Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form

Greg Forter Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form For the growing number of critics concerned to trace the links among historical forces, psychic experience, and literary expression, the growth of trauma studies since the publication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience (1996) offers an important opportunity for reflection. On one hand, the work in this field has been justly influential. It brings sophisticated psychoanalytic concepts to bear on collective processes, developing accounts of historical violence that are both socially specific and psychologically astute. These accounts are especially compelling when focused on what I call “punctual” traumas: historical events of such singularity, magnitude, and horror that they can be read as shocks that disable the psychic system. Thus, for example, in their readings of the Holocaust—the paradigmatic example for critics concerned with this kind of trauma—Caruth and others have helped us see how a historical moment might be experienced less as an ongoing set of processes that shape and are shaped by those living through them than as a punctual blow to the psyche that overwhelms its functioning, disables its defenses, and absents it from direct contact with the brutalizing event itself. Precisely because the violence suffered by Holocaust victims was so extreme, on this view, it affected those victims as a psychic concussion that short-circuited their capacity to “process” the traumatizing event as it took place. Traumas of this kind thus become accessible only in the mind’s recursive attempts to master what it has in some sense failed to experience in the first instance. A punctual incursion on the mind, having “dissociated” consciousness from itself, installs an unprocessed memory-trace that returns unbidden, as delayed effect, in an effort to force the mind to digest this previously unclaimed kernel of experience. Greg Forter is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel and of numerous articles on American literature. His current project is entitled “Melancholy Manhood: Gender, Race, and the Inability to Mourn in American Literary Modernism.” NARRATIVE, Vol. 15, No. 3 (October 2007) Copyright 2007 by The Ohio State University 260 Greg Forter The usefulness of such an account extends beyond its applicability to the perhaps extreme case of the Holocaust. Critics have marshaled it to illuminate a range of important social phenomena, from rape and child sexual abuse to certain experiences of racist violence and even of class domination. In doing so, they have helped tune our ears anew to those psychic expressions of trauma that this theory is especially adept at hearing. One such psychic expression concerns what Freud called the repetition compulsion: those reenactments in the present of psychic events that have not been safely consigned to the past, that retain the visual and affective intensity of lived (rather than remembered) experience, and that disrupt the unruffled present with flashbacks and terrifying nightmares, intrusive fragments of an unknown past that exceeds the self’s (relatively) coherent and integrated story about itself. All of these phenomena have been raised for renewed and vigorous debate by the “punctual” version of trauma theory. So, too, have the forms of writing that arise in response to such suffering. Critics deploying the category of trauma have stressed in particular the power of texts that seek less to represent traumatizing events—since representation risks, on this view, betraying the bewildering, imperfectly representational character of traumatic memory—than to transmit directly to the reader the experience of traumatic disruption. Here the study of trauma joins a more general contemporary interest in writing that performs or enacts what it has to say rather than (or in addition to) conveying it representationally. The emphasis on traumatic textualities, in this sense—on texts whose significance lies in part in their cognitive indigestibility—has helped to hold open an important area for interdisciplinary exchange, especially between the sometimes antagonistic fields of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. There is then much to admire in the trauma studies of the past decade. In what follows, my aim is to build upon that work by redressing one of its central limitations: its difficulty accounting for those forms of trauma that are not punctual, that are more mundanely catastrophic than such spectacular instances of violence as the Holocaust.1 I am speaking here of the trauma induced by patriarchal identity formation rather, say, than the trauma of rape, the violence not of lynching but of everyday racism. These phenomena are indeed traumas in the sense of having decisive and deforming effects on the psyche that give rise to compulsively repeated and highly rigidified social relations. But such traumas are also so chronic and cumulative, so woven into the fabric of our societies, that they cannot count as “shocks” in the way that Nazi persecution and genocide do in the accounts of Caruth and others. They are emphatically social disturbances, but have been thoroughly naturalized in ways that make it necessary to excavate and “estrange” them in order to see them as social traumas. One effect of this naturalization has been that the punctual acts of violence that no doubt attended the initial subjugation of women and racial “others,” and that remain the final recourse of such domination today, have been socially sublimated into ongoing, systemic practices and patterns of behavior. The very mechanisms by which our societies reproduce themselves are in this sense caught up in perpetuating injuries that, as I shall argue, are in the strictest sense traumas—but traumas that most work in the field has no way of describing.2 In developing a model for understanding those traumas, my essay moves to recover as well a different version of Freud than that preferred by current trauma Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 261 theory. The emphasis on “shock” and “surprise” in that theory derives from Freud’s late work on trauma. I draw instead on an earlier model of trauma in his work that I propose is better suited to grasping systemic traumatizations.3 That early model is less preoccupied with punctual incursions upon the psyche than with a dialectic arising from the biphasic character of human sexuality. It emphasizes the momentous, potentially traumatizing consequences of the fact that each of us is implicated in the world of adult sexual meanings before we have the psychic equipment to process those meanings. Since this precocious exposure to adult sexuality entails, in addition, the infant’s embroilment in networks of patriarchal power, the theory of trauma developed from this insight opens onto the problem of how patriarchy might itself be considered a normatively traumatogenic institution. The insight can be generalized, as we shall see: the potential for retrospective, traumatic identity-construction is installed not just by the processes of patriarchal gender formation that so preoccupy Freud, but also by the processes governing the production of class and racial identities. Freud’s early theory thus has the capacity to help us understand a range of social traumas whose effects are ordinarily masked by the normative character of our social institutions. The neglect of this early theory in contemporary trauma studies is far from accidental. It has its roots in Freud’s own movement away from that theory, a movement born in ambivalence and nurtured by fear. Starting with Freud, the possibilities for historical and political understanding promised by the “first” theory of trauma give rise to an acutely painful knowledge of the investigator’s implication in the structures of domination and social violence that he or she uncovers. In Freud’s case, that knowledge concerned the misogyny and femiphobia lodged at the heart of his own masculinity; he escaped it in part by developing and ambivalently embracing his second theory of trauma—a theory that absolved him of historical guilt by tracing all human misery (including that caused by misogyny and femiphobia) to a non-historical or structural cause,4 namely, the psychoanalytic redaction of original sin called the death drive. To elucidate the dangers of such a response, I put Freud’s writings into dialogue with two texts by William Faulkner: Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). My assumption in this part of the essay is that the discourses of psychoanalysis and modernism—and thus, of Freud and Faulkner—can broadly be thought of as parallel efforts to map the traumas of modern gender and (less explicitly in Freud’s case) race, but that literary modernism offers a knowledge of those traumas, a mode of psychic and sensuous cognition, that the theoretical speculations of Freud can only approximate. By devising inventive and radically new forms for mediating psychosocial experience, modernism explored modern racism and misogyny with a concrete specificity that helps us to see why some ways of figuring these trauma are enabling while others are mystifying and politically crippling. Faulkner is an especially compelling figure in this context because his account of Southern history echoes the dynamic tension in Freud between two models of trauma. He dramatizes the construction of Southern manhood as the inassimilable, traumatic incursion of the histories of white supremacy and misogyny upon the psyche. In doing so, he offers on one hand a richer account than even the early Freud of the interaction 262 Greg Forter between individual psyches and traumatogenic social processes—in this case, those associated with slavery and patriarchy. On the other hand, however, like Freud, Faulkner moves toward a “structural” view of trauma that cancels the force of his own critique, figuring the white male psyche as inevitably dispossessed by phantoms from the past that rob it of agency, and thus as doomed to repeat and perpetuate, in a kind of social repetition compulsion, the histories of gender and racial oppression that his critique begins by anatomizing. Trauma becomes then less the result of historically specific and resistible social forces than the transhistorical truth or condition of historical experience itself. The motivation for this rewriting is again an attempt to stave off the author’s implication in the systems of domination that his elaborations uncover. The relation between such a move and the currently dominant model of trauma is a final concern of this essay. I turn, therefore, in my conclusion to the work of Caruth herself, in order to ask if it, too, might be seen as part of a conceptual lineage that “structuralizes” trauma. My focus here is especially on problems surrounding Caruth’s treatment of trauma’s capacity to be represented or “known” (by those who haven’t directly experienced it). Her theory appears at least to imply that, because trauma is best conveyed “directly”—since attempts to thematize and make it comprehensible betray