The Edges of Trauma: Explorations in Visual Art and Literature [1 ed.] 1443853429, 9781443853422

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The Edges of Trauma

The Edges of Trauma: Explorations in Visual Art and Literature

Edited by

Tamás Bényei and Alexandra Stara

The Edges of Trauma: Explorations in Visual Art and Literature, Edited by Tamás Bényei and Alexandra Stara This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Tamás Bényei, Alexandra Stara and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5342-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5342-2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Introduction: The Arts of Trauma................................................................ 1 Tamás Bényei and Alexandra Stara “Broken Warriors, Tortured Souls”: Constructions of Physical and Psychological Trauma in British Art of the First World War, c. 1916-1919 .............................................................................................. 18 Jonathan Black An Explosion That Led to Paradise: Le Paradis des conditions humaines by Jean-Richard Bloch .............................................................. 36 Tivadar Gorilovics Trauma and “Ordinary Words”: Virginia Woolf’s Play on Words............ 48 Nicolas Pierre Boileau The Psychopathology of Colonial Life: Collective Colonial Trauma in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet ........................................................................ 61 Tamás Bényei Lying for Company: Devising Trauma in Beckett and Kristof ................. 87 Giovanni Parenzan Trauma Obscura Revealed: Revisiting Loss in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz .................................................................................................. 104 Catalina Botez The Body and Community in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Candy Spills or Towards a Positive Metaphor of Illness .............................................. 121 Elizabeth Maynard

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Table of Contents

Caught in the Grip of an Inherited Past: (Post)Memory and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus........................................ 137 María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro “The problem is, I’m not sure I believe in the thunderclap of trauma”: Aesthetics of Trauma in Contemporary American Literature ................. 148 Alan Gibbs Trauma: Mourning and Healing Processes through Artistic Practice ...... 169 Catherine Barrette Traces of Trauma: The Photography of Ori Gersht ................................. 181 Alexandra Stara The Trauma of Suburbia: Images of the Fringe ....................................... 191 Thomas Waitz 9/11, Television Comedy, and the Ideology of “National Trauma” ........ 200 Philip Scepanski Contributors ............................................................................................. 215 Index ........................................................................................................ 220

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Jonathan Black Figure 1: C. R. W. Nevinson, The Doctor, 1916, oil on canvas, Imperial War Museum. London. Figure 2: William Orpen, Blown Up and Mad, 1917, pencil and watercolour on paper, Imperial War Museum, London. Figure 3: William Orpen, Two RFC Officers Just Wounded And Having Breakfast at a Hotel in Amiens Before Going To Hospital, 1917, pencil and watercolour on paper, Imperial War Museum, London. Figure 4: Eric H. Kennington, The Kensingtons At Laventie: Winter 1914, 1915, oil on glass, Imperial War Museum, London. Figure 5: Eric H. Kennington, Mustard Gas, 1918, pastel on paper, Canadian War Museum, Ottawa. Figure 6: Eric. H. Kennington, German Helmet and Skeleton near Ribecourt, 1919, pencil and watercolour on paper, Private Collection. Elizabeth Maynard Figure 1: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Lover Boys), 1991. Installation view at Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Michael Jenkins at Galerie Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium, 1991. Photo: Dirk Gysel. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Figure 2: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Lover Boys), 1991. Installation view at Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form at Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, 2011. Photo: Axel Schneider. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Figure 3: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Placebo), 1991. Installation view at Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form at Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, 2010. Photo: Stefan Altenberger. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

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List of Illustrations

María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro Figure 1: Artie on the floor of his father’s home, taking notes, from chapter 3, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale/My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Figure 2: Artie sitting at his drawing table, from chapter 2, Maus II: A Survivor's Tale/And Here My Trouble Began by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Figure 3: Vladek’s picture, taken after his liberation, from chapter 4, Maus II: A Survivor's Tale/And Here My Trouble Began by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Catherine Barrette Figure 1. Catherine Barrette, Rouge, 2006. Oil and tar on canvas, 36” x 36”. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 2. Catherine Barrette, Sliding, 2008. Oil on board, 36” x 36”. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 3. Catherine Barrette, Body 13, 2009. Charcoal and gouache on paper, 16” x 20”. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 4. Catherine Barrette, Starfish, 2009. Latex and socket pieces, 3’ x 3’ x 2’. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 5. Catherine Barrette, Chandelier, 2009. Wire and socket pieces, 10’ x 1’. Courtesy of the artist. Alexandra Stara Figure 1: Ori Gersht, Olive #13, 2004, from photographic series Ghost. Chromogenic print, 150 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 2. Ori Gersht, Untitled #4, 1999-2000, from photographic series White Noise. Chromogenic print, 80 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 3. Ori Gersht, The Mountain, 2005, from photographic series Liquidation. Lamda print, 80 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 4. Ori Gersht, On Edge, 2009, from photographic series Evaders. Lamda print, 60 x 315 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 5. Ori Gersht, Fix in time, 2009, from photographic series Evaders. Lamda print, 63 x 274 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 6: Ori Gersht, still from Evaders, 2009. HD film for dual-channel projection (colour, sound), 14:44 min. Courtesy of the artist.

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Thomas Waitz Figure 1: “Die neue Straße (1932)”. Open access from http://dnb.info/965051609/34, accessed on 18 September 2013. Figure 2: Hans-Christian Schink, “A 71 – bei Traßdorf”, 1999. Courtesy of the artist. Philip Scepanski Figure 1: The U.S. Congress Sings “God Bless America”, from 11 September, 2001, television broadcast, NBC, United States. Figure 2: A typical opening image from South Park, episode “Cancelled”,19 March 2003, Comedy Central, United States. Figure 3: The South Park boys in gas masks, from South Park, episode “Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants”, 7 November 2001, Comedy Central, United States. Figure 4: South Park’s Afghan doubles, from South Park, episode “Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants”, 7 November, 2001, Comedy Central, United States. Figure 5: Cartman’s revenge on bin Laden, from South Park series, episode “Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants”, 7 November, 2001, Comedy Central, United States

INTRODUCTION: THE ARTS OF TRAUMA TAMÁS BÉNYEI AND ALEXANDRA STARA

In a characteristically tongue-in-cheek manner, Martin Amis’s 2010 novel The Pregnant Widow, an exploration of what is usually referred to as the sexual revolution, announces itself straightaway as a trauma novel: This is the story of a sexual trauma. He wasn’t at a tender age when it happened to him. He was by any definition an adult; and he consented—he comprehensively consented. Is trauma, then, really the word we want (from Gk. “wound”)? Because his wound, when it came—it didn’t hurt a bit. It was the sensory opposite of torture. She loomed up on him unclothed and unarmed, with her pincers of bliss—her lips, her fingertips. Torture: from L. torquere “to twist”. It was the opposite of torture, yet it twisted. It ruined him for twenty-five years. (Amis 2011, 1)

Having it both ways, the passage situates the narrative that is to follow both inside the deluge of trauma narratives and outside it, posing the disingenuous question: “Is trauma, then, really the word we want?” Whether we want it or not, the word “trauma” has become shorthand for experiences (or non-experiences) treated in a large variety of fictional and non-fictional texts and visual works—as Kirby Farrell suggests, it is not only a clinical concept but also “a cultural trope that has met many needs” (Farrell 1998, 14). By defining the protagonist Keath Nearing’s experience, a synecdoche for the sexual revolution, as at least potentially traumatic, Amis, with his accustomed provocativeness, manipulates and interrogates many of the presuppositions of “the culture of first-person writing” that, as Nancy Miller and Jason Tougaw put it, “needs to be understood in relation to a desire for common grounds—if not an identitybound shared experience, then one that is shareable through identification” (Miller and Tougaw 2002, 2). In its emphasis on the mixture of trauma and sensual pleasure, Amis’s novel also betrays an awareness of the paradoxical enjoyment factor behind the multitude of popular trauma stories appearing in several registers of contemporary culture and literature—Chris Cleave’s

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The Other Hand or Emma Donoghue’s Room are two recent examples that are not necessarily easy to place—and the tendency to level out and flatten the trauma affect: if Keith Nearing’s sexual wound deserves to be called a trauma, what about the survivors of child abuse or genocides? This is precisely what Amis is getting at: by referring to the sexual experience of a middle-class male character whose life clearly lacks experiences that are traumatic in a sense that would even remotely resemble the experiences of victims of historical traumas or domestic abuse, Amis might be making a wry comment on the contemporary “culture of trauma” (Miller and Tougaw 2002, 2) where accounts of experiences that are referred to as traumatic sell many books. By the same token, however, he is also questioning the kind of community of vicarious suffering and remembering that is forged by means of such narratives, practically suggesting that men whose sexual life was made difficult by the effects of the sexual revolution could be defined as a kind of traumatic community. “Trauma”, however, is not only a cultural reference in The Pregnant Widow. Having identified itself as a trauma narrative, the text in fact begins to behave like one with its faltering, spiralling structure that seems to be circling around the traumatic core, dramatising the well-known paradox: while trauma resists narrativisation—or, as Ulrich Baer puts it, trauma resists “integration into larger contexts” (Baer 2002, 1), it generates narrative. In fact, it might be said to be the event that generates narrative, as Graham Swift’s intergenerational trauma narrative Waterland suggests in a refrain-like phrase: “history begins only at the point where things go wrong, history is born only with trouble, with perplexity, with regret” (Swift 1983, 92). These are some, although by no means all, of the questions discussed in this collection, which is conceived as a modest contribution to the large number of theoretical and critical collections devoted to aspects of trauma. Rather than making grand claims about redefining trauma itself, the essays collected here look at some of the ways in which trauma appears in literary and artistic texts, working patiently with texts and visual representations, unravelling some implications of representing, narrating, testifying to trauma and of sharing or conveying traumatic non-experience. Most of the essays work with what has become the staple fare of trauma studies: First World War shell shock, the Holocaust, colonial trauma, AIDS, sexual abuse and, of course, 9/11. Some contributors explore neglected or underemphasised aspects of canonical trauma artifacts (Maus, W. G. Sebald, Virginia Woolf and abuse), trying to dislodge these well-known texts from all too familiar interpretative traditions. More radically, Catherine Barrette, creative artist as well as academic, explores her own

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artwork as part of the working through of traumatic experiences. Other essays situate themselves on the edges of the vast cultural and discursive construction that trauma has become in recent decades. In some cases, trauma works as an interpretative device that allows us to see otherwise familiar texts in a new light—Bényei’s essay on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet or Parenzan’s piece on Beckett and Agota Kristof are cases in point— while other contributors interrogate various aspects of the cultural constructedness of trauma referred to at the start of this introduction. Gibbs takes issue with the questionable and at least partly commercially inspired canonisation of trauma fiction, Boileau with the automatic and often facile linking of certain textual features and traumatic experiences, while Gorilovics’s account of the wartime experiences of Jean-Richard Bloch, more obliquely, with the community-creating role of trauma, its potentially false totalisation of collective traumatic experiences that fail to allow for occasionally widely different ways of experiencing these events. For all its diversity, this collection has at least one feature that distinguishes it from the multitude of similar volumes: gathering together essays on both literature and visual art, Exploring the Edges of Trauma places itself implicitly in what has been called “the potential space of trauma”, which is “that very domain that exists between the visual and the verbal, between that which is seen and that which is said” (Saltzman and Rosenberg 2006, xii). Thus, the essays are for the most part concerned with the relationship between trauma and art, between unutterable shock and the most elevated or supreme form of human communication and representation, between traumatic non-experience and aesthetic experience. In this Adornoian context, the interest of these essays is not chiefly in the psychological or therapeutic aspects of trauma, but primarily in how the non-experience of trauma finds its way into artistic representations. In their own ways, practically all the chapters interrogate the relationship between trauma and art, and what is brought out by the hybrid nature of the volume are the shared features, the “artistic” nature of the representations analysed therein—rather than, say, their “narrative” or “therapeutic” qualities. One important edge that is explored by some of the art essays is precisely that which divides art from other representations. With art placed in the centre, perhaps it is not irrelevant to evoke the ancient story about the invention of the art of memory.1 We remember 1

Versions of and commentaries on the anecdote can be found in Frances Yates. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1–4. H. Weinrich. 1997. Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens. Munich: C. H. Beck. Ch. 2., P Ramadanovic. 2001. Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma, and Identity. Lanham: Lexington Books.

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next to nothing about the ancient Greek poet Simonides, apart from the fact that he invented memory, the legend about the invention the art of memory—or of memory as art. When he was asked by a pugilist called Skopas to commemorate a boxing match for posterity, he devoted half of his celebratory encomium to the Dioscuri, thereby incurring the wrath of his employer, who chose to pay only half of the promised royalties, claiming that Simonides should expect the other half from the mythological heroes he was waxing so lyrical about. The commemorative feast ended in disaster: hit by an earthquake, the house collapsed, killing everyone except Simonides. The question, of course, is why Simonides is the only survivor of what can probably be called a traumatic disaster as well as the expression of divine wrath. On the one hand, he has to be the sole survivor, for, being a poet (an artist), only he has the ability to recall the sitting order of the guests—thus, he guarantees the possibility of proper mourning and cultural memory, restoring the symbolic identity of the dead erased by the catastrophe: they do not perish as anonymous corpses to be soon forgotten, but as individuals, each receiving a symbolic memorial site. On the other hand, the survival of Simonides is surely the result of divine will. During the feast, he was alone in acknowledging a debt to the gods, in humouring and propitiating them, reminding the mortals that no glory is exclusively human, that no human achievement or happiness is possible without the benevolence of the Olympians. Thus, in his commemoration of human achievements, Simonides also commemorated the glory of the gods and, specifically, of the Dioscuri, figures of mourning themselves, who owe their deification precisely to their larger than human grief and inability to accept the loss of the other. One moral of the story is surely that the work of cultural memory cannot be successful without the recognition of what is here identified as the divine, something beyond the scope of human endeavour. All cultural remembering (and Simonides’s act of remembering the seating order and identities of the dead is presented as the inaugurating act of cultural memory) is at least partly a commemoration of that which enables remembering in the first place. The two reasons—the practical and metaphysical—for Simonides’s survival are thus inextricably linked: Simonides the poet can become the agent or figure of cultural memory precisely because his commemoration of human glory does not neglect the divine dimension. One could argue that the invention and codification of the art of remembering, the sole point of this genealogical story in which remembering is supplied with an origin, is nothing but the reinvention or inscription of remembering as an imperative. From this moment, remembering is

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something we have to remember. Simonides transformed remembering (a natural, almost automatic faculty of storing experience) into an art, in the sense of a mnemotechnics that can be learned and improved. Nevertheless, it is significant that the individual who is credited with the invention of memory was a poet, a figure of art in the post-Renaissance sense of the word; one senses that it is precisely the acknowledgement of the divine and the metaphysical dimensions—the gesture of the artist that is pointless or at least superfluous for Skopas—that elevates cultural remembering above an automatic process.2 The story of Simonides also suggests something important about the troubled relationship between trauma texts and community referred to earlier: according to the anecdote, the art of memory—that is, memory as art, cultural memory—was invented in the aftermath of a traumatic event that literally tore the community apart. Dominated by the image of ruins and corpses, two key tropes of decay, oblivion and remembering, the anecdote suggests that trauma cannot simply be erased, just as it cannot be properly remembered; however, with the help of art, it can be made into a culturally useful discourse, something that is indispensable for the restoration of what the disaster shattered into an inoperative community. The relevance of this anecdote to contemporary discourses of trauma is brought out in an essay by expatriate Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešiü entitled “The Confiscation of Memory”, in which she continues the story of Simonides in the context of the Balkan war. In her version, Simonides is finally unable to fulfill the job he is commissioned with, for a second earthquake kills both him and the mourners. The witnesses of the disaster are able to identify the victims, but only those standing next to them. Thus, “each one remembers and mourns his own. The other victims—not to mention the original ones—do not exist” (Ugrešiü 1996, 39). In his reading of Ugrešiü’s essay, Petar Ramadanovic points out that with the death of the poet, the survivors are capable only of partial mourning and reconstruction, which results in the total disappearance from memory of the first disaster (Ramadanovic 2001, 68). Ugrešiü’s bleak sequel speculates on what would happen to the fabric of the community after a trauma if it weren’t for artists, while it might also be seen as a modern reinterpretation of the original story. The second catastrophe, striking down the poet who is no longer there to count and 2

According to the mythological tradition, when, at the wedding ceremony of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Zeus asked the gods whether there was anything they lacked or wanted, they replied that it would be nice to have someone who would sing their praises. Their want was, as it were, granted overnight: the nine muses were conceived then. Art—and artists like Simonides—were the answer to their prayers.

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name the dead and thus define the parameters of collective remembering, may be a warning that concerns the pretentiousness of art in its dealing with traumatic experiences and its alleged authority in matters of cultural recall. Perhaps the modern Simonides is struck down because of his presumption, because he thinks that his art can put in order and process “the state of things under the collapsed roof” (Ramadanovic 2001, 72), that his orderly account is an authentic rendering of that which is buried under the ruins. Ramadanovic argues that Simonides’s art confuses its own meaning with the meaning of the past event and offers to substitute its aesthetic order for the traumatic past, but then he goes on to identify this order as that of history, disregarding the profession of Simonides. The story of Simonides, especially if read in the light of Ugrešiü’s extension and interpretation of it, can be seen as a pessimistic allegory about trauma and art. On the hand, it reinforces the myth of the artist as a privileged agent of cultural recall, the figure to pay due respect not only to the dead but also to the gods, constructing art as a cultural and communal “site” where traumas can be, if not resolved, at least elevated into a higher sphere and used as grounds for identification. On the other hand, the fact that Simonides has an awareness of human insufficiency and failure suggests a more modern(ist) trauma aesthetics: instead of being pleased by the encomium, Simonides’s client is outraged, or at least irritated by it. This aspect of the anecdote might be seen as anticipating not the myth of art as a solution of the traumatic knot on a symbolic level, but the modernist myth of “art as trauma” or art as failure (not a representation but an embodiment of traumatic experience), and reconfiguring trauma as the incessant deconstruction of the structures of representation rather than the (im)possible object of representation, the very failure of representation. This is what is stressed by Saltzman and Rosenberg when they are speaking of the visual arts: “If trauma could have a proper visual form, it might very well be invisible” (2006, xiii). That is, a “successful” (authentic, honest) rendering of trauma entails the failure of representation. Such a conception of art and trauma, also suggested in the essays by Giovanni Parenzan and Catalina Botez, implies a Beckettian ethics of failure as an implied aesthetics of trauma. One crucial aspect of the artistic rendering of trauma, explored by several of the contributors, is the “necessary” moment of fictionalising which, while it makes the trauma universal, also inevitably individualises the traumatic non-experience of collective disasters. In this sense, the artistic, fictionalising inflection of the rendering of trauma might be seen as a primarily ethical gesture, as in Georges Perec’s autobiographical halffiction W or the Memories of Childhood, the narrator of which conceives

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his trauma as a “lost world”, an imaginary place that is entirely his own, and thus he has full responsibility for whatever it contains. “Whatever may happen now, whatever I may do, I was the sole depository, the only living memory, the only vestige of that world” (Perec 2011, 4). This looks like the appropriation of one’s own experience; Perec’s text, however, indicates that the fictionalizing act is also a necessary dispossession that is partly self-inflicted, when he clarifies his role vis-à-vis the lost world: I was a witness and not an actor. I am not the hero of my tale. Nor am I exactly its bard. Though the events I saw convulsed my previously insignificant existence, though their full weight still bears upon my conduct, upon my way of seeing, in recounting them I wish to adopt the cold, impassive tone of the ethnologist. (Perec 2011, 4)

If the first myth of art, suggested by the Simonides anecdote, is concerned with the way art elevates the failed experience of trauma into something that can be used by the community to make “trauma” a mediated construct and a factor of cohesion, modernism both challenged and perpetuated this general claim by suggesting that there might exist a possible connection between historical disasters and art. As Saltzman and Rosenberg argue, the ruptures of history necessitated some of the forms of historical modernism. Abstraction, fragmentation, illegibility, disjunction […] are all phenomena unto themselves, but each also answers a need for forms that hold, or fail to hold, modernity, in all its fullness. (Saltzman and Rosenberg 2006, ix)

The “failures” of modernist and avantgarde art might acquire a secondorder referentiality as objective correlatives of a cultural plight, a sense of rupture and a failure to register the enormity of historical experience—or, as in the chapter by Barrette, individual experience. The modernist myth of the special relationship between trauma and art is based on the sometimes unacknowledged hypothesis that traumatic semiosis is analogous with the transgressive semiosis of art, and therefore art is the adequate rendering of a trauma which cannot be recalled, conveyed or redressed through ordinary language. This fits not only the Romantic and modernist myth about the essential difference between ordinary language and poetic language, discussed in Boileau’s essay on Woolf but also the core idea of continental modernist aesthetics: art itself as (traumatic) disruption. If, as Boileau paraphrases Woolf’s modernist aesthetic, “the banal words of the trivial side of life are a screen that is more difficult to break than one would think, which results in silencing the event that caused the

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shock” (Boileau 2013, 52), we might begin to speculate about the crucial difference between literature and the visual arts in their relation to trauma. What we do not really have in visual culture is precisely the “screen” of ordinary words that would stand between trauma and art. While in language, there are several non-literary registers and kinds of discourse, including confession and autobiography, that attempt to render a traumatic non-experience, such a distinction is much more difficult to make in the case of the visual arts: a drawing or a painting, no matter how crude, is immediately seen as “art”. This is dramatised by Anthony Burgess’s excellent 1971 novel MF, in which the protagonist is obsessed with the paintings and other works of art of a mysterious artist called Sib Legeru. The paintings turn out to be products of a “therapeutic experiment” with mental patients including trauma victims. Zoon Fonanta, the character who enlightens protagonist Miles Faber, claims that this creative process provides “a spurious joy in spurious creation”, resulting in “pseudoworks”, and adds: Art takes the raw material of the world about us and attempts to shape it into signification. Anti-art takes the same material and seeks insignification. (Burgess 1973, 201)

If “insignification” is taken to mean anti-signification rather than insignificance, most trauma art might be said to belong to the second category. This episode of Burgess’s novel also suggests that the relationship between trauma and art is reciprocal: trauma art—as is evident from the chapter by Barrette—inevitably probes the limits of the very concept of art. The opening essay, Jonathan Black’s “‫ދ‬Broken Warriors, Tortured Souls’: Constructions of Physical and Psychological Trauma in British Art of the First World War, c. 1916-1919”, is a revealing exploration of the origins of official artistic representations of a collective traumatic experience. In contrast to, for instance, Goya’s unsolicited war art, the First World War saw the appointment of official war artists (in several countries), and, as Black shows, the representations of the atrocities manifest symptoms of a conflict between the official “court artist” status and the impulse to record the inglorious reality of the war, sometimes through avant-garde techniques far removed from the academic and heroic styles that had dominated the painterly representation of war. Black’s essay, which also addresses contemporary reception, charts the trajectories of three British painters—C. R. W. Nevinson, William Orpen and Eric Kennington—with very different backgrounds and artistic inclinations explores how the trauma of the war affected their later lives and work.

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What makes the essay particularly relevant for this collection is that it allows us to see early twentieth-century reactions to something that has become banalised by now, the (artistic) representation of trauma and suffering. In the light of the contemporary culture of trauma writing or the implied pornography of graphic representations of violence and suffering, we become aware of the long way we have travelled since the prevalence of opinions like those provoked by Nevinson’s pictures in the British Architect, which dismissed his images of war graves as singularly “macabre” or even melodramatically “Gothick”, and rejected Nevinson’s soldiers as “mechanical puppets” who “present us with a picture of stark, unmitigated horror […] we may fairly ask what is the end gained by such portrayals?” (Black 2013, 22). One answer to this rhetorical question from almost a century ago is surely that the end gained by such portrayals is the possibility of “ways of seeing that might be considered testimonial” (Baer 2002, 2). Tivadar Gorilovics’s article about French writer Jean-Richard Bloch (“An Explosion That Led to Paradise: Jean-Richard Bloch’s Le paradis des conditions humaines”), an obvious companion piece for Black’s chapter, is a particularly instructive case study inasmuch as it implicitly warns against ignoring the differences between individual experiences of traumatic upheavals in history. Gorilovics describes war in general and the First World War in particular as “a vast space of trauma of all kinds” (Gorilovics 2013, 36), suggesting that it is a mistake to subsume the widely different individual experiences under the convenient umbrella term of trauma without acknowledging the differences: war trauma—even the war trauma of combatants in trench warfare—is not a homogeneous experience. Gorilovics patiently unravels the way a nasty experience, involving cranial trauma and the witnessing of gory slaughter, is worked through by Bloch in a series of writings belonging to several different genres: notes, letters and the fictionalised narrative, Le Paradis des conditions humaines, a singular eye-witness account. The aestheticised event is mediated through literary reminiscences, and reworked in different types of texts. By the end of the war, Bloch succeeds in assimilating his experience to his philosophy, and his trauma is transmogrified into a near-death experience that elevates the individual out of the limitations of earthly existence, a jouissance-like moment in which he was allowed to feel “the sweetness of being no longer” (Gorilovics 2013, 44). Nicolas Pierre Boileau’s “Trauma and ‘Ordinary Words’: Virginia Woolf’s Play on Words” sets out to challenge what seems to have become the dominant strategy of reading Woolf in terms of trauma. Woolf is often

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seen as a typical case study, and the stylistic features of her writings are correlated with her life traumas. Many critics, suggests Boileau, simply posit these traumas, and fail to recognize that Woolf challenges our assumptions concerning them, for example by refusing to see rape as a determining factor in her life. In other words, sometimes trauma is in the eyes of the beholder(s). (Boileau 2013, 49-50)

Rather than using the available panels of trauma theory, Boileau starts out from the details of Woolf’s autobiographical texts and claims that these writings allow us to reconstruct a kind of implied Woolfian theory of trauma, subjectivity and language, a “theory of small things” that, however, in many ways “anticipates current ideas on traumatic experience” (Boileau 2013, 58-9). Woolf, Boileau suggests, “invites us to re-think trauma not as external but as a construction of the subject which is located between the event/referent and its verbalisation” (Boileau 2013, 50). The narrative rendering of the interrelationship between historical and personal trauma is the subject of Tamás Bényei’s essay: departing from the dominant reading of Scott’s quartet, “The Psychopathology of Colonial Life: Collective Colonial Trauma in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet” uses trauma as an interpretative lever to open up a text in an attempt to free it from the kind of critical quarantine into which it has been relegated. Although Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, with its apparently seamless epic flow, might seem an unlikely candidate for inclusion in a volume on trauma, Bényei unpacks the many motivic and narrative elements that identify the quartet as a text preoccupied with the rendering of collective trauma: thus, the dysfunctional relationships within the Anglo-Indian community may be seen as symptoms of an essentially traumatic non-experience. Making trauma the master trope of the interpretation enables Bényei to reinterpret many of the narrative idiosyncrasies of the quartet (for instance, its obsessively repetitive nature), while also testing the interpretative potential of the metaphor of collective trauma. Bényei concludes that, in Scott’s work, traumatic, unmasterable repetitions and dissociations “deprive presence and individual experience of its uniqueness without assigning to it a reassuring typological meaning” (Bényei 2013, 75). In “Lying For Company: Devising Trauma in Beckett and Kristof”, Giovanni Parenzan tackles the non-dialectical dynamics of intersubjectivity as it appears in the late work of Samuel Beckett, taking his cue from ethical theory and from the shifting emphasis in Beckett criticism induced largely by Levinasian criticism, a move that amounts to

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“a specular reversal—the mirror image—of the existentialist ontology insofar as it consists in the inversion of its temporal order: primary in the latter, solitude becomes, in the former, secondary to the interlocutory scene”. (Parenzan 2013, 97)

The ethical approach necessarily focuses on testimony, on the communicating or passing on of trauma, something which, as Parenzan argues, may be seen as the very consequence of the fact that it cannot be remembered: “the Other is not only the receiver and receptacle of truth, but the very condition of its coming into being, the only site where it can finally take place” (Parenzan 2013, 87). Parenzan’s interest, evoking Ugrešiü’s reworking of the Simonides legend, is in “what happens when there is no other, when there is no one else to listen to our story, when trauma is abandonment”. Beckett’s Company and Agota Kristof’s Trilogy of the Twins are texts which “offer us a scenario where the only way to bear one’s loneliness is to make up, to invent the Other, but where, by the same token, the narrator’s reliability and the very truth of his traumatic stories are dramatically called into question” (Parenzan 2013, 88). In an exciting move from the Beckettian “grammar of persons” (Parenzan 2013, 92) to history, the essay uses Kristof’s brilliant trilogy as an intervention into the reading of Beckett, as a kind of lever with which to loosen and broaden our reading of Beckett’s “pronominal play” (Parenzan 2013, 96) towards history. In “Trauma Obscura in W.G Sebald’s Austerlitz: The Return of the Repressed”, Catalina Botez analyses a novel that has become a classic of trauma fiction with extraordinary rapidity. Exploring the dissociative textual dynamics of the novel, Botez continues the analysis started in Parenzan’s article, inasmuch as both chapters are interested in the interplay of the internal and the external. However, whereas Parenzan discusses the intersubjective dynamism that is the context for traumatized subjectivity, Botez traces the externalized, extrapolated carriers of memory and trauma, the memories and traumas stored in objects. At one point in the novel, Austerlitz photographs the capital of a cast-iron column which had touched some chord of recognition in me. What made me uneasy at the sight of it, however, was not the question of whether the complex form of the capital, now covered with a puce-tinged encrustation, had really impressed itself on my mind when I passed through Pilsen with the children’s transport in the summer of 1939, but the idea, ridiculous in itself, that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself. (Sebald 2002, 311)

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This passage is typical of the non-dialectical slippages between the psyche and the world of (built) objects, a process that always—as in the quote above—stops just short of full-fledged prosopopeia, indicating the interminable nature of the process. As Botez charts the interplay between a wounded, dysfunctional individual memory and the externalised institutional and prosthetic kinds of memory machines like the archive, photography, propaganda documentaries and, primarily, built spaces and architectural sites of memory, the most disturbing finding of her essay is revealed, as it were, cumulatively: this is the realisation that Austerlitz’s defence mechanisms, his strategies of dealing or failing to deal with the past display an uncanny resemblance to the strategies of the Nazis to consciously falsify, distort and appropriate the past. The trauma of AIDS is fundamentally different from other traumas inasmuch as the sufferers are usually stigmatised by mainstream society; the discourses that were generated around AIDS tended to conceive of AIDS sufferers as traumatic for the social body. This is precisely what makes the rendering of the trauma of AIDS particularly difficult. In “The Body and Community in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Candy Spills or Towards a Positive Metaphor of Illness”, Elizabeth Maynard discusses works of art that try “to articulate the trauma of the illness afflicting both the individual and social body” (Maynard 2013, 122). The call for representation of People with AIDS (PWAs) wanted to give a “face to AIDS”, “making the illness visible and therefore more difficult to ignore” (Maynard 2013, 122), but these images, for all their honesty, “nonetheless generate and propagate an image of the Othered sick body” (Maynard 2013, 123). Thus, straightforward representations seem to be inadequate. Instead of resorting to the strategy of fictionalising, Gonzalez-Torres’s candy spills, besides staging the mechanism of transforming suffering into a “sweet” object of consumption, work as non-representational, participatory installations. By reading these installations, Maynard maps a complex interaction that will inevitably stage the politics of AIDS and thus force the spectatorparticipant to reflect upon the impled plotics of relating to AIDS victims. Drawing upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of the inoperative community, Maynard explores the dynamism and allegorical potential of literally consuming the candy spills. Although María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro’s essay, “Caught in the Grip of an Inherited Past: (Post)Memory and Holocaust Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus”, is mainly concerned with the complex intersubjective dynamics of testimony, in the context of this introduction it is worth emphasising a single aspect of his piece, one which connects his chapter with a thread that has been running through this introduction.

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According to Martínez-Alfaro, Maus foregrounds the problem of representation in several ways: through its genre, by dramatising the act of giving testimony, and, most blatantly and provocatively, by means of the animated animal figures. Since the only way these figures make any kind of sense is in terms of allegory, Maus might be said to be a sustained meditation on the problem also raised by several other contributions: the use of blatantly allegorical figures indicates the necessary act of fictionalisation, the gesture of untruth that seems to be indispensable in any rendering of traumatic non-experience. Art resurfaces here as artfulness. In Martínez-Alfaro’s essay, this act of fictionalisation acquires an ethical significance that becomes perceptible in the light of Marianne Hirsch’s suggestion: being responsive to the traumas of our parents “is productive only if the experience and feelings of the other are not subsumed in an appropriative identification”. By employing the animal figures, Artie finds a way of dealing with his family’s past, coping with this feeling of estrangement but maintaining the required distance: his parents’ traumas are not his own, he does not lay claim to them, but he does lay claim to their after-effects. (Martínez-Alfaro 2013, 140)

Here, art as artfulness is seen as an ethically relevant gesture of representation as appropriation. In ‘“The problem is, I’m not sure I believe in the thunderclap of trauma’: Aesthetics of Trauma in Contemporary American Literature”, Alan Gibbs discusses some of the backlashes of the recent vogue for trauma. Taking his cue from Roger Luckhurst’s worries about the commodification of trauma as a theme, Gibbs investigates one of the consequences of the fact that the cultural phenomenon called trauma “has so fully entered public discourse, has begun to influence both writers and, interdependently, critics and theorists” (Gibbs 2013, 148). The problem, he suggests, is not simply that certain narrative devices and strategies have become all too familiar, easily recognisable conventions, but also that, in a tacit collusion between theorists, critics and writers, much recent fiction has been instrumental in “reifying” contemporary trauma theory “into an often prescriptive aesthetic” (Gibbs 2013, 148). Through a discussion of the reception of Jonathan Safran Foer’s work, Gibbs identifies a hermeneutic circle born out of the symbiotic relationship between theory and fiction: theory-based criticism all too conveniently recognises itself in the mirror of theory-based fiction. Since much of this development has to do with the cultural currency and visibility enjoyed by these theories, one wonders whether the less conventional nature of East and Central

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European trauma novels (the fiction of Imre Kertész, Herta Müller, even Sofi Oksanen) could at least partly be attributed to the fact that, in these countries, trauma theory has not really become an academic staple. Gibbs identifies possible ways out of this impasse via realism (Carol Shields) or by means of what he calls “traumatic metafiction” (Doctorow, Mark Z. Danielewski or Tim O’Brien): writing which is more likely to undermine conventions of trauma writing and to challenge accepted theories regarding the representation of trauma and its effects. (Gibbs 2013, 149)

In “Trauma: Mourning and Healing Processes Through Artistic Practice”, Catherine Barrette, artist, academic and survivor of a traumatic accident, writes about her own work, borrowing the term “artworking” from Bracha Ettinger to characterize her own practice “at this threshold between trauma and representation” (Barrette 2013, 169). The focus of both her artworking and her chapter is the fraught relationship between trauma and representation. Instead of dismissing current theories of trauma out of hand, claiming that they cannot address the uniqueness of traumatic experience, Barrette analyses her artistic practice in psychoanalytic terms, testing the theory against her own art and her story, and also evoking inspiring artistic forerunners like Frida Kahlo. Barrette’s contribution is a narrative representation of her attempted representations of trauma— accordingly, the status and mode of the text constantly wavers between the confessional and the scholarly, or rather redefines the scholarly as always already confessional. In this therapeutic context, the scholarly text is both outside the trauma and its artistic reworkings and inside it, simply a further stage of the same process of working through. Connecting to the preoccupations of other essays in the volume, Barrette argues—following Jill Bennett—that trauma art is ill served by a theoretical framework that privileges “meaning” (i.e., the object of representation, outside art) over “form” (the inherent qualities or modus operandi of art). (Barrette 2013, 175)

Barrette’s difficulties also remind us that the impossibility of representing trauma is due not only to reasons inherent in the nature of traumatic nonexperience but also to that fact that the moment representation gets under way it follows certain existing cultural patterns that deprive it of uniqueness, thus, the act of representation is necessarily a dispossession. This evokes the impossibility of a realistic, documentary rendering of trauma and the necessity of fictionalising as the admission of untruth.

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In “Traces of Trauma: The Photography of Ori Gersht”, Alexandra Stara explores an issue that is in the centre not only of the Simonides anecdote about the origin of the art of memory but also of many of the essays collected in the present volume, including those of Bényei, Parenzan, Barrette and Maynard: the relationship between the nonexperience of trauma and the testimony of trauma as a possible ground for a kind of community, or at least intersubjectivity. Stara analyses the work of a contemporary artist working with photography and film in order to discuss concealment and ellipsis as devices for the exploration of trauma and the (im)possibility of its communication. Although Gersht’s family history is interwoven with the persecutions of WWII and the Holocaust, he, himself, has had access to these events second-hand; thus, his attempts to engage with the events and their aftermath are already mediated. The inherent paradox involved in the visualisation of the unrepresentable underlies all of Gersht’s work. As Stara argues, it is his investment in devices such as the idea of trace and the abstraction of the schema of art history that allows his work to transcend such impasses and operate as an opening of the realm of trauma to the intersubjective that does not challenge the authenticity of the original event but enhances its relevance. The trauma meant in Thomas Waitz’s “The Trauma of Suburbia: Images of the Fringe” is the most general and “theoretical” in the entire volume. Taking his cue from Walter Benjamin and Paul Virilio, Waitz discusses a spatial allegory of what he calls the trauma of modernity. Reading a photograph of the first public motorway in Germany and the multimedial work of 1930s German photographer and artist Peter Piller, Waitz reconceives the “green fringe”, the landscape interface between town and country, a semi-rural and semi-suburban hinterland as a traumatic space or experience of spatiality. If modernity, as he asserts, fails to deliver its promises, what is traumatic for the modern subject is to be confronted with that which is left behind, “and needs to be extinguished from perception” (Waitz 2013, 194). These nondescript, elided or “deflated” spaces, passed all too quickly, convey this trauma. Waitz also suggests that the link between photography and modernity might be rethought in terms of trauma: not in the sense that photography is the representation of trauma, but through the hypothesis that photography as such is inherently related to trauma: “one purpose of photography could be that of making the trauma explicit and consumable” (Waitz 2013, 197). 9/11, mediatised even as it was happening and immediately smothered by a multitude of discourses and representational patterns, is the obvious endpoint of any collection concerned with trauma and representation. Reading episodes of South Park, Family Guy, and The Boondocks, Philip

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Scepanski’s “9/11, Television Comedy, and the Ideology of ‘National Trauma’” discusses the vicissitudes of what Scepanski calls this “immense discursive knot” (Scepanski 2013, 200) in which the representations of the event were inextricably entangled with debates about these representations. Trauma (“the ideology of trauma” [Scepanski 2013, 201]) has been perhaps the most important node of this knot; since the event was overdetermined as the carrier of enormous symbolic significance, trauma was taken for granted; as Scepanski writes, the “repetitive narration of the event assumed the individual subject to be traumatized and thus positioned him/her as such” (Scepanski 2013, 200). This would seem automatically to lead to theorising trauma as a posterior construction that retrospectively makes sense of an event, although Scepanski warns against “blithely accepting the discursive construction of collective trauma” (Scepanski 2013, 202), and urges an examination of “how such subject positions and ideologies are created and negotiated in mass culture” (Scepanski 2013, 202).

Works Cited Amis, M. 2011 [2010]. The Pregnant Widow. London: Vintage. Baer, U. 2002. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Barrette, C. 2013. “Trauma: Mourning and Healing Processes through Artistic Practice.” In The Edges of Trauma, edited by T. Bényei and A. Stara, 169-180. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Bényei T. 2013. “The Psychopathology of Colonial Life: Collective Colonial Trauma in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet.” In The Edges of Trauma, edited by T. Bényei and A. Stara, 61-86. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Boileau, N. P. 2013. “’Trauma and “Ordinary Words’: Virginia Woolf’s Play on Words.” In The Edges of Trauma, edited by T. Bényei and A. Stara, 48-60. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Burgess, A. 1973. MF. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Farrell, K. 1998. Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Gibbs, A. 2013. “’The problem is, I’m not sure I believe in the thunderclap of trauma’: Aesthetics of Trauma in Contemporary American Literature.” In The Edges of Trauma, edited by T. Bényei and A. Stara, 148-168. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Gorilovics, T. 2013. “An Explosion That Led to Paradise: Le Paradis des conditions humaines by Jean-Richard Bloch.” In The Edges of Trauma,

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edited by T. Bényei and A. Stara, 36-47. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Maynard, E. 2013. “The Body and Community in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Candy Spills or Towards a Positive Metaphor of Illness.” In The Edges of Trauma, edited by T. Bényei and A. Stara, 121-136. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Martínez-Alfaro, M. J. 2013. “Caught in the Grip of an Inherited Past: (Post)Memory and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” In The Edges of Trauma, edited by T. Bényei and A. Stara, 137-147. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Miller, N. K. and Jason Tougaw (ed.). 2002. Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community. Urbana: U of Illinois P. Parenzan, G. 2013. “Lying for Company: Devising Trauma in Beckett and Kristof.” In The Edges of Trauma, edited by T. Bényei and A. Stara, 87-103. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Perec, G. 2011 [1975]. W or the Memories of Childhood. Trans. David Bellos. London: Vintage Ramadanovic, P. 2001. Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma, and Identity. Lanham: Lexington Books. Sebald, W. G. 2002. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Saltzman, L and E. Rosenberg, eds. 2006. Trauma and Visuality in Modernity. Hanover, NH: UP of New England. Scepanski, P. 2013. “9/11, Television Comedy, and the Ideology of ‘National Trauma’.” In The Edges of Trauma, edited by T. Bényei and A. Stara, 200-214. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Swift, G. 1983. Waterland. London: Picador. Waitz, T. 2013. “The Trauma of Suburbia: Images of the Fringe.” In The Edges of Trauma, edited by T. Bényei and A. Stara, 191-199. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Weinrich, H. 1997. Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens. Munich: C. H. Beck. Ugrešiü, D. 1996. “The Confiscation of Memory”. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth, New Left Review 218. Yates, F. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago: The U of Chicago P.

“BROKEN WARRIORS, TORTURED SOULS”: CONSTRUCTIONS OF PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA IN BRITISH ART OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR, C. 1916-1919. JONATHAN BLACK

This essay will focus upon the front-line experiences of three British artists who were later appointed official war artists by the Department of Information, founded February 1917 and then expanded to a full Ministry in February the following year. Why focus on these three particular artists? They all served in uniform during the war but at different ranks, in different capacities and with different outcomes. All three became official war artists but at different stages of the war; two—C. R. W. Nevinson and Eric Kennington—were recruited as war artists after they had been invalided out of the army as privates on medical grounds; the third, a much more established pre-war artist, William Orpen, deftly manipulated his extensive connections to first become an officer and then secure an official war artist post. His pre-war contacts and wealth then allowed him to pursue his duties in some comfort—though he was to come under fire and suffer maladies similar to those experienced by numerous ordinary British soldiers. All three experienced the war as a life-changing event; service as a war artist secured Orpen’s already impressive pre-war reputation as one of Britain’s leading portraitists while it helped launch the careers of Nevinson and Kennington. However, Nevinson found it difficult to cope with the physical and emotional scars that the war inflicted upon him while Kennington found a way of channelling his memories of the Western Front into a successful post-war career as a sculptor and carver of impressive war memorials.

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C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946) Nevinson was in the south of France, on holiday with his mother, when war broke out early in August 1914. As England’s sole self-proclaimed Futurist he believed he must behave accordingly and get involved in the struggle as soon as humanly possible. However, much to his chagrin and embarrassment, he was twice turned down for military service on health grounds (Black 1999, 28). He eventually reached the front in France through his father, who arranged for him to serve as an ambulance driver and medical orderly with a volunteer ambulance unit organised in London by the Society of Friends. During the morning of 13 November 1914, Nevinson was abruptly plunged into the horrifying reality of war when he arrived in Dunkirk and was immediately put to work by the Friends Ambulance Unit [FAU] as an orderly, “nurse, water-carrier, stretcher-bearer, driver and interpreter” in a makeshift dressing station in a railway goods yard shed grimly nicknamed “The Shambles” (Black 1999, 28-29). Nevinson later wrote in his autobiography, published in 1937, of working in a shed full of dead, wounded and dying. It was a sudden transition from peaceful England and I thought then that the people at home could never be expected to realise what war was … [the wounded in ‘The Shambles’] had been roughly bandaged … they lay, men with every form of terrible wound, swelling and festering, watching their comrades die … There was a strong smell of gangrene, wine and French cigarettes … They lay on dirty straw, foul with old bandages and filth, these gaunt bearded men, some white and still with only a faint movement of their chests to distinguish them from the dead by their side. (Nevinson 1938, 9698)

The gruesome sights he witnessed there were branded on his memory and feature in his powerful 1916 oil La Patrie [Birmingham Art Gallery], first exhibited with the London Group early in June 1916—from whence it was bought by the celebrated author Arnold Bennett. After two-to-three days working in the dreadful conditions of “The Shambles”, the FAU assigned Nevinson to his own motor ambulance which could carry 4-6 wounded men from a FAU forward dressing station at Woesten, close to the front north of Ypres, back to the Unit’s main hospital at Malo-lesBains on the outskirts of Dunkirk. After only nine days (15-23rd November) of driving his ambulance, its back axle and suspension were wrecked by a heavy calibre German shell while it was parked outside the dressing station at Woesten. Nevinson was not actually driving the vehicle, which was the impression he gave at the time and subsequently in

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his autobiography. Nevinson was assigned another ambulance, for the Malo-les-Bains/Ypres run, but had to give up driving a fortnight later when he experienced unspecified trouble with his hands and legs, preventing him from operating the heavy controls of his Mors Ambulance (Nevinson 1938, 99). By mid-December 1914, Henry Nevinson found his son working as a ward orderly at the Malo-les-Bains hospital in charge of a ward of 40 or so wounded French and Belgian soldiers and civilians; he also was expected to lend a hand in the operating theatre. Some of the soldiers had hideous wounds caused by shrapnel and bullets. The artist later wrote of the period in his autobiography: After a month had passed [at the Malo-les-Bains Hospital] I felt I had been born in a nightmare. I had seen sights so revolting that man seldom conceives them in his mind […] there was no shrinking even among the most sensitive of us. We could only help and ignore [the] shrieks, pus, gangrene and the disembowelled. (Walsh 2008, 99)

On 30 January 1915 Nevinson left Dunkirk for a month’s leave in London. The FAU was evidently expecting him back and was most displeased when he made no effort to return until April 1915. It was obvious that pursuing his career was his priority, painting new images of the war and ensuring they were exhibited in London. Just a few days later, Nevinson was interviewed by the Daily Express in an article titled: “Painter of Smells at the Front. A Futurists Views on the War”. According to the paper, Nevinson’s Futurist sensibility was not trained in the same school as the iron nerve of a Marinetti. His [Nevinson’s] nerves gave way, his health broke down and he had to return. (Wilenski 1915, 6)

Stung by the insinuation of a nervous collapse, the artist wrote that very day to the editor to strenuously deny this claim: My nerves did not give way … Beyond a severe attack of rheumatism, my health is better than before the war and I am in absolutely in no way suffering from any form of nerve trouble. (Nevinson 1915, 8)

After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to return to the FAU, on 1 June 1915 Nevinson surprised many of his friends, and his father, by enlisting as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps at the Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth (Black 1999, 29). The artist certainly did not enjoy the experience of being at the bottom of the Army hierarchy as a

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humble, lowly private—even though he volunteered with a group of artists and writers who were all members of the Chelsea Arts Club such as the journalist Ward Muir. By the end of June 1915 Nevinson was in charge of a 40-bed “Observation and Detention” ward (D3) containing patients suffering from what was known as “shell shock” and men suspected of malingering i.e. shamming insanity and pretending to hallucinate and have the most horrendous nightmares (Black 1999, 30). He later referred to his time in ward D3 as: the worst job I have ever tackled in my life. Lots of the “balmy ones” were indeed balmy and needed every attention [re the mental cases] some were mad, some were shell-shocked and some were nit-wits […] completely in a world of hallucination and persecution—especially the latter. There would be strange grievances against the man in the next bed and, particularly against their wives […] (Nevinson 1938, 106)

After about three months in ward D3 (July-September 1915) Nevinson wrote: [I] began to have an uneasy feeling that I was catching their complaint [of the patients in the ward] and had it not been for the observation of one of the doctors, I believe I should have become one of the “balmy ones” myself. Scientific or not, I am convinced that mental instability is infectious. I was moved into the Blind and Dead Ward, the deaf being terribly morose and the blind extremely gay. (Nevinson 1938, 106-107)

Towards the end of 1915 Nevinson fell ill from a severe bout of what was diagnosed as “rheumatic fever”; he was confined to bed and experienced hallucinations as his temperature rose to 102 degrees. He later recalled that: “my hands were in an appalling state, scarcely human and I was given to fainting” (Nevinson 1938, 111). Unsurprisingly, early in January 1916, he was invalided out of the army on medical grounds. At the end of May 1916—just a matter of weeks before the horror of the Battle of the Somme, opened 1 July 1916—Nevinson exhibited the oil La Patrie [1916, Birmingham Art Gallery] with the London Group at the Goupil Gallery (Daily 1916, 6). The canvas was much praised by the critics. In the Sunday Times critic Frank Rutter wrote that: “The pitiable horror of war has never been more powerfully emphasised in paint that in Mr. Nevinson’s La Patrie” (Rutter 1916, 14). The Athenaeum opined that month that the canvas dealt with “subject matter more acute in its appeal to human sympathy, the writhing figures with their unkempt beards and sordid rags bearing testimony to first-hand observation”, but complained

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that the “horror” all too vividly in evidence was not “dignified by a hint of tragedy” (Murry 1916, 299). Between June and September 1916 Nevinson produced a series of new oils and drypoint prints for display within his first solo show held towards the end of September at the prestigious Leicester Galleries, Leicester Square. The exhibition was supposed to close at the end of October 1916. However, it proved such a success with the public that it was extended a further week, until 4 November. One of the works in display which attracted particular attention was The Doctor (1916, Imperial war Museum, London) depicting a white-coated Friends Ambulance Unit doctor, who bears an intriguing physical resemblance to Nevinson, working in the Dunkirk “Shambles” on French wounded. This was a controversial image, for it showed one man’s bare bottom while another French soldier [the “poilu” was the name the French gave to their ordinary soldiers—akin to the British “tommy”] howls in pain—with a facial expression inspired by Munch’s celebrated painting The Scream (1893)—as the doctor probes his head wound with a scalpel and without anaesthetic. The overall critical reaction to the Leicester Galleries show was overwhelmingly positive; the Manchester Guardian praised Nevinson for confronting the spectator with “the black gloom […] the feeling of despair that make even death and mutilation seem trivial incidents in an epoch of horror” (Manchester Guardian 1916). From a more politically conservative perspective, the British Architect dismissed Nevinson’s soldiers as “mechanical puppets” who “present us with a picture of stark, unmitigated horror … we may fairly ask what is the end gained by such portrayals? […]” (British Architect 1916). War correspondent Henry Tomlinson defended Nevinson on the grounds that his work reproduces the first uncritical shock of the encounter without love or pity […] in The Doctor the soldier’s agony is faithfully portrayed but only in the same way as the wet weather in the trenches. Mr. Nevinson only supplies the picture, you bring your own emotions. (Tomlison 1916)

By the spring of 1917 Nevinson was desperate to avoid being conscripted back into the ranks for home service. So much so that he had already acquired proof from his former Commanding Officer at the Third London General, Lt-Col. Bruce Porter to the effect that he was “utterly unfit for active service” (Walsh 2008, 128). Indeed, he appears to have come close to a complete nervous breakdown. His father noted that he had seen a Dr. Rackham on 17 March 1917. Nevinson was “in terrible distress

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[…] his nerve all gone […] almost insane […] he will never go back into the army alive” (H. Nevinson 1917).

Fig. 1. C.R.W. Nevinson, The Doctor, 1916

Nevinson was offered an official war art position by the Department of Information in May 1917 and he promptly accepted. He was allowed a month-long visit to France in July 1917, but was not encouraged to visit front-line casualty clearing stations and base hospitals as he wished. His “official” war art was decidedly more anodyne and less challenging than the imagery he painted in 1916 after he left the army. He fell out with the Ministry of Information, and wrangles over money and censorship led to deterioration of his mental state: he regularly experienced nightmares, was unable to sleep or relax and was treated for “air nerves” by a Consulting Psychologist to the RAF, Dr. Henry Head (1861-1940), who had treated

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Virginia Woolf for a nervous breakdown shortly before the war broke out (Black 1999, 35). In March 1918, for example, he wrote to C.F.G. Masterman at the Ministry of Information: “I have been ill lately with nerves and acute insomnia and Dr. Head (the well-known neurologist) who is treating me insists that I must have at least one month’s complete rest.”1 Nevinson later wrote in his autobiography of suffering during this period from a recurring nightmare [accompanied by] the awful feeling that I was falling through the air […] just as I was about to go to sleep and of waking up with an imaginary crash. (Nevinson 1938, 150)

The mental strain imposed upon him by flying manifested itself in other ways: Like many sensitive men, I can honestly say that I have never felt fear at the moment of danger […] But some hours after, and when in complete safety, I suffer from delayed shock […] beginning with a terrible elation and by incontrollable trembling and ending with vomiting, with all forms of anticipation of evil and with eventual prostration. (Nevinson 1938, 150151)

Part of the therapy Head recommended was to avoid painting warrelated subject matter. Nevinson was, however, delighted to hear from Robert Ross, art critic and adviser to the BWMC at the Ministry of Information, in June 1918 that Ross was about to buy The Doctor for the art collection of the new Imperial War Museum. He wrote to Ross: it is entirely thanks to you that the IWM has accepted The Doctor […] if […] the picture does get into the collection, I shall not feel quite so indignant when the Government gets me again and has me shot. [Nevinson feared he would be conscripted into the Army despite his medical discharge granted in 1916]. I shall feel I have had the last word on the “horrors” of war for the generations to come and, in future, the warmongers of the world will not have the entire platform to themselves as they had in the past. (quoted in Ross 1952, 330-331)

The First World War effectively made Nevinson’s reputation and yet he never really fully recovered from it either mentally or physically, nor did he ever really regain a coherent sense of artistic purpose. As he wrote 1 C. R. W. Nevinson to C. F. G. Masterman. 10 March 1918. Nevinson WWI File. Department of Art, Imperial War Museum, London.

