Literary Aesthetics of Trauma

Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson

Reina Van der Wiel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137311016
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literary Aesthetics of Trauma: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson investigates a fundamental shift, from the 1920s to the present day, in the way that trauma is aesthetically expressed. Modernism's emphasis on impersonality and narrative abstraction has been replaced by the contemporary trauma memoir and an ethical imperative to bear witness.

1

Writing the Body: Trauma, Woolf, Winterson

Trauma and the body–mind dichotomy

In classical psychoanalysis, to cite Michael Brearley,

[t]he aim of the analytic work is to help our patients to own or re-own that which has been projected into the body, usually as a result of the fact that feelings have been unbearable and unthinkable. Thus we aim to bring into the field of thought, into the mind, that which has been ejected from the mind and expressed in and through the body. (2002: 117–18)

In the infamous ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905), better known as the Dora case, Sigmund Freud postulated that every hysterical symptom comprises a somatic and a psychical element. Although this relation is somewhat arbitrary (the hysterical symptom does not inherently hold the psychological meaning), or at least dependent on the nature of the repressed thoughts, Freud also discerned an essential level of concurrence. Once psychoanalysis has resolved all the symptoms by determining their psychical significance, this somatic underpinning becomes clear. ‘Somatic compliance’ (Freud, 1905: 40) is only rarely available, however. Conversion – that is, the defensive process in which a purely psychical excitation is translated into physical terms, ‘into some bodily form of expression’ (Freud cited in Deutsch, 1957: 40)¹ – will therefore often involve already existing outlets. Rather than having one unique meaning, a particular symptom can express several meanings either simultaneously or successively, and Freud (1905: 53–4) tentatively concluded that the somatic side of a hysterical symptom is more constant than the psychical side.

Jacqueline Rose (1978) has reminded us that Freud’s initial work on hysteria consisted of discarding Jean-Martin Charcot’s hysterogenic zones, which functioned as a system charting the symptom onto the body. ‘By so doing’, Rose writes,

he made of hysteria a language […] but one whose relation to the body was decentered, since if the body spoke it was precisely because there was something called the unconscious that could not. At this point the relation of dreams and hysteria […] can be reasserted as nothing other than the inflection of the body through language in its relation to the unconscious (indirect representation). (1978: 138)

With this notion of the ‘decentredness’ of the relation between this language called hysteria and the body, Rose accurately pinpoints the convoluted nature of the process of reading the body. Reading the unconscious is not at all straightforward. Its ‘indirect representation’ invites the possibility of several interpretations, several ‘readings’, and makes it difficult to establish the correct one(s). With somatic compliance Freud felt he had discovered a solution to this problem. In his ‘talking cure’, the disappearance of traumatic hysterical symptoms was the corollary of a rationally organized, coherent and complete life history. Describing this process as ‘the translation of pathogenic into normal material’ (1905: 115), Freud effectively implied that a sequential, coherent life story amounts to mental health – or, as Steven Marcus (1974: 71) notes, at least to the absence of hysteria – whereas the absence of such sequentiality results in ‘pathogenic material’. In narrative psychology, this ordering or organizing process has been called ‘narrativization’ (McLeod, 1997) or ‘the narratory principle’ (Sarbin, 1986).² Yet, as Stephen Frosh asserts, within ‘the “narrative” turn in therapy’, narrative was often no longer sought after for its organizing qualities, but rather seen through a postmodern lens: ‘the traditional Freudian interest in causality and cure’ was replaced by ‘an increased interest in the contribution of the therapist to the therapeutic process […] and a focus on narrative and story-telling’, with the latter understood as ‘provisional, reflecting confusion, emotional investment and desire, and open to negotiation at each stage of its own development’ (2006: 104, 105; see also Frosh, 2002).

