SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE: TRAUMA AND REPRESENTATION

Abstract

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), memory is "the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information". Photographic representation For Marianne Hirsch (2001), representation, mainly photographic representation, is particularly important in the process of bearing witness to the past and in the process of testimony for future generations, for what she particularly calls the post-generation trauma. [...]iconic representation has a double function, that of being a witness to the past, an aide-memoir, something that will prevent us from forgetting, and that of being a testimony, a visual evidence of the trauma that has been produced. [...]the compulsive repetition of these traumatic images has the role of enhancing and enabling the process of working through trauma in an attempt to overcome it. [...]I would suggest that while the reduction of the archive of images and their endless repetition might seem problematic in the abstract, the postmemorial generation - in displacing and recontextualizing these well-known images in their artistic work - has been able to make repetition not an instrument of fixity or paralysis or simple retraumatization (as it often is for survivors of trauma), but a mostly helpful vehicle of working through a traumatic past. Finding a voice for their trauma becomes their struggle. [...]linguistic representation becomes a first step towards a healing process.

Headnote

Abstract: The paper deals with the problematic relationship between trauma and representation by making use of such concepts as negative (re)presentation, void, absence and oblique representation. The "unrepresentable" enters a cycle of perpetual remembrance in which trauma can neither be remembered nor forgotten.

Keywords: absence, memory, representation, trauma

1. Introduction

One of the great paradoxes when having to discuss the relationship between trauma and representation is that trauma, as understood and conceptualized by contemporary theorists, is defined by absence. The traumatic event that has generated the trauma is gone, is absent, it is something that happened at a certain moment in the past. The traumatic behaviour of the individual is the result of an accident or an incident from the past that was somehow "missed" by the individual's inner mechanisms of perception. It was a missed encounter; an encounter that failed to be understood or appropriated by the individual. Thus, it has become an absence, a void, a loss. Being an absence or something that the individual failed to perceive, to understand or to grasp, it is also something that is elusive to memory.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), memory is "the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information". If the traumatic event brought about a collapse in understanding and in perceiving the outside incident that has intruded upon the inner world of the individual, then it must have also escaped being stored in the mind. The traumatic episode was not stored, was not turned into a memory; therefore, it cannot be recalled, it cannot be revived. Trauma is relived over and over again as if it were still happening in the present. The mind of the individual is caught in a present continuous, failing to understand the pastness of trauma. Trauma is seen as a possession of an individual's mind structure, altering its mechanisms and patterns. Trauma is a pathological condition having a compulsive-obsessive nature which does not allow the possessed individual to exit its never-ending repetition. But, if trauma is characterized by absence and dissociation, by a failure in comprehension and an impossibility to transform it into a normal memory and thus incorporate it into one's past, what is the relation between trauma and representation and how, if at all, can trauma be represented?

2. Trauma and representation

The two cornerstones that lie at the foundation of this paper are suggestive of its structure: it offers a twofold perspective on trauma and representation, the perspective of narrative representation and the perspective of photographic or iconic representation. The former is a picture of the memorial for the victims of the ghetto in Krakow. The memorial, which was inaugurated in 2005, is located in what is now called The Ghetto Heroes Square (Plac Bohaterów Getta) and it shocks through its simplicity and grim symbolism. It consists of 70 over-sized steel and cast iron chairs. The 33 chairs that are placed in the centre of the square are facing the gate through which the Jews who lived in the ghetto were taken to the death camps, following the final liquidation of the ghetto in March 1943. The square, being the ghetto's largest open space, was the place where the Jews were assembled before every deportation, the place where they were forced to leave behind all their possessions and the last place they would see before being taken to the death camps. The designers of the memorial, the local architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak, were inspired in designing the memorial by the historical fact which attested that, following deportations and the final liquidation of the ghetto, when the Jews had to abandon all their belongings, the square was strewn with furniture, clothes, and luggage. Through its simplicity and austerity, the memorial has become a powerful representation of absence and loss, a dark reminder of trauma inflicted upon an entire nation.

The latter is a quotation from Nicole Krauss' novel The Histoiy of Love (2005), talking about the melancholia of depicting a world that no longer exists. Leopold Gursky's world was completely destroyed, totally wiped-out; it no longer exists but in his memory. Memory and writing become a way to preserve and to represent that which no longer exists.

