Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization

Jennifer Ballengee, David Kelman, Jennifer Ballengee, David Kelman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000092059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While globalization is often associated with economic and social progress, it has also brought new forms of terrorism, permanent states of emergency, demographic displacement, climate change, and other "natural" disasters. Given these contemporary concerns, one might also view the current time as an age of traumatism. Yet what—or how—does the traumatic event mean in an age of global catastrophe? This volume explores trauma theory in an age of globalization by means of the practice of comparative literature. The essays and interviews in this volume ask how literary studies and the literary anticipate, imagine, or theorize the current global climate, especially in an age when the links between violence, amorphous traumatic events, and economic concerns are felt increasingly in everyday experience. Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization turns a literary perspective upon the most urgent issues of globalization—problems of borders, language, inequality, and institutionalized violence—and considers from a variety of perspectives how such events impact our lived experience and its representation in language and literature.

Part I

Trauma, Deconstruction, and Global Relations

1

Globalization and the Theory of Trauma

A Conversation with Cathy Caruth

Cathy Caruth

Translations of “Trauma”

Jennifer Ballengee (JB):Let’s begin by broadly considering the growing field of study related to trauma. Your work has introduced a fruitful and growing mode of literary, cultural, and philosophical analysis that is tied up with trauma—both its symptoms and the methods by which we analyze it. How do you feel about the terms “trauma theory” or “trauma studies”?

Cathy Caruth (CC):The problem with the phrase “trauma studies” is that “studies” makes “trauma” sound like a concept. When I was first working with trauma the word had a kind of surprise element. But I was also drawing from a text. I wasn’t thinking about a theory of “trauma.” I was going to do a book on the accident, I was teaching an undergrad class at the time that involved Moses and Monotheism.

David Kelman (DK):Was this while you were still at Yale? While you were getting your PhD?

CC:At Yale. After the PhD. I was a young professor. I’d already published Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud. That book was about death encounters in which the phenomenal frame of experience is questioned in one way or another. And the figures I looked at involved children and parents. So there were these child/parent encounters that involved one of them being dead, and the encounter couldn’t be assimilated to a phenomenal experience. So I wasn’t thinking “trauma,” but in a sense it was already there.

And then I was going to write on the accident, and specifically on the incommensurability of the cause and effect in the accident. While I was teaching Moses and Monotheism, in which the accident is so central, the first thing I noticed was that right away you could see it’s about a death that is missed. But at the same time all of the prefaces named very specific proper names of where Freud was living or going to live. So there was this strange situation: on the one hand there was a theory of the missed event but on the other hand there was the specificity of a name and the historicity of the framework in which he was writing.

So I got interested in trauma through the accident example. And then the psychoanalyst Dori Laub showed me a videotape of a conference that discussed the L’Ambiance Plaza disaster in Connecticut that had happened recently. And the video had had a bunch of clinicians who had worked with these people. And there was a therapist named Robert Ostroff who was working with a guy who had seen his best friend die. And this man said over and over again, “I can still see his eye hanging out of his socket. Could he see me? Could he see me?” And then the therapist said his dreams were accurate or precise—that the dreams or the hallucinations of traumatized people are precise until they get better, when they became symbolic. So all of a sudden, the notion of trauma—this idea of the force of the trauma being bound up with the nightmare or hallucination, rather than with ordinary consciousness—linked up with what I had learned about referentiality from [the literary critic and theorist] Paul de Man. He doesn’t call it referentiality exactly. But I understood some of his writing and teaching as attempting to articulate how the force of a text, what we might think of as its reality element, may arise where our understanding of the text is ruptured or interrupted, and not on the level of semantic comprehension, where we might expect it. And I realized that the phenomenon of trauma sounds a lot like this element of reading, this relation to what I thought of in terms of referentiality—specifically, the rupturing force of it. … And so that was amazing.

And then Dori encouraged me to go to the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies annual conference. Just about everything that I heard from the people at this conference seemed to contain the same paradox—the seeming accuracy of the returning image or behavior combined with its unconsciousness or splitting-off. And the clinicians and researchers were discovering it, too. It was still so new. Everyone was saying: Wow, the dreams are accurate, but they can’t remember. Or they would speak in terms of dissociative effects. For example, when the most overwhelming events ought to create increased levels of stress hormones but in fact produce the opposite. Every single talk had that paradox in it, at least as I heard it.

