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The Trauma Question
Abstract
In this book, Roger Luckhurst both introduces and advances the fields of cultural memory and trauma studies, tracing the ways in which ideas of trauma have become a major element in contemporary Western conceptions of the self.
The Trauma Question outlines the origins of the concept of trauma across psychiatric, legal and cultural-political sources from the 1860s to the coining of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in 1980. It further explores the nature and extent of ‘trauma culture’ from 1980 to the present, drawing upon a range of cultural practices from literature, memoirs and confessional journalism through to photography and film. The study covers a diverse range of cultural works, including writers such as Toni Morrison, Stephen King and W. G. Sebald, artists Tracey Emin, Christian Boltanski and Tracey Moffatt, and film-makers David Lynch and Atom Egoyan.
The Trauma Question offers a significant and fascinating step forward for those seeking a greater understanding of the controversial and ever-expanding field of trauma research.
... Before I begin my analysis, I wish to point to several elements of the context in which the film appeared. These elements reveal how stories of trauma function within society: according to Roger Luckhurst (2008), something called "judicious truth" is at NOW YOU HEAR IT, NOW YOU SEE IT 97 work when trauma narratives are judged to be adequate within public discourse. The "judicious truth" refers to the process through which the reader and the community of readers probe the autobiographical pact, working as detectives to determine the degree of verisimilitude that a trauma story has. ...
Although trauma and memory have been a focus of cultural studies for more than twenty years now, few scholarly works focus on medium-specific representations of trauma and even fewer comment on the tendency of trauma representations to be autobiographical in the twenty-first century. Since it was established as a genre in the 1960s, the autobiographical documentary has flourished due to the increased accessibility to recording equipment offered by technological advancement. The present paper will analyse two autodocumentaries, namely Sarah Polley‟s Stories We Tell (2012) and Chantal Ackerman‟s No Home Movie (2015), both of which represent the death of the filmmaker‟s mother and its aftermath. However, while Polley‟s autodocumentary was well-received by the audience, Ackerman‟s personal documentary was seen as an improper representation. I aim to investigate the context of creation for both films and how their form made these representations of trauma successful and unsuccessful, respectively.
... As Terri Tomsky has noted, such zero-sum debates constitute a 'trauma economy' in which memories are mediated by 'economic, cultural, discursive, and political structures that guide, enable and ultimately institutionalize the representation, travel and attention to certain traumas ' (2011: 53). So central has the idea of trauma become to questions about identity, inclusion, and belonging that critics have argued that we are living in a trauma culture, defined by a valorization of victimhood (Farrell 1998;Luckhurst 2003;Luckhurst 2008;Kaplan 2005). ...
... But beyond the terms of good and bad modernisms, old and new modernist studies, the idea of risk as a critical or emancipatory category has, in the early twenty-first century, lost something of its pizzazz. In striking ways, risk has come to be supplanted by a 'trauma culture' that has rendered psychic pain one of the dominant discourses of political and aesthetic culture in the postwar period (Kaplan 2005;Luckhurst 2008;Rothe 2011;Cvetkovich 2012;Halberstam 2014). Trauma culture's more recent mutation into the 'micro-aggression' and a 'call out' culture surely serves to further tame political or aesthetic risk, while at times coming dangerously close to a 'master morality'. ...
This introductory essay for the Australian Feminist Studies special issue on Modernist Women and Risk examines the changing fortunes of risk for feminist aesthetic and political work. It considers how risk in the work of modernist women intellectuals, writers and artists prompts us to imagine what it might mean in the twenty-first century to ‘risk anything’?
... As Terri Tomsky has noted, such zero-sum debates constitute a 'trauma economy' in which memories are mediated by 'economic, cultural, discursive, and political structures that guide, enable and ultimately institutionalize the representation, travel and attention to certain traumas ' (2011: 53). So central has the idea of trauma become to questions about identity, inclusion, and belonging that critics have argued that we are living in a trauma culture, defined by a valorization of victimhood (Farrell 1998;Luckhurst 2003;Luckhurst 2008;Kaplan 2005). ...
Trauma has become a catchword of our time and a central category in contemporary theory and criticism. In this illuminating and accessible volume, Lucy Bond and Stef Craps:
- provide an account of the history of the concept of trauma from the late nineteenth century to the present day
- examine debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts
- trace the origins and growth of literary trauma theory
- introduce the reader to key thinkers in the field
- explore important issues and tensions in the study of trauma as a cultural phenomenon
- outline and assess recent critiques and revisions of cultural trauma research
Trauma is an essential guide to a rich and vibrant area of literary and cultural inquiry.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Not Even Past
1. The History of Trauma
2. Words for Wounds
3. Trauma Theories
4. The Future of Trauma
Conclusion: The Limits of Trauma
Glossary
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Lucy Bond is a principal lecturer in English literature at the University of Westminster, UK.
Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University, Belgium.
DISCOUNT
Use the promotional code FLR40 at checkout to receive a 20% discount: http://www.routledge.com/9780415540421.
... Since then the theory has been widely criticized for its inherent inconsistencies and contradictions with serious limitations for literary studies (Luckhurst, 2008). ...
In this chapter I explore the transformations between history and memory and the views surrounding the dynamics governing the interaction between the two fields of enquiry. I then move on to define cultural memory and identify the concept I use in this study, as well as providing my own approach to understanding cultural memory in the Arab context. I make the transition to trauma as a subdivision in memory studies and its development as an area of decolonial research. My discussion will also draw attention to the connections made between these concepts and identity within a framework that acknowledges the intertwined political affiliations and play of power involved in the process of history-writing and memory-making. Finally, I discuss a new possible rhetoric of resilience in the aftermath of traumatic experiences and the problematic nature of the “bless of forgetfulness”.
... Attention was also directed towards the acknowledgement of its potentially fundamental contributions to a range of disciplines. Since then the theory has been widely criticized for its inherent inconsistencies and contradictions with serious limitations for literary studies (Luckhurst 2008). ...
Fictional representations of memory and traumatic experiences occupy a crucial space in contemporary literary studies. However, while empirical analysis of these two themes is flourishing beyond their traditional subjects and is enriched by studies examining narratives of memory and trauma in relation to post-colonial contexts (Craps, 2013; Ward, 2015), the theory continues to be euro-centric, revealing a substantial lack of awareness of cultural diversity. Moreover, critics argue against approaching memory as a standalone discipline (Gensburger, 2016) and go as far as anticipating its “soft landing” due to the current saturation with memory, suggesting changing the focus to the present and the future (Rosenfeld, 2009). Decolonial epistemology challenges mainstream trauma and memory studies, expanding their focus beyond Western contexts (Vissar, 2015). This research contributes to the endeavour of decolonizing trauma and memory studies, through an in-depth analysis of four novels by the Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour (1964-2014): Granada (2003, orig. Arabic, Thulatheyyat Gheranata, 1998), The Woman from Tantoura (2014, orig. Arabic, Al-Tantoureyah 2010), Blue Lorries (2014, orig. Arabic, Faraj, 2008) and Specters (2010, orig. Arabic, Atyaf, 1999).
My analysis addresses three main questions: 1) Why is it still important to study cultural memory and investigate traumatic histories despite the criticism and calls to move beyond these concepts? 2) What alternative approaches to canonical trauma theory and Western theories of memory are possible when interpreting literary works? 3) Can traumatic experiences and memories of suffering be viewed as positive forces for self-preservation and resilience and help overcome the pathological stigma?
