TRAUMATIC MEMORY AND THE ETHICAL, POLITICAL AND
TRANSHISTORICAL FUNCTIONS OF LITERATURE
Susana Onega, Constanza del Río and Maite Escudero-Alías, eds.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017
ALEXANDER HOPE
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
[email protected] 171
Interest in trauma has increased substantially since PTSD was included in the
American Psychological Association’s diagnostic manual in 1980, partly as a
result of years of work from US veterans’ associations (Whitehead 2004: 4).
Trauma theory, especially literary trauma theory, can be traced to the Yale school
and the landmark volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) edited by
Cathy Caruth, though later scholars have been sceptical about Caruth’s particular
reading of psychoanalysis (Leys 2000) and the Eurocentric focus of much early
trauma theory. In terms of literary theory, the editors of the present volume note
parallels between postmodern scepticism as regards grand narratives and the
stylistic and rhetorical experimentation frequently found in both postmodern and
trauma literature. It borrows theoretical frameworks from the likes of Jacques
Derrida, Judith Butler, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and Caruth, in
addition to cultural studies and theories of affect —according to the back cover
description. With some justification, much is also made of the interdisciplinarity
of the collection. Caruth and the “school of Deconstructive Trauma Studies” (2),
however, do come in for some criticism in the introduction, with suggestions that
Caruth’s focus on the “unrepresentable” and “unspeakable” (3) seems to lack a
basis for political action and risks placing a block against the potential of narrative
for healing trauma, as suggested by some psychotherapists (2-3). The introduction
also echoes Dominick LaCapra’s warning against conflating “generalised
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structural transhistorical trauma” and “specific historical traumas that may affect
specific people in different ways” (3), which LaCapra identifies as a problematic
tendency in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s book on testimony (LaCapra
2014: 76).
Anne Whitehead has noted that there is an intertwining between trauma theory
and fiction (2004: 161), and, as the title of the volume being reviewed makes
clear, the stakes of a collection such as this are therefore considerable. Trauma,
and the way it may be (re)presented or worked through in literature, is a difficult
enough question on its own without the addition of questions of history,
transgenerational trauma and the ethical and political functions of literature —
though these are undoubtedly inextricably linked. Inevitably, we meet competing
political demands: the potential to represent individual trauma or “generalised
structural transhistorical trauma” (3) or indeed to “be witnesses to the
unpresentable”, as Jean-François Lyotard claims we have an ethical imperative to
do (1984: 82), may indeed contrast with the therapeutic needs of specific
individuals or groups.
The first of the collection’s four sections includes two essays focused on ideology
172 and aesthetics in 20th-century literature and their relation to the “(Re)construction
of Cultural Memory” (19). The first contribution from Martin Elsky provides an
interesting case study of the importance of literary history for the construction of
imagined communities and narratives of national identities (Anderson 1991).
Elsky gives an impressively detailed account of the competing attempts to co-opt
Dante Alighieri, by Protestant Germany and Catholicism in Germany, around the
sexcentenary of Dante’s death. David Lloyd then gives us an intriguing Walter
Benjamin-inflected close reading of César Vallejo’s “Vusco volvvver de golpe el
golpe” (1922) and investigates some parallels with “policing violence” (48) and
how this relates to poetic or lyric violence. Lloyd’s essay on (post)colonial trauma
(2000) is much cited in trauma theory; here, however, he focuses on how the
“pure language” (51) —in the sense Benjamin gave it in “The Task of the
Translator”, which includes both the extinguishing and renewal of language—
potentially found in Vallejo’s poetry offers an unusual and politically-loaded
reading of the unexpected parallels between Vallejo and Keats.
In the first chapter of Part 2, which focuses on the ethical and aesthetic challenges
related to representing and teaching the Holocaust, Larissa Allwork provides one
of the most practical and nuanced chapters of the book, heavily influenced by her
work as a historian and highlighting how trauma literature has gone “beyond”
analysing Holocaust survivors’ emotional damage (78) and the ways in which this
literature has reshaped the writing of Holocaust historiography. Allwork analyses a
number of cultural examples, including Daniel Libeskind’s architecture and
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Marcelo Brodsky’s photography, and provides a sophisticated critique of the
weaknesses of some strands of trauma theory. She also revisits Felman’s chapter in
the Caruth collection on the question of teaching the Holocaust, and links this to
very practical questions about how teaching trauma literature can potentially bring
up unrelated trauma for the students.
