-animacy will we grasp that our feelings of vulnerability are produced precisely by our conceptions of ourselves as bordered.

Tree spirits Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience (1996) famously begins with Freud’s analysis of a scene of haunting from Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated. In Tasso’s epic of the First Crusade, Tancred accidentally kills his beloved, Clorinda. After the burial, Tancred enters a magical forest and slashes a tree with his sword. As blood streams down the tree, Tancred hears Clorinda’s voice cry out. To Tancred’s horror, Clorinda’s spirit resides in the tree. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud interprets this haunting as a representation of the repetition compulsion. Like trauma victims who return to their catastrophes through dreams, Tancred returns to the scene of trauma, re-wounding his beloved against his conscious will. Caruth goes further, interpreting the scene as a parable of the ethics embodied in witnessing trauma. Tancred’s trauma arises through his responsibility for Clorinda’s death, and through this implication a haunting voice arises to address Tancred. Just as Clorinda’s voice —or, more precisely, the voice of the wound (and thus Clarinda’s absence)—cries out to Tancred, trauma structurally opens new modes of being addressed by the other. Leys, on the other hand, argues that through their universalizing interpretations, Freud and Caruth mistakenly represent Tancred, the perpetrator, as a victim. For Leys, Clorinda is the “indisputable victim of wounding”, not Tancred, and Caruth’s mistake has larger consequences (Leys 2000: 294). Following Caruth’s logic “would turn other perpetrators into victims too”, Leys writes; “for example, it would turn the executioners of the Jews into victims and the ‘cries’ of the Jews into testimony to the trauma suffered by the Nazis” (297). In sum, Leys replaces Caruth’s emphasis on implicated subjectivity with a politically charged instantiation of bordered subject positions. Though extreme, Leys’ argument is emblematic of what has become the standard critique of psychoanalytic, deconstructive trauma theory—which, as we previously suggested, too readily fuels the identitarian trauma envy undergirding contemporary politics. The (ostensibly) postcolonial critique of trauma theory largely follows 194

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Leys’ cue in rejecting Caruth’s deconstructive approach to the subject of trauma, casting Clorinda, an Ethiopian princess, as “the female voice of black Africa” (Novak 2008: 32; Craps 2013: 15). In Multidirectional Memory, Rothberg intercedes in this debate, attempting to articulate a middle ground. Like Leys, he is predominantly concerned with the cultural politics of representing trauma, yet he recognizes a category mistake in Leys’ interpretation. The diagnostic category of trauma does not translate neatly into the legal/moral categories of victim and perpetrator, he insists (perpetrators often become traumatized, for instance); furthermore, Caruth’s conflation of subjectivities demonstrates the messy yet necessary process through which memories of cultural trauma (e.g., colonial expansion and the Holocaust) become entangled in the public sphere. We wish to intervene in this debate by questioning Rothberg’s most mundane point: Clorinda cannot be traumatized because she is dead. “The dead are not traumatized”, he writes, “they are dead” (Rothberg 2009: 90). What if Leys is misguided in her conflation of trauma and morality, political justice and stably bordered identities, but correct (perhaps unwittingly so) in her claim that dead people can be traumatized? What is repeated is not only Tancred’s initial wounding of Clorinda but monotheism’s attempted extirpation of animism. In voicing its own wounding, the spirited tree thus testifies both to its own animacy and to the ties that bind Tancred not just to Clorinda but to all life forms. If trauma studies is not yet postcolonial, it is because its secular, anthropocentric coordinates cannot conceive of trauma as a spiritual, environmental and cosmological rupture, as something that happens—and keeps on happening—not simply to individuals, nor even to a people, but to the broader network of relations by which life itself is animated.

Omeros Cosmological rupture is at the heart of Derek Walcott’s Omeros. If epic is irrevocably tied to the ideology of empire (Quint 1993), then Walcott’s poem is an anti-epic, what Robert Hamner (1997: 3) describes, almost oxymoronically, as an “epic of the dispossessed”. Like Moses and Monotheism, it is a deconstructive story of origins, an anti-foundational story about the foundation of a people. Its aim, like all epics, is homecoming, but a homecoming that is only possible through the dismantling of the fiction of a homeland. While epic poetry traditionally sings a people into being, Walcott wishes to “sing the deep hymn/of the Caribbean” (Walcott 1990: 321): on the one hand, the Caribbean is a geopolitical space of Relation that binds together all those implicated in transatlantic slavery and colonialism (Glissant 1997). On the other, the Caribbean is (also) a posthuman space: at the end of the poem, it is not a people but the sea itself which survives its abyssal history. The last line of the poem thus reconfigures Caruth’s exploration of departure and survival: “When he [Achille, Walcott’s (anti-) epic hero] left the beach, the sea was still going on” (Walcott 1990: 325). The goal of Walcott’s poetry turns out to be the cessation of poetry itself, that “light beyond metaphor” (271) in which the Caribbean would sing itself, the paradox of a wholly “green” poetry in which human sound gives way to the sound of nature: only in this act of creative amnesia can what Walcott calls the “wound of history” find its cure. In 1974, Derek Walcott was arguing against the same wound culture that is the subject of Brown and Mowitt’s contemporary critique: “In the New World servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters” (Walcott 1998: 37). Omeros begins with its own ironic take on the trauma industry: Philoctete, a St. Lucian fisherman ignorant of the wounds of his classical forebear, shows off his scarred shin to tourists in exchange for “some extra silver”. The wound was apparently made by a 195

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rusty anchor, but we later learn that he believes its refusal to heal is because “its swelling came from the chained ankles of his grandfather” (Walcott 1990: 19). The poem will go on to retell this history of ancestral wounding and its cure, a story that remains withheld from the tourists of the opening scene: “‘It have some things’—he smiles—‘worth more than a dollar’” (4). The tale that Philoctete does tell the tourists is instead seemingly more befitting of epic, a story of origins. The poem begins: “‘This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes’”. He narrates how he and his companions became fishermen by felling and hollowing some trees, a story of implication rather than victimage, a story not of slaves but of “murderers” (Walcott 1990: 3). In felling the trees, the men inscribe themselves in the history of Man’s domination of nature. As in Freud’s reading of Tasso’s epic, tree-hacking is a form of repetition compulsion: the poem explicitly parallels the wounding of the trees with the wounding of Philoctete’s shin and thus with the “originary” wound of slavery. This parallel deepens when Achille imagines himself as a “Buffalo Soldier” in the American West—his boat his steed, his oar his rifle—shooting at palm trees he takes to be Indians “until the shore/was littered with palm spears, bodies: like Aruacs/falling to the muskets of the Conquistador” (162). Contra Leys, perpetrator and victim cannot be separated: the descendants of slaves are seemingly destined to re-perpetrate both the caesura of the Middle Passage and the colonisation of the entire New World. The trees themselves understand their own felling as an act of genocide irrevocably entangled with the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands:

The bearded elders endured the decimation Of their tribe without uttering a syllable Of that language they had uttered as one nation. (Walcott 1990: 6) But the tribe being decimated here is not only the Aruacs whose “patois crackled in the smell/of a resinous bonfire” (6) but also those African tribes decimated by slavery and their Carribean descendants. The indigenous iguana for which the island was first named provides the only perspective from which this trauma can be witnessed:

Although smoke forgets the earth from which it ascends, and nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed, an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens over its lost name […]. The slit pods of its eyes ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries, that rose with the Aruacs’ smoke til a new race unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees. These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space for a single God where the old gods stood before. (Walcott 1990: 4–5) The passage collapses Freud’s readings of Tasso and the Hebrew Scriptures into one another. The about-to-become fishermen are unaware that the trees were once gods. What they are repeating in felling the trees is not only the severance of the New World from Africa, but the violence of the transition from polytheism to monotheism—which the 196

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language of fire and smoke in the passage above casts as a holocaust in its theological definition: a burnt offering. Leaving aside important distinctions between gods and spirits, polytheism and animism (see Vetlesen 2019), the fundamental movement of the passage is from a cosmology in which all matter is potentially spirit to a monotheism in which spirit is abstracted from the earth and sublimated into a sky-God, a “blue space” that signifies only through its absence, through the “hole” it leaves in the forest canopy. If Freud’s vision of the origin of monotheism is the undoing of monos itself, Walcott’s vision of colonization emerges both as a hole left by the discursive formation of (Western) sovereignty and as the repression of this theological undoing. Walcott’s poem offers a simultaneously dialectical and deconstructive—rather than Manichean—theory of trauma in which the postcolonial subject, entangled within mutually ruptured frames of reference, is forever caught between indigeneity and diaspora, enchantment and disenchantment, victimhood and complicity. Cosmological trauma, for Walcott, thus points towards the impossibility of indigeneity or authentic dwelling in the world. Nevertheless, hope lies in the fact that all cosmologies, as Freud intimates, contain memory traces of the systems they have displaced. Walcott’s pragmatic tree-fellers are irrevocably implicated in Enlightenment’s extirpation of animism. But Achille’s punning commentary on his labour—“Tree! You can be a canoe! Or else you cannot” (Walcott 1990: 6)—and his subsequent naming of his canoe “In God we Troust” suggests sublimation rather than extirpation, a process of transformation experienced even by the trees themselves: “now the trunks in eagerness to become canoes/ploughed into breakers of bushes [ … ]/feeling not death inside them but use—to roof the sea, to be hulls” (7). Walcott’s poem, like Tasso’s, thus gives voice to cosmological trauma, simultaneously narrating the history of disenchantment and reenchanting the world through the compulsively anthropomorphic drive of poetry itself. This drive, this survival of cosmological trauma, is emblematised in the poem by the swift that crosses the newly rent hole in the canopy, foreshadowing the way in which it, like the poet’s own “chirping nib” (321), will cross and recross the Middle Passage, frantically stitching together the multiple times of its wounding.

Beasts of No Nation Like Philoctete, we will not disclose how, or even if, such cosmological wounds are finally healed. Instead, we will close by turning to the ending of Uzodinma Iweala’s (2005) novella, Beasts of No Nation and its resistance to the trauma industry in which it finds itself inscribed. Child soldiers are the subject par excellence of both the “empire of trauma” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009) and “humanitarian reason” (Fassin 2011), the victims not only of civil war but also of international psychiatrists and counsellors parachuted in by international NGOs and tasked with the job of rehabilitation without pausing to ask what kind of subject needs rehabilitation and into whose worlds. “Time is passing. Time is not passing” (Iweala 2005: 65). Agu’s disoriented, presenttense narration reveals a young boy for whom time has lost all meaning because he has severed himself from his own cosmology. He has become the titular beast of no nation not because he has regressed into animality—a colonial mythology of regression dependent on a vertical understanding of the relation between animal, human and spirit—but because he has transgressed ancient taboos concerning indiscriminate violence. His village traces its origins to the fratricidal death of two magical twins who had the ability to shape-shift. They accidentally kill each other when one turns into a leopard and the other an ox, a scene of fatal misrecognition annually reenacted by the village as an anti-foundational story of origins, a remembrance of the potentially infinite nature of kinship. The dance of the leopard and the 197

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ox marks the passage of adolescent boys into manhood, culminating in the ritualized, and thus sanctioned, hacking to death of an ox and the smearing of its blood on the initiates. Manhood is thus figured as a rite of implication. War has meant not only that Agu is unable to participate in this rite, but that he is forced to participate in indiscriminate acts of violence, doomed to repeat the alienated familial violence of his ancestors. A memory of the initiation rite is triggered just before he hacks down a woman whose potential kinship must be disavowed: you are not my mother, I am saying to the girl’s mother and then I am raising my knife high above my head. I am liking the sound of knife chopping KPWUDA, KPWUDA on her head and how the blood is splashing on my hand and my face and feets. I am chopping and chopping and chopping until I am looking up and it is dark. (Iweala 2005: 63) Like Philoctete and his fellow “murderers,” Agu has severed himself from his own relationality, his own cosmos. However, unlike in Omeros, no new light is cast and no new belief system comes to take the place of the old. The novel ends in a rehabilitation camp. Despite his Christian upbringing, Agu is unable to find meaning in the ministrations of Father Festus: “I am always thinking Confession, Forgiveness and Resurrection, I am not knowing what all these words are meaning” (174). His counsellor’s attempts to get him to recount his story are similarly ineffectual, as retelling his story would only re-consign him to the realm of the beast: “If I am telling this to you it will be making you think that I am some sort of beast or devil” (177). The only way out of this alienated limbo is not his rehumanisation but rather his redistribution, the dispersal of his personhood in nature: And I am wanting to stay in this same place forever, never moving for anything, just waiting waiting until the dust is piling on me and grasses is covering me and insect is making their home in the space between my teeths. I am telling her [his counsellor] that one Iroko tree will be growing from my body, so wide that its trunk is separating day and night, and so tall that its top is tickling the moon until the man living there is smiling. (Iweala 2005: 176) What a Western-trained counsellor might understand as suicidal melancholia, as the cessation of what Freud termed “self-regard”, is in fact a creaturely affirmation of life, a powerfully post-sovereign image of his own resacralisation and thus reancestralisation. The Iroko tree is sacred for the Ibo culture that has only partially been displaced by the Christianity of Agu’s childhood. Iroko trees are ancestral shrines. Known as “Ozondu” (“life-wire”), their growth is symbolic of connection itself: to hack down such a tree would be to hack down life itself. Day and night, right and wrong have become confused in and by Agu’s experience. To dream of seeding an Iroko tree is to dream of restoring such distinctions, of “[re-]separating day and night” (176) but in such a way as to recover the possibility of connection, the reciprocal, life-affirming pleasures of “tickling”. To return to Tasso by way of conclusion, what postcolonial theory and literature has to offer trauma studies is the insight that it is the violent disavowal of our relatedness that Tancred is doomed to repeat as he returns from the Crusades. He strikes out not “simply” at Clorinda but at his own irreducible enmeshment in “her” world, his unwitting kinship with that magical forest of spirits which modernity has never quite been able to extirpate. 198

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Coming to terms with this trauma is not a matter of diversifying the identities examined within trauma theory, but of undoing identity itself, a decolonization of human sovereignty that aims to re-enchant the question of where subjectivity ends and the cosmos begins.

Bibliography Abram, D. (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, New York: Vintage. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bhabha, H. (1990) “DissemiNation”, in H. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 291– 322. Bird-David, N. (1999) “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology”, Current Anthropology 40(1): 67–91. Brown, W. (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. ———. (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (2013) Literature in the Ashes of History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Césaire, A. (2000 [1950]) Discourse on Colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deckard, S., Lawrence, N., Lazarus, N., Macdonald, G., Mukherjee, P., Parry, B. and Shapiro, S. (2015) Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Durrant, S. (2018) “Creaturely Mimesis: Life after Necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night”, Research in African Literatures 48(3): 178–206. Fanon, F. (1986 [1952]) Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. Lam Markmann, London: Pluto. ———. (2004 [1963]) The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox, New York: Grove. Fassin, D. (2011) Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fassin, D. and Rechtman, R. (2009) Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. R. Gomme, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freud, S. (1990a [1920]) “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, in The Penguin Freud Library Volume 11: On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, A. Dickson (ed.), trans. J. Strachey, London: Penguin, 269–338. ———. (1990b [1939]) Moses and Monotheism in the Penguin Freud Library Volume 13: The Origins of Religion: Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism and Other Works, A. Dickson (ed.) trans. J. Strachey, London: Penguin, 237–386. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. Glissant, E. (1997 [1990]) Poetics of Relation, trans. B. Wing, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hamner, R. (1997) Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Harvey, G. (2013) The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, London and New York: Routledge. Horkheimer, M and Adorno, T. (2002 [1947]) Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. G. Schmid Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ingold, T. (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, London: Routledge. Iweala, U. (2005) Beasts of No Nation, London: John Murray. LaCapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lazarus, N. (1999) Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leys, R. (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony, trans. A. Berrett et al., Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. ———. (2002) “African Modes of Self-Writing”, trans. S. Rendall, Public Culture 14(1): 239–73. Mowitt, J. (2000) “Trauma Envy”, Cultural Critique 46: 272–97.

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Sam Durrant and Ryan Topper Novak, A. (2008) “Who Speaks? Who Listens?: The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels”, Studies in the Novel 40(1): 31–51. Parry, B. (2004) Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, London: Routledge. Plumwood, V. (2003) “Decolonizing Relationships with Nature”, in W. Adams and M. Mulligan (eds) Strategies for Conservation in a Postcolonial Era, London: Earthscan, 51–78. Quint, D. (1993) Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ramanadovic, P. (1998) “When ‘To Die in Freedom’ Is Written in English”, Diacritics 28(4): 54–67. Rooney, C. (2000) African Literature, Animism and Politics, London: Routledge. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. (2019) Implicated Subjects. Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rushdie, S. (1988) The Satanic Verses, Dover, DE: The Consortium. Said, E. (2014 [2003]) Freud and the Non-European, London: Verso. Santner, E. (1999) “Freud’s ‘Moses’ and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire”, October 88: 3–41. Soyinka, W. (1992 [1976]) Myth, Literature and the African World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1994) “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 66–111. Topper, R. (2019) “The Sacrificial Foundation of Modernity in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman”, Research in African Literatures 50(1): 53–79. Vermeulen, P. (2014) “The Biopolitics of Trauma”, in G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone (eds) The Future of Trauma Theory, London: Routledge, 141–55. Vetlesen, A. J. (2019) Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism, London and New York: Routledge. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2014) Cannibal Metaphysics, trans. P. Skafish, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Walcott, D. (1990) Omeros, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. (1998) “The Muse of History” [1974], in What the Twilight Says: Essays, Faber and Faber. Wynter, S. (2003) “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337.

Further reading Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. (See in particular the essay entitled “DissemiNation” for an account of the migrant as the traumatic return of colonial history.) Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (See our discussion above. An important step towards the decolonization of trauma theory.) Fanon, F. (1986 [1952]) Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. Lam Markmann, London: Pluto. (The seminal exploration of the traumatic impact of colonialism on the colonized.) Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. (One of many studies concerned with the trauma of slavery and the Middle Passage.) Glissant, E. (1997 [1990]) Poetics of Relation, trans. B. Wing, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (A pivotal theorization of the trauma of Middle Passage and how this links the Caribbean to other cultures.) Harvey, G. (2013) The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, London and New York: Routledge. (Brings together many of the anthropologists who have advocated for the renewed importance of animism.) Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (A seminal study arguing for the non-competitive interrelation of different cultural traumas.) Spivak, G. (2013) “Imperative to Reimagine the Planet”, in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (One of many arguments in favour of planetary thinking. Even while planetary community remains for Spivak a catachrestic experience of the impossible, we should deploy “the responsibility-thinking of precapitalist societies” to disrupt the logic of global capital.)

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18 TRAUMA AND THE IMPLICATED SUBJECT Michael Rothberg

From victims and perpetrators to implicated subjects Theories of trauma have, until now, focused on the experience of victims and the actions of perpetrators. They have also opened up rich and sometimes controversial discussions of perpetrator trauma and the transmission of trauma to subsequent generations and even to onlookers and bystanders. The categories of victims, perpetrators and bystanders are obvious starting places for accounts of violence and trauma, but are they sufficient? In my book The Implicated Subject (Rothberg 2019), I argue that they are not and suggest that we need to supplement those familiar categories with a new figure of historical and political responsibility. The figures I call “implicated subjects” are neither victims nor perpetrators nor passive bystanders. Rather, they occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm. Implicated subjects contribute to, inhabit, inherit or benefit from – in short, are implicated in – regimes of violence and domination, but do not originate or control such regimes. Implicated subjects are participants in histories and social formations that generate trauma and consolidate the positions of victim and perpetrator, and yet in which most people do not occupy such clear-cut roles. Less “actively” involved than perpetrators, implicated subjects do not fit the mould of the “passive” bystander, either. Although indirect or belated, their actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators. In other words, implicated subjects help propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop up the structures of inequality that mar the present; apparently direct modes of traumatic violence turn out to rely on indirection. Derived from the Latin stem implicāre, meaning to entangle, involve and connect closely, implication, like the proximate but not identical term complicity, draws attention to how we are folded into (im-pli-cated in) events that at first seem beyond our agency as individual subjects. Because the role of implicated subjects in enabling traumatic violence has not generally been on the agenda of trauma theory, I turn here to Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché (Hidden), a concrete example that can help us think through what it means to integrate an account of implication and implicated subjects into our understanding of trauma. Such a contribution lies not in extending the scope of who may be considered a “victim” of trauma, but rather in shifting our focus from the individual, traumatized psyche to the

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enabling material conditions of traumatic violence. Read against the backdrop of Fredric Jameson’s Marxist account of the three horizons of interpretation, Haneke’s film reveals trauma as the effect of the indirect agency of implicated subjects within multiple scales of social life.

Caché: portrait of an implicated subject Caché offers a portrait of Georges Laurent, the successful host of a literary talk show on French television. Georges lives in a stylish Parisian home with his beautiful wife Anne, an editor, and their moody, adolescent son Pierrot. Georges’s comfortable bourgeois life and his apparently liberal values enter into crisis when surveillance videos of his home and the family farmhouse where he grew up appear on his doorstep along with ominous childlike drawings depicting bloody scenes. Brief, enigmatic flashbacks indicate that Georges has quickly developed a suspicion about who is behind the unsettling surveillance, but Georges keeps this information from his wife – and thus from viewers – until developing circumstances force him to reveal his hunch. Although Haneke deliberately leaves the mystery of the videotapes’ origins unresolved, he does encourage viewers to share Georges’s intuition that the harassment he experiences derives from an incident in his childhood and its presumed long-term effects. As Georges eventually admits to Anne – at the very centre of the film – he initially believes the videotapes to be the work of Majid, who was the son of Algerian workers on the Laurent family farm and now lives in a depressing flat in a housing development on the impoverished outskirts of Paris. Majid’s parents disappeared on the night of 17 October 1961 during the notorious police massacre of Algerians who were peacefully demonstrating in Paris against a racist curfew and in support of the FLN, the Algerian independence movement (on 1961, see House and MacMaster 2006). Georges’s parents, we learn in his reluctant and incomplete confession to Anne, wanted to adopt Majid, but the six-year-old Georges conspired through lies and manipulation to undermine their plan. Instead, as we observe in the film’s ambiguously coded penultimate shot – is it a dream sequence, a memory or a fantasy? – the young Majid was forcefully removed from the Laurent family estate and taken to some sort of orphanage or hospital. Once taken away, Majid disappeared from Georges’s life and consciousness for several decades – until the videos lead Georges to Majid’s doorstep. Forced to remember and confront his childhood rival after so many decades, Georges responds angrily and decides that Majid – or more likely Majid’s unnamed son – is seeking to exact revenge for those long-ago events, even though both Majid and his son deny any involvement in the surveillance. In the midst of his re-acquaintance with Georges, the still-suffering Majid slits his own throat in the film’s most visually shocking act of violence. Although disturbed by what he has witnessed, Georges continues to deny any responsibility for the trajectory of Majid’s life, and the film ends ambiguously with hints that the surveillance may continue and that Majid’s son and Pierrot may be co-conspirators of some sort. As this summary should make clear, Caché is manifestly a film about trauma. Its plot turns, like many trauma narratives, on the haunting return of a violent past long after the event in question. The film depicts that past as not yet worked through: it is an “unclaimed experience”, in Cathy Caruth’s resonant phrase, that is simultaneously personal and collective (Caruth 1996). At the centre of the film is Majid’s suicide, a shocking incident of selfinflicted violence that both re-enacts the originary trauma evoked by the film and transmits a version of that trauma to the viewer in turn. The marketing of the film – in the form of 202

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posters and the DVD cover image – turns that incident into a logo: a bloody slash that suggests the stain of traumatic violence. Like almost all trauma narratives, Caché depicts the experience of a victim, but here things become more complicated. Indeed, the film produces a shift in perspective in which viewers’ initial sense of who is being victimized changes as we learn more about the mystery at the heart of the narrative. If, initially, it seems that Georges is being terrorized by an unknown, threatening agent, we come to see that the real victim and traumatized subject is in fact Majid. The depiction of Majid’s trauma is elliptical but affecting: we know little of what has happened to him, but we witness the impact of trauma, après coup, in his interactions with Georges and ultimately in his suicide. In shifting our attention from Georges’s suffering to that of Majid, the film might be seen as enacting a recent turn in trauma theory, in particular the postcolonial critique offered by Stef Craps and others. Craps criticizes Caruth and other “canonical” trauma theorists for sidelining non-European histories and subjects while simultaneously projecting an ethnocentric model of trauma with little purchase outside the centres of power (Craps 2012). The figure of Majid and the repressed history of the 17 October massacre could certainly lead us in this direction and, indeed, in my earlier chapter on Caché in Multidirectional Memory I sought to “provincialize Europe” (Chakrabarty 2007) by showing how the film productively linked the Algerian War of Independence to the Holocaust (Rothberg 2009: ch. 9). Here I attempt something different: I want to suggest that – while powerful in depicting the long-term impact of traumatic victimization and helpful in decentring Eurocentric trauma theory – the film’s most original contribution lies in its exploration of the role of the implicated subject in enabling and benefiting from trauma (for more on narratives of implication, see Meretoja 2018).

Implication: at the margins of injustice By focalizing the film primarily through Georges, but preventing any kind of easy identification with his perspective, Caché opens up an intermediate space for exploring dilemmas of justice and historical responsibility and rethinking trauma. Indeed, the film creates an ambiguous scenario that illuminates the grey areas of responsibility explored in the aftermath of the Holocaust by Primo Levi, Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, among others. Haneke does not want viewers to feel sympathy for Georges – our sympathies are clearly on the side of the suffering, melancholic Majid and his confident, confrontational son – but he does want us to reflect on Georges’s fate: the fate of the implicated subject. Haneke’s film unsettles viewers, not just because of its deft use of surveillance and other motifs of the psychological thriller, but especially because it challenges the conventional languages of law, morality and psychology. Indeed, Haneke seems committed to depicting a subject confronted with modes of responsibility and justice that exceed legal frames and with legacies of trauma that unfold beyond the stable categories of victims and perpetrators. Georges has committed no crimes and cannot be easily thought of as a perpetrator of violence. To the extent that Georges prompted the exclusion of the young Majid from the Laurent household, he did so as a minor with no direct or clear-cut culpability; the decision to send Majid away was made by Georges’s parents – a decision that was ungenerous, to be sure, but also not criminal. Nor does Haneke provide us with a chronology that would directly connect the fact of Majid’s expulsion from the Laurent home with his obvious suffering and his eventual suicide a half century later, even though there is clearly some sort of connection. With the exception of brief comments by Majid’s son about the fate of his father, we know nothing about the intervening decades in Majid’s life and thus can 203

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extrapolate only speculatively the links between the events of the past and the situation of the present. In addition, Haneke makes clear that neither Georges nor his parents can be held directly responsible for the massacre that orphaned Majid in the first place; that episode consisted of state-sponsored violence that many French citizens may have approved and most citizens certainly chose to ignore, but that only agents of the state participated in directly. All the qualifications in the previous paragraph may seem to confirm Paul Gilroy’s wellknown objections to the film as trivializing the damage of colonial legacies in contemporary Europe and reproducing “the white, bourgeois monopoly on dramatizing the stresses of lived experience in this modernity” (Gilroy 2007: 234). Yet, the distinctions between different forms of responsibility that the film forces us to confront are precisely its productive kernel. For certainly Haneke does not let us think of Georges as removed from the damages that surround his privileged domesticity. Georges is by no means meant to seem as innocent as he himself defensively claims to Majid’s son when he uses a phrase – “Je ne suis pas responsable” (I am not responsible) – that echoes the Nazi perpetrators and collaborators depicted on trial in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, as Max Silverman has noted (Silverman 2010: 59). In the same conversation, Georges invokes the multi-layered title of the film and continues echoing the vocabulary of the legal system: “I have nothing to hide [rien à cacher]. […] Young man, your father’s death must hurt. But I refuse to be suspected [soupçonné] by you.” As a psychoanalytic critic might suggest, Georges’s repeated denial and relativization of his deeds can be read as negative admissions of a responsibility that, at least unconsciously, he does seem to recognize. As an implicated subject, Georges is both a participant in and a beneficiary of late colonial and postcolonial histories – as well as the “inheritor” of a longer colonial-national history – but, like most of his fellow citizens, he is something other than a perpetrator of the injustices that litter those histories. That distance from direct perpetration opens up a realm of “deniability” for Georges – in which, as he claims, he has no “bad conscience” – but it also challenges viewers to confront dominant frameworks premised on guilt and liability and to start to conceptualize alternative accounts of responsibility as implication. By telling a story full of gaps and uncertainties, Caché opens up a realm where legal and moral discourses seem to falter and where wrongs exist but responsibility for them has been dispersed. If we want to understand the traumatic suffering at the narrative’s core, the film suggests, we need to look beyond the guilt of perpetrators who commit crimes that can be tried in courts of law and condemned from a comfortable, normative position of justice. The film wants us instead to reflect on the murkier realms of implication. Caché’s questioning mode puts it into conversation especially with Jaspers’s exploration of individual and collective guilt in The Question of German Guilt (Jaspers 2000). The film confronts a situation similar in certain ways to the one Jaspers was addressing in early postwar Germany: one in which a majority of citizens does not recognize itself in a charge of criminal guilt and thus refuses to acknowledge its political responsibility and implication. Needless to say, the character of Georges in Caché neither apologizes nor enters into any process resembling self-transformation. Nor, one should add, has France as a polity or collective done much to accept its responsibility for the Paris massacre or the other crimes against humanity committed during the Algerian War of Independence (or, indeed, during the long process of colonization). Not even criminal guilt has been established in the case of the Algerian conflict, since amnesty laws forbid such accounting. Paris police chief Maurice Papon, one of the key responsible parties for the 1961 massacre, was only very belatedly brought to (imperfect) justice – and then for his collaboration in the deportation of Jews during the 204

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Second World War and not for his crimes of the era of decolonization. The latter crimes did, at least, receive an airing during the course of Papon’s trial, a form of public recognition that has helped foster limited acts of official commemoration and may have led Haneke to make Caché in the first place. By providing a set of diagnostic distinctions – in particular between the individual perpetrator’s criminal guilt and the citizen’s political guilt – Jaspers helps us to locate different dimensions of “the question of French guilt” addressed by Haneke’s film. But Caché, in turn, can also help us think through the limits of Jaspers’s approach. While the ultimate horizons of Jaspers’s work are non-political notions of moral and metaphysical guilt, the film politicizes implication by suggesting that matters of individual morality are inextricably intertwined with larger historical contexts and structures: not only in the film’s brief, but central, reference to 17 October but also in its use of diegetic television news in the background of the Laurents’ apartment to allude to ongoing neo- and post-colonial scenarios in Iraq, India and Israel/Palestine. Even more directly, the motif of surveillance undoes the split between the public and private that characterizes Jaspers’s philosophy by exposing the realm of the individual to its immersion in an unequal social world: the trail of the videos leads viewers to understand the privilege of Georges’s Parisian existence as linked structurally to the impoverished banlieue where Majid and his son live. Colonial legacies, in particular, along with their close relations – racialization and economic inequality – seep into all sectors of the everyday. What counts as hidden in Caché – and what the film seeks to reveal – are not simply the secrets of the human heart and soul but also especially the material relations of race, class and nation. The film reveals those relations – and their traumatizing potential – to operate on two intertwined axes: the synchronic and the diachronic. If Georges’s denial and aggression unfold in the unequal relations of the present, they equally concern personal and collective events in the past that return as trauma. In highlighting trauma via flashbacks and the centrality of Majid’s suicide, Caché thus also concerns the problem of diachronic implication that Jaspers could not have fully anticipated at the time he was writing The Question of German Guilt. As violent histories recede into the past, they do not stop making claims on the present; rather, such distant pasts continue to haunt the present and pose challenging questions for historical redress, as the Nazi period and Holocaust have come to illustrate over the decades in debates about what kind of responsibility descendants of perpetrators ought to take on. These are the dilemmas, which extend far beyond the Holocaust, that Janna Thompson calls matters of “diachronic justice” (Thompson 2002: 149). Haneke uses precisely this diachronic axis of implication to structure the plot of Caché. In linking the central trauma at the heart of the film to Georges’s behaviour as a six-year old child almost a half-century in the past, Haneke forces us to reflect on implication’s “statute of limitations”: How long do the claims of the traumatized last? How long does one remain responsible and for which entailments of one’s actions? Haneke goes even further by foregrounding inter- and transgenerational questions: not only does the film interrogate the relation of Georges to Majid in dual time frames (past, present), but it also asks about the relation of parents and children, both on the side of the “perpetrators” and that of the “victims”. As we’ve already observed, Georges’s story also reflects badly on his parents, who made the ultimate decision to send Majid away; in her one appearance in the film, Georges’s mother appears both to have largely repressed this incident and to harbour resentments against Georges for his childhood actions. But the film also encourages us to think in a future-oriented way about the subsequent generation. The sons of Georges and Majid live out their “inheritance” of the past in unequal and stylistically different modes, but their 205

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silent on-screen meeting at the conclusion of the film suggests the existence of some sort of generation-specific relationship, whether it be marked by cooperation or displaced rivalry. Despite the centrality of trauma and historical injustice to its plot, however, Caché’s narrative discourse unfolds predominantly in the present – with the exception of its brief flashbacks in the form of Georges’s dreams, fantasies and involuntary memories. In this manner, its staging of historical dilemmas coexists with its focus on present-day inequities. The film highlights in particular a power constellation shaped by race and class that is embedded in the texture of urban space. It draws attention not only to the obvious contrast between the fortress-like, singlefamily Laurent home and Majid’s apartment in the projects, but also to the conflicts that erupt in public and semi-public realms. After Georges and Anne visit the police station for the first time to complain about the surveillance tapes and threatening drawings, they have a brief but ominous encounter with a young black bicyclist that hovers on the edge of violence. Anne manages to paper over the tension with a discourse of mutual blame, but the sense of something awry in public space persists – and we are also led to wonder about Anne’s own “gentler”, gendered implication in maintaining the racial and class divisions that Georges polices more sharply. When, in the wake of his father’s suicide, Majid’s son makes an unannounced visit to Georges’s office, the camerawork emphasizes how the transparency of the contemporary office building architecture actually facilitates race- and class-based segregation: the rotating glass doors of the lobby and the glass wall separating the elevators from the work space seem to promise openness, but they can also become the barriers that keep uninvited, but easily identifiable “guests” out. As the glass doors and walls emphasize (and as the presence of a token black woman at one of the Laurents’ dinner parties confirms), this fluid form of segregation does not erect absolute barriers but rather creates a sorting mechanism for keeping those considered undesirable at bay. In the profoundly racialized and class-divided world of contemporary Paris depicted in Caché, fluid segregation keeps people in their places but renders the agency of that segregation less obvious: the very architecture of public and private spaces contributes to the production of implicated subjects. This present-tense production of implication only “works” however because it builds on and refunctions the racialized legacies of colonialism. The film links the anachronism of Georges and Majid’s childhood rivalry – figured in the film as the haunting return of a past that took place in a distant, rural world – to the business world of contemporary Paris. It thus suggests the need to locate the traumatic modality of time Berber Bevernage calls the “irrevocable” within the “irreversible” progress of capitalist modernity (Bevernage 2011). Implication, Caché suggests, lodges at the intersection of the irrevocable and the irreversible and demands a new confrontation with space and time.

Mapping the horizons of implication Haneke’s film is valuable less because it provides clear answers to the conundrums of distant and indirect responsibility for trauma than because it opens up a space of reflection in which we find stories of intimate trauma lodged within a larger historical frame and contemporary social space. It thus directs us toward a materialist approach to the conjunction of trauma and implication that I explore here via the work of Fredric Jameson. Writing within the Marxist tradition, Jameson offers useful tools for thinking trauma and implication between situated subjects and large-scale structures. In The Political Unconscious, Jameson develops a theory of interpretation that situates works of literature and art in relation to “three concentric frameworks” that offer ascending scales of analysis. He calls for: 206

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a widening out of the social ground [of interpretation] through the notions, first, of political history, in the narrow sense of punctual event and a chronicle-like sequence of happenings in time; then of society, in the now already less diachronic and time-bound sense of a constitutive tension and struggle between social classes; and ultimately, of history now conceived in its vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various human social formations, from prehistoric life to whatever far future history has in store for us. (Jameson 1981: 75) As Jameson points out in his more recent Valences of the Dialectic, he adapted these different scales or horizons of interpretation from the three “durées” in Fernand Braudel’s book on the Mediterranean (Jameson 2009: 532; see also the exposition in Wegner 2014). Framed by a narrative of traumatic return, Caché explores implication at these three levels of event, social group and mode of production. The deep structure of its plot begins with a punctual event from political history – the massacre of 17 October 1961 – which it explores allegorically through another punctual event: the exiling of Majid from the Laurent family estate. As allegory, this event opens up onto the second horizon of society: the film depicts class struggle (understood broadly) as unfolding both in the context of an anticolonial war (the implied but absent Algerian Revolution) and as an intra-French, postcolonial conflict contoured by race and ethnicity (as we see both in the main plot that pits Georges against Majid and his son and in such ephemeral occurrences as the encounter with the black bicyclist). But finally, at a third level, the film depicts these events and conflicts as taking place within the present-day mode of production: that of a hyper-modern, mediaand spectacle-based capitalism in an age of war and globalization. This third level – whose particularities correspond in this case rather precisely to Jameson’s characterization of postmodernism as the “cultural logic” of the late capitalist mode of production (Jameson 1990) – appears in the film primarily as its setting and backdrop: in the architecture in which the characters move (including the simulacrum that constitutes Georges’s talk-show set), in the conflicts that flicker across the television screens, and in casually mentioned details such as the fact that the book Anne has been editing is a study of globalization. The film also sets this dominant postmodern mode of information-capitalism against a residual agricultural mode that remains just visible in the farm owned by Georges’s family and once worked by Majid’s parents. In depicting the overlap and tension between these two modes of production (depicted allegorically as the city and the country), the film simultaneously spatializes history and shows that place is deeply historical. In situating its narrative of trauma within these three horizons of history – the event, social groups and modes of production – the film presents a complex map of implication. The film’s protagonist, Georges, is implicated at all these levels, albeit in different ways: he is a (not yet fully responsible) actor at the level of the punctual event; the beneficiary of a privileged class and race position as white Parisian “bobo” (bourgeois-bohemian) at the level of society; and an agent of an information-based mode of production as well as the heir apparent of the presumably no longer active family farm. While Jameson’s schema presupposes an ascending hermeneutical salience in the move from events to modes of production, Caché offers a less clear vision of where the central interpretive instance lies: the three levels of implication mediate each other and none can be said to subsume the others. In tracking Geroges’s implication across these three levels, the film also suggests the significance of both synchronic and diachronic forms of implication: the long-past events of 17 October and Majid’s expulsion – and the continued, if residual presence of the farm and the 207

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agricultural mode of production – signal the need for historical consciousness, even as the unfolding of the film in a present of racial and class conflict and postmodern capitalism reasserts the shaping force of synchrony. Despite his multi-layered implication in the production and reproduction of trauma and injustice, Georges lacks the ability to understand his own position, to grasp his own situatedness in the horizons of analysis we as viewers glimpse. Here is where a further contribution from Jameson proves useful: his hypothesis of cognitive mapping as a necessary tool for understanding subjects’ location in a global system characterized by “social confusion” (Jameson 1990: 54). In Wegner’s useful formulation, cognitive mapping is a narrative activity that has “the effect of coordinating […] two poles, the existential and phenomenological experience of people in their daily lives and the abstract global economic, political, and social totalities we always already inhabit” (Wegner 2014: 70). It is, “a process, a way of making connections, of drawing networks, and of situating ourselves as both individual and collective subjects within a particular spatial system” (71–2). To put this in my own categories: coming to terms with situatedness means mapping implication between subjects and structures. Mapping implication requires a form of cognition that works across scales and durées. Narrated within the genre of the psychological-political thriller, Caché follows Georges as he attempts to make sense of clues and connections that could reveal the source of the surveillance and harassment under which his family suffers. Yet he never really does the work of coordinating and situating that cognitive mapping requires because he lacks the selfreflexivity to enquire after his own location in the spatio-temporal system in which he finds himself (postcolonial France, globalized Europe). It is precisely Georges’s inability (or refusal) to connect past and present – as well as here and there – that constitutes the source of his “social confusion” and the stakes of the film’s dilemmas. A process of mapping that only seeks to draw connections between the dispersed spatial locations of contemporary capitalism (significant as they are to the film’s concerns) fails to address the unfinished business of history: here, the racialized legacies of colonialism that intertwine with the divisions of the present. Trauma, in Caché, is the effect of that intertwining. Yet the film is less interested in providing viewers with a completed “map” of postcolonial France than it is in encouraging viewers to occupy the position of the implicated subject. Such a completed map would surely give greater presence to the long-repressed events of 17 October 1961 than does Caché, just as it would probably probe the positions of victims (like Majid’s parents) and perpetrators (like Papon and the Paris police). But Caché does neither and instead dwells primarily on the morally ambiguous situation of the implicated subject in the distant aftermath of the events while still registering the damage of the events in relation to different scales and durations. This focus on implication manifests itself at the level of form. In its famous opening shot, the film draws us into Georges’s point of view: what looks like an objective long shot of a house turns out to be a subjective close-up of the Laurent television seen through Georges’s eyes. Although focalization shifts quickly after this opening, viewers’ positioning in proximity to Georges remains throughout – and focalization through his gaze re-emerges forcefully in moments such as Majid’s suicide. Caché is not just a film about implication, in other words, it is a film that seeks to produce the viewer as implicated subject. Persistent focalization through the anti-hero Georges – a cinematic version of the unreliable narrator – creates an asymmetry in the film: even as we have an intimate, if still somewhat “empty” sense of Georges’s consciousness, the perspectives of Majid and his son remain mostly absent. As we have seen, Gilroy (2007) laments that such a narrative set-up mimics the racial hierarchy in which the colonizer (or, here, the post-imperial subject) 208

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possesses a level of interiority denied to the colonized (or postcolonial subject). Gilroy’s diagnosis is, of course, correct, but this asymmetry also proves productive for developing the theory of the implicated subject. Indeed, the structure of focalization in Caché draws attention to the fundamental asymmetry between differentially positioned subjects in the wake of trauma and in the midst of structural inequality. The film reveals the grasping of asymmetrical relations as critical to the process of cognitively mapping implication in the past and present. Although the theory of the implicated subject seeks to shed light on a position beyond the victim/perpetrator binary, it does not presume a homogeneous space of implication, just as it does not suppose the disappearance of victims and perpetrators. Rather, the non-binary terrain of implication refracts subjects differentially. Crucially, Majid remains a victim who was presumably orphaned through actions of the French state, even if we cannot easily name Georges a perpetrator; this asymmetry probably generates a significant portion of the unease that accompanies the film. The asymmetry between the victim and perpetrator in experiences of violence is fundamental and obvious, but attention to implication brings to light a less obvious asymmetry: the fact that certain, ultimately very common scenarios of violence do not seem to require the binary categories of victims and perpetrators at all. This latter asymmetry may be Caché’s most disturbing insight: operations of power and violence produce traumatized victims without always requiring morally unambiguous, criminally indictable perpetrators. It is also the source of its most productive engagement: the positing of the implicated subject as central to the functioning of violence at the levels of historical events, social groups and social structures, even when perpetrators seem to be distant from the scene of the crime(s). Far from evading an indictment of the “real” perpetrators of 17 October, Haneke instead directs our attention to the enabling figures of the routine violence of the colonial and postcolonial worlds: those implicated subjects who would never understand themselves as “criminally” or even “politically” guilty; who might not even register or remember the events in which they were implicated; and yet whose responsibility is not merely moral or metaphysical. The implication of Georges and his parents derives not from conscious perpetration but from the material ways they have enabled and benefited from – without actively perpetrating – the very histories and social relations that traumatized Majid and murdered his parents.

Conclusion Caché helps us to see that the categories of victims and perpetrators cannot tell us everything we need to know about trauma, especially when traumatic events lie at a historical and spatial distance from the subjects implicated in them. Even as it powerfully evokes the intimate and haunting experience of psychic trauma, Haneke’s film also opens up an unsettling, yet all too familiar world: the world of implicated subjects. In opening up that world, it reveals that our understanding of trauma has much to gain from a materialist turn that understands violence as embedded in the circuits of the social and the structures of the everyday. According to the theory of implication and implicated subjects, intimate and isolating experiences such as psychic trauma are entangled with diffuse social forces at a multiplicity of scales, from dramatic events to global systems. Traumatic experiences, the theory also suggests, frequently bear the residues of both historical violence and contemporary inequality. Nothing should distract us from the suffering of traumatized victims or from the need to hold perpetrators accountable. But if we want to understand the sources of violence in our world, we also need to start attending to implicated subjects. 209

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Bibliography Bevernage, B. (2011) History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence, New York: Routledge. Caché, (2005) dir. M. Haneke, France 3 Cinema, Canal +, Bavaria Film, Wega film. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2007) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Craps, S. (2012) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilroy, P. (2007) “Shooting Crabs in a Barrel”, Screen 48(2): 233–35. House, J. and MacMaster, N. (2006) Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory, New York: Oxford University Press. Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. (1990) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press. ———. (2009) Valences of the Dialectic, New York: Verso. Jaspers, K. (2000) The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Fordham University Press. Meretoja, H. (2018) The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, New York: Oxford University Press. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. (2019) The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Silverman, M. (2010) “The Violence of the Cut: Michael Haneke’s Caché and Cultural Memory”, French Cultural Studies 21(1): 57–65. Thompson, J. (2002) Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Injustice, Cambridge: Polity. Wegner, P. (2014) Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Further reading Bevernage, B. (2011) History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence, New York: Routledge. (An exploration of the politics of time in the wake of traumatic political violence.) Craps, S. (2012) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (An influential critique of classical concepts of trauma and a proposal for a non-Eurocentric trauma theory.) Meretoja, H. (2018) The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, New York: Oxford University Press. (A sophisticated account of the ethics of storytelling with significant attention to the narratives of implicated subjects.) Rothberg, M. (2019) The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, Stanford: Stanford University Press. (A new theory of historical and political responsibility beyond the categories of victims, perpetrators and bystanders.)

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19 TRANSCULTURAL EMPATHY Katja Garloff

Trauma theory and transcultural empathy The claim that trauma may promote transcultural empathy sounds provocative. How can an experience that shatters ourselves have positive effects, such as opening us up to others? Yet this claim has been part of trauma theory for a long time, beginning with Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth’s classic work in the field. In this book, which arguably inaugurated the notion that trauma can be both shattering and liberating, Caruth first proposed that trauma forges new connections across cultural, ethnic, religious or national boundaries. She bases this idea on a reading of Sigmund Freud’s last book, Moses and Monotheism, which suggests that Moses was an Egyptian who imposed monotheism on the Hebrews and was later killed in an act of rebellion. According to Caruth, Freud advances a conception of history as ruled by traumatic temporality: the murder of Moses was a traumatic event for the Hebrews and after a period of latency lasting several hundred years, monotheism and its strict laws returned and were internalized. Because trauma results from a confrontation with both death and survival, Caruth concludes, it opens up “the possibility of a future” (Caruth 1996: 70). To support this argument, she mobilizes a variety of figures of departure. First, she argues that Moses did not return the Hebrews to their former homeland but rather created a new paradigm of human life, a monotheistic religion with a strong ethical bend. Second, she points out that Freud drafted the book during the rise of Nazism and completed it after leaving Austria for England, where he enjoyed the freedom of expression he had missed in previous years. Caruth argues that exile propels traumatized subjects into contact with others, thus ensuring the transmission of trauma and the beginning of a history always already shared with others: “the historical effect of trauma, in Freud’s text, is ultimately its inscription of the Jews in a history always bound to the history of the Christians” (Caruth 1996: 18). Caruth and others have fleshed out this claim – that trauma can build bridges between people from diverse historical backgrounds – by drawing attention to the acts of transcultural witnessing that trauma often entails. The latency of trauma, the fact that an event does not fully register at the moment of its first occurrence, makes it more likely that others will become exposed to it and the trauma transmitted in the process. Trauma forces people into other times and places, where their unprocessed experience will translate into dreams,

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stories, eyewitness accounts and other symbolic formations that call for particularly attentive listening or reading. The exposure to the trauma of others can create new forms of transcultural empathy and solidarity in part because it fosters an interpretative sensibility that is attuned to the gaps, ruptures and indeterminacies in trauma narratives. The term “departure” is so central in Caruth because it is the first element in a causative chain in which trauma equals departure, which gives rise to history, which calls for testimony, which in turn establishes new transcultural connections. As Caruth writes in her introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, the inherent departure, within trauma, from the moment of its first occurrence, is also a means of passing out of the isolation imposed by the event: […] the history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another. (Caruth 1995: 10–11) She concludes that in a catastrophic age such as ours “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures” (11). The idea that trauma implicates us in the histories of others still resonates in contemporary trauma studies, especially in theories that posit a transnational connectedness of cultural memory. This notion first emerged in the debates about the globalization of the memory of the Holocaust, which is still widely seen as the archetype of historical trauma. Thus Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider (2006) observe that the forms and rituals of Holocaust remembrance – including its iconic images, structuring narratives and moral imperatives – have increasingly been used to remember other forms of exclusion, expulsion and genocide. In his widely acclaimed book Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg takes this idea a step further, arguing that the memory of the Holocaust has not only helped articulate other traumatic histories but itself has been shaped by other histories, including violent conflicts during decolonization and American slavery (Rothberg 2009). Rothberg proposes an alternative to an understanding of cultural memory as competitive, that is, the notion that any particular event is remembered at the expense of other events. Rather than competing for limited space and attention, representations of different historical atrocities can crossreference, build on and ultimately enable each other, and they can do so across significant lapses of time. More recently, Rothberg has supplemented this concept of multidirectional memory by a theory of political affect in which the idea of transcultural empathy becomes even more explicit. According to this new theory, the comparison of different traumatic memories can generate affects ranging from competition to solidarity, with solidarity occupying the endpoint of the politically desirable spectrum of affects. Rothberg analyses, for example, journalistic and artistic works that juxtapose the suffering of Holocaust victims and of present-day Palestinians: whereas the combination of equation and competition in a photo-essay by Norman Finkelstein results in a politics of resentment, the combination of equation, differentiation and solidarity found in the art of Alan Schechner “reverses the affective charge from antagonistic competitiveness to empathy” (Rothberg 2011: 537). A paradigmatic thinker of the connection between trauma and transcultural empathy is Stef Craps, who gauges the possibilities and limits of the psychoanalytically inflected, deconstructive trauma theory that became paradigmatic during the 1990s with an eye toward non-Western cultures. In Postcolonial Witnessing, Craps draws attention to Caruth’s insights into the transcultural connectivity of trauma while noting that she and other theorists of her generation have not truly capitalized on these insights. Instead, their Eurocentric biases have 212

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led them to sideline the traumas of non-Western others, to favour an event-based model of trauma over the structural traumas that often affect the lives of minorities, and to canonize works that employ a modernist, experimental aesthetics at the expense of the realist, engaged trauma narratives often coming from Africa and other non-Western parts of the world. Craps himself finds in postcolonial literature a rich trove of examples of transcultural witnessing and empathy. In several literary analyses, he argues that postcolonial trauma narratives can promote a form of transcultural empathy that is neither projective nor appropriative. For example, Sindiwe Magona’s 1998 novel Mother to Mother, a fictionalized account of the killing of American Fulbright scholar Amy Biel by four black South African youths, can be read as “a moving attempt to reach out and share grief, offer comfort, and foster mutual understanding across racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries” (Craps 2013: 50).

Trauma theory versus cognitive science To emphasize this again, Rothberg and Craps elaborate on an idea of transcultural empathy that has accompanied psychoanalysis-inspired trauma theory from the beginning. To throw this idea into clearer relief, it is helpful to compare it with conceptions of empathy in cognitive science/narratology (this section is based on ideas I presented in a 2017 GSA faculty seminar on Cognition and Affect in Holocaust Culture). To this end I will draw once more on the field of Holocaust studies. In recent years, scholars of both theoretical orientations (i.e. trauma theory and cognitive science) have affirmed the value of empathy in Holocaust narratives while at the same time guarding against problematic empathic responses such as emotional contagion, facile identification and appropriative empathy. However, the two theoretical approaches differ in the emphasis they put on (1) text reception versus text production and (2) cognitive enhancement versus cognitive disruption. (1) Holocaust scholars who employ approaches from cognitive science and narratology tend to be particularly interested in the reception of texts. They produce typologies to describe narrative strategies and potential reader reactions, or they develop empirical methods to assess actual reader reactions. This focus on text reception reflects, among other things, the growing significance of matters of pedagogy and situations of difficult empathy in Holocaust studies. Of course, Holocaust remembrance has always come with an ethicalpolitical imperative – “never again!” – but at a time when Holocaust courses are being taught at many colleges across the country while the events themselves are moving into greater historical distance, the question of what and how we can learn from Holocaust literature acquires new urgency. Building on textual analysis as well as her own classroom experience, Ann Rider (2013) distinguishes between three kinds of empathic responses to classic texts of Holocaust literature – Elie Wiesel’s Night, Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness and Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive – responses that involve different degrees of affective sharing, selfother-awareness and emotional regulation. Scholars have also discussed the value and dangers of pedagogies that encourage the empathetic identification with various participant groups, including Holocaust perpetrators, a phenomenon that has increasingly become important as a result of a wave of recent literary texts that feature the perpetrator’s perspective. For example, Erin McGlothlin (2016) has developed a precise taxonomy to analyse the different forms of identification and dis-identification with perpetrators that such texts foster in readers. In contrast to this focus on the reception of texts, Holocaust scholars influenced by trauma theory pay more attention to the process of text production and the affective dispositions involved therein. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s (1992) seminal book on Holocaust 213

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testimony comes to mind, which emphasizes the supportive role of the empathetic listener in interviews with Holocaust survivors, many of which were videotaped and collected in the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University. In these interviews the stories the survivor tells frequently break down, as traumatizing memories interrupt the flow of his or her speech. The interviewer then helps the survivor to resume speech by listening attentively or by asking questions, so that the interview proceeds like a psychoanalytic session, providing a dialogic situation appropriate to the recollection of traumatic experience. In another classic of trauma theory, Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), Dominick LaCapra enjoins his fellow historians to adopt an attitude of empathy toward the traumatic testimonies that form the basis of their scholarly texts. As noted above, among younger scholars Stef Craps has been particularly interested in concepts of empathy. Craps has analysed, for example, the empathic collaboration between an American author and a Sudanese “lost boy” in Dave Eggers’s What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng – A Novel, a collaboration that culminates in the creation of a “‘third voice’ that is neither quite Deng’s nor quite Eggers’s” (Craps 2017: 60). All of these scholars who work within the paradigms of trauma theory ascribe to empathy a constitutive role in the production of texts. (2) Scholars working within the paradigm of cognitive science tend to evaluate affects with an eye on whether they help or hinder cognition. They often differentiate between types of reader responses with regard to their potential for enhancing cognition. Ann Rider, for example, pits emotional reactions that result in personal distress and narcissistic self-focus against what she calls “cognitive empathy” (Rider 2013). This is a state of mind in which readers remain aware of their separateness from the literary characters and are therefore more likely to arrive at a deeper understanding of others and to engage in pro-social action. Amy Coplan (2004) locates such a cognitive potential in the very concept of “empathy”, which is characterized by a self-other differentiation that is missing in emotional contagion. Scholars working on Holocaust literature from the perspective of cognitive studies often place a premium on cognition, awareness and reflection. Just as Rider valorizes literary works that have “the potential to spur critical reflection” (Rider 2013: 54) in student readers, McGlothlin is interested in Holocaust fiction that encourages both identification with and distanciation from perpetrator figures, triggering an oscillation between attitudes that “creates a space for critical ethical reflection” (McGlothlin 2016: 270f.). The privileging of cognition over affect in these scholars reflects their concern with Holocaust pedagogy and/or situations of difficult empathy. In contrast, scholars influenced by trauma theory put more emphasis on the potential of affect to disrupt existing cognitive patterns and predispositions. Their word choices already signal an appreciation of the destabilizing effects of empathic processes. Thus Dominick LaCapra speaks of the desirable affective dimension in historical texts on the Holocaust as “empathic unsettlement”, which “poses a barrier to closure in discourse and places in jeopardy harmonizing or spiritually uplifting accounts of extreme events from which we attempt to derive reassurance” (LaCapra 2001: 41f.; emphasis added). Arguably, such an unsettlement is enacted in Saul Friedländer’s authoritative work on Holocaust history, titled Germany and the Jews (1997, 2007), which interlaces first-person testimonials with third-person narration, as if to undermine any certainty the author (and the reader) may gain from the third-person perspective. David Eggers’s wish – which Stef Craps cites in his analysis of What Is the What – to have his own voice cancelled out by that of Deng betrays a similar desire to suspend the linguistic categories with which the author might frame his traumatized subject (Craps 2017). According to these writers and scholars, the infusion of empathic affects into trauma

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narratives destabilizes the epistemological assumptions authors (and readers) may bring to their topic – and they see this destabilization as a necessary and beneficial process. The point of this comparison is not to posit an absolute distinction between trauma theory and cognitive science. Both scholarly approaches are invested in the ethical potential of Holocaust narratives, and both have shown that traumatic witnessing involves adopting perspectives and transferring emotions across cultural, ethnic and religious boundaries. Furthermore, some scholars have fruitfully combined the two approaches in their work (see e.g. Lothe et al. 2012; Meretoja 2018). I simply want to highlight the special insights trauma theory made possible: that transcultural empathy operates already on the level of text production and that it entails – and should entail – moments of uncertainty and confusion for writers and readers. In what follows now, I suggest that, as we continue to work through these ideas, we should explore the complexity of the emphatic processes and the full range of affects transmitted in texts. The current focus on transcultural empathy (i.e. feeling with the other) and solidarity (i.e. acting with the other) tends to privilege connections over contestations, and to emphasize positive affects such as compassion, love and kindness at the expense of negative affects such as rage, hatred and resentment. As we have seen above, Michael Rothberg explicitly disqualifies resentment as a politically productive affect. However, such negative affects abound in post-Holocaust German Jewish and Austrian Jewish writers, and their expression has its own uses and functions. In what follows now, I will show how Jean Améry, an Austrian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, defends resentment as an effective form of communication between former victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Negative affects: Jean Améry’s resentments Born into a mixed Austrian Jewish family, Jean Améry fled Austria after the German annexation first to France and then to Belgium, from where he was deported back to France as a German alien. There he joined the Resistance until he was captured, tortured at Fort Breendonk and interned in Auschwitz. After the war, Améry made a conscious decision not to return Germany or Austria but rather to live in Belgium. In 1966, he published At the Mind’s Limits, a series of essayistic meditations on his experiences in the death camps. He wrote the book in German and with a German reading audience in mind – in fact, he often directly addresses his imagined German readers. In his book, Améry emphasizes that for a post-Holocaust German or Austrian Jew, the loss of home remains devastating because the experience of having been abandoned so easily by one’s homeland and fellow citizens instils a lasting insecurity. Out of this state of banishment emerges a voice that does not attempt to mitigate loss by restoring hope to it, but that challenges the Germans, reminding them of their guilt and calling upon them to remember. This intervening voice is most manifest in the essay “Resentments”, which levels a bitter charge against the tendencies of normalization during the 1950s and 1960s that succeeded in establishing West Germany in a Western political framework at the expense of a deeper confrontation with its past. Traveling through the economically successful, attractive, modern West Germany, Améry notes the discrepancy between his own rage and bitterness and the Germans’ complacency about the successful recovery of their country. To their seemingly natural sense of time passing and effacing the past, he opposes the shattered sense of time of the death camp survivor who clings to his or her traumatic past. He calls this disposition “resentment”, an inability to forget that represents for him the only moral – as opposed to natural – reaction to the Holocaust. (For a more detailed discussion of the issues discussed in this section, see Garloff 2005: 48–51.) 215

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The word “resentment” picks up on a catchword that has after 1945 served in West Germany to exclude the voices of exiled writers. With its Nietzschean undertones, the word insinuated that the refugees from Nazism were in an overly subjective state of mind, unable to abstract from their past experiences, and therefore could not seriously and rationally contribute to the debates on Germany’s responsibility for Nazism and on its future (see Peitsch 1991: 109). The devaluation of the victims’ voices continued and grew even stronger in the 1960s, when psychological discourses of the kind of “Delayed Psychic Effects After Political Persecution” (Améry 1980: 68) were pathologizing and marginalizing these voices instead of taking them seriously as testimonies to the Nazi crimes. By referring polemically to such discourses, Améry uncovers a mostly overlooked problem inherent in the West German politics of compensation – called Wiedergutmachung – which began in 1956. Wiedergutmachung encompassed a number of measures from financial aid for Israel to compensation payments for Jewish individuals who were persecuted or could prove that they were still suffering from the lasting effects of indirect persecution. As such, it not only had the potential to relieve Germans of their guilt-feelings by suggesting that recompense for the crimes was possible, but it also forced the victims to categorize themselves in terms of psychopathological symptoms, that is, to recognize themselves as impaired. It is in this context that we have to read Améry’s insistence on the survivor’s subjective experience as the only possible point of departure for understanding Nazism. By accepting the representation of the survivor’s subjectivity as damaged, tortured and extremely sensitive, Améry recuperates it as a valid moral reaction, thus challenging its ongoing psychologization and marginalization. The survivor’s resentments constitute for him a moral category rather than one of psychopathology. Améry attempts to realize this idea – to put his own pain to use for the production of moral knowledge – by directing his own negative affects toward his German readership. Throughout the text he emphasizes his position as an outsider to the group he addresses: “The people of whom I am speaking and whom I am addressing here show muted understanding for my retrospective grudge” (Améry 1980: 63). The text’s topography, which assigns to the speaking subject the position of a traveller who does not belong to this place but crosses through it temporarily, externalizes and enacts the tension between Améry and his imagined German readers. The first sentence of the essay reads: “Sometimes it happens that in the summer I travel through a thriving land” (62). Améry draws and constantly reinforces a line between victims and perpetrators, for instance, by using irony when addressing his readers, thus producing a distancing effect and suspending any cathartic relief they might otherwise derive from an identification with the victims: “I would be thankful to the reader if he were willing to follow me, even if in the hour before us he more than once feels the wish to put down the book” (63). The text as whole modulates from proximity to distance, from the hope of being heard to utter resignation and loneliness, from emotional appeal to bitter sarcasm. Witness the last sentence of the essay: We victims must finish with our retroactive rancor, in the sense that the KZ argot once gave the word ‘finish’; it meant as much as ‘to kill.’ Soon we must and will be finished. Until that time has come, we request of those whose peace is disturbed by our grudge that they be patient. (Améry 1980: 81)

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The sarcasm of this sentence illustrates the utter absence of the benevolence of pedagogy from Améry’s attitude toward his readership. His texts do not strive to educate and build bridges, but rather to disturb and disrupt, thus accentuating the conflict between Germans and Jews. The critical thrust of Améry’s writing lies in the way it responds to, and attempts to break through, a sociopsychological disposition he perceives as specific to his German audience. Améry describes this disposition varyingly as complacency, “equanimity” (Améry 1980: 66) and “peace” (81), highlighting the extent to which the Germans he meets remain unaffected by the monstrosity of their past. As Moishe Postone has shown, this state of mind was by no means confined to the reactionary or politically indifferent forces in German society; rather, it was also palpable in the leftist inclination to theoretical models of National Socialism. These theories have in fact abstracted Nazism at the expense of concretely felt horror and have been instrumental in mitigating guilt feelings (see Postone 1980: 101f.). Striving to break through such defence mechanisms, Améry departs from the enlightened, reasonable conversation that was constitutive for the critical function of the emerging bourgeois public sphere. Instead of initiating a dialogue grounded in a common reasoning, he emphasizes the abyss between victims and perpetrators, an abyss that has to be bridged not through a rational understanding of National Socialism but through the recuperation of painful affect. The deeper meaning of acts of punishment that force the perpetrator to mimetically reproduce the victim’s affects – his or her absolute helplessness in the face of violence – is the creation of a common ground between victims and perpetrators: The experience of persecution was, at the very bottom, that of an extreme loneliness. At stake for me is the release from the abandonment that has persisted from that time until today. When the SS-man Wajs stood before the firing squad, he experienced the moral truth of his crimes. At that moment, he was with me–and I was no longer alone with the shovel handle. (Améry 1980: 70) For the German contemporaries of Améry, the establishment of a common ground between victims and perpetrators would involve the repulsion against their own history while acknowledging it as their own and renouncing any attempt to distance themselves from it: “two groups of people, the overpowered and those who overpowered them, would be joined in the desire that time be turned back and, with it, that history become moral” (Améry 1980: 78). Any utopianism still implied in this sentence, however, is counterpoised by Améry’s scepticism regarding the likelihood that such a moral upsurge against the flow of time will happen in the Germany of the 1960s. What remains is a minimal hope that his own writing may achieve a similar effect, however transient and limited. Améry thus touches upon a critical potential elaborated by Homi Bhabha (1994) in his discussion of the ability of diasporic discourse to address incommensurable cultural and historical differences. Bhabha suggests that instead of mitigating such differences, diasporic discourse uses them as a disruptive force against the homogenizing discourse of the nation. Améry attempts to achieve a similar effect by injecting another time – that of a survivor who clings traumatically to his past – into the organic and progressive time of a West Germany rebuilding from an imagined zero hour. His resentments transform the survivor’s words into signs that form a barrier to the discourse of normalization. In many ways, Améry’s essays bear out the insights of trauma theory begun in the work of Caruth and continued in the work of Felman/Laub, LaCapra, Rothberg, Craps and 217

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others. In Améry, the experience of a traumatic departure leads to the realization that trauma is itself a departure of sorts, one that propels him into renewed contact with (the offspring of) the perpetrators that tortured him and drove him into exile to begin with. This contact informs the very writing of his essays, which not only describe but also perform the entanglement across cultural, ethnic and national boundaries. But Améry’s essays also make it clear that we need to move away from the idea that this connectedness should necessarily take the form of empathy and solidarity. Améry explicitly embraces resentment as the appropriate attitude toward his non-Jewish German readers. Other German-speaking Jewish writers who survived the Holocaust, including Edgar Hilsenrath and Ruth Klüger, similarly deploy negative affects in their writing (see Finch 2018). Most recently, Max Czollek (2018), a contemporary German Jewish poet and essayist, has called upon his fellow Jewish artists to “disintegrate” from the German mainstream and to assume a confrontational stance vis-à-vis the non-Jewish German audiences to which they inevitably speak. All of these writers and thinkers suggest that the contestation (which is based on competition rather than solidarity) of public memory is a political exigency in a postwar Austria that has long denied its complicity in Nazism, or in a post-unification Germany that is all too ready to “normalize” German-Jewish relations (and to use the work of Jewish artists to that end). PostHolocaust German-speaking Jewish authors invite us to pay attention to the expression of anger, rage and resentment in trauma narratives, as well as to the ways in which these affects are transmitted onto readers.

Bibliography Améry, J. (1980) At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. S. Rosenfeld and S. P. Rosenfeld, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge. Caruth, C. (1995) “Trauma and Experience: Introduction”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–12. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Coplan, A. (2004) “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fiction”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62(2): 141–52. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. (2017) “On Not Closing the Loop: Empathy, Ethics, and Transcultural Witnessing”, in J. G. Singh and D. D. Kim (eds) The Postcolonial World, Abingdon: Routledge, 53–67. Czollek, M. (2018) Desintegriert Euch!, Munich: Hanser. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, New York: Routledge. Finch, H. (2018) “Revenge, Restitution, Ressentiment: Edgar Hilsenrath’s and Ruth Klüger’s Late Writings as Holocaust Metatestimony”, in K. Garloff and A. Mueller (eds) German Jewish Literature after 1990, Rochester: Camden House, 60–82. Friedländer, S. (1997) Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, New York: HarperCollins. ———. (2007) Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945, New York: HarperCollins. Garloff, K. (2005) Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. LaCapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2006) The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, trans. A. Oksiloff, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lothe, J., Suleiman, S. R. and Phelan, J. (eds) (2012) After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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20 COGNITIVE APPROACHES TO TRAUMA AND LITERATURE Joshua Pederson

My first experience with what one might consider a “cognitive” approach to trauma in literature came while I was sitting by a pool in Florida getting ready to attend a relative’s wedding at Disney World. In graduate school and after, I had read through most of the first wave of trauma theory, from Hartman (1995) and Caruth (1995, 1996) to Felman and Laub (1992). But on this trip, and almost by chance, I had decided to pack Richard McNally’s 2003 volume, Remembering Trauma. McNally is a professor of psychology at Harvard, and his book was a revelation, in no small part because it presented a trauma model that is so different from the one that underpins the literary theory with which I had become familiar. To this day, many discussions of trauma and literature are shaped by the work of Cathy Caruth, whose pathbreaking 1996 book on the topic holds that the traumatic experience is “unclaimed”. To wit, trauma is “an event whose force is marked by its lack of registration” (Caruth 1995: 6). For Caruth – at least in her early writings on the theme – trauma may be impossible to remember or impossible to describe because of the unique way that the brain captures (or fails to capture) the traumatic experience. Caruth develops this characterization with the help of preeminent figures in psychiatry and psychology, most notably Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk. McNally (2003), however, vehemently rejects many of the descriptions of trauma put forth by these two figures, arguing that Herman and Van der Kolk mistake survivors’ unwillingness to talk about or recall trauma for an inability to do so. “We can never ‘prove a negative’”, McNally writes, “prove that the information is not available in the person’s memory” (McNally 2003: 184). McNally, then, develops an alternate model which holds that the traumatic memory, rather than being unclaimed, is deeply etched and perhaps even preternaturally detailed. He bolsters this model by integrating a bevy of contemporary clinical insights from the fields of psychology and neuroscience. I found his book to be incredibly persuasive and began to wonder: what would literary trauma theory look like if Caruth had begun her research not with Herman and Van der Kolk (or Freud) but rather with McNally? (I offer one possible answer – and elaborate on this discussion – in a 2014 essay in Narrative [Pederson 2014].) To this day, I remain unable to adjudicate on these competing claims. I am a mere literary scholar. But my dip into these cognitive discussions of trauma made one thing extremely clear to me: literary trauma theory must continue to grow and evolve as our understanding of the psychology and neuroscience of trauma advances. And literary theorists doing 220

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interdisciplinary work with trauma must make some effort to remain conversant with these advances, lest our own analyses become dated or obtuse. Psychologists and neuroscientists are constantly adjusting and improving on our understanding of trauma, and most argue that we still have much to learn about the ways brain and body process psychic pain. If they are so humble, literary scholars must be doubly so. In what follows, then, I review a few insights from the recent history of trauma research and begin to speculate on the ways these insights might bolster or reshape the ways literary scholars address depictions of trauma in literature. Given space considerations, this review is more representative than comprehensive, and the research I highlight in the second half of the essay has as much to do with its potential applicability in literary contexts as it does with its importance to our evolving understanding of the science of trauma. Before I begin, I note that this essay uses two definitions of “cognitive” that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The first, broader definition is borrowed from Alan Richardson via Lisa Zunshine; the cognitive here is an “interest in the active (and largely unconscious) mental processing that makes behavior understandable” (Richardson, quoted in Zunshine 2015: 1). A number of fields try to make sense of our “mental processing”, notably psychology and neuroscience. The second, narrower definition, at play in a later section of this essay, distinguishes the cognitive from the emotional; in this sense, the cognitive is the thinking part of our mental processes while the emotional is the feeling part.

Recent developments in trauma research In 2017, Green et al. published an extremely helpful review of recent advances in our behavioural, cognitive, biological and neurocognitive theories of PTSD in the APA’s Handbook of Trauma Psychology; their essay serves to give the lay of the recent research landscape. During the development of the PTSD diagnosis in the 1970s and 1980s, behavioral theories predominated. Many of these early models were based on Mowrer’s (1960) two-factory theory of avoidance learning, which explains the ways in which animals and humans become conditioned to fear. Following Mowrer’s model, early trauma researchers “first proposed that PTSD symptoms arise when previously neutral stimuli become associated with […] the traumatic event. The individual then subsequently responds emotionally to these CSs in much the same way as they did to the traumatic event” (Green et al. 2017: 407). Behavioural models were initially quite persuasive but had two main weaknesses: they did not clearly distinguish between trauma and anxiety disorders, and they failed to account for a number of common PTSD symptoms, notably intrusive memories and nightmares (409). Such weaknesses opened the door for the rise of a number of cognitive theories of trauma, a number of which flourished around the turn of the millennium. Such theories better account for the symptoms that behavioural theories miss while at the same time attempting to explain why traumatic and non-traumatic memories are encoded differently. Green et al. highlight two cognitive models: Ehlers and Clark’s and Brewin et al.’s. Ehlers and Clark (2000) note the ways in which trauma is followed by broadly negative appraisals of the traumatic event, among them an overgeneralized sense of fear or shame. Such appraisals often lead to “mental defeat”, “a state in which […] individuals believe they are unable to positively influence their fate” (Green et al. 2017: 412). Ehlers and Clark (2000) also note the ways in which traumatic memory is not well integrated with other types of autobiographical memory and hence behaves somewhat differently. Teams led by Brewin were able to expand on this observation by drawing a distinction between situationally accessible 221

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memories (SAMs) and verbally accessible memories (VAMs). The first are “visually based” and “cannot be recalled consciously”; the second can be consciously recalled and, obviously, can be put into words (Green et al. 2017: 413). Brewin et al. (2010) argue that in victims with PTSD, much information that would normally be stored as VAMs is instead stored as SAMs. The rise of cognitive theories of trauma coincided with the increasing availability of imaging technologies that actually allowed researchers to look at the ways trauma and traumatic memory affect the brain. These technologies then allowed the development of a number of persuasive biological and neurocognitive theories of trauma that continue to hold sway in the present moment. Specialists often single out three parts of the brain that behave abnormally in trauma survivors: the amygdala, the hippocampus and various parts of the frontal cortex (Green et al. 2017: 415–16). Different conceptualizations of the ways in which these areas activate and interact in those suffering from PTSD have led to the promulgation of a number of persuasive neurocognitive theories of trauma. A team led by Scott Rauch produced one of the earliest and most influential of these. Rauch et al.’s model addresses the activity of the amygdala, the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) but highlights the activity of the first of these (Rauch et al. 1998). The amygdala is the brain’s fear centre and, according to Van der Kolk, warns “us of impending danger and [… activates] the body’s stress response” (Van der Kolk 2014: 42). Among those suffering from PTSD, the amygdala fires – and activates a stress response – at the memory of a trauma. Green et al. (2017) identify the work of Liberzon and Garfinkel as being particularly valuable for understanding the ways in which trauma might affect the behaviour of the mPFC. Van der Kolk argues that if the amygdala is the brain’s “smoke detector”, the mPFC is the “watchtower”, providing a view from on high while assessing (rather than immediately responding) to potential threats (Van der Kolk 2014: 62). Green et al. describe the mPFC as crucial to “contextualization”, the process by which stimuli are “appraised, represented, and used to guide behavior” (Green et al. 2017: 418). For Liberzon and Garfinkel (2009), altered activity in the mPFC among those suffering PTSD leads to contextualization deficits, which often exacerbate the fear response identified by Rauch and his team. Green et al. also draw our attention to a number of other neurocognitive theories that explain – and in many ways, complicate – our understanding of the ways that trauma shapes and misshapes memory (Green et al. 2017: 419). I provide this brief summary of recent developments less to pull any specific insights from it than to offer a brief review that might help other literary trauma theorists orient themselves with respect to new research. In what follows, I offer a few insights gleaned from this recent history – along with some suggestions as to how they might shape or reshape our reading of creative texts about trauma.

Different manifestations of trauma It is a widely accepted truth both in- and outside psychology that trauma manifests differently in different people. But brain-scanning technology provides extremely compelling support for that claim. One case in particular drives the point home. A husband and wife are involved in a traffic disaster involving more than 100 cars. Though both survive the crash with no adverse physical effects, they are trapped in their car for a period of time before being rescued. During that time, both fear for their lives and, more gruesomely, see a child burn to death before their eyes. In the aftermath, both report peritraumatic symptoms and meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD. But their “traumas” are in other ways quite different. 222

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A team of psychologists led by Ruth Lanius used a heart-rate monitor and fMRI scanning to further elaborate on those differences: The man experienced intense anxiety, arousal, and escape-focused cognitions; his heart rate increased 13 bpm from baseline. Blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal increases were found in his anterior frontal, anterior cingulate, superior and medial temporal, thalamic, parietial, and occipital brain regions. In contrast, the woman reported being extremely “numb” and “frozen”, had no heart rate change, and had BOLD signal increases only in occipital regions. This report highlights the importance of individual differences in subjective and biological characteristics of posttraumatic remembrances, particularly those related to peritraumatic dissociation and numbing. (Lanius et al. 2003: 667) In somewhat simpler terms, though the couple have almost exactly the same traumatic experience, the psychic effects of that experience are quite distinct. This insight has continued to animate Lanius’s work over the years, and she and others have worked to better explain the ways in which trauma might hit different people in different ways. Thus, in a 2015 book Lanius co-authors with Paul Frewen, the pair ask readers to distinguish between two types of trauma in particular: “an intrinsically dissociative presentation, involving the experience of trauma-related altered states of consciousness (TRASC), and a presentation that lacks blatantly dissociative elements, involving clinically significant distress but presumed otherwise normal waking consciousness (NWC)” (Frewen and Lanius 2015: 4). The former, Lanius and Frewen argue, often features either a derealized or depersonalized experience of the world. Without going into too much detail, we might note that derealization and depersonalization are often characterized by abnormal perception of self or world; examples include out-of-body experiences, difficulty recognizing oneself or the sense that the world is not real. The other type of traumatic adaptation lacks these altered states; it is a challenging but not intrinsically different experience of the world. Lanius and Frewen’s work – along with that of other prominent researchers – led to the inclusion of a so-called “dissociative” sub-type of PTSD in the fifth edition of the DSM, published in 2013. Such insights may help clarify one of the most prominent contemporary debates in trauma theory, one that hinges on a relatively simple question: is it possible to tell a trauma story straight? Stef Craps engages this question head on in a recent chapter. He points out, as Luckhurst has done before him, that the first wave of trauma theorists, from Caruth to LaCapra, tend to focus their analyses on texts that trade in a “modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia” on the assumption such tropes are “uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma” (Craps 2013: 46). Craps goes on to explain why such an approach has become all but axiomatic within trauma theory. Trauma theorists often justify their focus on antinarrative, fragmented, modernist forms by pointing to similarities with the psychic experience of trauma. An experience that exceeds the possibility of narrative knowledge, so the logic goes, will best be represented by a failure of narrative. (Craps 2013: 50) Craps argues that this tendency has long obscured the fact that much trauma literature is not at all “fragmented”, and that more properly linear, straightforward narrative can be an 223

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equally effective means of transmitting tales of psychic pain. He further argues that trauma theory’s focus on modernist (and modernist-style) texts is indicative of a bias toward “Western” – or, more simply, European and American – literature and art. To extend his point and counteract this trend, he offers an extended reading of the Scottish-Sierra Leonean author Aminatta Forna’s Memory of Love, a novel that, like others she has written, grapples with the effects of war in Sierra Leone. Though that country’s recent history is nothing if not fragmented, Forna’s narrative is decidedly not; as Craps puts it, Memory unfolds without “the kind of avant-garde experimentation or modernist pyrotechnics beloved of many canonical trauma writers”; rather, Craps contends, the novel is a “fine example of literary realism, which does not derive its haunting power from the conversion of unspeakable suffering into broken, traumatized speech” (Craps 2013: 58). Craps’s overarching point – that Western biases toward modernist literature often lead critics to ignore both non-Western and straight-narrative representations of trauma – is not to be denied. Yet Lanius’s work suggests that trauma theorists wrestling with such questions are not playing a zero-sum game. Indeed, her research (and others’) suggests that there are at least two distinct flavours of trauma, each of which might manifest uniquely in text. The dissociative sub-type of trauma – with its altered states of consciousness – matches up nicely with the fragmented or otherwise warped narratives of European and American modernism. On the other hand, classic, realist narrative techniques might serve as a more appropriate vehicle for communicating the non-dissociative type of trauma that does not significantly affect the tone of one’s normal waking state.

A new focus on the “cognitive” aspects of trauma One common characterization of trauma suffer it. As just one example, we a neuroscientist whose work focuses on and his colleague Lucy Biven, trauma is system: PTSD is

focuses on its emotional effects on those who can turn to the work of Jaak Panksepp, the origins of human emotion. For Panksepp a disorder of what he calls our brain’s FEAR

the gradual penetration of fearfulness as an ever-present irritation of the soul, with many horrific images engraved into the memorial surfaces of minds. All mammals can be afflicted with PTSD because we all have very similar ancient FEAR systems that can become sensitized and full of trepidation. (Panksepp and Biven 2012: 176) Panksepp and Biven’s characterization comports with a common understanding of trauma as causing our fear switch to get stuck on the “on” position; accordingly, one might flash back to the terrifying experience or suffer from intrusive thoughts and nightmares. Or one might have a quick-trigger startle reflex. Yet in recent years, new research has compelled some specialists to argue that this focus on the emotional side of trauma has caused us to lose track of the fact that trauma can also manifest as a cognitive dysfunction – that it shapes not only how one feels but how one thinks. A team led by the neuropsychologist Amy Jak summarizes these developments in a recent review article. For Jak et al., cognitive impairment following a traumatic event may be equally destabilizing, as it affects professional and educational success and potentially hinders both one’s financial and interpersonal well-being (Jak et al. 2018: 94). Hence, she draws our attention to a variety of neurocognitive studies that help us better understand a less-discussed set of PTSD symptoms. For instance, trauma 224

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might make it harder for individuals to pay sustained attention. Or it may also slow what brain scientists refer to as “processing speed”, or as Walker defines it, “the rate at which a human can take in a bit of new information, reach some judgment on it and then formulate a response” (Walker 2014). Writing in a similar vein, Scott et al. mention the ways in which PTSD might hinder “concentration and everyday memory” (Scott et al. 2015: 106). Such symptoms demand specialists’ attention in no small part because initial studies suggest that treatment strategies that address both emotional and cognitive impairment may be more effective than those that isolate the former (Jak et al. 2018: 103ff.). The notion that trauma might shape the way we think – as well as the way we feel – is certainly not unknown to trauma theorists, but literary scholars who follow along the path lit by Jak, Scott and others might be more open to the ways trauma’s cognitive profile shapes narrative and style. As just one example, we might turn to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan’s 2006 novel The Keep. The book tells the story of a pair of cousins – Danny and Howard – whose lives are both shaped by a shared trauma in their youth. The two are quite close, until the moment when Danny plays a juvenile but sadistic prank on Howard, leading him into an underground cave system and leaving him there for three days. The experience is emotionally scarring for both – though obviously in different ways. Many years later, Howard invites Danny to help renovate a European castle, a project that brings back their fractured history in all sorts of disturbing ways. Danny is Egan’s protagonist, and he occasionally speaks of “the worm”, a metaphor that seems to stand in for the difficult emotions surrounding his memory of his childhood trick. It is a threatening figure, and one that suggests that Danny continues to suffer from that formative event. Now, to say that “the worm” never manifests itself emotionally would be dead wrong. The Keep is a book about the long tail of childhood trauma written in the mode of gothic horror; fear and paranoia are ubiquitous. And yet some of the effects of Danny’s pain are decidedly cognitive. Throughout the novel, Danny takes pride in his cognitive abilities, among them the acquisition and organization of knowledge. He loves collecting information and occasionally disseminates it to the reader in neat lists. However, when memories of his childhood creep nearer, these functions seem to shut down. They do so frequently at the castle, whose labyrinth of underground spaces recalls the caves in which Howard got lost so many years ago. At one point, after he has been at the castle for a few days, Danny realizes that his cognitive function has been “on ice” during the first part of his stay when an overheard conversation kicks it back into gear; the discussion: kicked something back to life in Danny that had been on ice since he’d gotten to the castle: the thinking, active part of him that spent its time figuring out what was going on around him so he’d know where he fit. The part that had kept Danny alive all these years. The world moved and rearranged itself around him and Danny was himself again, which meant not just knowing things but knowing more things than other people, seeing all the links when everyone else could see only a few. Information. This had worked for Danny, it had! For years and years it had worked. (Egan 2006: 111) Danny’s nimble arrangement and rearrangement of information helps him both survive and thrive, but this part of his brain slows as memories of trauma come near. Danny is actually quite aware of this process, and he has developed some coping mechanisms for dealing with 225

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it. When “the worm” approaches, he puts his mind into a kind of safe mode, shelving extraneous facts in hopes of preserving others. Egan writes, “He knew the signs. When you were vulnerable to the worm you had to take precautions, put a few key facts in a strong place where the worm couldn’t touch them if it somehow did get in” (Egan 2006: 149). That Danny knows how to “take precautions” in this way further emphasizes the ways in which trauma is sometimes accompanied by a sort of cognitive impairment in The Keep. Such impairment sometimes bleeds into the narrator’s structuring of the story as well. At one point later in the novel, when the degradation of Danny’s mental state has become apparent, the story’s narrator explains difficulties he is having structuring the tale he tells: Now I should back up here, because quite a few hours have passed since Danny was getting rained on out in the garden, and someone’s got to be wondering: (1) Was he ever really outside, or was it all just a dream? (2) Has he seen Howard since he got back (or dreamed he got back) to the castle? (3) Which part of Danny won the argument, the part that blamed everything on Howard or the part that blamed the worm? And I wish I knew how to sprinkle these answers around so you’d get the information without noticing how you got it, but I don’t. So I’ll just stick them in when the time seems right. (Egan 2006: 155) Here, the narrator’s difficulties in trying to present and distribute crucial facts are mirrored by Danny’s increasing inability to move and arrange information. And the presence of “the worm” at the core of this paragraph implies a similar cause for both.

Brain and body in recent trauma research With all this talk of trauma and the brain – whether in its “emotional” or “cognitive” capacities – it can be tempting to think that our deepest psychic pains live only inside our heads. However, a variety of specialists have come to argue that such a characterization of trauma is too narrow. To a certain extent, this conversation begins with the work of Stephen Porges, whose “polyvagal theory” (which I will not get into here) proposes that we might use “physiological measures to understand the psychological state of others” (Porges 2011: 1). In his foreword to Porges’s book, Bessel van der Kolk indicates that the polyvagal theory might help us clarify “the relation between visceral state and emotional expression” – to better understand why psychic states might manifest with somatic symptoms (Porges 2011: xiv). Porges paves the way for Van der Kolk’s book-length exploration of this theme in his best-selling 2014 volume, The Body Keeps the Score. The book is, among other things, an excellent introduction to many recent advances in the science of PTSD, but it also makes a compelling case that physical treatment practices – like yoga – might contribute to healing a trauma that is seated in both brain and body. His claims are based on a relatively simple observation: that traumatized individuals often suffer from an array of otherwise inexplicable physical symptoms. He writes: Somatic symptoms for which no clear physical basis can be found are ubiquitous in traumatized children and adults. They can include chronic back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, digestive problems, spastic colon/irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue, and some forms of asthma. (Van der Kolk 2014: 100) 226

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Today, Van der Kolk’s counselling sessions generally begin with the cultivation of “physical self-awareness” (103), and he often asks patients to describe their state not in terms of emotional conditions like anxiety or fear but rather “physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on” (100). Van der Kolk’s somatic characterization of trauma and its effects is helpful in understanding Hanya Yanagihara’s wrenching 2015 novel A Little Life. The book follows the exploits of four friends in New York but focuses on the story of Jude, a brilliant lawyer who is traumatized by repeated physical, emotional and sexual abuse by multiple perpetrators throughout his childhood and youth. Jude is in many ways a remarkably stable, emotionally mature character who is more likely to support his friends rather than to need support from them. All of which is not to say that the pains of his adolescence do not pursue him into his adulthood. Rather, they tend to manifest physically. One of Jude’s abusers leaves him with debilitating leg injuries that require a lifetime of therapeutic and surgical attention. But he is also repeatedly racked by otherwise causeless bouts of physical pain that lay him low. Yanagihara describes one early in the novel, when Jude’s friend and, later, partner finds him curled up in the bathroom; Willem pulled open the door and found Jude on the floor, one leg tucked up against his chest. He had vomited, and some of it had polled on the ground before him, and some of it was scabbed on his lips and chin, a stippled apricot smear. His eyes were shut and he was sweat, and with one hand he was holding the curved end of his crutch with an intensity that, as Willem would later come to recognize, comes only with extreme discomfort. (Yanagihara 2015: 23) Such episodes befuddle Jude’s friends and doctors but make more sense in the context of Van der Kolk’s understanding of the way trauma is situated in the body. In Body Keeps the Score, Van der Kolk also points out the ways in which a physical “lodging” of trauma might impel similarly physical responses. One of the most common is cutting, one of whose strongest predictors, according to one of Van der Kolk’s studies, is a history of childhood physical and sexual abuse (Van der Kolk 2014: 143). He cites a patient who claims that cutting “made her feel much better” and wonders if it is an “attempt to gain some sense of control” (143). Unsurprisingly, then, Jude too engages frequently in self-cutting, furtively and with extreme calculation. As the novel wears on, his cutting becomes an open secret shared by his closest confidantes. One of these is Willem, who is able to see the scars only when Jude falls deeply asleep. In one such episode, Willem ran his fingers down the inside of [Jude’s] arm, its scars rendering it into a miserable terrain, a place of mountains and valleys singed by fire [… sometimes] He would uncover him and move his palms over his arms, his legs, his back, feeling the texture of the skin change from rough to glossy, marveling at all the permutations flesh could take, at all the ways the body healed itself, even when attempts had been made to destroy it. (Yanagihara 2015: 528) In this and other passages, we see a tortured individual who has attempted to respond to the physical manifestation of trauma with, ironically, a physical trauma. But we would remiss not to notice the ways in which the marks of that pain have an aesthetic quality for 227

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Yanagihara. Scars and scar tissue are “mountains and valleys singed by fire”, and Jude’s flesh comes to resemble a painter’s canvas, with both “rough” and “glossy” patches. This is also a metaphor for art – Yanagihara’s and others’ – which tries to make healing beauty of destructive pain.

Inconsistencies and further exploration I end this brief discussion of new directions in the science of psychological trauma with an important caveat. One of the more fascinating and potentially problematic revelations of the neuroscientific turn in trauma studies is the possibility that trauma as we have come to know it may not really exist – at least on brain scans. I refer above to research that identifies abnormalities in the amygdala, hippocampus and frontal cortex among those suffering from PTSD. (As mentioned previously, the work of Rauch et al. [1998] represents one of the first and most influential of these studies.) However, while multiple studies observe, for instance, heightened activity in the amygdala among trauma victims, there are also some that have failed to identify such activity and one that actually found a decrease (Green et al. 2017: 416). And meta-analyses of similar work with the mPFC and the hippocampus reveal similar inconsistencies in those brain regions too (416). Or, to borrow a phrase from Gertrude Stein, many of those looking for psychological trauma on brain scans have begun to wonder if there is a there there. The reasons for such inconsistencies are unclear, but they should give pause to any literary theorists tempted to lean in too heavily on the trauma model. This is not to say that we should jettison trauma as a category for literary study. Indeed, Patel et al. published a review article on the neuroscience of PTSD that acknowledges variations among brain-scan studies of trauma victims but nonetheless urges “further exploration of the neurocircuitry and large-scale network models in PTSD” (Patel et al. 2012: 2130). But as psychologists and neuroscientists “further explore” the trauma concept, so should literary theorists, while continuing to pay close attention to our colleagues on the other side of the arts–sciences divide.

Bibliography Brewin, C. R., Lipton, M., Gregory, J. D. and Burgess, N. (2010) “Intrusive Images in Psychological Disorders: Characteristics, Neural Mechanisms, and Treatment Implications”, Psychological Review 117 (1): 210–32. Caruth, C. (ed.) (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Craps, S. (2013) “Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age”, in G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone (eds) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, New York: Routledge, 45–60. Egan, J. (2006) The Keep, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Ehlers, A. and Clark, D. M. (2000) “A Cognitive Model of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, Behaviour Research and Therapy 38(4): 319–45. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Frewen, P. and Lanius, R. (2015) Healing the Traumatized Self: Consciousness, Neuroscience, Treatment, New York: Norton. Green, J. D., Black, S. K., Marx, B. P. and Keane, T. M. (2017) “Behavioral, Cognitive, Biological, and Neurocognitive Conceptualizations of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, in S. N. Gold (ed.) APA Handbook of Trauma Psychology: Vol. 1., Foundations in Knowledge, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 407–28.

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Cognitive approaches Hartman, G. H. (1995) “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies”, New Literary History 26(3): 537–63. Jak, A. J., Crocker, L. D., Aupperle, R. L., Clausen, A. and Bomyea, J. (2018) “Neurocognition in PTSD: Treatment Insights and Implications”, Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences 38: 93–116. Lanius, R. A., Hopper, J. W. and Menon, R. S. (2003) “Individual Differences in A Husband and Wife Who Developed PTSD after A Motor Vehicle Accident: A Functional MRI Case Study”, American Journal of Psychiatry 160(4): 667–69. Liberzon, I. and Garfinkel, S. N. (2009) “Functional Neuroimaging in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”, in P. J. Shirmani, T. M. Keane and J. E. LeDoux (eds) Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Basic Science and Clinical Practice, New York: Humana Press, 297–317. McNally, R. (2003) Remembering Trauma, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mowrer, O. H. (1960) Learning Theory and Behavior, New York: Wiley. Panksepp, J. and Biven, L. (2012) The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, New York: Norton. Patel, R., Spreng, R. N., Shin, L. M. and Girard, T. A. (2012) “Neurocircuitry Models of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Beyond: A Meta-Analysis of Functional Neuroimaging Studies”, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 36(9): 2130–42. Pederson, J. (2014) “Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory”, Narrative 22(3): 333–53. Porges, S. W. (2011) The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, New York: Norton. Rauch, S. L., Shin, L. M., Whalen, P. J. and Pitman, R. K. (1998) “Neuroimaging and the Neuroanatomy of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, CNS Spectrums 3(Suppl. 2): 30–41. Scott, J. C., Matt, G. E., Wrocklage, K. M., Crnich, C., Jordan, J., Southwick, S. M., Krystal, J. H. and Schweinsburg, B. C. (2015) “A Quantitative Meta-Analysis of Neurocognitive Functioning in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”, Psychological Bulletin 141(1): 105–40. Van der Kolk, B. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, New York: Penguin. Walker, H. (2014) “What Causes the Brain to Have Slow Processing Speed, and How Can the Rate Be Improved?” Scientific American 1 March 2014. www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-causes-thebrain-to-have-slow-processing-speed-and-how-can-the-rate-be-improved/> Yanagihara, H. (2015) A Little Life, New York: Anchor Books. Zunshine, L. (2015) “Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies”, in L. Zunshine (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–14.

