Writing wounds: the inscription of trauma in post-1968 French women's life-writing

Writing Wounds

GENUS: Gender in Modern Culture 4 Russell West (Berlin) Jennifer Yee (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) Frank Lay (Cologne) Sabine Schülting (Berlin)

Writing Wounds The Inscription of Trauma in post-1968 French Women's Life-writing

Kathryn Robson

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

Cover photo: gettyimages/photodisc © The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence". ISBN: 90-420-1921-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004 Printed in the Netherlands

For my parents, and for S.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Romance Studies for permission to reproduce here a revised and extended version of my article “Falling into an abyss: remembering and writing sexual abuse in Béatrice de Jurquet's La Traversée des lignes”, which first appeared in the Journal of Romance Studies 2.1 (Spring 2002), 79-90. I should also like to thank the University of Newcastle for research leave that has enabled me to complete this book and the Arts and Humanities Research Board for funding the doctoral thesis from which this book has emerged. This book finds its origins in my doctoral thesis, undertaken at the University of Cambridge. I would like to thank first and foremost my thesis supervisor, Emma Wilson, for her seemingly endless encouragement and inspiration throughout the writing of the thesis and since. I am also warmly grateful to Victoria Best and Jennifer Yee for their friendship, stimulation and help with various drafts of this book. For intellectual debate and emotional support I would like to thank Emily Butterworth, Simon Gaunt, Thomas Lepeltier, Jackie Storey and Emily Tomlinson. Finally I am immensely grateful to my family, and to Simon Meacher, for their continued emotional and practical support throughout the writing process.

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CONTENTS Preface: Writing Wounds

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Introduction: The Story of Trauma in “Trauma Theory”

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Hysterical Heroines: From “Dora” to Marie Cardinal’s Les Mots pour le dire and Autrement dit

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Writing (through) the body: Hélène Cixous’s Dedans and “Stigmata”

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“Perdre pied”: The Inscription of Sexual Abuse in Béatrice de Jurquet’s Autobiographical Fiction

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Chantal Chawaf’s Le Manteau noir: Survival, Departure and Bearing Witness

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Choking on Words: Sarah Kofman’s Autobiographical Writings

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Ghost-writing the Holocaust: Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après

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Conclusion: Re-Reading the Wound

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Works Cited

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Preface: “Writing Wounds” Trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: 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. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language. (Caruth 1996, 4)

The Oxford English Dictionary gives a double definition of trauma: “a wound or external bodily injury” and a “psychic injury, esp. one caused by emotional shock the memory of which is repressed and remains unhealed”. Traumatic experience is too overwhelming to be registered fully in consciousness as it occurs and is thus unavailable to conscious recall. Yet trauma cannot simply be consigned to the past: it is relived endlessly in the present through repeated painful reenactments, nightmares, hallucinations and flashbacks. The past intrudes insistently on the present, demanding, yet resisting, articulation, wreaking devastating effects on the survivor’s memory and identity. According to most discourses on trauma in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, it is only when the seemingly unspeakable traumatic experience can be transformed into a narrative that the traumatic event can be put in the past and the survivor can begin to recreate an identity shattered by trauma. To quote Bessel A.

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van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart: “Traumatic memories are the unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences which need to be integrated with existing mental schemes, and be transformed into narrative language”. When this is achieved, they add, “The story can be told, the person can look back at what has happened; he has given it a place in his life history, his autobiography” (1995, 176). Yet how can the survivor put into words an event that seems to exceed the limits of knowledge and understanding and even of language? What kind of life-story can contain trauma within its frame? Furthermore, trauma – particularly on a massive scale – is often said to be “unspeakable”, “unrepresentable”; in trauma studies, as Leigh Gilmore observes, “something of a consensus has already developed that takes trauma as the unrepresentable to assert that trauma is beyond language in some crucial way” (2001, 6). To tell the story of trauma risks diluting the horror of traumatic experience and “forgetting” what happened, thereby losing the possibility of remembering and bearing witness to the traumatic past. Narratives of trauma are balanced between an imperative to convey the horror of trauma and the equally urgent need to contain or minimize that horror, between the requirement to remember and the urge to “forget”. This poses questions of crucial importance in literary theory as well as in therapy and in law: what is at stake in assimilating trauma into narrative? What are the limits and possibilities of a narrative of trauma? And how do we interpret or judge such narratives? These questions motivate and underpin this book. Trauma is difficult to put into words for several reasons. It seems “unspeakable” because it exceeds the mind’s capacity to assimilate or understand it as it occurs and by extension seems beyond language. Yet we should take care with the term “unspeakable”. Frequently, traumatic experiences remain unspoken primarily because they are disavowed in particular social contexts and thus there are no available templates, no formulations in which to give voice to these traumatic experiences. As the psychiatrist Judith Herman points out, “Denial, repression and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level” ([1992] 1994, 2). Survivors of trauma are only too frequently compelled to tell a story that is unacceptable, even unbelievable, within their social context because it breaks through the values

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shoring up the social contract.1 Survivors often face a double challenge: to put into words that which seems to resist narrativization and to recount experiences that cut through society’s convictions. The limits of what can and cannot be said about trauma are thus socially shaped and defined; trauma is recounted differently in different contexts. Yet the possibilities and limitations of language and of narrative in the face of trauma also depend on the forum in which trauma is recounted: in courts of law, in therapy, in televised talk shows, in magazines or in books. In law, the urgent need to uncover the “truth” of the event, to re-establish exactly what happened, has tended, necessarily, to override the question of how this “truth” can be reached, how the “unspeakable” can be spoken. In therapy, conversely, what matters above all is the facilitation of healing. Literary criticism, by contrast, can explore the strategies by which narratives of trauma – be they legal testimonies, stories told in private in therapy or in public in the forum of talk-shows or interviews, or indeed literary texts – recount experience that is outside the bounds of knowledge. Literary criticism, I would suggest, has a crucial role to play in furthering our understanding of how traumatic experience can be put into words and what kind of status such a narrative might have. This book departs from the principle that the question as to how trauma can be narrated is intrinsically literary, calling for us to map out the possibilities and limits of memory and narrative, as well as of language itself. Trauma defies our attempts to comprehend and to assimilate it, to “come to terms” with it in any way. For how can we come to terms with – both in the sense of giving voice to and in the sense of accepting – events that break through the mind’s coping strategies? There can be no direct, straightforward narrative of trauma: trauma stories necessarily challenge our understanding. As Cathy Caruth points out, trauma must “be spoken in a language that is always somehow literary: a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding” (1996, 5). Trauma, like the figure of the wound in the quotation from Caruth with which I began, demands to be heard and understood, yet simultaneously remains impossible to grasp. Indeed, Caruth’s image of the wound is itself a literary image: the bodily 1

I use the word “survivor” here advisedly, following common practice in trauma studies, to refer to those who have undergone traumatic experiences of any sort. The term “survivor” is now common currency, often used politically as an alternative to “victim”, which connotes disempowerment (see Champagne 1996, 2).

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wound acts as figure for the psychic rupture, spilling out words and blood in an attempt to convey a message we could not otherwise hear. The “wound” stands in for – in effect, speaks for – a “reality or truth that is not otherwise available”: it is a double image, signalling injury on the one hand and the gap(s) in our own lack of knowledge of psychic trauma on the other. Throughout this book, I return to the image of the wound as a figure of psychological injury and rupture, but also as a figure for the fracture of knowledge and narrative, that points towards what cannot otherwise be articulated in narratives of trauma. Interpreting narratives of trauma is, I would suggest, a literary endeavour, requiring that we listen to what is not explicitly said, through drawing out textual images and figures. This study examines literary texts, texts not explicitly constrained by the demands of “truth-telling” or of healing, texts that do not simply recount the events of the past but foreground the very question of how the past can be narrated. I focus on French women’s writing published since 1968, a watershed in French political and cultural history and, it may be argued, in the development of women’s writing in France. Margaret Atack points out that in the years following May 1968, “the demand that women must break out of the silence in which they were imprisoned was a constant theme” (1999, 92), which translated into an explosion in women’s writing. The texts published by women have varied immeasurably, ranging from the formally experimental works by writers such as Hélène Cixous and Jeanne Hyvrard to the more stylistically conventional narratives of, say, Christiane Rochefort or Marie Cardinal. Yet one dominant theme of these texts would seem to be the quest for self-expression, to “break out of silence”, be it via fiction, autobiography or hybrid forms of both. The writers whose texts I analyse, Marie Cardinal, Chantal Chawaf, Hélène Cixous, Charlotte Delbo, Béatrice de Jurquet and Sarah Kofman, all invoke their own experiences of trauma – parental death, physical and sexual abuse, imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps – in their texts. These texts are not, however, offered up as straightforward, “raw” testimonies to lived traumatic experiences, or even as autobiographies; instead, they are self-consciously stylized and fictionalized, concerned less with telling a story of trauma than with exploring, and exploding, the limits of what can be told. This recourse to fictional forms of writing rather than autobiography in the context of trauma is not surprising. Trauma, by definition, cannot be registered fully in consciousness as it occurs, and thus resists

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conscious knowledge. Where autobiography implies a knowing subject who can claim and narrate his or her own experience, trauma renders such (self)knowledge impossible; and questions how we can be sure of the “truth” and of the reality of experience and memory. Narratives of trauma tend to call their own knowledge and stories into question, to explicitly challenge their own attempts to explain and contain traumatic experience. In these narratives, the relation between “life” and “writing” can never be taken for granted. I use the term “life-writing” precisely in order to trouble the fraught relation between “life” and “writing” that my work traces: I define the texts I analyse as “life-writing” because they are explicitly produced out of lived experience, yet they do not simply narrate that experience as such; instead, they foreground the very question of how such experience can be narrated. This question is at the very foreground of my study. The primary aim of this book is to explore the relation between traumatic experience, memory and narrative. I do so by turning both to psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses and to literary texts written by French women that are shown to find their genesis in lived experience. These texts are not all well-known and I do not assume that readers will have prior knowledge of the texts or of the authors. My aim is not simply to offer readings of literary texts, but to set up a different mode of reading literary texts about trauma that is bound up in recurring bodily figures and particularly the image of the wound. To write trauma, I suggest, means “writing wounds”; by extension, reading trauma, to return to Caruth’s epigraph, means finding strategies to read such wounds. This book constitutes just such an attempt.

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Introduction: The Story of Trauma in “Trauma Theory” There is no single and coherent “story of trauma” in trauma theory. Indeed, there is no unified “trauma theory” as such: my title is deliberately provocative, aiming to rethink what it means to refer to trauma as a “story” in the context of the disparate theorizations of psychological trauma that have emerged since the late nineteenth century. Trauma, we have already seen, works to disrupt the possibility of memory and narrative and the question of what kind of story can be told about trauma has been central to trauma studies since the early work of Sigmund Freud and of Pierre Janet, a psychologist who worked at the Salpêtrière at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. In this introductory chapter I explore the relation between trauma, memory and narrative as it has been theorized in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, as well as in literary theory, in order to move beyond these models and set up my own approach to reading narratives of trauma.

Trauma, Memory and Narrative In the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud invokes the repeated nightmares suffered by soldiers returning from combat in World War 1 to illustrate what he calls the “traumatic neuroses”. He observes that these soldiers relive their combat experiences in nightmares: “Dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright” (Freud [1920] 1981, 18:13). The veterans seem compelled to relive repeatedly the horror of their experiences at war in

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nightmares, flashbacks and hallucinations, even as they block these memories out of their conscious minds; they seem, as Freud suggests, to be governed by a “compulsion to repeat”, to relive that which they cannot actively remember (22). In Freud’s formulation, then, trauma disrupts conventional processes of memory and breaks down the distinction between present and past, as the past is repeatedly and unwillingly relived in the present. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud does not explore the consequences of this disruption of memory. In his earlier writings on hysteria, however, he does spell out more clearly the effects of psychological trauma on memory and narrative and in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he draws links between hysterical symptoms and the effects of “traumatic neurosis” ([1920] 1981, 18:12). He suggests that hysterics have experienced a traumatic event, an event that acts like a “gap in the psyche” in that it is not registered fully in consciousness as it occurs and thus cannot be remembered (Freud [1892-1899] 1981, 1:228). Instead, the traumatic memory is replayed belatedly through somatic (hysterical) symptoms - symptoms that may, as feminist psychiatrists have pointed out, be related to the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Until the 1980s, despite the association between trauma and hysteria in Freuds thought, trauma theorists focused almost exclusively on combat trauma: hysteria played no part in theories of trauma (see Herman [1992] 1994, 7-32). In the 1990s, however, feminist psychiatrists followed Freud in likening hysteria to other traumatic neuroses: to quote Herman, “The hysteria of women and the combat neurosis of men are one” (Herman [1992] 1994, 32). Freud defines hysteria – like traumatic neuroses – as a disorder of memory, stating, in his collaborative work with Josef Breuer in the Studies on Hysteria, that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (Freud [1893] 1981, 2:7). This formulation has double significance. On the one hand, the past is all too pervasive in the present, yet, on the other, hysterics’ memories of the past are incomplete, riddled with gaps and inconsistencies as a result of the traumatic experience they have been unable to assimilate into their minds. As a result, hysterics are characteristically unable to tell their life stories; the stories they attempt to tell, Freud points out, are incoherent and frequently dry out, “leaving gaps unfulfilled and riddles unanswered” ([1905] 1981, 7:45). In Freud’s thought, traumatic experience cannot be fitted easily into a life story, not because it is “unspeakable” but because it remains

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unknown, a “gap” within consciousness and memory that defies narrativization. Freud’s theorization of trauma as a disruption of memory and narrative is echoed in the work of his contemporary, Pierre Janet, and in later psychiatry and psychotherapy. Like Freud, Janet suggests that trauma cannot be assimilated into consciousness as it occurs, but he goes beyond Freud in claiming that trauma is registered instead in an alternative split-off consciousness in a process he calls “dissociation”. This in turn produces an “altération de l’acte de mémoire”, whereby the traumatic memory is unavailable to conscious recall; indeed, is not, strictly speaking, a memory as such, in the sense that it cannot be “remembered” or recounted (Janet 1928, 2:272). It is worth pausing here to attempt to reconsider what we mean by memory. Janet differentiates between “traumatic memory”, which, in the words of Judith Herman, is “wordless and static”, and “narrative memory”, which itself constitutes a form of story-telling (Herman [1992] 1994, 175). Traumatic memories remain inaccessible to conscious recall: they are repeated unconsciously, rather than recalled as such, and, as Janet notes, the traumatized subject “n’a donc pas précisément un souvenir à propos de l’évènement” (1928, 2:274). Modern psychiatric and psychotherapeutic discourses on trauma have drawn explicitly on Janet’s theorization of traumatic memory and “dissociation”. In her book on the “genealogy” of trauma, Ruth Leys comments that Janet is repeatedly invoked by modern theorists of trauma as “a pioneer in developing a fully formulated mnemo-technology for the treatment of the trauma victim” (2000, 105). Trauma is widely described in terms of a breakdown in memory and in narrative, as an event that breaks through the mind’s attempts to contain it and that endures in a separate consciousness beyond the individual’s control (Herman [1992] 1994, 34-5). How then does one begin to turn that dissociated experience into a story? Since Freud, psychotherapists and psychiatrists have insisted on the therapeutic necessity of piecing together the scraps of traumatic memory and endeavouring to convert the fragments into a narrative. Telling “the story of the trauma”, both “in depth and in detail”, is seen as a necessary part of the healing process (Herman [1992] 1994, 181). In his work with hysterics, Freud asserts that the aim of analysis is to fill in the gaps in memory and to create a coherent life story, an “intelligible, consistent and unbroken” version of one’s life ([1905] 1981, 7:47). Similarly, Janet emphasizes the importance of recounting

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trauma as a story as a means to “l’associer aux autres événements de notre vie, le ranger dans l’histoire de notre vie” (1928, 2:273). In this way, traumatic memory is converted into narrative memory, into a memory that can be recounted over and over again in “l’histoire de notre vie”. Yet how can trauma, which often seems incomprehensible, even unthinkable, be incorporated into an intelligible and consistent life story? Are there some traumatic experiences that can never fully be recalled and narrated, even in therapy? These questions are even more pressing in the light of the massive traumatic events of the twentieth century – the Holocaust, two world wars, genocide, “ethnic cleansing”, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the list could go on indefinitely – not to mention individual traumas: physical and sexual abuse, rape, abduction, and so on. In their collaborative essay, “The Intrusive Past”, Bessel van der Kolk and van der Hart put the question starkly: “Can the Auschwitz experience and the loss of innumerable family members during the Holocaust really be integrated, be made part of one’s autobiography?” (1995, 178). Van der Kolk and van der Hart are referring specifically to the Holocaust here, but the point they are making is more generally applicable: certain traumatic events seem so unthinkable that they can never become part of a life story. This is not to say that it is possible to decide in advance which experiences can be assimilated into autobiography and which cannot: it is rather to suggest that traumatic experience cannot always be recuperated in narrative. But if so, how is a survivor to construct a life story? And what kind of story can be produced? If we turn back to Freud, it is worth pointing out that the case history in which he describes his therapy as the reconstruction of a cohesive and “unbroken” story is itself a “fragment”; the patient, the famous “Dora” whose case history I analyse in chapter one, terminated her analysis before her life story could be established. To produce the case history for “Dora”, Freud was himself required to restore “what was missing” and to fill in the gaps in his knowledge with hypothesis and supposition (Freud [1905] 1981, 7:41). Given that Dora never publicly responded to Freud’s case history, how can we be sure that Freud has filled in the gaps correctly, that his version of events is not semi-fictional? Indeed, if trauma defies narrativization, then any narrative of traumatic experience will necessarily modify, distort, even fictionalize, that experience. This is acknowledged by later theorists such as van der Kolk and van der Hart, who claim that

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some traumatic memories are uniquely accurate and that, unlike other memories, they “are not altered by the passage of time” (1995, 172). They admit that it is through distorting traumatic memories – consciously or unconsciously – that they can be articulated and become part of one’s life story. And this is undoubtedly part of the healing process. The modification of traumatic memory works to “soften the intrusive power of the original, unmitigated horror”, to dilute the force of the original event (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1995, 178). In some ways, the narrativization of trauma is curative not because it conveys “what happened” but because it modifies it, because it represents the past in a less disturbing fashion. It is worth pausing here. On one level, it is, of course, impossible to narrate any lived experience without transforming it. The stakes are, however, often higher in the context of trauma, where it is frequently important to establish the “truth” of what happened: either in a court of law, or in the all too common case in which the survivor’s experience has been repeatedly denied, so that the survivor urgently needs to be heard and believed. If any narrative of trauma necessarily involves a degree of modification and distortion, how can we judge its claims to “truth”? This question has repeatedly surfaced since the work of Freud and Janet and points to a tension within theories of trauma that extends beyond the boundaries of the therapeutic encounter to stand at the very heart of what is often called “trauma theory” or “trauma studies” today. In the preface to her edited volume, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, the literary critic Cathy Caruth writes: The study and treatment of trauma continue to face a crucial problem at the heart of this unique and difficult phenomenon: the problem of how to help relieve suffering, and how to understand the nature of the suffering, without eliminating the force and truth of the reality that trauma survivors face and quite often try to transmit to us. (Caruth 1995, vii)

Caruth points here to a tension between the need to heal – to reduce the impact of the traumatic event – and the equally pressing imperative to establish the “truth” and the horror of trauma. The question of how to narrate traumatic memories, Caruth adds, is “a problem central to the task of therapists, literary critics, neurobiologists, and filmmakers alike” (1995, vii). This problem has, however, presented different challenges in different contexts. Psychiatry, for example, has begun to turn to neuroscience to explore

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the ways in which trauma is registered in the brain, carrying out research to find out if traumatic memories are encoded differently from normal memories. Some of this research has shown that traumatic memories are stored as iconic or visual imprints that are outside language and remain unchanged over time (see van der Kolk 1996). Although this may seem to suggest that traumatic memories are somehow less distorted and more reliable than other memories, it does not, of course, solve the problem of how these literal memories, inaccessible to conscious recall, can be incorporated into memory. Moreover, the scientific evidence to support these claims about traumatic memories has been hotly disputed (Leys 2000, 229-265). For literary critics working with narratives of trauma, the question of how to read traumatic memories and narratives takes on a different nuance: that is, what are the possibilities and limits of narrative in the case of trauma? And what is at stake in writing – rather than verbally recounting – trauma in the form of a text intended for publication?

Trauma in Literary Criticism In recent years, proliferating first-person accounts of traumatic experience have emerged: in magazines, television talk-shows and in books. These have generated a “virtual explosion of critical interest in survivor discourse and in narratives of recovery” in literary criticism, as in other disciplines (Henke 1998, xiii). This “critical interest” is unsurprising given the challenge that trauma poses to narrative: how can one “narrate” experience that seems to resist narrativization? Moreover, narratives of trauma highlight the thorny problem of the relation between lived experience and text, between “life” and “writing”. Not all texts about lived traumatic experience are presented as straightforwardly autobiographical; indeed, many are fictionalized, stylized, self-consciously reworking experience into a narrative form. Yet they all invoke some kind of relation between writing and life that calls for us to rethink our critical approach. Surprisingly, however, literary criticism has tended to play down the problem of connecting “life” and “writing” in narratives of trauma, assuming that the text gives us unproblematic access to the writer’s lived experience. The literary text is implicitly treated like any other kind of first-person account of trauma, as unmediated “testimony” to lived experience. This has been particularly striking in feminist

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criticism of women’s writings on trauma and in analyses of texts concerning the Holocaust – that is, in cases where the individual’s experience has historically been contested, even negated. The reader is called upon to accept the text as historical or individual testimony, to believe the account as it is given. This model of reading narratives of trauma, however, risks making two troubling assumptions: firstly, that experience can simply be recounted in narrative, and secondly, that through the text we can accede to the author’s life. These assumptions are made explicit in (American) feminist criticism in the 1990s, notably in the work of Rosaria Champagne (1996) and Kalí Tal (1996). According to these critics, the reader should read through the text in order to uncover the experience of the author figured, overtly or covertly, in the text. This represents a significant departure from other modes of criticism, tending to analyse text over authorial biography. Kalí Tal claims that focus on the text is “inappropriate” when applied to reading the literature of trauma and thus should be left behind. Where postmodern criticism has prioritized questions of reading and interpretation, Tal asserts that in the case of narratives of trauma, “The act of writing, though perhaps less accessible to the critic, is as important as the act of reading” (1996, 19). What matters, to Tal and to other critics, is not so much the text itself as the process of writing; more precisely, these critics focus on what it means to write about trauma, rather than on textual interpretation. Tal’s emphasis on writing points, I would suggest, to a fundamental problem of this mode of criticism. Although autobiographical narratives of trauma do explicitly point to lived experience that it would perhaps be inappropriate to ignore, how is the critic to gain access to the writer’s life and, furthermore, to analyse the relation between the text and the writer’s life? Tal, along with other critics like Suzette Henke and Rosaria Champagne, assume that that the relation between author and text is fixed and stable and can be pinned down by the reader/critic. In Henke’s formulation, the author’s life constitutes a “focal point” for textual criticism, so that the text provides a privileged means of access to the writer’s life and, conversely, the writer’s life offers a way into the text (Henke 1998, xvi). Yet we should not lose sight of the devastating effects of traumatic experience on identity, memory and narrative, which prevent us from positing a straightforward relation between text and writing subject. My own mode of reading departs from that of other literary critics by invoking a relation between writing and life that can

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never be established as such, indeed, by calling into question the possibility of a fixed relation between them. This does not, I think, mean denying the reality of the traumatic experience, refuting the “testimony” the text offers; instead, it means turning away from the author’s life in order to analyse instead the text as an alternative form of “testimony”. The notion of “testimony” is central to contemporary trauma studies. My own understanding of this term is derived from Shoshana Felman’s and Dori Laub’s study of that name, in which they explore how historical trauma, more specifically the Holocaust and the Second World War, is represented, or, more accurately, “testified to”, in literary and cinematic texts as well as in therapy. Felman and Laub argue that literature can “bear witness” to what we do not know about the traumas of recent history, that literature can somehow say what we cannot otherwise articulate (Felman and Laub 1992, xx). This does not mean that the literary text simply recounts lived experiences of trauma; rather, as though in a court of law, this testimony is acted out, created through performance. This testimony may take different forms, may emerge through what is not said as much as through what is said. Although Felman and Laub are self-confessedly writing in the wake of the Holocaust, their model of “testimony”gestures beyond the specific question of how to bear witness to genocide, pointing equally towards other historical traumas. This is, in itself, surprising: writing on the Holocaust tends to be treated differently from other writings on trauma, largely because Holocaust narratives are situated within a particular religious and philosophical context. Following Felman and Laub, however, I would suggest that some of the questions posed by Holocaust writings also emerge, albeit differently, in the context of other narratives of trauma. One such question would be the question of how seemingly unthinkable atrocities can be contained or assimilated within narrative of any sort, a question which clearly goes beyond the frame of literary texts, yet which also highlights why literary representations might be a useful point of departure in thinking through how to narrate trauma. Literary texts do not simply “tell stories”; they interrogate different modes and forms of narrative, push further back the limits of what can or cannot be narrated. In this study, I choose to analyse literary representations of trauma rather than other sorts of testimony for precisely this reason. It is, moreover, striking that many narratives of trauma based (however loosely) on lived experience are explicitly offered in fictional form,

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rather than as autobiographies as such. They explore different ways in which trauma can be represented in narrative and renegotiate endlessly the relation between writing and experience via fiction or autobiographical fiction. There are numerous possible explanations for recourse to fiction in narratives of trauma. Firstly, recounting traumatic experience is potentially dangerous, as it risks stirring up memories that the mind has hitherto striven to avoid. Fiction offers the possibility of modifying those memories slightly, of reinventing the past even as one remembers it. Furthermore, as I suggested in my reading of Freud, it may even be necessary to re-imagine and fictionalize a traumatic past in order to survive and to deal with the past. There is no direct line marking the trajectory from traumatic experience to memory to autobiographical narrative – and this very indirectness poses a challenge to us as literary critics. Rather than assuming that texts can give us unproblematic access to external referents, and looking repeatedly to the figure of the authorsurvivor to anchor my interpretations, I focus on the text itself and on textual analysis. And crucially, analysing the text rather than the author’s life shows up not what we can know, but rather what we cannot know. If we accept that narratives of trauma self-consciously find their origin in traumatic experience, they simultaneously show that trauma defies knowledge and understanding; these narratives thus find their origin in a failure of knowledge. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth – unarguably the most influential critic on trauma – explores this crisis of knowledge in narratives of trauma. Caruth analyses diverse literary and theoretical texts which themselves grapple with the question of how to recount an experience that cannot be known in order to show how trauma is inscribed in texts in ways we might not expect. Caruth does not track the “story of trauma” as it appears in the texts she analyses: her aim is “to trace in each of these texts a different story, the story or the textual itinerary of insistently recurring words or figures” (1996, 5). These textual inscriptions of trauma may be seen to tell an alternative story, or non-story, of trauma, a story that “stubbornly persists in bearing witness to some forgotten wound” (1996, 5), a story that requires a “new mode of reading” (1996, 9). This book responds to Caruth’s call for a different “mode of reading” narratives of trauma. Like Caruth, I track recurring figures and images that may be seen to point to a different way of writing the story of trauma, that indicate what remains unsaid and unknown in

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narratives of trauma. And, like Caruth, I begin with the image of a “wound” that remains open, unhealed, an image of bodily vulnerability and rupture. My analyses repeatedly and self-confessedly draw on Caruth’s brilliant and innovative theorization of the relation between trauma, narrative and history. I deliberately juxtapose my textual analysis with readings of Caruth’s theory, in order to set up a dialogue of sorts between theory and literary text without privileging one or the other. And I read Caruth’s writing as a literary text in itself, pointing up the key images and tropes in order to analyse its structures and assumptions. It is for this reason that I return so frequently to Caruth, not only in areas where her work has intervened most directly, such as in readings of Freud, but also where it seems less immediately relevant, as in the chapter on Béatrice de Jurquet and sexual abuse, where other theorists have been much more influential. I am interested in generating new readings, new modes of interpretation, rather than simply “applying” the most obviously pertinent theories. My readings move beyond Caruth’s in a number of ways, but most importantly in focusing in more detail on the image of the wound and on the relation between body and psyche. Both Caruth and Freud move away from the bodily image of trauma as a wound without addressing the question of what it means to articulate psychological trauma through bodily images. This neglect of the implications of the relation between body and psyche in representations of trauma is, I argue, a crucial blind spot in Caruth’s work and in other theoretical writings on trauma. In exploring the relation between bodily and psychic wounding, my readings raise thorny questions that trauma theory has not yet attempted to articulate, still less answer. In the second part of this chapter, I set out my own “mode of reading”, which, like Caruth’s, begins with and departs from the image of trauma as wound. However, unlike Caruth, I retain emphasis on bodily figures throughout – on bleeding bodies, wounded bodies, falling bodies, bodies caught between ingestion and expulsion with no possibility of digestion.

Reading Narratives of Trauma The interface between body and mind in psychological trauma may be seen to begin with the wound – or, more accurately, with

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wounding. In her account of sexual violence and memory, the literary critic Roberta Culbertson states that Wounding begins the memory of the survivor, is its occasion and essence. It simultaneously launches one into a social recognition and explanation of it; it poses what must be explained. (1995, 173)

The trauma survivor’s memory is, as Culbertson asserts, shaped by and structured around wounding, around the symbolic gaps and tears in the fabric of the mind engendered by the experience of trauma. To attempt to remember trauma is to return to the wound that, far from offering a visual or visceral proof and explanation of trauma, “poses what must be explained” – and yet cannot be explained, just as, often, it cannot be healed. Certain wounds of the past persist in the present and can neither be forgotten nor bandaged up, but fester; furthermore, even if the wound of trauma seems to close up, there is always the possibility that it will reopen. This is illustrated beautifully in the writing of Charlotte Delbo, a member of the French Resistance who was imprisoned in two Nazi concentration camps, AuschwitzBirkenau and Ravensbrück. In La Mémoire et les jours, a text which presents a sequence of different narratives of trauma, Delbo takes on the voice of a woman whose mother died in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the same camp where the woman herself had been imprisoned. For years, the woman believed that her mother was killed in gas chambers on arrival in the camp, and she had taken comfort from this in knowing that her mother did not suffer the day-to-day horror of camp life. The discovery that her mother was not in fact killed on arrival at the camp brings back atrocious images of prolonged physical suffering in Auschwitz, reawakens the past in the present. A friend tells her to stop tormenting herself over the past: “Le temps a refermé les blessures”. The woman replies that although the intense grieving for her mother’s death is over, the recognition of her mother’s suffering reopens the old wound: “Aujourd’hui, la blessure se rouvre et cela fait d’autant plus mal que la cicatrice avait durci” (Delbo [1985] 1995, 33). The scar is ripped apart as the wound reopens, causing as much, or indeed more, pain than in the past. The wounds of the past, Delbo’s writing implies, are even more excruciating in the present than in the past. To remember and narrate trauma means, then, to attempt to write in and through wounds, through the holes within memory that represent the

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incursion of the past into the present. Yet how does one “write (through) wounds”? Hélène Cixous, whose autofictional texts I deal with in chapter three, links writing with wounding, but compares her narratives to scars rather than wounds: La blessure, c’est cela que je sentirais. La blessure, chose étrange: ou je meurs ou il y a un travail qui se fait, mystérieux, qui va rassembler les bords de la plaie. Chose merveilleuse aussi: qui va quand même laisser une trace, même si cela nous fait du mal [….] J’aime la cicatrice, ce récit (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1994, 26).

In Cixous’s formulation, the wound precipitates either death or healing; its story, she seems to imply, emerges through the scar that marks its healing. If we accept her logic, the scar – the point of suture, when, figuratively speaking, the skin re-mends and the wound is sewn up – is the site of the story, “ce récit”. Yet Cixous’s texts, like many of the others I analyse, do not tell stories as such: they chart instead disrupted narratives with no visible closure, pointing to the wounds that stay open and resist healing. If the scar points to a story (of wounding and healing), a past that can be remembered yet left behind, the image of the wound figures the breakdown of narrative. It is worth pausing here to consider this further. The wound is a visceral image, the mark of violence on the skin, before healing has taken place. It remains after the initial moment of rupture, pointing back to the moment of violence and forward to the possibility of healing. Narratives of trauma, I argue in this book, emerge from the wound, from a time between injury and healing, a time when the effects of trauma remain as powerful and as insistent as ever. Writing, in this formulation, is not akin to healing; writing finds its roots in the open wound rather than the closed scar. Indeed, remembering and writing are frequently figured in terms of delving into the open wound. The narrator of Béatrice de Jurquet’s novel La Traversée des lignes describes how, as she strives to anchor her fragmented childhood memories of physical and sexual abuse, “s’ouvre une veine, une saignée” (Jurquet 1997, 13). The act of remembering, this implies, is experienced as a bodily injury; it means re-opening wounds that have superficially closed, restaging the wounds of the past in the present with no suggestion of healing. “Writing wounds”: not only writing the wounds of the past, but reliving those wounds in the present, wounds that refuse assimilation

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into a smooth, coherent narrative. Like a bodily wound that resists healing, the wound of trauma breaks through the very skin of the mind and of memory, creating an injury that cannot be sewn up.

The Wound: The Body and the Psyche In describing trauma in terms of a bodily wound, I am drawing both on the etymology of the word “trauma” and on a tradition that began in the nineteenth century to equate bodily and psychological trauma. The word “trauma”, derived from the Greek word for a bodily wound, originally referred exclusively to bodily injury: according to Allan Young, it first appeared in an English dictionary in 1656, meaning “belonging to wounds or the cure of wounds” (1995, 13). In the nineteenth century, when the psychological effects of bodily traumas such as “railway spine” were identified, “trauma” came also to refer to the psychic wound engendered by bodily trauma. The word “trauma” was subsequently used – by the likes of Jean-Marie Charcot, Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet, Morton Prince and Sigmund Freud – to describe “the wounding of the mind brought about by sudden, unexpected, emotional shock” (Leys 2000, 4), an injury of the psyche, rather than the body. This psychic wound was initially seen to be analogous to a bodily wounding: a shock to the nervous system comparable with surgical shock (Young 1995, 21). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud uses a model of the body and of bodily wounding as a means to describe the mind’s response to trauma. Freud focuses on what he calls Pcpt.-Cs, the perceptual system of consciousness, which, he claims, “must lie on the borderline between outside and inside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems” (Freud [1920] 1981, 18:24). Here Freud figures the mind in the shape of the body, the system of consciousness acting as a skin that offers a point of contact between interior and exterior and, like skin, receives stimuli from outside. This surface layer filters through some stimuli and works like a “protective shield” to prevent others from entering (27). This anatomical model of the mind enables Freud to define psychological trauma in terms of bodily wounding, as a break in the protective surface of the mind that may be likened to the rupture of the skin. Freud describes the traumatic neuroses as “a consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli”

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(31): in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, psychological trauma is described as a psychic equivalent of a bodily wound. As Cathy Caruth points out, however, Freud’s model of psychological trauma differs from his conception of bodily wounding. Freud suggests that the mind defends itself against wounding from outside by preparing itself in advance and that “the difference between systems that are unprepared and systems that are well prepared […] may be a decisive factor in determining” whether or not an experience can break through the defensive layers of the psyche, although, as we might expect, “where the trauma exceeds a certain limit this factor will no doubt cease to carry weight” (Freud [1920] 1981, 18:31-32). In broad terms, an event is lived as traumatic only if the mind cannot prepare for it sufficiently in advance, whether because it is unexpected or because it exceeds the mind’s pre-emptive attempts to deal with it. Caruth observes that Freud’s “emphasis is on time rather than on quantity, which ultimately, it could then be argued, marks the difference between the nature of bodily and mental barriers”, between bodily and psychic wounding (Caruth 1996, 132n. 7). Freud’s essay both sets up a model of the psyche based on that of the body and simultaneously calls this model into question: the wound of the mind, he seems to claim, both is and, crucially, is not, like the wound of the body. The introduction to Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience is entitled “The Wound and the Voice”: like Freud, Caruth begins her theorization of trauma with the image of a bodily wound. And, again like Freud, Caruth moves between bodily and psychological wounding without clearly differentiating them, despite her clear assertion that “the wound of the mind […] is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event” (1996, 4). This may be seen in her analysis of Tasso’s story of Tancred and Clorinda, a story Freud refers to in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to illustrate his theory of traumatic repetition and which he summarizes as follows: Tancred […] unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest [….] He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (Freud [1920] 1981, 18:22)

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Caruth draws from Freud’s summary her notion of trauma as the story of a “wound that cries out” – the story, one might add, of Clorinda’s blood and voice streaming out of the tree. In a footnote, Caruth observes that “the story of the movement from the original wounding of Clorinda to the wounding of the tree can also be read as the story of the emergence of trauma from its bodily referent to its psychic extension”, so that she seems to see the blow to the tree as a figure of psychic, rather than bodily, trauma (1996, 116n. 8). Yet this could be read differently. Given that blood streams from its cut, the tree could equally stand in for Clorinda’s body, wounded by Tancred’s unwitting blow. Clorinda’s cry responds to her own bodily injury, not to a wound of the mind. Caruth, however, reads Clorinda’s words not only as an articulation of her own bodily pain, but also as the verbalization of Tancred’s own unspoken traumatic loss; that is, of a psychic injury (8). The trajectory Caruth traces from the wound of the body to that of the mind is, then, more complex than it first seems, as the expression of psychic trauma seems to be bound up in words describing bodily pain.2 In Caruth’s work, as in Freud’s, the wound of trauma seems both distinct from and yet inextricably bound up in that of the body: to describe the wound of the mind, for Caruth as for Freud, curiously seems to mean reinvoking the wound of the body. In a footnote, Caruth observes that “it would be interesting to pursue the complexity of the relation between mind and body as it might be rethought through the problem of trauma” (1996, 132n. 7). Yet Caruth does not pursue the relation between mind and body either in the experience of trauma or in attempts to define it. She ignores questions which seem to me to be crucial to our understanding both of psychological trauma and of the forms we use to represent it. How does psychological trauma call for us to rethink the relation between the mind and the body? And why should it be necessary to theorize psychic trauma through the body? These questions form the basis of this book. To address them, I suggest we begin by interrogating the image of the wound, commonly invoked as a means to convey the intensity of a psychic pain that can neither be seen nor, often, be imagined. This is not to suggest that bodily pain is somehow more “speakable” than psychological pain; the point is that if we cannot 2

It is noteworthy that Tancred’s psychic wounds are figured through Clorinda’s bodily wounds. I explore how the psychological wounds of the self are given figurative form through the bodily wounds of others in chapter two.

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visualize or articulate physical pain, we can visualize a bodily wound. The bodily wound offers an image of bodily vulnerability; this image in turn points to the vulnerability and lack of self-containment of the traumatized psyche. The image of the wound is, however, as Caruth points out, inadequate as a means of describing psychological trauma. Where the bodily wound is fixed and visible, the psychic wound is invisible and cannot be located or “known” as such. To explore the writing of psychic wounds, I move beyond the figure of the bodily wound to trace different, more complex bodily figures that point to psychic trauma in literary texts and in theoretical writings on trauma. This, I suggest, means learning to “read the body”, to interpret bodily images and figures.

Reading the Body in Contemporary French women’s “Lifewriting” There is no single category of “French women’s life-writing since 1968”. The writers whose texts I analyse in this book – Cardinal, Cixous, Jurquet, Chawaf, Kofman and Delbo – have little in common with each other: the differences between, for example, Cixous’s lush descriptions and Kofman’s spare, lucid prose are far more striking than the similarities. The texts I analyse do however share some common features: they all point beyond themselves to traumatic episodes in the life of the writer and self-consciously draw on literary figures and tropes as a means to represent trauma. These texts feature different traumatic experiences – premature parental death, physical or sexual abuse, imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps – and enact different types of writing, from Cixous’s and Chawaf’s sensual, almost visceral style, to Jurquet’s fragmentary, discontinuous narrative. Can these texts be linked under the umbrella term of “narratives of trauma”? The question as to whether or not different traumatic experiences provoke different responses is contested within clinical writings on trauma. Bessel A. van der Kolk has suggested that trauma overwhelms the psyche to the extent that individual differences are erased: “the human response to overwhelming and uncontrollable life events is remarkably consistent” (1987, 2). Yet even if trauma provokes a uniform response, differences emerge in the

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ways in which trauma is put into words and into a life story, depending not only on the nature of the traumatic experience but also on the context in which that experience is recounted. The texts I analyse recount different sorts of traumatic experience in different literary forms: in autobiographical novels, in life stories, in texts that move beyond the individual to make space for other voices, other viewpoints. These texts, which constitute diverse attempts to inscribe in writing the wounds of the psyche, tell different stories, or nonstories, of trauma. What links these texts in my analysis is not so much the common ground between them as a “mode of reading”, a reading that draws out bodily images and figures as a means to pinpoint a different “story of trauma”. Since the early 1970s, French women’s writing has been associated with a writing of the body: Cixous’s notion of écriture feminine, for example, is bound up with the possibility of writing in and through the body (Cixous 1975, 39). In Cixous’s lyrical descriptions of écriture feminine, this bodily writing is perhaps more accurately described as a libidinal writing, a writing that goes through the body and takes on the body’s rhythms and pulses. My emphasis on “writing of the body” is somewhat different, in that I do not focus on how to write through the body: instead I explore how to read the bodily images deployed as a means to articulate invisible psychic wounds. These images, even as they seem to offer a means of articulating psychic trauma, also serve to highlight the impossibility of narrating trauma as a story and leaving it in the past (tense). In other words, the bodily figures may be seen to point not to an alternative story of trauma, but to the limits of any narrative of trauma: they point to what otherwise remains unspoken within the “story” of trauma. There is, however, I argue, no single “story of trauma”, and, correspondingly, no single way of reading these texts. Instead, I chart a sequence of disparate and disrupted narratives of trauma that remain incomplete, invaded by images of a past that lingers into the present and that festers, like wounds, keeping open the vexed question of the relation between traumatic experience and writing.