To answer these questions, I rely on critical historiography studies (Nora, 1989; Assmann, 2008), psychoanalytical theory (Abraham and Torok, 1994), social theory (Foucault, 1977; Alexander, 2013) and cultural studies (Said, 1984; Spivak, 1988), and I contribute to the scholarship in the fields of memory and trauma studies by proposing “Circles of Memory” as an alternative approach to understanding memory in postcolonial contexts. In this model I build on Assmann’s concept of transnational memory and Erll’s concept of traveling memory to suggest a visualization of memory that is dynamic and interactive, traveling through temporal and special spheres, affected by representation and reception. I also suggest that traumatic experiences can be integrated into individual and collective identities to achieve self-affirmation and promote solidarity among people with traumatic histories. In the field of literary studies, this study contributes to positioning Radwa Ashour’s major works in the broader field of trauma narratives and representations of memory, a space where Arab literary experiences are often neglected, and it shows that shifting the field of observation can produce innovative theories.
... Esto conduce a una tensión intrínseca: la definición del trauma como irrepresentable, esencialmente 'no narrativo', contrasta con la profusión de narrativas que surgen a partir de, y giran en torno a, eventos traumáticos. Como señala Luckhurst (2008), si el trauma, por la disrupción que supone, desafía la posibilidad de narración, esto actúa como un acicate para ensayar formas culturales capaces de dar cuenta, explicar, aprehender el trauma, volverlo accesible, mostrar su esencia contradictoria. Las ficciones del trauma son aquellas que, a través de estrategias innovadoras que giran en torno a la disrupción de la linealidad, la suspensión de la lógica causal, las anacronías, las revelaciones desplazadas que retrospectivamente reescriben el significado narrativo, la intertextualidad, la repetición, son capaces de 'traducir' la esencia de lo traumático. ...
... In the posttrauma era we recognize that everyone has been traumatized, including the victimizers/oppressors, and we are willing to forgive and forget. Everyone has undergone trauma, perhaps even as part of the modern condition (Luckhurst, 2008;Seltzer, 1997), everyone carries a trauma: we must listen to everyone, have mercy and forgive. Clearly such a process ultimately harms the victims of actual trauma. ...
This chapter examines the role of the witness as a narrator, writer, and historian through a comparison of the writings and testimony of Primo Levi and those of Georges Perec. Despite the significant differences between the two, which cannot be ignored, both Levi and Perec focus on the role and the ability of the witness to provide authentic testimony. Based upon this comparison between Levi's testimony and that of Perec, I argue that the very fact that we are in an era of testimony in which the witness is also his own historian means that there are no innocent "uncontaminated" witnesses. Moreover, I attempt to show that Levi and Perec, each in his own way, propose an authentic model for bearing witness.
... The aesthetical dimension gives us an idea of the horribleness and the "presence" of war. Yet, trauma is refractory to logo centric communication and appears fragmented in its externalization (Luckhurst, 2013). The wounds and suffering could be healed by replacing disgust with beauty, by the contingent and fading memory, or by using tropes of language and arts to solve its tension (Best and Robson, 2005). ...
Evil doing is part of everyday social life and is extremely difficult to be counterbalanced by "good" practices, let alone to be eliminated. Even in the realm of abstract politics, there is no simple solution or way to understand their overlapping nature. In that sense, this study explores the relationship between both sides through aesthetics and constructs a dialogical analysis transposed to politics. This relationship shows that beautiful and disgusting politics are not simply two sides of the same coin. The former has a limited potential to counterbalance the latter and, paradoxically, without its counterpart it has a limited potential to promote social transformations.
This paper examines the conditions of dissemination and reception of narratives in the novel Le Cavalier et son ombre, which plunges us into the destiny of a young woman, Khadidja, traumatised by an event comparable to the Rwandan genocide. In contrast to a racist interpretation that would make this event the umpteenth occurrence of a series of collective traumas that are bound to recur in African history, I suggest a reading that highlights the mechanisms of subversion of discourses by leaders and, consequently, the attempts made by the characters to free themselves from them. In order to unravel this mystery and trace the source of this strange and invisible original trauma, the article begins by distinguishing the narrative strata and showing that their intertwining is already a traumatic fabrication. It then explores how the subversion of narrative frameworks unfolds at different levels and exacerbates the characters' traumas, which are buried in attitudes and behaviours that can be described as “madness”. Finally, the article shows that the origin of madness lies less in the genocide itself than in the subversion of discourses – in particular of the narrative scenography of storytelling.
Even though literary works serve as excellent media for bearing witness to trauma, postcolonial and diasporic literary texts are often dismissed for their falsified accounts of traumatic life experiences. Recent studies on African American literature have stressed the need for a decolonized conceptualization of trauma that would not only disrupt the long-existing white Global Northern perspectives but also recognize feelings of empathy and solidarity among members of the community in these literary corpora. The present study adopts a hybrid analytical framework to examine the representations of trauma in the Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013). Specifically, we draw upon Gérard Genette’s narrative levels, Ron Eyerman’s collective memory, and Jeffrey Charles Alexander’s collective identity to argue that the novel defies conventional forms of narrative by depicting postcolonial and diasporic identities as volatile and dynamic constructs. The findings indicate the multiple ways in which the story presents diasporic Africans – that is, the female protagonist Ifemelu and her male lover Obinze – as capable of overcoming the adverse effects of traumatic memories by chronicling an authentic record of their experiences. The study also reveals that the leading female character, like the novelist Adichie, creates an empowering platform for migrants of various ethnicities to speak up about their traumatic experiences, and thereby establish what is called ‘cross-cultural solidarity’ in reconstructing a new community.
Marc Adelman’s Stelen is a collection of 150 images of men posing at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Germany. Understanding the photographs that compromise Stelen involves tracking a number of shifts that have taken place across different fields: a change in the understanding of the role of the public memorial which has seen the construction of ‘anti-memorials’ or ‘counter-monuments’ such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; a turn towards participatory memory practices in museums and at memorial sites; digital photography and the impact of social media. In the first part of this paper, I explore how these trends intersect in order to give an account of the conditions of production of the photographs. Adelman has proposed that the photographs might be understood in relation to the role that the memory of the Holocaust plays in contemporary queer life. In the second part of this paper, I use Michael Rothberg’s concept of Multidirectional Memory to consider Stelen as a counter-archive that offers a multidirectional articulation of grief.
While it is now widely accepted that any understanding of PTSD needs to be contextualised within cultural parameters, there is a lack of pedagogical strategies to assist postgraduate psychology students engage with both the psychodynamic and socio-political aspects of trauma. To assist, role-play is put forward as a teaching strategy, enabling students to explore the impact of taken-for-granted attitudes, social norms and values on how traumatic stress is expressed and experienced. An illustration of a socio-politically rich role-play is used to demonstrate how, without engaging with trauma as socially embedded, comprehensive understanding, empathy, and care cannot be achieved.
How do particular genres and forms, with their distinct conventions and histories, shape representations of refugee experience? How do representations of refugeedom transform the conventions of genres such as memoir, theatre, comics, song, the essay, poetry or the novel? In this chapter, we outline a humanities approach to refugee studies with reference to significant contributions in the field. Then, we introduce the genres and forms covered in this collection and the relevance of these forms for claiming human rights: the memoir, the graphic novel, poetry, theatre, song, documentary film, media art, the Bildungsroman and the literary novel.
