Traces of Trauma in W. G. Sebald and Christoph Ransmayr

Dora Osborne

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781907975400
• eBook ISBN: 9781351192330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Both W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) and the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr (1954-) were born too late to know directly the violence of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but these traumatic events are a persistent presence in their work. In a series of close readings of key prose texts, Dora Osborne examines the different ways in which the traces of a traumatic past mark their narratives. By focusing on the authors' use of visual and topographical tropes, she shows how blind spots and inhospitable places configure signs of past violence, but, ultimately, resist our understanding. Whilst links between the two authors are well-documented, this book offers the first full-length study of Sebald and Ransmayr and their complicated relation to the traumatic traces of National Socialism. Dora Osborne is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham."

CHAPTER 1
Traces of Trauma

Trauma, Memory, and Mourning

The concept of trauma in its Freudian, psychoanalytic formulation underpins the following investigation into Ransmayr and Sebald. It is important, firstly, because it shows how past violence affects the subject in the present, and secondly, because it exposes memory as something other than a mimetic representation of the past. Freud expounds his theory of trauma in Jenseits des Lustprinzips [Beyond the Pleasure Principle] (1920), where it finds its most vivid illustration in shell-shocked soldiers returned from the First World War; the impact of mechanized warfare constitutes a particularly pervasive trauma, which provokes the compulsive repetition that is characteristic of traumatic neuroses (SF XIII, 9; XVIII, 12). With the concept of trauma, Freud explains how shocking, violent experiences are not registered consciously because the subject does not have the psychic resources to process them. When Freud writes ‘das Bewußtsein entstehe an Stelle der Erinnerungsspur’ [consciousness arises instead of a memory-trace] (SF XIII, 25; XVIII, 25), he indicates the non-coincidence at the heart of trauma between lived experience and its recording through memory traces, a non-coincidence that underlies the belated availability of such experiences in only mediated form. Precisely the failure to register the experience consciously and therefore in a meaningful way provokes the traumatized subject to return to or repeat the trauma, to make sense belatedly of the memory traces it leaves. Crucially, Freud identifies latency and repetition compulsion as key modes for traumatic retrieval, modes which, however, effect the deferral and distortion of the past as it is remembered.

Freud returns to the traumatic effects of modern technologies in Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion [Moses and Monotheism] (1939), where he uses the tropes of the railway accident and photographic development to describe the posttraumatic effects of latency and repetition compulsion. Although those involved in railway collision may seem to walk away unaffected, they come to experience a series of symptoms after the accident:

Es ereignet sich, daß ein Mensch scheinbar unbeschädigt die Stätte verläßt, an der er einen schreckhaften Unfall, z. B. einen Eisenbahnzusammenstoß, erlebt hat. Im Laufe der nächsten Wochen entwickelt er aber eine Reihe schwerer psychischer und motorischer Symptome, die man nur von seinem Schock, jener Erschütterung oder was sonst damals gewirkt hat, ableiten kann.

It may happen that a man who has experienced some frightful accident — a railway collision, for instance — leaves the scene of the event apparently uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he develops a number of severe psychical and motor symptoms which can only be traced to his shock, the concussion or whatever else it was.]

(SF XVI, 171; XXIII, 67)¹

Focusing on the case of infantile trauma, Freud goes on to show how the subject is not psychically equipped to register traumatic experience meaningfully; rather, the traces recorded become visible belatedly. Freud uses the analogy of photography to show this latent mode of memory: ‘Wir [dürfen] uns ihr Verständnis durch den Vergleich mit einer photographischen Aufnahme erleichtern, die nach einem beliebigen Aufschub entwickelt und in ein Bild verwandelt werden mag’ [we may make it more comprehensible by comparing it with a photographic exposure which can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture] (SF XVI, 234; XXIII, 126). The photographic image is made on the condition of belated development and viewing: this encounter can be deferred indefinitely, but the desire to know what has been captured on the plate compels its realization. Thus, the photographic analogy emphasizes the particularly visual nature of the traumatic scenario and the repetition compulsion that it provokes: it is a vision that cannot be looked at directly, but which, nonetheless, the subject is forced to view belatedly and repeatedly. Freud’s analogies are particularly relevant here, since the railway and photography feature in the texts by Ransmayr and Sebald. Train travel and photography signalled the technological advances of modernity that would allow the subject to experience himself and his world differently, but where the railway takes the subject away from what is familiar or where the photographic image shows what he cannot access directly, these mechanisms also expose the subject at odds with himself and his world. For Sebald and Ransmayr as for Freud, the railway and photography show the after-effects and after-images of traumatic experience: they are the carriers of modernity’s shocks and ruptures.

