Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form

Abstract

����� ��� For the growing number of critics concerned to trace the links among historical forces, psychic experience, and literary expression, the growth of trauma studies since the publication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience (1996) offers an important opportunity for reflection. On one hand, the work in this field has been justly influential. It brings sophisticated psychoanalytic concepts to bear on collective processes, developing accounts of historical violence that are both socially specific and psychologically astute. These accounts are especially compelling when focused on what I call “punctual” traumas: historical events of such singularity, magnitude, and horror that they can be read as shocks that disable the psychic system. Thus, for example, in their readings of the Holocaust—the paradigmatic example for critics concerned with this kind of trauma—Caruth and others have helped us see how a historical moment might be experienced less as an ongoing set of processes that shape and are shaped by those living through them than as a punctual blow to the psyche that overwhelms its functioning, disables its defenses, and absents it from direct contact with the brutalizing event itself. Precisely because the violence suffered by Holocaust victims was so extreme, on this view, it affected those victims as a psychic concussion that short-circuited their capacity to “process” the traumatizing event as it took place. Traumas of this kind thus become accessible only in the mind’s recursive attempts to master what it has in some sense failed to experience in the first instance. A punctual incursion on the mind, having “dissociated” consciousness from itself, installs an unprocessed memory-trace that returns unbidden, as delayed effect, in an effort to force the mind to digest this previously unclaimed kernel of experience.