Once upon a time, there was a bov. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword, a pebble could be a diamond, a tree, a castle. Once upon a time, there was a bov who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. (Krauss 2005:18)

The quotation talks about a world that no longer exists, exuding nostalgia and longing for the a-priori moment in time, for the "once upon a time" when the world made sense, when everything was possible. I have chosen this paragraph as representative for talking about trauma, because trauma too is a tale about an absence; it is a longing for a return to a prior moment in the development of the inner self, when the inner realm of the individual was linear and stable; it is a longing for a return to a moment preceding the traumatic incident that brought about a complete shift of paradigm in the internal mechanisms of the being. Both the quotation taken from Nicole Krauss, The Histoiy of Love and the photograph depicting the memorial for the victims of the ghetto in Krakow are symbolic narratives of an absence, of a loss, of a world devoid of the human element.

Trauma is an external event that breaks through and in a stable form of the psychic; it represents a disruption of time and history, a discontinuity of a wellestablished order. Beginning with the seminal work of Cathy Caruth, Geoffrey Hartman, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in the 1990s, the concept of trauma has gained prominence and has come to be regarded as "one of the key interpretative categories of contemporary politics and culture" (Kansteiner 2004:203).

Trauma is considered a very intense reaction of the mind to an uncontrollable and extremely powerful external event, having as a result an acute psychological damage. This emotional damage caused by the unexpectedness of the event and by the terror it had inflicted causes the mind to split or to dissociate itself from the distressful event. Thus, once the mechanisms of cognition and awareness are shattered, the mind is unable to register the wound it has suffered. As a consequence, the victim is not capable of integrating the traumatic experience and becomes tormented and haunted by intrusive traumatic memories.

Cathy Caruth, one of the most important names in contemporary trauma theory, has redefined trauma according to the "structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it" (Caruth 1995:4) This belated assimilation takes the form of a repeated possession of the person who experienced the trauma. For Caruth (1995:4-5), "to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event". This possession leads to a severe collapse of understanding. The traumatized carry an impossible history within them, impossible to understand, impossible to forget and impossible to voice. Articulating trauma and gaining linguistic control over it becomes the struggle of the traumatized.

Three different possible ways of coping with trauma have been identified by Dominick LaCapra (2001): hiding, avoiding or covering up the wound, thus denying that anything happened; giving in to the sorrow and the pain inflicted, "acting it out", trapped in a melancholia stage; mourning or "working through", learning to accept that we must now be different. This will eventually lead to establishing a posttraumatic identity.

In what follows, I will try to explain why the relation between trauma and representation is considered to be a problematic one and why we are talking about the paradox of trauma. On the one hand, trauma, as understood by Cathy Caruth, Dominic LaCapra and Geoffrey Hartman, following a well established Freudian tradition, is characterized by a belated assimilation and coming to terms with the traumatic event. Caruth (1996:6) describes it as a "missed encounter". The traumatized person suffers from compulsive, involuntary repetitions of the traumatic events, which "bear witness to a past that was never fully experienced as it occurred. Trauma does not simply serve as a record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned" (Caruth 1995:151). By not being able to distance himself/ herself from his/her traumatic past, the traumatized person cannot interpret, give meaning to, and thus understand his/her trauma.

This belatedness in understanding accounts for the impossibility of the traumatized to fully grasp, linguistically and cognitively, the dimension and the full scope of the trauma that had occurred to them. This linguistic and cognitive failure makes it impossible for the victims to represent trauma in a conscious way. There seems to be a very powerful link between representation and understanding. Without conscious and mental awareness of the traumatic incident there can be no representation, and, consequently, without representation there can be no healing, no conscious possession of the trauma. To be able to represent trauma is to integrate the traumatic event into one's past, to gain possession over it and to exit the never ending cycle of chronic, uncontrollable repetition. However, trauma representation is a negative representation, since it refers back to an absence, to a loss. In representing trauma, absence becomes a signifier.

3. Narrative representation

Representation is linked to gaining linguistic control over the traumatic event. Language has failed the traumatized not only on a private, personal level, but also on a public level. The linguistic crisis attached to the traumatic experience has made it difficult for the victims to fully comprehend and verbalise what has happened to them, thus propelling the traumatised into a confusing whirlpool of repetition and constant re-living of the trauma and denying them the role and quality of witness to their own lives. On a personal level, this linguistic awareness is believed to be necessary in order for the traumatised to enter the healing process and to exit the web of sterile repetition. The individual comes to an understanding of his/her own story through language. Put in a narrative form, the trauma regains its chronology and the status of memory that can be stored and remembered through voluntary action.

