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Article Excerpt
Reading Beloved specifically, this essay considers the explicit tension between trauma as a trope for recovered history and those therapeutic, empiricist-minded narratives that require a subject to progress beyond and locate herself rationally outside the traumatic moment.
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In the literary world populated by ghosts that eventually became synonymous with the Gothic tradition, the plot of haunting figures its social concerns as metaphysical matters, even to the point where the dramatic spectacle of the ghost makes it hard to trace the social meaning of which it is a spectral emanation. The social relevance of the ghost seems especially obsolete when the haunting coincides with a narrative of fatalism, as if the one who experiences the ghost and the one who suffers history must alike submit to a symbolic social order overdetermined by the spirits of ancestry and cast too strongly in the die of the past. Toni Morrison's Beloved, through its turn to Gothic tradition, recovers an untold history of suffering, which seems both the product of such an overdetermined past and a criticism of our conventional historical narratives. As Valerie Smith has argued, Morrison's method of circling her story back upon itself marks a suspicion about the "limits of hegemonic, authoritarian systems of k nowledge" (346). But it also marks, within the world of the story, the characters' inability to become adequate to a historical sense of themselves and thus to trace the social meanings behind their sufferings--a point made all too clearly when Paul D becomes frustrated with Sethe's inability to offer a linear, rational account of herself. Part of the problem, as Homi Bhabha has suggested, is that Sethe cannot construct herself by means of a teleological social narrative in which she would figure as an agent who chooses her own actions, and so, in Bhabha's view, we are forced to read the inwardness of the slave world from the outside--that is, through the ghostly returning memory of Sethe's infanticide (16-18). Like many readers of Beloved, Bhabha views this ghostly return as intimating a reclamation of Sethe's voice and a restoration of an interpersonal social reality eclipsed by the fatalism of slavery, so that history survives beyond the question of its overt visibility, if only in the "deepest resources of our amnesia, of our unconsciousness" (18).
Bhabha's use of psychoanalytic categories veers so close to the contemporary discourse of trauma as to make him complicitous--say, from the perspective of empiricist-minded critics who yield to the trauma all the status they would grant a ghost--with the trauma's most unreasonable tendencies. Lived as a resistance to an empirically conceived realism about persons, events, and, most significantly, time itself, trauma is a phenomenon that violently interrupts the present tense of consciousness, occurring for the first time only by being repeated. By virtue of this structure of repetition, trauma poses a challenge to historical knowledge, since it is always the symptomology of trauma that one confronts and never the event itself, much as it is always the lack of knowledge that perpetuates the traumatic effect. As an excess or afterlife of the event, trauma refers to an act not yet encountered--as it were, to a specter of the past. To the extent that it testifies, to borrow Cathy Caruth's phrase, to "a reality or truth that is otherwise not available"(4), the trauma depends by definition on the inadequacy of our knowledge in the present order. For this very reason, the trauma has come to function for many critics as a trope of access to more difficult histories, providing us with entry into a world inhabited by the victims of extraordinary social violences, those perspectives so often left out of rational, progressive narratives of history. Indeed, in this respect the trauma functions rather as a ghost of rationality, that which announces a history haunting the very possibility of history.
The problem, to recuperate Bhabha's conceit, may partly be conceived as a question of whether one stands inside or outside of traumatic history. In the case of Beloved, this is a question already pronounced by Morrison's revisionings of the Gothic and its rather fluid dualism, articulated, on the one hand, in the demand that we participate imaginatively in events beyond the scope or confidence of reason and, on the other, in a call for us to offer our resistances in the service of rationality and to demystify the story's supernatural logic. Much as therapists observe traumatic phenomena from the outside, we might argue that history arises not so much from traumatic consciousness as from those allegorical significances existing just beyond the characters' self-consciousness. In this view, the historically minded reader performs an act of intellectual intervention by restoring the sufferer of trauma to a more reasonable narrative. Yet such an intervention, modelled on the therapist's compassionate but critical listening, runs the risk of conceiving of history as finally in opposition to the private pathologies of history's victims. By contrast, Caruth espouses a reading of the trauma from within the structure of its symptomology, so that history speaks meaningfully through a content that we might not otherwise acknowledge, through the repetitions and pathology of the trauma. Strictly speaking, Caruth assigns trauma a meaning absent from Freud, who steadfastly insists upon an act of remembrance capable of dispelling the grip of the past on present consciousness. For Freud, as for the empirical historian, history must be built upon the possibility of an intervention, an intervention that develops as a reasonable and even compassionate opposition to the trauma.
It is upon the difficult premise of such an intervention in traumatic history that I focus in this essay. Although a number of critical readings of Beloved, such as Homi Bhabha's, cause us to focus our attention on the obliquity of a testimonial voice emerging in spite of violent repression, or (according to a reading through trauma) perhaps because of it, such readings speak impossibly from the inside of the trauma as a way of filling in history. This is to bypass the empiricist problem as also the therapist's concern, with its focus on the peculiar relation an indirect and incapable consciousness--which is to say, a traumatized one--bears to history. Among those who have brought the trauma to bear on questions of history, Dominick LaCapra has perhaps been most insistent on listening to trauma from the hitherside of the therapist's couch, privileging a rationality that remains outside the trauma. The therapist, as also the good student of history, should experience an "unsettlement" that is also "empathic," yet, as a lesson for history, the trauma will become meaningful, in LaCapra's account, only once it has been worked through (to use Freud's idiom); and so, in his own brief reading of Beloved, LaCapra gives heavy emphasis to the exorcism of Beloved's ghost as the moment in which community finds its place. If LaCapra's approach seems thoroughly reasonable, it may nevertheless be difficult to maintain such sensible interpretive strategies in relation to the history offered in Beloved. This is so because Morrison has so closely configured the history she recovers with the evidence of the trauma itself. As Beloved opens toward abandoned history, Morrison demands that her readers encounter characters who inhabit history through the symptomology of trauma, apart from and before the acts of imaginative or rational intervention through which we might return them to a myth of American progress that we have made the equivalent of reason itself. Beloved is a novel especially hard on a history so conceived precisely beca use the benevolence of our reason and the possibility of intervention suppose a separation from--and by definition, an opposition to--the very phenomena upon which we would focus our attention. Just as there is a cynicism that may occur from outside the trauma...
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