Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory

M. Balaev, M. Balaev

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137365941
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

This edited collection argues that trauma in literature must be read through a theoretical pluralism that allows for an understanding of trauma's variable representations that include yet move beyond the concept of trauma as pathological and unspeakable.

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Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered

Michelle Balaev

The field of trauma studies in literary criticism gained significant attention in 1996 with the publication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History and Kali Tal’s Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma.¹ Early scholarship shaped the initial course of literary trauma theory by popularizing the idea of trauma as an unrepresentable event. A theoretical trend was introduced by scholars like Caruth, who pioneered a psychoanalytic poststructural approach that suggests trauma is an unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language. This Lacanian approach crafts a concept of trauma as a recurring sense of absence that sunders knowledge of the extreme experience, thus preventing linguistic value other than a referential expression. For Caruth’s deconstructive criticism in particular, the model allows a special emphasis on linguistic indeterminacy, ambiguous referentiality, and aporia.² The unspeakable void became the dominant concept in criticism for imagining trauma’s function in literature. This classic model of trauma appealed to a range of critics working outside of poststructuralism as well due to the notion of trauma’s irreversible damage to the psyche. The assumed inherent neurobiological features of trauma that refuse representation and cause dissociation were significant to arguments that sought to emphasize the extent of profound suffering from an external source, whether that source is an individual perpetrator or collective social practice.³ While the model is useful to forward claims regarding language’s inability to locate the truth of the past, it was quickly accompanied by alternative models and methodologies that revised this foundational claim to suggest determinate value exists in traumatic experience.

The evolution of trauma theory in literary criticism might best be understood in terms of the changing psychological definitions of trauma as well as the semiotic, rhetorical, and social concerns that are part of the study of trauma in literature and society. The allure of the classic model exists in the pairing of neurobiological theories regarding the processes of the mind and memory together with semiotic theories regarding the processes of language, associations, and symbolization. Yet if the psychological basis of trauma is reexamined, then the classic model fails to fit the laws of structural and poststructural linguistics. This is to suggest that the traditional Lacanian approach only works if the psychological definition of trauma conforms to a particular theoretical recipe that draws from Freud to portray traumatic experience as a pre-linguistic event that universally causes dissociation. In many ways the thrill of the classic model is the apparent marriage of psychological laws that govern trauma’s function to the semiotic laws that govern language’s meaning.

The history of the concept of trauma is filled with contradictory theories and contentious debates, leaving both psychologists and literary scholars the ability to work with varying definitions of trauma and its effects.⁴ Some alternative approaches start with a definition of trauma that allows for a range of representational possibilities. Alternative models challenge the classic model’s governing principle that defines trauma in terms of universal characteristics and effects. Critics such as Leys, Cvetkovich, and myself who establish a psychological framework apart from the classic model thus produce different conclusions regarding trauma’s influence upon language, perception, and society.⁵ Beginning from a different psychological starting point for defining trauma than that established in the traditional approach thus allows critics a renewed focus on trauma’s specificity and the processes of remembering. Understanding trauma, for example, by situating it within a larger conceptual framework of social psychology theories in addition to neurobiological theories will produce a particular psychologically informed concept of trauma that acknowledges the range of contextual factors that specify the value of the experience. This stance might therefore consider dubious the assertion of trauma’s intrinsic dissociation.

Much of the newest criticism employs psychoanalytic and semiotic theories that restructure how we understand trauma’s function in literature. Recent scholarship is more likely to explore the rhetorical uses of pathological dissociation or silence instead of working through psychological research that will unlikely provide a consensus regarding the empirical validity of trauma’s universal pathologizing effects. By focusing on the rhetorical, semiotic, and social implications of trauma, contemporary critics have developed neoLacanian, neoFreudian, and new semiotic approaches. In this collection one finds a neoLacanian approach in Herman Rapaport’s chapter, Greg Forter pursues a neoFreudian analysis, and Barry Stampfl elucidates a Peircean semiotic model. This shift in literary trauma theory has produced a set of critical practices that place more focus on the particular social components and cultural contexts of traumatic experience.

There are a number of ways to classify the different approaches that utilize alternative trauma models. These contemporary approaches are wide ranging but could be generally referenced under the umbrella term of the pluralistic model of trauma due to the plurality of theories and approaches employed. Many critics who address the rhetorical components of trauma explore both how and why traumatic experience is represented in literature by combining psychoanalytic theory with postcolonial theory or cultural studies. For example, critics like Rothberg and Forter work within a neoFreudian and postcolonial framework. Critics such as Luckhurst, Mandel, Yaeger, and Visser address the social and political implications of trauma within a variety of frameworks. In this collection Irene Visser employs a social psychology model of trauma within a postcolonial analysis, while chapters by Laurie Vickroy and Paul Arthur situate rhetorical concerns of trauma within a cultural studies framework.