its essence as inassimilable shock—then the best kind of text is one that actually induces trauma in its readers.5 This view leads in practice to the theorists’ conflation of textually-induced psychic disequilibrium with actual historical traumas. Such a conflation has its roots, I suggest, in the assumption that historically-induced traumas are little more than local instances of a generalized linguistic or “structural” predicament, in which words refer beyond themselves only by way of a “traumatic” abruption into language of a real that words can neither expel nor properly digest (i.e., render representational).6 I In the broadest sense, the experience of trauma can be said to lie at the heart of Freud’s initial discoveries and so to inform his earliest psychoanalytic formulations. Studies on Hysteria (1895) suggests, for example, that hysteria is caused by traumatic experiences that have not been fully integrated into the personality. Because of their intensely painful quality, such experiences are repressed and apparently “forgotten”; the conscious mind remains more or less completely ignorant of them. They continue, however, to dwell in the unconscious, where they achieve the status of what Freud calls “foreign bod[ies]” in the psyche (6): heterogeneous memorial kernels that threaten to unleash unpleasurable affect if the mind’s associations approach them too closely. In the case of hysterics, such memories do indeed resurface, in the disguised form of bodily symptoms. The repressed memories are reactivated, that is, but the defenses against remembering remain strong enough to produce a kind of compromise formation, a symptomatic acting out in which the body “expresses” the memories in a language that consciousness cannot decipher. (The aim of this compromise is to keep intact the unconsciousness of repressed Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 263 material while giving voice to the suffering that caused its repression.) To cure such patients it thus becomes necessary to help them recall and put into words (“abreact”) what up till now has dwelt in them as a kind of internal, unassimilated alterity. Psychoanalysis was born as a treatment that sought precisely to enable this process: to facilitate the naming and integration of trauma into the patient’s self-understanding. Implicit in these early formulations is an analogy between psychic and physical trauma that would remain constant in Freud’s thought, despite significant reinflections in the course of his career. The analogy has at least three components: (1) as in physical injury, a traumatizing psychic event is punctual in character—it is an event, not an ongoing process or series of events;7 (2) an event is traumatic when it causes a “breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 29)—in psychological terms, when that part of the psyche which ordinarily filters out and limits what one perceives and processes has been disabled, punctured, and overwhelmed; and (3) this breaching of the barrier against stimuli “seems to rest upon the factor of surprise” (12). The psychic apparatus is overcome, that is, partly because it fails to anticipate the event that overwhelms it, just as the body is traumatized when an external concussion catches it unawares, making flight or defense against the concussive force impossible. There is, however, a wrinkle in this theory that makes the analogy with physical injury inexact. The theory itself emerged as part of Freud’s broader, early metapsychology, which saw the psyche as a field of conflict between the forces of sexuality and its repression. The sexual drives were of course primary; Freud understood them as impulses that sought immediate and unconditional satisfaction, defined in part as the elimination of unpleasurable tension from the psychic apparatus. These drives were countered by the pressures of “life-” or “ego-instincts” on one hand (which opposed the sexual instincts with a demand to postpone pleasure in the name of survival), and on the other, by the repressive requirements of “civilized” sexual morality. It was Freud’s contention that the demands of the latter could be internalized in a way that made one ill. He argued, in other words, both that the trauma which gives rise to neurosis is sexual in nature and that sex is traumatic in part because of its social repression. The kinds of trauma central to his early work were thus those in which an early initiation into sexual knowledge came to seem intolerable in the retrospective light of civilized morality. What had been at least potentially pleasurable was now felt as unpleasure (guilt, shame, anxiety); repression saved one from remembering the (past) pleasure and so from feeling the (present) unpleasure; and neurosis arose as a compromise formation when this repression was somehow undone. If, however, as this summary indicates, the initial experience is not in itself unpleasurable and could, indeed, be experienced as pleasure, then the account of trauma offered so far requires significant emendation. The psychic apparatus is not overwhelmed by a purely painful and external intrusion upon it, as is the case when the skin is punctured. Freud in fact argued that the initial event—a witnessed or experienced sexual act—takes the infant by surprise only in the sense that she or he does not yet have the cognitive capacity to make sense of what is happening. Nor is 264 Greg Forter the initial event repressed because of its traumatic character; it is, rather, repressed as part of the general amnesia that sets in during latency—as part of that “forgetting” of infantile eroticism that makes human sexuality uniquely biphasic. The first event falls victim to repression only because the formation of social beings requires that the untamed, disorganized, and polymorphous sexual energies of infancy be repressed and then reconstituted around the genitals after puberty. It is only after that reconstitution, Freud proposed, in the context of a fuller understanding of sex, that the first event becomes retrospectively significant and potentially pathogenic. It does so by way of a second event that often appears innocuous enough. A word, an observation, a sensory perception, a feeling—something in a person’s present life sets off a chain of associations that lead to the first scene’s unconscious “understanding,” giving rise to intense anxiety precisely by making that scene significant and rendering it traumatic for the first time.8 The theory of trauma is in this way governed by the temporal logic of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit—a term that James Strachey’s English translation renders as “deferred action,” but is perhaps, as John Brenkman proposes, more properly translated “retrodetermination” (21–22). Within this logic, the trauma that causes neurotic symptoms becomes less a matter of punctual events intruding upon an unprepared psyche than an effect of the interplay between two moments, the second of which retrospectively determines the meaning of the first. Trauma, on this view, is the psychic result of a (sexual) knowledge that comes at once too soon and too late. It comes “too soon” in that the event communicating this knowledge happens before the infant can grasp its significance; and it comes “too late” because, by the time that infant is old enough to understand what has befallen him, it has, quite simply, already befallen him, is in fact lodged within him as an inadmissible past experience whose affective repercussions are exceedingly difficult to defend against. Trauma might in this sense be defined as the internal, retrospective determination of a momentous yet initially incomprehensible event’s memorial significance.9 Readers familiar with Freud’s thinking on these matters may recall that the theory of neurosis as an effect of retrodetermined trauma finds its fullest elaboration in relation to his theory of the “primal scene.” This is a notoriously troubling concept that I want nonetheless to recover and reclaim. To do so it is necessary to pause and explicate the concept at some length. In the Wolf Man case history—the text in which this concept figures most centrally—Freud argues that his patient had at the age of one-and-a-half witnessed his parents in an act of coitus that only later, at the age of four, became comprehensible and pathogenic for him, giving rise to debilitating symptoms as well as to an extraordinary dream that expressed in disguised form the contents of the witnessed scene. Freud named the initial act of parental sex the “primal scene”; within this text, the Wolf Man’s observation of that scene becomes not just an example among others but the representative illustration of trauma’s disruptive effects, the scene around which is formed a self inhabited by the unassimilated residue of an event that will come to traumatize him. It is, accordingly, disconcerting to find how much Freud worries over the status of this scene. The text devotes significant space to the problem of whether it actually Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 265 took place or is, instead, a retrospective fantasy (as opposed to an actual event whose significance is fantasmatically and retrospectively determined). These ruminations matter because they raise the crucial question of where psychic trauma comes from.10 If the scenes are purely fantasmatic, then one is faced with two unpalatable options: either the patient has projected them back from the present on his own account, or else the analyst has elicited them from him in accordance with a preconceived analytic hypothesis. The result in either case is that the traumatic “memory” has no concrete, historical origin: the primal scene does not exist as an actual event at all. Freud was convinced that the impossibility of authenticating primal memories required him to confront this problem squarely. He solved it in part by proposing that in those cases where the construction of a primal scene is therapeutically beneficial yet difficult to arrive at inductively, the scene can be deduced from the hypothesis of phylogeneticallytransmitted “schemata” of experience that preexist any given individual. According to this view, real primal scenes were in fact witnessed in the prehistoric dawn of human time; these witnessed scenes decisively influenced the psychosexual development of the species; and the scenes themselves are thus now “remembered” by people who have not actually seen them, but who weave them into the texture of their memories as a way of making sense of otherwise incomprehensible psychic phenomena.11 The dubious character of this appeal to phylogeny is evident enough. It saves traumatic events from the realm of the patient’s fantasmatic invention only by substituting a metafantasy of the analyst’s own construction. Or, to put the case differently: Freud here makes an appeal to human history that’s meant to recover at a higher level the concrete, historical cause of trauma, but in the process he dissolves entirely the event’s concrete historicity, turning human history itself into a phylogenetic mythology. Nevertheless, these speculations seem to me to intuit