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to Sir William Rothenstein, in April 1932, in the midst of experiencing another prolonged bout of debilitating illness: “I am a disagreeable, disappointed man because I painted war as a private experienced it […]. I was the first to do so and I stripped [away] the pageantry of war.” (Rosenthein 1932)

Sir William Orpen (1878-1931) A highly successful pre-war society portraitist, Orpen volunteered in December 1915 for the non-combatant Army Service Corps on the understanding he would never be sent overseas (Upstone and Weight 2008, 9). He enjoyed a definite advantage over the majority of the other official war artists as he began as a Second Lieutenant and was quickly promoted to the rank of Major. He went to France in April 1917 with a batman and a car, complete with his pre-war chauffeur (Upstone and Weight 2008, 18).

Figure 2. William Orpen, Blown Up and Mad, 1917

Late in May 1917 he used his rank and influence to reach the Front and draw soldiers coming just out of the line during the later stages of the Battle of Arras. Some men were clearly identified as suffering from shellshock such as the watercolour drawing Blown Up and Mad (1917,

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Imperial War Museum, London). Tellingly, the GHQ censor, Major (later Lt. Colonel) Arthur Lee questioned the use of this emotive term. Indeed, he insisted the word was erased from all the drawings Orpen submitted. A year later, in May 1918, he expressly forbade the use of the term “mad” in the titles of work Orpen exhibited in his official war artists exhibition held at Agnews on Old Bond Street (May-July 1918) (Upstone and Weight 2008, 41). During the autumn of 1917 Orpen painted a series of glossy, highly idealised portraits of generals and dashing “knights of the air” such as 20year-old fighter pilot Lieutenant Arthur Percival Foley Rhys-Davids, DSO, MC, RFC who flew with the elite 56 Squadron (flying SE5a fighter aircraft) (1917, Imperial War Museum, London). Though Orpen presents Rhys-Davids as composed, even serene, he was actually in the throes of a near nervous breakdown as he increasingly came to despise the carefully constructed persona of devil-may-care, fighter ace imposed upon him by the press and the Department of Information. Rhys-Davids (1897-1917) was actually shot down and killed only a fortnight after Orpen completed his portrait in October 1917.2 Orpen was to later recall, in 1921, that RhysDavids: “hated fighting, hated flying, loved books and was terribly anxious for the war to be over, so that he could get to Oxford” (Upstone and Weight 2008, 126). His sitter had, indeed, won a Classics Scholarship from Eton to Balliol College, which he hoped to take up after the war. His determination to attack the enemy, however outnumbered, was near suicidal and many of his comrades became convinced he had a “death wish”. Rhys-Davids even confessed to his mother that, in the air, his personality changed completely: he felt taken over by a different self and became fixated on killing Germans (Upstone and Weight 2008, 126). Much closer, perhaps, to the reality of the physically and mentally exhausting nature of modern air combat was Orpen’s remarkable watercolour: Two RFC Officers Just Wounded And Having Breakfast at a Hotel in Amiens Before Going To Hospital (1917, Imperial War Museum, London). The pilot, wounded in the right hand, sits slumped at the hotel table. His Observer stares out at the viewer but with unseeing eyes; “the thousand yard stare” Don McCullin famously recorded in the face of a US Marine who had survived intense fighting at Hue during the “Tet Offensive” of January 1968 (McCullin 2002, 110). Orpen later wrote in his war memoir An Onlooker In France that he had encountered the two

2

Rhys-Davids joined the Royal Flying Corps in August 1916 and, having achieved 22 confirmed “kill’s, was himself shot down and killed on 27 October 1917”.

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RFC officers one morning in April 1917 while breakfasting at the Hôtel du Rhin, Amiens: there was a great noise outside—an English voice was cursing someone else hard and telling him to get on and not make an ass of himself. Then a Flying Pilot was pushed in by an Observer. The Pilot’s hand was temporarily bound up, but blood was dripping through. The Observer had his face badly scratched and one of his legs was not quite right. They sat at a table and the waiter brought them eggs and coffee, which they took with relish, but the Pilot was constantly drooping towards his left and the drooping continued until he went crack on the floor. Then the Observer would curse him soundly and put him back in his chair where he would eat again ‘till the next fall. When they had finished, the waiter put a cigarette into each of their mouths and lit them. After a few minutes four men walked in with two stretchers, put the two breakfasters on [them] and walked out with them—not a word was spoken. (Upstone and Weight 2008, 72)

Fig. 3. William Orpen, Two RFC Officers Just Wounded And Having Breakfast at a Hotel in Amiens Before Going To Hospital, 1917

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“Broken Warriors, Tortured Souls”

Orpen felt decidedly guilty that he had spent far too much of his time as an official war artist painting and immortalising the powerful and important, those to whom he referred as “frocks” and “brass hats”, at the expense of the ordinary combat soldiers who had overwhelmingly done all the fighting and dying. His conviction that the war had wrecked his physical and mental wellbeing was recorded in remarkable self-portraits in pen and ink such as: Self-Portrait With Blood Poisoning (1919, Imperial War Museum, London), which he sent to Lt. Colonel Lee. The “blood poisoning” was in actual fact syphilis which he had contracted early in the war. Distracted by his wartime duties as a war artist, he left concerted treatment of his malady until it was far too late. Post-war, an increasingly pessimistic and disenchanted Orpen came to the conclusion that the sacrifice of ordinary soldiers had been utterly betrayed and debased by the politicians. A future war, even more of a blood bath than 1914-18, seemed to him inevitable (Upstone and Weight 2008, 35-37).

Eric Kennington (1888-1960) Kennington was born into comfortable professional middle class background. His father, Thomas Benjamin, was a highly respected portraitist and founder-member of the New English Art Club (Black 2001, 1). Just two days after Britain declared war on Imperial Germany, on 6 August 1914, Kennington volunteered to serve as a private in a territorial infantry battalion: the 13th Battalion of the London Regiment—universally known as The Kensingtons (Black 2001, 2). After three months basic training, his unit was sent to the Western Front and, after a couple of weeks to acclimatise, it entered front-line trenches in the Lys Valley of north-eastern France, late in November 1914, as the first snows fell. The trenches were not deep enough and waterlogged—the artist later wrote to his elder brother, William, that the freezing mud “came up to his balls”— the men shivered as the temperature plummeted and German shell-fire prevented rations and hot food reaching them.3 Several of Kennington’s company were killed by German sniper fire, shelling or collapsed from the punishing effects of the horrendous weather, something we often overlook today. Kennington thought he was physically fit—he was a keen amateur boxer—but just three or four continuous days in the line brought him close to breaking point.4

3 4

E.H. Kennington to W.O, Kennington, c. February 1915, Family of the Artist. E. H. Kennington to W. O. Kennington c. March 1915. Family of the Artist.

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In mid January 1915 he was accidentally shot in the foot by a friend cleaning his rifle in their front-line trench. Kennington lost the middle toe on his right foot; the wound became infected and for a while he faced losing the entire foot. However, he recovered and was granted an honourable medical discharge from the army early in June 1915 (Black 2001, 3). During the rest of the year he painted his remarkable tribute on glass to No.7 Platoon, C. Company of the Kensingtons: the artist’s “home” for nearly 6 months, from August 1914 to January 1915, The Kensingtons At Laventie: Winter 1914 (1915, Imperial War Museum, London). This was exhibited as part of a charity show at the Goupil Gallery in April-May 1916 to raise money for disabled ex-servicemen.

Fig. 4. Eric H. Kennington, The Kensingtons At Laventie: Winter 1914, 1915

Many critics and visitors noted the prominence of the soldier Private “Sweeney” Todd, who has collapsed on the ground through exhaustion after the battalion has marched for two hours away from the front line down a mud filled communication trench under shell and sniper fire to the relative safety of the battered main street of Laventie (Black 2001, 3). It was as though Kennington, the former veteran of the front-line, made it permissible for the wider British public to grasp that British soldiers were not supermen: they too could succumb to the inhuman demands of frontline existence and acknowledge extreme bodily fatigue.

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“Broken Warriors, Tortured Souls”

In April of the following year Kennington approached the recently created Department of Information in search of an official war art position. He was recommended by Campbell Dodgson, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the British Library, who was also serving as an art adviser to the Department. He was sent to France as a temporary official war artist, without rank or pay, late in August 1917. Initially he was to stay for just a month—as had Nevinson. From the outset, however, Kennington was determined to get closer to the front line and draw men from the ranks who had distinguished themselves in battle such as an NCO in the Royal West Kents—8th Queens Hero (1917, Imperial War Museum, London) who could claim a remarkable record of sustained bravery over two years on the Western Front. The man had twice been awarded the Military Medal and was up for the Distinguished Conduct Medal after having participated in a recently successful raid on the German lines; in fact the man, whose surname was Johnson, had actually rugby tackled one fleeing German and brought him back to British lines as a prisoner. By any estimation, Johnson was every inch a hero, yet his facial expression plainly suggests utter exhaustion and that he was very much nearing the end of his tether. Kennington would later, during service as an official war artist in the Second World War, subscribe to the definition of the limits of courage for even the bravest of men offered by Lord Moran in his classic 1945 study The Anatomy of Courage (Moran 1945).5 As Moran memorably and succinctly put it: “Men wear out in war like clothes”. As a vivid physiological proof that he shared the life of a front-line tommy, in February 1918 Kennington fell ill from “trench fever”, a form of debilitating, lingering, blood poisoning caused by scratching infected lice bites (Black 2001, 6). He was sent to recover at the 55th Casualty Clearing Station [CCS] at Tincourt near Péronne, which was only 12 miles from the firing line and so subject to long-range German shelling as well as occasional bombing raids from the air. The CCS was a miniature town of tents and huts, one of 59 on the Western Front, which could treat up to 1,200 sick and wounded at a time and often treble that number during an offensive such as the Battle of Cambrai (November-December 1917) (Black 2001, 36). Each CCS had 3 surgical teams, plus about 100 RAMC personnel and nursing staff (Holmes 2005, 478). As he recovered, Kennington sketched patients throughout the CCS: men suffering from bullet wounds, from pneumonia, rheumatism and even 5

In Part One, Chapter Three, “The Birth of Fear”, Moran explored how even the bravest soldiers he had encountered on the Western Front, c. 1914-17, could succumb to “battle fatigue” given prolonged exposure to shell-fire and danger of death and/or serious injury.

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so-called SIWs [Self-Inflicted Wounds]. He was particularly interested in men suffering from the effects of a relatively recent weapon deployed by the Germans—mustard gas—which attacked the eyes and lungs, blistered exposed skin of hands, neck, arms and legs (Holmes 2005, 423-4).

Fig. 5. Eric H. Kennington, Mustard Gas, 1918, pastel on paper

Veterans of the front were to greatly approve of Kennington’s war art, when a selection was exhibited by the Ministry of Information in London, in June-July 1918. War poet Robert Graves, who had survived two years as an infantry officer in France, wrote to the critic/collector/connoisseur Edward Marsh: […] My God Eddie, Kennington can draw; makes your pals [Paul] Nash and [C.R.W.] Nevinson look like grease-spots. I don’t know why any other official artists are sent out [to the Western Front] at all […]. (Marsh 1918)

In October 1934 Kennington donated several studies of wounded men drawn at the 55th CCS to the Imperial War Museum. He also included a number of studies he had produced during the spring and summer of 1919 of makeshift battlefield graves during a trip to the old Western Front as an official artist working for Lord Beaverbrook’s Canadian War Memorials

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“Broken Warriors, Tortured Souls”

Scheme. He was later to mention how soothing he found sketching these graves, usually overgrown and often disturbed by later shelling to expose part of a skeleton or a grinning skull (Rosenthein 1919)—German Helmet and Skeleton near Ribecourt (1919, Private Collection). Many observers thought these images singularly “macabre” or even melodramatically “Gothick” when they were included in a solo exhibition Kennington held at the Alpine Club Gallery in October/November 1920 (Murry 1920). However, art critic for the Observer, Paul Konody, strongly disagreed with such criticism stating: “Mr. Kennington manages to reconcile the old with the new; he is now half-Pre-Raphaelite and half expressionist […]” (Konody 1920). One of the watercolours from 1919, depicting a partially unearthed battlefield grave near Cambrai, was apparently purchased by T.S. Eliot. It seems apposite he should have it hanging in his lodgings as he memorably referred to a corpse “planted last year” about to “sprout” and “bloom” in “The Burial of the Dead” section of “The Waste Land”, published in The Criterion in October 1922 while “hollow men” provided the subject and resonant title for a long poem published in 1925.

Fig. 6. Eric. H. Kennington, German Helmet and Skeleton near Ribecourt, 1919

Did the war and what he had seen and experienced on the Western Front have any long-term psychological effects on Kennington? In April

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1928 Kennington’s close friend T. E. Lawrence commented to painter William Rothenstein that Kennington and Augustus John were both hag-ridden by a sense that, perhaps, their strength was greater than they knew. What an uncertain, disappointed, barbarous generation we wartimers have been. They say the best ones were killed […]. (quoted in Garnett 1938, 583)

Lawrence’s matter-of-fact and yet rather bleak verdict could equally apply to Orpen, dying aged only 53 from syphilis and alcoholism in September 1931, and Nevinson who had become convinced that, while it had effectively launched his career, the war had wrecked his physical and mental health (Black 1999, 36). Indeed, Nevinson was far from alone in this perception: by March 1939 120,000 British ex-servicemen either had received, or were still receiving, pension payments for “war-related neurosis or traumatic neurasthenia” (Babington, 1997, 121).6 (Babington, 1997, 121). For his part Kennington actually appeared to derive a degree of peace and purpose to rebut Lawrence’s verdict precisely from immersing himself for much of the 1920s in planning and carving a series of large war memorial projects such as The 24th Infantry Division Memorial in Battersea Park, London (1921-24) and the Soissons Memorial to the Missing in Soissons, France (1925-28) (Black 2002, Chapter Three). In 1924 he told his close friend, the art critic R.H. Wilenski, that he had the war to thank for compelling him to become a sculptor once the hostilities had ended (Wilenski 1924, 549). Indeed, his experience of front-line combat—even the trauma of losing a toe—appeared to reinforce an existing pre-war conviction that life was by its very nature “a battle” and a relentless Darwinian struggle for existence.7 Ironically, Nevinson and Orpen, with their essentially more optimistic view of the world, and willingness to acknowledge their emotional and physical shortcomings, found it much harder after the war to process and overcome the wartime traumas they had experienced and witnessed.

6

This out of nearly 4.5 million British men who served in the First World War and survived. 7 Eric Kennington interviewed by The Daily News, 4 October 1924. Clipping: Family of the Artist.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Eric Kennington Papers. Family of the Artist. Sir Edward Marsh Papers. Berg Collection, New York Public Library. C. R. W. Nevinson Papers. Hyman Kreitman Research Centre, Tate Britain. C. R. W. Nevinson First World War File. Department of Art, Imperial War Museum, London. H. W. Nevinson Papers. Department of Modern Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Nevinson, H. W. 1917. Diaries. H.W. Nevinson Papers, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Sir William Rothenstein Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Secondary Sources Babington, A. 1997. Shell-Shock: A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis. London: Pen & Sword Books. Black, J. 1999. “A Curious, Cold, Intensity: C. R. W. Nevinson as a War Artist, 1914-1918” In C. R. W. Nevinson: The Twentieth Century, edited by J. Honer. London: Merrell Hoberton. —. 2001. The Graphic Art of Eric Kennington. London: UCL/Strang Print Room. —. 2002. The Sculpture of Eric Kennington. Aldershot, UK: Lund Humphries. “Exhibitions.” 1916. British Architect, October 1916, 7311.2B, Nevinson Papers, TGA. Holmes, R. 2005. Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 19141918. London: Harper Perennial. Garnett, D, ed. 1938. The Letters of T.E. Lawrence. London: Jonathan Cape. Honer, J, ed. 1999. C.R.W. Nevinson: The Twentieth Century. London: Merrell Holberton. McCullin, D. 2002. Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography. London: Vintage. Moran, C. 1945. The Anatomy of Courage. London: Constable & Co. “Mr. Nevinson’s Exhibition.” 1916. The Manchester Guardian, September 27.

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Nevinson, C. R. W. 1938. Paint and Prejudice: The Life Of A Painter. New York: Harcourt Brace. Ross, M. 1952. Robert Ross: Friend of Friends. London: Cassell. Tomlinson, H. R. 1916. “Exhibitions.” The Star, October 3, 7311.2B, Nevinson Papers, TGA. Upstone, R. and A. Weight, eds. 2008. William Orpen: An Onlooker In France. London: Paul Holberton Publishing. Walsh, M. J. K. 2008. Hanging A Rebel: The Life of C. R. W. Nevinson. Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press. Wilenski, R. H. 1915. Daily Express, February 25.

AN EXPLOSION THAT LED TO PARADISE:1 LE PARADIS DES CONDITIONS HUMAINES BY JEAN-RICHARD BLOCH TIVADAR GORILOVICS

For combatants under threat of violent death, the experience of war is a vast space of trauma of all kinds. With its industrial techniques for killing opponents—what Ernst Jünger called its “storms of steel” (Jünger 1993)— the 1914-18 war has a historic status linked to a number of emblematic locations, such as “the hell of Verdun”, where entire armies clashed. To be in the front line in these places was to be always close to death.2 It is the constant threat of a death at once feared and expected that gives the trauma suffered by combatants its particular nature. Whereas, for the victim of a road accident, the traumatic event is sudden and unforeseen (more precisely it is foreseen only in the abstract, as an awareness of potential danger), the front-line combatant is under direct threat for hours and days at a time, a witness to the appalling injuries and deaths of his comrades, in the anxious expectation that he too will succumb. Every time he finds himself in a dangerous situation, bent double beneath the bombardment, he behaves as Ernst Jünger describes: instinct links the idea of death to each of these growls of vibrating iron – and so I remained crouching in my hole, hands over my eyes, as all the ways I could be hit passed through my imagination. (Jünger 1993, 107)

As a writer, Jean-Richard Bloch (born 1884) was even more concerned by the idea of his own annihilation because it would simultaneously strike 1 “Une explosion qui menait au Paradis”. All references are to the editions listed at the end of the article. For the correspondence of Jean-Richard Bloch, the dates of letters alone are given. 2 “The means of mutual destruction are making great progress. Each time I go back to the Front I’m amazed by the discoveries I’m shown”. [les moyens de se détruire font de grands progrès. Chaque fois que je reviens au front, je suis étonné des découvertes qu’on m’y montre.] Letter from Bloch to his wife, 22 March 1916.

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his developing body of work.3 Having enlisted in August 1914 and been twice wounded (in September 1914 and October 1915, before he went to Verdun in March 1916), he was constantly in the presence of death. This led him to write, in a letter to his wife of 11 September 1914: But death obviously didn’t want me. My company was surrounded in a clearing in a wood. Only a very few of us managed to escape, wounded and crawling for kilometres at dusk, under the bullets [...].4

Bloch arrived in the Verdun area in May 1916, armed with all his experience of war. If, as Socrates said, the best philosophy consists in carefully preparing to die (Plato, Phaedo 67e)5, it can be said that Bloch had been doing his best to achieve this for some time,6 surely at the price of some inner struggle. To Romain Rolland (letter of 27 October 1915), “in a great moment of distress”,7 he described how the long days of reading, mother of nights of insomnia and fever, awaken the old man, who is only too quick to raise his head. The Urmensch comes 3

At the time this body of work comprised one (unpublished) play L’Inquiète, staged at the Odéon d’Antoine in January 1911, a collection of short stories, Lévy, Premier livre de contes (Gallimard, 1912), and a major novel, …Et Cie, completed in 1914 but not published until 1918, again by Gallimard, which tells the story of an Alsatian Jewish family of cloth manufacturers, who chose France at the time of the annexation and moved their factory to Normandy. Having obtained the agrégation in history and geography (1907) and taken a post as a high school teacher in Poitiers (1908), in 1910 Bloch founded the magazine L’Effort, which became L’Effort libre in 1912. According to its founder and editor, it was intended as a “magazine of revolutionary civilization”, by definition critical of society and the bourgeois literature of its day. After the war Bloch published a collection of his studies and articles from the magazine with the title Carnaval est mort. Premiers essais pour mieux comprendre mon temps (Gallimard, 1920, 266). 4 “Mais décidément la mort n’a pas voulu de moi. Ma compagnie a été cernée dans une clairière d’un bois. Nous sommes quelques-uns seuls qui avons pu, blessés et rampant pendant des kilomètres à la tombée du jour, sous les balles, nous échapper”. 5 “Philosophy itself is, in fact, a kind of ‘training for dying’, a purification of the philosopher’s soul from its bodily attachment”. 6 In his letter of 27 October 1915 to Romain Rolland, he recalls the lesson of the Phaedo as follows: “We do not ask to live: sacrifice is accepted in a peace without joy or pain, equalled only by the atmosphere that reigns in the Phaedo or in Dante’s circle of hell”. [“Nous ne demandons pas à vivre : le sacrifice est consenti avec une paix sans joie ni douleur qui n’a d’égale que l’atmosphère qui règne dans le Phédon ou dans le cercle de l’enfer dantesque”.] 7 “dans un grand moment de désarroi”

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An Explosion That Led to Paradise to sit down beside the soldier and places a leaden hand on his dirty greatcoat.8

Then, when he is about to go back to the Front, comes this admission of 11 March (again to Romain Rolland): “Reacclimatisation did not take place without a resurgence of the beast. The mind also balked. Both were brought to heel”.9 Brought to heel, tamed, as a wild animal is tamed to be made to obey. Bloch reacclimatized himself in conditions that can be judged from the letter he wrote to his friend André Monglond on 22 February 1916: “We are alternately in mud up to our knees, snow and water. The Germans facing us are certainly no more comfortable”.10 But there was something harder to bear than physical suffering: Inactivity in dangerous conditions is a fearful trial. I was able somehow to rise to being active in peril; I fear I have not reached the passive elasticity required by life in the trenches. Battle, yes; to await your fate without being given the means to prepare for it, that’s a lot harder.11

His only recourse was to a firm stoicism: Die without speaking, officer Vigny wrote the rule.12 I have just reread Tolstoy’s remarkable pages on the siege of Sebastopol: he too [...] settled for seeing, hearing suffering.13

8

“Les longues journées de lecture, mères des nuits d’insomnie et de fièvre, réveillent le vieil homme, qui n’a que trop tendance à dresser la tête. L’Urmensch revient s’asseoir à côté du soldat et pose sur la capote salie sa main de plomb.” 9 “La réacclimatation ne s’est pas faite sans ressauts de la bête. L’esprit aussi a renâclé. L’un et l’autre sont matés.” 10 “Nous sommes alternativement dans la boue jusqu’aux genoux, dans la neige et dans l’eau. Les Allemands ne sont certainement pas plus à leur aise en face de nous.” 11 To his wife, 22 March 1916. “L’inaction sous le danger est une épreuve redoutable. J’ai pu me mettre vaille que vaille à la hauteur de l’action dans le péril; je crains de n’être pas arrivé à l’élasticité passive que demande la vie de tranchée. La bataille, oui; l’attente du destin sans que vous soient donnés les moyens d’y pourvoir, c’est bien plus difficile.” 12 The quotation is from Alfred de Vigny’s La mort du Loup, from which Bloch the combatant also recalls the oft-cited maxim: “Silence alone is great, all the rest is weakness”. He had taken this as his guiding rule, as reflected in his entire correspondence from and after 1915. 13 Letter of 3 February 1916 to Romain Rolland. “Meurs sans parler, l’officier Vigny a formulé la règle. Je viens de relire les admirables pages de Tolstoï sur le

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Let us pause an instant to consider this rereading of Tolstoy, which clearly reflects the great concerns of the time. Two episodes describe the deaths of two characters, differently staged. For they are staged, despite the realist principle underlying the narrative. The first, which alone will concern us here, describes the death of Praskukhin during an attack, with a great many details of the character’s visual and auditory perceptions at the moment when the shell that will kill him hits the ground, and his immediate reactions to this event. The idea underlying the description is that in this moment human time reveals all its elasticity: a second seems like an hour and, during this second, the character hears, sees and thinks (remembers) intensely, his imagination traversed by “a whole world of feelings, thoughts, hopes and memories”, while “an awareness of the present - an expectation of death and honour—[…] did not abandon him for one instant”. Significantly, the narrator deliberately leaves his character in ignorance of what is happening to him (“something struck him in the middle of his chest with a terrible crash”), while detailing the physiological and psychological effects of the shock, notably Praskukhin’s sensation of being suffocated beneath a pile of stones just before he dies: He made an effort to heave them aside, straightened himself up, and then neither heard nor thought nor felt anything more. He had been killed on the spot by a shell splinter that had struck him in the middle of the chest. (Tolstoy 1986, 96-7)

Clearly for Tolstoy death is, in what we can call a very “clinical” way, the complete and irreversible cessation of the vital functions. There is no question of imagining anything beyond. The narrator’s omniscience has its limits. How can one read this narrative of such fearsome precision without imagining such an end for oneself? On 11 May, as he was about to leave for the Verdun area, Bloch sent his wife this laconic message: “Don’t torment yourself. Don’t expect any more regular news. We’re entering the last circle of the wheel of fate. Trust. And love”.14 And again on 17 May: Last stage. [...] Our orders are to hold to the last man the corner where we have been placed. Command won’t allow a single unit to retreat for any reason at all. It all comes down to the one and only tactic: get yourself killed on the spot, and they have to get twelve thousand men fired up to make them face this prospect. To tell the truth, the minutiae of this preface, siège de Sébastopol : lui aussi [...] s’est contenté de voir, d’entendre, de souffrir.” 14 “Ne te tourmente pas. N’attends plus de nouvelles régulières. Nous entrons dans le dernier cercle de la roue du destin. Confiance. Et amour.”

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An Explosion That Led to Paradise the unbelievable stories that come from over there (the thunder on our northern horizon) finally arouse one’s curiosity. They say man has never had to endure such a thing. So it’s not surprising that there are whole units on both sides who want nothing more to do with it.15

The correspondence reflects the state of stress that unavoidably takes hold of the combatant: We are fighting against Destruction—the Destruction within us and the Destruction outside us. In this struggle I see us all as sacrifices. We are nothing but meat bent double under the shells. Since we have had the misfortune to be born to take part in this story, those who will return, and they will be few, will be sad remnants.16

In his letter of 8 June 1916 (he had been on the front line since the day before) he recognises the mental and physiological consequences of the stress he is under, but reassures his family that he is able to face them, to the point of contradicting himself: I’m making myself old. I don’t know whether my heart will not play its own tricks on me. I’m troubled by rather worrying fits of choking, palpitations and circulation failures. Their effect is mental rather than physical. My mood remains good, as does my appetite. No reason to worry.17

15

To his wife: “Dernière étape. [...] La consigne est de tenir jusqu’au dernier sur le coin où on nous aura placés. Le commandement n’admet pas qu’une seule unité recule pour quelque motif que ce soit. Tout se résume en une seule tactique : se faire tuer sur place, et il faut échauffer douze mille hommes en vue de leur faire affronter cette perspective. Ma foi, les minuties de cette préface, les histoires inouïes qui arrivent de là-bas (ce tonnerre à notre horizon Nord) finissent par piquer la curiosité. On dit que l’homme n’a jamais eu à endurer pareille chose. Quoi d’étonnant à ce que, des deux côtés, il y ait des unités entières qui n’en aient plus voulu.” 16 31 mai 1916, à sa femme. “Nous luttons contre la Destruction,–celle qui est en nous et celle qui est hors de nous. Dans cette lutte, je nous regarde tous comme sacrifiés. Nous ne sommes que de la viande courbée sous les obus. Puisque nous avons eu le malheur d’être nés pour prendre part à cette histoire, ceux qui en reviendront, et ils seront peu nombreux, feront de tristes débris.” 17 “Moi je me fais vieux. Je ne sais pas si le cœur ne va pas me jouer des tours de sa façon. Je suis incommodé par des étouffements, des palpitations et des arrêts de circulation assez angoissants. Ils agissent plus sur le moral que sur le physique. L’humeur reste bonne et l’appétit. Aucune raison de s’inquiéter.”

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After he is relieved from front line duty for two days, no trace of this supposed good humour remains. In his letter of 13 June he confides to his wife, If you had seen us coming back yesterday: everyone had aged twenty years; some came back with white hair, we had all left the remains of our youth in that hell that nothing can come close to.18

A combatant could not be better prepared for the supreme shock. Awaiting Lieutenant Bloch on 4 July 1916, right beside him in his Verdun trench, was a bursting “stockpot” (large calibre shell) that left him with concussion, followed by violent nervous collapse. He gave the following description to his wife on 5 July: I’m being evacuated for a few days after a bursting 150 gave me something called concussion. It was yesterday morning on slope 304. I feel only a persistent migraine with ringing in my ears. It seems I started with a fit of nerves in the arms of my colonel, who brought us into his shelter. Poor Dulac [Bloch’s batman] was cut into slices next to me. I found bits of him ten metres away. We were half buried, half suffocated. Three dead.19

On 14 July he wrote to Romain Rolland: My dear friend, a stockpot that did a lot of damage all around me has put me at rest for a few days with a damaged eardrum and my faculties reduced to mush.20

18 “Si tu nous avais vus revenir hier: tout le monde a vieilli de vingt ans; certains ont rapporté leurs cheveux blanchis, nous avons tous laissé les restes de notre jeunesse dans cet enfer dont rien n’approche.” 19 “On m’évacue pour quelques jours à la suite de l’éclatement d’un 150 qui me vaut quelque chose qu’on appelle commotion cérébrale. C’était hier dans la matinée sur la côte 304. Je n’éprouve qu’une migraine tenace avec bourdonnements d’oreilles. Il paraît que j’ai commencé par piquer de la crise nerveuse entre les bras de mon colonel qui nous a recueillis dans son abri. Le pauvre Dulac [son ordonnance] a été coupé en tranches à côté de moi. J’en ai retrouvé des morceaux à dix mètres de là. Nous avons été à moitié enfouis, à moitié étouffés. Trois morts.” 20 “Mon cher ami, une marmite qui a fait bien des dégâts autour de moi me met pour quelques jours au repos avec un tympan détérioré et les facultés en marmelade.” Far from being evacuated “for a few days”, on 17 November he was still convalescing: “My convalescence has been extended to mid-December. I’m sick in the head”. (To Romain Rolland) [“Ma convalescence est prolongée jusqu’à la mi-décembre. Ma tête ne va pas bien.”]

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Bloch undoubtedly knew he had almost found himself in the same situation as Praskukhin, yet the story he tells his wife remained, as we can see, strictly factual. As often happens in cases of concussion, the event itself remained opaque, resisting exploration by memory for long after. So how, in such circumstances, can this inhibitive force, this resistance to attempts at rationalization, be overcome? Over the following months Bloch was continually wondering about what he had experienced, as reflected in his notes (in Cahier N° 7). On 4 December 1916, for example, we find a remark, in relation to Dante’s Vita Nuova, on “that part of life beyond which one cannot go with the intention of retracing one’s steps”.21 The link to the experience of 4 July is clear, I think. On 11 December the analogy made by the Russian biologist Metchnikoff “between sleep and natural death” (Carnet N° 7, 53) and his hypothesis of the existence of a natural death instinct in human beings inspired the following comment: If I think about myself, and the numerous cases in which I have found myself in mortal danger, without being too busy to have time to think about my situation, I was gripped by both the physical aspect of the death I saw striking all around me, tearing and crushing, and by an intellectual refusal to feel myself torn from all that still concerns the activity of my life; where the physical resolution of my body is concerned, that was a matter of indifference to me; the idea was more of a relief than a horror, as it was not a natural death (Carnet N° 7, 55).22

Here I would like to embark on a parenthetical speculation. As long as one remains a spectator of the deaths of others, one can call on one’s gifts as an observer and writer. And fear in the face of death is something the combatant knows from experience. But as soon as one starts imagining the experience of death itself, there is a problem of representation in the Freudian sense of the word. No matter how many thoughts upon thoughts or observations upon observations we accumulate, death remains the “simple and solemn mystery” (Tolstoy 2005, 1095) evoked by Tolstoy. 21

“cette partie de la vie, au-delà de laquelle on ne peut plus aller avec l’intention de retourner sur ses pas.” 22 “Si je me reporte à moi-même, et aux cas nombreux où je me suis trouvé en danger mortel, sans être assez occupé pour n’avoir pas le loisir de penser à ma situation, j’étais souvent contracté à la fois par l’aspect matériel de la mort que je voyais frapper autour de moi en déchirant et en écrasant, et par le refus intellectuel de me sentir arracher à tout ce qui intéresse encore l’activité de ma vie; pour ce qui est de la résolution physique de mon corps, elle m’était indifférente; l’idée m’en était plutôt un soulagement qu’une horreur, aussi bien ne s’agissait-il pas de mort naturelle.”

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Freud, in a piece written, significantly, in March-April 1915, ponders the relationship between man and death, distorted as it is by the banalities of its natural, inevitable character, and observes that to think about one’s own death is to think about something unrepresentable—“whenever we attempt to imagine it […] we can perceive that we really survive as spectators”. “At bottom, no one believes in his own death,” he concludes, “or, to put the same thing in another way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality”. It is only in literature that we still find people who understand that they will die, it is only “in the realm of fiction [that] we find the plurality of lives we need [to] die in the person of a given hero, yet we survive him” (Freud 1957, 295-8). On 6 January 1917, that is, already six months after the breakdown he had suffered, comes another confession of impotence in the face of the enigma: No means of expression these days. All my thoughts are concentrated around the decisive moment, in violent death, the fraction of a second in which the passing occurs. It’s a kind of inhibition in the contemplation of the monstrous event.23

This contemplation is at once an act of sustained thinking, an effort to remember and to explore experience and an attempt to gain mastery over a nightmare.24 The thinking is intended to be rigorous and the memory faithful. Both, however, require a lot of time. It is not until the very end of the war that we see the first specific allusion to the written work, which now had a title suggesting that the idea had already been sufficiently elaborated: “Deux contes philosophiques. / Le premier sur l’idée de patrie. Un homme s’est détaché de sa famille et de sa parenté. [...] Le second sur le Paradis.” [Two philosophical tales. / The first on the idea of fatherland. A man has moved away from his family and his relations. […] The second on Paradise.] (Cahier N° 9, 218). Although Le Paradis des conditions humaines does not relate events, nor does it sum them up in a few precise and accurate sentences, as does Maurice Genevoix, for example, it remains a scrupulous and valuable account. The description of concussion (Genevoix 1984, 598) sums up 23

“Aucun moyen d’expression ces jours-ci. Toutes mes pensées se concentrent autour de l’instant décisif, dans la mort violente, la fraction de seconde où s’opère le passage. C’est une sorte d’inhibition dans la contemplation du fait monstrueux” (Cahier N° 7, 83-84). 24 Cf. the note of 4 Dec. 1916, “Thoughts of an ‘insomniac’ (nightmares!)”. [Pensées d’ “insomniaque” (cauchemars!)], (Cahier N° 7, 10).

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what Bloch felt as he lost consciousness, hearing the passing, from “close by of a flight of many bells, low and beautifully sonorous”.25 The sweetness of sinking, slipping into the downy depths, to the swinging of low and distant bells. The sweetness of being no longer […] And already it’s over; a mouthful of rough spirit flooded in between my teeth and harshly scraped my throat.26

For Bloch it was precisely here, with the sweetness of being no longer, that it all began. True, in Le Paradis des conditions humaines, the first of the Quatre contes de la démobilisation [Four tales of demobilization] (1919),27 he did not forget to record what happened before: the death of a comrade and the way that he himself saw and experienced bursting stockpot: My last memory from there is that of suffocating dust and the noise that filled all. A great blow strikes me full in the chest and takes my breath away. Everything in me is crushed, without pain, as a bone cracks under anaesthetic. My legs and my eyesight fail. My sensations of the world are reduced to a whistling. I am falling like a stone. My oldest dreams were merely foresight. I am going down, in free-fall, with an exquisite dizziness that is jeopardised by nothing, that will be stopped by nothing. (Bloch 1927, 138-9)28

“Oh! I knew it would be delicious to die!” (Bloch 1927, 138-9)29 This sentence then sets in motion the main narrative of a deliverance from all that binds a man to his life and body: I am overcome by a powerful jubilation. Sensually I sink into this eiderdown, slowly I try out all the postures of fatigue. At the moment of climax, the microcosm of the trench and my former sufferings turn to 25

“tout près un vol nombreux de cloches, graves et bellement sonnantes” “Douceur de s’enfoncer, de glisser dans cette profondeur duveteuse, au branle des cloches lointaines et graves. Douceur de n’être plus... Et déjà, c’est fini; une gorgée d’alcool râpeux a coulé entre mes dents et durement m’a raclé la gorge.” 27 First published in the April 1920 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française. 28 “Mon dernier souvenir de là-bas est celui d’une poussière asphyxiante et de la clameur qui la remplit. Un grand choc m’arrive en pleine poitrine et me vide de mon souffle. Tout se broie en moi, sans souffrance, comme craque un os dans l’anesthésie. Mes jambes, ma vue s’anéantissent. Mes sensations du monde se réduisent à un sifflement. Je coule à pic. Mes plus anciens rêves n’étaient que des prévisions. Je tombe. Je tombe en chute libre, avec un vertige exquis que rien ne menace, que rien n’arrêtera plus.” 29 “Ah! je savais bien que mourir serait délicieux!” 26

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powder in the infinite distance. Now I feel my fall within me, incorporated into my essence. The delight of these first moments! Hours? Or centuries? I shut my eyes, closed in on myself. The world of instability is succeeded by that of eternal balance, the world of labour by eternal rest, that of worry by eternal indifference (Bloch 1927, 140-1).30

Thus, it is the story of a passing not into the next world, but into another, a descent into the unconscious and the dreamlike,31 in a mental space close to non-being, a void that “ultimately takes us in and maternally envelops us”32 as the narrator says (Bloch 1927, 140), and to which the title’s metaphor refers. It is there, in that space at once fleeting and restful, that we will at last be detached from what constitutes human, conscious life, with all its projects, desires, limitations and even its spatio-temporal conditions. At the end of the narrative the words “There is no more now!”33 (Bloch 1927, 170) are spoken by a voice of which the narrator says, “I couldn’t tell whether it was mine or someone else’s”34 (Bloch 1927, 143). For, while this is an individual journey, it is also a collective experience in which the traveller, whose identity is perpetually lost, is surrounded by companions of both sexes. The narrator draws on all the resources of language within his grasp to “tell the story” of how, by what progression, what “metamorphosis”, what “transmutation”, the mind—his mind—has reached this state of tranquillity that is at once an abolition of time and the birth of a “new nature” (Bloch 1927, 141-42), in which the human faculties, still miraculously intact, leave “the material order for that

30

“Une jubilation puissante m’envahit. Je m’enfonce savoureusement dans cet édredon, j’essaye avec lenteur toutes les postures de la fatigue. Au zénith, le microcosme de la tranchée et de mes anciennes souffrances achève de poudroyer dans un recul infini. C’est en moi que je sens à présent ma chute, incorporée à mon essence.” “Ravissement de ces premiers instants! Heures? Ou siècles? J’ai fermé les yeux, me suis enclos en moi-même. Au monde de l’instable, succède celui de l’éternel équilibre, au monde du labeur, l’éternel repos, à celui de l’inquiétude, l’éternelle indifférence.” 31 We should recall that Le Paradis des conditions humaines is dedicated “To Dr Morichau-Beauchant”, the writer’s friend, whom Freud himself had hailed as “the first Frenchman to accept psychoanalysis openly.” (Cf. Henri and Madeleine Vermorel. 1993. Sigmund Freud et Romain Rolland. Correspondance 1923-1936. Paris: PUF. 180.) 32 “finit par nous recevoir et nous envelopper maternellement” 33 “Il n’y a plus de maintenant!” 34 “dont je n’aurais pu dire si elle était la mienne ou celle d’un autre.”

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of spirituality”35 (Bloch 1927, 142). He also describes the quest and necessary stripping away that lead, in perfect accord with his philosophy, to human beings’ inevitable return to the immutable substance in which, open to our eternal games, to all undertakings of which our human conditions were a mere presage, Paradise offers its unhindered, boundless expanse to the inextinguishable pleasure of love and creation.36 (Bloch 1927, 171)

Le Paradis des conditions humaines is an eye-witness account that is like no other account. I call it an eye-witness account because, both in terms of vocabulary and phraseology (which of course express an author’s intent), this narrative constantly asserts its place in that genre. Nevertheless it is also, if not primarily, a tale37 with a strong philosophical framework, formulated primarily in its introductory paragraphs, impregnated with the biologism of the day, a framework to which determinist principles are applied, whether in relation to death itself, that “disaster” that is the cessation of organic life, or to “the hours of inhibition spent inside this mystical epsilon that suspends the movement of the precious machine”38 (Bloch 1927, 136) and which is, consequently, only a temporary suspension of certain vital functions and not death itself.39 The memory of the cranial trauma he suffered would continue to haunt Bloch, particularly as it long resisted the surrender of its secrets. Today these would be seen as a near-death experience, related in a narrative that seeks to reconstruct not only the unfolding of the experience, but also its 35

“l’ordre matériel pour celui de la spiritualité.” “ouvert à nos jeux éternels, à toutes entreprises dont nos conditions humaines n’étaient que le présage, le Paradis offre son étendue sans obstacle et sans limite à l’inextinguible plaisir de l’amour et de la création.” 37 In the classic sense of “narrative, story of some adventure, whether true, fabulous, serious or amusing” (Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 1694). This sense is also given by Littré’ “story, report or, notably, story of some anecdote or adventure”. 38 “des heures d’inhibition passées à l’intérieur de cet epsilon mystique qui suspend le mouvement de la précieuse machine.” 39 Why the “mystical epsilon”? In mathematics, the Trésor de la Langue Française tells us, epsilon is the symbol of an infinitesimal quantity tending towards zero. As the state described by Jean-Richard Bloch is close, at least in perspective, to final annihilation, it was possible for him to compare what he had experienced with death in the manner of a differential calculation calculus? As for the adjective “mystical” here, as in theology, it refers to a meaning that is hidden, allegorical, or symbolic. 36

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meaning, while recognizing that death, even near-death, is not an object of thought and representation like any other. Yes, an explosion can lead one to Paradise... It is at once through the quality of his account and its poetic power of divination that Bloch’s tale can claim its place among the great pieces of writing from the French literature of its time.

Works Cited Bloch, J. R. Lettres à sa femme, vol III, 1916-1917. Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), fonds Bloch. —. 1984. Correspondance (1913-1920) de Jean-Richard Bloch et André Monglond. In Jean-Richard Bloch, edited by Tivadar Gorilovics. Debrecen: Studia Romanica. —. with Romain Rolland. 1964. Deux hommes se rencontrent. Correspondance, 1910-1918. Cahiers Romain Rolland, 15. Paris: Albin Michel. —. Cahier N° 7 (4 December 1916 - July 1917). Fonds Jean-Richard Bloch, BnF. —. 1927. “Le Paradis des conditions humaines.” In Les Chasses de Renaut. Deuxième livre de contes, 133-172. Paris, Gallimard. Freud, S. 1957. “Our Attitude Towards Death.” In “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (1914-16). London: Hogarth. Genevoix, M. 1984. Ceux de 14, Paris: Flammarion, Points series. Jünger, E. 1993. Orages d’acier. Journal de guerre. Translated by Henri Plard. Paris: Christian Bourgois, Le Livre de poche “biblio.” Plato, Phaedo, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/phaedo. Tolstoy, L. 2005. War and Peace. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Trans. Anthony Briggs. —. The Sebastopol Sketches. 1986. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Trans. David McDuff.

TRAUMA AND “ORDINARY WORDS”: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S PLAY ON WORDS NICOLAS PIERRE BOILEAU

It might come as a surprise that Virginia Woolf should be considered as a good example for a volume exploring the “edge” of trauma. Woolf’s life is filled with trauma: rape, bereavement, madness, followed by her own suicide. Because of these circumstances, many critics see Woolf as a case-study which only confirms the theory. P. M. Cramer, for example, says: “Once again, Woolf’s self-analysis is consistent with what trauma survivors and experts tell us when they try to name the ‘essence’ of what abusers aim to destroy.”1 (Cramer 2007, 31) Woolf can barely be said to be on the edge of trauma, since she is rather in the centre of it. The other element of surprise might stem from the fact that this paper will focus on the “unspeakable”, when it is generally admitted that Woolf’s fiction successfully manages to express trauma and madness.2 Woolf is now considered as a lyrical prose poet, who, thanks to feminist critics, belongs to the classics of modernist literature (Linett 2009). Furthermore, the collection of essays that is looked at here, Moments of Being, focuses precisely on the narrative of these traumas in a straightforward manner. These essays are nowadays seen by many as

1

In this article, Patricia M. Cramer conflates Woolf’s life and the plot of the novel as if the correspondence between reality and text were obvious: “The saddest of Rachel’s hallucinations merges memory fragments from St Ives [...] with memory fragments associated with both Gerald and Gorge’s violations” (Cramer 2007, 35). See also DeMeester, K. 2009. “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” In Virginia Woolf, An MSF Reader, edited by M. Linett, 198-219. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP. 2 Poole, for example, notices that the writing and publication of each novel were the occasion for Woolf’s most worrying periods of depression and concludes that the novels seek to express madness (Poole 1990).

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evidence in the long-running battle to have Woolf regarded as a rape victim.3 The events of Woolf’s life are unanimously regarded as traumatic. If “increasingly memory worth talking about—worth remembering, is memory of trauma” (Antze and Lambek 1996, xii), narratives of trauma seem to focus more on causes or symptoms than on the subject.4 Trauma can be defined by the relation that can be traced between certain symptoms and a specific, haunting cause.5 Yet Caruth clearly states that trauma is constructed by the subject, and not posited. Her definition of PTSD (“overwhelming experience of sudden and catastrophic events in which responsibility to the events occurs in often uncontrolled, repetitive hallucinations” [Caruth 1996, 59-60]) foregrounds the “experience” of the individual whose job it is to build the relation with a specific moment of his/her past. The fact that some catastrophic events can at times be perfectly assimilated by the individual should not be overlooked. However, in Woolf’s case, critics have taken the events of her life at face value and linked them with the instability she is known to have suffered from.6 Many posit these traumas, and fail to recognize that Woolf challenges our assumptions concerning them, for example by refusing to

3 See the raging debates that still occur once in a while on whether a digital rape can be considered as a proper rape. For example, Lilienfield, J. 2007. “Could They Tell One What They Knew?’ Modes of Disclosure in To the Lighthouse.” In Virginia Woolf and Trauma, edited by S. Henke and D. Eberly, 95-122. New York: Pace University Press. 4 Cathy Caruth’s insistence on the necessity to re-consider the diagnoses of PTSD and other forms of trauma shows that people persistently associate effects with causes. Although Caruth herself focuses on trauma as subject-formation, interestingly, some critics who protest against the criteria for the nosology of PTSD will be ambivalent nevertheless. In her article, Laura S. Brown praises the decision to rely “more on the person’s subjective perceptions of fear, threat, and risk to well-being” than on the actual event while at the same time saying that all rape victims, just like all war victims, are suffering from PTSD (Brown 1995, 100112). 5 “In classic medical usage ‘trauma’ refers not to the injury inflicted but to the blow that inflicted it, not to the state of mind that ensures but to the event that provoked it. […] The location of the term has been shifting from [the blow to the injury]” (Erikson 1995, 184). 6 No reliable diagnosis exists. See Lee, H. 1999. Virginia Woolf. New York: Random House, Vintage; Bell, Quentin. 1972. Virginia Woolf. London: Triad/Granada; Gordon, C., R. Pryor and G. Watkins. 1990. Sounds from the Bell Jar. Ten psychotic Authors. London: Macmillan, 209.

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see rape as a determining factor in her life. In other words, sometimes trauma is in the eyes of the beholder(s) (Kahane 2007, 223). Drawing upon Woolf’s specific approach to her own traumas, I want to show how she repeatedly tries to fill in the void left by some experience beyond words which she calls “shock”. Woolf’s idea is that these shocks, pleasurable or not, are arbitrary and have probably more to do with the subject than with the nature of the event. Thus she invites us to re-think trauma not as external but as a construction of the subject which is located between the event/referent and its verbalisation (Lacan 1961-62). For, according to Woolf, shock is an experience characterised by a necessity to express it, even if unsuccessfully.7 First, the very idea of the unspeakable has gradually disappeared, for our society is nowadays saturated with the idea that thoughts and feelings must and can be expressed (Luckhurst 2008). The injunction to confess anything that is personal and intimate is said to enable people to get some form of relief, while the difficulty to express one’s emotions is regarded as the symptom of a society that hasn’t broken free from its moral taboos just yet. In the light of Foucault’s theorisation of the “confession”, autobiographical writings can be regarded as the result of a social process by which individuals are subjected to the difficult confession they are unable to make (Foucault 1976). This prompts us to historicise Woolf’s texts, which were written at a moment when Freud’s theory was only emerging: as Woolf herself says, this was a time when the public display of women’s feelings was looked upon with suspicion, if not disgust: George had always complained of Vanessa’s silence. I would prove that I could talk. So off I started. Heaven knows what devil prompted me—or why to Lady Carnavon and Mrs Popham of Littlecote of all people in the world I, a chit of eighteen, should have chosen to discourse upon the need of expressing the emotions! That, I said, was the great lack of modern life. […] Suddenly a twitch, a shiver, a convulsion of amazing expressiveness, shook the Countess by my side […]. I realised that I had committed some unspeakable impropriety. Lady Carnavon and Mrs Popham began at once to talk of something entirely different. (Woolf 2002, 40)

In addition to giving us access to the strict rules that govern the behaviour of Victorian girls, this can be read as a meta-commentary on auto/biographical writing: what seems to shock is the intrusion of the private in the public sphere, of a confession that is inappropriate. In a 7 For example when she unintentionally says, “That is the whole”, in front of the flower bed (Woolf 2002, 84).

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social context which favours silence over things that matter and conversation on things that don’t, confession was not on the agenda. In Moments of Being, Woolf mistrusts words. When she describes Stella’s reaction to her mother’s death, she sees language as, paradoxically perhaps, a way to postpone the confession, or rather to conceal it: Perhaps one would come into a room unexpectedly, and surprise her in tears, and, to one’s miserable confusion, she would hide them instantly, and speak ordinary words, as though she did not imagine that one could understand her suffering. (Woolf 2002, 18)

For Woolf, tears convey distress more efficiently than words, especially when these words are “ordinary”, quotidian words that one utters through the phatic use of language in order to avoid direct confrontation (Jakobson 1973). Woolf didn’t know the distinctions made by linguists but she did discriminate between various usages of language, and distrusted the conventional words that when beautifully crafted can be as far divorced from reality as fiction is from auto/biography,8 hence her toying with words till the end of her career. Secondly, in Moments of Being, Woolf elaborates on the “shocks” that she experiences. This reflection has often led critics and readers alike to associate her unquestioningly with trauma theory. Claire Kahane, for example, states that “Woolf meditates on the link between a disruptive traumatic event—a shock—and the process of writing, through which she can restore the order of things.” (Kahane 2007, 229) The unproblematic use of “shock” as a synonym for trauma needs addressing. Woolf’s “moments of being”9 can be read as a theory of small things: she shows how some insignificant things of life are kept in the individual’s mind, while some important elements seem to be forgotten. Things that are remembered are not necessarily traumatic. Using the memories that stand out, Woolf reflects on the arbitrary nature of the shocks she is liable to experience. The linking factor between all these experiences is that Woolf is both propelled to utter them while, at the same time, she experiences the difficulty of the confession, since she is unable 8

That is what she expresses at the beginning of her career as a writer when she is seeking her own voice against her father’s. It seems that death requires specific words or rather phrasing to express the particularity of the feelings that are experienced: “You will not find in what I say, or again in those sincere but conventional phrases in the life of your grandfather, or in the noble lamentations with which he fills the pages of his autobiography any semblance of a woman whom you can love” (Woolf 2002, 8). 9 It is the title of the collection, chosen by Jeanne Schulkind.

