The Future of Trauma Theory

Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism

Gert Buelens, Samuel Durrant, Robert Eaglestone, Gert Buelens, Samuel Durrant, Robert Eaglestone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415694599
• eBook ISBN: 9781135053093
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection analyses the future of 'trauma theory', a major theoretical discourse in contemporary criticism and theory. The chapters advance the current state of the field by exploring new areas, asking new questions and making new connections.

Part one, History and Culture, begins by developing trauma theory in its more familiar post-deconstructive mode and explores how these insights might still be productive. It goes on, via a critique of existing positions, to relocate trauma theory in a postcolonial and globalized world, theoretically, aesthetically and materially, and focuses on non-Western accounts and understandings of trauma, memory and suffering. Part two, Politics and Subjectivity, turns explicitly to politics and subjectivity, focussing on the state and the various forms of subjection to which it gives rise, and on human rights, biopolitics and community.

Each chapter, in different ways, advocates a movement beyond the sort of texts and concepts that are the usual focus for trauma criticism and moves this dynamic network of ideas forward.

With contributions from an international selection of leading critics and thinkers from the US and Europe, this volume will be a key critical intervention in one of the most important areas in contemporary literary criticism and theory.

PART I

History and culture

1

KNOWLEDGE, ‘AFTERWARDSNESS’ AND THE FUTURE OF TRAUMA THEORY

Robert Eaglestone

‘We are singing like little angels, our voices providing an accompaniment to the processions of the people in black who are slowly swallowed up into the crematoria’ (Kulka 27). When he was a boy of eleven, Otto Dov Kulka, now a very eminent Holocaust historian, a survivor of Auschwitz and the son of a survivor from Auschwitz, sang the ‘Ode to Joy’ in a children’s choir at Birkenau. All through his life since then, he has asked himself what drove the conductor to choose that famous declaration of human dignity: was it a protest, ‘as long as man breathes he breathes freedom, something like that’ (27)? Or was it ‘an act of extreme sarcasm … of self amusement, of a person in control of naïve beings and implanting in them naïve values, sublime and wonderful values, all the while knowing that there is no point or purpose and no meaning to those values’ (27)? Kulka can find no answer to this profound, historical and existential question. He chooses first one possibility and then the other. The first, somehow more hopeful, shapes what he is ‘occupied with and believes in’ (28) during his working life. However, when he considers the rise of the Nazis, the second haunts him and seems, ‘I will not say realistic – but more authentic’ (28). Each choice, like any truly existential choice, ‘is in fact the whole unfolding of my existence or of my confrontation both with the past and with the present from then until today’ (29). There are enough Holocaust survivor testimonies by historians to make a fascinating little canon (see Popkin). When Memory Comes by Saul Friedlander is a classic of this small genre and Kulka’s Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death deserves a place on a par with that volume.

I begin with this moment in Kulka’s astonishing testimony because, in our attempts to understand it, it draws attention to a number of crucial points about trauma. These seem central to me for the future of trauma theory, for the thinking about what questions and insights might be generated by this responsive and responsible conceptual apparatus – if it is anything so organized as an ‘apparatus’ and not, rather, conceptual threads turned into a pattern by observers keen to convert critical thought into a programme or a doctrine. I am going to focus on three interrelated aspects, each drawn from Kulka’s work. The first is the sense that trauma is both the origin and disruption not only of memorial work or fiction but of discipline-specific knowledge in other fields too: the impact of trauma and the theory that studies it respects no academic boundaries and shapes not only affective ‘feelings’ but also more formally recognized knowledge. Second, and again central to the form of Kulka’s testimony, I am going to draw attention to the way that trauma has an impact on our experience of time, our temporality, and its structure as ‘afterwardsness’. Freud’s idea of ‘Nachträglichkeit’ is theoretically complex but – oddly – experientially easy, as each of us lives it, often unnoticed, each day. It is not in itself traumatic but roughly corresponds to Kirkegaard’s observation, so often misquoted that it is now an old saw, that while life is lived forwards, it ‘can only be understood backwards’. Third, stemming from this moment in Kulka’s work and from the understanding of ‘afterwardsness’, is the idea that the questions posed by trauma (and investigated by trauma theory) are existential questions which are to do with the time of a whole life and so with its relation to ethics. In this way, much that underlies trauma theory is tied into not only post-deconstructive thought but wider currents of contemporary intellectual life.

