TraumaTrauma

& Postcolonial and Postmodern Representations

Outline Definitions: Definitions and Issues Psychological Responses Issues

Representation Reader’s Positions Postmodernism vs. Postcolonialism

Examples – Blue Skies -- Ann Marie Fleming Day Mark – Lee Briccetti

Next week References

Trauma – Definitions & Issues (1. a bodily wound 外傷 , 損傷 ) 2. a psychic wound,

a breach on the mind 精神創傷 ; --not fully known, comprehended or assimilated at the moment.

Of victims; of surviving witness; of all of us; of history’s im/possibility of referentiality.

Issues: 1. Traumatic Responses – symptoms of shock,

dissociation, fragmentation, guilt and loss; paralysis or identity re-construction

2. Representation: delayed appearance; doubleness and disjunction (between the past/dead & the present/alive; the victims and the reader. (Kaplan p. 7)

Psychological Responses -- Freud’s theories In the three models in Freud’s theory of psyche –

economic, topological and dynamic 1. The economic model ( 能量流通 )—Repression at

the moment and return later with its full impact known; e.g. sexual harassment.

2. Topological model ( 地形﹔拓僕 ) -- trauma breaks the protective shield against stimuli, and thus denies the usual discharge function following the principle of constancy repetition compulsion.

3. Dynamic model extended to a general phenomenon –e.g. Anxiety as a protection signal; Jewish people’s monotheism.

Psychological Responses

Cathy Caruth 1995 “The Wound and the Voice”

Uncanny repetitions of the voice of wound. p. 4 “. . .it is always the story of a wound that cries

out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.”

Two stories – Tancred and Clorinda; the return of the burning child.

Psychological Responses -- Freud’s theories (2) different causes of trauma:

external—train accident, war, sexual abuse; internal—Oedipal crisis, fear of castration and absence of the

mother Responses – mourning (gradual detachment) and

melancholia (identification and incorporation of the lost object) Melancholy: repetition compulsion, Mourning: acceptance/sublimation of absence thru’

symbolization in games (e.g. fort-da game or peek-a-boo) and arts,

disavowal –denying while admitting in forms of fantasies and fetishism (e.g. the mother’s lack of phallus/power) In Chang’s words, 視而不見 (pp. 102-103)

Names for Different Responses PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) vs. PTG

(Post-Traumatic Growth) DENOS ( Disorders of Extreme Stress Not

Otherwise Specified) describe the more subtle and characterologically

imprinted effects of long-term, chronic trauma, and would allow for the recognition of a distinct kind of traumatic experience in those for whom the experience may not be available as flashbacks or simple memories but may be exhibited in more subtle kinds of behavior (Caruth 1994 viii).

Issues in Representation Survival and Life: The film’s use of a story from John

Hersey’s Hiroshima. --the growth of the flowers over the ruins seen by an injured woman.

Betrayal? What is ‘ethical’ or possible to tell. (“betrayal of the past” –a worry of the woman in Hiroshima) indirect telling.

Incorporation into Official History: The past can be easily effaced in official history, or inscribed/translated into ‘an anonymous/general’ narrative of peace, national progress or trauma. (e.g. the death of some = the victory and liberation of others)

How: Through what (documentaries, archive, letters) can we understand the past. impossibility of full representation

Issues in Representation (2) Referentiality: Beyond complete comprehension and

direct referentiality -- Caruth p. 56 Witness in incomprehension: “What we see and hear, in

Hiroshima mon amour, resonates beyond what we can know and understand; but it is in the event of this incomprehension and in our departure from sense and understanding that our own witnessing may indeed begin to take place.”

Listening: The importance and possibility of attentive listening across the boundaries of cultures, time and life and death (Obasan, Hiroshima mon amour) and survival.

With Café Casablanca as a counter-example, so is the history of the film shooting with a Japanese actor who cannot speak French at all.

Issues in Representation (3) –”Popularity” of Trauma

from psychic screen to photography and TV screen

Chang’s article’s question: How is the collective memory of 921 Earthquake formed (entering our consciousness, becoming images or being verbalized)? How do we disavow history of the earthquake by consuming its images.

Issues in Representation (3) --from psyche to representation –

pp.91-92 –screen memory – the projection of the memory traces in the unconscious onto images of mass media.

