The Poetics of Trauma

What are the criteria of truth in a conversation? Are all statements either true or false? If a refugee who has been persecuted and tortured finds herself in a situation that feels like an interrogation, is her ability to express herself affected? What are the linguistic effects of trauma? Why is silence, or enigmatic obscurity, so often the linguistic expression of trauma? To what extent is silence a performance, a protest perhaps, and when is silence a symptom?

THE POETICS OF TRAUMA

Translated from swedish by Peter Graves

I spent twenty-five years in psychiatry, the last eleven as a psychologist. In the 1990s I worked for five years in the acute ward at Lillhagen Mental Hospital in Gothenburg and had many sessions with people under threat of deportation; these were cases in which linguistic analysis – as it is called – had been the decisive factor in the official refusal of permission to remain in Sweden. Linguistic analysis is the controversial and much criticized method used by the Immigration Office in its attempts to decide whether a refugee actually comes from the country he or she claims to come from.
During this time I spent several months talking to a girl of African origin in her late teens. The staff of the ward knew little more about her than that her application for asylum had been rejected and she was about to be deported. She had undergone linguistic analysis in French, her second language, and been informed that the conclusion was that she did not come from the country she claimed. How this linguistic analysis was carried out was something of a mystery since her primary symptoms were that she did not speak at all and did nothing but stare at the wall while lying semi-recumbent in a hospital bed. Or are we to take it that she had spoken to some extent before the analysis but become mute afterwards. She had, perhaps, felt under suspicion and experienced the linguistic analysis as an accusation: “Anything you say may be used against you”.
So the only thing she was left with was to fall back on humanity’s last legal resort – the right to remain silent. Doctors and psychiatric nurses had been trying without success for a week or more to get her to say something. Now it was my turn. I took her into a consulting room, sat her in a chair and began asking questions, sometimes in Swedish, sometimes in French: Do you know where you are? What’s your name? Do you have any family? Would you like a glass of water? Did you sleep last night? My goodness, look at that rain! Now the sun’s shining! If you understand what I’m saying, just nod.
Since she didn’t answer and, indeed, made no response at all, I started to do the talking myself, telling her things such as that I knew her application for asylum had been rejected, that she was in a psychiatric clinic, that it was now summer in Sweden. She didn’t even look at me, just rocked catatonically backwards and forwards in her chair. Our second conversation began in the same way, but at one point I asked her: Est-ce que tu penses que tu es folle? That is: Do you think you are mad? At last she looked up and gave some sign of contact. I repeated the question, which she clearly found painful; it had probably finally sunk in that she was in a psychiatric hospital and presenting the condition psychiatrists call stupor.
She started crying and then, haltingly and in fragments, but in very careful detail, she began telling me a story that was as unspeakably sad and brutal as it is possible to imagine. When she was fourteen years old her parents had been shot in front of her, her brothers had tried to run away but had probably been killed, and she herself had been locked in a cellar where for a month she had been raped by her gaolers until she eventually managed to escape through a ventilation hole.