The compulsive nature of the desire to repeat or return to traumatic experience results in a renewed unpleasurable encounter and is understood as pathological. Never theless, the repetition (‘Wiederholung’ as literal drawing back again) of the trauma is crucial to its overcoming. Bringing the past back to the present in the scene of the analysis is the means by which it can be reconstructed in a meaningful form. The analyst enables and controls the process of recollection, allowin g the analysand to work through trauma, a process which Freud sets out in his essay ‘Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten’ [‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-through’] (1914). The compulsion to repeat is directed into the transferential dynamic of the analysis, whereby the analyst conducts the exchange of disordered memory fragments for ordered narrative. In a later essay, ‘Konstruktionen in der Analyse’ [‘Constructions in Analysis’] (1937), Freud describes this dynamic as one that ultimately changes the analysand’s task of recollection into one of explicit construction by the analyst:

Der Analytiker hat von dem, worauf es ankommt, nichts erlebt und nichts verdrängt; seine Aufgabe kann es nicht sein, etwas zu erinnern. Was ist also seine Aufgabe? Er hat das Vergessene aus den Anzeichen, die es hinterlassen, zu erraten oder, richtiger ausgedrückt, zu konstruieren.

[The analyst has neither experienced nor repressed any of the material under consideration; his task cannot be to remember anything. What then is his task? His task is to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it.] (SF XVI, 45; XXIII, 258–59 (emphasis in the original English translation)]

For Freud, successful analysis works through the transference and through reconstruction, which in fact functions as construction. In this way, the experience of traumatic loss or separation is made available again belatedly, so that it can be experienced consciously and meaningfully. The compulsion to repeat it in its empty, traumatizing form is thereby arrested. The lost object is evoked again and as other, in order to repeat the act of separation in a scenario where the subject already acknowledges his otherness in relation to the object. Repressed elements are returned to the surface so that they can be lost again, definitively and irrevocably in the performance of an act of leave-taking. In this sense, the work of remembering the past precedes and is necessary for the work of mourning it in its irrevocability.

Freud’s project links memory and mourning through the work of bringing the past into the present. This should establish the boundary between self and other, here and there, then and now, a boundary constructed — problematically — through the repetition of violent separation:

Es ist unleugbar, daß die Bezwingung der Übertragungsphänomene dem Psychoanalytiker die größten Schwierigkeiten bereitet, aber man darf nicht vergessen, daß gerade sie uns den unschätzbaren Dienst erweisen, die verborgenen und vergessenen Liebesregungen der Kranken aktuell und manifest zu machen, denn schließlich kann niemand in absentia oder in effigie erschlagen werden.

[It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psycho-analyst with the greatest difficulties. But it should not be forgotten that it is precisely they that do us the inestimable service of making the patient’s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses immediate and manifest. For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie.

(SF VIII, 374; XII, 108)

This statement seems to suggest the impossibility of such a definitive act of leave-taking, since the absence and the substitution of the object (‘in absentia oder in effigie’) are posited as equally unsuited to this process. However, the pastness of original loss means that the analytic work is necessarily one of re-presentation and re-construction that has to make use of substitute objects. Or, as Jacques Lacan has it, ‘what Freud showed [...] was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt except in a symbolic way’.² Crucially, the act of taking leave allows traumatic loss to become understandable or meaningful only on the condition that the past be destroyed definitively, which means that the trauma is performed again.

