Cathy Caruth

My aim in this paper is to question the apparently mutually supportive bind between legal and psychoanalytic discourse in order to refine the methods used in Trauma Studies. I will do this by first reviewing Leys’ (2000) critique of Caruth’s (1996) work and then follow that by an analysis of Hiroshima, mon amour (1958) which, as a film based on a screenplay by Marguerite Duras about the ethical impact of the U.S. bombing of Japan to end WWII, gives us ample opportunity to see to what extent the legal and the psychoanalytic discourses are and are not bound to each other.

In this paper it will be suggested that in this era we cannot understand the concept of trauma without first understudying the cultural context. Yet not less important it will be suggested that trauma stands in the very core of our culture, namely, traumatic event and the creation of a group of survivors is a precondition for the formation of a community. The collective identity is rooted within the traumatic event, and the structure of this collective identity is based upon the survivors' stories. 1. Trauma as Culture, Culture as Trauma Defining culture is an almost impossible mission, yet in the simplest possible terms we can suggest that people who belong to the same culture share something in common: knowledge, belief, language etc. In the broadest sense, common symbols represent culture. This paper suggests that the very notion of culture is based upon trauma; namely, the traumatic event defines a heterogeneous and diverse collection of individuals as a group. Without trauma there can be no collective, since trauma is a constituent factor in forming a community and preventing that community from falling apart. Trauma is the fuel that keeps a community alive and functioning. Hence to be part of a community is in fact to accept and embrace the iconic trauma (such The Binding of Isaac, the crucifixion of Jesus, the Holocaust etc.) that shapes that particular community. Thus culture is rooted in trauma in the most fundamental way. Essentially, however, it is not necessary that all the members of a certain group will themselves undergo the constitutive traumatic event (Tal, 1996). Indeed one of the most important questions in the context of the linking between trauma and culture is how trauma can be absorbed by members of the community who did not experience the traumatic event itself? The answer is begging the question: the creation of culture allows a particular group to create symbols which, in turn, enable a particular individual to be part of a wider community. Tal (1996) defines this process as "cultural codification of the trauma" (p. 6). We not merely accept this notion but in fact believe that this process is unavoidable: trauma and culture are intimately connected. Although it may be argued that this link between trauma and culture is a type of circular reasoning, this objection is far from bothering us – it is not for nothing that we have declared that the answer begging the question. We do not deny the existence of circular reasoning between culture and trauma, rather the opposite: we believe that there is a closed loop between trauma and culture. Thus, trauma and culture are two sides of the same coin: the study of culture leads us to the iconic and constitutive trauma-the most famous example probably being "Moses and Monotheism" (Freud, 1939)-and the study of this iconic trauma is, in fact, the study of culture (Meghnagi, 1993). To study the one is to study the other (and vice versa). Likewise, it would not be an exaggeration to say that traumatic identity stands at the core of cultures, for instance as a national collective memory. Thus, according to Seltzer (1997) it is not merely that "a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound" (p. 3) occurs, but rather he believes that trauma creates a pathological public sphere: "The pathological public sphere is everywhere crossed by the vague and shifting lines between the singularity or privacy of the subject, on the one side, and collective forms of representation, exhibition, and witnessing, on the other" (p. 4). Moreover, Seltzer (1997) has suggested that trauma is a kind of Archimedes point at

Abstract: Jonathan Safran Foer's novels Everything is illuminated and Extremely loud and incredibly close are commonly read as trauma fiction—works that incorporate insights from literary trauma theory. This paper argues that these novels give rise to implications that are difficult to reconcile with that theory. Foer's signature motif of 'holes' alludes not only to trauma but also to post-structural theories of language and a postmodern sense of the absence of an all-synthesising paradigm of truth. By conflating these concepts, his novels evoke an original, structural trauma, which problematises the practical imperative of trauma theory to work through trauma. In its place, as I illustrate, Foer's novels advance a challenging philosophy of living with inexorable trauma: this ethic, which demands authenticity but discounts healing or self-preservation, and even apparently endorses suicide, highlights the dangers of ignoring Dominick LaCapra's warning against confusing absence with loss when talking about trauma.

