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Trauma, Witnessing, and the Poetics of Implication

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Trauma, Witnessing, and the Poetics of Implication Université de Montréal A (Dis)Play of Traces: Trauma, Witnessing, and the Poetics of Implication par Bachar Aloui Département d’études anglaises Faculté des Arts et des Sciences Thèse présentée à la faculté des études supérieures en vue de l’obtention du doctorat en études anglaises Juin 2012 © Bachar Aloui 2012 Université de Montréal Faculté des études supérieures Cette thèse intitulée : A (Dis)Play of Traces: Trauma, Witnessing, and the Poetics of Implication présentée par: Bachar Aloui a été évaluée par un jury composé des personnes suivantes: Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi président-rapporteur Eric Savoy directeur de recherche Terry Cochran membre du jury Jonathan Boulter (Universisty of Western Ontario) examinateur externe iii Abstract This thesis will provide a comparative analysis of the poetics of traumatic hindsight and the literary devices that three texts - Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved– utilize to signify the necessity of a retrospective gaze towards the atrocious past. The thesis investigates the ways in which each text negotiates the fragmentation that characterizes the traumatic aftermath, particularly as a result of the incomplete nature of traumatic history inscribed as absence of knowledge. It also explores the positioning of such a past within an intersubjective context, which goes beyond the simple individual plight to comprehend the need to be an ethically responsible agent of remembrance in the present. A central aspect of this study is thus the focus on how memory and witnessing are deeply entwined with the linguistic, which, by imploding into the poetic, offers the possibility of reconciling the imaginative intervention with the (obliquely) referential. Keywords: trauma; return; witnessing; poetics; transmission; language; memory; ethics iv Résumé Cette thèse se propose de fournir une analyse comparative de la poétique de la rétrospective traumatique et les dispositifs littéraires que trois textes - Fugitive Pieces d’Anne Michaels, Solar Storms de Linda Hogan, et Beloved de Toni Morrison - utilisent pour signifier la nécessité du recul, d'un regard rétrospectif, sur le passé atroce. La thèse étudie les façons dont chaque texte négocie la fragmentation qui caractérise la suite traumatique, notamment en raison du caractère incomplet de l'histoire traumatique inscrite comme l'absence de savoir. La thèse explore également le positionnement d'un tel passé, dans un contexte intersubjectif, qui va au-delà du simple sort individuel pour essayer de comprendre la nécessité d'être un agent moralement responsable de la sauvegarde de la mémoire dans le présent. Cette étude met ainsi l'accent sur la façon dont la mémoire et le témoignage sont intimement liés aux outils langagiers, qui, par implosion poétique, offrent la possibilité de concilier l’intervention imaginative avec le référentiel (oblique). Mots-clés: trauma; retour; témoignage; poétique; la transmission, le langage, la mémoire, l'éthique v TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction: A Poetics of re/collection 1 1. Dis/play of Traumatic Traces 17 2. Re/turning Memories 31 II. CHAPTER 1: Fugitive Pieces: “The tableau of the haunting trinity” 48 1. A Poetics of the Tragic: Representing the Holocaust 52 2. The Vicissitudes of Intergenerational Witnessing 64 3. Witnessing via the Lyrical 76 4. Fragments of Memory 93 5. A Place that Remembers 117 III. CHAPTER 2: Solar Storms: “Beginnings...are everything” 128 1. The Corporeal Site of Witnessing 135 2. Sustaining Metaphors 147 3. Ceremony as Ante-primal Scene 152 4. Return and Matrilineage 164 5. A Bildungsroman 170 6. Hogan’s Literary Strategies of Resistance 181 IV. CHAPTER 3: Beloved: “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” 192 1. The Other Slave Narrative 196 2. Beloved as a Hauntological Narrative 204 3. Maimed Bodies, Claimed Bodies 222 4. Communal Re/membering 241 V. CONCLUSION 253 vi DEDICATION I wish to dedicate this dissertation to my wonderful family: To my mother, Manana, and my father, Habib, for everything that they have given and taught me; And, To my wife, Imen, and my kids, Adam and Amin, for being my very breath... vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indefinitely indebted to my supervisor, Professor Eric Savoy, for his unwavering support, his illuminating guidance, and his rigorous analysis of earlier versions of this dissertation. I also wish to extend my expression of gratitude to both Professor Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi and Professor Heike Härting for their insightful remarks in the embryonic stage of this project. I also am grateful to my family: to my parents for their sustained encouragement, and to my lovely wife, Imen, for helping me shape much of my own thought around some of the perplexing questions raised in this dissertation. 