The Trauma Question

Roger Luckhurst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136015106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this book, Roger Luckhurst both introduces and advances the fields of cultural memory and trauma studies, tracing the ways in which ideas of trauma have become a major element in contemporary Western conceptions of the self.

The Trauma Question outlines the origins of the concept of trauma across psychiatric, legal and cultural-political sources from the 1860s to the coining of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in 1980. It further explores the nature and extent of 'trauma culture' from 1980 to the present, drawing upon a range of cultural practices from literature, memoirs and confessional journalism through to photography and film. The study covers a diverse range of cultural works, including writers such as Toni Morrison, Stephen King and W. G. Sebald, artists Tracey Emin, Christian Boltanski and Tracey Moffatt, and film-makers David Lynch and Atom Egoyan.

The Trauma Question offers a significant and fascinating step forward for those seeking a greater understanding of the controversial and ever-expanding field of trauma research.

Part I Aetiology

1 The genealogy of a concept

DOI: 10.4324/9780203607305-2

The history of a concept is not wholly and entirely that of its progressive refinement ... but that of its various fields of constitution and validity, that of its successive rules of use, that of the many theoretical contexts in which it developed and matured.

(Foucault 1974: 4)

This chapter will attempt to follow this programme, aware that trauma offers particular challenges in bringing together far-flung and heterogeneous resources. Authorities in the field have recognized that ‘a continuous history would be impossible to establish’, since historicism puts into question ‘the idea of a single, uniform, transhistorically valid concept of psychological trauma’ (Micale and Lerner 2001: 24, 25). For Judith Herman, the history of trauma is itself traumatized, being singularly marked by ‘episodic amnesia’: ‘Periods of active investigation have alternated with periods of oblivion. Repeatedly in the past century, similar lines of inquiry have been taken up and abruptly abandoned, only to be rediscovered later’ (Herman 1994: 7). Foucault's proposal, that histories need to be aware that concepts emerge across dispersed sites and in discontinuous ways, comes ready built into trauma. The challenge is to construct something coherent from the different elements that need to be put into play.

What follows is in five sections. I want to put some flesh on the truism that trauma is a concept that can only emerge within modernity, tracing it as an effect of the rise, in the nineteenth century, of the technological and statistical society that can generate, multiply and quantify the ‘shocks’ of modern life. This broad context is the frame that produces the conditions of emergence for trauma in specific disciplines from about 1870 to the Second World War: law, psychiatry and industrialized warfare. After elaborating the notions of trauma that develop from these distinct, but overlapping knowledges, the last section will examine how these languages were reformulated in the linkage of trauma and the politics of identity from the 1960s, looking particularly at the formation of ‘survivor syndromes’ for victims of nuclear war and Nazi persecution, the politicization of illness in Vietnam war veterans, and the transformed understanding of women's experience by feminism.

Trauma and modernity

Trauma is typically held to be ‘responsive to and constitutive of “modernity”’ (Micale and Lerner 2001: 10). ‘Modernity’, Seltzer confirms, ‘has come to be understood under the sign of the wound’: ‘the modern subject has become inseparable from the categories of shock and trauma’ (Seltzer 1997: 18). Modernity, often loosely dated to the rise of the modern nation state in the eighteenth century, is identified with a series of contradictory transformations of the relations of so-called traditional society. The fixity of place, the dense network of social relations and local traditions typical of the village, for instance, is dislocated by a new orientation of the individual to an abstract, national and increasingly international space. Similarly, the local rhythms of time are replaced by a standardized time that routinizes labour time and co-ordinates national economies and transport systems. Individuals are ‘disembedded’ from cyclical rituals and traditions and experience a release from narrow expectations that is at once liberating and angst-ridden. Self-identity, in other words, is uprooted from traditional verities and subject to a kind of permanent revolution: all that is solid melts into air (Berman 1983).

The classic site of modernity is the city, which by the end of the nineteenth century had swallowed the majority of the British population, turning an agrarian nation into an urban one. In these sprawling, artificial terrains, divorced from nature, commentators began to worry about the overstimulation and exhaustion caused by prolonged immersion in the city. ‘New machines had come in to make life still more complicated’, Grant Allen wrote in 1894: ‘sixpenny telegrams, Bell and Edison, submarine cables, evening papers, perturbations coming in from all sides incessantly; suburbs growing, the hubbub increasing, Metropolitan railways, trams, bicycles, innumerable’ (Allen 1894: 119–20). Walter Benjamin's account of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century explicitly theorized urban experience as ‘a series of shocks and collisions’, regarding the overwhelming rush of street transport, advertising, telephones, films and crowds as subjecting ‘the human sensorium to a complex kind of training’, in effect an engineering of new urban selves (Benjamin 1973: 171). Explicitly relying on Freud's ideas of the shock that overwhelms psychic defences, Benjamin saw Paris as a city of traumatic encounters, rewriting the very notion of experience. Charles Baudelaire was Paris’ great poet because he was a traumatophile, seeking out the shocking encounter, traversing the streets like a fencer, welcoming every shock and parry.