Sanctuary is about the wound of Temple Drake – her traumatic rape. However, the readers are prohibited from accessing the hyper-visible and invisible rape. Filled with distractions, repetitions, silences, and highly elliptical in structure, the novel prohibits the literal enactment of Temple’s rape. Firstly, this paper examines how the novel’s style and content are framed by a series of prohibitions. The prohibitive nature of the novel forbids the readers from “accessing”/”assessing” the characters, crucial events, and ultimately the trauma that occupies the core of the story. Secondly, this paper aims to show how the precise structure and act of prohibition becomes the exact site of trauma. Finally, this paper posits that the interplay of prohibition and trauma in the novel reflects the prohibition of the unspoken taboos associated with gender and race transgressions in the society.

This thesis investigates what trauma theory would look like if it were more attuned to the creaturely residues of trauma. Through theorizing Freudian trauma theory and showing how its humanist focus is taken on by literary scholars, the thesis examines how the traditional approach of trauma that focuses on language and narrative could move towards a more affective and embodied approach that finds its origin in animal studies and its theorization of concepts like the creaturely, the open, vulnerability, woundedness, suffering and care. Through a close reading of three literary works by J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace, Life and Times of Michael K and Slow Man) the thesis argues that, whereas traditional trauma theory focuses on trauma as a construct of anthropological difference, it is also possible to approach trauma in a non humanist and anti-anthropocentric manner by means of body-based relations of caring for oneself and fellow creatures

“Fiction Begot Fiction,” is a psychobiographical study of William Faulkner, which draws primarily on The Sound and the Fury for its evidence. It is not, strictly speaking, a study of Faulkner’s novel, since the questions it seeks to answer are biographical ones concerning Faulkner’s motivations for writing the novel, and the reasons for its famously elliptical style. Nor is it a conventional literary critical essay, even in the psychobiographical mode, since it relies heavily on red herrings, suspense, and a deus ex machina resolution. It is, therefore, most aptly considered as a specimen of creative non-fiction for which psychobiographical literary criticism provides the foundation. The project offers a defense of conjectural readings of characters’ fictive past traumas, drawn from the work of Esther Rashkin. The author offers her own justification for extending Rashkin’s character-focused approach to the uncovering of an authorial trauma that is figured elliptically in the traumatic and post-traumatic struggles of the novel’s fictional characters. The project provides a provocative “riff” on psychobiographical criticism.

When the post-war, utopian landscape of American suburbia transforms itself into a dystopian community of infested elm trees, the narrative takes the form of a talking cure. Jeffrey Eugendies' novel The Virgin Suicides dismantles the American Dream and moulds it into an American Nightmare where the nuclear family's custom-built house, covered by crusts of 'ephemeral insects'1, gradually becomes 'one big coffin'2. Unlike Phyllis McGinley's Spruce Manor, where everything is 'designed for the happiness of children'3, Eugenides' suburb of Grosse Pointe feeds on teenage misery. It is a place where thirteen-year olds are not to be found 'gamboling like dolphins'4 in the waters of Long Island Sound, but are enclosed in their suffocating homes, floating stoically in their blood-filled bathtubs. The collective voice of the narrative is not 'look[ing] back on [their suburban] way of life with nostalgia and respect'5, but instead the narrators reminisce in confusion and melancholia while attempting to integrate a fragmented experience from their past. The following passages will explore Eugenides' representation of the suburban space and how it generates a different form of narrative, while also enquiring into the nature of trauma and its effect on the characters. The latter's failed attempt to heal their past wounds produces a narrative of immense complexity, 'a stranger memorial'6 filled with obsession, scapegoating, repetition and scopophilic fantasies.