Was there any reason for me to doubt this young woman? It was quite obvious that the Immigration Office disbelieved her and, according to the linguistic analysis, she came from a neighbouring, more peaceful country than the one she had named.
*
There are a number of fundamental questions we need to ask ourselves when we meet people who are in a vulnerable position. What are the criteria of truth in a conversation? Are all statements true of false? Does being in a situation that may well be very similar to an interrogation have an effect on the language of a refugee who has been persecuted and tortured? What are the linguistic effects of trauma? Why is silence, or enigmatic obscurity, so often the linguistic expression of trauma? To what extent is silence a performance, a protest perhaps, and when is silence a symptom?
One of the basic concepts of psychanalysis is that the neurotic symptom is a compromise between an impulse and the defence against the impulse. The impulse can only express itself by disguising itself, by paraphrase. In other words, the symptom may be viewed as a metaphor. In his 1914 series of lectures Freud gave the following allegorical picture: “There is a large crowd of people standing in a spacious hallway (the unconscious). They all want to move on into the function room (the conscious) but they lack invitation cards. They are kept out by a doorman (the censor), posted at the door of the function room, but the crowd is so large and the doorman has so much to do that every now and again an uninvited guest slips past him. The uninvited guest is particularly likely to succeed if he is in disguise.” Thus the neurotic symptom is a way of trying to articulate the forbidden in a different way, as a kind of condensated compromise produced in the struggle between an individual’s irreconcilable wills.
If the neurotic symptom is a coded message which, nevertheless, it is sometimes possible to understand and interpret, the main symptoms of the trauma sufferer such as recurring flashbacks and nightmares seem to be of a different literal quality. They are transparent: victims of violence dream of the violence they suffered, or possibly of details surrounding that violence. The symptoms of the trauma sufferer do not so much arise from the unconscious as they derive from history. But as well as this literalness, trauma is characterized by a strange silence, a secretiveness, an unwillingness to tell the story.
How are we to understand trauma victims’ manifest difficulty and, sometimes, great reluctance to tell their stories? Cathy Caruth, in her important anthology Trauma: Explorations in Memory, states that truth for the victim of trauma does not reside in simple brutal facts but rather in the ways the event defies comprehension. “The flashback or traumatic reenactment conveys, that is, both the truth of an event, and the truth of its incomprehensibility.”
Trauma is thus not a catalogued memory, an archived occurrence, but a contradictory force for which it has not been possible to find a place and classifying it is beyond both human experience and the possibilities of language. Trauma lies beyond simple memory, which is why it returns as involuntary thoughts, as flashbacks.
A fundamental difficulty when dealing with survivors of trauma is to dare to linger on the silent, enigmatic literalness of the trauma without eliminating the force and truth of the reality that has been experienced. As Emily Dickinson expresses it:
If any ask me why –
'Twere easier to die –
Than tell –