Neurobiologist Bessel van der Kolk (2006) has argued, by contrast, that it may be time to leave behind Freud, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy altogether. ‘Leaving Vienna’, as he calls it, means ‘abandoning the notion that people can understand their way out of trauma’:

The notion that in order to process and overcome trauma, people need to create a coherent story, does not really seem to hold up. In my opinion, the discovery of EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing] opened up extremely important new ways of looking at what else might be going on in mind and brain that could help people. (van der Kolk, 2006: 224)

EMDR, discovered by Francine Shapiro in 1989, is a treatment method whereby, simply put, patients recall traumatic memories while their eyes follow the therapist’s fingers moving rapidly back and forth in front of their face.³ These induced eye movements, which are similar to those of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, cause a ‘desensitization’ in the patient which is part of a more comprehensive ‘reprocessing’ of the traumatic experience (Shapiro, 2007: 68). Urging us to concentrate on the biological basis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and concomitant treatment methods like body-centred psychotherapy (of which EMDR is an example), van der Kolk thus points towards alternative ways of treating psychological trauma (see also Servan-Schreiber, 2004).

Contemporary psychotherapist Babette Rothschild follows van der Kolk in taking the body into serious account, albeit not at the expense of verbal psychotherapy. Referring to trauma as ‘a psychophysical experience, even when the traumatic event causes no direct bodily harm’ (2000: 5), Rothschild aims to bridge the gap between verbal and body-psychotherapies in an attempt to incorporate attention to the traumatized body as well as to the traumatized mind. Although it is generally acknowledged that PTSD involves distressing bodily sensations such as increased heart rate, respiration, pain and muscle tension, it is rather unconventional to pay much attention to the body in a therapeutic situation. Strongly emphasizing that this does not entail any actual touching but rather an increased body awareness of the traumatized individual, Rothschild points to the central role of language in body therapy: ‘The somatic disturbances of trauma require language to make sense of them, comprehend their meaning, extract their message, and resolve their impact’ (2000: xiii–xiv). In this sense, she thus adheres to a classical Freudian view, while neurobiologists perceive trauma to be a purely biological phenomenon.

Finally, it is significant to note Freud’s (1920: 12, 33) assertion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that a physical wound or injury inflicted during the traumatic event would actually diminish the chance of developing a traumatic neurosis in the first place. While ‘the mechanical violence of the trauma would liberate a quantity of sexual excitation which, owing to the lack of preparation for anxiety, would have a traumatic effect’, Freud writes, ‘the simultaneous physical injury, by calling for a narcissistic hypercathexis of the injured organ, would bind the excess of excitation’ (1920: 33). The bodily injury ostensibly acts as diversion, an alternative point of focus, which prevents the mind from getting overwhelmed.

The Möbius strip

It is by no means my aim to choose sides between psychoanalysis and neurobiology, both of which offer valuable insights into the potential workings and treatment of psychological trauma.⁴ Rather, the selected theories presented above serve to illustrate that, within the realm of trauma, complex and disputed relationships exist between the inside, the surface and the outside of the body, as well as between body and mind, challenging any simplistic Cartesian dualism. More precisely, trauma lays bare and disrupts these intricate relationships, necessitating a re-evaluation of their constitution. Clinically as well as in the cultural imagination, of principal importance is the physical symptomology of psychological trauma: the body ‘speaks’ or ‘remembers’ what the overwhelmed mind cannot. This takes on particular significance regarding literature in the sense that since a traumatic experience is said to be ‘unspeakable’ in any conventional fashion, the text is often compared to the body in displaying traumatic symptoms instead. ‘Novelists have frequently found’, says Anne Whitehead, ‘that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms’ (2004: 3). This means, in turn, that literary analysis often involves identifying ‘symptomatic’ moments or characteristics in the text. While such aesthetic and critical practices serve an important purpose, they have become exceedingly conventionalized, which is incongruous with their ethical objective to maintain ‘the singularity of a traumatic aporia’ (Luckhurst, 2008: 89). They should be complemented, therefore, by ‘a model of trauma that acknowledges yet seeks to work through the traumatic past’ (Luckhurst, 2008: 213). The following chapters will propose an alternative literary aesthetics of trauma based on the crucial yet often overlooked distinction between symptom and symbol, between repression and symbolization. According to psychoanalysis, the difference between these distinct yet closely related phenomena and processes revolves around whether the individual manages to successfully displace anxiety onto external objects, or not – in which case there is an internal displacement or projection from the mind into the body. Yet, as we shall find, while Virginia Woolf’s experimental writing lends itself to such a reading, Jeanette Winterson’s novels prove largely unreceptive.