Yet trauma theory does have its origins in post-deconstructive work. The story of the origins of trauma theory is fairly well-established: developing from the Yale school of deconstruction and part of the ‘ethical turn’ in literary theory and European philosophy, it grew – centrally through the work of Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman – to become a critical-theoretical way of attending to and addressing the representation of human suffering and ‘wounding’, both literal and metaphorical, both personal and communal. Of course, there are other strands of ‘trauma theory’, too, woven into this tapestry: some stem from the work of Judith Herman, for example, or come out of memory studies and critical historiography. The concept of ‘trauma’ itself has a much longer life as, for example, Roger Luckhurst has shown, but it is this recognizably post-deconstructive strand that I take to be central in trauma theory. Indeed, this strand of critical thought represents one answer to the question – asked repeatedly in the 1990s – about the ‘ethics of deconstruction’. And, in its many sinuous appearances, trauma theory attempts to unite what we might call (perhaps too quickly) a formalist concern for text and problems of interpretation (what Paul de Man called the ‘internal laws’ of literature) with a historicist concern for application and response to the world (the ‘external relations’ of literature).

Any current in the seas of scholarship can sometimes flow too fast and, on a quick tide, in the fast surge of novelty, barks are launched when their hulls have not been checked carefully enough for ill-fitting planks and outright holes. Many scholars, such as Michael Rothberg, Jane Kilby and Susannah Radstone, have pointed to flaws, omissions and areas in which trauma theory needs to develop and expand. Stef Craps correctly points out that trauma theory has tended to focus too much on the Holocaust as the paradigm of individual and communal trauma, and so has marginalized other atrocious events. He suggests that it has been too Eurocentric in its development and risks appropriating other, non-Western events into a Western model of traumatic suffering: his work and the work of others seeks to address this. Some, such as Wulf Kansteiner in a series of articles (see Kansteiner 2004; 2008), have found the whole project (if it is a project) misbegotten, an ‘interdisciplinary research trajectory that has gone astray’ (Kansteiner 2004: 195). In a parallel to Craps, but with less sympathy, Kansteiner finds it obliterates ‘historical precision and moral specificity’ (194) (I am uncertain what ‘moral specificity’ is, but lacking it is clearly a bad thing). ‘Trauma theory’, he argues, conflates the traumatic and non-traumatic (194) and provides instead an ‘aestheticised, morally and politically imprecise concept of cultural trauma, which provides little insight into the social and cultural repercussions of historical traumata’ (194).

His substantive issue – from which all the others stem – is what he sees as the ‘misleading symbolic equivalency’ (194) between the ‘allegedly traumatic component of all human conversation’ (194) and the ‘concrete suffering of victims of physical and mental trauma’ (194). Kansteiner suggests that the core reason that this happens is because Cathy Caruth

focuses on the question of trauma because the phenomenon appears to her as a perfect, particularly vivid illustration of her understanding of the workings of language, which she adopts from Paul de Man.

