2000: Trauma on the Boulevard

Abstract

Those who lament that scholars of French literature ceased to lead way theoretically following eclipse of deconstruction in late 1980s might take heart at success of trauma as a paradigm in literary studies. Indeed, professors of French pioneered study of trauma in literature, which originated in 1990s, as a way of interpreting texts relating to Second World War and specifically to Holocaust or Shoah. This trend has yet to run its course. When my department tan a search for a new assistant professor of twentieth-century French literature two years ago, more than a few candidates applied with what seemed to be identical dissertations devoted to trauma in testimonial narratives of Charlotte Delbo, Saul Friedlander, Georges Perec, Claude Lanzmann, and Marguerite Duras, or some combination thereof. For what it's worth, however, Romanic Review seems to have remained trauma-free, at least through end of 1990s. Adapted from a clinical context, trauma theory presupposes an event too horrific to be psychically assimilated by a perceiving subject. Unable to process this event or move beyond it, subject remains bound to it in ways he or she cannot consciously grasp. Manifestations of trauma emerge in subject's actions, but more significantly in language, through points of logical disjuncture in testimonial narrative and endless metaphorical figurations of a truth that cannot be named. If these linguistic effects of trauma sound reminiscent of way that certain deconstructionist critics characterize all language, or all writing, this is not a coincidence. Many of most prominent literary theorists of trauma, such as Shoshana Felman, were associated with deconstruction and with leading deconstructionist critic, Paul de Man, who was Felman's colleague at Yale until his death 1983. It hardly seems a coincidence that rise of trauma as a critical paradigm followed revelation in 1987 that de Man had published a series of collaborationist and anti-Semitic articles as a young journalist in Belgium during World War II. To be sure, de Man controversy occupies a central place in Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, authored by Felman in conjunction with psychiatrist Dori Laub, which, perhaps more than any other book, helped popularize trauma theory in literary studies. An attempt to account for unique problems involved in representing Holocaust, Testimony juxtaposes chapters by Laub on survivor testimony with a series of essays by Felman on Albert Camus, Claude Lanzmann, and de Man. In section on de Man, Felman portrays her late colleague as a survivor of catastrophe who, like concentration camp survivors interviewed by Laub, bears exemplary witness to the trauma of contemporary history through his silence and refusal to confess his collaborationist past (Felman 164). In Representing Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Dominic LaCapra offers perhaps most biting critique of Felman's chapter on de Man, showing how she inadvertently supplies very confession she deems unnecessary. (1) The attacks leveled at certain key manifestations of trauma theory have not stopped it from gaining currency as a tool for examining representations not only of Holocaust and World War II but of other historical periods as well. In fact, and this will be real subject of this essay, one of main arenas of its deployment has been nineteenth-century studies. The French nineteenth century was not without its own horrific events, many of which were, if not as uniquely horrible as World War II, nevertheless worthy of inspiring trauma. Napoleon's Russian campaign comes to mind, in which over a million people are estimated to have been killed (including 300,000 French soldiers). One also thinks of cholera epidemic of 1832 (20,000 dead in Paris; 100,000 in France) and Crimean War, in which over 70,000 French soldiers died from wounds and disease alone. …