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21 TRAUMA, CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM AND NEW MATERIALISM Deniz Gundogan Ibrisim

By tracing several theoretical frameworks drawn from dominant trauma theory, current memory studies, critical posthumanism and new materialism this chapter, in its interdisciplinary engagement, is divided into subsections. However, this chapter primarily seeks to trouble the idea of centralizing and universalizing the human figure or what Giorgio Agamben calls an “anthropological machine” that defines the conceptual, material, philosophical and political production of the human subject (Agamben 2004: 37). Bruno Latour critically reminds us of a gap that is culturally and socially constructed between “two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on one hand; that of nonhumans on the other” (Latour 1993: 10–11), and it is ethically imperative to challenge the concept of the human as a privileged, dominant and fixed figure, supposedly an independent entity that is isolated from its socio-ecological surroundings. In an endeavour to critically talk about trauma today, it is necessary to renew and radically interrogate our perceptions and representations of trauma in a way that recognizes the complex entanglements of planetary existence. Rather than centralizing and privileging the human as the emblematic wounded and traumatized being that is at the root of Western psychoanalytical conceptualizations of the “talking cure” or “the work of therapy”, novelistic perspectives drawn from reconceptualization of natural-social entanglements are worth considering. To move beyond the constructivist-essentialist impasse of transcendental and humanist traditions, the interdependence of the material and the discursive, the human and the non-human underscores the idea that agents do not only denote humans. In this regard, the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s notion of the human subject which rests on “an enlarged sense of interconnection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others” rejects selfcentred individualism (Braidotti 2013: 48). Braidotti’s definition entails questioning the sovereignty of the human subject, and hence Cartesian dualism. Accordingly, Katherine Hayles’s seminal book, How We Became Posthuman, redefines the human as “an amalgam” that brings together the human and the non-human, which constitutes “a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (Hayles 1999: 3). Hayles’s definition engages with both a new dynamic subjectivity and the decentralization of a liberal humanist subject. This critical definition overrules the “mind-matter and culture-nature divides of transcendental humanist thought” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 96), and 230

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thereby complicates agency and causality. Agency is no longer considered to be the distinguishing quality unique to humans. Throughout this chapter, I will insist on this very indivisibility of subjectivity and objectivity, mind and matter, nature and culture, and human and non-human for approaching trauma theory from a new perspective that rethinks the psychoanalytic vocabulary of traumatic suffering. The chapter begins with a brief overview of trauma theory and focuses on its recent debates. It then sketches some emerging trends in posthumanist and new materialist studies and attempts to bring new materialism into current trauma discourse. Finally, it presents a brief example from postcolonial South African literature as a case study for the potential posthumanist representation of the trauma of Apartheid (1948–94). By following Freud’s trauma conceptualization, in her canonical 1995 work Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, influenced by the major debates of trauma theory in the early 1990s, Cathy Caruth conceives of trauma as “a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it” (Caruth 1995: 92). The dominant Western model of cultural trauma continues to rely to a great extent on this Freudian conceptualization of trauma and its psychological consequences, which include the inability of the traumatized subject to articulate its trauma and the issue of trauma’s belatedness (Caruth 1995; Felman and Laub 1992), the aporia of the wound (Derrida 1992; Lyotard 1994), the question of history, trauma and transmissibility (LaCapra 2001) and the gap between the wounding experience, artistic expression and poetic subjectivity (Hartman 1995). In these theorists’ works, the dominant Western model of cultural trauma takes as its points of reference individual and large-scale events (such as the Holocaust) and the normative definitions of the traumatized subject as a fragmented, isolated individual. In their introduction to Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary and Literary Cultural Criticism, Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone argue that Caruth’s work is a mission statement for the preoccupation with the problematic of incommensurability that characterizes trauma (Buelens et al. 2014). Nonetheless, especially since the 2000s, some critics have pointed to what they see as deficiencies in dominant Western trauma theory conceptualized in the 1990s by Caruth, LaCapra, Felman and Laub and Hartman. According to trauma theorists of the twenty-first century, the dominant Western trauma theory has been flattened, depoliticized and dehistoricized (Alexander 2002; Balaev 2012; Craps 2013; Luckhurst 2008; Najita 2006; Rajiva 2017; Rothberg 2009, 2011; Visser 2014). These theorists have pointed to the limitations of Caruthian trauma theory and envisaged a new orientation towards the relationship between history and trauma. They have been alerted to the sustained and enduring trauma of colonialism that is obscured/overlooked in the Eurocentric, event-based conceptions of trauma theory. In this context, Michael Rothberg aptly coins the term “multidirectional memory”, which is a paradigm-shifting concept in trauma theory. Multidirectional memory, for Rothberg, is not competitive in a zero-sum game, but interculturally and transculturally dynamic, and it allows us to unravel the concrete historical consequences of colonialism and postcolonialism that persist into the present (Rothberg 2009). In a similar vein, Stef Craps argues that due to this diversification, there has been an increasing tendency to read trauma not just as a product of Western thinking but in global contexts. Craps’s seminal book Postcolonial Witnessing opens trauma theory to specific local contexts that are marked by the burden of canonical Western trauma theory. Craps introduces his theory of cross-traumatic affiliation, which critically cautions us against the monumentalism of traumas as singular events. Craps places the emphasis on “alliances and solidarities that transcend race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and culture” (Craps 2013: 89). 231

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This opening-up of trauma theory has been much welcomed over the past years and Caruth, in her Literature in the Ashes of History (2013), eventually revisits her emphasis on stasis and aporia and turns to Freud’s conceptualization of the life instinct, a fundamental driving force that facilitates how the subject deals with its wishes. By investigating the weak points of the trauma theory of the 1990s, the above-mentioned theorists situate themselves in a wider framework in terms of power structures and non-Western collective traumas and facilitate the gradual process of moving away from embedded Freudian psychoanalytic and Eurocentric tendencies. Trauma studies today has been greatly concerned with the critical memory of colonial experience and thus has moved beyond a Eurocentric framework. Moreover, trauma studies has turned its gaze towards the large-scale effects of violence in an age of globalized neo-liberalism. A similar shift can be seen in memory studies. Memory studies as a field has become one of the best venues for rethinking the dominant Western trauma theories of the twenty-first century. Some theorists have begun to reject the superimposition of nation as the key determiner of memory by discussing transnational, transcultural or global perspectives (Assmann and Conrad 2010; Crownshaw 2013; De Cesari and Rigney 2016; Erll 2011; Levy and Sznaider 2002; Rothberg 2009) and thus to conceptualize remembrance across national cultural boundaries and go beyond Eurocentric frameworks. Moreover, topics such as long-term effects of ecological devastation have been discussed along with current memory studies. Before addressing the potential of posthumanist and new materialist discourse for trauma theory, it is useful to first consider the current major features of more environmentally-tuned approaches to trauma theory and current memory studies. Specifically, as theorists work on the interstices of the postcolonial and the ecocritical, they critically revisit a large body of colonial writing from an ecocritical and ecocosmopolitan perspective. By examining African, Caribbean, Pacific Island and South Asian literatures and how they depict the relationship between humans and nature, Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, opens up new areas for postcolonial and ecocritical discourse. The book critically tackles the object–subject, human– animal divide, indigenous ecopoetics, human rights and the divisions between the Global North and South (DeLoughrey and Handley 2011). DeLoughrey shows that Anthropocentrism, colonialism and capitalism have been deeply entwined in creating and reproducing inequalities and different marginalized groups that comprise both the human and nonhuman elements. Rosanne Kennedy’s concept of “multidirectional eco memory”, which builds upon Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, also underwrites the critique of dualisms, and emphasizes the importance of non-human animals and beings in the process of remembering and coming to terms with traumatization. Kennedy argues the following: “Multidirectional eco memory could facilitate new visions of justice that holds humans responsible and accountable for our actions towards nonhuman species […] their struggle for survival, recognition, and justice” (Kennedy 2017: 269). Human-induced climate change and responses to the Anthropocene – a term that theorizes humanity’s impact on the earth as a new geological epoch, coined by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000 – also inform trauma studies today. To illustrate this, the Spring 2018 volume of Studies in the Novel: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction, edited by Stef Craps and Rick Crownshaw, explores the poetics of climate change in its different textual, temporal and spatial contexts. In this way, rather than discussing extraordinary and event-based catastrophes, the volume brings together insidious, structural, everyday forms of violence and neoliberal capitalism to break with anthropocentric modes of representation (Craps and Crownshaw 2018: 13). In a similar vein, Lucy Bond, Ben de Bruyn and Jessica Rapson argue in their influential edited volume Planetary 232

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Memory in Contemporary American Fiction: “If we want to rethink collective life in the early twenty-first century, the most important setting we should be examining may be ‘the only social site we have’, the planet”, and they add, “the idea of the ‘planetary’ simultaneously destabilizes ‘the hegemony of the global,’ and decenters its human subject, by revealing the fundamental imbrication of human and non-human life worlds” (Bond et al. 2018: 853). Ecological and planetary thinking thus becomes productive to offer an anti-essentialist ontology that rejects the concept of a self-enclosed subject fully constituted without any engagement with the non-human.

Sovereignty eclipsed? Towards posthumanist and new materialist approaches to trauma theory How do we talk about trauma and its subject within current pluralistic trauma theories, ecologically-attuned memory practices that call humanist assumptions into question and transdisciplinary and planetary memory studies? What do we write when we write about the traumatized subject? From the conventional vantage point of psychologically-oriented trauma theory we tend to perceive the traumatized subject as an isolated, monad-like human being that strives to work through the process of a catastrophic experience and is usually debilitated by mourning and melancholia. We do not at most times consider the embedded and embodied nature of the process of working through trauma and how materiality plays into this image with its multiple registers. In what follows, I discuss a growing body of work that brings together materiality, vitalism and affect, questioning human distinctiveness and the complex boundaries between human and non-human worlds. In this framework, I discuss posthumanism and specifically new materialism because these theoretical frameworks potentially offer new and provocative modes of thinking about trauma and the traumatized subject that resist the dominant cultural imaginaries that seek to shape past, present and future. Rosi Braidotti’s conceptualization of the posthuman subject that is understood as a relational embodied and embedded, affective entity and not only as a transcendental consciousness (Braidotti 2018: 1) is an illuminating entry point to my discussion. Braidotti turns our gaze to the idea that embodiment is neither fundamentally biological nor socially constructed, but rather a point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the sociological. Several questions might arise from this perspective: what if we consider the subject as a model of immanent and continuously emergent relationality? Rather than focusing solely on the discursive and trying to understand how it exists in and is shaped by the material world, what if we centre on performance, embodiment and material practices that expand, complicate and thus recalibrate the subject in its coming to terms with traumatization? In this regard, we take materiality not as firmly attached to a sealed-off conception of the mind, the body and the world, but as a creative exploration of a human and more-thanhuman alliance, which in fact delineates critical posthumanism debates. The ground-breaking works that have shaped posthumanist theory through their different trajectories can be traced to the 1990s, especially to Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Judith M. Halberstam and Ira Livingston’s Posthuman Bodies (1995) and Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999). Current posthumanist discussions owe much debt to Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism? (2009), Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013), Stefan Herbrechter’s Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (2013), Pramod K. Nayar’s Posthumanism (2014), Tamar Sharon’s Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology: The Case for Mediated 233

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Posthumanism (2014), David Roden’s Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (2015) and Richard Grusin’s The Nonhuman Turn (2015). In sync with the debates on posthumanism, the concept of “new materialism” was coined in the 1990s to mark a particular moment in the cultural and theoretical turn away from the persistent dualisms in modern and humanist traditions. Specifically, new materialism brings forth a renewed critical materialist attention to the distributed and multivalent effects of global capitalism and climate change as well as emphasizing the importance of thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene. In doing so, new materialism forges new connections with the natural, chemical and climatological make-up of the earth. New materialist theorists of today such as Rosi Braidotti, Samantha Frost and Diana Coole, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Manuel DeLanda and Quentin Meillassaux investigate new connections by raising a series of questions that pivot around the idea of active, agential, self-differing and affective-affected matter and thus problematize discursive constructions that perpetuate Western liberal subjectivities. In what follows, I discuss Barad’s materialdiscursive framework, focus on Bennett’s concept of vibrant materiality and briefly introduce Alaimo’s formulation of trans-corporeality, which all raise thought-provoking questions about the representation of the idealized and bounded individual. These concepts offer a more realistic, permeable representation of the all-feeling, all-knowing human subject and, as I suggest, illuminate the traumatized subject’s complex ties with animals, plants, matter, objects and landscapes not to mention other humans. Karen Barad’s material-discursive framework that aims at the recalibration of the humanist subject position owes much to her groundbreaking conceptualization of “agential realism”, for which Barad takes her inspiration from physicist Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum physics. She aptly argues in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meanings that interaction, which assumes the encounter of separate, pre-existing individual agencies, implies the division that there are separate individual agencies that precede it, implies the division of object and subject. Barad engages with the displacement of these independently existing entities by introducing the notion of intraaction. In intra-action, distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge during the process. Put another way, agencies are only distinct in a relational sense and they do not exist as individual elements during the process of intra-action. Barad gives an example of two waves encountering each other. In this context, when two waves meet, they do not bounce off in different directions but occupy the same point in time and space. Barad calls this process diffraction in which the emergent wave takes on a new quality (Barad 2007: 76). For Barad, this process is not simply the joining of separate entities but is a fundamental condition of the enactment of all kinds of phenomena, which she defines as follows: “Phenomena”, in an agential realist sense, are the entanglement – the ontological inseparability – of intra-acting agencies. (Where agency is an enactment, not something someone has, or something instantiated in the form of an individual agent.) It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of “individuals” within the phenomenon become determinate and particular material articulations of the world become meaningful. (Kleinman 2012: 77) Barad questions the idea that identities and bodies are merely linguistically constructed and not tuned to the understanding that they are material emergences. Her agentic and materialist formulation is attuned to the idea that matter and meaning cannot be severed. Agency 234

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demands this entangled possibility for the emergent nature of embodiment. Moreover, for Barad, agency is an enactment that affects humans and non-humans. In this way, as Kleinman suggests, Barad critically revises foundational philosophical notions such as causality, agency, space, time and matter, what she describes as “entanglements of spacetime matterings” (Juelskjoer 2012: 20). Furthering this material-discursive framework and reimagining new networks of humans and non-humans, Jane Bennett’s commitment to the non-human challenges the instrumental and passive conception of nature as an entity that is designed for human use. Her Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things is an account on “direct sensory, linguistic, and imaginative attention toward a material vitality” (Bennett 2010: 19). Bennett follows Bruno Latour, who understands matter as consisting of “actants”, that it, as sources of action that can produce affective connections and have effects in the world. Bennett notes that the terms “agent” and “agency” are not the property of persons or things; rather, for her, agency is an enactment, a matter of possibilities (in the Latourian sense) for reconfiguring entanglements. Bennett rethinks matter as vibrant and material formations as agencies. She argues that the “environment” is active and we, as humans, are not sovereign subjects. In order to illustrate this, Bennett gives an account of her contemplation of various material entities such as a glove, some pollen, a bottle cap and even a dead rat. She is moved by the awareness of their singularity as she says: I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics. (Bennett 2010: 5) Here, the capacity to detect the presence of impersonal affect leads to receptivity. In other words, to question our belief in our intrinsic sovereignty, one needs to have a moment of suspension and adopt a more open-ended presence. With regards to the intimate connection between dynamic human and non-human bodies, Stacy Alaimo crucially insists that the idea of embodiment is never a private affair and always already trans-corporeal: “Trans-corporeality means that all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them” (Alaimo 2018: 435). Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality emphasizes the ongoing movement across different material and affective formations and sites. Alaimo’s concept rethinks the impact of various organic and inorganic substances that surround and penetrate us. In order to illuminate this impact, Alaimo discusses the Greenpeace Campaign held during 2004–5, during which people were asked to provide hair samples to be tested for mercury contamination. Alaimo writes that, “when I received my results, I imagined various routes that mercury may have taken to my body (tuna sandwiches in childhood, Dallas air pollution)” (Alaimo 2010: 19–20). In this way, Alaimo traces the negotiations of unruly substances (i.e. toxins, elements) that move across bodies and places. She claims that trans-corporeality opens a “mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, non-human creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (3). Trans-corporeality thus underscores the specificity of matter and things in their socio-historical realms as actors whose subjective or agential capacities forge new bonds.

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In order to illustrate this highly abstract framework, we can briefly trace the South African novelist Achmat Dangor’s post-apartheid novel Kafka’s Curse (1997) and its protagonist Omar/Oscar, who experiences an identity crisis and undergoes a gradual bodily transformation into a willow tree in the middle of the narrative. Throughout the novel, Omar/ Oscar’s growing bark-like skin welcomes all sorts of organisms from the earth, and spores and lichen from the walls and floorboards (Dangor 1997: 58). This transformation, as I suggest, opens an insistent trans-corporeal space that allows the reader to recognize other subjects and actors that have been systematically deprived of their ample resources: the displaced South Indian Muslims and Indian slaves and more significantly the severely uprooted non-human beings such as fast-growing willow trees that were brought to South Africa from Australia during the British occupation of the Cape Colony in the 1820s. In these critical and imaginative conceptualizations of agency and causality, we become aware of new alliances and new processes of meaning for the self, culture, politics, ecology and everyday life. We might be mobilized to think against the grain of the dominant representations of subjectivities. This conceptualization, as I propose, is fruitful for literary representations of trauma because it makes visible the infinite enfolding of human, matter and meaning in texts. In this way, we neither lock the traumatic experience into the psyche nor the body, but gesture towards a dynamic rhythm that affects the human subject. Thus, what happens if we do not take the human subject as the first and foremost starting point of our trauma analysis (even though trauma primarily originates from the human), but rather focus on non-human forces, matter and their interaction and intra-action?

In lieu of a conclusion: trauma, representation and emerging subjects Let us take the South African-Scottish author Zoë Wicomb’s 1987 short story collection You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town as a case study in which posthumanist and new materialist perspectives are played out in the text. In Wicomb’s book the reader follows a “colored woman”, Frieda Shenton, and her struggle for self-assertion in Apartheid-era South Africa. Specifically, in the short story “Jan Klinkies” the reader might trace posthumanist subjectivity and vibrant materialism and how it relates to the South African eco-political context. The story allows us to read distributed agencies and makes visible the temporal, spatial, corporeal and epistemological violence of South African capitalism. When Frieda and her father come to clean Jan Klinkies’s (her father’s cousin’s) home, they are surprised to see the entrance blocked by an immense pile of domestic refuse and a strange gate “barricaded with a hillock of tarnished cans” (Wicomb 2000: 15). Jan Klinkies’s collection of tarnished – but unopened – cans from South African colonial history might demonstrate his own strategic grief and survival under the laws of apartheid. On the one hand, some of these cans are old but still full of food that Jan is eating in order to “live”. On the other hand, a great number of these cans are empty and discarded as rubbish amid the refuse. For instance, among the wondrous variety of empty food cans, one stands out with its “Fray Bentos” company brand, which in fact supplied corned beef to the British Army in South Africa during the first Boer War (1899–1910). Jan’s decision to live in proximity to this tin-can matter points to the entanglement of the material (anything or entity that exists) and the discursive. As Alaimo argues, trans-corporeality involves a posthuman sense of the human perceived as “substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environment” (Alaimo 2012: 476). What is at stake in Wicomb’s story is a moment of suspension of the liberal human self through the circulation of material forces in the land, and thus the possibility of a trans-corporeal subjectivity. The 236

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traumatized human belongs to a broader material world that is not entirely withdrawn from other entities and matter. This upsets the Cartesian conception of persons and bodies in which there are strictly defined boundaries between subject and object, inside and outside. This condition, thereby, highlights the embedded and embodied memory that shows how matter is agential and storied in its own terms to create vibrancy, narrative and meaning. In the end, this is most visible in the vibrant tin-can tree that stands in the entrance garden: “The tree barely moved, but the branches stooping heavily under the hundreds of cans tied to them with wire rattled and sent off beams of blinding light at angles doubtlessly corresponding to a well-known law” (Wicomb 2000: 20). The moment the tin-can tree is revealed to the reader is pivotal in terms of a renewed critical materialist attention to the distributed agencies and influences of colonialism, especially of Apartheid as well as white African capitalism. More importantly, a careful reader will note that this well-known law does not only refer to scientific law of reflection. It might be suggested that it goes beyond the evocation of a law that sends off light at angles from objects. Within the apartheid context, it might correspond to the 1950 Group Areas Act (GAA), which imposed control over interracial property transactions and property occupation throughout apartheid South Africa. The aim of the law was to exclude non-Whites (Indians, Coloureds and Africans) from living in areas which were limited to Whites (Cape Town, Lansdowne, Claremont, Sea Point). The aim of the law was to control the movement and everyday life of urban blacks, but it also caused many non-whites either to relocate or commute vast distances from their home to work. In Wicomb’s imagination the complex dynamics of the trauma of living under the GAA become visible not only through discursive construction but also through ascribing agential and vital qualities to the non-human and the material. On the one hand, trauma stems from human violence, namely Apartheid, and Jan as a traumatized human subject develops survival mechanisms and counter-response to the GAA by reorganizing his life around the colonial waste. On the other hand, the tin-can tree embodies apartheid trauma since the tin-can tree “speaks” the colonial trauma as it rattles and provocatively sends “blinding” beams to its surroundings. The tin-can tree, in this respect, speaks, remembers, suffers and mourns. Moreover, it dilutes, if not surpasses, the mastery of the human subject in the narrative. This phenomenon encourages the reader to re-think their engagement with materiality. It also enables the reader to re-consider race, ethnicity, gender and class as flows of power and flows of resistance within a messy heterogeneous world. The tin-can tree ceases to be a mere metaphor for Apartheid here. It underscores the co-constitutive “intraactions” between meaning and matter, which leave neither materiality nor ideality intact. Thus, as we gesture toward a dissolution of the conception of the human as a monad, we cut across foundational dichotomies including nature–culture, human–non-human, animate– inanimate, agency–structure and mind–matter. In this context, waste and tin can render themselves as active forces due to the narrative potentialities that emerge through intraactions. Moreover, the tin-can tree creates a posthuman space that caters to the entanglement of humans, non-human entities and matter. From this perspective Andrew Pickering’s conceptualization of posthuman space is suggestive. For Pickering, this is a space where “the human actors are still there, but now inextricably entangled with the non-human”, and the human actors are “no longer at the center of action” (Pickering 1995: 26). This conceptualization upsets the human who is supposedly at the apex of the social pyramid. More importantly, it encourages the reader to expand and complicate Euro-Western humanist philosophy and scholarship, whose influence is still felt in psychoanalytic conceptualizations of trauma theory. Pickering adds that “the world makes us in one and the same process in 237

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which we make the world” (26). By not dismissing the human subject altogether, but by exploring the co-constitution of material and discursive productions of reality in sociohistorical and socio-spatial traumatic conditions, we might open new lines of inquiry and ethics in representing trauma. Instead of valorizing the human first and foremost, transferring agency to the affective capacities of the non-human enables us to rethink trauma subjects as becomings, movements, vibrant and trans-corporeal connections between bodies, things and places. As a conclusion let us reiterate the previous questions: How do we talk about trauma and its subject? What do we write when we write about the traumatized subject? Preserving the distinction between the physical world and the social constructs of human thoughts and meanings fails to address these questions. Innovative accounts which are not restricted to the realm of the social might provide noncompetitive and nonoppositional areas of critical exploration. Posthumanist and new materialistic thinking opens an insistent and mobile space capable of questioning power structures, geopolitical sovereign control, as well as human and non-human justice. At the same time, however, as is seen in Jan’s condition, it neither overemphasizes the perpetuation of trauma nor prioritizes solely one’s healing but insistently highlights processes that transgress boundaries on different scales. Research on posthumanist and new materialist thinking constitutes a rich potential for trauma theory in its multiplicity and diversity, and it provides illuminating insights and new outlets to recalibrate universalist and anthropocentric conceptions of Western trauma, which have already been poignantly addressed by current trauma and memory scholars over the past years.

Bibliography Agamben, G. (2004 [2002]) The Open Man and Animal, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Alaimo, S. (2010) Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. (2012) “States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea”, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19(3): 476–93. ———. (2018) “Trans-corporeality”, in R. Braidotti and M. Hlavajova (eds) Posthuman Glossary, London, Bloomsbury, 435–38. Alexander, J. C. (2002) “The Social Construction of Moral Universals”, European Journal of Social Theory 5: 5–85. Assmann, A. and Conrad, S. (2010) Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Balaev, M. (2012) The Nature of Trauma in American Novels, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bond, L., Bruyn B. D. and Rapson, J. (2018) Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction, London and New York: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. (2018) “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities”, Theory, Culture & Society 36 (6): 1–31. Buelens, G., Durrant, S. and Eaglestone, R. (eds) (2014) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary Criticism, New York: Routledge. Caruth, C. (1995) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (2013) Literature in the Ashes of History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Craps, S. and Crownshaw, R. (eds) (2018) Special issue: “The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction”. Studies in the Novel 50(1).

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Critical posthumanism and new materialism Crownshaw, R. (2013) Transcultural Memory, London: Routledge. Dangor, A. (1997) Kafka’s Curse, New York: Vintage. De Cesari, C. and Rigney, A. (eds) (2016) Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Berlin: De Gruyter. DeLoughrey, E. and Handley, G. B. (2011) Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, J. (1992) “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan”, in Derek Attridge (ed.) Acts of Literature, New York: Routledge, 370–413. Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012) New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Erll, A. (2011) “Travelling Memory”, Parallax 17(4): 4–18. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Grusin, R. (2015) The Nonhuman Turn, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Halberstam, J. and Livingston, I. (1995) Posthuman Bodies, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge. Hartman, G. H. (1995) “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies”, New Literary History 26(3): 537–63. Hayles, K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Herbrechter, S. (2013) Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis, London, UK: Bloomsbury. Juelskjoer, M. (2012) “Intra-active Entanglements: An Interview with Karen Barad”, Women, Gender and Research 21: 10–23. Kennedy, R. (2017) “Multidirectional Eco-Memory in an Era of Extinction: Colonial Whaling and Indigenous Dispossession in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance”, in U. K. Heise, J. Christensen and M. Niemann (eds) The Routledge Companion to Environmental Humanities, London: Routledge, 268–77. Kleinman, A. (2012) “Intra-actions”, Special dOCUMENTA 13: 76–81. LaCapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Latour, B. (1993 [1991]) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2002) “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory”, European Journal of Social Theory 5(1): 87–106. Luckhurst, R. (2013 [2008]) The Trauma Question, London and New York: Routledge. Lyotard, J. F. (1994) Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. E. Rottenberg and C. Porter, California: Stanford University Press. Najita, S. Y. (2006) Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction, New York: Routledge. Nayar, P. K. (2014) Posthumanism, Cambridge: Polity Press. Pickering, A. (1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Rajiva, J. (2017) Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma, London: Bloomsbury. Roden, D. (2015) Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human, London: Routledge. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. (2011) “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory”, Criticism 53(4): 523–48. Sharon, T. (2014) Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology: The Case for Mediated Posthumanism, Dordrecht: Springer. Visser, I. (2014) “Entanglements of Trauma: Relationality and Toni Morrison’s Home”, Postcolonial Text 9: 1–21. Wicomb, Z. (2000 [1987]) You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, New York: Feminist Press. Wolfe, C. (2009) What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Further reading Alaimo, S. and Hekman, J. S. (2008) “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory”, in S. Alaimo and S. J. Hekman (eds) Material Feminisms, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1–19. (The edited volume explores thematic and theoretical new directions toward materiality within feminist studies.) Barad, K. (2001) “Re(Con)figuring Space, Time, and Matter”, in M. DeKoven (ed.) Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 75–108. (The article examines knowledge production and nature as radical practices by engaging with current scholarship in physics, science studies, feminist, poststructuralist and other critical social theories.) ———. (2003) “Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, Signs 28: 801–31. (Barad advocates for the agency of matter by arguing that agency is not an exclusively human attribute, but rather the enactment of iterative changes across macro/microscopic levels of matter.) ———. (2010) “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, Spacetime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come”, Derrida Today 3(2): 240–68. (Barad advances her understanding of scientific analysis in relation to quantum entanglements between the object and the agencies of observation, which critically addresses the disruption of temporal continuity and entanglements of different temporalities.) Bennett, J. (2001) The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (The book’s main premise is that the ordinary does not in itself create affective enchantment but can be found in everyday human and non-human matter and its countless, interconnecting attachments. Enchantment for Bennett derives from active relations with material objects in modern life.) Bennett, T. and Joyce, P. (2010) Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, New York: Routledge. (The book examines the recent material turn and its complex relations with organizations of state, government and colonial power.) Braidotti, R. (2006) “Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology”, Theory, Culture & Society 23: 197–208. (By exploring Donna Haraway’s work in the light of Continental philosophy, and especially post-structuralism, this article re-examines both the posthumanist and the postanthropocentric aspects of Haraway’s thought.) Coole, D. and Frost, S. (2010) “Introducing the New Materialisms”, in D. Coole and S. Frost (eds) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1–46. (An extensive introduction that contextualizes and situates new materialist theories and philosophies within global political economy, contemporary biopolitical, technological and environmental developments.) Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012) New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities. (Including interviews with Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad and Quentin Meillassoux, this book approaches the theories of these scholars and offers an overview of materialist philosophies.) Hird, M. J. (2004) “Feminist Matters: New Materialist Considerations of Sexual Difference”, Feminist Theory 5(2): 223–32. (The article explores specific conceptualizations of matter through discussion of Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook’s Deleuze and Feminist Theory [2000], Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History [1997], Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan’s What is Sex? [1997] and Elizabeth Wilson’s Neural Geographies: Feminism and Microstructure of Cognition [1998].) Lizarazu, M. R. and Vince, R. (2018) “Memory Studies Goes Planetary: An Interview with Stef Craps”, Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 5(2): 1–15. (The interview focuses on present and future directions in memory and trauma studies by discussing the shift in focus from the transnational, transcultural, or global to the planetary, from the human to the non-human.) Van der Tuin, I. (2014) Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. (The book critically engages with the conception of generational logic as an impetus for new materialism and advances new feminist-materialist politics for the twentyfirst century.)

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22 TRAUMA STUDIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE Anna Menyhért

Why digital trauma studies? On 4 June 2011 my son, aged eight at the time, came home from school agitated and very scared. He said he had seen bloody hands on the interactive board tearing parts out of Hungary. He asked me if it was true that Hungary had lost a lot of people and a large part of its land. He asked me why we had been unable to prevent it, why we had been unable to keep those people and what had happened to them. He was visibly shaken. 2011 was the first year that the Day of National Unity was commemorated in Hungary. It is a memorial day of the Treaty of Trianon, the peace agreement which formally ended the First World War in 1920. Trianon, as it is called metaphorically, is a still-unprocessed collective historical trauma, and it is considered by many the greatest tragedy in the history of Hungary: the country lost two thirds of its territory and population. On the memorial day my son’s teacher used pictures and videos available online (on YouTube), to make the activities livelier. The videos, nationalistic in their tone, used the same imagery (both verbal and visual) that has surrounded Trianon for 100 years and shows the country as wounded and maimed. Some children were pushed into a quasi-traumatic state after watching the videos (Menyhért 2016). This incident prompted me to think about the relationship of the digital environment to trauma, noting the possibility of online trauma transmission, the uncontrollable spread of images on the Internet and the fact that century-old images can be revived via digital channels and cause intergenerational re-traumatization, reinforcing an unprocessed trauma among younger generations. The other experience that led me to initiate the field of digital trauma studies was joining and observing support groups on Facebook. These were related to various topics, including diverse family and health issues, mothers’ groups, expats’ and migrants’ groups and groups engaging in historical and political themes, including groups such as “The Holocaust and My Family” (Menyhért 2017). It was enlightening to see that social media not only transmit trauma but offer a novel way of dealing with it by creating a space in which acts and gestures that are characteristic of social media, such as sharing and commenting, can become a means of coping with and processing trauma, and building resilience and reconciliation in communities.

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Trauma studies and the digital age The digital age, information age or new media age is defined most commonly as the era beginning in the 1980s, enabled by the invention of the internet, personal computers and smart phones and the global spread of digital communication and the related digital culture: concepts, approaches, practices, tools and vocabulary. From the point of view of cultural trauma studies, the most important changes were brought about in relation to the appearance of online news portals and social media/social networking platforms, including video sharing and local and/or theme-related chatrooms and blogs. The most well-known social media platforms reached their full form by the mid2000s (Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger were launched in 1999, Wikipedia in 2001, Friendster and the Hungarian iWiW, “grandparents” of today’s social media networks, in 2002; Wordpress, LinkedIn, Skype and Myspace in 2003, Facebook in 2004 [open for the public after 2005], YouTube in 2005, Twitter and the Russian VKontakte in 2006, Instagram in 2010). Thus, the years since 1999 have transformed the way trauma is experienced, transmitted, processed, shared, represented and remembered on digital media. Digital trauma studies is the name of a novel interdisciplinary approach and an emerging research field that investigates the representation, transmission and processing of trauma – individual, as well as collective, historical and intergenerational – in the digital environment. Located at the intersection of digital memory studies, cultural trauma studies and digital (social) media studies, digital trauma studies introduced the concepts of “digital (cultural) trauma” and “digital trauma processing” (Menyhért 2017). Initially developed in the framework of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project entitled “Trauma Studies in the Digital Age: The Impact of Social Media on Trauma Processing in Life Narratives and in Trauma Literature: the Case of Hungary”, other scholars’ insights were then shared at an international workshop on digital trauma studies at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Amsterdam in 2017, and some papers of the workshop were published in a special issue of Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media in 2018, entitled “Digital Trauma in Eastern and Central Europe” (Menyhért and Makhortykh 2018). Digital trauma studies enquires into (1) how digital environments change the nature of trauma transmission and processing both at the individual and collective level in different social and cultural contexts; (2) what is the impact of migration on the process of trauma transmission and processing at the transcultural level; and (3) what kind of differences can be observed between digital historical trauma processing in democratic and (post)totalitarian systems of governance. The research initially focused on East-Central Europe and Hungary, on the Holocaust and on the Trianon and First World War traumas, on intra-European East to West migration; on Facebook groups, blogs and YouTube videos. The field expanded considerably and now studies various themes, historical eras and cultural contexts as well as digital media platforms (Menyhért and Makhortkyh 2018). The following four main themes have been defined in the framework of digital trauma studies (Menyhért 2017; Menyhért and Makhortykh 2018) related to areas of social media where the gestures and practices of sharing trauma are key, and which can be analysed in an interdisciplinary humanities framework. 1. Personal trauma and digital identity in relation to social media as an online community: coping with illness, abuse, rape, loss or grief, and the role of virtual cemeteries and online support groups; 2. Transcultural trauma related to migration, forced migration and cultural shock, and the role of transnational (online) writing, literary texts, blogs and Facebook groups; 242

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3. Social media and the painful past: the analysis of collective trauma processing online as well as collective memory and national identity formation; 4. Literary (printed, offline) texts and (digital) trauma processing through online reading groups, reviews in personal blogs and literary websites interpreting trauma texts.

Theoretical background After post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was classified as a mental disorder in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association, the field of cultural trauma studies expanded throughout the 1990s. It drew on critical theory – namely deconstruction (Caruth 1995, 1996) – on early 20th-century concepts of hysteria and combat neurosis (Freud, Janet), and on neurobiological studies that analysed the state of the brain in the moments of trauma and after, claiming that traumatic memories were stored by the brain in a different, pre-narrative mode (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1995). Cultural and historically oriented trauma studies examined testimonies collected for the Holocaust video archives that were growing in that period. Theories based on the by-now-famous notions of “postmemory” (Hirsch 2001), “re-traumatization” (Rüsen 2003), “chosen trauma” (Volkan 2001) and “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra 2001) induced a boom in cultural and literary trauma studies in the 2000s, including gender-oriented research and interpretations of life-writing (Henke 2000). After this first fruitful phase some scholars of cultural trauma studies became concerned with the future of the field at the end of the 2000s. The lack of interdisciplinarity was specifically noted. According to a vehemently critical stance, cultural trauma theories lacked interest in the empirical results of psychology and in the perspective of media studies, and they were characterized by the valorization and aestheticization of trauma (Kansteiner and Weilnböck 2010). Trauma studies were also thought to be in a state of confusion with trauma having become a “master term” communicating only Western notions of suffering (Argenti-Pillen 2000), overcome by Euro-centrism and colonization (Craps 2014), and universalization (Radstone 2007), with trauma problematically regarded as “scientifically neutral” and not “culturally specific” (Whitehead 2008). Trauma itself was thus even considered to be “a meaningless concept” (Bruner 2011), a “general explanatory principle”, “contagiously” spreading across the humanities (Bánfalvi 2009). On the other hand, psychoanalytic trauma studies were also reproached for keeping their field closed off from literary trauma theories (Somogyi 2009). New tendencies have emerged in the 2010s along with the growing recognition that trauma is related to era, to culture (Craps 2013; Staniloiu and Markowitsch 2012) and to power structures (Leisey and Lewis 2016). The first questions concerning the impact of the internet on trauma and recovery narratives were raised by Paul Arthur in the context of comparing traditional (pre-digital) monuments to online memorials and the appearance of private grief in public spaces (Arthur 2009), and in some of the articles of a special issue of Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, entitled “War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction”, edited by Adi Kunstman (2011). In the same period during the late 2000s, the related field of memory studies was refreshed by taking the influence of new media into account (Garde-Hansen et al. 2009), and through the emergence of the concepts of digital memories and mobile forms of memory (Reading 2011a). In Europe this development coincided with a growing interest in the recent history of Central and Eastern Europe and in post-totalitarian digital memory practices and their differences from Western-European approaches: the former tend to counteract official practices of “collective cultural forgetting” of the traumatic past in post-socialist states (Blacker and Etkind 243

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Defining Trauma

1990s, 2000s • • •

• • •

• •

Inherently indecipherable, unsayable, unrepresentable, inaccessible, unsharable Fixed in time and space A frozen moment, a break in lifeline

Fragmented traumatic memory The significance of silence Secondary and tertiary traumatization – tabooing and silencing by a community unwilling to listen; oppression by a regime Coherent life narrative as a cure The role of speaking and writing in recovery

Trauma texts and testimonies create posttraumatic literary language ♦ Reading transmits and processes trauma

2000s, 2010s • • • • • • •

Not fixed Multiply configured Mediated Culture- and era-dependent Diverse representations Resilience Role of communities in recovery

Digital trauma processing Trauma shared online on social media ♦ Sharing eliminates silence ♦ Allows for parallel or multiple versions of traumatic history ♦ Clears ideologically blocked avenues to traumatic past ♦ Induces social and cultural change

Figure 22.1 Definitions of trauma, 1990s–2010s

2013; Rutten 2013). It is in this post-socialist digital memory studies context (Rutten et al. 2013) that my project initiated the field of digital trauma studies, providing a new perspective for on-going literary and cultural trauma research through digital memory studies and digital media studies, with a special focus on East-Central European countries. Unprocessed traumas have a long-lasting impact on individuals and societies. They influence interpersonal, transgenerational and transcultural communication, lessening the chances of dialogue and emphatic understanding and creating “frozen currents” (i.e. series of unprocessed collective traumas in cultural memory). In the European landscape of populist political culture, unprocessed historical traumas are used by radical national-conservative elites to rally popular support. The region of Eastern and Central Europe is especially characterized by the presence of numerous collective traumas, which have remained unresolved until today, and frequent politicization and appropriation of these traumatic experiences by regional actors is also prevalent. Thus, the intensive digitization of the public sphere can be seen as a response to the limited influence that ordinary citizens have on mass media agendas in the region. Digital trauma studies examines in a digital context how the perception of trauma has changed in recent years. Trauma in the digital age is considered multifariously configured and represented in “interactive digital modes” (Arthur 2009); as “digitally mediated” (Rutten 2010), multidimensional, diverse and shareable in digital space, communicated via “digital performance” (Zukić 2010) or commemorated in virtual “traumascapes” (Kaelber 2010), and “operating” in the virtual (Kunstman 2010). It therefore opposes previous concepts based on the earliest developments of cultural trauma theory in the 1990s which saw trauma as fixed in time and space, as a break in the life story of the victim/survivor that split the life narrative into a “before” and an “after” (Menyhért 2008), as inexpressible, unspeakable (Trezise 2001), unrepresentable (Blacker and Etkind 2013) and unshareable, “an event without a witness” (Laub 1992), an “enigma” (Caruth 1996), “not assimilated or experienced fully at the time” (Caruth 1995), disconnected from its context and liable to dismantle communities.

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Trauma in the digital environment Users of digital media can meet trauma in several ways. They are regularly exposed to content related to the individual and collective traumatic experiences of others both on news portals and via their social media networks, both by reading texts (news items, articles, blogs, personal posts) and by viewing the pictures and videos that accompany them. The development of social media networks since the mid-2000s has led to major changes in the way people come to know about natural disasters and violence-induced catastrophes, in connection with the changes in media coverage of humanitarian disasters in the twenty-first century (Cooper 2019). In 2001 people learned about 9/11 all over the world predominantly from television on the day of the terrorist attack against the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and from newspapers the following day. Globally, information about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami came primarily from online news portals and individual blogs (Murthy 2013). In the case of the 2005 London tube bombing, pictures taken on mobile phone cameras (“mobile witnessing”) were spread globally by online news portals (Reading 2011b). Since the mid-2000s social media platforms have also played a role in spreading information about traumatic content and sharing responses to it. This has several consequences. Firstly, different versions of images and textual accounts of a given event become available very quickly as posts go viral on the internet; the representation of trauma thus becomes instantly multi-focused, with “tendencies for single dominant narratives” being challenged (Meek 2018). This phenomenon undermines the potential hegemonic power of any single version, and it makes the impact and effects unpredictable and uncontrollable to a much larger extent than was common in the pre-digital era. On the other hand, as was seen in the 2018 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, new means of controlling the spread of content over the internet have been – and can/will further be – developed by the combined forces of business agendas and political actors to extend power and to manipulate people, such as voters in an election. Second, social media provide information in those cases when mainstream (state-run) media do not cover (extensively or at all) some events due to political and ideological reasons. In such cases, social media offer space for digital activism and movements, which can also be considered a form of collective trauma processing. Thirdly, processing traumas can start as soon as people learn about traumatic events. This possibility has the potential to prevent or decrease the long-term impacts of traumatization both on individual and collective levels. Still, the exposure to traumatic content may have an unsettling effect on users of social media. The transmission of trauma may result in vicarious traumatization. Already in the 1990s cultural trauma studies conceived that trauma can be transmitted via reading (Felman and Laub 1992), and it has become clear that something similar can happen in the context of mass media and in the digital environment as well via media witnessing (Frosh and Pinchevski 2009). Cultural trauma studies have, from the beginning, also stressed that representations of trauma might evoke a certain numbing effect (Hartman 1996; Hirsch 2001). Research on the impact of media violence similarly suggests that watching violent scenes can make people, and especially children, violent (Anderson and Bushman 2001), and may also result in emotional withdrawal, leaving viewers in an alienated observer position without emotional involvement (Kansteiner 2007; Sparks and Sparks 2000; Zillmann 1998). Kaplan (2011) describes the emptying of an initial emphatic response to mediated trauma. However, social media are being used not only for representing and transmitting trauma but also for trauma processing. If we look at the usage of social media by people 245

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in cases of traumatic events with a large-scale impact, we can see that, according to the different characteristics of the different platforms, user actions have been changing from the spontaneous towards the intentional, as people have gradually become aware of the possibilities offered by the platforms. This has happened in recent years, in parallel with the appearance of the various platforms we know of today. This is because sharing has become relatively simple, and as a result it is possible to reach a larger number of people very quickly, as in the case of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, when 2.3 million tweets referred to it on Twitter within two days (Cooper 2019). Multiplying and sharing became more and more functional, consciously used as means to build communities and to express solidarity. Social media platforms are also used by authorities as tools to counteract the impact of catastrophes, to organise rescue and to increase resilience (Dufty 2012; Grey et al. 2016; Houston et al. 2015). Twitter hashtags and Facebook groups have both become means for promoting activism, protest and support movements, witnessing, community building, and for trauma processing in humanitarian crises as well as for processing historical traumas (Menyhért 2017) as certain Facebook group activities, migrant blogs and for example the #MeToo movement clearly show. I will briefly discuss these examples below.

Changes in trauma-processing: pre-digital silence vs digital sharing The theoretical approach of digital trauma studies towards the understanding of the differences between pre/non-digital and digital trauma-processing is grounded in argumentation and insight established by psychological study of PTSD. The three phases of recovery from PTSD were defined as follows: (1) reconstituting the survivor’s feeling of security; (2) reconstructing the trauma narrative; and (3) re-establishing the relationships of the survivor and re-integrating them into the community (Herman 1992). In the pre-digital era the second phase raised most of the interest in literary and cultural trauma studies, that is, the interpretation of texts – testimonies – produced during trauma processing and recovery and the mapping of (adequate) reading strategies. The narratives were considered interactive, needing a witness in order to become a testimony in the space of a dialogue (Radstone 2007; Laub, in Greenspan et al. 2014). The narratives created in the painful process of remembering, either in therapy or in giving a testimony orally or in writing, linked the “before” and the “after” of the traumatic moment, breaking the silence surrounding trauma, and thus leading to “narrative recovery”. Silence was seen as a defining element of trauma by many interpretations in cultural trauma theories. Silence surrounds trauma at three levels: in primary traumatization it is connected to the way victims are unable to talk about their trauma due to psychological and neurobiological complications, and because of the social shame that might follow a revelation of a traumatic personal history. Secondary traumatization of the victims is often caused by indifference, a way of silencing by others – bystanders and/or members of the community – who do not or are unable to listen to the traumatized individual or group and respond with empathy, acceptance and recognition. (Listeners and witnesses, people who do not turn away, might themselves be traumatized vicariously; fear of such transmission of trauma has an impact on the willingness to listen: it is not easy to hear the trauma of the other.) At a third level, the above reactions can be combined with silencing in totalitarian regimes as a consequence of political violence or in a political and cultural environment which is unfavourable for trauma processing. Oppressive official practices and ideologically

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influenced societal taboos may in turn result in tertiary trauma and create “silent events” (Parktal 2012; Pennebaker and Banasik 1997), “lacunae” and “frozen currents” (Menyhért 2014), a series of unprocessed collective traumas in cultural memory that imposes cultural trauma upon individual traumas. Out of the above-described phases of trauma processing the digital era elevated the first and the third phase into the public sphere, with instant response and dialogue becoming possible on social media platforms and in online communities. This change has the potential to redefine trauma in connection with practices of sharing on digital media. Sharing traumatic experiences online (in blogs, on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook feeds or in Facebook groups), and reacting to them (in comments and chat) can thus counteract and eliminate the element of silence. Sharing traumatic experiences online in a support group also means that there are others “listening”, that is, at the same time both the second and third stage of recovery (reconstruction of the trauma narrative, reintegration into a community; Herman 1992) can be reached. Research by Indian and Grieve shows that socially anxious people prefer online support groups to face-to-face meetings (Indian and Grieve 2014). One of the reasons for this, besides the opportunity to remain anonymous and to be able to withdraw at any time from contact without consequences, is that there are usually a large number of people “around”, and thus there is a good likelihood of receiving emphatic responses. Those unable to comment, or to recognize the trauma of the other, will remain silent, but their silence will not be noticeable online, thus it will not be taken as entailing a failure to recognize the trauma in question. Consequently, the wall of indifference that would lead to secondary traumatization will not be built, even though this effect might be considered illusory or false in a certain way, making it possible for the traumatized to avoid facing denial of their trauma. This means that online support groups predominantly work on resolving trauma not so much at the primary, individual level, but more at the secondary/ tertiary level that was originally the consequence of non-recognition of the suffering of victims and survivors, including non-emphatic reactions of individuals. Online support groups operate at the levels of collective trauma which are linked to community interactions as well as to traumatic events. At the same time, however, when social media users become active in sharing trauma, the traumatized individuals can regain the feeling of control and the agency to navigate what is surrounding them, thus preventing or processing trauma that is characterized by the loss of agency and control. As was shown in a study of Holocaust testimonies by Békés (2009), regaining control can be perceptible on the linguistic level, in the usage of active or passive phrasing in narratives: survivors reported their experience in a more passive way when they were closer to the traumatizing events, and decades later they situated themselves as active agents in their linguistic practice. Such processes of regaining agency, control and navigation competences after trauma can be considerably shortened by breaking the silence through the use of social media. Online interactions will be verbal and visual, they may proceed back and forth between the individual and the collective, and they may be transgenerational in nature, linking past traumas to their impact in the present as well as acknowledging the impact of present actions on the perceptions of the past, potentially resulting in identity transformations both at the individual and the collective level. In the last part of this chapter I will briefly discuss how sharing and processing trauma can happen on different types of online platforms: in digital cemeteries and Facebook memorial pages, in Facebook groups dealing with historical trauma, in blog com-

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munities of migrants, and on Twitter during the #MeToo campaign. The following sections will look at how the characteristics of the given platform define processes and activities.

Digital mourning and digital cemeteries Among the first forms of online support were online memorial sites. Sharing is central to online expressions of grief on such sites as well as through the later genre of Facebook memorial pages. There have been several virtual cemeteries since the 1990s. One of the largest, The Virtual Memorial Garden (https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/vmg/) has been operating since 1995 (Arthur 2014). A study has found that the texts left in memory of the deceased on the site by family members were predominantly written as letters, that is, they talk to the deceased rather than about them (De Vries and Rutherford 2004). The same tendency can be observed in the case of Facebook, which has millions of accounts whose users are no longer alive. If family members do not delete such profiles, they either become neglected, only occasionally displaying posts from game subscriptions, for example or, upon the request of the family, the profiles of deceased users, since 2009, can stay active as memorial pages (Staley 2014). On Facebook it is also possible “to address” the dead directly, and at the same time (semi)publicly, by posting on timelines. Such acts keep mourners together, forming a community. They might also prolong the period of bereavement by “continuing bonds”, which “represent a new mode of trauma processing and grief” that would earlier – pre-digitally – have been “considered ineffective” (Arthur 2014: 153). Emotionally loaded posts addressing the deceased are read by someone else, and the grief and trauma is shared with members of the mourners’ community. On Facebook it is friends or any Facebook user, according to how the privacy settings of the given profile are set; in virtual cemeteries memorials can be read by any visitor. The latter does not differ from what happens in non-virtual cemeteries, but in the case of Facebook, it is possible to comment on the posts, that is, to respond to the grief of others and share it for a long time after the funeral.

Historical trauma processing on social media In the past few years there have been a growing number of Facebook pages and groups concerned with historical trauma in different contexts which are powerful examples of the linking capacity of social media. The Facebook page “Historical Trauma and Healing” mostly disseminates information about the impact of the historical trauma of the indigenous populations in the US and Canada. Several groups relate to the Holocaust: “2G Second Generation Holocaust Survivors”, “The Holocaust and My Family”, “The Roma Holocaust and My Family” and “The Descendants of the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust” (the last three are Hungarian language groups, the first one is in English). My research showed that not only its theme but the actual type of the Facebook group and its privacy settings (who can see the posts, who can join the group, etc.) can determine the way people communicate in relation to a collective historical trauma in a group (Menyhért 2017). The comparative analysis of a closed and a public Facebook group, both related to the theme of the Holocaust and with overlapping membership, indicated that the public group (“The Holocaust and My Family”, www.facebook.com/groups/holokauszt.csaladom/) had a clear-cut aim of framing, telling and interlinking stories of families and sharing them 248

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publicly. Its outputs (a book of selected stories [Fenyves and Szalay 2015] and public readings) did not remain in the digital sphere and were able to serve as a harmonizing conclusion for the community by making previously untold stories accessible. The closed group (“The Descendants of the Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust”, www.facebook.com/groups/holo kausztmasodikesharmadikgen/) was more concerned with the ways past traumas shaped individual and transgenerational identities of descendants of Holocaust victims and survivors, including issues evoking disagreements between group members and raising questions, such as “who has a place in the group?” I joined the groups initially out of personal interest, but soon realized their importance in relation to my research. I have seen how group members were able to connect with one another by discovering connections to a shared past which had hitherto been unknown to them. They established links to the family members or acquaintances of the same victims. Connections were often built upon spaces and locations which had been shared by victims, such as ghettos, labour camps, the yellow star houses of Budapest (designated buildings in Budapest into which, in the summer of 1944, Jews of the city where compelled to move), the deportation journeys and places within the concentration camps. Such communities had not been able to emerge in previous decades because of the silence surrounding the collective trauma on all three (aforementioned) levels and its manifold impact on several generations. Digital media provided a safe space for sharing and for healing. Digitally mediated trauma processing proved to a means to open up (ideologically) blocked avenues (“thawing” “frozen currents”) to the traumatic past and to induce social and cultural change, or at least to allow for the existence of parallel or multiple versions of traumatic history: official, rigid versions, determined by oppressive past and present-day ideologies, and other versions, created by communities, the arts and civil society, that are versatile and mobile, emotionally active and capable of activating trauma processing reactions.

Transnational trauma processing in migrant blogs and communities In the pre-digital age, writing was one of the main means of processing migration trauma/ experience (King et al. 1995). In the (post)digital age, social media has become more important in that respect. Social media facilitates online writing and reader response. Consequently, the migratory experience can be shared with significantly more readers. Social media platforms provide a kind of digital homeland for transnational migrants. Facebook groups, individual blogs and blog communities, such as the Bordercrossing (Határátkelő) community that unites Hungarians living abroad, have significant achievements in connecting people, building networks, and enabling users to share their migratory experiences. These digital activities improve the resilience levels of migrants and prevent the migration experience from becoming traumatic. Moreover, a new digital genre, “social poetry” (as in social media) emerged as a shared creative product of Hungarian migrants. Several people filmed selfie videos while reciting a few lines of the same poem, and the recordings were combined into a video that was shared online. The first project was titled the “I can’t tell” selfie (www.jewcer.org/project/nemtudhatomselfie; Figure 22.2), a gesture to attempt to say good-bye to Hungary. Sixty-three Hungarians living in twenty-eight countries on four continents contributed. The poem “I can’t tell” (“Nem tudhatom”) talks about the meaning of a country as a homeland to its people as opposed to how that country is seen by others. The poem was written by Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti in 1944, ten months before he

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Figure 22.2 Contributors to the “I can’t tell” selfie. Source: “Online videót csináltunk Radnóti Miklós NEM TUDHATOM című verséből” (2016)

was killed on a death march. My analysis of Hungarian migrants’ blogs has added a new aspect to discussions about contemporary, digitally connected transnational migration and migratory trauma: even though digitally connected migrants are able to maintain ties to their homeland and build transnational networks online, these processes do not provide means for coping with a specific pre-migratory trauma which derives from a deep disillusionment with the home country and involves transnational re-negotiations of identities; but digital migrant communities can develop coping strategies on social media platforms for such special cases, too.

Tweet-testimonies “Me Too” was originally used as a slogan by African American women’s rights activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to raise awareness about sexual violence against women. On 15 October 2017 actress Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’” (Milano 2017; Figure 22.3). Milano’s tweet was prompted by a New York Times article about the sexual harassment accusations against Harvey Weinstein, after which influential female personalities came forward to share their own stories of abuse by the Hollywood producer, and a global campaign sought to expose the full extent of gender-based oppression and violence. #MeToo became a viral hashtag, spreading onto Facebook and Instagram and connecting millions of users; on Facebook, users posted and commented about it more than 12 million times in one day (CBS 2017). On Twitter it is possible to follow others asymmetrically, without knowing them and being followed back by them. This specific feature makes the development of extensive chains and networks possible, connected by hashtags and themes. Twitter, although it would not be considered a community in the traditional sense (Gruzd et al. 2011), can be used to express support and solidarity by retweeting or using the same hashtag (see Figures 22.4–

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Figure 22.3 Twitter post by Alyssa Milano, 15 October 2017. Source: Milano (2017)

Figure 22.4 Twitter post by Michelle Lewis, 16 October 2017. Source: Lewis (2017)

22.6 for example). Consequently, the hashtag is a well-known tool of digital activism, including (digital) feminism (Mendes et al. 2018). #MeToo, however, was criticized as an advocacy action: according to Montenegro (2018) #MeToo raised awareness but “did not promote change”, and the movement was “jeopardized” due to a “lack of coordination”. However, given the contemporary levels of digital awareness globally, the speed at which information travels online, and the characteristic feature of social media – that users learn and create new means of usage at the same time – the impact of spontaneous movements based on hashtags is neither predictable, controllable, nor easily overseen. It is perhaps more valuable to evaluate the impact of a movement by considering the extent to which it is 251

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Figure 22.5 Twitter post by Manda, 16 October 2017. Source: Manda (2017)

Figure 22.6 Twitter post by Gina Bolano, 15 October 2017. Source: Bolano (2017)

capable both of inspiring subsequent similar movements and of triggering off-line impact by raising awareness that may lead to social change. Social change in this case is related not only to raising awareness of gender-based violence, but also to trauma processing: #MeToo has evolved into an unpredictable and developing movement in which a remarkable number of people, mostly women, have shared very personal traumatic stories in a confessional mode in the digital space. It is as though what was earlier said in cultural trauma theories about trauma narratives needing interaction and dialogue – that survivors need someone to listen to them and not turn away indifferently in order to create testimonies and reach trauma processing – could be exploited on Twitter in the knowledge that there could be millions who would listen and provide support. Chains of tweet-testimonies can develop into support networks where people do not necessarily interact with each other; they are not interconnected but still act together or alongside one another linked to/by a shared idea or purpose. Breaking the silence not only means sharing private trauma and shame in public, but 252

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also publicizing the trauma narrative in the hope of gaining and providing support. One’s own trauma can be processed by an act of empathy towards someone else’s trauma, in a chain reaction mediated by Twitter. The roles within the trauma schema (victim, perpetrator, collaborator, bystander and the added roles of witness and rescuer) (Johnson and Lubin 2015) become mobile in the digital space on certain social media platforms. A person can be a victim, a witness and a listener to others at the same time: identities begin to intersect and interconnect. Such insights of what is possible on social media platforms in terms of trauma processing provide challenges and opportunities for future research in digital trauma studies. The digital representation, transmission and processing of trauma will be all the more important in the future. Transdisciplinarity, reconnecting psychological and cultural trauma research, as well as cross-sectorial directions will certainly play an important part in future trauma studies research, as well as the interaction of research with policy-making and applied research. Digital trauma studies can facilitate the recognition of the areas in which the digital environment has an impact on trauma, for research, society, education and policy-making. Digital trauma studies can draw attention to the importance of trauma-informed approaches in connection with digital culture and education in digital practices, and can respond to the growing need of (digital) trauma-informed cultural and social policies in the contexts of sexual abuse, migration, climate crisis, natural catastrophes and violent conflicts. Future focus areas of the impact of research in digital trauma can be, among others, discovering possible ways of online communication in a trauma-informed fashion; building consciously on what we observe on digital media in order to prevent trauma transmission; and helping trauma processing via developing targeted digital tools.

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Trauma studies in the digital age LaCapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laub, D. (1992) “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival”, in S. Felman and D. Laub (eds) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, London: Routledge, 75–92. Leisey, T. and Lewis, P. (2016) Historical Trauma, Power, and an Argument for Collective Healing Practices, Boston, MA: The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. Lewis, M. (2017) Twitter post, 16 October 2017. https://twitter.com/Michelle_Radio/status/ 919988714641809408 Manda. (2017) Twitter post, 16 October 2017. https://twitter.com/knitpsycho/status/ 920054902105059328 Meek, A. (2018) “Trauma in the Digital Age”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 167–80. Mendes, K., Ringrose, J. and Keller, J. (2018) “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 25(2): 236–46. Menyhért, A. (2008) Elmondani az elmondhatatlant: Trauma és irodalom, Budapest: Anonymus-Ráció. ———. (2014) “Introduction”, in A. Menyhért, B. Györe and G. Szabolcsi (eds) Trauma, Gender, Irodalom. A társadalmi nemi szerepek jelentősége a traumatikus tapasztalatok irodalmi értelmezésében, Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Publishers. ———. (2016) “The Image of ‘Maimed Hungary’ in 20th Century Cultural Memory and the 21st Century Consequences of an Unresolved Collective Trauma: The Impact of the Treaty of Trianon”, Environment, Space, Place 8(2): 69–97. ———. (2017) “Digital Trauma Processing in Social Media Groups: Transgenerational Holocaust Trauma on Facebook”, Hungarian Historical Review 6(2): 355–80. Menyhért, A. and Makhortykh, M. (2018) “From Individual Trauma to Frozen Currents: Conceptualising Digital Trauma Studies”, Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian, and Central European New Media, special issue on Digital Trauma in Eastern and Central Europe 18: 1–8. Milano, A. (2017) Twitter post, 15 October 2017. https://twitter.com/alyssa_milano/status/ 919659438700670976 Montenegro, C. (2018) Global Gender Advocacy: When Social Media Meets Grassroots. A Case Study about the #MeToo Movement, Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Murthy, D. (2013) “New Media and Natural Disasters. Blogs and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami”, Information, Communication, Society 16(7): 1176–92. “Online videót csináltunk Radnóti Miklós NEM TUDHATOM című verséből” (2016) Jewcer.org. www. jewcer.org/project/nemtudhatomselfie/ Parktal, A. (2012) “Lost Chances and Prosperous Present? The Traumatic Past and Estonian Life Today”, Journal of Loss and Trauma 17(4): 350–57. Pennebaker, J. W. and Banasik, B. L. (1997) “On the Creation and Maintenance of Collective Memories: History as Social Psychology” in J. W. Penebaker, D. Paez and B. Rimé (eds) Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, Mahwah: Erlbaum. 3–19. Radstone, S. (2007) “Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics”, Paragraph 30(1): 9–29. Reading, A. (2011a) “Memory and Digital Media: Six Dynamics of the Globital Memory Field”, in M. Neiger, E. Zandberg and O. Meyers (eds) On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 241–52. ———. (2011b) “The London Bombings: Mobile Witnessing, Mortal Bodies and Globital Time”, Memory Studies 4(3): 298–311. Rüsen, J. (2003) “Mourning by History – Ideas of a New Element in Historical Thinking”, Historiography East and West 1(1): 13–38. Rutten, E. (2010) “Web Wars: Digital Diasporas and the Language of Memory. (An Announcement of the HERA Research Project, University of Bergen)”, Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media 4: 171–76. ———. (2013) “Why Digital Memory Wars Should Not Overlook Eastern Europe’s Web Wars”, in U. Blacker, A. Etkind and J. Fedor (eds) Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 219–31. Rutten, E., Fedor, J. and Zvereva, V. (eds) (2013) Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in PostSocialist States, London: Routledge. Somogyi, G. (2009) “Személyesség és kritika”, Alföld 9: 114–18.

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Anna Menyhért Sparks, G. and Sparks, C. (2000) “Violence, Mayhem, Horror”, in D. Zillmann and P. Vorderer (eds) Media Entertainment: The Psychology of its Appeal, Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 73–91. Staley, E. (2014) “Messaging the Dead: Social Network Sites and the Theologies of Afterlife”, in C. M. Moreman and A. D. Lewis (eds) Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 9–21. Staniloiu, A. and Markowitsch, H. (2012) “Dissociation, Memory and Trauma Narrative”, Journal of Literary Theory 6(1): 103–30. Trezise, T. (2001) “Unspeakable”, The Yale Journal of Criticism 14(1): 39–66. Van der Kolk, B. A. and van der Hart, O. (1995) “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 158–82. Volkan, V. (2001) “Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity”, Group Analysis 34(1): 79–97. Whitehead, A. (2008) “Journeying Through Hell: Wole Soyinka, Trauma, and Postcolonial Nigeria”, Studies in the Novel 40(1–2): 13–30. Zillmann, D. (1998) “The Psychology of the Appeal of Portrayals of Violence”, in J. Goldstein (ed.) Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment, New York: Oxford University Press, 179–211. Zukić, N. (2010) “The Weight of Meaninglessness”, Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media 4:115–20.

Further reading Blacker, U., Etkind, A. and Fedor, J. (eds) (2013) Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Donn, K. (2016) A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11: Representing Trauma in a Digitized Present, London: Routledge. Ebert, H. (2014) “Profiles of the Dead: Mourning and Memorial on Facebook”, in C. M. Moreman and A. D. Lewis (eds) Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 23–42. Menyhért, A. (2018) “‘There is No Future Here’. Digital Trauma Processing in Hungarian Migrants’ Blogs”, Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian, and Central European New Media 18: 9–32. Saul, J. (2013) Collective Trauma, Collective Healing: Promoting Community Resilience in the Aftermath of Disaster, Milton Park: Routledge.

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23 READING LITERATURES OF TRAUMA IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION Kaisa Kaakinen

In the introduction to the collection of essays entitled A New World Order, writer Caryl Phillips conceives the contemporary world order as a conversation, as a “new global conversational babble”, in which the whole world is involved in an unprecedented way. The New World. A twenty-first-century world. A world in which it is impossible to resist the claims of the migrant, the asylum seeker, or the refugee. […] The old static order in which one people speaks down to another, lesser, people is dead. The colonial, or postcolonial, model has collapsed. In its place we have a new world order in which there will soon be one global conversation with limited participation open to all, and full participation available to none. In this new world order nobody will feel fully at home. (Phillips 2001: 5) The newness of this twenty-first-century condition does not lie simply in the increased breadth or intensity of the global conversation. What distinguishes the old and new centuries for Phillips is that the more global or transnational frame of human interaction undermines an old hierarchical, colonial model of conversation, in which certain people “speak down to” others. But Phillips does not propose an all-embracing global understanding as the model or goal for the new century. Instead, he suggests that if the conversation really is open to all participants, its basic premises have to change. The phrase “limited participation” reminds us that nobody has access to the whole world. It suggests that more people will (or should) become familiar with being overhearers to some conversations. Limited participation can be thought as an awareness of the fact that my own being in the world is linked to that of other people and collectives, who share the same time with me but whose conversations cohere only partly with those in which I am a ratified participant. At the same time, I might witness these conversations or become involved in them in some ways, because transnational media and the global circulation of cultural products allow me an unprecedented access to them. In this chapter, I propose that recognizing a limited global participation as a contemporary structure of experience and relation opens important analytical perspectives also to literary works that engage with traumatic histories and their mediation on a transnational scale. While the central concern of late twentieth-century 257

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literatures of trauma was the search for ethically and aesthetically sustainable ways to write about traumatic events difficult to capture in language and narrative, one may detect a more differentiated engagement in contemporary literature with challenges of transnational mediation of narratives of trauma in concrete contexts of production and reception. In the following I will shed light on some ways in which a concern with transnational mediation manifests itself in twenty-first-century literatures of trauma. Furthermore, I will point to analytical questions that pose themselves to scholars studying the ethical and political status of such narratives. The concern with transnational mediation in contemporary literature may be contextualized to a more general shift in cultural discourses towards an awareness of a more global public sphere. In memory studies, scholars speak about a fundamental move from a national paradigm of collective memory, dominant until the late twentieth century, to transnational and global frames of cultural reference in the new century (see e.g. Assmann and Conrad 2010: 1–10; Erll 2011). This chapter’s analysis of the emphasis on mediation in contemporary literatures of trauma is indebted to discussions in transcultural memory studies on cultural memory as a multidirectional process (see Rothberg 2009), in which individuals and collectives may invest locally specific meanings into memorial forms that circulate transnationally (see Rigney 2005). Furthermore, I draw on conversations in contemporary comparative literary studies, which have recognized the need to move beyond comparison of national literary traditions written in major European languages towards analytical models better attuned to transnational contexts of literary production and reception (see e.g. Cheah 2016; Melas 2007; Saussy 2006). My perspective on how globalization impacts the literatures of trauma is particularly inspired by scholars who pose questions about the effects of heterogeneous audiences on literary production and reception. Rebecca Walkowitz, for instance, has studied pieces of contemporary fiction (by authors such as J. M. Coetzee, Jamaica Kincaid and Caryl Phillips) that address multiple linguistically and culturally diverse reading publics simultaneously and take into account readers’ diverse cultural proficiencies (Walkowitz 2015). Walkowitz calls this fiction “born translated” (1–25), as it does not treat translation as a secondary event but as a “condition of [the literary text’s] production” (3–4). In view of this analysis, we should ask if contemporary narratives of trauma imply a comparable consciousness of heterogeneity but with respect to historical experiences and imaginaries of their readers. This question has also been inspired by Doris Sommer, who has written about “socially differentiated address” in the context of her work on minority writing in the Americas and drawn attention to the importance of acknowledging questions of power and hierarchy in analyses of literary reception (Sommer 1999). If we recognize that trauma narratives may be read by various co-present yet socially differentiated reading publics, we cannot link the cultural, ethical and political significance of these texts to how they mediate traumatic histories to a readership conceived as a circumscribed memory collective sharing the same horizon of expectation. The contemporary condition of heterogeneous and co-present readerships urges us to expand our perspectives on how literary strategies associated with the representation of trauma can be linked to processes of cultural memory. In order to shed light on this complex problematic through concrete examples, I will ask how one stylistic principle associated with trauma fiction, namely non-linear or fragmented narration that operates with textual gaps, functions in view of heterogeneous global reading contexts. Anne Whitehead, the author of the book Trauma Fiction (2004), argues that twentieth-century literary authors often responded to the challenges of representing traumatic experience by using fragmented narrative structures that break a conventional sense of temporal flow and mimic the symptoms of trauma. Whitehead 258

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draws here on Cathy Caruth’s definition of trauma deriving from Sigmund Freud’s writings, in which trauma signifies a rupture in temporal succession. A traumatic event is too shocking to be experienced when it occurs but comes to the realm of experience only belatedly, through repetitive symptoms (see Caruth 1996: 4; Whitehead 2004: 5). A fragmentary style associated with Western modernism and the avant-garde has often been privileged as a textual form able to present the experience of traumatic temporality, as Stef Craps points out in his study Postcolonial Witnessing. Craps argues that this privileging of a modernist or avant-garde poetics has had the effect that other stylistic strategies, and often those developed in non-Western literatures addressing trauma, have not been sufficiently recognized as ethically and aesthetically significant. (Craps 2013: 39–43.) But it is also far from clear how exactly a modernist fragmentary style operating with gaps positions the readers of literary trauma narratives, because its effects are highly dependent on the frames of interpretation readers bring to the event of reading. Narratives of trauma are often approached as narratives of indirection, in which textual gaps are indexes pointing to an absent, traumatic referent. For instance, Anne Whitehead writes – in the context of her analysis of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments – that readers are given an active task to fill in the textual gaps according to their own historical knowledge of the Holocaust (Whitehead 2004: 9). However, the function of textual gaps in literatures of trauma begins to look more complicated if the texts address multiple historical contexts and if readers bring multiple cultural competencies to the event of reading. In this chapter, I approach this problematic by discussing briefly two twenty-first-century novels by contemporary Anglophone authors, Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008), which both operate in their respective ways with unspecified analogies between historical contexts and narratives across large temporal and geographic distances. I propose that their use of textual gaps suggests reading strategies in which readers learn to engage with gaps in more differentiated ways. Their texts highlight how transnational historical legacies both overlap in and divide the frames people use to make sense of the contemporary world.

Reading the present in Teju Cole’s Open City In a scene in Teju Cole’s novel Open City, the narrator walks along the site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, a vast gap in the cityscape after the attacks of 11 September 2001 (Cole 2011: 57–9). While other pedestrians rush forward without turning their eyes toward the missing buildings, the narrator pauses to wonder if the site had been crossed by Lenape paths before the streets of European settlers. Cole’s novel presents the cityscape of New York as temporally layered, as “written, erased, rewritten” through centuries (59). It employs here the trope of palimpsest that has often been evoked in literatures of memory to give shape to the layered presence of the past in the present (see e.g. Silverman 2013). But what is significant about Cole’s novel is its sophisticated aesthetic attention to the present as a contested site of mediation of histories of trauma. Cole’s novel not only presents time as non-linear and layered, it also directs attention to the co-presence of divergent affective histories that have an impact on how layers of the past are read in the present. Open City juxtaposes histories of violence spanning various centuries and continents, such as the colonization of Native American territories by European settlers, the history of slavery in the United States and Western European colonialism in Africa. It does this through the narrative device of walking, which allows an associative linking of places, people and histories without spelling out the exact status of the linkages. Furthermore, the biography of the 259

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ambulatory narrator figure extends the novel’s geographic frame from New York to Europe and Africa. The narrator Julius, a resident psychiatrist at a New York hospital, has spent his childhood in Nigeria as the son of a Nigerian father and a German mother and emigrated to the United States to attend college. Julius is portrayed as someone taking the position of a detached observer, while other people often define him according to his skin color, as when African-American men call him “brother” (Cole 2011: 40–1, 53, 55) or white teenagers imagine him as a “gangster” (31–2). In the second half of the novel Julius takes a trip to Belgium, entertaining a vague wish to find his German grandmother whom he believes to reside in the city. Julius’s grandmother links the novel’s narrative to the German context and to the aftermath of the Second World War, as we learn that she most likely experienced the extensive bombings of German cities and perhaps even sexual violence committed by Red Army soldiers on German women. Thus, the novel sets up a broad frame of inquiry to the intricate ways in which transnational histories of violence resonate in cities like New York and Brussels, where people from various origins live next to each other and “re-enact […] unacknowledged traumas” (7). But what kind of reading modes do Cole’s ambiguous historical linkages suggest, and how do they position the readers? On the one hand, the narrator’s own stance as a detached observer points to a dehistoricizing reading mode that transcends the here and now. This perspective is introduced at the beginning of the novel, when the narrator sits alone in his Manhattan apartment, follows the patterns of migrating birds from his window and listens to Canadian and European radio announcers, whose voices seem to reach to him from another dimension (Cole 2011: 4–6). A clear intertext to Cole’s novel is the German émigré writer W. G. Sebald, who made a melancholic and ambulatory poetics of correspondence a signature style in his late-twentieth-century literary narratives of histories of trauma and violence linked to Western European modernity. In Sebald, the melancholic mode evokes a suspended transhistorical similarity between the narrative details brought into relation, a thread of suffering running through the history of the humankind. While Sebald’s literary texts and his critical essays present the melancholic gaze as an ethical mode of narrating histories of violence (see Kaakinen 2017a, 2017b; Santner 2006; Sebald 1994), Cole’s novel evidences a more complex and even critical engagement with a poetics that evokes a sense of transhistorical equivalence. The novel contains several passages that seem to comment on the activity of creating meaningful wholes out of separate elements, which is an activity also faced by the novel’s readers. One of these passages shows Julius visiting a church in Brussels and observing a curious dissonance in a piece of music played with the church organ (Cole 2011: 137–40). He wonders why someone would include such an audacious diabolus in musica in the composition, only to realize that the dissonant tone comes from a vacuum cleaner steered by an African woman cleaning the church. The attempt to unify the sounds into an aesthetic totality breaks down, and the narrator begins to wonder if the woman comes from the Congo, or perhaps from Cameroon or Rwanda. Furthermore, the novel’s ending entails a turn that undermines the authority of Julius’s narrative voice and highlights its particularity. An acquaintance from Julius’s school years in Nigeria reveals that she was raped by Julius at a party and that this experience had traumatized her severely (Cole 2011: 244–5). The narrative stages Julius’s inability to take in this information, as his narration resumes in its usual calm way before coming back to the charges levelled at him. The revelation that Julius might be a perpetrator of a rape, which he himself does not remember or acknowledge, forces readers to reassess his position in the text. Julius comes to lack narrative authority, which makes it difficult for readers to find 260

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a stable perspective to the text. As Claudia Breger has observed, the novel’s narration is “nonsovereign” but “ethically engaged” (Breger 2015: 17): it encourages readers to reflect on Julius’s and their own position vis-à-vis the histories of violence addressed in the text. Cole’s novel also contains many dialogues that highlight disjunctions between experiences of individuals, even those concerning the same event. In a call shop in Brussels, Julius meets a man called Farouq, an immigrant from Morocco, with whom he comes to have extended conversations about literature, terrorism, multiculturalism and on Farouq’s understanding of difference, of how “people can live together but still keep their values intact” (Cole 2011: 112). Julius tries to convey Farouq’s immigrant experience to a Belgian-born and US-based surgeon named Dr Maillotte, whom he has met on his flight to Brussels. After Farouq’s life story has been conveyed to readers through extended dialogues between him and the narrator Julius, Dr Maillotte’s dismissal of Farouq is likely to come across as hasty and callous. She portrays Farouq as a “complainer”, whose “difficulties are no more severe than her own or those of anyone else” (143), failing to acknowledge how different a social position they occupy in Belgium. The staging of this failure of understanding is likely to mobilize readers into pondering about the historical and social context that might condition it. Furthermore, through Julius’s interactions with Farouq, readers may observe the complexity of transnational subject positions, as Julius the New Yorker, who has been intrigued by Farouq’s experiences and viewpoint, is disturbed by the fact that Farouq gives an impression of not condemning the attacks of 9/11. The novel’s ending also poses the problem of comparison, as readers may wonder how Julius’s alleged crime of rape is linked to other instances in the text where rape is mentioned, namely the postwar situation in Germany experienced by Julius’s grandmother and Julius’s realization in Brussels that in this city of pronounced racial tensions he, “the dark, unsmiling, solitary stranger”, could “in the wrong place, be taken for a rapist” (Cole 2011: 106). But while the novel evokes a possibility of a connection, it simultaneously makes it difficult to read such connections in terms of equivalence or causation. Rather, the novel stages encounters between people who share the same present but are situated in markedly different material and narrative conditions of experience. Thus, rather than evoking a narrative whole that readers could piece together – either a specific historical narrative shared by a clearly defined memory collective or a more diffuse sense that all instances of violence or trauma are linked through some fundamental similarity – Cole’s use of textual gaps and linkages suggests a more open and context-specific mode of engaging with historical relatedness and difference.

Parallel worlds in Aleksandar Hemon’s the Lazarus Project Like Cole’s Open City, Alexander Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project addresses the difficulty of mediating narratives of historical trauma across different frames of experience and narrative in the contemporary world. Critic James Wood calls the novel “a 9/11 novel pretending not to be one” (Wood 2008), probably referring to the fact that while the events of the 9/11 do not feature in it directly, it tackles the structures of feeling in post-9/11 America obsessed with terrorism. At the center of the novel is the account of the narrator figure’s attempt to write a novel about the life story of a real historical individual named Lazarus Averbuch, a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant who survived a pogrom in Kishinev (in presentday Moldova) in 1903 but ended up being killed in Chicago by a local policeman who took him to be a dangerous anarchist. The hysteria around anarchism in early twentiethcentury United States creates an obvious parallel to the war on terror in the early twenty261

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first-century US, but what complicates this analogy is the presence of the Eastern European context and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s in the novel. The novel weaves these contexts to the story through a narrator figure named Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian-born writer, whose life story parallels in many ways that of Hemon himself. Brik resides in Chicago, writes in the English language and has left Bosnia before the war had broken out, missing the “whole shebang” (Hemon 2008: 18). He meets an old acquaintance from Sarajevo, photographer Rora, who has lived in Bosnia through the war. When Brik wins a generous grant to work on his book on Lazarus Averbuch, he asks Rora to accompany him on a journey to the Ukraine, Moldova and eventually to Sarajevo, and during this trip Rora comes to tell stories about the war to Brik. Rora is presented as a highly unreliable narrator, though, as he, like the teenager he once was when the narrator knew him in Sarajevo, is someone with a tendency to hyperbole and fabulation. A similarly self-reflexive doubt is cast on the passages that alternate in the novel with those on Vladimir Brik, recounting the history of Lazarus Averbuch. These chapters that seem to let readers become immersed in “the world as it had been in 1908” (41) underline their status as figments of Vladimir Brik’s archival imagination, as they feature phrases familiar to readers from the chapters on Brik. But to what effect does the novel connect or juxtapose these historical contexts and events? What happens, when the story of Lazarus Averbuch (spanning the pogrom of Kishinev and police violence in early twentieth-century Chicago), the war on terror in post-9/11 America and the Bosnian War of the 1990s are connected in the same text? If trauma narratives often prompt readers to read textual gaps as indexes pointing indirectly to a traumatic referent, how do ambiguous linkages function in Hemon’s text that combines multiple historical and geographic contexts? On the one hand, the novel evokes an ominous sense that beyond the reach of its explicit narrative, there is an altogether different realm of human evil that is withheld from readers, just as Rora seems to withhold his real experiences of wartime Bosnia from Brik, who has no direct experience of the war. The sense of the unsayable is suggested visually with the black pages that divide the sections of the text (and that, as readers turn the page, also function as a background on which the novel’s black-and-white photographs are reproduced). However, the novel’s narrative mode, which emphasizes analogies, parallels and unmediated shifts, does not simply suggest that all narrative fragments point to one unsayable, traumatic kernel. The novel rather spends a lot of aesthetic energy on portraying moments of disjunction between interpretive frames people use to make sense of events and historical legacies. For instance, Brik fights with his American wife Mary over the interpretation of the famous Abu Ghraib pictures from 2004 depicting torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers (Hemon 2008: 188). Mary is represented here by Brik as a person lodged in abundant security and decency, unable to imagine the existence of human evil and to comprehend her own implication in it as a citizen of a war-faring superpower. Furthermore, Mary’s father George is shown as unable to understand the existence of “parallel universes”, places that are not subordinated to his own cultural location representing the centre of the civilized world. Brik observes how his country, Bosnia, was “this remote, mythical place for [George], a remnant of the world from before America, a land of obsolescence whose people could arrive at humanity only in the United States, and belatedly” (162). With the triangulation of historical contexts, the novel crafts a narrative that seems to contest this presentation of the world, creating a sense of heterogeneous contexts that coexist but do not cohere. Furthermore, The Lazarus Project implies the existence of a heterogeneous readership that brings divergent historical perspectives and structures of experience to the event of reading. While the novel addresses the American audience and the post-9/11 sensibilities of its diverse population, the novel’s concern with migration and the presence of the 262

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Bosnian and Eastern European context create a sense of further parallel audiences, whose different sensibilities and cultural imaginaries might amplify certain aspects of the text. The novel could well resonate with “reasonably loyal citizens of a couple of countries” (Hemon 2008: 11) who, like Vladimir Brik himself, know in their very body the immigrant experience of becoming a material link between contexts that belong to separate spheres of historical experience and discourse. Some readers may be especially attuned to observe how Vladimir Brik calls her American spouse his “native wife” (11), turning around the familiar manner of looking at the world from a centre conceived as the norm. Furthermore, there is a sense of a subdued multilingualism suggesting an outside perspective on the Anglophone world, as when Lazarus Averbuch feels the names Billy and Pat in his mouth, almost like the lozenges he has bought in a candy store (6). Words become material objects, whose potential for signification is not only tied to convention but also to their sensory qualities. The presence of other languages is also at times marked in the text, as when the narrator refers to the central square of Lviv with the word Rinok without translating it (75). The word is understandable to readers familiar with Slavic languages but not necessarily to others. Since there is such a strong sense of multiple perspectives in the text, the black pages evoking the unsayable could also be read as contact points functioning in the logic of what Michael Rothberg has called multidirectional sublime (Rothberg 2013: 39). This means that instead of emphasizing the aspects of traumatic experience shared across contexts, the novel draws attention to disjunctive points of contact between separate but intertwined transnational histories, implying a comparative logic beyond that of equation. While the sense of the unsayable certainly also links to the general problematic of the difficulty to represent violence directly, the novel brings it to a more material historical level, drawing readers’ attention to how mediation of histories of trauma is made difficult also by material inequalities and cultural frames that maintain those inequalities. What is also interesting about the novel is that this emphasis is aided by the novel’s metafictive dimension, which I would read in relation to the problem of historical comparison. The novel not only reminds us of history as a product of our ways of telling it, which has been argued to be the key concern of late-twentieth-century historiographic metafiction. It also highlights that this telling of history takes place in a material world riven by inequalities and divisions due to both material and discursive circumstances. The fact that people are influenced by divergent frames of interpretation has real consequences on the bodies of individuals, which is evidenced by an immigrant like Lazarus, who moves across these separate spheres and gets killed, because he fits the Chicago policemen’s preconception of a foreign anarchist. One could say that Hemon’s novel operates with a twenty-first-century historical sensibility, which, in the words of Peter Boxall, evidences a “new sense of a responsibility to material historical forces” and makes visible a “gap between our experiences of living […] and the empty, circling, repetitive narratives which we have available to give expression to that experience” (Boxall 2013: 42). Thus, Hemon’s novel grows into a complex narrative articulation of the co-existence of different memory collectives and readerships in the world. They are linked through complex historical legacies but do not share their experiences in a common conversation. Transnational migration brings these separate spheres into relation, but the life stories of immigrants in Hemon’s novel also show that there is no “we” that understands all the connotations of these trajectories that cross various social contexts. The life stories function as signs that are legible in multiple ways: they create potential connections between separate

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frames of reference and outline how these frames do not cohere or belong to the same conversation.

Conclusion Cole and Hemon’s texts draw the contours of the present as an uneven powerscape, in which different historically conditioned frames of experience come into a disjunctive contact. My analysis of ambiguous or “weak” historical analogies in Cole and Hemon’s novels has sought to show how non-linear or fragmentary modes of narration reminiscent of trauma fiction should not only be linked to how fiction may mimic symptoms of trauma on its formal level. They should also be analysed in relation to problems of reception. In Cole and Hemon’s works, these narrative strategies contribute to the engagement with problems of historical transmission on a transnational scale. The ambiguous analogies open the possibility for readers to bring their own affective histories to the event of reading, while observing the encounters between multiple situated perspectives brought together in these texts. The ambiguous historical analogies in Cole and Hemon’s texts become textual sites that, in cooperation with heterogeneous audiences, make visible the co-existence of divergent historical imaginaries in the contemporary world. These novels partake in literary means to a larger cultural task of writing comparatively about historical traumas, a task made urgent by the increasingly transnational public spheres, in which various affective histories come into contact and conflict. Instead of approaching the challenges of transmission of trauma only in relation to the limits of language or narration as such, these novels also highlight context-specific reasons for the difficulties of transmission of traumatic experiences. Furthermore, as these texts also address the role of structural inequality that has both material and discursive dimensions, trauma is not seen here only as a shattering, punctual event. Cole and Hemon’s novels are also concerned with ongoing forms of traumatization such as racism, sexism and economic inequality (see Craps 2013). As several scholars have shown (see e.g. Adelson 2005; Kaakinen 2017a; Minnaard 2012; Rothberg 2009), literary narratives that create new aesthetic modes to capture complexities of transcultural remembering have the potential to challenge overly solidified memory discourses and to point readers to new ways of cultural sense-making. But while literary narrative is often given the power to make people empathize with other people’s experiences of suffering, Cole and Hemon’s narratives remind us that it is equally important to use the power of narrative to sensitize readers to the difficulty of understanding experiences and contexts unfamiliar to oneself. Such literary narratives may expand readers’ awareness of the ethically and politically sensitive negotiation demanded by the contact of divergent affective histories in today’s world. As suggested by Caryl Phillips’s notion of limited participation, it might be especially urgent in the twenty-first-century to learn imaginative ways to proceed with caution, when involved with histories of trauma in the interconnected world.

Bibliography Adelson, L. A. (2005) The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Towards a New Critical Grammar of Migration, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Assmann, A. and Conrad, S. (2010) Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave. Boxall, P. (2013) Twenty-First-Century Fiction, New York: Cambridge University Press. Breger, C. (2015) “Transnationalism, Colonial Loops, and the Vicissitudes of Cosmopolitan Affect: Christian Kracht’s Imperium and Teju Cole’s Open City”, in E. Herrmann, C. Smith-Prei and

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Trauma in the age of globalization S. Taberner (eds) Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 106–24. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cheah, P. (2016) What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature, Durham: Duke University Press. Cole, T. (2011) Open City, New York: Random House. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. Erll, A. (2011) “Travelling Memory”, Parallax 17(4): 4–18. Hemon, A. (2008) The Lazarus Project, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador. Kaakinen, K. (2017a) Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary: Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald, New York: Palgrave. ———. (2017b) “Melancholy and the Narration of Transnational Trauma in W. G. Sebald and Teju Cole”, in H. Meretoja and C. Davis (eds) Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, New York, London: Routledge, 142–58. Melas, N. (2007) All the Difference in the World. Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Minnaard, L. (2012) “Transnational Contact-narratives. Dutch Postcoloniality from a Turkish-German Viewpoint”, in E. Boehmer and S. De Mul (eds) The Postcolonial Low Countries. Literature, Colonialism and Multiculturalism, Lanham: Lexington Books, 123–37. Phillips, C. (2001) A New World Order, London: Secker & Warburg. Rigney, A. (2005) “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory”, Journal of European Studies 35(1): 11–28. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2013) “Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject: On Sebald and Kentridge”, in L. Plate and A. Smelik (eds) Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, New York: Routledge, 39–58. Santner, E. (2006) On Creaturely Life. Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saussy, H. (2006) Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sebald, W. G. (1994) Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Silverman, M. (2013) Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film, New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Sommer, D. (1999) Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walkowitz, R. (2015) Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Whitehead, A. (2004) Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wood, J. (2008) “The Unforgotten. Aleksandar Hemon’s Fictional Lives”, The New Yorker 28 July 2008 www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/07/28/the-unforgotten.

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24 TRAUMA, ILLNESS AND NARRATIVE IN THE MEDICAL HUMANITIES Jo Winning

In his exploration of the place of trauma in everyday life, the psychiatrist and practising Buddhist Mark Epstein recounts a vignette from his clinical practice. One of his patients with whom he had been working for some time, a man at a similar stage in life to Epstein himself, receives the “frightening diagnosis” of the bone marrow cancer multiple myeloma (Epstein 2013: 2). Epstein is shocked by the terminal diagnosis, the course of which is hugely uncertain. In the first instance he reacts with “genuine concern and barely disguised horror”, treating the news as a trauma that will devastate his patient’s life (2). His patient reacts to Epstein’s shock with his own alarm, asserting that he does not need “sympathy” from his psychiatrist but something rather different. He states: “this diagnosis is a fact, is it not? I can’t treat it like a tragedy” (2). His patient’s refusal, in the psychiatric consultation, to discuss his diagnosis in terms of trauma brings Epstein up short and he must move beyond his clinical toolkit to consider the reaction this patient requires through his own Buddhist beliefs. Reprising the Buddhist concept of the “realistic view”, Epstein recalls that the Buddha teaches that “trauma, in any of its forms, is not a failure or a mistake. It is not something to be ashamed of, not a sign of weakness and not a reflection of inner failing. It is simply a fact of life” (Epstein 2013: 2–3). By this spiritual reckoning, serious illness should not be perceived as a trauma but rather as a natural fact of human experience, one that must be received with acceptance. Such a repudiation of the yoking of trauma and illness in everyday life would seem to run contrary to the predominant narratives of pain and illness that have abounded in Western cultures for millennia. In her seminal exploration of the ways in which the discourses of Western culture deploy metaphors of disease to fend off the ubiquity of its experience, Susan Sontag describes illness as “the night side of life”, a “kingdom” unique and separate from the “kingdom of the well” (Sontag 1978: 3). Despite the fact that we all prefer to dwell there, Sontag attests commonsensically that we hold “dual citizenship” in both domains (3). Our repudiation of this bilocatedness is due in part to the “lurid metaphors with which [the kingdom of the ill] has been landscaped” (4). For the purposes of this chapter, which examines trauma, illness and its literary representation in written narrative, Sontag usefully links disease and illness, the experience of trauma and the languages we use to describe and communicate such abject embodiments. This chapter will consider the ways that written narratives come to function as containers for the trauma of illness. It will also 266

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rehearse some of the key concepts and frameworks about trauma, illness and literary representation that are used in the contemporary field of medical humanities, in which the critical thinking of the humanities disciplines is used as a lens through which to analyse medicine and the experience of illness.

“The poverty of language”: pain and narrative form The primary trauma of pain and illness would seem to be the profound difficulty of putting these intense physical and mental experiences into words and narrative form. The modernist writer Virginia Woolf, who herself experienced the complex trauma of mental illness through much of her adult life, astutely describes the lack of lexemes, phrases and concepts for pain. “English”, she writes, “has no words for the shiver and the headache” (Woolf 1926: 34). Such a “poverty of language” means that, contrary to other foundational human experiences such as falling in love, there is no literature of illness (34). The lack of literary representation is not the only problem, Woolf continues. The lack of language poses radical difficulty for the communication between doctor and patient in the clinical encounter: “let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him” (34). The process of putting pain into some kind of spoken form requires a process of language formation of the patient, as Woolf describes it: “He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other […] so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out” (34). Woolf conjectures that such new linguistic terms will be more “primitive, subtle, sensual, obscene” than our conventional vocabulary, in order to describe the intensity and specificity of pain. Woolf’s observation about the paucity of language available to describe pain is pushed further by the cultural theorist Elaine Scarry in her much-cited study of pain and the practices of torture. Scarry argues that the problem of language and pain is a deeper, structural one. “Physical pain”, she argues, “does not simply resist language, but actively destroys it” (Scarry 1985: 4). Further, the state of extreme pain returns the human subject “to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4). Alongside the trauma of extreme embodiment, pain presents particular difficulties because it defies ordinary systems of meaning-making in language. Scarry argues that “unlike any other state of consciousness, [pain] has no referential content. It is not of or for anything” (5). As such, “because it takes no object”, pain “resists objectification in language” (5). Over and above this traumatizing loss of language, the destruction of the means of description, Scarry’s account of pain and the problem of language also records the fundamental impact such inexpressibility has on the view clinicians take of their patients’ attempts to describe their symptoms: “physicians do not trust (hence, hear) the human voice, that they in effect perceive the voice of the patient as an ‘unreliable narrator’ of bodily events” (6). Scarry’s literary analogy, which casts patients as narrators and clinicians as readers of the “narrative” of disease, usefully provides a narrative turn in the exploration of pain and language. In his seminal work on narrative and illness, Arthur W. Frank explores the relationship between storytelling, narrative formation and the trauma of serious illness. Beginning with his own experience of suspected lung cancer, Frank observes the relentless call to narrativization required of a patient in the midst of diagnostic testing: “One day I recorded I had told a version of my illness story eight times” (Frank 1995: 54). These tellings and retellings to different clinicians in different settings belie the fact that the production of a narrative account is often impossible. Frank utilizes the term “narrative wreck” (a term he 267

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borrows from the philosopher of law Ronald Dworkin 1993) to describe the correlation between trauma, illness and subjectivity. As in other instances of trauma, the disintegration of the capacity to construct narrative, which Roger Luckhurst describes as trauma’s propensity to be “anti-narrative”, is central to the experience of illness (Luckhurst 2008: 79). As Frank observes, the eruption of serious illness into the trajectory of a life upends the “conventional expectation of any narrative, held alike by listeners and storytellers” which is a temporality that moves from past, through present to the future. “The illness story is wrecked”, argues Frank, “because its present is not what the past was supposed to lead up to, and the future is scarcely thinkable” (Frank 1995: 55). Counterintuitively however, despite the profound obstacles to expressing pain and illness in language and the ruinous effect of these states upon narrative formation, Frank’s argument is that the act of telling stories, of self-representation in written form, is the singular way to reconstruct identity and subjectivity: “the way out of narrative wreckage is telling stories” (Frank 1995: 55). Narration and selfhood sit in close relationship, and storytelling allows agentic reconstitution: “the self is being formed in what is told” (55). The veracity of Frank’s delineation of the transformative potential of writing out of the trauma of illness would seem to be borne out by the burgeoning of autobiographical accounts of illness experienced either by the writing subject themselves or experienced firsthand by relatives and carers. Latterly, as I will show, the narrativization of trauma in the clinical context extends to include clinicians themselves, with the growing genre of clinician memoirs. This exponential rise of the genre of pathography (the term used to describe illness narratives) across the later twentieth century and early twenty-first century is inextricable from the context of modernity and its concomitant phenomenon of trauma. As Leigh Gilmore argues in her analysis of late twentieth-century autobiography and testimony: “the age of the memoir and the age of trauma may have coincided” (Gilmore 2001: 16). While the writerly gains of apparent narrative reconstruction constitute a substantial reason for their upsurge as a cultural form, the sustained presence of pathographies (both written and graphic) on bestseller lists across Europe, the UK and the US from the 1990s onwards suggests the strong readerly appeal of consuming the illness narratives of others. While such consumption is legible from the vantage point of trauma studies, in which models of collective trauma and witnessing would explain the tenacious pull of such narratives, it is perhaps necessary to consider the specificity of the experience of illness, a human state which crosses cultural and generational boundaries. Anne Hunsaker Hawkins describes pathographies as “guidebooks to the medical experience itself” and identifies their functional capacity to “[shape] a reader’s expectations about the course of an illness and its treatment” (Hunsaker Hawkins 1999: 127). In the face of the profound transformation of biomedical science by what Jerome Lowenstein calls “the biomolecular revolution” and the resultant rapid progress in biomedical knowledge, the ordinary human experience of medical treatment risks becoming overwhelmed by alien terms and explanations (Lowenstein 2005: 3). In this context, pathographies function as a bridge between the discourses of medicine and the lived experience of the lay public. Less functionally, Frank describes the “pedagogy of suffering” as that which “the ill have to teach society” (Frank 1995: 145). Excavating what he perceives as the educational and ethical potential of stories of illness, Frank argues that “when the body’s vulnerability and pain are kept in the foreground, a new social ethic is required” (146). The social ethic Frank locates in the narratives of illness is one which recalibrates the power balance between patients’ voices and those of healthcare professionals and which also, somewhat like Mark Epstein’s experience with his patient which opens this chapter, centralizes the trauma of illness as core to human narratives. In the following 268

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section, I offer two test cases of the role of narrative construction in living with, and clinical treatment of, pain and illness.

Pathographic trauma in practice: two case studies The musician Ben Watt’s 1996 memoir Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness is in many ways an archetypal pathography that demonstrates the complexities of putting the pain and trauma of serious illness into narrative form. Chronicling his near-fatal experience of eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (previously known as Churg-Strauss syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks small blood vessels across multiple organs in the body), Watt creates a polyglossic text to represent the trauma of both the spiralling crisis of untreated vasculitis (the inflammation of the blood vessels which can lead to tissue death) and the state of being undiagnosable to clinicians confused by his condition. Opening the text with a Preface that grades trauma by the kind of hospital encounter one has, Watt writes: “Everyone is shocked by their first real hospital experience” (Watt 1996: ix). He recounts what by reasonable standards would appear to constitute a major traumatic incident from his childhood, a car crash in which his grandparents’ Mini collides with a bus. The crash kills his grandfather but, given his own minor injuries, Watt describes it as a “mild hospital experience, only one foot on the mountain” (xii). The marker of real trauma is being admitted to hospital “overnight”; this is “when you are really on the mountain”, and as real trauma will, “it makes you lose your bearings a little more” (xiii). In 1992, Watt begins to experience a range of symptoms, including what appears to be extremely debilitating asthma, fatigue and heart palpitations. In reality, though this is a diagnosis that will not come until much later in the text, Watt’s underlying condition EGPA has reached a critical stage and is affecting his lungs, heart and bowel. Like Watt and his clinicians, the reader encounters the disease in its immediacy and confounding detail, before the “plot” reveals the rare diagnosis. Chapter 1 begins with an italicized passage that describes Watt in a private hospital in Harley Street being told that his extreme chest pain is most likely to be a major heart attack: There is bad news and bad news. The bad news is he thinks I am in the middle of a long, slow heart attack, and the bad news is, if not, then he thinks I am about to have a massive one. (Watt 1996: 1) The use of italics is a common feature of the text, signalling switches into the intense internal experience of pain and fear. Something like Woolf’s pronouncement about the poverty of language to describe pain, Watt’s italicized passages attempt to mark out the difficultto-describe interiority of terrifying pain, and the medical procedures that accompany it. For instance, as Watt is anaesthetized to undergo a bone marrow biopsy, his interior monologue, italicized to separate it out from the roman type that records external reality, unfolds: “I’m not asleep yet. I’m not asleep. I can feel it. I can feel what you’re doing. Don’t start. Don’t start yet. Please wait. Is it a big needle?”(15). Further into the unfolding narrative, as Watt endures increasingly excruciating pain from what we will learn is the disintegration of his bowel, and multiple invasive procedures to try and elicit an accurate diagnosis, the text begins to fragment into multiple time frames and narratives. Childhood memories sit in italicized form alongside clinical details and agonizing symptoms. Fantasies and dreams of being elsewhere, in idyllic rural settings and distant 269

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countries, overlay the trauma of receiving toxic immunosuppressant drugs and diagnostic surgery. At times, Watt records instances of surgery he cannot remember, filling in the gaps with a retrospective narrative that infills his presence on the operating table, even despite the absence of consciousness. Slowly a narrative form is built that seems to contain the complexity of this illness. The form is constructed of layers, voices and segues between past and present. When Watt is admitted to the ITU (Intensive Treatment Unit), the text is infiltrated by passages from the ITU Relatives Leaflet, which bring the space of the hospital and the disorientating realities of acute clinical care into the textual space. Frank’s delineation of the reconstruction of the self in illness through narrative acts is borne out in Watt’s pathography. While Watt asks “does the body remember?” and asserts that “such invasion, such destruction and trauma – the cutting, the sewing, the bleeding – surely these must leave an imprint?”, the arc of Watt’s narrative brings some kind of restitution in the acquisition of “new” language and assimilation of trauma survived (Watt 1996: 34). Towards the end of the text, as Watt comes under the care of a rheumatology team who crack the enigma of his condition, he writes: “they [have] brought me a name for my illness” (139). As the psychoanalyst and physician Michael Balint notes, the fundamental need of every patient is “a name for his […] nameless, frightening illness” (Balint 1957: 25). In addition to the diagnosis of EGPA, with its attached promise of proper treatment and the hope of remission, Watt states that months of hospital admission teach him “a new language with a different rhythm that goes on inside our heads all the time” (Watt 1996: 176). This “rhythm” is the interiority of consciousness, the “ceaseless stream and current of thoughts and words, babbling and pulling through all our waking hours” that in wellness, before the trauma of illness, we are mostly ignorant of (176). Thus, Watt’s pathography would suggest, illness teaches us deeper knowledge of our own subjectivity. While much of the critical work on pathography within medical humanities has focused on the first-hand narratives of patients and their families and carers, the recent boom in clinician memoirs might well be read as a new sub-genre of the pathographical form. Trauma in these texts is not that of pain and illness experienced by the patient (though these of course feature as part of the narrative), but rather that of the huge physical and emotional demands of clinical practice itself and the traumatic impact it often has upon those tasked with treating pain and illness. Adam Kay’s bestselling 2017 memoir This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor evidences the use of narrative structure to represent the trauma of practice. Like Watt’s text, Kay’s has an unfolding narrative that does not reveal the nature or name of deep trauma until its very end. Kay opens his memoir of life as a medical trainee with the seemingly contradictory statement that “in 2010, after six years of training and a further six years on the wards, I resigned from my job as a junior doctor” (Kay 2017: xiii). The text we will come to read, he explains, “are the diaries I kept during my time in the NHS, verrucas and all”, written up until the point “one terrible day” when “it all became too much for me” (xv). In a sharply satirical voice that is maintained throughout the entirety of the text, Kay follows up the vague allusion to the trauma that ends his clinical career with a parenthetical gag: “(Sorry for the spoiler, but you watched Titanic knowing how that was going to play out)” (xv). Written in diary form and organized into chapters that take each grade of his career as their temporal focus, Kay presents clinical practice as a mix of day-shifts that are “mindnumbing and insanely time-consuming” and night-shifts that “make Dante look like Disney” (4–5). A&E (the Accident & Emergency Unit in a hospital) is “a ship that’s enormous, and on fire, and that no one has really taught you how to sail”, and during the course of a shift Kay is “drenched in bodily fluids (not even the fun kind)” and witnesses 270

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extremes of human bodily experience that “[scar his] retinas to this day” (Kay 2017: 5–6). The relentlessness of bodily trauma is twinned with the fact that as a clinician Kay is tasked with the imperative to treat and where possible save or cure the patient. The truncated form of episodic diary entries textually repeats the intensity of the events that occur on the ward. Kay’s first experience of a patient death, in the October of 2004 two months into his first post, is recorded in an entry of three short paragraphs, which detail the haemorrhage of a man with oesophageal varices (varicose veins inside the oesophagus) who bleeds out and dies loudly choking on his own blood: So there we go, the first death I’ve ever witnessed and every bit as horrific as it could possibly have been. Nothing romantic or beautiful about it. That sound. Hugo [Kay’s Registrar, a doctor who has completed their foundation training] took me outside for a cigarette – we both desperately needed one after that. And I’d never smoked before. (Kay 2017: 11) As Sarah Christopher observes in her analysis of the use of dark humour in paramedic practice: “Black or gallows humour has long been recognized as having therapeutic value, particularly when used by individuals dealing with traumatic incidents” (Christopher 2015). She describes dark humour as “a bona fide coping mechanism” that helps sustain “the resilience, health and wellbeing of emergency services personnel” (Christopher 2015). Kay’s deployment of humour swerves between gentleness and brutality. Less than one year into his first post he recounts an evening out with his partner and friends at a pizza restaurant when he is startled by the device that buzzes to signal that their food is ready for collection: The device goes off, I say “Oh my God” and reflexively jump to my feet. It’s not that I’m particularly excited about my Fiorentina – it’s just that the fucking thing has the exact same pitch and timbre as my hospital bleep. H takes my pulse: it’s 95. Work has pretty much given me PTSD. (Kay 2017: 18) Where the trauma of clinical practice seems recorded with lightness in this “joke” about its psychological impact, the humour takes on a brutal edge as patients become “bed-blocking fuckers” that must be cleared from the surgical wards in the wake of the terrorist events that take place in London on 7 July 2005 (Kay 2017: 26). The “miracle” of childbirth (Kay decides to undertake his specialty training in obstetrics and gynaecology) is irreverently rewritten: smart, rational people with jobs and the ability to vote look at these half-melted fleshly blobs, their heads misshapen from being squeezed through a pelvis, covered in five types of horrendous gunk, looking like they’ve spent a good two hours rolling around on top of a deep-pan pizza, and honestly believe they look beautiful. (49) Using popular cultural examples of trauma as ciphers for the traumatizing effects of his work, Kay writes: “Today I tipped into full-blown Stockholm Syndrome and decided to go into work on a Saturday off” (Kay 2017: 119). As the narrative progresses, Kay’s emotional hardening is enacted by the gaps that open up within the narrative, where serious, personally 271

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devastating facts are only partially spoken. We learn that Kay’s long-suffering partner H., who has spent birthdays and holidays alone because of rota timetables and hospital emergencies, has left him only by implication in the six-line diary entry that states: “Feels appropriate that work commitments mean I have to reschedule collecting my belongings from the flat. On the plus side, my depressing new bachelor pad is only ten minutes from the hospital” (252). Kay’s loss of relationship occurs only two weeks before the “terrible event” that precipitates his quitting of medicine. The final diary entry at the beginning of December 2010 records a catastrophic labour in which Kay and the junior doctor under his charge discover that the mother has an “undiagnosed placenta praevia” (in which the placenta covers the cervix and which can result in life-threatening haemorrhage) (255). Kay and his colleague deliver the dead baby and then struggle to save the mother’s life as she haemorrhages uncontrollably. Kay cannot staunch the enormous blood loss and calls upon his consultant, who in turn must call on the most senior surgeon in the hospital. When he arrives he can only save the woman’s life by performing a hysterectomy, thus removing any hope of further pregnancy. While Kay’s consultant goes to inform the husband, Kay goes to write up his notes but instead can only “cry for an hour” (Kay 2017: 256). In the final chapter titled “Aftermath”, Kay explains: “that was the last diary entry I wrote, and the reason there aren’t any more laughs in the book” (Kay 2017: 257). He attempts to carry on with the job but cannot recover from the trauma of the incident. There is nothing in the healthcare system to support him, the expectation being that he will manage his own distress. This is a structural dimension of the trauma in medicine: “in truth, doctors can’t acknowledge how devastating these moments really are. If you’re going to survive working in this profession, you have to convince yourself these horrors are just part of your job” (257–8). In this sense, it is the narrative form that contains and performs the trauma of practice, its snappy, caustic case vignettes, its relentlessly dark humour, its refusal to dwell on or even fully acknowledge the emotional realm. Kay writes that every doctor “remembers the sad stuff, the bad stuff, so vividly. Your brain presses record in HD” (262). This is the flipside of patient trauma. Clinicians themselves are scathed by the illness, pain and loss that make up the messy daily reality of clinical practice. Clinical pathographies are the narrative vehicle for representing this often unacknowledged truth.