About this time, I had been asked to do an issue of American Imago on psychoanalysis and ethics and I ended up changing the topic to trauma.¹ And then I just got interested in it and thought I should write on it.

So that’s how my interest developed. I wasn’t really thinking about trauma originally, but then it just kind of unfolded from my previous interest in the nonexperiential encounters that are central to but not assimilable within experience. So the work on trauma is kind of related to the first book as well as to the original idea for a second book, but it wasn’t a plan.

DK:You mentioned earlier that the word “trauma” seemed to produce a surprise.

CC:Yes, it has a performative value.

DK:Is “trauma” still surprising in that way? Does it still have that surprise?

CC:It is in relation to this question that the popular phrase “trauma studies” bothers me a little. But it’s sort of inevitable. Or even the word “theory”; you know that if you say “trauma theory” it’s still going to seem like it’s some kind of abstract or scientific theory. You can say it’s not really a “theory,” but it’s hard to explain that. The problem with these terms is that they make trauma like a “thing” or a concept that we can apply to things, as if we knew what “trauma” meant. The term “trauma,” at least in the versions in which it appears in Freud—and in the best writing about Freud—sort of says, along with its conceptual import, “you don’t know yet what I mean.”

I often say “the experience and notion of trauma,” in order to mark the difficulty with simply understanding the writing on trauma as providing a clear concept with a clear object, or as being distant and separable from its presumed referent. I noticed that Derrida does something similar with the term “archive” in Archive Fever. He’ll say “The concept and figure of the archive.” When I was writing (in Literature and the Ashes of History) about Derrida’s text as a reading of Freud and as a repetition of Freud’s own repeating of his earlier work in his later work, I argued that the relation between the term “trauma” and its presumed referent is itself a kind of repetition, and that this is the structure of its signification. So, for example in Moses and Monotheism, the presumed object, or the referent of the concept of, or the term, “trauma” is an experience that is delayed. This presumed object is an experience—that is, a kind of non-experience—of delay. But the relation between the experience and the concept of the experience is itself described by Freud in terms of a delay. Thus, Freud first gives the example of how it may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision, and then weeks later this person has symptoms. After stating this, Freud says that “[a]s an afterthought we observe that—in spite of the fundamental differences … there is a correspondence in one point. It is the feature which one might term latency” (Freud, Moses 84). Here, the word Freud uses (translated as “as an afterthought”) is nachträglich – this is the word for the delay, as in the term Nachträglichkeit.² So in the movement from the experience of trauma to the theory of the traumatic structure of the Jews, the word that connects the experience and the concept is the word nachträglich, which is used elsewhere by Freud to describe the inherent delay in traumatic experience.

And I think he does a similar thing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle with the fort-da analysis. This is where he tells the story of the child playing fort-da, “gone” and “there,” and in doing so Freud, himself, goes back and forth with the fort and the da: he says that the game is a game of fort, then that it is a game of da, then that it is a game of fort. There’s no obvious reason for him to oscillate like that in his interpretation; he could simply have said, “Here’s a game, we thought it was the pleasure principle, but actually it’s not.” But he doesn’t do that. He goes back and forth. So he repeats the game of the child, but he repeats it as something incomprehensible, because he can understand the game of “da” as a function of the pleasure principle, but he can’t explain the game of “fort.” The theory of trauma, which will derive from this analysis of the game, and the so-called object of this theory, are thus, themselves, bound by what looks like a traumatic structure, which is also the structure of Nachträglichkeit, or the movement of what appeared to be a da becoming a fort.

From this point of view, the term “trauma” itself, as a conceptual marker, repeats, but it doesn’t represent; it doesn’t even simply signify or refer, according to the principle of any of these traditional structures, as a word and its referent, or a signifier and its signified, or a concept and its object.