The archetypal descent into hell can provide a paradigm for the representation of trauma, which is often theorized as being unrepresentable. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) models the experience of psychological trauma on the archetypal descent into hell, or katabasis. House of Leaves thus challenges a certain strand of poststructuralism that has become dominant within literary critical circles of trauma studies. Ultimately, Danielewski manipulates the paradigm of katabasis to forge what I style an infernal phenomenal reference system to represent the hell of trauma.

What do we mean when we describe the history of the Caribbean as traumatic? Is it possible to use the term 'trauma' here in a more technical sense, or should we give it the less strict connotation of an extreme form of an event in which the past no longer stays just in the past and the future never ceases to demand something from the pres-ent? In this paper I analyze the image of the abyss, used by Édouard Glissant to evoke poetically one of the beginnings of the Caribbean, as leading to a paradox on the attitude toward history: Caribbean communities have been burdened with a non-history that feels, at the same time, like too much history. I show that this image resembles the paradoxical structure of trauma developed in the works of Cathy Caruth, according to whom trauma is a paradoxical structure of experience in which the subject (or a community) is painfully possessed by an image that they have barely perceived and that is so minimal that it cannot be controlled. However, I argue, there are limits to this resemblance. I focus on the question whether the (traumatic) paradox is escapable in this region of the world, that is, whether Caribbean communities can be de-traumatized, and what are the connections of this possibility with the question, central to Glissant, of decolonization. In order to answer these questions, I analyze a central feature of the Caribbean history according to Glissant, transversality, to show in what way the paradox of history can be loosened.

In this article, I engage with the present-tense narration in Anne Enright’s novel, The Gathering. The narrator, Veronica Hegarty, is tasked with assembling her family for a wake after the suicide of her closest brother Liam. What his death unleashes in her is a compulsion to write down an “uncertain event,” which may or “may not have happened,” in which Liam was sexually assaulted as a child. The narrative suggests that Veronica witnessed this “event” and, in line with the aporetic nature of traumatic experience, did not register it as such. The narrative temporal strategy, as this article will demonstrate, is key to the author’s representation of the “event” which, due to its traumatic nature, is always of the present, and never successfully relegated to the past. I also explore the ways in which the novel suggests a healing which can be neither contained nor enacted within the confines of this overtly present-tense narrative.

This article on François Ozon’s "Sous le sable/Under the Sand" (2000) examines how the disappearance of the main character’s husband results in her fascination with his image (a ghostly returning figure) fixating her in a zone between loss and acceptance. Using this figure of the image, existing in a liminal zone between existence and non-existence, I illustrate the ways in which it upsets traditional binary notions of time (past/present), reality (truth/fiction) and memory (remembrance/forgetfulness). To help in this endeavor, I employ three distinct albeit interconnected theoretical discourses: (1) trauma as temporal liminality where past and present come together, (2) narcissism as the liminality of an image’s realistic and fictitious natures and (3) melancholy as that liminal space between a memory’s retention and loss.

Trauma theory has necessarily changed the way we think about comparison.  Rather than assume that comparison can continue to take place as usual within a context of global trauma, “The Cut that Links” argues that the experience of trauma transforms comparison into a mode of listening that is attentive to traumas from the future (that which is not yet apparent) while also highlighting a comparatist who is constitutively not fully in control of the objects under comparison.

Beginning with Cathy Caruth's post-structuralist approach in the early 1990's, the study of trauma, memory, and affect has seen significant growth across many academic disciplines. Recent postcolonial perspectives, however, criticize Caruth's trauma theory for its focus on individual melancholia, its Eurocentric assumptions, and its diminishing of discursive practices and ritual. This article considers the rapidly expanding field of trauma studies, including current neuroscientific and biological approaches, to clarify the depth and breadth of trauma's relation to memory inscription, cultural identity, and the embodied transmission of trauma.

