Introduction Mariko Hori Tanaka, Yoshiki Tajiri and Michiko Tsushima, with Robert Eaglestone Roger Luckhurst argues that the modern concept of trauma developed in the West through the interlocking areas of ‘law, psychiatry and industrialized warfare’ (2008: 19). However, over the twentieth century, trauma as a concept became increasingly medicalised and simultaneously significantly linked with wider political frameworks: with survivor and testimony narratives, with responses to persecution and prejudice, to the Holocaust, and other acts of mass atrocity and genocide. In such discourses, the concept of trauma is not fully material or bodily, nor simply psychic, nor fully cultural, nor simply historical or structural, but a meeting of all of these. As Luckhurst usefully suggests, it is pre- cisely because it is a knot, or a point of intersection, of turbulence, that ‘trauma’ is such a powerful force and is impossible to define easily. In terms of its growth in literary studies, the study of trauma and trauma theory also has a range of antecedents. As Kerwin Lee Klein from the discipline of history demonstrates, there was a turn to ‘memory’ in the 1980s, in part stimulated by the work of Pierre Nora and David P. Jordan (2009) and Yosef Yerushalmi’s influ- ential book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982). Michel Foucault, too, invoked a politics of memory and, tracing this out, Ian Hacking explored what he named ‘memoro-politics’. This turn to memory involved a rediscovery and translation of Maurice Halbwachs’s work from the 1920s on collective memory (Halbwachs was murdered at Buchenwald in 1945). This shift in 2 Samuel Beckett and trauma historical discourse seems not only to align much in that field with similar questions about representation, politics and ethics and historical understanding in literary and cultural studies, but also to raise questions about trauma. Hacking, for example, wrote that ‘there are interconnections between group memory and per- sonal memory. One obvious link is trauma’ (1995: 211). Literary and cultural theory in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to turn towards trauma for other reasons as well, beyond the widely acknowledged ‘turn to history’ in the 1990s and 2000s. Research in the nascent fields of the medical humanities, sometimes inspired by Judith Lewis Herman’s Trauma and Recovery (1994) or Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller(1995), focused on traumatic events and the ways in which individuals may come to terms with them. The work of theorists inspired by Lacan, or by Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian politicised psychoanalysis (or, perhaps psy- choanalytic politics), often uses trauma as a core concept. Judith Butler, too, turned to issues of trauma, grief and mourning in books such as Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009). However, perhaps the most powerful source of trauma theory has been the work of Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman, devel- oping on works of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Many have argued that there is something profoundly traumatic in the impulse that underlies deconstruction and Derrida’s work, and that this work both enacts and responds to trauma (see Critchley, 1999; Eaglestone, 2004; Ofrat, 2001). A recent Derrida biography suggests political trauma in the events of his life (see Peeters, 2013). However, it is also the case that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Derrida and those inspired by his work were widely criticised by both the right and the left because many found his work overly textual and distant from the ‘real world’, unable to address political or ethical issues. This was aggravated by the Paul de Man scandal, when the influential Belgian-born critic was discovered to have published a handful of literary articles in a collaborationist newspaper in occupied Belgium during the Second World War. Much of Derrida’s work in the 1990s and afterwards, and much scholarship on his work, aimed to correct this impression. It is in this context that Caruth’s and Felman’s work developed. Introduction 3 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony (1992) also had a huge impact. Testimony shows an explicit debt to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, having at its core a sense of oddness and peculiarity connected to trauma: texts ‘that testify do not simply report facts but, in different ways, encounter – and make us encounter – strangeness’ (Felman and Laub, 1992: 7). Laub and Felman argue that the strangeness of trauma cannot be easily domesticated. While some of the claims of the book have been questioned, its impact remains powerful (see Trezise, 2008; Laub, 2009), not least in the academy itself, where so many have fol- lowed Felman’s lead in organising their teaching modules around questions of trauma, testimony and witnessing. The collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), edited