An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman Author(s): Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol.

35, No. 4, Essays in Honor of Geoffrey H. Hartman (Winter, 1996), pp. 630-652 Published by: Boston University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25601201 . Accessed: 09/05/2011 01:05
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630 There was a Boy: ye knew him weU, ye cliffs a time And islands ofWinander!?many At evening, when the starsbegan To move along the edges of the hiUs,

Rising or setting,would he stand alone Beneath the trees or by the gUmmering lake, And there,with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth UpUfted, he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic Hootings to the s?ent owls, That theymight answer him; and theywould
the watery vale, and shout again,

shout

Across

to his caU, with quivering peals, Responsive And long haUoos and screams, and echoes loud, and redoubled, concourse w?d Redoubled Of jocund din; and, when a lengthened pause Of Then Has s?ence came and baffled his best skiU, sometimes, in that silence wh?e he hung Listening, a gentle shock of m?d surprise

carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene enter unawares into his mind, Would With aU its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven,

received

Into the bosom of the steady lake. This Boy was taken from his mates, and died In ch?dhood, ere he was fi?l twelve years old. Fair is the spot,most beautiful the vale Where he was born; the grassy churchyard hangs

long half hour together I have stood Mute, looking at the grave inwhich he lies! Wordsworth, The Prelude 5.364-397 A

Upon a slope above the v?lage school, And through that churchyard when my way has led On summer evenings, I believe that there

(1850)

CATHY CARUTH

An

Interview with Hartman

Geoffrey

onWordsworth Hartman's careerextends from his pioneering earlywork Geoffrey on video testimony. His recent more recent work has emphasized a to his writing career: an exploration of the intricaterelation between possible continuity in this what he calls "literaryknowledge" and the variousforms of traumatic loss. I work withWordsworth, him in the interviewed fall ofi??4 on his early and ongoing thisworkfor understanding literary the implicationsof ways of knowing, and the to the kind of knowing and testifying relation thismight have provided by video
testimony.

i. Traumatic CC:

Impasse and Poetic Knowledge

I'm interested in the implications, for an understanding of poetry, or literature in general, of your comment that your literary critical work has
had a "concern for absences or intermittences of consciousness, for

the ambiguous status of accidents in mental life, for the ghosting of the subject."1 The most obvious place to illustrate this early and ongoing interest in absences and intermittenceswould be your repeated readings of The Prelude, and particularly the paradigmatic episode of the Boy of Winander. You note that, in The Prelude, which you call the first account of developmental psychology in our era, this particular episode surprisingly
describes it, "What an in development, impasse is the relation of memory and to loss, you go on to ask, to loss of control to regard even perhaps, in

always

to trauma? What kind of knowledge is poetry?"2 You seem to be speaking almost paradoxically, linking impasse and knowledge, trauma and poetry. I'd like you to comment on the kind of impasse we find in Wordsworth, and how it is related specifically to poetic knowledge. GH: Trauma is generally defined as an experience that is not experienced, that resists or escapes consciousness. In The Unmediated Vision I already mentioned a more mystical notion, that ofMeister Eckhart's Unerkennendes
i. See "Literary Studies and Traumatic Knowledge," Enlightenment" "Reading: The Wordsworthian New Literary History (Summer 1995). in European Romantidsm (1993).

2.

SiR,

35 (Winter

1996)

631

632
Erkennen, an unknowing

CATHY
knowing.

CARUTH
The context there was a necessary,

whether deUberate or natural, anti-selfconsciousness. And certainly from the beginning I've been interested in how to define a specificaUy literary knowledge, which can reveal without fuU consciousness, or systematic analysis. Again, thinking back to The Unmediated Vision, its last chapter caUed "The New Perseus" focused on the figure of theMedusa. It specu lated that as we move from the romantics into themodern period, there is an attempt to see things unaided, to catch a reaUty on the quick. I noticed inmodern authors a certain inner distancing or coldness, or an attempt to
a coldness despite the nearness to, the apparent nearness to, reaUty.

achieve

I associated this coldness, leaning on the Greek myth, with Perseus' which guarded him from the petrifying glance of theMedusa, and lated that tradition functioned as this shield. Itmanaged to provide uity, or representational modes that had an inbu?t obUquity. But

shield, specu

Wordsworth book, I posited certain fixations, in particular Then, in the what I caUed the spot syndrome, or the obsession with particular places, an obsession which came to the poet often unexpectedly and in ordinary
circumstances: "And there's a tree, of many one." I understood the em

obUq absent these traditional decorums, the poet had to go against the real with the unshielded eye or the unshielded senses. This seemed to increase the risk and potential of trauma.

phasis on oneness, on singularity rather than unity, as being part of the same complex, and which played a role in the drama of individuation. CC:
or

So the spot syndrome was Unked with

that unmediated vision.

that perceptual confrontation,

GH: Yes, and I was interested in how Wordsworth drew his stories and fictions out of his fascination with particular places. These highly charged images, I tried to show how the poet unblocked them, how he developed them. Many of them were ocular. VisuaUty was dominant within his sensory organization; and something, caU it nature, caU it an economic principle within sensory organization, pitted the other senses against the eye. Symbolic process, I said, was related to this undoing of images. CC: Are you unblocked?
GH: Yes. Or

saying that the image was

a fixation.

at first a block

that had to be

CC:

And

that Wordsworth's

poetry had to do with unblocking

the eye?

GH: Yes.

