The Trauma Question

‘Roger Luckhurst’s Trauma Question is a tour de force ... His prose is lucid, his
choice of examples illuminating, and his analyses consistently informative and
well developed.’
—Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University

‘This is the most comprehensive, intellectually exciting and elegantly

written book that I have read in the field.’
—Patricia Waugh, Durham University

‘Luckhurst’s The Trauma Question covers an extraordinary range of materials in a

most thorough and competent manner.’
—Sander Gilman, Emory University

In this book Roger Luckhurst introduces and advances the fields of cultural
memory and trauma studies, tracing the ways in which ideas of trauma have
become a major element in contemporary Western conceptions of the self.
Luckhurst outlines the origins of the concept of trauma across psychiatric, legal
and cultural-political sources, from the 1860s to the coining of Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder in 1980. He then explores the nature and extent of ‘trauma cul-
ture’ through English and American sources from 1980 to the present, drawing
upon a range of cultural practices from literature, memoirs and confessional jour-
nalism through to photography and film. The study covers a diverse range of cul-
tural works from writers Toni Morrison, Stephen King and W. G. Sebald to artists
like Tracey Emin, Christian Boltanski and Tracey Moffatt and film-makers David
Lynch and Atom Egoyan.
The Trauma Question represents an important step forward for those seeking a
greater understanding of this controversial and ever-expanding area of research.

Roger Luckhurst teaches in the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck

College, University of London. He is the author of ‘The Angle Between the Walls’:
The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (1997), The Invention of Telepathy (2002) and Science Fiction
(2005).
The Trauma Question

Roger Luckhurst
First published 2008
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2008 Roger Luckhurst

Typeset in Baskerville by
Book Now Ltd, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Luckhurst, Roger.
The trauma question / Roger Luckhurst—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Arts, Modern—Psychological aspects. 2. Psychic trauma in art.
3. Psychic trauma—Social aspects. I. Title.
NX449.5.L83 2008
709.04001′9—dc22 2007047897

ISBN10: 0–415–40272–7 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–415–40271–9 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–40272–9 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–40271–2 (pbk)
Contents

List of figures vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

PART I
Aetiology 17

1 The genealogy of a concept 19

Trauma and modernity 20
The law of ‘nervous shock’ 26
Trauma in psychology 1870–1914 34
Trauma in the war ecology: Shell shock 49
Trauma and the politics of identity: Vietnam, Holocaust
and abuse survivors 59

PART II
Cultural symptoms 77

Introduction: Trauma and narrative knowledge 79

2 Trauma in narrative fiction 87

Beloved: A paradigmatic trauma fiction 90
Stephen King’s trauma Gothic 97
Mainstream fiction and traumatic anachrony 105
W. G. Sebald: The last traumatophile? 111

3 My so-called life: The memoir boom 117

Five elements towards the trauma memoir 121
Memoir and the judicious truth 135
Generating autofictions: Philip Roth, Hervé Guibert, Kathryn Harrison 137
vi Contents
4 The intrusive image: Photography and trauma 147
The fine art of trauma 150
Aftermath aesthetics: Christian Boltanski,
Gerhard Richter, Tracey Moffatt 154
Beautiful books of atrocity: Sebastião Salgado,
Gilles Peress, Luc Delahaye 164

5 Flashbacks, mosaics and loops: Trauma

and narrative cinema 177
A genealogy of the traumatic flashback 179
Three trauma auteurs: Alain Resnais, Atom Egoyan, David Lynch 185
Trauma and ‘post-classical’ film since 1990 203

Afterwards 209

Bibliography 215
Legal cases 234
Index 235
Figures

4.1 Christian Boltanski, ‘The Reserve of Dead Swiss’ (1990).

Tate, London 2007. Copyright © 1990 Christian Boltanski 155
4.2 Gerhard Richter, ‘Uncle Rudi’ (1965). Reproduced by kind
permission of Gerhard Richter. Copyright © 1965
Gerhard Richter 157
4.3 Tracey Moffatt, ‘Scarred for Life: Heart Attack, 1970’, from
‘Scarred for Life’ (1994), offset prints, series of nine images.
Reproduced by courtesy of the Victoria Miro Gallery.
Copyright © 1994 Tracey Moffatt 160
4.4 Tracey Moffatt, ‘Scarred for Life: Birth Certificate, 1962’ from
‘Scarred for Life’ (1994), offset prints, series of nine images.
Reproduced by courtesy of the Victoria Miro Gallery.
Copyright © 1994 Tracey Moffatt 161
4.5 Tracey Moffatt, ‘Scarred for Life: Doll Birth, 1972’ from
‘Scarred for Life’ (1994), offset prints, series of nine images.
Reproduced by courtesy of the Victoria Miro Gallery.
Copyright © 1994 Tracey Moffatt 162
4.6 Abu Ghraib Prison, internet download (2004) 175

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. The publishers
would be pleased to hear from any copyright holders not acknowledged here, so
that this acknowledgement page may be amended at the earliest opportunity.
Acknowledgements

Thanks, as always, to the gang for putting up with this for too many years: Julie,
Simon, Francis, Mark, Sally and Mary.
This book could not have been completed without the enlightened atmosphere
of respect for every kind of research in the School of English and Humanities at
Birkbeck. For lively dialogue and assistance, my colleagues at Birkbeck Joe
Brooker, Sally Ledger, Laura Salisbury, Carol Watts and Jo Winning have been
consistently inspirational.
I’ve been helped along the way by Isobel Armstrong, John Beck, Fred Botting,
Mark Bould, Jenny Bourne-Taylor, Peter Brooker, Carolyn Burdett, Steve
Burwood, Rick Crownshaw, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Robert Eaglestone, Claire
Feehily, Arthur Frank, David James, Cora Kaplan, Nicola King, Richard
Kirkland, Dominick LaCapra, Rob Latham, Laura Marcus, Catherine Maxwell,
Ulrika Maude, Jo McDonagh, Keith McDonald, Aris Mousoutzanis, Peter
Middleton, Peter Nicholls, Daniel Pick, Adam Roberts, Antony Rowland, Lynne
Segal, Marq Smith, Pam Thurschwell, Marina Warner, Pat Waugh, Tim West
(who kept me moving), Wendy Wheeler, Anne Whitehead and Anne Witchard.
I was lucky enough to get expert advice from Mark Flynn, Clinical Psychologist
at the Tower Hamlets Mental Health Care Trust on current psychiatric thinking
about the treatment of trauma and I unashamedly plundered his reading lists.
Mark Reid of the British Film Institute and Stephen Hughes of BBC Radio 4’s
‘Film Programme’ took me for monthly lunches at Marino’s in Rathbone Place,
where I also dined on their amazing knowledge of film. Stephen has also given
me lots of opportunities to think about trauma and film for radio pieces, for which
I’m very grateful. Julie Crofts conveniently studied law whilst I was working on
this project and was able to assist my stumbling attempts in this field. There is no
chapter on drama in this book largely because I could not hope to compete with
Professor Mary Luckhurst’s expertise in this area. She’s also my big sister and
could still beat me up. I wholeheartedly recommend her work on the ‘shock’
drama of the 1990s by Sarah Kane, Martin McDonagh and others.
I’ve been able to think this project through with successive generations of
students on my MA course on trauma and cultural identity and on the short
course for the Cultural Memory MA at the Institute of German and Romance
x Acknowledgements
Studies at the School of Advanced Studies. I am lucky to have such brilliant and
disputatious students and I particularly want to mention Rob Harding, Anne
Holloway, and Frances Gertler for helpful references and discussion.
Portions of this book, in early and halting form, have appeared in Critique,
Science Fiction Studies, New Formations, Literature and the Contemporary, edited by Roger
Luckhurst and Peter Marks, Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, edited by
Patricia Waugh, and Uncanny Modernity edited by Jo Collins and John Jervis.
Although I’ve transformed nearly every word since, I want to thank everyone
involved for the opportunities to develop this project.
This book is, as always, for Julie. Julie has endured this project under her roof
for many years and has been its unstinting supporter, recommending reading,
lighting out for obscure art shows and unblinkingly knitting through whatever
trauma film came up next. This support was only mildly undermined by a ten-
dency to conduct discussions of trauma in a sort of cod-Marlene Dietrich accent
on the grounds it sounded suitably tragic and burdened by history.

>Sigh<

Still, this comes your way with unbounded love.

Introduction

In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association included in the new edition of its
official diagnostic manual the symptom indicators for a new illness: Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder. Those confronted with an experience involving ‘actual
or threatened death or serious injury, or a physical threat to the physical integrity
of the self ’ considered to be outside the range of normal experience are diag-
nosed with PTSD if they present certain clusters of symptoms. Individuals who
experience wars, disasters, accidents or other extreme ‘stressor’ events seem to
produce certain identifiable somatic and psycho-somatic disturbances. Aside from
myriad physical symptoms, trauma disrupts memory, and therefore identity, in
peculiar ways. The first cluster of symptoms relate to the ways in which ‘the trau-
matic event is persistently re-experienced’ – through intrusive flashbacks, recur-
ring dreams, or later situations that repeat or echo the original. Weirdly, the
second set of symptoms suggests the complete opposite: ‘persistent avoidance of
stimuli associated with the trauma’ that can range from avoidance of thoughts or
feelings related to the event to a general sense of emotional numbing to the total
absence of recall of the significant event. A third set of symptoms points to
‘increased arousal’, including loss of temper control, hyper-vigilance or ‘exagger-
ated startle response’. Symptoms can come on acutely, persist chronically, or, in
another strange effect, appear belatedly, months or years after the precipitating
event (American Psychiatric Association 2000: 467–8).
The arrival of PTSD helped consolidate a trauma paradigm that has come to
pervade the understanding of subjectivity and experience in the advanced indus-
trial world. Each successive edition of the Diagnostic Manual has expanded the cate-
gories of those who might be diagnosed with PTSD. At first PTSD was only
attributable to those directly involved, but ‘secondary’ victim status now includes
witnesses, bystanders, rescue workers, relatives caught up in the immediate after-
math, a proximity now extended to include receiving news of the death or injury of
a relative. An understanding of the psychological consequences of trauma has per-
colated into many different contexts, and Western cultures have convulsed around
iconic trauma events. Families might be found to conceal histories of domestic
abuse, as recovered memory treatments dissolve the psychic defences of denial and
amnesia and whole sections of traumatic childhoods return to consciousness in full,
horrific technicolour. Collectives, whether they are political activists, survivor
2 Introduction
groups, or ethnic, regional or national formations unite around the re-experiencing
of their woundedness. Histories of gender, sexual or racial violence have indu-
bitable reasons for finding explanatory power in ideas of trauma, yet traumatic
identity is now also commonly argued to be at the root of many national collective
memories. From Sigmund Freud’s speculations on the buried trauma at the origin of
Jewish history, one can now read up on the traumas that drive post-war Germany,
post-9/11 America, Eastern Europe after Communism, or post-colonial Britain (see
Santner 1990, Kaplan 2005, Butler 2004, Eyal 2004, Lindsay 2004, Howe 2003).
To Andreas Huyssen, it seemed as if the entire twentieth century was marked under
the sign of ‘historical trauma’ (Huyssen 2003: 8).
In this cultural context, extremity and survival are privileged markers of iden-
tity. Concentration camp inmates, Vietnam and Gulf War veterans, victims of
atrocities, traumatized parents and survivors of disaster are the subject of intensive
political, sociological, biological, psychiatric, therapeutic and legal investigation
and dispute. Government inquiries, medical task forces, newspaper leader columns
and grass-roots pressure groups contest the nature and extent – or even the basic
reality – of traumatic impacts. Best-seller lists have carried sagas detailing extrem-
ities of domestic violence, rape, war atrocity, terminal illness, family deaths or the
tragi-comic eccentricities of traumatic memory. Academic monographs have prolif-
erated, often appearing to subsume the whole area of Memory Studies under the
sign of trauma. ‘Increasingly, memory worth talking about – worth remembering –
is memory of trauma’ (Antze and Lambek 1996: xii). Meanwhile, in the curious
world of celebrity culture, trauma can amplify or even become the sole reason for
fame. What Mark Seltzer has termed the ‘pathological public sphere’ (Seltzer
1997: 3) periodically develops around moments of trauma and engenders a partic-
ular kind of community. Instances might include the death of Princess Diana,
cruel or unusual child murders, the inauguration of Holocaust Memorial Days, or
terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid, or London. One recent commentary skirts
close to open nostalgia for the New York of September 2001, when, in the wake
of the terrorist attacks, there was ‘the real creation of new public-sphere commu-
nities’: ‘I felt a connection to strangers I had never felt before’ (Kaplan 2005: 2, 9).
For another of the leading cultural theorists of recent years writing explicitly in the
wake of 9/11, grief is now one of the best means for thinking about social collec-
tives since it ‘furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it
does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications
for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility’ (Butler 2004:
22). Welcome to contemporary trauma culture.
Trauma derives from the Greek word meaning wound. First used in English in
the seventeenth century in medicine, it referred to a bodily injury caused by an
external agent. What wounded and what cured shared the same term: physicians
applied traumatic herbs or balsams to injuries. In early editions of the Oxford
English Dictionary the entries for trauma, traumatic, traumatism and the prefix
traumato- cite solely from sources concerning physical wounds. The one excep-
tion comes from an 1895 edition of Popular Science Monthly: ‘We have named this
psychical trauma, a morbid nervous condition’. This is an early indication of the
 Introduction 3
drift of trauma from the physical to the mental realm that would start taking place
in the late nineteenth century. In the current edition of the OED, citations to phy-
sical wounds are reduced to three and are substantially outnumbered by those
from psychoanalysis and psychiatry. The predominant popular connotations of
trauma now circle around metaphors of psychic scars and mental wounds. The
metaphor of a psychological ‘impact’ still retains the sense of a wound caused by
an exterior agent. The OED also records a further drift into general usage of the
adjective ‘traumatic’ for any difficult or untoward event. Trauma, however, still
refers to bodily injury in medicine and, as Steven Connor observes, the focus on
the boundary of the skin in ritual piercing, cutting or scarification continues to
play with powerful taboos in many cultures. Trauma culture has emerged whilst
the skin has been ‘the visible object of many different forms of imaginary or
actual assault’ in the modern world (Connor 2004: 65).
Indeed, it is useful to retain a sense that meanings of trauma have stalled some-
where between the physical and the psychical. Virtually every traumatic disorder
has been the occasion for violent dispute over its ultimate origin, whether indus-
trial accident, hysteria, shell shock, survivor syndrome, combat fatigue or PTSD.
Are the symptoms the result of a physical, organic disease produced by identifi-
able external agents, or a wholly psychical disorder constructed by simulation,
suggestion, mental breakdown or inherent mental weakness? Or does it emerge
from the ‘nerves’, that uncertain, interstitial locale somewhere between the body
and mind? Nervous shock or nervous exhaustion were self-consciously produced
by Victorian doctors seeking for a third term to lie between the organic and the
mental realms, a switching point where the physiological and psychological con-
verged and conversed in unpredictable ways. As Janet Oppenheim commented,
‘metaphor permeated all Victorian and Edwardian discussion of the nerves’
(Oppenheim 1991: 83). Arguments over the physical or psychical nature of
trauma regularly refresh their grounds of argumentative authority, yet the struc-
ture of the dispute has not substantially changed for a hundred years.
Trauma is a piercing or breach of a border that puts inside and outside into a
strange communication. Trauma violently opens passageways between systems
that were once discrete, making unforeseen connections that distress or confound.
Trauma also appears to be worryingly transmissible: it leaks between mental and
physical symptoms, between patients (as in the ‘contagions’ of hysteria or shell
shock), between patients and doctors via the mysterious processes of transference
or suggestion, and between victims and their listeners or viewers who are com-
monly moved to forms of overwhelming sympathy, even to the extent of claiming
secondary victimhood. Therapists have discussed the problem of developing
‘vicarious traumatization’ from listening to difficult patient material; E. Ann
Kaplan has used this idea to suggest a wider problematic of the ‘translation’
(through the media and other routes) of trauma across different communities.
Transmissibility has become a central ethical concern about the representation
and response to traumatic narratives and images. Can or should the right to speak
of trauma be limited to its primary victims? Who can claim ‘secondary’ status
without risking appropriation? Dominick LaCapra, recognizing trauma’s potential
4 Introduction
‘to confuse self and other, and collapse all distinctions’ has suggested a distinction
for criticism between identification, which falls into this dangerous confusion, and
empathy, which preserves distance (LaCapra 2001: 21). His reiteration of this
divide suggests that it is constantly under threat of being overrun.
This uncertain, unbounded outward movement of trauma from its original
wound is dramatically demonstrated by the very reach the term has now attained.
To grasp its full resonances, one needs to be at least minimally aware of the history
of psychodynamic psychology in the late nineteenth century including, but far from
exclusively, the work of Sigmund Freud, and then the progress of the law of tort
regarding recovery of damages relating to the negligent infliction of ‘nervous shock’
since 1901, and then the role of military psychiatry and pension agencies across suc-
cessive wars of the twentieth century, and then the place of trauma in deconstruction
and post-structuralist philosophy since about 1990, and then sociological theories of
trauma as ‘a socially mediated attribution’, a form of collective memorial practice
that therefore rejects the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ of psychologists (Alexander 2004: 8),
and then recent studies of the brain physiology of the locus coeruleus and the effects on
memory and emotion of catacholamines like norepinephrine when under severe
stress, and then, finally, the revolution in treatments of traumatic stress using a com-
bination of drugs focused on serotonin and cognitive behavioural therapy. Given the
specialization of knowledge and the sheer volume of discipline-specific scholarship,
it is a severe stretch to acquire this range of expertise, with almost inevitable lapses
of knowledge and understanding. As LaCapra observes, ‘No genre or discipline
“owns” trauma as a problem or can provide definitive boundaries for it’ (LaCapra
2001: 96). Trauma is also always a breaching of disciplines.
However, the dominant model for cultural trauma, my principal concern in this
book, derives from a relatively narrow segment of this complex, multi-disciplinary
history. The work of Cathy Caruth, one of the central figures who helped foster the
boom in cultural trauma theory in the early 1990s, turns on the device of aporia,
or unresolvable paradox. Trauma, Caruth suggested in an introduction to a spe-
cial issue on ‘Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma’ in 1991, ‘extends beyond the
bounds of a marginal pathology and has become a central characteristic of the
survivor experience of our time’ (Caruth 1991b: 417). Even so, trauma was an
inherently ‘paradoxical experience’ (Caruth 1991b: 417). An event might be con-
sidered traumatic to the extent that it overwhelmed the psychic defences and nor-
mal processes of registering memory traces. Trauma somehow is seared directly
into the psyche, almost like a piece of shrapnel, and is not subject to the distor-
tions of subjective memory: it is ‘a symptom of history’ (Caruth 1991a: 3). Yet
precisely because of this unusual memory registration, it may be that what is
most traumatic is that which does not appear in conscious memory. ‘Traumatic
experience’, as Caruth formulates it, ‘suggests a certain paradox: that the most
direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it’
(Caruth 1996a: 91–2). Paradoxes intensify around this critical instant of a defin-
ing yet unknowable memory lodged in the mind: under the sign of trauma, ‘a
history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence’, ‘its truth
is bound up with its crisis of truth’ (Caruth 1991a: 7). A further Freudian
 Introduction 5
paradox is the strange temporality of traumatic memory: an event can only be
understood as traumatic after the fact, through the symptoms and flashbacks and
the delayed attempts at understanding that these signs of disturbance produce.
The ‘peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness of trauma’ is another aporia:
‘since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in
connection with another place, and in another time’ (Caruth 1991a: 7). For
Caruth, trauma is therefore a crisis of representation, of history and truth, and of
narrative time. Repeatedly, there is the claim that psychoanalysis and literature
are particularly privileged forms of writing that can attend to these perplexing
paradoxes of trauma.
Caruth’s small body of work has been extremely influential, and it is worth
spending some time on elaborating the elements it manages so effectively to con-
dense. It could be said to derive from three distinct lines of thought. The first
invokes the work of the German–Jewish Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno
on the ruination of Western philosophy by the traumatic facts of Nazism, encom-
passed for him in one proper name: Auschwitz. In 1949, Adorno declared, in a
famous and much misquoted statement, that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric’ (Adorno 1981: 34). Within his broader attempt to maintain cultural cri-
tique within a remorselessly expropriative capitalism, Adorno kept returning to,
and modulating, a declaration which had begun to circulate beyond his control.
In Negative Dialectics, he saw Auschwitz as a challenge to the very act of thought
itself. ‘Our metaphysical faculty is paralysed because actual events have shattered
the basis on which speculative thought could be reconciled with experience …
After Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one,
that has any right unless it underwent a transformation’ (Adorno 1973: 362, 367).
For Adorno, all Western culture is at once contaminated by and complicit with
Auschwitz, yet the denial of culture is equally barbaric. If silence is no option
either, Adorno sets art and cultural criticism the severe, and paradoxical, impera-
tive of finding ways of representing the unrepresentable.
In Adorno’s wake, the ‘problem’ of Auschwitz is the determining catastrophe
that inaugurates the trauma paradigm, for after 1945 all culture must address this
question. ‘We come after’, was George Steiner’s abrupt statement (Steiner 1967:
ix). Giorgio Agamben has reiterated ‘the aporia of Auschwitz’ as ‘the very aporia
of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between ver-
ification and comprehension’ (Agamben 1999: 12). Jean-Francois Lyotard simi-
larly regarded Auschwitz as a ‘sign of history’, a ruptural moment of such
extremity that it challenged the premises of conventional historiography. Instead,
the historian ‘must break with the monopoly of history granted to the cognitive
regimen of phrases, and he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to
what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge’ (Lyotard 1988: 57). Lyotard
explicitly evoked the Freudian idea of the paradoxically registered yet unregis-
tered trauma, portraying modernity as something insistently haunted by what it
had violently suppressed or forgotten in the symptom that ‘would signal itself even
in the present as a spectre’ (Lyotard 1990: 11). For post-trauma aesthetics, Lyotard
turned to the theory of the sublime, where representing the very failure to process
6 Introduction
the overwhelming event paradoxically figures its success as a work of art. Lyotard
gave avant-garde art a privileged place in articulating this paradox: ‘What art can
do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to this aporia of art and to its pain. It
does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it’ (Lyotard 1990: 47).
The second main reference for this aporetic thinking came from Jacques
Derrida’s deconstruction of philosophy and its important place in literary theory
in the American academy in the 1970s and 1980s. In a late lecture called Aporias,
Derrida reflected on how his readings had always sought out significant moments
of apparent contradiction or irresolution, ‘so many aporetic places or disloca-
tions’ that each text tended to reveal (Derrida 1993: 15). Derrida figured the
aporia as a blocking of passage, a stalling or hesitation, a foot hovering on the
threshold, caught between advancing and falling back, between the possible and
the impossible. Derrida had pursued the possibility and impossibility of mourn-
ing in Paul de Man’s work, the paradoxes of memory in Freud’s models of psy-
chic inscription, burnt traces or cinders of memory, and the aporia of the wound
in Paul Celan’s poetry (Derrida 1986, 1991, 2001, 2005). Preserving the traces of
these aporia was central to Derrida’s commitment to responsible thought, ethics
and politics: the trauma was that most Western thought suppressed this passage
of undecidability, that all metaphysics enacted a kind of violence.
Derrida’s principal avenue into the American academy was through the so-
called Yale School from the mid-1970s. The linch-pin of this grouping was Paul
de Man, who developed a particular deconstructive reading of language. In the
gap between reference and representation at least some of what we intended to
mean was always open to misinterpretation or error; literature in particular
seemed to foreground the slippages inherent in the act of representation, and
often came to be about this erring. To de Man, this inevitably affected the work
of literary interpretation too, which he formulated in the pithy paradox: ‘The
allegory of reading narrates the impossibility of reading’ (de Man 1979: 77). De
Man’s errings and slippages between reference and representation clearly
informed Caruth’s formulation of the paradoxes of traumatic representation
(there is a whole chapter on his theories of referentiality and language in
Unclaimed Experience and her theory of traumatic aporia was first formulated
when at the Yale English department). Yet this reading of de Man was only part
of a wider move by Yale critics to trauma theory. Geoffrey Hartman, whose
deconstructive rereadings of Romantic literature and expositions of Derrida’s
work were prominent in establishing the influence of the Yale School, started to
turn his interest to the remembrance and representation of the Holocaust in the
early 1990s. The Fortunoff Holocaust Video Archives at Yale, which collects the
testimony of Holocaust survivors, and which Hartman co-founded, prompted
him to explore this area both theoretically and autobiographically (Hartman had
escaped the persecution and murder of the European Jews by travelling from
Germany first to England and then America as a child). By 1995, Hartman had
effectively translated his long critical career into variations on the study of
trauma. If trauma marks the disjunction between the event and the forever
belated, incomplete understanding of the event, then Hartman argued that this
 Introduction 7
was at the heart of Romantic poetry. Figurative language is a form of ‘perpetual
troping’ around a primary experience that can never be captured. Whether it is
Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner compulsively repeating his tale, or William
Wordsworth’s account in The Prelude of how poetic subjectivity is created through
wounding events, Hartman proposed that trauma theory was a key expository
device. Hartman had always emphasized that poetic discourse induced a prolif-
eration of meanings; trauma was now the motivating ‘nature of the negative that
provokes symbolic language and its surplus of signifiers’ (Hartman 1995: 540).
An interview with Caruth confirmed this reorientation of his work around
trauma (Caruth 1996b). Another important Yale critic, Shoshana Felman, also
undertook this translation of deconstruction into trauma theory at about the
same time. Felman is justly famous for her 1977 essay on Henry James’s The Turn
of the Screw, which explored how this ghost story had driven successive genera-
tions of literary critics to a form of interpretive madness. Rather than attempt-
ing to solve the enigma, Felman examined how the text generated ambiguity,
placing the emphasis not on positive knowledge but on where ‘meaning in the
text does not come off, that which in the text, and through which the text, fails to
mean’ (Felman 1977: 112). In 1991, Felman was still writing about the limits of
interpretive knowledge, but this time in relation to Holocaust testimony, publish-
ing a study of Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour film, Shoah, a collation of survivor
testimony that builds up a picture of how the genocidal machine of Nazism car-
ried out the ‘Final Solution’. Felman was still interested in paradoxes and the lim-
its of knowledge, but this time there was a language of crisis and urgency about
taking responsibility for the historical truth, given that ours is ‘an age of testimony,
an age in which witnessing itself has undergone a major trauma’ (Felman 1991:
41). She understands Lanzmann’s documentary project to capture the fragility of
surviving witness in now familiar aporetic terms: it is ‘to make the referent come
back, paradoxically, as something heretofore unseen by history; to reveal the real
as the impact of a literality that history cannot assimilate or integrate, as knowl-
edge, but that it keeps encountering’ (Felman 1991: 76). The following year,
Felman published Testimony with the psychoanalyst Dori Laub, a text in which the
trauma of the Holocaust prompts almost obsessively repeated and anxiously
underlined aporetic formulae. The Holocaust is presented as ‘a radical historical
crisis of witnessing … an event eliminating its own witness’ (Felman and Laub
1992: xvii). ‘The necessity of testimony … derives … from the impossibility of testimony’,
they reiterated (Felman and Laub 1992: 224).
Felman also theorized a new pedagogy of trauma, in which the effectiveness of
the textual material was measured by its ability to ‘break the very framework of the
class’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 48). Felman discovered that she had inadvertently
induced a ‘crisis’ in her students, but then actively sought this disturbance as a
measure of the material in communicating trauma. ‘Teaching’, Felman argued,
‘must in turn testify, make something happen’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 53). This
activism presumably aimed to incite affect in students for the ultimately cognitive
ends of learning, even though trauma was defined as an aporia that disarmed
cognitive grasp. The classroom was a significant space through which to theorize
8 Introduction
the affective transmission and circulation of traumatic emotions: Testimony headed
the boom in the transformation of Yale deconstruction into trauma theory which
then travelled across literary and cultural studies. Felman’s theory of education
appeared first in Caruth’s special issues of American Imago, where Caruth spoke
approvingly of ‘the possibility of a truly pedagogical encounter … [which] cre-
ates new ways of gaining access to a historical catastrophe for those who attempt
to witness it from afar’ (Caruth 1991b: 422). The academic influence of these
works actively demonstrated the transmissibility of traumatic affect.
The third and most explicit source for theories of cultural trauma is psycho-
analysis. That Lyotard, Derrida, Felman and Caruth all engage with trauma via
Freud suggests that his work is the unavoidable foundation for theories of trauma,
and this is undoubtedly the case for cultural studies. Freud’s engagement with the
traumatic neuroses was actually rather intermittent, and Ruth Leys comments that
‘Freud’s writings on trauma and the mechanisms of defence are disorganized in
ways that seem to invite, or necessitate, critical discussion’ (Leys 2000: 274). As a
result, Freud’s three major interventions have each provided models that are not
always compatible but which persist into contemporary discussions. ‘On the
Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’, co-authored with Joseph Breuer
in 1893, regarded traumatic hysteria as a psychical disorder of memory, encapsu-
lated in the famous epigram ‘Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (Freud 1895:
58). Traumatic memory is puzzling, ‘completely absent from the patient’s memory when they
are in a normal psychological state’, but which persists below the threshold of conscious-
ness ‘astonishingly intact’ and with ‘remarkable sensory force’ (Freud 1895: 60).
The sketch of their treatment turned the hysteric’s body into a cryptogram, each
bodily or mental symptom to be traced back to a ‘tormenting secret’ and to be
cured by ‘bringing clearly to light the memory of the event … and in arousing its accompanying
affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the
affect into words’ (Freud 1895: 57). In Studies on Hysteria these traumatic events related,
as in the famous case of ‘Anna O.’, to the death of the father and repressed guilt.
Three years later Freud insisted that these traumatic secrets ‘in the end … infallibly
come to the field of sexual experience’ (Freud 1896: 199), a position inextricably
linked to the origins of psychoanalysis itself, the term Freud coined in 1896. This
produced a different emphasis in theorizing the traumatic origins of hysteria.
Freud’s sexual theories supposed a two-stage development, an early phase of infan-
tile sexuality that was repressed for a period of childhood ‘latency’ and which
returned with puberty and the emergence of adult sexuality. Sexual neuroses and
perversions were ascribed to deviations of the sexual aims that resulted from infan-
tile disturbances (this normative language is Freud’s own, in his Three Essays on
Sexuality). In other words, early traumas in childhood would be forgotten in latency,
but re-emerge in adults. Sexual disorders therefore acted like clues hinting at a hid-
den crime buried in infancy: interpretive excavations to uncover the sexual secret
became the basis of Freud’s case histories. This two-stage theory of trauma, the
first forgotten impact making a belated return after a hiatus, has been central to
cultural trauma theory. The psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche has translated Freud’s
term for belated or deferred action as ‘afterwardsness’, a deliberately awkward
 Introduction 9
word that foregrounds the odd temporality of an event not understood as trau-
matic until its return (Laplanche 1999). No narrative of trauma can be told in a
linear way: it has a time signature that must fracture conventional causality.
Freud’s sexual economy of psychic life reached an impasse in 1918, when he was
forced to return to the problem of trauma a second time, at the end of the Great
War. His dynamic model of the psyche could not apparently account for the symp-
toms of war neurosis in soldiers, which was typically marked by an obsessive return
in waking thoughts and nightmares, to the pain and terror of traumatic battle
scenes. This active pursuit of unpleasure forced Freud reluctantly to return to what
he called ‘the dark and dismal subject of traumatic neurosis’ (Freud 1920a: 283).
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, first published in 1920, was Freud’s highly speculative
attempt to understand what he termed this ‘repetition compulsion’. In essence, the
psyche constantly returned to scenes of unpleasure because, by restaging the trau-
matic moment over and over again, it hoped belatedly to process the unassimilable
material, to find ways of mastering the trauma retroactively. In a lucid metaphor,
Freud envisaged the mind as a single cell with an outer membrane that does the
work of filtering material from the outside world, processing nutrients, repelling
toxins, and retaining the integrity of its borders – just as the conscious mind did.
A traumatic event is something unprecedented that blasts open the membrane and
floods the cell with foreign matter, leaving the cell overwhelmed and trying to
repair the damage. ‘We describe as “traumatic” any excitations from outside which
are powerful enough to break through the protective shield’, Freud said.

Such an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on

a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy and to set in motion
every possible defence measure. At the same time … there is no longer any
possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large
amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead – the problem of
mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding
them, in the psychical sense, so that they can be disposed of.
(Freud 1920a: 301)

The compulsion to repeat was a rearguard action to manage the traumatic

impact, Freud reverting to the original sense of trauma as a wounding intrusion
from outside. Observed in children (who staged the distressing absence and return
of the mother in obsessive games), Freud conjectured ‘that children repeat
unpleasurable experiences for the additional reason that they can master a pow-
erful impression far more thoroughly by being active than they could by merely
experiencing it passively’ (Freud 1920a: 307). Repetition compulsion has become
a cultural shorthand for the consequences of traumatic events: individuals, collec-
tives and nations risk trapping themselves in cycles of uncomprehending repeti-
tion unless the traumatic event is translated from repetition to the healthy analytic
process of ‘working through’ (see Freud 1914).
Third, Freud’s late work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), was given over to Freud’s
speculations on the origin of Judaism by using the analogy of the effect of trauma
10 Introduction
on the individual for an entire race. Freud proposed that the Jews carried a hid-
den traumatic secret in their infancy, the murder of their founder and law-giver
Moses. After a period of latency, the Mosaic law of the one vengeful god
returned, reaffirming Judaism as a monotheistic religion, which for Freud was the
ambiguous onset of civilization. Largely ungrounded speculations such as this on
prehistory were typical of Victorian anthropology, but Freud pressed for a struc-
ture of explanation from a ‘remote field’, applying the traumatic neuroses of the
individual to the group. ‘In it we once more come upon the phenomenon of
latency, the emergence of unintelligible manifestations calling for an explanation
and an early, and later forgotten, event as a necessary determinant. We also find
the characteristic of compulsion’ (Freud 1939: 72). In one of his clearest summa-
tions of the aetiology of traumatic neurosis, Freud argued that the compulsions
deriving from a forgotten traumatic kernel displayed ‘great psychical intensity and
at the same time exhibit a far-reaching independence of the organisation of the
other mental processes’. They act, he claimed, ‘like a State within a State’ (Freud
1939: 76). This analogy evoked the prejudice against Jews as unassimilated for-
eign bodies in European nations, and Moses and Monotheism was explicitly marked
by the disruptions to writing caused by the rise of Nazism in Germany, the inva-
sion of Austria, and Freud’s exile in London. The book has been read as a barely
encrypted autobiographical reflection on expulsion and exile.
For Caruth, Moses and Monotheism ‘can help us understand our own catastrophic
era, as well as the difficulties of writing a history from within it’ (Caruth 1996a:
12). Whilst Caruth emphasizes the aporia of a history driven by an inaccessible
traumatic pre-history, general notions of collective cultural traumas derive in
large part from Freud’s speculations. Kai Erikson defined ‘collective trauma’ as
‘a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people
together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality’ (Erikson 1991: 460).
‘The communal dimension of trauma’, Erikson concludes, ‘is one of its distinc-
tive clinical signatures’ (Erikson 1991: 471). There is a strong counter-tradition in
sociology that objects to modelling societies on the individual psyche: starting with
Maurice Halbwachs, and continued with work by Paul Connerton and Jeffrey
Alexander, collective memory is regarded as a set of changing social practices
rather than exteriorizations of psychic structures. Yet Freud’s elision of neurotic
and national history has been another important place where psychical trauma
has become delimited and easily transmissible by analogy, providing a set of
models in general circulation.
It is striking that whilst the trauma theory pursued by Felman, Caruth and others
excavated and redeployed these models from the history of psychoanalysis, there
is little acknowledgement in their work of the violent disputes that erupted around
Freud in the 1980s and 1990s, arguments that fundamentally re-examined the
contribution of psychoanalysis and inevitably coloured the reception of any
theory of trauma tinged with Freudianism. In these years, Freud was never far
from the controversies over the nature of traumatic memory. In 1984, as feminist
theorists advanced the thesis that sexual abuse was widespread and structural
within the patriarchal family, Jeffrey Masson published his interpretation of
 Introduction 11
previously unpublished materials in the Freud archive. Masson’s Assault on Truth:
Freud and Child Sexual Abuse argued that Freud had come to the realization that all
of his women patients had been sexually abused by their fathers. Although Freud
had published these findings in ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ in 1896, Masson sug-
gested that this paper had precipitated a professional and theoretical crisis, played
out mainly in letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess. Over the next two years Freud
discarded the so-called ‘seduction theory’ for an account of the universal sexual
fantasies of sons and daughters – the seed of the Oedipus complex that would be
Freud’s foundation for his psychodynamic theory of the universal development of
the subject. In Masson’s melodramatic account, Freud had come across a trau-
matic truth that he could not countenance and suppressed with a theory that
turned actual abuse into structural fantasy if not fabrication. A significant strand
of feminist cultural theory had relied on psychoanalysis, but Masson’s Freud
was a patriarch intent on suppressing the truth of women’s experience. Masson’s
thesis generated an outpouring of heavily invested attacks and defences (see, for
instance, Borch-Jacobsen 1996, A. Scott 1996, Malcolm 1997).
A corollary to this dispute began to develop in the late 1980s, when advocates
of recovered memory therapies claimed to be unearthing pristine memories of
repressed or dissociated childhood traumas many years after the fact in vast
numbers of patients. This relied on the conviction that traumatic memory was pre-
served in pristine form outside conscious recall, but could be recovered complete
with appropriate therapeutic intervention (called Recovered Memory Therapy, or
RMT). Some claimed this to be based on Freud’s model of the repression of trau-
matic memory. Recovered memories of abuse led to criminal proceedings and
imprisonments, even changes to the statutes on limitation in some American states,
the legal arguments often hinging on psychiatric expertise about the specific pecu-
liarities of traumatic memory. The iconic legal case was the imprisonment of
George Franklin in California in 1990, on the sole evidence of his daughter who
had, with her therapist, recovered repressed memories of the murder of a child-
hood friend from 1969. Psychiatric expertise that confirmed the ability to recover
repressed memories in pristine form was presented by Lenore Terr; equal and
opposite psychiatric expertise that traumatic memories were unusually malleable
and open to revision was presented by Elizabeth Loftus. Both published popular
accounts of their involvement in medico-legal wranglings over recovered memory,
part of a vast psychiatric literature (Loftus and Ketcham 1996, Terr 1994).
Already highly controversial, RMT techniques were thrown further into ques-
tion by a series of cases that alleged to recover extensive networks of ritual or
‘satanic’ abuse. At its peak, passionate advocates claimed that 50,000 babies had
been murdered in black magic rituals in America. Lawrence Wright attacked the
basis of Paul Ingram’s imprisonment for ritual abuse of his daughters in the New
Yorker in 1993, his book Remembering Satan appearing a year later. Two high-profile
cases in England claiming organized Satanic abuse collapsed in Rochdale in 1990
and Orkney in 1991. Meanwhile, at the outer fringes of this cultural imaginary,
Whitley Strieber published his best-seller Communion at the height of these
disputes, detailing his hypnotic recovery of profoundly traumatic memories of
12 Introduction
kidnap and sexual abuse by alien creatures. A slew of alien abduction narratives
followed, including the globally successful television series, the X Files (see
Luckhurst 1998). Because therapists were anxious not to deny the reality of trau-
matic testimony, and thus place themselves in the position of the reality-denying
Freud, these efflorescences had to be upheld as literally true. This helped the
cause of counter-movements like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (set up
in 1994), which argued that traumatic memory might be iatrogenic, the product
of the very therapy used to treat it.
Freud’s name was regularly if often inaccurately invoked in these disputes. The
campaigning anti-Freudian, Frederick Crews, regarded recovered memory as
the ‘stepchild’ of Freudianism and which helped confirm that ‘psychoanalysis was
the paradigmatic pseudoscience of our epoch’ (Crews 1997: 14, 9). Crews’ attacks
tended to be scattergun, constantly shifting their ground. Freud might indeed
have figured traumatic memory as a hidden truth that could be released from
repression and brought to light. However, as Richard Terdiman has pointed out,
there are two models of memory that exist in productive tension in Freud’s work.
The unconscious might seem to preserve pristine memories, but as soon as that
‘eerie fixity’ reached consciousness the traumatic memory ‘exhibits a positively wan-
ton disloyalty to the truth’ (Terdiman 1993: 290). As early as ‘Screen Memories’,
Freud recognized that childhood memories were highly malleable, subject to
ceaseless revision and interpretation:

It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our
childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess.
Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as
they appeared at later periods when the memories were aroused.
(Freud 1899: 322)

The difficulty that recovered memories could be constructions or confabula-

tions had already been anticipated by Freud. However, Crews’ tendentious anti-
Freudian journalism was backed by a host of serious scholarly and scientific
interrogations into the founding premises of psychoanalysis at this time (Sulloway
1992, Kitcher 1992, Webster 1995). Reflecting the shift away from the kind of
psychodynamic models that underpinned Freud’s thinking, psychiatry began to
legitimate itself by an appeal to the biochemistry and neuroendocrinology of the
brain from the 1970s on. This biologization, Allan Young has argued, in fact
helped produce the very term ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, and certainly its key
symptom clusters. In fundamental ways the scientific basis for PTSD was incom-
patible with psychoanalysis. Thus, whilst archivists and historians exploded the
myths of the origins of psychoanalysis, the reorientation of psychiatry had also
marginalized Freud.
Freud’s pervasion of certain parts of the humanities and his effective absence in
the social and natural sciences has led to strands of trauma theory that continue
along parallel tracks with only the vaguest (usually contemptuous) awareness of
each other. For Caruth at least, trauma is a challenge because it is an aporia that
 Introduction 13
tests the limits of the psychoanalytic frame, even if Freud’s work remains the
central corpus through which to articulate the traumatic paradox. Yet, to her credit,
there are signs that Caruth acknowledged the changing locus of authority. Her view
of traumatic memory as a registration ‘outside’ registration in fact owed much to
the neurobiological speculations of Bessel van der Kolk, whose work on the literal
‘engraving of trauma’ on the mind Caruth included in her American Imago special.
Van der Kolk has attempted to isolate the physiological basis for the peculiar, eidetic
intensity of traumatic memories and their location outside conscious recall by track-
ing the release of hormones in the brain at times of extreme stress. The hypothesis
is that these discharges intensify emotional states (which can be re-experienced later
as terrifying returns to the initial traumatic scene), but block cognitive processing
and so are unavailable to narrative memory. Caruth suggests parallels to her own
theorization of the unknowable fragment of history lodged in the unconscious. In
a forceful critique, Ruth Leys has taken aim at Caruth’s unlikely elision of poststruc-
turalist literary theory, neurophysiology and psychoanalysis, arguing that Caruth
and Van der Kolk reference circularly to each other’s speculations in order to bol-
ster up a naively literal model of trauma’s psychic imprint. Leys places Caruth and
Van der Kolk at the ‘mimetic’ pole of trauma theory, in which trauma is the
unprocessed fragment of the thing itself. It is undermined by the ‘antimimetic’ pole,
in which traumatic memory is always representational, available to memory, and
therefore open to constant revision. The oscillation of these poles dominates the
history of trauma back to its genealogical origins in the nineteenth century. For
Leys, it means ‘current debates over trauma are fated to end in an impasse’ (Leys
2000: 305) since equal and opposite theories hold court. After this mauling, it might
be tempting to discard Caruth, were it not that the length of Leys’ critique acts as
a strange sort of monument to its importance. It is still the work where the lines
feeding notions of cultural trauma converge: the problem of aesthetics ‘after
Auschwitz’; the aporia of representation in poststructuralism; the diverse models of
trauma developed by, and in the wake of, Freud.
In another ‘genealogical’ study, Wulf Kansteiner has charged that ‘the most
severe abuses of the trauma concept currently occur in the abstract, metaphorical
language of cultural criticism’ (Kansteiner 2004: 215). He takes aim at the ‘aes-
theticised, morally and politically imprecise concept of cultural trauma’, a loose
notion that ‘turns us all into accomplished survivors’ (Kansteiner 2004: 194, 203).
He examines a critical trajectory from Adorno through Lyotard to Caruth and into
cultural studies that generalizes traumatic experiences and turns it into a problem
of media signification: ‘Just because trauma is inevitably a problem of representa-
tion in memory and communication does not imply the reverse, i.e. that problems
of representation are always partaking in the traumatic’ (Kansteiner 2004: 205). It
is this reversal that has allowed trauma to saturate contemporary culture.
Kansteiner’s outrage is driven by his sense that there has been an appropriation of
the epoch’s inaugural historical trauma: the Holocaust. Any comparisons, any
sense of trauma’s transmissibility, its outward movement from the wound, turns
brute historical fact into cheaply traded tokens of degraded ‘survivor culture’. This
exceptionalist stance has been a significant strand in writing on the Holocaust,
14 Introduction
understandably where the difficulty of witness has been harried by Holocaust
revisionism. It is most often associated with the survivor Elie Wiesel’s insistence on
the ethical and political demands produced by unprecedented violence against
the Jews. Yet exceptionalism has also become controversial, some claiming that the
elevation of the Jewish catastrophe silences other genocidal acts and has been used
for reactionary political ends. These debates need time and care (and are treated
in the first chapter): here, the point is more about disciplinarity. Kansteiner privi-
leges history over cultural studies, yet his genealogy is ignorant of the history of
trauma in psychology and law since the 1860s, discourses that have shaped how
Holocaust survival has been constructed. Without a multi-disciplinary knowledge,
there can only be an unappetizing competition between disciplines to impose their
specific conception of trauma. We need another model for understanding the
tortuous history and bewildering contemporary extent of a paradigm that is an
intrinsically inter-disciplinary conjuncture.
The dead metaphor in Kansteiner’s essay is ‘genealogy’. Foucault’s proposal for a
historical genealogy was to suspect ‘all-encompassing and global theories’ in order to
attend to the ‘discontinuous, particular, and local’, all those ‘historical contents that
have been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systematizations’
(Foucault 2003: 6–7). He was also concerned to recover ‘subjugated knowledges’,
that ‘whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as nonconceptual knowl-
eges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges’ (Foucault 2003: 7). This might be more
rigorously pursued. But even more useful for this project is Bruno Latour’s attempts
to rethink science and its history as inextricably connected to culture, politics and
society. Latour’s theory does not put knowledge into hierarchies but sees knowledges
and practices as forming complicated networks. A successful statement can be meas-
ured by how many links or associations it makes, not only within the rigours of its
own discipline but far beyond it too, as it loops through different knowledges, institu-
tions, practices, social, political and cultural forums. A scientific concept therefore
succeeds through its heterogeneity rather than its purity, ‘the number of points
linked, the length and strength of the linkage’ (Latour 1987: 201). In this network,
Latour prefers to call a concept a knot because it helps to visualize the many hetero-
geneous elements it binds together. The history of such a knot would be an act of
unravelling, revealing how the knot is ‘intensely connected to a much larger reper-
toire of resources’ (Latour 1999: 108).
It seems to me that the rise of the concept of trauma suggests itself as an exem-
plary conceptual knot whose successful permeation must be understood by the
impressive range of elements that it ties together and which allows it to travel to
such diverse places in the network of knowledge. Even more relevantly, I see
trauma as one of those distinctive ‘hybrid assemblages’ that Latour suggests con-
front us in the contemporary world. Increasingly, we have to deal with ‘tangled
objects’, imbroglios that mess up our fundamental categories of subject and
object, human and non-human, society and nature. Latour’s examples include
ozone holes, global warming, ‘mad cow disease’ or immuno-deficiency diseases –
things that seem to emerge somewhere between the natural and the man-made
and that tangle up questions of science, law, technology, capitalism, politics,
 Introduction 15
medicine and risk. These have ‘no clear boundaries, no sharp separation between
their own hard kernel and their environment’ (Latour 2004: 24). Fundamentally,
they are not yet settled as ‘matters of fact’; they are contentious precisely because
the facts cannot be decided by competing claims, where facts are enrolled for
different kinds of social and political investments. Instead, these tangled objects
‘first appear as matters of concern, as new entities that provoke perplexity and thus
speech in those who gather around them, and argue over them’ (Latour 2004: 66).
Rival theories proliferate around the notion of trauma because it is one of these ‘tan-
gled objects’ whose enigmatic causation and strange effects that bridge the mental
and the physical, the individual and collective, and use in many diverse disciplinary
languages consequently provoke perplexed, contentious debate. Rather than offer
another invested polemic, I propose we need to begin by unravelling the complex
elements that have been knotted into the notion of trauma.
To this end, the first half of this book is a historical genealogy that tries to make
sense of the divergent resources that have been knotted into the concept of
trauma across its peculiarly disrupted, discontinuous history. This genealogy will
track the multi-disciplinary origin of trauma in the nineteenth century through
industrialization and bureaucratization, law and psychology, military and govern-
ment welfare policies, before suggesting that our current conjucture begins to knot
these diverse and discontinuous elements together in the identity politics of the
1970s. Tracing this history means it becomes easier to discern the strands that
thread through the cultural materials examined in Part II. I want to make the
strong claim that cultural narratives have been integral not just in consolidating
the idea of post-traumatic subjectivity, but have actively helped form it since
1980. The transmissibility of trauma has meant that many aspects of cultural life
in advanced capitalist societies have become part of the imbroglio of the post-
traumatic self. In four chapters, I examine literary and popular fiction, the reval-
uation of memoir around extreme experience, debates on the photography of
atrocity and the way narrative disruptions in cinema convey traumatic experience.
Visual culture in particular can demonstrate how the impact of culture can alter
psychiatric diagnostics: the ideas of flashbulb memories or intrusive flashbacks
have emerged in psychiatry long after the grammar and narrative possibilities of
these notions have been worked out in cultural forms. I have deliberately sought
to extend the range of cultural reference from the relatively narrow body of texts
that typically feature in cultural trauma theory: I wanted to move beyond
Modernist aesthetics of fragmentation and aporia and into popular culture to
demonstrate not just pervasiveness of trauma but also the reiteration of traumatic
subjectivity in different kinds of register. In a brief afterword, I suggest the ways
in which the trauma paradigm might meet its limits.
Part I

Aetiology
1 The genealogy of a concept

The history of a concept is not wholly and entirely that of its progressive
refinement … but that of its various fields of constitution and validity, that of its
successive rules of use, that of the many theoretical contexts in which it developed
and matured.
(Foucault 1974: 4)

This chapter will attempt to follow this programme, aware that trauma offers
particular challenges in bringing together far-flung and heterogeneous resources.
Authorities in the field have recognized that ‘a continuous history would be
impossible to establish’, since historicism puts into question ‘the idea of a single,
uniform, transhistorically valid concept of psychological trauma’ (Micale and
Lerner 2001: 24, 25). For Judith Herman, the history of trauma is itself trauma-
tized, being singularly marked by ‘episodic amnesia’: ‘Periods of active investiga-
tion have alternated with periods of oblivion. Repeatedly in the past century,
similar lines of inquiry have been taken up and abruptly abandoned, only to be
rediscovered later’ (Herman 1994: 7). Foucault’s proposal, that histories need to
be aware that concepts emerge across dispersed sites and in discontinuous ways,
comes ready built into trauma. The challenge is to construct something coherent
from the different elements that need to be put into play.
What follows is in five sections. I want to put some flesh on the truism that
trauma is a concept that can only emerge within modernity, tracing it as an effect
of the rise, in the nineteenth century, of the technological and statistical society
that can generate, multiply and quantify the ‘shocks’ of modern life. This broad
context is the frame that produces the conditions of emergence for trauma in spe-
cific disciplines from about 1870 to the Second World War: law, psychiatry and
industrialized warfare. After elaborating the notions of trauma that develop from
these distinct, but overlapping knowledges, the last section will examine how these
languages were reformulated in the linkage of trauma and the politics of identity
from the 1960s, looking particularly at the formation of ‘survivor syndromes’ for
victims of nuclear war and Nazi persecution, the politicization of illness in
Vietnam war veterans, and the transformed understanding of women’s experience
by feminism.
20 Aetiology
Trauma and modernity
Trauma is typically held to be ‘responsive to and constitutive of “modernity”’
(Micale and Lerner 2001: 10). ‘Modernity’, Seltzer confirms, ‘has come to be
understood under the sign of the wound’: ‘the modern subject has become
inseparable from the categories of shock and trauma’ (Seltzer 1997: 18). Modernity,
often loosely dated to the rise of the modern nation state in the eighteenth
century, is identified with a series of contradictory transformations of the rela-
tions of so-called traditional society. The fixity of place, the dense network of
social relations and local traditions typical of the village, for instance, is dislocated
by a new orientation of the individual to an abstract, national and increasingly
international space. Similarly, the local rhythms of time are replaced by a stan-
dardized time that routinizes labour time and co-ordinates national economies
and transport systems. Individuals are ‘disembedded’ from cyclical rituals and tra-
ditions and experience a release from narrow expectations that is at once liberat-
ing and angst-ridden. Self-identity, in other words, is uprooted from traditional
verities and subject to a kind of permanent revolution: all that is solid melts into
air (Berman 1983).
The classic site of modernity is the city, which by the end of the nineteenth
century had swallowed the majority of the British population, turning an agrar-
ian nation into an urban one. In these sprawling, artificial terrains, divorced from
nature, commentators began to worry about the overstimulation and exhaustion
caused by prolonged immersion in the city. ‘New machines had come in to make
life still more complicated’, Grant Allen wrote in 1894: ‘sixpenny telegrams, Bell
and Edison, submarine cables, evening papers, perturbations coming in from all
sides incessantly; suburbs growing, the hubbub increasing, Metropolitan railways,
trams, bicycles, innumerable’ (Allen 1894: 119–20). Walter Benjamin’s account of
Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century explicitly theorized urban experi-
ence as ‘a series of shocks and collisions’, regarding the overwhelming rush of
street transport, advertising, telephones, films and crowds as subjecting ‘the
human sensorium to a complex kind of training’, in effect an engineering of new
urban selves (Benjamin 1973: 171). Explicitly relying on Freud’s ideas of the shock
that overwhelms psychic defences, Benjamin saw Paris as a city of traumatic
encounters, rewriting the very notion of experience. Charles Baudelaire was Paris’
great poet because he was a traumatophile, seeking out the shocking encounter,
traversing the streets like a fencer, welcoming every shock and parry.
The intrinsic ambivalences of modernity – progress and ruin, liberation and
constraint, individualization and massification – are perhaps best concretized by
technology. Technology can be seen as the instrumental vehicle for the liberations
of modern space-time, but it can also be the ‘demonic’ force that reduces humans
to ‘the conscious limbs of the automaton,’ as Marx evocatively put it (Marx 1980:
141). Humans might regard technology as the prosthetic extension of their will to
mastery, yet nearly every new technology hailed in this way also attracts a com-
mentary that regards it as a violent assault on agency and self-determination. This
ambivalent commentary nearly always invokes the traumatic. The mythic origin
 The genealogy of a concept 21
of the cinematograph has an apocryphal story of audiences running from the
Lumière brothers’ film of an oncoming train, prompting Tom Gunning to call
early cinema ‘the cinema of attractions, which envisioned cinema as a series of
visual shocks’ (Gunning 1999: 820). Similarly, the global network of telegraphy
and telephony, the ‘nerves of empire’, was soon haunted by the spectral voices of
the dead that travelled along the wire at the same speed as the electrical spark
(Luckhurst 2002). It should come as no surprise, then, that the general scholarly
consensus is that the origin of the idea of trauma was inextricably linked to the
expansion of the railways in the 1860s.
The railway was the icon of British modernity: widely held to exemplify engi-
neering genius, it also heralded what contemporaries called ‘the annihilation of
space and time’, compressing travel length and distance. Whilst British clock-time
was eventually standardized across the country in order to integrate the railway
timetable, it remained a dangerous and chaotic industry. From the very first public
run of Stephenson’s Rocket in September 1830, death attended the operation of
the railway: the MP William Huskisson was struck on the tracks. With the 1871
Railways Regulation Act, records of fatal accidents were properly reported and
for the next thirty years, there were never less than 200 passenger deaths a year,
with the peak in 1874 of 758 deaths (Bartrip and Burman 1983).
Wolfgang Schivelbusch has influentially suggested that the effect of ‘the indus-
trialisation of the means of transport’ was ‘to alter the consciousness of passen-
gers: they developed a new set of perceptions’ (Schivelbusch 1986: 14). This
extended beyond the denatured terrain now processed through the window of the
‘machine ensemble’, for the railway accident was the site of the ‘first attempt to
explain industrial traumata’ (Schivelbusch 1986: 24, 136) as it exposed the travel-
ling middle and upper classes to the kinds of technological violence previously
restricted to factories. The speed of collisions often rendered these accidents par-
ticularly gruesome events. Yet even those who survived without apparent physical
injury began to report strange effects on their nerves. In 1862, The Lancet (the jour-
nal of the British Medical Association) carried a supplement on ‘The Influence of
Railway Travelling on Public Health’, which included medical speculations that
travelling at speed might have concussive effect on the nervous system, whilst the
violent jarring of the body in an accident might induce permanent but invisible
damage. Because the fevered expansion of the railways from the 1840s was driven
by free market companies, the medical question of injury was always also a legal
question of liability. Could those who bore no physical mark nevertheless claim
damages for nervous debility that often began to develop some time after the acci-
dent? In 1862, a Mr Shepherd was awarded £700 in compensation for the detri-
mental effects on his ability to conduct business, after testifying that since his
involvement in a railway accident in 1858 his ‘chief complaint’ was ‘a feeling of
nervous depression, and particularly that the countenances of his fellow-passengers,
with terrified eyes, would come before him whenever he attempted to do any
reading or writing’ (cited Harrington 2003: 212). Thus was the medico-legal
notion of ‘railway spine’ inaugurated. This is what Charles Dickens suffered after
his ‘terribly destructive accident’ in 1865, in which he assisted the badly injured
22 Aetiology
at a bridge derailment, and later rescued his manuscript of Our Mutual Friend
(Dickens 1865: 799). Dickens suffered all manner of subjective disturbances in the
following months: he wrote ‘I am not quite right within, but believe it to be an
effect of the railway shaking’ (cited Trimble 1981, 28). This has led some critics
to regard Dickens as a victim of PTSD (Matus 2001). In the 1870s, The Lancet
alarmingly announced that ‘we may be said to have supped full of railway hor-
rors, and railway travelling has become almost insupportable to persons of a nerv-
ous temperament’ (cited Harrington 1994: 17). Later still, Max Nordau decried
modernity’s degeneration as a result of nervous overstimulation, including in his
principal causes ‘the little shocks of railway travelling, not perceived by con-
sciousness’ and the mental overload of ‘every scene we perceive through the
window of the flying express’ (Nordau 1895: 39).
Railway spine was the first instance of a theory of trauma that became con-
tentious because rival theories placed it at opposing ends of the spectrum from
physical to psychical etiologies. The surgeon John Erichsen published a series of
lectures in 1866 on railway spine which was successful in linking the term to a
physical theory. The violent jolt of an accident resulted in concussion of the spine:

a certain state of the spinal cord occasioned by external violence; a state

that is independent of, and usually, but not necessarily, uncomplicated by
any obvious lesion of the vertebral column … – a condition that is sup-
posed to depend upon a shake or jar received by the cord, in consequence
of which its intimate organic structure may be more or less deranged, and
by which its functions are greatly disturbed.
(Erichsen 1875: 15)

In the absence of certain medical knowledge about the physiology of the nerv-
ous system, Erichsen speculated that jarring caused molecular changes in the
spinal fluid, yet he also resorted to analogy, as

when a magnet is struck a heavy blow with a hammer, the magnetic force
is jarred, shaken, or concussed out of the horse-shoe … . So, if the spine is
badly jarred, shaken or concussed by a blow or shock … we find that the
nervous force is to a certain extent shaken out of the man, and that he has
in some way lost nerve-power.
(Erichsen 1875: 156–7)

The case histories presented offered portraits of disordered memory, disturbed

sleep and frightful dreams, and various types of paralysis, melancholia and impo-
tence, with a particular emphasis on the sudden loss of business sense. The most
‘remarkable’ detail for Erichsen was the belated onset of these symptoms: ‘at the
time of the occurrence of the injury the sufferer is usually quite unconscious that
any serious accident has happened to him’ (Erichsen 1875: 157). The physical and
mental effects seemed to ramify and worsen over time: Erichsen’s prognosis for
amelioration was pessimistic.
 The genealogy of a concept 23
Erichsen’s organic basis appealed to simple mechanical cause and effect and
gained popular and professional currency, but it was also subject to critique. The
most sustained attack was by Herbert Page, who regarded Erichsen’s evidence as
‘lamentable’ and despaired that ‘“concussion of the spine” is used almost indis-
criminately both in and outside the medical profession’ (Page 1883: 74). Page
pointed to studies of post-mortem pathology that could present no evidence in
support of organic lesions. Instead, Page tried to shift railway spine onto a differ-
ent premise: ‘we shall see that the course, history, and general symptoms indicate
some functional disturbance of the whole nervous balance or tone rather than
structural damage to any organ of the body’ (Page 1883: 143). The functional
disorders were the product of the profound shock of the collision:

The vastness of the destructive forces, the magnitude of the results, the
imminent danger to the lives of numbers of human beings, and the hope-
lessness of escape from the danger, give rise to emotions which in themselves
are quite sufficient to produce shock.
(Page 1883: 148)

To Page, this also explained how symptoms arrived belatedly: ‘Warded off in
the first place by the excitement of the scene, the shock is gathering, in the very
delay itself ’ (Page 1883: 148). This was Page’s formulation of what he called
nervous shock. Erichsen had in fact already acknowledged shock in the considerably
expanded edition of his lectures in 1875, conceding that

terror has much to do with its production. It must be remembered that rail-
way accidents have this peculiarity, that they come upon the sufferers
instantaneously and without warning, or with but a few seconds for prepa-
ration, and that the utter helplessness of a human being in the midst of the
great masses in motion renders these accidents peculiarly terrible.
(Erichsen 1875: 196)

Yet Erichsen regarded these functional conditions as a distinct but lesser type
of response to accidents; organic impacts still occurred, and were the more seri-
ous illnesses. In contrast, Page saw all of these nervous disorders as resulting from
‘purely psychical causes’ (Page 1883: 148).
If Page seems the closer to modern conceptions, it is important to realize that
his insistence that the psychical traumas of railway accidents were forms of hyste-
ria came from transparently pecuniary motives. Page had been the surgeon for the
London and North Western Railway Company for nine years when he wrote his
book. Erichsen’s argument had to be defeated because an organic origin for rail-
way spine nearly always resulted in huge payments for damages to those caught up
in railway accidents, and this was being worryingly extended to those without any
visible physical injury. To associate nervous shock with hysteria was to equate it
with a shameful, effeminate disorder, often dismissed as a form of disease imitation
(what was called ‘neuromimesis’) or malingering. Accident victims who presented
24 Aetiology
these symptoms could now be suspected of feigning illness for financial advantage.
After a chapter devoted to spotting cases of ‘Malingering’, Page proposed that the
prospect of legal compensation was fuelling and prolonging forms of hysteria:

the knowledge that compensation is a certainty for the injuries received,

tends, almost from the first moment of illness, to colour the course and
aspect of the case, with each succeeding day to become part and parcel of
the injury in the patient’s mind.
(Page 1883: 255)

Eric Caplan has detailed the rise of the National Association of Railway
Surgeons in America in 1888 as an organization devoted to contesting any
organic basis to railway spine, since rail companies were losing millions in law
cases where they suspected juries were already biased to favour individual victims
over large railroad corporations in an era of anti-trust agitation. Railway spine,
one leading figure complained in 1894, had been ‘invented by one of the most
clever English surgeons’, yet ‘it has baffled both railway surgeons and counsel,
and, vampire-like, sucked more blood of the corporate bodies and railway
companies than all other cases combined’ (cited Caplan 1995: 412). But Page’s
argument should not be dismissed as laissez-faire Victoriana: the term ‘accident
neurosis’ was proposed in 1961 as a specific syndrome ‘motivated by hopes of
financial and other rewards, and which shows considerable improvement follow-
ing the settlement of compensation’ (Mayou 1996: 399). In 1981, Michael
Trimble’s historical study, Post-Traumatic Neurosis, foregrounded the fact that
psychiatric debates ‘represent the veneer of a multi-million pound enterprise’,
and included the chapter ‘The Central Issue – Malingering’. Guides for forensic
assessment of cases still outline the means to detect so-called ‘factitious PTSD’.
‘Railway spine’ names a conjuncture of body and machine, the violent collision
of technological modernity and human agency. This inaugural version of trauma
is also intrinsically modern because it is, from the first, a medico-legal problem,
which is to say it is defined in and through the institutions and discourses mark-
ing the rise of the professional society in the nineteenth century. Rival experts
would henceforth seek to define the protean signs of trauma in their specific dis-
ciplinary languages, partly recognizing that the very act of definition contributed
to the mobility of symptoms. I need to trace in some detail how the legal and psy-
chiatric disciplines have formulated trauma, sometimes in concert but just as fre-
quently in a curious kind of symbiotic conflict.
Before this, there is one significant way in which the modernity of trauma has not
yet been grasped. Whilst many historians of trauma start on the railway, it is impor-
tant not to fetishize these technological origins. To describe a machine, as Latour
says, is not just a technical matter: it is also to describe the social relations that are
bound into it (see Latour 1987). The railway accident was the encounter of the gen-
eral public with the consequences of industrialization that had largely been con-
cealed within the factory system. Early agitators for reform, like Robert Dale Owen,
might describe streets full of mutilated cotton workers, but these were out of sight
 The genealogy of a concept 25
of metropolitan governments and opinion. The figures for much of the nineteenth
century for railway fatalities were only for passengers, since rail worker deaths and
injuries were initially regarded as the occupational hazard of working in high-risk
environments. Workers ‘chose’ this work, and the pay allegedly reflected the risk,
this so-called volenti principle barring any right to claim from employers for injury.
However, the English High Court heard its first case for a claim for industrial acci-
dent in 1836, and this began a series of reforms throughout the century that even-
tually resulted in the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1897. The Act was intended
to introduce a general form of insurance to take the sting from the new union
co-ordination of negligence claims against employers. Initially it involved only a
narrow selection of industries considered vital to the national interest, establishing
‘work injury victims as an elite group, analogous to war pensioners, eligible for
special benefits’ (Bartrip 1985: 163). The range of workers was extended in 1906,
and progressively extended into the 1920s. The German state had established its
own Imperial Insurance Office for industrial injury in 1884, and most European
states followed over the next twenty years. In England, this agitation on behalf of
what Earl Fitzwilliam called ‘the wounded soldiers of industry’ was a significant ele-
ment of the transformation of a Victorian laissez-faire economy into the beginning
of a national insurance system, and thus the modern welfare state (Bartrip and
Burman 1983: 5). This is the rise of what Francois Ewald calls the ‘Providential
State’, where society is ‘constructed out of myriad efforts at the administrative and
personal levels to remove, predict, and repair the damages of dysfunction’ (cited
Rabinbach 1996: 50). The industrial accident is the juncture around which a new
kind of state emerges, since it brings together ‘attorneys, judges, lawmakers, gov-
ernment officials, medical experts, and the insurance specialists’, with claims adjus-
tors, health and safety officials and company assessors, and other subsets of
expertise emerging later (Rabinbach 1996: 51). The accident was where the social,
economic, political and bureaucratic elements of the state met up to determine and
contest the traumatic costs of industrialization.
The key change this legislation produced was a shift from liability to an insur-
ance system where responsibility was not an issue. Inside what Karl Figlio evoca-
tively names the ‘accident cosmology’ there is no good or bad intention and
therefore no blame (Figlio 1985: 197). Instead, ‘social risk was considered to be a
consequence of industrial modernity, recognizing that impersonal forces rather
than individual wills were often the determinants of a person’s destiny’
(Rabinbach 1996: 58–9). Inevitably, a state-run system also resulted in fears that
the intrinsically lazy working classes would exploit the system and rapidly produce
a large and permanently invalided population on state salaries. By the 1890s
French government experts discussed les maladies simulées, the Germans
Rentenneurose or ‘pension neurosis’ – new forms of that alleged accident neurosis of
the kind that had angered the railway surgeons.
If social relations were reorganized around the accident, it is possible to consider
the accident itself as a product of modernity. From the broadest purview, trauma
develops from the rise of the statistical society, those various forms of calculus
that helped to process and begin to control the chaotic explosion of the industrial
26 Aetiology
revolution in nineteenth century England, Europe and America. Statistical analysis
of the economic and social activities of populations, Theodore Porter argues,
helped marshal ways of conceiving a large-scale social entity, and was particularly
good at ‘uncovering causal relationships where the individual events are either con-
cealed from view or are highly variable and subject to a host of influences’ (Porter
1986: 3). From the local chaos of apparently free agents, statistics abstract larger
orders and regularities of behaviour: society becomes a calculus of probabilities.
Probabilism ‘implies simply that our knowledge does not permit prediction, though
there may be no exceptions to complete causality in the world’ (Porter 1986: 12).
This causality implied the possibility of rational management, reform and improve-
ment of society, and this drove the enlightenment ambitions of the statistical move-
ment. Yet as statistical measurements improved, so did the record of the puzzling
and damaging consequences of modernity, not just of poverty, inequality and dis-
ease, but records of industrial and technological accidents. The reporting of factory
accidents was uneven, and only marginal to the reformist Factory Acts of the 1840s,
but better enforcement of the reporting and collating of accident statistics amplified
concerns from the 1870s. Roger Cooter has proposed that late Victorian Britain was
transformed by a new consciousness of the accident, which prompted the rise of
the volunteer ambulance and first-aid movements. This was a quasi-military
attempt to control the hazards of the city, where accidents became ‘symbols of the
omnipresent potential dangers of the socially destabilized late-Victorian urban con-
text’ (Cooter 1997: 123). This collation made accidents appear to be rather para-
doxical events. On the one hand, they were obviously anomalous and disruptive
intrusions into the norms of the factory or transport system. On the other, they were
also, as statistical probabilities showed, entirely calculable. They were unforeseeably
foreseeable. As government reforms, health and safety regulations and standardiza-
tion (for instance, of railway timetables) mitigated the worst possibilities of industri-
alized modernity, these improvements of course increased the sense of cataclysm
when the inevitable accident struck somewhere in the system. If subjectivity is con-
stituted within increasingly complex technological environments, then when ‘the
technological base collapses, the feeling of habituation and security collapses with
it’ (Schivelbusch 1986: 162). The accident is therefore historically constituted by the
specific kinds of risky environments typical of modernity. Trauma is inextricably
tied to this accident cosmology: the psychological consequences of the accidents
and disasters continue to be a substantial area of current research. Legal scholars,
too, have recognized that in modern disasters ‘the more complex, interactive, and
opaque the system, the greater the number of latent errors it is likely to contain’,
making causation and attribution difficult to compute (Wells et al. 2000: 500). The
professional discourses of modernity may shape how trauma is conceived: it does
not mean that they can capture it in definitive formulations.