Reading the Story of Trauma I begin my readings with Marie Cardinal’s Les Mots pour le dire and Autrement dit. This chapter outlines my approach to the relation

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between body and psyche by analysing the hysterical female body in Freud’s writing on hysteria – which forms the basis of later theories of trauma – and in Marie Cardinal’s literary accounts of hysteria and psychoanalysis. Freud’s and Cardinal’s texts show psychic trauma that resists articulation is “articulated” through bodily symptoms, symptoms that disappear when the psychological wounds can be assimilated into a coherent narrative. By focusing on the hysterical female body, a blind spot in Freud’s account of hysteria, I show that the relation between body and psyche in narratives of trauma is more complex than has been suggested. I argue that the narrativization of the past does not simply dispel bodily symptoms: rather, the attempt to tell a story of trauma itself means trying to find words to give voice to the (female) body. This creates a very different kind of “case history”, as I show. My second chapter, “ ‘Writing Through the Body’ : The Loss of the Father in the Fiction of Hélène Cixous”, goes further in rethinking the relation between bodily and psychic wounding as it is articulated in the work of Freud and Caruth through a detailed discussion of Hélène Cixous’s first novel Dedans and her short autobiographical text “Stigmata”. I move beyond other critical writing on Cixous to reconsider what “writing (through) the body” means in Cixous’s autobiographical fiction and argue that Cixous’s writing mobilizes figures of bodily wounding and openings as a means to delve into the psyche and into the loss of the past. Through this rereading of Cixous’s texts, I show that writing trauma may itself be a form of stigmata, both opening wounds and bearing imprints of wounding, commemorating yet also keeping open the childhood loss in the present. In chapter three, I look at the autobiographical fiction of Béatrice de Jurquet to explore how childhood sexual abuse is inscribed in autobiographical narrative. I redefine Caruth’s image of the “wound” as an image of spatial and temporal rupture of the mind and of memory, a rupture figured in Jurquet’s writing by recurring images of imbalance and falling. These images also may be seen to point to an imbalance or disjunction between traumatic experience and writing: Jurquet’s texts suggest that text and lived experience can come together only through slippage, that is, where they seem to pull apart from each other. Jurquet’s novels demand that we in turn learn to read through this slippage, not to find a solid foothold from which to interpret narratives of sexual abuse, but to discover how the act of

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interpretation is itself dislocated and destabilized by the writing of abuse. Part One is concerned with narratives of individual traumatic experience, exploring how personal and individual trauma – particularly in the context of familial relationships – is inscribed in autobiographical fiction. The second part of the book, dealing with texts by Chawaf, Kofman and Delbo, analyses traumatic narratives explicitly rooted in the wider social context of the Second World War and the Holocaust. My last three chapters open up questions about testimony, about how an individual text can bear witness to collective or public trauma, questions that are played out against the backdrop of the individual suffering and public devastation of World War II and the Holocaust. My analysis of Chantal Chawaf’s autobiographical novel Le Manteau noir, a text about a woman’s experience of loss in Occupied Paris, marks my shift into discussion of the relation between individual and collective trauma in the wake of World War II. Here I read Le Manteau noir alongside Freud’s and Caruth’s writings on survival and creativity to address the question of what it means to survive and to bear witness. Testimony has become a crucial issue in contemporary studies of trauma precisely in the context of the Holocaust and of World War II and Chawaf’s novel may be seen to rethink what kinds of testimony to shared and individual loss can be possible. I argue that testimony is not a straightforward narrative of the past, but a creative act: in Chawaf’s text, it means writing “inside out”, beginning with the very interior of the self before moving outwards to a vision of historical atrocities. Testimony to history, then, begins by delving into the self and specifically into the inside of the body, into one’s own bodily survival. Drawing on the work of Caruth and of Shoshana Felman, I contend that testimony constitutes a kind of “double telling”, of life and also of death: to bear witness to others’ deaths, one must first affirm one’s own survival. In chapter six, I focus on Sarah Kofman’s autobiographical writings, in order to analyse how individual loss and traumatic experience can be recounted in a context of massive trauma. I show how in Kofman’s texts, the story of individual trauma is inextricably bound up in the missing story of other people’s suffering, in the first instance that of Kofman’s own father, killed in Auschwitz, but also of the many others killed during the Holocaust. I argue that Kofman’s writings set up a different model of “autobiography”, in which one life

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story may be used to gesture towards others, in which the other’s suffering is figured as the limits of the story of the self. The sixth chapter deals with the possibility, or impossibility, of bearing witness to collective trauma in a literary text through detailed analysis of Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy, Auschwitz et après. In this trilogy, Delbo attempts to describe her own and her comrades’ experiences of incarceration in Nazi concentration camps, the hideous deaths of many of her comrades, and the others’ experiences of survival and return to France after the war. I use the trope of “ghostwriting” as a means to explore the ethical and practical problems of her aim to “speak for all”: for herself, for the comrades who died in camps and for the others who survived. Focusing particularly on the third text in the trilogy, Mesure de nos jours, I argue that in attempting to bear witness to collective experiences, Delbo’s writing does not “speak for all”, but instead shows the impossibility of its own endeavour, remaining split by the conflict between the individual and the collective. This split, I show, is figured linguistically in Delbo’s text in the disjunction between “je” and “nous” that points up the impossibility of an ethical collective testimony. It is however, I suggest, precisely at the points where the individual and the collective disrupt each other that the possibility of an ethical testimony begins to emerge, paradoxically, where it seems to fail. Although it deals with issues specific to the experience of imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, this chapter also raises questions at the very crux of my project: that is, how to respond to and analyse texts that seem to refuse, yet demand, explanation and interpretation. To interpret narratives of trauma is to be addressed by a wound telling an incomprehensible story that, like the blood oozing out of Clorinda’s wound, points up the limits of story-telling. In this book I do not tell one “story of trauma”, but draw out a series of fragmentary stories that converge and diverge, remaining incomplete and stammering to articulate a “truth” that can never be entirely “available”.

Hysterical Heroines: From “Dora” to Marie Cardinal’s Les Mots pour le dire and Autrement dit When his patients came into possession of their own stories, Freud believed, they would not have to speak across the body. Yet Freud neglected to ask how a woman comes into possession of her own story, becomes a subject, when even narrative convention assigns her the place of an object of desire. How does an object tell a story? (Kahane [1985] 1990, 21)

In Freud’s accounts of hysteria, hysterics do not tell their own stories, but perform their unspoken narratives through or across the body in the form of somatic symptoms. Freud claims that these bodily symptoms point back to past experiences of psychological wounding that resist narrative assimilation and instead are imprinted on the body and subsequently restaged repeatedly through bodily performances. Hysterics, Freud insists, cannot give full and coherent accounts of their lives; instead, they “speak across the body”, to borrow Claire Kahane’s phrase from my epigraph. Through analysis, Freud suggests, the wordless bodily symptoms can be turned into a complete, coherent narrative; the hysteric can produce an “intelligible, consistent, and unbroken” life-story ([1905] 1981, 7:18). This would seem to be the case for the narrator of Marie Cardinal’s Les Mots pour le dire (1975), the text that is my point of focus in this chapter. Les Mots pour le dire offers a first person account of a woman’s incessant, hysterical menstrual bleeding, her psychoanalytic treatment and her gradual recovery. As she finds the words in which to describe the psychological wounds of the past, her somatic symptoms cease. Yet where Freud seems to take for granted the possibility of deciphering bodily symptoms and of establishing a fixed relation between body and psyche, in Les Mots pour le dire the relation between psychological wound and bodily symptom is interrogated more

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critically. Moreover, where Freud seems to take for granted the possibility of transforming somatic symptoms into a narrative of past suffering, Cardinal’s text explores the difficulties inherent in assimilating bodily and psychic angst into a story within the analytic framework. It is this relation between body, psyche and narrative in Cardinal’s writing that is the subject of this chapter. I begin my analysis of Cardinal’s texts by reading Freud’s writing on hysteria and, more specifically, his case history of “Dora”, entitled “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”.3 If “Dora’s case” has, as Carolyn Durham observes, become “the centrepiece for rethinking the interaction of narration, feminism and psychoanalysis in the United States and in France”, we can only ever read Freud’s version of events, not Dora’s (1992, 210-211). Unlike Dora, the narrator of Les Mots pour le dire succeeds through psychoanalysis in telling her story in her own words: Les Mots pour le dire, unlike Freud’s case studies, is told from the point of view of the analysand, rather than the analyst, from the perspective of the female patient rather than the male doctor. The narrator’s trajectory mirrors that of Cardinal herself, who has described her mental illness and excessive uterine bleeding extensively in the autobiographical text written in collaboration with Annie Leclerc, Autrement dit (1977). Like her fictional protagonist, Cardinal takes control of her own life-story, which she rewrites compulsively in explicitly autobiographical texts like Cet été-là and Au pays de mes racines and in texts described as novels, such as La Clé sur la porte, Amour/Amours and Les Mots pour le dire. Her writing explores the relation between gender, writing and the body, a relation figured in Les Mots pour le dire and Autrement dit by a bleeding female body that resists interpretation and narrativization. In the discussion that follows, I show how Cardinal’s texts return repeatedly to the sexed female body that Freudian psychoanalysis ignores and thus may be read to bring out the gaps and blind spots in Freud’s writings on hysteria. Cardinal develops a very different kind of “case history”, told from the woman’s perspective and focusing on female embodiment and sexuality.

3

The patient Freud called “Dora” was in fact named Ida Bauer; as my analysis deals with the character of the patient as presented in Freud’s narrative, rather than a “reallife” woman, I retain the name “Dora”.

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In Dora’s Case: Freud’s Narrative of Hysteria The word “hysteria” is derived from hystera, the Greek word for the uterus, marking a belief dating back to Ancient Egypt that bodily disorders experienced by women – convulsions, breathing difficulties, inexplicable pains – were caused by the womb wandering through the body, often as a result of sexual dissatisfaction (Bronfen 1998, 105-6). Explanations of hysteria find their roots in a misapprehension of the female body and, more specifically, of its reproductive powers (the womb) and its sexual desires. Freud’s treatment of hysterics, however, follows the work of Jean-Marie Charcot at the Salpêtrière in moving away from a bodily explanation of hysteria (Showalter 1999, 30). Yet where Charcot defined hysteria as a bodily disorder caused by a traumatic wound in the central nervous system, Freud associates hysteria with an experience of psychological trauma. This trauma, Freud emphasizes, cannot be assimilated or retained by the mind, but is relived repeatedly through somatic symptoms. These symptoms are, he claims, directly linked to the original traumatic experience: “The operation of psychical traumas […] unambiguously determine[s] the nature of the symptoms that arise” ([1893] 1981, 3:31, emphasis mine). The aim of psychoanalysis is, then, to read the “unambiguous” imprints of psychic disorder on the body in order to identify those originary traumatic experiences. In the various short case histories included in the Studies on Hysteria, Freud and Breuer endeavour to interpret their patients’ bodily symptoms, which seem to disappear as their underlying psychic causes are uncovered and a coherent lifestory can be established. Freud’s ability to “read” the body is, however, called into question by his treatment of “Dora”, an eighteen year-old suffering from various bodily symptoms including a cough, migraines and depression. Freud treated Dora in the last three months of 1900. It emerged that Dora’s father, involved in a long-standing affair with a married family friend, Frau K., was keen that Dora should in turn enter into a liaison with Frau K.’s husband in a form of exchange. In analysis, Dora came to remember different occasions in which Herr K. had attempted to seduce her, whereupon Freud concluded that she had repressed these memories in order to block out her own disavowed desire for Herr. K. Dora rejected this version of events and broke off

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the analysis before her story could be completed, whilst Freud published the incomplete case history several years later, in 1905. In this case history, he identifies two principal errors in his work with Dora: a disregard for the effects of transference between analyst and analysand and a failure to recognize the strength of Dora’s feelings not for Herr K., but for his wife. Freud admits: The longer the interval of time that separates me from the end of this analysis, the more probable it seems to me that the fault of my technique lay in this omission: I failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K. was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life. ([1905] 1981, 7:120, n. 1)

Freud thus acknowledges, belatedly, that during the analysis he misread Dora’s desiring gaze at Frau K.’s body: Dora would, he realizes in retrospect, “praise her [Frau K.’s] ‘adorable white body’ in accents more appropriate to a lover than to a defeated rival” (61). Whereas Peter Brooks suggests that “Dora’s suffering body remains enigmatic to Freud and one may be forced to the conclusion that the enigma of her body is very much what her story is about, for both patient and analyst” (1993, 243), I would suggest that it is not only her body, but also her desire – her desiring gaze at another female body – that poses an enigma to Freud’s thought. Dora’s case pivots around her confusion regarding her own sexuality and her sexed body, a confusion that Freud self-confessedly identifies only when it is too late, when he can no longer “inform the patient” of her secret love directly. It is precisely because Freud’s failure with Dora is linked to his inability to understand female desire and the female body that Dora’s case has become the subject of feminist critique: as Kahane notes, “The case of Dora […] has pushed psychoanalysis from the consulting room into an ideological arena where it must engage in a dialogue with feminism” (1990, 31). As a consequence of her refusal of Freud’s analysis and his narrative of events, the figure of Dora has become a “cult heroine of literary criticism, especially feminist criticism”, “the saint in the pantheon of feminist martyrs” (Showalter 1997, 57). Feminist critics have focused on “Dora’s case” as a means to draw out the gendered limits of Freudian theory and analysis, to highlight the blind spots in Freud’s theory (Moi [1985] 1990, Ramas [1985] 1990 and Rose [1985] 1990). It was in France, however, in the years following 1968,

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that Dora was cast as a revolutionary heroine whose rejection of Freud could be seen to offer a defiant critique of social structures predicated on the silencing of women. Hélène Cixous refers to Dora as “celle qui résiste au système, celle qui ne peut pas supporter que la Famille et la société soient fondées sur le corps des femmes, sur des corps méprisés, rejetés” (Cixous and Clément 1975, 282-3). For Cixous, Dora, like the other hysterics whose cases are recounted in Freud’s texts, does not merely refuse the positioning of the female body in Freudian thought, but also challenges and destabilizes Freud’s theory through her bodily speech: Elles ont habité furieusement ces corps somptueux: admirables hystériques qui ont fait subir à Freud tant de voluptueux et inavouables moments, bombardant sa statue mosaïque de leurs charnels et passionnés mots-de-corps [….] Celles qui en un seul mot du corps ont inscrit l’immense vertige d’une histoire détachée comme une flèche de toute l’histoire des hommes. (Cixous and Clément 1975, 176)

For Cixous, the hysteric’s silence represents a rejection of masculine order and discourse translated into a language of the body, an excessive bodily language that can break through the order of Freudian theory and, by extension, “men’s history”. In Cixous’s writing, hysteria is implicitly linked with écriture féminine; her exhortation for women to write (with) the body in “Sorties” is accompanied by adulation of the hysterics and their bodily language, by a reclaiming of “a hysterical mother tongue” (Evans 1991, 215). Identifying herself with the hysterics – “mes sœurs” – and more specifically with Dora – she writes that “je suis ce que Dora aurait été, si l’histoire des femmes avait commencé”– Cixous claims to speak and write from the position of a hysteric (Cixous and Clément 1975, 184). She is not alone: Noel Evans describes a meeting of the MLF – the Mouvement de libération des femmes – held in mid-May 1972, in which the women began to chant a phrase that, Evans notes, would become a “feminist battle-cry”: “Nous sommes toutes des hystériques!” (Evans 1991, 200). In what Evans calls “the hysterical phase of French feminism” (1991, 203), the women of the MLF reinterpreted the hysteric’s pathological symptoms as a form of bodily protest, a bodily language that could become the very source of a critique of patriarchal structures silencing women. This celebration of hysteria is, however, called into question by Catherine Clément in her exchange with Cixous in La Jeune née.

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Clément asserts, “Écoute, tu aimes bien Dora, mais à moi, elle ne m’est jamais apparue comme un personnage révolutionnaire”; “ce qu’elle a cassé était strictement individual et limité” (Cixous and Clément 1975, 289). This seems to be confirmed by Felix Deutsch’s account of Dora’s later life and death: continually afflicted with constipation and a cough, she also found sexual relations with her husband distasteful and complained constantly (Deutsch [1985] 1990). If Dora’s rejection of Freud is neither liberating nor curative, Cixous’s idolization of Dora seems misplaced, as Toril Moi points out: Hysteria is not, pace Hélène Cixous, the incarnation of the revolt of women forced to silence but rather a declaration of defeat, the realization that there is no other way out. Hysteria is, as Catherine Clément perceives, a cry for help when defeat becomes real, when the woman sees that she is efficiently gagged and chained to her feminine role. (Moi [1985] 1990, 192)

For Moi and Clément, the hysteric’s somatic symptoms reveal her inability to speak, her powerlessness, rather than an act of rebellion. This image of the hysteric as “chained to her feminine role” finds echoes in the early pages of Cardinal’s Les Mots pour le dire, which tells a very different story of hysteria from that offered by Cixous. At the beginning of Les Mots pour le dire, the narrator is bleeding excessively and crouched in a corner of the bathroom unable to leave the house, let alone express herself or write. In Cardinal’s text hysterical symptoms do not offer an alternative form of (feminine) language, but point back to unspoken, often unknown traumatic experiences of the past. Les Mots pour le dire thus seems to anticipate a different model of hysteria, one which was developed during the late 1980s and 1990s by feminist psychiatrists like Judith Herman, and which locates the origins of hysteria in past experiences of trauma (see Herman [1992] 1994, 7-32). Where studies of trauma had long been confined to cases of combat neurosis, feminists militated so that hysterical symptoms would be recognized as signs of psychological trauma and be taken seriously (see Haaken 1998). This traumatic model of hysteria is, as we shall see below, more appropriate than Cixous’s celebration of hysteria in relation to Les Mots pour le dire. Where Cixous attempts to reclaim hysteria as empowering for women, Cardinal’s text draws links between hysteria and psychological wounding; in Les Mots pour le dire, hysteria compels the narrator to be silent rather than enabling her to speak. Yet the narrator succeeds, through analysis, in constructing a narrative of her past, the narrative

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we are reading in the form of the text itself. The narrator of Les Mots pour le dire, unlike Dora, goes through a prolonged period of psychoanalytic treatment and can thus become “the appropriator of her own history, the teller of her own story” (Marcus [1985] 1990, 85). Cardinal’s text does, however, have one important point in common with Cixous’s writing on hysteria: both return repeatedly to the figure of the female body. Les Mots pour le dire may be seen to show how Freudian psychoanalysis remains blind to the sexed female body; as I have argued in relation to Dora’s case, the female body points up the blind spots in psychoanalytic narratives of hysteria. Yet where Freud’s account of Dora’s case seems to disregard the female body, Cardinal’s text seeks instead to focus on that body and how it can be written and read. Cardinal’s work, I suggest, renegotiates the relation between hysteria, feminism and psychoanalysis through its emphasis on the bleeding, sexual female body that both resists and demands articulation, “les mots pour le dire”.

The Story of Hysteria According to the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, whose readings of Les Mots pour le dire are recorded in a preface and afterword to the first edition of the English translation of the text, Cardinal’s novel is “the best account of psychoanalysis as seen and experienced by the patient” (Bettelheim 1984, 8). Unlike Dora, the narrator of Les Mots emerges from analysis able to tell her own story: where feminists have filled in the gaps in Dora’s story, attempted to retell Freud’s version of events from Dora’s viewpoint, Cardinal’s female narrator can speak for herself. Her analyst, who is rarely given voice in the text, remains a shadowy, unsubstantial figure in her narrative. It is, then, all the more curious that the first edition of the text in English should be framed by Bettelheim’s analysis, which seems both to replace the analyst that the novel has written out and to pre-empt critical responses to the text: Bettelheim’s exegesis of Les Mots pour le dire has shaped most subsequent readings of the text in the United States and in Britain. This is somewhat surprising given that his interpretation risks limiting Cardinal’s novel, which is not simply an account of psychoanalytic treatment from the perspective of the analysand, but an inventive narration of a woman’s life. Cardinal

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herself asserts that “je n’avais pas écrit un livre sur la psychanalyse. J’avais écrit l’histoire d’une femme dans laquelle la psychanalyse a une grande importance” (Cardinal 1977, 29). Les Mots pour le dire is not a “document sur la psychanalyse” (Cardinal 1977, 29); does not aim to recount the workings of the analytic encounter in the manner of a Freudian case history. Instead, this novel narrates one woman’s quest to come to terms with her life, that depends not only on her experience of psychoanalysis but also on her capacity to reinvent herself and her own sexualized bodily identity, as we shall see. The most striking image from the very beginning of Les Mots pour le dire is that of a woman, bleeding incessantly and profusely, desperate for her menstrual flow to be stopped. When she begins, through the framework of her analytic sessions, to remember differently her childhood in Algeria, and particularly her relationship with her mother, the bleeding does stop; as in Freud’s model, the somatic symptoms that replaced the missing narrative memory of her past cease when that memory can be evoked and recounted. Certainly the narrator regards her uncontrollable bleeding as an outlet for unresolved psychic conflict, as she notes that the body needs such “liquides chaudes […] pour apaiser sa souffrance ou son désir” (198). If we are to accept Freud’s theory that the somatic symptoms are unambiguously linked to an original psychic trauma, the blood may be seen as more than an outlet: a clue, perhaps, to the nature of the original trauma. In the sequel to Les Mots pour le dire, Autrement dit, a collaborative work involving Cardinal and another writer, Annie Leclerc, Leclerc links menstrual bleeding to female identity, stating that “Je ne suis femme qu’à condition d’avoir mes règles” (Cardinal 1977, 41). Similarly in Les Mots pour le dire the narrator’s menstrual periods may be seen to mark her gendered identity; by extension, her excessive bleeding must show her difficulty in assuming this identity. If, as Toril Moi claims, hysteria constitutes a woman’s response to being “chained to her feminine role”, here the narrator’s incessant menstrual bleeding seems to highlight her overwhelming sense of the demands of her gender, her sense of being trapped by her own body. Yet what precisely is this trap? What causes the narrator to have such an extreme bodily response? Les Mots pour le dire seems to link the narrator’s troubled relation with her own body firstly with guilt and secondly with fear. Guilt and shame are perhaps most evident early in the analytic process when the narrator recalls her first experiences of her own sexuality. She recalls

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guilty masturbation (104) and her first sexual experience as a teenager in the family home, which again induced guilt at having gone against her mother’s moral code, even as it gave her a sense of power, linked with having acted on her own desires regardless of social norms (4950). Her ambivalent attitude towards her own sexuality, her own sexed body, is bound up in her undecided position in relation to authority and to social convention. On the one hand, she is eager to affirm her own desires, to disregard social expectation; on the other, this will to rebel induces involuntary guilt staged via the (later) excessive bleeding. In this text, blood is associated with guilt and transgression of social norms: the narrator bleeds after her first sexual experience and immediately rises to wash the sheets, presumably to hide the evidence (49). Her later excessive bleeding is equally furtive: she bandages herself up in order to prevent the blood from seeping through her clothes and becoming visible, a tangible sign of her difference, her guilt, her illness. The incessant bleeding becomes the evidence of transgression of social expectation: although menstrual bleeding is, as the child’s mother comments, a “fonction naturelle” (115) it is also to be kept hidden. The excessive bleeding cannot, however, be hidden: it spills out and stains chairs, beds, any surface where the narrator sits down. In the narrator’s own words, “J’avais taché tant de fauteuils, tant de chaises, tant de divans” and so on, that “je ne pouvais plus vivre avec les autres” (10). The blood leaves indelible marks of her difference, of her non-conformity to social expectation. The result of this is madness, which she describes in similar terms to menstrual bleeding: “la folie, dont le flot grossissant romprait un jour les digues et déborderait” (14). The imagery here is striking: her madness, like her bleeding, cannot be contained, but instead risks overflowing and becoming perceptible. Indeed, “la chose”, the term she uses to describe her madness, her inability to function within society, is shown to be bound up in her excessive bleeding. What however are the causes of this madness? The narrator traces it back to her own body, which is not only guilty of socially unapproved desires, but is also and more troublingly vulnerable to attack from outside. Recounting in analysis a nightmare in which she is threatened by rape enables her to remember a forgotten episode when she was ten years old and a man grabbed her and inserted his finger underneath her underwear and into her vagina, before her nanny scared him off.

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Since her childhood, the narrator realizes, she has been terrified, not only of rape but also of her own body: J’ai commencé à penser comme je ne l’avais jamais fait à ce que c’était que d’être une femme. J’ai pensé à nos corps, le mien, celui de ma mère, celui des autres. Toutes pareilles, toutes trouées. J’appartenais à cette gigantesque horde d’êtres percés, livrés aux envahisseurs. Rien ne protège mon trou [….] Même pas un mot pour le protéger. (247)

Her reference to her mother’s body here is telling: she locates her anxiety not in her mother’s rejection, but in their shared experience of a “holed”, vulnerable female body. Her ambivalence towards her mother becomes clearer at this point: she finds proximity with her mother threatening not only because her mother once tried to destroy her before she was even born but also because her mother’s troubled relationship with her body reflects back her own fraught sense of her bodily identity. Her mother has transmitted to her a fear of her own body – “une peur […] enseignée aux femmes par les autres femmes” (248) – that leaves her in constant, albeit unconscious, dread of being violated. “Être une femme”, she now believes, is to have a body that can be penetrated, raped; that cannot preserve intact its own boundaries. The female body’s defencelessness against outside attack is aggravated by the breaking of the hymen, the protective membrane: the narrator claims that “Jamais je n’avais pensé à la protection que constituait l’hymen, au vide qui se créeait quand la fine membrane cédait en saignant […] livrant désormais passage à n’importe quoi” (248). The first sexual encounter, in which the hymen is broken (the narrator does not mention the possibility that it might be broken in other ways), leaves the woman more vulnerable, opening up her body to unwanted penetration. Here guilt and fear come together: the narrator fears that her body will be invaded, yet somehow believes that it is because she has been sexually active that this violent penetration is possible. Although the narrator only registers her own bodily insecurity belatedly through the analysis, her body has already set up its own defence mechanisms. Early in her analysis, the narrator asks: “Pourquoi mon corps vieillit-il? Pourquoi fabrique-t-il des liquides et des matières puantes? Pourquoi ma sueur, ma crotte, ma pisse?” (3334). If the narrator is repulsed by her bodily excretions – by sweat, excrement, urine, blood – nonetheless she depends upon them for selfprotection, to allow her to conceal herself inside her body:

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Pour mieux me cacher j’avais bouché toutes les issues [….] Pour mieux obstruer ces orifices mon corps fabriquait en abondance les matières adéquates dont certaines s’épaissaient au point de ne plus passer, de faire bloc, dont d’autres au contraire s’écoulaient sans cesse, interdisant l’entrée à quoi que ce soit. (10)

Responding to her need to block herself off from the outside world, her bodily excretions either solidify to the extent that they cannot be expelled from the body or they flow continuously, tamping up her orifices, becoming uncontrollable (like her excessive menstrual bleeding). The narrator seems terrified by the potential loss of her own bodily integrity; by the threat of other people. It is only through analysis that the narrator can gradually begin to take control over her body (“Je faisais de mon corps ce que je voulais, il m’obéissait” (155)) and can come to terms with her bodily functions, with urine, sweat, and, particularly, with her anus and with excrement (233). Yet she continues to be terrified by her vagina, repeatedly referred to as an unprotected orifice. This points back to her excessive bleeding, which worked to block up that orifice; the text links her bleeding with her hitherto unconscious and thus unspoken fear of her own bodily vulnerability. Rather than confronting this fear directly, her bleeding constituted a somatic defence, an attempt to protect herself from external penetration through closing up the bodily orifices that leave her vulnerable. Yet clearly, the bleeding also marked another loss of control over her bodily boundaries: the narrator asks rhetorically, “Comment, en effet, ne pas être effrayée par ces pertes constantes? Quelle femme ne serait pas affolée à voir comme ça couler sa sève?” (10) The blood spills out of the body beyond her conscious control, highlighting her inability to police her own bodily integrity and boundaries. The narrator seeks an alternative solution to her bodily vulnerability, first through the analytic sessions and later through her writing. As she becomes aware of her fear of her sexed body, the narrator also realizes that she is unable to work out what this means within the frame of her sessions with the psychoanalyst: “Pour la première fois, cette trouvaille me laissait perplexe. Je la sentais étrangère au traitement analytique [….] Il fallait que je m’en aille” (249). She begins to visit the analyst less frequently and eventually terminates her analysis altogether, exploring what it means to be a woman and to

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have a female body outside the frame of psychoanalysis.4 She points out: “Ce serait hors de l’impasse que je découvrirais le véritable sens de ma trouvaille” (249). “Hors de l’impasse”: outside the cul-de-sac in which the analyst’s consulting rooms are located, yet, equally, beyond the “impasse” that her analytic treatment has reached and from which she must escape in order to understand the vulnerability of her own body, her own status as a woman. She has come to a dead-end because her analysis offers her no way of moving beyond her recognition of her own bodily vulnerability, no means of asserting control over her own body. As the narrator becomes less dependent on her sessions with the psychoanalyst, she becomes increasingly aware of the socio-cultural context shaping and mediating her relation to her own body. A nightmare in which she is menaced by a snake shows her that she is not threatened by the male body, but by men’s power, a power that is conferred socially, rather than anatomically: Cette peur qui me paralysait, qui paralysait ma mère […] ce n’était pas la peur du phallus, du vit, du chibre, c’était la peur du pouvoir de l’homme. Suffisait de le partager ce pouvoir pour que la peur s’éloigne. (256)

If the male body is not intrinsically all-powerful, it follows that the vulnerability of the female body is itself a product of a particular social structure. The narrator’s recognition that her experience of her own body is mediated through the conditioning of a society dominated by men incites her towards politics, to find a way of dividing and thus challenging male power over women. She develops what she calls “la conscience de ma spécificité féminine” (252) outside her sessions with the doctor, symbolically moving beyond her analysis to a greater awareness of what it means to be a woman and, crucially, to critique the social structures that oppress women. The text leaves open the question as to whether or not psychoanalysis, which has so often been subject to attack by feminists, should be seen as one such structure. Hannah Lerman’s claim that (Freudian) psychoanalysis is “not clinically useful for women” (1986, 4

Whereas Dora terminates analysis prematurely, before she has become able to recount her own life story, Cardinal’s narrator ceases analysis in order to explore the gaps in the story that psychoanalytic treatment has enabled her to tell: Cardinal’s narrator leaves analysis empowered to tell her own story, whilst Dora’s departure marks her disempowerment.

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180) because it fails to take into account issues central to women’s lives, such as menstruation, seems on one level to be corroborated by the narrator’s experience of analysis in Les Mots pour le dire, as the narrator’s bleeding and her sexed female body are kept outside the limits of her analysis. Moreover at one stage in her analysis the narrator, speaking to her analyst, describes her analysis as “un système qui emprisonne les gens et dont vous êtes un des gardes-chiourme” (253). The text undermines this verdict, however, as the analyst replies that if the narrator is aware of the traps within the system then she is free to reinvent her own system: she is not, in reality, trapped. If the text highlights the gender blind-spots in the narrator’s psychoanalysis, a form of psychoanalysis based on techniques developed and outlined by Freud, it also shows analysis to be extremely “clinically useful” for her. In Autrement dit, Cardinal observes: Il m’est plusieurs fois arrivé d’entendre des “analystes féministes” attaquer Freud et me bombarder d’extraits de l’œuvre de ce “grand misogyne” [….] De là à en déduire que la psychanalyse n’est pas faite pour les femmes, il n’y a qu’un pas. Or j’ai découvert que j’étais une femme, ce que cela veut dire “être une femme”, grâce à l’analyse la plus freudienne qui soit. (1997, 13)

Like Cardinal herself, the narrator of Les Mots pour le dire, as we have seen, learns what it means to be a woman through analysis, yet it is only through supplementing that analysis by a move towards politics, implicitly, towards feminism, that her understanding of her female bodily identity is given meaning. The final chapter of the book, which consists of one single sentence: “Quelques jours plus tard c’était Mai 68” (279), hints at the narrator’s turn towards political awareness, pointing to the resurgence of feminism and of women’s liberation movements that occurred during and after the political upheaval of May 1968 in France. As Carolyn Durham notes, the short final chapter “guarantees that we will recall reading far less the story of the private analytic cure of one individual than the political narrative of the social transformation of the situation of women” (1992, 253). What Durham fails to observe is that in Les Mots the individual’s cure is itself bound up in, even dependent upon, the possibility of social change for women; more accurately, to find the words to articulate her own experience, the narrator has to open up her perspective to include the other women who have shared her social conditioning, in particular, her mother. If psychoanalysis provides her

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with the wherewithal to begin to give voice to her past and her hitherto unspoken fears and desires, it also somehow propels her beyond its limits, in a quest for other words, for other ways of expressing and defining her own identity. This quest, I would suggest, leads her not only towards feminism, but also towards writing, towards finding her own words: not through documenting her experiences, but through fiction.

The “Writing Cure” In the second year of her analytic treatment, the narrator of Les Mots pour le dire begins to write, without telling her analyst, although, she admits, “J’aurais dû en parler au docteur” (216). Her writing is differentiated sharply from her self-expression in analysis: Je ne pensais même pas que j’écrivais. Je prenais mon crayon, mon carnet, et je me laissais aller à divaguer. Pas comme sur le divan de l’impasse [….] J’allais où je voulais, je vivais des instants que je n’avais pas vécus mais que j’imaginais, je n’étais pas tenue par le carcan de la vérité comme avec le docteur. Je me sentais libre comme je ne l’avais jamais été. (206)

In analysis, she feels compelled to tell the truth as far as possible; in her own writing, she can reinvent herself beyond the limits of her own experience, drawing on her imagination to move beyond the boundaries of her past. At first she writes in secret, but she eventually shows her husband Jean-Pierre the pages that she has written. Fearful of his reaction, she tells herself that allowing him to read and analyse her writing is a proof of her madness (“C’était de la folie” (217)), because she has come to depend on writing as an outlet of selfexpression. Yet it is precisely when he reads her written words that Jean-Pierre stops treating her as “quelqu’un de malade” (217) and they can be reconciled. Her writing, one might adduce, is evidence not of madness, but of her continued recovery in analysis. This is confirmed when her first novel is accepted for publication, a step she identifies as a crucial turning-point in her life: Je t’ai tirée de là, ma vieille, je t’ai tirée de là! Cela tenait du miracle, du conte de fees, de la sorcellerie. Ma vie était entièrement transformée. Non seulement j’avais découvert le moyen de m’exprimer mais j’avais trouvé toute seule le chemin qui m’éloignait de ma

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famille, de mon milieu, me permettant ainsi de construire un univers qui m’était propre. (220)

If it is through analysis that she can find “le moyen de m’exprimer”, it is writing – carried out “toute seule” without the analyst’s intervention – that enables her to move beyond the constraints of her upbringing and rebuild her life. Writing offers the magic solution, the “sorcellerie”, that she had initially expected to find in analysis and did not (171). This does not mean that writing somehow replaces psychoanalysis; rather, she continues to depend on her sessions with the analyst even after the first book is published. If, as Carolyn Durham claims, “not speech but writing, not autobiography but fiction, finally allow the narrator of Les Mots pour le dire first to limit and then to leave analysis” (1992, 218), her fictional writing finds its roots in her successful analysis. This is also, according to Annie Leclerc, true of Cardinal herself. Like her narrator in Les Mots, Cardinal cites both psychoanalysis and writing as means of her “cure”, describing herself as “sauvée par la psychanalyse” (1977, 12) yet later claiming that “Mon premier livre a été l’aube de ma naissance, de ma guérison” (1977, 148). For Cardinal, analysis is not an ending, but a beginning, a period of gestation, in her words, “pour me mettre au monde” (1977, 50); its completion marks her rebirth, her birth to self-expression. In Autrement dit, Cardinal attests: “Je suis née à quarante ans sachant parler le français et capable de le lire” (1977, 99), as though hitherto she had been incapable of expressing herself in her native tongue. In the same text, Leclerc says of Cardinal: “Ne m’avait-elle pas dit ellemême qu’il avait fallu que le livre soit, que cela soit écrit, pour que l’analyse fût enfin, ce qu’il avait été à coup sûr, réussie” (Cardinal 1977, 211). For Cardinal, writing the story of her life and of her analysis is, according to Leclerc, not a supplement to her analysis, but its necessary conclusion, the means by which the analysis can come to an end. The book to which Leclerc refers is not, however, Cardinal’s first novel, Écoutez la mer, but Les Mots pour le dire, the story of her analysis: Leclerc contrasts “l’analyse, parole déployée, abandonnée au tumulte de l’obscurité et de la confusion” with “[Les] Mots pour le dire, écriture de l’analyse, tracé multiple mais sûr, dense mais clair, large mais bien tenu” (Cardinal 177, 211). As “l’écriture de l’analyse”, Les Mots pour le dire, she suggests, rewrites the experience of analysis; it may be read as the necessary supplement to

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Cardinal’s analysis in offering her the means to rethink her analysis and to find other forms of self-expression. If it is in Les Mots pour le dire that Cardinal begins to rewrite her analysis, it is, however, in the text she wrote in collaboration with Annie Leclerc, the text which is described on the blurb as a “prolongement” of Les Mots pour le dire, that she can go further in finding “other words”. In the final part of this chapter, I turn to Autrement dit to explore how Cardinal seeks ways of putting the female body and women’s corporeal experience into (other) words through her conversation with another woman, through a dialogue that rewrites and goes beyond the analytic encounter described in Les Mots pour le dire and thus offers a different kind of “case history”.

Rewriting the Female Body in Other Words The attempt in Autrement dit to write the female body and to map out a relation between gender, writing and the body is characteristic of contemporary French women’s writing. Hélène Cixous claims that masculine discourses have alienated women from their own bodies and calls for women to write in order to reclaim their bodies and their bodily identity: in her words, “en s’écrivant, la femme fera retour à ce corps qu’on lui a plus que confisqué” (1975, 43). She points out that “une femme bien réglée, normale” is perceived to be one who prevents her words and her uncontrolled desires to spurt out of her body and become known (Cixous 1975, 40). Annie Leclerc seems to reiterate this in Autrement dit when she says that “Les femmes répondent aux règles comme si c’était la règle générale de leur corps, une sorte d’obligation, de nécessité, la loi, d’avoir des règles” (Cardinal 1977, 38). Like Cixous, she plays on the multiple meanings of the word “règles”, “régler” in order to draw out a link between menstruating and submitting to social orthodoxy. Menstruation, Leclerc seems to claim, is another way in which women tend to conform involuntarily to social expectation and regulation; it is, by implication, another mechanism in the social silencing of women. To speak, to write, would be to defy this social regulation, as Cixous seems to suggest in her accounts of écriture féminine. Cixous envisages a writing of the body that would not only give voice to hitherto unspoken bodily secretions and substances, but would also itself imitate the rhythms of the body, the female body. In an essay

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recounting her “coming to writing”, Cixous explicitly links the female body with the act of writing: “Je déborde! Mes seins débordent! Du lait. De l’encre. L’heure de la têtée. Et moi? Moi aussi j’ai faim. Le goût de lait de l’encre!” (Cixous 1977, 37). Although here and elsewhere Cixous seems to link writing with giving birth, another kind of maternal, life-giving act, there is also the notion of writing as a kind of overspill, débordement, which could equally point to menstruation. Cixous implicitly associates écriture féminine with the menstruating female body, claiming, for example, of a woman who writes: “Et avec quelle aisance, tu verras, elle peut depuis ce ‘dans’ où elle était tapie somnolente, sourdre aux lèvres qu’elle va déborder de ses écumes” (Cixous and Clément 1975, 177). For Cixous, women’s writing flows out of the depths of the body, spills out beyond any attempt to contain it, like menstrual blood: as Mary Jane Lupton points out, Cixous, along with other contemporary French women thinkers like Luce Irigaray, has “reclaimed menstruation as an emblem of sexual difference, innovatively using images of flow and bleeding to represent cycles, flexibility, rhythm, jouissance” (1993, 6). Yet where Cixous sees writing and blood as similarly regenerative, Cardinal describes a different relation between bleeding and self-expression. Cardinal suggests that excessive bleeding may “nous épuiser”, may be physically weakening and render self-expression impossible. To write, Cixous implies, is impossible for a “femme bien réglée”, yet Les Mots pour le dire seems to suggest that it is equally impossible for a woman who is not “bien réglée”, whose blood flows irregularly and excessively: menstrual bleeding is not necessarily a source of creativity, of (re)production. Cixous’s lyrical descriptions of menstruation, when compared with Cardinal’s detailed accounts of the messy, uncomfortable and debilitating aspects of menstrual bleeding, risk treating menstruation as an “emblem”, a figure, rather than as a literal experience. Cardinal, like Cixous, claims to write (through) the body: she insists that “J’écris avec mon corps” (1977, 199). Mary Jane Lupton alludes to Cardinal’s “écriture féminine”, which, in her words, “floods forth” (1993, 178). Yet for Cardinal, writing frequently does not “flood forth”, indeed, in Au pays de mes racines she describes periods of being unable to write, periods of blockage: “À peine une centaine de pages écrites depuis plus de deux ans. Sans arrêt des blocages, des murailles, qui s’élèvent devant moi, infranchissables” (1980, 83-84). This break in the flow of words – a drying up of creative juices – is

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not, however, to be likened to a cessation of bleeding; Cardinal links bleeding with silence, menorrhagia with writing. Annie observes: “Puis tu me dis que maintenant, tu es passée du côté de l’écriture, de l’expression, que tu n’as plus de règles. Comme si tu n’en avais plus besoin” (Cardinal 1977, 28). For Cardinal, (excessive) bleeding is not a form of self-expression, but a bodily inscription of her inability to express herself; when she finds words to speak, her bleeding dries up. Cardinal does not seek metaphors for writing in bleeding, but rather aims to find words to describe what it means to bleed: to “parler de sa féminité” (1977, 37). To do so means going beyond both the analytic encounter and the process of writing, described in Autrement dit as a solitary endeavour, undertaken in a “maison vide” (1977, 71). To speak about her own body, Cardinal seems to require an interlocutor: not the ambivalent male doctor, who refuses to allow her to talk about her bleeding (1975, 35), or her husband, but Annie Leclerc, another woman writer. Autrement dit departs from a series of encounters between Cardinal and Leclerc, named in the text simply as Marie and Annie, which spark off dialogues inciting Cardinal to write several chapters without Leclerc and culminating in Leclerc’s written “postface” which follows the text proper. In many ways, Autrement dit recalls and rewrites Les Mots pour le dire, its two protagonists re-enacting the roles of the narrator and her analyst in the novel. At the beginning of the text, Cardinal sets the scene for the conversations in Annie’s house, observing that “à cause de la ruelle, du sofa, et de la parole – de la parole surtout – ces moments auraient pu être des séances de psychanalyse” (1977, 12), likening her encounters with Annie to sessions with a psychoanalyst. Where Cardinal dedicates Les Mots pour le dire “au docteur qui m’a aidée à naître”, in Autrement dit she describes Annie as an “accoucheuse” (1977, 74), implicitly placing the other woman in the role of the analyst, the “midwife” who brings her to life. In Autrement dit, Cardinal can explore menstrual bleeding and the female body in greater detail, with an interlocutor who encourages her to talk about her sexed body. Yet although the two women do return frequently to the subject of menstruation and menstrual blood, Cardinal eventually states that “je n’ai rien d’autre à dire à ce sujet pour l’instant” (1977, 122). This is partly because she fears making sweeping generalisations on the subject (1977, 39) but mainly because bleeding is one aspect of women’s lives and identity that should be

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analysed in the context of that wider experience within a social framework. When she states that “la vie gynécologique des femmes est très liée à leur esprit” (39), she does not mean that women’s menstrual cycles can offer simple clues to their identity, but that their menstrual bleeding is inextricably bound up in the way they think and live their own bodily identities. In their conversations, the two interlocutors of Autrement dit run through a range of issues affecting women’s lives: their bodily identity, their sexuality, their economic situations, and more. Yet, curiously, as in Les Mots pour le dire, Cardinal ends up returning to the realization of the vulnerability of her own body. She recounts how the production of Autrement dit was abruptly halted by the effects of a terrifying experience she had while staying in Canada with her husband, when she was nearly raped. The discussion of menstrual bleeding leads into a story of potential rape, of female bodily vulnerability, recalling the chapter in Les Mots pour le dire in which the narrator recovers the memory of a near-rape experience as a child. Just as Les Mots moves from a narrative of bleeding into a repressed memory of potential rape, so Autrement dit supplements its analysis of blood with an account of rape, of the vulnerability of the female body. Cardinal tells the story of her near-rape as follows: soon after arriving in Canada, she is lying naked in bed, dozing, when she is awakened by an unfamiliar man climbing on top of her. Images of bodily wounding and bleeding flash through her mind: Vision des plaies que je me ferais si je passais par là. Chair déchirée. Viande à vif [….] Doigts amputés. Peau lacérée. Ventre éclaté. Yeux crevés. Artères sectionnées et l’hémorragie qui jaillirait de partout par grands jets rouges, réguliers, tièdes, éclaboussant la chaux fraîche. (1977, 129)

Although the blood she evokes here bursts out of skin wounds, not the uterus, the adjectives she uses (“régulier”, “tiède”) seem to point back to the descriptions of menstrual bleeding in Les Mots pour le dire, implicitly drawing a link between rape and menstruation, a link that finds its roots in the (vulnerability of the) female body. Unable to speak or retaliate, she feigns a heart attack and the intruder leaves, whereupon she wraps herself in a bathrobe and runs out of the house to find her husband; as she runs, several men stare intrusively at her and one tugs on her robe. For some time following this experience,

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she is terrified of strangers and of being alone, obsessed with locking doors and windows, as though aware that her body cannot protect itself and seeking alternative ways of protecting it from others. She feels herself slumping back into her earlier mental illness: in her words, “je retombais dans la maladie mentale” (131). Rather than returning to her analyst, however, she carries out her own analysis – “J’ai tout analysé, tout décortiqué” (133) – and draws crucial conclusions about the female body. Cardinal’s self-analysis points back to the narrator’s discoveries in Les Mots pour le dire: she registers that “Nous sommes trouées et ce trou est d’une terrible faiblesse”, that, furthermore, “C’est par cette béance qu’on nous a asservies, par elle qu’on nous a définies” (1977, 134). Her notion of the female body as “holed” and intrinsically vulnerable to rape seems to echo Susan Brownmiller’s assertion that “By anatomical fiat – the inescapable construction of their genital organs – the human male was a natural predator and the human female served as his prey” (1975, 16). Both Cardinal and Brownmiller seem to posit rape as a biological necessity, an “anatomical fiat”, yet Cardinal goes on to question this necessity: “Le viol […] c’est d’abord une mauvaise habitude que les hommes ont prise: une femme, c’est baisable” (1977, 135). She asserts that rape is not an anatomical given but a cultural norm that can and should be militated against, part of a wider social framework in which women are oppressed and violated on an everyday basis. This understanding leads her to a different diagnostic of her own difficulty in dealing with the threat of rape: “C’était ça qui me rendait malade, qui taraudait mon esprit: la révolte refoulée, le refus annulé, la repulsion ignorée” (1977, 135). Rather than labelling herself mentally ill, she traces the source of her illness to the expectations placed on women within society and diagnoses society as sick, corrupted by its own gender divisions and definitions. Autrement dit constitutes a response to these gender divisions, insofar as it aims to rethink and rewrite the (sexed) female body and female identity. Yet although it diagnoses society, it offers no facile remedies, no palliative “cure”, other than the two women’s conversation, which may be perceived as analogous to the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis. If, as Bruno Bettelheim suggests, Les Mots pour le dire constitutes a different kind of case history – written from the viewpoint of the analysand – then the study of gender and the body undertaken in Autrement dit may be seen as another alternative kind of “case history”, written as a collaboration between two women.