Before Chapter 2 goes into more theoretical detail, it is important to establish a sense of how Woolf and Winterson each regard and write about the body. This will enhance our understanding of their respective aesthetics of trauma that are evidently located in different personal as well as historical and cultural contexts. It will also provide a foundation from which to discuss, in Chapter 4, the inherent paradox of aesthetics that Susanne K. Langer (1953) has identified (and problematizes) as a conflict between feeling and form. Within the body–mind dichotomy the mind traditionally governs the body, a hierarchy which has produced countless parallels, most notably masculine–feminine, active–passive, rational–emotional and, within art theory, form–feeling. Although to some extent it is inevitable and imperative to distinguish between the specific roles of body and mind, particularly within psychological trauma, throughout this book I will emphasize the importance of acknowledging their mutually constitutive relationship. One of the most constructive models I have encountered is Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) model of the Möbius strip, an inverted three-dimensional figure eight, to represent the relationship between body and mind. Grosz, who in turn borrowed this model from Jacques Lacan (albeit out of context and for different purposes), explains her model thus:

Bodies and minds are not two distinct substances or two kinds of attributes of a single substance but somewhere in between these two alternatives. The Möbius strip has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into body and body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another. This model also provides a way of problematizing and rethinking the relations between the inside and the outside of the subject, its psychical interior and its corporeal exterior, by showing not their fundamental identity or reducibility but the torsion of the one into the other. (1994: xii)

Such a representation or, rather, re-theorization of mind and body posits their relationship as mutual constitution rather than as intersection, which serves to think of the self in a non-reductive fashion. Additionally, as Grosz argues, it may facilitate an understanding of ‘the contributions of the body to the production of knowledge systems, regimes of representation, cultural production, and socioeconomic exchange’ (1994: 19) – an understanding indispensable not only for political reasons, but also for an enhanced comprehension of psychological trauma.

Woolf, trauma and the body

Virginia Woolf’s relationship to the body – in terms of textuality, sexuality and trauma – is complex. In 1989, the publication of Louise DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work instigated a dramatic shift in scholarly interest towards the sexual abuse that Woolf suffered at the hands of her half-brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth (see, for instance, Terr, 1990; Eberly, 1994; Moran, 2007). In a relatively recent essay collection with a telling subtitle, Virginia Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts (2007), edited by Suzette Henke and David Eberly, four of the ten essays (by Cramer, McNaron, Lilienfeld and Moran) discuss Woolf’s work in light of this trauma. It was in the posthumously published ‘Sketch of the Past’, written between 1939 and 1940, that Woolf had spoken most explicitly about these experiences, resulting in a life-long association of her body with shame, fear and guilt:

Once when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me on to this [slab outside the dining room for standing dishes upon], and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it – what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive. (1985: 82)

