Crossing over and in between: The caesura of traumatic memory, and working through in poetry and image

Abstract

In this paper, I pose the question of how a traumatic past may be represented through a strategy of intergenerational, interpsychic displacement. I present the case of one reader who uses poetry and art to respond to a difficult text: Lynda Barry’s The Freddie Stories. In my examination of this reader’s encounter with difficult knowledge, I turn to Bion’s concept of the caesura as a means of investigating between affect and representation, memory and its screen, self and other, past and present, revelation and concealment.