Itwasn't necessarily that theywere always the same images, let's say primal images, or primal scene images. But whatever the psychic talked quite openly etiology, that structure was there, and Wordsworth

INTERVIEW about the dominance

WITH

GEOFFREY

HARTMAN

633

of the eye. He confessed he had passed through a of "picturesque" composition, and later felt that thiswas related to period a stage of obsessive visuality. But there aremany other important statements in Wordsworth on the development of visuality and nature's counterpoint ing of visuality, and how his development as a poet has to do with that. CC: So visuality here is not something that immediately produces some kind of development, but presents itself as an impasse to development, or potentially so. GH: Yes. But as I also said, there is something powerfully abstract about visuality, in distinction from individual images. So you can fall in love with the visual, whereas you can't fall in love with overpower you or which you can't get rid of. obsessive images which

CC: The distinction then is between perception as a whole mode, shock of an individual perception.

and the

GH: That's right. In themovement from charged individual Wordsworth, to visuality is parallel to themovement from specific and haunting image a tension in the history of religion centering on epiphanic places. Bethel, for instance, the place where Jacob lies down and has the dream of angels ascending and descending, is nothing but a stone. Yet here are the gates of Heaven! It iswhat Mircea Eliade calls an omphalos: this evolution with
places to Nature. Nature is his most generous concept. I try to connect

the umbilical and nether point of the earth. But there is another issue that you and I have talked about in relation to trauma: how almost any
place?and that's part of the accidentality of revelation?can be revelatory

or charged or have something of a traumatic effect through deferred action. on the one hand, you have the omphalos, the umbilicus of theworld. So, On the other hand, it'smerely tree or stone; the seminal episode of The Ruined Cottage is the poet seeing four bare walls that remain, and a broken pane of glass glittering in themoonlight.
CC: So, as with

impasse and promise of development: the first paragraph describing a boy who creates an instrument with his two hands to blow "mimic hootings " to the silent owls, and who is suddenly confronted with the non-response of the owls, a "lengthened pause," and a "gentle shock of mild surprise." In the second verse paragraph, the boy is said to have died in youth, and

blocking effect, yet on the other this traumatic effect is intimately tied up with the possibility of poetic writing, or poetic development. In the Boy of Winander episode, for example, as you point out, there is at once

visuality,

the place

can

have,

on

the one

hand,

a traumatic,

634

CATHY

CARUTH he lies." How are

the poet stands "Mute, looking at the grave in which "pause" and "shock" Unked to development here? GH: This

is one of themost intriguing episodes in It is in Wordsworth. as we know from themanuscripts. The impassse, to part autobiographical, describe it very briefly, is that the first verse-paragraph leads one to expect that the boy should grow into maturity, and perhaps become a poet. The imagination of the boy is being prepared through a dissonance: the owls do not respond, or respond as theyw?l. Within the context or experience

of responsiveness, something is not symmetrical, and this prepares for the future, develops the boy's consciousness of a world that is independent of the lengthened pause, which meets the boy's best skiU: it him. Remember makes him reflective, and it anticipates is part of the dissonance, because it a further lengthening, untU the final pause is mortaUty or death?more precisely the ph?osophical mind that looks at death. So thatwh?e hori zontaUy death is foreshadowed, you expect from the first verse-paragraph that in the second the poet would say, "I was that boy." Instead the boy dies, and you have the poet as survivor looking at the boy's grave.

CC:

So you're saying that normaUy one would understand themoment of absence in the first verse-paragraph as preparing the boy for some kind of
self-consciousness, and

his death. But emerges. Could

moment in the

in this case the death comes before self-consciousness one say, then, that the impasse for the poet, the traumatic
developmental scheme, is not the death as such, but the

ultimately,

though

at

a greater

temporal

distance,

fact that the death comes at thewrong

time?

adds GH: Yes, the death is untimely, but not only the death. Wordsworth an argumentative frame to the Boy ofWinander when he inserts episode it into Book 5 of The Prelude. He argues thatwe cannot totaUy prepare the developing psyche, the young person, forwhat befaUs. That would be, he claims, engineering the psyche. Natural development ismuch freer and depends on accident. And accident is always defined as something you cannot prepare for. In that sense development is always both propadeutic and exceeds formal training. So that trauma is related to development by

excess asweU as lack. Yet Wordsworth's greatmyth in The Prelude remains: that there could be development?a "growth of the poet's mind"?with out psychic wounds, that the psyche could be "from aU internal injury
" exempt.

CC:

But what

is the relation between

lack and excess in this accident?

GH: Keeping strictlyto the passage, the fa?ure of response may have Unked itself, in themind of the poet, to a thought of death. This intuition is then

INTERVIEW

WITH

GEOFFREY

HARTMAN

635

literalized, by prophetic extension, as in the Lucy poems. A failure of the extremest reach ofWordsworth's response anticipates?by imagina tion?that therewould be no more nature. That if the human mind does not live fully, responsively, within nature, or nature does not respond to

of nature and the human mind. At this point you transcend the develop ment of the individual, you get amore cosmic model, you speed up time,
and that's apocalypse.

us, then the end-result, projected forward, is apocalyptic. The death is like a hyperbole of thismoment, a hyperbolic act of an imagination that leaps down not up, taking off from a simple failure of response. Should this failure of response accelerate, then we will have no habitat, no mutuality

boy's] mind."

So that the moment of excess is not only in the wild hooting of the owls when it comes, but in the imagination itselfwhich reacts to both failure of response and an "ecstatic" correlative of death, that piercing of the skin of the psyche when the natural scene "enter[s] unawares into [the

the problem of how development, here, is not simply dialectical, taking the negative and making it positive. You say specifically about that mute moment, "we sense that the poet is looking as well into himself, that he is a posthumous figure, he stands towards a prior stage of life, as a reader,
a

CC: Yet the impasse is, in a sense, passed through: at the end of the episode you do not simply have a death but a poet who is looking at, reflecting upon, this death (and writing the poem). The problem that arises, then, is the way that poetic and exemplary moment is characterized: even though it is a poetic moment, it is also a moment of muteness (which peculiarly does not seem to be completely opposed to poetic writing). And thisbrings back

If the poem is in some sense about poetic knowing, how can it be mute, how is the muteness poetic, or what is the link between muteness and poetry? Let me bring in the reader, at this point. The theme of time?of its flow?brings us to the reader, just as inMilton's Lycidas. Milton foresees what he calls "lucky words": "I should utter something in honor of and so in the future, I hope someone will write my epitaph, and Lycidas, make the passerby [who could be the reader] turn and be struck by what has been said about me." This fast-forwarding of imagination is what I mean by a posthumous stance in Wordsworth and it includes an adumbra GH: tion of the reader.Wordsworth allows you tomove from the poet looking at the grave of the boy to the reader reading the poet, an image of
3. "Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment."

quasi-epitaphic

reader

. . . the poet's

stance

emerges

as a

haunting

issue."3

636

CATHY

CARUTH

speechless and perhaps epitaphic reading. The problem is then: how do mute speech and (self )reading relate? We go frommuteness tomuteness, even if it is a muteness described in this is one reason why we feel words. That is, the Boy ofWinander?and that the episode was meant to be paradigmatic of human development, and that the death came too soon?is shown at the point where speech is st?l He is not shown speaking, he makes a pastoral pipe with his mimicry.

hands, but this is not speech. He doesn't mimic speech, he mimics the owls, nature's sounds. And so you expect the question to be: how do you go from that stage to mature poetic speech? Yet The Prelude records the You are given the pre-ma growth of the poet's mind, not of speech itself.
ture moment, the pre-mature then the mature because moment, the but pause the mature is lengthened, moment and is like you are moment,

shown a s?ent poet. Now what does itmean to be a s?ent poet? Speech as an agency in the growth of the (poetic) is not theorized in Wordsworth,
mind.