by Caruth, draws on a wide interdisciplinary range of critics and theorists, film-makers and medical experts and practitioners. Her introduction to the volume serves almost as a ‘mission statement’ for this form of ‘trauma theory’ and is, perhaps, the most widely cited piece in this field. It claims that trauma consists ‘in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimi- lated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it’ (Caruth, 1995: 4). Caruth’s understanding of trauma as a belated experience of the event that defies representation has had a great influence in the development of trauma studies. The essays in the present volume consider the psychoana- lytically based post-deconstructive theories of trauma not as ahis- torical contributions to a universalised idea of ‘the psyche’, but as historically and culturally contingent articulations of issues crucial to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet we perceive that theories of trauma and the arguments about them have reached an impasse that involves oppositional poles – trauma as the ‘unrepresentable’ vs. trauma as historical representation, or a broader sense of the ‘wounded’ subject that exists outside of history vs. the specificity of historical catastrophes in particular places and times. For example, in the introductory essay in the collection Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, Michelle Balaev criticises the model of trauma introduced by Caruth in which she thinks ‘[t]he unspeakable void became the 4 Samuel Beckett and trauma dominant concept in criticism for imagining trauma’s function in literature’ (2014: 1). According to Balaev, one of the limitations of this model is that it ‘moves away from the fact of the lived experi- ence of trauma’, ‘forgetting that trauma occurs to actual people, in specific bodies, located within particular time periods and places’ (7). She argues for a shift from ‘the classic model of trauma’ to ‘the pluralistic model’, from ‘the focus on trauma as unrepresent- able’ to ‘a focus on the specificity of trauma that locates meaning through a greater consideration of the social and cultural contexts of traumatic experience’ (3). Like this argument, many arguments about trauma are based on seemingly oppositional poles. Samuel Beckett’s work manages to walk the line between these two poles in unique ways: though often seen as abstract and anti-representational in many ways, it has connections to the historical and cultural contexts from which it emerged. The experience of trauma found in Beckett’s work is characterised by its resistance to representation. Yet this cannot be understood superficially. Samuel Beckett and trauma attempts to regard the anti-representational aspect of Beckett’s work as something that testifies to a profound question that involves a traumatic experi- ence. Beckett explores the ‘force and truth’ (Caruth, 1995: vii) of trauma that cannot be resolved or assimilated. In this sense, Beckett’s attempt can be read in relation to what is questioned in the post-deconstructive approaches of Caruth and Felman. As mentioned above, Caruth thinks that the pathology of trauma ‘consists … solely, in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who expe- riences it’ (1995: 4). This ‘belatedness’, or in other words, the structure of trauma as ‘afterwardsness’, is an important element in Beckett. We need to ‘look closely and more carefully not simply at the trauma, but at the structure of experience within which trauma is made manifest’ (Eaglestone, 2014: 18). Each essay in this book attempts to ‘look closely and more carefully’ at the structure of traumatic experience in Beckett’s work and to show how it is expressed as an unresolvable force of trauma. This anti-representational aspect of Beckett’s work cannot be grasped in terms of ‘the use of experimental, modernist textual Introduction 5 strategies’ (Craps, 2014: 50). One of the critiques of current trauma theory lies in ‘its investment in fragmented modernist aesthet- ics’ (Rothberg, 2014: xiii). Stef Craps, Luckhurst and others have suggested that trauma theory – influenced by Theodor Adorno – has valorised and even often prescribed ‘a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma’ (Craps, 2014: 46). Craps criticises ‘the notion that traumatic experiences can only be adequately represented through the use of experimental, modernist textual strategies’ (50). He holds that this assumption of current trauma theory may ‘lead to the establishment of a narrow trauma canon’ (50) and a ‘rush to dismiss whatever deviates from the prescribed aesthetic as regressive or irrelevant’ (51). He argues that trauma theory needs to be open to a wide range of cultural forms that bear witness to traumatic events. Beckett’s work sits at the intersection of these contemporary debates in trauma studies. It cannot be denied that his work is characterised by ‘a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia’.