something valuable. A range of recent clinicians and theorists have attested to the fact that children can inherit affective dispositions, “memories,” and even knowledge of traumatic events that they did not experience directly. Those exploring these phenomena have offered differing explanations for them; it’s clear, however, that the transmission in question takes place not through some mythic genetic inheritance but through the emotional and body “language” of the parents.12 The parents, in other words, unconsciously convey to the child a host of meanings that the child cannot process; they thereby implant in him or her traumatogenic possibilities that are real in the sense of being grounded in the parents’ experience, but do not have the status of events that the child must actually have witnessed. Since, moreover, these possibilities are implanted in the form of incomprehensible meanings, Freud’s appeal to phylogeny is as unnecessary as it is theoretically untenable. What he in fact intuits with this gesture is that the hypothesis of retrodetermination requires an emphatically social elaboration. The potentially traumatic knowledge of sex that the child acquires too soon yet too late is of necessity the knowledge of a specific historical construction of sex—of the sexual significances and contestations prevailing at the historical moment in which infant and parents find themselves, yet referring, too, beyond the family to a larger history of which they are a part. I’m proposing that we view the theory of primal scenes less as a factual description of events than as an allegory for how the forces of signification and sexual- 266 Greg Forter ity—and therefore, of history—come to inhabit the child before she has the equipment for making sense of them, and thus to dwell in her as a traumatic potentiality. This revision entails insisting that the knowledge transmitted and encysted within the subject includes a knowledge of sexual domination, not merely of the quasi-natural “distinction between the sexes” to which Freud often has recourse (male vs. female, activity vs. passivity, phallic vs. castrated, etc.). For the opening up onto history is also an opening up onto events and structures that traumatize in the more conventional sense: that hurt and disable women and deform men, that produce the gendered injuries that have accompanied all known human history. The constellation of psychic dangers posed by the primal scene, as well as Freud’s observation that children typically interpret that scene as an act of violence by the father against the mother, must each be viewed in this light. The Wolf Man has been traumatized largely because he identifies with a mother whom he understands as sexually violated rather than with the father, whom he sees as violating her. This identification poses the danger of “castration” not because women are castrated but because patriarchy says they are. What we are dealing with, in other words, is the Wolf Man’s social retrodetermination of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. Whether he has actually witnessed a scene of parental sex is beside the point. The fantasmatic projection of that scene dramatizes the fact that, by the time he becomes aware of the social distinction between the sexes and the need to “be” masculine, he has already been implicated in identifications with the feminine that will make male identity intrinsically unstable. He has imbibed a latent knowledge of women’s disempowerment and sexual vulnerability before grasping either that he knows this or what follows from such knowledge: the generalized social compulsion for men and boys to repudiate the feminine. To be male yet sexually loved by the father—to be in the psychic position of the mother—is to suffer a blow less to one’s actual body (castration) than to one’s bodily ego and social sense of self. The primal scene in this sense allegorizes a shattering rift in the apparently natural fit between male power and the male body, traumatizing the Wolf Man by revealing to him the de-masculinizing consequences of an identification with femininity he must already have made. The reconceptualization I am offering recasts Freud’s phylogenetic construction of supra-subjective “schemata” as the emphatically social inscription in the psyche of power relations that precede any given self. The primal scene represents nothing less than a way of describing the more or less pathogenic confrontation that each of us must make with this social inscription. The confrontation is “more or less” pathogenic because specific societies and families are able to “hold” or “contain” the child’s confrontation with an always-already internalized set of gendered meanings in ways that lie along a continuum from enabling or liberating to crippling or even lethal.13 It should be clear, however, that what most societies and families call “enabling” in the realm of gender is in fact pathological; to take the case of the modern West alone, the mechanism of oedipalization that produces relatively autonomous, functioning adults who identify as male or female also quite clearly does so by perpetuating gender inequality and violence, extending rather than alleviating the toxicity of traditional gender relations. The best kind of holding environments will thus be those that enable the metabolization of potentially traumatizing knowledge not Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 267 in a way that secures adaptation to prevailing gender norms but in a way that makes alternatives to those norms both psychically possible and socially imaginable. Finally, before turning to Faulkner, it’s important to describe the revisions Freud made to his theory in the second half of his career. I have indicated that his early formulations in essence define trauma as sexual trauma, linking it to the dialectic between a pleasure principle seeking direct satisfaction and the repressions that give rise, among other things, to the biphasic character of human sexuality. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) marks a significant shift in orientation. Here, trauma takes its place within the great, instinctual opposition between death drive and Eros: between the impulse of all living things toward (self-)destruction on one hand, and the impulse to perpetuate life by binding (cells, organisms, families, nations) into ever greater unities on the other. The novelty of this new opposition resides in the concept of the death drive; “Eros” absorbs what had previously been the opposition between life-drives and sexual drives, but the concept of a primary impulse toward destruction corresponds to nothing in Freud’s earlier theories. (It does have affinities with melancholia and masochism, but Freud had until 1920 treated these as secondary phenomena whose primary aim was unconscious pleasure.) Its introduction was prompted in part by Freud’s confrontation with adult experiences in which shock disorganizes the ego so profoundly that the person experiencing it engages in behaviors that serve neither the purposes of self-preservation nor those of pleasurable gratification. Patients suffering from “traumatic neuroses,” for example—shell-shocked war veterans and victims of motor-vehicle accidents—often report dreams in which they’re forced to relive the experiences that traumatized them. Such dreams are hard to square with either these patients’ diurnal efforts to forget what has befallen them or with the ordinary, wish-fulfilling function of dreams (according to which the oneiric activity of patients such as these should offer symbolic and distorted representations of cure, not conjure memories of the trauma itself). Freud is careful to distinguish this kind of repetition from the hysteric’s replication through bodily symptoms of the original trauma. In that case, the symptom expressed the traumatic memory in a compromise formation that displaced and disguised it; in this one, the victim literally dreams about and imaginatively returns to the experience that traumatized him. Since such experiences were undoubtedly painful, the observation leads Freud to suspect that there may be phenomena that cannot be explained by a theory in which the mind is driven by the demands of pleasure alone. It may be, as he suggests at one point, that the ego stands in the permanent grip of “mysterious masochistic trends,” which lead it to seek out suffering and pain rather than try to shun them (14). Freud actually resists drawing this conclusion from traumatic neurosis alone. He offers instead a more tentative interpretation that invokes (with a difference) the peculiarly double temporality of trauma. The initial shock, he argues, is traumatic partly because the ego was insufficiently prepared, that is to say, insufficiently anxious in the face of it. Anxiety becomes now an affect whose aim is to “cathect” the psychic apparatus in a way that preserves it against violent incursions, infusing it with a vigilant energy that makes it possible to process even extreme increases in 268 Greg Forter incoming stimuli and so to neutralize the factor of surprise. (Freud of course acknowledges that some psychic incursions are too powerful to defend against, no matter how much preparatory anxiety one has developed.) Because traumatized patients have failed to generate the requisite anxiety in advance, they experience the event as an inassimilable shock that inscribes itself as an unprocessed memory-trace in the psyche. Such patients return to the trauma in dreams precisely in an effort “to master the stimulus [i.e., the traumatizing event] retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (32). They dream of the trauma in an effort to make themselves psychically ‘present’ for it, and so to generate the prophylactic anxiety that could alone have shielded them from the event’s initial impact. This compulsive return of trauma in dreams is itself, Freud proposes, a replication of the gesture that gives birth in each of us to what he elsewhere calls the “pleasure-ego”: an early, primordial version of the ego that knows only the distinction between a good inside and a bad outside (“Negation” 235 –39). Traumatic nightmares in this sense serve a function prior to and more primitive than that of wishfulfillment; they seek to generate again the anxiety which alone enabled the pleasure principle first to assert its sway over mental life. For it is only, Freud remarks, once the infant psyche has developed the anxious egoic surface that makes any event potentially assimilable (rather than disruptive) that the principle of pleasure can achieve dominance. The establishment of a psychic “shield against stimuli,” saturated with anticipatory anxiety, is the condition of possibility for the emergence of a self that knows the difference between inside and outside, between pleasurable and unpleasurable affect. It is in this sense that traumatic neuroses point for Freud to something “beyond” the pleasure principle (though not, as yet, to a destructive impulse that operates in opposition to it). The apparently literal return in dreams to an experience of past unpleasure—rather than, say, the