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to trace the origin of the feeling. Silence is often a temptation that is hard to resist—that is, much ado about nothing and none about the thing: Yet the silence was difficult, not dull. It seemed as if the standard of what was worth saying had risen so high that it was better not to break it unworthily. (Woolf 2002, 50)

The banal words of the trivial side of life are a screen that is more difficult to break than one would think, which results in silencing the event that caused the shock. Woolf therefore can only resort to literature, where banal words are given another dimension, not so much in order to “restore the order of things” as to keep at bay the impression of chaos that could result from this. Woolf points out that shocks are an experience that the individual goes through irrespective of the event, that shock is a construction of the subject rather than anything in the outside world. In other words, the way the events are etched in her memory leaves Woolf perplexed: […] of course, as an account of my life [my first memories] are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important. (Woolf 2002, 83)

As opposed to the expected violence of trauma, Woolf suggests that some things may be essential, and yet forgotten, while others are remembered and useless. Woolf’s premise is that there is no way for her to know why some events left a long lasting imprint on her memory and why others didn’t. The reason for this can be found in the workings of the subject’s memory: “Unfortunately, one only remembers the exceptional. And there seems to be no reason why one thing is exceptional and another not” (Woolf 2002, 83). This is why Woolf is keener to analyse the force of her memories than the actual event they refer to. In this sense, her method is closer to psychoanalysis than to the “recovery movement”: commenting on Brown’s attachment to memory as “the defining mark of personal identity” and Ian Hacking’s argument that “the forgotten is the formative”, Ruth Leys “suggest[s] that, at the limit, it is precisely what cannot be remembered that is decisive for the subject—and for psychoanalysis” (Leys 1996, 111; 120). Woolf’s incapacity to speak about her traumas is first and foremost the result of the enigmatic way in which they are engraved in her mind. This doesn’t, however, prevent her from speaking about these issues, at length to boot. She questions the prejudices concerning the absolute, exceptional nature of certain events and thereby reveals some knowledge about the unconscious. Accordingly, for example, the account of the digital rape she was victim of, as a child, is only part of

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a list of events that could explain her aversion to the mirror image of herself: When I was six or seven perhaps, I got into the habit of looking at my face in the glass. But I only did this if I was sure that I was alone. I was ashamed of it. A strong feeling of guilt seemed naturally attached to it. But why was this so? (Woolf 2002, 81)

Surprisingly perhaps, she refuses to see that event as more determining than the fact that she was a tomboy or that her father seemed to disapprove of vanity. Woolf asserts that she is at a loss as to know how and under what circumstances truth could be found, although she suspects it might lie somewhere. In her implied theory of trauma, memory and subjectivity then, the most striking memories are meant to reveal as much about the person (her term for it) as about the things that they obliterate. Woolf does write about shocks, because they cannot be written. This enables us to favourably comment on Luckhurst’s point that: The aesthetic theory that dominates this field has emerged from the work of Lyotard, Derrida and Cathy Caruth’s revision of Paul de Man and reads trauma as an aporia of representation, placing emphasis on difficulty, rupture and impossibility, consistently privileging aesthetic experimentation. Meanwhile, our culture is saturated with stories that see trauma not as a blockage but a positive spur to narrative. (Luckhurst 2008, 82-3)

The aporia of Woolf’s work seems to lie in her incapacity to express these shocks while at the same time she can have no rest until she says something of them. In other words, she is driven to utter some words when confronted with a shock, an urge which proves unsatisfactory because it lacks explanatory value, and because nobody else seems to understand it. When reading a poem, she realises that it encapsulates some truth—once again linking shocks with the necessity to verbalise them: And instantly and for the first time I understood the poem (which it was I forget). It was as if it became altogether intelligible; I had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they developed what one is already feeling. I was so astonished that I tried to explain the feeling. “One seems to understand what it’s about”, I said awkwardly. I suppose Nessa has forgotten; no one could have understood from what I said the queer feeling I had in the hot grass, that poetry was coming true. Nor does that give the feeling. It matches what I have sometimes felt when I write. (Woolf 2002, 103)

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This example shows that Woolf’s concerns were primarily with the difficulty for “ordinary words” to convey her feelings. The poem, the literary text, which is bound to be seen in universal terms since the title has been forgotten, enabled Woolf to get access to another dimension of her existence and this certainly came as a “shock” to her (“and instantly and for the first time”). This shock in turn had to be put into words, something which Woolf seems driven to accomplish despite the unsatisfactory returns of her attempt. Woolf constantly hits a snag when she tries to express what a shock is; nevertheless, it is at the source of her creative activity. She claims: I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. (Woolf 2002, 85)

Fiction, essays, articles and eventually auto/biographical essays will serve this function, constantly repeating and re-enacting what cannot find an appropriate expression in the “ordinary words” that conceal tears. What Woolf is stressing here is the role of the subject in the e/affect of an event, hence the question raised by the absence of a memory which could easily have been traumatic: Why remember the hum of bees in the garden going down to the beach and forget completely being thrown naked by father into the sea? (Mrs Swanwick says she saw that happen.) (Woolf 2002, 83)

Jeanne Schulkind informs us that Mrs Swanwick’s version reads as follows: “We watched with delight his naked babies running about the beach or being towed into the sea between his legs, and their beautiful mother” (Woolf 2002, 83n). Clearly Woolf’s version is an interpretation of the episode in traumatic terms: the anecdote has become something dangerous and ominous, something which is remembered, while Mrs Swanwick’s account is more good-natured than what Woolf’s comparison evokes (the harmless hum of bees against the harmful effect of being thrown naked in the water). This shows the limits of her own theory, since she still expects some events to have a particular effect. Woolf therefore believes that there is a cause for everything, she just doesn’t know which cause is the most telling, nor if it is possible at all for her to know this: “Then, for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock; something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life”

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(Woolf 2002, 84). This was neither shock nor trauma but could easily have been, had it happened to someone else. It is true, nevertheless, that some shocks are indeed presented as traumatic, especially Julia Stephen’s death. Allen Friedman is surprised by Woolf’s silence on the issue: Though omnipresent, death during the modern period, like sex for the Victorians, was treated with prudery and reticence. Recalling the deaths of her mother and half-sister Stella Duckworth, Woolf wrote: “We never spoke of either of them”. (Friedman 1995, 207)

Here it is clear that Friedman expects death to be associated with a confession: the refusal to speak of death is both the sign of a pathological negation of the individual’s suffering and the revelation that death is indeed expected to cause some feelings that need expressing.10 Yet, “We never spoke of them” can either be interpreted as “we were not allowed to talk about them” or “there was nothing to say about it”. In “Reminiscences”, the first text written circa 1907, death is a structural element in the family’s life. No precise reference to shock is made, although death is obviously recorded as sad: despite Woolf’s insistence on the lack felt after Julia’s death, however, she says but little on her feelings about it at this stage. Death is understood as one of those moments that precipitate a series of actions that the individual is not capable of controlling.11 As for her own feelings, Woolf wrote about the effect of that death frequently, never hiding the havoc it caused: Her death, on the 5th May 1895, began a period of Oriental gloom, for surely there was something in the darkened rooms, the groans, the passionate lamentations that passed the normal limits of sorrow, and hung about the genuine tragedy with folds of Eastern drapery. (Woolf 2002, 13) 10 “The project of reading Woolf’s fiction as a case history of neurotic grief has now come to an end. In the past decade Thomas Caramagno, Susan Bennett Smith and John Mepham have produced studies that articulate Woolf’s positive reinvention of mourning. Despite diverse textual interests, these critics demonstrate how Woolf defies the orthodox assumption, still reigning in some circles today that healthy mourning comes to a decisive end when the bereaved have detached emotional bonds and installed consoling substitutes for the loss” (Clewell 2009, 172). 11 For example, she traces her birth to the deaths of Julia Stephen’s and Leslie’s first partners that compelled them both together. Woolf also marvels at the consequences of death: “Would any other arrangement of circumstance have so brought a miracle?” (Woolf 2002, 5).

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In “Sketch of the Past”, Woolf recounts the mourning scene in two successive, parallel accounts that enable us to see the construction of the affect rather than the correlation between the event and the feelings. The traumatic effect of death was only a side-effect of words, and death itself appears only as the edge of trauma. The final kiss to her mother is first an experience of emotional distance. The paragraph is very short, comes unannounced (it starts off with a date as a journal entry but has no introduction) and the eye of the narrator rests on things that don’t matter as much as the person lying dead or the reactions of the child: I noticed that one nurse was sobbing, and a desire to laugh came over me, and I said to myself as I have often done at moments of crisis since, “I feel nothing whatever”. (Woolf 2002, 102)

This can be seen as a personal exhortation not to be overcome by sadness. But it might as well be seen as the expression of a radical absence of feelings that runs counter to current interpretations of mourning and therefore risks being overlooked. For Woolf seems to feel nothing, as the parataxis of that short paragraph suggests: “Then I stooped and kissed my mother’s face. It was still warm. She [had] only died a moment before. Then we went upstairs into the day nursery” (Woolf 2002, 102). This is followed by an experience of deep fright and the first hallucinations which Woolf was going to have throughout the rest of her life, until she wrote To the Lighthouse. It happened the following evening, although Woolf is unsure of that. This time around though, Virginia’s shock at being faced with her mother’s dead body leads to the following confession: “When I see mother, I see a man sitting with her” (Woolf 2002, 102). Stella has noticed Virginia’s reaction (she started) and apologises, but Virginia apparently questions the reality of the event: “Did I say that in order to attract attention to myself? Or was it true? I cannot be sure, for certainly I had a great wish to draw attention to myself”. However she is certain that she saw the man again when Stella said “Forgive me”. Straightaway Woolf comments on the circumstances of this hallucination, trying to make it acceptable and even comprehensible. The shock of death seems to have been immediately displaced onto substitutes: poems, flowerbeds, hallucinations, in order to avoid facing the real issue, the loss and degradation of the body. These two scenes are set in sharp contrast thanks to the binary oppositions set up in them. Her mother only becomes one of the incidentals of that scene. All this serves to illustrate the arbitrary nature of the revelation of the shock, for it doesn’t seem to have originated in the contemplation of death itself or from this alone. It seems to be through her sister’s words, “Forgive me”, that Woolf is led to

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express the cause of her start, thus experiencing a moment of awakening, although it is not understood (“Stella looked at me as if I had frightened her” [Woolf 2002, 102]). The impact of Julia’s death on her daughter is translated into positive terms, since the hallucination is described as an access to reality, or rather the real:12 Also it was partly that my mother’s death unveiled and intensified; made me suddenly develop perceptions, as if a burning glass had been laid over what was shaded and dormant [...]—as if something were becoming more visible without any effort. (Woolf 2002, 103)

Ironically enough, Woolf doesn’t take hallucinations as a sign of her instability, but, more positively, as the access to the real that she can only negotiate by enunciating this experience. As this is impossible, her job is to try and explain it to other people.13 Contrary to what some critics are wont to say, the traumatic aspect of an event cannot be predicted and is not posited. Woolf constructs a theory of shock in order to be able to deal with a reality that is beyond language: hallucinations, starts, feeling of transparency in words, shame. Her experience is traumatic in the sense that it leaves a hole in the experience that must be filled with words, however inefficient these words are. Julia’s death is thus told in “Reminiscences” in a romantic way or through the eyes of Woolf’s sister; in “Sketch of the Past” as the circumstances surrounding Virginia’s first hallucinations; in To the Lighthouse as fiction. Woolf cannot resist telling that which is yet impossible to tell. To the Lighthouse is presented as the event that enabled her to stop the hallucinations and was her way of expressing what she felt about them— thus we must understand that “express” here has nothing to do with what is usually expected in recovery methods: I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. /I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. (Woolf 2002, 93)

This probably has to be seen as wishful thinking, for otherwise why would she be trying to tell the story all over again, this time focusing on a theory 12

In the Lacanian sense. See especially Lacan, J. 1975. Le Séminaire, Livre XX, Encore (1972-73). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. 13 Although Woolf doesn’t comment upon it, this account comes about at a very symbolic date, since she tells it at the end of May 1939, her mother was dead on May 5th 1895.

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of shocks into which her mother’s death fits? What Woolf is asserting is not the clichéd idea that fiction may be truer than auto/biography, but that the writing of this novel had a structural function for her and enabled her to assimilate an event that she had tried to get her head around for some time now. To the Lighthouse expressed an emotion that had never been expressed, that had left a hole in Woolf’s experience that story-telling could approach. But it was not the only solution, for now she’s set to the task of doing it all over again. And in expressing [my emotion] I explained it and then laid it to rest. But what is the meaning of “explained” it? Why, because I described her and my feeling for her in that book, should my vision of her and my feeling for her become so much dimmer and weaker? Perhaps one of these days I shall hit on the reason; and if so, I will give it, but at the moment I will go on, describing what I can remember [...]. (Woolf 2002, 93)

What is interpreted in traumatic terms by Woolf is not the act in itself or the emotions that she felt, but the moment of recognition when she was driven to write the book, “in a great, apparently involuntary, rush” (Woolf 2002, 92). Woolf deems the word “explain” inappropriate, in the sense that she hasn’t found out the meaning of the emotion, nor is the novel any exposé/presentation, yet she has unfolded that story, the many folds being scattered throughout her oeuvre, which she is able to appraise towards the end of her career. To the Lighthouse can only be seen as one attempt, amongst others, at filling in the void of the traumatic experience (it has warded off distress) which literary work can only border. Hence the existence of “Sketch”, which is yet another attempt to consolidate the “scaffoldings” (Woolf 2002, 84) behind the “cotton wool” of reality that makes the individual’s life more balanced. It is clear that some shock connected with this death has given her access to the real, in Lacanian terms, and that Woolf can only observe from the edge of her subjective position. Her only recourse is to recuperate something of it through construction. Woolf’s theory of small things enables us to question the too rapid conflation of causes and effects. Yet her traumatic experiences reveal that a hole in meaning has led her to fill it with various accounts. Woolf never fails to remind her readers that her own method could not be universalized, that it is conjectural/conjunctural. The multiple accounts have various functions and the autobiographical text, the one that could deal with these issues in the most straightforward manner, contrives to weave them all together in an autobiographical space (Boileau 2007). What is of paramount importance in Woolf’s theory is that it anticipates current ideas

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on traumatic experience, especially the now common belief that it can and should be voiced. Freed from the contemporary injunction to communicate the experience as a whole, Woolf is able to reveal the hole of experience that can be bordered, for her, by artistic activity and the multiplication of accounts. This strategy enables her to assert not only the impossibility of communicating trauma but also the impossibility of trauma itself, without its (re)construction. Against the idea that someone must “speak the horrifying truth” (Antze and Lambek 1996, 123) of their past, Woolf shows that the experience one goes through is inseparably related to or entangled in his or her subsequent interpretations of it: she says that “one of the reasons why [...] so many [memoirs] are failures” is that “they leave out the person to whom things happened” (Woolf 2002, 79).

Works Cited Antze, P. and M. J. Lambek. 1996. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge. Bell, Q. 1972. Virginia Woolf. London: Triad/Granada. Boileau, N. P. 2007. “Places of Being: Janet Frame’s Autobiographical Space.” a/b: Auto/biography Studies 22 (2): 217-229. Brown, L. S. 1995. “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma” In Trauma, Explorations in Memory, edited by C. Caruth, 100-112. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP. Caruth, C. ed. 1995. Trauma, Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP. Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience, Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP. Clewell, T. 2009. “Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, The Great War and Modernist Mourning.” In Virginia Woolf, An MSF Reader, edited by Linett, 171-179. M. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Cramer, P. M. “Trauma and Lesbian Returns in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and The Years.” In Virginia Woolf and Trauma, Embodied Texts, edited by S. Henke and D. Eberly, 19-50. New York: Pace UP. DeMeester, K. 2009. “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” In Virginia Woolf, An MSF Reader, edited by M. Linett, 198-219. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP. Erikson, K. 1995. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” In Trauma, Explorations in Memory, edited by C. Caruth, 183-199. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP. Foucault, M. 1976. Histoire de la Sexualité (I), La volonté de savoir. Paris : « Tel », Gallimard.

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Friedman, A. 1995. Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise. New York: Cambridge UP. Gordon, C., R. Pryor and G. Watkins. 1990. Sounds from the Bell Jar. Ten psychotic Authors. London: Macmillan. Henke, S. and D. Eberly, eds. 2007. Virginia Woolf and Trauma, Embodied Texts. New York: Pace UP. Jakobson, R. 1973. Essais de linguistique générale. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Kahane, C. “Of Snakes, Toads and Duckweeds: Traumatic Acts and Historical Actions in Between the Acts.” In Virginia Woolf and Trauma, Embodied Texts, edited by S. Henke and D. Eberly, 223-46. New York: Pace UP. Lacan, J. 1961-62. L’identification. Séminaire IX. Paris: Editions du Seuil. —. 1975. Le Séminaire. Livre XX, Encore (1972-73., Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lee, H, J. 1999. Virginia Woolf. New York: Random House, Vintage. Leys, R. 1996. “Traumatic Cures—Shell Shock, Janet and the Question of Memory.” In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, edited by P. Antze and M. J. Lambek, 103-45. New York: Routledge. Lilienfield, J. 2007. “Could They Tell One What They Knew?’ Modes of Disclosure in To the Lighthouse.” In Virginia Woolf and Trauma, edited by S. Henke and D. Eberly, 95-122. New York: Pace UP. Linett, M. ed. 2009. Virginia Woolf, An MSF Reader Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP. Luckhurst, R. 2008. The Trauma Question. New York: Routledge. Poole, R. 1990. The Unknown Virginia Woolf. Cambridge, Cambridge UP. Woolf, V. 2002. Moments of Being, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind, with an introduction by H. Lee. London: Pimlico.

THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF COLONIAL LIFE: COLLECTIVE COLONIAL TRAUMA IN PAUL SCOTT’S RAJ QUARTET TAMÁS BÉNYEI

In The Day of the Scorpion, the second volume of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, young Sarah Layton, one of the protagonists of the three closing volumes, is back on a visit to England with her great-aunt Mabel. As they are walking in the garden, she is visited by one of what she calls her “funny turns”, a curious disturbance in the way she perceives the world around her. During this funny turn she is stung by a wasp. Because of the special mental and physical condition caused by the attack, the sting is experienced by her in a curiously detached way. The pain was sharp. Her brain rendered the message accurately, but there was still a layer of insensitivity separating her recognition of the pain and her realisation that the pain was happening to her. (Scott 1983a, 86)

When Sarah and Aunt Mabel go on to discuss the risks of a wasp bite, Aunt Mabel says that it is better if one has already been stung, for in that case she will know whether there is any attendant danger (that is, some allergic reaction): if you have already had the experience, you know whether it may kill you or not. Aunt Mabel’s words immediately put Sarah in mind of her sister: Sarah worried because Susan had never been stung either by a wasp or a bee. Susan led a charmed life… Sarah could not remember Susan hurting herself badly—not badly enough to leave a scar. Susan did not remember the day of the scorpion. (Scott 1983a, 87)

What is remarkable here for the purposes of an exploration of the role of trauma in Scott’s tetralogy is not so much that Sarah’s thoughts evoke the Freudian discussion of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud speculates that a tiny breach of the protective shield, with the scar it leaves behind, offers at least some protection against later, more powerful

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onslaughts [Freud 1991]), but the automatic link in her mind between Susan’s alleged defencelessness and what she refers to as “the day of the scorpion” (when, still in India, the family’s native servant Dost Mohammed built a ring of fire around a scorpion and they all watched the scorpion crinkle up and die [Scott 1983a, 487]). This passage conveys a great deal about the general structure of experience as such in Scott’s quartet, the potential separation of physical impression (pain), perception and mental registration (thus, the splicing of the event into layers or levels that interact in unpredictable ways), as well as about the way the collective colonial subject of the Anglo-Indian community is represented in the quartet. The present essay might be seen as an unfolding of some implications of this marginal episode. While not breaking with the critical tradition of reading Scott’s text that has placed it in a predominantly postcolonial context,1 I shall explore the manner in which the Raj Quartet renders the colonial condition as thoroughly traumatic. By doing this, I shall depart from what seems to be the dominant reading of the text, according to which the quartet dramatises the conflict between the fragmented and fragmenting experience of history on the one hand and the ordering and symbol-making energies of artistic modernism on the other, staging the victory of the latter. I approach Scott’s work as a supreme literary rendering of colonial trauma, one that explores the collective traumatic experience of the Anglo-Indian community with extraordinary acuteness. In other words, I will try to answer the question why India appears as a familiar environment for Anna Klaus, refugee from Nazi Germany (Scott 1984, 469). Although the Raj Quartet has never been read as a “trauma text”—the epic scope and the apparently seamless narrative set it apart from the trademark narrative features of “trauma fiction”—in the light of the insights of postcolonial theory such an enterprise is far from surprising: 1

Besides the studies on Scott that I am going to refer to later on, one should note other major (postcolonial) readings of the quartet: D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke. 1988. Images of the Raj: South Asia in the Literature of Empire. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 132–56; M. Keith Booker. 1997. Colonial Power, Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1997; Peter Morey. 2000. Fictions of India: Narrative and Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 134–60; 138; 144. Morey—justifiably—interprets the trilogy as a postcolonial representative of postmodern historiographic metafiction that, by means of pastiche, subverts the discourses of British India, “deconstructing the archetypes of the imperial romance” (148). Practically every reinterpretation of the quartet adopts a postcolonial perspective, even though many readers claim that The Jewel in the Crown is a subversive rewriting of the codes determined by the colonial context.

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the colonial situation, as Ania Loomba states, “locked the inhabitants and the newcomers into the most complex and traumatic relationships in human history” (Loomba 1998, 2).2 Taking her cue from Homi Bhabha, Sara Suleri has made it clear that the colonisers are not exempt from the effects of this traumatic situation either, and therefore the all too neat symmetry of domination and subordination, the stark contrasting of coloniser and colonised no longer seems an adequate way to describe the affective dynamics of colonial experience (Suleri 1992, 11-18).3 Instead, the “colonial subject” might be conceived as a continuum containing natives and colonisers alike. Instead of questioning the fact of economic exploitation and the brute reality of the colonial power setup, this approach simply claims that the imperial subject is also involved in this affective dynamism. In this sense, Paul Scott’s quartet dramatises what Suleri calls the “secret economy” of colonial intersubjectivity, arising out of the complex affective dynamics compounded of desire, loathing and revulsion, as well as the “stupid primitive fear” of being touched by a black man mentioned by Daphne Manners (Scott 1984, 439). In Scott’s quartet, the workings and effects of this secret affective economy are described primarily from the perspective of the Anglo-Indian community. What is truly remarkable in Scott’s quartet—already suggested in the episode of the wasp—is the way it foregrounds the collective nature of the traumatic experience that befell the Anglo-Indians. The Anglo-Indian community appears in the text as a (traumatised) collective subject. The way in which the actual physical pain is detached from the recognition that the pain is “happening to” Sarah, the way the physical impression, the perception and the mental registration (the moment when knowledge or experience as such can be said to be born) are potentially separated from each other seem to characterise the larger processes of the tetralogy, especially the way in which collective experience is sedimented in the participants. The link between the wasp bite and the scar, Susan’s vulnerability and “the day of the scorpion” (a memory image, burnt into 2

There is no space here to address the colonial complicity of psychoanalytical theory and the need to reconfigure trauma theory to enable it to engage with traumas suffered through racial abuse. For such an appeal, see Sophie Croisy. 2008. “Michelle Cliff’s Non-Western Figures of Trauma: The Creolization of Trauma Studies.” The AnaChronisT 13 (2007/2008): 131–56, esp. 133–134. 3 See also Simon Gikandi. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity on the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia UP, 37; Anne McClintock. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London: Routledge, 15; Bart Moore-Gilbert. 1997. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso, 116.

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the mind, that still defies understanding), which seems largely unmotivated at this point of the text, is duly established later on: it is Susan, the sister who has completely forgotten about this episode (that is, she has “held it somewhere at the back of her mind” [Scott 1983a, 487]), who comes to repeat it when, as a young widow, she builds a circle of fire around her own baby. Susan’s fate, the repetition of the day of the scorpion (an event that has got nothing to do with her and that she does not even remember) reflects the way the collective subject of the Anglo-Indian community is traumatised by the colonial experience. If Patrick Swinden is right in claiming that Scott’s quartet is “preoccupied with the effect the loss of India had on the Anglo-Indian community” (Swinden 1980, 73), the day of the scorpion might be seen (at least as regards the crystallisation of the event as an experience) as the allegory of the larger, intangible event, irreducible to any particular date, that was the loss not only of India but also of the self-image of the British as enlightened civilisators: they had lost both before they could have any awareness of the loss, even before independence was considered seriously as a political alternative.4 Another episode of The Day of the Scorpion exemplifies not only the workings of the (traumatic) event but also the 4

Kaja Silverman’s Lacanian terminology might be relevant here: for Silverman, the concept of historical trauma represents “an attempt to conceptualise how history sometimes manages to interrupt or even deconstitute what a society assumes to be its master narratives and immanent Necessity – to undo our imaginary relation to the symbolic order, as well as to the other elements within the social formation with which that order is imbricated”. (Silverman 1992, 55). For a discussion of the implications of this view, cf. Ranjana Khanna. 2003. Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Durham: Duke UP, xi, 14, 145ff. See also Ashis Nandy. 1992. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford UP, xvi, 30–9. The erosion of the civilisatory selfimage is treated as a central theme of the quartet in Danny Colwell. 1996. “’I Am Your Mother and Your Father’: Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet and the Dissolution of Imperial Identity.’ In Writing India 1757–1990: The Literature of British India, edited by Bart Moore-Gilbert. Manchester: Manchester UP, 212–36, 214, 229. Peter Childs. 1998. Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet: History and Division. Victoria: University of Victoria, English Literary Studies, 103–7. For Englishmen at home– says Captain Purvis in the final volume of the quartet in a Lacanian frame of mind–the loss of India will be “like getting rid of what is no longer reflected in our mirror of ourselves” (Scott 1983c, 105). This is like a phantom limb, like Merrick’s lost arm. Purvis goes on to add that the English in India “may now see nothing at all when looking in their mirror” (Scott 1983c, 105), since they have identified themselves using the partly invisible and deeply ambiguous image of the native: as the Other (consciously acknowledged), but also as an object of desire and as the model of imaginary identifications.

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manner in which the collective subject is trying to work through its effect. A British colonial administrator called Morland is informed that a twoheaded baby was born somewhere in his district, and that the child and its mother died immediately afterwards. Morland, suspecting that the death of the child with any considerable deformity might well have been assisted (although two heads had to be taken with a pinch of salt), had spent two weeks attempting to trace the rumour to its source, but had no luck. Everyone knew it had happened, but nobody was sure of the exact locality. Places were suggested, but going to them Morland was told: Not here, not here: and another village would be named, usually the one he had come from. The closer he tried to get to it the farther away the scene of the event had become. But the effect on the people who discussed it with him was clear enough. Such things did not happen without a reason. It was a forewarning. But of what? Heads were shaken. Who could tell? On the journey home Morland noticed the constant freshness of the flowers placed on the little wayside shrines of the old tribal gods. (Scott 1983a, 319)

Although initially it is only the superstitious natives who seem to be affected by the turmoil caused by the event, it turns out that Morland himself is also tormented by nightmares that are linked by the narrator not only to the threatening approach of the Japanese army (that is, the threat against British India) but also to Barbie Batchelor’s dream which, in turn, connects these events with the traumatic opening episode of the entire quartet, the story of the English teacher Edwina Crane. This sequence illustrates the unpredictable ways in which collective colonial pathologies intermingle and merge with the individual anxieties of the characters—for instance, with the hideous faces Daphne sees in her dreams (Scott 1983a, 344) or with Sarah Layton’s “funny turns”. In a similar vein, the whiteclad Indian women haunting Sarah’s dreams are in fact the distillations of the political “messages” intended for Ronald Merrick. For Sarah there came a time when the whole of that summer became inextricably entangled, as if, at this point, converging strands of circumstances met and intermingled, but did not cohere; and woven into them were the patterns of her dream, and Barbie’s dream, and the tale from the hills that sent young Morland in his sleep to an unexpected death by drowning. She found it difficult later to remember things in the order they happened. There was a sense in which they became interchangeable. (Scott 1983a, 344)

It is not only the borderlines between individual subjectivities that are made permeable by the uncomprehended and unacknowledged experiences:

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the line that divides sexual and colonial-political pathologies and affects tends to be blurred in Anglo-India from the start, which is only to be expected in a novel that identifies the relationship between the mother country and the colony as an “imperial embrace” on its very first page (Scott 1984, 9). Rape, the central event, is one of the ruling narrative tropes of British colonial literature, and the sexual and political elements are similarly impossible to disentangle in the relationship between colonial policeman Ronald Merrick and Hari Kumar, the dark-skinned Indian who was educated in a public school in Britain.5 Libidinal energies and impulses are seen in the quartet as an indelible and inalienable part of the colonial experience; this is clearly indicated by the scene in the closing volume in which the young Englishman, Nigel Rowan wants to bring the record of Hari’s interrogation to its final shape by editing out all the sexual—homoerotic—implications and reducing it to its political content, but, given the libidinal nature of colonial experience, he has to realise that he simply cannot succeed.

The original scene(s) The quartet clearly invites us to read the Bibighar episode (the raping of an Englishwoman by a gang of natives) as the traumatic core which is retold by several characters and returns in unpredictable ways throughout the novel sequence: a considerable proportion of the text is in fact made up of the characters’ testimonies and recollections, results of the obsessive investigations of the historian-narrator. At the same time, however, the Raj Quartet also deconstructs the view of trauma seemingly implied by this strategy; the efforts of the Anglo-Indian community to work through this traumatic material lead not to the disappearance of the traumatic material through its insertion into healthy processes of narration and recollection, but, on the contrary, to its dissemination and permanent deferral. The Raj Quartet suggests that trauma, far from being an external irruption that has to be removed in order to enable the healthy functioning of the subject, is in fact the very condition of (colonial) subjectivity.6 5

Michael Gorra interprets the scene in the cell as a homosexual rape. (Gorra 1997, 52) 6 This way of reading the novel’s treatment of the traumatised community suggests that the Raj Quartet conceives of trauma not only in the “traditional” manner (as a shocking event that is not grasped when it occurs and returns to haunt the survivor, shattering subjectivity by subjecting it to the temporality of Nachträglichkeit), but also as the paradoxical and necessary condition of subjectivity as structure, the impossible kernel of the Real around which the symbolic world of the subject

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Robin White, the Deputy Commissioner of Mayapore, refers to Daphne’s diary—evoking Leopold von Ranke’s famous definition of the task of historiography—as an account “in which she describes what actually happened in the Bibighar” (Scott 1984, 336; the expression is repeated by Daphne [Scott 1984, 405]). However, as we gradually come to realise, her no doubt truthful, even accurate description of “what actually happened” is inevitably insufficient and inadequate. The fact that she does not know who her attackers are has wider repercussions in the fictional world of the quartet: Daphne knows perfectly well what happened to her body in Bibighar, but an understanding of the act, its becoming an experience in the sense of something integrated into her memory, would require an awareness of the identity and motivations of the other participants as well as a context in her own community that could somehow integrate or “place” this experience. In the Raj Quartet, experience is never exclusively individual experience, and this does not simply mean the reiteration of the well-known cliché of postcolonial criticism, originating with Fredric Jameson, according to which, in (post)colonial fiction, characters inevitably allegorise their respective communities, but a more radical insight into the nature of colonial experience. Daphne, who undergoes the experience, is not in the position to register and understand it properly, while those who attempt to synthesise the divergent, fragmented scraps of experience will, by definition, be unable to acquire an adequate picture of an event they have not witnessed. Thus, the necessary inadequacy of Daphne’s or anybody else’s knowledge of the Bibighar episode is caused by the fact that, even though the episode plays a crucial role in the conscious and unconscious psychic processes of the Anglo-Indian community, the core of what the Bibighar affair is about is not to be found there. This is half-suspected by the Anglo-Indians, too: in a somewhat ironical manner, the members of the English community are still trying to spare Daphne, who has seen and coagulates. The first view is represented, most notably, in Cathy Caruth. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, and also in Anne Whitehead. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. For an excellent survey of the psychoanalytic approach to traumatic temporality and subjectivity, see John Forrester. 1992. “Dead on Time: Lacan’s Theory of Temporality.” In The Seductions of Psychoanalysis, 168–218. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. The Lacanian and Žižekian view of trauma as the kernel of subjectivity is reiterated from a Levinasian perspective in Simon Critchley. 1997. “The Original Traumatism.” In Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility, edited by Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods, 88-104. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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suffered the untellable, from certain revelations, for instance, concerning Merrick (Scott 1984, 405). “Bibighar” is a convenient way of specifying and naming something that is dispersed everywhere, replacing the diffused trauma with an event that fits the imperial imagination (the rape of an Englishwoman by bestial natives), while the unnameable event itself keeps disseminating and causing damage in the community. The “whole truth” could only be known and pieced together through the collective effort of the community, although it seems that it is precisely the self-reflexive, interminable healing project of uncovering the truth that the traumatic experience has made impossible: this is the vicious circle that keeps revolving in the quartet. Scott’s quartet can be read as an exploration and re-enactment of the way in which colonial trauma, instead of crystallising around one event, expands, disseminates all over the collective subjectivity of the AngloIndian community, manifesting itself in—or as—a series of symptomatic, unmasterable repetitions without a clearly identifiable origin. Thus, instead of a pure point of origin, the Bibighar episode is simply a node in a series of repetitions and hauntings that is vaster even than the Anglo-Indian community and their history in India. The Bibighar affair is as much part of the history of the place itself as of the psychic history of any single individual or of the Anglo-Indian community. This is also suspected by Daphne, for whom Bibighar “was a place in which you sensed something having gone badly wrong at one time that hadn’t yet been put right but could be if only you knew how” (Scott 1984, 413). The place is haunted, with many of the ghosts returning from the immeasurably distant past, while others do their haunting, as it were, laterally, suggesting that the frequently muted or repressed aspects of the colonial condition will inevitably haunt and harass any intersubjective relationship that pretends to be purely personal or private, evoking Ronny Heaslop’s famous claim from A Passage to India: “Nothing is private in India” (Forster 1961, 33). The centrality of the Bibighar scene, however, is even more ambiguous, for, on the level of the plot, there is in fact a doubling of the traumatic kernel: the Bibighar scene is complemented by the prison interrogation (the two scenes involve partly different people—only Hari Kumar is directly involved in both). One of the fertile ambiguities offered by the text is whether we are dealing with two primal scenes or the splitting of a single scene. Whatever the case might be, these episodes, themselves inextricably related to one another, function as textual scenes of origin, generating countless repetitions (retellings and re-enactments) in the Anglo-Indian community. In fact, the Bibighar scene itself is already double, involving both the lovemaking and the rape; for the English

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community, the former is much the greater scandal, since the rape, though traumatic, is a culturally comprehensible event, crystallising and bearing out what the Anglo-Indians have always known: the bestiality of the native, the absoluteness of the racial difference and the taboo that separates the English from the natives. In the textual economy of the entire quartet, however, it is not the Bibighar scene that generates the greatest number of repetitions but its “complementary scene” of absolute enclosure, the physical torture of Hari Kumar by Ronald Merrick, the scene that Merrick consistently calls the enactment of the situation. Although the textual economy of the quartet is clearly based upon the multitude of attempts to make sense of the “situation” and of the double primal scene, these attempts, on the one hand, frequently do not even reach consciousness, and, on the other hand, they tend to become repetitions of the event rather than producing healing knowledge about it. The subject of these attempts and repetitions is the Anglo-Indian community, the internal psychic dynamics of which can be seen in terms of the paradoxical temporality of trauma. In this collective subject, Freudian Nachträglichkeit is the rule rather than the exception. What we have here is not simply the delayed understanding of the event but a delayed registration or inscription that is unable to anchor the event in the psychic world of the subject in any reassuring way and is thus transformed into a mechanism that hijacks psychic functioning as such. In The Jewel in the Crown, the blind Sister Ludmila, who is running a strange charity establishment in Mayapore, confides to the anonymous narrator a curious hunch of hers: Permit me, too, a further observation? That given the material evidence there is also in you an understanding that a specific historical event has no definite beginning, no satisfactory end? It is as if time were telescoped? Is that the right word? As if time were telescoped and space dovetailed? As if Bibighar almost had not happened yet, and yet has happened, so that at once past, present and future are contained in your cupped palm. (Scott 1984, 133)

In Sister Ludmila’s symptomatic account, subjectivity is identified not as agency but as a pair of cupped palms, that is—to use J. Hillis Miller’s term—a kind of anastomosis (Miller 1992, 155ff), a node in which layers of time and space are sedimented, and, finding themselves in a bottleneck (the subject), they are telescoped into each other and rearranged in novel, unpredictable ways. In a way that is typical of the novel’s temporality (the traumatised temporality of the Anglo-Indian community), the consequence of the

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Bibighar scene in fact precedes the incident in the narrative: I mean the first encounter between Merrick and Hari in “the death house” (Scott 1984, 141), that is, Sister Ludmila’s establishment. When evoking this scene, Sister Ludmila stresses the pattern of gazes, the triangle, this “dangerous geometrical arrangement” (Scott 1984, 140) involving Merrick (tormented by physical desire for and loathing of Hari Kumar), Hari (unwitting victim of his class superiority over Merrick) and an Indian subaltern, Rajendra Singh, who, at this stage, is allowed and encouraged to perform the violence (which in the central scene is not delegated by Merrick to the native in a Hegelian manner). For Sister Ludmila, who perceives “a cycle of inevitability” (Scott 1984, 159) in the pattern, the later Merrick–Kumar–Daphne triangle is simply the repetition of this scene (Scott 1984, 158–9), although she forgets to mention her own involvement, which, besides making the pattern quadrangular, also transforms the scene—in unconscious accordance with her own tentative theory—into a prefiguration of what is a much later repetition of the “situation”, the first prison interrogation ostensibly seeking to find out the truth about the Bibighar affair. In the second interrogation, an Englishman and an Indian are interrogating Hari, the whole pattern observed by an Englishwoman, Daphne’s aunt, Lady Manners, who also repeats Sister Ludmila’s position. Inasmuch as the Bibighar incident and what takes place between Merrick and Kumar can be regarded as traumatic events, their traumatic nature affects the entire collective subject: the trauma fails to become an experience, since for the subject it is not an event belonging to the past—while, on the other hand, it is precisely its irredeemable pastness that makes it unbearable. It is here that the doubling of the core trauma becomes important: if the two primal scenes are treated as aspects of a single traumatic situation, the native Kumar becomes imperceptibly but irretrievably involved in the psychic processes of the Anglo-Indian community. What is more, he becomes the embodiment of the very fact that the traumatic nature of the scene in the cell remains unmentionable and unclaimable for the community. Thus, the unmentionable, as it were, contaminates the entire complex that is constituted by these two (or three) entangled traumatic events. The two primal scenes—or the collapsing of the two scenes into one— function as traumatic cores for the entire Anglo-Indian community, and the reason for the inadequacy of the protective shields against trauma is precisely that, at the level of the collective subjectivity, these events have always already taken place. Thus, it is not surprising at all that the night thoughts of Edwina Crane anticipate Sarah Layton’s musings about the wasp and the day of the scorpion:

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Sometimes Miss Crane woke up in the night and lay sleepless, listening to the rain, and was alarmed, conscious of dangers that were growing and which people were preparing to face but not to understand, she said, so that virtually they were not facing them at all. We only understand, she said, the way to meet them, or sometimes, the way to avert them. (Scott 1984,46)

The Anglo-Indian community are trying to undo the trauma by failing to work through it, producing the effects of healing without the healing process taking place, rather like the fictional city of Mayapore: the events […] seemed first to flutter and then to shatter Mayapore—writes the narrator years after the scandal—, but actually seem to have left it untouched, massively in continuing brick-and-mortar possession of itself (if not of the landscape feebly invaded by its architectural, artisan formation). (Scott 1984, 100)

In the Anglo-Indian community, healing is not possible because the fact of the (collective) wound has not even been acknowledged or claimed. As is indicated by the title of her book (Unclaimed Experience), Cathy Caruth defines trauma as an experience that is not claimed by anyone as their own. The double—or multiple—primal scene of the Raj Quartet is also traumatic in this fundamental sense: those who live through the events are unable to claim and appropriate them for themselves. Their inability, in turn, is due to the fact that, on their own, they could get nowhere anyway because, as Scott suggests, the events could be appropriated and worked through only if the entire community could claim them as its own; in default of this act of claiming, the experience is interminably deferred and displaced. Those members of the Anglo-Indian community (like Guy Perron) who are preoccupied by these events at all want to understand them from the outside, as the experiences of others. As a result, in the process they find themselves repeating these events and thus, by definition, incapable of registering or anchoring them as their own. “Traumatic re-enactment—says Mieke Bal—is tragically solitary” (Bal 1999, x). The main difference between narrative memory and traumatic non-memory is grasped by her in the fact that, while the former is a social and collective construction (partly because it presupposes a person implied by the very act of narrating), the latter is fixed and unchangeable once and for all: it has “no social component” (Bal 1999, x), no addressee. Ronald Granofsky might be right when he claims that “a culture may resort to some of the same defensive strategies as an individual in times of stress” (Granosfky 1995, 7), although the mere assertion of a possible isomorphism does not take into account the fact that the defence

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mechanisms of a community are obviously different from those of the traumatised individual. On the whole, although a discussion of transpositions between individual and collective trauma is clearly beyond the scope of the present chapter,7 one could do worse than accepting Kai Erikson’s premise, according to which one can speak of traumatised communities as something distinct from assemblies of traumatised persons. Sometimes the tissues of community can be damaged in much the same way as the tissues of mind and body, […] but even when that does not happen traumatic wounds inflicted on individuals can combine to create a mood, an ethos—a group culture, almost—that is different from (and more than) the sum of the private wounds that make it up. (Erikson 1995, 183–99; 185)8

When discussing the centripetal and centrifugal forces involved in collective trauma, Erikson suggests that the former tend to be destructive, while the latter, paradoxically, can be seen as forces of cohesion (Erikson 1995, 186; 190). We could say that the reason why, in the Anglo-Indian community depicted in Scott’s quartet, only the centripetal, destructive energies are activated is precisely that neither the central events nor the traumatic loss of collective identity are successfully claimed by anyone. Those characters who in fact claim the traumatic events and the no less traumatic loss of identity as their own (especially Barbara Batchelor or Edwina Crane) are proclaimed insane by the community and seen as marginal to the colonial experience, and even they themselves (like Susan Layton repeating the day of the scorpion) fail to recognise that their experience is in fact a living through, a working through of a collective disaster. If we extend the opposition established by Mieke Bal, based precisely on the difference between individual and collective experience, 7 An influential opponent of the facile parallel between individual and collective (or cultural) trauma is Wulf Kansteiner. 2004. “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor.” Rethinking History 8.2 (2004): 193–221. Frank Ankersmit is similarly sceptical about the validity of such analogies: “What individual psychology could, on the scale of the individual, be the counterpart of the history of Poland? […] The contours of cultural and historical identities are far more fluid and far less fixed than is the case with individual human beings” (Ankersmit, 2005, 329.) For discussions of this issue, see Roger Luckhurst. 2008. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008, 9–10; Nicola King. 2000. Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 5ff, and Jeffrey Prager. 1998. Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2ff. 8 See also 187–8.

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and if we are ready to concede that we are justified to speak of something that we may call collective trauma, then we may go on to argue that a community inflicted by collective trauma will react in ways that are not unlike the reactions of an individual psyche; that is, the traumatised community will become “solitary”, dysfunctional, a community in which it is precisely the collective working through of experience that does not work. If a traumatised subject undergoes symptomatic fragmentation as a result of repression and/or dissociation, then the traumatised community is rendered incapable of integrating the experience of its members by incorporating it into signifying practices and thereby assigning to it a meaning.

Images and repetitions This pastness, which is absolute and partial at the same time, also determines the functioning of collective memory in the Raj Quartet. While, in a series of repetitions, unmasterable affects transferentially produce symptoms in the collective psyche, remembering, transformed into haunting and prophecy, becomes an unmasterable chaos of images and the kinds of affective charge attached to these images. The nature of the disorder is apparent from the way ex-teacher Barbie Batchelor’s memory works: “She remembered a great deal. But was unable to say what it was” (Scott 1983b, 398). For all this confusion, the reminiscences of hypermnesiac Barbie Batchelor, who, after her retirement from teaching, lives with Mrs. Layton as a companion, are in fact handed down, but certainly not because she is probably the most loquacious character in the quartet: her memories keep reappearing in others because, in the Anglo-Indian community, collective memory works not through the usual linear narratives or other acts of bequeathing, but in strange, unpredictable ways, among which silence, evoked in the title of the volume consecrated to Barbie (The Towers of Silence), turns out to be one of the most important. It should be noted, though—and at this point we may evoke one of the staple claims of Scott criticism—that mutism, the silence produced by trauma, may occasionally merge into the vaster silence suspected by Daphne Manners behind the cacophony of India: what a deep, lingering silence. Siva dances in it. Vishnu sleeps in it. Even their music is silence. It’s the only music I know that sounds conscious of breaking silence, of going back into it when it’s finished, as if to prove that every man-made sound is illusion. (Scott 1984, 468)

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Although this might be seen as an appropriation (and therefore an anaesthetisation) of the silence caused by historical trauma by an orientalising idea of cosmic silence, even this ostensible metaphysical silence is potentially reinscribed into traumatic history, when Daphne begins to wonder about the origin of this absolute silence: “Is it just a concept that could be traced to some long-forgotten, overwhelming, primitive experience of pain and suffering?” (Scott 1984, 369) The fact that the textual and psychic economy of the Raj Quartet is based on repetition may in itself alert us to the possibility of reading the tetralogy as a trauma text. “The experience of trauma”—writes Caruth— “repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his own very will” (Caruth 1996, 2). The repetition of memories telescoped into one another might be seen as the first stage of this traumatic repetition. In the collective psyche of the Anglo-Indian community, as the narrator of The Day of the Scorpion puts it, “images converge” (Scott 1983a, 343). The Bibighar incident itself emphatically appears as a series of disconnected images piled upon one another; in this way the quartet invites being read as a modernist text where the confusion of temporality is overruled by motifs and symbols that can be arranged into metaphorical sequences, patterns and dichotomies. Scott’s text, however, defies any arrangement of its images into allegorical or symbolic sequences. Using a rhetorical term that is also evoked by the quartet, the images fail to crystallise into a series of types (or antitypes) that triumph over the difference and confusion of temporality. This way of putting things recalls what Daphne writes in her diary about Bibighar, the first place that hit her as being “typically Indian”: the surprise of being hit made me think I’d come across something typical when all the time it was typical of no place, but only of human acts and desires that leave their mark in the most unexpected and sometimes chilling way. (Scott 1984, 413–4)

The indecipherable images, then, are simply held up for inspection to work metonymically as traces or, alternatively, they survive through repetition, passing from one character to another. On the plot level, repetition means the compulsive return of certain situations, a phenomenon that could be interpreted as the symptom of something like the “colonial death wish”, which would also pave the way for a metaphysical reading of the novel. Indeed, several critics have read the Raj Quartet as a dramatisation of the eternal fight between Eros and

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Thanatos, a drama of separation and unification.9 Repeated motifs include the idea of man-bap, the atavistic but ubiquitous core of colonial intersubjectivity that grotesquely projects the family metaphor onto the relationship between colonisers and natives, the image of the burning car and of fire itself, ostensibly unmotivated suicide (Edwina Crane, Captain Purvis), or the active, quasi-suicidal role several characters play in their own death (Barbie Batchelor, Merrick or even Susan’s husband Teddie Bingham). A plot structure based on repetition is in a sense the very opposite or denial of a plot: instead of a linear narrative with a certain number of variations and repetitions, we have a text that is obsessed with its own repetitiveness. On a deeper level, characters and situations may be read as each other’s repetitions (one such chain is provided by Edwina Crane, Sister Ludmila, Daphne and Barbie Batchelor, who becomes Edwina in her delirium). However, failing to solidify into a series of types and antitypes, these repetitions serve instead to deprive presence and individual experience of its uniqueness without assigning to it a reassuring typological meaning. The textual dynamism of the Raj Quartet mobilises psychoanalytically informed notions of repetition, evoking the argument of Samuel Weber, who, punning on the etymology of the verb “increase”, suggests that repetitions and duplications “seem to confirm, even increase the ‘original’ identity, and yet even more they crease it as its problematical and paradoxical precondition” (Weber 1973, 1127). The economy of repetition characterised by Weber is not unlike what is called the iterability of the sign by Derrida and repeatedly adapted by Homi Bhabha to the colonial context (Bhabha 1995, 107-8): self-identity, which is necessary for anything to be something, can only belong to that which remains recognisable through repetition. This is reinforced by Gilles Deleuze, for whom the point of repetition is precisely that it is not reproduction or a representation, and therefore, since it cannot be assimilated into the order of representation, it is the spectral return of the same (Deleuze 1997, 1–27; esp. 6–7; 14–8).

9

Cf. David Rubin. 1986. After the Raj: British Novels of India Since 1947. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986, 120–56; esp. 144–5; 149–50; Childs. Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, 35ff., Francine S. Weinbaum. 1992. Paul Scott: A Critical Study. Austin: University of Texas Press, 169–73. Weinbaum reads the quartet in terms of the duality of body and soul, along rather naively orientalist dichotomies: she fails to reflect on the problems attendant on the strategy of identifying India as body and allegorising the colonial relationship as a body/soul conflict.

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In Scott’s quartet, the internal dynamics of the Anglo-Indian community is determined by the double meaning and direction of repetition as transference, that is, the community is seen as a collective subject in the full psychoanalytical sense of the term, one that is not present to itself, that is cut across and fissured by countless internal rifts, fault-lines of class, gender, generation, politics, etc.10 Although it provides the basis for the textual dynamics of the quartet, repetition itself appears as an ambiguous and far from homogeneous mechanism, and the different economies of repetition are played out against each other. For instance, the two primal scenes or kernels of the trauma (Bibighar and the episode in the cell) seem to generate two contrasting economies or textualities of repetition. The scene in the cell is the staging of Merrick’s fantasy, and can be seen as part of an endless series of repetitions. Merrick’s objective is the enactment or realisation of what he calls the situation, that is, a pure master and servant scenario, the ultimate underlying truth of the colonial condition. For Merrick, to enact a situation is to understand it: without enactment, ideas lose their reality, and become figments of our imagination. “He said—recalls Kumar—that up until then our relationship had only been symbolic. It had to become real” (Scott 1983a, 305-6). The opposite of this kind of repetition is the unconscious re-enactment of certain events, something that suggests resistance and the lack of comprehension. This is how Kumar remembers what took place in the cell: He said that if people would enact a situation they would understand its significance. He said history was a sum of situations whose significance was never seen until long afterwards because people had been afraid to act them out. They couldn’t face up to their responsibility for them. They preferred to think of the situations they found themselves in as part of a general drift of events they had no control over, which meant that they never really understood those situations, and so in a curious way the situations did become part of a general drift of events. (Scott 1983a, 306–7)

Merrick sees action as such as repetition or re-enactment: actions are themselves as well as their own re-enactments. Thus, what he calls the situation does not in fact exist in its pure form, only as it is re-enacted in a 10 It is an interesting question whether this hypothesis can be extended to include the natives. Although the group in the focus of Scott’s attention is clearly the Anglo-Indian community, several details suggest that the collective subject that is meant here may include the natives; for instance, Guy Perron is frequently the repetition or haunting insistence of Hari Kumar.

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series of repetitions. This is indicated when, in a chiasmic inversion of Merrick’s original phrase (the enactment of the situation), Kumar designates the scene in the cell as “a situation of enactment” (Scott 1983a, 305). What took place in the cell was thus the enactment of the pure situation which, however, can only become real if re-enacted, and therefore the concrete situation is always inevitably “the situation of the enactment of the situation”. In Merrick’s perverted Platonism, it is the enactment that guarantees the truth and reality of the situation that is being enacted, thus, although “the situation” enjoys ontological priority, what exist are only situations of enactment. Imagining that there is a hard kernel of reality behind his fantasy scenario of colonial desire and revulsion, Merrick is looking for this kernel (a grotesque version of the already grotesque man-bap scenario) in the course of his compulsive reenactments of the scene. Through what is a reversal of symbolic repetition or enactment as therapy, he wants to arrive, in a profoundly Freudian fashion, to the real through a series of enactments. The re-enactment of this primal scene, for him, is one of contraction, of enclosure, of stripping off all externalities and getting to the pure kernel of the real. While gathering around itself an equally large proportion of the text, Bibighar seems to trigger off a different economy of repetition: a great deal of colonial history is reconfigured as a premonition or haunting repetition of this scene which expands, surges outwards, reverberating throughout the text and spawning a multitude of ghosts.11 This economy of repetition or, rather, its underlying psychoanalytical logic is evoked by Sir George Malcolm when he is discussing the Kumar case with Nigel Rowan and describing the way he sets about trying to find a solution when the conflicting interests of various administrative departments are at stake: although people seldom argued a point but argued round it, they sometimes found a solution to the problem they were evading by going round in ever increasing circles and disappearing into the centre of those, which, relatively speaking, coincide with the centre of the circle from whose periphery they had evasively spiralled out. (Scott 1983c, 318)

The solution suggested by Sir Malcolm—who discusses the difficulties of problem-solving within a collective subject—is not unlike the Freudian 11 As Janis E. Haswell says in her book that discusses the treatment of space in the quartet: “As an event, Bibighar is a fluid and dynamic occurrence whose true significance is without boundaries and therefore uncharitable” (Haswell 2001, 154). Haswell considers the Bibighar affair as the starting point of a motivic chain, which goes against the reading I am putting forward here.

