Lives of Wars and Trauma

"Of arms and the man I sing": these famous opening words from Virgil's Aeneid (Book 1) enshrine the theme of war as a source of literary creation. From antiquity to the present day, authors have depicted wars in poetry, drama and prose, in biographies, historical accounts, and novels. Wars have been described in rhyme, and figurative language, as well as in narratives, through complex characters, as well as through realistic and fictional portrayals. Many theories of drama and prose, as well as the development of the concept of the literary hero, have been shaped by the literature of war. The universality of war as a social phenomenon raises moral, psychological, and social issues all of which can be presented powerfully in literature. The cruelty of conflict engenders traumatic experiences, which are reflected in many ways in literary texts.

The concept of trauma was initially formulated by Sigmund Freud in his studies on hysteria at the turn of the twentieth century while treating mostly female patients. Yet clearly trauma has existed as long as human-kind has walked the earth. After World War I, and with a greater intensity since World War II and specifically in the last few decades, the theory of trauma has become a key part of literary studies. The confrontation with extreme situations and the contemporary awareness of trauma has led to a rethinking of the concept of representation, and prompted literary scholars (mainly as of the early 1990s) such as Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Judith Herman, along with theorists from other fields such as Dominick LaCapra, to develop literary trauma theories.¹ In these theories, trauma is not only a disaster but also a mode of experience associated with the notions of retrospection, deconstruction, and reconstruction of memory, repetitions, and fragmentation. Thus it is not surprising that the literary theory of trauma has evolved through the writings of post-structuralists and deconstructionalist scholars (such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard). Today, trauma theory is a critical category of literary studies promoted by such scholarly voices as Anne Whitehead, Ann Kaplan, and Deborah Horvitz, to name a few.²

The non-linearity, arbitrariness and incomprehensibility of trauma challenge traditional concepts of representation, but its non-representability provides a rare opportunity to depart from concepts of the true or the real to better reveal underlying socio-political situations, cultural and historical contexts, and ethical issues. Thus, literature, unlike other disciplines such as history, psychology, and sciences, can create what Iris Murdoch (in the context of ethical criticism) called not only facts but a "new vocabulary of attention" when dealing with war and other extreme situations of suffering.³

This problematization of the representation of war and trauma associated with the power of literature is a key concern in Modern Hebrew literature. Hebrew literature, and Israeli literature in its wake, was fused with the history of Jewish people in the twentieth century and the Zionist ideological mission. Literature played an active role in the educational system and the creation of Israel. Literary texts from the start mirrored ideological complexities, ethical issues, and traumatic lapses. For instance, debates on Jewish masculinity were major components of Hebrew literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from Peretz Smolenskin, through the works of Micha Josef Berdyczewski and Uri Nissan Gnessin to Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Uri Zvi Greenberg. Later, major canonical Israeli writers continued to grapple with the Zionist national ideological myths and their relationship to questions of masculinity, military conduct, trauma, and bereavement (Moshe Shamir, S. Yizhar, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz to name a few).

The urge to tell a story that cannot easily be told has prompted many authors to find different literary venues, both in prose and poetry to walk the narrow path between the personal, intimate, empathetic narrative, and retrospective...