The law of ‘nervous shock’

For Karl Figlio, the accident could only come to exist ‘in a cosmology in which
the common view of personal relationships had become contractual, so that
 The genealogy of a concept 27
obligations and injury could be seen as terms of contract’ (Figlio 1985: 183). The
accident must immediately invoke questions of responsibility and liability
(Campbell 1997). It is for this reason that negligence claims in the law of tort have
provided the dominant (although not only) way in which law has interacted with,
and fundamentally helped constitute, contemporary notions of trauma. PTSD
entered official psychiatric diagnostics in 1980, as we have seen. In 1989 the so-
called Zeebrugge Arbitration (following the sinking of a passenger ferry outside
the port) was the first case in England in which it was ‘agreed on all sides that the
courts would now accept that PTSD was a recognized psychiatric injury for which
compensation would be recoverable at law without proof of any actual physical
harm’ (Pugh and Trimble 1993: 426). Yet by 1998 the English Law Commission
issued a lengthy report, Liability for Psychiatric Illness, in recognition of the legal con-
fusion and injustices in recent cases concerned with PTSD and other forms of
trauma. The present law was deemed ‘unsatisfactory’, yet after extensive consul-
tation the commissioners concluded that ‘we do not think that medical knowledge
has advanced to a sufficiently mature stage for the complete codification of lia-
bility for psychiatric illness’ (Law Commission 1998: 3). They eschewed statutory
legislation in favour of allowing the law ‘to develop incrementally’ case by case
(Law Commission 1998: 3). Case law has been the means by which the notion of
‘nervous shock’ developed over the past one hundred years, but it was the judge-
ments in these cases that had produced the sense of arbitrariness in determining
psychiatric liability, and which prompted the Law Commission report in the first
place. The irresolution of legal discourse around nervous shock is central to any
understanding of the contemporary trauma paradigm.
The purpose of this section, since I am very far from being a legal expert, is
merely to try to outline the significant tort case law which developed the notion
of ‘nervous shock’ and changing conceptions of psychiatric harm. I will then
briefly turn from the civil law to look at the interaction of criminal law and theo-
ries of trauma. Both areas of the law show the pressure produced with changing
psychological conceptions of trauma in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1888 an employee at a railway crossing in Australia mistakenly waved a
horse and buggy through a barrier, nearly causing a collision with the oncoming
train. A legal case was mounted on behalf of Mrs Coultas, who claimed that the
severe fright of the incident had induced her later miscarriage. The judgement
(Coultas v. Victorian Railway Commissioners 1888) initially found for the claimant, but
was challenged all the way to the London Privy Council, which oversaw the colo-
nial courts. Here, the judgement was overturned on the basis that there had been
no physical injury and therefore no proof of direct causation from the incident at
the railway to the later miscarriage. The appeal judges explicitly stated that the
case had to be overturned, otherwise the field would be opened to a mass of
‘imaginary claims’ (see Mendelson 1997). This is the argument familiar from dis-
putes over ‘railway spine’, and the law has in general been reluctant to allow dam-
ages for ‘invisible’ psychological impacts (where causation cannot be proved by
physical evidence) in order to prevent, in that perennial legal phrase, opening the
floodgates of litigation.
28 Aetiology
In very similar circumstances to Coultas thirteen years later, a carriage was
driven through a pub window in East London, causing the publican’s wife severe
shock and the premature birth of an ‘idiot’ son. This time the case, Dulieu v. White
(1901), produced a landmark judgement: ‘Damages which result from a nervous
shock occasioned by fright unaccompanied by any actual impact may be recover-
able in an action for negligence if physical injury has been caused to the plaintiff ’
(669). No distinction was to be made between actual impact and fear of impact if
the physical result was the same. In passing judgement, Judge Kennedy com-
mented explicitly on the distinction between ‘nervous’ and ‘mental’ that should
have been made in Coultas. ‘“Nervous” is probably the more correct epithet where
terror operates through parts of the physical organism to produce bodily illness’,
he said, whilst ‘merely mental pain unaccompanied by any injury to the person
cannot sustain an action of this kind’ (672–3). Any psychological impact, in other
words, had to be proven to have been stamped on the body to reach the legal
threshold. To this limit on claims was added that the nervous shock could only
arise from fear of immediate injury to oneself, not others, and that defendants
were not bound ‘to guard against an injurious result which would only
happen to a person of peculiar sensitiveness’ (686). This introduced what later
became the ‘standard of susceptibility’, the intensity of nervous shock being
judged normatively as an event that could not be endured by those of ‘ordinary
fortitude’ or ‘customary phlegm’ (Bourhill v. Young 1943).
Dulieu established nervous shock both as a recognized illness and a strict meas-
ure of compensable traumatic impact. The limit on those who can claim nervous
shock to the primary victim of the incident has been consistently challenged, and
fitfully extended ever since. In Hambrook v. Stokes Bros (1925), a lorry careering out
of control had left a mother so terrified for the safety of her children that she
became ill and later died. A court ruled that fear for others could be grounds for
compensation, if the defendant’s action was reasonably foreseeable in producing
such shock. The ruling therefore added secondary victims to those involved in the
primary traumatic event. A restriction came with Bourhill v. Young: a woman who
heard a traffic accident but did not see the impact, only the blood on the pave-
ment, was judged to have no right to claim for nervous shock and subsequent
miscarriage, as the defendant could not reasonably foresee her reaction (the pre-
dominance of miscarriage cases likely reflects the anxiety to demonstrate nervous
shock had bodily rather than ‘merely mental’ consequences, but also of course
feminizes the shock reaction). Bourhill v. Young remained a guiding judgement for
over twenty years.
The central modern case determining questions of relationship and proximity
to the traumatic event was McLoughlin v. O’Brian (1983). In this case, the mother was
two miles away from an accident involving her husband and children. One child
died at the scene, and she rushed to the remainder of her family at the hospital.
Her subsequent nervous shock was held to be the result of witnessing her surviv-
ing family still covered in blood and dirt from the accident. The claim for damages
was successful by extending the arena of nervous shock from the accident to the
‘immediate aftermath’. This extension in time was bought at the expense of a
 The genealogy of a concept 29
reconfirmation of what Lord Wilberforce called ‘control mechanisms’ on who
might claim, since ‘defendants cannot be expected to compensate the world at
large’ (cited Giliker and Beckwith 2000: 88). Fear for others had to be fear for the
death, injury or imperilment of those with whom one has a ‘close tie’; bystanders,
the judgement held, ‘must be assumed to be possessed of sufficient fortitude to
enable them to endure the calamities of modern life’ (Law Commission 1998: 26).
This is the barest outline of the case law (see Giliker and Beckwith 2000 and
Weir 2000 for more complete surveys). Case law has come to identify five tests for
a successful claim: the event must be shocking; it must have been reasonably fore-
seeable that the defendant’s action would cause nervous shock; the shock must
breach the defences of ‘ordinary fortitude’; it must produce a recognizable psy-
chiatric illness beyond normal emotions of pain and grief (grief has to become
‘pathological’ to be considered an illness, as decided in Vernon v. Bosley No. 1
(1997)); and secondary victims must reach strict thresholds of proximity in time
and space to the event, as well as proximity of relationship to the primary victims.
It is evident that whilst legal definition is propped on psychiatric expertise these
tests are normative and restrictive in ways that abandon psychological under-
standing of trauma. Trauma is marked by strange, apparently non-causal tempo-
ral development; it can move outwards in an unpredictable proliferation from the
original wound; its limits are difficult to draw. Law is determined to restrict this
proliferation and insist on causation, always intent on preventing the floodgates of
litigation from opening. Yet, in relying on PTSD as the privileged ‘recognisable
psychiatric illness’, the law does not rest on a stable definition of trauma. Since
1980, PTSD has not been a fixed but a very mobile term, progressively extend-
ing the types of symptoms and categories of sufferers outwards from the initial
restrictions on what constituted the traumatic event. This has been partly consti-
tutive and partly reflective of very broad notions of ‘cultural trauma’, a term
virtually impossible to reconcile with legal definitions. Yet the restrictive law of
nervous shock came into conflict with this culture as awareness of traumatic
responses entered into wider currency. Contradictory legal judgements have
marked the traumatic consequences of one key event: the Hillsborough disaster.
In 1989, 95 Liverpool Football Club spectators were killed and 400 injured in
the Hillsborough football ground. Scenes of the crowd being crushed against
metal fences were broadcast live on television and radio, and repeated on news
broadcasts. Claims for physical injuries were settled quickly, since the police
admitted negligence in allowing too many fans into the stadium. In Alcock v. Chief
Constable of South Yorkshire (1992), sixteen claimants brought an action for nervous
shock and consequent psychiatric illness. Fifteen were relatives of those killed or
injured at Hillsborough. The judgement found against the claimants on a number
of points. Secondary victim status was strictly applied: hence, the judges thought
relationships to spouses, parents and children could be presumed to be a close tie,
whilst those of siblings, grandparents or uncles and aunts were not, and such
claimants would be required to demonstrate close ties. For one Hillsborough
claimant, watching a brother die might have been a trauma, but was not recover-
able at law. Questions of proximity were also narrowly invoked. In terms of time,
30 Aetiology
the ‘immediate aftermath’ was limited to an hour, so that the viewing and
identification of the bodies starting eight hours later was deemed to be outside the
limit of the event (bodies had also been prepared for viewing, so were held to be
less shocking). In terms of space, the necessary proximity ruled out anyone who
had seen the event in a mediated way, via television or by any third party report,
but also distinguished between different areas inside the football ground. Lord
Oliver insisted on the shock test, and therefore denied the claim because ‘their
discovery of the death of loved ones was gradual rather than sudden’ (Law
Commission 1998: 35–6). Wilberforce also concurred: ‘There remains … just
because “shock” in its nature is capable of affecting so wide a range of people, a
real need for the law to place some limitation on the extent of admissible claims’
(cited Pugh and Trimble 1993: 428). In the meantime, the judgement McFarlane v.
EE Caledonia (1994), a result of the Piper Alpha oil platform fire, effectively barred
claims of ‘bystanders’ from making nervous shock claims. Page v. Smith (1996),
another case concerning psychiatric illness resulting from a car accident, was a
landmark in effectively establishing that where the prospect of physical harm
existed, psychiatric damage was also reasonably foreseeable and did not have to
be proven separately. This parity of bodily and mental harm was restricted to pri-
mary victims only, reaffirming a clear distinction between primary victims (who
have a reasonable fear for their physical safety) and secondary victims (who are
only proximate to the traumatic event).
The perception that Alcock was a mechanical and cruel application of the law
intensified when six police officers on duty at Hillbsborough claimed for post-
traumatic stress in Frost v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police (1997). At trial, the
case was dismissed with the argument that ‘traumatized professional rescuers not
placed in personal peril by the accident were not to be assisted by the common
law’ (Mullany and Handford 1997: 411). However, the Court of Appeal by a
majority upheld their claim. The ruling found in favour of officers who had tried
to administer first aid by the metal pens or been in the ground, but also for those
who had handled bodies in hospitals and temporary mortuaries after the event
and at some distance. The judgement therefore extended claims of PTSD to ‘res-
cuers’ (four of the officers) and employees (the other two), where their duties had
brought them within range of foreseeable psychiatric injury through employer
negligence. The outrage of the relatives previously barred from claims resulted in
the House of Lords overturning this Appeal Court ruling, and the case of the offi-
cers was reconsidered in White v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire (1999). This
judgement prompted further refinements to the categories of primary and sec-
ondary victimhood, and within that to the special cases of employees, ‘unwitting
agents’ and rescuers. The judgement found against the officers, on the grounds
that they were not primary victims, and had also failed to meet the tests for sec-
ondary status. The ruling, over-ruling and then over-over-ruling of this case
demonstrated how confusing the law had become in establishing the legal param-
eters of a large-scale traumatic event.
In his Alcock judgement, Lord Oliver confessed that the law on psychiatric harm
was not ‘entirely satisfactory or logically defensible’ (1992: 418). Commentators
 The genealogy of a concept 31
have been harsher: Pugh and Trimble have called the law a lottery ‘in which some
bystanders get spattered with blood and others with money’ (Pugh and Trimble
1993: 429). It was these confusions and concerns that prompted the Law
Commission report in 1998. Their reform principally focused on addressing the
public perception of arbitrary and cruel divisions within secondary victimhood
status, arguing for legislation that a claimant

who suffers a reasonably foreseeable psychiatric illness as a result of the

death, injury or imperilment of a person with whom he or she has a close
tie of love and affection, should be entitled to recover damages … regard-
less of the plaintiff ’s closeness (in time and space) to the accident or its
aftermath or the means by which the plaintiff learns of it.
(Law Commission 1998: 89)

This eased the offence of having to demonstrate a relationship was strong

enough to result in a traumatic impact. It also considerably expanded the range
of claimants, as the commissioners considered ‘the class of relationships in which
the tie is presumed is currently drawn too narrowly’ (Law Commission 1998: 91).
Even so the report had to counter the inevitable ‘floodgates’ argument, and
included a projected calculation of higher insurance premiums as the result of
any legal change, arguing for only a limited financial impact. Society could insure
itself against wider traumatic impacts for only a two to five per cent increase in
premiums.
The strongest recommendation was for the abolition of nervous shock as a test
of psychiatric illness. Nervous shock, over one hundred years old and embedded
in Victorian reactions to a new technological modernity, had remained important
in law into the 1990s, again producing apparently cruel judgements. In Sion v.
Hampstead Health Authority (1994), for instance, a mother’s claim for psychiatric ill-
ness was disallowed because her son’s condition deteriorated slowly into coma and
eventual death: it was not speedy enough to be shocking. Nervous shock had been
retained in the main to establish an immediate causation to the event itself; the
report considered that courts and juries were now able to understand the more
complex and variegated causations, the strange time delays or displaced symp-
toms, often typical of trauma-related psychiatric disorders. ‘What matters is not
the label on the trigger for psychiatric damage, but the fact and foreseeability of
psychiatric damage’, said one judge at the Frost appeal, recommending that nerv-
ous shock be disregarded (cited Mullany and Handford 1997: 412). The legal cat-
egory of ‘recognisable psychiatric illness’ itself also needed some consideration:
the diagnostic grid of PTSD had become the legal standard, ignoring and some-
times dismissing other psychological reactions to trauma, such as debilitating
depression or anxiety. Nevertheless, the report considered it impossible to define
by statute what a ‘recognisable psychiatric illness’ could be. The flexibility of case
law would have to shadow-box with the protean nature of trauma itself.
Legal discussions often contain deferential gestures to psychiatric expertise.
Considering Frost, Lord Steyn reaffirmed that ‘Only recognisable psychiatric
32 Aetiology
harm ranks for consideration. Where the line is to be drawn is a matter for expert
psychiatric evidence’ (cited Weir 2000: 108). Yet these knowledges have remained
consistently in tension. The English Law Commission ultimately recognized that
legal definitions of trauma would never be compatible with official psychiatric
diagnostics, which were in any case insufficiently ‘mature’ to make good law. In
2004, yet another report, this time for the Scottish Law Commission called Damages
for Psychiatric Injury, was received with frustration in some quarters because it
‘prefers flexible, fact-oriented restrictions to bright-line, “legal” rules’. Psychiatry
had over-influenced the commissioners, where ‘in the world of litigation, certainty
matters’ (Nolan 2005: 995).
Tort is only one area in which trauma has come into contentious contact with the
law. The most dramatic and controversial cases derive from the ways in which
PTSD has been deployed within criminal law. Traumatic stressors are said to
produce long-term behavioural transformation, including loss of impulse control,
violent over-reactions, forms of dissociation or other amnesiac states. Each of these
has been the basis of defences that post-traumatic stress undermines intent, the legal
requirement of mens rea for any criminal act (for the English context see Adshead
and Mezey 1997). PTSD thus fuses, in English law, with the McNaughton rules on
insanity, or claims for diminished responsibility as a result of suffering a recognized
‘abnormality of mind’. There is more controversy around dissociation or ‘automa-
tism’ pleas, in which trance or other automatic states are argued to be the result of
prior traumatization, and thus suspend the defendant’s will from any criminal act
committed during the fugue. Some of these defences have been successful: in 1990,
for instance, a woman claimed to be in a state of acute PTSD following a rape and
was thus without criminal responsibility for stabbing a man to death three days later.
Prolonged and violent physical abuse of women has made some headway as a
defence for their reactive violence, although courts demand clear lines of causation
that such cases of ‘complex PTSD’ often resist (see Herman 1992). These argu-
ments echo the famous legal disputes in the late nineteenth century around crimi-
nal responsibility, hysteria and hypnotism, when a series of legal cases were the
public stage for rival psychological theories. In 1890, Gabrielle Bompard’s defence
against murder was that she had been hypnotized and compelled to act against her
will. ‘Criminal suggestion’, propounded by the psychologist Dr Liégeois at the trial,
relied on the disturbing idea that conscious will and morality could be suspended by
the accomplished hypnotist who could then implant suggestions outside the con-
scious memory of his unwitting subject. Claiming universal applicability – everyone
was suggestible rather than a susceptible few – this theory challenged legal funda-
mentals about responsibility and was dismissed (Laurence and Perry 1988). This
trial, however, was one of a number that brought ideas of the buried suggestion,
hidden compulsion and dissociated strands of multiple memory into the public
realm. Liégeois learnt that the conception could not be controlled by his medical
expertise but became sensationalized as it circulated through ‘medico-legal experts,
political theorists, and the public alike’ (Harris 1985: 232).
The sensational criminal trials concerning trauma since PTSD tend to be those
centred on the recovered memory of sexual abuse that have taken place in
 The genealogy of a concept 33
America. In the early 1990s, courts seemed prepared to accept that a traumatic
reaction to abuse could be a blanket ‘dissociative amnesia’ of the event which
might only be recovered many years later, often by hypnotic recovery techniques.
Some psychiatric experts testified to this effect, and argued that the statute of
limitations for prosecutions needed to be lifted, and the ‘delayed discovery’ rule
has been adopted in a number of states. The landmark recovered memory case
was the prosecution of George Franklin in California in 1990 for a murder com-
mitted in 1969, sole proof of which came in the form of memories recovered by
his daughter under hypnosis. Despite competing psychiatric views on the plausi-
bility of these recovered memories, Franklin was found guilty. Other prosecutions
followed, including the imprisonment of Paul Ingrams for ritual abuse of his
daughters that they had recovered, and of which Ingrams himself had no con-
scious memory until hypnotized (see Wright 1994). By the mid-1990s, however,
most courts had become sceptical of total amnesiac loss, and Franklin’s prosecu-
tion was overturned in 1995. Psychiatric research contesting blanket repressed
memory has compromised its use in the law courts. Judgements in California
(Engstrom v. Engstrom 1997), Rhode Island (State of Rhode Island v. Quattrocchi 1999)
and Massachusetts (Commonwealth v. Frangipane 2001) have all argued that because
recovered memory is a site of psychological controversy, it is not legally admissi-
ble. In Jane Doe et al. v. A Joseph Maskell (Maryland 1996), the court refused to rec-
ognize that repression had been proven to be a distinct memory mechanism (see
Loftus and Davis 2002 and Memon and Young 1997 for discussions).
Part of the problem in these cases has been the place of the psychiatric expert
in the adversarial legal system. In the 1920s, the Frye rule established that expert
testimony had to be ‘generally accepted’ in a particular specialism. This was
changed by Federal Rules of Evidence in 1974, since Frye was felt to be too nar-
row and exclusionary. A new bias emerged ‘in favour of admission of relevant evi-
dence … leaving it to the jurors to decide between competing experts’ (Shuman
2003: 6). Different theories could now be recruited adversarially, and the situation
developed further with the 1993 Supreme Court ruling in Daubert v. Dow
Pharmaceuticals, which reinforced the view that admissibility, to be determined by
the judge, depended on ‘the quality and adequacy of methodology and the theo-
retical soundness on which the expert’s opinion was based’ (Wilson and Moran
2004: 618). Now entirely incompatible theories of trauma had greater chances of
receiving a legitimate hearing: it emphasized the extent to which trauma was not
a ‘matter of fact’, as Latour puts it, but a ‘matter of concern’, an enigmatic thing
that prompts perplexity, debate and contested opinion (Latour 2004: 66). It
remains the case the psychiatric experts can be found to support the position that
traumatic memory is either a highly specific and accurate form of memory regis-
tration or, on the contrary, an unusually malleable form of interpretive memory.
Although there are a growing number of handbooks for psychologists giving
expert testimony (see, for instance, Simon 2003), most recognize a fundamental
incompatibility between legal and psychological discourse on trauma. Michael
Trimble despairs at the legal view that causation must be understood on the meas-
ure of the man in the street: ‘very often the man in the street is incorrect, linking
34 Aetiology
in a causal way things which scientifically have been shown to be non-causal.
Perhaps nowhere is this more common than when linking accidents to subsequent
medical symptoms’ (Trimble 1981: 133). Yet the authority of psychology, partic-
ularly in relation to the natural sciences, is not always secure. As the new discipline
took shape in the latter half of the nineteenth century, trauma was commonly at
the heart of the controversies that attended its emergence. Let’s now turn to this.

Trauma in psychology 1870–1914

The metaphorical drift of ‘trauma’ from physical damage to psychical wounding
took place at the time when the treatment of the insane was transformed by new
paradigms in psychology. This is not a straightforward story in which the
Victorian physicalist model is displaced by a modern psychogenic one. Rather,
there were new biological and neurological resources that were used to reinforce
the somatic origins of mental illness, and these arrived at exactly the same time
(in the 1870s and 1880s) that different groups of psychological researchers began
to argue the radical case for a largely psychodynamic model of mind. As a result,
the causes and consequences of trauma remained a matter of dispute between
rival theories up to the onset of the Great War, when shell shock once more rein-
vented the terms of the debate.
In 1900, Charles Dana rehearsed the history of railway accidents and their
effects on the nerves, explaining that the idea of ‘concussion of the spine’ had
now been displaced by the term traumatic neurosis. This had been theorized by the
German–Jewish psychiatrist Hermann Oppenheim in 1889. True to form,
Oppenheim had studied the cases of railway and industrial accidents, and had
concluded that the consequent symptoms were the result of ‘molecular changes
in the central nervous system’ or in the ‘vascular system of the brain’ (Oppenheim
1911: 1171). This was not a simple reduction to the physical, however.
Oppenheim used the term neurosis because he regarded the symptoms as func-
tional rather than organic disorders – that is, as disorders of the action of the nerv-
ous system, not of the structure of the nerves themselves. These were transient
rather than permanent disorders and thus treatable. He also recognized the emo-
tional effect of shock was responsible for the majority of symptoms. Nevertheless,
like Erichsen, Oppenheim’s theory was roundly attacked and accused of legiti-
mating fraudulent claims of malingerers and the weak-willed: unfortunately
Oppenheim’s monograph coincided with the decision of Bismarck’s Imperial
Insurance office to compensate workers for post-traumatic neurosis. A witch-hunt
against Rentenneurose (pension neurosis) left Oppenheim later recalling that in
Germany ‘the traumatic neurosis was everywhere expunged and tabooed’, and
his work vilified as crude somatic reductionism (cited Lerner 2001: 150).
The same term was more successful in France, however, because it was associ-
ated with the most famous European neurologist of the era, Jean-Martin Charcot.
Charcot was director of the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris between 1862 and his
death in 1893, turning a vast rambling holding centre for misfits and the crimi-
nally insane into a laboratory for the systematic study of mental illness, ‘a sort of
 The genealogy of a concept 35
living pathological museum whose resources are almost inexhaustible’ (Charcot 1991:
3). In 1876, Charcot had offered his codification of la grande hystérie, using pho-
tography and other modern technologies to determine the progressive stages of a
hysterical attack. His report to the Academie des Sciences in 1882 confirming the
clinical existence of hypnotism transformed a phenomenon previously associated
with fringe science, stage tricks and mesmeric charlatans into an orthodox med-
ical pursuit. In the mid-1880s, Charcot began to examine cases of névrose trauma-
tique in male patients. In his Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, Charcot
presented six cases of male hysteria, linking directly to debates around the nature
of railway spine, since the men’s symptoms were all sequelae to industrial acci-
dents, ‘serious and obstinate nervous states which present themselves after colli-
sions’ (Charcot 1991: 221). Charcot’s aggressive materialism was evident in his
persistent reduction of Catholic women saints to hysterics; here, the provocation
was in asserting that hysteria could be found in men, since the disease was ety-
mologically and historically associated only with women. Male hysteria lay ‘often
unrecognised, even by very distinguished physicians’ (Charcot 1991: 221), in part
because male symptoms – in contrast to women – tended to be persistent, stub-
born and stable and were therefore mistaken as organic illnesses. In acknowledg-
ing the existence of these cases, Charcot was ‘alive to the disturbing effects of the
work environment on the mental and physical health of the Parisian men’ (Harris
1991: xxxi), and played to the ‘widespread social perception that rapid, unre-
strained change may be disease-inducing’ (Micale 2001: 138–9). Even ‘robust
men presenting all the attributes of the male sex’, Charcot asserted, could be dis-
aggregated by the traumatic accident (Charcot 1991: 99). Trauma thus found
itself plugged into Charcot’s monumental taxonomy of hysterias.
The conditions presented the familiar mysterious trajectory. Minor accidents
were capable of flowering into an elaborate range of contractures, paralyses,
fainting, fugue states, or amnesia. ‘The Salpêtrière’s brand of trauma dealt in
quite simple scenes’ (Didi-Huberman 2003: 153) – a blacksmith burns his arm, a
razor slips, there is a fall on the stairs. ‘It is usual for these diseases to localise
themselves at first in parts where the wound, the contusion, or the sprain is pro-
duced’ (Charcot 1991: 33). The functional disorder propped itself on the initial
physical wound, but then seemed to use this opening to travel through the nerv-
ous system and to develop diffuse and varied organic manifestations. Charcot
noted that the contractures and paralyses could not be mapped onto the known
physical distribution of the nerves: they were fantasies of how the body worked.
These were therefore hysterical symptoms, ‘psychical paralyses’: ‘observe, I do not
say imaginary paralyses, for indeed these motor paralyses of psychical origin are as
objectively real as those depending on an organic lesion’ (Charcot 1991: 289).
Psychical factors were also emphasized with the disturbances of memory.
Accidents could produce traumatic retrograde amnesia (Charcot 1991: 376), where sig-
nificant chunks of time prior to and including the accident were lost. Salpêtrière
doctors also studied anterograde amnesia in which the capacity to create new
memories were lost in the wake of the traumatic event (see Janet 2001). As with
Erichsen, Page and the legal discussion of nervous shock, Charcot confirmed that
36 Aetiology
along with the injury, there is a factor which most probably plays a much
more important part in the genesis of the symptoms than the wound itself. I
allude to the fright experienced by the patient at the moment of the accident.
(Charcot 1991: 231)

For all this emphasis, Charcot regarded any hysterical symptom as ultimately a
marker of an inherited biological weakness. Hereditary physiological traits were
the precondition, the explanation for why certain people could survive extreme
events unscathed whilst others become irrecoverable hysterics over a mild distress.
Charcot’s case histories always situated a patient in a family history, a network of
biological disorders – a nervous father, an asthmatic mother, an epileptic great-
uncle, children with hystero-epilepsy, and so on. These cases play out the logic of
degeneration, the theory that any morbid deviation from normal behaviour
would produce biological consequences that would rapidly ramify through suc-
cessive generations. An alcoholic or epileptic parent might spawn sexually deviant
children, say, and then grandchildren who were criminally insane. Degeneration
theory, a precipitous descent down the evolutionary ladder, was coined by
Auguste Morel in 1857. By the late nineteenth century, it was ‘so pervasive and
seductive … that it was all but impossible to avoid’ (Greenslade 1994: 8). It was a
loose schema or generative metaphor that could organize materials as diverse as
sea squirts, decadent artists, rebellious working classes, African natives, the crimi-
nal residuum, and virtually every mental disorder (see Chamberlain and Gilman
1985). Charcot claimed that 70 per cent of his male traumatic hysterics suffered
from maternal ‘heredity of similitude’ – that is, hysterical mothers begat hysteri-
cal sons with identical symptoms (Charcot 1991: 85). For Charcot, physical injury
and psychical shock were immediate causes, but had flowered with the proper
hereditary conditions. Traumatic neurosis was a conjuncture where the accident
met destiny, modernity met blood.
This physicalist model matched the dominant thinking in English alienism too.
From about 1870, the enlightenment hope that moral management might cure or
ameliorate lunacy tended to be replaced with a stark biological determinism.
Although there was held to be a psychophysical parallelism between body and
mind, mental powers were regarded as the latest evolutionary addition and thus
able to control the lower, animalistic impulses and instincts of the body. Mental
illness was a failure of the will to command, in which the mind became subordi-
nate to morbid states of the brain: ‘Diseased physical processes as it were spilled
over from their ordinary sphere of action in the physical organism into the nor-
mally separate and closed domain of mind’ (Clark 1981: 276). The course of
‘cerebro-psychical dissolution’ was simple: it was

the reverse process to that of nervous evolution. The highest and latest-
evolved nervous arrangements, being the most unstable, are the first to be
thrown hors de combat by the inroads of general cerebral disease: the successive
changes of dissolution retrace the path followed by those of evolution.
(Sully 1892: 321)
 The genealogy of a concept 37
The pioneering neurologist Hughlings Jackson was open about the conse-
quences of this: ‘Psychical symptoms are to medical men only signs of what is
wrong in a material system’ (cited Clark 1981: 283). The manifest symptoms were
insignificant since they were epiphenomenal, pointing to an underlying somatic
pathology. As the leading alienist Henry Maudsley attested in Body and Will, nor-
mal psychological health was a ‘physiological conception of a number of confed-
erated nerve-centres’ (Maudsley 1883: 259). The ego or Self was not
metaphysical, but a result of ‘the objective synthesis or unity of the organism’
(Maudsley 1883: 315). If the will was ‘the last expression of an hierarchical co-
ordination of tendencies’ then ‘dissolution of the will is the absence of co-ordi-
nation, which terminates in independent, irregular and anarchical action’ (Ribot
1892: 1367–8). In Maudsley’s view, illness was always a disaggregation of this
unity, an unbinding of this synthesis into separate parts, and he speculated that
moral alienation was the result of ‘minute molecular changes’ in the brain
(Maudsley 1883: 268). Treatment was directed at reunifying and bolstering the
patient’s will, the doctor, if necessary, replacing the patient’s absent or perverted
will with their own severe injunctions (almost literally insisting the patient ‘pull
themselves together’ behind a unified will). In contrast to psychotherapeutic prac-
tice, doctors nearly uniformly resisted engaging with the precipitating traumatic
causes of illness. James Crichton-Browne aimed to ‘withdraw the patient’s mind
from the contemplation of an objectionable and painful past and from ferreting
out verminous reminiscences, and to occupy it with prospective duties and whole-
some pursuits’ (cited Clark 1981: 300). Hermann Oppenheim similarly suggested
that in cases of traumatic neurosis it was best ‘to convince the injured man that
neglect of his nervous troubles is the most effective means of getting rid of them’
(Oppenheim 1911: 1179). Yet treatment was also necessarily circumscribed by
heredity, since the dissolution of the will was likely predetermined by an inherent
weakness that waited in the blood to seize on a moment of trauma. The degen-
erative taint could not be removed; it banished cure.
The marginal status of mad-doctors and alienists in Victorian society has been
well recorded. For Nature, the official organ of the new science professionals, psy-
chology was ‘the science furthest removed from the reach of experimental means
and inductive method’ and was therefore the science ‘which has longest remained
in the trammels of … metaphysical thought’ (‘Charles Darwin’ 1882: 169). This
led to an anxiety to prop itself on authoritative discourses like biology. Yet this had
contradictory results, as historian Janet Oppenheim observes. ‘Psychiatry could
assume the status of science only if it embraced a somatic model of mental alien-
ation, tracing the roots of that disorder to some lesion or malfunction of the
body’, yet the more they insisted on their status as physiologists, the more they
ceded their authority to other disciplines and ‘contributed to the dilemma that
challenged their professional identity’ (Oppenheim 1991: 35 and 38). From the
1890s, neurological advances recategorized illnesses such as epilepsy and syphilitic
paralyses from the psychological to the definitively physiological realm. Neurones
were isolated in 1891. The structure of the synapse was described in 1897, end-
ing many vague speculations about mental action (see Black 1981). Hormones, a
38 Aetiology
term coined in 1905, became the basis for a new specialism, endocrinology, where
chemical explanations were developed for the complex physiological effects of
shock. Adrenalin was isolated in 1915: the release of adrenalin into the blood
stream in situations of extreme stress has been central to most subsequent physi-
ological theories of trauma, culminating in PTSD. No wonder that when shell-
shock patients were first received by the neurology elite of London’s Queen
Square from 1915, psychological assessments and treatments were regarded as an
utter irrelevance (see Shephard 2000: 112ff).
This physiological trajectory for traumatic neurosis rendered some psychologi-
cal speculations redundant. Yet trauma was also fundamentally retheorized in
another strand of psychology that emerged in the 1870s and this was also to have
enduring consequences. Psychodynamic theories in the main flatly refused to prop
themselves on a physiological explanation: trauma was to be understood intrapsy-
chically, as a disorder of the mental economy alone. The range of psychodynamic
theories has long been hidden by the tendency to focus solely on the psycho-
analysis pursued by Freud from the 1890s, but this has recently changed with revi-
sionist histories of psychology. This is vital, because the shadings of contemporary
trauma theory can only be grasped by excavating this history. I want to outline
four areas of psychodynamic theory that have had an impact on how psychic
trauma has been theorized: the psychotherapeutics of suggestion associated with
the Nancy School; theories of double personality; the model of dissociation devel-
oped by Pierre Janet; and lastly the psychogenic theory of traumatic hysteria
proposed by Freud.
European psychology in the 1880s became engulfed in a controversy that
demanded a declaration of one’s alliance either to Charcot’s Salpêtrière or the
Nancy School, associated with the professor of psychiatry at Nancy University,
Hippolyte Bernheim. Charcot confirmed his theory of predisposition in hysteria
experimentally, by artificially inducing the same symptoms with the use of his
newly minted technique, hypnosis. For Charcot, only those predisposed to neu-
rotic disaggregation were susceptible to hypnosis. Hypnosis was ‘an artificially
induced morbid condition – a neurosis – because there is not, so far as we know,
any anatomical lesion … This neurosis discloses itself almost always on the soil
predisposed by hysteria’ (Charcot and Tourette 1892: 606). In contrast, the Nancy
School argued that the hypnotic condition could be induced universally, regard-
less of predisposition, and that in this trance state everyone was highly susceptible
to suggestion. Hypnotic suggestion could be used therapeutically to cure or ame-
liorate hysterical and other symptoms because it was an ideodynamic mechanism,
‘an act by which an idea is introduced into the brain and accepted by it’: ‘The psy-
chic centre actively intervenes to transform the impression into an idea and to
elaborate it; each idea suggests other ideas, and these ideas are transformed into
sensations, emotions, and various images’ and finally become bodily states or acts
(Bernheim 1980: 18 and 22). This replaced any physiological explanation with a
‘purely psychologic’ theory (Bernheim 1980: 50); indeed, Bernheim charged that
Charcot’s distinct physical stages of hypnosis were not objective bodily states at all
but the products of the great man’s own suggestion (for a history of this dispute,
 The genealogy of a concept 39
see Gauld 1992). By 1889, Bernheim’s ‘psycho-therapeutic’ was being applied to
describe ‘all therapy which cures by the intermediary of the psychic functions of
the patient’ (Shamdasani 2005: 6). This method spread throughout Europe,
although always as a minority practice. The first serious works on hypnosis in
England produced around 1890 were all notably sympathetic toward Bernheim
(Tuckey 1889, for instance).
Bernheim produced an ideational, psychical theory of mental disorders. These
derived from a dysfunction of the attention: it was as if the mind narrowed itself
around a particular idea, and this idée fixe became a dam behind which pooled a
host of associated ideas that developed into unhealthy clusters that might then be
converted into neurotic symptoms. Suggestion worked because Bernheim regarded
hypnosis (in accord with James Braid, the man who invented the term) as a way
of artificially inducing the same narrowed attention, but which instead could be
targeted on unblocking idées fixes and allowing psychic energy to flow once more.
This is clearly a nascent theory for the psychical understanding and treatment of
trauma, the distressing event whose psychic imprint fixes itself in the mind in an
unassimilated way, becoming the locus for a host of disorders. Yet these early psy-
chotherapeutic writings were less interested in the cause, the precipitating trauma
as it were, than in detailing the consequences, the astonishing psychical phenomena
that came as sequelae.
The most sensational cases of this psychological literature were those patients
who suffered dédoublement de la personalité. It seemed that some hysterics developed
a distinct, double state where their personality was transformed more or less
coherently for sustained periods of time. A central case was ‘Félida X’ who had
been studied by the French doctor Eugène Azam for seventeen years, publishing
her case history in 1875. Félida was a morbid hysteric who suffered chronic nerv-
ous pains, debility and depression. An hysterical ‘crisis’ (or seizure) would turn her
into a relatively functional young woman again, more sociable and femininely
demur, before another crisis would her return her to her primary state. Over the
years, these successive personalities altered their relation, so that the second state
grew more dominant – she married and became pregnant in the second state, for
instance. A third state appeared irregularly: a condition of abject terror (see Binet
1977, Crabtree 1994, Hacking 1995). This case was taken up in psychotherapeu-
tics because it was discovered that the crisis that switched personalities could be
artificially induced by hypnosis and directed by suggestion. More fundamentally,
double personality was regarded as an intrapsychic problem, a disease of memory.
Félida had a complete amnesia about her second state, experiencing her life in her
first state as a series of discontinuous jump cuts. Yet the second personality was
not amnesiac; it knew and commented on the condition of the first. The
Salpêtrière doctor Alfred Binet suggested that secondary states might be more
sensitive and intelligent than normal consciousness: perceptual powers seemed
enhanced, memory recall seemed to be astonishingly accurate and well beyond
normal capacities. For the English writer Frederic Myers, who coined the term
‘multiplex personality’ for these cases, they even suggested a way in which ‘moral
sentiments can be improved’ (Myers 1886: 657). Hysterics revealed ‘the nascent
40 Aetiology
art of self-modification’, and hypnosis might artificially induce a national ‘moral-
isation’ if effectively employed (Myers 1886: 656). These statements were of
course a complete anathema to the dominant physicalist idea of psycho-physio-
logical unity and the singular will. The case of Félida X disturbingly inverted the
values ascribed to the normal and the pathological.
The historian Ian Hacking has provokingly argued that Multiple Personality
Disorder (MPD) was invented on 27 July 1885 when Louis Vivet entered the health
system and became the subject of intensive psychiatric experimentation (Hacking
1995). Vivet was a patchwork of as many as eight separate personalities, each with
its own hysterical symptoms, and each with its own distinct memory chain. Vivet
had been in and out of houses of correction, schools and prisons since the age of
eight. He could veer between the respectful and modest boy to the criminal delin-
quent, the paraplegic hysteric, or the atheistic radical. Most states possessed no
consciousness or memory of the others. Two doctors began to experiment with
hypnotic suggestion, drawing out different personalities from the boy. Their
methods (an old Mesmeric one, using magnets) became the subject of a book and
a controversy, drawing more doctors to the study, more experimentation, and the
discovery of yet more personalities. Hundreds of pages, written by over twenty
experts, were devoted to Louis in the late 1880s. Intriguingly, there are glimpses of
the origin of these successive crises and personality transformations. According to
Myers, at the age of fourteen a fright at seeing a viper began his serious hystero-
epileptic ‘oscillations’. Yet any interest in the traumatic origin is quickly displaced
by a concern to trace its hysterical effects: ‘A sudden shock, falling on an unstable
organisation, has effected in this boy a profounder severance between the functions
of the right and left hemispheres of the brain’ (Myers 1886: 651). The fascination
lay in the way the boy became literally sinister, left-handed and morally dissolute.
He switched sides like the great alternating personality that Myers had written on
earlier in 1886: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (see Luckhurst 2006b). In what Adam
Crabtree calls the ‘alternate-consciousness paradigm’, it is the bizarre state of split-
ting and not the traumatic trigger that is the focus.
In contrast, contemporary theories of MPD centre specifically on the inaugu-
ral trauma, and overwhelmingly (in 97 per cent of cases) identify that trauma as
child sexual abuse. Abuse acts as the shattering event that lies buried and forgot-
ten, yet pristinely preserved, somewhere in a fragmentary ‘alter’ personality. The
event is teased out with recovered memory techniques, including hypnotic recov-
ery, from the shards of isolated and amnesiac selves (the average number of alter
personalities reached twenty-four by the end of the 1980s). For Ian Hacking,
‘memory has always had political or ideological overtones, but each epoch has
found its own meaning in memory’ (Hacking 1995: 200). MPD presents ‘a poli-
tics of the secret, of the forgotten event that can be turned, if only by strange
flashbacks, into something monumental’ (Hacking 1995: 214).
The case of Louis Vivet displays how suggestion works not just on the hysteri-
cal patient but on their doctors too. Louis learnt fast that psychiatric attention
intensified with the dramatic performance of splitting. This is not at all to judge
that the boy faked his personalities, but that the new label of ‘double personality’
 The genealogy of a concept 41
actively guided his symptom formation: it was iatrogenic. This mutual act of
invention between doctor and patient is typical of anything involving hypnosis, for
any trance state not only abolishes will it also ‘overturns the ordinarily accepted
borders between “self ” and “other”’ (Borch-Jacobsen 1993: 100). In this intersti-
tial space, where suggestibility uncannily bridges between doctor and patient, the
therapeutic conviction of the former can be communicated to the latter, and mir-
rored back, as if in objective confirmation but in fact as a form of ‘dynamic nom-
inalism’, where ‘a kind of person … came into being at the same time as the kind
itself was being invented’ (Hacking 1986: 228). Many significant psychodynamic
theorists before the Great War had their own Louis, a case of ‘double personal-
ity’ that bewildered and entranced them. Pierre Janet began experiments with
Léonie, who soon became Léonie I, II and III. There were various attempts to
hypnotize her at a distance, including across the English Channel. Richard von
Krafft-Ebing studied Ilma S. an hystero-epileptic woman who exhibited ‘three dif-
ferent spheres of consciousness [that] never intersect’ and who had been rendered
profoundly suggestible by over-hypnosis (Krafft-Ebing 1889: 125). Krafft-Ebing
was persuaded her criminal acts had been committed under the suggestion of an
unknown hypnotist. William James spent years investigating Mrs Piper, a Boston
medium who had developed psychic sensitivity after a traffic accident affected her
nerves. He was forever unable to decide if her spirit guides and trance selves were
psychological or supernatural phenomena. Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a
Personality (1919) was the product of six years researching Sally Beauchamp, whose
multiple personalities presented ‘a virtual typology of early-twentieth-century
concepts of the feminine’ that Prince believed began to emerge after the trau-
matic death of her mother in 1893 (Leys 1992: 182).
The brief life-story of modern MPD shows an accelerated form of this dynamic
nominalism. Considered an extremely rare disorder, with perhaps only two hundred
extant cases, it was nevertheless included in DSM-III in 1980. A diagnostic explo-
sion followed, and by 1989 it was regularly claimed that one in twenty of the
American population had some form of multiplicity. By 1994, MPD sufferers num-
bered exactly zero: it was replaced in DSM-IV with a newly named disorder, meant
to carry less emphasis on discrete alter personalities: Dissociative Identity Disorder.
The sceptical commentator Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen commented that year

their hypnotic technique is extremely directive or manipulative, and it is

difficult to avoid the comparison with modern technology: patients are
“switched” like television channels; elements of trauma are decomposed and
recomposed as easily as “processing” words on a computer … . Multiple
personality is an epidemic, and psychiatrists are its vectors.
(Borch-Jacobsen 1994: 52)

This passage in the vagaries of the contemporary trauma paradigm was a

direct repetition of the ‘diseases of memory’ explored before 1914.
In MPD the trigger is a traumatic event, but the mechanism of psychic defence,
the agency that creates the ‘splitting’ of personality, is dissociation. This derives from
42 Aetiology
Pierre Janet’s work on psychological automatism which he conducted in the 1880s
and 1890s. Janet’s work had largely been forgotten, yet Henri Ellenberger’s mon-
umental history of psychodynamic psychiatry recovered Janet in 1969, arguing
that ‘Janet stands at the threshold of all modern dynamic psychiatry. His ideas have
become so widely known that their true origin is often unrecognised’ (Ellenberger
1994: 406). Ellenberger’s essay prompted a full-scale revival in the 1980s when
Janet became central to psychological trauma theories. In a formative paper, Frank
Putnam declared that it was Janet that ‘made the connection between dissociative
psychopathology and traumatic experiences’ and was one of the first to ‘concep-
tualize dissociative reactions occurring in the context of acute trauma as an adap-
tive process that protects the individual and allows him to continue to function,
though often in an automaton-like state’ (Putnam 1999: 116 and 120).
Although Janet was appointed to the Salpêtrière by Charcot in 1890 after the
publication of Psychological Automatism, Janet emphasized the psychological ele-
ments of hysteria, which he described as ‘an ensemble of maladies through rep-
resentation’ (Janet 1901: 488). Part of Janet’s later marginalisation came from the
aggressive stance he took against ‘the current physiological hypothesis’: ‘I consider
the pretended physiological conditions as mere translations of the psychological
ideas’ (Janet 1907: 322–3). His preferred general term, psychasthenia, deliberately
displaced any traces of the nervous physiology that survived in the more familiar
usage neurasthenia. Nevertheless, a disease of memory had to combine with
affect: ‘Hystericals have not only fixed ideas; they have also persistent emotions,
and emotions are complex states of the whole organism in which both the physi-
ological and psychological phenomena are intimately blended’ (Janet 1901: 513).
He was enough of a student of Charcot to affirm that in psychasthenia heredity
would still play ‘a role absolutely preponderant’ (Janet 1901: 516). Despite this, his
emphasis on the non-organic mental realm guaranteed his exclusion from serious
consideration by the physiologists who dominated the Salpêtrière hospital after
Charcot’s death in 1893, where even Charcot was considered dangerously ‘psy-
chological’ in his view of hysteria. Janet moved from the medical environment to
the elite academic College de France in 1902.
Janet’s model worked like this: a particularly shocking moment or event might
produce a defensive response of a narrowing of the field of consciousness. This
would become an idée fixe, held outside the recall memory of the conscious mind.
It would accrue its own memory chain and associations, becoming a ‘new system,
a personality independent of the first’ (Janet 1901: 492). It was this act of splitting
that created a double self, something that coalesced around the subconscious fixed
idea. The subconscious (Janet’s coinage) was not structural, then, but a specific
product of traumatic hysteria: ‘It is a special moral weakness consisting in the lack
of power on the part of the feeble subject to gather, to condense, his psychologi-
cal phenomena, and assimilate them to his personality’ (Janet 1901: 502).
Something of this lies behind current theories of traumatic dissociation, although
Janet dropped the term quite early in his career. One contemporary survey has
confessed that the usage of dissociation now ‘lacks a single, coherent referent or
conceptualisation’ (Cardena 1994: 15).
 The genealogy of a concept 43
Janet’s case histories detail a range of ‘mental accidents’ or ‘traumatic shocks’
that produce diseases of memory. ‘The most common accidents of hysteria’, he
argued, ‘should be interpreted in the same way as the accidents of traumatic hys-
teria’ (Janet 1901: 496). Intense emotions direct the routes of organic and nerv-
ous manifestations, but Janet was strikingly uninterested in thinking about the types
of event that might result in such exorbitant reactions, presumably because it was
predisposition rather than the nature of the trauma that resulted in dissociative
sequelae. Justine developed hysterical symptoms after glimpsing the corpse of a
cholera victim in China; Irène’s amnesia blocked out any knowledge of her
mother’s death. Mrs D. was jokingly told that her husband had been killed,
prompting a hysterical crisis, retrograde amnesia and anterograde memory loss,
in which ‘every impression skated over her without leaving the smallest trace’
(Janet 2001: 487). The woman bore no apparent memory of her incarceration
in the Salpêtrière for many months, nor her star turn for Charcot’s lecture-
demonstrations of 1891, nor of a subsequent traumatic event, an attack by a dog.
Yet her phobic reactions to dogs suggested the memory was registered subcon-
sciously, and this indeed proved recoverable by hypnosis. These diseases of
memory were rarely of organic origin, since a subconscious intelligence clearly
worked to ‘determine the choice of things forgotten’ (Janet 1901: 91).
Janet’s most well-known case (undoubtedly because Ellenberger translates it
fully in his history) is the treatment of Marie, a nineteen-year-old girl who suffered
from hysterical seizures with every menstruation, entering severe delirium,
wracked with tremors, imaginary terrors and vomiting blood for 48 hours, before
returning to normal. Janet

put her into a deep somnambulic condition, a state where … it is possible

to bring back seemingly forgotten memories, and thus I was able to find out
the exact memory of an incident which had hitherto been only very incom-
pletely known.
(cited Ellenberger 1994: 362–3)

The buried traumatic scene was her first experience of menstruation. Overcome
with shame, she plunged herself into a bucket of icy water, shocking her body into
stopping bleeding, at the cost of a fever and delirium. Janet concluded,

Every month the scene of the cold bath repeats itself, brings forth the same
stopping of the menstruation and a delirium … But in her normal state of
consciousness, she knows nothing at all about this, not even that the shiv-
ering is brought forth by the hallucination of cold. It is therefore probable
that this scene takes place below consciousness.
(cited Ellenberger 1994: 363)

This case has a very contemporary shape: an inaugural traumatic event of

sexual shame in childhood, followed by dissociation, amnesia and compulsive
re-experiencing of the trauma, the original scene being recovered under hypnosis.
44 Aetiology
It matches contemporary definitions of dissociation: ‘a defensive process in which
experiences are split off and kept unintegrated through alterations in memory
and consciousness, with a resulting impairment of the self ’ (Tillman et al. 1994:
398). Yet Janet’s psychotherapeutic cure is disarmingly non-modern:

I tried to take away from somnambulistic consciousness this fixed and

absurd idea that the menstruation was stopped by a cold bath. At first, I
could not manage to do it; the fixed idea persisted … I tried again: I was
able to succeed only thanks to a singular means. It was necessary to bring
her back, through suggestion, to the age of thirteen, put her back into the
initial circumstances of the delirium, convince her that the menstruation
had lasted for three days and was not interrupted through any regrettable
incident. Now once this was done, the following menstruation came at the
due point, lasted for three days, without any pain, convulsion or delirium.
(Cited Ellenberger 1994: 363)

Delighted by the result, Janet then addressed Marie’s hysterical blindness,

recovering a scene when Marie was six and had to share a bed with a child with
impetigo: ‘I put her back with the child who had so horrified her; I make her
believe that the child is very nice and does not have impetigo …; the sensitivity of
the left eye reappears without difficulty’ (cited Ellenberger 1994: 364). Cure by
this active reinvention was typical: Justine’s traumatic Chinese cholera corpse was
replaced with a positive memory of a Chinese general seen at the Paris Universal
Exposition in 1889; the associations of the very word cholera were attacked and
decomposed. ‘Fixed ideas must be destroyed by means of dissociation or trans-
formation’ (Ellenberger 1994: 373). Trauma was not to be recovered, affirmed,
respected, abreacted, mourned, assimilated, brought to closure – the familiar
language and trajectory of contemporary psychotherapy. Instead, a traumatic
memory was to be manipulated, recomposed or replaced with another sometimes
falsified memory, or else entirely erased. Given the controversies surrounding false
memory and the dangers of therapeutic suggestion, Janet’s defenders tend to
downplay this aspect of his treatment. Yet, for the purposes of healing psycho-
logical distress, Janet had, as Ian Hacking observes, ‘no compunction about lying
to his patients, and creating false memories through which they could deal with
their distress’: his ‘doctrine of psychological trauma, recovered memory, and
abreaction created a crisis of truth’ (Hacking 1995: 196).
It was the unsatisfactory nature of these ‘forcible prohibitions’ or active inter-
ventions that led Freud to abandon hypnotic suggestion in 1896, which he
regarded as one of the founding acts of the invention of psychoanalysis (Freud
1914: 9). Freud became concerned to always distinguish Pierre Janet’s ideas of
mental weakness leading to dissociation from his own model of ‘psychodynamic
factors – of mental conflict and of repression’:

The distinction seems to me to be far-reaching enough to put an end to the

glib repetition of the view that whatever is of value in psychoanalysis is
 The genealogy of a concept 45
borrowed from the ideas of Janet … [H]istorically psychoanalysis is com-
pletely independent of Janet’s discoveries, just as in its content it diverges
from them.
(Freud 1914: 31)

Freud obsessively wrote and rewrote his history, in part to preserve a strong dis-
tinction of psychoanalysis from other therapeutic schools. Janet became a target
after his attack on Freud and psychoanalysis at the 1913 International Congress
of Medicine. Yet Freud’s early work on traumatic hysteria was largely continuous
with the history I have been outlining. My introduction detailed Freud’s impor-
tant role in cultural theories of trauma, despite his intermittent writings on the
subject, so here I intend only to situate him in the context of psychodynamic theories
of trauma before 1914.
Freud, a young doctor training in neurology, visited both Charcot at the
Salpêtrière (in 1885–6) and Bernheim at Nancy (in 1889). His report on Charcot
to the medical authorities that funded his trip situated him at the heart of con-
temporary debates. He praised Charcot’s attempt to organize hysterical symp-
toms scientifically, and was aware ‘that the proposal to regard neuroses arising
from trauma (“railway spine”) as hysteria’ had been opposed by Oppenheim in
Berlin, whose clinic Freud had also visited (Freud 1886: 12). Freud confessed his
‘astonishment’ at the demonstrable powers of hypnosis, but his committee mainly
objected to his passing statements regarding ‘the enormous practical importance
of male hysteria … and particularly of the hysteria which follows upon trauma’
(Freud 1886: 12). This resulted in Freud’s presentation to the Vienna Society of
Medicine of a lecture-demonstration of ‘hemi-anaesthesia in a hysterical male’ –
a traumatic neurosis resultant from a childhood traffic accident. In his
Autobiographical Study Freud recalled this event as an instance of his early margin-
alization from orthodox opinion, although he was merely restaging the work of
Charcot. In an encyclopaedia entry for hysteria in 1888 Freud was an orthodox
follower of Charcot in regarding the illness as a functional disorder that ‘excludes
any suspicion of a material lesion’ (Freud 1888: 48). Predisposition was ‘entirely
in heredity’, however, in keeping with the Salpêtrière stance (Freud 1888: 49). In
the range of current treatments, Freud discusses the work of Oppenheim before
ending with an outline of Joseph Breuer’s technique which aimed to ‘lead the
patient under hypnosis back to the psychical prehistory of the ailment and com-
pel him to acknowledge the psychical occasion on which the disorder in question
originated’ (Freud 1888: 52). Breuer and Freud published their first collaborative
work in 1893, when, Freud later stated, ‘we were completely under the spell of
Charcot’s researches’ (Freud 1895: 44).
The very title of their Preliminary Communication, ‘On the Psychical
Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’, nailed their colours to the mast. The
essay argued for ‘an extension of the concept of traumatic hysteria’ (Freud 1895: 56) from
the well-known cases where the precipitating trauma was an accident. The same
causation, obvious in accidents, could be discovered across the range of other
merely psychical hysterias, Freud and Breuer arguing that ‘any experience which
46 Aetiology
calls up distressing affects – such as those of fright, anxiety, shame, or physical
pain – may operate as a trauma of this kind’ (Freud 1895: 56). They all produced
the same puzzling ‘disproportion between the many years’ duration of the hys-
terical symptom and the single occurrence which provoked it’ (Freud 1895: 54).
Hysteria was psychical because it was a disease of memory, not of the body,
prompting the famous dictum, ‘Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (Freud 1895:
58). Much of what followed appeared to be in keeping with Janet’s work, although
Freud claimed that Breuer’s private treatments anticipated Janet’s published work
by several years. Memories likely to become traumatic were those registered with
an affective intensity that does not fade: an idée fixe. Traumatic memory is charac-
terized by being ‘completely absent from the patient’s memory when they are in a normal
psychical state’ (Freud 1895: 60). Breuer and Freud use the model of ‘dissociation’
or a ‘second consciousness’ that coalesces around ideas ‘cut off from associative
connection with other ideas, but can be associated themselves’ (Freud 1895: 63,
67 and 66). Treatment also seems to follow Janet, subjecting traumatic memory
and attendant affect ‘to associative correction by introducing it to normal consciousness (under
light hypnosis) or by removing it through the physician’s suggestions’ (Freud 1895: 68).
Yet subtle signs of divergence are premonitions of Freud’s theoretical breaks
with Charcot and Janet. The symptom is rarely regarded as a simple sign that leads
transparently back from hysterical effect to traumatic cause. Freud and Breuer dis-
cuss the role of ‘symbolization’ in symptom-formation, and the idea of complex,
overlaid groups of partial traumatic memories, where the symptom is marked by
the sorts of metaphoric and metonymic displacements that become central to The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900). This means originating traumatic scenes have to be
interpreted or translated from a rebus or hieroglyph of puzzling symptoms, rather
than being always necessarily unearthed in pristinely preserved form.
Freud and Breuer expressed some hesitations about whether hysteria could be
ascribed entirely to hereditary predisposition, with a distinction made between
‘dispositional hysteria’ and ‘psychically acquired hysteria’ (Freud 1895: 63). In the later
case histories that make up Studies on Hysteria, this is formulated as an explicit rejec-
tion of Janet’s view of ‘abnormal restriction of the field of consciousness (due to
hereditary degeneracy)’ (Freud 1895: 166). To ascribe psychical splitting to some
inherent inability to integrate a unitary consciousness is to mistake a psychical
effect of trauma as its biological cause. This opened up the possibility of a new,
purely psychical topography of the mind that was structural and universal rather
than pathological, although the ‘unconscious’ is first used by Breuer in Studies on
Hysteria in uncertain quotation marks in his treatment of Anna O., where the
double personality paradigm is not displaced by its use (Freud 1895: 100).
As a consequence of questioning hereditary predisposition, Freud and Breuer
were much more interested in the types of memory that possess sufficient trau-
matic force to produce symptoms. The scenarios seemed very different: a father’s
death-bed, an inappropriate sexual scene witnessed between a father and
daughter; a yearning for a brother-in-law; a governess’s desire for her employer
obscured beneath ‘the many minor traumas subsidiary to that scene’ (Freud 1895:
183). The speculation that it was ‘some event in childhood that sets up a more or
 The genealogy of a concept 47
less severe symptom which persists during the years that follow’ (Freud 1895: 54)
came into sharp, polemical focus three years later in ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’
where Freud declared that ‘at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or
more occurrences of premature sexual experience’ (Freud 1896: 203). Freud broke with
Breuer over this insistence and also, he thought, with Charcot, Janet and the
entire psychiatric community. Freud held to the conviction that he had uncovered
true scenes of mainly intra-familial sexual activity for two years, before confessing
to Wilhelm Fliess that ‘I no longer believe in my neurotica’, partly by realizing that

there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot

distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect
(Accordingly, there would remain the solution that the sexual fantasy invari-
ably seizes upon the theme of the parents).
(Freud 1985: 264)

Yet for all the polemical writing on this transition after the letters were pub-
lished in 1985, Freud never simply replaced the ‘real event’ with fantasy, truth
with falsity. Rather, he considered traumatic memories as particularly hemmed in
by resistances to being brought into conscious recall, and were thus subject to
multiple tricks of transformation or displacement, intertwining the real and fan-
tasmatic. To some, it was Freud’s ‘terrible Will to Truth’ in pursuing these origi-
nary traumatic scenes (Hacking 1995: 195) that led him into the medical
wilderness by replacing his seduction theory with a more eccentric proposal: uni-
versal infantile sexuality. With this theory trauma now potentially attended every
phase of the fraught journey towards adult sexuality.
Inextricably connected with Freud’s theoretical shift was the decision to stop
any systematic use of hypnosis, since he was concerned to ensure his findings were
not products of therapeutic suggestion. Psychoanalysis announced itself by aban-
doning hypnotic suggestion and the attendant theory that trauma is registered in
some peculiarly receptive ‘hypnoid state’ (light trance or daydream states), an idea
that permeated Studies on Hysteria. In 1910, Freud remembered that he ‘came to
dislike hypnosis, for it was a temperamental and, one might almost say, a mystical
ally’ (Freud 1910: 46). He would instead engage with the patient in the normal
state, wrestling with ‘the force that prevented [forgotten memories] from becom-
ing conscious’ (Freud 1910: 48). The struggle of the conscious mind with what it
knew but did not want to know helped Freud outline his basic psychodynamic
forces:

All these experiences had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse

which was in sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes … There had been
a short conflict, and the end of this internal struggle was that the idea
which had appeared before consciousness as the vehicle of this irreconcil-
able wish fell a victim to repression, was pushed out of consciousness with
all its attached memories and was forgotten.
(Freud 1910: 48–9)
48 Aetiology
Hypnosis actively masked the clinical observation of this conflictual dynamic:
‘It is only if you exclude hypnosis that you can observe resistances and repressions
and form an adequate idea of the truly pathogenic course of events’, he con-
cluded (Freud 1910: 51). That suggestion might still operate outside hypnotic rap-
port and predetermine findings that matched the new theory was not something
that Freud apparently contemplated. Borch-Jacobsen polemically proposes that
the Oedipus complex is nothing more than a ‘hypnotic myth’: ‘In reality, his
patients did their best to confirm his theories, beyond his wildest expectations.
Psychoanalysis is the product of this feedback, the magical fulfilment of its own
property’ (Borch-Jacobsen 1996: 43 and 33).
Most importantly, Freud’s distinct concept of the systematic unconscious devel-
oped in parallel with this change in therapeutic treatment of psychical traumas.
The term unconscious would have been jarringly nonsensical to many of his con-
temporaries, certainly to the predominant psycho-physiological unity of body and
will. How could you ascribe psychical action to what was non-conscious? How
could you suggest this was a foundational element of mental action, rather than
an evidently unhealthy disaggregation? Freud not only opposed the unitary model
that regarded the conscious as co-terminous with all psychical action, but also
objected to the way double or ‘split’ personality was conceived. Janet’s dissocia-
tion worked as if a traumatic impact broke a unified psyche into two or more sim-
ilar parts. Dissociation was a horizontal model, where the self floats away from
coherence into separate islands of consciousness, the subsidiary selves organized
around traumatic memories. Freud’s topography was a vertical model, in which the
psyche is structurally split between conscious and unconscious systems, between
manifest and latent ideas and affects. Manifest contents lay on the surface, acces-
sible to conscious recall; latent contents were buried beneath, yet leaked from
their crypts like ghosts. Hysterical symptoms, dreams, and compulsive behaviours
were hauntings, the signs of something restless and unquiet that was buried but
still demanded witness. In this model, the unconscious ‘designates not only latent
ideas in general, but especially ideas with a certain character, ideas keeping apart
from consciousness in spite of their intensity and activity’ (Freud 1912: 262).
These ideas do not fail to become conscious because they are weak and disor-
ganized, but because they are actively prevented from reaching the surface by
repression. Freud figured repression either as a photographic negative that is pre-
vented from being developed or as a watchman guarding a door: ‘he examines the
different mental impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the draw-
ing-room if they displease him’ (Freud 1916–17: 336). What constitutes material
for repression is everything that conflicts with the restraints of social being: vio-
lent emotions, fantasies of aggression, unbounded wish-fulfilment, sexual desires.
Alongside these internal conflicts, repression also manages the unbounded psy-
chic energy that comes from an external traumatic impact, expelling painful and
unpleasurable memories and affects from the conscious system.
Although deriving from discussions of traumatic neurosis consequent to acci-
dents, Freud massively extended the potential range of the term trauma. Freud’s
conflictual psychodynamic was not a mark of a predisposed pathology, but the
 The genealogy of a concept 49
emergence of the social subject, which came into being through an inherently
traumatic development.
Both extremes of contemporary trauma theory can no longer necessarily be
expected to have read Freud in any detail, if at all. For biologists, the problem
remains that the theory of repression has never gained proof outside Freud’s network
of metaphors for its proposed mechanism. Freud also confessed that his psychic
topography had ‘for the present nothing to do with anatomy’ (Freud 1915: 175)
although he hoped proleptically to align his psychodynamic theory inside an overar-
ching psycho-physiological unity. Similarly, Freud admitted that the mechanism of
repression was ‘a preliminary working hypothesis’, ‘crude and fantastic and quite
impermissible in a scientific account’ (Freud 1916–17: 337). Patricia Kitcher argues
that in biology Freud ‘is widely regarded as the paradigm of bad science, a theory so
obviously false that its proponents must be deluded or devious or perhaps both’
(Kitcher 1992: 153). Kitcher’s own position is more subtle and engaged and there-
fore probably even more devastating: psychoanalysis exemplifies a historical moment
where Darwinian theory provided the fleeting possibility of a complete interdiscipli-
nary science, a nineteenth-century vision superseded long before Freud’s death yet
which he stubbornly pursued. Meanwhile, current psychotherapies of trauma have
often been virulently anti-Freudian and revived Janet and the alternative-consciousness
paradigm in place of psychoanalysis. This is partly related to the scapegoating of
Freud as the patriarch who denied the traumatic realities of his women patients. It
must also be partly to do with the pressure of the requirement in legal and financial
settings to insist on the truth or falsity of the inaugural traumatic event and its rela-
tion to subsequent symptoms: Freud’s intertwining of the real and fantasmatic can’t
survive in a court of law, which demands simpler models of psychical causation. The
ironies of replacing Freud with Janet in both these areas are manifold, given Janet’s
method of cure. But in the end the rejection of Freud must be mainly due to the
transformation of professional psychiatry since the 1970s by neuro-biological drug
treatments and the rise of other therapies, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy.
PTSD is a product of these changes in the 1970s and thus is a psychological catego-
rization that is difficult to reconcile with psychoanalysis at all. What that psychiatric
revolution displaced was the dynamic-conflictual model inaugurated by Freud, a par-
adigmatic model that had begun to dominate psychiatry in the 1920s and now
embodied a metapsychology that needed to be superseded.
Before 1914, Freud and rival schools of psychotherapy were distinctly mar-
ginal. Psychodynamic psychotherapeutics became paradigmatic only as a conse-
quence of treatments during the First World War. This was a strange repetition
of the argument between somatic and psychical theories of trauma, restaged all
over again when the conditions of modernity produced yet another novel means
for escalating instances of male traumatic hysteria: shell shock.

Trauma in the war ecology: Shell shock

In February 1915, the Cambridge academic psychologist and volunteer medic
Charles Myers reported in The Lancet on the cases of three soldiers whose injuries
50 Aetiology
related to being in proximity to shell bursts. His first example was a twenty-year-
old private who had been caught on barbed wire during a retreat, with several
shells exploding close enough to singe his clothes but cause no apparent physical
injury. His symptoms involved blurred and then severely restricted vision, invol-
untary shivering, crying, a loss of taste and smell (but not hearing), and retrograde
and anterograde amnesia. Myers called his paper ‘A Contribution to the Study of
Shell Shock’, and although this was the first time it was used medically, he wrote
as if the term was already in wide circulation. Myers concluded that comment
was ‘superfluous’ but in fact the cases were anomalous. Clearly selected for
injuries produced by proximity to explosions (the second case was buried by a
shell, the third blown off a stack of bricks), Myers nevertheless treated them
unorthodoxly with hypnosis and argued that ‘the close relation of these cases to
those of “hysteria” appears fairly certain’ (Myers 1915: 320). There, in capsule,
was the whole debate about trauma played out again: shell shock was named for
a violent, exterior, physical cause yet also appeared to be an interior, psychical
condition which was often completely detached from any causal connection to
artillery bombardments. Although this confusion of aetiology led to shell shock
being at first displaced and then forbidden as a diagnostic category in 1918,
the term that the official report of the War Office Enquiry termed ‘a grievous
misnomer’ in 1922 persisted and indeed has come to embody the traumatic
experience of the Great War in the collective memory (Report 1922: 4).
Although no reliable statistics exist, an estimated 200,000 British soldiers were
discharged for suffering shell shock. This number increased after the war, peaking
in 1922, although in 1939 the government was still paying £2 million a year in
pensions to psychiatric veterans (see Stone 1985). The shell-shocked soldier is one
of the iconic trauma victims of the twentieth century:

After a variable period of unconsciousness following “shock” the soldier

may recover. If he is not dumb it will be found that his mind is in a state of
confusion; there is both anterograde and retrograde amnesia. He has little
or no idea of time and place, and his powers of recognition and compre-
hension are greatly impaired. He may be deaf or mute or a deaf-mute; it
may be difficult therefore to ascertain what his mental condition is by con-
versation; or, unlike simple pithiatic mutism, he may be unable to write.
The condition of his mind is reflected, however, in his face, for he has a
dazed, stupid, mask-like, mindless expression. He probably assumes an
anergic, crouched or curled-up posture, but he may wander about in an
automatic-like way.
(Mott 1919: 80–1)