(203)

That is, Kansteiner argues that Caruth, and those who come after her, are less interested in the particular histories of a traumatic event, and more interested in using that event to demonstrate their view of language itself. Kansteiner fails to offer his view of ‘the workings of language’ but it seems fairly clear that he thinks of language in an unproblematic, positivistic kind of way, as a vehicle to carry (presumably extra-linguistic) concepts between people. One does not have to be an eighties-style deconstructor to find this ‘folk psychology’ concept of language limited: indeed, the whole ‘linguistic turn’ across the humanities in the twentieth century throws this concept of language into doubt. Moreover, Kansteiner also implicitly begs a question: if Caruth gets her understanding from de Man, what are his ideas about the working of language and where does he get them from? This question is too large to answer here, so I will focus on one aspect. De Man’s thought was influenced by Derrida’s work, and while Derrida does not, I think, offer a theory of how language works, he offers approaches to understanding why, at least, Kansteiner’s version doesn’t. (There is also a strong argument – too extensive to be made here – to say that Derrida’s work itself is an ethical response to trauma; see Eaglestone.) Kansteiner’s view of language fails to work because any moment of language works only in differentiation to a huge backdrop of language that is not there, is absent: absent in space and also absent in time. Kansteiner, very decently, says that moral ‘honesty and conceptual and historical precision demand that trauma be first and foremost read from the perspective of the victim’ (214): however, these same scholarly virtues point out that this ‘reading’ is just not possible in a straightforward way. It is not that Caruth (or de Man or Derrida) does not appreciate pain, suffering and so on, but their concern is with the understanding, and the limits of understanding, of these things. Trauma is not the chance example that exposes, from a deconstructive position, how language and reference works: instead, a deconstructive approach to language and reference is that which allows us better to understand trauma. This is obviously not to say, pace the critique of Kilby, Craps and others, that this approach is a final and complete form of understanding, but it is to say that the bland positivism of other approaches is not able to engage with the profound questions that a serious consideration of trauma asks. The future of trauma theory is most usefully to be found by exploring it through its deconstructive past.

The reason that these post-deconstructive insights are most effect is because, as Caruth argued, the pathology of trauma is not the event itself, or the distortion of the event in memory, but ‘consists, rather, solely, in the structure of its experience or reception: 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 4). While other scholars rightly broaden out and reflect on the nature of trauma in the wider, non-western world, this chapter aims to explore the future of trauma by thinking through these deconstructive terms, to explore what impact the idea of the ‘structure of experience’ can offer for the future of trauma theory. As I have suggested, I want to suggest that it is still illuminating in three areas: in the range of applicability across a number of forms of representation (including, for example, the writing of history); in terms of the idea of ‘afterwardsness’ and in relation to the widest and most demanding existential questions. And I want to suggest that all these consequences are shown in a most striking form in Kulka’s extraordinary work.

Trauma as history

Raul Hilberg, reflecting on Adorno’s famous remark, wonders if footnotes ‘after the Holocaust’ are ‘less barbaric?’ (138). Similarly, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub ask if ‘contemporary narrative’ can bear witness to how the ‘impact of history as Holocaust has modified, affected, shifted the very modes of relationship between narrative and history?’(94–5). This is a more detailed version of the question asked, occasionally too dramatically perhaps, about ‘how can we live after the Holocaust?’ If we do think that the Holocaust has had a profound impact on what it is to be a human being, how has it shifted the very frames by which narrative and language work? In disagreement with thinkers like Pascal Bruckner, who find the West too laden with guilt, I am more tempted to broaden this out to consider the huge array of atrocity and genocide of which we are now more excruciatingly and often shamefully aware, of that Europe ‘where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them … in all corners of the globe’ (Fanon 251). Even these questions – and to them we can add the arguments about hearing the voices of the victims that helped motivate the style of Saul Friedlander’s monumental final historical work – begin to show how historians, for example, are aware of the impact of the nature of trauma not simply as a ‘wound’ to individuals but to disciplines of thought (see also Ball).

