Introduction: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Literary Form

Notes Introduction: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Literary Form 1. For a historical genealogy of trauma, see Leys, 2000; Luckhurst, 2008: Part I. 2. Psychoanalysis has deeply informed our understanding of trauma, particularly in the Humanities (see, for instance, Felman and Laub, 1992; Caruth, 1995c; 1996; Leys, 2000; Garland, 2002d; Ball, 2007b), and several critics (including Stonebridge, 1998; Jacobus, 1999; Schwab, 2001; Jacobus, 2005; Moran, 2007; Radstone, 2007a; b) have turned specifically to British object relations theory when writing about the relationship between trauma or violence and literature. Nevertheless, important aspects of this strand of psychoanalysis have not yet been comprehensively explored regarding their usefulness for a literary aesthetics of trauma. 3. While PTSD is central to contemporary understandings of trauma (including mine), especially in the Humanities, Ruth Leys points to The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (1995) by anthropologist Allan Young, which postulates that, in Leys’s words, ‘far from being a timeless entity […] PTSD is a historical construct that has been “glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilized these efforts and resources”’ (2000: 6). For her part, Leys identifies ‘the problem of imitation, defined as a problem of hypnotic imitation’ (2000: 8) as central to the history of trauma (see also Radstone, 2007b: 14–16). 4. Relating to transnational adoption, Drucilla Cornell adopts Gayatri Spivak’s phrase ‘enabling violation’ to indicate ‘what can be enabling for certain children – parents who adopt them and, in many cases, enable them to stay alive – is inseparable from the violation perpetuated through systematic inequalities’ (2007: 234). 5. James Berger (1999) employs the term ‘post-apocalyptic’ to indicate a similar classification. 6. Page numbers cited in the text are from the latest edition of a work listed in the Bibliography. 7. This feeling of overwhelment not only concerns the neurological and psychological functions, but also instigates a profound existential doubt. Trauma crushes an individual’s fundamental belief in the safety of the world (Farrell, 1998: x), the positive value of the self, and the bond between individual and community (Herman, 2001: 51). Dori Laub furthermore high- lights the ability of a traumatic event such as the Holocaust to demolish not only personal beliefs but also ‘cultural values, political conventions, social mores, national identities, investments, families and institutions’ (Felman and Laub, 1992: 74). 8. For a similar defence of a democratic, emancipatory category of the aesthetic in terms of symbol-making, play and a cognitive theory of affect, see Armstrong, 2000. 218 Notes to Chapter 1 219 9. Luckhurst points to ‘the length and cost of psychodynamic therapies’ as contributing to this ‘revolution in diagnostics in the 1970s’ (2008: 211). 1 Writing the Body: Trauma, Woolf, Winterson 1. When reprinting Deutsch’s article (originally published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 26 (1957): 159–67) the editors changed his original references to refer to The Standard Edition instead. In this particular case, however, it appears that the text that Deutsch had originally cited (The Defense Neuropsychoses, in Collected Papers, I: 63) had a different translation than the later Standard Edition, for the latter reads ‘into something somatic’ rather than Deutsch’s ‘into some bodily form of expression’: ‘In hysteria, the incompatible idea is rendered innocuous by its sum of excitation being transformed into something somatic. For this I should like to propose the name of conversion’ (Freud, 1894: 49). I am thankful that the editors did not spot the variation, as the older translation seems more expressive than the cur- rent one. 2. Narrativization is also a topic of considerable concern in historiography (especially White, 1980). 3. For a more nuanced explanation of EMDR, which has an eight-phase approach, see Shapiro, 2007. 4. For a critique of van der Kolk’s neurobiological account of trauma, see Leys, 2000: Chapter VII. 5. Reading Woolf’s ‘generational conflict with the Edwardians’ more person- ally, Mark Gaipa postulates that the Bennett essays are actually a precursor to To the Lighthouse: ‘her earlier effort to work through the family triangle that she will return to in “Time Passes”’ (2003: 14, 15). It is through the empty house in ‘Time Passes’ and its separation of ‘body from spirit’, Gaipa suggests, that Woolf realizes that while ‘Bennett’s materialism may block Woolf’s access to Mrs. Brown, […] Woolf paradoxically needs this obstacle to help produce her vision’ (2003: 7, 16). 