The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma

Meera Atkinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501330889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The first decades of the twenty-first century have been beset by troubling social realities: coalition warfare, global terrorism and financial crisis, climate change, epidemics of family violence, violence toward women, addiction, neo-colonialism, continuing racial and religious conflict. While traumas involving large-scale or historical violence are widely represented in trauma theory, familial trauma is still largely considered a private matter, associated with personal failure. This book contributes to the emerging field of feminist trauma theory by bringing focus to works that contest this tendency, offering new understandings of the significance of the literary testimony and its relationship to broader society. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma adopts an interdisciplinary approach in examining how the literary testimony of familial transgenerational trauma, with its affective and relational contagion, illuminates transmissive cycles of trauma that have consequences across cultures and generations. It offers bold and insightful readings of works that explore those consequences in story-Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Hélène Cixous's Hyperdream (2009), Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1992), Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy (1999), and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), concluding that such testimony constitutes a fundamentally feminist experiment and encounter. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma challenges the casting of familial trauma in ahistorical terms, and affirms both trauma and writing as social forces of political import.

1

L’écriture Féminine and the Strange Body

Few of the founding texts that established the enormously productive field of Holocaust studies, or the works that came to the fore throughout the 1990s that took the examination of literary testimony as their project, gave sustained focus to the question of gender in relation to trauma. This is an understandable omission, especially for the pioneers of Holocaust studies, many themselves survivors, who were struggling to understand the diabolical psychic, social, and political operations that led to the Shoah, and its traumatic legacy. Since the 1990s, gender studies and trauma studies have proceeded side by side and the “scholarly fields of gender and trauma have been profiled, elaborated and intertwined in various theories and disciplines, to a various extent” (Festic 2012). The question of gender in relation to transgenerational trauma is a productive one, as scholars like Marianne Hirsch (2012) have confirmed and demonstrated, but even recent major publications in trauma theory, such as The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism (Buelens, Durrant, and Eagleston 2014), which takes a decidedly interdisciplinary approach to reevaluating trauma theory in the twenty-first century, fails to substantially address gender.

At the most obvious level a connection between gender and trauma can be made in terms of lived experience. For example, being or becoming a woman is associated with heightened traumatic encounter in the form of rape and violent crime, partner and family violence, historic (and still prevalent in degrees depending on location and context) educational disadvantage, and exclusion, constraint, and underrepresentation in public life. In theorizing a poetics of transgenerational trauma, my interest in gender lies more in the ways in which this poetics constitutes a feminist practice rather than in claims prescribing the biological sex of the practitioner. In this chapter I tease out the similarities, differences, and intriguing departures between what has been formulated as “feminine writing” and the writing of transgenerational trauma. In doing so, I evoke critical considerations around gender and writing in order to show that the poetics of transgenerational trauma is not a straightforwardly gendered writing; rather it is produced via strange-bodied traumatic memory and its affective circulations.

Reading trauma theory, one repeatedly comes across an interpretation that to speak or write trauma is to attempt to liberate the unconscious and express experience not representable in language. The claim is that trauma is not readily available to conventional discourse in language. This claim is based upon a general understanding of trauma responses as “the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (Caruth 1996: 11). Here, the subject is rendered speechless by delay, by a lack of psychic registration, and the seemingly incoherent reverberations of belatedness.

The post-structuralist feminists Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva highlight another area of the unsayable, or at least the not sayable in ordinary language. In Cixous’s works (Cixous 1981a,b), this is depicted, more or less, as writing the body (that which remains outside of figurative and conventional language) and writing the experience of woman (marginalized in phallocentric culture). Cixous has famously asserted that “feminine” and “revolutionary” embodied writing challenges cultural and literary gender operations. Relating this practice to the affective and bodily depths Cixous does not primarily refer to the physical body or biology, but to the body as a “complex of social and biological processes” (Oliver 1993: 174).