This article argues that Adania Shibli’s fiction explores the limits of individual and collective Palestinian subjectivity in order to emphasize a profound sense of estrangement from representational systems, which strikes at the heart of the redemptive function of postcolonial literature. Through concerted acts of narrative distancing in her novellas, Touch, We Are All Equally Far from Love, and Minor Detail, Shibli pushes the reader into a suspended state of jarring alienation, which results in a foregrounding of tensions between empathy and the ethics of representation. In doing so, these works of fiction become performative of a Palestinian identity that has been evacuated by the processes of postmemory in addition to continued erasure as a result of an ongoing state of coloniality and present-day injustices. The article concludes that Shibli’s fiction hails a new era of Palestinian literature, a post-sumud (steadfastness) sensibility, which is marked by unbearable fragmentation, futility, and melancholic despair.
Children's literature scholarship has a complex relationship with the dominant trauma paradigm. In children's historical fiction, nonfiction, and picturebooks, the understanding of traumatic memory and the possibility of witnessing historical trauma contest the premises of the paradigm. By minimizing or deviating from Cathy Caruth's account, authors of these texts provide a different understanding of traumatic memory, one which permits the child protagonist to function as a witness to her own traumatic experience or as a witness to the traumatic memories of others. This different understanding facilitates an exploration of psychological responses, a probing of what child witnesses can comprehend, and a sensitivity to children's agency. After surveying different critical approaches to trauma in children's literature scholarship, this chapter analyzes diverse texts to highlight the moral complexity of traumatic memory and the narrative and pedagogical issues of representing historical trauma in young people's literature.
IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship: Volume 10 – Issue 2
Editor-in-Chief: Bernard Montoneri, Taipei, Taiwan
Co-Editor: Rachel Franks, University of Newcastle, Australia
Published: December 15, 2021
ISSN: 2187-0608
https://doi.org/10.22492/ijl.10.2
https://iafor.org/journal/iafor-journal-of-literature-and-librarianship/volume-10-issue-2/
For many readers, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings stands out as a memorable, even life-changing book. Some readers have written autobiographically about reading this autobiographical text. In this essay, I look briefly at some of this writing about reading Angelou’s book, asking how it has affected different readers in the US and UK at different moments. For many, Angelou’s representation of Black experience in the American South, and of childhood sexual abuse, is crucial. I propose that for a reader such as myself, living in the wake of the widespread discrediting of ‘recovered memories’ that emerged in the 1990s, I Know Why could serve to destabilise the boundary between uncontested childhood memories and discredited memories of abuse.
Modern information technologies have radically transfigured human experience. The extensive use of mnemonic devices, for instance, has redefined the subject by externalizing aspects of inner consciousness. These transformations involve the incorporeal but deeply felt, violent dislocations of human experience, traumas that are grounded in reality but which challenge symbolic resources because they are difficult to articulate. I am interested in how the unseen wounding of mnemonic intervention is registered in the “impossible” language of speculative fiction (SF). SF is both rooted in the “real” and “estranged” from reality, and thus able to give form to impossible injuries. This paper argues that Haruki Murakami uses the mode of SF in his novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, to explore how mnemonic substitutes interfere with the complex process of remembering World War II in Japan. I will demonstrate how, through SF, Murakami is able to give form to an unseen crisis of memory in postwar Japan, a crisis marked by the unspeakable shock of war and by the trauma that results from the intrusion of artificial memories upon one’s consciousness of history.
This paper explores the themes of hospitality and trauma in Alexandra Wood’s The Human Ear (2015) by focusing on the modes of encounter with the Other in the play. As Lucy, a woman in her twenties, tries to come to terms with the death of her mother as a result of an unspecified bomb attack, she finds out that her estranged brother, Jason, killed himself. In the meantime, however, a man who claims to be her brother keeps turning up at her door, and through these encounters we can trace the possibilities and limits of hospitality. By referring to the theories of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Sara Ahmed on home and hospitality, this paper argues that in The Human Ear , the redefinition of the relationship with the Other is represented as a means to come to terms with trauma as Lucy’s process of welcoming the stranger is connected to her process of healing from trauma.
A recent special issue of this journal focussed on the emergence of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) movement as a key driver of Scottish social policy. In this article, we extend the critiques advanced therein by locating ACEs within a wider cultural turn towards psychological trauma which, over the past decade, has become reified as a master theory across social welfare. Yet, the concept is insubstantial and ill-defined, and the claims made for policy based upon it are at best disputable. Its prominence is less evidence-based than it is testimony to how a particular (cultural and professional) ideology, regardless of its intellectual merit, can be insinuated into policy discourse. ACEs, we suggest, is utilised to provide the trauma paradigm with some ostensibly quantifiable substance. We illustrate our argument through reference to the Scottish Government’s National Trauma Training Programme (2020). We go on to consider some of the implications of such ideological capture for the direction of Scottish social welfare policy and practice. The prominence given to trauma perspectives has potentially iatrogenic consequences for those identified or self-identifying as traumatised. At a wider level, it reflects a professional and epistemic privileging of a narrow, ostensibly therapeutic, worldview which, in turn, acts to marginalise ‘the social’ that characterised erstwhile Scottish approaches to welfare.
La théologie africaine qui se découvre chez J.-M. Ela entre en dialogue avec les sciences humaines. Cet article postule le même dialogue avec la psychanalyse. À partir de la théorie du trauma, il s’intéresse à la violence coloniale, étatique et ecclésiale ainsi qu’aux événements historiques qui affectent la vie des hommes et des femmes, en perturbant gravement parfois leurs capacités de pensée et de symbolisation. En creux, à partir du vécu traumatique engendré par cette violence en postcolonie, il est possible de voir la pertinence d’un christianisme africain qui réécrit l’histoire de l’Afrique en laissant Dieu se dire comme un Dieu libérateur.
This article contends that the evolution from a postmodern to a transmodern paradigm explains the changes in gay and queer representation from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library to Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk. With this purpose in mind, the analysis is structured on a triple axis: the articulation of non-western bodies and sexuality; the temporal framings that convey both novels’ discourses; and the progression from neo-Freudian trauma narratives to decolonized ones. After close reading the two novels, it can be argued that Rainbow Milk contests The Swimming-Pool Library on all three concerns. The black queer body is not only vindicated, but given a voice of its own. The teleological framework, which Hollinghurst’s novel revises, does not work in Mendez’s. Finally, Rainbow Milk works through the individual and collective traumata of the protagonist and his community instead of acting out a discursive aporia.
This paper aims to offer both an interpretation and a critique of the epistemological foundations underlying one of the most recent approaches to trauma studies: cultural trauma theory. After the First World War, the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, inquired into whether his diagnostic of “traumatic neurosis” could shed light on how collectives deal with unsettling experiences and memories. Throughout the intervening decades, Freud´s insights into collective trauma have attracted the interest of scholars from various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, from literary studies to historiography, memory studies, and, finally – the focus of this paper – cultural and social theory. By underlining the ways in which the proponents of cultural trauma theory – Jeffrey Alexander, Neil Smelzer, Piotr Sztompka, Bernhard Giesen, and Ron Eyerman – have reframed Freudian ideas regarding the transmission of legacies of collective suffering, the paper considers whether the notion of trauma can be extended to the analysis of cultures and societies. It explores the ambivalent relationship between psychoanalysis and contemporary cultural trauma theory to disclose the theoretical assumptions and weaknesses of the latter.
If 18th‐century literary criticism embraces trauma theory, it will do so belatedly. In 2020, trauma theory has become so much a part of the literary landscape that it is hard to imagine literary studies without it. Not only have modern and contemporary literary critics explored its tenets, but also scholars in Romanticism, 19th‐century American literature, and in the last 10 years or so, in Renaissance and early modern studies, although the number of these treatments remain few. By contrast, 18th‐century studies' wholehearted embrace of new historicism has put it on a different trajectory from trauma studies, and only in recent years has it begun to reset its course and make space for trauma theory, among other less unilaterally historicist approaches. Yet if meaning is necessarily and perennially belated—as trauma theorists espouse—then saying that 18th‐century studies will embrace trauma theory belatedly can mean that we may only now understand its significance to our field. It certainly does not mean that it is too late to learn from its lessons or alter what we do in the classroom. In fact, the events of 2020 point to the urgency of more directly serving as historical witnesses to the trauma of the 18th century, and the need to do so with the scholarly rigor and nuance that has so long distinguished our field.
