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Post-traumatic memory projects: autobiographical fiction and counter-monuments

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2013.858068

1470-1308

Meg Jensen,

Literature and Cultural Memory

AbstractIn our age the categories of memory, monumentality, and truth telling are all far from stable. In the highly charged world of what Foucault termed 'parrhesia' – a mode of free speech 'linked to courage in the face of danger' – testimony can challenge a state's version of events and autobiographical fictions offer contexts through which trauma might be understood. In this essay, I argue that this danger and instability has come to supersaturate concrete and textual representations of traumatic experience, and also to link the discourses with which these different renderings are debated. Such works function analogously as what Pierre Nora termed 'lieux dé memoire' that generate forms knowledge about the relations between truth, memory and memorial. As Leigh Gilmore puts it, they have the 'potential to reorganize what justice and knowledge look like in the context of trauma'. The seemingly distinct memory projects manifested in, for example, war memorials, autobiographical literature, and legal testimony have, I suggest, developed against and alongside a common set of problematic conceptual, linguistic and socio/political principles. Each of these projects similarly map out and produce idiosyncratic representations of the nature of these boundaries, the genre-blurring and interdisciplinary character of which my own argument echoes.Keywords: Life writingtrauma fictionautobiographical fictionpsychology of writingculture and mourning Notes1 Paul Celan, 'The Meridian', trans. Jerry Glen, in Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, ed. and trans. Thomas Dutoit and O. Pasanen (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), pp. 173–85, p. 178.2 Joseph DeLappe and David Simpson, 'Virtual commemoration: the Iraqi memorial project', Critical Inquiry, 37: 4 (Summer 2011), pp. 615–26.3 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 12.4 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, Ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Simotext(e), 2001), p. 170.5 Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), p. 3.6 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and The Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003), p. 94; p. 29.7 Robert Musil, 'Nachlaβ zu Lebzeiten', ed. Adolf Frisé, Gesammette Werke (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), Vol 2. pp. 506–9.8 Gilmore, Limits, p. 147.9 On the genre's-blurring intertextual nature of autobiographical fiction see Max Saunders, Self-Impression: Life Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2010), pp. 501–8. Suzette Henke first noted the fragmented forms of trauma fiction in Henke Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life Writing (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).10 Saul Friedlander, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews in Europe (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), pp. 127–8. Theodor Adorno, for example, famously stated that 'Poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.' Prisms, 6th ed., trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), p. 34. Note, however, his troubling and expansion of this prohibition in his later work, in particular in the essay 'Elements of Anti-Semitism' in Adorno and Max Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997) pp. 168–208. Huyssen contextualizes Adorno's statement as analogous to the biblical 'banning of graven images' 'Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno' in Present Pasts, pp. 14–19.11 Juliet Mitchell, 'Trauma, recognition and the place of language' Diacritics, 28:4 (Winter 1998), pp. 121–33, p. 132.12 In this summary of the neuroscience of trauma and the biochemistry of memory I have drawn upon the work of Barbara Bottalico and Tommasso Bruni, 'Post-traumatic stress disorder, neuroscience and the law', International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 35 (2012), pp. 112–20, and Robert Strickgold, 'EMDR: a putative neurobiological mechanism of action', Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58.1 (2002), pp. 61–75.13 Strickgold, p. 63.14 Ibid., p. 64.15 Ibid., p. 66.16 Ibid., p. 67.17 Mitchell, p. 130.18 Elsewhere I have examined in detail the repetitive use of key tropes in the works of some post-traumatic writers. See Jensen, 'The Writer's diary as borderland', Special Issue: Writing Between the Lives: Life Writing and the Work of