The first reports of medics and doctors still manage to evoke the sense of bewil-
derment at the grotesque symptoms displayed in such numbers. The new machineries
of war appeared to be producing a race of bizarrely maladapted creatures.
Despite the sense that 1914 was a profound rupture, there were continuities.
The soldier was ‘an industrial worker of sorts’ (Leese 2002: 4) operating in a
 The genealogy of a concept 51
de-skilled, Taylorized assembly line. The front line was a mechanized factory of
death, like the new efficient abattoirs that could process 200,000 cattle a day (early
rumours on the front included German factories said to render human bodies into
food). The Prussian state had been envisaged as a ‘war machine’ since the 1860s,
and the European imagination was also haunted by the image of mechanized war
as a driverless train, a ‘rudderless modernity’ heading towards catastrophe (Pick
1993: 108). Shell shock was an escalation of the industrial and train accident: it
brought the same problems of diagnosis, management, statistics and compensa-
tion. Soldiers had begun to experience new technologies of war and rapid trans-
port from the American Civil War in the 1860s (see Talbott 1996), and
psychological injuries, sometimes called ‘nostalgia’, had been noted in the Russo-
Japanese war of 1904. The Great War brought mass conscript armies into vast,
static environments of near perpetual bombardment. Shell shock therefore ‘defines
for the first time … mass trauma’, but it also quickly adapted the language of hys-
teria and ‘made a particular idiom of traumatic neurosis’ (Leese 2002: 4 and 2).
All the same, the notion of psychological trauma had to confront totally new
institutional conditions, most obviously a military establishment reluctant to rec-
ognize psychological illness as anything other than simulation or cowardice. To
recognize shell shock was to sanction what one lieutenant-colonel termed ‘a very
contagious source of trouble when it gets into a battalion’ (Report 1922: 66). In mil-
itary structures the individual psyche is irrelevant to collective discipline and the
hierarchy of command. Many of those treating shell shock discovered that mili-
tary psychiatry was an impossible profession, caught between contradictory
imperatives of cure and fitness for return to service. It explains why, from the
Great War to the Gulf Wars, ‘there appears to be a recurring cycle with the war
neuroses: the problem is first denied, then exaggerated, then understood, and,
finally, forgotten’ (Shephard 2000: xxii). War studs the history of trauma with its
own passages of fugue, where everything learnt is wiped away by a reiterative
institutional amnesia.
In 1914, trauma enters a new ecology of industrial and bureaucratically organ-
ized war. Shell shock develops as a dynamic construction between psychology,
neurology, military bureaucracy, technology, the political imperatives of warring
nations and public opinion. For Chris Feudtner, ‘the history of shell shock com-
pels us to think in terms of dynamic permeation, where different elements of the
disease-system interact … continuously recreating the disorder as both an indi-
vidual and a group phenomenon’ (Feudtner 1993: 406). The strongest medical
dynamic, between physical and psychological explanations of shell shock, did not
operate in isolation but around an entity constituted and fought over by multiple
interest groups. Trauma is once more a perplexing hybrid assemblage, rendered
even more fraught in war conditions, an undecided ‘matter of concern’ (in
Latourian terms) rather than sure fact.
The name shell shock was supposed to link causally traumatic impacts on the
body to the effect of bombardment. Germans termed it Granatshock or
Granatkontusion, the French vent du projectile (sometimes translated as ‘windage’),
using the same logic. The physicalist aetiology is principally associated with
52 Aetiology
Sir Frederick Mott, an asylum doctor trained in neurology who had worked under
the pessimistic hereditary determinist Henry Maudsley. Mott had successfully
linked the brain lesions found in ‘general paralysis of the insane’ to the syphilis
bacterium: he studied physical brain changes. Mott’s early work in the war spec-
ulated that shell shock was caused by aerial compression and concussion that pro-
duced shock waves through the incompressible spinal fluid and brain which
resulted in invisible lesions and consequent nervous disorders. This revived
Oppenheim’s aetiology of traumatic neurosis in accidents, and although soon dis-
credited by the vast increase of shell-shock cases (sometimes in training or long
before arrival at the front), it was often clung to as an explanation by soldiers since
it avoided the stigma of mental weakness. A physical wound was not just more
honourable, it was also legitimately compensable: it determined the receipt and
level of pension. Another persistent illness initially presumed to link to the physi-
cal effects of bombardment and the extreme exertions of the trenches was ‘effort
syndrome’ or ‘disordered action of the heart’, known popularly as ‘soldier’s
heart’. Arrhythmia was an unequivocally physical symptom, but it was soon
under suspicion as a psychosomatic illness.
Mott, however, soon added to this ‘commotional’ theory a necessary emotional
component, since it became evident that most shell-shock cases manifested
through functional rather than organic disorders. Psychogenic causes became the
predominant theory after the campaigns that began with the Somme in 1916,
when cases multiplied far beyond the limited capacities of the medical corps and
were clearly a response to Haig’s murderous logic of frontal assault on enemy
lines. Paul Fussell (1985) has influentially argued that the lunacy of these tactics
induced a kind of detached absurdism, but the flight into bodily illness was a dis-
tinctly less detached and controlled response. ‘The Battle of the Somme’, it has
been argued, ‘might also be remembered as marking the point where the moral
order represented by the dichotomy of courage and cowardice had to make way
for a scientific and medical order represented by the idea of neurosis’ (Brown
1995: 506). Whilst Mott was sympathetic to the intense fear and mental pressures
of the front, he was also clear that ‘the vast majority of psycho-neurotic cases
studied were among soldiers who had a neuropathic or psychopathic soil’ (Mott
1919: 110). Determinism returned to outbid the random accidents of war: a weak
hereditary predisposition was to blame. Mott conceded that ‘a combination of
factors is responsible for traumatic shock. There is a great difficulty in differenti-
ating the symptoms of emotional from commotional shock’ (Mott 1919: 22).
Nevertheless, he maintained that a strict use of shell shock was legitimate if it was
‘limited to cases where there is definite evidence of a shell or bomb bursting near
enough to knock the man down or blow him up’ (Mott 1919: 2). In 1917, he
helped introduce the form W3436 which was sent to the commanding officer of
any man claiming shell shock to determine the extent of the ‘exposure to shell
fire’. This decided whether a soldier was considered to be actually wounded or
merely ‘sick’. Yet the battle wound was all too often buried beneath psychogenic
factors that effloresced around a superficial injury. It was just as Charcot had
observed in male traumatic neurotics, in the elaborate hysterical sequelae to
 The genealogy of a concept 53
minor accidents. Given this psychical elaboration, it was quite understandable for
the neurologist Gordon Holmes, who had been in overall charge of Army treat-
ments, to refuse to recognize the existence of shell shock at all (Report 1922: 40).
However, the cultural memory of the Great War is inextricably linked to the
rise of psychodynamic treatments of shell shock. It is striking that the very first
Times reports were titled ‘The Wounded Mind’, pleading that soldiers with ‘dis-
eases and wounds of the mind’ be considered ‘wounded men in a real sense of
that term’ (‘The Wounded Mind’ 1915: 5). In support of Lord Knutsford’s cam-
paign for special hospitals for soldiers, rather than placing them in the pauper asy-
lum system, the Medical Correspondent used a rudimentary psychodynamic
model of mind, the ‘“wounds of consciousness”’ allowing the ‘primitive instincts
and emotions’ of the ‘sub-conscious’ to well up uncontrolled (‘Battle Shock’ 1915:
11). This public sympathy with the mentally wounded soldier, in contrast to the
disciplinarian response of the army, was a marked disjunction. The pressures of
home-front public opinion surely fostered a context in which shell shock was not
always received as a shameful weakness. Doxa became a dynamic element in the
formation of war neuroses just as the literature of the war helped dictate its cul-
tural afterlife. Indeed, Tim Armstrong suggests that many of the formal innova-
tions associated with aesthetic Modernism should be linked with the effect of the
Great War, which marks ‘the entry of notions of trauma as temporal dislocation
and anamnesis (lost memory) into Western consciousness’ (Armstrong 2005: 19).
In the 1990s, shell shock was absorbed into PTSD whilst the British govern-
ment still refused to pardon retrospectively men shot for desertion and cowardice.
The public sympathy towards a particular kind of victimage was consolidated by
Pat Barker’s best-selling Regeneration trilogy (1992–5). The novels are centred on
the anthropologist and Army psychologist W. H. R. Rivers. Rivers treated the
prominent poet Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart, a hospital for officers, osten-
sibly for shell shock, although Sassoon’s stay was largely to avoid a public con-
frontation at a court martial after his public declaration of pacifism and refusal to
return to his regiment. Despite the best efforts of historians to convey the atypi-
cal nature of this treatment (Shephard 1996), Barker’s Regeneration dramatizes a
simple and stark opposition between the vicious physical treatment by electric
shock by the neurologist Lewis Yealland and the sympathetic, analytic-interpre-
tive method pursued by Rivers, one of the earliest, if very cautious, English read-
ers of Freud. Thus Rivers appears as an emissary of our trauma-sensitized
present. Regeneration, intent on ‘remaking the oldest recollections of shell shock’
(Leese 2002: 175), retrofits the Great War with modern trauma theory.
The actual historical situation was as complex as the overlapping and com-
peting versions of psychodynamic theory that I outlined in the previous section
might suggest. Hans Binneveld has usefully proposed three distinct psychological
models for shell shock: nervous exhaustion, suggestion and psychodynamic con-
flict (Binneveld 1997: 90). Nervous exhaustion was an acceptable compromise
formation, implying neurological routes into the body for psychical damage. The
generic terms traumatic or war neuroses existed in the same space. As Charles
Myers emphasized, ‘a shell, then, may play no part whatever in the causation of
54 Aetiology
“shell shock”: excessive emotion, e.g. sudden horror or fear – indeed any
“psychical trauma” or “inadjustable experience” – is sufficient’ (Myers 1940: 26).
Very soon, conversion reactions to the traumas of war were distinguished
between hysterical and neurasthenic responses. Hysteria was a short-term reac-
tion to the extremity of a particular situation. If treated close in time and space
to the front, the soldier could be returned to his unit relatively quickly, whilst
evacuation was likely to turn acute problems into chronic ones. A tang of moral
weakness hung around hysteria: it was associated with new working-class con-
scripts, with Irish cannon-fodder by British commanders and with Jews by the
Germans (see Bourke 2000). Neurasthenia, on the other hand, was the result of
prolonged exposure to the perpetual anxiety of the front, causing nervous ‘wear
and tear’. This anxiety neurosis was typically associated with officers, who were
understood to suffer acceptably under the responsibilities of command and was
considered an understandable collapse, responsive to simple rest and relaxation.
Neurasthenia had survived as a disease-entity without much change from its
coinage by George Beard in 1869 as a problem of over-exciting modernity, and
the cure for officers was the same rest cure advised by Victorian alienists for
bourgeois women.
Charles Myers used these relatively conventional terms, yet his career in the
Army showed the difficulty in employing this basic psychological framework.
Initially refused an army post, and working as a volunteer in France, the crisis in
shell-shock cases rapidly elevated him to chief army specialist in 1915 and
Consultant Psychiatrist to the Army in 1916. He attempted to organize rudimen-
tary training in the identification of functional disorders at forward treatment
centres, but the Royal Army Medical Corps was a backwater, subservient to Army
priorities. Physicalists like Mott and Holmes were higher up the chain of com-
mand, and any organization of psychiatric support was treated with suspicion and
developed only with great reluctance. Myers also evidently used hypnosis, anath-
ema to the neurologist Holmes who would have seen it as only fostering further
mental weakness. Partly at his own request, Myers was returned to the home
front. His reflections on shell shock, which he was only prompted to write by the
onset of the Second World War in the hope of the same mistakes being avoided,
was itself traumatic for Myers: ‘the revival of these long-repressed memories …
has been extremely unpleasant’ (Myers 1940: 141). His case reveals the real lim-
its to the advance of psychodynamic theories of trauma in war conditions.
Suggestion, although a dynamic theory, was more compatible with the physi-
calist suspicion of the weak constitution of the conscript soldier. If shell shock was
a hysteria, then just as idées fixes converted into myriad bodily symptoms in the
individual, so one officially recognized case of shell shock could run through a
whole battalion, moving from soldier to soldier through neuromimesis or simula-
tion. Myers called it a ‘contagious’ term (Myers 1940: 40), and many witnesses to
the War Office Enquiry emphasized that shell shock was clustered in groups and
fostered by weak command. A refusal of officers to release a soldier from the front
line would prevent hysterical contagion. In this discussion, trauma is once more
marked by the now familiar mystery of transpersonal affective transmission.
 The genealogy of a concept 55
In an early understanding of the suggestive power of the mere name of an
illness, Myers was involved in abolishing the very term he had coined. By 1917,
forward medical units categorized the injured with the deliberately undetermined
‘NYD?N’ (Not Yet Diagnosed – Nervous?) in order to restrict a solider fixing on
and elaborating a version of shell shock by ‘auto-suggestion’ between initial diag-
nosis and subsequent treatment. Should a soldier reach treatment centres, the
imposition of the will of the doctor by aggressive counter-suggestion was a
common method of cure across the spectrum. Even the physicalist Yealland, who
treated a handful of hysterical mutism cases with electrical shocks to the throat,
confessed that his method worked primarily through the suggestive fear of pain
rather than any neurological rationale (Yealland 1918). Shell shock as suggestion
was most strongly associated with Charcot’s successor at the Salpêtrière, Joseph
Babinski. Babinski demolished Charcot’s taxonomy of hysteria, redistributing
some symptoms back to organic illnesses, but with the majority of psychogenic
instances redescribed as ‘pithiatic’. Pithiatism, Babinski’s coinage combining the
Greek for persuasion and cure, made suggestion the defining element: ‘Hysteria
is a pathological state manifested by disorders which it is possible to reproduce
exactly by suggestion in certain subjects and can be made to disappear by the
influence of persuasion (counter-suggestion) alone’ (Babinksi and Fremont 1918:
17). Epidemics of hysteria arose from ‘a love of imitation’, and had been inad-
vertently cultivated in ignorance by Charcot’s generation, so that a reorganization
of wards and treatments had been enough to end these outbreaks. The war, how-
ever, provided new favourable conditions for suggestive contagions. Babinski gath-
ered evidence to disprove both commotional and emotional theories: he was
adamant that ‘emotion alone, however intense it may be, does not produce hys-
terical disorders’ (Babinski and Fremont 1918: 24). Instead, Babinski argued that
extreme situations or violent bombardments could affect a state of mental confu-
sion where suggestion blossomed, and this explained the interregnum between the
extreme event and the appearance of symptoms. ‘Emotion and traumatism only
predispose to manifestations of this kind. They increase suggestibility and some-
times provide the elements of auto-suggestion’ (Babinski and Fremont 1918: 45).
Suggestion bound shell shock to ideas of neuromimesis and simulation: it fostered
a situation in which the French government refused to issue pensions to soldiers
with discharged with merely psychological illnesses.
The third psychological model of shell shock, psychodynamic conflict, was
developed by Rivers through the course of the war. Rivers had been initially
posted to work at Maghull, the psychiatric treatment centre outside Liverpool run
by R. G. Rows under an innovative therapeutic regime, far away from military
disciplinary models. It was where Elliot-Smith and Pear had worked, who publicly
argued for shell-shock cases as ‘emotional disturbances’ and advocated ‘psycho-
logical analysis and re-education’ (Elliot-Smith and Pear 1917: viii and ix).
Maghull latterly trained psychiatrists for front-line work. Rivers, after moving to
Craiglockhart where he worked intensively with a handful of officer patients,
composed an important string of essays. In ‘Repression of War Experience’ he
investigated shell shock as the result of psychological conflict, as a process of active
56 Aetiology
forgetting rather than a structure or state of mind, like dissociation. The amnesias
associated with shell shock were ‘due to the attempt to banish from the mind dis-
tressing memories of warfare or painful affective states which have come into
being as a result of their war experience’ (Rivers 1917: 173). For much of the
time, this was an appropriate adaptive response, where forgetting allowed psychi-
cal survival. War neurosis, however, developed around ‘the hidden working of
some forgotten yet active experience … whereby painful thoughts were pushed
into hidden recesses of his mind, only to accumulate such force as to make them
well up and produce attacks of depression’ (Rivers 1917: 175). It kept men in a
neurotic state, suffering repeated relapses, unless the specific memory was con-
fronted (this exhausting mental dynamic was hauntingly conveyed in Sassoon’s
poem with the same title as his analyst’s essay). Rivers’ thesis owed much to his
reading of Freud, although the limited extent of the influence of this psychody-
namic model is symbolized by its bracketing in its original Lancet publication by a
lecture by Frederick Mott on one side and a statistical survey on the other prov-
ing that 74 per cent of war neurotics had ‘a family history of neurotic or psychotic
stigmata, including insanity, epilepsy, alcoholism and nervousness’ (Wolfsohn
1918: 180). In a separate assessment of Freud, Rivers disregarded much of the
architecture of psychoanalysis, particularly the universal sexual aetiology of neu-
roses, and rescued the fundamental idea of psychic conflict mediated by the
mechanism of repression, that ‘active suppression of unpleasant experience’
(Rivers 1920: 163).
Freud wrote little on the war and treated no shell-shock cases himself, although
many in his inner circle did. A symposium on the war neuroses was held at the
Fifth International Psycho-Analytical Congress in September 1918, and Freud’s
brief introduction to the collected papers speculated on a conflict between ‘the
soldier’s old peaceful ego and his new war-like one’ in which ‘the old ego is pro-
tecting itself from a mortal danger by taking flight into a traumatic neurosis’
(Freud 1919: 209). But the introduction was mainly concerned with refuting ‘the
opponents of psychoanalysis, whose dislike of sexuality is evidently stronger than
their logic, [and who] have been in a hurry to proclaim that the investigation of
the war neuroses has finally disproved this portion of psycho-analytic theory’
(Freud 1919: 208). Yet this was exactly the version of psychoanalysis that began
to receive attention after the war. One of Freud’s closest allies, Sandor Ferenczi,
began to rethink trauma outside libido theory partly in response to his own treat-
ment of war neurotics (discussed at length in Leys 2000). In the craze for
‘Freudish’ talk that began in England in the early 1920s, cathartic treatments of
war neuroses were cited as its notable success, but praise routinely discarded any
sexual theory (see Rapp 1988 and Richards 2000). The psychoanalytically trained
doctor David Eder worked on shell-shock cases in Malta. His War-Shock: The
Psychoneuroses in War proposed that most symptoms were ‘the result of mental con-
flicts or other mental phenomena … understood in terms of the mind without
any reference to physio-pathology. The psycho-pathology of war-shock is that of
the psycho-neuroses, and the mechanisms those discovered by Freud in hysteria’
(Eder 1917: 144). However, his successes came with the distinctly un-Freudian
 The genealogy of a concept 57
method of hypnosis, and his book, Ben Shephard suggests, had little impact and
effectively ended his career.
After the war, however, psychotherapeutic treatments seemed to chime with a
strand of public sympathy for the still-increasing numbers of shell-shocked men.
Its very marginality in military medicine during the war now worked to its
advantage. Freud was called on as a witness to judge the harsh electrical treat-
ments of war neurotics by the Austrian War Ministry, since his treatment was evi-
dently represented an utterly opposed method (Freud 1920b). In England, the
1922 Report of the War Office registered this changing context. The Report ini-
tially uses scare quotes around ‘“mental wound”’, reflecting military suspicion of
regarding ‘the emotional variety’ as a proper ‘battle casualty’ (Report 1922: 115).
A few pages later, it uses the language of ‘psychical dissociation’ or the ‘func-
tional splitting of the personality … which, in the opinion of some witnesses,
should be regarded as a mental wound’ (Report 1922: 117). The final recommen-
dations tentatively recommended ‘the simplest forms of psycho-therapy’, but
rejected the dangers of hypnosis and ‘psycho-analysis in the Freudian sense’
(Report 1922: 192). In the main though, as Simon Wessely observes, the Report
‘continued to reflect traditional Edwardian values of courage and moral fibre’
and called for tougher training of recruits to prevent psychological weakness
(Wessely 2006: 271). In these tensions, the Report carried the stresses of trans-
formed social, political and psychological understandings of the War in the early
1920s (see Bogacz 1989).
By 1941 the idea of psychical conflict, developed by Rivers and drained of
Freud’s investment in libido theory, was at the heart of Abram Kardiner’s
Traumatic Neuroses of War. Kardiner’s book was organized around the concept of
‘trauma’ in a distinct way (rather than just using it as a synonymous term
amongst others). It emerged from Kardiner’s observation of chronic shell-shock
patients at an American veteran’s hospital in the early 1920s and from his dis-
satisfaction with Freud’s libidinal or instinctual theories to account for traumatic
neurosis in war. Instead, Kardiner proposed a conflict between the ego and the
environment: ‘a trauma is an external influence necessitating an abrupt change
in adaptation which the organism fails to meet’ (Kardiner 1941: 79). Symptoms,
in this theory, marked places where ‘an adaptation is injured, spoiled, disorgan-
ized, or shattered’ and modern war was ingenious in creating ‘more difficult sit-
uations to escape and thus activates disorganization of the ego’ (Kardiner 1941:
74 and 70). Whilst a psychodynamic theory (claiming psychoanalysis to provide
the best account of functional neuroses), Kardiner was nevertheless reviving the
nineteenth-century terminology of ‘traumatic neurosis’ and conceiving the mal-
adaptations to war in the same continuum as the submission of the individual
ego to modern mass industry (Kardiner 1941: 70). Although Kardiner’s work did
not register much in the repetition of the debates about war trauma in the
Second World War, it had a big influence on the Vietnam generation. Kardiner’s
book is ‘routinely cited as a landmark in the history of posttraumatic disorders’,
and it became one of the key sources of the presenting symptoms for PTSD
(Leys 2000: 193).
58 Aetiology
Shell shock was only ever ‘a makeshift umbrella covering a varied set of admin-
istrative, disciplinary, and medical problems’ (Stone 1985: 258). Like hysteria, it
morphed continually as official diagnostics tried to outfox the ingenuity of soma
and psyche, the plain cunning of the frontline soldier seeking ever new ways to
‘swing the lead’, and the ever-shifting alliances of the military, the political classes
and home-front opinion. War imperatives pushed the protean tendencies of
trauma into greater mobility. By World War Two, shell shock was replaced by
‘battle fatigue’ or the deliberately vague ‘exhaustion’. Doctors attempted new
treatments, including drugs like sodium amytal or pentathol, the dramatic ‘acting
out’ of traumatic scenes, and trials with group therapy. Military commanders
expressed the same suspicion or contempt for the medical ‘trick cyclists’ attached
to units. Montgomery humiliated them; American General Patton lost his com-
mand for slapping a traumatized soldier in a military hospital, enraged by the
apparent refusal to fight.
There are other continuities that suggest a dispiriting sense of repetition when
trauma enters the particular ecology of war. Gulf War Syndrome has remained
a disputed entity since 1991, with some commentators regarding it as a purely
psychical hysteria (for instance, Showalter 1997) whilst others insist that, beyond
a small number of cases of PTSD, veterans suffer physical illnesses as a result of
vaccine cocktails, pesticidal spraying of equipment, low-level exposure to nerve
gas or the inhalation of depleted uranium dust. In England, disability pensions
have been disbursed under the category of ‘Symptoms and Signs of Ill-Defined
Conditions’, but the Ministry of Defence has refused to accept the existence of
Gulf War Syndrome (see Lloyd 2004). In America, the Research Advisory
Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses issued a report in 2004 which argued
that the multisymptom conditions gathered under the name Gulf War
Syndrome were extensive in veterans, could not be solely explained by war-time
stress or psychiatric illness, were likely the result of exposure to neuro-toxins, and
would require extensive federal research funding to determine its full extent
(Research Advisory Committee 2004). In 2006, studies recorded that almost one-
fifth of Gulf War II veterans suffered psychiatric illnesses, with military author-
ities ‘not doing enough to support soldiers and their families’ (Townsend and
Revill 2006: 8).
Whilst this suggests the continued military refusal to accept psychosomatic
sequelae to combat experience, the hawkish military historian Eric Dean has
blamed the recent ‘rights revolution’ and liberal psychiatry for privileging the
individual soldier over military command, the new language of traumatic disor-
ders virtually putting an end to the possibility of large-scale military actions by
America. Dean identifies the Vietnam War as the critical passage in the reassess-
ment and cultural transvaluation of the war neurotic. Indeed, in the 1970s, a
group of committed anti-Vietnam War psychiatrists were responsible for naming
and defining the parameters of what they called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,
initially in relation to combat veterans. Yet their model of militant advocacy soon
became a strategy at the heart of the new identity politics that emerged in the
1970s, uniting war veterans, Holocaust survivors and feminists speaking out over
 The genealogy of a concept 59
the traumas of rape and sexual abuse. When PTSD entered official diagnostics in
1980, it gave a coherent disease-entity to diverse political programmes and
ensured the wide diffusion of the trauma paradigm.

Trauma and the politics of identity: Vietnam,

Holocaust and abuse survivors
In 1982, the American Congress commissioned a quantitative psychiatric assess-
ment of Vietnam veterans, in the main an attempt by Reagan to reduce funding
to the ninety veteran centres established under Carter’s presidency. The report,
Trauma and the Vietnam War Generation, was eventually published in 1990, and con-
tained startling findings. The first study of troops medically evacuated from the
front line in Vietnam, conducted in 1966, had recorded that only five per cent
were due to psychiatric disorders, a much lower percentage than cases during the
Second World War (W. Scott 1990: 295). This was considered a testament to les-
sons learnt, each battalion now staffed with its own psychiatrist. Over fifteen years
after the end of the war, however, Congress was told that now more than 25 per
cent of veterans, over 800,000 people, suffered from PTSD. This was nearly three
times the amount of soldiers who experienced direct combat in Vietnam. The
figure increased even further if the lifetime of the veteran was the measure: 30.6
per cent of men and 26.9 per cent of women had or would suffer from full or par-
tial PTSD as a result of their experience in Vietnam (Kulka et al. 1990). By 1997,
the number of veteran outreach centres had in fact doubled as PTSD diagnoses
reached the one million mark, and the Veterans Administration had become one
of the largest federal agencies in America. The Vietnam veteran was a trauma
icon, ‘the quintessential “stressed-out” American’ (Dean 1997: 23). The Report
gave statistical authority to what had already been fixed in the cultural imaginary.
Cinematic representations in particular cemented an image of the traumatized
veteran, starting soon after the war with Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1976), The
Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino 1979), Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979)
and Cutter’s Way (Ivan Passer 1981). These cultural representations of the Vietnam
veteran had already ‘helped to create a new “consciousness of trauma” in
Western society’ (Shephard 2000: 355).
In book after book, veterans and their psychiatrists described persistent symp-
toms of insomnia, hyper-vigilance, startle reactions, alcohol and drug addiction,
terror, paranoia and nightmares. ‘I think I don’t have long to live because I have
these dreams of guys in my unit standing at the end of the sofa and blood com-
ing down off them and up the sofa’ (Shay 1994: xiv). The sheer extent and delay
of post-traumatic responses has been attributed to the specific conditions of com-
bat in Vietnam: intense guerrilla engagements on the ground, where combatants
and civilians were indistinguishable, where the war aims were morally ambiguous,
command was openly contested and actions were shot through with notorious
instances of atrocity, where the conscript troops were mainly teenagers vulnera-
ble to drug addiction, and where the one-year tour of duty, designed to prevent
‘combat fatigue’, only intensified the alienation of soldiers returning alone to a
60 Aetiology
home front severely divided on the prosecution of the war (see Hendin and Haas
1984). Further, in the embarrassment of defeat, veterans were given no affirma-
tion, but felt silenced and blamed (it took Reagan to develop a revisionist account
that the military ‘had been denied permission to win’ by a liberal conspiracy on
the home front (Dean 1997: 184)). Sympathy for young conscripted soldiers had
disappeared after the My Lai massacre in March 1968, when a company entered
a village and murdered over four hundred civilians, an event at first denied by the
military but finally confirmed when photographic evidence surfaced, causing a
severe national convulsion in America (see Oliver 2006).
For the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, My Lai ‘brought about an abrupt change
in my own relationship to the war, and in my life in general’ (Lifton 1973: 16).
Susan Haley, a psychiatric nurse working with veterans in Boston, had reported in
1969 that patients revealing memories of atrocities had been dismissed by staff as
delusional paranoid schizophrenics. Now, a group of committed psychiatric advo-
cates wanted to affirm the traumatic reality of events in Vietnam. Using Haley’s
patient as the key testimony in Home from the War, Lifton argued that Vietnam was
an atrocity-producing situation, an existentially Absurd war that wounded every-
one it touched. Lifton testified on the damaging psychological effects of war to the
Sub-Committee on Veteran Affairs in 1970 and later that year began to meet with
the activist group Vietnam Veterans Against the War in its New York offices.
What were called ‘rap groups’ were a mix of anti-war planning and group ther-
apy. Another anti-war psychiatrist Chaim Shatan became involved when the
group grew in size and in May 1972 he wrote a piece for the New York Times argu-
ing that a distinct ‘Post-Vietnam Syndrome’ was discernable in veteran behaviour.
‘The so-called Post-Vietnam Syndrome confronts us with the unconsummated
grief of soldiers … Their sorrow is unspent, the grief of their wounds untold,
their guilt unexpatiated’ (cited W. Scott 1990: 301). Lifton continued his group
treatments into 1974, by which time John Wilson had begun treating veterans on
the Cleveland University campus in informal rap groups. Wilson failed to find
research money for an unrecognized psychological condition until the Disabled
Army Veterans group funded his work: three volumes of The Forgotten Warrior
appeared between 1977 and 1980. Wilson was convinced that a clear ‘post-
Vietnam pattern of psychological reaction’ required a new conceptual framework
and mode of treatment as the illness ‘was a multifaceted process that cut across
different dimensions of psychosocial functioning’ (Wilson 2006: 253). Wilson was
involved in organizing the Veterans Association outreach centres, finally given
Democratic funding in 1979. Charles Figley, meanwhile, entered graduate school
in psychology after serving as a marine officer in Vietnam: his study, Delayed
Combat Stress Disorders, was written for the American Legion in 1978. Using the
Consortium of Veteran Studies as an initial group, Figley helped transform this
into the wider-based Society for Trauma and Stress Studies in 1985, editing the
first two volumes of what became its journal under the title Trauma and its Wake.
It was this network that used politically inflected ‘advocacy research’ (Lifton’s
coinage) to campaign for the recognition of the syndrome that eventually became
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. There was a shuffling of potential terminologies
 The genealogy of a concept 61
throughout the 1970s: Shatan’s Post-Vietnam Syndrome was too specific, Gross
Stress Reaction was revived from follow-up studies of Second World War veterans
in the 1960s, and some favoured Catastrophic Stress Disorder before PTSD
emerged as a compromise in 1978. But there was a much more important reason
for this shifting language: the case for a trauma syndrome could be pressed because
throughout this period the American Psychiatric Association was undertaking a
revolutionary transformation of its conceptual base and psychiatric terminology.
For the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the APA announced that
it would depart from psychodynamic models of unconscious conflict, and instead
move to an empirical, purely descriptive model of syndromes, identifiable through
replicable rule-bound diagnostic criteria that had been developed in biomedical
research. The chair of the Task Force on Nomenclature, Robert Spitzer, had
already developed Research Diagnostic Criteria to trial the description of fourteen
psychiatric disorders, something encouraged by government agencies since diag-
nostic accuracy was reached more rapidly than psychotherapy and could circum-
scribe more precisely health and welfare benefits. This new method was intended
to banish aetiological speculation, and to provide instead ‘a diagnostic metalan-
guage: a way of talking about mental disorders that is not particular to any theo-
retical orientation’ (Young 1995: 94). This medical model was bitterly contested by
psychoanalytic associations, who refused to co-operate in the overthrow of the
dynamic paradigm. This was a serious mistake, for Spitzer had set up formal and
informal avenues of consultation, and a successful campaign (with 10,000 profes-
sional psychiatric signatories) had removed homosexuality as a disorder from the
planned DSM edition by 1974. This provided a model for psychiatric advocacy.
Soon, ‘unsolicited input from many of the nation’s psychiatrists’ began to make the
case for other syndromes and disorders (M. Wilson 1993: 406). Chaim Shatan
approached Spitzer in 1974 once it became clear that no specific combat disorder
was to be included in DSM-III. Shatan and Susan Haley were asked to present
material on Post-Vietnam Syndrome to the 1975 APA convention, and a working
group was set up to gather empirical evidence for potential criteria for a disorder.
The group expanded to include Lifton, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor
Henry Krystal, Jack Smith, head of the National Veterans Resource Project, and
Mardi Horowitz, whose work on stress provided a new physiological basis for trau-
matic reactions, thus linking Vietnam trauma to a key moment in the theorization
(and funding) of stress research in America (Viner 1999). They examined several
hundred cases, using techniques that persuaded the empirical biomedics on the
panel, but widened the category beyond combat scenarios and eventually agreed
on PTSD. This was ‘a cumbersome phrase devised by a cumbersome committee’
(Shephard 2000: xx), but it bound together diverse socio-political and medical aims
into one term.
Yet the arrival of PTSD in 1980 was not just the product of the long history of
traumatic neuroses inside the ecology of war, latterly transformed by anti-
Vietnam advocacy. The term would never have been so astoundingly successful in
its cultural pervasiveness if it had retained this relatively narrow focus. Instead,
the advocates were self-consciously comparative, seeking out links to studies of the
62 Aetiology
psychological reactions of those who survived the Hiroshima bombing, the
victims of Nazi persecution, the consequences of slavery and segregation on
African–American identity, and women who had suffered incest or rape trauma,
and whose experiences were only just beginning to be articulated by the feminist
movement. Workers in these distinct areas mutually reinforced each other; what
emerged was a general category of ‘the survivor’ that strongly linked trauma to
identity politics.
Identity politics, the idea that ‘identity itself – its elaboration, expression or
affirmation – is and should be a fundamental focus of political work’ (Kauffman
2001: 23), is often associated in cultural and political histories on both the left and
right with this era of civil rights, anti-Vietnam student protest, feminism, gay lib-
eration and Black Power. Many of these movements were reacting to the
‘unmarked’ identity and ‘affective foreclosures’ of what Dana Nelson regards as
an embedded construct of ‘national manhood’ in the imagined fraternity of white
men (Nelson 1998: ix). These new groupings developed forms of consciousness-
raising that often used the model of the rap groups developed by Lifton. Judith
Herman, student civil rights campaigner in the 1960s, pioneer in consciousness
raising, feminist therapist and PTSD advocate since the 1970s, argued in Trauma
and Recovery that ‘traumatic disorders are afflictions of the powerless’, reinforced
by mechanisms of social denial (Herman 1992: 83). Looking across from the con-
temporary study of sexual abuse to the Victorian hysteric and the wounded sol-
dier, she claimed that ‘traumatic reality … requires a social context that affirms
and protects the victim’ (Herman 1992: 9). This in turn meant that ‘the system-
atic study of psychological trauma therefore depends on the support of a politi-
cal movement’ (Herman 1992: 9). The psychiatrist must do more than diagnose
and medicate; they had to be a committed person, affirming identity from ‘a posi-
tion of moral solidarity with the survivor’ (Herman 1992: 178). Charles Figley
used what became standard terms to express the purpose of this therapeutic
empowerment: ‘Victims and survivors are familiar in that they both experienced
a traumatic event. But while the victim has been immobilized and discouraged by
the event, the survivor has overcome the traumatic memories and become mobile’
(Figley 1985: 399). PTSD is therefore not just a narrow medicalizing label,
although it has successfully served, as I have shown, as a category determining
recognizable psychiatric illness and compensable injury. Just as much, PTSD is a
socio-political category that has routed a significant strand of identity politics into
the language of survivorship. This is not to accuse liberal and left political advo-
cacy as the sole cause of the rise of ‘victim culture’, as conservative commenta-
tors like Christopher Lasch might. When the right complains of ‘political
correctness’ in the sphere of modern identity and risk, it nearly always conceals
the capitalist economic drivers of law, insurance and medical costs behind many
of these transformations.
In terms of the identity politics of this era, one of the key figures in the trans-
valuation of trauma was Robert Jay Lifton. It is worth spending some time on his
career because, perhaps more than any other single figure, Lifton maps out the
transition of psychical trauma from medical discourse to cultural condition.
 The genealogy of a concept 63
Lifton’s first work had been with American prisoners of war who had been
subjected to Chinese ‘brainwashing’ techniques during the Korean War. He then
travelled to study the psychological conditions of the hibakusha in Hiroshima in the
early 1960s. Hibakusha translated literally as ‘explosion-affected person’; the term
‘survivor’ was avoided by the Japanese as a dishonour to the dead. The initial
awkwardness of how to name his study group reflected something of the ‘extreme
historical situations characteristic of our own era’ (Lifton 1968: 5). This was to
inaugurate Lifton’s life’s work. In Death in Life, Lifton described Hiroshima as a
profound ontological shock, ‘a sudden and absolute shift from normal experience
to an overwhelming encounter with death’ (Lifton 1968: 21). From extensive
interviews, Lifton portrayed an absurdist, post-detonation world dominated by
the dead, where the still-living could survive only by psychic closing-off or numb-
ing, yet were indelibly marked by the ‘death-imprint’, suffered ‘survival guilt’ and
‘thralldom to the death encounter’ (Lifton 1968: 482). Those living on could only
identify with the dead, living a counterfeit or automatic life, yet secretly fearing
that they were contagious, ‘carriers of death’ (Lifton 1968: 517). The other mark
of the death-encounter was the inability to formulate the experience, a collapse
of narrative possibility, leaving death stalled in the psyche, a permanent rupture
in the sense of life continuity. Lifton’s framework was broadly psychodynamic but
did not (yet) use the language of trauma. The Freudian model was held to miss
the true significance of the death-encounter, so Lifton’s formative book was not
bound to a single school and largely invented its own, extremely accessible, tech-
nical terms. Crucially, Lifton always wanted to generalize outwards from the
mental anguish of the hibakusha, arguing that the globally destructive potential of
nuclear weapons meant that ‘we are all survivors of Hiroshima’ (Lifton 1968:
479). The final chapter of Death in Life was titled ‘The Survivor’, declaring that
‘the holocausts of the twentieth century have thrust the survivor ethos into special
prominence, and imposed upon us all a series of immersions into death’ (Lifton
1968: 479). Comparisons with concentration camp inmates proliferated, again as
symbols of a universal historical condition of the post-1945 world.
In the same year as Death in Life, Lifton was a contributor to the proceedings of
the conference, Massive Psychic Trauma. Edited by the psychoanalyst Henry Krystal
(who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, and
was his sole family survivor of the Holocaust), the conference was avowedly com-
parative, incorporating natural disasters, man-made catastrophes, victims of Nazi
persecution, industrial accidents and work place compensation, Hiroshima, and
those suffering social oppression, such as the American Negro, whose self-identity
had been ‘damaged in ways not repairable by himself ’ (Krystal 1968: 5). The
opening paper was given by William Niederland, who had coined the term ‘sur-
vivor syndrome’ for ‘emotional disorders of survivors of Nazi persecution’
(Niederland 1968b: 8). In a parallel essay in 1968, Niederland had argued that
traumatic neurosis, typically used for war experiences, ‘does not appear sufficient
to cover the multitude and severity of the clinical manifestations’, the ‘all-perva-
sive psychological scar’ of camp experience (Niederland 1968b: 314, 313). In the
conference, Niederland detailed the activism of a group of New York therapists
64 Aetiology
urgently trying to redefine concepts of trauma, because the delayed onset of
symptoms was resulting in former concentration camp inmates being refused
compensation for psychiatric injury by the German government on the basis that
causation from camp to symptom could not be proved. Lifton was introduced as
an openly comparative instance, and he rehearsed his work with Hiroshima
hibakusha. It was a moment where psychiatric advocacy forged new connections,
and helped establish the strategies Lifton pursued with his next group of death-
in-life survivors, the Vietnam veterans. As with the hibakusha, the veterans soon
became representative figures of a general condition: ‘all Americans are survivors
of the Vietnam holocaust and are faced with the task of recognizing and bring-
ing significance to their death immersion’ (Lifton 1973: 305). Later, Lifton worked
with the survivors of the industrial accident at Buffalo Creek, and in 1979 pub-
lished a theoretical work, The Broken Connection, which contained the essay
‘Survivor Experience and Traumatic Syndrome’. The book, an argument with
Freud’s prioritizing of libidinal theory and consequent disinterest in adult trauma,
marked Lifton’s acknowledgement of the new psychiatric terminology.
It is striking how soon Lifton begins morally to elevate the survivor. The sur-
vivor is explicitly regarded as a prophet or visionary because they have touched
death, ‘crossed over to the other side and returned’ and can ‘now claim an exclu-
sive knowledge of all matters related to death and holocaust’ (Lifton 1973: 314).
This echoes a long psychoanalytic tradition of believing traumatic experience
gifts the patient heightened, even supernatural powers (something Sandor
Ferenczi fervently believed, as Pam Thurschwell (2001) has recorded), and the
value existentialism gave to the ‘limit situation’, where only extremity truly con-
firmed being-in-the-world. This produced a curious circularity in Lifton’s work.
The psychiatric injuries of a specific survivor are described in all their anguish.
This becomes a representative experience of a generalized psychic numbing, but
traumatic experiences then become valued as those which precisely break through
this numbed state. In The Broken Connection, Lifton argued that for the Vietnam
veterans who became anti-war activists, ‘the traumatic experience, or at least
elements of it, had a constructive function’: ‘doubts about the war began with a
confrontation which broke through existing patterns of numbing’ (Lifton 1979:
169). The survivor alone can reconvene the shattered fragments of the post-war
world, the passage through a trauma giving the sanction of privileged perspective
from that rarest of things, a coherent, if trauma-defined, identity. The fear of the
hibakusha that they carried a deathly contagion thus also has its flip-side: the
victim becomes a site for identification, the survivor subject-position developing a
kind of glamour. This contagion of identification begins with the psychiatric
advocate: ‘If one is to grasp holocaust from a distance’, Lifton warned, ‘one must,
at some inner level, decide to become a “survivor” of that holocaust, and take on
the “survivor mission” of giving it form in a way that contributes to something
beyond it’ (Lifton 1973: 17). Trauma passes from analysand to analyst and,
through advocacy and activism, becomes a privileged site for identity.
In 1980, Robert Jay Lifton spoke to a conference on ‘the survivor syndrome’ in
London, held to address ‘the enormous resistance in the helping professions quite as
 The genealogy of a concept 65
much as in the population at large, to comprehending the problem of survival’
(Garland 1980b: 5). The final overview of the event, after Lifton and others had spo-
ken, asked a rather startling question: ‘This Workshop … found itself talking and
thinking almost solely about the Holocaust and its survivors. How and why did it
happen that all possible catastrophes, past, present, or future, were virtually ignored
in favour of this one?’ (Garland 1980a: 93). It is difficult to imagine this question
being asked now, yet it suggests that the ‘Holocaust survivor’ is a relatively late con-
struction in the psychiatric discourse of trauma, emerging alongside, or even slightly
later than, the Vietnam veteran. Just as striking, though, is the entire absence from
the workshop of any discussion of incest or sexual abuse survivors; these seem sim-
ply inconceivable to the participants. It is only after 1980, then, that these poles of
survivorship properly enter the language of trauma studies and come to dominate
the terrain. The spectrum of trauma is redrawn, with the Holocaust the worst imag-
inable collective trauma, sexual abuse the worst individual trauma. PTSD, initially
conceived for combat veterans, was recruited to very different politics of identity at
these poles, Lifton providing the model of psychiatric advocacy. These two areas of
survival are the final elements that need to be included in this genealogy of trauma.
Recent discussions of the Holocaust have been fenced around with claims
about the unique and unprecedented nature of the atrocity that make the kind of
historicization I propose here deeply offensive to some. To historicize is to ‘nor-
malize’ events, where much cultural trauma theory (as we’ve seen in my
Introduction) wants to consider the Holocaust an aporia, traumatic enough to
shatter the frame of historiography or representation itself. For Lawrence Langer,
narrative possibility, coherence and normalization belong to mémoire ordinaire,
whilst Holocaust accounts must always touch on the irresolvable and incompre-
hensible traumas of the mémoire profonde (this opposition derives from Delbo 1995).
The Holocaust is, for Dori Laub, a ‘massive trauma’ that ‘precludes its registra-
tion’ in the normal way (Felman and Laub 1992: 57). Nazism and the Final
Solution ‘need to be theorised under the sign of massive psychic trauma’, Eric
Santner concurs, ‘meaning that these events must be confronted and analysed in
their capacity to endanger and overwhelm the composition and coherence of
individual and collective identities’ (Santner 1992: 151). Yet to use the notion of
trauma might also itself be normalizing since, according to Robert Eaglestone, in
holding out a promise of cure, ‘trauma theory offers … an illusory redemption’
(Eaglestone 2004: 32). The risk for Eaglestone is that trauma

will overcode accounts of the Holocaust with a discourse of healing analy-

sis or therapy, and so pass over both the epistemological and ethical impos-
sibility of comprehending the survivors’ testimony by seeming to grasp and
resolve it, and “work through” or finish with the ethical obligation to recall
the events.
(Eaglestone 2004: 33)

These positions, that virtually any framework is unethical or normalizing

(including the word ‘holocaust’ itself, a Christian term often replaced by the
66 Aetiology
Hebrew Sho’ah), were consolidated in cultural trauma theory in the 1980s and
1990s at the same time that a very different group of Jewish–American scholars
were insisting on the uniqueness of the Holocaust as immeasurably graver a geno-
cidal act than any possible comparative events. Steven Katz’s The Holocaust in
Historical Context, for instance, demoted all acts of mass murder in history to cate-
gories below genocide, using a definition of genocide that could be filled only by
the Nazi extermination of the Jews. For Gavriel Rosenfeld, this insistence was
‘best understood as part of a self-consciously defensive response to the perceived
attempts by others to diminish the event for apologetic or revisionist purposes’
(Rosenfeld 2004: 371). This references the upsurge of Holocaust denial, but also
the so-called Historians’ Dispute in Germany, perceived by some as trying to fin-
ish with German post-war abjection, separating off its genocidal past as an his-
torical aberration. Rosenfeld suggests an alternative reason for this debate about
uniqueness, in rather more critical terms: it is the fault of multiculturalism. This
is translated as ‘the tendency … of ethnic groups to justify present-day demands
by citing past wrongs’ (Rosenfeld 2004: 389) and Rosenfeld dismisses largely as
polemic the attempts of David Stannard and Ward Churchill to call the deaths of
native Americans a genocide. ‘In this atmosphere of vicitimization’, Rosenfeld
says damningly of the politics of identity in multicultural America, ‘a genocidal
past is an obvious political asset’ (Rosenfeld 2004: 389). These are self-evidently
contentious and heavily invested areas of dispute.
The view that an authentic Jewish genocide has been borrowed and diluted by
other interest groups occasionally becomes explicit (E. Alexander 1980). Yet the
psychiatric construct of the ‘Holocaust survivor’ is not the original of which oth-
ers are lesser copies. Rather, the ‘Holocaust survivor’ developed alongside other
trauma subjects in the 1960s and 1970s, explicitly so in the work of Henry Krystal
and William Niederland. In that sense, Holocaust ‘survival’ – as a specific way of
theorizing post-traumatic existence – is an intrinsically time-specific and compar-
ative construction.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Displaced Persons (DPs) gradually
dispersed from the camps were not necessarily identified ethnically. It has been
well established by historians that there was little public discussion of the liberated
prisoners of the concentration camps until Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961
exposed the world to the bureaucracy of mass murder. Jewish organizations in
America had hoped for ‘a reduction of horror stories of victimized Jewry’ at the
end of the war (cited Novick 1999: 121). The founders of the state of Israel in
1948 similarly wished to promote an imagined national community based on
heroism rather than victimage, the new political leaders being privately dismissive
of camp survivors. Peter Novick has controversially suggested that it was the
period of the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur attacks of 1973 that
turned Holocaust remembrance into a political means to bolster support for the
state of Israel. In America, the Holocaust education programmes that began to
be funded by the Anti-Defamation League in 1973 culminated in the opening of
the National Holocaust Museum in Washington twenty years later, placing
Holocaust remembrance at the centre of American national culture. Both Novick
 The genealogy of a concept 67
and the polemicist Norman Finkelstein have explored the lobbying of the writer
and survivor Elie Wiesel to ensure that the Museum focused solely on the Jewish
victims of Nazi persecution. Less polemically, James Young has tracked how the
Israeli state has reorganized itself around a calendar of national remembrance
(Young 1993). These are inevitably controversial stances, since they politicize and
give a history to a rhetoric of remembrance that is saturated with the transcen-
dent language of the sacred.
Whatever one makes of these lines of argument, the narrower discourse around
the psychological effects of concentration camp internment seems to confirm that
the category of ‘Holocaust survivor’ was relatively late to develop. There are only
a handful of studies before the 1960s, and these repeat the familiar physical/
psychical oscillation found throughout the history of trauma. In 1951, V. A. Kral
wrote a short study of ‘severe chronic stress’ within the Terezin (Theresienstadt)
internment camp, using psychodynamic models of adaptation to detail how the
camp conditions arrested prior neurotic conditions, but produced long-term ‘reac-
tive depression’ and unfinished mourning in those that survived. Internees are
called DPs and not identified as predominantly Jewish. The report has a strangled
objective tone, and only in the last paragraph refers to the data being collected
through personal experience. ‘Repatriation neurosis’, an illness assumed to result
from the uprooted life of DPs, was renamed ‘Concentration Camp Syndrome’ in
1954, when symptoms persisted for unusual lengths of time. The new term
emphasized problems of physical deprivation and semi-starvation in the camps,
rather than factoring in the experience of witnessing systematic, ethnically based
mass murder, perhaps a product of the order in which the camps were liberated
(Bloxham 2004). In 1961, Leo Eitinger reported on a study of one hundred former
camp inmates (again, without any interest in what percentage were Jewish), and
concluded ‘that organic brain changes produced by the various traumatic situa-
tions … form the basis of the concentration camp syndrome’ (Eitinger 1961: 378).
Typically, this physicalist theory failed to find much support, and psychodynamic
models predominated. In the late 1960s, it was William Niederland who argued
that ‘traumatization of such magnitude’ occurred in the camps that this burst the
bounds of conventional traumatic neurosis, and so he coined the term ‘survivor
syndrome’ (Niederland 1968a: 313). Niederland’s involvement with the conference
‘Massive Psychic Trauma’ in 1968 brought his studies into contact with Lifton’s work
on Hiroshima survivors. Psychiatric advocacy from this point could remodel con-
centration camp experience through narratives of trauma and the identitarianism of
survival.
An important figure linking professional psychiatric discussion to wider public
discourse about Holocaust survival was the prominent child psychiatrist and
public intellectual Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim, part of Vienna’s pre-war intel-
lectual scene, had been interned in 1938–9 in Dachau and Buchenwald, punitive
labour camps that then held political prisoners and Jewish ‘race offenders’. After
a year’s internment, Bettelheim was released and went into exile in America. He
eventually published, after several rejections, his report on the psychology of the
camps, ‘Individual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations’, in 1943. He
68 Aetiology
regarded the camps as brutal machineries of massification and infantilization,
designed to produce passive subjects of the paternal Reich on a loosely psycho-
analytic model. Survival involved retention of private behaviours and beliefs, to
fend off the destruction of individuality. The year in the camp became the basis
for Bettelheim’s wider critiques of ‘modern mass society’ in the post-war era.
Rather like Zygmunt Bauman’s (1989) later claim that the Final Solution was a
result of bureaucratic rationalization rather than a deviation from it, Bettelheim
argued in The Informed Heart that the concentration camp was ‘an example of the
very nature of the coercive mass state’ (Bettelheim 1960: 108). The book repeated
material from his first study of the camps, now under the title ‘Traumatization’,
but with little evidence of integrating the psychology of trauma into his work.
Later, infantilizing defence mechanisms derived from the camps became the
explicit basis for his understanding of the autistic child in The Empty Fortress in
1967, an influential study. He also reinterpreted his studies of schizophrenia in
the 1950s as ‘in some vicarious manner a compensatory experience for having
suffered disintegration while in the concentration camps’ (Bettelheim 1979: 113).
This spiralling out from camp experience into wider cultural phenomena using
the same basic psychic structure is perhaps what prompted Primo Levi’s objection
to Bettelheim’s ‘approximate and simplified’ models (Levi 1989: 65). Levi was dis-
missive that any psychiatric language of neurosis could begin to capture the
‘atavistic anguish’ of the camps (Levi 1989: 65).
In 1976, Bettelheim’s essay in The New Yorker called ‘Surviving’ prompted a
wide public debate. It is striking, given the situation now, to read Bettelheim’s
accusation that in America ‘the millions who were murdered no longer arouse
much interest; they seem to have been forgotten; they no longer count’
(Bettelheim 1979: 284). Ostensibly an uneasy response to The Seven Beauties (Lina
Wertmüller 1975), a film comedy partly set in a concentration camp which struck
Bettelheim as marking a generational shift in attitudes to the war, the essay was
really a riposte to Terence des Pres’s book, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the
Death Camps. Des Pres wanted to reconfigure the Holocaust survivor as a heroic,
visionary figure, in much the same idealizing terms found in Lifton: ‘We require
a heroism commensurate with the sweep of ruin in our time’, des Pres declaimed
(Des Pres 1980: 6). The camp survivor affirmed life and the biological imperative
to survive, and this meant dismissing Bettelheim’s pessimistic account of infan-
tilization and disintegration. Elie Wiesel’s determination to survive, witness,
remember and campaign was the better model. Des Pres’s remodelling of the
concentration camp internee into the heroic Holocaust survivor is a significant
moment of transfiguration. As in Lifton, the survivor approaches a messianic
function:

The survivor is a man or woman who has passed through the ‘crisis of
civilisation’ we talk so much about …. He is the first of civilised men to
live beyond the compulsions of culture; beyond a fear of death which can
only be assuaged by insisting that life is worthless.
(Des Pres 1980: 207)
 The genealogy of a concept 69
In stark contrast, Bettelheim’s late essay ‘Trauma and Reintegration’ regarded
survivorship as a perpetual struggle to maintain ‘integration in the face of the
effects of past disintegration’ (Bettelheim 1979: 25). Primo Levi could not have
objected to this formulation, since he latterly used the language of unresolved
trauma himself: ‘The memory of a trauma suffered or inflicted is itself traumatic
because recalling it is painful or disturbing: a person who was wounded tends to
block out the memory so as not to renew the pain … The injury cannot be healed:
it extends through time’ (Levi 1989: 12). After the mid-1970s, then, the psycho-
logical burdens of the ‘Holocaust survivor’ were the subject of general debate
rather than specialist syndrome.
‘I cannot believe’, Elie Wiesel said in Legends of Our Time, ‘that an entire gener-
ation of fathers and sons could vanish into the abyss without creating, by their
very disappearance, a mystery which exceeds and overwhelms us’ (Wiesel 1968:
182). These incomprehensible events would defy ‘all the words in all the mouths
of the philosophers and psychologists’ who presumed to understand them (Wiesel
1968: 182). ‘By its uniqueness’, he proclaimed elsewhere, ‘the holocaust defies
literature’ (Wiesel 1970: 10). This august insistence clearly infuses the cultural
theory, by Felman and Caruth, Lyotard and Agamben, which places the
Holocaust at the aporetic core of any discussion of trauma.
And yet it is also important to recognize that, as with other modes of trauma,
Holocaust affect is unbounded and therefore extremely transmissible. It works its
way across generations, to the extent that the notion of ‘transgenerational haunt-
ing’ has now become its own specialism (see Abraham and Torok 1994).
Psychologists have tracked the ‘sharing of unconscious material between progen-
itors and offspring which seems to be transmitted in an uncanny and unspecified
fashion’ (Herzog 1982: 104). This is due, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis suggests, to ‘the
permeability of the ego boundaries in those areas connected with the trauma’ so
that traumatic affect infuses interpersonal relations (Grubrich-Simitis 1984: 308).
‘Some patients’, she continues, ‘without understanding what they are doing, con-
cretistically act out the traumatic aspect of their parents’ lives as if it were their
own story’ (Grubrich-Simitis 1984: 308). This transmission has been explored in
memoirs like Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead (2000).
Familial and cultural transmission within the Jewish heritage is understandable,
yet these processes merely point the way to wider forms of transmission. For the
more the Holocaust is proclaimed a ‘unique’ and incomparable trauma, the more
it in fact becomes a comparative measure and metaphor for all atrocity. ‘Rather
than looking for the Holocaust outside of metaphor’, James Young suggests in his
study of the cultural circulation of Holocaust iconography, he proposes ‘that we
find it in metaphor, in the countless ways it has been figured, coloured, distorted,
and ultimately cast as a figure for other events’ (Young 1988: 89). In particular as
soon as The Survivor becomes heroic, touched with the shamanistic powers of
cheating death (despite the best efforts of Levi, Wiesel and others to debunk this
mythic hero), the figure becomes a locus for a host of identifications. James Young’s
early example is the Holocaust identification in Sylvia Plath’s last poems, written
just before her suicide during the Eichmann trial and judgement in 1962. The poet
70 Aetiology
‘moves from seeing, to figuring what she sees, to entering the metaphor, as agent and
victim’ (Young 1988: 121), depicting herself as both Nazi and Jewish victim most
famously in her poem ‘Daddy’ (early drafts of which also included identification
with Hiroshima victims). Whilst Young suspects this attempt to master personal
pain through the figurations of public history only ended up introjecting Holocaust
horrors and amplifying her misery, he refuses to judge this process of metaphori-
cal transmission. After Auschwitz, one might say, there is a sort of historical
inevitability about this traumatic transfer. ‘Rather than disputing the authenticity
of her figures’, Young concludes, ‘we might look to her poetry for the ways the
Holocaust has entered public consciousness as a trope’ (Young 1988: 132).
The potential for this kind of identification has, if anything, intensified in
recent years. Binjamin Wilkomirski’s harrowing memoir Fragments was published
in 1995 to great acclaim. It was translated into twelve languages and won Jewish
literary prizes in England, France and America. In shattered, hallucinatory prose,
all told through the eyes of a young child without any other mediating perspec-
tive, the book detailed traumatic scenes of violence and cruelty in Majdanek and
another concentration camp, later identified as Auschwitz. Philip Gourevitch sug-
gests that book was such an international success because ‘Wilkomirski was the
embodiment of the purest form of victim: a child whose identity had been erased
in the Holocaust, but who was condemned to stay alive’ (Gourevitch 1999: 50). In
1999, Wilkomirski was publicly revealed as Bruno Grosjean, an illegitimate child
born in Switzerland in 1941, later adopted by a Protestant Swiss couple: this
Bruno Dössekker had no experience of the camps. Dössekker claimed that this
Swiss ‘pseudo-identity’ had been imposed by his adoptive parents and a culture
intent on suppressing his traumatic Jewish origins, as with other Holocaust
‘children without identity’ (Wilkomirski 1996: 154). His memories had been writ-
ten as part of a therapeutic process but he angrily denied they were ‘recovered
memories’, the technique tainted with confabulation of traumatic memories.
There have been outright denunciations of Wilkomirski, but the more interest-
ing responses focus on the empathic conviction of Fragments, whether true or false.
Israel Gutman, a Holocaust scholar and survivor, told the investigative reporter
Elena Lappin: ‘even if he is not Jewish, the fact that he was deeply affected by the
Holocaust is of huge importance … He is not a fake. He is someone who lives this
story very deeply in his soul. This pain is authentic’ (Lappin 1999: 46).
Wilkomirski is understood in this way as exploring his own traumatic childhood
(an illegitimate child, an adoptive ward of state), through the matrix of Holocaust
iconography. ‘Swiss history has nothing remotely similar to offer, nothing so dras-
tic to survive’ (Lappin 1999: 65). Overwhelming empathy with the fate of children
in the Holocaust has lost any distance and become ‘identification with the expe-
rience of others and the possibility of being traumatized by it’ (LaCapra 2001:
40). Transferential trauma therefore becomes psychologically true, outside objective
history. It demonstrates, as Peter Middleton and Tim Woods observe, that
‘memory can only only sustain identity because it is communicable, and this tex-
tual transmission opens it to the effects of textuality’ (Middleton and Woods 2000:
94). The proliferation of faux mémoires in recent years suggests that Wilkomirski is
 The genealogy of a concept 71
only one of the more extreme indicators of the heroic allure our culture now gives
to the Holocaust survivor (see Vice 2005).
This excavation of the construction of the Holocaust survivor indicates a certain
misfit between the rhetoric of unprecedented trauma or aporetic representation and
the way in which camp survival has entered general currency as a model for trauma,
identity and community. This is perhaps because the Holocaust survivor is now one
of the privileged figures for the traumatic ruptures of the post-1945 era, the survivor
of unimaginable, incomparable atrocity. However, by the end of the 1980s, to be
called ‘a survivor’ would not necessarily automatically invoke the Holocaust. In a
very short period of time, cultural awareness of incest survival and sexual abuse
added another aspect to contemporary traumatic experience, and another arena
where transmissibility and identification prompted all kinds of public controversy.
The term ‘survivor’, one recent discussion confidently asserts, was ‘coined by
feminists’ (Worrell 2003: 210). Although completely incorrect, this demonstrates
how survivor identity has become closely linked to gender politics over the last
thirty years. Feminism was the most successful form of identity politics to emerge
in the late 1960s, developing from an internal critique of the civil rights move-
ment. An essential early part of this phase of the women’s movement was to artic-
ulate the suppressed or silenced parts of women’s experience, often by sharing
them in group sessions. Pioneer feminist Robin Morgan recalls that ‘consciousness
raising’ developed in 1967, when women-only cadres would split away from
Vietnam marches and other civil rights meetings to discuss their own alienation
(Morgan 1970). There was clearly cross-fertilization between consciousness rais-
ing and Robert Lifton’s Vietnam veteran ‘rap groups’. In 1971, at a conference of
the New York Radical Feminists, Florence Rush spoke out about her childhood
experience of repeated rape by her father, and denounced the prevailing sexology
and psychiatry that minimized the impact of such contacts (like Kinsey), or
regarded them as fantasy (like Freud), or blamed the ‘seductive child’ who lured
men into inappropriate sexual behaviour. Susan Brownmiller was in the audience,
and within two days had sketched out the book proposal that would eventually
become the groundbreaking Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape published in
1975, by which time Rape Speak Out sessions had become a model for collective
public utterance of what had been suppressed as private shame. In 1972, Ann
Burgess and Lynda Holmstrom, an assistant professor of nursing and a sociolo-
gist radicalized by feminism, undertook a year-long study of women arriving at a
Boston hospital with injuries from sexual violence. Two years later they published
an account of what they called Rape Trauma Syndrome, defined as ‘the acute
phase and long-term reorganisation process that occurs as the result of forcible
rape or attempted forcible rape’ (Burgess and Holmstrom 1974: 982). Rape, they
concluded, was far more extensive than reporting to police or criminal trials sug-
gested, and the syndrome explained why women might delay reporting cases or
suffer traumatic sequelae. Twenty years after her first report, Burgess fully inte-
grated Rape Trauma with PTSD, and the life of the American woman was now
divided into pretrauma history, the traumatic event phase and post-trauma
response (Hartman and Burgess 1993: 507).
72 Aetiology
In 1977 the specific act of rape began to be incorporated into a wider, more
inclusive category. Ellen Weber published an explosive essay in Ms. magazine,
titled ‘Incest: Sexual Abuse Begins at Home’. Its opening sentence proclaimed:
‘One girl out of every four in the United States will be sexually abused in some
way before she reaches the age of eighteen’ (cited Davis 2005: 55). An academic
statistical extrapolation of incest figures, conducted by Diana Russell for the then
newly formed National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect, concluded that the
figure was likely to be a minimum of one in six (16 per cent of American women,
with 4.5 per cent abused by fathers, the rest by other male relatives). Russell’s The
Secret Trauma was published in 1986, but did not adopt PTSD as the means to
organize its symptomatology (the ‘trauma’ of this title was a largely untheorized
descriptor). This fusion began when the model of dissociated memory was used
for the core of ‘Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome,’ proposed in 1983.
The trauma model was at the centre of Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery in
1992 (reworking her earlier studies of father–daughter incest), an important book
that fixed the diagnostic association of sexual abuse and trauma subectivity.
Herman claimed that symptoms of dissociation, self-harm, multiple and border-
line personality disorders or ‘somatization’ (conversion hysteria) could be confi-
dently traced back in 97 per cent of cases to incidents of sexual abuse of
childhood. The insistence that sexual abuse was the primary aetiology prompted
a challenge to the diagnostic definition of PTSD. A traumatic event had been ini-
tially defined in DSM-III as something ‘outside the range of human experience’.
Feminist critique argued that these ‘current notions of traumatic stressors support
a social and political status quo’, ignoring ‘all of those everyday, repetitive, inter-
personal events that are so often the sources of psychic pain for women’ (L. Brown
1991: 119 and 129).
The idea that abuse might be marked by the very absence of any conscious
memory of abuse, due to traumatic dissociation, really took off with the
Recovered Memory self-help movement, which used the language of conscious-
ness-raising and women’s empowerment borrowed directly from feminism. This
was typified by the patient/analyst collaboration between Ellen Bass and Laura
Davis, The Courage to Heal, which sold 750,000 copies between 1988 and 1992, the
peak years of the movement. The book began with the claim that one in three
girls were abused (and one in seven boys), but many suffered blanket traumatic
amnesia of these childhood events. ‘If you remember almost nothing or very little
of your childhood’, another guide by Renée Fredrickson stated, ‘you have
repressed memories’ (Fredrickson 1992: 46). ‘Millions of people have blocked out
frightening episodes of abuse, years of their life, or their entire childhood’, the
guide asserted, providing detailed symptom check lists for the reader to determine
their own state of dissociation and denial (Fredrickson 1992: 15). By 1996, Kali
Tal asked the question: ‘Can it be that all feminist literature is based in trauma?
Perhaps not but it is certainly a proposition to take seriously. Trauma has played
a formative role in the lives of many, if not most American women’ (Tal 1996:
155). Tal suggested that all women existed in a ‘preatrocity consciousness’ and
that this was comparatively worse than combat veterans or Holocaust survivors
 The genealogy of a concept 73
because ‘the women who bear witness to these atrocities are still at risk, as all
women are at risk, in contemporary America’ (Tal 1996: 127 and 155). All
women were either pre- or post-survivors, defined on the pivot of the inevitable
traumatic event; saturation had been reached.
This is a trajectory of escalation, a remarkable exercise of traumatic trans-
mission, in which incest moves from being a vanishingly rare event (perhaps two
cases per million) to ‘the prototype of the unspeakable story’ that saturates
Western cultures (Haaken 2003: 78). The acceleration of these claims was the
main occasion for the eruption of the so-called ‘Memory Wars’ in the early
1990s, in which the nature of traumatic memory was at the core of the dispute.
Recovered Memory advocates argue that traumatic events are registered outside
conscious recall but in pristine, undegraded form in imagistic ‘flashbulb’ memo-
ries or in what Fredrickson calls ‘body memory’ since ‘our physical bodies always
remember sexual abuse’ (Fredrickson 1992: 93). Therapeutic techniques, includ-
ing hypnosis, could retrieve these memories in their pure, objective form. Yet
other research findings argue that traumatic events are likely to be the most mal-
leable memories, subject to continual retrospective transformation and particu-
larly open to therapeutic suggestion. This psychological debate hardened into
bitter adversarial dispute when criminal proceedings began on the basis of
recovered memories of sexual abuse. Psychologists who worked as legal expert
witnesses spoke up in favour of the retrieval of traumatic memory from blanket
amnesia (Terr) or instead emphasized the malleability of reconstructive memory
(Loftus). Accusations hardened against Recovered Memory Therapy when the
False Memory Syndrome Foundation was formed in 1994, an alliance of scepti-
cal psychologists and fathers accused of abuse. The legalistic framework forced
the discussion of trauma into unproductively Manichean positions. The most
vehement attacks on Recovered Memory suggested a conspiracy of twisted fem-
inists: ‘The Courage to Heal and its fellow manuals are not about surmounting one’s
tragic girlhood, but about keeping the psychic wounds open, refusing forgiveness
and reconciliation, and joining the permanently embittered corps of “survivors”’
(Crews 1997: 194).
There can be a more nuanced analysis of this moment of escalation, analysing
how recovered memory provides a compelling script of self-revelation that can
renarrate a life at a stroke, crystallizing vague and disturbing symptoms or gen-
eral dissatisfactions as now retrospectively meaningful after-effects of a childhood
trauma. That the trauma is all the more powerful for likely being entirely absent
from conscious memory is a logic that encourages self-suggestion. Auto-sugges-
tion was strongly advocated in self-help manuals: Fredrickson told her readers
‘whether what is remembered around that focal point is made up or real is of no
concern at the beginning of the process; that can be decided at a later date’, and
later suggests that ‘you will find it helpful to decide that your memories are real
for at least a year’ (Fredrickson 1992: 109 and 173). For Herman, these were affir-
mations that had to be both actively supported without question by the analyst-
advocate and reinforced by the survivor-group: ‘As each survivor shares her
unique story, the group provides a profound experience of universality. The group
74 Aetiology
bears witness to the survivor’s testimony, giving it social as well as personal mean-
ing’ (Herman 1992: 197). The story of the ‘adult survivor’, Joseph Davis argues,
is a transformative technology of the self, a machinery for an ultimately affirma-
tive redescription that places a reconstructed individual into a new, communitar-
ian identity (Davis 2005: 145). The inspirational narrative of transforming oneself
from victim to survivor works to ‘persuade other women of the personal benefits of
mapping their experience in light of this general narrative framework’ (Davis 2005:
106). There is an uncomplicated ‘moral authority’ that comes with survivorship
(Davis 2005: 105), and this Janice Haaken sees as central to the role of the survivor
within feminism: ‘trauma legends may … renew collective identity by re-establish-
ing the group’s entitlement – the rewards of suffering and righteousness – as well as
the group’s mourned losses’ (Haaken 1999: 23). And crucially, this is trauma no
longer bounded by the specific experience of war combat or camp imprisonment:
adult survivorship of unremembered childhood abuse holds out the greatest pos-
sibility of universal ascription. This allure is what gives the impetus to what Ian
Hacking has called the ‘semantic contagion’ of this particular form of dynamic
nominalism (Hacking 1995: 256).
The rapidity of this trauma transmission by the late 1980s has had the unfor-
tunate effect of diminishing the extraordinary achievement of second-wave fem-
inism in forcing the acknowledgement of incest and familial sexual abuse, in the
face of professional and general cultural denial, and its success in forcing concrete
cultural and institutional change. Women who had suffered implicitly condoned
violence now have supportive contexts in which to address physical and psycho-
logical damage. It is important not to blame feminism for this escalation in
trauma. Indeed, Joseph Davis’ history of the construction of the adult abuse sur-
vivor outlines numerous overlapping contexts: the family therapy movement, the
development of child protection agencies, and the arrival of PTSD in official
diagnostics, all of which interacted with the anti-rape movement and helped
shape and reshape the contours of the adult abuse survivor in unpredictable ways.
There is a convincing case to be made, for example, that sexual abuse only
became conceivable in child protection discourse in the late 1970s; doctors had
only really begun to acknowledge the possibility of physical abuse within the fam-
ily after Battered-Child Syndrome had been proposed in 1962 (Davis 2005; see
also Hacking 1991). Health and welfare institutions hybridized their developing
systems for detecting physical and mental abuse with the experience being artic-
ulated from within the contemporaneous feminist movement. From the mid-
1970s, it was a welfarist multi-agency conjuncture that did as much to shift
trauma out of a marginal identity politics and into a culturally pervasive structure
of subjectivity. This in turn brought in the vast machineries of law and insurance.
Recent feminist commentary on this transformation has in fact been critical of
the ‘success’ of this trauma subject. A common lament targets ‘the widespread
degeneration of the feminist practice of consciousness raising over the course of
the 1970s from a radical tactic to a form of group therapy’ (Kauffman 2001: 31).
What had been an exercise in situating women’s utterances within social and polit-
ical problematics in order to expose patriarchal logic now risked being reduced to
 The genealogy of a concept 75
private therapeutic acts of self-improvement. The fusion with the medicalized
language of trauma was also regarded as problematic: women might now be posi-
tioned as ‘naïve transmitters of raw experience’ (Alcoff and Gray 1993: 264) which
was then translated into official diagnostic terms by experts, who obscured social
oppression with the language of psychical trauma and personality disorders requir-
ing individual management and cure. Alcoff and Gray tracked how the Speak Out
had become an incitement to testify on confessional TV chat shows (led by Oprah
Winfrey, who declared herself an abuse survivor in 1991), a context that frequently
infantilized women, displaying them as ‘pitiable instantiations of the universal
truths the experts reveal’ (Alcoff and Gray 1993: 277).
Other lines of critique point to the passivity with which the abuse survivor is con-
structed. The model is of an external traumatic impact which shatters an Edenic
childhood innocence. Janice Haaken suspects that The Courage to Heal infantilizes
female sexuality, as any complex adult sexual act or fantasy (too much or too little, too
dominant or submissive) is reinterpreted as a probable restaging of childhood abuse.
It implies that female sexuality has been traumatically injected into women by abusive
men, that they have little or no sexual agency (Haaken 1999). A similar concern is pre-
sented by Susan Stefan’s study of the use of Rape Trauma Syndrome in the law
courts. The syndrome gave the authority of a medical diagnosis, yet also turned the
woman into ‘disordered victims’ whose normal reactions of fear and anger at sexual
violence became pathologies traded between experts, such that ‘women win in court
only by being represented as pathological and pathetic victims’ (Stefan 1993–4: 1275).
In fact, the feminist act of naming of Rape Trauma Syndrome in 1974 had ten years
later run into legal trouble: a rape prosecution was overturned on the basis that the
jury had been prejudiced by an expert witness using the syndrome to describe the psy-
chological condition of the alleged victim. Rape Trauma Syndrome was owned to
have psychotherapeutic value, but it was denied legal evidentiary weight and also did
not appear in the DSM (see Iles 1985 and Gaffney 2003–4). This is a reminder that
through all the modulations from the 1860s to the 1990s, from railway spine to abuse
survival, psychical trauma still remains a fundamentally medico-legal concept.
There is a certain irony in the feminist engagement with the trauma paradigm.
On the one hand, the morally authoritative discourse of the adult survivor devel-
oped from feminist consciousness-raising became one of the most influential
articulations of the trauma subject, building on the cross-fertilizations of identity
politics and therapeutic advocacy in the 1970s to shift welfare agencies and the
general perception in favour of protecting women and children from all forms of
domestic violence. On the other hand, this compelling survivor identity became
the model for an uncontainable transmission of trauma subjectivity far beyond
the political aims of the women’s movement, and soon feminism was scapegoated
for originating a universalized ‘culture of survivors’. This was all the harsher,
because the feminist politics behind speaking out on sexual abuse had lost much
of its force as soon as it tied its analysis to the language of PTSD and the profes-
sional discourses of law and medicine. This reinforces the view that any survivor
syndrome always ends up transmitting the trauma subject beyond the bounds of
its own identitarian agenda.
76 Aetiology
‘The history of the traumatic memory is a chain of analogies … But analogy
does a better job at proliferating meanings than containing them’ (A. Young 1995:
128). This genealogy has been an attempt to construct a roughly chronological
narrative about the emergence and diffusion of the concept of psychical trauma
from the 1860s until the coining of PTSD in 1980. It has also been a self-
conscious act of multi-disciplinary synthesis that brings into contact fields that
rarely acknowledge each other. By the late 1980s, I would suggest, the concept of
trauma was a tightly bound knot that linked together diverse threads of knowl-
edge. It also began to escape narrow professional discourses and diffuse into the
wider culture. Now that we have the genealogy in place, we can begin to read how
this complex history resonated through many aspects of culture.
Part II

Cultural symptoms
Introduction
Trauma and narrative knowledge

The second part of this book moves from an attempt to write a multi-disciplinary
history of trauma to the study of paired cultural forms: the differing claims of
written narrative in novels and memoirs (Chapters 2 and 3) and the static and
dynamic visual representations of trauma in photography and film (Chapters 4
and 5). Given the range of disciplinary knowledges compressed into the term
trauma, however, it is reasonable to address first why culture has been privileged
as the means to track the trauma paradigm.
The contemporary public sphere is saturated with specialist knowledges, gen-
eral accounts and stark images of traumatic experience. A traumatic event was
initially defined as ‘outside the range of normal human experience’, something
that might also be grasped as a gap between impact and understanding, influx
and assimilation. Anyone who has watched rolling news services in the immediate
wake of a disaster will have seen a disarray of competing and contradictory
accounts, obsessive repetition of the same, unedited footage, and a collapse of dis-
tinctions between knowledge, rumour and speculation. This chaos is only gradu-
ally corralled into a meaningful, strongly shaped media story, slowly edited back
into conformity with News discourse as the initial crisis recedes. The relationship
between trauma as a devastating disruption and the subsequent attempts to trans-
late or assimilate this disturbance is a fundamental tension between interruption
and flow, blockage and movement. Trauma, in effect, issues a challenge to the
capacities of narrative knowledge. In its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative,
but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to
explicate the trauma.
For me, the work done by cultural forms inheres in this contradiction: culture
rehearses or restages narratives that attempt to animate and explicate trauma
that has been formulated as something that exceeds the possibility of narrative
knowledge.
In a recent project to revive the category of the aesthetic, Isobel Armstrong has
argued that culture provides a space of (serious) play, a transitional mode where
knowledge and meaning can be constantly disarticulated and reassembled. The
aesthetic is often defined as an autonomous and non-purposive sphere, but for
Armstrong it is an inherently political mode that ‘mediates a life-creating, culture-
modifying space which is at once transgressive and communal’ (I. Armstrong
80 Cultural symptoms
2000: 40). Given the narrative/anti-narrative tension at the core of trauma,
aesthetics might step into this area because its task is (like that of the cultural
critic) to ‘play with contradictions’ (I. Armstrong 2000: 43). This play was formu-
lated in a different way by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who argued that the
peculiar specificity of literature was its ability to incorporate the languages of
other discourses (such as history, law, philosophy and science), yet suspend their
strict protocols of meaning and reference for a time. Literature’s ‘being-suspended’
(Derrida 1992: 49) means that it can play seriously with all forms of knowledge
by temporarily bracketing their rules of discourse. In this suspension, cultural
forms can explore the foundations of an array of knowledges. This is its strength,
but also its limit.
It is common to insist that culture is not reflective but constitutive of social
knowledge. In the case of trauma, cultural forms have been inextricably bound
up with some central concepts: the traumatic ‘flashback’, for instance, is borrowed
from cinema, multiple personality has always shadowed the literature of the dou-
ble, whilst the notion of recovering pristine recovered memories, as it developed in
the 1980s, was linked to cultural technologies like television and video recorders:
alters were switched like channels; memories were recorded, stored, rewound,
replayed. Principally, though, cultural forms have provided the genres and narra-
tive forms in which traumatic disruption is temporalized and rendered transmis-
sible. Trauma has become a paradigm because it has been turned into a repertoire
of compelling stories about the enigmas of identity, memory and selfhood that
have saturated Western cultural life.
This is perhaps the strongest claim for examining cultural articulations of
trauma, for if trauma can be seen as a problem of narrative knowledge, then
aesthetics foregrounds the artifices of narrative construction. Of late, an array of
visual and written stories involving trauma have ostentatiously played around with
narrative time, disrupting linearity, suspending logical causation, running out of
temporal sequence, working backwards towards the inaugurating traumatic
event, or playing with belated revelations that retrospectively rewrite narrative
significance. If these help figure the disruptions of trauma, this is not an interven-
tion into some imagined state of perfect narrative orderliness, but one of the defin-
ing marks of narrative discourse. As Gérard Genette observes, anachrony
(disruption of sequential narrative time) is not rare or modern, ‘but is one of the
traditional resources of literary narration’ (Genette 1980: 36). Where law, insur-
ance, medicine and psychiatry have often been confounded by the strange suspen-
sions of causation that attend post-traumatic sequelae, cultural narratives have
developed a repertoire of plots that explore both traumatic disruption and the
possibility of release into narrative.
This is somewhat at odds with some of the most influential cultural theories of
trauma, where the term trauma can be defined in opposition to narrative. In Jean-
Francois Lyotard’s view, trauma freezes time, and therefore any possibility of nar-
rative. He argues: ‘Narrative organisation is constitutive of diachronic time, and
the time that it constitutes has the effect of “neutralizing” an “initial” violence’
(Lyotard 1990: 16). Because trauma cannot be integrated into diachrony, it is a
 Trauma and narrative knowledge 81
blockage, ‘a bit monstrous, unformed, confusing, confounding’ (Lyotard 1990:
17), and the traumatic memory persists in a half-life, rather like a ghost, a haunt-
ing absent presence of another time in our time. This is then given an ethical turn
by Lyotard: any attempt to lay this ghostly traumatic trace is a form of tyranny or
totalization. Lyotard’s injunction is to ‘Let us wage war on totality; let us be
witnesses to the unpresentable’ (Lyotard 1984: 82). This is the severe task of
philosophy and art: ‘What art can do is bear witness … to this aporia of art and
to this pain. It does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it’ (Lyotard
1990: 47). Trauma can therefore only be an aporia in narrative, and any narra-
tive temporalization is an unethical act. Severe trauma can only be conveyed by
the catastrophic rupture of narrative possibility, in what Arthur Frank terms ‘an
anti-narrative of time without sequence, telling without mediation’ (Frank 1995:
98). This underlies allied approaches to Holocaust testimony, too. Lawrence
Langer insists that Holocaust accounts must ‘remain disrupted narratives’ and
suspects virtually any form of written codification of Holocaust experience as an
attempt to ‘mediate atrocity’ by domesticating it in narrative or generic form
(Langer 1991: xi and 9). His favouring of the oral over the written is of course
problematic (as if oral utterance escaped narrative conventions), but one can read
a Langer-like opposition between traumatic event and narrative possibility across
the work of Caruth, Laub and Felman, and into the body of cultural trauma
theory.
If narrative is at all possible, then critical theory has been particularly absorbed
by the temporal paradoxes of trauma’s belated effects. Trauma is Nachträglich,
meaning delayed or deferred, an enigmatic term used by Freud and developed by
subsequent psychoanalysts, to suggest that ordinary causality can be thrown into
reverse by a traumatic impact, whose affect is only registered long after the first
shock and which can retrospectively rewrite life narrative. Discourses requiring
logical causation (such as legal proofs of causes and post-traumatic effects) cannot
recognize this strange temporality. Literature can, registering it in the disarticula-
tion of linear narration, and theorists detail a Nachträglich body of literature ‘in
which anachronism is the principle feature’ (Nicholls 1996: 56).
Out of these aporias, what is identified is a few works of art that can testify to
the impossible possibility of an aesthetics of trauma, works that obey the injunc-
tion to bear witness to the unpresentable: Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Charlotte
Delbo’s Holocaust memoirs, W. G. Sebald’s hybrid texts documenting the forgot-
ten underside of European history, Daniel Libeskind’s memorial architecture,
Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah. The aesthetic is uncompromisingly
avant-garde: experimental, fragmented, refusing the consolations of beautiful form,
and suspicious of familiar representational and narrative conventions. Ultimately,
fractured Modernist form mimics narrative possibility disarmed by trauma.
In a typical disciplinary disjuncture, just as this cultural theory was abandon-
ing narrative so psychology was discovering it. In 1991, Jerome Bruner acknowl-
edged in ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’ that these ideas were likely
very familiar to cultural theorists, but revelatory for academic psychology. John
McLeod’s later survey of the new narrative therapy argued that the coherence
82 Cultural symptoms
of ‘life narrative’ was under pressure in contemporary society, resulting in disori-
entation as traditional scripts were torn up. ‘From a historical perspective’,
McLeod stated, ‘therapy can be regarded as a rearguard action against the ero-
sion of opportunities to tell personal stories’, since ‘there is little space in the
dominant social narrative of progress, development, and improvement for stories
of loss’ (McLeod 1997: 28 and 151). What McLeod terms ‘the therapeutic nar-
ration of trauma’ (McLeod 1997: 151) is the underlying premise for much work
done in the area, which might be summarized as: where trauma was, there nar-
rative shall be. In Susan Brison’s account (informed by her experience of violent
assault and rape), narrative reanimates the fixed traumatic intrusion, reassigning
agency:

Narrative memory is not passively endured; rather, it is an act on the part

of the narrator, a speech act that defuses traumatic memory, giving shape
and a temporal order to the events recalled, establishing more control over
their recalling, and helping the survivor to remake a self.
(Brison 1999: 40)