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It is this different form of feminist “case history”, of diagnosis, that I explore by way of conclusion.

A Feminist Case History: Diagnosis in Different Words In Autrement dit, Cardinal asks, “Comment dire notre sexe, la gestation vécue, le temps, la durée des femmes?” and answers her question with an imperative: “Il faudra inventer” (1977, 90). If her conversations with Annie Leclerc and her own writing testify to this aim to “invent” ways in which to voice her relation to her own body, nonetheless this “writing (of) the body” remains self-confessedly inadequate. Yet the emphasis on dialogue, rather than writing, in Autrement dit offers us a clue as to how Cardinal envisages inventing her experience differently. Firstly, she suggests, “la parole est une fluidité, un passage, un courant” (1977, 8), fluid and mobile as opposed to the fixity of the written word. This distinction is perhaps tenuous, given that the dialogues are later transcribed to form the written version of the text; nonetheless the notion of a “passage” is important. Where the doctor in Les Mots pour le dire remains, for the most part, silent in the face of the narrator’s spoken memories, Annie Leclerc contributes openly to the dialogue in Autrement dit, so that a kind of passage is created between the two women. This in turn paves the way for a different kind of diagnosis, or analysis, which begins not only to diagnose social expectations of women and their bodies but also to attempt to change them, to call into question how women perceive of their bodily identity. Where Freud’s analysis of hysteria moves away from the body to interrogate the psyche, Cardinal’s writing shows the need to rethink the relation between the sexed body and the psyche. It is worth returning briefly to Dora’s case here. Freud, as we have seen, admits to having misread Dora’s desiring gaze at Frau K.’s body. This suggestion of homosexual desire is missing from Les Mots pour le dire or Autrement dit and marks a crucial difference between these different stories. Yet Freud adds: “I ought to have guessed that the main source of her [Dora’s] knowledge of sexual matters could have been no one but Frau K.” ([1905] 1981, 120n. 1). For Dora, Frau K acts as a surrogate mother, whose explanations of the workings of sexuality shape Dora’s relation to her own body; Dora’s understanding of her own sexed body is thus mediated through her

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relationship with Frau K in the same way that Cardinal’s narrator’s experience of her sexed body is filtered through her mother’s words. Like the narrator of Les Mots pour le dire, then, Dora’s story may be perceived to be the story of female sexuality; in Dora’s case, however, this is a missing story of the female analysand’s relation with her own body. Where Freud admits in the case of “Dora” that he “restore[s] what is missing”, fills in interpretative gaps to complete his narrative, it seems that Freud does not only restore gaps, but also attempts to cover them up: in particular, he tries to gloss over Dora’s experience of her own sexed body. By contrast, Cardinal’s text repeatedly returns to the female body, to the bleeding body, with no possibility of resolution. This refusal of (curative) closure is, as the chapters that follow show, symptomatic of all of the writers whose work I analyse in this book. The next chapter, on the work of Hélène Cixous, analyses a different approach to articulating psychological wounds and to “writing the body”. Yet the imagery of blood and wounds – both psychic and bodily – drawn out in my reading of Cardinal’s writing recurs throughout this study, spilling over the boundaries of each individual chapter. In the quotation that opens this chapter, Claire Kahane comments that it is only when women can stop speaking “across the body” that their stories of trauma can be told. My reading of the bleeding female body in Cardinal’s writing suggests rather – and this is crucial throughout my study – that the attempt to give voice to psychological wounds is necessarily mediated “across” or through the body, through a vulnerable body that cannot simply be put into words. This poses a challenge to the reader, who cannot, as Freud did, interpret somatic symptoms as unambiguous signifiers of particular psychic traumas. Instead the reader is called upon the rethink the positioning of the female body and the female subject within psychoanalytic narratives of trauma and of hysteria. If women are typically objects, not subjects, within this framework, Cardinal’s writing insists that they can begin to tell their hitherto unspoken experiences only through recourse to the body, which bears the scars of women’s required submission to social regulations and hierarchies. In Freud’s framework, analysis is concomitant with “cure”; in Cardinal’s, any such “cure” can be possible only when society itself has been diagnosed and its divisions somehow healed. There is, in other words, no single story of individual trauma that is not inextricably bound up in a wider social context; and this will become

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clear throughout this study, as I explore very different stories of psychic trauma, in different contexts. All of these stories, however, are mediated “across the body” in one form or another; and in each the body figures the impossibility of telling a story of trauma once and for all.

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Writing (through) the body: Hélène Cixous’s Dedans and “Stigmata” Je crois qu’on ne peut avancer dans le chemin de la découverte, de la découverte de l’écriture ou d’autre chose, qu’à partir du deuil et dans la réparation d’un deuil. A l’origine le geste d’écrire est lié à l’expérience de la disparition. (Cixous 1990a, 19)

In an essay describing her trajectory as a writer, Hélène Cixous suggests that writing finds its origins in loss, in “l’expérience de la disparition”. In her case, this loss is personified: she claims that “The first book I wrote rose from my father’s tomb” (1993, 11). The death of her father from tuberculosis when she was ten years old is not only the central theme of Cixous’s first novel, Dedans, published in 1969, but recurs throughout her textual corpus. Cixous’s texts repeatedly return to the father’s death, showing that it cannot be mourned or put into the past tense; instead, it is relived endlessly and traumatically in the present tense. Cixous’s writing does not narrate a story of traumatic loss, but draws out the painful impact of loss on the psyche and explores how invisible psychological wounding can be articulated in writing. We saw in the previous chapter on Marie Cardinal how the wounds of the psyche are displaced into bodily symptoms: in the case of Cardinal’s narrator, into hysterical uterine bleeding. In this chapter, I argue that Cixous’s texts map out a different model of the relation between bodily and psychic wounding by mobilizing bodily imagery as a means to give voice to loss and, in particular, to the loss of the father. If Cixous’s use of imagery of bodily wounds as a means to describe trauma is common in theories of trauma, my reading of her texts raises questions that also have crucial implications for trauma theory: what is the relation between bodily and psychological

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wounding? And (how) can one “write loss” through the body, or, more accurately, through bodily images and figures? In her 1977 essay, “La Venue à l’écriture”, Cixous asserts: “Ce qui de moi marque tous mes livres rappelle que c’est ma chair qui les signe, c’est un rythme. Médium mon corps rythmé mon écriture” ([1977] 1986b, 64). This emphasis on a relation between writing and the body, on writing through the body, is characteristic of Cixous’s writing. In “Difficult Joys”, a paper originally given (in English) at a colloquium on Études féminines held in Liverpool in 1989, Cixous reiterates her claim to “write the body”: Personally, when I write fiction, I write with my body. My body is active, there is no interruption between the work that my body is performing and what is going to happen on the page. I write very near my body and my pulsions. (Cixous 1990b, 27)

Cixous’s focus on writing with the body, on writing the body, is linked with her theorization of an écriture féminine, a writing that aims to break down rigid social, gendered and literary categories and to renegotiate the relation between the body and the mind. Cixous opens her celebrated essay “Le Rire de la méduse” with the following imperative: “Il faut que la femme s’écrive: que la femme écrive de la femme et fasse venir les femmes à l’écriture, dont elles ont été éloignées aussi violemment qu’elles l’ont été de leurs corps” (1975, 39). Later in the same essay, she defines “feminine” writing as a writing of the body, a writing that will restore the broken connection between body and psyche: “Il faut que la femme écrive par son corps” (1975, 48). Her insistence on the body in “Le Rire de la méduse” has, as Morag Shiach notes, been “the focus of many of the frequent charges of ‘essentialism’” (1991, 17) directed at Cixous: that is, it has been seen to fix women’s identity in anatomy and thereby refuse the possibility of change. The fraught question as to whether or not Cixous’s writing ties feminine identity and writing down to the female body is too wide to be addressed fully in this chapter. It is, however, worth pointing out firstly that the body is by no means a fixed essence in Cixous’s account, but is shown to be inflected and shaped by culture, language and individual experience (see Freeman 1988, 62). Moreover, Cixous’s emphasis on the body – which predates her conceptualization of écriture féminine in the 1970s, as we shall see – goes beyond questions of gender: her interest in the body is motivated

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by a concern with the unconscious (see Shiach 1991, 70). It is through writing (with) the body, Cixous claims, that one can gain access to repressed impulses and desires and that otherwise hidden parts of the psyche can emerge. Cixous’s writing is concerned above all with articulating that which would usually remain unsaid and unknown: in her words, “Writing is the delicate, difficult and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the inavowable” (1993, 53). Her writing uses the body as a means of access to the psyche, exploring the body in order to delve into the psyche. In this chapter, I move beyond other critical writing on Cixous to rethink how the relation between body and psyche is figured in Cixous’s texts, focusing on the specific question of how to give voice to traumatic loss, in particular, to the death of the father. Cixous’s texts, I argue, do not tell the story of the father’s death as such, but trace its painful effects on the daughter’s psyche through evocative images of bodily wounding and disease. Through the narrator’s account of her father’s sickness and death in Dedans unfolds the fragmented story of her loss and (failed) mourning. The daughter’s anguished grieving is expressed through analogy with the father’s sick and, later, rotting body; the daughter’s wounded psyche is mapped onto the father’s disease-ridden body. The relation the text sets up between body and psyche, between the wounded self and the bodily injuries of the other, is also integral to contemporary trauma theory: before moving on to analyse her writing in more detail, it is worth pausing to reflect further on the relation between traumatic loss and body and psyche in the work of Freud and Caruth.

Theorising Traumatic Loss: Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Unclaimed Experience Freud’s 1920 essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, deals with traumatic experience, the compulsion to repeat and the theory of the death drive. Yet it is also an essay about traumatic loss, returning to and developing the work on loss in his earlier essay, “Mourning and Melancholia”. At the end of “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud admits that it is incomplete, to be “postpone[d]” pending further investigation “first, of physical pain, and then of the mental pain which is analogous to it”, an investigation which a footnote suggests

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will be undertaken in Beyond the Pleasure Principle ([1917] 1981, 14:258). The closing sentences of “Mourning and Melancholia” seem to point to its continuation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which draws out the relation between bodily and psychological wounding through a story of traumatic loss: Tasso’s story of Tancred and Clorinda in Gerusalemme Liberata, which I summarized in the Introduction. In his analysis of this story, Freud focuses not on Clorinda, who is fatally wounded twice, but on Tancred, who unwittingly injures and loses the woman he loves a second time: the exemplary story of trauma offered here is, crucially, a story of tragic loss. Tancred, unable to mourn Clorinda, is compelled against his will to repeat the loss and relive its psychological wounding. Clorinda’s open, bleeding wound here may be seen to evoke the wound of melancholia described in “Mourning and Melancholia”, referred to as an “open wound”, a “painful wound” ([1917] 1981, 14:253, 258). Beyond the Pleasure Principle thus seems to continue and refer back to the earlier essay, linking trauma and loss in Freud’s theoretical writing through the image of an open bodily wound. In my Introduction, I showed that Freud’s depiction of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Caruth’s reading of Freud’s essay both liken the wound of the psyche to that of the body and, simultaneously, emphasize the differences between bodily and psychological wounds. Freud cites Tasso’s story in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as an example of a case where “the subject appears to have a passive experience, over which he has no influence, but in which he meets with a repetition of the same fatality”, that is, as an example of the “compulsion to repeat” (Freud [1920] 1981, 18:22). Yet this is ambiguous: although Freud appears to be referring to Tancred, who is compelled to wound Clorinda a second time, Clorinda also meets with “a repetition of the same fatality”: that is, she is (fatally) wounded twice. In Caruth’s reading of Freud’s essay, this blurring of the boundaries between Tancred and Clorinda takes on added significance. For Caruth, “the wound that speaks is not precisely Tancred’s own, but the wound, the trauma of another” (Caruth 1996, 8): this implies that the voice that emerges from Clorinda’s wound testifies not (only) to Clorinda’s suffering, but (also) to Tancred’s loss. One story of trauma is, then, mediated through and displaced by another: Tancred’s psychic wound is articulated through Clorinda’s bodily wound. According to Caruth, this highlights the “very possibility and surprise of listening to

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another’s wound” (1996, 8), yet Caruth’s emphasis on Tancred’s sense of loss risks ignoring Clorinda’s fate, “listening” to Clorinda’s wound only to retell Tancred’s story.5 Caruth’s analysis of Tasso’s story thus implicitly raises crucial questions: what does it mean for one story of suffering to be told through another? What is at stake in figuring the invisible wounds of the psyche through the wounds of the body? And what kind of story can bodily wounds tell? These questions form the basis of my reading of Cixous’s writing in this chapter. In the first part of this chapter, I explore how Cixous’s first novel, Dedans, articulates psychological wounds through conflating body and psyche in the image of the “inside”. In this text, I argue, body and psyche come together in their vulnerability: Dedans offers no possibility of healing, of coming to terms with loss. In the second part of this chapter, I turn to an essay written almost thirty years after Dedans: “Stigmata, or Job the Dog”. This essay, which returns to the childhood death of the father recounted in Dedans, traces the differences between bodily and psychological wounding, showing how the psychic wound exceeds the bodily wound in ways that go beyond Caruth’s and Freud’s analyses. Both “Stigmata” and Dedans, I argue, invite us to rethink what it means to use bodily imagery in order to articulate psychic wounds: what is at stake in writing the wounds of trauma.

Dedans: Writing Loss Inside the Body Dedans is a text about loss, about the cataclysmic effect of a father’s illness and death. It is widely accepted in critical writing on Dedans that this text finds its origins in the death of Cixous’s father: according to Lynn Kettler Penrod, Dedans “find[s] its deepest source most probably in Cixous’s own traumatic loss of her father” (1996, 47), whilst Sarah Cornell points out that “The death of her father […] engendered her fictional writing. It was the subject of her first novel, Dedans” (1990, 32). The text is divided into two parts, the first of 5

Ruth Leys has suggested that Caruth’s interpretation turns “the murderer Tancred” into the victim and thus blurs the distinctions between victim and perpetrator. While this viewpoint is to some extent warranted by Caruth’s text, Leys goes on to accuse Caruth of implicitly describing the Nazis as ‘victims’, a charge that has no basis in Caruth’s argument, which does not mention the Holocaust (2000, 297).

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which focuses on the narrator’s childhood, shattered by the death of her father. The second part, which begins some twenty years later, recounts the narrator’s failed relationships with a series of lovers who are all presented as inadequate substitutes for her missing father. The loss of the father is not confined to the past, but repeatedly replayed in the present through the narrator’s separations from successive lovers. Her pattern of behaviour is reminiscent of Freud’s description in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of a “lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion” (Freud [1920] 1981, 18:22). Separating from one lover, the narrator writes: “Je le perdis comme j’avais perdu mon père et mon seul et seul et seul et même amant” (Cixous [1969] 1986a, 146). The repetition of “seul” here highlights that each of her succession of lovers can only ever be another copy of the father: there is no possibility of leaving the death of the father in the past. Yet although Dedans could on one level be described as a first person narrative of the father’s death and its continued effects in the narrator’s adult life, it is by no means a straightforward autobiographical narrative. The text “avoid[s] representation of anything tangible within the ‘real’ autobiographical world of Cixous herself”: the narrator remains unnamed and unidentified and there are few references to a specific historical or geographical location (Penrod 1996, 48). The only date referred to in the text is the twelfth of February (Cixous [1969] 1986a, 143), which is not elucidated in Dedans but which we know from Cixous’s later texts is the anniversary of her father’s death, a date which recurs throughout her writing as an apocryphal moment in her self-development. The unexplained allusion to the twelfth of February in Dedans points to a different temporal frame, governed not by dates and times but by the death of the father, which triggers a period of unceasing mourning and anguish, in which time seems to stand still. The text operates according to its own temporal structure, one based not on external markers of temporal development, but on the internal logic of the narrator’s psyche. We see the other characters in the text as though from the recesses of the narrator’s mind: they appear as shadowy figures that are often indistinguishable and merge into each other, like in a dream. This novel does not chart the narrator’s physical and social development, but gives voice to her innermost emotions, desires and fears: as its title suggests, this is a novel of the interior, opening up the inside of the body and of the psyche.

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In Cixous’s own words, “Dedans s’est écrit nécessairement dedans le père, en le cherchant jusque dans la mort et en revenant” (1990a, 19). This description of Dedans as a text written inside – “dedans” – the father points to a relation between loss, writing and interiority that is worth pausing over here before I analyse the text in more detail. In her essay “De la scène de l’Inconscient à la scène de l’Histoire”, Cixous links the inside with dreams and mythology: D’abord, dedans, là où l’on fait connaissance avec les mythologies, là où l’on apprend les secrets des récits en passant d’ailleurs par les rêves, là où l’on se heurte aux pulsions, dont Freud disait qu’elles sont nos Titans. Il faut aller voir ce qui se passe au fond, ce qui est refoulé, ce qui nous empêche de vivre et de penser et qui est toujours de l’ordre de l’épopée, mais ce sont des épopées informes et dangereuses. Il faut retourner aux origines, travailler sur le mystère des origines, car c’est ainsi que l’on arrivera sur le mystère de la fin. Aller travailler sur la question où, d’où viennent, pour ensuite travailler sur ensuite. (1990a, 24; emphasis Cixous’s)

The “inside” is linked here with psychic origins, with the past, defined as a space where repressed desires, fears and passions are located. It is, Cixous suggests, through returning “inside” that one can move beyond the psychological blocks of the past: in more classical Freudian terms, “working through” the question of the past as a means to move into the future. This is particularly crucial in relation to Dedans, a text which, as its title implies, is centred around an “inside” space and which also returns to Cixous’s past, to her childhood and to her father’s death. Indeed, Cixous has elsewhere emphasized that writing offers a privileged means of returning to one’s roots, to the inner depths of the psyche: Writing […] does not come from outside. On the contrary, it comes from deep inside. It comes from what Genet calls the “nether realms”, the inferior realms [….] This is where the treasure of writing lies, where it is formed, where it has stayed since the beginning of creation: down below. (Cixous 1993, 118)

Cixous continues a few sentences later: “It is deep in my body, further down […] somewhere in the depths of my heart” (118). In this account, writing is situated dedans, inside the body: to write, Cixous claims, is to descend inside the body and inside the psyche, to explore what has been silenced or repressed. The descent into the body seems to give access to the inner depths of the psyche, as I will show. This theorization of the relation between writing, the body and the psyche

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forms the basis of my reading of Dedans, a text that maps out an interior space in which body and psyche are brought together. Verena Andermatt Conley refers to “dedans” as being “là où le plaisir du vécu serait aussi proche que possible du mot écrit” (Conley 1990, 36): the inside figures the space where writing can move closest to lived experience, where the written word can best convey emotion.

Writing Through the Father’s Body Dedans does not narrate the father’s death in the past tense, but inscribes it through bodily imagery that recurs throughout the text, pointing to the narrator’s continued inability to come to terms with her loss. In “La Venue à l’écriture”, Cixous points out that loss and mourning in Dedans are both figured through the body: Cet être d’air et de chair qui s’est composé en moi […] prend la forme, le visage littéral, qui convient à ce que de lui veut faire sens [….] S’il veut faire sentir deuil, ah! tu m’as abandonée, son corps est sanglot, souffle coupé, blancs et crises du Dedans. ([1977] 1986b, 64)

Cixous is suggesting here that loss and mourning are not so much represented as embodied in Dedans, in the “sanglot”, the “souffle coupé”: it is through the body that otherwise unspeakable loss can be given voice. The body in question, however, belongs not to the narrator but to her father: the daughter maps her own psyche through a model of her father’s body. Cixous admits, “Quand j’avais écrit Dedans c’était d’une certaine manière dans la tombe et hors la tombe de mon père” (1990a, 19); in Dedans, the space of the tomb is also the space demarcated by the father’s body. The narrator of Dedans remains locked inside a space of loss and mourning mapped out in the image of the father’s body inside its tomb, which is also associated with the family home. The text opens with a striking image of the family house as a form of prison: “MA MAISON EST ENCERCLÉE. ELLE EST ENTOURÉE PAR LE GRILLAGE. DEDANS, nous vivons” (Cixous [1969] 1986a, 11). The typography emphasizes the sense of imprisonment, as the “nous”, in lower case letters, seems overpowered by the letters in upper case describing their enclosure. It is the dead father who controls the prison/house: the narrator writes, “J’étais dedans parce que mon père l’avait voulu” (70). The house,

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referred to as a “cube de pierre” or a “ventre de pierre” (71), resembles the father’s tomb: the flourishing vegetation in the garden recalls the flowers that continue to grow on and around the father’s tomb (88-92). The narrator’s imprisonment inside the tomb-like house points to her entrapment within the space of her father’s death, within an ongoing process of mourning. The text offers no possibility of escape: although she leaves the house daily (11) and eventually grows up and moves away, she feels imprisoned “dedans” with no apparent way out. The “inside” is not only spatial, but also temporal: she is trapped inside a perpetual obsession with her father, incapable of moving into the future. The text, which is narrated entirely from her perspective, remains inside this space of melancholic fantasy and anguish, a space demarcated by the repeated evocation of the (inside of) the father’s body. The narrator returns obsessively to images of her father’s diseased body, detailing his chronic respiratory problems and pains after he has contracted tuberculosis (Cixous [1969] 1986a, 130-135) and the indentation left by his frail body in the mattress (68) and dwelling on an image of his body rotting in the flower-strewn tomb (88-9). Just as Tancred’s unspoken loss is articulated through Clorinda’s wounded body, so here the narrator’s loss is figured in the father’s diseased and, later, disintegrating body. She fantasizes entering the father’s body: she claims that “Mon cœur se détache et tombe dans la poitrine de mon père” (82), whilst later, addressing the father, she writes, “Je passais ma tête entre tes cuisses, puis mon buste suivait” (94). The “inside” of the title seems to refer to the interior of the father’s body, where the narrator seeks refuge from her loss; she does not seek to take the father into herself. This reversal of Freud’s model of melancholic identification seems to go beyond the framework set up in “Mourning and Melancholia” and to point rather to the model constructed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which the self enters the body of the other.6 Tancred, as we have seen, cannot mourn: his loss is figured – or rather, re-enacted – through the violent and repeated wounding inflicted on the body of the lost object/other. This process is repeated in Dedans as the narrator’s loss is endlessly

6

Here my interpretation differs from that of other critics, who have sought to fit Dedans into the framework of loss and mourning set up in “Mourning and Melancholia”: see, for example, Wilson 1996, 124.

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inscribed in, or, more accurately, inside the diseased body of her father. This emphasis on the interior of the body is shown most strikingly in the narrator’s fascination with the figure of an athlete’s body in an anatomy textbook. The athlete’s skinless body is laid out on the page as a visual aid to learning, “un athlète écorché aux muscles rouges et blancs en forme de pétales de tulipes. Cent fines flèches détaillent les fibres de l’Apollon sans peau” (Cixous [1969] 1986a, 48). The narrator is, however, less motivated by physiological curiosity than by the desire to use the anatomy book as a means of approaching her father’s past, to discover “comment battait le petit cœur de mon père” (48): seeing into the athlete’s body seems to give her privileged access to her father’s body and, in particular, to his heart. The Robert dictionary describes the “cœur” as both “le siège des sentiments et des émotions” and “la vie intérieure; la pensée intime, secrète”, implying depths of emotion and feeling that are often unperceived, “secrète” because “intérieure”, hidden. The narrator’s description of the anatomy book prompts a sequence of memories and fantasies about her father: it is as though the father’s emotions and passions seem to be somehow visible in his heart, so that the inside of the body is somehow likened to the inside of the psyche. The relation between body and psyche in Dedans is mediated through an image of the inside: it is in their interiority that body and psyche come together. Dedans seems, then, to map out a complex relation between the athlete’s body, the father’s body and the narrator’s melancholic inability to comprehend her loss. That is, the narrator uses the model of the athlete’s body as a means of access to the hidden interior of her father’s body and, by extension, to her father’s psyche. Yet her image of the inside of the father’s body also gives shape and form to her own melancholic obsession, to the unhealed psychic wounds of her own past: it is as though the narrator’s loss is mapped onto her father’s body via the figure of the athlete’s body. Her fantasies of entering another’s body may, then, be translated as the desire to see into her own body, her own psyche, her past. Throughout Dedans, the narrator fantasizes about entering other bodies as a means of self-knowledge and self-expression, as a means to articulate her own loss. This means that her recurring descriptions of what is at stake in entering other bodies also offers a meditation on what it means to delve into her own psyche, into her own loss.

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Entering the Body Where the athlete’s body is neatly labelled, with arrows to orientate the reader, other bodies are less easy to penetrate. In a scene in a hotel, the narrator fantasizes about being able to see inside a woman’s body and thus find out about her past: Je pénètre la dame avec mes milliers d’yeux fouilleurs et fins comme des aiguilles […] il suffirait qu’on fende la peau sur une longueur de trente centimetres pour que tout sorte, douleur, chaleur, peurs et mauvais sang; alors je pourrais apercevoir la figure de sa première enfance réfugiée dans quelque cavité. (61)

Françoise Defromont points out that “il y a ici pêle-mêle le dedans interne du corps et l’intériorité psychique, celle qui contient la première enfance”. She adds tellingly: “Comme si on pouvait explorer à travers le dedans du corps le dedans de l’origine enfouie dans la mémoire qui a oublié” (1990, 92-3). As Defromont suggests, the woman’s childhood, her distant past, seems to be located deep inside her body: the bodily interior is set up as a space in which body and psyche come together. Childhood memory is posited inside the body: through seeing into the woman’s body, the narrator can gain knowledge of her past. Memory becomes visceral, bound up in the interior of the body, in its “chaleur” and “sang”, rather than in the mind: in the narrator’s words, “La chair est moins bête que l’esprit, elle n’oublie pas” (Cixous [1969] 1986a, 88), so that the (inside of the) body is shown to retain what the mind cannot remember. The woman’s childhood remains intact inside her body, “refugiée dans quelque cavité”, not “remembered” in the past, but preserved in the present in a hidden form. To delve inside the body does not offer a means of remembering as such, in that the past cannot be narrated in the past tense, but remains in a perpetual present: this is not a text about memory, but about interiority, about what conventionally remains unspoken and even unknown. And what is being explored is the possibility of perceiving and giving voice to what is “dedans”, what is inside the psyche, through a model of the interior of the body. As in Freud’s model in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, the psyche is given the form of a body here, with the same protective layer/skin that blocks entry from outside.

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According to Françoise Defromont, the body in Dedans is open, “un lieu d’ouverture”, enabling the narrator unlimited movement from inside to outside: “Elle voyage sans interdits du dedans au dehors, de la peau à la substance” (1990, 92). Yet this image of porous skin serving as an interface between inside and outside is troubled in the text by the emphasis on the body as closed and impermeable. Immediately after her father’s death, the narrator finds herself in front of a gate, “cadenassé, hérissé de piques, rouillé” (Cixous [1969] 1986a, 17), that she cannot open because the key is too large to fit in her hand, symbolically exceeding her strength. This locked gate is later associated with an impenetrable body: she strives to enter a “paroi sans porte”, a wall that she describes as a “corps opaque” which “ne cède pas” (181). The loss of the father is figured as a form of imprisonment, motivating her to attempt to break through the door or, to follow the text’s own imagery, to enter an impermeable body. The body in Dedans is non-porous, does not open up as such; to be seen, it must be violently penetrated. The description of the athlete in the anatomy book highlights the violence underpinning the layout of his body on the page: his body is “écorché”, pierced with “cent fine flèches”, a flayed body penetrated by arrows. Whereas the narrator contemplating an iris, can use X-ray vision to see inside the flower (she claims that “Mes yeux […] le photographiaient, le radiographiaient” (152)), she cannot use X-rays to see inside the body: the athlete’s muscles, “rouges et blancs” like “pétales de tulipes”, can be seen only when the skin is flayed and the body pierced by arrows, the colour “red” here suggesting blood. This imagery of penetration is echoed in the narrator’s fantasy of entering the body of the woman in the hotel, quoted above, in the use of verbs like “pénétrer” and “fendre” and in the allusion to “yeux comme des aiguilles”. The references to “douleur”, “peurs” and “sang” highlight the violence that underwrites the opening up of the body: to see inside the body means cutting it open, wounding it. Vision is likened to a violent penetration as the eyes like needles pierce the skin to see the body inside. In Dedans, there is no possibility of remembering loss in the past: the narrator seems, like Tancred in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, to be compelled to relive loss endlessly in the present through the repeated wounding of the body, not her own body, but the body of someone else. In Tasso’s story, however, Clorinda is allowed to speak her own wound, whereas in Dedans it is the narrator who speaks from – through – the other’s wound. The narrator adopts various different

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subject positions in her narrative, assuming the voices of her father (133-135), her grandfather (103-107) and, fleetingly, her grandmother (122-3). These assumed positions and narratives are, however, rooted in her own fantasies rather than in dialogue – she calls the father who speaks “mon père secret” (133), a product of her own fantasy – and blend into her self-narrative, so that she seems to appropriate their subject positions as a means of telling her own story. Where for Caruth, “listening to another’s wound” in trauma “may lead […] to the encounter with another” (1996, 8), here listening is replaced with appropriation. Cixous’s writing has most often been seen to renegotiate the relation between self and other, opening up “an/other type of relations in which love, and not death, becomes the key motivating element” (Sellers 1996, 55). My reading of Dedans points to a different model of self/other relations, in which the writing self repeatedly penetrates and wounds the body of the other as a means to remember and write. Dedans seems not to open up the self to the other, but instead to open up the other to the self. This is perhaps unsurprising: Dedans was written some years before Cixous began to theorize a different kind of writing, a writing Susan Sellers describes as “writing with the voice of the other” (1996, 55). Dedans should, I would suggest, be read as part of a sequence of early Cixousian texts that deal with the anguish and desires of the individual narrating subject. To borrow Lynn Kettler Penrod’s words: “In the first period [of Cixous’s writing] texts seem to be essentially self-referential and caught in a web of Freudian dream analysis” (1996, 39). In highlighting the violence in Dedans, I am deliberately not offering a commentary on the relation between self and other in écriture féminine. What interests me in the imagery of wounding and penetration in Dedans is less the relation between self and other than the emphasis in the text on the vulnerability of the body, and the implications this has for a model of the psyche rooted in the body.

The Vulnerable Body/Psyche The body in Dedans is repeatedly presented as vulnerable, susceptible to painful wounding from outside. The narrator is obsessed with her skin:

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La peau n’est qu’un sac à chair, et si je n’étais pas dedans avec toutes mes pensées et mes soupçons et tout ce que je dirai pendant des années, qu’est ce qu’elle serait, sauf sac souple insensible et mou? Si je regrette qu’elle existe c’est à cause de sa visibilité. (23)

She seems to distinguish herself and her body “dedans” from her skin, an external layer protecting her from the outside; the skin does not mould her body, but is itself shaped and stretched by the body inside. At times, the narrator’s body explodes its protective layer: she asserts that she is “extensible” (99), “pleine d’une substance souple illimitée, silencieuse, vibrante” (96), and points to the possibility of “m’étendre outre mes frontières organiques” (54). Her body has no single definitive shape, but seems to metamorphose frequently, stretching the limits of the skin and even bursting through the skin: the inside of the body – and, one might add, of the psyche – cannot be contained by the skin. Her fantasies of going beyond the limits of the skin are, however, undercut by the corresponding fear that the skin cannot protect her body. If the skin does not act as a limit, nor does it succeed in defending the inside from external stimuli/wounding. The narrator admits that both she and her father have “la même peau trop mince pour la vie” which “se déchire facilement” (82). She tries to reduce the surface area of her skin so as to minimize the danger of wounding: “Plus j’étais réduite, moins la vie aurait de surface à lacérer” (27). The skin that can be easily ruptured points to the fragility of the defensive layer of the psyche, that is also easily broken and that has already been wounded by the traumatic impact of the death of the father. The narrator’s fears and fantasies become uncontrollable in Dedans, indistinguishable from lived experience, spilling out through the text in the same way that the bodily innards risk leaking out of the ruptured skin of the woman in the hotel. Through its recurring images of bodily violence, this text points to the possible risks of opening up and exposing the psyche. Nicole Ward Jouve has observed in Dedans “the inner logic of a psychoanalytic cure” (1990, 94), yet in my reading this text may be seen to question the therapeutic value of an exploration of the interior of the self. There seems to be no progression as such: even at the end of the text, the narrator shows no signs of moving beyond her fantasies of union with her father. She is called by her father’s voice, inviting her to retreat with him into a privileged space “inside”: “Viens, dit-il, allons en prison, nous deux ensemble […] dedans nous

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aurons cessé de mourir” (Cixous [1969] 1986a, 209). This fantasized reunion seems on the one hand to resolve the anguish of separation and loss, reconfiguring the inside not as a space of death and loss but of a union outside death. Yet the narrator has already, several chapters previously, been summoned by the father in words curiously similar to those employed here (“Viens, allons en prison, tous les deux ensemble” (193)), whereupon she did follow him, but with the knowledge that it could only ever be short-term: “Je peux venir mais je ne peux pas rester” (197). The father’s invitation seems, then, to resurrect a fantasy that has already disintegrated and turned to dust along with the father’s body (197-205), showing the narrator to be still trapped by her melancholic fantasies. There is no resolution in Dedans, no move beyond or above the limits of the “inside”: the wounds of loss remain open. This text depicts the wound inflicted by traumatic loss on the psyche and the concomitant impossibility of healing; it does not, as Cixous claims, “rise” from the father’s tomb, but remains trapped within the symbolic space of the tomb and of loss. Dedans is Cixous’s first novel, the text most intimately bound up in the death of her father which, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Cixous cites as the origin of her own “coming to writing”. Later Cixousian texts, such as Or: Les lettres de mon père (1997), return repeatedly to the anguish brought about by the death of the father. Yet it is in “Stigmata, or Job the Dog” that Cixous takes further the question of the relation between body and psyche in the writing of traumatic loss, and it is to “Stigmata” that I now turn.

“Stigmata”, or Writing Wounds The essay “Stigmata, or Job the Dog” (1998), which may be read as a rewriting of the first section of Dedans, is explicitly described as an “autobiographical narrative” and an exploration of the relation between bodily and psychological wounding. The essay opens by pointing to the “thematics of the wound” in the work of male writers from Saint Augustine to James Joyce, in order to pose the following questions about wounding in women’s writing: Is the fertile wound, I wondered, part of the masculine phantasmal makeup? And is there anything analogous in women’s texts? What about my own relation to the inscription on the body of psychomythical events? I wrote a text

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called Stigmata or Job the dog. Or else The Origin of Philosophy. Or else First Symptoms of Writing. Or The Opening of the Mouth. (Cixous 1998, 182)

The text thus finds its origins in an attempt to address the question of what form a “fertile wound” might take in women’s writing, a question which Cixous immediately relates to her own writing. As its title suggests, “Stigmata, or Job the dog” explores the inscription of psychological wounding on the body through the figure of bodily stigmata. Before I turn to “Stigmata”, it is worth pausing to draw out the connotations and implications of the essay’s central image, that of bodily stigmata. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “stigma” as, variously, a “mark made upon the skin”, “a mark of disgrace or infamy”, “a sign of severe censure or condemnation”, “esp. one which bleeds spontaneously”. In the plural form, “stigmata” describes “marks resembling the wounds on the crucified body of Christ”. The word “stigma”, derived from the Greek word meaning a “mark made by a pointed instrument” and originally used to refer to the branding of slaves’ bodies by their masters, has, as the dictionary definitions suggest, since acquired a metaphorical or figurative meaning: to bear a “stigma” is to be figuratively marked by disgrace. The marks of “stigma”, impressed upon the skin, imprint the individual’s past on the body, so that the stigmatized body becomes a site where history and identity are inscribed. The plural form of stigma, “stigmata”, refers not simply to marks on the skin, but to bodily inscriptions that resemble the wounds of Christ on the cross. The first recorded instance of stigmata is the case of Saint Francis of Assisi, who, reliving Christ’s agony in prayer, suffered from wounds on the body that seemed to bleed spontaneously. There is no single accepted explanation for stigmata, in which Christ’s crucifixion seems to be rewritten on other bodies; it is commonly thought that an individual’s intense psychic identification with Christ’s suffering is inscribed on his/her own body. Whether stigmata are God-given, self-inflicted or the somatization of a psychic identification with Christ, the stigmatized body may be seen to retell the story of Christ’s crucifixion. In some cases, this means that the stigmatized body literally relives Christ’s wounding on the cross; in others, the body bears marks that resemble Christ’s wounds. Although popular conceptions of stigmata suggest a body bleeding spontaneously from open wounds, the word is more commonly used to refer to traces of wounds on the skin: in the OED definition, “marks

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resembling the wounds on the crucified body of Christ”. The stigmatized body may, then, be literally wounded or may bear the marks of wounds on the skin: the word “stigmata” may refer to open wounds or to inscriptions that resemble or imitate wounds, inscriptions that write on the skin rather than through it, whilst giving an impression of rupture. This double image of stigmata shapes my reading of Cixous’s essay, “Stigmata, or Job the Dog”, providing a basis from which to explore the relation set up in this text between memory, writing and the (wounded) body.

Writing (through) the other’s wounds “Stigmata, or Job the Dog” stages the narrator’s childhood against a backdrop of violence and aggression in Algeria through the story of the death of the family dog. According to the wishes of the narrator’s father, a humanitarian doctor, the family inhabits a poverty-stricken, so-called “Arab”, neighbourhood in Oran. Although they do not perceive themselves to be French, they are identified as French by their neighbours and, after the father’s death, subjected to violent attacks. The narrator claims that “Our Arab neighbors encircled us in a daily siege” and that “We live besieged as diminutive soldiers” (189), so that the family home is experienced as a form of prison in which they suffer an “enclosed fate” reminiscent of that described in Dedans.7 The central figure in this essay is the dog, Fips, who is confined within the house with the family until he becomes gradually more uncontrollable and attacks the postman, whereupon he is chained up as a mark – stigma – of his disgrace. The text recounts how later he breaks free, bites the narrator’s foot and dies in disgrace, largely ignored by the family. If at the moment of his death, the dog bears the stigma of disgrace, however, the narrator’s story retrospectively identifies him as a Christ-like figure, a sacrificial lamb (“As a lamb the dog is born to give his life for us” (186)) who dies betrayed by those closest to him at Easter. The narrator realizes with hindsight that the signs of aggression and hatred surrounding Fips are inscribed on 7

“Stigmata” offers a socio-historical contextualization conspicuously absent in Dedans, so that this shorter text may be seen to develop and extend the childhood story told in the earlier novel.