Mediation. Life Writing, 9.3 (2012), pp. 315–25.19 Gilmore, Limits, p. 145.20 Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), Vol I, pp. 14–19.21 Nora, Realms, pp. 1–7.22 Huyssen (pp. 38–40) suggests that Nora developed this idea in relation to Foucault's criticism of the monumental as evoking an innate cultural longing 'the fascism in us all [ … ] that causes us to love power and to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits', Michel Foucault, Preface to Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. xxi.23 'No doubt the world is being musealized […] Total recall seems to be the goal', Huyssen, p. 15.24 Foucault, p. 170.25 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006), p. 22.26 Felman, Juridical, p. 107.27 Huyssen, p. 151.28 Ibid., pp. 152–3.29 Foucault, Fearless, p. 170.30 Felman, Juridical, p. 152.31 Huyssen, p. 146.32 Leigh Gilmore, 'Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú, The Kiss and scandalous self-representation in the age of memoir and trauma', Signs, 28:2 (Winter 2003), pp. 695–718, p. 699.33 Gilmore, Limits, p. 146.34 Gilmore, Jurisdictions, p. 698.35 Felman, Juridical, p. 54; p. 95.36 Huyssen, p. 101.37 Gilmore, Limits, p. 36.38 Gilmore, Limits, p. 143. Kincaid's series of autobiographical novels includes At the Bottom of the River (1983), Annie John (1985), Lucy (1991), Autobiography of my Mother (1995); My Brother (1997). She clarified her sense of the juridical place of her own work: 'Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law'. Kay Bonetti, 'An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid', The Missouri Review, 25.2 (Summer 2002). Accessed online March 16, 2012, http://www.missourireview.org/content/dynamic/view_text.php?text_id=194739 Gilmore, Limits, pp. 146–9.40 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Subject of Sovereignty, Trans. George Schwab, (1922) (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), p. 5.41 Jacques Derrida, The Beast & The Sovereign, Ed. in Michel Lisse, M. Mallet, and G. Michand, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Vol. I, p. 16.42 Jacques Derrida, 'Majesties', Sovereignties in Question, p. 117.43 Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002), p. xxix.44 Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 236. On the danger of deconstructing sovereignty, Derrida wrote 'One cannot [ … ] threaten the whole principle of sovereignty without compromising [ … ] what are today the most stable foundations of morality, law and politics', Without Alibi, p. xix.45 Max Saunders, Self-Impression, p. 515; p. 526.46 Judith Butler, 'Preface' (1999), Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999) pp. vii–xxvi, p. xiv. Frank Kafka, 'Before the Law', Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories and Parables 3–4, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Willa & Edwin Muir (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1971); Derrida, Acts of Literature, Eds. Derrida and Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 187–220.47 Butler, 'Preface' (1999), p. xiv.48 Elizabeth Bruss, 'Eye for I', Autobiographical Acts: The Changing situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), p. 300.49 Paul De Man, 'Autobiography as de-facement', Modern Language Notes, 94: 5 (1979), pp. 919–30.50 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 'Appendix A: "Sixty Genres of Life Narrative"', Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 253–86.51 Smith and Waston, Reading, p. 143. As Butler and Smith and Watson all note, this version of the self in all its subsequent forms, derives from Nietzche's insight that 'there is no "being" behind doing, acting, becoming'. Nietzche, On the Geneaology of Morality (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), p. 13. See also Sidonie Smith, 'Performativity, autobiographical practice, resistance', A/B Autobiographical Studies, 10.1 (Spring 1995), pp. 17–33.52 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh PA, Duquesne UP, 1969), p. 297.53 Smith and Watson, Reading, p. 3.54 Ibid., p. 274.55 Lee Quinby, 'The Subject of Memoirs,' Decolonizing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota UP), pp. 297–320, p. 299.56 Smith and Watson, Reading, p. 13.57 Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Autobiography and the Problem of the Subject (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), p. 16.58 Huyssen, p. 19.59 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), p. 6.60 Juliet Mitchell, 'Trauma', pp. 129–30.61 Saunders, p. 502.62 See Jessica Wells Cantiello, 'That story about the gun: pseudo-memory in Julia Alvarez's autobiographical novels', Melus: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., 36:1 (Spring 2011), pp. 83–108, p. 85.63 See Thomas Jones, 'J.M.Coetzee: Summertime', Guardian, September 6, 2009. Accessed online March 16, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/06/jm-coetzee-summertime64 See Tim Adams. 