1 Introduction: A Poetics of re/collection “Is the witness the one who sees, the one who undergoes, or the one who propagates, the accident to which he bears witness?” – Barbara Johnson1. “Writing, friendship for the ill- come unknown, for the “reality” that cannot be made evident and that escapes every possible utterance” – Maurice Blanchot2. Texts written under the sign of trauma are often perceived as attempts to narrativize an event that is not fully assimilated during its occurrence – i.e., an event so violent that it shatters the linear unfolding of the subject’s comprehension of temporal ordering. Trauma is not registered as it happens but is rather re-lived belatedly; experienced for the first time as it returns. The dilemma that ensues, for the literary text attempting to bear witness to traumatic events, is similar to the paradox inherent in the mind’s fragmentary understanding of an event that insistently remains outside its reach. Textually confining a trauma which, by its very nature, escapes the grip of consciousness necessarily implies going beyond conventional modes of representation, just as trauma3 conveys a crisis of time and defies traditional modes of knowledge. Once this referential paradox is transposed into the field of historiography, trauma theory becomes an intensification of the deconstructive and anti-essentialist view that the récit cannot coincide with the totality of history – that history as symptomatic of trauma is, to use Cathy Caruth’s qualification, “an impossible history,” marked by its duplicitous impacts, demanding witness and occluding full recognition (Explorations 5). 2 If, as Cathy Caruth points out, the narratives of trauma pose a challenge to a homogenous reading as the oblique allusion towards the ineffable, or by pointing to an excess/insufficiency of language, then it becomes essential to pay attention to how the trauma narrative enlightens not only the project of bearing witness to past atrocity but also participates in shaping the subject-in-becoming. The récit informs the redefined individual who reintegrates the events of the past within a somewhat orderly narrative but also as one whose emergence as a more integral subject is itself shaped by the narrative in question. While the literary attempts to recuperate what is missing from a history of trauma not only highlight issues of expression and unspeakability, it also entails, due to its many removes from the event, the “difficulty of listening and responding to traumatic stories in a way that does not lose their impact, that does not reduce them to clichés or turn them all into versions of the same story” (Caruth Explorations vii, emphasis added). Arising, as Caruth enunciates, from the very theory of trauma that centralizes the structural pattern of repetition within the traumatic experience; this remark begs the question of situating the narratives of trauma within a dialectic whereby they supplement, challenge, or feed back into, trauma theory’s theoretical models. Accepting Caruth’s implicit invitation for an openness to the variations within the traumatic narrative “pattern,” this project embarks upon a search for what might be termed a poetics of the (literary) bearing of witness in three novels – Ann Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Thus, it focuses mainly on examining representational modes of bearing witness to trauma: it fuses the analysis of the trauma of/in literature with an investigation of the literariness of trauma – a question that Cathy Caruth, as she shifts the focus to the structure of the 3 traumatic experience in her Unclaimed Experience – raises but leaves rather undefined. In other words, this thesis asks what it means to read three texts that situate themselves within a chain of witnessing to traumatic events that were missed – if we are to align our understanding of trauma with that of Freud, Caruth, or Giorgio Agamben – even by their survivors. More specifically, I examine how the texts under study attempt to elaborate a poetics of the traumatic retrospective – the fictional, and paradoxical, writing in hindsight about trauma that coincides not with the experience but rather attempts to bear witness to bearing witness. I expose the different ways in which the novels ground their efforts in the linguistic medium, rely on similar tropics (having recourse to the figure of ‘un/covering,’ for instance) to point to a ‘non-appropriable’ event, and how they impose ethical demands upon the readers that advocates an ever-returning examination of the past as a corrective to amnesia. As Caruth postulates in Unclaimed Experience, the temporal breakdown entailed by the harrowing event – the “breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” – places trauma narratives within a paradoxical configuration that further refutes the notion of a straightforwardly referential language (4). Trauma is hence “not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its unassimilated nature – the way in which it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on” (4). Therefore, the gaps at the heart of the structure of traumatic events require oblique modes of signification to depict their unbridled nature, forcing poetic paradigms to reach for a referentiality that stubbornly remains beyond their grasp.
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