“Our sense of the possible”: narrative in medical education In the final section of this chapter, I will consider the role that narrative has come to play within medical education, as an object that constructs a bridge between a patient’s traumatic experience of pain and illness and the emerging skill-set of a young clinician. As Hanna Meretoja has observed, narratives can “enlarge the dialogic spaces of possibilities in which we act, think, and reimagine the world together with others” (Meretoja 2018: 2). Storytelling, she contends, has an ethical dimension in that it can “expand and diminish our sense of the possible” (2). It is this potential of narrative to convey the thoughts, perceptions and feelings of others which, for some, make it an essential element of medical training. As Liam Dwyer argues, “it represents a means of developing a skill in interpretive, relational and reflective areas otherwise difficult to teach” (Dwyer 2017). Rita Charon, one of the major proponents of narrative medicine in the US, describes the best practice of history-taking (the consultation task of acquiring clinical detail from a patient) as one in which the clinician elicits and listens attentively to a story, employing the “narrative competence” (Charon 2001) to

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listen not only for the content of […] narrative but [also] for its form – its temporal course, its images, its associated subplots, its silences, where [the patient] chooses to begin in telling of himself, how he sequences symptoms with other life events. (Charon 2008: 23) In his delineation of the raft of critical skills that the humanities disciplines bring to medical training, Alan Bleakley identifies both “close listening in receiving the patient’s history” and “making sense of the stories that patients tell and adapting interventions accordingly” as fundamental components (Bleakley 2015: 3). For both Charon and Bleakley, as well as other advocates of the crucial role the medical humanities have to play in medical education, the benefits for medical students are not simply evinced by reading patient narratives, either fictional or non-fictional, as stories of the trauma of illness. Rather students’ critical skills develop through the acquisition of an understanding of the complex nature of narrative as it unfolds in the illness experience, not least because diseases themselves often do not follow linear, or what literary scholars would call realist, narrative trajectories. Uncertainty is the norm, rather than the exception, in clinical practice. While many voices within the field of medical humanities uphold the value of foregrounding narrative within our critical understandings of, on the one hand, pain and illness and, on the other, how best to educate future and established clinicians about best clinical practice, there have been important counter-discourses. Angela Woods, in her “provocation” to medical humanities to consider the “limits of narrative”, draws on philosopher Galen Strawson’s polemical argument against narrativity, in which he contends that not all human beings share the capacity or desire to narrate themselves as a measure of their existence. In Strawson’s words, “It’s just not true that there is only one good way for human beings to experience their being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative” (Strawson 2004: 429). Woods develops the notion of “non-narrative” in relation to pain and illness, suggesting that other forms such as metaphor (she cites the example of poetry) and media from the visual arts (such as film and photography) as well as phenomenology (a branch of philosophy that examines consciousness and direct experience of the world), might be better vehicles for the communication of suffering and pain than the strictures of textual narrative form (Woods 2011). As one example of non-narrative representation of trauma, she cites the work of the photographer Deborah Padfield, whose co-production of photographic images with chronic pain patients seeks to more closely approximate accurate representations of their pain than written descriptions might (Padfield 2003). Woods’ strong caution about the centrality of notions of narrative within the field of medical humanities is taken up by Claire Charlotte Mckechnie who argues that “the boundaries of narrativity, […] should be expanded to include those forms of expression that Woods refers to as non-narrative” because such forms still require “language and narrative ordering in the construction of expression and in the process of meaning-making” (Mckechnie 2014: 5). Mckechnie argues that “there is no way to interpret trauma completely outside of narrative” and reminds us that narrative is by its nature relational, calling into being both a narrator and a listener, or a “narratee” (1). The listener or reader will of necessity narrativize the representation of trauma in order to understand it, as she argues: “each time we make an effort to produce an expression of suffering, we demand a cognitive engagement that requires the ordering [of] information into narrative” (5). This recognition that narrative is both made by a sufferer (whether in words or images) and received by a carer, healthcare professional (or indeed reader in the case of pathography) is of intrinsic importance in the context of human pain and illness. 273

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The trauma of these embodied human states, which are both everyday and yet also extraordinary, which stretch our human systems of representation, meaning-making and communication, remains one of the foundational human stories, both for those who tell and those who listen. While it is medicine that is tasked with a call to action in the face of pain and illness, that is required to locate their aetiology and then find ways of treating and potentially eradicating them, its ever more scientized frameworks make it hard for medicine to hear (or speak) such stories. The fractured language, non-linear narrative structures and multiple modes of representation that best convey the trauma of pain and illness are more legible when read, and at times translated, through humanities frameworks. It is the radical potential of the joined forces of medicine and humanities, beyond what C. P. Snow, in 1959, describes as “the two cultures” (Snow 1998), to develop new reading skills for clinical practice in the twenty-first century.

Bibliography Balint, M. (1957) The Doctor, His Patient and the Illness, London: Pitman Publishing Co. Ltd. Bleakley, A. (2015) Medical Humanities and Medical Education: How the Medical Humanities Can Shape Better Doctors, London: Routledge. Charon, R. (2001) “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust”, Journal of the American Medical Association 286(15): 1897–902. ———. (2008) “Where Does Narrative Medicine Come From? Drives, Diseases, Attention, and the Body”, in P. L. Rudnytsky and R. Charon (eds) Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine, New York: State University of New York Press, 23–36. Christopher, S. (2015) “An Introduction to Black Humour as a Coping Mechanism for Student Paramedics”, Journal of Paramedic Practice 7(12): 610–15. Dworkin, R. (1993) Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Dwyer, L. (2017) “Does Narrative Medicine Have a Place at the Frontline of Medicine?” Medical Humanities 30 May 2017. https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2017/05/30/does-narrative-medi cine-have-a-place-at-the-frontline-of-medicine/ Epstein, M. (2013) The Trauma of Everyday Life, New York: Penguin. Frank, A. W. (1995) The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Gilmore, L. (2001) The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hunsaker Hawkins, A. (1999) “Pathography: Patient Narratives of Illness”, Culture and Medicine 171(2): 127–29. Kay, A. (2017) This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor, London: Picador. Lowenstein, J. (2005) The Midnight Meal and Other Essays about Doctors, Patients and Medicine, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, Abingdon: Routledge. Mckechnie, C. C. (2014) “Anxieties of Communication: The Limits of Narrative in the Medical Humanities”, Medical Humanities 0: 1–6. Meretoja, H. (2018) The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Padfield, D. (2003) Perceptions of Pain, London: Dewi Lewis Publishing. Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snow, C. P. (1998) The Two Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sontag, S. (1978) Illness as Metaphor, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Strawson, G. (2004) “Against Narrativity”, Ratio 17(4): 428–52. Watt, B. (1996) Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness, New York: Grove Press. Woods, A. (2011) “The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical Humanities”, Medical Humanities 37(2): 73–78. Woolf, V. (1926) “On Being Ill”, The New Criterion 4(1): 32–45.

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The mental health effects of climate change have attracted a lot of attention in recent years as the threats posed by a warming world are becoming harder and harder to ignore. The growing frequency and severity of extreme weather events around the world have helped make the somewhat abstract concept of climate change tangible in people’s minds. After all, one can experience devastating hurricanes, destructive floods, prolonged droughts or intensified wildfires, but not gradually rising global temperatures. Not only is the dire impact of global warming on the planet becoming increasingly clear, even at just 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but scientists’ warnings about what is in store are also becoming more and more alarming. Combined with the increasing visibility of climate change, bleak scientific reports such as the one issued by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October 2018 are taking a toll on people’s mental well-being. A Yale and George Mason survey taken in December 2018 documents “a continued upward trend in Americans’ concern about global warming”: 69% of the American population are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming, and 29% are “very worried” about it – which is the highest level since the surveys began in 2008 (Leiserowitz et al. 2018: 3). According to a 2012 report from the National Wildlife Federation, “[a]n estimated 200 million Americans will be exposed to serious psychological distress from climate related events and incidents” (Coyle and Van Susteren 2012: v). A 2017 report sponsored by the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica finds that climate change produces both acute mental health impacts, such as “increases in trauma and shock, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), compounded stress, anxiety, substance abuse, and depression”, and chronic ones, including “higher rates of aggression and violence, more mental health emergencies, an increased sense of helplessness, hopelessness, or fatalism, and intense feelings of loss” (Clayton et al. 2017: 7). Groups facing particularly high mental health risks include climate scientists and activists, who spend their days immersed in depressing information and often confront apathy, denial and hostility. A number of articles in the popular press have brought attention to these groups’ psychological plight. One prominent example is an article in Esquire profiling the glaciologist Jason Box after he had tweeted his alarm – “we’re f*cked” – at learning that methane plumes were escaping from the sea-floor in the Arctic ocean (Richardson 2015). Another well-known case is that of the biologist and IPCC contributor Camille Parmesan, 275

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who announced that she had become “professionally depressed” as a result of her research on climate change (Thomas 2014). The meteorologist and journalist Eric Holthaus also drew attention when he posted a series of tweets venting his feelings of grief and despair about environmental destruction (Oberhaus 2017). A website titled “Is This How You Feel?” gathers together hand-written letters from dozens of climate scientists describing how they are being psychologically or emotionally affected by their work (Duggan 2014). Most of these letters are dominated by feelings of anger, frustration, anxiety, guilt and despair.

A new vocabulary for environmentally induced distress The filmmaker and activist Gillian Caldwell, for her part, has used the language of trauma to describe the emotional demands involved in getting her country to act on climate change. In a blog post titled “Coming Out of the Closet: My Climate Trauma (and Yours?)”, she stated: I believe that I and many other people around the world are suffering from “Climate Trauma”. It’s my own term. I am not a mental health professional, but I can identify plain as day the symptoms I recognize in myself and in my colleagues traumatized by our work to tackle climate change. (Caldwell 2009) In fact, a fair amount of new terminology has been invented lately to name and communicate emotionally induced distress, which is unsurprising, perhaps, given the ever-accelerating increase in pace, scope and severity of environmental degradation. The last few years have seen the emergence of a culturally resonant repertoire of new coinages such as solastalgia, ecological grief, ecosickness, Anthropocene disorder and pre-traumatic stress disorder. The oldest and most influential of these concepts is solastalgia, which was coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe a specific kind of homesickness felt at home. Albrecht developed the concept – a portmanteau of “solace” and “nostalgia” – around the turn of the millennium to refer to the psychological effects of extensive open-cut coal mining on the residents of the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia. As opposed to nostalgia – the homesickness experienced by people when separated from a loved home – solastalgia is the distress produced by negative environmental change impacting on individuals while they are directly connected to their home environment. It is the loss of comfort, or “solace”, when one’s home is transformed by external forces – both naturally occurring and humaninduced events and processes – mostly or completely beyond one’s control into something that is barely recognizable to its inhabitants. An evocative word first introduced in 2004 in the journal EcoHealth (Connor et al. 2004), solastalgia has brought Albrecht renown, led to an article in the New York Times Magazine (Smith 2010), been included in medical journal The Lancet’s 2015 “Health and Climate Change” report (Watts et al. 2015), and become the subject of various artistic projects, ranging from visual artworks to music, poetry and street theatre. Solastalgia perfectly encapsulates the feeling Zadie Smith seeks to put into words in her essay “Elegy for a Country’s Seasons” (2014), in which she bewails the loss of her familiar home environment in England due to subtle changes in the natural world around her caused by climate change. In an article in Nature Climate Change that, like Albrecht’s coinage, also resonated with many people, Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis introduce the term “ecological grief” to denote “the grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic 276

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environmental change” (2018: 275). They describe ecological grief as “a natural response to ecological losses […] and one that has the potential to be felt more strongly and by a growing number of people as we move deeper into the Anthropocene [the new geological epoch defined by human impact]” (275). Heather Houser’s related concept of ecosickness refers to the interdependence between environmental change and human sickness, which Houser traces across a range of contemporary American novels and memoirs – constituting the emergent literary mode of “ecosickness fiction” – that “join experiences of ecological and somatic damage through narrative affect” in order to move readers towards environmental awareness (2014: 2). Timothy Clark proposes the term “Anthropocene disorder” to describe a psychological affliction that emerges from the realization of a destructive incongruity between the human scale of daily life and the vast spatio-temporal scales of the Anthropocene. A “state of mind likely to become more widespread as the biosphere continues to degrade”, Anthropocene disorder names a new kind of psychic disorder, inherent in the mismatch between familiar day-today perception and the sneering voice of even a minimal ecological understanding or awareness of scale effects; and in the gap between the human sense of time and slow-motion catastrophe and, finally, in a sense of disjunction between the destructive processes at issue and the adequacy of the arguments and measures being urged to address them. (Clark 2015: 140) This disorienting loss of a sense of proportion leads to feelings of “rage and even despair” as well as an awareness that such reactions are regarded as “disproportionate and imbalanced” by mainstream society (140). Anthropocene disorder “seems always ready to break out”, according to Clark, as we struggle with the human epoch’s “unique dilemma” that “one needs to think in contained ways that one knows, at the same time, to be insufficient or even perhaps as yet unrecognized forms of denial” (171).

The trauma of the future Amidst this new vocabulary for mental anguish caused by environmental change, one term stands out as having attracted the attention of prominent scholars in the field of cultural trauma research: pre-traumatic stress disorder. The term was allegedly coined by Lise Van Susteren, a psychiatrist who specializes in the psychological effects of climate change. In an interview, she describes the condition as follows: much of traumatic stress disorder is how we imagine things are going to be […] we have in our minds images of the future that reflect what scientists are telling us; images of people and animals suffering because of dumb choices we’re making today. I would say it’s an entirely legitimate condition – accompanied by a nonstop, gnawing sense that more needs to be done. (Van Susteren, quoted in Myers 2017) However, the first recorded use of the term “pre-traumatic stress disorder” appears to be in a 2006 article on the satirical news website The Onion, which notes a rise in “pre-traumatic

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stress disorder” among US military service personnel (“Report” 2006). A fictitious Walter Reed Army Hospital psychologist interviewed about this “future-combat-related” psychological condition is quoted as saying that they are seeing more victims experiencing “flashforwards” of roadside bombings and rocket attacks or repeatedly “preliv[ing]” landmine explosions and mortar shellings wounding or killing innocent civilians, fellow soldiers or themselves. These soldiers are haunted not by traumatic memories of past events but by their own projections of events that they expect to experience or witness during their deployment to Afghanistan or Iraq. The article ends by pointing out that, according to unnamed researchers, it is not only members of the armed forces who are at risk for “Pre-TSD” but also other groups, including “parents of children approaching military age, Iraqi citizens, and any person who watches more than three hours of television news per day” (“Report” 2006). In an instance of science imitating satire, a scholarly article published in 2015 in Clinical Psychological Science provided evidence for the actual existence of the condition identified by The Onion. Citing the Onion piece, Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin point out that “concern for future negative events is to be expected” (2015: 663) given post-traumatic stress disorder’s status as an anxiety disorder. They contend that pre-traumatic stress reactions such as intrusive images of and nightmares about negative future events, avoidance behaviour and increased arousal to stimuli associated with the events are “a real aspect of the phenomenology of PTSD” (663) – a central aspect even, which, however, has so far been largely overlooked. Presenting data from Danish soldiers who saw active service in Afghanistan, Berntsen and Rubin demonstrate that pre-traumatic stress exists and that it reliably predicts PTSD symptoms during and after deployment: past-related PTSD symptoms are found to be mirrored by similar future-related PTSD symptoms. Their findings suggest that the prevailing understanding of PTSD as a disorder primarily related to the past needs to be revised, as “intrusive images and dreams of future events and associated avoidance and increased arousal are experienced to the same extent as reexperiencing, avoidance, and increased arousal associated with past events” (672). According to Berntsen and Rubin, then, pretraumatic stress does not constitute a separate, new diagnostic category that should get its own entry in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); rather, they argue for a more expansive understanding of PTSD that would explicitly include pre-traumatic stress reactions. While Berntsen and Rubin focus on combat-related trauma, they leave open the possibility that other kinds of stressors may produce similar effects. Indeed, at the end of their study they write that [f]uture research should examine whether it [the pre-traumatic stress reactions checklist they created to measure soldiers’ pre-traumatic responses] also may be used as a screening instrument in relation to nonmilitary traumatic events as well as other subjectively stressful events, such as exams, medical procedures, or childbirth. (Berntsen and Rubin 2015: 671) Paul Saint-Amour, the author of the first-full length treatment of pre-traumatic stress by a cultural critic, similarly discusses the notion initially in the context of military violence but later suggests that it could also apply to other phenomena. In Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (2015a), Saint-Amour calls for a re-orientation of trauma studies from the past to the future. As he points out, the field lacks “an account of the traumatizing power of anticipation” (Saint-Amour 2015a: 17). Due to trauma studies’ dependence on a “largely psychoanalytic chronology” (13), the notion of a pre-traumatic syndrome is “practically nonsensical” as the symptoms of trauma and the syndrome they constitute are 278

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“emphatically and exclusively post-traumatic” (14). While not oblivious to the future altogether, the field tends to construct it as “a container for the repetition of past traumas” rather than as “a vector or agent of traumatization” (14, n. 17). According to Saint-Amour, it is time for trauma studies to take seriously the suggestion that the dread of a potentially oncoming disaster can traumatize as much as an actually realized one. Tense Future is primarily concerned with the prospect of total war in the literature from the interwar period. Saint-Amour argues that the years 1918–39 were characterized by a pervasive sense of anxious anticipation and were thus experienced “in real time as an interwar period” (8). In the wake of the First World War, the dread of an even more devastating future conflagration saturated the imagination, as evidenced by the cultural production of those years: canonical works of modernist fiction such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–28) are reinterpreted as meditations on impending disaster. While focusing on the interwar period, Saint-Amour expands the scope of his inquiry to encompass the Cold War and even our own early-twenty-first-century moment, going so far as to characterize late modernity in its entirety as “perpetual interwar” (Saint-Amour 2015a: 305). After all, the experience of simultaneously remembering and expecting war is not unique to the historical interwar period but all too familiar also to those afflicted with anxiety about the prospect of nuclear annihilation or drone strikes. Indeed, Sarah Sentilles has coined the term “anticipatory traumatic stress disorder” to denote “the ‘anticipatory anxiety’ that results from the constant worry and fear of never knowing when the next drone attack will come” (Sentilles 2017: 300, n. 215). In a New York Times essay that covers some of the same ground as his book, Saint-Amour further specifies that “war has no monopoly on traumatizing anticipation” (2015b). He points out that other “storms in our future”, such as climate change, can also inflict psychic wounds. The hypothesis that the dread of climate change amounts to a pre-traumatic stress syndrome is central to another major recent work of cultural scholarship, E. Ann Kaplan’s Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (2016). If the more familiar PTSD is “a condition triggered in the present by past events”, pre-trauma, according to Kaplan, describes how “people unconsciously suffer from an immobilizing anticipatory anxiety about the future” (2016: xix). Like Berntsen and Rubin and Saint-Amour before her, she notes that this phenomenon has been little studied so far, despite its increasing prevalence, and ventures that conceptualizing pre-traumatic stress syndrome or “PreTSS” offers “a new lens for an expanded trauma theory” (4). Taking a shorter historical view than Saint-Amour, Kaplan posits that we may now be entering a new era characterized by pervasive pre-trauma, in which people live in fear of a catastrophic future marked by environmental crisis. In the absence – as yet – of sound empirical evidence, it is unclear whether this collective anticipatory anxiety does indeed amount to trauma in the clinical sense, which is why it seems safer to label climate-related PreTSS a hypothesis for now. In this post-9/11 era, media of all kinds bombard us with “catastrophic futurist scenarios”, inviting audiences to project themselves forward into a devastated future world (xix). According to Kaplan, this results in “a pretraumatized population, living with a sense of an uncertain future and an unreliable natural environment” (xix). She expresses the hope that, rather than paralysing audiences, these dystopian scenarios will serve as a warning and wake-up call to help prevent the apocalyptic outcomes depicted. There is thus an explicit ethical dimension to Kaplan’s project of analysing dystopian fictions. Just as in art about past catastrophes such as the Holocaust we witness what must never happen again, she argues in an earlier article, in pre-trauma fictions we witness what must be stopped from happening in the first place (Kaplan 2013: 59). 279

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Kaplan examines a wide range of futurist disaster narratives allegedly inducing pretraumatic stress, both cinematic and literary ones. Her prime example, though, is Take Shelter, a feature film written and directed by Jeff Nichols and released in 2011 that “embodie[s] exactly” the phenomenon she is theorizing (Kaplan 2016: 2). Set in smalltown Ohio, the film tells the story of a family man and construction worker, Curtis LaForche, who is plagued by a series of apocalyptic nightmares and visions. These take the form of thunderstorms, twisters, flash floods, motor-oil-like rain, swarms of menacing birds and attacks by the family dog and zombie-like strangers as well as people close to him. They can be interpreted as relating to pervasive fears about the threat of terrorism, economic precarity, the implosion of the American dream and – most literally and obviously – environmental devastation caused by climate change. Indeed, they prefigure the extreme and erratic weather conditions of the climate-changed future in store for us if not already upon us, such as severe hurricanes, torrential downpours and massive floods, as well as hinting at the collapse of human civilization that climate change could bring about (with society overrun by zombies). Curtis’s work and family life are thrown into turmoil and his sanity is called into question as a result of these unsettling premonitions of catastrophic climate change. At a community dinner, he gets into a fight with a former co-worker and unleashes a verbal tirade on everyone present, in which he announces that a devastating storm is coming for which none of them are prepared. His prophecy is apparently borne out in the film’s epilogue, where an actual end-of-the-world storm is seen gathering over the ocean, not only by Curtis this time but also by his wife and daughter. Steeped in an inexorable air of dread and foreboding, Take Shelter, for Kaplan, perfectly captures “the psychic state of a human being who is traumatized by imagining future climate catastrophe” (53–4). Another, more recent film showcasing this kind of anticipatory anxiety is Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017), which likewise features a leading character (as well as another key character) overwhelmed with dread about climate change. It is worth observing that the victims of PreTSS in these fictional examples are all white Western males, which raises the question of how race, gender and geopolitical location factor into this (as yet scientifically unvalidated) diagnosis.

Trauma beyond the human Moreover, the expanded trauma theory called for by scholars such as Saint-Amour and Kaplan, which would be future- as well as past-oriented, remains wedded to the idea that trauma is an essentially human experience. That trauma theory has tended to espouse an anthropocentric worldview can be illustrated with reference to the story of Tancred and Clorinda, an episode from Torquato Tasso’s sixteenth-century epic poem Gerusalemne Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581) whose interpretations by Sigmund Freud and Cathy Caruth have attracted considerable interest within the field of humanistic trauma scholarship, making it a focal point for the articulation of trauma theory as well as for critiques that have been directed against it. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud describes the story as follows: Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of 280

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Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (Freud, quoted in Caruth 1996: 2) While Freud interprets Tancred’s unknowing wounding of his beloved, not just once but twice, as an example of the repetition compulsion inherent in trauma, Caruth draws attention to “the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound” (2). For Caruth, Tancred’s story represents traumatic experience as “the enigma of the otherness of a human voice that cries out from the wound” (3). Many critics have expressed reservations about the ways in which Caruth’s analysis shifts the focus from the Ethiopian princess Clorinda’s wound to the white European crusader Tancred’s suffering, mostly to do with perceived Eurocentric bias and the blurring of boundaries between perpetrator and victim (Leys 2000; Novak 2008; Rothberg 2009; Craps 2013). However, another aspect of this story and its interpretations by Freud and Caruth that has not yet been remarked upon is the anthropocentrism that underlies and unites these various accounts. Indeed, what Tasso’s text and Freud’s and Caruth’s readings of it, as well as the critiques levelled at Caruth, have in common is the interpretation of harm to the natural world (a cut in a tree) in terms of violence and trauma inflicted on and suffered by humans (Clorinda and Tancred). The poem and its various readers are quick to trope away from environmental destruction, turning it into an image for human suffering. In thus derealizing and invisibilizing the scene of literal damage to a tree, this rhetorical operation is a manifestation of what has been called “plant blindness”; that is, “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment” (Wandersee and Schussler 2001: 3). Tellingly, in the afterword to the twentieth-anniversary edition of Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), where Caruth elaborates at great length on her reading of the Tancred and Clorinda story in Gerusalemne Liberata in an attempt to prove her critics wrong, “the issue of what happens to trees in the poem” is relegated to a footnote (2016: 179, n. 22). However, we are also beginning to see attempts to reconceptualize trauma in nonanthropocentric terms and to acknowledge the interconnectedness and entanglement of human and non-human traumas. One example of this post-humanist turn is the notion of eco-trauma put forward by Anil Narine in the edited collection Eco-Trauma Cinema (2015). In the introduction to the book, Narine defines eco-trauma as the harm we, as humans, inflict upon our natural surroundings, or the injuries we sustain from nature in its unforgiving iterations. The term encompasses both circumstances because these seemingly distinct instances of ecological harm are often related and even symbiotic: The traumas we perpetuate in an ecosystem through pollution and unsustainable resource management inevitably return to harm us. (Narine 2015: 9) According to Narine, “[n]ature [...] sustains and endures trauma as a human victim would”, and, in turn, “a traumatized earth begets traumatized people” (13). Deploying and elaborating Nick Land’s post-psychoanalytic notion of geotrauma (2011), scholars including Reza Negarestani (2011), Robin Mackay (2012) and Tim Matts and Aidan Tynan (2012) similarly insist on the need to extend trauma beyond the human and even the living to encompass the inorganic domain. According to Negarestani, “trauma should be understood not as what is experienced but as a form of cut made by the real or the absolute in its own unified 281

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order” (2011: 53, n. 3). To liberate trauma theory from its anthropocentrism and biocentrism, he suggests, we need “a generalized conception of trauma”: “a cosmologically deepened account of trauma […] that interconnects the particulate, the galactic, the stellar, the chemical, the biological, the socio-cultural and the neuropsychological within a continuous – albeit topologically counterintuitive – universal gradient” (26). In this account, which extends psychological trauma towards geology and cosmology, traumas are recursively “nested” within one another: “Since there is no single or isolated psychic trauma (all traumas are nested), there is no psychic trauma without an organic trauma and no organic trauma without a terrestrial trauma that in turn is deepened into open cosmic vistas” (Negarestani, quoted in Matts and Tynan 2012: 157). According to Matts and Tynan, geotrauma can help us conceptualize “a materialism of suffering which is beyond the psychic domain, and which is profoundly unnaturalizable as an element of psychic interiority” (160). Calls to rethink trauma from a broader conception of life or even inanimate matter, to give it a new materialist or post-humanist extension, challenge trauma studies to move beyond human exceptionalism and exemptionalism. As Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman argue, it is vital to “disrupt the dominance of human bodies as the only mournable subjects” and to expand the realm of the grievable (2017: 16). Mourning ecological losses also involves reckoning with our complicity in environmental degradation – indeed, we are often implicated in these processes, if only by virtue of being inhabitants of the Anthropocene (Cunsolo and Landman 2017: 16; Rothberg 2014: xvi). While environmental issues in general and climate change in particular have so far received relatively little attention from trauma scholars, in the years ahead we can expect to see the field make significant strides in its engagement with our environmental predicament, if for no other reason than that ignoring that already grave predicament will become all but impossible as it continues to deteriorate.

Bibliography Berntsen, D. and Rubin, D. C. (2015) “Pretraumatic Stress Reactions in Soldiers Deployed to Afghanistan”, Clinical Psychological Science 3(5): 663–74. Caldwell, G. (2009) “Coming Out of the Closet: My Climate Trauma (and Yours?)” The Skywriter 4 May 2009. www.1sky.org/blog/2009/05/coming-out-of-the-closet-my-climate-trauma-and-yours (accessed 6 June 2019). Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (2016) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, 20th-anniversary edition., Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Clark, T. (2015) Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, London: Bloomsbury. Clayton, S., Manning, C., Krygsman, K. and Speiser, M. (2017) Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica. Connor, L., Albrecht, G., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S. and Smith, W. (2004) “Environmental Change and Human Health in Upper Hunter Communities of New South Wales, Australia”, EcoHealth 1(Supp.): 47–58. Coyle, K. J. and Van Susteren, L. (2012) The Psychological Effects of Global Warming on the United States: And Why the US Mental Health Care System Is Not Adequately Prepared, National Wildlife Federation. www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Global-Warming/Reports/Psych_Effects_Climate_Change_ Full_3_23.ashx (accessed 23 February 2020). Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cunsolo, A. and Ellis, N. R. (2018) “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss”, Nature Climate Change 8(4): 275–81.

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Climate trauma Cunsolo, A. and Landman, K. (2017) “Introduction: To Mourn beyond the Human”, in A. Cunsolo and K. Landman (eds) Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 3–26. Duggan, J. (2014) “Is This How You Feel?” www.isthishowyoufeel.com/ (accessed 6 June 2019). First Reformed, (2017) dir. P. Schrader, Killer Films. Houser, H. (2014) Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect, New York: Columbia University Press. IPCC. (2018) “Global Warming of 1.5°C”, http://ipcc.ch/report/sr15 (accessed 6 June 2019). Kaplan, E. A. (2013) “Trauma Studies Moving Forward: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 27(2): 53–65. ———. (2016) Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Land, N. (2011) Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, R. Mackay and R. Brassier (eds), Falmouth: Urbanomic. Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Rosenthal, S., Kotcher, J., Ballew, M., Goldberg, M. and Gustafson, A. (2018) Climate Change in the American Mind: December 2018, Yale University and George Mason University, New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Leys, R. (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mackay, R. (2012) “A Brief History of Geotrauma”, in E. Keller, N. Masciandaro and E. Thacker (eds) Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 1–38. Matts, T. and Tynan, A. (2012) “Geotrauma and the Eco-Clinic”, symplokē 20(1–2): 153–71. Myers, D. K. (2017) “Climate Change and Mental Health: Q&A with Lise Van susteren, MD”, Global Health NOW, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 15 March 2017. www.global healthnow.org/2017-03/climate-change-and-mental-health-qa-lise-van-susteren-md Narine, A. (2015) “Introduction: Eco-Trauma Cinema”, in A. Narine (ed.) Eco-Trauma Cinema, New York: Routledge, 1–24. Negarestani, R. (2011) “Globe of Revolution: An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism”, Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 8(2): 25–54. Novak, A. (2008) “Who Speaks? Who Listens? The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels”, Studies in the Novel 40(1–2): 31–51. Oberhaus, D. (2017) “Climate Change Is Giving Us ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress’”, Motherboard 4 February 2017. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vvzzam/climate-change-is-giving-us-pre-traumaticstress (accessed 23 February 2020). “Report: More US Soldiers Suffering from Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (2006) The Onion 15 November 2006. www.theonion.com/articles/report-more-us-soldiers-sufferingfrom-pretraumati,2088/ Richardson, J. H. (2015) “When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job”, Esquire August. www. esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-sad-climatologists-0815/ (accessed 23 February 2020). Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. (2014) “Beyond Tancred and Clorinda: Trauma Studies for Implicated Subjects”, in G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone (eds) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, Abingdon: Routledge, xi–xviii. Saint-Amour, P. K. (2015a) Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2015b) “Waiting for the Bomb to Drop”, New York Times 3 August. https://opinionator.blogs. nytimes.com/author/paul-saint-amour/ (accessed 23 February 2020). Sentilles, S. (2017) Draw Your Weapons, New York: Random House. Smith, D. B. (2010) “Is There an Ecological Unconscious?” New York Times 27 January. www.nytimes. com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html (accessed 23 February 2020). Smith, Z. (2014) “Elegy for a Country’s Seasons”, New York Review of Books 3 April. www.nybooks. com/articles/2014/04/03/elegy-countrys-seasons/ (accessed 23 February 2020). Take Shelter, (2011) dir. J. Nichols, Hydraulx Entertainment. Thomas, M. (2014) “Climate Depression Is for Real: Just Ask a Scientist”, Grist 28 October. https://grist. org/climate-energy/climate-depression-is-for-real-just-ask-a-scientist/ (accessed 23 February 2020). Wandersee, J. H. and Schussler, E. E. (2001) “Toward a Theory of Plant Blindness”, Plant Science Bulletin 47(1): 2–9.

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Further reading Albrecht, G. (2019) Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (Explains the author’s concept of solastalgia as well as various other eco-emotions he has named, both negative and positive ones.) Cunsolo, A. and Landman, K. (eds) (2017) Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. (A pioneering collection of essays on mourning beyond the human.) Kaplan, E. A. (2016) Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. (An extensive treatment of the pre-traumatic stress disorder hypothesis in relation to climate change via film and literature.)

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PART IV

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26 TRAUMA AND FICTION Robert Eaglestone

Introduction Trauma means first a wound, then, after Freud, a psychic wound, and has since accumulated an array of meanings: the consequence of the destruction of a society (the collective trauma of the Holocaust, a paradigmatic example); an individual’s response to a terrible event; each human’s psychic sense of loss. Fiction, too, is a term which has accrued meanings. We take it in an everyday sense to mean “untrue”, but it refers also to a living tradition of writing, in a range of forms, which can tend toward being closed, or formulaic, or open: this latter is called literary fiction. To complicate further, the category of literary fiction includes “true novels” and writing that draws on the historical record as well as works of total invention; more, we expect literary fiction to tell us what I will call, for ease, existential truths – things about our shared world beyond merely factual matters, hard to establish though these are. Finally, the root of the word “fiction” is from the Latin fingere, meaning “to shape, fashion, form”, and so not to do with truth but making, in the way that a novel is “made up” or a narrative is “crafted”. These two, the category or craft of fiction (invention, shaping, yet somehow revealing things of importance) and the wound (personal, psychic, social and collective) have been intertwined: the aim of this chapter is to explore their threading together by looking at a series of questions raised by this weaving. This is centrally because literary interpretation depends on the questions we choose to ask, and so “trauma fiction” means less “fiction about trauma” and more, “reading with trauma in mind”.

How is a wound put into words? To ask, as some do, if fiction should represent trauma is moot because, simply, there are very many extant texts which appear to be about trauma. Indeed, if we accept the very widest definition of trauma (about which I am very sceptical), that it is the psychic experience of loss involved in simply existing, all texts are “traumatic” to some degree because they all presume existence. But even to take a less capacious and more sensible understanding – that a trauma is a historical event which wounds an individual or a community in

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a material, psychic or metaphorical way – the question remains: in what way does any fiction text represent trauma. How is a wound put into words? As Tom Toremans (2018) points out, the influential theoretical work on trauma and literature by Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman draws on the late work of Paul de Man, work which circles around the problem of reference: that is, the philosophical problem of how it is that language can represent anything. (A way into this idea is to think about how children learn language: each of us learns not simply the names for things, bird, door, Mum, their associations and the forms of life connected with them, but also the idea that things have names. What is implied or hidden in this referential process? And, of course, while some things are objects, others, often the more important, are not simply objects: love, justice, time, the environment, a person. Further, the subject of this book, trauma, often appears precisely in its being covered up or not named.) While there is, clearly, a kind of academic interest in how we come, say, to know a door is to be called a door (and a problem that researchers into artificial intelligence are keenly investigating), the representation of trauma is a kind of “limit case” of language – the representation of an event so overpowering that just naming it is already to be profoundly engaged with it: think of the political and legal arguments over naming events as a so-called “genocide”, or the personal struggle survivors can have over naming an act as sexual abuse. Our human engagement with trauma and its aftermath means that these questions are not just an examination of a function of language but are part of our more demanding ethical involvement with the world and with others. So, for example, in her book Unclaimed Experience (1996), Caruth follows a series of figures of speech in a text which use the idea of “falling” or “departure”, and in so doing, uncovers through them “a literary dimension” beyond the “thematic content”: what the language cannot say directly “stubbornly persists in bearing witness to some forgotten wound” (Caruth 1996: 5). This idea, that texts may contain something overwhelming which cannot be easily named but which emerges through that text in complex ways, underlies the foundational literary theoretical work in Caruth’s edited collection, Trauma: Explorations in memory (1995), and in the widely cited phrase that trauma consists “in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (Caruth 1995: 4–5).

Trauma fiction, testimony and the historical record The structures through which trauma underlies writing are more often seen in testimonies, in accounts by people who have witnessed terrible events. For example, from testimonies, it is possible to identify a range of generic characteristics which include the movement of the story backwards and forward through narrative time; the use of dramatic irony; narrative frames which both clarify and also cover up the events (if the narrator explains the retelling of the story, in a frame or context, this can work to distance the actual events of the story); different registers of writing taken from different genres – autobiographical, historical, memorial, novelistic; textual interruption; a refusal of closure; the use of epiphanies to reveal the meaning of crucial incidents. All this can add up to that what Spanish spy, writer, politician and Holocaust survivor Jorge Semprun calls a “studied disorder” (Semprun 1997: 16). But while a great number of testimonies display some of these characteristics, do they need to in order to represent trauma? Semprun seems to suggest something like this: in his astonishing Literature or Life?, a work part testimony, part literary and philosophical meditation, he explores precisely this question. French intellectuals imprisoned at Buchenwald discuss how 288

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their experiences will be retold: while a simple chronicle could retell the “facts”, one argues that this could not contain “the essential truth” (125), and Semprun adds, that to fully grasp the evil “We’ll need a Dostoyevsky!” (127), suggesting that the literary techniques are central. On the other hand, this is a very high bar for any testimony writer. Moreover, and as Semprun’s work shows, these literary techniques for the representation of trauma are not somehow unaffected by other sorts of writing: fiction and testimony are not two separated realms. Writers of testimonies are shaped by their experience of reading fiction and other texts (and, the tropes I have mentioned notwithstanding, it is true that many less well-known testimonies “take their bearings from the realistic style of the nineteenth century, in the belief that this is best suited to what they have to communicate” (Reiter 2000: 193). Writers of fiction have taken up, used and reused these markers: postmodern novels, for example, mix genres, refuse closure, interrupt themselves. But the boundary between fiction and testimony is complex. A text’s status as testimony and not fiction relies on the metatextual claim that the author is the actual witness. It is abuse of this claim that leads to the various fakes and scandals which periodically arise: one of the most famous is that of Bruno Dössekker, who, adopting the name Binjamin Wilkomirski, wrote an award-winning memoir, Fragments (1995), which purported to cover his time in Auschwitz and displayed many of the generic characteristics I discussed earlier. Later this was revealed to be an invention. Less controversially, many testimonies are, in fact, ghost written or, at least, the witness is assisted (look for any that begin in medias res: this is one of the ghost writer’s regular tricks). Sometimes texts make this clear: in No Common Place, the testimony of Alina Bacall-Zwirin, Jared Stark was explicit about his own role because in a previous telling of her story, Bacall-Zwirin said that the ghost writer “put in his philosophy too much” (Bacall-Zwirin and Stark 1999: xi). But, as it were, going the other way, the boundary between fiction and testimony is more complex: outside the trauma context, there are “true novels”, autobiographical novels, “Romans à clef” and so on. Because each work of literature is a singular thing rather than a made-to-measure consumable, there is no universal rule for “how much reality” a novel might contain, whether we measure this by contrasting it to the historical record (for example, is the Tsar’s Palace where the novel claims to be?) or our own sense of existential truth (does the love affair unravel in a convincing way?).

Example: “heart of darkness” One good example of a fiction about trauma that uses the historical record is Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (Conrad 1995 [1899]), a foundational text for postcolonial studies which perhaps, as Kafka does, foreshadows much in the twentieth century. The novella is about a colonial genocide, written from the point of view of a minor perpetrator of that genocide (for a fuller discussion, see Eaglestone 2017). Historians recognize that the Congo Free State, unnamed in the novella, was not simply a case of colonial exploitation but actively genocidal: estimates vary from three to thirteen million dead. But genocide is not just about numbers: the Congo before the Free State had over 200 different ethnic and linguistic groups, most of these – these peoples, that is – were destroyed. V. S. Naipaul unwittingly records a symptom of these multiple genocides in 1975: “I tried to find out about old songs, about historical traditions. I drew a blank. History has vanished here […]. History has disappeared” (Naipaul 1980: 42). Conrad’s novella allows us to see this genocide inflicted on the native populations: the “grove of death”, the many killings through labour or simply murder. It allows the reader to see – from the outside only – the symptoms of 289

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despair and desperation of the indigenous people. But, as fiction, the novella also allows the reader to think about the perpetrators, not least because Marlow is one. We are presented with a range of racisms, from the paternalistic racism of Marlow, through the colonial salvific racism of Kurtz to the utterly genocidal racism of the plotters at the Central Station. Marlow becomes traumatized: he is warned that the changes “take place inside” (Conrad 1995 [1899]: 27) and, like the perpetrators of the Holocaust, he begins to “split” himself, learning to terrify the indigenous people with a “speech in English with gestures, not one word of which was lost to the sixty pairs of eyes” (40). He is suborned into the plot by the Manager of the Central Station to kill Kurtz (the Manager fears Kurtz will expose him). They wreck the river steamer (an “affair […] too stupid […] to be altogether natural”) and delay the relief in order to let the climate “do away with this difficulty” – which is to say, with Kurtz. In Marlow’s narration of the tale – removed from the reader by the frame of another, nameless narrator – there are significant pauses. At one, the narrator says “I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative” (50). This interruption is crucial, for it occurs at the moment in which Marlow tips into complicity: he is traumatized by having become a murderer. Most critics presume Kurtz to be a monster, but a close reading of the text in fact reveals salient details that show this not to be the case. Rather, it is the nameless perpetrators at the Central Station who are the real “heart of darkness”. Each work of fiction incorporates the historical world to a degree specific to that work: trauma fiction is often closer to the historical record than other forms. Two examples: first, Conrad was a replacement for one Captain Freiesleben; Marlow for Captain Fresleven. The former was killed in 1891 in a genocidal punitive expedition on the people of Bolobo-Tchumbiri; the latter, Marlow says, over a “misunderstanding” (23) about hens. Second, in The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s protagonist writes that during the march from Matadi to Nselemba in June–August 1890, “Jósef Korzeniowski began to grasp that his own travails did not absolve him from the guilt which he had incurred by his mere presence in the Congo” (Sebald 1998: 120). While many critics seek to exculpate both Conrad (historically) and Marlow (fictionally), Sebald evocatively but unambiguously suggests that Conrad (in the historical record) and Marlow (in the novella) are, bluntly and despite their reservations, lowlevel genocidal perpetrators. This trauma text, then, bears witness to a colonial genocide; through its framing device it explores the traumatic impact of being a perpetrator and, while the events are obscure, the dividing line between fiction and history here is very thin. “Heart of Darkness” read this way, as trauma fiction, is not some “mythopoetic poetic” journey but the interweaving of the historical, ethical and aesthetics that leave us, like the narrator, with “uneasiness”.

Debates over the form of trauma fiction Heart of Darkness is a demanding literary novella, and some critics have argued or even assumed that trauma can only be represented in complex, challenging and, even perhaps, modernist or postmodernist forms. This is summed up by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s influential citation from Paul Celan, that the “breakage of the verse enacts the breakage of the world” (Felman and Laub 1992: 25). This view – that traumatic texts must be challenging – has two strengths but, as I will show, has been powerfully criticized. First, a novel that is challenging in form, “broken”, makes demands on the readers and asks questions of them. This form of literary unsettlement can be seen as an analogy to trauma, or at least as a way of making the traumatic event harder to process as 290

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a reader: a kind of prick to the conscience, an interruption in the conventional reading process. In this way, trauma fiction is unavoidably tied into debates about literary value. These ideas, of course, have a long history in the realm of literary criticism – that demanding books are “better” for one’s engagement with the world than easily consumed “airport novels”; that books that make you read, and so see, differently have a different ethical value from ones that simply entertain. The core of this idea may not be wrong, but there is not space here to scrape away from the masonry of this valuable insight the overgrowths of many decades of snobbery and elitism that have crept over it. However, it is clear that there are many different ways of being challenged by a literary text other than by, say, lexical or syntactic obscurity. The second strength of this view is that it is echoed by work in other disciplines. For example, illuminating parallels are suggested by some work in psychology (although much in this area is very much open to question and failures in repeatability). For example, a study of the stories of Ethiopian Jews noted thirteen recurring “trauma signals”: self-report (that is, describing an event or moment as traumatic); a “hidden” event, not at first narrated but which emerges during discussion; long silence; loss of emotional control; emotional detachment or numbness; repetitive reporting; losing oneself in the traumatic event; intrusive images; forceful argumentation of conduct within an event; cognitive-emotional disorientation; inability to tell a story at all; changes in voice; changes in body language (BenEzer 1999). Some of these “signals” clearly have fictional analogues. However, as with the case of written testimony texts, these markers are not unmediated but already exist in a world of specific cultural ideas and expectations, and are prey to some kind of socially unconscious literary fashioning (“fiction” as shaping). In contrast to this is the view of a range of scholars, notably Stef Craps (2013) and Roger Luckhurst (2008), who suggest that this view of trauma fiction prioritizes one – modernist, high-culture, Eurocentric – form of response to trauma, and indeed, prioritizes one form of Western medical-recognized understanding of trauma over non-western and unrecognized others: the trauma, for example, of the “slow violence” enacted on the poor of the less-developed world that Rob Nixon discusses in his Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). Why should one form of fiction be the “correct” one for the representation of trauma? Why should one definition of trauma be the only form of wound? Craps (2013) rightly questions the wider assumptions behind these ideas. We can find fiction that deals with trauma outside “high” literature, outside western literature, and that deal with a much wider range of historical traumas.

Appropriating trauma? But both these approaches – one prioritizing high culture and challenging trauma fiction, and the other opening to a much broader range or representation – beg the question of the way fiction might appropriate trauma. This appropriation has two parts: appropriation by the writer and, perhaps more subtly, appropriation by the reader. Since trauma fiction draws on the very deepest parts of what it is to be human – good and evil, suffering, justice, community, self-understanding – this question is especially fraught. In terms of authorship, it raises the question of the “right to write”: who is allowed to write about what traumatic event? This highly contentions question has a whole spectrum of answers. An example from one end of the spectrum is novelist Lionel Shriver, defending all forms of appropriation:

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who is the appropriator par excellence, really? Who assumes other people’s voices, accents, patois, and distinctive idioms? Who literally puts words into the mouths of people different from themselves? Who dares to get inside the very heads of strangers, who has the chutzpah to project thoughts and feelings into the minds of others, who steals their very souls? […] The fiction writer, that’s who. (Shriver 2016) For her, even to ask the question about the “right to write” is to betray what fiction is. At the other end, there is the (usually false) image of political correctness, keen to defend against any of this “soul stealing”. If we can separate this positon from the obloquy poured upon it by the alt-right and others, we can discern, behind layers of history, the figure of Plato and his argument that literature simply is not true, and that the transformation of the writing or performing self into different characters (even, shockingly for Socrates, “women in sickness or love or childbirth […] horses neighing or bulls bellowing” (Plato 1955: 395–6). can only be deleterious for oneself and for society. But one does not have to be an extremist of either sort to have a twinge of conscience in reading a novel in which the “socalled artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down by rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it” (Adorno 1993: 88). There’s some difference between a novelist who forms the “uncreated conscience” of a community, and one who simply exploits suffering. As usual in literary debates, the answer is somewhere in the middle and, as I suggested, is inextricably intertwined with questions of literary value. If authors can write interesting, thoughtful, moving fiction, they can “get away with it”, but a clumsy novel is soon “trauma kitsch” or cultural appropriation. Thinking about appropriation is another occasion where ethical and aesthetic judgements are hopelessly entangled: no law or “poetic licence” offers an easy resolution to this matter. The reader’s appropriation of a fictional trauma is more subtle. It is always possible to “work through” or appropriate a fiction and in so doing, simply pass over and appropriate a trauma. Indeed, if one takes an assessment by writing a paper about a trauma fiction, is one not turning it from a text about human suffering into a resource to get good marks? Does this not, somehow, diminish it? Take, as an example of one aspect of this, a stereotypical traumatic fiction plot, at a highly abstract level. There is, first, an overwhelming event, a trauma, for a character or community; then there is the period of “latency”, in which the symptoms recur and emerge in other ways; and then there is a confrontation, often via an act of transference, and so a resolution of the trauma. This is, among others, the story of the Fisher King, and so of that ur-text for modernity, Eliot’s The Waste Land, as well as many less impressive novels. The very framework of the fiction and closure works to resolve the trauma. And this pertains to the most important question, perhaps, about trauma, the possibility of healing. To what degree can traumas can be healed? I am uncertain who has the right to answer such a question.

Victims and perpetrators, trauma and healing?: Hanya Yanagihara Hanya Yanagihara’s much-lauded A Little Life (2015) focuses on precisely this question, and allows the reader to think about it. A Little Life, a long and not a little book, concerns the trauma of sexual abuse, and asks if this trauma be healed and if there is a “little life” left over. While the novel begins as the story of four young college friends in New York, it soon becomes the story of Jude, who, it emerges as the narrative jumps backwards and 292

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forward in time, is the survivor of shattering and deeply traumatic sexual abuse. In some way, Jude is given a wonderful life: a rewarding and successful career, a steadfast group of friends, a thoughtful, loyal and film-star handsome lover, adoption by a loving older couple. Yet he is never able to resolve or close the experience of his sexual abuse which remerges in different and terrible ways throughout the novel. The success of the characters, their golden lives, is juxtaposed with the terror of Jude’s real traumatized life and his struggle to overcome that trauma. The slightly oneiric quality of the novel (it seems to take place in a kind of “unchanging now” of New York, no 9/11, no iPhones, no temporal markers) adds to the this juxtaposition. The point of A Little Life seems to be that, unlike some other fictions on this topic, that trauma simply cannot be reconciled to life, cannot be resolved. Central to fiction is the idea of different views (Shriver’s daring to “get into the heads of strangers”): in terms of trauma, this allows fiction to explore the perpetrators of trauma. Indeed, it might even be possible to suggest that perpetrators make more challenging central characters for fiction precisely because they have agency whereas their victims have agency stripped from them. Hanya Yanagihara’s first novel The People in the Trees (2013) also focuses on sexual abuse, but on the perpetrator. Purporting to be an account, told mainly in the first person, by Abraham Norton Perina, a Nobel Laurate, the novel is “edited” and framed by his laboratory colleague (and lover? aspiring lover?) Ronald Kubodera. Some of the novel is in a scientific register, some, as it were, editorial (an appendix, footnotes, a glossary, a crucial missing document added as a final supplement), and much is written as an autobiography. Perina is a misanthropic scientist, who, through his heedless and reckless drive and lucky chance, goes on an expedition to U’ivu, an island in Micronesia on which he discovers, by observation and following “the people in the trees”, a medical way to extend human life, although not our intellectual faculties. The commercial exploitation of this leads, inevitably, to the traumatic destruction of the island’s ecosystem and social life, and degradation of its people. While on this expedition, Perina has – from his point of view – a profound sexual encounter with a boy. As he becomes a lauded scientist, and sees the destruction of U’ivu, he adopts some 43 abandoned children from the island. But the novel begins and ends with the revelation that Perina has been sexually abusing the children: the start describes his imprisonment and public; the conclusion – that supplemented document – Pernia’s one-sided account of his vengeful rape of Victor, one of his adopted children. Like many trauma texts, it has a historical inter-text, the case of the Nobel Laureate Daniel Carleton Gajdusek who abused children he had adopted. The novel seems to be equating the perpetration of sexual abuse with the abuse of the “people of the trees” and wider population by Perina for the advancement of himself, science and the colonizing Global North. For Perina, we are led to recognize, these abuses are both forms of warped love: a view of the “explorer-scientist as penetrator” which links together both individual depravity to wider western cultural norms to make us concerned about these – again, to return the reader to a sense of unease. Many of the questions that the experience of trauma leads to are impossible to answer and of this sort: in part, because trauma in this wider sense draws on so many discourses (medical, legal, historical, ethical, aesthetic and so on) that it is unclear how to answer them; in part, because the traumas vary – the devastating impact of a sexual assault is different from a genocide; and in part, because they are existential questions – who am I to answer on these matters for you? However, it is the case that trauma fiction allows us to think these through. Indeed, in this sense trauma fiction is an intensified version of what all narrative does, as Hanna Meretoja argues (Meretoja 2018, especially ch. 3). 293

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Trauma, memory and the political world: Kazuo Ishiguro One powerful fictive example of this in a wider context than Yanagihara’s work can be found in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro: all his novels concern guilt, complicity and remembrance and his recent Arthurian fable The Buried Giant (2015) contributes to this thinking through. The novel is narrated by a death figure, kind of Charon, and is set after the reign of King Arthur. Two elderly Britons, Axl and Beatrice, find that they as well as everyone else cannot recall the past, can barely remember who they are or even recall their son. They are unmoored in time. They set off, rather vaguely, to find their son and discover a world mostly soaked in forgetfulness, in which two populations, Saxons and Britons, live together not so much in peace but in a kind of idiotic quiescence. They are all enchanted by a mist that comes from a Dragon, Querig, set by Arthur, precisely in order to keep the land dormant and forgetful of a colossal secret: that Arthur and the Britons committed a genocidal betrayal on the Saxons in which Axl played a central role. The aim of this enchantment was to “allow for old wounds to heal for ever and an eternal peace to hold” (Ishiguro 2015: 311) but the consequence is that individuals and communities are stunted, rootless, superstitious, inventing strange and meaningless rituals and are unable to function fully, by, for example, using public deliberative reason. Even the landscape becomes a blasted waste land. But as Axl and Beatrice journey, they encounter a Saxon orphan, Edwin, and also a Saxon warrior, Winstan, able to “withstand strange spells” (308), who can remember and whose mission is to kill the dragon and return memory – the buried giant of the title – to the land. The consequences of this will be catastrophic: as Winstan explains to Edwin, “it was Britons under Arthur slaughtered our kind. It was Britons took your mother and mine. We’ve a duty to hate every man, woman and child of their blood” (264). Indeed, “justice and vengeance await” (322) and “men will burn their neighbours’ houses by night. Hang children from trees at dawn. The rivers will stink of corpses bloated from their days of voyaging” (324). The novel offers a “pathless path”, an aporia, between forgetfulness, which leads to the deterioration and degeneration of personal and social life, and a real world of memory, which leads to revenge and violence. It leaves the question unanswered.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the interaction between trauma and fiction, looking at the ways in which trauma is instantiated in fictive texts and the literary and generic interaction between fiction and testimony and questions this raises; the significance of the historical record for trauma fiction; issues of aesthetic value and appropriation; the ability of fiction to explore different views, including the views of the perpetrator; and, finally, the way in which trauma fiction poses wider ethical and existential questions in the way that only fiction can. Emerging through this discussion is that “trauma fiction” is as much a sensitized way of reading, with certain questions in mind, as it is a simplistic literary category.

Bibliography Adorno, A. (1993) Notes to Literature, Vol. II, R. Tiedemann (ed.), trans. S. Weber Nicholson, New York: Columbia University Press. Bacall-Zwirin, A. and Stark, J. (1999) No Common Place, London: University of Nebraska Press. BenEzer, G. (1999) “Trauma Signals in Life Stories”, in K. L. Rogers, S. Leydesdorff and G. Dawson (eds) Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives, London: Routledge, 29–44. Caruth, C. (ed.) (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Genres and media ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Conrad, J. (1995 [1899]) Heart of Darkness with the Congo Diary, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, London: Palgrave. Eaglestone, R. (2017) The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, London: Routledge. Ishiguro, K. (2015) The Buried Giant, London: Faber and Faber. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, London: Routledge. Meretoja, H. (2018) The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Naipaul, V. S. (1980) A Congo Diary, London: Sylvester and Orpharos. Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, London: Harvard University Press. Plato (1955 [380 BC]) The Republic, trans. H. D. P. Lee, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Reiter, A. (2000) Narrating the Holocaust, trans. P. Camiler, London: Continuum. Sebald, W. G. (1998) The Rings of Saturn, trans. M. Hulse, London: Harvill. Semprun, J. (1997) Literature or Life, trans. L. Coverdale, London: Viking. Shriver, L. (2016) “I Hope the Concept of Cultural Appropriation Is a Passing Fad”, The Guardian 13 September 2016. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/lionel-shrivers-fullspeech-i-hope-the-concept-of-cultural-appropriation-is-a-passing-fad Toremans, T. (2018) “Deconstruction”, in J. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 51–65. Yanagihara, H. (2013) The People in the Trees, London: Picador. ———. (2015) A Little Life, London: Picador.

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27 TRAUMA AND POETRY Charles I. Armstrong

Poetry is eminently a literature of memory. The formal characteristics of poetry, such as rhyme and metre, are not only characteristics that signify its proximity to music and song but also mnemonic devices that have been traditionally employed to ensure its cultural survival and transmission. A poem asks to be learnt by heart (cf. Derrida 2004). The dactylic hexameters of Homer’s epics were deployed by rhapsodes – professional performers of the verse – in order to facilitate memorization and improvisation, and when W. H. Auden much later (in 1939) singled out three traits characteristic of great poets, the first he identified was “a gift of a very high order for memorable language” (Auden 2002: 3). Yet although poetry typically aspires to be “memorable language” it nevertheless inhabits a markedly marginal position in the scholarly field of current memory studies, as well as within the more delimited field of trauma studies. A major reason for this lies in what Anyana Jahanara Kabir has described as the “privileging of certain interpretative structures devolving around narrative” (Kabir 2014: 65). While literary analysis of trauma and memory has benefitted from the interdisciplinary nature of a field where the humanities work alongside social studies, psychology and other areas of study, the predominant narrative focus of the field has meant that forms of writing more marked by lyrical and, to a smaller extent, dramatic modes have suffered neglect. The cultural studies emphasis on popular culture has arguably exacerbated this situation, as poetry – despite exceptions such as stunt poetry and the amenability of poetry to the internet – seldom has mass appeal. Poetry can be narrative (such as in the epic) and dramatic (such as in the dramatic monologue). Much modern poetry is of a lyric nature, though, and does not adhere to the typical narrative scenario of a speaker telling a story from exposition to closure. The modern lyric is often brief, and its speaker is frequently self-conscious and often not clearly distinguished from the author. There is also, from Romanticism, a heritage – negotiated in complex ways by poets of later eras – of exploring states of affect. All the mentioned features have an impact on how poetry has been used to respond to trauma. This chapter will particularly emphasize how poetical form, and the variety of genres that are at the disposal of the poet, can open for different approaches to trauma. After an account of how trauma has had an impact on the modernist tradition of the lyric and the understanding of its history, attention will be given to the idea of a “poetry of witnessing”, before concluding looks at the role of elegy and place. Key poems and conflicts will be presented in conjunction with influential critical opinion. 296

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Trauma and the modernist lyric Trauma has played a role in the poetry of many historical eras. Particularly within Romanticism, when the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolutionary terror were accompanied by the emergence of a new discourse of sensibility, one can find important anticipations of later developments (see Hartman 1995; Pfau 2005). Yet this is before the modern use of the word “trauma” to cover psychological phenomena, which first occurred in the 1860s. The industrial revolution of the Victorian period caused a powerful imbrication of technology and psychological illness, which also quickly was the subject for increasingly self-conscious treatment in the literature of the age. Of particular importance here is Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857). In his influential interpretation of Charles Baudelaire, developed in the 1920s, Walter Benjamin suggests that “lyric poetry can have as its basis an experience for which shock experience has become the norm” (Benjamin 1968: 162). For Benjamin, Les Fleurs du mal is a distinctly historical volume of poetry, since it grasps the essence of a new historical epoch and ushers in the modern lyric. Modern capitalism has made the orderly continuity of traditional experience impossible, with the consequence that modern man is “increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience” (Benjamin 1968: 158). For Benjamin, the disjointing encounter with urban masses is emblematic for this new state of affairs. While “[f]ear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the big-city crowd aroused in those who first observed it” (174), this has later been replaced by a form of adaptation and training. Benjamin sees both these tendencies at work in Baudelaire, making use of Freud’s trauma theory to arrive at his own, more collective and Marxist-oriented understanding of the modern era. In coming up with a hypothesis of a collective form of traumatic experience that was bereft of a single traumatic trigger, he effectively anticipates more recent emphasis (particularly in postcolonial theory) on insidious forms of trauma. Another key feature that we will see returning in other discussions of the poetry of trauma, is the emphasis on place: while Baudelaire (in Benjamin’s reading) casts the city as a uniquely traumatizing locality, other poetic responses will focus both on more specific places and on the generic possibilities when dealing with places. While Baudelaire thus can be identified as the founder of the high modernist lyric, Paul Celan has often been construed as the culmination of the same tradition. A German-speaking, Romanian Jew, Celan survived the Second World War but both of his parents died in an internment camp. Geoffrey Hartman has identified in Celan’s singular poetry, to a large degree marked by these historical circumstances, “a respect for reticence, for representational limits” that is indicative of “an obsessive scruple” (Hartman 1996: 161). In Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (2000), Ulrich Baer suggestively links Celan’s work with that of Baudelaire. While Baer acknowledges that Celan’s poetry attempts to clear a space for witnessing of the atrocities of the Holocaust, he at the same time acknowledges that it “names, addresses, and testifies to an occurrence that called the possibilities of language, of address, and of testimony into question” (Baer 2000: 172). Temporality comes particularly into focus through the final stanza of Celan’s poem “Corroded Away” (“Weggebeizt”), here in Baer’s own translation:

Deep in the rip in time, by the comb-shaped ice waits, a crystal of breath, your unassailable testimony. (Baer 2000: 183) 297

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For Baer, the “rip in time” (Zeitenschrunde) “corresponds to the way a traumatic experience refuses to become part of the past and instead rips open time’s continuous flow by painfully erupting, virtually unchanged, at a much later moment” (202). One might also take note of the density of Celan’s figurative language in this passage, a distinctive characteristic of poetical responses to events and experiences that resist straightforward mimesis. Celan’s notoriously complex and allusive verse has been read as a culmination of a modernist tendency to embrace difficulty as a virtue in itself. Baer is however suspicious of the implicit reductionism in reading him as part of a modernist heritage including Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, claiming that not only literary history but also more general accounts of history violate the singularity of the experiences communicated in and through the poetry of Baudelaire and Celan. The traumatic event, one might say, may define historical narrative but cannot itself be fully comprehended by such a narrative. In the conjunction of the traumatic event and the poem, Baer sees something that resists both the unity and therapeutic consequences of narrative, insisting that by “enacting rather than directly communicating its truth, poetry registers the type of experience that an individual, after suffering a trauma, may be compelled to reenact but cannot recall at will” (Baer 2000: 149). This is evident, he claims, in Celan’s innovative use of the genre of the landscape poem. A poem such as “Entwurf einer Landschaft” may evoke the sites of Buchenwald and Treblinka, but there is no simple reference or healing memory. In fact, Baer insists, “all of Celan’s work constitutes a warning against the belief in the healing dimensions of remembrance” (181).

The poetry of witness Alongside figures such as the Armenian Vahan Tekeyan, the Russian Marina Tsvetaeva and the Syrian Adonis, Celan is among the poets featured in the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché in 1993. Together with Duncan Wu, Forché has later co-edited a follow-up volume entitled Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500–2001 (2014). In her introductions to these books, Forché develops a concept of the “poetry of witness” that is closely related to political trauma. This concept is applied to poetry that pays witness to, and is marked in its language by, experiences of extremity. This is a poetry that does not simply place itself within the personal or political sphere, but rather interrogates an intermediate space that Forché identifies as “the social” (Forché 1993: 31). The poem that comes to be in this space is the poet’s response to something her or she has “personally endured” (30). Yet the poem is not a simple copy (or reportage) of that experience, being rather “a specific kind of trauma” in itself – and therefore both “an event and the trace of an event” of a traumatic kind (33). This emphasis on what amounts to a kind of partial autonomy leads to some unclarity in Forché. Her 1993 introduction to Against Forgetting hesitates on the question of what kind of evidentiary status a poem of witness might have: there is “no independent account that will tell us whether or not we can see a given text as being ‘objectively’ true” (31). In the later, corresponding introduction to Poetry of Witness, though, there is less doubt: Ethical reading of such works does not inhere in assessing their truth value or efficacy as ‘representation,’ but rather in recognizing their evidentiary nature: here language is a life-form, marked by human experience, and is also itself material evidence of that-which-occurred. (Forché 2014: 25) 298

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The later text uses Levinasian ethics to construe this form of poetry as kind of ethical relation to the Other, whereby the reader becomes a secondary witness echoing the writer’s originary act of witnessing. What is constant in both volumes is Forché´s emphasis on the formal resources of poetry: “In conditions of extremity (war, suffering, struggle)”, the form of poetic language “bears the trace of extremity, and may be composed of fragments: questions, aphorisms, broken passages of lyric prose or poetry, quotations, dialogue, brief and lucid passages that may or may not resemble what previously had been written” (Forché 1993: 25). One potential limitation with Forché’s concept of the “poetry of witness” is its strong emphasis on the personal experience of poets. Must poets themselves have first-hand experiences of trauma in order to create compelling and important work? The question is linked with the multifarious ways in which we speak of witnessing and testimony. Paul Ricoeur has pointed out that while the truth content we associate with testimony is “supposed to trace a clear boundary between factuality and fiction”, nevertheless the nature of this boundary is of an “always problematical character” (Ricoeur 2004: 163). It is perhaps of an especially problematical character in poetry, since poetry seldom establishes such a clear, semi-contractual distinction between its own world and that of the “real” world as literary prose. Poetry can be, but is not necessarily, “fiction”. This issue was much-debated in the heyday of poststructuralist literary theories, where the main tendency was to claim that any “stress on sincerity, feeling and intimate expression […] tends to overlook the irreducible problem that the lyric self who speaks is a linguistic construct” (Brewster 2009: 33). Yet although there are numerous cultural differences involved, it has also been claimed that a form of personal utterance is “the dominant paradigm for contemporary poetry” (Middleton and Woods 2000: 188). This is perhaps particularly true of poets whose careers have been marked by political marginalization and large-scale disasters. According to Ricoeur, the “specificity of testimony consists in the fact that the assertion of reality is inseparable from its being paired with the selfdesignation of the testifying subject” (Ricoeur 2004: 163). The testifying subject’s “I was there” is indeed part of the rhetorical effect of major poets of collective trauma such as Czesław Miłosz and Seamus Heaney. This kind of authenticity has also been attributed to the work of the British “soldier poets” of the First World War. Critical debates concerning the phenomenon of “shell shock”, and Freud’s theorizings in for instance Beyond the Pleasure Principle, are an important part of the aetiology of the modern concept of trauma (see Luckhurst 2008: 19–76). The poetry of writers such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves is of this historical moment, as their critical accounts of the Great War were linked with an attempt to make sense of uncharted psychological territory. After writing a public letter denouncing the war, Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. His conversations with the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers familiarized him with cutting-edge attempts to understand how trench warfare was affecting the minds of soldiers. A poem such as “Repression of War Experience” shows the fruits of those conversations, while others like “CounterAttack” demonstrate Sassoon’s unflinching desire to achieve a new realism in the representation of the horrors of warfare. Sassoon was also partly responsible for Wilfred Owen’s quick maturation as a war poet. The latter’s much-anthologized “Dulce et Decorum Est” captures the trauma of the trenches, as the speaker evokes how the horror of losing a comrade becomes an intrusive, repeated image: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (Owen 1990: 117). In the poem’s concluding address, the speaker turns to his audience, asking an unidentified friend to “not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum 299

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est / Pro patria mori” (117). Owen’s ironic paraphrase of Horace’s dictum (meaning “It is sweet and decorous to die for one’s country”) involves the poem in a dialogue with literary history. Although the war poets were far from unequivocal or consistent in how they negotiated the heritage of their literary past (cf. Vandiver 2013), the fact remains that this dialogue was an important part of how they made sense of the war. This was to a large degree a matter of genre, as the poets faced the question of whether “the conventions of previous martial literary genres – epic, heroic, tragic – are appropriate to convey the apparent meaninglessness” of the war (Campbell 2003: 69). The ending of “Dulce et Decorum Est” also demonstrates that the poet does not simply present a realistic imitation of the facts of war, but that his act of witnessing also involves performatively taking on ethical responsibility. This dimension is emphasized in Owen’s unfinished preface for a volume of poems that would remain unfinished, due to his dying just before the peace in 1918. In that preface, Owen writes: “Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. / My subject is War, and the pity of War. / The Poetry is in the pity” (Owen 1990: 12). Here the poet’s role of witness leads him, arguably, to minimalize the conventions and aesthetics of his vocation, with all the emphasis being placed on the intersubjective emotion of “pity”. A radical empathy is being aimed at, which will transform the reader into a seconddegree witness of what the poet has seen. Yet Owen’s formulations here are ambiguous, and the fact that there is poetry “in the pity” would seem to indicate that the aesthetic qualities of the literary text cannot be sidestepped or eradicated for the benefit of transparent realism. As Peter Howarth has noted in relation to Owen and other poets of the First World War, “war makes satisfactory form more difficult”, and yet there is always some kind of form in play – and form can be construed as having “therapeutic significance” (Howarth 2013: 62–3). The poetry of witness may, then, aspire to an empathetic ethics of such intensity that it questions its own very status as poetry. Yet although genres can be transformed, and poetical styles can be altered with a radicality akin to religious conversion, the poem itself will always exist at some remove from the traumatic event to which it responds. Another, complicating feature regarding the poetry of witnessing is the fact that many compelling poems have indeed been written without their author being present at the traumatic incidents to which they refer. Poetry can be made of secondary witnessing or even of newspaper reports of acts committed in distant lands. This is evident, for instance, in English-language poetry concerning the Bosnian War of 1992–5 (see Abazovic 2020). Most of this body of work has been written by poets who, unlike the soldier poets of the First World War, played no active role in the conflict itself. Colin Mackay’s volume Cold Night Lullaby (1998) is a notable exception to this tendency, being a collection of first-hand accounts based upon the author’s stay in Bosnia as a humanitarian aid worker. Other notable poems, though, were written from afar, such as the American Adrian Oktenberg’s volume The Bosnia Elegies (1997). Some of the most compelling responses – by Oktenberg, Sinéad Morrissey (“Bosnia”) and Joseph Brodsky (“Bosnia Tune”) – make their remove from the action part of the main business of their poetry. Bernard O’Donoghue’s “Reassurance” does the same, depicting a Western audience whose only encounter with disaster is mediated by the TV screen:

We who have turned to the sport news, Leaving the hanged girl from Srebrenica On the front page, just as before we watched Without a protest while the skeleton-soldier Burned by the steering-wheel on the road to Basra (O’Donoghue 1995: 15) 300

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While trauma theories have long focused on the flashbacks that recur as mental images of those suffering from past horrors, O’Donoghue here focuses on the circulation of images in a public sphere that recently has exploded into “a global network of collective perception, memory, and imagining via e-mail and postings on the internet” (Mitchell 2011: 124). For O’Donoghue’s speaker, a lack of responsiveness to the images distributed in this network entails that the “We” of the poem “can have little prospect of salvation”. The muchpublicized image of a “hanged girl from Srebrenica”, made public worldwide soon after the fall of Srebrenica on 11 July 1995, is also evoked by Oktenberg in The Bosnia Elegies. Her poem “In the morning” evokes a young woman being found “hanging from a tree”, after the fall of Strebrenica, in “high summer” (Oktenberg 1997: 17). In her text, the woman is filmed while being raped. At the end of the poem, when her body is carried “through the camp on a stretcher”, the speaker laconically repeats: “Everybody saw / Everybody saw” (17). More open-ended than O’Donoghue’s poem, Oktenberg’s text nevertheless similarly alerts us to the conflicted imbrication of trauma and insensibility, and the difficult ethics, inherent in mass media’s unbridled circulation of shocking images in a global context.

Elegy and poetry of place A similar tendency can be observed in some of the most powerful poems responding to 9/ 11. The terrorist attack on that fateful autumn day can be framed as a turning point of modern history, or as a collective trauma of the United States, but it is also remarkable for the way in which disaster became a global spectacle. Much of the poetry spurred by the event was commendable for the way in which it suggested a stance, or “that there was an alternative reaction to that of bloodlust, of the desire for vengeance, of the urge to go and kill in Afghanistan or Iraq, or any of the myriad other places where war has broken out since” (Merians and Johnson 2011: vii). The most compelling poems, however, engaged not only with the ethics of the event but also its aesthetics. Together with the live televised images that were immediately spread around the world, Richard Drew’s image of the falling man diving from the North Tower of the World Trade Center fixed the spectacle in striking and memorable fashion. Christine Hartzler’s “The Diver” draws attention to the taboo beauty of Drew’s image, comparing the diver to a personal memory of the youthful body of Greg Louganis in 1984. Wisława Szymborska’s “Photograph from September 11” strikes a related note, observing (in Clare Cavanagh’s translation) of the many who plunged to their death: “Each is still complete, / with a particular face / and blood well hidden” (Szymborska 2006: 69). These lines evoke a reversal or freezing of history, whereby the gory details of death are hinted at but set aside for a momentary memory of harmonious, almost beautiful, bodies. The final stanza of “Photograph from September 11” places the poet’s responsibility at the centre stage: “I can do only two things for them – / describe this flight / and not add a last line” (Szymborska 2006: 69). As Unni Langås has shown in relation to Norwegian responses to the Utøya massacre in 2011, the first poetical responses to a traumatic event of large, public import may struggle to free themselves from cliché (Langås 2016: 73–86). Szymborska’s final gesture here may indeed be accused of courting sentimentality: there is, to be sure, a “last line” in this poem, and it cannot avoid dealing both consciously and somewhat evasively with the kind of emotional closure towards which it points. Yet the poem arguably gains its emotional heft through the discipline and focus evident throughout – what Moberley Luger describes as its “taut shape” and “utter stillness” (Luger 2015: 193) – and the final stanza admirably sums up the tension between ethics and truth-telling evident in this poem of witness. 301

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Like other responses to 9/11 such as Billy Collins’s “The Names” or, more obliquely, Louise Glück’s “October”, Szymborska’s poem unfolds within an elegiac mode. Poetry’s dealings with trauma frequently do so. Large-scale wars and other traumatizing conflicts have involved innumerable fatalities, and even more personal and hidden traumas tend to engage with loss at some level. In the decades following the Second World War, American poets such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton wrote so-called “confessional” poetry, often addressing traumatic, autobiographical material. Reacting against this tendency, Stephen Tapscott argued for an alternative, elegiac subgenre in modern American poetry that he calls the “poem of trauma”, in which certain “themes (memory, adjustment, absence, loss) are the material of painful psychic dream, and their formal characteristics (lucidity, specificity, minimal authorial comment) bespeak their status as aesthetically reformed ‘traumas’” (Tapscott 1984: 41). The implicit argument was that while the confessional poets presented unsolved losses, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Theodore Roethke and other contemporary poets worked through this loss in aesthetic acts of “traumatic repetition” (44). Later theorists of elegy have analysed its workings in dialogue with Freud’s theory of mourning, in ways which suggest its close relationship to the psychology of trauma (see Ramazani 1994; Sacks 1985). Both the disasters of the twentieth century and changes in the culture of mourning brought to the fore a tendency, beginning early in the twentieth-century, to resist consolations and substitutes typically embraced by the traditional elegy. Geoffrey Hill’s poem “September Song” exemplifies this development, commemorating a young, unnamed victim of a Nazi concentration camp with both restraint and anguished self-consciousness. While acerbic irony is communicated in the understated hints of how a young, vulnerable life was snuffed out by the impersonal, bureaucratic war machine of the Third Reich, the awkward third stanza – placed entirely in parentheses – communicates the speaker’s qualms: “(I have made / an elegy for myself it / is true)” (Hill 1985: 67). Part of the context for this selfaccusatory turn is suggested by the dates given at the beginning of the poem: the elegized victim was born on 19 June 1932, only one day after Hill’s own birthday. Hill has later revealed that he came across the story of the child at “an exhibition of children’s art from Terezín” (Rahim 2016), and presumably the birthdate struck a chord. “September Song” communicates both the power and pitfalls of empathy, the scale of the disaster causing an intensification of the poet’s questioning of both his self and the genre of elegy. The poetry of trauma is typically caught in a tension between attempting to capture the singularity of the event to which it responds, on the one hand, and situating it in various larger contexts, including those of literary genre. Thus “September Song” is not only an elegy – it is also a sonnet of sorts, since it is fourteen lines long, while it also makes a nod to the genre of the pastoral poem in a concluding, ironic allusion to an autumnal landscape. As mentioned above, the landscape poem also plays a role in Ulrich Baer’s interpretation of Paul Celan, while Charles Baudelaire’s poetry can be interpreted as an analysis of the trauma of modern urban life. Such explorations of the significance of place are characteristic of the poetry of trauma. In Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem”, the memorialization of Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilev, and other victims of the Stalinist Terror occurs via a poetical depiction of a particular locality. The opening of the poem’s introduction states (in D. M. Thomas’s translation): “In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad”. It goes on to evoke an encounter with another woman in the queue, who asks Akhmatova in a whisper: “Can you describe this?” (Akhmatova 1988: 87) The witness of the poem is Akhmatova’s response, and it returns obsessively to the site of the queues where people waited desperately for the chance to encounter their imprisoned loved 302

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ones. The poem’s final closing epilogue ends with Akhmatova imagining a statue of herself being erected

[…] here, where I stood for three hundred hours And where they never, never opened the doors for me. Lest in blessed death I should forget The grinding scream of the Black Marias, The hideous clanging gate, the old Woman wailing like a wounded beast. And may the melting snow drop like tears From my motionless bronze eyelids, And the prison pigeons coo above me And the ships sail slowly down the Neva. (Akhmatova 1988: 96) There is a slight hint at transgression in this willed embrace of the fate of Lot’s wife, as the speaker refuses to escape the stymied repetition of her trauma. She must not “forget”, and her fixation at the spot of her suffering indicates a dogged, melancholy resistance to leaving the past behind. While the monument remains locked at the scene of her son’s imprisonment, as a sign of being lost in a frozen past, there is also a supplementary movement. For the wider, encompassing vista of the final couplet presents a hint of a different kind of space, a pastoral space, which can perhaps be interpreted as a hopeful anticipation of the site of trauma becoming transformed into a habitable place. The poem’s efficacy as a work of cultural memory is suggested by the fact that an actual monument of Akhmatova was erected at the location in question, in St Petersburg, in 2006. As Paul Fussell has shown with regard to the First World War, poetry can contribute significantly to our understanding of both history and the places where history occurred (Fussell 1975). It is a form of literature that can provide a powerful witness to trauma. Although the lyric poem’s relationship to cathartic narratives – and indeed to narratives in general – is contentious, it is a medium that has been frequently used to respond ethically, imaginatively and honestly to cataclysms that transgress the limits between the personal and the political. At the same time, as critical voices such as Ulrich Baer and Carolyn Forché make clear, there is something irreducible in poetic language that makes it unamenable to transparent reference and interpretation. This can be cast as a resistance of history and narrative. From the vantage point of memory studies this complexity – epitomized by the modernist lyric – can partially explain why poetry often is sidelined in favour of fictional prose that more straightforwardly gives an account of the past. On the other hand, though, the very same specificity of poetry can be argued to provide a reason why is it a particularly apposite medium for communicating how trauma resists transparent form of representation.

Bibliography Abazovic, D. (2020) Still Life: Literary Testimonies from the Bosnian War, unpublished PhD dissertation, Kristiansand: University of Agder. Akhmatova, A. (1988) Selected Poems, trans. D. M. Thomas, London: Penguin. Auden, W. H. (2002) The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II, 1939–1948, E. Mendelson (ed.), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Baer, U. (2000) Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, New York: Schocken.

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Charles I. Armstrong Brewster, S. (2009) The Lyric, London: Routledge. Campbell, M. (2003 [2001]) “Poetry and War”, in N. Roberts (ed.) A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Oxford: Blackwell, 64–75. Derrida, J. (2004) “Che cos’e la poesia?” in J. Cook (ed.) Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900–2000, Oxford: Blackwell, 533–37. Forché, C. (1993) “Introduction”, in C. Forché (ed.) Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, New York: Norton, 29–47. ———. (2014) “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art”, in C. Forché and D. Wu (eds) Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500–2001, New York: Norton, 17–26. Fussell, P. (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartman, G. (1995) “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies”, New Literary History 26(3): 537–63. ———. (1996) The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hill, G. (1985) Collected Poems, London: Penguin. Howarth, P. (2013) “Poetic Form and the First World War”, in S. Das (ed.) The Poetry of the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 51–66. Kabir, A. J. (2014) “Affect, Body, Place: Trauma Theory in the World”, in G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone (eds) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, London: Routledge, 63–76. Langås, U. (2016) Traumets betydning i norsk samtidslitteratur, Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, London: Routledge. Luger, M. (2015) “Poetry as Monument: Jenny Holzer and the Memorial Poems of 9/11”, Memory Studies 8(2): 183–96. Merians, V. and Johnson, D. L. (2011 [2002]) “Foreword to the Tenth Anniversary Edition”, in D. L. Johnson and V. Merians (eds) Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, New York: Melville House, vii–ix. Middleton, P. and Woods, T. (2000) Literature of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2011) Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. O’Donoghue, B. (1995) “Reassurance”, Poetry 167(1–2): 15. Oktenberg, A. (1997) The Bosnia Elegies, Ashfield: Paris Press. Owen, W. (1990) The Poems, J. Stallworthy (ed.), London: Chatto & Windus. Pfau, T. (2005) Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rahim, S. (2016) “Geoffrey Hill: ‘Poetry Should Be Shocking and Surprising’”, The Telegraph 1 July 2016. www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/geoffrey-hill-poetry-should-be-shockingand-surprising/ Ramazani, J. (1994) Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, P. (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Sacks, P. (1985) The English Elegy: Readings in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ˏ Szymborska, W. (2006) Monologue of a Dog: New Poems, C. Cavanagh and S. Baranczak (eds), Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Tapscott, S. (1984) “The Poem of Trauma”, The American Poetry Review 13(6): 38–47. Vandiver, E. (2013) Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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28 TRAUMA AND LIFE-WRITING Leena Kurvet-Käosaar

Life-writing constitutes an important space of interrogation of a range of questions about the possibilities and limits of mediating traumatic experience that, via complex engagements with different historical and sociocultural contexts, ideologies and discourses has served a number of different purposes. These include but are not limited to ways of coming to terms with and coping with traumatic experience on individual and collective level and the healing that writing autobiographically about traumatic experience can bring about, reassessment and revision of historical knowledge and cultural memory and the relationship between the private and the public and participating in social action concerning legislation and policymaking. As Leigh Gilmore has pointed out, “autobiographical representations of trauma […] offer indispensable eyewitness accounts of largescale and everyday violence and, through their specific elaboration of specific scenes of terror and trauma, provide an antidote to universalizing narratives about evil, suffering and history” (Gilmore 2008: 367). Holocaust remembrance has been of essential importance not only with regard to the wider recognition of the significance of autobiographical representations of traumatic experience in cultural memory and history but also for the development of the field of trauma studies and theoretical conceptualizations of trauma. As Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith argue, autobiographical representations of the Holocaust can be viewed as a “premier instance of traumatic remembering” in the West that have come to constitute a “template for all forms of traumatic telling, response, and responsibility within the field of human rights” (Schaffer and Smith 2004: 19, 21). Alongside mediation of traumatic remembering centred around world-historical events that in addition to the Holocaust, include, for instance, the Soviet Gulag system and Stalin’s terror, the Rwandan, Armenian and Bosnian genocides, the Vietnam War, the New York World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, in particular since the last decades of the twentieth century, there has been an upsurge of autobiographical mediation of traumatic experience that engage with the effects of suffering, violence and injustice in common everyday life contexts, focusing on, for example, domestic violence, sexual abuse, incest, social marginalization, racial and post/colonial oppression. In addition to the historical and collective dimensions of individual suffering, this has brought attention to the interrelationship of individual suffering often happening in intimate, familial contexts with institutional contexts 305

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(e.g. legal regulations on national and international level, policymaking), ideologies and authorized discourses of truth and identity and social recognition. Without the ambition of being comprehensive, this chapter offers a discussion of critical and theoretical considerations that focus on the capacity of self-representational writing for facilitating the mediation of traumatic experience, the limits and constraints it can impose, to which end such genres have been utilized and the kinds of cultural and social impact they might have. The chapter also directs attention to the complex entanglements of generic prescriptions of life-writing, questions of conceptualization, communication and circulation of trauma with dominating historical, political and socio-cultural discourses of power and authority that autobiographical representations of traumatic experience need to come to terms with. From the perspective of the “memoir boom” of the 1990s and 2000s characterized by a proliferation of trauma narratives, it is also important to tackle the ways in which publishing industry, popular markets, contemporary (Western) ideologies of selfimprovement, -monitoring and -promotion and public appetites for sensationalism have shaped modes of self-representation of traumatic experience. Of central importance here are questions of (the autobiographical) truth and models of selfhood – aspects of central importance with regard to the wider significance of life-writing in culture – that, interwoven with questions of memory, recall, experience and authority, acquire particular urgency in the case of trauma. Due to limited space, it will be not be possible to focus separately on the contribution of critical discussions of the representation of major historical events (most importantly the Holocaust) or on the shifts in cultural memory and perception of historical events that constitutes an essential dimension of the cultural significance of traumatic/traumarelated life-writing.

Engaging with conceptualizations of trauma The development of trauma studies as a field of cultural enquiry has been shaped by the work of Cathy Caruth (1996, 1995a, 1995b) and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992) as well as that of Dominick LaCapra (2000) with a close affinity to the theoretical frameworks of psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and deconstruction (see Radstone 2007: 10). Within this paradigm, the central defining feature of trauma is the failure of the event or condition that caused it to be integrated into memory, according to Caruth, a “pathology of […] the structure of its experience” (Caruth 1995a: 4). Trauma remains “largely inaccessible to conscious recall and control” manifesting itself in the form of “often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” that merit the status of reexperience rather than memory (Caruth 1995b: 151, 1995a: 11; see also Krystal 1990: 6) and results in a collapse of the distinction between the past and the present. Within the English-speaking and European world, an approach to trauma proceeding from the “psychoanalytic framework of interiority” (Schaffer and Smith 2004: 20) and understood as having a shattering effect on the construction of the self, has had immense influence on the ways in which trauma has been represented and interpreted, further enhanced by diagnostic and therapeutic practices that rely on psychoanalysis. Narrative reconstruction of traumatic experience is the central component of psychoanalytic therapeutic practice that is geared toward assisting the process of integrating traumatic memory into the survivor’s life story (Herman 1992: 175) and to embrace the survivor in “a publicly accessible ritual of healing that […] inaugurates the possibility of psychological reintegration” (Henke 1999: xviii). At the same time, within the field of cultural analysis, the focus has been excessively on the impossibility, insufficiency and even the undesirability of verbal and narrative representation 306

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of trauma, a feature that has also been subject to critical scrutiny on ethical grounds (see, for example, Radstone 2007). Critical engagements with different modes and formats of life-writing with the dominating paradigm of trauma vary from proceeding broadly within its framework to problematizing its underlying assumptions from various vantage points. In addition to the psychoanalytically informed paradigm of trauma, neuroscientific developments focusing on the interrelationship of memory and the functioning of the brain have been taken up in the study of life-writing for analysing the specificities of textual representation of traumatic experience. A share of current work in the field has also moved beyond the particularities of traumatic recall in order to address questions concerning the kinds of social, legal and human rights engagements that life narratives can engender as well as the contexts of their emergence, consumption, circulation and application. A number of critics have expressed concerns about the immense popularity of trauma narratives, in particular autobiographical narratives in contemporary (Western) culture. It has been suggested that this demonstrates an increasing fascination with “violent emotion […] shocking events and vicarious suffering”, pushing the limits of the tellable and overriding “taboos about life (and increasingly, death)” (Miller and Tougaw 2002: 2, see also Douglas et al. 2008: 2). While the boom of autobiographical narratives of trauma can be viewed as a sign of “the affective transmissibility of trauma” (Luckhurst 2008: 119) that may have the capacity of “expan[ding] […] the contours of the self” and contributing to community-building processes (Miller and Tougaw 2002: 3), the proliferation of such narratives also attests to a vogue of consumption of trauma for pleasure as well as its circulation for profit, including academic profit (Miller and Tougaw 2002: 2; Yaeger 2002: 29).

Generic limits and possibilities As the work of life-writing scholars has demonstrated, the generic pressures of life-writing shape and restrict the possibilities of the mediation of traumatic experience to an important extent, in particular with regard to (readerly) expectations of truth value and models of identity and selfhood. Therefore, conforming to cultural “scripts” shaped both by the publishing industry and (popular) readerly expectations and broader cultural understandings and social regulations concerning the interrelationship between the private and the public may be necessary or unavoidable for mediating traumatic experience autobiographically (see Douglas 2010: in particular 106–30; Gilmore 2017: 85–117). Representation of such experience often requires critical revision and conscious distancing from recognizably autobiographical formats and the creation of alternative fictional textual spaces that may be more suitable for therapeutic purposes (see, for example, Henke 1999; Jensen 2019; Schönfelder 2013) or may be turned to for a critical interrogation of the limits of autobiography in particular with regards to its demands on representativeness and models of selfhood (Gilmore 2001). More private and flexible genres such as, for example, diary and letters may offer alternative possibilities for the mediation of traumatic experience within the framework of their distinctive generic qualities (see, for example, Cardell 2014; Jensen 2019; Goldberg 2017). In particular with regard to global contexts of life-writing, including those of postcolonialism and zones of conflict and war, generic preferences (or prescriptions) may also be indicative of hierarchies of power and knowledge and respectively of the kinds of subjects engendered by specific genres (see, for example, Whitlock 2007: 131–60). While the psychoanalytically informed paradigm of trauma has centered on the unrepresentability of trauma in language due to the nature of traumatic memory that defies verbal 307

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and narrative representation, in The Limits of Autobiography (2001) Leigh Gilmore focuses on the limits of the representations of traumatic experience from the perspective of generic constraints of autobiography related to its “almost legalistic definition of truth telling” and its “preference for the literal and the verifiable” (Gilmore 2001: 3). For Gilmore, the question of truth is not only problematic because the nature of trauma defies understanding as such – and cannot therefore, by its very essence, reveal its “truth” but also because the capacity of autobiography to authoritatively represent reality and identity depends on the text’s “apprehended fit into culturally prevalent discourses of truth and identity” (Gilmore 1994: ix). Gilmore also directs attention to the “specific formulations of trauma” that are prescribed by the contexts of its mediation, most importantly those of the testimony that can be viewed as relying on reproducible linguistic discourse, solicited within “a legalistic frame” (Gilmore 2001: 7). Any attempt at representing traumatic experience autobiographically is therefore inevitably caught up within “a structural entanglement with law as a metaphor for authority and veracity” (7). Focusing on the work of Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid and Jeanette Winterson, Gilmore convincingly demonstrates, how, by deliberately moving away from recognizably self-representational formats, their work creates “alternative jurisdiction” of self-representation concerning “truth, subjectivity, kinship, […] law and love” (Gilmore 2001: 143). As Gilmore argues, these works refuse and criticize the subject position of “a sovereign or representative self” that would conform to the generic demands of autobiography and feature, instead, “a knowing subject” as a process or an ethic of “model[ing] an engagement with what is difficult, compelling, intractable, and surprising” (146–7). Such subject position does not only function to criticize the dominating models of selfhood and reveal the hierarchies of power that underlie but, more importantly, it offers a way around “the trauma they inflict and permit” (148). Gilmore’s work highlights the transgressive potential of (certain kind) of life-writing – one that deliberately distances itself from generic prescriptions – to function as an alternative space for coming to terms with traumatic experience by facilitating a process of knowledge-building that also has the capacity to heal. It is noteworthy that most of the works that Gilmore discusses were published in the 1990’s, a period characterized by publishing and reception landscapes favourable for “nonconformative witnesses and narratives” highlighting the capacity of both literature and autobiography, in particular in generically blurred format, to function as “eyewitness to history” giving a voice to lives “not characterized by privilege and status” (Gilmore 2017: 86–7). At about the same time, however, critical and censoring reception, zooming in on such works as “lies and inconvenient truths” started discrediting modes of self-representation of traumatic experience that on contemporary cultural landscapes (predominantly those of the US and the English-speaking world) has been replaced by “neoliberal life narratives” (Gilmore 2017: 88). Though seemingly offering a space for mediation of traumatic experience, the neoliberal life narrative “recasts historical and systemic harm as an individual alone can, and should, manage through […] perseverance, and enterprise” (89) thus pressing forward a strongly prescriptive template for representing subjectivity and identity. As Kylie Cardell argues, this kind of ideology that, in cases concerning the possibilities of representation of traumatic experience results in “ubiquity and flattening of suffering” for the sake of a redemption narrative has been successfully adopted by self-help manuals, including those focusing on the role of the diary as a tool for self-improvement (Cardell 2014: 35). An awareness of the centrality of cultural templates concerning self-representation of traumatic experience also informs the work of Kate Douglas (2010) who focuses on autobiographies of childhood (of American, British and Australian authors) that she views as an 308

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important characteristic feature of the memoir boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Although positing the representation of traumatic childhoods, in particular those of sexual abuse and incest as one of the leading contemporary cultural “script[s] for remembering” alongside the remembrance and representation of childhoods in nostalgic vein (84–130), Douglas does not analyse such representations primarily in terms of commodification or restraint. Rather, she focuses on the capacity of childhood autobiographies that mediate traumatic childhood experience to contribute to public debates concerning the social, legal and family policy related questions pertaining to the rights of children. The “templates” or “scripts” that constitute the more immediate literary as well as wider socio-cultural frameworks of the representation of traumatic childhoods that Douglas discusses in detail, focusing on a large number of childhood autobiographies, are not presented (at least not in entirety) either as rigid moulds imposed on individual life experience or as pre-existing models of structure and experience that spare the authors from the effort of sorting out complex ranges of issues pertaining to memory, truth, experience, subjectivity and ethics. The question of memory assumes particular importance in case of (traumatic) life experience occurring in the distant past and experienced by a child subject rendered in the autobiography by adult narrator, including implications relating to “false memory syndrome” debates that have been particularly fierce where childhood trauma of sexual abuse is concerned (Douglas 2010: 108–9). However, as Douglas demonstrates, the preciseness of recall or, alternatively, the inability to remember in detail abuse experienced in the past does not necessarily enhance or discredit the truth value of traumatic representations of childhood abuse but is more related to the availability of wider sociocultural discourses that support (or fail to support) the kinds of interventions that childhood autobiographies seek to perform and to the kind of autobiographical subject that certain kinds of narrative renderings enable. Therefore, for example, Douglas considers Douglas Fairhurst’s Our Little Secret: A Father’s Abuse, A Son’s Life Destroyed (2007) a success as a “counter-discourse” that he engages in upon the failure of the legal system. In the case of Ivor Knight’s Out of Darkness (1998), growing public awareness of child abuse in religious welfare institutions has to an important extent facilitated autobiographical mediation of such experience (Douglas 2010: 122). However, representations of traumatic childhoods resulting from suffering from sexual abuse, domestic violence, poverty and parental failures tend to gain a transformative power and address larger audiences when the authors succeed in assuming a “recovered, resilient and forgiving” identity position (171) and to demonstrating “recognizable paradigms of […] adult success” (118) in terms of career, family life and public presence. Despite acknowledging the limits that the autobiographical format imposes on the process of remembering and representing traumatic experience, Douglas nevertheless considers it an “effective mechanism for traumatic disclosure” (172) with a powerful transformative potential of dominating cultural discourses regarding childhood as well as institutional frameworks regulating the rights of the child. Critical considerations of autobiographical representation of traumatic experience have predominantly focused on its effects and ways of coping from the perspective of the victim, either within individual or collective or historical frameworks. In particular with regard to the representation of the Holocaust and its implications for the perception of the twentieth century that continues to inform and shape modes of engagement with violent conflict in the present, more recently, the focus has expanded to include the perspective of the perpetrator. Jenni Adams and Sue Vice emphasize the need to address critically “the sense of […] cultural unease which surrounds attempts to conceptualize or depict the Holocaust perpetrator” and to “attend critically and consciously both to issues of guilt and complicity” that 309

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emerge as central nexuses of this ethically complex area of critical inquiry (Adams and Vice 2013: 1–2; see also LaCapra 2000: xxvi, on the question of defining a perpetrator; Sanyal 2015: 1–22, on complicity as an alternative concept to that of trauma). Focusing on the ways in which Günter Grass addresses his involvement in the Hitler Youth and the Waffen-SS in his autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006), Hanna Meretoja views his work as a narrative act of “taking responsibility” by engaging with a particular mode of “narrative ethics of implication” (Meretoja 2018: 205). For Grass, writing an autobiography – speaking “in his own first-person voice” (Meretoja 2018: 204) – is an ethical imperative and a means of coming to terms with a (traumatic) past that as “too painful and shameful” he was unable to address earlier (206). However, as Meretoja argues, both the individual processes of coping with his past and the wider ethical implications of Grass’s oeuvre do not emerge via a straightforward emphasis on the referential qualities of autobiographical writing but via a narrative emphasis on the distortive, interpretative and selective nature of (autobiographical) storytelling that creates a space of reflection for the reader as a mode of engaging with history in a way that can expand one’s “sense of the possible” (210). Therefore, Grass’s narrative ethics of implication in his autobiographical writing is “an ethics of learning – learning courage to fight silence, to doubt, and to acknowledge that one is often wrong” (208). His autobiography can thus be viewed as a potent reminder of the ways in which “violent history implicates not only those involved in direct acts of perpetration but also all those indirectly involved, including those whose actions and inactions made the events possible and who witnessed them, even if from a temporal and spatial distance” (Meretoja 2018: 211–12).