Kristeva (1984) relates unrepresentability to what she calls the “semiotic chora” (the term “chora” is borrowed from Plato). Following on from, and complicating, Jacques Lacan (1977), she relates the semiotic to the maternal, which predates paternal (patriarchal) law and the subject’s entry into the Symbolic Order. Lacan establishes the Symbolic Order as the realm of signification and language and of social reality. In Michel Foucault’s nonpsychoanalytic political philosophy, such social operations are alternatively theorized as “discourse” (1980), which describes organizations of knowledge, language, bodies (individual, textual, institutional), materialities, activities, and power that are specific to particular moments in history and that change throughout history. The chora’s prelinguistic “semiotic aspect of signification indicates what is ‘below the surface’ of the speaking being” (McAfee 2004: 18). It is bodily and linked to the energy of the drives. Its relationality is to the maternal, but it is not simply somatic; it is also linked to the liminal, the thetic, and language, however socialized and conditioned. For Kristeva then, the subject is involved in a signifying process that cannot be reduced to categories of simple representation. Though she resists the idea of sexed writing, even in metaphorical terms, it is this inference of the prelinguistic maternal that has been read as implying a feminine element in language, resulting in a differently nuanced comprehension of what Cixous explicitly denotes as écriture féminine (feminine writing). Despite these developments in the period preceding their writing, those at the forefront of literary trauma theory, such as Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman, do not appear to have engaged with the question of sexual difference or the gender relations of, and within, language, when formulating their textual theories of traumatic writing. Even the psychoanalytic theorist Maria Torok (Abraham and Torok 1994), who takes an interest in both the literary operations of trauma and sexual difference, seems nevertheless to keep the two concerns separate in her work. ¹

I realize that recourse to these works by Cixous and Kristeva may, at first glance, seem dated due to their association with the second wave of feminism, but I cast them into a very specific context: the revisiting of notions of feminine writing in relation to transgenerational trauma and its transmissions. Such an examination necessarily requires engagement with the influential texts on écriture féminine, since they inform my positioning of trauma, as a first move in this book, in relation to questions of gender and writing. Despite their differences in detail, both theorists share the view that the desire or need to speak, to write, or to testify, contradicts trauma’s predisposition to elude language, though neither names trauma explicitly.

Caruth refers to trauma as “the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (Caruth 1996: 4). Felman articulates the pull to express trauma as a yearning to “seek reality” (italics in original) by exploring the “injury inflicted by it” in an effort to “re-emerge from the paralysis of this state” and move on (Felman 1995: 33). In extolling writing that “consists in saying the worst,” Cixous appeals to us to “go and see, and not only see but inscribe the abyss we are” (Cixous 1993: 42). In Kristeva’s view the language of the Symbolic Order is repressive, while the poetic language of the semiotic “reactivates” repressed material (1980: 136). So it is that the desire for voice and reckoning calls forth experience that resists (conventional) language, drawing us into therapy and/or the arts, into writing and reading, and into spaces and relations in which affect can lead the way.

In this chapter, I focus on two autobiographical novels and classics of poetic prose, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart (1991), which I hold to be a rendering of feminine writing as described by Cixous, and The Lover, by Marguerite Duras (1992). The Lover has been widely written about, and I acknowledge that in many ways it reads today as a decidedly twentieth-century text. I have selected it because I view it as a solid starting point for my examination of the poetics of transgenerational trauma, revealing, as I argue in this chapter, something of its gendered and imperialist operations, which I address with developing nuance in later chapters. It is my hope, then, that even those readers most familiar with The Lover and corresponding criticisms might remain open to a fresh reading from a posttrauma turn, postaffect turn, twenty-first-century vantage point.

