Trauma in Contemporary Literature

Narrative and Representation

Marita Nadal, Mónica Calvo, Marita Nadal, Mónica Calvo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415715874
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134738106
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Trauma in Contemporary Literature analyzes contemporary narrative texts in English in the light of trauma theory, including essays by scholars of different countries who approach trauma from a variety of perspectives. The book analyzes and applies the most relevant concepts and themes discussed in trauma theory, such as the relationship between individual and collective trauma, historical trauma, absence vs. loss, the roles of perpetrator and victim, dissociation, nachträglichkeit, transgenerational trauma, the process of acting out and working through, introjection and incorporation, mourning and melancholia, the phantom and the crypt, postmemory and multidirectional memory, shame and the affects, and the power of resilience to overcome trauma. Significantly, the essays not only focus on the phenomenon of trauma and its diverse manifestations but, above all, consider the elements that challenge the aporias of trauma, the traps of stasis and repetition, in order to reach beyond the confines of the traumatic condition and explore the possibilities of survival, healing and recovery.

Part I

Global Trauma and the End of History

1 After the End

Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of History*

Cathy Caruth

Memories of her village peopled by the dead turned slowly to ash and in their place a single image arose. Fire. (Toni Morrison, A Mercy)

In an essay of 1907, “Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva,” Sigmund Freud analyses the novella Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy (Jensen 1927) as a story exemplifying the principles of psychoanalysis laid out in The Interpretation of Dreams. In Jensen’s story, a young archaeologist becomes obsessed with the figure of a walking woman on a bas-relief he has seen on a trip to Italy. He names her “Gradiva” and convinced by a dream that the woman died in Pompeii during the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, he travels to the ruined city in order to search for the singular traces of her toe-prints in the ash.

In this archaeological love story set amid the ruins of Pompeii, Freud finds an allegory for repression and the reemergence of repressed desire. In a later reading of Freud’s text, the twentieth century philosopher Jacques Derrida, in his book Archive Fever (Mal d’Archive, 1995a), discovers, inside Freud’s figure of the archaeological dig, what Derrida calls an “archival” drive, a pain and a suffering (mal) that bears witness to the suffering, and evil, of a unique twentieth-century history. Derrida proposes that the history of the twentieth century can best be thought through its relation to the “archive,” a psychic as well as technical procedure of recording or of “writing” history that participates not only in its remembering but also in its forgetting.

At the heart of psychoanalysis, Derrida suggests, is the thinking of an archival drive that simultaneously yearns after memory and offers the potential for its radical elimination. Beginning from a reflection on the main argument of Archive Fever concerning the nature of the psychoanalytic archive, I will argue that the texts of Freud and Derrida, read together, ultimately enable a rethinking of the very nature of history around the possibility of its erasure. Moving beyond what Derrida explicitly suggests, I will also argue that these insights about history can ultimately be understood only from within the literary story of Norbert Hanold, the archaeologist, and in particular, the story of his dream. In what follows I will begin with Derrida’s general reflections on the archive and ultimately turn to the story of the dream, which is perhaps also that of psychoanalytic dreaming more generally, to ask: What does it mean for history to be a history of ashes? And how does psychoanalysis bear witness to such a history?

A BURNING ARCHIVE

The problem of the archive as an immediate contemporary question of historical memory first emerges in Archive Fever in the opening “Insert,” where Derrida links the archive to the urgency of twentieth-century history:

Why reelaborate today a concept of the archive? In a single configuration, equally technical and political, ethical and juridical?