Similarly, Arthur Frank’s work on memoirs of illness (a genre now called

pathography) suggests that the onset of serious sickness constitutes ‘narrative
wreckage’ (Frank 1995: 68). Under modernity, medicine hoped to cure but did so
by distributing selfhood across different medical specialisms, demanding a further
‘narrative surrender’ to professional expertise (Frank 1995: 6). ‘Postmodern times are
when the capacity for telling one’s story is reclaimed’, Frank avows: ‘Stories have
to repair the damage that illness has done’ (Frank 1995: 7 and 58). The idea of
‘narrative repair’ is also at the centre of Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s theory that
moral agency can be returned to the abjected or damaged identities of individu-
als or groups by promoting ‘identity-constituting counterstories’ (Nelson 2001:
xii). Narrative ideas also direct some forms of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy.
Traumatic memory persists because it is poorly integrated into autobiographical
memory, but ‘as therapy progresses … the narrative tends to become more coherent’
(Ehlers and Clark 2000: 339).
There seems to be a flat contradiction between cultural theory that regards nar-
rative as betraying traumatic singularity and various therapeutic discourses that
see narrative as a means of productive transformation or even final resolution of
trauma. This of course reflects different disciplinary imperatives: aesthetic medi-
tations that sustain irresolution and explore narrative disjuncture are not written
under the rubrics and aims of therapeutic work with traumatized people. One
should not be judged by the other – it would be as perverse to demand a greater
clarity of therapeutic outcomes from a Sebald text as to lecture Susan Brison that
her narrativization of her experience was an unethical act that failed to respect
the singularity of her rape trauma.
Yet this split over the value of narrative is somewhat artificial. The aesthetic
theory that dominates this field has emerged from the work of Lyotard, Derrida
and Cathy Caruth’s revision of Paul de Man and reads trauma as an aporia
 Trauma and narrative knowledge 83
of representation, placing emphasis on difficulty, rupture and impossibility,
consistently privileging aesthetic experimentation. Meanwhile, our culture is
saturated with stories that see trauma not as a blockage but a positive spur to
narrative. Beyond post-structuralist trauma theory and its trauma canon, a wide
diversity of high, middle and low cultural forms have provided a repertoire of
compelling ways to articulate that apparently paradoxical thing, the trauma
narrative. These work from a different aspect of the same problem: if trauma is
a crisis in representation, then this generates narrative possibility just as much as
impossibility, a compulsive outpouring of attempts to formulate narrative knowl-
edge. The following chapters will therefore not only examine texts where trauma
brings narrative to a halt, but where trauma’s stalling actively provokes the
production of narrative.
To do this, I want briefly to outline two alternative ways of thinking about cul-
tural narrative in relation to trauma. The first uses some old-fashioned resources
from formalism and structuralism to focus on the mechanics of trauma’s narrative
spur. The second offers a more phenomenological view of what shape aesthetic
narrative brings to human experience.
Boris Tomashevsky’s essay ‘Thematics’ was a central document of the Russian
Formalist School, and has provided an impressive tool-kit of terms for subsequent
narrative analysis. Tomashevsky distinguished story, the causal and chronological
sequence of events, from plot, the actual order in which events are presented in a
narrative (Tomashevsky 1965: 66). The time of the narrative can never be iden-
tical with the time of the narrated, and one of the definitions of aesthetic narra-
tive is the foregrounding of this anachonic disjointedness. Plot coheres because
the reader is always belatedly sorting and re-sorting ‘motifs’ (narrative units) into
meaningful, sequential stories. Sometimes the reader has to revise retrospectively
the whole story, because a last plot twist recasts the significance of every plot motif
(like the last scene of the film, The Usual Suspects). These narratives with ‘regres-
sive endings’ are usually the ones we want to read or see again, although this is
only one of the more severe forms of narrative anachrony. Genette subsequently
tried to produce a taxonomy of these time slippages: analepsis (movements back-
wards), prolepsis (anticipations), ellipsis (edits that accelerate narrative time), and
so on, a grid of ‘all forms of discordance between the two temporal orders of
story and narrative’ (Genette 1980: 40). At its most abstract, Tomashevsky saw
narrative as beginning in a stasis which is upset by some kind of ‘exciting force’
that drives plot dynamically forward towards an eventual recovery of stasis.
This formalism has been recast as an explicitly traumatic theory of narrative by
Peter Brooks. Brooks borrowed from the model of trauma Freud put forward in his
speculative essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which protective filters are over-
whelmed by a traumatic impact which unleashes unbound excitations into the psy-
chic system. The compulsion to repeat, to dream or relive or relate the traumatic
event over and over, is an attempt to bind this energy, to assimilate it, and return
the psyche to a state of quiescence once more. Ingeniously, Brooks maps this onto
Tomashevsky’s abstraction of plot as an exciting force that intrudes on, disturbs,
but eventually returns to stasis, making narrative foundationally a working through
84 Cultural symptoms
of traumatic disruption. Plot starts when quiescence is stimulated into a ‘state of
narratability’ (Brooks 1977: 291); its trajectory is aimed at returning again to ‘the
quiescence of the non-narratable’ (Brooks 1977: 296). In between, this disruption
is worked into reiterative motifs that generate meaningful plot: ‘Textual energy, all
that is aroused into expectancy and possibility in a text … can become usable by
plot only when it has been bound or formalised’ (Brooks 1977: 290). Reading is
driven by the desire for the end, for it is only here that the anachronic trauma of
plot can be fully assimilated and bound up in story.
These discussions of narrative form are very suggestive. They provide a lan-
guage to formalize the mechanics of narrative structure that (metaphorically at
least) relates the allure of storytelling to an inaugurating trauma. They do not leg-
islate for a particular aesthetic, but proffer a matrix of possibility that encom-
passes a wide diversity of narrative forms in different media (fiction, memoir,
historiography, cinema) and from high to low culture. Brooks’ emphasis on the
drive towards the end could be taken to privilege the kinds of strong narrative clo-
sure often identified with nineteenth-century Realism, but I understand his sketch
of the ‘masterplot’ to be an ideal, against which different kinds of resolution
(including deferred, suspended, or refused resolution), and thus very different
kinds of trauma narrative, might be measured. Most importantly, Brooks’ refor-
mulation of formalism is premised on the view that trauma does not halt narra-
tive but might be regarded as the motor that drives its manifold forms.
Formal and structural analyses are always inevitably limited by their need to
isolate texts artificially from context, and since I want to be able to tie recent nar-
rative formations to the rise of a trauma paradigm in the 1980s, I need another
bridge to effect this historicization. Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative is an inquiry
after the distinctiveness of narrative that also argues for the substantive power of
narrative form to refigure our grasp of the real world. This is the last element of
narrative theory I need to introduce before we can proceed.
For Ricoeur, Western philosophy has been unable to master conceptually tem-
poral experience, which can appear in speculative thought only as an aporia (he
takes as his founding text Augustine’s bafflement at being unable to answer his
own simple question, ‘What, then, is time?’). The entirety of Ricoeur’s three-
volume study could be summed up in three words: ‘Narrative heals aporia’ (Wood
1991: 4). This is to say that where philosophy encounters time as discordance,
narrative is an act of concordance, which ‘“grasps together” and integrates into
one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events’ (Ricoeur 1984: x).
Narrative is ‘the privileged means by which we re-configure our confused,
unformed, and at the limit mute temporal experience’ (Ricoeur 1984: xi). The
largest claim is that humans can comprehend time only as narrative: ‘time
becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and
narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal exis-
tence’ (Ricoeur 1984: 52). However, Ricoeur is at pains to complicate the idea
that narrative is a simple act of exercising order over chaos: plots incorporate con-
tradiction, reversal and complexity, and narrative comprehension always quivers
on the verge of collapse. Emplotment is a high-wire act of what Ricoeur calls
 Trauma and narrative knowledge 85
discordant concordance. The modern novel tends to appear as a limit-case through-
out the study, challenging the classical unities of Aristotelian aesthetics, since the
novel has acted for three centuries as ‘a prodigious workshop for experiments in
the … expression of time’ (Ricoeur 1985: 8). The Modernist experiments with
narrative time in Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust, for instance,
take us into ‘uncharted modes of discordant concordance’ (Ricoeur 1985: 101),
but the extreme attempts to disable narrative by Samuel Beckett are still subject
to the reader’s active configuration of meaning, because the imperative to find
narrative coherence is so embedded. Nevertheless, Ricoeur entertains the possi-
bility that ‘we are the witnesses – and the artisans – of a certain death, that of the
art of telling stories’ and concedes that ‘nothing … excludes the possibility that
the metamorphosis of the plot will encounter somewhere a boundary beyond
which we can no longer recognise the formal principle of temporal configuration
that make a story’ (Ricoeur 1985: 28). Even so, ‘we have no idea of what a cul-
ture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things’
(Ricoeur 1985: 28).
Although Ricoeur begins from the premise that ‘in the final analysis, narratives
have acting and suffering as their theme’ (Ricoeur 1984: 56), these elements that
threaten to dis-figure the configuration of plot seem to have grown apace, distend-
ing ever further the chances of narrative concordance in the modern world.
Indeed, the final volume raises those ‘epoch-making’ events, such as Auschwitz,
that stand at the limit of speculative and historical understanding. Here, however,
Ricoeur finally reaffirms the role of fictional narrative against frozen horror or
defeated thought: ‘Fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and
weep’ (Ricoeur 1988: 188). Fiction, he continues, ‘permits historiography to live
up to the task of memory’ and speaks for ‘victims whose suffering cries less for
vengeance than for narration’ (Ricoeur 1988: 189).
Ricoeur’s terms ‘discordance’ and ‘concordance’ are easily translated into the
poles of blockage and flow, trauma and narrative, but in this case traumatic dis-
cordance is the constant spur to innovations in narrative concordance.
Narrative heals aporia, although can never finally seal over the wounds of tem-
poral existence, and that discordance will always propel further narrative appre-
hensions. However, Ricoeur’s study extends beyond providing merely another
set of terms to examine narrative structure, because he is ultimately concerned
to argue that narrative is more than a textual configuration: narrative is also a
means ‘to re-figure our historical condition and thereby raise it to the level of
historical consciousness’ (Ricoeur 1988: 102). ‘Making a narrative’, he proclaims,
‘resignifies the world in its temporal dimension’ since it activates readers to
reorient their being in the world (Ricoeur 1984: 81). It is perhaps in these grand
terms that the rationale for examining cultural narratives of trauma is best
made. Discourses like law, medicine, psychiatry, social policy and even critical
theory itself define trauma as an enigmatic discordance or aporia. Narrative is
spurred to shape this disruptive anomaly into new kinds of forms, each fore-
grounding, sometimes more, sometimes less, the violent tension between discor-
dance and concordance. These new forms in turn become the places where we
86 Cultural symptoms
try out the re-significations of self that trauma has wrought on contemporary
subjectivity.
Ricoeur defines narrative in the broadest sense, incorporating myth, folklore,
fiction and history. In that spirit, the next four chapters will examine fiction,
memoir, cinema and photography in the light of the dynamics of trauma and
narrative that I have outlined here.
2 Trauma in narrative fiction

The attempt to identify a distinct ‘trauma novel’ has been a very recent literary
critical task: Anne Whitehead terms it an ‘emerging genre’ (Whitehead 2004: 4),
which suggests that we have yet to see its full extent. Exemplars of the trauma
novel cluster in the late 1980s and 1990s, after the clinical elaboration of PTSD,
but forming an instrinsic part of the public controversies around post-traumatic
sequelae, such as recovered memory, the politics of survival, or competing kinds
of public memorialization of past violence. Indeed, the anachronies of novelistic
narrative make the form an important site for configuring (and therefore refigur-
ing) traumatic impacts for the wider culture. Literary criticism has lagged behind
this new literature, perhaps because the dominant critical paradigm at this time
was Postmodernism, a contested term but one that often argued for a paralysis of
the historical sense, the erasure of memory, and an epochal shift from the prob-
lematic of time to space (see Jameson 1991). In retrospect (with appropriate belat-
edness, perhaps), an explosion in historical fiction and a literature of anamnesis
has become discernable in this era. All this time, literature was exploring ‘new
modes of memory’, producing texts that ‘have been particularly effective at trac-
ing the consequences of living out the belief in, say, traumatic memory’
(Middleton and Woods 2000: 85).
For such a recent literature, there is already an emergent international canon
of writers and works, and even an implicit aesthetic for the trauma novel. This
cluster of trauma fictions opens, I would argue, with Toni Morrison’s Beloved
(1987), a novel which has exerted a remarkably wide cultural influence. It then
extends through Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988), Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy
(1991–5), Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1996), Binjamin Wilkomirski’s memoir-
belatedly-turned-novel Fragments (1996), and incorporates the complete works of
W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz (2001) explicitly embraced the organiz-
ing notion of traumatic dissociaton and recovered memory to explore post-
Holocaust subjectivity. New careers in trauma fiction are still being forged:
Jonathan Safran Foer’s tragi-comedies of the Holocaust, Everything is Illuminated
(2002), and 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), show every sign of
becoming canonical. In critical discussions different patterns of texts emerge,
often because trauma fictions are seen to develop from the context of specific
identity politics. Vietnam fictions start earlier, and helped shape not just any
88 Cultural symptoms
putative trauma aesthetic but the formation of PTSD itself. These texts might
include the innovative reportage of Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), Tim
O’Brien’s fiction or Larry Heinemann’s novel about a group of post-traumatic
combat veterans, Paco’s Story (1986). Deborah Horvitz identifies a parallel
women’s trauma fiction that has a long pre-history but clusters around the issue
of domestic physical and sexual abuse in the early 1990s. Although the memoir
has been a key vehicle for the feminist articulation of silenced traumatic violence,
Horvitz’s study of fiction adds Leslie Marmon Silko and Dorothy Allison to the
more canonical figures of Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison.
The Holocaust perspective also refracts the novelistic canon, and sometimes claims
a determining priority over the trajectory of trauma fiction. Indeed, Robert
Eaglestone argues that the Holocaust hovers as the ‘absent content’ of much fic-
tion since Samuel Beckett, but wonders how useful it might be to consider the cat-
egory of post-Holocaust fiction as virtually synonymous with post-war fiction.
There have also been some significant attempts to do cross-cultural comparative
work (between Toni Morrison and the Haitian Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of
Bones (1999), for instance), and to set up convergences between the trauma para-
digm and the nervous conditions of post-colonial literature. This begins to imply
that there is a central body of trauma fictions that might be reconceived from the
margins, even as identitarian trauma politics tends to argue for its own marginality
and widespread cultural aversion to its concerns.
These texts are often brought together by critics as exemplary works because
they are held to share a particular trauma aesthetic. This is sometimes explicitly
stated in prescriptive terms, listing elements that must be included to establish
membership of a proper or authentic literature of trauma. Because a traumatic
event confounds narrative knowledge, the inherently narrative form of the novel
must acknowledge this in different kinds of temporal disruption. ‘If trauma is at
all susceptible to narrative formulation’, Whitehead argues, ‘then it requires a lit-
erary form which departs from conventional linear sequence’ (Whitehead 2004: 6).
‘Trauma narratives’, Vickroy concurs, ‘go beyond presenting trauma as a subject
matter or in characterization; they also incorporate the rhythms, processes, and
uncertainties of trauma within the consciousness and structures of these works’
(Vickroy 2002: xiv). Disorders of emplotment are read as mimicking the trau-
matic effect. In Nicola King’s view, the novel is particularly suited to a hermeneu-
tic understanding of traumatic memory as subject to ‘afterwardsness’ or
Nachträglichkeit, in which the past is open to retrospective reinterpretation once
occluded material has been recovered. The plots of trauma narratives can belat-
edly and magically reconfigure entire life stories.
The requirement for formal disturbance is often overdetermined by ethical or
politcal imperatives too. Robert Eaglestone’s formulation of the features of the
genre of Holocaust testimony suggests it is marked by interruptions, temporal dis-
order, refusal of easy readerly identification, disarming play with narrative fram-
ing, disjunct movements in style, tense, focalization or discourse, and a resistance
to closure that is demonstrated in compulsive telling and retelling (Eaglestone
2004: 42–65). These are elements that might serve as an outline of a general
 Trauma in narrative fiction 89
trauma aesthetic. For Eaglestone, these formal properties are all in the service of
retaining a sense of the impossibility of comprehending the Holocaust, which can
never be contained within narrative. In this context, other formal choices that do
not find ways of figuring this aporia become unethical. Thus, the very idea of the
‘Holocaust novel’, shaped by narrative, characterological and other conventions,
is always a fraught and compromised form. Elsewhere, where narrativization is
seen as an act acquiring agency, as in feminist discussions of trauma, a political
imperative is foregrounded. ‘Narrative representations of trauma’, Horvitz asserts,
must ‘expose the need for social transformation; they target for disruption such
bureaucratic institutions as the legal and medical systems or … capitalism and
consumerism’ (Horvitz 2000: 18). Formal radicalism is equated with political rad-
icalism, and sets a high bar of expectations about the political utility of fiction.
The forms favoured tend to evoke the innovations associated with Modernism (a
movement that has been recast by Tim Armstrong as a species of trauma literature).
The contemporary trauma aesthetic shares something else with Modernism: it is
defined against banal, exploitative or routinized cultural expression. Modernism has
been critically constructed as defining its own search for ceaseless novelty by abject-
ing the conventionalized middle- and low-brow culture that surrounded it. Even
if this account has now been problematized, avant-garde innovations remain
motivated by opposition to mainstream or mass cultural norms. Laurie Vickroy
identifies a ‘serious’ and ‘authentic’ trauma literature explicitly against a popular
culture that ‘has more often exploited such anxieties with tales or terror, suspense,
or prurience’ (Vickroy 2002: 8, 21 and 7). Kali Tal’s account of trauma literature
constantly asserts vigilance against ‘reducing a traumatic event to a set of standard-
ized narratives’, worrying that ‘traumatic events are written and rewritten until they
become codified and narrative form replaces content as the focus of attention’ (Tal
1996: 6). This is a familiar argument about the numbing effect of repeated expo-
sure to mediated traumatic material and the aesthetics of shock. Susan Sontag
feared overuse of these devices was producing a ‘pseudo-familiarity with the horri-
ble’ in her discussion of photography (Sontag 1977: 41), whilst she regarded the
mass cultural ‘imagination of the disaster’ as a ‘naïve and largely debased commer-
cial art’, a symptom ‘stripped of sophistication, of the inadequacy of most people’s
response to the unassimilable terrors that infect their consciousness’ (Sontag 1966:
223). Aesthetic experimentation is therefore valued because it defies the habituation
of trauma into numbing and domesticating cultural conventions.
There is something of a contradiction, however, in affirming the centrality of
innovation whilst identifying a specific (and sometimes prescriptive) trauma aes-
thetic. Paradoxically, the aesthetic means to convey the singularity of a traumatic
aporia has now become highly conventionalized, the narratives and tropes of
traumatic fiction easily identified. This contradiction can be avoided by making
two shifts. First, rather than privileging narrative rupture as the only proper mark
of a trauma aesthetic, if the focus is moved to consider narrative possibility, the
potential for the configuration and refiguration of trauma in narrative, this opens
up the different kinds of cultural work that trauma narratives undertake. This
necessitates a second move: regarding trauma fiction not as a narrow canon of
90 Cultural symptoms
works, but as a mass of narratives that have exploded across high, middle and low-
brow fiction since the late 1980s, texts with wildly different ambitions but that fre-
quently share the same narrative devices. To examine this diversity of fictional
forms, this chapter will start with Toni Morrison and end with W. G. Sebald, the
two most recognized masters of trauma fiction, but will move between them
through the generic delights of Stephen King’s trauma Gothic and a cluster of
mainstream trauma works that crammed bookshops in the 1990s.

Beloved: A paradigmatic trauma fiction

Beloved, a novel about the murderous legacies of slavery in America, elevated Toni
Morrison to major cultural pre-eminence: the book won the Pulitzer Prize and in
1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel was
intended to give some inner consciousness and humanity to the historical record
of atrocities inflicted against African and African–American people as a conse-
quence of institutional slavery. The events of the book are partly based on the
case of the slave Margaret Garner who escaped her Kentucky owner in 1856 to
‘freedom’ across the Ohio River, but who then cut the throat of her best loved
daughter at the prospect of their capture and return to slavery. This was a legally
enforceable act of recovery of property under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. At the
height of abolitionist controversies, Garner’s case was used to both attack slavery
and to defend the institution, since the act was argued to prove the essentially sav-
age nature of the African race. Beloved took this event as a metonymy for the ‘sixty
million and more’ subjected to the murderous institution of slavery (this is Beloved ’s
dedication), but was specifically intended to voice the female experience of slav-
ery, a violence frequently repressed by anti-slavery campaigners and subsequent
historians alike as simply ‘too disgusting to appear in this narrative’, as one
Abolitionist put it in the 1830s (cited Foster 1994: xxxi). The traumatic experience
of the slave woman was until late into the twentieth century doubly silenced: ‘If,
in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot
speak, the subaltern female is even more deeply in shadow’ (Spivak 1988: 287). It
was the identity politics of black women’s experience that made Beloved possible at
this late date; its formal and conceptual links to the trauma paradigm reinforced
its influence on American culture.
The book I think helped establish some of the basic narrative and tropological
conventions of trauma fiction. It was soon regarded as a formative text in literary
trauma studies, which has produced a torrent of academic commentary. There
are well over five hundred articles related to Beloved listed on periodical databases.
This is an excessive and no doubt repetitive body of critical work, but it testifies
to the success of Morrison’s attempt to construct a ‘participative’ mode of writ-
ing for dealing with such intensely disturbing material. Reflecting on the novel in
‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken’, Morrison wrote of devising means to throw the
reader into the midst of ‘compelling confusion’ at the opening of each chapter, a
discordance that only slowly worked ‘to provide the places and spaces so that the
reader can participate’ (Morrison 1989: 33). This was an exemplary instance of
 Trauma in narrative fiction 91
creating what Dominick LaCapra terms ‘empathic unsettlement’ in the reader
(LaCapra 2001: 78). The vast body of commentary is not redundant; it is a testa-
ment both to the transmissibility of trauma and the acts of compulsive repetition
trauma narratives can induce in their readers.
There are three aspects of Beloved that make it paradigmatic: its disarticulation
of linear narrative, its figuration of trauma in the ghost, and its closing reflections
on the transgenerational transmission and the complex accommodations commu-
nities need to make with such traumatic history. Let’s take these in turn.
When Paul D. confronts Sethe and asks for an account of what she has done to
leave her exiled from her community, he is bewildered by her circumambulations:

It made him dizzy. At first he thought it was her spinning. Circling him the
way she was circling the subject … Then he thought, No, it’s the sound of
her voice; it’s too near. Each turn she made was at least three yards from
where he sat, but listening to her was like having a child whisper into your
ear so close you could feel its lips form the words you couldn’t make out
because they were too close. He caught only pieces of what she said.
(Morrison 1987: 161)

There are two more pages of Paul D. listening to this ‘circling, circling’ (162)
until the narrative focalization shifts to Sethe:

Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the
subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for
anybody to who to ask. If they didn’t get it right off – she could never
explain. Because the truth was simple … She just flew. Collected every bit
of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and
beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away,
over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place,
where they would be safe.
(Morrison 1987: 163)

This is the closest we get to Sethe’s account of the event, one of avoidance,
delay and evasion and which is played out through the agitated movements of the
body as much as through language. The account makes sense only because the
events have been recounted through the hard eyes of the white slave-catchers just
before this exchange – a shed, a saw, and ‘a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked
child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in another’ (Morrison
1987: 149). The core event thus appears about half-way through the novel: its
extremity accounts for this delay, and for the turbulence that affects every level of
narrative. Linear temporal sequence is shipwrecked against the jagged fixity of
this atemporal traumatic scene. And Sethe is not alone; many of the African–
American characters carry a traumatic moment of violence, humiliation or sub-
jective death, which leaves them in a similar condition of circling what they are
defined by and cannot confront, unable to communicate their story. The men of
92 Cultural symptoms
Sweet Home are unmanned in shocking, near unendurable moments. These
defining scenes always come late, and crawl crabwise into the narrative, as if the
events cannot really be sustained within subjective memory or linguistic represen-
tation. In later stages, the loss of any boundaries of self between Sethe and her
strange young visitor in 124 disintegrates narrative possibility and even determi-
nate grammatical relationships. Readers encounter pages of reiterations spaced in
non-causal relationships, variations on the phrase ‘I am Beloved and she is mine’
(Morrison 1987: 214). The book is steeped in these kinds of code that bind people
together in encrypted ways. Paul D. remembers the strength garnered from slave
songs sung by ‘garbling up words so they could not be understood; tricking the
words so their syllables yielded up other meanings’ (Morrison 1987: 108), but is
also locked out of the dynamics of the women in Sethe’s house, unable to read
‘the code they used among themselves that he could not break’ (Morrison 1987:
132). Encryption is a form of compromised survival, acts of defence that every act
of decoding actually threatens.
The novel proceeds by this disfiguration of narrative coherence, compelling the
reader to attempt to configure a meaningful sequence, which always comes after
the fact and always feels anxiously provisional, open to further revision. This
occurs at the very local level, where Morrison consistently uses the device of
‘delayed decoding’. Objects are defamiliarized for a time, before leaping into sharp
relief: the tree traced out on Sethe’s back becomes the marks of a whipping; the
‘tip of the thing’ under Beloved’s chin becomes the scar made by the saw; the rib-
bon that Stamp Paid fingers in his pocket is eventually revealed as a gruesome
memorial, first found ‘knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its
bit of scalp’ (Morrison 1987: 180). This is Stamp Paid’s metonymic aide-memoire
for ‘the people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had
lost their ribbons’ (Morrison 1987: 181). These very local jolts make every image
or motif a site of unease: the ‘tip of the thing’ in fact has a long life as a repeated
phrase that accumulates anticipatory feelings of dread long before its significance
is confirmed. The presiding aim of the novel is therefore to create a feeling of
Nachträglichkeit, of being caught out by a time signature that consistently exposes
the reader too early to traumatic markers that can only be comprehended too late.
However, this severe discordance of plot is gradually brought together by the
reader to compose some kind of chronological story. The time scheme stretches from
the narrative present (1874) back to Sethe’s murderous act thirteen years previously
(1861), which ends her twenty-eight days of freedom in Cincinnati. Memories of the
slave plantation Sweet Home move further back (to 1855), and are divided
between the relatively benign rule under Garner, and the brutal regime of his suc-
cessor, Schoolteacher, who sanctions rape and violent emasculation of his slaves,
and thus provokes the desperate escape. The historical spine therefore straddles the
Civil War and although the war is an oblique presence in the novel, Sethe’s story
unfolds against the backdrop the shift from national division over slavery to the era
of Reconstruction in the 1870s. But the narrative schema of Beloved is constructed
kaleidoscopically through constantly shifting points of view, each narrator having
their own patterns of knowledge and occlusion. It is not a continuous account,
 Trauma in narrative fiction 93
being shot through with holes, and symptomatic absences. Some leave no trace;
not everyone survives to have a witness or be integrated into the narrative. This is
not history writing; some losses are irretrievable.
According to Wolfgang Iser, the reader of a fictional narrative strives ‘to fit
everything together in a consistent pattern’, projecting from the ‘polysemantic
possibilities’ of a text a gestalt or pattern, an ‘individual, configurative meaning’
(Iser 1988: 219 and 220). This projection undergoes constant revision: ‘By read-
ing, we uncover the unformulated part of the text, and this very indeterminacy is
the force that drives us to work out a configurative meaning’ (Iser 1988: 222). In
this working out, Iser even suggests that these configurative acts help ‘formulate
ourselves and so discover what had previously seemed to elude our consciousness’
(Iser 1988: 226). Trauma fictions work with and against this phenomenological
description of reading. In Morrison, trauma takes discordance to the very limits
of coherence. If concordance is possible, this grasping together of fragments into
story is far from unifying. The reader is jarred by belated recognitions of events
that are barely supportable in novelistic discourse. It may be that such reading
presents us with what ‘seemed to elude our consciousness’, but this is not an act
of completion or closure so much as a confrontation with a violent history that
has been held outside national history or collective memory. Beloved aims to
de-stabilize subjectivity; it disarms the reader with narrative and figurative
techniques that force a confrontation with traumatic material.
Beloved gained such cultural influence because its Nachträglich narrative device
was reinforced by the central metaphorical device of the book: the ghostly return
of Beloved. The ghost embodied the idea of the persistence of traumatic
memory, the anachronic intrusion of the past into the present. Although the ghost
as figure of trauma has become almost a cliché, reinforced as it was throughout
the 1990s by an elaborate critical discourse of spectres and ‘spectrality’, Beloved
was amongst the first texts to develop this aspect of trauma culture’s Zeitgeist.
Ghosts suffuse the book. This is not surprising, if we follow Orlando Patterson’s
view of slavery as a form of social death:

The essence of slavery is that the slave, in his social death, lives on the margin
between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular.
Already dead, he lives outside the mana of the gods and can cross the
boundaries with social and supernatural impunity.
(Patterson 1982: 51)

Ghosts are the signals of atrocities, marking sites of untold violence, a trau-
matic past whose traces remain to attest to a lack of testimony. A haunting does
not initiate a story; it is the sign of a blockage of story, a hurt that has not been hon-
oured by a memorializing narrative. The geography of Beloved is punctured by
traumas that have not been bound into story: ‘Not a house in the country ain’t
packed to its rafters with some dead negro’s grief ’ (Morrison 1987: 5); ‘You know
as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground’ (Morrison 1987:
188). The supernatural is semi-naturalized: Sethe and Paul D. calmly recall ‘that
94 Cultural symptoms
headless bride back behind Sweet Home’ (Morrison 1987: 13), and later Paul D.
hears dead Miami native Americans growl and sigh as he passes through their
land (Morrison 1987: 155). Such haunted places prompt Sethe to coin the term
‘rememory’: ‘You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do …
Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, its gone, but the place – the
picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the real world’.
It is easy enough to ‘bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else’
(Morrison 1987: 36). That such ghosts mark both the traces of individual histo-
ries, stories of the unnamed that remain untold and therefore hauntingly unre-
solved, as well as condensations of an entire community, is evidenced in Beloved’s
ambivalent representative status. 124 is the site of a specific tragic event, but also
invokes a whirlwind of multiple voices, a ‘roaring’ that compresses the entire
history of slavery.
Beloved is a weird and unconventional kind of ghost: she appears in discontin-
uous forms, defying folk wisdom. Where a grave and a name on a tombstone often
end haunting, here Sethe recalls that ‘as soon as I got the gravestone in place you
made your presence known in the house’ (Morrison 1987: 184). This appears to
be a benign haunting for some years until Denver discovers her mother’s murder-
ous secret. What ends her hysterical deaf-muteness is a shift in the aspect of haunt-
ing: ‘From then on the presence was full of spite’ (Morrison 1987: 104). Paul D.
enacts the first exorcism – which only ensures Beloved’s material return. In a text
so well known, it is easy to forget the disturbing gap between the appearance of
a young girl, apparently without history or explanation for her arrival, and the
confirmation that this is Beloved in her third mode of haunting. Sethe only ‘clicks’
late (and the reader mimics her belatedness). As mutual, overwhelming desire
consumes Beloved and Sethe inside 124, Beloved seems to expand to contain an
entire history, the ghosts of slaves from the Middle Passage speaking in panicked,
fractured paragraphs. Beloved channels a cacophony of voices, ‘the people of the
broken necks’ that forbid Stamp Paid entry to the house. The second exorcism
comes from a communal act. Ella, utterly unforgiving of Sethe’s act of murder
thirteen years before, ‘didn’t mind a little communication between the two worlds,
but this was an invasion’ (Morrison 1987: 257). The second ritual has to move
beyond any symbolic conventions: the women’s voices rise to find ‘the key, the
code, the sound that broke the back of words’ (Morrison 1987: 261) to expel the
ghost. Even then, Beloved remains in the final pages, ‘a loneliness that roams’, ‘dis-
remembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for
her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name?’
(Morrison 1987: 274). What Beloved embodies refuses the ghost story’s conven-
tional ending: she cannot be laid to rest. She can be captured only in contradictory
formulations: ‘a requiem that is a resurrection’ (Rushdy 1992: 571).
The spectre has come to bear a heavy theoretical freight as a figure for a cri-
tique of amnesiac modernity in the 1990s. Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote of the ghosts
that haunted any totalizing system, and of the commitment of ethical thought to be
‘haunted by a familiar and unknown guest which is agitating it’ (Lyotard 1991: 2).
Jean-Michel Rabaté concurred: ‘we might say that “modern” philosophy has
 Trauma in narrative fiction 95
always attempted to bury [its] irrational Other in some neat crypt, forgetting that
it would thereby lead to further ghostly reapparitions’ (Rabaté 1996: xviii). Any
proclamation of self-possessed modernity induces a haunting, what David
Glover terms the ‘spectrality effect’ (Glover 2001). All of this was undersigned by
Jacques Derrida’s reflections in Specters of Marx, in which the ghost throws time
out of joint, producing a ‘radical untimeliness’ or ‘anachrony’ in which self-
possession suffers permanent disjointure (Derrida 1994: 27). This temporal dis-
location also opens an ethical relation, for the revenant always returns with a
plea or demand for witness. For Derrida, ‘to be’ is ‘to be haunted by’ an Other:
ontology is replaced by hauntology, a pun which works better with a French
accent (Derrida 1994: 51).
This Gothic programme might almost be sketched out in the margins of
Beloved, whose ghost, as Peter Nicholls puts it, ‘evokes the traumatic force of a his-
toricity which splits the subject, compelling it to live in different times rather than
in a secure, metaphysical present’ (Nicholls 1996: 58). Beloved is at once an act of
recovery and memorialization, but also a testament to the immemorial, the ethical
impossibility of bringing to any close the mourning for ‘sixty million and more’
for subsequent generations.
It is these reflections on transgenerational transmission and the difficulty of
accommodation with this traumatic history that also make Beloved a central
trauma fiction. The novel follows the route of two daughters. Beloved and her
consuming desire first for recognition from and then possession of the mother
locks them into a form of melancholia, in which the traumatic losses of the past
are erased in their ecstatic embrace. Beloved’s return allows Sethe to ‘Think about
all I ain’t got to remember no more’ (Morrison 1987: 1982) because the ghost is
an insistence of the past: it obliterates memory. Denver, the surviving daughter,
born as her mother crossed the Ohio River into freedom, traverses the family
trauma in a different way, one that comes to spurn melancholia for a process of
mourning. Denver has lost her brothers, driven out by the haunting, and suffers
traumatic deaf-mutism initiated by the innocent question asked of her at school
(and typically delayed by Morrison to intensify its punch): ‘Didn’t your mother get
locked away for murder?’ (Morrison 1987: 103). Denver lives sealed in the melan-
cholic world of 124, her senses returning when a malign aspect to the haunting
begins. She initially takes the pleasures of recognition from Beloved’s material
return, but locked out of the psychotic mother–daughter dyad, she steps off the
front step of 124, a sign of her re-entry into social being. It is Denver who brings
a communal rescue of her mother from melancholic entrapment, and this act that
allows Sethe to utter, in her final words, a fragile return of self: ‘“Me? Me?”’
(Morrison 1987: 273). This is the first prospect of her escape from slavery’s social
death some thirteen years after her freedom.
Once again, Beloved’s metaphorical framework is shared with theoretical work
done elsewhere. The generational transmission of traumatic history has been fig-
ured as a form of haunting in the work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok. They explain melancholia thus: ‘Grief that cannot be expressed
builds a secret vault within the subject. In this crypt reposes … the objective
96 Cultural symptoms
counterpart of the loss, as a complete person with his own topography’ (Abraham
and Torok 1980: 8). Crypts only remain sealed for so long: they begin to leak
phantoms. ‘To be sure, all the departed may return, but some are destined to haunt:
the dead who have been shamed during their lifetime or those who took unspeak-
able secrets to the grave’ (Abraham 1987: 287). This is an intersubjective under-
standing of traumatic effects: such secrets are forms of ‘transgenerational haunting’:
‘What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of oth-
ers’ (Abraham 1987: 287). Typically, the passage of a secret is from parent to
child: ‘The buried speech of the parent becomes (a) dead (gap), without a burial
place, in the child’ (Abraham and Torok 1984: 17). Beloved enacts this transmission
in the symptomatic history of Denver. In a text stuffed with ghosts and phantoms,
another image chain develops of sealed crypts beginning to burst: Paul D. carries
a rusting tobacco tin in his chest that seals his ungovernable emotions; Sethe’s
belated click of understanding comes in a revealing image: ‘A hobnail casket of
jewels found in a tree hollow should be fondled before it is opened …. No smash-
ing with an ax head before it is decently exhumed from the grave that has hidden
it all this time’ (Morrison 1987: 176). These unleash phantoms that harry those
living in the wake of trauma. Just as Abraham and Torok lay out two different
psychic topographies of mourning and melancholy, so Sethe’s two daughters
embody these paths: a melancholia that perpetuates encryption or a mourning
that eventually decrypts occluded violent history.
The maturity of Morrison’s vision of the accommodation to this past lies in her
refusal to simply choose between what the daughters signify. It is of course neces-
sary to overcome a pathological relation to the traumatic past, to be relieved of its
violent insistence, in order to recover a sense of self and the possibility of com-
munity, but this cannot be done by a simple forgetting, since such exorbitant vio-
lence will continue to haunt the polity, much like Beloved’s remaining in the
closing pages of the book. What Morrison seems to advocate is a kind of hesita-
tion between two possibilities, as outlined by Derrida:

Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible
mourning which would interiorise within us the image, idol, or ideal of the
other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourn-
ing, which, leaving the other to his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove,
either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself ?
(Derrida 1986: 6)

This quandary is caught more economically in Morrison’s coinage ‘to disre-

member’, which combines contradictory imperatives: to recall and forget, to dis-
member and recompose. These tensions also spell out the discordant concordance
Ricoeur identifies in narrative knowledge. Beloved ends with Paul D. asking Sethe
‘to put his story next to hers’ (Morrison 1987: 273), recalling one of the Sweet
Home men speak of love as a species of story: ‘The pieces I am, she gather them
and give them back to me in all the right order’ (Morrison 1987: 272). The coda,
however, honours the persistence of discordant traumatic history: that there is no
 Trauma in narrative fiction 97
story, in this sphere, that will not carry shards that pierce through any claim to
closure.
Beloved suggests how important the role of fictional narrative can be in the
trauma paradigm, for it demonstrates the novel form’s capacity to bend the rules
of history, causation and representation in order to bring into presence an occluded
traumatic violence. The use of the supernatural foregrounds the limits of histori-
ography, law or medicine to convey the lived experience of traumatized subjectiv-
ity and its transgenerational consequences: this experience requires fantastical
tropes, exploded time schemes and impossible causations. In an act of creative
intervention into the historical record, Morrison’s narrative can at once depict the
wound, keep it open, and bring a measure of concordance to what violence has
shattered.
Beloved brilliantly consolidated a style of narrative distension, ethical hesitation
and focus on the politics of oppressed communal identity now seen as typical of
trauma fiction. However, it is striking how little commentary on the novel (includ-
ing my own here) takes place in relation to the discourses of the trauma subject
as they were substantially reconceived by the introduction of PTSD after 1980.
This is mainly because the novel is bound up with psychoanalytic formulations.
Morrison is openly indebted to this tradition: at the start of Playing in the Dark, for
instance, she asserts that ‘the narrative into which life seems to cast itself surfaces
most forcefully in certain kinds of psychoanalysis’ (Morrison 1993: vii), and most
of the dynamics between mother and daughters in Beloved are thought through
Freudian models. The remarkable symmetry of Beloved with a psychoanalytic
post-structuralism gone Gothic means that the text has become an easy form of
exemplification for a certain kind of cultural theory. What the text doesn’t do is reg-
ister how the trauma paradigm explicitly transforms narrative, trope and character-
formation in the contemporary novel. To begin to sketch this historical shift in
fiction, I turn to the work of Stephen King.

Stephen King’s trauma Gothic

Stephen King’s prolific, bestselling horror writing is frequently the source of sus-
picion, celebrated by fans but ignored in the main by literary critics and disdained
by experts in the Gothic. S. T. Joshi in The Modern Weird Tale lambasts King’s
‘cheap sentiment, naïve moral polarisations, hackneyed, implausible and ill-explained
supernatural phenomena … and a subscribing to the conventional morality of
common people’ ( Joshi 2001: 63). A problem for those who want to regard the
Gothic genre as potentially subversive is King’s conservatism; his novels invoke a
coercive ‘we’ that David Punter considers ‘at all points coterminous with US
norms’ (Punter 1996: 122). Even worse, King seems to agree, seeing horror fiction
as ‘above all else an agent of the norm’ (King 1991: 64). Yet this is not so simple,
for King’s work registers exactly the pressure on those norms across a particu-
larly turbulent span of American history. His work might be loosely defended as
‘sociopolitical’ in this regard (Magistrale 1988: 2), but one can be more precise.
King’s horrific tales are unusually sensitive to the depredations to contemporary
98 Cultural symptoms
subjectivity, and his narratives are so compulsive because they explore this dis-
cordance within narrative structures that work (for most of the time) towards
fragile kinds of concord. For me, this defines the value of reading popular fic-
tion as a form of surrogate public history. This historicity is nowhere more
apparent than in King’s relationship to the reconceptualization of trauma since
the 1970s.
King’s work might initially be regarded as trauma fiction in two ways. First,
trauma psychology frequently resorts to the Gothic or supernatural to articulate
post-traumatic effects. Large-scale traumatic events involve, as Robert Jay Lifton
puts it, ‘a permanent encounter with death’ that leaves behind it a host of ‘home-
less dead’ that cannot easily be laid to rest (Lifton in Krystal 1968: 171 and 183).
Survivors are treated as liminal beings, exaggeratedly valued or feared for now
possessing ‘a quality of supernatural evil’ (Lifton 1968: 517). In Trauma and
Recovery, Judith Herman proposes that

the pathological environment of childhood abuse forces the development of

extraordinary capacities, both creative and destructive. It fosters the develop-
ment of abnormal states of consciousness in which the ordinary relations of
body and mind, reality and imagination, knowledge and memory, no longer
hold …. The language of the supernatural, banished for three hundred years
from scientific discourse, still intrudes into the most sober attempts to
describe the psychological manifestations of chronic childhood trauma.
(Herman 1994: 96)

Janice Haaken noted that as the incest story took hold it was becoming super-
set with all kinds of ‘social symbolic loadings’ by the late 1980s, including the
‘clinical preoccupation with gothic scenes of sexual torture’ (Haaken 2003: 90).
Post-traumatic experience is intrinsically uncanny, finding cultural expression in
ghostly visitations, prophetic dread, spooky coincidence or telepathic transfer:
‘Traumatic anxiety is a ghost! It moves through the generations with the stealth
and cunning of a most skilled spectre’ (Terr 1985: 528).
This is not a collection of loose metaphorical analogues, but a stronger argu-
ment: genre fictions can become imbricated in the formation new psychiatric
subjects. Ian Hacking comments on the important role films like The Three Faces
of Eve (Nunnally Johnson, 1957) or Sybil (Daniel Petrie, 1976) had on the diagnos-
tic construction of multiple personality disorder. Generic scripts provide narra-
tives for what Hacking terms ‘making up people’, the dynamic interaction
between subjects and psychiatric categories. In a different context, the apparatus
of the horror and Gothic revival of the 1970s (of which King was an integral
part) clearly surfaced in the descriptions of recovered memories of Satanic Ritual
Abuse in the early 1990s. That the Gothic might prove appropriate to provide
scripts for trauma is perhaps because, as Robert Miles argues, the genre has from
its foundation been ‘embroiled within … the history of the “subject”,’ presenting
the self as ‘dispossessed in its own house, in a condition of rupture, disjunction,
fragmentation’ (Miles 1993: 2–3).
 Trauma in narrative fiction 99
Second, King’s trauma fiction could be read more literally as a body of work
symptomatic of personal trauma. This project has been duly undertaken, and by
Lenore Terr, one of the strongest proponents in the Memory Wars of the view
that buried traumatic memory can be recovered in pure, unmediated form. Her
suspicion that King’s work has traumatic origins begins with the non-supernatural,
rite-of-passage novella ‘The Body’ (filmed as Stand By Me), in which a handful of
boys from variously abusive homes follow train tracks into the forest on the
rumour that they will be able to see a dead body. ‘The Body’ is structured as a rec-
ollection of a writer on a defining incident in his adolescence, one which is suf-
fused with death, and Terr takes the story as barely encrypted autobiography.
Sure enough, King’s autobiographical writings reveal an incident of which King
claims to have no direct memory, only the indirect accounts of family lore: aged
four, returning home from play silent and shocked, King was the possible witness
to the death of his playmate on rail tracks. How apt that King’s traumatic origins
as a writer are staged on this amnesiac site, the origin of trauma itself, the rail-
way! King’s account in Danse Macabre, however, is savage about decoding his
career through this event. Such psychiatric speculation is ‘jumped-up astrology’:
‘writers are made’, he says, ‘not born or created out of dreams or childhood
trauma’ (King 1991: 103–4). Terr nevertheless traces this symptom with a dogged
and literal determination. Mechanical monsters loom in King’s work: possessed
cars, demonic machines, zombifying mobile phones and always, always the
train. King knows ‘how to present posttraumatic symptoms in his plots’ (Terr 1989:
379). King’s well-known writing compulsion (and other addictions), his exploration
of the same scenarios of menaced children, suggest rather that he is caught in cycles
of traumatic repetition rather than mastery. Even the inordinate length of the
novels that King produces has a traumatic origin for Terr: the over-accumulation
of detail, the slowing of narrative time, all imply King is re-experiencing the
timeless time of the traumatic event. Thus King’s fiction is entirely the result of ‘post-
traumatic play’: ‘King is a trauma victim, struck terrified in his own childhood
by a train’ (Terr 1989: 389).
Terr’s account is a warning about the brutal reduction of text to autobiograph-
ical symptom, read with the alarming literalism driven by the belief that eidetic
traumatic memory will never be seriously deformed or subject to revision, or even
undergo any aesthetic transformation, but will simply repeat itself in the grain of
texts as an open secret. This is not how I want to regard King’s representative
status. King is not an exemplification of trauma subjectivity; instead, his books are
narrative vectors for its consolidation. My approach will be to trace how King’s
attunement to the Zeitgeist very precisely shifts the locus and narrative form of sub-
jective terror in the Gothic directly in response to the rise of the trauma para-
digm, particularly in the early 1990s and most symptomatically in his novel
Gerald’s Game.
King writes self-consciously in the American Gothic tradition, in which domes-
tic intimacy is menaced by its dialectical other, an unearthly, cosmic and always
malignant force. In The Shining (1978), one of King’s strongest books, the father is
weak entry point in the family, taken over by the venomous spirits of the Overlook
100 Cultural symptoms
hotel. For all the supernatural pyrotechnics of The Shining, its ambitions to render
the hotel a repository of the monstrous underside the American twentieth century,
the book is also an impressive study of the father’s psychic failings. His alcoholism,
his guilty instant of physical abuse towards his son, his teaching job lost through
an eruption of rage, are traced back to an abusive father, whose exorbitant vio-
lence to his mother and siblings is recovered by Jack in a dissociative trance state
in the symbolic basement of the hotel, where all manner of forgotten histories
accumulate. The precognitive flashes of future violence, picked up by his psychic
son, are revealed to be repetitions of a traumatic scene from his father’s child-
hood. These traumatic motifs (the roar of ‘come here and take your medicine’) cut
across the narrative in distinct typographic intrusions that collapse linear tempo-
rality into the insistent presence of traumatic timeless time. This scene is com-
ing, it is what propels the narrative, but it has also already taken place. This
emplotment of psychic damage suggests an early recognition, on King’s part, of
psychological accounts of generational cycles of violence within the abusive fam-
ily. It also indicates that King will always associate supernatural capacities with
traumatic origins.
In the early 1980s, ‘The Body’ experimented with transferring Gothic affect
out of genre trappings, locating its affect in early adolescent rites of passage. It
was published in Different Seasons alongside ‘Apt Pupil’, a queasy investigation into
the transmissibility of trauma. An adolescent boy, apparently a model student,
discovers that an aged neighbour in his small American town has been living under
a pseudonym, concealing his past as a concentration camp unterkommandant in Belsen,
Auschwitz and Patin, where the Jews named him the Blood Fiend. Dussander is
blackmailed by the boy to detail every element of crimes, a narrative that corrupts
the listener and transfers the murderous impulse. The tale designedly walks a
dubious line between the exploitation of historical horrors and a critique of our
potentially unhealthy absorption in them. Punter observes that King offers his
readers ‘a series of opportunities to re-experience scenarios of childhood anxiety
under conditions of relative safety’ (Punter 1996: 123), but I see no reassurance
in ‘Apt Pupil’, only a grim assessment of how unimaginable horrors can become
vehicles of corrupting identification.
The 1990 long story, ‘The Library Policeman’ in Four Past Midnight signalled
King’s first explicit engagement with the recovered memory paradigm. The
supernatural element of the story connects directly to a traumatic scene that the
protagonist Sam must recover if he is to defeat the spectral figure who demands
his life in payment of debt, a monstrous exaggeration of every child’s fear of the
punitive librarian. Sam is unaware that Junction City Library had employed a
woman librarian in 1956 who had first traumatized children with a perverted sto-
rytelling hour before escalating her abuses to murder. A sort of vampiric creature
occupying different human bodies, this figure has returned, the library hovering
between present day and 1956 incarnations, a haunted site that collapses back to
the most traumatic moment in its history. This supernatural figure identifies Sam
as a potential host because Sam’s unacknowledged traumatic past leaves him with
an exploitable psychic flaw.
 Trauma in narrative fiction 101
Sam’s recovery of his traumatic memories could almost be transcribed from a
recovered memory therapy handbook. At forty years old, his functional life is
thrown into doubt by his first encounter with the sinister woman librarian. Fragile
defences are crushed and when he is forced to call on help, Sam recognizes that
his relationships fail, his social attachments are minimal, his business is only par-
tially successful because his clients sense something in him is missing. The visit
from the spectral library policeman sends him into a critical phase. Intrusive
motifs begin to proliferate, signs of an occluded memory attempting to resurface.
As in The Shining, these narrative anachronies are typographically marked off as
urgent and insidious intrusions into linear narrative and are understood by the
reader as anticipations of a recovered scene that will retrospectively rewrite Sam’s
life narrative. The recovery is too neatly done, emerging complete in ‘a watching
dream’ (King 1990: 685), a symptom of dissociation, as Sam slumps unconscious.
As a boy, returning in dread with a late book to the library, a figure claiming to be
a policeman led Sam into the bushes and raped him, compounding the violence
with shame (‘You liked it, didn’t you?’ (King 1990: 691)) and threats of death should
he speak of the event. His dissociative strategy at the height of the attack is rein-
forced by an immediate forgetting. He becomes a post-traumatic automaton.
Remembering the traumatic scene, however, promises the complete reintegration
that follows the emergency phases of recovering memory. Self restored, Sam slays
the beast and gets the girl.
If the introduction of abuse recovery does not radically shift King’s narrative
mode, it might be worth wondering whether that is because popular narrative forms
like King’s actually inform abuse accounts and their ‘clinical preoccupation with
gothic scenes of sexual torture’ (Haaken 2003: 90) rather than simply exploit them.
Even so, the supernatural elements in the story do not so much allegorize Sam’s
traumatic subjectivity as offer an oneiric, doubled account of it in ways that don’t
quite cohere. Reintegrated, Sam can cross into this other story and slay the vampire
that bears the weight of other multiple traumatic histories, yet which perhaps only
obscures his own story. The ambiguous function of the supernatural becomes
starker in Gerald’s Game, all the more because the text apparently shifts genre only for
the horror mode to return, to problematic effect, in the final pages of the book.
Gerald’s Game (1992) and the interlinked novel Dolores Claiborne (1993) moved
King to the centre of the trauma paradigm, focusing on female terror but ulti-
mate resilience in the face of paternal sexual abuse. Theresa Thompson has sug-
gested that the two books were King’s ripostes to charges of misogyny, but it is more
I think that at the height of the impact of the feminist self-help recovery movement,
King understood that these accounts had to be focalized through women. Gerald’s
Game is a narrative tour de force: in the opening pages, Jessie, handcuffed to a bed
in a sex game in a remote cabin, kicks out at her husband and accidentally kills him,
leaving the protagonist (and therefore the narrative focalization) tied to a bed for
the majority of the novel. The clue to escape starvation and death is buried, once
more, in a traumatic memory she must confront, but since her adult life has been
constructed around denial, passivity and dissociation, only extreme circumstances
will force the issue.
102 Cultural symptoms
Jessie is a thoroughly historicized subject, not just in the traumatic symptoms
she displays in the narrative present. Her past typifies a certain trajectory of fem-
inism. The abusive event occurs in 1963, the year Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique tried to express the nameless malaise American women experienced.
This event is dissociated, only to obtrude dangerously now and then, forced to the
surface during the era of feminist consciousness raising in the early 1970s. Jessie
suppresses and domesticates herself in marriage, giving up her teaching job on
her husband’s insistence, and by the 1980s, the era of conservatism and backlash,
has become another post-traumatic automaton, with some attempts at therapy
curtailed in panic at what they might disturb.
King’s populism means that he constantly expresses aggressive anti-psychiatric
opinions: Jessie dismisses talk of child abuse from ‘whining Cult-of-Selfers, the
Live-in-the-Pasts’ (King 1993: 141). Yet this only echoes the anti-establishment
rhetoric of the recovery movement itself, and King’s tracing of the traumatic
subject seems to me very precisely worked out inside the new paradigm. The
subject’s minimally functioning defensive tactics are sent into crisis. This induces
a disintegration: soon, the novel is driven by the competing voices in Jessie’s head.
These are given names and identities: the Goodwife and the countermanding
Ruth, her long-lost feminist friend, Daddy’s Little Girl, and a host of others some-
times termed ‘UFO voices’. Early on, Jessie half-recognizes that these repeat ‘the
voices you heard after the dark day’ (King 1993: 40), voices that splinter from
the inaugurating trauma. These selves are the ‘multiples’ or ‘alters’ that feature in
the official diagnostic manuals – although Multiple Personality Disorder was
replaced in 1994 by Dissociative Identity Disorder:

Each personality state may be experienced as if it has a distinct personal

history, self-image, and identity, including a separate name … . Particular
identities may emerge in specific circumstances and may differ in reported
age and gender, vocabulary, general knowledge or predominant affect.
Alternate identities are experienced as taking control in sequence, one at
the expense of the other, and may deny knowledge of one another, be crit-
ical of one another, or appear in open conflict … . Individuals with this dis-
order experience frequent gaps in memory for personal history, both
remote and recent.
(American Psychiatric Association 2000: 526)

Thirst and pain amplify these voices, but also send her into fevered states that
begin to lift her mechanisms of defence: dreams, visions and hallucinations of vis-
itors to her bedside merge with resurgent childhood memories. Here, King makes
the path to recovery much more effectively crooked from resistance: screen mem-
ories from later in childhood protect the core event of 1963 from straightforward
narrative reclamation. The event hovers at the margins of the text, not really a
secret, and in this King also finds a narrative means to distinguish repression from
dissociation, Janet’s model of trauma that had become favoured by the late 1980s.
King’s narrator explains: ‘The secret of that day had never completely sunk in her
 Trauma in narrative fiction 103
subconscious …; it had been buried in a shallow grave, at best. There had been
some selective amnesia, but of a completely voluntary sort’ (King 1992: 100). As
this memory begins to move in from the margin, King uses his familiar tactic of
increasing the anachronic intrusions of narratively dissociated phrases (‘to put out
the sun’) that hint at the content of the traumatic memory. These produce that
now-familiar narrative effect of Nachträglich discordance. Exactly half-way through
the book, the core traumatic memory emerges. It is a studiously un-Gothic scene:
on the day of the 1963 eclipse, as father and daughter stare up through polarized
glass at the sun, her father ejaculates against her back as he holds her on his lap.
For the following two years, she later confesses, she existed ‘in a kind of fugue
state’, ‘sharing space in my head with a kind of whispering choir, dozens of voices’
(King 1992: 383).
Recovery does not prompt instant reintegration (as it had in ‘The Library
Policeman’), but a phase of further defensive reactions: denial and self-accusation,
dramatic psychic splitting, all of which repeat childhood dissociative tactics. Yet
after a passage of disintegration, where textual focalization virtually disappears,
Jessie begins to pull herself into coherence. She acknowledges her father’s manip-
ulations, the shift of blame to the daughter, the complicity of her mother, and in
classic trauma paradigm fashion sees the event as the determining pivot of her
entire life:

How many of the choices she had made since that day had been directly or
indirectly influenced by what had happened during the final minute or so
she had spent on her daddy’s lap …. And was her current situation a result
of what had happened during the eclipse?
(King 1992: 215)

Yet the unconscious prompts of the traumatic scene have also been grasped.
The cuffs that bind her to patriarchal domination are made for male wrists, not
female, and are thus looser than they should be. Her father’s concern that Jessie
not cut herself on the eclipse glass reminds her that blood can be a lubricant. She
stabs at her wrists with broken glass in an act that, before recovery, would have
been a symptom of self-mutilating masochism but is now recast as active and
agential: ‘I refuse to die this way’ (King 1992: 292). The escape from bondage to
the marriage bed is painfully effected.
At this point, the reader might expect (as in The Shining) a brief coda depicting
fragile recovery, the prospect of a post-post-traumatic life. Instead, Gerald’s Game
takes a very odd turn: one of Jessie’s hallucinatory bedside visitors, a deformed
nightmare creature, transpires to be an actual backwoods serial killer. In the clos-
ing movement of the book, Jessie must confront Joubert across a courtroom, a
Gothic condensation of male violence created by gross family dysfunction: ‘He
was a victim of sex abuse himself, of course, his father, his stepfather, and his step-
mother all apparently had a go at him’ (King 1992: 378). As if to countervail the
predominantly domestic realism of the novel, Joubert’s crimes are grossly exces-
sive: grave robbery, corpse mutilation, serial murder and cannibalism. At his trial,
104 Cultural symptoms
Joubert constantly pulls Jessie back into her own traumatic moment: ‘I was back
in the lake house again – it happened with no lag whatsoever. Not remembering,
do you understand?’ (King 1992: 380). Jessie’s final act of defiance, spitting in
Joubert’s face, completes her escape from repetition and marks the restitution of
her Self.
Is this narrative move designed to make the text even more exemplary? The
serial killer became, after all, another central icon of popular trauma culture.
Mark Seltzer has argued that the serial killer is a subject constituted in modernity,
acting out ‘the form of public violence proper to a machine culture’ (Seltzer 1998:
17). The killer is a product, like the concept of trauma itself, of the statistical
society that emerged in the late nineteenth century, a ‘statistical person’, who ‘expe-
riences identity, his own and others, as a matter of numbers, kinds, types’ (Seltzer
1998: 4). The blankness of empty serial actions prompts psychological profiles
replete with traumatic indicators: abuse, violence, damaged attachments. King’s
use of an exaggerated Gothic mode for Joubert was hardly out of place in the
1990s, when Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series reached cultural saturation
with the film of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), whilst films like Se7en (David
Fincher, 1995) offered new levels of Gothic elaboration of serial killing and
generated a ceaseless stream of imitative films, trading on the clichés of the
psychological abuse profile.
Sympathetic feminist critics of Gerald’s Game consider Joubert an ‘apt symbol’
(Thompson 1998: 55) or a monster ‘of the realistic and plausible variety’ (Senf
1998: 99) that reinforces King’s critique of patriarchy. I am less convinced. The
introduction of Joubert means the novel veers away from confronting the everyday
story of domestic paternal abuse, replacing the father – eclipsing him, more aptly –
with exorbitant Gothic horrors. In this regard, Joubert works as a narrative fetish:
‘the serial killer serves the function of a fetish in public culture: he is the means of
the disavowal of institutionalized violence, while the “seriality” of his acts of vio-
lence marks the place of recognition in this disavowal’ (Freccero 1997: 48). This
device means that intra-familial violence is half-acknowledged but at once covered
over by exteriorizing it in an abjected, monstrous figure defined as the very oppo-
site of family. The clichés of the psychological profile killer as abused or damaged
place him beyond ordinary social attachments, the marginal figure that defines and
empties the norm of any transgressions, the exteriority that preys on the blameless
model family. The serial killer therefore embodies King’s sense of Gothic menace
as always an external evil, what Bernard Gallagher sees in the work as ‘the coer-
cive influence of the external world on the individual psyche’ (Gallagher 1987: 60).
And this also matches the model of trauma as something done to individuals, an
event that breaches the integrity of the subject from an outside, turning them from
agents to victims. Joubert’s deformed body and collection of body parts distracts
the force of King’s critique of male violence in the family. Dolores Claiborne corrects
this mistake by revisiting the same moment of the 1963 eclipse: the passage of vis-
ceral violence in this novel erupts exactly from within the abusive family dynamic,
as Dolores gruesomely clubs her husband to death. Dolores Claiborne is a less inter-
esting or at least less symptomatic text than its twin, however. The contradictions
 Trauma in narrative fiction 105
of Gerald’s Game suggest how popular fiction can at once compellingly embody a
narrative form of the insights of the trauma paradigm and at the same time work
furiously to disavow them. It is this tension that makes King’s work always absorb-
ing, representative of the contrary desires of recognition and displacement that
pulse through the cultural transmissions of traumatic affect.

Mainstream fiction and traumatic anachrony

The prescriptive aesthetic associated with canonical trauma fiction emphasizes the
‘tendency to bring conventional narrative techniques to their limit’ (Whitehead 2004:
82). Yet between Morrison’s austere experimentalism and King’s popular Gothic
there is a substantial overlap of tropes, generic conventions and narrative devices.
Ultimate aims might substantially differ, but they are on the same spectrum, com-
posed inside the same trauma paradigm. And just to underline the pervasion of
these narrative conventions for the new subject of trauma, I want briefly to range
across the mass of mainstream literary fiction that appeared in the 1990s. These
selected English and American texts show how quickly formal conventions were
established: narrative anachrony as a symptom of buried trauma; belated revelation
that regressively rewrites the significance of motifs; discordance that is reintegrated
to find different levels of concordant narrative coherence.
In 1991, at the peak of American awareness about recovered memory, Jane
Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. A reworking of
King Lear, transposing the fate of a kingdom to a mid-West farm divided amongst
the patriarch Larry Cook’s daughters, it was the mechanism of the revisionist
reading that spoke to its time. At the play’s pivotal moment – Lear’s abandonment
to the storm – Smiley shifts the focus back to the daughters, and Rose/Regan
begins to excavate Ginny/Goneril’s forgotten memories. ‘You don’t remember
how he came after us, do you? ... When we were teenagers. How he came into our
rooms … How can you not remember?’ (Smiley 1992: 188). The effect of this
challenge follows the pattern of recovered memory. Ginny issues a flat denial, but
the story speaks to Ginny’s sense of absence and disquiet. The farm is a fragile
landscape, ‘the filmiest net of the modern world, over layers of rock’ (Smiley
1992: 47). The brittle surface is punctured with buried secrets – Ginny’s bloodied
clothes from her last miscarriage, her symptomatic gaps of memory, the mother’s
grave. Forty pages on from Rose’s challenge, the forgotten trauma returns in a
flash of image-memory: ‘I knew that he had been in there to me, that my father
had lain with me in that bed, that I had looked at the top of his head, at his bald-
ing spot in the brown grizzled hair, while feeling him suck my breasts’ (Smiley
1992: 228). The emergency phase, the intrusion of occluded memories into an
identity built on an excised version of the past, follows from this one memory. The
abuse retrospectively explains the awkwardness of her marriage in symptomatic
behaviours that become now ‘obvious evidence [of] my midnight experiences
with Daddy’ (Smiley 1992: 279). What Renée Fredrickson terms ‘feeling memory’
and ‘bodily memory’ accompanies the imagistic flashes that have evaded the
censorious conscious memory.
106 Cultural symptoms
With one stroke Smiley rewrites the dynamics of Lear, giving the motivations of
Lear’s daughters vital depth. The horror at the derangement of natural orders is
resituated from the failure of daughterly duty to paternal incestuous desire. Lear’s
venomous disgust of female sexuality is marked as projection from abuser to
abused, and Cordelia’s loving rapprochement with her father is here transformed
into Caroline’s complicity in refusal to confront abuse. This is more than just an
ingenious exercise in revisionary intertextuality, however. Splitting open a canonical
text aims at exploding the wider cultural attitudes that would instate King Lear as
an exemplary humanist text, thus silencing its misogyny. Smiley’s decryption of a
subtext of paternal abuse in Lear acts to counter a conservatism about the family
that would precisely locate female insubordination as the greatest threat – that is,
take Lear’s part. As Kate Chedgzoy points out, however, ‘the compelling narra-
tive pleasures of Smiley’s fiction are secured by a revision of the plot which does
take the woman’s part and which … refuses tragic closure’ (Chedgzoy 1996: 58).
Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1996) was a best-selling, prize-
winning British novel that went through sixteen editions in its first year. This time,
the central occlusion is the forgotten trauma of a family death. It is a sprawling,
comic family saga, which tracks the generations of a dissolute family for over a
century, and appears at first to be an exercise in the recovery of family memory.
The forward progress of the narration of Ruby’s life from 1950s childhood to the
present is repeatedly disrupted by footnoted scenes from the family’s transgenera-
tional history, narratives which are sparked almost involuntarily by the secret histo-
ries of objects surviving anonymously into the present. Teaspoons, buttons, a
rabbit’s foot become uncanny objects, their inaccessible stores of memory impossi-
bly voiced by a narrator who hovers somewhere between Ruby and omniscience.
These objectal histories seemingly act to recuperate all the lost familial lines that
derive from the originating matriarch, and gradually animate an enigmatic photo-
graph that survives in the family from 1888. The patchwork of disordered segments
works to redeem individual histories of loss, disappointment and death. This is one
memorial narrative, but another belatedly intersects it and demands a retrospective
revision of the family narrative. Only when Ruby is seventeen is she confronted with
the repressed memory of her twin sister, who drowned at the age of five.

I could feel a dreadful, threatening pulse beating in my stomach, yet I had

no recollection of this sister and could bring no image to mind. I had a
strange flash of memory – as if caught in a photographer’s flash … – but
nothing more.
(Atkinson 1996: 328)

By a carefully staged process of hypnosis, the memory is recovered. It is this

device that takes the narrative behind the behind of the family museum. The tonal
disjunction of a comic romp which nevertheless aggregates an alarming record of
death and disappearance is thus revised as a symptomatic dissonance. The strange
oscillation of narrative locus – Ruby, yet not – is readable as a dissociated narrator
who is the product of a saga constituted around a central traumatic core. The floor
 Trauma in narrative fiction 107
drops away from the attempt to reconstruct tangled family lines, and the belated
realization of the repeated clues or signals that there is a ‘hole’ in this history is the
classic mark of a regressive narrative that joltingly resignifies its pattern of motifs.
By 1997, Nicci French’s The Memory Game traverses the same psychological ter-
rain only to explore the effects of the implantation of false memories using the
framework of the thriller. The novel opens with a discovery that literally shakes
the foundations of the Martello family. The architect daughter strikes ground for
a new building in the grounds of her parents house only to uncover a body: the
corpse of her sister Natalie, who disappeared in 1968. Jane’s initiation into the
culture of recovered memory advocates and support groups follows her work with
a therapist on retrieving the ‘repressed’ elements of her last memory of Natalie.
It seems as if the familiar structure is operating here, Jane worrying at the disquiet
that hovers over her memory:

I’ve been thinking about my golden, golden childhood and a black hole in
the middle of it … . Somehow it’s there, always on the edge of vision, but
when I turn to look at it directly it’s gone, gone to the edge again.
(French 1997: 57)

The results, however, are different. It is the persistence of her therapist’s belief
that the gap must contain an encrypted trauma, since Jane ‘fits’ the schema of
symptoms of repressed memory, that leads her to uncover her father in the core
memory. After his imprisonment for murder, Jane returns to the real scene only to
realize the image she has worked on so intensely misremembers crucial details.
The condensed finale exposes the false memory at work, and it is detective logic
that identifies the brother as the real perpetrator.
This is a text programmatically written from arguments that recovered memo-
ries are no more than suggestions implanted by schema-driven therapists. The
Memory Game dramatizes the view that therapists holding a belief in the pervasion
of familial abuse, and possessing a list of symptoms and a generic script, can sug-
gest an image a patient ought to hold, induce it and then confabulate fantasies
which are affirmed as memory. If the novel has a strangely educative air, this may
be because the plot owes much to the real-life case of Eileen Lipsker, whose recov-
ered memories which solved a sixteen-year-old murder by accusing her father
have been the subject of counter-suits in the American law courts.
Trauma fictions, then, clearly engaged with the Memory Wars and could invest
in the intractable positions of the recovered memory debate. In the 1990s, the dis-
pute was severely polarized: the sceptics Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters argued
in the polemical Making Monsters that ‘the options for taking sides in this debate are
quite unambiguous: the mind either has the ability to repress vast numbers of
events, as described by recovered memory therapists, or it does not’ (Ofshe and
Watters 1994: 5). Although investigating the possibilities of the same structure of
trauma narrative and subjectivity, the sympathies behind A Thousand Acres and The
Memory Game could hardly seem more incompatible. Other novelists, however,
explored this terrain with considerably more ambiguity, exploiting the suspensive
108 Cultural symptoms
hesitation of aesthetic discourse and using Nachträglich narrative to investigate more
critically the place of traumatic memory in contemporary subjectivity.
Michèle Roberts’ Daughters of the House (1993) is heavily indebted to Beloved,
working through a similar project of impossible mourning for abandoned souls,
this time in the house of post-war Europe. Set in France, the novel concerns the
reunion of two cousins, Thérèse, a nun in a contemplative order, and Léonie,
married and now living in the house in which twenty years earlier, in the 1950s,
the two as girls had experienced uncanny events. Thérèse’s return is occasioned
by a literal unearthing of that past: ‘The grave newly opened and desecrated,
swastikas in red daubed on the tombstone’ (Roberts 1993: 7). The violated grave
has revealed a gruesome secret: the epitaph that names Henri covers over ‘the
tangle of bones of the unknown Jews buried with him’ (Roberts 1993: 7). ‘There
was a secret somewhere’ (Roberts 1993: 132), and Thérèse and Léonie have to sift
multiple, incomplete, and fragmented evidences from diverse sources – whispered
parental conversations, the oblique and hastily curtailed reminiscences of the ser-
vants, the isolated phrases that leap from the mass of letters between their moth-
ers but that remain unread before being destroyed. The daughters of the house
are penetrated and to some extent ventriloquized by the encrypted secrets of their
parents’ generation and events from the last days of the Nazi occupation of
France. In effect, they suffer transgenerational haunting, the phantom of a history
illegally buried but leaking from the edges of the crypt.
This is a complex and ambitious novel, in which the overdetermined traumatic
core remains in some essentials opaque. The book opens with the shards of a night-
mare featuring a dismembered body in the cellar, but if it ends with the fragments of
a statue unearthed and reassembled from under the house, Roberts refuses to resolve
the suggestive tangle of plot motifs into some final, determining concordance. The
debt to Morrison is in this maintenance of a haunting, enigmatic core. Nevertheless,
the readable dynamic of the novel is a dialectic between Léonie’s attempts to sup-
press the interruptive presences in the house and Thérèse’s openness to visionary
experience and the trace of historical trauma. Léonie polices the boundaries of her
house by obsessively listing her property, an inventory of familial possessions that are
used as chapter titles. These attempt to fix concrete objects in a neutral taxonomy,
but each leaks a history. Léonie persistently denies this haunting during her child-
hood: ‘She wouldn’t be caught, trapped in the darkness. She wasn’t a Jew’ (Roberts
1993: 152). This finds direct echo in her adult resentment of Thérèse’s return, occa-
sioned by the desecrated grave, and the fear it will start again: ‘out of the grave
of the war, the unburied and the undead [were] arriving to lay hands upon them
all’ (Roberts 1993: 170). Yet the final movement of the book brings Léonie toward
integration of these discordant voices, in the last words of the novel:

All she had to do was go in and join them, listen to what they had to say,
unravel and reravel the different languages that they used … . The voices
came from somewhere just ahead, the shadowy bit she couldn’t see. She
stepped forward, into the darkness, to find words.
(Roberts 1993: 172)
 Trauma in narrative fiction 109
This open-ended conclusion is an uncanny echo of Lyotard’s imperative issued
to post-traumatic thought, that ‘It is necessary to “explain” that there might (have)
be(en) this stranger in the house, and to find a “reason” for his clandestine entry
and unnoticed stay’ (Lyotard 1990: 17).
Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead (1997), although narratively far more con-
ventional than Roberts, also refuses to stay in polarized debates and examines the
ambiguity of memorial subjectivity. The novel opens with Nina’s arrival to help
her elder sister Isabel through the first days following the birth of Isabel’s son.
Nina is assailed by memories of childhood and Isabel’s authoritative hold over the
story of her early years; as she says, ‘I’m in the habit of believing Isabel’s version’
(Dunmore 1997: 13). The air of tension, it is belatedly revealed, is the unspoken
absence of their younger brother, who died in infancy from cot death. This is the
core event on which the novel turns. At first its absent presence implies fears of
repetition with the new child, but something else is moving in the traumatic scene.
It is significant that immediately after this trauma’s first telling, Nina begins to
interrogate the general tenor of her childhood memories: ‘It’s a safe story, well-
worn and comforting. … Perhaps I tell myself this story so loudly that I can’t hear
anything else’ (Dunmore 1997: 58). The challenge becomes more urgent as the
first explicit mention of the lost brother occurs between the sisters: memory
surges, and begins to animate the frozen image of Colin’s death. ‘I want my past
back’, but Nina realizes there’s nothing except ‘Isabel’s stories’ (Dunmore 1997:
91). Just before the revelation, Nina is perfectly defined as the gapped subject of
traumatic amnesia: ‘There’s something missing in you’ (Dunmore 1997: 98).
As the sisters talk, Nina captures an image of Isabel pushing down on Colin’s
back, smothering him, but at the brink of articulation, Isabel reverses the agency
in the scene and orders her sister: ‘Don’t, don’t. Don’t remember. You were only
four. It wasn’t your fault’ (Dunmore 1997: 100). In this version, the authority of
Isabel’s narrative of their childhood has served to hide from Nina her act of mur-
der. With that knowledge, Nina’s fragile self is shattered: ‘uncertainty runs around
me like ice. … The iceberg hits the side of my ship, and I go down’ (Dunmore
1997: 102–3). Dunmore therefore builds her plot from the phases of recovered
memory: conscious recall of a placid childhood, edged by disquiet; a memory-
image that becomes the focus point for retrieval; the recovery of the scene and
entry into the emergency phase as identity threatens to collapse; a retrospective
attribution of a new cause to Nina’s various dysfunctions rewrites life narrative.
But Dunmore refuses to let the traumatic event become fixed. The scene speaks
of deadly sibling rivalry, but so does the context of the recovery. As the dread
gathers that contemporary events will compulsively repeat the past, the primal
scene is entered once more, agency reverses itself again, and Nina this time relo-
cates her sister, too late, as the murderous figure. By the end, following Isabel’s
suicide, Nina’s conviction seems secure: ‘It must have been hard to do. … By
the time he went still she must have hated him for taking so long to be dead’
(Dunmore 1997: 204). Nevertheless, the text ends on an incomplete fragment of
memory as Nina stands over her sister’s grave. Reaching up to take Isabel’s hand,
the memory and text end on a question – ‘Can I ask you something?’ (Dunmore
110 Cultural symptoms
1997: 214) – which now cannot be answered. Memory, which means talking to the
dead, will be without final resolution, Dunmore implies. This echoes Freud’s posi-
tion in his early essay ‘Screen Memories’, which examines the instability and mal-
leability of the earliest childhood memories: ‘It may indeed be questioned whether
we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood
may be all that we possess’ (Freud 1899: 322). It is not that the traumatic scene is
either ‘true’ or ‘false’ but is dynamic, set in motion by the imbrication of actual
history, memory’s imperfect and interpretive relation to that history, and the com-
peting phantasmatic investments in the retelling of the scene. As Ian Hacking
argues, recovery of trauma in particular allows ‘the past [to be] rewritten in
memory, with new kinds of descriptions, new words, new ways of feeling’, such
that ‘each of us becomes a different person as we redescribe the past’ (Hacking
1995: 94 and 68). As the agency in the recovered scene circulates between Nina and
Isabel, new subjectivities and new histories are being elaborated as the traumatic
scene submits to the impress of competing investments.
There could be many further additions to these five novels; this selection is
partly a serendipitous record of my reading of this trauma plot through the
1990s. Whole oeuvres can now carry the sense that traumatic subjectivity is the
abiding thematic (and sometimes formal) concern: Helen Dunmore, Maggie
O’Farrell, Andrew O’Hagan, Justine Picardie and Kathryn Harrison all spring to
mind. What else links these books? One might be tempted to call these works less
mainstream than middlebrow, were this not such a loaded term. Middlebrow is
always pejorative, coined in the 1920s (long after ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’) to
describe a largely feminine, middle-class, safely unexperimental, commercial, and
critically ignored writing. The middlebrow, as Virginia Woolf put it, ‘is the man,
or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side
of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life
itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame,
power, or prestige’ (Woolf 1981: 115). Even Nicola Humble’s sympathetic study
of the interwar women writers for whom this term was coined suggests that whilst
middlebrow works negotiate transforming class identity, they finally offer ‘narra-
tive excitement without guilt, and intellectual stimulation without undue effort’
(Humble 2001: 11). There must be a contradiction to identifying something like
a middlebrow trauma fiction, however, or else its allegedly undemanding textual
pleasures need to be rethought. The disarticulation of identity and narrative tem-
porality may not be as extreme as those high or low fictions examined above, but
they still imply serious cultural work to manage the depredations to the contem-
porary subject (and predominantly female subjectivity) marked by trauma. The
narrative binding of these mainstream fictions suggests that a wash of ungovern-
able traumatic affect saturates contemporary Western culture. In these middle-
brow fictions the pleasures of narrative concordance, of grasping together, are
seized from the jaws of traumatic discordance.
If these works are critically ignored it may be because their narrative pleasures
are too overt for a trauma aesthetic that sanctions difficulty, interruption and apo-
ria. Yet if we turn to the contemporary apotheosis of trauma fiction, W. G. Sebald,
 Trauma in narrative fiction 111
we can begin to discern how this austere aesthetic generates its own curious form
of pleasure.