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his body, in his feverish eyes and foaming mouth. Like Christ, the dog’s body is seen to bear the wounds – stigmata – not of his own guilt, but of the violence and intolerance inflicted by the people around him. His wounded body may be seen to tell a story about racial hatred in Oran during the narrator’s childhood. The narrator’s story also, however, re-inscribes the dog’s death in order to retell the story of her childhood and, in particular, the death of her father. Throughout the text, the dog is curiously associated with the father, who took care of him before his death: the narrator observes that “Of Fips and my father […] there was born a point of resemblance” (189). The text tells the story of the father’s death and of the dog’s death, two deaths that become interwoven: “Thus my father and Fips, their death kept very far behind me” (187). The story of the dog’s death is rooted in the father’s death (the narrator claims that “when my father died […] my tale begins” (183)), yet the story of the dog additionally serves to retell the loss of the father. The dog’s branded body may be seen to figure the father’s diseased body, implying that the father is also somehow stigmatized, marked by the bodily traces of disease: in the narrator’s words, “They both had those feverish eyes” (189).8 “Stigmata” thus restages the psychological wound of the loss of the father through the story of the dog, so that one story of the narrator’s experience of loss is displaced through or by another or, more accurately, the dog’s body acts as a point of mediation between the father’s body and the narrator’s psyche.9 Rather than simply retelling a childhood story of loss, however, “Stigmata” explores the ways in which that loss is inscribed on the body and mind of the narrator through repeated references to the bite that the dog inflicts on the narrator’s foot shortly before his death. Without seeing the dog, the narrator leaps on top of him, an action that the dog interprets as an attack and to which he responds by sinking his teeth into her foot. The narrator asserts, “It seemed to me that from 8

Although the cause of death is unspecified here, Cixous’s other texts specify death by tuberculosis, a disease that traditionally stigmatized the victim as impoverished and/or unclean. 9 In Freudian terms, displacement is a psychic response to events that overwhelm the psyche and that are registered in memory through associated (“screen”) memories that both mask and simultaneously point to the absent memories. In “Stigmata”, the father’s death is explicitly shown to be displaced into the story of the dog: the text could be seen to be self-consciously reproducing Freudian mechanisms and inviting a psychoanalytic reading.

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that bite I would die because it no longer released me, it sank in, it was penetrating it planted all its teeth in my heart” (191). The wound on her foot is described simultaneously as a wound of the heart; here, as in Dedans, the heart seems to be situated at an interface between body and psyche, between bodily and psychological wounding. This collapse of the differences between bodily and psychological pain is reiterated throughout the essay: Indelible are the traces of his cruel stay in my flesh and my soul. It is to him that I owe my scars. He is the innocent author of the signatures that inaugurated my book on my feet and my hands. (185)

Here again the bodily wound is also a psychological wound, a wound of the “soul” as well as of the “flesh”. As in Dedans, it is this confusion between body and psyche that enables the psyche to be explored through analogy with the body. This quotation suggests that writing itself – implied in the allusion to the “book” – emerges from the confusion of psychological and physical pain, from the “indelible” traces of the impact of the dog, inscribed on the narrator’s mind and body. That is, again as in Dedans, the collapse of differences between the body and the psyche is itself a condition of writing, of describing loss. In the next paragraph, however, the narrator distinguishes sharply between the bodily wound and the psychological wound: On the inside of my brain the very slight bleeding of a small lack of forgetting, a miniscule wound would not close its eyes. The five scars on my foot like a clumsy star had closed. (192)

Where the bodily wound closes up and heals, the psychological wound remains open and bleeding. The closed bodily scar is contrasted with the psychic wound that will not “close” or heal up, a wound that the narrator conceives of as a literal displacement of the bodily wound: “The little mute lips of the wounds have travelled, what remains of them on my feet and hands is only an insensible embossment, the marks of my cries are lodged on the very sensitive membranes of my brain” (185). The bodily wound is superficial, a wound visible on the surface, whereas the psychological wound is deep “inside” the mind. The bodily wound points beyond itself to a psychic wound that cannot be healed; the physical wound of the dog’s

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bite is transposed into a wound imprinted – embossed – on the psyche.10

The Open Wound: Opening the Mouth The images of open and closed wounds deployed here do not only serve to differentiate between bodily and psychic wounding, but also offer a commentary on the relation between writing and wounding and on what it means to testify to loss. The wound is described like a mouth that is either open or closed, speaking or silent: it has “lips”, can utter “cries”, like a mouth that opens to make itself heard (185). In the prologue, the narrator proposes alternative titles for the essay, including “First Symptoms of Writing” and “The Opening of the Mouth”, titles which link her “coming to writing” with the opened mouth and with stigmata and bodily wounding. The closed mouth is associated in “Stigmata” not only with the healed bodily wound, but also with the narrator’s repeated failure to witness the death of people to whom she is attached: When at last what was left of him departed […] I was not there. Moreover never […] was I present at the departure neither of my father nor of my son nor of my grandmother nor of any being of my flesh. The mouths sewn shut on my foot. (193)

The closed mouth/wound marks a failure to witness the deaths of her close family; in this way, healing seems curiously to depend on leaving those deaths behind in the past, on forgetting, rather than on mourning.11 Yet the stitched up wound is described as a mouth “sewn shut”, a surprisingly violent image which suggests that the narrator is forcibly – physically – silenced, rather than healed. Like the marks of stigmata, the closed bodily scars point to other bleeding wounds, to a suffering that is not yet over; they seem to stand in for psychological 10

This is not to suggest that the bodily wound itself causes a psychic wound. Freud notes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that a bodily wound accompanying a traumatic event usually impedes the development of a psychic wound: “A wound or injury inflicted simultaneously works as a rule against the development of a neurosis” ([1920] 1981, 18:12). 11 It is striking that Cixous tells the story of her son’s death in a text entitled Le jour où je n’étais pas là (2000).

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wounds that the mind tries to close up but that are relived in the present and cannot be healed. Where the closed mouth points to a healed bodily wound and a failed witnessing, the open mouth, by contrast, seems to suggest both an open wound and an inability or refusal to forget. The bodily wound is likened to a closed mouth, whereas the psychic wound remains open: in her mind, the narrator insists, “a miniscule wound would not close its eyes”. In the alternative titles she proposes for the piece, the narrator links writing with opening a mouth, a mouth that is elsewhere linked with a wound: she thus seems to draw a parallel between opening up a wound and speaking, bearing testimony to the open wound. Writing is shown to re-open a closed (physical) wound in order to bring out a hidden, raw psychic wound. There is no possibility of definitive “cure”: if elsewhere Cixous proclaims the liberating power of writing, here writing seems to perform the double function of healing and of keeping wounds open, with no suggestion of closure. This double-edged function of writing is described in an earlier essay, “La Venue à l’écriture”, in a context which initially seems to celebrate the potential of writing: “D’une main, souffrir, vivre, toucher au doigt la douleur, la perte. Mais il y a l’autre main: celle qui écrit” ([1977] 1986b, 16). This appears to suggest that writing can counteract pain, suffering and loss, yet there is no redemptive possibility of “cure” through writing as such. “Cure” would, the text intimates, mean cutting off the other hand: “Si une main ne vit pas, coupe-la. Tu as demain”. This classic Cixousian homonym – “demain”, tomorrow, also suggests “deux mains”, two hands – highlights that the future, “demain”, is with two hands. One of these hands will, however, either be useless or amputated; the act of writing, this suggests, is at once curative and self-mutilating or, perhaps more disturbingly, is curative only through the bodily mutilation. Moreover, the opening up to the future (“demain”) is countered by the potential closure of bodily amputation: writing is thus posited as a scene of both opening and closure. In “Stigmata”, as in “La Venue à l’écriture”, it is not through healing or closing up a wound that it becomes possible to move on and to put loss in the past: rather, closing up the wound of loss means remaining silent, trapped in the past. Although, unlike Dedans, “Stigmata” does succeed in telling a story of loss in the past – rather than simply repeating the loss in the present – it does so through the

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wounds that remain open, unhealed. Writing means repeatedly opening up the wound/mouth as a means to remember and retell the past; as in Dedans, there is no suggestion of definitive healing, merely, in this case, the traces of wounds, of stigmata.

Stigmata: The Inscription of Wounds I have argued in this chapter that Cixous’s texts play on the similarities and differences between body and psyche in order to stage the question of what is at stake in “writing loss”. While questioning the equation between bodily and psychological wounding set up both in trauma theory and in Cixous’s writing, my reading has also drawn on the analogy between body and psyche as a means to think through how to express the impact of traumatic loss on the psyche. In the next chapter, on Béatrice de Jurquet’s autobiographical fiction, I emphasize further the differences between the wound of the body and the wound of the mind. In concluding my analysis of Cixous’s writing, however, I follow Cixous – and Freud and Caruth – in using bodily imagery in order to discuss how traumatic loss is written. Cixous’s texts repeatedly return to the father’s death without satisfactorily assimilating or containing it: the story of loss can never be completed in Cixous’s writing. This lack of containment is articulated in Dedans through the figure of an open body and in “Stigmata” through images of bodily wounds that close up only to be reopened repeatedly. In these texts, writing is likened to opening up wounds, to breaking the skin, images of rupture that point to what is at stake in delving into the wounded psyche. In the Introduction I quoted Cixous’s portrayal of a relation between the wound, the scar and writing: Mais de la blessure il y en a. La blessure, c’est cela que je sentirais. La blessure, chose étrange: ou je meurs ou il y a un travail qui se fait, mystérieux, qui va rassembler les bords de la plaie. Chose merveilleuse aussi: qui va quand même laisser une trace, même si cela nous fait du mal [….] J’aime la cicatrice, ce récit. (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1994, 26)

Here, as in Dedans and “Stigmata”, Cixous relates writing to the body, to bodily wounds and scars. Where the texts about the father link writing to open wounds, here she seems to posit writing as a form of

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scar, that bears the traces of healed wounds of the past. Yet what is striking in the quotation from Photos de racines is the assumption that either the wound is fatal or it heals up and forms a scar, a scar that tells a story. “Stigmata” shows us instead that writing is bound up not only in the story of loss in the past, the scar, but also in the wounds that open up in the act of telling. My reading of “Stigmata” suggests that remembering and writing loss in the past means moving between open wounds and the scars that trace past wounds, with no sense of resolution. This interplay between open and closed wounds points, of course, to the central image of the text: stigmata, which, as noted earlier, can either be wounds or scars, either open or closed. Moreover, even if “stigmata” are closed wounds, there is always the risk that they will open up and bleed spontaneously. It is for this reason that the figure of bodily “stigmata” is particularly appropriate to describe Cixous’s texts about the father’s death, which both tell the story of a loss in the past and yet also open up the wounds of loss in the present. In my analysis of Cixous’s texts, writing itself may be seen to become a form of stigmata, both opening bodily wounds and bearing imprints of wounding, commemorating yet also keeping open the childhood loss in the present.

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“Perdre pied”: The Inscription of Sexual Abuse in Béatrice de Jurquet’s Autobiographical Fiction “Mon enfance est aussi racontable que n’importe quelle enfance peu racontable. Le chemin en arrière n’est plus praticable. Restent les détours” (Jurquet 1997, 10). The narrator of Béatrice de Jurquet’s most recent novel, La Traversée des lignes, struggles to remember and write about her traumatic childhood, in which she was physically and sexually abused by her father. Like Jurquet’s earlier novel, Cour intérieure (1991), La Traversée des lignes may be seen to explore what is at stake in attempting to give voice to childhood sexual abuse and to a past that resists articulation. There is no possibility of recounting that past directly: the narrator admits that she has no access to her childhood trauma. Instead, as she claims at the beginning of the text, “Restent les détours”: she cannot return directly to her childhood, but approaches it circuitously, through deviations and detours. In Jurquet’s writing, sexual abuse resists narrativization; it is inscribed indirectly, through detours and through recurring images and textual figures. In this chapter, I draw out these images and figures in order to explore how sexual abuse is inscribed in La Traversée des lignes and Cour intérieure. Both of these novels are self-consciously autobiographical: the narrator of La Traversée des lignes, named “Béatrice de Jurquet”, is explicitly identified with the author, which suggests that the experiences recounted in the text are not purely fictitious, but find some point of contact with the author’s life. Both La Traversée des lignes and Cour intérieure are, I argue, autobiographical novels questioning the very possibility of an autobiography of sexual abuse. My analysis is thus centred around the question: how is lived sexual abuse inscribed in narrative?

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Béatrice de Jurquet is the author of both fiction and poetry; her first novel, Molly Furgo, was published in 1981, and in 1999 she also published a volume of poetry, Le Jardin de bataille. Her two most recent novels may be seen to explore the effects of childhood physical and sexual abuse on memory, identity and autobiography. In Cour intérieure, the narrator addresses her dying grandmother, evoking their shared fear of the narrator’s violent and abusive father. In the later text, the narrator self-consciously tries to impose some sort of narrative order on disparate, barely-articulated memories of a childhood over-shadowed by physical and sexual abuse. La Traversée des lignes opens not with a direct return to the narrator’s childhood, but with an illness she experienced some ten years before beginning to write: Il y a un peu plus de dix ans, j’ai été malade, d’aucune maladie nommable [….] Un matin, j’ai constaté que j’avais perdu les mots. Je connaissais le sens des mots, oui, mais ce sens ne voulait rien dire [….] De l’extérieur, rien ne venait signifier que j’avais perdu les mots. Le centre de gravité éffacé, la langue tournait à vide, insoutenable. (1997, 9)

The narrator describes this experience of mental breakdown as “une expérience d’effacement” (9), linking her loss of language with a loss of identity. Where one might expect an autobiographical narrative to begin by situating the writing subject in time and space, here the text opens with the erasure of the subject and the loss of language. The narrator, unable to recount her childhood memories directly, seems compelled to approach her past via the detour of a description of selfeffacement. This detour points obliquely to the ongoing impact of her traumatic childhood and to her inability to recount it, both figured in her loss of language. Yet it is not so much that she has lost language; rather, language has become unstable, losing its meaning and thus its centre of gravity, as though words, that usually seem grounded in their meanings, have lost their pivotal point. This imagery of imbalance and slippage, which recurs throughout La Traversée des lignes, appears to emphasize the narrator’s inability to recount her past: she is unable to anchor her memories in narrative. If this account of the loss of language and identity seems to point to the impossibility of narrating the past, it also, however, works as a starting point from which the narrator can begin to approach her past. It is through the recurring figures of imbalance and slippage that the narrator can give voice to her traumatic childhood, which cannot be

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articulated directly. In this chapter, I argue that Jurquet’s novels similarly attempt to articulate seemingly unspeakable sexual abuse through imagery of imbalance and falling. This raises the crucial question of how a literary text can refer to sexual abuse: that is, the question of reference. In the first part of the chapter, I look at contemporary literary criticism on autobiographical narratives of sexual abuse, which, I argue, tends to rely on establishing an overly stable relation between writing subject and text and between text and reader. I turn instead to the model of reference set up by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, in which reference is defined not as an alignment between text and life but as a slippage or disruption in the relation between text and life. This notion of reference as a slippage between text and lived experience is integral to my reading of La Traversée des lignes and Cour intérieure in the second part of the chapter, which shows how sexual abuse is figured through imagery of imbalance and falling and explores the corresponding imbalance between lived experience of traumatic abuse and its narrativization. My analysis of Jurquet’s writing thus raises an important question both for autobiographical narratives of sexual abuse and for “life-writing” more generally: how are we to read this imbalance or slippage?

Theorising Autobiographical Narratives of Sexual Abuse Child sexual abuse is often referred to as an untold secret: a “secret trauma” (Russell 1986), even, in Florence Rush’s words, the “best kept secret” (Rush 1980). Psychiatrists have noted that in cases where children are abused by a parent or primary caretaker, they are forced to collude in the abuser’s secrecy not only out of fear but also, crucially, in order to retain belief in their parents: “All of the abused child’s psychological adaptations serve the fundamental purpose of preserving her primary attachment to her parents” (Herman [1992] 1994, 102). Child sexual abuse is, then, often concealed by the perpetrator and the victim alike, as well as by society, in order to protect the family unit (Herman [1992] 1994, 2). The narrator of La Traversée des lignes, who can attempt to recount her childhood only after her father’s death, when he is no longer present to silence her, continues to feel as though she is betraying him in some way: “Est-ce suffisant, qu’il soit mort, que je puisse m’octroyer la liberté d’en dire

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ce qu’il n’aurait voulu que je dise? Non. Je parle et il ne sait pas que je parle” (Jurquet 1997, 76). To recount her experience of abuse is to break an imposed silence and to defy paternal authority, asserting her own word over that of her father and thereby attempting to recreate her identity outside the father’s tyranny. Narratives of sexual abuse attempt “to articulate one of our culture’s unspeakable secrets” (Williamson 1992, 219): to make that abuse known – to betray the secret – is to break through the framework of the family unit, to tell a story society is unwilling, even unable, to hear. Yet “crucial to recovery is the act of breaking the silence”: healing is perceived to depend on speaking out, on making public the hidden abuse (Gorman 1991, 46). Most literary criticism on autobiographical narratives about sexual abuse focuses on the relation between writing and healing, on the possibility of “narrative recovery”, which Suzette Henke defines as “both the recovery of past experience through narrative articulation and the psychological reintegration of a traumatically shattered subject” (1998, xxii). For Henke, narratives of sexual abuse are centred around the narrative recovery and disclosure of the writing subject’s hidden psychological wounds: this “narrative recovery” seems to suggest the regain of psychological balance through the recuperation of the hitherto silenced traumatic experience in writing and the concomitant narrative reintegration of the destabilized subject. The author’s experience grounds the narrative, whilst the narrative stabilizes the author. According to Kalí Tal, “Literature of trauma is defined by the identity of its author. Literature of trauma holds at its center the reconstruction and recuperation of the traumatic experience” (Tal 1996, 17). The author’s experience is thus seen to anchor the text and govern its interpretation, offering what Suzette Henke calls a “focal point”, a gravitational centre around which autobiographical writing about traumatic experience is balanced (1998, xvi). Traumatic experience and writing fall towards each other as if by force of gravity, yet this falling does not destabilize them, but locks trauma and writing together by a force of attraction that anchors each in place. This form of literary criticism seems, then, to rely on a fixed, unquestioned relation between author and text established not by the author or indeed by the text, but by the literary critic. These critics, one could argue, perform a balancing act from a vantage spectatorial position, establishing a model of reference in which text and writing subject are equated or stabilized.

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This fixed model of reference is, however, highly troubling: given the destabilising effects of sexual abuse, how can we assume any sort of balanced relation between text and writing subject? As I shall argue, Jurquet’s texts may be seen to question the possibility of aligning author and narrator, life and text, in ways that call for a different model of reference from that offered in most criticism on narratives of sexual abuse. For this reason, I turn again to Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience, which, strikingly, criticism on sexual abuse has more or less ignored. This may be because Caruth does not write specifically on abuse; her perspective is not markedly feminist; she does not focus on female-authored texts. It may also, however, be because she gestures towards a complex model of reference that would call into question those models typically set up in criticism on texts recounting sexual abuse and that implicitly challenges any attempt to stabilize the relation between “life” and “writing”.

Trauma, Autobiography and The Question of Reference: Unclaimed Experience In her introduction to Unclaimed Experience, Caruth claims that writing of trauma may be seen to ask “what it means to transmit and to theorize around a crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness” (1996, 5). Trauma is not registered consciously as it occurs, but exerts a powerful and enduring effect on the subject; although it cannot be “known” as such, it demands to be taken into account and to be articulated. Yet how does one speak about or refer to an event that seems to defy understanding and knowledge? This problem is also, Caruth suggests, a problem of reference, and the question of how to refer to trauma underpins Unclaimed Experience. Indeed, Caruth’s writing attempts to rethink what we mean by reference in the context of trauma, pointing to what she calls elsewhere a “realignment of reference with what is not fully masterable by cognition” (Caruth and Esch 1995, 3). A traumatic event is precisely an event not “masterable by cognition”, that cannot be narrated directly and must be articulated indirectly. Narratives of trauma, Caruth suggests, do not tell a straightforward story of lived experience, but inscribe that experience in unexpected ways; they do not point to a simple and direct relation

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between “life” and text, but to a different model of reference, a model Caruth attempts to draw out in Unclaimed Experience. The fourth chapter of Unclaimed Experience, “The Falling Body and the Impact of Reference”, is particularly concerned with the question of referentiality. This chapter, as its title suggests, explores reference through the figure of a falling body, in a reading of Paul de Man’s essays on Heinrich von Kleist and Immanuel Kant. Although, as Caruth suggests, both of these essays primarily deal with the possibility of philosophy as a self-contained theoretical system, “Aesthetic Formalization”, de Man’s essay on Kleist’s story On the Marionette Theatre, also thinks through the relation between the life of the writing subject and the text, which is precisely the relation that interests me here. In On the Marionette Theatre, the principal dancer of an opera company suggests that human dancers could learn a great deal about their art from the mechanical movements of puppets, insisting that marionettes are more graceful than humans because they lack human clumsiness and are not weighed down by gravitational pull. De Man notes that the gracefulness of the puppets’ movements is the effect of the relation between puppets and puppeteer: “All their aesthetic charm stems from the transformations undergone by the linear motion of the puppeteer [….] The aesthetic power is located neither in the puppet nor in the puppeteer but in the text that spins itself between them” (de Man 1984, 285). This image of the puppet dance as a “text” is telling: as Caruth observes in her reading of de Man’s essay, “the relation between puppet and puppeteer […] appears to represent the relation between the author and his writing” (Caruth 1996, 81). De Man points out that the analogy between writer and text and puppeteer and puppet has also implicitly been drawn by other literary critics working on Kleist. These critics, de Man emphasizes, have seen the rising and falling of the marionettes as a reflection of a series of “crises and victories” in Kleist’s own life; they have thus taken the marionettes to be figures of Kleist himself, so that, curiously, the puppets become faces of the invisible puppeteer (de Man 1984, 283). Countering this traditional reading of Kleist’s work, de Man draws out a more complex relation between puppet and puppeteer in On the Marionette Theatre, which may in turn be seen to point to a more complex model of the relation between life and writing. He suggests that the figure of the puppeteer is lost in the formality of the puppet dance, which is governed by “tropes”, “quantified systems of motion”,

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rather than by “desire” or “semantic intentions” (de Man 1984, 286). The puppet dance is the result of what de Man calls a “transformative” relation between puppeteer and puppets: the puppets cannot be seen simply as figures of the puppeteer. Moreover, the puppets can seem human only when the puppeteer is invisible and unnoticed, that is, when the puppeteer’s movements are smooth and mechanical, not jerky and awkward. Yet it is precisely when the puppets move most gracefully that they are the most inhuman: a human dancer, de Man points out, is repeatedly compelled to stop for “brief periods of repose” that “interrupt” the continuity of the dance, whereas a puppet can maintain a constant motion (de Man 1984, 287). This leads to a paradox that may also, Caruth suggests, be applied to literary texts: in Caruth’s words, “precisely when the text appears most human, it is most mechanical” (Caruth 1996, 82). De Man’s writing seems to suggest that we can trace the relation between puppet and puppeteer and, by extension, between text and writing subject, when it is shown to be disrupted, jerky, unstable. Caruth takes this further, setting up a model of reference that is based not on a straightforward alignment between text and life, but on what she refers to as a “disruption” or mutilation of that apparent alignment (Caruth 1996, 83). This alternative model of reference seems to be enacted in de Man’s reading of Kleist, which, as Caruth emphasizes, draws out “breaks” and “discontinuities” in the relation between Kleist’s biography and his writing in order to rethink Kleist’s work as autobiography (Caruth 1996, 85). Caruth suggests that de Man’s oblique treatment of the relation between Kleist’s life and his writing may be seen to point to a different model of autobiography, to a “shadowy autobiographical reality” (Caruth 1996, 85). Her own reading of de Man seems to point to another “shadowy autobiographical reality”, alluded to in a footnote, where she adds: “We may understand this dynamic of autobiography also in terms of de Man’s own writing/non-writing of his past and the ongoing attempts to create autobiographical accounts of it” (Caruth 1996, 138n. 7). This seemingly tangential reference to de Man’s past is in fact crucial. It is now well known that de Man, renowned for his contributions to literary theory and to deconstruction in particular at Yale, also wrote anti-Semitic articles for the Belgian newspaper Le Soir during the Second World War; having emigrated to the United States after the war, he kept his past secret. When Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian scholar, discovered these articles in 1987, their

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ensuing publication precipitated a crisis surrounding deconstruction itself (see Hamacher et al. 1989). De Man was referred to as “the fallen idol”, a title conferred by his opponents and supporters alike (see Lehman 1991, 143; Johnson 1994, 94). For many critics of literary theory in general and deconstruction in particular, de Man’s demise discredited deconstruction as a theoretical practice based on unethical, even fascist premises (Hirsch 1991, 133-142). These critics, who had always been opposed to theories of deconstruction, could now claim that de Man himself had used deconstructive theory to evade responsibility for his own past. To quote David Hirsch: “De Man […] found in the techniques of deconstruction a useful device for creating an intricate and elaborate set of evasions that would help him to nullify his own guilt-ridden past” (1991, 100). Although this accusation is both excessive and under-theorized, it does raise an important question: how does what we now know about de Man’s past inflect our readings of his writing? Although some of de Man’s followers and former colleagues attempted to ignore the impact of his past, whilst others insisted that his past was irrelevant to his later theoretical work, the question of how to refer to de Man’s fall remained. This question remains unspoken in Unclaimed Experience, yet it is surely noteworthy that Caruth’s chapter on de Man is also explicitly about falling. Her silence on the subject of de Man’s controversial past has been read as a subtle defence of de Man: the literary critic James Berger claims that Caruth offers “a defense of de Manian methods of interpretation and somewhat obliquely or figuratively, a defense of de Man himself”. He sees her as “strangely coy about the traumatic backdrop to de Man’s own writing”, suggesting that she may be “too close to her subject” (Berger 1997, 579). De Man’s personal influence on Caruth is undeniable: she shares his academic background at Yale and her first book, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions (1991), is dedicated to de Man as teacher and mentor. Yet Caruth offers no defence of de Man; a more apt criticism might be her very refusal to deal directly with de Man’s troubled past. I would suggest, however, that Caruth’s indirect, oblique references to de Man’s life should be read in the context of her assertion that direct reference is impossible. The appended reference to de Man does not avoid the question of how to refer to de Man’s fall, but evokes it as, precisely, a “break” or “discontinuity” in her account of reference. That is, Caruth’s text seems to tell a doubled story and thus call for a double reading: her

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reading of de Man’s writing is undercut by the brief reference to his life, which implicitly shows up the discontinuities between life and writing. Caruth’s work seems to suggest that de Man’s theoretical writings cannot be simply aligned with his past life: that the connection between his life and his writing is discontinuous, unstable. Caruth does not ignore the question of de Man’s fall, which remains as a “shadowy” referent in Caruth’s chapter: the “falling body” referred to in the title of the chapter may be seen to point obliquely to de Man’s fall. Kleist’s puppet dance reminds us that puppets are not governed by the laws of gravity – de Man describes them as “antigrav”, antigravitational – whereas humans fall: the human body is, precisely, a falling body (de Man 1984, 286). De Man’s analysis of Kleist draws out the discontinuities between the falling human body and the “antigravitational” puppet as a question of reference: the puppets cannot simply be seen as figures of Kleist himself, cannot be seen to refer to Kleist directly. Where in traditional readings of Kleist, the puppets have been taken to embody an alignment between text and life, the image of the falling body that is at the centre of Caruth’s essay may, then, be seen to figure the disruption of the relation between life and text: in her words, “the impact of reference”.12 My reading of La Traversée des lignes draws on Caruth’s notion that reference emerges through disruption, through the figure of the falling body. Like Caruth, I see the relation between text and writing subject as discontinuous and disrupted and thus, by extension, indirect. I draw out the imagery of imbalance and falling used to describe sexual abuse in Jurquet’s writing, not only in order to analyse how abuse is lived and narrated, but also to explore the relation between lived sexual abuse and its inscription in writing. Where the literary critics like Kalí Tal and Suzette Henke that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter attempt to stabilize the relation between writing subject, text and reader, I show how this relation is fundamentally unstable and cannot be located as such. I do not offer a theory of reference in trauma writing, but explore what reference might mean in the context of autobiographical narratives of sexual

12

Caruth’s discussion of the falling body as a means to explore questions of reference is taken further in her analysis of de Man’s writing on Kant, which is too lengthy and complex to be considered here. I retain her image of the falling body however as a figure for the disruption of reference.

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abuse. My analysis is centred around the question: how do we refer to sexual abuse in narrative?

Writing Sexual Abuse in Jurquet’s Autobiographical Fiction Both Cour intérieure and La Traversée des lignes explore a narrator’s attempts to remember and describe her traumatic childhood and sexual abuse. Neither text can locate an origin to sexual abuse: in Cour intérieure, the narrator admits that “Je ne sais même pas comment ça commence” (Jurquet 1991, 69). The narrator of La Traversée des lignes seems to locate the beginning of her abuse in one night “qui préfigure d’autres nuits” (Jurquet 1997, 32), a night when she was sleeping outside the family home in a tent and her father crawled naked into the tent to sexually abuse her. She does not, perhaps cannot, describe this abuse directly. Rather, she refers to the night as “une nuit rompue” (32) in which “l’espace et le temps se distordent” (34), a night that breaks her understanding of space and time and thus precludes the possibility of fixing a traumatic origin. This vision of trauma as temporal rupture is echoed in Caruth’s writing: “What causes trauma […] is a shock that may appear to work very much like a bodily event but is in fact a break in the mind’s understanding of time” (Caruth 1996, 61). In her model, the psychological wound of trauma is not locatable and curable like a bodily wound, but a breach in the mind’s temporal framework: “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 1996, 4). The belated re-enactments that structure the experience of psychological trauma point to the impossibility of locating a traumatic origin: in Caruth’s words, since trauma “is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another place and in another time” (Caruth 1996, 17). To attempt to narrate an experience of trauma is, then, to try to speak, or write, through rupture, through a break in space and in time. In Jurquet’s writing, this spatial and temporal rupture is figured through recurring imagery of imbalance, slippage and falling; more accurately, through the figure of a falling body. In Cour intérieure, the narrator’s physical and sexual abuse remains unspoken except in short

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sections in italics, sectioned off from the main text and narrated in the third person: Elle s’élance vers le haut, il la rattrape d’une main entre ventre et poitrine. Elle est nue. La nudité est obligatoire. Il lui apprend à exécuter ce qu’il appelle un saut périlleux. Elle tombe souvent. Elle n’a pas peur de tomber, elle a peur des gifles. (71)

These memories, visually set off from the main text by the italic typeface, interrupt the flow of reading; the narrator’s memories of abuse are thus figured through disruption, a disruption linked to the child’s falling body. The narrator seems unable to remember in the first person, unable to “claim” her experiences of abuse except through the body; her childhood memories seem to emerge through the body, through a body that falls repeatedly and is beaten. In La Traversée des lignes, the narrator’s fragmented memories of abuse are also mediated through the figure of the falling body. The narrator describes how as a child she was forced to undertake daring naked gymnastic feats for the voyeuristic pleasure of her father, Victor: Un fil invisible noué autour de sa cheville et relié à la main de son père, le corps de la petite fille promet d’être léger. Idéalement, il devrait bondir, s’élancer entre ciel et terre, ‘s’envoler en pesanteur et défier le vide. Revenir se poser, en équilibre sur sa base, les épaules de Victor. Je me suis fait mal en tombant, je recommence aussitôt. (61)

The narrator alternates between the first and the third person narrative voice, figuring a shift between distance from and identification with the little girl performing for her father. Her description of herself as a marionette manipulated by the father-puppeteer marks her alienation from her own body, shown to be commanded by the father, an alienation that is reiterated throughout this text: later, she will assert explicitly that “De mon corps, j’étais parfois brutalement chassée” (77). She locates her abuse in the body, rather than in the mind, in the body that is taken over by the father and seems outside her own control. It is, moreover, striking that the body, although naked, apparently bears no visual trace of the abuse: it is manipulated by the father by an invisible thread. It is, then, not the body as such, but the falling body that points to the child’s experience of abuse in this text. In Caruth’s account of Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre, the falling

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human body that disrupts the graceful motion of the puppets may be seen to denote reference. Here, the child’s body, referred to in the third person, is likened to that of a puppet, defying gravity, until she falls; crucially, the fall is described painfully in the first person, as though it is the fall that confirms her human subjectivity, her pain. Sexual abuse is, then, inscribed in Jurquet’s writing not as the psychological equivalent of a fixed bodily wound, but as a repeated experience of losing balance and falling. This figuration of trauma in the falling body is significant, implying that the psychological wound of trauma cannot be located and visualized, but shifts repeatedly: the very figure used to convey trauma in this text is itself unfixed and unstable. It is through the falling body, through the body in motion, that the extent of Béatrice’s father’s brutality is indicated. He aims to turn her into a “fille-oiseau” (Jurquet 1997, 59) with an aerodynamic (weightless) body that can defy gravity, that can “monter les escaliers quatre à quatre et non pas marche après marche comme le commun des mortels” (60). His desire for her to attempt the impossible – to defy the force of gravity – highlights his lack of insight into his own abusive behaviour: his sexual demands are literally impossible as well as unthinkable. She falls frequently and painfully either onto Victor’s shoulders or onto the ground; in both cases, she is forced to begin the process anew or is beaten as punishment. There seems to be no means of escape: flight, far from constituting an escape, is controlled and dictated by the father. Landing does not mark a return to solid ground, but shows the impossibility of finding a foothold and regaining balance: the narrator’s experience of abuse is figured not only by falling, but also by landing, which marks the beginning of another sequence of abuse (“Je recommence aussitôt”). Her traumatic experience inheres not in a single fall so much as in an unending cycle of falling and landing painfully, in struggling to achieve equilibrium of any sort. As a child, the narrator seems to be involved in a continual struggle for stability. Her aristocratic family is anchored in tradition and history: in her words, “les racines étaient profondes” (Jurquet 1997, 18). Yet the father rejects the stability of the family home and becomes a military pilot, his choice of occupation implicitly pointing to his refusal of stability, his attempts to fly above familial and social obligation. Terrorized by her father, the narrator feels as though she has no fixed home, no point of anchorage: she is continually seeking

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hiding-places, spaces outside the tyranny of the father, to no avail (Jurquet 1997, 64).13 When a friend constructs for her a miniature house made out of matches, the father destroys it (27), symbolically refusing her a space of her own, invading her symbolic space as well as her body. Even when staying with her mother’s family, where her father is refused entry, she continues to feel out of place, condemned by her maternal family by her physical resemblance to her father, whom they despise (64). Her childhood, which she refers to tellingly as “l’abîme enfantin” (144), is thus marked by a relentless sense of displacement, insecurity and imbalance. This instability recurs throughout her adult life, played out most clearly through the slippages and dislocation of memory.

Remembering: “Une existence en apesanteur” La Traversée des lignes does not tell the story of Béatrice’s life as such: instead, the narrative switches between fragmented evocations of her childhood and disrupted descriptions of episodes of her adult life, which bears the legacy of her troubled childhood. We can piece together a story of sorts: she leaves home for Paris, and, later, London, and has a sexual relationship with a man called Yves, who fathers her baby daughter before their relationship breaks down. Lacking the financial and emotional means to look after her daughter, she leaves the child with foster parents and struggles to regain stability to no avail, moving from one psychiatric hospital to another. In hospital, she relives the falls she experienced as a child: Il m’arrive de tomber. Ce n’est pas fréquent. Plus exactement, je m’affaisse, mes jambes ne me portent plus, le cœur devient très lent, je ne peux plus parler, articuler, mais je ne perds pas conscience. (124-5)

As a child, she succeeded in blanking out – dissociating – her experiences (“On disait que je ne sentais rien” (116)); as an adult, however, she finds herself falling without losing consciousness, as though she is re-enacting consciously the falls she blanked out as a 13

This urge to hide is, according to Judith Herman, characteristic of abused children: “Many survivors remember literally hiding for long periods of time, and they associate their only feelings of safety with particular hiding places rather than with people” ([1992] 1994, 100).

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child. These re-enactments do not enable her to remember her traumatic past: she admits that she is unable to give voice to her childhood, reiterating that “Ma mémoire ne sert pas” (12). Rather, her repeated falls highlight her inability either to remember or to move beyond her past. In “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”, Freud distinguishes between remembering and repeating: The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it. ([1914] 1981 12:150)

Here the narrator does not relive her past unknowingly, but the knowledge of that repetition does not bring it to a stop; she remains unable to “remember” as such. This failure of memory may be seen from the beginning of the text, when the narrator evokes her first dislocated memory: of a military base in Germany at the end of the Second World War, when she was six years old and about to return to France. She remembers walking in the snow with other children and being reunited with a blonde woman, whom she now recognizes as her mother, on a flight of steps. Her memory stops there: “Je ne comprends pas les traces de pas. Il n’y a plus que le blanc de la neige, tout est blanc [….] La neige a tout recouvert” (14). The only possible traces of her past are transitory, marks on the snow that will disappear either with another fall of snow or when the snow melts: clearing the snow would not reveal the narrator’s tracks. These traces are not residues of memory, but marks of amnesia, of the absence of memory and of a locatable origin in the past, figured in the blank whiteness of the snow. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman warns that the survivor of abuse must weigh up the need to remember against the risks of confronting the past: “As the survivor summons her memories, the need to preserve safety must be balanced constantly against the need to face the past” ([1992]1994, 176). Béatrice seems to be performing just such a balancing act as she leans precariously out of a high window to peer at her childhood self: “Je sais que l’enfance a eu lieu et je n’y suis pas, moi aujourd’hui qui me penche à perdre l’équilibre” (117). Remembering her childhood trauma, this suggests, is bound up in imbalance: if she leans too far forward – the only possibility of seeing and remembering – she risks overbalancing. She begins her

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memories precisely where they break down and she loses her footing: “Dans mon souvenir, la première fois que je perds pied, j’ai six ans” (13). It is unclear whether she means that her memory slips, or whether she remembers slipping, or indeed that she remembers that her memory slipped; here again memory is associated with dislocation, slippage. The lost footing here does not, however, align adult and child but marks a slippage between them that recurs throughout the text, wrong-footing any attempt on the reader’s part to identify the two. Although the adult repeatedly relives her childhood experience, she remains alienated from her childhood self: “Il m’arrive que ma mémoire m’oublie […] que je n’y suis pas dans ma mémoire” (116-7). This offers an alternative understanding of imbalance in this text: in the Oxford English Dictionary, “imbalance” refers to “an unbalanced condition; a lack of proportion or relation between corresponding things”. Here adult and child are not balanced, equated, as we might expect them to be; balance is bound up in temporal continuity, in a consistency that is ruptured by trauma. In the narrator’s words, “J’ai manqué une marche, manqué un jour et l’étoffe des jours s’est déchiré” (23). The temporal rupture is linked with losing her footing as she figuratively misses a step and overbalances; indeed, she lives the break in time as a loss of balance. The narrator cannot, then, ground an identity in her childhood memories, which remain both inaccessible and, somewhat paradoxically, disturbingly present in her adult life. She describes her life as “une existence en apesanteur, sans fondements” (19), not, as one might expect, weighted down by trauma, but rather, too light to be grounded and thus unbalanced, precarious. She feels unable to provide her daughter with the emotional stability missing from her own childhood and concludes that, from her daughter’s perspective, she “ne fait pas le poids” (133). Inadequacy is expressed in terms of weightlessness: she is not heavy enough, or sufficiently anchored, to take care of her daughter and herself. Moreover, she identifies in the women she encounters in the psychiatric hospitals her own feeling of weightlessness: “Ces vies de femmes pèsent de peu de poids. D’ailleurs, la plupart ne faisaient aucun bruit” (128). Like her, these women are unable, for whatever reason, to look after their families and, like her, they live precarious, uncertain existences, ignored or marginalized from society. Silence and levity come together here, as weight is aligned with being able to speak; for these women in the psychiatric hospitals, the narrator implies, there is no means of

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speaking out. She seems to suggest that both sexual abuse and mental illness lack gravitas, are not weighty enough to impact on society, precisely because society prefers to keep them quiet, hidden away: “Il fallait rester léger, ne pas peser” (95). E. Sue Blume, a feminist psychiatrist, notes that “Post-Incest Syndrome describes a life out of balance” (1990, 45): if we read this in the context of Jurquet’s writing, “out of balance” also means without stable foothold, weightless. Yet how can one describe a “life out of balance”? Or, to follow the narrator’s imagery, how can experience that is too light to be contained within a social framework, too silent to be heard, be grounded in narrative? This question is reiterated throughout La Traversée des lignes, which, as we shall see, implicitly poses the question: how is sexual abuse inscribed in writing?