My aim is to position my theorizing of the poetics of transgenerational trauma by situating it in relation to a significant literary and feminist theory to a) show how the traumatic and feminine are implicated in, and by, one another in certain writing practices, and b) assert that the production of the poetics of transgenerational trauma has less to do with biological sex and more to do with the resonance of traumatic affect in bodily inscriptions. The notion of écriture féminine, as championed by Cixous during the late 1970s and early 1980s, sought to challenge phallocentric and logocentric gender relations with a vision of a feminist and revolutionary writing. Contentious from the start, it gave rise to international disputes about what constituted the feminine and whether or not a gendered casting of language was useful or advantageous. As well as highlighting gendered aspects of language and writing, écriture féminine also demonstrated a celebratory conceptual approach to writings that sit outside the dominant literary modes and the norms of the commercial publishing industry. In my examination of two such texts, I illuminate both crossovers and diversions between écriture féminine and the poetics of transgenerational trauma, showing that écriture féminine might be thought of as a kind of traumatic writing, and that the poetics of transgenerational trauma is, at root, a form of feminine writing that focuses on the operations of the transmission of trauma, familial and cultural. My suggestion that écriture féminine constitutes traumatic writing does not equate to a claim that “woman” is inherently traumatic, but rather that within a patriarchal cultural formation, writing the feminine—the affective, the chora, the subliminal—speaks of, and out of, currents of traumatic affect more readily than other, more conventional, forms of writing. My assertion that the poetics of transgenerational trauma is a form of écriture féminine is made in relation to Cixous’s notion of a socialized, metaphoric “system of cultural inscription readable as masculine or feminine” rather than in relation to her statements that locate écriture féminine in embodied terms. I argue that both écriture féminine and the poetics of transgenerational trauma seek to destabilize dichotomies in which qualities attributed to the masculine are privileged (such as logical and rational thought and language) by way of profoundly affective writing practices, but that they also diverge in crucial ways.

Revisiting feminine writing

When contemplation of the body in writing trauma inevitably led to questions around gendered social, theoretical, and literary operations, my undergraduate reading of Cixous’s exuberant texts celebrating écriture féminine came to mind as a seemingly obvious portal for reflection. No sooner had the thought occurred than reticence set in: the breathtakingly bold concept of écriture féminine, as proposed by Cixous, has been, for all its lyrical glory and emancipatory promise, a sticking point. Cixous herself admitted it was more a framework for exploration and a rallying cry rather than a theory proper, stating: “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist” (Cixous 1981a: 253). While it is not possible to do justice to the debates around feminine writing within the breadth of this chapter, I would like to draw out at least a couple of the issues raised in those debates in order to clarify my embrace of the term, and to position my view of the poetics of transgenerational trauma in relation to it.

The idea of subversive writing proposed by the so-called “French Feminists” generated a great deal of discussion, and dissent, particularly from American scholars and more materialist-oriented feminists such as Anne Rosalind Jones (1981), an early commentator and critic. The question as to where Kristeva should be positioned in relation to écriture féminine and to any notion of women’s writing per se has also been debated. Following Jones, a number of feminist writers, most notably Kelly Oliver (1993), teased out the similarities and differences between Cixous and Kristeva. Though Kristeva wrote about her concept of revolutionary, and in some sense feminized, writing around the same time as Cixous was publishing on écriture féminine, their propositions were constructed in distinct ways. This disparity is key to my understanding of the poetics of transgenerational trauma. For Cixous, écriture féminine redresses patriarchal social and literary operations through the practice of a bodily writing, while Kristeva theorizes a revolutionary practice of/in language that facilitates social and political revolution. In “Sorties” (1981b), Cixous critiques the binary oppositions that culture, philosophy, and literature are based upon, positing her “qualifiers” of masculine/feminine as a way of critiquing this binary imbalance and phallocentric, logocentric social and political order. Conversely, Kristeva’s revolutionary writing takes place in what Oliver calls a dialectic oscillation between the Symbolic Order—the dominant discourse of making sense—and the disavowed semiotic, which speaks the unconscious and drives via the musicality of poetics and avant-garde writing, and which is most evident in tones, rhythms, and gaps (Oliver 1993: 95).

In Kristeva’s view, the semiotic is more active in this oscillation in revolutionary writing than in traditional literatures, and she conceives of the semiotic as preverbal and linked to the maternal. It is this gendered aspect of Kristeva’s semiotic that has seen it linked to Cixous’s characterization of the feminine in literature and to Kristeva’s being associated with Cixous’s écriture féminine, despite the fact that Kristeva herself has emphatically rejected the claim to a “woman’s writing,” stating, “There is nothing in either past or recent publications by women that permits us to claim that a specifically female writing exists” (Kristeva 1987: 111). Interestingly, though Cixous has often been charged with essentialism for her conception of a feminine writing, and though she herself fanned the flames of such charges by waxing lyrical about women writing in the same breath with which she promotes the glories of écriture féminine, Cixous has been careful to distance her “feminine” from “socially determined” sex.