Therapeutic potential of life-writing Life-writing scholars who have focused on therapeutic effects of autobiographical mediation of traumatic experience have highlighted the ways in which creative engagements with lifewriting – accommodated by fictional genres and experimental writing formats (see, for example, Henke 1999; Jensen 2019; Schönfelder 2013) – can alleviate the symptoms of the post-traumatic state and facilitate the reconstruction and recreation of selfhood threatened or shattered by the experience. For Suzette Henke, life-writing, in particular its more experimental formats, such as, for example, biomythography and autofictions can effectively “mimic the scene of psychoanalysis” and provide a “therapeutic alternative for victims of […] post-traumatic stress disorder” by providing a textual site for “writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment” (Henke 1999: xii). Confirming to a psychoanalytic perspective, Henke’s interest in life-writing as an effective therapeutic tool lies in its capacity to “reassess the past and to reinterpret the intertextual codes inscribed on personal consciousness by society and culture” (xv) that, in turn, creates a liberated subject who can “assume an empowered position of political agency in the world” (xv–xvi). Though Henke shares with Gilmore and Douglas an awareness of the dependence of the possibilities of autobiographical self-representation on cultural norms and discourses of power and authority, she is far more optimistic about the transgressive potential of life-writing in subverting and delegitimizing normative frameworks within which traumatic experience is situated. For example, in her analysis of Sylvia Frazer’s highly contested autobiographical and autofictional work My Father’s House (1987) that centres on long-time systematic childhood sexual abuse by the author’s father, Henke argues that her skilful navigation between “autobiographical discourse and imaginary projections [that] occupy 310

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a liminal space between fantasy and reality” effectively functions to avoid risky entanglements with questions of truth telling (Henke 1999: 122; see, for example, Kilby 2007, for a detailed discussion of the debates concerning truth and representation of Fraser’s work). At the same time, due to the “vivid and convincing” narrative “articulated in “clear and coherent manner” (Henke 1999: 122), according to Henke, Fraser simultaneously convinces the reader of the truth value of her text and makes visible the powerful therapeutic effect to the author that exceeds all other forms of therapy that she has engaged in over the course of her lifetime (Henke 1999) and is eventually “liberated to reinvent herself as a woman and as an author […] and a historical witness to the abused children everywhere” (139). Henke’s consideration of Fraser’s text as a powerful form of scriptotherapy reveals her own enthusiastic reliance on a cultural script defined by a mode of coherent mediation that is closely related to the truth value attributed to the text and construction of a certain kind of selfhood, adhering to what Kate Douglas refers to as “the good subject” of autobiography “where displays of resilience and recovery are evident throughout the autobiographical project” (Douglas 2010: 109). The therapeutic potential of life-writing has been also explored by Meg Jensen who bases her argument to a great extent on recent research in the neurosciences that attribute the manifestation of symptoms of trauma to “biochemical processes in the brain that are triggered by the traumatic event” (Jensen 2019: 13). Jensen argues that elaboration of past experience by survivors of trauma “through representative narratives, metaphoric or otherwise”, including autobiographical narratives of various kinds, has a powerful capacity to bring about healing that, in turn, goes hand in hand with search for “recognition, justice and meaning” (19). According to her, utilization of “a specific set of rhetorical strategies” can be traced in autobiographical narratives mediating traumatic experience regardless of the genre employed and the positioning of the author(s) in their respective cultural and historical contexts (19). Including “disruption, fragmentation, dissociation, reticence and repetitive troping”, these strategies comply with recognized symptoms of traumatic disorders and highlight what Jensen considers the essential feature of the posttraumatic condition, “the altered relationship to meaning and body, and therefore to the experience of life itself” (20). Jensen further argues that a similar set of rhetorical figures can be traced in various material and visual representations of historical trauma that, similarly to textual representations are directed toward a similar aim of attempting to “fix it in the past” (Jensen 2019: 18). It proceeds via stages of representation, reflection and detachment from the past that are vital for the process of both individual and collective healing (6). Jensen’s concern with the question of truth, though interrelated with, for example, medical and legal contexts of testifying, focuses primarily on possibilities of healing and is premised on the notion of “negotiated truth” as a vital strategy for recovery that requires striving toward different creative engagements in both individual and collective formats (1–6). Mapping the diverse ways in which the rhetorical strategies characteristic of the posttraumatic state have emerged in different textual, visual and material contexts, Jensen’s work highlights the resilience and resourcefulness of individuals and communities in coping with traumatic experience across a variety of historical and socio-cultural frameworks. Her work on the role of collective autobiographical endeavours further expands on the notion of truth by not only recognizing the legitimacy of “plural integrated identities” in life-writings concerning traumatic experience but also attesting to the high significance of the “performative therapeutic intervention[s]” that such collective forms of representations of trauma enable (240). 311

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Addressing cultural differences Jensen also highlights the necessity for (further) cross-disciplinary dialogues that would take into account manifestations in diverse cultural contexts that would contribute to a more nuanced understanding of trauma with the primary aim of collaborative development of narrative-based treatments of trauma (Jensen 2019: 6). Bringing together a striking, perhaps at times even overwhelming number of different approaches and critical considerations of trauma, Jensen’s work seems to signal the beginning of a new era of trauma studies that cannot be reduced to the demands of any singular approach with normative implications. Such expanded view is, however, not entirely shared by scholars whose work has focused on global, non-Western contexts of self-representational mediation of traumatic experience. Given the “Euro-American origin” of trauma studies, the paradigmatic status of the Holocaust within it and its reliance on a psychoanalytic approach, its universal applicability to other cultural contexts characterized by “diverse experiential histories, languages of trauma, structures of feeling and storytelling modes” (Schaffer and Smith 2004: 22), in particular those with no familiarity of psychoanalysis (Bennett and Kennedy 2003: 4), has been called into doubt. At the same time, as Schaffer and Smith point out, it can be viewed as directly informing contemporary discourses and practices within the field of human rights “providing a framework for narrations of suffering” (Schaffer and Smith 2004: 20). Bennett and Kennedy argue for the need for the development of a new trauma theory that, by taking into account the ways in which cultural difference impacts the manner of mediating trauma, would have the capacity to “inform the study of memory within a changing global context” (Bennett and Kennedy 2003: 4–5). That would also require critical revision of the theoretically productive yet “surprisingly prescriptive” leaning of trauma studies toward “antinarrative modernist forms” and making room for often orally or non-verbally mediated “vernacular languages of trauma” (10–11). Scholarly work concerning the experience of the Gulag and repressions of the Stalinist regime has also called into question the applicability of the critical paradigm of trauma on mediations of such experience, at the same time arguing for the need of a theoretical paradigm of trauma that caters for the cultural and historical specificity of that experience and the way in which it is mediated in self-representational formats (see, for example, Gheith 2007; Merridale 2010; Tumarkin 2011). These controversies have been central to my own work on the life narratives of Baltic women focusing on Stalinist deportations and the Gulag. On the one hand, I have been acutely aware of the ethical liabilities of applying a demanding and prescriptive conceptual frame of trauma to contexts within which they were almost completely unknown at the time of mediation of the experience of Stalinist repressions. On the other, I have sought to make visible the normative testimonial and commemorative frameworks within which the narratives emerged during and shortly after the regaining of independence of the Baltic States in 1991, highlighting the national relevance of individual survival in the face of mass repression and leaving no room for making visible the hurtful nature of the deportation experience (see, for example, Kurvet-Käosaar 2012; Kurvet-Käosaar 2018). As many scholars working with life narratives and trauma in global and non-Western contexts have emphasized, it is crucially important to take into account “the global forces of commodification” that fashion the high demand for life narratives of trauma on transnational Western-based markets and the ways in which it shapes the mediation of such experience including its nature, mode of mediation and appeal to audiences with high risks of the specificity of local contexts getting lost “in translation” (Schaffer and Smith 2004: 24). In her 312

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analysis of The Baghdad Blog, posted online in English since September 2002 by a young Iraqi under the pseudonym of Salam Pax, Gillian Whitlock highlights the importance of “humane engagement” that contemporary autobiographical forms emerging in transcultural contexts of war and conflict encourage (Whitlock 2007: 3). However, positing these forms as a “potent, yet flawed weapons for cross-cultural engagement and the pursuit of human rights”, Whitlock further argues that an awareness needs to be retained on the extent to which the success of such endeavours in reaching transnational audiences are dependent on “metropolitan networks of power and patronage” (4). Therefore, for her, in transnational contexts of war and conflict autobiography operates as a “soft weapon”: while selfrepresentational texts belonging to this category can make a powerful contribution to debates on social justice and human rights, they can also be easily appropriated for the purposes of propaganda that in contemporary Western society takes the form of skilful “manipulation of opinion and emotion […] and management of information engineering consent” (3). As Nima Naghibi points out, the positive transformative potential of such narratives of traumatic personal experience mediated in transcultural spaces depends on the willingness of the reader to engage with them in “a socially and politically responsible way” that needs to go beyond merely affective responses (Naghibi 2017: 176). In an era of proliferation of various online formats of the representation and mediation of lives, the questions of circulation and consumption of both individual and collective self-representation of trauma in global and transcultural contexts, and the kinds of culturally, socially and politically informed responses it generates, will be an important site of critical interrogations of scholarly work focusing on life-writing and trauma.

Conclusion There is no doubt that life-writing will continue to constitute an important site of critical inquiry regarding the perception and interpretation of and response to violent histories on individual and collective levels. The imperative of representing traumatic experience has tested the generic limits of life-writing, leading to the creation of new modes and practices of self-representational writing that have contributed both to the expansion of the generic parameters of life-writing and the perception of the role of life-writing in culture in general. Recent critical work in the field reveals an interest in an even wider range of selfrepresentational modes and practices employed for the mediation of traumatic experience across wide temporal and geopolitical spectrums that include different cultural strata ranging from the work of iconic Western authors to ways of mediating lives of “ordinary individuals” in varied cultural contexts marked by conflict and violence. While the specificities of the narrative mediation of traumatic experience remain at the centre of critical inquiries in the field, often via engagements of a philosophical, ethical and epistemological nature, increasing attention is being paid to non-narrative (textual) formats, importantly including those of ego media. An acceleration of the blurring of the borderline between the private and public, the high visibility and continued popularity of life narratives of trauma within popular media and publishing for mass markets have directed attention to the ways in which trauma has been appropriated to serve the current vogue for sensationalism and the consumption of narratives of suffering, violence and loss for pleasure. At the same time, both life narratives of trauma and scholarly work focusing on ways of mediating such experience are playing an increasingly important role in instituting social change, contributing to policymaking on national and international levels and engaging in the development of new therapeutic tools. 313

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In the current age of globalization, a focus on the movement and mobility of memory and growing awareness of the ways in which traumatic experience is mediated in diverse cultural and sociopolitical contexts across the world have initiated a critical revision of conceptual frameworks of trauma and the ways in which these are applied in legal, testimonial and therapeutic contexts. A determination to move beyond a US- and Eurocentric paradigm of trauma and developing new “vocabularies” of trauma can be traced in recent work on the implications of the mediation of traumatic experience in global contexts. At the same time, self-representational mediation of traumatic experience that centres on major historical events of central importance to the Western world continues to inform scholarly inquiry focusing on critical revisions of the perception of the past and the role of cultural memory for envisioning the future. The diversity of critical interest and modes of engagement with trauma and life-writing attests to the continued relevance of the study of autobiographical mediations of traumatic experience within a wide range of disciplinary and, increasingly, inter- and transdisciplinary engagements. In turn, this highlights the need for a careful consideration of the genealogies of trauma guiding each inquiry and, most of all, a meticulous critical and ethical scrutiny of the positioning of the agent of inquiry – the researcher.

Bibliography Adams, J. and Vice, S. (2013) “Introduction”, in J. Adams and S. Vice (eds) Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film, Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 1–12. Bennett, J. and Kennedy, R. (2003) “Introduction”, in J. Bennett and R. Kennedy (eds) World Memory. Personal Trajectories in Global Time, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–15. Cardell, K. (2014) Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Caruth, C. (1995a) “Introduction. Trauma and Experience”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–12. ———. (1995b) “Introduction. Recapturing the Past”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 151–57. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Douglas, K. (2010) Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Douglas, K, Whitlock, G. and Stumm, B. (2008) “Editorial. Trauma in the Twenty-First Century”, Life Writing 5(1): 1–8. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Gheith, J. (2007) “‘I Never Talked’: Enforced Silence, Non-Narrative Memory, and the Gulag”, Mortality 12(2): 159–75. Gilmore, L. (1994) Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. (2001) The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. (2008) “What Do We Teach When We Teach Trauma?” in M. Fuchs and C. Howes (eds) Teaching Life Writing Texts, New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 367–73. ———. (2017) Tainted Witness. Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives, New York: Columbia University Press. Goldberg, A. (2017) Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust, trans. S. Sermoneta-Gertel and A. Greenberg, Indiana, IN: Indiana University Press. Henke, S. (1999) Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York: Basic Books.

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Trauma and life-writing Jensen, M. (2019) The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kilby, J. (2007) Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Krystal, J. (1990) “Animal Models for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”, in E. L. Giller Jr. (ed.) Biological Assessment and Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1–16. Kurvet-Käosaar, L. (2012) “Vulnerable Scriptings: Approaching Hurtfulness of the Repressions of the Stalinist Regime in the Life-writings of Baltic Women”, in F. Festic ́ (ed.) Gender and Trauma. Interdisciplinary Dialogues, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 89–111. ———. (2018) “Travelling Memory and Memory of Travel in Estonian Women’s Deportation Stories”, in M. Ilic (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in the Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 183–98. LaCapra, D. (2000) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, New York: Routledge. Meretoja, H. (2018) The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, New York: Oxford University Press. Merridale, K. (2010) “Soviet Memories: Patriotism and Trauma”, in S. Radstone and B. Schwartz (eds) Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, New York: Fordham University Press, 376–89. Miller, N. K. and Tougaw, J. (2002) “Introduction: Extremities”, in N. K. Miller and J. Tougaw (eds) Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1–21. Naghibi, N. (2017) “Exilic-Diasporic Life Writing and Human Rights: A Diasporic Iranian Perspective”, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32(2): 175–77. Radstone, S. (2007) “Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics”, Paragraph 30(1): 9–29. Sanyal, D. (2015) Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance, New York: Fordham University Press. Schaffer, K. and Smith, S. (2004) Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schönfelder, C. (2013) Wounds and Words: Childhood and Family Trauma in Romantic and Postmodern Fiction, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Tumarkin, M. (2011) “The Long Life of Stalinism: Reflections on the Aftermath of Totalitarianism and Social Memory”, Journal of Social History 44(4): 1047–61. Whitlock, G. (2007) Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Yaeger, P. (2002) “Consuming Trauma; or, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating”, in N. K. Miller and J. Tougaw (eds) Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 25–51.

Further reading Brison, S. (2002) Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Autotheoretical exploration of trauma and sexual violence.) Douglas, K. (2010) Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. (A critical reading of trauma narratives concerning childhood experience, with a focus on the social impact and modes of circulation and reception.) Gilmore, L. (2001) The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (An in-depth study of five instances of conscious distancing from recognizably self-referential formats in order to avoid generic limitations concerning requirements for truth and modes of the representation of selfhood.) Goldberg, A. (2017) Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust, trans. S. Sermoneta-Gertel and A. Greenberg, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (A study of the Holocaust diaries problematizing the status of the victim as an embodiment of the preservation of human and social values and focusing on social disintegration and shattering of identity.) Hirsch, M. (2012). The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press. (Self-reflective elaboration of the concept of postmemory, discussion of autobiographical mediation in textual and visual format of traumatic impact of the Holocaust.)

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Leena Kurvet-Käosaar Jensen, M. (2019) The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (A therapy-oriented in-depth engagement with a range of current psychological, neuroscientific and anthropological approaches to trauma, based on a wide spectrum of different lifewriting genres and practices.) Kurvet-Käosaar, L. (2012) “Vulnerable Scriptings: Approaching Hurtfulness of the Repressions of the Stalinist Regime in the Life-writings of Baltic Women”, in F. Festic ́ (ed.) Gender and Trauma. Interdisciplinary Dialogues, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 89–111. (A discussion of the risks and benefits of applying trauma theory to contexts with little or no familiarity with the concept – the deportation narratives of Baltic women.) Luckhurst, R. (2008) “Chapter 3. My So-Called Life. The Memoir Boom”, in The Trauma Question, New York: Routledge, 117–46. (Provides a detailed overview with a reading of a selection of lifewriting works of different foci and modes of autobiographical representation of traumatic experience within the context of the late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century life-writing boom.) Meretoja, H. (2018) “Narrative Ethics of Implication. Günter Grass and Historical Imagination”, in The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible, New York: Oxford University Press, 179–216. (A philosophical inquiry of the ethical implications of the fictional and autobiographical writing of Günter Grass from the perspective of perpetrator trauma.) Miller, N. K. and Tougaw, J. (eds) (2002) Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. (A collection of scholarly essays bringing together a wide range of engagements with mediations of traumatic experience with a focus both on the dangers of appropriation of trauma for pleasure and for profit as well as the community-building potential of mediation of and response to such experience.) Rothberg, M. (2000) “Part II. Realism in ‘the Concentrationary Universe’”, in Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 97–177. (Elaboration of the concept of “traumatic realism” based predominantly on the autobiographical work of Ruth Klüger and Charlotte Delbo as a new form of historical knowledge and documentation and aesthetic engagement.) Schaffer, K. and Smith, S. (2004) Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (An investigation of the implications of mediation of traumatic experience in human rights contexts that addresses the risks of applying an US- and Eurocentric model of trauma to other cultural contexts.)

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29 GRAPHIC NARRATIVES AS TRAUMA FICTION Katalin Orbán

The understanding of psychic trauma evolved over the same hundred years as the modern mass-cultural medium of comics, and the rise of trauma theory coincided with the recognition of comics as a mature medium for serious topics. On that basis alone, one might expect comics to address trauma extensively. Some claim, however, more than coexistence and expected intersections: comics are ideal for representing trauma due to their visual form (Earle 2017: 10) and offer unique opportunities for putting the elements of trauma on view (Køhlert 2015: 124; Chute 2016), thanks to “interesting parallels” between comics layout and structures of traumatic memory (Dony and van Linthout 2010: 178). The use of drawing, in particular, can forge a connection between comics and trauma’s precarious position between the body and mental life. For the act of drawing foregrounds the relationship between meaning and its material base differently from photography, as the line is a material trace of physical gestures. Drawing highlights the interplay between recording subjectivity as a fully intentional act and as the contingent material effects of contact, a peculiar, partly unconscious relationship between mental processes and embodied actions that was central to the concept of psychic trauma from the start. The shell shock epidemic caused by combat experiences in the First World War seemed to originate equally plausibly from the patient’s deeply shaken “self-love” and his brain tissue – observed by the psychiatrist and dissected by the military pathologist (Ferenczi 1994 [1926]: 141; Shively and Perl 2012: 235; Geroulanos and Meyers 2018: 72–4). The modern concept of psychic trauma evolved from these murky investigations almost beyond recognition into the dominant framework for thinking about many kinds of pain and suffering, including more collective, metaphorical and mediated experiences over the next hundred years. Yet, as a cultural framework, it still straddles a porous divide between mental life and the body, which often animates artistic responses to trauma, but serves as an exceptionally important connection between comics as a medium and the cultural imagination of trauma. Focusing on book-length works of graphic literature, while remaining attentive to their mass-cultural, commercial contexts, this chapter examines the affinities and key connections between trauma and its characteristic treatment in graphic fictions: divisions of form and selves, frozen images, transformation as a representation of the overwhelmed self and drawing as a physical gesture tied to sensory memory. This addresses both aspects of comics’ affinity with trauma: the visualization of traumatic experience within the gaps, divisions and 317

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heterogeneity of comics and its generation through the mind/body interface, through embodied practices of writing and drawing.

Divisions – gaps, parts, broken selves The page or the double-page tableau, as a layout of simultaneously visible panels, is the unit that structures our reading experience of comics most differently from other narratives, constraining what is accessible to the reader at a single time: “always a space that has been divided up, compartmentalized, a collection of juxtaposed frames” (Groensteen 2009: 130). This divided plane, typically composed of interconnected panels and gutters, can be exploited in the representation of traumatic experience and its aftermath in two major ways: by reflecting the shattering of the normal defences of the self and its capacity for creating coherent meaning and by reflecting the dissociative defence against trauma through a compartmentalization of experience that reduces its availability to consciousness and narrative. Since this division of the visual field is also the primary means of representing time in comics – temporal relationships are spatialized – layouts can creatively represent the temporal delay and persistence of trauma, its retroactive integration and ownership, especially when combined with multiple modes of producing meaning through words and images. This shattering of the plane is Art Spiegelman’s central strategy for responding to the traumatic experience of the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York City. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) is an unusually large book of unusually few pages (10 original pages created by Spiegelman and a “comic supplement” of 7 plates, which are reproductions of historical comic strips). When opened to a series of ten double-page tableaux, the size doubles to a surface of 14 by 20 inches, a vast plane orchestrating a vividly diverse set of micronarratives in individual panels and partially overlapping short sequences in varying degrees of dynamic disarray. While some mini-stories use a conventional left–right top–down arrangement of equal sized panels, the full arrangement has no uniformity of scale, colouring or style, so the story kernels float like a constellation of narrative debris from the explosion. The visual integrity of the small stories is threatened by panels that collide or detach themselves, and some elements appear to break through the two-dimensional plane: the side view of rotating panels reveals the towers, and the canvas on which someone is painting the burning towers juts out of its panel (Spiegelman 2004: 2, 4). These divisions inhibit sustained narrative development and scatter attention between the many stories which are started and interrupted, representing a time that refuses to arrange itself into a meaningful continuous experience of unfolding events. Undermining an overall sense of coherence, the many possible sequences and hierarchies within the large tableaus mimic the impact of severe shock. If this invokes trauma as a breach of the normal defences of the self, it also emphasizes the work of integration, not only in the artist’s repeated attempts to retell his experience, but just as crucially in the experiential work of integration imposed on the reader, who has to assemble the pieces rather than simply reading about such assembly. While emphasizing the collapse of self and its ability to represent an overwhelming experience, this departs from a notion of trauma as a pre-linguistic event that is the “ultimate unrepresentable” in the classic model of trauma (Balaev 2014: 5), nor does it excessively question individual autonomy and the ability to express experience. This is because “Trauma piles on trauma!” (Spiegelman 2004: 5) in the very literal sense of multiplicity and layering in the book, creating a surfeit of multi-discursive representation that draws on the specificity of the event (a series of explosions and a multitude of televisual, digital and analogue modes of representation surrounding the attacks), rather than any 318

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absence or a universal model of dissociation. Although this type of shattering narrative cohesion has at times been critiqued as a modernist cult of “foregrounded difficult and disrupted representation and form” (Luckhurst 2013: 159) and the attendant suspicion of mass cultural forms and the narrative pleasures they offer, this hardly fits Spiegelman’s work, which goes to great length to celebrate these pleasures by extensively incorporating historical comics into his work, in fact, taking solace in them in an otherwise inhospitable landscape of rubble and jingoism. Of course, the same formal characteristics of layout can be used to different effect in narratives of extreme hardship that emphasize agency and resilience above all. For example, in Josh Neufeld’s A.D. (2009) about the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the same breaking up of the plane is put in the service of parallel stories, a multi-vocal assemblage narrative that presents a complex anatomy of disaster with little emphasis on the breakdown of the seven narrating selves, relative to the breakdown and dysfunction of social institutions that should guarantee their safety and well-being. Similarly, their ability to articulate the experience is constrained primarily by the lack of social networks of support and a disinterest in the suffering of less privileged groups rather than by any “assumed inherent neurobiological features of trauma” (Balaev 2014: 1) that work against representation. In addition to the divisions of layout, comics can make use of the conjunction or disconnection between words and images to represent the absolute or relative unavailability of an experience to consciousness and narrative memory. Since comics spatialize time (shapes, gaps, distances and sequences showing pace, succession, etc.) while also expressing temporal relations verbally, artists can create a uniquely complex sense of contemporaneous or retrospective articulations and integrations of what happened. Not only can they combine these devices creatively, exploiting their mutual confirmation or conflict, but they can also withhold them, for instance, by eliminating panelling conventions that anchor voices and events in stable positions. This is the ever-changing rich variety of the ways graphic narrative accomplishes the tracing of time “in complex, often nonlinear paths across the space of the page” (Chute 2008: 454). Consequently, even when a graphic narrative focuses on traumatic events as hidden, unknown or silenced, its medium often yields a counter-discourse to traumatic absence. The silence modulated into a partial retrospective voicing and visualization through the interactions of verbal and visual narrative tracks can be a reintegration of the narrator’s own unacknowledged experiences, as in many survivor narratives. Alternatively, it can be the integration of a previously unknown or silenced traumatic experience through listening, secondary witnessing, and subtly or thoroughly transforming one’s own life in the process, as in numerous second-generation family narratives reconstructing events behind a wall of intergenerational silence or disinterest, from Art Spiegelman’s post-Holocaust Maus (Maus I 1986; Maus II, 1991) to G. B. Tran’s Vietnamerica, (2010), a discovery of exile and loss suffered by the previous generations. Pseudonymous British artist Una’s Becoming Unbecoming (2015) is of the former category, a story of sexual violence juxtaposed with the search for the Yorkshire Ripper. Una’s narrative shifts between genres, a composite of personal narrative and educational-political pamphlet, and her experience of abuse and rape is surrounded by a multitude of discourses: the misogynistic discourse that actively silenced her at the time and also drove the dismissive response to the Yorkshire Ripper’s serial killings, the emancipatory, therapeutic discourses which serve its delayed acknowledgement and re-integration, and the cautionary discourse that keeps the narrative open and the danger present for others. The latter are voiced not only by her older self, but by an anonymous chorus of outsiders represented by disembodied speech balloons. In the noise created by retrospective narration and commentary, certain 319

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images of trauma slow down or halt narration, completely replacing or overwhelming words. These amplify a strategy employed throughout the text: the closer the narrative comes to a traumatic event it recounts, the more it relies on the relative delay between word and image, rendering the reader a party to misrecognition and retroactive understanding. We first see and do not know (a disembodied pair of legs) or first know and only see later (a piece of clothing worn during an attack), and in either case we are prevented from making full sense of a scene until later. This disjunction between words and images is even stronger in the images that never show a literal visual representation of what happened to the artist, but rather visualize her solitary work of unknowing and unsaying it. Although she says “I soon learned to lower my gaze”, she is shown on her back looking upward, positioned on a rectangular shape like a comics panel, which contains the dark indistinct mass of watercolour wash oozing from her (Una 2015: 13). As always, the oozing shapeless form is behind her, physically, materially attached, but invisible to her. She says “life continued”, but repeated identical images of her climbing a hill, reeling under an empty bag, an unknown burden, show stasis and repetition (25). Her vacant bag of burden, which eventually darkens with retrospective knowledge, is visually revealed later as the lack of voice: the hill she climbs is shown as a field of sentences – copied from the media coverage of the Ripper case – and her bag is, in fact, an empty speech bubble (57). Divisions and delays between word and image, then, turn these images into the residue of former loneliness and vulnerability, the lingering limit to the delayed explanation and self-possession dominating the book. Instead of embracing trauma’s “undying pathological influence on consciousness” (Balaev 2014: 6), this imaging of trauma is always re-enveloped by a voluble commentary of competing voices that shows how much their lasting influence is a matter of social structures and norms. In fact, the equal privileging of aesthetic pleasure and the promotion of social change through the empowerment of past and potential victims of sexual violence also shows that this use of disunity in the representation of trauma need not be a celebration of difficulty in order to secure a place for comics in elite culture.

Frozen images – arrest and repetition Graphic narratives of trauma often freeze moments that exercise a hold on the protagonist, sometimes through repetition, sometimes through the difficulty of recollection. Such reconstructed mental images and reconstructions or reproductions of photographs transfix characters (or potentially the reader), depending on how the narrative constructs a sense of subjective vision in the given scene through the relation between what is visible in the panels, the point of view established by the narrative and what characters see (Mikkonen 2015: 105). They may be seen as intrusive, belatedly experienced returns of the moment as flashbacks or nightmares that break into consciousness and cannot be placed in a sequence. Yet, even though this may only be apparent once they have lost their power, these images tied to the overwhelming traumatic event are frozen moments abstracted from a flow that would have normally proceeded had the subject not been forced to dissociate him- or herself from the event. The archetype of such an arresting image of horror in comics which is recreated as the unassimilable sight of a particular moment is the narrator seeing the disintegrating living bodies of Hiroshima victims in Nakazawa’s “I Saw It” published in 1972 and later in the longer narrative of Barefoot Gen (Nakazawa 1982 [1972]: 13; 2016: 253–4). It is also, as Hillary Chute explains in Disaster Drawn, a counter-image to the atomic bomb as 320

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a technological image imprinted on objects and bodies through irradiation (Chute 2016: 136). Occurring both in narratives of horrific exceptional events and of prolonged abuse, such frozen images can serve as a site of the difficulties of satisfactorily recollecting and representing the experience, of the ultimately unverifiable truth of an experience that proved profoundly disorienting, and of establishing the traumatic nature of an unacknowledged experience. The most obvious cases of such images are, as in the case of “I Saw It”, images of what a survivor actually saw at the moment of shock, either as a remembered or an intrusive image. Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers includes such a repeated image of the glowing Twin Towers before they collapse, and the text describes them both as remembered and intrusive at different times (“We hear a roar like a waterfall, and look back”; “I still see the glowing tower, awesome as it collapses”; “he still sees that glowing tower when he closes his eyes”; “what he actually saw got seared into his skull forever”; Spiegelman 2004: 1, 4). The glowing image, repeated on every double-page spread, fulfils a dual function: it is an image of a sight that serves as a sign of the event’s powerful continued hold on the viewer, and it is a repeated representation that marks the slow integrative work of creating a recollection and a representation commensurate with a near-death event. Trauma narratives often include the inverse or negative of such a persistent traumatic image as well: persistent images that fail to show the traumatic events revealed or implied through words are central to several narratives about atrocity, genocide and ecological disaster. La fantaisie des Dieux: Rwanda 1994 recounts the narrator’s return to sites of genocide in Rwanda after twenty years. It includes both a traumatic image of a seemingly beautiful, quiet landscape suddenly revealing itself as a landscape of corpses in May 1994 (Hippolyte and de Saint-Exupery 2014: 8–11) and numerous inverse images of beautiful, quiet hills and lakes (20, 66–7, 82–3) refusing or failing to reveal the truth of a “country of silence” (78). Similarly, Springtime in Chernobyl, Emmanuel Lepage’s narrative about his visit to Chernobyl twenty-two years after the disaster, is filled with images of the Exclusion Zone; what transfixes Lepage are the beautiful images of invisible damage in the Zone, a sanctuary undisturbed by human activity that cannot be forced to give up its dark truth (Lepage 2019 [2013]). This inverse traumatic image is not a figure of the ultimate inaccessibility of trauma in either case, not only because it is surrounded by extensive survivor memories of the local communities, but also because it is shown to yield to a type of contact that is not reduced to vision – Fantaisie refills the landscape with the witness’s memories of victim and perpetrator bodies when he is submerged in Lake Kivu (Hippolyte and de Saint-Exupery 2014: 32–3, 45–7, 59–66), and Springtime visualizes the effect of radioactive landscape on the artist’s body physically exposed to radiation. The protagonist of Joe Sacco’s The Fixer (2004) is a former soldier in the war in Sarajevo, whose status as traumatized is deeply complicated by him being an unreliable witness to his past experience, and the uncertainty about how intentional his unreliability is. Is it a structural unreliability of trauma (his memory is impaired due to the very experiences he cannot verify), or an incidental one of fraud (he is a manipulative liar and embellisher). Based on the entire narrative, Neven is probably both: a traumatized teller of tall tales, a manipulative survivor. The image at the center of this vortex of uncertainty is a photograph (reproduced in the book as a drawing) that allegedly shows his comrades. The group photo certainly cannot prove all the unverified and disputed war memories Neven recounts during conversations throughout the book, and by the second time the photo appears they are dead and he can no longer remember their names (Sacco 2004: 34, 100). 321

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This can be interpreted as simply an emphasis on the instability and processual nature of memory (Chute 2016: 230), as the fixity of the photo fails both narratively and visually: its two instances sixty pages and six years apart in the book are not identical. Yet, the photo is also an image-object that signals vulnerability to the suspicion surrounding the trauma victim’s lack of self-possession from the start: from the earliest shell shock patients brutalized as presumed malingerers to the most recent debates about inflated numbers of PTSD and the failure of tests to identify “people trying to simulate the symptom pattern factitiously” (Konner 2007: 311). The most disturbing images of Phoebe Gloeckner’s book The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015 [2002]) are unrepeated traumatic images that arrest the reader not only due to their often graphic nature, but also because they suspend the near normalization of prolonged sexual abuse in a text where the sexual awakening of Minnie, the authorial alter ego, and her abuse by Monroe, her mother’s boyfriend, are conflated into a single, inextricable story. The text is difficult reading because the young diarist’s perspective and voice make it impossible to distinguish her agency and victimization, making us complicit in failing to acknowledge her traumatic experience if we take her claims of agency and desire at face value and complicit in denying her agency and voice if we reduce her to a victim. The Diary is punctuated by full-page illustrations, including numerous portraits, diverse drawings including diagrams, zoological illustrations and maps, and numerous comics ranging from single panels to longer stories up to twelve pages in length. Some of these function as traumatic images, freezing moments of the story; while alluding to traditional illustrations of nineteenthcentury novels, they are not accompanied by titles naming characters or scenes, but by captions that literally repeat words that appear in the text (“I love Monroe to touch me affectionately”; Gloeckner 2015 [2002]: 84) as if confirming their status of frozen image, extracting them from the narrative flow and immobilizing them against the readerly impulse to move on. These images address, even if they do not fully resolve, the dilemma of agency created by the text: they anchor the text in trauma fiction and give the reader the strongest footing to read the book against the normalization of abuse without demonizing female sexuality. They also introduce their own problem: the reader is once again very uncomfortably positioned as both witness and voyeur, looking at a scene of an adult male touching a teenage girl “affectionately”. Through the use of extreme foreshortening and internal differences in scale, these images appear somewhat distorted or altered visions of a neutrally observed reality, but they nearly always represent perspectives that could not have been held by the diarist. Thus the frozen images of “what happened” in the diary’s words constitute an external vantage point unavailable in those words, a vantage point shared by the adult self and the reader as co-viewers of her experience. We are the dissociated spectators of her experience in a way that she never could be. Never repetitive, these traumatic images not only insert a retrospective self-understanding into the text, but also create a space for an experience of immobility, the unsettling impossibility of intervention that only ends when the final moment of declared empowerment, control and self-worth concludes both the diary and the relationship.

Transformations – monsters and animals The self vacated in response to the overwhelming power of psychic trauma and the uncontrolled re-living of trauma have inspired fantastic and mythic visions of possession and metamorphosis from the earliest era of shell shock. Both the uncontrolled expressivity of the self 322

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and its loss of control to an external agency, embodied memorably in the hypnotically controlled murderous sleepwalker Cesare in the silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), recur in transformative representations of the traumatized self. The plasticity of drawing and the reliance on stylized representations allow comics to develop such transformations with exceptional ease and creative variety, and graphic trauma fictions abound in such altered states, especially in the form of monsters and animals, not only as occasional characters, but as sustained representations throughout entire works. These are also artistic revisions of superhero, sci-fi, horror and animal comic tropes, especially the linking of selftransformation to a riddle of identity in the superhero’s secret identity and the emphasis on their expressive body. Monstrosity as a traumatic transformation can be a revision of the “full-bodied, kinetic performance” enacted by superheroes (Bukatman 2009: 115), except as a reverse superpower which absorbs the transformative impact of shock. The acknowledgement of this generic history varies in its degree of explicitness, though rarely to the point of complete disavowal. The explicit invocation of Mickey Mouse in Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus (1986), using characters with human-animal hybrid bodies in a Holocaust narrative, is amplified to an ostentatious and ironic re-enactment of horror tropes in the pseudo-pulp My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) and muted to a tacit assumption of animal comic models in the “talking dog” character of Deogratias (2006 [2000]), a narrative about genocide in Rwanda. By contrast, La légèreté (2016), Catherine Meurisse’s narrative of recovery after the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, completely disavows this history, adopting a literary and art historical lineage of canonical elite culture (including the Niobe sculpture group in the Villa Medici in Rome, based on a Greek myth of the bereaved mother turned into a rock by Zeus to petrify her feelings). The use of animals and monsters, particularly the visualized human–animal transformation, in a genocidal or military context visually connects genocidal cause and traumatic impact. Even as the transformation exhibits trauma as a breakdown of the functioning self, it also identifies animalization and monstrosity as an intentional systematic dehumanization that removes agency as a foundation of humanity. The animal image materializes the conversion of an abstract dehumanizing rhetoric (for example, the “animalizing rhetoric of Tutsis as snakes and cockroaches” in Hutu propaganda (Chaney 2011: 93) into acts of murder. Whereas Rupert Bazambanza uses animals primarily as witnesses to genocide in his Smile through the Tears (2005), Stassen’s Deogratias has a protagonist that periodically transforms into an animal in a narrative structured as increasingly long interruptions of the present by intrusive memories that take possession of the young boy, who is slowly revealed to inhabit the composite roles of perpetrator, victim and witness. As Deogratias includes no narration to orient the reader beyond images and dialogue, the traumatization of an unwilling child perpetrator in genocide is conveyed primarily through his recurring transmogrification – a fantasy of turning into the scavenging, corpse-eating dogs he saw after the killings. Rather than a therapeutic process of integrating unassimilated memory, the transformations chart a descent into self-loss and murderous revenge that repeats rather than integrates his unassimilable past, even as an informative historical context emerges around this vortex through conversations and pre-genocide memories. As transformation is meaningful precisely in its dynamic change of self, it does not need to be reduced to a metaphorical screening of horror, with animals as cunning figurative estrangement to overcome the “paralyzing effects” of mimesis, for which Andreas Huyssen once praised Maus (Huyssen 2003: 128). In fact, the question whether animalization is used as a universalizing metaphor is all the more pressing in the visualization of genocide in an African country primarily for Western audiences. Like numerous critics of classic trauma 323

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theory, Alan Gibbs notes that abstracting trauma to a generalized structure and a transhistorical concept of absence risks “anaesthetising concrete historical loss” (Gibbs 2014: 205) in the name of an allegedly universally human experience that typically turns out to reflect Western bias (Craps 2014). Relying on the complementary figure of “the human”, the use of the animal and the monster can be vulnerable to this critique, but they can also embody contextual values and historically contingent representations of traumatic experience. The scavenging dog, for example, reinscribes the generic animal – a figure of Déogratias’s distintegrating self – into a historically specific setting where mass murder took place in public exacerbated by modern mass communication (hate radio), but minimally aided by modern industrial technology. This can be the starting point for asking about the foundations of community, if any, for people between whom “identifications via traumatic sufferings can be forged” (Radstone 2007: 25). Although Deogratias fails to accomplish this, it could in principle engage with colonial representations of Africa, in comics and elsewhere, as the troubling prehistory of its image of transformative shock. Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, presented as a young girl’s handwritten, copiously illustrated diary in a blue-lined notebook, is a far more playful, though by no means light, narrative defined by monstrous transformation. It sets up more unstable relations between reality and fantasy and between variant identities through many kinds of mimicry including disguise, ventriloquism and imitation of representational styles (notebook, horror comic covers for each chapter). It is unclear from the start to what extent the transformative processes are materially real, reflections of psychological states or the narrator’s creative acts of imagination. The detailed description of her physical transformation into a howling werewolf persecuted by a mob turns out to be a recurring dream, from which she wakes, but her waking state does not eliminate her (self-)representation as a monster. As layers upon layers of reality are peeled back, her precocious detective work keeps uncovering the seedy, immoral underside of normative social order in the Chicago of the 1960s, where crime, scenes of everyday violence, alcohol-fuelled rage, illness, death and exceptional historical events like the assassination of Martin Luther King mingle inextricably with the noir conventions of pulp mysteries. In the unfolding investigations, including the unsolved murder of a German neighbour, the monstrous impact of some yet unfathomable damage leads to dangerous and forbidden stories of the Holocaust and sexual slavery. Monstrosity is also the capacity, then, to sensitively register trauma which is unacknowledged or hidden by others. Yet, our detective of trauma embraces monstrosity as a chosen, desired otherness, agency and freedom (“people should get to be who they are”) and extraordinary adventure (the mob pursuing her stands for “mean, ordinary and boring”), which also undermines the fantastic heights and depths of her vision as perhaps an empowered revenge on reality, a creative or delusional resistance to its frames, which in turn evaporates the narrated characters and events into play and fantasy. Superimposing words and expressive cross-hatched images incongruously on the regular lines of the notebook, every page visualizes this overwriting of the established framework of reality, and the narrative pleasure of pursuing the story keeps this uncertainty in play: a dark concept of trauma as hidden memory and possession is balanced with a light concept of self-healing through limitless transformation and a thrilling irreality of damaging conditions.

Gestural acts and physical sensations All comics register an implied embodied contact between the writer and reader through the materiality of the book, as long as the comics appear to be produced through drawing and 324

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handwriting and the reader physically handles a material object in the process of reading, turning pages or even folding out or rotating them. This material contact is both real and, strictly speaking, imaginary, since the mass-produced industrial object can merely remind one of the touch that had to take place, just as the toxic radioactivity actually absorbed by the artist’s body in Chernobyl is a sensibility the work is infused with since the radioactivity absorbed by the author-reporter’s body and original drawings can never be transmitted to the reader of a printed book. Such implications of embodied contact can be staged, for example in the conspicuous use of a child’s handwriting in Ferris’s Monsters eschewed in Gloeckner’s Diary, or contingent, as in the unintended marks and uncorrected errors due to the circumstances of production, for example in Mazen Kerbaj’s Beirut Won’t Cry (2017 [2007]), where the circumstances of the aerial bombardment of Lebanon leave traces – jagged lines and literal stains – on the paper. This implied contact goes beyond the notion that comics combine hand-drawn words and images as material signs of the body’s actions and movements. What creates distinctive possibilities for trauma fiction is the association of drawing with intricately connected mental and bodily processes. The act of drawing, as described by British artist Avis Newman, is a mutable process, in which an act of consciousness and a “physical act of mark-making” mutually shape each other (Ramm 2005: 67), activating semi-conscious memories and half-thoughts at the limits of self-possession. This quality of the medium bears on any graphic narration of traumatic events and their aftermath, presented in their various bodily and mental processes and effects, but its effect can be especially powerful in stories where embodiment has a special narrative salience, such as traumas of illness and disability or violent events threatening bodily integrity. David Small’s Stitches (2009) not only exemplifies such a trauma of illness, but also puts drawing in the centre of its story of trauma and recovery during the years of David’s childhood and early youth in Detroit. The overwhelming loss in enacted on his body, which is damaged by illness and successively mistreated by his dysfunctional family of medical professionals, and redressed through drawing as a therapeutic means of escape and regained agency, supplying the supplementary voice David’s body lacks as a result of losing a vocal cord largely due to his family’s inadequate care as he develops throat cancer as a result of his radiologist father’s X-ray treatments. These elements of the story evoke a felt connection to the mark-making body, because Small visually conveys a strong sense of identification between the protagonist’s body and the book the reader is holding, visualizing the interior spaces of David’s body – biological or architectural spaces of lurking danger or a hospitable refuge from the outside world – as spaces behind the “skin” of the two-dimensional paper on which he draws. More than a metaphor, this heightened awareness of the physicality of image-making can foreground how gestural acts and memories are connected through both conscious and sensory memory – drawing activating dormant muscle memories and a vivid reimagining of a scene (Ramm 2005: 71; Gilmore 2011: 160). Variations in technique and texture or inconsistencies between outline and surface can also refocus of the reader’s attention on the material contact inherent in production to this end: similarly to Small’s consistent mismatch between ink outlines and erratically incomplete watercolour fills in Stitches, Catherine Meurisse’s representations of recurring Charlie Hebdo flashbacks and nightmares of flight immerse and partly dissolve her precise ink drawing in an unpredictably spreading graded wash (Meurisse 2016: 44). In other words, a graphic narrative can foreground its embodied making, engage tactility through its format and alterations of texture and thereby aid the reader’s imaginative investment in a fuller sensory recreation of memories, a felt surplus to the meaning acquired through the distant sense of sight. 325

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Trauma theory continues to evolve through new ways of understanding the process of traumatization and recovery, as our knowledge of the traumatic process inevitably changes with advances in cognitive science, while profound changes in media exposure and use and the shifting dynamics of a global exchange of information shape what counts as trauma and how it can be voiced and acknowledged. An altered or improved knowledge of the importance of images, narration and the links between the two in trauma may, in turn, shed new light on comics’ affinity with trauma in its complex form of telling stories with images.

Bibliography Balaev, M. (2014) “Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered”, in M. Balaev (ed.) Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, London and New York: Palgrave, 1–14. Bazambanza, R. (2005) Smile through the Tears: The Story of the Rwandan Genocide, Montreal: Les Éditions Images. Bukatman, S. (2009) “Secret Identity Politics”, in A. Ndalianis (ed.) The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, New York: Routledge, 109–25. Chaney, M. (2011) “The Animal Witness of the Rwandan Genocide”, in M. Chaney (ed.) Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 93–100. Chute, H. (2008) “Comics as Literature?: Reading Graphic Narrative”, PMLA 123(2): 452–65. ———. (2016) Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Craps, S. (2014) “Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age”, in G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone (eds) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, New York: Routledge, 45–61. Dony, C. and van Linthout, C. (2010) “Comics, Trauma, and Cultural Memory(ies) of 9/11”, in J. Goggin and D. Hassler-Forest (eds) The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form, London: McFarland Press, 178–88. Earle, H. (2017) Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Ferenczi, S. (1994 [1926]) “Two Types of War Neuroses [1916/17]”, in J. Rickman (comp.) Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac Books, 124–41. Ferris, E. (2017) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Geroulanos, S. and Meyers, T. (2018) The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Gibbs, A. (2014) Contemporary American Trauma Narratives, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gilmore, L. (2011) “Witnessing Persepolis: Comics, Trauma and Childhood Testimony”, in M. Chaney (ed.) Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 157–63. Gloeckner, P. (2015 [2002]) The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures, Revised edition, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Groensteen, T. (2009) “The Impossible Definition”, in J. Heer and K. Worcester (eds) A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 124–31. Hippolyte and de Saint-Exupery, P. (2014) La fantaisie des Dieux: Rwanda 1994, Paris: Les Arènes. Huyssen, A. (2003) Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kerbaj, M. (2017 [2007]) Beirut Won’t Cry. Lebanon’s July War: A Visual Diary, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Underground. Køhlert, F. B. (2015) “Working It Through: Trauma and Autobiography in Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and The Diary of a Teenage Girl”, South Central Review 32(3): 124–42. Konner, M. (2007) “Trauma, Adaptation, and Resilience: A Cross-Cultural and Evolutionary Perspective”, in L. Kirmayer, R. Lemelson and M. Barad (eds) Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 300–38. Lepage, E (2019 [2013]) Springtime in Chernobyl, San Diego, CA: IDW Publishing. Luckhurst, R. (2013) “Future Shock: Science Fiction and the Trauma Paradigm”, in G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone (eds) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism, London: Routledge, 157–67.

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Graphic narratives as trauma fiction Meurisse, C. (2016) La légèreté, Paris: Dargaud. Mikkonen, K. (2015). “Subjectivity and Style in Graphic Narratives”, in D. Stein and J.-N. Thon (eds) From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 101–25. Nakazawa, K. (1982 [1972]) I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor’s True Story, San Francisco, CA: EduComics. ———. (2016) Barefoot Gen. 1, A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima, trans. Project Gen, San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp. Neufeld, J. (2009) A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, New York: Pantheon. Radstone, S. (2007) “Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics”, Paragraph 30(1): 9–29. Ramm, A. (2005) “What Is Drawing? Bringing the Art into Art Therapy”, International Journal of Art Therapy 10(2): 63–77. Sacco, J. (2004) The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo, London: Jonathan Cape. Shively, S. B. and Perl, D. P. (2012) “Traumatic Brain Injury, Shell Shock, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the Military–Past, Present, and Future”, The Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation 27(3): 234–39. Small, D. (2009) Stitches: A Memoir, New York: Norton. Spiegelman, A. (1986) Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. I. My Father Bleeds History, New York: Pantheon. ———. (1991) Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. II. And Here My Troubles Began, New York: Pantheon. ———. (2004) In the Shadow of No Towers, New York: Pantheon. Stassen, J.-P. (2006 [2000]) Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, trans. A. Siegel, New York: First Second Press. Tran, G. B. (2010) Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey, New York: Villard. Una (2015) Becoming Unbecoming, Oxford, UK: Myriad.

Further reading Bainbridge, J. (2009) “‘Worlds within Worlds’: The Role of Superheroes in the Marvel and DC Universes”, in A. Ndalianis (ed.) The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, New York: Routledge, 64–85. Caruth, C. (1996) “Trauma and Experience”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–12. Gibbs, A. (2014) “‘The Problem Is, I’m Not Sure I Believe in the Thunderclap of Trauma’: Aesthetics of Trauma in Contemporary American Literature”, in T. Bényei and A. Stara (eds) The Edges of Trauma: Explorations in Visual Art and Literature, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 148–68. Kansteiner, W. (2006) “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor”, Rethinking History 8(2): 193–221. LaCapra, D. (2000) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Meurisse, C. (2016) “The Lightness: A Charlie Hebdo Cartoonist Finds Refuge from Terror”, Harper’s December 2016: 55–57.

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30 TRAUMA AND DRAMA/ THEATRE/PERFORMANCE Patrick Duggan

Remembering I want to start with an anecdote, a memory of a performance I saw in September 2000 at Warwick Arts Centre. The piece was An Die Musik, a revival of Pip Simmons’s 1975 work. I remember a very tall man walking onto the stage wearing an SS uniform. The house lights are still on, the audience is still settling. He turns to face us and says something like “good evening”. We quieten and give him our attention. He welcomes us to the performance and lets us know that there will be six inmates entertaining us this evening. A moment later these six enter the space. I remember them to be partly jogging, partly hopping. They wear grey-blue, stripped prison uniforms and, over 75 minutes or so, are subjected to a series of increasingly humiliating tasks and shouted insults. At one point, a naked female performer is made to jump for a trapeze bar that is seemingly just out of reach of her highest leaps. She makes it (of course), then clings to the bar while trying to sing as the man in the SS uniform violently hits the trapeze bar with a truncheon. Thinking back to this performance now, it seems oddly old fashioned in its representational approach; the actions that take place seem blunt and obvious (theatrically at least). Nevertheless, I remember finding the performance deeply unsettling. I remember not really being able to speak after leaving the auditorium. I was, I think, shocked by the affective force of the work. I remember the two people I went to see the piece with similarly struggling for words afterwards. Being silenced by a performance was not something I had experienced before. Why could I not articulate the experience in those moments after we left the auditorium? I suppose that this theatrical experience was partly responsible for my later curiosity about the ways in which performance might be able to articulate, reconsider, explore, reframe and represent the “unrepresentable” of trauma.

Theatre’s attendance to traumata This of course raises questions about what we might mean by unrepresentable. In his 1999 translation/adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Ted Hughes manages language to evoke (one of) the traumas at the heart of the trilogy of tragedies: 328

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“Daddy!” she screams. “Daddy!” – Her voice is snatched away by the boom of the surf. Her father turns aside, with a word She cannot hear. She chokes – Hands are cramming a gag into her mouth. They bind it there with cord, like a horse’s bit […] Now rough hands rip off her silks And the wind waltzes with them Down across the beach, and over the surf. Her eyes swivel in their tears. She recognises her killers. (Hughes 1999: 15) Hughes’s capacity to use poetic language is exemplary insofar as he is able here to capture an embodied sense of the violence of the event without the necessity to stage it. This evocation of trauma through the poeticism of violent language is one mechanism through which theatre might attend to and be in conversation with trauma. This attention to rupture, schism, violence – to traumata of plural form – has been constant in theatre since the Greeks. That is, in the Western tradition at least, theatre has long had a fascination with what performance scholar Miriam Haughton evocatively calls the “staging of suffering” in her excellent book Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow (Haughton 2018: 1). It is my contention in this chapter that theatre and performance offer a compelling and complex space in which people might encounter and consider traumata, personal or collective, local, national or global, historic or contemporary. In part, this is because of an ontological echo between the operation of performance and of trauma. In a now well-rehearsed argument, the performance theorist Peggy Phelan has argued that performance can never be recovered or adequately documented; it disappears in the moment of its presentation – or, performance “becomes itself through disappearance” (Phelan 1993: 146): Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. (Phelan 1993: 146) Performance and trauma share this complex interaction between presence and absence, and “impossibility” of representation. Yet, it is only fairly recently that theatre and performance scholars have turned to address these concerns in, through and with trauma studies. Though “young” in the discipline, this scholarship has gathered critical mass and considerable purchase as it turns to ask what performance might have to offer in relation to understandings of trauma and trauma studies: what work might performance that stages suffering be doing politically, culturally, socially or in terms of affective practices of witnessing and understanding trauma?

Trauma’s history of performance Before turning to review some of that scholarship, however, I want here to explicate an interrelation of trauma and performance that we might consider a more fundamental one than theatre’s interest in traumata as dramatic content. That is, I want to argue that performance practice is profoundly embedded in the emerging clinical practices relating to trauma in the late-1800s. In order to advance this performance (or performative) history of trauma, I want 329

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to return to arguments I first published in Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Duggan 2012; the first book-length study of theatre/performance and trauma theory). Recalling this work seems particularly useful in the context of the current volume as the following seeks to illuminate the usefulness of performance practice and theory to new understandings of trauma symptoms, clinical practices and contemporary theories (see also Duggan and Wallis 2011). The historiography I adopt here draws heavily on Chapter 1 of Trauma-Tragedy. The central points in what follows are that trauma theory as we understand it today can be seen to be underpinned by a history of “theatricality” (processes and practices that tightly resemble those found in the theatre practice), and that “performativity” (both being “performance-like” and enacting something in the world in J. L. Austin’s sense of the term) is inherent within the structure of trauma (see Austin 1962). Jean-Martin Charcot’s “clinical” practices are central within this proposition, but before turning to consider them in more depth, it will be useful to first discuss the writing of Herbert W. Page. A contemporary of Charcot and a surgeon, Page is perhaps less fully discussed in the history of trauma theory/ studies but I would contend no less important, especially in relation to the performance history I am sketching here. Page’s book, Injuries of the Spine and Spinal Cord and Nervous Shock, was published in 1883 in the midst of vast and rapid industrialization, during which the development of cities was redrawing the cartography of Britain and Europe. For literature scholar Roger Luckhurst, modernity and the increasing mechanization of society enabled the emergence of trauma as a concept. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Luckhurst argues that the rise of the city subsumed “the majority of the British population” by the end of the nineteenth century. This new urban life was characterized by “a series of shocks and collisions” that gave rise to new understandings of self – an urban self in part defined by regular “traumatic encounters”, “overwhelm[ing one’s] psychic defences” (Luckhurst 2008: 19–20). This “shocking” urban lifestyle is imbricated in the beginnings of modern investigations into trauma, particularly, as Luckhurst states, in relation to the expansion of the railways (21). It was from his experience of working with survivors of railway accidents – suffering from “railway spine” – that Page wrote his 1883 tome. In Injuries of the Spine, Page argued that the symptoms of railway spine were the result of the shock sustained in a traumatic incident, specifically train crashes, and not the result of physical injury. These symptoms, he argued, indicated “some functional disturbance of the whole nervous balance or tone rather than structural damage to any organ of the body” (Page 1883: 143). And this, for Page, aligned railway spine with hysteria. These symptoms were caused by an imminent threat of death and “the hopelessness of escape from danger”, causing a powerful emotional experience that was sufficient to produce shock (148). Page’s musings align closely with more current understandings of trauma, especially his idea of “nervous shock” where symptoms have been: [w]arded off in the first place by the excitement of the scene, the shock gathering, in the very delay itself, new force from the fact that the sources of alarm are continuous, and for the time all prevalent in the patient’s mind. (Page 1883: 148) While this usefully charts an early intervention into emerging understandings of trauma, there is a twist in the story that yokes it more closely to theatre than is apparent at first glance. At the time of writing his book, Page had been working for the London and North Western Railway Company for nine years. Thus, as Luckhurst points out, these “modern” 330

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arguments might be seen to come from less than objective but more “pecuniary motives” (Luckhurst 2008: 23). With the expansion of the railways there was a huge rise in locomotive accidents and related compensation claims made against the rail companies on the grounds of apparent organic links between the crash and damage or symptom. Moreover, compensation was increasingly being awarded in the absence of a visible injury (cf. Luckhurst 2008: 23). So, in connecting nervous shock with theorizations of hysteria Page was attempting to undermine the legitimacy of the disorder by “equat[ing] it with a shameful, effeminate disorder, often dismissed as a form of disease imitation (what was called ‘neuro-mimesis’) or malingering” (Luckhurst 2008: 23). The legal and perhaps clinical result of this would be to throw doubt on the validity of the victim’s symptoms. In raising the notion of malingering, especially in terms of imitation and thus pretence and make-believe, Page’s arguments begin to align the genealogy of trauma with a sense of performativity or theatricality – especially in terms of the long history of antitheatrical prejudice from Plato onwards. Drawing towards his conclusions, Page argues that the possibility of receiving compensation despite displaying no physical symptoms was prompting and prolonging cases of hysteria: the knowledge that compensation is a certainty for the injuries received, tends, almost from the first moment of illness, to colour the course and aspect of the case, with each succeeding day to become part and parcel of the injury in the patient’s mind. (Page 1883: 255) This amounts to a perpetuation of hysteric symptoms through what might be thought of as a neuro-mimetic performance, through playing the role of a hysteric for financial gain – or, literally, acting (it) out. The link between performance and trauma is further compounded when we interrogate Charcot’s theatrics in his infamous “Leçons du Mardi”. In his authoritative and illuminating book Invention of Hysteria (2003), Georges Didi-Huberman points out that Charcot’s use of hypnosis was a central tool in his “therapy”. He would put typically female patients into a hypnotic trance and then induce hysterical episodes through various theatrical and “far from innocent [… public] fondling of bodies” (Didi-Huberman 2003: 176). His techniques varied from exploding packages of gun-cotton under patients’ noses to “masturbating them […] until they could take no more” and even to “prescriptions for coitus” (176). These methods were played out in the overtly theatrical setting of his famous Tuesday Lectures with the expressed purpose of investigating, understanding and curing les névroses traumatiques. However, as Albert Londe, medical photographer for the Salpêtrière at the time, pointed out, these performances had little, if any, clinical value (cf. Didi-Huberman 2003: 210). Indeed, far from having clinical validity, the experiments were questionable at best and akin to sanctioned rape at worst. Charcot presided over these theatrics as writer, director and performer; each lecture was drafted and redrafted until they could be performed tightly “with lines, soliloquies, stage direction, asides by the hero, and so on” (Didi-Huberman 2003: 243). Moreover, Charcot’s hypnotic techniques and wider methods involved “coaching”, structured “playing” that was designed to achieve predisposed and pre-planned responses: denouements for the largely non-medial audience. The importance of an audience and the rhetorical use of theatrical techniques illustrate the overtly performative quality of Charcot’s work. Indeed, his practices might be argued to 331

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lend particular nuance and pertinence to the idea of “acting out”. Here the term is inverted, as it were: it is the analyst, not the analysand, who is author of the drama. Charcot’s theatricalized practice also highlights the dubious and contested background from which trauma theory has grown: its roots, we might argue, are in the violently theatrical traumatic experiences and pecuniarily motivated presentations of performed hysterical symptoms before audiences that, when not motivated by pure entertainment, were there to “watch”, “see” or “observe” another in a theatrically framed experimental space. More recently, Caroline Wake has compellingly extended this performance history by looking at the interrelation of understandings of PTSD to performance. In one of the most recent publications to explore the relation of theatre/performance to trauma, Wake traces the emergence of what we might call “the theatrical” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), “the so-called bible of the American Psychiatric Association” (Wake 2018: 219). Wake offers a compelling account of the ways that the DSM worked and re-worked definitions of post-traumatic stress disorder from 1980, when it first emerged as a clinical concept, to 2013 in the current edition of the Manual. Across five iterations of the DSM, Wake articulates how PTSD is wedded to ideas of representation and symbolization; how spectators emerge as both witnesses to trauma and as those traumatized through witnessing; how emotion and affect arise and recede as elements of the definition. Moreover, the DSM begins to grapple with questions of “spatiotemporal co-presence” in ways that theatre and performance have long since theorized in order to understand the affective impact of different kinds of “live” encounter: performance scholars – in contrast to their counterparts in medicine – would have no trouble describing the video call [in which two advocates witness a refugee set themselves alight] as live. Nor would they hesitate to describe these spectators as witnesses. (Wake 2018: 220) What is compelling about this theatre historiography of PTSD is that it further illustrates the connection between these seemingly disparate disciplines and highlights the capacity for performance to operate as an interlocutor in understandings of contemporary trauma theory in both cultural and clinical contexts.

Drama/theatre/performance scholarship on/with trauma To point this performance history of trauma back at the theatre, so to speak, we might usefully turn to trauma theorist Judith Herman’s proposition that trauma “destroys the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others” (Herman 2001: 53). Trauma-events, she contends, worry at and disrupt basic human relationships and attachments to the point of shattering understandings of self that are made and sustained in relation to others. This “cast[s] the victim into a state of existential crisis” through a fundamental violation of the survivor-sufferers’ understanding of natural order (51). Meanwhile, playwright and theatre scholar Karen Malpede has commented that “[b]ecause theatre takes place in public and involves the movement of bodies across a stage, theatre seems uniquely suited to portray the complex interpersonal [and intrapersonal] realities of trauma” (Malpede 1996: 168). Echoing something similar, Luckhurst comments that “culture rehearses or restages narratives that attempt to animate and explicate trauma that has been formulated as something that exceeds the possibility of narrative knowledge” 332

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(Luckhurst 2008: 79). This paradox surrounding narrative is taken further in Hans-Thies Lehmann’s examination of performance in which he claims that performance can “question and destabilise the spectator’s construction of identity” (Lehmann 2006: 5). This striking echo of Herman’s assertion that traumatic events shatter the construction of self is particularly interesting as it once again plots the line between performance and trauma. Not only can trauma-symptoms be considered as performative disturbances of self, time and psyche, but it would further appear, under Lehmann’s assertion, that theatre/performance shares this destabilizing power. Thus live performance, perhaps more than any other art form, is perfectly placed to attempt a dialogue with trauma, and, working against assertions of the impossibility of doing so, maybe even a representation of it. Attention to how trauma theory might illuminate and help to understand the importance of representations of traumatic events in the theatre marks the approach taken by those theorists who first engaged with trauma studies and performance. Perhaps one of the most widely known and important of these is Peter Buse’s work on Sarah Kane’s Blasted. In the last chapter of Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama (2001), Buse turns to an analysis of Blasted using trauma theory as the conceptual frame. The chapter is mainly focused on the text of the play rather than on an engagement with it in performance but it excellently foregrounds the importance of trauma theory as an analytical approach in drama. Buse contends, not unreasonably, that the foundation of contemporary understandings of trauma (theory) is Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Certainly this text cannot be underestimated in the development of trauma theory, especially as picked up by scholars in the humanities (notably Cathy Caruth 1995, 1996; Dori Laub 1992, 1995; Dominick LaCapra 1996, 2001). However, as the history sketched above makes clear, there is a complex and entangled relation between performance and trauma that points to the usefulness of performance, as both aesthetic object and analytical model, to understanding trauma. More recently, scholars have turned their attention to the analysis of live performance rather than (or as well as) textual analysis of plays. Moreover, and perhaps more excitingly, recent scholarship on trauma and performance has attended to the importance of performance to trauma rather than (only) the application of trauma theory to performance analysis. This shift represented an important development from the work of Buse. Where he rightly and importantly identified the potential for trauma theory to illuminate new understandings of drama, more recent scholarship positions performance as an active agent in the world with regards to understandings of trauma and its operation in the social real. In this shift, as Haughton recently articulated, it becomes apparent that theatre and performance can create “a shared space for the unspeakable to struggle in its desire for articulation and acknowledgment” (Haughton 2018: 2). What is perhaps most exciting about this turn towards trauma by performance and theatre scholars, especially in terms of the usefulness of performance to trauma, is the plurality of approaches afforded by the interdisciplinarity that is at the heart of performance studies. For instance, in a special issue of the journal Performance Research, “On Trauma”, that I edited with Mick Wallis in 2011, contributions included essays on: theoretical connections between the fields; analysis of protest performance in post-dictatorship Argentina; textual analysis of plays that represent traumatic events; the embodied experience of instillations; violence and ethics; “trauma tourism”; verbatim theatre and authenticity; African funeral rites; and performance art. In covering such wide territory, the special issue began to illustrate the diversity of approaches to trauma from within performance studies (broadly conceived). Moreover, 333

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the plurality of approaches and case studies foregrounded the different ways that scholars from all areas of the discipline were engaging with trauma as a “developing anchor” to explore ways in which performance practice can address trauma, how performance can be a critical frame for considering trauma in culture, and trauma theory and the traumatic as a productive means of thinking about performance and as a potentially creative force. (Wallis and Duggan 2011: 1) In 2013, performance scholars Bryoni Trezise and Caroline Wake’s edited collection Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma further demonstrated the capacity of performance (studies and practices) to function as a complex and potent means of complicating, critiquing and developing new and nuanced understandings of trauma in the contemporary moment and historically. One of the important achievements of Trezise and Wake’s book is that it makes clear the importance of scholarship that deliberately seeks to avoid “applying” trauma theory to performance, as well as of research that wishes to avoid any attempt to “cure” trauma as some applied practices might be seen to do. Rather the book’s contributors look to “ask what performance (as a theoretical ‘object’) and performance studies (as a theoretical field) might bring to trauma [studies]” (Trezise and Wake 2013: 16). The great strength of this approach is that it further develops the genuinely dialogic encounter between trauma and performance, taking account equally of performed content and the experience of performance. Geraldine Harris takes this dialogic approach into the territory of witnessing, a key area of concern in theatre and performance studies and particularly pertinent to enquiries on trauma. In her essay “The Ethics and Politics of Witnessing Whoopi”, Harris analyses her own live and mediated (television/DVD) encounters with the work of comedian Whoopi Goldberg. She convincingly argues that popular performance is capable of “promoting an abundance of meanings and (figurally) the ‘mutual transformation’ of performer and spectator, and [is] no less concerned with the political, the ethical and the aesthetic” (Harris 2013: 124) than “canonical” artists like Marina Abramović or Andy Warhol. Harris’s intervention is twofold as she not only argues for the need to turn critical attention toward the popular but also highlights, as Trezise and Wake note in their introduction to Visions and Revisions, that “performance studies privileges particular mediums, forms, and genres at its peril” (Trezise and Wake 2013: 19). From the outset, both trauma and (live) performance are embroiled in a complex liminality, a circulation of presence and absence that makes difficult any simple reading of these phenomena. Performance and trauma-symptoms are at once present and “real”, absent and phantasmagorical. That is, in Miriam Haughton’s terms, there is a historical (and ongoing) “space of nexus dominated by liminality that exists for performance and trauma” (Haughton 2018: 8). Moreover, as Sophie Anne Oliver notes, performance art has a long history of “directly addressing […] questions of personal and/or collective trauma” in order to establish for audiences the capacity of embodied experience to act as “a cultural and political force [… that is], performance art has sought to redefine discourses of the traumatized body” (Oliver 2010: 119–20). For Oliver, this suggests that through a “delicate negotiation of presence and absence, and its necessarily dialogic nature” performance offers a space for complex “understanding[s] of ‘ethical’ spectatorship” to emerge that can be put productively into conversation with trauma theory (120). The proposition here is that live performance offers 334

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a means through which traumatic events, histories, stories and legacies can be productively interrogated and remediated through aesthetic practice. But this practice need not attend to representational forms yoked to verisimilitude or naturalistic depictions of traumatic events, and indeed more often than not contemporary theatre and performance err away from such approaches. Rather, in deploying structural echoes of trauma – for example repetitions, fragments, flashbacks – performance has the capacity to dwell in and uncover new understandings of the traumatic in plural ways. Moreover, as Haughton has argued, such performance practice “is not only addressing but intervening in experiences of public and private trauma”: Increasingly, theatre artists are pushing established forms of staging to facilitate encounters between performer and audience/spectator/participant that are intimate, discomforting, political and visceral. Often, the material makes direct links to events of crisis in the socio-cultural sphere, provoking dialogue and debate regarding how society reads and receives these personal and public events of trauma. (Haughton 2018: 32–3) Performance can thus be seen to stage different kinds of thinking about trauma, doing so in multiple modes within the same experience.

The Stranger Disease To explicate this further, by way of conclusion and to try to tie together some of the threads of the foregoing, I want now to turn to a performance I attended in March 2018 in New Orleans, Goat in the Road’s The Stranger Disease. This was an immersive, promenade performance about an outbreak of yellow fever in the late nineteenth century in New Orleans. The piece was staged in Madame John’s Legacy, a museum and heritage site owned and run by the Louisiana State Museum in the French Quarter of the city. One of the oldest residences in New Orleans (the current structure dating from 1788), the building occupies a prominent site in the heart of the main tourist area of the city. In this performance, audience members arrived and were allowed to wander the museum learning its layout and contemplating the objects on display. Once the performance started, they could choose which room to be in and see aspects of the performance unfold around them, with different characters coming in and out of the space. Alternatively, one could choose to follow a particular character on their journey through the site and the performance, exploring the spaces – and atmospheres – of the building as part of the work. Or, one could embark on a combination of both approaches (as I did). In any approach to the performance the audience’s body was implicated in the unfolding action as one was moved by characters when in the way or simply pushed past for dramatic effect, or because one had suddenly to move to another room or chase up a flight of stairs in order to keep up with a fleeing performer and then search for them at the top. For the company, this was a deliberate attempt to force the audience “to step into the decision-making” that the characters were involved in working through; it ensured the audience could not absent themselves from “the feeling of putting yourself in the [characters’] shoes” (Flaherty and Kaminstein 2018). The performance played out twice during each showing, so the audience has two opportunities to see the work in order to encounter it from different perspectives and to engage with it in different ways. Nevertheless, the experience was always partial and

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fragmentary. It simply was not possible to see all of the performance, some aspect of it remained just out of grasp no matter which route one took through it. With a multi-racial cast, the central presented story in The Stranger Disease was about the complexities of domestic life “across the color line” during the outbreak of yellow fever in 1878 (see Goat in the Road Productions 2018). Yellow fever was a disease brought to New Orleans by strangers (mainly coming by ship from overseas) and in being performed at the heart of the tourist industry in the city, the performance was engaging with the difficulties and benefits of tourism in the city now. That is, in deliberately engaging with both the tourist industry (being in the French Quarter, staged in a tourist attraction) and with tourists (as audience members) the company attempted to put into conversation the benefits of tourists coming into the city alongside complex narratives about the city that relate to tourism (for example, gentrification and local landlords being priced out by companies like Airbnb; financial and race inequity; environmental and ecological disaster). The work thus looks to engage in an interrogation of contemporary social systems and structures that are related to – perhaps even propagate – current social traumas. The work is looking at how people from outside the city come into New Orleans and change it, either by “transplanting” themselves from elsewhere to take advantage of the post-Katrina depression in property prices or by attending the city as tourists who come, consume and leave. Moreover, the work enabled a complex interrogation of the traumas of historical race relations in the city through the “historically inspired […] love [story] across the color line in post-Reconstruction New Orleans” (Goat in the Road Productions 2018). This, however, was used as a prism through which to look at much more contemporary race related traumas. In having a determinedly multiracial cast the production staged diversity for a predominantly white audience. Being staged in a heritage site in the city, in an area that is mainly populated by whites, it is hardly surprising that the audience for all performances were “all white”. This was because, as Shannon Flaherty and Chris Kaminstein put it in interview, The Stranger Disease audience ended up not being our traditional audience because it was [made up of] so many tourists … which [was] exactly who we were trying to reach … One of the main things that New Orleans has to offer in terms of how our city functions, is the tourist economy. [We were asking], how can we tap into that situation? (Flaherty and Kaminstein 2018) In a city like New Orleans, one deeply and complexly bound up in histories of slavery, segregation and the subjugation of people of colour, to stage a performance that critiques these traumatic histories – that continue to be played out in various ways in the city now, deliberately for a predominantly white audience is importantly political. The Stranger Disease was highly political both in terms of who was in it and who they were talking to. In being performed in the tourist district, an area profoundly associated with people from outside the city, it sought to question unthinking engagements with the city as that relates to questions of contemporary social trauma. That is, it asked the mainly white audience to attend to complex questions about race and equality, about who is affected by the city’s housing crisis (the play stages the fleeing of one’s home), and wider questions of equity, power and diversity. It did this in both form and content, through embodied decision making and the playing out of interpersonal and systemic relations.

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However, in being staged within Madame John’s Legacy it also ran the risk of perpetuating some of the problems it sought to critique because: for people of colour, heritage sites and museums are really dangerous because you don’t always know what you’re walking into and what that museum is celebrating, especially in the South … [we] certainly understand why people feel like they are taking a risk. (Flaherty and Kaminstein 2018) The performance stages a live thinking through of the complex politics of New Orleans in the moment of its unfolding. It makes alive social concerns and structures that can sometimes seem distant from those not normally affected by them. In this way the performance operates through a complex relationship between how the performance unfolded as a story, in terms of audience’s embodied engagement with that story, fragmented structure and repetition, the makeup of the audience and the location and site of the work.

Conclusion There is much more to be said about this work in its particular context, but in relation to the current volume, the performance is useful in illuminating the complex, multifaceted ways in which live performance can attend to narratives and experiences of trauma. For Miriam Haughton, it is such complexities that give performance a particular capacity to engage with the politics and embodied experiences of trauma: The embodied moment of live performance (embodied for both performer and spectator/audience) disappears the moment it manifests, while the memory of the moment lives on, in flux from the performance environment to the wider public sphere and is thus subject to the socio-economic and cultural conditions which interact there. Similarly, is trauma that which disappears, or that which persists? It is both. (Haughton 2018: 3) Given its trans-historical investigation of social traumas, we might argue that The Stranger Disease was precisely concerned to interrogate the relation between that that which disappears and that which persists (especially in the context of New Orleans). The performance deployed a structure that operated, dramaturgically at least, in a mode akin to traumatic schism in its repetition but with difference and shadow, and in pulling the audience in different directions intellectually and physically in decision making. The audience is made witness to historical trauma on two counts – disease and violent race politics – as a means to contemplating and illuminating pressing to contemporary traumas (such as the role tourism plays in the city “falling into the sea”, complex race politics and division, huge inequities in housing and social mobility, and access to education that play out along racial divides). This work thus attends to trauma via content (narrative and action) and structure (elliptical, fragmented, frustrating, incomplete, recurring) to examine contemporary systems that propagate contemporary social trauma in New Orleans. This is further complicated by the site of the performance insofar as it might be seen to distance those on whom the structures under interrogation have had the most impact. Operating through multiple modes of representation, audience engagement and fragmented and elliptical narrative, The Stranger Disease is 337

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a useful example through which to illuminate the wider capacity of performance to critique and make complex social traumas that might otherwise be over-simplified or ignored.

Bibliography Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, J. O. Urmson (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Buse, P. (2001) Drama + Theory: Critical Approaches to Modern British Drama, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Caruth, C. (ed.) (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Didi-Huberman, G. (2003) Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, London: The MIT Press. An Die Musik (2000 [1975]) dir. P. Simmons, Warwick Arts Centre. Duggan, P. (2012) Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Duggan, P. and Wallis, M. (2011) “Trauma and Performance: Maps, Narratives and Folds”, Performance Research 16(1): 4–17. Flaherty, S. and Kaminstein, C. (2018) “Interview with Patrick Duggan and Stuart Andrews”, New Orleans, 30 March. Goat in the Road Productions. (2018) “The Stranger Disease”, www.goatintheroadproductions.org/ works-blog/2018/2/6/the-stranger-disease (accessed 12 February 2019). Harris, G. (2013) “The Ethics and Politics of Witnessing Whoopi”, in B. Trezise and C. Wake (eds) Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 115–34. Haughton, M. (2018) Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Herman, J. (2001 [1992]) Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, London: Rivers Oram Press. Hughes, T. (1999) The Oresteia: A Translation of Aeschylus’ Trilogy of Plays, London: Faber and Faber. LaCapra, D. (1996) Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laub, D. (1992) “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening”, in S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, London: Routledge, 57–74. ———. (1995) “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 61–75. Lehmann, H.-T. (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, Oxon: Routledge. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, London: Routledge. Malpede, K. (1996) “Teaching Witnessing: A Class Wakes to Genocide”, Theatre Topics 6(2): 167–79. Oliver, S. A. (2010) “Trauma, Bodies, and Performance Art: Towards an Embodied Ethics of Seeing”, Continuum 24(1): 119–29. Page, H. W. (1883) Injuries of the Spine and Spinal Cord and Nervous Shock, London: J. and A. Churchill. Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: Politics of Performance, London: Routledge. The Stranger Disease (2018) dirs. S. Flaherty and C. Kaminstein, Madame John’s Legacy, Louisiana State Museum. Trezise, B. and Wake, C. (eds) (2013) Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Wake, C. (2018) “On Clinical, Cultural and Theatrical Trauma”, Performance Research 23(4–5): 219–22. Wallis, M. and Duggan, P. (2011) “Editorial: On Trauma”, Performance Research 16(1): 1–3.

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31 TRAUMA AND PHOTOGRAPHY Cécile Bishop

New York, 2015, United Nations Headquarters. In the foreground, a middle-aged woman is looking at an exhibition of photographs. Her face is contracted in an expression of horror and disgust. She is covering her mouth and nose with her coat, as if she were about to vomit. She is looking at an exhibition of some of the 55,000 photographs produced between 2011 and 2013, at the request of the Syrian regime, by a military photographer known by the pseudonym “Caesar”. The photographs show the corpses of Syrian civilians, many of whom have been mutilated and tortured beyond recognition. Caesar decided to use these images in order to expose the crimes of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and the images were smuggled out of the country on a flash drive. International experts have confirmed their authenticity. The woman looking at the photographs is herself the subject of a photograph, illustrating an article in The Guardian (see Jalabi 2015, photograph by Lucas Jackson). The article quotes a statement by the US deputy representative to the UN, Michele J. Sison: “it is imperative we do not look away” (Jalabi 2015). This is a well-established cultural narrative: if world (or at least “Western”) audiences had evidence of the violence and grasped the trauma endured by victims, they would act to rectify it. Thus photographers, whether photojournalists or non-professionals, often take enormous personal risks to “bear witness”, and provide images of wars, conflicts and abuse. But how can photography represent trauma? The literature on the relationship between trauma and photography follows two main directions. The first considers the capabilities of the photographic medium when it comes to representing, registering and mediating the experience of trauma. The second has to do with the photographic representation of traumatic events and its effects on the spectator. While the position of the spectator is often fantasized as an empathic response of identification with the victim – sometimes coming close to a kind of vicarious trauma, theories of spectatorship often cast spectators as indifferent, voyeuristic or exploitative. These two directions have long defined the debate on trauma and photography. In recent years, however, major theoretical interventions have moved away from this investment in the affective response of the viewer, raising political questions about how the roles of victim and spectator of trauma come to be distributed in the first place.

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Trauma, photography and the unrepresentable Trauma is often defined as a rupture in an individual’s capacity to make sense of the world. Trauma theory, influenced by psychoanalysis, has described trauma as something that took place when individuals experienced events that they were incapable of processing using normal or habitual forms of knowledge. It is for this reason that pioneering works in the field of trauma studies, such as Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience, have emphasized the “unrepresentable” nature of trauma, seeking thereby to highlight the impossibility of representing something so far outside the bounds of normal experience (Caruth 1996). Photography, which can only capture a small portion of reality, and an isolated moment in time, thus seems incapable of representing an event of such magnitude as the Holocaust. Even Caesar’s photographs of mutilated corpses cannot fully account for the violence and suffering endured by their subjects. Indeed, the psychological experience of the victims and of those close to them remains invisible, outside the reach of the spectators’ imagination. Photography, however, is only partly a representational medium. The photographed object is present in the image not just through resemblance (as in a painting or a drawing), but also through the imprint left by its body, as it reflects and absorbs light. According to Charles Sanders Peirce’s well-known taxonomy of signs, photography is therefore both an icon – a sign linked to its referent by mimetic resemblance – and an index – a sign that is physically connected to its referent, acting like a trace (Peirce 1932). Because of this intimate connection between image and presence, photography is often called upon to prove the existence of violence and crimes, as Caesar sought to do. The indexicality of a photograph, however, does not depend on its iconic content. In 1944, for example, a member of the Sonderkommando of the Auschwitz extermination camp managed to take four photographs. The Sonderkommando was made up of Jewish inmates who were forced to perform the extermination of the Jewish prisoners and burn the corpses, until they were themselves executed. These are the only known images to document the process of extermination in the gas chambers. Three of the images feature bodies being burnt outside and women being pushed toward the chamber. The fourth only shows trees. All of them are blurry and decentred, probably because the photographer had to hide and could not aim properly. Judged solely in terms of the information they contain, the photographs clearly fail to represent the horror from which they emerged. When the photographs were used as evidence by the Polish Resistance, they were cropped to make the figures more visible, and the fourth photograph was left aside. According to Georges Didi-Huberman, however, their lack of representational content is not a defect, but an important part of their memorial value. Huberman regards these photographs as examples of a paradigm he terms “lacuna-image” (image-lacune): The lacuna-image is a trace-image [image-trace] and a disappearance-image [imagedisparition] at the same time. Something remains that is not the thing, but a scrap of its resemblance. Something – very little, a film – remains of a process of annihilation: that something, therefore, bears witness to a disappearance while simultaneously resisting it, since it becomes the opportunity of its possible remembrance. It is neither full presence, nor absolute absence. It is neither resurrection, nor death without remains. It is death insofar as it makes remains. (Didi-Huberman 2008: 167) The “lacuna-image” described by Didi-Huberman is reminiscent of the standard account of traumatic memory: an image or an event lingers in the mind of the subject, without being 340

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either understood or truly forgotten. This suggests that what connects photography and trauma is not so much the capacity of photography to show or prove the existence of a traumatic event, but rather its resemblance to the psychic phenomenon of trauma itself. The analogy between photography and the unconscious was suggested by Walter Benjamin in his “Little History of Photography”, particularly in relation to what he named “the optical unconscious”: For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. (Benjamin 1999: 510) In Benjamin’s account, photography automatically captures visual details that the human eye does not register, just as experiences are inscribed in the unconscious without the subject’s awareness. These elements constitute the optical unconscious. Although Benjamin does not refer to trauma in this passage, there is a striking resemblance between his description and Cathy Caruth’s formulation of the belatedness of trauma: “the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Caruth 1995: 4–5). Just like the photograph that reveals to the viewer what her/his eye had actually seen, trauma leaves an impression of something that bypassed the consciousness of the human subject. As Margaret Iversen puts it, because both evade intentionality, photography works as “an analogue of trauma” (Iversen 2017: 1). In that sense, the affinity between trauma and photography does not lie in the representational or evidentiary power of photographic images, but rather in the perceived similarity between the structure of trauma and the cognitive and affective experiences created by photography.

The photographic mediation of traumatic memory In addition to unintentionality, the analogy between photography and the experience of trauma also involves their peculiar temporality. A number of critics have emphasized how photography’s combination of belatedness, stillness and repetition resembles the way trauma disrupts one’s sense of time. Ulrich Baer thus explains that “Photographs can capture the shrapnel of traumatic time. They confront us with the possibility that time consists of singular bursts and explosions and that the continuity of time-as-river is another myth” (Baer 2002: 7). Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites have highlighted the connection between photographic and traumatic temporalities in relation to one of the 20th century’s most iconic photographs of trauma: Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, running naked after a napalm bomb was dropped on her village. They suggest that Ut’s picture is not only a trace of the circumstances in which Kim Phúc came to endure a lifelong physical and psychological trauma, but the site of

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a collective trauma for US audiences, made possible by photography’s capacity to freeze time, and by the repetition occasioned by its capacity to be reproduced: Although the activity within the frame directs action, the fact that this is a photograph – a “static” image – means that time has been stopped. The picture holds its experience of terror and uncompleted action for all time, while having the activity within the frame eternally repeat itself […]. This mythic sense of eternal recurrence as well as its “vertigo of time defeated” corresponds perfectly to the phenomenological structure of trauma: one simultaneously feels stopped in time while constantly repeating the actions within that isolated moment. The normal flow of time has been fragmented into shards of isolated events, while the traumatized subject remains trapped in the continually recurring scene, unable to break out of the ever-recurring pain. (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 182) The affinity between the repetitive circulation of the iconic photograph in mass-media culture and the psychological experience of trauma highlighted by Hariman and Lucaites thus produces a photographically mediated collective trauma. In their account, the spectators of the endlessly reproduced photograph experience the event in a kind of eternal present, akin to the constant return experienced by victims of trauma. Hariman and Lucaites’s interpretation reflects a broader shift in trauma studies away from the individual, event-based model of trauma to a more cultural understanding of the phenomenon, mediated by images. Their description of the relationship between cultural trauma and photography is reminiscent of the concept of “postmemory” proposed by Marianne Hirsch (Hirsch 1992, 1997, 2012). Postmemory, for Hirsch, refers to the mediated memories experienced by those who, whether through family ties or other forms of cultural identification, feel somehow connected to a collective trauma that they have not themselves experienced. Postmemory is therefore based on representations – especially photographs – rather than events experienced by an individual. Some critics have gone even further than Hirsch, arguing that traumatic memories are not just analogous to photographs, but are indeed mostly made out of photographs. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, suggests that in the current age of mass media, images (perhaps particularly television images) have become “traumatogenic”: it is the media themselves that produce memory as trauma through “breaking news”, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the permanent repetition of images of disasters whenever and wherever they strike, and above all, when reporting on wars as well as of natural catastrophes, putting the focus solely on the victims as victims, who are then harvested for their expressions of shock, grief and trauma. (Elsaesser 2014: 27) Elsaesser’s focus on the production and reception of images of trauma brings us back to the photograph of the woman looking at Caesar’s photographs in The Guardian. The woman depicted on The Guardian’s photograph (see Jalabi 2015) is clearly overwhelmed and deeply affected by what she is seeing. In fact, her bodily reaction to the images is so intense that it looks as if she could smell the corpses themselves. This response, Elsaesser argues, is a disabling one, because traumatogenic imagery causes the viewer to experience a form of affective paralysis similar to that of the traumatized subject: 342

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Such a scenario […] makes for a form of spectatorship/spectator-sport that can only navigate between trauma and disaster-fatigue, between overinvestment in the many kinds of wretchedness in this world, and underinvestment, that is, coldness and numbness to any sort of feeling other than cynical withdrawal. Spectatorship thus returns us to the pathological affectivity of trauma itself: between feeling too much and feeling nothing at all. (Elsaesser 2014: 27) The simultaneous invasiveness and distancing described by Elsaesser in this passage finds an apt illustration in the composition of The Guardian’s photograph. Strikingly, the depth of field is so shallow that only the woman is sharp. The images of atrocity she is looking at, those from which we are told “not to look away”, are entirely out of focus. This ambiguity captures the ambivalence that defines contemporary attitudes in relation to images of trauma. On the one hand, audiences are supposed to accept a direct confrontation with the pain endured by others, but on the other hand, the publication of such images creates concerns that spectators may fail to produce the right affective and ethical response, by being voyeuristic, overwhelmed or indifferent.

“Compassion fatigue” Elsaesser’s grim alternative for the spectator of traumatic imagery – “between feeling too much and feeling nothing at all” – has a long genealogy in photography studies. His notion of “disaster-fatigue” echoes the classic argument of “compassion fatigue” (Moeller 1999), namely that contemporary audiences have had their emotional and moral responsiveness numbed by overexposure to violent photographic images. Already in 1977, Susan Sontag had famously claimed that “images anaesthetize”, comparing the habituation created by photographs of suffering to the diminishing shock value of pornography (Sontag 1977: 20). Recounting her first encounter with photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau in a Santa Monica bookshop age twelve, Sontag described a reaction that itself resembles a form of trauma: it seems plausible to me to divide my life in two parts, before I saw these photographs (I was twelve) and after […]. When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying. (Sontag 1977: 20) This initial shock, she suggests, was never repeated. For Sontag, while photography may provide evidence that something happened, it also contributes to turning what it depicts into a mere image, a spectacle, thereby making it seem less real: The vast catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable. […] “concerned” photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it. 343

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(Sontag 1977: 20–1) If one adheres to this argument, it seems obvious that the intensification of image consumption permitted by the internet and the proliferation of electronic devices can only have compounded the predicament. The reduction of other people’s suffering to a spectacle has deep ethical and political implications. By reducing the victim of trauma to a mere object, a spectacle to be looked at, instead of a subject, it leads the latter to adopt a position of distance and detachment. When applied to the victims of violence and persecution, this attitude replicates the very process of dehumanization and objectification that brought about trauma in the first place. It is therefore perceived as complicit with the perpetration of traumatic violence.

Spectatorial acts In the last decade, however, two major theoretical interventions have rejected the now commonplace argument that photography blunts our sensibility. Instead, both have sought to challenge the longstanding association identified by philosophers between spectatorship and passivity. Ariella Azoulay proposes the first of these interventions in the Civil Contract of Photography (2008). Directly responding to Sontag’s argument about the anaesthetizing effects of photographs, Azoulay calls instead for spectators to engage actively with traumatic imagery. Azoulay’s argument is both a reflection on what the world is actually like and a theoretical fiction, in the spirit of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of the social contract. While actual citizenship often rests implicitly on the exclusion of those who are deemed non-citizens or second-rate citizens, she argues that photography reactivates the promise of universality underpinning the concept of citizenship as it was articulated in eighteenth-century declarations of natural rights. Because photography is a visual medium capable of transcending linguistic and national boundaries, Azoulay proposes that it also facilitates the emergence of a political space where all participants, because they are all governed, can make a claim for the recognition of their universal human rights. Photography, for Azoulay, defines a new, horizontal polity, where citizens – whether they are the citizens of the world’s richest countries or undocumented dwellers in refugee camps – may experience their individual and collective responsibility toward each member: “Photography, being in principle accessible to all, bestows universal citizenship on a new citizenry whose citizens produce, distribute, and look at images” (Azoulay 2008: 126). In this context, the spectator cannot simply wait to be moved or stirred by photographs of trauma. According to Azoulay, a photograph implicitly addresses a fictional agent, the “universal spectator”, who is “free of any personal interest save the common interest in the civil contract of photography” (Azoulay 2008: 340). The spectator’s duty is to respond actively to the claims addressed to her through photography, by performing “spectatorial acts” and reconstructing the situation that led to the emergence of trauma. This task involves not just registering the visible content of an image, but also, as in the case of photographs taken by the perpetrators of violence, to recover the situation of domination and violence that may have been left out of the frame, or deliberately obfuscated. For Azoulay, in other words, the question of what made Caesar’s photographs effective or not is irrelevant. The publication of his photographs did not result in the overthrow of Bashar alAssad. Hundreds of thousands died; many more were displaced or forced to flee. The inaction lies in the collective responsibility of the spectators, not in the images.

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Azoulay’s call for an active engagement with the photographic depiction of trauma has been hugely influential. However, as she herself acknowledges, the practice of spectatorship often falls short of the ideal implied by the “civil contract of photography”. Thus, in Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), Sontag suggests that photography works against the universal: because it does not speak and because its captions are easily falsifiable, photographs can only confirm for the viewer the position they already agree with. For Sontag, “photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen” (Sontag 2004: 13). In practice, according to Sontag, photography is not an instrument for forging a new universal citizenship but a convenient – and highly effective – tool for reinforcing existing divisions and interpretations. The question of whether photography can be “anchored” to any linguistic meaning is a major debate in photography studies. Caesar’s photographs offer a powerful example of the plasticity of photographic meaning, and of photography’s ability to legitimize preexisting positions. Initially, his photographs were produced at the request of the Syrian regime. After being transferred to a different context, and attached to a different set of extra-photographic information, they were repurposed to indict that same regime. But whatever international experts say, a portion of the people viewing them will probably still agree with Bashar al-Assad’s dismissal of their status as evidence: nothing is clear or proven. The pictures are not clear which person they show. They’re just pictures of a head, for example, with some skulls. Who said this is done by the government, not by the rebels? Who said this is a Syrian victim, not someone else? (Tepperman 2015) Ultimately, as Bashar al-Assad’s denial suggests, the concrete political effect of these photographs depends on the authority of “who” gets to establish their referent and meaning.

Emancipating the spectator? A second influential reflection on the role of the spectator faced with representations of trauma has been put forward by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator (2009). Rancière seeks to transcend what he sees as the two main philosophical positions on spectacle. Those are, on the one hand, a Platonic rejection of spectacle as alienating, passive and voyeuristic and, on the other hand, an attempt to turn the spectator into active participant. Rancière, by contrast, rejects the notion that the role of art is to transmit messages, offer models for political action, or teach the spectator to decipher social meaning. Instead, he argues, it is to bring about “dissensus”, that is to say to question the apparent evidence on which our concept of reality is based, the very boundaries and coordinates of the world we have in common. For Rancière, this implies a new “distribution of the sensible”. With this phrase, Rancière suggests that we need to question the field of sense perception underpinning the distribution of political roles and capacities: To reconfigure the landscape of what can be seen and what can be thought is to alter the field of the possible and the distribution of capacities and incapacities. Dissensus brings back into play both the obviousness of what can be perceived,

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thought and done, and the distribution of those who are capable of perceiving, thinking and altering the coordinates of the shared world. (Rancière 2009: 49) Commenting on the proliferation of images of trauma and suffering, Rancière thus claims that the issue is not our overexposure to such images, but rather the way in which we encounter them, which reinforces an unequal distribution of political roles: We do not see too many suffering bodies on the screen. But we do see too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having a chance to speak. The system of information does not operate through an excess of images, but by selecting the speaking and reasoning beings who are capable of “deciphering” the flow of information about anonymous multitudes. (Rancière 2009: 96) Against this reified vision of the suffering other, Rancière singles out a few recent art projects that provide an alternative perceptual organization. Among these features Alfredo Jaar’s installation “The Eyes of Gutete Emerita”. Visitors to Jaar’s work first encounter a text projected on a wall, telling them about the story of Gutete Emerita, a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Gutete Emerita was attending mass at the Ntamara Church when a Hutu death quad massacred 400 Tutsis, including her husband and two young sons, who were killed with machetes before her eyes. Behind the wall, visitors then find a large light table, on which a million slides have been strewn – the same number as the estimated number of people killed in the genocide. However, all the slides are identical: they contain photographs of the eyes of Gutete Emerita. For Rancière, this piece breaks the dominant logic through which images of trauma are usually circulated and consumed: it substitutes the traumatic spectacle of thousands of Tutsis being slaughtered with a metonym – the gaze of the traumatized. Instead of presenting the victim of trauma as a silent, nameless victim among a mass of other victims, as an object for the commentary of journalists and spectators, Jaar’s work shows us a subject who sees, just like the exhibition or museum visitors. According to Rancière, Jaar’s use of photography is political because its use of metonym disrupts the accepted relation between the part and the whole, thereby redistributing the places occupied by the individual and the multiple (Rancière 2009: 97–8).