W. G. Sebald: The last traumatophile?

I want to consider W. G. Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz (2001) as a culmination of the
trauma fiction genre. It is a tortured investigation of trauma subjectivity as both
endured by the eponymous central character and then transmitted to the narrator,
who virtually collapses under the burden of what he has been told. This traumatic
affect has since been disseminated to an enthusiastic readership in Britain and
America and Sebald can be regarded as the quintessential trauma fiction writer at
the turn of the century. Yet his work is a late and mannerist addition to the genre:
in my view it risks traumatophilia, taking a kind of perverse delight in the repeti-
tion or abject assumption of a collapsed trauma subjectivity. Unlike the complex
negotiation between mourning and melancholy explored in Beloved, Sebald seems
interested only in the psychology of melancholic entrapment.
Sebald’s brief literary ascendancy lasted in effect five years, between the
English translation of The Emigrants (1996) and his death in 2001, soon after
the publication of Austerlitz. An academic specializing in German literature at the
University of East Anglia, Sebald began to produce poetry and prose works in
German in his forties. The Emigrants was rapturously received in England and
America, and dictated the perception of Sebald as the ‘poet laureate … of miss-
ing history’ (Torgovnick 2006: xii), contributing a whole new narrative relation to
the legacy of the Second World War and particularly the Holocaust. Sebald was
born in 1944 in a remote rural area of Germany, seemingly untouched by the
war. His father served in the army, returned from France as a prisoner of war in
1947, and never spoke of his experience. Sebald ‘had grown up with the feeling
that something was being kept from me’ (Sebald 2003: 70), and claims to have
learnt of the Nazi policy of genocide only at seventeen in a culture that had
almost entirely suppressed discussion of the war. The eerie sense of shocking,
belated discoveries suffuses his work. Whilst the narrative perambulations of The
Emigrants and Austerlitz do repeatedly circle back to the Holocaust, this view of
Sebald tends to downplay his two other prose works, Vertigo (1990, translated 1999)
and The Rings of Saturn (1995, translated 1998), which journey through European
history on very different trajectories. Attention has been shifted by the posthu-
mous translation in 2003 of Sebald’s lectures on the saturation bombing of
German cities, where the same sense of lamentation, haunted memory and for-
gotten history is applied to the German populations massacred by the Allies. Any
consideration of this era of German history is always controversial because it is
feared to offer an argument of ‘moral equivalence’ with Holocaust victims: some
worry the lectures damage Sebald’s reputation (for a discussion of their reception,
see Kling 2004).
Sebald has already generated a large body of critical assessment, rather like
Beloved. This is partly because, as one collection notes, Sebald is ‘clearly conversant
with the discourse of trauma theory’ (Long and Whitehead 2004: 9), and thus
112 Cultural symptoms
allows for instant literary exemplification of the paradigm. The work conforms
to the trauma aesthetic: experimental, aporetic, foregrounding the difficulty of
representing atrocity. But more than this, Sebald’s austerity and melancholia, his
exile status as an unhomely German in England, means that he can be presented
as a saviour of the serious European novel in an era of frivolity (the view of Susan
Sontag (2002)) and one of the few inheritors of the cosmopolitan Modernist
project (Walkowitz 2006). This latterday high art, already imbued with
Nachträglichkeit or doomed belatedness, like Hegel’s owl of Minerva flying at dusk,
could only be reinforced by Sebald’s violent and untimely death in a car accident,
soon after Austerlitz had been translated.
Sebald’s works are trauma fictions not just because they explore the legacy of
the Second World War and are imbued with this suave melancholia, but also
because they hold to a model of history that coincides exactly with the idea of
traumatic occlusion and the belated recovery of memory. This is expressed iden-
tically across Sebald’s oeuvre, whether prose, poetry or lecture. ‘Certain things’,
as Henry Selwyn says in The Emigrants, ‘as I am increasingly becoming aware,
have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence’ (Sebald
1996: 23). Jacques Austerlitz is another compelling textbook example of a recov-
ered memory patient, a model of traumatic return that Sebald utilizes both for
post-war Germany in On the Natural History of Destruction and post-colonial English
historical consciousness in Rings of Saturn.
Sebald’s prose works are innovative hybrid forms, a mix of fiction, biography,
academic essay and documentary reconstruction (complete with photographic
evidence). They are like a cabinet of curiosities, stuffed with eccentric details and
overlooked or forgotten histories, often obscurely connected in an expansive
digressive style. Although some of these elements were borrowed from the post-
war German documentary fiction tradition, the real innovation is in the narrative
focalization. The ‘I’ is teasingly both Sebald and not, a semi-fictional narrator
who filters all the details through a single voice, viewpoint and prose rhythm, and
yet who seems to gain little substance throughout the course of the books. If
Virginia Woolf complained about the male ‘I’ that stabbed the page and oppressed
the reader with domineering presence, Sebald’s narrator is virtually effaced,
becoming only an invisible repository, an archive for collected information. ‘The
narrator’, Sebald explained, ‘is only the one who brings the tale but doesn’t install
himself in it’ (Jaggi 2001). As Amir Eshel puts it, this focalization is
‘a singular concentration, if not a fixation, on what is decisively outside the “I” –
the experiences of others, the fear that their story might vanish into oblivion’
(Eshel 2003: 75).
The ethical purpose of this effaced narrator is most explicit in The Emigrants, a
book that brings together four scattered biographies of displaced or exiled figures,
two of whom commit suicide, the other two suffering obliterating mental collapses –
and all of whom suffer the intolerable burden of history. In one key passage, the
narrator, following in the footsteps of his schoolteacher who has committed sui-
cide, stops himself: ‘Such endeavour to imagine his life and death did not, as I had
to admit, bring me any closer to Paul, except at best for brief emotional moments
 Trauma in narrative fiction 113
of the kind that seemed presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of
wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter’ (Sebald
1996: 29). The narrator, driven in this endeavour by a typically Sebaldian belated
discovery that Paul had been barred from teaching under Nazi Aryanization laws
in the 1930s, tries to control affective identification for a principled and distanced
compassion, effacing himself in an ‘objective’ collocation of the documents of a
life. Even so, by the fourth section, when the narrator is horrified again by his own
historical blindness in the tardy realization that his fellow German exile Max
Ferber must have suffered under the Nazis, traumatic transmission is less contain-
able. Many years after their first meeting, the narrator reads that Ferber’s parents
were deported and murdered in 1941, and is aghast: ‘it seemed unforgivable that
I should have omitted, or failed, in those Manchester times, to ask Ferber the
questions he must surely have expected from me’ (Sebald 1996: 178). Sebald’s
device when approaching profoundly traumatic material is to distance it through
layers of narrative framing: the narrator dutifully transcribes Ferber’s descriptions
of his post-traumatic amnesias around the recollections of his parents and the
reconstruction of that vanished pre-war Jewish past is narrated entirely through
Ferber’s mother’s memoir. If insulated from presumption by this respectful
reportage, the narrator also travels to the area in Germany, wanders through the
largely obliterated traces of Jewish community, documents it in photographs, and
places a stone on a Jewish grave in identification with Jewish memorial practice.
The book ends with an unreproduced photograph of three Jewish factory work-
ers. ‘Who the women are I do not know’, the narrator confesses, yet ‘I sense that
all three of them are looking across at me’ (Sebald 1996: 237), in that sort of
imperious ethical demand for witness that Derrida ascribes to the spectre who
returns. The book ends with exactly the presumption that had been so assiduously
avoided: a fantasmatic projection of possible identities of the women. It signals a
collapse of narrative control, moments that pepper all four prose works.
The same kind of trauma subject appears over and over in these books. In The
Emigrants, the aged Henry Selwyn endures the overwhelming return of memories
of his childhood as Hersch Seweryn in Grodno, Lithuana before the pogroms
drove his family into exile in 1899: ‘For years, the images of that exodus had been
gone from his memory, but recently, he said, they had been returning once again
and making their presence felt’ (Sebald 1996: 18–19). Ferber describes an
appalling physical and mental collapse as memories ‘that had long been buried and
which I had never dared disturb’ return (Sebald 1996: 172). In the third section,
the reconstruction of the life of Ambos Adelwarth’s life points to memory experi-
enced as a form of intolerable presence and unceasing grief: someone comments
that he ‘had an infallible memory, but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed
himself access to it’ (Sebald 1996: 100). The narrator reconstructs Ambos’ volun-
tary submission to obliterating electro-convulsive therapy to destroy his memorial
self. ‘Memory’, Ambos comments in a journal, ‘often strikes me as a kind of dumb-
ness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down
the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height’
(Sebald 1996: 145). It is Vertigo that traces this rhythm of nausea and subjective
114 Cultural symptoms
collapse most directly in the narrator himself who repeatedly breaks down as he
moves through the rubble of European history. Yet it was in Austerlitz that Sebald
wrote most directly within the trauma paradigm.
Austerlitz recounts his crisis of subjectivity to the narrator, who records it in
intense, labyrinthine sentences that make the text a single uninterrupted para-
graph. The book begins with a lengthy description of a patently symbolic struc-
ture, the Breendonk fortress in Belgium, a monument to a failed system of defence.
This monstrous bulwark (which housed the SS during the war) could never keep
up with new military technologies, however far it was extended. It symbolizes the
collapse of Austerlitz’s own mechanisms of defence and the flood of traumatic
material that returns to conscious recall late in life, after his retirement. The book
adopts the classic trauma plot of a delayed central secret which then retrospec-
tively recasts Austerlitz’s life narrative. That life has been full of dread and sus-
picion: in his childhood, ‘I never shook off the feeling that something very
obvious, very manifest was hidden from me’ (Sebald 2001: 76). He speaks of a
dissociated self, riven by ‘an agency greater than or superior to my own capacity
for thought … [that] has always preserved from me my own secret, systematically
preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions’ (Sebald 2001: 60). When
the mechanism of dissociated memory breaks down, it is on another symbolic
site, Liverpool Street station in London, built on the old Bedlam asylum, and
where refurbishment has uncovered an ancient graveyard. ‘As for me, said
Austerlitz, I felt at this time as if the dead were returning from exile and filling
the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing’
(Sebald 2001: 188). It also happens in an emblematic year, 1991, the height of
the recovered memory controversy (Sebald in part based the character of
Austerlitz on Susie Bechhofer, a recovered memory subject that had been the
focus of one of a myriad television documentaries in the 1990s). When Austerlitz
enters an old section of the station his childhood memory floods back: the arrival
in England, from Prague, on one of the Kindertransport. These child transports had
been an early Nazi method of depopulating German territory of Jews, before full-
scale extermination. Austerlitz had been fostered with Welsh Calvinists, renamed,
and his Jewish past erased.
In the emergency phase of traumatic recovery, Austerlitz recognizes ‘how hard
I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible’ (Sebald 1996: 197). Failed
relationships, frozen affect and multiple collapses are automatic post-traumatic
responses. He travels to Prague, recovers his childhood language, and picks up the
trail of his vanished parents. His mother was interned in Terezin, the ‘model’ con-
centration camp (and another fortress structure) that the Nazis had used to hood-
wink Red Cross inspectors. She was then sent East to certain death. His father’s
trail fizzles out in Paris: there will be no complete return to the past. Sebald if any-
thing overloads Austerlitz’s condensation of the history of trauma – a recovered
memory ‘survivor’ in the 1990s, with a traumatic secret from the Holocaust in the
1930s and 1940s, who breaks down in Paris and is admitted to the Salpêtrière,
home to the elaboration of traumatic neurosis in the 1880s. These concordances
only intensify the unrelieved agony of Austerlitz’s condition: memory does not in
 Trauma in narrative fiction 115
any way cure him. Instead, history invades him, and he can exist only in traumatic
temporality: ‘I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various
spaces … between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they
like’ (Sebald 2001: 261).
Towards the end of the book we learn that Austerlitz has given the narrator the
keys to his house in the East End of London and thus the run of his archive (the
house almost inevitably abuts onto an abandoned Jewish graveyard, walled off
and forgotten). This weirdly digressive and anachronic narrative is therefore a
reconstruction that could have pulled Austerlitz’s story into a more coherent or
linear form, but instead chooses to shadow the traumatic temporality of recovery.
The narrator has become so etiolated that his opinions merge with his subject. At
the Breendonk fort, the ethical injunction is renewed in terms that could have
been spoken by Austerlitz:

My memory … has clouded over in the course of time … . Even now, when
I try to remember … the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as
I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing
into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were,
draining itself, in that history of countless places and objects which them-
selves have no power of memory.
(Sebald 2001: 29–31)

Yet the narrator is markedly unable to find the means of concordance that
would grasp together, as Ricoeur would put it, the discordances of Austerlitz’s
biography. Some have traced little flickers of concordance across Sebald’s work,
repeated leitmotifs, figures or dates that suggest coherence at a different level (see
Whitehead 2004). Yet these are symptomatically weak, never enough to pull the
elements together and seem designed to express the fragility of any aesthetic con-
cordance against the massive destructive forces of discordance. Austerlitz certainly
works towards an agitated intensification of atrocity consciousness. The trail of
Austerlitz’s father cold in Paris, the narrator turns instead in the final pages of the
book to Dan Jacobsen’s memoir, Hershel’s Kingdom, another transgenerational tale
of Holocaust trauma. The narrator, by now virtually erased by the burden of
Austerlitz’s history, seeks further material that will crush his ego under an irresolv-
able burden of responsibility. The same impulse is there in the lectures on the
bombing of Germany: authors are berated for their evasions of the actual dam-
age done to bodies by fire-bombing, and Sebald pushes for the atrocious detail
(traumatized mothers carrying dead babies in their luggage, and so on), yet often
communicating a frustration that these hide further, even more insupportable
facts that must be unveiled. These later works, as Stewart Martin observes, are
determined by the experience of shock, and ‘exude a post-traumatic exhaustion’
(Martin 2005: 26).
Some view this intensification as a form of kitsch, a sort of adolescent affective
urge merely ‘to set the largest, most edifying standards of despair’ (Thirlwell 2003:
28). This I think misunderstands Sebald’s project. Yet Andreas Huyssen’s critique
116 Cultural symptoms
of this ‘relentless melancholy’ is sharper, arguing that Sebald ‘gives us not so
much an analysis as a reinscription of the trauma by means of quotation’
(Huyssen 2003: 154 and 156). By Austerlitz, Sebald had become a traumatophile.
The relation to trauma is that it must remain unrelieved. It is perhaps rather pro-
voking to say that Sara Paretsky’s hard-boiled detective novel, Total Recall, which
also appeared in 2001 and also featured a figure recovering memories of being on
a Kindertransport, offered a more complex array of possible relations to the trau-
matic past. Survivor shame, fantasmatic investment in Jewish ‘survivor’ identity,
the politics of financial reclamation, and heated comparativist controversies
between Holocaust and slavery compensation claims are entwined plot strands.
Some plot lines tie up in conventional concordances, but as is the convention with
the complexification of plot in the hard-boiled genre, many discordances and
irresolutions remain. The novel takes no pleasure in unrelievedness, however, and
in this way seems more complexly engaged in historical legacies.
In a distinctly odd passage of her book, The War Complex, Marianna Torgovnick con-
fesses to investing Sebald’s book-cover photograph with all manner of fantasy projec-
tions, and emotively mourns his untimely death. In a book that begins with a personal
account of living in lower Manhattan on the morning of the World Trade Center
attack, her ‘unusual and public act of identification with an author’ (Torgovnick 2006:
129) is perhaps only another element of a trauma-inspired return to what was once
called ‘personal criticism’. Yet Torgovnick also offers a clue to Sebald’s instant popular-
ity in Britain and America. The blurring of the boundary between fictional narrators
and authorial persona, true histories and narrative invention, was a commonly adopted
writing strategy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Philip Roth wrote a sequence of true
fictions and false memoirs, starting with The Facts in 1988, a memoir which was
attacked in an appendix for its falsehoods and evasions by Roth’s fictional alter-ego,
Nathan Zuckerman. Roth chased down an impersonator called Philip Roth in Operation
Shylock (1993). In the midst of these metafictional plays, Roth wrote Patrimony: A True
Story (1991), an ostensibly ‘straight’ memoir about the death of his father. Similarly,
J. G. Ballard’s The Kindness of Women (1991) was a fictional autobiography in which a
character called J. G. Ballard seemed to live out a mythologized version of the author’s
life. The book, Ballard told Will Self, ‘is my life seen through the mirror of the fiction
prompted by that life’ (Self 1995: 360). Both Roth and Ballard explored this breach of
fiction and memoir explicitly in relation to extreme traumatic experience. Ballard lured
the reader with a retrospective interpretation of his extraordinary fiction as the prod-
uct of a childhood spent in a Japanese internment camp during the war. Roth wrote
explicitly from a sequence of catastrophic mental collapses, punctuated by the wrench-
ing death of his father. What Sebald offered too was a sense that the artful concor-
dances of novelistic discourse could not contain this kind of traumatic material, that
the novel form was being breached by the traumatic force of the real. Sebald was the
apotheosis of trauma fiction, but at the same time, in that strange authorial presence
both inside and outside the frame of the work, hinted that perhaps trauma material
was better suited to the autobiographical or memoir form.
It is to the new kind of trauma memoir that emerged in the 1990s that I now turn.
3 My so-called life
The memoir boom

Martin Amis began his memoir Experience by observing:

It used to be said everyone had a novel in them. … Just now, though, in

1999, you would probably be obliged to doubt the basic proposition: what
everyone has in them, these days, is not a novel, but a memoir. We live in
the age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the
memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur. Nothing, for now, can com-
pete with experience – so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and
democratically dispensed. Experience is the one thing we share equally, and
everyone senses this.
(Amis 1999: 6)

This passage reflects anxiously on democratic generality, somewhat disingen-

uously it would appear, since Amis’s introduction rather builds the case for the
exceptional nature of his experience. The memoir is structured around a short
period in the 1990s that included the death of his famous father, his constant
presence in the tabloid press over various events in his private life, the discovery
of a teenage daughter of whom he had been unaware, and the discovery that a
female cousin had been the victim of the gruesomely abusive serial killer Fred
West some twenty years before. This would not appear to be ‘liberally and dem-
ocratically dispensed’ experience at all, because his memoir is prompted by an
extraordinary conjuncture of distressing events. Yet Amis’s anxiety perhaps
reveals his awareness that this exceptionality is precisely what renders his writing
so generic. The success of the genre of memoir was one of the most notable
publishing phenomena of the 1990s, and as Leigh Gilmore observed, ‘the cul-
tural awareness that something significant was happening around and through
memoir crystallised in relation to the recognition of trauma’s centrality to it’
(Gilmore 2001: 2). The experiential, if it was to gain a hearing, had to pass over
certain thresholds that mark out traumatic exceptionality from the everyday.
Paradoxically, experience beyond the range of the normal became the new
norm. ‘The age of memoir and the age of trauma may have coincided’, Gilmore
concluded (Gilmore 2001: 16).
118 Cultural symptoms
For post-traumatic culture, the appeal of the memoir seemed to be its ability to
outstrip the narrative conventionality of fiction in responding to what might be
called the pressure of the real. In 1996, the art critic Hal Foster registered a shift
from discussions about ‘reality as an effect of representation’, familiar enough to those
well versed in Roland Barthes’ critique of realism, to a new focus on ‘the real as a
thing of trauma’, something that burst through representation and appeared to be
its ruination. This move had been decisive ‘in contemporary art, let alone in con-
temporary theory, fiction, and film’ (Foster 1996: 146). Elsewhere, Michael
Rothberg argued that the playful self-reflexivity that dominated postmodern art
needed to be displaced by an urgent return to questions of reference and reality.
Rothberg proposed Traumatic Realism: ‘a realism in which the scars that mark
the relationship of discourse to the real are not fetishistically denied, but exposed;
a realism in which the claims of reference live on, but so does the traumatic
extremity that disable Realist representation as usual’ (Rothberg 2000: 106). This
was prompted by ‘various new forms of testimonial and documentary art and cul-
tural production’ (Rothberg 2000: 9), of which the Holocaust memoir was his pri-
mary instance. The pressure of the real appeared in several, often completely
discontinuous guises in the 1990s, from the high theory of Slavoj Žižek, who
obsessively worked and reworked Lacan’s very specific notion of ‘the Real’, to the
low cultural pleasures of the new genre of confessional celebrity and Reality TV.
Whether the real was invoked in a post-theoretical concern for a more ethical crit-
icism or a pre-critical assertion of greater authenticity, the memoir boom was sit-
uated in this matrix of concerns, its value bound to its allegedly greater proximity
to the traumatic real.
That the boom in memoir in the 1990s was generated by its reorganization
around trauma came with a central contradiction. The grand theorists of auto-
biography, such as Georges Gusdorf or James Olney, tied the genre to the deep-
est Western traditions of self-knowledge and humanism. Autobiography offered
the unity of identity across time, interpreting life in its totality, ‘a second reading
of experience … truer than the first because it adds to experience itself con-
sciousness of it’ (Gusdorf 1980: 35). Autobiography, in this tradition, secured
‘the much desired unity of the subject and the object of knowledge’ (Marcus
1994: 5). Memoir, although an older term, had come to be regarded as a lowlier
form, an incomplete and fragmentary slice of a life, a hybrid of history and per-
sonal narrative, uncertainly locating experience between self and others. The
trauma memoir takes even more distance from the autobiographical ideal, for
strictly speaking it must centre on precisely that moment which escapes self-
apprehension. The traumatic instant cannot be experienced as such, because
trauma both distends the subject and bursts the bounds of what constitutes
‘experience’. In some extreme cases, then, the trauma memoir centres the life
on what has been forgotten and only belatedly recovered: a life narrative in
which the main interest lies in this very process of analeptic revision. Where
someone like James Olney considered the autobiographical ‘I’ to command a
pattern that brings a life into meaningful concordance (Olney 1972), the trauma
memoir recounts a discordance, a circling around a shattering event, from which
 The memoir boom 119
self-knowledge arrives late, if at all, and with an uncomfortable awareness of the
frangibility of the self.
This, at least, has been the predominant critical conception of the trauma mem-
oir, sketched out within Caruth’s model of traumatized subjectivity and Felman
and Laub’s view of the simultaneous necessity yet impossibility of testimony as
‘a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 5).
Hence, Linda Anderson’s survey of autobiographical theory ends with a discussion
of those seemingly self-cancelling testimonies in which ‘traumatic history cannot
become integrated into the subject’s narrative or history of themselves because it
was not fully experienced at the time it happened’ (Anderson 2004: 128). As with
the novel, a small cluster of memoirs are invoked, which foreground their experi-
mental solutions to these difficulties: Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After and
Georges Perec’s W or History of Childhood are common choices.
Again a sole focus on this avant-garde ignores much of the work that the
trauma memoir seems to undertake in the wider culture. Bestseller lists have
been dominated for over a decade by a succession of high-profile trauma mem-
oirs, from Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called ‘It’ (1995) and its many sequels, written in
an authenticatingly halting prose from the perspective of a physically abused
child, to the post-ironic and tirelessly self-reflexive style of Dave Eggers’ A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2001). Between these extremes, memoirs
like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), Alice Sebold’s Lucky (1999), Constance
Bristoe’s Ugly (2006), or James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) caused sensa-
tions, often promoted by TV talk-show book clubs in a cross-media synergy of
confessionalism. The success of such books prompts periodic controversies about
their authenticity and also repetitious, supposedly concerned journalism inquir-
ing into the ‘misery memoir’ trend: ‘Why are we so addicted to other people’s
agony?’ one broadsheet writer angrily asked (Adams 2006: 4). The literary edi-
tor of The Observer confessed bewilderment at the affective contagion unleashed
by his own memoir of illness: ‘I’ve told my own survival story. Now everyone
wants to tell me theirs’ (McCrum 1999: 3). Whilst often dismissed as symptomatic
of a mass culture of narcissism, the success of the trauma memoir is merely fur-
ther evidence of the affective transmissibility of trauma I’ve tracked across virtually
every arena of discourse, whether scientific or cultural, professional or amateur,
high or low.
This is not to deny that these popular memoirs do take a different route: the
passage through trauma often works here not to undermine but rather to guaran-
tee subjectivity. One perspective would be to read sequences of catastrophe, sur-
vival, and supersession as trajectories that recompense the felt depredations to
identity; that these works help to narratively reconvene the self. Hal Foster is
exactly right to observe that ‘In trauma discourse, then, the subject is evacuated and elevated
at once’ (Foster 1996: 168). We need to cover both of these movements in the
trauma memoir. Both, after all, can instance Ricoeur’s conception of life as a
story, ‘an activity and a passion in search of a narrative’ (Ricoeur 1991: 29).
In fact, the trauma memoir was only one symptom of a challenge to the
Romantic and post-Romantic autobiographical monolith. By the late 1980s,
120 Cultural symptoms
autobiography could be regarded as a ‘field of self-representation’ that normal-
ized and disciplined the self, less an exercise in self-revelation than an act of
coerced fashioning of selves (Quinby 1992: 298). The memoir offered more ‘sub-
versive and revisionary possibilities’ (Buss 2001: 595) to those traditionally
excluded from the grandiose act of self-authoring. Hence, the identity politics that
emerged in the 1970s and established itself institutionally in the 1980s supported
an explosion of memoirs and commentary on memoir in post-colonial, African-
American, Latin American, feminist, gay and lesbian writing. Terms for new
kinds of hybrid writing began to proliferate: biomythography, autoethnography,
autofiction, autopathography, thanatography, testimonio. A more inclusive term
‘life writing’ incorporated texts that exceeded the narrow range of the autobio-
graphical canon. If the contemporary autobiography was a genre in crisis,
as Susanna Egan (1999) proposed, it was because the self was undergoing trans-
formation, and thus demanded new forms of narrative articulation. Trauma
was one crucial model for naming this pressure on the self and its modes of
self-authoring.
What follows is in three parts. First, I want to discriminate very precisely the
elements that came together to create conditions conducive to the success of the
trauma memoir. Of course, I have already detailed the historical routes towards
the arrival of PTSD in 1980 and the subsequent cultural pervasion of the trauma
paradigm. Most commentators on trauma culture would point to the insistent
demand of testimony (and particularly Holocaust writing) as the drive behind the
memoir boom. Here, I mean more narrowly to outline five distinct arenas that
transformed life writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s: feminist revisions of
autobiography and the particular impact of recovered memory on the memoir
form; the AIDS diary; the rise of the illness memoir, christened ‘pathography’ in
the early 1990s; the trend for confessional journalism; the metastasis of celebrity
confession across media, from the autobiography focused on revealing ‘private’
trauma to The Oprah Winfrey Show. These arenas inevitably overlap, but it’s impor-
tant not to subsume all these elements into an undifferentiated trauma discourse:
some have distinctly more honourable ambitions than others. After this outline, I
want then to observe the controversies that regularly erupt in this field over the
truth status of the confession. Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Holocaust memoir
Fragments was exposed as a fiction in 1999, but the so-called ‘memoir backlash’
was first associated with Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, which appeared in 1997,
and whose account of an (adult) affair between father and daughter was openly
disbelieved. Since then, other prominent memoirs have been accused of elabora-
tion or outright fabrication. New theories of autobiography have tried to avoid
this judicial understanding of the confession, yet the cultural work of the trauma
memoir seems intrinsically bound up not just with identification but punitive
abjection too. The ability to determine the truth of a memoir is surely vital, but
in the third section I try to suggest that the most interesting forms of contempo-
rary life-writing are those bodies of work in which trauma induces a continual
working and reworking of the event in different registers, mixing truth and fiction
in various forms of autofiction.
 The memoir boom 121
Five elements towards the trauma memoir
Lynne Segal has claimed that ‘the fundamental threat, or exhilarating promise,
which feminism offers those it ignites is that of transgressing the boundaries
between public and private’ (Segal 2004: 21). The imperative of the slogan the
personal is political directed forms of self-examination that sought to profess pub-
licly, rather than merely confess privately, the everyday circumstances of being or
becoming a woman. Segal considers the ‘traumatic turn’ of the 1990s as a falling
away from the collective political praxis of her 60s and 70s generation, yet con-
cedes that this might be an ambiguous mark of success: ‘Intimacy is still imagined
as a feminine preserve, the popularity of memoir writing is itself a sign of
women’s cultural influence’ (Segal 2004: 8). She has since followed this with her
own memoir (Segal 2007).
At a slightly earlier moment, in the late 1980s, a number of feminist literary crit-
ics began a concerted re-evaluation of women’s autobiographical writing. Shari
Benstock’s collection, The Private Self, used post-structuralism’s troubling of self-
identity to undermine the monolithic ‘I’ of the male autobiographical canon.
Simultaneously, Benstock’s contributors expanded the conception of autobiograph-
ical writing to include diary forms, essayistic memoirs and textual fragments. These
hitherto overlooked, apparently incomplete forms were argued to match the dis-
rupted rhythms of women’s fugitive writing lives, or represent the struggle for forms
appropriate to a different, feminine order of experience. Self-conscious experiment
with such new forms was associated with Modernism. Virginia Woolf was a theo-
rist of Bloomsbury’s ‘New Biography’, but also used diverse modes of life-writing.
H. D.’s strange production of palimpsests, textual fragments and constantly re-
worked autobiographical fictions could now be reconceived as a singular and coher-
ent life-writing project, and her work was consequently rescued from obscurity.
These reassessments were soon traced out in the language of the trauma paradigm.
Woolf famously figured subjectivity through the extended metaphor of ‘sealed ves-
sels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality: and at some moments, the sealing
matter cracks; in floods reality’ (Woolf 1978: 142). The epiphanies of Modernism
could suggestively be rewritten through traumatic temporality. In one of her last
essays, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf recalled a sexual assault by her half-brother,
George Duckworth. Benstock considers this ‘aftershock of trauma’ significant
(Benstock 1988: 14). Louise deSalvo, however, reinterpreted Woolf ’s entire writing
life as determined by this event in very contemporary terms: ‘Virginia Woolf was a
sexually abused child; she was an incest survivor’ (deSalvo 1989: 1). Sounding rather
like a text-book self-help case study, Woolf ’s ‘story, like that of so many other
women, is also one of survival and achievement against all odds’ (deSalvo 1989: 13).
H. D.’s reiterations were similarly related to the traumas of her childhood and the
Great War, which included the death of her brother, a shell-shocked husband, and
a miscarriage. Her childhood traumas were recovered later in psychotherapy under-
taken with, amongst others, Sigmund Freud, and worked over in memoirs, fictions,
and mythic and poetic fragments. Her life-writing ‘carries through the work of rein-
venting the shattered self as a coherent subject capable of meaningful resistance’
122 Cultural symptoms
(Henke 1998: xix). Suzette Henke coined the term ‘scriptotherapy’ for the ‘process
of writing out and writing through traumatic experience’, claiming that ‘a signifi-
cant pattern of repressed trauma and psychological fragmentation began to
emerge, often unexpectedly, in a large number of twentieth-century feminist auto-
biographies’ stretching from Colette to Audre Lorde and beyond (Henke 1998: xii).
Like much else, the historical trajectory of women’s writing could also fit the shape
of the trauma narrative.
Mary Ann Caws’s Women of Bloomsbury (1990) connected its historical subjects
to the contemporary act of feminist scholarship in a directly autobiographical
way, thus helping to inaugurate a movement called ‘Personal Criticism’. Nancy
Miller defined this as engaging in ‘an explicitly autobiographical performance
within the act of criticism’, ‘turning its authorial voice into spectacle’ in order to
foreground ‘the stakes of its own performance’ (Miller 1991: 1 and 24). The aim
was to reclaim experience from the aggression directed at the category of the
subject by High Theory in the 1980s, claiming to regain political agency for the
enunciating ‘I’. With this fusion of feminist generations around confession as pro-
fession, Liz Stanley asserted in 1992 that ‘a distinct feminist autobiography is in
the process of construction, characterized by its self-consciousness and increas-
ingly self-confident traversing of conventional boundaries between different gen-
res of writing’ (cited Marcus 1994: 281). This movement reflected, at the
academic level, a wider cultural shift in the value of individualized experience. It
survives into trauma theory, with personalized prefaces or epilogues reflecting, for
instance, on experiences of or responses to traumatic events such as 9/11 (see
Kaplan 2005 or Torgovnick 2006).
One of the most formative feminist memoirs of this era was Sylvia Fraser’s My
Father’s House, since it presented an entirely new sense of the ‘revisionist’ feminist
autobiography, encapsulated in the bewildering and apparently self-cancelling open-
ing words of the Author’s Note: ‘The story I have told in this book is autobiograph-
ical. As a result of amnesia, much of it was unknown to me until three years ago’
(Fraser 1989: x). Fraser’s book was published the year after Ellen Bass and Laura
Davis’s The Courage to Heal, the best-selling self-help manual for women survivors of
sexual abuse. Fraser’s memoir was therefore one of the earliest personal accounts to
explore the recovered memory of traumatic events blanketed out by protective
amnesia. The memoir offered a 1950s childhood of familiar banality and awkward-
ness, but in the corners of these consciously recalled scenes Fraser could now add
italicized memories of her father’s sexual abuse, recovered retrospectively. Hence:

In the cloakroom I teach the other kids to tie their shoelaces in a double bow
just like my daddy taught me. My daddy plays with my belly button, my daddy plays
with my toes as he did when I was little … . Something hard pushes up against me, then
between my legs and under my belly. It bursts all over me in a sticky stream.
(Fraser 1989: 8)

Every childhood action or reaction, every attachment or phobia, can now be

recast with motivations directed by a hidden history belatedly inked back in.
 The memoir boom 123
Fraser’s record very much conforms to the model of trauma outlined by recovered
memory therapy. Ventriloquizing therapeutic language, Fraser explains early on:

When the conflict caused by my sexual relationship with my father became

too acute to bear, I created a secret accomplice for my daddy by splitting
my personality in two. Thus, somewhere around the age of seven, I
acquired another self with memories and experiences separate from mine,
whose existence was unknown to me. My loss of memory was retroactive. I
did not remember my daddy ever having touched me sexually.
(Fraser 1989: 15)

Fraser never uses the technical term dissociation, in accord with a grass-roots
movement suspicious of psychiatric authority and that affirms absolutely the per-
sonal voice of experience instead. Implicitly though, the theory of traumatic sexual
origin of multiple personality directs Fraser’s autobiographical account of the con-
struction of femininity in her teenage years and her entire sexual life. Sexuality has
been perversely implanted by the father; it means, for instance, that she marries in
her dissociated persona: ‘I will have no memory of the wedding ceremony. It will never be
written on my consciousness … . Sexual initiation is the territory of my other self ’ (Fraser 1989:
141). This trauma also shadows her professional writing: the opaque elements of
her novel Pandora fall open retrospectively as encoded autobiographical trace.
These disjunct strands of self, typographically separated on the page, eventually
converge in a classic account of the ‘breakthrough’ of traumatic memories. This
final precipitation into recall comes when a childhood friend and TV interviewer
is exposed as a sexually abusive father. It plunges Fraser into the emergency phase:
‘I am no longer the same … I know my father raped me. My brain is alive with
memories, with shocking insights. In seconds, my history as I have known it under-
goes a drastic shift’ (Fraser 1989: 221). The book ends on a series of affirmations.
‘Now I understand’ begin ten successive sentences (Fraser 1989: 223). ‘I know that
now’ repeatedly punctuates her statements settling accounts with the disadjusted
past (Fraser 1989: 241). Healing is marked by a reintegrated authorial voice that
can assert of this reconstructed life narrative: ‘I believe in my truth’ (Fraser 1989:
235). The confession ultimately aims to transfigure pain in near religious terms.
Trauma, as so often, becomes the occasion for transcendence:

Yet even here I see a gift, for in place of my narrow, pragmatic world of cause
and effect and matter moving to immutable laws, I have burst into an infinite
world of wonder. The whole mystery of the universe has my reverence.
(Fraser 1989: 253)

Ralph Savarese has proposed that ‘recovered memory becomes … a figure for
the genre of memoir itself, for its revelatory drive’, since therapeutic recovery can
be aligned directly with the aims of specific identity politics to ‘“recover” and then
publicize some previously repressed (if only because unspoken) injury’ (Savarese
2001: 94–5). Critical of the danger of fusing identity with subject positions of
124 Cultural symptoms
unrelieved trauma, Savarese nevertheless acutely observes that objections to the
narcissism of the ‘misery memoir’ begin to appear only once so-called ‘minorities’
begin to use the memoir form as a political device. In Henke’s trajectory of
women’s autobiography, Fraser’s memoir represents the contemporary feminist
era. Henke does begin to unpick some of the contradictions in the idea of an
amnesiac autobiography, not least in Fraser’s open avowal in the ‘Author’s Note’
that whilst she asserts My Father’s House is a true testament, she has also ‘used many
of the techniques of the novelist’ (Fraser 1989: x). Accepting that Fraser’s narra-
tive is an artificial construction, Henke nevertheless argues that ‘her narrative
proves so vivid and convincing that we, as readers, do believe her’ (Henke 1998:
122). Recovered memory therapists insist that to question the patient’s recon-
structed memory is to repeat a form of abuse and societal denial. Yet Fraser’s
memoir has received substantial critical commentary because its performative
contradictions and narrative symmetries are often openly disbelieved. Mark
Freeman, for instance, regards the book as ‘downright incredible’ (Freeman 1993:
151), exploring its collision of impossible tenses: a life told in the present tense, as
if ignorant of the future interpolations of a hidden past that nevertheless direct
the selection of every stage of the narrative, building to a moment of revelation
that has already been inscribed from the opening page. Nicola King has also
expertly unravelled the inconsistent blurring of roman and italicized memory
strands in the book. King wants to suspend judgement on My Father’s House, pre-
ferring instead to use it as an occasion to argue that there are no memories of
childhood, only always shifting constructions of memories relating to childhood (as
Freud suggests in his conclusion to his essay ‘Screen Memories’). Inevitably,
though, this stance questions the fundamental belief that traumatic memory can
be dissociated, preserved and recovered without distortion and King ultimately
regards Fraser’s sequence of breakthrough revelations to be ‘too tightly plotted to
be convincing as truth’ and her dreams too reductively symbolic, conveying ‘the
unfortunate impression of having been invented’ (King 2000: 81 and 83). Fraser
thus gives us the first instance where the trauma memoir provokes a form of read-
erly trial, judgement and punishment. It is not enough casually to discard the
allegedly naïve truth claims of all autobiography and insist that the form simply
‘cannot … sever its links with narrative fiction’ (Evans 1999: 24). For memoirs
centred around trauma, judgements of truth or falsity bristle with substantive
political import.
Memoir acquires its contemporary significance from being a vehicle for testi-
mony, a witness that Felman and Laub declare ‘has become a crucial mode of our
relation to events of our times … composed of bits and pieces of a memory that
has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or
remembrance’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 5). Holocaust testimony drives much of
this discussion, although Latin American testimonio, transcriptions of oral testi-
mony from murderous campaigns against racial minorities, re-energized the pol-
itics of memoir in the 1980s. John Beverley influentially argued that social
struggles in specific contexts had to give rise to new forms of literature; the dis-
tention of form in the testimonio’s hybrid of oral and written modes stripped away
 The memoir boom 125
conventions to produce ‘if not the real then certainly a sensation of experiencing the
real that has a determinate effect on the reader’ (Beverley 1992: 102). AIDS writ-
ing, which began to emerge from America and Britain from about 1986, had sim-
ilar imperatives: to testify in the face of murderous indifference, to do so by
reconstructing the memoir form to meet the emergency, and to spur the reader to
action. In 1998, the AIDS diary was assessed to be ‘an emerging genre we have
yet to learn how to read’ (Chambers 1998: 32), its experimental form shadowing
the constantly mutating medical enigmas of the syndrome itself. AIDS writing
was therefore a crucial element in the surge of trauma memoir in the 1990s.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, as many commentators have
observed, is a complex global disease entity principally managed by governments
and mass media through metaphors of invasion or pollution, with exhortations to
be sexually ‘pure’ backed by the exhibition of those abjected minorities morally
blamed for their own deaths: gay men, intravenous drug users, ignorant or super-
stitious Africans (see Sontag 1989 or Crimp (ed.) 1989). In the West, AIDS was
identified principally with gay men and until 1996, when combination drug treat-
ments could stabilize the health of those with HIV, the syndrome inexorably
tended towards rapid multiple systems failure and death. Gay activism was
directed at the wilful under-funding of AIDS research by conservative govern-
ments in America and Britain. Here the role of the memoir had a contentious
place. Memorial tributes, elegies, memoirs of the untimely dead, were to be an
inevitable part of a highly literate gay culture. However, Douglas Crimp, at the
centre of New York activism, initially premised his politics on the last words of
the labour activist, Joe Hill: ‘Don’t mourn, organize!’ (Crimp 1989: 3). Memorials
individualized and dissipated collectivity. Mourning, at least as Freud theorized it,
was a period of suspended activity, a process of libidinal detachment from the
loved one, and an eventual return to normalcy. Militant anger was therefore more
or less aligned with the deranged refusal of reality Freud ascribed to melancholia.
Crimp finally sought to think mourning and militancy together, as mutually
informing, and AIDS writing has been characterized by Sarah Brophy as refusing
‘to become caught up in mourning as compensatory, as an aggressive action of
normalizing closure’, instead generating activist energy from this refusal (Brophy
2004: 21). For Brophy, the innovations of AIDS writing are found in forms that
resisted ‘compensation for feelings of loss’ and ‘make the process of reading and
interpretation impossible to bring to a conclusion’ (Brophy 2004: 26, 27). This
queered melancholy directly approaches the problematic core of a cultural
trauma theory that explicitly forbids the closure of the wound, and insists that
abjected spectres are left unrelieved. The AIDS dead must remain, rather like the
ghost of Beloved, ‘haunting the boundaries of what is deemed proper to the self …
stalling its restoration, and even, at certain moments, revoking the belief in the
possibility of redemption’ (Brophy 2004: 209). This is what makes AIDS testi-
mony a key element of what Ross Chambers describes as ‘aftermath society, one
regulated by a culture in which collectively traumatic events are denied’
(Chambers 2004: xxi). Aftermath cultures, Chambers contends, ‘are melancholic
in character; in them, mourning can never really be complete for the reason that
126 Cultural symptoms
trauma, although it has happened and has the status of a historical event, is never
over’ (Chambers 2004: xxix). Caught again between a possible and impossible
mourning, the argument is that AIDS writing must persist in this interstice, main-
taining a pressure to keep the wound open and unhealed until the scandal is
resolved medically and politically.
Hundreds of testimonies and memorials now exist, but a spine of texts has
emerged as significant because their political intent is worked through in formal
innovation: Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time (1988), Eric Michaels’ Unbecoming
(1990), Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), Derek
Jarman’s Modern Nature (1991), Oscar Moore’s newspaper bulletins on his illness,
collected after his death as PWA (1996), Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast (1996) and
Harold Brodkey’s This Wild Darkness (1996). The form of a first-person diary or
chronicle of a partner’s illness works because it is episodic and additive, written in
a present tense that can respond both to the sudden cruel turns of opportunistic
infections and the shifting rumours and realities of emerging drug trials or new
treatments. These experiences had no possibility of narrative shape or concor-
dance, in the main because in this first decade, these documents were also a
record of terminal illness and death. The published diary was also therefore a
deliberate transgression, making public what advanced industrial nations wanted
to sequester as a private shame (Michaels’ title punned on this ‘unbecoming’
public act). The author, as Ross Chambers put it, borrowed his authority from
death: in the trace of the writing ‘something is preserved from the effect of death:
an occasion of survival is offered and even a mode of posthumous action’
(Chambers 1998: 5). The elegy or memorial reflects on the past; the present tense
of the diary, read posthumously, is tilted toward the future and readerly action.
The philosopher Alexander Düttmann noted that this dying-before-one’s-time
in AIDS writing initially seemed to foil ‘the constitution of a coherent time and
the coherence of a life,’ yet suggested that these chroniclers, in facing death, had
reversed the formulation: ‘AIDS becomes the paradigm … of the coherent life
story that can be told or narrated’ (Düttmann 1996: 3–4). If this was the case, it
was only possible by distending and reinventing the form of their testimony. It is
striking how AIDS writing mixes modes. Monette’s chronicle of his partner’s ill-
ness and death is part unremittingly explicit medical record, part document of the
unofficial ‘underground railway’ of sympathetic doctors and fellow patients that
‘would find our own way’ against official indifference (Monette 1996: 103), and
part testament to a lover’s endurance. Yet the diary was only one vector for
Monette, and in the preface to his poetry sequence, ‘Love Alone: 18 Elegies for
Rog’, Monette wrote that ‘I wanted a form that would move with breathless speed,
so I could scream if I wanted and rattle on and empty my Uzi into the air … [I]f
only a fragment remained in the future, to fade in the sulphurous rain, it would
say how much I loved him and how terrible was the calamity’ (Monette 1994: 28).
In the memoir, these same reflections prompt Monette to explore sculptural form
too (Monette 1996: 146), suggesting a restless search for an appropriate mode of
expression, driven by a paradoxically energetic melancholy. Derek Jarman simi-
larly expressed himself through a proliferation of diverse forms of very public and
 The memoir boom 127
transgressive address: films, art-works, a fugitive garden designed in defiance of
the bleak landscape of Dungeness, and journals that mixed auobiobraphy, med-
ical report, political polemic against ‘heterosoc’, queer theory, gardening and sex
tips, and fiction. Jarman’s illness, announced publicly within days of being con-
firmed HIV+, energized him to become an important locus of cultural resistance
to Thatcherism, far wider than the limited identity as a person living with AIDS
might suggest. Proliferation of modes typifies other writers: Samuel Delany was
among the first to write on AIDS, but since this was embedded in his science fic-
tion no one appeared to notice. His use of letters from the earliest rumour-filled
months of the crisis (private communications published as 1984 sixteen years
later) have since joined his fiction, academic criticism on queer theory, and a series
of memoirs which defiantly record a promiscuous New York gay and bisexual life,
as in The Motion of Light on Water (1988).
Perhaps most significantly, AIDS writing consistently cuts across the boundary
between truth and fiction. Testimony is commonly defined as a discourse that must
be uncontaminated by fiction; even the sense of artificial narrative construction can
rouse suspicion of inauthenticity. Yet this breach is so consistent in gay writing that
Edmund White has borrowed the French term ‘autofiction’ for this ambiguous
mode: ‘The form, which is neither purely fact nor fiction, gives the writer both the
prestige of confession […], and the total freedom of imaginative invention’ (White
1995: 8). White has moved systematically across this boundary, from some of the ear-
liest fictional engagements with AIDS in The Darker Proof (1987), to AIDS autofictions
(The Farewell Symphony (1998)), elegiac essays for a lost generation (Loss within Loss:
Artists in the Age of AIDS (2002), a collective memorial project), and recently direct
memoir, in My Lives (2005). White nevertheless retains a fairly conventional invest-
ment in the consolations of good form (Realism is his default novelistic form). There
is none of the disorientation or scandal of the experimental work in self-exposure
undertaken by the French writer, Hervé Guibert, who consistently breached deco-
rum in his several bewilderingly confessional yet fictionalized accounts that he com-
posed at breakneck speed in the two years before his death in 1991. His death was a
suicide to cheat the progress of HIV, an event he effectively filmed (and certainly
rehearsed) in his documentary Pudeur ou L’impudeur, perhaps best translated as Decency
or Indecency, another wilful defiance of private shaming. Guibert’s persistent dramati-
zation of self-exposure has much to say about the general place of memoir in trauma
culture, and I will return to him in the last section of this chapter.
AIDS writing amongst this group exemplifies a literature of witness that is
defined by the need to transgress its own limits to catch at its traumatic object: ‘it
is precisely as a generic anomaly that it functions, within culture, as an infringe-
ment of cultural expectations’ (Chambers 2004: 25). This is a formal transgres-
sion necessitated by the attempt to contain AIDS to marginal, abjected identities:
it speaks from that ‘cultural periphery where it must make do, catachrestically,
with genres that scarcely admit it’ (Chambers 2004: 33). Whilst the prejudices that
conflated gay identity and AIDS make it a distinct form, it was also the case that
by the early 1990s this writing had joined a wider stream of pathography
that burgeoned in this period.
128 Cultural symptoms
Pathography, autobiographical accounts of illness or third-person memoirs by
partners, children or care-givers, is a distinctly contemporary form. Ann Hawkins
has observed that whilst a mere handful of examples exist before 1950, published
works in America had reached their hundreds by 1990 and then, extraordinarily,
doubled in number again between 1993 and 1997. Her extensive annotated bib-
liography was sub-divided by illness: cancer always the most extensive, followed
by AIDS/HIV, then heart disease, with Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and autism
close behind. This is, as Garry Kinnane puts it, a largely utilitarian, demotic dis-
course: ‘they emerge from a demos: individual stories from a body of people with
common interests and experience but with no special claims to literary expertise’
(Kinnane 2000: 102). Some circulate in samizdat form, particularly where solu-
tions to illness, such as assisted suicide, are at the boundaries of legality. Cancer
memoirs helped establish the pathogaphic genre, acquiring early intellectual
weight with Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Audre Lorde’s Cancer
Journals (1980). Indeed, cancer has become such a dominant emblem of the sick-
ness of modernity that the sociologist Arthur Frank has spoken of a ‘remission
society’, where illness has to be thought differently from being an exceptional and
traumatic interruption into the assumed norm of health (Frank 1995: 7). Yet rare
and spectacular illnesses proved popular with mainstream publishers, as if to reaf-
firm the idea of a norm from which it was possible to depart, grotesquely. Oliver
Sacks’s case histories of peculiar neurological disorders pioneered this genre;
books like Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), an
account of Locked-in Syndrome, painstakingly spelt out by letter by letter by
blinking his left eye, were literary sensations. There was even a place for semi-
comical accounts: Kamran Nazeer’s Send in the Idiots, a memoir on autism, was
gently self-mocking; the best title in Hawkins’s bibliography is surely Twitch and
Shout, a memoir about Tourette’s Syndrome.
Two new sub-genres were particularly notable in the 1990s. First, the taboo on
discussing the debilitations of mental depression was broken. William Styron’s
brief and devastating Darkness Visible (1990) appeared, initially as a comment in The
New Yorker on Primo Levi’s suicide and Styron’s own suicidal depressions, a confes-
sion which provoked an outpouring of reader empathy and thus prompted a more
extended account. Styron’s frame of reference was soon transformed by the per-
vasion of new serotonin-based drug treatments, best exemplified by Elizabeth
Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994) and culminating in the encyclopaedic memoir of
treatments by Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon (2001). In such instances,
Abigail Cheever argued, the depression memoir was merging with identity poli-
tics, conceiving of depression ‘not as a hindrance to or a vehicle for realizing the
self but rather as the self itself ’ (Cheever 2000: 350). The second strand was the
parental death memoir that saturated literary culture in a few short years after
Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991). A British version, Blake Morrison’s And When Did
you Last See your Father? (1993), helped generate other accounts (including a parent
suicide sub-genre, for instance) and a notable phase of confessional journalism in
the British press, which I’ll examine shortly. Nancy Miller’s Personal Criticism
veered into this territory in her critical assessment of the form, her own ‘mediated
 The memoir boom 129
autobiography’ on the death of her parents. ‘Autobiography is seen as the history
of a becoming’, Miller argued: ‘Here the autobiographical narrative, by its focus
on the failing other, provides an account of an undoing, an unbecoming’ (Miller
1996: 53–4). This linked it conceptually to other forms of trauma memoir.
What does this acceleration of pathography in the 1990s signify? Many mem-
oirists suggest the wave is a result of some kind of affective revolution in which
the secrecy, repression and silences of their parents’ Second World War genera-
tion has been superseded by the articulate confession in the wake of the cultural
revolutions of the 1960s. John Wiltshire (2000) has suggestively linked the rise of
pathography to a process of ‘meaning creation’ in the face of both an essentially
arbitrary intervention of illness into a life story and the de-humanizing treatments
of a health industry dominated since the 1960s by bio-medical technology. As the
medical apparatus around the ill and dying body multiplies, so one significant
strand of the genre is the memoir as accusation of misdiagnosis or mistreatment,
something Hawkins dates as beginning in 1980. Allied to this suspicion of med-
ical authority is the memoir of survival through alternative therapies dismissed by
orthodox science. These instances crystallize how the memoir works at ‘restoring
the patient’s voice to the medical enterprise’ (Hawkins 1999: xii).
A more abstract framing might link pathographic writing to what Anthony
Giddens termed the late modern ‘sequestration of experience’ (Giddens 1991:
144). In advanced capitalist societies, encounters with extremity are suppressed:
birth, death, insanity, even direct experience of nature are all removed from the
everyday and placed under technical and institutional command. This has is evi-
dent benefits, but it is also a ‘protective cocoon’ that is fragile and liable to crack if
routine experience is disturbed: ‘The individual faces a return of the repressed but
is likely to lack the psychic and social resources to cope with the issues thus posed’
(Giddens 1991: 167). Sequestration can never be total; insecurity and doubt flower
at key junctures of lived experience. The ‘frontiers of sequestered experience’,
Giddens noted, ‘are fault-lines, full of tensions and poorly mastered forces’
(Giddens 1991: 168). Thus illness, now removed from the social fabric and placed
in closed institutional settings, becomes a catastrophic disruption to an expected
norm of health. Giddens argument was also of its time: without direct recourse
to trauma theory, the metaphors that he used were saturated with ideas of the
traumatic event: cocoons, filters, and screens are punctured or breached; the real
bursts in and overflows the channels of everyday experience.
This sociological position has been worked out in terms of consequences for
narrative by Arthur Frank. Frank sees illness as ‘narrative wreckage’, and pathog-
raphy as a literal narrative salve: ‘Stories have to repair the damage that illness has
done’ (Frank 1995: 55). In Frank’s view the rise of patient memoirs results from
an epochal shift. In what he terms ‘modern times’ there was confidence in med-
ical authority that meant a willing surrender of the patient’s body and self-narra-
tive to the machineries of health care, which dealt not with selves but diseases.
Postmodern times emerge in the late 1970s, Frank argues, ‘when the capacity for
telling one’s own story is reclaimed’, often in holistic accounts that run in parallel
but often counter to the objectifications of medicine (Frank 1995: 7). Frank’s
130 Cultural symptoms
typology of pathographic narratives is suspicious of the dominant ‘restitution’
narrative, since this commands the return to health as the norm and continued
illness or relapse as an implicit moral failing. Instead, from out of the ‘chaos’ or
‘anti-narrative’ of illness, where ‘the story traces the edges of a wound’ that it can-
not initially grasp, Frank favours narratives of illness as quest and self-reinvention
(Frank 1995: 98). Storytelling accrues ethical responsibility as this argument devel-
ops, an element directly borrowed from cultural trauma theory. For Frank, the ill
person who tells their story becomes a healer in turn, because ‘testimony implicates
others in what they witness’ (Frank 1995: 143). In the remission society, then, nar-
rative is an affective antibody to the contagion of ill-health.
A number of these theories swirled around one of the principal vectors for the
growth of pathography in the 1990s: newspaper columns devoted to the progress
of an illness. In England, a distinct liberal class fraction of journalists and intel-
lectuals helped foster sympathetic conditions for the growth of this mode of
trauma memoir. Oscar Moore delivered health bulletins on being a person living
with AIDS in The Guardian Saturday colour supplement between 1994 and 1996
(unlike the more militant writers, Moore praised his hospital treatment and even
the efforts of drug companies). In 1997, a young fashion journalist Ruth Picardie
was given space in The Observer to write about her terminal cancer. Ruth Picardie’s
sister, Justine, was the editor who commissioned these pieces and later collected
them for a best-selling book, Before I Say Goodbye (1998). Justine Picardie has since
published an account of her stalled mourning, which included various visits to
Spiritualist séances to attempt contact with her dead sibling, If the Spirit Moves You
(2001). The prominent journalist and broadcaster John Diamond also began a
cancer column in The Times in 1997, later collected as C: Because Cowards Get Cancer
too (1998). The more right-wing location for these columns was reflected in
Diamond’s relief that his private health insurance allowed him to avoid the mur-
derous delays of the public health service. Diamond died in 2001, having been a
long-term resident of gossip-columns, TV documentaries, West End plays and
best-selling books. The latter years of the 1990s prompted one of the weirdest TV
genre hybrids, the trauma cookery show, where Diamond’s wife Nigella Lawson
made the recipes of her sister and mother (who had both died early of breast can-
cer) in a house haunted by the briefly glimpsed, terminally ill husband. The dis-
play of the disturbances to boundaries of public and private demonstrated by this
family seemed to be one of the starkest evidences of how an injunction to per-
form their traumatic identities had taken over a certain element of the liberal
intelligentsia, even as its press complained about the pervasion of the ‘misery
memoir’ (Adams 2006).
One legitimation for the obsessive interest of the fourth estate in confessional
narratives of illness and trauma was that it provided scripts for reactions to trau-
matic life-events for a somehow peculiarly ‘cocooned’ class. The convention
established by journalists was to articulate an initial hesitation about publishing
such intimate or difficult material, an uncertainty instantly dissolved by an over-
whelmingly supportive public response. The virtual communities formed around
the deaths of Ruth Picardie or John Diamond were displayed by reproducing
 The memoir boom 131
e-mail messages from ‘ordinary’ readers, for example. Robert McCrum, the literary
editor of The Observer, also testified to an avalanche of letters revealing a hidden
world of illness and death being endured in apparent isolation, after he published
his memoir of recovery from a stroke, My Year Off. This is a highly specific consti-
tution of a public, and one that emerges through a kind of empathetic identifica-
tion. Yet it is also worth observing that this whole process essentially vacated the
political public sphere and the allegedly traditional role of the liberal press to
challenge the armatures of the state, retreating instead into individualized expe-
rience. This manoeuvre often severed accounts from critical or analytic languages
(of the kind that Giddens or Frank supply) to rely entirely on the languages of self-
discovery and actualization. That this was taking place in largely liberal-left loca-
tions seems symptomatic of larger processes. Charles Turner suggests that there
has been a ‘rejection of the claims of collective belonging and obligation which a
state or political community might make on individuals’ (Turner 1996: 47). Such
‘slow-moving institutional failure’, Turner argues, ‘throws individuals increasingly
back upon themselves, and makes all of us more sensitive to catastrophes of every
sort’(Turner 1996: 58). All that is left are unrelieved individuals without any other
social or political resources than their own sequestered experience, and that expe-
rience is pierced repeatedly by the punctures of traumatic encounter because
intermediate structures of communality have disappeared, but also because the
critical languages that might abstract this individualized experience have been
largely abandoned.
In this account, traumatized identities become privileged sites of communality,
yet they need to be compulsively restaged because there are no longer any theo-
retical means to process trauma. Trauma needs to be re-presented, over and over.
This formulation immediately evokes the final element of the trauma memoir I
want to put in place: the culture of celebrity.
The obsession with celebrity has been codified as one of the privileged sites for
working through the ‘active construction of identity in the social world’ (Marshall
1998: xi). In line with some of the commentary on sequestration and the loss of
traditional markers of communal identity, the celebrity figure has become a new
site for the organization and condensation of the social meanings of selfhood, but
one largely limited to emotion and psychologized motivations. This emphasis has
extended beyond the realms of the culture industry in recent decades and trans-
formed the discourse of politics, journalism, academia, and many other spheres.
Intertwined with the public enactment of private experience typified by the
memoir boom, celebrity is premised on a willing confession or enforced exposé.
Driven by ‘the will to uncover a hidden truth’ (Marshall 1998: 4), celebrity inten-
sifies around the public performance of privacy. This is why the exaggerated
virtues of the celebrity are never far from a fall from grace, as sanctioned self-
exposure can topple into public shaming and vilification. In this ambivalence
celebrity, as Jacqueline Rose observes, is ‘our guilty secret, a veiled way of putting
into public circulation certain things which do not easily admit to public acknowl-
edgement’ (Rose 2004: 201). Benign adoration can quickly become ‘sadistic
curiosity’ (Rose 2004: 214).
132 Cultural symptoms
If celebrity does organize commodified models of contemporary identity, then
I would contend that this has been a significant vector for establishing the cur-
rency, allure (and also the repulsion) of the trauma subject. In David Marshall’s
lucid formulation:

The private sphere is constructed to be revelatory, the ultimate site of truth

and meaning for any representation in the public sphere. In a sense, the
representation of public action as manifestation of private experience
exemplifies a cultural pattern of psychologisation of the public sphere … .
The celebrity is the avant-garde of this movement to vivisect public action
by identifying the originary private experience.
(Marshall 1998: 247)

The revelation of a hidden trauma thus organizes the autobiographical narra-

tive, the revealed secret becoming the pivot for every public act.
It would be possible to generate a detailed typology of celebrity that established
different vectors of trauma subjectivity: here are some broad strokes. Illness sur-
vived and overcome tends to promise sympathetic identification, adoration, and
the self-conscious fashioning of scripts for fans to follow, usually in best-selling
memoirs (or series of reiterative memoirs) – one thinks of Lance Armstrong’s sur-
vival of testicular cancer to become the most successful cyclist in history, or singer
Kylie Minogue’s breast cancer scare and subsequent beatification for our remis-
sion society. Equal and opposite would be the vilification heaped on those who
develop addictions that result directly from the alleged temptations of the
celebrity life-style, although rehabilitations of all kinds are possible, and sheer addic-
tive persistence can be rewarded (as in the case of Keith Richards). Generations of
famous families ‘touched by tragedy’ develop a peculiar glow of overdetermined
trauma that sustains an ambivalent attraction and repulsion (the Kennedys, the
Jackson family, Liza Minnelli and her mother Judy Garland). The central narra-
tive device of current celebrity, however, is the supersession of traumatic origins
and the exercise of sheer will to find fame and fortune, a script of open wish-
fulfilment for commodified culture. Many instances abound: celebrity Pamela
Stephenson’s biography of her celebrity husband, comedian Billy Connolly, sold
in its millions. It begins: ‘Billy’s real story is an utterly triumphant one. Not a day
has passed since I met him twenty years ago, without my shaking my head and
marvelling at his miraculous survival of profound childhood trauma’ (Stephenson
2002: 3). The text see-saws between glimpses of Billy amongst famous friends
(Steve Martin, the Prince of Wales) and details of early maternal abandonment,
physical abuse from his aunt and schoolmasters, sexual abuse by his father, and
consequent psychological effects, including alcoholism. Stephenson provides a
patina of technical psychological explanation (she is a trained clinical psycholo-
gist), but the allure really derives from this progressive public unfolding of private
trauma within a celebrity marriage. One could multiply examples indefinitely:
Being Jordan, the memoir of the grim childhood of glamour model Katie Price,
 The memoir boom 133
shifted over a million units in the first year of release (the phenomenal success of
this text precipitated a whole British trend of celebrity trauma auto/biography).
The vacuity of those ‘famous for being famous’ can often be filled by narratives
of traumatic origin, as if this legitimates their celebrity. Thus, the most success-
ful product of Britain’s version of the Big Brother reality TV show was not one of
the winners but Jade Goody, ridiculed for her ignorance and exhibitionism dur-
ing the show and then refashioned as a ‘survivor’ of difficult childhood circum-
stances in the deprived inner city. A recent biography of her – one of a number
already in circulation – was entitled Jade Goody: Story of a Survivor. A self-fashioned
millionaire, vilification then returned five years later after a display of another
element of her early deprivation: an outburst of unreconstructed racism on
Celebrity Big Brother.
These are passing figures: the inaugurating figure of contemporary trauma
celebrity is undoubtedly Oprah Winfrey. Her daytime TV talk-show began in
1984; she is now a billion-dollar self-help industry, influential producer, black phi-
lanthropist, and through her Book Club (launched in 1995) has become a signifi-
cant influence on the direction of American publishing. Winfrey’s fame began
with an act of TV confession: interviewing abuse survivors, she broke down and
confessed that she herself had been abandoned by her parents and abused by her
uncle and cousin from the age of twelve. Her career has been subsequently organ-
ized around the ‘relentless public telling’ of her own traumatic biography (Illouz
2003: 17): teenage pregnancy and miscarriage, eating disorders, addiction,
destructive symptoms of low self-esteem, relationship difficulties, and a battle with
weight that became a triumph in 1989 and then a failure as the weight crept back
on. This last ‘struggle’ was reported in episodic, sometimes weekly, updates. The
TV Oprah therefore has no apparent boundary between the public and private
self, one that is engineered around a flawed and vulnerable identity, subject to
virtually every subjective depredation it would be possible to encounter. This
sense of intimacy with her mass audience positions her as ‘structured to reinforce
the feeling of close proximity to the real and the familial’ (Marshall 1998: 192).
At the same time, her wealth, celebrity and cultural influence mark her as excep-
tional, her trajectory embodying the therapeutic narrative behind all her enter-
prises: that psychological disadvantage can be superseded by the exercise of the
will. Breakdown becomes breakthrough, so the mantra goes. The TV show
probes the vulnerabilities of its guests until it gets the ‘money-shot’ of emotional
collapse, expertly steered by Winfrey’s empathetic identification with virtually
any manner of suffering. The act of confession is then rewarded and announced
as the first step towards self-empowerment. The show can engineer success sto-
ries before our eyes: guests like Trudi Chase, the abuse victim who developed 92
multiple personalities, appeared initially as an object of cultural and psychiatric
fascination. Her memoir, published in 1992, gave her subjective experience a
voice; her therapy formed part of a self-help video, her life-story became a
made-for-TV film, and she returned to The Oprah Winfrey Show for an hour-long
special, the culmination of the construction of a trauma celebrity.
134 Cultural symptoms
As Eva Illouz argues, ‘narratives of trauma’ nearly always dominate the show:

its privileged guests embody modern prototypes: they are victims and bear-
ers of “trauma.” The trauma narrative seems to best embody modern
tragic narratives of the suffering self … . The culture of recovery has con-
tributed to a deep narrativization of the self through suffering. The trauma
narrative is a powerful identity narrative that provides a “centre” to the self
by stitching together past and present in a narrative of self-knowledge.
(Illouz 2003: 97)

Winfrey’s reiteration of the same subjective account thus ensures that ‘the tem-
porality of the trauma narrative … is structurally standardised’ (Illouz 2003: 170).
The embedding of this trauma account has had important cultural effects, not
least through the Book Club. Winfrey chose to reposition her show in 1995, in
part to gain distance from the controversies surrounding the confrontational
‘shock’ confessional shows presented by the likes of Jerry Springer (from 1991) or
Rikki Lake (from 1993). Winfrey asserted the cultural and even spiritual value of her
project by becoming more concrete about channels of empowerment: in promot-
ing reading, books could also become ‘a teaching tool, a means to self-discovery’
(Hall 2003: 658). Every Book Club selection has been guaranteed best-seller
status, and Hall reported that most selections sold in the region of 750,000 copies.
Books favoured are narratives of pain, suffering and/or injustice eventually over-
come. The memoir is made for this narrative arc, and the Book Club has surely
driven the shifting cultural value of the confessional memoir form in the last
decade. In Britain, the copycat Book Club of talk-show couple Richard and Judy
has begun to have similar effect. Indeed, Richard and Judy held a competition for
viewers to pitch a memoir of childhood trauma and triumph, the prize being a
book contract and substantial advance. Novels do feature in these Book Clubs, but
have to conform to this narrative model of tribulation and ultimate moral uplift.
The reading mode encouraged is one of complete identification, affective con-
nection rather than aesthetic analysis. Winfrey herself dramatizes this in often
extreme ways: she pressed copies of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple on friends long
before acting a central role in the film version; she similarly part financed and
acted in the film version of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Identification through affect produces a circuit where Oprah’s choice guaran-
tees a book’s authenticity and the book reinforces Oprah’s privileging of trauma
subjectivity. In this way, the Book Club can encompass all the other elements in
the rise of the trauma memoir, guaranteeing the success of abuse survival
accounts, pathographies, celebrity confessions, so confirming the centrality of
memoir to publishing. Yet the memoir boom is haunted by anxieties about
authenticity, periodically convulsed by exposé and scandal. Is this merely an
inevitable result of the cultural weight of trauma subjectivity prompting the exag-
geration of traumatic impacts? Having established the elements that constitute
the emergence and development of the boom, I can now focus in on the signifi-
cance of these repeated trials of authenticity.
 The memoir boom 135
Memoir and the judicious truth
James Frey’s memoir about severe alcoholism and addiction, A Million Little Pieces,
was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club in September 2005. Already popular, this
selection contributed to a further increase in sales and a fifteen-week stint as the
New York Times best-seller; the book sold over three million copies and was trans-
lated into 22 languages. In January 2006, however, investigative journalists for
The Smoking Gun web-site pointed to at least one instance of elaboration of the
details of an arrest, and the authenticity of the book began to unravel. The
Smoking Gun report began: ‘Oprah Winfrey’s been had’ (Smoking Gun 2006).
Winfrey demanded Frey appear on her show to apologise; Doubleday, the pub-
lishers, made the extraordinary agreement ‘to provide refunds to readers who felt
they were defrauded in buying a book classified as memoir’ (Barton 2006: 9). The
book now carries a preface by Frey clarifying its status as a somewhat enhanced
memoir, appealing to sincerity not verisimilitude. In fact the influence of the Book
Club on publishing was evidently part responsible, for Frey revealed that the book
had been rejected as a novel by seventeen publishers but was accepted the instant
it was reclassified a memoir.
This trial joined the cases of the doubts expressed about Sylvia Fraser’s novelis-
tic reconstruction of her abusive childhood, the exposé of Binjamin Wikomirski’s
Holocaust memoir, Fragments, in 1996, and the apoplectic commentary on Kathryn
Harrison’s incest memoir The Kiss a year later. Memoirs are regularly contested
now, particularly if they are literary and financial successes: Constance Briscoe’s
account of her childhood was rejected by her family; Kathy O’Beirne’s Don’t Ever
Tell, involving childhood rape, physical abuse and incarceration in a succession of
punitive children’s homes in Ireland, was challenged by her siblings (see Addley
2006). The truth-status of documentary has also been undermined by various
kinds of hoax, pastiche, mock-documentary and Reality TV formats which have
challenged the ‘central tenets of classic documentary’, including ‘the essential
integrity of the referential image’ (Roscoe and Hight 2001: 8).
These trials would initially seem to function to test the authenticity of what
Philippe Lejeune terms ‘the autobiographical pact’. The pact guarantees the
unity of author, narrator and central protagonist in a single ‘I’ and brooks no
ambiguity: ‘Autobiography does not include degrees: it is all or nothing’ (Lejeune
1989: 13). Lejeune also uses the language of crime and punishment: ‘Confronted
with what looks like an autobiographical narrative, the reader often tends to think
of himself as a detective, that is to say, to look for breaches of contract’ (Lejeune
1989: 14). In this model, discoveries of transgression would work ultimately to
reinforce the integrity of testimonial discourse. These trials of trauma authentic-
ity would therefore echo the court-room disputes of expert-witness psychologists
about the status of trauma. Lenore Terr insists on pristine inscription and recov-
ery of traumatic memory, whilst Elizabeth Loftus argues that traumatic memory
is particularly malleable and therefore evidentially problematic in legal settings.
Yet this idea of a trial of the memorial truth brings to mind a very different
understanding of the judicial framework of confession. In Foucault’s The History of
136 Cultural symptoms
Sexuality, confession is a ‘procedure of individualisation’, ‘ordered according to the
infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself … a truth which the very
form of confession holds out like a shimmering mirage’ (Foucault 1981: 59). It
shifts from religious to medico-legal authorities in the nineteenth century, the West
becoming saturated with confession: ‘one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s
thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the
greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell’ (Foucault 1981: 59). The disci-
pline of confession is also the shaping of a specific kind of subjectivity: what is to
be confessed is not volunteered, but compelled. Confession is ‘an obligatory act of
speech which, under some imperious compulsion, breaks the bonds of discretion
or forgetfulness’ (Foucault 1981: 62). Under this model, memoirs are not simply
voluntary acts of writing, inaugurated by sovereign individuals. Rather, they are
part of an incitement, as Pierre Nora puts it, ‘to undertake to become memory-
individuals’ (Nora 1989: 16). In these terms, Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray have
questioned the scenarios in which abuse survivor discourse has been at once com-
pelled and contained, whether on television, where its shock value is converted into
‘a media commodity’ and corralled by expertise, or even in private therapy:

Before we speak we need to look at where the incitement to speak originates,

what relations of power and domination may exist between those who
incite and those who are asked to speak, as well as to whom the disclosure
is directed.
(Alcoff and Gray 1993: 278 and 284)

Selves are disciplined into valuing some kinds of memory rather more than
others: the content of the confession has altered as the trauma paradigm recon-
figures narratives of the subject. Foucault thus forces us to consider the nature of
agency in the memoir: there is a disciplining of the self that partly dictates the
direction of the genre.
A third way of thinking about the law of memoir is suggested by Leigh
Gilmore’s work. As Gilmore observes:

Because testimonial projects require subjects to confess, to bear witness, to

make public and shareable a private and intolerable pain, they enter into a
legalistic frame in which their efforts can move quickly beyond their inter-
pretation and control, and become subject to judgments about their veracity
and worth.
(Gilmore 2001: 7)

The aim of a memoir might be broadly therapeutic and educative, but publica-
tion transposes the story into a different terrain of author’s rights and responsibilities,
where claims about traumatic pasts become open to charges of defamation or libel.
Therapeutic resolutions might be publicly unravelled, a story of survival becoming a
retraumatization by public humiliation or denunciation. Equally, where a testimony
wants to situate a personal trauma as a representative experience, perhaps of an
 The memoir boom 137
oppressed group, then this extension from individual to representative extremity will
frequently ‘draw scepticism more readily than sympathy’ (Gilmore 2001: 22) and be
subject to intensive forms of rebuttal if they challenge predominant beliefs.
For Gilmore, this risk has fostered a deliberate confusion of factual and fictional
modes in some memoirists, precisely in order to evade this potential trial and perse-
cution. In playing along ‘the borderland between autobiography and fiction’, the aim
is to ‘establish an alternative jurisdiction for narratives in which self-representation
and the representation of trauma coincide’ (Gilmore 2001: 48 and 146). This argu-
ment has large implications for the notion of an ‘autobiographical pact’ in trauma
memoirs. When the critical imperative is driven by a demand for testimony in a
legalistic sense, the trauma memoir is instantly put on trial and must verify its con-
formity to a strict pact: verisimilitude; identity of author, narrator and character.
Yet, as has been consistently observed, trauma is not necessarily a stable or straight-
forwardly evidential or narratable event, but might be mobile, subject to all kinds
of transformation and revision. This might well be the defining element of a trau-
matic memory, and what makes it particularly amenable to fictional narrative
instead. The new kinds of autofiction that scuff the boundaries of fictional and
factual discourse work to confound the legal measure of true and false precisely in
order to preserve, in a different way, in an ‘alternative jurisdiction’, a traumatic
truth. In the main, the memoir boom is avowedly driven by unproblematic ‘true
stories’ of trauma, valued for their proximity to the real. Yet controversial memoirs
need not be those that are exposed and vilified as in some way ‘false’. These are
often limit-cases that play in the margins between fact and fiction and are a scan-
dal because they will not determine the factuality of their trauma.
In a study of confession in literature and law, Peter Brooks observed that ‘there
is something inherently unstable and unreliable about the speech act of confes-
sion, about its meaning and its motives’ (Brooks 2000: 23). Let’s now turn to three
contemporary authors whose autofictions have embraced this instability.