1. Screen as Protection: Freud and Benjamin – screen as a protective shield against stimuli (of psychic injuries or in a city);

2. Screen as Projection and Exposure: Mirror and image screen – pp. 92-93 tourism, infotainment and the ghostly uncanny.

1. mirror image in the Imaginary order (of the three orders, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the real 「真實」 --traces outside the screens in the symbolic and the imaginary)

2. Punctum p. 893. Obscenity of Communication: with everything screened in front

of us, and we ourselves, a screen to be written on.

The Viewers/Readers’ Perspectives Four main positions in viewing trauma films

(Kaplan pp. 9-10)

1. the position of being introduced to trauma in a film which ends with a comforting ‘cure.’ (e.g. disaster films, Vietnam war films such as In Country.)

2. The position of being vicariously traumatized; (e.g. Videodrome, The Fly by David Cronenberg)

The Viewers/Readers’ Perspectives (2) The position of a voyeur –of films and TV

programs which turn others traumas into spectacles.

The position of a witness. (Being there and not there; aware of the distance.) “This position of ‘witness’ may open up a space of transformation of the viewer through the empathic identification without vicarious traumatization. . . . It is the unusual, anti-narrative process of the narration that is itself transformative in inviting the viewer to be at once emotionally there . . . but also to keep a cognitive distance and awareness denied to victim by the traumatic process.” (e.g. Hiroshima mon amour, Lingchi)

The Viewers/Readers’ Perspectives (3) Is sympathy/empathy possible? Is being a sympathetic witness enough? Reading can involve action; critical reading

is critical practice (with a purpose to change)

Trauma & Postmodern/Postcolonial Discourses

Trauma & Postmodern/Postcolonial Discourses

Postmodernism (0): Definitions

--後現代主義 (Postmodernism) ︰ cultures which challenge language and the other types of “Truth,” foundation and tradition. (Poststructuralism as one example.)

-- 後結構主義 (Poststructuralism) ︰ theories which challenge the stable structure of language (binaries) and traditional value systems; sees their meanings as slippery, multiple and contingent ( 因時而定的 ).

--後現代狀況 (Postmodernity) ︰ The socio-economic and intellectual conditions which make postmodernism possible.

Postmodernism (1): Definitions & Issues1. Definition:

“post”modernism -- 什麼是現代？什麼是「後」？ Period or style: 是斷代還是文體？已經過去了嗎？

2. Postmodernism and postmodernity (postmodern conditions 後現代性 : 後工業資本主義、跨國企業 ) － the former reinforcing or critiquing the latter.

3. Interpretation: against interpretation, difficult wholenss or hybridity

4. Postmodern Identity: Depthlessness vs. 1. History, Memory, Capitalist culture and Identity 2. The role of the author – authority, originality and

authenticity 3. The boundaries of humanity

What is Postmodernism? (2)

Negative Positive

Flattening of subjectivity;

Pastiche

Ambiguity

Eclecticism

Pluralism

De-Centering & Boundary-crossing

Literature & Film:

Surfiction, metafiction pastiche

Parody

Ensemble film

Sci-fi . . .,etc

Historiographical metafiction & metafilm

Urban space

Society as spectacle; overall commofication

Plural space;

Multiple historical signs

De-zoning or democratization of urban space;

re-creation of historical spaces

PC & PM: Differences 1) Past the Last Post

Differences (x-xiii): pc – more overtly political pm – exercising a cultural and intellectual hegemony Different conceptions of the ‘Other’ (others), with pc

emphasizing more the local and regional. Different questions of the national, international and

transnational; of authenticity and simulacra; or representation and referentiality.

PC & PM: Similarities & Differences: 2) Linda Hutcheon Similarities in form (magic realism), theme

(history and margins) and strategy (irony, double-coding)

Different in the issue of agency and social change

Diane Brydon against Hutcheon Pluralize postcolonialism– two kinds of

ambivalence (p. 192)

Critique of Hutcheon – 1. evolutionary model; 2. Search for Synthesis 3. The Cult of Authenticity contamination as

a strategies (e.g. White Inuits)

Trauma & Postmodernism: Common Concerns (ref. Radstone 11)

Postmodern theories Trauma

referentiality -- différance in meaning -- language as mediation of reality

Laub: “an event without witness”; lacking traces

Subjectivity

--forgetting and testimony, Analyst and victim

Fragmentation Lack of autonomyDepthlessness

Mimetic theory: psychical dissociation from the self; hypnosisAnti-mimetic theory: unassimilable event dissociated from memory

Trauma & Postcolonialism Traumatization // colonization

“Trauma entails violent intrusion and a sense of utter objecti.cation that annihilates the person as subject or agent” (Lloyd 214).