Who owns trauma? While Rancière focuses on the various subject positions reinforced by the circulation of images in the mass media, it is surprising that the material and economic dimensions of these exchanges generally occupy a limited role in most theories dealing with photography and trauma. The celebration of contemporary art as a place where alternative ways of seeing may be elaborated is thus surprisingly unconcerned with the economic and sociological circuits in which these ways of seeing are constructed, promoted and facilitated. Even the well-trodden denunciation of the appropriation of the other’s trauma for voyeuristic pleasure, sentimental self-congratulation or aesthetic gratification often leaves aside the more literal forms of appropriation that define the circulation and commodification of trauma once it has been turned into a photographic image. Did anybody make any money from the photograph of the dead Syrian child Alan Kurdi, washed up on 346

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a Turkish shore in 2015? If so, who, and how much? Did the people who organized the exhibition of Caesar’s photographs at the UN gain any kind of professional benefit, and how does this compare with the benefits that the exhibition brought to the victims and their families (if any)? Or to Caesar himself? Asking these questions is not meant to undercut the significance of the images. Rather, it is a way of reminding ourselves, following Deborah Poole’s work on the “visual economy” of photography and Elizabeth Edwards’s reflections on the materiality of images, that photographs, even when they represent traumatic content, are not just icons but also objects, and that we cannot fully understand their social and cultural meaning without addressing this dimension as well (Poole 1997; Edwards and Harts 2004). These questions were at the core of Renzo Martens’s controversial art documentary, Episode III (2008). In one of the most memorable scenes, the Dutch artist lectures a group of Congolese wedding photographers. The setting is strongly reminiscent of a colonial school: dressed in a pristine white shirt, Martens writes numbers on a white board, while the black photographers listen respectfully. Martens’s lesson is simple: to survive economically, they should stop photographing parties and turn their cameras towards the victims of war, rape and malnutrition. Instead of making $1 a month, Renzo claims, they would earn up to $1000 by selling their images to Western aid organizations and media. Earlier in the film, Martens met an Italian photo-journalist from Agence France-Presse who sells his photographs of the conflict currently ravaging their country for $50 per image. Martens’s plan is therefore not to change or alleviate the poverty and suffering that surround him. Rather, it is to turn Africans into active participants in the exploitation and commodification of their own trauma. After all, Martens points out, everybody else (including NGOs, media organization, governments, palm oil producers and Western photographers) is benefitting economically from the Congo’s war and poverty, except the Congolese themselves. It is time, he suggests, to ensure a more equitable distribution of the benefits generated by poverty – the Congo’s most important natural resource, according to Martens. The film details the excruciating failure of this plan. Martens takes the photographers to various locations, including a hospital where he instructs them on how to frame the body of a starving little girl as luridly as possible. He then organizes a meeting with Médecins sans frontières representatives in order to present the Congolese photographers’ work and set up a collaboration. The representatives will have none of it: the images are deemed too exploitative. When Martens asks why they are more exploitative than those of the Western photographers who usually photograph the patients in MSF’s hospitals, their response is that the images are unprofessional, not good enough: “selling images demands work. Making an image requires more than pressing a button”. Ultimately, the Congolese are not the owners of their own trauma, and the wedding photographers simply do not have access to the visual market where the images of their suffering are being sold and exchanged. Crucially, Martens’s own film does not exempt itself from this general critique: the film provides no relief to the various victims of violence and exploitation he encounters, and it is fully complicit with the exploitative visual economy it exposes. Indeed, Episode III made Martens famous. However, all he had to say to the starving, impoverished people he met was: “enjoy poverty”. The overwhelming feelings of impotence, disgust and anger that many viewers have reported after watching the film lead to no catharsis. Martens’s film reactivates the pessimistic position on photographs of trauma put forward by people like Sontag, but its focus is no longer on the affective response of the spectator. Its key suggestion is that images of trauma are exploitative not because of their potentially voyeuristic or aestheticizing treatment of other people’s pain, but because they participate in 347

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an unequal system of production, distribution and consumption of images. In fact, the viewer’s emotions are not particularly relevant: whether we respond with compassion, outrage or empathy, these are simply the means by which the visual economy of trauma perpetuates itself, encouraging donations for NGOs and development aid. The anger produced by Martens’s film, just like the melancholy pleasures afforded by Jaar’s installation or the visible repulsion experienced by the woman in The Guardian’s photographs are aesthetic responses, experienced from a place of safety and comfort (a movie screening, an art gallery, a tour of the UN). The ways in which the emotions generated by traumatic photographs may or may not be translated into political action is ultimately dependent on our pre-existing sense of political agency, and on the broader political context defining the relations between viewers and subjects. A theory about the relationship between images, trauma and spectatorship is in that sense always a theory about something much broader: our place in the world and our capacity to act upon it.

Bibliography Azoulay, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography, New York: Zone Books. Baer, U. (2002) Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Benjamin, W. (1999 [1931]) “Little History of Photography”, in M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds) W. Benjamin Selected Writings, vol. II, trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 507–30. Caruth, C. (1995) “Trauma and Experience: Introduction”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–12. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Didi-Huberman, G. (2008) Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. S. B. Lillis, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edwards, E. and Harts, J. (eds) (2004) Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, London: Routledge. Elsaesser, T. (2014) German Cinema – Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945, New York: Routledge. Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) dir. R. Martens, Renzo Martens Menselijke Activiteiten, Inti Films. Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J. L. (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hirsch, M. (1992) “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory”, Discourse 15(2): 3–29. ———. (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press. Iversen, M. (2017) Photography, Trace, and Trauma, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jalabi, R. (2015) “Images of Syrian Torture on Display at UN: ‘It Is Imperative We Do Not Look Away’”, The Guardian 11 March 2015. www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/11/images-syriantorture-shock-new-yorkers-united-nations Moeller, S. (1999) Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, New York: Routledge. Peirce, C. S. (1932 [1897]) Collected Papers, vol. II, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Poole, D. (1997) Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, trans. G. Elliott, London and New York: Verso. Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography, London: Penguin. ———. (2004) Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador; Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Tepperman, J. (2015) “Syria’s President Speaks”, Foreign Affairs 94(2): 58–65. www.foreignaffairs.com/ interviews/2015-01-25/syrias-president-speaks

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32 POST-APOCALYPTIC FICTION AND THE FUTURE ANTERIOR Jouni Teittinen

For a long time now, philosophers and cultural critics have voiced occasional claims that we are living in a somehow post-apocalyptic culture (see for example Berger 1999; Heffernan 2008). Whether the notion primarily refers to coping with the ghosts of past disasters (paradigmatically the Nazi Holocaust), to the end of some grand narrative or ethos or to the disillusionment with the possibility of (secular) revelation and resolution of fundamental cultural-existential conflicts, it forcefully conjures the sense that some decisive moment has passed and left us to deal with its wake, salvage and scraps. This is a familiar and partly aged thematic, strongly connected to both modernist and postmodern outlooks, but also to the question of trauma, the rise of trauma theory and so-called trauma culture. The notions of post-apocalypse and trauma seem to go together, share a sensibility. In today’s media environment, chock-full with speculative narratives relating to massive future disasters and their aftermath, the moniker of post-apocalyptic culture again seems particularly apt (Colebrook 2017: 1022). However – and this remark is not limited to contemporary narratives – when the readings of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fictions become too fully governed by the concern with past trauma or present-day cultural anxieties, the futural dimension of these narratives easily gets lost. Fictions of a destroyed future thus risk being reduced to escapist fantasies or a form of semi-traumatic replay, in which “the most dystopic visions of contemporary science fiction can do no more than replicate the historical catastrophes of the twentieth century” (Berger 1999: 37). Clearly, such an approach must now – at the latest – be questioned. While the future is necessarily a projection from the present, it also for its part conditions the present, projects meaning back into it. In a specific sense, the present acquires its form only by way of its future: while that future itself is yet to exist, it has to be speculatively posited in order to tap into the fundamental logic of “what will have been” (future anterior), which serves to locate the present and existentially – at least in fantasy – secure its meaning. In the current material, political and cultural predicament, it seems that the narrative genre of post-apocalyptic fiction has become one of the foremost ways, through its inflection of our present by way of future-as-disaster (to modify a term from Eva Horn 2018), to think and feel through the experience of threatening, even traumatic future. To make this general point, the first part of the present chapter sketches some outlines regarding 349

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the contemporary structures of future threat, while the second focuses on how the basic coordinates of post-apocalyptic literature may bear on how we make sense of the present. Of course, post-apocalyptic fictions vary a great deal, belonging to a number of generic discourses from ecological utopia to zombie hunting, from juvenile fantasy to the decidedly weird. The observations of the present chapter may or may not apply to a given postapocalyptic discourse, narrative subgenre or individual work, but they principally refer to believable or conceivable speculative scenarios of a decidedly devastated future. These are in this chapter represented cursorily (as an occasional illustration rather than an object of interpretation) by Cormac McCarthy’s critically acclaimed novel The Road (McCarthy 2010), which describes the monotonous journey of two nameless protagonists, a man and his son, through a landscape completely devastated by an equally nameless disaster.

Shifting futures of threat Jacques Derrida, in his dialogue with Giovanna Borradori, contests the notion that a traumatic event is only “linked to presence or to the past, to the taking place of what has happened, once and for all, in an undeniable fashion” (Borradori 2003: 96). Speaking specifically to the significance of the 9/11 attacks (very recent to the dialogue), Derrida suggests that we should “rethink the temporalization of a traumatism” in order to understand how the wound conferred by such an event “remains open by our terror before the future and not only the past” (Borradori 2003: 96): The ordeal of the event has as its tragic correlate not what is presently happening or what has happened in the past but the precursory signs of what threatens to happen. It is the future that determines the unappropriability of the event, not the present or the past. Or at least, if it is the present or the past, it is only insofar as it bears on its body the terrible sign of what might or perhaps will take place, which will be worse than anything that has ever taken place. (Borradori 2003: 96–7) These remarks on the unappropriability of the event echo Cathy Caruth’s much-iterated formulation that a traumatic experience remains in an important sense “unclaimed” (Caruth 1996). In this sense, trauma is already by standard definition futural, carrying its full impact and fundamental meaning toward the horizon of an unrealized and perhaps unrealizable future. But Derrida here shifts the emphasis, suggesting that what might be most traumatizing in an event like 9/11 is the way it gestures towards the possibility of future-as-disaster. The traumatic temporality of what Derrida describes is, in his words, defined by “an impresentable to come (à venir)” (Borradori 2003: 97). Derrida specifies that this futural trauma, in its radical unappropriability, is also resistant to being conceived of in the mode of future anterior – as what will have been (Borradori 2003: 97). The future anterior, in this view, is a figure of both linguistic-conceptual and experiential appropriation, an attempt to extend the gesture of anticipation to what – if we are dealing with an event in the strong sense (see for example Borradori 2003: 90) – by definition finally escapes expectation. However, the future’s resistance to the logic of future anterior should not be understood as signalling immunity – and while Derrida’s suspicion of the future anterior must be noted, it seems that he would concur. As Derrida writes, the “experience of an event, the mode according to which it affects us, calls for a movement of appropriation” and so also “interpretation on the basis of a horizon of anticipation” (Borradori 2003: 90). While an event 350

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proper causes this appropriation to finally fail, the very structure of something which we designate as an event pulls in two directions, demanding identification and interpretation while also resisting it. Further, it seems that a form of the future anterior is at play also in withholding our definite pronouncement regarding the meaning of a given event. It is only the possibility that an event, in the light of some future consequence, development or insight, will have been in some significant sense different from our current estimate, which holds us from declaring that estimate as final. This concerns a fortiori the futural aspect of trauma, in the sense espoused by Derrida: if a given traumatic instance is not (affectively) defined by its past and present effects but even more so by “the threat of the worst to come” (Borradori 2003: 97), such a structure by necessity carries the imaginative traces of a future speculatively realized, however unknowable its form and content might remain. We need not represent this future and the concomitant future anterior to ourselves “as if we could see it as already having happened” (Klein 2008: 175) for it to enjoy a shadow existence, indeed to be defined solely by the shadow it casts on the present: to exist as a threat whose veracity is only attested to by the fear it evokes. While the events of 9/11, like the terrorist menace which they came to paradigmatically signal, harbour a very distinct affective logic of threat, their “traumatic effect on the future” is as such nothing new or unique (Wood 2006: 287). Accordingly, Derrida’s demand to “rethink the temporalization of a traumatism” (Borradori 2003: 96) has implications beyond the likes of his chosen event. Even if 9/11 came to signify, for a time and in a certain context, the possibility of “the worst”, in Matthew Gumpert’s words “the singularity of the catastrophe is always compromised, always multiplied, by the traces of other catastrophes” (Gumpert 2012: liii; cf. Rothberg 2009). To take the most ready historical example, the period after the Second World War and specifically the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw an even more global and long-lasting period of cultural anxiety, marked by the potential space of future catastrophe. The existential and textual futures summoned by the spectre of a complete nuclear holocaust have been extensively analysed by a critical pursuit called nuclear criticism (notably including a seminal essay by Derrida 1984). While the work on the cultural and literary history of the Cold War is obviously not over, Daniel Cordle has suggested that one of the main tasks of nuclear criticism today is precisely to historicize today’s futural disasters, end-time visions and abuses of exceptionalist rhetoric, articulate the cultural genealogies of anxiety and threat (Cordle 2006: 1196). What is different, then, in today’s structures of threat? The answer, for which I can provide just some rough coordinates, will have to take into account the changed nature both of actual threats and of their role in media and culture more generally. One general frame is given in Paul Virilio’s remark that, since the end of the Cold War, we have moved from expecting “The Great War” (which was preceded and partly paralleled by the expectation of “The Great Revolution”) to expecting “The Great Accident” (Virilio 2002: 176–7). The sense of threat has not diminished but only further dispersed into ecological, technological, epidemiological, religious and ethnic fears and even the iconic “Doomsday Clock” (adorning the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) has since 2007 begun to register also non-nuclear threats (Wallace 2016: 2). The threat of nuclear strike, also, remains present in a new guise: in Derrida’s view, the 9/11 in fact marks a situation more unsettling than the US–USSR arms race, since global and potentially nuclear terrorism is not checked by a balance of forces or calculation (Borradori 2003: 98). And the figure of catastrophic climate change, along with other ecodisasters reverberating into the future, looms large and increasingly near. (In this volume, climate trauma is covered by Stef Craps and consequently 351

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not here addressed at length.) In sum, to follow Brian Massumi’s formulation, the current global situation is defined by its “capacity to produce new threats at any and every moment”; even more than directly threatening, it is “threat generating: threat-o-genic” (Massumi 2007: para. 13; see Beck 2009). Regarding the question of media environment, and bypassing the general effects of the digital age on perceptions of threat (the volumes of anxiety-inducing data, social media bubbles, coordinated abuse of echo chambers, surveillance and paranoia, etc.), we can turn to Richard Grusin’s argument concerning the contemporary attempt to “premediate” the future (Grusin 2004; for an extended account see, Grusin 2010). His primary claim concerns the way in which the news media has increasingly taken on “a prophetic or predictive role of reporting on what might happen”, in contrast to what has already happened (Grusin 2004: 23; emphasis added). This development itself predates 9/11 by more than a decade, relating in Grusin’s words “to a shift in news reporting from historically oriented technologies like print, photography, and film to such real-time technologies as video and the Internet” (23), but it markedly intensified after the attack (and seems not to have waned by 2019). The fall of the Twin Towers, Grusin claims, “produced the desire or determination never to experience anything that has not already been premediated” (24–5). To translate this into Derrida’s terms, there is an increased fear of l’avenir, and an increased desire to see the future through the anticipatory mode of the future anterior. While the main weight of Grusin’s argument lies with the changing logic of how the news media covers and analyses events (and non-events), it resonates well with media and popular culture more broadly. Images of future-as-disaster abound and are interpreted in the light of events and fears current to their production and reception. Furthermore, Mary Manjikian draws attention to the fact that people are often unable to consistently distinguish what they know about disasters based on (what are presented as) facts as compared to fictional accounts – a “blurring” that can be intentionally produced by the fiction, which often incorporates science and documentary accounts (Manjikian 2012: 19). Accordingly, the still ongoing boom of post-apocalyptic fiction, on screen and in literature, should be understood in relation to both the cultural need for premediation and its seizing by the commodity market. If we entertain Grusin’s further claim that the basic purpose of premediation is actually to maintain a low-level anxiety as a shelter from a potentially traumatic future (Grusin 2004: 29), making accurate predictions matters less than to “imagine or map out as many possible futures as could plausibly be imagined” (28). When it comes to experiencing the future, fact and fiction, like enjoyment and anxiety, happily mix. Briefly put, through the combined efforts of the “threat-o-genic” present and its obsessive, recursive mirroring by the media and popular culture, threat has become something like an atmospheric element of our increasingly anxious age. As such, its precise sources are ultimately impossible to locate: even though threat is routinely reduced to an explicable risk, side effect or sign, as “the complexity of social and symbolic life arrays its defences to keep threat on the side of the symbolic” (Van Wyck 2005: 101–2), Peter van Wyck argues that its containment ultimately fails. While we may and do attempt to forestall particular threats, the sense of threat itself “cannot be prepared for”, since it is not a particular “object” to which a fear may be attached, nor is it simply a shock or surprise that frightens. The kind of injury that threat produces is difficult to see; it is as though we are wounded though cannot express that fact, nor how it came to be. (Van Wyck 2005: 102) 352

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The view from post-apocalypse In light of the above, it is understandable that (post)apocalyptic narratives are criticized for focusing their attention on a single major catastrophe, framed as a point-like event. Consider The Road: “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions” (McCarthy 2010: 54). Even if such scenarios of an instant end were apt in the Cold War era of Mutually Assured Destruction, they may feel out-of-sync with today’s causally diffuse and unevenly distributed threats. Accordingly, it has been argued that these futural visions distract us from the actual global disasters, which are irreducible to a single location in time due either to their nature of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) or to the uncertainties, feedback loops and hatching times involved. (There is an important analogy, here, to the criticism levelled at the traditional and narrow conception of trauma, which focuses on sudden and shattering events at the expense of more slow-burning, structural or mediated traumas.) This criticism against the clear-cut character of apocalyptic scenarios is often intertwined with criticism concerning their futurality. In Karen Pinkus’s representative formulation, in the foreword to a special issue on “climate change criticism”, “we cannot allow ourselves to reflect back on this time from a future as post-catastrophic or post-apocalyptic since anthropogenic climate change is ongoing rather than eventual or unilinear” (Pinkus 2013: 3–4). Instead of acknowledging that we are already living the crisis, already living through the “slow apocalypse” (McMurry 1996), contemporary culture (including economic and political culture) seems to relegate the encounter with trauma too easily to the future; and it might further be suggested that our trouble in acknowledging the current and “slow” disasters is partly due to the cultural imagery we’ve come to associate with sudden upheavals. It has been suggested that traumatic narratives, wherein the reader or spectator witnesses (by proxy) disasters which she then obviously outlives, may provide “a symbolic means of managing anxiety about mortality and social death” (Ball 2000: 19). Even though postapocalyptic narratives ostensibly place the reader in a somewhat different situation, prompting the thought of a possible future which she (or today’s society) has not survived, they can be argued to perform a similar role. These views clearly contrast with E. Ann Kaplan’s argument that the ongoing boom in near-future disaster narratives both “evidences” (Kaplan 2015: 1) and “induces” (3) a severe futural anxiety, which she boldly terms “pre-traumatic stress syndrome”, but they need not wholly contradict it. (For a more detailed account of the notion of pre-traumatic stress, see Stef Craps’s chapter.) If we allow that individuals or groups be traumatized by projections of future-as-disaster, as Kaplan suggests, their extreme anxiety might actually be bolstered just because it is not shared in similar proportions by the culture-at-large. Van Wyck indeed notes that the “traumatic force” of environmental threats is in large part due to the distressing fact that the society “refuses to allow threats to register as concerns or transforms them into something entirely different” (Van Wyck 2005: 117) – business opportunities, lifestyle choices. (All this might be either contrary or complementary to Grusin’s argument about the current need to maintain a low-level of anxiety in order to avoid the shock of trauma, depending on whether trauma and anxiety are defined in line with that Freudian view of their relation.) The criticisms of post-apocalyptic fiction are, to be sure, not unfounded. Nevertheless, to gain a more charitable perspective, we must shift the emphasis from the “apocalypse” to the “post”. As with the phenomenon of trauma, which has as its core not only a given traumatic situation but also – even especially – its troubling aftermath, in Caruth’s words “the 353

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unbearable nature of its survival” (Caruth 1996: 7), post-apocalyptic fictions are often principally about surviving. To take the example of The Road, the most suggestive locus for the adult protagonist’s trauma is arguably not the apocalyptic event, or even the parallel disaster of his wife’s suicide, but a more fundamental undoing of the past world: as the world loses its future, the past’s character retroactively shifts, turns colour, and he himself becomes (to the boy, perhaps, but most of all to himself) “[a] being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect” (McCarthy 2010: 162; for readings of The Road drawing on trauma theory, see Rambo 2008; Caruth 2008; Wicks 2014; Kaplan 2015). We find here, in the thematic of survival, of remembering and forgetting, and above all in the problem of making sense – not only surviving but having meaning survive or be reconstituted – some of the most interesting links between trauma theory and the post-apocalyptic genre. Amanda Wicks indeed suggests that while not “all post-apocalyptic works are traumatic or […] all trauma narratives register in the apocalyptic vein, the two overlap in ways that could expand the increasingly interdisciplinary field of trauma studies, as well as memory studies” (Wicks 2014: 215). Be that as it may, post-apocalyptic fiction lends itself well to interpretations informed by the notion of trauma, even if the prominent texts of trauma theory, perhaps due to the politics and aesthetics of genre, have tended to lack a corresponding interest in post-apocalyptic fiction. However, to get at the principal value of post-apocalyptic narratives in engaging with future-as-disaster, and to gauge the latter’s potentially traumatic impact, we must transpose the thematic of survival from an intra-textual matter into the temporal and existential situation that these narratives suggest to the reader. For this, we need to return to the notion of future anterior, which concisely marks the speculative relation between a post-apocalyptic narrative and its presumed audience (Kearney 2012: 163; Vermeulen 2017; Horn 2018). In this context, the future anterior should not be understood primarily as a grammatical tense relating to the future, but in Mark Currie’s words as “a mode of experience in the present, […] a retention embedded within a protention, which transforms the present into the object of a future memory” (Currie 2013: 68). Postapocalyptic literature effects this, very simply, by casting the speculative future as heir to the present world of us the readers, thus prompting the thought of our world as ruined. This dynamic is usually (again, as in The Road) performed by scattering the desolated landscape with material ruins, by analeptic episodes in narration and/or by focalized flashbacks, dreams and reveries. Currie makes the point, resonating with Grusin’s remarks on premediation, that something in the future anterior seems to speak to our day and age, as “the anticipatory structures of the existential moment are reified by our archiving technologies, inscribed in our cultural imaginings and inherent in our self-periodisations” (Currie 2013: 69). And indeed, in recent years there has been a growing interest in this “anticipation of retrospection”, especially (but not only) in connection with the futural perspectives which govern the discourses of climate change and the Anthropocene (e.g. Aravamudan 2013; Bayly 2013; DeRosa 2014; Garrard 2014; Craps 2017; Crownshaw 2017; Vermeulen 2017). To focus on just one representative example, Claire Colebrook takes the current popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction to indicate that “we are now feeling (if not thinking) a new relation between the human species and time”, tied to the dawning acknowledgement that the human species “will one day have had its time” (Colebrook 2014: 199). According to Colebrook, it is the postapocalyptic narratives’ job to try to capture the sense of “inhuman” time resulting from these considerations, even though they standardly pull back from annihilation in a replaying of humanity’s “semi-traumatic” undoing and eventual return/redemption (199). Suggesting that we 354

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take the post-apocalyptic as “a deconstructive genre”, she prompts us to read texts like The Road not as the end of ‘the world’ but as the fictional adoption of a point of view that might gaze upon ‘our’ world as an odd exception, as having had its time, and as falling into the violence, rapacity and self-consumption that was always one of its tendencies. (Colebrook 2016: 23) In this trajectory probed by Colebrook and others, the relative calm and sense of progress characterising our day and age is a short-lived exception, chronically blind to the prospect of its own disappearing. From this perspective, the “constant deferral of disaster”, which Cordle notes to be the signature Cold War experience (Cordle 2006: 1194–5), is an intensified instance of a much more general malaise, built into the near-inevitable development of our species’ increasingly rapacious relation to its environment. At issue here is not just the radical precarity of today’s world, but the way in which future-as-disaster reconfigures humanity’s self-understanding. Despite the actualized disasters from Auschwitz to atom bombs, despite also postmodernism and posthumanism, we still arguably function within the Enlightenment paradigm of progress, its belief in the future as that “horizon of ideality” in which “the practical projection of human ideals was to be taken for granted” (Wood 1990: 2). Colebrook articulates well, via Kant, the underlying motive force of this melioristic humanism: It is as though the actual life we live must be surpassed by a life that we would live, and it is as though actual humanity – a chaotic and disparate species responsible for so many recorded atrocities – must be surpassed by the idea of humanity. (Colebrook 2017: 1022) The thought of future-as-disaster, in not only pointing out the failures but compromising the transcendental condition (future) of rationality realizing itself in history, threatens to undo a modern history’s worth of how humanity makes sense. The imaginative power of narrative and media speculation has, of course, to be countered with a sense of the limits of irony, the difficulty of observing our accustomed processes of meaning-making from outside the context they themselves have set. But while we cannot casually exit our situated perspective via immersion in post-apocalyptic fictions, they may just help us make the absolutely necessary effort of thinking and acting “as if one’s world were ‘a’ world, capable of being imagined as at an end” (Colebrook 2016: 23).

What’s next? By way of conclusion, I wish to make three interrelated suggestions. First, rather than pitting a completely unforeseen future (à la l’avenir) against the reassured forecast of the future anterior, we should articulate more carefully the tensions and contradictions internal to the future anterior in its various uses. While the notion connects to moments of epistemic and epistemological hubris, aiming to undo the unpredictability of the future, it also functions as a form and formula of uncertainty. For one, by projecting a perspective-to-be, the future anterior implies that what we now know, we might only think we know; the certainties, even the feelings we own, we may well come to disown. This is, of course, not only or 355

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primarily a matter of apocalyptic shifts – or rather, the apocalypse should now be taken in the term’s original meaning of revelation, an unveiling. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, in what might well be a slogan for our current life on the brink of ecodisaster, “The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices” (Emerson 1950: 288). Or, Derrida: “The future can only be anticipated in the form of absolute danger. It is what breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can therefore only announce or present itself in the form of monstrosity” (Derrida 1997 [1967]: 5). Second, and keeping with the sense of apocalypse as a (secular) unveiling, we might think further about how the psychoanalytic notion of Nachträglichkeit (“afterwardsness”, in Laplanche’s translation) may inform our take on the perspective of future anterior that is prompted by narratives of future-as-disaster. What Nachträglichkeit adds to the problematic of the future anterior, in addition to the explicit thematic of trauma itself, is the dynamic of deferral, in which a given traumatic event only buds forth symptoms (and becomes in the first place marked as traumatic) only at a later date (for concise accounts see Eickhoff 2006; Bistoen et al. 2014). Van Wyck takes a step in that direction, suggesting that threats of ecological disaster or nuclear contamination “mimic the structure of trauma” (Van Wyck 2005: 111), since the actualization of such threats is often verified only retroactively, after the advent of disaster. Drawing from Ulrich Beck’s formulations regarding today’s “world risk society”, Molly Wallace makes the similar observation that while we depend on calculations of risk and probability, we cannot wholly count on them; there is always an accident, somewhere, and something which today is deemed safe to consume may tomorrow be a cancer risk (Wallace 2016: 13; see Beck 2006: 345). Or, in the modus of future anterior – which, Wallace suggests, constitutes the signature tense of today’s risk society – it “will have been a cancer risk” (Wallace 2016: 13). On a more general level, we can ask with Wallace, “will the apocalypse have been now?” (Wallace 2016: 1). The apocalypse is only defined by the post-apocalypse, belatedly, and in the case of a slow and complex apocalypse like a global ecodisaster, there is in a sense no apocalypse before the post-apocalypse. The wound is already there, or here, we just do not quite sense its cultural and existential implications in their full weight. We here return to the thematic touched on by Colebrook and others, but perhaps her suggestion ought to be reversed: perhaps the main problem is not that we are not adequately thinking about humanity’s finitude, but that we are not sufficiently capable – and can that ever be a “we”? – of feeling it. As Slavoj Žižek noted, back in 2010, “we know the (ecological) catastrophe is possible, probable even, yet we do not believe it will really happen” (Žižek 2010: 328). Does anything change, in this troubled relation between acknowledgement and epistemic-emotional commitment, as we learn the catastrophe to be nigh-inevitable, perhaps already upon us? The trauma of apocalypse, the fact that there indeed was an apocalyptic process brewing, hidden in plain sight among the ever-present discourse on apocalyptic disaster, perhaps comes to be felt only later. (By way of disclaimer, this suggestion of “anticipatory Nachträglichkeit” must be seen as only analogous to the psychoanalytic notion, either in the latter’s application to individuals or its extrapolations concerning cultural trauma. While the psychical or cultural processes at play must be different, I am encouraged by Robert Eaglestone’s suggestion that the logic of Nachträglichkeit might apply to strictly speaking nontraumatic phenomena, which nevertheless share some key features with the discourse and phenomenon of trauma; Eaglestone 2014: 17). Third, we should pay detailed attention to the extent in which fictions of future-asdisaster have shifted from narratives of warning into narratives of mourning. This purported shift, here presented as a hypothesis (drawing from Colebrook, Vermeulen 2017 and the 356

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broader discourse around anticipatory mourning), is reflected to an extent in the narrative content, but might have even more to do with the cultural role and reception of narratives. It would no doubt connect to the wider cultural prevalence of the discourses on trauma, nostalgia and generally on remembering, and also tie in directly with the combined severity and ambiguity of the threats we face. On the face of it, the suggestion may seem to be at odds with Richard Grusin’s claim that the cultural desire of “premediating” the future has increased. However, the main function of premediation differs from prediction or forecasting – notions which align, more directly, with narratives of warning – and rather concerns the concerted effort to come to grips with what might be called (after Paul Saint-Amour) “a conditional space of catastrophe” (Saint-Amour 2000: 60). This condition, this conditional, has now become chronic. From this perspective, the proleptic or anticipatory mourning, performed through today’s post-apocalyptic fiction, constitutes a powerful premediation. More than simply warnings or fantasies of release from the day-to-day (though they perform those functions as well), today’s fictions of future-as-disaster both rehearse and perform the mourning for “our” world.

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Jouni Teittinen Eickhoff, F.-W. (2006) “On Nachträglichkeit: The Modernity of an Old Concept”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 87: 1453–69. Emerson, R. W. (1950) The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, New York: Random House. Garrard, G. (2014) “Climate Change and the Art of Memory”, The Memory Network 18 March 2014, [Audio file]. http://thememorynetwork.net/climate-change-and-the-art-of-memory-greg-garrard/ Grusin, R. (2004) “Premediation”, Criticism 46(1): 17–39. ———. (2010) Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gumpert, M. (2012) The End of Meaning: Studies in Catastrophe, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Heffernan, T. (2008) Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Horn, E. (2018) The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, New York: Columbia University Press. Kaplan, E. A. (2015) Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kearney, K. (2012) “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Frontier of the Human”, Literature Interpretation Theory 23(2): 160–78. Klein, R. (2008) “Knowledge of the Future: Future Fables”, Diacritics 38(1): 173–79. Manjikian, M. (2012) Apocalypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End, Plymouth: Lexington Books. Massumi, B. (2007) “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption”, Theory & Event 10(2): n.p. McCarthy, C. (2010) The Road, London: Picador. McMurry, A. (1996) “The Slow Apocalypse: A Gradualistic Theory of the World’s Demise”, Postmodern Culture 6(3): n.p. Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Pinkus, K. (2013) “From The Editor: Climate Change Criticism”, Diacritics 41(3): 3–4. Rambo, S. (2008) “Beyond Redemption?: Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road after the End of the World”, Studies in the Literary Imagination 41(2): 99–120. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Saint-Amour, P. (2000) “Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny”, Diacritics 30(4): 59–82. Van Wyck, P. (2005) Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Vermeulen, P. (2017) “Future Readers: Narrating the Human in the Anthropocene”, Textual Practice 31 (5): 867–85. Virilio, P. (2002) Crepuscular Dawn, Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e). Wallace, M. (2016) Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Wicks, A. (2014) “The Imagined After: Re-Positioning Social Memory through Twentieth-Century PostApocalyptic Literature and Film”, Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Doctoral Dissertations 557. Wood, D. (1990) “Introduction: Editing the Future”, in D. Wood (ed.) Writing the Future, London: Routledge. ———. (2006) “On Being Haunted by the Future”, Research in Phenomenology 36: 274–98. Žižek, S. (2010) Living in the End Times, London: Verso.

Further reading Beck, U. (2009) World at Risk, Cambridge: Polity Press. (Ulrich Beck’s classic sociological account of world risk society, updated.) Berger, J. (1999) After the End: Representations of the Post-Apocalypse, Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. (Notable work of cultural analysis on the late-twentieth-century post-apocalyptic sensibilities.) David, H. (2017) “Bibliographical Resources for Nuclear Criticism”, Angelaki 22(3): 165–73. (Annotated selection of both old and new research relating to nuclear criticism.)

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Post-apocalyptic fiction Horn, E. (2018) The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, New York: Columbia University Press. (Historically grounded examination of how various imaginaries of disaster have come to define the modern relationship to the future, and what is particular about its currently prevalent forms.) Hicks, H. (2016) The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity beyond Salvage, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (Valuable readings of recent post-apocalyptic texts as interrogations of modernity.) Tate, A. (2017) Apocalyptic Fiction, London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. (Concise introduction to the thematics of contemporary apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, with guide to secondary reading.)

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PART V

Places and events

33 TRAUMA IN HOLOCAUST LITERATURE Sue Vice

The notion of trauma in Holocaust literature might seem to rest on a paradox, evident in Anne Whitehead’s question: “if trauma comprises an event or experience which overwhelms the individual and resists language or representation, how then can it be narrativised?” (Whitehead 2004: 3). Whitehead is referring here to fiction, in her study of a wide range of historical contexts that have given rise to traumatic responses in literary form, including but not limited to the Holocaust. Indeed, those elements of trauma as described by Freud (1922), and reconceived by others such as Cathy Caruth (1996) and Roger Luckhurst (2008), present a profound challenge to literary form. As Caruth puts it, trauma “describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Caruth 1996: 11). Trauma’s disturbances of both memory and of its communication make efforts to “narrativize” or represent responses to calamity of this kind hard to represent in conventional ways. The literary versions of such a psychic phenomenon are therefore characterized by a range of features. These include the impression of great proximity to the “catastrophic events”, even when a retrospective narrative position is adopted; the repetition of occurrences or utterances; the representation of frozen moments of an overtly or implicitly horrifying nature, in the form of episodes, stories, images or phrases; an inability to understand what has taken place; and an absence of redemptive narrative closure.

The Holocaust as paradigmatic trauma The question of the Holocaust’s particular relation to literary trauma theory of this kind, since it is often viewed as “the determining catastrophe that inaugurates the trauma paradigm” (Luckhurst 2008: 5), is central to these formulations. We might wonder whether the Holocaust is just one in a series of catastrophes whose traumatic effects follow the same psychological and literary pattern, even as the specificity of each historical context differs. A sense that the Holocaust might take a distinctive form is not simply due to the fact that the atrocities of the Holocaust had a communal, widespread, legalized and long-drawn-out form, rather than the single moment of unanticipated and life-threatening danger that Freud outlines in his writing on shellshock (Freud 1922). Rather, a sense of distinctiveness of this 363

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kind might arise from the ontological status of the Holocaust. With the hindsight of historiography and philosophy, and that of individual memory and representation, it has come to be seen as a series of events which exposed the fallacy of human self-conceptions of value and progress within history. In this sense, the Holocaust could be said to have exerted a traumatic effect not only on individual survivors but on western culture itself, which remains afflicted by the wound of this occurrence even, or especially, when it is not at the forefront of consciousness (Lyotard 1988 [1983]: 57). Thus, the Holocaust’s relation to what Luckhurst calls “the trauma paradigm” is itself characterized by a paradox: either it is an event “so anomalous and of such radical nature” that it cannot be assimilated to any other traumatic structure, or it is an extreme version “of characteristics found elsewhere and as such poses no new conceptual problems” (Halberstam 1981: 277), nor provokes new literary forms. This uncertainty affects at least the way in which Holocaust literature is read, even if these works cannot provide an answer to such a conceptual conundrum. While fictional genres of Holocaust literature could be described as “mimicking” the “forms and symptoms” of trauma, with its collapsed chronology, lapses in recall, “repetition and indirection” (Whitehead 2004: 3), there are also inevitably elements of such artistry present in the first-person non-fiction texts of testimony and memoir. It might rather seem that the traceable effects of trauma in autobiographical works are the direct and unplanned expressions of a psychological state. However, the very readability of non-fiction accounts of traumatic recall relies on the opposite impulse to that of fiction, where disruption and intrusion are the result of construction. In testimony, psychic chaos has to be presented in terms of the clarity of literary structure.

Trauma in testimony In this way, Primo Levi’s testimony If This Is a Man (1988 [1947]) can be viewed as an early example of a work that exemplifies the complex intertwining of trauma’s psychic and physical assault. The exact balance of these two elements in considering trauma continues to provoke debate (Luckhurst 2008: 6), and the extremity of both in the case of the Holocaust might make it appear to be the condition’s “ultimate” expression (Hunter 2018). As well as explicitly addressing the bodily and the psychological assaults of the Nazis’ camp universe, Levi’s testimony enacts the features of traumatic aftershock in its narrative construction. Indeed, they are shown to take place at once. Levi’s continuing to characterize that world as “the Lager”, using the German word for “camp”, rather than by the more abstract terms “Holocaust” or “Shoah” which have since become standard, itself makes his account seem located in the moment of its occurrence. Levi’s concern is with the dehumanization that precedes physical murder, and he describes the effect of the camp world as “this offence, the demolition of a man” (Levi 1988 [1947]: 32). Such destruction, of “a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time […] of everything he possesses”, so that he “easily loses himself”, gives the very term “extermination camp” a “double sense” (33). Its inmates are destroyed twice, first psychically and then physically. The very fact that Levi’s testimony often uses the present tense suggests not so much the form of a “diary” (Jacobson 2013), or the presence of a literary device, but rather the inability of the traumatized individual to experience the “offence” as located in the past. This is clear when Levi takes on the difficult task of describing the experience of great physical hardship, in an episode in which pairs of men are made to carry “cast-iron supports” to the camp railway. Levi’s “companion” is Null Achtzehn, named thus “after the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer 364

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a man” (Levi 1988 [1947]: 42). Levi’s concern throughout his testimony is with the nature of what it is to be human (“a man”), and in this case, Null Achtzehn has become so careless of his own welfare that his physical death is sure to follow the psychic one that has already occurred. While such experiences are a part of the trauma-inducing circumstances, it is the narrative temporality that succeeds in conveying that state’s characteristic intrusion of the past as if it were still present, as Levi adds in his description of Null Achtzehn: “I think that even he has forgotten his name” (42). The reader is caused to stumble over the temporal construction of Levi’s phrase “I think”: although at first it sounds as if the author is reflecting on Null Achtzehn in the present moment of writing, the rest of the sentence reveals that the notional present is in fact that of the camp world, when Null Achtzehn was still alive – “even he has forgotten”. This represents a confluence of the two time-frames, as if the past has overcome Levi even as he evokes it. Levi’s style in his account of the eleven months he spent in Auschwitz, principally in Buna where he was set to work in an artificial rubber factory, has been described as “scientific” (Wood 2015). Yet the apparently calm and deliberately detailed way in which Levi represents the camp world could be seen as another expression of the traumatized subject’s frozen or numbed view of past events. The denouement of the episode with Null Achtzehn reveals a sudden change to a gulf between past and present, rather than their indistinguishability, as Levi describes this moment in the camp world with extreme clarity but an absence of overt emotion, either revealed or described: It is enough, I cannot go any further, the load is now weighing entirely on my arm. I cannot stand the pain and exhaustion any longer: I shout, I try to turn around, just in time to see Null Achtzehn trip and throw everything down. If I had still my agility of earlier days, I could have jumped back. Instead, here I am on the ground, with all my muscles contracted, the wounded foot tight between my hands, blind with pain. The corner of the piece of iron had cut across the back of my foot. (Levi 1988 [1947]: 44) Levi’s account manages to maintain the distance of his wish in the present to provide “documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind” (Levi 1988 [1947]: 15), along with the events’ immediacy, his weak and vulnerable state and the catastrophe of a physical mishap in the circumstances of the camp. This is not so much “scientific” accuracy as a horror akin to that of a silent film in which a “shout” is seen, or in this case described, but not heard. We learn of the effect of Levi’s injury, “here I am on the ground”, before he tells us what caused it: “the piece of iron had cut across the back of my foot”. In this way, something of the original structure of Freud’s analysis of shellshock is evident, in which he argues that this “physioneurosis”, in which somatic and psychological aspects appear together, arises from the lack of anticipation of a shocking event (Freud 1922: 607). In Levi’s case, the physical injury is overwhelming in the instant, so that even at the time he only belatedly recognizes its source. Long after the physical damage has healed, the psychic wound of an unanticipated blow remains.

Poetry as trauma The apparently “scientific” narrative mode of Levi’s If This Is a Man, which nonetheless reveals the structure of trauma’s unintegrated flashes of memory and the subject’s experiencing the past as if it were present, is part of an extensive and largely chronologically 365

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presented narrative. By contrast, the notion of a sharply defined but unintegrated memory, which cannot be situated by the traumatized subject in an explanatory narrative frame, is readily shown by poetic efforts to express or represent such a state. Although long narrative poems on Holocaust-related subjects do exist, including Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975), it is the short, intimate form of the lyric that seems a promising vehicle for trauma in its centring on a single speaker’s emotion and memory. Further, unlike prose, poetry can be read as both testimonial and aesthetic (Rowland 2014), although matters of a poet’s biography may nevertheless be invoked to different ends. Sylvia Plath’s lyric poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”, both written in 1962, in which a speaker acts out “awful little Holocaust allegories” in the context of patriarchal and familial oppression, have been both criticized and praised as works by someone with no connection to the events (Steiner 1969; Smith 1982). On the other hand, the poems of the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, both of whose parents died during the war and who was himself a slave-labourer, are read entirely in relation to this biographical connection. Celan’s linguistic self-consciousness is thus invariably seen, particularly in the context of his writing in German, as that of a specifically postHolocaust kind. Countering such a generalizing view, Marjorie Perloff has argued that, for example, Celan’s 1959 poem “Sprachgitter”, translated as “Speech Grille” or “Language Mesh”, can be read in the more concrete terms of its postwar modernist techniques and collection of specific references, including the title’s invocation of the image of a church’s “confessional screen”. This makes it, in Perloff’s judgement, as much “a poem about failed love, failed communion, both between lovers and between the poet and his God”, as about the more general notion of a “post-Holocaust estrangement from language” (Perloff 2006: 198). It is as if the Holocaust-related concerns of Celan’s celebrated poem “Todesfuge” of 1947, which takes a wartime forced-labour camp as its setting, along with the details of his biography and his suicide in 1970, have determined the reading of the rest of his oeuvre and turned poetic concerns into those expressing trauma. My next example, that of Heimrad Bäcker’s concrete poetry in his transcript (nachschrift) of 1986, is of a different kind in relation to both poetic genre and what could be called its position or viewpoint. The trauma to which it testifies is not that of a survivor but of a perpetrator, or, more specifically, that of a perpetrating social group as voiced by one of its former members. Here it is not the survivor’s experience of powerlessness, unexpected shock or of facing one’s own death that is at stake, but the inability to forget the details of atrocity and one’s responsibility for it. The reader is witness to the intrusion of the past into the present in the form of its precise documents and utterances, as well as the difficulty of communication arising from a traumatized viewpoint that is characterized by shame and guilt. Bäcker’s transcript draws upon material from many wartime and postwar sources, ranging from railway timetables to legal trials, Gestapo reports and letters by senior Nazis, as well as writings and utterances from the victims themselves, with an effect that is both documentary yet also abstract. The volume consists of short, untitled verbatim extracts from what Bäcker calls the “deadly gibberish” (Bäcker 2010: 131) of a wide range of wartime bureaucratic and other historical sources, set out as free-verse poetry. These extracts are not for the most part presented in the form of first-person utterance, constituting instead strings of abbreviations and figures, truncated phrases and lists, reformatted in different styles, their punctuation and capitalization removed or transformed. In this way, such material “demands to be deciphered” (Greaney, quoted in Bäcker 2010: 149) by the reader, on several semantic and temporal levels. Many of the individual poems or scenarios include the repetition of 366

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a phrase or a conjunction that implies a causal or explanatory relationship to an atrocity, which is exposed even as it is taken for granted. For instance, we read the following four lines from a two-page extract of what is clearly a list of infringements of the Nuremberg Laws in Austria, starting with illegal activities by Jews – “because she was loitering in the prater […] / because he constantly violated the curfew” (Bäcker 2010: 12) – and concludes with judgements against non-Jews:

because she kept a jew in hiding because she kept a jew in hiding because she kept the jewish married couple in hiding because she allowed goldstajn, who is blind, to live with them for the last few months (Bäcker 2010: 13) Concealed yet displayed in each line is a cumulative narrative of everyday life under laws that were themselves criminal. The punishment administered “because” of the so-called infringements is not included, making that conjunction instead explanatory of the eventual project of genocide. The repetitive bureaucratic wording, including that of identical phrases, reveals that the same act kept taking place. The poem conveys the gaze of a later traumatized subject, one who has read these documents and cannot shake off their knowledge of the details of atrocity, as the repetition in the present reveals. It is no longer the original judgement that is the burden of these legal and grammatical sentences, but what was presented by them as incidental in terms of the syntax and its outcome, including the blindness of “goldstajn”, and the double significance of “the last” few months of his being sheltered, meaning both “the most recent” and “those that came at the end”. The “open” or montage nature of these quotations, in Henry Pickford’s (2008: 55) phrasing, which stand on their own rather than being enfolded in other sentences and are not marked out by quotation marks, makes the designation of “deadly gibberish” apply selfreflexively to Bäcker’s originally German-language poetic text as well as to the material itself. Yet, as the obvious reformatting alone suggests, the material in transcript is mediated by an implied editor-poet, as is true of Reznikoff’s more victim-focused poetry in Holocaust, which draws upon verbatim extracts from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials. Such mediation is clear from the very opening of transcript, where, in the place usually reserved for an epigraph, the first recto page after the contents, we read, “Is it true, are we really going to die?” (Bäcker 2010: 5). This question borrows the conventional quotation form of such an epigraph, in this case taken from Filip Müller’s witness statement at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (Greaney 2017). It assumes the heuristic function of guiding the reader into the verbal world of the text itself, ensuring that the significance of the blandest-seeming lines is apparent. However, the lamenting narrator, or transcriber, as evident in Reznikoff’s poem is replaced by an ambiguous, self-critical presence in Bäcker’s text. As critics have argued, the poet’s own biography, including his Austrian birth and wartime membership of the Hitler Youth and later the Nazi Party, is figured by the existence of the text at all, and specifically in the form of its inclusion of Bäcker’s handwritten entries (Greaney 2010: 42). When a first-person voice appears in transcript, it is not in the form of a lyric utterance, as in Plath’s poetry, but the quotation of an anterior source. Such citation takes the form for instance of a page-long litany of truncated first-person repudiations from unidentified voices, although comparison with the trial records reveals that the voices of infamous warcrimes trial defendants such as Robert Mulka and Pery Broad are among those quoted:

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i did not explain that i have to say I can’t remember i can’t remember anymore no i had nothing to do with prisoners i have only a dim recollection (Bäcker 2010: 111) Stylization, or what Bäcker calls the establishment of “new textual patterns” from preexisting material, draws attention to the dissolution of individuality in a communal effort to deny responsibility among the different defendants and, indeed, perhaps also the implied reader. The lower-case “I” draws attention to a splitting of the subject in the moment of its speaking, one that tells the truth in the act of lying. It also makes the reader take up the very same subject-position in the act of encountering the first-person utterance, enforcing an uncomfortable coalescence. Once more, the inescapable and overwhelming nature of traumatic literary expression is clear.

Trauma in fiction In the realm of novelistic Holocaust literature, examples which break away from conventional and realist narrative forms in their efforts to represent a traumatized subjectivity are surprisingly unusual. Anne Whitehead aptly uses as an example in her study of trauma fiction of this kind W. G. Sebald’s 2001 Austerlitz. The novel employs a distinctively digressive and indirect narrative construction to problematize what could otherwise seem to be a reparative concern with the eponymous character’s gradual retrieval of the memory of his Czech childhood and language. Whitehead’s second example of a Holocaust-related trauma fiction in her otherwise more general generic study is that of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments, published in 1995 as testimony but revealed to be an entirely fictional representation of the jumbled memories of its child-survivor narrator. Precisely because of Fragments’ fraudulence, the presence of traumatic features in a literary rather than a testimonial sense is strikingly clear in this case, as is its constructed rather than organic origin. Thus its protagonist’s photographic memory, his undergoing fragmentary and inexplicable memories of atrocity and being unable to enjoy a present-day life without the intrusions of past horror, are all the marks of its convincing literary rather than psychological status. Equally, traumatic psychic and moral damage is often most daringly represented or imagined in Holocaust fiction not in relation to survivors or victims, but in representations of perpetrators or the unwillingly complicit members of what Primo Levi calls “the grey zone”. In this way, temporal and narrative construction is thoroughly disrupted in Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow (1991), which represents in highly experimental form the life of Odilo Unverdorben, a former Nazi doctor. Unverdorben’s life is related in reverse, starting with his death, and by a first-person narrator who claims to reside in estranged form within Unverdorben’s body, as an entity constituting his cut-off conscience or soul. By these highly literary means, ethical questions about a perpetrator’s “split self”, as well as his and the reader’s spurious recourse to considering atrocities to have been inevitable, are given formal expression. Yet Unverdorben is shown to be traumatized by the memory of his own crimes in a way that the soul-narrator claims not to understand. He reacts badly to such triggers in the present as the smell of burning fingernail-clippings, is subject to recurrent nightmares and seeks absolution from a priest in an attempt to lay the traumatic effects of his own crimes to rest, in 368

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confessing to the irrepressible memory that, “We lost our feeling about the human body. Children, even. Tiny babies” (Amis 1991: 120). A different fictional version of a traumatized look back at atrocity for which the subject himself bears responsibility occurs in the writing of Tadeusz Borowski. During the war the Catholic Borowski was arrested in Warsaw in 1942 and sent as a political prisoner to Auschwitz, and his short stories about that experience, translated as This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, were originally published in Polish in 1948. The collection presents a version of Borowski’s two years in the camp by means of the device of a fictional alter-ego, a Kapo named Tadek. While Levi draws upon literary techniques in his testimony, Borowski does the opposite in transforming memoir into fiction, benefitting from the leeway it offers for shaping and patterning, as well as allowing for the uncertain status of events. The first name shared by author and protagonist takes the role, as critics have argued, of a moral statement (Kott, in Borowski 1976: 9). Borowski was thus able to analyse being at once the Nazis’ victim and, as the Czech writer Czesław Miłosz puts it, “an accessory to the crime” (Miłosz 2001 [1953]: 119). Borowski’s stories centre on the horrifying contradictions the Kapo Tadek experiences, since he has to rely on the influx of Jews into Auschwitz in order to have enough to eat, yet hates the Nazis and the camp in which they have imprisoned him. At the ramp, Tadek lets deadpan description convey moral judgement, in observing that humans come last in a list of objects: “Trucks drive around, load up lumber, cement, people – a regular daily routine” (Borowski 1976: 34). Following such a style, we could take the stories in Borowski’s collection to represent in fictional form a traumatized retrospection, in which the narrator questions his own recall even as its flash-images intrude into his consciousness. Although Primo Levi describes his disbelief about a past that is nonetheless unforgettable – “Today at this very moment as I sit writing at a table, I am not convinced that these things really happened” (Levi 1988 [1947]: 161) – in the case of Tadek and his implied author, any such incredulity arises from a different kind of emotion. Tadek’s responses to his role in the camp are contradictory ones. He feels “furious” with the arriving prisoners, “because I must be here because of them”, as he tells Henri; the figure of a “tall, gray-haired woman” who descends from a train and whispers to him, “My poor boy” (Borowski 1976: 40), appears to be a hallucinatory personification of his anguished wish for absolution; while the sensation of what he calls “sticky moisture on my eyelids” seems to be a misrecognition of his tears at “the mounting, uncontrollable terror” (41, 45). “Terror” here refers to Tadek’s inner and outer worlds: to the Nazis’ state-sponsored violence, and to his own horror that he must take part in it. After the war, Borowski described in a letter written in February 1946 that he had seen “the death of a million people – literally, not metaphorically” (Borowski 2001: 8), and in the story great emphasis is placed on the numbers of victims involved in the “monstrous conveyor belt” of the trains’ arrival, the departure of the trucks to the gas chambers and the work of the SS in marking down the figures. Tadek uses the plural “we” to signal the awareness of those Kapos who are both witnesses and forced accomplices: “The marks swell into thousands, the thousands into whole transports, which afterwards we shall simply call ‘from Salonica’, ‘from Strasbourg’, ‘from Rotterdam’” (Borowski 1976: 39). The apparent connection between the observation in Borowski’s letter and the fictional Tadek’s experience allows us to see more specifically where the traumatized viewpoint is situated. Borowski’s retrospective awareness allows for a stunned appraisal of what actually happened, when at the time events occurred too overwhelmingly and unpredictably to be judged accurately. Trauma is, as Caruth argues, known only by its belated effects, so that the suffering 369

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undergone by Tadek can only be described in such a way when viewed from a later perspective. The immediacy of the world of the past in the stories and the absence of any signalling of this later viewpoint suggests that these are fictional versions of scenes which cannot be forgotten or assimilated into ordinary memory, as the title story’s opening line shows, with its abrupt and direct present-tense characterization of an alien world: “All of us walk around naked. The delousing is finally over and our striped suits are back from the tanks of Cyclone B solution, an efficient killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers” (29). From its survivor perspective, Ida Fink’s collection of short stories A Scrap of Time, originally published in 1983 in Polish, is nonetheless similar to Borowski’s in its constituting a fictional version of the author’s own experience in wartime Poland, where she and her sister survived by escaping the ghetto in their home-town of Zbarazh and living on Aryan papers. Like Borowski’s, Fink’s writing relies upon the distance and artifice of fiction by contrast to the stricter factual demands of autobiography. She claimed in an interview, “Everything I write is a reconstruction of the events excavated from memory” (Fink, quoted in Ginsburg 2006: 207), the term “reconstruction” revealing that fiction allows her to introduce elements of hearsay, second-hand report and imagination into the historical record. The presence of traumatized recall is made clear in the collection’s title story, where the “freezing of time” (Ginsburg 2006: 212) is a characteristic of the memories and the stories that represent them. The narrator speaks almost metafictionally in this vein: I want to talk about a certain time not measured in months and years. For so long I have wanted to talk about this time, and not in the way I will talk about it now, not just about this one scrap of time. I wanted to, but I couldn’t, I didn’t know how. I was afraid, too, that this second time, which is measured in months and years, had buried the other time under a layer of years, and that this second time had crushed the first and destroyed it within me. But no. Today, digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched by forgetfulness. (Fink 1990 [1983]: 3) This passage, which is prefatory to the recovery of the particular memory of a cousin’s murder, sounds as if it is the subjective account of a period of traumatic recall’s latency or suppression, followed by its reappearance in the form of insistent “scraps”, in possession of a chronology of its own. The title’s “scraps” thus refers to the stories themselves as well as the memories, suggesting that both forms represent and constitute a traumatic flashback. However, the memorial activity is presented by the narrator in a deceptively gentle and even pastoral atmosphere that belies its constituting the moment of recognizing the existence of mass murder. As she puts it, “Our transformation was not yet complete; we were still living out of habit in that old time […] on that lovely peaceful morning, filled with dry golden mists” (Fink 1990 [1983]: 4). The memories are apparently the product of effort on the subject’s part in the present, since they emerge as the result of “digging”, and the “second time” to which she refers is not that of trauma’s abolition of chronology after the fact, but an acknowledgement of the detail of historical atrocity: “This time was measured not in months but in a word – we no longer said ‘in the month of May’, but ‘after the first ‘action’, or after the second, or right before the third’” (4). Instead of the overt violence and brutality of Borowski’s stories, Fink’s centre on apparently inconsequential moments that sum up an interaction or event, or constitute a turningpoint in understanding, or in the trajectory towards a death which usually takes place 370

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outside the frame of the story (Horowitz 2009; Waligóra 2016: 27). Yet the presence of a traumatized subject is implied, as in Borowski’s case, by the very existence of the fiction, the construct of an eyewitness narrator and the role of the implied author. As with Levi, a careful delineation is used in Fink’s writing to represent chaotic horror. This is true for instance of the story titled simply by a series of five asterisks: “*****”. The asterisks suggest either an ellipsis of time, as if the story is the continuation of a longer narrative, since it is very short and does indeed begin in medias res; or the omission of a word or phrase, as if the implied author has given up in despair at the task of naming it. Thus the reasons for not titling this “scrap” are both literary and those arising from traumatized witness. As is the case for several of the stories, the first-person narrator is an observer from a distant vantagepoint, revealed by the opening: Hidden in the dark interiors of apartments, with our faces pressed against windowpanes damp from rain and from our rapid breaths, we, reprieved until next time, looked out at the condemned, who stood in the marketplace, in the same spot where on fair days the cheerful town erects its stalls. (Fink 1990 [1983]: 23) The scene of old men being rounded up is one of an atrocity that is just about to take place yet is still embedded in an everyday, domestic context, as the narrator’s description of their destination shows: “the green ravine near the railroad station where our children – their grandchildren – used to go sledding” (Fink 1990 [1983]: 23). Such a clash of registers characterizes the story’s central image, which is both its thematic and its traumatic heart. The moment is not frozen in the sense that its movement is captured by the narrator’s description, as the old men are led away: It was then – the old men of our town were already on their way and were passing their homes and the children and grandchildren hidden behind the windows – it was then that the door of one of those houses opened and we saw a woman running across the marketplace. (24) The use of dashes and the repetition of “it was then” emphasizes the unexpectedness of the woman’s appearing, not only at the time the event took place but in the moment of its recall and retelling. The fact that this woman is “thin, covered with a shawl, carrying her huge pregnant belly in front of her” (Fink 1990 [1983]: 24) gives the story’s ending the misleadingly conventional impression of an epiphany, that is, an understated but crucial and unexpected revelation or showing-forth. In this context, the juxtaposition of the pregnant woman and old men going to their deaths is not simply that of the irony of different lifestages confronting one another, but a horrifying sign that all, including the unborn, are caught in a universe of death. Indeed, the final lines show that once more the “transformation” of everyday life into atrocity is at stake, and the pregnant woman’s message is of this kind: She was shouting, “Zei gezint, Tate! Tate, zei gezint!” And then all of us hidden in the darkness began to repeat, “Zeit gezint”, bidding farewell with those words to our loved ones who were walking to their deaths. (24) 371

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The Yiddish phrase is one customarily used to convey good wishes for a journey, the footnote translating it into English as “Be well, Papa, be well” itself using an asterisk as a cue, as if this might be the story’s missing title. Here the phrase signals a more universal farewell. In terms of the traumatic recurrence of Holocaust memory, the narrator’s surviving to relate this story, about the end of individual lives and of a culture, as well as any teleological view of human progress, is not triumphant or reassuring but remains “in the darkness”.

Conclusions It seems that many instances of Holocaust literature, in genres ranging from testimony to the novel, lyric or concrete poetry to the short story, and from perspectives that include perpetrators as well as survivors, convey the event’s aftershocks in ways that conform to the lineaments of trauma. These features include the vanishing of temporal distance and the difficulty of consigning experience to the past, the intrusion into consciousness of painful phrases and images and an inability to understand or integrate these elements into a healthy present. Such trauma is at times represented with what seems like a contradictory clarity and sustained attention, but this has itself been described as just as typical of traumatization as amnesia and aporia (Pederson 2014; Allwork 2016). Yet the reasons for considering the Holocaust as central to the “traumatic paradigm”, or as its “ultimate” instantiation, are themselves unclear, in the historiographic terms of caution about arguing for “uniqueness” (Stone 2004). A claim to literary uniqueness is equally hard to establish. Elie Wiesel’s contention that “our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony” (Wiesel 1990 [1977]: 7), as a form necessitated by the unprecedented experience of industrialized massmurder, does not take into account the earlier examples of such eyewitness representation of personal and political calamity, including First World War poetry. Equally, Theodor Adorno’s apparent proscription, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 1967: 34), with its emphasis on the shadow cast over concepts of human culture in the post-Holocaust era, has been honoured through its widespread contestation rather than assent (Gubar 2003). The significance of the Holocaust is therefore not its static paradigmatic status in relation to traumatic representation, but its offering a multidirectional or palimpsestic way in which to conceptualize the legacy of other atrocities (Rothberg 2009; Silverman 2013; Hunter 2018). This is also true in generational terms, as the notion of “postmemory”, conceived in relation to the successive generations in Holocaust survivor families, has become a means of approaching inherited traumatization more broadly (Hirsch 2008, 2012). In the twenty-first century, the centrality of the Holocaust to European memory-cultures and anti-racist education suggests its importance in a way that takes advantage of its extreme rather than anomalous form, in relation to those of the colonial past and genocidal or war-torn present.

Bibliography Adorno, T. (1967) “Cultural Criticism and Society”, in Prisms, trans. S. Weber and S. Weber, London: Neville Spearman. Allwork, L. (2016) “Interrogating Europe’s Voids of Memory: Trauma Theory and Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational”, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 10: 1–22. Amis, M. (1991) Time’s Arrow, London: Jonathan Cape. Bäcker, H. (2010) transcript, trans. P. Greaney and V. Kling, Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press. Borowski, T. (1976) This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. B. Vedder, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Trauma in Holocaust literature ———. (2001) Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski, trans. A. Nitecki, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fink, I. (1990 [1983]) A Scrap of Time and Other Stories, trans. M. Levine and F. Prose, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, S. (1922) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C. J. M. Hubback, London and Vienna: International Psycho-Analytical Press. Ginsburg, R. (2006) “Ida Fink’s Scraps and Traces: Forms of Space and the Chronotope of Trauma Narratives”, Partial Answers 4(2): 205–18. Greaney, P. (2010) “Aestheticization and the Shoah: Heimrad Bäcker’s transcript”, New German Critique 109: 27–51. ———. (2017) personal correspondence, 17 March 2017. Gubar, S. (2003) Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Halberstam, J. (1981) “Philosophy and the Holocaust”, Metaphilosophy 12(3/4): 277–83. Hirsch, M. (2008) “The Generation of Postmemory”, Poetics Today 29(1): 103–28. ———. (2012) The Generation of Postmemory, New York: Columbia University Press. Horowitz, S. (2009) “Ida Fink”, in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. https://jwa. org/encyclopedia/article/fink-ida (accessed 12 June 2019). Hunter, A. (2018) “The Holocaust as Ultimate Trauma Narrative”, in J. R. Kurtz (ed.) Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 66–82. Jacobson, H. (2013) “Rereading If This Is a Man by Primo Levi”, The Guardian 5 April 2013. www.the guardian.com/books/2013/apr/05/rereading-if-this-is-man Levi, P. (1988 [1947]) If this Is a Man, trans. S. Woolf, London: Abacus. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, London: Routledge. Lyotard, J. F. (1988 [1983]) The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Miłosz, C. (2001 [1953]) The Captive Mind, trans. J. Zielonko, London: Penguin. Pederson, J. (2014) “Speak, Trauma: Towards a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory”, Narrative 22(3): 333–53. Perloff, M. (2006) “Sound Scraps, Vision Scraps: Paul Celan’s Poetic Practice”, in S. J. Wolfson and M. Brown (eds) Reading for Form, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 177–202. Pickford, H. (2008) “Heimrad Bäcker’s ‘System Nachschrift’ and the Philosophy of Quotation”, Modern Austrian Literature 41(4): 51–73. Reznikoff, C. (1975) Holocaust, New York: David R. Godine. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rowland, A. (2014) Poetry as Testimony: Witnessing and Memory in Twentieth-Century Poems, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Silverman, M. (2013) Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film, Oxford: Berghahn. Smith, S. (1982) Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth-Century Poetry, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Steiner, G. (1969) “In Extremis”, in E. Homberger, W. Janeway and S. Schama (eds) The Cambridge Mind, London: Jonathan Cape, 305. Stone, D. (2004) “The Historiography of Genocide: Beyond ‘Uniqueness’ and Ethnic Competition”, Rethinking History 8(1): 127–42. Waligóra, J. (2016) “The Discreet Horror of the Holocaust in Ida Fink’s Stories”, CLeAR 3(1): 27–38. Whitehead, A. (2004) Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wiesel, E. (1990 [1977]) “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration”, in E. Wiesel, L. S. Dawidowicz, D. Rabinowitz and R. McAfee Brown (eds) Dimensions of the Holocaust: A Series of Lectures Presented at Northwestern University, 2nd edition, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 5–19. Wilkomirski, B. (1996 [1995]) Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, trans. C. Brown Janeway, New York: Schocken Books. Wood, J. (2015) “The Art of Witness: How Primo Levi Survived”, New Yorker 21 September 2015. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/28/the-art-of-witness

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34 THE GERMAN OCCUPATION OF FRANCE, 1940–44 Avril Tynan

In September 1939 France and Great Britain declared war on Germany following the Reich’s invasion of Poland. After a stalemate between French and German forces known as the drôle de guerre, or phoney war, the German army broke across defensive lines in May 1940 and entered France via Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Paris fell on 14 June. The armistice, signed on 22 June, divided France into an occupied zone in the north, administered by the Germans, and an unoccupied “free” zone in the south, administered from Vichy by a puppet regime fronted by the popular First World War veteran, Marshal Philippe Pétain. Although the armistice was opposed by some, including General Charles de Gaulle who condemned the settlement as surrender, it was perceived, initially at least, as a success by a significant proportion of the French population who welcomed the cessation of hostilities. During the years that followed, the Vichy government collaborated, with varying degrees of autonomy, with the German occupiers, assisting and even instigating oppressive and violent measures against primarily foreign-born and stateless Jews. As the war turned against Axis powers, the Allied invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 began the steady process of liberation across France. On 25 August, the capital was liberated, and in a triumphant address to the nation – that failed to mention international Allied efforts or Résistance insurrections across the country – de Gaulle declared that Paris had been Liberated by itself, by its own people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and aid of France as a whole, of fighting France, of the only France, of the true France, of eternal France. (de Gaulle, quoted in Rousso 1991 [1987, 1990]: 16) In the immediate after-war period high-ranking Vichy officials, such as Pétain and Pierre Laval, were tried on counts of treason, while a violent period of national cleansing, known as l’épuration, or the purge, took place across the country as those suspected of collaborating with the Germans, whether through military or intelligence services, sexual relations – collaboration horizontale – or other largely arbitrary and often unproven counts, were summarily tried and punished, executed, imprisoned or, in the case of women, their heads shaved, an act known as la tonte, the women, les tondues. Yet, if initial anger was directed towards those judged to be traitors to the nation by aiding and abetting the German occupiers in some 374

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way, it took far longer for the French state to acknowledge its betrayal of the Jews and active assistance in the Shoah. It was not until 1995 that President Jacques Chirac recognized the role of the French state in the persecution of the Jews during the Second World War, and trials of other officials, including Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon, continued until the late 1990s. Les années noires have come to be known as one of the darkest periods in modern French history, not only for their role in the deportation and murder of over 75,000 Jews from France, but for the way in which open discussion of Vichy’s collaborationist agenda remained virtually non-existent until the 1970s after a series of fortuitous events – the generational unrest of May 1968, the death of de Gaulle in 1970, the release of Marcel Ophuls’s film Le chagrin et la pitié in 1971 and the publication of American historian Robert Paxton’s La France de Vichy in 1973 – brought the Gaullist myth of national resistance crumbling to the ground. What has come to be known as le syndrome de Vichy, or the Vichy syndrome, thanks to Henry Rousso’s canonical work (1991 [1987, 1990]), presents the Occupation as a national trauma that flared up after years of private and publicly state-sanctioned repression and had to be worked through at a collective level: The Vichy syndrome consists of a diverse set of symptoms whereby the trauma of the Occupation, and particularly that trauma resulting from internal divisions within France, reveals itself in political, social, and cultural life. Since the end of the war, moreover, that trauma has been perpetuated and at times exacerbated. (Rousso 1991 [1987, 1990]: 10) In this influential model, Rousso argued that the immediate postwar period, from 1944 to 1954, centred on remembering national sacrifice, and on the horrors committed by German forces on French soil, such as the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane; from 1954 to 1971 fiercely patriotic résistancialiste narratives, led by de Gaulle, united wartime memory of national resistance until the return of repressed memories of collaboration in the 1970s, and of Jewish persecution in the 1980s, shattered this mythical mirror, resulting in an ongoing “obsession” with the Occupation in French cultural and political circles. Rousso’s chronological approach to memory of the Occupation is useful to this discussion because it clearly marks the return of the repressed, the point at which the trauma comes back – for the first time – in the 1970s. As such, it has tended to dominate literary discussion of memory and trauma of the Occupation in such a way that individual texts are often read through the lens of the syndrome’s seemingly homogeneous evolution. In this chapter, I will discuss how popular chronological frameworks can be valuable tools for our assessment of literature as they help us to engage with the trauma of the Occupation as it arises in a sociohistorical context. However, traumatic readings guided purely by temporal estrangement from the Occupation risk reaching a saturation point when contemporary cultural identity and memory are no longer obsessed with this past. Against Rousso, I suggest that a multilayered approach to understanding the memory of the Occupation, such as Michael Rothberg’s (2009) multidirectional memory, or Max Silverman’s (2013) palimpsestic memory, may provide a more fruitful framework for discussion of literature and trauma by helping to broaden our understanding of cultural trauma as embedded in interconnected and constantly fluctuating networks of identity and meaning. The trauma of the Occupation did not simply spring into national consciousness overnight sometime in the 1970s but rather flared up, violently and suddenly, during that time. Since then, this traumatic relationship to the past has waxed and waned, erupting in response to particular 375

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events and subdued by others, but it has always remained simmering, latent, beneath the calm surface of national unity. Finally, I will demonstrate, through a discussion of the tondues and of the unresolved conflicts surrounding liberation and the épuration, how the trauma of the Occupation still has the potential to be reactivated in response to other cultural traumas. This discussion does not attempt to universalize trauma but rather demonstrates how the interactions and negotiations taking place today and in the future place trauma at the forefront of an expanding global consciousness that connects through its similarities as much as through its differences.

Myth, obsession, saturation? A chronological approach to cultural trauma of the Occupation The trauma of the Occupation did not only affect the individual as the belated return of an experience that could not be “grasped” at the time (Caruth 1996: 6) but struck an entire nation, leaving “indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander 2004: 1). The traumatic turn in French memory was not instantaneous but worked its way “slowly and even insidiously” into the collective consciousness: A gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared. […] ‘We’ no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body. (Erikson 1976: 154) Following Rousso, a chronological approach to literature of the Occupation lends itself to a reading of cultural trauma because it enables us to group together particular themes and points of view in order to demonstrate the progression of memories understood as part of a collectivity and of the emergence of trauma as a “tear in the social fabric” (Eyerman 2001: 2) of communality and nationhood. Although a single text may reveal something about the memories and trauma of an individual, this approach advocates a relational reading that reveals more about the emergence of memories and trauma at the level of the collective consciousness. Yan Hamel’s sociocritical analysis of literature and the Second World War, La bataille des mémoires (2006), takes a chronological approach that delineates four main types of Occupation novel grouped according to the ideological and sociopolitical perspective of the author and his or her target audience. Corresponding largely to the temporal framework established by Rousso, Hamel notes the publication of what he terms romans résistancialistes in the immediate postwar period, including Roger Vailland’s Drôle de jeu (1945) and Vercors’s Les armes de la nuit (1946) – and to which we could add the intra-war Le silence de la mer (Vercors 1942) and L’armée des ombres (Kessel 1943) – that emphasised the (mythical) heroism of the Résistance. These were followed rapidly and often concurrently by the roman antirésistancialiste that sought to reverse the myth lauded in the first group, citing as examples Uranus (1948) by Marcel Aymé, Le hussard bleu (1950) by Roger Nimier and the more controversial Féerie pour une autre fois I and II (1952, 1954) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. In the third group, novels dealing with la conscience inquiète, Hamel places Patrick Modiano’s La ronde de nuit (1969) and Marguerite Duras’s La douleur (1985) which deal with the complex ethical issues raised by the apparent polarity of the first two groups, emphasising the moral complexities and ambiguities of the time. A final group, gaining importance in the 1960s 376

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and dominance from the 1980s, deals with la mémoire autoréflexive. Including works such as La route des Flandres (1960) by Claude Simon, Le grand voyage (1963) by Jorge Semprun and La compagnie des spectres (1997) by Lydie Salvayre these texts are not “romans de la mémoire”, novels of memory but “romans sur la mémoire”, novels about memory (Hamel 2006: 291) that place the complex evolutions of memory and history at their centre and refuse a definitive vision of the past, offering instead an image – images – of the malleability of memory and of the valid plurality of representations in perpetual conflict. Hamel’s approach is useful because it helps us to map memory of the Occupation onto prominent ideological eras that correspond largely to Rousso’s chronological framework, signalling the resurgence of traumatic memory. Of course, Hamel’s first and second groups, conflated in Manuel Bragança’s outline under the more general term romans engagés (Bragança 2014), suggest that the cultural narrative of the Occupation was more open and sceptical than Rousso’s model would have us believe (see also Berkvam 2000; Lloyd 2003: 182–93; Lawrie 2013). However, the relational methodology of Hamel’s approach when mapped onto Rousso is particularly fruitful for discussion of trauma because it clearly distinguishes a point at which ideological certainty cedes to vigorous attempts to assimilate a past that, it turns out, was “not known in the first instance” (Caruth 1996: 4). This wound in the communal body is clearly addressed in the third and fourth groups of Hamel’s structure which correspond to the agitation, from the 1960s onwards, to know, and it is particularly salient in the works of authors such as Modiano, Marie Chaix, Evelyne Le Garrec and Pascal Jardin, all children of so-called “collabos” writing primarily from the late 60s or 70s onwards who (re)present this traumatic turn in their construction of individual and collective selfhood. For these authors, individual trauma – the suspected, silenced or explicit collaboration of a parent – mutates into cultural trauma – the suspected, silenced or explicit collaboration of the nation – as it is broadcast through their works to destabilise “the structures of meaning of [the] collectivity” (Herrero and BaeloAllué 2011: xiii). Modiano’s Dora Bruder (2004 [1994]), for example, fuses the search for individual identity – the narrator’s and Dora’s – onto the city of Paris so that each twist in the personal story has a consequence upon collective memory and identity. This is not to claim, as Rousso appears to do, that memory of collaboration did not exist before the 1970s, but rather that these memories were not traumatic before this time. Memory of the Occupation is not and never has been inherently traumatic, but it has acquired the dimension of trauma as the result of ongoing reinterpretation and revision of cultural and collective identity and understanding. Reading literature of the Occupation through the lens of Rousso offers an insight into how the intentions, actions and repercussions of collaboration emerged as cultural trauma at the junction of individual and collective negotiation with the past; but such a navigation of literature risks homogenizing vastly differing works as calculated expressions of a single event and enforcing a prescribed traumatic reading at certain junctures. Moreover, it encourages a fragmented approach to reading that places memory in oppositional and competitive conflicts – note the title of Hamel’s work for instance – and imposes an evaluation of one particular trauma as either present or absent. Traumatic memory is far more complex than this, not least because trauma can be read as both present and absent – returned or repressed – but also because the precise locus of the trauma must be that which was missed in the first place. To infer always and only that it is the trauma of the Occupation that is repressed or expressed in these works misses the point of trauma (Davis 2018: 29–45): What if multiple traumas are present? Or none? Indeed, does

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not all literature, whether it is about the Occupation or not, whether it is a narrative of trauma or a traumatic narrative or neither, bear witness to this wound? The infamous claim that Vichy was un passé qui ne passe pas, or an ever-present past (Conan and Rousso 2013 [1994]) aptly demonstrated the traumatic relationship to a past that lived on in the obsessive memory work of the national consciousness, but in a recent reedition of their work, Conan and Rousso ask if we are rapidly approaching a time where this past will have passed (340), where, to borrow from Susan Sontag, a “saturation point” will have been reached (Sontag 2005 [1973]: 15) and memory of the Occupation will have faded. The question now, and for the future, is how to encounter this wound in a dynamic and interconnected way that will preserve and transmit the memory of the Occupation for generations to come.

Buried in a shallow grave: a multilayered approach to cultural trauma of the occupation Trauma, then, is not what separates these works, as Rousso’s model would suggest, but what connects them. Whether the author is a committed member of the Résistance, a loyal Pétainiste, a political or Jewish deportee, whether he or she lived through the war themselves or is the recipient of transmitted “postmemories” (Hirsch 2012), each work is bound to any other by the relationship it bears to the traumatic cultural wound of the Occupation. This is not to suggest that the cultural trauma is universal and homogeneous, but that, following Caruth, “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures” (Caruth 1995: 11). This argument has contributed in no small way to the literary and psychoanalytic study of global and particularly postcolonial traumas (Rothberg 2009; Craps 2013; Silverman 2013), but it also helps us to configure a link across a single culture over time, in which trauma not only provides the connection between here and there, but between past, present and future. Herrero and Baelo-Allué suggest that “unlike psychological trauma, which may ‘disappear’ through psychic work, in cultural traumas there is a constant, recurrent struggle that stirs up the troubling memory” (Herrero and Baelo-Allué 2011: xiii). Cultural trauma, in other words, does not go away; it cannot be worked through but only pacified until it flares up again in response to events and experiences that trigger collective crisis. The crisis of the gilets jaunes in France – initially a rural response to proposed fuel tax increases in late 2018 but snowballing rapidly to accommodate political distrust and social frustrations and inequalities – (re)exposed a cultural wound buried in a shallow grave. Journalists and cultural commentators have drawn parallels to the riots of 2007 and to the student uprisings of ’68, going as far back as to compare the current movement to the Revolution of 1789. Cultural wounds do not heal, and once they have been ripped open again, past traumas seep back into the present. This fluid and interminable process of covering and uncovering trauma is at play in literature of the Occupation, and it not only helps us to understand the evolutions of cultural trauma as a never-ending process rather than as a discrete temporal shift but also promotes a future-oriented and cross-cultural reading that establishes global interconnections and challenges a static view of history and memory. Recent approaches have advocated memory as “multidirectional” (Rothberg 2009) and “hybrid” (Silverman 2013: 4), noting that it is “productive [and] intercultural”, “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (Rothberg 2009: 3), inherently bound by “multiple connections across time and space” (Silverman 2013: 4). Cultural 378

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trauma, as we have seen, is similarly enmeshed in temporally and spatially disparate webs of collective crises that influence the interpretation and reinterpretation of identity and meaning. In the real world, the interconnectivity of cultural traumas can be seen in the ways that wounds lurk just beneath the surface of social and political tranquillity until civil fragmentation causes not simply a new wound to form, but old wounds to be reopened. In literary terms, this means that the words presented on the page may hide more than they reveal, that one word or idea may have multiple meanings depending upon its referential contexts and interpretative frameworks (see Davis 2018). Silverman describes this process as a palimpsest: A superimposition and interaction of different temporal traces to constitute a sort of composite structure […] so that one layer of traces can be seen through, and is transformed by, another […] producing a chain of signification which draws together disparate spaces and times. (Silverman 2013: 3) Literature of the Occupation, like all literature, is a potential palimpsest, and the writing of the Occupation itself may be precisely this superimposition that provokes a “reactivation” (Dillon 2007: 2) of underlying layers of traumatic memory instead of, or as well as, an activation of its own wounding. In other words, the Occupation may not be the only cultural trauma that lies beneath the surface of a text – even if it is the most obvious – and it may cry out from the recesses of even the most unlikely narratives. Claire Gorrara has drawn particular attention to the ways in which the structure of the palimpsest nourishes the French roman noir genre in which the narrative presents the investigation as the superimposed overwriting of “what happened” that must scratch beneath the surface to uncover the truth, so that the text itself is composed of “two narrative sequences that simultaneously pull the reader back in time to reconstruct a missing story of crime and forward in time to follow the processes of the investigation” (Gorrara 2003: 3, see also 2012, 2014). Of the many authors and noir narratives her works trace, crime writer Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire (1984) offers a particularly pertinent glimpse into the “intersecting war memories” (Gorrara 2014: 15) and cultural traumas of contemporary French society. Overlaying a murder investigation with the state-sanctioned murder of peaceful protestors of the Algerian war in Paris on 17 October 1961, the uncovering of French complicity in the Holocaust, and eventually with institutionalized racism and anti-Semitism, Daeninckx’s intersection of “transnational” and “transhistorical” memories (Gorrara 2014: 16) exposes the fragility of collective unity and the facile slippage from cultural trauma to cultural trauma that draws together “interconnecting traces […] without necessarily obliterating the differences between them” (Silverman 2013: 4). Silverman has noted Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge (1999) as adopting similar processes of interlocking memorial traces of racialized violence to overlay the more recent cultural trauma of the Algerian war and the massacre of 17 October 1961 with the Occupation and the Holocaust to highlight the ways in which the recent events are still painfully absent from authorised memorial reconstruction and to reopen old wounds and exorcise them from their shallow grave (Silverman 2013: 3). Finally, Modiano’s investigative Dora Bruder, undoubtedly significant in a chronological approach as a postmemorial enterprise of inherited trauma, is also striking in its

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topographical staging of cultural trauma. Addresses and sites around Paris like the boulevard Ornano that serve as geographical markers on the narrator’s search for traces of the disappeared Dora are also pivots for the text’s digressions backwards and forwards in history and memory as the past – both the Occupation and the Algerian war – returns to “reverberate in the present” (Silverman 2013: 113; see also Golsan 2000: 46). As the city is renovated the indexical link to the past is razed, repressed and rebuilt (Modiano 2004 [1994]: 154–67), but traces of this oppressed history persist, echoing through the streets, calling from a wound that waits to be addressed. Modiano shows that beneath the calm surface of the everyday, banal city lie interconnected histories, identities and memories, and that the city today, the world we live in, is built upon these traumatic fault lines, that life, like narrative, is a constructive, productive and future-oriented process of advancement that – wilfully or unwittingly – covers as it uncovers the cultural wounds of the collective body.

Les tondues: #MeToo and the cultural trauma of l’épuration 2017 became a decisive year in the recent history of sexism and sexual violence after the #MeToo campaign – a term coined in 2006 by Tarana Burke but rising to prominence after high-profile allegations of sexual harassment and abuse – exposed systematic exploitation of gender and power and led to the downfall of several prominent public figures. One of the more surprising and seemingly less remarkable consequences of this movement was an official apology by the prime minister of Norway, Erna Solberg, on 17 October 2018. Addressing the “filles de boches”, or “German girls”, and their children who had been victims of humiliating acts of revenge and punishment after the Second World War and the German Occupation of Norway, and marking the seventieth anniversary of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Solberg announced: Our conclusion is that the Norwegian authorities violated the fundamental rule-oflaw principle that no citizen should be punished without trial or convicted except according to law. […] On this basis, I would today like to apologise, on behalf of the Government, for the way the Norwegian authorities treated girls and women who had relationships with German soldiers during the Second World War. This apology has been a long time coming. (Solberg 2018) Although the history of this apology dates back much further than 2017, the #MeToo movement contributed both to the state’s willingness to recognize its historic guilt and, perhaps more importantly, to society’s readiness to listen to the “voice that cries out from the wound” (Caruth 1996: 3). From Caruth’s wound came a single voice, but from the cultural wounds exposed by the #MeToo campaign came thousands. Solberg’s apology has only just begun to scratch beneath the surface, revealing the shallow grave of another wound: the trauma of the liberation, the épuration, and the tonte. If France experienced an obsession with its memory of collaboration, memory of the épuration is still murky, and the liberation continues to be white-washed in glory: “une histoire inachevée”, an unfinished story (Rousso 1992). From a sociopolitical perspective, the épuration – and particularly the tonte – deeply complicates memory of liberation because the virtuous heroes of the Résistance who had so valiantly fought against collaborationist evils

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committed their own horrific abuses of power upon one of the most vulnerable – and least culpable – sectors of society. Although many punishments were meted out against those who had actively collaborated with the Occupiers, recent study has shown that the scale of justification was largely arbitrary, with women often punished by their own community for minor indiscretions and unproven hear-say (Brossat 1992; Rousso 1992; Virgili 2000). Moreover, the punishment was unquestionably a sexist one: no French men were punished for relationships with German women (Diamond 1999: 134–42; Jackson 2001: 475–7, 487). Women’s bodies came to represent the French nation, oppressed and violated by the German Occupiers, and only by punishing these individuals would the communal body be symbolically cleansed of the “‘stain’ left by the occupying forces” (Virgili 2002: 241, see also 1995). Although several photographs were widely circulated at the time and today – such as the well-known image by Robert Capa, taken in Chartres in 1944 – discussion of this violent purge remains “un angle mort”, or blind spot, in public discourse (Fraisse 2015: v). Although tondues do appear in some early postwar works, like Jean-Louis Curtis’s Les forêts de la nuit (1947), Aymé’s Uranus (1948) or Béatrix Beck’s Léon Morin, prêtre (1952), their role is never central but employed more generally to undermine the Gaullist myth of a résistancialiste nation and to point to the prolific errors – on both sides – of the Occupation era. Paul Éluard’s 1944 poem, “Comprenne qui voudra” is an exception, exposing and opposing this savage mistreatment and scapegoating of women. Testimonies of the tondues, and of their children, have reached limited public discourse only in the last fifteen years (Saubaber 2004; Moore 2005: 665–6), so that the trauma remains latent, repressed beneath the collective consciousness but nevertheless there. Norway’s apology – the first of its kind – shows how cultural traumas are intertwined and that trauma itself may act as a conduit for other traumas. The voices of the tondues, silenced for seventy years, have finally been released through the cries of a contemporary wound. Recent popular francophone literature has turned explicitly towards the figure of the tondue to develop themes of female autonomy or the resurgence of the past, including – but not limited to – Elsa Marpeau’s polar, Et ils oublieront la colère (2015), Fabienne Juhel’s La chaise numéro 14 (2015) and Carole Maurel and Navie’s graphic novel Collaboration horizontale, suggesting a move towards obsessive memory work as the topic envelops the cultural imaginary. In earlier works, however, I suggest that the tondue is a symptom of the repressed cultural trauma of the épuration. Silent and silenced, present yet absent, the tondue embodies the wound that cannot be spoken. This is particularly striking in Marguerite Duras’s and Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) or rather, in the differences between the film and the text, published one year later under Duras’s name alone. In the film, a cry pierces the voiceless scenes of Emmanuelle Riva’s flashbacks to her hometown, Nevers, interpreted almost unswervingly in conjunction with the death of her German lover. While certainly relevant to the loss of her first love, this cry, despite the achronology of these flashbacks, directly follows scenes of the young woman’s tonte, and it is the cry of not just Riva, but of all the women unjustly punished after the liberation. While the film makes such a claim controversial, the text, with extensive appendices, delivers a damning indictment of the liberation’s unjustly sexist and sexualized performance. Passing in mere seconds onscreen, Duras dedicates an entire page to describing the tonte in the appendices (Duras 1966 [1960]: 94), emphasising the futility of the act and the confusion of the time: “we’re doing our duty” (94). More striking still is the way that the appendices echo the silencing of the tonte across France. As Riva is allowed occasional visits along the Loire at night, she sees other members of the community: “They are the people who

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shaved me. No one has shaved me” (97). This contradiction is cultural repression at work: it should not have happened, it cannot have happened, it did not happen. The closing moments of the Nevers flashbacks, as it is suggested that Riva leave for Paris, mark the complete repression of this individual and cultural trauma: “My hair was now a decent length. No one was shaved” (105). With no remaining proof of the crimes, the tondue slips away, taking the shameful memory of the tonte with her. Riva’s story, told for the first time to a Japanese man in Japan, could not be told and would not be heard in France. Her story, even today, inverts the accepted narrative of the Occupation; for Riva, the Occupation was a period of love and happiness, and it was the liberation that brought sadness and pain. But the trauma of the tonte is not only her own: Riva, the name of the actress, is identified only as Elle in the text, an anonymous figure of historical shame like so many others, and her story is not only her own but the story of an entire community. Contrasting the first and last words of the transcript – “you” (17) and “France” (79) – her voice mutates through the text into the voice of a nation and of the thousands of silenced women whose traumas still wait to be heard. In the words of her Japanese lover: “You are like a thousand women in one” (26). The trauma of the tonte cries out from the text precisely as that which is not given a voice in the film, a story that has not yet been heard, even if it has been told (Davis 2018: 198). Here, the trauma lies in wait but, as #MeToo and Solberg’s apology have shown, we are not yet done reckoning with the past; cultural trauma breeds cultural trauma, and the past will return, it will come back, even if it has not yet arrived. To reach a saturation point in our dialogue with the Occupation does not only threaten the memory of the past but ignores the centrality of past traumas in the construction of present culture and society. 17 October 2018 may be the day that trauma of the tonte erupted into modern consciousness, but it also links us to the same date in 1961 and to the massacre of protesters in Paris. From 2018 to 1944 and back to 1961, from Norway to France to Algeria, trauma is not only what separates us, what tears away at our communality, but what binds us together, an unlikely trace of continuity in an age of chaos.

Bibliography Alexander, J. C. (2004) “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma”, in J. C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. J. Smelser and P. Sztomka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1–30. Berkvam, M. L. (2000) Writing the Story of France in World War II: Literature and Memory 1942–1958, New Orleans, LA: University Press of the South. Bragança, M. (2014) “Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas?” French Cultural Studies 25(3–4): 309–19. Brossat, A. (1992) Les tondues, un carnaval moche, Paris: Manya. Caruth, C. (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Conan, E. and Rousso, H. (2013 [1994]) Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas, Paris: Hachette-Pluriel. Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Davis, C. (2018) Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Diamond, H. (1999) Women and the Second World War in France, 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints, Abingdon: Routledge. Dillon, S. (2007) The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Duras, M. (1966 [1960]) Hiroshima mon amour, trans. R. Seaver, London: Calder and Boyars. Erikson, K. (1976) Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Buffalo Creek, New York: Simon & Schuster.

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The German occupation of France, 1940–44 Eyerman, R. (2001) Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraisse, G. (2015 [1992]) “Préface”, in A. Brossat (ed.) Les tondues, un carnaval moche, Paris: Téraèdre, i–x. Golsan, R. J. (2000) Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Gorrara, C. (2003) The Roman Noir in Post-War French Culture: Dark Fictions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2012) French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories, Manchester: Manchester University Press. ———. (2014) “Figuring Memory as Palimpsest: Rereading Cultural Memories of Jewish Persecution in French Crime Fiction about the Second World War”, in A. Kimyongür and A. Wigelsworth (eds) Rewriting Wrongs: French Crime Fiction and the Palimpsest, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 15–30. Hamel, Y. (2006) La bataille des mémoires: La Seconde Guerre mondiale et le roman français, Montréal: Presses Universitaires de Montréal. Herrero, D. and Baelo-Allué, S. (2011) “Introduction”, in D. Herrero and S. Baelo-Allué (eds) The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond, Amsterdam and New York: Brill, ix–xxvi. Hirsch, M. (2012) The Generation of Postmemory, New York: Columbia University Press. Jackson, J. (2001) France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lawrie, R. (2013) Narratives of Collaboration in Post-War France, 1944–1974, Unpublished PhD thesis, Durham: Durham University. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7374/ Lloyd, C. (2003) Collaboration and Resistance in Occupied France: Representing Treason and Sacrifice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Modiano, P. (2004 [1994]) Dora Bruder, Paris: Bibliothèque Gallimard/Gallimard. Moore, A. (2005) “History, Memory and Trauma in Photography of the Tondues: Visuality of the Vichy Past through the Silent Image of Women”, Gender and History 17(3): 657–81. Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rousso, H. (1991 [1987, 1990]) The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. A. Goldhammer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. (1992) “L’épuration en France, une histoire inachevée”, Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 33: 78–105. Saubaber, D. (2004) “Pour l’amour d’un ‘boche’”, L’express 31 May 2004. www.lexpress.fr/actualite/soci ete/pour-l-amour-d-un-boche_489486.html Silverman, M. (2013) Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film, New York: Berghahn. Solberg, E. (2018) “Official Apology to Girls and Women Who Had Relationships with German Soldiers During the Second World War”, 23 October 2018. www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/app/ id2616005/ Sontag, S. (2005 [1973]) On Photography, New York: Rosetta. Virgili, F. (1995) “Les ‘tondues’ à la Libération: le corps des femmes, enjeu d’une réappropriation”, Clio. Femmes, Genres, Histoires 1: n.p. ———. (2000) La France ‘virile’: des femmes tondues à la Libération, Paris: Payot. ———. (2002) Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France, trans. J. Flower, Oxford: Berg.

Further reading Atack, M. (1989) Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms, 1940–1950, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (An exploration of the role of fiction in shaping the experience of the War in France.) Atack, M. and Lloyd, C. (eds) (2012) Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France, 1939–2009: New Readings, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (An edited collection exploring the intersections of literature and film in the memory of the Second World War in France.)

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35 THE VIETNAM WAR Mark Heberle

Trauma in Freud and Herr’s Dispatches Cathy Caruth begins her 1991 study of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism by citing Michael Herr: [I]t took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed there in your eyes. (Herr, quoted in Caruth 1991: 181) Herr’s comment here in Dispatches (Herr 1991: 20) is symptomatic of the Vietnam War’s consequences – representational and clinical – to our current understanding of trauma. Indeed, Caruth’s initial definition of trauma, “the experience of the soldier faced with sudden and massive death around him […] who suffers this sight in a numbed state, only to relive it later on in repeated nightmares” (Caruth 2016: 12) focuses on the traumatized American Vietnam combat veteran, whether he actually fought in the war or has been represented in one of its many imaginative representations, or both: the Ron Kovic who was wounded in Vietnam and physically paralysed for the rest of his life or the Ron Kovic of the 1989 Oliver Stone Hollywood blockbuster, Born on the Fourth of July, which earned Tom Cruise an Academy Awards best actor nomination. Nor were Kovic’s own postVietnam roles limited to that of the physically and psychically wounded vet: his 1976 memoir of the same title was not only the source of the film but also, like his leadership of those Vietnam Veterans Against the War who staged a televised public protest at the 1972 Republican National Convention, an act of defiance and moral accounting against the war and its authors. The entanglement of the more than decade-long American war in Vietnam culminated in 1975 with total military, political and diplomatic defeat, a futile waste of human and material resources unprecedented in American history. While Vietnamese on both sides suffered even more devastation, national unification and the end of a thirty-year war that had started in 1945 seem to have been worth the cost for the victors. For the losers, on the 385

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other hand, the 200th anniversary of the nation’s birth in 1976 nearly coincided with the disastrous end of intervention in another nation’s struggle for independence one year earlier. For Americans and much of the world, the term “Vietnam” is not a nation or place but a quasi-traumatic signifier that has outlasted the US war in Vietnam and has been entangled ever since in discourses of fighting and writing, atrocity and victimization, individual breakdown and individual survival, overseas wars and domestic civil unrest, national defence and national dishonour. That sense of the word was so widespread twenty years after America’s defeat that when Tim O’Brien revealed publicly for the first time that he had been taking medication for years to combat suicidal postwar depression, he titled his revelation “The Vietnam in Me” (1994). While the notion of some national post-Vietnam traumatization might provide more comfortable forms of collective anguish, even a quasi-patriotic patina for the pain, the war was in fact an ongoing physical, psychic, political and moral wound for millions of individuals and for American society more generally. It has continued to fester latently until Desert Storm, 9/11, Operation Iraqi Freedom and subsequent American military and political interventions without end seem to have released its pathologies once again. As noted above, Caruth’s introduction to her study of Freud’s final treatise on trauma reflects the critical importance of Vietnam in our present understanding of trauma and trauma-writing. But Herr’s work, a salient example of such writing, also reflects the way in which trauma becomes referential of history, the ultimate revelation of Caruth’s analysis. Showing how Freud’s myth, positing a monotheistic Egyptian Moses murdered by his followers and replaced by another Moses, the priest of a volcano god who became Yahweh and whose worship, after a generational period of latency, recovered what had been repressed through the trauma of symbolic patricide. Caruth locates the most significant event in Freud’s hypothesis not in the return to the Promised Land but in the departure from Egypt and the latent trauma of the murder of Moses and recuperation of monotheism. And she links it to another departure from another unacknowledged trauma: Freud’s own departure from Austria “to die in freedom” (Caruth 2016: 25) in England, thus saving and completing Moses and Monotheism, his final contribution to the psychoanalysis of trauma, a work finished in the four years that initiated and completed the Nazification of Austria. Herr’s text similarly registers and recuperates historically a trauma that was “seen” but not “known”, registered by the eye but repressed or not fully recognized by the imagination during his year in Vietnam and in the eight years between initial publication of the earliest parts of what came out in book form as Dispatches in 1977. Its middle four sections represent the Battle of Hué; the Siege of Khe Sanh; a series of 21 brief, unconnected fragments of the war titled “Illumination Rounds”; and an appraisal of conventional and unconventional war correspondents. All were initially published between 1968 and 1970, not long after the scenes and actions that they represent. Except for “Illumination Rounds”, they are the most journalistically conventional of Herr’s war writing, not least because of their nearly contemporaneous publication with what they describe. But between his return from Vietnam and the composition of the first and final sections of the book, Herr was afflicted by the “Vietnam” that O’Brien referenced in 1994. In an interview with Ed Vulliamy for the Guardian in 2000, Herr acknowledged that The problem with Vietnam is that if your body came back, your mind came back too. Within 18 months of coming back, I was on the edge of a major breakdown. It hit in 1971 and it was very serious. Real despair for three or four years; deep

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paralysis. I split up with my wife for a year. I didn’t see anybody because I didn’t want anybody to see me. (Vulliamy 2000) Although Vulliamy attributes Herr’s successful completion of Dispatches to the fact that 70 per cent of it had been written and published nearly a decade earlier, before his breakdown, Herr’s bracketing of the earlier material with two new sections to begin and to end the book provide its heart and lungs. The long first section, “Breathing In”, is pervaded by images, recognitions and traces of death, like the helmet Herr accepts from a crew member as he boards a chopper (“You keep that! We got plenty!”; Herr 1991: 21) before realizing that whoever had worn it had just been killed. “Breathing In” is also pervaded by ironic, critical and caustic commentary on the American Mission (“for years now, there had been no country here but the war”; Herr 1991: 3), certainly present but less explicit in the previously published sections. It also includes Herr’s only account of the 1968 Tet Offensive and his sole engagement in combat, desperately providing machine gun cover fire to help an infantry team escape from being overwhelmed by the VC. “Breathing Out”, the conclusion of Dispatches, includes Herr’s attempts to articulate his own postwar breakdown (“I was once in such a bad head about it that I thought the dead had only been spared a great deal of pain. Debriefed by dreams, friends coming in from the other side to see that I was still alive”, Herr 1991: 259). But it also brings ironic historical closure, as the 1973 “peace with honor” is immediately followed by the war’s catastrophic finale for America and its allies two years later: The war ended, and then it really ended, the cities “fell”, I watched the choppers I’d loved dropping into the South China Sea as their Vietnamese pilots jumped clear, and one last chopper revved it up, lifted off, and flew out of my chest. (Herr 1991: 259–60) If “Breathing In” is an account of the deaths suffered and sown by Americans and “Breathing Out” a final accounting that makes those deaths meaningless, futile or criminal, then what was seen but not known, what was latent during Herr’s time in country but unarticulated during the years since has now become the history that was feared. Here, as in Freud’s myth and rescue of his life and work, a series of departures marks recovery from a trauma that is personal, historical and not fully acknowledged except by leaving it behind: the war, that “dense concentration of American energy […], American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste, and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years” (Herr 1991 [1977]: 44).