wish-fulfilling, pleasurable dreaming of a symbolic and distorted cure—signifies the psyche’s repossession by a principle older than the pursuit of pleasure and constituting that pursuit’s condition of possibility. This second, revised theory of trauma is important to my argument for several reasons. First, because the phenomena of traumatic repetition reveal for Freud a universal psychic tendency that opposes the work of the pleasure principle, his theory lends itself to an interpretation in which human subjectivity is intrinsically traumatic—in which manifestations of traumatic behavior are merely the expressions of a deep, structural trauma that compels all human beings toward regressive self-destruction. The theory of the death drive is crucial to this emphasis. I have noted that Freud explicitly states only that trauma points to a tendency older than the pleasure principle; he does not directly link traumatic repetition to the death drive. He is, however, sufficiently fuzzy on these matters—sufficiently cagey and allusive in his arguments—that his repeated yoking of trauma, compulsive repetition, and the death drive has the effect of suggesting that “death drive” is a way of naming how each of us is traumatized by primordial memories of an inorganic quiescence that we seek perpetually to repeat and recover. Given this suggestion, it becomes increasingly difficult in his text to discover the specificity of psychic trauma: how are we in princi- Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 269 ple to distinguish the structural trauma that affects us all from the paralyzing effects of events that only some of us—rape victims, for example, or survivors of accidents—have been brutalized by? The second reason that the late theory matters is closely linked to this first one. Freud’s interpretation of present suffering in terms of a transfixed, compulsive repetition of past events (rather than of those events’ displaced expression in symptoms) has the effect of homogenizing and dehistoricizing the experience of time itself. The theory of compulsive repetition, in this sense, marks a significant retreat from the concept of retrodetermination. Rather than seeing events that cause trauma as potentially pathogenic in the future, this theory sees them as effractions that evict us from the movement of historical time from the start. Rather than emphasizing the significatory content of trauma—meanings internalized too early yet too late, a subject who comes to be “always already” shaped by meanings with which he must contend—this view emphasizes the purely non-significatory effect of shock, the brute intrusion of unmasterable stimuli upon an unprepared psyche. And rather than viewing even this shock as producing a range of differential effects in the subject’s subsequent life (symptoms, character traits, etc.), this view posits the initial event as one that the subject literally repeats in a kind of transfixed and atemporal nightmare. The delay that Freud describes between an initial event and its activation in the psyche is in this way evacuated of both the complex temporal structure and the psychosocial content of the early theory. We are here dealing with a repetition of the same: a demonic impulse that turns development into reprisal, change into recurrence, temporal movement into the static circularity of myth. As a local description of a contingent and extraordinary phenomenon called traumatic neurosis, this may be accurate enough; when yoked to Freud’s universalizing proclivities—to the idea that we’re all “structurally” traumatized—it becomes not just ahistorical in its tendency toward abstract universals, but antihistorical in its emphasis upon the atemporal structure of human time.14 II We are now in a position to grasp what it means to say that Freud’s late theory of trauma enabled him to evade the political implications of his early theory. His second account is emphatically not developed in relation to a problematic of the constitution of gendered subjectivity, nor is it concerned to trace the retrodetermining inscription of gendered meanings in the psyche. It seeks instead to make ungendered human misery at once historically inexplicable (that is, insusceptible of historical analysis) and ontologically ineradicable. It implies that the psychic effects of war and train wrecks are best understood not in their psychohistorical specificity, but as local reprisals of a transhistorical, universal effort to master an event that disturbs our prior “quiescence”—an event that, phylogenically speaking, is nothing less than the traumatic inauguration into life of inorganic matter. In this sense, the late theory is compatible with a range of other late pronouncements in Freud’s texts: the claim 270 Greg Forter that “anatomy is destiny” (“Passing” 177); the concept of penis envy as a natural rather than culturo-political phenomenon (“New Introductory” 124–26); and the shift from an argument that we should resist those social repressions that compound the necessary psychic ones (“‘Civilized’” 197–204) to the assertion that social repressions are a beneficent evil, at once the motor of human progress and destined to make us increasingly ill (Civilization ch. 5–7). Freud’s interrelated shifts in this direction must be seen as shifts of emphasis rather than total displacements, however. He continued to have recourse to the early theory of trauma when it suited an immediate, explanatory purpose, and one can even find the two theories operating alongside one another in various texts. This is, in my view, the residue of an intellectual scruple that struggled mightily—and for me, quite movingly—against Freud’s impulse to resolve his ambivalence toward normative gender by naturalizing its pyschic and historical formation. In turning now to Faulkner’s texts, my aim is to stress how they show and make us feel the troubling consequences of resolving ambivalence in that direction. Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, that is, set in sensuously concrete motion the social and psychic dynamics of trauma, tracing the effects of pathogenic social processes on individual minds and human relations. Such a procedure enables for readers an extraordinarily rich and empathic understanding of what it means to be traumatized by a specific set of historical processes. At the same time, however, these novels move toward a pessimism that is at bottom more cosmic than historical. Faulkner’s ambivalent attachment to patriarchy and white supremacy leads him to disavow his indictment of those institutions, rewriting the traumas inflicted by them as the ineradicable truth of human being and insisting that to feel that truth is both the condition of ethical authenticity and the prelude to a literally suicidal despair. Let us begin with Light in August. The central event around which this novel turns is the murder of Joanna Burden at the hands (apparently) of her lover, Joe Christmas. To explain this murder, Faulkner elaborates an ever more complex and deeper personal past for each of his main characters, as if to suggest that an event of this kind can be understood only by tracing its root in the histories of all those involved in it. This excavation reveals, in turn, how the characters’ apparently “personal” stories cannot be told independently—are, indeed, inextricably intertwined, regardless of whether the characters know each other—precisely because all are implicated in the social history and legacy of slavery, the bloodshed of Civil War, and the violent suppression of Reconstruction. The novel’s inquiry in this sense leads it “through” Joanna’s murder and to the historical traumas induced by white racism. Along the way, Faulkner at once invites us to believe that Joe Christmas is black and that this explains his murder of Joanna, and thwarts this kind of explanation. The story of his blackness appears to be born in the lunatic mind of his grandfather Hines, whose religious misogyny and racism lead him to “know” that the man his daughter sleeps with is a “nigger” not a Mexican. (“Bitchery and abomination! Bitchery and abomination!”: this is about what his evidence amounts to [370].) More than thirty years later, Hines’s wife will tell Gail Hightower that her husband’s suspicions were confirmed by the owner of the circus Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 271 where the daughter’s seducer (Joe’s father) worked—but again, this is hearsay, based on no evidence, and clearly shaped by the force of memory and the culture’s dominant narratives about race. The book’s major characters manage little more than this kind of retrospective, circular reasoning: Joe is black because he behaves like a black man, and the proof that he behaves like a black man is the murder for which his blackness convicts him (“I always knew there was something funny about that fellow,” a deputy remarks after the “secret” of Christmas’s race is divulged [99]). The characters seize on this “fact” of blackness as the simple solution to the mystery of who killed Joanna Burden and why. Faulkner, in contrast, insists that race is itself the mystery, the enigma. Joe behaves “like a black man” because he has come to believe that he is one, and the question then becomes, how did this belief come to pass, and what are the concrete effects of holding it? In response to these questions, Light in August offers one of the most stunning accounts in our literature of how and to what effect “blackness” gets internalized. It does so through a passage that’s literally staged as a Freudian “primal scene,” and that therefore returns us to the problematic of trauma in the context of the issues discussed so far. The scene in question is that in which Joe at first ingests then seeks to vomit a substance that identifies him with blackness and femininity. He is at that time five years old and living in an orphanage. He has slipped into the bedroom of the institution’s dietician, a woman Faulkner describes as “young, a little fullbodied, smooth, pink-and-white.” Joe goes to her room in order to eat in “worm”-like dollops the sweet, “pinkcolored” toothpaste that she keeps by the washstand. He has been doing this surreptitiously “for almost a year.” But today the dietician returns to the room while he is still there. She brings with her “a young interne” with whom she is having an affair. Joe withdraws behind “a cloth curtain which screen[s] off one corner of the room.” He “squat[s] among the soft womansmelling garments and shoes,” listening as the intern coerces the woman into having sex with him. Transfixed and immobilized, he continues smearing the toothpaste into his mouth and eating it, until at last “it refuse[s] to go down”: “At once the paste which he had already swallowed lifted inside him, trying to get back out, into the air where it was cool. It was no longer sweet. In the rife, pinkwomansmelling obscurity behind the curtain he squatted, pink-foamed, listening to his insides, waiting…for what was about to happen to him. Then it happened. He said to himself with complete and passive surrender: ‘Well, here I am’” (121–22). “Well, here I am”…and then he