Psychologists and therapists, not to mention artists, journalists and employees of the Immigration Office who want to work with or become familiar with the effects of trauma, should at least have some understanding of how to avoid weakening the testimony with well-intended trivia or of causing the process to be one more horrific experience among the many already suffered.
Victims of trauma are faced with a dilemma: they may experience opening up and speaking out about the trauma as a surrender of the most tangible reality in life. This, the refusal to let go and give up the object, is the great and perhaps only advantage of and actual motive for trauma – one that it shares with melancholia. It was this that was at stake when health workers were trying to help the African girl.
“The staff says that you just sit in your room all day every day.”
“Yes.”
“What do you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you daydream about things?”
“No.”
“Do you think about anything?”
“No.”
“Are you sad? Do you cry sometimes? Do you think about your parents?”
“No.”
“Do you sleep? Do you walk around? Do you just sit and look?”
“I look.”
“What do you look at?”
“Nothing.”

And that, we might add, is precisely what she had tried to do in that cellar. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud writes: “But I am not aware that the patients suffering from traumatic neuroses are much occupied in waking life with the recollection of what happened to them. They perhaps strive rather not to think of it.”
*
The Immigration Office sometimes considers there is reason to believe that people applying for residence permits are not telling the truth with regard to the country they claim to come from. On some two thousand occasions a year the Office in Sweden calls for linguistic analysis. The basis of such an analysis is a recording lasting some fifteen minutes in which the asylum seeker is interviewed, usually by telephone, about his or her origin and way of life. Then it is up to a linguistic analyst from the country in question – or at least from the region – to decide whether the applicant is telling the truth. As far as possible, the language analysed is the asylum seeker’s native language, but it is often a matter of using his or her second language, which is almost always French or English.
Linguistic analysis, which has been in use since 1993, has frequently been in the media spotlight, invariably as the target of harsh criticism. In 2014 the Swedish Immigration Office was severely criticised by the UK Supreme Court, for instance, which pointed both to the defective analytic methodology and to clearly substandard reporting. An international network of legal linguists, The International Association of Forensic Linguists, has warned the authorities not to come to conclusions about nationality on the basis of speech alone.
*
Let us think for a moment about the relationship between language and geography. Consider, for instance, such basic issues as class, educational level, dialect, or even just the importance of the family for pronunciation and vocabulary. Remember that refugees often come from parts of the world where many different languages are spoken, or where one and the same language is spoken in a number of countries. It becomes quite obvious that linguistic analysis, if not impossible, should only be approached with the utmost care and caution.
To this, we should also add a criticism from the psychological perspective: trauma involves a crisis in relation to language and to truth. The fact that what occurred is experienced as too much makes it difficult to remember and to understand what really happened: the victim of trauma has reason to mistrust language itself and his or her interlocutors since there is a risk that the issue will be misused or cheapened. Thus, the essence of real trauma lies in its incomprehensibility – if it can be understood, then it isn’t trauma. A reading of the linguistic analysis reports makes it quite clear that hesitant speech, latency in response, memory problems – precisely the things that characterize the speech of sufferers from trauma or depression – are regularly interpreted as dissimulation and attempts to lie.
What are the chances, then, for the traumatic event to be given a linguistic, artistic and potentially therapeutic and healing form? I would argue that a fundamental problem of trauma is that it runs the risk of presenting itself, or being forced to present itself, as a cliché, or as self-exploitation, or, worse still, as a combination – a sentimental playing to the gallery. The literary theoretician Shoshana Felman believes that literature is often trivialized by literary interpretation; I would say, similarly, that trauma is often trivialized by psycho-analytic attempts to psychologise.
Claude Lanzmann, the director of the documentary Shoah, has often said and written that a certain kind of question is quite simply obscene. The example he gives is, “Why were the Jews killed during the Second World War?” Whichever explanation historians and psychologists may choose (unemployment in Germany, Hitler’s dreadful childhood and his idiotic martinet of a father, the persecution of Jews through the centuries), Lanzmann takes the view that the question in itself is both limiting and indecent; he sees it as an ethical imperative to consistently refuse to understand. In the case of the girl threatened with deportation I would assert that the obscenity takes something like the following form: “We believe that you are telling the truth, and we believe you when you say that you saw your parents killed when you were fourteen years old and that you were raped hundreds of times – so now you will be allowed to stay in Sweden.”