Using a comparative methodology to examine the seminal contributions of Ted Jennings to the field of ritual studies (Jennings 1982, 1987, 2014) that correspond with Judith Herman's three-stage narrative therapy process (Herman 1997), this essay suggests that Herman's method of narrative construction conveys unique, embodied knowledge as ritual performance. Several case studies are put into conversation with Herman's trauma theory in the conclusion of this paper to illustrate possible correctives to the weaknesses inherent in Caruth's “unspeakability” school of trauma theory—correctives having implications for fields as wide-ranging as cultural history, anthropology, ritual studies, affect theory, collective memory, anthropology, and postcolonial approaches to the study of religion.

Analytical review of Cathy Caruth's last book "Literature in the Ashes of History" (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). The review focuses on the interdisciplinary character (literature, philosophy, political theory, law studies) of Caruth's trauma theory; investigates Caruth's reinterpretation of the classical paradigm of post-traumatic witnessing in the era of political ideologies and her new conception of trauma studies theory as witnessing in itself.

The figure of a wounded body has been part of the cultural iconography of psychoanalysis since Freud defined trauma as the infringement of psyche's protective membrane that incites a neurotic response and represses memory of the injurious event. Recent feminist and postcolonial critiques of cultural trauma theory have problematised this ‘wound-centrism’ insofar as it has privileged an individuated, event-like and time-framed conceptions of violence, and has neglected systemic, incremental, continuous and quotidian experiences of violence. This article contributes to these critiques by analysing Hanya Yanagihara's 2013 novel The People in the Trees, which narrates an anthropological expedition to a fictitious Micronesian island and sets in motion aggressive colonisation of its populations. Yanagihara's postcolonial trauma novel offers a critical perspective onto the idiom of wounding not by denying its importance for some subjective experiences of violence, but by situating it in relation to other figurations of trauma. I argue that central to this narrative is the idea of traumatic appropriation, understood not only in line with social critiques of colonial and racial regimes of accumulation and dispossession, but also as an expression of epistemic violence that assigns personhood status solely to property owners and endows colonised populations with characteristics of things and commodities.

https://doi.org/10.1057/S41282-022-00291-3

The controversy surrounding Luke Willis Thompson’s film autoportrait (2017) raised important questions regarding the role art events and museums such as the Turner Prize and Tate Britain play in representing traumatic images. My concern in this article is with how French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s theorisation of the symptom might help us think about representing traumatic images in museums. First, a symptomatic reading of autoportrait is apposite to representing trauma as it sidesteps a binary oscillation between mimetic and anti-mimetic curatorial approaches that have historically structured traumatic representation in the museum. Second, a symptomatic approach is sympathetic to a theorisation of the ongoing effects of racial and postcolonial trauma as it eludes the single event model that has formed a cornerstone in trauma theory since the 1990s.

Event, Trauma, and Ethics in Wing Tek Lum’s The Nanjing Massacre

Richard C. Sha

American University in Washington, D.C.