vomits. But who is “I” and where is “here”? An identity announced by throwing up is a strangely elusive identity, since vomit is at once “me” and “not-me,” at once a substance assimilated to self and one that the self has violently rejected. Faulkner invents this scene, in other words, as an allegory for how identity is formed through a primitive dialectic of assimilation and expulsion: Joe incorporates the feminine pinkness, the sticky, blobby, shapeless matter whose color links it to the dietician. Faulkner accentuates this link by saying that when Joe first “discovered the toothpaste in her room he had gone directly there [to the washstand]…as if he already knew that she would possess something of that nature” 272 Greg Forter (120). The toothpaste is in this sense a kind of direct expression of the feminine. The meanings internalized when Joe eats that paste are then given content by the sexual character of the scene he overhears. To “be” the woman is here to be a passive, subordinated, penetrable object, unable to resist the force of a masculine agent of penetration. When Joe throws up, the act expresses a disgusted refusal of these combined meanings; his vomit says “I am not this,” “I refuse to be this,” “I will not be this,” but this brutely physical marking of limits is predicated on a prior recognition that the thing he refuses to be has already taken up residence inside him. This is, of course, a fictional elaboration of the traumatic formation of gender identity that closely parallels Freud’s in his first theory of trauma. As in Freud, the potentially traumatogenic event becomes in fact traumatic only later, when Joe experiences scenes and events that confirm and therefore trigger the first scene’s latent significances. Before turning to those scenes, however, it’s important to note that Faulkner’s account goes further than Freud’s as well. It concludes with the woman dragging Joe “out of his vomit” and hissing: “You little rat!…Spying on me! You little nigger bastard!” (122). This exclamation works to extend the traumatic formation of gender into the realm of race. Faulkner uses it to suggest that, in social hierarchies organized around both race and gender, black masculinity is often internalized as an impossible contradiction. The very meaning of being a black man is in part “feminization,” since black men are disempowered and rendered vulnerable in ways that the culture codes as “castration.” (This doesn’t of course preclude the construction of black men as enviably virile; sexual prowess does not map smoothly onto social power.) By having Joe called “nigger” to his face for the first time at the end of this passage, then, Faulkner insists that his racialization results from the traumatic ingestion of social meanings that link black manhood to femininity, rather than being, as the characters believe, the natural expression of his putative black blood. The biphasic character of the process I am tracing is marked at the start of the chapter in which this scene occurs. There Faulkner writes that “Memory believes before knowing remembers, believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders, knows remembers believes” (119). The sentence proposes that Joe’s “primal scene” is memorially cathected before being first forgotten (memory “believes” but then ceases to “recollect”) and then, later, consciously remembered (memory “believes before knowing remembers”). The scene dwells within him as an unconscious trace in part because it happens before he’s old enough to know what it means, let alone to know that he believes what it tells him. Crucially, the event that retrodetermines this first one, that makes Joe “remember” and consciously “believe” while triggering the scene’s traumatogenic potential, is also the scene that initiates him into adult sexuality. He and a group of white boys have paid a young black woman to have sex with them in a shed. Faulkner describes the experience as follows: His [Joe’s] turn came. He entered the shed. It was dark. At once he was overcome by a terrible haste. There was something in him trying to get out, like when he had used to think of toothpaste. But he could not move at one, standing there, smelling the woman smelling the negro all at one; enclosed by the womanshenegro…Then it seemed to him that he could see her—something, prone, Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 273 abject; her eyes perhaps. Leaning he seemed to look down into a black well and at the bottom saw to glints like reflections of dead stars…He kicked her hard, kicking into and through a choked wail of surprise and fear. She began to scream, he…hitting at her with wide, wild blows…enclosed by the womanshenegro and the haste. (157) Without analyzing this passage at length, we can note that its reference back to the toothpaste suggests that this moment gives to that scene its retrospective and traumatic significance. It does so by activating Joe’s identification with the black female “object” of sexual conquest. Rather than standing apart from and mastering that object, rather than instrumentalizing her in the name of his sexual pleasure, Joe is here “reminded” of his internalization of blackness and femininity. He is thus forced to see in the black girl an “abject” reflection of what he can’t stand to own in himself. The traumatic effect of this recognition is quite literally lethal. Joe’s sense of being at once olfactorily pierced (“smelling the negro”) and enclosed by the “womanshenegro” has its optical equivalent in his seeing himself in eyes that look like “dead stars.” In order then to stave off the trauma of “being” the black woman, Joe engages in her physical brutalization—a brutalization that we can read as the post-oedipal, “intersubjective” equivalent of vomiting, an act that seeks to abject and revile what it insists is “not-me,” and so to mark the limits of a purportedly white male self. It would be possible to trace the effects of this lethal dynamic in the remainder of the novel. Those effects take shape as an emphatically social repetition compulsion, in which Joe repeatedly assumes the position of black and feminine object-tobe-violated, or else tries to escape that position through identifications with toxic white manhood. In either case, the result is violence. Faulkner’s analysis in this way exposes how the logical effect of systems of power that are first traumatically inscribed in us, and then retrospectively activated, is a compulsively repeated dialectic of domination and submission. Rather than trace this process in detail, however, I want now to turn to Absalom, Absalom! This novel offers an even richer account of traumatized gender than does Light in August, even as it develops strategies designed to help Faulkner escape the political implications of his analysis. To see how both of these points work, it’s crucial to grasp that Absalom, Absalom!’s engagement with historical trauma occurs in part through its highly innovative manipulation of the conventions of crime fiction. The novel exploits what John Cawelti calls “the detective story’s double plot.” He means by this something fairly straightforward: that in a conventional detective story, the key event (i.e., the crime) takes place once in the actual happening, then a second time in its gradual reconstruction and retelling by the detective. Or, to put this another way, the main action of the detective story is in some sense the repetition in narrative of a “plot” that precedes the story we are reading. This repetition functions as a correction of all the false hypotheses generated along the way. It can therefore be judged on the basis of its fidelity to an initial, unrepresented event, as well as on the basis of its highlighting the mistaken character of the reconstructions offered to that point. Faulkner’s originality lies in his transposition of this double plot into an internal space (i.e., the mind) which nonetheless registers the historical forces shape and 274 Greg Forter constrain human subjectivity. He suggests that subjectivity can itself be structured by the “double plot” of historical trauma: something external happens to us, an event intrudes upon consciousness in an incipiently traumatic way, and yet this event remains unrecognized as such, unknown and therefore unassimilated to our self-understanding. It then requires a second, retroactivating event to bring this knowledge into consciousness, where it is now experienced, for the first time, as the trauma that it was in the first place. The detective story’s double plot is in this way both condensed and folded inward. Faulkner effects this transformation in order to suggest something like the following: that any conventional, external mystery (i.e., the murder of Charles Bon in Absalom, Absalom!) has as its secret subject the actors who did the deed or were its victims; that this requires a displacement of emphasis from the question “whodunit?” to the question, “why?”; that central to this mystery is the problem of how psychic motivations are also always social motives; and that these latter are installed through the incursion on the psyche of external, sociohistorical meanings, which mark us even before we know either what those meanings are or that we have internalized them. Two instances of this dynamic are worth discussing in detail. The first concerns Thomas Sutpen, the self-made Southern planter whose dynastic ambitions lie behind the mystery of Charles Bon’s murder. (Quentin and Shreve speculate that Sutpen’s son, Henry, kills Bon after Sutpen tells Henry of Bon’s black blood, since it’s he— Sutpen—whose dream of a dynasty will be spoiled by admitting racial otherness into the family.) In Chapter 7, Faulkner proposes that Sutpen’s ambitions have their origin in an “affront” he suffers as an adolescent boy. Born and raised in the wild, unsettled mountains of Virginia, he has remained brutally unsocialized and, accordingly, “innocent” of the sins attendant upon the intertwined systems of private property, slavery, and the subjugation of women. But then the family moves down into the Tidewater area of Virginia. After a couple of years, Sutpen is sent one day by his father to deliver a message at a local plantation. A black house-slave opens the door and, before Sutpen can say what he has come to say, rebuffs him for using the front entrance, instructing him to go around back and telling him never to make the mistake again. What happens next is this: before the monkey nigger who came to the door had finished saying what he did, he [Sutpen] seemed to kind of dissolve and a part of him turn and run back through the two years they had lived there like when you pass through a room fast and look at all the objects in it and you turn and go back through the room again and look at all the objects from the other side and you find out you had never seen them before, rushing back through those two years and seeing a dozen things that had happened and he hadn’t even seen them before…[He saw] his own father and sisters and brothers as the owner, the rich man (not the nigger) must have been seeing them all the time—as cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity…a