Consequences: will-to-forget or amnesia of the victim in relation to

the terror of the occasion; the consequent dissociation and dislocation of the person

recovery and anticolonialism??? No. -- survival but not recovery of the past

Postmodern vs. Postcolonial Traumas Hiroshima mon amour as World memory?

the term "world memory" is suggestive as a description of how memory moves beyond the individual and translates itself across and between cultures. (Durrant)

History as trauma: "history is precisely the way we are implicated in one

another's traumas" (Caruth 1995: 24) possible problems in generalization: ignoring

historical specificity, archiving involves hierarchization.

Blue Skies 2002 (source)

Ritual of surviving trauma and

Acceptance of difference cultures.

Blue Skies 2002

I was blue, just as blue as could be Every day is a cloudy day for me. Then good luck came knocking at my door Skies were grey but they're not grey anymore.

Blue skies smiling at me Nothing but blue skies do I see. Bluebirds singing a song Nothing but bluebirds all the day long.

Day MarkDuring the evacuation I walked upthe thirty-six floors in a darknessso utter the world no longer existed.Voices, slammed firedoors,above and below, fear, the smell of burning fuel.Then, in the dusty air of my savagely bright apartmentI hovered over the body I’d lived in.*Fire-glass particles sparkled on the school roofand the dazzle of charred steelworkwas a kind of blindness.Triage stations, refrigerator lockers—sound finished.Rescuers and stunned residents under the dusty treesremembered they were dust.*

Day Mark

Lee Briccetti

There is a blister on my mind.I agree to that.Moment as the plane, four blocks away,turned, angling in—and I knewthey would be dead but I would live.And so it is.Time, a membranewe both slipped through, into the nextmoment when I could scream.*Personality swallowed itself to a nerve:live.I live above the pit, the rivera gorgeous framefor abundant new morning light.

Day Mark (cont’d)

Lee Briccetti

Next week The Year of Magical Thinking

2003/7/26 ： 蒂蒂安 (Didion) 女兒琪恩達娜 (Quintana) 的婚禮 2003/12/25 ： 琪恩達娜感冒轉肺炎再轉敗血性休克，因而住院 2003/12/30 ：丈夫約翰在飯桌前死於冠狀動脈疾病 1~3 天之內：蒂蒂安寫下「 Life changes fast/Life changes in the

instant 」幾行 2004/1/22 ：琪恩達娜出院，由蒂蒂安照顧 2004/3/23 ：俟琪恩達娜可以行動，約翰的告別式方始舉行 2004/3/25 ：琪恩達娜因腦出血又住院 2004/4/30 ：琪恩達娜與蒂蒂安由加州返回紐約，琪恩達娜在魯斯克中

心接受治療，開始逐漸恢復，蒂蒂安則開始整理房子 2004/5/12 晚 11:11 ： 蒂蒂安把檔案打開再儲存，未加任何字 2004/10/4 ：蒂蒂安開始寫作

Next week The Year of Magical Thinking

2004/10/4 ：蒂蒂安開始寫作 2004/12/31 ：《奇想之年》寫作完畢 2005/8/26 ： 琪恩達娜過世 2005/10 ：《奇想之年》出版； 2007 春：蒂蒂安改編的《奇想之年》戲劇在百老匯上演；《

奇想之年》中文版在台灣出版．

Next week

The Year of Magical Thinking Focus chaps 1-7; 12-22

Initial responses (coolness) and repetitions Grief and mourning; magical thinking as a process of sense-

making

Reference Radstone, Susannah. “Trauma Theory: Contexts,

Politics, Ethics.” Paragraph 30:1 (2007) 9–29. Lloyd, David. “COLONIAL TRAUMA/ POS TCOLONIAL

RECOVERY?” interventions Vol. 2(2) 212–228. Durrant, Sam. “Postcolonializing Trauma Studies.”

Postcolonial Text, Vol 1, No 2 (2005) E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang. “From Traumatic

Paralysis to the Force Field of Modernity.” Trauma and cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations. Eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang. Hong Kong UP, 2004.