The poems in Wing Tek Lum’s The Nanjing Massacre collectively testify to the trauma of this event, and as such mounts a protest against the Japanese refusal to take responsibility for the massacre.  Gayle Sato has argued that Lum’s poems demand ethical looking at the poems’ images through strategies of acknowledging the precariousness of human life, but I, with the help of Lacan, move the clock back to understand how trauma exacerbates an earlier precariousness:  the ego’s vulnerability to ‘aggressivity.’    Lum suggests that because the literal event of the Nanjing massacre restages the very making of Japanese and Chinese subjects, the formation of the ego and its other is when violence begins.  By making the literal event an allegory of the making of the Japanese and Chinese subject—how the subject layers the event with particular affects—the poems ask whether subjectification can be accomplished without violence, and warn that without dealing with the ego’s need to advance itself at the expense of the other, the cycle of violence that flourishes in the massacre will never end.  Because Lacan believes the self is sustained and thwarted in the image of the other, “aggressivity” combines narcissism with aggression to capture both the ways in which the self needs and is threatened by the other because it sustains the self while potentially engulfing it.  Lum shows the degree to which any experience of trauma entails a theory of it, insofar as how the experience means shapes any version of a cure.
I thus use Lum to compare Lacan’s and van der Kolk’s influential models of trauma, because both provide radically different understandings of the ego, the analyst’s ethical role, and of trauma itself, and therefore any cure.  For Lacan, the ego’s aggressivity provides what self the self can have, and the self/moi is itself dangerous because its desire for wholeness means that it must subsume the other, often by sanitizing itself from it.  The analyzer’s ethical position in Lacan thus is to resist the ego’s ideals or the self’s obsessive aggressive misrecognitions, because they are at odds with what Lacan sees as true being.  In this view, excess desire is the signature of ethics, because that excess drives the subject to question what the names of public duty and the other leave out, and thus valorizes as opposed to exterminates the havoc in being.  This havoc both prevents the self from being instrumentalized and from becoming a version of the analyst’s ego (Finkelde 189, Écrits 140).  For Lacan, valorizing such excess, it turns out, is the only way to drain aggressivity of its defensive and therefore most destructive violence.  And because Lacan understands the ego to be constituted by aggressivity, there is no getting rid of it, only tempering it to avoid the worst of its destructiveness.
Van der Kolk, by contrast, thinks that trauma is a literal response to an event which triggers the breakdown of the integrative functions of the brain so much that the emotions have lost their functions, and body has split from mind.  Consequently, the analyst must foster reintegration through calming techniques that enable the ownership of physical sensations and thereby end traumatic depersonalization, which van der Kolk understands to be a kind of “biological freeze reaction” (131, 72)).  For van der Kolk, traumatic memories are bodily memories and are encoded non-narratively because the thalamus, a relay station for sensations in the brain, breaks down with trauma (71-2). According to him, “breakdown of the thalamus explains why trauma is primarily remembered not as a story, a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, but as isolated sensory imprints” (70).  Van der Kolk’s approach to trauma helps explain why trauma victims are compelled to relive their traumatic events over and over.  Yet his theory of non-narrative encoding severely and arguably unnecessarily limits the role cognition plays in any cure.  This insight, in turn, allows to question what work trauma as a Cartesian split between body and mind does for van der Kolk.  As Lacan sees it, the self is structured by the difference or lack between self and other, and thus integration is neither possible nor desirable.  In this view, such a mind and body split is an ineradicable feature of the self.
When Lacan and van der Kolk are considered together, then, trauma stages an ethical quandary rather than choreographs a recovery process.  The question thus is the loss of ego or depersonalization something to be cured, or is it the very reason why aggressivity begins in the first place?  Is integration between body and mind the solution as van der Kolk argues, or is it a return to aggressivity as the ego sanitizes the self?  And is the traumatic image a literal transcription of the event, or an imago, the fibs our ego tells us in the name of aggressivity?  For Lacan, the imago promises the false unity of the mirror stage, a “gestalt that is an ideal unity, a salutary imago” (Écrits 92), the moment when the infant looks at her reflection in the mirror, and sees a unity and autonomy that denies her essential helplessness.    As the subject fixates on the imago, something especially likely to happen during trauma, she negates herself, accuses the other, and these two moments “become indistinguishable” (Écrits 93).  Where van der Kolk reads the image as a fragmentation that requires healing, Lacan suggests the image and the imago provide a fantasy of an impossible totality or gestalt that freezes being and thus must be rejected.

I argue that Hornschemeier’s comic presents, through its two main characters, David and Thomas Tennant, two different ways of dealing with trauma: trying to logically reason through it, and sublimating trauma into fantasy. Neither approach helps the traumatized characters to heal from their trauma, but I argue that Mother, Come Home presents the act of writing this comic as the act that liberates its supposed author, Thomas Tennant, from his trauma. I also point to Mother, Come Home as an important work of graphic medicine for its depiction of trauma from a sufferer’s viewpoint, and for its depiction of how the world looks different to an individual experiencing trauma.

