Literary Aesthetics of Trauma: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson

261 Pages·2014·3.44 MB·English

by  Reina C. van der Wiel (auth.)

Literary Aesthetics of Trauma
Literary Aesthetics
of Trauma
Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson
Reina van der Wiel
Birkbeck, University of London, UK
© Reina C. van der Wiel 2014
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Literary Form 1
1 Writing the Body: Trauma, Woolf, Winterson 23
2 Symbolization, Thinking and Working-Through:
British Object Relations Theory 48
3 ‘The Most Difficult Abstract Piece of Writing’:
‘Time Passes’ as Container 70
4 ‘Ideas of Feeling’: Symbolic Transformation in
Modernist Formalist Aesthetics 106
5 Woolf’s Embodied Cognitive Aesthetics: The Waves 126
6 From Form to Feeling: Trauma and
Affective Excess in Art & Lies 155
7 ‘The Story of My Life’: Winterson’s Adoption, Art
and Autobiography 176
Coda 214
Notes 218
Bibliography 228
Index 245
v
Acknowledgements
Before a book sees life in print, there are really only a handful of people
apart from the author who engage with the work in its entirety. My first
thanks go to those involved in its earlier manifestation as a doctoral thesis:
first and foremost my supervisor, Joanne Winning, who introduced me
to psychoanalysis, challenged me, and taught me so much; also my
examiners Laura Marcus and Rick Crownshaw. More recently, I would
like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the constructive feedback
that greatly helped shape the final version of the book. Thanks also to
the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Paula Kennedy and
Peter Cary.
Then there are those people whose contributions are profound in
a very different way. My heartfelt thanks go to my parents, Kees and
Willeke van der Wiel, for their endless love, suppo rt and encourage-
ment. Likewise to my brother, Rogier Kerner, and uncle, Rein van der
Wiel. Special thanks are also due to Esther Croese, Manon Becher and
Ginnie Elgar, whose long-lasting friendships I treasure. Joanne Murray,
Justin Sausman and Paul Stock have been my academic partners in
crime for the past decade. I am grateful for their continuing friendship
and support. My warm thanks go to Jillian and Gary Goodwin as well
as to Jules Becher and Nienke Piena. Thanks to Remy Becher for his
support in the early stages of this project. Thank you to my colleagues
in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, particularly Lisa
Baraitser, Paula Fortune, Stephen Frosh and Margarita Palacios.
Parts of Chapter 7 in this book originally appeared as Reina van
der Wiel, ‘Trauma as Site of Identity: The Case of Jeanette Winterson
and Frida Kahlo’, Women: A Cultural Review, 20:2 (2009), 135–56 (www.
tandfonline.com). They are reproduced here with kind permission.
My deepest thanks are saved for Gavin Goodwin, my collaborator
in life. This book would simply not have come to fruition without his
amazing love, support and intellectual companionship. I dedicate this
book to him, with all my love.
vi
Introduction: Trauma,
Psychoanalysis, Literary Form
Introducing trauma
Trauma appears to be not only one of the most fashionable and pervasive
topics within the Humanities (Radstone, 2007b), but also a highly con-
troversial and debated concept.1 ‘Rival theories proliferate’, writes Roger
Luckhurst, ‘[…] because it is one of these “tangled objects” whose enigmatic
causation and strange effects that bridge the mental and the physical, the
individual and collective, and [whose] use in many diverse disciplinary lan-
guages consequently provoke perplexed, contentious debate’ (2008: 15).
It is not this book’s aim to ‘untangle’ the object of trauma (of which
Luckhurst does an excellent job) or to provide a conclusive resolution
to these debates. Rather, Literary Aesthetics of Trauma: Virginia Woolf and
Jeanette Winterson seeks to contribute to what Luckhurst deems ‘the most
interesting cultural work to emerge from the trauma question’, particu-
larly its ‘attempt to find a model of trauma that acknowledges yet seeks to
work through the traumatic past’ in a bid ‘to transform Freud’s distinctions
between remembering, repeating and working[-through] […] into a model
for cultural or political critique’ (2008: 213). Without losing sight of this
influential trauma paradigm, Literary Aesthetics of Trauma makes this
attempt by refashioning Sigmund Freud’s famous dictum into its British
object relations theory counterpart: symbolization, thinking and working-
through.2 That is, it shifts not only its theoretical focus from Freudian
to (neo-)Kleinian psychoanalysis, but also its conceptual emphasis from
traumatic memory to the role of thinking within trauma. With this double
move, fleshed out below, it endeavours to open up a creative new avenue
for literary applications of trauma theory.