Generating autofictions: Philip Roth, Hervé Guibert,

Kathryn Harrison
Between 1988 and 1993, in other words at the moment that the trauma paradigm
bloomed, Philip Roth published a sequence of four books that toyed with the con-
fessional mode. For a satirist and provocateur notorious for fabulating tales of Jewish
masculinity through a vertiginous play with alter egos, this was a striking turn. The
Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988) claimed to expose the critical confrontations that
helped constitute Roth as a novelist: with his father, his first wife, and with the out-
rage of American Jews at his early work. This searing account, however, is addressed
to Roth’s fictional self Nathan Zuckerman and the text concludes with Zuckerman’s
letter rubbishing the accuracy and value of the account. ‘The truth is’, Zuckerman
declares, ‘that the facts are much more refactory and unmanageable and inconclu-
sive’ (Roth 1988: 166). Autobiography could only be an act of ‘de-imagining’
compared to novelistic mediation (Roth 1988: 166). The densely particularized
Zuckerman, meanwhile, is contemptuous of the construction of Roth:
138 Cultural symptoms
As for characterization, you, Roth, are the least completely rendered of all
your protagonists … . My guess is that you’ve written metamorphoses of
yourself so many times, you no longer have any idea what you are or ever
were. By now what you are is a walking text.
(Roth 1988: 162)

Although elements of The Facts seem verifiably true, the book, as Elaine Kauvar
has observed, acts as ‘a refutation of facticity’ (Kauvar 1995: 421). Deception (1990)
is a series of pure dialogues without any supporting description between a novel-
ist called Philip and various interlocutors – a wife, a mistress, other women. It is
wound around some known facts of Roth’s life, such as his relationship with the
English actress Claire Bloom, yet is framed as fiction. Meta-textual play increases
when the wife of the writer finds these dialogues and accuses Philip of an affair
(just as Claire Bloom reports she did on reading the manuscript of the book). The
defence is that ‘I have been imagining myself, outside of my novel, having a love
affair with a character inside my novel’ (Roth 1990: 176) and Philip later pro-
claims with annoyance: ‘I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write
autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart,
let them decide what it is or it isn’t’ (Roth 1990: 184). This flipping between fiction
and true confession fosters uncertainty: ‘Readers will never know with certainty
just how much Deception deceives them’ (Tuerk 2005: 136). The subtitle of
Patrimony: A True Story (1991) holds out the prospect of more textual confusion, but
Roth’s memoir about the death of his father appears to be an unadorned account,
pushing only at the limits of what a reader might bear in terms of the intimacies
and humiliations of dying. The memoir helped consolidate a whole pathographic
sub-genre, a bewildering outcome for such a remorselessly playful writer. Operation
Shylock: A Confession (1993), however, is a return to metafictional play, a fantasia in
which Philip Roth offers a story of a famous American writer Philip Roth chas-
ing down a double Philip Roth who is impersonating him in order to gain pub-
licity for an absurd anti-Semitic Judaism in a paranoid and divided Israel. This
‘confession’ echoes the literary tradition of the persecutory double, yet is also full
of factual transcriptions: of the trial of the alleged concentration camp guard
John Demjanjuk in Israel in 1988; of Roth’s interview with writer and Holocaust
survivor Aahron Appelfeld, a dialogue verifiably published elsewhere as ‘true’.
Within this encounter, however, Appelfeld tells Roth why he has written fiction,
not memoir: ‘I tried several times to write “the story of my life” in the woods after
I ran way from the camp … . The result was rather meagre, an unconvincing
imaginary tale. The things that are most true are easily falsified’ (Roth 1993: 86).
The status of the book is left hopelessly entangled by Roth’s engagement by
Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. He is asked to remove the final chapter for
operational security, and does so, but is then the last directive of the book, ‘This
confession is false’ (Roth 1993: 399), true or false, inside the text or outside it?
At the time, Roth’s shuttling between fiction and fact was understood within
the paradigm of Postmodernism: a dismantling of the authority of the paratexts
that usually secure a text as truth or fiction; a demonstration of the rhetorical or
 The memoir boom 139
discursive equivalence of history and literature; a lesson in displaying the author
as a textual construct, the putative autobiography only able to show, as Roland
Barthes had done in his anti-memoir Roland Barthes, that ‘in the field of the
subject, there is no referent’ (Barthes 1977b: 56). Roth thus becomes an exem-
plary postmodern relativist. But in retrospect it seems obvious to observe that
these moments of textual uncertainty are generated by passages of trauma, which
newly disturb the relationship between representation and the real and thus
prompts these swerves in truth status. Roth tells Zuckerman that The Facts was
composed in the midst of a severe breakdown in 1987: ‘what was to have been
minor surgery turned into a prolonged physical ordeal that led to an extreme
depression that carried me right to the edge of emotional and mental dissolution’
(Roth 1988: 5). The book is a ‘post-crack-up meditation’: ‘In order to recover
what I had lost I had to go back to the moment of origin. I found no one moment
of origin, but a series of moments, a history of multiple origins, and that what I
have written here is the effort to repossess life’ (Roth 1988: 5). Zuckerman directs
his venom not at truth itself, but at the impoverished version of the truth autobi-
ography generates in comparison with the mediations of fiction. On the question
of Roth’s first wife, Zuckerman posits his own traumatic origin: a hidden, hered-
itary alcoholism. Between them, traumatic origins are not in doubt; rather, it is
the textual means to uncover them that are disputed.
Patrimony is also about the insistence of the traumatic real: this is what the central
scene demands. In the later stages of his illness, the patriarch Herman Roth spec-
tacularly loses control of his bowels; the son must clean the bathroom. A detailed,
clinical description confronts abjection and utterly refuses artful significance:

So that was the patrimony. And not because cleaning it up was symbolic of
something else but because it wasn’t, because it was nothing less or more
than the lived reality that it was. There was my patrimony: not the money,
not the tefillin, not the shaving mug, but the shit.
(Roth 1991: 176)

Nancy Miller’s rather presumptuous inhabitation of this text, using it as an

occasion to recall her own father’s illness and death in Bequest and Betrayal, insists
on resymbolizing this scene as if unable to bear this singularity. Yet Roth’s aus-
terity derives from understanding trauma as the unsymbolizable thing. As he says
elsewhere:

those of us who live with and by words are a bit astonished by the real
thing because we are always looking for the right word to describe the thing.
The words become a substitute for the thing. But the thing is something
different.
(Roth cited Hedin 2005: 150)

This is not, however, the final determination. Where Patrimony reduces itself
down to one brute scene, Operation Shylock doubles and redoubles narrative chaos,
140 Cultural symptoms
this Philip Roth seemingly suffering the same breakdown described in The Facts,
but unable to master narratively the multiplication of plots and conspiracies that
surround him. There is no single, appropriate representation of trauma: it is con-
veyed in the very swerves Roth takes between factual and fictional registers. These
books, then, might be termed autofictions, not because they depend upon or
expose a life but because they act out Zuckerman’s law that ‘with autobiography,
there’s always another text, a countertext if you will, to the one presented’ (Roth
1988: 172). Approaching the traumatic real, Roth’s persona multiplies as a means
to lure in but then evade the punitive judgements that have pursued his career.
Roth’s project initially seems entirely counter to the autofictions of Hervé
Guibert, who appeared intent on unveiling every detail of his private life and last
years with AIDS. Yet this body of work also has its own way of signalling the
tremors that de-stabilize the truth of trauma. Guibert’s career was dedicated to
self-exposure and the betrayal of secrets. In his first book, La Mort propagande, pub-
lished when he was twenty in 1975, he spoke of a desire ‘to kill myself on stage,
before the cameras. To offer up in my death this extreme, excessive spectacle of
my body’ (Guibert 1991a: 172, my translation). Uncannily, Guibert fantasized
about ‘filming my body in decomposition, day after day’ (Guibert 1991a: 172),
anticipating by sixteen years his video diary, Pudeur ou L’Impudeur, shown just weeks
after his suicide in December 1991. Guibert always wrote in the borderland
between autobiography and fiction. His texts were developed from his continuous
journal, the extent of reworking always queasily uncertain (his journal was even-
tually published in 2001). Guibert’s notoriety was not at first linked with his
shameless confession of AIDS, but with the betrayal of confidences. In 1986, he
published a private letter from Roland Barthes, who had asked to sleep with the
angelic Guibert in return for writing a preface. Guibert spurned the offer; Barthes
died in 1980, and Ralph Sarkonak has followed the haunting trace of this betrayal
through Guibert’s work. The estate had been anxious to maintain a silence on
Barthes’ homosexuality; Guibert betrayed one of his literary masters, although
Barthes’ letter, ‘Fragments pour H’, is now included in the Complete Works.
Similarly, the scandal of Guibert’s first AIDS autofiction To the Friend Who Did Not
Save My Life (1990) was not Guibert’s illness but the alleged betrayal of Michel
Foucault. Guibert and Foucault were neighbours in Paris and the younger writer
was part of Foucault’s inner circle. In the novel, Guibert’s death is foreshadowed
by the last illness of a philosopher called Muzil, whose last months are described
in detail and with enough clues to guess at the true identity. Foucault had not com-
mented on his illness, determining not to speak of AIDS publicly, and after his
death in 1984 the estate maintained silence on the cause of death: once more,
Guibert had betrayed and damaged a reputation.
This, however, is to read Guibert’s texts as material to decode for their autobio-
graphical trace, as if the fictional veneer was thin enough to discern the traumatic
facts beneath. Guibert’s suicide amplifies this temptation: as with Sylvia Plath, the
fact of the death is read retrospectively everywhere into the work. Guibert actively
fostered this misrecognition, speaking of a pacte du leurre, a pact of deceit, that toyed
with this expectation. The critic Raymond Bellour first called Guibert’s work aut-
ofiction in 1988 (before the AIDS texts); Jean-Pierre Boulé coined the apparently
 The memoir boom 141
tautological term roman faux or false novel for them, ‘a novel which does not respect
the fictional pact’ (Boulé 1999: 156). French critics often seem to value Guibert’s
texts precisely for the taxonomical difficulties they induce, situated in that ‘impos-
sible’ transgression simultaneously of fictional and autobiographical pacts. Guibert
then suggested that this lifetime project of blurring truth and fiction could reach
its apotheosis with his illness: ‘AIDS has allowed me to make even more radical cer-
tain techniques of narration, the relation to truth, the staging of myself beyond
what I had thought possible’ (Guibert cited Sarkonak 2000: 7). Guibert’s AIDS
texts are not a series of unveilings, heading towards the unvarnished truth: read in
sequence, they bewilder and confound with their shifting status.
To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, written in one hundred short sections, but
in long, breathless sentences (a style borrowed from Thomas Bernhard), is a typ-
ical AIDS account of its era, a story of medical ignorance, rumour and false
promise. The tense of the book’s arresting opening sentence, ‘I had AIDS for
three months’ is written with the prospect of a miracle cure being held out by a
wealthy American friend with privileged access to the latest drug trials (Guibert
1991b: 1). The Guibert of the novel is betrayed, his place in the trial taken by a
more attractive young man, but in the latter half of the book the promise of treat-
ment is overtaken by the calmative act of writing. ‘AIDS will have been my para-
digm in my project of self-revelation and the expression of the inexpressible’
(Guibert 1991b: 228). He agrees to meet Bill a last time, overcoming his hatred
for the sake of completing the novel: ‘Yes, I can write it, and that’s undoubtedly
what my madness is – I care more for my book than for my life, I won’t give up
my book to save my life’ (Guibert 1991b: 237). The publication of this autofiction
and an appearance on TV in which he renounced writing and declared that this
was to be his final book gave Guibert celebrity. The story of the outpouring of let-
ters praising his courage and encouraging him to continue writing is told inside
his next novel, The Compassion Protocol (1991). The book we read is not the same as
the writing this public sympathy produces: he struggles with ‘telling a story whose
beginning I knew, as well as its development and end, because I had lived it
myself ’ yet which had lost ‘that margin of the unpredictable that is the preroga-
tive of living writing’ (Guibert 1993a: 147). That book is clearly abandoned for
the far more indeterminate fiction we are now reading. This is a novel written in
remission and is a story of a deceit. All drug trials require double blind protocols,
the test group matched with another that takes a placebo, neither patient nor doc-
tor knowing which is which. Unable to face this uncertainty, since to take a
placebo is to be passive before imminent death, Guibert fashions his own ‘com-
passion protocol’: he is given a stash of drugs from a now dead dancer, yet con-
ceals this from his doctors. Guibert’s own double blinds and deceits renders the
truth entirely unclear. One section confesses that he has actually secretly travelled
to Los Angeles to receive the very injections denied him in To the Friend Who Did
Not Save My Life. In another lengthy sequence, he travels to a faith-healer in
Casablanca, maintaining a simultaneous belief and disbelief in this charlatanry.
Sufficient warning lies in the comment: ‘It is when what I am writing takes the
form of a journal that I most strongly feel that I am writing fiction’ (Guibert
1993a: 72). The journal form of the text continually belies its own status. After a
142 Cultural symptoms
gruelling description of a fibroscopy, depicted as brutal oral rape, Guibert
records: ‘When I got home, I opened my journal and wrote “Fibroscopy.”
Nothing else, nothing more, no explanation, no description of the examination
and no commentary on my suffering … I had become incapable of recounting
my experience’ (Guibert 1993a: 48). This contradicts itself: the trauma of the
fibroscopy is at once unrepresentable and exhaustively represented.
The third AIDS autofiction, The Man in the Red Hat, appeared posthumously in
January 1992. This opens by determining not to mention AIDS at all, a statement
of intent it does not fulfil. Nevertheless, the Guibert character does announce: ‘I
now can’t bear any talk of AIDS. I hate my AIDS. I want to have done with it’
(Guibert 1993b: 42). The novel does switch focus away from urgent medical
reportage. It is loosely structured as a detective fiction and concerns Guibert’s
obsession with art and the subterranean world of art-forgery. Typically, Guibert
thinks of building a collection not of originals but of fakes and copies. He travels
to Moscow on the trail of a dealer who has disappeared; he becomes obsessed
with the artist Yannis, who seems to be involved in faking his own work, utterly
confusing the line between original and copy, true and false. Assessment and treat-
ment of his illness possess similar uncertainty: test results that were negative
become positive, operations are started but abandoned, and the status of the illness
is forever unclear. Alongside this roman faux that foregrounds fakery, Guibert’s
diary Cytomegalovirus was published on the same day, an exercise in releasing
apparently unadorned diary transcriptions of a two-week stay in hospital when
threatened with blindness. The diary is ‘a way of giving rhythm to time and a way
to pass it’ (1996a: 8), yet the transcriptions are not straightforward, being full of
performative contradictions, such as ‘Wrote nothing this evening. Too shell-
shocked’ (Guibert 1996a: 49) and assertions that the diary record is more a kind of
purgative anti-record: ‘I thought I would no longer be able to write in this diary
because of the trauma, but it’s the only way to forget’ (Guibert 1996a: 53).
Just as one might be tempted to see the diary as the exit from the confusions of
the autofictions, Guibert’s last book, Paradise, explodes this teleology. Written six
months before his death, the book appears to be based on the missing manuscript
pages that bring The Man in the Red Hat to such an abrupt end. Yet in this novel,
the character Guibert is a heterosexual man mourning the accidental death of
his lover Jayne, an intense affair played out across exotic locations. Even so, the
fictionality of the text keeps disintegrating, as Guibert’s fevers cause an ‘amnesiac
state’ (Guibert 1996b: 78). Fiction appears to be displaced by transparent diary
transcriptions, but towards the end, these reflect only on Guibert’s own unstable
identity: ‘I have made myself the victim of a schizophrenic device installed by
myself in creating dual personalities for myself, with two different addresses, one
true … and one fictive’ (Guibert 1996b: 100). Guibert seems to embrace a
ramshackle, patch-work form, something that traces the ravages of his illness in
the structural ruin of the text. Nevertheless, Guibert ends this bewildering
sequence of indeterminate texts with his most clearly fictive work.
I have already argued that AIDS texts are central to the memoir boom, but also
that the urgency of AIDS witness demands new form. ‘Testimonial writing’, as
Ross Chambers insists, ‘speaks from a cultural periphery where it must make do,
 The memoir boom 143
catachrestically, with genres that scarcely admit it’ (Chambers 2004: 33). Guibert
once more exemplifies how traumatic truth is traced through the perverse interplay
of fact and fiction in order to evade a punitive trial and punishment.
For someone claiming pariah status, Guibert’s autofictions have been received
sympathetically by a community that was able to theorize this kind of textual play
(even if some have been impatient with Guibert’s disinterest in AIDS activism).
The same cannot be said for Kathryn Harrison, whose 1997 memoir, The Kiss,
provoked a campaign of press vilification and prompted several commentators to
observe that the 1990s memoir boom had now found its shipwreck. The Kiss
speaks in icy, detached prose of Harrison’s profoundly damaged attachments to
her parents. Her mother’s indifference was matched by her father’s forced expul-
sion from the family home. Lack of maternal recognition results in a variety of
hysterical stigmata, acts of masochistic self-harm and a decade of anorexia.
When the daughter, aged twenty, meets her father after a ten-year absence, he
forces their renewed contact into a sexual relationship, which continues for four
years. Her father’s first kiss, ‘his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, explor-
ing’, reverses Sleeping Beauty (Harrison 1997: 68). It sends her into a suspended,
somnambulistic state, and the blank prose style, often written in a shell-shocked
present tense, conveys the post-traumatic automaton that she has become.
Another kiss, of farewell to her grandfather at his funeral, wakes her from the
trance and the mesmeric power of the abusive father is shattered.
Even before publication, Vanity Fair reported an ‘extraordinary buzz’ around the
memoir, with the proofs becoming a kind of samizdat literature in the New York
publishing scene. Michael Shnayerson considered that the memoir ‘may be the
work of a writer who wrote it in a dreamlike state – a state that incest victims often
experience’ (Shnayerson 1997: 30). Shnayerson quoted a concerned trauma coun-
sellor to the effect that Harrison’s agency in writing and choosing to publish the
book was surely in question: she was a trauma victim, being asked to act out in
public by unscrupulous agents and publishers. Elsewhere, the only agency allowed
was to accuse Harrison of cynicism. Ed Vulliamy’s vitriolic account, a month before
The Kiss was published, painted Harrison as a failed but photogenic novelist pre-
pared to become ‘Manhattan’s circus freak’ by taking the confession of ‘one’s inti-
mate innards’ to new extremes (Vulliamy 1997: 3). Upon publication, Harrison’s
memoir was declared ‘shameful’ by Jonathan Yardley, who was sufficiently provoked
to attack it in three separate articles in the Washington Post. For him, The Kiss
announced ‘the death of literature’ (Yardley 1997: B2). James Wolcott considered
the book an exercise in narcissism and the ‘white zombie’ routine a failed attempt
to shift what had been a ‘consensual act between two adults’ into a narrative of
incest (Wolcott 1997: 34). For Elizabeth Powers (1997), Harrison was merely
another instance of catastrophic American disrespect for the paternal role, the dis-
taste at the act of disclosure apparently far outweighing the details of what had been
disclosed. Several national newspapers then dedicated themselves to discovering
Harrison’s father, and giving him the right to reply; soon, the memoir was openly
disbelieved. The final problem was that passages of The Kiss appeared to be direct
repetitions from Harrison’s first novel, Thicker Than Water (1991), which offered a
strikingly similar family narrative. Key scenes reappeared word for word, but the
144 Cultural symptoms
novel also contained sexual details that had been occluded in the memoir. Once
more, a crisis seemed to develop around a confusion of autobiographical and fic-
tional pacts. Harrison held to the logic of the trauma paradigm, by arguing that she
needed to rewrite Thicker than Water as non-fiction: ‘I knew there was a story that was
real and that needed to be owned. To novelise a story of incest is to participate in
the societal imperative to always lie about it’ (Harrison 2005a: 49). Many of her
reviewers, however, refused this logic: instead, the prior existence of the novel
pointed only to fabrication. Here was a striking instance where the cultural author-
ity of the memoir over the novel was refused; such a story was undermined rather
than reinforced by the pre-existing fiction. Now the memoir was too artful, too
archly designed to convey authentic traumatic extremity.
Such inordinate responses have themselves become the subject of critical
analysis. For David Parker, the details of The Kiss produce uncontrollable forms of
either identification or sharp disinvestment and denial (Parker 2002: 503). Even
those who work to expose some cultural factors for this critical eruption seemingly
cannot help but call The Kiss ‘shamelessly commercial sensationalism’ (Saverese
2001: 99). It seems obvious that much of this disturbance comes from Harrison’s
departure from standard incest narratives, which usually demonstrate a sharp
disparity of power between the guilty adult perpetrator and the innocent child
victim. Although The Kiss seems to me constructed to demonstrate how, psychi-
cally, a twenty-year-old woman could be left perilously arrested in an infantile
state, vulnerable to a predatory father, Harrison’s legal age makes her a consent-
ing adult and therefore complicit. As Laura Frost comments, ‘punishment is a cru-
cial element of incest paradigms’ (Frost 2002: 216), with nasty fates particularly
reserved for those rare and monstrous seductive daughters.
The media trial of Kathryn Harrison presumed to judge the truth or falsity of
her testimony, with attacks often making her work emblematic of an entire con-
fessional genre. Harrison’s response has been no doubt provoking for her detrac-
tors: she has produced two further memoirs, Seeking Rapture (2003) and The Mother
Knot (2004) and latterly the novel Envy (2005b) that cuts across father–daughter
incest at another angle. Combined with her first two novels, Thicker than Water
(1991) and Exposure (1993), both narrated by daughters recalling fragmentary
memories of their sexually abusive fathers, I would argue that this body of work
constitutes another kind of autofiction, although very different from the play with
authorial personae in Roth or Guibert. The facts of Harrison’s damaged attach-
ments (which I see no reason to deny) seem so exorbitant that they compel repeated
traversals, in different fictional and factual forms. It is through these repetitions and
modulations of difficult material that Harrison conveys the insistence of trauma,
and not necessarily always in ways that she controls.
There is a striking disjunction between The Kiss and its commentary: this abuse
account is also in large part a cancer pathography, occasioned by mourning her
mother’s death from breast cancer. It is the perversity of the maternal attachment
that is the critical focus for much of the memoir. The daughter recalls the hunger
for her mother’s recognition, unable to bear her mother sleeping ‘because for as
long as my mother refuses consciousness, she refuses consciousness of me: I do not
 The memoir boom 145
exist’ (Harrison 1997: 8). It is her disapproving look that instigates self-starvation
and her absent gaze that means she will be defenceless before her father’s devour-
ing eyes, the man who ‘has somehow begun to see me into being’ (Harrison 1997:
63). It is also the mother that first effectively rapes her daughter, by insisting a
gynaecologist breaks her hymen. This maternal focus was anticipated by Thicker
Than Water, which is a melancholic novel centred on a daughter nursing a mother
through her terminal illness. There, the narrator states:

Ever since I can remember, each hurt has gotten lost in Mother-hurt. When
I was yet in grammar school, any pain, physical or emotional, would lead
me back, drop me into an older, more basic agony, and in privacy I would
hold myself and rock myself and say MotherMotherMother over and over
and over, the way you repeated your secret mantra: an acknowledgment
and prayer to the central truth of my existence.
(Harrison 1991: 239)

The details of paternal abuse jut through this novel craggedly, in fragmentary
and disordered italicized passages as if as yet unassimilated or unassimilable.
Significantly, the scenes from the novel that recur in The Kiss tend to concern the
mother. The visit to the gynaecologist is restaged, as is the gruesome scene forc-
ing the eyes of newborn kittens to open, tied as it is to the hunger for recognition
(the memoir in fact curtails the more abject details of this scene). What is taken
up in Seeking Rapture and The Mother Knot is a more explicit sense of needing to
work through the relations to her mother and grandmother, as if repositioning the
centre of the family romance after the storm around The Kiss. The significant rep-
etition between The Kiss and Seeking Rapture is in an anecdote about a car accident.
Her mother insists on treatment by a Christian Scientist healer, where

this stranger ushered me into an experience of something I cannot help but

call rapture … I learned, at six, a truth dangerous to someone so young and
lovelorn. I saw that transcendence was possible: that spirit could conquer
matter, and that therefore I could overcome whatever obstacles prevented
my mother’s loving me. I could overcome myself.
(Harrison 1997: 106; repeated almost verbatim Harrison 2003: 42)

Such trance-like states, however, are first explored in detail in the novel
Exposure, in scenes where the daughter slips into dissociations and diabetic comas
as her father obsessively photographs her. The reader accumulating these repeti-
tions has to keep tacking between factual and fictional discourse.
Harrison’s cool, abstracted style is partly the product of incorporating its own
analytic commentary: these are thoroughly therapied texts. Exposure ends with the
transcript of a ‘Confidential Psychological Evaluation’ of the central female char-
acter; Envy is written from the perspective of a male analyst. The memoirs are keen
to demonstrate the extent of the therapeutic insight that has now accrued to the
memoirist. Anorexia is not just recounted, it is interpreted in crisp formulations that
146 Cultural symptoms
pass for analytic wisdom: ‘Anorexia can be satisfied, my mother cannot; so I replace
her with this disease, with a system of penances and renunciation that offers its own
reward’ (Harrison 1997: 39–40). This may account for the unease at the seemingly
over-artful design of The Kiss: experience has been processed into meaningful
image-chains and narrative patterns. The repetition across the memoirs, however,
rather implies that this insight has its limits and that Harrison’s work obeys the law
observed by Laura Marcus that ‘the anxious need to produce more and yet more
narrative suggests that confession is indeed endless and that the “self ” cannot even
catch up with itself in autobiographical representation’ (Marcus 1994: 280). Seeking
Rapture has to revisit and readjust the focus of The Kiss; The Mother Knot has to return
again. This last, slim addition strongly demonstrates the limits of insight. It is cen-
tred on Harrison’s decision to exhume her mother’s body and convert her remains
to ashes. ‘“I’m not so much having my mother dug out of the ground as I am
exhuming from my own body,” I told my analyst’ (Harrison 2004: 54). The prag-
matic, possibly laconic view of the Californian cemetery authorities – this happens
all the time – belies the genuinely weird decision to literalize this symbolic insight.
The reader keeps expecting Harrison to reflect on how a third memoir has also
been scraped out of the same ground, to put the same body on display again, but
the therapeutic disinterment is carried through without such commentary. The
ashes scattered, the memoir hails closure (‘at last I was allowing her to go’ (Harrison
2004: 82)), whilst demonstrating its perpetual entanglement: the knot will outlive the
attempted negation, the not. Envy is soon toying with a different, fictional avenue of
self-exposure in which possible father–daughter incest hauntingly returns. This
trajectory leaves me in doubt about how much control Harrison exerts over these
repetitions. Confusingly, the more the memoirs incorporate an analytic voice that
seeks to manage interpretations, the less control the books actually seem to display.
Harrison’s work embodies many of the aspects of the 1990s memoir boom that
I have been attempting to delineate here. The memoir form is reoriented around
extreme experience and that dramatic act of unveiling a traumatic origin which
retrospectively transforms a life narrative. This act of publishing a memorial
record can itself generate a form of celebrity, exemplary of a new kind of trauma
subject. In Harrison’s case, the privileged traumatic truth of intra-familial sexual
abuse is muddied by her ‘consenting’ age, therefore confusing the distribution of
guilt and innocence, so producing a punitive media trial. Autofiction has been one
means to evade the dangers of self-exposure in a culture that at once demands this
confessional truth, but also punishes its articulation. Harrison’s repetitions
between memoir and fiction are more difficult to determine as strategies than the
devices adopted by Roth or Guibert. By The Mother Knot, Harrison appears to be
invested in the notion of reparative or redemptive narrative, Ricoeur’s notion that
traumatic disfiguration can be calmatively configured by narrative. Harrison,
however, seems to demonstrate that the pronouncement of closure holds no force:
she generates ever more acts of confession in a dynamic process of constituting
the contemporary trauma subject. The trauma paradigm achieves saturation by
inciting narratives that demand instant repetition by their failure to master what
has been constituted as traumatic experience.
4 The intrusive image
Photography and trauma

The cultural symptoms of the novel and memoir foreground the tension between
narrative and its disruption, between concordance and the discordances that
trauma produces. Yet this narrative problem remains within the linguistic register,
whilst a definitional element of trauma might be that it defeats precisely this form
of representation. As Elaine Scarry observes, ‘physical pain does not simply resist
language, but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state
anterior to language’ (Scarry 1985: 4). One of the central ways in which contem-
porary trauma has been conceived is around the symptom of the intrusive or
recurrent image, the unbidden flashback that abolishes time and reimmerses you
in the visual field of the inaugurating traumatic instant. There is a profound dis-
junction implied: the visual intrusion recurs because linguistic and memorial
machineries completely fail to integrate or process the traumatic image. Perhaps,
then, it is in the image that the psychic registration of trauma truly resides.
The place of the intrusive image, as Ruth Leys notes, has been considerably
amplified in subsequent revisions to the 1980 definition of PTSD in the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (Leys 2006). Two
papers in 1985 argued that its centrality should be recognized. ‘The most unique
aspect of the PTSD diagnosis appears to be the intrusive symptoms, including
intrusive images and recurrent dreams and nightmares’, one group of researchers
suggested. ‘Because this is the most distinct aspect of the disorder and potentially
its hallmark, it is unfortunate that little attention has been paid to the content of
these images’ (Green et al. 1985: 409). A similar ‘neglect of imagery’ was observed
by Brett and Ostroff, who argued for a new emphasis on ‘imagic and affective
re-experiencing phenomena’ in PTSD (Brett and Ostroff 1985: 422). The revised
criteria in 1987 thus expanded the elements of re-experiencing to include intru-
sive recollections, recurrent dreams, ‘sudden acting or feeling as if the traumatic
event were recurring (includes a sense of reliving the experience, illusions, hallu-
cinations, and dissociative [flashback] episodes, even those that occur upon awak-
ening or when intoxicated)’ and finally a new additional category of ‘intense
psychological distress at exposure to events that symbolize or resemble an aspect
of the traumatic event’ (American Psychiatric Association 1987: 250). The fourth
edition had further accretions, in that now familiar logic of progressive extension
of categories of trauma.
148 Cultural symptoms
Ostroff and Brett also sketched out a genealogy of trauma theory that recalled
how recurrent images had been part of defining traumatic or war neuroses since
Freud. This could be taken back further, to Pierre Janet’s treatment of idées fixes in
the 1880s that had aimed to transform stubborn memory images into benign nar-
rative form. In Janet’s practice hypnosis recovered the scene and suggestion then
edited or erased its traumatic content. The critical stage of modern development,
however, had begun in the 1960s. Mardi Horowitz was a psychologist researching
the relationship between image and cognition and in 1969 he published a piece on
re-experiencing LSD hallucinations which he called ‘flashbacks’ following the
hippy usage in San Francisco. These were ‘recurrent unbidden images’ in which ‘the
contents seem to be returns of traumatic perceptions, breakthroughs of repressed
ideas and affects, or screen images’ (Horowitz 1969: 566 and 569). Horowitz went
on to provide a central plank for physiological theories of trauma in Stress Response
Syndromes in 1976. Stressful events could leave a legacy of an oscillation between
denial or evasion and sudden, unwelcome returns to the scene: ‘Intrusion labels the
period of unbidden ideas and pangs of feeling which are difficult to dispel, and of
direct or symbolic behavioural re-enactments of the stress event complex’
(Horowitz 1976b: 57). Horowitz, although sympathetic to psychodynamic theories,
instead opted to model this theory on cognitive processing. In his view, ‘active memory
storage has an intrinsic tendency towards repetition of contents until the contents held in active
memory are actively terminated ’ (Horowitz 1976b: 93). Stress events contained infor-
mation difficult to ‘terminate’; the images got stuck in cycles of repetition rather
than fading into conventional memories. Horowitz tied his work to the cluster of
research on concentration camps, Vietnam veterans and women with rape trauma,
and he became one of Robert Jay Lifton’s fellow advocates on the committee that
formulated PTSD, as I outlined in Chapter 1. Lifton himself consistently empha-
sized that the death-in-life experienced by Hiroshima survivors and war veterans
was a result of ‘inundating the organism with death imagery’ that could not be
symbolically integrated or narratively formulated (Lifton 1968: 503). The Broken
Connection began with the assertion that ‘We live on images’ and concluded that ‘one
could define the traumatic syndrome as the state of being haunted by images that
can neither be enacted nor cast aside’ (Lifton 1979: 3 and 172).
A lot of this material stands behind Bessel van der Kolk’s theory that traumatic
memory is registered in a specific, imagistic way that stands outside normal memory
creation. Trauma is engraved in the mind under distinct conditions, etched in by the
heightened adrenaline of the physiological reaction to bodily stress. It is also an
explicitly non-verbal, non-narrative memory: ‘The experience cannot be organized
on a linguistic level and this failure to arrange the memory in words and symbols
leaves it to be organized on a somatosensory or iconic level: as somatic sensations,
behavioural reenactments, nightmares and flashbacks’ (van der Kolk and van der
Hart 1991: 442–3). Hence PTSD is marked by unnerving intrusions of images that
are experienced as ‘context-free, fearful associations which are hard to locate in
space and time’ (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1991: 442). This provides the struc-
ture in which to present a theory of recovered memory. Traumatic memory is reg-
istered outside normal memory and is thus lost to conscious recall. Its presence is
 The intrusive image 149
marked by unfathomable flashes of disturbing images or compulsive repetitions. A
therapist will pull at the threads of this ‘context-free’ image and will eventually
uncover, engraved in pristine form, the traumatic event.
Ruth Leys has sharply observed that this history has increasingly regarded the
traumatic image as a literal record of the event. Horowitz had first used the
metaphor of the flashback as a return to a particular state in which elaboration,
transformation and displacement of imagery regularly occurred. Relatively soon,
however, the traumatic memory was not seen as a representation so much as a
shard of the event itself. Traumatic nightmares of veterans dispensed with the
dream logic of condensation, displacement or symbolism; instead, they were ‘usu-
ally exact replicas of actual combat events’ (van der Kolk et al. 1984: 188).
‘Flashbulb’ memories, first theorized in 1977, preserved a snapshot in memory of
particularly shocking or momentous events, such as Kennedy’s assassination.
Flashbulb memories were ‘very like a photograph’ and ‘not a narrative’; they were
not registered ‘in verbal form’ (Brown and Kulik 1977: 74 and 85). In the 1980s,
some argued that PTSD diagnostics needed to be more explicit that intrusive
images were ‘direct recapitulation of the event’ (Green et al. 1985: 409). Recovered
abuse memories often assumed this, and Leys also found this literalizing trace in
Caruth’s cultural theory of trauma (Leys 2000).
This tendency towards literalization is undoubtedly because the visual image is
held to be somehow closer to the event, less mediated, than the verbal record. In
C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, the written sign is an arbitrary symbol, rendered meaningful
by convention, whilst the image is an index, still a conventional sign but one that also
carries the physical trace of the object itself. According to Roland Barthes, what the
photograph announces, and what astounds us about it, is ‘the thing has been there’
(Barthes 2000: 76). Photography preserves a chemical trace of the object itself, pres-
ents itself as incontestable evidence, but in a way that is inherently deathly since the
indexical image is also, in the instant it is taken, a monument to what has now irrev-
ocably passed: ‘Death is the eidos of that Photograph’ (Barthes 2000: 15). This play
of presence and absence invokes all those familiar traumatic notions of spectres.
Thus, as Marianne Hirsch suggests: ‘The referent haunts the picture like a ghost: it
is a revenant, a return of the lost and dead other’ (M. Hirsch 1997: 5). The photo-
graph is the privileged medium of postmemory, ‘an intersubjective transgenera-
tional space of remembrance, linked specifically to cultural or collective trauma’
(M. Hirsch 2001: 10). The index therefore dominates thinking about visual culture,
even if the category of the indexical is held to be in crisis. As Laura Mulvey puts it:

The cinema (like photography) has a privileged relation to time, preserving

the moment at which the image is registered … Both have the attributes of
the indexical sign, the mark of trauma or the mark of light, and both need
to be deciphered retrospectively across delayed time.
(Mulvey 2006: 9)

What emerges from this commentary is an intrinsic relationship between

trauma theory and visual culture that needs to be explored. Modern technologies
150 Cultural symptoms
of the image have been inextricably associated with traumatic impacts and the the-
orization of trauma. Walter Benjamin considered cinema’s ‘formal principle’ to be
‘perception in the form of shocks’ (Benjamin 1973: 171) and in the 1960s Marshall
McLuhan regarded instant global communications as an exteriorization of the
human nervous system that lost ‘protective buffers’ and left man vulnerable to con-
tinual traumatic ‘shock’ (McLuhan 1987: 43). Robert Jay Lifton built on this analy-
sis to convey an ‘emerging psychological state’ at the end of the 1960s, a change
attributed in part to ‘the flooding of imagery produced by the extraordinary flow of
postmodern cultural influences over mass communication networks’ (Lifton 1969:
37 and 43). It is now hard to think of the contemporary psychology of trauma out-
side an imbrication with photography and cinema, with cultural metaphors of
flashbulbs and flashbacks now literalized in scientific and cultural theory. Ulrich
Baer, for instance, considers that trauma ‘parallels the defining structure of pho-
tography, which also traps an event during its occurrence while blocking its trans-
formation into memory’ (Baer 2002: 9). In the contemporary era, the trauma of
visual technologies continues, for the ‘shock’ of digital technology has been to
undermine the very notion of the photographic index, as the registration of the
image shifted from the chemical trace to the infinitely manipulable electronic bit.
This chapter will investigate the still image as the epitome of traumatic intru-
sion and disfiguration. The next chapter will reanimate the concern with narra-
tive knowledge by examining how trauma has reconfigured cinematic storytelling.
Photography will be considered in two principal frames: fine art and the fate of
the atrocity photograph as photojournalism has collided with art practice to pro-
duce some of the most disturbing objects of trauma culture: beautiful books of
atrocity images.

The fine art of trauma

It is now conventional, Julian Stallabrass notes, to claim that contemporary art is
too bewilderingly diverse to capture critically, touching as it does ‘upon femi-
nism, identity politics, mass culture, shopping, and trauma’ (Stallabrass 2004:
150). If trauma appears in this list as merely one element, it is not randomly
chosen and does suggest itself as a significant way of navigating a passage
through the contemporary art scene. In 1998, Jill Bennett organized the Telling
Tales exhibition, which led to her monograph on art and trauma, Empathic Vision.
In 2001, the Hayward Gallery toured twelve international artists under the
exhibition title Trauma, the curators arguing that artists like Felix Gonzarez-
Torres, Johan Grimonprez and Tracey Moffatt regard trauma as ‘one of the key
sites on which collective identity is established’ (Bradley et al. 2001: 7). Major
exhibitions also included Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain at the
Williams College Museum of Art in 2006. ‘We would like to acknowledge’, the
curators announced at the end of the show, ‘that the most objectionable aspect
of this exhibition may be its very existence’ (Reinhardt et al. 2006: np). After Shock:
Conflict, Violence and Resolution followed at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
in 2007.
 The intrusive image 151
Small, private gestures of confessional art flooded the art market in the 1990s,
from Tracey Emin’s self-exposures to Gillian Wearing’s Trauma (2000), a curtained
confessional in which one watched masked faces detail histories of violence, guilt
and abuse. The mixed media installations and writings of Everlyn Nicodemus,
intertwine personal losses and genocidal histories (see Cheddie 2007). This explo-
ration of trauma subjectivity could also be extended to the ‘states of depression’
that Christine Ross argues is ‘one of the privileged categories through which the
contemporary subject is being defined and designated, made and unmade’ (Ross
2006: xvii). Her formulation of an ‘aesthetic of disengagement’ encompasses
work by Ugo Rondinone, Vanessa Beecroft, Douglas Gordon, and others.
Meanwhile, monumental public art was, as Lisa Saltzman puts it, ‘preoccupied
with losses’, seeking a language of memorialization just as faith in the index of trau-
matic history was being put in question, leaving the index ‘a vestige rather than a
viable means of representation’ (Saltzman 2006: 13). The politics of public art and
memorials has become a highly disputatious discourse; stone no longer fixes a
heroic national narrative in place. Marita Sturken, for instance, has exhaustively
detailed the controversies that surrounded the building of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War
Memorial, dedicated in Washington in 1982. Its anti-monumental form (the mon-
ument is a 500-foot cut into the ground, which bears all the names of the American
war dead) prompted figural counter-monuments, counter-counter-monuments,
appropriations and reappropriations, self-evidently demonstrating ‘a very active
scripting and re-scripting of the war’ (Sturken 1997: 75). Holocaust memorials have
also been problematic memorial spaces, hemmed in by questions of aesthetics as
much as competing political investments in the legacy of the war. The architectural
grammar of trauma was established by Daniel Libeskind at the Jewish Museum in
Berlin (constructed between 1993 and 1999), although Libeskind spent many years
theorizing rather than building such structures. Other monuments had difficult ges-
tations, too. In the mid-1990s the British artist Rachel Whiteread won the compe-
tition to build a Holocaust memorial for Vienna’s Judenplatz. Local shopkeepers
complained that the memorial would deprive their customers of parking space.
Undaunted, the Viennese community, supported by Simon Wiesenthal, the famous
‘Nazi-hunter’, pushed the project through city planning meetings. Once the exca-
vations began, however, the earth revealed a secret: they uncovered the smoke-
blackened floor of a synagogue burnt down in a pogrom in 1421. Vienna’s chief
rabbi then withdrew support from Whiteread’s memorial: ‘For us, the excavations
alone are very moving … no other monument is necessary’ (MacRitchie 1996: 9).
The memorial was eventually completed, but demonstrated James Young’s insight
that ‘memorials by themselves remain inert and amnesiac’, and it is the energy of
dispute around them that keeps remembrance alive ( J. Young 1993: xiii). This is
evidenced by the competing pressures that have continually transformed the plans
for the memorial site in Manhattan where the World Trade Center once stood (see
Smith 2006). Such contentions inform the memorial art of Christian Boltanski,
Gerhard Richter, Krzysztof Wodiczko, William Kentridge or Kara Walker.
In 1996, Hal Foster had noted contemporary art’s fascination with this material:
‘For many in contemporary culture truth resides in the traumatic or abject subject,
152 Cultural symptoms
in the diseased or damaged body’ (Foster 1996: 166). Foster acutely observed a
central contradiction in this work. Academic theories of trauma continued to
‘deconstruct’ the subject, an aim much associated with art theory in the 1980s. Yet
wider cultural usages of trauma understood it to allow recovery of an authentic,
real self, working exactly against the alleged anti-humanism of critical theory.
Foster expressed concern about the return of this pre-theoretical self, but this was
unsurprising given that his work (and that of the group involved in the New York
art-theory journal October) was associated with theorizing Postmodernism through-
out the 1980s. The one thing art commentary on the 1990s agreed about was the
wholesale abandonment of this ‘high theory’ fusion of art and criticism. The
decade was marked, John Welchman observed of the American scene, by ‘a strand
of anti-academic counter-theorizing, popularly correlated with the material profu-
sions of the grunge aesthetic and the textualist disinclinations of the “slacker
generation”’ (Welchman 2001: 29). What replaced theorized conceptual art were
‘closely confessional narratives’ and ‘spectacles of the excessive’:

Not until the 1990s could so many artists allow themselves so many meas-
ures for facing and reproducing their selves, intimating, at the same time,
that the means and materials of this self-reflection were somehow enmeshed
with the most current elements of contemporary culture.
(Welchman 2001: 30 and 183)

The wounded narcissism being worked over in art was plugged directly into the
wider cultural obsession with the trauma subject.
Stallabrass offered a similar view in relation to the English scene. High Art Lite, his
survey of celebrity artists of the grouping collected by Charles Saatchi and shown
under the title ‘Young British Artists’, repeatedly returns to the aggressively anti-
theoretical stance of this group and the art-criticism associated with it. The critic
John Roberts has attempted to argue that what he calls the New Philistinism is a
radicalizing turn from the academicism of high theory art and criticism. If many
were sceptical, this was probably due to the flimsy resources provided by the art
itself for such a position (see Beech and Roberts 2002). Figures like Damien Hirst,
Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Gavin Turk presented studiedly blank, inarticulate
or perhaps even post-traumatic selves. These were constructed personae, ‘new artis-
tic identities’ that ensured ‘critical theory [would] bounce off this work’ (Stallabrass
1999: 18). That these resonated within the trauma paradigm is evident from the
following exchange with one of the key artists of the decade, Tracey Emin.

Do you feel you had a childhood?

Although I have a really brilliant memory – my work is about memory – in
my childhood I have massive blanks. I do remember waking up in the night
crocheting. I remember banging my head against a brick wall. I remember
putting a bamboo stick through my leg. I remember all these weird events.
But I wasn’t very happy as a child. I am not very happy as an adult, now I
come to think about it.
 The intrusive image 153
Did you consciously edit out episodes?
They just disappeared.
(Gisbourne 1998: 31)

The artist whose work famously mines a traumatic childhood here emphasizes
that the hypermnesic insistence of certain events in her work (sexual humiliation,
rape, and abortion) is matched by equally traumatic amnesic disturbances. This
persona promised a ‘tear-stained and torn guarantee of authenticity’, the work
elided with the life to ‘proffer the cut, the wound, a still suppurating incision into
body and soul’ (Townsend and Merck 2002: 10). The apparent instant trans-
parency and controversial contents of her work made for rapid success, although
only after it had crossed the threshold of gallery space and private ownership. Her
1999 Turner Prize installation ‘My Bed’ was famous largely for the cost of the
piece to Saatchi and for the avant-garde pillow fight conducted in Tate Britain by
protesters shouting ‘I am art’. Tabloid fascination with Emin was distinctly ambiva-
lent: at once an occasion for decrying the lunacy of the art establishment, her tac-
tics of disclosure, its contents, and its mode of expression often coincided with
that of the popular press. It was almost inevitable that she would contribute to the
trauma memoir genre, publishing Strangeland in 2005, an episodic and dissociated
trawl of childhood memories that featured damaged attachments, violence, humil-
iation, and sexual transgression. Her success seems strictly circumscribed to the
repetitive performance of a trauma through a persona constructed to be incapable
of mastering its own compulsions.
Something similar may be said about the photographic work of Nan Goldin.
Goldin has catalogued the lives and deaths of her extended family of those mar-
ginalized by sexuality, drug use or illness. Her Ballad of Sexual Dependency was pub-
lished in book form in 1986, but her work fully coincided with the times at her
major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1996. The snap-shot aesthetic of
her intimate portraits is surrounded by markers of authenticity: the images pres-
ent a brutal reality of sexual encounters, bodies of friends dying of HIV-related
illnesses, open coffins at funerals, or a self-portrait after physical battery. These
almost command dispensing with any need for theories of representation: they
seem to be purely denotative. The work is ‘free from domination by abstract con-
structs of art’, one commentator (and Goldin subject) stated. ‘Critical caution is
entirely unnecessary. Nan and her photographs form a single whole’ (Costa 2001:
7 and 3). This was a wholly different position from the kind of critical work of
intimate photography advocated, say, by Jo Spence in the theoretical 1980s. In her
last years, Spence had explored ‘phototherapy’ as a ‘form of phototheatre of the
self ’ that aimed at ‘making visible’ what she called ‘repressed memories’ (Spence
1995: 164). Spence’s project was informed by Lacanian and Althusserian theory
that interrogated the constructed nature of the self and critiqued photographic
‘realism’. In contrast, Goldin expresses only the self-evidence of her images: ‘My
work is exactly what it’s about … . There’s no theory behind it. I don’t want to
analyse it’ (Garratt 2002: 15). Goldin’s retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery
in 2002 was given further pathos by her communication that many of the subjects
154 Cultural symptoms
were now dead of AIDS or overdose; the global circulation of her images also
involved a certain nostalgia for the spaces of a vanished New York sub-culture.
Such confessional art was sometimes difficult to separate entirely from confes-
sional culture as ‘art celebrity’ turned these figures into generic icons of trauma
culture. What their art confessed seemed only to reconfirm what Foucault had
argued about both the compulsion to speak and the pre-determination of the
contents of any confession. Others in the international circuits of the art market
perhaps retain more critical ambivalence: let’s discuss three artists in more detail.

Aftermath aesthetics: Christian Boltanski, Gerhard

Richter, Tracey Moffatt
Initially, it might seem that the French artist Christian Boltanski has conducted
the same sort of obsessive self-investigation as Emin or Goldin. One of his earli-
est projects was a mock-ethnographic archival piece entitled Research and
Presentation of all that remains of my childhood, 1944–50 (1969). The work developed
from discovering his school class photograph from 1951 and realizing ‘I don’t
remember any of their names, I don’t remember anything more than the faces on
the photograph. It could be said that they disappeared from my memory, that this
period of time was dead … . This is why I felt the need to pay homage to those
“dead,” who, in this image, all look more or less the same, like cadavers’ (cited
Gumpert 1994: 80 and 83). In this curious statement, Boltanski rehearses his
abiding theme – the fragility of what he terms the ‘little memory’ disregarded and
lost from public history – but also the suspicion that photography may not pre-
serve the historical index so much as become a monument to its destruction.
Boltanski’s early explorations thus tested the lure of the index. Ten Photographic
Portraits of Christian Boltanski, 1946–64 (1972) seemed self-evident, but the images
reveal themselves as fabricated portraits, something set up ‘to show that photog-
raphy lies, that it doesn’t speak the truth but rather the cultural code’ (cited Perloff
1997: 42). These devices appear to place Boltanski in an alternative tradition of
photographic theory, which, like Siegfried Kracauer, places the photograph in
opposition to the memory-image, arguing that photography does not record expe-
rience but actively destroys it. ‘It is not the person who appears in his or her pho-
tograph’, Kracauer argued, ‘but the sum of what can be deducted from him or
her’ (Kracauer 1993: 430). Boltanski later confessed: ‘In my early work I pre-
tended to speak about my childhood, yet my real childhood had disappeared. I
have lied about it so often that I no longer have a real memory of this time’ (Garb
1997: 8).
However, in the 1980s, Boltanski began to employ the same qualities of the pho-
tograph for very different ends. Starting with The Children of Dijon (1985), Boltanski
used found photographic images, rephotographed them tightly cropped around
the faces and blown up to a size where individual features blurred into generic pat-
terns of light and shade. These were then installed site-specifically, sometimes rest-
ing on columns of rusting tin-boxes, suggestive of coffins or urns, and sometimes
attached to archive boxes, as if they contained the documents of a forgotten life
 The intrusive image 155

Figure 4.1 Christian Boltanski, ‘The Reserve of Dead Swiss’ (1990). Tate, London 2007.
Copyright © 1990 Christian Boltanski.

(see Figure 4.1). These images were either illuminated by memorial candles or
almost obliterated by the harsh glare of desk lamps that were pushed into the faces,
a tangle of electrical leads destroying any neat Minimalist sculptural lines.
Boltanski has shuffled and reshuffled his growing archive of anonymous faces ever
since, producing postindexical monuments: public memorial arts that attest to the
erasure of publics and memories. These larger-scale projects came with a new ele-
ment of confession: not just that Boltanski was half-Jewish, but that during the
German occupation of France his father had been hidden beneath the family
home to avoid deportation. His obsessive focus on documents, archives, photo-
graphic proof and faked evidence was now reinterpreted: ‘At the beginning of all
the work’, Boltanski said, ‘there is a kind of trauma: something happened’ (Garb
1997: 8). Boltanski is therefore one of the paradigmatic artists of the era because
his career shares the structure of belated traumatic recovery: what was empty post-
modern play is latterly re-signified with real traumatic content.
In a sequence of installations from 1987, Boltanski made his first explicit refer-
ences to the Holocaust. The Chases High School took another graduation photograph
as its source, this time from a Jewish school in 1931. Each face from this found pho-
tograph was further severed from its original context by being rephotographed and
monumentalized, and although Boltanski had no knowledge of their subsequent
lives, the piece indirectly evoked a likely fate: if not the concentration camps, then
genocide in the sense of the destruction of culture. The same evocation of an
156 Cultural symptoms
irreparably lost culture informed his use of pre-war photographs of Jewish children
in Fête de Pourim (1987). Canada (1988) used second-hand clothes, piled in their thou-
sands, a medium Boltanski has since installed in diverse, site-specific forms. He con-
sidered worn and discarded clothes, massed in now anonymous form, conceptually
equivalent to photographs: ‘they are simultaneously presence and absence. They
are both an object and a souvenir of a subject, exactly as a cadaver is both an object
and a souvenir of a subject’ (cited Gumpert 1994: 110). Canada directed the viewer
to an explicit Holocaust reference for the first time, being the Nazi euphemism for
the storage depots of materials gathered from those sent into the death camps. After
this phase of intensive exploration, Boltanski has worked to reuniversalize his
memorials, dislodging the automatic association of Jews and death with The Dead
Swiss (rephotographed obituary portraits), mixing victims and perpetrators in
decontextualized crime scene photographs in Detective, and remixing his entire
archive of anonymous photographs in the randomly displayed equivalences of the
1,500 faces that constituted Menschlich [Humanity] (1994).
However abstracted from specific contexts, these haunting evocations of disap-
peared populations produce for Ernst Van Alphen something he calls a
‘Holocaust-effect’. They create echoes of a historical trauma that resonate
throughout Boltanski’s practice, however indirectly, thus invoking the condition of
being ‘after’ Auschwitz. Indeed, Arthur Danto has claimed Boltanski ‘the only con-
vincing example’ of Holocaust art, ‘a genre I would have thought impossible’
(Danto 1997: 260). At the core of his practice, Boltanski forces the viewer to reflect
on the contradiction in the memorial promise of the photographic portrait or the
archive, pointing as much to their de-individualizing and amnesiac potentials. This
is an investigation that proceeds ‘by re-enacting principles that are defining aspects
of the Holocaust: a radical emptying out of subjectivity as a road leading up to a
wholesale destruction of a people – genocide’ (Van Alphen 2001: 49).
Another deconstructive interrogation of the possibilities of aesthetic and pho-
tographic memory has been undertaken by the German painter Gerhard Richter.
Richter has constantly and bewilderingly shifted painterly style from the extremes
of abstraction to photorealism, but there is a consistent thread of inquiry into
what painting can do in the age of photographic pre-eminence. The death of
painting was announced as early as the first Daguerrotypes and Yve-Alain Bois
has argued that since Modernism ‘mourning has been the activity of painting’
(Bois 1992: 329). Yet Richter has turned an apparently exhausted tradition into a
device for interrogating the dangerous allure of photographic verisimilitude. In a
sequence of monochromatic grey paintings, source photographs are uncannily
reproduced only to be damaged to various degrees, by dragging a squeegee across
the surface or by feathering the paint so that the image is blurred or by aggres-
sively overpainting images with obliterating sweeps of the brush. Richter has spo-
ken of needing to attack his canvases, sometimes with a palette knife, invoking the
slashes and wounds of Lucio Fontana’s canvases. He considers aesthetic beauty as
that which is uninjured: a strikingly post-traumatic definition (Storr 2002: 73).
These formal aggressions are in direct relation to the content of the works, and
once again biographical information directs the viewer towards trauma theory.
 The intrusive image 157

Figure 4.2 Gerhard Richter, ‘Uncle Rudi’ (1965). Reproduced by kind permission of
Gerhard Richter. Copyright © 1965 Gerhard Richter.

Richter was born in 1932, his father a National Socialist and soldier captured in
the latter stages of the war. Richter was enrolled in the Hitler Youth, and after the
1945 partition grew up in Communist East Germany (training as a muralist),
before defecting to the West in 1961. As an art student, Richter was at the epi-
centre of the revolt against the silence and complicity of the previous generation.
Two early paintings show the ambivalent legacies within Richter’s own family:
Uncle Rudi (1965) is a queasy monochromatic painting taken from a photograph
of his uncle grinning broadly in his new Nazi uniform (see Figure 4.2). His uncle
was killed within weeks of the war starting. Aunt Marianne (1965), meanwhile, is
sourced from a photograph of Richter as a baby held by an aunt who became
mentally ill and was murdered under the eugenic policies of the Third Reich (in
the same year, Richter’s Doctor Heyde used a news photograph from the trial of the
figure who pioneered exterminations by gas in the German asylum system). In
these works Richter has connected ‘the bankrupt conventions of history painting
with the banality of the family photograph’ (Buchloh 1996: 64). Richter has, like
his German peer Anselm Kiefer, ‘found in painting and its acknowledged inca-
pacity the very possibility of figuring something of their nation’s catastrophic
158 Cultural symptoms
history’ (Saltzmann 2006: 4). This hollowed-out history painting was extended to
explore one of the extreme results of 1960s revolt in Germany: the Baader-
Meinhof terrorist group. The fifteen monochromatic paintings under the title 18
October 1977 (1988) record the night of the unresolved deaths of the gang in their
prison cells. This group suicide or state murder has been ‘a horror’, Richter said,
‘that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since’ (cited
Storr 2002: 76). The source photographs, newspaper images and evidentiary pho-
tographs taken of the bodies, are feathered into virtual abstraction, evoking the
fog of mystification that has settled around the deaths. The critique of photo-
graphic transparency is conjoined with Richter’s suspicion of revolutionary ide-
ologies that obliterate the individual: the form therefore captures Richter’s
ambivalence about a key traumatic event in German post-war history.
As with Boltanski, Richter’s work confronts ‘the status of the traditional tools
available for commemoration’ (Buchloh 1996: 69). Just where the theory of the
intrusive traumatic image might privilege the traumatic instant as the true record,
their play with the indexicality of the photograph foregrounds ambiguity.
We might say that Richter and Boltanski head a group that has developed an
aftermath aesthetic, recalling Ross Chambers’ idea of aftermath cultures that are
intrinsically ‘melancholic in character’ because they exist in states of denial about
the traumas that nevertheless determine them (Chambers 2004: xxi). Doris
Salcedo works with domestic objects of Colombia’s ‘disappeared’ to produce
work that memorializes those now absent from domestic space. Zarina Bhimji has
produced a photographic record of the abandoned sites of Uganda’s institutions
of torture called Memories Were Trapped in the Asphalt, whilst Guy Tillim has done
the same for the ruins left by imperial and post-imperial powers in the Congo.
Paul Seawright’s series Sectarian Murders (1988) photographed sites of deaths, banal
spaces of playing fields or remote paths. Joel Sternfeld’s photographic book, On
This Site (1996), similarly revisits places of American violence, the bland normal-
ity of the spaces jarring with the short textual descriptions of atrocity or murder
that took place there, from the Washington bus shelter where a homeless woman
froze to death to the banal car park of Kent State University where the National
Guard killed student demonstrators in 1970, to the bulldozed field that then had
replaced the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, site of the ter-
rorist attack that killed 168 people. ‘I think of it as a question of knowability’,
Sternfeld stated in his Afterword. ‘Experience has taught me again and again that
you can never know what lies beneath a surface or behind a façade. Our sense of
place, our understanding of photographs of the landscape is inevitably limited
and fraught with misreading’ (Sternfeld 1996: np). Sally Mann has photographed
American Civil War sites, using nineteenth-century wet plate technology: ‘chem-
ically speaking colloidon is very similar to gun powder, but it was also used by sur-
geons during the Civil War who poured it into wounds’ (Mann 2007: 23). In What
Remains, she has photographed the decomposing bodies used for forensic research
at the notorious ‘Body Farm’ in Knoxville, Tennessee. All of these projects
associate sites of aftermath and ruination with the intrinsic afterwardsness of the
photograph itself, so redoubling the traumatic effect.
 The intrusive image 159
In contrast, Tracey Moffatt’s work engages more critically with a number of
elements of the trauma paradigm. Moffatt is an aboriginal Australian, fostered to
white parents in the assimilation programmes of the 1960s and 1970s and who
came to the fore as an exemplary construct of Third Cinema and post-colonial
theory. Her work continues to foreground the politics of identity and the interplay
of fantasy and history informed by critical theory. In 1994, she produced Scarred for
Life, a series of ten panels of captioned photographs that froze in place a moment
of psychic damage, a staging of the traumatic instant at which the intrusive image
would be seared into the mind. This series seemed premised on an acute grasp of
the lure of trauma narratives: the text and image recover and fix down the trau-
matic origin on which a life narrative will subsequently hinge. One reads: ‘Heart
Attack, 1970. She glimpsed her father belting the girl from down the street. That
day he died of a heart attack’ (Figure 4.3). Two more read: ‘Birth Certificate,
1962. During the fight, her mother threw her birth certificate at her. This is how
she found out her real father’s name’ (Figure 4.4); ‘Doll Birth, 1972. His mother
caught him giving birth to a doll. He was banned from playing with the boy next
door again’ (Figure 4.5). Although Régis Durand has argued that this ‘text-image
mix’ makes for polysemous and irresolvable work, ‘charged with narrative and psy-
chic energy’ (Durand 1999: 104), I would tend to see the captioning of these images
instead as a comment on the brutal way that the trauma paradigm can fix identity
through the singular childhood event, destining the self to reiterate this definitional
moment without prospect of resolution. The image-texts fill in, as it were, the ori-
gin of the gapped subject. These are the intrusive images never found in the family
album yet which are central to the very constitution of the familial narrative. For the
viewer, particularly if they are aware that these are based on true stories collected
by Moffatt, the wondrous photographic presence of this originating trauma pro-
vokes you to undertake a similar process. They demand what Marianne Hirsch has
proposed, in a similar context, as ‘an affiliative look through which we are sutured into
the images and through which we adopt the image’ (Hirsch 1997: 93). This was
demonstrated by the overwhelming response of Moffatt’s audience. She reported
that ‘over the years people have come up to me. They couldn’t wait to tell me their
tragic story. I thought I could make another series of this work and it could be an
ongoing project’ (Cathcart 2001). Scarred for Life II appeared in 1999, with notably
more surreal moments, e.g. ‘Piss Bags, 1978. Locked in the van while their moth-
ers continued their affair, the boys were forced to piss into their chip bags’. Always
intended as a tragi-comic series, the surreality of these later capsule narratives sug-
gests that Moffatt, whilst working through the mechanisms of the intrusive image
and recovered memory is also undercutting them. These images are, of course,
staged reconstructions, and their archness is evident in the studiedly neutral lan-
guage of the captions and the saturated colours that make the images redolent of
faded 1970s snaps or dated magazine spreads. The care of the restaging does not
authenticate, but rather exaggerates falsification, dramatizing the interplay of trau-
matic fixity and narrative mobility that constitutes the trauma subject. In doing so,
Moffatt’s series plays with but also exposes the allure of that originary plenitude
promised by the imprint of the intrusive traumatic image.
160 Cultural symptoms

Figure 4.3 Tracey Moffatt, ‘Scarred for Life: Heart Attack, 1970’, from ‘Scarred for Life’
(1994), offset prints, series of nine images. Reproduced by courtesy of the
Victoria Miro Gallery. Copyright © 1994 Tracey Moffatt.

This suturing of the viewer into the affective economy of the image is a
repeated effect in this kind of art. Moffatt generates a supplementary series from
audience reactions; Richard Cork sees Boltanski’s success in the invitation to view-
ers ‘to project their own private bereavements into the blankness confronting
them at every turn’ (Cork 2003: 416). For Jill Bennett, it is this relational affect that
distinguishes art practice from other cultural discourses of trauma. Bennett avoids
looking instrumentally, reading art against pre-existent diagnostic categories, and
refuses to countenance a determinate set of trauma images: ‘affect is not pre-
coded by a representational system that enables us to read an image as “about
trauma”’ (Bennett 2005: 35). Instead, aesthetics explores this terrain relationally
and intersubjectively, ‘figuring memory in “trauma art” as lived and felt in rela-
tion to a whole series of interconnected events and political forces, rather than as
embodied in an atomised subject’ (Bennett 2005: 18). After 9/11, Bennett advo-
cates art that makes these interconnections globally, putting distinct traumatic
instants into suggestive relationships to provoke what she calls empathic encoun-
ters. Her examples include Documenta 11 (2002), curated by Okumi Enwezor to
 The intrusive image 161

Figure 4.4 Tracey Moffatt, ‘Scarred for Life: Birth Certificate, 1962’ from ‘Scarred for Life’
(1994), offset prints, series of nine images. Reproduced by courtesy of the
Victoria Miro Gallery. Copyright © 1994 Tracey Moffatt.

foster transnational interconnections, for instance by juxtaposing work on

Palestine with images of Auschwitz and the Robben Island prison in South Africa.
To situate the fine art of trauma in this relational affect is of course highly con-
tentious. It does not obey the frequent injunctions to respect the singularity of
each specific traumatic event. Boltanski’s work has been criticized for precisely
this relational equivalence, as victims and perpetrators, Nazis and Jews, Jews and
Swiss are all rendered interchangeable. His ‘art of generic elegy’, a sort of uni-
form wistfulness about the loss inherent in the photographic, is ‘wholly inade-
quate to the historical, indeed to the ethical, requirements of historical
commemoration’ (Solomon-Godeau 1998: 7). Bennett would likely consider this
command too directive, even destructive of aesthetic empathy: ‘The affective
image neither draws us into a narrative that simply purports to deliver us into the
place of the traumatized subject nor achieves its best effects by inciting a particu-
lar kind of “moral” response’ (Bennett 2005: 43–4).
This comment delivers us to the heart of the debate about photography and its
relation to the intrusive, traumatic image. The area has been dominated by Susan
162 Cultural symptoms

Figure 4.5 Tracey Moffatt, ‘Scarred for Life: Doll Birth, 1972’ from ‘Scarred for Life’
(1994), offset prints, series of nine images. Reproduced by courtesy of the
Victoria Miro Gallery. Copyright © 1994 Tracey Moffatt.

Sontag’s reflections on the searing impact but fatally circumscribed moral force of
trauma photography. On Photography narrates a primal scene:

One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is

a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative
epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which
I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945.
Nothing I have seen … ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously … .
When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had
been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved,
wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went
dead; something is still crying.
(Sontag 1978: 19–20).

Amidst this classic proto-language of trauma and overwhelming affect, hesita-

tions are already emerging. In her very next paragraph, Sontag argues that images
 The intrusive image 163
can ‘corrupt’ conscience and compassion, transfixing with a shock that both rap-
idly diminishes and risks draining away the force of the real. Photographs, ulti-
mately, are ‘analgesic morally’: they ‘can and do distress. But the aestheticizing
tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by
neutralizing it’ (Sontag 1978: 109–10). Twenty-five years later, Sontag’s Regarding
the Pain of Others views an accelerated circulation of traumatic images with the
same suspicion: ‘shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source
of value’ (Sontag 2003: 20).
A similar sort of suspicion lies behind one of the more extreme positions on
trauma photography. Ulrich Baer suggests that ‘photographs can capture the
shrapnel of traumatic time’ (Baer 2002: 7), conflating the camera with the specific
psychological theory that trauma is registered outside normal memory systems.
To remain true to the decontextualized traumatic image, not only must critics
refrain from any historical explication, which would normalize the image, but
photographic art must also resist the banalities of all conventional representations
of trauma. Any direct images of the Holocaust, for instance, ‘trivialize’ the events
with a ‘mass-produced sublime’ (Baer 2002: 77). The only possible aesthetic is
abstract, anti-representational and ahistorical. Baer approves of one image from
Mikael Levin’s War Story (1997), a photo-book that retraces steps of Levin’s father,
who as a soldier helped liberate the concentration camps in 1945. The image, of
a door at Buchenwald opening onto a black void, ‘documents precisely the aboli-
tion of referential systems on which the notion of evidence depends’ (Baer 2002:
117). Such voids are praised above ‘referentially more stable photographs’
because they challenge ‘our understanding of reference itself ’ (Baer 2002: 77).
This argument uses the familiar rhetoric that trauma can only be represented
by foregrounding impossibility and aporia. Once again, the kitsch of ordinary
culture is resisted by austere avant-gardism – in theory, at least.
That Baer upheld this aesthetic so forcefully, and Sontag returned to the ethics
of photography two decades after her first intervention, speaks volumes about the
place of the photographic image in the trauma paradigm. But these responses
were dictated less by the sort of fine art practice I’ve outlined in this section, and
more by the documentary images of the violence, wars and mass migrations that
have typified the post-Cold War world. This era was in fact saturated with images
of war and atrocity, in an environment of ‘rolling’ news and apparent instant
access, from the Balkan wars and Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s to 9/11,
the invasion of Iraq, and the condensation of American imperialism in the images
of torture from Abu Ghraib prison, photographs that were leaked in 2004. In this
very saturation, however, Barbie Zelizer has argued that the 1990s saw the emer-
gence of a standardized atrocity aesthetic that testified only to ‘atrocity’s normali-
sation’ (Zelizer 1998: 212). After a superb analysis of Holocaust photography,
Zelizer presents a narrative of decline and fall. Shock registers diminishing returns,
with images that ‘lack the nuances and complications of earlier representations’
and Zelizer bemoans ‘the vacant nature of contemporary acts of bearing witness’
(Zelizer 1998: 224 and 212). I would beg to differ. The 1990s were marked not
just by a resurgence of photojournalism but a particular set of pressures on the
164 Cultural symptoms
traumatic documentary image. These conjunctures produced some of the most
provoking forms of trauma culture, and it is to these I now turn.

