Trauma, Narrative, and Two Forms of Death

Trauma and Narrative

There are several very different ways in which the relationship between "trauma" and "narrative" (or "life narrative") is articulated.¹ Some scholars think that these two concepts are opposites—stories are a mode of symbolic structure that constructs identity, while trauma is the effect of that which evades structure and shatters identity. Many attribute such an understanding to Freud, such as Cathy Caruth's approach to the relationship between trauma and the historical narrative.² These approaches stress mostly the discrepancies between the repetitive and belated temporal structure of the trauma versus the linear temporal structure of the narrative.

Others claim that trauma and the stories that are told by the traumatized victim often bear consequential, or at times even therapeutic, relations: a traumatic experience produces an immediate need to tell a story and to reformulate one's life story. Some, such as the psychiatrist Judith Herman or Primo Levi, would even say that a life story is the first essential step toward recovery, or at least toward working through the trauma.³ A third form of relation is enactment: the trauma narrative, in its form and mode of narration, reenacts the original traumatic event. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's work on Günter Grass's Cat and Mouse is a good example of such analysis.⁴

As a matter of fact, these three conceptual relationships between trauma and narrative do not necessarily exclude one another. In many instances, we can find them all, with changing emphases, in various writings on trauma. One example of this complex articulation is the work of Dominick LaCapra, who stresses the unavoidable oscillation between exclusion, working through, and acting out in representing trauma.⁵

In this paper, however, I would like to suggest yet another way to relate these two concepts to each other, recombining elements of the approaches mentioned above. I would like to suggest that in the case of a vast traumatic event, such as the Holocaust (but certainly not only the Holocaust), stories that are narrated by the victims are the place where trauma is "framed" so that it will not collapse into two very much more radical forms of death—the death of the victim subject by the annihilator's signifier and the victim's "symbolic death."⁶

These two forms of death refer, as will be discussed later, to two Lacanian concepts and were imposed, according to my analysis, by the Nazis on their victims, with the aim to annihilate them even before actually killing them. The concepts set up a theoretical framework for reading and understanding the fundamental challenges undertaken in texts that arise out of trauma. In order to establish my point I will examine texts of various genres—theoretical as well as poetic and documentary. First I will establish an historical-theoretical claim and then I will return to my initial question about the relationship between trauma and narrative. I will then illustrate my claim by closely reading one entry from a diary written by a young woman in the Greenberg forced labor camp.

I will begin with what I call "the annihilation of the self by the signifier."

The Annihilation of the Self

This idea of the self and its annihilation during and after the Holocaust has already been posited very forcefully by Theodor Adorno. In a lecture titled "The Liquidation of the Self," delivered on July 15, 1965, Adorno refers to the difficulty of talking about metaphysics after the great horrors of the twentieth century:

In the face of the experience we have had, not only through Auschwitz but through the introduction of torture as a permanent institution and through the atomic bomb—all these things form a kind of coherence, a hellish unity—in the face of these experiences the assertion that what is has meaning, and the affirmative character that has been attributed to metaphysics almost without exception, becomes a mockery; and in the face of the victims it becomes downright immoral.⁷

Thereafter, Adorno stresses that at the core of the crisis in metaphysical thought is the concept of the self: "[T]he...