race whose future would be a succession of cut-down and patched and made-over garments bought on exorbitant credit because they were white people, from stores where niggers were given the garments free. (186 –90) Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 275 Like the passage in which Joe Christmas eats the toothpaste, this one traces the complex temporality of a primal scene and its traumatic after-effects. Like that one, too, it insists on the social character of this process, elaborating the incursion upon the psyche of external, sociohistorical meanings, which mark the self before it knows either what those meanings are or that it has internalized them. There is, however, a crucial difference between the two scenes. Where Faulkner focuses in the toothpaste passage on the primal scene itself—on an initial, potentially traumatizing event that will only later be “activated”—this one portrays that second moment in which the latently traumatizing event is retrodetermined as trauma. Sutpen’s primal scenes (there are “dozens” of them) are by now already behind him. He has already looked at the “objects in the room” but has done so without really “see[ing]” them. They have made a sensory impression on him that has for a time lain dormant, resisting their translation into conscious, meaningful experience. It is, therefore, only through a second event—through Sutpen’s affront at the hands of the plantation-owner, for whom the slave serves merely as medium—that the humiliating content of his initial impressions becomes both conscious and retrospectively significant. This second event in some deep sense “retrodetermines” the initial one. It takes impressions of inferiority and feelings of incipient shame that might never have crystallized—might never have become inferiority and humiliation at all—and through an act of historical determination gives them a significatory content that constitutes the core of Sutpen’s subsequent self. Faulkner in this way seeks to suggest that Sutpen’s self is formed through the incursion of meanings that shape him before he even knows he has been subject to them, meanings internalized as traumatogenic potentialities whose latent and catastrophic force is only retrospectively unleashed.15 The meanings in question are of course social rather than narrowly personal. The act of historical determination I have mentioned, which recasts Sutpen’s prior impressions as traumas, entails the emergence of a self-understanding that Faulkner shows to be mediated by the other’s emphatically social gaze. Sutpen comes to see himself (and his family) “as the owner…must have been seeing them all the time— as cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity.” It’s only by reflecting on himself through these eyes that Sutpen discovers the entire system of social hierarchies, privileges, and deprivations entailed in racial patriarchy, including his own position within it—namely, that as a landless white boy he does not even figure in the system, is in some sense (on Faulkner’s view) less socially significant and more existentially impoverished (to the point indeed of brutishness) than even a slave. The specificity of Sutpen’s trauma is thus inconceivable without the particular social hierarchies, that in fact give shape and content to the traumatogenic event itself. The power of the novel derives, however, from its insistence that these social meanings are also psychic ones. Not only does the force of the current passage lie largely in its elaboration of internal processes and their determinative effect on the personality, but Sutpen goes on to respond to his affront by engaging in what Faulkner codes as an Oedipal rivalry with the plantation-owner. He conceives a “design” that requires he “beat” the man by surpassing him, by replicating yet bettering 276 Greg Forter his position in the social hierarchy, rather than by seeking (for example) to smash the hierarchy itself. This Oedipal rivalry is for Faulkner the very mechanism of slavery’s social reproduction. From it issues everything most toxic in the novel: the brutal coercion of unpaid labor and concomitant exploitation of the land; the instrumentalization of women as merely “adjunctive to [Sutpen’s] design” (or not: see Faulkner, Absalom 194); the repudiation of a son on the basis of his black blood (since filial blackness would render Sutpen’s Oedipal victory a sham); and the degradation of poor whites like Wash Jones, who serves as the postbellum repetition of Sutpen’s initial condition. By “oedipalizing” Sutpen’s response to his affront, I’m suggesting, Faulkner also “socializes” the Oedipus crisis. He proposes that, while the Oedipus complex may be a normative mechanism for producing adult masculinity, its effect on some men in sexist and racist societies is at once to traumatize them and to induce a defensive idealization of the social (i.e., not literal) father who causes that trauma. Its “normal” outcome is then the transmission of (white) male trauma from one generation to the next, along with a reproduction of the rigid, compulsively repeated structures of white male domination. All of this takes place, moreover, because far from resolving ambivalence toward paternal imagoes (as the Oedipus complex is conventionally said to do), the Oedipal crisis in these cases institutionalizes ambivalence as the psychohistorical foundation of identity. The trauma of Sutpen’s affront will therefore lead him to entomb melancholically within him the hated father-rival (the planter), in the form of an ambivalent identificatory ideal that he must “kill” (surpass) by becoming—even if this process works to extend the trauma’s initial destructiveness to others and to himself. Finally, it’s crucial to emphasize that there is as yet nothing necessary or inevitable about this dynamic. The trauma Sutpen suffers may, indeed, be one he perpetuates by incorporating the man who humiliates him. But Faulkner suggests in this case that it need not lead in this direction. Sutpen in essence chooses the oedipallystructured reproduction of slavery rather, say, than a course of political resistance. The traumatic recognition of his social insignificance could equally issue in the revolutionary yearning to level the hierarchies that traumatize him as in the urge to perpetuate those hierarchies. Faulkner emphasizes this sense of possibility through the very fact of having Sutpen retreat to a cave and debate his response (188)—the condition of such deliberation being, of course, that more than one response is conceivable. A residue of the choice not made, moreover—of what one might call the revolutionary option—remains even within the ruthless intrumentalizations of the design that he does choose. It limns that design with the utopian wish that “beating” the planter will redeem not only his own humiliation but that of all past and future boys like him, one of whom he imagines knocking at his future self’s front door. “[H]e would take that boy in,” Faulkner writes, “where he would never again need to stand on the outside of a white door and knock at it: and not at all for mere shelter but so that that boy, that whatever nameless stranger, could shut that door himself forever behind him on all that he had ever known, and look ahead along the still undivulged light rays in which his descendants who might not even ever hear his (the boy’s) name, waited to be born without even having to know that they had once been riven forever free from brutehood just as his own (Sutpen’s) children were” (210). Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 277 Such a fantasy suggests, of course, a future that repeats with a difference Sutpen’s own traumatic formation (what Moreland calls “revisionary repetition” [4–5]), rather than one that reprises the past in identically rigid and catastrophic form.16 In this sense, it suggests the possibility of working through trauma, of laboring to make trauma issue (in part) in non-destructive social relations, even within the disastrous framework of Sutpen’s choosing to replicate the plantation system itself.17 The second version of this process is both related and different. Toward the middle of Absalom, Absalom!, in one of the sections narrated by Quentin and Shreve, Faulkner writes the following: “Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm…” (210). Here Faulkner takes the traumatic possibilities of historical experience traced in the scene of Sutpen’s affront and turns them into irresistible certainties.18 He suggests that events or historical “happenings” are by their very nature traumatic. Before they occur, the waters of the self are smooth, undisturbed, still. There is then a splash; a pebble breaks the water’s surface. The sudden, punctual character of this rupture evokes Freud’s second model of trauma, in which a shock from the external world shatters the self’s composure. That evocation is strikingly extended by the way the initial shock becomes available only in its recursive effects. The historical event is here constituted by the “ripples” that follow “after the pebble sinks”; it is nothing more or less than the recurrent reprisals of the initial shock’s effects. By making the splash and its ripples the result of any and all historical events, then (“nothing ever happens once”), Faulkner recasts the movement of history from a retroactive effect that’s potentially traumatic to a shock that cannot but traumatize us. Even more, the passage insists that the trauma of historical events affects those who do not live through them with the same force as those who do. It proposes that to inherit a history is to have transmitted to one a disturbance that never stops disturbing (“Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished”). The “ripples” produced by any event radiate outward in concentric ringlets, reverberating beyond their initial occurrence to affect those who were neither geographically nor temporally present when the stone first disturbed the waters of consciousness. Faulkner emphasizes this latter fact by imagining a second “pool” that is at once radically distinct from the first one—with its own “molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered”— and nonetheless marked by the “watery echo” of the pebble’s “fall” as it moves irresistibly “across its surface.” The implications of this figuration are deeply departicularizing. No matter how distinct one’s own “molecularity” of experience and memory might be, it is in the end both trumped and effaced by the recursive effects of traumatic events that one has not even experienced—events, for example, that took place before one’s birth, or happened so far away that one cannot be said to have lived them directly. 