'What is the What? by Dave Eggers', Guardian, May 20, 2007. Accessed online March 16, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/20/fiction.features65 Dave Eggers, What is the What? The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007), p. 535.66 Eggers responds to these critics further in this interview. See Adams http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/20/fiction.features67 Caruth, p. 6.68 Levinas, p. 502.69 As Gilmore explains, in 1998, 'Nobel Peace prize recipient Rigoberta Menchú was accused of propagandistic distortion and outright lying' in her celebrated testimonio. At stake, Gilmore argues, were the limits of truth and the representation of traumatic experience. Gilmore, Jurisdictions, p. 695. See also David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 1998.70 Gilmore, Jurisdictions, p. 707.71 Ibid., Limits, p. 147.72 Eggers, What is the What? p. 535.73 Dominick La Capra, 'Trauma, absence, loss', Critical Inquiry, 25.4 (Summer 1999), pp. 696–727, p. 707.74 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (Boston: James Munroe and CO: 1836). Digitised first edition. http://www.archive.org/details/naturemunroe00emerrich75 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, by Peter Eisenman. It consists of a 4.7 acres site covered with 2711 concrete slabs or 'stelae', arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/germans/memorial/eisenman.htmlThe Suffragette Memorial, London Erected in 1970. http://parliamentandwomen.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/suffragette-fellowship-memorial/ The 07/07 Memorial, Hyde Park, London. Designed by Carmody Groarke with Anthony Gormley. 52 stainless steel stelae commemorate the 52 victims, arranged to symbolise the four attacks. 'The 3.5 m tall stainless steel pillars symbolised the random nature of the loss of life'. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8137265.stmLittle Bighorn Battlefield National Monument reinterprets the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1876. In 1940, this site was purchased to honour Custer and his defeated Cavalry, but in the 1990s, the park was redesignated at the behest of representatives of Native American interests. http://www.nps.gov/libi/index.htmThe National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Lower Manhattan, New York by Israeli-American Michael Arad. The title of the winning design is 'Reflecting Absence'. http://www.911memorial.org/76 Levi Smith, 'Window or Mirror: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Ambiguity of Remembrance' in Peter Homans (ed.), Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century's End (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 105–25, p. 105.77 Levi Smith, 'Window or Mirror', p. 106.78 LaCapra, 'Trauma, Absence, Loss', pp. 701–13.79 Sigmund Freud, Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (further Recommendations on the Technique of Psychoanalysis II) (1914), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 12: 145–56; 'Mourning and Melancholia' (1917) 14: 237–60. See also LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996).80 I am currently working on a companion essay that examines a number of serial autobiographies written post-trauma in detail. Jack Kerouac saw his 14 novel fictional autobiography (the Duluoz Legend), as a response to the death of his brother ('the whole reason why I ever wrote at all [was] because of Gerard', Kerouac, Visions of Gerard (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1963), p. 10.81 Levi Smith, p. 106.82 Levi Smith cites the Question and Answer Sheet, 10 February 1981, Records of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, container n. 63, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. 'The specifications sent to prospective designers cautioned them against making "any political statement" in their designs'. Smith, p. 107.83 Levi Smith, p. 116. Smith notes that a 'compromise was reached over the course of a year in which an inscription was added to the memorial and a flag and a sculpture of three infantrymen were placed near it', p. 107.84 Charles Griswold.,'The Vietnam War Memorial and the Washington Mall: philosophical thoughts on political iconography', Critical Inquiry, 12 (Summer 1986), pp. 699–719, p. 711.85 Mitchell, pp. 129–30.86 Ibid., p. 132.