This chapter will designate the horizon of this question discreetly, so burning is its evidence. The disasters that mark this end of the millennium are also archives of evil: dissimulated or destroyed, prohibited, diverted, “repressed.” Their treatment is equally massive and refined in the course of civil or international wars, of private or secret manipulations. No one ever renounces—and this is the unconscious itself—the appropriation of power over the document, over its detention, retention, or its interpretation. (Derrida 1995b)¹

The question of the archive is a question of “today”—of a particular historical period, a question with its own historical place—because it is linked, today, to the “disasters that mark the end of the millennium.” These disasters are not simply the objects of archives, or objects that call out for archiving; they are also, themselves, unique events whose archives have been repressed or erased, and whose singularity, as events, can be defined by that erasure. They can indeed, themselves be called “archives du mal”—archives of evil (or suffering)—because they not only leave an impression, but hide their impression. They involve evil or suffering, that is, precisely because they hide or prohibit their own memory: because they are themselves “hidden or destroyed, prohibited, repressed.” They consist precisely in hiding themselves; they become events insofar as they are, precisely, hidden.

The thinking of the archive is, in this sense, not only a thinking of memory but a thinking of history, and one that marks in particular, as I will argue, the historicity of the twentieth (and now twenty-first) centuries. This history is not, as one might traditionally expect, constituted by events that create their own remembrance, but by events that destroy their own remembrance. “Think of the debates around all the ‘revisions,” says Derrida, “and think of the seismic movements of historiography […] of techniques in the constitution and treatment of so many ‘dossiers’” (1995b, 2). This is why, I would suggest, psychoanalysis must be brought together with the thinking of the archive, because psychoanalysis has long been interested in the relation between history—personal and collective history—and the ways that its memory is suppressed or repressed: the ways that history is not available for immediate conscious access. Indeed psychoanalysis must itself be understood, Derrida argues, primarily as an archival science. Psychoanalysis, I would suggest, can thus help us to think, and perhaps witness, a new kind of event that is constituted, paradoxically, by the way it disappears.

Return and Repetition

The archival figure emerges from, and also reinterprets, Freud’s own famous figure for psychoanalytic discovery, the metaphor of the archaeological dig.² From 1896 onward Freud had repeatedly represented the surprising encounter with the unconscious through an analogy in which the unconscious aspects of the mind are likened to a buried city that occasionally shows signs of its presence and eventually comes to light in analysis. But at the heart of the archaeological metaphor, Derrida notes, we often find a different kind of figure, not the figure of buried objects but rather of buried writing:

[Psychoanalysis] does not, by accident, privilege the figures of the imprint and of imprinting. Installing itself often in the scene of the archaeological dig, its discourse concerns, first of all, the stock of “impressions” and the deciphering of inscriptions, but also their censorship and the repression, the repression and the reading of registrations. (1995b, 2)

If the archaeological project is the uncovering of an object, the archival task is the reading of an inscription. In this reading, psychoanalytic discourse does not only unveil a meaning of “impressions” and their “repressions” but also “installs itself” at the heart of the dig. The psychoanalyst’s act of interpretation does not, therefore, simply reveal what has been repressed, but may also repress again what has been inscribed. “Is it not necessary,” Derrida asks, “to distinguish the archive from that to which it is too often reduced, notably the experience of memory and the return to the origin, but also the archaic and the archeological, the memory of the dig, in other words, the search for lost time?” (1995b, 1–2).

Psychoanalysis does not permit a simple “return to the origin” because the impression it reads is not only left for psychoanalysis, but also left on psychoanalysis as it encounters the surprise of the inscription, and ultimately by psychoanalysis as it deciphers, as it leaves its own impressions, right at the site of the original ones, in a new archival act. The encounter with the archive is thus an act of interpretation that appears like a return, but is also an event that partially represses, as it passes on, the inscriptions it encounters; that passes on not only an impression but also, somewhat differently, its repression. The deciphering of desire, at the scene of the dig, is thus also the communication, and repression of desire, not necessarily of erotic desire, but rather of archival desire, “this fever, this presence, this desire [of Freud],” as Lacan described it (1998, 54). Through the act of its own archival drive, in other words, psychoanalysis reveals an “absolute desire for memory” (1995b, 3)—its own desire and perhaps also a desire at the heart of the erotic—that attempts to return to the past but to some extent always repeats and passes on, in its very act of interpretation, the ways in which the past has been erased.