CC:
or

It's almost as if the poem moved

the trauma"?trauma and

from what
before it can poetic

is caUed the "preverbal"

even enter as a verbal at least development,

"preverbal construct?to muteness,

in this episode, is the Unk between this preverbal or "shocking" perception and muteness. And the difficulty that you're trying to get at is to say that that somehow is Unked to poetic insight. We go from one GH: The impasse is not dialectized, as you correctly say. form of muteness to another form of muteness, yet Wordsworth speaks
again simply and want about muteness. again to them. speaker About It's not mute an insensate orphie things. He doesn't There is, a perspective.

the paradoxical

even perhaps, something potentiaUy orphie in the firstverse paragraph, but

nature if it is orphie, won't that animates nature, myth making it invisible, not not cooperate. a Rilkean It's not myth reaUy of orphie, then, not internaUzing a metamor not nature or

a Blakean

transformation

either,

phosis or anthropomorphizing of any kind. The mute insensate things remain mute and insensate. But they'rebrought live into human perception and as theyplay a part, like themother does. Mute dialogues with nature exist, between chUd and mother. The muteness is not always negative: it can be,
at times, the shadow cast by ecstasy.

CC: Maybe one way to restate the question would be to look at something else you say about s?ence. You say that the entire episode, even it is based in part on fa?ure of response, is framed, I would say paradoxicaUy, as an
address. Your words are specificaUy, "his address to Winander claims a

INTERVIEW

WITH

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HARTMAN

637

mation.

sufficient foundation in humanity by being an aversio as well as an excla That is, by using a turntale, in Putnam's words, to invoke a
or mute witness."4 So in the classical case there is a witness,

preternatural

a mute witness, the fields ofWinander, the cliffsofWinander. I want to ask: is there a link between the failure of response that the boy experiences, then themuteness of the poet, and the poem's frame of address?an address that implies a response?

Yes, but I would phrase it differently.The address to the cliffs and islands of evokes a lasting or apparently lasting presence, and this Winander Winander presence recurs at the end of the Boy of episode with the Lady, the Church, also a kind of monitory shape. You really have three figures: the cliffsand islands, the poet himself at the grave, and finally the Church, lies. watching over the children among whom the Boy ofWinander GH: CC: They're all witnesses.

shapes. One is tempted to say "witness," and "witness" is certainly appropriate to the forms of nature evoked at the beginning of the episode because of the formal force of the apostrophe. I am always re minded of Coleridge's marvelous phrase in his lines after hearing Wordsworth recite the poem on his own life, "The dread watchtower of GH: Monitory
man's absolute self." It's close to

for conscience, a super-ego. The beginning of the episode, the apostrophe to the cliffs and islands ofWinander, puts human development within a
quasi-eternal frame.

that,

almost

an

eternity-figure,

figure

CC:

Because

the cliffsare eternal?

GH: Yes?the danger of apocalypse, ofNature (familiar nature) disappear ing, is distanced here. There is lastingness, the sense of not only watchful but enduring presences. Which sense is instilled in the Boy from Nature. Instilled in Wordsworth also, from nature, and it becomes an instinctive article of faith. That something endures. That something is immortal or universal. It is not in the case of the Boy of Winander quite what Coleridge felt: Coleridge's special emphasis is on anxiety, the dread watchtower. That's not in Wordsworth, but it goes along the same lines, along the same
emotional

nature will not be no more. And it has the effect of affirming, in that sense witnessing, the boy's experience. It does not deny the Boy, it does not say, hey little titch, you think you're important. So the entire tonality of the experience is different from Coleridge's watchtower at thismoment, it's
4. "Reading: The Wordsworthian Enlightenment."

spectrum,

though

it has more

of a consolation,

an

assurance

that

638 more

CATHY

CARUTH

does not negate or threaten, but affirms the individual Ufe. If you wish, bears witness to it in fact. And the reason why it can do this, other than some kind of grand sentimental projection, has to do with Wordsworth's pecuUar, non-Coleridgean Angst, always kept in check by which mind

like the other presences, the starsrising and setting. That has always intrigued me, "rising or setting." You remember those are the Unes that foUow the apostrophe. You get a sense of vast cycUcalmovement: itdoesn't matter whether they're rising or setting, they're always rising or setting, or setting and rising. They're always going to be there. The setting is not a death: rising or setting, they wiU be there. It is a perpetual background

fear is that if the human that sense of permanent presences. Wordsworth's divorces itselffrom nature, and we invest our imagination separates, elsewhere, then and only then is there clanger of the fading of nature. In Wordsworth other words, precisely the ego, the psyche, is not ghosted in sees must be ghosted by the supernatural. Yet Wordsworth nature, as it by that if,because of industriaUzation and a turning away from a Nature ethos, nature is neglected, then the situation wiU drasticaUy change. But here he remains within the faith that human life is not ghosted but affirmed by
nature.

CC: Yet you speak elsewhere, as I said, of the poet's stance as a "haunting"
issue . . Wouldn't .

interpreted as overlooking

your

emphasis

now

on

the

"affirmation"

that haunting aspect?

by

nature

be

GH: One cannot forget that the ch?d is haunted by Nature, and the death could express this ghosting in the form of a "return Winander of the Boy of
to nature." ral" one, The and balance the reader in the here between affirmative that, and is, cut does at and not once, of negative wish to is a "natu recognizes intervene and an

concerning intimation Nature

what of

immortaUty: approaches

brooding poet's the promise, ecstasy.

short,

mortaUty a communion

with

which

The poet looking at the grave, and framed by these other witness figures, does not stress the ghosting of human life, does not stressmortification. works against trauma, Iwould MortaUty is there but not mortification. So it Wordsworth, yet the basis Look, everything works against trauma in say. of trauma is there. "A gentle shock of m?d surprise." Now reaUy! The muteness of the poet in the episode also raisesmore generaUy the question of themuteness in poetic speech. For his standing there "mute" is a kind of fading?counterpointed by his "fuU half-hour" steadfastness. I and the essay on Christopher in "Words and Wounds," explore paraUels
Smart in The Fate of Reading.5 We avoid, evade, muteness, but it's always

5. "Christopher Smart's Magnificat: Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: U

Toward of Chicago

a Theory P,

of Representation"

in The Fate of

1975).