Le but de cet article est de présenter une alternative à la relation oppositionnelle entre la mémoire et l'oubli, pour envisager le potentiel créateur de l'oubli. Ce changement de perspective oblige à reconsidérer l'oubli dans une relation d'écart négatif avec la mémoire afin de mettre à jour une paradoxale relation au manque. Cette relation particulière, définie comme disjonction spectrale, permet de repenser la manière dont on établit les liens entre, d'une part, la mémoire et l'oubli, et d'autre part, le sujet et l'événement. Prenant l'exemple du deuxième roman expérimental d'Adam Thorpe, Still (1995), l'article analysera de manière détaillée les différentes déclinaisons de cette relation au manque ainsi que le désir qu'il suscite, à travers le manque du signifié, la projection figurale et le manque de mouvement.
Abstract
The act of remembering a traumatic past has become one of the strategies for Palestinians to counter-assert settler colonial efforts denying Palestinians the right of return and obstructing their reclamation of memory. I examine the poetics of memories and the politics of representations in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses (2017). These novels present memory, whether individual or collective, as a non-violent resistance against the oppressor and an affirmation of the Palestinian national identity. Although Palestinian memories are characterized by compulsion to repeat, I argue that this compulsive return goes beyond the psychodynamics of remembering purported by trauma theory, and includes moral, political and ethical responsibilities. Reading Palestinian literature in line with trauma theory decolonizes the theory and extends its analysis to events happening in the global South.
Keywords: decolonization; memory fiction; resistance; Palestinian displacement,
Susan Abulhawa, Hala Alyan
The ancient Tamil epic Silappatikaram describes the flourishing portal city of Puhar and Manimekalai tells the story of how it was engulfed by the sea. The Sri Lankan chronicles Thupavamsa and Mahavamsa speak of another tsunami that was to have swallowed the kingdom of Kelani Tissa. The brave princess Vihara Mahadevi appeased the anger of nature that was intended for her father who had ill-treated a Buddhist monk by sacrificing herself. Surprisingly she survived. Almost two thousand years later, a daughter of the Island survives the tsunami of 2004 while tragically losing her parents, her husband and two sons in Wave (2013) by Sonali Deraniyagala. Deraniyagala’s story about coping with loss and grief and surviving shuttles between two Islands – England and Sri Lanka. The love of Sri Lanka surfaces in the humanitarian approach of Dr. Philippa Hawley, a British physician who had performed her internship in Sri Lanka and published There’s No Sea in Salford in 2013. The doctor-narrator Penny tries to re-establish contact with Kiri de Souza who was working as a nurse in the hospital where she did her internship in Sri Lanka and had married a Tamil doctor and settled in England. A story of liberation from cancer and domestic violence ensues that is enlarged and translated into a story of solidarity with the vulnerable in Sri Lanka. Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust in the Eyes (2014) evokes the close relationship between Renu and Savi, two cousins separated by civil war. During the trip to Sri Lanka from England undertaken to come to grips with her childhood, Savi is not able to retrieve anything but is helplessly swept away in the fatal swell of the sea. The aim of this paper is to first identify the type of narratives that insiders and outsiders choose to write when addressing the tsunami, then analyze what these tsunami narratives tell us about gender, family, ethnic, and race relations in times of personal, political and natural catastrophes. This paper finally explores how a pathway to peace is found across the geography of pain in these intimations of mortality.
Why Am I Still Thinking about World War II? Post-memory Experience of Sacha Batthyany
Sacha Batthyany found out that in 1945 his aunt hosted a ball during which 180 Jews were shot by her guests. Their mass grave has not been found until today. She also helped many Nazis escape from Hungary. Sacha’s family kept these stories secret for years. For Sacha, the discovery of his family’s past becomes the beginning of a new life, recognizing the tormenting feeling of guilt as inherited from his ancestors. Can we define the sense of guilt as traumatic? We can certainly try to do it. Yet, trauma assumes different shapes and reveals its huge interpretative potential.
African Canadian author Esi Edugyan’s second novel Half Blood Blues, published in 2011, undertakes an excavation of the trajectories of different types of blackness across the convoluted history of Europe after the Great War and the Nazi regime by focusing on the tragic whereabouts of Afro-European denizen Hiero Falk and his jazz band. The story exemplifies the complex perception of the black subject’s European identity and its resilient attitude by unpacking their ghostly memories and the exclusionary racial policies in a continent caught up into different wars. Thus, using as a theoretical framework the politics of cultural memory alongside the aesthetics of the (postcolonial) gothic and its intersection with the workings of racialization this essay focuses on Edugyan’s retrieval of Afro-European memory haunted by a context of racial supremacy and erasure to outline the much needed dialogue between European history and its colonial endeavor.
Abstract: Sexualized violence is a citizenly issue. It is a phenomenon that, in the Canadian context, is formed and informed by the settler-colonial nation-state. Yet, as the spike in attention to instances of sexualized violence in news media suggests, sexualized violence is also a sociopolitical ill, one that causes harms to persons who experience it and those who care for them. How, then, might we ensure that sexualized violence is no longer a possibility? Feminist anti-sexualized violence advocates have created or contributed to several identifiable approaches to sexualized violence prevention: education about consent, teaching self-defence, and implicating bystanders in the continuation of sexualized violence. In this dissertation, I focus on two of these approaches to sexualized violence prevention – consent discourse and fighting strategies – and consider how their amenability to a normative form of rationality that governs conceptions of citizenship – neoliberalism – might not only limit the preventative efficacy of such approaches, but also work to (re)produce the very conditions that allow sexualized violence to occur in the first place. Analyzing these prevention approaches through close readings of academic theories of prevention and practical mobilizations of these approaches (i.e. a poster campaign, a short independent film), I ultimately argue that while neoliberalism’s idea(l)s of individualism, personal responsibility, and normative interpretations of ‘equality’ function to potentially limit or contradict a feminist anti-sexualized violence goal of emphasizing the structural causes of sexualized violence, it is also the case that these theoretical and practical projects can produce alternative understandings of what it means to be ‘human’ and to ‘live together.’
The paper suggests that the increasing proliferation of network fictions in literature, film, television and the internet may be interpreted through a theoretical framework that reconceptuallises the originally strictly
psychoanalytic concept of the Unheimlich (Freud’s idea of the ‘unhomely’ or ‘uncanny’) within the context of political, economic and cultural disources fo globalisation. ‘Network fictions’ are those texts consisting of multiple interlocking narratives set in various times and places that explore the interconnections of characters and events across different storylines: novels such as William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), Hari Kunzro’s Transmission (2005) and Gods Without Men (2011), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), or Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled (2005) are some examples. My argument is that central to these fictions is a sense of a ‘global unhomely’. The sense of displacement, unhomeliness and global mobility that is conveyed in these fictions is fundamental to the experience of the Unheimlich. In addition, the ability of the concept to convey a combined sense of the familiar and the strange is useful in exploring the ways in which these fictions engage with theoretical debates on globalisation that perceive the interaction between global flows and local cultures either in terms of homogenisation and uniformity or of heterogenisation
and hybridity. Moreover, the repetitive temporality of the Unheimlich is another distinctive aspect that allows a reading of the disjunctive, non-linear temporal structure of these fictions from this perspective. The
‘repetition compulsion’, however, that Freud considered to be an example of uncanniness was also theorised by him as a post-traumatic symptom, and this implicit association of uncanniness with post-traumatic experience also allows to interpret the persistent preoccupation of these fictions with suffering and disaster, as well as their explorations of the ways in which collective tragedy and personal trauma reverberate within an increasingly globalised, interconnected world.