The intrinsic ambivalences of modernity – progress and ruin, liberation and constraint, individualization and massification – are perhaps best concretized by technology. Technology can be seen as the instrumental vehicle for the liberations of modern space-time, but it can also be the ‘demonic’ force that reduces humans to ‘the conscious limbs of the automaton,’ as Marx evocatively put it (Marx 1980: 141). Humans might regard technology as the prosthetic extension of their will to mastery, yet nearly every new technology hailed in this way also attracts a commentary that regards it as a violent assault on agency and self-determination. This ambivalent commentary nearly always invokes the traumatic. The mythic origin of the cinematograph has an apocryphal story of audiences running from the Lumière brothers’ film of an oncoming train, prompting Tom Gunning to call early cinema ‘the cinema of attractions, which envisioned cinema as a series of visual shocks’ (Gunning 1999: 820). Similarly, the global network of telegraphy and telephony, the ‘nerves of empire’, was soon haunted by the spectral voices of the dead that travelled along the wire at the same speed as the electrical spark (Luckhurst 2002). It should come as no surprise, then, that the general scholarly consensus is that the origin of the idea of trauma was inextricably linked to the expansion of the railways in the 1860s.

The railway was the icon of British modernity: widely held to exemplify engineering genius, it also heralded what contemporaries called ‘the annihilation of space and time’, compressing travel length and distance. Whilst British clock-time was eventually standardized across the country in order to integrate the railway timetable, it remained a dangerous and chaotic industry. From the very first public run of Stephenson's Rocket in September 1830, death attended the operation of the railway: the MP William Huskisson was struck on the tracks. With the 1871 Railways Regulation Act, records of fatal accidents were properly reported and for the next thirty years, there were never less than 200 passenger deaths a year, with the peak in 1874 of 758 deaths (Bartrip and Burman 1983).

Wolfgang Schivelbusch has influentially suggested that the effect of ‘the industrialisation of the means of transport’ was ‘to alter the consciousness of passengers: they developed a new set of perceptions’ (Schivelbusch 1986: 14). This extended beyond the denatured terrain now processed through the window of the ‘machine ensemble’, for the railway accident was the site of the ‘first attempt to explain industrial traumata’ (Schivelbusch 1986: 24, 136) as it exposed the travelling middle and upper classes to the kinds of technological violence previously restricted to factories. The speed of collisions often rendered these accidents particularly gruesome events. Yet even those who survived without apparent physical injury began to report strange effects on their nerves. In 1862, The Lancet (the journal of the British Medical Association) carried a supplement on ‘The Influence of Railway Travelling on Public Health’, which included medical speculations that travelling at speed might have concussive effect on the nervous system, whilst the violent jarring of the body in an accident might induce permanent but invisible damage. Because the fevered expansion of the railways from the 1840s was driven by free market companies, the medical question of injury was always also a legal question of liability. Could those who bore no physical mark nevertheless claim damages for nervous debility that often began to develop some time after the accident? In 1862, a Mr Shepherd was awarded £700 in compensation for the detrimental effects on his ability to conduct business, after testifying that since his involvement in a railway accident in 1858 his ‘chief complaint’ was ‘a feeling of nervous depression, and particularly that the countenances of his fellow-passengers, with terrified eyes, would come before him whenever he attempted to do any reading or writing’ (cited Harrington 2003: 212). Thus was the medico-legal notion of ‘railway spine’ inaugurated. This is what Charles Dickens suffered after his ‘terribly destructive accident’ in 1865, in which he assisted the badly injured at a bridge derailment, and later rescued his manuscript of Our Mutual Friend (Dickens 1865: 799). Dickens suffered all manner of subjective disturbances in the following months: he wrote ‘I am not quite right within, but believe it to be an effect of the railway shaking’ (cited Trimble 1981, 28). This has led some critics to regard Dickens as a victim of PTSD (Matus 2001). In the 1870s, The Lancet alarmingly announced that ‘we may be said to have supped full of railway horrors, and railway travelling has become almost insupportable to persons of a nervous temperament’ (cited Harrington 1994: 17). Later still, Max Nordau decried modernity's degeneration as a result of nervous overstimulation, including in his principal causes ‘the little shocks of railway travelling, not perceived by consciousness’ and the mental overload of ‘every scene we perceive through the window of the flying express’ (Nordau 1895: 39).

Railway spine was the first instance of a theory of trauma that became contentious because rival theories placed it at opposing ends of the spectrum from physical to psychical etiologies. The surgeon John Erichsen published a series of lectures in 1866 on railway spine which was successful in linking the term to a physical theory. The violent jolt of an accident resulted in concussion of the spine:

a certain state of the spinal cord occasioned by external violence; a state that is independent of, and usually, but not necessarily, uncomplicated by any obvious lesion of the vertebral column ... – a condition that is supposed to depend upon a shake or jar received by the cord, in consequence of which its intimate organic structure may be more or less deranged, and by which its functions are greatly disturbed.