As a thinking of the archive, psychoanalysis thus becomes witness to the strange notion of a memory that erases, a new notion of memory that, I would argue, is at the heart of the notion of “archive fever” (mal d’archive). Indeed, I would suggest, Derrida’s description of the archive in psychoanalytic thought alludes to a very specific and historically situated archival discovery, Freud’s encounter with “repetition compulsion” after WWI and his reformulation of the content and form of psychoanalytic theory around the notion of the “death drive,” another term that “archive fever” arguably attempts to translate. Freud, as we recall, described, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his encounter with a kind of memory of events that erased, rather than produced conscious recall: the dreams and memories of the soldiers of WWI whose death encounters repeatedly returned to interrupt, rather than enter, consciousness. No longer capable of interpreting these memories as expressions of unconscious desire, Freud came to understand them as repetitions of the experiences that the soldiers could not grasp, a form of memory that, in enacting what it could not recall, also passed on a historical event that this memory erased. These memories, in other words, in repeating and erasing, did not represent but rather enacted history; they made history by also erasing it. They themselves were archival memories because they archived history by effacing it, and in effacing history, they also created it. The soldiers became, as it were, self-erasing inscriptions of history. Traumatic memory thus totters between remembrance and erasure, producing a history that is, in its very events, a kind of inscription of the past; but also a history constituted by the erasure of its traces.

Psychoanalysis can thus think the singularity of twentieth-century history, the new impression it makes, because, as an archival theory, it describes the way memory can make history precisely by erasing it. The notion of the archive, as I would thus interpret both Freud and Derrida, is a change in modes of memory that is also a change in history, a change that is “equally technological and political, ethical and juridical” (1995b, 1). It is this surprising change in memory and history, moreover, that is reflected in Freud’s reconfiguration of the notion of the drive as a death drive. Although it is called a “drive,” it is also a new discovery in history—a new shift in the nature of the historical archive—whose own past cannot be traced, because it is effaced, and is thus named only in terms of the way it erases the archive of memory, including the archive of its own memory:

This drive […] always operates in silence, it never leaves an archive of its own. [I]ts silent vocation is to burn the archive and to incite amnesia […]. (1995a, 12)

[E]nlisting the in-finite, archive fever touches on radical evil. (1995a, 19–20)

Between the shock of the memory that effaces, and the shock of the discovery of this memory, is the event of an erasure, and of a history, that carries the name of the death drive, which is also archive fever, because it is made up of memory and is about memory, it is about the burning desire for memory and the history of its burning up.

FREUD’S FEVER

How can psychoanalysis bear witness to this erasure, beyond repression, which is new to the twentieth century? We should note that the concept of archive fever, and its fundamental psychoanalytic ancestors, the notions of traumatic repetition and of death drive, themselves, as concepts, enact a kind of return and repetition, a memory and its erasure. Indeed, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in its attempt to provide an economic understanding of the mind and in particular in its return to the notion of the memory trace, brings us back to Freud’s first full attempt at a psychic system, the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology. Derrida, likewise, in Archive Fever, returns explicitly to his own earlier attempt, in his 1967 “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” to read Freud’s Project, and to link it to Freud’s later work. It is on the level of the formation of psychoanalytic concepts, then, in the way that Freud’s concepts inscribe a memory, archive their own history within themselves, that psychoanalytic discourse will bear witness to the history that psychoanalysis encounters. This is how, I believe, we can interpret Derrida’s insight about the Freudian concept:

The principle of the internal division of the Freudian gesture, and thus of the Freudian concept of the archive, is that at the moment when psychoanalysis formalizes the conditions of archive fever and of the archive itself, it repeats the very thing […] which it makes its object. (1995a, 91)

The notion of the history referred to by the concept of “archive” is available only by studying the history of the concept of the archive, a story that occurs not on the level of a simple narration but, itself, requires a new temporal and historical modality.

What we find, indeed, when we return from Beyond the Pleasure Princip...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Trauma and Literary Representation: An Introduction
• Part I Global Trauma and the End of History
• Part II Trauma and the Power of Narrative
• Part III Trauma and the Problem of Representation
• Editors and Contributors
• Index