The term thus could be said to theorize itself. And that’s partly why it’s never just a concept, because it’s always moving. In fact, at the point that we get a theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we actually lose the term “Nachträglichkeit.” He repeats his earlier work where this term appeared, but he repeats it differently. The notion and language of trauma are constantly moving into something different. And it’s also a word that’s inscribed in a series of texts, for example in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It’s associated with these figures of departure, such as the “fort” in the child’s game, which he links to the departure of the child’s mother. Later, when he is trying to explain traumatic repetition, he describes it, essentially, in terms of the mind attempting and failing to return to the moment before the traumatic encounter, a failure that is essentially a departure from the event. Samuel Weber also discusses this inherent “fort” in trauma that recurs in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and as well in Freud’s description of the beginning of life.³ Or, in other places in Beyond, trauma is associated with the figure of awakening. Or it is associated implicitly with ashes in Freud’s writing on Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, if we look at that text from the perspective of Freud’s later writing.⁴ The notion of trauma in Freud is inextricable from these figures. So, to return to your question, I don’t think the surprise of trauma is ever entirely lost, because any reading of it in context can open it back up again.

Thus, when I was reexamining Freud’s use (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) of a scene from Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated for the “Afterword” to the 20th anniversary edition of Unclaimed Experience, the text opened up in a completely new way.⁵ If you encounter a good trauma reading, for example in the work of Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière’s History Beyond Trauma, you’ll be surprised all over again. They use “madness” more than “trauma,” but for them they’re inextricable.⁶ And the word “trauma” still speaks. It’s nice to go elsewhere than the US. In the US you get more questions like, “Shouldn’t we be beyond trauma already?” Whereas if you go to other parts of the world, where there’s a collective, everyday engagement with trauma, they’re not as concerned with what’s trendy. The word speaks to them still. But it doesn’t have to be the word “trauma.” In other languages, what happens? In fact, the global context of your collection raises this point. The word “trauma” can be traced back to the ancient Greek word for wound, but then it becomes German and French and English. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be designated by the same term. And it may need to change in different contexts. So sometimes you may be writing about it, but you don’t even need to use the word to convey something that’s linked to it (though the shift in language may also indicate a shift in experience or ideas).

What, linguistically, are the stakes of trauma? Because one of the problems I have found in recent criticism is that the argument often goes something like this: Trauma is based in the West. It’s Eurocentric. It’s colonial. It only comes from one perspective. And therefore we need to go to other cultures to look at trauma. We need to go to other cultures to get at the alterity of trauma in other contexts. So these critics use the same term in English, “trauma,” to describe what is supposed to be radically different in another language and culture. You can ask about trauma in other cultures but then you immediately have to ask the question: If we’re in another language, shouldn’t the word “trauma” also have to change? Even if it’s a formerly colonized people who use English, it’s not the same English. So in these critics’ arguments the word “trauma” gets conceptualized; it becomes a simple or stable concept, which is not the case in Freud, or in my writing, for that matter. The concept of trauma, these critics suggest, is “Western” or “European,” and so we are supposed to go to a non-Western place to decolonize it, but the same word and concept of “trauma” is used to describe what we are supposed to look at in that new context. To me that is a problem. So if there’s going to be a change in how we think about trauma, we may need to use other names, or we may need to change the structure we are talking about.

At other times critics say: “Caruth keeps mentioning alterity, but she doesn’t do the Other.” Okay, fair enough. But of course, then you have to ask: What is the Other? And why is a Western text only Western? And that’s what I was working on with Tasso.

DK:So it sounds like critics would like to enact a translation from Western to non-Western literatures and cultures, but that translation is not actually taking place when critics repeat the word “trauma”...

CC:Exactly. And, from another perspective, we might say that the word is already not itself. As I mentioned before, it’s from ancient Greek. So even when using the word “trauma,” we are already in a scene of translation, and to look at that carefully would be productive. That problem of translation is why Tasso is so interesting in Freud.⁷ I am referring to the example from Jerusalem Liberated with which Freud illustrates the notion of repetition compulsion: specifically, the actions of the character Tancred, who unwittingly kills the knight Clorinda (whom he loves) on a battlefield and then later swipes at a tree in a forest and hears her voice come out from the cut saying he has wounded her again. What’s striking, in that scene of the tree that is cut, is that there’s writing on it: there’s what’s called “Syriac,” which is apparently Arabic, but then...