6. Including George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb under the rubric of ‘Edwardian’, Ruth Livesey convincingly argues that ‘Woolf’s exorcism of Edwardian politics and literature [on the basis of their emphasis on ‘material externalities alone’] elides the continuing influence of writers and activists [such as William Morris, Edward Carpenter and Walter Crane] who had embraced socialism during the 1880s and for whom poetics, ethics, and politics were intimately related’ (2007: 129). The vestiges of this ‘forgotten’ generation of 1880s Bloomsbury socialists were problematic for Woolf, Livesey suggests, because they represented ‘a radical sympathy that sought to elide the individual in the name of solidarity’ which worked against Woolf’s own ‘tentative steps towards forming an individualist and autono- mous radical aesthetic’ (2007: 135). 7. Craig A. Gordon, for one, suggests that it is not a turn at all: ‘Far from a revisionist insight at which Woolf arrives in the last decade of her life, I would suggest that her exploration of the inseparability of body and mind is legible in her text from at least 1919 on’ (2007: 140). Gordon (2007: 135–41) performs a comparative reading of ‘Modern Fiction’ and ‘On Being Ill’ 220 Notes to Chapter 2 similar to mine, yet his particular focus is on Woolf’s preoccupation with psychology and the ‘nervous discourse’ of the period. 8. For a discussion of Jacob’s room as ‘empty coffin’, see Booth, 1996: 44–9. 9. On the ‘fabulous bodies’ of Villanelle and Sexing the Cherry’s Dog Woman, see Haslett, 2007. 10. Evelyne Ender links Written on the Body to a specific phrase from ‘On Being Ill’: ‘Left to ourselves we speculate thus carnally’ (Woolf, 1926b: 323). ‘In Winterson, just as in Woolf,’ she writes, ‘illness creates an intensification of bodily experience’ (Ender, 1999: 116). 11. This ‘genderless’ narrator forces readers to confront their own assumptions about gender, sexuality and narration. The incessant speculations on the ‘actual’ gender of the narrator (generally considered to be female) demon- strate the unwillingness of several readers and literary critics to accept such breach of literary convention. See Kauer, 1998; Stowers, 1998; Hobbs, 2004: Chapter 1; Antosa, 2008: Chapter 3. Reading gender identity as performa- tive, Antje Lindenmeyer more helpfully refers to the narrator as ‘butch’ (1999: 52). To preserve Winterson’s deliberate ambiguity, when talking about the narrator I use the pronouns s/he and him/her. 12. This is an undeniable evocation of The Lesbian Body, which contains about a dozen capitalized, unpunctuated passages listing the body’s (micro) anat- omy. See Wittig, 1975b: 28, 40, 53, 62, 76, 88, 101, 115, 128, 141, 153. Their function, Wittig asserts in the ‘Author’s Note’, is to affirm the reality of the female body (1975a: 10). 13. On the (mis)use of illness, particularly cancer and AIDS, as a figure or meta- phor, see Sontag, 1978; 1989. 14. See also Maagaard, who similarly concludes regarding Art & Lies: ‘What emerges is an ethics of the Word that is closely tied to the erotics of the body’ (1999: 56). ‘Language becomes a means to know the lover physically, and bodily sensations become a way to know language anew’ (Maagaard, 1999: 63). 15. Leigh Gilmore (2001: 134) addresses the turn towards trauma within the novel, but her focus is on questions about autobiography and self-representation or, more specifically, not-naming. 16. Alongside Winterson’s reverence for love, there is an earlier passage in the novel validating such a reading of the capital L. When sitting in the library, writing to Louise, the narrator looks at a facsimile of an illuminated manuscript, ‘the first letter a huge L’. The letter is a labyrinth with a pilgrim outside and the Lamb of God inside. Tellingly, the first word of the book is ‘Love’ (Winterson, 1992b: 88). 2 Symbolization, Thinking and Working-Through: British Object Relations Theory 1. For an excellent commentary of Jones’s paper, see Milner, 1955: 13–15. 2. On the debates between the Kleinians and the Independents concerning regression in patients, see Quinodoz, 2008: 15. 3. I have omitted the two intermediate stages of ‘incipient symbolization’ and ‘discursive symbolization’ in Freedman’s model as they are too particular Notes to Chapter 3 221 to be constructive here. Likewise, I disregard Susan K. Deri’s definition of a symptom as ‘the product of missymbolization’ (1984: 155), not because this is not a valid assertion, but because taking it up would lead to an even greater overload of too similar terminology. Finally, Anna Aragno (1997: 257–328) identifies as many as six stages of symbolization within a psychoanalytic developmental model of the mind. 4. Teresa Brennan clearly explains the distinction between projection and projective identification: ‘A projection is what I disown in myself and see in you; a projective identification is what I succeed in having you experience in yourself, although it comes from me in the first place’ (2004: 29). 5. Cathy Caruth’s work similarly emphasizes the role of survival within trauma: ‘What is enigmatically suggested […] is that the trauma consists not only in having confronted death but in having survived, precisely, without knowing it’ (1996: 64). 6.

Load more