The range of pluralistic models showcased in this collection moves away from the focus on trauma as unrepresentable and toward a focus on the specificity of trauma that locates meaning through a greater consideration of the social and cultural contexts of traumatic experience. The focus on the specificity of trauma is paired with an analysis that assumes greater skepticism regarding a universal pathological concept of trauma, thus generating more diverse views regarding the relationship between language and experience. Critics who diverge from the classic model may well be called revisionist. The revisionists, however, are not simply forging ahead along the path laid out by the early trauma theorists. Instead, revisionist critics either move away from Freud and Lacan altogether or take up certain Freudian or Lacanian theories while hewing a new theoretical paradigm in analyses that achieve a starkly different destination. In this fashion the scholars in the following chapters challenge the traditional concept of trauma as unspeakable by starting from a standpoint that concedes trauma’s variability in literature and society.

Taking into consideration the variety of approaches to studying trauma in literature, this collection broadens the parameters of literary trauma theory by suggesting that extreme experience cultivates multiple responses and values. Trauma causes a disruption and reorientation of consciousness, but the values attached to this experience are influenced by a variety of individual and cultural factors that change over time. Rather than viewing literature as a closed psychoanalytic system, the scholars in this book employ theoretical approaches and critical practices that suggest trauma’s function in literature and society is more varied and curious than first imagined by early theorists. The idea that knowledge of the past, not just any past but a particular type of past experience, can never be known or remains forever unclaimed by either the individual or society is being challenged by critical approaches that elucidate other possibilities regarding the value of trauma in terms of psychological, linguistic, and social mechanisms. The pluralistic model of trauma suggests that criticism may explore trauma as a subject that invites the study of the relationship between language, the psyche, and behavior without assuming the classic definition of trauma that asserts an unrepresentable and pathological universalism.

The collection thus demonstrates the methodological diversity within literary trauma theory that moves the field beyond a restrictive analysis by demonstrating trauma’s varying representations. Criticism within this framework may function to acknowledge the impact of suffering on individuals and communities, to consider the role of literature in a violent world, or to analyze the ways language conveys extreme experiences. Some approaches in the following pages, as mentioned above, pursue a neoLacanian approach that extends the notion of trauma’s silence in new directions. Still other approaches in the subsequent chapters challenge the central notion that trauma is a special pathogenic entity that uniquely ruptures knowledge, thus furthering the debate over the relationship between experience, language, and knowledge—a relationship that has vexed theorists for centuries.

Adhering to the dominant concept of trauma as a universal absence furthers certain ethical and aesthetic concerns but severely restricts the exploration of others. Understanding trauma beyond these monikers produces a greater range of questions regarding experience, representation, and value that this book explores. Authors here consider the multiple meanings of trauma that may be found within and between the spheres of personal and public worlds, thus providing views of both the individual and society, rather than consolidating the experience of trauma into a singular, silent ghost. The following chapters demonstrate the changing landscapes of literary trauma theory which has moved away from the early psychoanalytic methods to a theoretical position that advances a different set of issues, questions, and consequences that arose in part through the interdisciplinary approaches informed by psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. In a sense the book’s critical reach suggests that literature is more diffuse, varied, and less programmatic than the classic model affords.

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Trauma as the ultimate unrepresentable in the classic model maintains a tropological hegemony in literary criticism in part due to the theoretically appealing quality of this model to raise larger questions about the relationship between violence experienced by individuals and cultural groups, or the relationships between victim, perpetrator, and witness.⁶ For example, in understanding trauma in Freud and Lacan’s terms as both the return of the repressed and a sense of absence, Caruth writes in Unclaimed Experience that “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it is precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (4). Caruth’s classic trauma model utilizes psychoanalytical referents for a literary criticism that establishes claims about the repressive, repetitive, and dissociative nature of trauma. The claim highlights one of the significant arguments in the book that connects individual trauma to cultural/historical trauma, which is achieved partly by relying upon a particular neurobiological approach in psychiatry that insists upon a causal definition of trauma.⁷

The innate causality between trauma and dissociation, the idea that an extreme experience directly produces a dissociative consciousness wherein the truth of the past is hidden, supports Caruth’s claim that history functions the same as trauma insofar that “history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (18). And further, “For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs” (18). At the end of the first chapter Caruth writes that “trauma is never simply one’s own” (24). Although the book aims to create connections between the traumatized individual, society, and the historical past, this position rests upon the sacred assumption that trauma is inherently dissociative. The dissociative model of trauma here further supports the claim that “one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another” which forwards the notion of transhistorical trauma (8, 141). The claim that trauma “is not known in the first instance” and that trauma “returns to haunt the survivor later on” narrowly conceptualizes the psychological dimensions of trauma and the range of traumatic experience and responses. Psychological research indicates that amnesia, dissociation, or repression may be responses to trauma but they are not exclusive responses.⁸

Another problem within the classic model accompanies the dependence upon defining trauma as a deferred, recurrent wounding because this traumatic formulation removes determinate value from the experience. The theoretical binary of the traditional model rotates around an assumed paradox: “that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it” (Caruth 92). This view disallows a specific determinacy of trauma on rhetorical, psychological, and social levels, while at the same time embraces an undying pathological influence on consciousness. One result of trauma’s classic conundrum accordingly removes agency from the survivor by disregarding a survivor’s knowledge of the experience and the self, which restricts trauma’s variability and ignores the diverse values that change over time. In contrast, the pluralistic trauma model that allows determinate value and social specificity, even when a survivor like me had little agency in the moment of violence, thus acknowledges the variability of trauma in its definition and represen...