Copyright by Eléna-Maria Antonia Chandler 2005

Copyright by Eléna-Maria Antonia Chandler 2005 1 The Dissertation Committee for Eléna-Maria Antonia Chandler certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Trauma as [a Narrative of] the Sublime: the Semiotics of Silence Committee: ____________________________________ Peter Hess, Supervisor ____________________________________ Pascale Bos ____________________________________ Katherine Arens ____________________________________ Kristin Belgum ____________________________________ Brian Stross 2 Trauma as [a Narrative of] the Sublime: the Semiotics of Silence by Eléna-Maria Antonia Chandler, M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2005 3 Lovingly dedicated to my sister, Winnie the Boo; Astrid Nadolny; my grandfather, Clement (Chan) Chandler, and Nichola Torbett 4 Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to thank Peter Hess, who was not only an outstanding Doktorvater , but also a good friend. I could never have completed this project without his ongoing encouragement, close reading, and guidance. I would like to thank Pascale Bos. Her knowledge in the areas of trauma theory and critical theory are unparalleled, and her compassionate teaching philosophy has greatly impacted my own attitude about teaching. Many thanks to Kit Belgum for her generous close reading and her insightful suggestions, which significantly improved the quality of my project. She really helped to make this entire process enjoyable. Heartfelt thanks to Brian Stross for his guidance in linguistic theory and for all of the long, enjoyable conversations about philosophy in his office when I was first exploring my research ideas. I would like to thank Katie Arens for teaching me to stand up for what I believe in and to trust my own abilities in the face of critique. A huge thank-you to my friends at the University of Texas, especially Susan Engelhardt, Ann Keller-Lally, Daniela Richter, Tina Oesterreich, Karen Brettell, Bradly Boovy, Joshua Bonzo, Jim Busby, Michael Connor, Angela Fergusson, Rob Kohn, Carolyn Moore, Jennifer van Hyning, Agnieszka Nance, Zsuzsanna Abrams, Maria Pineda, Sarah Wischkaemper, Sarah Crossley, Kat Morgan, Lindsey Parker, and all of my colleagues for their friendship and support. I would like to give special thanks to my sister Jessica, for providing her insights into all matters philosophical, and in particular, for her contributions in the area of epistemology. She is a precocious but also precious swami and my very best friend. Finally, I would like to thank my two exceptional helpers; Rudy Blue, for eating forty pounds of mechanical pencils and at least one page of every chapter, and Jacob T. Dog for cheerfully refraining from doing so. (Thanks, Rudy, for never eating any handwritten, non-reproducible manuscript pages.) Their combination of rapacious critique and blithe acceptance, as well as their interjection of furry affection, made the writing of this dissertation a much more enjoyable process and less… well… traumatic. v Trauma as [a Narrative of] the Sublime: the Semiotics of Silence Publication No. ____________ Eléna-Maria Antonia Chandler, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisor: Peter Hess Both traditional and contemporary approaches to psychic trauma begin with the basic assumption that trauma is a pathological disordering of the subject in response to “an event outside the range of human experience.” Such event-based approaches to trauma have failed to establish a unified understanding of the wide range of symptoms and experiences that accompany traumatic crisis. This study departs from these traditional assumptions, placing the range of existent discourse from fields such as psychology, ethics, social theory, cognitive science, and literary studies within the broader framework of semiotics and epistemology. This broader framework allows me to define the underlying problematic in trauma as the finitude of what can be expressed and understood by others, and the infinitude of vi human experience not bound by the structure of symbolic meaning. Beginning with this basic opposition, I develop a dynamic model of semiosis and subjectivity, in which the contrasting cognitive objectives of delimiting and expanding meaning can be understood as a productive differential that induces a current of experience, cognition, discourse, and identity. This dynamic model utilizes the anomalous symptoms and responses of traumatic crisis to expand existing models of subjectivity, since I argue that what we call “trauma” is actually an attenuation of sub-processes integral to the successful functioning of signification. The dynamic model of signification and subjectivity defined in this study provides a comprehensive explanation for what has seemed a widely scattered and unpredictable array of traumatic symptoms, situating physical, ethical, emotional and