Silvia Pellicer-Ortín’s contribution deals with Jewish memory, especially for the
second and third generations following the Holocaust, and therefore transhistorical
trauma, in British-Jewish author Linda Grant’s fiction. Pellicer-Ortín provides a
nuanced analysis of three of Grant’s novels and how their generic hybridity relates
to the construction of (Jewish) memory; however, drawing on other major thinkers
on Jewish identity, such as Derrida or Yosef Yerushalmi could perhaps have helped
Pellicer-Ortín develop her argument even further.
Rudolf Freiburg then provides a fascinating account of Alan Scott Haft’s
transcription of his father’s life. Harry Haft was an illiterate Holocaust survivor
whose boxing ability kept him alive, at the cost of killing others. In contrast to
Primo Levi or Paul Celan, Haft had only an everyday language that was not his
own —English— when he finally told his story to his son. The usual association of
trauma fiction with fragmentation and rhetorical excess is consequently inverted. 173
Freiburg makes the interesting proposal that the bareness of the narrative and
Haft’s murder of others in the boxing ring in order to survive “destroys the grand
narrative of the exceptionally virtuous and heroic Holocaust survivor” (147).
Part 3 focuses on “Romance Strategies and Spectrality” (153) in fictionalised
traumatic memories. Justin Paul Brumit analyses Dennis Cooper’s My Loose Thread
(2002) in terms of romance and “postmodernist aesthetics” (159). Brumit’s
attribution of “nihilistic playfulness” and the “abandonment of affect and
authenticity” (161) to the postmodern might fit with some of Frederic Jameson’s
more critical moments, but does not really accord with Jean-François Lyotard’s
reading of the postmodern —as Brumit seems to suggest. Lyotard contrasts his
conception of the postmodern sublime to the nostalgia and demand for (false)
reality of the modern (Lyotard 1984: 80-82), effectively arguing against such a
loss of affect. In the end, Brumit provides a detailed reading that convincingly
claims that (arguably postmodern) reformulations of medieval romance are an
important response to the changes AIDS wrought on gay subjectivity (178) —a
reading that Lyotard might well have agreed with.
Jean-Michel Ganteau analyses Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) in terms of
Constanza del Río’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s “re-memoring” —“the
continued presence of that which has disappeared or been forgotten”— and
Nachträglichkeit (181-82). It features some sophisticated analysis of the stylistic
features of Enright’s novel in relation to the narration of memory, and some
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rather more provocative statements about testimony and fiction. He cites
Whitehead’s question, “if trauma comprises an event […] which overwhelms the
individual and resists language or representation, how can it then be narrativised
[…]”? (187) as being particularly applicable to The Gathering as “precarious
testimony”. Arguably, Ganteau slightly misrepresents Felman’s position on
testimony, claiming it appears when “accuracy is in doubt” (187-88) when the
context was actually testimony and historical accuracy in trials (Felman 1995: 17).
A very interesting meditation on what Ganteau calls “fictional testimony” (188)
and its interrelation with the characters’ memories and questions of inter-
generational transmission of memory follows —essentially asking in what ways
fiction can be said to bear witness.
Susana Onega’s contribution is one of the strongest in the volume. She analyses
Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009), a neo-gothic novel that plays with the
ghost story genre to ask questions about class and inherited trauma. Partly as a
contrast to Derrida’s spectres, Onega takes her starting point from Colin Davis’s
reading of Abraham and Torok’s transgenerational phantoms, in which they “are
not the spirits of the dead, but ‘lacunae left inside us by the secrets of others’”
174 (207). She analyses how the vengeful phantoms, in Abraham and Torok’s sense, of
Waters’s novel have apparently been generated by the past trauma of the menial
classes in a country house. Onega’s deft hand with the theoretical framework in
this chapter is also a good model for researchers —both those in their early careers
and the more experienced ones— to follow.
The fourth and final section focuses on postcolonial manifestations of traumatic
memory. Anna Maria Tomczak gives us a sophisticated analysis of Yasmin Alibhai-
Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook (2010), which tells the oft-excluded story of British
“twice migrant” (231) East African Asians through the prism of a recipe book.