INTERVIEW there.We

WITH

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HARTMAN

639

as ifwe were allowed to speak, but under certain conditions, when fulfilling these conditions: and so euphemic modes are speak only is too produced. The muteness indicates that there's something which difficult to utter. The way to get past that difficulty,however you conceive of themonitors, the dread you have to get past, however you conceive of it, or whatever Freudian understanding you may give to it, involves

sense. Even ironymay be euphemistic. Irony, the euphemism in the strong boast of themodern poet, remains within the euphemic mode (though the
poet would say I'm "destroying euphemism").6 It's not satire's mad

modern

not cursing. In other laughter?satire breaks through the euphemic. It is there is a mode of breaking through and I'm assuming that there words,
was trauma, shock,

exists a pathology of speech, inwhich the person speaks only by cursing. And I say there is also a mode of speech inwhich the person talks only in
terms of blessings. We arrange ourselves between these two extremes.

something

dreadful

or

ecstatic.

You

know

that

there

2. Pausal Style CC: That brings me to the second point I wanted to raise. The general argument you're making here, and in a number of differentplaces, concerns to poetic style,which you refer to as "pausal style," and again it appears suggest a paradoxical link between something that interrupts and something that continues. You mention specifically that at the very moment of the
turn to an ordinary style, or that conversational remains missed conversation, something there's language, and impossible. a pressure on

GH:

I do say that, I feel there is a tension which I'm not sure how it is resolvable, between the development, almost the genesis, in terms of the
of poetry?of is more which the conversational style, and the pressure And of traumatic, interruptive, transcendental. imagi I think

history nation

it is part ofWordsworth's gift to contain each within each. There however, where you feel that the suturingwill give way. points, CC: My
that's

are

impression was nonetheless

poetry. You say

that it's still the conversational

is mortal, or and that Wordsworth

style

assured the continuity of great poetry by a revolution of style.And

that you were

saving

that poetry

it seems
the

conversational
or pausal

style, saves poetry, but only in relation to this interruptive

saying

that

the

conversation,

ordinary

language,

awareness.

6. See Columbia

UP, Wordsworthian

also Geoffrey Hartman, "The in Easy Pieces (New York: Interpreter's Freud" in another 1985). For an excellent elaboration of the idea of euphemism context, see Kevis Goodman's The New Historicism, essay in this collection, "Making and the Apocalyptic Fallacy." Time for

History: Wordsworth,

640
GH: Yes. It's Wordsworth's

CATHY

CARUTH
style that saves it. Not conver

conversational

sation, because conversational style, insofar as it comes out of the epistolary mode, or middle style, is an achievement of the late seventeenth and caUed "poetic eighteenth century, and faUs into habits of what Wordsworth " diction. That is, it elevates itself despite itself, and isn't reaUy genuinely conversational. It's fam?iar in the sense that the author tries to speak to the audience as equal to equal, but in factwhen we read the epistles, any of the episdes, whether Pope's poetic epistles or Chesterfield's letters,we as certain notorious face an artificial tone and diction. But Wordsworth, lyrics show?think of "The Idiot Boy"?would an artificiaUy elevated diction. CC: Does tomodern this conversational poetry? rather have bathos than be linked

style found something thatwould

I would think yes. The main Une of modern poetry develops that GH: Unk. And in Ashbery, the casualness can become excessive. The more excessive it becomes, themore you feel an internal pressure that is being
evaded.

CC:

Wordsworth So this so-caUed ordinary style in pausal sensitivity. Always.

is shadowed by that

GH:

CC: Could that be a modern sensitivity: that the ordinary is inextricably bound to the pausal or interruptive? GH: I wonder. Possibly. But trauma is not modern. You don't need a trauma. And in terms of a historical theory of trauma to "experience" schematism I have only one firm idea, namely thatwhat I caU the Eastern trauma epiphanic style, visible in the Great Odes and neoclassicism, has with sharp turns, inscribed into it.By epiphanic style Imean a style direcdy is a faint Winander of which the apostrophe at the beginning of theBoy of echo. And by Eastern Imean themoment in theAncient Mariner (written in the older style)when "at one stride comes the dark." That abruptness "A gentle shock Wordsworth: is inscribed in the older style.But it's not in of mild surprise." Instead we have a sense of continuity or achievement of ever lose the sense of the something much, much m?der, not that you pressure of what thatm?dness is in function of, but theWordsworthian
poetic turn, let's not talk about revolution for a moment, creates a con

versational poetic style that subsumes the epiphanic style. So that he does not go from, he doesn't jump from nature into the supernatural. There is no dream vision, almost none in him. Eastern is not just a geographical category, although it has something to do with the "at one stride comes

INTERVIEW

WITH

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641

the dark." Imaginatively, if there's no twilight, then you are already in the
zone of trauma.

CC:

style, has something to do with a more general notion of modern writing. trauma theory emerges as a modern theoretical mode of writing, When after all, it emerges as something within ordinary life. GH: That and links up with

if your interest in, on the one hand, the relation between imaginative pressure and this interruptivemode, which you're also trying to see in the relation to style, and on the other hand ordinary conversational I wonder

is true. Theory as a mode of discourse is anti-conversational, the pressure of trauma. I would prefer to focus here on literary knowledge: how literature is a mode of experience. In the non pathological course of events, the "unclaimed experience," as you call it, can only be reclaimed by literary knowledge.7 you
and

CC: When
trauma studies

speak about
literature,

this literary knowledge

you suggest that trauma

in your essay on
studies allow us to

read the relationship of words and wounds without medical or political reductionism and you say specifically that figurative or poetic language is linked to trauma.8 Could you expand on that a bit, because there seems to be a kind of a paradox: normally one would think of trauma as the absencing of the possibility of speech, but you link it inherently to figura
tive language.