Beautiful books of atrocity: Sebastião Salgado, Gilles

Peress, Luc Delahaye
A major Sebastião Salgado retrospective exhibition was held at the Barbican
Gallery in London in 2003. Salgado is a Brazilian photojournalist, and one of the
most successful currently working. Originally a government economist, Salgado’s
allied photographic practice was deemed unhelpful by the military authorities
and he spent a number of years in exile after 1969. He has since documented dis-
appearing tribes in Brazil and elsewhere, worked with Medécins Sans Frontières
in Ethiopia during the 1984 famine, and with land reform movements across Latin
America, and runs his own environmental and humanitarian organization. Salgado
then began to produce self-consciously global, monumental and unashamedly uni-
versalist series. Workers documented the shifting patterns of employment between
North and South, First and Third Worlds over seven years. Another, Migrants,
tracked the massive movement of displaced populations across the world – the
starkest consequence of the New World Order after the end of the Cold War in
1989. In room after room at the Barbican, one looked, with increasing distress,
at strikingly beautiful images of the desperate conditions of Kurds, Croatians,
Serbs, Bosniaks, Albanians, Somalians, Sudanese, Hutus, Tutsis, Chechens,
Chinese, Mexicans, Brazilians, Roma, and so on. The most anomalous thing
about this exhibition came at the end, where, if you could afford it, you could
preserve your memory of your visit by spending £65 on the book of the Migrants
project or £70 on Workers. There was surely something deliberately disjunctive
about the lavish production of a coffee-table art book containing so much stark
imagery of suffering.
Yet Salgado was only one of many artists producing beautiful books of atrocity
in the 1990s. The French photographer, Gilles Peress, attached to the famous
Magnum agency, has produced a series of photo-books documenting sites of con-
flict, from the Iranian Revolution to Northern Ireland. In the 1990s, Peress pub-
lished books documenting contemporary genocides, texts that occupied, as he put
it, ‘a no-man’s-land, say, between “art” and “photojournalism”’ (Kreisler 1997).
Farewell to Bosnia was shot in the last months of the war before the Dayton Accord
suspended hostilities in November 1995. A large-format book rapidly put together
as a ‘raw take, a non-edit’ of his experience, there was virtually no text other than
a brief set of citations from letters written by Peress in which he spoke of ‘the curse
of history’ as taking a form of traumatic repetition in the former Yugoslavia (Peress
1994: np). This was followed by The Silence: Rwanda, a harrowing record of the
immediate aftermath of the genocidal massacres of Tutsis by Hutus in April 1994.
Black-bordered black-and-white images were accompanied by a detachable pam-
phlet which included a chronology of events and extracts from the preliminary
report of the United Nations Commission of Experts intended to determine the
international law to establish a tribunal for the prosecution of war crimes in
 The intrusive image 165
Rwanda. Peress then returned to Bosnia with a United Nations forensic team, pub-
lishing The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar, the images bracketing a long essay detail-
ing the forensic analysis of illegal mass graves by Eric Stover, an activist with
Physicians for Human Rights (Stover and Peress 1998). The photographs record
the process of locating mass graves, their patient excavation, forensic analysis, and
the occasional positive identification of remains. These images shift between aes-
thetic and evidential styles and collide with ‘screen grabs’ from media reports of
the atrocities. The final book in this sequence was A Village Destroyed, May 14, 1999:
War Crimes in Kosovo, the images once more accompanied by a text written by Fred
Abrahams and Eric Stover on the forensic investigation into the massacre at Cuska
(Abrahams et al. 2001). Peress’ photographs are again mixed in with media
reportage and the ‘found’ family photographs, now violently wrenched from their
domestic contexts and sometimes violently defaced by perpetrators, as if ethnic
cleansing also demanded the destruction of photographic traces too. All of Peress’
books are lavishly produced by Scalo editions, and are sometimes virtually impos-
sible to look at, the pages occupied by tangles of rotting corpses, amputee wounds,
or the pathetic detritus of vanished people recovered from sites of atrocity.
Luc Delahaye, meanwhile, explicitly paralleled his photojournalism with fine
art practice. Alongside his war-zone reportage for Newsweek and latterly for the
Magnum agency, Delahaye took large-format pictures that are displayed as 4-foot-
by-8-foot monumental panoramas in gallery spaces, photographs that included
dead Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan, Israeli bomb damage in the Palestinian
refugee camp at Jenin, or Slobodan Milosevic on trial for war crimes at the
International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. Delahaye argued that these
images took time to take and time to absorb, thus resisting the illustrative, rapid
scanning of press photography. The series won the Deutsche Börse Photography
Prize in 2005. The limited edition artist’s book of this series, History, initially sold
for £1000.
The cluster of questions provoked by these books is: why have these images
been put in circulation, why using the photo-essay form, and why in this ‘no-
man’s-land’ between art, photojournalism and near forensic documentation?
Inevitably, the terms of debate about such images are whether they induce pro-
ductive responses or aestheticize or neutralize pain. Sontag lambasted Salgado’s
Migrants project for its false universalism, ‘inauthenticity of the beautiful’, and its
ultimate quietism:

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they
‘care’ more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes
are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local
political intervention.
(Sontag 2003: 69–70)

This echoed John Berger’s short polemic about photojournalism, ‘Photographs

of Agony’, published in response to the Vietnam images of Don McCullin. ‘The
truth is that any response to that photographed moment is bound to be felt as
166 Cultural symptoms
inadequate’, Berger argued (Berger 2001: 280) The shutter isolates the atrocity as
discontinuous from everyday experience and as soon as this happens the moment
is ‘effectively depoliticised. The picture becomes evidence of the general human
condition’ (Berger 2001: 281). Mystification rather than politicization attends the
circulation of images of atrocity; this is why they continue to be ‘published with
impunity’ in the mainstream press (Berger 2001: 281). Berger’s despair was per-
haps understandable. Written in 1972, American policy in Vietnam had not
changed, despite a large anti-war movement. Photography had even played a part
in that movement: the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai village in 1968
became a public scandal when Ron Haeberle’s photographs of the bodies were
released in 1969. One image, initially sold to Life magazine, was reproduced as an
iconic anti-war poster by the Art Workers Coalition (see Schlegel 1995). Yet still
the war continued. Similar arguments about the impotence of images have been
rehearsed into the 1990s. Arthur and Joan Kleinman lamented image saturation:

viewers are overwhelmed by the sheer number of atrocities … . Thus, our

epoch’s dominating sense that complex problems can be neither under-
stood nor fixed works with the massive globalization of images of suffering
to produce moral fatigue, exhaustion of empathy, and political despair.
(A. and J. Kleinman 1996: 9)

Stephen Eisenman’s book, The Abu Ghraib Effect, was prompted by what he felt
was a notable absence of outrage or political reaction to the ‘most searing and dis-
tubing’ photographic record of government-sanctioned use of kidnap, torture
and state murder in the images taken by American service personnel in Iraq
(Eisenman 2007: 7).
To consider these curious artists’ books of atrocity, I want to displace these
familiar terms. Instead, I want to proceed in a different way, by putting up a series
of contextual frames for these image-texts by Salgado, Peress and Delahaye, try-
ing to establish a matrix of factors in the 1990s for which we need to account
before rushing to any kind of judgement. I want to build up four frames: the
alleged crisis of documentary photography, the fate of atrocity photography in
recent journalistic reportage, shifts in international law about war crimes and
genocide, and, finally, the rise of trauma theory itself.
The shock of the content of the atrocity photograph strips the viewer of all
interpretive sophistication. You are overwhelmed by the index of violence, by what
is denoted, and all the symbolic, aesthetic or ideological connotations of the image
fall away: you drop the book in horror at what you have just been shown. As John
Taylor says, ‘Direct trauma makes connotation more difficult. The greater the
trauma in the photograph, the greater are the denotative characteristics of direct-
ness, contingency and silence’ (Taylor 1998: 53–4). ‘Truly traumatic photographs
are rare’, Barthes observed as early as 1961, because this would mean all connota-
tion had been destroyed. Even if this could occur ‘the traumatic photograph’ would
be ‘the photograph about which there is nothing to say; the shock-photo is by struc-
ture insignificant: no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorization can
 The intrusive image 167
have a hold on the process instituting the signification’ (Barthes 1977a: 30–1).
Although Barthes would displace the banality of traumatic contents in Camera
Lucida, preferring the eccentric search for the punctum, the weird or anomalous
detail that pierced through the surface gloss and coherence of the image like a
wound, he still relied on the idea of the photograph as deathly, an emanation of
the lost referent itself. The photograph is intrinsically violent, ‘not because it shows
violent things but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because noth-
ing in it can be refused’ (Barthes 2000: 91). In this sense, photojournalism could be
seen to overcode an essentially violent form with atrocious content.
This sort of theorizing underwent two powerful challenges that converged at
the start of the 1990s. The first was an aggressive demystification of the rhetoric
of the documentary real. Documentary photography, especially in America, had
honourable liberal, progressivist associations. Jacob Riis documented immigrant
poverty to provoke liberal conscience in How the Other Half Lives. The organized
documentation of farm worker poverty and displacement made by the Farm
Security Agency in the 1930s was a New Deal project. Robert Capa co-founded
the Magnum agency, which had many ties to the Communist left. In 1992, how-
ever, the radical photographic theorist and practitioner Martha Rosler declared
such ‘concerned’ photography at an end, fatally compromised by both its liberal
mystifications, its theoretical naïvety and the art-market commodification of such
images. In direct parallel with the literary theory of the time, this new photo-
graphic theory also attacked the ‘classic Realist text’, estranging it into a strictly
circumscribed set of representational strategies. In one of the most important
photographic essays in this line, John Tagg exposed the ideological apparatus of
the Realist photograph and did so by addressing the documentation of suffering.
Tagg asked suspiciously: ‘What is the function, the office, of “realistic” representa-
tions of “misery” in the bourgeois state?’ (Tagg 2001: 107). The work of Salgado
or Peress can be directly traced to this tradition of ‘concerned’ photography: their
political aims, to such theorists, would be compromised from the start.
The second challenge to documentary photography was the emergence of dig-
ital technology. By replacing the chemical trace with informational bits, the very
nature of the photographic sign was transformed, announcing what Fred Ritchin
called ‘the post-photographic age … in the sense that the fidelity of the mechan-
ical age was being replaced by the fluidity of the digital’ (Ritchin 1999: xi). Digital
recording and storage displaced the negative as the anchor of authenticity, leav-
ing the image open to endless manipulation. Caroline Brothers remarked on ‘the
breakdown of photography’s indexical reality’ and estimated that as early as 1989
ten per cent of colour photographs in American newspapers were digitally
manipulated (Brothers 1997: 215). Revolutionary rhetorics often simplify the
ancien regime, and the history of war photography has also always been one of trick
photography, from the artful rearrangement of cannon balls on Crimean battle-
fields to the recent suspicions that Robert Capa’s iconic image of the Spanish
Civil War, the soldier caught at the moment the bullet hit, was a staged photo-
graph. Even so, the theoretical ‘crisis’ of the documentary real was undoubtedly
redoubled by the coincidence of technology change.
168 Cultural symptoms
The second frame, the fate of the image in contemporary war journalism, was
also dominated by a narrative of crisis in the 1990s. ‘The age of the war corre-
spondent as hero is clearly over’, Phillip Knightley concluded in his First Casualty
(Knightley 2000: 525). The fearless (or reckless) figure who compulsively sought
out the limit-situations of war zones, where truth was wrestled from extremity,
was inaugurated by William Hart Russell in the Crimean War, but fixed into
stereotype by Ernest Hemingway or Robert Capa. The narrative of eclipse or
decline began with Vietnam. Governments have been haunted by the prospect of
losing wars through the image: the myth of Vietnam was that it was lost by an
unfettered liberal anti-war press. Since the 1970s, war reportage and photography
have been increasingly controlled by the new public-relations wings of the mili-
tary. The model of this form of control was the Falklands War in 1982, when
twenty-nine reporters were allowed to travel with the Task Force, only two of
whom were photographers. Only three rolls of film came out of the war zone, two
hundred images in total, and their release was managed by the Ministry of
Defence during the course of the conflict (see McLaughlin 2002). The American
army used this model of maximum constraint for the invasions of Grenada in
1983 and Panama in 1989 (indeed, no images at all were taken of the Panama
invasion). Yet the apotheosis for many critics came not with this expunging of the
image, but rather its entirely successful integration of the image into the military
machine in the first Gulf War. Here the press pool of accredited reporters were
contained in a centre hundreds of miles from the front and fed managed images
from the nose-cones of allegedly smart bombs and fighter plane video cameras.
Reportage was thus finally made indistinguishable from the prosthetics of optical
surveillance (see de Landa 1991). Reporters outside the pool were obstructed, vil-
ified and the integrity of their work undermined. Following Jean Baudrillard’s
account of the Gulf War as hyperreal, Caroline Brothers regards ‘photography in
the age of the simulacral’ as suffering ‘a dramatic narrowing in the sphere in
which photography can operate as … a kind of witness’. She suggested that
‘changing institutional and technological circumstances … increasingly denied it
room to survive’ (Brothers 1997: 202). Phillip Knightley has extended this coda of
decline to the Kosovo campaign of 1999 orchestrated by NATO, and entitles his
closing chapter, ‘The Military’s Final Victory’.
Yet the collapse of Yugoslavia seemed to renew the discourse of moral com-
mitment or engaged journalism as international institutions failed to prevent
Croatian or Serbian nationalists from acts of ethnic cleansing. Several Western
intellectuals clearly regarded the siege of Sarajevo or the massacres in Bosnian
‘safe areas’ as traumatic events that constituted significant moral–political thresh-
olds. This is what haunts Sontag’s last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, which is
full of symptomatic assertions about the reality of her own commitment to the
abandoned people of Sarajevo as opposed to ‘cynics who have never been near a
war’, ‘war tourists’ and other ‘distinguished French day-trippers’ (Sontag 2003:
99–100).
Western journalism itself convulsed in Yugoslavia: it prompted Martin Bell to
denounce the tradition of neutrality at the BBC as producing ‘bystander’ journalism
 The intrusive image 169
and instead offered a manifesto for a journalism of attachment. Bell spoke of
untransmittable images and the limit of journalism: ‘What you see leaves you simply
speechless with grief: I actually couldn’t get the words out, for, I suppose, the first time
in my life’ (Bell 1993: 9). He soon left the BBC for a bizarre career as a white-suited
moral arbiter of British public life (being elected as a Member of Parliament in this
guise). Several other journalists similarly argued for committed or partisan reportage
in Yugoslavia: Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian considered the cleansing of Bosnia as ‘the
most hideous spectacle our generation will witness’, and were events that demanded
engagement: ‘I think that if I did require myself to be neutral, I would not under-
stand the war’ (Vulliamy 1993: 6–7).
Memoirs by journalists from this era constitute another sub-set of trauma culture
confessional: they are full of mildly alarming over-identifications and weird regrets.
‘I didn’t like what I saw in postwar Bosnia’, one memoir ends:

In a nostalgic and certainly selfish way, I preferred the spirit of the people
during the siege. It would be too much to say that I missed the war, but per-
haps it was the idealism of that time, that place, that I missed.
(di Giovanni 2004: 257)

This sort of thing was denounced by Mick Hume as reducing ‘complex con-
flicts to simple fairy tale confrontations between the innocent and forces of dark-
ness’ (Hume 1997: 4). In his polemic against the mainstream media coverage of
the Balkan Wars, Hume related the journalism of attachment to a therapeutic or
trauma culture. Journalists used foreign conflicts as a stage for ‘existential angst’
or ‘a twisted sort of therapy,’ in which they replaced the political with the personal
and the sentimental’ (Hume 1997: 18). ‘In the world-view of the Journalism of
Attachment’, Hume argued, ‘the war reporter emerges as an important, singu-
larly moral figure with a sense of decency, in a world sullied by evil abroad and
appeasement at home’ (Hume 1997: 19).
Far from falling away, the figure of the war correspondent or photographer
came to feature as a kind of moral limit, the exemplar of a Western society finally
traumatized enough to be prompted to confused action. Three recent novels
investigate trauma through the character of a damaged war journalist or photog-
rapher: Michael Ignatieff ’s Charlie Johnson in the Flames (2003) is set in Bosnia; Pat
Barker’s Double Vision (2003) includes a photographer with PTSD acquired after
an incident in Afghanistan, and Andrew Miller’s The Optimists (2005) involves a
journalist sent off the rails by what he had witnessed in Rwanda. These novels use
the familiar anachronic narratives, disfigured by a delayed traumatic event, here
repeatedly presented as a photographic instant that intrudes on an unravelling
post-traumatic life.
These frames give better means for understanding the appearance of books by
Salgado or Peress. The revival of the photo-book provides a means both to
counter the military control of the representation of war and the increasing con-
solidation of media outlets. Multinational ownership has severely squeezed the
tradition of ‘concerned’ reportage and photography: one of Rupert Murdoch’s
170 Cultural symptoms
first acts as new owner of The Times was to abolish the campaigning photo-essays
associated with The Sunday Times magazine. Consolidation of television channels
has also put severe pressure on liberal news outlets and campaigning reportage
has been progressively marginalized. Yet Salgado has insisted that ‘I don’t believe
that documentary photography is dying’ (Salgado et al. 2002: 19), and has self-
consciously set out to organize different routes of dissemination, working to build
a counter-network of humanitarian organizations, circulating his images through
globally touring exhibitions, publishing, disseminating through the internet, and
waiving permissions for humanitarian usages of some of his photographs, as well
as continuing to sell to mainstream magazines. Alternative distribution of docu-
mentary has also emerged, which accounts for the trend in limited cinematic
releases for documentaries and the collaborations between independent cinemas
and human rights organizations in film festivals around the world.
The artist’s book is another means to evade media control: ‘the idea of making
the book a tool of independent, activist thought, has become one of the persist-
ent elements of the mystique of the artist’s book’ (Drucker 1995: 8). Salgado and
Peress in particular use the tradition of the photo-essay, a form that W. J. T.
Mitchell describes as a ‘strange conceptual space’ that can foreground tensions
between high art and low journalism, aesthetic and anti-aesthetic imperatives,
and set word and image in a deliberately jarring tension to reanimate debate
(Mitchell 1994: 321). The tensions between beauty and atrocity might also be
read into the very price of these texts. Whilst Stallabrass worries that the ‘highly
formal, resolved, even excessive beauty’ of Salgado’s work risks ‘sentimentality or
mannerism’, he argues that the cost reminds us of the economic structures the
images might conceal: ‘the form of these luxurious books becomes oddly appro-
priate for they are manifestly consumer items founded on labour which, in
Salgado’s realist mode, tends to disappear as the object becomes more perfect’
(Stallabrass 1997: 158–9).
Luc Delahaye conceives of the gallery space as another kind of counter-point
to the newspaper. Under contract to Newsweek, the images he took were ‘vulgar,
reduced to a symbolic or simplistic function’. The vast panoramas of the History
series were therefore sized ‘to make them incompatible with the economy of the
press’ (Sullivan 2003). It is also a different temporal economy too: the panorama
of a funeral in Rwanda ‘monumentalises an event that we would at best have only
fleetingly encountered in the news media’ (Durden 2005: 15). Delahaye argues
that these monumental images have a greater truth-value than press photography,
an assertion Erina Duganne interrogates by comparing his work with that of
Alfredo Jaar. Jaar shares the suspicion that ‘journalistic information and presen-
tation actually discourage action’ (Jaar cited Duganne 2006: 70). His solution is
very different: his ‘Real Images’ series taken in Rwanda, Let There Be Light (1998)
shows not the images but their metaphorical ‘coffins’ – the photographs are dis-
played closed away in archive boxes distributed around the gallery to create a
‘cemetery of images’ (Duganne 2006: 69). This recontextualization to the gallery
might until very recently have been seen as a worrying form of aestheticization of
war, if the gallery is still regarded as the ‘white cube’ that decoupled art from
 The intrusive image 171
history. Brian O’Doherty influentially argued that ‘the ideal gallery subtracts from
the artwork all cues that interfere with that fact that it is “art.” The work is iso-
lated from everything … . Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and
its vicissitudes’ (O’Doherty 1986: 14–5). Yet the gallery might now be under-
stood relationally to other institutions and against media consolidations and the
control of the image since the 1980s. As Jacques Rancière (2004) would say, the
distribution of the visible has changed and so, therefore, have the politics of aes-
thetics. An interest in ‘the way that borders defining a practice as either artistic
or political are drawn and re-drawn’ (Funcke 2007: 285) means that distribu-
tions of the image might now make art spaces more conducive to the atrocity
image, or stage the shock of traumatic realism with less compromise and with-
out some inherent aesthetic dehistoricization.
Even so, there is always the risk that atrocity photography might pick up some-
thing like the ‘journalism of attachment’ as it enters the art book or gallery, merg-
ing with the confessional art that so marked the 1990s. Peress’ work was not
untouched by this confessional mode. One of the very short statements in Farewell
to Bosnia read the whole sequence as triggered by personal trauma. Peress writes:

The flashbacks started in a hospital room in Tuzla, filled with legless and
armless men, all grimacing in pain. I remembered my father, his amputated
arm and his pain, his descriptions of addiction to morphine, of World War
Two, the German occupation and the concentration camps. A flow of
buried images started to come back to me … I began to think that I had
come to Bosnia in part to see, almost to relive visions buried in my child-
hood memories … . It pushed through to my consciousness that the
Yugoslavs must also be going through the same experience. Fathers telling
horror stories from the war … . Here starts the curse of history, an illness
that may not be so personal anymore.
(Peress 1994: np)

Such a problematic account, which subsumes the war under an all-too-pat

account of repetition compulsion (complete with amputated/castrated fathers),
might well have been sanctioned by the confessional discourse also at work in art.
That language was clearly dropped for the subsequent photo-books he produced,
but it means that Peress took on contradictory elements from art-practice: a pri-
vate language of traumatic iteration, alongside a more evidently political intent to
use the less regulated space of art to evade the restrictions and compromises of
contemporary photojournalism.
The language that replaces the confessional speech of the photographer in
Peress’ case is the discourse of human rights and international law. This is my
third frame for exploring the appearance of these photo-essays. All of Peress’
books after Farewell to Bosnia contain forms of legal documentation written for
international war crimes tribunals. The investigation of the mass grave at Ovcara,
documented in The Graves, produced the first successful prosecution at the Hague
tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. It is therefore no surprise that some of Peress’
172 Cultural symptoms
work is resituated in another recent project that marries photography, literature,
witness and legal documentation: The Face of Human Rights (2004), a collaboration
between two lawyers, Walter Kälin and Judith Wyttenbach with the art-book pub-
lisher, Lars Müller. This is another strange, hybrid text which is half legal hand-
book, half unaffordable art object, the page layout busy with art photography,
photojournalism, fold-out sections, and dense citations from United Nations
documents, literature and witness testimony.
Why the convergence of photography and human rights? Human rights have
been repoliticized since 1989 and the end of Cold War geopolitics. The United
Nations delivered its ‘Universal Declaration’ in 1946, but the legal framework of
those rights has been unevenly adopted, not least around questions of war crimes,
crimes against humanity, and genocide. The first definition of genocide, by the
Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, was narrowed down from its original form, to
include only ‘national, religious or racial’ groups. The Soviets ensured political
persecution was not included; the Americans removed references to any ‘cultural’
aspects of genocide, as Ward Churchill (1997) records. There was also no court to
try these crimes: a law commission started with proposals at the United Nations
in 1950, but serious discussion was blocked until the end of the Cold War, begin-
ning again in 1991. There were specific tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda,
established in 1993 and 1994, because there was as yet no international criminal
court to try genocide. These tribunals came late, in part because many states
actively wanted to avoid the naming of genocidal acts. When the images of Serb-
run detention centres in Bosnia emerged in August 1992, White House officials
were explicitly forbidden to use the term genocide ‘so as not to trigger obligations
under the 1948 Genocide Convention which imposes a duty to prevent and pun-
ish acts of genocide’ (Scharf and Schabas 2002: 24). The International Criminal
Court was finally agreed in the Rome Statute of 1998. Although it has no pri-
macy over member states, only being able to act where internal national systems
of justice are seen to fail, many states, led by America, refused to sign up to the
treaty and have campaigned vigorously against it.
Against this background, photographic acts of witness to genocide or crimes
against humanity took on a new urgency in a situation where it was possible that
typical perpetrator denial was being reinforced by the evasions and delays of
Security Council Realpolitik. The impotence of the UN was condemned in a
sequence of accusatory books that examined the crises in Somalia, Bosnia and
Rwanda: Linda Polman’s We Did Nothing (2003) came from the Dutch context, a
liberal state traumatized by the complicity of its UN soldiers in the massacres in
Bosnian ‘safe areas’. In a crucial way, too, it seemed that the indexicality of the pho-
tograph, a signification apparently readable across cultural difference, could rein-
force the universalism of the discourse of human rights. Salgado is explicit about
this: ‘in the end, finally, the photograph is, for me, the universal language … .
What you write in this language in Africa, we can read here with no translation.
What you write in India, we can read in China’ (Salgado et al. 2002: 13).
However, any self-evidence in the universalism of human rights is undercut by
the ideological disputes that surrounded them as attempts to enforce treaties
 The intrusive image 173
began in the 1990s. The dismissal of the internationalism of the United Nations
is at the core of American neo-conservatism and the refusal to be a signatory to
many key charters. For liberals, rights hold all states to account, and Adam Jones
has spoken of a developing ‘multidisciplinary field of comparative genocide stud-
ies’ that targets the historical complicity of Western states ( Jones 2004: 18). Yet
there is also a leftist critique which sees humanitarian intervention as a new legit-
imation for war aims, veiled by transcendent appeals to an apolitical universal.
This is the substance of Wendy Brown’s critique of the kind of liberal justifica-
tions for humanitarian intervention. Rights claim to be ‘an antipolitical politics of
suffering reduction’, but for Brown often act as ‘tactics and vehicles of governance
and domination’ that ‘produce and regulate the subjects to whom they are
assigned’ (Brown 2004: 459–60). Universalism, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, ‘relies on a
violent gesture of depoliticization, depriving the other of any political subjec-
tivization’ (Žižek 2005: 128). Perhaps nowhere else are the limitations of arguing
on the basis of the image alone more in evidence than here, where the universal-
izing gesture of a humanitarian photography can be spun politically in multiple
and contradictory ways.
Sontag’s view was that ‘The images that mobilize conscience are always linked
to a given historical situation. The more general they are, the less likely they are
to be effective’ (Sontag 1978: 17). Commentators on Salgado suspect that ‘uni-
versalizing images of global suffering are a bit problematic for they suggest an
almost timeless, spaceless quality to human existence’ (Scheper-Hughes 2002: 30).
In Salgado’s very reach for a universal pathos, ‘there is a sort of humanism at
work that invokes a community of casualties and victims which can obscure
history and culture, socio-political circumstance, and retreats to a register of suf-
fering’ (Watts 2002: 38). T. J. Clark similarly ‘will never forget the shock’ Salgado
can induce, but wonders whether there could be ‘a photography of causes, not
faces’ (Clark 2002: 23 and 25), thus generating critique more than a diffuse sym-
pathy. This seems to be where the marriage of traumatic image and legal text
emerges. Peress accumulates more and more legal discourse to situate his images,
to have them, as Sontag insists, ‘embedded in history’ (Sontag 1977: 17). From the
fragments of personalized comments in Farewell to Bosnia, he attaches United
Nations text to The Silence: Rwanda, yet in detachable form, as if he still wishes to
preserve the separation and integrity of the image. Yet no image can profess self-
sufficiency: as Clive Scott observes, photographs ‘refer too pointedly and yet do
not know how to name what they refer to’ (Scott 1999: 55). The Graves, therefore,
complexly interweaves text and image in the layout, constantly shifting the hier-
archy between imagistic and textual testimony (Stover and Peress 1998). That
legal text alone is perhaps not enough explicitly informs the project of The Face of
Human Rights, which is intended to employ the affective immediacy of the visual
image to bolster a dry legal discourse of human rights being placed under intense
political pressure.
The final frame for these books must surely be trauma theory itself. On the one
hand, I have shown how the intrusive visual image, the index of the traumatic
event itself, moves to the centre of definitions of PTSD. On the other hand,
174 Cultural symptoms
cultural theory of trauma becomes increasingly suspicious of the direct image,
fearing banality, psychic numbing, or the cheap sentiment of affective identifica-
tion. Instead, an aesthetics of aporia or the sublime is invoked, ‘bearing pictorial
or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible’, as Jean-Francois Lyotard put
it (Lyotard 1989: 199). The aesthetic practice of Salgado and Peress would be
anathema to a theorist such as Ulrich Baer, who regards all graphic images as
narcissistic and suffering the delusions typical of ‘restitutive or redemptive
thought’ (Baer 2002: 77). Similarly, Peress’ images from Bosnia would be part of
the slide into a generic atrocity aesthetic identified by Barbie Zelizer. Photographic
practice is torn between two completely divergent notions of trauma.
It is probably quite easy to criticize recent atrocity photography for old sins,
and some newly invented ones: representational naïvety, its continual risk of aes-
theticizing pain, its perverse reserves of pleasure, its subsumption into affective
journalism or the discourse of personal trauma, and its potential complicity with
universalism. Yet the contradictory form of the ‘beautiful book of atrocity’ is
meant to dramatize some of these tensions. Within this form, one of the strongest
thrusts I find in Peress’ work is the registration of an urgency, an impatience with
theories of aporia, hesitation or meta-critical anxiety. The aporia is the threshold
on which academic discourse of trauma hovers, hesitating between the possible
and the impossible, caught on the horns of a dilemma because every decision will
produce a kind of ethical violence. As a result, Lyotard’s sublime or Baer’s trauma
aesthetic always favours the aporetic or non-representational as the lesser evil,
favouring the figural by abjecting the literal. The atrocity photography of
Salgado, Peress and Delahaye, in both its practice and in the minimal commen-
tary they have offered on that practice, is unapologetically literal – perhaps even
embarrassingly so. But there are new reasons for this literalism that develop in the
1990s, as this section has outlined: changing conceptions of photographic realism;
the pressure on outlets for campaigning photojournalism from consolidation of
newspapers and television into multinational corporations; the geopolitics of
international law on genocide; the trajectories of art and trauma theory. Farewell
to Bosnia or The Graves transgress all the rules of an avant-garde trauma aesthetic,
generating all kinds of accusations of appropriation, complicity, and representa-
tional violence. But that swirl of angry dispute is the very testament to the fact
that we are far from deadened or inured by such images after all.
Perhaps every generation gets its defining traumatic image: Margaret Bourke-
White’s photographs of Belsen in 1945 or Ron Haeberle’s images of massacre at
My Lai in 1969. In the era of the trauma paradigm, footage of the World Trade
Center attack and the digital snaps of American soldiers within Baghdad’s Abu
Ghraib prison remind us that photographs can always renew their capacity to
shock. This is the simple point made by Marianne Hirsch’s definition of ‘post-
memory’: a new generation always has a new relationship to trauma images:
‘Rather than desensitizing us to the “cut” of recollection they have the effect of
cutting and shocking in ways that fragmented and congealed traumatic memory
re-enacts the traumatic encounter’ (Hirsch 2001: 29). Abu Ghraib even had the
capacity to shock Sontag anew: ‘The photographs are us’, she acknowledged:
 The intrusive image 175

Figure 4.6 Abu Ghraib Prison, internet download (2004).

‘That is, they are representative of distinctive policies and the fundamental cor-
ruptions of colonial rule’ (Sontag 2004: 3). The limited number of images that
circulated in the press was wounding enough; most news outlets could or would
not carry the more gruesome records of sexually humiliated or desecrated dead
bodies, now stored on web-sites like www.memoryhole.org. These less familiar
images document some of the 27 confirmed homicides that occurred in Abu
Ghraib prison under this occupying regime. The photograph of Abdou Hussain
Saad Faleh, hooded, standing on a box and attached to electrical wires, has
become a condensation of this atrocity (Figure 4.6). As Dora Apel (2005) notes,
the image has been extracted from its context and détourned from a record of impe-
rial triumph to be used in anti-American murals across the Middle East, on anti-
war banners, on the cover of Mark Danner’s investigative book, Torture and Truth,
by artist Richard Serra in the Artists Coming Together exhibition, in culture jamming
subversions of corporate adverts (iPod becomes iRaq), and even as part of the
semiotics of recent cinema. The tableau is recreated in passing in Alfonso
Cuaron’s apocalyptic film Children of Men (2006) and also forms the basis on an art
project that jabs at the Washington establishment in The Walker (Paul Schrader
2006). There are inevitable ideological simplifications that disembed the image
from its original context in this process of circulation, but what it also does is
return representation to the tortured. The tortured body is intended, as Elaine
Scarry argues, to confer all power, all voice, to the torturer: the body is there ‘to
lend the aura of material reality to the winning construct’ (Scarry 1985: 21).
176 Cultural symptoms
The photograph, snatched from the circulation between American soldiers, defies
this logic and denudes the rhetoric of ‘liberation’. After Abu Ghraib, arguments
that direct images of atrocity are crude, ineffective or sentimental seem problem-
atic to me. Instead, they reinforce the sense that the photographic image is one of
the privileged cultural forms of the trauma paradigm because the photographic
image retains the capacity to shock us unutterably.
5 Flashbacks, mosaics and loops
Trauma and narrative cinema

The technology of cinema developed coincidentally alongside the burgeoning

late Victorian discourse on industrial and military traumatic neurosis. The foun-
dational stories of cinema themselves circle around profound physiological shock,
fostered by the even greater indexicality ascribed to the moving over the still
image. Apocryphally, audiences ran from the projected image in the Lumière
brothers Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895), an account in which ‘credulity over-
whelms all else, the physical reflex signalling a visual trauma’ (Gunning 1999:
819). By the 1920s, Sergei Eisenstein had theorized montage as a device ‘that
subjects the spectator to a sensual or psychological impact, experimentally regu-
lated and mathematically calculated to produce in him certain emotional shocks’
(Eisenstein 1974: 78) and Walter Benjamin isolated cinema’s ‘formal principle’ as
‘perception in the form of shocks’ (Benjamin 1973: 171). This view was fostered from
the very beginning by the seemingly irresistible temptation to elide conceptually the
mechanics of film with the apparatus of the human psyche. Cinematographic
metaphors peppered Henri Bergson’s conception of memory processes and Hugo
Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1915), regarded as one of the
first pieces of film theory, argued from the premise that cinema objectified psy-
chic processes of attention, association and memory. Freud, despite his refusal to
act as a consultant on G. W. Pabst’s film Secrets of a Soul (1926), similarly used the
metaphorics of cinema for psychic mechanisms. In the era of the trauma para-
digm, this elision still occurs. Laura Mulvey equates the cinema and the uncon-
scious in these terms: ‘Both have the attributes of the indexical sign, the mark of
trauma or the mark of light, and both need to be deciphered retrospectively
across delayed time’ (Mulvey 2006: 9).
Cinema has become one of the key means for the narrative temporalization of
experience in the twentieth century, and its specific stylistic devices (mise en scène,
montage, conventions for marking point of view and temporal shifts in particular)
have made it a cultural form closely attuned to representing the discordances of
trauma. In this chapter, I want to pursue the stronger claim that cinema in fact
helped constitute the PTSD subject in 1980, and that it has continued to interact
with and help shape the psychological and general cultural discourse of trauma
into the present day. For the first claim, I will investigate the history of the flash-
back, eventually incorporated into the official diagnostic definition of PTSD only
178 Cultural symptoms
in 1987, but which of course emerged much earlier in film practice, probably in
the 1910s. For the second part, after the formulation and extension of PTSD
in the 1980s, I want to suggest that the marked disruption of linear temporality
in 1990s cinema – with plots presented backwards, in loops, or disarticulated into
mosaics that only retrospectively cohere – is partly driven by attempts to convey
the experience of traumatized subjectivity. Cinema has been particularly effective
at developing formal conventions in which the disordering of narrative presages
the revelation of a traumatic secret, one that retrospectively reorders the fractured
elements of plot into a new kind of story.
As in previous chapters, evidence is taken from diverse sources in Western cinema,
from Holocaust documentary to film noir, from the peaks of European art-house
alienation in the 1950s to the low comedy of contemporary Hollywood. The
trauma paradigm pervades Western culture, yet once more the cultural theory of
trauma in cinema tends to privilege a specific Modernist aesthetic and a narrow
canon of films. For Joshua Hirsch, a post-traumatic cinema of the Holocaust must
work by ‘rejecting the classical realist forms of film narration traditionally used to
provide a sense of mastery over the past, and adopting instead modernist forms
of narration that formally repeat the traumatic structure of experience’ ( J. Hirsch
2004: 3). Linda Williams’ discussion of the New Documentary identified only a
‘special few’ that foregrounded the filmic construction of truth. This self-reflexivity
was precisely because these works concerned ‘traumatic events of the past’ and
used avant-garde strategies to convey an ‘awareness of the final inaccessibility of
a moment of crime, violence, trauma, irretrievably located in the past’ (Williams
1993: 12 and 17). Janet Walker similarly defines trauma cinema as dealing ‘with
traumatic events in a nonrealist mode characterised by disturbance and fragmen-
tation of the film’s narrative and stylistic regimes’ (Walker 2005: 19). Walker con-
curs with Williams that only ‘a special few’ films achieve this model (Walker 2005:
85). When she observes that large numbers of made-for-TV issue films focused on
incest or abuse actually ‘prefigure the explosion of radical subject and style’ of
trauma cinema in the 1980s they have to be understood to do so ‘in spite of
themselves’ so as to preserve the automatic privilege of the avant-garde (Walker
2005: 59–60). Whilst E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang share a conception of
trauma cinema’s ‘anti-narrative process of narration’, they at least recognize that
a codified Modernist aesthetic ‘risks becoming a closure in its own turn’ (Kaplan
and Wang 2004: 10).
Often, this debate on the ethics of cinematic representation of trauma is reduced
to praise for Claude Lanzmann’s austere nine-hour documentary, Shoah (1985) and
condemnation of Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust melodrama Schindler’s List (1993).
Lanzmann can become splenetic at the very thought of an ‘aesthetic’ of trauma, as
his appalled reaction to a question framed in these terms in a seminar on his docu-
mentary suggests (see Lanzmann 1991: 97). He condemned Spielberg’s film as a
gross moral offence, undertaken without thought. Shoah is an iconic instance for
Shoshana Felman’s trauma theory, foregrounding impossibility and aporia, a film
that ‘gives us to witness a historical crisis of witnessing’ in a typically self-cancelling
phrase (Felman 1991: 41). Spielberg, in Hirsch’s curt dismissal, in contrast offers an
 Trauma and narrative cinema 179
offensive ‘reactionary postmodernism’ that co-opts and neutralizes the Modernist
representational strategies exemplified by Lanzmann (J. Hirsch 2004: 140). Yet, as
Miriam Hansen suggests, Schindler’s List can be respected as being ‘capable of
reflecting upon the shocks and scars inflicted by modernity’, but merely in a differ-
ent, mass cultural register (Hansen 1997: 97). The automatic privileging of
Lanzmann’s apparent preservation of the ‘ineffable’ over the crudity of Spielberg is
how Gillian Rose chooses to define ‘Holocaust piety’ (G. Rose 1996: 43). As Hansen
further observes: ‘whether we like it or not, the predominant vehicles of public
memory are the media of technical re/production and mass consumption’ (Hansen
1997: 98). I take the cast of my own inquiry from this comment: Hollywood repre-
sentations are as important as those of the avant-garde in the co-constitution and
diffusion of the trauma paradigm. Indeed, a significant mark of trauma in cinema
is its constant movement between high and low forms. If I identify three trauma
‘auteurs’ of the fiction film later in this chapter, it is partly to observe how progres-
sively difficult it is to situate their cinema of trauma as either marginal or main-
stream, and I suspect that a thematic and/or formal interest in representing
trauma is what prompts this mobility. Let’s begin, though, with the central device
of cinema’s representation of trauma: the flashback.

A genealogy of the traumatic flashback

In the influential TV movie Sybil (Daniel Petrie, 1977), the protagonist’s enslave-
ment to a buried traumatic past is established within the opening five minutes.
Sybil Dorsett is trying to manage a class of children in Central Park; the squeak
of a playground swing prompts a virtually subliminal flashback to a rope and a
pulley; Sybil’s command of the children slips in her distraction; the continued
squeak produces a second and third flashback, the remembered scene progres-
sively accruing detail. The fourth flashback in this additive montage unfolds at
greater length, strongly hinting at a bound child being hoisted on a hook in a
barn. When we cut back to the narrative present, time has evidently slipped, and
coming out of her dissociation Sybil finds herself ankle-deep in a lake and
mocked by her children. The distress of these unprompted flashbacks causes Sybil
more lost time and unnerving dissociations, suggested on screen by jump cuts
between discontinuous spaces and time of day. The spectator soon learns that
these flashbacks are intrusive childhood memories resisted by Sybil’s defensive dis-
sociation into separate personalities that don’t share continuous memorial iden-
tity. Sally Field offers a virtuoso acting display of these multiple selves in her
analyst’s office, a role played by Joanne Woodward, herself famed for her per-
formance of multiple personality in The Three Faces of Eve (Nunnally Johnson,
1957). Whilst this pulley image resolves itself into a form that the spectator can
speculate over, it is more than half-way through the film before hypnosis opens out
the frame of these flashbacks to reveal violent maternal abuse. The whole process
of hypnotic recovery provides a much more conventional frame to signal a tem-
poral shift in the narrative. Meanwhile, another flashback image chain, a light-
bulb and a swinging metal shade, constantly recurs. It takes three hours of screen
180 Cultural symptoms
time to resolve this image into narrative form. As a child, her legs were tied to the
kitchen lampshade as her paranoid schizophrenic mother enforced repeated vagi-
nal douches on Sybil. With this scene finally recovered all free-floating visual
motifs are corralled into narrative form and Sybil is able to move from victim to
survivor in the key self-actualizing statement: ‘I am Sybil and I remember and I
hate her’. The analyst’s controlling voice-over informs us that Sybil ‘had reached
the centre of the maze and come out whole … I celebrate the beginning of her
emancipation’.
Recent cinema signals traumatic disturbance with the sudden flashback,
unsignalled by either voice-over or transitional dissolve, and which is prompted
analogically by a graphic (or auditory) match. The flashback is an intrusive,
anachronic image that throws off the linear temporality of the story. It can only
ever be explained belatedly, leaving the spectator in varying degrees of disorien-
tation or suspense, depending on when or whether the flashback is reintegrated
into the storyline. This brutal splicing of temporally disadjusted images is the cin-
ema’s rendition of the frozen moment of the traumatic impact: it flashes back
insistently in the present because this image cannot yet or perhaps ever be narra-
tivized as past. Experimental films tend to resist the kind of visual and narrative
integration offered by Sybil in an attempt to foreground formally how the histori-
cized image may not always be mastered by the spectator. This unsignalled flash-
back was invented by Alain Resnais in five revolutionary seconds in the severe
Modernist film Hiroshima Mon Amour (1957), as we shall see, yet only twenty years
later it was embedded in the mass cultural melodrama of Sybil as an instantly
recognizable device to mark a traumatic return.
As early as 1915 Hugo Münsterberg declared the ‘cut back’ (as he termed it)
‘an objectivisation of our memory function’ (Münsterberg 2002: 90). Maureen
Turim’s history of the device details a fascinating interweaving of formal tech-
nique and psychological theory across the century: associationism in the 1910s,
Freudianism in Germany in the 1920s and Hollywood in the 1940s, and eidetic
visual memory in the 1950s. The link of intrusive flashbacks and post-traumatic
stress, however, only appeared in the psychological literature in about 1985, after
over seventy years of use in film. Turim points to scriptwriting manuals that were
by 1922 already objecting to the overuse of flashback storytelling. Auteur theory
has supported D. W. Griffith’s claim to have invented the ‘switchback’ in 1911,
although Turim suggests a more diffuse and probably irrecoverable origin.
Nevertheless, Margaret’s flashback in The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) to
her lover killed in the Civil War is an important early indication of the analogy
of photoplay and the psychology of memory, as Hugo Münsterberg had argued.
The flashback was incorporated into the emerging narrative conventions of clas-
sical Hollywood in the 1910s: it ‘depicts emotional states of mind’ with images
that ‘symbolize the conditions that inform a character’s emotional trauma’ (Turim
1989: 39 and 40). There is a more experimental and subjective use in the
European cinema of the 1920s, with German expressionism in particular influ-
enced by Freud. This European usage was transposed to Hollywood in the émigré
cinema of the 1940s, particularly film noir. Noir introduced an extraordinary
 Trauma and narrative cinema 181
period of complex, overlapping flashbacks, in which narrative authority and
coherence was undermined by an endlessly malleable past and voice-overs that
often failed to master their images. In The Killers (Richard Siodmak, 1946) or Laura
(Otto Preminger, 1944) multiple perspective flashbacks swirled around a dead (or
apparently dead) protagonist, a device borrowed from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles,
1941). The Locket ( John Brahm, 1946) is an extreme instance of flashbacks placed
within flashbacks, unfolding Chinese boxes designed to delay the central trau-
matic scene. Many critics have associated the labyrinthine disturbance of noir
narrative with returning war veterans, who are commonly the anxious heroes of
the genre (when Raymond Chandler made a wounded veteran the killer in The
Blue Dahlia (George Marshall, 1946), the censor enforced rewrites). Film noir was
‘about problems of what was defined as the psychological readjustment of return-
ing veterans’ these men ‘in full, paranoid flight from the broken wartime dream
of liberal rationalism’ (Maltby 1994: 44 and 46). Hitchcock’s popular
Freudianism twice deployed the delayed flashback to recover the repressed origin
of neurosis in Spellbound (1945) and Marnie (1964).
It was in the 1950s, however, that a distinct European ‘art-house’ cinema
renewed experiment with flashbacks. The unnamed woman protagonist of Alain
Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1957) spends one night with a Japanese lover. In the
morning, as she stares down at him sleeping, the sight of his twitching fingers is dis-
rupted by a jump cut to another body, another time. ‘It is with one cut … that a
new tendency in flashbacks emerges’ (Turim 1989: 210). A revolutionary moment,
the scene is captured spatially in the published screenplay as a double page spread
of six stills illustrating the rhythm of viewpoint and memory. The image is focal-
ized from the woman’s point of view and works by a graphic match, but is other-
wise unmotivated and only belatedly meaningful. According to Joshua Hirsh,
Resnais reinvents the flashback here as ‘mimicry and transmission of post-traumatic
consciousness’ and situates it in the foreground for the first time ‘as a pimary moti-
vation’ (J. Hirsch 2004: 98). This new Modernist tactic under-determines the nar-
rative significance of the disruptive image for a disorientingly lengthy period: this
is the beginning of the contemporary convention, as used in Sybil.
Turim’s history ends in 1985, just as the trauma paradigm was beginning to
consolidate around PTSD. Turim’s later reflections for a Screen ‘special debate’ on
trauma surprisingly remains with Freud rather than following this turn (see Turim
2001). Yet if the modern flashback seems uncannily mimetic of the psychology of
trauma, then it is probably because films like Sybil were instrumental in helping
formulate the psychological symptoms of mental illnesses linked with traumatic
origins. Ian Hacking observes in his history of Multiple Personality Disorder that
Cornelia Wilbur’s account of her patient ‘Sybil’ was written up as a ‘dramatisa-
tion’ by the journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber because orthodox medical journals
rejected scientific papers about long-discredited ‘multiplicity’. The best-selling
novel and TV adaptation (with a shorter version also released as a film) helped in
the campaign to enter Multiple Personality Disorder into the third edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980. Schreiber’s unorthodox form also res-
onated with a women’s movement seeking to find new ways to confront a medical
182 Cultural symptoms
establishment that was accused of denying the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and
its traumatic consequences. The book and film’s triumphant reintegrative conclusion
exemplified the aims of women’s empowerment through therapeutic consciousness-
raising. ‘Buried in the depleted self ’, Schreiber said, ‘had been this new woman,
this whole woman, so long denied’ (Schreiber 1975: 405). Janet Walker might crit-
icize Sybil’s positivism and realism, yet it was precisely the drive to evidential affir-
mation of patient memory and the restorative closure of Sybil’s case history that
gave the text its cultural impact. ‘Clinicians have written about the effect on some
patients of reading Sybil’, Hacking observes, in another instance of what he terms
dynamic nominalism, that interaction of new psychiatric labels, self-narration
and available cultural scripts. Yet Hacking is not implying that Sybil is the inau-
gural script for MPD and its abusive origins: multiples ‘reflect or distort a far
wider spectrum of current culture than that’ (Hacking 1995: 47). The same is true
of the traumatic flashback.
In Chapter 1, I detailed how the immediate pressure for the establishment of
PTSD as a diagnostic category came from a coalition of advocates demanding
recognition and recompense for specific identity groups in the 1970s. Comparative
work encouraged an inclusive category of ‘post-traumatic stress’ to incorporate con-
centration camp survivors, Vietnam veterans, and victims of rape and sexual abuse.
Sybil gave one visual narrative rendition of traumatic symptoms of abuse, including
repressed memory, dissociation and flashbacks. The TV series Holocaust (1978) is
often credited with transforming American memorialization of the genocide,
although its melodramatic elements also prompted Elie Wiesel’s insistence that the
Holocaust could not and should not be contained within conventional filmic narra-
tive or form. Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1965) provided an early use of the
device of the unsignalled flashback in American cinema, used to convey the disturb-
ing insistence of concentration camp memories on a survivor trying to overcome his
losses in post-war New York. Split-second flashbacks, brought on by graphic matches,
shock and disorient the viewer because they openly defy the conventions of continu-
ity editing or the carefully framed and demarcated flashback sequence in classical
Hollywood cinema (this perhaps explains why the film was independently financed
and took three years to find a distributor). These almost subliminal insertions – what
Cunningham calls ‘a few instantly repressed, staccato flashes’ (Cunningham 2001:
176) – work towards a more extended sequence that contains Sol’s core traumatic
memory of the camps: being forced to witness the rape of his wife by a Nazi officer.
In Joshua Hirsch’s view The Pawnbroker ‘goes further than … any other film of which
I am aware in its systematic efforts to mimic psychological flashbacks precisely, and
to link these efforts to a systematic representation of PTSD at the level of content’
( J. Hirsch 2004: 109). Yet in many ways this statement needs to be reversed: the film
appeared fifteen years before the arrival of PTSD and the symptoms did not initially
include the traumatic flashback as a significant diagnostic element. Psychiatric defi-
nitions of traumatic flashbacks in fact mimic the cinematic representations of
memory in films like The Pawnbroker. This influence occurred belatedly because the
notion of the flashback was only transformed following both the military experience
and cultural representation of that combat in Vietnam.
 Trauma and narrative cinema 183
Psychiatric research into the intrusive flashback was first undertaken by Mardi
Horowitz in the 1960s, initially among the hippies of Haight-Ashbury who used
‘flashback’ to refer to the recurrence of hallucinogenic states long after LSD had
left the system. A person who suffered this was known as a flashbacker. Flashback
seemed to refer to general perceptual disturbances, but this was narrowed by
Horowitz to ‘recurrent intrusions of the same frightening image’ (Horowitz 1969:
565). He developed this work on unbidden returning images of distress in his general
theory, Stress Response Syndromes in 1976. In the same year, Horowitz showed test
subjects ‘stress films’ of bodily injury (measuring their stress against ‘positive’
images derived from pornography with ‘no hint of perversion’!). He theorized on
the model of information-processing that after viewing stress films ‘important but
incompletely processed images remained in a form of active memory with an
intrinsic tendency toward representations’ (Horowitz 1976a: 1339): something
like a recurrent cinematic flashback in other words. Horowitz allied his work with
that of Robert Jay Lifton’s accounts of the symptoms of returning Vietnam vet-
erans, but the link of Vietnam combat experience and flashbacks was only made
in the mid-1980s.
Mellman and Davis, in a study of twenty-five veterans suffering ‘combat-related
flashbacks,’ suggested that it had been left out of the symptom clusters of PTSD in
1980 due to ‘variations in the definition of the flashback’ (Mellman and Davis 1985:
379). This was something that research could now address. Arthur Blank similarly
remarked on the ‘absence of study of flashbacks’ suffered by Vietnam veterans, and
noted: ‘Even in clinical papers, the term is usually placed in quotes, notwithstand-
ing its universal usage among veterans’ (Blank 1985: 296). Blank suggested that the
flashback had become significant once the use of the traumatic re-experiencing of
Vietnam had been used as a legal defence for veterans committing crimes in
America – another instance of trauma being formulated between law, psychiatry
and culture. Assessing the entry of the traumatic flashback into the revised third edi-
tion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1987, Fred Frankel pointed to an impor-
tant but entirely untheorized shift. Drug flashback returned someone to a
hallucinogenic state, where perceptual experience was generally heightened and
liable to elaboration. The traumatic flashback, however, was assumed to be a pre-
cise return to a specific memory, and the image was taken to be eidetic and entirely
veridical. Frankel was concerned, as were others weighing the clinical value of hyp-
notically recovered memories in the early 1990s, about the disappearance of sug-
gestion (or fantasy) in this silent readjustment in the theory of the flashback. Frankel
cited research that suggested flashbacks were heightened or exaggerated in 60 per
cent of cases. ‘Although the content of flashbacks might well be grounded at times
in something that was once real’, Frankel concluded, ‘there is little mention in the
literature that the reality for suggestible patients might easily be borrowed from the
accounts in the media and from the reports of other patients’ (Frankel 1994: 332).
Susannah Radstone also argues for the importance of unconscious fantasy elabo-
ration when considering traumatic memory (Radstone 2000)
Some ten years before psychiatric papers began to emerge on flashbacks in the
Vietnam veteran, the cinema of the conflict was central in shifting the cultural
184 Cultural symptoms
representation of the veteran from violent misfit to traumatized, re-experiencing
victim. Between 1965 and 1975 ‘the image of the veteran became the site where
America’s ambivalent feelings toward the conflict were made manifest’ (Dittmar
and Michaud 1990: 4). In films like Welcome Home, Soldier Boys (Richard Compton,
1972) or The Visitors (Elia Kazan, 1972) returning veterans were so alienated that
exorbitant violence was the only relation to an indifferent American home front.
This was the subtext of Travis Bickle’s eruption of redemptive rage in Taxi Driver
(Martin Scorsese, 1976), although there is only one brief, elliptical reference to his
veteran status. After 1977, the disturbed veteran had another, more therapeutic
trajectory. Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978) contrasts Bruce Dern’s raging soldier
with Jon Voight’s newly politicized and reintegrated disabled veteran (nursed back
to physical and social health by that iconic anti-war star, Jane Fonda). After this,
Harry Haines discerns a ‘therapeutic strategy’ for reintegrating the veteran in cin-
ematic representations. Veterans who resist this ‘therapeutic fix are subject to
marginalisation’ (Haines 1990: 95). Active therapeutic revision or retrospective
mastery of the Vietnam War is most famously associated with the Rambo films.
Sylvester Stallone’s hypermasculine, invulnerable cyborg of a veteran is hardly
associated with psychic interiority. However, the beserker rage in First Blood (Ted
Kotcheff, 1982) is initiated after his unjust treatment by bigoted small-town
Americans prompts flashbacks to his Vietnam experience (four micro-second
flashes back to imprisonment and torture early in the film provide all the motiva-
tion this Green Beret war hero needs to become a machinic killer again). Rambo
is the newly theorized traumatized veteran whose rage state disinhibits impulse
control and defaults him back into automatic combat reactions (something that
was briefly called Intermittent Explosive Disorder in DSM-III before such rage
was recategorized). Stallone might have enacted the Reaganite revision of the
defeat over the course of the Rambo trilogy, but in each of the films the hard-
body is pierced and torn and the audience has to endure Rambo stitching or cau-
terizing his own wounds, as if to emphasize that eventual triumph is premised on
the traumatic wounding and narrative repair of the American male body.
Second World War films provided a historical displacement to address
Vietnam, which explains why the film of Joseph Heller’s novel Catch 22 (Mike
Nichols, 1970) is rarely mentioned in histories of Vietnam War cinema.
Nevertheless, Yossarian’s active resistance to an absurd and corrupt command
structure spoke directly to the Vietnam situation (which Robert Lifton denounced
as ‘absurdist’ throughout Home from the War). Nichols’ adaptation also interspersed
set-piece comic scenes with a recurring flashback, which accrues additional detail
each time it returns. Yossarian’s mania is at core driven by a profoundly traumatic
scene on a bombing run, when one of his young crew dies messily and abjectly
despite Yossarian’s desperate ministrations. The additive montage starts this
sequence as an initially unmotivated and puzzling break in linear storytelling; the
formal delay in revealing its significance is designed to reinforce its shock. This
cyclical return and uneasy tonal shift between comedy and abruptly violent
imagery has proved highly influential. Catch 22 appeared fifteen years before the
flashback became a central element of definitions of veteran impulse control
 Trauma and narrative cinema 185
disorders and post-traumatic stress. Via the experiential language of the veterans,
psychiatry incorporated popular visual culture.
The politics of identity in the 1970s was therefore in each case accompanied
by and intertwined with cinematic representations of trauma marked by the expe-
rience of the intrusive flashback. It is intriguing to note that alongside Vietnam
veterans and incest and Holocaust survivors, key theorists of trauma were at the
same time researching the impact on communities of major accidents or disasters.
Robert Lifton worked with the Buffalo Creek community and Lenore Terr with
children from the Chowchilla bus kidnap. What relation might be established
between this work and the sequence of over fifty Hollywood disaster movies that
stretched from Airport (George Seaton, 1969) and the sequels that ended in 1980
via The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972) and The Towering Inferno ( John
Guillermin, 1974)? These films spectacularized disaster, perhaps allegorizing the
feared disintegration of the American polity (see Keane 2001). This imagination
of disaster had a very different impact, however, from the intimate portraits of
psychological trauma, because this cinema consolidated a specific formal device
to transport the spectator into the heart of temporal rupture and psychic disad-
justment, just as psychiatric advocates were formulating PTSD.
Experiment with the flashback has developed in the post-war era, pushing nar-
rative anachrony in cinema to new levels of complexity. The 1990s marks a par-
ticularly intensive phase, a tendency bound up with the rise of the trauma
paradigm. I want to track this development by concentrating on three exemplary
directors before opening this into a wider consideration of contemporary narrative
cinema.