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notion of transference appearing as repetition, where repetition is symptom, resistance and a cure at the same time. In a similar fashion, Sir Malcolm’s example conceives of transference as the symptom of evading the problem, a technique of transferring it onto another (just like in transference neurosis, where the individual psyche repeats instead of remembering). This is how the narrations of the primal scenes themselves become the repetitions of the scenes they are attempting to tell, repetitions in which therapeutic function and compulsiveness are practically inseparable. One of the clearest examples of this logic is provided by Nigel Rowan’s account of the interrogation of Hari Kumar years after Hari’s imprisonment. The interrogation is intended by Rowan as well as by the entire Anglo-Indian community to put an end to the awkward affair, to bring a solution to the traumatic kernel of the “situation”; instead, however, it begins to work as yet another repetition of the situation, producing further pathogenic material. This is partly what is behind Rowan’s compulsive desire to tell about it, although he is a kind of person who normally has to overcome powerful psychic obstacles to be able to discuss awkward subjects. His interlocutor, Guy Perron, who proves to be an instinctive analyst as well as a historian, understands perfectly why Rowan feels such an insurmountable desire to relate the interrogation. Rowan’s narrative is a confession in which the narrator frees himself of the burden of an experience he has not personally lived through. What Rowan was doing, in telling me all this, was trying to set off against his own inertia someone else’s positive action: mine. He wanted me to do what he could not do: help Kumar. (Scott 1983c, 302)

Although Susan Layton cannot remember the day of the scorpion, it is she who repeats the building of the circle of fire, inscribing her act into the interminable series of fiery circles and conflagrations, from the fiery ring around the dancing Shiva to Edwina Crane’s suttee and Merrick’s burnt face. This is transference in the sense of conversion, when the pathogenic psychic material signals its existence in the displaced form of symptoms, and the affective energies attached to the primal scenes and the painful experience of the loss of imperial identity continue to circulate in the system of the collective subject, appearing in unpredictable ways and places—that is, individual subjectivities. The very existence of Barbie Batchelor, a superfluous character if there ever was one, can be seen as a hypertrophied symptom, and it is perhaps not by chance that she is the character who condenses in herself the symptoms of others:

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suddenly she felt what she had felt before in Ranpur, the presence of a curious emanation, of a sickness, a kind of nausea that was not hers but someone else’s. (Scott 1983b, 24)

Barbie’s madness, then, is not so much her own mental disturbance as a symptom of the collective subject to which she belongs. Barbie is also an important link in another chain of symptomatic transferential repetitions, namely, the half-conscious but persistent way in which Daphne Manners lingers on in the thoughts of Sarah Layton, filtered through characters like Lady Manners and Barbie Batchelor: The poems of Gaffur and the smell of garlic: a dark vision of an old lady under an awning on the sun-deck of a house-boat, and of trunks, musty, unclaimed, containing what was left of that girl: passed over Sarah’s consciousness of her presence on a sunlit scene—inconsequential but positive—like vapours casting actual shadows. (Scott 1983a, 184)

The convoluted syntax contributes to the questioning of the very idea of fully possessing or grasping one’s experience and presence: it is not simply Sarah’s consciousness but her consciousness of her present that is disturbed by the haunting return of Daphne through other figures, and what haunts Sarah’s present (and presence) is precisely the “unclaimed”, “unclaimable” nature of “what was left of that girl”. This disturbing uncertainty concerning the “propriety” of experience pervades the quartet’s handling of voice and perspective. Underneath the ostensible seamlessness of the narrative, there is a perplexing confusion that reflects both the internal fault-lines within the collective subjectivity of the AngloIndian community and the “unclaimed” nature of much of the experience of the individuals belonging to it. This is obvious already from the otherwise uncharacteristically convoluted perspectivism of the opening sentence: Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south. (Scott 1984, 9)

By the time we get to the end of the sentence, we cannot be certain as to whose perspective the concluding image belongs to—and this in a passage that stresses the importance of perspective through the opening injunction. The image that is taking shape is compounded from the

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perspectives of at least four different “participants”—but the resulting formation is far from being a harmonious whole: the spectacle the reader is called on to “imagine” and the perspective (s)he is called on to adopt immediately merge with what is seen by the running girl, only for this fuzzy perspective, failing to crystallise, to extend further into a more general perspective, suggesting a parallel between two remote experiences. The parallel, however, that is tentatively established between the gaze of Daphne and that of Miss Crane, remains uncertain, and the imperative of “imagining”, which might refer both to “re-imagining” something that actually happened and to making something up in our imagination, is unable to rest in either of the invoked views. Instead of congealing and affirming a panoramic view—as in the opening section of A Passage to India—the shift towards the collectivisation of the perspective entails a permanent sense of deferral. This strategy suggests the impossibility both of having a properly individual experience and of developing a communal narrative voice and perspective that would serve as a reassuring context for awkward or difficult individual experiences. The first word of the quartet (“imagine”) calls attention to one of the most important aspects of textual repetition, that of the recurrence and telescoping of images and motifs. This aspect raises the issue of what can be called the modernist reading of Scott’s quartet, and the question of the relationship between a modernist reading of the text and the traumatictransferential nature of textual repetition that I have been arguing for throughout this essay. In Ronald Granofsky’s somewhat simplifying view, “literary symbolism allows for a ‘safe’ confrontation with a traumatic experience” (Granofsky 1995, 7), and the dominant interpretation of the Raj Quartet—although it has never been read as a trauma narrative—sees it as a text that dramatises a fight between an overwhelming sense of loss and an aesthetic (mythical, motivic, archetypal) totality that nevertheless overrides this loss. According to this view, repeated motifs and images would gain their final meaning and significance in a coherent aesthetic whole. Francine Weinbaum’s claim is fairly representative of this view: “The reader who sees mere repetition in this novel misses its evocative and delicately woven fabric” (Weinbaum 1992, 179).12 Elsewhere, she writes that “the repetitive nature of the book […] grows out of Scott’s desire to present a total picture” (Weinbaum 1992, 101).13 12 It has to be noted that what Weinbaum means here by “mere repetition” is basically redundancy as an aesthetic flaw rather than the repetitive formations described by psychoanalysis. 13 David Rubin emphasises the tendency of Scott’s characters to merge into each other (Rubin 1986, 136), but sees it as contributing to the panoramic historical

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Indeed, the quartet works with a number of recurrent images and motifs (fire, the christening shawl with the butterflies, the book with the poems of the 18th-century Persian poet Gaffur, etc.), and, on the textual level, this seems to bring about the triumph of Eros over Thanatos, the text becoming a patterned, orderly, “aesthetic” object and thereby symbolically overlaying and “healing” the traumatic loss. This view seems to be confirmed by the ubiquity of the self-reflexive word “image”: the text works with and through images (like the one of Daphne Manners running home after she has been raped in the Bibighar Gardens, Edwina Crane sitting by the roadside beside the burning car and holding the hand of a dying Indian, or Susan Layton placing her baby on the grass in a circle of fire), and, by endlessly repeating them and calling attention to their status as images, seems to endeavour to polish them into some final artistic significance. In my view, however, the text of the quartet—whether on the level of motifs or more overarching patterns—does not approve of these interpretations that seem too neat in their desire to see reassuring closure and polished aesthetic totality. The role of the image and the textual economy of repetition are both too ambiguous to allow us to see them merely as instruments of aesthetic totality. The aim of the present essay is precisely to argue that considering the Raj Quartet as a trauma text might be useful in accounting for its obsessively repetitive nature. Images in the quartet tend to be emotionally overwhelming, unexplained and inexplicable manifestations of something,14 and their recurrence signals not so much closure and final meaning as a symptomatic repetition of their unmasterable transference. In the Anglo-Indian community, images multiply and are passed on in unaccountable ways.

view that is forged out by the novel. For Peter Childs, repetitions and linkages are “illustrations of Emerson’s view that we can see explanations of our own lives in those of others and vice versa” (Childs 1998, 151). Haswell, emphasising the significance of “Scott’s trademark layering of parallels, associations and images” (Haswell 2001, 182), finds one of the most important types of this layering in the system of “artistic associations” (Haswell 2001, 189). Thus, the telescoping or piling up of images is seen by him, too, as part of a totalising strategy: “these techniques create a privileged position for readers, a fluid site from which to view the drama with Scott’s characters but also to transcend their perspective” (Haswell 2001, 198). 14 Much has been said about the central role of images in the quartet, but only Peter Childs has noticed that, in Scott, images do not function as explanations or closures: they provoke a strong emotional response, but are invariably in need of explanation themselves (Childs 1998, 17, 19).

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Images—phenomenally perceptible, externalised manifestations of undigested events—become objects for scrutiny, and thus their final comprehension is made impossible; instead, they are deferred, only to return to other characters. The role of images in the Raj Quartet evokes modernist poetics only if the modernist image is meant in its most radical sense, as, for instance, in Maurice Blanchot’s speculations: After the object comes the image. “After” means that the thing must first take itself off away in order to be grasped. But this remove is not the simple displacement of a moveable object which would nevertheless remain the same. Here the distance is in the heart of the thing. The thing was there; we grasped it in the vital moment of a comprehensive action— and lo, having become image, instantly it has become that which no one can grasp, the unreal, the impossible. (Blanchot 1982, 255)

The haunting role of recurrent images is illustrated even by the eponymous picture representing India as “The Jewel in the Crown”, an allegorical image of the British Raj and the man-bap, with Queen Victoria receiving the representatives of the colony and graciously accepting their gift, a large gem (Scott 1984, 27). The recurring picture, itself a mise en abyme, is awarded to Miss Edwina Crane (a missionary teacher of Indian children) in acknowledgement of her courage in 1919, after she has singlehandedly defended her school against a gang of native rioters. Its subsequent textual career links the two aspects of repetition identified above. For a long time, it is used by Miss Crane when teaching the English language, thus it seems to be divested of its direct allegorical political content, only to be reinscribed into the colonial mechanism of acculturation on a more sophisticated level. This is repetition as accumulation, as solidification of meaning. After the Dibrapur incident, in which her Indian colleague is murdered by the rioting mob while he is trying to save Miss Crane’s life, she removes the picture from her wall, thereby indicating her own decision to leave behind the space of allegorical representation—although this is seen by the Anglo-Indian community as a sign of her madness. The picture is found by Merrick, and it keeps reappearing through much of the quartet. The interesting point is that, although it is an unambiguous representation of the most sublime aspect of the colonial presence, it returns as the repressed. In The Towers of Silence, a volume which is almost entirely made up of repetition, going

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over familiar material, it turns out that Barbie Batchelor, who succeeded Miss Crane in Muzzafirabad, was given a miniature version of the same picture (Scott 1983b, 25). Before her death, when she is almost Edwina Crane, with whom she identifies herself in her final delirium, she hands the picture over to Merrick, somehow intuiting the appropriateness of the gift (she deliriously confuses Merrick with the devil). Thus, the variously overdetermined allegorical image, doubled only for both of the doubles to end up with Merrick, itself becomes a symptom that is transferred, as in transference neurosis, from one component unit of the collective psyche onto another. Miss Batchelor’s reading of the picture, identifying the basic interpretative situation of the colonial subject, links the two aspects of repetition (as transference and as symbolic representation): she claims that what she calls “the unknown Indian” is absent from the picture: ǥWe’ve had everything in the picture except what got left out’. ǥWhat is it, Miss Batchelor?’ [asks Merrick] ǥI call it the unknown Indian. He isn’t there. So the picture isn’t finished’. (Scott 1983b, 388)

As a representation, the image aims to crystallise meaning, to provide an interpretative framework for everything that goes on in the Raj. On the other hand, Barbie Batchelor recognises that the image is unmasterable, identifying it as an absence that can never be filled in, and thus suggesting the reason behind its haunting recurrence. Perhaps this example suffices to indicate that, if we read Scott’s quartet as an exploration of the psyche of the traumatised, dysfunctional collective colonial subject, the recurring symbols cannot simply be seen as the triumph of formal patterning over trauma, the triumph of the symbolic over the irruption of the real; it is precisely through these recurrent symbols that the trauma, the unclaimed experience that is neither fully personal nor successfully appropriated and assimilated by the community, persists in the text. These motifs and images, then, are also symptoms, and their haunting recurrence is also the sign of the inability of the collective psyche (and the text) to get over, or even to register the trauma. Their manifold overdetermination is not simply an aesthetic phenomenon (the inexhaustibility of symbols or something like that), but also the overdetermination of dream symbols and neurotic symptoms. Even though Jenny Sharpe’s postcolonial interpretation of the quartet—reinforcing the existing critical consensus—starts out from the premise that Scott’s tetralogy “leaves no loose ends untied” and that “all is revealed at the end” (Sharpe 1993, 145), reading the Raj Quartet as a trauma text might go some way towards challenging the dominant view of

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Scott’s work as en epic that nostalgically grieves over the loss of India and, by drawing upon the strategies of modernist poetics, transforms the experience of loss into beauty, in a seamless patterning of images. Such a venture—the first steps of which are sketched in this essay—might also contribute to modifying our view of trauma fiction as well as of the nature and literary rendering of collective trauma.

Works Cited Ankersmit, F. 2005. Sublime Historical Experience. Stanford: Stanford UP. Bal, M. 1999. “Introduction.” In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by M. Bal, Jonathan V. Crewe and Leo Spitzer. Dartmouth: Dartmouth College. Bhabha, H. K. 1995. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Blanchot, M. 1982. The Space of Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Booker, M. K. 1997. Colonial Power, Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Childs, P. 1998. Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet: History and Division. Victoria: University of Victoria, English Literary Studies. Colwell, D. 1996. “’I Am Your Mother and Your Father’: Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet and the Dissolution of Imperial Identity.” In Writing India 1757-1990: The Literature of British India, edited by Bart MooreGilbert, 212-36. Manchester: Manchester UP. Critchley, S. 1997. “The Original Traumatism.” In Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility, edited by Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods, 88-104. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Croisy, S. 2008. “Michelle Cliff’s Non-Western Figures of Trauma: The Creolization of Trauma Studies.” The AnaChronisT 13 (2007/2008): 131-56. Deleuze, G. 1997. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Athlone. Erikson, K. 1995. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 183-99. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Forrester, J. 1992. “Dead on Time: Lacan’s Theory of Temporality.” In The Seductions of Psychoanalysis. 169-218. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Forster, E. M. 1961. A Passage to India. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Freud, S. 1991. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. 295-305. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gikandi, S. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity on the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia UP. Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. 1988. Images of the Raj: South Asia in the Literature of Empire. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Gorra, M. 1997. After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. Chicago: The U of Chicago P. Granofsky, R. 1995. The Trauma Novel: Contemporary Symbolic Depictions of Collective Disaster. New York: Peter Lang. Haswell, J. E. 2001. Paul Scott’s Philosophy of Space(s): The Fiction of Relationality. New York: Peter Lang. Kansteiner, W. 2004. “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor.” Rethinking History 8.2 (2004): 193-221. Khanna, R. 2003. Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Durham: Duke UP. King, N. 2000. Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Loomba, A. 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. Luckhurst, R. 2008. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge. McClintock, A. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London: Routledge. Miller, J. H. 1992. Ariadne’s Thread. New Haven: Yale UP. Moore-Gilbert, B. 1997. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso. Morey, P. 2000. Fictions of India: Narrative and Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Nandy, A. 1992. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford UP. Prager, J. 1998. Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Rubin, D. 1986. After the Raj: British Novels of India Since 1947. Hanover: UP of New England. Scott, P. 1983a. The Day of the Scorpion. London: Granada. —. 1984. The Jewel in the Crown. London: Granada. —. 1983b. The Towers of Silence. London: Granada. —. 1983c. A Division of the Spoils. London: Granada. Sharpe, J. 1993. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P.

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Silverman, K. 1992. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. London: Routledge. Suleri, S. 1992. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Swinden, P. 1980. Paul Scott: Images of India. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Weber, S. 1973. “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment.” Modern Language Notes 88 (6): 1102-1133. Weinbaum, F. S. 1992. Paul Scott: A Critical Study. Austin: U of Texas P. Whitehead A. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

LYING FOR COMPANY: DEVISING TRAUMA IN BECKETT AND KRISTOF GIOVANNI PARENZAN

Then babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark. —Samuel Beckett, Endgame

According to Shoshana Felman, the emergence of trauma in modern times has determined a “crisis of truth”, which forces us to rethink narration in dramatically new terms (Felman and Laub 1992). This crisis does not affect the correspondence between narration and factual or historical truth but, rather, is the core of the interlocutionary scene of testimony: “crisis” is, etymologically, the distinction between teller and listener across which the truth of history comes to establish itself. This dual—in fact oral—structure is inextricably linked to the phenomenology of traumatic experience, and more precisely to the displaced nature of its evenementuality. As Cathy Caruth affirmed, because of its unbearable violence, traumatic experience is “missed” at the moment of its occurrence and therefore resists understanding and assimilation; as such, it “is never simply one’s own” (Caruth 1996, 24). Instead of being seized, appropriated by the subject, the event is preserved in latency and literally “passed on” to the Other in testimony. Narration therefore becomes the place where the memory of the past returns—and is returned—as “absolutely true to the event” (Caruth 1995, 5). In this structure of experience, the Other is not only the receiver and receptacle of truth, but the very condition of its coming into being, the only site where it can finally take place. But what happens when there is no other, when there is no one else to listen to our story, when trauma is abandonment? Is it possible—and if so, how—to speak from the inside of trauma, to get out of absolute loneliness through narration? These are precisely the questions raised by Samuel Beckett’s Company and Agota Kristof’s Trilogy of the Twins. I would suggest that these novels impose on

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us the task of thinking of an entirely different “crisis of truth”: they offer us a scenario where the only way to bear one’s loneliness is to make up, to invent the Other, but where, by the same token, the narrator’s reliability and the very truth of his traumatic stories are dramatically called into question. I will argue that, in Beckett, lying is the only way of claiming one’s loneliness: in Company, the first novel of his so-called second “trilogy”, published between 1981 and 1983, only the projection onto an imaginary Other allows the subject to appropriate the trauma of abandonment, to “own up” to his solitude by giving a history to himself. Instead, in Kristof’s Trilogy (1986-91), the invention of company results in an attempt at making up, that is inventing and embellishing, the past. This attempt, though, will prove to be vain, asking us to face the failure of fiction.

Lying in the Dark: Samuel Beckett’s Company In Company, a voice comes to a hearer “lying in the dark” (Beckett 1996, 6); addressing him in the second person, as “you”, it tells him stories from his childhood. These episodes are often traumatic, and consist for the most part of parental rejections: the mother gives his child an unforgettable “cutting retort” (Beckett 1996, 12); his father sets out for a tramp in the mountains the very day he was born “out of aversion for the general unpleasantness of delivery” (Beckett 1996, 12); as a boy he tries in vain to attract his mother’s attention by jumping off the top of a great fir (Beckett 1996, 14-15), etc. The narrating voice tries to seduce the hearer into confessing that these memories belong to him. All the while, a third person narrative provides us with a punctual commentary on the voice’s attempts: “Another trait is repetitiousness. As if willing him to make [the past] his. To confess, Yes, I remember. […] What an addition to company that would be!” (Beckett 1996, 10) Eventually, however, the voice is revealed to belong to the hearer himself, in a final acknowledgement of his originary solitude: you find yourself imagining you are not alone while knowing full well that nothing has occurred to make this possible. […] But without a word you view yourself […] as you would a stranger. Till finally you hear how the words are coming to an end. […] And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. And you as you always were. Alone. (Beckett 1996, 45)

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Retrospectively, this confession makes it clear that all the episodes are fictions—or, as Beckett calls them, “figments”—of a “devised deviser devising it all for company” (Beckett 1996, 33). Indeed, as Stanley Gontarsky noticed, the lie was predictable since the hearer has been in the dark lying from the start.1

Abstraction and Intimacy In the text, the two questions of the past and company are formulated separately: aside from the childhood stories, the impersonal narrator tries to work out of whom and to whom the voice is really speaking: If the voice is not speaking of him it must be speaking of another. To another of that other. […]. So it reasons but it reasons ill. For were the voice speaking not to him but to another then it must be of that other it is speaking and not of him or of another still. Since it speaks in the second person. (Beckett 1996, 6-7)

However, speculations and stories, experience and enunciation are not entirely separate. On the contrary, as the voice reveals, “sometimes the two are combined, as for example you first saw the light on such and such a day and now you are on your back in the dark” (Beckett 1996, 3). Indeed, abstraction and intimacy2 are made to reflect each other. On the one hand, the description of the present is used to make the past more credible: their combination is “a device perhaps from the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other” (Beckett 1996, 3). On the other hand, the past serves to make the abstract speculation “verisimilar”, as when the voice imagines a location for the story: “Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z. Or say for verisimilitude the Ballyogan Road. The dear old back road” (Beckett 1996, 16). On a closer look, this play of reflection points to an intimate affinity between the abstract lucubrations of the present and the painful scenes of the past. In fact, all the episodes revolve around the problem of company, being variations on the theme of the missed encounter: with a girl, with a hedgehog, with the father, with the mother, etc. Conversely, the search for grammatical instances results in an imaginative proliferation of characters: 1

“The narrator is, after all, in Company's most persistent pun, ‘lying’ from the first” (Gontarski 1996, xx-xxi). 2 We borrow this expression from Stanley Cavell’s definition of Beckett’s characters: “They have the abstraction, and the intimacy, of Figures and words and objects in a dream” (Cavell 1979, 131).

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“Why in the dark? And whose voice asking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? […] Who asks in the end, Who asks?” (Beckett 1996, 16). If imagination is based on a neurological “regression”, the counterinvestment of the perceptual apparatus3, here regression takes on the form of a backtracking which creates a community of instances by the very act of looking for the unattainable subject. This ethical imagination inverts the grammar transforming the “I” into the last person of the series: “The unthinkable last of all. Last person. I” (Beckett 1996, 16-17).4 I would suggest that the key to the relationship between past experience and pronominal play (we can use this term here in a fully theatrical sense) lies precisely in the structure of traumatic experience. In order to understand this relation, I propose to read Company’s opening episode, a story of maternal rejection.

Retorts and retaliations Mother and child are walking back home when the boy breaks the silence “asking her if it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. The sky that is. The blue sky” (Beckett 1996, 12). Receiving no answer, the boy “reframes” his question but to no avail: “For some reason you could never fathom this question must have angered her exceedingly. For she shook off your little hand and made you a cutting retort you have never forgotten.” (Beckett 1996, 12) This memory recurs throughout Beckett’s workas early as 1946 in The End, where we can read the “cutting retort” that here remains untold: the answer is “Fuck off”.5 In Company, then, the retort itself has been left out of the story. This narrative cut indicates the radical ambiguity running through the episode, a double sens borne by the pronoun “you” which is the only “person” in the 3

See J. Breuer and S. Freud. 1895. Studies on Hysteria. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II. (1893-1895), translated and edited by J. Strachey , London: Vintage, 2001. 4 This pronominal regression is a negative way of individuation and, in the terms of Michel Foucault and more recently of Giorgio Agamben, a properly “archeological” one in that it finds and founds the subject backtracking towards its origin, much in the same way as Benjamin’s Angel flies towards the future à reculons. On the relationship between Foucauldian archaeology, Freudian regression, and trauma see G. Agamben. 2009. “Philosophical Archaeology.” In The Signature of All Things. On Method. Translated by L. D’Isanto and K. Attell, New York: Zone Books. 5 “A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said” (Beckett 2006, 277).

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story and which refers alternatively to the couple of mother and child walking together—as in “you turn right”, “you make ground in silence”— and to the child alone (for example “you break the silence”, “you reframe your question”). Of course, this episode must have given some trouble to Beckett when he set out to translate it to French: he was then forced to split this “you” into two series—“vous prenez à droite et avancez en silence”, “vous virez vers l’intérieur et entamez la longue montée menant à la maison”, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, “tu romps le silence”, “tu reformules mentalement ta question” (Beckett 1980, 12). Whereas the French translation decides by cutting (in the Latin sense of de-cidere) the pronominal ambiguity, the English text seems to stage a sort of retaliation: if the mother severs the ties with her son by a cutting retort, the voice (which as we said belongs to the boy) retrospectively returns this cut “reframing” (as the text says instead of “rephrasing”) the story as that of the child alone. Indeed, it may well be that the voice refers only to him from the beginning, which reads: “As a child you come out of Connolly Stores holding your mother by the hand. You turn right, etc.” Here, thus, solitude seems somehow made up, invented and carved out into the past of company. This reversal suggests that company is posited in order to let the individual—the “single”, the lonely—arise out of it: if the “you” replaces the “I”, this is because the individual is always a “second person”, the result of a cut, subtraction or abandonment. The subject therefore claims his survival and gives a history to its loneliness; it appears—for the very first time—in the “you”, and precisely in and through what, in the retrospective light shed by the last sentence (“And you as you always were. Alone.”) appears to be the instrumental positing of company. If the second person pronoun is the outcome not only of the mother’s cutting retort, but also of the son’s narrative reaction, it is legitimate to say that the traumatic story literally cuts both ways. In Judith Butler’s words, this episode stages the “mis-appropriation of the injurious speech” through which, as, “a founding subordination becomes the scene of agency” (Butler 1997, 39). However, if Company’s subject originates in the shift from passivity to action, from one sense of lying (immobility, hearing) to another (making up, telling), the opposite movement is staged, too; the ‘rise’ from a horizontal to a vertical sense of ‘lying’ is inseparable from, and simultaneous with, a specular falling, the falling back of the ‘free’ subject to the scene of his founding subordination. This simultaneity and/or reversibility plays a crucial role in the configuration of Company’s abstract temporality. Paradoxically, though, this very abstraction allows Company’s ‘you’ to vehicle a double reality, signalling both the subject’s affirmation and his collapse into language .

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Surviving in Dark Times. Agota Kristof’s Trilogy In Company, then, the encounter with self and past takes place at once in the dark interiority of consciousness6 and in the apparently impersonal, neutral exteriority of grammar. Significantly, in Beckett the pursuit of the Other is either located in the restricted intimacy of a closed space, as in Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), where a man and a woman lie inside a small rotunda (measuring 80 centimetres in diameter and height), or in the wider context of a social architecture such as the cylinder of The Lost Ones (1970), where hundreds of “lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one” (Beckett 2006, 381) and therefore “the being-two is inscribed into the many, into the bizarre multiplicity of human animals” (Badiou 2003, 60). Beckett’s analytical imagination requires an act of delimitation, a “cutting off” of and from reality: as Alain Badiou wrote, “the will to produce the complete inventory of actions and situations” —in the light of Company’s homebound walk one might say actions and reactions— presupposes the existence of a fixed place, far from any empirical reality […]. As though it were necessary, in order to guarantee prose’s definitive grasp of human plurality, that prose establish an eternity of sorts, a separate laboratory where the animals in question are atemporally observed [and which is submitted to laws] which are as strict and contingent as scientific laws. (Badiou 2003, 60-61)

In order to observe them, therefore, Beckett sets his couples into an abstract atemporality—that is, in Company, a double and reversible temporality, which elicits a question: would the logic singled out through Beckettian isolation stand if opened to time, if the couple were exposed to history and fell into its flow, if the novel crossed the threshold of abstraction and stepped into reality—and a violent one at that? If Beckett, as is known, never took this step, Agota Kristof’s Trilogy of the Twins provides us with a telling example of the transformations the logic of the couple undergoes when plunged into the stream of history; more specifically, the Trilogy stages the ways in which a given historical loss is denied—in the sense of the “disavowal” (Verleugnung) of a perceived reality which characterises fetishism according to Freud (Freud 1927)—in order for the characters to overcome the very solitude it brought about. As such, the Trilogy will enable us to move from consciousness to history, from a grammar of persons to the history of two violent lives. 6 Carla Locatelli rightly defined Company as a “fiction of consciouness” (Locatelli 1990, 157).

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A brief outline of the story may be in order. In the first of the three novels, entitled The Notebook, two twins abandoned by their mother in the city of K. tell their struggle for survival during the war, until the moment where they separate and one of them flees the country. In the second novel, The Proof, a third person narrator tells how Lucas, the twin who stayed on, meets Jasmine and her deformed baby Mathias. Lucas kills Jasmine out of jealousy for Mathias, who eventually hangs himself; years later, Klaus, the other twin, arrives in K. looking for his brother; we then discover that the manuscript containing all we have been reading—that is the notebook and Lucas’ history—has been written by Klaus himself during his short stay in town. In the third novel, called The Third Lie, Klaus admits to having taken his brother’s name and tells another version of his life: his name is Lucas, he was abandoned in a hospital as a crippled child, and at the beginning of the war he had already lost his brother; he is now looking for him; however, when they finally meet, the real Klaus pretends not to recognize him. The “we” referring to the narrators in The Notebook turns out to be the fiction of a lonely child. The concluding part of the novel is written by Klaus himself who finally relates the family catastrophe at the origin of their separation: their mother killed their father and seriously wounded Lucas, who was then believed to have died. The novel ends with the announcement that Lucas threw himself under a train, a suicide suggesting to Klaus a suitable “way out” of his history (“Not a bad idea, the train” [Kristof 1997, 478]).

Écarts The final fiction of non-recognition responds to the imperative of preventing the returning brother from stirring up the past and awakening the memory of their primordial traumatic scene. Here, as in Beckett’s reframing of personal history, the fiction of togetherness turns into a fiction of solitude. Before their missed encounter, Klaus says: “At all costs I must fend off Lucas, keep him from reopening that terrible wound [l’effrayante blessure]” (Kristof 1997, 421). “Je dois à tout prix écarter Lucas”: not only is this écart the novel’s central act(ion) but it retrospectively recasts the two previous stories—this is “the third lie” because it repeats two other écarts. What the two previous novels avoided, fended off, are the boy’s unbearable solitude and his traumatic abandonment. Thus, when asked whether he writes “things that are true or things that are made up”, Klaus replies:

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As is clear, then, écart is quite simply the name given to a narrative act. And yet, the question concerning the status of fiction remains unanswered since Klaus never tells us why his story comes so close— definitely too close—to reality. In point of fact, his embellishment may well be a wish or, even worse, a further lie, since it is never really accomplished in the novel. Lucas’s imaginary life is just as traumatic as the real one: if in reality he is abandoned in the hospital, in the fictional version he loses his mother, who is killed by a shell. Similarly, in The Proof Lucas kills his wife and causes his child’s death. And the final “missed encounter” between the twins is certainly no less painful, resulting, moreover, in Klaus’ suicide. It is therefore imperative to ask why the characters escape truth by telling themselves so scarcely consolatory lies. Of course, one may explain this “misfire” according to the logic of symptom formation described by Freud, whereby a turning away from the painful past becomes an equally painful “detour” or turning towards it. There is, however, an additional explanation: much as in Company, in the Trilogy facts and fictions are set apart by a small but crucial difference, namely the “invention of agency”, the conversion of passion into action. In fiction, the mother comes back to get her children, but they refuse to go with her; a shell hits her during her vain attempt to convince them. Equally, Lucas’s paternal love for Mathias leads him to kill Jasmine; it is the crippled boy, the narrator’s alter-ego, who, by killing himself, evades his new father’s love; as the title indicates, in The Proof the fiction transforms the twins’ separation into one of their exercises: the novel closes when Klaus comes back to K. claiming that “the test [la preuve, just as the book’s title] has lasted long enough” (Kristof 1997, 331). And in The Third Lie, by rejecting his brother the twin chooses what destiny has already imposed on him. Through the invention of agency these dreams accomplish a wish—fleeting and minimal though it may be—either of love and company or of quietness and respite (“I describe things not as they happened but the way I wish they had happened”, says Klaus).

The Distinction of Fiction However small, the difference created by the lies is a decisive one inasmuch as it distorts the literality of traumatic repetition and therefore calls into question the foundational assumption of trauma theory from

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Freud to Caruth.7 In Kristof’s Trilogy truth and fiction are not identical twins: trauma implies a fictional, and not only a narrative dimension, one “absolutely faithful to truth”.8 At the same time, though, it urges us to understand how the very concept of fiction is distorted by its violence. Mathias’ deformity is the exemplary figure of the conflict between desire (of company) and reality (the past of the crippled boy the narrator used to be). I would suggest that fiction is the resultant of the two opposite drives of trauma and desire. The past seems to exert on fiction an irresistible attraction, akin to the one leading the children to repeat the violence of the adults. The proverb through which a character utters his sense of being weighted down by the burden of the past has therefore to be read in its gravitational sense: “The apple does not fall far from the tree” (Kristof 1997, 47). In this fictional physics, the offspring of imagination is distorted by the gravity of the past. Yet, for all that, écart is not only the name given to fiction’s inevitable failure, decay and degeneration but also 7

A photographic and anti-literary assumption thus resumed by Roger Luckhurst: “One of the central ways in which contemporary trauma has been conceived is around the symptom of the intrusive or recurrent image […] the visual intrusion recurs because linguistic and memorial machineries completely fail to integrate or process the traumatic image. Perhaps, then, it is in the image that the psychic registration of trauma truly resides” (Luckhurst 2006, 147, italics mine). 8 See Caruth: “Taking this literal return of the past as a model of repetitive behaviour in general, Freud ultimately argues, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that it is traumatic repetition, rather than the meaningful distortions of neurosis, that defines the shape of individual lives” (Caruth 1996, 59). Curiously enough, it is precisely in an interview given to Caruth in 1994 that the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche deconstructs the écart between Freud’s theory of dreams and of trauma by insisting on the crucial role played by the smallest difference in interpretation—a criticism addressed to Freud which would eventually ricochet on Caruth’s own book. The missed encounter between Caruth and Laplanche ‘takes place’ in this passage: “JL: First, he [Freud] says, the dreams of the traumatic neuroses prove that some dreams are not the accomplishment of desire. But he did not try to analyze those dreams. […] There are always some points where the analytic method could be used. And this he forgets completely. […] CC: […] Isn’t there a difference still between traumatic nightmares and other kinds of nightmares? JL: Yes. There’s certainly something that resists interpretation. But we have something similar in symbolic dreams, dreams that have an overtly symbolic content […] You always have to find the small details, […] what changes even in these dreams as well. Freud said the repetitions are the same, but they are not always the same, and that's the difference that makes all the difference.” C. Caruth. 2002. “An Interview with Jean Laplanche.” (1994) In Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory, edited by L. Belau and P. Ramadanovic, 102-126. New York: Other Press.

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to its power to deflect, however slightly, the curve of the twins’ falling history. Of decisive importance here is the fact that, in the Trilogy, the encounter between the forces of the past and the forces of desire is figured through a thoroughly constructed progression from repetition to distortion to fiction. In other words, if, as Carla Locatelli said, in Company “memory is carried out as a verbal drama” (Locatelli 1990, 157) and, more precisely, as a pronominal play, we can say, in a similar vein, that in Kristof’s Trilogy memory is carried out at first as a verbal drama that gradually turns into a novelistic one. To begin with, literal repetition appears under the form of a verbal exercise, one of the many exercises described in The Notebook (in cruelty, begging, deafness and so on): in order to get accustomed to the “injurious speech” they are the victims of, the twins perform a daily “exercise to strengthen the mind” by heavily insulting each other: “One of us says: ‘Turd! Asshole! The other one says: ‘Faggot! Prick!’” (Kristof 1997, 20). Secondly, a completely unfaithful translation provides Lucas with an instructive narrative exercise. Thus, in The Third Lie, he reads to his hospital mates the letters they receive from their parents: Generally I read the exact opposite of what the letters actually said. The results were, for instance: “Our dear child, whatever you do, don’t get well. We’re getting along just fine without you. We don’t miss you at all. We hope that you’ll remain where you are, because the last thing we want is a crippled in the house”. (Kristof 1997, 360-61)

“You are the last thing we want”: one can but recall how in Beckett’s regressive imagination the first person singular “I” had become the “last person”. Not only is the whole Trilogy an exercise in repetition and translation but the novel itself is generated by their very encounter, or once again by their missed encounter: in the frame of the three manuscripts, Klaus’s fictive translations coexist alongside the true chronicle of their past by which Lucas puts an end to the story. Fiction is made to fall within the same literary space as factual truth. One should not be too surprised by Klaus’s fiction of non-recognition: in the end, right up to that moment, Lucas himself has “fended off” the encounter with the past and kept it at bay. But at the same time, without Klaus’ fiction there would be no space for truth—the space physically offered by the manuscript he hands to Lucas for him to complete it. A chiasmus seems therefore to take shape: whereas Klaus cannot utter the past but finds his brother, Lucas manages to say the truth only after rejecting his brother. This paradox, according to

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which writing flows only if the Other is put or kept at a distance and the encounter can take place only on a written page, is what Vincent Kaufmann called “the epistolary misunderstanding”.9 Company and the telling of traumatic past exclude each other; trauma can only happen in the broader frame of writing: only a book—here the Trilogy—is able to contain it.

Ghostliness and Violence We are now in the position to better evaluate the ethical implications of Company’s cutting retort. In this scene we have seen simultaneously at work two movements or cuts: while the voice tells of how a mother severs her tie with her son, the story enacts a retrospective cut reframing the past with the boy alone. This double configuration of the relation between subject and Other is of central relevance, touching as it does upon a key turning point in the recent critical appreciation of Beckett’s work. Beckett criticism was for a long time dominated by an existentialist and humanist approach grounded in the Sartrian assumption that works such as Waiting for Godot staged the originary and inescapable solitude which characterises the human condition. As Andrew Gibson observed (Gibson 1999, 157), it was not until the end of the 1980s that this interpretation was countered by scholars such as Thomas Tresize and Steven Connor.10 According to Tresize, in particular, Beckett questions the ontological conception of subjectivity as “a separation from exteriority” and instead sees intersubjectivity as “a relation not subsequent but rather prior to separation” (Tresize 1990, 27)—a conception which, according to Gibson, “makes Beckett close to Levinas” (Gibson 1999, 157). The ethical reading, however, seems to be a specular reversal—the mirror image—of the existentialist ontology insofar as it consists in the inversion of its temporal order: primary in the latter, solitude becomes, in the former, secondary to the interlocutory scene. And yet, Beckett’s text 9

Kaufmann suggestively showed that writers such as Flaubert, Rilke, Proust, and Kafka used their epistolary as a “pre-text” for their work, writing letters not to bridge the distance with the Other but to create it, thus carving out a space into which their literary writing could emerge. V. Kaufmann. 1990. L’équivoque épistolaire. Paris: Minuit (see in particular ch. 1, ‘Destination distance’, 13-51), published in English under the (unperspicuous) title of Post Scripts: The Writer’s Workshop. Translated by D. Treisman, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP, 1994. 10 See S. Connor. 1988. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text. Oxford: Blackwell.

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seems to resist this opposition precisely by crossing these two generative accounts (of company from solitude and of solitude from company), enacting them both at a time, thus setting up an ethical construct whereby solitude and company are co-present as the two extremes of a non-oriented oscillation. As we have seen, solitude is presented at once as the result of a traumatic rejection and as the originary condition of the subject. Beckett’s regression enacts what in Foucauldian terms we can define as an “archeological” movement, since it does not aim at singling out the point where the subject appears alone—or the subject alone appears—, but rather at seizing the “point of fracture” or “insurgence” where loneliness and company are given together. In the text this point is, of course, the “you”, the pronoun which leaves undecided who is invented in and through it (whether the boy alone or the mother with him). The archeological sense of this indecision becomes visible as soon as we let the terms “invention” and “discovery” merge back into the Latin word inventio, which indicates at once the invention or making of something (not yet there) and the discovery, the unearthing of something (long hidden). Privileging one originary movement over against the other, the ethical readings of Beckett end up in the same aporia as the existentialist interpretations: they cut off the radical ambiguity Beckett’s text struggles to preserve, doing away with the intermittence—the fading of solitude into company and vice versa—that governs it.11 11

As is known, intermittence is a key concept in Beckett’s late prose—think of The Lost Ones and Ill Seen Ill Said, where the flickering of light and its fading in and out are the figures of narrative reversibility. Reading Beckett in the light of Levinas, Andrew Gibson very acutely takes issue with the Levinasian idea that the ethical confrontation comes to disrupt ontology and Being: Levinas’s concept of “breaching” seems to him to “posit the ethical moment […] as cutting across ontology, and thus as secondary to it” (Gibson 1999, 140). Instead, Gibson argues for the originary nature of the ethical moment, claiming that, in Beckett, writing (the equivalent of Levinas’s “Saying”) “constantly” performs an ethical breaching of being (the “Said”), and that “reversibility is there from the start” (Gibson 1999, 142). Curiously, Gibson distinguishes “reversibility” from “intermittence”, reading the latter as a chronologically oriented concept—precisely the one which encapsulates Levinas’s failure, in Otherwise Than Being, to move beyond ontology: “in Levinas’s text, it [reversibility] is surely caught up in a process of intermittence, whereby the text moves away from ontology towards proximity only to move back again” (Gibson 1999, 142). It may be argued that Gibson’s labile distinction between “reversibility” and “intermittence” (as the one between “cutting across” and “breaching”) and his tipping of “intermittence” into a temporal narrative sequence are symptomatic of what seems to be his own uncertainty in setting “reversibility” entirely free from the secondariness of

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The main downside of the ethical turn in Beckett criticism is precisely that scholars have often tended to substitute the unhappiness of existentialist solitude for the happiness connected to the being-two. Alain Badiou’s interpretation is exemplary in this respect: in his writings on Beckett, the French philosopher associates the encounter with the Other with the unbinding of prose, arguing that the exhaustion of movement which characterises Beckett’s writing (its surplace or piétinement) reached its culminating point in Texts For Nothing (1955), but that after the cul-desac represented by the Texts Beckett’s prose began to flow. Now, this happened precisely when the encounter with the Other came to “fracture solipsistic seclusion” (Badiou 2003, 64). In How It Is, for instance, an orderly narrative sequence is made possible by the encounter of the narrator with Pim. Thus, the novel is structured in three successive phases: “before Pim”, “with Pim”, and “after Pim”. As Gibson writes, “Badiou is inclined to see Beckett as more concerned with happiness than ethics” (Gibson 1999, 150). Thus, if Beckett’s texts indisputably configure a direct link between the flow of writing and the encounter with the Other, Badiou tends to assimilate this relationship to love: for him, Beckett’s prose “establishes a double link that makes ‘love’ into the true name of a subject’s encounter of its other or lost one and connects this encounter to the tender fables of the past” (Badiou 2003, 64).12 In Beckett, however, the relationship between the telling of the past and the presence of the Other is rarely felicitous (and when it is love, it is often of a peculiarly unhappy sort indeed). Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), for example, sets up an inverted ratio between seeing and writing, on the one hand, and the demands of the Other on the other: here the eye of a narrator observes the movements of an old woman but does not manage to fix them in words before her disappearance into the dark, so that the description never builds up into narrative consistency. Indeed, as Gibson writes, Ill Seen Ill Said actually struggles not to “say” the Other, not to produce the other as Said, but rather to leave her half-said, to let her be in some dim “breaching”: in fact, Gibson seems to come full circle to the hierarchical order he criticised in Lévinas, proposing what he calls constant secondariness: “In Company, ethical time constantly breaches ontological time” (Gibson 1999, 143, italics mine). The resilience of a one-way genealogy testifies to the difficulty of thinking the paradox of an “ethical archaeology”, in the case of Company, the intermittence of solitude and company Beckett so painstakingly built and held in balance throughout his pronominal play. 12 As if to witness to the bordering of ethics with love in Badiou’s account, this sentence closes the section of his book called “The Others” and opens onto the one entitled “Love”.

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If there is gentleness, then, this is insofar as narrative succession (the flow of writing) is blocked or held back, since saying the Other is conceived as a way of “exposing” her and therefore as a form of violence. Gentleness is the virtue of not quite saying the Other, of not saying her away; it is prose’s capacity of half-saying which preserves the Other as half-person, or “phantom”.13 In other words, the happiness of the relationship between the woman and the descriptive eye rests entirely on the performative “infelicity” (to use J. L. Austin’s word) of the act of writing. That the Other is preserved by narrative’s holding is confirmed a contrario by Hamm’s “soliloquy” in Endgame, his “chronicle [roman]” of the encounter with Clov: if Hamm can say “I’ve got on with it [his story] well” (Beckett 1958, 39), this is because Clov is not mentioned but is elided, cut off, edited out: even if Clov is the “hearer” and co-protagonist of his “family romance”, Hamm insists in designating him by the third person singular “he” (refusing to say “you” or “Clov”). The story “gets on well” only on condition that the Other is depersonalised, de-signated or abstracted.14 Similarly, in Not I (1972), Mouth, a lonely old woman, keeps on attributing her own painful story of parental abandonment to a third person (“What?... who?... no!... she!... SHE!...” [Beckett 1972, 223]). This “vehement refusal to relinquish third person” (Beckett 1972, 215) is a clear example of what Freud meant by Verneinung, the “negation” which, paradoxically, allows a traumatic past to float up to consciousness.15

13

In a remarkable essay on Joseph Conrad, Frank Kermode claimed that the presence of a ghost constitutes a threat to the legibility of a literary text for it compromises “the clearness and effect” that are the preconditions of narrative closure. Thus, for example, in reading Under Western Eyes, critics de-realised the return of Haldin’s ghost explaining it away as a delusion of the protagonist Razumov; in doing so, they “buried” the ghost “in psychology”, an act of misreading aimed at preserving narrative sequence (Kermode 1980). 14 This narrative abstraction is an almost oxymoronic form of sadistic bond, since it is precisely through his fiction of non-recognition that Hamm can hold Clov captive: the latter cannot get out of the dialogue because he is not allowed into the story. 15 Thus, when his patient answers that the female Figure in his dream is not his mother, Freud interprets the answer as meaning that it really is his mother (“then it

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Significantly, the figure of the Auditor listening to Mouth’s “stream of words” (Beckett 1972, 220) is reduced to a “scarcely perceptible” (Beckett 1972, 220) figure in a black djellaba, a bodiless phantom whom Beckett himself came to consider as optional and exonerated the directors from staging. Company is, therefore, just one more case in a long line of pronominal plays where it is not the presence of the Other that makes the words flow, as Badiou tends to think, but his/her “ghosting” or abstraction. In this respect, Klaus’s rejection of Lucas in Kristof’s Trilogy suggests a revealing affinity to Beckett’s text, making it clear that the invention of the Other is inseparable from an act of physical violence or bodily erasure. Company’s episode of the “cutting retort” is even more telling in that, far from implying a gentle company, its balance is based on a double violence, performed as it is by one character and returned by the other. Thus, we would do violence to Beckett’s text were we to miss this violence and its “intermittence”: we would dispel the ghost of the child’s subjectivity if we didn’t see how it is embryonically contained in and emerges within the “you” through the very cut the boy is a victim of; conversely, if we privileged the retrospective hypothesis of an originary solitude (and of the instrumental positing of company) we would dispel the ghost of the mother, still present and resonant in the pronoun.16 Narrating trauma requires an act of mis-recognition, a negative delusion that allows company to proliferate, but only in the imagination. In this regard, Company and the Trilogy shed light on the fundamental role narrative plays in facing traumatic experience. If trauma is missed in the first place, narrative provides the frame where it can finally take place. This is suggestively stated by Cathy Caruth when she writes: “the rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at

is the mother”). The repressed content can only penetrate into consciousness on condition that it is initially negated (Freud 1925) 16 Indeed, Beckett’s “ethical” configuration can be said to define also the unbalanced comparative reading we have offered of Beckett’s and Kristof’s works. The unbalance evident in the last section stems from the difficulty of comparing two authors who not only produced two bodies of work of entirely different dimensions (Kristof’s being restricted to a handful of titles) but, especially, who have reached two totally different levels of critical appreciation. In bringing the weight of Beckett studies to bear upon Kristof’s work, our hope is at least that some key Beckettian issues rub off, or rather shed light, on the Trilogy (our invention of literary company would then be, in Beckett’s terms, “a device perhaps from the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other”).

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resituating it in our understanding, that is, at permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not.” (Caruth 1996, 11) And yet, Beckett and Kristof give this extension an altogether different form. In Company, in the interplay of the two cuts we can locate the origin of the subject. On the contrary, in Kristof’s Trilogy attraction becomes a figure of irreversible degeneration. Furthermore, whereas in the closed space of Beckett’s fiction solitude and company are given as still together, the historical time of Kristof’s Trilogy is marked by the inescapable necessity of belatedness. Finally, these “fictions of togetherness” figure two different ways of exploring the borders of a traumatic past: whereas Company crosses it towards individuation, the Trilogy stretches it to capture imagination.

Works Cited Agamben, G. 2009. “Philosophical Archaeology.” In The Signature of All Things. On Method. Translated by L. D’Isanto and K. Attell, New York: Zone Books. Badiou, A. 2003. “Tireless Desire.” In On Beckett, edited by Alberto Toscano and Nina Power, 37-78. Manchester: Clinamen Press. Beckett, S. 1996. Company. In Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho. New York: Grove Press. —. 1958. Endgame. New York: Grove Press. —. 1972. Not I. In The Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove Press. —. 2006. Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol. IV., Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism. Edited by P. Auster. New York: Grove Press. Butler, J. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge. Caruth, C. 2002. “An Interview with Jean Laplanche.” (1994) In Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory, edited by L. Belau and P. Ramadanovic, 102-126. New York: Other Press. —. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP. —. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP. Cavell, S. 1979. “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame.” In Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP. Felman, S. and Laub, D. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge.

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Freud, S. 1927. “Fetishism.” In The Standard Edition, vol. XXI (19271931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilisation and Its Discontents and Other Works. 152-159. London: Hogarth Press. —. 1925. “Negation,” In The Standard Edition, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works. 233-240. London: Hogarth Press. —. 2001. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II. (1893-1895). Translated and edited by J. Strachey with the collaboration of A. Freud, London: Vintage. Gibson, A. 1999. Postmodernity, Ethics, and the Novel. London: Routledge. Gontarski, S. E. 1996. “The Conjuring Something Out of Nothing: Samuel Beckett’s ‘Closed Space’ Novels.” In Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho. vii-xxvii. New York: Grove Press. Kaufman, V. 1994. Post Scripts: The Writer’s Workshop (1990). Translated by D. Treisman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Kermode, F. 1980. “Secrets and Narrative Sequence.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 83-101. Kristof, A. 1997. Trilogie des jumeaux. Le grand cahier. La preuve. Le troisième mensonge. Translated by Alan Sheridan, David Watson and Marc Romano. [The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie] New York: Grove Press. Locatelli, C. 1990. Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose After the Nobel Prize. Ann Arbor: U of Minnesota P. Luckhurst, R. 2006. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge. Tresize, T. 1990. Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.

TRAUMA OBSCURA REVEALED: REVISITING LOSS IN W. G. SEBALD’S AUSTERLITZ CATALINA BOTEZ

This summit of the abyss, memory. —Blanchot 1993, 317

W. G. Sebald’s “transfictional”1 work Austerlitz2 digs deeply at the roots of traumatic memory, which it explores in all its complex guises: from individual and cultural to architectural, archival, and technological3 memories. Also remarkable is the nuanced engagement with countermemories of various European people and the complex treatment of 1

The term “transfiction” was coined by S. Clingman in The Grammar of Identity and it mainly refers to the overlapping of genres in Sebald’s Austerlitz, to the “mixed modes” of “image and text, but even within the text the combination of history, memoir, fiction, journal, travelogues, catalogue, research - every available form… It is itself a migrant form… a syntactic form, a metonymic form, a navigational form” (Clingman 2009, 187-8). 2 The protagonist’s name, along with the title of the novel, alludes to one of Napoleon’s resounding victories. As Sebald declares in an interview, “Napoleon und alles Napolleonische taucht in fast allen meinen Büchern auf, als historisches Paradigma, das etwas mit der Europa-Idee zu tun hat, die damals erstmals auf branchiale Weise durchexerziert wurde”. The interesting fact is that 130 years later Germany tried to establish their own hegemonic empire using the same methods, beginning with Wilhelm II up until 1939/40/41 when the map of Europe consisted mainly of Germany and its satellites. (Doerry and Hage 2001, 230) This comparative historical approach makes sense particularly in view of the more recent studies on the Holocaust and multidirectional memory, as explained by M. Rothberg in the introductory chapter to his book of the same title (Rothberg 2009, 1-33). B. A. Kaplan’s Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory also clarifies how “expanded ‘postmemory’ articulates the reach of the Holocaust across diverse eras, genres and geographies”, thus paying tribute to M. Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory (Kaplan 2011, 5). 3 i.e. photographs and video-recordings.