On a public level, when having to bear witness to the traumatic events they have gone through, the traumatised feel again at a loss for words. The majority of the victims experience the lack of adequate linguistic means to express the full scale of what they have lived. Their experiences seem inexpressible and the majority of the Holocaust survivors began to feel that what they had to tell about the atrocities done to them or to their families in the camps would represent something almost unimaginable. Most of them began to fear that their experiences might be viewed as extraordinary to such an extent that they might not be believed. The traumatised are dissatisfied with language; they feel betrayed by a vocabulary that cannot render the intensity of their experience; they are in search of new words that could accurately describe the grimness of their traumas. Language is considered an inadequate tool that leaves out, that lacks accuracy. Consequently, narrative representation is mistrusted and believed to be incomplete or to diminish the trauma of the victim by making the horror of it representable. Nevertheless, however dissatisfying language might seem to survivors, the need that resides within them to tell their story is greater and overarching. Their stories are not merely stories about trauma and atrocity, but they are also stories about survival. Through linguistic representation, the stories of the traumatised become testimonies, public and historic testimonies that enhance the healing of a community. Through its linguistic possession of trauma, representation becomes a very important part in the process of working through and constitutes itself as a fundamental component of testimony and witness bearing.

But how can trauma which, as we have seen, is a highly irrational, fragmented, and broken linguistic and logical discourse, be represented in the art of fiction?

Trauma is characterized, at least in the first two stages of its development, by a severe linguistic and cognitive crisis, by an impossibility to fully grasp and remember the traumatic events, by compulsive repetition and flashbacks that take the victim over and over again to the site where the wound was inflicted. Torn between the impossibility to forget and the impossibility to remember, the victims of trauma fall pray to an obsessive and addictive act of past remembrance that comes to haunt their present. They are possessed by an event, by an image that needs to be put into language, that needs to be caught in a narrative. Thus, the fictional discourse becomes the perfect medium for trauma representation. The art of fiction and the narrative discourse embrace the fragmentariness and the irrational that characterize the trauma discourse, the compulsive repetitions, the recurrent images and obsessive flashbacks, the broken chronology to produce a discourse that comes to represent the struggle of the traumatized. Anne Whitehead (2004:3) writes in Trauma Fiction that:

Novelists have frequently found that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterized by repetition and indirection.

Trauma is also almost always depicted in the work of fiction as something that has already happened, that has already occurred to the characters. They are set on a quest to discover the origin of the traumatic event or to remember the trauma inflicted upon them.

In Time 's Arrow, Martin Amis completely breaks the pattern of chronology and of linguistic discourse, creating an unsettling and irrational atmosphere. The reverse dialogues, narratives and explanations, together with the narrator's constant misinterpretations of events come to underline the arbitrariness of artificially constructed concepts, such as language and time. The novel recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in reverse chronological order and involves the reader and the narrator in a discovery journey towards the uncovering of the reason behind the trauma of the main character. The trauma we are about to discover in the novel is not the trauma of the victim, but the trauma of the perpetrator. The reader is trapped in this reverse journey towards Auschwitz, towards the nature of the offence together with the camera eye narrator. The narrator is a secondary consciousness that resides inside the protagonist, having access to his feelings, but not to his thoughts and having no control or insight over the events. The narrator, just like the reader, is innocent; he is caught in a perverse relationship, because, although he can guess the destination of his journey and the nature of the offence that is recurrent in Odilo Unverdorben's dreams (the choice of names is more that just ironical in this case because unverdorben means pristine, unspoilt), he cannot exit this relationship. In choosing the narrative technique of presenting the events in a completely broken and reversed chronology, and the tool of the innocent, unreliable, unaware narrator, Amis found a very powerful way of obliquely representing and talking about one of the most horrific and traumatic episodes in contemporary history.

What happens to representation and how is the memory of the event kept alive in the post-generation of trauma? In Foer's (2003) Everything is Illuminated, fiction becomes an imaginative realm, a medium that recuperates a past that can no longer be represented, because all the iconic figures that could testify about the past are dead. The hero of the book initiates a journey in search of a representation of the past. Everything is put in motion by a photograph of his grandfather, Safran, and of Augustine, the girl that saved him from the Nazis during the war. The search for Augustine, just like the search for the representation of the past proves to be a complete failure, but everything can be recuperated through fiction. Everything that was not found is imagined, is fictionalized. In Everything is Illuminated, the past cannot be recuperated, cannot be represented, because the shtetl (small town) where the hero's grandfather used to live was completely destroyed, wiped out. All that had survived are some material remnants of objects that had once belonged to the people who lived in the shtetl. They were gathered by Lista, the sole human survivor and stored in boxes, and they become the symbolic representation of the shtetl, of what it-used to be, of a world that no longer exists.