Three trauma auteurs: Alain Resnais, Atom Egoyan,

David Lynch
Alain Resnais invented the traumatic flashback in Hiroshima Mon Amour, the visual
analogue of hands transposing one disaster upon another. In the film the site of
the unspeakable catastrophe of Hiroshima is displaced from the narrative after
the opening twenty minutes, the remnant of the documentary on Hiroshima
Resnais had initially been commissioned to produce. The camera soon leaves
behind the newsreel footage, Japanese film portrayals of the aftermath, and mon-
tages of the memorial and museum at Hiroshima. Instead, the disaster is
addressed indirectly through the traumatic memories the city provokes in the vis-
iting French actress. To her Japanese lover, the unnamed woman eventually nar-
rates her transgressive love affair with a German soldier in the town of Nevers in
1944, his death on the eve of liberation, her discovery of his dying body (the
source memory of the first enigmatic flashback), the woman’s ritual punishment
as a collaborator by the town, and her descent into madness as a melancholic
means to keep her lover and herself alive in a suspended, living-dead state.
Months later, she is spirited away from Nevers and arrives in Paris to the news of
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This is told in innovative flashback form, the
editing frequently stitching together shots of Hiroshima and Nevers to invent a
186 Cultural symptoms
phantom intermediate city of memory. The editor, Henri Colpi, referred to
‘a kind of immediate transition which I like to call “leopard-linking,” the refer-
ence being to a leopard’s leap’ – a way of introducing rapid ellipses that propelled
the interwoven images and cross-cutting temporality forward (Colpi 1959–60: 15). At
the end of the film, the woman insists on a permanent end to the intense affair –
riven by contrary aims to at once to remain faithful to the memory of her
German lover and to forget and avoid repeating the annihilating, mad intensity
of that love. ‘I’ll forget you! I’m forgetting you already!’ she tries to persuade
herself in the last scene.
Controversy has always attended the explicit parallelism established between
the public history of Hiroshima and a private story of transgression. ‘There is
Hiroshima’s grotesque death imagery, and there is the intensity of two people
coming together in bodily union, but the two themes merely co-exist’, Robert
Lifton complained in Death in Life, also noting the opposition to the film in
Hiroshima itself ‘because some hibakusha felt that its sensuality was an insult to the
A-bomb dead’ (Lifton 1968: 468). Julia Kristeva’s reading of ‘Durassian melan-
choly’ suspects that political commitment is erased for ‘an exclusive detailing of
the rainbow of pain. We are survivors, the living dead, corpses on suspended sen-
tence, harbouring our personal Hiroshima in the hollow of our private world’
(Kristeva 1987: 144). In Cathy Caruth’s reading, however, whilst the Japanese
man’s own history is occluded by the story of Nevers he is the only possible inter-
locutor of her story because of his own undisclosed traumatic past on this cata-
strophic site. Both are ‘possessed’ by the flashback narrative and he speaks as if
from the impossible position of the dead soldier. ‘It is indeed the enigmatic lan-
guage of untold stories – of experiences not yet completely grasped – that res-
onates throughout the film’, Caruth argues, allowing the lovers to ‘communicate,
across the gap, between their cultures and their experiences, precisely through
what they do not comprehend’ (Caruth 1996a: 56). This is Caruth’s insistence on
aporia, in this case reinforced by Marguerite Duras’ extended comments in the
screenplay, in which she proclaimed the aim ‘to have done with the description of
horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves, but make this
horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily
be special’ (Duras 1961: 9). Duras, for sure, inscribes the film within the familiar
representational paradox beloved of trauma theory: ‘Impossible to talk about
Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about
Hiroshima’ (Duras 1961: 9).
Hiroshima Mon Amour benefits from being grasped as a single element in a
sequence of Resnais’ films that constitute a systematic experiment in exploring
how cinematic form can represent traumatic, temporal disturbance in the wake of
violence or war. Resnais began his career as an editor and documentary film-
maker, including a piece devoted to Picasso’s Guernica in 1950, focused on the
painting that protested at a new kind of indiscriminate targeting in the tactics of
air war. Resnais also made Nuit et Bruillard (1955), arguably the most influential
Holocaust documentary of the era. Resnais worked from a script by Jean Cayrol,
poet and political deportee to Mauthausen concentration camp. Cayrol’s status as
 Trauma and narrative cinema 187
a ‘political’ has been held to be one reason why the film mentioned Jews only once,
although this was a typical occlusion in discussions of the camps at the time. The
film was composed under French censorship rules, meaning images of French
detention centres were doctored to bury evidence of complicity. Nuit et Bruillard
established Resnais’ abiding theme of forgetfulness, tied to a montage that cut
between ominous colour-saturated tracking shots of the abandoned Auschwitz
camp and black-and-white footage of the camps in operation, gathered from a
wide array of sources and arranged in a loosely sequential order to narrate the
development of the concentration camp system. The voice-over continually draws
attention to the inadequacy of the visual record: here ‘memories are not mastered,
but rather are experienced as involuntary, hallucinatory repetitions’ ( J. Hirsch
2004: 53). Nuit et Bruillard also established Resnais’ method of working with screen-
plays commissioned from experimental writers. After Hiroshima Mon Amour with
Duras, Resnais collaborated with Alain Robbe-Grillet on Last Year at Marienbad
(1960), with Jean Cayrol on Muriel (1963), and with Jorge Semprun (another
Holocaust survivor) on La Guerre est Finie (1966). These four fiction films each
offered a new innovation with temporal montage and each experiment was
prompted by an oblique, unrepresented trauma: after Hiroshima/Nevers, rape
(perhaps) in Marienbad, torture in Muriel and violence in La Guerre. In this sense,
Resnais offered a general indictment of post-war modernity. He exemplified, for
Gilles Deleuze, an understanding of the catastrophic post-war moment as inaugu-
rating a new rhythm of time in cinema. ‘What we call temporal structure, or direct
time-image, clearly goes beyond the purely empirical succession of time – past-
present-future. It is, for example, a coexistence of distinct durations’ (Deleuze
1989: xii). In Resnais’ films, Deleuze observed, ‘the present begins to float, struck
with uncertainty’ (Deleuze 1989: 116). This is a definitively post-war French cinema,
marked by both the Occupation and the ghosts of the contemporaneous Algerian
conflict, Naomi Greene suggests, as we watch ‘numbed survivors chained to the
past by remembered trauma’ (Greene 1999: 32).
The structural and visual ambiguities of Last Year in Marienbad make it a cipher
text, designed to drive its spectator into an interpretive frenzy. In a vast mansion
and grounds, populated by barely animate aristocratic guests, the man X sets
about persuading the woman A that they had an intense liaison a year before,
recalling scenes in a remorseless, hypnotic discourse as the camera glides cease-
lessly through the corridors and rooms. She at first claims to have no memory of
these events, but she either begins to remember fragments of this affair or suc-
cumbs to X’s hypnotic suggestion and imagines flashes of a possible affair, played
out with the clichés of snatched meetings, jealous husbands, guns and threats.
Any visual or narrative distinction between past and present or reality and fantasy
is soon abolished; there is no story to reorganize into a linear sequence, only the
plot spoken by X’s circling, suffocating discourse. Labyrinths, mirrors, and trompe
l’oeil effects visually repeat this confusion. The temporal disorientation of the
spectator is complete: whilst the gliding and softly dissolving tracking shots sug-
gest linearity and continuity, there is no definitive way to parse the temporal
grammar of the film. There are no flashbacks in Marienbad because that requires
188 Cultural symptoms
orientation in time. Resnais thus formally abolishes Hiroshima Mon Amour’s innovation.
Instead, narrative is frozen into hellish cycles of repetition.
Early interpretations tended to follow Robbe-Grillet’s focus on male desire, a
discourse that drives obsessively and sadistically at its object. Lacanian interpre-
tations offer a neat fit (helped along by the delightful fact that Lacan delivered his
lecture on ‘The Mirror Stage’ to the International Psychoanalytic Association
when it met at Marienbad in 1936). X works to impose a fantasy on A, contain-
ing the Other’s desire. When she begins to concur, however, this fantasy imposi-
tion collapses and disturbing images begin to cut into the smooth gliding
discourse of male fantasy. This reading renders A the rather passive object of X’s
discourse, perhaps encouraged by Delphine Seyrig’s extraordinary statuesque –
indeed petrified – performance.
Other interpretations, however, pick out Resnais’ one major departure from an
otherwise meticulous faithfulness to Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay. Resnais did not
film this: ‘A fairly quick and brutal rape scene … A struggles, but without any
effect. She opens her mouth as if she is going to scream; but X, leaning over her,
quickly gags her with a small piece of her underwear he had in his other hand’
(Robbe-Grillet, cited E. Wilson 2006: 79). In the film, this is replaced by a repet-
itive jolting edit in a violently overlit corridor as the camera travels towards A’s
open embrace only to be continually thrown back by a jump cut repeated several
times. T. Jefferson Kline reinterprets the film from A’s perspective and inside the
trauma paradigm: A is a post-traumatic abuse victim, frozen in affect, subject to
alarming visions of violence and death the moment X is seen (or fantasized) near
her bedroom. Seyrig’s petrification and languor now take on a different aspect:
‘all communicate the impairment of her mechanism of self-protection, coupled
with a repetition compulsion with respect to abusive relationships’ (Kline 1992:
77–8). X is not necessarily a rapist in this scenario, merely one of a sequence of
obscurely threatening men. There is another clue for Kline in the way Resnais
adds a further detail to the screenplay by naming the play that is being dully
enacted in the opening scenes: Rosmer. Ibsen’s Rosmersholm concerns a woman’s
decline from confident rule over a household, prompted by an obscure realization
and debilitating guilt that Freud interpreted (in ‘Some Character-Types Met with
in Psycho-Analytic Work’ in 1916) as a belated realization of an incestuous rela-
tion with her father. The film thus re-enacts the fractured temporal experience of
the trauma victim, bleakly refusing to dramatize any resolution of occluded mem-
ories, and offering only a deadened, post-traumatic world of fragment and repe-
tition. It is a long way from the teasing surfaces and anti-psychological thrust of
Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman style to this depth-model of the buried traumatic
secret. As early as 1963, Peter Cowie had recognized the significance of the miss-
ing rape scene covered up by this ‘traumatic sequence’ (Cowie 1963: 149), yet
Kline’s reinterpretation becomes much more available with the consolidation of
the trauma paradigm in the early 1990s.
Muriel is subtitled The Time of a Return, which might serve as another name for the
traumatic flashback. Instead, the film remains steadfastly in the narrative present,
refusing the complex time shifts of either Hiroshima or Marienbad. In its entrapment
 Trauma and narrative cinema 189
in the present, Muriel has been called ‘an anti-memory film’ (Monaco 1978: 89).
Resnais advances by once more forbidding himself a signature technique:
Marienbad’s gliding tracking shots are also abolished. The most striking element of
the formal design is the rapid cutting that shreds some scenes into a disorienting
clutter of isolated instants. The evocation of post-war Boulogne, for instance, splices
together random takes of the old and new town, mixing up day and night scenes,
ignoring temporal markers and deleting the role of the establishing shot to organ-
ize on-screen space. The narrative similarly wrong-foots expectations. At first, the
‘return’ appears to be the visit of Alphonse to Hélène; as in Hiroshima, they were
involved in a passionate war-time love affair that began in 1939. Yet Alphonse
brings his ‘niece’ (self-evidently his mistress) and his claims about his war-time and
post-war life are eventually revealed as lies. Hélène seems equally indifferent to their
shared past, whilst her step-son, Bernard, is actively hostile to the visitors. It is
Bernard’s recent return from war service in Algeria that shifts the focus of the film
from one war to another. He announces early on that he is visiting Muriel, a girl
who might or might not be sick, and might or might not be his fiancée. Later we are
offered a rapid montage of his notebooks, photos and diaries with elliptical com-
ments about Muriel. Exactly half-way through the film, Bernard runs footage of his
time in Algeria through a projector: banal scenes of soldiers messing around in the
sand. His voice-over, however, details the torture of an Algerian woman the soldiers
name ‘Muriel’, who is kicked, punched, ‘split open like a sack of potatoes’ and who
dies after thirty hours of torture led by Bernard’s commanding officer. The visual
ellipsis might have had to do with strict French government censorship of repre-
sentations of the Algerian War: the film was made in 1962, although released after the
war had finished. Yet the disjuncture of image and voice-over formally invokes the
unrepresentable. This is not film but ‘proof ’, Bernard insists, to his step-mother – who
inadvertently burns the film in the projector. Once the sound recording of the tor-
ture is compromised too, Bernard performs an incoherent act of expiation by shooting
his commanding officer, just returned from the war. In the closing scene, however,
Resnais and Cayrol again slide one traumatic event over another. Comforting
Bernard, Hélène recalls a moment from the boy’s wartime childhood, when he was
jolted awake by a direct hit from a German (?) bomb that destroyed his bedroom
ceiling (and, we are left to speculate, killed his mother). Hélène gently corrects
Bernard’s recall of crucial details in this scene, yet this is a woman who is always dis-
tracted and disinterested in the past: ‘Forgive me, I forget everything’. The uncer-
tainty of one recalled event seems to infect another; Bernard’s motivations seem at
once over- and under-determined. In Muriel trauma inheres not in the burden of
the past but in the unanchored and indeterminate present. This seemed to be
Cayrol’s aim: ‘I am not interested in the events themselves but in what happens
afterwards. Not the departure, but the return’ (Cayrol cited E. Wilson 2006: 87).
La Guerre est Finie experiments with the anticipatory flash forward, splicing pos-
sible futures into the narrative present. This is a new means to unbalance specta-
tors, leaving them in an always already belated relation to meaningful story. This
device reaffirmed Resnais’ Modernist commitment to constant reinvention of cin-
ematic time. Hiroshima Mon Amour created the traumatic flashback, but subsequent
190 Cultural symptoms
films each formally eschewed what Deleuze dismissed as ‘the false piety of the
recollection-image’ (Deleuze 1989: 122), exploring instead the multiple facets of
the ‘time-image’.
For David Bordwell, early Resnais possesses the signature style of the ‘art-
cinema mode’ that appeared in post-war Europe and was formulated as a delib-
erate counter-reaction to the dominance of Hollywood classical narration. In
art-cinema, plot has priority whilst story exposition is delayed or completely
deferred, leaving permanent gaps in the narrative. Time signatures are manipu-
lated, and the artifice of filmic composition is foregrounded to disrupt any spec-
tatorial absorption (see Bordwell 1985). This is the cinema routinely described as
Modernist and Resnais seems to confirm an intrinsic link of this form to the
(im)possibility of narrating trauma in film. Yet there is also a sense of the intrin-
sic transmissibility of trauma in Resnais’ work: one site (Hiroshima or Algeria)
seems to invoke another (Nevers or Boulogne). This confirms, for me, the sense
that trauma does not only stall narrative but compels narration too, becoming a site
for the intensive production of story. This sense of overdetermined cinematic nar-
rative that slides one site of trauma under another is also a device repeatedly seen
in Atom Egoyan’s films.
Atom Egoyan is an Armenian–Canadian director and artist whose avant-garde
work in the 1980s has been succeeded by a sequence of films that explore post-
traumatic conditions by combining formal experiment with the pleasures of nar-
rative cinema. Exotica (1994), his breakthrough film, distributed by big Hollywood
player Miramax in America, began a loose trilogy that included The Sweet Hereafter
(1997) and Felicia’s Journey (1999). These concerned childhood and communal
traumas of complex kinds, each film touching sometimes very obliquely on incest.
In Ararat (2002), Egoyan addressed the historical event that had always hovered at
the edges of his work from the beginning: the Armenian genocide in Eastern
Anatolia during the First World War, events from which his grandparents had
escaped as sole survivors of large families. In these films (only a partial record of
a prodigious output of work in different media), Egoyan has developed a particu-
lar device that opens out the traumatic flashback or narrative anachrony into a
new kind of storytelling technique. This might be termed the mosaic, after
Romney’s use of the term in his study of Egoyan. The films open with short
scenes of disparate figures that are only slowly brought together into a discern-
able pattern. These fragments can be disparate in time as well as space and the
viewer has to work to organize them into meaningful relations and chronological
sequence. It can take time to attribute recurrent sequences to particular charac-
ters; the tiles of the mosaic can float unanchored in the overall design, disturbing
the building of story. The last enigmatic pieces of the mosaic are often delayed
until the closing moments in regressive endings where the final pattern recasts the
significance of every relation in the film. This structure of belated or retrospec-
tive narrative understanding is of course perfect for conveying the afterwardsness
of post-traumatic affect. It extends beyond the capacities of the subjective trau-
matic flashback, the modular narrative ‘offering a series of disarticulated narra-
tive pieces, often arranged in radically achronological ways via flashforwards,
 Trauma and narrative cinema 191
overt repetition, or a destabilization of the relationship between past and present’
(Cameron 2006: 65). ‘You may not feel it, but you’re in a state of shock’, Noah
Render repeatedly tells his clients in The Adjuster (1991), a man who believes
he can value and compensate for every loss. The disarticulated mosaic of narra-
tive puts the spectator in a similar state, struggling always belatedly to build a
workable whole from a jumble of obscure elements.
Egoyan places himself in the avant-garde, auteur tradition (Resnais is a key
influence alongside Bergman, Godard and Antonioni). His early films critiqued
the lure of the image and disrupted narrative pleasure: the society of the specta-
cle, Egoyan said, had placed selves in an environment where they now were ‘com-
pletely overwhelmed’ (Egoyan and Virilio 1993: 107). Family Viewing (1987) and
Speaking Parts (1989) explored video technology as a new prosthesis less of com-
munity and memory than of isolation and structured forgetting. These works
were alienated and alienating, giving Egoyan a reputation as a cold ‘strategist’
(a term he preferred to director). Yet the films were valued as a counter-cinema
that stood against ‘easy kind of emotional investment’ and ‘the cacophonous
static of popular entertainment’ (Pevere 1995: 16 and 41). It was also part of a
diasporic cinema, countering the homogenization of Hollywood by exploring
post-colonial and other exilic identities, a particularly important stance in
Canadian film-making. Some critics have therefore been suspicious of Egoyan’s
move since the 1990s to combine formal experiment with more conventional
films: he now works with rather than against ‘immediately cathartic emotional
discharge’ of popular cinema (Romney 2003: 14). Yet this is not some craven
abandonment: Egoyan recognizes that narrative form and affective identification
is the default from which traumatic disruptions generate their most transforma-
tive effects on the spectator.
Let’s look at the quartet of films that starts with Exotica. Exotica is a mosaic of
characters that are constellated around a strip-club in downtown Toronto.
Structured as a striptease, the narrative gradually unveils a network of relations,
leaving a last revelation about the exotic dancer, Christina, until the closing scene.
The spectator at first can discern only structural parallels between short, elliptical
units of narrative. Thomas, a gay man who smuggles exotic birds into the country,
hits upon a ritual of picking up men by scalping ballet tickets, encounters that
begin and end with the exchange of money. These scenes are intercut with
Francis, a regular visitor to the Exotica club, where he pays for a private dance
from Christina, always dressed as a school-girl. The ritual ends when the strip
becomes too revealing and Francis escapes to the wash-room, overcome with dis-
tress. This is closely observed by the DJ, Eric, who pours a seductive discourse into
the club’s PA system about a school-girl’s ‘special innocence’, playing to generic
male fantasies. Eric’s evident over-investment in the transaction between
Christina and Francis is patrolled by the anxious Madame of the establishment,
who has only recently inherited the club after her mother’s death. Later, Francis
pays off a young girl in his car at the end of the night. What seems to be another
sexual arrangement is actually the second part of the ritual: he is paying his niece
for babysitting for his nights at the club. Predatory behaviour is disarmed by his
192 Cultural symptoms
farewell: ‘Say hi to your dad’. The spectator has to shuffle the relations again,
speculate on another way of patterning the scenes.
Further disorientation comes with another brief and apparently wholly dis-
connected scene: a bright, lush field of tall grass, overlit compared to the dark
interiors of Exotica, with a row of figures advancing from the horizon. It seems
to be a memory – it is in fact the first flashback to a traumatic scene that will recur
five times and develop with each return – yet is difficult to attribute it to a partic-
ular character, since in this first encounter we cut to it from Eric but cut away
from it to Francis. Each time this scene recurs, subjective attribution is impossible
to decide. The traumatic flashbacks seem to float dissociatively between characters:
‘it is impossible to determine who “owns” them’ (Romney 2003: 116).
The film’s backbone is the structural repetition of ritualistic behaviour (we are
taken through such a night four times), but the disparate characters are pulled into
relation in intervening scenes and the resonances therefore grow with each repe-
tition. On the penultimate night Francis, now barred from the club, has to ask
Thomas to replace him for the private dance, and it is Christina who tells him the
story of Francis. He is locked in a compulsive ritual since the murder of his
daughter (found dead in her school uniform). Briefly suspected of the murder by
the police, given motive by being taunted that his daughter is not his own but
fathered by his brother in an affair with his wife, the strip-club ritual seems to
stage a scenario in which Francis can test whether his desire could ever have cor-
rupted his protective paternalism. ‘How could somebody even think of doing
something like that?’ he has asked Christina in glassy-eyed horror over and over
again. Meanwhile his niece sits in his empty home, babysitting his lost child.
The horror of this revelation gives Francis backstory: he is an auditor who has
accumulated losses he can no longer calculate. But the ripples of this traumatic
narrative spread wider: Eric, the DJ, found the body on the search-party to which
we flash back. His menacing behaviour, his breaking-up of Francis’ ritual at the
club, is rewritten as an attempt to smash the post-traumatic fixation that binds
them all to rehearsing the girl’s death. That Christina met Eric for the first time
in the search-party apparently links her to this revelation, but the film ends with
an entirely different history between Francis and Christina. Years before, a caring
and nurturing Francis drives the awkward adolescent Christina home from
babysitting his daughter. Merely by hints and silences, her ‘troubles at home’ are
made to seem portentous and in the final shot of the film a static camera stays at
the end of the garden path and watches her become dwarfed by her house and
reluctantly swallowed by her front door. Some critics call this an evocation of
‘unspecified damage’ (Romney 2003: 124), but others are more confident:
‘Christina is a character who has been abused within a family context’ (E. Wilson
2003: 32) or ‘she is being sexually abused by her father’ (Masterson 2002: 884).
This last link finally rewrites the whole dance from her perspective: since the rit-
ual demands that the lap-dancer cannot be touched, Francis can remain the
benign father-figure she idealized as a young girl even within this degraded mon-
etary and sexual transaction. This explains her devastation when Francis is tricked
into touching her: the ideal father has fallen into traumatic history. Only at the
 Trauma and narrative cinema 193
very end of the film, then, can the viewer retrospectively navigate the multiple
traumatic resonances that are condensed into the rituals of the dance.
Egoyan offers many signals for navigation between these short narrative units:
explanation is only delayed, never entirely refused. Unlike the severe Modernist
disruption of visual pleasure, Exotica rewards its viewer by finally organizing its
tiles into a highly determined (even overdetermined) closure. This act of comple-
tion has been regarded as ‘a commitment to the preservation of the symbolic
order’ that renders the film ‘merely sad – and safe’ (Schwartz 2003: 110–1). Yet
the flashback scenes are never safely fixed in place. They hover between charac-
ters, as if the camera keeps such an intolerable event ‘outside’ any particular point
of view or subjective memory, as if the camera, in fact, modelled dissociated trau-
matic memory. It is in the filmic narrative itself, then, that community is found
between these disparate, post-traumatic people. This is the cinematic device
Egoyan hits upon and explains how even the greater temporal and spatial
disruptions of The Sweet Hereafter found commercial success.
The Sweet Hereafter won Egoyan prizes in Cannes and two Oscar nominations,
including Best Director. It was his first adapted screenplay, taken from Russell
Banks’ novel. The title names a post-traumatic condition: a small town devastated
by a school-bus accident that kills nearly all of the children on board. The narra-
tive is initially focalized through Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer who travels to the
town to persuade the parents to initiate a class action. Like Noah in The Adjuster,
Stephens has his own stock phrases for comforting the bereaved, radiating pro-
fessional calm. Like the adjuster or auditor in Exotica, Stephens is another profes-
sional who believes losses can be calculated and properly recompensed, even as
his own accounts with his heroin-addicted daughter run out of control. Egoyan
opens the film with the same mosaic structure, moving between initially uncon-
nected figures. The innovation is a temporal shuffling of narrative units, too: we
constantly move between events before the crash, the morning of the crash itself
(built up through the points of view of different witnesses), the devastating
aftermath, and a flight that Stephens takes two years after these events, where he
narrates the story of the loss of his daughter to addiction. Threaded through
these elements is the story of Nicole, the surviving girl from the accident, now
paralysed, the potential star witness for the negligence class action.
The film heads inexorably towards the crash itself, which is staged half-way
through the film and is presented from an austere distance, dwarfed by the
immensity of the winter landscape, the children’s screams barely audible as the
bus sinks through the ice. Yet this convulsion, because of the shuffled time-
scheme, is juxtaposed with two other revelations that adjust the centre of the nar-
rative. First, the depiction of the crash and its immediate aftermath is split by
moving forward two years to Stephens’ extraordinary account of his daughter’s
near death from a spider bite when she was a baby. This binds in a free-floating
set of images that have haunted the narrative from the beginning – a vision of
sleeping parents and young child that seems to hover as an emblem of innocence
and plenitude but which is now recast as a pre-catastrophic instant of bliss.
Stephens has to carry his child to hospital prepared at any moment to perform an
194 Cultural symptoms
emergency tracheotomy with a blunt knife, a violence that would also be an act
of love. This impossible conjuncture seems to corrupt his entire relationship to his
daughter, shattering their slumbering idyll. The lawyer’s drive to deny accident,
attribute blame, recompense lost children, is prospectively laid bare. The second
revelation comes before the crash and is retrospective: Nicole, who will survive the
crash, is led by her father into a barn where they embrace in an incestuous act.
No wonder when Nicole wakes in the hospital after the accident her father’s first
words to her are: ‘Don’t even try to remember’. From this point, the film largely
shifts focalization to Nicole, leading to her decision to scupper her father’s hopes
of compensation by lying about the cause of the accident. Once again, one
trauma slides over another: Nicole’s private act of agency starts to redress the
public fracture of community around the accident.
Egoyan noted that ‘Exotica ended with a young woman walking towards her
house. With this film we go inside’ (cited Romney 2003: 135). He has revealed in
interview an interest in the effects of incest since dating someone as a teenager
that he later discovered was being sexually abused. In the exotic dancer Christina,
he aimed to explore how an abused person ‘makes a parody of their own sexual
identity as a means of trying to convince themselves that that part of themselves
which has been destroyed is somehow not as vital as it is’ (Egoyan 1995: 47). The
brief scene of Nicole and her father in The Sweet Hereafter is highly stylized, even
romanticized. They are surrounded by candles and soft light and the camera
chastely swoops up into the rafters in a camera move repeated throughout the
film, as if seeking transcendence or merely wishing to sway away from regarding
disaster. Egoyan wanted to avoid the clichéd representation of abuse and to con-
vey the blurred confusions of love felt by the child in the abusive relationship. In
a short essay called ‘Recovery’, Egoyan argued that ‘any child who is sexually
abused must create some fantasy, however distorted, that will ease the pain of this
violent transgressive act’ (Egoyan 1997: 21). The placement of this scene in the
mosaic does not allow the viewer to process its implications, as the bus crash
comes hard on its heels. The spectator, in Egoyan’s narrative design, therefore
lives out the central thematic of the film: ‘the politics of denial’ (Egoyan 1997:
23). Thus public and private trauma converge in her deliberate lie at the legal pre-
hearing. Nicole foregrounds how narrative itself is restorative even if untrue, as
she stares her father down: ‘I remember this. I do now. Now that I’m telling it’.
Egoyan overdetermines the film by the additional use of Browning’s poem,
‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, read by Nicole on the night before the accident as
a bed-time story told to two children who will die the next day. As a voice-over
reiterated heavy-handedly over the second half of the film, it hammers home the
obvious parallels of lost children and the lame sole survivor, but is presumably
inserted as scaffolding in fear that in the temporal shuffling the audience will lose
the pattern.
Felicia’s Journey is considerably less innovative, perhaps because it was the first
project Egoyan took from another production company rather than developing
on his own. Nevertheless, the film layers different kinds of flashback to construct
the psychology of the serial killer Hilditch. The audience soon knows that Felicia,
 Trauma and narrative cinema 195
the vulnerable Irish Catholic teenager that Hilditch befriends in her search for her
boyfriend, is to be the next victim in a long line of ‘lost girls’, usually prostitutes,
that he videotapes in his car. In his final confession to Felicia, he claims that he
sends each one to sleep as they begin to struggle away from his suffocating care,
although there is no violence depicted on screen. True to other serial killer con-
ventions since Psycho, however, Hilditch is the product of maternal abuse: if the
baroque dramas of demonic serial killers draw attention away from everyday sta-
tistics of murder, as Sarah Knox (1998) argues, they also tend to wave the fetish
of the perverse mother to hide paternal abuse. Hilditch is completely stuck in
time, slave to his mother’s memory, actualized in the video recordings of her early
1960s television cookery programmes that he watches and acts out compulsively.
Video’s role as familial prosthetic memory has been central to Egoyan’s work from
Next of Kin (1984); in Felicia’s Journey it also captures the humiliation of the boy Joey
Hilditch, his mother’s hapless cookery assistant. Egoyan Gothicizes this suffocat-
ing mother: the scratchy pixellation of video feeds into another order of child-
hood memory, represented by garish colour-saturated film-stock redolent of home
movies. These passages are heightened evocations of the devouring mother: Joey
attends the opera Salomé under his mother’s tutelage, confused by the erotic kiss
the dancer plants on the severed head of John the Baptist. This grand guignol
mother wears her debts to Hitchcock heavily but Hilditch also fits into Egoyan’s
investigation of children who have been used and abused by narcissistic adults.
There is a confusing kind of redemption promised in the line ‘The healing will
commence, the pain will wash away’ that transfers from a belligerent evangelical
Christian to Hilditch and finally to Felicia, each time changing meaning in the
kind of modulated repetition that Egoyan favours. However, the film’s relative lin-
earity, with clearly demarcated flashbacks, contributes to a flatness of affect.
Felicia’s Journey is designed to draw the sting of Hitchcockian suspense and manip-
ulation, but does so rather too well.
From the suffocating interiors of English suburban horror, Egoyan’s Ararat
returns to public history and the mosaic narrative. Indeed, the pressure of repre-
senting the Armenian genocide extends almost to breaking point Egoyan’s signa-
ture devices of initially undetermined relations between characters, rapid time
shifts and different levels of image status. This is perhaps appropriate: the film
communicates a conflicted sense of urgency and over-choreographed design that
reinforces the central concern with how to represent a genocidal act that continues
to be aggressively denied by the Turkish state. Lisa Sirganian has convincingly dis-
played how Egoyan’s early films, particularly Family Viewing, allegorize the fragility
of memory in the Armenian diaspora, but Ararat was the first direct address.
There are three main strands to Ararat. In the first, the film director Edward
Saroyan (played by prominent Armenian, Charles Aznavour) is finally making the
film of the genocide he promised to his mother. The film-within-a-film provides
a set of quotation marks around the restaged scenes of atrocity: illusion is consis-
tently broken by panning to film crews and glimpsing the back-stories of the lead
actors. The Ararat that is premiered inside the film is a genocide melodrama, the
ghost of Schindler’s List. There is an implicit critique of the economies of truth and
196 Cultural symptoms
pleasure in such epics, yet the status of these scenes shifts according to where they
are placed in the mosaic. They can also serve as straight historical record rather
than problematic reconstruction, important representations of something that has
been systematically erased. In this I think the film resists the default objections to
Spielberg, although critics have inevitably seen Ararat as a riposte to the ‘danger-
ous passivity’ of Schindler’s List (Siraganian 2007: 148). The second strand con-
cerns the art historian Ani, a specialist in the work of genocide-survivor Arshile
Gorky, whose ‘Mother and Child’ memorial painting is for Ani the repository of
Armenian history, a monument to a lost culture and diasporic melancholia. Her
lectures prompt scenes from Gorky’s studio in 1934 and within that his flashbacks
to his mother in the years before the forced marches, starvation and deaths. Gorky
is worked melodramatically into the film-within-a-film with evident fabrication,
making it tricky to determine the exact status of these different levels of cinematic
reconstruction of Armenian history. Ani has two children by different fathers,
who are involved in an incestuous relationship. Celia eventually slashes at Gorky’s
painting in a refusal of personal and collective traumatic history. Raffi, however,
travels to Turkey and shoots his own actual footage of the ruins of his civilization
to reconnect with his heritage. The video diary we glimpse is self-evidently a
counter-cinema to the epic on which Saroyan works. In the third strand, Raffi is
interrogated about the content of his film canisters at Canadian border control,
restaging at another level the question of testimony, truth and representation. If
the customs officer cannot be persuaded that the cans contain film, they will be
opened and the record destroyed. It is here that Ararat becomes less about the
events of the massacres than ‘how the genocide is mediated by the various reac-
tions to later interpretations of this testimony by later generations’ (Tschofen and
Burwell 2007: 126).
The rapid movements across these three narrative strands ensure that multiple
frames surround the worst atrocities depicted directly. Raffi reads out testimony
to the customs officer; we see the oral report of this testimony staged in the film;
we are allowed glimpses of the slaughter itself, witnessed by the fictional Gorky,
but this scene is followed by the ‘real’ Gorky remembering these atrocities as he
works over his unfinishable painting of his mother. Levels of the mediation of
trauma are thus constantly shifting: cinema and counter-cinema, the possible and
the impossible, flicker on screen in near simultaneity.
The weight of responsibility to represent and the counterweight of anxiety
about cinematic representation renders Ararat a little airless, but overwhelming
affect is here evidently kept in check by rigid structural and narrative design.
There is something frozen in all of Egoyan’s cinema, but this is precisely what
makes it timely. His numbed or deadened characters, alienated from each other
by technology and caught in compulsive repetitions, dramatize the post-traumatic
subjectivity, whilst his narrative mosaics evoke post-traumatic community.
That Egoyan takes the formal cinematic experiments of Resnais beyond the
confines of art-cinema and into mainstream cinema is not a betrayal of Modernist
integrity: it is testament to transmissibility of trauma narrative. Whilst Egoyan
remains rooted in an independent cinema and is ultimately suspicious of the allure
 Trauma and narrative cinema 197
of spectacle, David Lynch works his effects by an embrace of fascination with the
cinematic image.
Lynch took several years struggling to complete his underground film Eraserhead
(1977), yet three years later The Elephant Man (1980) received eight Oscar nomi-
nations and the Hollywood mainstream rushed to embrace his authentically
Surrealist vision. The financial and critical catastrophe of Dune (1984) has meant
that Lynch has subsequently worked mainly in the independent sector, yet he cre-
ated a commercial network television hit with Twin Peaks (1990–1). Confusingly
enough, the lush cinematic experimental narrative of Mulholland Dr. (2001) was
built from the elements of a cancelled ABC television series, the same text cutting
across commercial and avant-garde categories.
Lynch contributes to a cinema of trauma with his attention to overwhelming
emotional display enhanced by manipulations of film form. Lynch’s world is
utterly polarized between light and dark: anxiety, dread and exorbitant displays
of grief are juxtaposed with comedy, laughter and unembarrassed declaration of
love. Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire (2006) foreground the apparatus of Hollywood
cinema itself for generating these extremes of seduction and terror. Although
Lynch edges into many genres, the representation and generation of primal emo-
tions suggests he principally uses melodrama, ‘a mode of high emotionalism and
stark ethical conflict’ between exaggerated figures of good and evil (Brooks 1995:
12). Although associated with the alleged crudity of low culture, Peter Brooks
argues that the melodramatic mode cuts across diverse forms: ‘Perhaps melo-
drama alone is adequate to contemporary psychic affect’, he suggests. ‘It has the
flexibility, the multifariousness, to dramatize and explicate life in imaginative
forms that transgress traditional generic constraints, and the traditional demarca-
tions of high culture from popular entertainment’ (Brooks 1995: xii). In Lynch,
traumatic affect travels through this melodramatic vector, far beyond the strictures
of Modernist technique.
Since The Grandmother (1970), Lynch has focused on extreme representations of
the family romance. The father barks and threatens violence, the mother veers
between depressive silence, indifference and weirdly seductive manoeuvres, so
that the bed-wetting boy generates a fantastical surrogate grandparent. The com-
fort she offers is short-lived. This primal scenario is repeated and modulated many
times. Eraserhead roils with male dread about female reproduction. The sickly,
mewling child that Henry fathers binds him to another dysfunctional family and
leaves him obscurely menaced by devouringly seductive neighbours. Henry
escapes into the fantasy world that opens up behind his radiator. Merrick in The
Elephant Man has two fathers, the brutal freak show owner Bytes and his rescuer
Dr Treves, who nevertheless horrifies himself by developing a middle-class freak
show of his own. Merrick idealizes mothers, weeping openly at displays of nor-
mal family life and fetishizing his own absent mother’s photograph (despite the
obvious assumption that she must have abandoned her monstrous offspring). The
fantasy of family generates extraordinary excesses of sentiment in the film, espe-
cially given its fragile proximity to the abuses Merrick undergoes at the hospital
every night. Treves’ tears when he first sees Merrick, a mix of pity and awe, are
198 Cultural symptoms
meant to trigger those of the audience. ‘It’s like a yawn’, Lynch says of the tears
that soak his work: ‘it transfers over’ (Rodley 2005: 167). Blue Velvet (1986) is
another rendition of this family romance. The film opens with Jeffrey’s father
struck down by a heart attack, and with his mother passive and virtually silent
throughout, the boy soon finds alluring and dangerous surrogate parents in
Dorothy Vallens and Frank Booth, played in exaggerated, expressionistic mode by
Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper. Melodramatic polarizations structure
everything in the film, condensed ultimately into the opposition between Sandy,
Jeffrey’s blonde girlfriend whose gauche innocence is always on the point of cur-
dling, and Dorothy, the older femme fatale, a dark and eroticized mother-figure
(as Michel Chion (2006) notes, she is another in a long line of severely depressed
mothers in Lynch’s work). Jeffrey plays out the Oedipal relation through these sur-
rogates in starkly literal terms before returning, queasily, to small-town familial
normality with parents and saccharine girlfriend restored in idyllic domesticity.
Using Dominick LaCapra’s helpful distinction, it might appear that Lynch is
interested less in specific, historical losses than in general, structural absences – that
is, in the foundational trauma of what it means to be a subject rather than any
locatable historical condition. Lynch sometimes seems in such close proximity to
the primal conflicts described by psychoanalysis (another form of melodrama,
Brooks proposes), that commentary in that vein can seem redundant. From The
Grandmother to Blue Velvet, the films can easily be interpreted as exploring what
Freud called ‘the sexual researches of children’ in his Three Essays on Sexuality.
These researches produce different fantasies of origin – about where the child
comes from (fantastical theories of reproduction), about the sexual act (misrecog-
nized as a violent attack), and about the origins of sexual difference (misunder-
stood as castration). The famous scene of voyeurism in Blue Velvet is like a
text-book navigation through the primal scene as described by the psychoanalysts
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis in ‘Fantasy and the Origins of
Sexuality’. Through the slats of a bedroom cupboard, Jeffrey sees his ‘parents’
engaged in an incomprehensible act by turns sexual and violent and mixed up
with incoherent fantasies of birthing (the patch of blue velvet is at once comfort
blanket, erotic tactile object and a surrogate umbilical cord). Identities are mobile,
Frank and Dorothy moving between dominance and submission, adult and child,
ritual and chance. Once Jeffrey is drawn into the scene, the scopic control of
voyeurism collapses and he enters the mobile position of the primal scene, which
Laplanche and Pontalis call ‘a scenario with multiple entries’. ‘The original fan-
tasy’, they suggest, ‘is characterized by the absence of subjectivization, and the
subject is present in the scene: the child, for instance, is one character amongst
many’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1986: 22). Lynch’s scene thus stages Jeffrey’s trau-
matic entry into the dynamics of sexualized subjectivity, in a way that might have
been scripted by cultural theory. Latterly, Lynch’s work has also been the occasion
for Slavoj Žižek to illustrate Lacan’s theory of the subject. Lynch’s polarized uni-
verse, where two worlds clash, dramatizes the discordance between everyday real-
ity, held together in a functional coherence by fantasy, and the proximity of the
traumatic Real that obtrudes through the veneer of normality in disgusting and
 Trauma and narrative cinema 199
terrifying ways (see Žižek 1994, 2000). In the same framework, Todd McGowan
suggests Lynch systematically probes the compensations of fantasy: ‘if we escape
at all in Lynch’s cinema, we escape into the trauma that remains hidden but
nevertheless structures the outside world’ (McGowan 2007: 24).
These readings produce varying levels of insight, since they ultimately redou-
ble Lynch’s avowed interest in primal fantasies. But if the work is held to be about
the foundational trauma that brings the subject into being, it loses purchase on the
historical, as LaCapra suggests, because it becomes an indifferent and generalized
structure (LaCapra 1999). Lynch nonetheless had a considerable role in the consol-
idation of the trauma paradigm, which I would argue was historically specific and
centred on the phenomenal global impact of Twin Peaks in 1990–1. Lynch’s work
develops from this point, his cinema afterwards pivoting around post-traumatic,
anachronic disturbances to narrative.
Twin Peaks, created for ABC by Lynch and the TV-writer Mark Frost, ran for
twenty-nine episodes over two series (five pivotal episodes were directed by Lynch
himself). Lynch was interested in the way a television serial could at once slow down
and open out narrative time compared to the confines of film. The mythos
remained distinctly Lynchian. The traumatic murder of Laura Palmer takes place
in an idyllic small-town American world, where every eccentricity is normalized.
The very name, Twin Peaks, invokes maternal comfort and a world of oral satis-
faction is implied by the communal obsession with doughnuts and cherry pie. Ben
and Jerry Horne, named for ice cream, puff on outsized pipes and obsess about
gourmet food. This plenitude is wrenched apart by the aching loss of the town’s
homecoming queen, Laura Palmer. The pilot was watched by one-third of the
American viewing public, and the first season produced crazes in America, Britain
and Japan. After the main murder plot was resolved in episode sixteen (under pres-
sure from channel executives), audiences dramatically declined and the series was
cancelled. The last episode, rewritten by Lynch, refused closure by ending on a dra-
matic reversal. The subsequent film, Fire Walk with Me (1992) confounded expecta-
tions and was therefore reviled: it did not finish things, but looped back obliquely to
the start, rehearsing the last days of Laura Palmer and setting out to kill her all over
again, the violence this time unconstrained by strict television guidelines.
The series was originally received as a stylish postmodern pastiche. It adopted
the tropes of the detective series, but Kyle MacLachlan’s pristine and preppy FBI
Special Agent Dale Cooper displaced the bureaucratic rationality of police pro-
cedure for reliance on dreams, visions, and clues delivered by logs, dwarves, talk-
ative mynah birds and giants on the basis of an intuitive method developed from
Tibetan Buddhism. Surrealist juxtaposition – always intended to derange rational
order – saturated the mise en scène. The episodes were stuffed with sly Hollywood
references and replete with all the cliff-hanger endings, petty secrets and charac-
ter reversals typical of soap opera. Characters periodically watched a dire soap-
within-a-soap called Invitation to Love in the first series, presumed to act as a sort of
homeopathic inoculation against the low culture it parodied.
Seeing Twin Peaks as pastiche seems a striking misrecognition now: what
impresses is the wrenching authenticity of the emotional spectacle of the series. The
200 Cultural symptoms
season gripped from the start because it stopped to explore exorbitant expressions
of grief in almost intolerable proximity and length. The pilot episode tracked the
transmission of the news of Laura’s death from the always weeping Deputy Andy,
standing over the discovered body, to the first agonies of the parents, brilliantly
staged, and the empty chair at school that provokes a wave of tears from Laura’s
best friend Donna Hayward all the way to the School Principal. In Lynch’s typi-
cal yoking of opposites, heightened declarations of love were also present, multi-
plying the sickly sweet scene between Jeffrey and Sandy in Blue Velvet many times
over in the different character strands of the soap opera format. Žižek is right ‘to
assert the absolute necessity of taking these excessive figures absolutely seriously’
(Žižek 2000: 19). However, affective identification was always complicated by the
weird or comical juxtaposition. Leland Palmer’s expressions of grief have him
riding up and down on his daughter’s coffin lift or dancing compulsively to big
band music whilst confused tourists mimic his painful gestures of unbounded loss.
Screen space reinforced this continually with disjunctive tableaux: stuffed deer
heads in bank deposit rooms; Sea Scouts bouncing balls around a writhing one-
armed man. Again and again, extreme emotion was toppled into its opposite.
This signature device of jarring affect developed different connotations as the
series moved towards its core revelation. Beneath Laura’s typical teenage diary
(‘Asparagus for dinner again. I hate asparagus’) was a secret diary that revealed a
history of devastating molestation and abuse. The abuser is so monstrous he seems
graspable only through supernatural visions. He is first glimpsed by Laura’s
mother who, touched by the ‘little death’ of trauma, becomes a visionary. The
Gothic is openly invoked as ‘Bob’ crawls or creeps through the domestic clutter of
the defamiliarized spaces of the Palmer household, distorted into vast planes of
menace by low camera angles and wide-lenses so that Bob becomes the very
instantiation of the ‘unhomely’ (unheimlich). In one memorable moment, Bob
appears in the background of a wide angle shot of the Hayward living room and
clambers over the furniture into the camera, engulfing it in a direct assault on the
viewer’s domestic comfort. Unresolved trauma compels repetition and Laura’s
cousin Maddy (played by the same actress, Sheryl Lee) becomes the victim of Bob
in the fourteenth episode in a scene of shocking violence that rattles the very frame
of the image (slow motion and inter-cutting extended the murder to four minutes
of screen time). The episode reveals that Leland Palmer, inhabited by Bob, has
abused and murdered many girls, including his own daughter. Two episodes later,
in his dying moments, Leland recovers his memory of these events and speaks of
his own abused childhood in the language of demonic possession (‘I was just a boy.
I saw him in my dreams. He opened me and I invited him and he came inside me.
He made me do things, terrible things’). Here, at the height of the recovered
memory movement and the theory of the subject driven by an occulted traumatic
scene of childhood abuse, Twin Peaks belatedly rewrote itself into this narrative,
thus becoming a significant cultural vector for post-traumatic theory. Queasy
affect, genre slippage, supernatural trappings and Surrealist juxtaposition could be
reinterpreted as struggles to articulate the secret of intrafamilial abuse. The series
veers tonally because ‘we still lack a settled language to talk about these things
 Trauma and narrative cinema 201
“realistically”’, Diane Stevenson suggests, seeing the role of the fantastic elements
in Twin Peaks as ‘an expression of a genuine uncertainty about our understanding
of family violence’ (Stevenson 1995: 72 and 75). If melodrama loosely binds these
elements together, then it may be because that overarching form allows ‘a whole
terrain of the “unspeakable” [to] be depicted’ (Mulvey 1989: 73).
Television has been regarded by John Ellis as a forum for working through diffi-
culties, seeking means to narrativize unprocessed or ambiguous cultural problematics
through news, documentary, soap and drama (see Ellis 1999). Television’s seriality
and open-endedness encourages an unending cultural conversation. The drama-
tization of incest is hardly new – Janet Walker sees TV-movies from the 1970s
onwards as important pioneers of a trauma cinema. The domestic intimacy of
television redoubles this medium’s particular power to confront the silencing of
familial abuse. Twin Peaks was striking because it refused the traditional framing
of the issue, disguising itself and then (arguably) working to transpose the secret
it had revealed into a different register entirely.
For Diana Hume George, the series worked itself up to address father–
daughter incest but then promptly looked away, seeking refuge in myth. ‘Twin
Peaks lets [men] off the hook by reverting to a simplistic displacement to the super-
natural’, she argues (George 1995: 117). In the immediate wake of Leland
Palmer’s death, there is a reflective discussion between the stalwart good men of
the town. The sheriff can’t quite grasp that Bob is an elemental force of evil, an
obtrusion into the world that leaves Leland an entirely innocent victim: ‘I’m hav-
ing a hard time believing’. Cooper’s response is firm: ‘Harry, is it easier to believe
a man would rape and murder his own daughter? Any more comforting?’ ‘Maybe
that’s all Bob is’, Albert concurs, ‘the evil that men do’. In Sheli Ayers’ view, Bob
‘is a projection of suburban incest and bourgeois greed – a figure within an
American mythology that mystifies violent domestic energies by displacing them
onto the figure of the criminalised outsider’ (Ayers 2004: 100) Does Twin Peaks
work, like Stephen King’s Gothic turn in Gerald’s Game, to rebury a truth it had
struggled so hard to uncover?
In ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ Edgar Allen Poe proposed that the death of
a beautiful woman was ‘the most poetical subject in the world’ (Poe 1846). There is
undoubtedly something unnerving in the way Twin Peaks circles back to kill Laura
Palmer three times (counting Maddy’s murder and the film’s restaging of Laura’s
death). It is also surely intentionally disturbing that Lynch gave the job of writing
the published version of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer to his own daughter, Jennifer,
compacting further levels of family romance around the primary text. Despite his
professions of love for the character, Lynch seemed more enamoured of the dying
fall, the evocation of unbounded sadness that wrapped up narrative, mise en scène and
music into a total rendition of an affect that depended on Laura’s repetitive mur-
der. Melodrama can certainly articulate the oppressive contradictions faced by
women, but also often punishes them for any transgressive attempt at resolution, as
feminist film theory has noted (see Kaplan 2000, Mulvey 1989).
Yet there is a defence of Twin Peaks’ turn towards the supernatural and mythic
register as the series leaves behind Leland and Laura for a metaphysical struggle
202 Cultural symptoms
between White and Black Lodges deep in the mysterious, primal forest. Peter
Brooks argues that the melodramatic mode emerges in a post-sacred secular
world, but that its exaggerated emotions, gestures and emblems of good and evil
are all attempts to push beyond the bland surface of the everyday to find a hid-
den yet powerful ‘moral occult’. In terms that resonate powerfully with the vision
of Twin Peaks, ‘We want to believe, and yet cannot wholly credit, that we live on
the brink of an abyss, the domain of occult forces which … infuse an intense
meaning into the life we lead in everyday reality’ (Brooks 1995: 205). Under the
sign of this paradoxical secular sacred ‘there is a resurrection of magic and taboo,
a recognition of the diabolical forces which inhabit our world and our inner
being’ (Brooks 1995: 18–19). Laura and Leland’s journey, followed by Cooper’s
trek into the Red Room of the Black Lodge, a mythical trial of the white knight,
is thus part of the generic apparatus for a larger ethical inquiry into the way to
manage the primal energies that bind or destroy family and community. In this
way, the series does not displace the core of incest but scales up the trauma to
become an act of almost cosmic disorder. The echoes, parallels and comic shad-
owings of the central story of Twin Peaks (the triangles of Shelley, Leo and Bobby
or Andy, Dick and Lucy, the dalliance with incest between Audrey and her father,
and so on) don’t cover over the crime. Supernaturalized melodrama suffuses the
small-town with the fact of abuse; it is drenched in this post-traumatic affect.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me begins by panning out from the snow of an untuned
television, which is then axed to pieces. The confines of the box are resentfully
smashed and we are returned to the cinema to violent effect. The punishment of
the viewer continues: the film opens not in Twin Peaks but Deer Meadow, an anti-
Twin Peaks where the police are menacing, the coffee disgusting and the diner has
no specials. Some of the failings of the film might be related to this aggressive dis-
tancing from the series, but its main difficulty was the temporal paradox of the pre-
quel. Lynch must trade on the accumulated knowledge of the series yet can depict
only precursory events. Since attentive viewers know that Dale Cooper has become
trapped in the timeless time of the other-dimensional Red Room, he and other
denizens of this realm can appear ahead of time, in visions to a Laura who has
understood in her final days that her father is her abuser. Sequential narrative logic
is abandoned for a temporal loop in which the spirit of the murdered girl can be
welcomed into the Red Room by the agent who has not, as yet, been dispatched to
solve her death. There is some attempt at depicting Laura’s redemption here
(angels will guide her), but since the film precedes rather than succeeds the series,
this emotional closure is cancelled. The series must end, with Cooper trapped, in
order for Laura to be killed in the film and for the story to start all over again in a
hellish loop. This cyclical logic suspends any narrative drive but intensifies Laura’s
doom and results in a film that is an almost abstract evocation of a post-traumatic
mood that morphs into pre-traumatic dread.
Fire Walk with Me initiates a complex folding of linear narrative around a trau-
matic event that Lynch has explored in the loose trilogy, Lost Highway (1996),
Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). In each case, the central figure
becomes so disturbed that they split into two or more personae. Near the beginning
 Trauma and narrative cinema 203
of Lost Highway, Fred hears a voice mutter the ominous news ‘Dick Laurant is
dead’ through his intercom. The film sends him on a loop, through another ver-
sion of himself, to the point at the end of the film where he can deliver this mes-
sage to himself. The beginning requires the end: Fred can stitch himself back
together, but something has been unleashed by his murderous jealousy and rage
that ensures self-identity is impossible. Fred will circle this Möbius strip of a high-
way forever. In Mullholland Dr., the Hollywood ingénue Betty disappears half-way
into the film at the discovery of a rotting corpse. Betty is replaced by Diane
(played by the same actress, Naomi Watts) in a joyless world of jealousy and
despair and where the characters we have already encountered are shuffled into
different roles. Diane’s suicide is the corpse her alter-ego discovers: the film loops
around this impossible self-encounter. Inland Empire fractures Nikki into at least
three distinct identities, temporalities and criss-crossing realities – all are played by
Laura Dern. Discernable narrative soon dissolves into a mosaic of parallel spaces
and times in which ‘Nikki’ can sometimes impossibly view her alter-egos or even
herself. In each of these films narrative causality is unhinged by violent death.
The trauma splits apart narrative and character continuities, the temporal loop
trying to master events but succeeding only in ensuring deadly repetition.
Inland Empire was shot on digital video and distributed by Lynch himself, sug-
gesting that this particular narrative experiment has led Lynch back to his avant-
garde origins and beyond the pale of mainstream cinema. Mulholland Dr. is
Lynch’s masterpiece because it brilliantly inhabits the lush fantasmatic world of
35 mm Hollywood Cinemascope and understands its every pleasure whilst simul-
taneously undermining audience investment and identification in it. Club Silencio
is a lesson in this illusionism: no wonder Betty and Rita weep uncontrollably in
their seats, mirroring back the reaction of the spectator. As the film cracks open
around its central narrative rupture, it pours out a wave of traumatic affect that
has become unanchored from narrative logic and thus permeates everywhere.
This section has risked solely associating the traumatic flashback with Resnais,
the narrative mosaic with Egoyan and the temporal loop with Lynch. It is impor-
tant, however, to see these experiments as part of a wide-scale complexification of
narrative that has emerged in what is sometimes called ‘post-classical’ cinema. In
the final section I want to illustrate briefly how extensive the temporal fracture of
narrative cinema was in the 1990s, confirming its importance as a cultural vector
of the trauma paradigm.

Trauma and ‘post-classical’ film since 1990

Classical cinema is an epithet used to describe a dominant mode of Hollywood
film-making, a norm against which experiment has come to be defined. For André
Bazin or Gilles Deleuze, classicism went into crisis after 1945 and the new cinema
was associated with the baroque mannerisms of film noir or European experi-
ments in neo-Realism and the New Wave. For David Bordwell, its principal theo-
rist, classical cinema remained a stable set of structures and narratives developed
by the Hollywood studio system between 1917 and 1960, although he has recently
204 Cultural symptoms
argued for its continuing dominance beyond 2000. Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood
Tells It mounts a defence of classicism against several claims that the disturbances
to cinema in the 1990s at the levels of economics, technology and production
as well as narrative have been decisive enough to produce a recognizable ‘post-
classical’ cinema.
The classical mode is indicated by linear stories of coherent characters, stitched
together by continuity editing and the drive towards definitive narrative and ide-
ological closure. Whilst this has remained a dominant, this form was repeatedly
challenged by popular and influential films inside and outside Hollywood that
began to experiment with the time signatures of cinematic narrative. Reservoir Dogs
and Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1991 and 1994) shuffled narrative sequences
and used audacious flashbacks-within-flashbacks and complex narrative loops.
Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) looped in repetition of the same day, Hal
Hartley staged the same script three times in different contexts in Flirt (1995), and
the same event recurred successively with narratives looping around from differ-
ent character perspectives in Go (Doug Liman, 1999) and more experimentally in
Elephant and Last Days (Gus Van Sant, 2003 and 2004). Time travel and narrative
loops explicitly featured in Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), Primer (Shane
Carruth, 2004), The Jacket (John Maybury, 2004) or Déjà vu (Tony Scott, 2006).
The regressive ending retrospectively rewrote the narrative significance of The
Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) or The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)
and these ‘trick’ films spawned hosts of imitators. Narrative possibilities split into
two (Sliding Doors (Peter Howitt, 1997)) or three (Run Lola Run (Tom Twyker, 1998));
whilst Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogy (2002) offered three interconnecting films with all
the plots taking place simultaneously, but which of course had to be viewed suc-
cessively. Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) told its story backwards, as did
Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-Dong, 1999), Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002) and 5 x
2 (François Ozon, 2004). 21 Grams (Gonzalez Inarritu, 2003) fractured into a dis-
ordered temporal mosaic of almost exactly two hundred narrative units linked by
associative rather than successive logic. Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) and Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), both scripted by Charlie
Kauffman, made the dismantling of narrative time the subject of the narrative
itself. These examples could be multiplied many times over.
The ‘post-classical’ epithet need not be a simplistic or decisive rupture but sim-
ply something that marks a symptom of narrative complexification in contempo-
rary film alongside the persistence of classical forms of narrative. Why does it
happen in the 1990s? Bordwell’s strictly formalist focus on narratological structure
and suspicion of anything resembling interpretation leaves him only able to appeal
vaguely to ‘broader cultural factors’ to explain this phase of experiment (Bordwell
2006: 33). Elsewhere, the impact of digital technology has been a frequent source
of discussion. Narratives ‘that foreground the relationship between the temporal-
ity of the story and the order of its telling’ are sometimes called ‘database’ narra-
tives, on the basis that spectators have imbibed the new potentials of non-linear
random access and hypertext links (Cameron 2006: 65). But Thomas Elsaesser has
argued that the ‘complex temporal schemes’ of a post-classical cinema are more
 Trauma and narrative cinema 205
directly related to questions ‘of memory and trauma, of anticipation and the
après-coup, of dependence and interdependence’ (Elsaesser 1998: 204–5). These
transform the conceptual ground of film criticism, he argues, which needs to work
through the matrix less of voyeurism and fetishism than ideas of bodily inscription
and engulfment. Slightly earlier, Steven Shapiro argued for a cinema not of lack
but of excess, an overwhelming experience that is inscribed on the body: ‘cinema
allows me and forces me to see what I cannot assimilate or grasp, it assaults the eye
and ear, it touches and wounds’ (Shapiro 1993: 259). In key ways, then, we might
again link the experiments in the temporality of narrative in the 1990s to the ques-
tion of trauma and post-traumatic subjectivity.
What narrative ‘grasps together’ and configures, in Paul Ricoeur’s terms, is
meant to unify a subject around a meaningful and coherent human narrative.
The splintering of narrative in film often conveys the disintegration of the memo-
rial self under traumatic impacts. It is striking, for instance, how often traumatic
amnesia or memory occlusions drive characters, from action thrillers like Total
Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) and the Bourne trilogy (2002, 2004, 2007) to more
formally adventurous films like Memento, where the central protagonist has a
memory span of only fifteen minutes and is unable to form new memories, or
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where Joel and Clementine elect to erase the
memory of their catastrophic relationship only to then repeat it. The amnesiac
quest of the central character of Mysterious Skin (Greg Araki, 2004) is constructed
inside the trauma paradigm: in the final scene, an old school friend helps him
uncover a dissociated memory of sexual abuse by their baseball coach. Such
belated flashbacks to pivotal memories that transform narrative significance
appear in the Gothic register, too. Ghosts that have failed to remember their own
deaths – that misunderstand their own ontological status and therefore the rela-
tion of haunter to haunted – are at the centre of The Sixth Sense and The Others
(Alejandro Amanabar, 2001). In Identity (James Mangold, 2003), the bewildered
characters being killed off one by one are eventually revealed as the alters of a
multiple personality, each with severely circumscribed memories. In The Return
(Asif Kapadia, 2006), Joanna, played by the iconic horror actress Sarah Michelle
Gellar, suffers from severe dissociations, time slips and overwhelming flashbacks.
These initially point to a return of repressed memories of familial abuse. Having
toyed with this familiar possibility, the returns prove to be supernatural intrusions
of someone else’s memory, however: Joanna is being directed by a vengeful spirit
towards the murderer, who is using the conventions of traumatic subjectivity to
lay down clues for the recovery of her own death.
Horror constantly stages the eruption of an undead past into the present, and
this is why Adam Lowenstein suggests that in this Gothicized form of memory
‘the modern horror film may well be the genre of our time that registers most bru-
tally the legacies of historical trauma’ (Lowenstein 2005: 10). In the controversies
around ‘torture porn’ horror films such as Saw (James Wan, 2004), Hostel (Eli
Roth, 2005) or Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2004), however, the opposite is played
out: the lovingly detailed destruction of bodies, selves and therefore memories.
Scenes of torture have filtered out of horror into relatively mainstream films too:
206 Cultural symptoms
audiences must endure passages of intense suffering in Syriana (Stephen Gaghan,
2005), The Wind that Shook the Barley (Ken Loach, 2006) or Pan’s Labyrinth
(Guillermo Del Toro, 2006) as lessons in political tyranny. Bodies are tortured to
give up truths, Elaine Scarry influentially argued, in societies where there is

a crisis of belief – that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural
construct has ceased to elicit a population’s belief either because it is man-
ifestly fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary
forms of substantiation [and] the sheer material factualness of the human
body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of “realness”
and “certainty”.
(Scarry 1985: 14)

Critics and film-makers of ‘torture porn’ inevitably reference 9/11 or Abu

Ghraib as the traumas of their time in the American polity, although the allegor-
ical transposition to film is not necessarily as obvious as it might be. What releases
are found in the ecstatic cinematic demolition of body, memory and self ? These
might not be engagements with the trauma paradigm so much as attempts to
transcend its legacies of burdened history and compromised, damaged selves.
‘Post-classical’ cinema registers this concern with memory dysfunction in the
temporal disadjustment of narrative conventions, developing a paradoxically rec-
ognizable aesthetic of trauma. The innovations around the traumatic flashback,
the narrative mosaic and the temporal loop can thus be observed beyond my trio
of auteurs in three important films since 2000: Memento, 21 Grams and Elephant.
Memento ‘addresses the complexities of surviving trauma’ (Little 2005: 67). The
modular narrative presents colour segments that move backwards in time from
Shelby’s murder of Teddy and towards the moment where he decides he has to
kill him. In between these regressing sequences, shorter black-and-white segments
move forwards, acting as exposition as Shelby explains his condition in a phone
call. These black-and-white inserts end where the colour segments begin, in a
brief intersection of conventional causation at the end of the film. The narrative,
however, innovatively inverts the usual relationship of progression and regression,
making modular flashback the predominant structuring device. Shelby explains
(and then explains again and again) that in the burglary where his wife was mur-
dered, he picks up a head injury that leaves him with anterograde amnesia,
unable to sustain any memory beyond haunting, free-floating flashback images of
his dead wife. He is driven to avenge her death, but his disorder prohibits any
notion of redemption through violence, because the act will be instantly forgot-
ten. ‘How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time?’ he asks. Shelby’s subjectiv-
ity thus renders him frozen in the timeless time of the post-traumatic condition,
where time seems arbitrary but is in fact undergirded by a repetition compulsion
that he cannot know or master. The film’s slow revelation is that Shelby under-
stands this precisely and is using his condition against himself to engineer an
instant of false redemption anyway: Teddy will do, this time, as the fall-guy. The
film culminates in Shelby’s moment of self-knowledge that is also spectacular
 Trauma and narrative cinema 207
self-deceit, whose status is erased as soon as it is articulated: ‘Now, where was I?’
the film ends. Whilst David Bordwell argues persuasively that Memento’s appar-
ently radical narrative conforms perfectly well to classical structures (Bordwell
2006: 78–80), there is no undoing this profound unsettling of redemptive closure
by the prospect of unending forgetful repetition.
21 Grams opens with short segments evidently presented in temporal and nar-
rative disorder, a mosaic in which scenes switch apparently randomly between
three principal characters. They are bound together in a car accident that is
revealed thirty minutes into the film: the ex-con Jack kills Christina’s husband
Michael and her two daughters in a hit and run; Paul is the recipient of Michael’s
heart; Paul, overwhelmed with the gift of renewed life, leaves his partner, finds
Christina and enters into a pact with her to kill Jack; Paul commits suicide rather
than perpetuating a cycle of violent death. The fractured time scheme, at the sim-
plest level, conveys the intense grief of shattered life stories. The accident itself
remains off-screen, the unrepresentable central tile of the mosaic. Around it, con-
nective narrative tissue is dissolved, there is no before and after, only a diffusion
of traumatic affect that resists ‘serial coherence’ for ‘circular, lateral, and diago-
nal’ movements of narrative’ (Hahn 2005: 56). ‘The film challenges us,’ Jonathan
Romney observes, ‘not only to reconstruct an original sequence but also to imag-
ine a non-linear map of the action, in which any given moment appears to pre-
determine or ironically to pre-empt others’ (Romney 2004: 148). The narrative
form therefore reinforces the metaphysical speculations of the film on chance and
destiny, chaos and faith.
The short, intense film Elephant is loosely based on the Columbine school shoot-
ings in Colorado in April 1999 and borrows its central aesthetic device from Alan
Clarke’s film about sectarian killings in Northern Ireland, also called Elephant
(1989). The film is shot in long takes, often using steadicam in tight close-up to fol-
low the complex trajectories of the students through the school buildings. The
length of each sequence foregrounds the successive unfolding of time on-screen,
but there is a jolt of misrecognition when the spectator realizes that these individ-
ual trajectories are not always successive but are often simultaneous. We thus loop
around three times for the three perspectives of a simple encounter between John,
Eli and Michelle in the school corridor, a looping that occupies the central portion
of the film. Each tracking shot is thus literally its own time line, complete with sub-
jective soundscape for each featured student. The effect of this looping is to dilate
time, slowing it down (moments of these walks take place in slow motion too), and
the reason becomes clear an hour into the film: this encounter is one of the last
moments before the student gunmen enter the building and begin their massacre,
in which Eli and Michelle will die arbitrarily. It’s as if the film stutters and pulls
back from starting this grim sequence, time curling in on itself to preserve the last
moments of its innocent victims. Van Sant used a similar looping device to dilate
time in Last Days, as if trying to hold off the inevitable violent act of suicide that
concludes the film. In each case, form foreshadows the impending catastrophe.
Whilst the traumatic flashback has been embedded in cinema since Hiroshima
Mon Amour, it is striking how quickly mosaics and loops can be processed into the
208 Cultural symptoms
spectator’s understanding. Cinematic narratives don’t just mimic but help organize
popular conceptions of what trauma does to subjectivity. Some psychologists have
been concerned at cinema’s falsification of mental disorders: The Psychiatric
Bulletin, for instance, suggested in an editorial that the Farrelly brothers’ comedy
Me, Myself and Irene (1999) was ‘a golden opportunity’ for professional psychiatrists
‘to draw attention to how easy it is to mock or misrepresent mental illness’ and
that ‘it is possible to object to a film like this without appearing to be humourless
or cranky’ (Byrne 2000: 365). I hope I have argued for a far more nuanced rela-
tionship between cinema and the psychology of trauma. PTSD is of course an
internally consistent product of psychiatric discourse that defines some forma-
tions of the contemporary subject, but it also interacts with and is inevitably
shaped by narratives that emerge in verbal and visual culture. The intrusive
images and flashbacks that belatedly entered the definition of PTSD in 1987 were
demonstrably cinematic before they were psychiatric. Narrative innovations,
driven by new technologies, might also have similar effects. As Thomas Elsaesser
has observed, ‘trauma may here be … the name of a particular contemporary
subject-effect, as individual (or groups) try to reinscribe themselves into different
kinds of media-memory’ (Elsaesser 2001: 199).
Afterwards

My aim has been to provide a multi-disciplinary genealogy of the concept of

trauma from its nineteenth-century origins and then to trace its permeation into
the culture of advanced industrial nations after the arrival of PTSD in 1980. The
risk of tracking the influence of the idea of the traumatic subject across psychol-
ogy, medicine, law, military history, literature, autobiography, confessional TV,
fine art and film is that it may end up conveying a sense of homogeneity, that soci-
eties are indifferently saturated with this model. If this were a record of inex-
orable advance, then the last stop might be a jeremiad against the rise of ‘therapy
culture’. American critics such as Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic
(1966) or Eva Moskowitz in In Therapy We Trust (2001) have analysed the progres-
sive psychologization of society and lamented the sanction of wounded narcissism
in public life and civil society. Frank Furedi has argued that concepts like trauma
have further extended these models: ‘What distinguishes circumstances today
from past therapeutic regimes is that the system of therapy is not confined to a
distinct and functionally specific role, it has merged with wider cultural institu-
tions and has an impact on all institutions of society’ (Furedi 2004: 17). This takes
us back to ideas of ‘wound culture’, in which the public sphere is increasingly only
conceivable through communalities of trauma. Thus, for Richard Sennett, the
fall of public man is announced with the rise of the Intimate Society, marked by
the incivilities and evacuated politics of those ‘who need others to enter the daily
trauma of their own lives’ (Sennett 2002: 265).
The jeremiad is never a particularly subtle or discriminating mode, however.
Whilst it has been important to acknowledge the transmissibility that gives trauma
its peculiar mobility across different knowledges, I have always wanted to respect
the disciplinary or formal specificity of each discourse I have examined. Trauma
changes shape and meaning as it crosses boundaries; it is constituted out of the
controversies generated in these passages.
Every researcher inevitably overvalues their object of inquiry. Rather than pro-
claim the final triumph of trauma over a now thoroughly therapied West, I want
to conclude by hinting at developments that might point to the limits of the
trauma paradigm.
On many occasions in this study it is the post-traumatic phase, the sequelae, the
weird effects of the afterwards, that has been the focus of concern. ‘These are the
210 Afterwards
days after. Everything is now measured by after’, says Don DeLillo’s narrator in
The Falling Man, his novel about survivors of the World Trade Center attack
(DeLillo 2007: 138). In Rachel Seiffert’s novel, Afterwards (2007), two generations
of men involved in British military occupations, Kenya in the 1950s and Northern
Ireland in the 1970s, meet on the occluded ground of their repressed experience.
These update George Steiner’s proclamation about the brute persistence of the
Holocaust: ‘we come after, and that is the nerve of our condition’ (Steiner 1967:
ix). Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has provided the clinical means to detail the
symptoms of what is described in a wholly different register as ‘aftermath society’
(Chambers 2004: xxi). It would be easy to assume from a reading of cultural
trauma theory that there is a kind of injunction to maintain the post-traumatic
condition. To be in a frozen or suspended afterwards, it seems to be assumed, is
the only proper ethical response to trauma, displacing any other memorial rela-
tion to the past and situating memory entirely under the sign of post-traumatic melan-
cholia. This is worked out in the aesthetics of aporia or the sublime, a rigorously
irresolute Modernism found in Sebald’s writing or Lanzmann’s cinema.
Psychiatric findings regarding PTSD may be enrolled to support such claims.
But PTSD is not the only response to extreme events. Indeed, PTSD has a
shadow condition that has been theorized in parallel with the emergence of
trauma: resilience. Resilience is defined as ‘positive adaptation within the context of
significant adversity’ (Luthar et al. 2000: 543) The field was first sketched out in the
1970s in an attempt to understand the entirely healthy development of children
in extreme environments such as parental mental illness, severe socioeconomic dis-
advantage or community violence. ‘Early images of resilience’, Ann Masten
reports, ‘implied that there was something remarkable or special about these
children, often described by such words as invulnerable or invincible’, but subsequent
research has emphasized ‘the ordinariness of the phenomena’ (Masten 2001: 227).
Resilience has extended to studies of grief, adaptation in war contexts, and reac-
tions to traumatic events. This work has to counter the default assumptions of
the trauma model that has ‘tended to argue a unidimensional response with little
variability in possible outcome trajectory among adults exposed to potentially
traumatic events’ (Bonnano 2004: 21). With this default, signs of resilience could
even be pathologized: simply enduring mourning in an undemonstrative way, for
instance, can be seen to be suffering from ‘absent grief ’.
There are now signs of a significant shift in psychiatric attitudes to people who
have experienced events considered to be potentially traumatic. In the 1980s, the
idea of ‘psychological debriefing’ was developed to counsel emergency services
teams with the aim of preventing any post-traumatic sequelae. The automatic
assumption of negative psychological impacts extended this model of debriefing
to those involved in disasters, traffic accidents or bereavement. Yet studies began
to emerge that early interventions might actually be inducing the very syndromes
that they aimed to prevent. In a study of accident victims, for instance, ‘patients
who initially had high intrusion and avoidance symptoms remained symptomatic
if they had received the intervention, but recovered if they did not receive the
intervention’ (Mayou et al. 2000: 589). Interventions into the ordinary process of
 Afterwards 211
grieving were found to have worsened the condition in nearly 40 per cent of cases
(Bonnano 2004: 22). A large survey of the method issued in 1998 was similarly
sceptical (Wessely et al. 1998). George Bonnano concluded that ‘many individuals
will show a genuine resilience that should not be interfered with or undermined
by clinical intervention’ (Bonnano 2004: 22).
One turning point in psychiatric practice may have been the July 7 bombings
in London in 2005. In New York, ‘during the immediate aftermath of 9/11,
psychotherapists outnumbered victims and even began haggling for patients’
(Linklater 2006: 35). In contrast, London services established limited support
mechanisms but refrained from active early intervention, waiting instead to catch
those whose ordinary resilience was unable to master their experience of the
atrocity weeks or months later. Thousands of people on the tube system that day
met the criteria of experiencing an extreme stressor event, yet diagnoses of PTSD
fell vastly below usual statistical extrapolations. Psychiatric treatment now usually
involves courses in Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy that ‘directly confronts mal-
adaptive belief, faulty attributions and inaccurate expectations’ that have resulted
from the event (Shipherd et al. 2006: 99). These are intensive, time-limited inter-
ventions that emotionally and cognitively ‘process’ trauma in eight or ten sessions.
If these approaches begin to predominate, it might be that the influence of the
trauma model begins to wane.
This is not meant to diminish the very real existence of post-traumatic suffer-
ing, but it is important to recognize the different trajectory psychiatric practice is
taking from the assertions of trauma theory as it appears in the humanities. I have
heard those invested in cultural trauma theory dismiss ideas of resilience and
Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy as cynical new technologies of the self, designed
to process suffering speedily, principally for financial reasons. One might note from
history that every version of trauma, from railway spine via traumatic neurosis and
shell shock to PTSD, has always been in major part a medico-legal concept bound
up with economic questions of compensation, its treatment determined by
medical and welfare costs. One of the principal reasons for the revolution in diag-
nostics in the 1970s was the length and cost of psychodynamic therapies. The
concept of trauma, including the psychoanalytic account, changes its very shape
in relation to these concerns.
Of course, resilience remains just another kind of post-traumatic reaction. It
does not displace the predominance of trauma so much as assume a different or
parallel response to psychic depredation or collapse. Resilience is in many ways an
anti-analytic category, suggesting that it is better to leave psychic mechanisms to
operate in a closed and unexamined way. It is hardly a replacement for the pre-
dominant trauma theory: if it were, the risk of denial of traumatic effects would
be increased rather than reduced. It is not really the basis, either, for any form of
cultural or political critique, in ways that have been pursued by those using
notions of wounded or mournful communality, as in, for instance, the essays of
Judith Butler in Precarious Life. Yet it is valuable to be made aware that psychiatric
discourse assumes a plurality of possible responses to traumatic impacts. Cultural
theory too often demands that the impossible, aporetic or melancholic response is
212 Afterwards
the only appropriately ethical condition for individuals and communities defined
by their post-traumatic afterwardsness.
Another limit began to be voiced towards the end of the 1990s, after numer-
ous aid workers expressed concern about the export of the trauma model to war
zones across the world. In 1995, the European Commission Humanitarian Office
promoted psychiatric intervention in the ex-Yugoslav states, suggesting PTSD was
likely to be the major health problem in the aftermath of the war. UNICEF’s
report, The State of the World’s Children (1996), also estimated a new ten million
children were suffering PTSD from ongoing or recent conflict zones. A critical
collection, Rethinking the Trauma of War (Bracken and Petty 1998), took aim at the
ethnocentrism of terms developed for Western models of the self in which indi-
vidual psychology and intrapsychic conflict predominated over the collective or
sociosomatic self often found outside the West. Survival, Derek Summerfield sug-
gested, often depends on local traditions and embedded social networks left invis-
ible to the diagnostic criteria parachuted into non-Western contexts with
psychiatric technicians (Summerfield 1998). At the same time, a psychological
intervention displaced more difficult engagements: ‘By providing trauma pro-
grammes, donor agencies and NGOs have an opportunity to intervene in a way
that is perceived to be useful without engaging with the broader political, eco-
nomic, and human rights abuses that have characterised recent conflicts’ (Bracken
and Petty 1998: 2).
Since the end of the Cold War in 1989 global conflicts have accelerated. Wars
are less often between state actors and more likely to be internal wars that are
waged upon civilian populations. Civilians now constitute 90 per cent of casual-
ties, compared to just five per cent in the First World War. These conflicts aim to
destroy ways of life and bearers of cultural continuity, and so often target women
and children. In the 1980s and 1990s, millions were killed in the civil wars in the
Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, and systematic genocides were con-
ducted against Mayans in Guatemala, the Dinka in Sudan, the Kurds and Shiites
in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the Tutsis in Rwanda and the civilian populations
of East Timor. Ethnic cleansing by Serbs and Croats killed over 200,000
Europeans in the former Yugoslavia. Following the rise of extremist Islamic ter-
rorism against Western targets throughout this period, the resultant American
occupation of Iraq has killed an estimated 77,000 civilians, produced two million
refugees and another two million internally displaced persons (current figures can
be accessed at www.iraqbodycount.org).
Stephen Eisenman has professed amazement that the photographs of torture
at Abu Ghraib jail in 2004 produced no political convulsion in America, and spec-
ulated that the images were embedded in a Western aesthetic tradition of repre-
senting violent triumph over colonized and therefore dehumanized peoples. There
was no shock: this was imperial business as usual. But I also wonder if this rela-
tive indifference hasn’t been due to the rise and rise of the trauma paradigm in
the West in the same post-Cold War era. What appears superficially to be a par-
adigm that might address atrocity, genocide and war might shockingly fail to do
so. Western eyes see the persecuted, ‘feel their pain’, and might even contribute to
 Afterwards 213
relief funds now and then, convulsing around contagions of traumatic emotion
amplified by affective journalism. This is a familiar enough complaint (see, for
instance, A. and J. Kleinman 1996). Yet notions of ‘cultural trauma’ applied to
such scenarios might block pathways to practical politics. Abject theories of the
ethical and empathetic response to the pain of the other pour out of academic
presses, all of which find little purchase in the brutal geo-politics of the contem-
porary world. The testament of the multiple failures of practical politics, usually
blocked by superpower Realpolitik at the United Nations before and since the end
of the Cold War, is eloquent and shaming (see, for instance, Polman 2003). Perhaps
we need to spend less time trying to rethink politics through the language of
trauma, as Jenny Edkins (2003) suggests, and consider the virtues of holding these
discourses apart. For all the demonstrable power trauma has in creating commu-
nalities, these identifications seem volatile and temporary alliances, weak against
the merciless logic of military–industrial complexes.
Often enough, of course, communal entrapment in melancholia can be
regarded as a vehicle for renewing cycles of violence – as in, for instance, the engi-
neering of Serbian (and Croatian) extreme nationalism in the 1990s, premised on
redressing the wrongs of the traumatic past. Judith Butler’s trenchant comments
on this subject are implicitly addressed to American neo-Conservative policy since
9/11: ‘it would seem that I am as much constituted by those I do grieve for as by
those whose deaths I disavow, whose nameless and faceless deaths form the
melancholic background of my social world’ (Butler 2004: 46). Some of the most
interesting cultural work to emerge from the trauma question has involved an
attempt to find a model of trauma that acknowledges yet seeks to work through the
traumatic past, premising communality not on preserving trauma but on trans-
forming its legacy. This is an attempt to transform Freud’s distinctions between
remembering, repeating and working in 1914 into a model for cultural or politi-
cal critique. This is perhaps why Toni Morrison’s Beloved remains such an impor-
tant text: the melancholic ghost continues to haunt, but the other daughter,
Denver, is allowed to start to refashion some other kind of community afterwards.
Dominick LaCapra’s insistence on the model of working through suggests that
there is a mode that might renew cultural politics and replace displays of ethical
abjection or the aesthetics of aporia (see LaCapra 2001, 2004)
But perhaps the last limit is that the concept of trauma is not, ultimately, abstract
enough to explain its own relation to modernity. In Chapter 1 I argued that trauma
emerged from nineteenth-century industrialism and a new ‘accident cosmology’
measured out in the accounts of the statistical society. PTSD coincides with late
modernity, and it is surely significant that the success of this term has been coincident
with an intensive phase of neo-liberal capitalism that has transformed economies
and thus societies, cultures, narratives and selves over the last thirty years. The
appeal of the language of trauma might be because it is a specialized sub-set of
the discourse that dominates this intensive capitalist environment: risk. In the risk
society, the process of modernization itself becomes the source of difficulty rather
than the solution: over-population, technological saturation, pollution, or over-
dependency on complex technological ensembles generate ever more risks. ‘In the
214 Afterwards
risk society’, Ulrich Beck argues, ‘the unknown and unintended consequences come
to be a dominant force in history and society’ (Beck 1992: 22). ‘Risk society’, he con-
tinues, ‘is a catastrophic society. In it, the exceptional condition threatens to become
the norm’ (Beck 1992: 24). The progressive extension of what determines a stressor
event in the diagnosis of PTSD is one sure way of delineating the widening param-
eters of risk in late modernity. PTSD remains the recognizable mental illness in pur-
suit of compensation claims, since all risks are claimed to be calculable, attributable
and thus compensable. There are no accidents any more, only failures of risk man-
agement, and in 2001 a British Medical Journal editorial proposed abolishing ‘acci-
dent’ from the medical lexicon (cited Furedi 2002: 8). Even the horror films of the
Final Destination trilogy ( James Wong, 2000, David Ellis, 2003, James Wong, 2006)
tell us this: you might escape a plane crash or multiple pile-up, but you cannot cheat
‘Death’s design’, which is actually intricately charting the path of every life and
deciding the proper moment of death. Trauma then works as the calculable meas-
ure of psychological risk but it is also the term invoked when the unforeseeable
catastrophe strikes. It is a cusp term, both a product of modernity and a description
of what occurs when modern systems fail. The need to circulate so many traumatic
stories, finally, suggests that this has become a means to articulate some of the psy-
chic costs of capitalist modernity. This translation into the abstract language of
socio-political analysis does not for one moment deny the reality of post-traumatic
reactions or abolish the relevance of professional psychology to manage such dis-
tress. But it does reaffirm the spirit of this investigation, to regard trauma as a com-
plex knot that binds together multiple strands of knowledge and which can be best
understood through plural, multi-disciplinary perspectives.
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Dulieu v. White 1901: 2 King’s Bench 669
Frost v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police 1997: 3 Weekly Law Reports 1194
Hambrook v. Stokes Bros 1925: 1 King’s Bench 141
McFarlane v. EE Caledonia Ltd 1994: 2 All England Reports 1
McLoughlin v. O’Brian 1983: 1 Appeals Cases 410
Page v. Smith 1996: 1 Appeals Cases 155
Sion v. Hampstead Health Authority 1994: 5 Medical Law Review 170
Vernon v. Bosley No. 1 1997: 1 All England Reports 577
White v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire 1999: 2 Appeals Cases 455

USA
Commonwealth v. Frangipane, Massachusetts 2001: 433 Mass. 527
Daubert v. Dow Pharmaceuticals, Supreme Court 1993: 509 US Reports 579
Engstrom v. Engstrom, California 1997
Jane Doe et al. v. A Joseph Maskell, Maryland 1996: 342 Md 684
State of Rhode Island v. Quattrocchi, Rhode Island 1999
Index

Abraham, N. 95–6 Ballard, J. G. 116

Abu Ghraib 163, 166, 174–6, 206, 212 Barker, P. 53, 87, 169
accident 24–6 Barthes, R. 118, 139, 140, 149, 166–7
accident neurosis 24 Bass, E. 72, 122
Adjuster, The 191 Battered Child Syndrome 74
Adorno, T. 5 Battle fatigue 58
aesthetics 79–80, 88, 156, 160, Baudrillard, J. 168
171, 174, 178 Bauman, Z. 68
Agamben, G. 5 Beard, G. 54
AIDS 120, 125–8, 140–3, 154 Beck, U. 214
Alcoff, L. 75, 136 belatedness 1, 8, 81, 111, 155, 209–10;
Algerian War 189 in narrative 91, 92, 180, 190
alien abduction 11–12 Bellour, R. 140
American Civil War 51, 92, 158 Benjamin, W. 20, 150, 177
American Psychiatric Association 61 Bennett, J. 150, 160
Amis, M. 117 Benstock, S. 121
amnesia 35, 39, 56, 122–4, 153, 205; see Bergen-Belsen 162, 174
also memory; recovered memory Berger, J. 165–6
anachrony 80, 81, 83, 95, 103, 105 Bernheim, H. 38–9
anorexia 146 Bettelheim, B. 67–8
Apel, D. 175 Bhimji, Z. 158
aporia 4, 6, 7, 65, 81, 84, 163, 174, 210 Binneveld, H. 53
Appelfeld, A. 138 Blank, A. 183
Appignanesi, L. 69 Bloom, C. 138
Ararat 195–6 Blue Velvet 198
Armenian genocide 190, 195–6 Boltanski, C. 154–6, 161
Armstrong, I. 79 Bonnano, G. 211
Armstrong, T. 53, 89 Borch-Jacobsen, M. 41, 48
Atkinson, K. 106–7 Bordwell, D. 190, 203–4, 207
Atwood, M. 87, 88 Bosnia 164, 165, 171
Auschwitz 5, 70, 85, 156, 187 Boulé, J.-P. 141
autobiography 118, 120, 121, 135, 140; Brison, S. 82
see also memoir Brooks, P. 83–4, 137, 197, 202
autofiction 121, 127, 137, 140 Brophy, S. 125
see also memoir Brothers, C. 167, 168
Azam, E. 39 Brown, W. 173
Brownmiller, S. 71
Babinski, J. 55 Bruner, J. 81
Baer, U. 150, 163, 174 Buffalo Creek disaster 64
236 Index
Burgess, A. 71 Duras, M. 186
Butler, J. 211, 213 Düttmann, A. 126

cancer memoirs 128 Eaglestone, R. 65, 88–9

Caplan, E. 24 Egoyan, A. 190–6
Caruth, C. 4–5, 10, 12–13, 119, 186 Eichmann trial 66
Catch 22 184 Eisenman, S. 166, 212
Caws, M. A. 122 Eisenstein, S. 177
celebrity culture 131–3 Elephant 207
Chambers, R. 125–6, 142–3, 158 Elephant Man, The 198
Charcot, J.-M. 34–6, 38, 45 Ellis, J. 201
Chion, M. 198 Elsaesser, T. 204–5, 208
Churchill, W. 66, 172 Emin, T. 151, 152–3
cinema 150, 177–208 Erichsen, J. 22–3
Clark, T. J. 173 Exotica 191–3
cognitive behavioural therapy 82, 211
Concentration Camp Syndrome 67 Falklands War 168
Confessional culture 119, 131, 134, 136, false memory 12, 70, 73, 107;
152, 154 see also hypnosis
Connolly, B. 132 Felicia’s Journey 194–5
Connor, S. 3 Felman, S. 7–9, 119, 124, 178
Cork, R. 160 feminism 62, 71–5, 101, 102, 121–4
Crews, F. 12, 73 Ferenczi, S. 56, 64
Crimp, D. 125 Feudtner, C. 51
culture 79–80 Figley, C. 60, 62
Figlio, K. 25
D., H. [Hilda Doolittle] 121 film noir 180–1
Dachau 162 Final Destination trilogy 214
Danto, A. 156 Finkelstein, N. 67
Davis, J. 74 flashbacks 148, 177–8, 179–85, 192
Davis, L. 72, 122 flashbulb memory 149
Dean, E. 58 Foer, J. S. 87
degeneration 36 formalism 83, 84
Delahaye, L. 165, 170 Foster, H. 118, 119, 151–2
Delany, S. 127 Foucault, M. 14, 19, 136, 140
Delbo, C. 65, 81, 119 Frank, A. 81, 82, 128, 129–30
Deleuze, G. 187, 190, 203 Frankel, F. 183
DeLillo, D. 210 Fraser, S. 122–4
de Man, P. 6 Fredrickson, R. 72, 105
Depression 128, 151 Freeman, M. 124
Derrida, J. 6, 80, 95, 96, 113 French, N. 107
de Salvo, L. 121 Freud, S. 8–11, 44–9, 56–7, 110, 181, 198
Des Pres, T. 68 Frey, J. 135
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Frost, L. 144
1, 61, 147, 183 Furedi, F. 209
Diamond, J. 130 Fussell, P. 52
Dickens, C. 21–2
digital image 150, 167, 204
disaster films 185 Gallagher, B. 104
dissociation 41–2, 44, 48, 102–3, 123 gay activism 125
documentary film 178, 186 Gennette, G. 80, 83
documentary photography 167, 170 genocide 66, 155, 164, 172, 212
double consciousness 39, 41 George, D. H. 201
Dunmore, H. 109 Germany 111, 157–8
 Index 237
ghosts 93–5, 96, 98, 108–9, 149, 205 International Criminal Court 172
Giddens, A. 129 Iraq War 212
Gilmore, L. 117, 136 Iser, W. 93
Glover, D. 95 Israel 66–7, 138
Goldin, N. 153
Goody, J. 133 Jaar, A. 170
gothic 98, 200 Jacobsen, D. 115
Gray, L. 75, 136 James, W. 41
Griffith, D. W. 180 Janet, P. 41–4, 148
Grubrich-Simitis, I. 69 Jarman, D. 126–7
Guibert, H. 127, 140–3 Jekyll and Hyde 40
Gulf War 168 Jordan [Katie Price] 133
Gulf War Syndrome 58 journalism and trauma culture 130–1;
Gusdorf, G. 118 and war 168–9
July 7 Bombings 211
Haaken, J. 74, 75, 98
Hacking, I. 40, 44, 74, 98, 110, 181 Kansteiner, W. 13
Haley, S. 60, 61 Kaplan, E. A. 178
Hansen, M. 179 Kardiner, A. 57
Harrison, K. 120, 143–6 Katz, S. 66
Hartman, G. 6–7 Kauvar, E. 138
Hawkins, A. 128, 129 King, N. 88, 124
Henke, S. 122 King, S. 97–105, 201
Herman, J. 19, 62, 72, 73, 97 King Lear 105–6
Hillsborough disaster 29–31 Kleinman, A. and J. 166
Hiroshima 62, 63, 185–6 Kline, T. J. 188
Hiroshima Mon Amour 181, 185–6 Knightley, P. 168
Hirsch, J. 178, 181, 182 Kracauer, S. 154
Hirsch, M. 149, 159, 174 Krafft-Ebing, R. 41
Hitchcock, A. 181 Kral, V. 67
Holmes, G. 53, 54 Kristeva, J. 186
holocaust 13–14, 63–4, 65–71, 81, 88, Krystal, H. 63
100, 111, 118, 155, 163, 182
Holocaust 182 Lacan, J. 188
holocaust-effect 156 LaCapra D. 3–4, 91, 198, 213
Horowitz, M. 61, 148, 183 Langer, L. 81
horror film 205–6 Lanzmann, C. 7, 81, 178–9, 210
Horvitz, D. 88 Laplanche, J. 8–9, 198
human rights 171–3 Lappin, E. 70
Hume, M. 169 Lasch, C. 62
Huyssen, A. 115 Last Year in Marienbad 187–8
hypnotism 32, 38, 47–8, 106; and Latour, B. 14–15, 24, 51
suggestion 39, 41, 44, 54, 73 Law, 27–34
hysteria 8, 23, 35, 45–6, 51, 54, 55 Law Commission 31
Lawson, N. 130
identity politics 62, 75 Lejeune, P. 135
Ignatieff, M. 169 Lemkin, R. 172
Illouz, E. 134 Levi, P. 68, 69, 128
image 147–50, 159 Levin, M. 163
incest 72–5, 143, 144, 201; Leys, R. 8, 13, 147, 149
see also sexual abuse Libeskind, D. 81, 151
indexical signs 149, 151, 154, 158, Lifton, R. J. 60, 62–4, 98, 148, 150, 183,
167, 172 184, 185, 186
Inland Empire 203 Lost Highway 203
238 Index
Lowenstein, A. 205 ‘Nancy School’ 38
Lumet, S. 182 narrative theory 79–86; in cinema 203–5
Lynch, D. 197–203 National Holocaust Museum in
Lyotard J.-F. 5, 80–1, 94, 109, 174 Washington 66
Nelson, D. 62
McCrum, R. 131 Nelson, H. L. 82
McGowan, T. 199 nerves 3, 53
McLeod, J. 81–2 nervous exhaustion 53
McLuhan, M. 150 nervous shock 3, 23, 27–8, 31
Mann, S. 158 neurasthenia 54
Marcus, L. 146 neurology 37–8, 52
Marshall, D. 131, 132 Nicholls, P. 95
Marx, K. 20 Nicodemus, E. 151
Masson, J. 10–11 Niederland, W. 63, 67
Maudsley, H. 37 9/11 163, 206, 211, 213
melancholia 95, 111, 116, 125, 158 Nora, P. 136
melodrama 197, 201, 202 Novick, P. 66
Memento 206–7 Nuit et Bruillard 186–7
memoir 117–46; as distinct from numbing 63, 89
autobiography 120; ‘misery memoirs’
119, 130; of war 169; by women 121–4; O’Doherty, B. 171
see also autobiography; autofiction; Ofshe, R. 107
pathography Oklahoma City Bombing 158
memorials 151; and countermemorials Olney, J. 118
151, 154 Oppenheim, H. 34
memory, 12, 44, 72–4, 87, 110, 113, 154, Oppenheim, J. 3, 37
183; diseases of 39; ‘Memory Wars’ 73,
107; see also amnesia; flashbacks; Page, H. 23
recovered memory painting, death of 156
Michaels, A. 87 Paretsky, S. 116
middlebrow fiction 110 Parker, D. 144
Middleton, P. 70, 87 pathography 82, 120, 128–30
military and psychiatry 49–59 Patterson, O. 93
Miller, A. 169 Pawnbroker, The 182
Miller, N. 122, 128–9, 139 Peirce, C. S. 149
Mitchell, W. J. T. 170 Perec, G. 119
Modernism 89, 121, 156, 178 Peress, G. 164–5, 171, 173, 174
modernity 20 photo-essay 169–70
Moffatt, T. 159–62 photography 149, 154, 158, 162–3, 172
Monette, P. 126 photojournalism 163, 164, 165, 171
Moore, O. 130 Picardie, J. and R. 130
Morrison, T. 81, 87, 89–97 pithiatism 55
Mott, F. 50, 52, 56 Plath, S. 69–70
mourning 95, 96, 125 Poe, E. A. 201
Mullholland Dr 203 Polman, L. 172
Multiple Personality Disorder 40, 41, 98, Pontalis, J.-B. 198
123, 179, 181–2 Porter, T. 26
Mulvey, L. 149, 177 postmemory 149, 174
Münsterberg, H. 177, 180 postmodernism 87, 138, 152
Muriel 188–9 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 1, 57, 58,
Myers, C. 49–50, 53–4 61, 72, 147, 148, 211; and cinema 177,
Myers, F. 39–40 181–2, 183, 208; and identity politics
My Lai massacre 60, 166, 174 62; in legal cases 27, 29, 31–2
Mysterious Skin 205 Powers, E. 143
 Index 239
Prince, M. 41 Scarry, E. 147, 175, 206
psychoanalysis 8, 11, 12, 44, 47, 56, Schindler’s List 178–9, 196
61, 97, 198 Schivelbusch, W. 21
psychodynamic theories 38–49 Schreiber, F. R. 181–2
psychology as discipline 37, 61; as Seawright, P. 158
expertise 33; and narrative theory 81–2; Sebald, W. G. 81, 87, 111–16, 210
in tension with law 31–2 Segal, L. 121
‘psycho-therapeutic’, origin of term 39 Seiffert, R. 210
Punter, D. 97 Seltzer, M. 2, 20, 104
Putnam, F. 42 Sennett, R. 209
serial killer 104, 195
Rabaté, J.-M. 94 sexual abuse 10–11, 40, 71–5, 101, 103,
Radstone, S. 183 106, 121, 122–4, 133, 144, 194, 200;
railways 21–2, 24, 99 see also incest
Rambo films 184 Shapiro, S. 205
Rancière, J. 171 Shatan, C. 60, 61
rape 71 shell shock 9, 49–59
Reagan, R. 59, 60 Shephard, B. 53, 57
recovered memory 11–12, 32–3, 70, 72–4, Shnayerson, M. 143
101, 105, 107, 112, 122–4, 148–9 Shoah, 66; see also Holocaust
repetition 9, 83, 131, 148, 171 shock 163, 166, 173, 174, 176, 177;
repression 48, 55–6 see also nervous shock; shell shock
resilience 210 slavery 90–7
Resnais, A. 181, 185–90 Smiley, J. 105–6
Return, The 205 Somme 52
Richard and Judy 134 Sontag, S. 89, 112, 162–3, 165,
Richter, G. 156–8 168, 173, 174–5
Ricoeur, P. 84–6, 115, 119, 205 Spence, J. 153
risk 213–14 Spielberg, S. 178–9
Rivers, W. H. R. 53, 55–6 Spitzer, R. 61
Robbe-Grillet, A. 187, 188 Stallabrass, J. 150, 152, 170
Roberts, J. 152 Stallone, S. 184
Roberts, M. 108 Stanley, L. 122
Romney, J. 190, 207 Steiner, G. 5, 210
Rose, G. 179 Stephenson, P. 132
Rose, J. 131 Sternfeld, J. 158
Rosenfeld, G. 66 Stevenson, D. 201
Rosler, M. 167 Stover, E. 165
Ross, C. 151 stress 148
Roth, P. 116, 128, 137–40 Sturken, M. 151
Rothberg, M. 118 Styron, W. 128
Rush, F. 71 subconsciousness 42
Russell, D. 72 sublime 5–6
Rwanda 164, 170, 171, 172 suggestion see hypnosis
Summerfield, D. 212
Sacks, O. 128 survivor 62, 64, 66–8, 71, 73–5, 97, 133, 180
Salcedo, D. 158 Sweet Hereafter, The 193–4
Salgado, S. 164, 165, 170, 172, 173 Sybil 179
Saltzman, L. 151
Santner, E. 65 Tagg, J. 167
Sarkonak, R. 140 Tal, K. 72, 89
Sassoon, S. 53 Taxi Driver 59, 184
Satanic ritual abuse 11, 98 Taylor, J. 166
Savarese, R. 123 technology 20, 24, 80
240 Index
Terezin (Theresienstadt) 67, 114 Van Sant, G. 207
Terr, L. 98–9 Vickroy, L. 88
testimony 81, 120, 124–5, 126, 127, Vietnam Veterans Against the
136–7, 142–3 War 60
therapy culture 209 Vietnam war 58, 59–61, 64, 87–8,
Thurschwell, P. 64 165–6, 183, 184; and reportage 168;
Tillim, G. 158 Vietnam War Memorial 151
time 5, 8–9, 80, 84–5, 99, 100, 115, 180, Vulliamy, E. 143, 169
187, 206
Tomachevsky, B. 83 Walker, J. 178, 201
Torgovnick, M. 116 Wang, B. 178
Torok, M. 95–6 war correspondents 168;
torture porn 205–6 see also journalism
trauma in art exhibitions 150, 160–1; war crime tribunals 171–3
belated effect of 1, 8, 81, 91, 92; and Watters, E. 107
celebrity 131–3; and cinema 177; and Wearing, G. 151
collectives 10; and compensation claims Welchman, J. 152
24, 25, 28, 29, 211; and cultural theory Wessely, S. 57
4, 5, 66, 80–5, 174, 211–12; definition White, E. 127
of 2–3; and the image, 147–50, 159, Whitehead, A. 87, 88, 105, 115
173–6; and industrial accidents 24–6; Whiteread, R. 151
and law 26–34; and narrative 79–86, Wiesel, E. 67, 68, 69, 182
88, 97; and neurology 13, 52; as organic Wiesenthal, S. 151
illness 22–3, 34, 36, 52, 67; paradoxes Wilkomirski, B. 70, 87, 120
of 4–5; as psychodynamic product Williams, L. 178
38–49; and sexuality 8–9, 47, 71–5, Wilson, J. 60
198; and the supernatural 64, 98, 200, Wiltshire, J. 129
202; and technology 20–1, 24, 80, 150; Winfrey, O. 75, 133–4, 135
transmission of 3, 8, 54–5, 64, 69–70, Wolcott, J. 143
73, 91, 100, 111, 119, 196; and war 9, Woods, T. 70, 87
49–61, 168–76, 212 Woolf, V. 110, 112, 121
traumatic hysteria 45 worker’s compensation 25–6
traumatic neurosis 34, 56, 57, 114 World Trade Center 116, 151, 174;
Trimble, M. 24, 33–4 see also 9/11
Turim, M. 180, 181
Turner, C. 131 Yardley, J. 143
21 Grams 207 Yealland, L. 53, 55
Twin Peaks 199–202 Young British Artists 152
Young, J. 67, 69–70, 151
unconscious 48 Yugoslavia 168–9, 171, 172, 212
United Nations 164, 172, 213
Zeebrugge disaster 27
Van Alphen, E. 156 Zelizer, B. 163, 174
Van Der Kolk, B. 148 Žižek, S. 118, 173, 198–9, 200
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