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New Books on
Trauma
Reviewed by
Professor Jennifer Travis
Extremities:
Trauma, Testimony, and Community. Edited by Nancy K. Miller
and Jason Tougaw
Paperback:$18.95
Trauma at
Home: After 9/11. Edited by Judith Greenberg
Paperback:$19.95
The explosion of interest in trauma theory among
literary and cultural critics in the 1990s appears to confirm Kirby Farrell's
claim that the
Critics across ideological spectrums seem to agree
that we are now living in an “age of trauma” and that our contemporary cogito may
well have become “I Bleed Therefore I am” (Geoffrey Hartman qtd. in Extremeties, 19). The term “trauma”
itself has been around for a long time—it is from the ancient Greek word
meaning wound—yet not until the nineteenth century would the meaning of trauma with
its emphasis on the physical manifestations of “wounding” also include the
wounding of the mind. With the proliferation of new technologies like the
railroad and the abundance of physical wounds associated with it (accidents
abounded on early railways), other kinds of non-physical disorders
flourished. These “hysterical” symptoms,
from the anxieties produced by train accidents and wartime shell shock to,
later, the extreme experiences of concentration camp survivors and the victims
of domestic violence, required a new vocabulary, a different kind of
socio-political genealogy, to describe them.
With the birth of psychoanalysis and the work of Freud and his
contemporaries, psychical wounds were sundered from their physical
counterparts; trauma, they argued, was a “hysterical shattering of the
personality” (Ley, 33).
Despite these early voices, the discourse about
trauma would also be marked by what Ruth Leys calls the “alternation between
episodes of forgetting and remembering,” from the belated psychiatric response
to the Holocaust to the emergence of clinical diagnoses such as Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD), which was only adopted as a clinical category by the
American Psychological Association in 1980 (Leys, 15). Similarly, it would be
many years before domestic violence was recognized, clinically and culturally,
as a source of trauma. Judith Herman, a
prominent voice in feminist theories about trauma argues that “not until the
1970s was it recognized that the most common post-traumatic stress disorders
are those not of men in war but of women in civilian life” (Herman, 28). Given the cautious history and reluctant
recognition of trauma, it becomes all the more notable that traumatic
experience, at least colloquially, now describes a wide spectrum of events
“including modern life itself” (Saunders, 29). We live in what the editors of
the new volume Extremeties, Nancy K.
Miller and Jason Tougaw, grandly label the “age of trauma” (1). They argue that
“narratives of illness, sexual abuse, torture, or the death of loved ones have
come to rival the classic heroic adventure as a test of limits that offers the
reader the suspicious thrill of borrowed emotion” (2). The borders between “private self” and
“public citizen,” the individual body and the body politic, my suffering and
your sympathy, are being dissolved as the “limits of tellable experience”
expands (2)
This is not quite how trauma theorists such as
Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Shoshana Felman had theorized trauma early on, especially in
relation to the paradigmatic traumatic moment of the twentieth century: the
Holocaust. Caruth describes trauma as
“unclaimed experience” characterized by its very “unassimilated nature,” an
experience that returns to “haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth, 4). Other critics argue that the Holocaust
“serves as a compelling example that unrepresentability and aporia can be
integral to lived experience rather than the deconstruction of experience”
(Cvetcovich, 27). If the Holocaust
“supplies the paradigm” of traumatic experience and incommensurable suffering
in contemporary discourse, Extremities
seeks to examine what has emerged from it, what the editors describe as the
“set of terms and debates about the nature of trauma, testimony, witness, and
community—that has affected other domains of meditation on the forms the
representation of extreme human suffering seems to engender and require”
(4). There are a number of essays on the
Holocaust in the collection, and each one looks in different ways at what
Michael Rothberg, in his essay on Ruth Kluger’s memoir Still Alive, calls the “marking of boundaries” (57). From Marianne Hirsch’s examination of
“postmemory” in her analysis of the “gap” between women survivors and their
daughters, and Ross Chambers’s examination of the Fragments controversy and the phenomenon of “phantom pain”
(Binjamin Wilkomirski’s personal testimony of survival published in 1995 under
the title Fragments was met with
great critical acclaim only later to be exposed, amid great controversy, as a
fraud), to Susan Gubars’s reading of Sylvia Plath’s use of Holocaust material,
each essay asks the question “To whom does the memory of the Holocaust belong?”