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death shows this ‘from the inside’. It is hard to know what to call Kulka’s book – perhaps it is a work of ‘traumatic meta-history’. It is a sort of modernist precipitate of a historical work, something strange and powerful formed from, but separate to, the solution of history. It is not ‘against’ history but ‘beyond’ or ‘below’ history, striving to illuminate what Kulka calls the ‘tremendous “meta-dimensional” baggage and tensions’ (82), philosophical and personal, which underlie his historical work. It is an account, in fractured, modernist prose, mixed with photographs and clearly influenced by the work of W. G. Sebald, of his thoughts, dreams, diaries, visits, moments of epiphany and memory, of his unconscious and rarely spoken ‘mythology’ of the ‘Metropolis of Death’, of Auschwitz. He names the ‘Great Death’ (the gas chambers) but also the ‘Small Death’ (the electrified fence) and the ‘Life beyond Death’, recalling the occasion where he was electrified on the fence, hanging a moment ‘after death’ – ‘I am dead, and the world as I see it has not changed! Is this what the world looks like after death?’ (34) – he was saved by being pushed off by a pole, ‘or maybe it was a shovel’ (35), held by a Soviet POW. Most of all, perhaps, it is about his attempts to face his own history. There is a narrative, a map, but it is told not as a chronicle but as a series of moments, flashes, impressions, ideas, illuminations, poems, even dreams and recalled daydreams. The style is terse, often simply descriptive.

Crucially of interest here is Kulka’s relationship to himself as a historian. Kulka describes how he went out of his way to separate himself from his research. So successful was he in this that, for example, in 1978, on hearing he planned to visit Auschwitz, a well-meaning colleague suggested that he ignore the main camp and ‘go to Birkenau – that is the real Auschwitz’ (3). He writes of his ‘paradoxical duality’ (82) in which he was both historian of that period and at the same time managed totally to avoid ‘integrating any detail of biographical involvement’ (82). This is discussed in the book and then illustrated by an appended meta-text, his scholarly article ‘Ghetto in an Annihilation Camp: Jewish Social History in the Holocaust Period and its Ultimate Limits’. As a historian, he both poses and answers the question of why the inmates of the ‘family camp’ – the sub-camp in Auschwitz in which he was held – were treated so differently. The ‘family camp’ was planned as a ‘show camp’ for the Red Cross and was suddenly ‘liquidated’ when the Nazis found it was no longer necessary. Identifying himself as a survivor, in the book but not the article, he discusses his intense memories and associations. This doubleness and the use of meta-texts are, of course, recognized tropes of texts that deal with trauma.

Kulka writes that he hoped that his highly regarded historical research would be ‘infused’ with a consciousness of the intensity of those events he witnessed, or that the ‘scientific historical research’ (82) would somehow help him break into the ‘metropolis of death’. However, he finds that

the truth, as it seems to me now, is that I only tried to bypass here the barrier of that gate, to enter it with the whole force of my being, in the guise of, or in the metamorphosis of, perhaps, a Trojan horse, intended, finally, to smash the gate and shatter the invisible wall of the city forbidden to me, outside whose domain I had decreed that I would remain.

(82)

Disguised or hidden as a historian he sought to come to terms with, to work at, if not ‘work through’ perhaps, the childhood experiences from which he had, in some profound way, exiled himself. But quite the opposite happened: the ‘safe and well-paved way of scientific discipline’ (82) led him to skirt precisely the violence, the murder and torture he had seen, ‘as perhaps I skirted the piles of skeletons in Auschwitz on my way to the youth hut’ (83). The ‘safe passage’ (83) of the discipline of history led him, he thinks, both not to be able to convey ‘the message’ (83) that was ‘burned into’ (83) his being but at the same time to cope with precisely that inability to tell it. And yet, in these passages over these few pages, he writes that the message that he could not tell, indeed, that made him ‘cower at the vague awareness that I had no way, and would never attempt, to embark on the path of an attempt to disclose’ (83–4) is that ‘the world, with the Metropolis and the immutable law of the Great Dea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface Beyond Tancred and Clorinda—trauma studies for implicated subjects
• Introduction
• PART I History and culture
• PART II Politics and subjectivity
• Index