The Railway Man (Teplitzky, 2013) recreates the experience of Eric Lomax, a Far East Prisoner of War (FEPOW) who was brutally interrogated by the Japanese but later reconciled with his captor, the interpreter Nagase Takashi. Adapted from Lomax’ autobiography, the film was produced in the context of on-going debates regarding Anglo-Japanese reconciliation and the absence of a formal Japanese apology for their treatment of FEPOWs. The adaptation departs from Lomax’ autobiography, and omits the support groups and initiatives to commemorate the FEPOW experience, to present the FEPOWs as a ‘forgotten army’. In addition, the adaptation includes a fictional collective of marginalized FEPOWs in England and a memorial museum in Kanchanaburi at the site where Lomax was tortured and where Nagase works following the war. While framing the FEPOWs as ‘forgotten’, the adaptation simultaneously suggests they are ‘remembered’ in Kanchanaburi and privileges the museum as a space of remembrance in which reconciliation between the pair can be achieved. However, this space also evokes the controversies surrounding actual memorial sites which have been criticized for marginalizing issues of Japanese culpability. These contradictions and resonances illustrate that The Railway Man adaptation is indicative of the very complexities regarding reconciliation it seeks to manage.
Trauma theory has traditionally positioned itself as an ethical mode of critique. Theorists have since criticized the development, born out of trauma theory’s ethical imperative, of a dominant trauma fiction aesthetic seeking to mimic the inaccessibility of traumatic memory, advocating the use of genres like the Gothic to voice otherwise unspeakable subject matter. However, implicating the Gothic in trauma theory’s ethical project ignores the voyeuristic impulse that drives audiences to seek out the Gothic’s pleasurable excesses. These tensions collide in Pat Barker’s Double Vision (2003), whose seemingly clichéd use of Gothic conventions belies a sophisticated metafictional interrogation of trauma fiction’s ethical complexities.
טראומה היא אירוע מכונן בחייו של אדם. פרויד, ובעקבותיו חוקרים מובילים, טוענים
כי אפשר להתייחס לטראומה ברמת הקבוצה כמו לטראומה ברמת הפרט. במאמר זה
אני מבקר גישה זו בהתייחסי למאפיינים שונים בחוויה הטראומטית. אני מציע כאן
מודל של טראומה הפועלת כמעין חור שחור בספֵרה הציבורית ומעוותת את החלל–זמן.
הסובייקט הפוסט–טראומטי, כך אני מבקש להראות, משמש סוכן טראומה: גופו מנכיח
באופן אלים את הממשי בתוך הסדר הסמלי ומעצב מחדש את הסדר הסמלי, ועם זאת,
על מנת להיות מסוגלים לעבור מטראומה של הפרט לטראומה של הקבוצה, עדיין
נדרשת עבודה רבה הן אמפירית והן תאורטית. יש אפוא לענות על השאלה הבאה: איך
טראומה במישור האישי הופכת להיות טראומה במישור הלאומי. בשלב זה לא ברור
על אילו יסודות עומד רעיון הטראומה במישור הלאומי או רעיון הזיכרון הקולקטיבי,
אך אין ספק שהן פרויד והן לאקאן, כל אחד בדרכו, מסייעים לנו להבין טוב יותר כיצד
חורגת טראומה אישית מהפרט ועוברת לרמת הקבוצה. במובן זה הדיון בפרויד ובלאקאן
אינו עקר אלא מפרה, ופותח לפנינו שער שדרכו אפשר להתחיל לחשוף את היסודות
הטראומטיים של החברה.
Since the events of 11 September 2001, an extensive range of genres increasingly feature traumatized protagonists. However, there are acknowledged difficulties in trying to recreate the actual experience of trauma on screen [Walker, J. 2005. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley and London: University of California Press]. Slavoj Žižek [2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London and New York: Verso] explores this dilemma through an extension of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and places trauma in a category termed ‘the Real’ as a form that is resistant to symbolization. This article examines the signification of trauma in two post-9/11 combat films and considers how they enable an understanding of war trauma through the insertion of visuals which construct their respective narratives as traumatic memory, thereby bringing the viewer closer to Žižek’s concept of the traumatic Real.
The Dalit community has suffered generational, multi-faceted and institutionalised discrimination as a result of the implementation of the Hindu caste system in the Indian society for religious and political reasons. This casteist practice has left a clear mark of social division and inequality and has severely damaged this community’s identity. Mulk Raj Anand, one of the pioneers in addressing this issue, offers a glimpse of what being a Dalit or untouchable entailed in pre-independent India in his short but intense novel Untouchable, in which he narrates episodes of verbal and physical violence and recurrent inter- and intra-caste discrimination, thus depicting the traumatic existence of this oppressed community. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to delineate the aesthetics of Dalit trauma as represented in this short novel and to determine the extent to which this model complies with the pre-existing paradigms of trauma theory or if they need to be reconsidered.
Ann Cvetkovich, in her book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures looks at the definition of 'trauma' and the development of trauma theory over time. Cvetkovich's concentration in trauma is associated with homosexuality and so is my concern in this paper. Using Cvetkovich's book as a starting point, I will discuss how trauma and homosexuality can be related (or not) in the light of two contemporary British fictions-Sarah Waters' The Night Watch and Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army. Waters' The Night Watch is a historical drama set in the Second World War while Hall's The Carhullan Army is a dystopian fiction. Keeping death, destruction, state oppression and the associated collective trauma in the background, the books primarily focus on individual loss and suffering.At the same time, they emphatically display homosexual love, especially lesbianism, and thus raise questions on both the narrative of trauma and queer identity which will be the focus of my discussion in this paper using comparative method and textual analysis.
Artykuł stanowi analizę postaci weterana w literaturze francuskiej, angielskiej i kanadyjskiej przełomu XX oraz XXI wieku. Autorka kreśli portret żołnierza I wojny jako figury abiektu, nie-osoby, zawieszonej w przestrzeni liminalnej. Następnie analizuje relację między nieprzepracowaną traumą, działającą destrukcyjnie na podmiot, a przepracowaniem urazu, które pozwala weteranowi odbudować swoje życie. Interpretuje powieści, które wpisują się w „kulturę rany”, koncentrując się na urazie doznanym przez żołnierza I wojny, uniemożliwiającym mu powrót do normalnego życia. Oprócz poetyki traumy, uczulającej czytelnika na tragedię doznaną przez tysiące mężczyzn w trakcie konfliktu, autorka ukazuje również, w jaki sposób przepracowanie traumy może prowadzić do zaangażowania społecznego. Obok urazu istotny w analizowanej prozie jest więc również wątek wytrwałości i odnowy. Niepokój, którego źródłem jest wojna, pobudza bohaterów do działania na rzecz pokoju.