(Erichsen 1875: 15)

In the absence of certain medical knowledge about the physiology of the nervous system, Erichsen speculated that jarring caused molecular changes in the spinal fluid, yet he also resorted to analogy, as

when a magnet is struck a heavy blow with a hammer, the magnetic force is jarred, shaken, or concussed out of the horse-shoe ... . So, if the spine is badly jarred, shaken or concussed by a blow or shock ... we find that the nervous force is to a certain extent shaken out of the man, and that he has in some way lost nerve-power.

(Erichsen 1875: 156–7)

The case histories presented offered portraits of disordered memory, disturbed sleep and frightful dreams, and various types of paralysis, melancholia and impotence, with a particular emphasis on the sudden loss of business sense. The most ‘remarkable’ detail for Erichsen was the belated onset of these symptoms: ‘at the time of the occurrence of the injury the sufferer is usually quite unconscious that any serious accident has happened to him’ (Erichsen 1875: 157). The physical and mental effects seemed to ramify and worsen over time: Erichsen's prognosis for amelioration was pessimistic.

Erichsen's organic basis appealed to simple mechanical cause and effect and gained popular and professional currency, but it was also subject to critique. The most sustained attack was by Herbert Page, who regarded Erichsen's evidence as ‘lamentable’ and despaired that ‘“concussion of the spine” is used almost indiscriminately both in and outside the medical profession’ (Page 1883: 74). Page pointed to studies of post-mortem pathology that could present no evidence in support of organic lesions. Instead, Page tried to shift railway spine onto a different premise: ‘we shall see that the course, history, and general symptoms indicate some functional disturbance of the whole nervous balance or tone rather than structural damage to any organ of the body’ (Page 1883: 143). The functional disorders were the product of the profound shock of the collision:

The vastness of the destructive forces, the magnitude of the results, the imminent danger to the lives of numbers of human beings, and the hopelessness of escape from the danger, give rise to emotions which in themselves are quite sufficient to produce shock.

(Page 1883: 148)

To Page, this also explained how symptoms arrived belatedly: ‘Warded off in the first place by the excitement of the scene, the shock is gathering, in the very delay itself ’ (Page 1883: 148). This was Page's formulation of what he called nervous shock. Erichsen had in fact already acknowledged shock in the considerably expanded edition of his lectures in 1875, conceding that

terror has much to do with its production. It must be remembered that railway accidents have this peculiarity, that they come upon the sufferers instantaneously and without warning, or with but a few seconds for preparation, and that the utter helplessness of a human being in the midst of the great masses in motion renders these accidents peculiarly terrible.

(Erichsen 1875: 196)

Yet Erichsen regarded these functional conditions as a distinct but lesser type of response to accidents; organic impacts still occurred, and were the more serious illnesses. In contrast, Page saw all of these nervous disorders as resulting from ‘purely psychical causes’ (Page 1883: 148).

If Page seems the closer to modern conceptions, it is important to realize that his insistence that the psychical traumas of railway accidents were forms of hysteria came from transparently pecuniary motives. Page had been the surgeon for the London and North Western Railway Company for nine years when he wrote his book. Erichsen's argument had to be defeated because an organic origin for railway spine nearly always resulted in huge payments for damages to those caught up in railway accidents, and this was being worryingly extended to those without any visible physical injury. To associate nervous shock with hysteria was to equate it with a shameful, effeminate disorder, often dismissed as a form of disease imitation (what was called ‘neuromimesis’) or malingering. Accident victims who presented these symptoms could now be suspected of feigning illness for financial advantage. After a chapter devoted to spotting cases of ‘Malingering’, Page proposed that the prospect of legal compensation was fuelling and prolonging forms of hysteria:

the knowledge that compensation is a certainty for the injuries received, tends, almost from the first moment of illness, to colour the course and aspect of the case, with each succeeding day to become part and parcel of the injury in the patient's mind.

(Page 1883: 255)

Eric Caplan has detailed the rise of the National Association of Railway Surgeons in America in 1888 as an organization devoted to contesting any organic basis to railway spine, since rail companies were losing millions in law cases where they suspected juries were already biased to favour individual victims over large railroad corporations in an era of anti-trust agitation. Railway spine, one leading figure complained in 1894, had been ‘invented by one of the most clever English surgeons’, yet ‘it has baffled both railway surgeons and counsel, and, vampire-like, sucked more blood of the corporate bodies and railway companies than all other cases combined’ (cited Caplan 1995: 412). But Page's argument should not be dismissed as laissez-faire Victoriana: the term ‘accident neurosis’ was proposed in 1961 as a specific syndrome ‘motivated by hopes of financial and other rewards, and which shows considerable improvement following the settlement of compensation’ (Mayou 1996: 399). In 1981, Michael Trimble's historical study, Post-Traumatic Neurosis, foregrounded the fact that psychiatric debates ‘represent the veneer of a multi-million pound enterprise’, and included the chapter ‘The Central Issue – Malingering’. Guides for forensic assessment of cases still outline the means to detect so-called ‘factitious PTSD’.

‘Railway spine’ names a conjuncture of body and machine, the violent collision of technological modernity ...