The conditions and effects of traumatic events, on sociocultural and individual levels, present special problems, questions, and issues concerning ethical remembering, representation, witnessing, and working-through. While I will use some theories from the
complete “understanding.” The principle of communicating human experience despite, within, and through difference is a vital, necessary space for Bakhtin’s call for “the individual [to] become answerable through and through” (Art 2). I seek to join Bakhtin’s effort toward engaging in ethical human dialogue and the response, or answerability, it calls for while heeding his cautions regarding the slippery dangers of possession and overshadowing of others’ subjectivities.
28 It is to the wholeness and particularities of life, a co-constituted world of multiple subjects/subjectivities, that
Bakhtin feels he must be answerable. He wishes “to answer with my own life what I have experienced and understood [. . .] so that everything I have experienced and understood would not remain ineffectual in my life” (Art 2). In other words, for life to be meaningful, one must engage in making meaning with and through others.
Western psychoanalytic tradition to talk about the veterans’ experiences and memories of violence, I employ these ideas and terms associatively rather than according to their strict disciplinary definitions. Trauma is, in Cathy Caruth’s formulation, a form of recurrent memory of a “shocking and unexpected occurrence of an accident” that at the time of its first occurrence “is not precisely grasped” (Unclaimed 6).29 Here one must ask, “is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it” (7)? Caruth contends trauma is contingent on both: the confrontation with death and the ambivalence of survival. Trauma, in some ways, is a result of the shock, disbelief, and guilt at surviving an accident, for “far from telling of an escape from reality—the escape from a death, or from its referential force,” the “story of trauma,” “attests to its endless impact on life” (7).30 A critical question arising from theorizations of trauma is: “What does it mean to survive?” or “What does it mean for consciousness to survive?” (60-1)?31
29 Starting with the relationship between trauma and the individual, Caruth notes that “the Greek trauma, or
‘wound,’ originally refer[s] to an injury inflicted on the body” (Unclaimed 3). However, to Freud “trauma is understood [primarily] as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind,” which “repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of the survivor and against his [sic] very will” (2). As a “wound that cries,” in “belated address,” and “seems so much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche,” “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it is precisely not known in the first instance— returns to haunt the survivor later on” (4).
30 Caruth articulates a primary paradox by expressing that the “notion of trauma has confronted us not only with
a simple pathology but also with a fundamental enigma concerning the psyche’s relation to reality [. . .] trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena. Traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimensions of suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness” (Unclaimed 91-92). Consequently, as bolstered by depictions of American Vietnam war veterans, a central archetype of trauma within Western culture is “the soldier faced with sudden and massive death around him [. . .] suffers this sight in a numbed state, only to relive it later on in repeated nightmares” (11).
31 Another constituent component of trauma, as it is conceived in Western psychoanalytic traditions, is that it
exists as “the collapse of [] understanding” so that the experience of the accidental/traumatizing event, and its successive returns, resists narration (Caruth, Trauma 4). Trauma’s resistance to “mak[ing] sense” through narration causes Bal to call it “(non)memory,” or that “tragically solitary” “reenactment” which “has no social
In terms of differentiating absence, loss, and forms of social trauma from socio- historical perspectives, the work of Dominik LaCapra is particularly relevant. Starting his discussion of trauma at the social level, LaCapra believes “psychoanalysis is misunderstood as merely a psychology of the individual,” for “certain psychoanalytic concepts [. . .] [such as working-through] are crucial in the attempt to elucidate the relation between cultures that come into contact as well as between the present [. . .] and the past” (Representing 9). Within social forms of trauma, LaCapra makes an ethical distinction between “historical trauma” and “structural trauma” (“Trauma” 699-700). “Historical traumas” are past moments and events that happen to specific individuals where “its representation [and] the distinction among victims, perpetrators, and bystanders is crucial.” Related, yet critically different, “structural trauma” is sociocultural damage emanating from historical atrocity wherein “everyone is subject” to its damages, but in different ways (723).32
Within this delineation between social forms of trauma, LaCapra marks another ethical divide between absence and loss, noting that “losses are specific and involve particular events, such as the death of loved ones on a personal level or, on a broader scale, the losses brought about by apartheid or by the Holocaust [. . .] including both the lives and the cultures of affected groups” so that “it is misleading to situate loss on a transhistorical level,” rather it is particularly placed as historical moments (700-1). “Absence,” can operate
Traumatic (non)memory needs “healing integration,” into narrative and social structures and can therefore “be overcome only in an interaction with others” (x). “To enter memory,” Bal states, “the traumatic event of the past needs to be made ‘narratable,’” that is, the traumatized person needs a “second person to act as confirming witness to a painfully elusive past” so that the traumatic “memory [] is not confined to the individual psyche” (x). As with the psychoanalytic terminology of “working-through,” Bal’s formulation for overcoming trauma states that “a second person is needed for the first person to come into his- or herself in the present,” an external witness is necessary for the survivor to be “able to bear the past” (xi).
32 LaCapra repeatedly offers warnings regarding the potentially harmful relationship between empathy and
“on a transhistorical level,” as it “is not an event and does not imply tenses (past, present, or future),” but is often expressed or experienced as a yearning for something someone never had (700-1).33 There are real material dangers at stake in combining and conflating loss and absence, LaCapra contends; it is critical to “recognize that one cannot lose what one never had” (emphasis added, 701).34 While I do not adopt his exact terminology, I heed LaCapra’s ethical distinctions.