Affects of Speech
Truth telling among trauma survivors is what Caruth, relying on Freud, refers to as the ‘crying wound’ (1996: 8), and as Kristeva notes, Duras both expresses and inflicts pain as she pulls off the ‘careful making up of [her]self’, exposing this ‘absolute vulnerability and melancholy’ malady (Kluchin 2018: 43). The wound never heals because it can never be fully known (1996: 6). No witness, not even the victim, can return to the chronotope of wounding and make sense of it. They are always borne away from it by time, new experience, and by retraumatization through lack of self-knowledge, the absence of empathetic witnessing, and the sheer segregation that trauma causes within the self and within relationships.
Is it for this reason that Duras, as a traumatized person and as a writer, never gives the reader the catharsis on which Kristeva appears to insist? Is it because Duras has never been set free of her crying wound? More importantly, would a cathartic telling be an existential sleight of hand, an insincere maneuver, for her as a traumatized person?
On a personal note, reading Duras as a survivor is comforting! It is even aesthetically preferable, because it is noncathartic. Trauma survivors know there is not a lancing, purging or cleansing of their wound. As a survivor, I don’t want to experience post-traumatic symptoms, but I do experience them, because there is no cure for trauma: there is only an intermittent alleviation of symptoms. Catharsis in a narrative like Duras’s would, for me, be like probing, or cutting into my trauma and making my wound deeper because I would not be able to accept it as truth or be able to willingly suspend my disbelief. Duras allows the reader to explore and observe the wound without judgment or expectation: to just be present with it and know that you also exist in that space.
But that is not the only reason why the cathectic bond with Duras is a source of comfort to me: it is also a comfort because when I witness her telling, she comes beside me in my own horror so that, in a way, and for a brief time, we share wounds (not like swapping war stories, but like two amputees may pre-empt and assist one another without verbal communication, because they know).
Further, Duras indicates to me that perspectives shift with speaking. Duras reminds me that I am not trapped, that this here speaking may be inadequate, but there can be another speaking. Kristeva’s work on Duras and her concerns about the noncathartic are vital, and I recognize that not every survivor will experience Duras as I have, but perhaps the cathectic aspect of Duras’s oeuvre could be constructively explored.
Kinguin – A new Lord of the Rings story awaits…
As a psychoanalyst, Kristeva appears to focus, in her readings of Duras, on the necessity of self-knowledge, and the ‘capacity to speak and act’ for psychic transformation. She anecdotally found that her students (especially the ‘fragile’ ones) found themselves silent and seemingly ‘imprisoned by the truth Duras reveals’ (Kluchin 2018: 41, 42). In other words, the reader could be seen to ‘catch’ Duras’s trauma.
Caruth asserts that trauma ‘is never simply one’s own’ but implicates everyone (1996: 24). For her, listening to, and accepting testimony of the ‘unpresentable’ [i.e. unspeakable], means being ‘infected’ by the trauma, and accepting an ethical obligation as a participant in the event of the trauma and the event of the telling (Leys 2000: 269). Caruth’s articulation is that of a ‘disease model’, with trauma being described as contagious. This puts survivors, and writers, in a position where to speak is to harm, by spreading the trauma so that others are, so-to-speak, infected by it…