The Vietnam War and PTSD If powerful trauma-writing by American writers like Herr, O’Brien, W. D. Ehrhart, Larry Heinemann, Emily Mann, David Rabe, Linda Van Devanter, Bruce Weigl and many others less well known has been one positive though ironic legacy of the war, the most publicly recognized and most lasting has been the intensive and extensive study of trauma itself and the clinical revolution that has given it a permanent local habitation and a name within the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). What we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was given official, professional recognition in the third edition of the APA’s diagnostic bible, published in 1980, and has been 387

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included and more fully articulated in all subsequent revisions and editions to the most recent in 2013 (American Psychiatric Association 2013). In The Evil Hours, his capacious “biography” of PTSD, David Morris follows others in dating its birth from a 6 May 1972 New York Times op-ed titled “Post-Vietnam Syndrome” by Chaim Shatan, an NYU psychoanalyst and therapist who had joined the psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton in facilitating and participating in group therapy with former American soldiers at the New York office of Vietnam Veterans Against the War that had begun on 12 December 1970 (Morris 2015: 141, 148–9). Caruth begins her analysis of Freud with a “general definition” of our current understanding of trauma: “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Caruth 2016: 11–12). Using the figure of the combat soldier as her model, Caruth notes how the experiences of other survivors of traumatizing experiences (rape, child abuse, catastrophic accidents) have been assimilated to “the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder” (12). In sum, she implicitly traces the evolution of trauma from the combat and psychic battlefields of Vietnam to its current expansive clinical diagnosis. The italicization of the term in the 2016 edition suggests how PTSD has become a field of study and controversy itself since the original 1991 article, where it appeared in more provisional, tentative citation marks (“post-traumatic stress disorder”). Whatever its limitations and exaggerations as a clinical category, PTSD, the signature pathology of the Vietnam War, has significantly changed our understanding of ourselves through its diachronic and synchronic expansiveness. “Psychologically distressing event[s] […] outside the range of usual human experience” that are “experienced with intense fear, horror, and helplessness” (American Psychiatric Association 1987: 247) extend back to the first humans who survived rape, potentially lethal wounds and torture. And the medical canonization of the disorder has forever brought to an end the pattern of discontinuous, temporary attention given to survivors of trauma during previous cycles of medical investment in their fates as covered by histories of trauma like Morris’s or the first chapter of Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery: American Civil War “nostalgia’; late nineteenth-century female “hysteria”; First World War “shell shock”. Finally, and most significantly, while it may have been birthed by the American war in Vietnam, PTSD has come to define a new “republic of suffering” (to borrow Drew Faust’s 2008 characterization of how America was changed by the unprecedented bloodbath of the Civil War) that transcends any war and any nation and cuts across gender, age, class and occupational distinctions. The Journal of Traumatic Stress, first published in 1988 and growing exponentially since, number by number, is the professional standard for the field. The increasingly international and indeed universal subjects of its research and published articles virtually define twenty-first century humankind as a suffering creature in need of attention, care and recovery. While the greatest single number of articles still focuses on American Vietnam (and now Middle East) war veterans, diagnostic and therapeutic attention extends more discriminately and indiscriminately to such subjects as PTSD suffered by American Indian veterans, a special 1992 issue on PTSD and Israeli Self-Defense soldier survivors of the 1982 Lebanon incursion, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquakes and tsunamis, the 2006 volcanic eruptions in El Salvador, mother-infant prenatal attachment, intimate partner psychological aggression and resultant childhood behaviour and adolescent abuse, as well as broader categories of survivors who have been tortured, abused as children or adolescents and raped (the most prevalent PTSD trigger in the US and, most likely, elsewhere).

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To view the world through the perspective of PTSD is to recognize the universality of trauma and the need for diagnosis, therapy and recovery for its subjects but also the need to critically question and intervene against the conditions that lead to the disorder and its effects. Tsunamis and life-destroying accidents cannot easily be prevented or avoided, but war, rape, torture, separation of families and other causes of trauma result from human decisions, choices and ways of living and acting in history. The revised version of DSM-III noted that post-trauma symptoms are more severe when “the stressor is of human design” (American Psychiatric Association 1987: 248). PTSD is itself a product of history, and its efficient cause was those disturbed veterans dissatisfied enough with themselves and with the “human design” of a war in which they had participated to angrily and mournfully register their traumatization during the therapeutic group rap sessions at the New York VVAW office from 1970 through 1972. “Neither victims nor executioners”, to cite the subtitle of Lifton’s (1973) history of that intervention, theirs were the original stories that allowed PTSD to emerge from the war. Their accounts, like nearly all American writing about Vietnam, were stories of experiences that most of their fellow citizens had never heard nor wanted to hear. Over the decades that followed, among those who listened most productively were the researchers and therapists that have defined trauma and recovery as it is recognized today. Despite the vast array of symptoms reflected in the changing PTSD protocols, Herman’s division of posttraumatic symptoms into three general categories (Herman 2015: 35–47) continues to be reflected in the revised editions of DSM: intrusion (various ways in which latent or repressed experiences unexpectedly emerge and disrupt or take over the present), constriction (a variety of conscious and unconscious attempts to shut down and efface traumatic experiences resulting in cognitive and emotional deadening in the present) and hyperarousal (chronic paranoid and hostile vigilance that includes problems with concentration and chronic sleeplessness). Typical and extreme forms of the first include dissociative and quasischizophrenic symptoms; depression, and suicidal ideation for the second; and reckless behaviour with homicidal or suicidal ideation for the third. As one who has been dealing with his own Iraq War PTSD since 2007, David Morris (2015) provides the most up-todate treatment of recovery in The Evil Hours, including various alternative therapies (e.g. yoga, mixed martial arts, mantram repetition, post-traumatic growth), a cornucopia of psycho-pharmaceuticals and therapist-patient psychodynamic approaches, including psychoanalysis and group therapies. As a former patient, he gives most attention to the Veteran Administration’s well-funded, aggressive and proactive research and therapy programs for Americans who have returned from war, but finds their hyper-empiricist, exclusively medicalized approaches too narrowly focused upon trauma as simply the neurological or cognitive residue of a catastrophic experience that needs to be repaired.

Trauma literature and Vietnam Earlier VA therapies for Vietnam veterans combined group dynamics with traditional patient–analyst relationships. Such practices are significantly aligned with Kalí Tal’s analyses of Vietnam War trauma literature and with Herman’s four-part process for recovery. For Tal, trauma literature is unlike typical representational war fiction or life-writing in that the writer has gone through a life-shattering experience that has altered his or her personal allegiance and trust in communal or national moral and ideological assumptions that the trauma has demolished. But the survivor’s experience is so unique and disruptive that it must be alien to the rest of us. The Holocaust survivor must have lived through the experience of 389

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the death camp; the rape survivor recognizes the fragility of the body’s integrity when subjected to coercive and degrading force and terror; the Vietnam survivor must have gone through and directly experienced the brutality and horror of combat, and possibly guilt, shame and berserking in a bad war that the US political system eventually repudiated. Nonetheless, such writer-survivors need not only bear witness to what they have suffered and discovered about (this) war but also emerge on the other side of their physical, emotional or moral wounds with “the necessary rebuilding of shattered personal myths” (Tal 1991: 226). To do so, however, the Vietnam trauma writer must represent an experience or revelation that cannot be fully shared with or understood or even perhaps accepted by the untraumatized reader. “Caught forever in this liminal state, the survivor comes to represent the shattering of our national myths without ever coming close to shattering the reader’s individual personal myth” (231). Tal notes that trauma-writing therefore tends to appear nearly a decade after the experience that has generated it, after the Vietnam survivor has rebuilt his identity, accommodated his revised personal myth to the nation’s current sense of identity and revised his story, fictional or nonfictional, to his personal need to witness the truth but to also have an audience with whom he can share it. Just as important, I would add, is the way in which the audience for such trauma literature can change over ten years as older national myths accommodate themselves to history. This metamorphosis or adaptation of trauma to trauma-writing is quite evident in Vietnam literature and film: Tim O’Brien fought in Vietnam in 1969, but won the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato only in 1979; Michael Herr’s Vietnam experiences occurred in 1967–8, but his full testimony was only published in 1977. All the great traumatic films of the war, from Go Tell the Spartans through Apocalpyse Now¸ appeared after the war was over – after it was lost, in fact, an outcome of history that would have brought some closure to the collective trauma of Vietnam and would have drawn movie audiences and readers to share it. As we have noted, the portions of Dispatches published during the Vietnam War registered what was seen, but knowledge of and responsibility for what was traumatic could be articulated only after the war had become history. Tal’s account of the dynamics of Vietnam trauma writers and their trauma-writing closely resembles psychodynamic trauma therapy as practiced and advocated by Judith Herman and other therapists as well as the particular group dynamics of veterans. Herman posits, as a “convenient fiction” (Herman 2015: 155), three stages of recovery for all trauma victims and those who help them heal: “the establishment of safety”, “remembrance and mourning” and “reconnection with ordinary life” followed by communalization of the experience with others who will listen with empathy and understanding. For veterans, traumatized with guilt, grief, shame, anger and resentment among the chronic symptoms of PTSD, being able to share their stories and feelings with those who have gone through similar experiences, as well as with their therapists, provides a communal security within which they can safely tell their disturbing stories and connect themselves with others. The Vietnam trauma writer’s need to testify to what he or she has experienced or witnessed also takes the form of a story to be shared with others. That community is larger and more diffuse, but more ignorant and much less empathetic than group therapy participants, and the writer’s purpose may range from simply testifying to changing his readers’ points of view to simply shocking them into listening. Given Tal’s reminder that the actual experience of trauma is almost literally unspeakable in any case, its representation through trauma-writing is necessarily indirect, symbolic or simply metonymic, a figurative version of such experiences even in first-person accounts. Dispatches illustrates this particularly well, both through its self-conscious hyperbole and 390

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equally self-conscious understatement, but so do other memoirs: Kovic’s asynchronic life story in Born on the Fourth of July (1976), Philip Caputo’s seeding of his with literary epigraphs in A Rumour of War (the title is the first of them), O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone, a collection of chronologically indeterminate scenes classified as “fiction” on the spine of my original copy of the memoir. On the other hand, fictions can be (mis)taken for fact in many Vietnam trauma narratives. In Trauma and Recovery, Herman cites GI figures from The Things They Carried as examples of the effects of traumatizations as if they were actual clinical cases rather than metonyms. One of the most shocking and most admired American “lyrics” of the war, Bruce Weigl’s title poem in his collection Song of Napalm is a case in point. In what seems to be the record of an actually experienced intrusion, the green Ohio countryside transforms itself into symbolic jungle, and then the vision of a Vietnamese girl carbonized by a napalm strike and “burned behind [the speaker’s] eyes” (Weigl 1994: 35) implodes in his imagination. The vision only partially fades away in the “jungle green pasture/Unfolding before us” (35) that ends the experience. But an epigraph addressing the work to the speaker’s wife reminds us that this experience is carefully fabricated, not simply remembered, even as the present tense of its ending gives it a preternatural synchronicity (we seem to be in an eternal present) and pulls it away from us into an experience that is shared only with the implied addressee. The placement of the word “napalm” at the end of the middle line of the middle stanza of the poem is similarly deliberate, half-hiding its most important word, half-centring the entire experience on the implications of its manufacture and use by Americans on Vietnamese. The scene of horror itself, represented as both a unique and intimate experience, may also recall Nick Ut’s iconic 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Kim Phuc, the “napalm girl” who did survive. Conversely, “Sailing to Bien Hoa” replaces any mimetic representation of intrusion or disassociation through the metaphor of a phantasmagorical return journey to Vietnam, made up of increasingly grotesque, dadaesque images that ultimately take us back to a point in time before the American war began: “two children eating rice, Speaking French” (Weigl 1994: 3), the clearest and most resonant image in the poem. Like “Song of Napalm” and “Sailing to Bien Hoa”, the trauma works of Weigl and other American poets like W. D. Ehrhart, Yusef Komunyakaa and Basil T. Paquet do not so much replicate trauma as reshape it into forms that require their readers to puzzle out its effects on survivors through effects of language and reference.

PTSD and its discontents Paquet’s role as a medic in the war, like David Rabe’s, may remind us of the older meaning of “trauma” as a physical wound, associated by the ancient Greeks (and Romans) with combat wounds in particular. The Journals of Trauma, Injury, Infection, and Critical Care (1961–) and Head Trauma Rehabilitation (1986–), still dedicated to research and treatment of what we might designate pre-PTSD trauma, focus on the sort of wounds that constituted war’s essence until at least the American Civil War. In his ground-breaking studies of psychiatry and literature, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002) Jonathan Shay re-examines Homer’s texts to unearth the psychic costs of war for Vietnam survivors, interweaving with the stories of Achilles’s berserking and Odysseus’s postwar difficulties in coming home and adjusting to normal social expectations the post-traumatic stories of the groups of Vietnam veterans whom he interviewed and counselled at Boston’s VA clinic between 1987 and 2008. As therapist, classical scholar and literary analyst, Shay’s most 391

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important insight and innovation for Vietnam trauma is his notion of “moral injury”, not just a “disorder” but a wounding or deformation of the soul or character of the warrior due to violations of what is morally right and just. While conventional therapy has encouraged recognizing, remembering, grieving for and recovering from patients’ own participation or connivance in atrocities and criminal actions in combat, Shay was among the first therapists to emphasize violations of what’s right (Greek themis) by others, especially commanding officers and officials, and the effect of such wrong and malignant decisions, orders and actions upon the character of men forced to follow, condone or repress what was unfair, dishonest, immoral or even evil. As a therapist who has also advised the military and provided recommendations for improving training and operations to avoid so damaging soldiers that they may damage themselves and others, Shay was and is not explicitly a critic of the Vietnam war or of war itself, but something of a meliorist. At the very least, however, he represents a dissatisfaction with treating war trauma as a medically sealed clinical procedure devoted to uncovering and exorcising discrete traumatic experiences whose effects have prevented the survivor from getting over the war and reassuming his “normal” identity in society. The notion that traumatization is not merely a maladjustment disorder or desolating shockwave into the final truth of human mortality but a symptom of something very wrong outside the self governs many psychodynamic approaches to recovery, especially but not exclusively in treating survivors of rape and sexual abuse. For Judith Herman, “the study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the subordination of women and children” (Herman 2015: 9), although she acknowledges with regret in the Epilogue to her 2015 update of Trauma and Recovery that the need for a political movement to translate our fuller awareness of trauma into social action has been disappointed once again: “In the past two decades, unfortunately, no popular movement has shown this kind of power, whether in the public domain of war and war crimes or in the private domain of crimes against women and children” (264). In the middle of another decade-long and uncertain American military intervention, despite the therapeutic advances, public awareness, and ethical justness of recognizing and institutionalizing PTSD, the post-traumatic offspring of the Vietnam War, there are increasing doubts about the limits, reliability and implications of its diagnosis among psychiatric professionals, trauma researchers and patients, if we can take Morris as representing both of the last two categories. Book-length studies by Alan Young (1995), who criticizes its ontogeny and development as a man-made disease and Ben Shephard, who concludes his history of modern British and American war psychiatry through the Falklands and Gulf Wars with the cultural triumph and therapeutic failures of the PTSD complex are among the most important. The most scathing and extreme critique, Jerry Lembcke’s PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America, exposes numerous cases of PTSD war “survivors” who were never in Vietnam, questions whether anyone who has not experienced or seen combat could have been traumatized, and analyses and debunks published figures of Vietnam PTSD survivors (somewhere between 33 and 50 per cent, according to news reports in 2003 that were anticipating the first return that summer of troops from Operation Iraqi Freedom) (Lembcke 2013). Lembcke, a chaplain’s assistant in Vietnam, half-facetiously claims that he could have identified himself as a combat veteran according to a “Combat Index” included in the VAcommissioned Legacies of Vietnam study published in 1981 (one year after DSM-III) that compared the life outcomes of Vietnam veterans and their peers. Lembcke’s discussion also returns directly to the birth of PTSD as a step-child of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a political and therapeutic community that combined anti-war activism with collective therapy (John Kerry, one of its leaders, even ran 392

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unsuccessfully for president in the wake of America’s invasion of Iraq). Those combat survivors of Vietnam were equally and desperately invested in recovering psychologically and morally from the war and saw ending it as complementary to both. Lembcke’s most important critique is less focused on the medicalization of Vietnam trauma than on the triumph of a national post-traumatic cultural formation that privileges psychic wounds over physical and moral ones and traumatized American veterans over the peoples whose nations they have invaded, occupied and managed over the last two decades. In the process, the psychological and adjustment problems of the remaining veterans of Vietnam and the ongoing survivors of the anti-terror wars without end in the Middle East and elsewhere are increasingly taken as both tokens for sympathy and badges of honour by a people whose disinterest in either stopping or understanding their heroes’ wars is assuaged by what they know about PTSD. The continuing pathologies of American war trauma will work themselves out within the US or anywhere else that a terrorist or alien threat can be recognized or manufactured. It is also likely that American Vietnam War literature, traumatic and otherwise, will move away from the direct experiences of American soldiers and those who write about them (who writes or reads American Civil War or Second World War fiction or poetry in the twenty-first century?). Two future directions seem likely. The Vietnamese American community and its concerns with diaspora, transitioning from the war generation and knitting together America and Vietnam individually and collectively has already and will continue to produce important literary works like Andrew Lam’s Perfume Dreams (2005), a collection of autobiographical essays, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer (2015) or his recent collection of short stories, The Refugees (2017), set in Vietnam and America. On the other hand, the trauma of Vietnam continues to be an important context for and influence upon the ongoing fiction, poetry, drama and creative nonfiction of the American wars in the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq as well as critical works like Ty Hawkins’s (2012) post 9/11 interpretation of Vietnam and the “war on terror”.

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. (1987) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-III-R, 3rd ed., revised, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. ———. (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5, 5th ed., Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association. Born on the Fourth of July (1989) dir. O. Stone, Universal Studios. Caruth, C. (1991) “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History”, Yale French Studies 79: 181–92. ———. (2016) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and Theory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Faust, D. G. (2008) This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hawkins, T. (2012) Reading Vietnam Amid the War on Terror, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Herman, J. L. (2015 [1992]) Trauma and Recovery, New York: Basic Books. Herr, M. (1991 [1977]) Dispatches, New York: Random House. Kovic, R. (1976) Born on the Fourth of July, New York: McGraw-Hill. Lam, A. (2005) Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, Berkeley, CA: Heyday. Lembcke, J. (2013) PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Lifton, R. J. (1973) Home From the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners, New York: Simon and Schuster. Morris, D. J. (2015) The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Boston and New York: An Eamon Dolan Book, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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Mark Heberle Nguyen, V. T. (2015) The Sympathizer, New York: Grove. ———. (2017) The Refugees, New York: Grove. O’Brien, T. (1994) “The Vietnam in Me”, The New York Times 2 October 1994, 48–57. Shay, J. (1994) Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, New York: Touchstone. ———. (2002) Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, New York: Scribner. Shephard, B. (2001) A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tal, K. (1991) “Speaking the Language of Pain: Vietnam War Literature in the Context of a Literature of Trauma”, in P. K. Jason (ed.) Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, Iowa City, IA: Iowa University Press, 217–50. Vulliamy, E. (2000) “It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over”, interview with M. Herr, The Guardian 16 July 2000. www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jul/16/film Weigl, B. (1994 [1988]) Song of Napalm, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Young, A. (1995) The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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36 NARRATIVES OF THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE Josias Semujanga

In this chapter, I will discuss literature on the genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda. First, however, I would like to give some elements of the historical context of this mass murder. In Rwanda, there are three social groups (Hutu, Tutsi and Twa) which share the same culture, language and religion. At the time of the colonial rule of the Germans and after the Belgian colonialists arrived in the early 1900s, the label “Hutu, Tutsi and Twa” described the social status or social class of a person, rather than his or her ethnic group. The status in the Kingdom of Rwanda was flexible. In general, Tutsi are usually cattle herders and Hutu are farmers and sheep breeders. However, a person who grew up in a Hutu family could acquire cows and be considered Tutsi; and in the same sense a Tutsi who lost his herd of cows, through an epizootic outbreak, for example, became Hutu when he started to live only from agriculture. The Twa were marginalized by other groups and considered unclean. Others could not share food or drink with them, and as a result the marriage between the Twa and the other groups was socially condemned. Under colonial rule and at the European school, class differences between Tutsi and Hutu were increasingly seen as ethnic differences. This change occurred because of European ideas about race and ethnicity and because Hutu and Tutsi increasingly emphasized their ethnicity, especially among the elites in their struggle for power and privileges after independence (Mamdani 2002; Twagilimana 2003). Later, since the beginning of independence in 1962, ethnic differences led to terrible tragedies between the two groups in Rwanda. For example, in 1959, the civil war led more than 300,000 thousand Tutsi into exile in neighbouring countries. Independence was given by Belgium to a racist party (the Party for the Promotion of Hutu or PARMEHUTU). After the massacres of the Tutsi in the 1960s and 1970s, the Tutsi who remained in the country were marginalized by the laws that excluded them from political and administrative positions at all levels as well as in the police and the army. Meanwhile, refugees created their own political movement (Rwandan Patriotic Front, RPF) and a guerrilla army (Rwanda Patriotic Army, RPA). War broke out in 1990; the Tutsi inside Rwanda were mistreated before being massacred during the genocide from 7 April to 16 July 1994. During the genocide, the government used propaganda of hatred against Tutsi through the media, and the radio called on Hutu to kill Tutsi (Chrétien et al. 1995; Thompson 2007). It also created a militia called Interahamwe to coordinate the killings. Over one million people are estimated to have been killed in the genocide. On 395

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16 July 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) forces took over the town of Gisenyi on the Congolese border of Northwestern Rwanda. The war and the genocide were over, and Rwanda was officially liberated. Under the debris of a hateful regime, a new literature was about to be born, although it would require a great deal of contemplation and would be undertaken with apprehension.

Can literature depict genocide? In the aftermath of the genocide, in a remarkably unified voice, writers, journalists, witnesses and poets described the events and atrocities experienced by the Tutsi under the Hutu regime. Writers discussed the capability of art or narrative accounts to depict the inhumanity and barbarism that led to the Tutsi genocide or Itsembabwoko. How could one speak about genocide? This was the pressing question in the aftermath of the horror. In Rwanda after the genocide, new life began on the ruins of the former. After the end of the genocide, many terms were used. The term Itsembabwoko is still used primarily among Tutsi survivors; Itsembatsemba, whose meaning is, in essence, the same, is used in liberal Hutu environments to underline the fact that many Hutu political leaders were killed under Hutu Power for promoting power sharing with the Tutsi group. Those neologisms – Itsembabwoko, Itsembatsemba, jenoside – which were necessary to describe the new event, genocide, show the difficulty inherent in the nature of language: words cannot properly speak of genocide, an event that destroys all links, all values and all social foundations (Semujanga 2019: 176, note 1). In July 1998, four years after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda, organizers of Fest’Africa, a multidisciplinary arts festival celebrating African culture which takes place biennially in Lille, France, invited several African writers as part of a project called Projet Rwanda: Ecrire par Devoir de Mémoire (Project Rwanda: Writing for Memory). Fest’Africa organizers decided that it was time to face the horrors of the 1994 genocide and to attempt to represent them in writing. Their project revolved around memorial sites; they invited these African writers to visit memorial sites and to interact with the Rwandan population in general and survivors of the genocide in particular. Among the horrors that the writers witnessed were bodies dug up from common graves where they had been thrown in April–July 1994 and later installed in public buildings where it seemed they had been fossilized by death. Some of the writings that came from Fest’Africa’s initiative include: Tierno Monénembo’s L’Aîné des orphelins (2000) or The Oldest Orphan (2004), Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi (2006 [2000]), Abdourahman Waberi’s Moisson de crânes: Textes pour le Rwanda or Harvest of Skulls: Texts for Rwanda (2000), Veronique Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana (2000) or The Shadow of Imana (2002), Koulsy Lamko’s La phalène des Collines or The Butterfly of the Hills (2002) and Monique Ilboudo’s Murekatete (2000). Other texts from this project include a poem collection by Nocky Djédanoum, Nyamirambo (2000), and an essay by Jean-Marie V. Rurangwa, Le Génocide des Tutsi expliqué à un étranger or Genocide against Tutsi explained to a Stranger (2000). The testimonial narratives about the tragedy in Rwanda that have been published so far – from Boubacar Boris Diop (2000) to Yolande Mukagasana (1997, 1999) – try to take into account both Adorno’s ban of silence (Adorno 1986: 23) and the necessity of telling for remembering. Most of the narratives about the Rwandan tragedy have been testimonial. Among the rare works of fiction, a great number of them came from the project Rwanda: Writing for Memory, while a small number of others are the result of individual initiatives, in Africa and elsewhere. We can add three narratives written by Benjamin Sehene (Le feu sous la soutane, 2005) (Fire under the Cassock), Scolastique Mukasonga (Inyenzi ou les cafards, 2006) (Inyenzi or Cockroaches) and Gilbert Gatore (Le passè devant soi, 2008) (The Past Ahead, 2012). 396

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These texts have been adapted into a musical play entitled Corps et voix, paroles rhizome by Koulsy Lamko, an actor who participated in the project. This unpublished show was performed in Rwanda and in Europe. The play unfolds in ten tableaux, each recalling a moment of the genocide. It pays homage to the victims by beginning each show with a minute’s silence. These tableaux tell the horror with singular restraint. Music accompanies the actors as they say their lines, and they dance to simulate what cannot be said. It is also necessary to mention that these writers have inscribed themselves in the Rwandan Post-Genocide Project, a project aiming to keep away from everyone’s view the exposed remains of human bodies. In fact, many genocide sites are like wide-open cemeteries that can be visited as such. This choice of memory may surprise some because it does not correspond to the Rwandese representation of death before the genocide. One can experience different reactions before these sanctuaries. However, what remains important for the visitors and the Rwandese themselves is to see these remains so that oblivion does not submerge the horrors undergone by the victims. Here the overwhelming sight of these remains is more powerful than the words used to tell the horrors. At that precise moment it is impossible to deny the horror. Places like Nyamata and Ntarama Churches or the Murambi Techinical School are astounding places. Besides the texts written as a part of Fest’Africa, the most outstanding one is without a question the novel by Canadian journalist Gil Courtemanche entitled Un Dimanche à la piscine à Kigali (2000) or A Sunday at a Pool in Kigali (2004). Through the voice of Valcourt, the main narrator, this incisive narrative recounts the recent history of Rwanda and brings light into the understanding of the mechanisms and issues related to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. It is a work of fiction that powerfully evokes the events that took place in Rwanda in 1994 and also a penetrating anthropological analysis of the complexity of Rwandan society before the colonial invasion. The novel opens upon a description of a network of unpleasant characters who meet daily around the same pool at an upscale hotel in Kigali while the city is under a bloodbath: cynical humanitarians, members of the government that planned the genocide, French parachutists salivating over prostitutes and the United Nations Canadian Commander. At the beginning of the genocide, Valcourt narrates that the UN troops leave the country abandoning the Tutsi victims at the mercy of their executioners. During his conversations with his friend, Father Louis Valcourt later adds that he learned that Colonel Théoneste confessed to a priest that he had helped plan the massacre of the Tutsi. Valcourt declares then that the members of the government and half of the IMF internationals and the World Bank should be imprisoned for what happened in Rwanda. The book aroused such a great deal of interest that it was soon translated into fourteen languages and adapted to the big screen. Courtemanche’s novel remains, along with General Romeo Dallaire’s indispensable book, Shake Hands with the Devil (2003), one of the rare Canadian narratives about the tragedy in Rwanda. This book presents an impressive first-hand account of the unfolding of the massacres and the cowardice of this world’s great nations who knew through this General about the preparations for the genocide and yet did nothing. On this subject we can also read the narrative entitled We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families by Philip Gourevitch (1999). Frustrated by his inability to understand the event from afar, the author began visiting Rwanda in 1995 and over the next two years made nine trips to the country and to its neighbours to report on the genocide and its aftermath. The book describes Gourevitch’s travels in Rwanda after the conflict, in which he interviews survivors and gathers information. The book is about genocide survivors’ stories. This title is taken from a letter written by several Adventist pastors to Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the President of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, who had taken refuge in Mugonero Adventist Hospital in the West of Rwanda. 397

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We could also mention the narratives by Monique Bernier, a Belgian who had lived in Rwanda for decades and who recounts her shame at not being able to protect her friends in 1994, leaving the country with the other Westerners protected by their military convoy (Bernier 1999, 2001), and the works of Jean Hatzfeld (2000, 2003) in which the author has respectively collected the stories of the survivors (Hatzfeld 2000) and then those of the executioners (2003, 2006, 2007). There are also many documentary or fiction films about Rwandan genocide. Up until now five fictional movies have come out: Shooting Dogs by Michael Caton-Jones (2005); Sometimes in April by Raoul Peck (2004), Hotel Rwanda by Terry George (2004) and 100 days by Nick Hughes (2001). The considerable number of documentaries include Après, un voyage dans le Rwanda by Denis Gheerbrandt (2005), Rwanda, l’histoire qui mène au génocide by Robert Genoud (1999), Une république devenue folle by Luc De Heusch (1997) and Mères courage by the Canadian Rwandan journalist Léo Kalinda (2006). All these films contribute to the memory of the Genocide; they make up its archives. Following the examples of the remains of the Genocide sites and the narratives about the event, these films ensure that this event will never be forgotten. Of the studies on films on the genocide of Tutsi, Alexandre Dauge-Roth’s (2010) monograph is currently the most compelling and best documented. There are many studies about the genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda. Most of them analyse the 1994 carnage with the intention of authenticating the facts or the credibility of the accounts. For example, Catherine Coquio’s study Rwanda: Le réel et les récits (2004) (Rwanda: Fact and Fiction) and the volume edited by Laure Coret, Rwanda, 1994–2004: des faits, des mots et des oeuvres (2004) (Rwanda 1994–2004: Facts, Words, and Works), analyse works of fiction from a thematic point of view and generally treat them in the same capacity as essays, political speeches and other historical writings. These essays whose documentary value is significant are a part of the moral project of first-hand fictional accounts, as well as other types of narrative, be they journalistic or political. Other methodological points of view avoid this pitfall in the analysis of the phenomenon of genocide. For example, Alexandre Dauge-Roth’s Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History (2010) examines fiction and testimonies about the 1994 genocide from the perspectives of writing and filming (cinematic representation), and Virginie Brinker in La Transmission littéraire et cinématographique du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda (2014) uses the same methodology, while Catalina Sagarra Martin’s Genocide des Tutsi, Rwanda, 1994 (2009) (Genocide against the Tutsi, Rwanda, 1994) focuses on the analysis of the notion of discourse. Rangira Béa Gallimore and Gerise Herndon’s Art from Trauma: Genocide and Healing Beyond Rwanda (2019) offers analysis of the genocide of the Tutsi, and other violence, to show how trauma can be healed through different forms of art. The studies of Nicki Hitchcott (2013) and Jean-Pierre Karegeye (2009) follow the same direction in their analysis of different stories. These articles are a reflection on literary production after the genocide of the Tutsi. The authors show that post-genocide literature is irrevocably at the crossroads of testimony and narrative. The originality of these works resides in showing that fictional representation allows for a broader testimony of the genocide. That is, the fictional space, by virtue of the multiple possibilities of imagination that it makes possible, allows for all components that coalesced to lead to the 1994 genocide to play a role in the interpretation of the texts. In other words, the myths of origins, the history, the culture, the political ideologies and discourses and other elements readily invite themselves into the fictional space of the analysed novels so as to create a more complex, and perhaps more complete, representation of the genocide. I argue that in the realm of fiction, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi becomes a pretext (in the sense of pre-text) to invoke all the other phenomena that preceded and followed it. 398

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How can literature depict the trauma of the genocide, the blows and sorrows endured in the aftermath of a traumatic event like genocide? Since the Holocaust, the occurrence of state-led exterminations of innocent civilians remains a critical issue in the world. Discourse has an ethical dimension: genocide is an annihilation of the human community. How can works of literature expose the unspeakable beyond Adorno’s dictum and its resonances (Todd 1996)? Taken in its absolute meaning, as suggested by Michael Rinn (1998), genocide appears unspeakable insofar as it refers to a linguistic model that blocks veracious translation into a natural language, due to simple ignorance or the divergence between a personal experience’s limits and its verbal expression. This does not mean that we adopt the opposed principle, effability, which suggests that all the events of the real world can be expressed by language. There is always a difference between the data of nature and the words that give an account of and transmit it, because the unspeakable manifests itself before anything else, just like a particular form of linguistic rhetoric rather than a certain specific content. Therefore, the unspeakability of genocide and trauma is a limit that cannot be crossed for moral or ethical reasons rather than an incapability to speak about the extreme violence of genocide. Otherwise, the unspeakable is based on the dichotomy between reality and narratives. According to Cathy Caruth, there are many ways to analyse traumatic experiences: she states that “there is no single approach to listening to the many different traumatic experiences and stories we encounter” (Caruth 1995: ix). For their part, Rangira Béa Gallimore and Gerise Herndon note that an interdisciplinary approach is required to study trauma: “Like Caruth, we also believe that interdisciplinary, artistic approach […] allows critics to apprehend the different manifestations of memory that survivors face” (Gallimore and Herndon 2019: xviii). In this chapter I argue that, as severe emotional shock and pain caused by an extremely upsetting experience, such as a genocide, trauma can be represented in narrative discourse in two ways. As literal representation, which is to fix a memory of the past traumatic event, it tirelessly repeats the wounds. The second takes the form of resilience. As I have stated elsewhere (Semujanga 2016: 20), “any text is built on the principle of the rhetoric effect even if literary work is characterized by the fiction effect and the storytelling by the truth-telling effect”. In other words, it is the rhetorical effect that gives full meaning to any narrative as a discourse, both as a narrative and an axiological process. Narratives about trauma tend to be underpinned by an axiological discourse that, while condemning the perpetrator, emphasizes the resilience of the victim or community when the victim is dead. Taking the form of remembering the victim, these narratives tell the reader that life has become possible despite the wounds of the past, according to Boris Cyrulnik (2003, 2005) whose main idea about resilience is to show what makes for success in the struggle to gain freedom from early wounds. In literary stories or testimonials, we can see this phenomenon through themes and scenes such as denial, love, violence, hate, death, rape and solidarity, which, although they can be presented in many different ways, are emotions and experiences that any reader can recognize and share. Because of this empathy that leads the reader to focus on the victims, the stories of the genocide have an ethical function to raise questions about individual and collective responsibility.

How to read novels and stories of genocide? The analysis of many novels and testimonial narratives have served as examples (see Semujanga 2008, 2016) in the exploration of the the following question: Can our aesthetic quests, especially in literature, support efforts to build societies that respect and protect all people? My goal has been to show that fiction and testimony about genocide have the same function: to bear witness to genocide by creating emotion in the reader. Because of this 399

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empathy that leads the reader to focus on the victims, the stories of the genocide have an ethical function. I would enumerate five aspects that apply to many narratives about the Rwandan genocide.

Realism as method of narration Narratives – works and testimonies – of the Rwandan genocide tend to use realistic methods even for fiction. Realism is a narrative technique by which the references to the event are clearly expressed or at least implied. In the context of the Tutsi genocide, many toponyms and anthroponyms refer both to the Rwandan history and the genocide. In literary works, everything happens as if fiction on genocide should validate and authenticate the event, as Charlotte Wardi (1986: 136) states: The representation of genocide in fiction must meet the test of authenticity as measured by the power of the imaginary creation to create past events and communicate without distorting. Genuine, it will allow the imagination and emotion of the reader to understand tragedy and to grasp the meaning. Indeed, narratives about the Rwandan genocide tend to evoke the memorial sites at which massacres occurred and places such as the Hôtel des Mille Collines, the Church of the Holy Family in Kigali, the hills of Bisesero, Mugombwa, Nyamata, Murambi and Nyarubuye. Moreover, the narrative is rarely linear: the movement back and forth between past and present reproduces the discrepancy between facts and memory. Furthermore, this realism is based on the narrative voice of the survivors, the dead and the executioners; it makes the symbolic context of the quest of the main characters, whose narrative course takes place in a geographical area, quite real. For fiction that follows the technique of literary realism, the relationship with the characters and the direct contact with the genocide are the first conditions for legitimizing fiction. Besides that, narratives concerning the Rwandan genocide show without a doubt that one of the huge strengths of the study of literature and testimonies about the genocide is that the two kinds of texts have more similarities than differences: both literature and testimony are built upon narration. The event is history as it proceeds from the facts as they happened. When one begins to tell what happened, one constructs a narrative about that history, which can be fiction or testimony. Fiction and testimony are not distinguished in the process of narration unless the reader knows historical facts because the genre – fiction or testimony – does not impose a single reading on the reader, but rather requires the reader to engage intellectually and emotionally with the text in order to generate meaning. As a form, the text is always suggestive, evocative and allusive, even if it is affirmative in the case of testimony, inspiring readers to construct their own sense and meaning. By emphasizing the testimonies of genocide, these realistic narrative techniques invite the reader to reflect on the ethical question: who is the victim and who is the killer?

The voice of the killer and the victim The stories of the genocide – fiction or testimony – are set in a world where victims and perpetrators are the main actors in the story. The question is how to tell the story of a perpetrator and victim without creating confusion of values for the reader. In many texts on the Rwandan genocide, there are three special techniques used in order to eliminate confusion. 400

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First, the narrative voice makes the slaughterer’s representation possible without falling into pathos, even if the representation of both the victim and the killer is in certain ways problematic. Second, the criminal is presented from the point of view of the victim or of the writer; in addition, textual enunciation makes a judgment based upon the writer’s opinion on the genocide. By doing so, the writer’s perspective on the perpetrator leads to the quest for judgment, as is the case in every act of testimony in which the witness refers to the guilty and the innocent. The perpetrator is in any case considered or approached through the voice of the victims, and their questioning. Both novels and testimonial narratives depict the relationship between killer and victim, which seems realistic and even ethical. Some of them explore a perpetrator’s perspective without forgiveness or promoting misplaced empathy. In the narratives, discursive enunciation rarely leaves any ambiguity between the victim and the perpetrator. For example, novels by Boubacar Boris Diop and Koulsy Lamko tend to feature a character with the author’s point of view on what is right or morally wrong. Third, the narration by different voices, with a harmonic effect, as in the case of Diop’s Murambi: The Book of Bones, reproduces the distance between the reality of genocide and its narration, which is polyphonic. In many novels on the Rwandan genocide, fictional narratives are juxtaposed with or embedded within a testimonial narrative. These narrative voices maintain in the text the various levels of enunciation between fiction and reality, but they also highlight the fact that the victims tell the stories of the dead. Their speech symbolically demonstrates their existence. This is where fiction joins testimony. The dead are thus present in the text through direct evidence of a fictional reminiscence, or as characters in the form of ghosts, as in the case of The Hill-Moth by Koulsy Lamko. A happy ending is also out of the question because it would not only be wrong in this context, but it would also entail a denial. All these narrative mechanisms making use of memory, symbolism and space resort to the technique of intertextuality.

Intertextuality or the Holocaust as a metaphor for other genocides Intertextuality is pervasive in narratives on the Rwandan genocide: evocation of themes and words concerning the Holocaust, African literature, world literature and Rwandan history and culture. The intertextual process is mainly observed at two levels. First, in these texts the Holocaust as a metaphor for absolute disaster has the function of interpreting the massacre of Tutsi as another genocide. Not that the Holocaust explains the massacre of Tutsi, but the reference to the historical and discursive time allows an accurate depiction of what happened in Rwanda in 1994. The Holocaust, while keeping its original reference to the massacre of Jews in Europe, is now used as a metaphor for any possible genocide. Second, in literature on the Rwandan genocide, the stories of the old Rwanda (the foundational narratives) or colonial narratives (history, anthropology, religion) and political narratives are evoked in many ways. Both references to the Holocaust and Rwandan history contextualize the genocide by providing not only the words used by the perpetrators, but also those used to talk about the aftermath. These fragments of narratives highlight the relationship between history, anthropology, politics and literature. Moreover, using intertextuality is not only a formal fantasy, but also a moral and ideological strategy: it is a way of condemning the perpetrators’ actions and their ideology of the dehumanization and destruction of human beings. Writing about genocide has both an 401

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aesthetic level (literature) and an axiological one (expressing values). Intertextuality helps to examine how writers – whether they write as witnesses to the Tutsi genocide or at an imaginative distance from it – articulate the borderline between fact and fiction, between event and its expression, between the condition of horrible life suffered in atrocity and the desire for a better existence. They pave the ways in which historical facts are mediated in the complex relationship between writing, history and ethics.

Genocide narratives and the quest of ethics Many narratives on the Rwandan genocide share a common element: the theme of the extermination of citizens by the State and the emotional charge it arouses in the reader. Literature can teach us about great human themes such as the horror of genocide by provoking an emotional experience, as does any tragic work. In this way, a narrative about genocide opens us to the other; it challenges us to leave room for the other, and the “I” of the narrator exists only in the postulated interaction with the reader. Through the dialogue between reader and writer, a work helps us to remember that to live is to live for the other – the survivor – asking for his or her solitude, to make him or her feel at home in the new, postgenocide community. Literary and testimonial narratives, with their flexibility of form and structure, offer a fruitful space in which to create and recreate experience for a broad range of readers. The texts evoke both factual and emotive content, build multiple narrative voices and enunciative positions, and recover personal voices to bring about dialogue between the writer and the reader. These texts also encourage readers to consider the realities of different points of view. The testimonial narratives set out two correlated aspects of the testimony: the narrator has a dual position of victim and witness. This narrator’s capability makes a testimonial narrative that not only evokes the experiences but also aims to transform such a factual experience into a new sense of the world and things. The goal of many narratives is the production of identification between the reader and the protagonist in order to determine what is right or wrong. In the case of genocide fiction, the reader experiences many difficulties in identifying with a creation that is extremely horrifying, because the more horrible instants of the novel face the reader with the difficulties of identification with the perpetrators. Otherwise, to respect the suffering of survivors, writers adopt an ethical contract which not only dictates the choice of realism in evoking the material and moral conditions of their survival, but also a certain restraint in describing family and social aspects of the characters. In the debate about perpetrators and victims as characters, the reader is in the position of the trusted third party at an ethical level on which genocide is seen as an absolute horror. Monénembo’s thinking joins that of Jean Améry (2005) on the ambivalence of the anger of an Auschwitz survivor who rejects the present as the genocide’s echo; many of his characters dream of a better world than the one where they live now.

Tainting the language: the génocidaire’s speech The carrying out of genocide requires the use of language to plan and put in order the crime. It prevents language from being used to tell the truth of the crime; this requires words to lose their initial meaning and be replaced with perverted words or buzzwords (Klemperer 1947, 2000). Propaganda reverses the meaning of the words and creates a new semantic context in which words will eventually be false so that the only 402

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significance they have is as ideology and political lies. Propaganda taints language, humans and things. The genocides of the 20th century threw great suspicion on the ability of human language to render the extent of the genocidal enterprise through words. Even the neologism genocide had to be created. Before genocide occurred, the génocidaires attacked language because they wanted to destroy the link between humans. Before the physical destruction of the people, there is the destruction of language by the tainting of some of their words. There is a manipulation of language to manipulate minds. The propaganda conducted during genocide reverses the meaning of words and generates confusion in language. Words falter at this point, they lose all contact with reality and become pure signifiers, having lost any real meaning, or rather, having only ideology and falsehood as their signifiers. Genocide cannot be reduced to the destruction of physical bodies because it affects culture in its most basic expression: language. It is “the expression of a mysterious essence in humans […] for speech is first and foremost a human act” (Steiner 1969: 13) and so it must participate in the act of genocide; it is abused, made to say the unspeakable and think the unthinkable. Genocide taints language because when words become instruments of terror, they lose their innocence; they obtain a new meaning that will permanently affect their initial meaning. The Tutsi genocide produced a language so coarse that many words are no longer free. For instance, the word Interahamwe once had a positive connotation, linked to the heroic deeds of young men who worked together and co-operated in their warrior and social activities. However, since those who carried out the Tutsi massacre adopted the term Interahamwe, the word is now tainted, and can no longer be used outside its current context. The same has happened with the word gukora, which means to work, but which has been used since the 1960s to refer to the macabre work of despoiling the Tutsi or killing them. It has been so deeply tainted that the use of its substantive form to signify gratitude – urakoze (singular) and murakoze (plural) or “please” – is problematic. Once it was used as a call for massacre, gukora can never serve for giving thanks. Some people, sensitive to the grace of the words, offer a synonym instead: urakenuye/murakenuye or merci. Similarly, the term umuganda, which used to mean the collective work developing local communities in Rwanda, was used, in 1994, as a code word for killings. Then an administrative directive was sent to the mayors by the prefects and then to the councilors in each sector to organize a special umuganda: the collective killing of the Tutsi. These words do not convey what they initially expressed, and the substitute word recalls the tainting that the genocide threw on language. Such is the case with the word Impuzamugambi, which had meant those who share the same ideals of solidarity for the collective good, and is now associated with the genocide. To evoke the unspeakable rape of Tutsi women during the genocide, the word ikizungerezi, which first referred to a beautiful and desirable woman, came to mean the Tutsi woman who is always desirable, connoting the treachery and obscenity of the rape of Tutsi women by Hutu militiamen. The word Inyenzi as well, the name of the harmless bug that lives in Rwandan huts, came to designate, in the discourse of the Hutu Power propaganda, the Tutsi as the enemy to be crushed. The poor insect lost its innocence in its association with the Rwandan language: it continues to live in the huts and be known by the same name, however tainted and suspicious. Furthermore, the speech of the génocidaire calling for massacres entails both a legal and philosophical phenomenon: intentionality. As the génocidaire’s act presupposes collective responsibility, it also suggests the possibility of a collective intention of committing genocide, without which the crime would not be genocide. However, there is not a 403

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collective culpability as Karl Jaspers (1996) described in the light of his disappointment that the German people have not contemplated what happened collectively during the Nazi regime, and Jean-Paul Sartre (Judaken 2006) suggests by showing in Anti-Semite and Jew how the persecution of the Jews in France was not merely the excess of some extremists, as has often been asserted in postwar France in the context of mass killings. This also raises the question of the status of the autonomous subject on the basis of which the concept of intentionality and the autonomy of our actions is conceived (Weber 1978) in a world dominated by State propaganda, which prevents personal thought and leads to manipulation, as in a totalitarian regime, as described by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968). In this major book, Arendt identifies three stages leading to total domination and genocide: the first step is to kill people by putting outside the law certain categories of the population and identifying them as if they were foreigners; the second consists in killing moral people, thus rendering impossible any decision based on conscience; the last step is the destruction of what makes the identity of each person unique. This is why literary works from Rwanda are essentially engaged in nationalist ideology, which is a way of fighting racist views and promoting a shared community. The popular artforms – songs, painting, literature – evoke Rwanda as a nation, using the foundational myths of Gihanga as the ancestor of all Banyarwanda. The works in Kinyarwanda explore the impact of genocide on individuals and communities, effectively conveying the complexity of genocidal suffering in order to escape the media binary of victims and perpetrators. Writers demonstrate the significant post-genocide recovery achieved within Rwanda, and consider the value of cross-ethnic group interaction in further affirming this recovery. Could this popular art be an antidote to génocidaires calling for massacres of Tutsi, and heal the survivors “by allowing them to tell their painful experience to each other, to Rwandans, and to the world beyond the Rwandan borders” (Gallimore 2019: 67)?

Bibliography Adorno, T. (1986 [1967]) Prisme: Critique de la culture et de la société, Paris: Payot. Améry, J. (2005) Par-delà le crime et le châtiment: Essai pour surmonter l’insurmontable, Arles: Actes Sud. Arendt, H. (1968 [1951]) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace & World. Bernier, M. (1999) La Honte, Bruxelles: Les Éperonniers. ———. (2001) Le Silence des collines, Bruxelles: Les Éperonniers. Brinker, V. (2014) La Transmission littéraire et cinématographique du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda, Paris: Garnier. Caruth, C. (1995) “Preface”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, vii-xi. Chrétien, J. P., Kabanda, M., Dupaquier, J.-F. and Ngarambe, J. (1995) Rwanda: Les médias du génocide, Paris: Karthala. Coquio, C. (2004) Rwanda: Le réel et les récits, Paris: Belin. Coret, L. (ed.) (2004) Rwanda 1994–2004: des faits, des mots et des œuvres, Paris: L’Harmattan. Courtemanche, G. (2000) Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali, Montréal: Boréal. ———. (2004 [2000]) A Sunday at a Pool in Kigali, trans. P. Claxton, Toronto: Random House. Cyrulnik, B. (2003) Le Murmure des fantômes, Paris: Odile Jacob. ———. (2005 [2003]) The Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience, trans. S. Fairfield, New York: Other Press. Dallaire, R. (2003) Shake Hands with the Devil, Toronto: Random House. Dauge-Roth, A. (2010) Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, New York: Lexington Books. Diop, B. B. (2000) Murambi: le livre des ossements, Paris: Stock.

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Narratives of the Rwandan genocide ———. (2006 [2000]) Murambi: The Book of Bones, trans. F. McLaughlin, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Djédanoum, N. (2000) Nyamirambo, Bamako and Lille: Le Figuier, Éditions de Fest’Africa. Gallimore, B. R. (2019) “Ingoma Nshya: Forbidden Fruit Brings Healing and Empowerment to Rwandan Female Drummers”, in B. R. Gallimore and G. Herndon (eds) Art from Trauma: Genocide and Healing beyond Rwanda, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 51–71. Gallimore, B. R. and Herndon, G. (eds) (2019) Art from Trauma: Genocide and Healing beyond Rwanda, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Gatore, G. (2008) Le passé devant soi, Paris: Phébus. ———. (2012 [2008]) The Past Ahead, trans. M. de Jager, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gourevitch, P. (1999) We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, New York: Picador. Hatzfeld, J. (2000) Dans le nu de la vie: Récits des marais rwandais, Paris: Seuil. ———. (2003) Une saison de machettes: Récits, Paris: Seuil. ———. (2006 [2003]) Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, trans. L. Coverdale, New York: St Martin’s Press. ———. (2007 [2000]) Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak, trans. L. Coverdale, New York: Other Press. Hitchcott, N. (2013) “Between Remembering and Forgetting: (In)visible Rwanda in Gilbert Gatore’s Le Passé Devant Soi”, Research in African Literatures 44(2): 79–90. Ilboudo, M. (2000) Murekatete, Bamako and Lille: Le Figuier, Éditions de Fest’Africa. Jaspers, K. (1996 [1947]) The Question of German Guilt, New York: Fordham University Press. Judaken, J. (2006) Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Karegeye, J.-P. (2009) “Rwanda: littérature post-génocide, écritures itinérantes: témoignage ou engagement?”, Protée 37(2): 21–32. Klemperer, V. (1947) LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. ———. (2000 [1947]) The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. M. Brady, London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press. Lamko, K. (2002) La phalène des collines, Paris: Le Serpent à plumes. Mamdani, M. (2002 [2001]) When Victims Become Killers, New York: Princeton University Press. Monénembo, T. (2000) L’aîné des orphelins, Paris: Seuil. ———. (2004 [2000]) The Oldest Orphan, trans. M. F. Nagem, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books. Mukagasana, Y. (1997) La Mort ne veut pas de moi, Paris: Fixot. ———. (1999) N’aie pas peur de savoir, Paris: Robert Laffont. Mukasonga, S. (2006) Inyenzi ou les cafards, Paris: Gallimard. Rinn, M. (1998) Les récits du génocide: Sémiotique de l’indicible, Paris and Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestlé. Rurangwa, J.-M. V. (2000) Le Génocide des Tutsi expliqué à un étranger, Bamako and Lille: Le Figuier, Éditions de Fest’Africa. Sagarra Martin, C. (2009) Genocide des Tutsi, Rwanda, 1994: Lectures et écritures, Québec: Presses de l’université Laval. Sartre, J.-P. (1976 [1946]) Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, trans. G. J. Becker, New York: Schocken. Sehene, B. (2005) Le feu sous la soutane, Paris: L’Esprit Frappeur. Semujanga, J. (2008) Le génocide, sujet de fiction? Analyse des récits du massacre des Tutsi dans la littérature africaine, Québec: Éditions Nota Bene. ———. (2016) Narrating Itsembabwoko: When Literature becomes Testimony of Genocide, Bern: Peter Lang Editor. ———. (2019) “Narrating Itsembabwoko and the Quest for Empathy”, in B. R. Gallimore and G. Herndon (eds) Art from Trauma: Genocide and Healing beyond Rwanda, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 161–78. Steiner, G. (1969 [1967]) Langage et silence, Paris: Seuil. Tadjo, V. (2000) L’ombre d’Imana: Voyages jusqu’au bout du Rwanda, Arles: Actes Sud. ———. (2002 [2000]) The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda, trans. V. Wakerley, Oxford: Heinmann Educational Publishers. Thompson, A. (ed.) (2007) The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, London: Pluto Press. Todd, J. D. (1996) “Adorno’s ‘Ban’ on Poetry after Auschwitz”, Focus on Literatur 3(2): 147–57.

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Josias Semujanga Twagilimana, A. (2003) The Debris of Ham: Ethnicity, Regionalism, and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Waberi, A. (2000) Moisson de crânes: Textes pour le Rwanda, Paris: Le Serpent à plumes. Wardi, C. (1986) Le génocide dans la fiction romanesque, Paris: PUF. Weber, M. (1978 [1921]) Economy and Society, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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37 9/11 Lucy Bond

The events of 11 September 2001 were immediately interpreted as having “changed the grain of the most routine moment” (DeLillo 2001). According to Don DeLillo, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC left Americans confronting “the ruins of the future”. For DeLillo, 9/11 was an event “with no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile” (DeLillo 2001). Indeed, for many American authors – from Jonathan Franzen to Norman Mailer – reality’s abrupt “desertion of every basis for comparison” (DeLillo 2001) seemed to pose a challenge to the very idea of fiction. As Jay McInerney comments, “[f]or a while, quite a while, fiction did seem inadequate to the moment”; “the idea of ‘invented characters’ and alternate realities seemed trivial and frivolous and suddenly, horribly outdated” (McInerney 2005). However, while American novelists found it difficult to broach the subject of 9/11, the popular demand for a literary response to the attacks was significant. As Arin Keeble makes clear: Even before there were such novels, the apparent need for literary interpretations of the attacks reflected just how incomprehensible they felt for many. And perhaps because 9/11 was such a visual spectacle, newspapers and magazines sought literary authors – experts at exploring the human condition through the written word – to interpret or narrate the trauma. (Keeble 2016) This standoff between authors who felt unwilling or unable to write about the attacks and the public’s desire for a narrative that was able to bring meaning to these events recalls the classic paradox of trauma. As Roger Luckhurst reminds us, trauma “issues a challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge. In its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative, but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explicate the trauma” (Luckhurst 2008: 80). At the turn of the new millennium trauma was well on its way to becoming a Western master-narrative. By the early 1990s, trauma had begun to “escape narrow professional discourses and diffuse into wider culture” (76). As “overlapping psychiatric, medical, legal, journalistic, sociological, cultural, theoretical and aesthetic languages […] contributed to such a pervasive sense of the organizing power of the notion of trauma”, “a new kind of subjectivity […] organized around the concept of trauma” emerged 407

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(Luckhurst 2003: 28–39). The resulting “traumatophilia” proved particularly pervasive in North America. By the late twentieth century, the fetishization of pain and victimhood had produced a “pathological public sphere”, which fed upon the collective “fascination with torn and opened bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (Seltzer 1997: 4). Mark Seltzer defines the pathological public sphere as the habitus of a “wound culture”, which “represents itself to itself, from the art and culture scenes to tabloid and talk TV, as a culture of suffering, states of injury, and wound attachments” (Seltzer 1997: 4). The evolution of American wound culture is too complicated to unfold in detail here. In brief, however, Kirby Farrell suggests that late twentieth-century America was characterized by a “post-traumatic mood” that came “as an aftershock of the great catastrophes of midcentury” (Farrell 1998: 2). As the traumas of the Great Depression and the Second World War were compounded by “the Cold War, the Korean War, McCarthyism, threats of nuclear annihilation, and new racial and socioeconomic tensions”, Americans felt “a disturbance in the ground of collective experience” (2–3). New anxieties about “loss of control and decline or degeneration” (3) were heightened by political, social and environmental crises from the Kennedy assassination to the AIDS epidemic and climate change. Cumulatively, Farrell asserts, these events were registered as a “shock to people’s values, trust and sense of purpose; an obsessive awareness that nations, leaders, even we ourselves can die” (3). American wound culture, then, preceded 9/11, but intensified in its aftermath. In Seltzer’s formulation, wound culture exists at the intersection of “the vague and shifting lines between the singularity and privacy of the subject, on the one side, and collective forms of representation, exhibition, and witnessing, on the other” (Seltzer 1997: 4). Wound culture inhabits the boundary between experience and representation, between private and public life, between psychological and social worlds. This liminal space has become the setting for the corpus of “9/11 trauma fiction” (Bond 2015), which was mostly published from 2001 to 2008. After this point novels relating to the attacks became far more heterogeneous in their geographical and historical parameters, their cultural and ethnic diversity and the extent to which they engaged politically with the post-9/11 world. Early publications, however, remained wedded to the tropes of wound culture: exhibiting a fascination with trauma that verged on the voyeuristic. As we will see, this fetishization of trauma manifested itself in two apparently oppositional narrative tendencies: first, a retreat from the disorder of public life into the familiar environs of the home; second, the hyperbolic encoding of personal issues as national problems. These impulses mirrored patterns elsewhere in the pathological public sphere: the propensity to privatize the representation of the attacks echoed the highly personal responses of psychiatric professionals and critics in literary and trauma studies; and the desire to nationalize the trauma of 9/11 reinforced the sentiments of hegemonic media and political narratives. Together, the simultaneous contraction and expansion of the trauma of 9/11 threatened to homogenize different responses to the attacks, eliding the distinction between personal and political worlds. Taking these issues in turn, this chapter will examine the rise and fall of the trauma paradigm after 9/11. I begin by exploring the emergence of the subgenre of 9/11 trauma fiction, which dominated early novelistic responses to the attacks. I then consider the scalar telescoping that led literary, critical and political discourses to simultaneously shrink the narrative of 9/11 to the confines of the home and symbolically expand the boundaries of the domicile to the borders of the Homeland. Finally, I analyse the critical backlash against trauma that followed in the wake of these developments, before concluding with some suggestions about how cultural trauma studies might move beyond the theoretical impasse that followed in the wake of 11 September 2001. 408

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9/11 trauma fiction In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, 9/11 was widely represented as an unprecedented historical rupture that was incomprehensible, unrepresentable and unreal (Bond 2015). These tropes formed the thematic thrust of early literary responses to 9/11 (most of which were published between 2001 and 2008) and the initial reactions of scholars working in trauma studies (most of which were published between 2001 and 2005). Many authors prioritised personal narratives in which the events of 11 September were equated with smaller, domestic traumas. The effect was arguably to dehistoricize the attacks and divert attention away from their geopolitical consequences. Early literary responses to 11 September 2001 subscribed to a highly limited representational template, which I define as 9/11 trauma fiction. This corpus “recurrently returns to tropes of silence and amnesia, evoking buried or repressed pasts, whose unavailability to recall destabilizes the very coordinates that make it possible to interpret the world” (Bond 2015: 22–3). The plots of these novels tend to manifest “an uncritical recycling of paradigms inherited from orthodox trauma theory” (17), which resonate strongly with the foundational theorizations of trauma outlined by Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996), Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992). These tendencies can be seen in texts aimed at diverse audiences: from children’s picture books, such as Andrea Patel’s On That Day (2001), Susan L. Roth’s It’s Still a Dog’s New York (2001) and Rosina G. Schnurr’s Terrorism (2002); to young adult fiction, including Joyce Maynard’s The Usual Rules (2003), Dina Friedman’s Playing Dad’s Song (2006) and Francine Prose’s Bullyville (2007); popular or genre fiction, like Karen Kingsbury’s Remember (2003) and Shirley Abbott’s The Future of Love (2008); and “literary” novels, such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2006) and DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). Although these texts are very different in their scope and appeal, each “frames disaster within sentimental domestic settings, assimilating trauma into conventional narrative structures, and generating a standardized, almost homogenized portrait of post-9/11 America” (Bond 2015: 23). In this sense, 9/11 trauma fiction is very different to the models of trauma fiction theorized by critics like Anne Whitehead and Michael Rothberg. Whitehead suggests that seminal trauma fictions (like Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces [1997] or W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz [2001]) are self-conscious about “the challenge posed to conventional narrative frameworks and epistemologies” by traumatic experience, aware of the “difficulty of spatially locating the past” and the need to acknowledge the “hitherto unrecognized cultural diversity of historical representation” (Whitehead 2004: 81). Rothberg’s “traumatic realism” (examples of which can be seen in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock [1993] and Art Spiegelman’s Maus I [1986] and Maus II [1991]), provides “an aesthetic and cognitive solution to the conflicting demands inherent in representing and understanding [trauma]” (Rothberg 2000: 9). Aware of the danger of positioning trauma as sublime (and hence beyond representation) or seeking premature closure, Rothberg argues that traumatic realism posits the catastrophic event as a “necessary absence”, a “felt lack” in the text, without attempting to “produce an imaginary resolution” (104). This suspicion of illusory redemption stands in contrast to the narrative arc of the majority of 9/11 trauma fictions. The insistent emphasis placed on working through trauma in these novels suggests a form of “narrative fetishism”, which Eric Santner describes as “strategy of undoing” dependent upon “the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma and loss that called the narrative into being in the first place” (Santner 1992: 144). 409

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Both Whitehead and Rothberg foreground texts in which the experience of trauma is registered at the level of form and content. By contrast, in 9/11 trauma fiction, theoretical paradigms of trauma are transcribed into literary themes without much apparent disruption to the conventions of domestic realism. Throughout these novels, we see characters struggling with a radically altered world. In DeLillo’s Falling Man, for example, the protagonist, Keith, notes that “[t]here was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means” (DeLillo 2007: 5). Similarly, Abbott’s Mark suggests that Americans had entered “a new epoch” in which “[e]veryday life had been vaporized” (Abbott 2008: 137, 141). What follows, in each of these texts “is a peculiar pathologization of the novel, which is reduced to little more than a register of the symptoms of trauma” (Bond 2015: 27). In the vast majority of these works, the protagonists’ behaviour can be faultlessly mapped onto the description of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1980). Yet, despite the overwhelming emphasis on the shattering nature of the attacks, Richard Gray argues, there is paradoxically little sense here of what it is humanly like to encounter trauma [… T]here is none of the confusion of feeling, the groping after a language with which to say the unsayable, that characterizes much of the fiction devoted to the new forms of terror. (Gray 2008: 132) In Gray’s reading, the novels of the 9/11 trauma canon are “symptomatically numb”, able to register that “something traumatic – perhaps too dreadful for words, unsusceptible as yet to understanding – has happened” (Gray 2011: 27), but unable to give meaningful form to this trauma. Gray criticizes the orthodoxy of 9/11 trauma fiction, arguing that, while it is widely acknowledged that “[n]ew events generate new forms of consciousness requiring new structures of ideology and the imagination to assimilate and express them”, in the case of the post-9/11 novel, we “are still, perhaps, waiting for a fictional measure of the new world view” (Gray 2008: 132–3). The problem, he continues, is not only that these texts add “next to nothing to our understanding of the trauma at the heart of the action”, but that they disguise the “difference” of the new world order “by inserting it in a series of familiar tropes” (133). This “begs the question of just how new, or at least different, the structures of these books are. The answer is, for the most part, not at all” (133). There are some points of caution to raise about Gray’s critique. As a number of critics have noted (Craps 2013; Luckhurst 2008; Rothe 2011), the desire to privilege an experimental, “modernist” aesthetic in works of trauma fiction tends to marginalize other forms of trauma narrative (and, indeed, to occlude non-Western suffering in general). Moreover, as Catherine Morley contends, it is prescriptive for critics to “outline a specific trajectory for American writers that might seem to transcend the role of the cultural or literary spectator” (Morley 2011: 720). The central point here, however, is not only that these post-9/11 novels “simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures”, but the fact that by dint of their doing so, “[t]he crisis is, in every sense of the word, domesticated” (Gray 2008: 134).

The paradox of scale in 9/11 trauma culture As has been widely noted, the corpus of 9/11 trauma fiction focuses overwhelmingly – though admittedly, not exclusively – on the household of white, privileged New Yorkers. 410

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The attacks of 11 September form the backdrop to a series of smaller domestic crises including illness, infidelity, adoption and divorce. As Gray notes, “all life here is personal; cataclysmic public events are measured purely and simply in terms of their impact on the emotional entanglements of their protagonists” (Gray 2008: 134). The historical and geographical range of these texts tends to be limited and offers little reflection on the pre-9/11 world, which has the effect of personalizing the attacks and divesting them of their geopolitical contexts. Paradoxically, however, in many of these novels a peculiar inversion of scale means that as the trauma of 9/11 becomes assimilated with the emotional lives of the protagonists, the dramas of the domicile are imagined as playing out on a national, even international stage. The overwhelming emphasis upon trauma engenders a strange telescoping of scale in which the narrative at once contracts to the boundaries of the home and expands these boundaries to the borders of the nation. The texts establish a slippage between personal biography and global history, creating a peculiar dynamic in which “the domestic arena promises an escape from the sudden terror of the external world, whilst paradoxically replicating the dramas playing out on the geopolitical stage in an altogether more intimate setting” (Bond 2015: 37). Helen Schulman’s A Day at the Beach (2007) documents the progressive elision of private and public life over the course of 11 September 2001. As her protagonists, the emotionally estranged Gerhard and Suzannah Falktopf, watch the attacks unfold Suzannah comments, “outside their window these people were diving to their deaths. On TV it was so fucking quiet. Here in Suzannah’s home, sirens screened” (Schulman 2007: 59). For Suzannah, the “reality” of 9/11 is more easily locatable within her own apartment than it is in the outside world. This internalization of the attacks continues as the Falktopfs flee the island: Suzannah asks, “[w]hat was that smell? Plastic, paper, metal? All was burning. She was burning. The buildings were burning. The world” (78). An even more explicit appropriation can be seen in both Kingsbury’s Remember and Abbott’s The Future of Love. While Kingsbury’s Luke Baxter fears that the attacks might be a sign of God’s displeasure at him having premarital sex with his girlfriend (Kingsbury 2003: 187), Abbott’s Antonia wonders whether 9/11 may be attributed to her affair with a married man. She comments, “maybe it was her fault that terrorists had knocked down the World Trade Center. She was committing adultery, or at least Sam was” (Abbott 2008: 171). While these imagined causalities are undoubtedly hyperbolic, Seltzer suggests that this telescoping of private and public realms is an integral feature of wound culture, which entails “a fundamental shattering or breaking-in of the boundaries between the external and the internal” (Seltzer 1997: 10). In the aftermath of 9/11, this conflation of private and public life played out in disparate ways across the narratives of the pathological public sphere. Psychiatric professionals and trauma scholars tended to contract their focus, engendering a highly personalized mode of response that ignored the wider contexts of the attacks. This occasioned the emergence of a form of “testimony-criticism […] that draws upon the author’s own experiences as its principal frame of reference, creating a problematic identification between author and subject that leaves little room for any distanced critical perspective to emerge” (Bond 2015: 38). In the aftermath of 9/11, this tendency was evident in the work of a number of prominent trauma theorists, including James Berger (2003), Judith Greenberg (2003), Marianne Hirsch (2003), Laub (2003) and E. Ann Kaplan (2005). Kaplan explores how the events of 11 September “radically altered my relationship to New York, to the United States qua nation and produced a new personal identity” (Kaplan 2005: 2) – or, to revisit Luckhurst’s formulation, “a new kind of articulation of subjectivity […] organised around the concept of trauma” (Luckhurst 2003: 28). There is no 411

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reason to discount Kaplan’s need to bear witness to her experience of the attacks. However, the ubiquity of this tendency does raise questions about the extent to which cultural trauma studies was initially able to engage with the complex circumstances of 9/11. The danger of using testimony-criticism as a way of approaching the analysis of complicated historical events is that “self-witnessing threatens to eclipse the wider subject of enquiry” (Bond 2015: 38). This might not have seemed especially problematic were it not for the insistent instrumentalization of the trauma of the attacks elsewhere in the pathological public sphere. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued a press release that gave the general public advice about “coping with terrorism”. The guidance was that individuals should cede their concerns to “trained officials throughout the country” and “[l]imit their exposure to media coverage” (APA 2001). In return, they were assured, they could take comfort from “the actions our government is taking to combat terrorism and restore safety and security” (2001). There is something infantilizing about this advice that mimics the disenfranchizing effects that various critics have seen in paradigms of trauma relating to other events including the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and the 1997 Oklahoma City Bombings (Eaglestone 2004; Edkins 2003; Linenthal 2001; Tal 1996). However, the infantilization inherent in APA’s advice also demonstrates how the ubiquity of trauma as a frame of reference in the American public sphere… made it hard to identify the divergent agendas of various interest groups […] as mental health practitioners and academics […] remained insufficiently alert to trauma’s instrumentalization in political discourse. (Bond 2015: 49) Dana Heller notes that “[m]ajor television networks were quick to exploit the infantile aspects of this emotional framing of the attacks, banking on narratives […] that fashioned George W. Bush as the nation’s patriarchal protector” (Heller 2005: 15). Such attitudes were bolstered by political rhetoric that portrayed the attacks as an assault upon the homes of Americans; as Susan Faludi remarks, the “threat, according to this revised script, wasn’t to our commercial and governmental hubs but to our domestic hearth” (Faludi 2008: 5). From 2001 onwards, the Bush administration routinely used the equation between the home and the nation to buttress its policy decisions. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, for example, Bush remarked, “[w]e face an enemy determined to bring death and suffering into our homes” (Bush 2010: 1639). He continued, “[o]n September 11th, we learned that America must confront threats before they reach our shores”, “the war is not over, and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious” (1639). The intimation that the homes of individual citizens were under threat was thus used to bolster support for an increasingly controversial foreign policy which involved the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects, their detention without trial at black site prisons and the widespread use of torture. The creation of the Office of Homeland Security (from 2002, the Department of Homeland Security) institutionalized this slippage between private and public realms. As Donald Pease contends, the “term Homeland was the keynote that anchored all of the other terms in the Bush administration’s new symbolic arrangement” (Pease 2009: 194). It generated a definition that “not only links the familial household to the nation but also imagines both in opposition to everything outside the geographical and conceptual borders of the home” (168). It was for these reasons that, in the aftermath of 9/ 11, “the signifier of the Homeland” became a felicitous way “to capture [the] experience of trauma” (193) and to mobilize it for political ends. 412

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The critical backlash against trauma There is no doubt that the White House exploited the trauma of 9/11 in support of its own agenda. Perhaps more surprising, however, is how overt this instrumentalization was. Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under both the Clinton and Bush (junior) presidencies confirms that the Bush administration leaned heavily upon the “White House 9/11 trauma defence” in order to excuse the military measures they authorised after the attacks “on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic” (Clarke 2009). As Alan Gibbs remarks the Bush administration employed a paradigm of collective trauma precisely to decontextualize and depoliticize alleged reasons for the attacks […]. This depoliticized construction of a sense of victimhood and epochal change […was] useful for neoconservatives as a way to further their agendas. (Gibbs 2014: 23) This cynical appropriation of the trauma of 9/11 in US political culture has caused a number of scholars to raise concerns about the overreliance upon tropes of trauma in literary and critical responses to the attacks. The critical backlash against trauma has taken two principal forms: first, a wave of critiques, including those by Gray and Rothberg, which focus on the overpersonalization of 9/11 trauma fiction, arguing that the emphasis on domestic narratives evidences a “failure of the imagination” (Rothberg 2009). Gray and Rothberg indict this corpus for eliding the geopolitical consequences of the attacks and presenting contemporary America as populated by traumatized white, middle class families. Against this reductive portrait, Gray calls for fiction to adopt an “interstitial perspective” that examines the United States as “a site of multiple ethnic and cultural encounters”, “a world that exists beyond the binary opposition of nationalist rhetoric” (Gray 2011: 70). Rothberg, meanwhile demands “a fiction of international relations and extraterritorial citizenship […] that charts the outward movement of American power” (Rothberg 2009: 153). A second group of scholars, including Gibbs and myself, have argued that the aftermath of 9/11 revealed the limits of the trauma paradigm. Critiquing the “increasingly monolithic and programmatic critical prism” (Gibbs 2014: 2) of cultural trauma studies, Gibbs contends that “trauma theory is indirectly complicit with US actions following 9/11”; “trauma theory sets an ideal foundation for tendencies which […] enabled a sense of false innocence to take root and deflect attention from America’s complicity in actions both before and after 9/11” (121). In turn, I suggest that the oversubscription to trauma in cultural and critical discourses served to buttress the claims of “hegemonic trauma culture”, “causing counter-narratives and masternarratives to appear mutually reinforcing” (Bond 2015: 44). As Cristina Cavedon notes, “in many critical contributions, impatience and even embarrassment shines through that the immediate instrumentalization of the impression of a national trauma by the Bush Administration met with such little opposition from intellectual quarters” (Cavedon 2015: 40). Cavedon suggests that this turn away from trauma, which occurred around the ten-year anniversary of the attacks, contrasts markedly with the earlier “five year moratorium on criticism of trauma in a cultural climate primarily shaped by discourses on victimhood and the importance of a nation united by the shared experience of the attacks” (39). This moratorium coincided with the period during which the majority of 9/11 trauma fiction and 9/11 testimony criticism was written and published, perhaps helping to explain the prevalence of trauma as an explanatory framework in these texts. Cavedon 413

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is largely sympathetic to the concerns that have been raised about trauma’s “limited validity as an explanatory matrix for the exploration of public discourses” (39). However, she voices some anxiety about the consequences of this backlash. Most importantly, she suggests, “many critical approaches which simply dismiss the trauma metaphor inadvertently emulate the rhetorical gesture inherent in approaches informed by trauma – namely that the history preceding the attacks is of no importance and hence can be neglected” (40). Instead of reinforcing the impression of 11 September as a rupture that “changed the grain of the most routine moment”, Cavedon argues, critical responses should offer more discussion “about how 9/11 as a symbolic event lays bare the dysfunctionality of American foundational myths which haunted pre-9/11 cultural discourses that can be assessed as melancholy” (40). In adopting an analytical framework based on melancholia rather than trauma, she contends, secondary accounts of the attacks “can accommodate both an examination of the ways in which trauma has been deployed in public and literary discourses and provide a means to criticize these very discourses”. In addition, “melancholia serves as a guiding concept to investigate how discourses that precede the attacks directly shaped cultural responses to 9/ 11” (40). Other critiques have also suggested that in focusing so much energy upon destabilising the trauma paradigm, critics have, paradoxically, reinforced the discursive myopia that views 9/11 only in relation to its status as a traumatic event. Arguing that there is “a special burden on scholars to resist focalizing 9/11 in a way that reproduces Western narcissistic responses similar to those that immediately followed the fall of the towers” (Duvall and Marzec 2015: 2), John Duvall and Robert Marzec attempt to open up both the types of narratives through which the literary response to 9/11 has been examined and the conceptual frameworks through which these responses have been analysed. They contend that the “widely held view regarding the failure of the Western post-9/11 narrative imagination”, shared by Gray and Rothberg among others, “rests on analyses that privilege contemporary trauma fiction” (7). However, in considering a wider variety of post-9/11 narratives (including genre fiction, alternative history, speculative fiction and postmodern narrative), “the claim that contemporary narrative’s focus is exclusively domestic begins to fall away” (8). In turn, Duvall and Marzec also posit an alternative critical perspective, arguing that the focus on trauma might be exchanged for a theoretical emphasis on fantasy. Following the work of Jacqueline Rose (1998) and Pease (2009), they regard fantasy as “a self-reflexive, self-deconstructive concept” able to foreground how “the successful constitution of the nation depends on an essential relationship to fiction and forms its existence in forms of fictionalization” (Duvall and Marzec 2015: 3). By pursuing this kind of “fictive formalism”, Duvall and Marzec hope to expose the role that the fantasy of American exceptionalism has played in the “failure to imagine the terrorist attacks as part of a history of unequal relations – unequal distribution of power and wealth, unequal access to global resources, and unequal representations” (2). Further interventions have proposed additional ways of opening up the narrative of 9/11 to different kinds of scrutiny. Georgiana Banita suggests adapting established theories of narrative ethics to the new challenge of engaging with media representations of terrorism, to the increasing popularization and the political implications of psychoanalytical discourse and psychotherapy, as well as to the effects of transnational warfare and global surveillance systems on contemporary fiction. (Banita 2012: 1) 414

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Meanwhile, Cara Cilano (2009) and Birgit Däwes (2011) argue that secondary writing on the post-9/11 novel needs to move beyond Anglophone fiction to foreground settings, characters, and issues at best only tangentially American. This movement beyond the US traces how different peoples and cultures may represent and understand their post-9/11 worlds in non-US centered ways, thereby pointing toward possible reconfigurations of what this event means and how it may alter relations between groups and nations. (Cilano 2009: 16–17) There is, of course, also a strong case to be made for looking at forms of textual representation that move beyond the novel, including poetry and drama, and for considering the literary response to 9/11 in relation to other media including (but by no means limited to) the visual arts, politics, journalism and the law. By expanding the lens through which the literary response to 9/11 has been considered, the authors cited above propose several possible solutions to the discursive impasse posed by the oversubscription to trauma. They also emphasize that, in continuing to debunk the compromised interpretation of 9/11 as a national trauma, the critical backlash against trauma risks reinforcing its status as the master-narrative of the attacks. Such arguments are certainly compelling, but where do they leave us in terms of thinking about trauma after 9/11? It is clear that the work done in trauma studies over the past 20 years or so has been highly important in encouraging critical and cultural reflection on individual and collective responses to historical violence. Yet it is equally obvious that even before 9/11 the popularization of trauma in the pathological public sphere had reinforced the solipsistic attitudes of contemporary wound culture. In the aftermath of the attacks, this pre-existing fascination with victimhood was easily exploited into a fantasy of national traumatization that was mobilized to justify morally dubious foreign policies and the exportation of violence to other lands. The insistent reinscription of the narrative of trauma in literature and testimony-criticism in turn threatened to devalue these discourses as a medium of critique. My aim in tracing these trends is neither to deny that people were genuinely traumatized by 9/11 nor to reject the legitimacy of authors’ desire to bear witness to this trauma. As Duvall and Marcez contend, it would be wrong to conclude “that trauma narratives deserve no place at the table” (Duvall and Marzec 2015: 7). However, in acknowledging the trauma of the attacks, we must also insist that the literary and critical frames through which 9/11 is addressed ensure that the broader geopolitical contexts of 11 September, its antecedents and its aftermaths, can be understood. As all of the critics above agree, this necessitates widening the historical, geographical, cultural, conceptual, generic and discursive focus of our analysis.

Bibliography Abbott, S. (2008) The Future of Love, New York: Algonquin Books. American Psychiatric Association. (1980) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd ed., Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. American Psychological Association (APA). (2001) “Coping with Terrorism”, www.apa.org/helpcenter/ terrorism.aspx Banita, G. (2012) Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

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Lucy Bond Berger, J. (2003) “There’s No Backhand to This”, in J. Greenberg (ed.) Trauma at Home: After 9/11, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 52–59. Bond, L. (2015) Frames of Memory after 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bush, G. W. (2010) “Address to the Nation on the War on Terror”, in Public Papers of the Presidents, George W. Bush 2006: Book II, Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1638– 42. Caruth, C. (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cavedon, C. (2015) Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11, Berlin: Brill Rodopi. Cilano, C. (2009) “Introduction: From Solidarity to Schisms”, in C. Cilano (ed.) From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US, New York: Rodopi, 13–23. Clarke, R.A. (2009) “Cheney and Rice Remember 9/11. I Do, Too”, Washington Post 31 May 2009. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/29/AR2009052901560.html Craps, S. (2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Däwes, B. (2011) Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory, and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel, Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag. DeLillo, D. (2001) “In the Ruins of the Future”, Harpers Magazine December 2001. https://harpers.org/ archive/2001/12/in-the-ruins-of-the-future ———. (2007) Falling Man, Basingstoke: Picador. Duvall, J. N. and Marzec, R. P. (2015) “Introduction: Fantasies of 9/11”, in J. N. Duvall and R. P. Marzec (eds) Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1–13. Eaglestone, R. (2004) The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edkins, J. (2003) Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Faludi, S. (2008) The Terror Dream, London: Atlantic Books. Farrell, K. (1998) Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Foer, J. S. (2006) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, London: Penguin Books. Friedman, D. (2006) Playing Dad’s Song, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gibbs, A. (2014) Contemporary American Trauma Narratives, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gray, R. (2008) “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis”, American Literary History 21(1): 128–51. ———. (2011) After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Greenberg, J. (2003) “Wounded New York”, in J. Greenberg (ed.) Trauma at Home: After 9/11, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 21–38. Heller, D. (2005) “Introduction: Consuming 9/11”, in D. Heller (ed.) The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–26. Hirsch, M. (2003) “I Took Pictures: September 11, 2001 and Beyond”, in J. Greenberg (ed.) Trauma at Home: After 9/11, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 69–86. Kaplan, E. A. (2005) Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Keeble, A. (2016) “Why the 9/11 Novel Has Been Such a Contested and Troubled Genre”, Independent 10 September 2016. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/911-novel-thomaspynchon-twin-towers-september-11-don-delillo-a7236091.html Kingsbury, K. (2003) Remember, Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House. Laub, D. (2003) “September 11, 2001—An Event Without a Voice”, in J. Greenberg (ed.) Trauma at Home: After 9/11, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 204–15. Linenthal, E. T. (2001) The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luckhurst, R. (2003) “Trauma Culture”, New Formations 50(3): 28–47. ———. (2008) The Trauma Question, London: Routledge. Maynard, J. (2003) The Usual Rules, New York: St Martin’s Press.

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9/11 McInerney, J. (2005) “The Uses of Invention”, The Guardian 17 September 2005. www.theguardian. com/books/2005/sep/17/fiction.vsnaipaul Michaels, A. (1997) Fugitive Pieces, London: Bloomsbury. Morley, C. (2011) “‘How Do We Write About This?’: The Domestic and the Global in the Post-9/11 Novel”, Journal of American Studies 45(4): 717–31. Patel, A. (2001) On That Day: A Book of Hope for Children, Berkley, CA: Tricycle Press. Pease, D. E. (2009) The New American Exceptionalism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Prose, F. (2007) Bullyville, New York: Harper Collins. Rose, J. (1998) States of Fantasy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roth, P. (1993) Operation Shylock, New York: Simon & Schuster. Roth, S. L. (2001) It’s Still a Dog’s New York: A Book of Healing, Washington, DC: National Geographic Society. Rothberg, M. (2000) Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (2009) “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray”, American Literary History 21(1): 152–58. Rothe, A. (2011) Popular Media Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Santner, E. (1992) “History Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma”, in S. Friedlander (ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 143–54. Schnurr, R. G. (2002) Terrorism: The Only Way is Through—A Child’s Story, Ottawa: Anisior Publishing. Schulman, H. (2007) A Day at the Beach, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Schwartz, L. S. (2005) The Writing on the Wall, New York: Counterpoint. Sebald, W. G. (2001) Austerlitz, trans. A. Bell, London: Hamish Hamilton. Seltzer, M. (1997) “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere”, October 80(1): 3–26. Spiegelman, A. (1986) Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, New York: Pantheon Books. ———. (1991) Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, New York: Pantheon Books. Tal, K. (1996) Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, A. (2004) Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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38 THE IRAQ WAR Patrick Deer

The Iraq War has powerfully complicated US citizens’ relationship to trauma and the discourse that surrounds it. In the absence of compelling official narratives or a cohesive place in American popular memory, the invasion and occupation of Iraq (“Operation Iraqi Freedom”, 2003–2011) has often been understood and represented through the lens of trauma. The lack of a stable archive for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has also posed severe challenges for veterans and historians alike. In media and literary representations, the conflict often thus seems more a distant war zone than a clearly defined historical period, this blurriness heightened by the indeterminate duration of the conflict and the seeming invisibility of its vast and brutal human, economic and societal costs. The Iraq War has become a site of the production of American trauma, but is distanced and contained away from a US homeland that lacks imaginative unity or a stable wartime geography. The decades since the end of the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War have seen a persistent low intensity militarization of America’s culture, economy and everyday life, reembedding them into wars waged at a distance on people of colour in the Global South. The post-9/11 “Forever War” era has escalated the racialized and militarized policing of domestic communities of colour, and seemingly endless US “global power projection” abroad. But unlike earlier empires, America’s imperial “consolidated vision” does not seem to depend on grand civilizational narratives, but instead projects a low intensity, fragmented and confused culture of war (Deer 2016). While the larger framing of endless war has failed to hold in historical memory, narratives of war trauma and militarized logics have embedded themselves within the fabric of US literature and culture. I will argue here that representations of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, like the war in Afghanistan (from October 2001 onwards), and the seemingly open-ended post-9/11 “Global War on Terror”, have at once consolidated the place of trauma at the heart of US war culture and powerfully destabilized its definitions and limits. I will explore this process of the consolidation and destabilization of trauma in three main aspects of contemporary American and Iraqi war culture and war literature: the appropriation of trauma discourse in contemporary war culture; high tech warfare’s mediation of trauma; and challenges to the media embedding of trauma in contemporary war writing. Together, I will argue, these tendencies suggest that we need to move beyond conventional approaches to trauma in order 418

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to reckon with the devastating psychic, social and economic toll of America’s “Forever Wars” era for US citizens and for citizens of the Global South.

Trauma as “forever wars” bridge discourse In the absence of strong official or popular narratives, discourses of trauma and the struggle for recovery often act as a bridge between the homeland and a distant war zone. They thus play the role of what Nancy Fraser has called “bridge discourses”, formerly expert discourses which “become the bridge discourses linking loosely organized social movements with the […] state” (Fraser 1989: 174). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s critique of neo-liberal governmentality, Fraser argues that bridge discourses tend to be administrative and depoliticizing, positioning people passively as “individual ‘cases’ rather than members of social groups or participants in political movements” (174). While they can offer more seemingly therapeutic and inclusive approaches to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, narratives of trauma and recovery are often appropriated for nationalist and exceptionalist purposes. Both US and Iraqi writers have challenged narratives about the war that serve the nationalist purpose of recovery, displaying powerful scepticism about the possibility of representing violent histories in terms of therapeutic narratives of collective mourning or recovery from trauma (Deer 2017). Yet, as I will argue here, the appropriation and militarization of trauma discourse during the Iraq War does not exhaust its critical potential. Rendering trauma visible can help reveal the hidden costs of two brutal, inconclusive wars lasting eight and a half years in Iraq and nearly twenty years in Afghanistan, with over 6,900 US military personnel dead and more than 53,700 wounded. More than 970,000 disability claims were filed with the US Department of Veterans Affairs by the beginning of 2015, with a reported 300,000 traumatic brain injuries (Crawford 2018). Despite this huge demand, veterans with PTSD and other disabilities have often struggled to secure timely medical treatment and benefits through the Veterans Administration because of the damaged and incomplete documentary archive of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (Pro Publica 2016). To this can be added the deaths of between 480,000 and 507,000 civilians killed in the United States’ post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (Crawford 2018). This has come at a cost to US tax payers calculated at $5.9 trillion by the Costs of War Project (COWP 2020). “Active combat missions” in Iraq and Afghanistan ended officially in November 2011 and December 2014 respectively, but US involvement continues. The ongoing Syrian conflict and global refugee crisis, as well as the ongoing drone warfare in multiple theatres suggest wars – and war traumas – without end. The crucial difference between the Iraq War and previous conflicts like the Second World War, Korea or the war in Vietnam, was that it was fought by an all-volunteer military, who often experienced multiple deployments across the war zone. Thus military veterans only make up a small percentage of the overall US population, some 1.6 million or 0.5%, many of whom may have had radically different experiences of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, depending on when and where they served. After the invasion of MarchApril 2003, the occupation of Iraq also saw a shift to urban warfare, night-time house raids and detention of civilians and the constant threat of IED explosions and ambushes rather than set piece battles. The violence of the occupation, which escalated during the “Civil War” of 2004–2005 and the two Battles of Fallujah in April and November 2004, placed immense psychological burdens on both soldiers and civilians during the occupation. The imbalance between the numbers of military deaths and often terribly wounded casualties, aided by improvements in combat medicine and medevac communication, posed great 419

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challenges for survivors and families alike. The diagnosis of trauma was also challenged by the changing nature of warfare, as Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) became a “signature” wound of the conflict. More recently, psychologists have explored, controversially, the diagnosis of “moral injury” to account for the wars’ traumatic effects on the perpetrators of violence. Although Americans take pride in their respect, even veneration for Iraq War veterans, in contrast with the Vietnam War era, as Andrew Bacevich (2013) has argued, they have remained largely detached from the “Forever Wars”. The well-meaning gesture, “Thank You for Your Service”, often ends conversations rather than opens up dialogue across the civilian-military divide. Despite the insistence of many US veterans, and prominent veteran war writers like Phil Klay, that they did not return “broken” from the wars, PTSD has become a commonplace and inescapable label for contemporary war experience. The globalization of trauma as a lens for understanding warfare, together with the crossover diagnosis of PTSD, which can apply both to civilian and military trauma, has also blurred the ethical and political question of who bears the responsibility for war. As the veteran war poet Brian Turner has put it, “The veteran and the civilian become alienated from one another over a widening gulf of silence” (Turner 2013: xi). His precise diction, “become alienated” and “a widening gulf”, make clear that this is a contingent process. It also raises the question of how “civilian” identities are constructed and imposed on citizens. The difference is that the imagined commonality is channelled through an affectively immensely powerful, but readily appropriated, trauma discourse, rather than through familiar images of battlefields and military campaigns.

The uses of trauma in contemporary war culture The Iraq War has both complicated and disturbed US citizens’ relationship to trauma and the discourse around it. Although it is a dominant trope in contemporary American war culture, trauma occupies an unstable place in representations of the occupation of Iraq. The invasion and occupation intensified the appropriation of trauma discourse in contemporary war culture, representing citizens as participants in a collective trauma that followed the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks and positioning veterans as heroic victims of combat trauma (Meek 2016). Despite the seeming commonality provided by the diagnostic category of PTSD, contemporary US culture has tended to compartmentalize and disconnect civilians and veterans along the lines of a seemingly insurmountable “civilian–military divide”. In Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation of Navy Seal Chris Kyle’s memoir, American Sniper (2014), Bradley Cooper portrays Kyle as a lethal hyper-masculine sniper, providing “overwatch” to Marine infantry troops from rooftops in Fallujah and leading “Punisher” commando squads on search and destroy house raids, who becomes increasingly psychologically damaged by his repeated deployments to Iraq. Eastwood’s film, which received several Oscar nominations and grossed $350,126,372 domestically, is a notable exception to the box office failure of most feature films about the Iraq war. Despite its patriotic narrative and conventional representation of Kyle as the most lethal sniper in US military history, the film adaptation of American Sniper reveals the instability of trauma narratives. Right after attending the military funeral of one of his best friends, Marc Lee, at which the fallen Navy Seal’s mother reads a letter calling the war’s rationale into question, the film shows Bradley Cooper lying at home motionless beside his wife, Taya (played by Sienna Cooper). The screenplay signals his traumatized state, declaring “His detachment is unearthly”, even as it shows Kyle unable to communicate with his wife. 420

The Iraq War CHRIS KYLE: TAYA KYLE:

Something happens to me … you’d be all right. You’d find someone else. Do you wanna die? Is that what it is?

CHRIS:

No. Then just tell me. Tell me why you do it. CHRIS: Oh, come on. TAYA: I wanna understand. CHRIS: Babe, I do it for you. I do it to protect you. TAYA: No, you don’t. CHRIS: Yes, I do. TAYA: I’m here. Your family is here. Your children have no father. CHRIS: Yeah, well, I have to serve my country. TAYA: Such fucking bullshit! CHRIS: No, it’s not. TAYA: You don’t know when to quit. You did your part. We’ve sacrificed enough. You let somebody else go. CHRIS: Let somebody else go? Babe, I couldn’t live with myself if I did. TAYA: Yeah, well, you find a way. You have to. Okay, I need you to be human again. I need you here. Baby, I need you here. If you leave again. I don’t think we’ll be here when you get back. TAYA:

American Sniper represents Taya Kyle’s suffering and sense of outrage, expressed through the intimate domestic language of a marital row, as she calls into question the very reason for his serving in Iraq. Yet the film nevertheless focuses on Kyle’s heroic struggle over his trauma and to perform his duty. Trauma can be articulated by American civilian women in the film, who are represented as unwanted mourners, but their protests remain caught within the gendered demands of patriotic sacrifice and domestic service. In the increasingly blurry geography of his repeated tours, Kyle returns to finish his mission and kill his nemesis, a Syrian sniper, with deadly accuracy in the midst of an enemy assault and looming sandstorm. He overcomes PTSD by volunteering to teach disabled veterans to shoot and co-writes the best-selling memoir adapted into Eastwood’s movie; significantly, however, the film adaptation of American Sniper includes no postwar scenes of writing, depending instead on Bradley Cooper’s highly relatable portrayal of Kyle as an inarticulate warrior. Although narratives like American Sniper promise recovery, whether through literary creation or a therapeutic reintegration into family, community and nation, they are often stories that lack development or closure, especially in the context of the ongoing veteran suicide epidemic of more than 6,000 veterans taking their lives each year since 2008 (VA 2019). In Eastwood’s film, for example, Chris Kyle can only be fully returned to the nation through his death at the hands of a fellow veteran, an act of killing not represented in the film, replaced by television footage of his funeral motorcade heading towards a funeral celebration in a sports stadium. This emphasis on melancholy and loss is also strikingly visible, though more fully and complexly explored, in the damaged narrators of Phil Klay’s Redeployment (2014), Leah Carpenter’s novel about a grieving mother of a Navy Seal, Eleven Days (2013), Kevin Powers’ lyrical yet disturbing The Yellow Birds (2012), veteran poet Brian Turner’s superbly palimpsestic memoir My Life as a Foreign Country (2014) or Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s revision of Antigone from the Afghan point of view, The Watch (2012). Like other Iraq and Afghanistan war narratives, feature films like In the Valley of Elah (2007), The Messenger (2009) or Thank You For Your Service (2017), the documentaries Alive Day Memories: Home 421

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from Iraq (2007), Lioness (2008) and The Pat Tillman Story (2010), or the Serial Season 2 podcast about the search for Bowe Bergdahl, their plots often explore the limits of narratives of recovery, especially of bodies living and dead (Deer 2017). American Sniper is perhaps the most obvious example of the appropriation of trauma discourse by contemporary US war culture, where combat experience is valorized as a crucible for masculinity and character, and as a source for literary and aesthetic inspiration. By gaining access to this privileged yet damaging experience, combat veterans are simultaneously heroicized and positioned as victims of trauma. Variously critiqued as “combat gnosticism”, the myth of the trauma hero, and “embedded poetry”, this Hemingwayesque approach to war writing has its roots in First World War writing (Antoon 2014; Campbell 1999; Scranton 2015). Projected onto the Iraq War, these narratives tend to focus on the suffering of the traumatized hero while rendering invisible the voices and the suffering of Iraqi citizens. The traumatized soldiers they represent are very often positioned as victims no longer responsible for the moral consequences of violence (Scranton 2015). Meanwhile, the Iraqi citizens appear as the objects or even targets of the occupiers’ violence, but are denied subjecthood or the agency to tell their own stories (Antoon 2014). The trauma of the Other in American Sniper appears only as external physical wounding, as when the child of a sympathetic local leader, “the Sheikh”, is tortured and murdered with a drill by an Al Qaeda in Iraq enforcer as punishment for collaborating with the occupying forces. The film cannot explore what would drive a woman and child into a suicidal attack on US Marines in the opening sequence, or a small boy to pick up an RPG rocket launcher and point it an American Humvee immediately after seeing the killing of an insurgent attacker. What seemingly cannot be represented in narratives like American Sniper is the suffering of the Iraqi citizens of Fallujah.

Shock and awe: trauma, embedding and technology Approaches to representing trauma in the Iraq War have also been complicated and compromised by the mediating role of technology in the conflict: high tech “Shock and Awe” warfare claimed to shatter Iraqi morale through precision firepower; a vast media embedding program presented a tightly filtered and self-censored spectacle of the war largely without blood or carnage; and the access of troops, insurgents and US and Iraqi civilians to the internet via cellphone camera photos, digital videos, blogs and alternative news sources bypassed traditional media norms to present often seemingly raw and shocking images from the war zone. The March 2003 invasion of Iraq offered a media spectacle of high tech “Shock and Awe” bombing that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the generals and war planners promised would traumatize the entire Iraqi nation into rapid submission. Despite Rumsfeld’s flamboyant postmodern rhetoric, the “shock and awe” campaign drew on a longer history both of colonial air power and Second World War-era bombing campaigns, projecting a consolidated imperial vision (Tanaka and Young 2010). Harlan Ullman, the theorist of “shock and awe”, spoke enthusiastically of the shattering blow delivered by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when “a society prepared to die was turned around” (Stern 2003: 15). Although Shock and Awe failed to deliver the desired results in the “active combat phase” of March-April 2003, the mythology of high tech warfare lives on in drone warfare and the global deployment of US special forces. Precision warfare waged by unmanned Predator drones claims to target, intimidate and neutralize enemy combatants using hyperbaric Hellfire missiles. The results are indeed terrifying, but they may 422

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instil resistance and hostility in targeted civilian populations as much as they strike fear into the hearts of insurgent enemies. Despite its ultramodern face, the high tech air power of precision bombing and drone warfare, like paramilitary special forces warfare, has a thoroughly traditional imperial genealogy in the colonial “air policing” that followed the First World War. While it seems to offer the fantasy of a disembodied, dematerialized “technological sublime”, the primary purpose of high tech airpower, as Grégoire Chamayou argues, is the surveillance, targeting and destruction of the bodies of the enemy other (Arendt 1970: 50–1; Chamayou 2013: 219). This implicated the US occupation of Iraq in what Achille Mbembe has influentially described as a violent logic of “necropolitics” that pushes biopolitical power to an extreme: This form of governmentality is different from the colonial commandement. […] Technologies of destruction have become more tactile, more anatomical an sensorial, in a context in which the choice is between life and death. If power still depends on tight control over bodies (or on concentrating them in camps), the new technologies of destruction are less concerned with inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses as inscribing them, when the time comes, within the order of the maximal economy now represented by the “massacre”. (Mbembe 2003: 34) As Jasbir Puar observes, “necropolitics entails the[…] subjugation of bodies – whether those of the detainees of Guantanamo Bay or the human waste of refugees, evacuees, the living dead, the dead living, those living slow deaths” (Puar 2007: 35). By laying claim to the waging of futuristic shock and awe warfare, the war machine positions its enemies in another, backward historical reality. They can thus be more easily linguistically redescribed, to use Elaine Scarry’s terms, into targets and collateral damage (Scarry 1987). This colonialist approach to warfare extended to Iraqi and Afghan others, who were denied coeval status, to use Johannes Fabian’s terms, in their psychological responses to occupation, just as they were denied equal political or human rights (Fabian 2014: 31). Too often the trauma of Iraqi citizens, like others in the war zones of the Global South, is represented as the object of a war machine or the object of humanitarian pity, as they are denied their agency as human subjects. As in earlier anti-colonial conflicts, this proved to be a disastrous miscalculation. The revival of counterinsurgency doctrine during the Surge and Sunni Awakening attempted to offer a different approach to “hearts and minds” (Gurman 2013). But the promise of national reconstruction was never fulfilled, and Iraq remains a country devastated by war. Ironically, however, it was the low tech use of torture that helped expose the abuses of power during the US occupation of Iraq.