social “conflicts” within a single contiguous process. More importantly, it makes it feasible to talk about fields of study as disparate as psychology, cognitive science, social science using parallel models that are based upon the same principles. This will allow one field to contribute to another in a way that has not yet been possible, and has implications for the active treatment of traumatic crisis. Finally, the model developed here founds an overarching interpretive approach to trauma narrative that is textually based, and hence applicable to literatures from a different cultural and historical basis. vii Table of Contents List of Tables x List of Figures x Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Where Signification Fails: A Redefinition of Trauma 1.0 Historical View of Trauma 24 1.0.1 Public and Private Repression 31 1.0.2 Fragmentation and Inconsistencies 37 1.1 Systemic Failure: An Idiopathic Approach 47 1.1.1. The Primacy of the Word 49 1.1.2 Structuralism and the Landmarks of Linguistic of Identity 57 1.2. Linguistic Freudianism 64 1.2.1 The Separation of the Subject from Its Environment 65 1.2.2 Emergence of a Subject that Speaks 71 1.3 Divided Subjectivity in Crisis: Experience into Narrative 74 1.3.1 False Division of the Symbolic 86 1.3.2 Doublethink as Doublespeak 89 1.4 Divided Language 98 1.5 Conclusion 103 Chapter 2 The Structure of the Semiotic Current 2.0 Introduction 106 2.1 Separating Light from Darkness: The Origins of Traumatic Opposition 108 2.2 Force and Counterforce: How the Potential to Signification Arises 122 2.3 The Epistemic Domain 131 2.4 The Ethical Domain and Epistemic Crisis 143 2.5 Idiolect and the Emergence of Epistemology 155 2.6 The Narrative and Communicative Domains: Public Discourse 167 2.7 Trauma as an Experience of the Sublime: The Semiotics of Silence 183 viii Chapter 3 Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle : Traumatic Crisis as an Internal Experience 3.1 The Foreclosure of Identity: Displaced Subjectivity and Displaced Conflict 196 3.2: The Origin of Ambiguity and the Demand for Structural Reorganization 229 3.3 The Foreclosure of Deferred Identity 263 3.4 Albertine’s Dream and the Sublimation of Conflicted Subjectivity 302 3.5 “Not Every Dream is Truly a Dream” 319 Chapter 4 Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter : Individual Reactions to a Shared Event 4.0 Introduction 343 4.1 Dolores Driscoll: Embedded Trauma 352 4.2 Billy Ansel: A Topography of Separate Realities 390 Chapter 5 Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter : Individual Trauma and Collective Trauma 5.0 Introduction 451 5.1 Expectation and the Formation of Meaning: Ethics and Experience 454 5.2 Nichole Burnell: Covalence and the Resolution of Individual Crisis 501 5.3 Dolores Driscoll: The Resolution of Collective Trauma 549 Conclusion 577 Bibliography 583 Vita 604 ix Lists of Tables Table 1: Characteristics of differentials manifested in Epistemic Domain 143 Table 2: Characteristics of differentials manifested in Epistemic and Ethical Domain 149 Table 3: Characteristics of differentials manifested in Epistemic, Ethical, & Idiolect 166 Table 4: Characteristics of differentials, complete table 182 Table 5: Reciprocal relationship of primary and deferred identity 245 Lists of Figures Optical illusion that demonstrates the eigenstates in a shifting metonymy 190 x Introduction And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. (King James Bible, Genesis 11.5-7) In the twentieth century, psychological trauma has emerged as a dominant discourse both in popular culture and in scholarly debate. First understood in mid- nineteenth-century medicine and experimental psychology as a physiological response to a physical trauma, 1 the notion of psychic trauma has changed over the course of the last century and a half, transcending the field of medicine, and challenging basic assumptions about ethics, cognition, individual identity, and social identity. In the most general terms, psychic trauma constitutes a response to an event or experience that overwhelms the individual’s coping mechanisms. The traumatic response is characterized by a wide range of often paradoxical symptoms, some of which are somatic in nature, others of which are manifested as a disruption to cognition, identity, and even to the individual’s ability to formulate a narrative of the trauma. 2 (For a more detailed examination of traumatic crisis and the symptoms that such crisis may engender, see section 1.0.2.) 1 Trauma has been variously defined. A standard overview of the origin of modern psychology can be found in: Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970). George Drinka’s The Birth of Neurosis is a standard work that examines hysteria, and more specifically, the social conditions out of which the diagnosis of hysteria emerged.

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