Sexual Abuse and Writing: Imbalance and Dislocation The narrator of La Traversée des lignes initially seems to subscribe to the possibility of using writing as a means to stabilize herself, to create for herself a coherent and balanced life story. Critics working on scriptotherapy emphasize that, in the words of Louise DeSalvo, “a healing narrative is a balanced narrative” (1999, 59), centred around the recuperation and revelation of hitherto silenced psychological trauma. The narrator of La Traversée des lignes dreams of achieving equilibrium through writing: “Je rêve un centre. D’une suite inexorable de mots, d’un cercle, la mouvance immobile et secrète, un centre” (134). She envisages a narrative centred around the recovery of her past in language, a balanced narrative. If, as she claims, “les récits sont des marches” that offer a “lieu où se poser” (62), a landingplace, story-telling seems to offer her a means of establishing a stable foothold. Where previously she had been caught in a cycle of flying and falling, narrative would seem to provide her with fixed steps, a safe path she can follow without tripping. The possibility of achieving equilibrium in writing is, however, undercut: the narrator admits that “Manque un axe bien défini pour parler” (101) and that, deprived of that axis, her narrative, like her memory, remains unbalanced. The text cannot anchor itself in traumatic experience and seems off-centre and askew from the very beginning. The narrator admits that her life cannot be defined in terms

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of a causal narrative, beginning with her traumatic childhood and tracing its impact on her development and adult life. She admits: “Il me semble que je n’aie pas une histoire, mais des histoires qui communiquent peu entre elles” (119). This emphasis on a plurality of stories is, perhaps, characteristic in women’s narratives of self, which, according to Shoshana Felman, tend to trace “the absence of a story or, what amounts to the same thing, the presence of too many stories” (1993, 15), stories that remain disconnected from one another. Béatrice’s narrative, split into disparate, discontinuous threads (“lignes”) and fragments, seems to illustrate Felman’s point exactly. The stories she has to tell are, she claims, like a shadow “trop légère pour un livre” (Jurquet 1997, 9), too light to anchor her narrative. These narrative fragments – described as “les morceaux désassemblés de mes récits” (139) – remain distinct from one another; they cannot be pieced together. This may be seen in the very structure of the text, split into short, irregular segments that are separated by blanks on the page; there is no suggestion of narrative continuity or progression. The narrator claims that her “récits” lack grounding – “Mes récits n’ont pas de quoi faire rempart”– and fall away from her, “copeaux en spirales qui s’enfonceront peu à peu dans la terre (129). She seems unable to find a centre of gravity in her own decentred, unstable narratives; as she tries to put her foot down and regain balance, the stories fall away from her feet and she risks falling. This inability to find balance in narrative is, Felman suggests, symptomatic of women’s autobiographical writing in general (1993, 15-16). Here, however, the narrator’s struggle for equilibrium is particularly pressing, given the systematic physical and sexual abuse endured throughout her childhood and her considerable emotional and psychological problems as an adult, as well as her lack of financial and familial stability. Moreover, there is no sense in which she can even attempt to draw together the discontinuous threads of her stories: it is as though the text, like the writing subject, cannot ground itself in traumatic memory. Yet what is at stake in equating the text with the writing subject, as though the text is also in some way “wounded” or destabilized by trauma? La Traversée des lignes refuses any equivalence or balance between the traumatized writing subject and her dislocated narratives. The narrator describes her writing as “une écriture de descente alors que je veux remonter” (62), as though the writing subject and her narrative pull in different directions, coming together only where their

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opposing forces collide. This point of intersection is, moreover, located in the steps that the narrator falls off repeatedly, suggesting not only that the narrator’s aim to achieve balance through writing fails but also that the relation between text and narrator is itself shifting and unstable. The unbalanced text is not, then, to be equated with the unbalanced writing subject; indeed, it is precisely this lack of equation, this imbalance, that marks their interrelation. If the narrator is “wounded” by her experience of physical and sexual abuse, her narrative is destabilized by its own inability to articulate her experience. At the beginning of the text, the narrator recounts a previous illness in which language lost its meaning (“Je connaissais le sens des mots […] mais ce sens ne voulait rien dire” (9)) and its centre of gravity: “Le centre de gravité éffacé, la langue tournait à vide, insoutenable”. Words, rendered meaningless by their inability to convey her experience, become off-centre and unbalanced. This may be related to Kalí Tal’s observation that Traumatic experience catalyzes a transformation of meaning in the signs individuals use to represent their experiences [….] On the surface, language remains unchanged – survivors still use the word terror, non-traumatized audiences read and understand the word terror, and the dislocation of meaning is inevitable until one pays attention to the cry of survivors. (Tal 1996, 16)

Tal is highlighting here the inadequacy of language in the face of trauma, as words can never fully describe the horror of traumatic experience. Yet she is pointing not only towards a dislocation between the word and the experience, but also to a dislocation of meaning within language itself. For Tal, trauma causes an invisible disjuncture between different meanings of particular words, such as “terror”, that may be seen to destabilize language and narrative. This notion of a dislocation within language and narrative – between signifiers – rather than between signifier and referent seems entirely appropriate in relation to La Traversée des lignes. Here there is no means of recovering trauma in language: traumatic experience necessarily remains outside the text. The text is unbalanced not by the incursion of trauma but by its own inability to describe traumatic experience, an inability inscribed within the text, as we have seen, by dislocation and slippage. Yet it is only through this dislocation that Béatrice can write at all: “Je ne puis écrire le sens que si je le laisse échapper” (129). In La Traversée des lignes, writing finds its condition of possibility in a

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dislocation or slippage between writing and experience, a dislocation inscribed within language itself. This dislocation between writing and experience is, of course, not necessarily singular to narratives of trauma, yet it takes on particular significance in the context of autobiographical writings of trauma. According to Kalí Tal, the dislocation within language in narratives of trauma also points to a disjunction of understanding between the survivor attempting to tell his or her story and an audience or reader without personal experience of trauma. The slippage of meaning in language, Tal claims, means that the reader who has not experienced the traumatic event can have no access to the experiences described. Tal thus obliquely poses this dislocation within language as a problem of interpretation or of reading, suggesting that the reader can somehow learn how to see through the dislocation and gain access to the traumatic experience underpinning the text simply through “pay[ing] attention to the cry of survivors”. Yet can we see through that dislocation so easily? What does it mean to read through dislocation? How is the reader positioned in relation to narratives of trauma and, in particular, of sexual abuse?

Reading Narratives of Sexual Abuse Both Cour intérieure and La Traversée des lignes explicitly address the question of the reader’s positioning in relation to the revelation of sexual abuse in narrative. In La Traversée des lignes, the role of the reader is foregrounded through the figure of the psychoanalyst, who is shown to act as an ideal reader for the narrator’s writing and who she refers to as a “témoin” (63) to her childhood trauma. In Cour intérieure, the narrator addresses her dying grandmother, evoking shared memories shadowed by fears that remain barely articulated, yet that are repeatedly associated with the narrator’s father. The grandmother, like the analyst, is invoked as witness: “Si tu existes, alors moi aussi. La preuve. Le témoin” (Jurquet 1991, 63). Both texts are written after the death of the father, who, having been accused of espionage against the French government, falls from his tenth floor apartment to escape arrest and is killed instantly. The narrator seems to call for a reader as witness to make her hitherto hidden childhood abuse known, liberated from her father’s tyranny by his death: “Il me voulait tue. C’est lui qui l’est” (Jurquet 1991, 97). This invocation of a

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reader-witness is unsurprising in autobiographical accounts of sexual abuse: as Janice Williamson notes, the reader of narratives of sexual abuse is called upon as “witness”, as “one who will not misread” (1992, 226). In both Cour intérieure and La Traversée des lignes, however, the witness dies midway through the composition of the text; the death of the grandmother in the earlier text is mirrored by the death of the analyst in the later text. Both texts are structured around the death of the reader as witness. What implications does this have for the model of reading set up in Jurquet’s writing? And how can this help us to read narratives of sexual abuse? In Cour intérieure, the narrator’s choice of witness seems particularly surprising given that the grandmother, the mother of her abusive father, is caught between a need to know about the abuse and a paralysing inability to confront her son’s cruelty: Tu me questionnes sur ton fils, sur le père qu’il est. C’est difficile de te répondre vraiment. Ce serait encore plus difficile pour toi que je te réponde vraiment [….] Tu me crois, nous faisons un peu semblant et nous le savons. Tu es inquiète, je te rassure. Je t’ai toujours menti. Je n’ai pas pu faire autrement. (30)

The relationship between the narrator and her grandmother is framed by a mutual need to block out the knowledge of the father’s abuse. The narrator gives to her grandmother a promise of silence and, thus, of protection: “Je ne te dirai rien qui puisse te faire mal” (79). The “cour intérieure” of the title refers to the courtyard in the grandmother’s house, a closed, protected space in which the father’s abuse is unspoken, disavowed. Yet this fantasy of denial is undercut as the grandmother remains anxious and the narrator traumatized; their relationship is rooted in secrecy and disavowal. As an adult addressing her grandmother in this text, the narrator feels torn between the need to articulate her past and the concomitant inability to tell. It is, I would suggest, for this reason that the narrator calls upon a witness who has always been unwilling or unable to acknowledge the father’s actions: the narrator invokes as witness one who has repeatedly refused such a role. It is, in any case, too late for the grandmother to accept the role of witness: as her death precedes that of the father, she cannot hear the narrator’s testimony or testify to its truth. In invoking the deceased grandmother as witness, the narrator seems to highlight her own inability to bear witness, to pass on the unthinkable story of abuse. Reading is posited as a missed encounter, a failed testimony: the

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grandmother can no longer put a stop to the abuse, or even admit it to herself. The narrator describes her “story”, if it can be referred to as such, in the following terms: “Je savais, je sais qu’un récit intérieur est moins qu’un récit, il n’ordonne pas les faits, mais leur absence ou leur silence” (11). The “récit intérieur” implicitly points to the “cour intérieure” of the title, a space that is throughout the text associated with denial or disavowal; as this quotation suggests, the “récit intérieur” deals not with revelation of hidden past experiences, but with silences and absences. The narrator asks rhetorically, “De quoi est-ce que je te parle à mots couverts?” (82) It is, however, precisely through the absences and silences – through the “mots couverts” – that the narrator’s childhood abuse can, if not be revealed, at least be gestured towards. If the two main characters in this text are ostensibly the narrator and her grandmother, the father is the indirect subject of the narrative; the story of his abusive treatment of his daughter emerges through the unfolding relation between the daughter and grandmother. If the father’s abuse of Béatrice depended on the complicity of the grandmother, so this narrative, curiously doubling the abuse itself, depends on the grandmother’s silence, which enables the narrator both to tell and not to tell. In Cour intérieure, the narrator attempts to speak through “mots couverts”, without breaking the framework of the family; the condition of this seems to be the death – or silence – of the reader/witness. In La Traversée des lignes, the narrator’s choice of witness appears more appropriate: where the grandmother encouraged the narrator to forget and deny her past, we assume that the psychoanalyst seeks to help her to remember and work through her disturbing childhood experiences. The narrator explains that she would read her writing to her analyst, needing “une sorte de visa” (Jurquet 1997, 104) to continue to write; this work, she seems to suggest, becomes the text of La Traversée des lignes itself. Curiously, however, we are unaware of the existence of the analyst until he dies mid-way through the writing of the text: “Vous êtes mort vers le milieu du temps du livre. À la mitemps de mon travail” (105). The narrator goes on to explain that the analyst has died of a brain haemorrhage and that she cannot accept his death. They had planned to meet in September, she writes, and, if that meeting could still take place, she would read her text to him: “Vous comprenez, lui aurais-je dit, je dois aller au bout – et je vous rappelle que je n’ai pas terminé” (105). His death precedes her conclusion; her

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text is incomplete when he dies. Yet until this point she has referred to him only in the third person: it is only after this admission that she will continue to invoke him as fantasized reader that she begins to address him in the second person. She writes: J’attendais la mort des récits, dans l’écriture, leur mort naturelle. C’est vous qui êtes mort. Vous attendiez la suite. Elle s’étendra au souvenir de vous, de votre attente, de la mienne. (105)

Strangely, the analyst is addressed as reader only after his death, when he can no longer read; like the grandmother, he is called upon as witness when it is too late. It seems, however, to be precisely because he is dead that he is interpellated as witness and reader: remembering him, the narrator suggests, will propel her writing forward. This text echoes Cour intérieure in that again it seems somehow to depend on the death and silence of the reader/witness. The process of reading, like that of writing, is brutally interrupted in mid-flow: Août 199*. La ligne a été coupée. Tandis que j’écrivais. Le dernier mot était: lisible. Puis plus rien. L’effacement. L’interruption. Tout s’éteint. Le témoin disparaît. (104)

At the heart of the writing process is inscribed a discontinuous, broken line that marks the relationship with the reader; it is at the point where writing becomes “lisible”, paradoxically, that the relation with the reader is cut off by the reader’s sudden death. Indeed, the broken thread that signifies the only possibility of a relationship between narrator and reader also differentiates between them, highlighting the distance and discontinuity between the reader and the text. If we take the reader-analyst within the text as a projection of the extra-textual reader of La Traversée des lignes, this may serve to warn us as readers not to attempt to occupy the role of analyst in relation to the text. The narrator observes that “Le lecteur va vouloir un fil conducteur, c’est normal” (21), yet as readers of her narrative we are refused such a connecting thread. The text seems to visualize a disempowered reader unable to intervene in its production; reading, we might conclude, itself becomes a missed encounter, as the reader can never come to the text in time to act and make a difference. The reader is, then, distanced from the events and experiences described and, by extension, cut off from the writing subject; there is no suggestion of identification or alignment between reader and narrator.

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The reader is not, I would suggest, unbalanced by the text, but explicitly denied access to the traumatic experience it attempts to convey. As readers we cannot, then, act as privileged witnesses in relation to La Traversée des lignes, but are, rather, asked to read through discontinuous, broken lines and through an irresolvable dislocation between text and experience. This calls for a different mode of reading, one that is based not on the alignment between writing subject, text and reader established by most literary criticism on narratives of sexual abuse, but on slippage and discontinuity, as I will sketch by way of conclusion to this chapter.

Reading Through Discontinuities: “La traversée des lignes” The narrator of La Traversée des lignes admits that her narrative is composed not of words or memories as such, but of “des signes tracés d’une trace de trace” (102), the inscription of layer upon layer of traces of the past that cannot lead her to an origin as such. The use of the word “trace” here seems to point to the “traces de pas”, the footprints in the snow evoked in the narrator’s earliest childhood memory. Just as these footprints remain necessarily transitory, erased by fresh snowfall or when the snow melts, so writing does not imprint the past on the page, but, rather, leaves marks of the failure or slippage of memory and narrative. The narrator claims that “L’encre noire est tombée sur le mot neige et le nom de la neige a fondu dans ma bouche” (158), as though writing cannot capture the past, which melts or fades even as it is articulated. The narrator admits that “Dire est peut-être un fait accompli, mais le dernier mot disparaît dans le chemin qu’il trace” (159): writing is shown to leave no lasting mark, as words efface their own inscription, disappear in their own tracks. This is echoed in Cour intérieure, where the narrator asserts that “Ce que j’écris est du blanc sur du blanc” (Jurquet 1991, 95), figuring her words as invisible white prints on a white page. In Jurquet’s writing, words cannot render the traumatic past visible: these two texts work rather to highlight the invisibility of the narrator’s troubled childhood. To read Jurquet’s writing is, then, to draw out the disjunction between the visible traces and the invisible, absent memories that the narrator remains unable to conjure up. This does not mean trying to “see through” the text to the traumatic experience it attempts to describe: that experience is not to be found hidden under layers of

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narrative. In La Traversée des lignes, Béatrice describes her sexual abuse as the “trou noir de mes récits” (106), likening the unspeakable traumatic wound to a black hole that the gravitational force of language is unable to absorb. Black holes cannot deflect or emit light and thus cannot be seen directly, that is, through light; they can be seen only through darkness. This offers a compelling image of how to read not only Jurquet’s writing, but also narratives of sexual abuse more generally. Narratives of sexual abuse call for us to try to read in and through the dislocation between memories and amnesia, narrative and silence, in narratives of abuse. In La Traversée des lignes, the narrator observes that words “ne comblent pas la distance, ils sont la distance” (158): narrative does not bridge a gap of memory, but charts the distance and dislocation between past and present, visibility and invisibility. As readers we are called upon to trace these dislocations and discontinuities and to learn to read in and through these gaps. Jurquet’s writing, “lisible” only when it is unreadable, refuses the possibility of a fixed, stable reading: indeed, “la traversée des lignes” becomes the figure for a reading that constantly crosses lines, displacing and dislocating its own interpretations, and unable to anchor itself in fixed or definitive conclusions.

Chantal Chawaf’s Le Manteau noir: Survival, Departure and Bearing Witness To listen to the crisis of a trauma […] is not only to listen for the event, but to hear in the testimony the survivor’s departure from it: the challenge of the therapeutic listener, in other words, is how to listen to departure. (Caruth 1995, 10)

In her review of Chantal Chawaf’s 1998 novel, Le Manteau noir, Régine Deforges claims that “Chantal Chawaf a enfin écrit le texte qu’elle portait en elle depuis ce jour de 1943 où elle est née, arrachée au ventre maternel” (1998). We know from interviews and publicity notices accompanying Chawaf’s texts that she was born during a bomb explosion in Paris in 1943 in which her parents were killed and she was extracted from her dying mother’s stomach by Caesarian section.14 Since Chawaf’s first novel Retable/La Rêverie (1974), which features a melancholic orphan whose parents were killed in a bomb explosion in the Second World War, her novels have repeatedly returned to fictionalized scenes of parental death: in Elwina, le roman fée, published in 1985, Elwine’s parents are killed in Nazi extermination camps, whilst in Vers la lumière (1993), the protagonist’s parents are brutally murdered in the family home before her eyes. Yet it is not until Le Manteau noir, which tells the story of a woman born during a bomb explosion in Paris in 1943, that the recurring story of parental death is told in a coherent linear narrative and anchored in the specific historical context of World War II and the following years. The protagonist, Marie-Antoinette, moves from melancholic obsession with the death of her parents to become a 14

See in particular the publicity notice that accompanied L’Intérieur des heures (Chawaf 1986) when it came out, in which Chawaf states that her mother died before she was born.

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writer searching for a way to narrate her life story and to bear witness not only to the deaths of her parents but also to the thousands of other forgotten civilian deaths of World War II. It is, as Régine Deforges comments, as though Chawaf has finally – “enfin” – written the story of her life, or, more accurately, of her birth; as though the different stories of parental deaths throughout her textual corpus have been leading up to this text, which anchors her individual trauma in its wider historical context. My discussion of Le Manteau noir also heralds my own move from an analysis of individual trauma to collective trauma in this book. In the first three chapters, I focused on how individual narrators struggle to narrate their singular experiences of psychological wounding. In the chapter and in the following two chapters on Sarah Kofman and Charlotte Delbo, I explore what is at stake in bearing witness to individual trauma in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. Le Manteau noir calls into question the very possibility of bearing witness to individual loss in the context of the mass suffering and devastation of the war. At the end of the text, as Marie-Antoinette prepares to testify to her past, the narrator poses the question, “Comment témoignera-t-elle?” (410), a question that Le Manteau noir raises repeatedly yet cannot answer fully. This question is my point of focus in this chapter. I read Le Manteau noir alongside Cathy Caruth’s recent essay, “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival”. This essay pivots about the relation between survival, witnessing and departure, a question that also underpins both Chawaf’s writing and my interpretation of it in this chapter. The testimony to traumatic loss and to survival in Chawaf’s work, I argue, calls for us – to borrow Caruth’s words cited in the epigraph above – to learn “how to listen to departure”, to “parting words”.

Chawaf’s Fiction: “Speaking the Unspeakable” In recent years, Chawaf’s writing has become the object of increased critical attention in the United States and in Canada and the first full-length study of her work, Marianne Bosshard’s Chantal Chawaf, was published in 1999. Since the publication of her first novel, Retable/la rêverie, in 1974, only a year before the publication of Hélène Cixous’s influential article “Le Rire de la méduse”, Chawaf’s writing has repeatedly been compared with that of Cixous

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(see, for example, Zupančič 1995). Certainly Chawaf and Cixous share central concerns: with the body, with the maternal, with loss and mourning. Both conceive of writing as an attempt to give voice to emotions, desires and fears that usually remain unspoken; Chawaf’s expressed aim is “Écrire, pour que l’indicible puisse se dire”. She continues: “Écrire un roman, pour moi […] c’est chercher à accueillir dans le langage ce que était relégué hors du langage et restait bloqué à l’état de pulsions, confusion, symptômes [...] monde de la chair première et oubliée” (Chawaf 1989, 10). Like Cixous, Chawaf aims to “write the body”, which, she believes, has been cut off from the mind, from representation and signification (Chawaf 1992, 7-13). Writing the body, for Chawaf, necessitates a return to the relation with the mother, to pre-linguistic experience, a relation that is in her view excluded from language and symbolization. The obsessive return in Chawaf’s texts to the mother and to the symbolic space of the womb is characteristic of contemporary French women’s writing: Valerie Hannagan observes that “Like many women writers of her generation (Hélène Cixous, Emma Santos, Jeanne Hyvrard), she [Chawaf] is attempting to work in a pre-Oedipal mode, to write preverbally even” (1990, 178). Where Chawaf differs from writers like Cixous and Hyvrard is in the links she draws between the circumstances of her own birth and her attempt to write “preverbally”. Chawaf claims that it is her mother’s death before she was born that gives her a privileged access to the pre-verbal and the bodily, to that which resists articulation: “Ma mere est morte à ma naissance […] c’est peut-être cela qui m’a donné accès à ces rouges, qui m’a donné les clés de ce monde archaïque des profondeurs de notre corps. Moi qui n’ai, de ma mere, gardé que cela” (Chawaf 1984). This has double significance: on the one hand, Chawaf uses the insights offered by the tragedy of her own birth to gain access to a pre-verbal realm, to “des profondeurs de notre corps”, whilst simultaneously, her attempts to give voice to the pre-linguistic body seem to offer a means to describe her own life. That is, Chawaf’s attempt to “speak the unspeakable” seems to mean finding a language that can not only incorporate the body and sensations that are excluded from conventional language, but also can begin to give voice to the traumatic circumstances of Chawaf’s own birth and, by extension, to the deaths of her parents.

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A “Fetal Witness” If Le Manteau noir moves beyond Chawaf’s earlier texts in attempting to give voice to the atrocities of the war, it does so, as Chawaf herself points out, from a prenatal perspective that is already present in her previous texts. In an interview with Beth Droppleman, Chawaf draws a link between the viewpoint of her early texts and that set up in Le Manteau noir: I am speaking of a witness’s experience, a witness who was a baby, a fetus even. So the gaze is inevitably different and inevitably it is new because history is not made by way of a fetal gaze [….] It’s the whole shock of the war. That is where I begin in this work. In fact, all the literature from the start came from there, but I did not really say it [….] I was writing precisely to reject this world of violence and this male world which yielded this type of solution. So this early writing was a resistance, you might say. But there came a time when I told myself that I must anchor this work firmly to the society from which it comes [….] In this work, I want to get to another stage, to the stage where one approaches the world that is not the feminine, that is not the world of the feminine – of wars, of violence, of our history, of our immediate past, of our present… to approach it from the most simple elements of the living inside of us and which, if we listen, requires another language, another work. (Chawaf 1998b)15

Chawaf’s earlier texts, she suggests, eschew the violence of “wars” and of “history” – a violence she aligns with a “male world” – in favour of a feminine space that is, presumably, to be conceived of outside the context of recent historical events, of “our immediate past” (see Hannagan 1990, 179). Chawaf links the “feminine” with “the most simple elements of the living inside of us”, with the bodily interior, with the preverbal.16 Le Manteau noir, Chawaf suggests, retains the “fetal” perspective of her earlier texts, yet “anchors” it in a specific historical context; in this text, the violence of the war is revealed through what she calls a “fetal gaze”. Le Manteau noir aims to set up a different way of (re)visioning history, the trauma of the past: the “fetal gaze” bears witness both to personal tragedy and to collective destruction. As Chawaf observes elsewhere, the theme of 15

Unfortunately Droppleman does not transcribe Chawaf’s words fully, but quotes excerpts from her conversation with Chawaf, which obviously risks distorting taking meaning out of context. 16 Although this implies that Chawaf’s work subscribes to a normative binary opposition between male and female, masculine and feminine, her early texts have been seen both to repeat and to undermine this opposition: see Powrie 1990, 81.

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this text is “memory, in the links between the most intimate memory – fetal memory – and collective and historical memory” (Chawaf 1997). The relation between individual and historical trauma, between testifying to one’s own trauma and to the traumas of history, is integral in Le Manteau noir. This text tells the story of MarieAntoinette, who is illegally adopted after her parents’ deaths, whereupon all traces of her birth and identity are destroyed: “Toutes traces, tous documents écrits qui permettraient de relier MarieAntoinette de Lummont à la posthume Marie-Antoinette de Parthenay ont entre-temps été soigneusement éliminés” (72). The text links this erasure of her past with the attempts made by French authorities to cover up the effects of bombs and devastation: “Obsessionellement les hommes s’efforcent de boucher les trous des bombes, d’effacer les traces du bombardement du 15 septembre” (19).17 Later in the text, this denial is shown to have succeeded to a certain extent, as the deaths of civilians during the war remain largely forgotten, erased from collective history and memory: “Ces civils qui ne se battent pas, qui ne se décident pas, on les passe sous silence. Ils feront partie des non-dits de l’Histoire” (76). Yet this erasure of the traumas of the past does not enable Marie-Antoinette, or the other solitary survivors she meets later in the text, to forget the past, or leave it behind. Instead, Marie-Antoinette, plagued by recurring headaches, hallucinations and nightmares, sets out on a quest for the truth about her birth – “Elle veut une mémoire, un passé, elle veut des repères, elle veut la vérité” (318) – that leads her to spend two years in the archives reading endless documents detailing civilian deaths in the war, from which, she hopes, “la vérité surgira” (321). Eventually, unable to discover her parents’ identities, MarieAntoinette abandons her lonely quest and affirms her own survival through becoming a witness to the forgotten deaths of the war: “Elle a fini […] pourvu qu’elle profite de l’enseignement des morts, pourvu qu’elle ose parler en leur nom, qu’elle tire de son expérience chez les morts une leçon d’humanité” (394). The conditional “pourvu que”, repeated five times in this paragraph, emphasizes that she can move “de l’état de victime” only if it is to occupy “l’état de témoin” (395). 17

The reference to “les hommes” may be seen to fit with Chawaf’s opinion stated in the interview with Beth Droppleman, cited above, that history is constructed and shaped by men, in contrast with an interior, personal space associated with the maternal and the feminine.

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Her survival is thus shown to be bound up in an imperative to bear witness: to testify to the deaths of her own parents and to the thousands of other civilian deaths that have been erased from history, to speak for those who cannot.18 This link between survival and testimony in the aftermath of World War II finds echoes in the words of Dori Laub: “The survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their story; they also needed to tell their story in order to survive” (Felman and Laub 1992, 78). Yet Le Manteau noir calls into question the very possibility of “telling the story”: Comment témoignera-t-elle? Pour dire l’indicible? Dans quelle langue parlera-t-elle? Pour parler d’un temps où son cerveau encore en formation, encore inachevé, n’avait pas de mots, pas de paroles pour exprimer la guerre, la mort, la souffrance? (410-1)

Although Marie-Antoinette begins to write her life story at the end of the text, she has not yet found a language in which to bear witness, in which to convey her fetal experience, the time when she was in the womb. She cannot speak as an eye-witness able to recount the past under oath, but must try to speak from the perspective of a fetus – or, perhaps more accurately, as a baby on the verge of being born – with no access to language or knowledge. If Le Manteau noir questions how history and collective memory have rewritten the events of the war, it does so not by replacing the most common version of history with another, but by attempting to adopt a different language or discourse, a different mode of “testimony”. The emphasis in Le Manteau noir on the imperative to bear witness to what one can neither know nor narrate directly has resonance in Shoshana Felman’s and Dori Laub’s theorization of testimony in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. Felman and Laub claim that “testimony has become a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times” because recent historical traumas, too large-scale to be understood or registered fully in consciousness, have prompted a crisis in truth and in knowledge that calls for individuals to bear witness to their own experiences (Felman and Laub 1992, 5). Yet to bear witness in this context does not mean knowing what happened and putting it 18

If Le Manteau noir emphasizes the need for testimony to mass trauma, it does not attempt to offer collective testimony as such, but speaks explicitly from the viewpoint of the individual. In my chapter on Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après, I discuss what it means for a single-authored literary text to attempt to give collective testimony to shared trauma (in Nazi concentration camps).

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into words, but giving voice to what one neither knows nor understands as such. Felman and Laub suggest that this form of testimony works through art rather than through conventional historical discourses, observing that “art inscribes (artistically bears witness to) what we do not yet know about our lived historical relation to events of our times” (xx). In Le Manteau noir, of course, it is primarily because Marie-Antoinette’s parents died when she was being born that she cannot remember or “know” her traumatic past, yet the text also suggests that society itself cannot “know” the traumatic events it endured yet somehow failed to bear witness to. Le Manteau noir, like Testimony, implicitly poses questions about the relation between trauma, testimony and literature: how can a literary text bear witness to individual and historical trauma? What is the relation between testimony and creativity? These questions, integral to my reading of Le Manteau noir, shape Cathy Caruth’s recent essay “Parting Words”, which offers me a point of departure in approaching Chawaf’s novel.

Cathy Caruth’s “Parting Words”: Survival and Bearing Witness In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Caruth suggests that to live through a traumatic experience is to be confronted repeatedly with the inability either to register the impact of the traumatic event or “to claim one’s own survival” (1996, 64). To live through – “survive” – trauma is not necessarily to identify oneself as a survivor as such; survival means both registering the threat to one’s life and the fact that one has come through it. This is compounded when one’s own survival is bound up in another’s death, as in the case of Tasso’s story of Tancred and Clorinda and in that of MarieAntoinette in Le Manteau noir, when it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between the other’s death and one’s own survival. In bearing witness to the impact of traumatic loss, then, one is inevitably pointing to a breakdown in the boundaries between one’s own life and another’s death. In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth reads a series of texts that deal with questions of trauma, loss and survival and asserts that “it is the inextricability of the story of one’s life from the story of a death, an impossible and necessary double telling, that constitutes their historical witness” (1996, 8). Caruth’s emphasis here is not so much on what it means to survive, but on “historical witness”: that is,

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on the ways that inextricable stories of death and of life may be read as bearing witness to the traumas of history in the form of a “double telling”. She takes further this notion of “historical witness” as a “double telling” in her later essay, “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival”, which offers a different perspective on what it means to bear witness to one’s own survival and the other’s death. In “Parting Words”, Caruth addresses the question, “What does it mean for life to bear witness to death?” (2001, 8; emphasis Caruth’s) through rereading Freud’s descriptions of the repetitive nightmares suffered by veterans of the First World War alongside his story of the child playing the fort/da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.19 Caruth’s reading of Freud’s essay is also, crucially, informed by her encounter with a group in Atlanta, “Kids Alive and Loved”, set up by Bernadette Leite – whose son Khalil was brutally murdered – in order to help children traumatized by having witnessed or lived through the violent deaths of their friends. She explores in particular the “real-life” story of Khalil’s best friend, Greg, whose discussion with Khalil’s mother about the impact of his friend’s death is recorded in an oral history archive. In juxtaposing a reading of Freud’s essay with an analysis of the conversation between Greg and Bernadette, Caruth can take further the question of what it means to bear witness to loss, a question which prompts another question: “What kind of witness is a creative act?” (9; emphasis Caruth’s). Freud’s discussion of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle begins with a description of the painful re-enactment of traumatic nightmares suffered by veterans of the First World War. Freud admits to being unable to fit these nightmares into his theory of dreams as unconscious wish-fulfilment – that is, with the theory of the overriding dominance of the “pleasure principle” – and thus cannot “explain” the motivation behind the nightmares. He then leaves this subject behind to turn to the example of child-play, which will provide him with a different way of thinking about traumatic re-enactment.20 Freud tells the story of a child who repeatedly throws a wooden spool 19 This attempt to think through the juxtaposition of the descriptions of the veterans’ nightmares and the child’s game in Freud’s text is unusual: Caruth points out that “this juxtaposition is not ordinarily taken into account in the critical reception of Freud’s text” (2001, 9). 20 Freud explicitly proposes to “leave” his discussion of the traumatic neuroses in order to think about the child’s game ([1920] 1981, 18:14): this terminology of leaving is central to Caruth’s reading of Freud, as will become apparent.

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on a string into his cot, whilst making the sound “o-o-o-o”, which Freud interprets as “fort” (gone) and then retrieves the spool, uttering “a-a-a-a”, which Freud understands as “da” (here). Freud suggests that the child is compensating for the recent separation from his mother by staging the disappearance and return of objects within his reach and thus under his control, unlike his mother. Freud writes, “At the outset he was in a passive situation – he was overpowered by that experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part” ([1920] 1981, 18:16). To deal with his loss, then, the child does not simply find a substitute love object to replace the lost mother, but re-enacts the loss of the mother in such a way as to gain control or mastery over it. Freud interprets this game as a creative response to loss: in Caruth’s words, an “act of creation that, unlike the dreams of the war veterans, does not simply compulsively repeat a history it doesn’t own but creates, in its repetition, something new” (2001, 12). The child’s game, unlike the war veterans’ nightmares, succeeds in creating something new through its active repetition of loss, enabling the child not only to accept the loss of his mother but also to move beyond that loss in what Caruth calls “an act of parting” (2001, 13). She uses the image of departure deliberately, pointing out Freud’s observation that the child plays the game of departure (“fort”) more frequently than the fort/da game in its entirety; this, Caruth suggests, marks his “departure into life”, an “act of parting that distinguishes death from life” (13). The child’s acceptance of the loss of his mother depends on his affirmation of his own survival, his own life without his mother. Caruth takes this theorization of survival as departure further in her analysis of Greg’s conversation with Khalil’s mother about his dead friend. Initially, Greg seems unable to separate his own survival from Khalil’s death or to describe Khalil’s life without referring to what it has meant for him to survive Khalil’s death (Caruth 2001, 15), but he gradually comes to take leave of his friend and to affirm his own survival. He declares: I am more determined to make it in the music business somehow and I know it will be because of him [….] We were to go to Clark Atlanta, him for business management and me for communication, music, and combine our talents. But now he can’t do that… But that’s O.K., because when […] we get that studio [Khalil’s] name is going to be the name of it. (Caruth 2001, 18)

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If Greg’s words point to his future beyond Khalil’s death, his “departure into life”, which Caruth also interchangeably refers to as the “life drive”, is not to be understood as the “wish to live” but as the “survivor mission to tell” (Caruth 2001, 22n. 6), to bear witness to his friend’s death. 21 Caruth suggests that if the experience of traumatic loss blurs the boundaries between life and death, as between the living self and the dead other, testifying to that loss depends on restoring the borders between survival and death, self and other. Caruth reads Greg’s words as “parting words” that, like the child’s game, constitute a creative act, “an act that bears witness to the dead precisely in turning away” (14). For Caruth, it is not through identifying with but by turning away from the dead that it becomes possible to bear witness to their death: in bearing witness to another’s death one must first testify to one’s own survival, however meaningless it may seem, and thus to the difference between life and death. A testimony to death, then, Caruth suggests, must necessarily emerge from the language of survival, that is, the language of the “life drive”, that does not bear witness to the dead through narrating the past, but through a future act of commemoration and naming. Greg bears witness to his friend’s death not through telling his story, but by attributing his own creative success to Khalil (it is as a result of Khalil’s death that Greg is “more determined to make it”) and by naming his music studio after his friend. It is, Caruth suggests, through departing from Khalil and commemorating him in his own survival and creativity that Greg can bear witness: testimony is, then, an act of naming, of commemoration. Drawing on this theorization of survival, creativity and bearing witness, Caruth returns to Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She points out that Freud’s text repeats the structures of the “fort/da” game and derives from that game a creative language with which to refer to trauma and to loss, a language of departure. In interpreting the child’s game, Freud initially seems unsure as to which part of the game, the “fort” or the “da”, is the most significant. He firstly suggests that the 21

This concept of the “life drive” is drawn from Freud’s theorization of the two classes of instincts, the death instincts (Todestriebe) and the life instincts (Lebenstriebe) that Caruth calls the death drive and the life drive respectively (See Freud [1920] 1981, 18:34-63). For Freud, the death instincts represent a pulsion towards an inanimate state (death) and the life instincts an opposing drive towards creating new entities, organisms. In “Parting Words”, however, Caruth departs from Freud in her use of the term “life drive”, linking it rather with the creative act of bearing witness.

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child only plays “fort”, ignoring the return movement of the game, but goes on to describe the game in its entirety, claiming that it is the “da” part of the game that affords the most pleasure. Finally he adds that the game of departure is played much more often than the complete “fort/da” game, and that it is the perpetual re-enactment of departure that is most significant. Caruth, analysing this, points out that in analysing the child’s oscillation between “fort” and “da”, Freud’s own text also wavers between departure and return, imitating the very structure of the child’s game, yet also moving on from the game by putting it into words. She describes Freud’s text as itself a “creative act”, that draws on, repeats and yet also moves beyond the child’s game, in the sense that it passes on – bears witness to – the loss that the child himself is unable to articulate in words. Caruth notes: “It is not necessarily on the level of the child’s own game, but on the level of Freud’s repetition of it that the creative act of the game, the new conceptual language of the life drive, will take place” (19). The “new conceptual language” of psychoanalysis is rooted not only in traumatic loss but also in what Caruth calls the “life drive”, in creatively repeating yet simultaneously departing from the structures of trauma. If Freud’s text moves beyond the child’s game in giving it form in language, it also departs from it by, according to Caruth, turning from the individual and towards a wider history.22 Caruth’s text in turn responds to Freud’s by moving on from the discussion of the fort/da game not only to think about historical trauma as it is revealed in the veterans’ nightmares, but also to find ways to refer to contemporary violence in North America. In Caruth’s words, “History […] is reclaimed and generated not by reliving unconsciously the death of the past but by an act that bears witness by parting from it” (2001, 14). Caruth’s text implies that it is through articulating and departing from individual trauma that one can begin to reclaim and bear witness to historical trauma, not necessarily through narrating it but through turning from the past and into the future. Yet what is at stake in turning away from the traumas of history? In emphasising the power of the “life drive”, Caruth risks erasing the impact both of the veterans’ nightmares and of Khalil’s death. 22

In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth argues that “Freud’s understanding of history as survival, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ultimately extends beyond the confines of the individual psyche” (1996, 67).

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Freud’s text, unable to resolve the question of the nightmares and to link the repetitive nightmares with the child’s game, retains the incomprehensible horror of the veterans’ perpetual traumatic reenactments; by contrast, Caruth “restores the broken line between the child and the soldiers” (Phelan 2001, 36). Phelan points out, however, that “this assimilation is not quite as smooth as Caruth intends” because it is “difficult to see the soldiers’ nightmares within the pleasurable frame” that Caruth sets up in her reading of the child’s game (36). Caruth’s essay seems to leave behind and thus in some way to cover up not only the painful effects of combat trauma, but also, I would add, the impact of Khalil’s violent death on his mother, whose grief Caruth ignores in order to focus on her determination to help traumatized children and to provide a “living memorial to her dead son” (Caruth 2001, 15). Moreover, it is this erasure of the mother’s grief that leads Caruth to interpret Greg’s parting words as testimony to Khalil’s life and death. Yet given that these words are spoken to the mourning mother of his dead friend, it also seems possible that Greg’s will to succeed is framed as testimony to Khalil for the sake of Khalil’s mother. Caruth’s focus on the “life drive”, then, risks writing over the traumatic experiences of death in which it finds its roots and, by extension, potentially misreading the nature of the “life drive”. Although she conceives of the language of the “life drive” as a “double telling” of trauma and survival, death and life, her essay – unlike Freud’s – cannot sustain its “double telling”. By contrast, I will argue, Chawaf’s novel is structured around what I call a “double telling”: a doubled testimony to traumatic loss and to survival, to death and to life. The question that Caruth poses in “Parting Words”, “What is the language of the life drive?” (14; emphasis Caruth’s), and its corollary (“What is the language of the death drive?”) are, I suggest, addressed in Le Manteau noir. Chawaf’s novel foregrounds the thorny issue that Caruth’s essay evades, showing how a literary text can go beyond the limits of theory: what does it mean to base a testimony to another’s death in an affirmation of one’s own survival? Chawaf’s writing, I contend, enables us to take further Caruth’s theorization of loss, survival, and the imperative to bear witness in relation to the notion of the “life drive” and in the specific historical context of World War II and its aftermath in France.

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Le Manteau noir and The Life Drive Until the end of Le Manteau noir, Marie-Antoinette identifies more with the dead victims of the war than with the living; she remains unable to accept that she has survived the bomb that killed her parents (“Elle ne se rend pas compte qu’elle n’est pas morte avec eux” (Chawaf 1998a, 306)). “Vêtue d’un manteau noir comme le manteau de la victime exposée dans la chapelle ardente” (304) – her coat evoking the shroud covering the body of a fatality of the war – her life remains enmeshed in her parents’ tragic deaths. Yet towards the end of the text, for no discernible reason, she suddenly feels driven towards life, experiencing “une irrépressible envie de vivre qui la pousse” (395), and abandons her quest. She sheds the black coat and with it the burden of death and mourning and breaks her symbiotic attachment to the dead victims of the war: “Elle a assez fait corps avec tous ces morts, il lui faut, pour agir, s’arracher d’eux qui ne bougent pas” (395). She walks out of the archives without looking back (the text states explicitly that “Elle ne se retourne pas” (395)), thus seemingly turning her back on her parents and on the tragic circumstances of her own birth. Finally she understands the difference between life and death (“Elle entrevoit enfin la différence entre la vie et la mort, qu’elle n’avait jamais pu différencier” (402)) and can move away from death and towards life, “à la rencontre de la vie” (408). What Caruth calls the “life drive” is given expression here as MarieAntoinette dons the flesh-coloured coat and comes to celebrate life through a second birth, a curative rebirth. This second birth, like the first, marks a separation from her mother, to whom she bids a final farewell (401). Yet whereas the first birth prematurely exposed her to death and loss (“C’était trop tôt, dehors, c’était la mort” (398)), she can choose to act out her rebirth when she knows that “le temps est venu” (401). Her second birth reenacts the separation and loss of the first, yet whereas the first was overshadowed by death and destruction, the second is described as a celebration of life. Like the child playing the “fort/da” game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, she deals with loss by repeating it as a performance over which she has complete control. She dresses up in a birth robe and dances and sings, in a creative performance described as a “spectacle” (400) and a “cérémonie de la vie” (402) that culminates in an act of creation, a re-creation of her own self:

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La peau, la chair vivantes se tendent, fil à fil. Le nouveau cerveau se tisse. Le temps a fait son œuvre. La vie tisseuse prend un à un les rayons de lumière, noue solidement les liens. (408)

Earlier, Marie-Antoinette experienced the erasure of her life story as a bodily amputation: “On avait voulu l’opérer sous anesthésie, pour qu’elle ne sente rien, pour lui arracher l’organe de la mémoire, l’en amputer” (284). Now, however, the different parts of her body are stitched together (note the imagery of sewing: “fil”, “se tisser”) to form an entirely new self. This rebirth is described as magical, as though part of a fairytale: Le printemps reverdit l’arbre des fées. La fontaine miraculeuse rejaillit. Elle va à la fontaine chaude, dans le bourg chaud, douce de sa robe du soleil et de fleurs qui lui redonne une terre, un pays où revivre. Le merveilleux l’a reprise dans son pouvoir. (403)

The allusions here to the fairy-tree and the magic fountain suggest that Marie-Antoinette has made a creative leap from the dark, enclosed space of the archives and of her loss and into a realm of imagination and fantasy, in which she can be reborn. The text conjures up images of flowers and trees in different shades of pink, red and green, seemingly moving from monochrome – and particularly the darkness of the archives and of Marie-Antoinette’s coat – into technicolour. Marie-Antoinette’s second birth may, then, be construed as a creative response to loss, a performance that enables her to move beyond her parents’ deaths to accept her own life. This acceptance of her own survival is bound up in an imperative to bear witness to and commemorate her parents’ deaths, as she moves from the position of victim to that of witness. The final chapter of the text, describing her coming to writing, suggests that it is through writing that she can bear witness to her parents’ deaths: where Khalil’s premature death motivates Greg to pursue a career in the music business, the deaths of Marie-Antoinette’s parents spur her on to become a writer. Yet the extract from Marie-Antoinette’s writing given at the end of Le Manteau noir does not bear witness to the forgotten civilian deaths of the Second World War; indeed, her writing contains no references to her parents’ deaths or to the war. Instead, her life story is written in a highly poeticized and lyrical style that is reminiscent of earlier Chawafian texts like Cercœur and Retable/La Rêverie and that echoes the narrator’s descriptions of her

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rebirth a few pages earlier. Speaking from the viewpoint of a “fillearbre”, she traces an alternative family tree, with a different genealogy and roots, in “l’immémorial arbre généalogique des lignées de la terre archaïque” (417). She rewrites her birth outside its historical and geographical context, relocating her family heritage from Occupied France to an unspecified “time immemorial”. This temporal dislocation also points back to her rebirth, which seems to take place outside the recognizable context of Paris in the 1990s and inside a realm of fairytale. The black coat is shown to be rooted in aspects of life in Paris during the Occupation: described as a “uniforme de guerre” (402) that resembles “les pardessus des années 40” (313), its fabric is reminiscent of black-out curtains (“la toile des rideaux de fermeture qu’on accrochait sur les portes des postes de secours où on craignait des attaques aérochimiques” (338)). The black coat explicitly recalls the war and its atrocities: “Son manteau noir a de la mémoire, son manteau noir a la lourdeur de l’angoisse de la guerre…” (338). By contrast, the flesh-coloured coat is made of sun and flowers (403), the stuff of fairytales; in exchanging the black coat for the flesh coat, Marie-Antoinette moves out of history and into fairytale and, it seems, from memory to forgetting. Her writing does not start at the beginning of her life in the war, but seems rather to begin with her rebirth and thus to offer a different life story and family history, that covers up the horror of her birth and her parents’ deaths. She is not bearing witness to forgotten civilian deaths, but to her own survival and to the power of the life drive: “Elle essaiera de transfuser la vie dans les mots comme du sang dans les veines… Ella va essayer d’écrire… Au nom de la vie” (411). If this celebration of her own survival seems to mean turning her back on the past and on her parents’ deaths – as on the archives – yet Marie-Antoinette does not discard the black coat carrying the memory of the war, but simply turns it inside out: Le manteau est retourné. Brodé à l’envers, rebrodé de miroirs, il étincelle, on ne voit que la blancheur de cette doublure de lumière qui s’est vaporisée d’un coup sur le noir du vêtement de guerre. (401-2)

The flesh coloured coat denoting rebirth and the black coat symbolising loss and the imperative to mourn are the same garment, two sides of a whole. The black coat that has blocked out light throughout the text now shimmers, giving off reflective light, pointing

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to the emergence of creativity out of loss. As Marie-Antoinette writes the account of her rebirth, she is still wearing the black coat, hidden on the underside of the flesh coat; the black coat that represents traumatic loss is thus somehow inscribed as her writing’s silent underside and its very condition of possibility. If Marie-Antoinette turns her back on the archives as she begins to write her life story, she does not discard her black coat or the past that is bound up in it. Instead, she seems to be rejecting the meaningless administrative language of the documents she uncovers in the archives, in which a death is recorded as follows: “Hopital Laennec. 301. Femme non identifiée. Cheveux blonds. Blessée à la tête. Une chemise rose” (345). In her own writing she strives to adopt a different discourse, one emerging not from the meaninglessness of death and destruction, but from the will to live, that is, from the life drive.