What is now known as academic trauma theory originated in the
early 1990s from a relatively small group of scholars (including Cathy
1
2 Literary Aesthetics of Trauma
Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman) from Yale University,
famous for its deconstructionist approach following Jacques Derrida and
Paul de Man. ‘Arguably,’ Lewis Ward notes, ‘trauma theory’s popularity
[in the 1990s] owed more to the parallel wave of “Holocaust studies”
that sought to define the century around the Shoah, than to any sus-
tainable project of mapping onto literary form’ (2012: n. pag.). With
its emphasis on the (ethics of ) unrepresentability of principally
Holocaust trauma, this original strand of trauma theory seemed almost
‘to close off the possibility of conveying traumatic experience in
literature’ (ibid.), let alone working through it. It corresponded with
the poststructuralist and postmodern turn in critical theory towards
fragmentation, a decentred self, the sublime and apocalypse (for
example, Berger, 1999; Ray, 2005). By attempting to ‘define its limits’,
such discourses ‘problematize representation’ (Berger, 1997: 573), an
aim which we can also ascribe to orthodox trauma theory. Due to the
so-called unspeakable, unrepresentable core of traumatic experience,
trauma theory is forced to engage with the paradox of the incommensu-
rability and impossibility of language and representation in relation to
trauma, on the one hand, and the desperate need for a means of expres-
sion, on the other. Perceiving literature as ‘a form of turning toward a
catastrophe, an instinct, and a desire – an attempt to face them in the
most radical and immediate way possible’, Petar Ramadanovic sees this
as an attempt not to grasp the meaning of trauma, but to understand
‘what it means that meaning is absent’ (2001: 113, 115).
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History
(1992), co-authored by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Trauma:
Explorations in Memory (1995), edited by Cathy Caruth, and Caruth’s
own monograph, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
(1996), are usually cited as the seminal books ‘which opened up the
Humanities to trauma’ (Radstone, 2007b: 9), and which the scholar-
ship coming afterward either aligned itself with or pitted itself against.
Most prominent are Ruth Leys’s and Dominick LaCapra’s critiques of
Caruth’s work on trauma as ‘unclaimed experience’, its latency and the
infectious way in which others are implicated in the suffering of indi-
vidual and historical trauma (Caruth, 1996: 8, 18). Whereas Leys (2000:
Chapter 8) criticizes its ‘misreading’ of Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit
and its externalization of trauma, LaCapra (2001) discerns a confla-
tion of trauma and history (or absence and loss, in his terminology).
Both furthermore challenge its ‘sacralizing, or making sublime’ of ‘the
compulsive repetition of acting-out of a traumatic past’ (LaCapra, 2004:
121; cited in Ward, 2012: n. pag.; see also LaCapra, 2001: 184). Rather
Introduction 3
than reproducing these disputes at length, which other critics (especially
Ball, 2007a: xxxii–xxxvii; Radstone, 2007b: 14–20; Luckhurst, 2008: 13)
have done so compellingly, this introduction sketches my position
within some of the main debates, before presenting the version of
trauma underlying the literary analyses performed in this study.
Trauma in the Humanities
With the recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as official
diagnosis by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, the psychiatric
world made its first attempt to shed light on this complex condition.