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historic events. Essentially, its narrative texture is built upon repressed and occasionally resurfacing memories. In its beauty that is monolithic and fluid at the same time, this work is a narrative testimony to the postmnemonic4 and post-traumatic5 effort of recuperating and comprehending identity in the face of the destructive force of war and genocide. In this essay I enquire into the ways in which (post-)memory and history feature as traumatic loci in Sebald’s text and how they help trace the cause of lost identity. I also investigate the role of traumatic photography and film in the event of failed memory retrieval. I will also show how the photographic medium itself is affected by trauma in the form of repetition compulsion and a constant return to the sites of incomplete memory. Finally, I shall examine the ways in which the limits of the remembrance and representation of Holocaust trauma are probed in a challenging text that resists classification precisely through its structural and stylistic resemblance to the very mechanisms of trauma.6

4 The postmnemonic effort I refer to is the manifestation of what Marianne Hirsch dubs “postmemory”, with reference to second-generation Holocaust survivors; it’s a mediated form of intergenerational trauma and knowledge “not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation”. It is, Hirsch adds, a mass of “overwhelming inherited memories […] that defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension” and thus extend into the present (Hirsch 2008, 107). Postmemory, she avers, “reactivate[s] and reembod[ies] more distant social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression” (Hirsch 2008, 111). 5 Trauma, according to Cathy Caruth, is “a wound inflicted not upon the body, but upon the mind […] experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor. […] so trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in the individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature […] returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 1996, 3-4). 6 Susannah Radstone addresses this issue by reinforcing Shoshana Felman’s interpretation of Adorno’s famous dictum regarding the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, which she calls “the founding equivocation of post-holocaust memory”: “The near annihilation of the entire European Jewry certainly constituted the near-annihilation of Jewish memory. The traumatic impact of the Holocaust has also been linked to the impossibility of both representation and remembrance. Yet […] it [poetry] must write ‘through’ its own impossibility” (Felman 1992, 34). If the entire field of representation was contaminated by this event whose incommensurability precluded adequate representation, then art was the only—albeit apparently impossible—hope (Radstone 2000, 5-6).

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In an article he wrote for The Guardian entitled “The Last Word”, W.G. Sebald declared that the moral backbone of literature is about the whole question of memory […]. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing. (Jaggi 2001)

But what is it about writing traumatic memory that makes it a fictional theme? As Sebald seems to suggest, it is precisely this mixture of lived reality, psychological makeup, affect and imagination that stands at the roots of literature, the mission of which is to process and reduce a friction, as he describes below: It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. Because we have created an environment for us which isn’t what it should be. And we’re out of our depth all the time. We’re living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out…and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs right through our physical and emotional makeup. And probably where these tectonic plates rub against each other is where the sources of pain are. Memory is one of those phenomena. It’s what qualifies us as emotional creatures, psychozootica or whatever one might describe them. And I think there is no way we can escape it. The only thing that you can do, and that most people seem to be able to do very successfully, is to subdue it. (Schwartz 2010, 56)

Loyal to this line of thought, Sebald steers his whole literary career towards negotiating a balance between literature and memory, and in particular the traumatic recollections and re-articulations of genocide, war and destruction. In his last novel symbolically entitled Austerlitz (2001), Sebald focuses on the catastrophic effects of World War Two and the Holocaust on individual and collective memory, which he refers to elsewhere as “the head of the Medusa: you carry it with you in a sack, but if you looked at it you’d be petrified” (Jaggi 2001). Austerlitz relates the story of a child survivor of the Holocaust who does exactly that: he shuns the stare of the Medusa until forced by circumstances to explore and accommodate an unlived experience he has enormous trouble to appropriate. It is the story of a deeply traumatised self trapped between repressed or absent personal memories, on the one hand, and an immanent collective memory, on the other.7 7

Geoffrey H. Hartman warns against the perils of mistaking fiction for history and underscores the role of the historian and literary critic in the learning process: “The

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Sebald found inspiration to write this novel in a documentary called Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, broadcast on Channel 4 in Britain in 2000, which focuses on Susie Bechhofer’s middleage recollections of her trip to Wales during WWII. Like many other Jewish children evacuated from Austria, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia, she herself had boarded a train heading for Britain, leaving behind a family, whom she would never be reunited with. With the mutual agreement of the German and British governments, 10,000 children were thus saved between November 1938 and September 1939 (Bigsby 2006, 69). Sebald approached Susie’s real life story at an angle, though, creating Jacques Austerlitz as a character whose life story only tangentially reflects on the original. Back in 1939, at the age of 4, Austerlitz parted with his mother in Prague, boarding a train that would take him across Germany to Belgium and Holland, then by ship across the English Channel to Wales in Britain. There, he was adopted by a dour Welsh couple of fundamentalist Calvinist faith, leading a strict life dominated by silence and closure,8 both literal and figurative, in a little country town in Bala. His past got completely erased when they took his backpack away—the only link to his previous life—, then changed his name to Dafydd Elias and raised him in complete oblivion of his roots and the historical circumstances of his flight to Britain. As Sebald later declared in a conversation with Christopher Bigsby, “there you have a situation of someone who has been deprived, by active intervention or default, of any knowledge of his own origins and who later resolves not to investigate his own case” (Bigsby 2001, 162-3). As Austerlitz himself confesses to the narrator in the novel, his knowledge of European history ends with the 19th century. As for his self-knowledge, he adds: Since my childhood and youth […] I have never known who I really was. From where I stand now, of course, I can see that my name alone, and the collective memory uses and produces fictions, yet it must learn from art not to confuse fiction and history, and from history not to succumb to sentimental or mystical ideas about a community’s ‘world-historical’ destiny” (Hartman 1994, 16). For a theoretical background on collective memory, see M. Halbwachs 1980. Collective Memory. Translated by M. Douglas. New York: Harper & Row, 22-44. 8 Austerlitz recalls the first few days after being shipped to Wales as an experience of being “in some kind of captivity. Only recently have I recalled how oppressed I felt, in all the time I spent with the Eliases, by the fact that they never opened a window […] I remember how one of the two windows of my bedroom was walled up on the inside. And just as cold reigned in the house in Bala, so did silence” (Sebald 2002, 62-3).

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It is only late in his life that Jacques Austerlitz, now an architectural historian at the end of his career, feels prompted to deal with the crisis of lost identity and to revisit a suppressed past that has plagued him for many years. His travels take him around Europe for a more or less purposeful observation of archeological ruins and architectural wonders (like the railway stations of Antwerp and Luzern, the fortifications of Breendonk and Willebroek, the streets of London, the Palace of Justice in Brussels etc.), and these peregrinations occasion the many chance encounters and conversations with “the narrator” who tells the protagonist’s story. It is precisely the story of an archeological site—i.e., the fortress of Breendonk in Belgium—that triggers in Austerlitz the possibility of recollection, through its association with both world wars and with the torture of Jean Améry and Novelli by the Nazis. It is, as Sebald himself elucidates, a case of localised memory or of memory embedded, situated or invested in places:9 “Places seem to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Jaggi 2001). Similarly, the sight of the four hundred skeletons discovered after excavations during demolition work at Broad Street Station in London in 1984 presents Austerlitz with the possibility of recovering or “disinterring” (Bigsby 2001, 73) the actual remnants of his very own past: “I felt at this time as if the dead were returning from exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to and fro-ing” (Sebald 2002, 188). Thus, Austerlitz’s premonition correlates the missing memory to the absence or death of his family.

9

B. Prager stresses the importance of locatedness for traumatic memory and warns against a transhistoric outlook: “not everyone, including Jews, Germans, children and survivors, and Hollywood directors, is likely to commemorate and remember the Holocaust with one international and transhistoric voice. Rather than pretend that such differences do not exist, the standards used to evaluate the efficacy of these responsesstandards that facilitate dialogue and critical analysis—benefit from attending to national and historical contexts” (Prager 2005, 102).

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Austerlitz also observes how the collective memory of trauma is embedded in physical space, evident in the connection between grand architectural structures and colonialism, and later fascism, as manifestations of power versus powerlessness and slavery across history. This is particularly obvious in the construction of the Antwerp train station in Belgium, where Austerlitz meets the narrator, but also in the Nazi conception of architecture. The Nazi megalomaniac fantasies were put into practice by Speer, the court architect, at Sonthofen Ordensburg, a former college for the Nazi elite. It is, Sebald says, the architecture of power-crazed minds. It was prefigured by the bombast of the 19th-century bourgeois style […] These vast edifices depended on slave labour. The SS ran quarries next to concentration camps. It’s not an accidental link. (Jaggi 2001)

In spite of his peripatetic meditations on history and cultural memory, Jacques Austerlitz activates fierce mechanisms of denial and refines his defensive responses to remembrance, in order to preserve what J. J. Long calls “an internal mnemic void” (Long 2007, 152): Inconceivable as it seems to me today, I knew nothing about the conquest of Europe by the Germans and the slave state they set up, and nothing about the persecution I had escaped […] I did not read newspapers because I feared unwelcome revelations. (Sebald 2002, 197-8)

This mnemonic void functions both as a mechanism of self-protection and an incentive to action towards memory-recovery. In order to achieve this abstraction from reality, Jacques deploys his scholarly skills to accumulate knowledge and build “a substitute or compensatory memory” (Sebald 2002, 198), which is a mere prosthesis10 or complementary memory to make up for the latent, crippled childhood recollections. In fact, the archives in Britain, Paris or Prague, which he visits with the intention to fill in the gaps of his existence, are nothing but another form of “substitute memory”, because they make up, I argue, a 10

Postmemory is essentially a form of intergenerational prosthetic subjectivity: “Prosthetic memories thus become part of one’s personal archive of experience, informing one’s subjectivity as well as one’s relationship to the present and future tenses. […] these memories are not ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’ and yet they organize and energize the bodies and subjectivities that take them on” (Landsberg 2004, 26). In Austerlitz’s case, however, this substitute memory doesn’t have exclusively beneficent effects. See also C. Lury’s chapter on “Identity and Prosthetic Culture” (Lury 1998, 1-7).

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substitute for his present, as well. Thus, the archive as a form of infinite regression “becomes a self-generating, self-referential system that entails a perpetual deferral of the moment of completion” (Long 2007, 154). That is to say, the archival data Austerlitz consults are often incomplete and cannot, therefore, clarify the instances of his personal life. Yet, the temporal structure of the archive facilitates the elision of all that intervenes between the recorded past and the projected future towards which the archivist is perpetually impelled. In Austerlitz’s case, the elision includes the recent past and present of his life. (Lury 1998, 1-7)

Moreover, as R. Crownshaw contends on the margins of Derrida’s meditation on le mal d’archive (archive fever), its internal condition is built on a contradiction: it amasses information while at the same time consuming and therefore destroying memory (Crownshaw 2004, 219-220). All the above shows the controversial nature of the archive, which functions both as a container and preserver of memory and as an agent of forgetting. In this vein, Aleida Assmann suggests, and I concur, that memory, including cultural memory [the archive], is always permeated and shot through with forgetting. […] The canon stands for the active working memory of a society that defines and supports the cultural identity of a group. […] The function of the archive, the reference memory of a society […] creates a meta-memory, a second-order memory that preserves what has been forgotten. (A. Assmann 2008, 105-6)

This explains why Jacques feels baffled by with regard to his identity: unable to retrace his own memories, he is also incapable of relating to the archival data by feiling to establish a meaningful, enduring connection with them. Theory, on the one hand, shows that trauma severely impairs both “embodied communicative memory and institutionalized cultural/archival memory”11 (A. and J. Assmann 2008, 97-109; 109-118). Austerlitz, on the other hand, reveals that trauma equally impairs the functionality of both personal and collective memory, since the Nazis’ 11

In a book called Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (1997), Jan Assmann discriminated between “communicative”, biographical or factual memory on the one hand, and cultural, institutional or archival memory on the other. In 2006, Aleida Assmann elaborates on this twofold distinction by distinguishing four memory compartments: on the one hand, individual and family/group memory correspond to Jan Assmann’s “communicative” memory; on the other hand, national/political memory and cultural/archival memory are classified under J. Assmann’s second category of “cultural” memory (as explained in Hirsch 2008, 110).

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erasure of records upsets archival memory, as well: “Under the Nazis, cultural archives were destroyed, records burned, possessions lost, histories suppressed and eradicated” (Hirsch 2008, 111). Consequently, the reliability of archival information is questionable, because it might, in some cases, be undermined by censorship and an abusive process of selection. Still, just like the ruins and disintegrated structures Austerlitz observes and photographs all around Europe (like the fortifications of Willebroek in Lithuania or Breendonk in Belgium), his own defensive walls eventually collapse, because ruins are inherently lieux de mémoire. The effects of this “surrender” are no less catastrophic at the human level: this censorship of the mind […] led to the almost paralysis of my linguistic faculties, the destruction of all my notes and sketches, my endless nocturnal peregrinations through London, and the hallucinations which plagued me with increasing frequency up to the point of my nervous breakdown in the summer of 1992. (Sebald 2002, 198)

Such self-defensive mechanisms against memory, strangely similar to the Nazi attempts to eradicate memory, are synonymous with a state of aggression against language as substitute of memory itself, which results in a situation Gabrielle Schwab compares to “a form of death in life”: Thus quarantined from the world, he remains immune to traumatic impingements and mnemonic intrusions, a state that ultimately translates into immunity to being. (Schwab, 2010, 50)

However, I would add, the paradox of living death is all the more traumatic, as it triggers a deeper tension in Austerlitz, i.e. the anxiety of non-identity, and prompts him to take self-restorative action. It is at an antiquarian bookseller’s (not an insignificant location) that he gets the first ever glimpse of the memories that he has been suppressing for years. His memories begin to resurface when he overhears a radio programme in which two ladies recall the story of their arrival in England as children on a special transport in 1939: They mentioned a number of cities—Vienna, Munich, Danzig, Bratislava, Berlin—but only when one of the couple said that her own transport, after two days travelling through the German Reich and the Netherlands […] had finally left the Hook of Holland on the ferry Prague to cross the North Sea to Harwich, only then did I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of history were part of my own life, as well. (Sebald 2002, 200)

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This first impulse of adherence to a group memory has a tremendous impact on Austerlitz, as the momentous discovery motivates him to retrace the train journey back to his native Prague from London (via Germany), and thus attempt to undo the partly self-inflicted psychological damage. The idea of the train as a symbol intrinsic to Holocaust memory is pointed out by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved: at the beginning of the memory sequence, stands the train […] There is not a diary or story, among our many such accounts, in which the train does not appear. (Levi 1988, 85)

The map of his estrangement as a child refugee on a Kindertransport during WWII is now reconstructed step by step, with a double anticlimax in Prague and Paris, two cityscapes still imbued with trauma, where he tracks down elements of his parents’ incomplete stories of deportation and death at the Nazis’ hands. In his attempt to reconstruct personal memory in Prague, Austerlitz comes across a photo of himself dressed as a Rose Queen page at the age of four. While photography is usually regarded as a technical aid for memory, in Jacques’s case it signals the limitations of traumatic memory, as he is unable to identify with the boy in the image and decipher its encrypted meaning.12 Thus, the photo remains, “despite detailed scrutiny and extensive textual commentary, fragmentary, decontextualised and opaque” (Duttlinger 2006, 157). The act of analysing the photo and retrieving a latent memory is a psychological process which Freud dubbed Durcharbeiten or “working through” of trauma through the recuperation of repressed memory. Yet, like memory, photographs themselves are unreliable, precarious media: In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long. (Sebald 2002, 109)

As Duttlinger suggests,

12

D. Blackler shows how photography in Sebald’s fiction has an alienating effect not only on the protagonist faced with an irretrievable past, but also on the reader, “because the photographs reflect our otherness as readers in a darkly unrevealing way, as the verbal text does not to the same degree” (Blackler 2007, 176-7).

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photography is thus figured as a model not for the permanence of memory but for the phenomenon of forgetting. Interestingly, all three processes— photography, recollection and forgetting—take place in the dark […] and therefore in the liminal sphere between dreaming and waking, consciousness and the unconscious. (Duttlinger, 2006, 158)

Freud, in fact, had already signalled the similarity between photographic development and the mechanism of memory and trauma, particularly with regard to disturbing childhood events that block out memories due to the insufficient receptivity of the psychic apparatus.13 This Freudian explanation fits Austerlitz’ case, since Prague—the place where this photo was taken—functions as a locus of trauma for Jacques. According to S. Pane, Austerlitz’s purpose, when faced with the fouryear-old page boy in the photograph, is “Barthesian”, that is, he wants to ratify the past, not to restore it. Once unable to attest to the existence of that past, Jacques experiences what Barthes calls punctum in Camera Lucida, i.e. the wounding or piercing effect of a photo, translated as the inability to name the source of grief.14 Which goes to show that the photographic medium is traumatic in itself, i.e. that trauma can and does reside in photographs. The repetition compulsion inherent in trauma is evidenced in the fact that Austerlitz keeps taking photos throughout his life, animated by the hope to order the narrative of his existence through the photographed material. Yet, his efforts are constantly frustrated, an indication of the fact that the photographic medium can furnish no evidence and bridge no gaps. At best, it can function as replacement memory for Jacques, one that hardly alludes to the atrocities of the past. I propose, however, an understanding of this instance of dissimilation (young Jacquot in the photo versus the mature Austerlitz returned to Prague) through the term “heteropathic recollection”. In a chapter called “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs and Public Fantasy”, Marianne Hirsch alludes to the term when discussing the case of contemporary second-generation survivors glimpsing photos of child victims of the Holocaust, and thereby experiencing identification with them through what she calls a “triangular visual encounter”: The adult […] encounters the child (the other child and his/her own child self) both as a child, through identification, and from the protective vantage point of the adult-looking subject. (Hirsch 1999, 15)

13

In Introductory Lectures, Moses and Monotheism, and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 14 As discussed in Pane 2005, 47-8.

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Hirsch goes on to explain that in the particular case of postmemory and “heteropathic recollection” where the subject is split not just between past and present, adult and child, but also between self and other, the layers of recollection and the subjective topography are even more complicated [because] the adult subject of postmemory encounters the image of the child victim as child witness, and thus the split subjectivity characterizing the structure of memory is triangulated. (Pane 2005, 47-8)

This triangle is inherent to postmnemonic alterity and it is defined as cultural and intergenerational. The fact that the adult Austerlitz does not recognise himself in the pre-war photo of the costumed boy steers the interpretation towards a case of “heteropathic recollection”, because identification between Austerlitz’s own child self and the child in the photo does not occur at any stage. The dramatic quality of this photo featuring Austerlitz dressed in a role-performing ball costume is cancelled by the sheer frozenness and lack of dynamism of the photographic medium, which in this case translates as the paralysing force of life-long trauma. The lifeless image and its inability to trigger memory, however, induce a sense of performative trauma by “staging” and encapsulating the uncanny nature of deep, irretrievable memories.15 Following in his mother’s footsteps, Austerlitz sets foot in Terezín, the former Nazi concentration camp known as “a limbo en route to annihilation where people had been held, living out a parody of normal life” (Bigsby 2001, 76). In the ghetto museum in Terezín, he is faced with solid proof of the Nazi corruption of memory while watching a propaganda documentary commissioned by the Nazis staging a Verschönerungsaktion, meant to deceive a visiting Red Cross team.16 The video is meant to show the presumably humane side of Teresienstadt, yet the falsity of the attempt, along with the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust, are revealed to Austerlitz when he rewinds the tape and plays it backwards: “Strangest of all, however, said Austerlitz, was the transformation of sounds in this slow-motion version” (Sebald 2002, 348), where the polka from some Austrian operetta and the can-can from La Vie parisienne and the scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream “moved in a kind of subterranean world, through the most 15

See Maya Barzilai’s discussion of Langer’s concept of “deep memory” as interlinked with common memory in individual testimonies (Barzilai 2006, 215216). 16 The film is called Der Führer schenkt die Juden eine Stadt.

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nightmarish depths […] to which no human voice has ever descended” (Sebald 2002, 349). Rewinding the tape, Austerlitz identifies his mother Agáta, who seems to him “both strange and familiar” (Sebald 2002, 351), and later on recovers a photo of hers from the Prague theatrical archives in the Celetna. This is as close as Austerlitz comes to official information on his dead mother, which by no means makes up for his absent memory of her. Paradoxically, “the film made by the Nazis uses the same strategies of staging, masquerade and theatricality that underpin the protagonist’s attempts to reactivate his memory of the past” (Duttlinger 2006, 166), which reinforces the point I made earlier about the uncanny similarities between Jacques’s internal psychic strategies of blocking memory and the political mnemonic strategies of the Nazis. Critic Russell J.A. Kilbourn compares Jacques’s uncanny journey of self-discovery to an intentionally ironic and recontextualised modern Odyssey, a kind of underworld excursion: The self’s recuperation of lost memory-content allegorises his reemergence into the land of the living; the state of “un-remembering” or mnemonic divestment is shown to be emblematic of the self’s sojourn through a living death. (Kilbourn 2006, 152)

Inflected by trauma, though, this journey into the underworld of memory is similar to a further deconstruction of it, which defeats the purpose of memory recuperation. From Prague, Austerlitz travels to Paris, aware of the fact that “he did not belong in this city, either, or indeed anywhere else in the world”, (Sebald 2002, 354) and convinced that “we also have appointments in the past […] and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time” (Sebald, 2002, 360). Like all trauma fiction, Sebald’s also dwells on the dissolution of time, and the proximity of or indistinguishable limit between the living and the dead, past and present: “The border between life and death is less impermeable than we commonly think” (Sebald 2002, 395). In fact, the very boundaries of time are deleted and replaced with those between comprehension and incomprehension: “there was no transition, only this dividing line, with ordinary life on one side and its unimaginable opposite on the other” (Sebald 2002, 414). Jacques’s physical and imaginary peregrinations in search of personal memory exude a sense of psychological restlessness, while at the same time set the narrative in motion. Sebald’s stream-of-consciousness prose is itself a journey at the textual level: long sentences and paragraphs with a

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melancholy rhythm reminiscent of late 19th-century German literature set the pace for the winding, yet inconclusive, path to self-discovery. His narrative style is best described by Peter Brooks’s concept of “narrative desire”: “narrative both tells of a desire—typically present in some story of desire—and makes use of desire as a dynamic of signification” (Brooks 2002, 37). That is to say, through the narrative and photographic media employed in his prose, Sebald constantly frustrates and stimulates the desire for knowledge and order. Unsatisfied desire becomes the stimulus to narrate, to travel, to photograph and look for hints related to his past experience. After several fainting fits and a “temporary, but complete loss of memory, a condition described in psychiatric books […] as hysterical epilepsy” (Sebald 2002, 374), Austerlitz reaches Paris, Gare d’Austerlitz and the National Library, both settings bringing him closer to an awareness of his father’s fate. As the narrator of the story recalls, when I met Austerlitz […] on the boulevard Auguste Blanqui, […] he told me that the previous day he had heard, from one of the staff at the records centre in the rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, that Maximilian Aychenwald [his father] had been interned during the latter part of 1942 in the camps at Gurs, a place in the Pyrenean foothills which he, Austerlitz, must now seek out. (Sebald 2002, 404)

But Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris is the uncanny place where memory and premonition, past and present, father and son, meet in an imaginary encounter of sorts. Captured by the Nazis in Paris, his father would have embarked here on his journey into the unknown: I imagined, said Austerlitz, that I saw him leaning out the window of his compartment as the train left. […] That station […] has always seemed to me the most mysterious of all the railway terminals in Paris. I spent many hours in it during my student days, and even wrote a memorandum on its layout and history […] And I also remember that I felt an uneasiness induced by the hall behind this façade […] where, on a platform roughly assembled out of beams and boards, there stood a scaffolding reminiscent of a gallows with all kinds of rusty iron hooks […] perhaps because of the plucked pigeon feathers lying all over the floor boards, an impression forced itself upon me of being on the scene of an expiated crime. (Sebald 2002, 405-7)

However, Gare d’Austerlitz is not the only place where the layers of time and history are superimposed. The fortress of Breendonk’s transformation from a colossal architectural structure of defence into a Nazi prison camp and later a museum of the Belgian resistance provides

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evidence of the multiple, and often contradictory, counter-memories embedded in ruins. Similarly, the now dysfunctional Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris served once as a massive warehouse for the expropriated possessions of Parisian Jews. These sites of memory show how “the [traumatic] past intrudes upon the present” and can therefore never “be covered up indefinitely” (Bauer 2006, 250). As Francois Mauriac recalls in the “Foreword” to Elie Wiesel’s Night, Gare d’Austerlitz was also a transition point for the Kindertransporte to Britain. The indelible memory of this sorrowful location marks for Mauriac a turning point: nothing I had seen during those sombre years had left so deep a mark upon me as those trainloads of Jewish children standing at Austerlitz station. […] I believe that on that day I touched for the first time upon the mystery of iniquity whose revelation was to mark the end of an era and the beginning of another. (Wiesel 1990, 7-8)

For Jacques Austerlitz, however, the Parisian train-station as a spot in history and time is neither a terminus, nor a departure point, but a transitional site of continuous, unresolved trauma. His story, steeped in the myriad layers of other stories of dislocation and disruption in wartime Europe, cannot reach definite closure and remains subject to incompleteness, premonition and supposition. Lacking conclusive evidence and rational cohesiveness, the archeology of his personal story is “not a narrative, but an instantaneous accumulation of debris…building ever higher” (Bigsby 2006, 78), a mere collection of fragmented data that undermine his project of reconciliation with his past. With both parents lost a second time and he himself wandering in search of further traces of their (non)existence, Austerlitz remains a nomadic hybrid of cultures and languages, a tragically liminal figure or postmnemonic alterity, whose failed attempts to break the boundaries of memory and trauma epitomise the struggle of man confronted with the barbaric violence of history. As for the way Sebald negotiates the tensions between fiction writing and remembrance, between trauma and post-memory, it is no doubt a question of artistic mediation and reconciliation of the forces of remembering and forgetting in the presence of severe post-traumatic stress disorder and memory repression. Art in both its performative and postmnemonic aspects (like writing, photographic and cinematic representation) functions as preserver and modifier of (post-)memory, but is essentially a problematic medium as far as representing trauma goes: fiction does not help retrieve suppressed memories, replace lived experience or heal memories of the offence. What it can do, however, is

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render the depth and complexity of this experience, of the attempt to bring back memories and recreate a sense of identity. Sebald’s fiction is thus a profound, alluring performance of post-memory and all its wrenching force.

Works Cited Assmann, A. 2008. “Canon and Archive.” In Cultural Memories Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by A. Erll and A. Nünning, 97-107. Berlin, New York: Water de Gruyter. Assmann, J. 2008. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Cultural Memories Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by A. Erll and A. Nünning, 109-118. Berlin, New York: Water de Gruyter. Barzilai, A. 2006. “On Exposure: Photography and Uncanny Memory in W.G Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten and Austerlitz.” In W. G. Sebald. History—Memory—Trauma, edited by S. Denham and M. McCulloh, 205-219. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bauer, K. 2006. “The Dystopian Entwinement of Histories and Identities in W.G Sebald’s Austerlitz.” In W. G. Sebald. History—Memory— Trauma, edited by S. Denham and M. McCulloh, 233-250. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bigsby, C. 2006. “W. G. Sebald: An Act of Restitution.” In Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust. The Chain of Memory. 25-115. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP. —. 2001. Writers in Conversation with Christopher Bigsby. Vol. II. Norwich: Pen & Inc. Press. Blackler, D. 2007. Reading W. G. Sebald. Adventure and Disobedience. Rochester. New York: Camden House. Blanchot, M. 1995. The Writing of the Disaster/L’Ecriture du désastre. Translated by A. Smock. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P. Brooks, P. 2002. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP. Clingman, S. 2009. “Transfiction: W. G. Sebald.” In The Grammar of Identity. 167-205. Oxford: Oxford UP. Creet. J. 2003. “Hypermnesia and the Genealogical Archive.” In Travelling Concepts III. Memory. Narrative. Image, edited by N. Pedri, 59-73. Amsterdam: ASCA Press.

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Crownshaw, R. 2004. “Reconsidering Post-Memory: Photography, the Archive, and Post-Holocaust Memory in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature and Ideas 37: 215-236. Doerry, M. and V. Hage, 2001. “Ich furchte das Melodramatische.” Der Spiegel, November: 228-234. Duttlinger, C. 2006. “Traumatic Photographs. Remembrance and the Technical Media in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” In W.G Sebald—A Critical Companion, edited by J.J. Long and A. Whitehead, 155-175. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Felman, S. and Laub, D. 1992. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge. Halbwachs, M. 1980. The Collective Memory. Translated by M. Douglas. New York, Canada: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. Hartman, G. H. 1994. “Introduction: Darkness Visible.” In Holocaust Remembrance. The Shapes of Memory, edited by G. H. Hartman, 1-22. Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell. Hirsch, M. 1999. “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy.” In Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by M. Bal, J. Crewe, and L. Spitzer, 3-24. Hanover and London: University Press of New England (Dartmouth College). —. 2008. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today: International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication 29 (1): 103-128. Jaggi, M. 2001. “Recovered Memories.” The Guardian, September 22. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/22/artsandhumanities.highe reducation?INTCMP=SRCH. —. 2001. “The Last Word.” The Guardian, December 21. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/dec/21/artsandhumanities.h ighereducation?INTCMP=SRCH. Kaplan, B. A. 2011. Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory. New York, London: Routledge. Kilbourn, R. J. 2006. “Architecture and Cinema: The Representation of Memory in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” In W.G Sebald—A Critical Companion, edited by J. J. Long and A. Whitehead, 140-155. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Landsberg, A. 2004. Prosthetic Memory. The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia UP. Levi, P. 1988. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Penguin.

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Long, J. J. 2007. “The Archival Subject.” In W. G. Sebald. 149-168. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Lury, C. 1998. Prosthetic Culture. Photography, Memory and Identity. London, New York: Routledge. Pane, S. 2005. “Trauma Obscura: Photographic Media in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature and Ideas 38: 37-54. Prager, B, 2005. “The Good German as Narrator: On W. G. Sebald and the Risks of Holocaust Writing.” New German Critique, Volume on “Memory and the Holocaust” 96: 75-102. Radstone, S. 2000. “Working with Memory: An Introduction.” In Memory and Methodology, edited by S. Radstone, 1-25. Oxford, New York: Berg. Rothberg, M. 2009. “Introduction: Theorizing Multidirectional Memory in a Transnational Age.” In: Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, edited by M. Rothberg, 1-33. Stanford, California: Stanford UP. Sebald, W. G. 2002. Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. London, New York: Penguin. Schwab, G. 2010. Haunting Legacies. Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia UP. Schwartz, L. S., ed. 2010. The Emergence of Memory. Conversations with W. G. Sebald. New York, London, Melbourne, Toronto: Seven Stories Press. Wiesel, E. 1990. The Night Trilogy. Vol. 1. Night. New York: Hill and Wang.

THE BODY AND COMMUNITY IN FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES’ CANDY SPILLS OR TOWARDS A POSITIVE METAPHOR OF ILLNESS ELIZABETH MAYNARD

Felix Gonzalez-Torres belonged to a generation of people whose life spans were counted not necessarily in years, but in months, weeks, and days. During the 1980s and early 1990s in the United States, AIDS reached a level of crisis akin to the devastating plagues of the Middle Ages. It was first diagnosed among a community already stigmatised, male homosexuals, but what caused it and how it was transmitted remained unknown, even as the cumulative loss of life reached staggering levels. And like the plague, the disease was accompanied by fear, persecution, and the pressing desire to understand such illness as an affliction of the Other.1 As with so many misunderstood illnesses, AIDS was accompanied by a fiery moralising discourse—though in this case such preaching took place on both ends of the political spectrum. While the Religious Right deemed AIDS divine punishment for a perverse and immoral society, activist artist collectives Gran Fury and ACT UP waged poster campaigns with aggressively didactic slogans like “Women Don’t Get AIDS, They Just Die From It” and “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do—Corporate Greed, Government Inaction, and Public Indifference Make AIDS a Political Crisis”.2 The patent urgency of such 1

Mikhaël Elbaz and Ruth Murbach establish AIDS and the vilification of people with AIDS as part of a long history of epidemics and persecution in “Fear of the Other, Condemned and Damned: AIDS, Epidemics and Exclusions”. The text includes a chart that compares instances of epidemics through three categories: social representations—the evil; the signed body; and social responses (Elbaz and Murbach 1992, 7). 2 Gran Fury also produced “Women Don’t Get AIDS…” in Spanish, as is seen on a bus stop shelter in Los Angeles. This speaks to the educative mission of Gran Fury (Deitcher 1999, 100).

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campaigns is moving, but their tactics have been interpreted as confrontationally divisive. Gonzalez-Torres produced a number of artworks referencing the epidemic, but perhaps best known are the candy spills. They started materialising in the early 1990s as a response to his experience with AIDS, witnessing both the loss of his partner as well as the damaging effects on his community, both physically and socially.3 Though the spills can be understood as protests against the lack of government action in either AIDS-prevention education, stymieing the spread of the illness, or supporting those diagnosed as HIV-positive, the polemic stances of Gran Fury and ACT UP are not obvious in these artworks. Rather, the spills accomplish their protests through poignant metaphors for mortality, loss, death, and the joy of living. The democratic approach of the candy spills creates a communal space of interaction between spectator and work, and in doing so imparts an experience of loss in order to articulate the trauma of the illness afflicting both the individual and social body, and to try to tear down contemporary assumptions about AIDS and the people who have it. The destructive impact of the AIDS epidemic led substantial factions of the art community to insist on the paramount importance of artworks that explicitly responded to the crisis.4 Included in this activist demand was a call for representations of People with AIDS (PWAs). While a diagnosis alone could be a devastating event, even more traumatic would have been the lack of access to adequate information, care, and support. Being admitted into the community of the ill meant that the individual now belonged to a group of people actively marginalised politically and socially. The goal of increased representation of PWAs was to give a “face to AIDS”, making the illness visible and therefore more difficult to ignore. 3

It must be noted that while reading the candy spills as referencing the AIDS epidemic is a common interpretation, and while my agenda is to articulate the compelling power of the spills in attempting to understand, protest against the conditions of, and even cope with the trauma of the epidemic, it is certainly not the only way to read these works. The artist welcomed different interpretations of his work, and while this particular set of sociopolitical conditions is crucial to my own arguments, they should not be construed as the parameters by which the candy spills should be always read; such a tactic would only serve to limit further interpretations of the work, which would be in direct contradiction with the artist’s intent and generosity. 4 Gran Fury’s and ACT UP’s contributions might be representative of the kind of response that functions as HIV-prevention education materials, however, their didacticism does not allow for the democratic process of learning that Jacques Rancière argues for in The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The Emancipated Spectator.

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Douglas Crimp discusses the complexities of representing PWAs in his chapter, “Portraits of People with AIDS”, citing Rosalind Solomon’s exhibition of photographs in 1988, entitled “Portraits in the Time of AIDS”. In the introductory notes to her exhibition she exclaims, “the thing that became very compelling was knowing the people” (qtd. in Crimp 2002, 93). Of course, this experience is not available to the viewer, who only gets a general demographic of those infected with virus: over 90% of those in Solomon’s photographs are men; the majority are pictured alone; none are in a work environment; more than half are pictured with the visible signs of AIDS (specifically Karposi’s sarcoma skin lesions); none are identified as individuals (Crimp 2002, 93).5 While visibility is crucial in building AIDS awareness, part of the problem with these portraits is that, in Crimp’s words, “the best they can do is elicit pity, and pity is not solidarity” (Crimp 2002, 100). Such portraits were critically acclaimed for their power to reveal the pain (both physical and social) of the illness, but they nonetheless generate and propagate an image of the Othered sick body. In “Birth of the Clinic” Michel Foucault argues that the nineteenthcentury clinic attempted to organise scientific practice and theory around the medical gaze (Foucault 2003, 108). This gaze discerned the symptoms and signs of illness against the “background of an essential identity”, that is, the healthy body. This distinction between the normative healthy body and the correlative deviant sick body bleeds beyond the medical field into cultural understandings of illness, which is a significant part of the arguments of Susan Sontag’s books Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. In the latter text, Sontag revisits her initial thoughts on the compounded suffering of cancer patients caused by the stigma of illness, arguing that AIDS and its metaphors have an even greater capacity for alienation as it is an illness not only of shame but also of guilt. AIDS institutes a kind of Othering of which cancer is incapable, because the perceived behaviour that results in AIDS is moralistically linked with indulgence and deviancy—illegal drugs, sexual excess, and perversity. The infected becomes representative of a risk group, such as homosexual men, and is defined by an identity that not only isolates him from the larger community but also makes him increasingly vulnerable to

5

Crimp also discusses Nicholas Nixon’s photographs at length, which are portraits of ravaged, emaciated, weakened bodies, always pictured alone. Nixon almost mercenarily describes his subjects as “perhaps because stripped of so many of their hopes, less masked than others, more open to collaboration” (qtd. in Crimp 2002, 86).

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harassment and persecution.6 This alienation and isolation is, of course, linked to the promulgation of misinformation—The New York Times periodically published “updates” assuring their reader that the danger of heterosexual transmission was extremely low—and bigotry of public figures such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanan, and most dangerously, politicians like Jesse Helms.7 Gonzalez-Torres’s candy spills articulate a community that resists the Othering that takes place in contemporary society at large as well as in the apparently activist portraits by Solomon. The candy spills come in different forms: different candies, different colour cellophane wrapping, different installations, and different ideal weights. The premise that unites them is the participation of the spectator, who is welcome to take pieces of candy. This potentially results in the eventual elimination of the work’s physical form, at which point the gallery or museum is replenishes the pile.8 Gonzalez-Torres began installing the spills in 1990, producing them with even more frequency in 1991, when facing the loss of his partner, Ross Laycock, from AIDS-related complications. Indeed, Gonzalez-Torres was himself one of a generation of artists who were making art closely identified with the epidemic and who then died from complications of the illness (Bishop 2005, 115). Rather than making didactic claims about AIDS, the candy spills do not just invite, but necessitate the viewer’s participation and in doing so create a communal experience that accomplishes what Sontag suggests as a way to counter the conservative

6

Sontag defines a risk group as “a community of pariahs” (Sontag 1989, 112-3). See Hilts, P. J. 1990. “Spread of AIDS By Heterosexuals Remains Slow.” New York Times, May 1. Helms initiated the 1987 Helms Amendment that banned federal support for the production and distribution of HIV-prevention materials that in any way appeared to condone homosexual activities. 8 The spills are extremely flexible works in both their physical form and their maintenance. According to the certificates of authenticity that accompany the works, the exhibitor decides when, if at all, to replenish the candies. While my interpretation focuses on the diminishment of the pile as a metaphor for degenerative illnesses and loss, this flexibility ensures that the meanings of the spills are myriad. Furthermore, while the spills come in different ideal weights, some pieces were installed at different weights at different times, truly emphasizing the versatility of the works. For example, during Gonzalez-Torres’ lifetime, “Untitled” (Revenge) was first installed at 325 pounds at La Fundacion Caja de Pensiones in 1991, and at 1000 pounds at the Renaissance Society in 1994. In the framework of my own argument, the unique enactment of each spill’s installation and incarnation can act as an acknowledgment of the specific experience of individual PWAs, an issue that I touch on briefly later in this text. 7

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moralising of the epidemic: “Making AIDS everyone’s problem and therefore a subject on which everyone needs to be educated”. What Jacques Rancière terms the aesthetic regime is in large part defined by democratisation of different realms of art, including content, media, and the public or audience (Ranciere 2006, 23). In this regime, the museum or gallery space becomes increasingly accessible: a place where anybody can come and look at art.9 Gonzalez-Torres similarly worked under the assumption that his audience is the “anybody”—in his words, both those who can read Fredric Jameson and those who watch “Golden Girls”. In doing so, his work uses the legitimised gallery space to incorporate marginalised themes (Gonzales-Torres 2006, 234).10 A common tactic for highly politicised art of this moment was to move out of the gallery space into the public arena to take advantage of the “potential for an expansion of cultural participation” (Deitcher 1999, 99).11 As a member of the art collective Group Material, Gonzalez-Torres exhibited both in traditional and non-traditional spaces, but during his solo career, he made exhibiting in the gallery part of his tactical approach—his critiques of social dichotomies were incorporated into institutions of cultural production. Perhaps the most obviously democratic function (in the Rancièrean sense) of the candy spills is the necessity of the spectator’s participation. In an almost hyperbolic extension of the theatricality of 1960s minimalist sculpture, Gonzalez-Torres insists: 9

Gonzalez-Torres frequently made the tongue-in-cheek distinction between public art and outdoor art. He strove to make “truly public and accessible” work regardless of its location (Gonzalez-Torres 1993, 14). 10 We might extend such democratisation to the installation techniques of the candy spills. Of his stacks, which function in the same “gift” capacity as the candies, Gonzalez-Torres said, “Around 1989 everyone was fighting for all space. So the floor space was free, the floor space was marginal”. In reconfiguring the gallery space itself and utilising a previously marginalised area, the artist clearly points to his minimalist roots, but also metaphorises his larger project: the guerrilla act of infiltration and making the invisible visible (Rollins 1993, 13). Another way that the candy spills tweak the operations of the museum or gallery space is the participation of the guards. For an account of how the relationships between the guard, the artwork, and the museum visitor shift in certain incarnations of the spills, see Storr, R. 1996. “Setting Traps for the Mind and Heart.” Art in America 84 (1): 70-77, 125. 11 This is exemplified by Gran Fury and ACT UP’s posters mentioned in the introduction. Both posters make use of the public transit system to increase the visibility of their messages. This ‘mobilisation’ is succinctly articulated in the ACT UP poster, which literally traverses the space of the city as a bus poster.

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The Body and Community in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Candy Spills without a public these works are nothing, nothing. I need the public to complete the work. I ask the public to help me, to take responsibility to become part of my work, to join in. (Rollins 1993, 23)

And so the participant approaches the spill, perhaps piled up in a corner or laid out as a carpet, and decides to either take or not take a piece (or pieces) of candy. From there the choices continue: Does she eat it? Keep it as a souvenir? Pass it on? Participation is at the heart of Claire Bishop’s claims in her book Installation Art. She tentatively delimits two kinds of viewer created by installation works: the activated and the decentred. Though it is certainly true that without the physical participation of the spectator the candy spills would not articulate the fluidity of the body and the process of loss as they do, participation in the work is not limited to the physical, as Bishop obliquely implies in her analysis. Nicholas Bourriaud describes his own experience at a Gonzalez-Torres show in Relational Aesthetics: I saw visitors grabbing as many candies as their hands and pockets could hold…while others did not dare, or waited for the person next to them to filch a candy, before doing likewise. (Bourriaud 2002, 56)

Figs 1 & 2. “Untitled” (Lover Boys), 1991, installation view at Galerie Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 1991 (left, photo: Axel Schneider); same work, installation at Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2011 (right, photo: Dirk Gysel)

Bourriaud’s very act of observance—the kind of activated seeing Rancière insists upon in The Emancipated Spectator—is the witnessing of a metaphoric deterioration from illness, a theme that Bourriaud never directly addresses in his text (Rancière 2009, 54). While Bourriaud celebrates Gonzalez-Torres for his formal acumen, his generosity to the viewer, and his production of the “community effect” (which I return to later in this paper), he only once references the sociopolitical context and autobiographical specificity of the candy spills (Bourriaud 2002, 54). While the participant may or may not take a candy, simply by looking at the work, which is

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almost certainly altered from its “ideal” state by her predecessors, she takes part in the witnessing of loss that the mainstream and conservative media has made difficult through the marginalisation of PWAs. As per the artist’s instructions, the work’s ideal is defined not by the shape of the spill, but by its weight.12 Indeed, the specificity of the artist’s loss is occasionally reflected in the weight of the spills, as in “Untitled” (Lover Boys) (1991), which, at 355 pounds, suggests the combined ideal weight of two adult men. Though the candy spills begin their lifespan at a determined weight, they must deteriorate by virtue of their interface with the public. The works actualise a symptom and sign of the illness, a mode of distinguishing between the healthy body and infected body. This change represents so much of what we know—that is what the media has told us—about AIDS: PWAs’ conditions steadily degrade, shrivelling the physical body. While the effect of this participation may not be initially noticeable, the work exists only briefly at its ideal weight, quite possibly disappearing altogether before the gallery chooses to replenish it. While it seems portraits of PWAs are more often than not dependent upon and over-determined by prejudices established about the “kind” of people who have AIDS—gay men, junkies, people of colour, poor people, and other risk groups—Gonzalez-Torres eliminates the specificity of the infected body by representing it through utterly pedestrian candy. Here, there is no individual to objectify or render anonymous, as nothing more than a body with AIDS.13 Indeed, the work treads a line between the individual and the anonymous. While the candy spills are most certainly an expression of the artist’s personal mourning, they also exist as a universal body—one that takes on the symbolic value the spectator projects onto it. To think about the spills in this abstracted fashion, it is helpful to turn to Jean-Luc Nancy’s model of the community as set forth in The Inoperative Community. His theory is particularly apt when considering the communities created by illness—especially terminal illnesses. The model is built around a nostalgic desire for relations, or “communion”, between its members. Nancy’s community demands an inherent diversity of discrete subjects.14 What unifies the community, which is “calibrated on 12

This weight is termed “ideal” in Catalogue Raisonné descriptions. In her article, “Camera Medica”, Erin O’Connor discusses the capacity of nineteenth-century French medical photography to erase the identity of the patient, as the true subject is the illness. The most damaging of Solomon’s and Nixon’s photographs function similarly when they image PWAs by their visible symptoms rather than as individuals (O’Connor 1999). 14 This diversity is represented by the “in” of being-in-common. Without this “in”, the community degrades into something like fascism (Nancy 1991, xxxix). Nancy 13

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death”, is each member’s mortality (Nancy 1991, 15).15 Thus it is continuously in flux—with each exit and each new entrance the shape of the “whole” consistently changes.16 The spills seem to spell out a community, member by member: each instance of the spill is a body limited by its own mortality, which is then replaced by another finite subject after its disappearance (Nancy 1991, 15).17 As a function of this mortality, the community, as constituted by the public of the work or considering the spill itself as a community of candy, does not exist as a stable entity—just as the spills are only briefly at their ideal weight. Each candy’s disappearance alters the whole of the work, changing its physical borders and its mass. Arguably, this change has the opportunity for the most drama when the candies are piled in a corner; taking a single unit may very well disturb its neighbours, causing little waterfalls of displacement until a temporary stasis is achieved again. Just as Nancy’s communities both lose and gain subjects, the candy is diminished and replenished according to the institution’s will. In some instances, though, the spill is not replenished until it has completely disappeared, as if insisting upon the loss of its subject—one of the features that make a spill such a potent memorial. The steady deterioration of the spill also articulates the contemporaneous understanding of an AIDS diagnosis as a death sentence—so easily coopted by the moralising narratives of both the political left and right. For Jerry Falwell, death by AIDS is divine justice for a society that does not abide by God’s rules, while for activist art collective ACT UP, death is the inevitability of inaction, articulated in their aphorism “SILENCE=DEATH” (Crimp 2002, 35; 33). This analogy is compounded by the temporal nature of the candy spill. Exploring the minimalist roots of Gonzalez-Torres’s work, Bourriaud writes: “The encounter with the work gives rise not so does not read these subjects as individuals, however, but as singularities (Kester 2004, 155). 15 Nancy also writes that the community does not “operate the dead being’s passage into some communal intimacy. […] Community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others”. 16 This entrance might be traditionally understood as birth, but entrance into a community of the ill would begin with infection or diagnosis. 17 AIDS is not a disease, but a syndrome. It creates conditions within the body that allow opportunistic diseases to take hold—thus when someone dies from AIDS, they have actually died from AIDS-related complications. The being-in-common of Nancy’s community is particularly apt when describing people with AIDS. While PWAs belong to a community defined by mortality, this death is both common and yet distinct in its cause. So it is with the fate of each candy: it must be taken, but its ultimate destination is yet unknown and may be unique.

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much to a space (as in the case of Minimal Art) as to a time span” (Bourriaud 2002, 59). While the work invites the viewer to consider their place in relation to the artwork as she moves around the spill or kneels down to pick up a candy, more crucial is the sense of time enforced by the spill. It prompts the questions: at what stage in its lifespan are you witnessing the work? If you come back, will it still be as it is now? Even, how much have you hastened its deterioration? Sontag suggests that while cancer is a spatial disease, moving through the body, AIDS is a temporal one.18 The characterisation of the illness in stages—HIV, ARC (AIDS-related complex), and “full-blown” AIDS— connotes a steady evolution towards death.19 Indeed, the spills prompt the viewer-participant to ask questions that echo the artist’s own fears about the imminent death of his partner: In a way this “letting go” of the work, this refusal to make a static form, a monolithic sculpture, in favour of a disappearing, changing, unstable, and fragile form was an attempt on my part to rehearse my fears of having Ross disappear day by day right in front of my eyes. (Rollins 1993, 13)

The artist shared his private anxieties about his personal relationship in a profoundly public way, expressing the permeable borders between public and private, personal and social, between the fear of loss and the joy of loving…of losing oneself slowly and then becoming replenished all over again from scratch. (Rollins 1993, 23)

In “Untitled” (Lover Boys), the artist mourns his own loss, as two metonymic bodies steadily drop from their ideal weight, the intermingled blue and white candies both eventually disappearing. In this way, the spills embody what Cathy Caruth describes as the “oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life” (Caruth 1996, 7). The trauma of loss is doubled in such instances. It exists as the inevitable death—both the dreadful waiting and the loss itself—as well as the understanding that one continues to live after such a loss. The coupled deterioration of “Untitled” (Lover Boys) might be read as this crisis of life—as an attempt to pre-empt

18 “AIDS is progressive, a disease of time. Once a certain density of symptoms is attained, the course of the illness can be swift […]” (Sontag 1989, 109). 19 Deitcher traces the shift in perception of AIDS from “a death sentence to a chronic but manageable disease, as it is said, like diabetes”, to 1995 or 1996 with the emergence of increasingly effective drug therapies (Deitcher 1999, 93).

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the loneliness of the survivor inflicted by the crisis of death by erasing his own body with his lover’s.20 However, if we consider the institution’s capacity to replenish the candy spills, the crisis of the survivor might be understood in a more positive light, if not with some melancholy. Though the acts of the viewerparticipant result in the elimination of the metaphorical body, the replenishment of the spill by the museum connotes a kind of immortality, which is implied in the understanding that one can start “over again from scratch”. Although Bishop positions the candy spills as building a “community centred around loss, always on the verge of disappearance”, she does not address the fact that the work is often kept physically “present” through the care of the gallery (Bishop 2005, 139).21 The disappearance of the embodied couple in “Untitled” (Lover Boys) appears to illustrate this loss, but both the formal composition of the work and the role of the museum complicate this understanding. Though the title suggests a plurality, the swirled blue and white candies comprise a single body—is this not a celebration of the communion between lovers, fleeting though it might be? Additionally, as long as the work is being exhibited, it will likely continue to be reconstituted by the institution.22 Significantly, this does not undermine the singular loss of any individual. In point of fact, the loss of any individual is mourned by the spills capacity to disappear: during its exhibition at MoMA, the artist requested that the deterioration of the 1,000 pound “Untitled” (Placebo) not be interfered with until the work was completely depleted.23 And while a compulsive playing out of a body’s deterioration might read as traumatic repetition, or despair about a community that is defined by its illness and mortality, the 20

Both David Deitcher and Douglas Crimp address the melancholy of surviving the epidemic when so many have died. Deitcher writes, “This paralysis ‘melancholia,’ is the product of a sense of guilt that is so powerful, so insupportable, that the mourner prefers immobilisation to life. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that the difficulty I’ve had in writing this essay is a consequence of guilt that I (unconsciously) feel as a survivor of the plague” (Deitcher 1999, 123). 21 Bishop employs Nancy’s theory of politics that is based not on individual will, but on the drive towards the eternally elusive communion. While I find Nancy’s model of community useful, I believe the spills’ admittedly nostalgic longing for communion is nonetheless satisfied in certain instances and moments. 22 As stated earlier, it is up the exhibitor of the work at what rate, or if at all, the spills are to be replenished. 23 I would like to reemphasise the malleability of these works; while GonzalezTorres made this request, he was never dictatorial about the many forms his work might take (Storr 2006, 7).

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hope inherent in the artist’s quote above speaks to a celebration of resilience that is not articulated in Bishop’s analysis.

Fig. 3. “Untitled” (Placebo), 1991, installation view at Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, 2010 (Photo: Stefan Altenberger)

Indeed, Bishop seems to elide the pleasure of the candy spills, particularly their tactile quality. At the end of her discussion of GonzalezTorres’ work in Installation Art, she remarks that the candies establish a relationship with the viewer at the moment of disappearance, yet this moment is “infused with both mortality and eroticism” (Bishop 2005, 115). However, in her assessment Bishop presents the sensuality of the work as an afterthought rather than as a formally crucial aspect. Of his candies, Gonzalez-Torres said I’m giving you this sugary thing; you put it in your mouth and you suck on someone else’s body. And in this way, my work becomes part of so many other people’s bodies…For just a few seconds, I have put something sweet in someone’s mouth and that is very sexy. (Bishop 2005, 115)

While Bishop ends her analysis of the artist with this quote, she writes nothing of the playful nature or the joy of the spills. Though the works are

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easily understood as metaphors of loss, the delightful nature of the work, both in its gifting capacity and the near-universally appealing nature of candy, speaks to a joie de vivre—life being a vital component of the phrase—that Bishop does not address. Furthermore, the artist’s description of the candy has little to do with unsatisfied desire for communion and everything to do with a sensual union, even if only momentary. As the ultimate destination of the candy may very well be the spectator’s mouth, Gonzalez-Torres refuses to desexualise the infected body. Reflecting on the AIDS crisis from the standpoint of the late 1990s, Deitcher looks to clinical psychologist Walt Odets’ notion of the “deification of survival” and the fraught question: is there nothing worse than to become HIV positive? (Deitcher 1999, 118-9). Odets states that the HIV-prevention technique of cautioning gay men to practice safe sex for the rest of their lives without reference to the emotionally traumatic environment of the epidemic devalues gay experience when it fails to take into account degrees of risk and different kinds of sex. Concurrently, there is an increased level of shame (and guilt) associated with those who have seroconverted after the height of the crisis. For Odets, however, it would be worse for a patient to remain negative at the expense of fulfilling emotional and sexual attachments.24 Crimp has argued that the gay liberation movement instantiated a vacuum of normative moral values that allowed for the creation of a new system of ethical behaviour among gay men. He writes, responsibility is not that which would obligate us to modify or curtail sex, or to justify or redeem it. On the contrary, responsibility may well follow from sex. (Crimp 2002, 16)

While others, like gay mainstream journalist Andrew Sullivan, viewed the liberation movement as the collective flight from a larger community that resulted in unsafe practices, Crimp argues that the movement made a space for queer practices such as homosexual sex or promiscuity, for which there was no room in the normative moral or sexual framework. He suggests that finding fulfilling sexual expression may lead to a “genuine queer responsibility” (Crimp 2002, 16). And while promiscuity has overtly negative connotations in the larger community, in this new realm it does not carry the same stigmatisation.