Sidonie Smith pertinently adds that ‘it is not only Gerald Duckworth’s sexual abuse but bourgeois Victorian taboos surrounding the body that effectively remove the feeling subject from [Woolf’s] own body’ (1993: 89). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was deemed inappropriate – particularly for women – to publicly speak about bodily and other private matters. Even within the Bloomsbury Group, notorious for its radical openness and open-mindedness, Woolf was met with ‘loud laughter’ and ‘uncomfortable boredom on the part of the males; to whose genial cheerful sense [her] revelations were at once mawkish & distasteful’ when she read out ‘[her] chapter’ at the second meeting of the Memoir Club in 1920 (Woolf, 1978 [18 March 1920]: 26; cited in Lee, 1996: 17–18). Although we can only speculate about what Woolf actually spoke about that day (she does not specify where this ‘chapter’ came from or what it contained), she retrospectively referred to it in her diary as ‘this egotistic sentimental trash’, and regretfully proclaimed, ‘What possessed me to lay bare my soul!’ (ibid.; cited in Lee, 1996: 18). In her novels, therefore, she would come to express matters of both body and soul in a more cloaked fashion.

Yet, as Daniel R. Schwarz and others (such as Albright, 1978) persuasively argue, ‘[t]hat some or all of the great British Modernists – Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Woolf – withdraw from their work, eliminate the intrusive author, and move to objectivity and impersonality’ is not to say that they are wholly absent; rather, ‘by making themselves their subject they have, in fact, created a more subjective, self-expressive novel than their predecessors’ (Schwarz, 1997: 24). Underneath their experimental writing style, the novels deal with the deaths of Woolf’s mother and half-sister Stella (To the Lighthouse) and her brother Thoby (Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse and The Waves), as well as with the sexual abuse. This is not to say that all of Woolf’s work is only, or even primarily, concerned with personal trauma. The collective trauma of the First World War permeates several of her novels. Yet, the following chapters aim to show that even where personal material underlies her fiction, Woolf’s formal experimentation in the 1920s and early 1930s constituted a linguistic process of detachment and working-through. Although, according to DeSalvo, ‘[e]very one of her novels describes a child abandoned, a child ignored, a child at risk, a child abused, a child betrayed’ (1989: 14), it is particularly The Years that critics (Eberly, 1994; Cramer, 2007) focus on. Moreover, critical analyses of the influence of Woolf’s sexual abuse on her writing tend to rest on representations of ‘family structure, perpetrator strategies, and victim response’ (Cramer, 2007: 32) and ‘familial abuse’ (Lilienfeld, 2007: 95). Martin Gliserman identifies signs of the abuse ‘in the very syntax and semantic networks of her sentences’ (1996: 12). Finally, taking Woolf’s ‘anxieties about female embodiment’ as starting point, Patricia Moran traces ‘the gradual emergence of Woolf’s […] painful memories over the course of [her] writing [career], as [she] insistently returned to and rewrote these originary scenes of trauma’ (2007: 3).

While Moran’s project is different from mine in ways that will become apparent in the next chapter, my interest similarly lies with the impact of trauma on Woolf’s narrative aesthetics. The primary focus in Chapters 3 and 5 is on the ways in which trauma both underlies and affects the writing style of two of Woolf’s most experimental works, To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Indeed, I will argue that we can read these texts through a particular aesthetics of trauma that differs significantly both from current ‘symptomatic’ understandings of modernist literary form and from contemporary trauma fiction. Although Woolf’s abuse inevitably shaped her later experience of, and reaction to, the personal losses she suffered as well as the collective trauma of the two World Wars, these chapters will concentrate on the specific issues raised by these two novels. Rather than reading them as symptomatic in the Freudian sense, moreover, I will propose an understand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Literary Form
• 1 Writing the Body: Trauma, Woolf, Winterson
• 2 Symbolization, Thinking and Working-Through: British Object Relations Theory
• 3 ‘The Most Difficult Abstract Piece of Writing’: ‘Time Passes’ as Container
• 4 ‘Ideas of Feeling’: Symbolic Transformation in Modernist Formalist Aesthetics
• 5 Woolf’s Embodied Cognitive Aesthetics: The Waves
• 6 From Form to Feeling: Trauma and Affective Excess in Art & Lies
• 7 ‘The Story of My Life’: Winterson’s Adoption, Art and Autobiography
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index