Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form

Freud, Faulkner, Caruth:

Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form

For the growing number of critics concerned to trace the links among historical forces, psychic experience, and literary expression, the growth of trauma studies since the publication of Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience (1996) offers an important opportunity for reflection. On one hand, the work in this field has been justly influential. It brings sophisticated psychoanalytic concepts to bear on collective processes, developing accounts of historical violence that are both socially specific and psychologically astute. These accounts are especially compelling when focused on what I call "punctual" traumas: historical events of such singularity, magnitude, and horror that they can be read as shocks that disable the psychic system. Thus, for example, in their readings of the Holocaust—the paradigmatic example for critics concerned with this kind of trauma—Caruth and others have helped us see how a historical moment might be experienced less as an ongoing set of processes that shape and are shaped by those living through them than as a punctual blow to the psyche that overwhelms its functioning, disables its defenses, and absents it from direct contact with the brutalizing event itself. Precisely because the violence suffered by Holocaust victims was so extreme, on this view, it affected those victims as a psychic concussion that short-circuited their capacity to "process" the traumatizing event as it took place. Traumas of this kind thus become accessible only in the mind's recursive attempts to master what it has in some sense failed to experience in the first instance. A punctual incursion on the mind, having "dissociated" consciousness from itself, installs an unprocessed memory-trace that returns unbidden, as delayed effect, in an effort to force the mind to digest this previously unclaimed kernel of experience.

The usefulness of such an account extends beyond its applicability to the perhaps extreme case of the Holocaust. Critics have marshaled it to illuminate a range of important social phenomena, from rape and child sexual abuse to certain experiences of racist violence and even of class domination. In doing so, they have helped tune our ears anew to those psychic expressions of trauma that this theory is especially adept at hearing. One such psychic expression concerns what Freud called the repetition compulsion: those reenactments in the present of psychic events that have not been safely consigned to the past, that retain the visual and affective intensity of lived (rather than remembered) experience, and that disrupt the unruffled present with flashbacks and terrifying nightmares, intrusive fragments of an unknown past that exceeds the self's (relatively) coherent and integrated story about itself. All of these phenomena have been raised for renewed and vigorous debate by the "punctual" version of trauma theory. So, too, have the forms of writing that arise in response to such suffering. Critics deploying the category of trauma have stressed in particular the power of texts that seek less to represent traumatizing events—since representation risks, on this view, betraying the bewildering, imperfectly representational character of traumatic memory—than to transmit directly to the reader the experience of traumatic disruption. Here the study of trauma joins a more general contemporary interest in writing that performs or enacts what it has to say rather than (or in addition to) conveying it representationally. The emphasis on traumatic textualities, in this sense—on texts whose significance lies in part in their cognitive indigestibility—has helped to hold open an important area for interdisciplinary exchange, especially between the sometimes antagonistic fields of psychoanalysis and deconstruction.

There is then much to admire in the trauma studies of the past decade. In what follows, my aim is to build upon that work by redressing one of its central limitations: its difficulty accounting for those forms of trauma that are not punctual, that are more mundanely catastrophic than such spectacular instances of violence as the Holocaust.¹ I am speaking here of the trauma induced by patriarchal identity formation rather, say, than...