Voice

GH: I've always been intrigued by certain basic literary forms, and the riddle is one of them. I suggest that all poetic language partakes of the riddle form,with its surplus of signifiers.An answer is evoked, but can you get to the answer? If you could get there, the signifierswould become redundant and fall away. But in poetry you can't get to the answer. So the signifierskeep pointing towhat ismissing. Or mute. There's too litde that is referred to, if you want to use that scheme, and too much that is But I've not been able to develop fully the poetry-riddle rela suggested. tion. I'm not a systematic thinker. I began this line of speculation in "The
of the Shuttle,"9 where muteness and trauma are at the

tongue having been cut out. "The voice of the shuttle" is,you a phrase cited in Aristotle's Poetics. It refers to, we think, the remember, Philomela story: how her shuttleweaves a garment that restores her voice. Philomela's
"Unclaimed 7- See Cathy Caruth, Trauma and the Possibility of History," Experience: Yale French Studies 79 (1991), reprinted in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). 8. "Literary Studies and Traumatic Knowledge." 9. "The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature" in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970).

center,

642

CATHY

CARUTH

But the compactness itself of the phrase is riddling, and I try to describe that structure as, basicaUy, over-specified ends ("voice" and "shuttle") and something in themiddle that ismuted or left out. And I suggest that aU figurative language has these overspecified ends, as if themiddle were out. It is the cutting out that's important.
Yes, Yes, and we cutting, gUmpse rather than erasing, as a which is relevant. My essay, however,

cut

CC: GH:

stops short at one point, and I've never been able to extend it. I speculate that the very structure of figurative language, if it has these overspecified ends and an absent middle?which interpretation can fiU in?also holds for narration. But I don't show it by a narratological analysis. I simply suggest that in the Oedipus
language

figuration

counter-force.

story you can glimpse an extension from figurative

structure. Insofar as the Oedipus story converges on

to narrative

incest, persons do not have enough space for development. Incest violates developmental space. It coUapses the plot of Ufe. I try to bring that structure together with the overspecified ends and the middle that is lost. CC:
way

Are you saying that figurative or poetic

to

language is linked in some

been interested in aU

think of muteness then along? through the Boy of Winander, language wouldn't be so much trying to get at some kind of experience
is ever-receding, the muteness of but the Boy, at a failure of is a fa?ure experience. of response, Because you said. the mute So is that

If we

"trauma,"

or

the

kind

of muteness

you've

which ness,

a way of saying that figurativeness is referential because the referent itself has to do with fa?ure? In other words, you suggest that the figuration uncann?y intensifies the referent, and I am asking if that is because the
referent for

failure of response in some way, or linked to untimely speech? GH: That is a far-reaching thought, and I touch on a "mimetic" strength ening of the referent in "I. A. Richards and the Dream of Communica
tion."10 Yet I'm not sure I want to

you

has

always

been,

insofar

as you

are Wordsworthian,

Because

in poetry it is not entirely empirical or historical. The fact that figuration, moreover, uncannily intensifies the (deferred) referent, indicates a desire (however frustrated) for "timely utterance"?even for prophetic
or ecstatic speech. But I accept everything you say about untimeliness.

give

the referent

that

specific

a content.

is certainly linked to the untimely. In the basic theory of trauma, derived from Freud, you weren't prepared (hence also a certain anxiety). And it is doubtful that you could be prepared for either sheU-shock or Trauma
experience prepare io. you, "LA. shock. Wordsworth's you immune, to make argument or to is, Nature gentle the does shock. everything He doesn't to say

Richards

and the Dream

of Communication"

in The Fate ofReading.

INTERVIEW

WITH

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HARTMAN

643

there is no shock, or surprise, but that nature aims at a growth of themind which can absorb or overcome shock. 3. Video Testimony and the Place ofModern Memory

revolution in style, and CC: We have been talking about Wordsworth's itsway of communicating (without succumbing to) shock. Do you think that there is another, similar revolution of style, after themomentous events in this century thatwe have passed through? In your recent work, you have begun to focus on the video testimony project in the Fortunoff Holocaust Video Archives atYale, which you helped found, and inwhich individuals are filmed telling their stories, in relatively undirected fashion,

to trained interviewers. In recent years, you have talked about these videos as providing a means of communicating or witnessing an event that is difficult to represent adequately by other means?for example in the
seemingly realistic medium or more of mainstream surrealistic, movies, the more which, realistically as you they suggest, attempt less realistic,

become

to portray visual detail.11 Would you say, then, that the video testimonies also represent a revolution in style for communicating this kind of event? GH: Yes, but see for yourself! They are effective as an antidote, within technology, within the era of mechanical reproduction, to the glossy of themedia. They are audiovisual and yet do not privilege super-realism the ocular or assault the eye. I have suggested that they avoid the contagion the sensitive mind

of "secondary trauma"?that they allow reflection, even if there is shock. CC: You
marked

space for

have talked about the effacement of an earlier type of recollection

by memory places. I'm curious if that reflective moment in

as paradigmatic, Wordsworth, which you look at in the Boy ofWinander is linked in any way, through the problems of muteness and speaking that
it raises, attempts to later questions to remember. you come up against, in regard to contemporary

GH: They are linked. The reflectivemoment must be at the center of this. By "must be," I mean for me, when I compare what interested me in
Wordsworth, mony can and what play in I'm interested My in now?the focus, on role the one that video hand, on testi the remembrance.

individual as individual and his memory processes, and on the other hand, on what can be called public memory,12 how a public knows or could know about events, is linked to an increasingly besieged and competitive condition which many have talked about. A condition inwhich our mind
ii. See theWound: in The Longest Shadow: "Reading Testimony, Art and Trauma" theAftermath of the Holocaust Indiana UP, 1996). (Bloomington: 12. See "Public and Its Discontents" in The Longest Shadow. Memory In