278 Greg Forter This second passage has, moreover, a retrodetermining effect of its own. It encourages us to project back onto Sutpen’s affront an inescapable fatality. For if history indeed happens in the way this passage describes, then the fact that Sutpen’s humiliating self-awareness leads him to affirm the system that humiliated him becomes as inevitable as a pool of water rippling at the drop of a stone: He is the passive recipient of a shock that he can repeat and transmit but never alter. The fact that Quentin is equally traumatized follows from this view as well. The current generation experiences the past as a concussive force that it cannot have felt directly. Precisely because of Quentin’s belatedness—precisely because he is, metaphorically, that second “pool” of water that did not experience the “splash” of slavery and Civil War—he can only know those events as “ripples” whose cause will evade all efforts at recall. No amount of psychic labor will be sufficient to “work through” the kind of disequilibrium inherited in this fashion. It is from here a very short step to seeing historical experience itself as intrinsically traumatic and privative. Faulkner’s language suggests elsewhere, for example, that by virtue of growing up in the South Quentin is not a “self” at all. He is instead “an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, but a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease” (7). This passage might seem at first to delineate a historically particular understanding: it’s because he is a Southerner and not, say, the Northerner Shreve, that Quentin has instead of a self a psychic graveyard in which are entombed the historical selves that went into his making. The passage has in addition the benefit of proposing that such events as the Civil War (the “fever” that cured the “disease” of slavery) can be so traumatic as to make their linear narration and integration into a progressive history impossible. And yet, the critique of naïve historicism here tips into a vision of history as catastrophic self-dispossession. Because history happens to all Southerners “too soon” to be assimilated—because Quentin “ha[s] to be” a ghost by virtue of being “born and bred in the deep South” (4)—he becomes representative of Southern subjectivity itself rather than of one particular possibility for that subjectivity. The Southern self is here little more than an empty corridor inhabited by ghosts one can neither comprehend nor exorcise, and towards which one’s ambivalence is sufficiently profound to issue in suicide (“I dont hate [the South]! I dont! I don’t!” [303]). Slavery and racism may be bad, on this view, but by the time anyone (or at least any Southerner) possesses the knowledge necessary to make this judgment, she or he has internalized wholesale the social system that the insight condemns. The result is a suicidal self-loathing that leaves the system itself intact. The world as it is becomes an expression of “the old ineradicable rhythm” of History (with an emphatically capital “H”), inflicting itself on a consciousness that cannot but extend and deepen the wounds against which it rails. Finally, and somewhat more ambiguously, this generalization of trauma is both extended and complicated by Absalom, Absalom!’s narrative strategies. Those strategies include an effort to induce in readers a disturbance that the book codes as trauma. They include, that is, the persistent planting of details whose most basic significance Faulkner withholds, compelling thereby a cognitive paralysis relieved only Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 279 by the retrodetermined revelation of a given scene’s meaning. Readers are thus made to encounter the effects of slavery and patriarchy “too soon,” before they’re able to grasp or make sense of the traumatogenic significances that Faulkner foists upon them. A brief example here will suffice. Absalom, Absalom!’s opening pages contain a summary of the book’s basic plot that is both precise and impossible to “take in.” I refer to the moment when Quentin listens to Rosa speak of “that Sunday in June in 1833 when he [Sutpen] first rode into town out of no discernible past and acquired his land no one knew how and built his house, his mansion, apparently out of nothing and married Ellen Coldfield and begot his two children—the son who widowed the daughter who had not yet been a bride—and so accomplished his allotted course to its violent (Miss Coldfield at least would say, just) end” (7). Far from the forms of dilation intrinsic to any narrative development, this is a kind of precocious and bewildering dilation. It offers at once too much and too little information. It offers too much in the sense that a book’s entire plot is conventionally not disclosed in its opening pages; yet it offers too little in the sense that, in the example I have quoted, the narrative declines to divulge the secrets that ought to accompany that plot’s disclosure. Who Sutpen is, where he comes from, how he made his money, why he marries Ellen, and who kills who, exactly, and why—by declining to answer any of these questions, the skeleton summary that Faulkner offers at once gives us the lineaments of his plot and withholds the details that would alone enable us to make sense of it. The result is that our reading experience is marked by a kind of “biphasic textuality” that echoes Freud’s biphasic sexuality. A maturational divide that is the time involved in reading Faulkner’s book separates our first “ingestion” of its plot from our understanding of that plot’s significance. This deployment of details that the reader is forced to encounter at once too soon and too late takes place so often that one is tempted to call it the novel’s most fundamental strategy. The entire panoply of Faulknerian techniques—the endlessly deferred periods; the interruption of sentences that resume one hundred or more pages later; the enigmatically precocious references to Rosa’s “insult,” Bon’s murder, Sutpen’s “design”; and the withholding of any answer to the question of how Quentin “knows” Bon was black—each of these functions in something akin to the way I have described. Each asks us to “ingest” details that remain at first cognitively indigestible, until such time as a second set of details retrodetermines their significance. The strategies thus seek collectively to induce a kind of signification trauma in the reader. They work to “say” through the novel’s form that the story it tells is itself a trauma that must be transmitted and known as trauma.19 They work, in other words, to transmit a form of psychic disequilibrium “directly” to the reader, rather than offering a merely cognitive knowledge of the traumas the book explores. The political implications of this strategy are, however, more ambiguous than those of Faulkner’s generalization of trauma in the novel itself. On one hand, the implicit analogy between our reading experience and the traumas suffered by the book’s characters should, I think, give us pause. Such an analogy not only risks equating things that ought not be equated—historically-induced and readerly “trauma”—but also suggests that the only (or best) way to “know” about Sutpen is to inherit his 280 Greg Forter trauma by reading about it: to be traumatized in our own turn by the encounter with his story, no matter where or when or who we happen to be. It then becomes hard to imagine how we might stop transmitting historical trauma without also failing in the ethically crucial task of remembering (i.e., knowing about) such trauma. On the other hand, however, precisely inasmuch as the disturbance induced by the book’s form is a signification trauma—that is, a disturbance corresponding to Freud’s early model and hinging upon the process of retrodetermination—Absalom, Absalom! formally encodes the possibility of “working through” the trauma it transmits. To interpret the novel is here to metabolize the trauma inflicted by reading it. It’s to move from the compulsive replication of the book’s traumas to a cognitive understanding of those traumas that expresses the conditional agency of any textual interpretation. The novel’s biphasic textuality in this sense contains the seeds of a hope that differentiates its imaginative designs from the movement of History within its representation—differentiates those designs, that is, from the model of history as repercussive ripples that perfectly transmit their traumatizing effects across any expanse of time and space. III This final example helps us return to the larger theoretical concerns of my essay. It illustrates both the usefulness of and the challenges posed by the model of trauma I am proposing. The model’s usefulness lies in the way it reveals how systems of domination can inflict themselves on the psyche as traumatogenic potentialities. These potentialities are retrodetermined as traumas, I have argued, if and when a given society reinforces their traumatic character, encouraging the congealing of identities around those traumatogenic events. One result of this process is that individual men and women come to perpetuate existing systems of domination in the form of a social repetition compulsion: a rigid tendency to replicate the destructive dynamics and identities that have injured them. Since, moreover, this model of trauma attends to the social location of the traumatized, it makes it possible for theorists to stress the crucial differences between, for example, the trauma of white male subject-formation and the much more seriously debilitating traumas around which black manhood or conventional femininity are habitually formed. The model of trauma as retrodetermination enables something else as well. It gives us a conceptual starting point for approaching the question of how we might resist traumatic subject-formation. A crucial gesture in that resistance, one that follows naturally from my analysis, would be to highlight and celebrate such representational impulses as the historically-sensitive ones in Faulkner—impulses that trace in rich detail the lineaments of identities formed around historically-induced traumas. Such representations might work together to generate a collective understanding not only of how these traumas “objectively” unfold (i.e., what the historical forces are that produced them) but of what it feels like to experience them, of what precisely the human deformations entailed in such traumas are. It is from there at least conceivable that we might learn to metabolize existing (but as-yet unactivated) social injuries and to resist the future infliction of others. This would mean seeking Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 281 actively to embody conceptions of race and gender that subvert (rather than confirming) the meanings transmitted through the kinds of “primal scenes” that Faulkner so powerfully fictionalizes. The challenges posed by this theory of trauma are equally worth emphasizing. For those in dominant subject positions, the central challenge is to resist the allure of the move I’ve traced in Absalom, Absalom!: the “structuralization” of history itself as a way of evading historical responsibility. For just as Freud’s second theory of trauma enabled him to escape implication in the dynamics of patriarchal oppression uncovered by his first theory, so did Faulkner’s generalization of trauma as the Truth of historical experience save him from confronting the forms of guilt and responsibility that the history he anatomizes bequeathed to him. If we are “all” traumatized by virtue