Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory
trauma brings us to the limits of our understanding, unsettles us, forces us to rethink our notions of experience. Canât be defined by event itself, because itâs only assimilated belatedly. To be traumatized is to be possessed by an image or event. Crisis of truth problematizes our own access to historical experience. The truth of trauma is bound up in its crisis of truth and its refusal of historical boundaries.
Laub, Dori. âTruth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggleâ
Process of testimony is ceaseless struggle. There are three levels of witnessing: witnessing the self, witnessing testimony of others, and witnessing the process of witnessing. Need to tell stories in order to survive, but the compulsion is unsatisfiable. Even endless talking cannot solve the problem. Not telling perpetuates the tyranny of story over subject. This is the collapse of witnessing, and it defined the Holocaust as a state of being. Thus, there were no witnesses of the Holocaust. Imagining the other was no longer possible. Being inside the event made it impossible to step outside the framework of dehumanization. But encounter between survivor and listener makes it possible to reclaim witnessing, through giving testimony. Testimony is passage through difference rather than exploration of identity. The ultimate unassimilable difference is the otherness of death.Â
Brown, Laura. âNot Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Traumaâ
The range of human experience is constituted as androcentric. Trauma is also seen as public, and little attention is given to private events. Defining trauma as outside the norm dehumanizes those who experience it. Insidious trauma, day-to-day effects of oppression that do violence to the spirit, is important to recognize.Â
Van der Kolk, Van der Hart, âThe Intrustive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Traumaâ
Traumatic memory is inflexible/invariable, as opposed to narrative memory, which is a social act. Memory best processes not singular events, but quality of experience and feelings associated.Â
Felman, Shoshana. âEducation and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teachingâ
How is writing bound up in act of bearing witness, and experience of trial? What do literature and psychoanalysis have to tell us about testimony? Testimony is to accomplish a performative speech act, rather than to formulate a statement. Trial derives from a crisis of evidence, which verdict must resolve. Testimony isnât reporting facts, but rather, encountering strangeness. Freud realized it takes two to witness the unconscious, developed psychoanalysis. One doesnât have to possess truth in order to bear witness. Testimony as access to, rather than statement of, truth. Â Self-knowledge cannot exist apart from testimony, which reverses the indifferent process of death as constituted by the Holocaust.Â
Thoughts relating to dissertation:Â
Can trauma theory produce insights about narrative outside of its own framework and field? Trauma performs boundary work, leads to crisis of truth. Perhaps the truth wasnât assured to begin with. What are the connections between witness/testimony of trauma and of the crime? What are the significant differences between events that might preclude a comparison? Testimony as passage through difference, can this apply to detective fiction? Detective fiction as testimony? Trauma as narrative theory. With detective fiction positioned as a type of testimony, we can interrogate the idea of the witness and see how the event is assimilated--or not--into the text. Subject/object binary becomes permeable due to the inextricability of the event (object) from the subject, and, in the narrative, the bridging of book (author) and reader through affect.Â