644

CATHY

CARUTH

is actuaUy blocked, rather than encouraged, prevented from developing mentaUy, experientiaUy, by our very virtuosity in reconstructing technicaUy Frisch said that technology was the knack of so what occurred. Max arranging the world that we didn't have to experience it. You have a surplus of simulacra, technicaUy transmitted, but subder mediations are eUded. So that one is never quite released from this surround of simulacra. What happens to reflection in this increas question therefore arises, ingly ocular situation? There is a relation between that and my understanding ofWordsworth, orWordsworth's self-understanding, since he talks propheticaUy, towards the beginning of the industrial revolution, about the increasing pressure of external stimuU,which act on themind Uke a drug that causes dependence. He mentions specificaUy journaUsm, urbanization, and (st?l a part of jour The naUsm), "wretched and frantic novels," where theword "novel" contains theword "news." These things converge to besiege themind, and deprive it of themoment of reflection. There is no mind without a pastoral space,

and this is disappearing. The pastoral and the Utopian may be close, but at least, it is Wordsworth the pastoral is not quite the Utopian because, in within time. Itmay be an imagined place, but it occurs within time. One else is does have space within time, for reflection, one must have. Where mind? And here of course the psychological dimension comes in, and this fascinated me, because it pointed also towhat I had observed in the history
of

can be given a national or nationaUstic interpretation. Itmay be that the revelation, in order to fire up the community beyond the individual who has it, needs to be substantiated by evidential deta?, such as the idea of specific place. And it has to be an earth-place, it doesn't work as weU if it's a place in the air. To have a revelation it has to be associated with specific place, even if you don't know anymore where that place is. And is here, of course, as inmodern Israel or Islam, people st?l claim Moriah is over there, and so on. To locate Moriah, you actuaUy need no, Moriah two things, name and place. You need those specifics; you need place names, ifyou wish. And a certain storied deta?.

religion:

that

revelation

is always

linked

to

specific

place.

These

places

reveaUng force, caU itGod, could manifest itself anywhere? There is, then, a fertile tension between the potential universaUty of the message of revelation, and the accidentality and individuaUty of place and case, and this is person, of the bearer and the location. InWordsworth's of his originaUty, place becomes memory-place: spots of time, spots part

I was made conscious of the arbitrariness of this,why this place Now and not another. Time is also in question, but the time is always needy, a time of urgency, a time of crisis, and hence the pressure of apocalyptic thoughts. Yet why should it be this place rather than another, since the

INTERVIEW

WITH

GEOFFREY

HARTMAN

645

the fountain from which this shall I seek the origin?" Where or this specific thought came? But clearly it is impossible to envisage feeling an origin without thinking of emplacement. So the recovery, the retrieval process, insofar as it can be called healing or therapeutic, involves the notion of place, the image of a power place. or in my own I do not know how much of this, inWordsworth is related to a need for thought to be situated, and safely situated. thinking, For the power place keeps working the memory, as if itwere the pulse "Where
which allows that stream, the stream of consciousness, to continue, so it's

in and creative of a temporal consciousness. That is, the reflectivemoment is introduced in all its dimensions. And there is recovery. For the recovery to be effective, salutary, it has to be associated with place. It cannot be Wordsworth, but he simply a feeling. There are feelings without place in is not satisfied with those, he wants to follow them to a surreptitious source.

not that there is only?in Wordsworth?a desire to rest. The reflective moment is not just a moment of pastoral safety and rest but one where you
can

Wordsworthian memory place, after the Holocaust memory place, of the and after entering an era of mechanical reproduction. While the places of are remembered, they cannot Jewish existence destroyed in theHolocaust be as dynamic in the individual consciousness as the Wordsworthian mem
ory places. Alas, they are severed, or fixed or nostalgic. And in relation to

raised forme?how do I take this into conscious questions theHolocaust ness, what can I do about it, is this in any way thinkable, is it repre I had gone along that path, my interest in sentable?once Wordsworth's understanding of the memory process did come in. I sensed a loss of

Implicit in much I have done is a meditation on place and its relation to memory and identity (individual rather than collective). Itwasn't the that led me to study the Holocaust. There is a clear study ofWordsworth separation between these two subjects. But once I had engaged with

be equal

to your

experience.

theWordsworthian perspective of a memory not hindered by shock, I think there is always a question in my mind how future generations can be brought to remember theHolocaust without secondary trauma. I don't
sensitive. My move is not a protectionist move. It's more a question of

underestimate defenses, of course, and don't claim that everybody is all that how trauma can work creatively rather than destructively in one's life.

CC:

It's the opposite of protectionism because in your argument, a violent imposition often ends up numbing the psyche, so that in fact by making it less violent one paradoxically allows formore of a shock.

It is, as you say, precisely the question of how sensitivity can be maintained, and how sensory overload, leading to numbing, leading to studies?to feelings of impotence, can be avoided. Or as in some Holocaust GH:

646

CATHY

CARUTH

feelings of mystery and enigma, which I do not value. I do not reject all feelings of mystery, but I don't want them to become protectionist, only
protective. moment Iwant sufficiendy to see as so clearly that and yet preserve possible, comes creative about. something as the reflective In terms of

future generations especially, the dialectic there may be very complex, because for them what must be overcome is not only numbness but also indifference. CC: So the question of representation thatwe're looking at now concerns not only the nature of the different events that are represented, that is, the as opposed to whatever itwas that was traumatic before (or Holocaust but specifically the possibility formodes of representation to prevent, after),
rather than create, indifference.

GH: Yes, I agree with thatwholeheartedly. There really is something at once terrible and hypnotic in contemporary representations of violence, in their directness and detail. CC:
seem,

Curiously,
in your

then, the less direct mode

to permit more

of the video
of events

testimony would
to enter, without

view,

of a sense

the hypnotic or numbing quality of direct visual representation. I am if thiswould help us understand what you meant when you wondering in one essay, that your concern with video testimony has to do with said, the ethical aspect of representation;13what would be ethical in thismode of representation would be, paradoxically, how it gives less directly to sight,
or raises questions seeing and about what it means to see, and what the relation is between knowing.

GH:
that

That
leads

is correct. If it is sufficient to describe the ethical as something

to questions, rather than to decisive action. Moreover, the

us "hypnosis" in literature and art tests ethically. Iwould have to add that, me to conceive of the ethical as possible being an intellectual, it's hard for without reflection. CC: I'm not sure that bringing questioning opposes itself to action. into it, or reflection, actually

InWordsworth this is quite clear in the Boy ofWinander GH: episode. He saw the activitywithin contemplation. He breaks down the dichotomy
between action and reflection, action and

to the hypnosis replays this issue of reflective answering, of pushing back against what comes from outside. I come back to theWordsworthian
insistence on a creative response to what is given. Again, to qualify, the

contemplation.