*
The fear that their traumatic experiences will be denigrated and belittled by the interpreter is perhaps most obvious among Holocaust survivors, who sometimes voice the feeling that they belong to a special group of Geheimnisträger – bearers of the secret. In fact, that fear is to be found everywhere in clinics that deal with trauma, presumably also in their literary equivalents. I think of trauma as waging a sort of war to avoid banal interpretations. Let me propose six tools for use in this struggle:
1) Condensation: to express oneself in terms difficult to understand, cryptically even, and never – or only very discreetly – mention the trauma in concrete terms.
2) Displacement: to talk or write about something off to one side of what was truly traumatizing, but that something is nevertheless implicitly or otherwise made to carry the full load of the trauma.
3) Simplification: to approach and mention the event as simply, clearly, honestly and in as emotionally neutral way as possible. In a manner, then, that may seem emotionally disconnected.
4) Ignorance: to disregard all one’s knowledge, deny all understanding and explanation and approach the traumatic event with new, consciously naïve and unknowing eyes in order to allow the material the possibility to retell its story.
5) Excess: to express oneself too much, to talk at too much length, be too long-winded, too boring, too detailed, so excluding the possibility of dialogue. The subtext is, you are asking me for the most important part, but I can only give you everything.
6) Implacability: to refuse cooperation, community, comprehension, readability. Or, quite simply, refuse to speak.
*
I think that the poetic oeuvre of the New York based, Jewish objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) can tell us something about the possibilities of literature working with trauma. In his long and unfinished work Testimony: the United States of America, 1885-1915: recitative, he strived for forty years to pare down and simultaneously concentrate and simplify American law reports from the years around 1900. His aim was a kind of simple, clarified poem in which the course of events and nothing but the course of events would be present in their purest form. In an interview Reznikoff said the following: “Well, I take the original source and edit it and edit it. In many cases I keep the language. I sometimes change it, but rarely. I do change the language if it doesn't coincide with something that I think is simple and direct. But as a rule, I just edit, that is, I throw out everything.”
So he cuts all expressions of emotion, value judgments, all Latinisms and unnecessarily difficult words, all secondhand information such as legal discussions and judgments. What remains is the event itself, transferred from its judicial context to a poetic context. Emmanuel Hocquard has called Reznikoff’s work translations “from American into American”. Hocquard continues: “What makes this work so revolutionary is precisely its literalness, which is the opposite to literature. The doubling reveals the model in a new light, logically, mercilessly, unbearably. […] They are the same words, the same phrases, but they are not the same statements. It is remarkable to observe that this small displacement of the same thing, this simple transition from one form to another in the same powerful way produces meaning and purifies it.”
But is Reznikoff’s work with Testimony really a translation? Yes, it is, at least in the sense that, following a method that has been carefully thought through, he transfers a text from one context to another. If we consider the etymology of the word translation (from Latin translatus, “carried over”) and allow ourselves a sufficiently generous definition of the word, not only do new literary possibilities become available to us, we also approach more closely to a completely fundamental aspect of the very essence of literary work: the discovery and administration of poetic quality. Suddenly it is no longer necessary to invent literature, it becomes instead a matter of locating it and giving it room to think. The writer’s task is not to produce poetic content, but rather to recognize it and transfer it to new contexts.
*
At the age of eighty Charles Reznikoff set about a new task, which was to use the same poetic method to compress some twenty volumes of reports from the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial down to the one hundred pages of his long poem Holocaust. It is clear that Reznikoff waited until he was a great age before starting to work on the death camps. In earlier interviews, when asked whether he was going to write about Auschwitz, he answered that he could have a place in Testimony for the despair he felt when faced with the camps. But it is nevertheless clear that he could not let go of the thought. His hesitation resulted above all from his lack of firsthand experience: he had not been there, and he was uncertain whether the work was ethically or poetically motivated.
The contents of Holocaust are divided into sections with headings such as “Deportation”, “Invasion”, “Ghettos”, “Massacres”, “Children”, “Mass Graves” and finally “Escapes”. We can sense a vague chronological order that points to a kind of exit from a darkness that would, perhaps, otherwise be too dense. We can read the following in the section headed “Children”:

1
Once, among the transports, was one with children – two freight cars full.
The young men sorting out the belongings of those taken to the gas chambers
had to undress the children – they were orphans –
and then take them to the “lazarette”.
There the S.S. men shot them.

2
A large eight-wheeled car arrived at the hospital
where there were children:
in the two trailers – open trucks – were sick women and men
lying on the floor.
The Germans threw the children into the trucks
from the second floor and the balconies –
children from one year old to ten:
threw them upon the sick in the trucks.
Some of the children tried to hold on to the walls,
scratched at the walls with their nails:
but the shouting Germans
beat and pushed the children towards the windows.

3
…
A visitor once stopped one of the children:
a boy of seven or eight, handsome, alert and gay.
He had only one shoe and the other foot was bare,
and his coat of good quality had no buttons.
The visitor asked him his name
and then what his parents were doing:
and he said, “Father is working in the office
and Mother is playing the piano.”
Then he asked the visitor if he would be joining his parents soon –
they always told the children they would be leaving soon to rejoin their parents –
and the visitor answered, “Certainly. In a day or two.”
At that the child took out of his pocket
half an army biscuit he had been given in camp
and said, “I am keeping this half for Mother”;
and then the child who had been so gay
burst into tears.
*
Reznikoff took the view that it was his juridical approach that provided the very basis for his poetics. He wrote: “With respect to the treatment of subject matter in verse and the use of the term “objectivist” and “objectivism,” let me again refer to the rules with respect to testimony in a court of law. Evidence to be admissible in a trial cannot state conclusions of fact: it must state the fact themselves.” His use of the evidence should not, however, be thought of as blind faith in the importance of the court or the code of law. Holocaust should not be understood as a trial in which the guilty are being called to account; Reznikoff wants, rather, to make use of the rhetoric of the court setting to access the actual course of events – and he insists that it is a rhetoric which shares some of the same seriousness as the questions it is dealing with. We cannot, however, claim that Reznikoff is trying to achieve neutral documentation or any kind of reconciliation: the inherent brutality of the crimes and the selection of evidence excludes that. In his work Reznikoff is not really acting as a witness, possibly as a witness of the witnesses, or perhaps even more as an editor of the witnesses.
*
As translator of Reznikoff’s book into Swedish I can say that I took on Reznikoff’s symptoms. I sometimes had a strange and, to an extent, extremely unpleasant sense of working with something my experience could not accommodate, something I quite simply had nothing to do with. If it is true that an important and desirable reason for translating a text is to study it – not just to understand it, but also to see what it can do – then, obviously, the issue is particularly pointed when the material being translated deals with the Holocaust. To make it possible for me to carry the task through to conclusion, I was forced to translate slowly and in manageable segments, meanwhile immersing myself in essential Holocaust literature: Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Imre Kertész, Shoshana Felman.

While working on the translation I thought that the method of writing, the disposition, that Reznikoff had come up with offered both the necessary and sober distance as well as a way of writing his way out of an explanatory, psychologising approach to the Holocaust. Auschwitz, the great catastrophe of our modernity, has after all been scrutinized intently in films, T.V. series, literature and art, so that, while a reading of Reznikoff’s cycle of poems may make us angry, shocked, full of despair, the account given by Holocaust witnesses comes as confirmation rather than as a surprise. Reznikoff’s purpose is not to discover, reveal and present us with something new, but to make us look with new eyes and, significantly, he does so by reduction rather than addition. Nor does Reznikoff take the place of the narrator – there is no narrative voice, and what is left instead, after all the revisions and revisions of revisions, is the voice of the witness and the exactness of detail carved in stone, which resists all efforts to read it allegorically or metaphorically. It is the ultimate distilled detail that gives the event the chance to speak for itself and allows as much as possible to remain unsaid. Thus, Reznikoff’s Auschwitz does not become a metaphysical symbol for all the evil in the world, but is a real place where men and women lived and died, worked and were murdered.
*
With Holocaust Reznikoff achieves something that I would like to call an umbilical moment, that is the moment where opposites meet, as is the case with the navel, the point of the body where outside becomes inside and inside becomes outside. Reznikoff’s poetry, extremely conceptual and based on ideas, becomes existential at the same time as it is possible to claim the opposite: his fundamentally existential poetry can manifest itself precisely by becoming conceptual. This point can be illustrated with a pun that plays on the ambiguity of the word subject in English, which will, of course, also work with French sujet. The word subject in English corresponds to I, to the nominative case, but it can also mean topic. In existential poetry it is the ego that is the subject, the topic: the poet is writing about him or herself and his or her life. In conceptual poetry the situation is the opposite in that it is the topic of the poetry that speaks, that is its ego. In existential poetry, then, the subject is the subject (the ego is its topic); in conceptual poetry the situation is the exact reverse, namely the subject is the subject (the topic is its ego). So, amazingly enough, it come to the same thing.
*
Some years after our last conversation, the African woman rang me quite out of the blue. She said she was pregnant and was about to get married. She told me – without me asking – that the man was kind and that she herself was a home carer. When I asked whether she wanted to come and talk, she said no: “There’s no need. I just wanted to tell you.” “OK, all the best.” “Thank you.” “Take care of yourself.” “I will.” “Bye, then.” “Bye.”