The Language of the “Life Drive” In Caruth’s essay, the language of the “life drive” is implicitly figured as a language of departure, of naming and commemoration.23 Yet although Marie-Antoinette cannot name her dead parents in her writing – the text repeatedly emphasizes that “Elle ne trouvait pas le nom” (406) – she writes “au nom de la vie” (411). Here, however, the language of the life drive finds its roots its roots in a preverbal, fetal memory and in the mother’s womb, which, throughout Le Manteau noir, is shown to be a space of protection from destruction: “Contre les effets de souffle de la bombe, contre les projections d’éclats, la mère […] avait tenu l’enfant-fœtus instinctivement, passionnément, l’avait tenu de toutes les dernières forces de l’organe de la vie” (15). In the mother’s overriding need to protect her child at all costs, even as she herself dies, we can see the life drive at work, albeit in a slightly different form: the mother, unable to save herself, instinctively seeks to give life to her child and to keep her child alive. It is this same drive towards life that motivates Marie-Antoinette to separate from the dead at the end of the text (“Elle est portée par la foi 23

Bernadette Leite’s organization, Kids Alive and Loved, bears the initials of her dead son, Khalil Aseem Leite, highlighting its double function: both to commemorate Khalil and to give living children an opportunity to talk through their grief. Similarly, Greg will commemorate Khalil through naming his music studio after him.

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en la vie qu’au moment de mourir sa mère a sûrement priée” (400)). Marie-Antoinette’s attempts to invent a language of the life drive, then, require her to find words to inscribe her pre-verbal, fetal memory: Il faudra inventer cette langue de muqueuses, de tressaillements, d’étouffements… Il faudra donner une langue à l’angoisse pour qu’elle puisse raconter, pour qu’elle puisse être le témoin du vif du choc. Il faudra donner des mots, des images, des faits à cette mémoire fœtale, primitive qui n’avait été qu’une ébauche de langage et était restée à l’état d’ébauche dans le corps de Marie-Antoinette. (411)

This emphasis on a return to the (mother’s) body and, more explicitly, to the womb, echoes Chawaf’s exhortation in the final paragraph of Le Corps et le verbe to renew the severed link between body and language by developing a language of bodily memory. Chawaf urges: Pour réparer le processus destructeur, il nous reste maintenant à travailler à apprendre mot à mot le passé de notre corps [….] Il nous reste à porter à la lumière l’inscription humaine et à trouver chaleureusement son équivalent, sa trajectoire spirituelle pour qu’un nouveau langage puisse percer nos replis intérieurs comme le vagissement d’un nouveau-né traverse la chair jusqu’au jour…’ (Chawaf 1992, 286-7)

The “new language” that Chawaf both advocates and, arguably, invents in Le Corps et le Verbe to affirm life and counteract destruction and death is likened to the cry of a new-born baby and its reverberations in the body of the mother. Similarly, the language that can give voice to Marie-Antoinette’s fetal memories – and, by extension to the life drive – is one that can return to the womb. Earlier in the text, the narrator claims that “Le passé est […] à l’intérieur d’elle, elle en sent les plis d’eau, de sang, de mucus et de graisse qui la protégaient dans la robe biologique” (1998a, 219-220); the inside of the womb is linked with the senses, with bodily fluids, blood, water, mucus.24 This emphasis on the senses is reflected in MarieAntoinette’s writing, as she describes collapsing into a downy bed of moss, twigs and ivy (417) and alludes to leaves tickling her skin: her writing evokes a series of bodily sensations rather than a sequence of events. It is from this bodily memory that she can begin to affirm the 24 The image of the womb as a “robe biologique” links the womb with the coat: both contain the fetal Marie-Antoinette.

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power of life over death and destruction: “Cette vitalité bouillonnait, crachait comme de la lave dans l’éveil de ma chair pour me dire de prendre autant que je pourrais la défense de la vie partout où elle était agressée, méconnue” (417). From images of boiling, spitting bodily fluids emerges a language of life, a language that can testify to the life drive and against war, deaths, violence. Yet if Chawaf’s writing repeatedly associates the womb with life, in Le Manteau noir the womb is also linked with a refusal of life. As Marie-Antoinette becomes increasingly obsessed with her quest to uncover her parents’ identities, the narrator comments that “Elle ne parvient plus à s’arracher à la matrice funéraire où fœtus elle avait entendu cette guerre que lui répètent maintenant les archives” (327). Until her rebirth, Marie-Antoinette clings to the black coat in an attempt to hold on to the womb, a womb described as a “matrice funéraire”. In re-invoking a language of the womb, then, MarieAntoinette risks repeating her earlier refusal of life and embracing of death.25 This is, I think, clearer if we turn to Chawaf’s previous novel, Vers la lumière, published in 1993. Vers la lumière tells the story of France Meininguel, whose parents were killed brutally in front of her during her childhood in the family home. France, unable to come to terms with or move beyond the horror of the death of her parents, is haunted throughout the text by the spectral figure of her mother calling her to join her in death. Like Marie-Antoinette, France undertakes a quest to find her ancestral home, Meininguel, a quest that culminates in her suicide by drowning at the end of the text. Vers la lumière and Le Manteau noir seem to present two different possible endings to a story of traumatic loss: where France commits suicide, Marie-Antoinette reenacts her birth and begins to write. Unable to accept separation from her mother, France walks unthinkingly into the sea, whilst MarieAntoinette writes in a hotel garden with a sea-view, with her back turned to the sea: she seems to have turned away from France’s suicide and from her earlier suicidal thoughts, choosing instead to

25

Marie-Antoinette’s repeated refusal of life is in some ways indistinguishable from the curative re-enactment of her birth. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud seems to distinguish between the soldiers’ repetitive nightmares and the child’s game, which, as Caruth suggests, both repeats and yet crucially departs from trauma. Yet in Le Manteau noir, the differences between these forms of repetition become blurred: the possibility of moving beyond loss is undercut by its endless repetition.

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keep alive both the memory of her parents and her own drive towards life through writing. If these texts seem to offer two diametrically opposed endings, however, this is undermined by the recurring imagery of light used to describe both France’s suicide and Marie-Antoinette’s rebirth. France’s suicide is narrated as a step towards the light: “Je peux tout à coup soutenir la vue de cette merveille: cette unique merveille, la lumière!” (Chawaf 1993, 190). This image is echoed in MarieAntoinette’s description of her rebirth: “La lumière s’écoulait comme un sérum que je buvais” (Chawaf 1998a, 416). It is as though France, like Marie-Antoinette, is undergoing a form of rebirth: as she is slowly asphyxiated in the water, France claims, “La vie remonte à mes lèvres” (Chawaf 1993, 189). The imagery used to describe France’s propulsion into death is repeated in the account of Marie-Antoinette’s rebirth and coming to writing, so that suicide and rebirth (to writing) seem interchangeable.26 This points to the impossibility of establishing boundaries between the “life drive” and the death drive, which come to resemble each other almost to the point of becoming interchangeable. In Le Manteau noir, a return to the womb seems to enable rebirth and renewed access to language, whereas in Vers la lumière a similar return results in death, suggesting that a language that can represent the womb is a language that not only affirms life, but also points to death. If the language of the life drive in Le Manteau noir is bound up in a return to the womb, it is also, however, shown to be rooted in birth, in a departure from the womb that represents a coming to life. MarieAntoinette aims to find a language that can represent fetal experience and the sensations of the womb, yet her writing recounts her emergence from the womb. Where Vers la lumière ends with a return to the womb (death), Le Manteau noir concludes with a return (to the womb) that inaugurates a departure (into life). Marie-Antoinette asserts that “Mon corps s’ouvrait, ma peau nue sous mes vêtements s’excitait, humait le terreau” (415), as though her body is slowly 26 This confusion between the two texts is revealed in the critical responses to Le Manteau noir: Monique Pétillon’s review of Le Manteau noir in Le Monde is under the heading “Chantal Chawaf vers la lumière” (Pétillon 1998, 3), whilst Monique Saigal’s extended review is entitled “Le Manteau noir ou la découverte de la lumière” (Saigal 1998). These reviews do not negotiate the relation between the two texts implied in the titles of their reviews, nor do they explore the fascinating juxtaposition of death and rebirth in these texts.

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opening up to sensations, coming to life. Her writing deploys a language of departure, invoking the future, even as it draws on a language connected to the womb, a language of the past. This may be linked with Caruth’s claim that “The language of the life drive does not simply point backward […] but bears witness to the past by pointing to the future” (Caruth 2001, 14). Here Marie-Antoinette’s writing both returns to and departs from the womb, seeking to develop a sensory language that may eventually offer a means of testifying to the traumatic deaths of her parents. Marie-Antoinette’s writing, then, finds its roots both in death and life; moreover, in this text, life and death, like the double-sided coat, are inseparable, two sides of one whole. Contrary to Monique Saigal’s claim that Marie-Antoinette “coupe le fil du manteau noir qui la rattachait à la mort pour tisser celui de la vie par l’écriture” (1998), she weaves the threads of the black coat, of loss, into the fleshcoloured coat and into her rebirth and regeneration. Her affirmation of what it means to survive is threaded through with loss that remains unspoken, the hidden underside of her survival. Her writing, broken off by suspension points, is incomplete, suggesting that her testimony to her parents’ deaths will be in the future; this is reinforced by her insistence that “C’est l’écriture qui saura, qui pourra dire”. Although she begins her life story with a narrative of her own rebirth, the text emphasizes that this piece of writing is only a beginning (Chawaf 1998a, 415), an affirmation of her own survival that is the very condition of becoming a witness to her parents’ deaths. If her writing cannot yet bear witness to her parents’ deaths, however, the model of testimony as a double-sided inscription of life and death, interwoven like the threads of Marie-Antoinette’s coat, points back to Caruth’s description of testimony as a “double telling”. Yet where Caruth’s essay, as we have seen, falls short of the “double telling” it points towards, Le Manteau noir goes beyond both Marie-Antoinette’s writing and Caruth’s essay by opening up the possibility of a double witness: to death and to survival, to the individual and to history.

A Double Telling: Testifying to History In her review of Le Manteau noir for Le Monde, Monique Pétillon points out that this text returns to and rewrites Chawaf’s first novel, Retable/La Rêverie (1998, 3). Le Manteau noir, the first Chawafian

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text to incorporate extracts from official letters, documents and reports detailing deaths and bombing targets, is the first of Chawaf’s novels to be anchored in the specific context of Paris, during and after the war and moves beyond Retable in opening itself up to a wider historical context. Retable, like Le Manteau noir, features a protagonist whose parents were killed in an accident in the war and who has been brought up by adoptive parents, unaware of the identity of her parents, yet where this history is recounted directly in linear fashion at the beginning of Le Manteau noir, in Retable it emerges through disparate fragments of narrative that do not cohere into a whole. The text shifts between dialogue between the narrator and her adoptive mother and streams of consciousness in which the narrator addresses her dead mother and fantasizes about reliving her birth. These dream-like passages, suffused with the anguish of loss (“Tu es morte. Frêle. Individuelle. Peau maïse, muscles déchiquetés”), frequently take the form of lyrical incantation: “Tout ce que tu pénètres, tu le fécondes, ô mère” (Chawaf 1974, 44, 46). Like Vers la lumière, Retable, which contains only fleeting references to the devastation of the war (see, for example, 1974, 29), and a document detailing the circumstances of the narrator’s illegal adoption, does not move beyond an evocation of individual loss and the fruitless quest for the mother. Furthermore, Retable is published in an edition with another text, La Rêverie, which offers a lyrical, sensual evocation of a woman’s experience of her own body, of love and sex. The juxtaposition in one edition of a text that returns repeatedly to traumatic loss and a text that celebrates sexuality and passions is striking, raising the question as to why two such dissimilar texts should be put together in one edition and how they should be read in relation to each other.27 Like Retable/La Rêverie, albeit less explicitly, Le Manteau noir seems to be split between a narrative of loss and one that celebrates life, love and the body. Le Manteau noir is also, moreover, split between a narrative anchored in time and place and the fairy story of rebirth at the end of the text, as we saw earlier. Yet where the two texts that make up Retable/La Rêverie are set apart from one another, the two seemingly disparate parts of Le Manteau noir are brought together by the fetal viewpoint that offers up a double perspective to 27

Critics have neglected to address the question of the relation between the two texts, tending to discuss them exclusively as separate texts: see, for example, Hannagan 1990.

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death and survival, the individual and history. This doubled fetal vision may be seen to recall Caruth’s notion of a “double telling”, with a difference: where in Caruth’s essay the “double telling” is bound up in “parting words”, in Le Manteau noir it is rooted in a fetal viewpoint that is itself double, in that it embraces death and life, yet both from the point of view of the individual. In Le Manteau noir, historical memory is filtered through the perspective of the individual, Marie-Antoinette, who is repeatedly shown to be the only person to care about the forgotten civilian deaths of World War II, the first person to read the government records locked away in public archives (Chawaf 1998a, 298). It is through Marie-Antoinette’s pain and her obsession with civilian deaths in the war that a different vision of history can emerge in Le Manteau noir: in Vicki Mistacco’s words, “Narrating in the third person, Chawaf consistently shifts outward from the anguished perspective of the traumatized fetus-infant ever seeking to restore the link with her own repressed origins to an all-embracing view of World War II” (Mistacco 1998). Yet if the text does reach towards an “all-embracing view of World War II”, its viewpoint remains rooted in MarieAntoinette’s wounded vision, in her pain and sense of loss. The text includes excerpts from government records, brief inventories of deaths and injuries, yet these are suffused with Marie-Antoinette’s anguish as she reads even as she suffers from headaches, hallucinations, nightmares. As the narrator notes, “Ce n’est pas en historienne que Marie-Antoinette lit l’évolution des opérations militaires alliées mais en bébé qui suit l’approche du moment où il va perdre ses parents” (341): Marie-Antoinette reads not from the point of view of a historian engaged in academic research, but as an orphan with a wounded memory, whose quest has intense personal significance. In Chawaf’s own words, Le Manteau noir “follows another way of writing history and the novel in following a point of view which is no longer, properly speaking, a historian’s or novelist’s look at the substance of memory, but a point of view as close as possible to the sensible and the sensorial” (Chawaf 1997). This “sensorial” viewpoint is not only that of the traumatized orphan; rather, it is filtered through the language of the life drive, itself a language of the senses and a language linked both with Marie-Antoinette’s rebirth at the end of the text and with the critique of the war and of official versions of history reiterated throughout the text. Throughout the text, the narrating voice proclaims the importance of life, condemning “ce que cette guerre a

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coûté de vies inutilement sacrifiées” (23); this voice seems to speak in the language of the “life drive”. If the text moves from a recognizable social context into a realm of fairytale, its perspective and language remain unchanged throughout. More surprisingly, if the text as a whole may be seen to emerge out of the language of the life drive, it could be argued that it begins where it appears to end, with MarieAntoinette’s survival, before telling the story of trauma that comes first in the text; the text seems to turn itself inside out, like MarieAntoinette’s coat.

The Inside Out Text It is, I think, precisely in turning itself out that Le Manteau noir can begin to testify to history, not offering a straightforward narrative account, but a “double telling”. The text does not simply approach history through Marie-Antoinette’s vision of the world around her and through the “facts” she accumulates on her search, but rather, turns to history through opening itself up to the inner depths of her anguished psyche. “Le passé n’est ni dans les immeubles, ni dans les hôtels [….] Il est à l’intérieur d’elle [….] Et il lui faut l’extérieur: les images de l’extérieur…” (219-220). Yet if Marie-Antoinette turns outwards from her individual loss to immerse herself in public testimonies to the past, it is through simultaneously drawing on her innermost memories, preserved not inside the mind but in indistinct and non-verbal bodily sensations. She is possessed by fleeting images of her birth appearing to her in dreams, “comme si un coin obscur du cerveau se rendait subitement visible, dans cette coulée fantomatique, comme si on pouvait avoir, en un éclair, accès à la matérialité physiologique du passé”, but as she awakens and attempts to fix the image in her mind, “la vision s’évanouit” (274). The text also seems to strive to capture these imprints of the inner mind, “la matérialité physiologique du passé”, but they remain fleeting, ungraspable. Yet it is from this gaze into the interior of the mind and of the body, of individual memory, that the text, like Marie-Antoinette, can open up to the outside, to testify to history, thus turning from the inside, out. At the end of the text, Marie-Antoinette draws together the fragments of individual memory and the pieces of information gleaned from interviewing witnesses and reading government records:

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Marie-Antoinette commence à voir ce que la mémoire éparse qu’elle a rassemblée a de commun avec les fragments qu’elle gardait en elle depuis l’enfance. Puissent tous les innocents sacrifiés de la guerre nous mettre en garde contre les destructions irréversibles, nous rappeler que chaque vie humaine est irremplaçable, au moins dans le cœur de son enfant orphelin. (411)

Her own memories and her research into a wider history come together not, as we might expect, in a general picture of death and destruction, but in the affirmation of the value of human life. Just as Caruth’s essay draws together the veterans’ nightmares, the child’s game and the encounter between Greg and Bernadette through its emphasis on the “life drive”, so Le Manteau noir intertwines individual and collective memory through a central focus on the value of life. In both texts, however, the life drive is inextricably linked with the death drive; survival is perpetually threatened by its impossibility. Le Manteau noir highlights the difficulty and necessity of separating death from survival – the narrator points out that “À travers le miroir du cœur, la mort semble identique à la vie” (389-90) – yet the text ends, like Caruth’s, by drawing out the differences between them. Where Le Manteau noir goes beyond the limits of Caruth’s short theoretical essay is in returning to individual trauma in order to move into a testimony to the traumas of history, moving from the inside, out. In so doing, it turns inside out the question of what it means to bear witness to individual trauma and to the traumas of history. Here we are not given a single narrative of events telling us “what happened”, but a “double telling”, that delves into the interior of the mind to open up a wider historical perspective, that brings together the individual and history in a denunciation of war and destruction and an affirmation of life. In “Parting Words”, Caruth suggests that to write a history of trauma and loss is also to write a “different history of survival” (2001, 21), yet her text risks writing its narrative of survival over the stories of loss. By contrast, Le Manteau noir offers a double narrative of death and of survival, retaining the force of Caruth’s question, “What does it mean for life to bear witness to death?” (2001, 11) by weaving it into another question: in what ways can death testify to life? Le Manteau noir returns urgently to the scene of traumatic loss that recurs throughout Chawaf’s work, yet also departs from it, and, in so doing, testifies both to death and to survival.

Choking on Words: Sarah Kofman’s Autobiographical Writings “Parce qu’il était juif, mon père est mort à Auschwitz: comment ne pas le dire? Et comment le dire? Comment parler de ce devant quoi cesse toute possibilité de parler?” (Kofman 1987a, 15-16) These questions, posed at the beginning of Sarah Kofman’s Paroles suffoquées, raise issues that are crucial both to Kofman’s autobiographical writing and to my account of it here. Kofman, who taught philosophy at the Université de Paris 1 until her death in 1994, is perhaps best known for her philosophical writing, yet throughout her career she also wrote autobiographical texts, texts which address the (im)possibility of recounting her troubled childhood as a Jew in Occupied France and her father’s death in Auschwitz. Furthermore, even her philosophical writings make reference at times to the traumas of her childhood and her father’s death: Comment s’en sortir (1983), a text about Platonic aporia, ends with an account of a dream of her childhood, whilst Paroles suffoquées mixes autobiography, literary criticism and politics. Kofman’s writing, in collapsing the distinctions between philosophy and autobiography, repeatedly raises questions about the relation between “life” and writing. Indeed, according to the editors of the only book-length study of Kofman’s writing to date, the interface between writing and life has become the focus of criticism of Kofman’s work: “The connection between the psychic life, the text of the life, the text of the psyche and the philosophical texts may be the single strongest implicit and explicit theme in the nascent genre of ‘Kofman studies’” (Deutscher and Oliver 1999, 7). My aim in this chapter is not to comment on Kofman’s lived experience of traumatic loss: the relation between text and writing subject, highlighted in all autobiographical writing, is particularly sensitive in the case of

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Kofman, whose suicide months after completing the full-length autobiographical text, Rue Ordener, rue Labat, has led critics to speculate on the relation between the revelation of her past and her suicide (see, for instance, Conley 1996, 156 and Duroux 1999, 138)). To do so, however, means making assumptions about Kofman’s life through interpreting her texts, or indeed analysing her texts on the basis of speculation about her life. In this chapter I do not consider what it meant to Kofman herself to write her past, but rather explore what is at stake in the inscription of death and loss in Kofman’s autobiographical writing. Kofman’s texts repeatedly return to the urgent question of how to remember, narrate and mourn traumatic loss that cannot be voiced directly, a question that is inevitably mediated through the death of her own father in Auschwitz. In “‘Ma vie’ et la psychanalyse”, a short text about her experience of psychoanalysis, Kofman claims that “J’ai toujours eu envie de raconter ma vie”, but cannot because, in her own words, “elle est inénarrable”: her desire to tell her life story is coupled with – or perhaps motivated by – her inability to turn her life into a story (Kofman [1976] 1987b, 18). Although she does not explain what makes her life so difficult to narrate in this particular text, the circumstances of her childhood are made explicit in other texts. In Paroles suffoquées, her (non)story is situated in its wider social context: the question of how to speak of her father’s death is shown to be bound up in the question of how to represent the incommensurate losses of the Nazi concentration camps and death camps in the Second World War. The desire and inability to tell that she describes is compounded for the survivors of the camps, who, as Robert Antelme asserts in the preface to L’Espèce humaine, urgently need to testify to their experiences yet cannot: “Nous éprouvions un désir frénétique de la dire [….] Et cependant c’était impossible” ([1947] 1957, 9). Kofman, commenting on Antelme’s claim, asks Comment parler, alors qu’on éprouve un “désir frénétique” de dire, tâche impossible telle quelle, cette expérience, de tout expliquer à l’autre, que l’on est en proie à un délire de paroles, et qu’en même temps il vous est impossible de parler? (1987a, 45)

If language is inadequate as a medium to express the full horror of the prisoners’ experiences, the survivor is caught in a double bind in which both speech and silence are impossible and insufficient. This

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problem is exacerbated in the context of the innumerable victims who died in the camps and whose testimony thus remains unheard: Kofman highlights the survivors’ sense of obligation to bear witness to the silenced suffering of the dead, to remember “un nombre de morts qui passe toute grandeur imaginable […], des ‘millions’ d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants réduits en cendres: qui n’ont pas eu le droit de parler” (1987a, 47). Yet Paroles suffoquées emphasizes the difficulty, even impossibility, of remembering and mourning such unthinkable loss. The survivors of the concentration camps, struggling to tell that which cannot be told, find themselves in a paralysing “double bind” from which there seems to be no possible escape (1987a, 46). They end up choking on their own unspoken words, on the one hand longing to move beyond the traumas of their past and on the other paralysed by the need to remember and commemorate those who died and who thus cannot speak up for themselves. This emphasis on the contradictory need to tell and the urge to forget is crucial for survivors of collective traumatic experiences. The Vietnam veteran cited in the epigraph to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory asserts: “I do not want to take drugs for my nightmares, because I must remain a memorial to my dead friends” (Caruth 1995, vii). The possibility of curative oblivion is undercut by the imperative to remember others’ unspoken trauma. Those who have survived collective traumas, such as the Nazi concentration camp survivors, are particularly likely to be haunted by the need to commemorate the deaths of their comrades, or, put differently, by the fear of erasing the story of their comrades’ deaths through the act of telling their own stories of survival.28 The story of their survival is inextricably bound up in the narrative of others’ deaths. This is certainly true for Sarah Kofman, who was hidden in a Gentile house in Paris during the Occupation and who survived, whilst her father was killed in Auschwitz. Kofman’s texts reiterate an irresolvable tension between the need to remember and the will to forget, between the story of the child who survived and the father who did not. If her own story is “inénarrable”, it is so at least partly because it points us towards other stories that are even more difficult to tell, not only that of her father, but also the innumerable deaths in Nazi concentration camps. As Kofman argues in Paroles suffoquées, these deaths seem to 28 I explore this at greater length in the next chapter on Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après.

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resist assimilation into narrative, into memory. This notion of assimilation is important: in psychoanalytic terms, assimilation is part of the mourning process, a means by which the subject comes to terms with the loss of the love object and, by implication, moves on. Here, however, it is not the process of mourning, or assimilating loss, that interests me so much as the way that mass, or collective, loss and trauma shapes or distorts the life story of the individual implicated within this context of massive trauma. In a study of the treatment of Holocaust survivors, the psychotherapist Yael Danieli cites a woman who survived whilst many members of her family were killed. She asks: “Even if it takes me one year to mourn each loss, and even if I live to be 107” [by which time she will have mourned every dead family member], “what do I do about the rest of the six million?” (Danieli 1988, 282). Herein lies the key issue: if one could find a way to come to terms with individual losses, individual traumas, nonetheless these are bound up in wider traumas, on a larger scale. In Kofman’s writings, the unresolved story of other people’s suffering and death works to interrupt any narrative of personal trauma, any attempt to construct a narrative of self woven out of her own childhood memories. In my reading, the inextricability of the story of the self from that of the other emerges as a point of tension at the crux of Kofman’s texts. This tension is explored thematically but also structurally, the very driving force of the quest to tell a life story in the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust. All of Kofman’s texts, implicitly or explicitly, reiterate the central question of how one can tell a life story “after Auschwitz”; all struggle to find strategies of articulating the relation between survival and death, self and other, in relation to this question. These problems of expression are clustered around images and invocations of the death of the father, which stands at the very limits of what can or cannot be articulated and assimilated within Kofman’s multiple narratives. This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first, I explore how Kofman’s texts tell the story of her own childhood as a hidden Jew in occupied France, focusing not only on the celebrated Rue Ordener, rue Labat but also on two shorter autobiographical texts, “Tombeau pour un nom propre” and “Sacrée nourriture”, both written some years before Rue Ordener, rue Labat. If these texts all seem to leave behind the death of the father to dwell on Kofman’s own traumatic past and her own quest for identity, they also, I argue, find alternative ways of

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inscribing the seemingly unspeakable story of the father’s death within the story of the daughter. The father’s death marks the limits of the narrator’s story, not only highlighting the fissures in her narrative of self but also pointing outwards, beyond the narrator’s own experiences, to their wider context. This leads me to the second part of the chapter, which focuses on Paroles suffoquées in order to analyse how what Kofman calls the incommensurate loss of the Holocaust can be represented. In Paroles suffoquées, I argue, Kofman goes beyond the context of her own loss and in so doing, paradoxically succeeds in beginning to write in and through the double bind that has seemed inescapable in her other autobiographical texts. This is not, of course, to say that she overcomes or undoes that bind; rather, her writing is rooted in the double bind it articulates yet cannot erase, and it is as such, I suggest, that it may be read as a discussion and enactment of what it means to write “after Auschwitz”.

Loss, Identity and Self-destruction: “Tombeau pour un nom propre” “Tombeau pour un nom propre” was first published as a single text in Première livraison in 1976, before being reproduced in Trois in 1987, along with two other autobiographical texts by Kofman, “Sacrée nourriture” and “ ‘Ma vie’ ou la psychanalyse”. “Sacrée nourriture”, which comes first of the set of three texts in Trois, tells the story of Kofman’s childhood before and during the Occupation, specifically, as the title suggests, focusing on food and the cultural prohibitions governing her complex responses to the different foods offered by her mother and father and by the Gentile woman who took her in during the war. This text refers explicitly, if very succinctly, to her father’s deportation. The second text, “ ‘Ma vie’ ou la psychanalyse”, is about the subject’s fraught attempts to tell her own life-story, mediated through her bodily responses; there is no reference to the father’s death, which is, similarly, apparently missing from “Tombeau pour un nom propre”. Yet given that this text appears with another in which the death is recorded, it is not inappropriate to read “Tombeau” in relation to the father’s death, particularly as, as I shall show, this text does implicitly seem to inscribe the father’s story in its exploration of

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the intersection between name and identity, which is shown to lead inexorably to bodily suffering and death. In this text the narrating subject recounts a dream, in which she read, on the cover of a book, the words: “KAFKA traduit par Sar… Ko(a)f…” ([1976] 1987d, 20). She goes on to explore the significance of her fragmented name, which reminds her of “Kaufmann”, in turn linked with “le commerce, l’argent, le kaka, le juif” (20). The words deployed here are telling: Judaism becomes itself associated with money, and with anality, with that which is typically impure and unclean. The narrator claims that the name “Kofman”, apparently derived from a clerical error when a worker in a town hall miscopied the name “Kaufmann”, has entirely different connotations, implying the “Ko(p)f”, the head. The head by implication stands literally and symbolically above the unclean body; the name “Kofman” allows the narrator to distance herself from her Jewish ancestry, her origins and identity. The division between past and present, however, results in a violent, bodily mutilation that the narrator describes as a “double castration”, another kind of wounding. The narrator’s final assertion – “Je dévore ma propre chair: sarcophage” (20) – strikingly highlights her shattered identity: she is left in the position of devouring her own flesh, just as a sarcophagus devours the body entombed inside. This image points to her guilt, and, again, to the problem of reconciling her own survival and identity with her traumatic Jewish origins: to her sense that she needs to commemorate the Jewish origins yet equally cannot. If “Tombeau” appears to inscribe the mutilation of the narrator’s identity and body via the image of the fragmented name that connects both, it also, however, points again to the father, not explicitly mentioned here yet evoked throughout. The inscription of the dead father within the text is firstly figured in the references to Kafka, with whom, the narrator speculates, she feels a certain “parenté” (20) and whose work she has apparently translated in the book that appears in her dream. These references to Kafka are ambiguous. On the one hand, the narrator associates him with guilt and anality (“kaka” (20)). On the other, an indirect link may be made with the opening page of Rue Ordener, rue Labat when the narrator describes how she writes with her father’s pen, long since broken, in front of her. She may not be able to write with it directly, but the implication is that she is translating her father’s silence, figured in the pen that cannot be written with. In both of these texts, Kofman is carrying out a form of

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translation, a translation into words of what has remained silenced, and at the level of the body. The body in question, however, is not only hers, but also, crucially, the body of her father. If we consider this text in the light of the later account of the father’s death in Rue Ordener, rue Labat, then the image of the sarcophagus, of the body being devoured within the tomb, can only remind us of Kofman’s father, believed to have been “enterré vivant” in Auschwitz for refusing to work on the Sabbath (1994, 16). The father’s presumably slow and painful death by asphyxiation within a “tomb” of sorts that would bring about his death casts a different light on the image of the sarcophagus here and on the very notion of entombment, of burial, in relation to memory and identity. It is worth pausing here to reconsider both the “tomb” and the “proper name” or indeed “clean name” alluded to in the title of this short text. The title implies a quest to entomb the name “Kofman” (the so-called proper name), which would mean assimilating the name into an acceptable symbolic order. In modern Western society, burying the body constitutes a socially approved ritual of mourning, a means of coming to terms with the death; the burial of the body is concomitant with some form of commemorative service which invites mourners to register the reality of death and loss. Here, however, the narrator is not seeking out a tomb for a body, but for a name. More accurately, the narrator is trying to find a link between her own name (the sign of her identity) and her ancestors, to relocate her relation to her own Jewish origins. This quest is however far from being abstractly intellectual: the name is itself also inextricably bound up with the body here. Entombing the name, by implication, means entombing the body – and in this case, it would seem to be not (only) the narrator’s own body, but (also) the body of the other, of the father possibly. The narrator’s own wounded body, figured in the fragmented signature “Sar... Kof”, points obliquely to another body, unnamed but not necessarily unknown; the relation between her body and that of the other is perhaps best understood in the framework of what Freud terms melancholia. In “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud suggests that the melancholic, unable to accept the loss of the love object, feels violently abandoned by the other, but directs his/her violent feelings towards the lost love object inwards, engaging in self-torment and self-punishment that can ultimately lead to suicide (Freud [1917] 1981, 250-253). Diana Fuss, glossing this, describes it in terms of

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autocannibalism, using images that correspond curiously to those deployed in “Tombeau”: Melancholia operates as a self-destructive, self-consuming pathology. By mistaking its own ego for the object that must be forsaken, the melancholic subject, in effect, commits suicide, suffering much the same fate as the lost object. Turning identification’s violent impulses completely inward, the ego consumes itself in an act of autocannibalism. (Fuss 1995, 37)

Melancholia, Fuss suggests, causes the subject to devour itself: whereas the mourning subject can sustain itself on the internalized lost object, the melancholic feeds off her own flesh. “Tombeau pour un nom propre” literalizes this image of the autophagic melancholic, as the narrator describes herself as a sarcophagus, devouring its own flesh. Yet note Fuss’s explanation: it is by mistaking one’s own ego for the lost object that the melancholic becomes autophagic, selfdestructive. The violence that should be aimed at the lost object (because the melancholic perceives the lost object as having abandoned him/her) has been turned inwards onto the self, provoking a confusion between self and other. In “Tombeau” this confusion is most clearly hinted at in terms of the body. “Tombeau”, I would suggest, draws on this blurring of the divisions between self and other in order to find ways of articulating the death of the father, through descriptions of the narrator’s own wounded body. In this text, the melancholic narrating subject describes her own pain as a means to rearticulate the death of her father, to find a way of representing his name, his body and his death within an appropriate narrative framework. The ending suggests that this endeavour has failed: that she remains melancholic, while his death (and that of many other Jews) remains unrepresented, even violently forgotten. The postscript added to this text in 1992 offers a different interpretation. This postscript rewrites Kofman’s earlier conclusions about her name, explaining that, if “Kofman” is derived from “Kaufmann”, then “Kaufmann” was itself a deliberate distortion of the original (Jewish!) name “Kofman”, intended to hide the Jewish roots implied by “Kofman”. Kofman, the narrator has learned, is a name directly derived from “Yackov” (Jacob), a name which contains within it the narrator’s Jewish ancestry and heritage. She ends the postscript with the confident assertion that she can now be proud of her name and her Jewish heritage and still walk tall with the proper, clean name derived from her father and from generations of Jews.

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This does not, however, mark a resolution. The contrast between this ending and that of the first version of the text is too striking to ignore and raises another, important, distinction between the narrating subject and her father. In the first ending, the sarcophagus slowly devours a mutilated body, which, I have suggested, points to the father’s dead body; there is no sense of recovery or even of assimilation of death. In the second ending, the narrator believes she has succeeded in entombing and also commemorating her father and her origins. She seems to have found the ideal compromise between, on the one hand, forgetting and getting on with her life, and, on the other, remembering and suffering from guilt. Yet inscribed within this doubled text, split curiously by her initial textual signature “Sar Ko(a)f”, is the crucial distinction between the narrator, who has survived to tell the story, and her father, who has not. This distinction in turn may be seen to undermine the positive second ending, and to disrupt any equivalence between the narrator and her father. This text is, then, split between identification of the self with the other and the ultimate impossibility of such identification. It is this textual rupture, however, which renders telling possible, and which acts as the very condition of possibility for the doubled story of death and of (guilt-ridden, ambivalent) survival offered up in “Tombeau pour un nom propre” but also in the text accompanying it in Trois, “Sacrée nourriture”, and in the later Rue Ordener, rue Labat, to which I now turn.

Rue Ordener, rue Labat: The Missing Father and the Two Mothers Rue Ordener, rue Labat tells the story of Kofman’s childhood in Paris during the Occupation, when she and her mother were hidden in a Gentile house on the rue Labat to avoid deportation. The first few chapters describe her father’s arrest on the 16th July 1942, the day when thirteen thousand Jews were “rounded up” and taken to the Vélodrome d’hiver to be deported, and his subsequent deportation and death. The father’s death is not, however, the main focus in this text, as the narrator seemingly leaves his story behind to tell that of her own experiences as a “hidden child” living in a Gentile home. The narrative charts the child’s ambivalent relationship between her mother, who hides with her, and the woman who takes them into her

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home, a previous neighbour who the narrator calls mémé. The child’s divided allegiances between these two competing mother figures is shown to continue long after the war, and the text ends with mémé’s death and with the narrator’s lingering feeling of being split by divided loyalties. This sense of being pulled between two cultures and religions is common to accounts by “hidden children” of their experiences: living with Gentile families and forced to conceal their Jewish identity in order to survive, they led “double lives” caught between Jewish and Christian tradition and culture until they were separated from the Gentile families who had rescued them, often at considerable emotional cost. Rue Ordener, rue Labat would seem to offer a first-person account of this divided allegiance, focusing almost entirely on the recollection of the child’s perception of her situation. As Madeleine Dobie observes, “The literal death of the father transforms the narrative of Kofman’s childhood into a feminocentric or matriarchal one” (1997, 341n. 24): the text seems to shift from its focus on the father (in the house on the rue Ordener) into the feminized space of the kitchen in the rue Labat. Yet, as in Kofman’s other autobiographical texts, this narrative finds alternative strategies to inscribe the death of the father within the story of the child’s own experience of the war. This alternative inscription of the father’s death is prefigured in the opening pages of Rue Ordener, rue Labat, in which the narrator’s loss is expressed in terms of a loss of inheritance. In the second chapter, the narrator explains that all they received from their father after his deportation was a card sent from Drancy, written in French “de la main d’un autre” (15). She assumes that this is because he was forbidden to write in Yiddish or Polish: unlike their children, born in France, her father and her mother – Polish emigrants – could not communicate in French. The narrator clung to the card from Drancy as the material reminder of her father and was devastated to discover that this – her sole inheritance – was lost when her mother died: “C’était comme si j’avais perdu mon père une seconde fois. Rien ne restait plus désormais, même plus cette carte qui n’avait pas été écrite de sa main” (16). The narrator experiences the loss of the father’s final message to his family as a re-enactment of his death: without the card, she feels she has nothing left of her father. Her memories of her father are thus based around a gap: a gap in her own knowledge of how he died, a missing inheritance. Her narrative emerges out of this gap, out of the loss both of the father and of his inheritance. Yet the narrator

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does, despite her claim that she has nothing left of her father, still have his pen, which she used throughout her childhood until it stopped working, long before she was ready to stop using it (“Il m’a “lâchée” avant que je puisse me décider à l’abandonner” (9)). The pen constitutes a symbol of the father and of his premature death; she clings on to this pen even though she cannot use it to write because it offers her only connection with her father. The narrator adds: “il est devant mes yeux sur ma table de travail et il me contraint à écrire, écrire...” (9). The pen with which she cannot write stands in somehow for the story of the father’s death that she does not know how to tell and impels her to find a way of writing it, writing it differently. The ethical imperative alluded to here – to bear witness to her father’s death – implies that this text is not simply the narrative of her childhood, but an oblique inscription of her father’s deportation and horrific death via the story of the narrator’s experiences as a hidden child and via the story of the two mother figures. The conflict between the two mother-figures, which occupies centre-stage in Rue Ordener, rue Labat, is prefigured in the earlier, shorter autobiographical text “Sacrée nourriture”. This text, which opens before the war, sets up an opposition between the mother, who feeds her children to excess and the father imposes Jewish food laws onto his children: “Il ne faut pas […] mêler la viande et le lait […] mêler assiettes et couverts, milchig et fleischig” (Kofman 1987c, 17). This differentiation of the parental roles corresponds to a prototypical psychoanalytic distinction between the nurturing mother and the prohibitive father, spokesperson for the law. Yet, faced with rationing and lack, the mother still upholds Jewish law, forbidding the children to eat the ham and butter sandwiches distributed by the Red Cross, whilst the father overrules her: “Laisse manger les enfants […] c’est la guerre”. Whereas the narrator resisted her mother’s persistent feeding, she finds the food approved by her father delicious; she can digest only that which is sanctioned by patriarchal law. Eating is shown to involve a negotiation between paternal law and maternal imperative: the daughter’s sense of entrapment between two competing authorities is figured through what she is (un)able to eat. Kelly Oliver (1999) and Tina Chanter (1999) have both linked this image of the daughter caught between maternal and paternal authority with that of Kofman as female philosopher in a masculine tradition. Yet the conflict between two different authority figures staged in “Sacrée nourriture” and later in Rue Ordener, rue Labat does not only, I would argue,

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serve to highlight the narrator’s ambivalent response to conflicting gendered authorities, but also, crucially, works to inscribe the loss of the father in the narrative even (and most strikingly) where it appears absent. This may be seen if we link the father’s role as provider before and during the war with that of mémé and the child’s biological mother after his disappearance. Initially, he upholds the Jewish food laws; later, when food is in shorter supply, he prioritizes survival and health over religious law. Before his deportation, the father (lawful provider) stands in contrast with the mother; afterwards, however, the division of roles is displaced onto the two mother figures, who compete for the child’s affection and allegiance. The child is initially terrified of losing her mother, a fear which she claims dates from before the war but which is exacerbated by the loss of her father. She refuses to hide without her mother, and so her The narrator siblings are scattered in various residences while she alone remains with her mother. Yet quickly her allegiance shifts from her mother to mémé. She buys two cards on Mother’s Day but gives mémé the card that she prefers (Kofman 1994, 55), and her growing allegiance to mémé separates her from her mother and from her Jewish past: “Mémé avait réussi ce tour de force: en présence de ma mère, me détacher d’elle. Et aussi du judaïsme” (57). Her detachment from her mother is revealed in her digestion of mémé’s forbidden Gentile food, which stands in stark contrast with the “nourriture kasher” (48) prepared by the Jewish mother. The narrator points out that although “la viande saignante m’avait toujours été interdite” (50-1), she is now compelled by mémé to eat near-raw meat to improve her health, thus transgressing Jewish dietary laws and ingesting food without paternal sanction. It seems that mémé has taken on the role of her father at the beginning of the war, dictating what she can eat and encouraging her to eat food forbidden by her religion on health grounds. Certainly the child seems to accept mémé’s food in the same way that she accepted that food purified by her father’s blessing. It would, however, be wrong to conclude that mémé has simply stepped into the child’s father’s shoes. The child has always associated the father with her Jewish customs and heritage; as a rabbi he literally upheld Jewish law and he taught it to his children. Mémé, by contrast, seems to pull the child away from her Jewish origins, as well as from her mother, not only by feeding her food prohibited by Jewish law, but also by transmitting her own antiSemitic prejudices (57). The biological mother now stands as the sole

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representative of the Jewish law, of the child’s past, which the child rejects along with her mother as she accepts the adoptive mother’s nurture instead. She eats steak with butter, pork, and other forbidden foods, declaring them delicious, signifiers of her allegiance to her adoptive mother and of her detachment from her past and, by extension, from her father. Eating mémé’s food represents assimilation of her father’s loss, a kind of burial of the past and movement into the future: in the narrator’s own words, “J’avais, semble-t-il, enterré tout le passé” (67). If the body appears to stage the child’s detachment from her father, it is also, however, the site of her (involuntary) commemoration of her father and of her Jewish origins. The text describes the child’s surprise at discovering mémé’s extended family, in which successive generations can come together under one roof. Of her father’s ten siblings, the narrator states, all but one died in the Warsaw ghetto, and the one brother who was not killed in Poland (and who was ostracized by his entire family, except for the narrator’s father, after marrying out of his religion) was murdered by the Nazis in Yugoslavia. Mémé’s close-knit extended family contrasts sharply with the child’s family, literally destroyed by anti-Semitic persecution. Yet if the child seems to detach herself from her own broken family to turn towards mémé’s, the adult narrator interrupts her own narrative with a retrospective account of her body’s continued allegiance to her father’s family during the war. She recounts how years after the war, her sister recovered letters written by her father to his brother in Yugoslavia, in which he would trace the outlines of his children’s hands onto the paper in the form of a signature, because the children were too young to sign their own names. This reminds her of the attachments within her family, as well as of the curious fact that throughout the war, “Je n’avais cessé moi-même de dessiner mes mains” (63). This suggests that she was, albeit involuntarily, using the bodily signature as a means to reaffirm her identity under erasure: she had, after all, lost her father and her name (which mémé had changed to Suzanne to protect her), and was living under the constant threat of discovery and deportation. In keeping up a tradition set in place by her father, the child stages a bodily refusal to forget and leave behind her father. This refusal to forget is figured also in her physical inability to digest mémé’s food, which she ingests but frequently ends up rejecting: in her words, “Mon corps, à sa manière, refusait cette diététique qui m’était si étrangère et ne pouvait que m’inquiéter” (51).

