Trauma and Public Memory

J. Goodall, C. Lee, J. Goodall, C. Lee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137406798
• eBook ISBN: 9781137406804
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This collection explores the ways in which traumatic experience becomes a part of public memory. It explores the premise that traumatic events are realities; they happen in the world, not in the fantasy life of individuals or in the narrative frames of our televisions and cinemas.

Part I

Overviews

Introduction

The essays here explore transitional frames of memory, from the personal, through communal and community recollections to the wider landscapes of social and collective memory. At all of these levels, memory is connected to lived experience, albeit at one remove. Public memory, though, is characterised by a level of dis-connection from lived experience. The writers in this section explore how and where that occurs, and to what effect.

Christopher Lee looks at the provenance in the public sphere over the last century of a group of private letters describing the trauma of war. His essay is interested in the ways in which repeated framings of testimonies of war within a socially redemptive discourse of sacrifice failed to bear witness. Using debates over the changing nature of the public sphere and recent sociological work on the sacred, he suggests that the ritual of sacrifice and the brutalities of war are connected in a potent circuit that represents the commercialisation and instrumentalisation of contemporary life.

Wendy Richards describes how Sudanese youth who formerly belonged to the Red Army were reinvented as ‘Lost Boys’ for European and American media, so as to invest them with the pathos of the Peter Pan story. While this narrative of stateless innocents assisted their case for refugee status, it is now installed in public memory and in the longer term leaves them stateless in another sense, with their experience as militarised youth in a protracted civil war left unacknowledged, together with all the complex and traumatic recollections arising from it. Richards gives an account of a community documentation project for Sudanese refugees in Australia who, as adult men, are reflecting back on their boyhood experience.

In ‘Trauma and the Stoic foundations of Sympathy,’ Jane Goodall focuses on cases in which the immediate witnessing of trauma and traumatised subjects in civil war is recorded for a wider audience. These recordings – photographs, journals and letters – may find a place in public culture, but their intimate and personal connection with the original events makes a special kind of demand on public attention. Such works can serve to convert the public back to a collective of feeling and responsive individuals. This essay links the bid for public sympathy to Adam Smith’s writings, and his embrace of a Stoic tradition that presents rational self-command as a precondition for fellow feeling.

Laurie Johnson takes the other side of the equation, exploring a syndrome of obtuseness in which practices of commemoration and memorialisation have the psycho-social function of creating distance from the inexpressible sense of traumatic loss. Built structures and formalised rituals of memorial, Johnson suggests, come to stand in for it. This leads to a challenging reversal of Freudian logic, with the proposition that in the public domain, traumatic memory is characterised by a lack rather than an alien superfluity of affect; a culture of memorial works to preserve a state of collective consciousness based on a deficiency of engagement with the real.

1

‘But Why Should You People at Home Not Know?’: Sacrifice as a Social Fact in the Public Memory of War

Christopher Lee

I write from the battlefield of the Great Push with thousands of shells passing in a tornado overhead, and thousands of unburied dead around me. It seems easy to say that, but you who have not seen it can hardly conceive the awfulness of it all. I’ve just read a letter from you dated May 16th, and that makes me think of writing to you, absurd though it is to think of writing to you in this inferno. Your letters are such a comfort – and by Jove it’s good of you to write. One feels on such a battlefield as this, that one can never survive, or that if the body lives the brain must go forever. For the horrors one sees and the never ending shock of the shells is more than can be borne. Hell must be a home to it . . . . My battalion has been in it for eight days, and one-third of it is left – all shattered at that. And they’re sticking it still, incomparable heroes, all. We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless. Even when we’re back a bit we can’t sleep for our guns. I have one puttee, a dead man’s helmet, another dead man’s gas protector, a dead man’s bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men’s blood, and partly splattered with a comrade’s brains. It is horrible but why should you people at home [not] know?

(Raws and Raws 1995, p. 145)¹

Lieutenant J. A. Raws, a 33-year-old journalist from Melbourne, Australia, describes here his experience of one of the greatest conflagrations of the Great War. It was 4 August 1916 and Raws was nearing the end of his own personal involvement in the battle for Pozieres on the great Somme battlefield. Australian success in capturing this important strongpoint in the German defensive line created a narrow salient which enabled the enemy to concentrate its artillery on the assaulting forces from three directions. Shells falling short from British support batteries far behind ensured their complete encirclement. The failure of the push on both flanks also meant that most of the enemy’s available artillery could be brought to bear on that one small French village and the gentle ridge that turned its immediate surrounds into a strategic objective. The shelling at Pozieres is often described as amongst the most sustained and concentrated bombardments of the First World War. In seven weeks of fighting here three Australian divisions suffered 23,000 casualties. Thirty per cent of these were killed or died of wounds; the majority of them – Raws and his younger brother Lieut. R. G. (‘Goldy’) Raws included – received no known grave. The two men are commemorated on the Australian memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, 25 kilometres away to the south and west, in the Books of Remembrance at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, the Roll of Honour in the Australian War Memorial in the national capital Canberra, and on a small honour board in the Flinders Street Baptist Church in Adelaide, where their father was minister (Figure 1.1).