Some Cixous passages do muddy the waters, such as when she writes: “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies” (Cixous 1981a: 245). Cixous also states that while men are “coaxed toward social success, toward sublimation,” women “are body” and to her mind this calculates as “more body, hence more writing” (257). These read as direct equations of woman, body, and writing. On the other hand, she stresses the cross-gender potential of feminine writing. Unsurprisingly, many failed to grasp the complexity of the apparent contradictions of Cixous’s vision, which at one level advocated the writing of women, while at another went to pains to stress the metaphoric and nonbiological foundation of écriture féminine. In “Sorties,” Cixous argues that there is a socialized “immense system of cultural inscription readable as masculine or feminine,” which can be either reinforced or disrupted via the production of signs and relationships of power and production (Cixous 1981a: 93). She stresses that she uses masculine and feminine as “qualifiers of sexual difference,” as cultural signifiers as it were, and that the “difference is not, of course, distributed according to socially determined ‘sexes’” (93).

This claim would appear to be verified by the fact that Cixous wrote her PhD thesis on James Joyce. She has also repeatedly hailed Jean Genet as an exemplary practitioner of écriture féminine, along with Latin American writer Clarice Lispector. In my conception of the strange body, I propose a casting of “feminine”/feminist writing that loosens lingering associations with the activisms of the “second wave” women’s liberation movement and revives it in the twenty-first-century present. In the pages that follow, I outline the poetics of transgenerational trauma as a related, but distinct, challenge to the patriarchal bearing and heritage of society at the deepest strata through language and literature, one generated from a locus beyond the specificity of the given individual body or its biological sex. So long as culture is bound by binary oppositions in which the masculine is privileged, the term “écriture féminine” remains useful, if for no other reason than that conceptions of revolutionary and feminine operations and writings remind us of the gendered conditions in which we participate in culture, write, read, and theorize.

The strange body

Lauded a masterpiece by Angela Carter, and widely held to be a gem of poetic prose, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept chronicles Smart’s passionate affair with the married British poet George Barker, with whom she bore four children. It was first published during their four-year affair in 1945. In her foreword to the 1991 publication of the book, Brigid Brophy defends it as a “novel” despite stating that it is little more than “the bare three lines of a love triangle, and even those have to be inferred from the narrator’s rhapsodizing or lamentation over them” (Brophy 1991: 8). This comment is crucial because though the book is a fine example of écriture féminine as espoused by Cixous—poetically somatic, penetratingly affective, and stunningly unconventional at the time of its publication—its narrative is, by and large, confined to the conditions of the affair. The Lover, by Marguerite Duras, is a critically acclaimed experimental memoir, hailed as one of the greatest autobiographical novels of the twentieth century. It is ostensibly about Duras’s teenaged affair with a wealthy Chinese man in the dying days of colonial Saigon. In The Lover, Duras too demonstrates the feminine in and of language—that which is bodily, affective, and in Kristeva’s terms, semiotic, though here we need remember that Kristeva’s “semiotic” does not refer to de Saussure’s structuralist theory of semiotics. Her semiotic is the emotional underbelly of the Symbolic Order. But, as I will show in my comparative reading of these texts, Duras also illuminates transgenerational and intergenerational trauma and the traumatic shame-binds of patriarchy, imperialism, and racism. As Maxine Hong Kingston says in her introduction, “The couple with no names in The Lover also reach each other through history that moved populations singly and en masse to and fro across the earth and into its every corner” (Kingston 1992: vi). Above all, it is the traumatized relation with the other that Duras mines—erotically, familiarly, and culturally.

Brophy notes the “liturgical” (1991: 9) nature of Smart’s work, its “plundering classical mythology” and “mastery of metaphor” (10), and she likens the book to the work of “the only other supreme prose-poet of our age, Jean Genet” (11), whose work, we may recall, Cixous holds as exemplary of écriture féminine. Brophy declares the text’s “insistent rhythm” to be the “rhythm of a throb,” stating that “even when its rhythm expresses the throb of pleasure, the pleasure is so ardent that it lays waste the personality which experiences it” (Brophy 1991: 9). Pounding with poetic immediacy in the first person, present tense, Smart’s text explodes in the manner Cixous espouses in “The Laugh of the Medusa” when she says, “A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subver...