The Language of Trauma: War and Technology in Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka by John Zilcosky

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Language of Trauma: War and Technology in Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka by John Zilcosky Dylan Mohr John Zilcosky, The Language of Trauma: War and Technology in Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2021. 192 pp. John Zilcosky's The Language of Trauma returns to several texts familiar to readers of his previous work such as Kafka's Travels (2003) and Uncanny Encounters (2016). The Language of Trauma further expands Zilcosky's framework for discussing the interplay between literature, medicine, and modernity. Drawing from the failure of positivist thought to deal with the etiologies of trauma, Zilcosky draws out two discursive responses to the trauma of modernity. The first is the development of a language of explanation (as put forward by the medical community). The second is the language of expression (as advanced by writers and artists). Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka, however, bridged the two discursive fields to both "explain traumatic suffering and let it speak" (15). In other words, these three writers, Zilcosky contends, "allow for new ways of looking at modern literature from the perspective of a crisis in the semiotics of traumatic illness" (14). Zilcosky begins with E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" and claims that [End Page 74] the tale of Nathanael's descent into madness following his veiled encounter with Coppelius is actually a war story, a traumatic reenactment of Hoffmann's own experiences during the Battle of Dresden in 1813. Hoffmann's diaries record his experiences as a civilian trapped in Dresden during the battle. He witnessed soldiers decapitated by cannonballs, civilians disemboweled, and bodies torn asunder and clotted back together with congealing blood. Zilcosky reads these entries into "The Sandman" and discovers that the language of the story not only resembles Hoffmann's firsthand accounts of the battle but often quotes from the entries verbatim. This narrative mode, Zilcosky argues, forms an "uncanny subplot" (or an embodied trauma) in a text that seemingly has nothing to do with warfare. Zilcosky's second chapter returns to Freud's 1919 "The Uncanny," a "prototypical modernist crossover text" that, like "The Sandman," also harbors an "undiscovered subtext" of war—this time World War I. The First World War, after all, posed the greatest threat to the core foundations of psychoanalysis. How could one still hold that the causes of all neuroses were sexual in nature, critics of psychoanalysis asked, after witnessing the phenomenon of shell shock in soldiers? Freud, Zilcosky rightly contends, was never able to convincingly connect the war neuroses to sexuality, and this forced Freud to rethink psychoanalysis after the war—most notably in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In trying to bridge the language of expression and explanation, Zilcosky convincingly outlines a reading of "The Uncanny" that is firmly historical in its lineage with other causal explanations of neuroses such as "Eisenbahnkrankheit" or "vent du boulet" as well as Freud's own source material (ranging from a short story in the English magazine The Strand to Freud's own sons at the front); it is also a reading that allows the text to express its own, unacknowledged traumatic logic—what Zilcosky calls "system-immanent pathologies" that could come to infect anyone, not just soldiers at the front. Such system-immanent pathologies are traced out more fully in the work of Kafka, a writer whose work exemplifies an "obsession with sourceless symptoms" (106). The insurance agents that populate some of Kafka's texts often come up against the problematic connections between the body and its symptoms. It wasn't just Freud's couch where the dramas of medical and legal insistence on locating physical causes for neuroses manifested. There was, in fact, a burgeoning business adjudicating just such things. Specific pathologies emerged from this legal and medical knotting, such as Rentenneurose, the conscious struggle to justify one's neurosis pension. Emerging from that affliction [End Page 75] was its inverse, Rentenkampfneurose, in which "the fight to prove that one was truly ill […] resulted itself in a neurosis" (129). Kafka understood how this medico-legal structure (in the form of social insurance) actually became the "cure and cause," a system-immanent pathology. Kafka's fictions, Zilcosky argues, enacts a poetics of...