My aim in this paper is to question the apparently mutually supportive bind between legal and psychoanalytic discourse in order to refine the methods used in Trauma Studies. I will do this by first reviewing Leys' (2000) critique of Caruth's (1996) work and then follow that by an analysis of Hiroshima, mon amour (1958) which, as a film based on a screenplay by Marguerite Duras about the ethical impact of the U.S. bombing of Japan to end WWII, gives us ample opportunity to see to what extent the legal and the psychoanalytic discourses are and are not bound to each other. Mon but dans cet article est de questionner la connexion entre la liaison apparemment mutuellement solidaire entre le discours légal et psychanalytique afin de raffiner les méthodes utilisées dans les études sur le trauma. Afin de réaliser ce but je réviserai d'abord la critique proposée par Leys de l'oeuvre de Caruth et ensuite j'analyserai Hiroshima mon amour, un film qui – basé sur le scénario de Marguerite Duras concernant l'impact éthique du bombardement du Japon – nous fournit l'opportunité de considérer jusqu'où les discours légaux et psychanalytiques sont ou ne sont pas solidaires. (Translation: Alireza Taheri)

Wing Tek Lum’s 2012 poetry collection The Nanjing Massacre raises vital questions about trauma. How do we know when a traumatic event begins? What cognitive options are open to victims of trauma? What are the ethical implications of our theories of trauma? I thus situate this volume between Bessel van der Kolk’s and Jacques Lacan’s theories of trauma because these poems challenge their key assumptions. Lum turns to poetry to think through how trauma begins and ends, the degree to which healing the gap between body and mind is part of the “cure” or part of the disease, and how much cognitive stretching is possible in trauma’s wake.

This paper is concerned with the articulation of trauma and the ways of representing traumatic events by transforming, modifying and recasting certain memories. It draws primarily on two novels, namely Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (1982) that explores the struggle of working through unacknowledged guilt and vividly, faintly and problematically recalled traumatic memories and Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) that gives an account of the political persecution on individuals during the apartheid state in a complex mixture of personal memories and collective trauma. By revisiting unspeakable pain, loss and humiliation Etsuko and the victims of the TRC dig up buried traumatic experiences and reopens graves that were underground and covered with grass. The trauma as the unspeakable will be considered in this paper to showcase how Ishiguro and Krog allows disguises and silences to speak when the retelling and remembering of traumatic experiences becomes too painful to translate into words.

Don DeLillo’s ‘Underworld’ is often read as a fresco of the Cold War era. These critical readings tend to minimize the attention paid to the psychological portrait of Nick Shay, the character whose existential path is the main narrative vehicle of the novel. The correspondence between the private and public levels of the story is usually taken for granted. In this essay, I contend that there is no direct narrative or causal connection between Nick’s personal history and America’s Cold War history. In fact, Nick is conspicuously absent from most of the key historical events portrayed in the novel. I propose a reading of Underworld that brings Nick Shay’s personal history to the forefront. My main aim is to analyze the narrative devices deployed by DeLillo to depict this character in order to determine how the interweaving of the individual and historical dimensions takes place in the text through a stylistic pattern of equivalence known in trauma studies as “traumatic reverberation.” The homologous reverberation at both levels—individual and historical— produces the textual illusion of a continuity between them, which, I contend, is not causal or thematic, but structural. This pattern articulates a parallelism between the two dimensions of the text, emphasizing the paradoxical nature of traumatic memory: an absent core around which the text gravitates, persistently signaling a point of origin that is never fully realized.

Having evaded the Auschwitz gas chambers aged twelve, Ruth Klüger posits escape as the unifying thread of weiter leben and the thematic intersection between memory and identity. Spatial manipulation is both the form and the theme of Klüger’s autobiographical reconstruction. Employing and extending Massey’s discussion of topography as a site of representation, Assmann’s approach to memorialised sites, and Caruth’s discussions of traumatic re-visualisation, this article analyses spatial transformations in weiter leben as attempts to re-assert lost agency. In the light of Klüger’s concept of ‘Zeitschaften’, it situates the recollection and transformation of traumatic spaces both within and beyond temporal confines.