24

This sentiment is also at the heart of Douglas Crimp’s “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic (1988)”, published alongside Deitcher’s chapter in Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America.

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We might consider the gifting that takes place in the candy piles as a kind of promiscuity; certainly there is something delightful and titillating in eating the proffered candy, and the work is hardly discriminating of its audience. The act of consumption, a word so easily linked to illness and deterioration, denotes the viewer-participant’s bodily intimacy with the work, particularly at what is, amongst other things, a sexual site. The candy spills echo the contemporary political transformation of sex as a private issue to one of public concern, but rather than imagining sex as shameful and as laden with guilt, in the context of a spill it becomes a communal experience of pleasure. Returning to Bourriaud’s notion of the “community effect”, we can see how the candy spills create communities distinct from the larger social structure with their own ethical practices, much as Crimp argues the liberation movement did.25 The community of the candy spill is constituted by “any body” who would participate. This participation, however, is linked with an intimate act of consumption, creating a sort of promiscuous community that carries none of the shameful baggage it does outside the gallery space. Indeed, the makeup of the community transcends any notion that might correspond with any specific sexual demographic: male, female, adult, child, gay, straight, positive, negative. Furthermore, removed from the normative institutional regulations that demand the museum visitor “don’t touch!” the artwork, the participant is forced to consider her behaviour, because even as the artwork invites participation, it is this engagement that results in the spill’s deterioration. How many is too many? How will the other visitors judge her if she takes more than one? Will she sheepishly wait until someone else goes first or dive right in? She is confronted with questions about her participation and responsibility within the community created by the artwork. The candy spills are not intended to demonise the spectator, but the self-awareness and questioning of one’s role within the community fostered by this gifting is a crucial part of how the artwork articulates a communal space that allows the viewer to understand herself in relation to her community, rather than in opposition to the Other. This communal responsibility bespeaks the larger political goal of the spills. Like much of the art community, Gonzalez-Torres was also deeply invested in making the suffering of people with AIDS, who largely already belonged to marginalised groups, a national concern. While the impetus for the first spill may have been the imminent loss of his partner, the monumental 25

Bourriaud writes that relational art of the 1990s reinstituted the aura, but transferred it from the object to the free association that plays out around or within the artwork (Bourriaud, 2002, 61).

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scale of “Untitled” (Placebo) also makes visible the global problem of the epidemic, the lack of a cure and the insufficient care for those suffering. As an epidemic explicitly linked to the marginalisation and persecution of vulnerable subjectivities, AIDS wrought great violence against both individual and social bodies. The sudden “death sentence” of diagnosis and the daily changing topography of communities contributed to a traumatic environment, but as metaphors, the candy spills eloquently carry multiple meanings that articulate the nuance of life during the epidemic. Rather than picture the objectified “faces of AIDS”, the spills domesticate illness and loss. It is not an exotic sickness of the Other, but the suffering of members of our own community. Even as treatment and care have improved, the stigmatisation of HIV-positive remains a heavy burden. But the spills also insinuate that this is a suffering that can be at least partially alleviated through the enactment of an inclusive social responsibility. In their persistent deterioration, the spills insist on the fact of both individual and cumulative loss, working to bring a marginalised trauma into public view through their institutional contexts. By the same token, the candies do not situate the viewer in opposition to the sick body, but instead offer inclusion—membership in an intimate community of the anybody—a community that is not static, not concretely immortal, but vibrantly in flux. In doing so, the spills transcend the isolation and abandonment of so many PWAs through the ethics of pleasure and responsibility instituted by the participatory process. There is no victim to pity, no body to other, only the interactions between spectator and artwork and spectator. Within this communal space of transmission—of ideas, of pleasure, of candy—the spills offer an experience of delight tinged with sorrow and loss: on that permeable border between “public and private, personal and social, and between the fear of loss and the joy of loving”.

Works Cited Ault, J. ed. 2006. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. New York: The Felix GonzalezTorres Foundation. Bishop, C. 2005. Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate Publishing. Bourriaud, N. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by S. Pleasance, F. Woods and M. Copeland. Dijon: Les presses du reel. Cahan, S. 1993. “Visitor Behavior.” In Felix Gonzalez-Torres, edited by T. Rollins et al., 72-73. New York: A.R.T. Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

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Crimp, D. 1992. “AIDS Demo Graphics.” In A Leap in the Dark: AIDS, Art & Contemporary Cultures, edited by A. Klusaþek and K. Morrison, 47-57. Montreal: Véhicule Press. —. 1999. “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic (1988).” In Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, edited by B. Wallis, M. Weems and P. Yenawine, 126-153. New York: New York UP. —. 2002. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press. Deitcher, D. 1999. “What Does Silence Equal Now?” In Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, edited by B. Wallis, M. Weems and P. Yenawine, 92-125. New York: New York UP. Eckholm, E. 1988. “Sex Researchers Defend AIDS Book Against Wide Criticism.” New York Times, March 8. Elbaz, M. and R. Murbach. 1992. “Fear of the Other, Condemned and Damned: AIDS, Epidemics and Exclusions.” In A Leap in the Dark: AIDS, Art & Contemporary Cultures, edited by A. Klusaþek and K. Morrison, 1-9. Montreal: Véhicule Press. Elger, D. 1997. Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz. Foucault, M. 2003. The Birth of the Clinic. Translated by A. M. Sheridan. New York: Routledge. Gonzalez-Torres, F. 1993. “Interview with Felix Gonzalez-Torres, April 16, June 12, 1993, Interview by Tim Rollins.” In Felix GonzalezTorres, edited by T. Rollins et al. New York: A.R.T. Press. —. 2006. “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: être un espion, Interview by Robert Storr.” In Felix Gonzalez-Torres, edited by J. Ault, 228-239. New York: The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Grover, J. Z. 1989. AIDS: The Artist’s Response. Columbus: Ohio State UP. Hilts, P. J. 1990. “Spread of AIDS By Heterosexuals Remains Slow.” New York Times, May 1. Kester, G. H. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication In Modern Art. Berkeley: U of California P. Lacy, S.,ed. 1995. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press. Nancy, J.-L. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Translated by P. Connor, L. Garbus, M. Holland, and S. Sawhney. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. O’Connor, E. 1999. “Camera Medica: Towards a Morbid History of Photography.” History of Photography 23 (3): 232-244.

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Rancière, J. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by G. Elliott. New York: Verso. —. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by G. Rockhill. New York: Continuum. Rosen, A. 1997. “’Untitled’ (The Neverending Portrait).” In Felix Gonzalez-Torres, edited by D. Elger. Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 1997. Sontag, S. 1989. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador. Storr, R. 1996. “Setting Traps for the Mind and Heart.” Art in America 84 (1): 70-77, 125. —. 2006. “When This You See Remember Me.” In Felix GonzalezTorres, edited by J. Ault, 5-37. New York: The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

CAUGHT IN THE GRIP OF AN INHERITED PAST: (POST)MEMORY AND REPRESENTATION IN ART SPIEGELMAN’S MAUS MARÍA JESÚS MARTÍNEZ-ALFARO

In the preface to Trauma Fiction, published in 2004, Anne Whitehead dates the origin of contemporary trauma studies to the year 1980, when post-traumatic stress disorder was first included in the diagnostic canon of the medical and psychiatric professions. As Whitehead explains, the title of her book points to the recent journey of the concept of trauma from medical and scientific discourse to the field of literary studies (Whitehead 2004, 4). She also calls attention to the inherent contradiction at the heart of trauma literature: if trauma comprises an event or experience which overwhelms the individual and resists language or representation, how then can it be narrativised in fiction? (Whitehead 2004, 3)

Whatever is traumatic fails to be understood and becomes unspeakable. Thus, the extreme nature of trauma can be said to exclude or at least problematise the possibility of narrative. In the last decades, though, the narrative impossibility of trauma has generated a considerable amount of narratives dealing precisely, in an oxymoron of sorts, with that which cannot be narrated: literature has become a vehicle for exploring both the disruption caused by trauma and also the possibility of healing by means of the attempt to transform the traumatic impasse into a story that may bring some release and may consequently help in the progress towards working through. Within the field of trauma studies and trauma literature, the Holocaust figures prominent. Trauma has often been described as a “black hole” phenomenon within which the light of awareness, wholeness and peace is absorbed. Bearing with this metaphor, the Holocaust would be the most outstanding illustration of the black hole of trauma, described by Dori Laub as “the gaping hole of genocide and the gaping hole of silence”

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(Laub 1992, 65). The black hole is the ever-open wound of traumatic memory that cannot be articulated but that simultaneously demands transformation into testimony. Thus, in the 1980s and 1990s Holocaust testimony emerged as a distinct genre, with its conventions defined by key trauma theorists such as Lawrence Langer, Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman. The outpouring of diaries, memoirs and novels by survivors has also shown their commitment to a duty: that of bearing witness. With the passing of the first generation, others have engaged in this task initially performed by Holocaust survivors: those in a second or third generation, who were either born too late or, for other reasons, excluded as actual participants or witnesses to the events. Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale can be described as the testimony of a real survivor of the Nazi genocide transmitted by his son, who thus bears witness to the witness and also to the fact that the descendants of survivors cannot extricate themselves from the traumatic experiences gone through by their parents. Maus was originally published in serialised form (between 1980 and 1991) in successive issues of Raw, an avant-garde comic magazine edited by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly. This initially serialised story was then published in two volumes: Maus I (1986) and Maus II (1991), collected in one single book entitled The Complete Maus. Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1992. Perhaps the most salient feature of Maus is the author’s having recourse to hybrid characters—human bodies with animal heads—in order to depict the life and times of his father Vladek, a survivor of Auschwitz. By using cartoon figures, the author invites readers to look on the major topoi of the Holocaust from a radically innovative formal perspective. The reader of Maus soon gets used to a world in which Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, North Americans are dogs, French are frogs, etc. As one follows these hybrid characters, two distinct but intertwined narratives unfold: a wartime narrative taking place in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which comprises Vladek’s story of suffering and survival in the past; and the story of the complicated relationship of Artie (the author’s persona) with his father in the present, which the reader has access to as the son regularly visits and interviews Vladek in order to write a comic about the old man’s experiences shortly before, during, and immediately after the war. Consequently, the vignettes alternate the past and the present, a present which includes self-referential depictions of Artie in the act of drawing, as well as his doubts about the aesthetically and ethically appropriate ways of presenting his subject. The subtitle of Maus I is My Father Bleeds History, thus suggesting a

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wound that is both personal and historical. No matter how long ago it was inflicted, the wound still bleeds, spilling suffering all over and creating ripple effects that seep through the years, and through generations. This first volume of the work opens with a two-page preface of sorts, which is the only part of the book in which Artie appears as a child in intercourse with his father. The action takes place in 1958 and portrays the child Artie playing with friends in Rego Park, Queens, where the Spiegelmans settled after the war. When Artie breaks his roller skate, his friends run along, leaving him behind, and the child walks back home in tears. On hearing of the incident, Vladek tells his son: “Your friends?… If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week… then you could see what it is, friends!” (Spiegelman 2003, 6; emphasis in the original).1 This short exchange is enough for the reader to see Artie as someone growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, thus illustrating the typical plight of survivors’ descendants, which Marianne Hirsch explains in the light of what she calls “postmemory”. She uses the term to describe the relationship of survivors’ children to the events that inhabit their parents’ memories, and which are grasped only indirectly by the second generation. Thus, postmemory “is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” (Hirsch 1992-93, 8). Resorting to Kaja Silverman’s concept of “heteropathic identification” as a model for the second generation seeking resolution with respect to their parents’ (or guardians’) traumas, Hirsch emphasises that being responsive to these traumas is productive only if the experience and feelings of the other are not subsumed in an appropriative identification. The subject should rather engage in what Silverman describes as “identification-at-a-distance” (Hirsch 1999, 9). It can be concluded, then, that the second generation has a right to claim the Holocaust, but this right should be coupled with the ability to claim it without claiming to have experienced it, thus avoiding the snares of surrogate victimisation. That the past of Artie’s parents has left its indelible mark on the son’s life becomes abundantly evident throughout the narrative, the two-page preface referred to earlier being just a prologue to what is to come. Significantly, Vladek is not portrayed as a survivor who needs to talk about his past; it is rather the son, Artie, who needs to listen. Unlike his 1

The Complete Maus opens with the above-mentioned preface and brings together Maus. A Survivor’s Tale I: My Father Bleeds History and Maus. A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began. The information in the parantheses indicates the volume (Maus I or Maus II) and the page. It should be noted in this respect that pagination is consecutive in The Complete Maus, that is, it does not begin anew in the second volume.

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father and (deceased) mother, he has no first-hand experience of the pogroms, the war and the camps, being as he is a post-war child. There is also the shadow of an elder brother who did not survive the war and to whom Artie has always felt compared, a “ghost brother” he did not meet but who could have fulfilled his parents’ expectations in ways he has not managed to do. All this makes him feel estranged from his own family. By listening to his father’s story and “translating” it into a comic book afterwards, Artie finds a way of dealing with his family’s past, coping with this feeling of estrangement but maintaining the required distance: his parents’ traumas are not his own, he does not lay claim to them, but he does lay claim to their after-effects. The interconnection between the past and the present is revealed not only through words, but also through images. As has been pointed out, the vignettes alternate between the time of Vladek’s story and the time of its narration, and the reader should pay attention not only to what happens within each frame, but also to what happens between the frames. As Spiegelman observes, comics are “a gutter medium; that is, it’s what takes place in the gutters between the panels that activates the medium” (qtd. in Levine 2006, 25). The past and the present are superimposed on some occasions, but there is also what Levine refers to as “the hemorrhaging of visual images, which literally burst out of their pictorial frames” (Levine 2006, 23; emphasis in the original). Thus, for instance, in the third chapter of Maus I, Vladek tells Artie about his circumstances in 1939, when he became a prisoner of war.

Fig. 1. Artie on the floor of his father’s home, taking notes (Maus I, Chapter 3)

Artie is on the floor of his father’s home in Queens, taking notes, but panels are disposed as if Artie’s body was bridging decades, overlapping

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and joining a panel depicting 1939 and the panel depicting a conversation in the present (Spiegelman Maus I, 47). Repeatedly, the past and the present break into one another in this very visual way. There are also panels that literally spill over, as when Vladek shows Artie the pictures of family members, many of who did not survive the Holocaust. The photographs flow over the bottom part of the frame, literally invading the page margins (Spiegelman Maus II, 275). This is a story that resists being contained by frames, which is suggested by frames spilling over, and also a story that has no end and whose effects are felt in the present, which is highlighted by frames breaking into one another or superimposing different temporal planes. Interestingly, the story that is told is framed by a conspicuous absence, the absence of the mother, Anja, missing entirely except through her husband’s and son’s memories. Although Anja survived, she could not overcome the extreme experiences and the suffering she went through. Anja Spiegelman committed suicide in May 1968, shortly after her son Art, then 20 years old, returned home after a brief but intense nervous breakdown. She left no note. Anja kept a diary during the first stages of the war and, although this diary was lost, she rewrote what she remembered after the war and kept a second diary, which Artie insistently asks his father to search for in the course of the interviews. Eventually, Vladek confesses to his son that he burned Anja’s notebooks in a fit of anger and despair after her suicide. And so, Anja’s diaries and Anja herself, her story, become a very much a present absence throughout the narrative. In fact, it is one of the author’s challenges not to silence this silence. As Nancy Miller puts it, we should “understand […] the question of Anja as that which will forever escape representation and at the same time require it” (Miller 2003, 49). Two years after his mother’s suicide, Art Spiegelman published a short comic connected with this tragic event in his life—“Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History”—which is interestingly reproduced in Maus (Spiegelman Maus I, 101-104). These four pages are disruptive in many respects. They do not only break the chronological development of the story, but they also introduce a marked contrast with the rest of the work. “Prisoner” uses human figures instead of humanised animals, the style is highly expressionistic and it portrays past events that Artie did actually witness, thus presenting his mother (for the first and last time) through his eyes, not through Vladek’s. “Prisoner” should also be regarded as one of the many strategies that Spiegelman resorts to in order to question the animal imagery in Maus. The epigraph to Maus I provides a first explanation for Spiegelman’s

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aesthetic choices and his use of animal images.2 It reproduces a passage from Hitler’s inflammatory speech: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human”. Fascist thought simplified something as complex as identity and then equated this simplification with disease-carrying vermin. Maus relies on this fabrication as it casts humans as animals based on ethnic difference, but the author also deconstructs such a representation. Spiegelman’s stylistic choices serve precisely as a vehicle for dealing with the complexities of ethnic categories. Maus makes the reader reflect on the construction of Jewishness. Everywhere, but especially in North America, the Holocaust has become a cornerstone of Jewish identity. Precisely for that reason, the passing of the first generation (that of Holocaust survivors) and other factors like assimilation and intermarriage can be seen as threatening to sever the communal ties to a most important source of identity. If, as Amy Hungerford puts it, connection with the Holocaust rather than commitment to Judaism stands near the centre of North-American Jewishness, it is no wonder that new ways of connecting with the Holocaust should have been sought for. Hungerford refers to these new ways of establishing identity links as “technologies of connection”, which include movies, books, classes and museums that tell the Holocaust story, as well as the separate efforts of Yale’s Fortuneoff Archive and of director Steven Spielberg to collect videotaped testimonies of survivors. Since these new connections “remain independent of the life of individual survivors for their future existence, they promise to remain available to all for all time” (Hungerford 2003, 78). I would like to emphasise this “to all” because, though the connection of Jewishness with the Holocaust is especially relevant for obvious reasons, what these technologies of connection demonstrate is that anyone can come to identify with the event. We live in the post-Holocaust era and what the many representations of the Holocaust seem to convey is that it affects us all. The Holocaust has become a global phenomenon, and so many representations of it are aimed at the reader/viewer getting closer—not so much, or not only, intellectually, but also emotionally—to the events and those that went through them. Moreover, precisely because the Holocaust is still very much present in our culture, and because the present as a post-Holocaust age can be said to be defined by the past, characters in Maus who have their identities determined by Holocaust events remain unchanged in the 2

See T. Doherty for an insightful analysis of the most relevant intertexts when it comes to analysing Spiegelman’s artistic style: the two graphic media whose images make up the visual memory of the twelve-year Reich—cartoons and cinema—and the animation legacy of American popular culture.

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vignettes depicting present-day North America, where Jews are still mice, New Yorkers are still dogs, and so on. Present-day identities still go back to the Holocaust or, in other words, the technologies of connection we see in Maus convey the message that “all important aspects of the present take their identity from the past event” (Hungerford 2003, 86).

Fig. 2. Artie sitting at his drawing table (Maus II, Chapter 2)

The second chapter in Volume II of Maus opens with Artie wearing a mouse mask that hides a human face (Spiegelman Maus II, 201). He is sitting at his drawing table, in the midst of a writer’s block, overwhelmed and full of doubts on account of the success of Maus I. These vignettes constitute just one example of the several instances in which characters in Maus appear wearing masks. The various uses of masks in Spiegelman’s work are open to manifold interpretations, one of them being the selfconstructedness of ethnicity. As Werner Sollors puts it in The Invention of Ethnicity: ethnicity is not so much an ancient and deep-seated force surviving from the historical past, but rather the modern and modernizing feature of a contrasting strategy that may be shared far beyond the boundaries within which it is claimed. It marks an acquired modern sense of belonging that replaces visible, concrete communities whose kinship symbolism ethnicity may yet mobilize in order to appear more natural. The trick that it passes itself off as blood, as “thicker than water”, should not mislead interpreters to take it at face value. It is not a thing but a process and it requires constant detective work from readers, not a settling on a fixed encyclopedia of supposed cultural essentials. (Sollors 1991, xiv-xv)

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Masks in Maus are sometimes clues for the reader to carry out such detective work. In order to cope with his troubling feelings and his writer’s block, Artie decides to visit his psychiatrist, Paul Pavel, who is, like his father, a survivor. At this stage in the narrative, Artie has informed the reader that Vladek died of congestive heart failure four and a half years earlier. The son’s interviews to the father were completed before and Vladek’s story is recorded, but Artie still has to finish his comic book. A sunk Artie— literally diminished in size due to the weight of what he still has to tell but also on account of all the commercial fuss brought about by Maus I— discusses with Pavel some of the problems related to his work as well as to his complex relationship with his father. When Artie explains that he has always felt inferior when faced with Vladek’s great feat of survival, Pavel remarks: “But you weren’t in Auschwitz, you were in Rego Park”. And yet, he goes on: Maybe your father needed to show he was always right—that he could always survive—because he felt guilty about surviving […] And he took his guilt out on you, where it was safe […] on the real survivor. (Spiegelman Maus II, 204; emphasis in the original)

These words lead us to think of the work’s subtitle—A Survivor’s Tale—in a new light. The survivor of the title emerges now as possibly referring not only to the father, but also to the son.3 However, the view of Artie as a survivor is both put forward and questioned in this exchange between the character and his psychiatrist. As Pavel says, Artie was not in Auschwitz, but in Rego Park. Be it as it may, Artie leaves Pavel feeling well again. From one vignette to the next we see him regaining the size of an adult as he walks back home. We assume also that his writer’s block is over, as the following pages resume the narrative of his father’s story. Among the “technologies of connection” dealt with by Amy Hungerford, special attention is paid to “the belief in specifically intergenerational transmission of trauma” as a powerful vehicle for creating/strengthening Jewish identity (Hungerford 2003, 92). Artie’s mask is somehow related to a feeling of inauthenticity, as if the passing of time, his father’s death, and the 3 Volume II’s subtitle—And Here My Troubles Began—already advances this merging of father and son, as the possessive “my” may well refer to both. Maus I closes with Vladek’s arrival at Auschwitz, so Volume II covers the hardest part of his story: his stay first in Auschwitz and then in Dachau after being separated from Anja. Vladek uses this sentence himself, but given the fact that we find Artie in the midst of a crisis at the start of the second volume, the sentence may equally refer to him, as well as to his father.

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commercial success of his work had disturbed or weakened his Jewish identity. The strategies to attain what Sollors refers to as a modern sense of belonging may not be themselves authentic—given the fact that there is much of constructedness about ethnicity—but they must make one feel so. The session with Pavel works well with Artie in this sense, because what he needs at this critical moment is not to close the chapter of the family’s Holocaust past, but to reinforce his own connection with it. His link with it thus re-established/strengthened, he can go on writing about it, which will in turn reinforce the said link even further. The question of whether Artie is or is not a survivor remains open to debate, and it is precisely by selfconsciously problematising issues like this in Maus that Spiegelman can be said to keep the required distance with something—the Holocaust, Holocaust trauma, ethnic identity—which is presented (and which the reader is intended to perceive) as always open to manipulation. This possibility of manipulation is precisely what the third and last real picture inserted in Maus suggests.4 When, after liberation from the camps, Vladek discovered the whereabouts of Anja, he sent her a picture of him to show that he was alive. In one panel, we see Anja holding the picture and exclaiming “My God, Vladek is really alive!” In the following panel, the real picture is reproduced (Spiegelman Maus II, 294). On the one hand, the picture is authentic and, as Anja’s words emphasise, it unquestionably proved that Vladek had survived the camps. On the other hand, there is something odd about this picture, which makes it feel unreal: rather than a camp inmate, what the reader sees is a healthy round-faced man posing in a camp uniform that is clean and carefully buttoned up. As Vladek explains to Artie: “I passed once a photo place what [sic] had a camp uniform—a new clean one to make souvenir photos…” (Spiegelman Maus II, 294). So this is the genesis of Vladek’s picture, which makes it both real and fake. As Marianne Hirsch puts it, this photograph is particularly disturbing in that it stages, performs the identity of the camp inmate […] Anyone could have had this picture taken in the same souvenir shop […] Breaking out of the frame, looking intently at the viewer/reader, Vladek’s picture dangerously relativises the identity of the survivor. (Hirsch 1992-93, 24-25; emphasis in the original)

4

The three real photographs in Maus are: 1) that of Art and his mother—taken during a holiday in Trojan Lake, New York, in 1958, when Art was ten—included at the beginning of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”, in Volume I; 2) that of Richieu, Art’s elder brother, on the frontispiece of Volume II; and 3) that of Vladek at the end of the second volume.

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Fig. 3. Vladek’s picture, taken after his liberation (Maus II, Chapter 4)

Just as Vladek’s picture was staged in a souvenir shop, so Spiegelman’s cartoons are an artistic distortion, a performance, and, like the photograph, are both real and contrived. The hybrid characters call attention to the artificiality of representation, but they are also the vehicle for telling an authentic story. When Spiegelman was asked “Why mice?”, he answered, “I need to show the events and memory of the Holocaust without showing them. I want to show the masking of these events in their representation” (qtd. in Young 1998, 687; emphasis in the original). And so, both the picture and the book are grounded on the same principle: to show reality without showing it. Maus dexterously navigates in this way between the need to tell and the need to acknowledge that not all can be told, or shown. In the course of Artie’s session with his psychiatrist, Pavel sadly remarks that perhaps it would be better not to tell any more Holocaust stories. Then Artie quotes Beckett as saying once: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”. After a marked silence in a panel with no words, Artie resumes, in the following panel: “On the other hand, he said it” (Spiegelman Maus II, 205 ; emphasis in the original). And so did Spiegelman himself, by narrating a story that bears the silences of (personal and collective) history and that makes the reader reflect on the paradoxes and dilemmas of representing what can be told, through words

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and images.5

Works Cited Doherty, T. 1996. “Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust.” American Literature 68 (1): 69-84. Hirsch, M. 1992-93. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and PostMemory.” Discourse 15 (2): 3-29. —. 1999. “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy.” In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by M. Bal, J. Crewe and L. Spitzer, 3-23. Hanover: Dartmouth UP. Hungerford, A. 2003. The Holocaust of Texts. Genocide, Literature, and Personification. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P. Laub, D. 1992. “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” In S. Felman and D. Laub. Testimony. Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. 57-74. New York and London: Routledge. Levine, M. G. 2006. The Belated Witness. Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival. Stanford: Stanford UP. Miller, N. K. 2003. “Cartoons of the Self. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Murderer. Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” In Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust, edited by D. R. Geis, 44-59. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P. Sollors, W. 1991. “Introduction. The Invention of Ethnicity.” In The Invention of Ethnicity, edited by W. Sollors, ix-xx. New York: Oxford UP. Spiegelman, A. 2003. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin. Whitehead, A. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Young, J. E. 1998. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History.” Critical Enquiry 24 (3): 666-99.

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The research carried out for the writing of this essay is part of a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Regional Development Fund (HUM 2007-61035). For more on the issues analysed here, see also my “Narrating the Holocaust and its Legacy: The Complexities of Identity, Trauma and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” In Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics, edited by M. Modlinger and P. Sonntag 91-113. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang (Cultural History and Literary Imagination Series). 2011.

“THE PROBLEM IS, I’M NOT SURE I BELIEVE IN THE THUNDERCLAP OF TRAUMA”: AESTHETICS OF TRAUMA IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE ALAN GIBBS

Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), focusing on a nine-year-old boy’s traumatised response to losing his father in the attacks of 11 September 2001, polarised responses from reviewers and critics. The general hostility of newspaper reviewers is epitomised by Harry Siegel, writing in the New York Press, who accused Foer of arch opportunism, arguing that in choosing the novel’s key subject, “he snatches 9/11 to invest his conceit with gravitas, thus crossing the line that separates the risible from the villainous” (Siegel 2005). Several literary critics, by contrast, approved of Foer’s formally experimental novel. Philippe Codde, for example, argues that it is precisely the failure of written language and narrative in the face of unrepresentable trauma that “has prompted the controversial form of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”, and that this is also “why both of Foer’s novels are such interesting and convincing representations of trauma” (Codde 2007, 249). Vociferous debates regarding the literary representation of trauma are illustrated by strikingly divergent assessments of novels such as Foer’s. This essay considers those debates, focusing especially on how the discussion of trauma in America, where the phenomenon has so fully entered public discourse, has begun to influence both writers and, interdependently, critics and theorists. In the following I contend that a significant proportion of contemporary literature has reified elements of dominant trauma theory into an often prescriptive aesthetic. Elements of representation that were once highly experimental have become instead aesthetic tropes of the “trauma genre”. This essay also discusses a number of writers and texts which resist this trauma aesthetic, either through a rigorously deployed realism or through the employment of more disruptive effects and subjects which have not, at least yet,

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become ossified into genre clichés. Trauma genre writing conforms to approved conventions of theme and form in the representation of trauma deriving from prominent and widely disseminated theory. Particular problems of this representational matrix include the way in which its narrow definition of trauma has limited aesthetic practices to supposedly challenging but actually hackneyed disruptions to ordered narrative. The narrow dominant definition of trauma and the consequently limited aesthetic tropes of trauma genre writing are discussed further below. The trauma genre also persists in part through a limiting inward looking tendency whereby literature and criticism exist in a mutually reinforcing circuit. According to this scenario, writers may borrow from existing criticism in order to lend their works verisimilitude, while critics evidently see their positions validated by this theoretically orthodox literary practice. Trauma genre writing also tends to provide formulaic thematic and narrative arcs, whereby the rupturing effect of trauma will be followed by a redemptive process of working through. Elsewhere on this continuum is a genre I term here “traumatic metafiction”, writing which is more likely to undermine conventions of trauma writing and to challenge accepted theories regarding the representation of trauma and its effects, through the development of narratives which violate the kind of accepted trajectory mentioned above, or through formal devices that more fully and precisely dramatise issues related to narrating trauma. By contrast, texts characterised here as comprising the trauma genre are inclined to adopt dominant theories of trauma into their structures in relatively unquestioning ways. Another form of resistance to the increasingly programmatic tendencies of the trauma genre, as we shall see, involves a “return” to a form of realism. As suggested by Michael Rothberg in his (appropriately named) monograph, Traumatic Realism, a significant part of the effect of this mimetic tendency is to contest the dominant definition of trauma as something which is, in its exceptional nature, sublime and beyond representation. This challenge to assertions that trauma is therefore only representable through experimental discourse may be found, for example, in the deadpan realist prose of recent works by writers such as Carol Shields and Lorrie Moore. Before examining these types in more detail, it is necessary to summarise a few of the conventions of trauma discourse that have become established in the theoretical, cultural and literary fields.1 1

There is insufficient space here to provide a full history of the development and popular dissemination of trauma as a term. The best delineations of this process may be found in chapter one of Roger Luckhurst’s The Trauma Question (19-76)

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Trauma Culture Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was first defined according to particular reoccurring symptoms by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in the third edition of the organisation’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III 1980) (Luckhurst 2008, 61-62). While the increasingly wide-ranging definitions of mental illness in this and subsequent volumes (see also DSM-IV, 1994) have proved extremely controversial—for example, provoking comment that the APA seeks to define all human behaviour as pathological and thus commercially treatable—that debate lies beyond the scope of this essay.2 The point here is that the symptoms described in DSM-III’s definition of PTSD gained much cultural prominence and provoked widespread popular interest in the concept of trauma. According to these definitions, PTSD’s symptoms include intrusion, a tendency to re-experience the traumatic incident through unbidden flashbacks and/or nightmares, and hyperarousal, characterised by extreme heightened awareness and/or insomnia. These elements are often coupled—somewhat paradoxically—with constriction, neuroses that cause the patient involuntarily to avoid memories of the traumatising event, and which operate through a process of either dissociation or repression. These neuroses produce a latency period, of indeterminate and sometimes permanent length, during which victims are unable to recall the traumatic causation. As we shall see, these definitions have been strikingly influential, especially in terms of the way in which trauma is understood at a wider cultural level. While the various editions of the DSM were influential in terms of disseminating certain key understandings of trauma into a wider cultural field, Cathy Caruth’s work has done much to expand its influence in cultural studies, not least in advancing influential arguments about the representation of trauma in works of literature. Employing a contentious synthesis of Freudian theory and post-structuralism, Caruth chooses not to focus in her work upon the trauma-inducing event, because PTSD “cannot be defined […] by the event itself” (Caruth 1995, 4). Since events that produce traumatic symptoms vary so widely, Caruth insists that we look elsewhere for defining characteristics: “The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception” (Caruth 1995, 4; emphasis in the original). A fundamental part of Caruth’s argument or Ruth Leys’s Trauma: A Genealogy. Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience is the clearest articulation of her interpretation of Freud. 2 For a polemical critique of this aspect of DSM-IV see Laurence J. Davis’s article in Harper’s Magazine (1997).

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therefore rests upon identifying common strands to this structure of experience. One particularly influential component of this structure derives from the APA’s assertion that trauma is the result of a single, sudden event, outside the realm of normal experience. Another aspect that was only a part of the APA definition, but which has come to assume overriding importance for Caruth and her followers is the notion, from Freud, of Nachträglichkeit. This idea suggests that trauma is always delayed, being too sudden and too overwhelming for it to be contemporaneously processed by the sufferer’s consciousness: “the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (Caruth 1995, 4; emphasis in the original). The trauma victim thus dissociates from or represses the event, and begins to display various neuroses. One’s acceptance of an understanding of trauma underlain by definitions contained in the various editions of the DSM and in Caruth’s writing depends on a few fundamental issues: firstly, that trauma is the result of a single overwhelming event; secondly, that it is the structured experience of trauma rather than its triggering event which defines the phenomenon, and, thirdly, that there is always a latency period. From these three claims follow certain consequences for the way in which trauma is understood and represented in artistic and literary artefacts. Of perhaps prime importance is Caruth’s notion that in its status as something beyond everyday experience, trauma is also beyond understanding in language, and, as Ruth Leys’s critique observes, its symptoms therefore “stand outside representation” (Leys 2000, 229). This assertion appears to have persuaded many writers and artists to employ suitably unconventional narrative and formal means in order to demonstrate the impossibility of representing trauma and its effects. As we shall see, this can result in writers who adopt ostensibly challenging representational practices being especially lauded by critics for their treatment of trauma, even at the same time as this produces a kind of “trauma kitsch”.

The Trauma Genre: Aesthetics and Criticism The narrow way in which trauma has been popularly defined, according to an often simplified and sometimes contradictory synthesis of Freudian thought, definitions of PTSD from the APA, elements of Holocaust studies, and the works of theorists such as Caruth, has proved problematic. The key difficulty concerning us here is that a prescriptive understanding of trauma based on this range of popularised work has come to limit representations of trauma’s effects, and to produce an identifiable

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critically approved aesthetic. The “trauma genre”, in other words, draws in relatively unquestioning ways upon a simplified and narrow range of those aspects of trauma theory most widely disseminated into popular culture. These include the notion that the traumatic event occurs with such sudden violence that it is not assimilated to consciousness. Victims are thus typically depicted as suffering symptoms such as involuntary flashbacks, nightmares, and cycles of repetitive, often self-destructive behaviour, without having access to memories of the originating cause. The trauma genre also attests to the inevitability of Nachträglichkeit, and its allied Freudian-Caruthian categories of melancholia and mourning, whereby the sufferer embarks on some form of therapy in an attempt to acknowledge and address the source of their symptoms. These concepts are dominant in contemporary trauma theory and they—or simplified versions of them— have found their way into the wider culture, and from there into the aesthetic of the trauma genre. While these symptoms and treatments unquestionably characterise a wide number of victims’ encounter with trauma, however, it devalues the experience of and recovery from trauma to suggest that this is the only model. In seeking to endorse a universal template of the presentation of traumatic pathologies, the dominant aesthetic that has emerged from this narrow conception of trauma is similarly limited. Generally confirming Caruth’s claims that trauma is fundamentally beyond representation, the trauma genre aesthetic, as Luckhurst suggests, “is uncompromisingly avant-garde”, as writers seek structures that are “experimental, fragmented, refusing the consolations of beautiful form, and suspicious of familiar representational and narrative conventions” (Luckhurst 2008, 81). Critics’ often favourable appraisals of such work have enabled the emergence of an identifiable canon of “approved” trauma literature, conforming to various conventions. Anne Whitehead, for example, affirms Caruth’s reading of trauma by extrapolating it into an aesthetic whereby “if trauma is at all susceptible to narrative formulation”, then this is only possible through “a literary form which departs from conventional linear sequence” (Whitehead 2004, 6). Laurie Vickroy similarly insists that trauma narratives “incorporate the rhythms, processes, and uncertainties of trauma within the consciousness and structures of these works” (Vickroy 2002, xiv). Luckhurst correctly notes that strongly prescriptive aesthetic programmes such as these have effectively shaped a genre: texts are often brought together by critics as exemplary works because they are held to share a particular trauma aesthetic. This is sometimes explicitly stated in prescriptive terms, listing elements that must be included to

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establish membership of a proper or authentic literature of trauma. Because a traumatic event confounds narrative knowledge, the inherently narrative form of the novel must acknowledge this in different kinds of temporal disruption. (Luckhurst 2008, 88)3

Luckhurst clearly has in mind here a literary practice which employs certain disruptive formal techniques of postmodernism—most familiarly, perhaps, fragmented, non-linear chronologies, repetition, shifts in narrating voice, and a resultantly dispersed subjectivity—in order to represent the “unrepresentable” trauma. Some of the founding novels of postmodernism, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, indeed employ what were then startlingly disruptive techniques partly in order to represent the effects of historical traumas upon their protagonists. In America, similar techniques were used by E. L. Doctorow in The Book of Daniel, wherein the disrupted chronology, numerous shifts in narrating voice, and historiographic questioning through the merging of fact and fiction help to represent trauma. These techniques also highlight the potential for depictions of trauma such as those in the works by Doctorow, Marquez and Grass to be politically radical, and one might add to these later diverse influential texts such as Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. There are, thus, a number of radical initiator texts that unwittingly help to define certain conventions for the literary treatment of trauma. As Luckhurst suggests, a problematic reification of representational modes occurred when the originality of these progenitor texts was lauded by critics: There is something of a contradiction […] in affirming the centrality of innovation whilst identifying a specific (and sometimes prescriptive) trauma aesthetic. Paradoxically, the aesthetic means to convey the singularity of a traumatic aporia has now become highly conventionalized, the narratives and tropes of traumatic fiction easily identified. (Luckhurst 2008, 89)

In other words, while foundational trauma texts such as those cited above were pioneering both politically and in terms of their aesthetic, once these techniques were accepted as conventions by critics and adopted as techniques by writers their effect was blunted. In this respect, the controversy surrounding Binjamin Wilkomirski’s 3

See also Wulf Kansteiner, who argues that “the valorization of semantic excess and caesuras privileges narrow, selective perceptions of contemporary culture” (Kansteiner 2004, 215).

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“faked” Holocaust memoir, Fragments, is particularly telling. Although published as an autobiography, Fragments was later revealed to be fictional, a trauma genre text that replicates a number of representational conventions so successfully that it was initially taken for genuine testimony. In the text, Wilkomirski lays claim to a latency period during which he was unable to recall or write about his experiences. The text also comprises familiar techniques such as fragmented chronology and splitting of the narrative voice at moments of thematic rupture. As Whitehead notes, “[i]n replicating the conventions of testimony, Wilkomirski produces a convincing account of extreme trauma” (Whitehead 2004, 37). Fragments is thus only the most notorious example of writers adopting what had, by the end of the twentieth century, become generic conventions in order to produce their own “convincing accounts” of trauma. Other authors writing in the 1990s and afterwards may be identified as perpetuating what had become, by then, increasingly conventional methods of representing trauma, to the extent that such writing constructs an identifiable (and critically-supported) genre. When effects drawing upon this aesthetic are evident in later texts—Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, Pat Barker’s Another World, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated to name but three examples—any disruptive or disorientating effect upon the reader is inevitably lessened through familiarity. All three of these novels employ tropes including non-linear chronology and shifts in narrating voice, which had, by the mid-1990s, become familiar to readers. This means that when a reader acquainted with the tropes of the trauma genre encounters, for example, the breach in the narrative between parts one and two of Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved, the death of the protagonist’s son, Matt, is actually remarkably predictable. These texts, and other ostensibly unconventional works, have nevertheless drawn significant praise from critics. For example, notwithstanding her reservations about the novel’s approach to history, Whitehead approves Another World’s incorporation of ghosts from the past in constructing a disrupted narrative that “powerfully dramatises the notion of transgenerational haunting” and thus reinforces through its form and content certain key tenets of popular trauma theory (Whitehead 2004, 28). Interestingly, in relation to Michaels’s novel, Whitehead notes that James Young “has pointed out that the gathering of fragments is central to the process of Holocaust memorialisation” (Whitehead 2004, 60). This observation suggests a possible line of influence between Fugitive Pieces and Foer’s Holocaust novel, Everything is Illuminated, perhaps through precisely this argument of Young’s. Foer’s novel is marked not only by a plethora of the tropes of the trauma aesthetic—numerous repetitions and

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split, non-linear narratives, voiced by a range of characters, for example— but also by the literal playing out of this urge to collect fragments in the habits of its protagonist, Jonathan Safran Foer, who self-consciously travels with a supply of Ziploc bags in order to preserve found fragments of his ancestry. Although Foer (the author) arguably combines well-worn formal and thematic elements of the trauma genre through his protagonist’s tendencies, his debut novel gained generally favourable comments in reviews and articles. Daniel Mendelsohn, for example, applauded the appearance in the novel of “some of the most complex technical tricks you’re likely to encounter in recent fiction”, which, he argues, comprise “a remarkably effective way of dwelling on an issue of considerable urgency in Holocaust literature: the seemingly hopeless split between history and narrative, between what happened and what can be told” (Mendelsohn 2002). In an even more rapturous review, Francine Prose, in the New York Times, declared that “Not since […] A Clockwork Orange has the English language been simultaneously mauled and energized with such brilliance and such brio”, and went on to praise Foer’s formal strategies: “the structure reveals itself slowly, in stages, and each one of these small revelations is a source of surprise and pleasure” (Prose 2002). As we have seen, however, the non-linear, fragmentary and repetitive structure of Everything is Illuminated, built around incremental revelations, is actually a staple of the trauma genre. Foer’s is not an isolated case, and lavish reviews in widely circulated publications such as these promote the narrow trauma aesthetic criticized here. Numerous other ostensibly innovative trauma writers of the 1990s and beyond have been similarly championed in both newspapers and academic journals. Alongside Michaels, Barker and Foer, one might mention works as apparently diverse as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, whose 1997 Booker Prize win ably demonstrated an emerging vogue for “experimental” trauma narratives confirmed, moreover, by the 2011 Orange Prize awarded to Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. In addition, we might include works by W.G. Sebald, who Luckhurst witheringly refers to as a “traumatophile”, or Don DeLillo’s 2001 novella, The Body Artist. This is not to dismiss these texts out of hand. Indeed, a number of these works, for all their occasional drawing on genre aesthetics, also present an equivocal challenge to certain dominant elements of trauma theory. The Body Artist, for example, through its parodic imitation of popular trauma discourse (in the simulation of an interview feature with its protagonist, Lauren), and its ambiguous refusal of the neat closure provided by a conventional narrative model of trauma and recovery (given that Lauren arguably remains traumatised at the novella’s end),

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demonstrates an awareness of debates in the field, but also a willingness to engage with and critique, rather than adopt them. The problem lies, rather, in these texts existing, albeit perhaps unwittingly, in a close and selfreinforcing relationship with certain forms of criticism. Authors and critics may be held equally to blame in this respect; the former for too unquestioningly adopting dominant, simplified and popularised aspects of trauma theory, the latter for finding confirmatory evidence of their theories in the works of these and other trauma authors. In particular, critics are not infrequently guilty of mounting tendentious readings of novels for precisely this aim. The parodic and ambiguous elements identified in The Body Artist, for example, have been largely ignored by critics who insist on imposing a “recovery” ending. Anne Longmuir, for example, although she acknowledges certain elements of the novella’s ambiguity, insists that “one thing seems clear: Mr. Tuttle appears in order that Lauren can work through her own grief and trauma” (Longmuir 2007, 534). Clearly, a wider range of options than the narrow aesthetic that characterises the trauma genre is available for writers, and these options have not been entirely ignored. The mode I term traumatic metafiction is discussed later in the essay. Another mode adopted by some contemporary writers may be classed in part as a return to realism, drawing in part upon certain non-fiction techniques that have recently been (re)popularised through factual trauma memoirs. This new realism perhaps now represents a more effective technique for “jolting” the reader than over-familiar postmodernist effects. Its tendency to adopt a deadpan narrating tone, for example, convincingly mimics the jaded, disconnected voice of the traumatised protagonist. Accomplished works that deal with trauma without recourse to the sometimes meretricious “tricks” of trauma genre literature belie the latter’s narrow and prescriptive aesthetic. Carol Shields’s Unless, for example, communicates a thoroughly convincing and affecting depiction of family trauma, but the predominant register in the novel is realist, being chronologically linear, and defiantly nonexperimental. Despite her refusal to employ the prescribed formal elements of the trauma genre, Shields is nevertheless clearly versed in the theoretical issues at stake. PTSD and its treatments are specifically—and knowledgably—mentioned in the novel, while towards its end her narrator, Reta, states “I’m not sure I believe in the thunderclap of trauma” (Shields 2002, 263; 269). She continues, expressing her doubts about “the filigree of fine-spun theory” not only regarding the necessarily overwhelming intrusion of trauma, but also the existence of the latency period upon which PTSD and Caruthian theory depends (Shields 2002, 269). Unlike novels characterised above as trauma genre, Unless engages

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with existing theory but refuses to adhere slavishly to any doctrinal requirements regarding the representation of trauma. Shields provides an essential example of someone who breaks the reinforcing circle of experimental literary techniques and, more importantly, suggests that the narrow genre aesthetic represents merely one way in which trauma might be addressed. Critics who hold too rigidly to this programmatic model of writing may thus be missing crucial exceptions to their rule and, indeed, lagging well behind actual literary practice. A similarly sceptical, downbeat, disconnected but realist narrating voice can be found in the work of Lorrie Moore, most notably in her A Gate at the Stairs (2009). Like Shields, Moore provides a highly persuasive account of family trauma and, as she explained in an interview with The Believer, the potentially traumatising effect of broader political decisions, the way that the workings of governments and elected officials intrude upon the lives and minds of people who feel generally safe from the immediate effects of such workings. (Moore 2005)

Moore similarly achieves this effect without employing the paraphernalia of postmodernist techniques generally demanded by the trauma genre. Like Shields, Moore demonstrates an awareness of debates, but critiques prescriptive assumptions regarding representation, not only through an apparently anachronistic realist mode, but also, for example, when characters openly state that when it comes to traumatic events, rather than therapeutic remembering, “it is good to forget” (Moore 2009, 243). A further problem of the trauma genre is that its aforementioned aesthetic “rules” begin to shade into value judgements, both aesthetic and moral. Texts which exhibit the disrupted and fragmented experimental aesthetic are thus lauded by critics as morally superior, in ostensibly acknowledging trauma’s complexity. This judgement may be familiar from Holocaust studies, where forms that mirror classic tropes of trauma tend to be valued, but has also emerged in studies of contemporary trauma fiction. Luckhurst, for example, notes that Vickroy “identifies a ‘serious’ and ‘authentic’ trauma literature explicitly against a popular culture” (Luckhurst 2008, 89). Certainly, Vickroy’s study aims in part to establish whether particular trauma aesthetics function to “bring the reader into the disturbing but weighty aspects of the material”, or whether they are, conversely, “too comforting” (Vickroy 2002, 7). She links “self-reflexive, uncertain, ambivalent aspects” of works’ trauma aesthetic and structure with their capacity to offer a “subversive” challenge to “oppressive practices and relations” (Vickroy 2002, 7). As Michael Rothberg has

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noted, however, “[p]recisely because it has the potential to cloud ethical and political judgments, trauma should not be a category that confirms moral value” (Rothberg 2009, 90). As this suggests, in seeking to bestow moral and aesthetic value on a particular type of writing, critics may have exaggerated the alleged subversive qualities of what has in fact become a codified way of representing trauma. Equally damagingly, many of the principal concepts of dominant trauma theory—especially the popularised conception of PTSD—have been so well absorbed into mainstream western culture that the existence of this body of thought has begun demonstrably to influence the ways in which writers of fiction engage with the subject, to the extent where one could envisage writers following these strictures precisely so that their works pass for realistic and convincing representations of traumatic pathology. Without overstating this claim, some of the previously cited works, as well as recent examples such as Nicole Krauss’s Great House and Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, seem at the very least calculated to cater for a readership now well-versed in the formal aesthetic of trauma literature. In this respect, Luckhurst caustically comments that New careers in trauma fiction are still being forged: Jonathan Safran Foer’s tragi-comedies of the Holocaust, Everything is Illuminated […] and 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close […] show every sign of becoming canonical. (Luckhurst 2008, 87)

This returns us conveniently to the start of the essay, and the critical controversy surrounding Foer’s second novel. As suggested above, one of the most dubious aspects of the interdependency between contemporary fiction and criticism in the trauma genre is that the employment of elements from theory by fiction writers has been taken by critics as evidence of the validity of their positions. Indeed, a number of reviewers and critics in the field have constructed what amounts to a critical practice based on a search for elements in literary texts which endorse accepted tenets of trauma theory. This has arguably led to an iatrogenetic vicious circle, whereby dominant theoretical staples inspire works of fiction which are in turn taken to prove trauma theory’s validity. To cite just one example, Whitehead finds that in Fugitive Pieces, “in the childhood experiences of Jakob, Michaels encapsulates Caruth’s notion of ‘missed’ or ‘unclaimed experience’”, thus confirming a value in the fictional work’s employment of the theoretical principle (Whitehead 2004, 53). Articles on Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close also provide a useful illustration—indeed, some of the most egregious examples—of this

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collusive process. As quoted earlier, Codde approvingly registers the presence of dominant features of trauma theory in Foer’s fragmentary narrative strategies. His article, however, neglects the extent to which Foer’s text seems to draw upon extensively disseminated theories of trauma. Indeed, Foer works them through his text so mechanically, transparently, and programmatically that it is scarcely surprising that the novel conforms to trauma genre aesthetics. Similarly, Kristiaan Versluys applauds Foer’s adoption of Judith Herman’s notion of constriction— whereby trauma sufferers inadvertently aggravate trauma symptoms when trying to ward them off—as embodied in the character of Oskar’s grandfather (Versluys 2009, 84-85). Francisco Collado-Rodriguez also writes approvingly of the formal qualities of Foer’s work, while betraying his recognition that the roots of its aesthetic programme lie in the influential trauma theory of writers such as Caruth and Whitehead. Indeed, his essay provides a good example of the “listing [of] elements that must be included” in an “authentic literature of trauma” that Luckhurst criticised in the passage cited above. Unfortunately, instead of interrogating Foer’s acceptance of theory and its transformation into literary form, ColladoRodriguez sets out to test the fiction by its compliance with theoretical models: following Whitehead’s views on trauma fiction, we should evaluate the existence of strategies related to experimentation… Let us now consider if these strategies are traceable in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. (Collado-Rodriguez, 2008, 57)

Unsurprisingly, these elements are plentifully found and, accordingly, noted: Following the already typical patterns of trauma fiction, Foer has wisely combined testimonial elements with different subject perspectives to create a dialogical structure of witnessing that forces readers into an ethical evaluative position. (Collado-Rodriguez, 2008, 59)

The word “wisely” is immensely telling; Foer is, in other words, praised for employing models established by theoretical work on trauma, not least since it reinforces the critic’s own perspective. One might well conversely argue, however, that the methodology of Foer and numerous other authors mentioned above, constructing novels around the prescribed but trite devices of trauma fiction (multiple narrators, disrupted chronology, repetition, flashbacks etc.) produce texts that reinforce dominant but narrow understandings of trauma and thus address the experience on a superficial and, frequently, aestheticised level.