Disembedding trauma: the open wound Like the promotion of high tech warfare, the scale and pervasiveness of media embedding during the Iraq War presents formidable challenges to conventional accounts of war trauma. The Pentagon definitively changed the relationship of the US media to the military in the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by launching a program to embed nearly 700 journalists within military units. As Heinz Brandenburg has noted: “The aim of embedding was to have news production during the Iraq War be governed by military rationale, support for operational objectives, and empathy with the troops” (Brandenburg 2007: 995). The sheer scale of the embed program sustained the illusion of a panoramic spectacle beyond the 2003 423

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invasion of Iraq, despite the embeds’ limited points of view, which news editors and military called looking at battle “through a soda-straw” (Lewis 2012: 440–1). This framing of the media representations of war within a military perspective, along with the vigorous selfcensorship of US media outlets which seldom showed graphic images of US and Iraqi dead and wounded, insulated the viewing public from the traumatic effects of war. This was heightened as the number of war correspondents dropped dramatically after the invasion of Iraq, falling to 100 by September 2003, and 26 by October 2006, drastically limiting the US media’s ability to cover the subsequent occupation of Iraq (Vaina 2006). The vast scale of media embedding further consolidated the US homeland’s distanced and aestheticizing relationship to representations of the suffering of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Embedded reportage emerged early in the occupation of Iraq as a dominant genre, elbowing aside the role of poets as traditional witnesses to war while actively presenting a poeticized and aestheticized spectacle of war, which gave their readers an experience of what I have called elsewhere “the embedded sublime” (Deer 2020). Books like Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (2004), Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (2008) or David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers (2009) were celebrated for their combination of “big picture” narratives (Kakutani 2014; Packer 2014). Their often Hemingwayesque personas as war reporters exposed to trauma gave them the authority of “combat gnosticism”, albeit second hand. Like embedded reporting, which blurs the boundaries between the military’s framing of the conflict and the reporter’s perspective, the embedding of trauma is both seductive and potentially confusing, often producing an ethical hesitation in readers and audiences. How have writers, journalists and citizens sought to disembed their own representations of the costs of the Iraq War? The most powerful way of countering the seductions of trauma discourse is to write from outside the protective enclosure of US war culture, like independent “unilateral” journalists Dahr Jamail, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad or Nir Rosen or the rarer voices of Iraqi writers and bloggers who reached a US audience. We encounter a strikingly different gendered and racialized representation of images of violence in Baghdad’s Burning, the extraordinary four-year project of the anonymous Iraqi blogger, Riverbend. Riverbend frequently critiques the mediatized spectacle of war in the name of solidarity and empathy, often making direct ethical demands on her readers. Like the video blogger and satirist Salam Pax, Riverbend’s repeated interrogation of images of Iraqi violence suggests a counter-strategy that seeks to dis-embed aestheticized violence and restore its unstable, disturbing status (Otterman et al. 2010: 38–53). By contrast with the aestheticizing strategies of embedded reportage, the more ironic approaches of Iraqi writers like Riverbend in Baghdad’s Burning (2003–7), Ahmed Sadaawi in his celebrated novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), and exile writer Sinan Antoon in his novels The Corpse Washer (2013) and The Book of Collateral Damage (2019), have tended to represent trauma far more sceptically in narratives which refuse either heroicization or victimhood, often approaching trauma palimpsestically through melancholy negation or satire. This tendency in Iraq War writing challenges the ideological framing of war and trauma also critiqued by theorists and critics like Judith Butler (2009), Susan Sontag (2004), Ariella Azoulay (2008), Alan Feldman (2005), Sylvia Shin Huey Chong (2011) or Sinan Antoon (2014). Typically focusing on violent visual images, they challenge what Judith Butler calls the official “regulation of perspective” (Butler 2009: 64–74). Sinan Antoon has also powerfully critiqued what he calls the “embedded poetry” of the Iraq War arguing that “embedded poetry […] did represent the visceral violence of the war, of course, but […] never questioned the genealogy of the war itself nor its ideological edifice” (Antoon 2014: par. 12, 424

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par. 8). Clearly, this is an argument that applies to other genres: “whatever it sees is filtered through a version of the war’s official narrative. The occupier is a victim trapped in a foreign landscape, fighting a war in an incomprehensible place” (par. 15). This scepticism about representations of trauma also powerfully marks the work of US war writers (Cage 2019: 91–102; Peebles 2011: 1–22). This is visible across a variety of genres, in the corrosive irony of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead (2003), in Kayla Williams’s memoir Love My Rifle More Than You (2005), Nick McDonell’s book of reportage, The End of Major Combat Operations (2010), Ben Fountain’s remarkable satire of sport and the military, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012), Brian Castner’s memoir of his service as a bomb disposal technician, The Long Walk (2013), Brian Van Reet’s Spoils (2017), Matt Gallagher’s blend of imperial romance and satire in Youngblood (2016) and Matt Young’s bravura memoir, Eat the Apple (2018). In his account of his belated embed as Time magazine correspondent in Mosul in early 2009, Nick McDonell displays a striking scepticism about the seductions of representing aestheticized violence. Towards the end of his narrative, he tells a brief embedded story about drinking with fellow journalists to reflect on the corrupting effects of the Iraq War’s violence on storytelling itself: As we smoked and switched to beer and other topics, I thought of something a journalist who had covered Rwanda once told me. He said that in an awful way it was the easiest story he had ever reported, because literally everyone he spoke to had a story. And in this way, in these places, the whole idea of stories became base and twisted. It seemed that way in my short time in Iraq. Everyone had stories, and they were all awful. (McDonell 2010: 150) McDonell suggests that his own narrative is interwoven with other “awful” stories and consistently undercuts the despicable beauty of war. In her recent study of war poetry, Rachel Galvin argues for the similarly critical potential of “Literature’s proposals for shifting thinking” to counter the sublimity of war, exploring the ways that wartime poems “make this argument through their structures, probing norms of poetic and journalistic language and encouraging readers to take critical distance from war culture” (Galvin 2017: 16). Ahmed Sadaawi’s highly acclaimed novel set during the height of violence of the “militia wars” in Baghdad in 2004–5, brilliantly and ironically displaces conventional representations of trauma through the multiple perspectives and stories of its protagonists: especially an old Iraqi woman, Elishva; a young journalist, Mahmoud; Brigadier Majid, who presides over the occult soothsayers and magicians of an Iraqi military “Tracking and Pursuit Department”; and “Whatshisname”, a sentient monster assembled from the body parts of people killed during the violence of occupation. Frankenstein in Baghdad sidelines the American military by focusing on the everyday and supernatural struggle of its various protagonists, including the murderous “Whatshisname”, to negotiate the brutal environment created by the occupation’s deliberate fostering of sectarian violence as a policy of divide and rule. In one scene, a journalist appears on a television talk show responding to a disastrous incident on a bridge which has killed hundreds of civilians. The host turned to Farid to give him a chance to elaborate. “Honestly, I think everyone was responsible in one way or another. I’d go further and say that all the security incidents and the tragedies we’re seeing stem from one thing – fear. The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. Every day we’re 425

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dying from the same fear of dying. The groups that have given shelter and support to al-Qaeda have done so because they are frightened of another group, and this other group has created and mobilized militias to protect itself from al-Qaeda. It has created a death machine working in the other direction because it’s afraid of the Other. And we’re going to see more and more death because of fear. The government and occupation forces have to eliminate fear. They must put a stop to it if they really want this cycle of killing to end.” (Sadaawi 2018: 123) In effect, Farid is advocating a local affective “war on terror”, which is both necessary and completely absurd. Sadaawi’s narrative refuses conventional representations of civilian suffering in favour of a highly nuanced and richly ironic exploration of how its characters refuse to be captured by fear or trauma. The Iraq War lacks stable official or historical narratives, a cohesive popular memory or an adequate documentary archive, and those responsible for the terrible and vast social, economic and human costs of the US invasion and occupation have yet to be held accountable. Trauma discourse has been appropriated and often compromised in contemporary war culture, by the military, and by an embedded media, profoundly unsettling our relationship to trauma. Yet its critical potential remains a crucial resource. As a strategy to render visible the catastrophic damage of the “Forever War” era, representations of trauma can help bridge the gaps between the US homeland and seemingly distant war zones and break the silences about the damage and suffering America’s wars have wrought.

Bibliography American Sniper. (2014) dir. C. Eastwood, Warner Brothers Entertainment. Antoon, S. (2014) “Embedded Poetry: Iraq; Through a Soldier’s Binoculars”, Jadaliyya 11 June 2014. www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18082/embedded-poetry_iraq;-through-a-soldiers-binocular Arendt, H. (1970) On Violence, New York: Harcourt. Azoulay, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. R. Mazali and R. Danieli, New York: Zone Books. Bacevich, A. J. (2013) Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed their Soldiers and their Country, New York: Henry Holt. Brandenburg, H. (2007) “Security at the Source”, Journalism Studies 8(6): 948–63. Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso. Cage, C. S. (2019) War Narratives: Shaping Beliefs, Blurring Truths in the Middle East, College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. Campbell, J. (1999) “Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Criticism”, New Literary History 30(1): 203–15. Chamayou, G. (2013) A Theory of the Drone, New York: New Press. Chong, S. S. H. (2011) The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. COWP (Costs of War Project). (2020) “Costs of War”, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ Crawford, N. C. (2018) “Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars: Lethality and the Need for Transparency”, Costs of War, Watson Institute For International And Public Affairs, Brown University. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2018/Human%20Costs%2C% 20Nov%208%202018%20CoW.pdf Deer, P. (2016) “Mapping Contemporary American War Culture”, College Literature 43(1): 48–90. ———. (2017) “Beyond Recovery: Representing History and Memory in Iraq War Writing”, MFS Modern Fiction Studies 63(2): 312–35.

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The Iraq War ———. (2020) “‘Despicable Beauty’: The Embedded Sublime and Ethical Hesitation in Iraq War Reportage”, Textual Practice, forthcoming. Fabian, J. (2014) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Feldman, A. (2005) “On the Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib”, Cultural Studies 19(2): 203–26. Fraser, N. (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Galvin, R. (2017) News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936–1945, New York: Oxford University Press. Gurman, H. (ed.) (2013) Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency, New York: New Press. Kakutani, M. (2014) “Human Costs of the Forever Wars, Enough to Fill a Bookshelf”, New York Times 25 December 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/12/26/books/human-costs-of-the-forever-warsenough-to-fill-a-bookshelf.html Lewis, A. R. (2012) The American Culture of War: The History of U.S. Military Force from World War II to Operation Enduring Freedom, 2nd edition, New York: Routledge. Mbembe, A. (2003) “Necropolitics”, Public Culture 15(1): 11–40. McDonell, N. (2010) The End of Major Combat Operations, San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s. Meek, A. (2016) “Cultural Trauma and the Media”, in Y. Ataria, D. Gurevitz, H. Pedaya and Y. Neria (eds) Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, New York: Springer, 27–37. Otterman, M., Wilson, P. and Hil, R. (2010) Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs Of Carnage, London: Pluto Press. Packer, G. (2014) “Home Fires: How Soldiers Write Their Wars”, New Yorker 7 April 2014. www.new yorker.com/magazine/2014/04/07/home-fires-2 Peebles, S. (2011) Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier’s Experience in Iraq, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pro Publica. (2016) “Lost to History: When War Records Go Missing”, ProPublica 10 January 2016. www.propublica.org/article/lost-to-history-missing-war-records-complicate-benefit-claims-byveterans Puar, J. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sadaawi, A. (2018) Frankenstein in Baghdad, trans. J. Wright, New York: Penguin. Scarry, E. (1987) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford University Press. Scranton, R. (2015) “The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to Redeployment and American Sniper”, Los Angeles Review of Books 25 January 2015. www.lareviewofbooks.org/essay/trauma-hero-wilfredowen-redeployment-american-sniper Sontag, S. (2004) Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador. Stern, S. (2003) “From Paper to the Battlefield”, The Christian Science Monitor 20 March 2003. www. csmonitor.com/2003/0320/p15s01-woiq.html Tanaka, Y. and Young, M. B. (eds) (2010) Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History, New York: New Press. Turner, B. (2013) “Foreword”, in C. D. Leche (ed.) Outside the Wire: American Soldiers’ Voices from Afghanistan, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, xi–xiv. VA (2019) 2019 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, US Department of Veterans Affairs. www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/datasheets/2019/2019_National_Veteran_Suicide_Prevention_An nual_Report_508.pdf Vaina, D. (2006) “The Vanishing Embedded Reporter in Iraq”, Pew Research Center, 26 October 2006. www.journalism.org/2006/10/26/the-vanishing-embedded-reporter-in-iraq

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39 KATRINA Eric Doise

On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made its initial landfall at the Louisiana/Mississippi coast, causing widespread destruction to those Gulf of Mexico coastal areas. Soon after, the New Orleans levees failed, with those still in the city abandoned for days by government agencies. A diaspora of New Orleans residents followed. The event – and throughout this chapter, “Katrina” will refer to all these elements, not just the storm – have led to several literary and filmic responses. Spike Lee, for example, notes that as the above unfolded, I was in Venice, Italy for the Venice Film Festival. And so I was just holed up in my hotel room switching back and forth between the BBC and CNN. […] And very early on, I recognized I was watching a historic moment in American history. And I quickly came to the decision I would like to – if given the chance, I would like to document that. (Gordon 2006) Similarly, poet Patricia Smith explains, My only connection to Katrina was the same connection that those who had processed it through the news had. The only difference was that, as an artist, I felt it wasn’t just a witnessing, that I owed to myself at least to say, “This is something else human beings are capable of, this is something else nature is capable of, and I need to be able to understand it with my own voice.” (McEwen 2016) This chapter will examine the characteristics of those Katrina texts. I will first document how responses to the event fulfil and run counter to characteristics scholars have found in trauma and trauma literature. The chapter will then look more closely at how Katrina texts and scholarship have narrated and interpreted the specifics of the Katrina event. More precisely, I will detail how media coverage of the event re-traumatized many of its victims and thus heightened the importance of documentation of the event despite the abundance of reporting. Those remembrances exist not simply to remember but to argue for a particular memory of Katrina and its victims. I will then show that these texts argue that the flooding 428

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and ensuing damage, to people and nature, was not the beginning of the trauma but a result of long-standing violence from racism and neoliberalism. Finally, I will note avenues that Katrina texts and scholarship have opened for further development of trauma studies, both in direct relation to Katrina and for the field as a whole. Like a growing number of traumatic events, Katrina was experienced by many via television. However, because of the slow government response and slowly receding waters, Katrina’s course was uniquely lengthy. As Melissa Harris-Lacewell points out, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was an unfolding drama that lasted for days. Rather than a single, terrible moment replayed by the media, the horror of New Orleans increased daily, produced new images of agony and death, and generated increasingly awful narratives of suffering. Americans witnessed hours of grisly footage. The nation was able to watch in real time as the faces of their fellow citizens were contorted in fear, pain, and hunger; unable to feed their children or comfort their parents or find their partners. (Harris-Lacewell 2008: 167) Unlike 9/11, then, media coverage was not dominated by a handful of images but featured five days of intensive reporting on a city experiencing apocalyptic conditions, followed by a long recovery. Arin Keeble explains that the body of Katrina texts “is undoubtedly dwarfed by the still rapidly growing canon of 9/11 narratives” (Keeble 2019: 6). The Katrina texts that do exist, however, carry with them many well-known markers of trauma and trauma literature. Smith’s poetry collection Blood Dazzler (2008), for example, alludes frequently to the inadequacy of language. The personified Katrina remarks, “now officially a bitch, I’m confounded by words” (Smith 2008: 11, line 19). A traumatized survivor of Katrina “opens his mouth to scream,/but river rushes in” (71, lines 16–17). These speakers’ struggles to speak reflect the silence several scholars have found in witnesses to trauma. Perhaps none are more closely associated with this claim than Giorgio Agamben, who follows Primo Levi in arguing that the Muselmann – those Second World War concentration camp captives who were especially emaciated, exhausted and resigned to their fate – is the true witness and for whom Holocaust survivors must speak. Agamben claims that in becoming a speaking-I, the witness becomes “the subject of enunciation”, and “[t]he subject of enunciation is composed of discourse and exists in discourse alone. But, for this very reason, once the subject is in discourse, he can say nothing; he cannot speak” (Agamben 1999: 116–17). The inadequacy of language, a theme common to Holocaust texts, also marks Katrina texts. As Anne Whitehead notes, [o]ne of the key literary strategies in trauma fiction is the device of repetition, which can act at the levels of language, imagery or plot. Repetition mimics the effects of trauma, for it suggests the insistent return of the event and the disruption of narrative chronology or progression. (Whitehead 2004: 86) Likewise, repetition and return are defining features of the media coverage of Katrina, albeit in part because of the nature of 24-hour news cycle. Jane Elliott notes that

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[c]ertain images of Hurricane Katrina have come to be ritually repeated when the storm and its aftermath are represented in the visual media: white flags and SOS signs being waved from rooftops, thousands massed in the heat outside the New Orleans Convention Center, an elderly African American woman dead in her wheel chair. (Elliott 2010: 89) Katrina texts, particularly those whose central purpose is to document, repeat this repetition: images of those outside the Convention Center appear in Lee’s documentaries When the Levees Broke (2006) and If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise (2010), Josh Neufeld’s graphic novel A.D.: New Orleans After the Flood (2009) and Smith’s collection Blood Dazzler. Furthermore, in Blood Dazzler, the personified Katrina repeatedly returns as speaker, including two poems bearing her name, as if to mirror the turning of the storm. Lee returns to update his audience on the state of the city with If God Is Willing, and many of his initial subjects return to scenes of trauma they first visited in When the Levees Broke. Most notably musician Terrence Blanchard’s mother returns to her home, now renovated after having been gutted. In A.D., Leo recalls remembering all the notes and clothes he lost in the storm. On that page, Katrina returns as a turning hurricane-shaped swirl, sucking the aforementioned items into its vortex (Neufeld 2009: 182). Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011) also repeats in several ways. Early in the book, Daddy leads his children in preparing for Katrina as he has for all hurricanes for years. Moreover, Ward employs intertextuality, alluding repeatedly to the Medea myth and Faulkner’s fiction, specifically As I Lay Dying. The setting, Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, is one Ward has featured repeatedly in her novels, her own Yoknapatawpha County. As Whitehead explains, intertextual fiction can suggest that the past is not necessarily always fated to repeat itself, but that alternative futures can be posited and played out. Intertextuality is thus, like trauma, caught in a curious and undecidable wavering between departure and return. (Whitehead 2004: 90) Despite displaying these tendencies common to trauma and trauma literature – the inadequacy of language and the use of repetition and returns, Katrina literature tends to employ familiar structures, breaking with characteristics many scholars have found in trauma texts. Neufeld, for example, relies primarily on rectangular and square frames with images rarely bleeding into the gutter or other frames. Similarly, Smith’s poetry collection utilizes received forms of poetry, including persona poems, ghazals, tankas, chain verse and sestinas. This reliance calls to mind the poet Tara Betts’s commentary on “Sestina for the Sin”, her poem about lynchings: “this traumatic, emotionally startling material required a form to help me find words that render the described situation with unexpected language” (Betts 2013: 52). This turn to form without questioning its limitations runs against most work on trauma and trauma texts. Robert Jay Lifton, for example, claims that “insight [in response to a traumatic event] begins with the shattering of prior forms. Because forms have to be shattered for there to be new insight” (Caruth 1995: 135). Similarly, Michael Rothberg, in his description of traumatic realism, notes “three fundamental demands that confronting the Holocaust makes on attempts at comprehension and representation”, one of which is “a demand for reflection on the formal limits of representation” (Rothberg 2000: 7). That reflexivity is not common in Katrina texts. Even when we do see a semblance of that reflection – Neufeld, 430

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for example, appears as a character in his graphic novel A.D. recording his characters’ testimonies – the text does little to comment on what this meta-textuality reveals about the limitations of genre, form or comprehension. Lee’s documentaries rely similarly on expected documentary techniques that include expert and eyewitness testimonies, existing footage and new footage. This approach does not meet Janet Walker’s definition of “trauma cinema”. She explains that “[t]o be construed as a traumatic documentary, a film must place in abeyance the traditionally assumed correspondences between image and reality and between imagination and reality”, which a film does, in part, through the use of distinctive aesthetics and form (Walker 2005: 85). However, Keeble argues: that what makes Lee’s documentary particularly interesting is the way it functions as a specific kind of trauma narrative where the overwhelmingly brutal images represent a trauma that the film’s tightly defined narrative structure, which meticulously explores systemic violence, struggles to contain, manage and work through. (Keeble 2019: 109) This description echoes Betts’s remarks above. Unlike Lee’s documentaries, however, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water (2008) does question the “correspondences between image and reality”. That film tells the survival story of Kimberly Roberts and her family using footage shot by Roberts but edited by the filmmakers. In fact, the viewer sees Roberts selling her footage to Lessin and Deal. Roberts is thus a documentarian within a documentary made by someone else using images she recorded. Although many use familiar forms, Katrina texts do often refuse to provide narrative closure. In this way, Katrina texts do embody Rothberg’s traumatic realism by “[r]efusing the potential comforts of narrative, such as the imposition of closure and meaningful wholeness” (Rothberg 2000: 226–7). For instance, Neufeld ends his graphic novel with an image of FEMA trailers accompanied by a character’s explanation “We’re not all home yet” (Neufeld 2009: 187) in a caption. Emily Todd VanDerWerff notes that [i]n the musical montage that finishes [David Simon’s TV series Treme], there are no closing parentheses placed on any of these lives. Rather, a sense that the characters are still in the process of realizing what their own endpoint might look like in the years they have left is provided. (Todd VanDerWerff 2013) In the closing moments of Salvage the Bones, characters hopefully await the return of China, a dog swept away by the flood. As they do, Esch tells the reader that “[i]n the starsuffocated sky, there is a great waiting silence” (Ward 2011: 258).

Media coverage and documentation As I stated above, Katrina was unique in its widespread and lengthy televisual presence. Media coverage quickly noticed the racial component of the event’s violence and trauma. Repeated images and prolonged footage of black and brown bodies, both alive and dead, on roof tops, in floodwater and on highway overpasses, dominated televisions and newspapers for days. An industry slow to call attention to race and racism could not help but do so. As Ron Eyerman notes, these images “recalled for many a long history of mistreatment and 431

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abuse with roots reaching back to slavery” (Eyerman 2015: 14). He writes, “a foundational racial cleavage was once again made public on a scale that recalled the heyday of the civil rights movement” (13). Stabile likewise notes that [f]or the white eyes turned on the city of New Orleans, forced to witness for the first time in decades the effects of racism and economic despair exacerbated by the undermining of public infrastructures in the United States, evidence of the government’s abandonment of New Orleans threatened to overwhelm their sense of self and place. (Stabile 2007: 684) For this reason, Eyerman and many other scholars view Katrina as a cultural trauma, which he defines as “a publicly articulated response to a tear in the social fabric, when the foundations of an established collective identity are shaken and in need of a revised narrative” (Eyerman 2015: 8). Anna Hartnell likewise argues that “post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans offers a unique vantage point from which to understand the narrative of US decline that is emerging as a pivotal feature of the twenty-first century” (Hartnell 2017: 2). Part of Hartnell’s framework, and that of several other scholars, is the damage neoliberalism had already inflicted on New Orleans and other US cities (2). For example, Keeble claims that “the human stories [of Katrina documentaries] aggregate to a damming [sic] indictment of the US federal government; exposing a racialized neoliberal system that for decades has abandoned its most vulnerable citizens” (Keeble 2019: 23). Thus, a common narrative across Katrina texts, both creative and scholarly, is that in addition to the storm, Katrina uncovered violence and thus trauma that long predated the storm. One such example is the aforementioned media coverage. Although initially attentive to the role racism played in the disaster, news outlets quickly helped spread false and exaggerated reports of gang violence, violent looting and infant rapes, along with increasing analysis that blamed the victims for their losses. For this reason, Diana Negra argues “that after an initial frenzy of media coverage, efforts to impose conservative representational discipline over an event deemed ideologically problematic have played out over a sustained period of time” (Negra 2010: 4). Also for this reason, writers and filmmakers felt the need to document victims’ experiences not despite the extensive reporting but because of it. As Keeble notes, Katrina texts are “characterized by [their] focus on the ‘human stories’ of disaster, on giving voices to the voiceless, a project which underpins [their] explicit political critiques” (Keeble 2019: 6). Smith explains that one of the reasons she felt called to write about Katrina was that “most of the people affected by Hurricane Katrina were poor and black, a fact that – in the eyes of many – made the tragedy much less important” (Richards 2013). Ward says that she wrote about Katrina in part because she was “angry at the people who blamed survivors for staying and for choosing to return to the Mississippi Gulf Coast after the storm” (Hoover 2011). Both writers say they were also motivated by the fact that Katrina had already begun to disappear from the public memory by the time they started writing. Katrina texts, then, are primarily concerned with making sure the victims are not forgotten, a fate the writers worry about especially due to the race of most of the traumatized, and documenting what occurred in order to counteract blame assigned to those victims. Such motivation leads writers and filmmakers like Lee to aim for “hopefully the definitive visual document on the fiasco that happened down in New Orleans” (Gordon 2006), a goal for completion and fixedness that does not make room for the kind of reflection Rothberg describes via traumatic realism. Stabile notes that the transformation of African-American victims into scapegoats or threats has a long history in the US. She cites examples such as Northern newspapers 432

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justifying lynchings in the late nineteenth century because of dubious rape charges, and coverage of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement playing into stereotypes of African Americans’ supposed predisposition toward violence (Stabile 2007: 686). These narratives resurface in the form of “the ascription of blame and even moral deficiency to the residents of New Orleans rather than to government agencies or corporate interests” (Negra 2010: 7). Accordingly, race plays a central role in texts like Lee’s documentaries, Smith’s poems, Ward’s novel and Dave Eggers’s nonfiction book Zeitoun (2009). Just as scholars recognize this long history of media narratives blaming African-Americans for their suffering, Katrina texts tend to look back to the racial violence of slavery as precursor to the negligence of those caught up in the aftermath of Katrina. Here, we find another way in which the trauma of Katrina is the return of a cultural trauma. Clyde Woods writes that “[t]here is an omnipresent fear […] that the tortured past of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi is reasserting itself” in Katrina (Woods 2009: 428) and that “[f]undamentally, the post-Katrina world is one in which we are destined to confront the social visions, paradigms, movements, communities of conscience, and leaders that we prematurely buried” (429). In If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, for example, Lee includes footage from a city council meeting where a vote led to the destruction of a housing project predominantly home to African Americans, many of whom had not yet returned to the city after the diaspora Katrina forced. Through expert testimony, Lee traces the original de jure segregation of New Orleans government housing and the ensuing de facto segregation, which resulted from unequal economic development and White Flight that began in the 1950s, altering significantly the demographics of New Orleans’ poor. Just before the hearing turns violent, with police keeping citizens out of the supposedly public meeting through the use of barricades, tasers and pepper spray, city resident Krystal Muhammad reminds the council that her ancestors built the city “for free for 500 years”. Similarly, experts in When the Levees Broke note how the separation of families and forced diaspora that followed Katrina called back to the thousands of similar instances as a result of the New Orleans slave market. Lee’s films are not the only texts to see the shadow of slavery in the racial and class disparities that predated Katrina. Keeble explains that the presence of former plantations and slave galleys in Salvage the Bones “indicates an acute awareness of the present class and racial divisions and slaveholding history of the region” (Keeble 2019: 47). While we do not learn the race of the speaker in Smith’s “Inconvenient”, we do witness socioeconomic difference when she resigns herself to “consider this whole mess a holiday,/a simple trade, one home for its vacation version” (Smith 2008: 13, lines 18–19). Her lament, offered as her husband packs up their car, stands in stark contrast to those who do not own a home and have no means of evacuation. Ironically, A.D.’s Dr Brobson, a White man who is also the book’s wealthiest character, waits out the storm in his home, but he can afford to live in the French Quarter, one of the city’s highest points. As the book closes, while other characters struggle with concerns like finding housing, he bemoans the substandard quality of the shrimp at Galatoire’s, a world-renowned restaurant in the city. For African-American victims, then, the trauma of Katrina comes not just from the storm’s destruction but also from the repetition of racial discrimination through negligence and violence. This history determines how they interpret the destruction that followed the storm. In When the Levees Broke, Lee provides a space for Katrina victims to share what many consider a conspiracy theory: that the US government blew up the levees in order to rid the city of its poor African-American residents. The adherents to this theory report hearing a loud crack – likely the floodwaters splitting the levees – that preceded rapidly rising waters, interpreting that noise as an explosive device being set off. Lee recalls previous 433

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instances when the government did blow up parts of the levees, inundating predominantly Black parts of the city in order to save White areas. Lee explains that, Well, I feel it’s very important for me as a filmmaker not to discount what people feel. I think that African-Americans in this country have to go to many historic things that happened in the past that this government has done to us. So this is – again, this stuff is not just coming out of thin air. (Gordon 2006) Neufeld also documents this claim, an unnamed character exclaiming, “Y’know, I heard they blew up that levee in the Ninth Ward to flood us out! My cousin heard them explosions!” (Neufeld 2009: 149). The following pages feature a two-page spread, populated by wide-eyed faces expressing terror. That character’s response calls to mind Laub’s description of historians discounting a Holocaust testimony because of its inaccuracy. Laub explains that the witness was testifying not simply to empirical historical facts, but to the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination. The historians could not hear, I thought, the way in which her silence was itself part of her testimony, an essential part of the historical truth she was precisely bearing witness to. (Laub 1992: 62)

Multidirectionality and slow violence Because of their call back to the trauma of slavery, Katrina texts frequently illustrate Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, “a model based on recognition of the productive interplay of disparate acts of remembrance and developed in contrast to an understanding of memory as involved in a competition over scarce public resources” (Rothberg 2009: 309). Rather than worrying that attention to the racialized trauma of Katrina will detract from attention to the ongoing trauma of slavery in the manifestation of undemocratic conditions for citizens of color, continued economic oppression of countries resistant to white supremacy like Haiti or the uneven impact of government corruption on racial minorities, the creators of Katrina texts often see the event as an opportunity to forge connections between these effects of white supremacy without flattening the differences between them. In the case of Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun, the bridge extends to the Islamophobia of the War on Terror, with the titular character experiencing the trauma many terror “suspects” abroad faced in the wake of 9/11 as the result of detainment and questioning without due process. The multidirectionality that Katrina texts tend to employ challenges some earlier formulations of trauma. Rothberg writes that one critique of Caruth’s seminal work in the field is that “its model of trauma remains tied to the expectations of a privileged Western worldview and ignores insidious, everyday forms of trauma” (Rothberg 2009: 91). Katrina has summoned texts that attend to these insidious traumas, perhaps because an “account of the racialized poor as failed neoliberal subjects has considerable explanatory power in relation to many aspects of” Katrina (Elliott 2010: 90). Because they tend to employ multidirectionality, Katrina texts avoid this oversight and “offer vantage points from which we might consider the overlapping of traumatic ruptures and the ‘slow violence’ or systemic violence of neoliberalism” (Keeble 2019: 3). “Slow violence” is Rob Nixon’s term for violence

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that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all […]. violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. (Nixon 2011: 2) Lee’s documentaries call attention to slow violence through the aforementioned documentation of racism and the negligence at various levels of government. The latter includes a history of the US government failing to hold oil companies responsible for environmental damage and unsafe working conditions, leading to the shrinking of the wetlands that once slowed hurricanes before they hit shore and catastrophes like the 2010 BP Oil Spill. In writing about When the Levees Broke but with a claim that could be applied to If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, Keeble writes that “Lee’s film’s discussion of disposability, criminality and militarization also meaningfully probes the intersections between traumatic rupture and slow or systemic violence. In fact, much of the film’s emphasis is on a systemic malaise that prevents the recovery from trauma” (Keeble 2019: 111). Lee, however, extends this analysis outside the US borders, featuring expert commentary that countries like Nicaragua and Nigeria suffer from such oil spills annually. The pacing of Treme (2010–2013), which also points to the role institutional failure played in the trauma of Katrina, is compatible with “slow violence”, one TV critic noting that throughout the show’s run many critics and viewers asked, “Shouldn’t there be more happening? Shouldn’t the show be bigger, or have more of an epic sweep?” (Todd VanDerWerff 2013). The show’s values also reveal its characters – and several scholars and critics have noted that the city itself is the central character – to be the victims of a long history of slow-building but pervasive trauma. J. M. Tyree argues that “Individual perseverance and DIY neighbourhood community-building are two quasi-libertarian spells against darkness advocated by Treme, but they are ones that reveal a collapse of faith in any sort of largerscale institution-building or the possibility of real structural change” (Tyree 2010: 26). Similarly, Keeble points out that in Salvage the Bones, “The novel’s depiction of a Mississippian family totally abandoned by the US government is a powerful indictment of a neoliberal government’s neglect of swaths of its ‘unproductive’ citizens” (Keeble 2019: 34). Given that the environment both produced and suffered from the damage wrought by the hurricane, Katrina texts illustrate Nixon’s “slow violence” in their attention to the violence suffered by nature as well. Just as marginalized people are more likely to be disproportionately traumatized, the land they occupy is more likely to be plundered, leading to an extended traumatization of its residents. Nixon thus proposes a shift in our understanding of “displacement”, whereby instead of [that term] referring solely to the movement of people from their places of belonging, [it] refers rather to the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable. (Nixon 2011: 19) No Katrina text traces this stripping more extensively than If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise. In this documentary, Lee notes the aforementioned loss of wetlands but also the violence the oil spill inflicts on the sea life. That damage in turn traumatizes Cajun and Vietnamese-American fishermen, threatening families’ long-established way of life and 435

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multiplying their financial difficulties. The inability of the doctor in A.D. to find shrimp that meets his standard is the other end of this trauma and stands in stark contrast to the effects the fishermen feel. Likewise, “Ward frequently uses natural and animal imagery to describe” her African-American characters (Keeble 2019: 45). For example, Esch, the main character and narrator, describes her hair as “like a Doberman come out white” (Ward 2011: 7). The muscles of another character, Manny, “jabbered like chickens” (11). Notably, in a plot point that mirrors a narrative that runs through Smith’s poetry collection, a female family dog fights to survive the Katrina floodwaters just as the family does. In Blood Dazzler, Smith personifies the storm as an angry woman, a narrator stating early in the collection, “every woman begins as weather” (Smith 2008: 1, line 15), the difference between female humans and storms erased. Just as racist language has and continues to associate people of colour and the poor with animals as a means of dehumanizing them, these texts show Katrina to treat the marginalized more like wildlife than like financially stable White people. Moreover, the gendering present in many of these metaphors points to the heightened vulnerability women faced in the wake of Katrina – a trend certainly not unique to the event – and the tendency in English to gender nature as female. In fact, in the US, hurricanes were named only after women for 25–26 years, until 1978 or 1979, depending on the region. Looking to the future, scholarship on Katrina and Katrina texts can continue to widen the purview of trauma studies. As Nixon notes, “[t]he long dyings – the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change – are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory” (Nixon 2011: 2–3). Katrina offers a unique opportunity to combat this underrepresentation due to its connections to climate change, or at the very least environmental change, and war – many laid part of the blame for the federal government’s slow response to the decision to send National Guard troops to the Middle East. While Nixon seems to disfavour event-based approaches to representations of slow-building violence, such as climate change and environmental destruction, perspectives that begin with sudden violence and move to the insidious might be the best rhetorical strategy for a populace encultured to look for the former and not the latter. As I have already noted, the history of New Orleans also makes Katrina especially well suited to illustrate the opportunities a multidirectional approach to memory and trauma offer, and thus opportunities to further explore and strengthen the paradigm. Additionally, Lee’s global perspective and the neoliberal critique many scholars have pursued through Katrina can contribute to the trans- and subnational approaches to American literary studies called for by scholars like Wai Chee Dimock, who, in an analysis of Katrina, writes, “Local disasters are […] the almost predictable side effects of global geopolitics” (Dimock 2009: 147). Finally, as “natural” disasters like Katrina occur more frequently and as the sciences discover new information about methods of communication and apparent emotional responses from nature, trauma scholars may need to consider if nature experiences psychic trauma or something akin to it. If so, that would necessitate considerations of who gets to speak for trauma and the most ethical strategies for doing so. Ironically, then, a traumatic event like Katrina, whose victims fought to be fully seen by their compatriots and whose unfolding was spectacular, may help us continue to work beyond the confines of the national and species boundaries as well as event-based approaches to trauma.

Bibliography Agamben, G. (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books.

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Katrina Betts, T. (2013) “Sestina for the Sin”, in D. Nester (ed.) The Incredible Sestina Anthology, Austin, TX: America’s Independent Press, 51–52. Caruth, C. (1995) “An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 128–46. Dimock, W. C. (2009) “World History according to Katrina”, in R. Castronovo and S. Gillman (eds) States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 143–60. Eggers, D. (2009) Zeitoun, San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s. Elliott, J. (2010) “Life Preservers: The Neoliberal Enterprise of Hurricane Katrina Survival in Trouble the Water, House M.D., and When the Levees Broke”, in D. Negra (ed.) Old and New Media after Katrina, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 89–112. Eyerman, R. (2015) Is This America? Katrina as Cultural Trauma, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Gordon, E. (2006) “Spike Lee Produces a Vision of Katrina”, National Public Radio 18 August 2006, [Audio file]. www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5669697 Harris-Lacewell, M. (2008) “‘Do You Know What It Means … ?’ Mapping Emotion in the Aftermath of Katrina”, in M. Marable and K. Clarke (eds) Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 153–72. Hartnell, A. (2017) After Katrina: Race, Neoliberalism, and the End of the American Century, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Hoover, E. (2011) “Jesmyn Ward on Salvage the Bones”, The Paris Review 30 August 2011. www.theparis review.org/blog/2011/08/30/jesmyn-ward-on-salvage-the-bones/ If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise (2010) dir. S. Lee, HBO. Keeble, A. (2019) Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context: Literature, Film and Television, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Laub, D. (1992) “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening”, in S. Felman and D. Laub (eds) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,and History, New York: Routledge, 57–74. McEwen, C. (2016) “Interview with Patricia Smith: The Poet as Storyteller”, Teachers & Writers Magazine 21 March 2016. https://teachersandwritersmagazine.org/the-poet-as-storyteller-interview-with-patri cia-smith-2431.htm Negra, D. (2010) “Introduction: Old and New Media after Katrina”, in D. Negra (ed.) Old and New Media after Katrina, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–22. Neufeld, J. (2009) A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, New York: Pantheon Books. Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Richards, M. (2013) “Patricia Smith on Blood Dazzler and Hurricane Katrina”, Modern American Poetry 13 August 2013. www.modernamericanpoetry.org/content/patricia-smith-blood-dazzler-hurricanekatrina-excerpted-interview-moira-richards Rothberg, M. (2000) Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Simon, D., Kostross Noble, N., Overmeyer, E., Strauss, C., Yoshimura, J. and Pelecanos, G. (2010– 2013) Treme, HBO. Smith, P. (2008) Blood Dazzler, Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press. Stabile, C. (2007) “No Shelter from the Storm”, South Atlantic Quarterly 106(4): 683–708. Todd VanDerWerff, E. (2013) “Treme Dies as It Lived”, AV Club 29 November 2013. https://tv.avclub. com/treme-dies-as-it-lived-1798178870 Trouble the Water (2008) dir. T. Lessin and C. Deal, Zeitgeist Films. Tyree, J. M. (2010) “Treme Vs. The Bad Lieutenant”, Film Quarterly 64(1): 23–28. Walker, J. (2005) Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ward, J. (2011) Salvage the Bones: A Novel, New York: Bloomsbury. When the Levees Broke, (2006) dir. S. Lee, HBO. Whitehead, A. (2004) Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Woods, C. (2009) “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon, and the Return to the Source”, American Quarterly 61(3): 427–53.

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40 TRANSGENERATIONAL NUCLEAR TRAUMA Gabriele Schwab

C. K. Williams’s “Tar” invokes a haunting that comes from the future of nuclear destruction:

However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood: We were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if notsoon, then someday. Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock, would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse oursurfeits and submissions. (William 1995) The poem alludes to the desire not to know or act, yet insists on the understanding that someday “some final generation” will perish from the forces unleashed with the splitting of the atom and the inauguration of the nuclear age. The conflicted knowledge of this very possibility generates a transgenerational nuclear trauma. Starting with the premise that the impact of the nuclear age itself is traumatic, I will pinpoint paradigmatic instances that are symptomatic of a traumatic formation of subjectivity by the nuclear. Based on interviews with survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Robert J. Lifton’s Death in Life (Lifton 1991 [1968]) provides empirical evidence for the pervasive nuclear trauma in the aftermath of the first atomic attacks. Nuclear violence, however, also impacts psychic life at a much broader level, leading to a specific subject formation that I term “nuclear subjectivities”. Apart from actual sites of nuclear colonialism, war or catastrophe such as, for example, the nuclear borderlands in the American Southwest, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Maralinga, Hanford, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear trauma also extends to sites of slow or structural nuclear violence (Nixon 2013). I consider the latter to be virtually ubiquitous because nuclear risks to health include their traumatic consequences for psychic health. The use of the first atomic bomb and the haunting knowledge of its power potentially to annihilate planetary life have generated a rupture in “the order of things” that leaves a profound mark on psychic life (Foucault 2005). We know that our species has invented weapons with the capacity to contaminate the entire earth, including air, water, soil and food. We know of these weapons’ ability to destroy the human as well as other species. How can this knowledge not affect people in their entire existence? And yet, we rarely think, let alone feel, this way. This blindness at the heart of the gravest danger humans have 438

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ever faced constitutes a central aspect of the nuclear unconscious. I indeed believe that the very knowledge of a possible nuclear annihilation, even if split off from conscious awareness, generates a qualitative leap in the collective shaping of subjectivities.

Politics of splitting and the nuclear unconscious Theorists such as Günther Anders, Theodor W. Adorno, Georges Bataille, Michel Serres, Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Schell and R. J. Lifton assume that nuclearism affects every facet of our lives and psyches. The far-reaching implications of nuclearism for the restructuring of subjectivity, however, have yet to be fully explored. Moreover, regarding nuclear knowledge production, there is ample ground to speak of a nuclear episteme linked to an epistemology of deceit and denial. Denial includes not only the official denial at the heart of nuclear politics but also self-deception. Many do not want to face the full extent of the nuclear threat. We would not be able to live our daily lives if we did not succumb to a fair amount of psychic splitting. This means that we go on living as if the nuclear conundrum did not exist. As a result of the splitting off of nuclear fears, living in a mode of “as if” is an essential feature of nuclear subjectivities. While this type of splitting is adaptive, facilitating living in a nuclear world, it also creates a potentially threatening psychic rift, not only because splitting causes the ontological insecurity of divided selves (Laing 1990), but also because it reduces the felt urgency for political resistance and action. Eclipsing the nuclear threat from consciousness, splitting thus helps one to live without becoming paralysed by fear. At the same time, however, splitting exiles those very fears into the nuclear unconscious, generating a haunting from within. The nuclear unconscious, I argue, profoundly shapes the cultural, political and indeed economic unconscious in the nuclear age. Most of us know, but do not necessarily act as if we knew, that even against our will we structurally participate in the nuclear-industrial-military complex. Most of us do not want to think about how many of our tax dollars feed the nuclear war machine. Thus we become involuntary, and many indeed voluntary, participants in nuclear violence. There is a traumatic feedback loop that fuels the formation of nuclear subjectivities. The more we brush our fears aside or succumb to trauma fatigue, the more we become unconsciously affected. The images of nuclear catastrophes from Hiroshima to Fukushima remain burned into people’s minds, even if they do not consciously recall them. Yet, it is virtually impossible not to become numb to the now almost daily news of nuclear war talk or the frequent reports about irresolvable problems of nuclear reactors and the storage of nuclear waste. To the extent that the nuclear provokes a genuine trauma, the formation of defences is inevitable. Attending to the nuclear unconscious therefore becomes a political task because it contributes to removing the barriers to political awareness and action. Taking the nuclear unconscious into account thus means being attentive to the unsaid, to ellipses, catachresis, inconsistencies and contradictions in the rhetoric of nuclear discourses.

Soul blindness and psychic numbing Another dimension related to the formation of nuclear trauma is scale. In their debates about “rules of proportionality”, for example, the International Criminal Court called nuclear weapons “out-of-ratio weapons”. In Thermonuclear Monarchy, Elaine Scarry contends that weapons designed to kill millions of people cannot but fail to elicit proportional emotional responses. In part, she writes “this reflects the nature of compassion: public health scholars differentiate between our ready ability to feel ‘compassion’ for a solitary person and our inability to feel ‘statistical compassion’ when a large multitude undergoes far more 439

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excruciating forms of suffering” (Scarry 2014: 21). As a consequence, Scarry insists that nuclear weapons have ceased to “have any interior psychological content […] it is as though they have ceased to be a center of suffering or a center of gravity” (11). In a remarkable letter to President Kennedy from 13 January 1961, German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist Günther Anders invokes the notion of “Seelenblindheit” or “soul blindness”, a classical technical term in psychology to designate an overly weak reaction to a major disaster or trauma. Soul blindness is a widespread symptom of the nuclear age. In the US it has also become a national pathology. In Hiroshima in America, Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell write: While the tendency toward numbing in relation to Hiroshima is universal, it is bound to be greatest in Americans, where numbing serves the additional purpose of warding off potential feelings of guilt. As in the very different case of German attitudes toward Auschwitz, we have not wished to permit Hiroshima to enter our psyches in ways that could affect our feelings. (Lifton and Mitchell 1996: 338) “One was supposed to be numbed to Hiroshima”, they add, “It became […] politically suspect if one was troubled or inclined to make a fuss about it” (338). It is this psychic numbing that will paradoxically end up feeding into the haunting from the future that characterizes the nuclear ecology of fear. Consciously or unconsciously, people are haunted by the fear of the atomic bomb. According to polls, until the late eighties, half of all Americans expected to die in a nuclear war. Psychic numbing toward the suffering of others and perhaps even one’s own can, as Lifton and Mitchell maintain, spread to other areas until it becomes all-pervasive: By closing ourselves off from the human costs of our devastating weapon, we are more able to do the same in relation to other experiences of collective suffering– for example, the 1990s genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. […] As the numbing spreads, we can become increasingly insensitive to violence and suffering around us, to killing in general, but also to poverty and homelessness. (Lifton and Mitchell 1996: 340) This larger context of nuclear necropolitics has prepared the psychological ground for the US to become a country where common goods such as social security, health care for all, subsidized housing and affordable education are vilified as socialist goods. The numbing toward violence at a mass scale has gradually seeped into a numbing toward the slow structural violence that targets quotidian lives. This is why Lifton and Mitchell say that, if we can speak of an age of numbing, it begins with Hiroshima. (Lifton and Mitchell 1996: 340). This complex condition of psychic numbing and denial is part of the psychological trauma that structures nuclear subjectivities. We could indeed speak of a nuclear colonization of the mind. Nuclear dangers, including those resulting from the threat of nuclear wars, create a chronic collective nuclear trauma. Usually concealed within a relentless politics of denial, the risks from the already existing planetary radioactive contamination include not only the skyrocketing levels of various cancers and other health problems, including reproductive damage, but also the transgenerational persistence of major forms of physical and psychological trauma. The psychic afterlife of the Bomb has, in fact, led survivors to question whether the damage done by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can ever be repaired. Indeed as Takashi Nagai, a survivor of Nagasaki wrote: 440

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Today, we of Nagasaki, living on in the atomic wasteland, apply our energies to reconstruction […] Does it seem, then, that the deadly work of an atom bomb can be repaired? […] We carry deep in our hearts, every one of us, stubborn, unhealing wounds. […] It is this spiritual wreckage, which the visitor to Nagasaki’s wastes does not see, that is indeed beyond repair. (Nagai 1951: 188–9) This “spiritual wreckage” is closely linked to another feature of nuclear politics and its “out-of-range weapons”, namely the sense that the kind of death faced by the victims of nuclear attacks is, in the words of a Hiroshima survivor, a “false death” (Lifton 1991 [1968]: 309). The latter emerges from the feeling that, in a nuclear world whose entire order has been shaken, the unprecedented possibility of total annihilation leaves the notion of natural death behind. Humans have thus irrevocably dislodged the natural order of things. According to Lifton (1991 [1968]), the completely annihilating death encounter in an atomic attack prevents hibakusha (survivors of an atomic attack) from integrating the catastrophic experience as part of their ongoing self-process. This inability to metabolize terrifying life experiences that break through the psyche’s protective shield is the hallmark of trauma. At the psychological level, nuclear politics thus includes an irreparable sense of annihilation at the core of psychic life. If Lifton calls this a “false death” or “double death”, it is because it is an entirely unnatural psychic death that happens before the actual death of the body. This death will henceforth haunt the survivors of nuclear attacks from within like an uncanny double of natural death.

Doubling and the nuclear uncanny Lifton and Mitchell (1996) identify three basic psychic defense mechanisms against nuclear fear: splitting, doubling and numbing. While splitting and numbing are intimately tied to the psychic closing off of overwhelmingly terrifying or painful aspects of experience, doubling addresses a more active agency and collusion with nuclear violence. Lifton and Mitchell speak of “an inner division so extreme as to constitute a form of doubling, of the formation of separate, relatively autonomous selves” (Lifton and Mitchell 1996: 136). The concept of doubling also helps to understand how people can entirely split off their humane and compassionate self when they perform tasks in the service of mass violence and genocide. While the Nazi doctors are prime examples of such psychic doubling, Lifton and Mitchell argue that it is also present in people involved with the production and use of nuclear weapons. More generally, doubling helps to understand one of the most troubling psychological mechanisms that facilitate atrocious acts such as murder, torture or mass violence. Lifton and Mitchell put this in painfully succinct terms in relation to the implication of doubling for nuclear culture: “The most decent and loving person could be capable, under certain circumstances, of forming a relatively autonomous second self drawn to and joining in with the immortalizing appeal of nuclear desecration and transgression” (317). Doubling also supports the nuclear phantasms of an “apocalyptic self” related to death and immortality. Lifton and Mitchell (1996) note a division between a “measured self” and an “apocalyptic self” to be ubiquitous in relation to catastrophic threats of annihilation. While people are usually trying to make their way through the natural life cycle in measured ways, traumatic events reactivate the “apocalyptic self” that is preoccupied with premature or violent death, such as death through catastrophic illnesses, mass killings, genocide or nuclear Holocaust. All ecologies of fear, we can surmise, mobilize phantasms of the apocalyptic self. Hiroshima has forever disrupted the expectation of a natural life cycle and therefore released the dangerous energies of the apocalyptic self. 441

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Doubling is also generative of experiences of the uncanny. Survivors are haunted by the fear of a death that has already occurred at the level of the psyche. Moreover, the sense of the uncanny is enhanced by the material invisibility of the nuclear threat. The first use of the atomic bomb inaugurates, as Akira Lippit (2005) argues, the age of invisible warfare, that is, a warfare that extends beyond the immediate damage into the distant future. The waves of invisible radiation that had infiltrated the survivors’ bodies continue the warfare indefinitely and out of sight, so to speak. Beyond its immediate annihilating destruction, the atomic work of death operates as a form of slow violence inside the bodies of victims, thus extending into the aftermath of the official end of the war. While many of the victims suffer and die from radiation sickness, and later from cancers, this invisible warfare also operates transgenerationally, potentially inflicting genetic damage on subsequent generations of children of victims and their children. While previous wars had left a psychic transgenerational legacy of war trauma, this invisible warfare is the first that leaves a transgenerational physical legacy of genetic damage in addition to the psychic one. In his analysis of radioactive colonization in The Nuclear Borderlands, Joseph Masco writes: Nuclear materials are sources of invisible power. Radiation is colorless and odorless, yet capable of affecting living beings at the genetic level. In this sense, nuclear materials produce the uncanny effect of blurring the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and between the natural and the supernatural. (Masco 2006: 30) Analysing the ghostly quality of plutonium as a metal that, in the minds of those who encounter it, assumes the animistic quality of organic life, Masco speaks of the “nuclear uncanny” (25–34). The nuclear uncanny forms the core of a proliferating imaginary that emerges as a long-term effect of living in the shadow of a global plutonium economy. It is part of the uncontainable psychosocial fallout that shapes the very structure of subjectivity by creating a haunting from the future for generations to come, if not the rest of planetary time. Being haunted by the knowledge of invisible, yet potentially lethal toxins in one’s body and in those of future generations who are forced to live on toxic lands, also creates a psychic toxicity that, while often unconscious, profoundly shapes psychic life (Masco 2006). This interplay between material and psychic toxicity and its impact on emergent nuclear subjectivities generates, in Masco’s terms, “a new kind of trauma, one that corrupts the possibility of an everyday life outside the plutonium economy” (Masco 2006: 237). This is true not only for the indigenous people Masco interviews but also for people worldwide, even those who have been kept in the dark about the nuclear threat. Today, the entire world lives inside the plutonium economy, an economy that affects everything, including the air people breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat, as well as their psychic life with its fantasies and fears. At the same time, however, this global existential enclosure in an irreversible plutonium economy remains under erasure. People live as if there still were a shared world free from the threat of nuclear annihilation. In “Wallace Stevens’s Birds”, Cary Wolfe (2018) analyses this mode of “as if” as part of an “ecological poetics”. Wolfe links poetic worldmaking in a world without ontological security to an uncanny hauntology that marks “our responsibility to those spectral ones who are not here, either already departed or not yet arrived” (Wolfe 2018: 333). This is precisely how I would describe the psycho-ontological position of major nuclear trauma in terms of a double haunting from the past by the spectral ones who have been incinerated in

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Hiroshima and a haunting from the future by the spectral ones who have not yet arrived but might be born as mutant children or die in a future nuclear war.

Nuclear colonization of psychic space The psychic splitting that facilitates a mode of living as if allows people to remain largely oblivious to the damage done by innumerable atomic tests in the US and around the world, by the virtually irresolvable problems posed by nuclear waste, and the real longterm dangers that threaten the survival of the human species. Psychic splitting and denial, the most pervasive defence mechanisms against nuclear fear, also prevent the very acknowledgement of nuclear trauma. The Bomb creates a colonization of the mind and the future, a psychic toxicity, and a particular form of transgenerational nuclear trauma. In New Mexico where the Trinity Test Site is located, the effort to normalize nuclear nature has, according to Masco, been a multigenerational process, “one affecting concepts of social order, ecology, health, and security” (Masco 2006: 293). Masco further states that New Mexico’s citizens, especially its indigenous populations, experience the nuclear colonization and contamination of their lands also as a psychic intrusion, if not as “a quotidian experience of nuclear terror” (229). One of the activists he interviews speaks of a proliferating anxiety and inability to escape the nuclear terror generated by the knowledge of both radioactive contamination and nuclear war. According to Masco, this terror “destabilizes a self that can no longer locate the boundaries between the body and the bomb” (229). From the perspective of New Mexico’s colonization as a nuclear borderland, New Mexicans are indeed nuclear survivors but Masco pointedly asks, “survivors of what nuclear trauma?” (327). The psychosocial legacies of living within a nuclear ecology are ubiquitous at the global level as well, albeit with a radically unequal distribution. The formation of nuclear subjectivities under the impact of nuclear trauma is, of course, most pronounced in victims of nuclear catastrophes. The subjectivities of survivors can therefore be read as symptomatic of the effects of nuclear culture on psychic life more generally. When Svetlana Alexievich interviewed the survivors of Chernobyl, she felt she was recording the future. Similarly, we could say that by tracing the formation of the nuclear subjectivities of atomic survivors, we are also drawing a map of a much more pervasive threat that looms over the nuclear world, if not a future anterior of nuclear subjectivities and psychic lives to come. Post-Chernobyl subjectivities, for example, can be seen as exemplary of post-nuclear subject formations more generally. The basic features of these formations have also been observed in the aftermath of Fukushima. In many ways, these features also resemble subjectivities formed after other traumatic events such as colonial subjugation, war or the Holocaust. While major trauma is the common denominator, the analysis of nuclear subjectivities also shows that there are certain features that mark nuclear trauma specifically. Among those are, to name just a few, obsession with illnesses developing in radioactively contaminated bodies, fears of reproductive damage and related phantasms of the mutant body, the phantasmatic refashioning of the disaster zone into an idyllic space of freedom and, finally, the often apocalyptic haunting from the future, linked to the vision of planetary extinction. In this context, scale poses a problem that profoundly impacts the capacity of psychic processing. The long-term nuclear slow violence and damage operates at scales not accessible to experience, scales that indeed surpass the scope of human imagination. While the largescale material effects of nuclearism unfold in a trans-human, geological timescale, such effects 443

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are also transgenerational because nuclear destruction encompasses damage to biological reproductive capacities and genetic heredity. Beyond killing instantly, or slowly through radiation sickness or cancers, nuclear weapons also threaten long-term survival at the most basic material level, that is, the genetic make-up of organic life. In contrast to the transgenerational trauma caused by traditional war where the trauma originates in a past violent history, transgenerational nuclear trauma encompasses past, present and future. People live in the present with memories of nuclear disasters from Hiroshima to Fukushima as well as the knowledge not only of the threat of future nuclear attacks but also of the devastating effects of nuclear contamination that extend over many generations into the distant future. Oral histories of survivors testify to deep-seated reproductive fears. These are, in a sense, anticipatory imaginary manifestations of corporeal transgenerational trauma. Rampant phantasms of the mutant body, particularly among female survivors who are or want to become pregnant, reveal a transgenerational anxiety regarding our “species self”. Lifton and Mitchell define the latter as the recognition of “our shared fate as fellow members of a single species in trouble […] a sense of being part of humankind” (Lifton and Mitchell 1996: 355). The nuclear threat paradoxically enhances this recognition of a common humanity because of the knowledge that all human beings on earth could be wiped out. Created in response to nuclear haunting, phantasms of the mutant body can be seen as a threat-specific manifestation of what Jacques Lacan calls “phantasms of the fragmented body” (Lacan 1977: 11). Phantasmatic images of damaged bodies are psychic formations created in response to ontological insecurity, precarity of embodiment and the related instability of ego boundaries. The knowledge of damages of such unfathomable dimensions threatens any sense of existential sovereignty. The nuclear subject is, as if (nuclear) death were not. Only thus can the minimal sovereignty required for everyday life be maintained. Radical psychic splitting therefore defines not only the condition of nuclear sovereignty but also the condition of living in today’s nuclear world. People in the wake of Chernobyl, for example, cannot but oscillate between two modes of being. On the one hand, they try to live as if the disaster never happened. On the other hand, they live under traumatic shock and a haunting from the future. Fears of another nuclear disaster, if not war, augment fears of the slow radioactive violence that causes deadly illnesses after a period of latency. Women in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, for example, had the double burden of caring for victims and dealing with the slow effects of radioactive contamination. In addition to fearing for their own health, they had to see their husbands dying from radiation sickness and their children born with birth defects or radiation-induced illnesses. They also had to face social isolation and indeed social death from being ousted by relatives who feared them as carriers of toxic and contagious radiation. But splitting as both an adaptive and defensive psychic mechanism marks not only the nuclear subjectivities of survivors. All humans have become divided nuclear subjects. Short of utter despair and paralysis, nuclear subjects need to live as if the spectre of all-out nuclear destruction were not (or no longer) imminent. Politically, splitting may feed into sustaining nuclear necropower. Rather than being merely adaptive, it cuts subjects off from fear, compassion, love, anger or grief. Within an ecology of nuclear fear, emotions are never proportionate to the violence, cruelty and dangers of a nuclear world. The nuclear has thus contaminated the most basic emotions, either numbing them completely or replacing them, as the hibakusha Lifton interviews insist, with “counterfeit” ones. Apart from chronic fear, counterfeit emotions form a central aspect of psychic toxicity.

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Imagining extinction The nuclear age has further refashioned the boundaries of human subjectivity and communal relationality by introducing what Jonathan Schell (2000) famously calls “the second death”. Schell distinguishes between two forms of death, the natural death of an individual and the death of a species by extinction. For humans, the species responsible for creating the conditions that propel extinction and the only one capable of imagining it, this second death entails facing the death of mankind. In the event of a nuclear holocaust, however, Schell identifies two forms of death: In extinction by nuclear arms, the death of the species and the death of all the people in the world would happen together, but it is important to make a clear distinction between the two losses; otherwise, the mind, overwhelmed by the thought of the deaths of the billions of living people, might stagger back without realizing that behind this already ungraspable loss there lies the separate loss of the future generation. (Schell 2000: 115) Nuclear necropolitics thus performs a double work of death, namely mass killing and the potential extinction of the species. Or, to put it differently, nuclear necropolitics doubles the work of death with the work of extinction. As Schell writes: “Death is only death; extinction is the death of death” (119). To think this way, however, entails posing the question: what do future generations mean to those of us among the living? This question concerns the currently living because, as Schell puts it, “no generation before ours has ever held the life and death of the species in its hands” (216). Within the parameters of nuclear necropolitics, sovereignty thus means more than arrogating the right to decide which individuals, communities or nations will live or die. It also means deciding, by design or accident, whether the human species, if not much of planetary life, will live or die. In the context of imagining extinction (Heise 2016) it is important to remember that nuclear necropolitics is only part and parcel of a much more encompassing environmental necropolitics. Schell sees nuclear danger as an ecological danger that has to be considered in its entanglement with other ecological threats to planetary life: “The nuclear peril is usually seen in isolation from the threats to other forms of life and their ecosystems, but in fact it should be seen as the very center of the ecological crisis” (Schell 2000: 111). The reason Schell insists on the centrality of the nuclear crisis, however, is its “unique combination of immensity and suddenness” (111). It is the potentially annihilating power of nuclear war that challenges the limits of human imagination and emotional comprehension. And, I argue, it is this challenge that engenders denial, including the denial inherent in the wishful fantasy that humans can remain in control of the power they have unleashed with the splitting of the atom. Such denial also operates collectively, including at a national level. It is pervasive in the US, the country with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and the only country so far that used atomic bombs in an act of warfare. Lifton and Mitchell emphasize the pernicious feedback loop created by nuclear weapons: “Nuclear weapons thus take their place in the dominant technology of a permanent, self-propelling American megamachine that seems almost independent of human control” (Lifton and Mitchell 1996: 304). This American nuclear megamachine defines the core of nuclear necropolitics. The fact that this machine tends toward becoming independent of human control shows that nuclear necropolitics is 445

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inseparable from a psychopolitics that deals with nuclearism’s extensive psychic damages in the present as well as the haunting from the future of its manifold transgenerational legacies. To face such haunting requires people today not only to imagine extinction while at the same time resisting the lure of apocalypticism, but also to learn to imagine thinking across immense scales that extend over millennia. To care about planetary futures ultimately requires humans to relinquish their anthropocentric rootedness in a temporal thinking that focuses on conceivable human lifespans. This challenge has profound implications for the formation of psychic life within the parameters of nuclear subjectivity. In Deep Time, Gregory Benford contends that tempocentric notions of the human condition do not survive. Nuclear waste alone demands, he argues, “that we mark sites for times longer than the age of our civilization” (Benford 1999: 2). To think about the condition of human and planetary life in the nuclear age thus requires the formation of nuclear subjectivities trained to thinking across unimaginably immense temporal scales. Not surprisingly, it is the technology of radioactive dating that has helped scientists to enhance such scalar imaginings. Benford emphasizes the chasm that has opened in modern history between the deep longing for perpetuity, ubiquitous across the diverse histories of civilization, and a fundamental fear that human civilization now has the power to annihilate most, if not all life on earth. It is a tension, Benford writes, between a longing to “extend across time some lasting shadow of the present” and an “anxiety about the passing of all referents, the loss of meaning” (3). Imagining extinction thus becomes of utmost political urgency. The haunting from the future of anticipated nuclear annihilation can only be ignored by a denial operating in collusion with the epistemology of (self-)deception that marks nuclear politics. The challenge then is to imagine possible forms of extinction without succumbing to the lures of an apocalyptic imaginary. While the latter looms large in the formation of nuclear subjectivities, it remains confined to a paranoid-schizoid world that precludes a politics of mourning. The world before the nuclear age is not mourned because the ontological break that ended it remains eclipsed from consciousness. Concomitantly, possible future worlds cannot be mourned because the ontological insecurity of the nuclear age and the spectre of extinction are repressed. This repression feeds not only denial but also a psychologically inevitable widespread disaster fatigue, if not disaster amnesia. In this context, apocalyptic phantasms propel a return of the repressed, albeit one that often comes in the domesticated form of either illusory survival or of melancholic attachments to omnipotent visions of extinction. Both, I think, are fuelled by the autoimmune logic of the death-drive that finds it ultimate satisfaction in species-suicide. There is one image that has circulated globally, embodying the spectre of nuclear annihilation. It is the imprint on the steps of a Hiroshima bank of a human incinerated by the atomic bomb. This image has proliferated in representations of the atomic attacks, including an entire range of poetry. It has become a transformational cultural object shared worldwide for the processing of nuclear trauma. This ghostly human shadow left by thermal rays on stone has haunted me ever since I first saw it in high school. It was the images of Night and Fog, Alain Resnais’s documentary about the concentration camps, and this shadow image of an incinerated human that embodied for me the twin horrors of the Second World War: the camps and the atomic bomb. The Hiroshima shadow’s capture of the cultural imaginary demonstrates that it is haunting in its very iconic value. It is haunting because this trace of a human incinerated and burnt into stone turns viewers into witnesses of a trauma that extends from the past into the distant future. “Burning, another world enters through the shadows of bodies flashed on walls”, writes Linda Hogan (1994: 273). Evoked by the past trauma of an individual life that was annihilated by the first atomic bomb, this “other 446

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world” mobilizes the knowledge of a possible future annihilation, a world of “bodies flashed on walls” that heralds extinction of life. The latter causes the permanent trauma of a hitherto unknown anticipatory haunting from the future. We cannot resist imagining this man’s life as it was snatched away from him in a second, consumed by a murderous nuclear force whose radiation left nothing but his shadow image, a stain on the stair, an icon of atomic death. And yet, as Stephanie Strickland’s powerful poetic image reminds us, the stain erases the individual human in the very moment that monumentalizes his trace:

The monument: a grey stain fused in concrete, a shadow cast on three steps in Nagasaki for a moment, by the silvery flash of the explosion; etched there by light from the suns that exposed it. Not a man. Not a woman. An effigy: human by deduction, like a cloak. (Strickland 1994: 209) Perhaps it is the very erasure of the human that turns this shadow image into a prime icon of Hiroshima, an empty graph on which viewers project the affects that fuel their nuclear imaginary. Yet Strickland’s poem also likens the shadowgraph to an effigy, that is, a model of a particular person originally designed to be damaged or destroyed in protest or expression of anger. The image of the effigy thus invokes both, a haunting from the past nuclear attack on Hiroshima as an act of retaliation and a haunting from the future of an all-out nuclear annihilation that leaves nothing behind but a shadow world of incinerated humans.

Haunting from the future It is this haunting from the future that distinguishes nuclear trauma from other forms of trauma. Survivors of previous wars knew they had survived. They could process the war trauma by propagating visions of “never again”. While such visions have also been developed in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear trauma reaches differently into the future. It is not only fears of slow nuclear violence that generate a haunting from the future; it is also the knowledge that the radioactive contamination of the earth is irreversible and the stockpiling of nuclear weapons as well as the production of nuclear waste from nuclear power plants is a ticking time bomb. Reading Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity, a documentary about nuclear waste, E. Ann Kaplan in Climate Trauma (2016) develops a concept of “pre-trauma”. Kaplan describes the film’s dark mood in terms of a “pre-traumatic scenario, a trauma waiting to happen” (Kaplan 2016: 120). While Kaplan’s concept of “pre-trauma” bears certain affinities with my concept of “haunting from the future”, the main difference is that “pre-trauma” suggests a time before the onset of trauma, while “haunting from the future” already presupposes a trauma in the present. 447

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If, as Kaplan (2016) suggests, Madsen’s film interpellates us into the position of a witness to a catastrophe in an unfathomably distant future, it also invites us to enter into an experimental apprehension of scale that is almost impossible to imagine. It was the fascination with this problem of scale, Madsen says, that motivated him to make Into Eternity. Thinking about the problem of the immense temporal scale of 100,000 years opened up by the film, we could in fact argue that, apart from the irresolvable problem of toxic waste, it is scale itself that haunts the film as well as its viewers. This haunting by scale bears upon the responsibilities humans today assume when they leave a deadly crypt of nuclear waste for future generations. Madsen, as the film’s narrator, asks, “How far into the future will your way of life have consequences?” (Kaplan 2016: 123). Kaplan argues that the viewer is put in the position of “the ghost-like human” who is the film’s imaginary addressee (Kaplan 2016: 121). And it is indeed this spectral addressee that haunts viewers of Into Eternity from a distance of 100,000 years. Madsen also anchors the scale of this haunting in the sheer unlimited capacity of radioactive substances to cause damage. He defines atomic light as “a fire that cannot be extinguished” because it has already penetrated everything, soil, crops and bodies, human or animal. And assuming that this catastrophic “fire” has already irreversibly damaged the human gene pool (along with that of other species), the film’s imaginary addressee is literally a radioactive human ghost. But how do we communicate about the dangers of the nuclear waste repository to such a spectral being who is supposed to discover the site 100,000 years from now? Since the evolution of languages will presumably have made current languages incomprehensible, the scientists and philosophers Madsen interviews debate whether it is better to leave the site completely unmarked or to try to imagine iconic markers that will remain readable and translatable across 100,000 years. These markers include, for example, a monolith with layered messages about the dangers of radiation, cartoonlike warnings and a forbidding surrounding wall of thorns and rocks. Someone suggested including a copy of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s The Scream as universally terrifying. The German title Munch gave the painting was actually “Der Schrei der Natur”, that is, the “scream of nature”. In 1895, he made a lithograph stone with the painting that could easily be imagined as a pictorial version of the warnings on a monolith the scientists and philosophers in Into Eternity had suggested. If the crypt of buried radioactive waste in Madsen’s documentary can be seen as a material archive of the nuclear age, Munch’s painting belongs to another traumatic archive. It features a ghost from a past memory of violent destruction, presumably of a volcanic explosion. Let me conclude by returning to the spectre of extinction. Lifton’s Indefensible Weapons (Lifton and Falk 1991 [1982]) ends with an Appendix (co-authored with Kai Erikson) designed to break through psychic numbing by imagining extinction after a nuclear disaster. The authors pose the question “Would the survivors envy the dead?” to which they give the following answer: “No, they would be incapable of such feelings. They would not so much envy as, inwardly and outwardly, resemble the dead” (Lifton and Erikson 1991 [1982]: 278). Extinction thus needs to be thought of not only in terms of what Derrida calls the “remainderless destruction” of an all-out nuclear war, but also in terms of what Lifton calls “death in life”, that is, the psychic condition in which massive trauma has literally extinguished the capacity to feel. Lifton’s interviews reveal that, in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear attack, psychic numbing is a protection against the terror of mass death. Someone unable to feel alive does not need to fear death. However, survivors continue to live

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a form of death in life. Lifton also analyses the equivalent feeling in the perpetrators of nuclear attacks: [P]atterns of psychic numbing have surrounded the overall creation, testing, and military use (actual or planned) of nuclear weapons: a combination of technicalprofessional focus and perceived ideological imperative which excludes emotional perceptions of what these weapons do. It is no exaggeration to say that psychic numbing is one of the great problems of our age. (Lifton 1991 [1968]: 508) We thus encounter psychic numbing and death-in-life as manifestations of an isomorphic psychic damage that affects both victims and perpetrators, albeit in different ways and to a different degree. How would survivors mourn their poisoned lives and lands, how would they mourn the lives lost to nuclear madness, theirs and those of other species? How would they mourn their forfeited futures and the extinctions they imagine? There is a simple answer. It is impossible properly to mourn these losses. Nuclear entrapment has also fostered a profound inability to mourn. This is not to say that survivors would not feel the pain and grief and sadness about the damage humans have brought to the planet. Rather, it is to say that their grief, just like ours today, will never be proportionate to that damage. A profound inability to mourn is already among us, inevitably paralysing some of our most compassionate emotions. The very range of emotions has been narrowed to a scale that allows people to live their daily lives until the bitter end. But this curtailing of emotions comes in the form of an injurious psychic splitting and collective denial. It is a schizoid splitting that creates an internal crypt which houses the shadow lives of everything that cannot be grieved, the shadow lives of foreclosed futures, of contaminated land, water, air and bodies. The shadow lives of radioactive ghosts poison us from inside. This is what Herman Agoyo, the indigenous activist from the nuclear borderlands, identified as psychic toxicity. In Death in Life, Lifton describes such a toxicity of the mind in the case of a Hiroshima survivor: “The embittered world-view becomes his total vision of the way things were and the way things are. Not having been able to ‘vomit’ his ‘bitter water,’ such a survivor finds his entire psychic life poisoned by it” (Lifton 1991 [1968]: 526). The “nuclear crypt” forms a space of haunting, a haunting that comes from outside and inside the self. The legacy of nuclear violence haunts not only its actual victims but, knowingly or unknowingly, everyone on the planet, including future generations. In The Shell and the Kernel, Abraham and Torok (1994) envision a crypt in which people bury unspeakable events or unbearable, if not disavowed, losses or injuries incurred during violent histories. In the twentieth century, Auschwitz and Hiroshima are the names that designate such unspeakable histories of violence. Both also stand for the first instances of technologically induced mass extermination. “In the extermination camps natural death was completely eliminated”, writes Anders and concludes that, as a consequence, “all men are exterminable”. “[W]hat is exterminable today”, he concludes, “is not ‘merely’ all men, but mankind as a whole” (Anders 1956: 148). And, we should add, most other living species as well. It is this shift that inaugurates the nuclear age. Abraham and Torok insist that any unnatural death creates ghosts that come to haunt the living. The complete elimination of natural death in Auschwitz and the fear of nuclear annihilation, a man-made unnatural event, create a collective haunting from both past and future. Formed in response to a refusal or inability to mourn, nuclear crypts harbour 449

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radioactive ghosts like an undead vibrant matter (Bennett 2010). Just like the material halflife of radioactive matter, the psychic half-life of nuclear trauma approximates notions of an immortal force. Nuclear trauma resists integration into the psychic fabric. It is virtually impossible appropriately to mourn the loss of a pre-nuclear world that provided humans with a sense of permanence and transgenerational continuity. Yet, while we may disavow the loss of such a world, we keep its memory psychically alive, if only unconsciously. Nuclear crypts are collective crypts, formed by the silences and secrets of nuclear necropolitics. They emerge in the wake of disavowed nuclear violence, blurring the boundaries between psychic and social life and voiding the world and its forms of expression of their vital force. Those who encapsulate silences and secrets in collective crypts psychically merge with the ghosts they harbour. In a complex process of identification, crypts subject the haunted to a psychic state that increasingly resembles the living dead. Finally, we could say that the crypt prevents us from facing the Angelus Novus of our time, the Angel of Nuclear History. Is the angel staring at, yet moving away from, the world’s nuclear contamination, his face turned toward the past? Does he, as Benjamin suggests, see one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet? Would the angel like to awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed? And is it a nuclear storm that is blowing from Paradise, getting caught in his wings with such violence that he can no longer close them? Benjamin writes: “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (Benjamin 1969: 249). Can we find a better image for the nuclear storm that pushes life toward its final extinction while the Angel of History looks at the pile of radioactive waste that is growing skyward?

Acknowledgement In this chapter I draw on my forthcoming book Radioactive Ghosts (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

Bibliography Abraham, N. and Torok, M. (1994) The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. I, trans. N. T. Rand (ed.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Anders, G. (1956) “Reflections on the H Bomb”, Dissent 3(2): 146–55. Benford, G. (1999) Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millenia, New York: Harper Collins. Benjamin, W. (1969) Theses on the Philosophy of History, trans. H. Zohn, New York: Schocken Books. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (2005) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Routledge. Heise, U. K. (2016) Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hogan, L. (1994) “Prayer for Men and Children”, in J. Bradley (ed.) Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 272–73. Kaplan, E. A. (2016) Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction, New Brunswick, NY: Rutgers University Press. Lacan, J. (1977) Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Tavistock Publications. Laing, R. D. (1990) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, New York: Penguin Books. Lifton, R. J. (1991 [1968]) Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Cape Hill, London: University of Carolina Press. Lifton, R. J. and Erikson, K. (1991 [1982]) “Appendix”, in R. J. Lifton and R. Falk (eds) Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism, New York: Basic Books.

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Transgenerational nuclear trauma Lifton, R. J. and Falk, R. A. (1991 [1982]) Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism, New York: Basic Books. Lifton, R. J. and Mitchell, G. (1996) Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial, New York: Harper and Collins. Lippit, A. M. (2005) Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Masco, J. (2006) The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nagai, T. (1951) We of Nagasaki: The Story of Survivors in an Atomic Wasteland, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Nixon, R. (2013) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scarry, E. (2014) Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Schell, J. (2000) The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Strickland, S. (1994) “Shadow”, in J. Bradley (ed.) Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 209–10. Williams, C. K. (1995) “Tar”, in J. Bradley (ed.) Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 93–95. Wolfe, C. (2018) “Wallace Stevens’s Birds, or, Derrida and Ecological Poetics”, in M. Fritsch, P. Lynes and D. Woods (eds) Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, New York: Fordham University Press, 317–38.

Further reading Eatherly, C. and Günther, A. (1962) Burning Conscience: The Case of Hiroshima Pilot Claude Eatherly, NewYork: Monthly Review Press. Schwab, G. (2010) Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, New York: Columbia University Press.

451

INDEX

Abazovic, Dina 300 Abbot, Jack Henry 69 Abbott, Shirley 409–411 Abdul-Ahad, Ghaith 424 ableism 178 aboriginal 92, 98 abortion 105, 164 Abraham, Nicolas 449 Abram, David 190–191 absence 19–20, 26, 54, 57, 107, 127–128, 194, 197, 270, 302, 319, 324, 340; necessary 409; of chronological memory 72; and presence 127–128, 329, 334 Abu Ghraib 96, 262 accident 5, 33, 57, 79, 81–82, 84, 92–93, 103, 270, 351, 356, 388–389, 445; railway 2, 12, 16, 330–331; survivor 80; traffic 158; workplace 2, 14 actant 235 acting out 4, 55, 127, 133, 135–139, 332 Adams, Jenni 309–310 address 40, 79–88, 194, 248, 258, 297, 299, 374; undoing of 82 addressee 81–82, 111, 391, 448 addressor 82 Adelson, Leslie 264 Adonis 298 Adorno, Theodor W. 132, 187–188, 190, 193, 292, 372, 396, 399, 439 Aeschylus 328 aesthetics 3, 20, 55, 59, 142, 213, 290, 300–301, 354, 431; film 155; of the earth 191; of the unsayable 32–33; of trauma 26, 32; aesthetic forms 4–5 aestheticization of trauma 19, 243 aestheticized violence 424–425

affect 3, 6, 33, 91, 94, 97, 108, 123–125, 129, 141–150, 178, 181, 212–218, 233, 235, 277, 296, 332, 447; legacy of 149; negative 215–216, 218; positive 215; rise of 142, 144; and emotion 142–143; theory 62, 141–143, 145, 147–150; see also affective; emotions affective: autonomy 147; circulation (of) 144, 148, 150; commons 144; community 42; dimensions of traumatic re-enactment 148; economies 144, 148; fallacy 149; forecasting 147; histories 259, 264; narratology 150; order 149; politics 146, 148; sharing 213; state 144, 146; table of elements 143; turn 141–142; see also affect; emotions Afghanistan 278, 301, 393, 412, 418–419, 421 Africa 5, 17, 50, 69, 176, 190, 195–196, 213, 236–237, 259–260, 323–324, 333, 396–397; African diaspora 191; African literature 231, 401 African American 47–48, 52, 177, 260, 432–434, 436; collective identity 48; feminism 173; history 179; studies 180 Afrikaners 50–51 aftershock 364, 372, 408 Agamben, Giorgio 67, 77, 96, 116, 166, 230, 429 age of globalization 20, 257–263, 314 age of the memoir 268 agency 25, 27, 31–34, 37, 55, 69–70, 92–93, 148, 152, 175, 192, 201–202, 206, 231, 234–238, 247, 293, 319, 322–325, 422–423, 428, 433, 441; lack of 94, 97, 144; epistemic 169–170; political 310, 348; sense of 25, 32, 34; see also narrative agency agential realism 234 Agger, Inger 72 Agoyo, Herman 449 Ahmed, Sara 98, 143–146 AIDS 7, 408

Index Akhmatova, Anna 302–303 Al Qaeda 422, 426 Alaimo, Stacy 234–236, 240 Albrecht, Glenn 276, 284 Alexander, Jeffrey 4, 20, 45–47, 49–52, 231, 376 Alexievich, Svetlana 443 Algeria 118, 190, 382; Algerian independence movement 202; Algerian War 51, 122, 203–204, 379–380 alienation 91, 97, 175–176, 179 Allison, Dorothy 308 alt-right 292 Althusser, Louis 36 Altieri, Charles 141–143, 147 Altinay, Ayşe Gül 63 America 2, 59, 63, 67, 69, 117, 122, 181, 189, 258, 261–262, 314, 386–388, 391–419, 408–409, 426, 440; American Civil War 388, 391, 393; American dream 280; American history 179, 385, 428; American identity 46, 50; American Mission 387; American poetry 302; American slavery 46, 212; American society 49, 386; black Americans 46, 69; indigenous Americans 122 American Psychiatric Association (APA) 3, 11, 21, 55 Améry, Jean 215–218, 402 Amir, Nida 24 Amis, Martin 101, 108, 368–369 amnesia 12–13, 25, 195, 372, 409, 446 amnesty laws 204 Amsterdam 242 amygdala 222, 228 Andermahr, Sonya 102 Anders, Günther 439–440, 449 Anderson, Craig 245 Anderson, Tea 62, 63 Anderson, Kjell 100, 104, 106–107 Andrews, Molly 74 Angelou, Maya 46 anger 137, 142, 144–146, 148–149, 218, 276, 347–348, 374, 390, 402, 444, 447 Angolan battle for independence 69 animal 93, 96, 190, 197, 221, 232, 234, 277, 322–324, 436, 448 animalization 323 Antelme, Robert 167–168 Anthropocene 62–63, 181, 232, 234, 282, 354; disorder 276–277 anthropocentrism 232, 281–282 anthropology 142, 401 anti-biologism 142 anti-cognitive models 147 anti-colonial: conflicts 423; movements 190; rebellions 113 anti-elegy 137 anti-humanism 37

anti-intentionalism 147 anti-narrative 57, 268, 407 anti-Semitism 38, 192, 379 anti-terror wars 393 anticipatory: anxiety 279–280; haunting 447; listeners 73; mode of the future anterior 352; mourning 357; Nachträglichkeit 356; traumatic stress (disorder) 279 Antoon, Sinan 424 anxiety 27, 67, 92, 94, 101, 107, 134, 142, 223, 227, 275–276, 279–280, 351–353, 414, 443–444, 446; anticipatory 279–280; climate 1, 5; cultural 351; disorders 221, 278 Apartheid 17, 50–51, 92, 231, 236–237; trauma 237 apathy 275 aphorism 299 apocalypse 349, 353, 356 apocalyptic: nightmares 280; self 441 appropriation 19, 29–30, 39, 126, 165, 244, 291–292, 294, 346, 350–351, 413, 418–420, 422; of trauma 19, 418, 420, 422 arche-violence 29 archeology 193 architecture 158, 206–207 archive 56, 59, 67, 115, 181, 214, 243, 398, 418–419, 448; documentary 419, 426; of feelings 145, 176; archival film footage 154 Arendt, Hannah 30, 152–153, 190, 203, 404, 423 Argenti-Pillen, Alexandra 243 Aristotle 145–147 Armenia 1; Armenian genocide 7, 112–113, 305 Arthur, Paul 243–244, 248 Asia 5, 29, 232 assemblage 42, 123–125, 127, 181, 235, 319 assimilation 28, 30, 79, 92, 270 Assmann, Aleida 17, 42, 55, 59, 62, 111, 158, 232, 258 Assmann, Jan 55, 59, 102 asylum seeker 5, 98, 257 Atack, Margaret 383 atomic bomb 320, 422, 438, 440, 442, 445–446 Auden, W. H. 296 Aufarbeitung 132 Augustine 69 Auschwitz 58, 67, 73, 107–108, 112–114, 116, 127, 135, 157–160, 162, 166–168, 215, 289, 340, 355, 365, 367, 369, 372, 402, 440, 449 Austin, J. L. 82, 330 Australia 92, 236, 276 Austria 211, 215, 218, 367, 386 authenticity 18, 68, 70–71, 148, 299, 333, 339, 400 autobiography 67, 69, 214, 268, 293, 307–311, 313, 370; childhood 309

453

Index autobiographical: film 58; narrative 61, 74, 307, 311; representations 305–306; subject 68, 309; texts 68–69 autofiction 310 autonomy 37, 146–148, 298, 318, 374, 381, 404; autonomous subject 404 Averbuch, Lazarus 261–263 avoidance 16, 107–108, 137, 221, 278 Azoulay, Ariella 344–345, 424 Bacall-Zwirin, Alina 289 Bacevich, Andrew 420 Bäcker, Heimrad 366–368 bad conscience 204 Badiou, Alain 36 Baelo-Allué, Sonia 377–378 Baer, Elizabeth 164 Baer, Ulrich 297–298, 302–303, 341 Bahrain 73 Bal, Mieke 152 Balaev, Michelle 4, 7, 231, 318–320 Balint, Michael 270 Banasik, Becky 247 Bánfalvi, Attila 243 Banita, Georgiana 414 Baltic States 312 banlieue 205 Barad, Karen 234–235, 240 barbarism 112, 396 Barbie, Klaus 123 bare life 96, 116 Barker, Pat 139 Barnes, Fiona R. 175 Barthes, Roland 127 Bataille, Georges 439 battle fatigue 66 Battle of Marathon 66 Baudelaire, Charles 297–298, 302 Baudrillard, Jean 92, 94–97 Bazambanza, Rupert 323 Beardsley, Monroe 149 Beauvoir, Simone de 69 Beck, Béatrix 381 Beck, Ulrich 352, 356, 358 behavioral theories 221 belatedness 3, 24, 56, 102, 189, 212, 231, 341 Belgium 37, 215, 260–261, 374, 395 Belsey, Catherine 37 Bemporad, Elissa 164 BenEzer, Gadi 291 Benford, Gregory 446 Bennett, Jane 234–235, 240 Bennett, Jill 4, 57, 77, 141, 147, 312 Bennett, Tony 240 Bergdahl, Bowe 422 Bergen-Belsen 343 Berger, James 349, 358, 411

Bergson, Henri 124–125 Berlant, Lauren 143–145, 147, 149–150, 176, 190 Bernard-Donals, Michael 73 Bernier, Monique 398 Berntsen, Dorthe 278–279 Bevernage, Berber 206, 210 Bhabha, Homi K. 200 Biafran War 118 Biel, Amy 213 Bildungsroman 71 Bin Laden, Osama 147 biocentrism 282 biography 153, 259, 366–367, 388, 411 biomythography 310 biopolitics 192; biopolitical power 423 Bird-David, Nurid 188 Biven, Lucy 224 Black and Third World Feminists 173 Black, Donald 105 Blacker, Uilleam 243–244 Blackwell, Richard 72–73 Blanchard, Terrence 430 Blanchot, Maurice 19, 127 Bleakley, Alan 273 blog 242–243, 245–247, 249–250, 276, 313, 422 Bloom, Harold 37 bobo 207 body 26, 31, 66, 70, 92, 127, 180–181, 198, 221–223, 233, 235, 263, 268–270, 291, 301, 317–318, 321, 323, 325, 329–332, 334–335, 340, 347, 350, 368–369, 380–381, 386, 390, 425, 441–444; and affect 141–146, 148; and brain 221, 226–228; collective 57, 380; communal 376–377, 381; dead 80; and materiality 145; and meaning 72–74, 311; mutant 443–444; traumatized 334 Boer War 236 Boersema, Jacob 46, 50–51 Bohr, Niels 234 Bond, Lucy 7, 232–233, 408–413 Borowski, Tadeusz 68, 369–371 Borradori, Giovanna 350–351 Bosnia 1, 7, 118, 262, 300–301, 305, 440; Bosnian War 262, 300 Box, Jason 275 Boxall, Peter 263 Boyce Davies, Carole 174 Bradley, Mark Philip 78 Brah, Avtar 173 Braidotti, Rosi 230, 233–234, 240 Brandenburg, Heinz 423 Braudel, Fernand 207 Breger, Claudia 261 Brennan, Theresa 150 Brentano, Clemens 15 Breuer, Josef 13, 66, 102 Brewin, Chris 221–222

454

Index Brewster, Scott 299 Bricmont, Jean 37 Bridenthal, Renate 163 bridge discourses 419 Brinker, Virginie 398 Brison, Susan 163, 165, 315 Britain 194, 330, 374; British 12, 112, 158, 175, 179, 236, 299, 308, 319, 325, 330, 392; see also Great Britain; UK Broad, Pery 367 Brockmeier, Jens 153–154, 158 Brodber, Erna 173 Brodsky, Joseph 300 Brown, Laura 4, 27, 177–178 Bruner, Markus 243 Brunner, José 16–17 Brussels 260–261 Bryant Voigt, Ellen 302 Buchanan, Ian 121 Buchenwald 123, 166–167, 288, 298 Budapest 113, 249 Buelens, Gert 4–5, 7, 20, 63, 231 Bukatman, Scott 323 bullying 101, 176 bureaucracy 17, 91, 302, 366–367 Burgos-Debray, Elisabeth 70 Burke, Tarana 250, 380 Buse, Peter 333 Bush, George W. 412–413 Bushman, Brad 245 Butler, Judith 19, 33, 95–98, 193–194, 424 Butler Breese, Elizabeth 52 bystander 18, 154, 181, 201, 246, 253 Caesar 339–340, 342, 344–345, 347 Caldwell, Gillian 276 Calvo, Monica 7 Cambodia 1, 7, 71 Cambridge Analytica 245 camerawork 206 Campbell, James 422 Campbell, Matthew 300 Canada 92, 248, 260, 397–398 cancer 27–28, 139, 266–267, 325, 356, 440, 442, 444; patients 28; trauma 27 Capa, Robert 381 capital punishment 105 capitalism 97, 181, 190, 207–208, 232, 234, 236–237, 297; capitalist system 14; capitalist West 69 Caputo, Philip 391 Cardell, Kylie 308 Caribbean 20, 173–176, 179–180, 191, 195, 232; Creole 174; feminism 173; migrant writing 174 Carpenter, Leah 421 Carter-White, Richard 73

Caruth, Cathy 3, 18–20, 24–26, 28–29, 38–40, 44, 49, 51, 56–57, 67, 80, 102–103, 116, 118, 123, 163, 165–166, 187–195, 202–203, 211–212, 217, 220, 223, 231–232, 243–244, 259, 280–281, 288, 306, 333, 340–341, 350, 353–354, 363, 369, 376–378, 380, 385–386, 388, 399, 409, 430, 434; Caruthian trauma theory 25, 178, 192, 231 Cassigneul, Adèle 138 Castner, Brian 425 Caton-Jones, Michael 398 catharsis 97, 145–147, 347 Cavanagh, Clare 301 Cavarero, Adriana 33 Cavedon, Cristina 413–414 Celan, Paul 19, 290, 297–298, 302, 366 Celtic Tiger years 135 Central Europe 242, 244 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 203 Chaix, Marie 377 Chaney, Michael 323 Chamayou, Grégoire 423 Charcot, Jean-Martin 2, 12–14, 16, 330–332 Charlie Hebdo 323, 325 Charon, Rita 272–273 Cheah, Pheng 258 Chernobyl 48, 321, 325, 438, 443–444 Chicago 261–263, 324 child: prostitute 71; sexual abuse 55 childbirth 271, 278, 292 childhood 13, 15, 27, 31–33, 70, 127, 133, 198, 202, 205–206, 227, 235, 260, 308–310, 325, 368, 388; autobiography 309; memories 121, 269; trauma 31, 225, 309 China 51, 69, 387, 431; Chinese identity 51 Chirac, Jacques 375 Choi, Sung-Eun 51 Chol-Hwan, Kang 68 Chomsky, Noam 96 Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey 424 Christian(ity) 92–93, 111–112, 193, 198, 211 Christopher, Sarah 271 chronic illness 27 chronology 124, 203, 278, 364, 370, 429 Churg-Strauss syndrome 269 Chute, Hillary 317, 319–322 Cilano, Cara 415 civil war 118, 197, 388, 391, 393, 395, 419; in Lebanon 127 Clark, David Millar 221 Clark, Timothy 277 Clarke, Richard A. 413 class 14, 27, 46, 174, 176–177, 205–208, 237, 388, 395, 413, 433; class-based segregation 206; classism 178; status 179–180 Clayton, Susan 275 Cliff, Michelle 174–175, 178–179

455

Index climate change 1, 20, 62–63, 232, 234, 279–280, 282, 353–354, 408, 436; age of 27; anxiety 1, 5; catastrophe 5–6, 280; criticism 353; trauma 7–8, 17, 27, 181, 275–277, 279, 281, 351, 447, 450 clinician memoirs 268, 270 Clinton, Bill 413 closure 73, 136, 181, 214, 288–289, 292, 296, 301, 363, 387, 390, 409, 421, 431; impossibility of 138; problematical 133, 137, 139 Clough, Patricia 142–143 Coatlicue state 173 Coetzee, J. M. 258 cognition 16, 56, 75, 141–142, 145, 208, 213–214, 223 cognitive: disruption 213; dissonance 106; empathy 214; enhancement 213; mapping 208; science 213–215; theories of trauma 221–222; cognitivism 25–26 Cold War 69, 279, 351, 353, 355, 408, 418 Cole, Teju 259–261, 264 Colebrook, Claire 349, 354–356 collapse: of address 79, 82; of witness 83 collective: body 55, 57, 380; consciousness 376, 381; culpability 404; healer 180; healing 311; identity 4, 46–52, 377, 432; injury 46; meaning 160, 169; meaning-making practices 169–170; memory 47, 50, 56, 59–62, 69, 177, 179, 243, 258, 377; mourning 95, 419; remembrance 61; responsibility 1, 42, 344, 399, 403; self 70, 313; trauma 4, 28, 232, 243–245, 247, 249, 268, 287, 299, 334, 342, 390, 413, 420; trauma processing online 243; trauma of the United States 301; weakness 168 Collins, Billy 302 colonialism 1, 5, 17, 55, 63, 102, 122, 179–180, 188–192, 195–198, 206, 208, 231–232, 237, 259, 438; colonial genocide 289–290; colonial healing 180; colonial narratives 401; colonial oppression 67, 305; colonies 51, 69, 189; intellectual colonialism 102 combat 16–17, 101–105, 111, 166–169, 188, 190, 278, 317, 385–388, 390, 419–420, 424, 436; fatigue 16; gnosticism 422, 424; neurosis 243; soldiers 102, 111; stress 103–104; trauma 104, 391, 420; veterans 104, 166, 422 comics 317–320, 322–326 communicative memory 59 community-building 307, 435 compassion fatigue 343 compensation 2–3, 5, 14, 91, 216, 331 competitive memory 124, 126, 179 complicity 19, 114, 197, 201, 218, 282, 290, 294, 309–310, 379, 413 compulsion repetition, compulsion to repeat 13, 102–103, 133 conatus 145

concentration camp 16, 113, 154, 157, 249, 302, 429, 446 concrete poetry 366, 372 confession(al) 70, 135, 139, 198, 202, 252, 366; autobiography 67; poetry 302 Congo 260, 289–290, 347, 396; Congo Free State 289 connective memory 62–63 Connerton, Paul 60 Connolly, William 143 Connor, Linda 276 Conrad, Joseph 289–290 Conrad, Sebastian 62, 232, 258 consolation 42–43, 137, 302 contagion 144, 213–214 Continental philosophy 36 Coole, Diana 234, 240 Cooper, Bradley 420–421 Cooper, Glenda 245–246 coping mechanisms 107, 225 Coplan, Amy 214 Coquio, Catherine 398 Cordle, Daniel 351, 355 Coret, Laure 398 coronavirus pandemic 1, 28 corruption 91, 434 cosmological: trauma 187–189, 191–193, 195, 197; violence 187 cosmopolitan memory 122 counselling 1, 5, 227 counter-discourse 273, 309, 319 counter-narrative 68, 413 Courtemanche, Gil 397 cover memory 127 Covi, Giovanna 173 Coyle, Kevin 275 Craps, Stef 5, 7, 20, 27, 46, 55, 57, 63, 136–138, 178, 188, 193, 195, 200, 203, 210, 212–214, 217, 223–224, 231–232, 243, 259, 264, 281, 291, 324, 351, 353–354, 378, 410 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 164, 173, 177, 179 Critchley, Simon 41, 44 critical race theory 180 critical theory 38–39, 121, 190, 243 Crocq, Louis 104 Crocq, Marc-Antoine 104 cross-border memories 61 cross-cultural ethical engagement 20, 178 Crownshaw, Rick 5, 55, 63, 101, 232, 354 Cruise, Tom 385 Crutzen, Paul 232 Cuba 69 culture: of consolation 42–43; of memory 103; of mourning 302; of suffering 408; of war 418 cultural: identification 342; identity 174–175, 375; media 60; mediation 4; memorialization 67; memory 4, 54–55, 59–64, 122, 126, 165, 179,

456

Index 181, 212, 244, 247, 258, 303, 305–306, 314; memory studies 4, 54, 59, 62–64, 122; narrative 28, 116, 339, 377; psychology 25; remembrance 61; and social dimensions of trauma 4; trauma 4, 17, 19, 45–52, 57–58, 195, 231, 242–247, 252–253, 277, 342, 356, 375–382, 432–433; trauma of objects 47, 52; trauma studies 19, 242–243, 245–246, 408, 412–413; trauma theory 47–48, 244, 246, 252 Cunsolo, Ashlee 276, 282, 284 Currie, Mark 354 Curtis, Jean-Louis 381 Cvetkovich, Ann 145, 176–178, 180 Cyrulnik, Boris 399 Czollek, Max 218 Dachau 343 dactylic hexameters 296 Daeninckx, Didier 379 Dallaire, Romeo 397 Damasio, Antonio 148 Dangor, Achmat 236 Darfur genocide 7 Dauge-Roth, Alexandre 398 David, Harriet 358 Davis, Angela 173 Davis, Colin 19, 24, 156, 377, 379, 382 Davis, Kathy 179 Davoine, Françoise 83 Dawes, James 118 Day of National Unity 241 De Bruyn, Ben 232 De Cesari, Chiara 62, 232 De Gaulle, Charles 374–375 De Man, Paul 24, 37–38, 85, 87, 288 De Saint-Exupery, Patrick 321 De Vries, Brian 248 Deal, Carl 431 Dean, Carolyn 118 death in life 438, 448–449 death of Man 37 debriefing 1 Debs, Mira 47–48, 50, 52 Deckard, Sharae 190 Deckerinnerung 127 decolonization 63, 91, 199, 212; era of 205; of trauma theory 178, 188–190; decolonized history 181 deconstruction 18, 24, 36–38, 54–55, 150, 175, 243, 306; deconstructive trauma theory 19, 194, 212 defence mechanism 28, 123, 217, 443 DeGraffenreid vs. General Motors 177 dehumanization 95–96, 98, 167–168, 323, 344, 364, 401; dehumanizing 115, 167, 323, 436 DeLanda, Manuel 234 Delbo, Charlotte 162–163, 166–169