Yvonne Vera is a reformist writer of Zimbabwe who agitated the society to attend to serious issues in the life of a Zimbabwean woman. This paper will examine Yvonne Vera’s Under the Tongue in which representations of language of monologue contribute to the creation of an atmosphere in which the pain of female body is obviously felt. The legacies of colonialism and strategic policies of nationalism collaborate to facilitate the vulnerability of women thus contributing to their violation of rights and victimisation. It is a metaphorical representation of female resistance against violent male Zimbabwean society. The trauma of the victim is thoughtfully integrated into linguistic and symbolic systems aesthetically created by the writer. Using the discordant chronology of words of the female protagonist, Vera stylistically identifies the silence of a girl who is captive of flashbacks and intrusive thoughts but struggles to liberate herself from the discourse of pain. Restoration of confidence does take place with the power of language. By articulating a private experience of a victimised young girl, the writer reclaims the essential power of women’s speech and silences in the context of gendered nationalist ideology where sacrifices of women have been reduced to an invisible state by historiographers.
Intervening in the current debate about an overemphasis on the individual in classical psychoanalytic trauma theory and the demand for a prioritization of the group in postcolonial trauma studies, this article proposes that Anton Nimblett’s short stories ‘Ring Games’ and titular ‘Sections of an Orange’ from his 2009 collection invite a postcolonial, post-Jungian optic because they portray the devastating effects of a colonized creative unconscious on the characters’ Self, relationships, and the collective. Both short stories explore the traumatic impact of colonialism and neoliberalism on the development of the characters’ unconscious and consciousness, unveiling the obstacles to re-inscribing a traditional heteronormative, Euro-American image of masculinity; individuating as gay; and living an authentic life. Questioning the binary opposites of the individual and the group, both short stories gesture towards the importance of creative self-realization as one cornerstone of individual and collective health when healing the destructive impact of postcolonial and neoliberal power configurations.
The metaphor of cultural trauma, which currently enjoys great popularity in cultural and literary studies, combines two independent traditions of trauma research. The writings on cultural trauma are based primarily on philosophical reflections about Auschwitz and the limits of representation, which emerged in the postwar writings of members of the Frankfurt School and were further developed by a number of poststructuralist thinkers. In addition, the proponents of the cultural trauma metaphor take advantage of the large body of psychological and psychotherapeutic studies about the experiences of actual trauma victims, including victims of the Holocaust. But the attempts to integrate these very different research traditions and concepts of trauma have ultimately not been successful. The writings on cultural trauma display a disconcerting lack of historical and moral precision, which aestheticizes violence and conflates the experiences of victims, perpetrators and spectators of traumatic events.
Me, Myself and Irene (UK release date: September 22, 2000) is the latest film from the Farrelly brothers, specialists of ‘gross-out’ comedies such as Kingpin (1996) and There's Something About Mary (1998). Its plot is simple: boy meets girl, boy fights himself for girl, boy gets girl. Comedian
History & Memory 16.1 (2004) 5-36
There seems to be general agreement among scholars that in Eastern Europe, after the fall of communism, there is a crisis of collective memory. At the same time, there is also disagreement about the causes and nature of this crisis: some attribute it to postcommunist amnesia, a tendency to forget the crimes and compromises of communism, which is responsible for many of the ills of postcommunist society. They usually repeat Santayana's famous dictum that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Other scholars, however, entertain the opposite view and argue that the problem is not forgetting, not that there is too little memory, but rather too much of it: an excessive preoccupation with historical wrongs and injuries, and too many competing versions of history. Claus Offe, therefore, formulated a counter-dictum: "those who remember history are condemned to repeat it." The implication being that strategic forgetting might be preferable.
It turns out, however, that this sense of crisis is not unique to Eastern Europe. It pervades also the scholarship on collective memory in the "Western" world. Pierre Nora's monumental work on the "sites of memory," after all, is introduced with the resignation: "we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left," while Tony Judt's complaint about too much memory in Eastern Europe was coupled with the opposite diagnosis about Western Europe—too little memory and remembering. Nor is there shortage of the counter-assertion about too much memory in West European and North American societies. Observers of the German and American cultural scenes, for example, have discerned a "fascination, even obsession, with historical memory ... [a] surging commitment to remembering," and have speculated about its causes and consequences.
With so many complaints one starts to suspect that the problem may not lie with the societies in question, and their purported preferences to forget or to remember, but with the concept of "collective memory" itself, and those who formulate it. It seems that whenever "collective memory" is discussed, it immediately elicits doubts, which, to be precise, touch not only on its quantity, but also more generally on its authenticity, validity and significance. This suspicion is reinforced by another observation, namely that the same complaints and doubts have attached themselves with tenacity, over the past century, not only or primarily to the concept of "collective memory" but even more so to the concept of individual "memory," which ever since Thèodule Ribot's identification of "diseases of memory" has been at the center of scientific scrutiny and cultural conflict.
Why are there so many doubts and complaints about memory, collectiveor individual? Is it because it is in the nature of memory to be imprecise, indeterminate and indeed many times reconstructed or invented? I do not think so. First, one cannot use a universal human constant to explain a historical event—the rise of contemporary complaints and doubts about memory. Second, and related, any judgment on the imprecision or indeterminacy of memory, about whether there is too much or too little of it, is impossible to render unless against the background of a certain understanding of what memory is good for, how it should be used, what it should do for the collective or individual subject. Memory might well be somewhat imprecise and indeterminate, but it is only when we expect it to answer some pressing need that we begin to problematize it as such, or to become concerned with its quality and quantity. And it is not enough to say that memory is expected to reflect accurately the collective or individual past, because this merely begs the question: why do we need an accurate representation of the past to begin with? How accurate should it be? For what purpose?
I would suggest therefore that the sense of a crisis of memory, and the diagnosis of too much or too little memory, are generated not by the universal nature of human memory but by a historically specific will to memory, a constellation of discourses and practices within which memory is entrusted with a certain goal and...
What we call today damage in the form of psychiatric injury has been in the past referred to as “nervous shock”. In this article the concept of nervous shock in medicine is examined. This term was originally used by surgeons and physicians. It was introduced into legal usage from medicine, and, although this term is not used in clinical practice today, it continues to be utilised by lawyers who have assigned to it a specific juridical meaning. The evolution of liability for negligently caused psychiatric injury is traced by examining three seminal Australian cases.
n 1865 Charles Dickens narrowly escaped death when the train on which he was traveling from Folkestone to London jumped a gap in the line occasioned by some repair work on a viaduct near Staplehurst, Kent. The foreman on the job miscalculated the time of the train’s arrival; the flagman was only 550 yards from the works and unable to give adequate warning of the train’s approach. The central and rear carriages fell off the bridge, plunging onto the river-bed below. Only one of the first class carriages escaped that plunge, coupled fast to the second class carriage in front. “It had come off the rail and was [. . .] hanging over the bridge at an angle, so that all three of them were tilted down into a corner” (Ackroyd 1013). Dickens managed to get Ellen Ternan and her mother, with whom he was traveling, out of the carriage and then behaved with remarkable self-possession, climbing down into the ravine and ministering to the many who lay injured and dying. With further aplomb, he climbed back into the dangerously unstable carriage and retrieved his manuscript, an account of which is offered in the memorable postscript to Our Mutual Friend (1865). Once back in London, however, Dickens began to develop the symptomatology that today we would recognize as typical of trauma. 1
This book argues that postmodernism, especially in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, is a deeply engaged response to the Holocaust. In turn, this thought illuminates a number of issues in our understanding of the Holocaust. The book is divided into three parts. The first part, Reading and the Holocaust, concentrates on testimony and literature, and argues that testimony is a new and singular genre with its own generic characteristics. It clarifies issues of memory and literature and analyses and defines post-1990 Holocaust fiction. The second part, Holocaust Histories, argues that there are two different understandings of truth at work in the discipline of history, and that the history of the Holocaust brings this to the fore: later chapters explore this by looking at the work of one leading Holocaust historian, Saul Friedländer, the limits of historical explanation, and at Holocaust denial. The third part, The Trace of the Holocaust, turns to philosophy and argues in detail that the work of Levinas is a response to the Holocaust and evaluates its success. Chapter 10 evaluates Derrida's thought as post-Holocaust philosophy and focuses on the idea of the trace. Chapter 11 looks at philosophical attempts to explain Nazism and reveals the limits of philosophical discourse. The final chapter turns to the idea of the human and looks at ways in which the human has been thought after the Holocaust. The conclusion turns to issues to which this overall discussion might lead.