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Traumatic Metafiction As suggested above, certain writers have resisted the demands of the trauma genre. In their predominantly realist work Shields and Moore provide a successful antidote to the ostentatiously avant-garde strategies of the trauma genre. The body of literature termed here “traumatic metafiction” provides a challenge to the dominant aesthetic from a different direction. The label “traumatic metafiction” is deliberately intended to evoke Linda Hutcheon’s earlier term, historiographic metafiction. Just as the works of metafiction noted by Hutcheon self-consciously interrogated conceptions of history, so texts I would class as traumatic metafictions tend to engage with and critique theories of trauma. In other words—and provisionally for the moment—the contingencies of constructing a written narrative about trauma become a central subject for these traumatic metafictions. E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves form part of a lineage of novels that emphasises the process of narrating, in sometimes radical ways. In metafictions such as these, the narrating of trauma, long held by many theorists to be near impossible, is dramatised alongside the traumatic incidents themselves and their consequences. These texts therefore engage more critically with the precepts of trauma theory regarding representation, by foregrounding the narrator actually in the act of inscribing their narrative. In laying bare a number of questions crucially hidden by the conventionally unconventional aesthetic employed by the writers discussed above, this is a considerably more disruptive phenomenon than the combined prescribed elements of the trauma genre. One decisive way in which the inscribed narrator is a more effective tool than methods used by writers of trauma genre literature is that it enables a sceptical attitude towards canonical criticism regarding the necessarily unrepresentable nature of trauma. Caruth, as the preeminent canonical critic, for example, recommends that writers avoid the fruitless task of representation, and instead aim to produce texts which transmit trauma to the reader, suggesting that to do otherwise risks, as Greg Forter observes, “betraying the bewildering, imperfectly representational character of traumatic memory” (Forter 2007, 260). Two elements of this view have, more recently, come under attack: firstly, that trauma is a universal experience, and secondly, that trauma cannot be represented but only transmitted to the reader. The first assertion clearly risks theoretical defeatism, in positing trauma as a fundamental part of the human condition rather than a localised phenomenon that may be, moreover, addressed. In this respect, Dominick LaCapra has usefully sought to

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distinguish between two broad types of traumatic experience, which he terms absence and loss. Whereas absence is structural, general, and may indeed be understood as part of the human condition, loss is historical and located in specific events. LaCapra warns against conflating the two, as a number of critics are wont to do, since this produces “the dubious idea that everyone (including perpetrators and collaborators) is a victim, that all history is trauma” (LaCapra 2001, 64). In terms of representation versus transmission, Forter notes that Caruth’s perspective makes it hard to imagine how we might stop transmitting historical trauma without also failing in the ethically crucial task of remembering (i.e. knowing about) such trauma. (Forter 2007, 280; emphasis in the original)

Diverging significantly from the model suggested by Caruthian trauma theory, fictional texts over recent years have successfully sought innovative narrative means precisely in order to represent trauma, its effects and the potential for recovery. It is worth spending a little time investigating exactly how works of traumatic metafiction carry out this representational and critical task. E. L. Doctorow’s Book of Daniel is a useful precursor to some of the more recent traumatic metafictions, both in terms of form and theme. The continual reminders that what we are reading is (a simulation of) the protagonist’s Ph.D. thesis presents an act of inscribed narrating that serves to underline the psychological fracturing of the character of Daniel, traumatised by the political murder of his parents, and the suicide of his sister. Daniel’s experience of trauma is doubled in the use of inscribed narration: he re-experiences trauma symptoms—as evidenced in the abrupt switches between homo- and heterodiegetic voice—as he writes of the originating events. Doctorow’s innovative formal approach to trauma mirrors the novel’s unconventional thematic focus. Despite his profound experience of trauma and victimisation Daniel is a notably unsympathetic protagonist, prone to self-absorption, resentful anger and, it is implied, violent outbursts that reveal sadomasochistic tendencies. Daniel, in other words, is equally victim and perpetrator. Interestingly, a number of other more recent texts that employ inscribed narration—including Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods and Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream—focus on male characters who are culpable in perpetrating traumatic symptoms in other characters, as well as being themselves trauma victims. It might be argued that this thematic focus, an “illicit” one in terms of conventional trauma theory, forces the more radically metafictional approach that we witness in these texts’ employment of

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inscription.4 Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel, House of Leaves, provides a similarly experimental treatment of the narrating voice, while simultaneously performing a critique of certain facets of dominant trauma theory. The novel is structured around a series of framed discourses, each narrated by a different voice. This is signalled throughout by paratexts as well as text itself; the title page, for example, attributes the novel not to Danielewski, instead labelling it thus: House of Leaves by Zampanò with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant

Zampanò and Truant are fictional characters of the text itself; thus even before we begin the narrative proper, the text challenges our expectations of an originating and identifiable narrating voice and thus any notion of its stable ontological bases. The narrative begins with Johnny Truant finding an unfinished and disorderly manuscript written by the recently deceased Zampanò that purports to provide an analysis of a film (fictional even in Johnny’s world) called The Navidson Record. This film documents the traumatic experience of the Navidson family, on moving in to a new house in Virginia. The family begins to encounter uncanny events: an interior door mysteriously appears, behind which is a more or less infinite labyrinthine darkness which, flouting the laws of physics still further, continually alters its dimensions. The core of the ensuing narrative comprises Zampanò’s “description” (of course, actually a fictional reconstruction within the fictional layer of Johnny’s reality) of Navidson’s filmed record of his and others’ explorations of this void, and their disastrous and traumatic consequences. The text also includes Johnny’s own inscribed narrative, his account of 4

The “illicit” quality would appear to stem from trauma theory’s basis in Holocaust Studies, which, for obvious and justifiable reasons, has little concern with investigating the trauma of the perpetrator. Kansteiner’s queasiness, as evidenced in the following quotation, is typical: “The experiences of perpetrators and some bystanders of violence may still fit the trauma concept, but the pleasures of spectatorship can no longer be reconciled with even the most flexible notion of trauma. Moral honesty and conceptual and historical precision demand that trauma be first and foremost read from the perspective of the victim and only then carefully extended to explore other borderline phenomena” (Kansteiner 2004, 214).

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editing Zampanò’s manuscript and a resultant growing paranoia in his everyday life, suggesting that traumatic incidents in Zampanò’s narrative are transmitted on to him. In suggesting that trauma is readily transmissible across the novel’s unstable ontological borders, the narrative here toys parodically with the more conventional Caruthian perspective on transmission discussed above. That this is a parodic treatment is suggested by Danielewski’s aping of the discourse of trauma studies, specifically with regard to transmissibility. At one point Zampanò considers three competing psychological theories that purport to explain the traumatic after-effects of the events in the Navidsons’ house: In what remains the most controversial aspect of The Haven-Slocum Theory, the concluding paragraphs claim that people not even directly associated with the events on Ash Tree Lane have been affected. The Theory, however, is careful to distinguish between those who have merely seen The Navidson Record and those who have read and written, in some cases extensively, about the film. (Danielewski 2000, 407)

Such transmissibility echoes not only genuine theories of trauma, but also Johnny’s experience; as the (fictional) Haven-Slocum Theory suggests, sure enough he undergoes “an increase in obsessiveness, insomnia, and incoherence” (Danielewski 2000, 407). Zampanò’s detailing of the competing trauma theories and their parodically transparent manifestation in Johnny’s experience thus demonstrate Danielewski’s awareness of actual academic debates in the field. As we shall see, this sceptical attitude towards trauma theory works in tandem with Danielewski’s formal strategies concerning the acts of writing and narrating. Katherine Hayles compares these strategies to those of Heart of Darkness, wherein, as is typical of realist narrative convention, for all its complexity, “there is no recognition in the text of how these multiple oral narrations are transcribed into writing” (Hayles 2002, 784).5 By contrast, House of Leaves is precisely one of those rare novels that carefully stages the transcription of narration into writing that Hayles, Gérard Genette and others correctly note is conventionally elided. Clearly, this inscription of the narrating act represents a minor trend in the literature of traumatic metafiction; Doctorow’s is an originating text in this sense, given that the narrative of The Book of Daniel, as suggested above, purports to be 5 Although she characterises its narrative strategies as comparatively simple, Hayles’s mention of Heart of Darkness is nevertheless appropriate. Conrad’s novel may convincingly be read as a much-imitated precursor text; Marlow displays numerous symptoms of trauma, while the narrating of his story to the crew of The Nellie may be interpreted as an early form of narrative therapy.

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Daniel’s Ph.D. thesis. Following his example, Saleem Sinai in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children gestures towards this act of inscription as he narrates his story of postcolonial trauma. More recent examples of traumatic metafictions making use of the inscribed narrator include examples mentioned above, such as Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, with its indeterminate author-narrator surrogate lurking in the footnotes, and Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream, whose elderly and ailing autobiographical narrator figure tortuously inscribes his traumatic adolescence onto his wordprocessor, as well as Paul Auster’s Oracle Night (2004), whose protagonist-narrator, Sidney Orr, actually seems to become disembodied when he is in the midst of writing down his various traumatic narratives. As if to demonstrate the contiguous character of the trauma genre-traumatic metafiction continuum described in this essay, even sections of Foer’s Everything is Illuminated employ a degree of inscribed narration, in the forms of the various narratives sent between Alex and Jonathan. According to these unconventional practices, the action of inscription involved in the narrating act itself becomes part of the narrative. Thus the complex narratives we encounter in novels such as Danielewski’s incorporate into themselves a simulated version of the narrating act. These novels suggest that writers concerned with exploring the effects of trauma—including, evidently, upon perpetrators—find it useful to work their narrators’ physical task of inscription into their texts. It is, of course, necessary to ask why this particular narrative strategy has become a marker of traumatic metafiction. One answer is simply that inscribed narration—at least until it, too, becomes over-familiar—offers a radical solution to the apparent impasse regarding the unrepresentability of trauma. In texts such as House of Leaves narrating trauma becomes, once more, an experimental act, fraught with doubt, rather than a means to prove certain tenets of existing theory. The misgivings of Johnny Truant, expressed through the numerous contradictions and paradoxes in the layered narratives of House of Leaves, or the agonised “conversations” the elderly Ira conducts with his computer over whether to include certain shameful events from his past in Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream, constitute evolving and contingent commentaries on the trauma narratives with which these narrative acts are imbricated. In these works’ widening the scope of the portrayal of traumatic symptoms to include perpetrators, moreover, the uncertainty communicated to the reader by their witnessing the narrating act in all its tortured contingency also conveys a measure of the crippling guilt which haunts the narrator-protagonists. Perhaps more significantly, another notable effect of inscribed narration is its reintroduction of a chronological dimension into the narrating

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instance. This is a phenomenon that, as Genette points out, is actually very unusual in conventional texts: “the fictive narrating of […] almost all the novels in the world […] is considered to have no duration; or more exactly, everything takes place as if the question of its duration had no relevance” (Genette 1980, 70-71). As the examples above suggest, however, a sense of narrating duration rarely portrayed since the days of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy has become increasingly common in traumatic metafictions.6 One way in which Danielewski explores this is through experiments in typography, wherein some pages are stupendously cluttered with text while others are virtually blank, respectively slowing down and speeding up the reading process. More significant than these ostentatious experiments in typography, however, is the very fact that Johnny’s narrating instance possesses duration. The reader is regularly reminded of this unusual dimension; “Three months have gone by”, for example, by the time we get to Johnny’s editing of Zampanò’s third chapter (Danielewski 2000, 20). This durational element should be understood as a direct and significant challenge to another aspect of trauma theory, especially as popularised through the concept of PTSD and through Caruth’s work, namely the insistence that trauma is sudden and violent in impact.7 Since we are present alongside Johnny’s narrating act we are able to witness the gradually traumatising effect of his encounter with the uncanny, as he edits and transcribes Zampanò’s manuscript. This echoes the inscribed narrations mentioned above, with an incremental and gradual rather than a sudden experience of trauma detectable in the works by Doctorow, Rushdie, Roth, and Auster. In these instances, it is precisely the innovation in form which enables a critique of the widely accepted 6

The terminology with regard to this phenomenon is somewhat opaque and a little imprecise. In Narrative Discourse Genette discusses it, as in the quoted examples, in terms of “duration”, which can lead to confusion as it is an entirely different phenomenon to that discussed elsewhere in the book in his chapter on duration (which refers to discourse rather than narrating speed). The German term Erzählzeit maps onto this phenomenon, albeit somewhat imprecisely, but has not been widely disseminated into English-language narratology. 7 A number of theorists have challenged this assertion recently, especially with regard to the gradual but no less traumatic experience of living under colonial oppression. See, for example, Baxter, K. 2011. “Memory and Photography: Rethinking Postcolonial Trauma Studies.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47 (1): 18–29; and Rothberg, who notes that ‘the “event”- or “accident”-based model of trauma associated with Caruth assumes the circumstances of white, Western privilege and distracts from “insidious” forms of trauma that involve everyday, repeated forms of traumatizing violence, such as sexism, racism, and colonialism’ (Rothberg 2009, 89).

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allegedly instantaneous facet of PTSD. It is also significant that the time period of Johnny’s discourse is ultimately revealed to be circular. To an extent this evokes the typical functioning of trauma, in suggesting that Johnny is locked into repetitive patterns of behaviour. Passages narrated by Johnny towards the end bear the same date as his introduction.8 This circularity presents a further challenge to conventional trauma criticism, in this case to the emphasis placed upon the working through of trauma. In other words, powerful disruptions to the narrating process—including the breaking of narrative frames when Johnny himself encounters readers of a published version of House of Leaves, paradoxical elisions and disjunctions in the narratives of Navidson and Zampanò, and the frequently circular digressions entailed by the labyrinthine footnotes—suggest that this is a narrating instance unlikely to reach a resolution or conclusion. These disruptions render dubious any sense that the narrating act provides Johnny with a conventionally therapeutic sense of closure or recovery. This destabilising of the narrating process therefore signals that in House of Leaves, as in DeLillo’s The Body Artist discussed above, we encounter a failed instance of working through, a proposition reinforced by the traumatised state in which Johnny remains even at the end of his narrating act. Again, texts employing a genuinely experimental form alongside a more sceptical perspective enable a challenge to dominant models, in this case of the comforting notion that trauma is followed inevitably by recovery. While the trauma genre employs ostensibly disruptive narrative devices, these have become over-familiar and generally form part of a conventional narrative of disruption followed by redemptive working through. They are likely to be used, as the discussion of responses to Foer’s work suggested, in ways that reinforce rather than critique widely accepted perspectives on trauma. By contrast, Shields’s informed critique of trauma theory demonstrates that experimental forms are not essential vehicles for thoroughly convincing examinations of the effects of trauma. At the other end of the spectrum, traumatic metafictions can be shown to use more radical and destabilising methods to present a sustained challenge to the tenets of trauma theory. Elements in House of Leaves and other texts, such as their beginning to turn discomforting attention to the experience of the perpetrator, complement radical disruptions at the level of form which similarly attempt to breach the moral and aesthetic prescriptions of trauma theory. 8

Not only is the fact of circularity important, so too is the date itself: 31 October 1998, the appropriateness of which (Halloween) for a text focused so intently on the uncanny hardly needs stating.

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Works Cited Baxter, K. 2011. “Memory and Photography: Rethinking Postcolonial Trauma Studies.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47 (1): 18–29. Caruth, C. 1995. “Trauma and Experience: Introduction.” In Trauma Explorations in Memory, edited by C. Caruth, 3-12. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. —. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Codde, P. 2007. “Philomela Revisited: Traumatic Iconicity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” Studies in American Fiction 35 (2): 241-255. Collado-Rodriguez, F. 2008. “Ethics in the Second Degree: Trauma and Dual Narratives in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated.” Journal of Modern Literature 32 (1): 54-68. Danielewski, M. 2000. House of Leaves. London and New York: Doubleday. Davis, L. J. 1997. “The Encyclopedia of Insanity: A Psychiatric Handbook Lists a Madness for Everyone.” Harper’s Magazine, February. http://harpers.org/archive/1997/02/0008270. Doctorow, E. L. 1971. The Book of Daniel. London: Picador. Forter, G. 2007. “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form.” Narrative 15 (3): 259-285. Genette, G. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by J. E. Lewin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hayles, N.K. 2002. “Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves.” American Literature 74 (4): 779-806. Kansteiner, W. 2004. “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor.” Rethinking History 8 (2): 193-221. LaCapra, D. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Leys, R. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Longmuir, A. 2007. “Performing the Body in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist.” Modern Fiction Studies 53 (3): 528-543. Luckhurst, R. 2008. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge. Mendelsohn, D. 2002. “Boy of Wonders.” New York Magazine, April 22. http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/5903/. Moore, L. 2005. “Keeping Your Fingers Crossed Makes it Difficult to Hold a Pen, But I must Say, It’s Worth It.” [Interview]. The Believer. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200510/?read=interview_moore.

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Moore, L. 2009. A Gate at the Stairs. London: Faber and Faber. Prose, F. 2002. “Back in the Totally Awesome U.S.S.R.” New York Times, April 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/14/books/back-in-the-totallyawesome-ussr.html. Rothberg, M. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP. Shields, C. 2002. Unless. London: Harper Collins. Siegel, H. 2005. “Extremely Cloying and Incredibly False.” New York Press, April 20. http://www.nypress.com/article-11418-extremelycloying-incredibly-false.html. Versluys, K. 2009. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP. Vickroy, L. 2002. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P. Whitehead, A. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

TRAUMA: MOURNING AND HEALING PROCESSES THROUGH ARTISTIC PRACTICE CATHERINE BARRETTE

The exploration of the relationship between art and trauma is a relatively recent phenomenon within the visual art discourse. In my own artistic practice, I have developed numerous ways to respond to my own personal trauma, including self-portraits of my wounded body and other explorations of emotional and physical pain. This reflexive process presents an intimate account of mourning my former identity and examines the processes of healing through artistic practice. On 21 January 1997, I was waiting to cross the street when two vehicles collided. The impact sent a truck careening into me, throwing me against a tree. My injuries included collapsed lungs, brain trauma and swelling, loss of blood, broken bones and tissue damage. My left leg was badly damaged and subsequently amputated above the knee. My artistic practice centres on representing trauma as it serves to mourn deep emotions about my serious accident as a means of making the necessary internal transformations regarding my losses. The artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger uses the term “artworking” to characterize her own painting practice at this threshold between trauma and representation. My practice can be considered a type of psychic working or, in Ettinger’s words, a “transport-station of trauma” worked over time. Such transport-station not only helps to alleviate the pain of loss but also plays a significant role in reclaiming one’s own life (Lichtenberg-Ettinger 2000). I do not remember the accident and have only patchy memories of the first week at the hospital. The injuries were so serious that my doctors doubted that I would survive. My first flashes of reality were of agonizing pain, panic and fear. Doctors and nurses were working on my damaged body and I could register only the confusion and shock of the deeply distressing experience. These initial moments clearly illustrate the Freudian definition of “psychic traumata”: a psychic deformation and

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symbolic wound where the usual way of dealing with or processing an experience fails (Freud 1957b, 6-7). In the months that followed, the ensuing surgeries and medical interventions were effective. I continued physical rehabilitation for my broken bones, amputated leg and traumatic brain injury for several years. The events of this accident caused great discontinuities in my life that would take years to reconcile. At the time of the accident, I was working as a public servant in the Canadian government. After studying and obtaining degrees in political science and later business administration, I worked in several positions and achieved professional success early in my career. During this time, I took part-time courses in art history where the early influences of key professors marked the beginning of my interest in art theory. Eight months after the accident, I returned to work part time and faced difficult physical and emotional sequelae that eroded my strength. It took five years and five different positions to admit my failings and resign myself to letting go of former ambitions. Paradoxically, acknowledging my limitations enabled me to recognize my need to express my ideas through visual means. After resigning from the public service in 2003, I continued taking fulltime studio classes at the University of Ottawa in Visual Arts. Looking back, I realize that my work provided a way for me to engage with the difficult experiences of the accident. During my undergraduate studies, my paintings offered me a necessary means of expression: I was about to transform inner feelings into outer forms. In her own collection of essays Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth, an influential scholar in trauma studies, focuses on defining traumatic events and the complex changes our unconscious emotions have in traumatic reactions. Caruth analyses the origins of the word “trauma” as referring frequently to the notion of a wound that the body is subjected to when injured. In her continued analysis of Freudian literature, Caruth proposes that trauma is inflicted on the mind as well as on the body (Caruth 1996, 3). She illustrates this theory using Freud’s text Beyond the Pleasure Principle and bases her analysis on the psychoanalytic practice of relating traumatic reactions to the unconscious replay of an event that becomes impossible to forget.1 Hidden in the unconscious, the traumatic event is experienced without 1

Caruth describes the text relating to the romantic story told by Tasso in Gerusalemme Liberata. Tancred unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda as written in chapter 3 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.

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reason, in the dreams, nightmares and repetitive acts of the victim as a post-traumatic reaction.2 What is important in traumatic events is that which is not precisely grasped: What returns to haunt the victim, these stories tell us, is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known. (Caruth 1996, 6)

My early works in 2004 and 2005 typified this post-traumatic haunting, a re-encounter with facts that overwhelmed me with shock and grief. At the time, I was involved in a legal tort case with the automobile insurance companies covering the accident damages. During a mediation session, I listened to lawyers read a statement from an eyewitness describing how the truck collided with me, causing my body to be hurled through the air and land against a tree. As I had no memory of the accident because of my brain injury, I was shocked and greatly disturbed by this account. I used my abstract paintings as a post-traumatic response and a type of splitting or dissociation. It was a coping mechanism I used to separate myself from my emotions in order to distance myself from the overwhelming facts I had heard during the mediation session. As Caruth adeptly describes in her theories, the post-traumatic images were not originating from past traumatic events but rather lived in the emotions of the present. The event’s unassimilated nature (in my case, the lack of memory of the accident) returned to haunt me repeatedly. My work in painting was not unlike the psychological work of analysis. I reacted to the facts and events of the accident and began staging potential encounters with objects to mourn lost facets of my life: former ambitions, freedom of movement, cognitive abilities, and identity. My abstract paintings represented a way to hold on to the solidity of my past life. It represented my wanting to hold on to something known. Mourning is the feeling or manifestation of profound sorrow implying deep emotions felt over time. In his book The New Black, Darian Leader describes the process of mourning a lost loved one in the following words:

2

The DSM-IV-TR describes the diagnostic features of post-traumatic stress disorder as the development of characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct or witnessed experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity. For more information see: American Psychiatric Association. 2000. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 463.

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Trauma In mourning, our memories and hopes linked to the one we’ve lost are run through, and each is met with the judgment that the person is no longer there. This process of surveying and reshuffling thoughts and images will eventually exhaust itself, and the mourner will choose life over death. (Leader 2008, 60)

Melancholia differs from mourning in that melancholia involves the unconscious hatred of the lost person—in psychoanalytical parlance “the object”—submerging the subject. In melancholia, we rage against ourselves as we once raged against the lost object because of our unconscious identification with this object. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud observed that there are fundamental differences between what we have lost and what we have lost in the object. Melancholia relates to that second kind of loss; it is the deepest absence of meaning (Freud 1957a). Christine Ross expands on this in The Aesthetics of Disengagement and proposes that, in contemporary art, the loss of original meaning is central to the notion of melancholy. The subject attempts to recover meaning that is impossible to reclaim in any symbolic form. Artistic work can involve practising an aesthetic of disengagement, a process by which artists enact descriptively what occurs in melancholia and depression (Ross 2006). While melancholia is an important theoretical framework for understanding contemporary art, I believe theories on how mourning applies to contemporary imagery are more relevant for me since they relate more accurately to my artistic practice. In the year before applying to graduate school, I completed Rouge (2006), a red and dark brown oil on canvas painting. The red band painted in the middle of the raw canvas is composed of several layers of almost transparent paint, giving the pigment a visceral quality close to the abject secretions of the body. The brown tar stands out like a gesture, a movement or a type of writing. I remember painting the tar gesture in a quick motion to express my anger towards the accident. In a way, what would have been a verbal scream became an expressive symbolic gesture on canvas. I was attempting to fashion a communicable language of sensation and affect to show the experience of trauma. Jill Bennett, an art historian engaged in furthering the study of cultural trauma, proposes that through visual means, the affective quality of artwork contributes to a new understanding of the experiences of trauma and loss (Bennett 2005). Bennett understands affect as the effect a given object or practice has on the viewer and his or her embodied reaction (Bennett 2005, 11). Bennett’s theories broaden Caruth’s psychoanalytical analysis of trauma studies. She proposes a formal innovation: a “communicable language of sensation and affect with which to register

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something of the experience of traumatic memory” (Bennett 2005, 2). According to Bennett, defining this new language for trauma through art opens up a contemporary discourse on the lived experience and memories of trauma. With Rouge, I hoped to represent the conflict and loss surrounding my traumatic experience and thus participate in defining Bennett’s language for trauma.

Fig. 1. Rouge, 2006

A vast majority of my work is about trauma and, during my studies, I was drawn to works by artists dealing with trauma, such as those by Frieda Kahlo. The parallels I drew between Kahlo’s traumatic accident and my own compelled me to analyse how art can be used to describe trauma autobiographically. I admired how Kahlo was able to capture on canvas her life and work in the context of the Mexican Revolution and her chronic physical and emotional pain from childhood polio, a near-fatal traumatic bus accident, many surgeries, isolation and loss. In the self-portrait Broken Column (1944), Kahlo depicts her torso split open while a corset holds her body together. A cracked column inside her torso is a substitute for her spine and nails penetrate her body. The barren, fissured landscape behind her expresses isolation while the nails piercing her skin seem to amplify pain. She stands tall, naked except for a loose

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sheet that she holds around her hips. In Tree of Hope (1946), Kahlo presents two self-portraits that offer insight into the nature of her suffering. In the daytime image on the left, Kahlo lies on a gurney with her back turned to the viewer. Her ruptured scars reveal internal tissue from which blood drips. In the night-time image on the right, Kahlo sits, strong and erect, adorned with a Tehuana costume, holding a corset in her left hand. In her right hand she holds a flag that reads [translation] “Tree of Hope Remain Strong”. I was intrigued by how these paintings juxtapose Kahlo’s injury, treatment, suffering and subsequent relapses with the determination of recovery. I admired the distinctive duality of emotion and physical pain in her paintings and noted how a strong-willed resilience and courage were ever present in them. My investigation of historical work by such artists using traumatic events gave me the courage to tackle head-on the effects of the accident. Once I understood that I, too, could deal with my trauma in my art and had been doing so in a way that was veiled even to me, I painted several artefacts from my tragic event. After finding a picture of the vehicle involved in the accident in a legal document, I painted the fragmented rendition of the remains of the sport utility truck. This painting showed the wrecked front face of a Chevrolet Jimmy painted on a neutral background. The use of dark paint and tar rendered the broken and bent hood, front grill and fender of the vehicle as a sad, forgotten object. This process was my way of what Darian Leader calls “killing the dead” (Leader 2008, 114) and helped symbolically put to rest the imagery of the accident. Leader proposes that killing the dead is an essential part of the work of mourning and a way of loosening one’s bonds to the lost object (Leader 2008, 124). Killing the dead, which involves a symbolic death different from a real biological death, is central to many aspects of popular culture (Leader 2008, 116). Villains rarely only die once and the hero must kill the menacing evil force several times before the film’s conclusion. Harry Potter’s seven-year struggle against the evil Voldermort, his parents’ killer, long-thought dead, is a prime example. Leader argues that for the mourner, a person’s real physical death is different from his or her symbolic death. Specific to each person’s course of mourning, the process of killing the dead makes it possible to create new ties with the living (Leader 2008, 124). As part of my continued process of killing the dead, I painted the remains of the coat I was wearing at the time of the accident. Visible ragged rips in the fabric that ruined the garment evoked the trauma of the tragic day when the emergency workers cut the garment off my body to

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attend to my survival. The coat, stored in my basement for over a decade, had also been a “silent witness” to my long process of recovery. Not unlike a musician practising scales to enhance elements of technique, I drew and painted the coat in different media. The over one hundred drawings were studies of the coat in different positions, reminiscent of repetitive life drawing exercises. In one drawing, I depicted the garment’s dense folds and collar area in an off-centre viewpoint using expressive lines and shading in gouache. Repetition is a significant aspect of trauma, a type of revisiting of intrusive imagery to overcome the difficult experience. The repetition of the coat image was an exploration with form and colour that assisted me in externalizing difficult emotions. Bennett states that much of the work on trauma has its roots in interpreting literature through psychoanalytic models or through art theory (Bennett 2005, 2). She proposes that this limited theoretical framework unduly constrains the analysis for contemporary visual arts. Bennett submits that, since trauma is usually defined as being beyond the scope of language and representation, the visual images of trauma might not be easily adaptable to the logic of representation (Bennett 2005, 3). She also argues that trauma art is “ill served by a theoretical framework that privileges ‘meaning’ (i.e., the object of representation, outside art) over ‘form’ (the inherent qualities or modus operandi of art)” (Bennett 2005, 4). In my case, I did not limit my interest to representing trauma in narrative terms or expressing painful experiences in abstract forms. I represented the objects with the intention of generating emotions for the viewer without necessarily communicating my personal experience; it is through this affective encounter that the viewer engages with my paintings and, in some sense, cannot help but feel it viscerally. Through this process of killing the dead, I discovered how the inside space of the coat became the focus of my attention. This is where my body was subjected to the accident’s trauma, made all the more significant by my lack of memory. My mourning process then led me to explore the body in figurative paintings, worked on tactile surfaces. Sliding (2008), perhaps the piece closest to my imagined re-enactment of the accident scene was inspired by a drawing in an anatomy book for artists. The body lies on the ground face down. Red paint surrounds the scratched out body’s outline as if it is sliding on a large puddle of blood. The composition is dynamic as a result of marks along the body’s borders, scratched lines across the skin and abject fluids that fill the field of vision. Contemporary art theoreticians such as Bennett have suggested in their writing that trauma is experienced between subject and world, between inside and outside; it is always lived and negotiated at that intersection.

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Sliding underscores this liminal space as the red paint is neither inside nor outside the body. The dramatic painting reveals the inner pain and injury of the traumatic experience as a shock inscribed on the skin and flesh. Turning to self-portraits, I hoped to show how traumatic emotion and physical pain are represented in the wounded body.

Fig. 2. Sliding, 2008

Greatly inspired by other artists, I found the courage to use my own body in my artwork. I began taking photographs of my body with a digital SLR camera programmed by computer software to take shots at timed intervals, which eliminated the need for a photographer and allowed me to be alone in front of the camera. My underlying purpose was to explore the registration of my traumatized body, moving through time. I then selected particular poses that focused on dramatic gestures echoing the traumatic scars remaining on my psyche. I then drew my body on paper using charcoal pencils and gouache paints. My body was revealed through the repetition of fragmented lines, allowing only glimpses of certain body parts. Body Series (2009) includes thirty-two drawings depicting an almost filmic rendition of the different poses I photographed myself in. In Body 13, the visible physical wounds and scar of my amputation meet the gaze of the viewer in the forefront of the composition; washed out gouache blotches the body, while repeated lines evoke body movements.

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Fig. 3. Body 13. 2009

Much of my symbolic practice relating to trauma blurs the distinction between the inside and the outside of the body; it encourages a fluid reading in which meaning moves freely. The tumultuous lines and boundaries mirror the violent psychic redefinition of the self’s own territory, often edged by messy paint, metaphorically referring to the body’s abject fluids. The fragmented topography of the drawings and the presence of the gouache signal the violence and traumatic nature of the accident. In my continued research, I became interested in showing how the body is marked by the memories and sensations of painful events. Through a process of experimenting with different materials, I constructed a starfish made of latex rubber. The latex was moulded from the inside portion of check sockets, recycled from the prosthetic lab that has been making my artificial leg since my accident. A check socket is created by taking a plaster cast of the leg stump. A mould is then made from the plaster cast out of thermoplastic materials so that temporary changes can be made to the mould before casting the final socket. After extracting the latex from the socket, I stitched the material together using a surgeon’s knot. I shaped the latex into a starfish using castaway sockets to add volume.

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Fig. 4. Starfish, 2009

Starfish (2009), a yellow-ochre sculpture, strongly suggests the marine species by its five radiating legs and geometrical configuration. The prosthetic sockets create a bulbous body that stretches the latex material around its shape. The grey knots, spaced every two millimetres, construct a bristly line on the top of each arm, with the lines finally joining at the apex of the starfish. I chose the starfish as a way to represent my amputation that was different from drawings. I was intrigued by one of the starfish’s unique biological characteristics: this marine echinoderm has the ability to regenerate a lost limb. I have wished many times that humans had this remarkable capability. I could simply have restored my leg after my loss. The repetitious stitching was a crude analogy of how my prosthetic limb is linked to my body. Completing Starfish made me confront the finality of my amputation and mourn my changed body image, that is, a body that wears a prosthetic leg to achieve mobility. As a way of conveying the psychic trauma of grieving and loss for those who have lost a limb as a result of amputation, I constructed Chandelier (2009). This branched ceiling-mounted sculpture is composed of over a dozen prosthetic sockets hanging from a thick wire. The complex array of sockets is of varying size and materials: thermoplastic (transparent), laminated fibreglass (flesh colour) and carbon fibre (black). The sockets are not quickly perceived—the viewer might not recognize the object, making the visible invisible. The objects haunt the viewer as they encounter items that no longer function the way they once did. The way the sockets hang precariously on the wire evokes pain, while the branched configuration of the entire sculpture suggests how the prosthetic limb is linked to a body. Chandelier is not a direct representation of a traumatized body, but offers a reading of trauma as a long process of mourning and coming to terms with a changed future.

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Fig. 5. Chandelier, 2009

These works engage both the figure and trauma in a reflexive creative process. They deal with the difficult events and painful images of traumatic events, while still producing art that is engaging to the viewer. Leader considers that it is only through identifying with works of artists that successful mourning can be achieved and that the “the place of arts in a culture takes on a new sense: as a set of instruments to help us mourn” (Leader 2008, 86-87). I agree. My experience confirms that a commitment to artistic practice can transform trauma and assist all of us in coming to terms with the wounds and suffering of tragic incidents.

Works Cited Bennett, J. 2005. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Cultural Memory in the Present). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP. Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Freud, S. 1957. “Mourning and Melancholia”. In A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by J. Rickman, 124-140. New York: Liveright. Freud, S. 1957. “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis.” In A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by J. Rickman, 3-37. New York: Liveright. Leader, D. 2008. The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression. London: Hamish Hamilton.

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Lichtenberg-Ettinger, B. 2000. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Artworking, 1985-1999. Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts. Ross, C. 2006. The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

TRACES OF TRAUMA: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF ORI GERSHT ALEXANDRA STARA

Ori Gersht was born in Israel in 1967 and lived there until 1988. He then moved to London, where he studied and began practicing photography. His own story and that of his extended family, who originate from Poland and what is now the Ukraine, are woven through with the serial violence and ethnic conflict of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the fraught history of the state of Israel, which continues to this day. Throughout his career, the largest part of Gersht’s work is associated with journeys he takes to places across the world that have witnessed or are still witnessing conflict. Gersht photographs—and sometimes films— the landscape of these places, carefully selecting his frames so that any references to the identity of location are extremely oblique if not entirely absent. His images are technically sophisticated, pushing the boundaries of the camera and what it can record through such devices as overexposure or movement, which further intensify the abstraction of representation. The titles of photographs and the series they compose are short and oblique, occasionally hinting at their significance, but helping little with how we might begin to look at them or the extent of what might be at stake. The series Ghost from 2004 was made in Israel, in the region of Galilee, which borders the Lebanon in the north and has a large Arab population (Fig. 1). Olive trees are loaded with religious and cultural meanings for all the inhabitants of the region, being the symbol of peace, as well as signifying the bond between the people and the land, and thus the continuity of history.1 These trees are also entangled in the current Israeli-Palestinian territorial disputes, spreading indiscriminately, as they do, across a physical and symbolic divide. 1

Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Collins. 1995. includes perhaps one of the most evocative recent analyses of the deeply-rooted cultural significance of trees.

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Fig. 1. Olive #13, from Ghost, 2004

Gersht’s images in this series were taken at high noon and were overexposed, so the trees have a ghost-like quality dissolving and disappearing into the earth and the sky, leaving only traces behind. Gersht writes: My practice investigates the themes of history’s violence, the poignancy of time’s indifference to what passes, and the cyclical relation between past, present, and future; the flow of movement and its sudden arrest in both still photographs and film-loop installations. The work has taken on the topical dimensions of these themes elliptically, rather than literally; exploring the visual dialectics of what was but no longer is, of what presents itself to the eyes as arrested and frozen or ever returning presence, but which is finally an eternal absence, something missing-in-action and gone forever.2

Gersht’s art is not overtly “about trauma”. To use Jill Bennett’s expression for the art she discusses in her book Empathic Vision, in such work “the trauma is not evinced in the narrative component or in the

2

Artist’s statement given to the author.

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ostensible meaning, but in a certain dynamic internal to the work” (Bennett 2005, 1). The aim of Empathic Vision is to argue that it is possible to conceive of the art of trauma and conflict as something other than the deposit of primary experience, which remains “owned” and unshareable even once it is communicated. (Bennett 2005, 6)

Ori Gersht’s work can be read in those terms, as structuring a dialectics of absence via a further distancing or stylisation through knowing references to the history of art, but which, at the same time, allow for the engendering of affect. Gersht’s images are poised between revelation and concealment, between a “bringing-to-appearance”—the classical role of art as techne— and a “making strange”—an attitude associate with Baroque art, which eschews full disclosure as inadequate for the communication of the complexity of its meaning. The Heideggerian “unconcealment”, or aletheia,3 the Greek word for truth, in Gersht’s work thus takes place between cognition and affect, operating as an opening of the realm of trauma to the intersubjective that does not challenge the authenticity of the original event but enhances its relevance. The series White Noise (1999-2000) was made on a train journey through Poland—from Krakow to Auschwitz and Belzec. To quote Joanna Lowry, Gersht is not only photographing a place, but also a history (Lowry 2002, 153). The images are taken through the window of a moving train (Fig. 2). We can effectively “see” the passing of time through the marks left by the landscape speeding by—although it is of course, the train that moves—the physical landscape, but also the historical one. These marks seem like the traces of erasure, the blurring of form to the point of unrecognisability. But traces remain and this is the hinge of Gersht’s work and its proposition in terms of historical memory, and how we might engage with it. Footprints is one the most representational images in White Noise, while simultaneously being nearly invisible, showing an almost perfect white expanse. The barely discernible footprints of the title record the impression of a human’s passing through the snow, soon to be completely erased by further snowfall. The picture was taken at Birkenau.

3

See Heidegger, M. 1975. “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by A. Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row.

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Fig. 2. Untitled #4, from White Noise, 1999-2000

Joanna Lowry suggests that the notion of the footprint “has always been a prime example of the index as a sign caused by the pressure of an event”. “Photography”, she continues, “is characterised by its indexicality as the light from some real event impressing itself upon the film gives a photograph its evidential force”. But, she concludes, this picture, poised on the brink of erasure, also foregrounds the limitations of photography’s ability to represent history (Lowry 2002, 154). Conceived in relation to the problem of history and the elusive nature of the reality of the past, philosopher Paul Ricœur proposes the notion of the trace in order to capture the ambiguity and obliqueness which are essential for the understanding of something predominantly absent, something that has passed, yet also formative of the present and therefore still somehow here. Ricœur writes that the only way to engage with history in the modern world is through the recognition and empowerment of the remainder, or “trace”. In the absence of the eternal presence of the present of traditional cultures, and against a “history” entirely conditioned by the prevailing prospect of the future, the trace is the only medium through

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which the reality of the historical past can be rendered. Ricœur understands trace as an analogue, as the dialectic between same and different, between re-enactment and distance. It is only in this “between” that something “past” can make sense: The past is indeed what is to be re-enacted in the mode of the identical. But is so only to the extent that it is also what is absent from all our constructions. The analogue, precisely, holds within it the force of reenactment and of distancing, to the extent that being as is both being and non-being. (Ricœur 1984, 36)

Fig. 3. The Mountain, from Liquidation, 2005

In 2005 Gersht undertook another journey, to the towns of Kolomiya and Kosov in the Ukraine, wherefrom his wife’s family originates. The personal accounts of Nazi persecution by those family members who survived it inspired Gersht’s body of work there, Liquidation and The Forest. Liquidation echoes the series White Noise from five years earlier, as it is also mostly shot from a train. The repetition of this device is significant, as it reflects the repetition of circumstances that have rendered this place also, among so many others, a site of trauma: persecution, ethnic cleansing, a train journey… In this series, however, the landscapes taken

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from the train window, blurred from movement, are interspersed with a few shots of remarkable stillness, with a strong painterly feel, of the towns themselves (Fig. 3). These calm, almost picturesque scenes contrast strongly with the frantic abstraction of the train shots and suggest an altogether different temporality. They are at once timeless and of a different era, like monochrome photographs of a snowy rural idyll from the early days of photography. These almost nostalgic scenes appear as if the abjection of their history may be forgotten, but perhaps what is forgotten is the idyll itself, fading from overexposure to the mercilessness of history. Accompanying the stills of Liquidation is the film The Forest shot in the woods around the town of Kolomiya. At 13 mins the film consists of a series of slow, almost processional pans across groups of trees. At certain points, individual trees fall, although it is not shown how or why, and the camera seems to capture these almost accidentally, as it proceeds through its slow movement. The hush of the forest is interrupted by the hugely amplified sound of each crash. And the process starts all over again. The metaphor for “felling” which is clearly at work here, as well as the idea of witnessing, are fundamental to the work, but so is the enormously affective experience it offers, through a combination of image and sound. Returning to Paul Ricœur, the argument for the rehabilitation of analogy—that is, a metaphoric device—in the reading of history flies in the face of established conventions of a science of history based on such positivist principles as objectivity and totality. Ricœur’s proposition points towards a rehabilitation of modes of thinking and being that allow for the poetic, elliptical and experiential to complement the rational, conceptual and complete as essential correctives in the pursuit of the “real” and the “true”. This important philosophical proposition is resonant with Jill Bennett’s more specific argument about art and its ability to engage with trauma in a meaningful way. Bennett suggests that such art operates as a junction of the affective and the cognitive, where the affect becomes a better catalyst for thought than any explicit reference or sign, because it gathers up deeper layers of our consciousness linked to feeling and the senses, rather than just the conceptual. Gersht’s series Evaders was shot in the sublime landscape of the Pyrenees, along the Lister Route between France and Spain. The route has a long history of use by refugees of all sorts of persecutions including during WWII and Nazi-occupied France.

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Figs 4 & 5. On Edge (top) and Fix in time, both from Evaders, 2009

The philosopher Walter Benjamin famously committed suicide there in September 1940, after making the crossing but finding the borders to Spain closed. As with Liquidation and The Forest, Evaders consists of stills and a film, the latter being a dual projection showing a man walking the Lister Route, on one screen, and his surroundings, on the other. Not a re-enactment of Benjamin’s fateful journey, Evaders conjures up ideas of flight—from place and time—the futile combating of elements and man’s loneliness in the face of nature and history’s indifference. This body of work marks a departure for Gersht in that it focuses on a person. However, it is arguably the landscape that remains the real protagonist. As with all his work, the historic and geographic specificity, which is essential to the work on first encounter, quickly dissolves into something else, something broader and vaguer, more universal and less graspable. Gersht knowingly operates in the tradition of the Romantic landscapes, with the panoramic frames, atmospheric light and mists of German painters and Caspar David Friedrich in particular (Figs 4&5). Although there are obvious tensions with the national and ethnic associations of this work—the Jew trapped in a Germanic landscape— more important is the evocation of the existential philosophy accompanying this tradition of art; placing emphasis on “becoming” rather than being, on incompletion, ambiguity and the refusal, or rebuttal, of the Enlightenment ideal of the transparency and graspability of the world. Gersht himself has repeatedly stated that he is interested in representing metaphysical space rather than just geographical (K. Stout 2002, 138).

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Fig. 6. Still from film Evaders, 2009

Behind the temporality of history alluded to in Gerhst’s images, there is another—the temporality of nature, that is, cosmological time. The sublime landscapes of snow, desert or mountains of the Romantic tradition allude to nature as the perhaps indifferent but enduring ground, the expanses of eternity, on which the vicissitudes of history leave faint, transient marks. In this light, drawing from Jill Bennett again, Gersht’s images can be seen to belong to the kind of work that, through its refusal to depict atrocity, shifts its focus away from the traumatic confrontation towards a more enduring experience of traumatic memory and grief. The work is not intent on triggering a reductivist shock response through “trauma signifiers”, but it opens up instead a place transformed by pain. Bennett continues: Rather than addressing trauma as a physical or inner phenomenon [the work] treats it as having a physical extension in the world. As well as being a temporal phenomenon, traumatic memory is envisaged as folding into space in a way that leaves manifest traces: not simply marks that tell a story of the past, but indications of a lived present, of a mode of inhabiting both place and memory. (Bennett 2005, 70)

Precisely the function of Ricœur’s trace, present yet simultaneously of the past. Ori Gersht says that he always finds himself “drifting towards the poetic” (Stout 2002, 141). Aesthetically his images consistently reference the tradition of western painting and the very idea of the aesthetic as such. This engagement with a history of an altogether different kind—art history—might be seen as compromising, even inimical to, the realm of collective trauma he is addressing through his subject matter. However, I would argue that this overt aestheticisation and attachment to a cultural history is a gesture of intent, acknowledging the essential role that art, understood as fundamentally symbolic representation, has to play on the sociopolitical, ethical and ultimately metaphysical scale. It is also important to bear in mind that the “poetic” is not the same as the

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“aesthetic”, although in contemporary discourses the two tend to be conflated. Originating from poeisis, the poetic is closer to “making”—“a kind of creative making, an elaboration on the real for the purposes of disclosure of meaning via sensual experience (with aesthesis, of course, original meaning “sense”).4 The “poetic” therefore, that Gersht finds himself attracted to could also be seen as the constitutive element of art. All art is essentially poetry, Heidegger reminds us (Heidegger 1975, 72). Gerhst’s retreat into the schema of art history situates the works in a cultural tradition and wrests them from the province of the personal and perishable. As various recent theorists of trauma have convincingly argued, the suspicion against the image as an appropriate medium for engaging with trauma is ultimately a limitation of culture’s responsibility to address the violence of history and its repercussions. Whilst trauma as such remains deeply personal and unrepresentable, traumatic historical events can and must be brought into the collective imaginary. Particularly the image as art rather than documentary, “relieved from the singular burden of veracity” (Guerin and Hallas 2007, 9), is in a uniquely privileged position as a transformative phenomenon for simultaneously engendering the critical and the poetic, the cognitive and the affective. It acknowledges the inevitable, necessary distance from the personal immediacy of trauma to allow for culture to bear witness. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas write that in the long tradition of western art—with its roots in religious art—the image offers the experience of a personal encounter with something effectively absent, through its “iconic presence”—a term they borrow from Hans Belting, which denotes a presence that maintains within it an essential absent. This experience, rather than considered vicarious or a compromise, is understood to be at its most authentic, precisely because of the elusiveness of its subject (Guerin and Hallas 2007, 10). Thus, continue Guerin and Hallas, the image’s role in the process of bearing witness can be seen to rely not upon a faith in the image’s ability to provide empirical evidence of the event, but upon a faith in the image’s phenomenological capacity to bring the event into iconic presence and to mediate the intersubjective relations that ground the act of bearing witness. […] These intersubjective relations generated by the presence of the image open up a space for a witness who did not directly observe or participate in the traumatic historical event. The 4

See Gadamer, H.-G. 1986. “The Relevance of the Beautiful.” In The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, translated by N. Walker, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.

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In this light, the liquid landscapes of Ori Gersht, with their traces disappearing into mists and their specificity dissolving into layers of histories, are perhaps not only talking about erasure and defeat, but also about a tentative overcoming. To talk about healing may be too ambitious a claim, but situating trauma in the ground of culture and art opens it up to the possibility of a communal witnessing, transcending place, time and personal circumstance, and, thus engendering a transformation from personal recollection and suffering to cultural memory and shared responsibility.

Works Cited Bennett, J. 2005. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford: Stanford UP. Gadamer, H.-G. 1986. “The Relevance of the Beautiful.” In The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, translated by N. Walker, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge UP. Guerin, F. and Hallas, Roger, eds. 2007. The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture. London: Wallflower. Heidegger, M. 1975. “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by A. Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row. Lowry, J. 2002. “Documents of History, Allegories of Time.” In Afterglow: Ori Gersht, exhibition catalogue, 153-166. Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Ricœur, P. 1984. The Reality of the Historical Past. Milwaukee: Marquette UP. Schama, S. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Collins. Stout, K. 2002. “Katharine Stout in conversation with Ori Gersht.” In Afterglow: Ori Gersht, exhibition catalogue, 137-144. Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

THE TRAUMA OF SUBURBIA: IMAGES OF THE FRINGE THOMAS WAITZ

Fig. 1. “Die neue Straße (1932)”

The New Road The picture shows the new road. On the left-hand side woodlands, some white objects in front of it, barely visible. On the horizon are hills, barely silhouetted against a grey sky. The road extends from the front to the middle ground, a straight line towards the vanishing point. We cannot perceive the end of the road, all vehicles are absent. The landscape opened up by the image seems to be as empty as the road. A paved thoroughfare of smooth concrete, it cuts through the landscape leaving high embankments on its sides, overcoming all geographic obstacles. Who

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made this picture? On which occasion and for what purpose? We will not find the slightest hint of the actual location of this road, nor where it leads. What we see is not a signifying image, in the sense that it would show us a specific place. What we see is an image per se, an emblematic image, epitomising the very idea of a road. This is what the image makes us see: the paradigm of the road.

In-Between The lyrics of Autobahn, a pop song composed in 1974 by Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, members of German electronic band Kraftwerk, might serve as a caption for this image: Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal Die Sonne scheint mit Glitzerstrahl Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band Weiße Streifen, grüner Rand1

Set in the rough typeface of a mechanical typewriter, these lines are printed on the back cover of the German edition of Paul Virilio’s essay Véhiculaire, published in 1978. Virilio’s work is generally taken to be the expression of one specific idea: in modernity space is collapsing and vanishing, Virilio says, and that is a result of an all-pervasive acceleration in society, especially felt in traffic and transportation. As a consequence, all the places in-between are erased from our perception—we pass them too quickly to perceive them. And this is what makes their experience traumatic. According to Kraftwerk we could call this eradicated space the “green fringe”. Paul Virilio says: The street wants not to be bound to its surrounding landscape anymore. It seeks geometric abstraction and uniformity. Speed evokes emptiness, and emptiness evokes speed… (Virilo 1978, 91)

But is it really speed that causes the deflating of space? Or is speed more like the “catalyst” of a specific gaze, with the impression of emptiness then the generic effect on the images of this gaze? Paul Virilio says that the experience of speed results in the so-called “loss of vision” (Virilo 1978, 25) of the passenger—and although he does not make this 1

Translation: ‘In front of us is a valley / The sun is shining in glittering light / We drive, drive, drive on the motorway / The surface of the road is a grey band / White stripes, green fringe’.

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connection explicit, in some respect this idea resembles Walter Benjamin’s understanding of modern experience as “shock”.2 According to Virilio, the shock of modernity, which equals the shock of speed, leads to a double question: “What remains of the world? What remains of us?” (Virilo 1978, 31). One might say that Virilio is arguing from a culturally pessimistic and defensive position, and what he suggests remains evidently apodictic. However, it seems to be obvious that the idea of speed and acceleration as decisive for cultural change has been a key concept in cultural theory for a long time. But the idea that modernity liquidates the “real” or “concrete” sites in-between raises a certain problem. If accepted, it would make it impossible to define such spaces. They would remain erased, withdrawn from perception. In order to answer Virilio’s double question, I would like to resist his nihilistic impulse and actually look at this “green fringe”, the landscape interface between town and country. My aim is to study the visual culture of this space, its imagery and the gaze that creates it. I will argue that the cultural invention and social creation of this landscape is based on certain visual practices, which are themselves the result of trauma—the trauma of modernity.

Visual Culture of the Rural-Urban Fringe The picture illustrated above, depicting an empty street within a (seemingly) empty landscape, has been made on a special occasion: the opening of a 20-mile long motorway, leading from Cologne to Bonn, by Lord Mayor Konrad Adenauer on August 6th, 1932. The image has been printed on the front cover of monthly magazine Die Autobahn, Organ der HAFRABA e.V., entitled, “Der Beginn einer neuen Ära” [The beginning of a new era]. In fact, this opening marks a significant event in transportation history. What is called the A 555 today is the first publicly accessible motorway in Germany.3 The new road and the technological progress that made it simultaneously possible and necessary fill people with enthusiasm. A letter to the editor of one of the local newspapers reads: 2

Benjamin relies on a specific Freudian concept, the idea that consciousness is a shield protecting the organism against stimuli. See also Buck-Morss, S. 1992. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62 (10/1): 3-41. 3 See Kunze, T. and Stommer, R., eds. 1982. Reichsautobahn. Pyramiden des Dritten Reichs. Analysen zur Ästhetik eines unbewältigten Mythos. Marburg: Jonas.

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A different reader argues that the real purpose of the new road is the fast transition between the two cities. “The seven hills [the nearby Siebengebirge, T.W.] greet from a distance. As quick as possible the driver seeks to conquer the plain” (Generalanzeiger Bonn 1932a), he declares. Apparently the new road changes the way the area between Bonn and Cologne is perceived, and, for a start, that means that the area is literally seen en passant. Even before this new perception becomes a common and casual experience for the driver, it marks a change in rhetoric, in semantics and changing cultural attributions, which initialise and establish it. At the same time—and decisively—this change is based on the visual evidence given by photography. Reversing Virilio’s argument, the so-called “prevailing” over distance does not wipe out space at all, but instead produces a different relation to space, and a space in its own right. The rural-urban fringe is an effect of a highly “modern” visual culture. This is all the more interesting as this visual culture, the multifarious images as well as the implicit or blatant value judgements associated with the “new” kind of space, add up to an actively produced image politics of the fringe. These image politics convey the expression of a cultural desire for and after modernity: After modernity, because this desire is articulated at the supposed end of the project of modernity. For modernity, because it is a desire aiming at modernity, since “to be modern” actually and always means “to become modern”. In this sense, modernity has never been a state of being; it has always been a promise—the promise of rationality, of subjectivity and of sense. But we all know, from our own experiences with modern technology to the cultural “occurrence” of the Shoah, that modernity will not deliver on its promises, and that it will continuously fail to fulfil the very hopes for progress and expectations of advancement. This failure is what upsets intellectuals and academics most, to the extent that they consider it a constant indignity. What else could be more insulting than the mere existence of something like the rural hinterland, a tributary area that is literally left behind, in space and time, and needs to be extinguished from perception. This is the underlying idea behind the 4

See also Strohkark, I. “Die Wahrnehmung von ‘Landschaft’ und der Bau von Autobahnen in Deutschland, Frankreich und Italien vor 1933.” PhD thesis, Berlin: Universität der Künste, 2001.