Not

succumbing

13. "Public Memory

and ItsDiscontents."

INTERVIEW Holocaust

WITH

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HARTMAN

647

is not only the type or general instance of a violent historical which make video testimony but there are very specific features of it event, an important agent, an instrument, I would have to say, of memory. In this light,what
texts that

CC:

are the continuities and differences between

worked on, and the speech-texts of

the

romantic

you've

video

testimony? one finds occasionaUy in is something Uke natural Wordsworth I think of a fragment from the time of writing his first great metaphor. poem, The Ruined Cottage. Margaret is abandoned, her husband having sold himself into the army because he couldn't bear seeing his children and wife starve. In the fragmentMargaret says about the baker's wagon which used to stop, but now goes by because the baker knows there's no business GH: What there: "that wagon
doesn't

does not care for us." She doesn't want

she therefore says the wagon doesn't.

to say, "The
what

baker

care,"

That's

Anna Devere Smith caUs "naturaUy figurative speech." A vernacular vigor in the speech of ordinary people.14 And this you also have in the speech of the witnesses, many of whom, in the United States, are not especiaUy Uterate. Because coming to America the survivors became displaced per
sons,

who

Lyrical Ballads.
CC: You The

after thewar did not always have themeans to take up their education again. They had to live in a strange land, they had to learn a new language. ... So inAmerica many of the survivors are not people who could write it down. But their speech nevertheless has a certain eloquence. It has the tries to evoke in pathos and vigor of the ordinary people Wordsworth
have also talked about the "mute suggests of the survivors' to

separated

from

their

culture,

whose

education

was

interrupted,

and

eloquence" that there

the teUing of these stories beyond the question of skiU in writing or speaking, a difficulty Unked to the problem ofmemory and memory places that you mentioned above. I wonder if some of your thinking about the video archive in terms of what itmakes possible in the relation between the natural eloquence of the speech sight and the sound of thewords?or
and the mute eloquence of the gestures?suggests a way of creating a place of memory.15

gestures.

muteness

in the gestures

is a resistance

GH:

places, because

I'd have to repeat first of aU that something has happened tomemory it's difficult to think of the camps as being such memory
Angeles, 1994). Testimony Project," Holocaust and Genocide 1992: On the Road: A Search for

14. See Anna Devere Smith, Twilight?Los American Character (New York: Anchor Books, 15. See "Learning from Survivors: The Yale Studies 9.2 (Fall 1995) and The Longest Shadow.

648

CATHY

CARUTH

worthian memory place, although there is something sinister or dark about Wordsworth's spot of time. I like your formulation that theArchive itselfcreates a place ofmemory. stories. And letme also But letme talk of what is in the Archive?the

places, although obviously they are fixed in the imagination of the survi vors. The older lieux de m?moire, thememory places the survivor has left behind, were the traditional ones of home or native region. Yet we find it very difficult to get specific information, when we try to question survivors about the time before the camps. It is so far in the past, and, it are not like aWords may be too painful to recall. But the camps?they

separate these storiesfrom memory place for themoment, although I think the traditional story is often focused by a memory place. I have to say two We call the survivor testimonies "stories," but I'm uneasy with that things.
word.

say "tale," which is too close to fiction, and "narrative" I find cold. The testimony is not a storywith narrative desire. On the few occasions when I have found a story told with suspense or picaresque gusto, for instance, the Schlomo Perl story filmed as Europa, Europa, I begin to doubt. It is, in obstacles by cunning or other qualities, so that you could survive. Accident played a much greater role in survival, as did physical strength or having a trade needed in the camps, than powers of intellect, discernment, intui
tion, and so on. you don't have suspense, "Tomorrow" and for a very Secondly, simple reason. The any case, very untypical. The testimonies are not stories about overcoming

I say

"story,"

because

it's

the most

common

word.

I don't

want

to

in univers concentrationnaire which

future. There was no future.

the inmates lived blinded

became, the next, for most, and

them to the
a horizon

beyond which mind

on the sheer attempt,

could not stretch.Everything had to be concentrated

this moment, and the next, to keep

alive. So that an element which is essential to story-telling, foreshadowing, keeping things in suspense, until you know how to resolve them?that
dimension, in the consciousness of the survivor, or narrative was

allowing
doesn't

the survivor now to tell something like a story, even though it

strong properties of suspense desire, restores what

rarely

there.

Yet

have

had been taken away. It restores a power of communicating with the future or toward the future, a future most clearly indicated by interviewers themselves and thismode of communication (the video testimony) which
can

It is retrieval in that sense, it is recuperated in that sense. In other words, the capacity of telling a story, even though it doesn't have the characteristic of a fictional story, restores to the survivor who tells it this capacity to imagine a future, a transgenerational effect coming from his own act of telling.

speak

to the generation

after,

including

their

own

sons

and

daughters.

INTERVIEW

WITH

GEOFFREY

HARTMAN

649

CC: But how then is what isn't narratively experienced communicated? And does this have something specific to do with the visual mode of the video? you caU the mute element is to some extent in the broken in its poetry. But always inwhat might be caUed the reembodi language, ment of the survivors. Imean by that their gestures, the ensemble of their is a very them to be represented by the medium gestures. AUowing GH: What

Itmakes more sense against the back important effect of the medium. of deprivation. Because another thing survivorswere deprived of, ground deUberately of course, was their body. Its ordinary, human fuUness. That is not speech. Given the historical background of the deprivation, this is an important dimension, quite apart from the semiotics of gestures, which faU into the area of speech.

about the way in which the survivor faces the camera, and CC: What seems in that sense to create a kind of address? You have spoken about video testimony as activating awiUingness to Usten, of a person being made into an addressee of a conversation. You testimonies: Wh?e say in speaking about the video

survivor testimony eUcits its own kind of dialogue, it is only a dialogue with us. Survivors face not only a Uving audience, partly or now accept that audience rather than insisting on the intransitive character of their experience. They also face family members and friends who perished. It is the witnesses who undertake that descent to the dead. They address the Uving frontaUy. Often using warnings
and admonishments they also speak for the dead, or in their name.