(Miller and Tougaw, 10).
If the memory of the Holocaust belongs to us all,
it does so, in part, because it has made the notion of testimony fundamental in
our perceptions of ourselves. Essays by
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jason Tougaw, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examine the
texture of testimony and its social and political meanings in and through
extreme events and circumstances: mass violence against women, AIDS, and breast
cancer respectively. In “Unbearable
Witness,” Chun analyzes the 1989 massacre of several female engineering
students by the professed “anti-femininst” Marc Lepin. Chun examines the discussion and silencing
of the event in
Personal writing about trauma and the act of listening
to traumatic experiences has become crucial in the “construction of community
and collective identity” (Miller and Tougaw, 14). What, we may ask, is the role of the cultural
critic in this process? Patricia
Yaeger’s essay, “Consuming Trauma; or, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating”
queries: “If circulating the suffering
of others has become the meat and potatoes of our profession, if this
circulation evokes a lost history but also runs the danger of commodification,
how should we proceed?” (30). Several essays in Extremities address the moral murkiness of the academy’s
consumption of trauma in light of its search for a politics of empathy. Perhaps no recent event highlights this task
more sharply than September 11th.
Trauma at
Home: After 9/11 is a collection of short essays that address on personal, scholarly,
and clinical levels a variety of responses to September 11th. The essays mainly are by academics, but the
collection also includes visual artists and poets among the voices
represented. The collection, importantly,
resists constructing a unified account of the after shocks of the terrorist attacks;
some contributors analyze their grief, while others express their rage at the
ways in which 9/11 has been co-opted for partisan political agendas. Peter Brooks in his essay “If you have
Tears,” laments the “political failure of our mourning and thus its failure to
bring us the right, sobering lessons about our global responsibilities” (49).
He likens the current administration’s use of September 11th to
Anthony’s use of Caesar’s body in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which the “mantel of mourning” is used to
“conceal political maneuver[s]” (50).
The public, argues Brooks, must be cautioned that “political mischief”
is often “wrought from mourning” (51).
Trauma at
Home, in
fact, is home to several of the same critics included in Extremities: Michael Rothberg, Nancy K. Miller, Patricia Yaeger,
Orly Rubin, and Marianne Hirsch, and it is particularly interesting to compare
these writers’ accounts of trauma before and after 9/11. (Although Extremities was published in 2002, the
collection was in its final editing stages at the time of the attacks and thus
none of the essays take September 11th into their purview.) Marianne Hirsch, for example, questions how
photography on September 11th not only enabled a form of “witness for the
witness,” but also, to invoke her earlier phrase from “Marked by Memory” in Extremities, how differently this day “inflected
the ethics and politics of grief,” since commentators seem to agree that the
September 11th attacks were the “most photographed disaster in
history’” (71).
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 called
upon us all to reckon with the vocabulary of trauma; we live in its aftermath
politically, socially, and culturally. Whether or not it has made us think
differently of “home” is a question we all may profitably ask ourselves. The collection Trauma at Home is a useful resource toward such a reckoning.
Books
referred to in this review:
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
Cvetcovich, Ann. An
Archive of Feelings.
Farrel, Kirby. Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and
Interpretation in the Nineties.
Hartman, Geoffrey H. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary
Studies,” New Literary History (1995):
537-555.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery.
Hughes, Robert. The
Culture of Complaint: A Passionate Look into the Ailing Heart of
Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy.
Saunders, Rebecca. “And the Women Wailed in Answer”: The
Lamentation Tradition. Unpublished Manuscript.
Showalter, Elaine. Hystories.
__________________________
Jennifer
Travis is an Assistant Professor of English at