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This bodily refusal of mémé’s food does not represent a rejection of mémé and a return to her mother, as the child continues to show affection to the Gentile mother at the expense of her biological mother. Instead, it may be seen to embody her continued attachment to her father and to her Jewish past, the wish to commemorate her father even as she forges a different life in the rue Labat and as she rejects the laws and obligations of her religion. Even though she appears to have left her father behind, the text obliquely traces a continued allegiance to him, figured not in words but in bodily performance. This is pre-empted by the narrator’s description, near the beginning of the text, of her own and her siblings’ response to their father’s arrest: “six enfants, abandonnés de leur père, purent seulement crier en suffoquant, et avec la certitude qu’ils ne le reverraient jamais plus: ‘ô papa, papa, papa’” (14). Faced with the reality of the father’s deportation and certain death, the children can only chant his name: they cannot verbalize their hurt any other way and the loss of words (as well as the loss of their father) suffocates them. The deployment of the verb “suffoquer” is telling, referring the reader back to Kofman’s earlier text, Paroles suffoquées, in which Kofman explores the question of how to recount loss in the context of the Holocaust through imagery of suffocation and asphyxiation.

Suffocated (by) Words We have seen that Kofman’s texts reiterate a paralysing double bind in which speech and silence, memory and forgetting, are equally painful and indigestible, a double bind lived as a painful bodily entrapment or indigestion. This double bind is, however, taken furthest in Paroles suffoquées, in which Kofman explores questions of loss and mourning beyond the context of the single individual. Paroles suffoquées addresses ethical issues surrounding the Holocaust, linking Kofman’s father’s tragic death in Auschwitz with Maurice Blanchot’s philosophical fragments and Robert Antelme’s book L’Espèce humaine. In her reading of this last text, which offers both a first person account of Antelme’s experience in various Nazi concentration camps and a philosophical consideration of “humanity” after the Holocaust, Kofman observes that those who return from the camps, “privés autant d’une vraie parole que de nourriture, ne peuvent plus se rassasier de parler” (1987a, 44). This suggests an affinity

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between starvation and imposed silence, as though speech is as fundamental to survival as food, yet this comparison breaks down as speech, unlike food, cannot satisfy the survivors’ hunger. In Paroles suffoquées, hunger, digestion and indigestion are metaphors for speech and writing, as words become material – digestible or indigestible – like food. Kofman explicates the “double bind” in terms of words literally stuck in the throat of the survivor: Un étrange “double bind”: une revendication infinie de parler, un devoir parler à l’infini, s’imposant avec une force irrépressible – et une impossibilité quasi physique de parler: une suffocation; une parole nouée, exigée et interdite, parce que trop longtemps rentrée, arrêtée, restée dans la gorge et qui vous fait étouffer, perdre respiration, vous asphyxie. (1987a, 46)

The need to speak and its concomitant impossibility are articulated through the image of unformed, knotted-up words that choke the speaker. This recalls Kofman’s description of her father’s death, based on witness accounts: his insistence on praying on the Sabbath enrages his captors and he is “enterré vivant à coups de pioche” (1987a, 41), entrapped and suffocated in the attempt to resist the all-encompassing Nazi regime. If Kofman’s father is literally suffocated, other concentration camp victims are, she suggests, figuratively suffocated, denied the right to eat (ingest), and prevented from speaking their opinion (expulsion). Even having escaped from the camps, Kofman suggests in her reading of L’Espèce humaine, the survivors remain haunted by a lingering sense of suffocation brought about by their need and concomitant inability to testify to their experience: in Antelme’s words, “À peine commencions-nous à raconter, que nous suffoquions” ([1947] 1957, 9). This imagery of suffocation recurs throughout the writings of concentration camp survivors: Charlotte Delbo, describing her return to France from Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück, admits that she felt “seule, au creux d’un vide où l’oxygène manquait, où je cherchais ma respiration, où je suffoquais” (1971, 20). Susan Shapiro, analysing the poetry of Celan and Sachs, writes that “The failure of speech and the expiration of breath are two related and recurrent aspects of the textuality of their poems [….] Speech is stifled and breath is suffocated by that which these poets breathe in and seek to tell” (1987, 71). In Shapiro’s reading, enforced silence is equated with suffocation; by implication, if speech were possible, it would enable the survivor to breathe again.

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Although Kofman uses similar imagery in Paroles suffoquées to describe the predicament of survivors threatened with suffocation as they attempt to speak, her account is somewhat different. She suggests that survivors choke on the words stuck in their throats that they cannot expel or ingest, words that describe their own experiences of unspeakable horror. Yet for Kofman, camp survivors are not only choking on the unspoken words of their own experiences, but are suffocated by the unthinkable scale of mass horror. She claims that “Le livre d’Antelme témoigne en suffoquant pour l’Incommensurable, pour un nombre de morts qui passe toute grandeur imaginable” (1987a, 47). The unthinkable scale of devastation in the Holocaust cannot be defined or verbalized; it suffocates those who can neither digest nor ignore it. In this way, according to Kofman, Holocaust survivors are choked by the material words they cannot expel and suffocated by the intangible, indefinable mass atrocity that they cannot ingest. This is, of course, bound up in the ethical dilemma that surrounds discourses on the Holocaust: how to speak without simplifying and betraying the unthinkable experiences of those whose deaths have silenced their testimony. Each word seems insufficient, yet chokes the witnesses who attempts to speak, preventing them from telling the story that the victims can never tell; these survivors are also, in effect, choking on other people’s suffocated silence. At stake here, then, is the relation between individual and collective trauma, which, in Kofman’s own imagery, become knotted together into a double bind in the context of the Holocaust. To recount one’s own experience, if it is possible, is to run the risk of silencing the deaths of others.29 In Kofman’s words, “Parler – il le faut – sans pouvoir: sans que le langage trop puissant, souverain, ne vienne maîtriser la situation la plus aporétique” (1987a, 16). This re-inscribes differently the double bind: it is not only that one needs to speak yet cannot, but also that one must speak (“il le faut”) and yet simultaneously must not. If this text emphasizes that there is no way out of the “situation la plus aporétique”, that one remains knotted up in any attempt to give voice to the horror of Nazi atrocities, it concomitantly highlights that any apparent escape from that aporia would be ethically troubling. Kofman’s text, appropriately named Paroles suffoquées, speaks in and through an impasse. Yet this is not 29 I address the question of how to speak for others in more detail in depth in my next chapter, on Charlotte Delbo.

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unproblematic: how can we read suffocated words? And, perhaps more crucially, (how) can one write in and through a paralysing, suffocating double bind? What, Kofman’s text invites us to ask, does it mean to write “after Auschwitz”?

Writing “after Auschwitz” In Kofman’s writing, loss is not an individual possession and can never be demarcated as such, so that writing does not describe or delimit loss, but points to it, inscribing it obliquely, as we have seen. Paroles suffoquées emphasizes that the traumatic deaths of the Holocaust can never “belong” to one person in particular, that this unthinkable devastation defies the possibility of demarcating and thus mourning individual loss.30 At the beginning of Paroles suffoquées, the narrator writes of her father’s death: “De cet événement, mon absolu, qui communique avec l’absolu de l’histoire – intéressant seulement à ce titre?” (1987a, 16). This implicitly poses questions as to the relation between her personal loss, inscribed at the beginning of the text and in the dedication to her father, and the millions of other losses evoked in the text, between her own “absolu” and that of a wider social history. To separate them seems on one level impossible, so tightly are they interwoven, yet also somehow necessary, so as not to suggest a homogeneity of subject positions in relation to the historical traumas of the Holocaust and World War II. As the Jewish daughter of a concentration camp victim, having herself been obliged to go into hiding, Kofman is also, as she reminds us at the beginning of Paroles suffoquées, an “intellectuelle juive”. Yet if Paroles suffoquées does not fix the relation between individual experience and the collective trauma of Nazi genocide, this is precisely because, following the example of Robert Antelme in L’Espèce humaine and Blanchot in L’Entretien infini, this text works to interrogate the relation between individual and collective, self and other, in the context of massive trauma. In Paroles suffoquées, Kofman turns to L’Espèce humaine, in 30

This is not to draw a definitive distinction between the Holocaust and other traumatic events: I am deliberately leaving open the possibility that the extreme example of the Shoah identifies a more general impossibility of mourning (traumatic) loss. Yet my discussion here, following Kofman’s own, refers explicitly to the Holocaust.

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which Antelme theorizes humanity as somehow indestructible. He suggests that the attempts of the Final Solution to erase a species – its leitmotif being simply “Il ne faut pas que tu sois” – necessarily fail: “Les SS ne peuvent pas muter notre espèce” (Antelme [1947] 1957, 79). That is, even humiliated, violated and mutilated, the camp victims cannot have their humanity taken from them: for Antelme, the act of eating peelings in order to survive confirms their status as human beings. He takes this further: “Plus on est contesté en tant qu’homme par le SS, plus on a des chances d’être confirmé comme tel”, implying, broadly, that torture does not destroy, but rather, reinforces, their humanity ([1947] 1957, 101). This contentious argument is derived from his observation that the camp prisoners and the camp officials are “enfermés dans la même espèce et dans la même histoire”, that is “l’espèce humaine” invoked in the title ([1947] 1957, 79). Kofman’s analysis of L’Espèce humaine is filtered through Blanchot’s account of the text in L’Ecriture du désastre and L’’Entretien infini, in which he privileges the role of alterity in Antelme’s account. Indeed, Kofman’s text moves between the writing of Antelme and Blanchot without always signalling the transition, so that the two writers are sometimes confused in Kofman’s text. As Colin Davis has pointed out, Blanchot’s reading risks denying the importance of Antelme’s text as a testimony to his experience of concentration camp existence (1997, 173). In drawing on Blanchot’s interpretation, however, Kofman does not lose sight of the testimonial function of Antelme’s text, nor does she efface the questions it raises about what it means to bear witness to unthinkable Nazi atrocity. Rather, she uses Blanchot’s reading of L’Espèce humaine in order to rethink the possibility of testifying to atrocity through a relation of alterity and difference. In his reading of L’Espèce humaine, Blanchot points out that each prisoner in the camp experiences self-alienation (assuming the voice of a prisoner, he claims “Déchu de moi, étranger à moi-même, ce qui s’affirme à ma place, c’est l’étrangeté d’autrui”), so that the mass of self-alienated prisoners forms “un enchevêtrement sans liens d’hommes Autres, un magma d’autrui” ([1969] 1992, 195 and 198). It is this emphasis on alterity, “l’étrangeté d’autrui”, that Kofman traces in Antelme’s vision of humanity, which, she argues, depends on “le rapport sans rapport”, a relation of alterity or irreducible difference (Blanchot [1969] 1992, 79). Antelme’s book, Kofman claims, shows

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how Nazi horror cannot ultimately destroy the traces of human alterity. Her vision of humanism, borrowed from Antelme, differs from traditional humanism – and, arguably, from Antelme’s own theory – in that it is rooted in irreducible difference rather than in a shared set of values or characteristics, which were destroyed by Nazi atrocity. She sees in Antelme’s thought the basis for a new ethics: En montrant que le dessaisissement abject dont les déportés ont été victimes signifie l’indestructibilité de l’altérité, son caractère absolu, en instaurant la possibilité d’un “nous” d’un nouveau genre, il fonde sans fonder, car ce “nous” est toujours déjà défait, déstabilisé, la possibilité d’une nouvelle éthique. (1987a, 82)

The “nous” that forms the basis of Antelme’s ethics marks a shifting, unstable group linked not through similarity but through irresolvable difference, a group that is dissolved even as it is formed. The “nouvelle éthique” is itself perpetually collapsed even as it is formulated, an ethics that stages its own impossibility as the basis of its very possibility. Yet Kofman’s text does not, I would suggest, offer a model of that “nouvelle éthique”; rather, it explores what it means to use that fundamental alterity, that relation of otherness, as the basis for an ethical testimony to Nazi genocide.

Writing Through Alterity Paroles suffoquées enacts the relation of alterity it articulates in its very structure. The text bears a triple dedication: “A la mémoire de mon père, mort à Auschwitz, pour Robert Antelme, en hommage à Maurice Blanchot”. The differences between these figures could not be more striking. Her father was a Jewish rabbi killed in Auschwitz in prayer, Antelme a non-Jewish survivor of Dachau and writer, and Blanchot a literary critic with no personal experience of the camps.31 Paroles suffoquées, perhaps unexpectedly, moves between recounting the traumatic death of the narrator’s father, analysing Blanchot’s 31 Blanchot has, moreover, like Heidegger and Paul de Man, been frequently associated with pre-war fascism. In a vitriolic essay, Jeffrey Mehlman highlights fascist sympathies in Blanchot’s political essays in Combat in the 1930s and suggests that Blanchot’s post-1942 theories of literature are constructed in order to assist his “liquidation of an anti-Semitic past” (1983, 16).

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theories on the possibility of writing “after Auschwitz” and tracing Antelme’s theory of humanity based on his experiences in a concentration camp. This text blurs the differences between different discourses, calling into question the stability of subject-positions. At the beginning of the text, the narrator asserts that “s’impose à moi, intellectuelle juive qui ai survécu à l’holocauste, de rendre hommage à Blanchot pour ces fragments sur Auschwitz épars dans ces textes, écriture de cendres” (Kofman 1987a, 14): paradoxically, the Jewish survivor pays homage to the literary critic/philosopher, indeed seems to suggest that her own writing emerges out of his. Paroles suffoquées may thus be seen to highlight the impossibility of giving voice directly to the incommensurate horror of the Holocaust: this text is self-consciously mediated through other discourses on the Holocaust. Elaine Marks, claiming that “Jews writing in French ‘after Auschwitz’ may be divided roughly into two groups: those who write about ‘Auschwitz’ and those who write about how to write about Auschwitz”, places Kofman’s writing in the second category (1995, 35). Yet this fails to recognize how Kofman’s writing works to undermine such a distinction: to write about her own traumatic loss, the narrator has to address the question of how to write about Auschwitz. Her individual loss cannot be articulated or defined without mediation or deviation. This suggests that the text cannot contain loss within its limits, but can only point outwards, towards other discourses, other losses: intertextuality here becomes a space of unlimited loss, in a writing that can never be complete, but whose condition of possibility is that very incompletion. This text sets up a layered model of intertextuality in which each voice contains within it other voices, so that no voice can be separated from the others. This is reinforced by the proliferation of short quotations interrupting the narrator’s own prose, quotations that are not always clearly attributed. As Madeleine Dobie astutely observes, “Through its fragmentary structure and numerous citations – or the introduction of different voices which are not often clearly differentiated – Paroles suffoquées continually displaces itself, becoming ‘other’ to itself” (1997, 336). The text enacts the alterity it advocates, engendering dialogue through difference and discontinuity rather than through assimilation. In my reading, then, Paroles suffoquées sets up a model of textuality that goes beyond assimilation and expulsion. This text does not assimilate other discourses into its own, but incorporates them as a mark of the impossibility of assimilation, in order to dissolve its own

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limits and the limits of the individual. The imperative to articulate the silence of the victims without assimilating it is crucial to Paroles suffoquées : “S’il n’y a pas de récit possible après Auschwitz, s’impose pourtant de parler, parler sans fin pour ceux qui n’ont pu” (1987a, 43). Yet, in this text there is no possibility of speaking without choking, no means of expelling or digesting the suffocated words. The impasse reached in Paroles suffoquées points us again to Rue Ordener, rue Labat and to its central image of a child caught between two cultures, two mother figures, and yet also trapped by her own inability to come to terms with the loss of her father. The father seems forgotten in this text, yet his loss is re-inscribed via the child’s indigestion and vomiting, via her literal, physical refusal or inability to assimilate it. Such a loss cannot simply be contained within the narrative, can only be gestured towards via the bodily performance that stands in for but cannot replace the narrative articulation of loss. Yet my reading of Paroles suffoquées can, I think, help us to reread the inscription of the loss of the father in Rue Ordener, rue Labat. In Paroles suffoquées, any narrative of Holocaust trauma is mediated via others; the incommensurate loss emerges through the gaps and limits in these multiple and disparate discourses. In Rue Ordener, rue Labat, this splitting is played out not at the level of the narrative itself but in the body of the narrator, caught between the two mother figures. The narrator never makes a definitive choice between these two figures, these two traditions; instead she splits herself painfully between them until the very end of the text. In so doing, she retains a bodily allegiance to the father, whose loss is not compensated for, but rather exacerbated by, the two mothers. The child’s bodily performance refers back to the father’s bodily suffering, yet always simultaneously enacts the irreducible difference between the two, condition of possibility for the story of the father’s death through the story of the child.

Reading Kofman’s Writings: Through the Body and the Words of the Other Kofman’s writing, I have suggested, calls for us to read the (non)story of the other through the limits and divisions in the multiple narratives of the self. The narratives I have explored here focus on the body: the

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body of the child, but also and less clearly that of her father. Memory is negotiated through the (wounded) body, yet equally the body stages the limits of what can be remembered or narrated. At the beginning of this chapter I asked what it meant to write a life story “after Auschwitz”, in the aftermath of collective and unthinkable horror. Kofman’s own writing responds implicitly to this question by experimenting with different forms of story, ranging from the philosophical theorisations of Paroles suffoquées to the apparently simple and confessional style of Rue Ordener, rue Labat. Ann Smock, who translated Rue Ordener, rue Labat into English, suggests that this text “does not have any style”: “it exists and is plainly legible” (Smock 1996, xi). I would argue, however, that this is more than a confessional “life story”, not least because its point of departure is not Kofman’s own life but that of her father, or, more precisely, the gaps in her own knowledge and understanding of what happened to her father during the Second World War. The child’s experience of being torn in two in the rue Labat is shown to be inextricably bound up in the disappearance of her father. My reading turns the inevitable debate surrounding Rue Ordener, rue Labat in particular on its head. Where critics have tended, unsurprisingly, to focus on the effect that writing this autobiography might have had on Kofman, my reading leaves the fraught question of Kofman’s own psychological responses behind in order to analyse how the father’s death is inscribed within the narrative of the child’s life. This in turn involves renegotiating the relation between self and other, between different voices and bodies, in the same way that Kofman’s own writing does. It also means rethinking precisely the relations between “life” and writing and between self and other which have emerged repeatedly throughout this chapter. What precisely does it mean to write one’s life? In an interview given in Le Monde in 1986, Kofman likens herself to Hoffmann’s “Chat Murr”, “dont l’autobiographie n’est qu’un assemblage de citations d’auteurs divers” (Kofman 1986, vii), amongst which the voice and identity of the writing self become tangled up. This means that the autobiographical enterprise erases identity even as it asserts it: in Kofman’s words, the cat “cherche à affirmer son identité par cette autobiographie, mais il ne se rend pas compte qu’il la perd par l’écriture même” (Kofman 1986, vii). Having commented on the doubled affirmation and loss of identity that constitute an integral part of the autobiographical project, Kofman continues: “J’ai l’impression de n’avoir plus rien à dire et,

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pourtant, je me sens acculée à faire une autobiographie qui serait moimême. Mais ce moi-même, n’est-ce pas un leurre?” (Kofman 1986, vii). The urge to write her life story is always coupled with the knowledge that any notion of self-identity is itself problematic; autobiography can never simply be the story of a self. In the case of Kofman’s writings, autobiography is also importantly the missing story of another, the missing body of another: Kofman’s texts point to the silenced (suffocated) words of those who did not survive to tell, even as they attest to a troubling survival and the need to affirm some kind of self-identity, some kind of lifestory, out of the unspeakable atrocities of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

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Ghost-writing the Holocaust: Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après Mieux vaut ne pas y croire à ces histoires de revenants plus jamais vous ne dormirez si jamais vous les croyez ces spectres revenants qui reviennent sans pouvoir même expliquer comment. (Delbo 1970b, 191)

In her celebrated trilogy, Auschwitz et après, Charlotte Delbo testifies to her own experiences and those of her comrades in AuschwitzBirkenau and Ravensbrück during the Second World War and describes life after the survivors’ return to France.32 The first two volumes of the trilogy, Aucun de nous ne reviendra (1970a) and Une Connaissance inutile (1970b), consist of fragmented memories of life in the concentration camps, whilst the third volume, Mesure de nos jours, recounts how the different members of the convoy in which Delbo was sent to Auschwitz experienced their return to France.33 32

Delbo and her husband, Georges Dudach, both working for the Resistance, were arrested in their Parisian apartment by French police on March 2nd, 1942, turned over to the Gestapo and imprisoned. Delbo’s husband was executed in May 1942; Delbo was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1943, where she remained until 1944, when she moved to Ravensbrück. She was evacuated to Sweden by the Red Cross towards the end of the war and returned to Paris in 1945. See Delbo 1965, 100-102. 33 Aucun de nous ne reviendra was completed in 1946, but Delbo would not allow it to be published until she could judge its veracity as a testimony: it was finally published in 1970. Similarly, although most sections of Une Connaissance inutile were written between 1946 and 1947, this text was published in 1970.

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Mesure de nos jours consists of a sequence of prose monologues written in the first person, apparently by the individual survivors themselves, and prose poems written in the first person plural. In this text, recurring images of ghosts testify to the difficulty, even impossibility, of returning from Auschwitz, a return that seems to defy belief: the text is structured around the image of the revenant, in the sense both of one who returns and of a “ghost”. The spectral imagery is bound up in Delbo’s self-declared aim to testify to the suffering of the comrades who did not return from the camp. Rosette Lamont writes that “Her companions in camp – the other phantoms, soon to become wispy ghosts – begged her to remember, to be their voice if she returned” (1988, 252). The ghostly return brings with it a testimonial obligation: to bear witness to the trauma suffered by a silenced collective, to speak for those who cannot. It is this testimonial imperative to speak for a collective that is my focus in this chapter. In the previous chapter, we saw how Kofman’s Paroles suffoquées incorporates a plurality of voices and discourses in an attempt to move beyond an articulation of individual loss in the context of the mass devastation of the Holocaust. Although it was published some fifteen years before Paroles suffoquées, Delbo’s Mesure de nos jours may, I argue, be seen to offer a different perspective on the relation between individual loss and collective trauma and to explore further how a single-authored literary text can bear witness to collective trauma.34 In the Nazi concentration camps, as Terrence Des Pres points out, individual identity was erased: “men and women were reduced to a single human mass”, identified by number rather than by name (1976, 37). After returning from the camps, survivors most often recount their ordeals in the first person plural: “Almost all survivors say ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ when describing their camp experiences” (Des Pres 1976, 29). Collective trauma appears to render individual testimony problematic, as the individual’s experience of mass trauma is tightly interwoven with that of the collective. In the first two volumes of the trilogy of Auschwitz et après, the narrator speaks mainly in the first person plural; her own emotions and recollections are frequently difficult to distinguish from those of her comrades. Literary critics have emphasized how this erasure of the authorial “je” makes space for a collective testimony: Marlene Heinemann, for example, claims 34

Delbo’s experience of incarceration in Nazi concentration camps obviously places her in a different position as witness to the horrors of the camps from Kofman.

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that Delbo’s “personal story is often submerged within the collective” (1986, 48). Heinemann does not, however, consider what is at stake in this self-silencing or in the assumption of a collective viewpoint. Instead, she simply asserts that “Delbo erases the personal completely, leaving a surreal portrait of suffering body parts”, as though Delbo’s descriptions of fragmented bodies form the basis of a collective testimony (1986, 43). This emphasis on collective testimony recurs throughout critical writing on Auschwitz et après; most critics seem to take it for granted that the individual testimony can bear witness to a collective (see, for example, Lamont 1988). This critical viewpoint relies, however, on certain assumptions that go largely unexamined in the critical literature. Firstly, does Delbo – indeed, can she? – return from the unthinkable trauma of AuschwitzBirkenau as an embodied witness? Can one remember and testify to trauma as an embodied agent? Secondly, what is at stake in attempting to speak for a collective? Is it possible for a single-authored text to testify to collective trauma and survival from the subject position of the collective? These questions are explored in the third volume of Auschwitz et après, Mesure de nos jours, a text which has received considerably less critical attention than the first two texts in the trilogy.35 Mesure de nos jours describes the attempts of Delbo and her comrades to rebuild their lives after their return from the camps, highlighting the breakdown in the collective identity forged in the camps. The narrator speaks not from the point of view of a single “nous”, but from the different perspectives of individual survivors: she is figured not an embodied witness to collective trauma, but as a disembodied “ghost-writer”.

“Ghost-writing” In this chapter, I use the figure of “ghost-writing” to explore Delbo’s attempts to testify to her own and her comrades’ experiences of survival and of life “after Auschwitz” in Mesure de nos jours. This text includes a sequence of monologues attributed to different survivors, monologues entitled according to the name of the survivor 35

All of the articles about Delbo cited in this chapter deal almost exclusively with Aucun de nous ne reviendra, with passing references to Une connaissance inutile; the exception is Langer (1978), which discusses all three parts of the trilogy.

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whose experiences are narrated and offered as testimonies given verbally to Delbo herself. Yet although Delbo did interview the other survivors of her convoy for Le Convoi du 24 janvier, a factual account detailing what happened to all of the women who accompanied Delbo to Auschwitz, there is no evidence that the monologues in Mesure de nos jours are directly quoted from these interviews.36 Rather, as the text bears no acknowledgement of the other survivors’ participation, it is to be assumed that Delbo has written the monologues herself based loosely on the interviews she conducted.37 In explicitly ghost-writing the stories of other camp survivors, the figure of the author is thus obliquely inscribed as a ghost-writer within her own text. The word “ghost-writer” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a “person who writes on behalf of another person who takes the credit” and in the Chambers dictionary as “one who writes for another as a ghost”. A ghost-writer effaces his/her own subject position and name in order to write for someone else, and, in adopting the other’s voice, to write as someone else. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that many Holocaust testimonies are ghost-written, scripted by professional writers into a format suitable for publication. If this highlights the risk that survivors’ experiences will be diluted, made palatable for a reading public, it also enables testimonies that would otherwise remain unknown to be heard. The ghost-writer may be seen to act as mediator between the survivor and the reader, showing up the difficulty of unmediated testimony to traumatic experience. It is this role as mediator that Delbo seems to assume in Mesure de nos jours, as she lends her voice to the other survivors of her convoy to allow their experiences to be heard. Claire Gorrara suggests that Delbo’s “insistent wish to pick up the voices of others” marks an ethical imperative to testify to others’ traumatic experience, in order not to 36

Le Convoi du 24 janvier offers biographical accounts of all but one of the deportees in Delbo’s convoy and statistical information on the relation between survival and age, profession, education and political affiliation. This text is structured very differently from Mesure de nos jours: Delbo recounts her own trajectory in the first person and that of her comrades in the third person and acknowledges her comrades’ participation, claiming that “Je n’aurais pas pu faire ce livre sans l’aide de mes camarades” (1965, 8). 37 These monologues are not purely fictitious: there are discernible similarities between some of the monologues and corresponding presentation of survivors in Le Convoi du 24 janvier. See, for example, Mado’s vignette in Mesure de nos jours (Delbo 1971, 47-66) and the description of Madeleine Doiret in Le Convoi du 24 janvier (Delbo 1965, 88-91); Mado’s testimony seems to correspond to that of Doiret.

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silence it (1998, 20). In Mesure de nos jours, Delbo appears to perform the ethical act of allowing the “other” to speak through her own writing in a act of generous textual ventriloquism. The notion of “ghost-writing” also, however, troubles the relation between “je” and “nous” that Mesure de nos jours appears to set up. Firstly, “ghost-writing” implies a blurring of the boundaries between subject positions that can be as disturbing as it is enabling: who is speaking at any given time? This is a question of particular urgency in relation to Holocaust testimony, given that the deportees in camps, denied the right to bear witness to the atrocities they lived through, suffered a violent erasure of their identity. Dori Laub links the destruction of personal identity with the inability to witness, observing that the “loss of the capacity to be a witness for oneself […] is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well” (Felman and Laub 1992, 82). Laub suggests that the survivors’ need to bear witness to their suffering after their return is particularly pressing, not only in order to make their experiences public, but also to reconstruct the identities destroyed in the camps. Ghost-writing, in blurring the identity of the speaking “je”, thus seems to pose specific problems in Holocaust testimony, which is bound up in re-establishing self-identity. Moreover, ghost-writing raises questions about authorial signature and attribution: the role of the ghost-writer is often unacknowledged or even unnoticed as the named “author” “takes the credit” for the text. To whom should we attribute a ghost-written testimony? Can we see a ghost-written text as a joint effort or does it imply the risk that one voice will erase another? Mesure de nos jours is not “ghost-written” in the conventional sense, but foregrounds the figure of the author as ghost-writer of her comrades’ monologues in order to address these questions of identity, signature and attribution in collective testimony. To read this text as ghost-writing is, then, to explore crucial questions about the possibility of ethical testimony to collective trauma.38 Does speaking for others also imply in some way appropriating their experiences and denying them voice? Yet what would it mean if Delbo were to speak 38 Questions pertaining to the ethics of Holocaust testimony have been analysed repeatedly through readings of the work of writers such as Elie Wiesel. Critics have tended, however, to disregard how Delbo’s writing explicitly addresses the question of ethics: it is my contention that Delbo’s work enables us to explore what an ethical testimony to collective trauma might be.

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solely for herself, erasing the experiences of her comrades from her account? Moreover, what does it mean for a literary critic to ask questions about the ethics of a testimony of an Auschwitz survivor? In this chapter, I explore how Mesure de nos jours inscribes survival of and testimony to collective trauma in a single-authored literary text through imagery of ghosts and (dis)embodiment, taking literally the definition of ghost-writer in the Chambers dictionary as “one who writes for another as a ghost”. In the first part of this chapter, I focus on the figure of the survivor not as embodied witness but as disembodied revenant, highlighting how survival depends on dissociation and spectral disembodiment. The second part of this chapter draws out the textual and ethical implications of Delbo’s “ghost-writing” in order to think through the possibility of setting up a collective testimony in a literary text. Sara R. Horowitz has pointed out that in critical accounts of texts dealing with the Holocaust, “Questions of morality and ‘authenticity’ displace discussions of literary technique and narrative strategy, as though a truly ‘genuine’ work would read itself” (1997, 25). I argue rather that it is precisely through focusing on the narrative structures of Auschwitz et après that we can begin to address questions of ethics in Delbo’s work. My reading of Mesure de nos jours locates points of rupture in the text in order to suggest that it is where the apparent collective testimony breaks down that a different framework of testimony can emerge. Mesure de nos jours, in highlighting its own failure to sustain a collective viewpoint, calls for us to rethink what an ethical testimony to Auschwitz might be. This testimony explodes the frame of the text and of critical responses, yet retains the question implicit in my title: what does it mean to “ghost-write” the Holocaust?

Revenants, Memory, (Dis)embodiment The survivors’ testimonies in Mesure de nos jours reiterate the continued impossibility of leaving Auschwitz behind. Mado’s testimony opens with the striking statement, “Il me semble que je ne suis pas vivante” and ends with the moving claim, “Je suis morte à Auschwitz et personne ne le voit” (Delbo 1971, 66). For Mado, as for several of the other survivors whose testimonies are recounted in Mesure de nos jours, to survive is not to move beyond Auschwitz, but to register repeatedly the impossibility of “outliving” their trauma.

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Gilberte, for example, asserts that “Je me répète pour m’en assurer qu’il y a vingt-cinq ans que nous sommes rentrés, sinon je ne le croirais pas” (41). This emphasis on the difficulty of moving beyond traumatic experience is echoed in contemporary trauma theory. Caruth suggests that “The survival of trauma is not the fortunate passage beyond a violent event […] but rather the endless inherent necessity of repetition, which ultimately may lead to destruction” (Caruth 1996, 62-3). For Caruth, to survive is to relive trauma repeatedly: survival is itself inextricably bound up in the repetitive structures of traumatic experience. Like the experience of trauma, survival means repeatedly facing both the necessity and the impossibility of confronting one’s own death. Traumatic repetition is, then, partly an attempt to come to terms with one’s unthinkable survival: “Repetition […] is not simply the attempt to grasp that one has almost died but, more fundamentally and enigmatically, the very attempt to claim one’s own survival” (Caruth 1996, 64). The testimonies offered in Mesure de nos jours repeatedly testify to the difficulty, even impossibility, of grasping one’s own survival, a difficulty illustrated in the story Langer tells about Delbo in his introduction to the English translation of Auschwitz et après. When Delbo hears her name called at a commemorative ceremony for French people who died in Nazi camps, she is stunned: “It seemed like a bizarre perversion of her discovery that one could die in Auschwitz and still be alive” (Langer 1995, xviii). Caruth reads in the traumatic stories she analyses a “double telling”, involving “the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (1996, 7). If trauma is to be understood as an “encounter with death”, this is an ongoing encounter: survival, Caruth emphasizes, entails a double encounter with both death and life (1996, 7). If the first two volumes of the trilogy of Auschwitz et après, Aucun de nous ne reviendra and Une connaissance inutile, testify to the “unbearable nature” of the concentration camps, Mesure de nos jours highlights the “unbearable nature” of survival through its oscillation between a “crisis of death” and a “crisis of life”. In Mesure de nos jours, “survival” is described as a living death. Mado speaks of being haunted by the ghosts of her comrades – “les spectres de mes compagnons” (55) – and insists that one deceased

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comrade, Mounette, “vit en moi” (60). Mado’s dead comrades revisit her at night, not in the guise of disembodied spectres, but as they appeared in physical torment: in her words, “je les revois dans leur agonie […] comme elles étaient avant de mourir” (54). Yet the survivors are also themselves figured as revenants who return, insofar as return is possible, from death: Je reviens d’un autre monde […] Dites-moi suis-je revenue De l’autre monde? (Delbo 1970b, 183)

Where Lawrence Langer suggests that the survivors “are more numb to life than to death, which paradoxically now lies vividly behind them”, the narrator’s uncertainty as to her own return suggests that she has not gone beyond death completely (1978, 229). The revenants in Mesure de nos jours have never entirely returned: like ghosts, they seem to belong not to the world of the living but to the domain of the dead or the living dead. This image of the survivor as revenant recurs throughout Auschwitz et après. In the Robert dictionary, “revenant” is defined as both “Âme d’un mort que l’on suppose revenir de l’autre monde sous une apparence physique” and “Personne qui revient (après une absence)”; both meanings of the word originate in the late seventeenth century, but the former is now more common. In Mesure de nos jours, the one who returns is also necessarily a ghost returning from the world of the dead; the image of the “revenant” implies that return from the camps is somehow subtended by spectrality. The recurring image of the revenant, then, works to question the very possibility of “returning” from Auschwitz. Mado claims that “Aujourd’hui mes souvenirs, mon passé, c’est là-bas. Mes retours en arrière ne franchissent jamais cette borne” (50). Auschwitz has erased Mado’s memory of her past before deportation, rendering impossible the notion of “going home” afterwards. “After Auschwitz”, “home” no longer implies safety, but becomes a form of exile: Poupette is deprived of her place in her father’s home (70-76), whilst Jacques returns to find his house blown up and his parents killed (151-166). “Retourner”, with its evocation of “re-turning”, is a more apt verb than “rentrer” in describing the survivors’ return to France, as they are alienated, rather than comforted, by the past. The survivors’ spectral return is also a non-return; like ghosts, they both do and do not return to life.

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Believing in Ghosts In L’Ecriture et la vie, Jorge Semprun recounts a young woman’s shock when she sees him after his return from Buchenwald: “Comme si elle avait vu un revenant, aurait-on dit dans un roman de gare. Mais c’est qu’elle voyait vraiment un revenant” (1994, 146). In Mesure de nos jours, however, the ghosts are not recognized as such: Mado claims that “On dirait que je vis, à me voir” (62) and insists that noone can see that she is “dead”. The survivors bear a superficial resemblance to the living: unlike the narrator of L’Ecriture et la vie, they appear alive but, under the surface, are dead. Other people, Mado claims, look at the spectral survivors without recognising them as such, because recognition would mean suspending disbelief. If, as Langer has suggested, Auschwitz et après is governed by the imperative, “Il faut donner à voir”, vision does not lead to cognition, but to being literally unable to believe one’s eyes (1995, xiv). The narrator admits that the survivors’ testimony to the impossibility of return and survival is seemingly belied by their embodied presence as witnesses: Vous ne croyez pas ce que nous disons parce que si c’était vrai ce que nous disons nous ne serions pas là pour le dire. (78)

The husband of one survivor, Marceline insists that humans can adapt to any experience: “La preuve qu’il en est ainsi, dit-il, c’est que tu es revenue” (182). The notion of “return” as “proof” of successful adaptation to trauma is, however, undercut in this text because the body cannot offer material evidence of survival. In Aucun de nous ne reviendra and Une connaissance inutile, trauma is lived almost exclusively in and through the body: Marlene Heinemann notes that “Delbo emphasizes the body as the representative locus of the struggle for survival” (1986, 48), whilst Langer observes that “the human body is the protagonist of Aucun de nous ne reviendra” (1978, 204). It is all the more striking, then, that return from the camps is described in terms of a disembodiment in

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Mesure de nos jours: if trauma is lived in the body, survival is shown to depend on disembodiment. The survivors are portrayed as incorporeal ghosts, as we see in the opening pages of the text: as the aeroplane carrying the survivors back to France approaches Paris, they turn into disembodied “spectres” that, in the narrator’s words, “glissaient, disparaissaient, reprenaient apparence un instant, si impalpables, si irréelles, si fuyantes, que je doutais de mon existence propre” (9-10). The ghostly survivors, scarcely able to believe in their own material existence, see themselves as bodiless apparitions, unreal and unbelievable. When she returns home, the narrator writes, “Je flottais dans un présent sans réalité”; “mon corps était sans poids, ma tête sans poids” (14), as though she can no longer count on her body as proof of survival. This is not, of course, to deny the survivors’ bodily suffering after their return. Almost all of the survivors who appear in Mesure de nos jours suffer from digestive problems, insomnia, fatigue. Gaby is so affected by the cold, after the unbearable freezing nights in Auschwitz, that she cannot leave her house; Marceline is afflicted annually by an inexplicable bout of fever. This sickness, Marceline suggests, refutes her husband’s theory of human adaptation to trauma: “Sa théorie est mise en déroute chaque fois que j’ai un accès de fièvre” (183). Where for the prisoners in Auschwitz, the enduring body offered material proof of survival (in Langer’s words, “Their physical being was the axis of their daily ordeal” (1978, 230)), after their return, the body manifests the impossibility of survival. Gaby’s constant feeling of cold and Marceline’s annual bout of fever both testify to their inability to leave Auschwitz behind. The body seems to remember and re-live the trauma of the camp in the apparently “safe” space of survival. In Mesure de nos jours, the illusion of disembodiment is shown to be a precondition of survival: if in the camps, the body proved their existence, afterwards the survivors seem obliged to distance themselves from their own bodies in an attempt to deny the unending effects of Auschwitz.