4. Photographic representation

For Marianne Hirsch (2001), representation, mainly photographic representation, is particularly important in the process of bearing witness to the past and in the process of testimony for future generations, for what she particularly calls the post-generation trauma. Thus, iconic representation has a double function, that of being a witness to the past, an aide-memoir, something that will prevent us from forgetting, and that of being a testimony, a visual evidence of the trauma that has been produced.

Postmemory is a term she uses in order to talk about the connection the children of survivors establish with the experiences their parents went through as victims of cultural or collective trauma. The term is also meant to-draw a distinction between it and survivor memory, and to establish its "secondary or second-generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its vicariousness and belatedness" (Hirsch 2001:9). Past experiences cannot be properly remembered as such, since they were not directly or fully endured by the post-generation. They cannot represent memories of a direct incident inflicted upon the offspring. However, these experiences that have come to be integrated in their lives and remembered as the narratives and images with which they grew up are, according to Hirsch (2001:9), "so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right". In her study, she establishes postmemory as a very powerful form of memory through which trauma can be transmitted to the second generation. What makes postmemoiy such a powerful form of memory is the fact that "its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, creation - often based on silence rather than speech, on the invisible rather than the visible" (Hirsch 2001:9). Through the work of postmemory, trauma becomes a family inheritance that can be transmitted to the second generation. Through narrative and photographic representation, it enters the legacy passed on by the survivors of the trauma.

We can only imagine the impact which the photographic representations of the atrocities in the death camps, depicting mounds of discarded personal possessions with the same ease and liberty and aloofness with which they were depicting mounds of corpses being harvested with huge bulldozers, might have had on the generation of survivors as well as on the generation of postmemoiy. For some, these surviving images lay at the core of what was later called photorealism. For Susan Sontag (1989:19), they represent "the photographic inventory of ultimate horror". Many commentators on the representation and memorialization of the Holocaust expressed serious concerns and warnings regarding this sort of photojournalism. They expressed the fear that the photographic representations might come to replace the actual event; that the visual evidence of the trauma might come to substitute the real trauma and numb human perception through its serialization and sterile repetition. Geoffrey Hartman (1996:152) asks: "Is our capacity for sympathy finite and soon exhausted?" Susan Sontag also talks about the danger of becoming too accustomed to the photographic representations of a traumatic event, to the extent that one fails to perceive it, fails to see it and grasp its meaning. There is the danger of becoming desensitized to such a degree that the visual will stop having an impact on the viewer.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize. At the time of the first photographs of the Nazi camps, there was nothing banal about these images. After thirty years, a saturation point may have been reached. (Sontag 1989:20)

For Marianne Hirsch, however, the danger of becoming immune to photographic representation of trauma simply does not exist. The repetition of such images does not have the effect of "desensitizing us to horror, or shielding us from shock" (Hirsch 2001: 8), thus increasing the amount and the intensity of disturbing imagery in an endless trial to stir emotion and empathy in the viewer; quite on the contrary, the photographic representation of trauma serves as a point of reference, as a connection between the second generation and the first. For her, the compulsive repetition of these traumatic images has the role of enhancing and enabling the process of working through trauma in an attempt to overcome it.

Thus, I would suggest that while the reduction of the archive of images and their endless repetition might seem problematic in the abstract, the postmemorial generation - in displacing and recontextualizing these well-known images in their artistic work - has been able to make repetition not an instrument of fixity or paralysis or simple retraumatization (as it often is for survivors of trauma), but a mostly helpful vehicle of working through a traumatic past. (Hirsch 2001:9)

5. Conclusion

The relation between trauma and representation is a very problematic and paradoxical one, because most of the times the traumatised have difficulties in understanding and expressing the traumatic event they experienced. Trauma eludes representation, referring back to an absence, to an event that has failed to enter the mechanisms of cognition and comprehension of the victim. The traumatised are linguistically challenged. Finding a voice for their trauma becomes their struggle. Therefore linguistic representation becomes a first step towards a healing process. Photographic representation bears witness to the atrocities and the trauma of the past, being at the same time a testimony of trauma for the future; it is a sign that speaks against trauma connecting the past and the future, representing a very important part in the process of working-through.

References

References

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