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Article Excerpt
Sinikka Grant
"Their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement": Haunting and Trans-generational Trauma in Joe Turner's Come and Gone
In August Wilson's play Joe Turner's Come and Gone traumatic events in the lives of past generations return to haunt the characters of the play. This article argues that the horrors of the Middle Passage and of slavery have caused an ontological rupture that produces haunting. The unknown and untold stories of a violent past--a silence that marks the rupture--are loaded with traumatic material, which is unwittingly transmitted from one generation to another. In Joe Turner this trans-generational trauma, which is inextricably linked with questions of mourning and melancholia, is manifest in the traumatized character of Herald Loomis, whose personal experiences of violence mirror those of his ancestors, as well as in the on-going struggle between Western influences and African heritage in the play.
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In his ten-play chronicle of African American experience in the twentieth century August Wilson examines the impact of the past in the present. (1) His plays abound with cultural traditions, music, art, and what James Baldwin referred to as "the field of manners and rituals of intercourse"--a phrase Wilson frequently cited--all of which are manifestations of deliberate, creative incorporation of the past in the present. (2) The past is not always welcome in Wilson's plays, however, but is sometimes an uninvited guest whose arrival the characters experience as an intrusion. In these moments we can say that the past has returned to haunt the present. The Piano Lesson, for example, literally includes ghosts, and in other plays the past frequently intrudes as unpleasant memories or horrifying visions (Wilson 1 990). In many of his plays, however, we encounter haunting as trauma, a psychological wound in a character or characters in the play, such as Troy Maxson in Fences (1990), Herald Loomis in Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), and King in King Hedley II (2004). Moreover, these characters are haunted not just by their own personal pasts, but also by centuries of injustice suffered by their ancestors; they are victims of trans-generational trauma.
In this article I will examine haunting as trans-generational trauma in August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, a play in which the impact that violent events in the lives of past generations have on the following generations is central to the dramatic intensity of the play In Joe Turner the trans-generational trauma is largely a result of the gaps in African American cultural memory that the unknown and untold stories of the Middle Passage and slavery entail. This trauma, which is inextricably linked with questions of mourning and melancholia, is manifest in the traumatized character of Herald Loomis, whose personal experiences of violence mirror those of his ancestors, as well as in the on-going struggle between Western influences and African heritage in the play.
Most literary critics working on haunting associate it with psychological trauma. For example, in Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature, Kathleen Brogan links haunting with trauma, observing that both have to do with difficulties in remembering, in retrieving the past. Consequently, she argues, haunting is a means through which the writers can access a "forgotten" or unwritten cultural past. Although she and other critics refer both to Freud and to Cathy Caruth's work on trauma, I find that to better understand how and why traumatic events lead to haunting we need to examine more carefully the structure of trauma, both in terms of the subject and in relation to time.
Trauma is the result of either undergoing or witnessing a horrific, violent event, or a series of events or circumstances the accumulated impact of which eventually results in trauma. The terror of violence is ultimately in that something that should not happen in the first place--the unthinkable, the unspeakable--nevertheless occurs. Such an event is incomprehensible. One cannot understand what exactly is happening or why, and the event as such therefore does not enter the consciousness of its survivor or witness. Outside consciousness and thus outside of active remembrance the "experience" of a traumatic event is therefore defined by a constitutive forgetting or amnesia.
But although trauma is defined by forgetting, the victim or witness of trauma is paradoxically destined to re-live the shock many times in the future, as fragmented memories--what Freud called the "return of the repressed"--will return in nightmares and visions. (3) This repressed material is precisely that which is beyond active remembering: these are memories that cannot be voluntarily called to mind. As Cathy Caruth points out, "The historical power of trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is experienced at all" (1996, 17).
The return of the repressed is often called haunting; nevertheless, this is not exactly what we encounter in works of August Wilson. In Joe Turner and other Wilson plays the traumatic events haunting the text are frequently generations removed from the time in which the play is set. The return of the repressed, however, is directly linked with one and the same person, who has either witnessed or lived through horror, or both. Therefore, as the French psychoanalysts Karl Abraham and Maria Torok point out in The Shell and the Kernel, when a person haunted by events from the past has no experiential connection to those events, there is nothing he or she could have repressed. What returns from the past, they argue, is thus not the repressed, but the manifestation of a secret in the psyche of another person. Yet how the psychic matter of one person is actually transferred to the psyche of another individual remains unclear even to them. It is evident, however, as Nicholas Rand notes in his editorial introduction to The Shell and the Kernel, that "the issue is the process of transmission which assures the survival of the memory traces derived from the experiences of earlier generations" (Abraham and Torok 1994, 168-69; my emphasis).
Consequently, psychoanalysis alone may not fully explain the trant-generational transmission of traumatic material. Therefore, I suggest that to better understand haunting as trans-generational trauma we need to complement psychoanalytic theory with the psychoanalytic ally informed philosophy of Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot argues that trauma--or what he calls the disaster--cannot strictly speaking be experienced at all: devoid of consciousness, there is no "I"--no subject--to experience anything. Beyond experience, knowledge, memory, and understanding, the disaster distorts the linearity of time. Blanchot writes about passivity, a concept he directly associates with the impossibility of experiencing the disaster (4):
Passivity is measureless: for it exceeds being; it is being when being is worn past the nub--the passivity of a past which has never been, come back again. It is the disaster defined--hinted at--not as an event of the past, but as the immemorial past which returns, dispersing by its return the present, where, ghostly, it would be experienced as a return. (Blanchot 1995, 17)
Blanchot argues here that the loss of subjectivity at the heart of the disaster--the lack of consciousness caused by the incomprehensibility of the situation--calls into question the notion of being and the relation of being to time. Consequently, the disaster is inextricably linked with the question of ontology--the question of being as such. If there is no "I" to experience the event, there is no "being present" either. The disaster causes the relation of being and time to be dispersed, creating what Blanchot calls "time out of synchrony." That unknown--or what Abraham and Torok call a secret--at the heart of the disaster does, however, like everything else in the world, leave an imprint. That imprint, that secret, is the "memory-trace" of an event that was never brought to consciousness and this trace is what comes back to haunt.
Both psychoanalysis and (psychoanalytically informed) philosophy thus indicate that horror and violence disrupt the linear progression of time and cause the past to intrude in the present. This allows us to consider haunting in a broader sense than the traditional notion of haunting as having to do with ghosts or visions of past events, and define haunting rather as a structure where a trace of past violence intervenes in the present. And, according to this definition, the plays of August Wilson--each profoundly affected by historical violence that has helped to create the world that the text represents--are all haunted. (5) In Joe Turner's Come and Gone, this haunting manifests itself not as ghosts, but as a psychological trauma transmitted from one generation to another, stretching back to the traumatic events of the Middle Passage and of slavery, that mark the inception of African American experience in America.
Significantly, Joe Turner is set on the cusp of radical changes in African American history: in 1911 the Great Migration, the flow of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the impoverished, rural, segregated South to the industrial, desegregated North in search of a better life, had only just begun. The play examines the efforts of Herald Loomis, a man whose life has been destroyed by the injustices of racism, to move on in life--to imagine a...
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