Deleuze, Gilles 36–37, 125, 127, 145, 148, 191 DeLillo, Don 407, 409–410 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 232 Deng, Valentino Achak 71, 214 denial 107–108, 113, 136, 139, 166, 204–205, 247, 275, 277, 345, 399, 401, 439–440, 443, 445–446; collective 449 depersonalization 107, 223 deportation 166, 204, 249, 312, 375; deportee 162, 166–168, 170, 378 depression 67, 107, 142, 176, 275, 389, 408; postKatrina 336; postpartum 169; post-war 386 derealization 95–96, 107, 223 Derrida, Jacques 29, 36–38, 70, 74, 125–128, 231, 296, 350–352, 356, 439, 448 Des Pres, Terrence 114 Descartes, René 145 Desert Storm 386 desire for completion 138 despair 195, 276–277, 290, 371, 386, 432, 444 developmental psychology 15 Dhamoon, Rita Kaur 177 diachronic justice 205 dialectical image 125, 128 dialogue 7, 29, 34, 42, 85–86, 149, 179, 217, 244, 246–247, 252, 261, 299, 312, 323, 335, 402; dialogic encounter 334; dialogic narrative understanding 30, 33; dialogic situation 214; dialogic spaces of possibilities 272; dialogic understanding 153; dialogue effects 72; dialogicality of narrative and subjectivity 160 diary 68, 71, 270–272, 307–308, 322, 324, 364 diasporic community 180 Didi-Huberman, Georges 125, 331, 340 digital: age 75, 241–253, 352; animation 58, 60; culture 67, 242, 253; identity 242; media 59, 75, 242, 244–245, 247, 249, 253; memories 243; memory cultures 64; mourning 248; representation 253; sharing 246; trauma processing 242–244; trauma studies 241–242, 244, s246, 253 Diedrich, Lisa 18 DiGeorgio-Lutz, JoAnn 164 Dijana, Jelaca 129 Dillon, Sarah 379 Dimock, Wai Chee 436 Dink, Hrant 50, 52 Dinur, Yehiel 73–74, 113 Diop, Boubacar Boris 396, 401 dis-ease 180 disaffection 94–95 disaster psychiatry 153 discourse analysis 14 discourses of power 96, 306, 310 discrimination 95, 168, 177–178, 433 displacement 121, 123–126, 128, 175, 178–179, 181, 192, 234, 435; of affect 125

457

Index disrupted temporality 26 dissensus 345 dissociation 12–13, 15, 20, 107, 223, 311, 319; dissociated memory 13; dissociative defence 318 dissolution of individuality 368 distancing 132, 216, 307, 343; distanciation 214 Djédanoum, Nocky 396 Doctors Without Borders 118 documentary 7, 56, 58, 60, 93, 154, 347, 398, 419, 419, 421, 426, 431–433, 435, 446–448 Dolphijn, Rick 230, 240 domestic violence 7, 55, 67, 101, 305, 309 Donovan, Courtney 75 Dony, Cristophe 317 Doomsday Clock 351 double consciousness 15 double death 441 doubling 20, 108, 441–442 Douglas, Kate 307–311, 315 Douglas, Lawrence 113 Douglass, Ana 56 Draesner, Ulrike 20 drama 7, 47–49, 52, 75, 127, 146, 328–329, 331–333, 335, 337, 393, 415 dramatic irony 288 dream 13, 24, 31, 39, 58, 60, 79–83, 86–88, 121, 125, 146, 158, 194, 198, 202, 206, 211, 226, 269, 278, 280, 299, 302, 324, 354, 387, 393; dream-memory 60; dream-work 121; recurring 324 Dresden 50 Drew, Richard 301 drought 275 drunk driving 46, 48 dual personality 12 Dufty, Neil 246 Duggan, Joe 276 duplicity of personality 15 Duras, Marguerite 29, 376, 381 Durcharbeitung 131–132 Durrant, Sam 20, 27, 183, 191, 231 Duvall, John 414–415 Dworkin, Ronald 268 Eaglestone, Robert 20, 26, 41, 138, 231, 289, 356, 412 Earle, Harriet 317 earthquake 48, 246, 388 Eastern Europe 243, 262–263 Eastwood, Clint 420–421 ecology 232, 235–236, 440–441, 443–444; eco memory 232; eco-trauma 281; ecocosmopolitan perspective 232; ecocriticism 3; ecodisaster 351, 356; ecological devastation 232; ecological disaster 321, 336, 356; ecological grief 276–277; ecological loss 276–277, 282; ecologically-

attuned memory 233; ecopoetics 232; ecosickness 276–277 ecoAmerica 275 economy 418, 423, 442; global 97; moral 2, 11, 16–17; psychic 13; visual 347–248; economic inequality 101, 176, 205, 264; economic oppression 69, 434 Edwards, Elizabeth 347 Egan, Jennifer 225–226 Eggers, Dave 71, 214, 433–434 Egginton, William 148 ego 123, 134, 141, 313, 322, 369, 444 EGPA 269–270 Ehlers, Anke 221 Ehrhart, W. D. 387, 391 Eichmann, Adolf 69, 73, 113–115, 367; Eichmann trial 69, 73, 114–115, 367 elegy 135, 137, 276, 296, 300–302 Eliot, T. S. 292 Elliott, Jane 429–430, 434 ellipsis 127, 157, 371, 439 Ellis, Neville 276 Elsaesser, Thomas 129, 342–343 Éluard, Paul 381 embedded: poetry 422, 424, 426; reportage 424; sublime 424 embodied experience 26, 142, 148, 164, 333–334, 337 embodiment 101, 114, 141, 143, 233, 235, 266–267, 325, 444 Emerita, Gutete 346 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 356 emotions 49, 61–63, 98, 108, 141–149, 168, 178, 215, 225, 227, 297, 444, 449 emotional: abuse 27; closure 301; contagion 144, 213–214; control 291; detachment 67, 291; dimension of human experience 145; identification 146; reaction 214; regulation 213; responses 46, 436, 439; shock 399; wounds 1; intelligence of 145; see also affect empathy 17, 39, 42, 94, 100, 108, 144, 165, 179, 211–215, 217–218, 246, 253, 300, 302, 348, 390, 399–401, 423–424; appropriative 213; cognitive 214; difficult 213–214; empathetic listener 42–43, 158, 214; empathic unsettlement 19, 39, 214, 243; lack of 94 empirical psychology 15 empiricism 23–25 emplotment 74, 150 England 16, 54, 85, 158, 175–176, 178, 211, 276, 386 English (language) 59, 85, 93, 132, 189, 262, 267, 290, 300, 306, 308, 313, 372, 436; see also Oxford English Dictionary Enlightenment 15, 37, 67, 71, 136, 138, 142, 188, 190, 197, 355

458

Index Enright, Anne 135 environmental pollution 20 epic 187, 194–196, 280, 296, 300, 435; poetry 195 episodic amnesia 13 epistemic agency 169–170 Epizelos 66 Epstein, Mark 266, 268 era of the witness 117 Erichsen, John 2, 12 Erikson, Kai 45, 376, 448 Erll, Astrid 59–62, 258 Eros and Thanatos 123 ethics 3, 34–43, 54–55, 83, 132, 147, 154–155, 158–160, 194, 238, 299–301, 309–310, 333–334, 414; ethical choice 37;ethical contract 402; ethical criticism 41, 44; ethical dilemmas 19; ethical engagement 20, 42, 178; ethical imperative 24, 39, 42–43, 138, 310; ethical obligation to provide testimony 19; ethical potential 29, 33, 181, 215, 268; ethical turn 17–18, 36, 38, 40; of mourning 95; of psychoanalysis 36; of trauma 19; return to 39 ethnic background 175 Etkind, Alexander 243 Eurocentric trauma theory 178, 203 Europe 2, 54, 62–63, 66, 92, 98, 113, 175, 189–190, 203–204, 208, 242–244, 260, 268, 330, 372, 397, 401; European colonialism 188, 190, 259; European history 152, 190, 203; European Jewry 115–117; European languages 258 event-focussed approach 5 everyday: processes of violence 27; racism 179; violence 305, 324 exile 41, 174, 211, 218, 319, 395, 424, 439 experience: of catastrophe 79; of committing violence 108; of illness 28, 267–269, 272; of loss 287; of suffering 100; of time 28, 51; of trauma 25, 40, 57, 74, 165, 167, 209, 218, 223, 266, 293, 339, 341–342, 390, 410, 412; of traumatic temporality 259; of violence 27, 30, 108; of war 2, 262; of witnessing 150 experimental writing 310 extinction 27, 63, 443, 445–450 Eyerman, Ron 45–46, 49, 51–52, 376, 431–432 eyewitness narrator 371 face of the Other 156 face-to-face encounter 156, 159 Facebook 241–242, 245–250 factuality 86, 299 Fairhurst, Douglas 309 Falklands 392 Falkoff, Marc 67 false death 441 false memory 309

family 15, 18, 61, 106, 116, 135, 139, 150, 154, 165, 175–176, 193, 202, 207–208, 215, 241, 248–249, 270, 280, 309, 319, 325, 342, 347, 372, 389, 395, 397, 400, 402, 413, 420–421, 431, 433, 435–436; dysfunctional 325; familial oppression 366; reconstituted 139 Fanon, Frantz 55, 189, 200 fantasy 16, 60, 123–124, 129, 135, 149, 202, 206, 269, 311, 323–324, 349–350, 401, 414–415, 423, 442, 445 Farrell, Kirby 4, 57, 408 fascism 132, 192, 194 Fassin, Didier 2, 4–5, 7, 16–17, 39, 57, 63–64, 91, 118, 197 fatalism 275 Faulkner, William 430 Faust, Drew 388 fear 13, 16, 49, 63, 72, 74, 94, 97–98, 125, 129, 142, 144, 146–149, 164, 221–222, 224–225, 227, 246, 269, 279–280, 290, 351–352, 388, 411, 423, 425–426, 429, 433, 439–444, 446–449; chronic 444; of dying 426; religious and ethnic 351; system 224 Feldman, Alan 424 Felman, Shoshana 3–4, 18–20, 24, 38–42, 44, 54, 56–57, 66, 70–72, 74–75, 83, 115–116, 118, 140, 150, 163, 190, 213, 217, 220, 231, 245, 288, 290, 306, 409 female sexuality 322 feminism 173, 180, 251 feminist 34, 63, 69, 163–166, 170, 173–174, 178, 189, 230; critics 16; fiction 173; philosophy 163, 168; reading 165; resistance 173; scholarship 164–165; theory 166, 173; writing 180 Ferenczi, Sandor 317 Ferris, Emil 324 Ferry, Luc 37 ffrench, Patrick 127 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 15 fiction effect 399 Figley, Charles 11–12, 16, 19 Filkins, Dexter 424 filles de boches 380 film 7–8, 19, 46, 54–56, 58–61, 101, 106, 114–116, 126–127, 129, 142, 154–155, 159, 201, 273, 279–280, 293, 323, 340, 347, 352, 365, 375, 381, 385, 390, 420–422, 428, 431, 433, 435, 447–448; adaptation 420–421; aesthetics 155; documentary 56; fiction 159, 398; studies 55, 154; filmic present 155; filmic repetition 156; historical 159; non-fiction 159; propaganda 159–160 Finch, Helen 218 financial compensation 2 Fink, Ida 370–371 Finkel, David 424 Finkelstein, Norman 212

459

Index First World War 2, 13, 16, 26, 55, 66, 103–104, 112, 139, 241–242, 279, 299–300, 303, 317, 372, 374, 388, 422–423; see also Great War first-person: narrator 368, 371; representation 73; testimony 74–75; trauma narrative 165; voice 310, 367; witness 71 Fischer, Gottfried 13, 16 Flaherty, Shannon 335 flash-images 369 flashback 4, 19, 32, 56, 58, 60, 66–67, 74, 107, 174, 202, 205–206, 301, 320, 325, 335, 354, 370, 381–382; traumatic 58, 60 flood 275, 280, 430–431, 434 focalism 147 focalization 208–209 Foer, Jonathan Safran 409 Fohring, Stephanie 99 folk tales 67 Folman, Ari 58, 60 Forché, Carolyn 298–299 forced migration 242 Ford, Christine Blasey 71 Ford, Ford Madox 279 Forever Wars 419–420 forgetting 29, 59, 132–133, 150, 159, 243, 298, 354 Forna, Aminatta 224 Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies 56, 115 Foster, Hal 97 Foucault, Michel 14, 36, 57, 145, 419, 438 foundational narratives 401 Fountain, Ben 425 fragment 56, 69–70, 115, 133–135, 155, 181, 259, 262, 269, 289, 299, 335, 368, 386, 401; memory 58, 69 fragmentation 67, 72, 97, 136, 188, 223, 311, 379; of identity 180 frame narrator 158–160 France 14, 51, 54, 59, 123, 204, 215, 377, 396, 404; German occupation of 374–375, 377, 379, 381; postcolonial 208 Franco-French War 122 Frank, Adam 142–143 Frank, Anne 68, 71 Frank, Arthur 267–268, 270 Fraser, Nancy 311, 419 Franzen, Jonathan 407 Frazer, Sylvia 310 freedom 75, 211, 324, 386, 392, 399, 418, 443 Freeman, Lindsey 123 Freeman, Mark 154 French Quarter 335–336, 433 French Revolution 15 Freud, Sigmund 2, 12–13, 16–17, 20, 24, 39, 55, 66, 79–84, 88, 94, 102–103, 121–127, 129, 132–134, 136, 138–139, 166, 187–188,

191–194, 196–198, 211, 220, 231–232, 243, 259, 280–281, 287, 297, 299, 302, 333, 353, 363, 365, 385–388; Freudian psychoanalysis 79 Frewen, Paul 223 Frey, James 70 Fricke, Hannes 12 Fricker, Miranda 31, 163, 168–169 Friedan, Betty 69 Friedländer, Saul 131–132, 137–138, 214 Friedman, Dina 409 Friendster 242 Frosh, Paul 245 Frost, Samantha 234, 240 Fukushima 438–439, 443–444 Fussell, Paul 303 futural 349–351, 353–354 future anterior 349–352, 354–356, 443 future-as-disaster 349–350, 352–357 future trauma 1, 5, 27, 49; see also pre-trauma Gadamer, Hans-Georg 30 Gallagher, Matt 425 Gallimore, Rangira Béa 398–399, 404 Galvin, Rachel 425 Gandhi, Mahatma 50 Gao, Rui 51 Ganteau, Jean-Michel 99 Garbarini, Alexandra 112 Garde-Hansen, Joanne 243 Garfinkel, Sarah 222 Garloff, Katja 215 Garner, Margaret 61 gas chamber 113, 162–163, 340, 369–370 Gatore, Gilbert 396 Gaudillière, Jean-Max 83 gender 6–7, 27, 46, 101, 148, 162, 174–177, 179–180, 237, 252, 280, 380, 388, 436; genderbased oppression 250; gender-oriented research 243; gendered analysis 164–166, 169; gendered experiences 164; gendered meaning-making 170; politics 69; violence 4 generational memory 60 Geneva Convention 96 genocide 1, 6–7, 17, 54–55, 100–101, 104–105, 108, 112–118, 122, 164, 170, 196, 212, 288–290, 293, 305, 321, 323, 346, 367, 440–441; aftereffects 55; colonial 289–290; of the Jews 93; narrative 402; paradigm 118; perpetrator trauma 100; Rwandan 395–404; see also post-genocide genre 7, 59–62, 73, 75, 137, 149, 208, 248–249, 268, 270, 285, 288–289, 291, 293–296, 298, 302, 306–307, 310–311, 319, 334, 349, 354–355, 364, 366, 372, 379, 400, 424–425, 431; fiction 357, 409; literary 300; postapocalyptic 354 geopolitics 436

460

Index George, Terry 398 geotrauma 281 Germany 14–15, 17, 50–51, 54, 97, 132, 163, 170, 214–218, 261; German audience 217–218; German guilt 123, 204–205; German occupation of France 374–375, 377, 379, 381; German society 51, 217; German war crimes 123; see also West Germany Geroulanos, Stephanos 317 Gestapo 113, 366 gestural acts 324–325 Gheerbrandt, Denis 398 Gheith, Jehanne 312 ghetto 165, 249, 370 ghost story 61 Gibbs, Alan 101, 104, 324, 413 Giesen, Bernhard 46, 51 Gigliotti, Simone 78 Gilbert, D. T. 147 gilets jaunes 378 Gilmore, Leigh 30, 66, 68, 72–73, 75, 268, 305, 307–308, 310, 315, 325 Gilroy, Paul 191, 200, 204, 208 Ginzburg, Eugenia 68 Giotto 48 Givoni, Michal 118 Gladstone, William 112 Glissant, Edouard 191, 200 globalization 7, 20, 91, 207, 212, 257–259, 261, 263, 314, 420; of Holocaust memory 117, 122 global: capitalism 190, 234; conflict 68; consciousness 376; conversation 257; culture 1; disasters 353; economy 97; geopolitics 436; human trafficking 71; memory 62; North 62–63, 232, 293; public sphere 258; South 63, 178, 418–419, 423; terrorism 48; understanding 257; warming 275 globital memory 62 Gloeckner, Phoebe 322, 325 Glück, Louise 302 Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla 140 God 40, 93, 111, 187, 196–197, 271, 366, 386, 411 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 15, 69 Goldberg, Amos 307, 315 Goldberg, Whoopi 334 Goldenberg, Myrna 164 Goldman, Marlene 141 Gorrara, Claire 379 Gosbee, Donna 164 Gourevitch, Philip 397 Grabham, Emily 177–178 Grant, Jon 105 graphic narrative 7, 61, 317, 319–321, 323, 325 Grass, Günter 310 Graves, Robert 299 Gray, Richard 410–411

Great Britain 374; see also Britain; UK Great War 13, 299, 351 Green, Jonathan 221–222, 228 Greenberg, Judith 411 Greenspan, Henry 67, 72 Greer, Germaine 69 Gregg, Melissa 142 Grey, B. 246 grief 95, 102, 176, 213, 236, 242–243, 248, 276–277, 342, 390, 444, 449; private 243 grievability 95 Grieve, Rachel 247 Griffiths, Jennifer 164 Groensteen, Thierry 318 Grønstad, Asbjørn 154 Grossman, Atina 163 Grossman, Vasily 123 Group Areas Act (GAA) 237 group consciousness 45, 376 group memory 60 Grusin, Richard 234, 352–354, 357 Gruzd, Anatoliy 250 Guantanamo Bay 67, 96. 423 Guattari, Félix 36, 145, 148 Gugelberger, Georg 69, 70 guilt 58, 84–86, 104, 106, 108, 122–123, 148, 204–205, 215–217, 276, 290, 294, 309, 366, 390, 440; collective 175, 204; historic 380 Gulf War 392, 418 Gumilev, Lev 302 Gumpert, Matthew 351 Hadjithomas, Joana 127, 129 Hague Conventions 112 Halberstam, Judith M. 233, 364 Halbwachs, Maurice 59–60, 144 Hallett, Christine E. 26 Halley, Jean 142 hallucination 24, 306, 363, 388 Hamel, Yan 376–377 Handley, George B. 232 Haneke, Michael 201–206, 209 Hanford 438 Hansen, Per Krogh 28 harassment 27, 72, 92–93, 169, 202, 208, 250, 380 Haraway, Donna 233 Hariman, Robert 341–342 Harrington, Ralph 12 Harris, Geraldine 334, 429 Harris-Lacewell, Melissa 429 Hartman, Geoffrey 18–20, 37–38, 67, 97, 190, 194, 220, 231, 245, 297 Hartnell, Anna 432 Harvey, Graham 188, 200 Hartzler, Christine 301 Hatzfeld, Jean 398 Haughton, Miriam 329, 333–335, 337

461

Index Hawkins, Ty 393 Hayles, Katherine 230, 233 Haynes, Stephen 164 healing 4, 28, 72, 74, 131–134, 136–138, 150, 175, 179–181, 226, 228, 238, 248–249, 292, 305–306, 311, 324, 398; colonial 180; individual 180; intersectional 180–181; memory 298; narratives 180–181; stories 180 health insurance 14 Hebrew 93, 196, 211 Heidegger, Martin 26, 28, 40 Heinemann, Larry 163, 387 Heins, Volker 50 Hekman, Susan 240 Heller, Dana 412 helplessness 16, 94, 97, 217, 275, 388 Hemon, Aleksandar 259, 261–264 Henke, Suzette 67–68, 72, 243, 306–307, 310–311 Herbrechter, Stefan 233 Herman, David 149 Herman, Judith 4, 12–14, 27, 55, 166, 220, 246–247, 306, 332–333, 388–392 hermeneutics 23–24, 30–31; hermeneutic circle 30; hermeneutic philosophy 25–26, 32, 34; hermeneutical injustice 31, 163, 168–170; hermeneutical marginalization 169–170; hermeneutical sensibility 169; of suffering 24 Herndon, Gerise 398–399 Herodotus 66 heroic 114, 300, 403, 420–421 Herr, Michael 385–387, 390 Herrero, Dolores 377–378 Heusch, Luc de 398 Hicks, Heather 359 Hilberg, Raul 154, 164 Hill, Anita 71 Hill, Geoffrey 302 Hilsenrath, Edgar 218 Himmler, Heinrich 105 hippocampus 222, 228 Hippolyte 321 Hird, Myra J. 240 Hiroshima 20, 29, 92, 113–114, 320, 351, 381, 422, 438–441, 443–444, 446–447, 449; survivor 441, 449; victims 320 Hirsch, Marianne 20–21, 58, 60, 62, 116, 165, 243, 245, 315, 342, 372, 378, 411 historians debate 123 history: historical accuracy 68, 71, 123; historical catastrophe 4, 349; historical consciousness 208; historical fiction 101; historical injustice 206; historical legacies 126, 259, 262–263; historical memory 177, 418; historical narrations 137; historical narrative 74, 181, 261, 298, 426; historical record 287–290, 294, 370; historical testimony 137; historical trauma 19, 92, 102,

129, 164, 170, 176, 193, 212, 241–242, 244, 246–248, 261, 264, 291, 311, 337; historical trauma processing 242, 248; historical violence 201, 209, 415; historicity of collective affect 144; histories of oppression 75; histories of slavery 122, 336; histories of violence 259–261, 449; of philosophy 29; of trauma 11–17, 19, 21–22, 221, 329–330, 332 historiography 11, 132, 193, 330, 332, 364 Hitchcott, Nicki 398 Hitler, Adolf 97, 123, 310, 367 Hitler Youth 310, 367 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 15, 20 Hogan, Linda 446 Hogan, Patrick Colm 149–150 Holocaust 1–3, 5–8, 17, 19, 29, 38, 41, 54–56, 63, 66–68, 71, 75, 91–93, 101–103, 105, 107–108, 111–118, 122, 152–158, 160, 163–166, 169, 179, 190–191, 195, 197, 203, 205, 212–215, 218, 231, 241–243, 247–249, 259, 279, 287–288, 290, 297–306, 309, 312, 319, 323–324, 340, 351, 363–369, 371, 379, 389, 399, 412, 429–430, 434, 441, 443, 445; discourse 56, 118; film 101; fiction 214, 368; literature 101, 213–214, 363–365, 367–369, 371; memorial 115, 118; Holocaust Memorial Museum 115; memory 117, 122, 179, 372; as a metaphor 401; narrative 213, 215, 218, 323; pedagogy 115, 214; perpetrator 101–102, 213, 309; remembrance 212–213, 305, 372; studies 3, 38, 101, 213; survivor 41, 66, 111–115, 117, 153–156, 165, 214, 248, 288, 366, 372, 389, 429; testimony 56, 115, 247, 434; trauma 116; victim 117, 212, 249; witness 114 Holthaus, Eric 276 Homer 11, 67, 91, 296, 391 homophobia 178 hopelessness 275, 330 Horace 300 horizon of opacity 148 Horn, Eva 349, 359 horror 16, 19, 26, 60–62, 68, 105, 111–113, 166, 194, 217, 225, 266, 272, 297, 299, 301, 320, 323–324, 339–340, 343, 365, 368–369, 371, 375, 388, 390–391, 396–397, 402, 429, 446; film 323 Horsman, Yasco 132 House, Jim 202 Houser, Heather 277 Housman-Kessels, Susan 84, 87 Houston, J. Brian 246 Hovey, Richard B. 24 Howarth, Peter 300 Hughes, Langston 46 Hughes, Nick 398 Hughes, Ted 46, 328–329

462

Index humanity 67, 112–114, 117, 164, 232, 323, 354–356, 444; crimes against 69, 117–118, 123, 204; human experience 16, 27, 51, 105, 143, 145, 266–268, 280, 298, 324, 388; human race 167, 170; human rights 75, 117–118, 188, 232, 305, 307, 312–313, 344, 380, 423; human trafficking 71, 93 humanitarianism 95, 118; humanitarian aid 118, 300; humanitarian psychiatry 5 humanities 3, 5–7, 11, 18, 36, 42–43, 55, 58, 108, 149, 189, 242–243, 266–267, 269–271, 273–274, 296, 333 Hume, David 145 Hungary 157, 241–242, 249 Hunsaker Hawkins, Anne 268 hurricane 275, 280; Hurricane Katrina 7, 319, 428–436 Hurston, Zora 46 Husserl, Edmund 28, 40 Hutu 323, 346, 395–396, 403 Huyssen, Andreas 54–56, 126, 323 hyperreactivity 16 hyperreal 96 hypnosis 131, 331 hysteria 2, 12–14, 102, 131, 243, 261, 330–331, 388 idealist philosophy 15 identification 66, 103, 146–147, 173, 203, 213–214, 216, 324–325, 339, 351, 402, 411, 450; cultural 342; emotional 146; work 138 identity 4, 30, 39, 45–52, 62, 69–71, 94–95, 98, 153, 156, 164, 173–175, 177–180, 195, 234, 236, 242–243, 247, 249–250, 268, 306–309, 311, 323–324, 333, 375–377, 379–380, 390, 392–393, 404, 411, 420, 432; borders 174; categories 173–174, 177–178; crisis 106, 236; cultural 174–175, 375; fragmentation of 180; future 45, 376; individual 70, 174, 377; Jewish 117, 193; politics 124, 148, 177, 179, 188–189; prejudice 168; racial 191; religious 101; of victims 48 Ilboudo, Monique 396 illocutionary force 82 Ilmonen, Kaisa 27, 164, 180 image-object 322 immediacy 25, 269, 365, 370 immigration 98, 146, 261, 263 imperialism 7, 20, 190; imperial violence 113 implicated subject 7, 42, 181, 187, 190, 194, 201–209 implied author 158, 369, 371 implied reader 368 in-between 31, 144 in-betweenness 175 inability to mourn 449 inadequacy of language 429–430 incest 91, 305, 309

Indian, Michaelle 247 Indians (Asian) 236, 237 Indians (Native American) 196 indirection 20, 201, 259, 364 individual: memory 56, 71, 364; psyche 4, 57; trauma 91, 247, 377; individualism 69, 167–168, 230 industrialization 14, 330; industrial age 2; industrial revolution 2, 11–12, 14, 297 inequality 27, 101, 176–178, 201, 205, 209, 232, 263–264, 378 infant rapes 432 informant 169 inherited: burdens 33; disorders 16; memory 116; structural violence 1; trauma 379; traumatization 372 Instagram 242, 247, 250 institutionalized racism 101, 379 intergenerational silence 319 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 275 interiority 144, 209, 269–270, 282, 306 International Criminal Court 117, 439 internet 75, 118, 241–243, 245, 296, 301, 344, 352, 422 intersectionality 6–7, 164, 173–181; intersectional discrimination 178; intersectional healing 180–181; intersectional identity 174; intersectional trauma 173, 177–179, 181; intersectional trauma studies 177–178, 181; intersectional trauma theory 178–179, 181; intersectional understanding of trauma 174 intersubjectivity 31, 33, 149, 174, 300 intertextuality 310, 401–402, 430 intra-action 234, 236 intrapsychic conflict 13 invasion: of Afghanistan 412; of Iraq 393, 418–424; of Normandy 374; of Poland 374 involuntary memory 125, 206 Iraq 205, 262, 278, 301, 313, 386, 392–393; Iraq War 95, 389, 412, 418–426 Ishiguro, Kazuo 294 Islamophobia 434 isolation 97, 116, 133, 136, 212, 444 Israel 58–60, 113–114, 117, 131, 190, 193, 205, 216, 388 Iversen, Margaret 341 Iweala, Uzodinma 187, 197–198 iWiW 242 Jaar, Alfredo 346, 348 Jacobs, Harriet 68 Jacoby, T. A. 99 Jak, Amy 224–225 Jamaica 174–175, 180–181 Jamail, Dahr 424 James, William 142

463

Index Jameson, Fredric 38, 97, 202, 206–208 Janet, Pierre 12–13, 15, 17–18, 20, 243 Jardin, Pascal 377 Jaspers, Karl 203–205, 404 Jensen, Meg 307, 310–312, 315 Jews 71,93, 96, 112–113, 154–155, 157, 159, 164, 188, 192, 194, 204, 217, 249, 367, 369, 401; Ethiopian 291; persecution of 375, 404; stateless 374 Jewish: Americans 117; deportees 166; diaspora 191; history 193, 372; identity 117, 193; memory 113; persecution 375; pogroms 112; trauma 193; victims 114; witnesses 117; women 156–159, 166; writers 215, 218 Johnson, Barbara 38 Johnson, David Read 253 Johnson, Dennis Loy 301 Jolly, Margaretta 71, 75 Jones, Adam 164 Joreige, Khalil 127, 129 journalism 7, 38, 415 Joyce, James 279 Joyce, Patrick 240 Judaism 102, 187, 192 Juelskjær, Malou 235 Juhel, Fabienne 381 jurisdiction 308 Kaakinen, Kaisa 260, 264 K-Zetnik 113–115 Kabir, Anyana Jahanara 178, 296 Kaelber, Lutz 244 Kafka, Franz 236, 289 Kalinda, Léo 398 Kaminstein, Chris 335 Kane, Sarah 333 Kansteiner, Wulf 4, 17, 19, 57 Kant, Immanuel 40, 355 Kaplan, E. Ann 4–5, 17, 136, 138, 170, 245, 279–280, 284, 353–354, 411–412, 447–448 Kapucinski, Ryszard 69 Kardiner, Abram 13 Karegeye, Jean-Pierre 398 Katrina 7, 319, 336, 428 Katz, Esther 163 Kay, Adam 270–272 Kearney, Michael 69, 70 Keeble, Arin 407, 429, 431 Keenan, Thomas 117 Kennedy, David 137 Kennedy, Rosanne 4, 17, 232, 312 Kerbaj, Mazen 325 Kermode, Frank 51 Kessel, Joseph 376 Khanna, Ranjana 55, 63 Kidd, James 168 Kilby, Jane 117, 311

Kincaid, Jamaica 258, 308 Kindertransport 158 King, Martin Luther 324 King, Russell 249 Kingsbury, Karen 409, 411 kinship 197–198, 308 Klay, Phil 420–421 Klein, Melanie 134 Klein, Richard 351 Kleinman, Adam 234–235 Knight, Etheridge 69 Knight, Ivor 309 knowing subject 308 Kobak, Annette 75 Køhlert, Frederik Byrn 317 Komunyakaa, Yusef 391 Konner, Melvin 322 Korean War 408 Kossofsky Sedgwick, Eve 142–143 Kovic, Ron 385, 391 Krämer, Sybille 111 Krause, Sharon 143 Kumbla 173 Kunstman, Adi 243–244 Kurtz, J. Roger 7, 14 Kurvet-Käosaar, Leena 312, 316 Kurz, Katja 70, 71 Kyle, Chris 420–421 labour movement 14 Lacan, Jacques 36, 39, 79–83, 88, 444 LaCapra, Dominick 3–5, 17, 19, 24, 38–39, 55–57, 67, 116, 122, 131, 135–136, 138, 154, 193, 214, 217–218, 223, 231, 243, 306, 310, 333 lack 170; of address 86; of agency 94, 97, 144; felt 409 lacuna-image 340 LaForche, Curtis 280 Lake Kivu 321 Lamko, Koulsy 396–397, 401 Lamming, George 174 Land, Nick 281 Landman, Karen 282, 284 Landsberg, Alison 60 Lang, Berel 166 Langenohl, Andreas 50 Langer, Lawrence 42–43, 164 language 16–19, 29, 31–32, 37, 39–43, 52, 54, 59, 62, 75, 82–88, 93, 97, 102, 107, 113, 115–116, 127, 129, 132, 142, 147, 154–155, 166, 181, 193, 196–197, 203, 244, 248, 258, 262–270, 273–274, 288, 291, 296–300, 303, 307, 312, 328–329, 363, 366–368, 391, 421, 425, 429–430, 436, 448; of address 85; of awakening 83; of ethics 39, 42–43; figurative 19, 298; lack of 31, 267; of law 203; limits of

464

Index 264; of perpetrators 107; poetic 299, 303, 329; poverty of 267, 269; racist 436; of representation 24; of trauma 1, 5, 31, 276 Lanius, Ruth 223–224 Lanzmann, Claude 29, 56, 106, 115–116, 154–156, 160 Laplanche, Jean 131, 356 Laska, Vera 163 latency period 46, 102 Latin America 67, 69 Latour, Bruno 230, 235 Laub, Dori 3–4, 18–19, 24, 30, 38, 40–42, 44, 54, 56–57, 66, 70–72, 74–75, 83, 115–116, 118, 150, 163, 213, 217, 220, 231, 244–246, 290, 306, 333, 409, 411, 434 Laval, Pierre 374 law 3, 14, 17, 29, 48, 55–56, 68, 91, 96, 112, 115, 141–142, 149, 173, 177, 181, 203–204, 211, 236–237, 268, 292, 308, 367, 380, 395, 404, 415; amnesty laws 204; courts of 204; enforcement 105; laws of apartheid 236; legal culpability 108; legal discourse 2, 173; Nuremberg laws 367; scientific 237 Le Garrec, Evelyne 377 Le Soir 37 Leake, Eric 100 Lebanon 58–60, 127, 325, 388; Lebanon War 58–60 Lee, Spike 428, 430–436 legacy: of colonialism 1; of the Holocaust 54; of slavery 7; of trauma 203 legend 67 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 333 Leisey, Ty 243 Leizerowitz, Anthony 275 Lembcke, Jerry 392–393 Leningrad 302 Léon-Dufour, Xavier 111 Lepage, Emmanuel 321 Lerner, Paul 12, 14–15 lesbian 173, 176 Lessin, Tia 431 Letschert, Rianne 99 letters 68–69, 75, 85, 87, 158, 248, 276, 307, 366 Levi, Primo 68, 74, 96–97, 112, 114, 116, 167–168, 170, 203, 364–365, 368–369, 371, 429 Levin, Hugh 69 Levinas, Emmanuel 24, 29, 36, 40–41, 83, 97–98, 156, 159 Levine, Howard 122, 124 Levy, Daniel 62, 117, 122, 212, 232 Lewis, Phoenicia 243 Leys, Ruth 4, 7, 12, 25, 103, 141, 143, 146–147, 190, 193–196, 281 liability 204, 312 Liberzon, Israel 222

life-writing 26, 69–70, 243, 305–311, 313, 389 Lifton, Robert Jay 107–108, 114, 388–389, 430, 438–441, 444–445, 448 limit event 54 linguistic turn 142 LinkedIn 242 Lippit, Akira 442 listening 33, 39–40, 43, 55, 67, 72, 74, 81, 83, 115, 156, 165, 168, 212, 214, 247, 273, 319, 390, 399 literary: analysis 213, 296; criticism 11, 42, 291; and cultural criticism 7, 20–21, 39; device 26, 61, 364; discourse 149, 414; fiction 287; genres 300; history 298, 300, 351; narratives 31, 260, 264; realism 224, 400; remembrance 62; representations 101–102, 236, 418; studies 11, 17, 24, 39, 54, 67, 258, 436; techniques 289, 369; theory 55, 63, 112, 220, 299; traditions 258; trauma narratives 26, 259; trauma studies 1, 3–5, 7, 13, 18, 25, 34, 42, 243; trauma theory 7, 23–24, 34, 54, 220, 243, 253, 363; works 42, 62, 214, 257, 393, 400 literature of the Occupation 376–379 Littell, Jonathan 101, 106–108 Lizarazu, Maria Roca 240 Livingston, Ira 233 Lloyd, Christopher 383 lockdown trauma 1 Londe, Albert 331 Lorde, Audre 173 loss: of a child 39; of a loved object 136; of a loved one 6; of agency 247; of control 247, 323, 408; of emotional control 291; of home 215; of human life 47; of identity 52; of language 267; of meaning 446; self-loss 323; sense of 180, 287; of species 276; of trust 25; of voice 87 Lothe, Jakob 215 Louganis, Greg 301 Lowell, Robert 302 Lubin, Hadar 253 Lucaites, John Louis 341–342 Luckhurst, Roger 2, 4, 7, 15, 28, 55, 91, 181, 223, 268, 291, 299, 307, 316, 319, 330–333, 363–364, 407–408, 410–411 Luger, Moberley 301 Lutz, Helma 173, 177 Lyotard, Jean-François 29, 36, 127, 231, 364 lyric 296–297, 299, 303, 366–367, 372; modernist 297; prose 299; see also poetry Mackay, Colin 300 Mackay, Robin 281 MacKinnon, Catharine 177 MacMaster, Neil 202 MacNair, Rachel 103–107 Madigan, Todd 52 Madsen, Michael 447–448

465

Index Magona, Sindiwe 213 Maguen, Shira 104, 105, 107 Mailer, Norman 407 Malpede, Karen 332 Mam, Somaly 71 Mandel, Naomi 4 manipulation 145, 158, 202, 313, 403–404 Manjikian, Mary 352 Mann, Emily 387 Maralinga 438 Markowitsch, Hans J. 243 Margalit, Avishai 111–113 marginalization 169–170, 176–177, 216, 299, 305; marginalized communities 163, 169; marginalized subjects 169, 189 Marmar, Charles 13, 18 Marpeau, Elsa 381 Marquart, Sharon 4, 166–167 Marten, Renzo 347–348 martial literary genres 300 Marxism 173, 180 Marzec, Robert 414–415 Masco, Joseph 442–443 masculinity 60, 422 mass communication 324 mass media 17, 96, 112, 244–245, 301, 342, 346; mass-media culture 342 mass murder 46, 106, 114, 117, 324, 370, 395 mass psychology 192 mass violence 105–106, 112, 441 massacre 51–52, 112, 202–204, 207, 301, 375, 379, 382, 423; of Jews 401; Paris 204; of Palestinians 58; of Tutsi 401 Massumi, Brian 141, 143–148, 352 materiality 143, 145, 149, 233–234, 237, 324, 347 Matts, Tim 281 Maurel, Carole 381 May, Vivian 179 Maynard, Joyce 409 Mbembe, Achille 188, 192, 423 McCarthy, Cormac 350, 353–354 McCarthy-Brown, Karen 180 McDonell, Nick 425 McGlothlin, Erin 46, 99, 213–214 McGrath, Patrick 26 McInerney, Jay 407 Mckechnie, Claire Charlotte 273 McMurry, Andrew 353 McNally, Richard 25, 220 meaning-making practices 169–170 media: coverage 245, 320, 412, 428–429, 431–432; creative 4; cultural 60; of cultural memory 59; digital media 59, 75, 242, 244–245, 247, 249, 253; exposure 326; mass 17, 96, 112, 244–245, 301, 342, 346; mediatransmitted trauma 18; new 242–243; news 352;

spectacle 422; studies 142, 242–244; visual 2, 430 medial prefrontal cortex 222 mediated memories 342 medical humanities 3, 7, 266–274 medical treatment 1–2, 268, 419 medicine 3, 91, 100, 180–181, 267–268, 272, 274, 332, 419 medieval mystics 67 Medina, José 168–169 Mehlman, Jeffrey 38 Meek, Allen 245 Meillassaux, Quentin 234 Melamed, Laliv 123 melancholia 4, 135–138, 198, 233, 414; melancholic mourning 137 Melas, Natalie 258 melodrama 137 memoir 60–61, 67–69, 71, 115, 268–270, 277, 289, 364, 369, 385, 391, 420–421, 425; age of the 268; boom 306, 309; clinician memoirs 268, 270; misery memoirs 67 memorial walks 63 memory 3–8, 13, 16–18, 21–22, 32–34, 39, 42–43, 45, 47, 49–50, 52–75, 91, 103, 106–108, 112–129, 132–136, 144, 147, 150, 152–156, 158–160, 163–165, 177, 179, 190, 195, 197–198, 202–203, 206, 212, 214, 222, 224–225, 230–233, 237, 242–244, 247–248, 258–259, 261, 263, 269, 278, 288, 294, 296, 298, 301–307, 309, 312, 314, 317, 319, 321–328, 334, 337, 340–342, 354, 363–366, 368–370, 372, 375, 396–401, 418, 421, 428, 432, 434, 436, 444, 448, 450; activism 63; boom 67; of collaboration 377, 380; collective 258, 261, 263; cultural 4, 54–55, 57, 59–64, 108, 122, 126, 165, 179, 181, 212, 244, 247, 258, 303, 305–306; in culture 55, 59, 64; popular 418, 426; sites of 59; of slavery 62; studies 3–6, 17, 42, 54–57, 59, 61–64, 122, 230, 232–233, 242–244, 258, 296, 354; cultures 62–64, 372; dissociated 13; dream-memory 60; dynamics of 64; effects 72; generational 60; group 60; Jewish 113; re-claimed 181; screen 6, 121–129; stressful 66; traumatic 18, 54, 56–58, 68, 72, 106, 114, 117, 128, 135–136, 147, 153, 160, 163, 212, 220–222, 243–244, 278, 306–307, 317, 340–342, 377, 379; unassimilated 323; unintegrated 366; universal 118; wars 124; work 56, 124, 179, 378, 381 Menchú, Rigoberta 70 Mendes, Kaitlynn 251 Mengele, Josef 117, 157–158, 160 mental health 16, 67, 275–276, 412 Meretoja, Hanna 5, 28–29, 31–33, 57, 109, 153, 160, 203, 210, 215, 272, 293, 310, 316

466

Index metaphor 19, 52, 58, 125–126, 137, 173, 177, 195, 203, 225, 228, 237, 266, 273, 308, 323, 325, 391, 401, 436; metaphoric uses of trauma 57; metaphors of disease 266 Merians, Valerie 301 Merridale, Catherine 312 methodological nationalism 62 metonym 346, 391 #MeToo 31, 67, 71–72, 246, 248, 250–252, 380, 382 metre 296 Meurisse, Catherine 323, 325 Meyers, Todd 317 Miall, David 144 Micale, Marc 12, 14–15 Michaels, Anne 409 Mickey Mouse 323 micro-aggression 178–179 Middle Passage 92, 191, 196–197 Middleton, Peter 299 migrant 174, 189, 241, 246, 248–257 migratory trauma 250 Mikkonen, Kai 320 militarization 418–419, 435 military: deaths 419; discourses 96; trauma 420; violence 101, 278 Miller, J. Hillis 37 Miller, Nancy 307, 316 mimesis 298, 323, 331 mini-stories 318 Minnaard, Liesbeth 264 minority trauma 178, 188 mirror neurons 144 misery memoirs 67 Mitchell, Greg 440–441, 444–445 Mitchell, W. J. T. 301 modernism 20, 224, 259, 278 modernist 26, 97, 213, 223–224, 259, 267, 290–291, 296–298, 312, 319, 349, 366; aesthetic 188, 223, 410; art 125; fiction 57, 279; heritage 298; literary forms 57; lyric 297, 303 modernity 11, 13–15, 18–19, 21, 116, 142, 178, 181, 187–195, 197–198, 204, 206, 260, 268, 292, 297, 303, 330; late 18, 279; modern capitalism 297; modern nation 11; modern poetry 296; modern self 15; modern subject 15; modern trauma theory 102; modern warfare 14, 104 Modiano, Patrick 376–377, 379–380 Mohamed, Saira 100, 105, 107 Monénembo, Tierno 396, 402 monotheism 102–103, 187, 192–193, 195–197, 211, 385–386 Monroe, Marilyn 97 monster 322, 425; monstrosity 217, 323–324, 356 monument 61–62, 243, 303, 447 Morag, Raya 101, 104, 108

moral 2–3, 38–40, 42–43, 48, 96, 100, 104–106, 108, 115, 117–118, 122, 142, 189, 195, 204–205, 209, 215–217, 343, 368–369, 376, 385–386, 389–390, 392–393, 398–399, 401–402, 420, 422, 433; and metaphysical guilt 205; code 106; conflict 104; conscience 117; economy 2, 11, 16–17; genealogy of trauma 2; imperative 112, 114, 118, 212; injury 392, 420; judgement 39, 369; nihilism 38; obligations 117–118; responsibility 108, 118; sentiment 145; subjects 7; turn 17; values 3, 154–155, 158–159, 165; witness 111–112; wound 386, 390 morality 195, 203, 205 Moreau de Tours, Jacques-Joseph 13 Moritz, Karl-Philipp 15 Morocco 261 Morris, Alan 284 Morris, David 388–389, 392 Morrison, Toni 19–20, 46, 61–62, 191 Morrissey, Sinéad 300 Moses 102–103, 192–193, 211, 385–386 Mothers Against Drunk Driving 48 mourning 4, 34, 63, 97, 135–137, 176, 233, 248, 282, 302, 356–357, 390, 446; collective 95, 419; ecological losses 282 Mowrer, Orval Hobart 221 mPFC 222, 228 Muhammad, Krystal 433 Mukagasana, Yolande 396 Mukasonga, Scholastique 396 Mulka, Robert 367 Müller, Filip 367 multidirectional memory 62, 126, 179, 181, 190, 195, 203, 212, 231–232, 375, 434 Munch, Edvard 105, 448 Munch-Jurišic, Ditte Marie 105 Murthy, Dhiraj 245 music 60, 260, 276, 296, 397 muteness 84, 86–87 mutism 97 Myspace 242 myth 67, 102, 160, 188, 323, 375–376, 381, 386–387, 390, 398, 404, 414, 422, 430 Nadal, Marita 7 Nagai, Takashi 440–441 Nagasaki 92, 113–114, 351, 422, 438, 440–441, 447 Naghibi, Nima 313 Naipaul, V. S. 289 Najita, Susan 231 Nakazawa, Keiji 320 Nancy, Jean-Luc 166 Nanking massacre 51 Napoleonic Wars 15, 297 Naqvi, Fatima 92, 94, 98

467

Index narcissism 42, 95, 214, 414 Narine, Anil 281 narratee 158, 273 narration 46, 91, 138, 152–154, 158, 175, 197, 260–261, 264, 268, 290, 312, 320, 323, 326, 354, 400–401; graphic 325; fragmented 258; historical 137; process of 400; retrospective 319, 407; third-person 214 narrative 6, 13, 19–20, 24, 26–34, 38, 46–49, 51, 54–58, 67–74, 107–108, 115–116, 122–124, 138–139, 152–160, 167–169, 178, 180–181, 208, 212, 215, 225, 237, 245–247, 258–264, 266, 293, 296, 303, 332, 349–350, 355, 363–364, 368, 380, 395–403, 407–415, 422, 424–426, 429, 431–433, 436; agency 32–34; analysis 132; closure 363, 431; communication 153; competence 272; cultural 28, 116, 339, 377; debris 318; ethics 132, 154, 310, 414–415; ethics of implication 310; fiction 7, 156, 160; fragment 155, 262; frame 288, 366; graphic 7, 61, 317, 319–321, 323, 325; healing 180–181; hermeneutics 30, 109; identity 152–153, 156; imagination 32–33, 414; of implication 203; inbetween 31; lacuna 158; life 307–308, 312–313; master 47, 175, 177, 181, 407, 415; mediation 313; memory 314, 319; of mourning 356; personal 13, 319, 409; perspective 20, 154; preunderstandings 30; process of meaning-making 154; representation 102, 224, 273, 306, 308; rhetoric 158; self-diminishing 31 self-narrative 27, 31–34; self-understanding 28; sense of self 32, 34; strategies 26, 213, 264; structures 19, 258, 274, 409; techniques 19, 224, 400; temporality 288, 365; time 288; trauma 20, 26, 41, 138, 163, 165, 170, 178, 180–181, 202, 212–213, 218, 247, 252–253, 258–259, 306, 354, 391; of trauma 3, 39, 67, 207, 258, 307, 337; understanding 23–24, 28–30, 33–34; voice 20, 260, 400–402; void 157; of warning 356–357; working through 30; wreck 267 narrativization 61, 154, 267–268 narrator 20, 42, 68, 106, 108, 135, 154, 156, 158–160, 176, 226, 259–263, 273, 288, 290, 309, 319–321, 324, 367–372, 377, 380, 397, 402, 421, 436, 448; first-person 368, 371; unreliable 208, 262, 267 Nash, Jennifer 173, 177 nation-state 189, 192 national: identity 50–52, 62, 243; memory 54, 59, 62; myths 390; resistance 375; socialist 106, 132; trauma 177, 375, 413, 415; trauma cultures 177 National Wildlife Federation 275 nationalist: collective identity 51; ideology 404, 419; movement 190; rhetoric 413 natural disaster 1, 5–6, 16, 91–92, 245 Navie 381

Nayar, Pramod K. 233 Nazi 58, 69, 93, 103, 112, 122, 132, 154–160, 162, 168, 192, 194, 204–205, 302, 349, 364, 366–369, 404, 441; camps 71, 114, 116, 163, 165–167, 170; crimes 123, 216; Germany 51, 163, 170, 218; oppression 163; Party 367; persecution 16; propaganda 96, 159–160; occupied Belgium 37; see also National Socialism Nazism 96–97, 113–114, 116, 211, 216–218 necropolitics 192, 423, 440, 445, 450 Neal, Arthur 45 Negarestani, Reza 281 Negra, Diana 432–433 neoliberal 142, 232, 308, 432, 434; capitalism 232; West 142; neoliberalism 429, 432, 434 nervous shock 12, 330–331 Netherlands 84, 242, 374 Neufeld, Josh 319, 430–431, 434 neurophysiology 15 neuroscience 143, 145, 220–221, 228, 311; neuroscientist 143, 147, 221, 224, 228 neurosis 2, 11–14, 16, 102, 133, 243 new golden age 12 new historicism 142 new materialism 230–231, 233–235, 237 new media 242–243 New Mestiza consciousness 173 New Mexico 443 new victim order 94 New York 95, 136, 227, 245, 250, 259–261, 276, 279, 292, 305, 318, 339, 388–389, 407, 409–411 Newman, Avis 325 news media 352 Ngai, Sianne 149 Nichols, Jeff 280 Nienass, Benjamin 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29, 216 Nigeria 118, 260, 435 nightmare 4, 32, 56, 58, 60, 79–82, 84, 88, 107, 221, 224, 278, 280, 320, 325, 368, 385; apocalyptic 280; repeated 385 Nimier, Roger 376 9/11 1, 6, 50, 57, 194, 245, 261, 293, 301–302, 305, 350–352, 386, 393, 407–415, 418–420, 429, 434; aftermath 411–413; novel 261, 410, 415; trauma 136; trauma fiction 408–410, 413; see also post-9/11; pre-9/11 Nixon, Rob 20, 27, 291, 353, 434–436 Nkrumah, Kwame 69 Nolte, Ernst 123 non-European 188, 190, 193, 203 non-human 190–192, 230–233, 235–238, 281 non-narrative: people 273; representation of trauma 273; (textual) formats 178, 313 Nora, Pierre 59 normal waking consciousness (NWC) 223–224

468

Index Oxford English Dictionary 70, 92–93, 132, 136 Ozick, Cynthia 164

normative optimism 28 North America 63, 408 Norris, Christopher 44 Norway 157, 159, 301, 380–382, 448 nostalgia 276, 309, 388 Notowicz, Edith 156–160 Novak, Amy 195, 281 Novick, Peter 122 nuclear 438–450; annihilation 5, 279, 408, 439, 442, 446–447, 449; bomb 114; criticism 351; crypt 449–450; destruction 438, 440, 444; ecology of fear 440; extinction 27; family 15; fear 439, 441, 443–444; Holocaust 351, 441, 445; power plant 48, 447; subjectivity 438–440, 442–444, 446; uncanny 441–442; violence 438–439, 441, 447, 449–450 Null Achtzehn 364–365 numbness 132, 291, 343 Nuremberg laws 367 Nussbaum, Martha 145 Oberhaus, Daniel 276 obsessional neurosis 133 Occupation 236–237, 374, 418–420, 423–426; see also France O’Donoghue, Bernard 300–301 Ofer, Dahlia 164 Office of Homeland Security 412 Oklahoma City Bombings 412 Oktenberg, Adrian 300–301 Oliver, Sophie Anne 334 Olthof, Jan 84 Onega, Susana 91, 99 online support groups 242, 247 onlooker 201 Onwuachi-Willig, Angela 46–48, 52 openness 29, 34, 138, 206 Operation Cast Lead 60 Operation Iraqi Freedom 386, 392, 418 Ophuls, Marcel 375 Oppenheim, Hermann 2, 12, 14 oppression 27, 46, 75, 101, 164, 173–174, 176–177, 180, 244, 366; colonial 67, 305; economic 69, 434; gender-based 250; Nazi 163; systemic 181 Orange, Donna 24 Ormond, Julia 93–94 Ortner, Jessica 62–63 The Other 24, 40–41, 83, 94–98, 153, 156, 159, 165, 194, 215, 230, 246–247, 299, 346, 402, 422 otherness 24, 40–41, 95, 97, 180, 281, 324 Ottoman 112–113; Empire 113; massacres of Bulgarian Christians 112 out-of-body experience 223 Owen, Wilfred 299–300

Pacific Island 232 Padfield, Deborah 273 paedophilia 135 Page, Herbert W. 12, 330–331 pain 399; chronic 273; everyday 27; narratives of 266; painful memories 154, 160; painful past 3, 243; physical 227, 267, 292; psychic 221, 224, 226 Palestine 58–59, 193, 205, 212 palimpsest 126, 259, 379; palimpsestic memory 126, 375 pandemic 1, 28 Pane, Samuel 159 Panksepp, Jaak 224 Papon, Maurice 204–205, 208, 375 Paquet, Basil T. 391 paralipsis 157 paralysis 12, 173, 342, 387, 444 parapractic memory 129 Paris 202, 204–208, 374, 377, 379–380, 382; massacre 204 Parktal, Ants 247 Parmesan, Camille 275 passions 141–142, 145, 147 Patel, Andrea 409 Patel, Ronak 228 pathography 268–270, 272; pathographic trauma 269 pathos 401 patient 3, 13–14, 16, 18, 28, 66, 74, 79, 131, 133–134, 166, 169, 227, 266–273, 317, 322, 330–331, 347, 389, 392; narratives 273; trauma 272; patient-therapist model of trauma theory 169 patriarchal: oppression 366; structures 180 Pax, Salam 313, 424 Paxton, Robert 375 Pease, Donald 412, 414 pedagogy 15, 115, 132, 213–214, 217, 268 Pederson, Joshua 19–20, 25–26, 153 Peirce, Charles Sander 340 Peitsch, Helmut 216 Pennebaker, James 71, 247 pension hysteria 14 perception 124–125, 139, 143, 223, 230, 272, 277, 301, 345; pure 125 Perec, Georges 127–129 performance 63, 69, 75, 145, 154, 233, 244, 323, 328, 338, 381 performative 19, 26, 71, 111, 124, 128, 136, 300, 311, 329, 331, 333; dimension of language 24; illness 18; reenactment 115; speech act 18 peripateia 134

469

Index perlocutionary force 82 Perl, Daniel 317 Perloff, Marjorie 366 perpetrator 19, 51, 58, 93, 154, 164, 204–205, 214–216, 218, 227, 289–290, 293–294, 309–310, 344, 366, 368, 372, 399–402, 404, 420; child 323; descendants of 205; self 106; genocide perpetrator trauma 100; Holocaust 101–102, 213, 309; of nuclear attacks 449; Perpetrator-Induced Traumatic Stress 105; perpetrator-victim binary 5, 209; of rape 260; testimony trauma 100–110, 107–108, 201; victims and 42, 46, 48–49, 181, 193–196, 201, 203, 208, 217, 281, 292, 321, 232 persecution 16–17, 41, 114, 117, 216–218, 344, 375, 404 personal: identity 106, 411; memory 60, 301; narrative 13, 319; terrorism 101 Petro, Patrice 78 Pfau, Thomas 297 Phelan, James 154 Phelan, Peggy 329 phenomenology 26, 273, 278; phenomenological trauma theories 25 Phillips, Caryl 174–176, 178–180, 257–258, 264 Phillips Casteel, Sarah 179 philosophy 17, 23–34, 30, 40, 67, 112, 205, 234, 273, 289, 364; contemporary 168; Continental 36; feminist 163, 168; idealist 15; hermeneutic 25–26, 32, 34; of language 24; political 142–143; poststructuralist 24; of psychology 25; of trauma 23–26, 32–34; Western 147, 237 Phoenix, Ann 173 Phoney war 374 photo-essay 212 photography 59, 273, 317, 339–348, 352 Phuc, Kim 391 physical: accidents 12; assault 364 physioneurosis 365 Pickering, Andrew 237 Pickford, Henry 367 Pinchevski, Amit 245 Pine, Lisa 166, 168 Pinkus, Karen 353 Pires, Rui Pena 51 PITS (perpetrator-induced traumatic stress) 105, 107–108, 207, 214 Planet Auschwitz 113 planetary 190, 230, 232–233, 438, 440, 442–443, 445–446; memory 233 Plath, Sylvia 302, 366–367 Plato 292, 331 Plumwood, Val 190 plutonium 442 poetic language 299, 303, 329 poetics: of climate change 232; of trauma 15, 19

poetry 7, 67, 139, 167, 173, 194–195, 197, 249, 273, 276, 296, 365–367, 393, 415, 422, 424, 429–430, 436, 446; after Auschwitz 372; of place 301; of trauma 297, 302; of witnessing 296, 300 Pohlhaus, Gaile 168 Poland 69, 155, 340, 369–370, 374 policymaking 253, 305–306, 313 political: agency 310, 348; agent 3; deportees 166; guilt 205; language 193; narratives 68, 401, 408; philosophy 142–143; prisoners 166; resistance 439; rhetoric 142, 412; terrorism 55; witness 112 politics 14, 38, 42, 67, 69, 91, 97–98, 123, 142–144, 146–147, 173, 181, 194–195, 212, 216, 236, 334, 337, 354, 401, 415, 439–441; identity 124, 148, 177, 179, 188–189; trauma 5; of denial 440; of fear 146–147; of mourning 446; of trauma 11, 16; see also biopolitics; necropolitics Pollin-Galay, Hannah 116 polyangiitis 269 polyglossic text 269 polyphony 175 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 131 Poole, Deborah 347 popular: culture 296, 352; memory 418, 426 Porges, Stephen 226 Portugal 51; Portuguese colonies 69 positivism 137 post-9/11 136, 262, 279, 408–410, 414–415, 418–419, 426; America 261–262, 409; trauma 136; see also 9/11 post-apartheid South Africa 17, 50 post-apocalyptic: culture 349; fiction 7, 349–355, 357; genre 354 post-genocide 397–398, 404; recovery 404; see also genocide post-Holocaust: era 55, 372; estrangement from language 366 post-socialist states 243 post-traumatic stress disorder 11, 15, 27, 55–56, 67, 92, 102, 243, 275, 278, 310, 332, 387–388, 393, 410; see also PTSD post-traumatic writing 19; see also trauma-writing post-truth 37; political era 37 post-Vietnam: syndrome 16, 388; traumatization 386 post-wall Germany 17 postcognitivism 25–26 postcolonial: and intersectional healing narratives 180; ecologies 232; France 208; history 189, 204; legacies 118; literary texts 187; literature 213; memories 118; modernity 187–189, 191, 193, 195, 197; nations 20; studies 3, 188, 190, 289; subject 197, 209; trauma narrative 20, 213; trauma theory 189, 191

470

Index postgeneration 165 posthumanism 3, 230–231, 233–235, 237, 355 postmemory 20–21, 42, 58, 116, 165, 243, 342, 372, 378 postmodern 19, 41, 94, 97, 124, 207–208, 289, 349, 414, 422; capitalism 208; individual subject 97; novels 289 postmodernism 97, 142, 207, 290, 355; postmodernist trauma fiction 26 Postone, Moishe 217 poststructuralism 3, 18, 23–24, 33, 36–40, 54, 189–190, 306 poststructuralist 5, 17–19, 24–26, 28, 32, 36–37, 39, 55, 190, 299; criticism 29; historiography 193; philosophy 24, 26; trauma aesthetics 32; trauma theory 17, 19, 29; posttraumatic writing 19 postwar: era 69; France 404; Germany 132, 204; period 16, 375–376 poverty 27, 176, 179–180, 267, 269, 309, 347, 440 power 67–69, 92, 95, 123, 145, 148, 174–175, 177, 201, 203, 206, 209, 237–238, 245, 258, 307–308, 313, 336, 374, 380, 392, 395–396, 403, 413–414, 418, 423; abuses of 381, 423; balance 118, 169, 268; discourses of 96, 306, 310; of narrative 33, 264; networks of 145, 313; relations 71, 93; structures 232, 238, 243; struggle 14; powerlessness 144, 366 Powers, Kevin 421 pre-9/11 411, 414 pre-digital silence 246 pre-trauma 1, 447; fiction 279; pre-traumatic stress (disorder/syndrome) 1, 276–279, 353 pregnancy 164, 272, 371, 444 premediation 352, 354, 357 Presser, Lois 107 prison 67–69, 75, 302–303, 328, 412; camps 96; poetry 67 privilege 5, 69, 180–181, 201, 205, 207, 308, 334, 318, 395, 410, 414, 434 Procurement for Specific Audiences 72 propaganda 96, 132, 159–160, 313, 323, 395, 402–404 Prose, Francine 409 prosopopoeia 85–87 prosthetic memory 60 prostitution 71, 164, 397 protest 37, 63, 92, 246, 300, 333, 385, 421, 447; movement of May 1968 37 Proust, Marcel 125, 127 psyche 4, 12–13, 15, 56–57, 102, 108, 115, 124–125, 194, 201, 236, 333, 439–442 psychiatry 3, 5, 12, 14–15, 153, 181, 220, 391–392; psychiatric nosology 13

psychic: memory 56, 126; numbing 107, 439–440, 448–449; toxicity 442–444, 449; trauma 4, 7, 34, 91–92, 209, 282, 317, 322, 436 psychoanalysis 3, 13, 19, 24–25, 38, 54–56, 63, 79, 102, 116, 121, 131–132, 142, 145, 188, 191, 213, 306, 310, 312, 340–341, 386, 389; of trauma 386; psychoanalysis-inspired trauma theory 213; psychoanalyst 2, 13, 83, 134–135, 139, 270, 388; psychoanalytic process 131; psychoanalytic trauma theory 57 psychological: effects of climate change 277; trauma 11–12, 49, 228, 282, 341, 378, 440; universalism 102 psychologization 12, 216 psychology 4, 15, 25, 61, 67, 142, 166, 192, 203, 220–222, 243, 291, 296, 302, 440 psychopathology 3, 16, 121, 129, 216 psychopolitics 446 psychotherapy 63, 414 psychotraumatology 13, 19 PTSD 3, 11, 13–18, 26–27, 55–57, 66–67, 92, 102–105, 221–226, 228, 243, 246, 271, 275, 278–279, 322, 332, 387–393, 419–421; see also post-traumatic stress disorder Puar, Jasbir 423 public: memory 60, 62, 218, 432; pathological public sphere 408, 411–412, 415 publishing industry 306–307 Pulitzer Prize 61, 225, 391, 393 pulp 323–324 queer 98, 148, 174, 180; studies 174; theory 180 Quint, David 195 Rabe, David 387, 391 race 46, 101, 162–164, 166–170, 173–177, 179–180, 196, 205–207, 231, 237, 280, 336–337, 351, 395, 431–433; discrimination 177; inequity 336; Jewish 157; politics 337; race-based hierarchy 46; racial identity 191; racial violence 27, 176, 433 racism 55, 46, 62, 69, 95, 118, 122, 174, 176, 178–181, 189–190, 202, 264, 290, 372, 395, 404, 429, 431–432, 435–436; everyday 179; institutionalized 101, 379; racist language 436; racist violence 62 radioactive 321, 440, 442–444, 446–450; ghost 449–450; violence 444 Radstone, Susannah 19, 25, 42–43, 59–61, 243, 246, 306–307, 324 Rahim, Sameer 302 Rahman, Momin 177 railway: accidents 2, 12, 16, 330; spine 2, 11–12, 14, 55, 330 Rajiva, Jay Rak, Julie 66

471

Index Ramazani, Jahan 137, 302 Ramm, Alison 325 Randall, Amy 164 rap groups 67 rape 16, 164–165, 242, 260–261, 293, 319, 331, 347, 388–390, 392, 399, 403, 432–433; trauma 16, 165; trauma syndrome 16 Rapson, Jessica 63, 232 Ratcliffe, Matthew 25 rationality 145, 355 Rauch, Scott 222, 228 re-remembering 49–50 re-traumatization 241, 243, 428 reader 6, 19, 42, 61, 98, 115, 137–139, 142, 144, 154, 156, 158–160, 163, 167–168, 179, 213–214, 223, 225, 236–237, 249, 258–264, 267–269, 273, 277, 281, 289–293, 299–300, 310–311, 313, 318, 320, 322, 353–354, 365–368, 379, 390–391, 399–400, 402, 424–425, 431; empathy 109; German readers 215–216, 218; historical horizon of the reader 181; reactions 213; responses 214; reader-text framework 163; readerly expectations 307; readership 216–217, 258, 262–263 Reading, Anna 62, 64, 243, 245 realism 19, 188, 224, 234, 299–300, 400, 402, 409–410, 430–432; realist turn 18 Rechtman, Richard 2, 4–5, 7, 16–17, 39, 57, 64, 91, 197 reconciliation 133, 176, 181, 241 recovery 38, 55, 74, 93, 178, 188, 215, 244, 247, 311, 323, 325–326, 370, 387, 404, 421–422, 429; from trauma 419, 435; narrative 246; narratives 243; post-genocide 404; psychodynamic approaches to 392 Red Cross 118 Reed, Gail 122, 124 refugee 58, 72, 75, 194, 216, 257, 332, 344, 395, 419, 423; camps 72, 344; crisis 194, 419 Reil, Johann Christian 15 Reiter, Andrea 298 relationality 16, 25, 33, 71, 75, 125, 148, 177, 187, 191, 198, 234, 272–273, 376, 377, 445; emergent 233; model of trauma 13 religious identity 101 remembrance 1, 17, 59, 74–75, 150, 197, 232, 294, 298, 309, 340, 390, 428, 434; collective 61; cultural 61; Holocaust 212–213, 305, 372; literary 62; narratives 72; object of 61; of slavery 61–62; poststructuralist 223; public 54, 61 Renaissance 48, 66 Renaut, Alain 37 repetition 13, 20, 26, 39, 55, 74, 80–81, 84, 87, 97, 107, 134–135, 138, 144, 148, 155–156, 279, 303, 320, 335, 337, 341–342, 363–364, 366–367, 389, 429–430; compulsion 13, 20, 79,

102, 107, 133, 194, 196, 281; traumatic 79, 116, 139, 302 representation 2, 26, 38–39, 55, 57, 59, 67, 75, 78–79, 91, 97–98, 100, 126–127, 132, 134–137, 139, 142–143, 194, 212, 216, 224, 230–231, 234, 242, 244–245, 266–268, 298–299, 305, 310, 314–319, 321, 323–325, 332–333, 337, 342, 345, 363–364, 372, 377, 385, 390–391, 397–401, 409, 414–415, 420, 424–426, 430, 436, 446; autobiographical 305–306; fictional 133, 368, 398; filmic 155; forms of 303, 311, 408; Holocaust 116; impossibility of 18, 329; literary 101–102, 236, 418; media 414, 424; mimetic models of 147; misrepresentation 94; modes of 19, 232, 274, 318, 337; multi-discursive 318; non-narrative representation of trauma 273; representational closure 73; representational paradox 19; of perpetrators 368; socially-mediated 49; symbolic 147; systems of 24, 274; testimonial 136; transformative 323; of trauma 133, 253, 273, 288–289, 291, 306–309, 313, 320, 339; visual 311, 320 repression 55, 102, 104, 123–124, 126, 134, 166, 170, 197, 299, 375, 446; cultural 382; mass 312; Stalinist 312 republic of suffering 388 resentment 205, 212, 215–218, 390 resilience 91, 93, 241, 244, 246, 249, 271, 309, 311, 319, 399 resistance 46, 97, 112–114, 131, 133–134, 136, 154, 163, 165, 173–174, 177, 180, 197, 215, 237, 303, 324, 350, 423, 434; anti-Nazi 112; feminist 173; fighters 112; national 375; Polish 340; political 439 Resnais, Alain 29, 204, 381, 446 response-ability 42 responsibility 16–17, 39–43, 47–50, 57–58, 83, 93, 96, 116, 122, 135, 156, 167, 194, 201–206, 209, 216, 263, 301, 305, 310, 366, 368–369, 390, 399, 403, 420, 442, 448; collective 1, 42, 344, 399, 403; denial of 107; ethical 19, 36, 41, 300; historical 42, 203; moral 108, 118; political 201, 204; social 39 Reuther, Bryan T. 25–26 revolution 2, 11–12, 14–15, 207, 268, 297, 351, 378, 387; revolutionary terror 297 rhapsode 296 rhetoric effect 399 Rhodesia 69 Rhys, Jean 174 rhythm 137, 139, 178, 236, 270 Richardson, Alan 221 Richardson, John 275 Ricoeur, Paul 30, 147, 152–153, 299 Rider, Ann 213–214 Riedesser, Peter 13, 16

472

Index rights activism 67 Rigney, Ann 5, 55, 59, 61–63, 232, 258 Ring, Magnus 52 Ringelheim, Joan 163–165 Rinn, Michael 399 Riverbend 424 Rivers, W. H. R. 299 Robinson-Walcott, Kim 175 Roden, David 234 Roethke, Theodore 302 Roma 248 roman noir 379 romance 137, 425 Romantic aesthetics 3 Romanticism 296–297 Rome 323 Rooney, Caroline 188, 192 Rose, Jacqueline 414 Rosen, Nir 424 Roth, Philip 409 Roth, Susan L. 409 Rothberg, Michael 4–5, 19, 27, 42, 44, 55, 62–63, 118, 123, 126, 140, 178–179, 181, 190, 195, 200, 201, 203, 210, 212–213, 215, 217, 231–232, 258, 263–264, 281, 316, 375, 409–410, 413–414, 430–432, 434 Rothe, Anne 4, 17, 19 Rousset, David 112, 123 Roussillon, René 134 Rousso, Henry 122, 374–378 Rowland, Antony 117 Roy, Arundhati 96 Roy-Bhattacharya, Joydeep 421 Rubin, David 278–279 Rumsfeld, Donald 96, 422 Rurangwa, Jean-Marie V. 396 Rüsen, Jörn 243 Rushdie, Salman 189 Russia 123, 242–243, 298 Rutherford, Judy 248 Rutten, Ellen 244 Rwanda 1, 7, 118, 260, 305, 321, 323, 395–398, 401, 403–404, 425, 440; Rwandan genocide 7, 346, 395, 397–403 Sabra and Shatila refugee camp 58 Sacco, Joe 321 Sacks, Peter 302 sacrifice 59, 92–94, 98, 375, 421 Sadaawi, Ahmed 424 Saeed, Nazeeha 73 Safter, Martin 104 Sagarra Martin, Catalina 398 Said, Edward 187, 189, 193 Saint-Amour, Paul 278–280, 357 Salaam Pax 424 Samogyu, Gyula 243

Sandberg, Sveinung 107 Sander, David 148 Santner, Eric 127, 260, 409 Sanyal, Debarati 5, 100, 126, 310 Sarajevo 262, 321 Sartre, Jean-Paul 404 Sassoon, Siegfried 299 Saussy, Haun 258 Scarry, Elaine 267, 423, 439–440 Schaffer, Kay 305–306, 312, 316 Schechner, Alan 212 Schell, Jonathan 439, 445 Scherer, Klaus 148 Schmidt, Inge 46, 48–49 Schmidt, Sibylle 107, 109 Schnurr, Rosina G. 409 Schönfelder, Christa 307, 310 Schrader, Paul 280 Schulman, Helen 411 Schussler, E. E. 281 Schwab, Gabriele 20, 27, 126 Schwartz, Lynne Sharon 409 science fiction 323, 349 Sciortino, Giuseppe 45, 47, 49, 51 screen memory 6, 121–129 script 30, 307, 309, 311, 412 scriptotherapy 311 Seagal, Janel 71 Sebald, W. G. 158–160, 260, 290, 368, 409 Sebbar, Leïla 379 second death 445 Second World War 2, 50–51, 55, 104, 112, 118, 122, 127, 158, 205, 260, 297, 302, 351, 375–376, 380, 393, 408, 419, 422, 429, 446 second-generation 319 secondary: forms of trauma 19; witness 19, 115–116, 299 sectarian violence 425 seduction theory 13 Sehene, Benjamin 396 Seigworth, Gregory 142 self-help 308 self-image 28, 106 self-improvement 308 self-loss 323 self-narrative 27, 31–34 self-representation 268, 306, 308, 310, 313–314; self-representational writing 306, 313 self-transformation 204 self-witnessing 42, 412 selfie 249–250 Seltzer, Mark 96, 408, 411 Selvon, Sam 174 semiotics 235 Semprun, Jorge 166–168, 170, 288–289, 377 sender 154

473

Index sensation 31, 74, 142–144, 146, 148, 227, 324, 369 sensationalism 117, 306, 313 sense of self 27, 32, 34, 107, 174, 432 sense of the possible 32, 272, 310 sensory memory 317, 325 Sentilles, Sarah 279 serial killing 319 Serres, Michel 439 sexism 95, 101, 174, 180, 264, 380–381 Sexton, Anne 302 sexual: abuse 13, 31, 55, 67, 91, 179, 227, 253, 288, 292–293, 305, 309–310, 322, 392; assault 13, 15–17, 101, 165–166, 293; minorities 168; slavery 324; trauma 16; violence 7, 67, 72, 164, 250, 260, 319–320, 380 shame 27, 31–32, 52, 94, 104, 135, 143, 148, 221, 246, 252, 366, 382, 390, 398; shameful memory 382 Shandler, Jeffrey 115 Shatan, Chaim 388 Shay, Jonathan 11, 391–392 shell shock 2, 16, 92, 103, 299, 317, 322, 388 Shenker, Noah 71 Shephard, Ben 392 Sheringham, Michael 124 Shively, Sharon 317 Shiver, Lionel 292 Shoah 56, 67, 106, 115–118, 131–132, 138, 154–156, 364, 375 Shock and Awe 422–423 Shorter, Edward 66 short story 173–174, 236, 369–370, 372, 393 Shriver, Lionel 291–293 Sierra Leone 224 signification 19, 93, 142, 147, 149, 263, 379 Silverman, Max 123, 126, 204, 259, 375, 378–380 Simmons, Pip 328 Simon, Claude 377 Simon Wiesenthal Institute 118 simulation 14, 96, 144 Sison, Michele 339 sites of memory 59 Skype 242 slave 61, 68, 111, 168, 175–176, 180, 191, 236, 366, 433; descendants of slaves 195–196; labour 168; mother 61, 176, 180; narratives 68; trade 175 Slaughter, Joseph 71 slavery 46, 68, 179–180, 191, 195–196, 212, 259, 324, 336, 432–434; American 46, 212; histories of 122, 336; legacy of 7; memory of 62; remembrance of 61–62; sexual 324; trauma of 176, 434 Sleep Apnea Syndrome 127 slow apocalypse 353

slow violence 20, 27, 291, 353, 434–435, 442; nuclear 443 Small, David 325 Smelser, Neil 46, 50 Smith, Barry 37 Smith, Daniel 276 Smith, Patricia 428–430, 432–433, 436 Smith, Sidonie 67, 71, 75, 305, 312 Smith, Valerie 60, 165 Smith, Zadie 276 Snow, C. P. 274 snowman story 145–146 social: constructivist 142; fragmentation 97; media 7, 18, 241–251, 352; poetry 249; sciences 6, 45, 52, 55, 58, 149 socialist 14, 106, 132, 243–244, 440; party 14 Sojourner Truth 173 Sokal, Alan 37 solastalgia 276 Solberg, Erna 380 soldiers 2, 13, 16, 58, 60, 66, 79, 102–103, 111, 197, 260, 262, 278, 299, 380, 388, 392, 419, 422, 424; American 388, 393; combat 102, 111; First World War 2, 16; German 380; Israeli 58, 60; Second World War 16 solidarity 112, 167, 174, 177–179, 181, 212, 215, 218, 231, 246, 250, 399, 403, 424; ideals of 403 solitude 97, 402 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander 68 somatic marker hypothesis 148 Sommer, Doris 258 somnambulism 12 Sonderkommando 340 Sontag, Susan 28, 266, 343–345, 347, 378, 424 soul blindness 439–440 South Africa 17, 50, 69, 236–237 South America 63 South Indian Muslims 236 Soviet Gulag 67, 92, 305; Soviet Gulag survivor stories 67 Soviet: terror 7; Union 48 Soyinka, Wole 188, 194 space of possibility 3 Sparks, Cheri 245 Sparks, Glenn 245 spectacle 96, 106, 207, 301, 343–346, 407, 422–424 spectatorship 334, 339, 343–345, 348 Spiegelman, Art 318–319, 321, 323, 409 Spielberg, Steven 115 Spinoza, Baruch 145, 148 Spitzer, Leo 165 Spivak, Gayatri Chakrav 200 split sense of self 174 splitting 20, 126, 136, 368, 433, 438–439, 441, 443–445, 449 Sprengnether, Madelon 122

474

Index Srebnik, Simon 154–156, 160 SS officers 162 St Petersburg 303 Stabile, Carol A. 432 Staley, Erinn 248 Stalin, Josif 123, 305 Stalinist Terror 305, 302, 312 Staniloiu, Angelica 243 stanza 297, 301–302, 391 Stark, Jared 289 Stassen, J. P. 323 state violence 67, 110; state-sponsored violence 204, 369 Staub, Ervin 107–108 Steele, Cassie Premo 73 Steffens, Karolyn 15 sterilization 157, 164 Stewart, Kathleen 143, 146, 149 stigma 52, 94; stigmatization 94, 113 Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust 117 Stockholm Syndrome 271 stoicism 168, 170 Stone, Oliver 385 storytelling 29–30, 67, 152, 160, 267–268, 272, 310, 312, 399, 425; abuse of 157–158; audiences 41; healing 180; life 75; testimonial 41; traditions 180; trauma 67 Strawson, Galen 273 Strebrenica 301 stressor 15, 19, 278, 389 Strickgold, Robert 71 Strickland, Stephanie 447 structural: trauma 19, 213; violence 1, 5, 27, 31, 181, 440 structuralism 142 structures of feeling 145, 149, 261, 312 subject position 58, 63, 70, 177, 181, 188, 194, 234, 261, 308, 346; of a trauma victim 3, 5 subjectivity 11, 25, 41, 59, 83, 98, 142–143, 148, 160, 165, 177, 187, 189–191, 194–195, 216, 230, 234, 268, 270, 308–309, 317, 407, 411; human 190, 445; migratory 174; nuclear 438–440, 442–444, 446; poetic 231; posthumanist 236; traumatized 18, 368 subjectivization 148 substance abuse 275 subsumption model 29–30 Suchomel, Franz 106 Sudan 71 suicide 113, 135, 202–203, 205–206, 208, 354, 366, 421, 446 Suleiman, Susan 160 superhero 323 Surrealism 125 surrogate voices 118

surveillance 202–203, 205–206, 208, 352, 414, 423 survival 30, 113–114, 116, 167–168, 191, 195, 197, 211, 232, 236–237, 354, 402, 434, 443–444, 446; collective modes of 166; cultural 296; individual 312, 386; Jewish 103; of human life on earth 5; story 431; strategies 164–165 survivor 1–2, 5, 11, 30, 58, 69, 74, 80, 94–95, 98, 103, 111–118, 123, 157, 163, 165–168, 170, 214–218, 220, 222, 244, 246–249, 252, 293, 306, 311, 319, 330, 332, 346, 388–392, 396–400, 402, 404, 420, 432, 438, 440–442, 447; Auschwitz 73, 112, 114, 402; childsurvivor 368; combat 393; death camp 215; families 372; female survivors 444; genocide survivors 114, 397; Gulag 67; Hiroshima 441, 449; histories of survivors 444; Holocaust 41, 66, 111–115, 117, 153–156, 165, 214, 248, 288, 366, 372, 389, 429; individual 364; memories 321; nuclear 443; perspective 370; subjectivity of 443–444; syndrome 16; testimony 41, 54, 56, 72, 113, 115–117, 166; of crime 93; of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 438; of nuclear attacks 441; of sexual harassment 93; rape 390; suffering of survivors 117, 402; Vietnam 390–391 Sütterlin, Nicole 2, 15, 19, 20 Swift, Graham 136–137 Swofford, Anthony 425 symbolic injury 48 synchronic 205, 207, 388 Syria 298, 339, 345–346, 419, 421 system of violence 95, 98 systemic: forms of oppression 177, 181; violence 178, 431, 434–435 Sznaider, Natan 62, 117, 122, 212, 232 Szymborska, Wisława 301–302 Tadjo, Véronique 396 Tal, Kali 67, 389 talking cure 13, 66, 230 Tapscott, Stephen 302 Tasso, Torquato 102–103, 187, 194, 196–198, 280–281 Tate, Andrew 359 Taylor, Diana 63 technology 2, 12, 15, 60, 142, 145, 181, 297, 352, 354, 422–423, 445–446 age of information technology 94; brain-scanning 222; industrial 324; information 94, 96; technologization 14 Teittinen, Jouni 27, 46 tellability 72, 307 temporality: of the failed address 84; of trauma 26, 80, 82; temporal delay 79, 318; temporally multi-levelled trauma 180 tentativeness 138 Terada, Rei 145, 150

475

Index testimonial 2, 41, 67–75, 91, 98, 115, 117, 136–137, 163, 169, 178, 181, 214, 312, 366, 368; audiences 74; literature 69–70; narrative 67–69, 71, 73–74, 163, 396, 399, 401–402; networks 72 testimonio 69–70 testimony 1, 19, 40, 55–58, 63, 66–75, 91, 111–118, 127, 135, 156–157, 159–160, 162–163, 168, 178, 194, 212, 214, 246, 250, 268, 288–289, 291, 297, 299, 308, 364–365, 368–369, 372, 398–402, 413, 433–434; age of 40, 68; criticism 411–412, 415; first person 74–75; historical 137; Holocaust 56, 115, 247, 434; hybrid 117; perpetrator 109–110; postbattle 66; studies 6; survivor 41, 54, 56, 72, 113, 115–117, 166; Taste for Testimony 69; trauma 41, 67–68, 72, 74, 169–170; victim 112–113; witness 114, 116–117 text: production 213, 215; reception 213; textual monument 62 Themistokleous, George 123 theory of cultural trauma 45–48, 52 theory of traumatic events 47–50, 52 theory of traumatized societies 47, 49–50, 52 Theresienstadt 159–160 Theweleit, Klaus 164 Third Reich 192, 302 Third World feminist fiction 173 Thomas, D. M. 302 Thomas, Madeleine 276 Thompson, Janna 205 threat 222, 275, 280, 350–353, 356, 393, 412, 419, 432; future 350; of illness 5, to integrity 106, 325; nuclear 27, 408, 439–445; to one’s life 103–104, 330, 363; of suffering 46, of violence 93 threat-o-genic 352 Three Mile Island 438 thriller 203, 208 Till, Emmitt 46–47 Titchener, Edward 142 Todorov, Tzvetan 67, 123 Tomkins, Silvan 148 tondues 374, 376, 380 tonte 374, 380–382 Topper, Ryan 192 Toremans, Tom 18, 38–39, 288 Torok, Maria 449 torture 16, 92–93, 96, 122, 262, 267, 388–389, 412, 423, 441 totemic object 48 Totten, Samuel 164 Tougaw, Jason 307, 316 Touvier, Paul 375 toxicity 442–444, 449 tragic 1, 11, 48, 300, 350, 402 Tran, G. B. 319 trans-corporeality 234–236, 238

transcultural: empathy 211–213, 215, 217; witnessing 211, 213, 218 transgenerational: nuclear trauma 7, 438–439, 441, 443–445, 447, 449; transmission 19–20; trauma 20, 444 transhistorical 126, 260, 324, 379 transmission: of memory 56, 60; of trauma 7, 39, 58, 116, 201, 211, 245–246, 264 transnational turn 62 trauma: 9/11 trauma fiction 408–410, 413; cinema 431; culture 11, 17, 176–177, 349, 410, 413; discourse 3, 56, 63, 100–101, 104, 180, 231, 418–420, 422, 424, 426; drama 47–49, 52; fiction 26, 138, 258, 279, 287–288, 290–294, 317, 319, 321–322, 325, 368, 408–410, 413–414, 429; graphic trauma fiction 323; of illness 266, 268, 270, 273, 325; industry 189, 195, 197; kitsch 17, 292; of the liberation 380; literature 41, 138, 223, 242, 389–390, 428–430; of loss 137; multiperspectival account of 167; narrative 20, 26, 41, 48, 51, 138, 163, 165, 170, 178, 180–181, 202–203, 212–213, 218, 246–247, 252–253, 258–259, 262, 306–307, 321, 354, 391, 410, 415, 420, 431; paradigm 11, 15, 91, 100–101, 104, 363–364, 408, 413–414; perpetual 46, 48; politics 5; processing 242–249, 252–253; question 33, 91; rise of 317, 349; of the routine 46, 52; story 74, 177, 223; studies 1–7, 13, 18–20, 24–25, 27, 34, 36, 38–43, 62–64, 122, 131, 135, 138, 141, 147, 150, 163, 166, 177–178, 181, 187–189, 192, 195, 198, 212, 228, 232–246, 249, 251, 268, 278–279, 296, 305–306, 312, 329, 333, 340, 342, 354, 408–409, 412–413, 415, 429, 436; survivor 5, 11, 72, 170, 222; testimony 41, 67–68, 72, 74, 169–170; theory 2–8, 11, 13, 15, 17–26, 29, 34, 38, 47–48, 54–58, 63–64, 67, 100, 102–103, 105, 165, 168–169, 177–179, 181, 187–201, 203–215, 217, 220, 223–224, 228, 233, 237–238, 243–244, 246, 252, 279–280, 297, 301, 312–317, 330, 332–334, 340, 349, 354, 363, 372, 409, 413; of sexual abuse 292, 309; of slavery 176, 434; of survival 103; therapy 13, 390; tourism 333; victim 2–3, 5, 47, 97, 188, 194, 228, 322, 390; unacknowledged 260, 386; universality of 5, 389; universalized understanding of 166; unprocessed 241, 244; traumawriting 26, 386–387, 390 traumascape 244 traumatic: absence 319; affect 97; aftershock 364; disorder 2, 311; hermeneutics 24; hysteria 12; image 32, 321–322; memories 68, 72, 212, 221, 243, 278, 342; memory 18, 54, 56–58, 106, 114, 117, 128, 135–136, 147, 153, 160, 163, 220–222, 244, 306–307, 317, 340–341, 377, 379; neurosis 2, 12–14, 16, 102; nightmare 79, 82; realism 19, 430–432, 409; repetition 79,

476

Index 116, 139, 302; temporality 80, 83, 211, 259, 341, 350; time 341; violence 201–203, 344; witnessing 115, 215 traumatized: perpetrator 101, 110; psyche 201; victim 2, 111, 114, 118, 209 traumatogenic imagery 342 traumatophilia 408 travelling memory 62 Treaty of Trianon 241 Treblinka 106, 298 Trezise, Bryoni 334 Trezise, Thomas 4, 41, 116, 244 trope 19–20, 105, 112, 149, 223, 259, 289, 323, 408–410, 413, 420; of repetition 20; trauma as 57 Trump, Donald 37 truth 14, 17–18, 36–37, 47, 56, 69–70, 74–75, 111, 115–116, 124, 129, 160, 173, 222, 272, 299, 301, 306–308, 311, 321, 368, 379, 390, 392, 399, 402; absence of 107; absolute 36; crises of 71; existential 287, 289; historical 192, 434; manipulation of the 122–123, 125; moral 112, 217; negotiated 311; of trauma 116; value 298, 307, 309, 311 truth-telling 68, 71, 301, 311, 399; effect 399 tsunami 5, 245, 388–389 Tsvetaeva, Marina 298 Tumarkin, Maria 312 Türkmen-Dervisoglu, Gülay 50, 52 Turner, Brian 420–421 Tutsi 323, 346, 395–404 tweet 246, 275–276; tweet-testimonies 250, 252 twenty-first century 14, 45, 158, 233, 245, 272, 279, 388, 393; clinical practice 274; literature 258–259; trauma theorists 231–232; world 20, 257 Twitter 242, 246–248, 250 Tynan, Aidan 281–282 Tyree, J. M. 435

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) 115, 118 universal: citizenship 344–345; memory 118 universalism 6, 102, 178 universalization 5, 19, 188, 193, 243 unrepresentability 5, 20, 24, 97, 166, 244, 307, 318, 328, 340, 409 unspeakability: of genocide 399; of trauma 4, 166, 170, 399 uprising 73, 378 urbanization 14 Ursano, Robert 153 US veterans 3, 420 USC Shoah Foundation 115, 117–118 Ustundag, Ebru 75 Ut, Nick 341, 391

ugly feelings 149 un-belonging 174 Una 319–320 uncanny 442 unclaimed experience 202 unconscious 55, 58, 107, 121, 123–129, 221, 291, 317, 389, 442; associations 125; economic 439; juridical 40; nuclear 439; operation of repression 126; optical 341; political 206; process of memory work 124 understanding: collective 169; narrative 23–24, 28–30, 33–34; negativity of 30; obscenity of 29 ungrievability 95, 98 United Kingdom 174; see also Britain United States (of America) 16, 38, 50, 54, 62, 95–96, 104, 113, 174, 259–262, 301, 411, 413, 419, 432

Van Alphen, Ernst 152–153 Van Devanter, Linda 387 Van Dijk, Jan 93–94, 99 Van der Hart, Onno 12–13, 18, 243 Van der Kolk, Bessel 12–13, 18, 220, 222, 226–227, 243 Van Linthout, Caroline 317 Van der Merwe, Chris 140 Van Reet, Brian 425 Van Susteren, Lise 275, 277 Van der Tuin, Iris 230, 240 Van Wyck, Peter 352–353, 356 VanDerWerff, Emily Todd 431 Vandiver, Elizabeth 300 Van Winkle, Elizabeth 104 ventriloquism 324 Vercors 376 Vergès, Jacques 123 Vermetten, Eric 84 Vetlesen, Arne Johan 197 vibrant materiality 234 vicarious: trauma 19, 339; witnessing 116 Vice, Sue 100, 309 Vichy: government 374; syndrome 375 victim 1–5, 16–17, 19, 25, 42, 46–50, 58, 63, 67, 69–71, 74, 91–92, 94, 96, 100, 102–107, 111–118, 122, 138, 150, 152, 158, 160, 163–166, 181, 188–189, 191, 193–197, 201, 203, 205, 208, 212, 215–217, 222, 244, 246–249, 253, 278, 280–281, 292–293, 302, 309–310, 320–323, 331–332, 339–340, 342, 344–347, 366–369, 380, 389, 397, 399–402, 404, 420, 422, 425, 428, 432–433, 435–436, 441–444, 449; culture 4; society 92, 94–95, 97–98; story 71; testimony 112–113; trauma 2–3, 5, 47, 97, 188, 194, 228, 322, 390; victimfocused poetry 367; of accidents 2, 5, 12 victimhood 2, 6, 16–17, 19, 91–94, 98, 100, 197, 408, 413, 415, 424 victimization 71, 98, 101, 104, 203, 322, 386

477

Index victimizer 92 Victorian: England 16; period 297; public 12 Vietnam: Veterans Against the War 385, 388, 392; War 1, 3, 55, 59, 67, 91, 117, 122, 305, 385, 387, 412, 420 Vince, Rebekah 240 Vinen, Richard 384 violence 1–6, 27, 29–31, 42, 54–55, 61–63, 91, 93, 95–96, 98, 100–108, 112–113, 118, 138, 145, 176, 187, 189, 196–198, 201–204, 206, 209, 217, 232, 236–237, 245–246, 252, 263, 275, 278, 281, 294, 313, 324, 329, 333, 340, 344, 347, 353, 355, 369–370, 379, 398–399, 415, 419–420, 422, 424–425, 429, 431–436, 444; act 103–104, 198, 202; commission of 101, 105–108; domestic 7, 55, 67, 101, 305, 309; extreme 56, 100, 122, 399; histories of 259–261, 449; of language 29; nuclear 438–439, 441, 447, 449–450; police 262; on poetics and its metaphors 399; sexual 7, 67, 72, 164, 250, 260, 319–320, 380; slow 20, 291, 353, 434–435, 442–443; structural 1, 5, 27, 31, 181, 440; systemic 178, 431, 435; of understanding 29 Virilio, Paul 351 virtual cemeteries 242, 248 Virtual Memorial Garden 248 Visser, Irene 231 visual: art 273,276, 415; media 2, 430; representation(s) 146, 160, 202, 222, 262, 311, 320, 323, 325 vitalism 233 VKontakte 242 Vogler, Thomas A. 56 volk 50 Volkan, Vamik 243 vorwurfsvoll 81 voyeuristic 339, 343, 345–347, 408 Vulliamy, Ed 386–387 vulnerability 12, 15–16, 41, 67, 71, 81, 95, 98, 115, 134, 139, 165, 167, 170, 268, 320, 322, 436; common corporeal 194; hermeneutical 170; ontological 138; poetics of 137–139 Waberi, Abdourahman 396 Waffen-SS 310 Wake, Caroline 332, 334 Walker, Alice 46, 173 Walker, Heather 225 Walker, Janet 431 Walcott, Derek 187, 195–197 Walkowitz, Rebecca 258 Wallace, Molly 356 Wallis, Mick 330, 333–334 Wandersee, J. H. 281 war: culture 418, 420, 422, 424–426; literature 393, 418; memories 379; neurosis 11, 13; of

Troy 91; on Terror 95–96, 194, 261–262, 393, 418, 426, 434; poetry 372, 425; psychiatry 392; trauma 242, 389, 392–393, 418–419, 423, 442, 447 Warburg, Aby 59, 125 Ward, Jesmyn 430–434, 436 Wardi, Charlotte 400 Warhol, Andy 97, 334 Warren, Joyce 164 waste 112, 237, 294, 385, 387, 423, 439, 441, 443, 446–448, 450 Watson, Julia 67–68, 71, 75 Watt, Ben 269–270 Watts, Nick 276 Waxman, Zoë 163–164 Wegner, Phillip E. 207–208 Weigel, Sigrid 102–103, 111 Weigl, Bruce 387, 391 Weilnböck, Harald 243 Weinstein, Harvey 250 Weisaeth, Lars 13 Weissman, Gary 117 Weitzman, Lenore 164 Weizman, Eyal 117 West Germany 215–217 Western: Europe 92; European 114, 259–260; humanist philosophy 237; Modernity 178, 188; psychiatry 181; trauma theory 231–232 White, Daniel 142, 146 White, Hayden 54, 57 Whitehead, Anne 26, 68, 138, 243, 258–259, 363–364, 368, 409–410, 429–430 Whitlock, Gillian 66, 307, 313 Wicomb, Zoë 236–237 Wiedergutmachung 216 Wiesel, Elie 66, 114–115, 213, 372 Wieviorka, Annette 66, 69, 112, 117 Wikipedia 242 wildfire 275 Wilentz, Gay 180 Wilkomirski, Binjamin 70, 259, 289, 368 Williams, C. K. 438 Williams, Kayla 425 Williams, Raymond 59, 145, 149 Wilson, J. K. 99 Wilson, Timothy 147 Wimsatt Jr., William Kurtz 149 Winter, Jay 111 Winterson, Jeanette 308 witness 1, 18–19, 39, 41, 52, 54–56, 58, 66–75, 81, 83, 103, 105–106, 112–113, 132, 136, 154, 156–158, 162–163, 165–170, 203, 216, 244, 246, 253, 257, 270, 278–279, 289–290, 298, 308, 311, 321–323, 332, 337–340, 353, 366–367, 369, 371, 378, 390, 396, 399, 401–402, 412, 415, 424, 429, 432–433, 446, 448; bearing 72–75, 111, 114–118, 223, 288,

478

Index 434; narratives 70–71, 170; testimony 114, 116–117 witnessing 6, 19, 54–56, 63, 66, 70–71, 73, 75, 96, 104–105, 111–118, 150, 170, 194, 213, 215, 246, 268, 297, 299, 332, 334, 408, 428; affective practices of 329; collective 163, 166–167; crises of 19, 115; fantasies of 117; media 245; mobile 245; secondary 41–42, 300, 319; self-witnessing 42, 412; theories of 112 Wolfe, Cary 233, 442 Wood, James 261 Woods, Angela 273 Woods, Clyde 433 Woods, Eric Taylor 45 Woods, Tim 299 Woolf, Virginia 267, 269 Wordpress 242 working class 14 working(-)through 4, 6, 28, 30–31, 34, 55, 91, 97, 127, 131–139, 194, 233, 335, 409 world heritage sites 47 world risk society 356 World Trade Center 245, 259, 301, 305, 411 Worms, Frédéric 124 wound culture 96, 195, 408, 411, 415 Wright, Evan 424

Wright, Richard 69 Wu, Duncan 298 Wundt, Wilhelm Max 142 Yablonka, Hanna 113 Yaeger, Patricia 307 Yahoo 242 Yale School 18, 37 Yanagihara, Hanya 23, 26, 31–33, 227–228, 292–294 Yezhov terror 302 yoga 226, 389 Yorkshire Ripper 319 Young, Alan 392 Young, Matt 425 YouTube 241–242 Yusin, Jennifer 20 Yuval-Davis, Nira 174 Zeitlin, Froma 116 Zeus 323 Zhukova, Ekatherina 48 Zillmann, Dolf 245 Žižek, Slavoj 19, 140, 356 Zukic, Naida 244 Zunshine, Lisa 221

479