Terrorizing Images

Trauma and Ekphrasis in Contemporary Literature

Charles Ivan Armstrong, Unni Langas, Charles Ivan Armstrong, Unni Langas

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110694031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

It is broadly accepted that "terrorizing" images are often instrumentalized in periods of conflict to serve political interests. This volume proposes that paying attention to how images of trauma and conflict are described in literary texts, i.e. to the rhetorical practice known as "ekphrasis", is crucial to our understanding of how such images work. The volume's contributors discuss verbal images of trauma and terror in literary texts both from a contemporary perspective and as historical artefacts in order to illuminate the many different functions of ekphrasis in literature. The articles in this volume reflect the vast developments in the field of trauma studies since the 1990s, a field that has recently broadened to include genres beyond the memoir and testimony and that lends itself well to new postcolonial, feminist, and multimedia approaches. By expanding the scholarly understanding of how images of trauma are described, interpreted, and acted out in literary texts, this collected volume makes a significant contribution to both trauma and memory studies, as well as more broadly to cultural studies.

The Ordinariness of Trauma: Reconstructing Intertextuality as an Aesthetics of Trauma

Joachim Schiedermair

1 Vietnamization

In 2012, the Whitney Museum of American Art displayed an exhibition by Canadian artist Mischa Grey under the sober title Grey – A Retrospective. Pictures of the series Vietnamization from 1998 were among the pieces of art on display. The catalogue describes this creative phase of the artist with particular detail, and one sentence of the phraseology used there takes us to the core topic of this anthology: the discursive relation between image, trauma, and literature.¹ It reads as follows: “By drawing heavily on image material from the Vietnam War era and recirculating it, Grey has created an art series that symbolizes the loss of contact with the self.”²

Vietnam played the lead role in the fight for medical recognition of traumatic suffering: as is commonly known, the American Psychiatric Association decided to react to the mass traumatization of the Vietnam veterans by adding Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to their manual of mental disorders in 1980 (Mülder-Bach 2000: 8).³ Considering that 18 years later, Grey compiled a series of images under the title Vietnamization, all of which depict “the loss of contact with the self,” this phrasing presents a suitable description for the paradoxical situation of the traumatized person: the sufferer loses contact with his present life because the past – in the form of mental images within the traumatized memory – forces its way between the self and the present. The point of Grey’s art is that she depicts the traumatic recurrence of mental images by reusing pictures from the media associated with the war in Vietnam from 20 to 30 years ago; or, as the Retrospective catalogue puts it, Grey produces the traumatic effect of losing contact with the self by letting image material from the Vietnam War era re-circulate in her own pictures. (How she does this exactly, will be described further below.)

The third aspect, literature, comes into play when we realize that Mischa Grey’s pictures exist merely as verbal images: that they were part of a Retrospective in the Whitney Museum in New York is already – as is the existence of the artist – in itself a fiction, part of a brilliant novel titled Max, Mischa & tetoffensiven (Max, Mischa and the Tet Offensive) from 2015. The author, Johan Harstad,⁴ one of the most important and at the same time most entertaining representatives of contemporary Norwegian literature, has the protagonist of his novel, Max Hansen, take stock of his life over 1000 pages. In his statement of account, Max quotes his friend Mischa Grey’s Retrospective catalogue over five long pages. This quote is thus a detailed ekphrasis of images of the trauma of Vietnam.

The fact that the pictures described there do not exist in the reader’s reality, that we are not confronted with the description of an existing object but with the evocation of an imaginary object, does not take anything away from this. The same is true with regard to the very first example of this genre: Homer’s ekphrasis of the images on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad (Book 18) does not refer to a specific material object but to one that Homer imagined (Simon 1995: 123 – 141). The ekphrasis replaces the image. The important aspect of investigating this topic is rather the fact that Max Hansen, by recirculating an existing text (that of the Retrospective catalogue) in his own text, transfers the layering technique – which Mischa uses in Vietnamization – from visual arts to literature. That means that a technique from visual arts, used to artistically explore traumatic flashbacks and recurring dreams, is reproduced in the layering of texts. Thus, Harstad ties together two topics that initially do not seem to be connected to each other: on the one hand, mental suffering triggered by the experience of extreme violence, and, on the other hand, already established methods in artistic creation that are known in literary studies under the names of intertextuality, intermediation, or adaptation.

At the end of this article, I will draw two conclusions about the connection between trauma research and research into intertextuality by reconstructing the ekphrasis of Mischa Grey’s Vietnamization. But before that, I will use the first half of the article to address another question, and its focus can also be derived from the ekphrastic passage in the novel: the Retrospective catalogue not only includes information about the techniques of trauma depiction, but also frames another objective of Mischa Grey’s work, for the prints “reflected Hansen’s fixation on Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now and the Vietnam conflict in general.”⁵ Thus, the topic is not really Vietnam veterans’ trauma, but rather the main character’s preoccupation with media images of that trauma. Using one character as an example, the novel negotiates the presence of trauma in our society: Harstad circles around the question of the attraction exerted by depictions of trauma. This question sounds improperly cynical: to what extent do we, as readers, museum-visitors, or filmgoers, benefit from other people’s trauma? Why are we so interested in texts, films, and paintings about humans haunted by images of violence? Why do we, who do not suffer from trauma, expose ourselves, in the cinema or in our readings, to pictures and scenes that those suffering from trauma would very much like to be rid of? Why are non-traumatized people so fascinated by other people’s trauma?