Bárbara Arizti analyses Jamaica Kincaid’s “ongoing self-representational project”
(253) and provides an interesting account of the ways in which Kincaid’s narrative
strategies push the conventions of life writing to their limits.
In their investigation of Toni Morrison’s Home (2012), Katrina Harack and
Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz provide some of the most theoretically sophisticated
analysis in the volume. Judith Butler’s and Sam Durrant’s interpretations of
ethical mourning are used to interpret Morrison’s novel, in an attempt to go
some way towards unpicking the complex relationship between individual and
collective trauma —as well as how Morrison’s work might disrupt some of the
Eurocentrism found in earlier trauma theory. In their conclusion they flag up
Felman and Laub’s important observation that the “critical demand for
contextualisation” also necessitates “textualization of the context” (306-
307).
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In the conclusion to the volume the editors cite deconstructivist and Yale school
critic J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading, saying that “the rhetorical study of
literature has crucial practical implications for our moral, social and political
lives” (315). Clearly this is never truer than when dealing with questions of
trauma both in its individual forms and as societal phantoms in Abraham and
Torok’s sense. This volume manages to find a good range of examples to
continue attempts to decolonize trauma theory and to show the reader how
literature may illuminate transhistorical trauma and traumatic memory. Indeed,
one of the book’s strengths is the focus on close reading. As a result, sections 3
and 4 do actually go a fair way towards making good on the ambitious promise
of the title.
However, the ethical imperative for a volume like this is evidently greater than for
a less politically and ethically fraught area of literary theory; hence Ruth Leys’s
fairly vituperative criticism of Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience, echoed by the
editors. The introduction talks of affect theory as an antidote to “the obsessive and
paranoid theorising of deconstructive approaches” to trauma theory (5-6), in this
context meaning Caruth —and potentially some other Yale scholars, though which
175
is not clear— rather than Derrida or indeed Paul de Man. However, only two of
the chapters actually make use of affect theory. This is not really a problem with
the contributions per se given the (fairly) interdisciplinary approach, rather that the
interactions with affect theory, memory studies, Derrida, Butler, and Abraham and
Torok promised in the blurb and introduction appear in a more limited fashion
than one might have expected.
Overall, while the volume is indeed interdisciplinary, perspectives from further
outside the bounds of literary theory might have provided added insight. The
fourth section in particular does some important work towards decolonizing
trauma theory, a necessary task given its beginnings in Vietnam veterans’ PTSD
and the trauma of the Holocaust (Rothberg 2008; Visser 2015). However, it is
noticeable that some of the most successful contributions make use of
reformulations of trauma theory with Derridean deconstructive heritage rather
than via Yale, or of alternative reconfigurations of psychoanalysis like Abraham
and Torok. Borrowing from Deleuzian theories of affect, neuropsychoanalysis,
medical humanities or indeed clinical psychology might well have given the
volume an extra push to take literary trauma theory yet further in its quest for a
nuanced and effective postcolonial approach. That said, the volume makes a very
welcome contribution to the growing field of postcolonial trauma theory with a
number of excellent individual contributions, well-supported by a focus on
detailed close reading.
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Works Cited
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Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Postcolonial Recovery?” Interventions 2 (2):
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London and New York: Verso.
LYOTARD, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern
CARUTH, Cathy. (ed.) 1995. Trauma: Explorations Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. G.
in Memory. Baltimore and London: Johns Bennington and B. Massumi. Manchester:
Hopkins U.P.
Manchester U.P.
FELMAN, Shoshana. 1995. “Education and Crisis,
ROTHBERG, Michael. 2008. “Decolonizing
or the Vicissitudes of Teaching”. In Caruth, Cathy
(ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore Trauma Studies: A Response”. Studies in the
and London: Johns Hopkins U.P.: 13-60. Novel 40 (1/2): 224-234.
LACAPRA, Dominick. 2014. Writing History, VISSER, Irene. 2015. “Decolonizing Trauma
Writing Trauma. With a New Preface. Theory: Retrospect and Prospects”.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P. Humanities 4 (2): 250-265.
LEYS, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago WHITEHEAD, Anne. 2004. Trauma Fiction.
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176
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