In doing so, it gave rise to numerous other, similarly complicated ques-
tions related to pathology as well as to history, politics and culture.3 To
oversimplify for the sake of argument, even if PTSD is taken as a valid
diagnostic category (for the most recent version of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-V, see APA, 2013), there are
at least three crucial discussion points: firstly, the use of a psychiatric,
psychological or psychoanalytic framework to begin with; secondly, the
overlap and/or difference between individual and cultural trauma; and
thirdly, whether it is ethically more desirable (and politically more effec-
tive) to privilege incomprehensibility and unrepresentability, to keep
the past open and prevent integration so as not to lose the ‘force of [the
traumatic event’s] affront to understanding’ (Caruth, 1995b: 154), or to
(attempt to) work through the past to avoid the sacralizing or making
sublime of traumatic acting-out. Let us first consider the political and
ethical dimensions of the term ‘trauma’.
LaCapra incisively notes that ‘“[v]ictim” is not a psychological category.
It is, in variable ways, a social, political, and ethical category’ (2001: 79).
Judith Lewis Herman (2001: 33) distinguishes, therefore, between
trauma resulting from ‘disasters’ (such as earthquakes and hurricanes,
but also medical illness), which are produced by the overwhelming
forces of nature, and ‘atrocities’ (such as wars, terrorist attacks and
abuse in all its forms) at the hands of other human beings – what
Ryan LaMothe calls ‘malignant trauma’ (1999: 1193). Likewise, there
is a marked difference between perpetrators and victims, even though
a perpetrator might stake a legitimate claim to trauma. Regarding the
assumption that childhood trauma potentially lies at the root of com-
pulsive violence, Mark Seltzer (1998: 256–8) recognizes both reasons
to accept this assumption (the basic premise of psychoanalysis being
that childhood experience moulds the adult, and the fact that such
explanation privately accounts for public violence) and reasons not to
4 Literary Aesthetics of Trauma
(the resistance to a notion of the victimizer as victim, ‘an equivalence,
an hypnotic identification, of murderer and victim’). Factors like liability
and control need to be taken into account. Leys makes a similar point
concerning Vietnam veterans. Considering war trauma as a purely
external event affecting all participants alike, one runs the risk of
‘eliminat[ing] the issue of moral meaning and ethical assessment’ (Leys,
2000: 7). Kalí Tal furthermore perceives an unambiguous distinction
between the trauma of combat veterans and that of (sexual) abuse
victims, which centres on power or a lack thereof. Soldiers in combat
are ‘both victim and victimizer’, whereas (sexual) abuse victims (whom
Tal predominantly identifies as women) ‘almost never control the tools
of violence’ (1996: 138). This leads to a significantly different experi-
ence for both groups: ‘Women view their trauma as a natural extension
of powerlessness. Warriors are forced to realize the vulnerability of
everything they have ever considered powerful’ (Tal, 1996: 139). Thus
linking trauma to identity politics, Tal reinforces the feminist credo that
‘the personal is political, without exception’ (1996: 247). As the authors
under discussion in Literary Aesthetics of Trauma are both women, this
becomes especially significant.
Largely, the traumas considered here are what Herman designates
as disasters: medical illness in Chapter 1, traumatic bereavement in
Chapters 3 and 5. Although these, too, are never wholly apolitical –
think of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, and the criticism
(for instance, Giles, 2005) levied at the US government that race was a
factor in its delayed response – generally there is much less controversy
around victimhood. In Chapter 3, the traumatic effects of the First
World War are predominantly described from a civilian’s or woman’s
perspective, focusing on the countless deaths rather than on battle.
Virginia Woolf’s highly critical attitude to the war, although edited out
of the final version of To the Lighthouse, underscores its political and
ethical dimensions. Jeanette Winterson’s adoption trauma, comprehen-
sively examined in Chapter 7, hovers in between categories (it is not a
natural disaster, but it evidently occupies a radically different position
from Herman’s atrocities or LaMothe’s malignant trauma, which signify
a conscious act of violence)4 – indeed, adoption’s depiction as trauma
or wound will be closely scrutinized, although here the psychoanalytic
approach to what is experienced as traumatic (outlined below) becomes
operational. In fact, Woolf and Winterson share a personal and literary
concern with maternal loss, rejection or death, which makes a matri-
centric Kleinian model of trauma particularly apposite to their work. It
is in Chapter 6 that the political aspect of trauma (especially concerning