Bodily Doubling and Dissociation The relation between trauma, memory and the body that I have been exploring here is opened up in the first few pages of Delbo’s later text, La Mémoire et les jours, in which her individual memories

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of Auschwitz are interspersed with other voices recounting different traumatic experiences. This text opens with the imperative to “expliquer l’inexplicable”, that is, to explain how the narrator can have survived Auschwitz (Delbo [1985] 1995, 11). The narrating voice asks explicitly the unspoken question underlying Mesure de nos jours: “Comment ai-je fait […] pour vivre aujourd’hui? Une question qu’on me pose souvent, à laquelle je cherche une réponse, sans la trouver” (12). To address this question, the text evokes the image of a snake shedding one skin as it grows another. The narrator states that she left behind in Auschwitz a used skin, “marquée de tous les coups qu’elle avait reçus”, a skin that bore the bodily imprint of the violence of the camp; shedding this skin erases the visible traces of her camp experience (11). Unlike the snake, however, Delbo is unable to shed her skin completely (“Je ne m’en suis pas dépouillée”) and it hardens, keeping the memory of Auschwitz locked inside, “inaltérable, précis” (11-12). Her time in Auschwitz remains intact within the skin of memory (“la peau de la mémoire”) that, unlike the snake’s skin, cannot be shed and replaced (12). The narrator claims that the self she was in Auschwitz remains locked inside this skin, cut off from her present “self”: “Je vis dans un être double. Le double d’Auschwitz ne me gêne pas, ne se mêle pas de sa vie. Comme si ce n’était pas moi du tout. Sans cette coupure, je n’aurais pas pu revivre” (13). Her survival depends on a doubling that was impossible in Auschwitz ( ”Nous n’avions aucune énergie de reste pour cet effort de dédoublement”) but that return renders necessary (12).39 This image of a doubled survivor self recurs in Mesure de nos jours, most strikingly in Ida’s account of her mental breakdown: “Il y avait moi et un spectre de moi qui voulait coller à son double et n’y arrivait jamais” (Delbo 1971, 120). This painful, irreconcilable split between selves is, of course, characteristic of what contemporary psychiatry, following Pierre Janet, calls “dissociation”, whereby the traumatic memories that cannot be registered directly in consciousness are contained in an alternate state of consciousness (Janet 1928, 2:284). Curiously, since Delbo’s model of dissociated traumatic memory was quoted in translation in Langer’s book Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991, 4-7) it has been cited repeatedly in psychiatric writing 39

Curiously, other survivors in Mesure de nos jours claim to have been able to dissociate in Auschwitz: Poupette comments to Charlotte, ‘Tu dis que se dédoubler était impossible là-bas. Moi, j’y parvenais’ (Delbo 1971, 75).

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as a paradigm of dissociation. Delbo’s image of a skin of memory points to a distinction between, in her words, “la mémoire externe”, described as verbal and narrative, and “la mémoire profonde”, nonverbal and sensory. These different forms of memory may be seen to correspond to a distinction in contemporary trauma theory between “narrative memory” and “traumatic memory”, “inflexible and invariable” (see van der Hart and van der Kolk 1995, 163). In Delbo’s text, “narrative memory” is associated with the mind and traumatic, non-verbal memory with the body, reiterating a division also established by trauma theory: in Susan Brison’s words, “A primary distinguishing factor of traumatic memories is that they are more tied to the body than are narrative memories” (1999, 42). According to Delbo’s narrator, these two different forms of memory inhabit different states of consciousness and cannot be integrated. Despite this insistence on the clear division between “external” and “sensory” memory, however, the narrating voice in the first chapter of La Mémoire et les jours admits that the tough skin of traumatic memory can nevertheless break down: “Elle éclate, pourtant, quelquefois, et restitue tout son contenu” (Delbo [1985] 1995, 13). Janice Haaken, a psychologist, employs a similar image of traumatic memory bursting through its protective layer: “Like an encapsulated cyst, the traumatic memory is sealed off behind a protective shield – an amnesiac barrier – but erupts into consciousness when that shield breaks down” (1998, 63). In Delbo’s text, the violence of this eruption is brought out as the memory that bursts through its skin also seems to reopen old wounds in her own body, causing her physical pain: “La souffrance est si insupportable […] que je la ressens dans tout mon corps ([1985] 1995, 13). The traumatic memory takes her viscerally back to Auschwitz (“La souffrance est […] exactement la souffrance endurée là-bas” (13)), thus breaking through the skin of her apparently healed body. This visceral, embodied memory of Auschwitz is contrasted with her everyday memory that only brushes the surface (skin): the distinction between “la mémoire profonde” and “la mémoire externe” in Delbo’s writing works through an opposition between depth and surface, body and skin.

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Traumatic Memory, Narrative and the Body Roberta Culbertson, who explicitly borrows Delbo’s distinction between external and bodily memory, suggests that traumatic experience is “locked within […] skin, played out within it in actions rather than words [….]”. She glosses this with the statement that trauma “is not known in words, but in the body” (1995, 170). According to Culbertson, bodily traumatic memories “possess an energy of flow that leads to their movement from whatever locked places […] into the interstices of the everyday” (175). This flow marks the therapeutic transformation of traumatic memory into narrative form: she claims that “Telling is a process of disembodying memory” (179), a process analogous to “the healing of wounds” (175). In Delbo’s writing, however, narrative is always necessarily disembodied: the narrator of La Mémoire et les jours writes that “Lorsque je vous parle d’Auschwitz ce n’est pas de la mémoire profonde que viennent mes paroles” (14). Narrative cannot incorporate traumatic memory; in speaking about Auschwitz, she is necessarily, as Culbertson notes, “skating along the surface of words” (175). Words leave traumatic memories untouched: “Ce ne sont pas les mots qui sont gonflés de charge émotionnelle” (Delbo [1985] 1995, 14). To say that one is thirsty, the narrator points out, has entirely different connotations in Auschwitz; she has dreams in which she “ressen[t] physiquement cette vraie soif”, a thirst that cannot be conveyed in conventional, “skin-deep” words (14). The narrator invites us to read her account of Auschwitz as surface, as skin, covering embodied traumatic memory. “La peau de la mémoire” alluded to in the opening pages of La Mémoire et les jours appears initially to refer to the skin covering traumatic memory, yet it could suggest a skin made of memory – external memory – that protects traumatic memory. This means that a “narrative cure” would work not by opening up traumatic memory, but by “re-covering” and bandaging its bodily wounds. Narrative cannot, however, entirely cover the bodily wounds: the very image of the snake employed in La Mémoire et les jours is immediately exploded by the text. Langer suggests that the cry that Delbo describes awakening her from her dream in the opening pages of La Mémoire et les jours “also awakens us to the astonishing realization that Delbo […] has herself pierced the skin of memory through her description, using the dream as an ‘excuse’ to do so”

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(1991, 7). I would argue, however, that this piercing cannot simply be a matter of authorial intention: it is beyond authorial control, rupturing the textual surface. The English translation of Auschwitz et après features a photograph of Delbo, in which we see her camp number inscribed on her skin; Delbo’s skin in this photograph bears indelible traces of her past. Similarly, her writing, even if “only” surfacewriting, may be seen to bear imprints of her traumatic past and to both point to and conceal the wounding underneath. In Delbo’s image of the skin of memory, skin is wounded from within rather than from outside; similarly, her text is punctured from within, by the exploded metaphor of the snake, rather than by the extra-textual trauma it appears to describe. This leads me to consider Auschwitz et après as “surface writing”, in which textual eruptions figure a wounding that the text cannot articulate. Using Delbo’s own model according to which traumatic memory punctures the framework of narrative memory, in the second part of this chapter I detect in her writing the points where the surface appears punctured, uneven, where the narrative framework breaks down. This is, I argue, bound up in the presentation of the collective viewpoint that seems so integral to Delbo’s testimonial project. I go on to show how the superficial collective testimony in Mesure de nos jours is broken down, leading to what Caruth would call a “double telling” in which the survival of the group is denied even as it is asserted. The disembodied narrative of survival, attributed to a collective “nous”, is disrupted from within, by the figure of the author as she appears in her own text as a “ghost”. Where literary critics, as we have seen, tend to claim that Delbo bears witness in and through the body, in the second part of this chapter I explore the relation between collective testimony and disembodiment and spectrality, a relation captured in the image of Delbo as “ghostwriter”.

Ghost-Writing a Collective Testimony According to Terrence Des Pres, “Survival is a collective act, and so is bearing witness” (1976, 38). This claim would seem to be confirmed in Auschwitz et après, which refuses the single viewpoint of any individual survivor, striving instead to attain a collective subject position. If the first two texts in the trilogy of Auschwitz et après sustain a collective viewpoint, however, the superficial

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insistence on a collective subject position in Mesure de nos jours is punctured from within, as we shall see. Mesure de nos jours may, I argue, be seen to work through a “double telling”, split between its surface “nous” and the breakdown of that collective identity that emerges at crucial moments throughout the text. In Le Convoi du 24 janvier, Delbo offers a possible explanation for the extraordinarily high survival rate within the convoy in which she was sent to Auschwitz, in comparison with the overall statistics of survival in the camp: Si notre convoi a eu un si grand nombre de survivantes […] c’est que nous nous connaissions déjà, que nous formions, à l’intérieur d’un grand groupe compact, de petits groupes étroitement liés […] que nous nous aidions de toutes les manières [….] Chacune des revenantes sait que, sans les autres, elle ne serait pas revenue. (1965, 17)

In Auschwitz et après, the women are shown to look after one another in a maternal fashion: in Aucun de nous ne reviendra, Viva encourages the narrator in “la voix de ma mère”, leading her to realize that “je tiens après Viva autant que l’enfant après sa mère” (Delbo 1970a, 106), whilst crying on Lulu’s breast is likened to crying “contre la poitrine de ma mère” (168). Throughout Auschwitz et après, group solidarity is emphasized as the sole condition of possibility for survival; to be separated from the group is represented as an extreme danger.40 Giuliana Tedeschi, describing her experience in AuschwitzBirkenau, deploys a metaphor of knitting to convey the horror of being separated from one’s group: “Prison life is like a piece of knitting whose stitches are strong as long as they remain woven together; but if the woolen strand breaks, the invisible stitch that comes undone slips off among the others and is lost” (1992, 124). If the concentration camps destroy the possibility of individual identity, survival depends crucially on establishing a collective group identity in its place: in testifying to survival, the survivor speaks not as an individual but as a member of a collective. The monologues in Mesure de nos jours superficially testify to the enduring bond between the survivors of the convoy, who see themselves as a surrogate family. Mado, speaking to Delbo, claims 40

In Aucun de nous ne reviendra, the narrator describes how, left alone on one occasion, she was overcome with despair and hopelessness: “Aucune ne croit plus au retour quand elle est seule” (Delbo 1970a, 164).

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that her fellow survivors have replaced her family: “Ma vraie sœur, c’est toi. Ma vraie famille, c’est vous, ceux qui étaient là-bas avec moi” (50). The survivors see their comrades as a surrogate family who share a common past and memories, a family that finds its roots in Auschwitz (28). Mado, addressing Charlotte, insists that the latter not only understands, but shares, her feelings about survival: “Je te dis tout cela parce qu’il n’y a qu’à une pareille que je puisse le dire, parce que toi tu le comprends. Je n’aurais même pas besoin de te le dire” (58). In the fragments of poetry interspersed between the monologues, the narrator speaks in the first person plural, setting up a binary opposition between those who have experienced the horror of the camps and those who have not: Nous ne savons pas répondre avec vos mots à vous Et nos mots à nous Vous ne les comprenez pas. (77)

She seems to speak not as an individual but from the perspective of the collective “nous”, a “nous” which is, however, ruptured from within.

The Broken “Nous” Although the survivors claim to continue to see their comrades as a surrogate family after their return, Mesure de nos jours opens with the breakdown of that family unit. Survival and return are shown to be concomitant with separation and loss: the narrator comments that as the aeroplane approached Paris on their return, “Tous les liens, toutes les lianes qui nous reliaient les unes aux autres se détendaient déjà” (9). Return generates belated mourning, a mourning that was impossible in the camp if they were to survive: Poupette observes that “Libres, nous prenions les deuils que nous n’avions pas portés là-bas” (70). Mado takes this further, claiming that “Je n’ai plus ce que j’avais là-bas, ce que j’avais avant, ce que j’étais avant. Tout m’a été arraché” (51). Return, in Mado’s piece, brings about a painful separation from living comrades and the loss of a past that she still had access to in Auschwitz: “Depuis que je suis rentrée […] tout s’est dissout, défait. On dirait que je l’ai usé là-bas” (50). “Retourner”, then, means “turning back” to the point of deportation, repeating the beginning of

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trauma in isolation. The model of a close-knit “family” of survivors offered in Mesure de nos jours is undermined as the survivors testify to profound loneliness and isolation. One survivor, Germaine, reproaches Charlotte gently from her dying bed for not visiting her earlier: “‘Tu promettais de venir me voir, si nous rentrions [….] Et c’est seulement maintenant que tu viens me voir ’” (139). Return constitutes a collapse of the family unit as the survivors remain geographically and emotionally separated. This is confirmed in Delbo’s account of survival in La Mémoire et les jours: “Aussi a-t-on vu chacun se replier sur lui, et ceux qui avaient été des compagnons inséparables sont restés parfois des années sans se revoir” (136). For Gilberte, this separation is akin to a physical amputation: “Vous n’étiez plus à côté de moi. Il me manquait tout à coup un membre, un organe essentiel” (22). Return, Gilberte’s monologue suggests, is concomitant with a bodily loss and the breakdown of the collective identity: the collapse of the collective identity is bound up in the amputation of the body. The collective identity, forged in Auschwitz, bears no resemblance to Rousseau’s vision of a social contract whereby the individual actively chooses to subjugate individual identity to the collective. In Auschwitz, collective identity is rooted in the destruction of identity and in the fragmented body. In a chapter of Aucun de nous ne reviendra entitled “Nuit”, the narrator recounts a nightmare in which she and her comrades are strangled by octopi and cease to experience their bodies as individual: “Tout s’évanouit dans l’ombre où bougent cette jambe qui est celle de Lulu, ce bras qui est d’Yvonne, cette tête […] de Viva” (1970a, 89). Langer’s assertion that “The human body is the protagonist of Aucun de nous ne reviendra” (1978, 204) should be nuanced: the body here, depersonalized and even dehumanized, cannot become a “protagonist” as such. As the women parade through the snow one icy night, the narrator observes that “Nous avançons. Si engourdies que nous semblons n’être qu’un morceau de froid qui avance d’une pièce. Nos jambes avancent comme si elles n’étaient pas nous” (1970a, 51). The women’s bodies merge into a single block of cold; this does not, however, mark a shared corporeal identity so much as a collective sense of bodily alienation. The “nous” around which Auschwitz et après is constructed is rooted in a disintegrating, dehumanized body. In Le Convoi du 24 janvier, Delbo recalls the sign at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau, “Vernichttunglager”, meaning “Vers le néant”, “camp d’anéantisse-

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ment” (1965, 12). Auschwitz is named as a place of destruction, a place where identity is violently and irreparably shattered: none of those who enter are intended to return. An identity that finds its roots in Auschwitz is an identity founded in the very destruction of identity, pointing to a “nous” that cannot be sustained but is, to borrow Sarah Kofman’s words, “toujours déjà défait, déstabilisé” (Kofman 1987a, 82). Mesure de nos jours, in attempting to recreate a “nous” destroyed by return from the camps, is also trying to bear witness to a collective identity that is constantly erasing itself. Yet how can one speak from a position under erasure, a position destroyed even as it is constructed?

Speaking for “All” In an article on Aucun de nous ne reviendra, Rosette Lamont quotes Delbo’s promise to speak for “all”: When I return – and I refuse to say if – I promise to write about all of us. Then, I will keep what I have written for twenty years, and if, when I re-read it, it still says what I wanted it to say, and convinces me that it will keep on saying it, then I will publish it. (Lamont 1975, 11)

Elsewhere, Lamont observes that “Delbo does not wish to write a personal memoir, but to create a series of prose poems that will speak for all those who were with her” (1988, 248). In Mesure de nos jours, speaking for “all” does not mean adopting a collective position, which, as we have seen, cannot be sustained: instead, according to the blurb, Delbo “prête sa voix” to other survivors, “ghosting” a collective memoir to make space for a plurality of perspectives and voices. At times it is impossible to distinguish Delbo’s voice from the voices of the survivors whose stories she tells: Delbo’s insistence that the self in Auschwitz survived only as part of a collective is thus reflected in the very structure of her text, which blurs the boundaries between self and other, individual and collective. This seems to set up a different model of testimony, one based neither on an individual nor on a collective subject position, but on the dissolution of the boundaries between individual and collective, which appears to enable a single literary text, in Delbo’s own words, to speak for “all”. The multiplicity of voices is, however, ultimately a product of Delbo’s own voice: although each monologue is written in the first

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person, the title page bears Delbo’s name. In Mesure de nos jours, Delbo rarely describes her own experience of life “after Auschwitz”, yet she seems to tell her own story indirectly through her comrades’ stories. This is perhaps most clear in the final monologue, attributed to Françoise who, like Delbo, was summoned from prison for a last meeting with her husband before he was shot. Françoise asks Delbo, “Tu te souviens, ce matin de mai, à la prison, ce matin où tu as été appelée en même temps que moi?” (205). In invoking their common experience of traumatic loss, Françoise’s story points back to Delbo’s own, which is partially recounted in a short chapter called “L’Adieu” in Une Connaissance inutile (1970b, 155-157). “L’Adieu”, as its title suggests, focuses on the narrator’s farewell scene with her husband, which she describes through allusion to Girandoux’s Ondine, who had to be called three times to leave the dying Chevalier and return to her underwater realm. Rather than narrating her own experience directly in her writing, Delbo uses other stories – Girandoux’s story of Ondine and Françoise’s monologue, as well as the other monologues – as a means to recount her life indirectly. If Mesure de nos jours “speaks for” the other survivors, their monologues also tell Delbo’s own story. Mesure de nos jours highlights how both the assumption of a collective viewpoint and the attempt to give voice to a plurality of individual testimonies risk silencing individuals’ experiences of survival and return. This problem is, however, highlighted through the figure of the ghost-writer: where the ghost-writer typically effaces his/her position in the text, here the ethical problems of speaking for “all” are revealed through the shifting but visible figure of Delbo as ghost-writer. The ghost-writer seems to point to the impossibility of an ethical testimony to collective trauma in a single-authored literary text. In apparently failing to offer a collective testimony, however, this text may be seen to renegotiate the relation between individual and collective identity in the case of a collective trauma and to explore how a literary text can bear witness to Auschwitz.

Fractured Collective Testimony Mesure de nos jours, as we have seen, initially seems to offer an illusion of a community of survivors. This textual insistence on the survivors as a collective seems to point both to the need to acknowledge the necessity of group identity for survival and, perhaps,

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to a need to “heal” the fractures in that identity through the reconstruction of the “nous” in narrative. Yet this “nous” is, as we have seen, ruptured from within: Gilberte’s image of separation as a bodily amputation, quoted above, may be seen to point suggestively to a fracture in the surface of the textual “nous” reiterated throughout Mesure de nos jours. In La Mémoire et les jours, narrative – or, to use Delbo’s terminology, “external” – memory is ruptured by traumatic – “deep” – memory. Similarly, the ruptures in the surface narrative of Mesure de nos jours allow us to reread the textual “nous” as fractured, wounded from within. Mesure de nos jours seems, then, to bear witness through rupture, through the breaks in the textual framework that point to the fracture of both individual and collective identity “after Auschwitz”. The pieces of poetry, written almost exclusively in the first person plural, are interrupted by prose testimonies, monologues set apart by gaps in the text; their format seems to highlight the survivors’ isolation from one another. Almost all the vignettes in Mesure de nos jours feature a disembodied voice describing his/her return in an uninterrupted monologue: there is little interaction between the monologues and where one survivor refers to another’s account, it is to express incomprehension of the other’s suffering. Marceline begins her piece with the remark that “Elle a de la chance, Gaby, de pouvoir s’écouter. Moi, je ne pourrais pas” (178), seeming to find Gaby’s endurance of suffering lacking in comparison with her own. Louise, referring to Mado’s claim that her married life would have been easier if her husband had also been deported, opens her piece by expressing incomprehension of this: “Je ne sais pourquoi Mado s’est mis en tête que […]” (176). This formulation (“s’est mis en tête”) implies that she is right and Mado simply wrong: Mado has got an idea into her head and is not making an informed statement. In their opening remarks, then, both Marceline and Louise betray incomprehension of others’ suffering: their monologues find their origin not in understanding but in the refusal, or inability, to understand. These monologues are not individual expressions of collective experience, but trace incompatible experiences of life “after Auschwitz”. Neither Marceline nor Louise is replying directly and immediately to the other women whose words they call into question: Louise’s piece, long after Mado’s, is sandwiched between Gaby’s and Marceline’s, thus obstructing a possible encounter between the two womens’ testimonies. This is only one in a series of failed encounters

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in Mesure de nos jours: Charlotte does not visit Germaine until it is too late; the text ends before the survivors arrive at Germaine’s funeral; Jacques can never be reunited with his previous resistance comrades or indeed with his parents. Dialogue is possible only in the single vignette in which the author figures explicitly as an embodied character, Charlotte, who visits a fellow survivor, Marie-Louise, for lunch (83-99). Unlike the narrator, Marie-Louise has returned to Auschwitz as a visitor with her husband, who tells Charlotte: “Évidemment, j’en ai vu plus que vous n’en aviez vu quand vous y étiez: les crématoires, les chambres à gaz, le mur des éxecutions au camp des hommes en bas. Nous avons tout visité” (97; emphasis mine). He seems implicitly to equate his own visit to Auschwitz as a tourist and the survivors’ lengthy, tortuous imprisonment and to claim superior knowledge of the camp as a result: he does not recognize the possibility of a different form of knowledge, the survivors’ “connaissance inutile”. The narrator’s silence in the face of the couple’s chatter emphasizes the fact that their dialogue reduces the horror of Auschwitz to a fond memory: as Langer remarks, “In the telling, the experience seems almost frivolous, like revisiting the summer camp where you were counselor as a teenager” (1978, 236). The dialogue ends with the narrator’s comment that “Je les ai laissés sur le seuil de leur jolie maison au bout de l’allée” (99). The imagery used here – threshold, the end of a street – implies that the couple can maintain the illusion of contentment only through remaining on the periphery and refusing to face the horror of Marie-Louise’s past. Their “dialogue” works like a monologue, whilst their apparent ability to remember Marie-Louise’s past seems to point to an inability to encounter the past as such. The textual structure of Mesure de nos jours imitates these failed encounters, as it stages a sequence of disparate, disembodied voices without offering the possibility of interaction or dialogue between them. The gaps between the monologues highlight the distance between the survivors as a (bodily) break in the text, fracturing the textual surface. The monologues constitute a series of fragments that cannot be pieced together to form a coherent whole; the plurality of voices speaking in the first person cannot make up a seamless “nous”. The “nous” in this text is, then, broken from within by the disparate voices that construct it; the illusion of a community of survivors cannot be sustained in the text but is repeatedly fragmented even as it is articulated. The text imitates and even embodies the fragmented

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collective identity it describes, highlighting its own failure to sustain a collective viewpoint as each successive “je” breaks through and undercuts the “nous”.

The “Failed” Testimony: Ethics and Bearing Witness If the “nous” designating a collective identity in Mesure de nos jours is shattered by the “je” that interrupts it, this is paradoxically the same “je” that constructs the collective identity as such and that itself emerges through the rupture of the “nous”. That is, unlike other subject positions, “nous” is constructed by a “je” that effaces itself to speak for a collective; it is always a plural (“nous”) conveyed by a singular (“je”). Unlike other plural pronouns (“elles”, “vous”), “nous” can never simply represent a plurality of “je”s: as the subject speaks in the “nous” form, the “nous” is divided between the speaker, “je”, and the others (“elles”). The first person plural form is, then, undercut even as it is asserted, as it always implies a speaking “je” whose “je” disrupts the collective “nous”. This is shown clearly in Mesure de nos jours, where the individual and the collective come together not in shared understanding, but in disjuncture and incompatibility as each emerges where the other is fragmented. This disjuncture seems to work ethically to highlight the impossibility of both individual and collective testimony, which can function only in tension with each other. The refusal of collective testimony in Mesure de nos jours marks an ethical refusal to allow the individual text to speak unproblematically for the collective. Claire Gorrara comments that the “obliteration of particularity” denoted in the erasure of the first person narrating voice in Auschwitz et après is evidence of Delbo’s desire to “present a poetics of responsibility in relation to the memory of Auschwitz” (1998, 20). I would suggest rather that in Mesure de nos jours, this “poetics of responsibility” is marked not by the erasure of the particular, but by an emphasis on the disjunction between the individual and the collective. Mesure de nos jours does not in my reading “speak for all” so much as explore what it means to attempt to speak for all, highlighting that an ethical testimony to collective trauma can sustain neither an individual nor a collective position. Shoshana Felman, analysing Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, points out that it is impossible to give testimony from inside a concentration

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camp, in which prisoners can neither “know” nor articulate their experience as such. The atrocities of the concentration camps are, however, even more incomprehensible to those outside: in Felman’s words, “If it is indeed impossible to bear witness to the Holocaust from inside, it is even more impossible to testify to it from the outside” (Felman and Laub 1992, 232). She concludes that testimony to the Holocaust means that one be “neither simply inside nor simply outside, but paradoxically, both inside and outside” (232). The “double telling” that Caruth reads in stories of trauma and survival is echoed in Felman’s notion of speaking from two positions simultaneously and, one could argue, in the structure of Mesure de nos jours, doubled and split between two incompatible subject positions. Where for Felman, testifying from two positions works to reconnect these positions (“to create a connection that did not exist during the war and does not exist today” (Felman and Laub 1992, 232)), in Mesure de nos jours testimony functions not through reconnection but through rupture. That is, in Mesure de nos jours, ethical testimony emerges where it is shown to be impossible, at the ruptures between the individual and the collective voice. The broken relation between individual and collective ruptures the text, exploding its surface, just as the traumatic memory breaks through the narrator’s skin in La Mémoire et les jours. In this way, the text resembles a ruptured skin that cannot contain the bodily trauma underneath; the text re-enacts the wounding of trauma without healing the wound. Yet it is not trauma, but the disjunction between individual and collective testimony that breaks through the text. The text is bearing witness not only to the trauma itself, but to the difficulty of ethical testimony: the text that witnesses both from inside and from outside is situated in an impossible position, ruptured by its attempt to represent the collective from the position of the individual writer. In Delbo’s text, then, a “poetics of responsibility” is haunted by its own impossibility: Mesure de nos jours is not offered as a model of ethical testimony, but as an embodiment of its impossibility. The text remains split between appropriation of and respect for alterity, a split that becomes the condition of its possibility. In calling its own ethical position into question, Mesure de nos jours may be read as posing the question of what would constitute an ethical testimony to concentration camp trauma. As readers we are not, however, called to make judgements about this text’s ethical positioning; the text denies the reader the role of critical judge. Those who were not in Auschwitz,

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the narrator insists, not only cannot know or understand it, but also do not even know what questions to ask to find out: Vous voudriez savoir poser des questions et vous ne savez quelles questions et vous ne savez poser les questions. (77)

This piece, addressed to the reader as ”vous”, suggests that as readers we do not know how to read; that is, we do not know what questions to ask or how to phrase our questions. The text not only refuses the reader knowledge or understanding, but also calls into question any critical framework we might wish to impose upon the text. The text seems to suggest that as readers, we would not be able to recognize an (ethical) testimony to Auschwitz even if we could see it. This means that instead of reading in order to judge the ethics of Delbo’s testimonial project, we are encouraged to focus instead on the “poetics of responsibility” of reading itself and on our positioning as readers of a testimony to an event to which we have no access and which we cannot assimilate into our understanding.

Reading through Rupture Critical accounts of Delbo’s writing have emphasized how it touches the reader directly and palpably: Ethel Tolansky and Nicole Thatcher claim that Delbo’s writing “allows the unimaginable and the senseless to reach the reader, who can see and feel the war experience described” (Tolansky and Thatcher 1997, 60). Langer suggests that Delbo “lead[s] the reader into a world of sense experience, where pain and physical deprivation accumulate until we begin to identify with the response of one of her characters: ‘I just can’t take it any more’” (1978, 202). Yet “deep” traumatic memories of Auschwitz, as we have seen, are precisely inaccessible to the reader except where they puncture the surface of narrative memory. We have direct access only to the narrative surface and precisely cannot “see” or “feel” the experiences related in Auschwitz et après. In Aucun de nous ne reviendra, the narrator challenges the reader: “Essayez de regarder. Essayez pour voir” (Delbo 1970a, 138). The second part of this command negates the possibility of the first: in trying to look, one

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realizes precisely that one cannot see. Like the people who look at Mado and believe her to be a normal living person, critics seem to read Auschwitz et après without realising that they are seeing textual ghosts, not flesh and blood humans. Reading Auschwitz et après does not, then, involve a direct encounter with atrocity: rather, it means attempting to “see” ghosts. Slavoj Žižek has observed that ghosts mark “a sign of a disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of symbolization” (Žižek 1991, 22-3). That is, ghosts, which resist burial and occupy a liminal position between life and death, point to a breakdown in the functioning of our symbolic means to cope with death and thus to a gap or rupture in the symbolic system itself. According to Žižek, the ghost marks the point where symbolization and representation break down. In Mesure de nos jours, the ghost also figures the rupture of identity and narrative “after Auschwitz”. The stories of life “after Auschwitz”, ghost-written and written by ghosts, highlight that Mesure de nos jours is not an unproblematic account of survival, but a terrifying ghost-story, inscribing a literal ghostly return that the reader is called upon to believe but can never know how to “see”.

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Conclusion: Re-Reading the Wound Sarah Kofman begins her short text “‘Ma vie’ et la psychanalyse” with the assertion that “J’ai toujours eu envie de raconter ma vie” ([1976] 1987b, 18). In her early sessions with a psychoanalyst, she admits, she would strive to fit her life story into a “récit linéaire, continu”, not so much to tell the story of her life but to take control over it. She goes on: “Tout a ‘commencé’ quand je n’eus plus rien à dire, quand je ne sus plus par quoi commencer ni par où finir. Ce que j’avais raconté auparavant revint alors, mais tout autrement, de façon discontinue” (18). It is only when the coherent story dries up, when she has nothing to say, that she can begin to give voice to an alternative form of self-expression, a different kind of “story”. Where her earlier story is closed, almost impenetrable – without “la moindre rupture, le moindre trou” (18) – her words become discontinuous, uncontrolled, surprising even herself in what they reveal. This alternative discourse opens up space for an exchange between analyst and analysand, in which the analyst is called upon not to confer meaning on her words but to respond to them and to acknowledge their worth. Through this exchange, she suggests, she can “redresser, tenir debout, et repartir” (18) at the end of each session. Kofman’s text thus points to a different model of curative story-telling, one that does not seek to assimilate the past into a coherent and closed narrative, but that instead opens up and interrogates the past. In this text, opening up past wounds seems to offer a means to move into the future: there seems to be no possibility of healing, of closing down the past. Instead, the move towards the future is associated with opening rather than with closure, with a beginning, rather than with an ending: there is no end to the story of the wounds of the past.

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The emphasis in Kofman’s text on opening up and interrogating the gaps and contradictions in narrative also underwrites my study. I began with the image of trauma as an open bodily wound that seemed to resist healing and closure. In the Introduction, I suggested that the wound implies a trajectory from violence to healing, from openness to closure; the texts I have analysed follow no such development, offer no such closure. The image of trauma as a bodily wound is an inadequate figure for the effects of psychological trauma: the wounds of the psyche exceed any attempt to represent them through bodily figures. It is, then, fitting that I should end with Charlotte Delbo’s image of disembodiment, of a painful rupture in the relation between body and psyche. Yet I do not entirely leave behind the image of the wound, with its connotations of openness and closure, of the irreducible mark of the past in the present. Images of opening and closure have recurred throughout my readings in this study, most strikingly in Cixous’s image of “dedans”, but also in Cardinal’s and Chawaf’s – surprisingly similar – images of a fetal entrapment in the past, and Kofman’s image of the “double bind”; in Jurquet’s image of a “cour intérieure”, and, of course, in Delbo’s poignant descriptions of literal incarceration in Nazi concentration camps. These texts all deploy imagery of opening and closure, of inside and outside, to describe their attempts to narrate the traumas of the past and to reach towards some sort of future. It is this relation that these texts chart between the past and the future, between opening and closure, that I wish to explore by way of conclusion: not to close down the questions that my study raises, but instead to open up the future implications of my own strategies of reading.

Opening up the Future? According to Dori Laub, “Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure” (Felman and Laub 1992, 69). The survivor, trapped within the compelled reenactment of an event that s/he cannot assimilate into a life story, cannot move beyond the past into the future. This seems to suggest that the wounds of the past remain open in the present, forming irreducible gaps in the survivor’s life story. Yet the re-enactment of trauma in the present also closes down the possibility of a future, of a

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progression beyond the destructive compulsion to repeat. In Delbo’s Mesure de nos jours, Mado, a survivor of Auschwitz, states that “Le temps ne passe pas. Le temps s’est arrêté” (Delbo 1971, 52), adding that “Je suis enfermée dans des souvenirs et des redites” (54). She feels imprisoned within the past, a past that will not give way to the future and that holds her within its grip. If the traumatic event itself, in Laub’s words, “attained no closure” and recurs in the present, it does so in a way that prevents the survivor from moving on into the future, enclosing her in the past. All of the texts I analyse feature a narrator or protagonist struggling to escape from the confines of trauma, or traumatic memory. In Dedans and in Kofman’s texts, this interior space is figured by the entombed body of the dead father: in each case, the melancholic narrator seems locked within the space defined by the father’s tomb. Like Marie-Antoinette in Le Manteau noir, the narrator of Les Mots pour le dire feels trapped inside the mother’s womb, not yet ready to be born; in both texts, the possibility of putting the past into words is represented as a form of rebirth. Yet escape from the closed spaces demarcated by these texts is never entirely possible, as Mado’s words indicate: although she is no longer literally imprisoned in the concentration camp, she remains trapped within her memories and nightmares. The attempt to open up space, to move beyond a space defined by traumatic re-enactment, is itself risky. In an attempt to give her return from the camp some meaning, Mado explains, she tries to reach out, to tell other people, even though she knows they cannot understand. Her husband’s response is characteristic: “Je sais qu’on ne revient pas de là-bas sans garder des cicatrices qui se redéchirent au moindre effleurement. C’est pour cela que je ne t’en parle jamais” (Delbo 1971, 63). Mado’s words suggest that it is only through returning to the past that the possibility of the future is opened up: she can cope with the present and face the future only through attempting to remember the past. Her husband’s response, although motivated perhaps by his own unwillingness or inability to contemplate the horrors of her past, points to the risks of evoking memories of Auschwitz. The return to the past is not without risks: it means reopening old wounds, or delving within wounds that are still, figuratively speaking, raw. The writers whose texts I have analysed in this study have all repeatedly invoked – and re-opened – the wounds of the past throughout their textual corpus. Cardinal, Cixous and Chawaf in

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particular have rewritten their own experiences of psychological wounding over and over again, whilst Delbo, Kofman and Jurquet have also returned several times to their past traumas in their writing. Trauma, as I have shown, does not fit into a single story, cannot simply be recounted and left behind; instead, it must be retold endlessly. None of the texts analysed in the above chapters offers closure, an end to the story of trauma. This raises crucial questions as to whether these writers re-write the past compulsively without moving beyond it or succeed in opening up different narratives, different possibilities for the future. Such questions must necessarily remain open because any definitive answers would fix the relation between the writer’s life and the text, a relation which should, I have argued, remain open. Thus, the question remains as to what is at stake in opening up (past) wounds in writing, a question at the very crux of my readings. I have explored different aspects of this question: the possibility of healing through psychoanalysis (in chapter one), the risk of remembering (particularly in my analyses of the writings of Cixous, and Jurquet), the imperative to remember and bear witness to public trauma (in my chapters on Chawaf, Kofman and Delbo). Yet throughout I have focused not only on what it means to “write wounds”, but also on what is at stake in reading narratives of trauma; it is appropriate, then, to end by sketching out the possibilities and limitations of my own modes of reading – what Caruth calls a “new mode of reading” (1996, 9).

“A new mode of reading” Throughout this study I have explored how trauma is inscribed in contemporary French women’s writing, focusing particularly on recurring images, most frequently bodily images, that point to the possibility, or impossibility, of telling a story of trauma. I have rethought what it means to describe French women’s writing since 1968 as a “writing of the body”, arguing that the bodily figures in these texts do not mark a reclaiming of female identity in writing, but gesture towards the limits of narrative, towards a past that resists narrativisation. Yet my emphasis on returning images means that my readings differ not only from those offered by other literary critics writing on French women’s writing, but also from the sorts of analysis carried out by critics in the field of trauma studies. I draw out

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sequences of textual images and figures to point up different stories, broken and disrupted narratives that cannot quite be fitted together and that cannot be closed down. My readings keep open the questions and difficulties raised by these unfinished stories, in particular the pressing question of how traumatic experience is remembered and narrated. Moreover, I do not try to close down the irreducible differences between the texts I analyse. These texts tell different kinds of story, from Cardinal’s straightforward account of hysteria and healing to Cixous’s evocative, visceral prose and Jurquet’s discontinuous, fragmented narratives. Yet my mode of reading – tracking recurring images – enables me to explore the different ways in which traumatic experience and survival are figured in these texts and, crucially, to keep open the questions that underwrite both these texts and my interpretations of them. Throughout this study I have returned repeatedly to question why bodily images should be deployed as a means to articulate psychic trauma, in literary texts and in theory. Where Caruth and Freud use bodily imagery to explain the workings of psychological trauma, I have argued that the bodily imagery in the texts I analyse reveals the limits of the reader’s insight and understanding. Delbo’s challenge to the reader in Aucun de nous ne reviendra, “Essayez de regarder. Essayez pour voir” (Delbo 1970a, 138), serves to underscore the reader’s lack of access to knowledge and vision. If Delbo’s texts are the only texts I analyse which address the reader directly, they are not alone in refusing the reader a privileged position from which to visualize a writing of trauma: Jurquet’s texts, for example, link the possibility of writing traumatic experience with the death of an implied reader. These texts emphasize how as readers of narratives of trauma we cannot presume to have access to the experience of trauma, to the horror that we can neither see nor know. Yet they are urgently striving to find ways to communicate trauma, even as they emphasize the limits of the narratives they can offer and of the reader’s understanding. Jurquet’s narrator in Cour intérieure affirms: “Je ne te raconterai pas d’histoire. Je voudrais avoir une histoire à raconter” (Jurquet 1991, 69). If these texts do not offer straightforward stories, it is not to challenge the reader’s powers of interpretation, but, as Jurquet’s narrator suggests, because trauma has no place in a story, because a story of trauma inevitably breaks down. In “‘Ma vie’ et la psychanalyse”, Kofman admits that her initial desire to tell her life story was motivated by the urge to take control of

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her “life”: “Je compris que j’avais été tenté, par le récit, non pas de raconter “ma vie” – elle est inénarrable – mais de la maîtriser. J’avais été à la fois sotte et infidèle” ([1976] 1987b, 18). It would be deceptively easy for a literary critic to try to turn these failed, disrupted narratives into a coherent story of trauma, to make sense of the seemingly meaningless atrocities to which these texts attempt to bear witness. Yet to do so, as Kofman suggests, would mean being “infidèle”: these texts demand a different mode of reading, one that does not seek to impose meaning or coherence, but that constantly interrogates itself, that can consider what is at stake in the interpretative strategies it adopts. Literary texts that recount lived traumatic experience do not resolve the questions they pose, do not offer facile endings or resolution; their refusal of closure should translate itself into our reading practice. In this book, I have attempted to open up questions about the relation between trauma and writing that call for a different mode of reading from that offered hitherto in literary criticism. In focusing on the possibility of a “writing cure”, literary critics have tended to use literary texts about trauma only as a means of access to the writer’s life. I have attempted to shift this focus within literary criticism from the author’s life to explore how trauma can be narrated and read, to develop strategies of reading texts that deal with lived experience without fixing a stable relation between writing and life. My interpretations raise questions that extend beyond the boundaries of my analyses of French literary texts. Are my findings specific to literary texts written by French women, to texts that blur the boundaries between autobiography and fiction? How would a straightforward “autobiography” of trauma, if it were possible, inscribe traumatic experience? And would fictional texts with no basis in lived experience tell a different kind of story of trauma? These questions go beyond the scope of this study but should, I would suggest, constitute a point of focus in future work on the relation between trauma and writing. Rather than focusing exclusively on the writer’s life, literary criticism should open itself up to explore the question of the relation between “life” and writing, between trauma and narrative. My readings of literary texts also have implications outside literary criticism. Literature, I have argued, offers insights into how trauma is lived and narrated and into what it means to survive and to attempt to bear witness, questions at the very heart of “trauma studies”. What

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remains to be seen is how the insights that literary texts can give us into the relation between trauma and narrative can contribute to our understanding of other types of narrative of trauma. As Leigh Gilmore points out, “Trauma is no longer primarily represented in the clinic where case studies written by medical professionals dominate. Instead, self-authored, first-person representations of trauma seem to be everywhere” (2001, 48). The proliferation of narratives of trauma in recent years means that we need to think through what is at stake in recounting and testifying to traumatic experience in different forums. This is beyond the scope of my study, yet in emphasising the question of how to respond to writings of trauma, my work addresses issues that are also of crucial importance in the context of different types of narrative of trauma. One pressing issue is precisely the question of the kinds of narrative of trauma which are possible in a given cultural context. In The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, Katie Roiphe observes that as she listens to different women’s accounts of being raped, “all of their stories began to sound the same” (1994, 48). Stories of trauma might indeed “sound the same” because they are all shaped by the limits of what can be told, on what kinds of narrative are accepted within a particular context. Yet equally, different types of narrative can tell different kinds of story. Would my modes of reading be appropriate in the context of other kinds of narrative of trauma? What are the similarities and differences between different types of narrative? Can exploring the narratives of trauma that are possible in literary texts, for example, help us to track the limits and possibilities of narrative in legal testimonies of trauma or in the stories offered up in talk shows or in therapy? These questions, I would suggest, require urgent attention, not only on the part of literary critics, but in law, sociology and psychiatry. Throughout this study, I have opened up questions about the relation between trauma and writing that cannot easily be resolved or closed down. Yet I have also repeatedly posed the question of what is at stake in opening up such questions in the context of texts that refer outwards to lived experiences of trauma. Where the texts analysed above are written from the inside of traumatic experience memory, in an attempt to reach outwards, the reader is positioned outside and called upon to look inwards, to open up the text from the outside. These texts prevent us from drawing facile conclusions, from imposing on them the narrative order they lack. As critics, then, our role is not to close down the questions posed by narratives of trauma,

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but to continue to seek alternative ways of reading, and of responding to, open wounds – to borrow Delbo’s words, “des cicatrices qui se redéchirent au moindre effleurement” (1971, 63).

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