This has its clangers. To go down may be easy, but to come up again, that is the hard task. "I am not among the Uving, but no one notices it," Charlotte Delbo wrote. So they remember the dead, that they too were in the house of the dead, yet they are not back here, but truly instructing us. ("Learning from Survivors") This takes us back to the question of response, lack of response and address. One of the things that you're bringing forward from your earlier work, and forme specificaUy from the Boy ofWinander episode, is the relation between a moment of reflection and an address, an address that is not

simply aimed at the living. Here, in the testimonies, you also have an address that is directed not only to the living but to the dead. That is Wordsworth poem: something that you remarked on in talking about the you said the apostrophe as a figure of speech comes from an apostrophe to the dead.

650

CATHY

CARUTH

GH: Yes, to define thatmode of address is essential.We're talking about a structure. In the classical apostrophe, you turn to the dead in order to summon their help. You swear by them. But it is not that you're asking

for their help, necessarily, it is that you have to represent them. At least that's true of the camp survivor. I would put it thisway, perhaps. You,
the survivor, are a?ve, they are dead, but you have to speak in some way

with the voice of the dead. Obversely, wh?e in the camp, you were in a universe of death, but st?l therewas something alive in you. In both cases there is a chiasmic relation between the survivor and his past self as camp inmate. The survivor, part of him is stillwith the dead, whether he uses the figure of address or not. For the camp inmate, and that's part of the obligation of thewitness, to face it?even though he was dead or as ifdead therewere st?lmoments of extraordinary life. 4. Interrupted Pastoral CC: I want to close with a question about your own life. In describing your passage out of Europe, when you were a boy, you talk about the love that you had for the English countryside, how distant you felt from everything, and the love of nature you had then: "I felt at home in the gentle countryside of Buckinghamshire."16 You didn't experience your experience as a constant shock at that time. And Iwas struck by something that you say at the end of your introduction to Holocaust Remembrance,
about

way

to a lecture during the faU:

your

more

present

situation

as an

academic,

where

you

are

on

the

In New England the leaves have turned. One or It ismid-October. two begin to float in the crisp air. Further north many maples have already shed half their gold, a hectic treasure for the ch?dren. I see them in the large frontyard of an old house, running and shouting, five of them, all sizes. A woman is raking the leaves, or trying to. The ch?dren, romping around, undo her work; she cuffs them with the
rake, as

minute.

p?e of raked leaves grows, and the ch?dren invent a new game. They coUapse into the p?e, spreading out deliriously, while the woman? their game, and covers them with the mother, housekeeper?abets st?l fragrant, Ught leaves. At first giggles and squeaks, then, as the tumulus rises to a respectable height, total s?ence. But only for a

tolerantly

as a kitten

perplexing

baU

or

comatose

object.

The

For, as if on signal, aU emerge simultaneously from the leafy tomb, jumping out, laughing, resurrected to themock surprise of the one who is raking and who patiently begins again.
16. "The Longest Shadow" (New York: in Testimony. Contemporary Writers make the Holocaust Random House, 1989). Personal,

ed. David

Rosenberg

INTERVIEW

WITH

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HARTMAN

651

I am on my way to give a lecture on theHolocaust, when I come across the pastoral scene. What am I doing, I ask myself. How can I talk about such matters, here? I cannot reconcile scenes like thiswith others I know about. In a fleeting montage I see or dream I see the green, cursed fields at Auschwitz. A cold calm has settled on them. The blood does not will now be the same.17
cry from the ground. Yet no place, no wood, meadow, sylvan scene

I read it, with the Boy of For me this scene resonated, the moment the silence of the children linking up somehow with your own Winander, lecture. The pastoral scene has a pause in it here, going off to a Holocaust too. There's something about the movement from that earlier pastoral scene of you in England, to this moment of you as a lecturer on the Holocaust, coming across a pastoral scene, that strikesme, since it is mediated via a scene from Wordsworth, which has been a focus of your own reading. I'm wondering if there's any comment you'd like to make on this peculiar itinerary for you in your career and in your life.Have you reflected on it at all? GH: You're right in crossing from that autobiographical sketch to my interest in the interrupted pastoral. I suppose it shows how drawn I am to resilience. Think of the children. And also to the resilience of the pastoral moment is literal, or close to literal in the idea, which itself And
Wordsworth, or a renewed of rural nature chance an event, of as a shield, But know as you as giving some relief, was you've so a new chance, so about recovery. the Holocaust well, because traumatic, written

such experiences, it exists unintegrated alongside normal memories. So that not only is the pastoral interrupted, but you have a juxtaposition that probably can't be resolved. I'm reminded of Charlotte Delbo, who says (I I live paraphrase), "It's not right to ask how do I live with Auschwitz: I have a problem, because I want to integrate thatmemory. There is no chance of that: my Auschwitz place is here and my ordinary place, or post-Auschwitz self is here. And the survivor has to live on like that. CC: Do you think that "alongside," or a reading ofthat alongside, could or is it precisely something have been found already inWordsworth, for you? In other words, do you think your theWordsworth alongside Wordsworth reading has prepared you for thinking about that, or is it rather that now you have to put something alongside your other reading?
17- "Introduction: Geoffrey H. Hartman Darkness Visible" (Cambridge, MA: inHolocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, Blackwell, 1994). ed. alongside of Auschwitz. " There it is still, a complete memory. It's not that

interruptive

that,

652 GH:

CATHY

CARUTH

That would return us to a discussion of how trauma shows itself in or Uterature generaUy?and whether trauma can ever be Wordsworth As tomy personal case, please remember that since I did not "integrated." was not deported myself pass through the fuU extent of coUective trauma (I
and in a

I suspect that my EngUsh countryside experience andWordsworth's

me or helped converged, was. trauma And there to that think about, to articulate, more severe whatever issue of the much

camp),

the

sense,

or

recovery

of

the

sense

of

trauma

comes

late.

poetry
personal coUective

trauma,which
later st?l.

after aUwas not my case, did not become

an issue till much

and specificaUy on the you were commenting onWordsworth, said that there could have been something traumatic earUer, and pause, you in your pastoral, therewas something earUer (your leaving Germany alone without your parents), and maybe partly that iswhat is emerging now. The CC: When
pastoral scene wasn't your first experience, it came later.

GH:
always

It is hard to say what

seems to be acquired

came first,what
knowledge. But

came later. And knowledge

to whatever my consciousness

on me. Yes, that happens of the Holocaust speaks, it's shock has grown too. It's not just that you start with shock and then try tomove away from the shock, or to absorb or integrate it. There are times when the shock
grows on you and becomes more severe.