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imaginary yet powerful geography of the fringe, Virilio’s “placeless place” (Virilo 1978, 17), empty of man, blamed for what Edward Relph calls “placelessness” (Relph 1976). Not inherently “non-places” themselves, the places on the margins of modernity get cut off, become redundant, and, eventually, seem to be infected by the characteristics of what Marc Augé calls “supermodernity” (Augé 1995). What remains of the world? What remains of us? An image of the fringe. The indignation about this intrinsic trauma of modernity is mirrored in one brief dictum: “That this fustiness is allowed to exist—that is a scandal” (Piller 2007).

Hiking the Fringe The one who wrote this sentence is German photographer Peter Piller. Piller was invited by the Beethovenstiftung, a distinguished art trust, to hike on a circular route around the city of Bonn. The title of his project and the subsequent exhibition is Peripheriewanderung [Hike at the periphery]. The sentence quoted above, an expression of profound dissatisfaction with the assumed backwardness of the villages and neighbourhoods he visited, can be found printed on the cover of the artist’s book (Piller 2007). During the hike, which took him eight days, Piller shot a series of black and white and colour photographs. Also, he sketched a couple of drawings associated with specific sections of his journey. Afterwards, Piller composed short prose works compiled from audio recordings he had made during the journey. By assembling these fragments of text, the author reconstructs his hike at Bonn’s “periphery” as an experience of indifferent placelessness. One of the short texts, written in verse, goes, the vague zoning of the gardens, the hallways as a honest no man’s land, the transition from used land to fallow, the helplessness of the adolescent about lakes of spit at terminus. (Piller 2007)

Another depiction combines phenomena of nature with the mundanity of everyday life and the automobile: the seemingly senseless gentleness of vespertine rays of sun on the carport (Piller 2007)

The senselessness and placelessness Piller applies to the fringe revokes bourgeois ideas of modernity and their immanent concepts of subjectivity,

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cohesion, and order. Attributions of senselessness, of placelessness or the assertion of a loss of place in a comprehensive sense, their pictorial or literary depictions—a carport plunged in the sun—can be read as what Jean-François Lyotard calls a postmodern “loss of profoundness”, a loss of “feelings, experiences and memories” (Lyotard 1991). Dutch cultural philosopher René Boomkens points out that the intent to be modern has always been associated with a specific lifestyle, with speed, an engineered environment and living in the city (Boomkens 1988). In fact, the idea of modernity draws upon a two sided spatial concept: on the one hand the big city, offering a dissociated, “cool” way of modern life, and on the other a life in the countryside and small towns, characterised by intimacy and backwardness—the yet to become modern fringe. In his famous text on “Metropolis and Mental Life”, Georg Simmel regards the “intellectualistic quality” of life in the modern city “as a protection of the inner life against the domination of the metropolis” (Simmel 1903, 185-206). But Simmel’s dichotomy dates from 1903, and nowadays, one might argue, the lifestyle formerly linked to the big city has become ubiquitous. In fact, urban planning and settlement geography have developed concepts which prevail over antagonisms of “centre” and “periphery”, of developed cities and rural areas, and even of the existence of an urban hinterland. This is “Where We Live Now” (Sieverts 2008), as Thomas Sieverts puts it. “Our fascination with the myth of the city distorts our perception of the periphery’s realities” (Sieverts 2008, 31).

A Desire for Modernity At the end of Peripheriewanderung the first-person narrator characterises the hike as a violation of distance, relating to both meanings of distance: the avoidance of familiarity, aloofness or reserve and distance referring to the more remote part of what is visible or discernible: intruded into the inside of an empty house and the pictures of it not in this book [...] Someone slept here rolled up nothing makes me fear not even sincere things unwillingly i sneak away like a criminal out of this sort-of Bonn which does not exist anymore

A picture of loss and shame, and a blank space—the image of what Piller depicts remains unseen. The fact that it is not included in the book

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might remind us of Roland Barthes’s essay “La chambre Claire” and the fact that the picture Barthes is most interested in is missing in this book as well: the one of his dead mother (Barthes 1980). The place where the trauma originates is a non-place, an utopian place: the rupture between consciousness and perception. Trauma hits us with such speed that it leaves a rupture in our sensation, but it does not leave an image, as Jacques Lacan has pointed out. According to Roland Barthes, photography is impervious to displacement, since photographic pictures are not classifiable and, therefore, cannot be entrusted to an archive. From this we could argue that one purpose of photography could be that of making the trauma explicit and consumable. But at the same time, the images of empty streets and Peter Piller’s rhetoric images of the periphery remain empty—“empty” in terms of what Barthes calls the traumatic “punctum”, the point beyond the things “shown” in images, a point of presence. This, then, would be the reason why pictures tend to reiterate.

Means of Transportation

Fig. 2. Hans-Christian Schink, A 71—bei Traßdorf, 1999

Hans-Christian Schink took the photograph A 71—bei Traßdorf in 1999 (Fig. 2). Though it is unlikely that he draws directly from the one of the “new road” between Bonn and Cologne, similarities in framing, perspective and motif are obvious. I have taken this picture from a series entitled Verkehrsprojekte Deutsche Einheit [Traffic Projects German Reunification] (Schink 2004). In this series Schink presents photographs of newly built infrastructure projects. We see supporting pillars of bridges,

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gaunt motorway exits made of concrete in front of pale fields, and grey motorway embankments in a landscape always devoid of man. Taken in front of a mealy sky and shot in the manner of the Düsseldorfer Schule of Bernd and Hiller Becher, they offer geometric rigour in diffused light. Once again, looking at this image we are reminded of the opening question: where does this road lead to? Turning our view to the horizon will not give us an answer. This road leads to us. The underlying concrete of the road breaks off at the lower margin of the picture. What we see is a deeply romantic image; an image that points out to the far distance, while simultaneously addressing the spectator, thus exhibiting the both desired and feared anti-humanism of our times; a subjectless emptiness, a gesture of the still unfulfilled and ever unfinished modernity.

Works Cited Augé, M. 1995. Non-Places. Introduction of an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London/New York: Verso. Barthes, R. 1980. La Chambre claire. Note sur la photographie. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil/Cahiers du cinéma. Boomkens, R. 1988. Drempelwereld. Moderne Ervaring en Stedelijke Openbaarheid. Rotterdam: NAI. Buck-Morss, S. 1992. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62 (10/01): 3-41. “Eröffnung der modernsten Autostraße Europas. Bonn-Köln in 15 Minuten.” Generalanzeiger Bonn, 4 August, 1932. Kunze, T. and Stommer, R., eds. 1982. Reichsautobahn. Pyramiden des Dritten Reichs. Analysen zur Ästhetik eines unbewältigten Mythos. Marburg: Jonas. Lyotard, J.-F. 1991. Leçons sur l'Analytique du Sublime. Paris: Galilée. “Mit hundert und mehr klm. Geschwindigkeit über die neue Autostraße.” Generalanzeiger Bonn, 16 July, 1932. Piller, P. 2007. Peripheriewanderung Bonn. Archiv Peter Piller, Materialien (B), Frankfurt a.M.: Revolver. Relph, E. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Schink, H.-C. 2004. Verkehrsprojekte Deutsche Einheit. Hatje Cantz: Ostfildern-Ruit. Sieverts, T. 2008. “Where We Live Now.” In Where We Live Now. An Annotated Reader, edited by M. Stadler, 21-84. Portland: Lulu.com. Simmel, G. 1903. “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben.” In Die Großstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, edited by T. Petermann, 185-206. Dresden: Zahn & Jaensch.

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Strohkark, I. “Die Wahrnehmung von ‘Landschaft’ und der Bau von Autobahnen in Deutschland, Frankreich und Italien vor 1933.” PhD thesis, Berlin: Universität der Künste, 2001. Virilio, P. 1978. Fahrzeug. Berlin: Merve [Original: Virilio, P. 1975. “Véhiculaire.” In Nomades et Vagabonds, edited by J. Berque, P. Virilio, J. Ziegler, et al., 61-68. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, Paris.]

9/11, TELEVISION COMEDY, AND THE IDEOLOGY OF “NATIONAL TRAUMA” PHILIP SCEPANSKI

As a media-friendly performance, 9/11 was likely the single most visible event in American history. It proved particularly iconic since the first attack ensured that a large number of cameras in America’s news capital were trained on the World Trade Center as the second airliner collided with the tower and both eventually collapsed. Thus, unlike many other narratives that could arguably be defined as the United States’ “'national traumas”—slavery, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, Watergate, and so forth—the New York theatre of September 11 was more readily available for American television’s ability to report, revisit, and seemingly obsess over the primarily television-made collective experience of national witness. It is no wonder then, that the echoes of 9/11 have been heard again and again in every corner of American culture. Television and other media outlets turned the events of that morning into an immense discursive knot as little in the American mass media escaped the shadow of 9/11 for some time. Indicative of what E. Ann Kaplan identifies as media-constructed “vicarious trauma”, these images proved distressing to many viewers in the US (Kaplan 2005, 39-41; 87100). Though it is unlikely that many television witnesses were clinically traumatized by this coverage, it is certain that repetitive narration of the event assumed the individual subject to be traumatized and thus positioned him/her as such. But though it is tempting to simply focus on serious engagements with 9/11, it is perhaps more enlightening when trying to construct a more thorough picture of the American television landscape to compare news coverage with more irreverent and subversive examples from other genres. Comedy, despite its assumed inconsequentiality, thus proves vitally important. Representations of these events were and continue to be weighted with ideological baggage. It is not surprising then that as 9/11 moved beyond the confines of news and documentary and into television’s other generic discourses, such issues continued to be analysed and debated. And as

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coverage wore on, the cultural engagement with these events necessarily changed. Of course, time and perspective shifted the debates present within the public sphere. But so too did the discursive frames in which these debates could be argued. News and documentary coverage concerned itself primarily with facts although these genres also engaged with more affective issues such as the emotional suffering of victims’ families. Drama programmes often concerned the same set of issues, though they placed more emphasis on affect than did news. However, once these events became available to comedy, the attitudes and representations changed. Among television content, comedy is particularly worthy of attention due to its unique ability to explore more imaginative scenarios as well as what can and cannot be said at particular moments in time.1 On a comedy programme, for example, children can assault Osama bin Laden, playing to an angered community’s bloodlust. But by the same token, comedy also demonstrates more unique and subversive attitudes, calling into question both political and public reactions to the events. In a sense then, while news and drama create an ideology of trauma by repeating the facts and emotional reactions to such events, comedy offers some refuge from their tone, even as it repeats the events in its parodies. But while comedy offers up television’s most subversive voices, it must also rely on and thus reinforce certain deeply rooted ideologies such as nationalism. The cultural tendency to mull over such events in news and parody suggests psychoanalytic theories on how individual subjects deal with trauma through repetition and rehearsal (Freud 1950). It would be easy to misconstrue the mechanisms at work here as constitutive of some sort of trauma to the volksgeist as if mass media served as the mind of the social body. But while the way that culture deals with events like 9/11 has elements in common with a more individualist notion of psychological trauma and may at times serve as a useful metaphor, subjects and cultures are ultimately too complex and unique to be unproblematically mapped onto one another. The use of the word “trauma” can be troubling when scholars uncritically equate the stresses of witnessing a mediated disaster with that of clinical trauma. This is not to malign the work of pioneers such as Cathy Caruth in their quest to examine how individual subjects express 1

Bakhtin, M. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Edited by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP.; Bakhtin, M. 1981b. “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” In The Dialogic Imagination, edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist, 41-83. Austin: U of Texas Press.; Bakhtin, M. 1981a. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination, edited by M. Holmquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holmquist, 259-422. Austin: U of Texas P.

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and/or work through their individual traumas in art and media (Caruth 1996). But there must be caution in using the word so as to not diminish the suffering of actual trauma survivors. And rather than blithely accepting the discursive construction of collective trauma, scholars should instead examine how such subject positions and ideologies are created and negotiated in mass culture. In dealing with issues such as these, the term “ideology” can have different implications. On the one hand, the classically liberal definition uses the word to mean a conscious and coherent set of beliefs: liberal, Christian, etc. Obviously, such use of the term is a key in understanding the everyday politics of events like 9/11 since battles between liberals and conservatives, among others, proved vitally important. Orthodox Marxist thinkers use the term in a different sense where ideology functions as a largely unconscious but determining worldview (Marx and Engels 1998, 67-71). In this sense, the nation itself as well as any construction of collective trauma would function as ideological expressions of the deeper conditions of capitalism. Marxian cultural studies takes a more measured view, however, putting the two senses of the term in dialogue and, while maintaining a distinction between these uses, finds value in both. Stuart Hall argues that the concept of ideology as “false consciousness” should not imply that such ideas are somehow ineffectual (Hall 1996). The concept of the nation, for example, has proven to have very real effects in modern history. Nor does he believe that one can ignore the real effects of the classically liberal understanding of the term—as he notes the fallout of Thatcherite ideology in the UK. Instead of valuing one over the other, there must be a middle ground where both understandings of ideology are legitimate and useful for modelling the machinery of culture. So while collective trauma reflects and reinforces in the ideology of nationalism, it also functions as an important element in everyday ideological battles. A complete and simple dismissal of shared experience as false consciousness would elide the fact that there are clear collective social operations at work here. Obviously, real people directly cooperate to produce specific content or else contribute to a larger discursive tendency by producing similar content without direct contact. And at the same time, viewers effectively choose among a finite number of readings of television content, meaning that large groups of viewers will experience similar reactions. Thus, while rejecting a romantic notion of an anthropomorphised society and instead examining how discourse constructs this myth, it is still safe to generalize to some extent about the ways in which these discourses construct and manage “collective traumas” like September 11.

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Many in America today still discuss 9/11 with a sense of respect and reverence reserved for the most symbolically important matters. The weight given to these events in reinforcing a national identity and connection to “something bigger” suggests that 9/11 bears the symbolic weight of a sacred event to many. In treating these events as the secular sacred, news reinforced the twin concepts of nation as an imagined community and nationalism as its supporting ideological framework. Almost immediately after the attacks, other stakeholders planned related media events that not only further reinforced these constructions, but also positioned the participants as symbolic actors in the national drama (Dayan and Katz 1992). In a particularly political example, the US Congress gathered on the steps of the Capitol Building for a show of interparty unity (“11 September, 2001” Fox). With news cameras trained on the group, they appeared to spontaneously break into singing the patriotic hymn “God Bless America” (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. The U.S. Congress Sings “God Bless America”

These figures, which literally represent different parts of the nation, engaged in a ritualized performance that showed the hardy spirit of the United States and symbolically demonstrated the resiliency of order in the face of disorder and unity in the face of international factionalism. The spirit of national unity both demonstrated and reinforced here had consequences in the United States as two-party politics were effectively suspended for a time, silencing the left in Congress and leading to the passage of reactionary laws such as the USA Patriot Act. Such constructions are natural outgrowths of the ways in which television in America has functioned as a national(ist) medium. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities takes a historical perspective on the

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formation of the idea of nations as the product of print and collective agreement (Anderson 2006). Drawing on this and the clear homologies between print capitalism in the modern era and how broadcast media have operated since the rise of national networks in the US, scholars have pointed to the ideological work that television has done in symbolically uniting time and space to reinforce the concept of the United States (Feuer 1983). In performing the work to register 9/11, TV news constructed the loss as a shared one. For example, American television networks branded their coverage with nationalist sluglines like NBC’s “Attack on America” and CNN’s “America Under Attack” (Archive.org). While much time was given to individualized accounts, the coverage at large was ultimately a narrative of national suffering and governmental response. But why should a television viewer in the deep south or Hawaii identify as a member of the traumatized group? Their connection to the destruction would almost certainly be symbolic or imagined rather than direct, personal, or physical. This is not to diminish the real sense of anxiety and sadness felt by many, but to examine how and why television viewers were made to feel as they did. The seriousness with which most media outlets treated 9/11 continued and will continue into the future. However, as time wore on, television dramas and comedies began to treat the attacks and surrounding issues. Surprisingly, comedy television programmes began to engage with these issues as early as late September, when Saturday Night Live was playing around with post-9/11 seriousness. By November, South Park’s selfconscious edginess was fully engaged with these issues (Spigel 2007). While early examples played it relatively safe, they still demonstrated a cheekiness in their willingness to joke around with, if not about, 9/11, offering a taste of comic disorder as a relief from all that stuffiness.2 Though television news presented the debates surrounding 9/11, the medium’s engagement with these issues heightened as they passed into other genres. Because of its ability to justify otherwise offensive speech as “just a joke”, humour served as a vehicle by which television's discourse adopted a wider range of viewpoints. In a passage relevant to both news and comedy, anthropologist Mary Douglas argues, 2

Though not a television example, the parody newspaper The Onion was a notable exception to the rule of humourists “playing it safe”. Unlike folk, print, and internet comedy, however, American television usually remains relatively conservative due to a combination of government regulation and commercial fears over offending the audience (The Onion).

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great rituals create unity in experience. They assert hierarchy and order. In doing so, they affirm the value of the symbolic patterning of the universe. Each level of patterning is validated and enriched by association with the rest. But jokes have the opposite effect. They connect widely differing fields, but the connection destroys the hierarchy and order. They do not affirm the dominant values, but denigrate and devalue. Essentially a joke is an anti-rite. (Douglas 1991, 301)

Douglas’ model of pure antithesis is overly simplistic. Even if we could cleanly parse out dominant from subversive ideas, certainly some jokes reinforce certain dominant values at the expense of others while others lack subversive value altogether. More importantly, however, even the jokes which most shock us with their disrespect for the dominant order provoke laughter by playing on a contrast against what we take to be normal, right, or truthful. Thus, while some humour may give us a temporary holiday from this ideology of trauma, it ultimately serves to reinforce its foundations and effects.

Fig. 2. A typical opening image from South Park

But when functioning as anti-rites, many television jokes regarding the attacks worked to question the dominant ideological message of their

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media construction, but the earliest comedy responses often mirrored the going discourses. Notable as the first extended comedic exploration of these issues, Comedy Central’s South Park, in the episode “Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants”, maintained its reputation as an iconoclastic show even while reinforcing certain elements of these ideologies.3 While vaguely critical of some American policies and attitudes, the episode ultimately revolved around the idea that the four “everyboys” from a mountain town in the west were directly affected by the fallout of the attacks on the east coast.

Fig. 3. The South Park boys in gas masks 3

It is notable that my comedic examples come exclusively from animated television series. While jokes related to the 9/11 attacks appear on live action programmes as well, the examples drawn from South Park and Family Guy are useful inasmuch as they represent extreme cases. I believe the commonality of edgy material in animated television series is due to two factors. First, unlike live action programming, animated images do not record any pre-televisual reality. They are pure representation with no re-presentation. Second, the low cultural capital of cartoons affords these series a bit more freedom in terms of what they can express. It is oft said that comedy plays the role of the fool that can speak truth to power. If so, then animated comedy is the fool among fools—slipping seemingly more offensive humour past censors and onto the air than its live action counterpart (“Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants” South Park, Comedy Central).

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Like on television more generally, issues of space and place are crucial to the narrative universe of South Park. As this episode opens, the first shot is of the four main characters lined up waiting for the bus: a familiar sight to fans of the show. Except in this instance, the boys wear gas masks (Figs. 2 and 3). They are not in a war zone, nor anywhere near a city considered vulnerable to terrorist attacks. The masks and other unnecessary precautions form an escalating pattern of incongruity as the citizens of this low-priority town overreact to world events. As if to drive the point home, the episode then comically contrasts the boys to those for whom claims to collective trauma would be more legitimate: four Afghan boys who look uncannily like the Americans (Fig. 4). From these opening scenes, it would seem clear that the episode rejects an ideology of national trauma, but the articulation of these ideas and the sense of ideological negation are complex and perhaps even contradictory.

Fig. 4. South Park’s Afghan doubles

As the South Park narrative continues, the boys come to represent the United States as they travel to Afghanistan. In doing so, there arises a complicated set of arguments regarding issues of sameness and difference. Take for example the boys’ visual doubling mentioned above, where the

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character Kenny—whose face is always covered by his winter parka— finds his mirror in a boy whose face is covered with a turban. While there is a joke here in doubling the boys using the garb of the Other, the more serious message is that children are fundamentally the same anywhere. However, South Park also demonstrates a violent us/them dichotomy common to reactionary humour in the wake of such events—highlighting the Other in opposition to the nationalist self. A particularly notable element of this episode sees the character Eric Cartman playing the mischievous Bugs Bunny to Osama bin Laden’s hapless Elmer Fudd. While Cartman generally serves as a negative example of a racist, selfish id gone wild on South Park, he here offers a point of identification for schadenfreudic revenge fantasies against the al Qaeda leader. However, the revenge fantasy is ultimately staged as juvenile, both in its visual quotations of Bugs Bunny cartoons and in the title’s use of the childish insult “farty pants”. And at some level, the joke here is at least moderately ambiguous in that it equates jingoism with childhood insults and cartoonish violence. While South Park thus appears to symbolically answer calls for violence, there is also the sense that such calls should not be taken too seriously. Henri Bergson argues that laughter functions as a social corrective. A group of people laugh at an individual in order to punish him/her for antisocial behaviour (Bergson 1980, 72-73). Of course, when mass media separates the laughing group from the object of their disdain, this primary and immediate cultural function of laughter is lost. In other words, bin Laden probably never saw South Park. However, its obvious side-effects, allowing Americans to feel a sense of justice and, more importantly, group cohesion operate at a magnified level. Humour, in this case, reinforces a form of hawkish nationalism, even while demeaning it at another level. But sometimes punishment itself can be funny, inverting the Bergsonian model. On South Park, while bin Laden appears to survive in each case, Cartman flattens his skull with a mallet, gets him repeatedly shot, and blows him up with dynamite. But bin Laden is not just physically punished in this bit. Cartman uses transparent trickery to shame him as well. For instance, when bin Laden threatens him with a knife, Cartman announces, “uh oh, five-thirty, time to pray”. At once mocking his piety and an invented gullibility, the leader kneels on a rug before Cartman flattens his head (Fig. 5).

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Fig. 5. Cartman’s revenge on bin Laden

This bit suggests, somewhat counterintuitively, that bin Laden may not have been such a threat in the first place. While this implies that the individual and national victims were even more impotent on the morning of September 11, the jokes here serve as shaming or discursive revenge. At another level though, the rewriting of the once-frightening villain as relatively harmless may serve as a form of comfort—suggesting that the attacks were a fluke and a prepared community or individual has little to fear from bin Laden. This of course flies in the face of much serious news and dramatic fiction that suggests otherwise, but highlights the role of parody as an attempt to refigure past events against the discursive grain of more serious content. But bin Laden is not just physically punished in this bit. Cartman uses transparent trickery to shame him as well. For instance, when bin Laden threatens him with a knife, Cartman announces, “uh oh, five-thirty, time to pray”. At once mocking his piety and an invented gullibility, the leader kneels on a rug before Cartman flattens his head (Fig. 5). This bit suggests, somewhat counterintuitively, that bin Laden may not have been such a threat in the first place. While this implies that the individual and national victims were even more impotent on the morning of September 11, the jokes here serve as shaming or discursive revenge. At another level though, the rewriting of the once-frightening

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villain as relatively harmless may serve as a form of comfort—suggesting that the attacks were a fluke and a prepared community or individual has little to fear from bin Laden. This of course flies in the face of much serious news and dramatic fiction that suggests otherwise, but highlights the role of parody as an attempt to refigure past events against the discursive grain of more serious content. Attempts to rewrite the past after a traumatic experience weigh heavy in the literature on the topic. While nightmares and flashbacks offer extreme cases of this tendency with regards to clinical trauma, Freud noted that the compulsion to repeat as a response to anxiety and loss was common to all people, not just shell-shocked soldiers (Freud 1950). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he argued that repetition in the face of such stresses has a dual purpose. On the one hand, such reiterations function as a largely futile attempt to rewrite and master the past. On the other hand, they serve as preparation for future shocks—a psychic callousing of sorts. While South Park’s attacks on bin Laden may in some sense serve as a refiguring of the past, other shows demonstrate this tendency more clearly. The attacks’ initial coverage, with the constant replaying and analysing of mass violence suggest a pattern of traumatic repetition. But this is not necessarily reflective of a cultural trauma as much as it is constitutive of it. News and other media played a visual game of fort-da with the Twin Towers, embroiling viewers in a sense of shared loss. Serious information sources also treated 9/11 as a prompt to prepare for future attacks as well. In the U.S., government and news sources made a strong effort to prepare the citizenry for future attacks, for example, by giving tips on how to seal windows in the case of airborne contaminants. In Freud's reading, his grandson alternately threw a toy out of sight and retrieved it, thus making fun out of his loss. Where and how does television use moments of shared loss to make its own fun, or even to make fun of loss? In one example, the programme Family Guy refutes the assumption that all Americans were individually traumatized by these events. As the character Lois sits on a couch crying while watching coverage of the 9/11 attacks, her husband, Peter, walks by and jokes, “ha, must’ve been a woman pilot, eh?” (“Padre de Familia” Family Guy, Fox). He gives his wife a playful pat and walks away unaffected. While in some sense playing the fool for our amusement, Peter Griffin also serves as a possible model for identification. His flippant attitude simultaneously refuses to acknowledge any personal trauma while also negating the symbolic importance of mediated terrorism to his immediate experience. He maintains his emotional distance from the event and thus remains

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separate from the imagined community. But even here, for one character to stand apart from the crowd implies that the crowd is still traumatized. While generally maintaining this dismissive tone, Family Guy also took more direct stands on partisan issues. In another example, Peter again plays the fool in order to disarticulate the associational logic of conservative rhetoric that tied 9/11 to Iraq (“Baby Not on Board” Family Guy, Fox). When Family Guy's Griffin family visited the site of the New York attacks, they approach it solemnly. The conversation between Peter and his anthropomorphic dog, Brian, then directly debunks post-9/11 conservatism. Peter: Ground Zero. So this is where the first guy got AIDS. Brian: Peter, this is the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Peter: Oh, so Saddam Hussein did this? Brian: No. Peter: The Iraqi army? Brian: No. Peter: Some guys from Iraq? Brian: No. Peter: That one lady that visited Iraq that one time? Brian: No, Peter, Iraq had nothing to do with this. It was a bunch of Saudi Arabians, Lebanese, and Egyptians financed by a Saudi Arabian guy living in Afghanistan and sheltered by Pakistanis. Peter: So you're saying we need to invade Iran?

In Family Guy’s blatant attempt to wear its liberalism on its sleeve, it still can’t help but reinforce elements of the conservative fallout from 9/11. Not only is the fundamental importance of 9/11 again reinscribed, but so too is the notion that this was an attack on America. And if perhaps it offers accuracy in describing the conspirators as citizens, rather than representatives, of certain middle-Eastern nations, it still suggests that this was and is a war between nations. In a similar vein, the television show The Boondocks took a more fully pacifist stance when it imagined what would happen if civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. had survived his assassination attempt in a coma only to be awoken shortly before the 2001 attacks (“The Return of the King” The Boondocks, Adult Swim). When asked about foreign policy, he argues that Christians should “turn the other cheek” in the face of terrorist attacks. Because of this stand, he becomes a pariah. It is notable that in this episode, titled “Return of the King”, the argument undercuts the articulation of Christianity with hawkish conservatism—an assumed connection in American politics. Of course, this is an argument that “warmongering Christianity” ought to be considered an oxymoron. But

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more generally this episode is notable as one of the more counterhegemonic arguments made in television comedy regarding the September 11 attacks. It flies in the face of the assumed logic of how to respond to a trauma. Again, it does nothing to dissuade the viewer from the subject position of the traumatized, but perhaps offers an argument in favour of rethinking the discourse that follows the constructed trauma. Humour is often ambiguous. Indeed, this characteristic aids in its ability to joke about touchy subjects like 9/11. In the examples above, it appears that even when subverting certain forms of conservative political ideology, jokes tend to reinforce the more fundamental worldviews of nationalism and national trauma. Such assumptions are necessary in order to create the types of logical contradictions that create humour. Without some shared values, these jokes would be largely illegible on a mass scale. By way of a conclusion, however, I would like to suggest that laughter may allow for a type of aloof disengagement touched on with regard to Peter Griffin’s “woman pilot” joke. Even if the content of the jokes themselves serve to reinscribe the sense of importance and trauma, laughing at and with these shows’ audacity performs an aloofness that many wish they had in 2001. While this is certainly not true of all or even most Americans, there was, especially in the waning Bush years, a sense of changed perspective and even a touch of embarrassment among some over their willingness to buy into the sense of collective trauma. Whether in the relatively benign forms of sadness, anxiety, and flag-waving or in the more troubling fallout of their support for an administration that they came to view as abusive of its post-9/11 power, some Americans would like to reimagine their own reactions to the attacks. Similar to Peter Griffin's initial reaction, the laughter of the television viewer engages their own relationship to the event with a knowing cynicism. It acknowledges the importance placed on these events by the culture at large and then demeans that importance by laughing. If the creation of national trauma relies on rituals of nationalism, then these jokes may offer the opportunity to negate that ideology—if only for a moment.

Works Cited “11 September, 2001.” Fox. United States. September 11, 2001. Anderson, B. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. “Baby Not on Board.” Family Guy. Fox. United States. 2 November, 2008.

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Bakhtin, M. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination, edited by M. Holmquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holmquist, 259-422. Austin: University of Texas Press. —. 1981. “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” In The Dialogic Imagination, edited by M. Holmquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holmquist, 41-83. Austin: University of Texas Press. —. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Edited by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Bergson, H. 1980. “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic” In Comedy, edited by Wylie Sypher, 61-190. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Dayan, D. and E. Katz. 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Douglas, M. 1991. “Jokes.” In Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, edited by C. Mukerji and M. Schudson, 291-310. Berkeley: U of California Press. Feuer, J. 1983. “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology.” In Regarding Television: Critical Approaches—An Anthology, edited by E. A. Kaplan, 12-21. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America. Freud, S. 1950. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Liveright. Hall, S. 1996. “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by D. Morley and K.S. Chen, 25-46. New York: Routledge. “Issue 3734.” The Onion. 26 September, 2001. Accessed 3 March 2011, http://www.theonion.com/issue/3734/. Kaplan, E. A. 2005. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1998. The German Ideology. Amherst: Prometheus. “Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants.” South Park. Comedy Central. United States. 7 November, 2001. “Padre de Familia.” Family Guy. Fox. United States. 18 November, 2007. “Return of the King.” The Boondocks. Adult Swim. United States. 15 January, 2006. “September 11 Television Archive.” Archive. http://www.archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Catherine Barrette Catherine Barrette is an artist and PhD candidate at Concordia University, Quebec. Through an artist/researcher position with a scholarly approach embedded within the creative process, Catherine’s research investigates how artistic practice can transform trauma. Catherine’s artistic interest was formed following her survival from a major accident in 1997, which resulted in polytrauma and an above-knee amputation. Holding degrees in social sciences and business administration and working full-time, she faced the limitations caused by the accident and re-oriented her career towards the arts. Despite the challenges of her disability, Catherine completed full-time studies to obtain her BA in Fine Arts in 2003 and graduated in the Master’s in Fine Arts program at the University of Ottawa in 2009. During her MFA, Catherine’s artistic works and research were closely intertwined with her life experience. Her MFA thesis presented an intimate account of mourning her former identity and examined the processes of healing through artistic practice. Currently living in Gatineau Quebec, Catherine’s works have been exhibited in the National Capital Region, Montreal and Vancouver. Tamás Bényei Tamás Bényei is professor of English Literature at the Department of British Studies, University of Debrecen. His main research fields are post1945 British fiction, (post)colonial fiction and crime fiction. He is the author of seven books (one of them in English: Acts of Attention: Figure and Narrative in Postwar British Fiction) and has published book chapters and journal articles in Hungary, Britain, the USA and other countries on writers like Rudyard Kipling, Kurt Vonnegut and contemporary British authors like Jeanette Winterson, Graham Swift, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, J. G. Ballard and Angela Carter. He has translated into Hungarian the works, among others, of Angela Carter and Anthony Burgess. Jonathan Black Jonathan Black is Senior Research Fellow in History of Art, at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Kingston University London. He read history of art at the University of Cambridge, and obtained a MA and PhD

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Contributors

in the same discipline from University College London. His research interests revolve around the social, political and military history of the First & Second World Wars, and public sculpture in Western Europe 1900-1950s. He has produced numerous publications, conference papers and exhibitions on related subjects. Selected recent projects include: an AHRC funded project on the sculptor Ivor Roberts-Jones (1913-1996), culminating in exhibitions at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff and at the Henry Moore Institute for the Study of Sculpture, Leeds (2014); an exhibition on the sculptor Dora Gordine at the Adamson Eric Museum, Tallinn, Estonia (2012); and a monograph on the portraiture of Eric Kennington (P. Wilson, 2011) and exhibition of his work at the Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon (2011-12). Nicolas Pierre Boileau Nicolas Pierre Boileau is a lecturer and researcher at the Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone at the University of Aix-Marseilles, wherefrom he also holds a PhD. His research interests include modernism, autobiography and psychoanalysis, and 20th-century and contemporary British literature. He has published essays and delivered papers on Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, and Rachel Cusk, among others, in both French and English. Catalina Botez Catalina Botez is about to complete her PhD in English Literature at the University of Constance, Germany. She has studied and pursued research at Yale University, the University of Sydney, Australia and the University of Iasi, Romania. Her scholarly work focuses on trauma and identity studies, Holocaust (post-)memory, transnationalism, transculturality and migration, particularly as reflected in the recent literature of the Holocaust. She is the recipient of several international research and travel grants and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Routledge European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’histoire, Literature and Aesthetics. The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics, Social Alternatives, Babilónia: Revista Lusófona de Línguas, Culturas e Tradução, and Global Interdisciplinary Research Studies (InterDisciplinary Network: Oxford, UK), in addition to chapters for several edited volumes. She has also edited a transdisciplinary essay collection on Pluralism, Inclusion and Citizenship. Alan Gibbs Alan Gibbs has worked in the School of English, University College Cork since 2006 as a lecturer in American literature. He has particular research

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interests in Jewish-American literature, trauma narratives and trauma theory, contemporary American literature, and narrative theory. He is the author of Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream 1994-1998: The Second Career of an American Novelist (2008). He has published articles and book chapters on a range of American authors. His monograph, Contemporary American Trauma Narratives, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2014. Tivadar Gorilovics Tivadar Gorilovics is emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Debrecen, Hungary, where he was Head of the Department of French Studies and general editor of Studia Romanica. His main field of research is French literature after 1850, especially authors like Renan, Zola, Roger Martin du Gard, Jean-Richard Bloch and Guillevic. His publications in French include Recherches sur les origines et les sources de la pensée de Roger Martin du Gard, La Légende de Victor Hugo de Paul Lafargue, Correspondance J.-R. Bloch—André Monglond, J.-R. Bloch, Lettres du régiment (1902-1903), and an annotated edition of Bloch’s previously unpublished play Le Cuistre mystifié. María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro María Jesús Martinez-Alfaro is Senior Lecturer at the English Department of the University of Zaragoza. She is the author of Text and Intertexts in Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx (UMI, 1996) and she co-edited a volume of collected essays entitled Beyond Borders: Re-defining Generic and Ontological Boundaries (C. Winter, 2000). Her research focuses on the contemporary novel in general and, more specifically, on such issues as metafiction, parody, intertextuality, detective fiction, and more recently, trauma and ethics, with a special emphasis on the representation of the Holocaust in literature. She has published articles on the aforementioned subjects in journals such as Twentieth-Century Literature, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Symbolism, Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE), and The AnaChronisT. At present, she is one of the members of a research team working on trauma, memory and the rhetorics and politics of suffering in contemporary fiction in English [http://cne.literatureresearch.net/]. Elizabeth Maynard Elizabeth Maynard is a doctoral candidate in the department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University. She completed her BA in art history and English at Tufts University and her MA in humanities at the University of Chicago. Elizabeth has lectured in art history at several

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different academic institutions. Her research interests center around the construction of historical and art historical narratives, and the threads of experience that are marginalized in the process. She is especially interested in the ways one can ethically represent trauma and queer readings of gender in the postwar United States. Giovanni Parenzan After studying the history of art at the University of Pavia and Birkbeck College, London, in 2009 Giovanni Parenzan completed a PhD in literary theory at the University of Bergamo, with a dissertation on the relationship between abstraction and traumatic experience in the work of Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Robert Morris. He was subsequently postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Bergamo and later Postdoctoral Researcher at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, and Visiting Fellow at the Department of Comparative Literature of the University of Paris 3–Sorbonne Nouvelle. Currently an independent scholar, his research focuses on the referential and fictional paradoxes underlying some foundational literary and artistic texts of mid-20th-century abstraction, and on the anthropology of literary influence in and of Beckett’s work. Philip Scepanski Philip Scepanski recently completed his PhD in the Screen Cultures Program at Northwestern University with a dissertation entitled “American Television Comedy’s Negotiation and Management of National Trauma.” He is currently an adjunct professor in the Communication and Theatre Department at Concordia University Chicago. His research interests include television, comedy, and affect. Alexandra Stara Alexandra Stara is Reader in the History and Theory of Architecture at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Kingston University London. She is a qualified architect with Masters degrees from the Bartlett, University College London, and the University of Cambridge, and holds a PhD (DPhil) in the history of art from the University of Oxford. She has been teaching, lecturing and publishing on the hermeneutics of art, architecture and the modern museum for the past twenty years. Selected recent publications include the monograph The Museum of French Monuments 1795-1816: Killing Art to Make History (2013); and essays in Migration and Culture (2014), History of Photography Journal (April 2013), Museum and Biographies (2012), and The Cultural Role of Architecture (2012).

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Thomas Waitz Thomas Waitz is Visiting Professor at Braunschweig University of Art, Germany, and a lecturer at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna. His research interests include the aesthetics, theory and politics of contemporary media, and the cultural theory of transport. He is the author of numerous articles, conference papers and book chapters, while his monograph Bilder des Verkehrs. Repräsentationspolitiken der Gegenwart is in preparation by Transcript Press.

INDEX

9/11, 2, 15, 17, 148, 158, 200-14 absence, 54, 56, 83, 141, 161, 172, 182, 183, 184, 189 accident, 36, 165, 169-75, 177, 215 aesthetics, 13, 16, 126, 134, 136, 148, 151, 172, 180, 193, 198, 216 affect/affective, 2, 54, 56, 87, 106, 172, 175, 179, 183, 186, 190, 201, 218 AIDS, 2, 12, 121-9, 132-6, 211 amputation, 170, 176, 178, 215 analogue, 185 Anderson, Benedict, 203-4, 212 Antze, Paul, 49, 59, 60 architecture, 92, 109, 218 artworking, 14, 169 Assmann, Aleida, 110, 118 Assmann, Jan, 110, 118 audience participation, 124 Augé, Mark, 195, 198 Auster, Paul, Oracle Night, 164, 165 autobiography, 8, 19, 20, 24, 44-6, 49-59, 154, 216 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 201, 213 Bal, Mieke, 71, 73, 84, 119, 147 Barker, Pat, Another World, 154, 155 Barthes, Roland, 113, 197, 198 Becher, Bernd and Hiller, 198 Beckett, Samuel, 87-91, 97-102, 146 Belting, Hans, 189 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 28, 90, 187, 193, 198 Bennett, Arnold, 19 Bennett, Jill, 14, 172, 175, 179, 182, 186, 188, 190 Bergson, Henri, 208, 213

Bhabha, Homi, 63, 75, 84 Bigsby, Christopher, 107, 108, 114, 117, 118 Blanchot, Maurice, 82, 84, 104, 118 Bloch, Jean-Richard, 3, 9, 36-47, 217 Booker, M. Keith, 62, 84, 155 Boomkens, René, 196, 198 Brooks, Peter, 116, 118 Brown, Laura S., 52, 59 candy spills, 12, 17, 121 Caruth, Cathy, 49, 53, 59, 67, 71, 74, 84, 87, 95, 101, 102, 105, 118, 129, 134, 150-2, 158-61, 165, 167, 170-2, 179, 201, 202, 213 Childs, Peter, 64, 75, 81, 84 Clewell, Tammy, 59 Clingman, S., 104, 118 Codde, Philippe, 148, 159, 167 Collado-Rodriguez, Fransisco, 159, 167 collective trauma, 10, 16, 70-73, 84, 188, 202, 207, 212 colonial trauma, 2, 62, 68 comedy, 16, 200, 201, 204, 206, 212, 213 confession, 8, 43, 50, 51, 55-6, 78, 89 counter-memory, 104, 116 Cramer, P. M., 48, 59 Critchley, Simon, 67, 84 Crownshaw, R., 110, 118 cultural memory, 4, 5, 109, 110, 190 Danielewski, Mark Z., House of Leaves, 160, 162-4, 166, 167 Dante Alighieri, 37, 42 Dayan, Daniel, 203, 213

The Edges of Trauma: Explorations in Visual Art and Literature death, 5, 9, 22, 26, 30, 36, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 65, 70, 74, 83, 94, 111, 112, 115, 122, 128, 129, 134, 145, 154, 171, 172, 174 Deleuze, Gilles, 75, 76, 84 DeLillo, Don, The Body Artist, 155, 156, 166, 167 descendant, 138, 139 discourse, 5, 8, 13, 50, 121, 137, 148-9, 155, 163, 165, 166, 169, 173, 202, 204, 212 dissociation, 73, 150-1, 171 Doctorow, E. L., The Book of Daniel, 153, 160, 163, 167 Dodgson, C., 30 Douglas, Mary, 107, 119, 123, 130, 132, 204-5, 213 drawing, 8, 25, 84, 108, 138, 143, 154, 155, 156, 175, 188, 195 Duttlinger, C., 112, 113, 115, 119 Eliot, T. S., 32 embodiment, 6, 70 Engels, Friedrich, 202, 213 Erikson, Kai, 59, 72, 84 ethnicity, 143, 145 Ettinger, Bracha, 14, 169, 180 experience, 1-3, 5, 6-10, 13-5, 20, 33, 36, 37, 42-6, 49-53, 56-9, 6175, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 89-90, 101, 106-10, 116-7, 122-6, 13240, 150-2, 158-69, 171-9, 183, 186, 188-9, 192, 194-5, 200, 202, 205, 210, 215, 218 Family Guy, 15, 206, 210-3 Feuer, J., 204, 213 fiction, 3, 7, 11, 13, 43, 48, 51, 55, 57, 58, 62, 67, 84, 88, 92-6, 100, 104, 106, 112, 115, 117, 137, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 209, 215, 217 film, 186-7, 219 First World War, 8, 9, 18-34, 36-48 Foer, Jonathan Safran, Everything is Illuminated, 154, 155, 158, 164

221

Foer, Jonathan Safran, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 148, 158, 159, 167 Forrester, John, 67, 84 Forster, E. M., 68, 84 Forter, Greg, 160, 161, 167 Foucault, Michel, 50, 59, 90, 123, 135 Freud, Sigmund, 43, 45, 47, 50, 61, 62, 85, 90, 92, 94-5, 100, 101, 103, 112, 113, 150, 151, 167, 170, 172, 180, 201, 210, 213 Friedman, Allen, 55, 60 Friedrich, Caspar David, 187 García Márquez, Gabriel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 153 Genette, Gérard, 163, 165, 167 Genevoix, Maurice, 43, 47 Gersht, Ori, 15, 181-90 ghost, 68, 77, 97-101, 140, 154, 181-2 Gikandi, Simon, 63, 85 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 12, 17, 12136 Gorra, Michael, 66, 85 Grass, Günter, The Tin Drum, 153 Graves, Robert, 31 grief, 4, 55, 113, 156, 171, 188 Guerin, Frances, 189, 190 Hacking, Ian, 52 Halbwachs, Maurice, 107, 119 Hall, Stuart, 202, 213 Hallas, Roger, 189, 190 hallucination, 21, 56 Hartman, Geoffrey, 106, 107, 119 Hayles, Katherine, 163, 167 healing, 68, 69, 71, 81, 137, 169, 190, 215 Heidegger, Martin, 183, 189, 190 Herman, Judith, 159 heteropathic recollection, 113, 114, 139 Hirsch, Marianne, 13, 105, 110, 111, 113, 119, 139, 145, 147

222 Holocaust, 2, 12, 15, 104-6, 108, 112-4, 118-20, 137-47, 151, 154, 157-8, 162, 168, 181, 216-7 humour, 41, 204-6, 208, 212 Hungerford, Amy, 142-4, 147 Hustvedt, Siri, What I Loved, 154 Hutcheon, Linda, 160 identification, 1, 6, 13, 60, 113, 114, 139, 172, 208, 210 ideology, 16, 201-2, 205, 207, 212 illness, 12, 25, 121-4, 126-30, 133, 134, 150 inoperable community, 5, 127-9 inscribed narration, 161, 164, 165 installation art, 124-6, 131 Jaggi, Maya, 106, 108, 109, 119 Jakobson, Roman, 60 Jameson, Fredric, 67, 125 Jewishness, 107, 117, 138, 142-5, 187, 217 Jünger, Ernst, 36, 47 Kahane, Clare, 51, 60 Kahlo, Frida, 14, 173, 174 Kansteiner, Wulf, 72, 85, 153, 162, 167 Kaplan, B. A., 104, 119 Kaplan, E. A., 200, 213 Katz, Elihu, 203, 213 Kennington, Eric, 8, 18, 28-34, 216 Kindertransport, 107, 112 King, Nicola, 72, 85 Konody, Paul, 32 Kraftwerk, 192 Kristof, Agota, 87, 91-7, 102 Kraus, Nicole, Great House, 158 Kundera, Milan, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 153 Lacan, Jacques, 57, 60, 67, 84, 197 LaCapra, Dominick, 160, 161, 167 Lambek, Michael, 49, 59 landscape, 185-7, 191-5 language, 7, 8, 10, 45, 51, 57, 82, 91, 111, 137, 148, 151, 155, 165, 172, 175 Laub, Dori, 87, 102, 119, 137, 138, 147

Index Leader, Darian, 171, 172, 174, 179, 180 Lee, Arthur, 26 Lee, Hermione, 60 Levi, Primo, 112, 119 Levine, Michael G., 140, 147 Leys, Ruth, 52, 60, 150, 151, 167 Linett, Marten, 48, 59, 60 localised memory, 108 loci of trauma, 105, 188 Long, J. J., 109, 119 Longmuir, Anne, 156, 167 Loomba, Ania, 63, 85 Lowry, Joanna, 183, 184, 190 Luckhurst, Roger, 13, 53, 60, 72, 85, 95, 103, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 167 Lyotard, Jean-François, 53, 196, 198 madness, 48, 79, 82 manipulation, 145 Martel, Yann, Beatrice and Virgil, 158 Marx, Karl, 202, 213 mask, 143, 144 McClintock, Anne, 63, 85 McCullin, Don, 26, 34 melancholia, 130, 152, 172 memory, 3-5, 7, 11-2, 15, 19, 42, 43-6, 48-9, 52-4, 63, 67, 71, 73, 87, 90, 93, 96, 104-6, 107, 10817, 138, 139, 142, 146, 160, 171, 173, 175, 183, 188, 216-7 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 155, 167 metaphor, 10, 45, 75, 124, 137, 186, 201 Michael, Anne, Fugitive Pieces, 154, 158 Miller, J. Hillis, 69, 85 Miller, Nancy, 1, 2, 17, 141, 147 modernism, 7, 62, 73, 80-83, 216 modernity, 193-8 Monglond, André, 38, 47, 217 Moore, Lorrie, A Gate at the Stairs, 157, 168 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 63, 64, 84, 85

The Edges of Trauma: Explorations in Visual Art and Literature Moran, C. W. (Lord), 30 Morrison, Toni, Beloved, 153 mourning, 4, 5, 55-6, 127, 152, 169, 171-2, 174-5, 178-9, 215 Muir, Ward, 21 Nachträglichkeit, 66, 69, 151, 152 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1, 12, 127-8, 130, 135, 141 nationalism, 201, 202, 203, 208, 212 near-death experience, 46-7 Nevinson, C. R. W., 8-9, 18-25, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35 O’Brien, Tim, In the Lake of the Woods, 161, 164 Obreht, Téa, The Tiger’s Wife, 155 Orpen, William, 8, 18, 25-8, 33, 35 painting, 8, 18-35, 169, 171, 172, 174, 176, 188 parody, 114, 201, 204, 209, 217 participation, 124-7, 133 photography, 12, 15, 105, 112, 127, 144-6, 181-6, 194, 197 Piller, Peter, 15, 195, 196, 197, 198 Plato, Phaedo, 37, 47 poeisis, 189 politics, 12, 76, 130, 194, 202-3, 211, 217, 219 Poole, Roger, 48, 60 postmemory, 104, 105, 114, 139 postmnemonic alterity, 114, 117 postmodernism, 153, 157, 196 primal scene, 69, 71, 77, 68-9, 70, 71, 76, 77-8 Prose, Francine, 155, 168 prosthetic, 12, 109, 177, 178 prosthetic memory, 119 protest art, 49, 122 PTSD, 49, 137, 150-1, 156, 158, 165 public/private, 13, 15, 22, 29, 50, 66, 124-9, 133-4, 148, 170, 201, 216 queer identity, 132-5 rape, 10, 48, 49, 50, 52, 66, 68-9, 81 re-enactment, 68, 71, 76, 77, 175, 185, 187

223

Relph, Edward, 195, 198 repetition, 10, 64, 68-82, 94-6, 105, 113, 130, 153, 154, 159, 166, 175, 176, 185, 201, 210 Rhys-Davids, A. P. F., 26 Ricoeur, Paul, 184-5, 186, 188 Rolland, Romain, 37, 38, 41, 45, 47 Ross, Christine, 172, 180 Ross, Robert, 24, 35 Roth, Henry, Mercy of a Rude Stream, 161, 164, 165, 217 Rothberg, Michael, 104, 120, 149, 157, 158, 165, 168 Rothenstein, William, 25 Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things, 155 ruins, 5, 6, 108, 111, 117 Rushdie, Salman, 85, 164, 165 Rutter, Frank, 21 Schulkind, Jeanne, 51, 54, 60 Schwab, G. M., 111, 120 Scott, Paul, The Raj Quartet, 3, 10, 16, 61-86 Sebald, W. G., 2, 11, 17, 104-20, 155 Second World War, 30, 181 Sharpe, Jenny, 83, 85 shell shock, 2, 21, 24, 25, 33, 41-2, 210 Shields, Carol, 156-7, 160, 166, 168 shock, 3, 8, 22-5, 39, 41, 47-58, 169, 171, 176, 188, 193, 205 Siegel, Harry, 148, 168 Sieverts, Thomas, 196, 198 silence, 50, 51, 52, 55, 73, 74, 90, 91, 107, 137, 141, 146 Silverman, Kaja, 64, 86, 139 Simmel, Georg, 196, 198 Sollors, Werner, 143, 145, 147 Sontag, Susan, 123, 124, 129, 136 South Park, 15, 204-13 speed, 192-3 Spiegelman, Art, Maus, 12, 17, 13747 Spigel, Lynn, 204, 214 Stephen, Julia, 55

224 stoicism, 38 Suleri, Sara, 63, 86 survivor, 4, 14, 66, 74, 105-6, 130, 138, 139, 144-5 Swinden, Patrick, 64, 86 symptom, 50, 74, 78-9, 83, 94-5, 127 technologies of connection, 142, 143, 144 testimony, 5, 7, 11, 12, 15, 21, 66, 87, 105, 114, 122-5, 126, 137-8, 142, 146, 154, 189 The Boondocks, 15, 211, 213 Tolstoy, Leo, 39 Tomlison, Henry, 22 trace, 15, 74, 117, 182-4, 188, 190 transference, 76-8, 81-3 trauma culture, 150-1 trauma genre, 148-9, 152, 154-60, 164, 166 traumatic metafiction, 14, 149, 156, 160-4 traumatic realism, 149

Index unspeakable, 48, 50, 137 Versluys, Kristiaan, 159 Vickroy, Laurie, 152, 157, 168 De Vigny, Alfred, 38 Virilio, Paul, 192, 193, 195 war trauma, 9 Weber, Samuel, 75, 86 Whitehead, Anne, 67, 86, 119, 137, 147, 152, 154, 158-9, 168 Wiesel, Elie, 117 Wilenski, R. H., 20, 33, 35 Wilkomirski, Binjamin, Fragments, 153-4 witnessing, see testimony Woolf, Virginia, Moments of Being, 48, 50-60 Woolf, Virginia, “Sketch of the Past”, 56, 57 Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, 49, 56-8, 60 wound, 1, 2, 19, 22, 29, 71, 93, 105, 138, 139, 170 Young, James, 146, 147, 154