2000: Trauma on the Boulevard

Those who lament that scholars of French literature ceased to lead the way theoretically following the eclipse of deconstruction in the late 1980s might take heart at the success of trauma as a paradigm in literary studies. Indeed, professors of French pioneered the study of trauma in literature, which originated in the 1990s, as a way of interpreting texts relating to the Second World War and specifically to the Holocaust or Shoah. This trend has yet to run its course. When my department tan a search for a new assistant professor of twentieth-century French literature two years ago, more than a few candidates applied with what seemed to be identical dissertations devoted to trauma in the testimonial narratives of Charlotte Delbo, Saul Friedlander, Georges Perec, Claude Lanzmann, and Marguerite Duras, or some combination thereof. For what it's worth, however, the Romanic Review seems to have remained trauma-free, at least through the end of the 1990s. Adapted from a clinical context, trauma theory presupposes an event too horrific to be psychically assimilated by a perceiving subject. Unable to process this event or move beyond it, the subject remains bound to it in ways he or she cannot consciously grasp. Manifestations of the trauma emerge in the subject's actions, but more significantly in language, through points of logical disjuncture in testimonial narrative and endless metaphorical figurations of a truth that cannot be named. If these linguistic effects of trauma sound reminiscent of the way that certain deconstructionist critics characterize all language, or all writing, this is not a coincidence. Many of the most prominent literary theorists of trauma, such as Shoshana Felman, were associated with deconstruction and with the leading deconstructionist critic, Paul de Man, who was Felman's colleague at Yale until his death 1983. It hardly seems a coincidence that the rise of trauma as a critical paradigm followed the revelation in 1987 that de Man had published a series of collaborationist and anti-Semitic articles as a young journalist in Belgium during World War II. To be sure, the de Man controversy occupies a central place in Testimony" Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, authored by Felman in conjunction with the psychiatrist Dori Laub, which, perhaps more than any other book, helped popularize trauma theory in literary studies. An attempt to account for the unique problems involved in representing the Holocaust, Testimony juxtaposes chapters by Laub on survivor testimony with a series of essays by Felman on Albert Camus, Claude Lanzmann, and de Man. In the section on de Man, Felman portrays her late colleague as a survivor of catastrophe who, like the concentration camp survivors interviewed by Laub, bears exemplary witness to "the trauma of contemporary history" through his silence and refusal to confess his collaborationist past (Felman 164). In Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Dominic LaCapra offers perhaps the most biting critique of Felman's chapter on de Man, showing how she inadvertently supplies the very confession she deems unnecessary. (1) The attacks leveled at certain key manifestations of trauma theory have not stopped it from gaining currency as a tool for examining representations not only of the Holocaust and World War II but of other historical periods as well. In fact, and this will be the real subject of this essay, one of the main arenas of its deployment has been nineteenth-century studies. The French nineteenth century was not without its own horrific events, many of which were, if not as uniquely horrible as World War II, nevertheless worthy of inspiring trauma. Napoleon's Russian campaign comes to mind, in which over a million people are estimated to have been killed (including 300,000 French soldiers). One also thinks of the cholera epidemic of 1832 (20,000 dead in Paris; 100,000 in France) and the Crimean War, in which over 70,000 French soldiers died from wounds and disease alone. …