Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism

3 Identification with the Trauma of Others

66 RISKING DIFFERENCE 66 Chapter 3 Identification with the Trauma of Others Slavery, Collective Trauma, and the Difficulties of Representation in Toni Morrison’s Beloved If Beloved is a novel about the “crisis of subjectivity” suffered by slaves (Morgenstern 114), it is also about the crisis of subjectivity transmitted to the descendants of slaves. What are the identification processes that account for the intergenerational transmission of trauma? What is the psychic mechanism of transmission, especially in cases where the traumatic event remains unspoken, untold? What are the effects on the second-generation trauma survivor’s capacities for desire and language? And what is the identification mechanism that enables someone to suffer the symptoms of collective trauma, of a traumatic past experienced by a whole group of people but not by the sufferer herself? In Beloved, I will argue, both a character and the narrative voice play out the effects of identification with a traumatic past not their own. Denver, the daughter of the ex-slave Sethe, did not herself experience slavery; but the deaf-mutism that immobilizes her for two years is a sign of her identification first with the specific trauma suffered by her slave mother and second with the dehumanizing trauma inflicted by slavery on all her slave ancestors. As in Freud’s classic cases of hysteria, Denver’s deaf-mutism is a symptom of past trauma: the body expresses what the voice cannot say. It is, however, not Denver’s own traumatic experience that her deaf-muteness expresses, but the experience of her mother. The story of Sethe’s infanticide has not been told, cannot be told: it is “unspeakable,” and Sethe wants it to remain that way (58). IDENTIFICATION WITH THE TRAUMA OF OTHERS 67 Denver lives out what Lacan calls the “desire of the Other” at the level of the body, enacting her mother’s pathological desire that the story of her child-murder not be told, not be heard. Like the symptoms of the trauma survivors Freud treated, Denver’s deafness and mutism are hysterical: that is, they are without physiological cause. Identification is the mark of the hysteric, Freud says in the Interpretation of Dreams: Identification is a highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms. It enables patients to express in their symptoms not only their own experiences but those of a large number of other people. It enables them, as it were, to suffer on behalf of a whole crowd of people” (149). That insight opens the door, as Elin Diamond says, “to understanding identification as a social as well as a psychical relation” (“Rethinking” 89). Denver’s substitution of the body for language expresses an identification with the trauma of her enslaved ancestors, who were likewise denied access to language and reduced to bodies.1 I will argue, finally, that the narrative discourse of Beloved sometimes mimics the concretisms of second-generation children of trauma victims. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, describing patients who are children of Holocaust survivors, observes that second-generation subjects of a collective trauma often exhibit a concrete way of thinking and speaking, including an inability to understand or to use metaphor. Although Grubrich-Simitis does not say so, her patients’ “concretism” can be read as a form of identification with the literal quality of their parents’ traumatic reminiscences. As is well known, traumatic events do not become part of narrative memory but come back in concrete forms, as flashback or recurrent nightmare: “It is as if the thing itself returns, as opposed to its representation” (Morgenstern 103). The narrative voice of Beloved falls into similar “concretisms” when it approaches an idea connected with slavery, such as the body or the past. The narrative voice stutters, so to speak; it aims for the substitutions of metaphor but falls back into the literal. Like the language of a second-generation trauma survivor, the novel’s language bears the mark of inherited trauma: it dramatizes Morrison’s identification and solidarity with her slave ancestors. At the heart of the narrative is a conflict between the therapeutic necessity to translate the untold story of slavery into language—a need to tell that propels the narrative—and a textual resistance to that therapeutic 68 RISKING DIFFERENCE imperative, a resistance carried out by the text’s refusal of some of the constitutive substitutions of language. Ultimately, Beloved “is the story of its own impossibility,” as Naomi Morgenstern...