In its unavailability and inaccessibility, trauma at once delays and compels the work of memory and mourning. To use the terms developed subsequently by Lacan, both trauma and the transference are (dis)figures of a missed encounter. Through repetition, transference permits the performance of trauma in order to effect a coincidence of signifier and signified after the event. Yet, making the lost object available again in only symbolic form ultimately reveals the inadequacy of this gesture, causing the subject (qua analysand) to stall in melancholic fixation on that which is no longer available in its original, integral form. Through the reconstructive, transferential methods employed, the work of the analyst can be understood in terms of the work of narrative, developing an ordered structure in which past experience is literally re-membered and re-presented in meaningful form. However, as we will see in the following chapters, narrative attempts at mourning loss and working through a traumatic past can stall in compulsive repetition. Acts of leave-taking are inadequate (because always symbolic) and where traumatic experience, specifically that of the Holocaust, has been so radically evacuated of meaning, the work of conveying significance belatedly is rendered futile. Moreover, coming later, the mourning work undertaken in or by post-postwar fiction threatens to appropriate the experiences of the other. Through the transference and in the scene of the analysis, the analyst comes to take the place of the lost object, that is, the analyst must literally take the place of others. In these texts by Ransmayr and Sebald, the respective narrators stake a claim to the memories and experiences of those who cannot be made present again.

In Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany, Eric Santner describes the effects of stalled mourning work for German identity after 1945. Reflecting on the claim made by Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich in 1967 that the German nation had failed to mourn the losses incurred as a result of National Socialism and the collapse of the Third Reich, Santner returns to Freud’s essay ‘Trauer und Melancholie’ [‘Mourning and Melancholy] (1917), which famously contrasts ‘healthy’ mourning with pathological melancholy: in mourning, the lost object is acknowledged — indeed, was loved — as separate from the subject, but in melancholy, the narcissistic fantasy of oneness prevents the subject from comprehending or accepting the boundaries between self and other. Santner goes on to identify a ‘rhetoric of mourning’ which characterizes cultural discourse in a postmodern, post-Holocaust age.³ This refers to a nostalgia for meaning, which is conveyed principally and conventionally in narrative, and to the turn towards a postmodern, ludic mode of reassembling the fragments of the shattered narcissistic fantasy of modernism, of ‘the (always already) lost organic society that has haunted the Western imagination’.⁴ Santner emphasizes the relationship between historical and structural conceptions of loss and mourning, suggesting that the postmodern, post-structuralist modes mobilized in the contemporary response to creative writing after Auschwitz require an understanding of both the human subject’s inherent, constitutive state of having survived an experience of loss and the specific trauma of the Holocaust:

The violence of history grows out of a refusal or an inability on the part of the members of society to assume the vocation of mourner-survivor of what might be called the violence of the signifier. In the writings of numerous poststructuralist theorists, historical suffering is believed to spring from a failure to tolerate the structural suffering — the always already shattered mirrors of the Imaginary — that scars one’s being as a speaking subject.⁵

In the textual analyses that follow, I understand the traumatic traces in narrative as doubly inscribed; that is, as signs of the structural, constitutive losses suffered by the subject, as well as specific, historical violence.

According to psychoanalytic accounts, such constitutive loss results from the separation from the mother and the subject works through this via the ‘homeopathic’ strategy of symbolic castration.⁶ The experience of loss is carried over into the realm of patriarchal prohibition where the subject enters into the symbolic economy of signification. Following a metonymic logic of exchange, the signifier stands in for the signified and infinitely defers the experience of loss, whilst allowing its controlled performance through substitute objects. Freud offers a paradigm for this performance in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he describes a game played by his grandson, the so-called fort–da game. In the same text in which he sets out the central significance of the repetition compulsion for strategies of traumatic retrieval, Freud describes how the child masters the actual loss of his mother through the repeated action of casting out and reclaiming a cotton reel. This performance is not only key to trauma theory; it also describes the fundamental, recuperative movement of narrative. As Terry Eagleton observes, ‘Fort–da is perhaps the shortest story we can imagine: an object is lost, and then recovered’.⁷

With the fort–da game, Freud tells how the child seeks to master separ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Post-Postwar Literature
• 1 Traces of Trauma
• 2 The Terrors of Ice and Darkness: The Case of the Ice-Man
• 3 'Narbenübersät': An Excess of Traces in The Dog King
• 4 Displacement, Dysfunction, and Erasure in The Emigrants
• 5 Blind Spots: Austerlitz
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index