This essay introduces the work of controversial historian and philosopher of science and technology, Bruno Latour. It suggests that his theories of hybrid objects, his analyses of networks that criss-cross normally discrete categories of science, politics, and culture, and his displacement of the modern/postmodern paradigm can offer productive new readings of science fiction, permitting critics to rethink the genre's relation to science and society. Latour's own "scientifictions" (his coinage) are examined alongside works by sf authors China Miéville, Paul McAuley, and Kim Stanley Robinson.
This book explores an illness that figures in nearly every volume of Victorian autobiography, memoirs, diaries, letters, and more than a few novels. Variously described as shattered nerves, nervous collapse, neurasthenia, or nervous breakdown, the illness was the focus of extensive medical discussion during the Victorian and Edwardian decades. Few doctors could decide whether the nervous breakdown was a physiological disorder, to be cured by medication, or a moral weakness for which the patient needed psychiatric care. The book uses the letters, diaries, and autobiographies of men and women who suffered breakdowns, examines medical archives, published scientific sources, and contemporary fiction, in which the "nervous type" was so familiar as to border on caricature. The book places a puzzling medical problem in its full social, cultural, and intellectual context.
Professor of English, SUNY Oswego
Although sometimes dismissed as an arty melodrama, 21 Grains is an important, original film, distinguished by its application of modernist techniques to the materials of classical tragedy. Its fragmented method and non-linear form are not artificial but eloquently expressive of its themes: subjective time, uncertain identity, and unknowable fate.
Hans Selye discovered Stress in 1935 as a syndrome occurring in laboratory rats. In the modern world, Stress has become a universal explanation for human behaviour in industrial society. Selye's discovery arose out of widespread interest in the stability of bodily systems in 1930s' physiology; however, his findings were rejected by physiologists until the 1970s. This analysis is framed in terms of Latour's actor-network theories, and traces the translation of Stress from the animal laboratory into the narratives of modern life experience. This mapping reveals that translation was brought about by Selye's recruitment of a broadly based constituency outside of academic physiology, whose members each saw in Stress a validation of their pre-existing ideas of the relationship of the human mind and body in industrial civilization. While Selye was successful in realizing Stress as a scientific fact, he was unable to make his institute the obligatory passage point for Stress research. Selye's notion of a universal non-specific reaction has become accepted in almost all forms of human discourse about life and health, and physiologists in the 1990s use Stress as a unifying concept to understand the interaction of organic life with the environment. However, this modern use of Stress contains none of the physiological postulates of Selye's original findings.
The Argument
Despite the enormous historical attention psychoanalysis has attracted, its popularization in Britain (as opposed to the United States) in the wake of the Great War has been largely overlooked. The present paper explores the sources and fate of the sudden “craze” for psychoanalysis after 1918, examining the content of the books through which the doctrine became widely known, along with the roles played by religious interests and the popular press. The percolation of Freudian and related language into everyday English was effectively complete by the 1930s. Crucially, it is argued that in Britain the character of psychoanalytic theory itself demonstrably converged with the psychological needs of the British population in the postwar period. The situation in Britain was clearly different in many respects from that in the United States. This episode bears on numerous questions about scientific popularization, the distinctiveness of British psychoanalysis, and though it is treated here only peripherally the epistemological status or nature of psychoanalysis. More generally the present paper may be read as an exercise in reflexive disciplinary historiography, in which the levels of discipline (“Psychology”) and subject matter (“psychology”) are viewed as interpenetrating and mutually constitutive.
Biography 25.3 (2002) 493-504
I really should call this paper "Reading David Parker reading critics reading Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss." The paper is in two parts. There is a central section about how I read The Kiss in relation to certain critics, some of them sympathetic and some unsympathetic to the memoir. The rest of the paper is a sort of metadiscursive frame that focuses on the question of why I read it in that way, and why I agree with some critics and disagree with others. In this section I engage explicitly with questions of counter-transference in reading, and the interpretation of interpretation.
As will soon be evident, in focusing on the why question I will be mirroring the alleged narcissism of my chosen text by putting my own work center stage—something I find both unprofessional and a little bit exhilarating. And why I find thewhyquestion like this is itself part of thewhyquestion. As will also become evident, this part of the paper keeps threatening to slip into a mise en abîme of reflections on reflections that goes all the way down, potentially relativizing the discipline of literary criticism itself. I shall return to this issue at the very end.
The question of why I read The Kiss as I do necessarily involves any general theory of reading I hold. As it turns out, counter-transference is a significant part of that theory, though I have never called it that. In my book Ethics, Theory and the Novel, I attempted to account for the greatness of the very greatest novels, such as Anna Karenina, in terms of their moral vision. I argued that what distinguishes such novels is that no character, no matter how limited or evil, is beyond the pale of the author's sympathetic understanding. In other words, the author's implicit or explicit judgments of the characters are nonjudgmental. In saying that, I was using the word "judgmental" in a special sense, which I defined in a chapter called "The judgmental unconscious" (43-52).
The story I used to define the meaning of this term was the story in the gospel of St John, chapter 8, of the woman taken in adultery. I quoted the story there, and would quote it again here, so great is my attachment to it. But I shall assume its familiarity to readers, and simply draw out what I see as its defining features. The turning point in the story comes when Jesus says to the Pharisees, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Up till then, they have been in the grip of a rigid binary code. They are within the Law, they are the righteous; the woman is a sinner, and therefore outside, Other, forfeiting her claim to membership in the tribe. This rigid binarism is what I mean by the word "judgmental." Jesus's words call this binarism into question. The woman's accusers are forced to look into their own consciences and to admit that they are not simply "different" from her; they look within themselves and find an element of similarity to her, which presumably convinces them that they don't belong to another moral universe after all. The point needs to be underlined that Jesus isn't refusing to make judgments per se: the woman is still guilty of this serious sin, which presumably the Pharisees are not. What he is implicitly objecting to is an ethic of difference that obliterates any sense of common humanity. It's this element of commonness, the fact they are sinners too, that the Pharisees, in the grip of their rigid binary code, appear to have forgotten.
Judgmentalism, in short, is a form of unconsciousness, of moral obliviousness. Carl Jung would go further and argue that the Pharisees are externalizing their psychic "shadow"—that is, the darker side of themselves that resists the moral law by which they try to live. Jung's point, of course, is that they can only silence the accusations of the shadow within by projecting them onto some scapegoat beyond themselves. The aim of Jungian therapy here...
Narrative 13.1 (2005) 67-83
Christopher Nolan's recent film Memento (2000) addresses the complexities of surviving trauma. While watching the film is not identical to living through a trauma, responses to an initial viewing often bear witness to a cinematic experience marked by profound disruption of expectation. The film's unusual formal construction certainly unsettles viewer expectations of temporal continuity and coherence, expectations shaped by mainstream Hollywood cinema's commitment to linear narrative. One of the film's narrative threads is composed of a series of color segments that, while not exactly a reel running backward, nevertheless moves the viewer backward through time. The other thread consists of segments shot in black and white that move the viewer forward through time. Toward the end of the film, the viewer discovers that, with respect to the chronology of the plot, the point in time at which the black-and-white segments end is the point in time at which the color segments begin.