Although I will refer to two of Johan Harstad’s texts in both parts of this article, I will not do so in the sense of a classical interpretation. Instead, I want to use literature’s epistemological potential to discuss, together with Harstad’s texts, the desire for trauma in our society and the link between trauma and intermediality, and trauma and intertextuality, respectively. Both issues are, of course, demanding and far too complex to be settled here, but I hope to illustrate one or two facets that can at least provide more structure in this complex area.

2 Regarding the pain of others: The authenticity of trauma

In order to investigate the attractiveness of trauma, I want to establish a dialogue between Harstad’s play Osv. (Etc.) from 2010 and Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman’s study L’empire du traumatisme⁶ from 2007. The play’s plot develops over the years 1994 and 1995. The focus is on an American family suffering severe traumas. The daughter, Nola Zimmer, is traumatized because her husband and child were killed in the London Underground by a man also suffering from trauma. The shock of this event causes Nola’s father, Joseph Zimmer, to recall crimes he committed as a soldier in the Vietnam War. The images of this past take possession of him so radically that he chooses to live as a tramp in a park, where he scrubs a Vietnam monument with soap and brush. And then there is the son, Alan Zimmer, who works as a war photographer, documenting war and genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Chechnya; in the epilogue set in November 2004 (i. e., almost 10 years later), he has a stroke, triggered by trauma, during a job in Fallujah, which, in turn, drives a suicide bomber to detonate his bomb.

The central problem, which is negotiated by the play on different levels, is that of testimony. Nola represents the victims, Joseph the perpetrators, and Alan the bystanders. All of them are traumatized. Time and time again, the other characters in the play ask them to recount the horrors they have experienced, convinced that trauma can be alleviated by testifying about it. But what was intended to be a therapeutic talking cure ends – in the case of the father, Joseph – in a criminal confession and with the question as to whether a sinner only needs to confess to be forgiven. The issue of war photography enters the discourse of testimony as well.⁷ Unni Langås (2016: 150) writes of the drama: “How far can we go, what are we allowed to take pictures of, and when do we have to intervene?”⁸ At what point does journalistic testimony become voyeurism? The question of why we non-traumatized people expose ourselves to images of trauma is directly addressed in Osv. using a war photographer as a character.

When tackling this question, one quickly notices that there are at least two possible paths to finding an answer. Langås took one of them in 2016 with her book Traumets betydning i norsk samtidslitteratur (The Meaning of Trauma in Norwegian Contemporary Literature), and her answer is so comprehensive that I am happy to just outline the basic ideas. With the help of many examples (and one of them is Harstad’s play), Langås shows that trauma has been present in Norwegian fiction for the last 15 years. Behind her analyses lies the belief that literature has a social function. Narrative fiction constitutes an interface between collective and individual consciousness. This means that in the process of reading literature, the imagination of an individual is synchronized with the events in the world. It is this synchronization that enables us to talk about a common reality in the first place. And this also applies to the trauma: by depicting traumatizing events and traumatized characters, novels, plays, art exhibitions, and films communicate the reality of the trauma to the individual imagination. Trauma literature takes the suffering of the traumatized seriously and interprets it as social and political reality.

Johan Harstad’s play has the same function: the title of the drama Osv. is explained on the spine of the book. One reads: Vietnam, Bosnia, Rwanda, Tsjetsjenia, Somalia, Darfur, Afghanistan, Irak osv. (Vietnam, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Somalia, Darfur, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) The title Osv., hence, stands for the never-ending series of wars and military conflicts, which manifests itself in the changing locations that Alan Zimmer, the war photographer, travels to for his work. But, as the series of wars that were raging in the main plot of the play (Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya) stretches in the epilogue into the present-day of the reader, it renders the play highly authentic. Implicitly, the title says: I am telling a story about real-life military conflicts; this is about your reality, about you! Using Langås, it is possible to say about Osv. that trauma literature “points towards the present and the future, because the text delivers […] critical perspectives and ideas on opportunities for action, that show a way out both at an individual and at a so...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Encounters between Trauma and Ekphrasis, Words and Images
• De te fabula narratur! Violence and Representation in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance
• What Does It Mean To Be Human? Speculative Ekphrasis and Anthropocene Trauma in Don DeLillo’s Zero K
• The Ordinariness of Trauma: Reconstructing Intertextuality as an Aesthetics of Trauma
• Terrorizing Images and Traumatic Anticipation in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours
• Phantomogenic Ekphrasis: Traumatizing Images in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
• Reenacting Rape in Édouard Louis’s History of Violence
• Empathic Vision? War Photography, Ekphrasis, and Memory in Bosnian War Literature
• Remedial Intermediality: Ekphrasis in Sinéad Morrissey’s “The Doctors”
• Traumatizing Images of Belfast in Mary Costello’s Novel Titanic Town
• Ekphrasis and the Holocaust: Traumatic Images in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones
• White Oblivion: Antarctica and the Suspension of Trauma
• Contributors
• Index