Alec’s letters describe the coded contaminations of trench warfare. Horror is presented as an intimate proximity with the dead. He fights and hides amongst them. He is equipped by them: helmet, gas protector, bayonet. He is marked by their remains: blood and brains. He is ‘rotten’ with them. Bearing witness to the decay and dismemberment of the human form is a particularly compelling ordeal. The dead insist upon a purifying ritual that also carries a story and that story in Christian traditions is embodied whole in the crucified figure of Jesus Christ. Another letter describes Raws’s failure to distinguish the living from the dead. A rotten corpse is mistaken for a shell-shocked soldier. He pulls the head off another body which he suspects of malingering. Character cannot avail in the face of the overwhelming impact of the shelling upon the senses. The barrage unleashes the storm of affect which bypasses character to directly challenge the physiological systems of the embodied human animal. Raws’s account imagines trench warfare as an assault upon the socially constructed purities of his human nature. It is a trauma that transgresses the distinctions that socialise him into the civilised roles of son, brother and friend, as these roles are understood within the structures of an upwardly mobile middle class Australian family.

Figure 1.1 Official Australian photograph of the Pozieres battlefield nine months after the battle

The village of Pozieres as it was some months after the battle. The lonely grave is that of Captain Ivor Stephen Margetts of Wynyard, Tasmania who served in the 12th Battalion and was killed in action on 24 July 1916. The German Spring Offensive in 1918 re-captured this area and Margetts’ grave was obliterated and lost. His name is commemorated on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial. This image was used as the cover for Les Carlyon’s award winning popular history The Great War (2006). Photograph by unknown official Australian photographer.

Mary Douglas makes a point about the way that the distinction between purity and dirt arranges things. Dirt is matter out of place. This functional classification regulates social place according to distributions of identity and power. In representing the traumatic experience of trench warfare to his friend, Raws describes himself as out of place amongst the dirt and destruction. That is part of the horror of it all. But in the midst of a holocaust he reads a letter and is ‘absurdly’ moved to reply. Correspondence reassures Raws by invoking a relationship that reaffirms the social categories transgressed by the horrors of trench warfare. But the distance between these two incompatible orders of reality cannot be crossed: ‘you who have not seen it can hardly conceive the awfulness of it all . . . but why should you people at home [not] know?’ The urgent question suggests that what Raws has seen and experienced cannot be communicated. The fear is that it is also unacceptable to try.

There is a solace sought in desperation through the letters this doomed soldier sends to his family and friends. The need transgresses the established social etiquette that men will bear the suffering of the world, the secret masculine ordeals of combat, and not impose them upon those whose lives they understand themselves to be protecting. Michael Roper has written eloquently of the affective support soldiers in the trenches sought from their mothers during the Great War. Letters from unmarried men to their mothers comprise almost half the collection in the Imperial War Museum in London. Letters to fathers are far less frequent. Roper suggests that this is because the letter’s ‘potential introspection and emotionality’ made it a ‘feminine form’ (Roper 2009, p. 60). ‘Practical letters’ went to fathers; ‘loving’ letters to mothers (p. 61). And sons were more likely to discuss violence with fathers than mothers, though younger sisters might sometimes be used to circumvent the prohibitions relating to the maternal figure. When Raws reported on the fate of his younger brother, who was posted missing the day preceding his own arrival as a reinforcement in the line, he told his sister flatly that ‘Goldy . . . is either dead, prisoner or wounded in the head.’ He confides to her, however, that he ‘shall tell Father and Mother that he has been wounded but will recover’ (Raws and Raws 1993, pp. 146–7).

The act of writing for someone known and conversely of being addressed as someone known clearly girds the social orders of reality that are under siege. These modes of address are underpinned by the hygienic distinctions that Douglas famously explores. The nuanced decision about how to write to whom and why reaffirms an established social position in a network of relations that brings comfort and reassurance. And so the receipt of a letter stirs Raws to return a letter: ‘absurd though it is to think of writing in this inferno’. But what happens to such a letter when it finds its way into the public sphere? What form of social relation is invoked in taking up the trauma text?

Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean describes the contributions of the Raws boys to the battle for Pozieres in his own account of the part played by Australian forces in the First World War. The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 is a monumental work which, in keeping with Ricœur’s observation of the relation between war and historical community, uses Australian involvement in the Great War to proclaim an originating Australian social contract (Ricœur 2006, p. 79). Bean, the architect, general editor and principal author of the 12 volume history believed that during the war ‘the Australian nation, previously almost unknown to most other peoples, won the respect of the world’ (Bean qtd. in Inglis, p. 90). The task of his official history was to demonstrate how and why that was so to an international as well as to an Australian audience. The different modes of address in Raws’s letters, adjusted subtly as they are to fit the person and the social position of correspondents within an intimate family circle, are not possible in an official history. Bean had to decide upon the great animating theme of his story and he had to decide how to singularly address the public he sought for it. That sense of a public is represented as an act of interpellation by the Official History and that mode of address had to be one that a contemporary Australian audience could accept.

A statement in the preface to The Story of Anzac, Volume 1 suggests that a decision on the appropriate mode of address of the Official History was taken early in the war. When writing about ‘the men and officers of the Australian Imperial Force’, he explained,

the only memorial which could be worthy of them was the bare and uncoloured story of their part in the war. From the moment when, early in the war, he realised this, his duty became strangely simple – to record the plain and absolute truth so far as it was within his limited power to compass it.

(Bean 1921, p. xxx)

The models of official military history available at the time were characterised by the abstract military jargon of the professional soldier. Bean replaced this with a detailed description of the action in simple, dispassionate language. This approach avoided the romantic associations and classical allusions that characterise populist British treatments of the Gallipoli campaign by John Masefield, Cecil Aspinall-Oglander and Sir Ian Hamilton (Macleod 2004, pp. 76–7). According to the historian Ken Inglis, Bean’s style sought the authentic straightforwardness of the ordinary Australian soldier and indicated a desire to communicate with an unlettered Australian public:

No reader could have guessed from the prose that Bean had studied classics at Oxford. But it was also at Oxford that he had decided to write for the housemaid of average intelligence; and now he was devoting the best part of his working life to writing about and for unlettered Australians, born in severely unclassical localities and acquainted hardly at all with the ancient history and folklore of the eastern Mediterranean.

(Inglis 1998, p. 84)

The various audiences imagined for the Official History raised concerns over the level of culture appropriate to the task and debates over an appropriate literary style characterised its early production (Barker 1994). Bean’s response to these concerns selected and combined traditions of culture which were stratifying in Britain, Europe and the United States in ways which bear out the historian Richard Waterhouse’s argument that in Australia during this period ‘the division between high and low culture remained less clear and defined’ (Waterhouse 1995, p. 133; Heyck 1992; Levine 1988). The search for an appropriate level of culture in the Official History invokes differing perceptions of the public available to Australian cultural production between the wars and offers some different styles which were thought appropriate to them (Lee 2007).

Bean’s experience as a correspondent during the war prepared him for these debates in particular ways. John F. Williams has described him ‘as a journalist who used truth selectively, lied sometimes and was given to over-exaggeration’, while acknowledging that this was the lot of the wartime correspondent (Williams 1999, p. 265). Bean was one of the first ‘embedded’ journalists, however, and his own battlefield experiences of the horrors of modern warfare inspired in him a determination to avoid the glorification of war and to tone down the romantic embellishments that were characteristic of peers such as the legendry Ellis Ashmead Bartlett. According to Bean, Bartlett achieved the true ‘spirit’ by describing incidents which did not actually occur and his own response ‘was to describe battle in plain, simple and “Anglo-Saxon” prose, with a minimum of rhetorical flourish’ (Bean qtd. in Thomson 1994, pp. 60–1). The contrast with the famous British correspondent was noted to Bean’s detriment in Australia, however, and both the Argus and the Age came close to discontinuing his work because of its lack of an appropriate spirit (pp. 62–3; Macleod 2004, p. 117). According to the Bulletin, Bean’s dispatches did not

serve the Australian who wanted the story of Australian arms to be written so that they could visualise it. The fact is that he’s too small for the job. It demanded a man able to make images with the vocabulary of a literary man and the eye of a photographic lens, and it got – a reporter.

(qtd. in Macleod 2004, p. 117)²

During the war, Bean, as correspondent, was caught up in the contrary demands of representing the soldier’s experience of the horrors of modern warfare, the politician’s expectations of stirring propaganda, and the press’s desire for tales of glory (Thomson 1994, p. 63). The predicament bears out the difficult situation that reporters find themselves in a commercialised public sphere, particularly during times of national insecurity and it underscores Habermas’s nostalgic lament for a free exchange between liberal individuals of education and culture (Habermas 1992).

The Bulletin’s demand for visualisation is symptomatic. The press photograph itself emerged during the 1890s in Britain as newspapers applied technological developments to appeal to the wider markets made possible by both the higher literacy levels provided by the education acts and the broader sense of social engagement prompted by the extension of suffrage (Weiner 1988, p. 52; Conboy 2004, p. 166). Paul Wombell claims that the appeal to visuality developed out of advertising techniques designed to draw the eye from the news t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Overviews
• Part II: Interviews
• Part III: Reflections
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index