The film's disruptiveness is not limited to its making problematic the viewer's desire to put events in 'proper' order. Equally unsettling is the fact that no character's point of view can be considered reliable. Though the main character, a former insurance claims agent named Leonard Shelby, seeks to inhabit an authoritative position within the film by mimicking the cinematic traits of a hardboiled private eye, and though the film teasingly simulates this authority by granting him a voice-over narration, he suffers from a debilitating condition of short-term memory loss that continually subverts any claim he makes to producing a sustained, coherent narrative, either about himself or about others. Likewise, the two characters with whom Leonard has the most contact, Teddy the 'cop' and Natalie the bartender, appear to manipulate him for their own purposes, making it impossible to get from them satisfactory explanation of the plot's most conspicuous feature, Leonard's repetition of certain behaviors: his repeated failure of short-term memory; his repeated tattooing; his repeated killing; his repeated attempts to narrativize his experience. For example, the only significant revelation concerning his character that emerges at the end of the film turns out to be superficial, namely where he gets the scratches on his cheek and the clothes on his back (from his murderous confrontation with Natalie's boyfriend, the drug dealer Jimmy Grants). Otherwise, his lengthy exchange with Teddy is so heavy with layers of possible fabrication as to make it impossible to know the truth: Is Teddy making up the story that he is a cop? Is Teddy making up the story that Leonard's wife was diabetic and that Leonard killed his wife? Did Leonard really receive a blow to the head, or did he make up his condition in order to kill his wife without consequence? Did Leonard make up the story about a client of his named Sammy Jankis who suffered from Leonard's condition and accidentally killed his wife?
The film's shifts, displacements, and concealments seem designed to produce a viewing experience that is marked, even after repeated viewings, by missing. In one respect, what is missing (i.e., both absent and longed for) is a familiar temporal framework. In another respect, what is missing is Leonard Shelby's character. Isolated in a landscape perpetually unfamiliar to him, he is a missing person of sorts, a figure lacking memory of, and guilt for, actions he takes throughout the film, a 'shell' of a 'be'ing apparently motivated exclusively by longing for his dead wife, though a clear backdrop to, or substantiation of, this longing—this missing—is itself missing from the film. Any effort to reconstruct a linear narrative and any effort to produce leads on the identity of this missing person compels the viewer to simulate detective work, not unlike what Leonard does. Just as a viewer's attempt to make up for the experience of missing must involve repeated sifting through the film's evidence, Leonard's attempt to make up for the experience of missing his wife (in the sense of mourning her absence and in the sense of having been asleep when she was attacked...
After three years the author reports his observations of prisoners in Dachau and Buchenwald (concentration camps) in 1938-1939. The purposes of the camps were (1) to break individuals into docile masses, (2) to terrorize and discourage group opposition to Nazism, (3) to train Gestapo men in methods of breaking human spirit, and (4) to study effects of the worst conditions of cruelty and slavery. As an ego defense the author used his training to study personality changes of himself and others in adapting to extreme hardships. Criminals and politically educated internees withstood the shock best, whereas middle class internees disintegrated. Ego defenses were varied and extreme, with split personalities practically universal. The author outlines the Gestapo methods of destroying group spirit, developing childishness in internees, and preventing martyrdom. New prisoners were aggressive to friends and guards, interested in escape and in keeping their personalities intact. Old prisoners lost interest in world affairs, tried to keep peace in camp, feared adjusting to life outside of camp, and identified themselves with the Gestapo. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Christian Boltanski's Missing House , a site-specific work created in 1993 and located in the former East Berlin is a work organized around the missing central section of an apartment building destroyed in the allied bombings of Berlin. To the degree that the work's thematics are those of absence and disappearance, it bears comparisons to other contemporary 'counter-monuments' that deal with both the war and the holocaust. Nevertheless, the work raises troubling questions about the distinction between historical commemoration and generic elegy, a distinction that may be likened to Freud's concept of mourning as opposed to the illness of melancholy.
Purpose. The debate concerning the recovery of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is one with which academics and professionals are becoming increasingly familiar. This paper asks whether or not recovered memories require special psychological mechanisms to explain as this has implications if legal proceedings are initiated on the basis of that recovered memory.
Method. The following areas are deemed relevant when evaluating evidence based upon a recovered memory: (i) the effects of trauma on memory (an influence on memory at the encoding stage); (ii) how memory can be aided and distorted (an influence on memory at the retrieval stage); and (iii) factors likely to influence jury decisions concerning recovered memories.
Results. Cases documenting the veracity of recovered memories are few and far between. On the contrary there is sufficient evidence to be concerned about the accuracy of recovered memories in the legal context.
Conclusions. Further research is needed on the conditions under which false recollections may occur and how these may be prevented.
The clinical theory of the repetition compulsion is sometimes taken to mean that neurotic persons, when traumatized, will develop compulsive repetitions of the trauma. Our experiment suggests that there is a more general effect--that various types of persons, after a variety of stressful events, will tend to develop intrusive and stimulus-repetitive thought; the stress itself does not necessarily have to have a negative valence. Equivalent effects were noted after stimuli that aroused positive emotions and after those stimuli that aroused dysphoric affects.
A survey of forty-three general interest magazines shows that popularizing materials about psychoanalysis greatly increased in 1920, peaked in 1921, and declined thereafter. The press was more favorable to Freud than has been assumed, for a number of writers accepted his theory of the unconscious and readily acknowledged the curative powers of psychoanalysis. But there was also much hostility to Freud, particularly to his sexual theories. The press was therefore more favorable to Jung and Adler, but especially to the British depth psychologists, who deemphasized sexuality while accepting the theory of a dynamic unconscious.
This report raises conceptual issues about the validity of the posttraumatic stress disorder diagnosis as described in DSM-III. The helpfulness of DSM-III is acknowledged, but gaps in that classification are noted. These are organized into three areas: the etiology of the disorder, its natural history, and diagnostic specificity. Suggestions are made for conceptualizing these issues and for research that needs to be undertaken to help resolve them. The authors urge more theoretical and empirical attention to these important issues in the upcoming years, so that later diagnostic descriptions and understandings will be more precise.
Combat veterans (N = 25) with posttraumatic stress disorder had flashbacks related to their combat stressors, which included major losses and exposure to danger. Certain affects, loud noises, fatigue, and personal stress tended to precipitate flashback episodes. Flashbacks began a year or more after exposure to combat in 50% of patients; 56% of patients experienced daily flashbacks. Flashback phenomenology met DSM-III criteria for panic attacks. The similarity of flashbacks to panic attacks suggests treatment trials with monoamine oxidase inhibitors or imipramine for these selected symptoms.
Flashbacks are returns of imagery for extended periods after the immediate effect of hallucinogens has worn off. The most symptomatic form is recurrent intrusions of the same frightening image into awareness, without volitional control. The author compares flashbacks with other clinical phenomena; he believes that psychotherapy is helpful, especially if there is a focus on the traumatic and screening aspects of the imagery.
In this study the chronic traumatic nightmares of men who had been in combat were found to differ from the lifelong nightmares of veterans with no combat experience in that they tended to occur earlier in the sleep cycle, were more likely to be replicas of actual events, and were more commonly accompanied by gross body movements. Traumatic nightmares may arise out of varying stages of sleep and are not confined to REM sleep alone. The group with lifelong nightmares showed evidence of thought disorder on the Rorschach. The men with posttraumatic stress disorder had failed to psychologically integrate their traumatic experiences and used dissociation as a way of dealing with strong affects.