of suffering the movement of History, then there’s nothing Faulkner can or need do to combat the legacy of slavery and patriarchy whose history his novel recounts. I suggest that the challenge of the theory I’m proposing is precisely that the insights it offers are sufficiently disturbing to render the appeal of structuralizing them considerable. The continued centrality of the punctual model in discussions of trauma confirms this suspicion. For as my argument has tried to suggest, while the punctual model can be used in historically sensitive ways, its genetic proximity to such concepts as the death drive and the “literal” character of compulsive repetition makes it more prone to a structuralizing deployment than the model linking trauma to retrodetermination. Caruth’s work in particular engages in a set of conflations that strikingly echo those traced so far. She speaks at times, just as does Faulkner, as if history and trauma were synonymous: “history is the history of a trauma,” she writes (64); and “history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24). She relies on a model of language that makes it hard to distinguish between reading about trauma and experiencing it. Language “refers,” in her account, by “register[ing]…the impact of an event” (74; my emphasis); it involves us in a traumatizing encounter with a referent it can neither digest nor fully expunge. And Caruth effects the further conflation of perpetrator with victim, speaking for example of Tasso’s Tancred (in Freud’s reading of the Gerusalemme Liberata) as if he were a trauma victim, despite the fact that it’s he who “traumatizes” (kills) his beloved (Clorinda)—twice (2–4)! The fact that this theory with its attendant dangers has held such sway in debates about traumas suggests that the challenge of resisting those dangers is formidable, whichever model one chooses. It remains, nonetheless, worth pondering the conceptual and psychic appeal of the punctual model. That appeal has a familiar logic in the case of Caruth herself. Given the paradigmatic place of the Holocaust in her understanding, along with both her allegiance to de Manian deconstruction and the extraordinary silence in Unclaimed Experience about de Man’s collaborationist journalism (it came to light a full decade before her text), the conflations in her work can be speculatively read as an effort to keep herself from knowing that there is a difference between perpetrator (or collaborator) and victim—that Tancred is not Clorinda. In this sense, her choice of the punctual model over the earlier, more historically supple theory of trauma extends the sequence of self-protective gestures begun by Freud and continued in Faulkner. 282 Greg Forter But the widening influence and often uncritical application of Caruth’s work suggest that something more is at stake.20 It is as if the proposition that we can best know trauma by being traumatized, and that the best kind of text about trauma will therefore transmit trauma “itself” rather than knowledge about it, makes it possible for critics to embrace an aestheticized despair while construing that embrace as political wisdom. Robin Wood has written perceptively of this problem in a related context. In watching Alain Resnais’ Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, he argues, “we are tempted to surrender…not so much [to] the film’s intelligence and sensitivity as [to] its seductive despair; and despair, while understandable enough as a response to the enormities we have been made to contemplate, is never a very helpful emotion. What the ending leaves us with is liberalism’s familiar hands-in-the-air gesture of appalled helplessness: these things have happened before; they will happen (and today are happening) again; they are part of nature or ‘the human condition’; there is nothing we can do except remember, and memory always fails” (16). Fold in the concept of trauma and we get something very close to the effect of a text like Absalom, Absalom!. The affective intensity of Faulkner’s treatment lends to a generalized state of trauma an aesthetic authority that legitimates, in turn, the despair that this treatment produces. I’m suggesting that the contemporary version of trauma theory does something similar: it makes the human predicament a trauma we can only “know” by repeating. This repetition happens precisely by virtue of our common linguistic condition: through our talking and listening, our reading and writing—in short, our very being-in-language. The political imperative then becomes not to articulate and seek to resist the historical forces that traumatize a given people, but rather to recognize with knowing anguish that we are already and endlessly replicating, in our inescapable linguistic entanglements, a “trauma” that no one can fail to have suffered. If Faulkner’s texts can help us see why we should resist such a move, my aim in stressing their textual conflictedness has been to show that there are in his work moments of equal power that elaborate more systemic accounts of trauma—and that open up rather than foreclose a space for acting on the systems that traumatize. ENDNOTES For suggestions that helped me improve this essay, I wish to thank Susan Courtney, Seth Moglen, James Phelan, and members of the English Department’s works-in-progress colloquium at the University of South Carolina. 1. Whether the punctual model is best for discussing even all instances of Holocaust trauma should, I think, remain an open question. It seems likely that at least some German and Eastern European Jews experienced the increases in institutionalized anti-Semitism from 1933 to 1939 (and after) as an accumulation of oppressive and dehumanizing measures rather than as one punctual event. For a compelling argument to this effect, see Moglen. 2. My intervention can be usefully distinguished here from two recent critiques of contemporary trauma theory, Leys’s Trauma (esp. 266 –97) and Michaels’s “‘You Who Never Was There.’” I am in basic sympathy with these authors’ criticisms; both, however, remain at the negative moment of emphasizing trauma theory’s conceptual flaws, without yet offering emendations that would make the theory more responsive to the phenomena it seeks to explain. Trauma, Literary Form, and Faulkner 283 3. While indicating in a footnote that Freud developed two models of trauma, Caruth fails to note that one emerged quite late in his thought. Her claim that he “generally placed…the two kinds of trauma side by side” (135, n.18) is thus both accurate and misleading: he places them side by side only after developing the second model, and the question of why he did develop it therefore requires explication. 4. I borrow the distinction between historical and structural trauma from LaCapra, who roots it in his account of the difference between loss (a psychohistorical experience) and absence (a transhistorical condition). See 43 –50, 76 –85. Santner calls for a similar distinction in discussions of mourning (chap. 1). For my purposes, “structural” traumas are those that purportedly inhere in the human condition; they operate in different registers depending upon a given theorist’s foundational assumptions. Thus the founding trauma for Freud is the biologico-cosmic trauma that inaugurates life from inorganic matter (the birth into life and of the death drive); for postructuralists, the basic trauma is that of our alienation into language and the resulting exile from Presence. 5. See Leys (268–70) and Michaels (8). Michaels focuses not on Caruth but on the work of Shoshana Felman. For a deployment of trauma theory that perceptively shows how a novel might keep faith with historical traumas without seeking to transmit them “directly” to the reader, see Wyatt’s chapter on Beloved, 66 –84. 6. See my “Against Melancholia,” which argues that one failure of contemporary mourning theory is its confusion of the unmournable character of our entry into language with historically-induced bereavements. 7. In Studies on Hysteria, Freud and Breuer do speak of traumas that result from a succession of shocks, none of which alone would have been traumatic. The idea then drops out of Freud’s thought. 8. Freud’s earliest statement of these ideas is in his Project for a Scientific Psychology. See esp. 356. 9. I have been influenced here by Laplanche 112. 10. The primal scene thus reposes for boys the problem Freud faced in the case of girls when he moved from the seduction theory to the theory of infantile sexuality. Both shifts stress how fantasy generates psychic reality, raising the problem of how to link (without equating) psychic and historical causation. 11. See especially Introductory Lectures 371 and Infantile Neurosis 119. 12. See Kaplan on “transposition” (223 –36), Abraham and Torok’s “transgenerational phantom” (171–76), and Laplanche on how children receive from their parents “enigmatic signifiers”—“verbal, non-verbal and even behavioural signifiers which are pregnant with unconscious sexual significations” (126). 13. The concepts of “holding” and “containing” come from D. W. Winnicott and Wilfred Bion, respectively. 14. In practice, for Freud, the temporality of the death drive works in conjunction with Eros to produce a kind of halting and recursive, but nonetheless “forward,” motion. Still, the late work exhibits a strong tendency to assimilate Eros to the death drive, so that even the principle of pleasure aims finally to recover the past-as-death. 15. For a related reading of trauma in this scene, see Loebel. For an analysis that reads Sutpen’s affront as a primal scene in terms quite different from my own, see Bergner. 16. Moreland argues persuasively that revisionary repetition comes to displace compulsive reprisals in Faulkner’s work after Absalom, Absalom!. 17. This emphasis on agency characterizes Shreve and Quentin’s version of Sutpen’s story as well. For them, Bon leaves Sutpen free to choose to acknowledge him (Bon) as Sutpen’s son, and so to avert the ensuing disasters. 18. The meditation in the quoted passage belongs less to Faulkner than to Quentin; it’s an instance of internal monologue. But as I show in the chapter from which this essay is excerpted, this attribution 284 Greg Forter does not succeed in limiting the meditation’s view of trauma to Quentin. Faulkner distributes versions of that view among practically all of Absalom, Absalom!’s characters, and there are places where the narrative voice expresses similar sentiments as well. 19. My argument here extends some of Slatoff’s claims while translating them into a contemporary idiom. 20. For two among many examples of relatively uncritical application, see Kaufman and Ramadanovic. WORKS CITED Abraham, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994. Bergner, Gwen. Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005. Brenkman, John. Straight Male Modern: A Cultural Critique of Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1996. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996. Cawelti, John G. “The Detective Story’s Double Plot.” Clues 12, no. 2 (1991): 1–15. Faulkner, William. 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